scvn2812

I was going to bring that up as well but not until I had a chance to look up how much weight granite and the like can support

For me, the sheer mass of even Borg scout ships shows that this is a huge threat to be taken seriously. That they're able to make even their tiny ships massive.

 

Also, is that reference that of the theorized Star Trek/Doctor Who crossover that would have happened?

Big Bang Theory, it's a Sheldon line. If I remember right, he says Leonard is about as likely to get laid as it being discovered that at the center of every black hole is a little man looking for a flashlight.

As many times as we've trod this ground, I'm surprised you don't know it by heart by now. ) Riker wanted to blow through two kilometers of asteroid using most of their torpedoes in order to destroy Pegasus. Safety of the ship was why they didn't try to shoot their way out, it had nothing to do with the selection of weapons outside the asteroid.

I'm not arguing that the second ship is substantially different from the first. I never said anything about the two not being comparable. What I did say, repeatedly, is that the only clues we have on scale are the phrase "small" and a few shots of one part of a crashed ship which we cannot be certain we are seeing the whole thing. We only see one part of one side and we don't even have a corner in the frame. It's essentially a square taking up the entire frame of the camera. We don't see side edges, we don't even know what the top looks like because it's a 2d view. So it could extend out of the frame and under the ground for a hundred meters for all we know.

The singularity power source is interesting. Assuming that after crashing, it's mass is not lightened, then that might actually explain why the thing has such crazy mass compared to Starfleet ships. The Romulans would probably have also had to solve the problem of not having their power core being so dense it would make a Warbird into a space station. Which could be solved with the creative use of subspace fields since the same technique can be used to move small moons.

Please don't selectively interpret my comments. I was very clear that the Borg are not much better than Fed standard for material strength, not that they are only modestly better in all areas. Regeneration of the hull could be an application of transporter and replicator tech. With perhaps a dash of nanotechnology magic involved. Borg science is likely far ahead of the Feds, their engineering is a lot better in terms of propulsion, not much better if at all in terms of how resilient their materials are if Borg hulls are a fair sample.

Seriously dude, of course I object to taking this meters long, two and a half million ton shuttle face value. It flies in the face of other evidence from the franchise and sanity in about the same way as measuring the intensity of energy in space in decibels or the stunning revelation I'm certain we would find out in season 5 of Enterprise where the crew discovers a tiny man searching for a flash light at the center of a black hole. (+1 Internets for that last reference.)

I read the Memory Alpha page at the start, like a lot of things I've run into on wikis, there's no rationale given for the meters figure. Also, even five meters by five meters by five meters would be a stretch for the alcoves and including anything else like propulsion systems, sensors, power supply or anything else a ship might find useful.

The E D used phasers not torpedoes to carve out that big chunk of cube which you are suggesting is orders of magnitude tougher than the Pegasus asteroid which Riker wanted to use torpedoes on to blow through two klicks of material to get to the Pegasus rather than dig using phasers.

You try to claim a shuttle sized object from a race not significantly more advanced than the Feds in materials science in terms of durability weighs almost an order of magnitude more than the traditionally accepted mass of the first Enterprise, two and a half times it's mass according to dialog, three times more than Voyager according to dialog and then complain that I'm objecting? You don't exactly need the Hubble telescope to see that coming.

I object to any conclusion I think is on the spectrum of iffy to pants on head crazy. Brian apparently has been busy lately so the debate on the what, where and how of Star Wars shields has stalled out or is it only when you're the one making claims that it counts? ;-)

Did you read the quote? The dialog you posted contains no mention of the dimensions of the ship, just mass.

We cannot see how large the crashed one is because the camera doesn't show the whole thing, just what may be the top sticking out of the ground. We don't even see a corner to see even where one side ends.

Your three by three box that can barely fit five drones in it without palletizing them, is also two and a half times heavier than the original Enterprise according to Scotty and five times heavier than the significantly larger than the original Enterprise USS Voyager according to dialog from the show. So either the scout is bigger than it appears on screen, something is missing with the ability of the D to determine the mass of the scout. Otherwise, we're left with the conclusion that Borg ships are orders of magnitude more dense than anything Starfleet has yet build ships that are much more fragile without shields or other counter measures, judging by the way the D blew a hole in one the size of the ship the first time they met.

To state the obvious, the whole thing is never shown on screen so how can the scale of the whole ship be extrapolated to 3 x 3 x 3 when the camera cuts off our view of it before we see where the corner is and its partially embedded in the ground? Furthermore, as we see later in First Contact and Voyager, not all Borg ships are cubical or symmetrical.

Data said "several meters long", and he said that it was identical to the ship that they found crashed on the planet. Said ship (that crashed) looked about 3 meters long on each side.

When did he say this? Can you provide the actual quote?

Scaling based on what may be a chunk of debris field versus the entire field seems like a flawed process. How would you even fit five drones and their support equipment in a 3 by 3 meter box? Those outlets they plug into alone take up significant space.

Found the quote about the mass of the rescue vessel of similar configuration in the episode transcript but nothing that establishes size. Assuming 1 ton per cubic meter, the cube root of 2.5 million is 136 meters. 136 meters of length is pretty big but still pretty small compared to a Galaxy-class starship and most ships in Starfleet. Length wise, its close to an Oberth, though you could cram a lot of Oberths into such a space. You could of course make the ship smaller by assuming greater densities but I fail to see anything rational about jumping straight to assuming this is something smaller than a shuttle with the density of a white dwarf.

I didn't realize that there was a third book in the series, how was number three?

I loved the way he twisted it into historical events and did a pretty convincing James Bond type thriller with alien technology.

Ah yeah. Banks not being around anymore will definitely be a tragedy for the scifi community. What's Surface Detail about? The Culture books have been a bit hit or miss for me. I liked Matter, Excession and Look to Windward but Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games were not really my cup of tea.

I'm out too. I got a new job closer to my girlfriend, so I've been taking advantage of that to spend more time with her and as a consequence, away from my laptop. Also I get wound up and tend not to manage time well with these threads which makes me run late leaving for work or low on sleep :-P

The Culture books are hit or miss, largely because each one is a very different type of story. Political intrigue, Indiana Jones in space adventure, espionage are all focuses for novels and those are just the ones I'm familiar with. I'd recommend excession, Look to Windward and Matter as personal favorites.

Statement from the author

I'm definitely saddened by this news. In general, I've enjoyed those books of his that I've read. They had a style and tone of their own and the most unique setting of any I've read. As well as probably one of the few authors who had an appreciation of just how broad of a canvas he was working on in his setting, though he tended to write, smaller more personal stories than sweeping epics.

I still haven't figured out if you annoy the crap out of me or are hysterical.

The battle of Coruscant was supposed to have gone on hours before shields were pounded down... cannot remember if we have top level canon on that though.

We don't. There's nothing in ROTS indicating time any more than there are any statements about elapsed time specifying a specific time frame in any battles except Yavin IV in the films. I can't find my ROTS novelization at the moment, it might give more hints about how long the battle was raging. Although I would caution against using hours as an estimate of combat endurance, we don't know how they were fought and really, I would find it highly doubtful that these hours were literally spent shooting incessantly.

The SD.net thread actually was a fast read. Its only 9 pages, half of which isn't actually about the nature of shields but rather how disruptors work (which is largely a copy and paste job after page 2), and the part that is, is Batman and Jim refusing to concede that the other has a just as valid interpretation of the A-Wing attack scene, which is also basically a copy and paste job after page 2. No one really says anything that wasn't argued and counter argued and counter counter argued in much greater depth here in either this thread or the original thread. Also, I'm feeling like we've wandered off the original point of this thread and should probably be doing the technical arguing in the original thread for ease of research in the future.

After rereading all forty pages worth of arguments about this here and on SD, I withdraw criticism about shield permeability. Between crashing fighters, breaching pods and the Falcon landing on a probably shielded ISD, I think that aspect of Brian's theory has been well argued.

I am still a contrarion on the issue of where shields operate. I do not feel there is sufficient weight of evidence that they generally allow enough clearance for fighters to operate their energy weapons uninhibited.

I am not convinced that the notion of invisible shield barriers having no obvious effects on turbolaser fire is a less absurd idea than off camera fighting we were not privy to softened up the ships being attacked in most cases or that a fighter attack with heavy ordinance on a very small area like the Malevolence ion cannon base or Ex's domes is automatically doomed to failure in the absence of shield loss.

It is possible that the volumetric effect proposed by Vympel is the best explanation and that the deeper one goes into the defensive fields, the less energy absorbing medium there is to fire through and thus the more effective gun fire is, maybe allowing that Rebel frigate to land hits on the hull of that ISD while Tantive IV couldn't get her gunfire as deep, firing from a point much further away. The consequences for fighters skimming the hull? Eh, maybe they can shoot around the field effects, assuming there are generators emitting a shield effect that narrows the closer you get to the hull.

The other possibility is that the default mode of shields for capital ships is to conform tightly to the skin of the ship which is hinted at very strongly at Naboo, Coruscant, Hoth and Endor. For fighters to inflict damage through the shields requires either pin point bombardment with heavy weapons as I believe is responsible for the damage to Executor and Malevolence or shields to be compromised by heavy bombardment or redirection to prioritize defense in other areas opening up areas that have been sacrificed to reinforce elsewhere to attack from fighters. In the specific cases of the Battle of Coruscant and the Clone Wars battles where fighters and capital ships are simultaneously attacking the same exact targets with no visible shield effects implying bubble shields, these battles were already in progress before the audience arrives for the most dramatic parts in much the same way that only a few minutes of footage of critical moments of hours long battles are shown in war documentaries. Disclaimer: I am not suggesting that Star Wars battles last for hours.

On kinetic impacts: kinetic impacts seem to disproportionately do damage compared to energy weapons. An out of control Tie fighter does what a Nebulon B's nuclear caliber guns, maybe even gigaton scale weapons could not at point blank range: leave part of the hull with a lingering, glowing spot. The car bomb in space scene Khas posted a while back also showed that Star Wars ships do not respond well to being pelted with debris, although those ships may have been unshielded.

Whatever mechanism protects against physical impacts, and at this point I'm willing to concede it may be the same system as the energy shields, is not able to adequately protect against impacts with a much lower total energy than a turbolaser.

Note the use of the qualifier of by default or normal operation for hull hugging shields. Given the variety of shield forms in evidence, it is probable that this is not their only mode of operation and an ISD can, for example, project a shield plane further away to interdict lighter fire or missiles to reduce the risk of damage to the hull from any inefficiency in shield energy absorption.

It may also be possible to pour more energy into a specific point of shields to harden them against physical attack, such as a out of control fighter or asteroid detected in time. Both of which have been stopped by and failed to be stopped by shields.

Alright, I'm sure there is a lot I'm leaving out. There are forty pages in three threads debating a forty minute or so video and probably another twenty minutes of YouTube videos and stuff lost to Dropbox hosting limits. One single post cannot address it all but it's a start.I think this framework is able to adequately describe the body of evidence we've discussed with minimal contortions and gyrating hands.

Fair is fair, Brian I've spent hours making you defend your theory, so come at me bro. :-P

Brian; I think ESAD was trying (and not succeeding) at being funny. We're amongst fellow uber nerds here, so it's probably a mistake to go after each other for ironic comments as if someone were the school bully. :-P

Brian, you keep dodging this fundamental issue: where are the shield effects from weapons being effected by or even stopped by the shields? Surely, SOME of the guns being used in ROTS, Clone Wars or at Endor are low enough caliber that they shouldn't just blaze through the shields and hit the hull directly every_single_time. The closest I've seen you come to answering this question is that shots that are too powerful for the shields fully absorb instantaneously take their remaining energy and go on through without a shield flare or any obvious change to the visible portion of the beam.

Volume wise, a Neb-B is not much bigger than Tantive IV, yet there are no shield flares involved in the frigate's attack run on the ISD trench at Endor. There's never any shield flares when any capital ship or fighter attacks or rams another that extend away from the hull, we've seen scenes where crashing fighters at Endor do not ignite shield flares either but leave no damage even though they are hitting directly on the hull (or as close to it as can be resolved with the scale of the ships, and in two instances: the Neb-B trench attack and the TIE that can't pull out of its attack run in time to avoid the Mon Cal, we see fighters crash right on the hull.)

You claim I'm making stuff up but you're the one invoking invisible shields with enough clearance for fighters to pass under! Yes, the counter arguments involve extra criteria such as battles starting before the audience arrives or off camera events but what is unproven invisible shields away from the hull if not extra criteria? The opposition is at least working within the bounds of the observed data instead of assuming droids walk through shields, therefore fighters must go through shields when every physical object we see crashing into a starship hits the hull is unopposed by any outside force but do not leave any lasting damage unless the ship in question has been in combat for some time.

Naboo: fighters cannot damage the capital ship. Shock and surprise by both the TF captain and the Naboo when something blows up that isn't a fighter. No one apparently thought it was possible.\

Clone Wars: what's the least unreasonable made up factor: invisible shields that do nothing at all to alter the appearance of turbolaser bolts or inhibit the flight speed of fighters or the battles where fighters gut ships were happening before the audience arrived?

Malevolence: what noise SHOULD fighters make if they crash on shields? What special effect should be seen? Endor argues that we don't need a special effect for this. The Y-Wings used concentrated torpedo fire on the same spot. Not unlike what the A-Wings did to Ex.

ROTS: battle was clearly raging for some time, not a single off the hull shield effect to be seen and everyone is letting fly with everything they have, small, medium and large guns. Something ought to impact away from the hull.

Death Star 1: it is specifically pointed out that her defenses are designed around a direct, large scale attack and it can be argued that this an oversight or technology limitation that the DS1 cannot shut out fighters.

Falcon landing on the ISD: why is it assumed the Falcon landed on the hull instead of the shields? If the shields have no volume, then landing on the shields would be no different than landing on the hull.

Out of time, gotta go to work. I am, at this point, about half way through reading through all the arguments in the original part 2 thread and have some notes sketched out laying out my thoughts on how shields might work as per my interpretations of the scenes in question. In the spirit of being Devil's Advocate, I'm also consolidating the strongest arguments for your theory and the best critiques. I hope to be done sometime this week.

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.