They really should have looked up the specs for one of those fancy Xindi super weapons before they left the house.
I always liked to think the Feds and the Doms, both skilled at diplomacy, had some agreements about warfare by the time they actually went to war. Including using only "conventional" weapons in orbitary battles and not using "WMDs" to annihilate entire systems (Especially after the trilithium bomb incident before the war). Such agreements would also help explain the odd warfare in "The siege of AR 334", where they don't use the broad Phaser beams we saw on TNG (and the houdinis aren't as deadly as they could be). The real reason was of course it wouldn't have been much of a battle if they had.
In AR 334, the Feds were battling the Jem'Hadar. They sent Kamakazis against the Odyssey. I don't think they have rules of engagement, other than win the war.
The Breen attacked Earth, and we know the attack was in California ... it was no big deal ... it is just California.
Well lets see... First Pearl Harbor and then the Alaskan Islands, next New York City, then part of Florida, and now California. Clearly "they" have it out for our outlying regions!
Yeah! What's wrong with Michigan! Attack Detroit, or Denver. Isn't that where Cheyene Mountain is? Isn't it all the same from space? Geez!!
I mean what has the NYC or Florida done to YOU?! Attack Rochester NY or Alabama or even parts of England just to spice things up.
^^Or Iran or North Korea. Although that may be counter-productive as they'd likely get a standing ovation from the rest of the planet....
Gee if they attacked Michigan they would only be destroying the empty homes in Detroit. Has Detroit turned into the worlds larges empty parking lot?
Too near being, apparently, ``less than twelve feet above sea level'' based on what actually appears on screen. Would you be so kind to tell me what the functional difference is between aiming a fast-as-light item at a planet and aiming a telescope to look at a planet? We've managed the feat of getting a planet in telescopic sites -- despite all the alleged dangers of gravity, quantum mechanics, and luminal flight you want to name -- for four centuries now. Gravity (Newtonian approximation): Force = G (m_1 m_2) (1/r_{1, 2}^3}\vec{r_{1, 2}} Magnetic influence on an electrically charged particle: Force = q \vec{E} + q \vec{v} \ctimes \vec{B} where m_1 and m_2 are masses of relevant bodies; r_{1, 2} is the distance between the centers of mass of the bodies; \vec{r_{1, 2}} is the vector from one to the other; G is the gravitational constant of the universe; q is the charge of the moving body, \vec{E} is the electric field in which the charged object moves; \vec{v} is the velocity of the moving charged body, and \vec{B} is the magnetic field in which the charged body moves. This would be an enormously challenging problem to work out analytically if you happened to be in 1778. These days, it's maybe worth giving a freshman physics major to do, but won't really tax anyone's intellect.
Dear Neb, So G is Planck's Constant? I'm sorry, I'm not a mathematician, perhaps you could lay out the equation for the effect on a stationary gravitational body produced by the initiation of a static warp bubble within effective proximity.I missed it in those equations.Oh, wait, no one has even come up with the theory for a static warp bubble-or functioning FTL practices in any way, shape, or form. If you do-LET ME KNOW! I wanna go on the first trip.
We've seen that: In ``Remember Me'' a static warp bubble is created in a space station in low orbit of a Class M planet. This is such an unexceptional and difficulty-free problem that a high school student is allowed to fiddle with it in his spare time. And the results of that bubble are so unnoticed that neither the starship in which it was created nor the space station in which it resides detected it until they returned looking very specifically for a trivially faint effect and trusted mostly to hope. We may therefore conclude that the interactions between static warp bubbles and gravitational fields are utterly minor, very predictable things. By the way, what's got you worked up about static warp bubbles? What have they got to do with, well, anything, but particularly with the alleged difficulties of managing to shoot something in sight with a weapon that goes in a straight line at very high speeds?
This is completely noncanonical, but I always figured that the Xindi weapon seen at the end of ENT Season Two was basically just a phaser comparable to the phasers of TOS or TNG, and that the Superweapon used at the end of Season Three was a phaser that was maybe a hundred or so years more advanced than TNG-era phasers. Just my speculation. 1) What makes you think that the key admirals from Starfleet Command wouldn't survive, or that the Federation President and/or Council couldn't be evacuated? In the novel Before Dishonor, it's revealed that Starfleet Command is capable of transferring its operations center to an underground bunker located miles into the Earth that's made of duranium and other fake Star Trekky metals, with its own lifesupport system -- a bunker that's theoretically capable of surviving the complete destruction of the Earth and yet small enough to be overlooked in that sort of destruction, allowing its occupants to be rescued later on. 2) Even if the relevent personnel from Earth were all destroyed, Starfleet Command has placed admirals with relevent jurisdictions all across Federation space. We've seen that -- Ross being the prime example. Even if Earth was destroyed, there would still be a functional chain of command. They tried. The Klingons, whose ships could be modified to be immune, held them back. Remember? For anyone who's interested, the short story "Eleven Hours Out" from the anthology Tales of the Dominion War -- edited by the TrekBBS's own KRAD (Keith R.A. DeCandido), tells the story of the Breen attack on Earth, while the short story "Safe Harbor" from that same anthology tells the story of what two TOS characters were doing at the same time.
The Breen should have done just that. Having taken out both the Federation and Romulan ships, the Klingons should have been easy to deal with given the numerical superiority of the Dominion fleets. Maybe the Founders were not interested in simply destruction for it's own sake. Maybe I'm starting to engage in annihilation fantasy?