Defiant For The Borg? Makes No Sense

[All Seeing Eye]

Why would starfleet design the Defiant class to fight the Borg? it makes no sense.

To fight the Borg and have any chance of winning you need a ship or weapon capable of slinging out Quantum Torpedos likes there's no tomorrow and having a huge stockpile of them.

In TNG we found out that Galaxy class ships can fire something like 10 torpedoes in one shot (a spread) and even in Voyager i'm sure Janeway has ordered a spread of torpedoes before and yet when we look at the battle on First Contact all the ships just fire the odd torpedo, we never even see ships firing spreads of torpedoes and yet these ships can supposedly fire 10 at a time.

So what's going on here?

Starfleet should be building ships for planetary defence capable of shooting hundreds of torpedoes, a vessel capable of firing a spread of 10 torpedoes every second. A Borg cube would be history.

Where are the huge leviathan sized torpedo slingers?

How did you determine that the only way to fight the Borg is to sling out massive quantities of quantum torpedoes?

From TNG days, a key weakness was that the Borg couldn't rapidly adapt to changing phaser frequency settings.

The Defiant main offensive feature (seemed to be) the rapid-fire pulse phasers.

So...to my mind, I always envisioned it as using the phaser frequency settings to full effect against the Borg.
Each four-burst pulse has a different phaser frequency setting.
And each rapid fire burst quickly and randomly changes the phaser frequencies between shots.

Not only do the Borg get pummeled with multiple phaser hits, but repeatedly and at changing random settings they can't adapt to quickly enough.

Sounds like a perfectly designed Borg Buster weapon.
And deploy it on a fast manueverable platform like the Defiant.

The Defiant as a Borg Buster makes a whole lot of sense to me.
Especially when combined in a swarm/fleet of Defiant-types.
Much better than some sort of super-capital ship with dozens of torpedo tubes.

Well in that case then it still doesn't make sense.

They should have a huge "system ship" containing dozens of pulse phaser cannons. The ship would be crewless and it would be made of nothing more than matter-antimatter reactors and pulse phaser cannons. It would also have so many powerplants that the shields would survive enormous amounts of strikes.
Before the Borg even get close to it the cube would be toast from so many pulse phaser strikes.

Imagine having a Galaxy Class starship with no nacelles, no crew quarters, no science labs. Imagine the entire ship was comprised of nothing more than reactors, multi layered regenerative shielding, ablative armour and pulse phaser cannons.

Say bye bye Borg.

Hell! why stop there, make it 2 times bigger than a Galaxy class. If the poor Reman slaves can build the Scimitar i'm sure Starfleet could pull off a ship like this.

 

[Kaziarl]

Why would starfleet design the Defiant class to fight the Borg? it makes no sense.

To fight the Borg and have any chance of winning you need a ship or weapon capable of slinging out Quantum Torpedos likes there's no tomorrow and having a huge stockpile of them.

In TNG we found out that Galaxy class ships can fire something like 10 torpedoes in one shot (a spread) and even in Voyager i'm sure Janeway has ordered a spread of torpedoes before and yet when we look at the battle on First Contact all the ships just fire the odd torpedo, we never even see ships firing spreads of torpedoes and yet these ships can supposedly fire 10 at a time.

So what's going on here?

Starfleet should be building ships for planetary defence capable of shooting hundreds of torpedoes, a vessel capable of firing a spread of 10 torpedoes every second. A Borg cube would be history.

Where are the huge leviathan sized torpedo slingers?

How did you determine that the only way to fight the Borg is to sling out massive quantities of quantum torpedoes?

From TNG days, a key weakness was that the Borg couldn't rapidly adapt to changing phaser frequency settings.

The Defiant main offensive feature (seemed to be) the rapid-fire pulse phasers.

So...to my mind, I always envisioned it as using the phaser frequency settings to full effect against the Borg.
Each four-burst pulse has a different phaser frequency setting.
And each rapid fire burst quickly and randomly changes the phaser frequencies between shots.

Not only do the Borg get pummeled with multiple phaser hits, but repeatedly and at changing random settings they can't adapt to quickly enough.

Sounds like a perfectly designed Borg Buster weapon.
And deploy it on a fast manueverable platform like the Defiant.

The Defiant as a Borg Buster makes a whole lot of sense to me.
Especially when combined in a swarm/fleet of Defiant-types.
Much better than some sort of super-capital ship with dozens of torpedo tubes.

Well in that case then it still doesn't make sense.

They should have a huge "system ship" containing dozens of pulse phaser cannons. The ship would be crewless and it would be made of nothing more than matter-antimatter reactors and pulse phaser cannons. It would also have so many powerplants that the shields would survive enormous amounts of strikes.
Before the Borg even get close to it the cube would be toast from so many pulse phaser strikes.

Imagine having a Galaxy Class starship with no nacelles, no crew quarters, no science labs. Imagine the entire ship was comprised of nothing more than reactors, multi layered regenerative shielding, ablative armour and pulse phaser cannons.

Say bye bye Borg.

Hell! why stop there, make it 2 times bigger than a Galaxy class. If the poor Reman slaves can build the Scimitar i'm sure Starfleet could pull off a ship like this.

One big slow ship is going to be more of a target then a bunch of smaller ships. You're thinking just like that ship you wanted to design, the "Completely efficient at EVERYTHING" ship. It's not going to happen, and its not a good idea. The better military strategy is to make smaller ships, it gives your enemy more targets. Add to the fact that the defiant can doge just about anything, has powerful shields if the enemy does hit, and ablative armor if the shields fail, you've got something difficult for the borg to deal with. On top of that, make it 5 defiants. 10 Defiants. However many and you've got a swarm of very small, very fast, and very maneuverable ships to deal with. A giant capital ship isn't going to perform as well, their job is to support the smaller craft.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

One big slow ship is going to be more of a target then a bunch of smaller ships. You're thinking just like that ship you wanted to design, the "Completely efficient at EVERYTHING" ship. It's not going to happen, and its not a good idea. The better military strategy is to make smaller ships, it gives your enemy more targets. Add to the fact that the defiant can doge just about anything, has powerful shields if the enemy does hit, and ablative armor if the shields fail, you've got something difficult for the borg to deal with. On top of that, make it 5 defiants. 10 Defiants. However many and you've got a swarm of very small, very fast, and very maneuverable ships to deal with. A giant capital ship isn't going to perform as well, their job is to support the smaller craft.

There's another aspect to this, which is a STRONG advantage over "the borg."

(Of course, in-universe, the Borg are gone now, totally eliminated, so the whole point is sort of moot. But still...)

I'm talking about CHAOS.

What are the Borg? They are very organized, very meticulous, very logical. They are very efficient at analyzing, understanding, and adapting to patterns.

One big ship is going to, inevitably, have one big "command and control" system. Meaning that it will become very easy to predict exactly what that big ship is going to do in five seconds, based upon what you see it doing now. There's very little in the way of "unpredictable randomness" with a "super-duper-uber-ship."

But it's ONLY that "unpredictable randomness" which is capable of effectively combating the Borg, isn't it?

If you see a bull charging at you, you can largely determine which way to dodge at the last minute. If you see a pack of wolves, with the same total body mass as that big bull... you're gonna have a much harder time dodging. Yes, the bull, if it hits you, can do more instantaneous damage, but the odds of hitting are far less. Now, imagine the same "body mass" from a swarm of hornets." At this point it's effectively impossible.

Given the same total "body mass," in each case... is the potential for damage more, or less, in each case?

Being attacked by one massive bull? Being attacked by a dozen wolves? Being attacked by a few thousand hornets?

A "swarm" of Defiants, with each under the command and control of a different crew in every case, is going to be much more random, much more unpredictable. Much harder to predict, which means much harder to adapt to.

If you DO manage to strike back at the wolf pack and kill one, you've still got the rest of the pack attacking you without having been "hobbled" in any way.

If you manage to swat even a hundred of the hornets, well... any such effort is, essentially, wasted, since 900 angry hornets all focused on attacking you aren't really any less dangerous than 1000, are they?

A SINGLE hornet, compared to a single bull, is worthless. A single wolf, compared to a single bull, isn't very dangerous.

It's all a matter of numbers. The "super-duper-uber-mega-collossus-ship" is, as a general rule, a really bad idea for combat.

This is something that, in-universe, the Jem Hadar got pretty easily. They realized that a single suicide run from one of their smaller ships was more than sufficient to take out the Federation's most powerful warship. And losing that one little ship was far less of a loss for them than was the loss of a Galaxy-class starship, wasn't it?

 

[Timo]

Of course, in-universe, the Borg are gone now, totally eliminated, so the whole point is sort of moot.

Hmh? In the novelverse, perhaps? On screen, we have no evidence of the demise of the Borg. Only of loss of one out of several transwarp hubs, a few speciesfuls of Drones, plus yet another Queen. And if something characterizes the Borg, it's that they shrug off losses and quickly return meaner than ever.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Of course, in-universe, the Borg are gone now, totally eliminated, so the whole point is sort of moot.

Hmh? In the novelverse, perhaps? On screen, we have no evidence of the demise of the Borg. Only of loss of one out of several transwarp hubs, a few speciesfuls of Drones, plus yet another Queen. And if something characterizes the Borg, it's that they shrug off losses and quickly return meaner than ever.

Timo Saloniemi

In the "official novelverse," yeah. You're correct that it wasn't "on-screen" so it could be contradicted later. But the TNG-era "novelverse" is entirely consistent on this point - the Borg were, as a species, "transformed" into something entirely different... for all practical purposes, they were "assimilated" into something else (which, for the moment at least, seems to be benign and friendly).

Anyone who does follow the novels, or who doesn't and would like to know what's going on, read the following spoiler coded item. If you think you might want to read and are just behind, DO NOT READ THIS.

Spoiler: Description of "Destiny" Series Borg Events

In the "Destiny" series, a history of the Borg was presented. They were survivors of the Caeliar Gestalt and the crew of the NX-02, Columbia, who were thrown back in time and into the Delta Quadrant following an attack on a Caeliar City Ship. The Caeliar forced the humans into a perverted form of their Gestalt (a mental linking of the Caeliar) based upon the will of the last surviving Caeliar and not the whole. They launched a final attack of Federation space with over 7,000 cubes at their disposal; however, they were stopped after the Caeliar were made aware of their responsibility for the Borg's actions. The Collective was dismantled and the assimilated Borg Drones were accepted into the Caeliar's gestalt. Former drones fully regained their individuality (as evidenced by Seven of Nine's remaining implants dematerializing).

 

[Kaziarl]

Of course, in-universe, the Borg are gone now, totally eliminated, so the whole point is sort of moot.

Hmh? In the novelverse, perhaps? On screen, we have no evidence of the demise of the Borg. Only of loss of one out of several transwarp hubs, a few speciesfuls of Drones, plus yet another Queen. And if something characterizes the Borg, it's that they shrug off losses and quickly return meaner than ever.

Timo Saloniemi

In the "official novelverse," yeah. You're correct that it wasn't "on-screen" so it could be contradicted later. But the TNG-era "novelverse" is entirely consistent on this point - the Borg were, as a species, "transformed" into something entirely different... for all practical purposes, they were "assimilated" into something else (which, for the moment at least, seems to be benign and friendly).

which novels are these? I haven't been able to get my hands on the new books for a while.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

which novels are these? I haven't been able to get my hands on the new books for a while.

I edited my earlier post... see above.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

Why do people always compare Star Trek and Starfleet ships to animals and insects? there's no correlation between them at all.
A bull cannot fire quantum torpedoes and pulse phasers from afar.

using animals as an analogy is silly.

 

[Timo]

Why? In the previous arguments, the presence or absence of ranged weapons was not a factor, so even this minor detail shouldn't invalidate the animal analogy.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[All Seeing Eye]

A ship dropping out of warp or travelling at .9c and then pummelling a cube with torpedoes and pulsed phasers has nothing in common with a bull coming at you and you stepping out of the way.

A more accurate analogy would be a bull coming at your with a guy sat on its back firing a machine gun at you. Try dodging BULLETS!!!!!!

 

[Timo]

It's just a quantitative rather than qualitative issue. If the assailant starts out from a sufficient distance, the phasers or the bullets can of course be dodged.

Animals are as good a starting point as any for formulating an analogy. It will never be accurate (because that would defeat its very purpose or being a simplification), but it will probably work out just fine with minor side notes ("bull with a gun turret" or "shark with a laser on its head" are rather vivid and clear analogies to certain military vehicles today, and perhaps tomorrow).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kaziarl]

A ship dropping out of warp or travelling at .9c and then pummelling a cube with torpedoes and pulsed phasers has nothing in common with a bull coming at you and you stepping out of the way.

A more accurate analogy would be a bull coming at your with a guy sat on its back firing a machine gun at you. Try dodging BULLETS!!!!!!

Ok, fine. One guy sitting on a bull firing at you. Not easy, but you can dodge the bullets. 10 guys on horses, which are more maneuverable then a bull, firing at you... ALOT harder to dodge all the bullets, and a lot harder to fire back without taking more fire then the one guy on a bull.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

A ship dropping out of warp or travelling at .9c and then pummelling a cube with torpedoes and pulsed phasers has nothing in common with a bull coming at you and you stepping out of the way.

A more accurate analogy would be a bull coming at your with a guy sat on its back firing a machine gun at you. Try dodging BULLETS!!!!!!

Okay... you're dedicated to your own position and won't consider others, I see that. But I'll play along.

How about this?

Which is a more effective combat force?

An elephant with 20 men strapped around it's body, all with machine guns?

Or,

20 men on horseback, all with machine guns?

Is either more desirable than the other? If so, why? If not, why not?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

A more accurate analogy would be a bull coming at your with a guy sat on its back firing a machine gun at you. Try dodging BULLETS!!!!!!

If you want a more fitting analogy, try the example of an air raid. Stick fifty antiship missiles on a B-52 and then send it to attack the Kirov; you'll get off one, maybe two shots before Kirov blows it out of the sky along with its missiles. Then try it again with twenty fighter bombers each armed with two missiles; even if Kirov can shoot down half of them, the weight of firepower is far greater from multiple craft being able to attack from multiple directions.

Funny you bring up a machinegun... it's this very consideration that lead to the development of the M-16 rifle. It turns out that the ability to shoot more bullets at individual targets is more important than the power of a single bullet.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

A ship dropping out of warp or travelling at .9c and then pummelling a cube with torpedoes and pulsed phasers has nothing in common with a bull coming at you and you stepping out of the way.

A more accurate analogy would be a bull coming at your with a guy sat on its back firing a machine gun at you. Try dodging BULLETS!!!!!!

Okay... you're dedicated to your own position and won't consider others, I see that. But I'll play along.

How about this?

Which is a more effective combat force?

An elephant with 20 men strapped around it's body, all with machine guns?

Or,

20 men on horseback, all with machine guns?

Is either more desirable than the other? If so, why? If not, why not?

But that analogy doesn't fit right.

A better analogy would be the men on the elephant carrying machine guns and rocket launches and the horseback riders carrying pistols.

If you want a more fitting analogy, try the example of an air raid. Stick fifty antiship missiles on a B-52 and then send it to attack the Kirov; you'll get off one, maybe two shots before Kirov blows it out of the sky along with its missiles. Then try it again with twenty fighter bombers each armed with two missiles; even if Kirov can shoot down half of them, the weight of firepower is far greater from multiple craft being able to attack from multiple directions.

A starfleet vessel comprising of dozens of m/a-m reactors would be able to power a shield capable of taking hits from a Borg cube, the cube probably wouldn't have enough fire power to take down the shield same as the Ent-E didn't have enough firepower to take down the Scimitars. You can't compare Trek ships from a future era with real life ones.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

A ship dropping out of warp or travelling at .9c and then pummelling a cube with torpedoes and pulsed phasers has nothing in common with a bull coming at you and you stepping out of the way.

A more accurate analogy would be a bull coming at your with a guy sat on its back firing a machine gun at you. Try dodging BULLETS!!!!!!

Okay... you're dedicated to your own position and won't consider others, I see that. But I'll play along.

How about this?

Which is a more effective combat force?

An elephant with 20 men strapped around it's body, all with machine guns?

Or,

20 men on horseback, all with machine guns?

Is either more desirable than the other? If so, why? If not, why not?

But that analogy doesn't fit right.

A better analogy would be the men on the elephant carrying machine guns and rocket launches and the horseback riders carrying pistols.

No, see, the guys on horseback are carrying rocket launchers too. Where "rocket launcher" is equivalent to "photon torpedo bay," then your idea starship is basically an elephant with twenty guys holding RPGs.

Your logic has been proven historically flawed, though: the Japanese proved in 1941--and the Americans RE-proved throughout the following four years--that a squadron of fighters armed with bombs and torpedoes are far more dangerous than a single battleship armed with big guns. You're basically suggesting that the best weapon to use against a superbattleship is an even bigger battleship, while history, logic and precedent have shown us that the exact OPPOSITE is true. The German battleship Bismark, for example, had enough firepower to obliterate any other ship in the British Navy, but in the end it was a squadron of biplanes and some old torpdedoes that finished the job.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

No, see, the guys on horseback are carrying rocket launchers too. Where "rocket launcher" is equivalent to "photon torpedo bay," then your idea starship is basically an elephant with twenty guys holding RPGs.

Your logic has been proven historically flawed, though: the Japanese proved in 1941--and the Americans RE-proved throughout the following four years--that a squadron of fighters armed with bombs and torpedoes are far more dangerous than a single battleship armed with big guns. You're basically suggesting that the best weapon to use against a superbattleship is an even bigger battleship, while history, logic and precedent have shown us that the exact OPPOSITE is true. The German battleship Bismark, for example, had enough firepower to obliterate any other ship in the British Navy, but in the end it was a squadron of biplanes and some old torpdedoes that finished the job.

No no no no no.

You can't keep doing this. Trek ships have shields! they have different components, different types of weapons, different powerplants. The more powerplants a ship has the more powerful the shields and the more damage it can take.

Using present day ship analogy's doesn't take into account all of this. So you send planes against a ship, it has shields, stronger shields than the planes and therefore can withstand an attack, the shields of the planes are too weak to withstand attacks and they are taken out. Now imagine that instead you send in a huge ship, a ship with more powerful shields than the enemy ship, the enemy ship will be toast.

If you break a ship up into smaller ships the individual ships become weaker and cant withstand attacks, they cant take as much damage and will be destroyed.

imagine getting attacked by a swarm of wasps, your weapon is a can of wasp spray, you spray the wasps and they die, now a bull comes charging, spray the bull with the can what happens? nothing, you're dead.

The Borg cutting beams would act like wasp/fly spray against the Defiants, but against a ship bigger than it and with an enormous centralised shield grid the cutting beams will be far less useful.

If a Defiant is losing shields you can't divert power from one Defiant to another, with a huge ship you can spread the power to different areas of the shield.

Building one enormous ship will cost far less resources then building many, that's an undeniable fact therefore you can build a single ship more powerful than it's Defiant equivalent for the same price.

 

[Kaziarl]

No, see, the guys on horseback are carrying rocket launchers too. Where "rocket launcher" is equivalent to "photon torpedo bay," then your idea starship is basically an elephant with twenty guys holding RPGs.

Your logic has been proven historically flawed, though: the Japanese proved in 1941--and the Americans RE-proved throughout the following four years--that a squadron of fighters armed with bombs and torpedoes are far more dangerous than a single battleship armed with big guns. You're basically suggesting that the best weapon to use against a superbattleship is an even bigger battleship, while history, logic and precedent have shown us that the exact OPPOSITE is true. The German battleship Bismark, for example, had enough firepower to obliterate any other ship in the British Navy, but in the end it was a squadron of biplanes and some old torpdedoes that finished the job.

No no no no no.

You can't keep doing this. Trek ships have shields! they have different components, different types of weapons, different powerplants. The more powerplants a ship has the more powerful the shields and the more damage it can take.

Using present day ship analogy's doesn't take into account all of this. So you send planes against a ship, it has shields, stronger shields than the planes and therefore can withstand an attack, the shields of the planes are too weak to withstand attacks and they are taken out. Now imagine that instead you send in a huge ship, a ship with more powerful shields than the enemy ship, the enemy ship will be toast.

If you break a ship up into smaller ships the individual ships become weaker and cant withstand attacks, they cant take as much damage and will be destroyed.

imagine getting attacked by a swarm of wasps, your weapon is a can of wasp spray, you spray the wasps and they die, now a bull comes charging, spray the bull with the can what happens? nothing, you're dead.

It is the same. There is something that you, yourself, are blatantly missing. Shields are just a different type of armor. And just like you have different types of rounds to deal with different thicknesses and types of armor, the same thing applies to shields. And plugging in a bigger battery doesn't automatically make the shields better.

Trek has shown us that there are 'cracks' in the shields. This happen where the shield grids overlap. You're talking about a ship that would have so many of these overlap points, that the shields would end up being weaker as a result. There are MORE points of vulnerability. And since we were discussing the borg to begin with, they'd just adapt to the shields anyway. Ships that are harder for the borg to even touch would make it harder for them to adapt.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

^ I added more to my last post.

 

[Kaziarl]

The cutting beams wouldn't act like anything if the borg couldn't catch them. Thats the whole purpose of being fast and maneuverable, you're harder to hit.