Tarvitz, on 08 January 2012 - 09:42 AM, said:
Gene Roddenberry stated that the movies and episodes are canon, nothing else is. The newt evolution came from an episode, so it's canon according to the creator of Star Trek.
Even then let's consider some other things - Star Trek ships have been noted to consider point blank range in ship to ship battles to be 500 meters, many other franchises consider point blank range in ship to ship combat to be thousands of kilometers which suggests they have extremely short range weapons. Trek ships, again going by Voyager, can be rendered all but utterly crippled by interferometry, and have some of the lowest weapons outputs in science fiction. It also takes them seven years to cross 25% of the galaxy even with help of omnipotent beings like Q, where as the factions of Warhammer 40K, Star Wars and Andromeda can manage twice that distance in a month at the longest.
Oh, and the Borg can be all crippled by MC Escher images as they can't comprehend shapes which cannot exist in 3D according to The Next Generation, so all the enemy would have to do is fly forwards with Escher's Relativity painted on their hulls.
To add to the bolded statement:
The
Systems [color="#0000ee"]
Commonwealth[/color] spanned three galaxies - the
Andromeda Galaxy (M31), the
Milky Way Galaxy, and the
Triangulum Galaxy (M33).
Milky Way to Andromeda: 2.54 ± 0.06 million light years (Mly)
Milky Way to Triangulum: 2,380-3,070 thousand light years (Kly) {that is, 2.38-3.07 Mly}
Andromeda and Triangulum are near enough to one another that the latter is thought to be a satellite galaxy of the former.
In order to govern and police effectively, High Guard ships would have to be able to traverse those distances in very short order (e.g. weeks or months at most).
The article for Slipstream (Andromeda's version of FTL travel):
Quote
Even the most sophisticated starship in the Systems Commonwealth has an organic sentient to pilot through the starlanes -- a prospect some sentients regard as deeply disturbing but others find comforting. However, machines with organic neural components (ie- cyborgs, in this case) have the intuition required to do so. VX, for example of the Consensus of Parts was able to navigate the slipstream because he had these components and thus the intuition required. Thus, an organic brain is required, though the organism itself need not be wholly organic.
However, it appears even a full AI is capable of navigating the slipstream to some extent, albeit in a very haphazard and dangerous way. When the entire original organic crew of the Andromeda Ascendant was killed by the Magog from the Magog Worldship, the Andromeda's AI made the journey from the galaxy M66 to Triangulum by wandering the slipstream pilotless for 13 months.
For reference, M66 is approximately 36 million light years (36 Mly) from the Milky Way.
So, we know that High Guard ships can cover a distance of at least 30 Mly in a little over a year without a pilot.
It stands to reason, then, that the same trip with a pilot would take much less time, while a trip one-tenth of the distance (e.g. Andromeda/Triangulum to Milky Way) would be shorter still.
By contrast (according to
the Memory Alpha article on warp factors), a Federation starship traveling at Warp 9.975 (what seems to be the upper limit of safe warp travel) would take approximately one month to cover approximately 132 light years.
According to
its Memory Alpha entry, the Federation "encompassed 8,000 light years and over 150 member worlds".
Whether this is an area (8,000 square light years), a volume (8,000 cubic light years) of the widest dimension of the Federation's territory is not made clear.
Assuming the second, the Federation could be, say, 10x20x40 light years, and a Federation starship traveling at warp 9.975 would take a little over a week to traverse its longest dimension.
Assuming the lattermost, it would take a Federation starship traveling at warp 9.975 approximately 60.6 months (just over 5 years) to go from one side of the Federation to the other.
By comparison, the
Astronomican (the psychic beacon by which the ships of
Warhammer 40,000's Imperium of Man are able to navigate) has a range of 70,000 light years (the Milky Way has a diameter of 100,000-120,000 light years and a thickness of approximately 1,000 light years). This makes the Imperium's territory, at most, a sphere centered around Terra with a radius of 70,000 light years).
The same article states that without contact with the Astronomican, the
Immaterium/"Warp" (
Warhammer 40,000's version of hyperspace) is "otherwise unnavigable chaos" and that, as noted in the Immaterium article, "the timing itself is unpredictable due to the very nature of the Immaterium, and occasionally a fleet of reinforcements will emerge from the Immaterium to find that the war they were sent to fight in has long been lost, or not yet even started". As such, it seems the
Imperial Navy is effectively rendered a non-issue outside of the Astronomican's range.
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My
previous post outlines the offensive and defensive capabilities of a High Guard ship (a
Glorious Heritage class heavy cruiser, to be specific; other ship types include the
Siege Perilous class, the
Righteous Fist of Heaven class, the
Pride of Kaldera class, the
Atmospheric Attack Carrier, the
Victory's Crucible class, and others, typically arranged into "
Heavy Cruiser Battle Groups" and "
Planetfall Readiness Groups").
The offensive and defensive capabilities of Federation starships has been covered previously, while those of the Imperium's ships have been much more... sparse and vague.
According to
the article on the Imperial Navy, "the general consensus is that in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, Imperial Escort vessels are anywhere between 750 metres and 3 kilometres in length, Cruisers are anywhere between 5 and 6 kilometres long and Battleships anywhere between 6 and 8 kilometres".
The main
battleships in use by the Imperium seem to be the
Emperor-class and
Retribution-class, along with the
Victory-class, the
Apocalypse-class and the
Oberon-class.
The main
cruisers in use by the Imperium seem to be the
Avenger-class, the
Lunar-class, and the
Gothic-class.
The main
escorts in use by the Imperium seem to be the
Cobra-class destroyers and the
Firestorm-class frigates.
It seems that nearly all ships carry "
void shields" as their first line of defense:
Quote
A Void Shield is a special form of gravitic or electrically-charged energy field employed by the Imperium of Man's various military forces to protect super-heavy vehicles like starships and Titans from enemy attacks. Void Shields use Imperial Warp-based technology to displace ranged attacks by subtly distorting the localized space-time around the poin of impact. It is unclear whether Void Shields neutralize the projectile or energy beam, transport it into the Warp, or whether they use some other method to displace the damaging force of a physical attack upon the vehicle or vessel. Void Shields act in the same manner as Ork Kustom Force Fields, though Ork energy fields are far less reliable and tend to be inoperable once downed. Inversely, Imperial Void Shields can be re-activated after being collapsed, even during battle. In combat, Void Shields do not protect from close combat assaults or other vehicles moving through them to then attack the shielded vehicle or vessel.
Quote
Void Shields on Imperial vessels (and enemy vessels for that matter), are larger and more powerful versions than those found on titans and other war machines. A void shield is created by single generator that creates a sphere of energy around the ship that protects it from direct and indirect enemy fire. It prevents damage from energy weapons and prevents actual critical structural damage occurring on the ship. Any vessel large enough to be built with a shield generator thus as a shield but energy weapons overload the generators so once fire as been absorbed, the void shield collapses. The shield regenerates several minutes later assuming the ship isn’t attacked again and that subsequent attacks do not damage the shield generator. Ordnance like torpedoes and fighters are not affected by the effects of shields and can do direct damage to the ship unless engaged by turrets. The Emperor-class has four shield generators and thus four separate shields.
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The Retribution-class has four Void Shield generators and thus has four shields.
Hull and armor materials seem to include "
adamantium", "
armaplas", "
ceramite", "
plasteel", and possibly others.
Quote
Every spacefaring vessel is equipped with a certain amount of physical armour, capable of deflecting direct weapon impacts on the starship's hull. The strength and thickness of the armour varies depending on the starship's size and type - a tiny Escort ship will have a ribbed outer hull maybe a foot thick or less, while an 8-kilometre-long Imperial Battleship will have three separate, heavily reinforced adamantium hull layers, with a total thickness of dozens of metres. Common among all the warships of the Imperial Navy, ranging from Frigate to Battleship size is the armoured prow, which is massively reinforced and can be hundreds of metres thick on the largest ships as it is also used as a ram. It is capable of deflecting all but the most powerful of strikes to a vessel's bow.
However, the adamantium article states, "many items made in the past from adamantium cannot be reverse-engineered by the Imperium's Adepts because their adamantium shells are so strong that they cannot be disassembled", so it stands to reason that very few, if any, ships are made primarily from a material that their technician corps cannot work with - so it's likely that most ships' hulls are made of some combination of the other materials.
For realspace propulsion, Imperial starships seem to use some variant of plasma thruster (possibly a
MPD thruster?):
Quote
Every Imperial starship is equipped with a plasma drive for normal propulsion through the depths of space. Running up to a third of the ship's length, the aft section is a mass of drive tubes, engine compartments and plasma reactors. Most Imperial Navy ships employ Warp drives to breach the barrier that separates realspace from the Immaterium and allow for interstellar travel. Implosion of these drives can lead to the creation of a Warp rift.
In terms of Imperial
starship weapons:
Quote
"Weapons battery" is a generic name for the Plasma Batteries, Laser Cannons, Rail Guns, and Missile Launchers that make up the vast majority of spaceborne weapons and can be fired in a multitude of ways, from one concentrated blast to a pattern determined by the captain. Nearly all warships are well-armed with gun ports and weapon housings for weapons batteries.
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The idea behind lances is simple: use an ultra-heavy energy cannon to hit an enemy with a blast so powerful that it punches straight through its armour. Like weapons batteries, each starfaring race has its own lance-type weapons, many of which have effects that are drastically different from those technologies employed by the Imperial Navy.
-----
Torpedoes are large anti-starship missiles used in space naval battles. They are a highly versatile weapon, as they can be used by any spacecraft from the largest battleships to the smallest planetside missile defence silos. Up to 200 feet long and powered by a powerful plasma reactor that also forms part of the warhead, torpedoes' extremely limited tracking abilities are made up for by the sheer size of the blast they can produce, making a near miss almost as good as a direct hit. Torpedoes are made even more effective by the difficulty of hitting them, which results in fighters and point-defense turrets being the only weapons that can be counted on to consistently engage and destroy them.
Of particular note is the Imperium's "
Nova Cannon":
Quote
The Nova Cannon is one of the most powerful weapons commonly employed by the Imperium of Man. The size, power requirement and recoil is such that it is only mounted on capital ships or planetary defenses.
The cannon itself is massive, the barrel running most of the length of all but the largest vessels. The projectiles have a diameter of 50m, and are fired at "close to light speed", accelerated by "Graviometric" coils. When the missile has travelled the predetermined distance, the warhead implodes with a force equivalent to several plasma bombs. This creates a blast zone the size of a small planet, powerful enough to destroy a light cruiser in a single hit or cripple a battleship.
While the exact principle of the weapon remains unknown, there have been several arguments about the kinetic energy of the impact. Unfortunately, while the kinetic energy can be estimated with some accuracy, the weapon (primarily due to the extreme range and unreliable aiming) is unlikely to directly hit anything smaller than a planetoid. The primary effect is derived from the explosive force, which is produced by an unknown method (presumably a very large thermonuclear/fusion warhead, given the name).
Compare to the High Guard's "
Nova Bomb":
Quote
A Nova Bomb is a very powerful weapon capable of making a sun go supernova, destroying nearly all the matter of a solar system. The weapon itself is about the size of a 55 gallon drum, and is mounted on a missile in place of a traditional explosive payload.
-----
A nova bomb doesn't destroy a sun by "blowing it up" in the traditional sense. A sun's gravity exerts a tremendous amount of pressure inward, while the ongoing fusion reaction exerts a constant outward pressure. Therefore, a star is in a constant state of balance. The Nova Bomb unbalances this equilibrium by negating the star's inherent gravity, causing a runaway fusion reaction of stellar proportions. With no gravity, the hydrogen gas which was undergoing fusion disperses in all directions, exploding and destroying everything in its path.
Immense amounts of Nova Bombs can be used on a black hole. The collective field destroys the gravity well of the black hole, creating a White Hole, which is essentially a miniature big bang, which, like the big bang, takes a singularity of almost infinite density and scatters it. However, once the effects of the Nova wear off, gravity reasserts itself, and all the matter released in the white hole starts compressing back together. This might work, theoretically, on a star large enough, but there isn't nearly enough matter or gravity for a star to reform, making its destruction almost absolute.
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Based on the above, it seems like the Imperium favors "traditional" sci-fi weaponry (lasers, railguns, plasma cannons, and missiles/torpedos) mounted in large numbers on very large, heavily armored hulls with (IMO) rather unimpressive shields.
I would say that, in a protracted naval war with no outside influence (no Avatars or Chaos Gods), the Commonwealth and its High Guard would most likely win as they can stage from outside of the Imperium's reach (that is, from the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies), can easily match function-equivalent Imperial ships, and would probably "fight smarter" as their primary tactics don't depend on tossing away ships while thinking their manpower is inexhaustable (which the Imperium's
isn't, regardless of how much they might like to believe otherwise).
Not to mention 1.) the Commonwealth would likely go about the same sort of diplomatic co-opting of Imperial worlds as the Federation and 2.) effectively disabling the Imperial fleet could be done relatively quickly by slipping a few HCBGs in, having each fire a Nova Bomb or 20 at Sol, and slipping away - no more Astronomican
and a monumental blow to Imperial morale.
Your thoughts?
13
). Until then, they've very successfully resorted to guerrilla warfare against both the Goa'uld and Wraith.
