Spoilers Beyond: The Swarm VS USS Vengeance

[anh165]

Firstly the Yorktown is an enormous stationary target, it was clearly troubled by the swarm but was durable enough defensively to remain operational and for the Franklin to be able to mount a counter. The Enterprise was rendered defenseless rather easily and the crew was afforded no time to think or escape.

Secondly, it was Spock who 'defeated' Khan in a situation of a double-cross. The Enterprise had nothing to do with the destruction of the V, all that was required was to signal detonation of the torpedoes that Khan beamed over to the V. Spock could have been sitting on an Oberth class ship for all I care and would have achieved the same effect.

Additionally, we only witnessed a hint of what the Vengeance was capable of in combat, you cannot pretend that she 'gave everything she's got' at the Enterprise, you cannot ignore the 72 advanced torpedoes detonating inside the Vengeance which would have completely ripped lesser ships (and the Enterprise) into thousands of pieces. Where as the latter we have witnessed against the compromised Narada and the Swarm that the E unloaded everything, at least there we understand what the Enterprise's abilities and limitations are in combat.

We look at the swarm and they were scripted to be capable enough to overwhelm the Enterprise. In some crazy twisted alternative dimension , if Kirk commanded the Vengeance, I am sure the script writers would have really up-scaled and beefed up the swarm much further to get the same effect convincingly.

 

[DonIago]

I'm not convinced the swarm would have had to have been up-scaled or beefed up to defeat the Vengeance. Much as they would have eventually overwhelmed Yorktown (they'd already breached one of the airlocks), I'm sure Vengeance would have been overwhelmed if it, as with the Enterprise was unable to retreat.

 

[OpenMaw]

The vengeance has teeth, no doubt, but that swarm is designed to cut starships to pieces. A few more rapid-fire phaser cannons and torpedo launchers are not going to change that.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Firstly the Yorktown is an enormous stationary target, it was clearly troubled by the swarm but was durable enough defensively to remain operational and for the Franklin to be able to mount a counter.

And yet even WITH that counter, Krall managed to penetrate Yorktown's defenses with a handful of swarm ships. The station was as good as beaten right up until the Beast Boys hit their freqs.

Secondly, it was Spock who 'defeated' Khan in a situation of a double-cross. The Enterprise had nothing to do with the destruction of the V...

Technically, it was the combination of Kirk, Scotty and Khan who defeated the Vengeance, first with an act of sabotage and then a rather high-risk boarding action that allowed them to take the bridge. So ASIDE from Khan's fuckery their boarding action was actually pretty successful.

Again, the Enterprise is exactly as good as its crew, which is damn good. This is true of ANY starship, particularly the Vengeance. Its technical capabilities are basically irrelevant, what truly matters here is what kind of person is in command, who's at the helm, and who's running its weapon systems. The interesting question to ask here is whether or not someone like Khan or Admiral Marcus would have actually TRIED to escape from the swarm while they had the chance? Or would they have banked on their ship's superior armor and weapon systems -- like you're doing now -- and tried to fight it out?

Spock could have been sitting on an Oberth class ship for all I care and would have achieved the same effect.

Spock could have been sitting on the USS Franklin and had the same effect.

That's kinda my point. Vengeance isn't crewed by the kinds of people who would have been able to cope with the swarm, whether the ship was designed to cope with it or not (which it wasn't). They would have gone down the same way Enterprise went, for precisely the same reason. The only difference is, they wouldn't have been able to regroup on the planet and turn the tables in time to save Yorktown.

Additionally, we only witnessed a hint of what the Vengeance was capable of in combat

The same can be said for the Enterprise, actually, considering Vengeance managed to disable its weapons array with its first attack. It's likely the two ships would have been more evenly matched in a stand-up fight.

The same cannot be said for Vengeance's crew. Three people with hand phasers managed to board that ship and shoot their way onto the bridge in just a matte of minutes (granted, one of then was Khan, but still...) Considering that many of Krall's men actually boarded the Enterprise BEFORE the nacelles were severed, you've got to ask yourself whether the crew that failed to stop a three-man infiltration would have fared any better against four dozen guys wearing powered assault armor. Whatever you might want to believe about Vengeance's tactical capabilities, Marcus' hired goons weren't exactly elite commandos.

We look at the swarm and they were scripted to be capable enough to overwhelm the Enterprise. In some crazy twisted alternative dimension , if Kirk commanded the Vengeance...

... the battle would have been slightly more epic but with the same basic outcome.

But Kirk wouldn't command the Vengeance. Alex Marcus would. And based on what we've seen of Admiral Marcus, what would HE actually do when he encountered the swarm? I find it unlikely that he would actually retreat from that kind of threat; he would probably open up with his phaser banks and main weapons, and then when that failed to work would scream "FIRE EVERYTHING!" and then watch the swarm avoid his torpedoes.

You're also forgetting that the destruction of the Enterprise was an ACCIDENT and wasn't Krall's real objective; he clipped the nacelles to keep it from escaping and ultimately cutting the ship in half served the exact same purpose since he knew the artifact he was looking for was in the saucer and not in the engineering section. Vengeance's CREW definitely isn't more tactically inclined than the Enterprise's security officers and would have succumbed to the boarding action that much faster, giving Krall control not only of the artifact he was looking for, but a mostly-intact dreadnaught class starship to call his own.

 

[psCargile]

Arm the Vengy with some subspace phonon dissonance arrays and blast some Slayer through it and the swarm will not have a chance.

 

[Kemaiku]

We know from the crash of the Franklin and Enterprise how tough their hulls are against physical impacts, so the weapons in the new movies must be pretty powerful.

But Vengeance bumps into a shoreline and the entire stardrive sheers off, meaning its as weak or more to physical assault as any other ship, 250,000 Swarm drones would be far too many things for her to lock on to. And the drones simple move around weapons fire.

Yorktown was pumping hundreds of photon torpedoes and who knows how much phaser fire into the cloud and nothing was really happening at all, far more firepower than Vengeance from a much larger surface area at once, made no difference.

She would be enveloped, the saucer sheered off, the automation server farms disconnected violently interrupting the data flow, leaving the ship wwith esesntially it's brain cut from it's body and defenseless, the drones would then just puncture something critical or leave her to fall into a planets gravitational well.

 

[publiusr]

One other thing to throw into the mix. Were the swarm ships warp capable individually?
I might have done a Picard Maneuver--warp back fire, warp back again--use tractor beams.
Find a way to use First World power against 3rd world terror as it were.

Still--I wouldn't be confident with anything less than a Borg Tactical Cube (outfitted with this: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Ablative_generator ) with a lot of mass and lots of my own "drones" to assimilate.

If you really think about it--this should be how the Borg should travel--swarm ships.

If I didn't know what the Borg cube was--I'd call it an orbital refinery at the top of a space elevator above Titan draining it of all its high-test (Malon/Exxon style)

 

[DonIago]

I imagine if the Borg thought they had anything to gain from swarm style vessels they'd adopt them.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I imagine if the Borg thought they had anything to gain from swarm style vessels they'd adopt them.

If the writing staff of TNG had come up with the idea and had a practical way to film the effects, they would have done exactly that.

I've had this exact same thought. Think about how a Borg swarm would actually work: Each individual drone runs a small "piece" of the ship and can run independently or as part of a larger mass. You can hit the cube with photon torpedoes and blow it to pieces, but the pieces will just reform like a giant T-1000 and it still comes after you as strong as ever. All together in a huge mass sharing a common power supply they can do a million things at once; a third of the drones provide propulsion while a bunch of others sweep with sensors, some others control maneuvering, still others run their deflectors for warp flight.

Then they are close enough that they no longer need to multi-task and its time to "feed." The cube breaks up, the drones swarm all around you. They overwhelm and smash through your shields, draining the energy from the emitters to recharge their own power cells. They take your nacelles off, rip the warp coils out, cannibalize them for parts. They storm into your engine room a few at a time and gorge themselves on your main power relays, and all the while the rest of the swarm is rampaging through the hull, ripping computers out of the bulkheads, tearing motors out of turbolifts, tearing chips and circuits and wiring out of conduits, basically stripping your ship to the skeleton like a technological locust swarm.

Except they're biological too, a mix of flesh and machinery. So your CREW is also pretty tasty; while three of them crash through your sickbay and rip the circuitry out of the bio beds, four others tear through your triage center disembowling your patients, collecting useful organs, arteries, digestive tissues, brain tissues, nerve fibers, everything a drone could want to stay functional and even improve itself a little. They skin your chief medical officer alive and use it for thermal insulation, take out his brainstem and reconfigure it for an extra sub processor, and we could use another pair of eyes over here, we'll take those too. They also take his tricorder, his communicator, his desk computer and his pet hamster; all of these are just parts for the Borg to consume.

And once they've taken everything of value from your ship and your crew, they pull out, reform into a cube and move on in silence without so much as a backward glance, leaving the mangled carcass of a gutted starship and a butchered crew to tumble forever in space.

Borg Swarm: Piranhas of the Stars.

 

[OpenMaw]

Damn, Eddie... I mean... Damn.

That would be a fantastic reinterpretation of The Borg.

 

[anh165]

I'm not convinced the swarm would have had to have been up-scaled or beefed up to defeat the Vengeance. Much as they would have eventually overwhelmed Yorktown (they'd already breached one of the airlocks), I'm sure Vengeance would have been overwhelmed if it, as with the Enterprise was unable to retreat.

Any punishment the Enterprise can absorb, the Vengeance can do even better.

The E is my favorite ship, but I can't deny she isn't the toughest Starfleet vessel out there.

 

[DonIago]

The E successfully absorbed it for, what, a minute, before critical damage was done?

If the V absorbs the punishment for a minute longer, then unless they're able to GTFO, it doesn't seem likely to make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things.

And consider that the swarm was never trying to destroy the E (or Yorktown for that matter); that would have been counterproductive to Krall's goals.

 

[Jedi_Master]

If the writing staff of TNG had come up with the idea and had a practical way to film the effects, they would have done exactly that.

I've had this exact same thought. Think about how a Borg swarm would actually work: Each individual drone runs a small "piece" of the ship and can run independently or as part of a larger mass. You can hit the cube with photon torpedoes and blow it to pieces, but the pieces will just reform like a giant T-1000 and it still comes after you as strong as ever. All together in a huge mass sharing a common power supply they can do a million things at once; a third of the drones provide propulsion while a bunch of others sweep with sensors, some others control maneuvering, still others run their deflectors for warp flight.

Then they are close enough that they no longer need to multi-task and its time to "feed." The cube breaks up, the drones swarm all around you. They overwhelm and smash through your shields, draining the energy from the emitters to recharge their own power cells. They take your nacelles off, rip the warp coils out, cannibalize them for parts. They storm into your engine room a few at a time and gorge themselves on your main power relays, and all the while the rest of the swarm is rampaging through the hull, ripping computers out of the bulkheads, tearing motors out of turbolifts, tearing chips and circuits and wiring out of conduits, basically stripping your ship to the skeleton like a technological locust swarm.

Except they're biological too, a mix of flesh and machinery. So your CREW is also pretty tasty; while three of them crash through your sickbay and rip the circuitry out of the bio beds, four others tear through your triage center disembowling your patients, collecting useful organs, arteries, digestive tissues, brain tissues, nerve fibers, everything a drone could want to stay functional and even improve itself a little. They skin your chief medical officer alive and use it for thermal insulation, take out his brainstem and reconfigure it for an extra sub processor, and we could use another pair of eyes over here, we'll take those too. They also take his tricorder, his communicator, his desk computer and his pet hamster; all of these are just parts for the Borg to consume.

And once they've taken everything of value from your ship and your crew, they pull out, reform into a cube and move on in silence without so much as a backward glance, leaving the mangled carcass of a gutted starship and a butchered crew to tumble forever in space.

Borg Swarm: Piranhas of the Stars.

Way better than Robot Space Zombies!

 

[Search4]

It's not about the ship it's about tactics. Franklin defeated the swarm. It isn't that insightful to jam the controlling signals - or perhaps not hard - these are mining drones after all.

And I think the E or V could have simply out run them and stayed at a stand off distance and phasered away.

 

[anh165]

It's not about the ship it's about tactics. Franklin defeated the swarm. It isn't that insightful to jam the controlling signals - or perhaps not hard - these are mining drones after all.

And I think the E or V could have simply out run them and stayed at a stand off distance and phasered away.

Agreed.

Let's just make a conservative guess that the Vengeance's hull and pylons are only 2 x as durable than the Enterprise, and assuming the commander of the Vengeance isn't some idiot Berman-era-Klingon who wants to slug it out to the death, there would have been a better opportunity for this ship to escape to long range and for the crew work out what the hell just happened.

The V could then swing out her torpedo cannons, set the torpedoes to proximity blast among the swarm....

The crew can then sit back and watch the fireworks display.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

And I think the E or V could have simply out run them and stayed at a stand off distance and phasered away.

You can't really stay at standoff distance from a SWARM. There's no logical way to maneuver to "get away" from it except to run really fast in a single direction, which precludes engagement of any kind. Presuming the swarm has the capacity to close the distance faster than you can take evasive action, "keep them at a distance" isn't really an option.

You kind of missed the point about the fact that Franklin defeated the swarm. Franklin was able to do this because its adoptive crew had an opportunity to analyze the swarm's tactics and communication signals. They were mainly able to do this because they had encountered the swarm before, because they had had some access to Krall's technology on the surface, and because they already had some working theories about how the swarm worked.

All things being equal, it's a question of whether or not the CREW of the Vengeance would have exceeded the performance of the Enterprise crew. They had plenty of opportunities to do so, in order:
- Would they have recognized the swarm as a threat sooner?
- Would they have moved more swiftly to take evasive action?
- Would they have recognized the nature of the threat faster than the Enterprise crew?
- Would they have been able to repel Krall's boarding parties more effectively than Enterprise' security teams?
- Would they have been smart enough -- just minutes into the attack -- to realize that Krall's boarders were after something specific and sent someone below decks to find out what it was?
- Would they, having discovered Krall's objective, worked efficiently to keep him from obtaining it?
- And if having failed to accomplish all of the above, would they then be able to disengage from the swarm and retreat?

You're assuming that they would have been able to accomplish the first two. BASED ON WHAT? Vengeance's sensors aren't dramatically more advanced than Enterprise, in fact less so for their lack of a science officer or equipment sophisticated enough to determine the nature of the "ship" approaching them. Nor is Vengeance a great deal more maneuverable than Enterprise under impulse power; the much larger and more heavily armored ship probably ISN'T more agile and would have been able to evade the swarm no better. That, too, depends on the skill of its helm and navigation officers, who in the case of the Vengeance are almost certainly less experienced than Sulu and Chekov.

Does "better weapons" automatically make a starship stronger, a crew smarter, and the enemy less aggressive than it would be? Or does it work more like the real world where even the most powerful weapons become useless if you don't make exactly the right decisions at exactly the right time to maximize your advantage? Nothing we know about the Vengeance supports the notion that its crew is more capable of that than Enterprise; their rather embarassing history in dealing with boarding parties suggests the exact opposite.

 

[WarpFactorZ]

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.

Thank you! I said this exact thing about the Vengeance's computers a few pages ago in this thread, but it needs repeating. I'm not sure why it's hard to digest the idea that the Vengeance is a super top secret MILITARY ship, whose tech, propulsion and weaponry is likely years ahead of the Enterprise. I would wager a kilometre-long battleship that can be operated by ONE PERSON possesses some pretty bizarre technology unseen by eyes outside Section 31.

It's also worth noting that we probably didn't see the full range of Vengeance's warfare tools. It could be that the ship wasn't quite ready for prime time when Marcus took her to Kronos, or that when it is operated by "one person if necessary", only select systems can be effectively used. Given a full crew complement, however -- all of whom are trained to operate specific weapons -- I'd say Vengeance would surprise quite a few adversaries.

Lastly: remember that the Narada (which really set the whole Starfleet military push into overdrive) attacked ships with a "swarm" of tiny, fast-moving objects. You'd think fighting these types of things would be the very first countermeasure programmed into every Starfleet vessel!

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Thank you! I said this exact thing about the Vengeance's computers a few pages ago in this thread, but it needs repeating. I'm not sure why it's hard to digest the idea that the Vengeance is a super top secret MILITARY ship, whose tech, propulsion and weaponry is likely years ahead of the Enterprise.

Again, that's like suggesting the computers on an aircraft carrier are more advanced than the computers at CERN. That is actually FAR from the case; military computers are designed to be robust (e.g. hard to damage), low maintenance, and easy to use. They don't NEED to be powerful because they aren't intended to solve complex scientific problems in a chaotic and unknown environment.

It's the same reason modern military vessels do not have R&D departments and why only specialized surveillance vessels have any equipment specialized for cryptography or signals intelligence. These are not things that would normally be useful on a warship, whose mission profile is necessarily limited to the number of combat regimes it is designed to handle.

I would wager a kilometre-long battleship that can be operated by ONE PERSON possesses some pretty bizarre technology unseen by eyes outside Section 31.

Unless Vengeance is equipped with a quasi-sentient multitronic computer like M5, you're wasting your time. Most of its internal computing infrastructure is basically devoted to the automation of the maintenance and servicing of its MANY weapon systems, which also adequately explains how Scotty is able to disable the entire ship just by fiddling with some controls in engineering.

FYI, the Enterprise was able to run more or less the same way in Search for Spock, but ultimately faltered when it didn't have enough computing power to automate ship functions in combat. Vengeance is designed with that shortfall in mind.

Lastly: remember that the Narada (which really set the whole Starfleet military push into overdrive) attacked ships with a "swarm" of tiny, fast-moving objects....

And was subsequently destroyed by the Enterprise, whose defenses proved more than adequate for the Narada's attacks.

Remember also that Khan didn't start work on the Vengeance until AFTER Vulcan's destruction, which means the Narada would not have been a design consideration in modifying the ship's weapon systems. Quite the contrary, Vengeance was designed primarily to fight the Klingons, which is why its weapons were mostly optimized to overwhelm other capital ships in direct combat.

Question for the peanut gallery: when in the entire history of Star Trek has "superior firepower" ever worked to Starfleet's advantage? A quick browsing of canon tells me this has almost never been the case; even when a starship has a tactical advantage this alone proves insufficient to actually achieve victory and they wind up having to rely on superior tactics or well-conceived custom counter measures to defeat their enemies anyway.

Just off the top of my head, aggressors who were defeated despite overwhelming tactical superiority
The Fesarius
The Doomsday Machine
The Borg (multiple times)
The klingon ship in Elaan of Troyus
The Kazon fleet in "Basics Pt II"
The Cardassian Dreadnaught
Literally everyone NX-01 ever fought with
The Narada
USS Vengeance

Aggressors who were successful or nearly so despite tactical inferiority:
The Duras Sisters
The Orions from "Journey to Babel"
The Ferengi from "Rascals"
The Angosian commandos
The Bajoran Resistance
The Maquis (most of the time)
The Cloud Creature

Superior weapons does not always or even usually equal victory. Better strategy and adaptability wins the day every time. The most dangerous person on a Federation starship isn't the man at the weapons console, it's the science officer. And Vengeance doesn't even have one.

 

[WarpFactorZ]

Again, that's like suggesting the computers on an aircraft carrier are more advanced than the computers at CERN.

No, it's like suggesting that some highly classified program in the NSA or CIA has a more advanced computer than CERN. You think they're taking things like quantum cryptography lightly?

The Vengeance isn't a run-of-the-mill aircraft carrier. It's a top secret project built by an organization that "doesn't exist", designed to be superior to any other type of vessel known to Starfleet.

Unless Vengeance is equipped with a quasi-sentient multitronic computer like M5, ...

I think that's quite likely the case.

 

[publiusr]

A good way to defeat a swarm is to give it a fat target--maybe a holoship. Once the swarm enter--you trigger a breach. Burn the hornet's nest as a whole--maybe gum up the ships with a very thick hull with a type of fluid that holds everything fast.

Then send in your capital ships now that it's one target again.