The Garden of Kadesh in the Delta Quadrant

[WesFox13]

Hey all, I just had a good idea of a scenario. By an act of Q or some other omnipotent entity, the entirety of the Kadeshi nebula is displaced to a spot in the Delta Quadrant in the STverse. The Kadeshi have all of their needle motherships and all of their vessels intact, including the ones that were destroyed by the Kushan Mothership fleet. Let say one of these two scenarios occurs.

-The USS Voyager investigates the new nebula that has appeared.

-A Borg Cube accidentally travels into the nebula and soon the Queen losses contact with the cube once it goes inside the nebula.

What happens?

[SirNitram]

Honestly? The Borg are fucked. Kadeshi fighters are insane. They've got decent acceleration, and are much smaller than Federation ships, and very maneuverable. I don't recall the exact acceleration, but the ability to do the flip-turn and their tiny size means Borg vessels will have almost no chance to hit(They missed the slow turn the E-D made, after all). Additionally, all their munitions are kinetic rounds. The needleships ion cannon might be adaptable to, but the ramming attack they perform will be absurdly effective against the flimsy superstructure of most Cubes.

[Junghalli]

Homeworld Shipyards puts the acceleration of the Kadesh Swarmer at 1000 m/s^2, which while pretty fast for a realistic spacecraft is a tenth the max accel of the E-E going off the SDN Federation Propulsion page (1000 G/10,000 m/s^2).

http://shipyards.relicnews.com/kadesh/swarmer.htm

Of course, that could just be game mechanics, I won't pretend to be an authority on this.

[Stark]

Yeah, they probably used absurd numbers like 'the mothership is 30km tall' to get that shit.

[SirNitram]

Homeworld Shipyards puts the acceleration of the Kadesh Swarmer at 1000 m/s^2, which while pretty fast for a realistic spacecraft is a tenth the max accel of the E-E going off the SDN Federation Propulsion page (1000 G/10,000 m/s^2).

http://shipyards.relicnews.com/kadesh/swarmer.htm

Of course, that could just be game mechanics, I won't pretend to be an authority on this.

The Fed Propulsion page is pretty out of date, honestly. Conundrum suggests a Full Impulse being around 100m/s^2.

[MJ12 Commando]

Yeah, they probably used absurd numbers like 'the mothership is 30km tall' to get that shit.

No, if they did the acceleration numbers would be about... 5 or 10 times higher, I believe. I don't have HW with me right now so I can't confirm, but the "official" scaling is that the MS is in the single digit kilometers tall.

[Stark]

Even that's probably a bit generous, but back in the 90s (when scifi debating was for Real Men lol) i heard ridiculous numbers for the mothership from all quarters.

Frankly, trying to get acceleration numbers from a game with top speeds is a very strange idea. But hey, most scifi debators just want to inflate their capabilities as much as they can...

[Darth Smiley]

I think that really depends on whether or not the hyperspace inhibitors on the Kadesh ships can stop the Borg or Voyager from simply going to warp. The Kadesh are not going to chase them out of the Garden.

That said, if they do than it's trouble for both of them.

For this I go to http://shipyards.relicnews.com/index.html - the values are pulled from the game's source files.

Both the Kadesh Swarmers and Advanced Swarmers have accelerations of 1,000 m/s^2, with a "max speed" of 1,500 m/s. Max Speed is just a silly game play mechanic, that can be best described as the maximum a ship is willing to go in a combat environment without experiencing degradation in their ability to dodge enemy fire.

In terms of weaponry, Swarmers and Advanced Swarmers mount two and four 'small' mass driver cannons respectively, which can fire a shot with a range of 2.5 km every .15 seconds. Here's where we go off into speculationville.



Swarmers mass 40 tons, and Advance Swarmers mass 50 ( assuming 1 ton = 907.2 kg ). They don't have that much fuel or ammo, as they are expected to be close to their support ships at all times. So we can say that perhaps 5% of their mass is ammo. Again, we don't know how many rounds that is (the game doesn't keep count of ammo), but from experience I know that Swarmers don't last more than a few minutes in combat - five is a good upper limit. Given a fire rate of ( 1 shot / 0.15 seconds * 1 gun ) * 300 seconds * 2 guns = 90 shots. Assuming if we assume five percent mass, then (40 tons * 907.2 kg/ton * .05 ) / 90 shots = 20 kg/shot. A range of 2.5 km is the stated range, but of course a mass driver round, in reality, keeps going until it hits something. Thus 2.5 km is probably the range at which a projectile can hit a fighter taking evasive action. In game terms this means it takes about 1/4 of a second to travel 2.5 km, so the muzzle velocity of our projectile is 10,000 m/s. Using Nyrath's Atomic Rockets to double check my physics, (10,000 m/s)^2 * 20 kg * .5 = 1e9 joules per shot. There's a shot coming every about 6 times a second per ship, and there will undoubtedly be more than one ship. They don't call these things Swarmers for no reason. If Voyager is attacked by two fuel pods and 12 Swarmers, then it would be pelted by 7.2e10 joules per second.

I haven't been able to find much about how well ST shields stop kinetic attacks, so it may not even scratch Voyager's surface. I also can't get a consistent answer on sublight speeds for ST, so if someone has definite stats, please post them and the source.

As to how the diplomacy would go....

JANEWAY: We are Peaceful Explorers, who....
KADESH AMBASSADOR: This is the Garden of Kadesh. For thirteen generations we have protected it from the unclean. The Turanic Raiders who came before you refused to join and were punished for this trespass. Like theirs, your ship has already defiled this holy place. If you have come to join we welcome you and will spare your ship until all have disembarked. If you have come to consume the garden you will be removed at once. What are your intentions?
JANEWAY: I'm sure we can come to some kind of understanding. We are not going to give up our ship. If you don't want to deal, we'll just leave.
KADESH AMBASSADOR: If you will not join, then die. There is no withdrawal from the Garden.
*cool space battle begins*

OR

BORG:We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.
KADESH: Funny. We were just about to say the same thing to you.
*cool space battle begins*

[Beowulf]

1e9J is a decent amount of energy. It's still only about 1 ton of TNT equivalent, though. This is quite a bit short of what we know ST is capable of defending against.

[Darth Smiley]

1e9 is one shot from one Swarmer - the smallest fighter in the game.

In the Kadesh levels, those things come at you in massive waves - and you still haven't gotten into the really nasty weapons, the multi-beam frigates. Or the getting rammed by the needle mothership (which, in game, can an does plow through practically anything, save your own mothership)

Link the fucking large images

Go on. Harvest my Garden. Lets see how long you last.

[MJ12 Commando]

1e9J is a decent amount of energy. It's still only about 1 ton of TNT equivalent, though. This is quite a bit short of what we know ST is capable of defending against.

There is the ability to kamikaze.

At 100 Gs and a constant acceleration for 20 seconds, you get a 4 kiloton kamikaze fighter.

It's not great but it's not BAD either. :p

[Stark]

Christ. Next they'll be saying they can build another fighter every 5s and expect to be taken seriously.

Get this: the game mechanics are explictly non-newtonian. That makes them pretty much useless. The units used in the game data can *say* they're meters all they want, but ingame scaling had better bear that out or it gets ignored.

I think saying 'oh the files say 100G which I'll keep, but then cap speed at 1.5km/s which I'll ignore' is retarded. Piling a bunch of baseless assumptions (lol 5% volume for ammo lol I say 90 shots cause I can lol) onto dubious or outright broken numbers then proudly proclaiming 'look, shit firepower' just makes my brain hurt. Building arguments on game mechanics is always retarded, but taking numbers and running like that is exactly why I find Homeworld fans so irritating.

I mean, you're left with fighters that AT BEST can kamikaze for 4kT if you accept a bunch of assumptions. Ooooooh.

[Junghalli]

Well, 1000 m/s^2 acceleration and subkiloton tac nuke level firepower isn't that outrageous by the standards of pop SF. It's not like Homeworld gives you much else to go on IIRC.

[Stark]

Yeah, nobody's saying they're rubbish: just that blindly taking game mechanics, ignoring half of them, then adding assumptions to get 'numbers' is dumb.

[Junghalli]

Yeah, nobody's saying they're rubbish: just that blindly taking game mechanics, ignoring half of them, then adding assumptions to get 'numbers' is dumb.

Well, we can probably safely eliminate the stated delta V ("maximum speed") but not the stated acceleration because the latter makes some kind of sense and the former doesn't. I mean a ship with 1.5 km/s delta V would be kind of useless. Who actually designs a ship with only enough fuel for .75 seconds of acceleration (1.5 if the pilot is willing to have "destination: void" stamped on his ticket)? At 1.5 km/s delta V a Swarmer couldn't even escape orbit of an Earthlike planet.

[Stark]

No, I think that's broken. The non-newtonian nature of the game means all propulsion data is suspect: taking this to mean 'their max speed is 1.5s of acceleration ERGO they only have thrust for 1.5s' is, frankly, stupid. They can stop, you know.

Turns out game mechanics are pretty useless, especially for non-newtonian games. They even burn their engines all the time! They burn fuel when they move!

[Junghalli]

No, I think that's broken. The non-newtonian nature of the game means all propulsion data is suspect: taking this to mean 'their max speed is 1.5s of acceleration ERGO they only have thrust for 1.5s' is, frankly, stupid. They can stop, you know.

Beats me, I never played the game. I was just trying to wrestle something approximating sense from the numbers on that site, cause I don't know anything else to go on.

Turns out game mechanics are pretty useless, especially for non-newtonian games. They even burn their engines all the time! They burn fuel when they move!

Well I can't disagree with that. Either way the "maximum speed" is crazy.

[MJ12 Commando]

Christ. Next they'll be saying they can build another fighter every 5s and expect to be taken seriously.

Get this: the game mechanics are explictly non-newtonian. That makes them pretty much useless. The units used in the game data can *say* they're meters all they want, but ingame scaling had better bear that out or it gets ignored.

I think saying 'oh the files say 100G which I'll keep, but then cap speed at 1.5km/s which I'll ignore' is retarded. Piling a bunch of baseless assumptions (lol 5% volume for ammo lol I say 90 shots cause I can lol) onto dubious or outright broken numbers then proudly proclaiming 'look, shit firepower' just makes my brain hurt. Building arguments on game mechanics is always retarded, but taking numbers and running like that is exactly why I find Homeworld fans so irritating.

I mean, you're left with fighters that AT BEST can kamikaze for 4kT if you accept a bunch of assumptions. Ooooooh.

Alternatively, you look into the game files, IIRC the mass drivers are named for the kilo/megatonnage they're supposed to have... or something. The .bigs are... interesting.

There's also the fact that Somtaaw built and designed two 600,000+ ton vessels in 45 days, which gives a minimum fabrication rate of 0.3 tons/second. This is assuming that R&D did not take up most of that cycle and they immediately started building both as soon as they had access.

With that the Mothership PDA can replace, low-end, a 50 ton fighter in approximately 2.8 MINUTES. This fits with the HW:C manual stating that missile destroyers construct missiles in the field past their initial combat load of 32 missiles.

[Stark]

Yeah, because 'writers intent' is worth so much in the face of contradictory evidence, right?

Thanks for confirming my expectations of Homeworld debates, though. Remember, game mechanics don't count... unless they make your side awesome! In that case they're okay and the preferred source!

[MJ12 Commando]

Yeah, because 'writers intent' is worth so much in the face of contradictory evidence, right?

Thanks for confirming my expectations of Homeworld debates, though. Remember, game mechanics don't count... unless they make your side awesome! In that case they're okay and the preferred source!

The Headshot asteroid had to be destroyed within a fairly usable amount of time, whether by fragmentation or other methods. Considering just how large it was, I believe ion beams were calced at mt/second ability. These calcs are actually *lower* than that.

Junghalli's calcs are probably about right. It's stated the fighter-caliber guns in HW1 have a velocity of nearly 10 km/s in the manual and larger gauss weapons have higher possible firepower.

Now, Swarmers/Advanced Swarmers have more firepower than scouts, but they're in the same order of magnitude.

[Stark]

Sadly, calculations based on hitpoints are always going to be dodgey, just like powerplant or maneuver estimates based on non-newtonian physics. Like I said before, I'm not saying the Homeworld guys suck: just that blindly accepting the nonsensical game mechanics and data files is stupid.

At least Halo has the advantage of novels with higher canonicity than the games. Homeworld has nothing, and gleefully cherrypicking data to get the best 'numbers' is just dishonest. I personally consider most games too inconsistent for quantification.

Then again, apparently many people accept the laughably inaccurate FS2 tech room fluff over the ingame performance.

[SirNitram]

Frankly, I don't particularly care about the ingame mechanics. The swarmers have the following properties:

Kinetic weaponry. ST shields and hulls suck ass against this, Borg doubly so. Whether it's single ton of TNT or whatever, they spit it out in volleys that will do unpleasant things to any ship they find.

Maneuverability. They are surprisingly agile based on visuals, even in the cutscenes.

Armour. You know, that thing phasers tend to suck ass against.

Sheer. Fucking. Numbers. Trek very rarely goes up against anything so damnably tiny, and rarely in such numbers. They certainly have trouble tracking small craft.

So basically, the Kadesh will tear up the ST ships, for the simple fact that not only are Swarmers the worst opponents Trek could face, they're in an enviroment that plays to all the observed weaknesses of ST sensors and other systems.

[CaptJodan]

Yeah, because 'writers intent' is worth so much in the face of contradictory evidence, right?

Thanks for confirming my expectations of Homeworld debates, though. Remember, game mechanics don't count... unless they make your side awesome! In that case they're okay and the preferred source!

I'm genuinely curious, Stark. If game mechanics and .shp files can't give you any useful data, and you discount cutscenes because they don't jive with the in-game mechanics, what, if anything, do you use to try and quantify HW? Or are you saying it just shouldn't be tried because of the inherent contradictions?

For me, (with no official standing whatsoever on the issue) I'd put cutscene canon above pretty much anything we see in-game, and work from there.

[SirNitram]

Cutscenes are generally the best idea; game mechanics are for playability, and the manuals can be absurdly wrong. It is made worse by Relic never putting forth a cohesive Canon policy, save for one quote, that might just be a figment of my deranged imagination, and in either case I can't find anymore.

It depends on how to do it. By cutscenes, we have things like a Swarmer going to zero relative to another ship in a second, and thrusting sideways despite no visible vent. By manual, the half-a-million-tons Somtaaw command carrier was built in just 15 days in the Mothership's PDA. Or one could be stupid and just rant that nothing should be taken.

[Darth Smiley]

Sadly, calculations based on hitpoints are always going to be dodgey, just like powerplant or maneuver estimates based on non-newtonian physics. Like I said before, I'm not saying the Homeworld guys suck: just that blindly accepting the nonsensical game mechanics and data files is stupid.

Funny.....

Sadly, calculations based on dialog are always going to be dodgey, just like powerplant or maneuver estimates based on special effects. Like I said before, I'm not saying the Star Trek guys suck: just that blindly accepting the nonsensical visuals and scripts is stupid.

Any science fiction debate is going to run into contradictory evidence or simply wrong science. Homeworld is no less guilty. I am simply trying to get some kind of standard for comparison in real world units.

I'll agree that any calculations are order of magnitude estimates at best. sketchy, but it is the only thing to go on. No movies, no novels, just the game and the manuals. The projectile mass, acceleration, and muzzle velocity are just guesses. But they are what is most supported by the game and the manuals, and in absence of an other information, I think the it is reasonable to conclude that that HW fighter kinetic weapons dish out approximately 1e9 joules, give or take an order of magnitude or two.

So basically, the Kadesh will tear up the ST ships, for the simple fact that not only are Swarmers the worst opponents Trek could face, they're in an enviroment that plays to all the observed weaknesses of ST sensors and other systems.

Indeed. I'd forgotten about the nebula. The ST ships can't do jack without a sensor lock, and I don't think the Kadesh are going to obligingly stand still and wait for that to happen. Unless, of course, the ST ship can harness the power of technobabble to 'recalibrate' the sensors.