Andrew Joshua Talon wrote:The Akira goes the right way, although you'll need many with many torps to actually scratch an ISD's shields. SF's best bet is to switch to small ships and to modify the hulls of the big ships to giant bombs.
Standard torps, yeah, but if we follow Wong's advice and boost the yeild on the torps (subspace compression of the warhead material would be a good start) to >100 MT, then we can actually start hurting the Imps without having to expend our entire inventory. Just modify all our ships to carry multiple launchers and we can do plenty of damage.
Your problem is you need to raise torpedo yields into the GT range before you are going to harm front-line warships larger than a Corellian Corvette. If you read through Mr Bean's low-end and mid-range calcs you'll note that shield systems in SW can be measured in the TT and PT range while weapons go from GT to TT range. In other words the best weapons in ST are at least 3 orders of magntiude too weak to make a serious dent in SW vessels. Tricks like "subspace compression" won't get you as good a set of results as two simple solutions:
1) Use denser matter: Sure deuterium is abundant enough but if you annihilate denser materials you get more energy per volume.
2) Shaped explosions: use good old 20th century tech to focus your energy yield on a smaller space which might help punch holes in Imperial shielding that might llow follwo on strikes to hit paydirt.
Another way would be taking some lessons from Andromeda: When firing torps in warp, Fed ships pass on a short-lived warp feild from their warp feild to the missile, sending it at the ship they're engaging (ST Encylopedia entry "photon torpedos") . Well, what if you threw your entire warp field into boosting your torps to Warp 9.9 while in normal space? A torp slamming into an Imperial Starship at 42 billion mps ("The 37s" VOY) is nothing to sneeze at.
Here's the problem. No ST vessel has EVER engaged a non-FTL target at FTL speeds even when it would be advantageous to do so ("Way of the Warrior" comes to mind). While the Picard Manuever would be a realisitc tactic (it has been used on multiple occasions) "Warp Straffing" does not exist. Moreso vessels moving at warp speeds do not have a correspondingly equal "real world" velocity. The velocity of the torpedo will nto change and it will never be granted amazing KE impact energies that are nto added to it to begin with. In other words moving at warp does not change your "non-warp" KE so that imapct velocity is a non-factor as the object won't be moving at warp anymore.
Additionally the Encyclopedia and TM are both unallowed material for most debates here. If you haven't heard th reason why just ask btu I will assume for the time being that you know that they are not allowed.
There are problems with this: Firing from long range allows the Imps FTL sensors to track the torp and possibly shoot it down. From short range, it would work only if A: The Fed ship squeezed off the shot fast enough before it would be blown to bits and B: The Fed ship got out of there before the blast got them. And aiming might be difficult, but it would at least eliminate the problem of boosting our warhead power.
Well it is a better tactic than stand-up dogfights but you still have to up your firepower or the ISD (or even a Neb-B) wiull simply shrug off your hits and keep on going.
The big, useless ships like Galaxies would be perfect as flying bombs, but it's not nessescary to drop them out of warp to ram into an ISD at 0.9c. Just fly them relatively near the ISDs at Warp 2 or so and they'll do plenty of damage. Even if they only graze the Imp it'll cause a pretty big boom.
The damaged caused will only be the equivalnet of their real-world KE plus roughly half the explosive power of the warp core (after you subtract the enegy neccessary for said core to disintegrate the ship). Moreso this assumes that an ISD won't simply outrun the /Galaxy/ in the other direciton since they have vastly superior straight line acceleration. It also assumes that a vessel on suicide course wouldn't be a huge target for disintegration by the ISD's (or other vessel) heavy weapons.
Yes, we could, but only if we failed to close the wormhole that brought the Empire to this galaxy in the first place. Flying bomb ships would probably be best for this: Anything traveling at about Warp 9 is difficult to stop, even with FTL sensors and especially if they're a lot of them. One good sized anti-matter explosion in the wormhole and the Imp forces already here are all we have to worry about for about seventy years ("The Search Part II" DS9)
Ummmm. You are assuming:
1) That the invasion route is via wormhole rather than just crossing intergalactic space
2) That the distance if they had to cross intergalactic would be such as to make the journey seventy years long.
Those two assumptions weigh very heavily towards unrealisitcs. Now the wormhole scenario is a common one but it isn't the only one and if you are relying on a wormhole defense then you implicitly agree that the AQ has no chance if the Empire is not constrained to a single avenue of approach.
