Captain Seafort

On 11/17/2021 at 3:02 AM, Khas said:

Obviously, starship weapons yields and the like will be "massaged", in order to prevent curbstomps.  Because stompfics like "Portal" and "Conquest" are, to be frank, at best boring, and usually just godawful. 

This is part of the reason I made the suggestion.  If you ignore the TNG-era, the debate suddenly becomes a lot more interesting, because instead of Voyager taking decades to get home, or kt-Mt torpedoes, you're looking GO24, or the "Obsession" AM change putting a decent-sized hole in a planet or the E-nil treating a 1000-ly trip as an inconvenience in "That Which Survives".

How about just going back to basics?

Wars Canon: Original Trilogy

Trek Canon: Original series and first four films.

47 minutes ago, Khas said:

Because that page uses outdated info, and going by the new canon, Turbolaser bolts are made of Tibanna plasma, which HAS mass.  So, there's some regular kinetic energy being delivered there.

Then we go back to the asteroid calcs, knock a zero off the Falcon's resilience, and are still left with kiloton-ish TIE lasers, a couple of orders of magnitude more than the shot that slapped the Yangtze Kiang silly in Battle Lines

55 minutes ago, Khas said:

That the Falcon can withstand megaton hits

Then how exactly do you explain the Falcon doing precisely that in ESB?  A figure that implies TIE firepower roughly equivalent to the multi-GJ bare minimum demonstrated by X-wings when strafing the first Death Star.

EDIT: Even if you only go by the asteroid vapourisation TL estimates, that still means the Falcon shrugged off hundreds of kilotons in that shot, which still implies kiloton-range TIE weapons .

1 hour ago, Khas said:

Which is contradicted by TFA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sarFZJl3h0

When you say "contradicted", do you mean that the Falcon cannot withstand megaton-range hits, or that TIEs do not pose a threat to the Falcon?  Both of these are clearly demonstrated in the films I referenced.

2 hours ago, Praeothmin said:

By the way, where in Battle Lines is the weapons fire started to be GJ

The satellite that shot down the Yangtzee Kiang went from dormant to high megawatt-range output in a few seconds, as did the one that destroyed the Rio Grande's probe.  It didn't have time to build up a charge of more than low GJ range before firing.

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will we ignore that fighters in SW can be damaged by handheld weapons?

ESB establishes that the Falcon can survive low megaton-range hits.  ANH establishes that TIEs are a threat to the Falcon after scoring dozens of hits.  Ergo, TIE laser fire is almost certainly low-mid kiloton range.

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The Runabout still takes on the Defender and destroys it rather easily...

BS.  The runabout probably has the firepower to destroy a Defender, but that's far from cut-and-dried, and the reverse is certainly true.  I expect the battle would be won by whoever lands the first solid hit, and I expect that to be the Defender.  While the Danube-class are manoeuvrable, they aren't anywhere near as good as TIE fighters. Not surprising, given that their role is closer to Lambda-class than a TIE.

1 hour ago, Praeothmin said:

I don’t know about the last two, but the Runabout can tangle one on one with ST Capships, so it creams the Tie Defender...

No they can't, any more than the Falcon can tangle with SW capships.  Runabouts can survive incidental fire, and their weapons have been seen to be powerful enough to destroy a Jem'hadar fighter (not exactly the most powerful ships around) if, and only if, they have detailed targeting advice from a senior Vorta.

Runabouts can be very badly damaged by low-GJ range weapons fire (from Battle Lines), and starfighter laser cannon are at least that powerful (from ANH).  As I said in the other thread, even small numbers of bog-standard TIEs  are a threat to the Falcon, which can withstand low megaton-range shots, so a Defender should be able to take on a runabout on at least even terms.

40 minutes ago, Praeothmin said:

I have to agree, when Ties get hit with the self-exploding asteroids in ESB, there is what could be taken as a shield glow from the Ties that get hit...

I would say the Ties’ shields are probably weaker than the X-Wing shields, but they seem to be there...

There are also repeated shield flashes from two of the fighters hit by the Falcon's guns during the escape from the Death Star. I wouldn't even say with confidence that they're weaker than an X-wing's shields - there are examples of both types being hit and blowing up with no shields flashes at all.

8 hours ago, Khas said:

Actually, TIEs are unshielded (with the exception of TIE Defenders):

7 hours ago, IkaikaKekai said:

TIE/In have no shields whatsoever.

A common, oft-repeated error, proved wrong by watching the engagements between the Falcon and various TIEs in ANH and ESB.  Brian looked at this comprehensively in some of his earliest videos.

1 hour ago, IkaikaKekai said:

Think I'm gonna have to give this to the Oberth,   My understanding is while they had shit weapons they did have some decent shields and fair armor, and more importantly they had warp drive.  Standard TIEs had no shields or FTL and only their lasers, no missiles or sort of anti shield weaponry.  I would also think that the Oberth would have the range advantage with it's sensors and phasers, not saying it would win outright but it'd inflict higher casualties than the TIEs could before they Warp away to repair any damage.

An Oberth's defences are utter crap - Kruge's BoP destroyed the Grissom with one torpedo accidentally, and I see no reason whatsoever for a science vessel to have any sort of armour. It might not even have any weapons, as I'm not aware of any example of them being shown firing, although the presence of one at Wolf 359 may indicate otherwise. It does, of course, have the ability to choose whether or not to engage, due to having FTL.

A TIE, on the other hand, definitely has shields (albeit probably fairly weak ones), and its lasers are, with sustained fire, capable of punching through the Falcon's shields (seen in the ANH engagement). As the Falcon is capable of surviving at least one multi-megaton TL hit (seen in ESB), and even capship PTs of several decades after the Kruge-Grissom encounter are of the same strength or less (from Pegasus and Rise), this leads me to conclude that even a flight of TIEs would be a threat to an Oberth, let alone the wing-strength group proposed.

Scenario: This would, obviously, occur with the Imperial forces on the tactical defensive - any ship or group of ships carrying that many fighters would almost certainly have the firepower to blow away a defending Oberth with ease.  The TIEs must therefore be guarding something, having either been left there by a ship that has since departed, or based locally, on the ground on in a space station. The most likely use of something as weak as an Oberth would be to deploy or extract special forces, or perhaps personnel from a base left behind in a general withdrawal.

Conclusion: TIE fighter victory.  Either they destroy the Oberth, or the Oberth runs away and leaves the TIEs in control of local space. It is highly unlikely that the Oberth would be able to destroy all the TIEs, as would be required prior to lowering shields to conduct transporter operations.

21 hours ago, Khas said:

I really only included the Galaxy Gun due to it being one of the seemingly endless number of superweapons that would show up.  It wasn't so much about not having something that could do what the Galaxy Gun did, as it was commentary on the "oh look, ANOTHER Imperial superweapon!" plots of the early EU.

Fair enough, although to be fair to the GG, it was one of the first, if not the first of that seemingly-endless string of increasingly-silly plot devices, and one of the more plausible and interesting.  It certainly wasn't as bad as the Sun Crusher.

You're too late for the Galaxy Gun, unless you don't count the functionally identical Starkiller Base.

I'd like to see two things:

1) The awe and terror-inspiring majesty of a Base Delta Zero on the big screen

2) The even more awe and terror-inspiring majesty of the Errant Venture. In the appropriate colour.

Didn't you watch the "Rebels" episode "Zero Hour", and how HTL bombardment delivered, at most, gigajoules of energy into the target during the orbital bombardment?  The Disney canon is very, VERY different from the old.

So we have an outlier or two. I assume you're talking about this, which seems to make HTLs about as powerful as the famous blaster rifle grate shot.  That doesn't change the overall conclusions any more that ST5 gives Trek hyperdrive-scale strategic mobility or MJ-scale torpedoes.

The "new cannon" still show ISD light guns vaporising asteroids in milliseconds, big chunks of the Tantive IV in seconds, and knocking the Falcon off its axis.  It still shows AT-AT guns likewise vaporising big chunks of the Hoth shield generator.  It still shows the Death Star blowing Alderaan apart at close to lightspeed.

Yeah, ever since the

Well?  Don't keep us in suspense.

And Federation ships used to go by themselves.   That was until the Dominion War.  As we saw in "Sacrifice of Angels", during Operation Return, large fleets had become common.  A task force composed of 627 Federation and 300 Klingon ships was sent to retake Deep Space Nine, and went against a fleet of 1254 Dominion and Cardassian ships.  With another 2800 Dominion ships waiting on the other side of the Bajoran wormhole.

Doesn't really help when the Empire can deploy similar numbers (as at the Battle of Coruscant) and Imperial light guns are about as powerful as the best the Feds have (low Mt LTLs shown against the Falcon in ESB vs maybe-Mt PTs in The Pegasus and Rise, and the low-Mt deflector dish weapon derivable from BoBW and Deja Q.)

If we were going with the old SW canon, as well as Pre-STO ST canon I might agree with you.  But alas, some... interesting developments happened in both universes.

 

Your bog-standard Imperial Star Destroyer is 1,600 meters long, while a Rebel Mon Cal Cruiser is 1,200 meters long.  A Romulan Warbird is about 1,300 meters long.

 

So, technically, size isn't too much of a factor any more.

1) Do you have any evidence that the online game is cannon, given how consistent Trek has been that only live-action TV series and movies count?

2) Assuming the existence of such evidence, I fail to see how the fact that Trek capital ships are starting to approach the size of Imperial escorts helps them.

Another big decider is ship firepower.  Take this scene from the Deep Space Nine episode "The Die Is Cast":

 

And yes, there is that talk about the "transponder sending back false readings", but remember, the surprise didn't come until AFTER those life-form readings - the devastation of the planet's crust was about what they were expecting.  And it was said earlier in the episode that the fleet was expected to boil that planet (about the size of Earth) down to its core after 6 hours of bombardment.

The problem with the scene is that it directly contradicts everything we've seen concerning capital ship beam weapons against rock.  In A Matter of Time, Legacy and Inheritance, phasers were drilling phaser-width tunnels through rock at about 100m/s, and suffering worrying feedback from ore concentrations in the latter.  In The Pegasus, Riker didn't even consider using phasers against the asteroid, instead advising using hundreds of PTs even through TDiC-scale phaser firepower would have destroyed it in a fraction of a second.  Likewise, Voyager used one of her "irreplaceable" PTs to destroy the Rise asteroid, even though it was a fraction of the size of even the Pegasus asteroid.

High-end for their weapons?  Sure.  But not even close to the highest firepower showing/tanking.

Where have we ever seen anything close to that sort of firepower in the TNG era?  The only thing I can think of is the planet-cracker from Obsession and The Immunity Syndrome, and frankly, given that TOS repeatedly demonstrated the sort of speeds that would have had Voyager home in months, I'm not convinced its capabilities can be reconciled with the TNG-era.

But STV is still occassionally shown on TV, whereas the Holiday Special has all but vanished off the face of the Earth, so V has more of an effect.

Excuse me, but you did say that:

 

You were arguing that a phaser beam could not destroy a sherman as it could neither destroy a packing crate nor a mudflap.The only way this argument makes sense is if a phaser could not damage a mudflap. Because otherwise nothing would be proven.

 

This is what the argument comes across as. So either yes you did say that and the above accusation is uncalled for, or you mistakenly did not communicate your argument well and we can all overlook this simple miscommunication of ideas and proceed.

Go back and read the thread in its entirety.

 

1) As I remember it, 27 is greater than 4 times 3. As such this does not prove that the armor is stronger than a meter of granite, only that 6.75" or armor is at least equivalent to a meter of armor.

27 is indeed greater than 4 x 3.  It is considerable less than 4 x 3 x 12. Also, please correct whatever it was you meant to say in the last sentence.

 

Watch the next scene too. Then you can see as they climb through they do in fact pass from the cut tunnel to a slightly wider and natural one. The cut one is clearly over a meter in depth.

There was no "cut tunnel".  There was an existing tunnel with a think sheet of rock over the entrance.  Brian's used the clip of Worf phasering that thin sheet several times.

 

I'm no gun expert, yet I can safely say that with modern weapons, even pre-modern, a small force could handily engage one armed with spears and such. In fact this happened pre-WWI in Africa when a group of British colonial forces wiped out a native fighting force.

And at Isandlwana a British force armed with modern weapons was wiped out by a native force with spears.

 

And further still, Merik was initially in Star Fleet and did attend the academy for a short time before dropping out.

Indeed.  Emphasis on "dropping out".

The most likely outcome from Paris's shot is that the tire tread was blown out with sidewall remaining somewhat intact, and the rim heated to such a degree that the trailer brakes activated or the rim just locked on the axle at that point.

Or the driver simply lost control due to the blowout.

 

Your claim that the vehicle was undamaged or specifically that the mudflap was undamaged is going to require proof, and after reviewing the scene I can tell you that you don't have it.

I said nothing of the sort liar.  I said that the fact that the vehicle was driving normally shows that there was no significant damage to the wheel - i.e. the phaser did no more than burst the tire.

1. Please demonstrate that the referenced rock-eating events feature loose piles.

2. Inches of steel are not going to be more resistant than feet of rock.

1) It's a fucking cave-in.

2) Yes it is. The WW2 APC shell of the British 15"/42 Mk1 could penetrate up to 27" of armour at zero range, 16.5" at 10,000 yards.  HMS Ramillies used such shells to penetrate four metres of stone wall during the bombardment of Toulon.

 

Already addressed.

Refresh my memory of why a delusional Riker's claims of a phaser's effects on a figment of his imagination are relevant to a discussion of what phasers actually do, especially when they're contradicted by non-delusional events.

 

I read it as a clean, non-explosive vaporization of about two cubic meters of granite.

Watch the scene again then.  The area of the hole was about a square metre, but the tunnel they subsequently climed through was already there, and Worf just removed a thin layer of rock over the entrance.

 

His advisor Merik knew more than you or I. Perhaps you hve some evidence showing why we should disregard his statements?

For the reasons I stated above - one is a native of a planet with 20th century technology and the other is merchant navy, not Starfleet.

And of course phasers eat rock like candy, the blasting of several cubic meters of rock in Insurrection being a nice example.

So? The fact that we've seen plenty of examples of phasers blasting loose piles of rock out of the way has no relevence to their effectiveness against several inches of armour plate.

Riker, in "Frame of Mind"[TNG6], suggests that setting his phaser to level 16 on a wide field should be sufficient to destroy half of the building he is occupying. Though we don't know the exact size of the structure, we know based on the multiple wards and corridors that the building is quite substantial. It seemed to be a metallic-walled structure.

The entire scenario was a figment of his imagination, and when we actually saw a phaser on level 16 being used against rock in Chain of Command, the result was, at best, the removal of about half a cubic metre.

And let's not forget that the Roman Proconsul believed phaser pistols would be sufficient to defeat the armies of a 20th Century Rome. Rome was hardly the type to eschew large destruction machines.

He wasn't exactly an expert on Starfleet weaponry, and neither was Merik - an Academy dropout who went into the merchant navy.

Is *that* what he was talking about?  I wasn't gonna use shuttle or 29th Century phasers.

I was talking about Paris using his Type 2 to penetrate the mudflap on the back of an artic and pop a tire to stop it. The lorry was subsequently seen driving normally, demonstrating that there was no significant damage to the wheel itself.

The shuttle's phasers vapourised (or whatever the hell the actually do to stuff) the engine block with a single shot, so there's at least a decent chance of them being able to penetrate the armour of an AT-ST (or a Sherman).

By analogy, the difference would be like taking cover in a modern gunfight behind a plywood sheet versus taking cover behind a thick-walled steel drum.

Agreed, but the fact that that thick-walled steel drum can stop small arms fire means that an armoured vehicle is also likely to be immune to small arms fire.

Do you not think a phaser can kill a tank?  Say, an old Sherman?   If you think it could, what evidence do you have that an AT-ST would be more difficult?

Is a Sherman tougher than a packing crate? Or a mudflap? Yes or no?

Modern naval ships can't, but historically capital ships were expected to have a decent sized zone of immunity against their own weapons.  As for tanks, the frontal armour of a modern MBT certainly can resist its own firepower.

True. Possibly instantanious fusion of the heavy elements in the core? My whole reason for this line of thought, is to account for any possible secondary reactions which could have aided the destruction.

Why?  We've already got a much simpler solution staring us in the face: it's the ultimate BFG.  There's no need to go jumping through hoops to come up with a mechanism that involves vastly lower power levels when its not necessary, and indeed would leave unexplained phenomena that the BFG theory explains nicely.

In ANH, we hear that X-Wings have shields, when one pilot says "switch main power to front deflector screen".  We also hear Han say that the Millennium Falcon is losing its deflector shields when the ISDs are attacking.

There was also the order to stablise rear deflectors when Vader's flight attacked.

In ROTJ, when the Executor gets hit and loses one of its domes, we hear an Imperial officer say "Sir, we lost our bridge deflector shield".

 

In TPM, the Naboo pilots mention that the Droid Control Ship's shields are too strong for their weapons to get through.

Good point - so we have had capship shields discussed.

My point was never that shields are never discussed, merely that the absence of such a mention is irrelevent to whether or not they're present.

There's also the fact that the Empire wouldn't really need to shield the AT-ATs.  In the Battle of Hoth, one of the pilots (I think it was Wedge), mentioned that the AT-ATs' armor was too thick for the snowspeeders' blasters to penetrate.

They probably wouldn't be necessary against snowspeeders, but it would be idiotic for them to be designed with such light opponents in mind - as a rule of thmb they should be protected against their own firepower.

If they had been shielded, I'm pretty sure it would have been noted by one of the pilots, since deflector shields get mentioned, oh, only a ton of times in battles in SW.

Not particularly - the TIE's shields are never mentioned, and neither, AFAIK are any capship shields

To be fair I think the case for flak-bursting laser bolts in sw (as stupid and retarded and unexplainable as it is) is pretty compelling I think. The Falcon chase sequence in the asteroid belt for example. Shots which stray far from the Falcon appear to burst in the blackness of space. 

I've always interpreted that as the Avenger continuing to target asteroids rather than the bolts bursting - they're small and dark enough to be invisible against the background.