the Warp Bomb

[Ahriman238]

200.000 c and 8000 ly means 0.04 years, thus roughly two weaks of signal delay. Still a government like that can work (with an even longer delay too, since both the Spanish and British Empire functioned without rapid means of transportation and communication).

In the case of Star Trek at least, I'm not as familiar with published stats as I am with the show itself. Honestly, though? We had real-time conversations with earth from out on the frontier many times in TNG, real-time conversations between Earth and Bajor in DS9, they were even able to arrange real-time communication with Voyager, though for all I know that was a one-shot techno-babble trick that was never mentioned or used again.

Page 5 of the Episode III ICS. It's given in the Venator SD entry, under the DBY-287 gunnery section. Logic dictates that later-model SDs are more than likely to have equivalent (or greater!) range.

Ok, so this is just a stat from a cross-section book, with no context whatsoever? Cause most any weapon used in space will have effectively unlimited range, the important part is how close you have to be to have a realistic chance of hitting the enemy.

At ten light minutes, unless you have magic-tech FTL sensors, you are by definition seeing your target not where it is, but where it was ten minutes ago. And unless you have some sort of FTL weapon system, like the hyper-missiles from Dahakverse, your shots will take ten minutes or more to reach the target. So, at a minimum you must predict your enemy's location twenty minutes (from your perspective) in advance. For a an evading target a few hundred meters in size, more than a 150 million km away. At this point you have to ask yourself what a prophet such as yourself is doing as a gunner. Hence my skepticism.

Even ignoring the difference between communication and ability to respond, how are subspace comms supposed to help when they are slower than the enemy's ships? Hyperspace travel works out at over 20 million c. Imperial ships could attack a system and be on to the next one before the distress call even got there!

Even if you can travel that much faster than an SOS, that's a hell of an operational tempo. This and the ten light-minute range both seem to assume godly capabilities and competence on the part of the Imperials.

[Darth Tedious]

Given that most of the outlying colonies we see depicted are little more than villages, orbital bombardment would take mere seconds once the target was located. An ISD captain would have to drop a couple of low power warning shots in the vicinity for a distress call to even get out. Doing that and hopping on to the next planet really wouldn't be hard at all. It really wouldn't take any kind of godlike ability on the Imperial's part- though it would appear it to the Federation.

[Azron_Stoma]

In the case of Star Trek at least, I'm not as familiar with published stats as I am with the show itself. Honestly, though? We had real-time conversations with earth from out on the frontier many times in TNG, real-time conversations between Earth and Bajor in DS9, they were even able to arrange real-time communication with Voyager, though for all I know that was a one-shot techno-babble trick that was never mentioned or used again.

DS9 is only a few sectors away from earth, it's "frontier" but not as far flung as some Beta Quadrant bases, the real time comms with voyager was due to some ancient Hirogen network that they wouldn't let them ever use again.

Ok, so this is just a stat from a cross-section book, with no context whatsoever? Cause most any weapon used in space will have effectively unlimited range, the important part is how close you have to be to have a realistic chance of hitting the enemy.

At ten light minutes, unless you have magic-tech FTL sensors, you are by definition seeing your target not where it is, but where it was ten minutes ago. And unless you have some sort of FTL weapon system, like the hyper-missiles from Dahakverse, your shots will take ten minutes or more to reach the target. So, at a minimum you must predict your enemy's location twenty minutes (from your perspective) in advance. For a an evading target a few hundred meters in size, more than a 150 million km away. At this point you have to ask yourself what a prophet such as yourself is doing as a gunner. Hence my skepticism.

We know that they do have FTL sensors, so they would only have to predict 10 minutes, and it would be fine to attack a ship that is moving along a predictable course, IE to ambush a starship (provided it can't see the bolts coming somehow) or attack a station/planetary instillation. The exact, relevant quote says

"The DBY-827's precise, long-range tracking mode enables it to hit a target vessel at distances of over ten light-minutes."

Even if you can travel that much faster than an SOS, that's a hell of an operational tempo. This and the ten light-minute range both seem to assume godly capabilities and competence on the part of the Imperials.

Only if you wanted to take out all of the federation before they even knew the other colonies/worlds were under attack, it IS however enough to be several steps ahead of them in terms of awareness (IE by the time they receive the first SOS you have already taken out numerous bases)

[Ahriman238]

"The DBY-827's precise, long-range tracking mode enables it to hit a target vessel at distances of over ten light-minutes."

Fair enough, I'll respond to your quote with another quote. Essential guide to Weapons and Technology pg. 114. Emphasis mine.

A number of standardized sensors are used by ships across the galaxy. Electro-photo receptors, also known as EPRs, are short range visual scanners that gather data provided by normal light, infared, and ultraviolet telescopes; they are also the primary sensors used in targeting computers.

Full-spectrum transceivers (FSTs) employ clusters of scanners to detect a wide range of objects, energies, and fields, although these transceivers are not very sensitive.

Dedicated Energy Receptors (DERs) are used to gather more detailed data, allowing crews to detect electromagnetic emissions such as comm transmissions, nav beacons, heat, and laser light. These sensors must be run by a skilled officer; poor operators have been known to misinterpret stray cosmic rays as comlink signals or to dismiss energy surges as solar flares when in truth they were facing a starship.

And again on pg 118, where it kindly describes an ISD's sensor capabilities.

Imperial Star Destroyers scan space with dozens of directional long-range electro-photo receptors and over a hundred full-spectrum transceivers and dedicated energy receptors. A score of broadband transceivers monitor all communications- from subspace bands to radionics frequencies- searching for transmissions that are hidden under natural X-ray emissions or background static.

So, it looks like long-range detection is done with the unreliable DER system that requires highly skilled operators, and good old-fashioned telescopes, which are certainly not FTL sensors. Cannot, by definition, be FTL sensors. And those same advanced telescopes are what the gunners use to sight their targets.

[Darth Tedious]

ICS is higher-tier canon than EGWT. As it accompanies the film, it qualifies as G-level.

Ignoring that for a second, FTL sensors clearly exist in SW. We see them demonstrated on screen in RotJ.

[Ahriman238]

ICS is higher-tier canon than EGWT. As it accompanies the film, it qualifies as G-level.

Ignoring that for a second, FTL sensors clearly exist in SW. We see them demonstrated on screen in RotJ.

Seriously? No, wait. I'm not going to turn this into a cannon debate.

I've asked you to do some serious stretching of SoD for this scenario, least I can do is accept figures from an official source. Okay, ISD's have weapon range that trumps the Federations by two orders of magnitude or more. That's a pretty big hit to the Federation's ability to fight.

Really, it only serves to convince me further that what the Federation needs to do to survive is build large numbers of Defiants (preferably with add-ons like transwarp, QS-drive, and/or cloak) to go offensive, hitting the Empire wherever they are weakly defended and doing anything they can to reduce Imperial logistics, communications, staging areas, supply depots, etc. They can defend their planets with fighter spam, those Marquis jobs could carry two photon torps, so with Warp Bomb they should be able to pull under all but the most insanely powerful of flotillas. Even with the range disparity, the Federation should have the detection range to use the hilariously obvious "Picard Maneuver" where you use warp drive to close with the enemy in a second and unleash everything you have at point-blank range.

The other essential thing is coalition building, getting all of the other AQ powers, maybe more, on their side. That will take a lot of time, unfortunatly, and they areu nlikely to get it.

[PhilosopherOfSorts]

Or, they could accept that they're badly outmached and surrender. I doubt the Empire is going to bother much with a sector of backwater primatives, beyond making sure they pay their taxes. This changes, of course, if said primatives start shooting at Imperial vessels. Prove yourself a threat, and you'll get buried.

To use the vernacular, "don't start none, won't be none."

[Batman]

ICS is higher-tier canon than EGWT. As it accompanies the film, it qualifies as G-level.
Ignoring that for a second, FTL sensors clearly exist in SW. We see them demonstrated on screen in RotJ.

Okay, ISD's have weapon range that trumps the Federations by two orders of magnitude or more.

Against stationary targets/ones on predicable paths at any rate. Lightminute ranges are bound to be moderately useless in fights between even marginally agile opponents with sufficiently sophisticated FTL sensors (or even against targets without that are unpredictable enough in their course changes).

That's a pretty big hit to the Federation's ability to fight.
Really, it only serves to convince me further that what the Federation needs to do to survive is build large numbers of Defiants (preferably with add-ons like transwarp, QS-drive, and/or cloak)

The first two of which they don't have, and their complete lack of going Defiant spam during the Dominion war tells me they simply don't have the shipbuilding industry to do it, at least not in time to matter for the Dominion war, which in turn likely means they can't do so in time to matter for the Galactic Empire invasion (actually I don't see why it would matter to begin with even if they did, the industrial and performance discrepancy is just too vast).

to go offensive, hitting the Empire wherever they are weakly defended and doing anything they can to reduce Imperial logistics, communications, staging areas, supply depots, etc.

Which is going to take some doing. Park a single Carrack in orbit, and any believable Trek Task Force you can send there is massively outgunned. A cloaked Defiant may or may not slip by it, at which point it better hope the outpost it is attacking isn't shielded, because if it is, not only did it achieve jack all, it just gave away it's position.

They can defend their planets with fighter spam those Marquis jobs could carry two photon torps, so with Warp Bomb they should be able to pull under all but the most insanely powerful of flotillas.

I'm sorry, which side of this dispute are you talking about? If you're talking Wars, they absolutely can, those two photorps are never going to hit leave alone damage anything, and by Star Wars standards, the Maquis fighters aren't fighters in anything but name thanks to their size, and I have yet to see any convincing argument why 'any shield known to man' said by a Trek character has any bearing on their effects on Wars shields.

Even with the range disparity, the Federation should have the detection range to use the hilariously obvious "Picard Maneuver" where you use warp drive to close with the enemy in a second and unleash everything you have at point-blank range.

Which, as we know, is used all the time all over Star Trek. Oh wait.[/quote]
But let's assume you actually managed to pull it off. Congratulations! You just fired a double dozen photon torpedoes into the face of a Victory class star destroyer.
*The Victory star destroyer's bridge*
'Analysis?'
'No clue.Those things, whatever they were, were way too weak to be considered weapons for something that size. They did hit in a ripple pattern so maybe they were trying to communicate via morse code or something.'

[Ahriman238]

The first two of which they don't have, and their complete lack of going Defiant spam during the Dominion war tells me they simply don't have the shipbuilding industry to do it, at least not in time to matter for the Dominion war, which in turn likely means they can't do so in time to matter for the Galactic Empire invasion (actually I don't see why it would matter to begin with even if they did, the industrial and performance discrepancy is just too vast).

That is something of a flaw, yes. IIRC didn't Voyager install both of those systems but run into problems and have to discontinue them? I recall the Quantum Slipstream one pretty clearly at least, I believe they kept the system for further study.

We see a lot more starships of more varied design in the TNG movies. Word of God is that this shows the Federation has been taking some lessons from the war to heart.

Which is going to take some doing. Park a single Carrack in orbit, and any believable Trek Task Force you can send there is massively outgunned. A cloaked Defiant may or may not slip by it, at which point it better hope the outpost it is attacking isn't shielded, because if it is, not only did it achieve jack all, it just gave away it's position.

But let's assume you actually managed to pull it off. Congratulations! You just fired a double dozen photon torpedoes into the face of a Victory class star destroyer.
*The Victory star destroyer's bridge*
'Analysis?'
'No clue.Those things, whatever they were, were way too weak to be considered weapons for something that size. They did hit in a ripple pattern so maybe they were trying to communicate via morse code or something.'

:Sigh:

Batman, did you bother reading any more of this thread then the last two posts? Both of these statments are certainly true in the usual vs. threads. This thread is here to ask what changes if all the photon torps are substituted with real ship-killers (that are even likely feasible in-universe) capable of casually destroying anything smaller than a Star Destroyer, and posing a real threat even to the big ships. Does the Emprie decide the Federation isn't worth conquering, or do they take ST seriously enough to send a vast ass-rape fleet? Can the Federation delay Imperial victory long enough to come up with a non-technobabble solution?

World's Greatest Detective...

Personally, I have no stake in either side winning. I do find myself arguing increasingly for Trek, but that's mostly because everyone agreeing has no discussion value, I think prior threads have conditioned people here to accept nothing short of divine (or Q) intervention can save the Feddies, and maybe a little because I like to see the underdog win every once in a long while.

The weapon isn't an automatic "Victory: Federation" device, I just want to know if it makes the scenario no longer "Victory: Empire."

[Connor MacLeod]

This could mean be precise enough to point at a particular angle. A 2 km object (typical Star Wars ship size) at ten light minute distance would be an angle of about 3 milli-arcseconds... very small angle.

That's the only thing I can think of that can make sense with that quote. Actually hitting a vessel would depend on more than the tracking mode, like if it were evading. While the angle does still include a size assumption, that's not as big of a thing to assume since ship sizes fall in the same ballpark anyway - the word "over" can easily account for that. (bigger ships of course being easier to hit)

Hitting is difficult but is probably the least of the problems with the implications of that quote. energy transfer for a SW ship is not instantaneous but neither is reaction time. Depending on how they are balancing power allocation and reactor levels (which by themselves could take minutes: Curtis suggested that adjusting the power levels of the reactors alone could take minutes.) and when you factor in sensor issues with weapons fire (even with FTL I doubt detecting weapons fire is totally instantaneous or even precise.)

The real problem is that at best, SW starships are designed to sustain max output for something like hours, tops. And you could easily take hours simply trying to land a single hit on a ship, but end up wasting all oyur fuel in the process. I doubt a few tens or even a few hundreds of thousands of shots would neccesarily give you accurate fire, and a few scattered shots (unless at maximum level, which only cuts down on the number of shots you cna fire) are unlikely to punch through shields.

The projectiles of course could be guided, since not all evidence points to a massless beam or even a particle beam, but even in that case it overlooks the simple fact that at 10 light minutes any starship could hyper-in closeer and engage while your multi-LM broadside is totally wasted (hyperdrive can in fact make jumps across light minute ranges or less. It's not easy, but if you aren't big on precision it can be done.)

Considering that hyperdrive pretty much allows a target to emerge from hyperspace within orbit of a planet (where most starship battles occur) you rarely need more than tens of thousands of km of combat distance, if even that.

I really wish people would put some thought into what they quote from the ICS. It's not the fucking Big Book of Answers.

So, it looks like long-range detection is done with the unreliable DER system that requires highly skilled operators, and good old-fashioned telescopes, which are certainly not FTL sensors. Cannot, by definition, be FTL sensors. And those same advanced telescopes are what the gunners use to sight their targets.

The Falcon carries subspace sensors as per Star by Star. Starfighters routinely carry a "phased tachyon detection array" for long range detection (the only source coming to mind at the moment is the Star Wars Technical Journal for that, but I know there are others.)

Failing that, there are probes and drones that can transmit sensor data back using FTL sensors.

[Connor MacLeod]

Now, the Warp Bomb. Simon hit on all the salient points, but several of them bear repeating.

1.) shielding. This is important for one very simple reason: the warp bubble itself being immune to forcefields is not the same thing as the projectile it is mounted in, and there's no reason particle shielding (or barring that, a simple EM field) wouldn't stop the projectile. IT might still go off on hitting a shield, but SW ships can project their shields quite some distance from the hull should circumstances require (indeed, they can cover other starships if they need to) and that can put the ship at the extreme edges of the bubble, if not keep it entirely away from said bubble.

Barring that there's also things like tractor beams and repulsors (the latter has been used to push away objects, and tractor beams can divert or redirect the weapon quite easily)

2.) Standoff distance. The weapon's area of effect, even if it is hundreds of meters long, is still is a drawback. Not only for the reasons of shields as stated above, but also that unless a starship is sitting still or moving slowly, its debatable whether the target will remain inside the area of effect unless it happens VERY fast. And even then, depending on how fast it's moving, the bubble might not catch it fully (or at all.)

To the above points I can add a simple third countermeasure. Interdiction technology. Interdictors are, by nature, designed to simulate a large planetary or even stellar-scale gravity well in order to prevent ships from escaping into hyperspace. Use of an interdictor cruiser, or hell even munitions designed to do that (they have mines and related tech designed to prevent ships from going into hyperspace) can probably mitigate the effects of the warp bomb quite a bit. Given the demonstrated capabilities of SW gravity tech on starships as standard (protection against the gravity of such phenomena as neutron stars and black holes, for example) it is quite possible that their own gravity technology provides some defense.

Given all that, it almost makes more sense to use the transporter to teleport them at the target. But there are the usual problems with that technique (shields, jamming, etc.) and even then it would work just as well with regular munitions.

Hell, this isn't even a doomsday weapon some are making it out to be so I dont know why people are assuming this bomb would suddnely make the Federation so dangerous that the Empire has to declare total war. Even in a worse case scenario that means they might end up losing hundreds or thousands of ships (tops) before adapting new tactics, and that's a drop in the bucket for the Empire. Hell, Palpy would probably welcome such casualties, since it would give him ammunition to expand the military to "meet this new threat". It would be the perfect propoganda tool for him, not an excuse to go in all guns blazing and decimate an entire civilization in one fell swoop.

[Simon_Jester]

Another thing- the question of size. Star destroyers are really big. Hitting one with a weapon that annihilates everything within a sphere eighteen or twenty meters across might not actually do enough damage to kill one, depending on where you hit it, how much system redundancy the ship has, how good the ship's damage control is at dealing with situations like "oh balls one of our fuel tanks now has a hole in it," and so on.

A weapon that annihilates an area hundreds of meters across would be more effective against large Star Wars ships... but just how big an area of effect is this torpedo supposed to have, anyway? There has to be a limit, and once we go beyond the precedent of "about eighteen meters" established by actual hardware tests, I have no idea where it goes.

EDIT: I know the basic assumption Ahriman is making is "what if the radius of effect is measured in hundreds of meters?" I just feel uncomfortable with that assumption, since in-setting we never ever see such a weapon used.

[Eternal_Freedom]

In-setting it could have a radius of a hundred metres of you are at the orbit of Neptune. Anything further beyond that (like, say, in deep space) it becomes ordinary warp drive.

[The Romulan Republic]

In-setting it could have a radius of a hundred metres of you are at the orbit of Neptune. Anything further beyond that (like, say, in deep space) it becomes ordinary warp drive.

So it can only be deployed in defence of planets/systems?

That at least won't hinder its effectiveness much- most battles take place around planets. I suppose if the Federation has any deep space bases they'll have to be abandoned, but they can survive that.

[Connor MacLeod]

What sort of targeting accuracy are we assuming with this thing? For even "hundreds of meters in diameteR" to be taking huge chunks out of the ship, you have to assume (aside from things like skintight shielding and they don't divert it with tractor beams or shoot it down) that it either goes off virtually in front of the target (so the Star destroyer runs into it) or they can somehow predict and place it with pinpoint accuracy. Or, the ISD is just sitting there a hundred meters or so off to one side or another (or above or below) and its damage is going to be alot less nasty.

The only other option is a huge, honorverse like missile spam.

[Eternal_Freedom]

In-setting it could have a radius of a hundred metres of you are at the orbit of Neptune. Anything further beyond that (like, say, in deep space) it becomes ordinary warp drive.

So it can only be deployed in defence of planets/systems?

Actually, in setting it doesn't work at all.

Or rather, the original warp-field-removing-anything-in-it's-path was said to only work at limited radii that were inversely proportional to distance to the sun.

The idea that the warp bomb could release uber energies was treated as a flawed concept by the E-D crew.

[Batman]

What sort of targeting accuracy are we assuming with this thing? For even "hundreds of meters in diameteR" to be taking huge chunks out of the ship, you have to assume (aside from things like skintight shielding and they don't divert it with tractor beams or shoot it down) that it either goes off virtually in front of the target (so the Star destroyer runs into it) or they can somehow predict and place it with pinpoint accuracy. Or, the ISD is just sitting there a hundred meters or so off to one side or another (or above or below) and its damage is going to be alot less nasty.
The only other option is a huge, honorverse like missile spam.

Well if it it replaces the M/AM warhead on a photorp, if it hits at all I'd expect it to be a direct hit, i.e. shield/hull contact. Photon torpedoes are at least in theory guided, afterall.

[Simon_Jester]

What sort of targeting accuracy are we assuming with this thing? For even "hundreds of meters in diameteR" to be taking huge chunks out of the ship, you have to assume (aside from things like skintight shielding and they don't divert it with tractor beams or shoot it down) that it either goes off virtually in front of the target (so the Star destroyer runs into it) or they can somehow predict and place it with pinpoint accuracy. Or, the ISD is just sitting there a hundred meters or so off to one side or another (or above or below) and its damage is going to be alot less nasty.

The only other option is a huge, honorverse like missile spam.

Well, you have to assume the ability to score a hit with any weapon- a photon torpedo becomes a lot less impressive if it can't light off within a few hundred meters of a target's hull, for instance.

[Connor MacLeod]

I'm not saying that its an issue of whether they hit/miss with the weapon, it's whether the bomb can get itself close enough to the target to be dangerous. How likely is it to hit a ISD that knows what the weapon does (which they will after the first time it is used) and starts pulling hundreds of gees to change position? You don't even need to be as agile as a fighter to just make it hard to land a close-proximity hit (say within a few tens of meters of the hull) a radius of a few km leaves a LOT of empty space for a ship to be in, even if you assume it is going just from a dead stop.

[Simon_Jester]

A fair question.

Then again, is Star Wars sublight maneuverability that much better than Trek? I don't recall that being advertised as an area where they have such a great advantage, either in agility or in straight-line acceleration.

Starships in Trek get hit by torpedoes all the time; unless Star Wars ships prove dramatically better able to outrun or shoot down the torpedoes, I would expect hits. With photorps this doesn't really matter much; with these things it could...

But there are so many other factors in play. ECM, whether the shields provide standoff distance, whether the damn thing can work at all let alone in the all-devouring "I eat your entire ship!" mode the original poster posits. I can see the things hitting and doing some damage, but they're really not decisive. Major wars very rarely revolve around the existence of a single weapon, even a powerful one.

As illustration, witness a conflict in which something very like this warp bomb appears: Arthur C. Clarke's Superiority

[Darth Yoshi]

I remember that in one particular battle in the NJO, fighters are said to engage at relativistic velocities, but I don't remember where specifically that was.

Also, in BFC Plat Mallar brings a TIE Interceptor to relative velocities by maintaining full thrust until his engines die. I don't quite feel like riffling through Before the Storm to find the exact passage, but Google tells me that he exited the Polneye system in less than a day, of which only a portion was spent accelerating, and expected to reach the nearest star system in 3 yrs. However, I'm fairly certain the passage had no real numbers, and that kind of acceleration most certainly wouldn't be used in combat.

[Connor MacLeod]

A fair question.

Then again, is Star Wars sublight maneuverability that much better than Trek? I don't recall that being advertised as an area where they have such a great advantage, either in agility or in straight-line acceleration.

They can go fast or be very manuverable, but IIRC most examples rely on some measure of "warp field" usage to reduce mass or whatever, since there are of course other cases where they never move at all or move about very sluggishly.

Starships in Trek get hit by torpedoes all the time; unless Star Wars ships prove dramatically better able to outrun or shoot down the torpedoes, I would expect hits. With photorps this doesn't really matter much; with these things it could...

Yeah, they could, but alot of that depends on the method in which they use to fight or manuver like with starships and their onscreen performance is highly variable. IF they have to resort to the warp field stuff to boost speed, I'm inclined to think that would make them easier, not harder to dodge. Really the use of warp fields to boost speed makes more sense with a "traditional" warhead (fusion, antimatter, etc.) or some sort of stand off attack. The "Warp Bomb" wouldn't really qualify unless we got some truly huge areas of effect going.

You're right about it not being a game-winner.