tharkûn wrote:On matters of physical phenomena, I agree. However the point in question was not the existance of wide range stun ... rather why it isn't used in battle ... why a *tactic* isn't used.
So what? The point remains. You should not assume a phenomenon
or the availability of a viable combat tactic without some kind of supporting evidence, rather than challenging others to prove that it's
not true. This is a simple matter of basic logic.
In the case of wide-angle stun beams, they are used only in rare circumstances, IIRC mostly in sneak-attack or covert-ops situations. It is unreasonable to assume that they must therefore be a viable combat tactic despite never having seen them used as such, even in many cases where they would have been
very useful.
So let's play this out assume for a second that wide range stun (at the range shown in voyager) exists but no countermeasures exist. Why wouldn't the feddies use it ... say when a pack of klingons are overrunning their position?
Because you would have to put your weapon down and fiddle with its adjustments while some Klingon is standing three feet away about to disembowel you. Surely this obvious explanation already occurred to you?
Consider the facts: we have never seen wide-angle stun used at long or medium range. Period. We have seen it used at short range, but only in situations where they had time to adjust their weapons beforehand. Ergo, in battle they keep their weapons configured for direct-fire because that works at medium range. If they get overrun, they desperately try to defend themselves. No one can calmly put his weapon down and perform adjustments on it in that situation. Therefore, no wide-angle stun beams in combat. Simple, no?
No let's assume that countermeasures do exist. First off is this possible? Well the two most common methods of stunning that would fit with a phaser work of electromuscular disruption and sensory overload. For the former technology akin to a pace maker would serve as a marvelous countermeasure. If its sensory overload ... drugs. Now is it logical for the enemy to employ such measures? If the benifit outweighs the risk.
Again, see Occam's Razor. Now you're adding extra devices, technologies, and mechanisms into the mix in order to justify the extra combat tactic which you have
already added into the mix, and all so that you can produce an alternate theory which, at best, merely explains the phenomena as well (but not better than) straightforward explanations.
As far as tactics go, well something I was taught, "Unless the you evidence to the contrary, assume the enemy will use any tactic that seems physically viable and good half dozen that aren't."
That is because the soldier must consider the worst-case scenario. We aren't doing that; we are looking for the most reasonable theory.
Argueing that a tactic will never be used out of sheer stupidity, just doesn't cut it. Eventually natural selection sets in. The guys who use a viable tactic live longer ... the guys who don't ... die. There is only so much intiative you can beat out of man.
Two points: Firstly, one doesn't necessarily have to resort to simple stupidity. There are other explanations which do not require all manner of silly new mechanisms and enemy body implants. Second, theory does not trump observation. Feddies have been brainwashed to put their lives and their families' lives at risk without hesitation over matters of Federation dogma (such as the Prime Directive). We have seen an unending string of incredibly stupid tactics from them, and we have seen an incredibly inflexible mindset in all its glorious infamy. Natural selection always sets in, but not necessarily the way you want. Sometimes, an entire population simply becomes extinct.
Air heating is not too much an issue. Phasers cannot be super hot (no thunder), nor do we see convection currents arising from them (hotter air being less dense rises, so if there is massive heat discharge we would see something with symmetry reminiscent of the beam moving upwards while expanding outwards). To whit I can't recall ever seeing a phenomena consistent with large amounts of heating *from the beam*. At the target (where whatever the hell mystic reaction occurs, yes. at the point of origin, yes ... along the beam no ... but feel free to prove me wrong).
In one of the DS9 episodes they were hunting for shapeshifters and they were shooting down the crawlways. After a while they complained that the entire volume of air in the tunnels was becoming uncomfortably hot.
Granted there should be some, but the magnitude is low. I had assumed low enough not to be an issue if we need only 5k joules working at the other end.
Assuming perfect conversion into the desired form of energy. Very small amounts of energy can kill a man, but surprisingly large amounts of energy sometimes won't. It depends on the manner of transmission and conversion.
I always thought Klingons used battledeaths and honor deaths as population control (like some polygamous cultures did in ancient history). I mean a fundementalist, authortarian state which doesn't practice birth control has to eliminate people somehow. Have them fight with garunteed heavy losses is one way (for a decent historical analogy see China's deployment of the former nationalists in Korea ... two brids with one stone ... no more nationalists who might potentially revolt and throw enough bodies at a machine gun and eventually they run out of bullets, the barrels overheat or somebody gets lucky).
That might seem reasonable if we'd ever seen a shred of cynicism at the upper levels of government (the way Cicero commented that religion was useful for controlling the stupid masses). But we haven't; everyone in the entire Klingon civilization believes wholeheartedly in that shit.
Stupid soldiers just don't live long, even against other stupid soldiers. A civilization can't continiously rack up unsustainable losses and not wither and die.
Which is why the Federation doesn't even bother trying to invade territory. They send the Klingons instead, which is even more of an indictment of their ground combat skills since the Klingons are idiots.
Darth Wong wrote:"Well, any hypothetical ideas about ground-support aircraft would require the necessary manpower and equipment, and I don't think they have it. As we have seen on the show, ground troops can be dropped in hostile territory and left to fend for themselves for months before being resupplied. This is obviously a Starfleet that is stretched to its limits already, despite a lot of Trekkie claims about vast fleets and industrial output. "
If you have a production shortage is it going to matter if its fighter craft or tanks?
Umm ... I'm not sure what argument you think you're refuting here, but since I have long argued that they do not have fighter craft
or tanks, this is a moot point, isn't it? Starfleet has nowhere near the resources that some would like it to have, so they have no dedicated air support or armour. Too bad for their ground troops (which aren't dedicated either; they report to Starfleet, not to any other branch of the Federation armed forces).
They've also transported through EM radiation (how many times have we seen people transport out while a phaser shoots the air being left behind?). If through "holes" microns wide in magnetic forcefeilds if voyager dialogue is to be beleived.
Red herring. There is a big difference between ambient EM radiation and a phaser being fired just after the target is already gone. Similarly, their ability to synchronize with a cycling field and pass a beam through it does not prove the ability to beam through EM radiation or fields. By synchronizing phase and frequency, they send the beam through when the field intensity is
lowest, remember? Depending on the waveform, it might even be zero.
My best guess is that the process is pathway dependant. If you hit sufficiently strong EM disruption over the beams path ... bad things can happen.
In one case, "sufficiently strong EM disruption" was caused by the feeble magnetic field of a natural moon, which affected the entire region of space it occupied. Moreover, the static charges that propel lightning storms can range over huge areas many hundreds of kilometres wide; it's not like Bugs Bunny where a little stormcloud sits over one spot and rains on it. And finally, their sensitivity is such that the presence of certain natural
minerals in the ground will make their transporters useless, remember?
Without some extreme pathway dependancy I fail to see how voyager can exploit narrow holes in EM feilds, or how they can transport during cycle delays which are whatever the prefix the writer thought sound fun long (I'm betting the writers never learned that EM propogates at c).
Transporters are obviously pathway dependent. However, the phenomena which stymie them are often wide area-effect phenomena, so the pathway dependence of the transporters themselves is irrelevant.
Take five shuttles, land one in Scandanavia, another in Ireland, one more near Andorra, one in Switzerland, and your last say in Tunsia ... the only way EM blocks you is if its directly over the target.
Or an area effect somewhere between you and the target. Or an area effect over you. Or a huge area effect surrounding the entire planet, as in a period of elevated solar wind. And keep in mind, you are quietly adding dedicated aircraft to the Feddies' list of toys. We have seen in many cases that this is simply not likely to be the case. At best, they might have a field transporter (which we've never seen, but which has been vaguely alluded to in dialogue), which is going to have an extremely limited energy supply and even less flexibility.
Not planning too. For the record a Napoleonic army would not be positioned expecting attack. Napoleon quartered his troops dispersed so they could more easily live off the land (and have less to carry).
So? How does that help when the best you can possibly do (even if we grant these mythical field transport units) is to transport a handful of people somewhere close to the enemy camp? In Napoleon's time, you could have accomplished the same thing with stealthy scouts.
The imporant aspect of the transporter is beaming people *out* (and say up 50km).
That requires a transporter lock. It's easier to beam something in than out, as we have seen on TNG. Moreover, the GPE increase required for beaming objects to such great height would quickly drain the reserves of any field transporter unit. An 80kg man elevated to 50 km would require 40 MJ assuming 100% efficiency. How many men could you perform this trick on before you run out of juice?
A handful of transporters could easily cut communications lines. You see a messanger coming from enemy HQ, get a tricorder reading, lock onto him, beam him up 50km and let free fall. The same approach could be used for scouts. As tricorders are not LOS you can position tricorder observers in protected areas (i.e. root cellars) and beam scouts out once you get a lock.
You are merely using technologically complex and energy intensive methods to accomplish what they might have accomplished with a gun in Napoleon's era. If you've already got scouts all throughout enemy territory who can relay the precise location of any runner and are close enough to provide such accurate location data that they can get a transporter lock, you can simply
shoot him, with the same effect. Similarly, if you already know where all of the enemy scouts are (again, with such precision that you can get transporter locks), you can simply capture or kill them without having to use pointless techno-tricks.
This falls into the "mama, look what I can do!" list of tactics. It still fails to address the question of how the Feddies are actually going to do serious harm to Napoleon's forces.
The other part of this is that you can beam enemy officers out in the midst of battle (or just before). Losing your commanding officer is normally damning to morale, lousing them to "magic" would be worse. Depending on how many transporters, and how many locks you can get ... you could make a decent dent in the officer corp.
So now you have a whole
bunch of transporter units, and you've got a pile of scouts who are so close to the enemy officers that they can relay enough information for a transporter lock without a line of sight? Most of your tactics seem to rely on the Federation already having accomplished all sorts of wonderful things beforehand.
Lastly transporters can be used as ad hoc artillery. Transporting rocks (say .2kg each) overhead will kill anyone they land on. Dumping water overhead could ruin gunpowder. Transporting red hot iron into the gunpowder kegs would certainly be interesting.
It would appear that virtually all of your tactics are dependent upon having large numbers of field transporters with unlimited energy reserves available. If you're going to continue on this path, I would demand that you justify this assumption.
Except of course that Napoleon kept his troops dispersed. Say we start with equal numbers, the feddie army is roughly in the same area (within a days march of each other). The Napoleonic army would be dispersed. If you can cut communications (like the English did in Iberia) then the dispersed troops don't know where to unite.
Do we have any evidence that hand tricorders are sufficient to allow such quick location of all enemy troops and their scouts and couriers at a distance without a line of sight? After all, this isn't a flat desert. And keep in mind, you are
still assuming that the Feddies know all about the enemy forces, and have a game plan along with a highly aggressive posture and a unilateral attack strategy, while the other side is basically sleeping, has no inkling as to what's going to happen. You keep saying that Napoleon kept his troops dispersed; would he still do that in this condition? Or must we have one side start with such an unfair advantage?
Realistically, the Feddies would laugh at their primitives, ignore their laughable threat, make no attempt to conceal their location, and then all get killed. You can't discuss this fairly while giving the Feds a whole new gameplan specially optimized for Napoleon's army while Napoleon is basically unaware and does not adapt or adjust at all.
The feddies have an extreme advantage in scouting and communications ... if you use those you might be able to catch fractions of an army at time (which some of Napoleons opponents did from time to time).
The Feddies have an extreme advantage in communications. Their advantage in scouting is not as obvious. Their tricorders are not omniscient, and neither are their transporters. They don't know the terrain, and they don't know how to distinguish hostiles from civilians (maybe they would by eye, but would a tricorder know the difference?)
Darth Wong wrote:However, we have seen from ST6 that a short-range stun blast is LETHAL and causes serious burns, while we know that the same blast from only 2 metres away is harmless.
First off lethal does not impress me. 100 mA is enough to be lethal.
Red herring. I am talking about the fact that we have a high observed rate of decay with range. That has nothing to do with the minimum amount of current required to kill someone through electric shock. How do you know a phaser produces a voltage potential sufficient to induce 100 mA of current through the target body? What ratio of its energy goes into the production of this voltage potential and the induction of the requisite amount of current? Does it even have an electromagnetic field at all?
All told 410,000 joules. This about the energy equivalent of your morning toast. Its undoubtedly on the high side (an electric chair normally is much more juiced than needed to be hit or miss lethal) and the numbers may be off. However unless I screwed this up hideously, that's just about enough energy to heat a litre of water 1 K.
You screwed it up hideously. The specific energy of water is 4180 J/kgK. 1 litre of water has a mass of approximately 1 kg. Therefore, 410 kJ would heat 1 litre of water by roughly 98 K: enough to raise it almost from freezing point to boiling point. 410 kJ is nothing to sneeze at: a typical rifle bullet only has a few kJ of kinetic energy; you would have to empty three clips of ammo into somebody to produce several hundred kJ.
Lethal energy levels are meaningless to talk about without a mechanism. It could be anything from rediciously low energy with current across the heart/brain or rediciously high (vaporization).
Which is why they are a red herring, and I don't know why you're wasting my time by talking about them. I pointed out the simple fact that stun beams are lethal at close range and harmless at a couple of metres, which indicates extremely rapid loss of power over short distances.
Now as for the ST6 evidence itself. First off we have a shot on the forehead, which is quite suprising if the subject was conscious. As bad as feddie phasers are (although still worlds better than TNG crap) it becomes nigh to impossible to shoot above eye level. Now it may have been the curvature of the screen, but the burn mark looks wider at the bottom than at the top ... if this is case then its a *downward* angle. In other words the victim is likely already passed out (or looking up at his assailant from a sitting or kneeling position) and the shot is placed right on top of the skull with a slight downward slant.
Completely irrelevant details, listed only to distact from the simple point that a stun beam is lethal at short range but harmless at a couple of metres, therefore it obviously loses power quickly.
Now we know that at full power a phaser gives off 13% of its input energy as waste heat *at the emitter*(assuming we don't have a downgrade to go TOS -> TNG). However what we don't know is the relation between the energy loss and the output of the weapon (is it 87% efficient at 100% power and 87% efficient at 50% full power ... or 67% efficient at 50% power ... very few systems are uniformly efficient at different output levels). There will be a certain amount of overhead heatloss just from priming the gun. If a full power shot comes up to the emitter and all but a miniscule fraction is reflected ... you might end up with significantly more waste heat than energy in the beam. From the looks of the burns these are from a heat source with uniform conductance (the centre of the burn is not appreciably different from anything within say a .5 -1 cm diametre) If the burn came from the beat (and not the gun itself) we should see a gradient of damage ... most intense in/on the the surface of the beam and tapering off from there ... we don't its like a small circle of heated metal was pressed against the skin.
Don't make me laugh. The difference between the thermal conductivity of skin and metal is such that a small circle of heated metal pressed against the skin would leave visible, obvious marks showing its outline (here's a hint: that's how they
brand cows). Your attempt to bullshit the ST6 burn marks into a hot-metal contact area only makes you look deceptive. If you don't know dick about heat transfer, don't try to bluff your way through it with pseudoscientific language.
Also unless I'm forgetting some details, those look like second degree burns and not third ... hardly a massive expenditure of energy.
Again, you are using details such as this to evade and distract from the point, which is that this same beam leaves no mark and causes no injury after travelling just a couple of metres. I don't want to sound like I'm beating on a dead horse, but you keep finding ways to evade it, and I'll be damned if I let you get away with it.
The placing of the shot is indicative of a *low* energy shot ... the skull is not breached but the victim is dead. The wound did not bleed profusely ... all the signs of electrocution by sending some current across the gap.
And yet the barrel obviously did not touch the head, since it left no visible mark. Therefore, the beam was sufficient to burn and kill at close range, but it's harmless after a couple of metres. Once again, I reiterate that you are not doing anything to affect the point. Hand phasers obviously have severe power loss with travel.
1. I'm not just looking at the clip. I looked a Paramounts stills, those posted in the Great Link Database, and one or two other Trek sites. I have yet to find a one which shows any sky in it.
It was night-time. The sky was dark. This is not rocket-science.
Add that to personally watching the episode when it debuted and I said well I remember it this way, every blooding screen shot I see has rock at the end of the LOS.
Hint: this might have something to do with the fact that the shots are horizontal. But it would be exceedingly strange to have a "valley" in an underground tunnel, wouldn't it?
If you know of a screen shot showing open sky overhead, please produce it and I will retract my claim here.
No, burden of proof is on you. There has never been the slightest suggestion that the
entire theatre of battle was underground in Siege of AR-588, and you have no right to demand evidence to disprove your "unconventional" interpretation.
AR is stated to be in the Chintakas (sp?) system. Which we saw earlier as having a habitable planet (the one with orbital fighting platforms). The feddies plan to use this as a staging point. It buggers the mind to think that you can have a massive staging point right next door to a starved two bit defensive operation. If the hardware on that rock is so damn important and it was also so close, even starfleet would better protect it.
Irrelevant detail. Yes, Starfleet is idiotic, and they should have better protected it. How does this change my point about how they obviously don't have dedicated air support, or that you have no evidence for your bizarre claim that the entire theatre of battle was underground, complete with hills and valleys?
If it isn't close to the habitable planet where SF is staging, then its likely not in the habitable belt (which makes sense seeing feddie convention is to name planets Chintakas I, Chintakas II, Chintakas III, Chintakas IV, etc.). Indeed the number of the rock suggests there are thousands of similar rocks, which buggers the mind if they are all planets.
4. If its not in the habitable belt then how in hell does Sisko manage to breath? O2 doesn't stick around in planetar atmospheres for millions of years without photsynthesis to keep reproducing it. Its too thermodynamically favorable to make Iron Oxides, Silicon Oxides, etc. Without photsynthesis O2 doesn't last.
5. Why is no one freezing their ass off? You've got a "barren" planet which has no visible life. The rocks are standard issue trekkie grey, and we see little to no sunlight incoming (all the lighting I recalled looked artificial in origin). Without something to trap the heat, nights get damned cold ... even in the desert. Sisko's breath doesn't frost over nor does anyone complain of the cold or show signs of it being subzero despite having totally exposed heads.
You make assumptions and then you proceed to generate extra mechanisms in order to account for those assumptions. In fact, all of the problems associated with your assumption of the rock being far out of the habitable belt merely make it obvious that it's probably
not out of the habitable belt.
So I could be wrong here, but without a screenshot against me, I think it makes more sense if AR is an uninhabitable rock with closed caverns that stop heat from escaping and provide atmospheric containment. I don't recall seeing an open sky, but I could be wrong.
You're wrong. Moreover, your "logic" is very disturbing, and hints at an almost desperate mindset. You have piled so many unnecessary mechanisms and phenomena into your argument that the entire thing seems nothing more than a trifling redundancy, designed to waste time and confuse people. Now you've got an entire theatre of battle, complete with valleys and hills, all contained in an underground cavern which was articially heated and sustained with life-support systems so that they could put a piece of equipment in one tiny corner of it and hope that no one ever popped a hole anywhere in the entire network of caves and tunnels that make up this Rube Goldbergian idea of yours?
Tell me, if you were going to put a comm relay on an airless asteroid, would you construct vast underground caverns and a gigantic artificial-gravity field in it? Or would you simply build a small, self-contained installation on its surface? And if you wanted to retake such an installation, would you spend
six months launching futile assaults against dug-in defenders who are hopelessly incompetent and under-armed but are still capable of holding off your screaming-idiot troops, or would you simply evacuate the air from the facility and suffocate them all, then move in and clean up the mess? Face it: your idea is not only wrong, but it is so ridiculous that you should be downright embarrassed to have your name attached to it.
) showing sharp-object damage indicative of being stabbed in the back.
