how fast is "ramming speed"

[Rarewolf]

The best thing to do, I think, is to time impact with the enemy hull exactly with the explosion of a warp core.

Then Picard times it wrong in Nemesis, waiting until they've impacted before giving the autodestruct instruction.

IIRC the Defiant does have a last resort warhead in the docking port, so ramming speed might be an exact command for that class of vessel.

Then again, the ship would have to expend those same newtons across the distance she travels in order to attain the ramming, which is a lot of joules, probably more than exist in the universe.

Wouldn't they see the explosion before they caused it?

 

[Timo]

Then Picard times it wrong in Nemesis, waiting until they've impacted before giving the autodestruct instruction.

Picard isn't suicidal. If he pulls this off right, he can destroy Shinzon' horror ship without sacrificing his own life - say, lodging his ship tightly against Shinzon's, setting autodestruct, and then leaving in a shuttlecraft. In the best possible scenario, Shinzon can save his own life the same way and live happily ever after.

When autodestruct fails, Picard could still manually destroy his own ship before Shinzon manages to pull free. That he doesn't is further proof that he doesn't want to die, not until every other option is exhausted. Being dead would mean he wouldn't keep on fighting Shinzon, too - so he has to be sure of neutralizing the villain!

(Another issue here is that we may well be viewing the ramming in slow motion. Picard isn't exactly wasting time with setting autodestruct if the collision sequence only takes a few seconds.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Trekker4747]

I'd love for someone to compute the force of impact of the Enterprise-D at Warp 9. Please snap to it, someone! That's a lot of newtons.

As has been stated, at Warp 9 the ship really isn't traveling at 1024 times the speed of light. It's just bending space to effectively make that the case. In "reality" it's not moving any faster than some fraction of c. Likely .25c as is the standard speed of full-impulse to restrict time dilation effects.

.25c is 74,948,114.5 meters per second.

The mass of a Galaxy-class starship is 4,500,000 metric tons.

That's 12,638,744,700.986,498,062,500,000 Joules of energy. (12.6 septillion.)

Which is equal to 3,020,732,481 megatons.

- There are around 17,300 nuclear bombs in the world. Let's go crazy and assume they're all as big as the Tsar Bomba, at 50 megatons the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated. That's only 865,000 megatons. So this impact would be over 3500 times as powerful as detonating every, single, nuclear bomb on the planet inside of the split-second of that impact.

To put another way it's equal to 3.5 zetawatts per hour. Roughly 2.5% of the luminosity of Wolf 359.

I *think* these calculations are accurate as I had to look up the conversions and do most of the math myself as when we're dealing with numbers this large they blow out most on-line calculator programs, all of the ones I encountered didn't even deal with units larger than megatons or terrawatts.

So the impact of a Galaxy-class starship traveling at "maximum warp" (really only .25c/full impulse) would release inside of that split-second impact something equivalent to the amount of radiant energy released in 90 seconds by one of the dimmest known stars.

If you want to assume that traveling at Warp 9 the ship really is moving at 1014 times the speed of light, knock yourself out on going up from there on these calculations.

 

[T'Girl]

Ramming speed is more a matter of timing, it's the time between when the ship is seen to streach and snap forward, and when we see the flare of light.

What would have done the majority of the damage wouldn't have been the ship colliding with the cube, it would have been the leading edge of the ship's warp field envelope passing through the the body of the cube.

By the time (a fraction of a second later) the ship arrive at the cube, the entirety of cube would have basically been small pieces of scrap metal. The "ramming" would also destroy the ship.

 

[Melakon]

^ Ramming speed was still a possible tactic if warp drive was out and you only had impulse.

 

[Timewalker]

This fast:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXh1tW16V-8

I was thinking about Ben-Hur, too!

 

[VORTEX8472]

I'd love for someone to compute the force of impact of the Enterprise-D at Warp 9. Please snap to it, someone! That's a lot of newtons.

As has been stated, at Warp 9 the ship really isn't traveling at 1024 times the speed of light. It's just bending space to effectively make that the case. In "reality" it's not moving any faster than some fraction of c. Likely .25c as is the standard speed of full-impulse to restrict time dilation effects.

.25c is 74,948,114.5 meters per second.

The mass of a Galaxy-class starship is 4,500,000 metric tons.

That's 12,638,744,700.986,498,062,500,000 Joules of energy. (12.6 septillion.)

Which is equal to 3,020,732,481 megatons.

- There are around 17,300 nuclear bombs in the world. Let's go crazy and assume they're all as big as the Tsar Bomba, at 50 megatons the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated. That's only 865,000 megatons. So this impact would be over 3500 times as powerful as detonating every, single, nuclear bomb on the planet inside of the split-second of that impact.

To put another way it's equal to 3.5 zetawatts per hour. Roughly 2.5% of the luminosity of Wolf 359.

I *think* these calculations are accurate as I had to look up the conversions and do most of the math myself as when we're dealing with numbers this large they blow out most on-line calculator programs, all of the ones I encountered didn't even deal with units larger than megatons or terrawatts.

So the impact of a Galaxy-class starship traveling at "maximum warp" (really only .25c/full impulse) would release inside of that split-second impact something equivalent to the amount of radiant energy released in 90 seconds by one of the dimmest known stars.

If you want to assume that traveling at Warp 9 the ship really is moving at 1014 times the speed of light, knock yourself out on going up from there on these calculations.

WOW that's some mighty fine mathematics Trekker4747!

 

[jimbotron]

Thanks Trekker4747!

 

[SoM]

I'd love for someone to compute the force of impact of the Enterprise-D at Warp 9. Please snap to it, someone! That's a lot of newtons.

Then again, the ship would have to expend those same newtons across the distance she travels in order to attain the ramming, which is a lot of joules, probably more than exist in the universe. Since starships can travel at warp without beggaring the universe's energy resources, somebody somewhere has found a cheat. And the same cheat that makes warp travel energetically possible will probably make warp ramming energetically low-key, too.

Depends how you look at it. If "warp ramming" was simply "go to warp, aim at object, don't hit the brakes" then yes, absolutely.

If, OTOH, warp ramming was "aim at object, don't hit the brakes, go to warp a femtosecond or so before you hit", half the enemy ship would be at warp 5 or 6 while the rest would be at warp 0. That couldn't be good for it...

 

[Timo]

Interestingly, the daring tightrope act from one starship to another in ENT would seem to suggest that warp fields are in fact fairly compact affairs; once the cable is torn, it hits a field edge and spectacularly disintegrates within just a few meters of the ships' hulls.

And we see ships maneuver around each other at warp in, say, VOY "Basics" at point blank range - it wouldn't stand to reason to assume that the antagonists agreed to carefully merging their fields for the fight, so again we have to assume that a warp field in itself isn't any good at tearing apart nearby spacecraft, not unless they are literally just a few meters away.

What specific speeds were involved might matter, of course; perhaps faster means wider? In ENT, it was close to warp five, but in VOY, we could assume an even higher speed because the hero ship would have no reason to hold back and the Trabe ships used by the Kazon weren't particularly slow, either. So faster doesn't appear to mean that much wider...

Ramming in Trek is typically conducted at impulse anyway; we never see it happen at warp, even if Riker suggests such in "BoBW II". The Jem'Hadar at Chin'toka would have had the option of using warp, but chose impulse, and were quite successful, which is something of a surprise considering how photon torpedoes never seem to do any kinetic-energy damage against shielded ships!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Trekker4747]

WOW that's some mighty fine mathematics Trekker4747!

Thanks Trekker4747!

And that's just the energy release from the impact. To say nothing of the detonation of the antimatter on the ship.

According to the TNG Tech-Manual the ship carries with it 3000 m^3 of antimatter. (This doesn't include the antimatter presumably contained in the torpedoes, shuttles, probes or any research vessels in labs and such around the ship.)

The antimatter is antihydrogen (or more likely antideuterium) and this amount comes to 257 kilograms of antimatter, if its stored as a gas which it likely isn't. It's also not very "much" (granted, it's utterly huge by today's standards, but it seems to be the ship would be generating a lot of antimatter quite often in order to keep its antimatter stores full.)

How much energy released by THIS detonation? E=MC^2. A matter/antimatter explosion is a pure 1-to-1 detonation from mass to energy. 514.2 kilograms of energy (the detonation of matter AND the antimatter) results in an explosion of 11,045.4 megatons (1.1 tetratons.) Or 220 Tsar Bombas.

Or a meaningless fraction of the energy released from the impact alone.

 

[SoM]

Interestingly, the daring tightrope act from one starship to another in ENT would seem to suggest that warp fields are in fact fairly compact affairs; once the cable is torn, it hits a field edge and spectacularly disintegrates within just a few meters of the ships' hulls.

At the same time, we know they can expand a warp field deliberately, since the E-D crew "wrap a low level warp field around [a] moon" - well, more specifically, part of it since they couldn't encompass the whole thing - to try and make it easier to move in Déjà Q. And that was them trying to keep the thing intact. A high level warp field, OTOH...

And we see ships maneuver around each other at warp in, say, VOY "Basics" at point blank range - it wouldn't stand to reason to assume that the antagonists agreed to carefully merging their fields for the fight, so again we have to assume that a warp field in itself isn't any good at tearing apart nearby spacecraft, not unless they are literally just a few meters away.

If they're both at warp, though, the bubbles may merge when they get in range. Certainly, you're looking at relatively comparable distortion, rather than from 0 to plaid.

Ramming in Trek is typically conducted at impulse anyway; we never see it happen at warp, even if Riker suggests such in "BoBW II". The Jem'Hadar at Chin'toka would have had the option of using warp, but chose impulse, and were quite successful, which is something of a surprise considering how photon torpedoes never seem to do any kinetic-energy damage against shielded ships!

OTOH, didn't George Kirk take the Kelvin to warp as he hit the Narada, crippling it enough for the shuttles/escape pods to get away?

 

[Timo]

Hmm. I never considered the possibility that the Kelvin might have attempted to go to warp. If she could, wouldn't she have tried to escape in the first place?

...Or to conclude the ramming a bit faster? It took a full minute to fly from the outer edge of the Narada to the final collision, and the mining rig supposedly was about five kilometers "deep" from front (or about ten long overall). Three hundred kilometers per hour isn't exactly warp speed.

The "Basics" fight would involve an odd sort of merger, as the Kazon ships flew almost perpendicular to the Voyager at one point. Essentially, they were going sideways at high warp there, while moving at a very slow relative speed across the path of the hero ship. Seems as if the Voyager "sucked in" the small raiders to some degree.

Then there's Kirk's ability to come to a standstill next to V'Ger, which was speeding towards Earth at high warp. Kirk didn't exactly ask for a permission to merge fields before entering, but enter he must have, for him to be able to turn off his own engines soon thereafter. So that would support the general ability of two ships to force a merger regardless of what their commanders want. Although the scale of the V'Ger field probably makes it unrepresentative in every respect.

Timo Saloniemi