Spoilers Beyond: The Swarm VS USS Vengeance
- Thread starter Skipper
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So can the swarm.
And Vengeance is may be a powerful ship, but I'd be amazed if it was more agile than the Enterprise at sublight speed.
Which has nothing at all to do with the swarm, which fights by simply bum-rushing its targets and overwhelming them before they can effectively counter attack. EVADING the swarm isn't a valid defense against it; if they don't want you to leave, you won't.
That's not how gravity (or Star Trek) works, but that's a cute theory all the same.
Which is a VERY good point: Vengeance is designed as a space superiority platform, so its weapons are optimized for crushing other starships at long range. It can outgun anything else in space in a standup fight and has heavy enough shields to hang in a fight with a small squadron of enemy cruisers.
Against the swarm, those weapons are useless. There are no big cap ship targets for it to blast to pieces, no heavily-shielded cruisers to slice apart with its railguns (the swarm will simply DODGE those). Its drones, designed to encircle single targets and hit them from all sides, would get torn apart like a pair of doughnut holes in an office party. All the things that make Vengeance an advanced combatant would make it less than
Does anyone in this thread actually remember what DOES work against the swarm? Weapons and maneuvering are nice to talk about, but the only effective way to stop the swarm is to jam the radio signals they use to coordinate their attacks. Vengeance -- which lacks a science officer or the advanced analytical computers of a conventional starship -- is in no position to do that.
It worked because they were able to match relative velocities close enough top make ramming passes. If "Enterprise" have freedom of movement and already-reached significant velocity, she would be able to dodge such kind of attacks almost indefinitedly, simply by jerking randomly. The slow reaction of swarm - humpered by their organic pilots - would make any hits against moving target impossible.
They have no ranged weapons. Which means that they must go to contact... and on relative velocities of hundreds/thousands kilometers per second this is next thing to impossible.
Just imagine the size of circulation the Swarm would be forced to make to go head-on onto moving "Enterprise"! This would take hours just to maneuvre the Swarm into the strike position - assuming that the "Enterprise" would not change course or velocity. Because if she change them, the Swarm ramming colution would be thrown completely out of order, and it would took them another hours to make next attempt... and next... and next... and then "Enterprise" would vaporise the last swarm ship, making firing passes on high velocities.
The spaceships aren't planes. Never forget this.
Nothing could be simple.
Just the more or less actual combat situation: the swarm attempting to ram the "Enterprise" which is moving on the velocity of, say, around 3000 km per second (pathetic 1/100 of lightspeed). And she also jerk randomly from side to side and make changes in her acceleration
How could the Swarm do anything against her?
- If they start tail chase, they are toast. Simply because they would reach the target SLOWLY, and gave the "Enterprise" phasers a few hours of shooting in ideal conditions. And when the remaining swarmships came dangerously close (from behind) the "Enterprise" would just warp out and change position.
- If they go to head-on attack... how for Pete's sake they do it?! They need somehow to place themselves forward of "Enterprise" (which is moving at 3000 km per second), which would took a lot of time. And then they would need to lay a course that would move them and "Enterprise" in one point in exactly the same time. If the "Enterprise" suddenly turned, all trajectory solution would be completely thrown off. Just 0,1 second disrepancy between the "Enterprise" and swarm movement would mean clear miss of more than 300 km.
Speaking simply: the ramming attack didn't work against moving targets in space.
Sigh.
The "Venegeance" computers are military-grade systems.
Which means that they are far more competent in therms of ECM and electronic warfare than "Enterprise"'s. Because in combat conditions, the human reaction is insufficient to work against enemy systems.
Which means, that "Venegeance" would detect and analyse Swarm methods of coordinations automatically - it's just simple acustic modulation, after all! - and jam them on auto.
On what sources are you basing the claims you've just made, and why would we assume the Venegance computer systems were any more sophisticated than Enterprise's in this particular regard?
I'll grant that Vengeance had bigger, newer, and more powerful weapons designs, but that in no way suggests that the ship's threat analysis systems were more advanced as well.
I'll grant that Vengeance had bigger, newer, and more powerful weapons designs, but that in no way suggests that the ship's threat analysis systems were more advanced as well.
They are not more sophisticated. They are more specialized on defense functions and have much more control. As example - the surface radiotelescope is much more capable than military ECM station, but in strictly military functions the ECM station would outpreform the radiotelescope significantly. Simply because ECM station did not need such level of analysis as radiotelescope to react. Or more simple expample - the "Enterprise" is the scientist, who need to analyse the nearby flash before do anything, and "Venegeance" is soldier, who would instinctively duck and cover. And who would survive the shockwave?
I.e. the "Venegeance" would not think in this situation. It would react. The unidentified artifical object(s) of significant mass on the interception course - the automatic reaction of MILITARY starship would be immediatedly start heavy burn and threw herself out of intercept position on maximum "g". She would not think, she would not consult human officers - she would just burn and blast out of the gravity well. Because it's the only possible answer in military therms.
Yes. Which is EXACTLY what they do. And it works pretty well.
Or thirty five seconds, depending on whether or not the swarm ships are equipped with impulse engines (which they are) or whether or not they're more maneuverable than the Enterprise (which they definitely are).
Take your own advice. There's no reason for the swarm to have to change its attack vector against a "head-on moving" Enterprise, they'd just use retrofire to change their relative velocity to something more appropriate for precision attacks. Again, the fact that they are far more maneuverable than the Enterprise means they can match any maneuver the ship can make for far less energy (individually) required.
Enterprise doesn't move that quickly in orbital space, assuming it's capable of those kinds of speeds AT ALL (this is far from certain).
But even if it did, what exactly prevents the swarm from matching its velocity? Velocity is irrelevant in space, only ACCELERATION matters. if the Swarm can match or exceed Enterprise's acceleration, it doesn't matter how FAST its going, the swarm can control their velocity relative to their target and Enterprise simply can't.
Or accelerate to overtake. Spaceships aren't airplanes, remember?
Retrofire acceleration to cut relative closing velocity. Spaceships aren't airplanes, remember?
Right. And so they're limited in function to target acquisition, rangefinding and interception, because they are MILITARY computers, not scientific ones.
Consider what you're implying here. Scientists researching the Higgs Boson can be found at national laboratories with highly sensitive detection equipment and some of the most advanced computers ever constructed. The one place you WON'T find those scientists is in the CIC of an aircraft carrier, trying to get the ship's threat analysis suite to produce feynman diagrams of quarks.
That's actually the whole reason that Starfleet is as effective as it is: they can do things that military organizations can't, because their equipment can pull scientific magic tricks that render even the most devastating weapons (like the swarm) useless.
ECM systems do not work that way. They're designed to counter specific types of signals and attacks that are pre-programmed into their functioning by the people who design them. It wouldn't have been effective in this case unless the swarm was already known to Starfleet engineers who had already developed a function to counter them.
This is obviously not the case, as the Enterprise crew had to custom make a counter measure to neutralize the swarm. Vengeance's crew would have to do the same thing in order to survive, but unlike the Enterprise, their crew does not include a science officer.
This has been true in Star Trek only ONCE, in the case of the pyschotic M5 computer. Since then it has been disproven a dozen and a half times, all such occasions being contemporary to STB.
So on this count, you're just plain wrong.
If both sides have generally limitless acceleration (which impulse engines provided), then both sides would just continue to accelerate until the sufficient fraction of lightspeed would be reached... And then due to relativistic distortions the swarm would became completely helpless. No ability to communicate, because the signals are distorted and shifted. No ability to intercept, because they always saw the point where the ship was.
Very old systems - 1960s type, the first automatics - yes, they worked like that.
The modern systems are designed to react, analyse and jam signals on auto. They aren't simple "specific type - specific response" relays. This would be useless against modern radars and seekers, which used combination of frequences, usually several search methods and vatiable beam parameters. Modern ECM is first of all the analytic program, which detect and think about "what I detected exactly?" and then proposed several possible responses (or started to launch chaffs and flares on auto, if the answer is "supersonic sea-skimmer, second before strike")
Told this fable to the simple old-fashioned "Vulcan-Phalanx", or old-fashioned Drozd tank defense system. They would probably laught (if they could) till jammed.
Basically you are mixing command decisions and automatic reactions. The command decisions - like to fire offensieve weapons - could be linked through men. But nobody would link through men the decisions that required faster reactions.
In space warfare, the human reaction would just not work. The fraction of seconds that humans need to decide (and it could took a lot longer, if the decision is complex or human is distracted!) may just means that the spaceship would be blown to dust.
Which they don't. The swarm ships are considerably faster under impulse power and clearly have superior acceleration and agility.
Yes, based on a subset of threat systems they've been designed to counter. Multiband jamming devices, frequency-agile devices, and some phased array systems have the ability to shift modulation and polarity to more effectively jam their high tech counterparts. That still, however, requires the nature of the threat system to be known ahead of time and programmed into the system by engineers. An ECM package cannot jam or directly interfere with an electronic detection method it hasn't been designed to cope with, even if it CAN interfere with two dozen others that it IS designed for.
Amusingly, even the systems they ARE designed for, the countermeasures do not always work the way they're supposed to.
Enterprise already has automated fire control systems and deflector shields. Sulu hits a button that says "lock phasers" and another button that says "Pew pew" and whatever the phasers are tracking suddenly explodes.
That's a FAR cry from having the entire ship perform a complex set of automated evasions pre-programmed to a specific threat that no one on the ship even knew existed until ten seconds ago. Technology, unlike magic, is limited to what you can design it to do, and you can't design technology for something you've never seen before.
Actually, REAL space warfare is likely to be so slow-paced and boring that human beings would have time to sit and watch an episode of Game of Thrones between command decisions. The distances involved, the scale of it, and the velocities of the weapons means that any orbital or deep space combat situation will involved temendously long hours of boredom punctuated every couple of days by 60 seconds of abject terror as an enemy projectile begins to approach and you and your ship/crew do everything possible to evade the attack and launch one in return, then wait 6 more hours to see if the enemy managed to survive.
On the other hand:
Nothing in the history of Star Trek has ever come down to "fractions of a second" decisions. Even an ambush that takes everyone completely off guard generally gives enough time to speak two or more lines of dialog before the hit comes and even then death is never entirely instantaneous.
You might consider that the fact that NOBODY ELSE uses fully automated drone ships (like M5) is a pretty good reason for this. Human reaction time may be slow, but the reaction time of the Romulan commanders attacking them is JUST as slow.
And I'll invite you to consider one other important thing: the swarm's movements, coordinated electronically through an advanced distributed computer network, is exactly what made them so deadly to the Enterprise and is exactly the kind of system you're assuming the Enterprise should have by default. And yet it was the exploitation of this very system that allowed Starfleet to utterly annihilate the swarm with a simple radio signal. So all of the armchair analysis you're doing and all of your assumptions about what Starfleet should/could do are irrelevant; the swarm has one critical weakness that would allow a starship to defeat it, and that weakness would have to be identified and analyzed by a highly trained Starfleet crew in order to be exploited properly. Vengeance would therefore only survive that encounter if it had better scientists than Enterprise did, and THAT is something that doesn't even exist in the Star Trek universe.
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Then the Star Fleet Battles universe ships could easily swamp them with ECM/ECCM
You know the old GEC logbooks had something similar--the so-called venom Lance one Klingon ships.
They could form pinwheels, like Battle LA.
I'm thinking the Krall ships might be neutronium. Maybe the same tech as the Doomsday machine.
I don't think any of them ever fired.
So, how would you compare them with other fighters?
I think they'd eat X-wings too.
The Vengeance would likely have many times the hull durability of the NCC-1701, and a wide array of weapons, with support from the phaser drones to slow the swarm down a fair amount better than the Enterprise.
Should the Vengeance's standard weapons have not neutralised the swarm and was taking heavy hits, it would have jumped to warp to fight another day. The Enterprise was seconds away from escaping before it's relatively weak nacelle pylons were strimmed off, it would be reasonable to think the V would still have warp capability.
The Narada overwhelmed Starfleet and the Klingons with their 24th century cascading torpedoes - Section 31 & Khan must have taken this into account when they built the Vengeance, it was after all a product of Khan's intellect. Admiral Marcus needed someone of greater potential to combat 'unfamiliar threats'.
Comparing the Vengeance to the Enterprise isn't so straight forward, as the latter represents the Federation in the most positive stance possible, as a flagship bearing peace keeping, exploratory & science capabilities. For it to be armor plated and armed to the teeth spells hostility to whoever she encounters, exploring space and trespassing unknown territories is dangerous enough as it is.
Should the Vengeance's standard weapons have not neutralised the swarm and was taking heavy hits, it would have jumped to warp to fight another day. The Enterprise was seconds away from escaping before it's relatively weak nacelle pylons were strimmed off, it would be reasonable to think the V would still have warp capability.
The Narada overwhelmed Starfleet and the Klingons with their 24th century cascading torpedoes - Section 31 & Khan must have taken this into account when they built the Vengeance, it was after all a product of Khan's intellect. Admiral Marcus needed someone of greater potential to combat 'unfamiliar threats'.
Comparing the Vengeance to the Enterprise isn't so straight forward, as the latter represents the Federation in the most positive stance possible, as a flagship bearing peace keeping, exploratory & science capabilities. For it to be armor plated and armed to the teeth spells hostility to whoever she encounters, exploring space and trespassing unknown territories is dangerous enough as it is.
Unlikely. Again, Vengeance's weapons were designed to smash other starships with one-shot kills. They weren't designed to take down multitudes of fast-moving targets that don't actually require a lot of firepower to kill. And again, Vengeance only had those two drones. That wouldn't have made a whole lot of difference.
What WOULD have made a difference was the Dreadnaught's armor providing better protection to its deflector dish. It would have been harder for the swarm to take out its shields -- not THAT much harder, but enough to the point that Vengeance might actually have a little bit longer than Enterprise did before its defenses were disabled.
Also unlikely: Vengeance's nacelle pylons aren't that much stronger than Enterprise's, they're simply LARGER, which means a larger number of drone ships would hit them at once to cut through them. The logical place to do this would be farther up the pylon, closer to the actual nacelle housing; being more widely spaced means those housings would be easier to hit on the Vengeance than the Enterprise.
Vengeance wasn't designed to counter the Narada, primarily because Kirk had already destroyed that ship by the time Khan was discovered.
Vengeance was designed to overwhelm 23rd century Klingon and Romulan warships, primarily by hitting them with heavy weapons to overwhelm their shields and armor with just one or two shots. It's not designed to fight swarming torpedoes, it's designed to kill its opponents before they have a chance to fire anything at all (as it did with Enterprise).
Correct, just not for the reasons you're thinking.
Starfleet isn't a collection of ships and technologies. Stafleet is a collection of PEOPLE. Any starship is only as effective as the people running it, and the ship's capabilities do not exceed those of the capabilities of its crew. With that in mind, the inescapable fact is that Vengeance's limitations have to do with who built it and for what purpose it was built; it will not be run by a standard Starfleet crew with a wide range of skill sets and a range of scientific knowledge and expertise. It will be run, instead, by Section 31 field agents and/or mercenaries who are appointed to crew positions not because of their qualifications, but because of their ideological purity and their loyalty to whoever happens to be calling the shots that day.
When you consider that the only effective countermeasure against the swarm is to neutralize its capacity to coordinate its formations and effectively reduce the entire mass of them to a giant fireworks display, you have to consider that only a group of very skilled officers would have the capacity to do that in a short period of time. Vengeance wouldn't be run by anyone with those kinds of qualifications just by virtue of its mission.
As a real world example: it's like looking at the air defenses around 1970s Hanoi and trying to figure out whether or not a double ace pilot in an F-15 would have a better chance than a flight school cadet in an F-22 Raptor. They're actually BOTH kind of screwed, but the experienced pilot is slightly less screwed because he actually possesses the skill to recognize and exploit the weaknesses in the enemy radar systems and their weapons, while the rookie has nothing going for him except a very advanced aircraft that he can't really use to its full potential.
Eddie,
At the end of the day, the Vengeance is supposed to be a much stronger ship than the Enterprise in a combat situation - we can come to this reasonable conclusion from the events of STID and ST09.
If we remain incredulous towards the true defensive/tactical capabilities of the V and her crew, then base her chances of survival on what we witness with the Enterprise in STB - then we're going to disagree and debate all day long.
I am satisfied from a technical standpoint the V would have survived it, at least jump into warp to buy time and work out how to deal with the swarm in a second encounter. If the STB script had the E instantly taken down, then I would be more inclined to agree with your point of view.
Anh
At the end of the day, the Vengeance is supposed to be a much stronger ship than the Enterprise in a combat situation - we can come to this reasonable conclusion from the events of STID and ST09.
If we remain incredulous towards the true defensive/tactical capabilities of the V and her crew, then base her chances of survival on what we witness with the Enterprise in STB - then we're going to disagree and debate all day long.
I am satisfied from a technical standpoint the V would have survived it, at least jump into warp to buy time and work out how to deal with the swarm in a second encounter. If the STB script had the E instantly taken down, then I would be more inclined to agree with your point of view.
Anh
Well, really, if Kirk had ordered a retreat as soon as the nature of the swarm become apparent, the E might have survived as well. What we don't know is when things went from "this is bad but we can still get away" to "now we're stuck here". Obviously once the E's nacelles are shredded things are dire, but Sulu was having trouble getting the ship to warp prior to that point. For all we know the swarm (or the nebula, or other factor) was generating some sort of interference that prevented a warp speed escape and would just as surely have impacted the Vengeance.
In any case, I tend to conclude that any ship finding itself amidst the swarm, without time to analyze it and determine a weakness, and without weapons intended to be used on that type of enemy, was unlikely to survive.
In any case, I tend to conclude that any ship finding itself amidst the swarm, without time to analyze it and determine a weakness, and without weapons intended to be used on that type of enemy, was unlikely to survive.
That was why we made the comparison to Yorktown Station, whose defenses were designed to fend off a direct assault from multiple large starships. Same difference in this case: the swarm was able to overwhelm those defenses and ultimately compromised Yorktown's perimeter.
It's not a matter of incredulity. We KNOW what Vengeance was designed to do, and we know who it was designed and operated by. We know the capabilities of both its operators and designers and we know that they are certainly no better equipped to deal with the swarm than Enterprise was. The only thing they have going for them is better weapons and armor, but as the attack on Yorktown demonstrates, better weapons and armor wouldn't have been enough.
"From a technical standpoint" Vengeance was superior to the Enterprise too. You seem to be forgetting that the crew of the Enterprise actually DEFEATED the Vengeance, despite that technical superiority.
To argue that Vengeance would have fared better than the ship that actually destroyed it simply flies in the face of facts. It would have done no better against the swarm than it did against the Enterprise.
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