Who's lost their cool? We have offered counterpoints to the posters theory in the spirit of the universe and rational informed design. No loss of cool anywhere.
Starbases....Warp drive capable?
- Thread starter MarsWeeps
- Start date
If starbases were capable of warp travel on their own, what would be the point of starships?
Perhaps, but as we've seen over the shows, Starbases can vary greatly in shape, style, and size, indicating they each have a different function. Smallers ones are perhaps all that is needed for some missions so it must be easier to station one and just build another as needed.
A large, warp-capable Starbase just seems liek a legistical nightmare; all the cards have to be pre-arranged to fall into place to finally do it, it'll need a big escort to fend off attackers, and it's wide open for sabotage (since it'll take more people out with it and even rain down desbris on the planet below, including perhaps radioactive material). And then they drain human resources; the bigger the base, more personnel are needed to operate it, maintain it, and protect it.
Imagine the stink the Klingons and the Romulans would cause over if there was a large suspicious floating warp-capable city going around for, as they might think, who knows what devious purposes.
We could just say that Starfleet has begun building battlestars. And just park one or two where ever you need one to defend a planet. And instead of having batteries of projectile weapons. They have hundreds of batteries of phaser and torpedo launchers.
And the things are big enough to make the USS Vengeance look like an angry poodle.
And the things are big enough to make the USS Vengeance look like an angry poodle.
Regarding what we actually see happen in the show, Starfleet is not a good source for evidence as we extremely seldom visit its starbases. But Cardassians are basically at the same tech level with Starfleet, and we have two of their largish space stations to study.
Would a station be built in place, or towed/flown to end use location? With Terok Nor, we don't know. With Empok Nor... This station appears to sit in the middle of nowhere - no planets nearby. Why is it there? Its structure is identical to that of Terok Nor, an established ore refinery and orbital intimidation base. If there's no "ore" nor "orbit" next to Empok Nor, the natural assuption would be that Empok Nor is not where it was supposed to be. So, tugs or onboard FTL drive...
...And, supposedly, a great deal of exceptional effort involved, or otherwise Empok Nor would have ended up where it was supposed to be.
The big problem with big battlestars in planetary defense is that they can only ever guard one hemisphere at best, and probably much less given how short-ranged most of the Trek defensive weapons appear to be.
Four might be the absolute minimum, and then every single one of them would have to be capable of taking the full brunt of the attack. It's no surprise that Trek cultures at Starfleet/Cardassian level would rather opt for thousands upon thousands of small defensive satellites.
Now, using these lone battlestars to attack planets...
Timo Saloniemi
Would a station be built in place, or towed/flown to end use location? With Terok Nor, we don't know. With Empok Nor... This station appears to sit in the middle of nowhere - no planets nearby. Why is it there? Its structure is identical to that of Terok Nor, an established ore refinery and orbital intimidation base. If there's no "ore" nor "orbit" next to Empok Nor, the natural assuption would be that Empok Nor is not where it was supposed to be. So, tugs or onboard FTL drive...
...And, supposedly, a great deal of exceptional effort involved, or otherwise Empok Nor would have ended up where it was supposed to be.
The big problem with big battlestars in planetary defense is that they can only ever guard one hemisphere at best, and probably much less given how short-ranged most of the Trek defensive weapons appear to be.
Four might be the absolute minimum, and then every single one of them would have to be capable of taking the full brunt of the attack. It's no surprise that Trek cultures at Starfleet/Cardassian level would rather opt for thousands upon thousands of small defensive satellites.
Now, using these lone battlestars to attack planets...
Timo Saloniemi
There could've been some sort of Praxis-esque mishap that threw Empok Nor aside from its world.
the mobile drydock designs are way cool, similar concepts exist in the Halo universe
That's a cool one! It's something that might warrant a mention in the introductory ep, though. Instead, what we learn there almost qualifies as proof to the contrary.
"Empok Nor" says the station was abandoned by the Cardassians about a year prior, that is, before the war with the Feds but after the one with the Klingons; perhaps they tried to pull the station to a safer location where the Klingons wouldn't get at it (and where it could keep up the valuable work), but failed basically right at the start, never getting the station out of the Trivas system. They did intend to return, it seems, or else they wouldn't have left booby traps but would simply have blown up the place.
Timo Saloniemi
I would say that they are built on site, but if needed elsewhere then they could be warp-towed by a number of starships to a new location--though this would be a rarity.
It was done in one of the S.C.E. books, when Empok Nor was towed to the Bajoran System by a dozen ships.
It was done in one of the S.C.E. books, when Empok Nor was towed to the Bajoran System by a dozen ships.
Yeah, well, the Vulcan Science Directorate said time travel was impossible, too.
I doubt you could replicate a whole, functional ship, but replicating most of one and then adding the unreplicable elements seems doable enough - especially if one had a handy Dyson sphere to work with to generate the needed power.
Just don't try to steal the one that's really, really black - like hard to look at, even, it's so black. That's a bad idea.
1. Diplomatic reasons. Some alien civilizations (and some human ones, for that matter) might see having a nearby presence as less invasive than you building a base on their world.
2. Environmental/diplomatic reasons. Maybe the natives of the planet breathe gaseous phosphorus, and you want to have an embassy there, but it would just be easier/safer for everyone to keep someplace with completely artificial environmental controls in orbit.
3. Shipyard. To support your own fleet or to offer services to the orbited world, or both.
4. Shipping and Trade. This one incorporates elements of 2 and 3, in that you would want to provide a comfortable living environment for multiple visiting species, and repair services for their ships.
5. Planetary operations support. Perhaps the planet is a mining operation, and the product of their mining is sent up to the station for preliminary processing and storage for convenient pickup by starships that come by periodically and don't have to make a planetary landing to pick up cargo. And again, perhaps limited repair facilities for the cargo ships would be available, too.
6. Ecological and overpopulation concerns. It's easier to keep a planet clean, uncrowded, and "natural" if the sapients mostly live in habitats away from the surface. Spoiler alert: If humanity survives, it won't be long ("long" on an evolutionary scale of time) before an awful lot of us live in stations in the asteroid belt.
7. Because it's wicked cool.
I'll allow that this may have been the intent of what we've seen - but I'm not sure it is born out by the video evidence. Compare the size of the 1701 next to the main Spacedock doors, versus the 1701-D next to those doors, and one might conclude that another station was built with a very similar design, but larger.
This is what I was thinking, yes....
...and this very well may have been why I was thinking it. I loved those FASA books when I was young. Still do, actually, just haven't pulled them out for a while.
I never liked that. I was hoping it would be towed to a newly stabilized Barzan wormhole.
I was unaware the Barzan wormhole had been stablised. In my fandom I like to imagine Empok Nor was reactivated by Starfleet as an outpost used for the relief and recovery work in and along Cardassian space, to help ease the burden on DS9.
I like to look at the purpose of the structure and work backwards from there. Empok Nor was like Terok Nor. Not so much a Space Station as a Space refinery for ore. We never got a good look at Empok Nor beyond it wasn't closely over a planet. It may have been located at a convenient transit spot for multiple mining sources such as an asteroid belt or small planetoids. Someplace far enough from the hazardous floating space rocks of death, but convenient to the transit lanes. The stations were meant to be part of a supply or logistical chain. Kind of a a central point to convert raw materials into the next stage and a deep space truck stop. It would need to sit at the most convenient point between the mining operations and Cardassia or the factory planet that it was feeding. Not necessarily orbiting a planet. Terok Nor was ove rthe planet because the planet was its primary feeder source of raw materials, and the greater energy or logistical problem is getting the materials offworld. It was placed to minimize those energy needs of shooting stuff into space. But that might not always be the case. Heck the Cardies might have hired the Vogons to blow up the planet so they could broaden the hyperspace bypass between the mines and Cardassia.
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