Kamikaze attack

[James Wright]

Knowing that the starship Odyssey was rammed in the navigational deflector by a Jem'Hadar fighter led to the destruction of the Odyssey, even the Enterprise-D being hit on a nacelle by the Bozeman led to the big E's destruction.
Can Federation starships survive a kamikaze attack if they're struck along the side of the engineering hull, could the primary hull take a hit and survive?
There were ships in World War II that got hit and took heavy
damage but they survived, among the most notable was a destroyer, the USS Laffey(DD-724), survived 6 kamikaze hits as well as several bomb hits.
Thank you,

James

 

[Timo]

To be sure, the Odyssey also took a hit in the nacelle - a big chunk of starship hull was seen spinning out of the original impact point and hitting the nacelle tip, after which a massive internal explosion followed. So presumably any tap on the nacelle of an unshielded starship will send some sort of a backlash along the plasma system into the warp core and blow it to bits, either immediately (as in "Jem'Hadar") or then at least inevitably (as in "Cause and Effect").

However, a hit on a shielded nacelle has minimal effect. A major piece of debris from the recently deceased Romulan starship hits the nacelle of the E-E in the battle against the Scimitar in ST:NEM, hurting the shields but not the ship. And phaser bombardment against a nacelle that's not protected by combat shields but merely by SIF trickery (perhaps similar to Archer's old polarized armor?) is inefficient in hurting the hero ship in "The Chase", too.

What happens in a shielded impact is a somewhat different question. The Scimitar still had shields when Picard's ship hit her at what looked like a relatively low speed (even allowing for slow-motion photography). The result was carnage nevertheless. And the Klingon ships must have been heavily shielded when they proceeded against the defenses of Chin'toka in "Tears of the Prophets", yet Jem'Hadar kamikaze techniques worked against them nevertheless. In neither case did the rammings create a series of internal explosions, though: the targeted ships weren't vaporized right away, but merely hacked to no longer functional pieces. Notably, none of the hits was directly at a warp nacelle, although one was against a wing containing a nacelle.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Hatchet2k4]

I wouldn't say it would be inevitable if the nacelle is damaged in a collision that the ship is destroyed.. In ENT Twilight the nacelle takes a pretty hard hit when it's crashed into the Xindi reptilian ship, and though the engine was disabled the ship wasn't destroyed. Could just be nature of the technology though, or how it's hit. Get just the right spot to make the plasma backfeed into the core before the valves can shut.

As for primary hull hits I imagine the ship could take it, as long as it didn't tear the saucer in half or anything.

 

[James Wright]

The reason the Japanese kamikaze's didn't alway succeed is because they couldn't reach terminal velocity, I'm thinking a ship moving at impulse can reach terminal velocity, even a starship with shields up is bound to be badly damaged if not destroyed!?

James

 

[blssdwlf]

Depends on the mood of the writer I suppose.

The Odyssey had her shields down (Keogh ordered it) when she was hit by the Jem'hedar Fighter (or small ship as it's as big Klingon BOPs) and the Jem'hedar ship exploded taking out a good chunk of the secondary hull. IIRC that class' MSD, the whole M/AM reactor was in or very near that glowy-charred section. The random fragment that spun off and hit the nacelle probably would've made no difference at that point. Effectively this is what would happen to any ST ship that got hit with a big enough wallup like that.

As to a nacelle hit, I think we can split the difference as the Odyssey suffered a big hit on her nacelle and looked like it was going to withdraw from battle until she got hit with the kamikaze. In "Cause and Effect" the E-D exploded because of the collision (but also perhaps from her systems being affected by the anomaly).

I think it just depends on where the kamikaze (aka exploding suicide ship) hits and whether the deflectors and shields are strong enough to ward off the kamikaze and the resulting explosion. The secondary hull, by nature of all the highly volatile stuff it has packed inside, has few places where a strong kamikaze could hit and not cause catastrophic damage. However, that's not to say that all SF ships are flying Pintos You can see that the Enterprise in "Wrath of Khan" gets smacked around alot in the secondary hull and no core breach. Also, the Constellation in "Doomsday Machine" is completely trashed with blown nacelles and didn't core breach either. It would take a very very big explosion in the right spot to do one in immediately, IMHO.

Keep in mind that a kamikaze ST ship is effectively a kinetic energy weapon with a secondary antimatter explosion (or the other way around depending on relative speeds). The WW2 japanese equivalent would be to send kamikaze fighter planes with tactical nukes strapped to them.

Knowing that the starship Odyssey was rammed in the navigational deflector by a Jem'Hadar fighter led to the destruction of the Odyssey, even the Enterprise-D being hit on a nacelle by the Bozeman led to the big E's destruction.
Can Federation starships survive a kamikaze attack if they're struck along the side of the engineering hull, could the primary hull take a hit and survive?
There were ships in World War II that got hit and took heavy
damage but they survived, among the most notable was a destroyer, the USS Laffey(DD-724), survived 6 kamikaze hits as well as several bomb hits.
Thank you,

James

 

[SpyOne]

You can see that the Enterprise in "Wrath of Khan" gets smacked around alot in the secondary hull and no core breach.

In all the trek movies, the scene that made the biggest impression on me was when we see Enterprise return to Spacedock (In Search For Spock, IIRC): we see it through a lounge with a floor-to-ceiling window, and we see the saucer go by and people just standing around talking like this happens every day. But as the phaser-burned secondary hull comes into view, conversations die as people turn to look at the ship and totally lose their train of thought. Basically everyone in the room has turned to gape at the ship as the view through the window shows where the phasers burned right through the hull, and Main Engineering is exposed to space.

"Smacked around" does no justice to what happened to the Enterprise in Wrath of Khan.

 

[Arpy]

Also, the airplanes weren't far more delicate and far less massive than the ships they were crashing into. Along with the speed Jem'Hadar ships were traveling at and their anti-matter suppy...that's another thing: when any Trek ship explodes, it should have a much larger bang than we see. Larger than our biggest nukes today.

 

[nx1701g]

Something else I just thought of. If a ship crashes into another one wouldn't it, theoretically, have a warp drive? Wouldn't that cause a massive explosion?

 

[Unicron]

I imagine it would, if the target were struck in the engineering section. The WWII kamikazes inflicted major (and sometimes fatal) damage on some vessels by hitting either the fuel storage tanks or the ammunition bays, and even conventional artillery could cause catastrophic damage there on a lucky hit (as happened at Pearl Harbor).

 

[nx1701g]

I'm sorry allow me to clarify my statement (even I had trouble discerning what I was saying).

When starships are constructed they are typically given a warp drive to travel vast distances through space. Now when a ship would decide to kamikaze another vessel the attacker would, theoretically, have a warp core installed aboard their vessel. When the attacker impacted the target wouldn't the attacker's warp drive breach causing a massive explosion that would do massive damage/destroy the ship that the attacker attacked?

 

[blssdwlf]

Well, depends on the amount of antimatter that is expected to react immediately on impact, right?

Ships powered with a M/AM reactor will have X amount of M/AM reacting at any moment. But the bulk of the AM fuel is probably kept in such a way that a warp breach (accident) through impact would not release the AM in a rate that would be as explosive as a deliberate release. So the ship doing the kamikaze run would need to time the AM release to go off at the same time of impact for maximum effect.

Then you'd need to figure out how much AM a ship carries (which I don't think there is an episode that states such) to calculate out potential released energy. For comparison, let's say a ship like Voyager (700,000 tons) rammed a target at .3c... The kinetic energy is equivalent to about 6.7x10^8 megatons of TNT. Even 5000 tons of AM+5000 tons of M going off at once would only be about a third the kinetic energy of the ramming. Both would still cause a huge explosion that I wouldn't expect any ship to survive though, but you can kinda see that if you go fast enough, the secondary warp core breach might not add that much more to it.

Now things change when you consider a less massive ship - although it might carry less AM fuel - but who knows?

 

[Timo]

One might also consider that warp core ejection systems are generally incapable of saving a ship from an explosion. Yet those systems are still installed aboard all starships. Perhaps the reason is not merely to offer an extremely slim chance of survival for the starship crew - but rather to protect bystanders in the inevitable case of a ship-and-crew-killing explosion?

That is, it may be too much to ask that the core would eject cleanly in a second or less, thereby saving the crew from catastrophe. But it may be perfectly possible to eject the core "dirtily", ignoring purge processes on antimatter intakes and outtakes. The ship would still explode since the antimatter in those leads is released and causes a cascade of destruction, but the bulk of the antimatter would be ejected from the dying ship and would safely float through space to explode somewhere else.

Thus, in the general case, a "destroyed" ship would be like those we find after the Borg attack at Wolf 359: almost perfectly intact, only slightly pitted and charred (or at most half the hull missing), but with all the crew dead. And the ships next to it would have survived to fight another day (or, in the case of Wolf 359, another minute!), thanks to the ejection of antimatter.

If this is true, then one might expect a ship's antimatter stores to survive a ramming attack, even if the ship doesn't.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[SpyOne]

For comparison, let's say a ship like Voyager (700,000 tons) rammed a target at .3c... The kinetic energy is equivalent to about 6.7x10^8 megatons of TNT. Even 5000 tons of AM+5000 tons of M going off at once would only be about a third the kinetic energy of the ramming.

Math error:
A ton of TNT is not directly comparable to a ton of antimatter, as the antimatter will convert directly to energy.
That 700,000 ton ship moving at .3c has an energy of ... well, that's 700 million kg moving at 100 million meters-per-second (you'll forgive my using approximate numbers), and one Joule is one kg-meter per second squared, and kinetic energy is 1/2 mass*(velocity squared), so the kinetic energy there is 1/2 * 700 million * 10 quadrillion = 3.5 septillion joules or 3.5 * 10^27 joules.
A matter-antimatter reaction, however, uses the famous E=mc^2. 5000 tons of antimatter reacting with 5000 tons of matter gives us a mass of 10000 tons or 10 million kg. The speed of light is 300 million meters-per-second. That works out to 900 sextillion joules, or 9*10^23.
Or about 1/4000th the energy of the collision itself.

While it does not give a mass, the TNG Tech Manual does list a Galaxy Class ship as carrying 3000 cubic meters of antimatter, which should last for 3 years. At the density of water, that would be 3000 tons, so I think it is a safe guess that Voyager (or a Voyager-sized ship) carries considerably less than 5000 tons of antimatter.
That antimatter is stored, however, in a location on the underside of the hull fairly near that deflector dish. I need a screen cap to see if I think that Jem'hadar fighter might have hit the antimatter supply.
So, yes, a ship kinda serves as a giant photon torpedo, but unlike a photon torpedo the mass of the ship is a much bigger issue than the giant explosion: either one could really mess up your ship.

 

[Timo]

I need a screen cap to see if I think that Jem'hadar fighter might have hit the antimatter supply.

http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/2x26/jemhadar_300.jpg
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/2x26/jemhadar_301.jpg
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/2x26/jemhadar_302.jpg

The original impact point appears to be in the neck, just above the deflector and to the starboard (the first image). Nowhere near the antimatter stores, and too far forward to hit the warp core. A secondary explosion blows up the whole underside of the secondary hull bow, though, while leaving the wide rim between the blowout and the impact point intact for the time being (the second image). So probably something important inside the secondary hull bow got damaged in the neck impact. This area still does not quite coincide with where the TNG Tech Manual claims the antimatter is mainly stored, though. It's too far forward: antimatter is behind the ventral phaser strip, the secondary explosion here is forward of the strip.

However, the second picture also shows that a chunk of something, probably the Jem'Hadar ship, is blown to the upper left, and eventually impacts with the tip of the starboard nacelle. And it's after this that the ship finally blows up for good. Slowly and painfully...

http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/2x26/jemhadar_304.jpg

The deflector area is aflame, and so is the nacelle tip. But something is happening deep inside, apparently, because the secondary hull bow soon explodes, taking the rest of the ship with it:

http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/2x26/jemhadar_304.jpg

So, in all likelihood the antimatter tanks were ruptured eventually - but not at the moment of impact yet. I'd speculate that the Odyssey was killed by the same thing that killed the Enterprise in "Cause and Effect": an impact on an unshielded nacelle sent some sort of a feedback wave through the plasma system and damaged the warp core, eventually detonating it, after which the rest of the antimatter joined the mayhem and finished off the ship.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[blssdwlf]

Thanks Timo for the screen caps. Personally I think the Odyssey would've blown up regardless of the nacelle hit but the "Cause and Effect" episode is compelling If the Jem'hedar would've only known, they could've just bumped the Odyssey instead

As for the math Spyone you can check mine then as I think you've got too many zeros in the KE solution:

Voyager kinetic energy =

0.5 * 700,000,000 kg * (90,000,000 m/s ^2) =
2.8x10^24 j

5000t AM + 5000t M =
10,000,000 kg * (300,000,000 m/s ^2) =
9x10^23 j

The KE impact is 3x more potent AFAIK.

As to the TNT comparison I used this conversion factor:
4,184,000,000 j = 1 ton TNT

 

[Unicron]

I seem to recall that when the Yamato explodes in "Contagion," the explosion seems to start in the engineering hull and we see the saucer section get blown away separately. Different circumstances naturally, but it could be inferred this might be a potential design flaw in the Galaxy class design.

 

[Timo]

...OTOH, other starships tend to blow up all at once, suggesting an even worse design flaw!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Gagarin]

Perhaps Starfleet's 24th century ships rely too much on SIFs and not enough on brute strength of the material. Perhaps in an effort to reduce mass and replication/fabrication costs.

 

[blssdwlf]

Also in Generations, the E-D seemed to take superficial damage on the secondary hull but it did lead to a core breach also. It does seem like they don't make them like they use to anymore...

 

[SpyOne]

Timo: excellent play-by-play.
I'm not 100% certain I agree about the exact point of impact: while the ship appears to be headed to the neck, the flare of the explosion obscures our view of the deflector. Since we are looking from below, this would suggest that the explosion is lower than the neck, to be between us and the deflector. Perhaps the point of impact was the deflector itself.
Still, not the antimatter storage, nor close to the warp core, so I agree the cause of the eventual destruction is probably the bit hitting the nacelle.

Darn: it was such a good theory.

As for the math Spyone you can check mine then as I think you've got too many zeros in the KE solution:

Quite possible.
Scientific notation makes it easier to double check: just add the exponents.
So, let's convert your numbers to scientific notation and see what I get:

Voyager kinetic energy =

(0.5) * (7*10^8) * (9*10^7*9*10^7) = 283.5*10^22 or 2.8*10^24. You are right.

(1*10^7) * (3*10^8) * (3*10^8) = 9*10^23. You are right again.
I must have slipped a decimal somewhere.

As to the TNT comparison I used this conversion factor:
4,184,000,000 j = 1 ton TNT

Yeah, ... when I started writing that post, I thought you had underestimated the kaboom in antimatter. The facts proved me wrong, but I didn't go back and change my intro.