/strek/ - Star Trek

>>31746

Klingons wouldn't pull a Kamikaze attack, too dishonourable. They'd ram it, certainly, at high impulse but only as a prelude to the boarding action which would be bizarrely successful considering how the writers decided to nerf the Borg almost immediately after establishing them.

The reason this doesn't happen in Star Trek is the same reason it doesn't happen in ANY sci-fi that features FTL travel: because it's a fucking game-breaker and the producers know that. The fact they did it in the last Star Wars film and everyone cringed themselves to death at the unending layers of plot holes it opens just proves this.

I'm sure you can handwave something about deflector shields blocking any kind of physical impact, though.

>>31753

>Star wars

kek. the tin can ships of star wars can't even make it through an asteroid belt without exploding.

>>31751

A thousand kilograms of tungsten would show up on anyone's sensors way the fuck out. Just grab a rock over 300m in size and hide her on the day-side of the target, because at those speeds you don't need much else to go full Shoemaker-Levy.

>>31753

No, the producers and writers don't know this. You overestimate them. The reason it isn't done is that none of those cunts knows shit about physics, and they don't give a damn about the fans who do, or they WOULD have done it to be the first.

What Star Wars did was lazy writing coupled with a massive and unending hubris to do something "new" in the canon. They thought they could bump up the ramming they showed in Rogue One another notch to turn the tide of some unwinnable situation. Lazy writing.

>>31789

Actually, the reason is that in both shows going fast means going into the fast dimension. The fast dimension is parallel to real space and is therefore not even truly going fast, but rather traveling in a zone where space is shorter. This means it's impossible to use the "fast realm" to go so fast as to instantaneously fuck anything you smack into.

>>31751

There was an interesting thread on /k/ about that concept. The Relativistic Bomb (a few thousand Kg of mass accelerated to a significant chunk of light speed) would be an uncounterable super-weapon with real world physics. If you add in warp drives then you can make them significantly less massive whilst guaranteeing that the impact will at least be an extinction level event for the planet that gets hit.

The only counter to it would be making sure that your entire civilisation is 'running dark' to try and lower the odds that another civilisation would figure out where to aim their bombs. If you encountered another species in your slow and quiet expansion then you'd do everything in your power to make sure that they understood MAD and that you never got past the calmer parts of a Cold War style political relationship with them, as anything more exciting than that has fairly high odds of Armageddon for everybody involved.

You couldn't include it in a setting like Strek without radically altering every part of the story. It wouldn't be so much a '5 year mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before" as a team of analysts sat at a Star Fleet intelligence facility trying to figure out if that blip on the sensor screen was a sign that they'd finally figured out that there was a Vulcan settlement on a particular planet, or if it meant that the Betazoids had fired off their doomsday bombs at someone (of if it was just a good old fashioned technical glitch).

>>31797

>the reason is that in both shows going fast means going into the fast dimension

Just wrong. In Star Wars, yes, they have "hyperspace" which is as you described. But there is no such thing in Star Trek. They're just going really, really fast with engines powered by exotic matter that near-instantly accelerates them to faster than light speed.

>>31803

Doesn't the ship warp space around itself and thus basically creates temporary bubble of "fast space"? The physics of such bubble encountering another ship and the subsequent collision would probably be quite complex.

>>31801

Those Star Fleet intelligence analysts would probably all kill each other in the second episode after being exposed to Romulan AI-engineered civilization killing attack memes.

>>31811

something something make "thinner space" in front of the ship and denser space behind but the space wants to be even so it gives the ship forward momentum

from certain point of view the ship is standing still while the time-space around it is being bent

actual warp "drive" according to know physics isnt a drive at all

its a "road" mad out of exotic (non-barionic) matter that locally increased the speed of light

>>31801

The three body problem is a Chinese novel that explores this 'dark forest' concept. Highly recommend reading it as its a great novel.

>>31748

Even the relativistic effects of ramming something at say, even 1/8th impulse, would be more than enough to completely obliterate it.

I mean as soon as you talk about ANY mass being accelerated to beyond the speed of light, the mass of the object would be greater than anything we could even consider existing. Assuming this doesn't just cause the mass to turn into a black hole, or tear the fabric of reality in two, a speck of dust traveling at warp 1.0000001 would release more energy than the entirety of the universe as soon as it collided into another particle.

taking post-relativistic or even near-relativistic effects into account when the show previously has disregarded them is counterproductive and causes more issues, as >>31753 points out.

keep it simple, stupid.

>>31753

Didn't the Jem'Hadar did this when the battle turned again the Dominion in DS9? The writers do use star ships ramming each other when it's convenient, even STD had a Klingon ram ship in the final episode of S2.

>>31821

You are right. Problems with FTL are so numerous, that any amount of it makes a setting a logicless fantasy land, where everyone is forced to act willfully retarded to have any hope of a coherent plot. Might as well go all-in, and add space wizards and laserswords, both of which make much more sense than vehicles going faster than light.

>>31812

>Interplanetary, Strategic, WMD level, memetic warfare

Wouldn't Star Fleet just need to mobilise a few of their Australian officers to have the Romulans begging for peace and an iron clad non-aggression treaty?

>>31819

Cheers for the recommendation, looks like they're worth a read.

the warp drive isn't an FTL drive

it does not make a ship go faster than light

the ship is traveling at sub-light speeds

<the warp drive compresses space infront of it, and expands it again behind it

at best the warp drive would overload and explode when it comes into contact with a large object.

relativistic impacts would not occur, because the ship never reaches those speeds.

>>31831

>An object moving at Warp Factor 5 can travel a distance 143 billion miles in an hour

>It travels 213.237 light hours in an hour

<"DAS NORT EFF-TEE-ELL!!!!!" t.you

We know that a warp speed ship is FTL, if you're certain that it isn't then explain the Picard Manoeuvre.

>>31834

from what i understand when using warp engine the ship is standing still but the space around the ship is being bent

so when you turn off the warp engine the ship has no momentum and stops moving

the ship is standing still in the local bubble but the whole bubble is being moved

>>31839

From any perspective outside the ship it's still moving at FTL speeds. Besides, if it was staying perfectly still then why would it need 'Inertial Compensators"?

>>31840

Because the writers mixed two different ideas. In an Alcubierre drive the whole point is you don't accelerate to light speed, space expands and contracts around you to give you effective faster than light travel. Technically your velocity is zero, the universe is changing around you.

They imply sometimes on the show this is the case, like the episode where they discover warp drives are damaging space/time by constantly stretching and compressing it.

>>31844

IIRC it's illegal to use warp in the solar system.

>>31844

OK, fair enough, in that case we can't build a 1 gram relativistic bomb and are stuck using impulse engines on a ~1000 tonne mass. Sustaining subwarp speeds on a setup like that would be no trouble for the tech and engineering of the show. If we can get it up to an impulse speed equal to around 0.3 to 0.5 C (no trouble at all from what we've seen in the show) then it will still be a planet killer with a fair amount of energy to spare. Hook it up to some kind of warp tug to deliver it into the target system without having to wait a few centuries for it to arrive. Heck, with an industrial replicator set up on the 'tug' you could have a cloaked ship arrive in system, hang about for the hour or so it took to replicate the weapon, then undock it (leaving the weapons computers to select the fastest collision course) and warp out without being detected.

It wouldn't even need to happen that close to the planet, where the enemy might have tachyon scanners to detect cloaked ships, you could fire it out in interstellar space and head back to base without ever working up much of a sweat.

>>31811

From what I understand, the sole purpose of the "bubble" is to protect the ship from being instantly blasted to pieces by the first stray particle of dust or gas it runs into at FTL speeds. It's created by a deflector shield that, big surprise, deflects shit out of the way. But even if this plays a role in allowing Warp Speed to be possible (by essentially removing "space friction" from the ship) it's still not what makes it go fast (that's the purpose of the dilithium). It's still not an alternate dimension or whatever where you can go fast no matter what. Case in point: a ship that has lost its warp drive can only travel at sublight speeds even if it still has a deflector. On its own, this bubble doesn't do anything.

>>31834

>explain the Picard Manoeuvre

A plot hole, nothing more. Oh sure, they tried to patch it later by handwaving that ship's sensors usually travel FTL… somehow… but that didn't fix the fundamental issue that in 99% of the cases the bridge crew is basically just looking out the window.

>>31855

You can cover that plothole by assuming that they upgraded to FTL sensors sometime after that. Granted, you'd think they'd make a bigger point of it (light speed lag would play a significant role in space combat at any distance over a few million kilometres), but it's hardly the first or only thing that the writers missed.

Since warp is a bubble wouldn't it bounce off objects?

>>31865

This doesn't explain how different Warp speeds are possible. Does it just… bubble harder?

>>32108

Actually, yes. The Acubierre drive works such that space behind the ship expands while space infront of the ship compresses, causing it to almost "surf" the spacetime continuum without actually moving. Expanding/contracting space to a more extreme degree translates to shorter time to destination.

>>32112

There's still nothing in canon to suggest that this is how Star Trek warp drive works. It's just ass-pulling about theoretical real-world physics and applying them to fiction.

>>32117

I'm pretty sure there is. I remember Krauss talking about this shit in direct reference to Star Trek long before Alcubierre formalized it.

>>32119

Alcubierre published in 1994, you may be on to something there. Do we now have to add the Alcubierre drive to the list of ideas the engineers lifted from the evenings episode of strek?

>>32120

Alcubierre outright states he got the idea from Star Trek. He was watching Trek and thought, "You know, this might actually be possible." Then he did some math and wrote a paper. I didn't think it was 1994, though. I thought he did it around 99-2000.

>>31746

A single ship would be able to destroy a planet, at full warp. The only possible way of keeping the setting intact, is to disallow this through fantasy physica. Like saying that hyperspace ships have null mass, or warp ships being effectively still with only space moving around them.

>>31834

The Picard maneuver is literally ninja afterimages.

>>32121

>Alcubierre outright states he got the idea from Star Trek. He was watching Trek and thought, "You know, this might actually be possible."

Is Strek the result of a Vulcan science team trying to accelerate our first contact by planting ideas for future tech into our social consciousness? I'm seriously asking.

>>32141

>Is Strek the result of a Vulcan science team trying to accelerate our first contact by planting ideas for future tech into our social consciousness?

I hope so.

>>32121

Anything is theoretically possible if you throw enough math at it. We're still talking about creating energies that violate everything we know about physics.

>>32223

I think confusing "theoretically possible" and "mathematically explainable." Take negative mass, for instance. As far as we know, no such this exists, but if it could, we have a pretty good idea how it would act.

The borg as written were too powerful, Voyager proved you have to mary sue your way just to deal with them.

Each borg was a tiny spaceship with shields and could regenerate any damage that got through the shields. The borg cubes themselves didn't even bother with shielding (although they had them) because a photon torpedo that can crack a planet open could barely scratch the paint on a borg cube.

They HAD to be nerfed.

>>32242

>They HAD to be nerfed.

No, they didn't you megafaggot. That was the whole point of the Borg, they were an existential threat that you could not deal with. They were a force of nature that could not be truly opposed, and your only recourse in 99% of cases was to go around them and hope they didn't glance in your direction. Not every villain needs to be defeated. Not every story needs to be a power fantasy that vindicates the protagonists with no consequences and no harm done. If the Borg are nerfed, they're functionally no different from every other big bad. Their whole schtick is that they cannot be truly defeated.

>>32243

You could theoretically manage both approaches without too much hassle.

>Downplay the resilience of the individual Borg drone to the point where it can be credibly defeated without resorting to mary-sue-technobabble

>Rejig their overall threat level so that a well equipped/trained unit of anti-borg specialists, that has prepared out the ass, can reasonably take down a single minor Borg light-ship (I forget which shapes they used for those, but no more than a corvette analog)

>However the moment a single drone on that small ship registers you as a threat the nearest cube (and they're never *too* far away from a cube) will dispatch reinforcements and you are now working with a deadline of 2-3 minutes before you get captured and assimilated

That way you can still get episodes where the crew can fight and 'beat' the Borg but they retain their threat and can still play the role you described there.