Cloaked Mines

[Bry_Sinclair]

Quick question, would inactive cloaked mines be able to pass through a ship's shields?

Shields typically look to be useful for energy-based attacks, as we've seen a Maquis raider and shuttlecraft pass through them with ease. Would the same principle apply to mines, especially if the ship didn't know they were there?

 

[Timo]

Ships are supposed to have navigational shields for deflecting random space debris. It seems likely that such shields would be on at all times, and would deflect invisible debris just as well as visible stuff - unless said "debris" was actively pushing through somehow, or using a sneaky way to affect the navigational shields.

Combat shields would probably also make debris bounce, just as they made Danar's escape pod bounce in "The Hunted".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Dilandu]

The main problem would always be "how to persuade the enemy to hit the mine". The space is BIG. Even the low planetary orbits actually are the tremendous volume of vacuum. So, the chances for ship to actually hit the stationary mine is... zero. The only possible exeptions could be some "narrows", like Bajoran wormhole.

So, the space mine could not just lay low and wait until the enemy hit her. The Universe could collapse before this happens)

The usual rules for space mines:

- They must be placed near the object of importance, where the enemy would surely come.
- They must either have propulsion system to close the enemy, or ranged weapons to use against him.

 

[Timo]

We can probably rule out ranged weapons in relation to the cloaked mines of "Sons of Mogh" fame - proximity detonation seemed to be the kill mechanism. But propulsion is certainly an option there. (Cardassians had "gravitic" mines, perhaps literally attracted to the victim?)

OTOH, those mines were deployed to deter commerce. Scoring a hit would not be important - even a thousand hits wouldn't make much of a dent in the tonnage, supposedly. Creating fear of said is all that matters. And for that, the kill mechanism needs to be somewhat effective or at least scary-sounding, but the mechanism providing the odds of a kill can be less effective. Or indeed less than effective, as long as there's a finite chance of me being the one unlucky skipper out of the thousands whose ship actually blows up.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Dilandu]

We can probably rule out ranged weapons in relation to the cloaked mines of "Sons of Mogh" fame - proximity detonation seemed to be the kill mechanism. But propulsion is certainly an option there. (Cardassians had "gravitic" mines, perhaps literally attracted to the victim?)

Propulsion, then. Then two possible designs:

- "Crawling"-type, i.e. mine accelerated slowly toward enemy, trying to stay cloaked while advancing.
- "Missile"-type, i.e. after the enemy came in range the mine would drop the cloaking and accelerate toward enemy as fast as possible, acting as a usual missile.

OTOH, those mines were deployed to deter commerce. Scoring a hit would not be important - even a thousand hits wouldn't make much of a dent in the tonnage, supposedly. Creating fear of said is all that matters.

Well, this is possible. Low-orbital mines could, actually, deter merchants from attempting to close with planet. And, actually, having the planet on the background it's relatively simple to hide the mines - the planet reflect quite a lot of infrared radiation, which could completely hide the small infrared signatures of mines.

 

[Timo]

It's also possible that the mines, at least in said DS9 episode, were intended to catastrophically disrupt warp fields. We know that the preferred way (indeed, the only way, save for internal sabotage or a few tricks utilized in parallel timelines) to force ships out of warp is to fire at their warp engines or warp fields with conventional weapons. And we know that big explosions, at least those of photon torpedoes and similar weapons, have strange side effects going way beyond the actual explosive power. Disrupting a warp field at a distance, EMP style, could be a valid kill mechanism that only incidentally also involves a proximity kill mechanism, namely the physical explosion itself.

The "Sons of Mogh" mines were deployed seemingly randomly at the edge of the Bajoran system, supposedly where the merchant ships would go to warp (Bajor is infamous for people not wanting to do much warping insystem, as opposed to most other star systems - perhaps the foul weather evident in "Invasive Procedures" and "Things Past", or the general messiness of the Denorios Belt, are to blame?).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Dilandu]

Hm, this is pretty interesting idea. The mine so would have some sort of subspace pulse modulator, capable of disrupting the warp field and making at least "soft kill"; and, because of the subspace character of "detonation", they could beat the inverse squares law. Good idea, Timo!

The "Sons of Mogh" mines were deployed seemingly randomly at the edge of the Bajoran system, supposedly where the merchant ships would go to warp

Frankly, I completely forgot about such navigation problem of Bajoran system... You mean that ships are usually forced to drop out of warp far outside the system, and may go to warp only at more or less predictable points?

 

[Timo]

This is a possibility that never gets an actual mention. What we do learn is that while the Defiant can go to warp with ease and abandon right after undocking from DS9, there are many times where runabouts are in an extreme hurry to make an insystem journey but fail to utilize warp; that when the Defiant similarly undocks from DS9 in "By Inferno's Light", she hesitates to go to warp (although eventually does so without a hitch); and that in the same episode, a nova bomb is supposed to catch a fleet of ships near DS9, despite the nova supposedly being STL and the ships FTL.

In addition, while ships warp out of DS9, they never arrive at warp - perhaps a pure congestion issue, perhaps a sign of caution necessary whenever plunging deeper into the mess that is the subspace environment around Bajor's star.

If we assume that only "clear skies" allow for unlimited warping, and the "weather" typically is foul, then there could be limitations to where warp normally gets engaged. But predictability would probably be a casualty to this theory! Unless the Klingons also engaged in some serious subspace meteorology as part of their mining project - a possibility as such.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Dilandu]

Well, the Klingons were spacefaring civilization for quite a long time, so it's pretty possible that they refined their "subspace meteorology" to a highest degree. This is definitedly quite interesting conception, Timo!

 

[Timo]

Thank you for that! Speaking of ancient starfaring, we don't know when and whether old Bajor attained warp. But their famous civilization might have attracted enough attention from warp-capable species that it would have suffered from the Hekaras Corridor syndrome, the traffic itself ruining local subspace and creating warp hazards and possible lanes of lesser risk.

We don't know how long Hekaras had been busy before the subspace tears began forming (only that once they got really bad, total collapse was a matter of mere decades). Perhaps the more spatially distributed visits to Bajor would not have much effect even in the hundreds of millennia of civilization? But perhaps they would, helping explain why only the next-door-neighbor Cardassians ever bothered to conquer this place? If so, though, I'd think the issue would have come up at some point, probably already in the pilot where traffic into and out of the system was predicted to increase greatly.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Dilandu]

Hm... if i'm not mistaken, the deformation of subspace became threat only if the high warp - over warp 5 on TNG scale - is used. And the engines, capable of warp factor over 5 became common only in latest times.

But perhaps they would, helping explain why only the next-door-neighbor Cardassians ever bothered to conquer this place?

Well... probably because only Cardassians were close enough, so the conquest may have economical sense.

And another reason - the Cardassians were close enough. Anyone who wants to invade Bajor in the past shpuld took into account that Cardassian Union may not like this at all. And they were power to be reckoned with.

 

[Timo]

Hm... if i'm not mistaken, the deformation of subspace became threat only if the high warp - over warp 5 on TNG scale - is used. And the engines, capable of warp factor over 5 became common only in latest times.

The ecoterrorists claimed it came simply from accumulating exposure to warp, when conventional wisdom (Data) thought it only came from warp fields a million times stronger than those of even the most modern and most powerful starships. Low warp drives might have qualified, then.

But would warp higher than 5 really only "become common" after the humans reached that speed? There's not much indication that other species would have been slow in the ENT era, or even "barely faster". Vulcans had ships that were reputed to do warp 6 and in fact reached at least warp 7 in practice, but Vulcans were ultraconservatives. And nothing was stated about the speed of Andorian or Klingon drives. And those were only the local folks; the galactic average might always have been the same, in ENT, TOS, TNG and in an era preceding those by sixty thousand years.

With Bajor, we're really talking about the galactic average, rather than about the species familiar from the shows, as most of the folks visiting that truly ancient planet might have Ascended by the time Picard entered the picture...

And another reason - the Cardassians were close enough. Anyone who wants to invade Bajor in the past shpuld took into account that Cardassian Union may not like this at all. And they were power to be reckoned with.

But were they? The old Hebitians supposedly were peaceful - and the Cardassians in turn were utter wimps in "The Wounded", and supposedly would have been wimpy in relative terms in the preceding eras as well, against adversaries developing apace with the UFP.

That interstellar contact between Bajor and Cardassia as recently as 800 years prior to "Explorers" was but a myth tells us something. But does it tell us something about Bajor, or about Cardassia? Bajorans might have failed to make public trips to Cardassia simply because Bajorans are Bajorans - they didn't even settle their own paradise moon before the Occupation ("Progress"), or climb all the mountains of their planet in the hundreds of millennia allotted ("Explorers" again). But modern Cardassians would only fail to visit Bajor if they lacked the technology...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Go-Captain]

Quick question, would inactive cloaked mines be able to pass through a ship's shields?

Shields typically look to be useful for energy-based attacks, as we've seen a Maquis raider and shuttlecraft pass through them with ease. Would the same principle apply to mines, especially if the ship didn't know they were there?

Shields would definitely stop the mine. The Maquis raider in question is allowed through the shield by the Enterprise crew who weaken the shield to make it look like the Maquis have found a realistic sounding, but erroneous, soft spot. Even with that weakness, the Maquis ship still has to strain its engines to push through, showing the shield exerts force.

Shuttles pass through shuttle bay shields, but those shields are specifically designed to keep air in while letting ships pass through.

Humanoids behind shields find themselves too weak to push through containment shields.

When the broken piece of ship hits the Enterprise-E nacelle in Nemesis it bounces off the shield without doing harm to the hull underneath.

The way a cloaked mine works best is either by getting his by a ship with its guard, and shields, down, or by overwhelming the ship's defenses with explosive strength and numbers of munitions.

Hm... if i'm not mistaken, the deformation of subspace became threat only if the high warp - over warp 5 on TNG scale - is used. And the engines, capable of warp factor over 5 became common only in latest times.

The problem with the subspace pollution episode is the warp 5 limit was forgotten almost three episodes later. It indicates Data might have been right about the source of the damage not being normal warp drives running at normal cruise speeds of warp 7-ish. Or, it indicates the fix was ridiculously easy.

There is also the matter that the particular volume of damaged space was already very unstable, so another possibility is Data was right about all space outside that particular damaged realm, and wrong only about that particular place. That is also a handy explanation for why the speed limit was dropped so quickly.

 

[Timo]

The problem with the subspace pollution episode is the warp 5 limit was forgotten almost three episodes later. It indicates Data might have been right about the source of the damage not being normal warp drives running at normal cruise speeds of warp 7-ish. Or, it indicates the fix was ridiculously easy.

Or then the ecoterrorists were found to have been 100% right, but the UFP decided it didn't matter. After all, only special choke points like the Hekaras Corridor would be in danger, and the rest of the galaxy would probably be fine for the next ten thousand years or so even if nothing at all were done.

It just took a while to make the bold decision to do nothing, and in the meantime there were feel-good measures in place.

As for cloaked mines, it doesn't seem to matter that they are highly unlikely to penetrate shields: if they manage to explode against the shields, they still supposedly do damage. Or at least the Denver was hurt despite supposedly having navigational shields up, and the Romulan mine in "Balance of Terror" did considerable damage to the battle-ready Enterprise (although to be fair, in that episode Kirk never actually commanded shields of any sort to be raised!).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Dilandu]

(although to be fair, in that episode Kirk never actually commanded shields of any sort to be raised!).

It's probable that the shields may interfer with the scanners - and he definitedly need all scanning ability that he have.

 

[Timo]

It's also possible that we missed the 1.2 seconds it takes to say "Raise shields!" because the camera had something better to look at...

Timo Saloniemi