How many Eclipse Super Star Destroyers to take Culture GOU

[ChosenOne54]

A fairly simple match that occurred to me recently. How many fully-armed Eclipse class Super Star Destroyers are required to defeat a single Culture GOU, Excession era?

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

A transfinite number. Culture ships run on a version of physics that opens up possibilities that most other universes simply do not have and are not remotely capable of dealing with.

Effectors are a monstrous violation of nonlocality, which the overwhelming majority of universes including the apparently real one cannot support; the grid- and thus the gridfire- is peculiar to the Banksverse and so most other universes simply have no answer for it.

They can submerge in hyperspace and evade all things not peculiar to the Banksverse, dodge and attack from an unreachable point indefinitely.

Culture Minds, also, if I remember Consider Phlebas rightly, use funky hyperspace for their memory coils- something else that cannot be interacted with by most universes.


So, basically, if they get all their demonstrated abilities, they're unbeatable by anyone without an infinite improbability drive really, or some seriously wierd cosmic architecture; on the other hand, if forced to play by other people's rules (and this was a plot point, it was the reason for the race to rescue in the first book)- being essentially impossible they should tend to fall apart into a dissociated heap of particles.

Getting all the demonstrated abilities is SOP for versus debates though, so the answer is some variation on it can't be done, or as many as it takes to support a population large enough to evolve to the point where they can invent matching technology, or as many as it takes to find and make a deal with the Gallifreyans, take your pick.

[Darth Hoth]

Some guy in a fairly recent thread (a couple of months ago, or so) told me that effectors use force-fields fine enough to manipulate even small numbers of photons and electrons at a distance to cause their effects. If so, they would have a component that other universes' energy shield/whatever might conceivably block out. I have only his word on that, however, not having read the book in question where they are described in detail.

The other stuff still holds in any case, of course. To which might be added sub-microsecond reaction times and teleported munitions, among further advantages.

The problem with the Culture for most high-end sci-fi factions is not their mere brute force, but all the "cheats" they employ. They are big, dumb planetoids with Earth-wrecking weapons, but more than that, they have all the nifty technobabble ECR listed above, which is the real game winner. A ship like Dahak from the Weberverse can probably put out as much or more raw energy as Culture ships regularly throw around (since it was able to vaporise planets), for example. Yet Dahak would be helpless against their hyper-dimensional attacks. While its own shields would probably not stop the Culture's transporter-bomb spamming. The same would be true for a Death Star, but even more so; its power generation would most likely be more impressive than the Culture usually manages with ships of similar size, but it would stand a snowball's chance actually hitting anything with its beams.

About the "hardest" thing I can think of that would be able to take down Culture warships would be a Valeron-class planetoid from "Doc" Smith's old Skylark series, and that only because their own cheats are equally absurd. (A lot of their tech actually reads like a prototype for Culture stuff in places, although obviously with significant differences.) Any series without that kind of really exotic technobabble stands no hope of victory at all.

[ChosenOne54]

Since ECR mentioned Gallifreyans, how would, say a 103 or 105 War Tardis fare against the GOU?

[Parallax]

We do not have enough information on WarTARDISes to even begin to make a valid comparison.

[Stark]

Since ECR mentioned Gallifreyans, how would, say a 103 or 105 War Tardis fare against the GOU?

How about you give us some hard information about the capabilites of these wonderous devices? Let's talk about 'time torpedoes' first, and not 'my my the EU authors are amazingly unimaginative aren't they' doesn't count!

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

What there is is summarised here- http://www.whoniverse.net/tardis/, for what good it does. All so far in the clouds it's difficult to get a grip of, never mind a hard analysis.

[inviz345]

time war daleks could defeat the culture, but it a stomp for the culture

[evilsoup]

If it's a time war-era TARDIS, then that would presumably mean that the crew won't care about time paradoxes/crossing their own timelines. It has been demonstrated in the show that the Time Lords have this ability, even the Doctor's rickety, obsolete old TARDIS can be rigged to allow major paradoxes: I would assume that these 'war TARDISes' have some of these features built in.

If my assumption is true, then there are no limits to the Time Lords vs. any non-time travellers, and it is therefore a curbstomp. Well, not even a curbstomp: that would imply that there is an enemy to fight in the first place.

[Sriad]

If you define "defeat" as "cause to run out of ammo and go resupply" and suppose the Eclipse-fleets shields would protect them from Effectors the answer is probably in the low thousands--high end Culture weaponry is mostly munitions based. Gridfire could take out a lot, but it's basically a titanic distortion of hyperspace and would be detectable once the Eclipse fleet knew what to look for. Gridfire is agonizingly slow by Culture combat standards; it takes several seconds to create an incursion. On high alert it's reasonable (ok, ok... "plausible". I'm being inclined to generosity here.) to think it's avoidable.

The real problem (at least IMHO) with Culture vs. X is that their high level tech is run by weakly godlike AIs, with all the nansecond reaction times and nigh-perfect tactics that implies. Even if the GOU had to personally drop out of hyperspace to engage mere light-seconds from the opponent it could launch its attack, jump back into hyperspace, and repeat several hundred times in the time it took the visual stimulus from the first attack to travel from the Eclipse-class ship's meat-bag gunners' eyes to their brains.

It's reasonable to say that tactics employed against hyperspace-traveling ships would theoretically work on a GOU, whether it's pulling it out of hyperspace or engaging it there; what's unusual about Cultureverse hyperspace is just that there are two kinds: one "above" the metaphorical rubber-sheet of 3D space-time, and another "below". If the GOU just floated in hyperspace and let it happen an Interdictor could yank it back into 3-space (and probably fuck with the Mind's 4D components a bit) but the key-word there is "let".

[Starglider]

It's reasonable to say that tactics employed against hyperspace-traveling ships would theoretically work on a GOU, whether it's pulling it out of hyperspace or engaging it there; what's unusual about Cultureverse hyperspace is just that there are two kinds: one "above" the metaphorical rubber-sheet of 3D space-time, and another "below". If the GOU just floated in hyperspace and let it happen an Interdictor could yank it back into 3-space (and probably fuck with the Mind's 4D components a bit) but the key-word there is "let".

Culture GCUs can hover in the photosphere of a star and isolated Culture Minds have no problem existing in planetary gravity wells. For reference the surface gravity of the Sun is 28g. Unless an Interdictor produces a gravity well a lot stronger than that - and AFAIK they only mimic 'planetary' gravity wells - I don't think they're going to be relevant. Also while the description of Culture hyperspace is a bit vague, I don't get the impression that the influence of gravity extends any further into hyperspace than electromagnetism does.

[Sriad]

It's reasonable to say that tactics employed against hyperspace-traveling ships would theoretically work on a GOU, whether it's pulling it out of hyperspace or engaging it there; what's unusual about Cultureverse hyperspace is just that there are two kinds: one "above" the metaphorical rubber-sheet of 3D space-time, and another "below". If the GOU just floated in hyperspace and let it happen an Interdictor could yank it back into 3-space (and probably fuck with the Mind's 4D components a bit) but the key-word there is "let".

Culture GCUs can hover in the photosphere of a star and isolated Culture Minds have no problem existing in planetary gravity wells. For reference the surface gravity of the Sun is 28g. Unless an Interdictor produces a gravity well a lot stronger than that - and AFAIK they only mimic 'planetary' gravity wells - I don't think they're going to be relevant. Also while the description of Culture hyperspace is a bit vague, I don't get the impression that the influence of gravity extends any further into hyperspace than electromagnetism does.

Remember: "let".

But looking at Wookieepedia you're right; the gravity well projectors the Empire could broadly deploy "simulate the gravity shadow of a planet". It's only Galactic Artifact level tech like Centerpoint Station that might be able to deploy fields large/strong enough to actually trouble anything but a totally complacent GOU or damage the hyperspatial components of a Mind.

Electromagnetism propagates through hyperspace just fine; Effectors wouldn't work otherwise. I'm pretty sure objects cast hyperspatial gravity shadows, but can't cite an exact example... The Mind that projected itself through hyperspace into the tunnels in Consider Phlebus impressed everyone at the time and I think that's largely due to extremely high precision travel under bad conditions through a gravity shadow. 800+ year-old tech of course, but I'm looking at theory. Gravity doesn't extend peculiarly far from the skein into hyperspace, only what would be expected. I'm not sure if "expected" is a ^2 or ^3 function. There's probably something revealed more explicitly on the subject in Matter with all the 4D shell world infodumps, but I haven't read that one since it was published.

Anyway I'm MOSTLY putting this forward as a counter to the idea that Culture Ships sitting in their special version of hyperspace are untouchable... If you can mess with spacetime's topology or engage in 4D movement you can get at them even though you'll probably still lose very very badly.

[Darth Hoth]

According to WEG, the gravity projectors of the original Interdictor cruiser could produce the effective mass of a larger-than-average star:

When in operation, the gravity well generator emits waves of energy which disrupt mass lines in realspace, thus simulating the presence of a large stellar body. The presence of so much mass prevents ships from engaging hyperdrive engines. Any ship unfortunate enough to pass close to such a gravity shadow is forced to cut to realspace, occasionally suffering severe damage.

[ . . . ] By waiting outside an area of combat, the Interdictor positions itself to fire its gravity waves so that it can disrupt escape attempts of enemy craft. After it is positioned, the cruiser projects fields of gravity throughout a battle zone, rendering all hyperspace-capable ships impotent when trying to jump to lightspeed.

There were also some obscure early books (such as Scavenger Hunt, famous for being cited on Saxton's site) which showed that gravity projectors could be super-charged; in that book, Rebels jury-rigged one to produce a black hole. Now, one might not want to take that too seriously, but against the Culture one might as well bring out everything, including the kitchen sink.