Defiant For The Borg? Makes No Sense

[Crazy Eddie]

Trek ships have shields!

Battleships have antiaircraft guns. HUNDREDS of them, in fact, plus incredibly thick armor, radar, smoke screens, all kinds of stuff that could in theory help to defend against an air attack.

The more powerplants a ship has the more powerful the shields and the more damage it can take.

Just like the more guns a battleship has, the more planes it should be able to repel at a single time.

Using present day ship analogy's doesn't take into account all of this.

As a matter of fact, it does. Only the details have changed, the LOGICAL CIRCUMSTANCES are identical: single vessel with alot of power vs. multiple smaller vessels with a little power. The "death of a thousand cuts" approach has proven to be superior almost every time it has been used, in every circumstance, with few if any exceptions.

You want another analogy?
King Tiger vs. Sherman: The most powerful tank of WW-II against the more numerous (and relatively wimpy) sherman tanks. The shermans devastated the tigers precisely because there were a hell of a lot more of them, because the Tigers were too slow and not especially manueverable. Let alone that a King Tiger was capable of surviving dozens of direct hits from a Sherman and still remain active (sound familiar?), the only thing that mitigated this superiority was numbers and mobility.

So you send planes against a ship,

So you send Defiants against a Cube

it has shields

It has armor

stronger shields than the planes

Stronger armor 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.

And therefore the battleship can withstand an attack, since the planes' armor is too weak to withstand the battleship's AA guns.

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.

Right, just like the best weapon to take out a battleship is an even bigger battleship, for all of the exact same reasons you just described.

Or so the US Navy thought until that infamous sunday morning...

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.

The smaller bits don't have to withstand the attacks; in fact, their entire advantage is their ability to deliver firepower while AVOIDING the enemy's attacks. Even Riker understood this concept, hence the need to separate the saucer: giving the Borg more than one target to worry about is more valuable, tactically, than the extra power you'd get from the saucer's impulse engines. For precisely this reason, two smaller ships are better than one powerful ship, and for the same reason, thirty very small and very powerful ships are better than one very large very powerful ship.

Especially considering the way the Borg fight battles. Once their tractor beam locks on it can suck the life out of your shields in a matter of seconds, and then they can either board you or carve up your uberbattleship like a turkey: game over. With a swarm of 30 Defiants, the Borg could lock up half of your fleet and slice them all to pieces and you'd still have 45 working torpedo tubes and 60 pulse phasers to hit them with.

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.

For one thing "wasp spray" is not an aerosol, and it doesn't work that quickly. Against a swarm of them the best weapon would probably be a flamethrower, and even that wouldn't be completely effective since SOME of them will inevitably still get to you (and it might only take a few stings to incapacitate you). So checkmate: you can't possibly kill them ALL, and they can still get to you. Of course, turning your flamethrower against a charging bull would have a dramatically different and considerably more tasty effect.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

And just because it needs to be emphasized:

The Borg cutting beams would act like wasp/fly spray against the Defiants,

The Borg don't use their cutting beam until AFTER they've drained your shields. This is easy to do against a bigger ship, since you only have to lock onto the one and then slice it to pieces. But we have never seen a tractor beam that can lock onto thirty different ships simultaneously.

The cutting beam isn't a bug spray, if anything it's a sword. Unless you're some kind of crazy super-ninja on PCP, I don't think you're going to be taking on a swarm of bees with a sword.

If a Defiant is losing shields you can't divert power from one Defiant to another

You don't have to, you can just get the other 29 defiants in your group to pool their firepower and destroy the tractor beam that's gripping the one (besides, against the borg, simply transferring additional power to the shields won't do squat).

 

[Cary L. Brown]

And just because it needs to be emphasized:

The Borg cutting beams would act like wasp/fly spray against the Defiants,

The Borg don't use their cutting beam until AFTER they've drained your shields. This is easy to do against a bigger ship, since you only have to lock onto the one and then slice it to pieces. But we have never seen a tractor beam that can lock onto thirty different ships simultaneously.

The cutting beam isn't a bug spray, if anything it's a sword. Unless you're some kind of crazy super-ninja on PCP, I don't think you're going to be taking on a swarm of bees with a sword.

I'll add something else to this point...


The comment is made that "defiant's shields are wimpy."

This comment is also nonsensical.

Instead... the Defiant, being much smaller, requires a lot less power to protect the entire ship with a field of a particular strength.

So, per-unit-exposed-hull, the Defiant can have a shield EXACTLY as power as that of a Galaxy. But since the "units-of-exposed-hull" is a lot less on a Defiant, it takes a lot less power to shield the entire ship.

A sword will bounce of a heavily-armored midget just like it will off of a heavily-armored giant, provided that the armor is the same thickness. But the midget's armor is a lot cheaper and lighter, overall.

(Granted, this brings up all sorts of twisted "Wizard of Oz" possibilities that I'm sure we could let this conversation descend into easily enough...)

If a Defiant is losing shields you can't divert power from one Defiant to another

You don't have to, you can just get the other 29 defiants in your group to pool their firepower and destroy the tractor beam that's gripping the one (besides, against the borg, simply transferring additional power to the shields won't do squat).

And you can also WITHDRAW that one ship from battle for a few minutes while they restore their shields, while the other 29 do their business.

 

[Vanyel]

I tend to think of the Borg as one of those Asian Giant Hornet's that attack bee hives. The hornet is much bigger than a bee. The honey bees native to Asia have a defense that can kill a hornet scout before it can alert the other hornets to the bee hive. The bees completely surround the hornet, heating the hornet up and killing it. However, if the bees cannot stop the scout before it tells the rest of the hornets nest where the bee hive is, the hornets will come in and make short work of the bees. The bees stingers don't do much, if any, damage to the much larger hornet. The bees can still surround a hornet and kill it, but the bees cannot kill the hornets as fast as the hornets can kill the bees.

So using that as an analogy, Defiant class ships can swarm and attack a Borg Cube, maybe even destroy it. The Federation has no known technology to disrupt the Borg Collective (not without infecting the Borg Queen); now the Collective knows of this new attack. The next attack (if it comes, the Borg's seem to be easily distracted or the assimilation of the Federation is a low priority.) will be one with more cubes, the Defiants can swarm all they want, but the cubes would be able to destroy Defiants, faster than the Defiants can destroy cubes.

The Borg, as shown in The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager, use more than just cutting beams. They have weapons designed to drain a ships shields, others to dissipate the warp field of a ship (That's the only way I can see how, in Q Who?, the weapon the Borg fired at a shield less 1701D, seemed to cascade around what looked like the shield bubble but I think it was the warp field and dissipated it making it fall out of warp) and other beam and bolt looking weapons. So the Borg, will win the battle.

Sooner or later, whatever bright shiny objects that are distracting the Borg from the Federation, will be gone. And they will come. Unless someone jangles their keys...

 

[All Seeing Eye]

Heck, just build a ship with a beam weapon like that found on Neros ship, that would slice through cubes like industrial laser beams through tinfoil.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Heck, just build a ship with a beam weapon like that found on Neros ship, that would slice through cubes like industrial laser beams through tinfoil.

Well, since Nero's ship is (not ENTIRELY canonically, but by writer intent, in any case) a Romulan conversion of borg technology, I'm not sure that's entirely true.

Of course, since none of this is real anyway, the ONLY thing that makes REAL logical sense is to say "The Borg are as powerful as the writers need them to be."

Still... and you can argue this until you turn purple and pass out, if you like, but it's a fact, plain and simple... the writer's intent, coming up with the Defiant, was not that this ship, BY ITSELF, was going to be some sort of "super-duper-uber-weapon" to defeat the Borg. It was a PROTOTYPE DESIGN, and that DESIGN was intended to fight the Borg. AS A SWARM OF SMALLER SHIPS.

You don't have to like it. Since everything here is fictional, you can argue against it all you want. But we've told you the original intent. And most of us think that the original intent makes sense.

Nobody's telling you that you have to. But I don't think you're going to convince anybody else that you're right and the author-intent was wrong.

I certainly am not convinced... or rather, I'm more convinced than ever that the original intent makes sense.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

I'm a master tactician, I know what i'm talking about.

 

[Kaziarl]

I'm a master tactician, I know what i'm talking about.

A baseless claim with no proof. Wow, I'm so sorry, I see now that you are OH SO right about every idea you've ever presented.

Seriously, if you were really a "Master Tactician," you would know that what you're saying is completely and utter nonsense. Theory has shown this, history has shown this, practice has shown this. It is the way it is.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

I'm a master tactician, I know what i'm talking about.

You are? I'm intrigued... please, tell us why that's the case.

To be a "master tactician," this would mean that you're a high-ranking military officer of some sort, with real-world experience in real military engagements. So I'm intrigued.

I'm a pretty decent tactician... my job in the military was to advice the commanding officer on enemy activities and capabilities... to "play the entire enemy force" insofar as the commander's planning process was concerned. And I've done that in real-world situations. But I'd never call myself a "master tactician." There are remarkably few of those in the world.

Norman Schwarzkopf would be one of them (I know that from personal experience as well). There are others, today. And we can point to plenty throughout history.

But I'm intrigued to hear your claim on the title.

 

[The Badger]

I'm a master tactician, I know what i'm talking about.

I'm going to give TS the benefit of the doubt here and assume that this was meant in a tongue in cheek, ironic way.

 

[Anticitizen]

If you insist on getting realism in your Star Trek, you'd probably end up disappointed. Ships shooting each other is dramatic, realism is not.

Here's what's realistic - Starfleet sensors pick up a Borg cube headed for Earth. They take a retired starship, load her up with antimatter, and send her on autopilot to smash into the cube at Warp 7. Boom. No more Borg cube.

But that doesn't make for good storytelling, does it?

 

[All Seeing Eye]

Here's what's realistic - Starfleet sensors pick up a Borg cube headed for Earth. They take a retired starship, load her up with antimatter, and send her on autopilot to smash into the cube at Warp 7. Boom. No more Borg cube.

Wouldn't work, the Borg would detect it coming light years away and move out of the way, before it even got close enough to strike the cube the Borg would destroy it.

 

[kv1at3485]

Here's what's realistic - Starfleet sensors pick up a Borg cube headed for Earth. They take a retired starship, load her up with antimatter, and send her on autopilot to smash into the cube at Warp 7. Boom. No more Borg cube.

Wouldn't work, the Borg would detect it coming light years away and move out of the way, before it even got close enough to strike the cube the Borg would destroy it.

Heehee.

"Let's get a crewed ship to intercept the Borg cube at warp speed."

"Naw, that wouldn't work. The Borg would detect it from light years away and move out of the way, or the Borg would destroy it before it got close enough to shoot at the Borg."

 

[All Seeing Eye]

Here's what's realistic - Starfleet sensors pick up a Borg cube headed for Earth. They take a retired starship, load her up with antimatter, and send her on autopilot to smash into the cube at Warp 7. Boom. No more Borg cube.

Wouldn't work, the Borg would detect it coming light years away and move out of the way, before it even got close enough to strike the cube the Borg would destroy it.

Heehee.

"Let's get a crewed ship to intercept the Borg cube at warp speed."

"Naw, that wouldn't work. The Borg would detect it from light years away and move out of the way, or the Borg would destroy it before it got close enough to shoot at the Borg."

It's not the same. The Borg would intercept a crewed ship to assimilate the crew and the Borg ship does not need to avoid a crewed ship on a collision course cos it more than likely wouldn't be on a collision course. Even if a crewed ship collided with it it would not have the same explosive force as a ship packed with antimatter.

 

[kv1at3485]

It's not the same. The Borg would intercept a crewed ship to assimilate the crew and the Borg ship does not need to avoid a crewed ship on a collision course cos it more than likely wouldn't be on a collision course. Even if a crewed ship collided with it it would not have the same explosive force as a ship packed with antimatter.

That works too. Let then avoid and run, it makes it far more difficult for them to assimilate planets.

Because if it ever slows down the missiles will catch up and kill it.

Seeing how battles work out in the ST universe, living long enough to scratch paint is not a problem.

 

[Anticitizen]

Wouldn't work, the Borg would detect it coming light years away and move out of the way, before it even got close enough to strike the cube the Borg would destroy it.

Heehee.

"Let's get a crewed ship to intercept the Borg cube at warp speed."

"Naw, that wouldn't work. The Borg would detect it from light years away and move out of the way, or the Borg would destroy it before it got close enough to shoot at the Borg."

It's not the same. The Borg would intercept a crewed ship to assimilate the crew and the Borg ship does not need to avoid a crewed ship on a collision course cos it more than likely wouldn't be on a collision course. Even if a crewed ship collided with it it would not have the same explosive force as a ship packed with antimatter.

Well, we're told that Borg only have limited interest in humans other than to use as drones (which they grow themselves anyway), and the tech is what they really want. All you have to do is emit some wacky energy signature to lure the Borg close enough, and kablooie.

In any case, they can try to dodge, but if you can get close enough... kablooie. We're talking about the explosion that would've wiped out V'ger, remember. But why would they try to dodge? You're assuming they'd know what was about to happen. They'd probably assume the ship was coming to intercept them, and the Borg aren't exactly known for employing 'evasive maneuvers'. They just keep trodding on to their destination, despite the presence of an entire starfleet armada.

Speaking of ships going kablooie, TOS got ship explosions right - remember when the Romulan Bird of Prey self-destructed? A super-bright flash of light, then nothing. That's more or less what you'd get with an antimatter (or nuclear) explosion in space. When TNG came along, the ship explosions (for the early seasons especially) looked like somebody took a match to a balloon full of kerosene.

 

[Scout101]

I'm a master tactician, I know what i'm talking about.

Based upon what, exactly? Credentials?

 

[All Seeing Eye]

I'm a master tactician, I know what i'm talking about.

Based upon what, exactly? Credentials?

You can trust me and take my word for it.

 

[Kaziarl]

I'm a master tactician, I know what i'm talking about.

Based upon what, exactly? Credentials?

You can trust me and take my word for it.

And while we're at it, I discovered an alternative fuel source in my basement that will revolutionize the world. Just trust me, and take my word.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

Based upon what, exactly? Credentials?

You can trust me and take my word for it.

And while we're at it, I discovered an alternative fuel source in my basement that will revolutionize the world. Just trust me, and take my word.

I don't believe you. If there was such a fuel source, i'd have discovered it or invented it.