Trek Weapons Make No Sense

[Urge]

As this discussion has proved, star-trek weapons and ship to ship combat DOES make sense. This is on of several reasons for why I have resently become a fan of the series. Compared to Starwars, startrek combat is incredibily well thought through, where starwars-battles is fought with lots and small ships, and slow light that is either dogded or misses its target, star-trek weapons hit where they want to hit, and the ship with the best shields, and greatest power-generators to create these shields win. This is why al star-trek ships are big, and this is why not lots of smaller ships are released to fight the enemy, such as it is with the big imperial ships and their TIE-fighters in Starwars (The enterprise would have destroyed all the TIEs in some seconds with its fasers, since they are unshielded, and because faser fire is as fast as light, and doesnt miss its target)

Can teleportation be used to deliver weapons in startrek? Yes. In one of the games (starfleet commander I think its called) its possible to teleport out mines, wich explode if the enemy ship comes within a reasonable distance from the mine. Mines such as these can perhaps be cloaked.

As for the photon-torpedoes, they already seem to move very, very fast and are usualy only avoided if the ship jumps to warp-drive - something that can also be used to confuse the enemy into firerng at the wrong spot, since the ship appears at two places at once (the picard manouver) Since the torpedoes are fast, uses short time to reach its target, and everything else is also happening fast in a combat situation, teleporting torpedoes has been dropped - but Im sure the scientists in the star-trek universe has been thinking about it. Hitting incoming torpedoes with faser-fire is something that perhaps could be used more. In the new star-trek movie (wich was horrible, not true startrek) this happens in some of the battle scenes - but then again, the missiles used by the romulan mining-ship was not photon-torpedoes, it was probably some non-military equipment used for blasting holes in asteroids so that the ship could access the metal at the asteroid core (its very strange that the combined Vulcan-human military might was not strong enough to destroy the civilian mining-vessle, even though its was from the future)

I read at the star-trek wikipedia that the photon-torpedoes has their own shields, so they can probably take some phaserfire without blowing up, and in combination with high speed, evasive manouver is the only countermeasure that is sometimes used.

When watching Voyager, I noticed captain Janeway often ordered some sort of evasive-manouver that always had a fansy name - but enemy fire never missed (at least not in the first season, wich is the only one I have seen exept from two episodes), so perhaps she should have re-thought her battle-style and order either full stop, or warp/picard manouver.

Blablabla.
Annyway, Im new to the forum. I might drop in and write sometimes

 

[rahullak]

Have you even considered how through the roof this would case power consumption to go during combat?

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.

It is an interesting and complex way to achieve something simpler, I think. Why replicate torpedoes on the fly which would obviously involve complex systems, high power consumption an extra warp core when you can do the job directly?

You're assuming that replication of large warheads would be quick and ready to deploy during battle on the fly....yet we know that replicating even a cup of Earl Grey takes a few seconds. Granted you're assuming that technology advances so that large replication is extremely quick. You could also achieve the same objective by assuming that technology can be advanced so that reprogramming pre-stored torpedo yields to arbitrarily high levels on the fly during battles can be done almost instantaneously. Why tie in a replicator that drains power and solve that problem by adding another warp core?

I like the idea of transporting warheads....like mobile invisible self-replicating mines. After being transported, you could have each warhead replicate itself four times or more before detonating against the enemy ship.
A devastating arsenal.

And yet, if you're dealing with the Borg no amount or yield of quantum torpedoes would be sufficient...they'd adapt. You'd then need transphasic torpedoes and so on.

A thelaron weapon fully charged on a ship would pwn everything though...even Borg. Good thing shinzon didn't think of pre-charging it before taking on the enterprise...otherwise it'd have been bye-bye Enterprise, Earth and Federation.

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

It probably couldn't be charged while the ship was in combat. The generation of thalaron radiation... particles () probably used a lot of juice.