SolidSnake wrote:I might be the only one here who will say this, but it's a good 3 in 1 target for EA and ISA gun crews.
How many ships? 100?
Come on, SS.
Prometheus would tear
Excalibur a new
asshole. Check the website in my sig, and go to the ISA section
(top right of the home page). "Offensive capabilities" is what you
want.
I also respectfully disagree with everyone's objections to the
Prometheus. The splitting up idea is rather stupid, but the idea was for
a *single* ship to attain extreme warp velocities with the three warp
cores running, in addition to the whole one core per section in combat
thing.
That's the trouble with simply building three smaller ships. They can't
integrate and combine warp power to go a lot faster, so they don't have
the response time
Prometheus could. Their weapons might be
comparable, though even that's questionable. The separate sections'
power feeds could top off each section's phasers prior to separation (as
in storing the energy in a battery), giving each section an initial burst
of power otherwise unavailable had they been required to generate
the phaser energy alone.
Thus, you could be looking at not just three times a respectable phaser
power, but as much as *nine* times, given that each section could
potentially receive power from three cores as described above.
That would go a LONG way in explaining why
Prometheus
easily disabled a
Nebula-class ship and a Warbird with a handful
of shots. Comparably-armed ships, like
Defiant v.
Lakota,
can remain in battle for several minutes.
Granted, that's purely speculative, but it makes sense on the latter
count, and *would* explain why the SF engineers would pick such
an otherwise weird ship. Better that than simply assume they're dumb,
anyway.
Also, I think the idea of launching fighters would be a very poor substitute for
Prometheus. It took WAVES of fighters to begin to damage
Cardassian
Galors in "Sacrifice of Angels," yet in the same episode
(and effectively twice in "The Wounded"), a GCS blows a
Galor'sshields away almost instantly.
Now, you figure that a
Galaxy doesn't have NEAR the phaser power of
Prometheus, and the rest is pretty easy to figure out. The fighters
simply don't have the power to do capship levels of damage. Only a truly massive carrier with hundreds of fighters might have the potential of
far outstripping the PCS's performance in "MIAB"; but even then, your
carrier automatically loses because its mass would keep it very, very
slow. (There is a definitive link between the mass of a ship and its
top warp speeds; e.g., Annorax's time ship was limited to warp six
because of its mass in "Year of Hell.") The whole point of the PCS
isn't merely to surround your enemy with lots of little sections; it's supposed to be a fast attack cruiser, with sheer firepower and unmatched threat-response time. In seeking a lesser priority (a fighter carrier
and its fast warp prohibitive mass), you eschew the true value of the
ship.
