The Dominions weapons vs. Starfleet's.

[Edit_XYZ]

There have been other examples beyond Ds9: The jem'hadar of trek ships evading energy weapons fire:
Ds9: Defiant, Voy: Night or Voy: Dragon's teeth, for example. In Ds9: A time to stand, maneuverability is the method of evading direct hits (as opposed to glancing shots)

If the hands of a good pilot, maneuverability counts.

 

[Timo]

Big and maneuverable is fine, I guess. But if you're small as well, there's no such thing as a glancing hit or a less vulnerable flank...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Photon]

Big and maneuverable is fine, I guess. But if you're small as well, there's no such thing as a glancing hit or a less vulnerable flank...

Timo Saloniemi

That's one of the reasons I've never understood those Fed Fighters (and Cardy Hedieki fighters)

Now the Maquis seemed to be able to reinforce and sex up the fighters to make them much tougher.

 

[Vanyel]

Big and maneuverable is fine, I guess. But if you're small as well, there's no such thing as a glancing hit or a less vulnerable flank...

Timo Saloniemi

That's one of the reasons I've never understood those Fed Fighters (and Cardy Hedieki fighters)

Now the Maquis seemed to be able to reinforce and sex up the fighters to make them much tougher.

The Maquis seem to have had access to two ships of similar design but different sizes.One roughly the size of a Runabout and another much bigger one, able to replace a good sized portion of Voyager's lost crew, Federation fighter s are pretty tough. One is seen taking a direct hit from a Cardassian ship and surviving then being destroyed by a second hit. (Seen in the battle during Sacrifice of Angels.) So they are tough.

 

[Nightdiamond]

I think it was intended to give the Dominion the advantage by giving them superior weapons.

Even during the war it seemed to hint at it. We never actually see a regular Starfleet ship, except for the Defiant class and maybe one Runabout, destroy a Dominion ship, at least on screen.

In every screen battle or altercation, it never happens, though we see Klingon and Cardassian do it.

It made for a strange imbalance, that made Starfleet look kind of weaker in a way.

 

[Edit_XYZ]

Big and maneuverable is fine, I guess. But if you're small as well, there's no such thing as a glancing hit or a less vulnerable flank...

Timo Saloniemi

But there is such a thing as not being hit.

Voy: Dragon's teeth depicts maneuverable small fighters defeating Voyager's targeting technology;
Ds9: Treachery, faith, and the great river shows Odo evading jem'hadar ship fire in a small runabout;
etc.


Also - phaser speed, as shown, is far slower than light speed; nevertheless, let's presume the intent was to make phasers fly at light speed.
Even so, if your ship is - and stays - a few light seconds away from an attacker, you can easily evade all incoming energy beam fire with maneuverability.

 

[Timo]

That's one of the reasons I've never understood those Fed Fighters (and Cardy Hedieki fighters)

Those would work fine against opponents other than starships. Indeed, the Maquis use the fighters to attack a ground target in their introductory episode. (The one that introduces the fighters, that is - "Maquis pt II"; the one that introduces the Maquis for TNG, "Preemptive Strike", shows the fighters performing well against a Cardassian ship. But the important thing there is that Cardassian ships aren't very good. It's the Starfleet beams that are undodgeable.)

Voy: Dragon's teeth depicts maneuverable small fighters defeating Voyager's targeting technology

Which really is interesting, considering various other targets of similar size and agility were easy prey to the same guns, targeting-wise - Kazon fighters, the Swarm ships, any number of shuttlecraft...

This anomaly I'd rather blame on a state of disrepair or damage on the Voyager fire control systems than on the general usefulness of fightercraft.

Ds9: Treachery, faith, and the great river shows Odo evading jem'hadar ship fire in a small runabout

Jem'Hadar fire is easy to evade - even the Defiant can dodge. And no wonder, when "The Ship" reveals that the Jem'Hadar beam weapons have mechanically swiveling turrets!

if your ship is - and stays - a few light seconds away from an attacker, you can easily evade all incoming energy beam fire with maneuverability.

But then your ship or craft is useless, because her weapons will be of the same type, and cannot reach the opponent.

And there's always such a thing as predictive fire control. The beam may take its sweet time reaching the target, but the targeting scanners and other key sensors always act at high FTL speeds. Or if they don't, it's a very special case and the proper time to apply the Picard Maneuver...

(As for how fast the phaser beams move, it seems that something in the underlying physics dictates not speed, but rather flight time! That is, the beams can reach across lightseconds and perhaps lightminutes easily enough, in the same number of frames as it takes for them to reach across fifty meters, or five thousand meters. Intriguingly enough, phasers share this feature with the other known application of phasing technology, the transporter...)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Edit_XYZ]

Timo,
Your explanations are forced:

Voy: Dragon's teeth depicts maneuverable small fighters defeating Voyager's targeting technology

Which really is interesting, considering various other targets of similar size and agility were easy prey to the same guns, targeting-wise - Kazon fighters, the Swarm ships, any number of shuttlecraft...

This anomaly I'd rather blame on a state of disrepair or damage on the Voyager fire control systems than on the general usefulness of fightercraft.

The incidents occur at the beginning of the episode (and again, at the end). At the beginning, Tuvok made no mention of Voyager's targeting systems being in anything else than pristine condition - indeed, he gave as the only reason the enemy's maneuverability and acknowledged that the problem was not due to a malfunction, the targeting systems functioning adequately.

Ds9: Treachery, faith, and the great river shows Odo evading jem'hadar ship fire in a small runabout

Jem'Hadar fire is easy to evade - even the Defiant can dodge. And no wonder, when "The Ship" reveals that the Jem'Hadar beam weapons have mechanically swiveling turrets!

Dominion weapons technology is several times shown - and said - to be equal, even superior to starfleet's.
The opposite, on the other hand, is nowhere even close to being implied.


And, of course, these are far from the only episodes where it is shown that maneuverability (of even larger ships) avoids the ship enemy fire (even entirely).
Beyond Voy: Dragon's teeth, Ds9: Treachery, faith, and the great river, I already mentioned Ds9: Defiant, Ds9: The jem'hadar, Voy: Night. Another example would be Ds9: What you leave behind (breen avoiding at length starfleet phaser fire), etc.

Maneuverabillity can defeat targeting tech in the trekverse; far from being an "anomaly", this was established unambiguously multiple times.

if your ship is - and stays - a few light seconds away from an attacker, you can easily evade all incoming energy beam fire with maneuverability.

But then your ship or craft is useless, because her weapons will be of the same type, and cannot reach the opponent.

Unless your craft is more maneuverable than your opponents' (a small, maneuverable fighter, shown repeatedly in trek), allowing you to get closer to your opponent, bringing him into your effective weapons range, with the risk of being hit by enemy fire remaining minimal.

And there's always such a thing as predictive fire control. The beam may take its sweet time reaching the target, but the targeting scanners and other key sensors always act at high FTL speeds. Or if they don't, it's a very special case and the proper time to apply the Picard Maneuver...

The movements of a talented pilot are completely unpredictable after a few seconds into the future - at most.
It doesn't really matter if the enemy can see him or how fast the opponents' computer systems are - there is just not enough information to compute where the pilot will fly his ship.

 

[Vanyel]

Well dodging an energy beam is more difficult than you make it sound. Defiant made use of its size and skimmed along the surface of the big ships. This took the enemy ship's big guns out because a hit could send Defiant crashing into the ship; while a miss could have the beam hitting the ship (depending on the angle). That tactic worked so long as Defiant stayed away from the weapon placements or giving a weapon a good shot at hitting her and sending her tumbling away from the ship.

But dodging beams even those that can travel at c or only less than c (for arguments sake say they are traveling at .05 c or 9250 fps - if someone wants to do the math count the number of seconds it takes a beam to hit a ship and you have a decent idea as to how fast the beams are moving.) The pilot has to be out of the way before the beam is fired, not impossible, but improbable. Just like in baseball the, batter has to be swinging as the ball is being thrown or it'll pass, untouched, right by him. If the beam has you locked, it will hit you before you can move your ship completely out of the way. The only thing maneuvering does is keep the targeting system from locking on you.

However, Starfleet and other races in the Star Trek Universe don't let the computer fire (or in TNG Data) if it did, it would cut out the vital seconds from getting a lock and pushing the fire button. Computer control would be batting 1.00.

 

[Edit_XYZ]

Vanyel

Defiant didn't use the 'skimm along the surface of the big ship' tactic to avoid enemy fire in Ds9: Defiant. Nor did the various starfleet or alien vessels in the other episodes I mentioned (and other episodes).
As said - avoiding enemy fire by maneuverability is heavily depicted in trek canon; so much, that the opposite ideea is unsupportable.


Also - if a pilot stays 2 light-second away from an enemy larger, less maneuverable ship, then light takes 2 seconds to reach the pilot, starting from the ship; phasers, even longer (as per on-screen evidence, they're far slower).
Let's say the phaser beam is 1m in diameter, fired at a fighter; all the pilot needs to do is move his entire ship from from this 1 meter in 2+ seconds; with the HUGE speeds needed for interstellar travel, that's trivial (millionths of a second are MORE than sufficient).
And 'predictive' fire is equally trivial to avoid for a talented pilot; all he has to do is fly erratically, his position 2 seconds into the future becoming impossible to compute reliably (by anyone without a crystal ball that shows the future - including Data, enterprise's mainframe, etc).
Meaning - you can have arbitrarily fast computers; your chances of hitting a maneuverable fighter from 2 light seconds away remain minimal.

 

[Vanyel]

Vanyel

Defiant didn't use the 'skimm along the surface of the big ship' tactic to avoid enemy fire in Ds9: Defiant. Nor did the various starfleet or alien vessels in the other episodes I mentioned (and other episodes).
As said - avoiding enemy fire by maneuverability is heavily depicted in trek canon; so much, that the opposite ideea is unsupportable.


Also - if a pilot stays 2 light-second away from an enemy larger, less maneuverable ship, then light takes 2 seconds to reach the pilot, starting from the ship; phasers, even longer (as per on-screen evidence, they're far slower).
Let's say the phaser beam is 1m in diameter, fired at a fighter; all the pilot needs to do is move his entire ship from from this 1 meter in 2+ seconds; with the HUGE speeds needed for interstellar travel, that's trivial (millionths of a second are MORE than sufficient).
And 'predictive' fire is equally trivial to avoid for a talented pilot; all he has to do is fly erratically, his position 2 seconds into the future becoming impossible to compute reliably (by anyone without a crystal ball that shows the future - including Data, enterprise's mainframe, etc).
Meaning - you can have arbitrarily fast computers; your chances of hitting a maneuverable fighter from 2 light seconds away remain minimal.

In Defiant, no she didn't. Indeed there were no ships big enough for her to skim the surface or scratch the paint. However, the Valiant did it in Valiant. In Sacrifice of Angles, she did it to the giant Jem'Hadar ship and also in the Mirror Universe's Defiant did it to the Klingon giant Neg'Vhar variant in Shattered Mirror.

In your simulation you are assuming a few things. Among them:
the pilot of the smaller ship is constantly employing evasive maneuvers
that people are not predictable
that the firing ship is firing after the fighter has started its evasive maneuver.

The fighter cannot be constantly employing evasive maneuvers, Federation fighters seem to have forward mounted weapons. So at some point it's going to have to drive right at its target or miss. Giving it time to be hit.

People are predictable. We tend to react in predictable ways. You'd have to ask a fighter pilot instructor, but I'm sure one can give you many ways how fighter pilots react and how to handle them. Also the ships best speed and ability to turn limit it.

The fighter pilot has to have begun turning out of the way before the larger ship has fired, if not it has basically lost a second to dodge.

So while not maneuvering is a stupid thing to do, sooner or later you either have to stop to begin an attack run, your predictability will be your downfall or you'll be a second to slow.

No crystal ball needed.

 

[Edit_XYZ]

Vanyel

As said, none of the episodes I mentioned - and were under discussion - used 'stay close to a larger ship' as a tactic for avoiding weapons fire.
Nevertheless, this is a legitimate tactic that uses maneuverability to avoid enemy fire - and, as such, its depictions also support the conclusion that maneuverability makes sense in trek - and, indeed, is a HUGE advantage.

As for an erratic flight path:
-it's well within the capabilities of a human pilot to fly erratically;
-by definition, it cannot be predicted with any accuracy beyond a few milliseconds into the future. A future seeing crystal ball is required to 'know' where the fighter will be afterwards;
-even with the weapons mounted on the forward part of the fighter, its weapons will face the enemy ship during a lot of portions of the erratic flight path. Not always - but you don't need to have your weapons face the opponent at all times to attack effectively; as such, only a fool would sacrifice essential maneuverability to keep his weapons facing a specific point at all times.