brianeyci wrote:A walking robot is not intrinsically more difficult to build than a tank. You still have to prove it. Which is easily done, so much as is most people consider it trivial,
Yes. As it has more moving parts. That's one of the main reasons why mechas are going to be unreliable. How many moving parts in a force field generator used in AM containment? Observe your lack of clue to this.
as is for antimatter.
There is
no comprehension of the science behind AM containment in the trek universe.
Okay fine. According to Nyrath's wonderful atomic rockets page,
A page reffering to a universe with consistant application of science and engineering principles... AKA, not Trek.
Atomic Rockets wrote:Current particle accelerators are horribly inefficient at generating antimatter, but Dr. Forward says this is because they were designed by physicists, not industrial engineers. He is of the opinion that a dedicated antimatter factory build with current technology could approach 0.01% efficiency (which isn't good but is still about 6000 times better than Fermilab)
Let's presume this accurate: You know how much
volume the UFP may happen to devote to generating its power supply?
Now if I didn't fuck up the numbers, it's two nanograms an hour if the Federation has 6000x better than Fermilab.
Using a facility of the same volume. For all you know, they have entire planets devoted to making the stuff.
That's still not industrial scale, but it shows the difficulty of producing antimatter. You can't just wave away what we know in modern day about producing antimatter any more than you can wave away than what we know in modern day about the difficulty in producing walking robots compared to tanks.
The UFP does it. In mass quantities. It
must therefore be waved away. Of course, this is assuming no more efficient mechanism is used, such as a small scale tap into the entire
universe of antimatter shown in TOS. Let's not forget that in trek it's possible for a life form (Crystalline entity) to produce sufficient numbers of antiprotons to leave a trail, as it goes about its day to day business.
We may not have walking robots, but we do know it is more difficult.
Yes, but we have
no comprehension of how hard it should be to make a trek forcefield to contain antimatter, and how this stacks against the difficulty of maintaining a nuclear weapon. NONE.
So take this "we don't know" argument from ignorance and stuff it kindly down your ass. This is somehow a controversal topic at SDN, that a nuclear warhead is more simply produced than a photon torpedo?
Appeal to popularity. There is no comprehension of whether or not they are difficult to produce or use: Let's throw an idea out here: Anti hydrogen replicable, fissile materials not - what would you say then?
I've read at least a half dozen versus threads where torpedoes are replaced by nuclear weapons, one most recently in OSF, so why don't you stop pretending there's some kind of controversy about it as if I was talking shit.
You're stating as fact that you
know a torpedo must be harder to make than an equivtech fission bomb. EPISODE NAME AND SERIES, SHIT HEAD.
False analogy because we can make antimatter in real life but we can't make a warp drive in real life. Not in industrial quantities but that's besides the point. Somehow this is controversal, some new topic on SDN, that antimatter production is difficult? Give me a break.
Yes, moron, it is. Because you have absolutely no idea what the industry of the UFP looks like beyond the ship - unless there's a
Star Trek: Industrial Engineers I've missed.
Sure I have justification... if we take our current antimatter production and make it orders of magnitude cheaper, it's still difficult to produce antimatter. Is this something new on SDN, that has not been covered before?
Yes. You're making an unfounded assumption that UFP antimatter production must be limited to a few orders of magnitude of our own - when it is canon that they
shit the stuff out by the bucketload - quite literally. You're making an
assumption that is not only unfounded, but contradicts canon, now. They have tons of antimatter. This is a fact - work with it.
and so did the missiles and they had photonic torpedoes at their disposal.
In what numbers? We see such an 'atomic weapon' used in Balance of Terror. They're clearly not photon torpedos. That's about all that can be said about them.
So whatever the reasons are, political, whatever, it seems that they would do better with nuclear weapons.
Why? If they were cheaper and easier to use in a war generations ago, why does that mean that they should still be used 'now?' By this standard, we should still be using Spitfires.
I don't see how variable yield has anything to do with my original point.
It's a reason to carry them instead of fucking nukes, shitface.
We are talking about firepower, and if nuclear weapons are more easily made than photon torpedoes, what the hell is bringing up a variable yield has to do with anything?
You wanted to know why they would carry photon torpedos if nuclear weapons of equivalent or greater firepower could be constructed You ignored repeatedly the point that this is precisely what real torpedos are like, even when nuclear tipped ones could be more efficient, and were then presented with an argument from what you consider a continuty piece of material explaining why they upgraded to antimatter based weapons - they're more precise.
You can have different sizes of nuclear weapons as well.
And you have to change the warhead (EDIT: Yes, I know of dail-a-yeilds, but they're still highly limited in comparison, and fairly high maintainance to boot). Which is rather different from just changing the pumping of a torpedo.
The Federation had photonic torpedoes available and used nuclear weapons instead in the Federation Romulan war.
The Earth Spacefleet used atomic weapons throughout the war - maybe the gloves came off and they used the dangerous weapons... How the fuck do you know? Have I missed a 'Romulan War' miniseries?
Your scattergun tactics, mentioning "it might be a special mission"
"Enterprise" was loaded with photonics before being sent off to find the xeelee, sorry, Xinidi, explicitly for that mission, and continued to carry its previous weapons.
"it might be variable yield"
It
is, if you accept Enterprise as valid material. I was happy to leave it in the bin where it belongs...
"atomic might mean photon torpedoes instead of atomic weapons" is a whole load of bullshit.
You don't think their function is atomic? We have no idea what Spock is talking about. Personally, I'd envisioned pure fusion weapons, until the mention of mass quantities of radiation.
Is that your strategy, keep bringing up a hundred objections until I drown in it? None of that has anything to do with the point of this digression which is they manufactured nuclear weapons and had them available, which you said they did not, so the proper thing to do is concede rather than keep slogging it out.
Because it's a fact that the UFP can produce enough antimatter to make it a viable fuel for thousands of interstellar ships. Therefore they have enough to make weapons out of it (as if the fact that they do make plentiful weapons out of it wasn't enough proof that they have sufficient AM for that use...) Do they manufacture nuclear weapons? Where the fuck does that come from.
You claimed that they should have super-duper megatonnage for their weapons because otherwise they'd just use nukes, when there's a whole host of reasons why they don't use nuclear weapons, even
presuming a nuke of equivalent size gives better yeild than a photon torpedo.
Then you harped on and on and on and on about the cost of antimatter, ignoring the fact that they
do manufacture sufficient antimatter for plentiful weaponisation, therefore they
do have sufficient industry to make that much antimatter. Regardless of how inconcievable it may seem to you;
They do it, therefore they are capable of it. Regardless of how stupidly powerful this is.
Then why not apply the same logic and say "The Federation is stupid for not using nuclear weapons."
Why bother? There's tons of reasons you wouldn't want nukes for every piffling encounter with an energy being. We'll ignore that it wasn't even until TWoK, when photon were long established, that the idea of a photon torpedo being a physical device (Probert redesigned the Ent nil with the assumption that they were some kind of energy blob, and thus placed the launcher near the power source) analogous to a nuclear weapon was brought in.
I don't understand your position, it's as if suddenly you had an epiphany when dealing with me and chose to dredge up a topic discussed to death, that is that nuclear weapons are more easily built and manufactured than photon torpedoes.
No.
You claimed that they should be using nuclear weapons if photons have sub-Tsar Bomba yeilds, because using anything but the most powerful weapon around is unrealistic (despite reams of evidence from real life of less-than-ultimate-power weapons being used in practically every ole for a host of reasons - I don't see Davy Crockett tanks and Atomic Annie howitzers everywhere, do you?)
This whole she-bang diversion about torpedoes versus nuclear weapons is kind of pointless,
I quite agree, but you were the one who insists that they must be of higher yeild than nukes or no one should be using them...
because I do admit I was probably wanking when I said that because photon torpedoes were more difficult to produce than nukes, they should have higher yield. But I'm still right about them being more difficult to produce unless you completely ignore modern particle accelerators (why the hell should I?)
Because there are
oodles of antimatter devices floating around on ST. Therefore, they can make oodles of the stuff. Therefore, thier industry is sufficient.
Why aren't you getting this? Analyse the evidence, don't arbitrarily say 'it can't be more than X*modernity where X is whatever I want.'
