Point Defense and other Weapons Tech Matters

[urbandk]

Since this movie starts from scratch with a lot of Trek tech, it holds some promise to avoid past mistakes but also dangers of falling into the same conventions.

I think Ebert in one of his Star Trek reviews noted that the weapons of the future seem startlingly weak. One could rebut that the weapons are powerful, but so are the shields. But Trek episodes often put the lie to this contention. Often shields are down and the ship continues to get pounded by torpedoes, but my goodness, there are still a couple minutes left for everyone important to make it onto an escape pod (Defiant destruction, Kelvin destruction, various Ent destructions, to name a few examples).

Those "primitive atomic weapons" wouldn't have much trouble incinerating an entire ship at once. You could reply that such weapons would pose a threat to the ship that fired the weapon as well, but there are several situations in which the attacking ship would clearly be willing to take such a risk (against the Borg cube, for instance).

I hope that in new JJ Abrams Trek, we have some more creative use of weapons such that they aren't just convenient toys to propel the story wherever it needs to go.

I also wanted to commend the use of point defense, an idea long past overdue. Someone remarked in an earlier thread that phaser targeting systems often seem clumsy in Trek. I couldn't agree more. Piloting also seems slow and inefficient. I hope that evasive manoeuvres aren't really dependent on how quickly Sulu can implement evasive pattern delta.

 

[GhostFaceSaint]

Atomic weaponry doesn't have much punch in space without an atmosphere to expand powerfully and superheat at the same time, instead you get a lot of radiation which depending on the atomic weapon in use may not be as powerful a reaction as the older dirtier ones, the newer ones are designed to leave radiation that rapidly returns to safe levels so that the conquering army that comes through doesn't die from radiation. Anyway in space you need something with more punch like antimatter weapons and phased particle weapons (IE phasers and lasers).

 

[urbandk]

Atomic weaponry doesn't have much punch in space without an atmosphere to expand powerfully and superheat at the same time, instead you get a lot of radiation which depending on the atomic weapon in use may not be as powerful a reaction as the older dirtier ones, the newer ones are designed to leave radiation that rapidly returns to safe levels so that the conquering army that comes through doesn't die from radiation. Anyway in space you need something with more punch like antimatter weapons and phased particle weapons (IE phasers and lasers).

What you write in your remark would make nuclear weapons even more effective in space.

Consider, space ships are already hardened against radiation, so less threat of radiation from the blast for the attacking ship.

The explosion would be concentrated on the point of impact. No fallout or shockwave.

The only thing that really matters is the blast radius of the fireball.

If this site's calculation method is accurate, then a five megaton blast would have a minimum blast radius of 820 meters, with the limit calculated as the the threshold for lethal burns. As the site notes, the effects of this thermal radiation are irrespective of air.

Therefore, a nuclear warhead of 5 mt would make a very effective weapon in outer space, if you ship is smaller than, say, 1640 meters, maybe only 762 meters, perhaps.