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Can a UFP class 8 & 9 probes be a viable weapon? They can travel at warp 9, with sufficient room for an adult Klingon female inside. What I'd like to know is could a kinetic or antimatter warhead be placed inside and used as a long range / high impact weapon.

Rommie_xmc wrote:Can a UFP class 8 & 9 probes be a viable weapon? They can travel at warp 9, with sufficient room for an adult Klingon female inside. What I'd like to know is could a kinetic or antimatter warhead be placed inside and used as a long range / high impact weapon.

It's just a photon torpedo with the warhead and terminal guidance removed and an alternative payload placed inside. So no.

How do they travel at warp 9? Even top of the range starships can't do that for long before everything starts to shake and the engineer needs to be shouted at.

This gives reference to the episode Rommie_xmc is referring to.
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Class_8_probe[/url]

Darth Tanner wrote:How do they travel at warp 9?

According to the TNG tech manual, they have to be fired from a starship already travelling at high warp. They have a small matter-antimatter powered warp sustainer engine.

Even top of the range starships can't do that for long before everything starts to shake and the engineer needs to be shouted at.

The Galaxy class can sustain a speed of warp 9.2 more or less indefinitely and warp 9.6 for 12 hours. Later ships are much faster; the Intrepid is supposed to have a maximum speed of warp 9.975.

Darth Tanner wrote:How do they travel at warp 9? Even top of the range starships can't do that for long before everything starts to shake and the engineer needs to be shouted at.

From memory, it's mostly the 'getting to warp 9' that's shaky; once ships reach their cruising speed the shaking subsides (see: ST4, TMP). Since a probe can't get to warp on it's own, but instead coasts along with a warp sustainer after being launched from a ship, it skips the hard part.

Warp 9 really isn't that big a deal in TNG.

If you search in SLAM, or OSF or maybe even PST for a post by Sikon, he calculates the theoretical maximum yield for a torpedo with a nuclear warhead. And it's a lot more than you'd expect.

In Voyager, there were these little drone weapons, each one even smaller than a torpedo that could destroy Voyager, and they even had shields and weapons that could beat Voyager. But the Federation can't make those.

For kinetic penetrator, you just have to look at a torpedo. It's round, not a shaped charge, and is definitely not a penetrator. A tank shell it is not, it's probably not made of tungsten or depleted uranium either, probably just a metal shell. I think it was Degan who said that a kinetic penetrator totally goes against everything we've seen photon torpedoes do in Star Trek ever. So if you're going to turn it into one, better to redesign an entirely new weapon.

brianeyci wrote:If you search in SLAM, or OSF or maybe even PST for a post by Sikon, he calculates the theoretical maximum yield for a torpedo with a nuclear warhead. And it's a lot more than you'd expect.

It's more than Trek gets out of their M/AM warheads, anyway

For kinetic penetrator, you just have to look at a torpedo. It's round, not a shaped charge, and is definitely not a penetrator.

Neither is a shaped charge. As a matter of fact shaped charges by definition go off BEFORE entering armour. And kinetic penetrators are a quite different beast from shaped charges anyway.

A tank shell it is not, it's probably not made of tungsten or depleted uranium either, probably just a metal shell. I think it was Degan who said that a kinetic penetrator totally goes against everything we've seen photon torpedoes do in Star Trek ever. So if you're going to turn it into one, better to redesign an entirely new weapon.

Actually, the BoP PTs in TUC showed behaviour in line with with kinetic penetrators, or at the very least lousy fuse design. Not that this isn't contradicted by more or less ALL of TNG and later Trek, mind you.

What would the kinetic output of a 500Kg probe moving at warp 9 be against a shielded vessel?

Have you heard of 'mass lightning'?

The whole problem is that the "mass lightening" effect of subspace-field engines nullifies the mass part of this equation, and to drop out of warp would nullify the velocity part. So the very engineering behind a warp drive rules out the use of any warp-driven object as a kinetic kill weapon.

^ Which is consistent with nearly everything in the show...the one excepion I know of being when Riker tries to use the Enterprise as a Warp 9 kinetic-kill weapon against a Borg cube. But if that worked, one would think it would be tried more often.

Anguirus wrote:^ Which is consistent with nearly everything in the show...the one excepion I know of being when Riker tries to use the Enterprise as a Warp 9 kinetic-kill weapon against a Borg cube. But if that worked, one would think it would be tried more often.

They were in normal space not in warp when he gave the order to ram the borg ship.

It was a last-ditch effort anyway: it's also worth mentioning that a 600m ship chockers with superexploding technology is a tiny bit different that a flying coffin that goes off like a petrol bomb.

I believe Riker told them to go to Warp Nine because it would prevent the Cube from blowing them away when he was trying to ram them, not because it would do more damage.

If we're talking about BoBW Pt II Riker never ordered them to go to Warp 9 in the first place-he tells Wesley to lay in a collision course, then tells Geordi to prepare to go to Warp power.

My mistake.