Question about electronic warfare in Beyond

[Mountie1988]

Electronic Warfare is arguably the most common kind of warfare in Star Trek. They use cloaking techniques, seeking fire-and-forget torpedoes, frequency adaptation, ionic pulses to engage or disengage enemy subsystems etc.
Now the Kelvin timeline is no different: Narada's drilling beam negates subspace communication, Enterprise was jammed by Vengeance so it couldn't contact Starfleet Command and most prominently, Franklin interrupted the Swarm's communications which led to mass collisions and its destruction. I really like that outside-the-box thinking which distinguishes Star Trek from many other SciFi/Fantasy/Hero-movies, in my opinion.

Well here's my question: I watched Beyond in cinema twice and I cannot recall if they tried to jam the Swarm's comm systems when they were attacked the first time. I remember Spock saying something like 'we are not equipped for this engagement'. Considering jamming techniques a standard military procedure, or aren't they? Is there someone here from the military? Anyhow what could have prevented them from succeeding right from the start and saving the ship?

By the way, I like the torpedo sequence where they shoot the solid missile right through the evading Swarm, but why not set it to proximity detonation like Kirk did when confronted with the Romulans in Balance of Terror?

 

[Kor]

Perhaps the usual handwavium BS waves or particles of the week prevented them from jamming the swarm's signal with conventional means, necessitating the unique solution that we saw later in the movie.

Kor

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Well here's my question: I watched Beyond in cinema twice and I cannot recall if they tried to jam the Swarm's comm systems when they were attacked the first time. I remember Spock saying something like 'we are not equipped for this engagement'. Considering jamming techniques a standard military procedure, or aren't they? Is there someone here from the military? Anyhow what could have prevented them from succeeding right from the start and saving the ship?

For one thing, they misinterpreted Krall's transmissions as a jamming signal itself. Attempting to jam a jamming signal would make very little sense in that case. For another thing, it turns out Krall's signals were only vulnerable on a very narrow range of frequencies that Starfleet doesn't normally even use and even then only with a very noisy and disruptive signal (e.g. the Beastie Boys).

The fact that Krall's signal was interfering with their own communications tells you something about electronic warfare right there: it's a complex interaction of radio waves and frequencies that is difficult to work out from just a back-of-the-napkin guess and you actually have to know something about the signal parameters to figure out how those different radio waves will or will not interfere with each other.

tl;dr: it's alot easier to send and receive a transmission than it is to jam a transmission.

By the way, I like the torpedo sequence where they shoot the solid missile right through the evading Swarm, but why not set it to proximity detonation like Kirk did when confronted with the Romulans in Balance of Terror?

Wouldn't have made that much difference. The blast radius of those torpedoes is only a couple hundred meters at most, so even if they'd managed to fire off a dozen of those torpedoes they might have destroyed maybe a hundred swarm ships. It would have bought them all of twenty seconds before they swarm smashed the deflector dish and took down their shields.

 

[DonIago]

I've always assumed that if the E had had five more minutes to analyze the situation then things might have gone very differently.

Unfortunately, they didn't have those five minutes.

 

[F. King Daniel]

The Swarm jammed them, although it's later revealed to be an unintentional byproduct of their cyberpathic communication.

 

[gerbil]

I've always assumed that if the E had had five more minutes to analyze the situation then things might have gone very differently.

Unfortunately, they didn't have those five minutes.

Exactly. The Swarm appeared as a single vessel on first approach. Given that the swarm used the ships themselves as weapons, shields would have been less useful. Chekov, himself, reports that.

 

[drt]

Chekov also reported the swarm had Enterprise's shield frequencies, which is also electronic warfare since I assume Krall obtained them via his hack of her databases.

 

[ominous_thunk]

Chekov also reported the swarm had Enterprise's shield frequencies, which is also electronic warfare since I assume Krall obtained them via his hack of her databases.

I hadn't considered that, but it makes a great deal of sense. It makes Krall's choice to eliminate the deflector dish first seem more strategic, too.

Had the Enterprise crew managed to get the shields working against the swarm, they most likely would've escaped in one piece.