Well, c'mon, it was the 80s. EVERYTHING was advanced back then.
For that matter, Conquerer sunk the Belgrano with a pair of 60-year-old straight-running torpedoes. "Advanced" in this context is a relative term.
Partially true. It's just that most people overlook the fact that attack submarines are unequivocally lethal to just about everything in the ocean, especially surface ships.
What the hell are you talking about? Anti-ship missiles are not designed to penetrate armor. AT ALL. Anything WITH armor is, by definition, missile proof. This was actually one of the key strategic points in World War-II, when American aircraft carriers were found to be vulnerable to Kamikaze attacks because they had omitted armored flight decks. British carriers had included armored decks at the cost of a reduced flight wing and as a result were nearly impervious to Kamikaze attacks. The difference was so dramatic that it is often joked (probably apocryphally) that British captains would warn their crews of Kamikaze attacks with the address "Deck crews, man your brooms!"
Better example: USS Tennessee was hit by Kamikaze planes on three seperate occasions during WWII, in two cases with high explosives going off in the superstructure. NONE of those strikes actually disabled the ship, since none of them penetrated the ship's armor.
You simply don't know what you're talking about. Guided missiles have NO capacity to penetrate shipboard armor, primarily because most surface vessels don't HAVE any armor and there is no reason to design a missile to penetrate it.
That's just wrong. They've ceased using it because surface combatants are no longer equipped to directly engage other surface combatants in combat. Their primarily role is defending an aircraft carrier from airborne threats, which requires them to be fast and maneuverable.
Aircraft carriers and some submarines DO carry armor. The former because they are considered to be the primary target of any naval engagement, the latter because they are the primary aggressor in many naval engagements. Put that another way: the only things that carry armor these days are things that aren't cannon fodders, which MOST surface vessels basically are.
It's worth pointing out, however, that some very smart people at West Point wargamed the scenario of a full-scale war against the Soviets a couple of dozen times in the past few years, and more recently against the Chinese. It actually turns out that against any sort of modern opposition, U.S. surface groups would have a depressingly low survival rate and the lack of armored protection means the carrier's escort would be put out of commission relatively quickly.
The planet killer is made out of solid neutronium. Starfleet doesn't have weapons capable of punching through it. The only way to destroy the planet killer is to shove a starship down its throat and blow it up from the inside. Vengeance isn't equipped to do that on its own.
Because Enterprise's communications system didn't pick up the signal. AT ALL. It was the science suite that picked up the signal, at a frequency of over a million megahertz and at such a high rate of speed that the entire message lasted only a millisecond. It actually took Spock several minutes to go through his sensor log and find the signal, and then only because he knew for sure that V'ger had been trying to communicate.
For Vengeance to pull this off it would need an advanced set of scientific sensors designed to passively scan every spectrum of the EM frequency and record that data in an archive (this is what the "library computer" on the Enterprise does) and also a science officer clever enough to use the system as effectively as Spock. Even Decker isn't fully up to that task; Marcus' Section 31 flunkies certainly wouldn't be.
1 million mhz isn't radio. That's a millisecond pulse in the far infrared spectrum. Enterprise is able to identify that signal because it has a frequency-agile infrared telescope on board and a computer that records EVERYTHING the sensors detect. Vengeance, which isn't designed for scientific analysis, does not.
"Weapons and troops" didn't defeat the Borg. DATA did, with a single command that triggered a self-destruct sequence in the cube.
Which the exploration and scientific ships essentially are: they are, as we've shown, PERFECTLY capable of engaging in combat. They are just not built exclusively for it because conventional military threats are actually the LEAST of the Federation's problems.
It's quite the opposite in fact: they need to brush up on their cybernetics acumen in order to more efficiently neutralize the Borg when they come calling. Trying to outgun the Borg is a loosing proposition because they can always bring more firepower to the table than the Federation can, and this is probably true of any enemy they will ever face.
But trying to OUTSMART the Borg is perfectly dooable, especially since you can generally do this before the Borg have actually arrived.
There is no "right weapon" in this situation. Starfleet is not going to out-gun V'ger; that one ship has enough firepower to slag entire planets and make it look easy.
Not as critical as scientific knowledge and adaptability, which Enterprise actually proved in this case: We KNOW that Enterprise was able to neutralize V'ger by fulfilling its programming. We do not know for sure that blowing up the ship would have done anything to V'ger's except make it angry (as the novelization implies was the case; this was actually not the first time an enemy had attacked V'ger's core and it had evolved defenses to keep its central brain protected at all costs).
It's more than that. Science is what SOLVED THE PROBLEM. Enterprise's weapons and defenses weren't all that effective against V'ger; her phasers were next to useless, and her screens wouldn't have been up to a second attack had it hit them.
It remains a fact that a vessel built PURELY FOR COMBAT could not have solved the V'ger problem; it would not have survived long enough to do so had it had the opportunity. Starfleet knows this, which is why they DO NOT build ships purely for combat.
Vengeance itself is actually proof enough of this: in a battle between the "purely for combat" USS Vengeance and the multirole explorer Enterprise, which one of them actually WON that fight?
helped to stop the ship while they had the opportunity.
