scvn2812

My girlfriend does not live with me, does not know about this forum but if she did, at worst she would make fun of me relentlessly. Sort of like how she does about my table top role playing and larping. She can't decide if I talk to imaginary people as a fantasy being because I'm schizophrenic or just stopped maturing at the age of 9. She's a dork, loves anime and scifi but doesn't really share my rather peculiar level of interest. I can't speak for anyone else, but this really doesn't occupy that much of my time. When things get really intense I might spend a few hours total in a day bickering over this stuff but I enjoy it more than watching TV and at least as much as reading. Maybe not quite as much as role playing, which at times, when I put on my devil's advocate hat, this has elements of. I actually watch so little TV that there are probably weeks where I've logged more hours on here going back and forth on how the validity of the ICS calcs or whether The Die is Cast represents conventional weapons than I've spent watching TV.

@jm while I vehemently disagree with the position you've taken on the nature of disruptors, the more sensible tactics would be to beam or launch munitions into hanger bays or through lower density materials such as windows. There's no telling how far into the ship you can go before internal bulkheads have put too much exotic matter into the path of the transporter beam but I'd wager you could beam a quantity of antimatter or exotic weapons such as those I believe to be responsible for the damage to the planet in The Die is Cast far enough into a ship like Executor or a Star Destroyer that it would be unpleasant, probably break something important although it may not be fatal depending on the device used. I don't believe something capable of gutting or reformatting an ISD are standard issue or stockpiled in great quantities but it might work a few times until a survivor gets word out and they start trying to work out precautions like heavy jamming or isolating the devices with force fields.

Also, when did having a better idea become a prerequisite for pointing out flaws in a theory that need to be addressed or other ways the data could be interpreted? I'm not arguing from a position of having a dire emotional need for it to go one way or another but for scifi debating purposes, a theory that has counter examples needs to have those examples explained. I've got some ideas but I don't know if I have a theory that can hold against all evidence yet, guess I'll see when I revisit the examples we've been looking at. I don't need to have a correct theory though to demonstrate you've still got some work to do explaining all of the evidence.

I'll go point by point later on your post: Two quick things though, I did, in previous posts, outline at least one, if not two possible shield theories that fit every last one of your examples. I'm not in the mood to wall of text the same material all over again, I'll restate it in a more direct way in a follow up. The short version is that proximity to the hull and intensity of a given area of shield can be dictated by the ship to fit its needs depending on the situation. Projecting the shields away from the hull may confer benefits like reducing the effects of any bleed through of hostile energy from shield inefficiency but in many examples in The Clone Wars and the films, it appears most capital ship shields in most situations are hull hugging with no allowance for fighters to dip into them and fire underneath them. Which brings me to point two: your theory requires all capital ships in virtually all scenarios to have shields that are projected off of the hull with enough clearance for a fighter to at least dip their nose through and fire their weapons. This is demonstrably untrue in virtually all of the Clone Wars clips of combat you have used. We see both starfighter and capital ship weapons used on the same targets, simultaneously and both appear to hit the hull. There are only two options for explaining this: either the shields are invisible and are having no obvious effect on the visible portion of the beam - unlike the gradual break up of the beam in Tantive IV vs Devastator (which I am undecided if that is Devastator projecting its shields outwards or a separate defensive system) which then impacts harmlessly on the hull OR the ships have been in combat for some time already and, not unlike WW2 documentaries, we are only seeing the decisive moments. The same would also have to be true of the battles at Coruscant in ROTS and at Endor in ROTJ, no weapon impacts anywhere from capital weapons at a distance a fighter would be able to fly under. The only examples that come to mind immediately of shields being visible in Clone Wars clips you have posted are of Grievious' three frigates sheltering behind the asteroids firing on Ashoka's Venators with the shield effects not being really possible to determine if they are on or above the hull due to the scale of the ships in question and the Confederacy ship that raised thermal shields to stop a missile attack. Notably the commander of that vessel emphasized the phrase thermal shields instead of deflector shields, ray shields or just plain shields. As for Malevolence, a point for hull hugging shields would be that we do not know what noise anything makes when it scrapes against a shield and the Falcon landing on the back of an ISD could be evidence that you can safely come into contact with a shield if you don't crash into it. Where are the examples of turbolasers being stopped by capital ship shields with enough clearance to fly a fighter under them? You've shown an arsenal of examples of fighters flying through empty space above the hull of capital ships and even maiming them but none that show capital ship gunfire being stopped by capital ship shields with enough clearance above the hull to fly a fighter. Meanwhile, there are plenty of examples in ROTS, ROTJ and Clone Wars of capital ship firing reaching the hull and not causing any damage, sometimes with apparent shield effects, sometimes not. If you addressed this already, then I missed it so maybe it bares repeating.

I suppose part of me likes the semi permeable idea because it allows for other vs scenarios to be interesting. In the absence of semi permeable shields the only vs against Star Wars in a civilization on civilization beat down that would be a fight worth talking about is Andromeda. Yet honesty compels me to make you work harder for this one Brian.

How can you objectively say that the semi-permeable idea is consistent the most evidence? I think I've pretty much gone down the line at this point and posited how these scenes might play out with different shield mechanics. Last time I checked, that's called a draw. On one extreme, we have the Death Star 1 which cannot be explained any other way than permeable shields but then we also have in the movies, the Trade Fed ship that the Naboo were unable to inflict any credible damage on until Annie ended up in the hangar bay. That bit could go either way, you could say that the shields around the hangar were down to allow Vulture droids to take off or that they were permeable and the Naboo hadn't trained for tackling capital ships and thus didn't know about slipping through the shields. Then we have Endor and the Clone Wars, where virtually every impact except for that missile salvo from the cloaked ship, hits directly on the hull or so close as to be impossible to argue that they did or didn't which is in contrast to the notion that shields extend outwards as a general rule and that fighters are flying through them to get to the hull. The scenes without shield effects might be explainable as scenes where battle had already been joined before the audience sees it and we are just seeing the decisive moments where the fighters go in to decisively end the battle once shields are compromised. In the scene with Grievous sheltering behind asteroids, he made no effort to attack the Republic with fighters while their shields were still obviously up. It is arriving at the same conclusion from two different routes but the route does have implications for how we deal with VS scenarios, in universe or out. I would be interesting to see the extra evidence you gathered though. Maybe the smoking gun to tilt the weight of evidence one way or another is in there. So on Ex, are we clear now that I don't think the Ex is "as weak as" a lone ISD? My point being that as the Clone Wars is demonstrating in a few clips, size is not the final arbiter of who wins and who loses. I would venture to say for example, that though she may wield firepower equal to in excess of a hundred ISDs, less than that number could probably do her in with the right tactics. Lining up in a formation dead ahead of her in full view of the 700+ probable heavy turrets Saxton identified and where Ex can maximize her shields being a prime example of "not the right tactics."

Valid points but I will not hold my breath that prime will ever continue in film or on television. What could they do that wouldn't be a rehash of everything else they've done? Voyager and Enterprise suffered a great deal from their semi-blatant stealing of TNG's story formulas but can a new series not feel like a rerun with better FX? I think that's a question worth exploring but I don't see it happening in the Prime verse. It ain't over until its over but if there's anyone who thinks there's actually going to be a fifth season of Enterprise, the Browncoats have some swampland they'd like to sell to shoot it. Just don't dig too deep, that's where they buried the cult of Farscape.

Here's where I'm at. For all intents and purposes, I'm rejecting the idea of shields as a collection of damage sponges of fixed size, shape and capacity dictated by the profile of the ship and no other factors that fail after you put X joules into them. In other words, the video game hit point model. I think total power available for shields is less important than how strong the shields are in the specific area being fired upon. Essentially they would be analogous to armor. Some degree of dispersion of energy but not across the total area of the ship's surface area. At least not instantaneously. Going back to the example of Executor: if she were slugging it out with a peer warship then she would throw everything she's got into defending against that opponent from that angle and the two could probably hammer each other for minutes without one obviously having the upper hand and no lesser ship could hope to effect her shields from that angle by even a percentage point. A brawl with mixed formations and multiple threats attacking from multiple angles is a much harder fight. Ex can either even out her shields in which case the resilience of any one segment of shielding is going to be a few ISDs worth while the total shield power of all segments combined could be several hundred ISDs. Or she could prioritize a few angles and reduce shielding in areas not immediately threatened. The bridge shield might have been looted to boost power to another angle under heavy attack leaving it possible for rebel fighters to breach it. Reprioritizing shields like this might create vulnerabilities that would allow solid objects to pass through in areas that are not at full strength. That is not strictly necessary to fit the evidence as far as I'm concerned though. Projecting shields away from the hull to catch fire from missiles (as in the Battle of Naboo or that Clone Wars clip) or light gun fire such as from T4 might confer situational benefits over keeping the shield close to the hull. It might reduce the chance of damage to the hull from any energy not caught by the shields due to inefficiency or other unknown variables that might permit damage to the hull through the shields. For maximum protection, though, as in the battle with Grievous in the asteroid field, you want your shields tight against the hull and with all available shield capacity directed into the smallest feasible footprint. This model would make ships especially vulnerable to flanking maneuvers by ships and fighters attacking from angles where their target has not optimized their defenses. This may explain why sometimes an asteroid or out of control fighter crashes and leaves obvious damage and why sometimes they leave no lasting damage, without trying to explain it as differences in velocity that I think will prove hard to quantify and makes sense for a droid that walks on the ground but there is no reason why space craft shields should discriminate by velocity. The moon sized elephant in the room is the Death Star and how it was unable to prevent fighters from reaching its surface and inflicting damage on turrets and other structures. This could have been an oversight, over confidence in the density of the gun fire the Death Star could throw out (not entirely misplaced given the number of kills they were able to make on the descending fighters) and in the ability of the fighter wing to mitigate the damage done (also not entirely misplaced) or it could have been a limitation in scaling conventional shield technology up to that size. It wouldn't be without precedent in the real world, in Star Wars its a bit iffy as we've seen composite lasers small enough for a gunship and large enough for a Death Star but its an explanation. I make no pretense that its the only plausible explanation.

I did not say that Executor was merely as tough as an ISD. Do not put words in my mouth. What I did say was that while she has substantially greater volume for defensive gear, she also has significant surface area to defend. In absolute terms her total shield strength would be appropriate for her size but there is no basis for assuming that an arbitrarily selected segment of her shields would be a hundred times more resilient than the same area of shield on an ISD. Ex has something to the tune of a hundred twenty or so greater surface area to defend than an ISD. This puts isolated areas of shield within the ability of ships that can kill an ISD within the realm of possibility of being compromised by heavy bombardment. The Clone War era Munis could hang in a fight with significantly more massive Venators and take them out with intense bombardment in less time than is likely to have been between Ackbar giving the order to concentrate all fire on Ex and the A Wing attack. I was not and am not talking about Executor's total defense capacity across all shields and angles but her ability to resist a concentrated attack on a small area by unknown numbers of capital ships with fire power enough to blow ISDs out of the sky. They need not even breach her shields, just force her to reroute capacity to the point of attack and leave the bridge understrength enough that fighter munitions of unknown yield and nature can penetrate to the dome. Referring back to Grievous' trio of Munis killing a Venator, clearly size is not the only factor involved in combat success and maybe a significantly less important factor than we have generally presumed. Let me put it another way, a Nimitz is ten times heavier than virtually any other surface ship in the Navy. It isn't out of line to say that she'd probably take about that much more punishment to sink but if you take a meter cross section of her hull and compare it to a destroyer's, neither one is going to hold up to a missile. Nimitz's hull is probably a bit stronger but not ten times stronger even though the ship as a whole is good for ten times the abuse. Since you're in a spirited mood, if you want me to stop playing devil's advocate and demonstrating all the other ways the data can be interpreted, prove that velocity matters. Not with a feature of Destroyer droid shields that only makes sense for walking droids but actually demonstrate that the speeds of the asteroids and fighters we see safely close in on the hull are measurably slower than the ones that break up without causing damage. Otherwise I will continue to remain convinced that the semi permeable shield theory for starships is not the only viable explanation for shield mechanics as we see them or rather don't. I can guarantee you that I'm not likely the only one who is going to be skeptical of the claim that the velocity trick applies to starships in the absence of verified study.

I give this a snowball's chance. Cranking out character dramas and comedies is one thing but scifi calls for a budget and I'm not at all confident Netflix would cough up the cash for anything more than a TV movie equivalent. Maybe a mini. Did they go the nBSG route and digitize the sets? If not, they'd have to rebuild everything from scratch. That makes things even more expensive. If CBS wants to make a new Trek series, they will not look back to a series that basically failed and does not have a cult following. Star Trek as a whole has the cult following and not matter how awesome the fourth season is supposed to be, I seriously doubt they'd go to the trouble of reviving the series. Maybe something in the same time period as a follow up but this sort of thing hasn't happened to my knowledge since Galactica 1980. My gut feeling though is that prime universe Trek is dead and isn't coming back. Whether it should or not is an entirely different discussion. I wouldn't mind a well done series picking up the pieces after the Dominion War but even that I'd be somewhat iffy on. The temptation would be to rely on themes of reconstruction and terrorism in a war torn part of the galaxy and television is already saturated enough with that. I'd prefer to see an episodic exploration series that hearkens back to the blend of space western and Outer Limits / Twilight Zone type story telling.

Okay, just did a back of the envelope comparing the cubes of the lengths of a Home One and an ISD. At 3.2 km they'd have about 8 times the volume of an ISD, assuming similar shape (which they don't really have but close enough for a guesstimate) Oops. I thought the volume accumulated faster or they were a bit bigger. Still, unless we assume that Executor's shields are a hundred times more resilient than an ISD's in every single spot rather than in absolute terms, I still maintain that concentrated fire from an inferior force can harm a single superior ship. We saw it in Clone Wars with three Munis who collectively shouldn't have even one Venator's worth of internal volume overpowering a single Venator and they do it fairly regularly. Size apparently isn't the advantage we think is.

For one I think you're seriously underestimating the Rebel fleet. The two remaining Home One types would be able to bring a couple dozen ISDs worth of power to bare and that also ignores the fact that the A Wings pumped a dozen or so weapons similar if not identical to the munitions the Falcon was packing into the same few square meters of the same dome in a matter of seconds. In absolute terms, Ex might have a hundred or more ISDs worth of power but she's also got a good hundred times the surface area of an ISD to protect. Is it that infeasible that a concentrated bombardment to the same point might breach her shields? Especially if power had been diverted to other aspects to anticipate attacks from Rebel ships from multiple angles in a mixed brawl with no battle front to let her put all her power into defense from that angle? Maybe there is no extended time in that specific cut but I don't see the issue with the A Wings doing the job on their own rather than ducking through the shields. Especially since not a single ship at that fight is showing signs of shields extending away from the hull except the Falcon. There may be circumstances where fighters can go through shields but I'm not buying it with that specific scene. I'm not so sure about Malevolence any more either given we didn't see the Y Wings bother with using lasers for collateral damage while they were flying to the ion cannon and used torpedoes on the cannon. On the other hand, a couple minutes between Ackbar's order and Ex's demise is not unreasonable. It is, in my opinion,an equally valid interpretation of the scene that the A-Wing attack run is to demonstrate that the shields are down, not the cause of the shields coming down. It is entirely feasible that the Rebels could have hammered Ex hard enough that she had to play games with her shield intensity and left herself open to attack from unexpected angles, which the A-Wings exploited. In a clip that was posted previously, we saw three Munificents or at least three ships that look like Munis, hammer a Venator until she started diving out of control Executor style in just a few seconds of heavy bombardment. When they want to, it seems clear that ships can dramatically increase their combat power though this may cost them in other areas like shield resilience, propulsion and draining reserve power. Similarly, in the few minutes or so of on screen combat footage that we saw, a Mon Cal cruiser was able to get a kill on an ISD.

Perhaps ships can reconfigure the properties and geometry of their shields based on the nature of the attack. It may be impractical to protect a large area such as the entire ship with the equipment that a ship can practically carry against all forms of attack. Shields may be concentrated into a very narrow area tight against the hull to protect against a physical impact or spread out, further from the hull to disrupt lighter gunfire from multiple sources and allow more space for the beam to spread or for the detonation of a torpedo to spread out such that in either case, what reaches the hull is insignificant. Alternatively this may only describe ray shields and shields against physical impact are a separate system. This seems like a logical synthesis of the different properties of shields that we've seen.

Okay so maybe it would be useful to summarize some of the data and some of the points of discussion: Facts: Fighters are sometimes able to close very close to the hull of a ship or battlestation and inflict significant damage using just their guns and without using brute force to penetrate the shields (Death Star I, one interpretation of numerous Clone Wars examples) Fighters are not able to do this consistently. Anakin was the only one who was able to fly through the shields at Naboo, some crashing fighters at Endor left lasting damage, others did not. Physical objects such as battle droids apparently do not always trigger obvious shield effects when a fighter runs them over. Inanimate objects like asteroids sometimes do but sometimes do not manage to connect with ships and cause damage. Sometimes energy weapons appear to be in the process of being dispersed well away from the hull and significantly further away from where we observe most beam impacts to hit. (Tantive IV vs Devastator) Feel free to add to this list, perhaps if we can lay out what we KNOW we can get closer to stitching together all the facts into a cohesive whole.

Brian: just caught the notion of reconfiguring torpedoes for the right velocity. This is a tricky idea that depends on figuring out what that velocity is and getting past the point defense. The main issue I see is that we don't really know how fast torpedoes can decelerate. If they can go from a hundred thousand kps or so to a few hundred meters per second in the span of a few seconds it might work but longer deceleration makes the torpedoes easier targets. Although that might explain the A Wings getting through Ex's shields at significant distance better than getting in the shield perimeter. It's one of a range of possibilities I see that don't have a decisive edge over other paradigms. I'm a foot in Cap's camp in that I don't think all that is filmed of Endor is all that is happening. I think it makes as much sense that Ex was under attack in quarters we didn't see for an undefined period of time between Ackbar's orders and the strike on the bridge domes. She need not have taken obvious physical damage for her shields to be compromised. We've seen ships without shield effects take fire and not take obvious damage like Yoda's ship in that ambush. The ground battle clearly has cuts where time passes. Why not the space battle? This isn't like Dooku bailing from Geonosis where you'd have to be nuts not to see its basically real time. There is ambiguity in the presentation of the ground and space battle.

Two things, I didn't say fighters weren't viable only that if fighters alone were effective for battling ships, the tactics would have shifted to fighters being the major combatants instead of both ships and fighters operating together. Secondly, how do we know how long it takes a capital ship to raise shields? In space they are largely invisible so we can only infer the presence of shields by the effects on ships and even that is iffy.

I think the most accurate portrait of space travel for Trek is likely that having possession of a ship, even a shuttle, is many, many times less common than having a boat. Space travel is time consuming and resource intensive so only a fraction of the population does it regularly but with very stringent regulation, it does happen. A shuttle with a hundred Gee acceleration like Brian's E-D crossing the surface of a Borg Cube, or that can use warp drive to hit relativistic speeds like the E-nil in ST:TMP, is a weapon of mass destruction after all. Who could blame any race for limiting unnecessary space travel? Especially when its noteworthy for smaller planets and outposts to have shields.

Its a potential asymmetric warfare tactic. It relegates capital ships to the sidelines as little more than carriers and escorts that need to stay well away from the actual battle. However, if this were a viable tactic, there'd be no capital ships in Star Wars. Fighters operate as an extension of the selection of weapons available to the capital ship, not in place of. Likely this would alter the tactics used by Star Wars. If no enemy ships are staying around to give battle, then there's no reason for Star Wars capital ships to stick around either. They may just drop their fighters and leave, then come back when the battle is over. Imperial and Separatist fighter doctrines revolve around non-hyperdrive equipped fighters and as far as we know, they don't have an equivalent of hyperspace rings like the Republic does. This means they would have to expose their capital ships to hostile action but the density of fire they can throw up is pretty formidable considering the volume of fire in many Clone Wars fights and at Coruscant. So the Empire and Confederacy would be at greater risk deploying their fighters than the Republic. There are areas of ships like hangers where ships are especially vulnerable to transporter bombs. Hangars by their very nature are generally in close proximity to stores of fuel and munitions for their strike wings. Now as has been discussed many, many times: these need not be volatile on their own. Nuclear weapons aren't volatile, nuclear power plants aren't explosively volatile (at least not in a way that damage to them is likely to sink a ship rather than irradiate it) on the other hand, they might be. A damaged fuel silo that stores fuel in a tachyonic form (as has been speculated as a means of letting Star Wars ships haul around the obscene amount of fuel needed to function without becoming immobile lumps of neutronium) might spontaneously convert ALL of its fuel back into baryonic form, summoning dozens of times more fuel than can fit in the space available, antimatter warheads might lose containment etc. We don't really know enough about how their weapons or power systems work to say exactly how vulnerable they are. Generally speaking though, nothing good ever seems to come of fighters firing explosives into hangar bays or holes in starships. Similarly, while only an idiot would design a ship that can't function without its bridge, destroying a bridge can throw a ship into chaos, confusion and malfunction long enough for bad things to happen like the ship taking a nose dive into a nearby Deathstar. In a war like this, someone is going to run out of fighters or fighter equivalents and an attrition war favors Star Wars. On the other hand, scenarios like Death Squadron gets stranded in the Alpha Quadrant with no way home get more perilous for Star Wars as permeable shields would mean that large scale shuttle / fighter attacks can have a chance at negating the threat posed by the superior firepower and shield resilience of Star Destroyers and Executor. If they can wear down Death Squadron's fighter wings and inflict enough damage to force a retreat or fully disarm the task force before Vader gives in to the dark side and starts toasting planets. That is one of the few interesting "VS" scenarios for these two universes that I can think of off the top of my head. I'm not moved by stories where one side is inevitably ground into the dust with no realistic possibility of the tide turning. Its one of the things I found tedious about that incredibly long Trek / B5 crossover I read on Spacebattles or the Salvation War saga from SD.net and every other Honor Harrington novel.

I wouldn't really call that a tizzy. He got them to acknowledge that shield permeability is possible but lost most of his credibility on that issue trying to claim that disruptors are antimatter beams when there's no evidence one way or another if the antiprotons are a side effect, deliberately used and in either case, how important they are to the effectiveness of the beam or that enough antimatter is present in the armaments of a craft that could slip through the shields to make a dent in the hull of a ship. Looks more like a draw to me. Different standards of victory I guess.

Anyway, the thread on SD.net doesn't really reveal anything new. They basically hashed out the same stuff with regards to shields as we did, except with a bit of derision for TCW. The permeable shield theory fits the evidence. The problem is that its not the only theory that fits the evidence. There's no smoking gun to really affirm with certainty that yes the shields of most major combatants are permeable to physical objects or no they're not, those are all instances where shields didn't go up in time or were already beleaguered by enemy fire. I've argued both sides and still don't know what I think is the most reasonable. Right now I'd say its probably a case of maybe the Death Star relied too heavily on its gun density and fighter wing for defense against strike craft and didn't invest enough in resistance to physical attack and that The Phantom Menace shows that ship shields can keep fighters out (the bombing run on the antennae seems to have failed) and some idiot or droid forgot to raise the landing bay shields after launching fighters. Ships may or may not be able to keep out fighters depending on what angle the fighters are approaching from and from what angles shield energy is prioritized. So 60% of one and 40% of the other. Today at least. Tomorrow, my gut may tell me something else. I'm not seeing a smoking gun for one or the other.

What weird magnetic and gravitational properties? Why would there be debris flying everywhere? Phaser effects generally are not like bombs going off. The shaking, sparks etc. on the ships seem to be more related to system failures and overloads than the direct effects of the weapon impacts themselves as the outside shots generally aren't too violent. However, even if the collateral effects of that much matter being made to go away would be a threat to the ship in a confined space, why not destroy it from outside? Size apparently matters not, judge phaser effects by the size of the target do you? As well you should not for the Cardassians and Romulans were planning on shenanigans far in excess of what would be involved in destroying the Pegasus from outside. Edit: Answered my own questions. There's enough odd stuff going on with that asteroid that magnetic and gravitational shifts make accessing Pegasus via shuttle unpalatable. Of interest: Pegasus according to the wiki is roughly 2 kilometers in but Riker is confident they can destroy her with photon torpedoes. This means they are significantly more powerful than hand grenades. (Slight dig at Star Trek: V) This also means that photon torpedoes are most likely the most practical way of disposing of Pegasus even though it would take most of their torpedoes. By implication, using phasers is impractical. There's no reference to any goofy ores being responsible for the gravitational and magnetic effects, so it would be a bit of a reach to say that its because the asteroid is ultra dense or made of some weird material phasers aren't useful for obliterating it from outside.

Not really no. Where was this incredible ability of conventional starship weapons to scale up to continental level devastation when it came time to destroy Pegasus or for the E-D to escape from said asteroid? Interpreting TDIC as being the result of standard shipboard weapons circumvents the plot of at least one episode and I think there are other times where such ability would be pretty handy if we dig back through the dozens of pages from the last dust off about phasers. This analogy to ICS not being valid if attributing an inability of Warbirds to pull off planetary destruction due to reactor outputs is flawed in that the TDIC is an outlier that can only be explained through de-canonizing events in other episodes or weapons of mass destruction. The evidence for the conclusions of ICS is not based on prioritizing some film evidence over any other. Your vision of TDIC is incompatible with other evidence like Pegasus. ICS doesn't require kicking out all or part of a movie to be an accurate depiction of the weapons and technology we see on screen. While it does require taking a broader view of the accuracy of the rest of the EU's description of technology and certain events, the EU is a lower degree of canon than the movies. All events in filmed Star Trek are theoretically equal and the best explanation is the one that fits the most evidence. WMDs allows Pegasus to co-exist with TDIC, shipboard conventional weapons being capable of literally stripping a planet of its crust and mantle in less than a day does not. Were that the case, the Enterprise-D would never have needed bother with entering the asteroid to guarantee Pegasus' destruction, she could have evaporated the asteroid in a few minutes and then took her out. If you can plausibly reconcile conventional weapons being responsible for the destruction in The Die is Cast with the times where this would have been a very handy ability to have, then that's the superior theory. However, any theory that rejects other evidence rather than reconciling it automatically has problems if there are viable alternatives.

On the other hand, people do travel. Maybe not many and maybe not often but all those people at Risa come from somewhere, likewise Professor Galen, Picard's mentor, didn't have Starfleet assistance iirc and he went around the galaxy prior to running into Picard again. Also we have the Hansens who also weren't working for Starfleet and snagged a ship. I've no objection to ships being rare and perhaps enormously "expensive" and possibly strictly regulated given that a shuttle is a potential weapon of mass destruction but clearly civilians can and do travel and can get a degree of autonomy.

Without pulling out my Pathfinder Monster Manual, the first thing that comes to mind for the Tholians are the classic scifi / comic "lava men." Of which I'm sure there's some example of them in fantasy, I'm just struggling to think of a mainstream one. Any humanoid mob in Molten Core of WoW would probably do.

There are thousands of tankers and cargo ships at sea to the three hundred or so warships of the USN. The total number of coastal yachts, cruise ships, fishing boats, ice breakers etc would almost certainly dwarf the USN many times over. The Enterprise may be the only ship capable of intercepting V'ger but that doesn't make her the only ship in the system.