Starship Enterprise vs. Battlestar Galactica

[CommodoreKong]

Incidentally, a better reason why Starfleet ships don't use railguns: They require ammo storage space, and you can run out. Why bother with that sort of problem when you can channel energy directly via phaser beams, and stock torpedoes which have higher yield *and* guidance systems. It doesn't mean railguns wouldn't be at all effective.

Starfleet ships use photon torpedoes, which also require storage space and can run out, so if railguns were effective against starships that wouldn't be a problem.
Not only that, but if they were effective I would imagine at the very least Klingon ships would use them.

 

[3D Master]

Board seemed to eat this one, trying again.

Uh, no, there are no fighters in DS9. There are some craft that are classified as fighters, but so are the Jem'hadar attack ships. Both the Jem'hadar and Starfleet "fighters", however, are not fighters in the sense of Battlestar Galactica or Star Wars (aka a fighter jet in space.) Those Star Trek "fighters" are full-fledged starships that dwarf the one-man fighter jets in space of Battlestar Galactica.

The Peregrine is appox. 16-18 meters. The Jem Haddar Attack Ships are nearly 100m. The Peregrine carries a crew of 2. The Jem Haddar Attack Ship carries a crew of 42.

Ex Astris Scentia, one of the most detailed Trek sites on the web, has this to say:
The Peregrine class is a small fighter with a crew of one or two and a size only slightly larger than a 20th century fighter aircraft. The design was used by the former Maquis and is in Starfleet service as of 2376.
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/schematics/starfleet_ships2.htm
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/schematics/dominion_ships.htm

No official figure for the size of the Peregine is given that I'm aware of, but the fight in Sacrifice of Angels shows the Peregrine near the Jem Hadar 'fighter' and the Jem Hadar ship is shown to be a much larger vessel.

Your comment that the size determines whether it qualifies as a fighter is incorrect - its the function. A P-61B Blackwidow was a huge fighter in WWII bigger than many small bombers, but it was still most definitely a fighter.

There is also a Maquis Raider which uses the same model which is the size of the Jem Haddar Attack Craft. Trek got into the CGI game late and often reused models as different ships.

It isn't simply the size the size, it's what the ship contains. A fighter in Battlestar terms, is a tiny one-man fighter that mostly takes on other fighters, and bombers of similar size, that are stationed on a mother ship. They do not have the capability of going places and back under their own power.

The "fighters" in Star Trek are NOT like that. Those "fighters" are full-fledged starships that are NOT stationed on a carrier/mothership. The difference in power between the carrier and fighter is several orders of a magnitude; but what the carrier gains in power with its size, it loses in maneuverability and acceleration. Nimble fighters are thus able to outmaneuver the big ships and a lot of their defenses, for which they require their own fighter scree to counter it.

In Star Trek, such things are meaningless with inertial dampers. In Star Trek, starships are every bit as maneuverable as fighters, the result being; that fighters are completely meaningless. There are none. Every ship fighter another shp, is a fully equipped and fully powered starship, and not Battlestar style fighter craft.

Just because the large shields around a large starship, surrounding it in a wide bubble can't work in the nebula, doesn't mean the tiny shields around a small torpedo can't work.

The 4th season TNG Writers manual p14 (you do have that, don't you? LOL) says that it's encased in an magnetic bubble that keeps the matter and antimatter from interacting. That's different from a defensive shield. We don't need to speculate on this one - we know.

All of the other technical manuals say the same thing (for example, TNG Technical Manual, p128. Why? Because they were all written or taken from the notes of Mike Okuda (the one I mentioned above co-authored by Rick Sternbach).

The shield systems are specifically described as gravitic shields, not electromagnetic ones. They bend space time to deflect matter and energy away.

Even if you want to ignore what the people who actually wrote the show say, it still doesn't match the on screen evidence. The deflectors never visibly appear similar to the glow given by that torpedo.

So there's years of onscreen evidence against your hypothesis, the writers tell us it isn't that, and its not used except in one late Voyager episode.

Of course it doesn't look like the torpedo; the torpedo is an overpowered projectile, where it's own propulsion is in the mix. Who would consider it looking exactly the same?

And shields on the OUTSIDE of the torpedo to keep the anti-matter INSIDE the torpedo from touching the matter of the torpedo is ridiculous. Obviously the fields keeping the anti-matter contained are INSIDE the torpedo.

Which leaves us with on-screen evidence to support the torpedo. Go watch Journey to Babel. There's a way overpowered Orion ship there, that is zipping about. Overpowered shields and inertial dampers to compensate for the overpowered engines. Go check out what it looks like - in the original that is, not the screwed up remastered version - a glowing ball of energy. Aka it looks like a torpedo, it's moving like a torpedo; ergo, same modifications done to it, as to a torpedo.

 

[Lindley]

Please. Not even close. Trek tech is far ahead of BG tech. Warp, Shields, photon torpedos and transporters vs jumping FTL and bullets?

As I said, the primary disadvantage of bullets is that they run out. In terms of the energy they can deliver, remember that's proportional to the square of the velocity. If Galactica's railguns can produce projectiles moving at even a small fraction of the speed of light, that's going to deliver a massive amount of energy.

A 1-gram bullet accelerated to c/10 would deliver 8.987 * 10^5 megajoules of energy. I don't know precisely how much a phaser blast is supposed to deliver, but I don't recall Star Trek often using prefixes larger than "mega" when referring to Joules.....

While there are many other factors in play, some people really need to get over the "energy weapons completely outclass projectiles" fallacy.

Bullets won't HIT. The problem with objects, is that they are susceptible to energies, most notably gravity no matter how fast they go. (And the ship going at warp speeds is going much faster than close to light.) A starship's navigational shields are built entirely for the purpose of bending objects away from the ship so they never hit. Bullets will simply be veered off course by the navigational shields, and pass left, right, up and down by the starships, never hitting anything.

Lasers, similarly, would simply be bent aside by the same shields.

Phasers aren't simply energy weapons - they can be fired at warp speeds - they are SUBSPACE energy weapons. They carry a subspace component that allows them to penetrate navigational shields and the deflector shields.

The Battlestar's weapons will never hit the starship or its shields. What would happening would be the Battlestar crew and fighter pilot watching in shocked awe, as their bullets as they came closer to the starship simply bend off course and pass the starship by. They'd be watching with utter dread at the realization that not only are their weapons not powerful enough to hurt the starship, they can't even hit it!

That's not to mention the sheer amount of ECM that a Starship could throw up. It'd be like EarthForce versus the Minbari. The Battlestar wouldn't even be able to target the Enterprise; if the starship allowed itself even to get close enough to detect. It's worse, really, with EarthForce if they could target the Minbari they could at least hit and hurt them. Here, even if the Enterprise would allow the Galactica to target it, they can't hit.

The Battlestar is so far outclassed it isn't even funny - actually it might be SO far outclassed, it'll come out the other end and be funny even hilarious again.

So your argument is basically that Star Trek technology is magic. That's fine, but say what you mean. The only way anything short of a full-on warp-field-generated spatial twist could deflect something with that much kinetic energy around something the size of a starship is with magic, after all....and I already posited one possible reason why Warp Drive could be taken away from the Enterprise to level the playing field here. And I don't think Federation starships have stolen Dovin Basal tech from the Yuuzhan Vong either.

I honestly don't give a damn about the battle here. I'm just saying, kinetic energy, WAY more powerful than Trekkies give it credit for.

Babylon 5 even used energy weapons because bullets were too powerful----you don't want security punching holes in the hull every time they have to chase someone down.

 

[3D Master]

As I said, the primary disadvantage of bullets is that they run out. In terms of the energy they can deliver, remember that's proportional to the square of the velocity. If Galactica's railguns can produce projectiles moving at even a small fraction of the speed of light, that's going to deliver a massive amount of energy.

A 1-gram bullet accelerated to c/10 would deliver 8.987 * 10^5 megajoules of energy. I don't know precisely how much a phaser blast is supposed to deliver, but I don't recall Star Trek often using prefixes larger than "mega" when referring to Joules.....

While there are many other factors in play, some people really need to get over the "energy weapons completely outclass projectiles" fallacy.

Bullets won't HIT. The problem with objects, is that they are susceptible to energies, most notably gravity no matter how fast they go. (And the ship going at warp speeds is going much faster than close to light.) A starship's navigational shields are built entirely for the purpose of bending objects away from the ship so they never hit. Bullets will simply be veered off course by the navigational shields, and pass left, right, up and down by the starships, never hitting anything.

Lasers, similarly, would simply be bent aside by the same shields.

Phasers aren't simply energy weapons - they can be fired at warp speeds - they are SUBSPACE energy weapons. They carry a subspace component that allows them to penetrate navigational shields and the deflector shields.

The Battlestar's weapons will never hit the starship or its shields. What would happening would be the Battlestar crew and fighter pilot watching in shocked awe, as their bullets as they came closer to the starship simply bend off course and pass the starship by. They'd be watching with utter dread at the realization that not only are their weapons not powerful enough to hurt the starship, they can't even hit it!

That's not to mention the sheer amount of ECM that a Starship could throw up. It'd be like EarthForce versus the Minbari. The Battlestar wouldn't even be able to target the Enterprise; if the starship allowed itself even to get close enough to detect. It's worse, really, with EarthForce if they could target the Minbari they could at least hit and hurt them. Here, even if the Enterprise would allow the Galactica to target it, they can't hit.

The Battlestar is so far outclassed it isn't even funny - actually it might be SO far outclassed, it'll come out the other end and be funny even hilarious again.

So your argument is basically that Star Trek technology is magic. That's fine, but say what you mean. The only way anything short of a full-on warp-field-generated spatial twist could deflect something with that much kinetic energy around something the size of a starship is with magic, after all....and I already posited one possible reason why Warp Drive could be taken away from the Enterprise to level the playing field here.

I honestly don't give a damn about the battle here. I'm just saying, kinetic energy, WAY more powerful than Trekkies give it credit for.

Babylon 5 even used energy weapons because bullets were too powerful----you don't want security punching holes in the hull every time they have to chase someone down.

It's not magic, it's gravity. It's called the navigational deflectors. It's a gravity lense of a star, but then artificially done. THAT'S WHAT THEY DO!

You may not like it, and derogatorily call it magic, but that's the way it is.

 

[Lindley]

It's not magic, it's gravity. It's called the navigational deflectors. It's a gravity lense of a star, but then artificially done. THAT'S WHAT THEY DO!

You may not like it, and derogatorily call it magic, but that's the way it is.

What I don't like is that the Trek writers don't think these things through nearly as much as some people here do. I mean, it would take an insane amount of energy to deflect a projectile with that much KE around a starship, even using gravity to do it. Far more than the navigational deflectors are typically depicted as using------they're portrayed a low-power systems, whereas this ability seems to make them better than shields.

I don't like "magic" tech, no.

 

[Lindley]

Incidentally, a better reason why Starfleet ships don't use railguns: They require ammo storage space, and you can run out. Why bother with that sort of problem when you can channel energy directly via phaser beams, and stock torpedoes which have higher yield *and* guidance systems. It doesn't mean railguns wouldn't be at all effective.

Starfleet ships use photon torpedoes, which also require storage space and can run out, so if railguns were effective against starships that wouldn't be a problem.
Not only that, but if they were effective I would imagine at the very least Klingon ships would use them.

Again, the issue is that the Trek writers didn't think about it in the 60s, and those who've come since don't dare deviate from the "phasers and torpedoes" formula enough to throw things like railguns into the mix. It would have made perfect sense to see something like that in Enterprise......but now we're getting back into that old territory, and I don't really feel like going there right now.

 

[Demiurge]

It isn't simply the size the size, it's what the ship contains. A fighter in Battlestar terms, is a tiny one-man fighter that mostly takes on other fighters, and bombers of similar size, that are stationed on a mother ship. They do not have the capability of going places and back under their own power.

Ah, so the Cylon fighters that are jump capable and are often used for independent raids aren't fighters either? Of course they are.

Sorry, that argument is silly. I don't care what you meant, I care what the term means. A 1 or 2 man shuttlecraft sized craft that's called a fighter in Star Trek IS a fighter, regardless of how you opine.

There's fighters in Trek. They aren't used often, but they are canon in later seasons.

The "fighters" in Star Trek are NOT like that. Those "fighters" are full-fledged starships that are NOT stationed on a carrier/mothership.

The designer of the Akira class said it was a 'gunship/aircraft carrier' in Star Trek the Magazine, Issue #2, page 48. However, I'll take that one with a grain of salt as we've never seen it launching Peregrines.

In Star Trek, such things are meaningless with inertial dampers. In Star Trek, starships are every bit as maneuverable as fighters, the result being; that fighters are completely meaningless. There are none. Every ship fighter another shp, is a fully equipped and fully powered starship, and not Battlestar style fighter craft.

A Galaxy or Constitution is every bit as maneuverable as a Viper or Raider? That's ridiculous. Watch the movies again. The ships are fast in sublight, but they aren't anywhere near as manueverable as a fighter.

Of course it doesn't look like the torpedo; the torpedo is an overpowered projectile, where it's own propulsion is in the mix. Who would consider it looking exactly the same?

I don't know, I'd think that a shield would look like a shield. But that's just me.

Which leaves us with on-screen evidence to support the torpedo. Go watch Journey to Babel. There's a way overpowered Orion ship there, that is zipping about. Overpowered shields and inertial dampers to compensate for the overpowered engines. Go check out what it looks like - in the original that is, not the screwed up remastered version - a glowing ball of energy. Aka it looks like a torpedo, it's moving like a torpedo; ergo, same modifications done to it, as to a torpedo.

So why does the 'Proximity Phaser' in A Matter of Terror look like a Photon Torpedo?

Oh, that's right, it was 1967 and they hadn't standardized the special effects yet.

Here's the entry from Memory Alpha:

Having originally appeared as "a simple spinning wheel of light," the original appearance of the Orion scout ship suffered from the series' budget limitations, but would ultimately be revised for the remastered episode that aired in 2007.
Having been given a certain amount of leeway in their design creativity, the digital artists managed to "remained faithful to the original effect, but embellished it by creating an ingenious ship design that used the spinning lights as a powerful alien propulsion system."

Here's the remastered pic:
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Orion_scout_ship

It's a bad special effect.

I'm seeing a trend here - all of these arguments are ones I've seen on the Trek vs Wars boards. Personally I think a lot of the argument the Wars guys put forward are just silly, but a lot of these are as well.

 

[Demiurge]

Demi, Demi, Demi, you silly Goose!

Yes, I took this discussion to where many others already have: TNG vs BSG2.0. I guess I didn't think I had to explain that? Silly me then.

Nice try, but you were saying arguments were 'retarded' that were obviously about the TOS Enterprise. Nice evasion though. LOL.

ST fighters appear in the two part Borg ep when the Cube gets to earth as well. I choose to cherry pick against ST with those as they are so silly they only appear in maybe 3 episodes ever. If they were useful in ST universe, at least Galron's flagship would have a compliment, dontcha think? But if suddenly we get to toss in ST fighters, BSG universe is double dog screwed as they have shields and phasers.

Agreed. Of course, they aren't used often (though they do show up in several of the big battles in DS9 IIRC), and aren't used at all in the TOS era. Not much point in contrasting a Galaxy with nuBSG - it isn't even close. A Constitution or Connie refit I still think wins in almost every imaginable situation, with the possible exception of having to stand and fight at short range.

I said the normal shield can withstand SHORT PERIODS in the corona of a star, not extended exposure like the scientist was trying to accomplish. Since Bird of Prey shields are certainly weaker than a Galaxy Class, this proves my point. Unless you missed Warf and his brother pull that maneuver. Reading is indeed fundamental, huh buddy?

Actually, I'm not aware of anything in TOS or movie era that implies a Constitution can withstand the corona of a sun.

There's lots of different types of Birds of Prey - again, a result of the show using the same model over and over again.

The BoP that Kurn captained was a K'vort, not a B'rel of the movie era. It's a 24th century ship that's about twice the size, has several more times the firepower, and a crew of 1,500 (instead of the B'rel's 12!).

http://startrek.wikia.com/wiki/IKS_Hegh'ta
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_starships

If the tactical nuke (much more damaging in an atmosphere than a much bigger one in space) was still not a deadly threat to a horribly damaged TOS Enterprise, I think its safe to say that bigger BSG nukes in space against an undamaged Enterprise are friggin USELESS. If you don't understand why a nuke in space is far less damaging than a nuke in an atmosphere, spend some time reading up.

Not entirely. Thermobaric and shockwave effects are negligible without an atmosphere obviously, but neutron and gamma radiation actually is much more potent in space - its not attenuated by an atmosphere. It has both higher range and higher yield in radiation.

The reason I pointed out the Tomorrow is Yesterday reference because it's possibly the only Trek episode where we know actual stats of a weapon because it's a real weapon. A 1.5 kiloton warhead is said to cause severe damage to a shieldless Enterprise.

But in Balance of Terror the Enterprise is nuked at short range by a Romulan Warbird. The Enterprise actually detects the nuke and destroys it with phaser fire, but that detonates the nuke 100 meters away from the hull. It does damage to the Enterprise, causes 22 casualties according to McCoy (who said it could have been much worse), and temporarily knocks out power to the Enterprise: the Romulan subcommander says 'we have them at our mercy now!' and the Enterprise is shown listing uncontrollably in space.

Now we don't know the yield of that weapon - if it's on the low end of the scale (say 20 kilotons) and the BSG nukes are on the high end (say 50 megatons) than yes, a salvo of nukes could be very dangerous for the Enterprise.

We also don't know whether there are shields. There are no mention of them in the episode, either up or down. So how they'd fair against shields is another question entirely. However, a nuke missile is going to be toast by a phaser before it gets close in most cases.

 

[Bungoman]

Demi, first off, calling me a liar is pointless retard ad-hominem nonsense. Its also kind of narcissistic, dontcha think? I mean, thinking so highly of yourself as to assume I could care enough about you to go to the extent of lying? Get a grip, you really don't matter to much of anyone, as it is with most of us.

Bird of Prey still weaker than Galaxy Class, hence shield argument HOLDS. Watching you grasp for that rope makes me feel pity for you. But hey, you want book stuff, here's book stuff:

http://startrek.wikia.com/wiki/Corona

And that's TOS Enterprise...FTW!

 

[Captain Intrepid]

Please. Not even close. Trek tech is far ahead of BG tech. Warp, Shields, photon torpedos and transporters vs jumping FTL and bullets?

As I said, the primary disadvantage of bullets is that they run out. In terms of the energy they can deliver, remember that's proportional to the square of the velocity. If Galactica's railguns can produce projectiles moving at even a small fraction of the speed of light, that's going to deliver a massive amount of energy.

A 1-gram bullet accelerated to c/10 would deliver 8.987 * 10^5 megajoules of energy. I don't know precisely how much a phaser blast is supposed to deliver, but I don't recall Star Trek often using prefixes larger than "mega" when referring to Joules.....

While there are many other factors in play, some people really need to get over the "energy weapons completely outclass projectiles" fallacy.

And yet the navigational deflector deals with such masses at significant chunks of the speed of light on a routine basis.

 

[Lindley]

And yet the navigational deflector deals with such masses at significant chunks of the speed of light on a routine basis.

At warp velocities (or any time a warp field is established), I could buy it; once you're folding space anyway, it's pretty easy to just use that to ripple any debris around you via direct spacial manipulation.

I'm not convinced Impulse drive comes anywhere near C. It's certainly not depicted that way visually. If they've claimed otherwise in dialog, that's just another example of writers trying (and failing) to be engineers.

 

[Neroon]

Demi, first off, calling me a liar is pointless retard ad-hominem nonsense. Its also kind of narcissistic, dontcha think? I mean, thinking so highly of yourself as to assume I could care enough about you to go to the extent of lying? Get a grip, you really don't matter to much of anyone, as it is with most of us.

You are apparently new around here, so you're getting this one chance to get it back in line. Cool down and CEASE with the name-calling. Passion is fine. The personal attacks are not, but they are warnable. Take some time to look over the rules and the FAQ in order to get a better feel for how we run things on this BBS. But posts like this which I've quoted, and a couple of other above will only serve to get you in trouble.




Demiurge, you've also come close to that line yourself. And the same goes. Your knowledge and passion are impressive, to say the least. I know that you're deeply involved in this aspect of the shows out in TV-land, but the discussions need to remain that: discussions.

 

[3D Master]

And yet the navigational deflector deals with such masses at significant chunks of the speed of light on a routine basis.

At warp velocities (or any time a warp field is established), I could buy it; once you're folding space anyway, it's pretty easy to just use that to ripple any debris around you via direct spacial manipulation.

You don't need any spacial manipulation to make something move aside. All you need is a nudge. In vacuum, there's no gravity and air pressure to keep an object from going; a little nudge is all it takes to send it careening off in another direction, no matter how fast it goes. You don't need to stop an object and then send it off in another direction speeding it up again.

I'm not convinced Impulse drive comes anywhere near C. It's certainly not depicted that way visually. If they've claimed otherwise in dialog, that's just another example of writers trying (and failing) to be engineers.

And you're wrong and the writers are completely right and whether they're trying to be engineers or not doesn't matter. Full impulse during TOS times was some .8c, during movie times closer to .88c and during TNG some .91c-.92c.

 

[Bungoman]

Demi, first off, calling me a liar is pointless retard ad-hominem nonsense. Its also kind of narcissistic, dontcha think? I mean, thinking so highly of yourself as to assume I could care enough about you to go to the extent of lying? Get a grip, you really don't matter to much of anyone, as it is with most of us.

You are apparently new around here, so you're getting this one chance to get it back in line. Cool down and CEASE with the name-calling. Passion is fine. The personal attacks are not, but they are warnable. Take some time to look over the rules and the FAQ in order to get a better feel for how we run things on this BBS. But posts like this which I've quoted, and a couple of other above will only serve to get you in trouble.




Demiurge, you've also come close to that line yourself. And the same goes. Your knowledge and passion are impressive, to say the least. I know that you're deeply involved in this aspect of the shows out in TV-land, but the discussions need to remain that: discussions.

Oh allright. How about I use the word "special" rather than "retard"?

 

[Lindley]

And yet the navigational deflector deals with such masses at significant chunks of the speed of light on a routine basis.

At warp velocities (or any time a warp field is established), I could buy it; once you're folding space anyway, it's pretty easy to just use that to ripple any debris around you via direct spacial manipulation.

You don't need any spacial manipulation to make something move aside. All you need is a nudge. In vacuum, there's no gravity and air pressure to keep an object from going; a little nudge is all it takes to send it careening off in another direction, no matter how fast it goes. You don't need to stop an object and then send it off in another direction speeding it up again.

Absolutely right-----if you don't care how *much* you move it. But to deflect something moving extremely fast around an object the size of a starship, you either need your nudge to be extremely far away, or extremely powerful. Take your pick, but it has to be one or the other, because it's existing velocity component is sizable and taking it right towards you, and whatever vector your nudge applies is added to that---it won't just replace it. I'm not sure why you aren't getting that because it's pretty obvious.

I'm not convinced Impulse drive comes anywhere near C. It's certainly not depicted that way visually. If they've claimed otherwise in dialog, that's just another example of writers trying (and failing) to be engineers.

And you're wrong and the writers are completely right and whether they're trying to be engineers or not doesn't matter. Full impulse during TOS times was some .8c, during movie times closer to .88c and during TNG some .91c-.92c.

If there's some dialog to that effect I'd be curious to see it. I'm not a big enough nerd to give a damn what tech manuals and the like might say. My big question would be why there's no notable relativistic effects from full impulse travel if that's the case.

 

[3D Master]

At warp velocities (or any time a warp field is established), I could buy it; once you're folding space anyway, it's pretty easy to just use that to ripple any debris around you via direct spacial manipulation.

You don't need any spacial manipulation to make something move aside. All you need is a nudge. In vacuum, there's no gravity and air pressure to keep an object from going; a little nudge is all it takes to send it careening off in another direction, no matter how fast it goes. You don't need to stop an object and then send it off in another direction speeding it up again.

Absolutely right-----if you don't care how *much* you move it. But to deflect something moving extremely fast around an object the size of a starship, you either need your nudge to be extremely far away, or extremely powerful. Take your pick, but it has to be one or the other, because it's existing velocity component is sizable and taking it right towards you, and whatever vector your nudge applies is added to that---it won't just replace it. I'm not sure why you aren't getting that because it's pretty obvious.

That depends entirely on what yo consider "extremely powerful". I think you're way overestimating what it takes to get an object to be moved aside. Hell, there are fully functional blueprints now for a EM-based navigational deflection field that would work as advertised if we ever build an interstellar ship that would reach significant parts of light speed.

I'm not convinced Impulse drive comes anywhere near C. It's certainly not depicted that way visually. If they've claimed otherwise in dialog, that's just another example of writers trying (and failing) to be engineers.

And you're wrong and the writers are completely right and whether they're trying to be engineers or not doesn't matter. Full impulse during TOS times was some .8c, during movie times closer to .88c and during TNG some .91c-.92c.

If there's some dialog to that effect I'd be curious to see it. I'm not a big enough nerd to give a damn what tech manuals and the like might say. My big question would be why there's no notable relativistic effects from full impulse travel if that's the case.

Subspace fields are generated to go against that, and also to lower a ship's mass to make it easier to get those speeds.

 

[Neroon]

Demi, first off, calling me a liar is pointless retard ad-hominem nonsense. Its also kind of narcissistic, dontcha think? I mean, thinking so highly of yourself as to assume I could care enough about you to go to the extent of lying? Get a grip, you really don't matter to much of anyone, as it is with most of us.

You are apparently new around here, so you're getting this one chance to get it back in line. Cool down and CEASE with the name-calling. Passion is fine. The personal attacks are not, but they are warnable. Take some time to look over the rules and the FAQ in order to get a better feel for how we run things on this BBS. But posts like this which I've quoted, and a couple of other above will only serve to get you in trouble.




Demiurge, you've also come close to that line yourself. And the same goes. Your knowledge and passion are impressive, to say the least. I know that you're deeply involved in this aspect of the shows out in TV-land, but the discussions need to remain that: discussions.

Oh allright. How about I use the word "special" rather than "retard"?

How about I give you an infraction, just so you can see up close and personal how things work here?

 

[Lindley]

That depends entirely on what yo consider "extremely powerful". I think you're way overestimating what it takes to get an object to be moved aside.

Okay, I can do some math. It's not my favorite pasttime, but I've kind of gotten myself curious about this anyway.

There's a 1 gram object moving at C/10 meters per second directly towards the center of a starship. We'll use the ship's frame of reference here so that we can consider it stationary.

Let's say the object needs to be moved x distance to the side to avoid a collision, and it is first acted on at distance y. x and y are in meters.

For simplicity, let's say the force applied by the deflector is directed in the desired direction of movement (to the side). There may be some benefit to directing the force slightly away from the ship to slow down the object, but that complicates the equation and I suspect won't change the result much.

Since the force is entirely to the side, the deflector has only 10*y/C seconds to move the object to the side before impact. Assuming the force applied is constant, velocity to the side will increase linearly from zero; and we require that the integral of the velocity from times 0 to 10*y/c is equal to x. As this is a triangle, this gives us that x = 5*y*v/C if v is the final velocity at impact (or not) time. We can rearrange this to be v = x*C/(5y).

So we can take the derivative of this velocity to find the necessary acceleration: v/t = a = (x*C/(5y))/(10*y/C) = x*C*C/(50*y*y). We can sanity-check that the units here are m/s^2, which indeed they are.

Now that we have the acceleration we can find the force. Newtons have the units kg*m/s^2, so the force required to deflect the object would be F = x*C*C/(50000*y*y) Newtons.

To give a few examples, if the effect of the navigational deflector extended 5000 meters from the ship and the size of the ship was 1000 meters, then we would have F = 71,900,414.3 Newtons. 72 Meganewtons for a 1-gram bullet. If it's 2 grams, that doubles. That's a lot of force. Maybe not outside the realm of possibility, but nothing to sneeze at either. If the nav deflector can do that, I don't dare speculate on the tractor beam's capabilities!

Also, the deflector dish is pointed ahead of the ship. Together with the fact that the fastest (relative) impacts would be approaching from the front during normal operations, it's a safe bet that the deflector envelope isn't spherical. That could render the ship more vulnerable from particular directions if the deflector field doesn't extend as far that way.

 

[Demiurge]

And yet the navigational deflector deals with such masses at significant chunks of the speed of light on a routine basis.

At warp velocities (or any time a warp field is established), I could buy it; once you're folding space anyway, it's pretty easy to just use that to ripple any debris around you via direct spacial manipulation.

I'm not convinced Impulse drive comes anywhere near C. It's certainly not depicted that way visually. If they've claimed otherwise in dialog, that's just another example of writers trying (and failing) to be engineers.

Lindley, the tech specs say that a low level warp field can be created at sublight speeds in order to help the impulse drive get the ship near relativistic speeds. They don't often do it because of the inherent time dilation. But we do occasionally see something like it - for example, the refit Constitution Enterprise in ST:TMP going from Earth out past Jupiter in just minutes.

Most of the time we don't see the ships in relation to any fixed object in space to define speeds, but we often get clues in terms of onscreen dialog.

Anyway, I think it's pretty much established that the Trek ships can get up to a significant fraction of C in real space, though the tech manual says they are 'cheating' to do so.

 

[Bungoman]

How about I give you an infraction, just so you can see up close and personal how things work here?

Will it put points on my license?