Weaponized red matter (ST XI spoilers)

[Darwin]

Odds of the FTL teleport ever being used again are low.

Which would be sad, because something like that would throw a whole shift into how this timeline could turn out. It could be THE big Federation secret weapon for its next several conflicts.

[Patrick Degan]

Red Matter would be useless as a weapon against either Imperial ships or planets. The planetary drill beam would never penetrate a planetary shield and the ship using one wouldn't even be able to get close enough to the target world before being shot down.

Against ships, the weapon is similarly useless: no RM torpedo would be able to penetrate the shields of an Imperial vessel. If it initiates outside the ship, with nothing to feed upon, it might fuck up attempts to go to hyperdrive for the few seconds before the singularity expired. In other words, it would have the same effect as an interdiction generator but shorter term.

Chalk this one up to another one-shot wonder which would have no effect upon the power-balance.

[Junghalli]

That brings up something I hadn't thought of- how hot was the beam from Nero's drill? It was hot enough to burn through Vulcan and presumably the Earth, but it didn't seem to have any other heat effects. Being hit by it killed the red shirt and a Romulan, but getting dangerous close didn't kill Sulu or Kirk (especially when it vented on the top of the platform).

Shouldn't clouds of vaporized rock be coming out of the drill site? Shoudln't people nearby be baked by the heat?

Anyone have any theories, because it seems to have acted more like a lightsaber than a mining laser. It took up space, vaporized what it came into contact with without displacing it and had really poor heat conductivity outside the beam.

As Rochey said, I think it was a giant phaser. "Vaporizing" away huge amounts of material while apparently dumping way too little heat into the environment is perfectly consistent with phasers.

[Darth Wong]

Odds of the FTL teleport ever being used again are low.

Which would be sad, because something like that would throw a whole shift into how this timeline could turn out. It could be THE big Federation secret weapon for its next several conflicts.

Until the enemy figures out that they should keep their shields up in transit, or run interference generating fields all the time. Another problem is locating enemy ships in transit. Kirk knew where the Enterprise was going; this helps them in terms of locating the ship (and maybe those ships leave a kind of "wake" behind them from which you can extrapolate a heading and distance). But in this Star Trek, their sensor pulses don't seem to be any faster than their warp drive; they don't even know what's ahead of them before they drop out of warp.

[Stark]

As Rochey said, I think it was a giant phaser. "Vaporizing" away huge amounts of material while apparently dumping way too little heat into the environment is perfectly consistent with phasers.

If only the Narada itself had even a single beam weapon, Nero would have won.

[Darth Wong]

As Rochey said, I think it was a giant phaser. "Vaporizing" away huge amounts of material while apparently dumping way too little heat into the environment is perfectly consistent with phasers.

If only the Narada itself had even a single beam weapon, Nero would have won.

Or if the Narada had continued to attack Enterprise at Vulcan after capturing its captain, rather than warping away and inexplicably leaving the Enterprise intact. But Nero wouldn't do that ... because that's exactly what we would expect him to do!

[Stark]

Y'know, when this comes out on DVD/Bluray/whatever, I'm pretty sure people will 'discover' that the shots Narada fired at Spock's ship at the end of the movie were slower than those against the Kelvin (at similar range) for no reason other than being shot down by Enterprise.

The point-defence issue is really strange too; Kelvin seemed to be able to swipe a beam through a bunch of submunitions before impact, but couldn't just hit the missile before it released the submunitions. It's not like they were following erratic flightpaths or anything - and the submunitions are so slow they're barely faster than a shuttle.

[Rochey]

Perhaps the Narada had some sort of jamming system to prevent them firing with accuracy?
Or maybe the Kelvin's guns just have shit accuracy.

[bz249]

Anyway if this FTL transport thingy really works why one need a startship. FTL transport is (nearly) instantenous while starships are rather slow. What is the disadvantage of FTL transport? Energy requirement, accuracy?

[Darwin]

Anyway if this FTL transport thingy really works why one need a startship. FTL transport is (nearly) instantenous while starships are rather slow. What is the disadvantage of FTL transport? Energy requirement, accuracy?

That it works over interplanetary distances but not interstellar?

[bz249]

Anyway if this FTL transport thingy really works why one need a startship. FTL transport is (nearly) instantenous while starships are rather slow. What is the disadvantage of FTL transport? Energy requirement, accuracy?

That it works over interplanetary distances but not interstellar?

At least a few hours have passed after Kirk was dropped to the planet, during that time the Enterprise should be in lightyears away even at low warp.

[Darth Wong]

Anyway if this FTL transport thingy really works why one need a startship. FTL transport is (nearly) instantenous while starships are rather slow. What is the disadvantage of FTL transport? Energy requirement, accuracy?

Safety is one issue that comes to mind. Scotty materialized in water. He could have just as easily materialized in a bulkhead, or an antimatter storage pod.

If you want to see where you're going, it really helps to be closer to the target. I suppose one might argue that it would work better for transport between two planets which each have a transporter pad and are both co-operating, thus taking away the safety issue. But it's also possible that there are other safety issues associated with such a long-range transport. True, we didn't hear about them in the movie, but we also didn't hear about the possibility that they would materialize inside a pressure vessel either. It's pretty obvious that they did it because of the whole "we can't let the entire planet Earth be wiped out" factor, not because it was a particularly safe thing to do.

[Ariphaos]

It's important to remember that the Enterprise's left warp nacelle was damaged ("If Scotty can get us to warp 4...") - so neither the Enterprise nor the Narada were in terribly fit shape dealing with getting away from the singularity.

Dealing with planets is out of the question. Nero had to interrogate Pike to disable Earth's defenses (though why a single captain would be able to do that is beyond me).

The short is this wasn't even a very effective weapon by Star Trek standards, it only worked due to acts of plot. You might be able to bring down a command ship on a suicide run if you were fast and lucky.

[Darth Wong]

The whole bit about interrogating Pike was stupid too. If he knew he needed to capture a Federation captain for interrogation, why did he blow up the first group of ships that arrived? How could he know that there would be one more straggler showing up late to the party? And why wouldn't Starfleet change any kind of "defense frequencies" that Pike knew, once they knew he'd been kidnapped and (probably) tortured for information?

Perhaps more to the point, what kind of "defense frequencies" could these be, anyway? Does the entire defensive grid have an off switch? Are the operators so clueless that they don't see any reason to be concerned when a six mile long ship flies into their territory?

[Aaron]

The whole bit about interrogating Pike was stupid too. If he knew he needed to capture a Federation captain for interrogation, why did he blow up the first group of ships that arrived? How could he know that there would be one more straggler showing up late to the party? And why wouldn't Starfleet change any kind of "defense frequencies" that Pike knew, once they knew he'd been kidnapped and (probably) tortured for information?

Perhaps more to the point, what kind of "defense frequencies" could these be, anyway? Does the entire defensive grid have an off switch? Are the operators so clueless that they don't see any reason to be concerned when a six mile long ship flies into their territory?

Keep in mind that I have yet to see this but from what I hear online it sounds like he just stole the equivalent of a SF ships IFF codes. Yes, it's not going to take them long to figure out that "hey, USS Enterprise isn't 6 miles long" but it might buy Nero a few extra minutes.

[Darth Wong]

Keep in mind that I have yet to see this but from what I hear online it sounds like he just stole the equivalent of a SF ships IFF codes. Yes, it's not going to take them long to figure out that "hey, USS Enterprise isn't 6 miles long" but it might buy Nero a few extra minutes.

That's a clever attempt at an explanation but it assumes that the IFF code is so simple that the captain would actually have it memorized. Why wouldn't it look more like this?

-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----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-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

You could stick all the brain-sucking worms you want in some guy's head; he won't be able to recall that for you.

PS. I just created that by making a temporary RSA keypair with ssh-keygen.

[Aaron]

Hmm, good point. Nor I suppose would he have the prefix codes for the defence system/net/whatever memorized, which was going to be my other suggestion. Perhaps I should just turn my brain off if I see this.

[Ariphaos]

Because RSA Public/Private encryption is crackable by quantum computers in the time it takes a standard computer to authenticate. In two and a half centuries, even the possibility of that would make me scoff when superior encryption is being discussed now. 23rd century code security for a ship like that would be something like 4096-bit time-synchronized (down to the second) AES codes used on a per-ship basis, with each ship having ~40 million (twelve years or so) of codes available to it. You would then need to exhaust several thousand universal masses in the span of a second to crack.

And even then it would only be an identification and authority mechanism. Somehow getting a hold of the Enterprise's key generator will only work if you construct a ship that matches all potential sensory signals of the Enterprise, and would last a second after it opened fire.

[Stark]

Remember guys, there wasn't any defence grid and even if there was Nero could drop out of warp right inside Earth's atmosphere if he wanted. Earth would have been saved by a kamakaze shuttle for fuck's sake; there's clearly no doombeams or spaceguns or whatever around. Even the 'so huge cadets were stunned' starbase from the beginning must have been unarmed.

[Peptuck]

The whole bit about interrogating Pike was stupid too. If he knew he needed to capture a Federation captain for interrogation, why did he blow up the first group of ships that arrived? How could he know that there would be one more straggler showing up late to the party? And why wouldn't Starfleet change any kind of "defense frequencies" that Pike knew, once they knew he'd been kidnapped and (probably) tortured for information?

It would have made a lot more sense if they'd asked Pike about things like defense fleets, military response times, locations of defense platforms, whether the Feddies have surface to space weapons emplacements, etc. Pike would reasonably be expected to know that sort of thing, and it wouldn't make the Feddies look like asstards. Again.

I mean, the movie has pretty much established that all you need to do to effectively render Earth defenseless is to capture a single starship captain and question him. That makes the Empire's already brutally simple assault doctrine even easier. Find a Feddie ship, ion the fuck out of it, board with blasters set to stun, grab the captain, question him, and now the Federation is helpless.

Oh, wait, you don't even have to board. Just ion the fuck out of the ship and ask to speak with the captain. The moment he steps aboard, they grab him and the Federation gets its shit wrecked. For fuck's sakes, they give sensitive, strategically valuable information to officers who happily skip onto the enemy ship the moment they've been disabled to have a friendly chat with the ruthless evil invaders. Someone in Federation High Command is doing it wrong.

[Lord Relvenous]

The disparity between FTL speeds improved for Star Trek though, so Star Trek has gained a small amount in the strategic flexibility department. However, unless the weapons and shields have also improved, it won't actually gain them anything. See http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... &start=150 for the detalis of the calc.

I also found it odd the whole RM ball didn't have more of an effect. Also, does the movie ever explain why exactly Spock has all that RM on his ship when only a small amount is needed? Did I miss an explanation in there?

[Richardson]

Um... common sense? If you only have enough to try and save the galaxy once, you're doing it waaaay wrong. Did they go overboard? Yes, he could have gone with significantly less, and probably did fine, but it seemed to me to be 'oh hey, just in case, take everything, so that you can use as much as you need to kill this thing!'

They also might not have known how much it would take, too.

[Darwin]

Um... common sense? If you only have enough to try and save the galaxy once, you're doing it waaaay wrong. Did they go overboard? Yes, he could have gone with significantly less, and probably did fine, but it seemed to me to be 'oh hey, just in case, take everything, so that you can use as much as you need to kill this thing!'

They also might not have known how much it would take, too.

Hm.

Hmmm.

Spock may have known what would have happened with a bunch of red matter laying around, and taken 'All of It' in order to deprive the Romulans of the largest WMD since the Genesis Device.

of course that's relying on non-canon sources too.

[Solauren]

Um, a point with the capture of Captain Pike.


Nero wanted the frequency for Earth's defenses.

Could that mean he wanted to be able to scan fo them, so he'd know the best path to take to avoid them?

That actually makes Nero look a little smarter, and doesn't make Starfleet/UFP look stupid. It leaves their defense capabilities ambigious.

[Samuel]

Um, a point with the capture of Captain Pike.


Nero wanted the frequency for Earth's defenses.

Could that mean he wanted to be able to scan fo them, so he'd know the best path to take to avoid them?

That actually makes Nero look a little smarter, and doesn't make Starfleet/UFP look stupid. It leaves their defense capabilities ambigious.

The defenses of Earth have a frequency

Please tell me that was sarcasm- reality does not work that way. At the very least, even if it DID, they wouldn't leave one open so you could magically fly in an see everything- unless you can activate God-Mode in the Trek universe that way (thus explaining Kirk's rationale for his cheating )