♂ why do you think they went with another male captain? ♂

legendarylycan

presumably 'isoton' in star trek does not mean the same thing it means in real life (assuming isoton is actually a real thing - i thought it was just made-up treknobabble because they couldn't find a measurement they wanted)​​

artan42

shadowfang240 wrote: »

presumably 'isoton' in star trek does not mean the same thing it means in real life (assuming isoton is actually a real thing - i thought it was just made-up treknobabble because they couldn't find a measurement they wanted)

Iso- is a real scientific prefix. It means 'the same as or equal to' . It's not a qualifier of measurement. Obviously here it is so I equated it to the amount of TNT equivalent anti-matter would be needed to destroy the Earth. It's entirely possible I'm over estimating massivly but I'm a chemist, not a physicist.
Either way, I can't see Voyager as physically capable of holding that amount of material on board. Especially not as we've seen warp core explosions that aren't as powerful as torpedoes and they contain far more anti-matter. Well I assume it's in the core, if it's in the nacelles, then we've seen them explode as well and that's not planet destroying.​​

legendarylycan

the only thing in nacelles should be warp plasma generated by the core's M/AM reaction

as for iso...if that's what it means, i'm thinking either the first writer to use it in star trek either didn't know what it meant and just thought it looked cool or did and decided to use it anyway, which makes him/her a moron​​

angrytarg

@artan42 - uuhm... compressed subspace folds? That torpedo's bigger on the inside ​​

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jonsills

So the answer to the question depends on what an "isoton" is, in Trek. Also on what Harry means by "destroy" - out of curiosity, I tried looking up how much antimatter it would take to destroy Earth, and definition of terms was the main issue. (Obviously, to convert the entire mass of Earth to radiant energy would require one Earth-mass of antimatter; smaller amounts would suffice for lesser meanings of "destroy". To reduce it to something resembling the asteroid belt, for example, the best guess is on the close order of 1.3x10^15 kilograms of antimatter, or a cube of antiwater 10km on a side.)

angrytarg

This is actually one of the times Trek terms are used in a good way. You know that somehow "isotons" of antimatter are in a 2 meter casing and they can destroy worlds, appearantly, but since it's a nonsense measurement not much one can say about that - other than that the authors SHOULD keep their nosnense measurements consistent, of course ​​

artan42

angrytarg wrote: »

This is actually one of the times Trek terms are used in a good way. You know that somehow "isotons" of antimatter are in a 2 meter casing and they can destroy worlds, appearantly, but since it's a nonsense measurement not much one can say about that - other than that the authors SHOULD keep their nosnense measurements consistent, of course ​​

Read the bottom of the article. They do not keep it consistent.

legendarylycan

they should've just used real measurements from the start...i mean, it's not like 'Gigaton' is a recent word - even back in the 60s it was a thing​​

artan42

Once they had established Anti-matter as their magic of choice that should have put a physicist on the payroll to do maths for them.

jorantomalak

k20vtec wrote: »

interview with Harry Kim, apperently there were death threats sent to the production coz Janway was a woman.

startrek.com/article/straight-talk-with-voyagerundefineds-garrett-wang-part-i

I thought janeway was a good captain till the writers turned her into a genocidal maniac

starswordc

nikeix wrote: »

Rifles have made male strength largely superfluous for more than a century. It ain't some grand disparity in lethality that's kept the transition moving along at a snails pace. But sure, we can write criteria that would largely bar them from serving. It's funny who exactly is begin asked to set those criteria though. It's just a wee bit like gerrymandering, really .

Might want to recheck your facts on that, bub, because the rifle isn't the only thing soldiers have to carry. Before the US military opened ground combat roles to female personnel by order of DoD last year, the Army and Marine Corps did some pretty extensive testing and there turned out to be a serious disparity in injury statistics between male and female personnel taking infantry training. In particular the women were taking stress fractures that men were not, for understandable reasons given the average Marine infantryman is saddled with over a hundred pounds of gear as of 2007. Or take field-servicing armored vehicles: NPR spoke to a female trainee who was having to lift a huge tire from a Bradley or MRAP on her legs because she didn't have the upper-body strength to do it with her arms.

Now, there's an argument that it's not due to female bodies specifically, but rather because they weren't in combat roles all along and therefore didn't have to be as physically fit until just now, but the complaint the Commandant of the Marine Corps made in asking to keep women out of the infantry was that Marine infantry frequently have to march overland instead of driving or flying. I happen to like stories about badass women a lot, whether fictional or real (check out the Night Witches and Maj. Lyudmila Pavlichenko), but the argument is against diluting the strength of the organization to permit more equality in staffing.

In contrast, there's physiological data that women are actually better-suited to handle g forces than men, because they're statistically smaller. So the female body is actually an asset to aviators.

But here's the tricky part where science fiction and reality collide: most of those cases are not applicable to Starfleet. This is overwhelmingly a spacefaring organization that does not do major surface warfare operations very often. (In fact that's true across Star Trek: long-lasting ground conflicts like the Occupation of Bajor, AR-558, or the Kobali Prime war in STO, are the exception rather than the rule. It seems to me it is far more common for planets to simply surrender if the other side attains space superiority.) Similarly Starfleet's technology alleviates a lot of the other problems: fractures can be quickly healed by handwavium, and inertial dampeners mean feeling g forces at dangerous levels at all is a thing of the past. So logically, I would expect the ratio of males to females in Starfleet to be a lot closer to 1:1, excepting surface warfare specialties (i.e. Starfleet Security). So it follows that if it isn't, there's something else going on.

artan42 wrote: »

ryan218 wrote: »

artan42 wrote: »

ryan218 wrote: »

True, but Voyager showed a single Federation probe was capable of totally devastating a planetary ecosystem. Given what we know of photon torpedoes, it's not outrageous to suggest a few hundred photon torpedoes placed properly could destroy all humanoid life on a planetary surface. If I recall correctly, the Constitution-Class carried at least 100 torpedoes.

It's not outrageous (and the maths does check out) but it kinda makes a lot of DS9 a bit... silly, maybe?

The Obsidian Order/Tal Shiar sends a few dozen ships to obliterate the Founders homeworld when a D'D out carries a TOS Constitution in the first place. It takes several B'Rels and Vor'Chas to destroy a unshielded shipyard. Even little B'rels and the Defiant hull tank photon torpedoes.

TNG mostly followed TOS and used torpedoes sparingly justifying their superposed high power, but the rate they were used in DS9 and VOY (against shielded and unshielded targets) shows that can't be as powerful as TOS and TNG made out.

It's worth noting that General Order 24 was designed to render a planet uninhabitable, while the Tal Shiar and Obsidian Order literally obliterated the planet's crust.

Also, photon torpedoes don't have an exclusive yield. In 'The Expanse', Reed remarks that they could calculate the yield on a photonic torpedo anywhere from 'destroying a ship's communications array to vaporising a mountain'. And I believe there's a line somewhere about high-yield torpedoes depleting more power, so in a battle scenario there is a limit to how high you can charge a photon's yield, especially when you're constantly cloaking like a Bird of Prey. As for the Defiant; her armour was specifically designed to resist weapons-fire. The Defiant was able to absorb fire from a Vorcha-Class Attack Cruiser for 5 minutes with largely minor damage without firing back during 'Way of the Warrior' (and that included disruptor fire).

I think we can agree it'd be silly for Klingons to be running anything except full yield. They've never fought to disable ships. Especially when their mission is to destroy the shipyards.
I also don't think you can change the torpedoes yield on the fly. They're physical casings with a set amount of anti-matter in them. I can't see how that's something you can change from a console.​​

markhawkman wrote: »

shadowfang240 wrote: »

you can remote-detonate torpedoes in flight (as demonstrated in TNG when one of the enterprise's went off-course and they tried to self-destruct it, which naturally failed) so i don't see why yield can't also be adjusted mid-flight​​

Um... Photon torpedos use a violent anti-matter detonation. Reducing the yield would require it to have a way to vent anti-matter without destroying itself.

Here's how I would write it. We know the warp core is powered by matter/antimatter annihilation. It would therefore be considerably safer to store the torpedo casings unloaded in the magazine and only add the antimatter warhead before launch, using a feed from the same fuel tank that powers the reactor. This way reduces the chance of an accidental or secondary explosion a la respectively USS Maine or Beatty's battlecruisers at Jutland, and enables varying size warheads by simply adding more or less antimatter as appropriate.

alexmakepeace

starswordc wrote: »

-snip, relevant section addressing the wight of gear carried by soldiers-

I also recall reading that research suggests that the weight of gear carried by modern soldiers is too much, and that there are problems to long-term health associated with it. Combine this with the eternal push to make combat gear smaller, lighter, and more flexible, and it's conceivable that weight of gear will cease to be a limiting factor. Powered armor would also help, but it doesn't seem to exist in Star Trek.

angrytarg

starswordc wrote: »

(...)This is overwhelmingly a spacefaring organization that does not do major surface warfare operations very often. (In fact that's true across Star Trek: long-lasting ground conflicts like the Occupation of Bajor, AR-558, or the Kobali Prime war in STO, are the exception rather than the rule. It seems to me it is far more common for planets to simply surrender if the other side attains space superiority.) (...)

I just wanted to pull this one out, for all the people who like to play army men in Star Trek. We can extrapolate form numerous episodes and dialogues that this is indeed true - ground defence of a planet most likely consists of a few weapons and strong shielding. Once orbital defences are gone, the ground simply holds out to wait for reinforcements or surrenders - we don't have Star Wars like ground invasions since the cruisers in orbit can do anything from annihilating the planet to stun singular targets on ground - there is no reason to have land based combat, and even if that happens shuttles would substitute for any kind of vehicle in this scenario and infantry would be completely obsolete. Ground combat, that's even true for AR-558, consists of smaller groups fighting for key positions like shield generators, communication arrays and the like and are fought indoors and as already mentioned if we go there, not for a gender ratio but in general, Starfleet equipment most likely weighs next to nothing and this is even before we have shrouds, forcefields and the like in the equation. It is a completely different world.​​

artan42

angrytarg wrote: »

starswordc wrote: »

(...)This is overwhelmingly a spacefaring organization that does not do major surface warfare operations very often. (In fact that's true across Star Trek: long-lasting ground conflicts like the Occupation of Bajor, AR-558, or the Kobali Prime war in STO, are the exception rather than the rule. It seems to me it is far more common for planets to simply surrender if the other side attains space superiority.) (...)

I just wanted to pull this one out, for all the people who like to play army men in Star Trek. We can extrapolate form numerous episodes and dialogues that this is indeed true - ground defence of a planet most likely consists of a few weapons and strong shielding. Once orbital defences are gone, the ground simply holds out to wait for reinforcements or surrenders - we don't have Star Wars like ground invasions since the cruisers in orbit can do anything from annihilating the planet to stun singular targets on ground - there is no reason to have land based combat, and even if that happens shuttles would substitute for any kind of vehicle in this scenario and infantry would be completely obsolete. Ground combat, that's even true for AR-558, consists of smaller groups fighting for key positions like shield generators, communication arrays and the like and are fought indoors and as already mentioned if we go there, not for a gender ratio but in general, Starfleet equipment most likely weighs next to nothing and this is even before we have shrouds, forcefields and the like in the equation. It is a completely different world.​​

It does, characters often wave phaser rifles around one handed (firing or gesturing) and they never seem to carry any other equipment other than a tricorder (which weight about the same as a mobile phone) or a tool-case (usually medical) which is normally light enough to be held in the hand rather than strapped in some way.

Besides, Starfleet officers spend their time crawling through Jeffries tubes, wandering aimlessly over soundstages alien worlds, and sitting down on comfy chairs, they're not a military (as well all know by now), they're selected for their ability to preform as scientists or engineers etc. Imagine how AR-558 would have gone if Starfleet was a military and they had actual military equipment and not a multi-function cutting/stunning tool in a rifle shell. You know, tanks and grenades, and air support etc. Heavy weapons, body armour, helmets, surveillance equipment, you know, stuff that even a third rate dying terrorist faction has access to now.