Semi-OT: The Icaran Empire Preview (the book one)

[dogscoff]

Starhawk said:
LOL actually anything so much as sneezes at an unsheilded trek ship and you get massive casualties and a big mother of a hole wherever the shot hit.

Exactly. There are physical limits to the possibile strength of any armour, since matter and molecular bonds can only do so much.

Trek ships have energy available in such obscene quantities that no physical barrier short of a small moon will stop their weapons. Armour is useless, you are utterly reliant on your shields whether you like it or not. Therefore you might as well not bother with armour at all.

Windows still are stupid what about micro-meteors? There's an idea let the window take the hit instead of unobtanium armor heh.

Trek waves micrometeors away with deflector dishes I think, but again you might as well just use shields if the technology is available. After all, the amount of shielding you'd need to protect against even space dust impacts is prohibitive when travelling at relativistic speeds. Radiation shielding, too. What do you want, a couple metres of concrete and/or lead wraped around your hull or a nice tidy little energy field, versatile, configurable, and running on just a tiny fraction of the hideous, mind-bending quantities of energy being constantly generated by your powerplant to hurl your multi-kiloton starship up to the speed of light and beyond.

It's like when they "divert power from life support" to get more juice for the engines. Switching off the lights and the aircon is going to free up the kazillions of joules required to bend space-time around your starship is it? I don't think so.

And the whole forcefield window is just suicide and stupid in the extreme I mean one small blackout on the ship and your sucking vaccum out your bedroom "window" lol

So have a few backups in place. It would be nice to imagine that by the 23rd century the phrase "power blackout" will have faded into obscurity, but you'd surely have a few independent and redundant backups just in case of attack. Besides, when you live in space, your physical survival depends entirely on technology. Without power, you will die sooner or later anyway: you can expect to be cooked, frozen, choked on co2, starved or otherwise dealt some nasty demise inside a few days for sure. With that in mind it's not too much of a stretch (but still risky, I'll grant you that) to be dependent on power for your ship's physical integrity as well. Read Iain M Banks' Culture novels- many of their ships would actually fall apart if not actively and constantly reinforced by fields.

Although that also brings me to the huge quarters and the fact that everyone gets their own, have these people ever heard of packing in more hull? Shield generators? weapons? larger magazine capacity?

Again, mass and volume stop becoming an issue when your ship has sufficent power output to make your average main sequence star look like a 60watt light bulb. The power needed to shift a starship of X cubic metres at warp speed really isn't going to be that much different to the power required to shift X+100 cubic metres. Scrimping a few cubic metres for extra missiles or whatever would be like improving the fuel efficiency of your car by cleaning the dust off the back seat. Granted, there might be other advantages to reduced volume- docking and targetting come to mind- but with the apparent abilities of Trek's transporters (don't even get me started on transporters...) and computer/sensor systems these are negated anyway, especially in light of the improved crew morale that comes from larger living areas.

A better question would be, what does the enterprise actually need all that crew for? On more than one occasion the entire thing has been run by one person on the bridge talking to the computer...

[Starhawk]

Uh Dogscoff I've mentioned this before it is a Cannon statement "From Riker" that the Entire E-D did not produce even ONE terrawatt not EVEN One.

For a ship the size of the ent "Which btw is smaller then a modern Aircraft carrier and WTF is up with that?" that has to generate shields, warp, phasers, photon torpedoes Producing less then a terrawatt is BS.

Let's face it ST ships are pathetic when it comes to energy output (or at least the math behind it) as I think someone pointed out the Warp core makes less power then it would take to power a modern Attack Submarine.

Now we also see phasers constantly bouncing off of buildings and the like and not vaporizing everything in sight, not even a black mark for that matter (that's a hand phaser/disruptor yes but just scale up the armor on a warship and there yah go)

Yeah they shrug of micro-meteors with deflectors I forgot about that.

And given the fact that the Defiant which has no windows employs armor that works to reinforce the defense once shields fail as do later Akira and Steamrunner class ships it seems stupid to have your CAPITAL SHIPS like the Ent-D have and Galaxies have chock full of windows with no armor.

I mean no offense here but a warship does not need windows at best it should have "projectors" if you have so much spare room for mini "window shield" generators.

There are examples in many different sci-fi worlds with much more powerful weapons of armors made of advanced composites and metals that give the ship SOME survivability.

As far as "power outages" we've seen a few eps where a ship lost power at least for a few minutes and that's all it would take to go wooosh out your bedroom window.

As far as redundancy LOL what have we EVER seen on Star Trek that makes you think Starfleet has any form of redundant systems? I mean they forgot what a fuse or circuit breaker is for cryin out loud.

[Hunpecked]

I'm both surprised and disappointed that such a sophisticated science fiction fan as Starhawk has so badly misunderstood the Star Trek ficverse.

Take this "windows" stuff, for example. No, the Enterprise DOES NOT HAVE windows. What it has are inside and outside scene projectors. The inside projector simulates the outside view; the outside projector either simulates the inside view, or just emits light so the audience and the Federation public get the warm fuzzy illusion of a ship with lit portholes/windows. The outside projector's simulation capability is especially useful when unwelcome visitors drop by; even if you have a wild party going on inside, they just see an empty cabin and go bother someone else.

If Starhawk still isn't convinced, tnen perhaps he'd care to explain THOSE STUPID MOVING DOTS we see through the "windows" when the ship is in warp drive. Stars? HAHAHAHA! Gimme a break! Obviously they're just a graphic construct added to the simulated scene to give the compartment occupants the illusion of motion.

As for the supposed "terawatt" paradox, it's so excruciatingly obvious that it pains me to explain it. You see, just as a "star date" has nothing in common with a 21st Century Terran date, a "star terawatt" is completely different from a Terran terawatt. I suppose the scripts should have explicitly included the "star" part of the term for the intellectually impaired, but I can't blame the writers for assuming at least a minuscule level of intelligence in their viewers.

I could go on, but I think I've made my point. No need to embarrass Starhawk any more.

Oh, and for the humor-impaired: