Stormie armor vs Jem Hadar weapons

[Praxis]

This morning I saw "Blaze of Glory", a DS9 episode. There were a few surprising things. First of all, Eddington plotted a spiral course around a plasma burst with 5 button presses. Rather efficient computer there.

More importantly was the ending. Michael Eddington gets shot by a Jem Hadar, and it does less damage than a modern-day bullet. He stumbles and gets up and hides behind a couple boxes. The boxes completely deflect the volley of fire from three Jem Hadar. After hiding and firing sporadically, he decides to go out in a blaze of glory and charges the Jem Hadar. They shoot him SIX TIMES (that's 7 hits total), full on in the chest, and he falls over, sits for a minute, whispers his wife's name, and dies. Between the time of the Jem Hadar final volley of 6 shots, and the time he dies, I counted 15 seconds. This indicates PATHETIC Jem Hadar weapons yield (though they have a nice rapid-fire mode).

If a guy wearing a couple rags takes seven hits to die, and still dies slowly, shouldn't an armored stormtrooper be able to survive at least a dozen hits? Maybe two?

How many Jem Hadar would it take to bring down a stormtrooper in a firefight?

[Gandalf]

I think Eddington's survival can be chalked up to some sort of heroic last stand syndrome. (Think Boromir in FoTR.)

[Praxis]

True, but do you remember the Seige of Ar559?
Nog gets hit in the lower leg, and it isn't even severed. In fact, all it does is damage some neural tissue- the doctor had to amputate the leg. You'd expect that a good weapon would at least have enough power to small a scrawny Ferengi's lower leg...

[Gandalf]

True, but in What You Leave Behind a Cardassian guard is downed in one shot.

A pistol lifted from a Jem' Hadar vapourises in one shot in In Purgatory's Shadow.

[Kamakazie Sith]

In short Praxis it's called variable settings. The same reason why blasters didn't blow some imperial officers into bloody giblits in ANH.

[Sarevok]

But the Jemhader were stupid. They should have set their weapons to max yield to take out the boxes and kill Eddington.

[Drooling Iguana]

They're a Star Trek "warrior race". What did you expect?

[Darth Wong]

But the Jemhader were stupid. They should have set their weapons to max yield to take out the boxes and kill Eddington.

What makes you think they could take out the boxes even on max-yield? There are certain materials in Trek which seem to be virtually immune to the effect of phasers.

[Gil Hamilton]

A Jem'hedar hit Judzia Dax in the stomache once and she survived it, even though that's where her worm keeps itself. In fact, the major problem wasn't shock or shear organ damage, but blood loss, and she managed for quite awhile without any real first aid.

[Gandalf]

A Jem'hedar hit Judzia Dax in the stomache once and she survived it, even though that's where her worm keeps itself. In fact, the major problem wasn't shock or shear organ damage, but blood loss, and she managed for quite awhile without any real first aid.

Plus the weapons has an anti-coagulant attached or some such. I thought it clever.

[Terr Fangbite]

I find it so pathetic that people fear the jem'hedar. Yah their weapons seem to do variable fire, but when most of the time, the best they have is a vap in one episode, then an anti-coagulant in the rest, its a nifty ability, but hardly worth worrying about. I learned in basic first aide that if you can't stop the bleeding by a compress, to either use a tournaquet (not useful to a stomach blow) or to cauterize the wound with a hot iron or something. The only thing which may be worrysome is if the blast went deep, but all the wounds seem primarily surface and easy to stop without resorting to some fancy medkit.The cloak ability is also good, but only to people who must rely totally on sight.
For storm troopers, from what I see the armor could probably take a direct hit, maybe a few before the stormtrooper goes down. That is unless the armor is comparable to packing crates where he could waltz with his companion into the midst of the jem'hedar, while taking hundreds of attacks, and have time to bore the jem'hedar to tears. The only episode I ever saw a packing crate get pierced was in DS9, where quark gets the inheritence of..... Morn or something (the quiet guy in the bar all the time). And then it was a non-standard weapon.

[Vympel]

In the episode "Rocks & Shoals" the stranded Jem'Hadar are running out of "the white" - in the end, their Vorta sends them on a suicide mission at Sisko's people so they can all be killed and he can be taken into custody (after their more capable engineers repair a comms device) rather than having them go berserk from lack of ketracel and kill him, Sisko & Co, and each other.

The lack of white makes them less effective combatants (i.e. firing when the order was given not too)- at the same time this happens, their leader (the Jem'Hadar third, not the Vorta) questions his men as to whehter they can cloak- they can't. Why not? Do they need white for this?

What are the Jem'Hadar weapons anyway?

[Gandalf]

The lack of white makes them less effective combatants (i.e. firing when the order was given not too)- at the same time this happens, their leader (the Jem'Hadar third, not the Vorta) questions his men as to whehter they can cloak- they can't. Why not? Do they need white for this?

If the inability to shroud can be linked to the lack of white, perhaps it requires a great deal of concentration to operate? That's my theory anyway.

[Praxis]

I really don't know why people fear the Jem Hadar.

I'd fear the Jemmies in hand to hand combat, but in a firefight? Would I fear people with pathetic weaponry, who run screaming into battle, making themselves obvious targets? No.

[Grand Admiral Thrawn]

Because usually the people Jem'Hadar fight are civilians the Dominion is pissed at.

[Master of Ossus]

Given that stormtrooper armor integrity is not even compromised by a spear travelling at about 500 mph, I kind of doubt that anything that wouldn't punch through a packing crate would even do damage to it. The Jemmies' only chance against stormtroopers would be to score hits along the body suit.

[Grand Admiral Thrawn]

When did a Stormtrooper get hit by a 500mph spear???

[Kazuaki Shimazaki]

When did a Stormtrooper get hit by a 500mph spear???

The math in all its blazing glory near the bottom

In the case of the spear-throwing incident, the tiny nick on the armour indicates that it is much stronger and tougher than the metallic spear, otherwise there should have been more damage. The human brain can withstand up to 300 G's of transient (as opposed to sustained) acceleration without injury, and the subject nearly lost consciousness from the impact against the far wall despite his padded helmet, so it seems likely that he was near the threshold. If we assume 1 inch of deflection from the helmet padding (which you can see in the SWVD), this means his head must stop in roughly 4 ms, and he was moving at speeds of up to 12 m/s, even if we disregard the braking effect of his feet sliding across the floor beneath him before impact. This gives him around 1000 kg*m/s of momentum (assuming 80 kg body weight). Even if the spear's mass was quite large (say, 10 pounds), it would still have to be moving at 220 m/s (around 500 miles per hour!) in order to send him flying backwards so violently. Small wonder they used a robot instead of a human to throw the spear, eh? Given the same 44 mm deflection, the reaction force exceeds 2.5 MN (although according to IXJac, force is completely irrelevant ... snicker). When you plug these figures into the equations used above for the bullet, keeping in mind how little damage was done to the armour and what a tiny contact area the "nick" would have been, you will see why I concluded that stormtrooper armour can deflect small-arms fire, even if it wasn't intuitively obvious to you before.

And it came from Lightsaber of the Young Knight Series. IIRC, KJA or someone equally crummy wrote that series, which suggests that even crummy authors can have useful contributions

[Gil Hamilton]

Plus the weapons has an anti-coagulant attached or some such. I thought it clever.

It couldn't been that effective, since she wasn't bleeding to death particularly quickly, even in a spot where you'd expect a gut wound to be particularly damaging (with her worm there, and all).

I find it hard for variable settings to explain this, since there is no reason for them to dial their guns all the way down to "give mediorce injury" in that situation.

[Praxis]

Even worse. I just saw "Empok Nor". Chief O'Brien's phaser set to overload not only failed to kill a Cardassian standing a couple feet away (that he was TRYING to kill, no less), all it did was knock him down, give him a burn mark or two, and knock him half-conscious (moan, groan, slump over, wake up a few hours later perfectly fine).

THIS is a phaser set to overload? Doesn't say much about phaser power.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

Even worse. I just saw "Empok Nor". Chief O'Brien's phaser set to overload not only failed to kill a Cardassian standing a couple feet away (that he was TRYING to kill, no less), all it did was knock him down, give him a burn mark or two, and knock him half-conscious (moan, groan, slump over, wake up a few hours later perfectly fine).

THIS is a phaser set to overload? Doesn't say much about phaser power.

Yet a hundred years earlier, an overloaded phaser was a risk to an entire deck of a Constitution-class starship...

[Praxis]

And do quite a bit of damage in one of the TNG Enterprise-D's Jeffries tubes. I know. (though it was very localized, so maybe not that powerful)

Perhaps TNG phasers had bigger power packs? Or perhaps the TOS enterprise was built of weaker materials between the decks, that would shatter easy, lol.

[Praxis]

Sorry, I meant TOS, not TNG, phasers had bigger batteries.

[Chris OFarrell]

Praxis, why the heck are you assuming O'Briens phaser overloaded?

SOMETHING detonated that is true. But an overload takes quite a while to build up, a minuite or so at least. O'Brien just hit his combadge and there was a small detonation that sent Garak flying, stunned, like a concussion grenade would. Nothing indicates it was a phaser on overload...

[Praxis]

Except that he told Garak in the sickbay bed that the overloaded phaser detonation was intended to kill him.

He specifically said the phaser detonation (not sure if overloaded was said or not, but I think so).