Ramming

[sunnyside]

I think it's just coincidence, but I've just happened to run into a lot of ramming lately whenever a little ship is losing to a bigger one. (And it isn't always the hero's doing the ramming, little dominion attack ships ramming Klingon ships for example).

Now I can understand trying to ram as a desperate last measure. What bugs me is how effective it is. There doesn't seem to be a good defense against it. In fact now that I'm thinking about it I've never seen a case where an attempted ramming didn't work out.

Oh wait,I guess ramming the doomsday machine with a shuttlecraft didn't work. Of course giving the thing a proper ramming with a larger ship did the trick.

Anyway is there some reason why ramming wouldn't pretty much always work? Even with shields up all that antimatter in the smaller ship reacting seems to be plenty devestating.

If you were a captain of a larger, slower ship and you didn't have the power to blow up a smaller ship in the time it would take it to ram you what could you do?

 

[mvkemp]

Use the tractor beam to push the ship out of the way.

And really, ramming shouldn't be the way to go. You should set a proximity self destruct. Ramming is dependent on the actual collision causing a catastrophic failure and resulting explosion. However, with tractor beams, that should be statistically unlikely to happen. Why Federation ships didn't automatically target, but not engage, a close passing ship with the tractor beam is beyond me. Tractor beam disabled? Well, then you got a problem.

 

[SPOCKED]

mvkemp said:
Tractor beam disabled? Well, then you got a problem.

Not if your Engineer made sure the ship was still outfitted with the trusty-dusty Grappler™

 

[Forbin]

Ramming is pretty expensive.
There comes a time when you're gonna lose because you've run out of ships!

 

[sunnyside]

I guess I'm including the popular "self destruct at point blank range" under "ramming" though I suppose they are different.

How useful is the federation tractor beam as far as that goes? Can you effectively tractor a shielded and powered ship rushing at you? Sure you could grab onto a shuttlecraft but if you could easily tractor around vessels a fifth your size you'd think you'd see it done more. And can you tractor them aft enough range that a self destruct will be far enough off for survival?

If all that works out any idea why tractors aren't used to counter ramming attempts? (Just for the writers?)

 

[jayrath]

Ramming is kewl fanboy stuff, nothing more. In real space, thanks to those undramatic laws of physics, unless the ship to be rammed is accelerating or at least station-keeping, your own ship is going to bounce back immediately. For a lesser example, Gemini astronauts found that when they tried to turn a screwdriver during spacewalks, they were the ones who were twisted, not the screws. Action, reaction, etc.

Even if so, it's a recipe for suicide.

And the Doomsday machine was never rammed. The shuttle entered it and exploded.

 

[FPAlpha]

Forbin said:
Ramming is pretty expensive.
There comes a time when you're gonna lose because you've run out of ships!

Not when you have small, easily and fast produced ships crewed by genetically designed soldiers who mature within days and are ready within weeks.

Trading 2-4 Dominion bug ships for a Sovereign class vessel is a good deal i think.

Anyway is there some reason why ramming wouldn't pretty much always work? Even with shields up all that antimatter in the smaller ship reacting seems to be plenty devestating.

If you were a captain of a larger, slower ship and you didn't have the power to blow up a smaller ship in the time it would take it to ram you what could you do?

Hit the "immediately go to warp button and hope nobody's in front of your ship for the next few lightseconds"

Basically.. if your weapons can't shoot down an approaching ship at a ramming course you are in deep trouble. The Americans found that out once the Japanese started to use the Kamikaze tactic.

 

[Timo]

In real space, thanks to those undramatic laws of physics, unless the ship to be rammed is accelerating or at least station-keeping, your own ship is going to bounce back immediately.

Naah. That's not "laws of physics", that's "special case of the target being significantly lighter than the rammer".

There is no such bounce-back effect if the target has great mass and isn't made of a bouncy material. We have seen thrice that the typical Star Trek hull does yield when another hull plunges into it (the shot of a Jem'Hadar battlebug going first through the Odyssey hull and then a Vor'cha wing in DS9, and the ST:NEM ramming). We can also rest assured that the targets of Trek ramming have sufficient mass and thus sufficient inertia to be victimized by a kinetic attack.

The three pieces of information we are missing are 1) the role of shields, 2) the effect of impulse or warp drive on the kinetic energy of the rammer, and 3) the effect of impulse or warp drive on the destructive potential of the rammer.

We know shields (and their cousins, tractor beams) can very effectively block material objects up to a certain limit. We know the limit is higher than "starship at average combat sublight speed" for the Borg tractor beams, as they could e.g. capture the Saratoga with ease. But the biggest/fastest/most energetic resisting object ever held in a Starfleet tractor beam is probably the high-warping runabout in DS9 "Paradise".

We hear that subspace fields reduce inertial mass. So perhaps a ship at high impulse or warp is actually much less destructive than a ship moving at thrusters, because she weighs less than a feather? Perhaps the ships that have successfully performed rammings in Trek turned off their subspace fields for this feat.

We hear and see that physical objects suffer ill effects at the edges of a warp field, such as during the tightrope act between NX-01 and NX-02. Perhaps these ill effects contribute to ramming at warp - perhaps the collapse of the rammer's warp field releases additional destructive energies at the target.

But basically we are only guessing. We have only seen those three cases of successful ramming (the middle one was seen several times in reuses of stock footage) and we could claim that the victim ships had reduced or damaged shielding at the time. Or, we know for sure the Odyssey case involved the lack of shields; we can see that the Dominion War battles involve a new type of shield that doesn't form the usual bubble, and may be vulnerable to kinetic attack; and we hear that the target has 70% secondary shielding remaining when Picard rams her in the third case. Perhaps properly shielded ships cannot be rammed, which is why the maneuver (or its obvious uncrewed variants) is not performed more often.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[WalkinMan]

I'd like to see what would happen on ramming a shields-up Galaxy class ship...

...also the Defiant supposedly had a forward warhead module ramming device.

 

[3D Master]

Timo said:
We know shields (and their cousins, tractor beams) can very effectively block material objects up to a certain limit. We know the limit is higher than "starship at average combat sublight speed" for the Borg tractor beams, as they could e.g. capture the Saratoga with ease. But the biggest/fastest/most energetic resisting object ever held in a Starfleet tractor beam is probably the high-warping runabout in DS9 "Paradise".

No, that would be the Stargazer.

 

[Redshirts_Widow]

Timo said:
We know shields (and their cousins, tractor beams) can very effectively block material objects up to a certain limit. We know the limit is higher than "starship at average combat sublight speed" for the Borg tractor beams, as they could e.g. capture the Saratoga with ease. But the biggest/fastest/most energetic resisting object ever held in a Starfleet tractor beam is probably the high-warping runabout in DS9 "Paradise".

Indeed, didn't we see the Ent-D's tractor beam fail miserably to stop the <Starship which name escapes me Boozeman?> in Cause and Effect?

 

[mvkemp]

Wasn't main power failing and they couldn't move? I can't imagine that the tractor beam was at full strength.

 

[Professor Moriarty]

They also engaged that tractor beam awfully late, when the Bozeman was already within shouting distance of the Enterprise-D.

 

[sunnyside]

We've obviously seen more ramming than the three times Timo mentioned. Some of the stuff mentioned since, plus "Caretaker" in voyager off the top of my head.

And again the kinetic ram is only half of the problem. The ship could be self destructing just before impact.

 

[Deckerd]

I misread the title and thought this was a thread about reaming.

 

[TheMasterOfOrion]

mvkemp said:
Use the tractor beam to push the ship out of the way.

It's a bit silly why they haven't done that very often

 

[Hambone]

Redshirts_Widow said:

Indeed, didn't we see the Ent-D's tractor beam fail miserably to stop the <Starship which name escapes me Boozeman?> in Cause and Effect?

U.S.S. Boozeman is funnier, with a tipsy Captain Frasier Crane in command.

 

[SPOCKED]

Ramming is a technique Kirk often employed - just not in outer space

 

[FordSVT]

Professor Moriarty said:
They also engaged that tractor beam awfully late, when the Bozeman was already within shouting distance of the Enterprise-D.

Which reminds me: if you're not sure which will move your ship out of the way faster, decompressing a shuttle bay or using the tractor beam, why not F-CKING DO BOTH INSTEAD OF ARGUING ABOUT IT?!

 

[Timo]

To be fair, the two maneuvers would have cancelled out each other if performed at the same time.

The Bozeman was approaching from the direction of the starboard bow (ain't they all?), and the tractor would have needed to push her back towards whence she came. Opening the shuttlebay doors would in turn have pushed the Enterprise in that rough same direction, with the hopes of clearing the flightpath of the Bozeman "timewise" rather than "directionwise".

The E-D missed Capt. Bateson's ship by moving a bit forward before that ship arrived. But it wouldn't have done any good if the tractor beam also had simultaneously pushed that ship in that very direction...

Timo Saloniemi