Rom's Self-Replicating Mines

[Photon]

How, exactly, did they work? It seems if they were hit by a torpedo/phaser they wouldn't have the time to replicate.
The cloak prolly prevented some rudimentary shielding so the only thing I can come up with is that when it sensed Dominion specific ship preparing to fire-it went ahead and started the replication process. Thoughts?

 

[CorporalClegg]

Hollywood Magic trumps all logic.

:thumbsup:

 

[Apogeal Alpha01]

I assumed: If one is hit, an adjacent Mine's replicating unit produced another mine to fill the void. The program would assume an existing pattern of mines and that the field grid should be filled, that a mine should always be adjacent to another. Very simply put, that is.

 

[Blueicus]

Couldn't they have just use their anti proton beams to find the mines and then shoot them down faster than they could replicate themselves? Or trigger a massive explosion taking out a large chunk of mines? I assume with a fleet of fifty ships they could cover the territory... but perhaps it's ten thousand kilometers across.

 

[DonIago]

^Isn't that basically what they did near the end of the Occupation Arc? So...what's your point?

 

[Blueicus]

Actually, they used an anti-graviton beam to disable the replicating process then disabled the minefield. I think a fast enough barrage could've destroyed the whole thing even with replication... although clearly the writers don't agree.

 

[FordSVT]

Where does the matter for a self replicating mine come from?

 

[Mike Have-Not]

^ Is is converted from energy, presumably

 

[Timo]

...One might say that the mines had so much antimatter aboard that they could keep siphoning that off to creating new mine casings and donating half their load to the new casing for several generations, and still not become so weak individually as to be harmless to Dominion starships. For all the bad press it gets, overkill does solve most problems.

A really smart design might get its energy by tapping into the blast of the neighbor going off. Again, though, losses in the process would be significant, and an overkill approach would be necessary.

I could easily buy the minefield surviving barrage fire for half an hour or so, thereby effectively if temporarily halting the progress of a fleet through that choke point. But three months? Simple blind firing (by the Dominion starships if we allow for the fact that the big bad station guns would not be quickly repaired) should have disabled the field by then. Unless the process of tapping into blast energy is really efficient, and every time they fire a phaser, disruptor or phased polaron beam that misses, a hundred new mines are manufactured...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JoeZhang]

How, exactly, did they work?

by Plotdevice technology - they are then put in the cupboard with the genesis device, BOPs that can fire cloaked etc...

 

[All Seeing Eye]

Firstly it has been stated previously by Dax (in the episode where the Klingons were laying cloaked Mines) that cloaked mines unlike cloaked ships cannot be detected by any known sensor array so the Mines were pretty much invisible even to Anti-proton sweeps.

Secondly, the mines more than likely had a tiny cargo hold which stored matter in it which could be used to replicate a new mine, if an adjacent mine was destroyed then the surrounding mines would a) replicate a new mine to replace it and b) beam the debris of the destroyed mine into its cargo hold to use later to make another new mine, also if the destroyed mines were destroyed because they hit a Dominion ship the debris from those destroyed Dominion ships would also be beamed aboard and stored in the cargo holds and there would be more than enough debris (raw material) to replicate about a hundred new mines, the more ships destroyed by the mine field the more mines could be replicated which is why the Dominion needed to take down the entire minefield in one quick sweep and is why the Dominion didnt dare send through any ships.

Thirdly, the mines obviously had some form of thrusters in order to eithr move to attack a ship or move into position after being replicated, these thruster combined with hundreds of sensors would be more than adequate to allow the mines to dodge any incoming energy fire, ALSO it wouldnt be wise for the Dominion to start firing energy weapons towards the mine field, if any of those energy weapons hit the wormhole the wormhole would collapse, something the Dominion didnt want.

 

[FordSVT]

I'd thought about all of these things, but they didn't seem likely to me. At least, not likely to work more than a couple of generations. There's no way it could possibly work efficiently enough and fast enough or long enough to hold off the Dominion for months. First of all, the idea of them being able to "capture" and use explosive energy from nearby mines like that doesn't jive with what we know about their tech. And remember, they couldn't just rely on capturing energy and matter from destroyed ships, otherwise they could have simply sat back and fired a bunch of torpedoes and taken down the field from a distance. So how do they explode, expend energy exploding via light and radiation, have enough of that energy be "captured" by surrounding mines, and then have enough matter and energy to perpetually replicate more mines? See what I'm getting at here? It's a relatively closed, inefficient system. It violates the laws of thermodynamics as it's presented. It would be like building a perpetual motion machine.

It's an interesting idea that seems to work on the surface by combining a few different Treknologies, and since it works on screen, well, it just does. I think I'm just going to say "plot magic" and move on.

 

[Huntingdon]

According to the explanation in the DS9 Technical manual they extracted zero point energy from space. Extremely loosely based on a scientific theory.

 

[JoeZhang]

em.. if the federation is able to use Zero Point energy - what do they need warp corps and other power sources for?

 

[FordSVT]

JoeZhang said:
em.. if the federation is able to use Zero Point energy - what do they need warp corps and other power sources for?

Exactly. I understand quantum torpedoes supposedly rely on ZPE, but that's a destructive, violent reaction. This would be harnessing that energy and using it as a power source. And if Starfleet has the technology to bend strings out of 11th dimensional space-time membranes and create particles out of "nothing", what in the hell are they still using shitty old M/AM reactors to power their ships for? It's the only case I can think of in all of Trek where ZPE is used to actually power something. If it's brand new technology, O'Brien should be up for the Nobel and Daystrom Prizes.

 

[Apogeal Alpha01]

Huntingdon said:
According to the explanation in the DS9 Technical manual they extracted zero point energy from space. Extremely loosely based on a scientific theory.

Star Trek used Zed PMs first?

 

[Huntingdon]

It's apparently an extremely slow process, which is presumably why it isn't used to replace warp cores etc. It is also mentioned as a very new technology.

 

[FordSVT]

If it's an extremely slow process, how do the mines replicate so fast?

 

[All Seeing Eye]

FordSVT said:
If it's an extremely slow process, how do the mines replicate so fast?

Its possible theres a battery type device on board, the battery is charged via the ZPE and stored for when a new mine needs replicating, its possible just the one battery can store enough power to replicate several mines, as new mines are replicated the ZPE simulataneously recharges the battery.
Also its possible that the ZPE is too slow a process to power an entire starship utilising multiple devices and warp engines, whereas for a small mine using merely a replicator device it may generate just enough power.