Ender wrote:Alyeska, It's my understandign that the War GCS packs 275 QTs instead of the 250 PTs carried by the Standard one. Is that correct?
And by how much were shields upgraded?
Ender,
To my knowledge, no such information exists. I do know that we've never seen a
Galaxy fire quantum torpedoes, though I'm sure they could be modified to carry them.
As far as shields go, our good Alyeska and I discussed a bit about that in a thread some time ago. Shields weren't the primary topic at hand, so I don't remember the thread itself...
Basically, the idea was that a 100% increase in shield strength might take two decades to achieve. This is evident in "Yesterday's Enterprise," in which the E-D's heat dissipation rates were twice that of the E-C's (Yar tells Castillo this in so many words). Something was mentioned to loosely corroborate that train of thought, but I can't remember what
Damn.
Anyway, the GCS was launched in the early 2360's. Toward the end of the Dominion War, that's roughly 15 years of
potential advancements in shield technology, though passage of time itself is no guarantee of anything.
I would
guess that the modern GCSs probably have shields 25%-50% stronger than the E-D's. For example, if ten Warbird pulses were required to drop the E-D's shields, at least 13-15 pulses might be needed to drop the "war GCSs'" shielding.
It's possible that shield improvements designed to counter Borg and Dominion threats sped things along such that these war-era
Galaxies are better protected yet. Still, I hesitate to suggest that the aforementioned 100% increase is yet feasible, at least in the context of the GCS platform. The
Sovereign is probably a different story.
A potential monkeywrench in all of this is the fact that, circa VGR, we started seeing starships use warp power for combat systems more often, increasing the energy potentially fed to those systems by an order of magnitude.
In TNG, using warp power for non-propulsive systems was occassionally discussed but rarely considered feasible to my knowledge...LaForge didn't even
attempt to transfer warp power to shields in "The Nth Degree." (The "smart" Barclay did, and it saved their ass, boosting the shields by some 300%!) Using warp power through the deflector dish in "Best of Both Worlds" was deemed very dangerous.
Instead of using the warp core to juice combat systems, those first flight
Galaxies relied very heavily on their fusion reactors. Riker tells us that the saucer section's reactors were much needed in a combat situation ("Best of Both Worlds"), presumably the same reactors that couldn't even generate a single
terawatt for that communique in "Dauphin."
Fast-forward to late VGR, "Good Shepherd" IIRC. Torres notes that some system, perhaps a comm array?, "needs another five terawatts" to do something.
A 5 TW+ signal seems really dumb to me, but given how most starship components are galactic ginsus, I'll refrain from further disparagement right now. She's an engineer, the only character on VGR that didn't butcher SI units to my knowledge. I'll give her the benefit of the doubt where I wouldn't many others...
Anyway, VGR is TINY next to a GCS...there's simply no WAY her fusion sources could be as powerful as the E-D's. Therefore, VGR must be using warp power to feed that expensive comm array.
VGR and
Defiant both frequently used the warp core to power weapons and shields, though this had to be specifically ordered, indicating that using said power source for these systems is not SOP.
This could mean that the war GCSs, which could potentially power terawatt-class shields using some of the warp core's output, have considerably superior defenses than their first-flight cousins which, at best, could maybe power their shields to the tune of a couple hundred GW--certainly less than a terawatt given Riker's "Dauphin" statement.
That doesn't necessarily mean, however, that the shields would simply be 10 times more powerful. For instance, shield emitters can't simply handle more and more power without extensive modifications, mods that might be rather difficult to make.
Besideswhich, we don't know the ratio between shield power--the energy the devices require to run at peak efficiency--and actual shield
strength, that which is the amount of energy needed to blast the shield down.
For all we know, to double the shield strength, you may well have to produce ten times more power to achieve such protection. *shrugs*
So I honestly don't know...I think the 1000%/order of magnitude improvements are pretty much theoretical, very loosely supported if at all, but a mere 50% increase might be a hair too little, despite my earlier objections.
Meditate on this, I will
Jem Hadar Attack Ships seem to be in the playing field of BoP's, so they ought to be extremely dangerous to a large target like a Galaxy. The fact non were destroyed indicates a mere 50% shield increase is too small, I would not be surprised if the value is close to your high-end.
