/strek/ - Star Trek ★

>>22648 (OP)

Reason 1: Evasion, Even if you assume phasers move at the speed of light, with the distances and velocities involved in Star Trek missing is not impossible (though to be fair, light speed is really fucking fast, you might have to Picard Maneuver to really "dodge" a phaser shot), and projectile weapons moving at sub-light speeds still exist as well (and are frequently portrayed as more destructive in many cases). In addition, tracking sensors are not going to be perfect, something that is rarely brought up outside of full on cloaking technology is any attempts to evade lock on by sensors by using coatings on the hull or energy fields of some kind, but we can generally assume there is such technology at play, it would make sense if movement would help assist in this.

Reason 2: Angles of attack, even if you can fire at any angle, you're limited to firing in a straight line (in the case of phasers at least, projectile weapons like torpedoes are shown to be capable of maneuvering and tracking to some extent) so flying to the back of the enemy ship to hit their engines for example would make sense tactically. In addition, getting closer would theoretically lead to a more powerful shot if only slightly, since there would be less distance for the phaser blast to lose energy over (less of an issue in space due to the lack of matter around you usually, but still worth considering)

Reason 3: Rotating damage, this makes some degree of sense if your hull plating/shielding is built around the idea of dispersing energy (heat) to avoid extra damage, by getting hit in separate places rather than focusing it in one location, you would more readily be able to absorb and disperse any energy (heat) that hit you.

If anything the question should be why don't they move around at higher velocities (programming the computer to pull of the occasional Picard maneuver for example) or more frequently since we often see ships simply sitting still and taking it, I imagine most of it simply the limitations of the earlier special effects since later in VOY and DS9 they relied a lot on CG for this.

>>22649

Yeah the problem is in the movie I saw the distances were a few ship lengths at least, and the enemy had no engines it was a giant metal square.

>>22650

More importantly if you can get that massive rectangle through the enemy shields, why not fill it with a couple of dozen missile warheads?

This is why I can't get into this franchise, it requires too much suspension of disbelief.

>>22653

>More importantly if you can get that massive rectangle through the enemy shields, why not fill it with a couple of dozen missile warheads?

The Klingons, while they can be ruthlessly pragmatic, still enjoy stroking their war-boners and pretending that it's still the 1300's. Klingons are also rather fond of boasting about how many people they've killed with their Bat'leth - if it helps think of them as WW2 era Japan, but it somehow actually works for them.

>>22650

Because after BoBW Star Trek writers became retards who believed the Borg wouldn’t adapt to swords.

It amazes me how the original concept of the Borg was so immediately fucked over by subsequent writers who lack imagination.

>>22656

>It amazes me how the original concept of the Borg was so immediately fucked over by subsequent writers who lack imagination.

To be fair, they kind of had to.

>Okay, so we've established that the entire federation can be wiped out by a single Borg rowboat.

>Great! Now write one where they send a fleet of ten bajillion warships.

>Do you want the series to end?

>No.

>Okay. Suddenly-profoundly-weak-and-retarded Borg it is!

>>22727

<Suddenly-profoundly-weak-and-retarded Borg it is!

Or, instead of being an unimaginative faggot that' pretended to write himself into a corner, you could explore the Borg in ways beyond "there's a cube headed for Earth." You could have them run into a derelict Borg vessel that's been abandoned for centuries, but might spring to life in a few isolated areas (but still disconnected from the Collective), thus giving you weakened Borg without trivializing their threat as a whole. Maybe some drones that were in stasis or some shit get thawed out, and are starting to show signs of individuality, but any attempt to take them off of the ship/wake them up some more risks the greater Collective being alerted and warping into the location, leaving the crew with a difficult choice to make. Or they encounter another civilization that's found a way to reliably fend off the Borg, but their method requires them to do shit that's so utterly inhumane you have to wonder if sacrificing your humanity to this degree is even worth it to prevent assimilation. There are thousands of ways to deal with the Borg without making them cartoon villain robo-ants; that stipulation ONLY makes sense if you're so creatively bankrupt that you can't think of a way to use them in the series besides DAE THE BORG ARE ATTACKING TEH FEDERASHUN AGAIN.

>>22648 (OP)

>So what's the point of maneuvering?

What if the ship is beneath you and the phaser array is on top of the saucer section? Do you think it should just fire through the ship at the enemy?

Staying still seems like a great way to be a target.

>>22653

They're still sometimes trying to treat massive starships like fighter jets rather then submarine fights.

>>22727

>Great! Now write one where they send a fleet of ten bajillion warships

Why would you do that? Is your name Gene?

We already have a thread about Star Trek weapons, it's even got /k/ in the fucking thread title. Check the fucking catalogue you inept turd and stop suffering us through your abysmal retardation >>14060

Also swing by the ancient ancestral "can the emh cure a 30 cal bullet wound to the head" youd like that one.

But yeah check the catalogue sometime while you oil your nugget

>>22735

>Why would you do that?

<Every other show I worked on ramps up to 'le ebin hueg batel' at the end of each season

<Besides, the network demanded something they could tease and boast about in the commercials over the next week

<Yeah, so it doesn't fit into the world we've established and it doesn't make much sense, but everyone knows this is just a bit of entertainment, nobody takes Star Trek that seriously, right?

<Fuck it; Frank, get the cocaine, we're doing this. Don't get too into it though, I want to be home by 5.

>>22732

>Staying still seems like a great way to be a target.

It's space, there nothing to hide behind, nothing to distract them. You have an omni-directional weapon and an omni-directional shield, and so do they.

In that situation the best thing to do would be to stay at the edge of maximum phaser focus range, and slug each other until one of you either retreats, or has his engines broken and dies.

>>22734

It should be more like age-of-sail ship of the line fights.

>>22821

>In that situation the best thing to do would be to stay at the edge of maximum phaser focus range, and slug each other until one of you either retreats, or has his engines broken and dies.

Not firing multi-tonne, target seeking, warp-speed KKVs at enemies right on the edge of sensor range.

>>22821

>has his engines broken and dies

If there's no advantage to movement in combat, why would getting their engines broken cause them to lose the fight?

Reminder that photon torpedoes exist too.

>>22827

>disable enemy engines

>run away

This is actually the best strategy…assuming you don't want to just kill everyone.

>>22888

Why do you even have that picture?

>>22901

Why don't you have pics like that?

>>22901

>>23014

Actually I used that as an alternate icon for a dnd game on roll20. The regular one was a mean looking pic of him as Hercules on the old tv show, but this one I switched to when hitting on the slutty elf chick in the party. Laughs were had by all. It was a good time.

>>22827

Because they're clearly the weaker ship since their engines got disabled in the first place, and can't run away from the stronger ship.

>>22888

There aren't any crucial systems, the shield is spherical (or nearly so). Once it gets down to armor obviously the game changes, but the very fact of shields and phasers completely obviates any normal combat. Closest I can think of is old battleships since their weapons were omni directional and their armor was omni directional (in 2D).

>>23166

Doesn't really change anything, since you can't shoot at each other, you're just putting the fight on pause.

>>23183

MegaCochrane Hours.

>>23194

Ah, thanks for that m8. Although, looking through the Cochrane ratings we're given in the show that means that the Ent-D is naturally generating a Graviton field about 312.5 times higher than the listed lifetime of the warp coils on the Galaxy class ship (2MCH between refits), and if DS9 is accurate it only takes about 30kCH to open an artificial wormhole. Why wasn't the Ent-D opening random wormholes every few nanoseconds while its shields were active?

>>23203

I was going to try and think of something clever, but I'll be honest. It was just an asspull. It was probably Okuda's dog's initials or some bullshit.

>>23204

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Cochrane_(unit)

>A cochrane (symbol C) was the unit of subspace distortion, named after Zefram Cochrane

As it's being used as the reading for "Graviton Field Output" we know that Gravitons distort subspace in sufficient density - which fits with what we're told about the warp drives and the deflector shields although you never do see them deflect, they always seem to absorb. I know that Trek writers can't seem to remember what they established last scene, let alone a few episodes ago, but this is a big one. Would they not have a master document actually telling them what shit DOES rather than a postit note saying 'just make some shit up'?

>>23203

>>23194

Maybe it's MILLIcochranes, and you just can't tell because the text on the monitor is all caps?

>>23207

>you just can't tell because the text on the monitor is all caps?

That could be a workable explanation, it would be a retarded thing to have on critical display panels though - having a member of the engineering team or bridge crew mistake milli-X for mega-X would be potentially catastrophic. Then again, we are talking about the people who thought that building circuit boards out of frag grenades was a good idea.

>>23207

>z

It's not in all caps.

That information just happens to be REALLY IMPORTANT

So I was pooping just now and it hit me. The symbols.for hours is "h." It's lowercase. A capital H is a Henry, the unit of inductance. So it's MegaCochrane Henries.

>>23234

So it's the change in the shield's EM induction per unit of subspace distortion? I guess that could make sense if you assume that induction is one of the ways that shields block phaser fire, by "storing" the energy in a virtual induction coil and letting it slowly radiate out over time. If you also assume that MCH is Mega-CochraneHenries, which is to say a million of the single combined unit CochraneHenries, then it's plausible that the high value is the result of the shields having an extremely high inductance, as opposed to an extremely high subspace distortion. Which to me, makes sense because it's established in-universe that a million Cochranes is obscenely large. However, there's nothing to suggest that a million Henries is obscenely large, especially considering the outrageous values we get from phasers already.

>>23236

Well it's not cochranes per Henry, it Cochrane Henries. Rather it's not the ratio of cochranes to Henries, it's Cochrane with a 'duration' of Henries. The kilowatt is a unit of power. If something uses a kilowatt of power for a duration of one hour, then it has used one kilowatt hour of energy. The thing is, it could also have been two kilowatts of power used for half an hour. So a MegaCochrane Henry could only be one millicochrane of subspace distortion and 1000 megahenries of induction. It's a conserved value. Another example is a kilogram meter. It's one kilogram moved one meter. It's the same as 100 kilograms moved one centimeter. Yet one more example I can think of is man-hours. It's the same wether it's one person working ten hours, or ten people working one hour.

Now that this is the graviton field output, I imagine there is some common divided unit we're not seeing. The graviton is just a virtual particle of gravity. When two objects are gravitationally attracted, we can say they they exchange a graviton. I would assume what we're reallybtalking about it something like MCH/g or something like that. Who knows.

Since the Cochrane is a fictional unit and we don't really know anything about it, we'll never really know what a MegaCochrane Henry is.

Fuck. I've put way toouch thought into this.

>>23239

It is why we are here.

>>23211

>as soon as shields hit 0% BOOM

That's not the only possible conclusion to be taken from this.

Correct me if I'm wrong but once the shield is gone the ship inside is basically dead meat, a single torpedo can put a hole the size of a skyscraper in it, and a phaser can cut it in half. That's the entire point of the tension ratcheting in the series by everyone going "captain shields are down to 50%! now 25%!"

Shields are the primary and only way of preventing a ship to take damage, and they're semi-spherical with no real weak points. Although it helps to hit in the same spot, it doesn't matter where you first pick that spot to be, they get weaker continuously.

Armor later got introduced into the plot when they ran out of levels of tension to move the plot along, kind of like power levels increasing continuously in dragonball z. But even armor doesn't seem to protect the ship from damage, when Defiant gets hit without shields, its still getting wrecked inside and people are dying.

>>23862

>when Defiant gets hit without shields, its still getting wrecked inside and people are dying.

Don't forget the number of flashpacks detonating inside the bridge, and the number of screaming redshirts we see thrown over railings by the damage done to the ship while the shields are apparently still up.

>>23895

Defiant at this point is so bullshit its not even canon.

>>23862

Granted, however in this context I would argue that the point holds that crucial systems aboard a starship Do Exist.

A Hit to a nacelle or main reactor, or a blow to a habitation deck are going to have massively different consequences.

Maybe I should scan in my official blueprints.

>>23183

Holy shit. You nailed the physics of the shadowy plot armor another anon mentioned. With the ritual sacrifice of redshirts through exploding panels. Those guys must be taken to sickbay and exsanguinated for use in the shield generation matrix.

>>23900

and yet it is canon. Sitting there, taunting you, with its ablative armour, the little tart.

>>23944

>You nailed the physics of the shadowy plot armor another anon mentioned.

Got a cap? But yes, the dark secrets behind the Federation are clearly more than a shadowy and deniable intelligence outfit.

>>23905

>Farce Field

Are they even meant to exist at that point of time?

>>24005

He might be referring to a post that I made a while back. If so, TL;DR exploding consoles and loads of no-name ensigns on board that are killed by them is actually a design feature implemented by S31--because the space commies refuse to design their ships with adequate armor and shielding, S31 has made a pact with the blood god to ritually sacrifice red/goldshirts through unholy shrines disguised as consoles, in exchange for the protection of their ship.

>>24015

I suppose if we're not going to accept 'plot armour' as an explanation for it that is one way to explain the survival of the ship and bridge crew. It's also hardly the most ridiculous thing in SW Canon at the moment.

>>23957

A lot of dumb things are canon which is why popularity for star trek is dropping like a stone.

>>24059

Is that really the reason why?

Or maybe it's just because sci-fi has a high bar for entry and the bulk of potential audiences just refuse to bother with it mostly preferring more accessible sitcoms or an occasional horror movie for those rare times when they're feeling really adventurous.

>>24085

It's really why. The only way a star trek type show could exist today is as a comedy, because no one can suspend disbelief that hard anymore.

>sci-fi has a high bar for entry

"Reverse the polarity" plot points are not a high bar.

The general population in the 60s didn't know that much about science or space travel. The average audience since the popularization of internet (~2000s) knows a hell of a lot more even if they still don't know FTL travel is equivalent to time travel about basic physics and science.

As a result the bar set for writers is much higher, and they keep failing, ignoring staff experts, and treating reference material as a coffee cup coaster.

Nobody watches sitcoms anymore… wtf…

>>24088

>Nobody watches sitcoms anymore

Up until last week Roseanne was one of the most popular shows on TV. People love The Big Bang Theory.

>>24015

This is correct.

>>24129

Dude nobody even watches TV anymore.

>>24027

Cuck Wars has canon?

>>24059

Star Trek got oversaturated by fans of Dr Who whom thought timetravel was the best thing since sliced bread.

>>24136

Well they certainly don't watch /tv/ anymore.

>>23214

Honestly, that would be the kind of thing you would just fucking memorize on your first day at the job. It's like a seasoned electrician needing a post-it note to tell him what voltage household current is at.

>>23236

This actually makes some sense. When they talk about shields being "down to 20%" it would mean that their ability to store energy and thus absorb potential damage had dropped to that level. It also makes the whole "shit starts to explode" thing plausible, if the shielding system attempts to absorb too much energy, it starts overloading.

>>24088

>The average audience since the popularization of internet (~2000s) knows a hell of a lot more

This is true. Most people know basic stuff like "when you turn off the engines in space you don't just stop"; "traveling between places without exceeding the speed of light takes months in a solar system or centuries between them"; and "you don't actually freeze in space". Movies like The Martian can even give them a 101 in orbital mechanics if they don't let their eyes glaze over and pay attention even if they did slingshot the wrong way around Earth.

Sci-fi like Trek is basically dead. People want Hard Sci-fi now, if they want it at all.

>>24188

I don't think it's a bad thing, we just need to:

1. Get writers that aren't uneducated, follow reference material, and have experts on staff helping them.

2. De-emphasize the hard science and spend less time explaining it. Just make it a part of the setting, not a part of the plot.