OMNI SCIFI VERSUS: These Size-Chart ships fight! Who wins?

[Eternal_Freedom]

I seriously question the idea that TOS had far higher firepower than TNG, especially given that, for all the E-Nil's power, it took them blowing up Constellation's impulse drive to produce an explosion just shy of 100 megatons. That doesn't speak for the Connie's having such massive firepower if their own weapons can't do that.

[Q99]

In that episode, the Doomsday machine sliced up planes in short periods of time and the Connies were able to take hits from the same. The Connies that are capable of hurting each other.

A Taste of Armageddon and Whom Gods Destroy both establish that a Constitution class has the power to wipe out a planet.

"How can we be powerful enough to wipe out a planet and still be so helpless?" - McCoy, to Scott



So yea, the spoken yield *numbers* don't work too well- heck, there's another episode that has the Ent-Nil tank '18 to the 12th power decibel' attacks (in space. Yea, I don't even). But the feats are more consistently impressive than the numbers, and the only reason the detonation worked wasn't the amount of power, but where it was- a simple shuttle's destruction did more than all the weapon fire of two Constitution class ships, after all, because the shuttle was internal.

And one really can't argue that the Doomsday Machine itself has firepower any less than 'capable of slicing up and completely devouring a planet in an unknown but fairly short time'.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Just because the Doomsday Machine can slice up planets doesn't mean it uses that firepower for every single shot. Plus, the Connies have shields and planets in Trek don't, which may go some way to explain the difference in effect.

[Q99]

Just because the Doomsday Machine can slice up planets doesn't mean it uses that firepower for every single shot. Plus, the Connies have shields and planets in Trek don't, which may go some way to explain the difference in effect.

It's automatic, fairly dumb as you noted, and no-one notices or comments on any difference in power, and the beam is a simple 'anti-proton beam,' not anything too exotic... and besides, we're talking about the Doomsday Machine/Planet Killer itself in the fight, so does it matter much how strong a Connie is for this discussion? The PK has the PK's firepower, there's no need or point in scaling.

It has planet-slicing power that it brings to this battle, combined with warp speed and a very tough hull.

Oh, it also has a field that somehow managed to deactivate the Constellation's anti-matter from prolonged exposure. That's potentially useful, considering how long a battle with this many combatants is likely to take.


Hm.... who else has weird ECM, fields, or so on that'll mess with the battlefield? The Durandal has the Hilbert effect which un-phases phased things and serves as a minor EMP....

[Eternal_Freedom]

True, it's the Planet Killer in the fight. But isn't a Connie int he fight as well?

As for the "neutralises antimatter" effect, as best I can tell it's an effect of being hit by the gun, not a generic field, since the E-Nil didn't lose it's antimatter just from being nearby. Though if it is a general field, perhaps one that is stronger closer in, it would explain why photon torpedoes aren't used for the 100-megaton blast in the thing's maw.

[Starglider]

A backhoe excavactor ´slices up planets´, albeit in very small increments. Mount a mass driver on it capable of flinging gravel into orbit; have you just turned a fleet of JCBs into a planet-destroying weapon?

The ability of the Trek planet killer to ´consume´ within a few hours speaks more of its tractor beam capacity than anything else. The logistics of it are actually rather absurd; the mouth diameter is only a kilometre or so, so for it to consume the earth in ten hours it would rearrange about a trillion cubic km of liquid rock and iron into a trillion km long cyliner and feed it into the converter at about 100c. Obviously this is impossible so either it compresses matter to a superdense state before ingesting it, or it is extremely inefficient and wastes most of the material from the destroyed planets, or both of the above. If the hull is actually made of ´stabilised neutronium´ then I guess it´s relatively plausible that it could crush matter into neutronium fuel and liberate the energy via neutronium evaporation (as in Schlock Mercenary); there certainly isn´t any other Trek technology that could come close to storing (an appreciable fraction of) the mass-energy of a planet inside a few-km conical hull. But for all that, we don´t see it crush the Constellation or even the shuttlecraft into compressed matter, and its tractor beam is weak enough that the Enterprise can break free (at the risk of engine damage). Either the combat programming is really stupid and doesn´t use the full capabilities of the drone, or they only work on large amounts of inert matter and cannot be focused onto a small mobile target (or both). The former is quite plausible given the original writer´s concept for the planet killer; the idea was that it originally had numerous secondary weapons that were destroyed/shot away over time, leaving only the neutronium-armoured power plant core. In which case you would expect its combat programming to have relied on those missing weapons and the ability to use the mining beam / tractors as a weapon as a last-ditch emergency tactic.

It does have warp speed but both the warp and impulse speeds are pretty slow by Trek standards. As noted by other posters the tactical utility of warp drive is dubious given the canon examples of starship combat. The simple programming in the planet killer is certainly not going to invent the Picard maneuver. As for the animatter deactivation, the only way I can rationalise that to something even vaugely sane is to go with the description of dilithium crystals as a reaction mediator from the TNG tech manual, and then assume that a secondary effect of the planet killer´s super-powered tractor beam is to temporary disable the ability of dilithium to contain a M/AM reaction. We know that the crystal structure is finicky and can break down (and can also be restored by gamma irradiation) from Star Trek 4. This is highly speculative but much more sane than the idea that antimatter can be temporarily ´deactivated´ and then return to normal on its own (i.e. it wasn´t just converted to normal matter). So in short it will probably get a change to demolish at least one planet and maybe some minor combatants that get too close, but either the Federation ships or allies will take it out with the known hidden bomb trick, or whichever high-end combatant is victorious will destroy it as a high priority item on their ´mopping up´ to-do list.

It´s a shame that V´Ger isn´t on that chart, because I´d give it a much better chance than the planet killer; aside from demonstrating the ability to rapid-fire precision guided plasma weapons each with 1000s of times the yield needed to kill a D7 cruiser, it probably has vastly greater tactical flexibility. Plus it has the implied capability to destroy planets in one shot, if we assume that the images of planets Spock saw in its memory were generated the same way that the other images were, e.g. destructive scanning by plasma torpedo. Plus we can probably assume that the V´Ger plasma torpedoes are FTL as the much more primitive romulan ones are and the Klingons would logically have been running away as fast as they could (i.e. at warp) once they decided to retreat.

[Q99]

A backhoe excavactor ´slices up planets´, albeit in very small increments. Mount a mass driver on it capable of flinging gravel into orbit; have you just turned a fleet of JCBs into a planet-destroying weapon?

The ability of the Trek planet killer to ´consume´ within a few hours speaks more of its tractor beam capacity than anything else. The logistics of it are actually rather absurd;

The breaking it up to do so is no small amount of firepower either!

It does have warp speed but both the warp and impulse speeds are pretty slow by Trek standards. As noted by other posters the tactical utility of warp drive is dubious given the canon examples of starship combat. The simple programming in the planet killer is certainly not going to invent the Picard maneuver.

Sure it's less maneuverable than TOS ships (though *not* faster- it was catching up on the E-nil in a straight line), but in TOS, combat is constant-FTL anyway, which is better than the picard maneuver. They don't just hop around at warp, most of their flying and fighting is warp without slowing down to do stuff, and even impulse is clearly FTL at this point. It may be the *tactically* fastest ships present, with only the First Federation ship comparing. As all the Federation ships are post-TOS (the Constitution on the chart is a refit, and the movie were the first to have non-FTL fighting. The only TOS ships present are the Planet Killer, Fesarius, and Romulan Bird of Prey), this poses a problem with *them* dealing with it. Plus, heck, knowing how it works, they can steer clear and let it deal with harder stuff that they can't.

Also, just like firepower, speed is a thing that went down from TNG to TOS. Not only has the Enterprise gone to the edge of the galaxy, but the Planet Killer is extragalactic in origin.

True, it's the Planet Killer in the fight. But isn't a Connie int he fight as well?

As for the "neutralises antimatter" effect, as best I can tell it's an effect of being hit by the gun, not a generic field, since the E-Nil didn't lose it's antimatter just from being nearby. Though if it is a general field, perhaps one that is stronger closer in, it would explain why photon torpedoes aren't used for the 100-megaton blast in the thing's maw.

The field was also responsible for the communication jamming that prevented them from calling reinforcements. So unless there's two power-damping effects, it's probably the same thing.

And yes, the E-Nil didn't lose antimatter from being nearby, and the Constellation was able to engage in a pitched battle before being affected. So I think it's either relatively slow-acting, or the shields were enough to stop it until they were knocked down.


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Speaking of TOS super-ships and power draining, the First Federation Fesarius was able to shut down all of the Enterprise's weapons and defenses remotely. That's some nice remote-hacking, in addition to it being out of the E-Nil's league in stuff like power generation (their tiny pilot ship could barely be outpowered by the E-Nil).