Most overhyped Weapon...

[Aretaku]

To be fair, though, the Breen energy weapon ensured that Starfleet and the Romulans would be out of commission for a good chunk of the war effort. A few episodes noted how the Klingon fleet was all that was left to defend the Alpha Quadrant, and they were hugely outnumbered. The AQ powers ultimately won, but it left the Klingons severely depleted of military might. If anything, the prolonged fighting the Klingons had to do thanks to the Breen weapon knocked them behind the Federation and the Romulans as a viable post-war military power.

...which had a lot more to do with Gowron's idiocy than anything else. Also, it was not the Breen alone who dealt the Klingons that blow.

 

[GeorgeKirk]

Any Klingon blade weaponry.

Amen! How the writers expected us to believe that Klingons could consistently bring knives to a gunfight and not get cut down like field mice under a lawnmower, I don't know. It's one of those things that the audience instinctively knows isn't true.

 

[JuanBolio]

Another vote for the photon torpedo. Almost all post-TMP depictions of their explosive yield have been exceedingly weak. Granted, there would not be a blast like that of a nuke in an atmosphere (unless, of course, you're detonating your torps IN an atmosphere), but there would be a flash that would outshine the sun for a brief second.

I can buy that a shielded ship could resist several torpedoes, but one that's unshielded? Forget it. It wouldn't blow a hole through the saucer like in STVI. The effects would be more like this:

First off, the weapon itself. A nuclear explosion in space, will look pretty much like a Very Very Bright flashbulb going off. The effects are instantaneous or nearly so. There is no fireball. The gaseous remains of the weapon may be incandescent, but they are also expanding at about a thousand kilometers per second, so one frame after detonation they will have dissipated to the point of invisibility. Just a flash.



The effects on the ship itself, those are a bit more visible. If you're getting impulsive shock damage, you will by definition see hot gas boiling off from the surface. Again, the effect is instantaneous, but this time the vapor will expand at maybe one kilometer per second, so depending on the scale you might be able to see some of this action. But don't blink; it will be quick.



Next is spallation - shocks will bounce back and forth through the skin of the target, probably tearing chunks off both sides. Some of these may come off at mere hundreds of meters per second. And they will be hot, red- or maybe even white-hot depending on the material.



To envision the appearance of this part, a thought experiment. Or, heck, go ahead and actually perform it. Start with a big piece of sheet metal, covered in a fine layer of flour and glitter. Shine a spotlight on it, in an otherwise-dark room. Then whack the thing with a sledgehammer, hard enough for the recoil to knock the flour and glitter into the air.



The haze of brightly-lit flour is your vaporized hull material, and the bits of glitter are the spallation. Scale up the velocities as needed, and ignore the bit where air resistance and gravity brings everything to a halt.



Next, the exposed hull is going to be quite hot, probably close to the melting point. So, dull red even for aluminum, brilliant white for steel or titanium or most ceramics or composites. The seriously hot layer will only be a millimeter or so thick, so it can cool fairly quickly - a second or two for a thick metallic hull that can cool by internal conduction, possibly as long as a minute for something thin and/or insulating that has to cool by radiation.



After this, if the shock is strong enough, the hull is going to be materially deformed. For this, take the sledgehammer from your last thought experiment and give a whack to some tin cans. Depending on how hard you hit them, and whether they are full or empty, you can get effects ranging from mild denting at weak points, crushing and tearing, all the way to complete obliteration with bits of tin-can remnant and tin-can contents splattered across the landscape.



Again, this will be much faster in reality than in the thought experiment. And note that a spacecraft will have many weak points to be dented, fragile bits to be torn off, and they all get hit at once. If the hull is of isogrid construction, which is pretty common, you might see an intact triangular lattice with shallow dents in between. Bits of antenna and whatnot, tumbling away.



Finally, secondary effects. Part of your ship is likely to be pressurized, either habitat space or propellant tank. Coolant and drinking water and whatnot, as well. With serious damage, that stuff is going to vent to space. You can probably see this happening (air and water and some propellants will freeze into snow as they escape, BTW). You'll also see the reaction force try to tumble the spacecraft, and if the spacecraft's attitude control systems are working you'll see them try to fight back.
You might see fires, if reactive materials are escaping. But not convection flames, of course. Diffuse jets of flame, or possibly surface reactions. Maybe secondary explosions if concentrations of reactive gasses are building up in enclosed (more or less) spaces.

 

[Solariabsg25]

Yeah but this is the problem with ANY sci-fi weapon, it's dependant on the requirements of the story.

How many photon hits did the Enterprise take in TUC before the shields collapsed?

Yet in The Changeling in TOS Spock states that the Enterprise shields absorbed the power of several HUNDRED photons in a single shot!

In the battle of the Mutara Nebula, if phasers were as powerful as they're supposed to be, when the Reliant hit the Enterprise, they would have gone through the torpedo bay, out the other side and possibly even severed the dorsal. ( I specifically didn't mention the first gunfight as Khan wanted information so wouldn't use full-power phasers/torps).

As for the most overhyped weapon - has to be The Borg Cube. Massive! Dangerous!! Toast!!!!

 

[JuanBolio]

I don't even really care if they fudge the destructive power so much... but when a 50 megaton+ weapon detonates, there should visually be a bigger boom than a modern artillery shell, or worse simply being absorbed into the target with a little blue "zap" (Like the Defiant's torpedoes in ENT "In a Mirror, Darkly").

 

[Cyke101]

To be fair, though, the Breen energy weapon ensured that Starfleet and the Romulans would be out of commission for a good chunk of the war effort. A few episodes noted how the Klingon fleet was all that was left to defend the Alpha Quadrant, and they were hugely outnumbered. The AQ powers ultimately won, but it left the Klingons severely depleted of military might. If anything, the prolonged fighting the Klingons had to do thanks to the Breen weapon knocked them behind the Federation and the Romulans as a viable post-war military power.

...which had a lot more to do with Gowron's idiocy than anything else. Also, it was not the Breen alone who dealt the Klingons that blow.

What would the alternative be? Leave the Alpha Quadrant completely defenseless while everyone scrambled to try to find a counter-measure, or send in the fleets knowing that one shot would be all it takes to down a ship?

 

[USSHermes]

What about the futuristic phaser from voyager when they travelled back in time to 1998 or whenever - ooh it can vaporise a CAR!!!! so can every phaser for the past 100+ years, never mind futuristic ones...

 

[Kemaiku]

Yet in The Changeling in TOS Spock states that the Enterprise shields absorbed the power of several HUNDRED photons in a single shot!

Nintey (90). And the shields lost only 1/5 to 1/4 their effectiveness.

 

[Aretaku]

What would the alternative be? Leave the Alpha Quadrant completely defenseless while everyone scrambled to try to find a counter-measure, or send in the fleets knowing that one shot would be all it takes to down a ship?

Well, at that point, the Klingons were outnumbered a stated 20-to-1. Until Gowron messed everything up, General Martoks strategy of keeping the fleet scattered, cloaked and seeking vulnerable targets of opportunity, was sound, and was doing it's job of keeping the Dominion off balance and buying time until the UFP and Romulans could reenter the fray.

During this time, UFP/Romulan ships presumably would be defending key installations and performing logistical operations away from the front lines...giving the Klingons the maximum amount of flexibility for their front-line operations.

And let us not forget that their are likely small scale engagements going on during this time that do not involve a Breen vessel... and Fed/Rom ships are not helpless. Also, the energy weapon does not render a Breen ship invulnerable to defeat at the hands of an alliance vessel. Breen ships were lost at the Second Battle of Chin'toka, despite the lopsided Dominion victory.

Finally, the Dominion recognized that Damar's rebellion was the biggest threat, given the lack of reinforcement from the Gamma quardant, and therefore did not capitalize on the weakness of the Alliance...and then it was too late to do so. They foolishly surrendered the security of their strategic base of operations for a temporary advantage in tactical capability. A foolish mistake in any war...and it is questionable as to whether the numerical support gained from the Breen equalled the support lost from the initial Cardassian rebellion in the first place, to say nothing of the eventual changing of sides at the Battle of Cardassia.

So, yes, I'll say the weapon was overhyped.

 

[Cyke101]

What would the alternative be? Leave the Alpha Quadrant completely defenseless while everyone scrambled to try to find a counter-measure, or send in the fleets knowing that one shot would be all it takes to down a ship?

Well, at that point, the Klingons were outnumbered a stated 20-to-1. Until Gowron messed everything up, General Martoks strategy of keeping the fleet scattered, cloaked and seeking vulnerable targets of opportunity, was sound, and was doing it's job of keeping the Dominion off balance and buying time until the UFP and Romulans could reenter the fray.

During this time, UFP/Romulan ships presumably would be defending key installations and performing logistical operations away from the front lines...giving the Klingons the maximum amount of flexibility for their front-line operations.

And let us not forget that their are likely small scale engagements going on during this time that do not involve a Breen vessel... and Fed/Rom ships are not helpless. Also, the energy weapon does not render a Breen ship invulnerable to defeat at the hands of an alliance vessel. Breen ships were lost at the Second Battle of Chin'toka, despite the lopsided Dominion victory.

Finally, the Dominion recognized that Damar's rebellion was the biggest threat, given the lack of reinforcement from the Gamma quardant, and therefore did not capitalize on the weakness of the Alliance...and then it was too late to do so. They foolishly surrendered the security of their strategic base of operations for a temporary advantage in tactical capability. A foolish mistake in any war...and it is questionable as to whether the numerical support gained from the Breen equalled the support lost from the initial Cardassian rebellion in the first place, to say nothing of the eventual changing of sides at the Battle of Cardassia.

So, yes, I'll say the weapon was overhyped.

Okay, I get what you're saying about Gowron's strategy vs. Martok's strategy, so I agree with you there. I'm still going to disagree with you about the weapon being overhyped, however. Frankly, out of all the weapons listed in this thread, the Breen weapon is the only one that did what it was invented to do

After all, guns don't kill people, inept planning kills people!

 

[The Wormhole]

How is it that this thread has gone on for three pages and no one has mentioned the Xindi weapon yet?

 

[Cyke101]

How is it that this thread has gone on for three pages and no one has mentioned the Xindi weapon yet?

I can't speak for anyone else, but I've purposely tried to shove ENT seasons 1-3 out of my mind.

 

[LutherSloan]

I would go with the ancient Vulcan weapon from 'The Gambit'. What a let-down. A hand phaser was more effective than that thing.

 

[JuanBolio]

How is it that this thread has gone on for three pages and no one has mentioned the Xindi weapon yet?

Trying to forget it...

 

[The Wormhole]

How is it that this thread has gone on for three pages and no one has mentioned the Xindi weapon yet?

I can't speak for anyone else, but I've purposely tried to shove ENT seasons 1-3 out of my mind.

How is it that this thread has gone on for three pages and no one has mentioned the Xindi weapon yet?

Trying to forget it...

These answers make sense and are acceptable explanations.

 

[Solariabsg25]

Yet in The Changeling in TOS Spock states that the Enterprise shields absorbed the power of several HUNDRED photons in a single shot!

Nintey (90). And the shields lost only 1/5 to 1/4 their effectiveness.

Thanks for that been AGES since seen the episode.

So following that logic, Chang would have had to hit the Enterprise with at least 360 photons before the shields collapsed, assuming shield advancements and photon advancements kept abreast of eachother.

Yet, in STIII a single photon takes out the Grissom, but as the bridge lighting was red, that usually means red alert, meaning the shields were up! If the shields were down, that means that no starship, in Trek, ever, without shields should be able to handle a single hit.

The Enterpise in Star Trek II, III, VI, Enterprise D in Generations, Voyager on numerous occassions, the Odyssey, all would have been toast anytime they were hit without shields.

 

[Cyke101]

Yet in The Changeling in TOS Spock states that the Enterprise shields absorbed the power of several HUNDRED photons in a single shot!

Nintey (90). And the shields lost only 1/5 to 1/4 their effectiveness.

Thanks for that been AGES since seen the episode.

So following that logic, Chang would have had to hit the Enterprise with at least 360 photons before the shields collapsed, assuming shield advancements and photon advancements kept abreast of eachother.

Yet, in STIII a single photon takes out the Grissom, but as the bridge lighting was red, that usually means red alert, meaning the shields were up! If the shields were down, that means that no starship, in Trek, ever, without shields should be able to handle a single hit.

The Enterpise in Star Trek II, III, VI, Enterprise D in Generations, Voyager on numerous occassions, the Odyssey, all would have been toast anytime they were hit without shields.

Agreed with the inconsistencies, except for the Grissom, only because it feels like Capt. Estaban would ask radio Starfleet asking for permission to raise the shields

I remember watching the movie as a kid, yelling at Estaban because his first order after seeing the bird of prey wasn't to raise the shields, but for evasive maneuvers. Even at the age of nine, I pretty much yelled out, "Come ON!"

 

[JuanBolio]

How is it that this thread has gone on for three pages and no one has mentioned the Xindi weapon yet?

I can't speak for anyone else, but I've purposely tried to shove ENT seasons 1-3 out of my mind.

How is it that this thread has gone on for three pages and no one has mentioned the Xindi weapon yet?

Trying to forget it...

These answers make sense and are acceptable explanations.

But no, seriously, the Xindi weapon worked well enough. Its just that there are far better and easier ways to wipe out all life on a planet. Hell, accelerate a few hundred ship-sized masses of metal to near the speed of light and carpet-bomb the Earth at that speed, there won't be anything left. Even a nuclear or "photonic" bombardment would do a pretty effective job, if it was thorough enough.

Here's what a relativistic attack would do to a planet:

From The Killing Star by Charles Pelligrino and George Zebrowski (you really should read this book):
All the energy put into achieving that velocity had transformed the Intruder into a kinetic storage device of nightmarish design. If it struck a world, every gram of the vessel’s substance would be received by that world as the target in a linear accelerator receives a spray of relativistic buckshot. Someone, somewhere, had built and was putting to use a relativistic bomb -- a giant, roving atom smasher aimed at worlds...
The gamma-ray shine of the decelerating half was also detectable, but it made no difference. One of the iron rules of relativistic bombardment was that if you could see something approaching at 92 percent of light speed, it was never where you saw it when you saw it, but was practically upon you...
In the forests below, lakes caught the first rays of the rising Sun and threw them back into space. Abandoning the two-dimensional sprawl of twentieth-century cities, Sri Lanka Tower, and others like it, had been erected in the world’s rain forests and farmlands, leaving the countryside virtually uninhabited. Even in Africa, where more than a hundred city arcologies had risen, nature was beginning to renew itself. It was a good day to be alive, she told herself, taking in the peace of the garden. Then, looking east, she saw it coming -- at least her eyes began to register it -- but her optic nerves did not last long enough to transmit what the eyes had seen.
It was quite small for what it could do -- small enough to fit into an average-sized living room -- but it was moving at 92 percent of light speed when it touched Earth’s atmosphere. A spear point of light appeared, so intense that the air below snapped away from it, creating a low-density tunnel through which the object descended. The walls of the tunnel were a plasma boundary layer, six and a half kilometers wide and more than 160 deep -- the flaming spear that Virginia’s eyes began to register -- with every square foot of its surface radiating a trillion watts, and still its destructive potential was but fractionally spent.
Thirty-three kilometers above the Indian Ocean, the point began to encounter too much air. It tunneled down only eight kilometers more, then stalled and detonated, less than two-thousandths of a second after crossing the orbits of Earth’s nearest artificial satellites.
Virginia was more than three hundred kilometers away when the light burst toward her. Every nerve ending in her body began to record a strange, prickling sensation -- the sheer pressure of photons trying to push her backward. No shadows were cast anywhere in the tower, so bright was the glare. It pierced walls, ceramic beams, notepads, and people -- four hundred thousand people. The maglev terminal connecting Sri Lanka Tower to London and Sydney, the waste treatment centers that sustained the lakes and farms, all the shops, theaters, and apartments liquefied instantly. The structure began to slip and crash like a giant waterfall, but gravity could not yank it down fast enough. The Tower became vapor before it could fall half a meter. At the vanished city’s feet, the trees of the forest were no longer able to cast shadows; they had themselves become long shadows of carbonized dust on the ground.
In Kandy and Columbo, where sidewalks steamed, the relativistic onslaught was unfinished. The electromagnetic pulse alone killed every living thing as far away as Bombay and the Maldives. All of India south of the Godavari River became an instant microwave oven. Nearer the epicenter, Demon Rock glowed with a fierce red heat, then fractured down its center, as if to herald the second coming of the tyrant it memorialized. The air blast followed, surging out of the Indian Ocean -- faster than sound -- flattening whatever still stood. As it slashed north through Jaffna and Madurai, the wave front was met and overpowered by shocks rushing out from strikes in central and southern India.
Across the face of the planet, without warning, thousands of flaming swords pierced the sky...
Then out of no where -- out of the deep impersonal nowhere -- came a bombardment that even the science fiction writers had failed to entertain.
Just nine days short of America’s tricentennial celebrations, every inhabited planetary surface in the solar system had been wiped clean by relativistic bombs. Research centers on Mars, Europa, and Ganymede were silent; even tiny Phobos and Moo-kau were silent. Port Chaffee was silent. New York, Colombo, Wellington, the Mercury Power Project and the Asimov Array. Silent. Silent. Silent.
A Valkyrie rocket’s transmission of Mercury’s surface had revealed thousands of saucer-shaped depressions where only hours before had existed a planet-spanning carpet of solar panels. The transmission had lasted only a few seconds -- just long enough for Isak to realize there would be no more of the self-replicating robots that had built the array of panels and accelerators, just long enough for him to understand that humanity no longer possessed a fuel source for its antimatter rockets -- and then the transmission had ceased abruptly as the Valkyrie disappeared in a silent white glare.
Presently, most of the station’s scopes and spectrographs were turning Earthward, and Isak found it impossible to believe what they revealed. The Moon rising over Africa from behind Earth was peppered with new fields of craters. The planet below looked like a ball of cotton stained grayish yellow. The top five meters of ocean had boiled off under the assault, and sea level air was three times denser than the day before -- and twice as hot...
The sobering truth is that relativistic civilizations are a potential nightmare to anyone living within range of them. The problem is that objects traveling at an appreciable fraction of light speed are never where you see them when you see them (i.e., light-speed lag). Relativistic rockets, if their owners turn out to be less than benevolent, are both totally unstoppable and totally destructive. A starship weighing in at 1,500 tons (approximately the weight of a fully fueled space shuttle sitting on the launchpad) impacting an earthlike planet at "only" 30 percent of lightspeed will release 1.5 million megatons of energy -- an explosive force equivalent to 150 times today's global nuclear arsenal... (ed note: this means the freaking thing has about nine hundred mega-Ricks of damage!) The most humbling feature of the relativistic bomb is that even if you happen to see it coming, its exact motion and position can never be determined; and given a technology even a hundred orders of magnitude above our own, you cannot hope to intercept one of these weapons. It often happens, in these discussions, that an expression from the old west arises: "God made some men bigger and stronger than others, but Mr. Colt made all men equal." Variations on Mr. Colt's weapon are still popular today, even in a society that possesses hydrogen bombs. Similarly, no matter how advanced civilizations grow, the relativistic bomb is not likely to go away...

 

[Myasishchev]

I'm always dubious when someone says there's no countermeasures to a weapon.

Space is not empty. Especially not the space around a star. Before we even need to posit interplanetary dust, the space inside a solar system is by necessity full of photons, and light has momentum. If the projectile is perfectly mirrored, it's still slowing down from terribly blueshifted light being reflected off of it. If it's not, it's absorbing that terribly blueshifted light, it's not just slowing down, but heating up and evaporating. The farther it gets into a solar system the greater the density of light and the worse these effects are going to be. At best, the object is going to be bright. In fact other than the sun it might be the brightest thing in the whole sky. And it will not be moving at .92c by the time it reaches Target Earth.

Light lag is not going to present an insurmountable obstacle to determining the position of a circa-.92c object. How maneuverable can an object like that be? Even if it may move, it will lose momentum in the process from loss of reaction mass, and it will have moved off target and need to move back. This further deteriorates its final effectiveness.

I also want to point out that there remains a nearly 10% difference in the speed of light and the speed of the object. Over the distance between, say, Earth and Neptune, light from the shining object will reach Earth twenty-three minutes ahead of the object itself (10% of 29 AU, or two hundred thirty-two light minutes).

Let's posit a planetary defense network of x-ray lasers married to extremely fast computers. They have the opportunity to target and fire upon the calculated position of the object. It will be close, but they assuming their calculations are correct they'll hit it.

Upon impact the x-rays blueshift to hard gammas. The object cannot reliably maneuver against a laser by the very nature of the weapon--the moment it has the information about the laser beam necessary to avoid it, the laser beam has already hit it. To avoid light, it must be oscillating constantly. It's being thrown off target every time. It's losing effectiveness every time. A sufficiently large defensive array would be able to determine the physically possible area it must occupy in order to hit the target at all and saturate it with x-ray bursts, which, again, are more effective than they have any right to be due to the near-lightspeed blueshift.

At this point it depends on what kind of energy is required to displace it from its targeting solution.

I'm not arguing that defense against near-lightspeed objects is easy, but I'm laying out some of the problems inherent in assuming it's impossible.

Edit: I'm also willing to accept evidence that blueshift isn't as bad as I'm thinking. I certainly haven't done the calculations. Maybe I should.