Nebfer, on 05 December 2011 - 12:24 PM, said:
Well FTL is well know their going to take high rate. Though their are plenty of times that contradict these examples... Theirs even an episode that mentions that to speed up their Sub light speed they could use a gravitational slingshot around a planet... For any race with a sustained acceleration of 1G or higher this is a pointless maneuver (sure we can take this as an outlier...).
I can't recall that instance off-hand. Do you happen to remember the episode and circumstances?
It's also important to note that a lot of Trek's sublight acceleration comes from the artificial mass reducers that are a major part of their impulse engines. When these systems are damaged or power is limited (such as the ramming scene in Nemesis, when both were the case), sublight acceleration is much lower.
Nebfer, on 05 December 2011 - 12:24 PM, said:
right.... please prove "armor in other universes" will be completely useless.
You might also want to prove if this actually happens in their universe (This ability would of been useful in a number of instances but is never shown or "used", like when they need to get rid of a few asteroids).
Also interesting in the episode Inheritance "Magnesium Carbonate" (referenced as Magnesite) a can cause a feed back along a phaser beam that can threaten the ship (it's not a uncommon mineral).
The TNG Tech Manual directly describes phasers as operating thus, and on-screen references and the observed effects of phasers support the NDF effect (see the vaporization of people - and asteroids (such as in TNG: "Booby Trap")). Other tech manuals and encyclopedias make reference to materials that are resistant to phasers. This does not mean that the armor of ships from other universes would be "completely useless" - I never said such. It means that the
effective yield of phasers and disruptors would be much higher against the armors of other powers
that are not hardened to resist the NDF effect. Now, the armor materials of these other franchises might just happen to contain materials resistant to phaser effects, but given that no other franchise demonstrates the use of any weapon any kind of effect like the phaser/disruptor NDF effect at all (with the sole exception that I am aware of being the superlaser beam and related weaponry of Star Wars), it is highly unlikely that they would have armor designed to resist the NDF effect as well as the armor of Trek ships. Even Trek ships sometimes have trouble resisting the NDF effect if the weapons involved can be adapted to bypass their hardening, as was quite clearly demonstrated in the First Battle of Chin'Toka in DS9 "Tears of the Prophets."
Furthermore, a large part of the resistance ability of Trek ships to the NDF effect comes from their Structural Integrity Fields, a system that no other franchise uses, to my knowledge.
Again, this does not mean that the armors of other franchises would be completely useless, it just means that the
effective yield of phasers and disruptors against them would be significantly higher than they would be against Trek armor.
As for Magnesite, the properties escribed to Magnesite in Trek are not consistent with the properties of Magnesium Carbonate. For example, Magnesite has replaced wood as the fuel source for fires in the 24th Century. Since Magnesium Carbonate is formed by the oxydation of minerals like olivine, it is not a material that will
burn in an oxygen atmosphere, because it has already oxydized. You might as well try to burn CO2. This, along with other discrepancies, suggests that the Magnesite of the 23rd and 24th Century is not the same material as what we call Magnesite today.
Nebfer, on 05 December 2011 - 12:24 PM, said:
Though you might want to explain on the speed of which ships tend to get take out in fleet engagements in DS9...
Of course theirs all the times where various consoles blew up when the shields are still up...
You know, the past Mechwarrior games are a perfect example to explain the first of the two issues you raise here. In general, single Battlemechs engaging each other 1v1 took some time to kill each other, provided they were of comparable weight range and loadout. It didn't take forever, but engagements typically lasted a couple minutes or more, between both mechs maneuvering and the time it took each mech to wear each other down, especially with damage spread across different parts of the mech because both mechs were firing while maneuvering.
But throw those same mechs into a team battle instead of a 1v1 duel, and the time it takes to kill a single mech goes down drastically. Even in the relatively small battles of Mechwarrior IV, a properly coordinated team would concentrate fire, and even with just a handful of mechs concentrating together, the time it took to kill an enemy mech dropped radically. Now imagine that scaled up from a couple dozen combatants to three thousand combatants.
Of course ships are going to be popping left and right in fleet engagements. They're facing off against a coordinated enemy fleet that is going to have whole squadrons of ships concentrating fire on single targets, and even after the battle devolves into a close-quarters general melee, you'll still see ships popping left and right because there are so many ships involved. What we saw of fleet battles in DS9 were brief glimpses of massive engagements viewed while following a highly-maneuverable ship as it wove through the furball of both fleets. We see ships getting hit and nothing happening and we see ships getting hit and going up in one shot, because we only see them briefly, we only get a tiny snapshot of their role in the battle, we don't see the firepower they sustained beforehand, and we don't see the damage inflicted afterward.
As for the consoles, Trek shields are pretty impressive, but they do have their limits. There is a brief window at the very beginning of weapons impact before the shield generators spike up and concentrate their outputs above the constantly-sustained full bubble, when some energy that exceeds the strength of the sustained bubble 'bleeds through.' This leads to damage inflicted through the shields (if the energy is high enough before the shield spike to bleed a significant enough amount of energy through), as well as surges in the ship's EPS grid. Given the amount of energy flowing through the ship's power grid, the minor flashes and fireworks-sized overloads we see are actually pretty remarkable, since even relatively small EPS taps on a Light Cruiser can have the energy equivalent of almost 1.2 megatons of TNT flowing through them every second (VOY "Revulsion", Kim notes a live EPS tap has "five million gigawatts", or 5 petawatts, flowing through it). If even a thousandth of a percent of that energy leaked out, it would be the equivalent of a 12 ton bomb going off.
Nebfer, on 05 December 2011 - 12:24 PM, said:
Their are times where one can calculate that their long term speeds is around 1,000x C. Sisko in fact mentions the exact same time frame for a similar distance in DS9.
Though for the maintenance and supplies, they must have to do that a lot for their FTL speed to only be 1,000x C
In Q who they (Data) estimate that it would take them ~2.6 years at maximum warp to travel 7,000 light years (~2,700x C). In bloodlines Riker indicates that warp 9 is 830x C, In Clues assuming average cruising speeds it would take them about a half a day to move a bit over a half a parsec (around 650x C).
On the other hand maximum warp in Voyager episode "Scorpion part II" is stated to travel 40 light years in 5 days (~3,000x C).
There are some instances that suggest lower speeds, but a much greater number that suggest higher speeds, and much higher still than the figures I have listed. The speeds I have listed are most consistent with the production materials, and most consistent with the more common figures (also, it's worth noting that the "Bloodlines" figure of 300 billion ly in about 20 minutes, or about 900c, is likely a math error on the part of the production staff, since they have well-established the maximum velocity of the E-D as being about 9,000c, both in other episodes and in the tech manuals and back-stage materials).
Furthermore, as the TNG:TM notes, the actual speed of a given warp factor fluctuates by local variations in subspace. Warp factors are assigned by the warp field strength, not actual velocity. This is part of where the popular explanation of 'subspace lanes' comes in, because canonically, warp drive mileage
does vary.
Nebfer, on 05 December 2011 - 12:24 PM, said:
In the Best of both worlds the Borg traveling some 7,000 light years in a single year takes the Federation by surprise, as they where expecting a longer lead time. It also takes them 4 days to assemble a fleet of just under 40 ships.
And theirs a number of episodes that mention travel times are days or weeks in the federation (and in some cases months).
The distance the Cube traveled is somewhat curious, though not greatly given standard cruising speeds at the time on the order of 2,000c or so. It would take a typical Federation vessel three to seven years to cross that distance, and even the E-D, the fastest ship in the fleet at the time, would have taken over two-and-a-half years to get back. That the Cube took only a year to cross that distance, suggesting a sustained cruise velocity of 7,000c if they set couse for the Federation and ran their engines continuously, would have been surprising. Especially since it's highly unlikely that even Federation ships can keep their engines running constantly for a solid year.
As for why it took so long to muster so few ships... Wolf 359 is in the heart of the Federation, just a few lightyears from Sol in the very center of Federation territory. Most of that region would have seen little activity in terms of ships, since most of the fleet would have been dispersed around the borders of the Federation (the Federation's defensive strategy is not so much to have a heavily-fortified core world, but to have ships and stations deployed along hostile borders to intercept ships before they can penetrate deep into Federation territory), and out into space beyond the borders of the Federation (much of the fleet would have been dispersed on various exploration and survey/research duties, away from the core of the Federation). It took that long to assemble that many ships because there just weren't that many ships close enough to respond. Later on, in First Contact, we see Starfleet able to assemble a larger fleet, in the hundreds, on shorter notice, and in VOY "Endgame", they were able to assemble a full dozen ships ("with more on the way") in a matter of minutes.
That, and Starfleet was more than a little over-confident in that situation...
Nebfer, on 05 December 2011 - 12:24 PM, said:
Not really most of the combat we do see has them engaging combat largely within visual range (some times they contradict it with stated ranges, a few times they confirm it (like in Conundrums and A Call to Arms -via exterior shot of ship and a quite visible "target" then a shot in the Attacker ship and a statement of we are not in firing range), and often they do not reference the range). So while we do know they can engage targets at long range most of the time their decidedly short, particularly for fleet engagements.
Interestingly in The Wounded Data indicates Torpedoes have a max range of around 300,000km
Yes, much of the combat we observe is at closer range. But a lot of it is also at longer ranges, and ranges in the hundreds of thousands of kilometers and more have been observed. We also have valid reasons for why most of the engagements against other Trek ships would be at well below maximum range - weapon travel times makes hitting targets as maneuverable as Trek ships difficult, and engagement at closer range also reduces response time (as Riker noted to the commander of the Klingon sleeper ship that was getting ready to attack the E-D). This is especially significant when you consider how Trek shields operate - the lower the response time to weapons fire, the greater the 'bleed-through window' against the target's shields, so the more energy you can slip past the target's shields to inflict damage directly to the ship. Weapons, especially phasers and disruptors, would 'hit harder' at closer ranges, because more energy would bleed through the target's shields.
As for torpedoes, we have observed them fired at millions of km and more, and the backstage materials list them as having ranges in the millions of km. With missile weapons this range will vary greatly, however, depending on the relative velocities of both ships.
Nebfer, on 05 December 2011 - 12:24 PM, said:
The "insane sensor" capabilities are highly inconsistent to say the lest, their are times when they directly mention if a ship is in such an orbit they can not see you. Then theirs all the times where they get ambushed, or even the time where an unspecified actinide ore interfered with their sensors (most common of thoughs is Uranium and Thorium).
There are a number of different circumstances that can inhibit sensor function in Trek, but even when inhibited, the data they can gather is usually far beyond the data that can be gathered by the sensors of any other franchise.
13
