Breeching Pods

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Are Star Trek Beyond & Star Trek Voyager the only 2x times I can remember that Breeching Pods were ever used in the "Star Trek" Cannonical franchise?

Are there other scenarios of getting a Personnel Invasion Force onto a vessel?

What counter techniques can you think of to defeat "Breeching Pods"?

1) Mines always comes down to shoot it out of the sky before it gets to you.
2) If it's inside your Shield Bubble, transport the eff out of it and spread the de-materialized matter across nearby space, instantly killing the pod.
3) If they are jamming or preventing the transporter lock from happening or have a way to block it, then have internal automated security ready to fight back
4) Then send in your internal security team

 

[Tenacity]

Are there other scenarios of getting a Personnel Invasion Force onto a vessel?

Beaming?

 

[DonIago]

#2 may work for singular pods, though likely isn't viable for a swarm as seen in Beyond, especially in the TOS days. As for internal automated security...ha...not exactly a Trek strong point that we've seen...

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Beaming?

Let's make the assumption that the opponent still has their shields up or has something baked into the hull that prevents beaming through.

Beaming would be the super easy solution, but that's assuming their defenses are down.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

As for internal automated security...ha...not exactly a Trek strong point that we've seen...

That can be fixed in the future.

 

[Tenacity]

Let's make the assumption that the opponent still has their shields up

A standard ionic pulse from the main deflector will over-ride the shields.

 

[DonIago]

I mean, are you asking hypothetically what should a Federation starship be capable of doing, or what should it be able to do that's clearly supported by canon?

If nothing else you'd think any sort of decent internal forcefields would help a lot in this regard.

 

[Unicron]

I recall in the Mirror Universe Saga, the ISS Enterprise took out a group of fighter style craft after it invaded our universe and attacked a starbase (which didn't know that the normal Enterprise had been destroyed at that point, per the events of TSFS) by charging its shields briefly with an antimatter pulse. When the fighters came into contact with the shields, they immediately disintegrated.

ATM, the only series I can recall with a dedicated breaching pod was the EA one seen in B5, but I'd have to check my nerd library. The Star Wars EU has dedicated boarding craft, and a few such designs exist in Battletech. I wouldn't be surprised if similar units exist in other series, but it tends to vary a lot by how ships function in their respective universes. Many of them seem to assume that either capital ships have the firepower to deal with such units, or that other small craft would do that.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

Let's make the assumption that the opponent still has their shields up or has something baked into the hull that prevents beaming through.

If they still have shields up then they'll still have weapons so any sort of auxiliary craft would become a target, only of they had cloaking technology or sheer numbers (like the Swarm) would that not be an issue.

Ablative armour may provide protection from breeching pods (we don't know it's full capabilities). Or they could use the deflector dish to depolarise the hull and repel incoming metallic objects, or some other technobabble to defend the ship.

 

[Timo]

In the ENT era, breaching pods are sort of implicit: the Suliban arrive uninvited without possessing transporters. Hull polarizing might not make a difference there, nor would cranking up the SIF in the future: the pods would be designed to provide sufficient breaching force locally, burning through the hull no matter what.

Getting them to that hull would require a combination of Suliban-like stealth (cloaking or other blinding of enemy sensors), high speed (so the enemy gets few opportunities for shooting back), and possibly a swarm of decoys or other escorting units, probably firing at the enemy with whatever weapons they have for the psychological purpose of keeping heads down. As small craft aren't faster than big ships in Trek, the pods would need to be deployed at the right moment, close to their target; the deploying ship might make the "heads down" hail of fire.

Countermeasures in addition to standard firing back might include explosive devices on the hull, blowing away any attached pods or entire hull sections. Or forcefield/pusher beam versions of same. It might also be prudent for the main guns of a starship to be capable of firing at all points of the ship's own hull...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Tenacity]

During the last trilogy episode of nuBSG, during a rescue mission the Galactica FTL jumps to within a few hundred meters of a Cylon space station, and then rams it's bow into the station, boarding parties then enter the station.

Adama doesn't piss around.

Picard could have used this method during Nemesis.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

A standard ionic pulse from the main deflector will over-ride the shields.

If shields go down that easily, shields would literally be meaningless in the ST universe. I doubt that a Ionic pulse would bring it down for all ships.

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Ionic_pulse

From what MA states, it seems that Klingon Cloak got triggered when they used the Ionic Pulse to hit the defective Plasma Coil on a Klingon Ship. This forced the computers to drop shields & raise cloak when they didn't want to do it. Ergo making them incredibly vulnerable.

I doubt that it can be a common strategy that is used all the time and that the Klingons won't learn from it.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

I mean, are you asking hypothetically what should a Federation starship be capable of doing, or what should it be able to do that's clearly supported by canon?

If nothing else you'd think any sort of decent internal forcefields would help a lot in this regard.

I agree, the internal systems should erect a force field every corridor section it can to limit what the invaders can do / slow them down.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

In the ENT era, breaching pods are sort of implicit: the Suliban arrive uninvited without possessing transporters. Hull polarizing might not make a difference there, nor would cranking up the SIF in the future: the pods would be designed to provide sufficient breaching force locally, burning through the hull no matter what.

Getting them to that hull would require a combination of Suliban-like stealth (cloaking or other blinding of enemy sensors), high speed (so the enemy gets few opportunities for shooting back), and possibly a swarm of decoys or other escorting units, probably firing at the enemy with whatever weapons they have for the psychological purpose of keeping heads down. As small craft aren't faster than big ships in Trek, the pods would need to be deployed at the right moment, close to their target; the deploying ship might make the "heads down" hail of fire.

Countermeasures in addition to standard firing back might include explosive devices on the hull, blowing away any attached pods or entire hull sections. Or forcefield/pusher beam versions of same. It might also be prudent for the main guns of a starship to be capable of firing at all points of the ship's own hull...

Timo Saloniemi

Cloaked Breeching Pods that latch on and destroy sections of the hull makes sense.

 

[Timo]

Yeah, if the Romulan mine managed that...

During the last trilogy episode of nuBSG, during a rescue mission the Galactica FTL jumps to within a few hundred meters of a Cylon space station, and then rams it's bow into the station, boarding parties then enter the station.

I sort of gather the Defiant was built to do the very thing. The only tactic known to work against the Borg at the time was boarding, after all. And the bow of the ship is supposed to have a docking tube somewhere, but the exterior features suggest there would have to be two, side by side; overkill unless the bow's very raison d'être was boarding by ramming. Either by pushing the whole ship against the enemy, or by separating that very distinct-looking bow section at a suitable distance.

From what MA states, it seems that Klingon Cloak got triggered when they used the Ionic Pulse to hit the defective Plasma Coil on a Klingon Ship. This forced the computers to drop shields & raise cloak when they didn't want to do it. Ergo making them incredibly vulnerable.

Sounded like that to me, too. The pulse did zip to shields as such, but it goaded the cloak into activating, making the Romulan computer aboard think it was time to engage overall stealth mode and, among other things, drop shields. Regular Klingon hardware would allow for raising of shields and arming of disruptors while cloaked, but the Duras sisters relied on a different supplier, with a different cloaking doctrine...

The pulse that disrupts shields is the tachyon burst from ST:INS. And it doesn't make shields vulnerable to weapons fire in that movie - it only creates a window through which transporters can act. Unless there are inhibitors in action. Which makes it curious that we seldom hear of said inhibitors. They are Starfleet hardware (software?) in the movie, and a sort of a Chekov's Beeping Gadget for events later in the movie, too. Why would other heroes fail to make use of those when their shields go down and the Jem'Hadar or Hirogen start beaming in?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

I need to rewatch the final battle for ST:INS, it's been a long time!!!

 

[Timo]

Insurrection did quite a bit of tech foreshadowing.

- The tachyon pulse that is supposed to allow Picard and Worf to beam Data out of the scoutcraft is later used against the Son'a command ship, to the very same end of making the enemy reset the shields and thus allow for transport.
- The transporter inhibitor which allows Data to defeat Picard and Worf is later used to defeat Dougherty and Rua'fo when they want to capture the Ba'ku.
- The holodeck that is supposed to fool the victims of the story is ultimately used to fool the villains.
- The time-slowing or perception-enhancing trick of the Ba'ku is later used to save the lives of Anij and Picard.

Even the fountain of youth was originally going to see dual use, sending the villain to his well-earned doom by rejuvenating him to an unbirth.

In light of this careful laying of the groundwork, it's not all that objectionable that the tachyon burst shield reset comes out of the blue, never having been mentioned in previous Trek. But even in the final battle, it is consistently portrayed as not being an effective weapon of war: Data "keeps on firing" those pulses at the enemy, without creating any damage the heroes or villains would comment on. Its purpose is to annoy, and thus to prompt the reset that allows for the transporter trick; targets who feel less confident (say, ships at war) would simply not do the reset and subsequently wouldn't be vulnerable to transporter warfare.

In much of Trek, tachyons have to do with time travel. And nudging the phase of things seems to be a "time" trick, as in "Time's Arrow"; nudging the phase of a shield with tachyons sounds doable, then. But it's about as effective as using lasers at war today: blinding is possible, drilling holes is impractical, and blowing up stuff is impossible unless you aim at something eminently explosive and exposed.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

I'm sure StarFleet will have learned of that trick and figure out a way to build in defenses against it down the time line.

Wouldn't want that same trick used against us, now would we =D