Size of the K'Tinga-class

[Vance]

Erm.. guys, the Constitution was named after the ship which was named after the parchment... not the parchment itself. The Constitution class vessels were all named after legendary ships of the line...

Not a difficult concept, and one that's been explicitly stated again and again and again and again and again and again...

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Erm.. guys, the Constitution was named after the ship which was named after the parchment... not the parchment itself. The Constitution class vessels were all named after legendary ships of the line...

Not a difficult concept, and one that's been explicitly stated again and again and again and again and again and again...

The tone of that post is sort of silly, Vance...

How do you know what the ship was named after? Were you part of the christening committee?

And even if we assume that the starship was named after the sailing vessel... that sailing vessel was named after the document, so that's a perfectly reasonable thing to name a ship after, isn't it?

There's nothing... nothing whatsoever... that tells us, in-canon, what the class-ship was named after. It might have been the Constitution of the Alpha Centauri colony, for all we know for sure.

 

[Forbin]

It was actually named after an admiral who drank a lot on duty, but still performed well because he had a strong constitution.

 

[Forbin]

Star Trek really has no weapon analogous to the torpedo. The photon torpedoes play the same role in ship-to-ship battles as cannonballs did until the early 19th century...

So true, but only because the writers from TNG-on were idiots and had no idea how they were supposed to work.

 

[Timo]

TOS writers were every bit as idiotic, though: torpedoes in that show were also cannonballs instead of one-shot killers. At least the enemy torps in "Errand of Mercy" were; usually Kirk's own torpedoes tended to miss when the opponent evaded, or were blocked by such superior defenses that their power could not be estimated. For example, in "The Changeling" Kirk took on the stride the fact that a Nomad blast worth ninety of "their" photon torpedoes took down only a quarter of the Enterprise's shields...

Just because they're called torpedoes doesn't mean they should be equal in every respect to the 21-inch or 24-inch shipwreckers of yore.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Just because they're called torpedoes doesn't mean they should be equal in every respect to the 21-inch or 24-inch shipwreckers of yore.

When your photon torpedoes have energy outputs equivalent to several dozen megatons, they ought to be equal, even with the existence of deflector shields (or, at least, equal to anti-shipping missiles which can be deflected by CIWS and/or jamming but otherwise destroy your entire ship).

 

[Longinus]

When your photon torpedoes have energy outputs equivalent to several dozen megatons, they ought to be equal, even with the existence of deflector shields (or, at least, equal to anti-shipping missiles which can be deflected by CIWS and/or jamming but otherwise destroy your entire ship).

Why? How do you know how durable ship hulls and shields are?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

When your photon torpedoes have energy outputs equivalent to several dozen megatons, they ought to be equal, even with the existence of deflector shields (or, at least, equal to anti-shipping missiles which can be deflected by CIWS and/or jamming but otherwise destroy your entire ship).

Why? How do you know how durable ship hulls and shields are?

Who said anything about shields? When both Reliant and Enterprise both take photon torpedo hits with their shields DOWN, given the supposed weapon yields of these weapons, they should be blown away. Klingon bird of prey decloaking in TSFS: Dead. Enterprise taking return fire: Dead. Enterprise being hit in the Great Barrier: Dead. Kronos-1 with that first torpedo hit: Dead. Enterprise-A hit by chang's torpedoes after shields collapse: Dead. Enterprise-D with Klingon torpedoes shooting through the shields: Dead.

Torpedoes should do alot more damage than they are depicted as doing, but don't. Photon torpedoes produce the kind of damage you'd expect to see from chemical warheads or else just really fast moving kinetic projectiles. Short of postulating that photon torpedoes really ARE just glorified relativistic kill vehicles, the only other explanation is that the VFX guys just don't know how to do big explosions.

 

[Longinus]

It only means that the starships are more durable than you assume.

Do you realise that it is already known that by arranging molecules "better" it is in theory possible to increase the strength of material hundredfold. Also, they have structural integrity fields, effects of which are unknown. So it actually is not so bizarre that a starship could withstand a blast of several dozen megatons.

 

[Timo]

...Or that Trek heroes and villains would be disinterested in lobbing those megatons around. After all, the nifty thing about an antimatter bomb is its easily variable yield - something that's unavailable to today's warfighters, who can at the very best vary the propelling charge of an artillery round, but not the explosive yield of the round.

A single torp did kill a starship identical to Khan's in "Unnatural Selection". But Kirk had zero interest in killing. Khan had even less interest in killing Kirk when his torps struck the Enterprise, or more probably detonated close to her hull. If Joachim had blown the Enterprise to bits with one of those torps, his death would probably not have been as easy as that of Kruge's gunner in ST3...

As for the various BoP torps, we have zero evidence that they would be capable of providing the same megaton oomph as the big Starfleet torps. And the ones fired by Chang would have to have been nonlethal, since Chang was firing them at himself!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

It only means that the starships are more durable than you assume.

Or that photon torpedoes are less powerful than they have been described.

 

[Longinus]

Or that photon torpedoes are less powerful than they have been described.

However, we do know that they use anti-matter warheads, so they have to produce rather powerful bang.

 

[Vance]

Or that photon torpedoes are less powerful than they have been described.

I might be willing to say that the torps are much less powerful in yield that the numbers state. I mean, even if you assume the hull of a starship can take a several megaton explosion.. the interior atmosphere and people inside cannot... everything within the ship would be vaporized.

It's just another issue of 'yield varies depending on the needs of plot'. Since, of course, we DO see examples of torpedoes really doing what they're supposed to do at times, and it's pretty clear even in TOS that a torpedo hit would destroy a large city...

 

[Timo]

the interior atmosphere and people inside cannot... everything within the ship would be vaporized.

Not if the hull holds, and the inertia-damping magic works.

In a couple of episodes, the inertia dampers and "structural integrity fields" are explicitly used as substitutes for shielding - which is sort of logical, as they could be expected to stop the hull from budging under force. Perhaps the "shieldless" hits we witnessed were not quite as shieldless as we thought...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Longinus]

In a couple of episodes, the inertia dampers and "structural integrity fields" are explicitly used as substitutes for shielding - which is sort of logical, as they could be expected to stop the hull from budging under force. Perhaps the "shieldless" hits we witnessed were not quite as shieldless as we thought...

Yes, this is what I've always thought. The NX-1 polarised hullplating could be just a predecessor of later structural integrity fields.

 

[Vance]

In a couple of episodes, the inertia dampers and "structural integrity fields" are explicitly used as substitutes for shielding - which is sort of logical, as they could be expected to stop the hull from budging under force. Perhaps the "shieldless" hits we witnessed were not quite as shieldless as we thought...

Well, there ARE internal defense fields, as we know. But, even then, we're talking about blocking the heat and power of an explosion orders of magnitude larger than the A-Bombs that levelled Hiroshima...

 

[Longinus]

Well, there ARE internal defense fields, as we know. But, even then, we're talking about blocking the heat and power of an explosion orders of magnitude larger than the A-Bombs that levelled Hiroshima...

So? Even in Hiroshima, not so far from the blast centre, some steel structures were left standing. And those were not molecularly optimised duranium alloy, supported by structural integrity field here, just regular steel.

 

[Timo]

Indeed, one would assume that there'd be a tenfold increase in tensile strength for hull materials at the very least. But probably a hundredfold one at the very most, until we run into the limits of theoretical chemistry. Anything beyond that would have to be done by gravitics, an unexplored science whose limits at the moment are largely fictional and dependent only on the internal rules of the Trek universe.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Vance]

So? Even in Hiroshima, not so far from the blast centre, some steel structures were left standing. And those were not molecularly optimised duranium alloy, supported by structural integrity field here, just regular steel.

This is a logical fallacy: "Product A survied 10, so product B MUST survive 10,000"

Besides, you don't see too many PEOPLE surviving Hiroshima within 100M of the blast center, which was my point...

 

[Longinus]

This is a logical fallacy: "Product A survied 10, so product B MUST survive 10,000"

No it is not, if product B is 1000 times more durable.