White Star vs Defiant

[Darth Wong]

No, but the ship's automatic weapon targeting system probably uses active sensors.

Oh, right. They can reconfigure every critical component on their ship from here to Hell and back, but they can't set their targeting system to lock onto a passive signal

Sorry, but "manual" has a definition, and you'll have to do better than idle speculation if you want to propose that it has a completely different meaning in Star Trek.

[Crossover_Maniac]

No, but the ship's automatic weapon targeting system probably uses active sensors.

Oh, right. They can reconfigure every critical component on their ship from here to Hell and back, but they can't set their targeting system to lock onto a passive signal

Those are Federation ships. That rule may or may not apply to Klingon ships.

Sorry, but "manual" has a definition, and you'll have to do better than idle speculation if you want to propose that it has a completely different meaning in Star Trek.

Sorry, but that was the only explanation I could come up with to explain why the Klingon sensors can detect the automatic weapons' lock but not the manual targeting. And yes, I know the definition of the word 'manual'.

[Darth Wong]

Sorry, but that was the only explanation I could come up with to explain why the Klingon sensors can detect the automatic weapons' lock but not the manual targeting. And yes, I know the definition of the word 'manual'.

No, there is also the conventional explanation, that Worf manually targeted the weapons ... you know, like he said he was doing. That would also result in no weapons lock, without having to go through some bizarre acrobatics of pretending that "manual" actually means "automatic, but with passive sensors".

[Alyeska]

Sorry, but that was the only explanation I could come up with to explain why the Klingon sensors can detect the automatic weapons' lock but not the manual targeting. And yes, I know the definition of the word 'manual'.

That was the same thing in Star Trek 2 when the Enterprise detected the Reliants phaser lock. There is a real world presedence to this. There are active targeting systems and passive targeting systems. You can set weapons to fire on the enemy and home in on their active emissions, or you can use active sensors of your own to target the enemy. They screwed up the definition of passive targeting when they called it manual, but the tactic itself is still sound.

[Darth Wong]

Of course the tactic is sound, but that doesn't mean you have any cause to say that it's what happened when they explicitly state otherwise. You'll need better evidence to disregard their description than a mere possibility.

[Alyeska]

Sorry, but that was the only explanation I could come up with to explain why the Klingon sensors can detect the automatic weapons' lock but not the manual targeting. And yes, I know the definition of the word 'manual'.

No, there is also the conventional explanation, that Worf manually targeted the weapons ... you know, like he said he was doing. That would also result in no weapons lock, without having to go through some bizarre acrobatics of pretending that "manual" actually means "automatic, but with passive sensors".

In Trek Manual targeting traditionally means that you must select the targets and fire the weapons yourself. You can not use the ships targeting systems for you. In other words you have to input the specific point you wish to fire on, then fire the weapon. Nemesis has clear examples of auto targeting and firing systems. Manual targeting means manual selection of the targets.

[Darth Wong]

In Trek Manual targeting traditionally means that you must select the targets and fire the weapons yourself. You can not use the ships targeting systems for you. In other words you have to input the specific point you wish to fire on, then fire the weapon. Nemesis has clear examples of auto targeting and firing systems. Manual targeting means manual selection of the targets.

Having to tell it where to shoot is manual targeting. Picking a target and letting it automatically aim is NOT manual targeting. And you seem to be confusing speculation with fact here.

[Alyeska]

In Trek Manual targeting traditionally means that you must select the targets and fire the weapons yourself. You can not use the ships targeting systems for you. In other words you have to input the specific point you wish to fire on, then fire the weapon. Nemesis has clear examples of auto targeting and firing systems. Manual targeting means manual selection of the targets.

Having to tell it where to shoot is manual targeting. Picking a target and letting it automatically aim is NOT manual targeting. And you seem to be confusing speculation with fact here.

IIRC the two examples of "manual" targeting is when they had to tell it where to shoot.

[Crossover_Maniac]

Sorry, but that was the only explanation I could come up with to explain why the Klingon sensors can detect the automatic weapons' lock but not the manual targeting. And yes, I know the definition of the word 'manual'.

No, there is also the conventional explanation, that Worf manually targeted the weapons ... you know, like he said he was doing. That would also result in no weapons lock, without having to go through some bizarre acrobatics of pretending that "manual" actually means "automatic, but with passive sensors".

I wasn't saying 'manual' means 'automatic, but with passive sensors'. What my theory was, the Klingon automatic targeting systems only uses active sensors.

[Ted C]

The White Stars have no shields. This could be a fatal weakness if the captain of the Defiant has the intelligence to--for instance--beam the White Star's crew into space.

Transporters have to be able to get a "lock" to be useful. The stealth system should foil that just as easily as any other targeting system.

[Ted C]

But could the Whitestar's armor absorb all the energy from the Defiant's pulse phasers or photon torpedoes? All that energy has to go somewhere. And remember, the Defiant is one of the few Starfleet ships that actually possesses armor. That armor has probably saved Sisko's skin on more than one occasion in the series.

The Whitestar's hull does not absorb energy; it reflects energy back to space.

[Ted C]

Conservation of energy does not exist in the B5 universe. One of the magic armors (I can't remember if it's on the Sharlin, White Star or the Defeat classes) is capable of dropping %80 of the energy from an energy weapon down a black hole marked 'JMS' scientific illiteracy.'

I remember that! They called it "refractive" armour and it was on the Excalibur! ROTFLMAO!!! JMS actually put pen to paper and wrote that the armour refracts 80% of the energy! I guess he didn't realize that refraction, as opposed to reflection, actually requires penetration ...[/quote]

It's the Victory-class, and I guess that gaff rates up there with the infamous "baryon sweep" from Trek.

This is one of those situations in which I assume the character got tongue-tied and meant to say "reflect".

[Alyeska]

The White Stars have no shields. This could be a fatal weakness if the captain of the Defiant has the intelligence to--for instance--beam the White Star's crew into space.

Transporters have to be able to get a "lock" to be useful. The stealth system should foil that just as easily as any other targeting system.

That is incorrect. Transporters need a lock in order to beam things out. You can still beam things in through interference of one sort or another.

[Ender]

The White Stars have no shields. This could be a fatal weakness if the captain of the Defiant has the intelligence to--for instance--beam the White Star's crew into space.

The whitestar does have shields

[Slartibartfast]

The White Stars have no shields. This could be a fatal weakness if the captain of the Defiant has the intelligence to--for instance--beam the White Star's crew into space.

Transporters have to be able to get a "lock" to be useful. The stealth system should foil that just as easily as any other targeting system.

That is incorrect. Transporters need a lock in order to beam things out.

Did you completely ignore the "beam the White Star's crew into space" part?

[Ender]

I vote for the Defiant. I usually go with 50 MT PT and 150 MT QTs for Trek, but even low end, it should win.

Lets go with the episode Night Terrors. The combinded weapons output of a GCS is suppossedly equal to a deflector beam trick after 6 hours of charging. Using Wong's numbers on the main reactor of 900 terawatts this works out to a total of 1.944E19 joules. Now based on quotes from two episodes and the number of phasers (there was a thread by HDS in STvSW about it, two seperate quotes that ended up putting the main array at 6 terawatts) you would get 60 terawatts. So subtract that, divide by 250 (for torpedoes) and convert to MT. You get 18.6 MT per torp. Now then the type 6 are 11% better then that, the QTs 2x better then that, and during the dominion war weapons got a 35% increase (as I was told according to a ST magazine quote, never saw it myself). So the QTs carried by a Defiant would be 55.7 MT. Enough to kill a Battle Crab, much less a Whitestar. And on top of that you have the pulse phasers, which are the strength of a GCS array, and 2 type eights. Ignoring NDF thats another 24 terrajoules per volley fron the PPCs and 3 terawatts for the phasers.

The only real advantages for the WS I see here are the stealth, and the fact taht the main gun is a beam weapon. Beams are should be more effective agaisnt ST shields because the frequency thing means some energy alsways gets though unabated (hence my theory on why phasers are superior to disruptors even though disruptors pack a bit more punch and have a faster fire rate). I mean, even if the armor learns to negate NDF (unlikely) there is still too much raw power there.

[Alyeska]

Transporters have to be able to get a "lock" to be useful. The stealth system should foil that just as easily as any other targeting system.

That is incorrect. Transporters need a lock in order to beam things out.

Did you completely ignore the "beam the White Star's crew into space" part?

You can always beam a bomb onboard.

[Ender]

I should also note the Defiant has far better weapons coverage and is smaller, though there is the extremely outside chance that the other weapons on the WS have some funky effect of the week on the ship. Speaking of which, I've never seen numbers on those. Anyone ever do any crunching on them?

[Master of Ossus]

I think the Defiant wins, although the Slave-1 could easily defeat them both.

[Brian Young]

This particular crossover battle has always left me undecided.

Whitestars carry Minbari fighters, which may or may not help with the battle? We know two critical points from "Meditations on the Abyss."
*Whitestars can carry at least four Minbari fighters.
*These fighters have a lot of firepower.

Those fighters are much less powerful than a Whitestar, and since I only have an upper limit on Whitestar firepower, we'll use these as a lower limit.
The fighters were vaporizing asteroids that were composed of "ice and solid rock." By my scaling of the fighters and asteroids, this requires anywhere from over 250 gigajoules (ice) to around 7 terajoules (iron) per asteroid, depending on composition. Energy delivered in fractions of a second.

Given the Enterprise shield limits demonstrated in "The Survivors," and this power level supported in "The Dauphin (entire ship can't generate a terawatt)," "Who Watches the Watchers (~4 gigawatts can power a phaser bank)," etc., even Minbari fighter weapons would have no difficulty with Federation shields. As Whitestars are larger and more powerful, Federation shields should not be an issue.

In fact, since ~4 gigawatts can power "a small phaser bank," Minbari fighter weapons deliver orders of magnitude greater firepower than that "small phaser bank." And they can really hit small targets consistently at high speed while making hard maneuvers.

So far, there is decent evidence that Whitestars have the advantage in firepower and accuracy.

Whitestars can withstand firepower from Earth and Shadow fighters while sustaining only minimal damage. How those compare to Minbari fighters is open to speculation, but B5Wars says that Earthforce Thunderbolts have comparable firepower to Minbari fighters. That is difficult to believe given the asteroid incident mentioned above. But if even Shadow fighters come anywhere close to Minbari fighters, Whitestars are possibly more resilient than the Defiant too. At least from certain types of weapons.

Whitestars are quick enough to evade slow-moving shots from Shadow fighters. The Defiant is quick too, but can it actually evade enemy fire? Note from the Lakota, we know that.

To sum up,
*Trek phasers don't compare favorably to even Minbari fighters, much less Whitestars.
*Whitestars can withstand fire from weapons which may, or may not be comparable to those mentioned above.
*Despite their size, Whitestars can actally evade some types of energy weapons. Probably torpedoes too.
So, Whitestars do appear to have certain advantages in this particular matchup.

Slave1 could beat them both easily.

[Sea Skimmer]

The Defiant might not hit shit with its pulse phasers, and the torpedo guidance makes the Stagger look accurate. But the beam phasers do okay, and a few hits would be fatal to the Whitestar.

[Sektor31]

I'd go with the Whitestar.

Stealth may not be calibrated to reflect subspace sensors, but the 'star is damn FAST! Agility plus the regenerating hull and all its firepower would fry the Defiant, no matter how many weapons the tough little ship has.

Also, the Whitestar could open a jump point on the Defiant, easy kill.

BTW, Whitestars do have shields. They reflect energy at a set amount, and if the weapon's intensity is higher than the shield power level, the weapon goes through.

[Sektor31]

BTW, what is Slave-1? Fett's ship?

[Crown]

BTW, what is Slave-1? Fett's ship?

Yep.

[Master of Ossus]

In Trek Manual targeting traditionally means that you must select the targets and fire the weapons yourself. You can not use the ships targeting systems for you. In other words you have to input the specific point you wish to fire on, then fire the weapon. Nemesis has clear examples of auto targeting and firing systems. Manual targeting means manual selection of the targets.

Having to tell it where to shoot is manual targeting. Picking a target and letting it automatically aim is NOT manual targeting. And you seem to be confusing speculation with fact here.

IIRC the two examples of "manual" targeting is when they had to tell it where to shoot.

That is supported by Picard's actions in "Yesterday's Enterprise," when Picard takes over the tactical station after Riker is killed. Darth Wong is correct, though, so far as that picking a target and letting the weapon aim for you is not considered manual targeting.