All Seeing Eye
Admiral
Ok so you supply the ship with 2 warp cores instead of one. Also what combat? the enemy ship is toast in the first shot because the weapon replicated is replicated with a large enough warhead to get the job done in 1 hit.
Trek Weapons Make No Sense
- Thread starter All Seeing Eye
- Start date
Ok so you supply the ship with 2 warp cores instead of one. Also what combat? the enemy ship is toast in the first shot because the weapon replicated is replicated with a large enough warhead to get the job done in 1 hit.
Why would a transported photon torpedo be any faster than a fired photon torpedo, anyway? You have the exact same energy expenditure in accelerating a swarm of particles of (say) 60kg as you do one object of 60kg. There's no real intrinsic difference between a guy lobbed at a planet at .01c in a transporter beam and a stream of "nadions" of the same mass lobbed in a phaser beam, except something (magic?) decelerates the guy and puts him back in the pattern he held before being disintegrated.
Why would a transported photon torpedo be any less detectable than a fired photon torpedo? The light or gravity from the incoming object should be as detectable in either case.
Further, I have severe doubts about mixing matter and antimatter in a transporter beam, or anything but an extremely controlled environment. One mistake in a pattern buffer or whatever cooks off the rest.
Finally, rematerialization is shown to be extremely easy to block. Much easier than blocking a solid object.
Why would a transported photon torpedo be any less detectable than a fired photon torpedo? The light or gravity from the incoming object should be as detectable in either case.
Further, I have severe doubts about mixing matter and antimatter in a transporter beam, or anything but an extremely controlled environment. One mistake in a pattern buffer or whatever cooks off the rest.
Finally, rematerialization is shown to be extremely easy to block. Much easier than blocking a solid object.
All Seeing Eye
Admiral
Because the transporter beam is faster and travels through subspace.
I'm sure you can detect a transporter beam but you'll not be able to pinpoint where the warhead is like you would if it was a torpedo heading towards you normally. Add to this the fact you could quite possibly shoot "dud" transporter beams at the enemy ship making it impossible for them to know where the warhead is coming from makes it a more effective weapon
Why would they be mixed in the transporter beam?? we've seen Voyager beam a Photon Torpedo onto a Borg ship before so it's not like there's any danger. Clearly there isn't otherwise Janeway wouldn't have done it.
Unless a ship is aware beforehand of the new weapon they won't have beam scatterers in place, beam scatterers are also not necessarily effective over a wide area. Any ship coming against this type of weapon wont be around to tell their friends to employ beam scatterers.
Did the Ent-E employ beam scatterers to stop the Remans beaming aboard?
Did the Sona employ them to stop Picard beaming onto the collector?
Ships can't just suddenly employ transporter scatterers.
Anyway as I said before, if they do have scramblers then a torpedo can be beamed as close as possible and can continue on as normal getting around the scramblers and yet still managing to get to target quicker. extra transporters beams can still work to confuse the enemy ship.
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Remember, ships are powered by a limited amount of a power, so using conventional projectile weapons does sort of make sense. You can't just go around firing massive bursts of matter and anitmatter at everything that attacks... it takes energy to deal out energy... So it makes sense to fling something out of your ship that doesn't reduce your available power, but still delivers a massive punch. You don't want to make things so alien that people won't immediately know what they are... if power were unlimited, why not just lock on to the entire outer hull of your adversarial ship and beam it away, exposing the entire crew to the vacuum of space? Why? Because that's not realistic (and it would make for REALLY boring space battles).
My comment regarding it being science fiction still stands... enjoy the license the writers take, and just have fun with it. It's about asking "why not," not asking "why?" Keep that in mind :-)
My comment regarding it being science fiction still stands... enjoy the license the writers take, and just have fun with it. It's about asking "why not," not asking "why?" Keep that in mind :-)
All Seeing Eye
Admiral
How do you get more power? you either (A) Build a larger warp reactor or (B) Build an extra warp reactor.
Job's a good en.
I think we'd have a pretty boring msg board if we all just kept quiet and said to ourselves "it's just science fiction".
All Seeing Eye
Admiral
Excuse me?
I agree, ships need 2 reactors, one for the warp drive itself, and the second for shields and weapons (using replicator and transporter tech.) If nothing else, have the torpedos lined up and fired as usual, and right behind them keep replicating new torpedos, the ship would never run out of ammunition.
Replicators don't make something out of nothing, and sooner or later (probably sooner) you're going to run out of stuff to make them out of.
All Seeing Eye
Admiral
I already answered this, the ship uses the debris from the enemy ships to restock it's replicator matter supply.
besides this you could potentially fit at least 10 times your normal weapon stockpile. Torpedo casing take up more room than a tank of replicator matter.
There is also the matter of range to consider. Transporters have a range measured in the ten of thousands of Kilometers (40,000 I believe was previously posted). According to the TNG tech manual, Phasers have a range of 300,000 Kilometers and Torps can reach out to over 3 MILLION Kilometers. Now some may not see that as "Canon" enough but even in cannon the Toprs have a range of at least 300,000 K. That is far in excess of all but Dominion transporters.
This has a lot in common with your thread on indestructible starships, and I think it comes down to this: Transporters and replicators are not very consistent with the rest of Trek technology. A civilization that can convert matter to energy (or vice versa) should be accomplishing one helluva lot more than what we see on screen. There are so many potential applications that the mind boggles, yet all we see these devices used for is to move from place to place, or to create tomato soup.
All Seeing Eye
Admiral
Already answered this one aswell.
If the ship can replicate a warhead large enough to take out the enemy vessel then they're only gunna need one shot. So they get within 40,000km and beam the warhead in the path of the enemy ship or directly onto the enemies shield.
I also mentioned the other method of replicating torpedoes in the actual torpedo tube and then firing them as normal, but instead of leaving the tube as normal the tranporters beam the torpedo 40,000km closer to the enemy vessel and it literally cuts out 40,000km of the journey of the torpedo and if enough transporter beams are shot toward the enemy ship the ship wont know where the torpedoes are coming from.
This works similar to that projectile weapon that was used in DS9 by that Vulcan. When it fired the bullet it was beamed through the bulkheads, rematerialised and it continued on its way.
All Seeing Eye
Admiral
The range has nothing to do with combat, the further away the target is the less accurate the weapon is. I'm sure you could fire a torpedo at great range but what use is that when the enemy ship can just move out of the way or shoot it down?
Combat is done in close quarters in order to prevent the enemy ship from evading the weapons fire and to prevent them from taking evasive action.
Phasers will still be used, but when the ship gets lose enough to beam over a warhead large enough to take out the enemy ship in one shot then that's what will win the battle.
Whereabouts in central Illinois are you from, thedude?
I don't believe the dialogue in that DS9 episode, "A Call To Arms", said that the mines were specifically anti-matter. I do remember a line from O'Brien, "What about pulse mines?" but we don't know what the explosive agent is in pulse mines.
Also, I don't know of any circumstance in which anti-matter has been beamed anywhere. All of the anti-matter tankage on the ships is next t o the outer hull, where it can be ejected in an emergency.
There was a Voyager episode where the ship beamed an photon torpedo casing into the middle of a Borg probe ship, but I don't think the dialogue specified whether or not it had an anti-matter warhead, or a powerful conventional explosive (or nuclear) warhead.
All of that being said, I think we have to go back to Timo's suggestions that transporter usage during combat is a tricky thing, and subject to all kinds of wild variables, too many of which could prevent a ship from, say, beaming a high-explosive device directly onto a target ship's bridge, or into their main engineering section.
This whole debate = EPIC F.A.I.L! To quote the great Bill Shatner ''IT'S A T.V. SHOW! GET A LIFE!
You're new to this subforum, aren't you?
