Kinetic Projectile options used to defeat Borg Drones?

[Kamen Rider Blade]

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Here's a 1 ton explosion:

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If we use 20 micrograms of Iron / Anti-Iron mix in a high impact force trigger in a simple bullet design, we can get 1 ton of TNT equivalent explosion.
We could have a easily mass producible Anti-Borg personnel weapon using primitive FireArms with updated technology. Have a Simple Tungsten Carbide Penetrator tip + Iron/Anti-Iron explosive payload + lead to encase the rest for the bullet in a polymer coating using a very aerodynamic projectile design that allows very flat shooting with low recoil.

Wouldn't it be nice to explode drones with 1 bullet, don't even give them a chance to adapt.

Make sure the bullet is nice and fast (Mach 3+ muzzle velocity).

There wouldn't be enough time for the borg to process and stop the bullet.

It also makes for a simple dumb explosive rocket for StarFleet Ground Troops to carry around in a pistol / rifle format.

 

[Steven P Bastien]

This is the future. Even Mach 3 is slow compared to the processing power available by then. The Borg have adapted to your bullets, and you, as the inventor of the weapon, are assimilated. If you somehow make a bullet fast enough, they will travel into the past and terminate (sorry, wrong movie) you.

 

[Timo]

In any case, it's two separate processes: even if your weapon can blow up a Drone before it has time to analyze the threat, another Drone will analyze the threat from a safe position, and can then devise a defense that blocks your weapon. Speed is not relevant for that second process: the second Drone may have its armor in place well in advance of you firing your second bullet.

Of course, single-shot-kill weapons are always preferable in the fight against the Borg. But against hordes of Drones, those aren't sufficient. What you need is single-shot-kill weapons that can drop entire Cubes. Or entire formations of Cubes, preferably. A viral-virtual attack does that; a kinetic attack might be hard pressed to catch more than two or three Cubes at best, even in tight formations. Were a bigger kaboom devised, it would then be likely to take out the star system you hope to defend, too...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Red Matter Black-Hole Torpedo as Anti-Cube weapon?

Thalaron Radiation Torpedo / Beam if you want to preserve the non-organic parts of the Borg.

This is 50 kg / 110 lbs of TNT explosion

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1 kg of TNT ~= 1 milli-ton of TNT explosive power
0.02 μg Iron/Anti-Iron ~= 1 milli-tons of TNT
1.0 μg Iron/Anti-Iron ~= 50 milli-tons of TNT

Pack the 1.0 μg Iron/Anti-Iron into a .224 Valkyrie round and blow the group / target up at 600+ meter range.

Even if the Borg Drones / Jem Hadar had their personnal shields on, they would be sent flying so far and the shields would take a huge amount of damage. When they impact whatever terrain they hit, they're insides and limbs will be broken / mush. You can then easily finish them off.

If the StarFleet Ground Forces would have 24th Century FireArms backed with these war heads and even the TR-116 Rifle to give it that extra distance to teleport the Round past objects / barriers and into the target at extra long range for safety. StarFleet should never lose a ground battle of Soldier vs Soldier realistically.

 

[Timo]

It depends a bit on how shields work. Tractor beams work by koshing Newton in the head: a tiny shuttle can grab onto a massive speeding object and bring it to a halt without Newtonian forces being transmitted along the beam (see for example "Day of Honor", but also Wesley's trick of lifting a heavy chair with a handheld device and his slim unaugmented wrists in "The Naked Now"). If shields are the same sort of tech (backstage technobabble: gravitons suspended in a subspace trench), no, they need not be "sent flying" if something immensely powerful explodes next to them, or against them. After all, this doesn't generally happen when a ship-killing blast hits a shielded runabout...

Indeed, kinetic attack (in the physical sense of the word, not the modern military sense) appears to be one of those things a shielded target need not worry about. Ramming used to be unheard of, say. Until it suddenly became a valid tactic in DS9 and then in ST:NEM, so go figure. But big explosions generally don't hurt anybody through working shields, not even indirectly - unless some sort of feedback makes a console explode, that is. I gather a trooper wearing a shield harness might not appreciate feedback, either.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

Arguably, Starfleet tried a form of kinetic weapon way back in Best of Both Worlds Part II, with those three little ships launched from Mars. Maybe they were simpler unmanned bombs, or maybe they were going to go to warp right before impact to minimize any attempt to dodge them. Ramming may also have been on the minds of the people behind sending the not-necessarily-USS Melbourne head first into the cube at Wolf 359 without firing a shot, and Riker was in the middle of ordering a collision with the cube when naptime came. We'll never know for sure...

Mark

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

It depends a bit on how shields work. Tractor beams work by koshing Newton in the head: a tiny shuttle can grab onto a massive speeding object and bring it to a halt without Newtonian forces being transmitted along the beam (see for example "Day of Honor", but also Wesley's trick of lifting a heavy chair with a handheld device and his slim unaugmented wrists in "The Naked Now"). If shields are the same sort of tech (backstage technobabble: gravitons suspended in a subspace trench), no, they need not be "sent flying" if something immensely powerful explodes next to them, or against them. After all, this doesn't generally happen when a ship-killing blast hits a shielded runabout...

The RunAbout isn't a trivial amount of mass, and blasts do rock & shake the ship. The RunAbouts are slightly shorter in length than a 737, so it's not a small light weight vessel.

All StarShips have RCS / Inertial Dampeners / Impulse engines to control position in space, should they get rocked, the computers should automatically correct their position unless the pilot chooses for the vessel to not auto-compensate their position.

On the ground, we see explosions send all sorts of humanoids flying about, most drones / people don't carry Inertial Dampners, Tractor Beams to latch onto the ground, or RCS units unless they're in a EV / Space Suit. At best they carry Shields of some sort and use their body to compensate for any force put on them.

 

[Shamrock Holmes]

The RunAbout isn't a trivial amount of mass, and blasts do rock & shake the ship. The RunAbouts are slightly shorter in length than a 737, so it's not a small light weight vessel.

Whereas the standard shuttle has about the same usable volume as a light utility helo (not even as much as COD plane), and the shuttlepod is more like a toothless MH-6 Little Bird (only good for about 2-3 hours flying) than anything else.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Yeah, their ShuttlePod's are glorified VW Bug's in space.

 

[The Librarian]

Why would you possible want to risk using antimatter in bullets? One mistake and then the entire thing blows up, and then the entire magazine and the rest of the ship goes along with it.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Why would you possible want to risk using antimatter in bullets? One mistake and then the entire thing blows up, and then the entire magazine and the rest of the ship goes along with it.

That's why you limit the yield and have strong blast walls for the armory. You can argue the same about Photon Torpedoes, yet every single StarShip has them.

 

[SolarisOne]

I guarantee you a proper relativistic kill vehicle would pass right through any shielding and shatter (or even outright vaporize) a Borg cube. Even a small object traveling at upwards of 99.9% c would do horrific damage. You wouldn't even need a warhead. The object itself would be carrying waaaaaaaay more than enough kinetic energy to do the job.

The only way to protect against a RKV is to get the fuck out of the way, which is only really possible if you have FTL sensors and warp drive. If you're restricted to real world detection methods, by the time you see the RKV, it's almost on top of you.

Of course, this is something Star Trek never seemed to consider.

 

[The Librarian]

That's why you limit the yield and have strong blast walls for the armory. You can argue the same about Photon Torpedoes, yet every single StarShip has them.

Photon torpedos are loaded with antimatter only when ready to fire. Antimatter requires active containment, if there's any interruption to the power it explodes. Why would you want to bother with a bullet that requires a containment vessel and a big battery instead of just using chemical propulsion, or better yet use a coilgun?

I guarantee you a proper relativistic kill vehicle would pass right through any shielding and shatter (or even outright vaporize) a Borg cube. Even a small object traveling at upwards of 99.9% c would do horrific damage. You wouldn't even need a warhead. The object itself would be carrying waaaaaaaay more than enough kinetic energy to do the job.

The only way to protect against a RKV is to get the fuck out of the way, which is only really possible if you have FTL sensors and warp drive. If you're restricted to real world detection methods, by the time you see the RKV, it's almost on top of you.

Of course, this is something Star Trek never seemed to consider.

That's the point of the navigational deflector, a technology so simple in the Trek universe that even the NX-01 had one. Also, Star Trek ships all have FTL sensors and so they could dodge one. Even in the real world, an RKV would be glowing with gamma rays due to passing through the interstellar medium and the light would arrive well in advance, to say nothing of the light from it being launched and accelerating in the first place.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Photon torpedos are loaded with antimatter only when ready to fire. Antimatter requires active containment, if there's any interruption to the power it explodes. Why would you want to bother with a bullet that requires a containment vessel and a big battery instead of just using chemical propulsion, or better yet use a coilgun?

The type of Anti-Matter that I'm using in the bullets isn't Deuterium + Anti-Deuterium.
I'm planning on using Iron/Anti-Iron as the special Matter/Anti-Matter mix.
This allows the mixture to be stable without any special handling properties and just encase the Anti-Iron with proper non-reactive material so that it won't be exposed to the iron unless it's upon impact, ergo the detonation.

 

[The Librarian]

The type of Anti-Matter that I'm using in the bullets isn't Deuterium + Anti-Deuterium.
I'm planning on using Iron/Anti-Iron as the special Matter/Anti-Matter mix.
This allows the mixture to be stable without any special handling properties and just encase the Anti-Iron with proper non-reactive material so that it won't be exposed to the iron unless it's upon impact, ergo the detonation.

No. That's not how it works at all. There's no such thing as non-reactive material as far as antimatter goes. Anti-iron doesn't only react with iron, anymore than deuterium only reacts with anti-deuterium (hence why an antimatter containment breach is bad juju). The positrons of the anti-iron would react with the electrons of all the surrounding atoms, and so will the anti-protons with the protons.

 

[Ithekro]

If iron reacts with oxygen and water to rust, than so will anti-iron, save that it will be a matter-antimatter reaction...and blowup. It won't be as efficient of a reaction, but it will still react.

Antimatter Noble Gases might be the least reactive in nature, like their matter counterparts, but positrons hitting electrons will still just blow stuff up.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

No. That's not how it works at all. There's no such thing as non-reactive material as far as antimatter goes. Anti-iron doesn't only react with iron, anymore than deuterium only reacts with anti-deuterium (hence why an antimatter containment breach is bad juju). The positrons of the anti-iron would react with the electrons of all the surrounding atoms, and so will the anti-protons with the protons.

That's why you have a proper micro sized containment vessel for the Anti-Matter, look carefully at the amounts of matter I want to contain, I'm talking about shrinking the containment vessel along with it's battery to keep the containment unit functioning for a VERY long time.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Photon_grenade

By the point that StarFleet has "Photon Grenades" in the 24th century, they can probably shrink the containment unit down to something that can be fired out of a bullet by the 26th century.

I've carefully calculated the dosage of Anti-Iron to be contained as well.

Look at how much IRL technology has improved in just 1 century, imagine what they can do going from the end of the 24th century to the start of the 26th century

Before, Artillery was just dumb fire with complicated math, now we have tiny guidance systems that can make very pin point accurate Shells that withstand the tremendous G-Force of acceleration. I'm sure in that time frame, we can miniaturize the same tech as a Photon Grenade.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

If Anti-Iron is too resource intensive to make compared to the mass production of Anti-Deuterium, I'm more than happy to swap the payload back to Anti-Deuterium + Deuterium.

 

[Timo]

I gather Starfleet chiefly goes for deuterium as its preferred antimatter because deuterium nicely doubles as fusion fuel. Not the best fusion fuel, perhaps, but the best single-component one, it being a chore to haul additional tritium or whatever.

Deuterium isn't particulary efficient as a type of antimatter otherwise - half of it is useless neutrons instead of protons/antiprotons, much as with heavier elements, and it's a chore to contain in fluid form. Anti-lead or anti-mercury might be more practical ITRW, assuming we ever learned how to make antimatter directly out of corresponding matter the Trek way (instead of "assembling" it the current way, in which case simpler is definitely better).

Anyway, keeping stuff in place and not touching anything is a Trek forte, so I don't see problems with containing of the explosive stuff even in field conditions. Trek artificial gravity is 100% reliable for centuries, so just build the walls of your magazine so that every direction is up and the stuff always remains in the middle. Who knows, perhaps phaser clips are exactly like that, which is why phasers go so nicely kaboom when commanded, and can power up shuttlecraft, etc?

But photon torpedoes really do very little to kick stuff around, and we've never really seen a photon grenade do much kicking, either. Do shields double as inertial dampers? Hard to tell when damping is seen to happen on ships that have shields and dedicated dampers... A shielded infantryman could go either way, if we ever saw one.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[publiusr]

Using trek tech. Have the anti-gravs we saw transport some anti-matter to the surface in OBSESSION.
Atop that a tube with Garth's explosive.(like Kirk's cannon from ARENA.

The pellets?

Neutronium bits.

Call it the shotgun from hell
guaranteed one shot stop