Holographic/photonic armies?

[Timo]

The holo ships had fully functional weapons that did actual damage to the kazon fleet attacking them.

Well, no. We see no evidence of any damage done. To the contrary, whenever phaser beams from the Voyager hit Kazon hulls, there's a gasoline explosion. Whenever the holographic blue death rays from the holographic Talaxian ships hit Kazon hulls, there isn't.

However, there's no theoretical objection to holoweapons being deadly. We've seen deadly, in ST:FC at the very least. It's just that "Basics" doesn't really try to claim that the Voyager had the resources to create a dozen fully functional starships out of thin air. The heroes only speak of confusing the enemy, not of multiplying their own firepower as such.

But after that happened, janeway had to be reassured mid battle that no damage had happened to the doctors program itself by the oopsie. so that raises the question of wether holographic soldiers can be destroyed in combat.

It's a good question - but nothing about Janeway's concern necessary relates to the Doctor taking hits from Kazon weapons. It's just an unexpected turn of events, something that wasn't supposed to happen, so the Captain is rightly concerned.

One'd assume that if a hologram tries to project force at you with one of its parts, you can project force against that specific part of the hologram, and the feedback will damage the holoprojector. And of course you can also try and hit the projector directly. But holograms have the nice ability to become invulnerable at will, then return to being solid and deadly (as with the EMH's demonstration where he becomes thin air for Paris, then slaps the poor chap).

Also once voyager had been captured by the hirogen and used as a holographic training ship in a ww2 battle, complete with holographic weapons and enemies to kill. is where I get the idea the federation holds such things in very low regard.

I don't follow. Both the Hirogen and the Feds love to do fake battles on holodecks. Where's the "low regard" part?

why go to the expense of building such holographic equipment... when you can simply use the cheapest simplest weapons to do the same job

Why build expensive drones, when air combat could be conducted with tried and true crewed fighters instead? Aerial drones capable of defending themselves or fighting other drones are significantly more expensive today than their crewed counterparts, yet under active development nevertheless. Drones for ground fighting might cost a hundred times more to field and maintain than a foot soldier, yet there's active development there, too.

Holographic fighting would be the ultimate in not being there: not only could you leave the precious live personnel home, you could eschew with all logistics save for raw power, and provide the forward troops with weapons and ammo of your choice at the push of a button. Major savings appear likely.

Of course, Janeway couldn't keep up her holographic fleet. Nor did she try the trick twice (perhaps because she never again faced the Kazon, possibly the only "sapient" species in the galaxy to fall for that one!). Doesn't mean there wouldn't be potential for the tactic, either with better contemporary hardware or with near future developments...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Drone]

On voyager its discovered the maquis sent an automated cardassian weapons platform on a mission to destroy cardassian bases, but it got sent over seas by the caretaker and was attacking random planets. When it was discovered star fleet officers had done such a thing, Janeways reaction was the typical "oh my god, how could you do such an atrocious thing like that?"

I won't swear to complete memorization of the series, though it's certainly my favorite, but I don't remember this sequence or revelation at all. Would you identify what episode in which this was stated?

 

[Timo]

That was "Dreadnought", and topcat gets the basics down pat. The weapon was an autonomous missile that originally (some time before the show) was sent to hunt the Maquis; Torres then mindfucked the weapon's AI into attacking Cardassians; and the Caretaker sent the weapon to Delta, where it was so lost it mistook a bystander planet for its target.

This was just villainy piled upon villainy, though. Just because a terrorist might misuse a suitcase nuke doesn't mean the US or the USSR would have been opposed to the concept of suitcase nukes as such. Or of shoulder SAMS, or whatever.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[topcat]

Dreadnaught was also a major event of Voyager, the somewhat righteous Maquis sending a robot weapon to commit an act of war on a planet. Compared to Janeways mission to hunt down the maquis outpost in a sector of space that had soo many ships go missing....
Most would say it was janeway being forced to look at herself the way she felt the maquis were. EVIL relentless, un forgiving war criminals.
Exactly how cochranes female copilot compared Picard to the Borg after he machine gunned them down on the holodeck.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

Wouldn't that be a violation of their "holographic rights"

I think that unless its characters on a holodeck (used sparingly) then there shouldn't be any more nonsense about holographic characters. Otherwise why even have the Academy? Why not recreate holograms of Kirk & Co and send them out of ships that are essentially holodecks with nacelles, why bother with flesh and blood crews at all--no logical reason to put sentients in harms way if it can be at all avoided.

 

[Timo]

Dreadnaught was also a major event of Voyager, the somewhat righteous Maquis sending a robot weapon to commit an act of war on a planet. Compared to Janeways mission to hunt down the maquis outpost in a sector of space that had soo many ships go missing....

Comparing to that, what the Maquis (and the Cardassians!) tried to do there sounds peanuts. Torres didn't try to blow up a Cardassian colony or anything - her target was a "fuel depot". And the original Cardassian target had been a Maquis "munitions base". It's really difficult to understand why these two ruthless combatants attempted to waste a powerful weapon on such timid targets of no real strategic significance, as if worried that actual casualties would hurt rather than bolster their cause.

Most would say it was janeway being forced to look at herself the way she felt the maquis were. EVIL relentless, un forgiving war criminals.

Why? No war crimes were involved there. If anything, the combat being described was the sort of squeaky-clean that only ever happens in bad propaganda. Except it didn't even happen.

Otherwise why even have the Academy?

Well, it is a logical step for Starfleet to gradually yet totally abandon the use of people, within the next couple of decades or so.

What is strange there is that no other culture has been witnessed abandoning the use of people. This despite us meeting many cultures that are either slightly or significantly more advanced than the Federation, and would find it easy indeed to use automatons (be they holograms in the Trek sense, or robots, or whatever).

Or are we just missing the point? Perhaps many of the species we meet are in fact automatons employed by higher forces for exploration and combat purposes. Humans included.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Tim Thomason]

Wouldn't that be a violation of their "holographic rights"

I think that unless its characters on a holodeck (used sparingly) then there shouldn't be any more nonsense about holographic characters. Otherwise why even have the Academy? Why not recreate holograms of Kirk & Co and send them out of ships that are essentially holodecks with nacelles, why bother with flesh and blood crews at all--no logical reason to put sentients in harms way if it can be at all avoided.

According to Strange New Worlds VI's One Million-Year Mission, that's the ultimate fate of the Star Trek Universe.

 

[jaime]

Holodeck material can kill with the safeties off on a holodeck because it uses replicated matter (hence Picard using the replicated bullets to kill the borg after using the rest of the program to mildly confuse them.) would seem to be the logical answer to part of the whyfores and wherefores. Without the holoemitter you basically have nothing but a fancy firework show (less in fact)

Now...with holoemitters you have the possibility of human sized (or whatever size that thing goes up to) potential combatants, but are limited by the tech to still needing physical weaponry (the doc picks up hypospray etc, therefore he is a light and forcefield kind of guy as opposed to a replicated matter puppet) which means their only advantage is in basically being tiny drones (the size of the emitter.)

Which is basically what we are talking about here. Drone warfare. Which comes with its own ethical, moral and technical dimension, already touched upon.

Now in the Trek universe, where you can find an energy pulse to disable damn near anything, or alien tech exists that can take over your software without even interfacing through normal means (iconian probes, the inner light probe, the probe thing in masks....etc) Shields that can be impenetrable to physical objects, transporter that can lock onto sub atomic particles and render them immobile before doing basically whatever it likes with them, and energy bases weapons that vaporise on a similar scale....and it all becomes moot before the ultimate thing that makes all 'armies' and even air/space fighters pretty much irrelevant in trek:

A starship in orbit able to execute starfleet general order 47 and basically destroy a planet, with weapons able to finely tune enough for the captain to sign his name in the rubble afterwards like weeing in some handy snow.

And don't forget that plant in Tos, episode name eludes me, where they had taken it all to its total logical extreme. Computers fight, civilians report to be killed. Not a single living soldier to be harmed on either side.

 

[Drone]

A Taste of Armageddon.

 

[jaime]

A Taste of Armageddon.

Ty. Downside to flying by memory alone and being too proud or lazy to Google Xd

Yeah that one. Which illustrates something about the federation and it's morals and ethics and opinion of warfare in general.

 

[Timo]

Holodeck material can kill with the safeties off on a holodeck because it uses replicated matter

That's not a requirement, though. Forcefields can kill, too. Or too much heat, or too little of it. Or too much or too little of gravity, or air from the ship's general circulation rather than from dedicated replication. The various mechanisms that make holoillusions possible can all be turned deadly.

The real issue here is why holodecks would kill with the safeties off. Do they just let deaths happen? Or do they actively create fatal circumstances, for the obviously sought-after extra thrills?

Letting death happen is really difficult when you think of it. Nobody on a holodeck will fall from a great height, as the holodecks are only three-four meters tall in reality. Nobody ought to be crushed by a falling anvil, either, as the holodeck would not be motivated to replicate a real metal anvil unless for the explicit purpose of crushing somebody; for every other purpose, a forcefield construct would be preferable. The fire and the water aren't real, either, except when specifically required to be. So a dedicated effort to introduce risk is apparently involved.

Now...with holoemitters you have the possibility of human sized (or whatever size that thing goes up to) potential combatants, but are limited by the tech to still needing physical weaponry

Doesn't sound likely at all. The gangsters in "Big Goodbye" had deadly handguns, but those disappeared into thin air along with the gangsters when they departed the range of the holoemitters. The deadliness apparently came from a "fancy fireworks show". And why wouldn't it? We know that forcefields involve real forces: they stop enemy death rays or prevent air or prisoners from escaping.

The likelier scenario is that a holographic character is mostly forcefields, and when he strangles you to death, that is with forcefields gripping your throat. A holographic soldier could do much better, say, suddenly sprouting a razor-sharp sickle with a blade five hundred meters long and cutting off your head (and all the trees in the jungle around you) with one blow. That's more than the mercurial Terminator could do, because forcefields can do those 500 meters and basically infinite force and momentum while the Terminator has to work with just the physical mass contained in its body.

Instead of drones, we're really talking about projections. A centrally mounted "gun" holoemitter can project a "death ray" to a great distance - except we know it doesn't have to obey laser-like limitations of line-of-sight, but (probably thanks to proper multi-emitter placement) can surprisingly reach through or around obstacles and create a variety of indirect effects at the destination. An enemy infantry formation approaching your three well-positioned holoemitter tanks might suddenly find itself in a situation where half the infantrymen have airtight bubbles surrounding their heads till they suffocate, while the other half has forcefield spears through their hearts, despite every effort to use ground cover for protection.

Taking the holograms to the enemy via dronelike emitters is also a deadlier threat than you'd think, as the drones can do such surprising tricks with their forcefields, merging into vast monsters or sneaking into unlikely locations.

What is decisive there, then, is the ability to block forcefield projections. And this is a case of fighting fire with fire: it's shield against shield, one used offensively, the other defensively. We have no real idea which side would enjoy an advantage there. Although we can suspect that both sides would wish to ditch the superfluous elements of holography, such as visual appearance, and concentrate on the deadliness of the forcefields only, it's also possible that both sides would extensively use holotricks to sneak their emitters to advantageous locations and misdirect enemy countermeasures.

It's really an all-new area of warfare where the side that makes the most radical break from the stale conventions of physical fighting will make the most headway.

A starship in orbit...

...Is just a matter of scale. Holowarfare can negate that opponent as well - say, by crushing the ship with a divine hand made of forcefields.

Timo Saloniemi