Trek Weapons Make No Sense

[SicOne]

This whole debate = EPIC F.A.I.L! To quote the great Bill Shatner ''IT'S A T.V. SHOW! GET A LIFE!

We have lives. Sometimes we take a well-deserved break from them to quibble about minutiae of a fictional show. Why? Because it's fun. Join us, or don't join us, but take the "epic fail" crap back to Miscellaneous, and do something about the cats under your crawl space, for God's sake, ya nasty ol' troll.

OK, gentlemen, let's continue.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

This whole debate = EPIC F.A.I.L! To quote the great Bill Shatner ''IT'S A T.V. SHOW! GET A LIFE!

If you have nothing of substance to add to the discussion then please don't add anything at all.

 

[Omega_Glory]

I'm not 100% sure what you just said but i'll assume that you think a shell would take down a ships shields?
If you've ever watched Nemesis you'll see that the Enterprises nacelle got hit by an enormous chunk of Romulan Warbird debris and the shields still held.

The S'ona ships in Insurrection had their shields destroyed by exploding nebulae gases and starship fragments. The lead ship was destroyed by a chemical reaction and the trailing ship was crippled when hit by debris from the lead vessel..right through the shields. And it appeared the S'ona were technologically equavalent to the Federation in ships.

As to the main topic of this thread, I doubt that replicators and tranporters would work as a weapons systems. I think a ship that relied on that would get hammered long before transporter range was achieved.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

The S'ona ships in Insurrection had their shields destroyed by exploding nebulae gases and starship fragments. The lead ship was destroyed by a chemical reaction and the trailing ship was crippled when hit by debris from the lead vessel..right through the shields. And it appeared the S'ona were technologically equavalent to the Federation in ships.

There's no doubt that with enough chunks of debris the shields can be compromised, but building a ship and having it big enough so it can hurl huge chunks of metal at an enemy ship big enough to cause significant damage to shields would be inefficient and nigh on impossible. Not to mention that it would have to be flung fast enough so the enemy ship can't evade it.
On all the occasions where ships have been hit by debris it's been at extreme close quarters.
The fact remains that the Ent-E survived a strike from a huge chunk of Romulan Warbird and a huge chunk I might add that would be far too large to be fired from another ship. To fire a chunk that size and at any appreciable velocity would require a ship larger than a Borg cube and with a major power consuming projectile accelerator.
Let's also not forget the fact that the Ent-E and Scimitar survived a full blown kamikaze collision.

Also IMO, the Sona were not equal to the Federation in technology, at least not shield wise.

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

Shields are pretty inconsistently portrayed. They seem pretty malleable though, so any inconsistencies could be lined up with an unluckily-timed weapons-fire window, power adjustment or shield remodulation.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The S'ona ships in Insurrection had their shields destroyed by exploding nebulae gases and starship fragments. The lead ship was destroyed by a chemical reaction and the trailing ship was crippled when hit by debris from the lead vessel..right through the shields. And it appeared the S'ona were technologically equavalent to the Federation in ships.

There's no doubt that with enough chunks of debris the shields can be compromised, but building a ship and having it big enough so it can hurl huge chunks of metal at an enemy ship big enough to cause significant damage to shields would be inefficient and nigh on impossible.

Think again. A relativistic railgun--i.e. a weapon firing a metallic slug at close to the speed of light--would have the kinetic energy of a photon torpedo warhead. Even through shields it's bound to do quite a bit of damage; if you get THROUGH somebody's shields... well, think of someone detonating a tactical nuclear warhead in the officer's mess.

Such a device is not only viable, it would probably make a pretty nasty bombardment weapon against fortresses and planets that don't have a chance at evading them.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

Even through shields it's bound to do quite a bit of damage; if you get THROUGH somebody's shields... well, think of someone detonating a tactical nuclear warhead in the officer's mess.

Such a device is not only viable, it would probably make a pretty nasty bombardment weapon against fortresses and planets that don't have a chance at evading them.

Starships are built of Duranium, they are strong and can withstand direct hull strikes by matter/anti-matter torpedoes especially if they have ablative armour. I'm sure a chunk of metal fired at high speed would cause some damage but certainly not the scale of which you speak. Ships in Trek are made of alloys and metals that don't exist in reality so you cannot compare the hull of a Starship to something made of metal of today.

The Ent-E rammed the scimitar at full impulse which is close to .9c and still had only the front half of the saucer damaged and that was hitting a chunk of metal the size of the Scimitar (because the chunk of metal WAS the Scimitar).
Imagine how big a slug would have to be to cause even the slightest bit of damage and with shields up it would be a pointless weapon since we've seen time and time again Starship survive ship collisions. There's the Ent-E surviving a chunk of hull hitting the nacelle and in DS9 we see the Defiant blow up bug ships at close range and just flying through the debris (see that episode where the Tal'Shiar and Obsidion order send ships to destroy the founders for the scene i'm talking about).

 

[Rarewolf]

What about the other way round - could you use the transporter to lock on to and dispose of a armed torpedo flying towards you?

 

[All Seeing Eye]

What about the other way round - could you use the transporter to lock on to and dispose of a armed torpedo flying towards you?

Interesting point.

 

[Tigger]

Also, I don't know of any circumstance in which anti-matter has been beamed anywhere.

The TOS episode "Obsession" where Kirk has anti-matter beamed down to the planet's surface in a man-portable transport container.

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

And when Wesely beamed some antimatter to the Hathaway in that one TNG ep (Peak Performance?).

 

[SicOne]

Also, I don't know of any circumstance in which anti-matter has been beamed anywhere.

The TOS episode "Obsession" where Kirk has anti-matter beamed down to the planet's surface in a man-portable transport container.

And when Wesely beamed some antimatter to the Hathaway in that one TNG ep (Peak Performance?).

Hmm. Good points. Not seen "Obsession" but had seen (and forgot about) "Peak Performance". I stand corrected.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Even through shields it's bound to do quite a bit of damage; if you get THROUGH somebody's shields... well, think of someone detonating a tactical nuclear warhead in the officer's mess.

Such a device is not only viable, it would probably make a pretty nasty bombardment weapon against fortresses and planets that don't have a chance at evading them.

Starships are built of Duranium

So what? Assuming Duranium isn't just a shorter word for "depleted uranium" (and it very well might be) then all you need to penetrate duranium is to make your projectiles out of duranium too. Or better yet, use a relativistic railgun firing 20mm neutronium slugs at about .5c; that kind of projectile would have the kinetic energy of a Tsar Bomba.

I'm sure a chunk of metal fired at high speed would cause some damage but certainly not the scale of which you speak.

The scale of which I speak is the same scale of energies delivered by photon torpedoes. You grossly underestimate just how much energy an object can really have if it hits something at a high enough speed. I can say without exagerrating that I could destroy any ship in the galaxy with my son's teething ring; it's a simple matter of imparting enough kinetic energy on the thing to turn it into a weapon of mass destruction. A teething ring traveling at warp 4 becomes a deadly weapon no matter what your ship is made of.

The Ent-E rammed the scimitar at full impulse which is close to .9c

Actually, the Enterprise rammed the scimitar at about seventy miles per hour. Impulse power is a unit of engine output, not an actual speed, and it would have taken quite a bit longer than they had to accelerate to that kind of speed.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

What about the other way round - could you use the transporter to lock on to and dispose of a armed torpedo flying towards you?

If you can lock into a photon torpedo with a transporter beam, you can lock onto it with your phasers. Ships in the Prime universe don't have alot of luck shooting down other people's torpedoes (you'd think they would, right?) while NuEnterprise and Kelvin at least made an admirable attempt.

In the end, as Spock put it once, it has always been easier to destroy than to create. Transporter beams could be used defensively, sure, but it doesn't make sense to use them this way if you still have a working phaser bank on board.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

Actually, the Enterprise rammed the scimitar at about seventy miles per hour. Impulse power is a unit of engine output, not an actual speed, and it would have taken quite a bit longer than they had to accelerate to that kind of speed.

Picard msged Troi to go to full impulse, inertial dampeners mean the ship would hit maximum impulse instantly since the dampeners would cancel out the ships weight and mass.

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

If the Enterprise was travelling at max impulse, we wouldn't have even seen it.

In TMP, the Enterprise's top sublight speed was 80 percent of the speed of light. The crash in Nemesis seemed to happen very slowly by comparison to that figure.

By any rational sense of thought, both ships would have been destroyed were the Enterprise travelling at that velocity.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

If the Enterprise was travelling at max impulse, we wouldn't have even seen it.

In TMP, the Enterprise's top sublight speed was 80 percent of the speed of light. The crash in Nemesis seemed to happen very slowly by comparison to that figure.

By any rational sense of thought, both ships would have been destroyed were the Enterprise travelling at that velocity.

It's a film, ever heard of slow motion for dramatic effect?

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

However, the VFX do show the Enterprise gradually accelerating after Picard gives the order, rather than jumping right into motion.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Actually, the Enterprise rammed the scimitar at about seventy miles per hour. Impulse power is a unit of engine output, not an actual speed, and it would have taken quite a bit longer than they had to accelerate to that kind of speed.

Picard msged Troi to go to full impulse, inertial dampeners mean the ship would hit maximum impulse instantly since the dampeners would cancel out the ships weight and mass.

Inertial dampeners don't cancel out "weight and mass." They cancel out INERTIA, which is the tendency of an object to remain at rest until something moves it. This only applies for people inside the ship who will therefore not feel any acceleration as the ship moves forward.

And again: impulse power is an ENGINE setting, not a SPEED setting. It takes a while to accelerate to any velocity, and the Enterprise did not have a while; Scimitar was parked some eight hundred meters in front of it when Troi dropped the hammer, and it didn't accelerate all that quickly.

Just as a matter of physics: at .9C Enterprise would have had the kinetic energy of several hundred thousand photon torpedoes. It wouldn't have crashed through the shields and dented Scimitar, it would have VAPORIZED on impact.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

If the Enterprise was travelling at max impulse, we wouldn't have even seen it.

In TMP, the Enterprise's top sublight speed was 80 percent of the speed of light. The crash in Nemesis seemed to happen very slowly by comparison to that figure.

By any rational sense of thought, both ships would have been destroyed were the Enterprise travelling at that velocity.

It's a film, ever heard of slow motion for dramatic effect?

Heard of it, yes. But that's not what happened.