Four Tie Defenders vs Six Enterprise E's

Darth Fanboy · Post by **Darth Fanboy** » 2003-02-19 08:22am

Just TIE Fighter IIRC

Keevan_Colton · Post by **Keevan_Colton** » 2003-02-19 08:25am

Darth Fanboy wrote:Just TIE Fighter IIRC

Yeah, though people made mods that added it into XWA and XvT.

Kerneth · Post by **Kerneth** » 2003-02-19 09:41am

The missile boat carries 60 concussion missiles and, what, 40 proton torpedos with a mixed loadout? Are we talking "game" concussion missiles or "book/movie" concussion missiles, because there's a huge difference between the two. The game concussion missiles are fighter-killer warheads while it seems in the movies and EU concussion missiles are extremely short-ranged anti-starship. In ROTJ Wedge, describing the DS2 reactor, says "My torpedos won't put a dent in that thing!" and Lando blows it up with a concussion missile volley from the Falcon. And I believe concussion missiles are described somewhere as having a range of .5 kilometers but carrying a payload more than twice that of a proton torpedo.

Either way, I suspect a half-dozen proton torpedos per SCS would be enough to seriously damage or destroy them, and the missile boat demonstrates effective targeting of its warheads at a range that would be considered long vs Star Trek targeting systems, especially for a starfighter-sized target. Concussion missiles could be used to finish off crippled vessels that the missile boat could safely close with, or if using the "game" concussion missiles could be added to thicken the proton torpedo volleys at long range.

Obviously, if the books or movies say anything about concussion missiles, then that's canon, regardless of what the games say about them.

seanrobertson · Post by **seanrobertson** » 2003-02-19 11:39am

Illuminatus Primus wrote:Because...

1.) The TIE/d has shields that well withstand phaser hits.

2.) The TIE/d will fire missiles from easily hundreds of km away.

I rather doubt the Defenders' shields are that strong. We saw X and Y-Wings rapidly shredded by TIE fire in "ANH"...if you figure each bolt is a few kilotons, and they fire say a dozen bolts/sec. (?), you've got maybe 50 kT shields. I doubt the Defenders have significantly more powerful defenses, especially given that they're smaller than Y-Wings.

Even if we assume their shields were 5x stronger than the aforementioned fighters', a single phaser shot oughta take them out or cripple them.

The real question is whether or not the phasers could target them. If the Defenders are moving at typical onscreen attack speeds, it's...possible. I definitely wouldn't say it's a sure thing.

I also think it's a given that the Defender's missiles should be instant kills. (Someone said a single laser blast should do the trick; I think that's being silly, frankly.) But even if those missiles were 1/10th as powerful as Slave One's--and they probably will be at least that, though they are in fact smaller than Fett's missiles--they're going to be fatal IMO.

I wouldn't go so far as to let the fighters use those missiles at hundreds of kilometers whilst, using the same purely empirical approach, simultaneously claim the Trek weapons are limited to a few kms, however. The only time I remember seeing a fighter's projectile weapon even approach that range was in "ANH," as it traversed the distance between the DS's exhaust port and the main reactor (~80 km?). Typically the fighters also close to PBR before they engage enemies, including massive capships (see the battle at Endor).

Let both sides engage at typically observed ranges; i.e., a few klicks for both. (Note: I'm not saying the fighters are limited to this range or, for that matter, are the SCSs. It's simply what's usually seen.) The fighters could still easily win. They'd probably stand a *better* chance up close since that'd limit the Sovereigns' ability to proximity-torpedo blast them (the only sure way I think they can score a "hit").

Darth Servo · Post by **Darth Servo** » 2003-02-19 03:23pm

seanrobertson wrote:I rather doubt the Defenders' shields are that strong. We saw X and Y-Wings rapidly shredded by TIE fire in "ANH"...if you figure each bolt is a few kilotons, and they fire say a dozen bolts/sec. (?), you've got maybe 50 kT shields. I doubt the Defenders have significantly more powerful defenses, especially given that they're smaller than Y-Wings.

Even if we assume their shields were 5x stronger than the aforementioned fighters', a single phaser shot oughta take them out or cripple them.

Care to provide some numbers for this claim?

The real question is whether or not the phasers could target them. If the Defenders are moving at typical onscreen attack speeds, it's...possible. I definitely wouldn't say it's a sure thing.

Possible but not probably. ST ships rarely maneuver in combat at all. They just like to sit around and fire at each other. Starfleet isn't used to hitting targets that actually try and evade fire and there are only one or two incidents where they were able to hit something the size of a TIE. Its even worse when you consider that they routinely miss cap ships measuring several hundred meters.

corporial · Post by **corporial** » 2003-02-19 03:44pm

Do imperial fighters employ any ECM tech?

Keevan_Colton · Post by **Keevan_Colton** » 2003-02-19 04:11pm

corporial wrote:Do imperial fighters employ any ECM tech?

Yes.

seanrobertson · Post by **seanrobertson** » 2003-02-19 05:32pm

Darth Servo wrote:Care to provide some numbers for this claim?

Err...which one?

The phaser?

The Defender's shields relative to an X-Wing's?

I assume you're thinking of the former, in which case I've got to wonder why a phaser putting out the equivalent of ~250 kT/sec. is an outlandish idea. What I do think is outlandish is to rate the Defender's shields as such...no way could it handle over 100 hits from Kenobi's fighter.

If I sound snippy it's because, with all due respect, I've been over my own take on Trek weapons dozens of times in this forum and Spacebattles (*shudder, wince*). It's similar to many of the conclusions Michael reached at SD.net proper...well, divided by about an order of magnitude, which is why I'm surprised we're talking about this. If you want me to go over what I think's reasonable for Trek weapons, I happily will though.

Possible but not probably. ST ships rarely maneuver in combat at all.

That's true. I can't think of many capships from any of the big 3 that really maneuver in combat much, save Defiant and White Stars.

The ships are designed to primarily fight "sluggish" opponents, yes. But to suggest their tracking ability is strictly limited to that role is a false dichotomy; we have, in fact, seen small craft successfully targetted and destroyed, on several occassions anyway.

Some of these instances have already been discussed in this thread; e.g., "Conundrum" and "Dragon's Teeth." Those do involve tight ranges and, especially in the former episode, highly predictable flight paths (straight as an arrow "maneuvering").

Then again, so what? TIEs typically close to similarly "tight ranges" before they open fire on an enemy. That enemy's size is an important consideration, to be sure; consequently, we could forgive the TIE squadrons at Endor for holding back until their formation was literally on top of the Rebels'. (Jamming is also an unknown.)

When the X and Y-Wings were ready to attack the DS, we saw more of the same sorts of ranges when the TIEs attacked, but this, too, is pretty excusable given the massive jamming from the DS.

What's not quite as easy to forgive are the TIEs that chased the Millenium Falcon in ANH, which closed to at least a few hundred meters before they pressed their attack. During that fight, the TIEs seemed to strafe the MF at a few hundred kph tops, venture a few kilometers out at greater speed, then turn around and repeat the process.

The TIEs had orders to just "put on a show" for the MF, of course, but their true performance couldn't be wildly different; Han and company wouldn't have believed their victory if it was quite that easy (nor do we know that the pilots were simply told to go out there and be slaughtered, which is a sure thing when you're moving as slowly as they were). The ruse would've been blown.

Clearly, the SCS presents a far more massive target than the MF, so the attack speeds needn't be as slow and the flight paths needn't be quite so linear; and, of course, the SCS's ability to target the fighters would be commensurately smaller and all that. But the question is, what sort of difference are we looking at?

I say it's probably big, but not that big. Evidence? Naboo fighters' performance against the TF control ship in TPM. Here we have a massive, static target with a volume of many dozens of Sovereigns. So what do the fighters do?

They wait until they're within a few kilometers of the ship before opening fire, and they remain at spitting distance ranges throughout the battle.
Their attack speed was definitely not on the order of even several kilometers/sec. as they weren't crossing the diameter of the TFCS quicker than "one thousand one." Extreme jamming, to the point of compromising the fighters' ability to simply function, isn't likely, as that could interfere with their control over the droids in space and on ground. It's not mentioned, anyway.

And sure, these are Nubian fighters, not Defenders or even TIE/In. But why should--or perhaps more pertinent, how could--they be worlds apart in terms of overall capabilities? Like TIEs and more "modern" Wars fighters, they had outstanding straight-line acceleration. But when it came time to fight a big lumbering target, they close to PBR and don't display much in the way of wild maneuvering to dodge enemy fire--certainly not duking several meters in a split-second.

That's a loose comparison (what in this business isn't at some point?), but it's changed my mind. I think the SCS could definitely target and kill the Defender. It's not as if a Sovereign's phasers are as slow to direct energy as, say, Riker's hand phaser was in "Conspiracy." Dodging those beams from a starting point of typically observed fighter attack speeds is going to be tough.

Now I think whoever shoots first wins.

They just like to sit around and fire at each other. Starfleet isn't used to hitting targets that actually try and evade fire and there are only one or two incidents where they were able to hit something the size of a TIE. Its even worse when you consider that they routinely miss cap ships measuring several hundred meters.

I might be putting words in your mouth, here, but if you're thinking of phasers, I don't recall a Sovereign's missing the boat by much.
And yes, stupid as it sounds (the appeal thereto which seems like context-dropping; why not extend the same question to warp drive feasibility?), the Briar Patches' trekno-radiation makes the photorp miss somewhat excusable, just as I tend to forgive Lord Vader for "leading" his targets in ANH given the DS's jamming.

Now, fixed-axis guns like those on Defiant or a Bird-of-Prey *do* often miss, but "strip phasers" have a pretty good track record. They're actually quite impressive if dialogue is admissable; e.g., 8-15 seconds to lock onto Soran's 2m long missile from thousands of kilometers-plus, and a Nebula-class starship's ability to hit a Runabout at thousands of kilometers in "Non Sequitur."

It's definitely not perfect, but to nitpick, they don't routinely miss either

P.S.--I don't know that fighters employ ECM, or if Starfleet ships do. I know Dominion and Klingon ships like to jam their enemies' communications, but that's subspace-based (like seemingly everything else in Star Trek). They might not be able to jam the fighters rapidly enough to affect their attack coordination, and vice-versa, even if we assume the ability is a given.

Illuminatus Primus · Post by **Illuminatus Primus** » 2003-02-19 07:13pm

Kerneth wrote:Obviously, if the books or movies say anything about concussion missiles, then that's canon, regardless of what the games say about them.

I think concussion missiles and proton torpedoes are just two type of self-propelled projectile weapons in SW. Just as tanks have kinetic penetrators and high-explosive rounds both for anti-tank purposes.

All continuity, taken holistically, suggests that there are anti-surface, anti-armor, anti-personel, anti-starship, and anti-fighter varieties of both concussion missiles and proton torpedoes.

Also continuity describes proton missiles, heavy rockets, and space bombs, as well as ion pulse warhead missile weapons and weapon-jamming weapons.

I think there are lots of types, but I think concussion missiles and proton torpedoes come in varieties for each mission and there are pros and cons to each method of the way they do damage, but like I said, all of continuity describes everything from anti-surface to anti-fighter to anti-starship models of both concussion missiles and proton torpedoes.

seanrobertson · Post by **seanrobertson** » 2003-02-19 07:32pm

Darth Servo,

Though Crow was my favorite

, I wanted to say I'm sorry if I was testy in that last response. I don't think I was over the top or anything, but I'm in a bad fucking mood today. I wanted to be sure I didn't take it out on you.

I also wanted to go ahead and talk about my reasoning behind phaser firepower.

I see it thusly: phasers and photorps/quantorps have similar effects against shielded targets. Naturally, effects are what we're most concerned with, so when we find that a photon torpedo has a given yield, a phaser--regardless of its actual "pre-NDF" output--should have a roughly equivalent effect. (I could heavily qualify this, inasmuch as it's possible Trek beam weapons are only so effective against shields which involve subspace at some level.)

Yet AGAIN I digress. The way I see it, there are lots of ways to determine a photorp's yield and, therefore, a phaser's equivalence thereto:

1--asteroid destructions ("Rise," "Genesis," "Booby Trap," "Cost of Living," "ST:TMP") or implied ("Pegasus")

2--proximity threats to firing ships ("Q Who?", "The Nth Degree," "Dead Stop")

3--collision damage ("ST: Nemesis," "Tears of the Prophets")

4--working backwards from known, quantifiable shield effectiveness ("Survivors," "Relics," "Descent," "I, Borg")

The first method is, IMO, one of the best. There's nothing like a good inert material to test your weapons against; it has the added advantage of something we can actually SEE, too.

All of those episodes suggest rather different yields, but all are (if barely so) into the kT range. "Rise" and "Pegasus" might suggest the highest yields, in the 200-500 kT torpedo range or thereabouts.

Note: IF Riker's statement is to be taken as true evidence, AND we assume that by "most of our photon torpedoes" Riker means, in fact, all 250, the lower-limit for destroying the Pegasus asteroid would be around 50 kT/torpedo, IIRC (I apologize...I could be way off, here, but I don't think it was lower than this). I'll work on finding my figures...suffice to say, I assumed the asteroid was almost completely hollow, and I compared the resulting volume to that of a similar-sized, solid asteroid.

The second method depends heavily on dialogue because we've never seen a proximity-detonated photorp actually *destroy* the ship firing it, or a ship nearby for that matter. (Side-note: we have seen proximity detonated photorps, though, FWIW.) If it was a one-shot deal, no pun intended, I might not take it so seriously...However, I do not think it should be dismissed out of hand, largely because it's something we're told about on several different occassions (see above, one example of which presumably refers to a weapon far inferior to a photorp, from "ENT"). To be sure, repeating a mistake countless times doesn't make it any more truthful, but I'm going to have to assume characters like Mr. Data have some idea what threatens the ship and what does not.

Anyway, I digress. In "Q Who?," Michael has estimated that the E-D was about 5-10 kilometers ahead of a Borg cube. Data says photorp blasts at this range could destroy the E-D, since she was unshielded.

The next step is to ask what would destroy the E-D. I try to do one better and wonder what would simply damage her to try to make the figure more conservative.

We have that from "Survivors." One of the 400 GW shots hits the ship after the shields drop and causes "thermal damage to the hull." Evidently it wasn't very bad damage, however. And it was concentrated on an area of a few hundred square meters*.

Thus, we can conclude that, to destroy the E-D with a proximity blast, we should expect that one would need to hit her with >200 GJ. Moreover, this energy should be contained within an area of several hundred sq. meters, but I'll ignore that.

The E-D has a frontal area of about 60,000 square meters, give or take. To hit that with 200 gigajoules from 5 kilometers out (for the lowest figure),
a photorp would have to rate in excess of 250 kT. This danger *might* have been posed by a spread of three torpedoes (I won't quibble about Data saying, singular, "a photon detonation"); nevertheless, this is fairly consistent with the instances of asteroid shattering to which I alluded earlier, and is meant chiefly to give us an idea of a photorp yield's *general range*.

Then we have the third method, collision damage, which yields incredibly low numbers (on the order of about 625 ton yields/torpedo based on "Nemesis," and something similar from "Tears of the Prophets" and "What You Leave Behind"). Put simply, if a shield can be easily overwhelmed by an impact that amounts to a few terajoules, photorps--which do NOT typically blow shields away with single hits--MUST yield less than this.

I do not think this method is very reliable, however. For one thing, it would mean that the NX-01, which could presumably manage a fwd. firepower of a few terawatts under great duress, could CREAM the E-E, etc. That doesn't fly.

For another, it'd mean that Riker's expectation of shattering a several kilometer-wide asteroid even with hundreds of torpedoes would translate to Riker's utter and complete stupidity. Even a 1 km asteroid requires a one megaton explosion (4,180,000 gigajoules) to shatter the thing. So...Riker's expectation is off by several hundred thousand times?! Patently absurd...he might be a moron in many respects, but the guy isn't THAT stupid. This would be analogous to a modern naval officer expecting a single daisy cutter could level much of NYC.

Third, it'd mean that photorps would be absolutely worthless for planetary bombardment purposes. To be sure, stripping off much of a planet's crust, shades of "The Die Is Cast," isn't going to be done with trillions of photorps; however, we DO know single starships are at least capable of wiping out most of a civilized world given a few hours, which implies mid-kiloton ranged devices (plus magic-like phasers) are more likely.

Similarly, the Cardassian Interceptor Dreadnought, which is said to have enough destructive power (~20 gigatons, or a 1 metric ton charge of AM) to "destroy a small moon," doesn't far outstrip a starship's ultimate capabilities. Say the missile strikes with 20 GT in a split-second. Give a starship a few hours at most (a'la "Broken Link"), and it should be able to do the same task.

Say three hours are required for a single starship to equal the FX of one Interceptor or so, which fits with all of the General Order 24 crap we've heard over the years. 20 GT/3,600 sec. per hour * 3 hrs. = a starship's ability to sustain ~1.8 megatons/sec. bombardment over that period. Phasers might account for a lot of that with their funky effects, and torpedo inventory is, of course, limited; however, it must make up at least a decent fraction of the attack or they wouldn't bother firing torpedoes at all.
To be absolutely sure, torpedoes with an upper-limit of hundreds of gigajoules or a couple of terajoules yield would be ABSOLUTELY worthless.

I could keep going...in the end, it simply doesn't make much sense that photorps wouldn't at least be into the low kT range. I have a few shaky theories about why the E-E was able to plow through the Scimitar's 70% shields, but I think the Jem'Hadar ramming incidents come down to shield "slippage." That is, Jem'Hadar shields, which are impervious to tractor beams (highly localized graviton fields, like shields), similarly can slip through enemy shields unimpeded, allowing their craft to ram a target head-on.

To rate shields, you first must DEAL with the shields...and when the Jem'Hadar can just slip through (if that's the case...as I said, it's a theory!--I have a bit more on it if you wish), they're not dealing with Klingon shields at all.

So that leaves us with an oddly inconsistent example of the E-E ramming the Scimitar to derive figures for photorps' output. But this, too, is secondary to actual EFFECTS of torpedoes...we could easily explain this away as some kind of threshold shielding at work; i.e., the E-E was moving so *slowly* that it passed through the Scimitar's shield envelope (which is not without precedent: Data and Worf's shuttle did the very same thing to a cube's shields in "Best of Both Worlds"), the shield copes with kinetic energy very, very poorly, or whatever.

Finally, we have the fourth method: judging a torpedoes' yield from known or likely shield strength (since torpedoes rapidly deplete shields). "Survivors" suggests a Galaxy-class starship has shields that can only withstand 400 gigawatts, which would mean each torpedo should only yield about 40 GJ or so (perhaps less since they detonate rapidly).

40 gigajoules?! Doesn't hold up for the reasons noted above. There is an escape/technobabble clause, though: when the Husnock ship first shoots the E-D, Worf expresses the shot as "equivalent firepower." If he meant equivalent to, say, raw phaser energy (which has effects far in excess of its initial output), then a weapon that equals the FX of a 400 GW-powered phaser could indeed drop the shields.

That pretty much HAS to be the case, unless we're to conclude it'd take hundreds of torpedo hits to level even ONE city, that Riker's expectation of shattering the "Pegasus" asteroid was over 100,000 times overestimation on his part, etc. ad infinitum.

Much better examples come from the incidents in which the E-D orbits stars, particularly "Relics" (which quantifies the star orbitted as G2-type, and they even state the E-D's altitude, the duration for which they could withstand the energy, and so on). "Relics" suggests shields should be able to take on the order of several tens of thousands, perhaps up to 120,000,
terajoules prior to total failure:

At an altitude of 150,000 km, I figured the E-D was facing 1.8 TW from the star (which, yes, I figured was far less luminous than Sol...25%, IIRC, but it's been awhile), times 3 hours at 23% full shields, yielding a nice figure of about 85,000 TJ for full shields.

If 10-15 photorps are required to knock these shields down (yes, I know it's a bit oversimplified, assuming burst and long-term capacities are identical), meaning individual photorps would have an effective yield--that is, on the target, after efficiency and geometric losses--of 1.35 megatons.

I *reiterate*, that's intended to provide a general range, and the range is significant--from around 50 kT to about a megaton. I tend to think photorps are in the 250-500 kT range. A very powerful phaser array seems more powerful than a single photorp against shields ("Yesterday's Enterprise"), but is less powerful than 5 photorps. Roughly speaking, a phaser MIGHT be equal, against shields, to approximately 2.5 photon torpedoes. (That's debatable but it's roughly right...I mean, consider that, to kill the E-D's shields, how long would you have to strike them with a sustained phaser beam? 10 seconds? 20? That's still equal to over a megaton/sec.)

Or, for the purposes of this thread, 125 kT-2 MT/sec. *equivalent firepower*. Yes, I definitely think that's more than enough to smack the shit out of a Defender's shields...as I said, I really think 50 kT shields are rather generous for the larger (but admittedly less advanced) X and Y-Wings' defensive systems.

seanrobertson · Post by **seanrobertson** » 2003-02-19 07:35pm

Darth Servo,

Though Crow was my favorite

, I wanted to say I'm sorry if I was testy in that last response. I don't think I was over the top or anything, but I'm in a bad fucking mood today. I wanted to be sure I didn't take it out on you.

I also wanted to go ahead and talk about my reasoning behind phaser firepower.

I see it thusly: phasers and photorps/quantorps have similar effects against shielded targets. Naturally, effects are what we're most concerned with, so when we find that a photon torpedo has a given yield, a phaser--regardless of its actual "pre-NDF" output--should have a roughly equivalent effect. (I could heavily qualify this, inasmuch as it's possible Trek beam weapons are only so effective against shields which involve subspace at some level.)

Yet AGAIN I digress. The way I see it, there are lots of ways to determine a photorp's yield and, therefore, a phaser's equivalence thereto:

1--asteroid destructions ("Rise," "Genesis," "Booby Trap," "Cost of Living," "ST:TMP") or implied ("Pegasus")

2--proximity threats to firing ships ("Q Who?", "The Nth Degree," "Dead Stop")

3--collision damage ("ST: Nemesis," "Tears of the Prophets")

4--working backwards from known, quantifiable shield effectiveness ("Survivors," "Relics," "Descent," "I, Borg")

The first method is, IMO, one of the best. There's nothing like a good inert material to test your weapons against; it has the added advantage of something we can actually SEE, too.

All of those episodes suggest rather different yields, but all are (if barely so) into the kT range. "Rise" and "Pegasus" might suggest the highest yields, in the 200-500 kT torpedo range or thereabouts.

Note: IF Riker's statement is to be taken as true evidence, AND we assume that by "most of our photon torpedoes" Riker means, in fact, all 250, the lower-limit for destroying the Pegasus asteroid would be around 50 kT/torpedo, IIRC (I apologize...I could be way off, here, but I don't think it was lower than this). I'll work on finding my figures...suffice to say, I assumed the asteroid was almost completely hollow, and I compared the resulting volume to that of a similar-sized, solid asteroid.

The second method depends heavily on dialogue because we've never seen a proximity-detonated photorp actually *destroy* the ship firing it, or a ship nearby for that matter. (Side-note: we have seen proximity detonated photorps, though, FWIW.) If it was a one-shot deal, no pun intended, I might not take it so seriously...However, I do not think it should be dismissed out of hand, largely because it's something we're told about on several different occassions (see above, one example of which presumably refers to a weapon far inferior to a photorp, from "ENT"). To be sure, repeating a mistake countless times doesn't make it any more truthful, but I'm going to have to assume characters like Mr. Data have some idea what threatens the ship and what does not.

Anyway, I digress. In "Q Who?," Michael has estimated that the E-D was about 5-10 kilometers ahead of a Borg cube. Data says photorp blasts at this range could destroy the E-D, since she was unshielded.

The next step is to ask what would destroy the E-D. I try to do one better and wonder what would simply damage her to try to make the figure more conservative.

We have that from "Survivors." One of the 400 GW shots hits the ship after the shields drop and causes "thermal damage to the hull." Evidently it wasn't very bad damage, however. And it was concentrated on an area of a few hundred square meters*.

Thus, we can conclude that, to destroy the E-D with a proximity blast, we should expect that one would need to hit her with >200 GJ. Moreover, this energy should be contained within an area of several hundred sq. meters, but I'll ignore that.

The E-D has a frontal area of about 60,000 square meters, give or take. To hit that with 200 gigajoules from 5 kilometers out (for the lowest figure),
a photorp would have to rate in excess of 250 kT. This danger *might* have been posed by a spread of three torpedoes (I won't quibble about Data saying, singular, "a photon detonation"); nevertheless, this is fairly consistent with the instances of asteroid shattering to which I alluded earlier, and is meant chiefly to give us an idea of a photorp yield's *general range*.

Then we have the third method, collision damage, which yields incredibly low numbers (on the order of about 625 ton yields/torpedo based on "Nemesis," and something similar from "Tears of the Prophets" and "What You Leave Behind"). Put simply, if a shield can be easily overwhelmed by an impact that amounts to a few terajoules, photorps--which do NOT typically blow shields away with single hits--MUST yield less than this.

I do not think this method is very reliable, however. For one thing, it would mean that the NX-01, which could presumably manage a fwd. firepower of a few terawatts under great duress, could CREAM the E-E, etc. That doesn't fly.

For another, it'd mean that Riker's expectation of shattering a several kilometer-wide asteroid even with hundreds of torpedoes would translate to Riker's utter and complete stupidity. Even a 1 km asteroid requires a one megaton explosion (4,180,000 gigajoules) to shatter the thing. So...Riker's expectation is off by several hundred thousand times?! Patently absurd...he might be a moron in many respects, but the guy isn't THAT stupid. This would be analogous to a modern naval officer expecting a single daisy cutter could level much of NYC.

Third, it'd mean that photorps would be absolutely worthless for planetary bombardment purposes. To be sure, stripping off much of a planet's crust, shades of "The Die Is Cast," isn't going to be done with trillions of photorps; however, we DO know single starships are at least capable of wiping out most of a civilized world given a few hours, which implies mid-kiloton ranged devices (plus magic-like phasers) are more likely.

Similarly, the Cardassian Interceptor Dreadnought, which is said to have enough destructive power (~20 gigatons, or a 1 metric ton charge of AM) to "destroy a small moon," doesn't far outstrip a starship's ultimate capabilities. Say the missile strikes with 20 GT in a split-second. Give a starship a few hours at most (a'la "Broken Link"), and it should be able to do the same task.

Say three hours are required for a single starship to equal the FX of one Interceptor or so, which fits with all of the General Order 24 crap we've heard over the years. 20 GT/3,600 sec. per hour * 3 hrs. = a starship's ability to sustain ~1.8 megatons/sec. bombardment over that period. Phasers might account for a lot of that with their funky effects, and torpedo inventory is, of course, limited; however, it must make up at least a decent fraction of the attack or they wouldn't bother firing torpedoes at all.
To be absolutely sure, torpedoes with an upper-limit of hundreds of gigajoules or a couple of terajoules yield would be ABSOLUTELY worthless.

I could keep going...in the end, it simply doesn't make much sense that photorps wouldn't at least be into the low kT range. I have a few shaky theories about why the E-E was able to plow through the Scimitar's 70% shields, but I think the Jem'Hadar ramming incidents come down to shield "slippage." That is, Jem'Hadar shields, which are impervious to tractor beams (highly localized graviton fields, like shields), similarly can slip through enemy shields unimpeded, allowing their craft to ram a target head-on.

To rate shields, you first must DEAL with the shields...and when the Jem'Hadar can just slip through (if that's the case...as I said, it's a theory!--I have a bit more on it if you wish), they're not dealing with Klingon shields at all.

So that leaves us with an oddly inconsistent example of the E-E ramming the Scimitar to derive figures for photorps' output. But this, too, is secondary to actual EFFECTS of torpedoes...we could easily explain this away as some kind of threshold shielding at work; i.e., the E-E was moving so *slowly* that it passed through the Scimitar's shield envelope (which is not without precedent: Data and Worf's shuttle did the very same thing to a cube's shields in "Best of Both Worlds"), the shield copes with kinetic energy very, very poorly, or whatever.

Finally, we have the fourth method: judging a torpedoes' yield from known or likely shield strength (since torpedoes rapidly deplete shields). "Survivors" suggests a Galaxy-class starship has shields that can only withstand 400 gigawatts, which would mean each torpedo should only yield about 40 GJ or so (perhaps less since they detonate rapidly).

40 gigajoules?! Doesn't hold up for the reasons noted above. There is an escape/technobabble clause, though: when the Husnock ship first shoots the E-D, Worf expresses the shot as "equivalent firepower." If he meant equivalent to, say, raw phaser energy (which has effects far in excess of its initial output), then a weapon that equals the FX of a 400 GW-powered phaser could indeed drop the shields.

That pretty much HAS to be the case, unless we're to conclude it'd take hundreds of torpedo hits to level even ONE city, that Riker's expectation of shattering the "Pegasus" asteroid was over 100,000 times overestimation on his part, etc. ad infinitum.

Much better examples come from the incidents in which the E-D orbits stars, particularly "Relics" (which quantifies the star orbitted as G2-type, and they even state the E-D's altitude, the duration for which they could withstand the energy, and so on). "Relics" suggests shields should be able to take on the order of several tens of thousands, perhaps up to 120,000,
terajoules prior to total failure:

At an altitude of 150,000 km, I figured the E-D was facing 1.8 TW from the star (which, yes, I figured was far less luminous than Sol...25%, IIRC, but it's been awhile), times 3 hours at 23% full shields, yielding a nice figure of about 85,000 TJ for full shields.

If 10-15 photorps are required to knock these shields down (yes, I know it's a bit oversimplified, assuming burst and long-term capacities are identical), meaning individual photorps would have an effective yield--that is, on the target, after efficiency and geometric losses--of 1.35 megatons.

I *reiterate*, that's intended to provide a general range, and the range is significant--from around 50 kT to about a megaton. I tend to think photorps are in the 250-500 kT range. A very powerful phaser array seems more powerful than a single photorp against shields ("Yesterday's Enterprise"), but is less powerful than 5 photorps. Roughly speaking, a phaser MIGHT be equal, against shields, to approximately 2.5 photon torpedoes. (That's debatable but it's roughly right...I mean, consider that, to kill the E-D's shields, how long would you have to strike them with a sustained phaser beam? 10 seconds? 20? That's still equal to over a megaton/sec.)

Or, for the purposes of this thread, 125 kT-2 MT/sec. *equivalent firepower*. Yes, I definitely think that's more than enough to smack the shit out of a Defender's shields...as I said, I really think 50 kT shields are rather generous for the larger (but admittedly less advanced) X and Y-Wings' defensive systems.

seanrobertson · Post by **seanrobertson** » 2003-02-19 07:37pm

DAMN!

Everyone, I'm sorry for the double-post. Will one of the Almighty Mods please delete one of them (and this apology if you see fit)?

My thanks.

Sean

Howedar · Post by **Howedar** » 2003-02-19 08:39pm

Thats a damn fine analysis IMHO.

Darth Yoshi · Post by **Darth Yoshi** » 2003-02-19 10:15pm

Isolder74 wrote:
Darth Yoshi wrote:
Isolder74 wrote:There is one other thing at .9 c the size of the Tie Defender's length would become real tiny. I don't have time to do the Cacls no but it would shrink by a consideral margin.
44% of it's rest length, I believe.
done the calculations and it comes to 3.23 Meters. Original length 7.4 meters contraction of 43.59%

Formula
L=Lo(1-(v/c)^2)^1/2

Which comes out to 44 if you use significant figures (I know, they're not as important as they are in chemistry, but still).

Don't missile boats also have the ability to seriously up it's acceleration at the expense of blaster power? And it has a mini-tractor, too. IIRC, you can use that to shorten your turn radius.

darthdavid · Post by **darthdavid** » 2003-02-19 10:16pm

Finally someone agrees that feddies could stand a chance against sw universe people.

Captain tycho · Post by **Captain tycho** » 2003-02-19 11:22pm

darthdavid wrote:Finally someone agrees that feddies could stand a chance against sw universe people.

Not for long. The rebellion shall be exterminated shortly.

Post by **Ghost Rider** » 2003-02-19 11:42pm

darthdavid wrote:Finally someone agrees that feddies could stand a chance against sw universe people.

Did you read the same thing I did...he said that the firepower(no estimation upon how they would hit the craft) is capable of taking down FOUR snub fighters.

Oh yeah....real chance there

Ender · Post by **Ender** » 2003-02-20 12:21am

darthdavid wrote:Finally someone agrees that feddies could stand a chance against sw universe people.

... I would love to hear your reasoning there. He said that the Trek weapons were very low MT. I'd like to know why you think that means they stand a chance.

darthdavid · Post by **darthdavid** » 2003-02-20 12:45am

Well the empire just throws swarms of crap at its enemies as evidenced by tie fighters. So basically if you can blow up a port-o-potty with an ion engine and a laser pointer on steroids you can blow up a tie fighter. The shuttles shuttles should be able to do this and it's been demonstrated that unconventional attacks can take out star destroyers (circa NJO). So, With the shuttles taking out the UNSHEILDED tie fighters and bombers and the small cap ships taking out the sheilded fighters and mid sized ships so the regular cap ships should be free to concentrate their fire on the bridge of the star destroyers (an a wing made it through so you can't say that focused cap ship fire won't) so if nothing else the feddies take a sizable hunk out of the Imperial (or New Republic) fleet.

Post by **Ghost Rider** » 2003-02-20 12:48am

darthdavid wrote:Well the empire just throws swarms of crap at its enemies as evidenced by tie fighters. So basically if you can blow up a port-o-potty with an ion engine and a laser pointer on steroids you can blow up a tie fighter. The shuttles shuttles should be able to do this and it's been demonstrated that unconventional attacks can take out star destroyers (circa NJO). So, With the shuttles taking out the UNSHEILDED tie fighters and bombers and the small cap ships taking out the sheilded fighters and mid sized ships so the regular cap ships should be free to concentrate their fire on the bridge of the star destroyers (an a wing made it through so you can't say that focused cap ship fire won't) so if nothing else the feddies take a sizable hunk out of the Imperial (or New Republic) fleet.

Holy shit...

You plan on backing up a single word, or do you think most of us just go ahead and accept this.

Let's see...given that it takes an Upper end WARSHIP to kill a Snub Fighter(and even then the Snub fighter has weaponry capable of killing the upper end Warship)

What makes you think an ISD is even challenged by a good chunk of Starfleet?

Howedar · Post by **Howedar** » 2003-02-20 12:51am

darthdavid wrote:Well the empire just throws swarms of crap at its enemies as evidenced by tie fighters. So basically if you can blow up a port-o-potty with an ion engine and a laser pointer on steroids you can blow up a tie fighter.

Yes, if that port-o-potty can take kilotons of enemy fire before being destroyed.

The shuttles shuttles should be able to do this and it's been demonstrated that unconventional attacks can take out star destroyers (circa NJO).

The shuttles have never demonstrated such capability.

So, With the shuttles taking out the UNSHEILDED tie fighters and bombers

Many are shielded.

and the small cap ships taking out the sheilded fighters and mid sized ships so the regular cap ships should be free to concentrate their fire on the bridge of the star destroyers

Fat fucking lot of good that will do.

(an a wing made it through so you can't say that focused cap ship fire won't)

An A-wing made it through after a half hour of Rebel bombardment, yes.

so if nothing else the feddies take a sizable hunk out of the Imperial (or New Republic) fleet.

Nothing I've never heard (or disproved) before. Typical nonsensical Trekkie nonsense. I'll cut you some slack cause you seem to be new around here, but never make these foolish claims again and expect to garner any sort of respect.

Illuminatus Primus · Post by **Illuminatus Primus** » 2003-02-20 12:51am

darthdavid wrote:Well the empire just throws swarms of crap at its enemies as evidenced by tie fighters.

Did you watch A New Hope, shithead? Only a handful of the wing or so of Rebel fighters made it home. The TIEs owned them.

So basically if you can blow up a port-o-potty with an ion engine and a laser pointer on steroids you can blow up a tie fighter.

Bullshit. The TIE lasers rival the phaser strips in firepower. The TIE is very fast and manuverable and capable of holding its own against shielded Rebel fighters.

The shuttles shuttles should be able to do this

Doubtful, they'd probably get outmanuvered and shot to shit.

and it's been demonstrated that unconventional attacks can take out star destroyers (circa NJO).

What are you talking about?

So, With the shuttles taking out the UNSHEILDED tie fighters and bombers

I don't think so.

and the small cap ships taking out the sheilded fighters

If they can hit them.

and mid sized ships so the regular cap ships should be free to concentrate their fire on the bridge of the star destroyers (an a wing made it through so you can't say that focused cap ship fire won't)

Hey shithead, the fucking shields collapsed and by freak chance the A-Wing crashed through a window the size of itself. The Feds can't penetrate Imperial shields.

so if nothing else the feddies take a sizable hunk out of the Imperial (or New Republic) fleet.

Please refrain from posting your explicit masturbatory fantasies on this board.

darthdavid · Post by **darthdavid** » 2003-02-20 01:20am

Well i geuss it's time to spin the wheel of stupidity. Today it landed on moronic posting while not thinking, tommorow, who knows ?

Eaglewood · Post by **Eaglewood** » 2003-02-20 01:33am

darthdavid wrote:Well i geuss it's time to spin the wheel of stupidity. Today it landed on moronic posting while not thinking, tommorow, who knows ?

At least try to spell "geuss" and "tommorow" correctly.

SPOOFE · Post by **SPOOFE** » 2003-02-20 04:44am

an a wing made it through so you can't say that focused cap ship fire won't

Sure I can.

"Focused cap ship fire won't."

As evidenced how? Well, first, you're forgetting that the A-wing in question had a fleet of about a dozen Mon Calamari cruisers to back it up... now, if the Federation can get their hands on a Mon Cal (or something else with equivalent firepower), THEN they can start thinking about taking down Star Destroyers.