their inefficient use of their tech to wage war?

[Almael]

No offense taken. This is the net you got to grow a thick skin or grow beyond childishness.
Back to discussion
That said the point is warp ramming doesn't quite work out as you would normally expect.

People use opiates because they are curious, in clique that forces them to or they are unhappy and look for an escape. The setting preclude the last point. And the other probably can be taken care/cured of with wonder pills.

This leaves combat tactics and battle strategy.
This is where the question is wrong in its premise or assumptions.
A war is waged usually among technically more or less equal opponents otherwise one side massacres the other, hence, no real war... just an extermination. Therefore, it can be presumed both sides have counter measures against each other at the beginning of a story.

The borg being veterans of thousands of assimilation have plenty of experience. They don't care about losing a few ships which means they can afford to sit back and let the opposition show all their cards. They didn't react to the away teams because they are no threat. If it were a bomb that would be different. But this is what the authors wanted it to be. No point bickering over it.

The federation is outmatched in every respect. Realistically, they would frantically use anything at their disposal. But again this how the story is meant to be.

 

[Arpy]

No offense taken. This is the net you got to grow a thick skin or grow beyond childishness.
Back to discussion
That said the point is warp ramming doesn't quite work out as you would normally expect.

People use opiates because they are curious, in clique that forces them to or they are unhappy and look for an escape. The setting preclude the last point. And the other probably can be taken care/cured of with wonder pills.

This leaves combat tactics and battle strategy.
This is where the question is wrong in its premise or assumptions.
A war is waged usually among technically more or less equal opponents otherwise one side massacres the other, hence, no real war... just an extermination. Therefore, it can be presumed both sides have counter measures against each other at the beginning of a story.

The borg being veterans of thousands of assimilation have plenty of experience. They don't care about losing a few ships which means they can afford to sit back and let the opposition show all their cards. They didn't react to the away teams because they are no threat. If it were a bomb that would be different. But this is what the authors wanted it to be. No point bickering over it.

The federation is outmatched in every respect. Realistically, they would frantically use anything at their disposal. But again this how the story is meant to be.

?? Oh, right, the low-intensity warp field...with the toroids...and the thing... Yeah, no, I read attitude in your reply as well. It's not "childish" to call a behavior what it is, regardless if it's shared by many. "Polish your social skills."

 

[Go-Captain]

As soon as their shields fail, start beaming enemy crew and huge chunks of important machinery into space.

There was also the opening of Dark Frontier in which Harry Kim thought to beam a torpedo onto a Borg ship during a brief opening in their shields. This could have been done more often.

In a fight it is unsafe to drop one's shields at any point. It is far safer to keep shields up once the enemy shields are down, at which point very few shots to the hull will be required to finish them. Beaming through one's own shields can be done but it is always shown as something difficult.

Voyager beaming a torpedo into the Borg ship destroyed it by accident, their intention was to disable that ship. I believe they weren't under attack when they did the beaming, otherwise they purposefully accepted the risk of dropping shields for the chance at capturing the Borg ship mostly intact.

In Enterprise the ship was attacked by way of transporters, for the sake of thieving, a few times thanks to its shields and poor offensive abilities. At the top of a fight it makes some sense to risk a coup de grâce.

I don't think warp ramming works, or it'd be the main weapon in the Star Trek universe.

I like to think that the warp bubble collapses on contact with objects.

I agree that warp ramming must not work because we never see nor hear about it even at times where it would make sense. For instance the Cardassia's Dreadnought missile has an antimatter warhead, it doesn't just ram planets.

Rather than the warp field collapsing I believe that because the contents of a warp bubble are not moving faster than light, just the bubble, the impact of an at-warp object would be no different than the pre-warp impulse speed.

Like how you point out that warp ramming would just be a faster way to deliver a warp core breach, I believe we should torpedoes which jump to warp even when the ship is not at warp. A fast closing time makes good sense in defeating counter maneuvers, but we never see that so presumably all the maneuvers might only be effective in combination with electronic countermeasures. If that is the case then even in instant time to target wouldn't matter, so might as well build the cheaper slower torpedoes that we see.

Nope. Without the field the mass reduction effect will be lost and the ship immediately gains its real mass back. The kinetic energy converted back would result in a much smaller velocity. So far mass change ranges up to 40, hence, a reduction to 1/1600.

I used to think that but someone told me I was wrong. I believe the explanation is that once the mass returns to normal there is no place the old momentum returns from so the new velocity does not drop. It supposed to be completely different from tacking new, slow mass which needs to be accelerated. I'm not certain of this though.

If this were the warp field just magnifying a ship's speed it would be simpler because it would result in speed loss with field loss, but the show makes it specific that warp fields can reduce mass.

An object with a mass of 1 Million gross tons like the Constitution class ship, travelling at anywhere near a fraction of c would be catastrophic upon striking a planetary surface. Your only hope is that it breaks up in the atmosphere upon re-entry.

If that moves at 0.1 c I think that's 11,642,410,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules or 2,782,602,772 MT. I think that would kill all complex life on Earth.

 

[Almael]

Yeah, no, I read attitude in your reply as well. It's not "childish" to call a behavior what it is, regardless if it's shared by many. "Polish your social skills."

I didn't call him calling me as childish I referred to people raging on over things on the net as childish. Read my post again.
I'm always polite but I don't hold back saying the truth even if it hurts. And I don't mind being told either.

I used to think that but someone told me I was wrong. I believe the explanation is that once the mass returns to normal there is no place the old momentum returns from so the new velocity does not drop. It supposed to be completely different from tacking new, slow mass which needs to be accelerated. I'm not certain of this though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy
Is the law that prevents kinetic energy from changing, hence, increasing. A mass always has energy according to relativity whether it at rest or moving. If the energy remains the same its velocity has to decrease otherwise the excess energy goes into its mass. This would cause an increase of kinetic energy. In other words making it a perpetual ernergy machine which goes against the law again.

 

[Ithekro]

This leads to the idea that allows the Romulans to have low level warp capabilities using Impulse Power, via a slightly higher version of its low level subspace field, and boost the ship to low warp speeds rather than just high sublight speeds.

 

[Arpy]

I didn't call him calling me as childish I referred to people raging on over things on the net as childish. Read my post again.
I'm always polite but I don't hold back saying the truth even if it hurts. And I don't mind being told either.

Hubris. If you were always polite we wouldn't have had this conversation.

Truthfulness and politeness are not mutually exclusive. One shouldn't hold back the truth, but when it comes out wrapped in attitude, it's not the truth part that's the issue.

 

[Captain Triggered]

i'm assuming warp core explosions are about the most powerful thing the federation has access to? can they make anti-matter bombs? or is that like shinzon's weapon from nemesis, "banned" from use by the alpha quadrant powers? maybe warping into the target for whatever reason isn't practical, but just mustering up a fleet of 500 unmanned random ships that just simply have a warp core, and throwing them into the cube seems feasable?

it just bugs me that they were facing complete and utter annihilation of their conglomerate of species at the hands of a single borg cube, and their only line of defense was 3 dozen starships fighting conventionally? earth isn't protected by wacky orbital platforms or something that can spew out photon torpedos at least on the scale DS9 was upgraded to? I would think a planet in the 24th century, especially one as prestigious and important as earth, should be capable of defending itself?

 

[Captain Triggered]

also, unrelated, was the borg cube from best of both worlds some kind of borg flagship, or was it the same as one of the fodder cubes from voyager that regularily struggled with one intrepid class ship? why do the borg only send one ship when they go for the alpha quadrant, now that we know they have so, so many. why come up with wacky plans like in First Contact, when they could just send another cube or two. since they have a hard-on for the federation, and so many damn cubes. was that just bad writing on voyagers part?

 

[JasonJ]

also, unrelated, was the borg cube from best of both worlds some kind of borg flagship, or was it the same as one of the fodder cubes from voyager that regularily struggled with one intrepid class ship? why do the borg only send one ship when they go for the alpha quadrant, now that we know they have so, so many. why come up with wacky plans like in First Contact, when they could just send another cube or two. since they have a hard-on for the federation, and so many damn cubes. was that just bad writing on voyagers part?

With regards to Voyager, it would have been too easy to overpower and assimilate the hero ship if the writers actually wrote a story that used the Borg in a "realistic" strategy... yeah, the Borg would just swarm Voyager with a dozen ships, disable her, beam aboard, and assimilate everything, series over. So they wrote MacGuffins here and there, changed things to fit the story they wanted to tell, not the story as it would really turn out if this were reality.

First Contact... yeah, finally after all this time, going after Earth and the Alpha Quadrant.. only sends one ship. I think the Sphere scout ship and the temporal plan was the original intent all along. They may also have known that they needed to go back to the mid 21st century in order to send the signal to the Delta Quadrant that told the Borg to come here in the first place (which resulted in Borg in the Arctic in Enterprise). Given that, they only sent the one cube + sphere time-ship.

 

[Ithekro]

Whatever Earth has as a planetary defense system seems to be able to be deactivated before certain enemy ships can enter range. V'Ger neutralized Earth defenses just as it was getting into orbit. The Borg were stopped short of Earth orbit both times, so I can be guessed the defenses were not in range yetm or due to Picard, they would be useless anyway and turned off by remote. The Breen manage to bombard Starfleet headquarters, but were all destroyed by either the defense systems or nearly starships.

 

[Almael]

Hubris. If you were always polite we wouldn't have had this conversation.

Truthfulness and politeness are not mutually exclusive. One shouldn't hold back the truth, but when it comes out wrapped in attitude, it's not the truth part that's the issue.

Fair enough. But on a note it had the same quality as I'm telling you to "read again" or "google something".

i'm assuming warp core explosions are about the most powerful thing the federation has access to? can they make anti-matter bombs?

A reactor is inefficient compared to any type of bomb regardless of the underlying technology.

 

[Almael]

Some example graphics from data I compiled from the ST:TN TM and various episodes.

The scale on the left is based on the TM data, it's complicated

For whatever reason they made a random picking in the TM here.
(I'll be away for a while.)