Trek ships that could stand up to Wars ships.

[Stark]

Doesn't 'several hundred times more powerful' than a shot that took down E-nil's shields put it at high hundreds of MT, at best (particularly if they're plasma weapons given ST shield weaknesses)?

'At best' for PTs is probably the TNG tech manual's estimate of ~50MT effective yield from a 1.5kg of antimatter, which would put the split ..

Sorry, but get fucked. We've seen torpedoes, they AIN'T motherfucking 50MT, they're hundreds of kt, maybe low MT. Ironically, even with these grossly inflated figures, V'ger's firepower is still pathetic for such a huge target.

This is of course just a lower limit, but since there's no other evidence (beyond 'it took it an unknown time with unknown methods to take a picture of a planet this one time') that's what we got, and it's lame.

PTs fired at it just disappeared with no effect. It was using 10,000 times the max power output of the Enterprise-Nil just to generate the /cloud/, it must need much more than that just to move at warp speeds (and indeed transwarp speeds are implied by the length of the journey and the available time since the launch of the probe, though time travel is a possible alternate explanation). I would be very surprised if it did not have at least 100,000 times the shielding capabilty of the Enterprise-Nil.

No, I mean defensive capabilities, not random trivia. I'm really not seeing where you pull '100,000 times Enterprise shields' from. 'We don't know how it's drive works' doesn't translate into 'woot invincible shields lol'. Even if we accept that drive power is interchangeable with shield capacity (which seems unwarranted).

Of course, it can HAVE 100,000 times Enterprise shields. Damn thing is still fucking toast in SW, unless we're playing some stupid Bruce Lee one-at-a-time method.

If it occurs to them to disguise them as consumable mass and set them to detonate just as they are entering the maw. If the doomsday machine had been better programmed it would've blased anything vaguely threatening to space dust instead of trying to eat it.

Yeah, but it wasn't. Frankly I'm not of the 'needs bombz' school, I think a single TL bolt would destroy the stupid thing. Or just missile spam from a few fighters. It's not dangerous, it's a stupid idea with stupid implementation with wanko armour of plot. That's it. Shit, the first Imperial ship it eats might result in it's death as the magazine explodes/capacitors discharge/ship is scuttled, secret plot not required.

[Stark]

Ack. Accidentally assumed that the Enterprise shields can be taken down by one PT above. The Undiscovered Country showed that it took more like 10 PTs, though the Enterprise was starting to suffer hull damage well before the shields finally collapsed.

That bumps the upper end observed firepower to 2.5TT a shot, which at 2 shots/second may actually give an ISD some trouble. The lower end firepower would be a 10 GT shot every few seconds, which is only enough to take out light patrol craft.

Welcome to 'Let's Pretend BoP Torps Are The Same As E-Nil Torps To Inflate V'ger Firepower'. Let's play!

Torps might be inconsistent (which isn't surprising, given the length of time covered and the variety in launching platforms) but they're consistently weak, certainly not TM-esque 64MT.

It amuses me that you ARE assuming Bruce Lee one-at-a-time-method. Wank it's guns all you want, there's no reason to believe that a sector fleet won't just blast the thing at extreme range and stop for tea and crumpets. Unlike most ST ships it *is* dangerous if ignored, and some kind of V'ger vs ISD scenario seems contrived.

[Batman]

Via some funky 'digitizing' technobabble effect the powe of which is completely undeterminable

It's 'some kind of plasma energy'. Any technobabble effect is in addition to the raw impact.

Because...you say so. DO quantify what was done to those ships and explain how it was done by 'plasma energy'. Whilw we're at it, explain what 'plasma energy' is.

and the E-nil refit's shields, which are millions of times less powerful than those of Imperial warships, SURVIVED one such hit,

But Spock scans the glowing balls V'Ger was launching at a rate of one every few seconds at the end of the film and say 'they are thousands of times more powerful (than the one that hit us earlier)'. It is unclear whether this refers to the full devices as originally launched, or to the submunitions they split into (apparently nine each). The total firepower of each shot could easily be 50,000 times the firepower of the hit that took down the Enterprise's shields, itself equivalent to many photon torpedoes.

That's not only dialogue to begin with but also totally pointless until someone quantifies the one that hit the Ent-nil. Have fun trying to.

I suspect V'Ger could give an ISD a hard time.

Based on-what, exactly?

Funny, I didn't see any ocean vapourisation in the movie.

It was in there; we saw sections of ocean surface flashing into steam. But they weren't very big sections. Maybe someone can do a calc working out how much energy it takes to vaporise enough water to give the whole planet 100% cloud cover, but it'll be several orders of magnitude less than a BDZ.

Duly noted. But I think we agree that 'ocean vapourization' is generally assumed to be TOTAL or at least a reasonable fraction of the total being vapourized which clearly wasn't the case.

[Starglider]

It amuses me that you ARE assuming Bruce Lee one-at-a-time-method.

I'm just saying what ships it might be able to take on 1 on 1. Obviously it's fucked against any sort of serious SW military response, but then so is everything else in Trek except godlike beings.

Wank it's guns all you want, there's no reason to believe that a sector fleet won't just blast the thing at extreme range and stop for tea and crumpets.

Where did I say otherwise? Though the 'extreme range' thing probably /won't/ work, if the cloud is 82 AU across (that's bigger than the orbit of Neptune) and the Klingon ships were destroyed while visibly well outside the cloud.

[Stark]

Oh, the OP was like 'what ship would you want to take into SW', so I was working under the assumption that V'ger showing up would stir up quite a military response. It's pretty powerful for ST, but it's not a ST ship that can do anything other than be destroyed by the hopeless overkill of the Imperial response (holy shit sir it's 82AU in diameter! All ships fire full power... oh, it's gone! That's one for the books). It's got no chance against the kind of fleet they'd pull together to match what they'd expect to be a greater than Death Star-level threat.

[Starglider]

Sorry, but get fucked. We've seen torpedoes, they AIN'T motherfucking 50MT, they're hundreds of kt, maybe low MT.

True, but I tend to grant Trekkies the TM figure as an the upper end for two reasons; a) it gives them a marginally higher chance of actually being able to present a challenge and b) I find it incredibly stupid that /all/ the Trek powers are using an antimatter device, with all the costs and safey risks that entails, to do the job a mid 20th century nuclear device of similar size could accomplish. But yeah I know I'm overly generous like that.

PTs fired at it just disappeared with no effect.

No, I mean defensive capabilities, not random trivia.

That's a defensive capability, it's just not terribly useful in saying what SW grade firepower it can resist.

We run into a similar problem with the 'all earth defences just went inactive', and for that matter the Whale probe's 'jam all power generation including fusion reactors'. On the one hand, I don't like saying 'well that probably won't work against SW tech' - it's probably true, given the general technological disparity, but it seems to violate 'everyone's tech works equally well in versus'. I've never seen a debator on the SW side conceed that one of their pieces of tech might not work on ST ships (though taken too far that leads to 'LOLZ TREK SHIPS IMMUNE TO LASORS').

However it isn't a fair comparison. Trek uses a lot of technobabble which is just nonsensical shit, but that isn't the issue here; we don't get a technobabble explanation for how V'Ger and the Whale Probe fuck up Federation tech, they just do it. It's supposed to be technology so advanced it looks like magic. This happens a lot in Trek (particularly early Trek), because the Federation are expressly /not/ the most powerful and advanced group in their universe - there are older races that are much more advanced. Indeed it may well be that the Q are the ultimate expression of this. Unfortunately this doesn't play well with SW, where the tech we see is pretty much the best tech that exists anywhere. There are no super-advanced races around that look like magic to the main characters. The technology base in SW is more consistent in the first place, but things like V'Ger are extreme outliers to the general Trek tech base that we get little opportunity to quantify, outliers of a kind that simply do not exist in SW (much as the Trekkies wish that the Death Star and other superweapons were outliers).

So yeah I'm basically ok with 'magic-appearing abilities like knocking out all of Earth's defences, or all Fed ship reactors, most likely won't work on SW ships'. But the magic-like presentation of the tech from the point of view of the main characters makes these 'Trek one episode wonder versus standard Imperial tech' comparisons inherently dubious.

Yeah, but it wasn't. Frankly I'm not of the 'needs bombz' school, I think a single TL bolt would destroy the stupid thing. Or just missile spam from a few fighters. It's not dangerous, it's a stupid idea with stupid implementation with wanko armour of plot. That's it,

SW is in no place to criticise about wanko armour *cough* sun crusher *cough*. For all you know this has the same properties and it too can survive grazing superlaser blasts with no appreciable damage.

[Stark]

That's low, man.

[Batman]

Did Starglider just use the Sun Crusher in trying to debate 'I fucking hate the fucking EU to begin with' Stark?
The Sun Crusher? Which even the PRO Wars side considers wank beyond comprehension and best forgotten about?

[Patrick Degan]

As far as the TOS planet-killer goes:

We saw this thing hovering over the planet, slicing out chunks of it with a force-beam.

This suggests that the planet-killer had to do rather a lot of work to break apart a terrestial-sized world and that the process was not simply a single blast shattering the body of the planet. It had to perform this operation at relatively close range to the target body, so this rules out any power beam with the punch to blow apart a world with one shot. It's beam was not powerful enough to destroy a much smaller vessel with one shot or even take down its shields immediately, and actually left an intact wreck after combat with another similar vessel. It also had to immediately refuel after expending the energy required to do the damage it did to the one vessel and in the effort to tractor it into its maw. Finally, as has been pointed out, the internal machinery of the weapon was wrecked or destroyed by the energy of an exploding fusion engine (not even a M/AM reactor) the yield of which was merely 1.63 times the Tsar Bomba test blast of 1961.

Somehow, I don't see an Imperial vessel having too much difficulty with the planet-killer.

[TC Pilot]

The Enterprise could probably defeat a tug...

[harbringer]

the only ship I can think of is the one that was used in that episode where the enterprise comes to the destroyed colony planet... huskarl???? where the Q like being simulates the ship and attacks the enterprise. However this ship and the others mentioned (let alone the others mentioned are unique and not available as a fleet option) still cannot equal the power of a wars frigate let alone the battleship like star destroyer. The main problem isn't in any single area but the whole package.

V'ger and the whale probe only have a forward attack and seem defenseless to flank threats-this will be of little importance against federation ships (who are inable to capitalise on this flaw as they have insufficient firepower) against a star destroyer this will be a larger problem as they have turreted heavy anti-ship weapons and can keep pace and target the "planet kilers" from long range and outside their fire arc.

The main problem is that star trek ships are really benchmarked against the enterprise and this makes them underpowered when your using a wars ship of any size.

[lord Martiya]

Ack. Accidentally assumed that the Enterprise shields can be taken down by one PT above. The Undiscovered Country showed that it took more like 10 PTs, though the Enterprise was starting to suffer hull damage well before the shields finally collapsed.

It's a problem with the shields: their frequency (necessary to fire their weapons) means that in certain moments the strenght of the raised shield is zero. For a complete analysis (not mine: it's on the main site), see the COMMON SCI-FI SCIENCE MYTHS ON THE MAIN SITE.
And for the BOP torpedoes, I'm wondering why everyone assumes that Federation torpedoes and Klingon torpedoes are similar... In a DS9 episode Kira mentioned Federal advances in PT tech the Federation didn't want to share with Cardassians. Yes, that tech was previously shared with Klingons, but in alliance time, after that fight between Enterprise-A and that BOP.

[Starglider]

This suggests that the planet-killer had to do rather a lot of work to break apart a terrestial-sized world and that the process was not simply a single blast shattering the body of the planet. It had to perform this operation at relatively close range to the target body, so this rules out any power beam with the punch to blow apart a world with one shot.

Even still, the amount of power required to reduce a terrestial planet to rubble, suck it into that maw and presumably compress it into some sort of compressed matter fuel storage is extremely high, much higher than a BDZ. The doomsday machine isn't that much bigger than an ISD, but apparently has much greater power generation capability. However its demonstrated anti-ship weapons capability is pathetic compared to the amount of firepower it must've used to carve up the planets. I prefer to rationalise this as the weapon using only the minimum power its sensors estimate necessary for the size of the threat, otherwise the thing would be helpless against enemy fleets or significant planetary defences, which would rather defeat the point of a doomsday machine.

Finally, as has been pointed out, the internal machinery of the weapon was wrecked or destroyed by the energy of an exploding fusion engine (not even a M/AM reactor) the yield of which was merely 1.63 times the Tsar Bomba test blast of 1961.

Well yes and the DSI was destroyed by a single proton torpedo and the DSII was destroyed by two concussion missiles. You don't expect internal machinery to stand up to multimegaton yields - at least it didn't blow itself to pieces Death Star style. The real flaw was the crappy programming that allowed potential threats to get so close in the first place.

And for the BOP torpedoes, I'm wondering why everyone assumes that Federation torpedoes and Klingon torpedoes are similar...

I don't think 'everyone' does. It's just that I don't have any better way of estimating the shield strength of the refit constitution class.

V'ger and the whale probe only have a forward attack and seem defenseless to flank threats

Where do you get this notion from? V'ger's plasma balls are highly maneuverable and persistent, the spread out to a spherical coverage of earth and held position, and there's no indication that the Enterprise or the Klingon ships were approaching from dead forward.

The whale probe's power-drain effect appeared to be omnidirectional. Of course we have no idea how the V'ger instant-planetary-defence-disabler worked, but it didn't seem to rely on any sort of directional beam.

[AirshipFanboy]

Even still, the amount of power required to reduce a terrestial planet to rubble, suck it into that maw and presumably compress it into some sort of compressed matter fuel storage is extremely high, much higher than a BDZ. The doomsday machine isn't that much bigger than an ISD, but apparently has much greater power generation capability.

Wouldn't it just need enought power to suck a single chunk of planet up? It can always eat a piece of planet, and use the fuel digested from that piece to suck up its next bite.

[Starglider]

Wouldn't it just need enought power to suck a single chunk of planet up? It can always eat a piece of planet, and use the fuel digested from that piece to suck up its next bite.

That's a fuel/energy storage issue not a power generation one.

[AirshipFanboy]

Suppose the Doomsday Machine destroys planets by tractor-beaming up chunks, eating some of them, and hurling the rest into space. It would still expend the energy needed to destroy a planet, but it could take its time going about it.

(Of course, considering that it took a few days (at most) to destroy a rocky planet, it probably still has much more power generation capability than an ISD. We don't know how long Matt Decker was alone on the Constitution, but I presume it wasn't on the order of weeks.)

[Patrick Degan]

Suppose the Doomsday Machine destroys planets by tractor-beaming up chunks, eating some of them, and hurling the rest into space. It would still expend the energy needed to destroy a planet, but it could take its time going about it.

(Of course, considering that it took a few days (at most) to destroy a rocky planet, it probably still has much more power generation capability than an ISD. We don't know how long Matt Decker was alone on the Constitution, but I presume it wasn't on the order of weeks.)

This would make it's planetary destruction operation somewhat similar to the described first-stage function of an Imperial World Devestator, only of course unlike one of those, the planet-killer is a basic destruction engine with no defensive or reprocessing/manufacturing capabilities.

It is implicit that the Constellation had been adrift only for days when the Enterprise found her. What is unknown is how long the planet-killer had been hovering over LV-427 IV and consuming it, but we do know the Constellation arrived in the middle of this operation and that the planet was still apparently largely intact.

To touch on a point argued by Starglider, it does not follow automatically that the machine must have superior power generation and storage capability to a stardestroyer. It is certainly capable of consuming the debris from the planets it attacks as fuel to continue the destruction process and runs off of this fuel-conversion during the operation. The fact that it immediately had to start sucking in more debris to refuel itself after its combat with the Enteprise indicates its limitations in these areas when not performing this function.

[Starglider]

This would make it's planetary destruction operation somewhat similar to the described first-stage function of an Imperial World Devestator, only of course unlike one of those, the planet-killer is a basic destruction engine with no defensive or reprocessing/manufacturing capabilities.

The World Devestator is a lot more impressive in many respects. However the Doomsday Machine is impressive in one sense; it has a total conversion power system (it can't be fusion given that most of the mass of a rocky planet is iron). That's magic technology by Trek standards. Unfortunately AFAIK we don't know enough about hypermatter production to know whether SW has an effective total conversion process when you consider the whole hypermatter production+transport+consumption chain, but certainly nothing smaller than a World Devestator is known to manufacture its own fuel from rocky rubble (just how many tankers and refineries it took to refuel the death star is an interesting question). This isn't relevant to combat capability, it's just an interesting aside.

To touch on a point argued by Starglider, it does not follow automatically that the machine must have superior power generation and storage capability to a stardestroyer.

I don't see how it's possible to conduct an operation that requires several orders of magnitude more continuous power generation than a BDZ, however you slice it, without having vastly superior generation capability. Well actually I can think of one way; the planetkiller produces antiproton beams, which presumably react with the target to release energy. Theoretically if it had some sort of highly efficient matter -> antimatter convertor (without an intermediate energy state, which is implied as existing in the GCS by the TNG tech manual but with horrible efficiency), it could produce those antiproton beams from scavanged matter at little energy cost, and external anhiliation would liberate most of the energy required to shatter the target, which doesn't really count as internal generation capability (but does count as weapons yield, unless you can reliably shield against antiprotons, which SW particle shields may be able to).

Actually now that I think about it that hypothesis makes a lot of sense. The starship shielding in the episode may have been reacting to only the kinetic energy of the antiproton beam; this would be vastly lower than the effective yield against unshielded targets, but against shielded targets in a vaccuum there would be nothing to react with. Presumably the damage to the Constellation occured when small amounts of antiprotons leaked through the shields and reacted with the hull. That would cut down the generation requirements for the Doomsday Machine to its tractors, warp drives and the amount required to accelerate the antiprotons. Internally the high-efficiency M->AM conversion process provides an effective total conversion reactor as well as the basis of the main weapon. That even makes the 'it deactivated our antimatter' line almost plausible, since the tech required would be related.

That said,

The fact that it immediately had to start sucking in more debris to refuel itself after its combat with the Enteprise indicates its limitations in these areas when not performing this function.

Are you sure it /had/ to do this? Or was it merely resuming its earlier preprogrammed behaviour of consuming the whole planet before moving on, once the immediate threat was (apparently) neutralised.

[Starglider]

Are you sure it /had/ to do this? Or was it merely resuming its earlier preprogrammed behaviour of consuming the whole planet before moving on, once the immediate threat was (apparently) neutralised.

Reviewing the episode dialogue, this is most likely correct; Spock has several lines about the machine having a 'a programmed defensive sphere, and any energy source detected within that sphere will trigger an attack'. When it isn't doing that, it mechanically consumes each planet before moving on. I'd note that the KE requirements for tractoring the majority of the rubble into the maw are probably still competitive with a BDZ, though no longer vastly greater if external AP anhiliation is doing the heavy lifting. I'd forgotten about the DM's wide-area subspace jamming; again, a similar effect to the Whale Probe but not quite as powerful.

Again it's implied that if this technology was by competent designers (e.g. project matter and AM beams and have them intersect on or immediately before the target, feed only on planet core material not on possibly-mined space junk) it could produce quite a formidable weapon. But unfortuantely despite their impressive base tech the DM builders don't rise above the usual (abysmal) Trek standards of starship design.

[Patrick Degan]

The fact that it immediately had to start sucking in more debris to refuel itself after its combat with the Enteprise indicates its limitations in these areas when not performing this function.

Are you sure it /had/ to do this? Or was it merely resuming its earlier preprogrammed behaviour of consuming the whole planet before moving on, once the immediate threat was (apparently) neutralised.

If you recall, when Decker had the Enterprise make her attack run, the machine had already altered course to the next system on its path, the Rigel colonies.

[Alien-Carrot]

Pertaining to the Think Tank, it was run off by a group of about 10-12 of the mercenary aliens that were attacking Voyager.

IIRC it took 2-3 of these shipe to damage Voyager.

So if the think tank is 20-40 times as powerfull as Voyager, which is listed as a top of the line warship, it still makes the Think Tank, what, 1000 times less powerfull than Slave 1?


Forgive my assumption math here, but i really dont remember the exact numbers from that episode, as the entire episode sucked ass.

[Batman]

Since when is Voyager a top of the line warship?

[Ender]

The World Devestator is a lot more impressive in many respects. However the Doomsday Machine is impressive in one sense; it has a total conversion power system (it can't be fusion given that most of the mass of a rocky planet is iron). That's magic technology by Trek standards.

? Romulan Warbirds use singularities to power themselves. You can use any matter as fuel to extract energy from it. That would be more then sufficient for this.

[Starglider]

Romulan Warbirds use singularities to power themselves. You can use any matter as fuel to extract energy from it.

How exactly do you think that works?

Back when the 'Warbirds use singularities' decision was made, Hawking radiation wasn't well known or proven. I have a collection of short sci-fi stories about black holes from the 1980s on my shelf and they all fail to feature it. The only known way to extract energy from a black hole was to use the frame drag from its spin to accelerate matter. Spinning black holes can store a relatively high amount of energy for their mass, but nowhere near as much as their actual mass-energy equivalent. You also get a small amount of gravity waves out when you toss matter in, but not enough to do anything useful with even if you could somehow convert that into a useful form of energy (which no known mechanism could).

With Hawking radiation small black holes evaporate very quickly in a flash of energetic particles (mostly hard gamma). That's better for power generation in principle, but the problem here is that any singularity small enough to lug around in a ship has a rather short lifetime, and the power output over that lifetime is highly nonlinear. The Enterprise-D supposedly has a mass of 4.5 million tonnes. A one million tonne black hole has a lifetime of 19.6 days. Radiative power output will start in the exawatt range (easily enough to make the Warbird glow like a small sun) and creep up as the hole evaporates, reaching 7 × 10^23 watts by the time the hole is down to 500 tonnes of mass. Stabilising the black hole at the exawatt range will require half a million tonnes of fuel a week, and if it doesn't get that, it will explode and take the ship with it. Note that a million tonne power plant is extremely generous given the lack of heavy structural bracing and massive containment generators we saw around the Warbird's warp core (that million tonne mass would have to be accelerated at several hundred g whenever the warbird goes to full impulse).

For continuous black hole catalysed total annihilation to be practical it would have to be on a scale one to two orders of magnitude larger than a Warbird. This is ok for the Doomsday machine; it isn't physically that big, but given the likely mass of the neutronium-plated hull and the amount of fuel it consumes having a multi-million tonne black hole as the primary generator, fed by multi-billion tonne fuel reserves isn't a problem.

I can only think of two obvious ways to make it work at Warbird scales; technobabble time dilation fields (or outright magic technobabble) to slow down the evaporation rate by a couple of orders of magnitude (unfortunately two micro black holes orbiting extremely closely at relativistic velocities won't work due to gravitational radiation carrying the energy away), or using some kind of implosion mechanism to create a series of tiny black holes which annihilate small chunks of matter. I'm dubious about whether the later could be made energy positive in practice, but I suppose in Trek you can posit near-perfectly efficient energy recovery and gravitic compression mechanisms. This is rather more sane than the other approach, but it doesn't fit canon, since dialogue suggests that there is a single continuous singularity and 'Timescape' does indirectly suggest that time-manipulation technology is in use in the Warbird warp core.

So I'm forced to conclude that Warbirds use relatively small singularities (thousands of tons at most, since they don't create exaton explosions when destroyed in combat) and time dilations fields to bring down the evaporation rate from zettawatts to mere terawatts (and the fuel consumption rate to tonnes a day). That's ridiculously unsafe, an order of magnitude moreso than the already horribly unsafe Federation antimatter drives - one glitch in the temporal dilation system and the ship disappears in a burst of hard gamma. The tech would still seem like magic in Kirk's era, in application if not in theory. However it's true that by Janeway's era, it would be understood (at least in the sense of 'the Romulans have made this work somehow').

[lord Martiya]

Since when is Voyager a top of the line warship?

I think Alien-Carrot confused the fact that the Intrepid-class Voyager was the most modern Federation ship at its introduction with the power of weapons and shield, or that he was confused by the poor performances of most of Delta Quadrant ships (in the last battle against the Kazon, the Kazon used EIGHT of their most powerful ships, big as a Romulan warbird, and the Voyager managed to hold the line for long time and destroying one). Comparing with the war time Galaxy class (or even the standard Galaxy class), an Intrepid class is simply a light cruiser, that in war against Dominion or Romulans could be used only as scout (a very fast one, for Federation standard), as a flagship for destroyers and Defiant flottillas or as a destroyer-killer, like a WWII cruiser.