Federation/Empire fleet battle: Not smooth Imp sailing?

[Eleas]

and they do have a great big reactor inside that empty cavity.

No they don't they have a bunch of little ones. The last theory I saw on SB was something along the lines of a treknobabble energy pulse would cause all the plasma conduits to burst, acting in the same manner. The idea was that this was a good explanation because now it was garunteed that ISDs would go up instead of just damage.

Ender, I know you're on my side, but prove this, please? In "Q Who", they did state something on the order of a singular power source. It's late, sure, but I don't recall any other evidence either way.

[Ender]

DATA: The ship is strangely generalized in design. There is no specific bridge or central control area, no specific engineering section -- I can identify no living quarters.

No specific engineering areas. I would interperate this to mean no main reactor, based on the fact that with every other ship (real and Trek) main engineering involves the generator. The idea of dispersed generators would be consistent with the Borg design philosophy.

[Eleas]

DATA: The ship is strangely generalized in design. There is no specific bridge or central control area, no specific engineering section -- I can identify no living quarters.

No specific engineering areas. I would interperate this to mean no main reactor, based on the fact that with every other ship (real and Trek) main engineering involves the generator. The idea of dispersed generators would be consistent with the Borg design philosophy.

True. In the absence of memory and will to better it, I will defer to your opinion.

[The Yosemite Bear]

There is just no solving the basic problem that the Feds would be facing. They loose in BOTH quality and quanity by orders of magnatude. (The combination of number's and power is so much larger that a single moncal ship is worth more then a few hundred fedships, just on the fact that one SW snubfighter has shields and firepower greater then any federation or dominion warship. coupled with a speed advantage, FTL advantage, there is NO saving the federation. here.

[Master of Ossus]

Most snubfighters do not have shields equivalent to ST capital ships, but their weapons are far in excess of anything the Federation has faced in the past. Proton torpedo firepower tops out at about 750 MT of directed energy, the equivalent of more than 10 proton torpedoes. That would be enough to overload the defenses of nearly any UFP ship, short of their absolute top of the line warships. The fact that snubfighters carry several sets of these torpedoes, and are vastly less expensive, means that the Federation fleets would stand little chance against a group of SW starfighters.

[Patrick Degan]

Fine Ender, call my arguments what you want. I've done my homework. I know just what Imperial starships can do, I know the Federation's completely outmatched by current standards, but if the Feds have shown ANYTHING, it's that they can do the R&D to find the nessecary technological advancements to get back up on their feet and kick their enemy's ass all the way to hell. Anything else you say cannot knock down this simple fact.

The Federation has failed to crack the secret of transwarp drive after 80+ years of R&D and Geordi LaForge tells Scotty in "Relics" that Federation technology is basically the same as in his day.

Secondly, R&D takes time, as others have pointed out. Against a full-scale Imperial blitzkrieg, the Federation would not have that luxury.

The Borg? See First Contact, bud. They may have lost a lot of ships (again) but they had advanced enough to actually make their weapons do real damage to the cube.

Starfleet finally figured out that massing their firepower instead of making useless strafing runs at random would be more effective tactically, and Picard used his "link" with the Borg to identify the weak-point on the cubeship.

Species 8472? Sure, they used Borg tech, but the Feds figured out how to use it.

The Borg, quite frankly, are idiots. Their centralised command, control, and analysis structure is their single greatest weakness; something which even Janeway and her lackeys do not quite suffer from. All that was required was to see how to effectively use an already existing weapon and it didn't take any particular leap of creative genius to figure it out either.

Unfortunately, the analogy fails when matched to the problem of defeating an enemy which outguns you thousands to one and has ships far more massive, protected, and powerful in terms of both offensive capability and sheer speed and you've got nothing to work with to negate those advantages.

The Dominion? The captured Jem'Hadar ships allowed the UFP to adapt their sheilds to first the Dominion polaron based weapons and later the Breen sheild dampening tech.

Simply because they could read frequencies and adjust their weapons accordingly? That's fine if you're facing an enemy which is as slaved to frequency modulation as you are. That does not help you cope with raw firepower many orders of magnitude beyond your own or circumvent shields which are not frequency/phase coherent and pump out enough power to resist firepower many orders of magnitude beyond your own.

This is the Fed's greatest strength: The means to R&D their way out of anything thrown at them, and yes the Empire is huge and uses a force, ruthlessness and cunning the AQ has never seen before, but the UFP can triumph.

The Federation can't R&D its way out of a paper bag. Their entire scientific establishment is rigidly centralised and government controlled; so much so that entire lines of research have been shut down on the dictate of some central authority in the Federation bureaucracy. Their basic technology has not advanced one millimetre in 85 years and their enemies are pathetic. They do not have equal resources to the Empire, nor do they have the sheer force numbers necessary to stand off the sort of monstrous blitzkrieg they'd be facing.

And even if the Federation's R&D was as hot as you claim, the resource and force disparity alone is enough to doom the UFP to defeat. The Germans in World War II were more advanced in their R&D in some areas than their enemies. They fielded a superior design of tank, they had jet fighters and ballistic and cruise missiles before the Allies. The Soviets, by contrast, had many more millions of soldiers and simply built several thousand of their tried-and-true T34 tank and rolled over the Germans in the East with it. The United States dropped thousands and thousands of bombs and leveled Germany's cities and factories, then sent in the army to finish the job. They fielded more Shermans than the Wehrmacht could field Tiger and Panther tanks, and once they fitted multiple rocket launchers on the Shermans, that pretty much put paid to the German tank threat. The Germans had no time to exploit the Wonder Weapons their R&D brought them, and in the end we were the beneficiaries of their R&D.

They got pounded into rubble and lost the war.

Contemplate this whenever you start indulging the fantasy that the Federation can R&D its way to victory against a massively superior foe.

[The Yosemite Bear]

Your right I exagerated the Snubfighter Shield strength, but given Manuverability most ST ships would be hard pressed against a Y-Wing, or X-Wing, would beable to kill T.I.E.'s and Interceptors, bomber's would die as well, but would take out ST ships with them, Missile Boats, and T.I.E. Advanced and Defenders would just rape them.

[Isolder74]

German R&D's worst enemy was not the Allies but Hitler. In 1939 the Germans had a protoype version of the Me-262 and the V-2 rocket was 6-months from finishing a working rocket. But when Hitler saw how easily he rolled over the Pols and French he Froze all R&D efforts what would provide results in less than 3 months cause he thought the war would only last a year at most. As Winston Churchil said when a MI-6 Officer sugested assasignating Hitler he said why he's our best weapon.

Needless to say the Germans could have jet fighters in full production by 1940-41. The V-2 rocket could have been deployed as a weapon in as early as 1940. With the addition of these weapons at these dates then the Allied bombers would have been desimated by the German jets and their bombing raids would have been a abismal failer just as the german's were in The Battle Of Britian. Incidentally the secret weapon of RADER is what killed the Germans air offencive(the German's had RADER too but Hitler killed the funding to that too)

[Typhonis 1]

Not to mention the fact that they often had several lines of development going at the same time for the same item ,14 types of radar?? good grief .They diddnt have someone who knew what was happening with all the projects.

[Isolder74]

Not to mention the fact that they often had several lines of development going at the same time for the same item ,14 types of radar?? good grief .They diddnt have someone who knew what was happening with all the projects.

Who do you think RADAR was a Lufwaffa Project(Goiring), but the Army had their own Radar project, as did the navy, and Gurbels even had his own radar project running, as well as the SS. Talk about skistophrenic R&D

[Patrick Degan]

The Germans weren't quite as close to working Wonder Weapons as you suggest. The indications are that the earliest date for delivery on the first of them would have been late 1943. The Me262 made its combat debut (as a bomber instead of a fighter, thanks to Hitler) in 1944. In the end, however, Germany was still facing massive disadvantages in terms of lack of resources and manpower.

Hitler's interference in the Nazi scientific effort is actually parallel to the hamstringing of Federation R&D by their own bureaucracy. The fact that the Federation would also be massively outnumbered and outgunned in an all-out war with the vastly technologically superior Empire only further negates the idea that the Federation could R&D its way to victory while the invasion was actually underway.

[Isolder74]

The Germans weren't quite as close to working Wonder Weapons as you suggest. The indications are that the earliest date for delivery on the first of them would have been late 1943. The Me262 made its combat debut (as a bomber instead of a fighter, thanks to Hitler) in 1944. In the end, however, Germany was still facing massive disadvantages in terms of lack of resources and manpower.

Hitler's interference in the Nazi scientific effort is actually parallel to the hamstringing of Federation R&D by their own bureaucracy. The fact that the Federation would also be massively outnumbered and outgunned in an all-out war with the vastly technologically superior Empire only further negates the idea that the Federation could R&D its way to victory while the invasion was actually underway.

That point i wasn't refuting but even an year in a war can make a big difference. And the German's had a flying jet plane in 1939 before they attacked Poland. and it true no R&D will save the Federation from a major frontal assault from the Empire

[The Yosemite Bear]

How did we get from Fed vs. GE to WWII?

[The Yosemite Bear]

Of course this should be no suprise to me, we've had the Jedi/Sith Rankings on the Warner Bros cartoons before:

Wiley Coyote: Reduce Injury, Acclerate Healing, partail TK (Help him levitate in mid air before falling)

Road Runner: Acclerated Movement, Force Leap, force run, move through solid mass (Still not sure how he does that)

Bugs Bunny: Enhance Strength (Bending Elmer's Shotgun, carring 100ton anvils), TK, Enhance Speed, Absorb/Dissapate Energy, Reduce Injury, Accelrate healing, Jedi Mind Tricks (How do you think he can get away with dressing up and no one notices that he's the bleeping rabbit.)

[Vympel]

"Starfleet finally figured out that massing their firepower instead of making useless strafing runs at random would be more effective tactically, and Picard used his "link" with the Borg to identify the weak-point on the cubeship."

Actually strafing runs at random was exactly what Starfleet was doing before Picard told them to concentrate all their fire on a single point. Idiocy.

[Patrick Degan]

Actually strafing runs at random was exactly what Starfleet was doing before Picard told them to concentrate all their fire on a single point. Idiocy.

If you recall, when the Enterprise reached Earth in the middle of the battle, the cubeship had already suffered visible damage and Data was reading power fluctuations on his sensors; an indication that the cubeship's power grid was unstable.

At some point in the battle, the fleet commander was killed. This may have thrown the Starfleet force into disarray, with no officer other than Worf willing to take any substantial initiative in pressing the attack. Picard arrives at Earth and promptly assumes fleet command to rally the Federationists. He "identifies" the weak point, and orders the ships to mass their firepower on that spot. This attack is successful in destroying the cubeship.

[Vympel]

Yup we don't disagree really, unless you think that before Picard shows up that they were concentrating their firepower- which I don't think is true

- Data's heavy damage to the outer hull comment seems to support that it had taken fire all over its outer hull, not just at small points
- the Cube's damage is represented by the glowing green patches- these are very obvious over an entire face of the cube, not just at concentrated points

the heavy damage was probably caused in the opening stages of battle, where all the 'frequency modulations' were 'fresh' and there were lots of Starfleet vessels to cause significant damage- notice that the Admiral's ship was destroyed very late in the battle- and before his ship is reported as destroyed, we see the Fed ships strafing at random from the E-E view screen, not to mention before the Enterprise shows up, when the Defiant and other ships are clearly not concentrating their firepower.