Mr Lopez, on 21 January 2012 - 04:48 AM, said:
my last comment about fleets. flying by another fleet with all the ships in that fleet shooting thier torpedos would be devestating and as earlier stated and i agree phasers and other contunious directed energy weapons would be near useless for flyby tactics due to low time on target. and i said fleet not 1 ship..(i believe there was an episode when they fired a torpedo in warp).
Except that you apparently missed my point.
A single volley of torpedoes is
not devestating. Ship-to-ship it would achieve almost nothing, but shall we extend it to fleets? Combined weapons fire can collapse shield grids and destroy ships, obviously, but Trek ships are very durable most of the time (Chin'Toka being the biggest exception; those weapons platforms were devestating), so it takes a lot of fire to actually bring one down. The Enterprise C, at the battle of Narendra III, took over
two hundred hits that reached her hull, and while she was savaged, she was still restorable to partial working order in only about a day, without the aid of a starbase. Unless you're talking gross size or tech differences (which
is common in many combat instances), Trek ships really just don't go down that easily, nor should they. Even when weapons reach the hull, either from shield bleedthrough, or shields collapsing, there's considerable armor to go through, and more importantly still, structural integrity fields which bolster up the ship with an effective second shield grid (albiet one that works slightly differently).
Further, torpedoes are rarely especially effective on shields on their own, but honestly we can set that fact aside for our purposes here, even if it should be noted. Let's say we're talking about a fleet of 100 ships, each with an average torpedo volley of 10 torpedoes, so that's 1,000 torpedoes. A middling ship, like a mid-sized cruiser, would probably lose her shields and be destroyed by maybe 30 torpedoes. This is inline with what we typically see. At the Battle of Kitomer, the Enterprise A took 7 hits from torpedoes before actually taking the first significant damage, and even then, the overall ship was laregely not damage besides having her shields begin to collapose (she also lost the aid of auxiliary power, but main power stayed online). She probably would have gone down in another half dozen to a dozen hits or so, but it's hard to say exactly. In that same battle, a scout BoP, a
very tiny ship, took 7 hits to destroy without any kind of shields. Fast forward 50 years, and ships get a lot bigger, SIF systems get added to better contain damage, and torpedo yields go up more through numbers than bigger warheads. The Enteprise C is a lot bigger than the Enteprise A, more than twelve times bigger in fact, and is a beast of a ship in her day (as opposed to just a heavy cruiser by size/capability), and takes 200 such hits at Narendra III. She's bigger than an average Starfleet cruiser, however, a lot bigger, so that number needs to be knocked down enormously.
So at, 30 torpedoes, you'd knock out three middling ships out of 100, and maybe scratch the paint on one more. You wouldn't even be
able to take down a proper capital ship. So you'd inflict about 3% losses, give or take. In short, you'd do nothing to the other fleet, and then what?
It's even possible that, based on the Narendra III incident, I'm underestimating durability here, but like all fictional franchises, there's high and low instances, something I try to keep in mind (which is why I presented one of both).
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i did not say it was useless to have discussions of fictional scenarios or equipment . i would be in effect insulting myself as well as anyone who posted in this thread. if that is how you took my post i apologize. i was saying i have a hard time swallowing the startrek lore in its totality as internally logical because it takes itself so serious. the reason i picked 40k is because they make little attempt to make any sense for the most part as most of the creatures that inhabit its universe have absolutly no idea how anything works, just that it does
There's just too problems I see with this:
A.) It's not actually an argument
B.) I don't think we particularly care if you like Trek, or our perceptions of Trek, anymore than you should care what I think of 40k, not for the purposes of this discussion (we can discuss that another time). I don't particularly like Warhammer 40k; storywise I think it's a childish franchise that acheives little beyond packing explosions and violence into a pseudo-scifi background, without any kind of attempt to make a story relevant to the modern day, which idolizes and attempts to make cool a downright evil cast of fictional characters, who in any other universe, would be the enemies of mankind, and are honestly arguable such even
in the 40k universe (which isn't to comment on them as games qua games; the PC games are actually fairly fun, and I bet the TT game are too).
What I think, however, does not amount to addressing the topic of the discussion, which is who would win in a battle, a topic which you have not addressed.
If it's an ancillary comment, you can say whatever you want about any franchise; it's not my thread, and I can't stop you. However, you really should address the topic at hand as your primary reason for being here.
Edit: There is also a "Welcome to the forums" due for you here somewhere. I'm not trying to be mean, honest.
But please, do stick to the topic at hand. Address franchises and how powerful they appear to be, not how much you like/dislike them.
Edited by Catamount, 21 January 2012 - 09:07 AM.
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Did anybody see "The Daedalus Variations"?
