Planets. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powered.

[Search4]

Okay, the line is actually from E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series and goes as follows: "Planets. Seven of them. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powered."

In the series, over many books, ships and weapons are eventually replaced by mobile bases - planets - with vastly greater capabilities.

Love to see the board's reaction to this in the Star Trek universe.

We have seen planetary shields as early as TOS "Dagger of the Mind". They are clearly canon and effective at shutting out the TOS Enterprise... even for just an "insane asylum". But somehow, in combat situations the defensive capabilities of planets are never otherwise mentioned. Little old earth is always at risk whenever the bad guys come to visit and our 1000-2000 foot long ships must save her.

Think of the first Borg attack on Earth, or the one in First Contact. Wouldn't Earth would have large scale planetary defenses including Shields? Force beams powered by planetary power supplies, not ones that have to fit into a ship's hull?

Consider Deep Space 9. A less-than-mobile target, larger than many ships, powered, i believe by a fusion reactor. She can take out 50 or so ships in some of the later battles... which makes perfect sense to me.

Earth, Vulcan, the Founder homeworld just sit there and wait for a pounding?

I'm aware we have heard referenece to orbital defense capabilities. I'm talking full planetary capabilities at large scale.

And yes, in particular, the Borg can adapt, but there must be some amount of energy that they cannot absorb or otherwise deal with. Bulletproof vests are probably not immune to tank fire.

So - what is the state of play for planetary defenses?

(and if you don't know the Lensmen series... Get to Amazon, pronto).

 

[Timo]

Re: Planets. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powe

We have seen planetary shields as early as TOS "Dagger of the Mind". They are clearly canon and effective at shutting out the TOS Enterprise...

Actually, in "Dagger" and "Whom Gods Destroy" alike, the shields are only good for blocking the transporters of the starship. In the latter episode, Scotty basically agonizes that he could bombard the planet to bits, killing Kirk and Spock in the process, but he can't beam them to safety or beam down a security detail.

Think of the first Borg attack on Earth, or the one in First Contact. Wouldn't Earth would have large scale planetary defenses

Yes. The capacity has been implied whenever a powerful alien force threatens Earth; it's just that when said force hits Earth, the camera is elsewhere (as with the Borg) or the force turns off the defenses with what amounts to a hypnotic gesture (as with V'Ger or the Whale Probe). The capacity has also been witnessed in action around other planets - to wit, Chin'toka.

including Shields?

No. Planetwide shielding that can actually stop hits has never really been mentioned or shown, and anything planetwide done with forcefields is considered advanced magic even by our TNG heroes.

Force beams powered by planetary power supplies, not ones that have to fit into a ship's hull?

Beam emitters on the surface would suffer from two hindrances: atmospheric attenuation, and horizons. Orbital platforms might be the better solution, probably with beamed-in rather than in situ power as in the Chin'toka setup. It has its risks, but it probably provides more juice.

A few really big cannon on the Moon, or at the largely uninhabited poles of Earth, are probably part of the mix, though. But humans would probably try and avoid mixing defenses and targets, and would keep their important antiship fortresses away from major population centers. Those would instead have some localized shielding, and perhaps close-in defenses - a combo that would explain the minor damage from the Breen strike in "When it Rains".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Dayton3]

Re: Planets. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powe

Realistically, planet wide defenses would stop any SINGLE ship.

what they would not stop is a fleet of ships which could eventually manuever, focus their firepower on a single point in the defenses and overwhelm it, thus opening gaps for further attacks.

Randall Garrett's short story, The Highest Treason mentions this very dilemna.

To survive, a planet still has to have a fleet supporting it to prevent an enemy fleet from concentrating.

 

[Timo]

Re: Planets. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powe

We may also have to think of a reason why a fleet and the defensive fortifications don't work together too well. That is, when the Borg invade in ST:FC, the fleet does all the work and the fortresses do zip - but this doesn't necessarily mean that the fortresses don't exist. It could instead be analogous to how the anti-aircraft cannon fall silent when there's a dogfight above the carrier group in any decent WWII movie: there must exist clear rules by which the AAA and the fighters cooperate, and at some point of the battle the former must yield to the latter or vice versa.

Quite possibly the fight against the single Borg Cube was of the sort where the fortresses couldn't get a clear shot through the swarm of ships, but OTOH the swarm was already doing good work and the fortress guns might not have been any more effective.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Wingsley]

Re: Planets. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powe

The biggest threats to Earth were V'Ger and the Borg, IIRC.

Checkov told Kirk that "all planetary defenses have just gone inoperative!" in TMP. And, of course, V'Ger and the Borg were each the size of a small moon, give or take. I do not think that even if the Federation could devise a serious planetary defense shield, geared for combat, that it would be anymore effective than a starships' shields and weapons would be against super-adversaries such as these.

 

[JNG]

Re: Planets. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powe

I sure am curious about how that Breen attack went down, exactly, in light of everything we're talking about here.

 

[Dayton3]

Re: Planets. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powe

In the proposed Trek episode "Ktimba" IIRC, for the proposed new series in the 1970s, the Enterprise crew took on the Klingons.

In the story outline, the Klingon homeworld was completely unprotected by planetary defenses.

The thing was that Klingons were proud of the fact that their fleet and its mighty warriors were the only defense the homeworld needed.

 

[MyClone]

Re: Planets. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powe

I sure am curious about how that Breen attack went down, exactly, in light of everything we're talking about here.

Maybe the Breen attack was a sort of "Doolittle Raid," intended to be primarily of symbolic value? Perhaps its real purpose was to force the Federation to reinforce its Earth defenses (and thereby pull units from the front) at little actual cost to the Breen.

Best,
--MyClone

 

[JNG]

Re: Planets. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powe

I sure am curious about how that Breen attack went down, exactly, in light of everything we're talking about here.

Maybe the Breen attack was a sort of "Doolittle Raid," intended to be primarily of symbolic value? Perhaps its real purpose was to force the Federation to reinforce its Earth defenses (and thereby pull units from the front) at little actual cost to the Breen.

Best,
--MyClone

It appeared they were able to score direct or near-direct hits on the Starfleet properties in San Francisco. It suggests either 1.) that ships were guarding the Earth and some Breen got past them, and that the planetary defenses were insufficient at one of the points we'd expect them to be their strongest or 2.) That few or no ships guard Earth, as we've seen in some past instances, and that the planetary defenses, in which they'd clearly have put a lot of stock in such a scenario, were insufficient.

I can reconcile all this in my head: Earth residents in the Trek future don't like seeing soldiers or anything around, Earth wants to be seen as a paradise, Sol system has the happy coincidence of being near the center of a relatively large and mostly contiguous group of other sectors filled with Federation members and colonies and starbases and sensor relays and communications infrastructure, layered defenses are commonsensical for a war in space, and if someone battered their way past interceptor ships based at Andor and Vulcan and Tellar and Betazed and Alpha Centauri or wherever intruders would pass near on their chosen vector, they then face layered defenses within the system too--such as the flying bombs of the Mars Defense Perimeter, which may be a minor threat to someone way beyond us like the Borg (although a big enough threat to shoot down instead of letting them impact) but could certainly ruin the day of most bad guys on a similar tech level. There's probably stuff all over the solar system along these lines.

So really, what are they going to put at Earth that would make the final difference if someone got past all that? I'm sure there are reasonable shield generators for major facilities and such, but they probably do expect protection from ships that would have been notified and redirected toward the threat long before. It'd have to be some insane fortress showing up anything else known to the Federation to hope to stop anything that got past all the other defenses...and it's only one member among many, after all, so there's no particular reason they'd go to that trouble. Location, location, location.

Now the Breen attack was a sneak attack. A Romulan with a cloaking device, for example, might have a hard time just waltzing into a protected Federation member system due to various sensor nets and so forth (though a Klingon BOP had no trouble just dropping people off on Romulus, so I don't know). But the Breen probably had different cloaking technology with different strengths and weaknesses, and they came from an unexpected direction, and lack of detailed knowledge of their weapons probably minimized the effectiveness of the defenses. So they landed some hits. Earth's not bristling with giant phaser cannons or anything. I can buy that.

 

[Timo]

Re: Planets. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powe

It appeared they were able to score direct or near-direct hits on the Starfleet properties in San Francisco.

But, weirdly enough, those hits did virtually no damage. Instead of erasing San Francisco from the map, they merely cut the historical bridge in half and created a few tiny craters here and there.

Was this because the defenses (localized shields, interceptors) attenuated the hits? Or because the attacker used extremely weak weaponry, either because this was the only thing they could carry (as in the Doolittle Raid), or because this was strategically and psychologically desirable (as in most of the USAF or IAF raids in recent times)?

We did hear that an entire Fleet was dedicated to the protection of Earth or its vicinity during the war. Whether this 3rd Fleet was on the ball that day is unknown, but we could just as well assume it was. After all, a supposedly much bigger Dominion formation was unable to prevent single ships from slipping through in "Sacrifice of Angels"...

We lack data on the scale of the sneak attack. Was it a Doolittle Raid (an insignificant number of bombers sent out for psychological purposes) or a Pearl Harbor Attack (the maximum number of planes available sent out for specific tactical purposes)? The former would have needed guile to get through, but the latter might have done it with sheer brute force and strength of numbers.

As for guile, cloaking devices are a possibility - but so is the use of the energy damping weapon, not at first recognized for what it was. Then again, either that weapon wasn't yet available in quantity, or it wasn't risked on a mission where capture of a few ships or wrecks was inevitable.

A short story the name of which I forget paints the raid as a special forces operation involving just a handful of ships under false colors. The short story doesn't quite match the onscreen facts, though, in that it involves no surviving attackers.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[SicOne]

Re: Planets. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powe

Regarding planetary shields, or shielding around specific installations such as Starfleet HQ, check out the relevant sections of the Next Generation Technical Manual. There are wave guides throught the ship's hull for shield emitters. A building may be designed in this fashion (think Palais De La Concorde in Paris) to protect the inhabitants, but a whole planet? Nah. You'd have to install wave guides everywhere on land, and even then, how would you protect the water? A few tractor-beamed asteroids plopped into the Pacific would wreak global havoc.

 

[JNG]

Re: Planets. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powe

Regarding planetary shields, or shielding around specific installations such as Starfleet HQ, check out the relevant sections of the Next Generation Technical Manual. There are wave guides throught the ship's hull for shield emitters. A building may be designed in this fashion (think Palais De La Concorde in Paris) to protect the inhabitants, but a whole planet? Nah. You'd have to install wave guides everywhere on land, and even then, how would you protect the water? A few tractor-beamed asteroids plopped into the Pacific would wreak global havoc.

The Aldeans pulled off cloaking/shielding a whole planet, though not without problems from running the thing 24/7 and forgetting how to maintain it. You're right that the waveguides everywhere on land would be tough, but some kind of satellite network might make it possible (not necessarily practical). The Aldean shield is specified to be electromagnetic, though, so I imagine it'd work rather differently from Starfleet shielding.

Particularly because of the reaction of our heroes to the Aldean tech, I agree the Federation doesn't do things like this (or typically need to).

 

[Search4]

Re: Planets. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powe

Thanks for your thoughts; here's what i'm hearing.

- There's clearly sufficient power generation capacity for defensive weapons. So while i don't believe we've ever seen the planetary equivalent of antiaircraft guns, they would be consistent with capabilities.
- They might be more useful in orbit, though. If DS9's fusion plant, still powering the station, could shield itself and drive enough firepower to take out, oh, say 50 ships, then 10 of those without the docking capabilities, etc. could easily be in orbit and ready to take out, oh, say 500 ships. Again never seen on screen but consistent and reasonable. Scale up if you think you need more.
- Planetary shielding in known tech is impractical and probably doesn't exist outside of shielding from transport.

The interesting wrinkle on this, expressed above, is the combination of cloaking and weapons. A cloaked ship dropping any form of a nuclear weapon (or above) would be devastating. A cloaked torpedo, something i don't think we have seen but which should be possible, would be equally devastating. Short of one heck of a sensor grid, i don't know what our heroes could do about this threat.

But i gather, no armed and powered planets!!

 

[SicOne]

Re: Planets. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powe

JNG, in the recent "Destiny" books, there was a line about how Sonya Gomez from the Corps of Engineers managed to somehow "hide" an entire planet from the Borg; do we know in what book that incident appeared in better description?

 

[Deks]

Re: Planets. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powe

Planetary shields were mentioned in Trek actually.
Voyager to be exact.
Season 7 (if I'm not mistaken) 'Nightingale' episode.
The alien race that Kim was commanding on a stolen cloaked ship ... their planet was surrounded by a planetary shield, plain and simple.
True that the planet was under a blockade, but at the same time, it wasn't really conquered because of that shield.
They didn't seem to be any more advanced compared to the Federation (perhaps less so) and they had a planetary shield technology ...
The race in 'Workforce' had one too if I'm not mistaken.

I find it unlikely the Feds wouldn't have it.

 

[SoM]

Re: Planets. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powe

...they then face layered defenses within the system too--such as the flying bombs of the Mars Defense Perimeter, which may be a minor threat to someone way beyond us like the Borg (although a big enough threat to shoot down instead of letting them impact) but could certainly ruin the day of most bad guys on a similar tech level. There's probably stuff all over the solar system along these lines.

That feels like very two-dimensional thinking (as does some of the other stuff to a certain extent, although I'm not sure exactly where Earth and the other sectors fall relative to the plane falling through the middle of the Milky Way) - a ship wouldn't have to approach along the elliptic if they were on a raid, even if, say, Mars and the Jupiter system were ideally placed at the time of the attack.

To get a 3D defence grid fully layered throughout the solar system, you'd need to resort to some sort of Dyson Sphere (not, I hasten to add, a solid Dyson Shell))

 

[JNG]

Re: Planets. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powe

...they then face layered defenses within the system too--such as the flying bombs of the Mars Defense Perimeter, which may be a minor threat to someone way beyond us like the Borg (although a big enough threat to shoot down instead of letting them impact) but could certainly ruin the day of most bad guys on a similar tech level. There's probably stuff all over the solar system along these lines.

That feels like very two-dimensional thinking (as does some of the other stuff to a certain extent, although I'm not sure exactly where Earth and the other sectors fall relative to the plane falling through the middle of the Milky Way) - a ship wouldn't have to approach along the elliptic if they were on a raid, even if, say, Mars and the Jupiter system were ideally placed at the time of the attack.

To get a 3D defence grid fully layered throughout the solar system, you'd need to resort to some sort of Dyson Sphere (not, I hasten to add, a solid Dyson Shell))

The Mars Defense Perimeter ships are evidently limited to sublight, but obviously mobile; given the fact that a premise of my post was the expectation of detecting intruders well before they reach their target, both on an interstellar and intrasystem scale, I don't understand in what way anything I said demonstrates two-dimensional thinking.

 

[Timo]

Re: Planets. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powe

But the MDP ships/missiles only took action when their target was within visual range of Mars - indicating that they would only be good for two applications:

a) stopping an Earth-bound enemy who thinks two-dimensionally and thus feels compelled to fly past Mars
b) stopping an enemy whose target is Mars

Personally, I think that MDP is there solely to defend Mars, and plays no role in defending Earth. Each of the inhabited or industrially significant planets in the Sol system would have their own Defense Perimeter - we heard the one at Jupiter tackle the Borg and fail, we saw some of the Mars action, and we missed the Saturn action but did see the prelude or aftermath where the Cube flew past that planet.

Also, I like to think that these clearly nacelle-equipped ships/missiles are older corvettes or similar small starships that have been converted into flying bombs after retirement. The overall design isn't all that different from the TOS-R Aurora, so I could easily see these ships act as fully crewed small patrol vessels in the 2240s-60s Starfleet - perhaps with proper ramscoops on the nacelle forward ends, and a bridge about where the conning tower of a submarine would go. Those features would be removed in the conversion to kamikaze drone, and antimatter charges installed, perhaps where the silos of the submarine hull are.

(Incidentally, was the central hull of the ship/missile created out of a "stock" Typhoon class submarine kit, or a dedicated Red October kit? Does the latter even exist? If it does, and was used, then the next question is, does this model follow Tom Clancy's lead in featuring an increased number of missile silos, 26 against the 20 of a standard Typhoon? Anybody?)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[SicOne]

Re: Planets. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powe

Timo, it is my understanding that the model ships depicted in that episode were crafted out of Akula-class models. AFAIK, there have never been models produced of the 26-tube Krasny Oktabyr...though I would love to see one!

 

[JNG]

Re: Planets. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powe

The MDP flying bombs were nicknamed "Blue-Gray Octobers" and were each made out of one Typhoon-class model and two smaller-scale models of another type of submarine. I believe that type was an American submarine class, but don't remember which.

It is certainly possible that they used to be crewed ships, but they are quite small and obviously sublight (or else they would have intercepted the cube sooner, or even warped into it). Mr. Sternbach gave us some notes about their dimensions here on the BBS, from which I calculated the following:

Length 12.60 meters
Beam 4.21 meters
Height 1.6 meters

Because the model was reused for the soliton wave test vehicle, I like the idea that this is an existing uncrewed, relatively large sublight probe design easily adaptable to various autonomous-operation or remotely controlled applications, such as the flying bomb approach or leaving one in systems to patrol and scan stuff for months.

I can't see any good reason why all of the solar system defenses wouldn't have tried to group up on an intruder whose stated target was specifically Earth, or why such mobile defenses wouldn't be likely to be launched from at least the planet or station closest to the approach vector of such an intruder. (This is not to suggest that I think this sort of thing happens very often or that defenses are specifically built for it, but after the Xindi and V'ger and the whale probe thingy and the Borg...) Maybe there are even defenses of some sort out in the Oort cloud. It seems likely there were other, equally unsuccessful efforts made, and we happened to see Mars to show the audience that the cube had reached the closest major planet to Earth and was "almost here."