Is a Combination Starship Class a feasible way to hide a Mega Weapon?

Comments

• captainrevo1 Member Posts: 3,948 Arc User

  September 2012 edited September 2012

  The borg had the fusion cube in armada II. Species 8472 used 9 or 10 bioships to create their planet killer weapon, and the suliban used their cell ships to make the helix and the MVAM kind of works in reverse.
  
  so it would not be totally unprecedented but i think it would have to belong to a alien race we had not seen before to create the sort of thing you are thinking of. i cant imagine fed or klingons using such tech. i could imagine say the xindi insectoids using it like insects come together to create a colony or hive.

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• sockmunkey Member Posts: 4,504 Arc User

  September 2012 edited September 2012

  The whole idea combining to be stronger really kinda falls apart when you really think about it.
  
  From an engineering point of view. You end up with massive redundancy eating into space and power. 5 engines, 5 life support systems, 5 power cores, 5 weapon systems, ect, ect. Not to mention the needed equipment to convert said single vessel into the mega vessel. With all this wasted space and power...where do you end up putting the big weapon? A large vessel dedicated to supporting a mega weapon would be far more efficient.
  
  And then you gota consider crew issues. Even with Voltron its a mess. You have 5 separate pilots that then have to either work flawlessly as a team when joined. A job that might be done better or easier with a single pilot in charge of the super weapon rather then trying to share control. But that would reduce 4 of the team members to little more then spectators. Not real efficient. A problem that only gets compounded when you consider starships with huge crews and multiple captains.
  
  But even if all that wasn't reason enough to think its a poor idea. What happens when the bad guy gets smart enough to simply focus fine on one lion, starship, or what have you? And makes a real effort to cripple the super weapon before it could form by simply removing one of the weaker links...while they are still weak. Take out one lion and you take out voltron. It seems a really bad way to design a war machine.

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• hortwort Member Posts: 281

  September 2012 edited September 2012

  lonnehart wrote: »

  Now we all know about giant robots with fantastic weapons that are formed from up to 5 (and in a rare case 15) smaller seperate components.

  
  Hahahahahha!!!
  HAHAHH!!
  
  That's all the words I needed. Thank you for the mental image.

  I miss my _.
  [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]

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• lilchibiclari Member Posts: 1,193 Arc User

  September 2012 edited September 2012

  Such a ship would essentially be the inversion of the "Multi-Vector Assault Mode". To be useful in the combined form (that is, in comparison to staying separated all of the time), the combined form would have to have:
  
  1: More efficient protection--the shield power of the combined vessel would have to be superior to that of the separated components.
  
  2: Powerful weapons that could not be used in separated mode (e.g. a large Spinal Phaser Lance that requires more power than the individual sub-ships could provide)
  
  Even given these, there is the question of why you don't just build one big ship in the first place, which would eliminate some of the unneeded redundancy. Unless, as the topic implies, the goal is to conceal the mega weapon until just before firing it, but such a surprise tactic tends to work only once, after which the entire enemy empire (Klingon, Borg, whoever) knows that a squadron of this type can combine to make the weapon.

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• centersolace Member Posts: 11,178 Arc User

  September 2012 edited September 2012

  sockmunkey wrote: »

  But even if all that wasn't reason enough to think its a poor idea. What happens when the bad guy gets smart enough to simply focus fine on one lion, starship, or what have you? And makes a real effort to cripple the super weapon before it could form by simply removing one of the weaker links...while they are still weak. Take out one lion and you take out voltron. It seems a really bad way to design a war machine.

  lilchibiclari wrote: »

  Even given these, there is the question of why you don't just build one big ship in the first place, which would eliminate some of the unneeded redundancy. Unless, as the topic implies, the goal is to conceal the mega weapon until just before firing it, but such a surprise tactic tends to work only once, after which the entire enemy empire (Klingon, Borg, whoever) knows that a squadron of this type can combine to make the weapon.

  
  A simple way to get around this limitation, is make the ships unspecialised. And then just build fleets of the buggers and send them off. If you need 10 of the ships then it's a problem if you only have 9, but if you have 500 of the things and all of them can form any part of the 10 ship superweapon then that's not really a problem any more is it?

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• sollvax Member Posts: 4 Arc User

  September 2012 edited September 2012

  presumably built by that newly discovered race the Saban
  
  Imagine the captains on the bridges shouting
  "Red Ranger mega zoid power GO"

  Live long and Prosper

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