scvn2812

I raised this thought in the other thread about STV and the possibility of navigational issues with going to warp in a system, such as having to dodge debris and other ships at C+ velocities. Bryan countered with the point that the Enterprise was the only ship in interception range and that we didn't really see any other ships on screen. My contention was that numbers of military ships don't necessarily reflect the number of ships around period. After all, for every cop car there are dozens, maybe even hundreds of semi trucks on the roads or for every blue water navy ship (the best analog we have to the Enterprise) there are many, many civilian ships of all sorts and far more as you get closer to land and you start to have more yachts, fishing trawlers, sport boats, cruise liners etc. I say this, but on the other hand, there's something that rings a bit hollow in that argument. Earth in Star Trek NEVER has any traffic. I don't think we've ever seen a non-Starfleet ship coming and going from any location in the Sol system. Maybe in Enterprise? So what's the deal? Is this not important enough to show on screen and its just assumed to take place off camera? We've seen Coruscant and while it would be ludicrous to assume the same volume of traffic, shouldn't we at least see a handful of ships or even just one puttering to and from Earth orbit? Am I think about this all wrong though? Is it wrong to transplant our economics onto a futuristic star nation that has access to on site fabrication of complex items via replicators (just add power and raw matter) and perhaps even minimally invasive mining techniques via transporters? Where we would assume that they would do most of their industry and mining in space for reasons of environmental protection, it may not even be an issue if you can use the transporter to basically pan for gold and mine in a way that doesn't require major excavations or release toxic chemicals into local aquifers. Mining of asteroids, barren planets and moons, comets etc. might only be for extremely rare materials and in quantities that we wouldn't see highways in space when we see orbital shots of Earth in Star Trek. In other words, the exact opposite of what you see in Coruscant which is essentially a modern city in space with invisible highways and legions of ships coming and going at all times. Shipping might just be for stuff that can't be replicated and that list might be fairly small and involve relatively small objects. Well, aside from stuff to establish colonies like industrial replicators. One would assume those would be rather large but depending on their output, they might not be something shipped around often enough for there to be obvious commercial traffic coming and going from planets like Qonos or Earth. The stuff carried by freighters in DS9 would be luxury goods like naturally created wines, unreplicatable natural resources, delicacies etc. meanwhile the stuff needed for day to day life is largely harvested from the environment without serious consequence and replicated on site. I don't think it would be a stretch to say that maybe 90% of what the average household has to go to the store to buy would fall under the category of stuff we've seen replicated with trivial effort in Star Trek. That would take a big bite out of commercial shipping. As far as travel, I wonder how many people are really traveling off world at any given time. Probably not all that many. If you're looking at a couple or three days to the next system, that's equivalent to a cross country drive. How often do most people really take trips lasting longer than a few hours? A couple times a year maybe, depending on the nature of our jobs. How about a week or longer? I go out of state for a week about once a year to visit relatives and that's about it. When I was working in retail, a week at a time is about as long as they'd let you have off in one chunk. That's a long time to be away from friends, family, work or other obligations. A trip across the Federation might last months. Historically, the only times people traveled that far were either for exploration, trade, war or migration. That's a long time to be away from home and I'd be willing to bet that in all cases except war and migration, maybe 1% of the population had the means, desire and a motive to drop everything and leave for a few months. Travel time and the consequences for society has been on my mind to a degree, I spent a few weeks teaching about the American Revolution and that was the hardest thing to get across was how different people's lives were and how travel times had a lot of consequences for what people thought, how they acted and for the war itself. (Its not fun trying to fight a war half a planet away when communications between the quartermaster of your armies in the field and the motherland are limited to the speed of a sailing ship.)

With a few exceptions like nBSG and B5, this seems to be something that pops up all over scifi. SG-1: Deathgliders can hit nearly the speed of light, Ha'taks have same day travel of AU distances without using hyperspace Star Wars: 30 seconds from surface to orbit, lunar orbit in minutes, the Death Star appears to have been perhaps at lunar orbit when it fired on Alderaan Star Trek: same day in system travel at impulse speeds demonstrated a few times (ST1 was discussed previously), warp speed combat maneuvers in TOS and USS Phoenix took out a Cardassian ship from 300,000 km at one point oBSG: top speeds for the Galactica of just over a light speed, twice the speed of light for Vipers Andromeda: dialog indicating ship speeds generally measured in PSL (percentage speed of light) and ships attacking at ranges as far out as 2 light minutes Yet the visuals for each of these shows routinely show fights with closing speeds of hundreds of meters to single digit KPS, weapons used at ranges of just a few ship lengths. Without exception these shows routinely have fights taking place between ships in the same frame at distances that Jack Sparrow and Horatio Nelson might think are just a bit close. So what is your personal preference for dealing with these issues?

Does anyone play any rpgs besides the digital kind? I play a good variety of games. My favorite is White Wolf games: Exalted, Scion, World of Darkness.. no system is quite as eloquent and easy to pick up and their world building is superb. I'm also a frequent player of a d20 Star Wars campaign with a merciless DM when it comes to handing out dark side points.

Rather touching story Very cool story about the power of social media being used for good and people in Hollywood being class acts. I caught the first 8 minutes ahead of the Hobbit and it definitely looks like its going to be a fun movie. I'm looking forward to it. If you thought Trek 11 was a good mix of action and thoughtful story telling, I suspect you'll think the same. If you thought it was a shameless, mindless exploitation of the franchise you'll probably not think otherwise of this one either.

For myself, right now I'm about half way into The Desert of Stars. Its the second book in a series by John J. Lumpkin. Its the sequel to a book I've referenced a few times, Through Struggle The Stars. Overall, I'd say its a great sequel. Really fleshes out the setting although it hasn't had a really good space battle yet, which was the best part of the original. I like the not very futuristic approach, the harder edge to the space war bits gives it a nice, unique feel. Basically its Atomic Rockets the novel. Except that in addition to great battles, it also has a fairly interesting setting and characters.

All that shows is that Hand had damage to key structural members from her fight with Gualara and Vengeance didn't take enough damage to be structurally compromised. Enterprise was at risk of not just crashing but burning up. Although I suspect the risk might have been to the crew rather than the ship as a whole unless she had taken such a severe beating that it was just crossed fingers and duct tape holding her together.

Another thought: if armor rated for say 1 terraton gets hit by 1 terraton and a kiloton, might that be a bad experience for the crew and anyone nearby the ship?

Read the above a bit more carefully dude Its pointed out that there are stray hits in capital ship on capital ship combat in atmosphere that hit the ground instead of the ship which we must assume was intended to be hazardous to the other ship's health. Hazardous to the other ship's health requiring nuclear force at minimum. I took yonder laser weapon calculator and plugged in a kiloton of wattage and used tungsten as the material because I didn't feel like trying to decide what value to use for rock. However, it does make a good stand in for a low end starship armor. Actual starship materials and energy weapon yields would be significantly stronger / more potent as evidenced by Hoth. My above calc was to show that a beam weapon hitting the ground with even a kiloton equivalent in wattage will result in shockwaves to some extent or another. By the calculators' determination, enough to cause significant destruction within the confines of a single compartment, however large that is expected to be. An effect similar to this was not seen or so I'm getting from reading this second hand (I don't know precisely which video is being referred to where this instance of a turbolaser aimed at a ship hits the ground.) With regards to starships, the assertion is not that turbolasers are Kilotons in wattage nor that ship armor can accurately be described by tungsten. I'm exploring an idea that if enough death ray energy hits something with enough energy that it causes an explosion, an explosion of several dozen meters in diameter as we sometimes see inflicted on ships in these videos would likely cause a shock wave proportionate to the size of the explosion itself. The potency of the explosion being based on just how much more vigorous the beam was than the armor was resilient. If there's enough overkill to cause an explosion that looks like a bomb going off then a shock wave is a reasonable assumption if the atmosphere is thick enough. Its only the energy above and beyond the ability of the materials to handle causing the shockwaves so it wouldn't be continental in scale in any case. The Venators vs Munis fight may be too high of an altitude but I've also seen Acclamators downed by flak explosions with no shock waves either. I'm going to go out on a limb and say we probably have a lot of explosions in film toon canon that probably ought to have shockwaves. If that is the case, I beg the question, then what? Do we add this to the list of known weapon feats or call it an error? If the latter, might that have consequences for other universes with goofy effects like phasers are treated?

Notable is that this movie offers the first instance of a ship weapon, albeit a heavy shuttle sized one, hitting ground. The result makes me suspect even more that if there is any starship grade combat in atmosphere in Star Wars ep 7, it is not likely to be all that more impressive than what the Clone Wars has offered. Vengeance did a swan dive comparable to the Enterprise-D and took all the heat and kinetic effects that would imply yet flying over a volcano about to erupt is bad juju for shuttles and even the Big-E herself. Granted, this was likely just the tip of a super volcano if it really could wipe out the tribal civilization on the planet and most life. So all in all, not a very helpful movie for trying to figure out what the new old girl can handle. Space ICBMs are a thing now though. First time I can recall an autonomous weapon with interstellar range being considered in any franchise aside from Dreadnaught.

Playing with numbers using this calculator with the assumption of 1 kiloton yield, a 5 meter lens, wavelength of 2.9 e -7 (the default value) and a beam duration of .3 seconds, we'd get a 1.6 kilometer pin hole in the ground with a radius of 35 centimeters or so if the ground were made of tungsten and the beam fired at a distance of 1,000 km. Said calculator also informs me that impulse shock, which it defines as the rate of vaporization exceeding the speed of sound causing shockwaves in any material nearby. How far those shockwaves would extend is beyond the calculator's scope. So if there's enough inefficiency in the disposal of heat to cause melting of something with a melt point of gigatons, a rounding error's worth of excess energy above the capacity of the armor ought to cause some local turbulence in the atmosphere in ship to ship combat. For that matter, don't even WWII caliber naval guns cause shockwaves? I seem to recall an aerial picture of an Iowa broadside where the water is moved by the violence of the firing of the guns, I would imagine the explosion on the receiving end would likewise cause some shockwaves as well. The explosions in that video of the Separatist and Republic ships fighting in atmosphere certainly seem WW2 in scale yet I don't recall shockwaves. Is there a way these ships can have chunks of hull flying off of them without producing some sort of atmospheric shockwave? A terraton missing and hitting a planet ought to be a bit more violent. If there is a reasnable expectation that even the scale of blasts that we do see should have a shockwave then we seem to have two conclusions, both opening doors to rabbit holes that make claiming anything we do is scientifically justiable rather tricky, the first being that everything we see in at least Clone Wars is a recreation with flawed effects akin to Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor (except I don't think Michael Bay would ever soft peddle the scale of explosions ) which still leaves us with the question of whether that's a 1 ton explosion the animators failed to put a shockwave around or a 1 ton explosion that is just the tip of an ice berg of pain the size of a small sun that was safely absorbed by the shields / armor and not permitted to escape into the environment. The 1 ton being what our eyes tell us, the 1 ton + significantly more that we can't see because it was absorbed being what the Death Star, General Dodonna, causal asteroid destruction etc. tell us. The second being that its some sort of reverse voodoo physics phaser where military targets are harmed far more savagely than soft targets - either way without a shockwave, at which point everything up to and including the Death Star's hypermatter reactor burning condensed orphan tears is not fully able to be ruled out. As analyists looking at a children's cartoon based on a movie franchise with live actors, are we obligated to mind trick ourselves into forgetting that's its a children's cartoon if we hit a brick wall with our ability to contrive excuses for why the cartoon doesn't match even our most conservative estimates of what is happening in the movies such as the Hoth asteroids being blown to smithereens? I don't mean that to make a mockery of what we do here but I do think its a fair question.

I have the same reservations about both flawless damage control even as damage is being taken and the notion of a gentleman's agreement not to leave planets with their populations and climates devastated by adding stellar amounts of heat into the planet. Especially in the case of the latter where we can't get every country to agree to stop using landmines, cluster bombs, chemical weapons, phosphorus weapons etc on just one planet. Its hard to imagine such a consensus arising in a civilization of numerous species. On the other hand, they can and do throw some pretty fantastic energy around with zero apparent consequences to the environment. The Millennium Falcon can take off without knocking over Stormtroopers a stone's throw away or kicking up any debris at all. The Death Star technicians work next to beams containing a chunk of the energy needed to destroy a planet without any obvious protection. Yet their ability to manipulate energy isn't so perfect that you don't have things happen like the ISDs that explodes at Endor rather than being bludgeoned into scrap. An explosion where the visible portion is large enough to consume a mile long warship ought not to be pleasant to have happen over your house no matter how conservative the assumptions. I suppose it's possible that in either case, they take the chance that their safeguards might fail or someone might cheat and dial the power up to apocalypse. Although I would imagine going to full combat power might take time if the reactor and associated systems are running at their low end, everything would have to be brought to full strength in tandem, you'd have to walk the reactor up to max, since every magnitude increase in output would require all the safeties to be ramped up to handle it. So it might be difficult to cheat as the other guy would probably notice and start ramping up their power too, neutralizing any advantage from racing to see who can cause the apocalypse first. I've remarked a few times that as far as on screen canon goes, aside from one side trying to build a Death Star, it's a pretty civil civil war. Aside from the Death Star, the hundred megaton missiles defending that one planet are the most powerful weapons we have direct confirmation of existing rather than extrapolating their existence and enough of those would handily do the job of slaughtering millions and devastating planetary economies and environments. Yet we have no canon planetary holocausts except Alderaan and almost Yavin and that was after 20 years of military dictatorship rather than a 3 year civil war after generations of peace on the galactic scale. Terraton turbolasers or not, if they want to murder planets they can but don't.

Quick question: are there bombardments from the main guns on a soft target like a planet's surface in a situation where we should expect them to be taking advantage of how much energy they can throw around? I know there's a few instances of shields and armor tanking shots that would level a city according to Brian's and Wong's models without more fireworks than what we would expect from a WW2 fight. That I assume is due to implausibly efficient and resilient armor and shields that prevent more than a token amount of energy escaping. Ground bombardment without a need to reduce collateral damage would be messy to explain.

I don't think anyone has ever really come up with an explanation for this that I've seen. SG-1 is known for its conundrums when it comes to orbital bombardment. So here we have half a dozen Goa'uld motherships that can apparently withstand stellar energies for some time, a feat which the most conservative calculations put at permitting them to withstand small nuclear weapons and they go up from that. Said motherships then rain fire down upon Anubis' mothership, a significantly larger vessel, which is hovering above the city. Not all of the fire is accurate, not all of the fire is absorbed the shields and hull. Some shots miss, some over penetrate. Now as we all know, the direct effects from an energy weapon impact are likely to be significantly less than a bomb of the same joules due to how the energy is delivered. On the other hand, you still have superheated columns of debris that will be expanding outwards to cook their surroundings to some extent and I'm having a hard time reconciling the firepower that would apparently be needed to bring down a Goa'uld ship with the end result. A couple of thoughts. One is that the bolts did not just overpenetrate the ship, they also penetrated so deeply into the crust that their effects would not be immediately felt. There may be later climate / geological impacts from opening very deep, if very narrow fissures in the crust in the city. The city may later need to be evacuated due to new volcanic activity. Another is that the runaway naquadria reaction later described to be threatening the entire continent if not planet was part of why there was so little collateral damage: the energy from the Goa'uld weapons was somehow largely conducted into the naquadria.

I rather like the model from Hull No. 721 where Star Destroyers and Mon Cal ships use random thrusts to throw off accuracy and turbolasers are used at long ranges to create patterns of fire that ships have to try to navigate through, sort of like how kinetics are treated in harder scifi. Targets are hosed down with light gun fire to try and get lucky to hit when a hole in the shields opens to let fire out. Shields aren't perfect and well timed fire can let shots through even if the shield hasn't failed. Heat management is also a limiting factor on how much of a pounding ships can take.

I couldn't check the math or even whether you're accurately portraying the universe but I can definitely say if an explanation works or not in terms of making sense to the uninitiated.

Alright since the OP didn't generate as much dialog as I was hoping, I'll widen the premise. What is your preferred vision of how various universes duke it out? Not necessarily what you think is suggested by the most bits of canon but if you were put in charge, how would you portray combat in various universes? For example, I fins myself torn between the minimally destructive (relatively speaking, it's still pretty destructive just not go for the jugular decisive like B5), high precision combat implied by the TOS movies and the implied combat of TOS with long range, warp speed combat with potent nuclear caliber torpedoes for very long range proximity bombardment when accuracy is low. Aka the model Starfleet Museum uses in its fiction.

I remember there being a projectile of some kind. I'll have to excavate my closet and figure out where my comics are.

It's a missile, all missiles look phallic. George Carlin does a great rant about it. I don't remember the original art in Dark Empire looking that bad. I might have to find my trade paperback and see how it looked originally and see how much creative license was taken here. I suspect a lot.

Other than the idea of an entire Federation existing on the opposite side of the Klingon and Romulan Empires, that's one of my favorite Trek guides. As time has gone on, I think the colonial / age of Sail model where each nation has its core which are all nearby as in age of sail Europe and then they have far flung colonies beyond their cores which are intermingled and logistically difficult to defend from one another. I raise an eyebrow at the only ship in the quadrant line as well given that Federation space is almost half in the Beta quadrant, one would figure given the majority of TOS is about the race to make allies and secure resources before the Klingons, half or more of the fleet would be in Beta Quadrant. Even if we go by the 12 like her quote, that's 6 ships. If we go by USN carrier battlegroup deployments, that would at least then be 2 on station, 2 in transit and 2 in dock. This also does not factor in that at this point, additional vesssels that are nearly as capable in a fight as a Connie are around such as the Mirandas. Another possibility is that the orientation of the quadrants was changed by a few degrees sometime later as new terminology came into vogue and discoveries about galactic geography came to light. Originally you may have been almost in Klingon space before you crossed into the Beta quadrant. They

I don't care for that method myself. Being a fan of torch drive settings, I actually don't have a problem with settings with disproportionate engine power to electrical power available for weapons. My favorite novels of late involve terrawatt torch drives and gigawatt tops lasers. Although they do have nukes which means that they technically do have access to comparable energies for destruction as they do propulsion, it's just not directly relatable to energy weapons. I think it's more reasonable to measure firepower and propulsion separately and break down firepower by weapon type. My preferred method for presuming the power of Star Destroyers for example is working downwards from the Death Star. I sense a greater interest in complaining about the inconsistencies of one specific franchise in this thread than discussion of the topic in the OP. Anyway, in an attempt to steer the thread back, I'm rather taken with Starfleet Museum's Starfleet Battles / TOS vision of warp speed combat and multi light second ranges.

Anti grav would explain the lack of interaction with the surroundings at very low speeds but I'm thinking to avoid sonic booms would require a more exotic propulsion method or some way of manipulating the air along the ship's path. Even the Acclamators in Attack of the Clones are moving up at space shuttle speeds without making much of a fuss. I look at it as a problem that would have needed solving once a civilization decided it was desirable to have ships as long as a kilometer plus land and take off in any sort of reasonable time you don't want them killing entire states with the airflow of their passing. How they do it, beats me. Anyway, so to return to the OP. I tend to lean towards the head canon that visuals are the equivalent of animations in a History Channel special and not necessarily perfectly scaled, showing everything going on. Simplified abstractions. Its not a very good model for debating though so it sort of requires keeping personal preference and "real" canon separate. In the latter case, one is still left with trying to figure out why the optimum use of technology in the setting from the outsider point of view isn't actually the best use after all.

I look at the surface to orbit issue as exotic propulsion technology as the Falcon doesn't even bother anyone when it takes off, let alone leave the sonic boom in its wake you'd expect from something accelerating rapidly. I'd buy the time compression idea if not for Obi Wan having a conversation in real time as he exits the atmosphere in Attack of the Clones and then speeds past a moon until both planet and moon rapidly shrink in the distance. I know all of the out of universe reasons why ships go at one another age of sail style, I'm more interested in how people regard "real" combat and how or if they consider visuals representative of combat.

Terms like that tend to be used in a rather squishy way by science fiction writers. They also tend to be hotly debated among scientific circles as well. Right now the definition of planet iirc is above a certain mass and has cleared its orbit of significant debris. What would one call an object in the 400 to 600 km neighborhood that does not orbit anything besides the primary and does not share its orbit with anything else of significance? Presumably a planet of some sort, it may technically be a dwarf planet but the adjective might be dropped just as short hand if its the only colonized object in the system or is the dominant colonized object at least in terms of importance or population.

Scaling this seems like a very iffy proposition given the UFP has artificial gravity technology (which means object size is no barrier to habitation as long as it's within artificial structures) and there are no scaling cues to tell us how close the big E is to the camera other than she's close enough to the camera that she's not casting a shadow on the colony. That said I have no objection to the UFP having the ability to erect such structures on a planet or in space. Earth space dock has tens of thousands of times the volume of the Enterprise. Scale seems to be no limiting factor on their ability to build immobile structures.

The first episode of Stargate SG-1 establishes that the movie and the show are part of the same continuity. There are some issues like Ra being a more spiritual / energy being possessing a human rather than a snake like creature (I've always mentally retconned that as Ra having secretly been a quasi-ascended being like Anubis and movie Anubis was series Anubis who had figured out Ra's secret and used it to survive having his head ringed up to Ra's ship) and Ra's personal guard being human instead of Jaffa, but the events of the movie happened even if the details might have quietly been retconned.