test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
Star Trek universe tactical question: How do you stop a ship at warp?
snakethefox2
Member Posts: 15 Arc User
This is less a question about the game and more a question about the Star Trek universe as a whole. How do you stop a ship that is in warp? I mean, let's assume you have a ship that moves at a maximum of warp 9, and you're chasing a ship that can move at warp 9.5: what's stopping them from just flying past all your ships, right up to your planet, and then dropping a *insert nuclear/chemical/biological superweapon here* on it and ending wars lickidy split? I know that ships can engage one another in warp, but if a ship was moving even .5 warp units faster than its opponent, it would theoretically be unmatchable, right?
I don't consider myself an expert on Star Trek technology, but I've never heard or read anything relating to interdiction technology in the ST universe. For example, in the Star Wars universe, artificial "gravity wells" are utilized on a number of interdiction vessels to pull passing ships out of hyperspace and force them into an engagement. Does a similar technology exist in Star Trek?
This doesn't really matter in STO for obvious reasons, but it's one of the glaring inconsistencies that's making my question the validity or necessity of upwards of 99% of the engagements taking place therein. I understand the Federation has an aversion against superweapons, and the Klingons would probably consider it dishonorable, but surely the federation would have little against grabbing a ship with superior warp capability to the Klinks and then flying it straight up to a Klink starbase housing admirals/leaders of the Klingon war effort and pummeling it with quantum torpedos to end the war sooner/save Federation lives.
Any bona fide Trekkie want to shed some light on this?
I don't consider myself an expert on Star Trek technology, but I've never heard or read anything relating to interdiction technology in the ST universe. For example, in the Star Wars universe, artificial "gravity wells" are utilized on a number of interdiction vessels to pull passing ships out of hyperspace and force them into an engagement. Does a similar technology exist in Star Trek?
This doesn't really matter in STO for obvious reasons, but it's one of the glaring inconsistencies that's making my question the validity or necessity of upwards of 99% of the engagements taking place therein. I understand the Federation has an aversion against superweapons, and the Klingons would probably consider it dishonorable, but surely the federation would have little against grabbing a ship with superior warp capability to the Klinks and then flying it straight up to a Klink starbase housing admirals/leaders of the Klingon war effort and pummeling it with quantum torpedos to end the war sooner/save Federation lives.
Any bona fide Trekkie want to shed some light on this?
Post edited by snakethefox2 on
0
Comments
figure when you want to stop you just turn off the engine?
maybe the ship has space brakes
[12:44] Vessel One of Two Unimatrix 01 deals 1019527 (1157678) Kinetic Damage to you with Plasma Energy Bolt Explosion.
As far as having a faster ship, and why you can't just rock up at their planet , is mostly because you'd be met upon arrival by more force than you can handle
Your may travel from point A to point B faster, but your enemy is likely to be closer to his home systems than you are, and having set up detection networks and will know your comming, thus probably having ships nearby that can arrive before you do even at slower speeds
Take the ending of Voyager, Somehow the got home through a transwarp corridor i think, faster then anything a starfleet ship has, and yet they were met upon arrival by a medium sized fleet of ships
The writers ret-con the hell out of warp drive to suit their plots.
Likewise, with starbases, most ships or fleets warp in well enough away because they run the risk of ramming into the starbase if they try to warp in too close. That's why, even when you warp to a friendly starbase or spacedock, you have warp in further out and hoof it the rest of the way on impulse.
In practice, do you even need a weapon? Just ram a planet at warp speed. Something massing 2 million tons going thousands of times light speed, how much kinetic energy would that impact release? Yikes.
theoretical, if you were in warp bubble you would pass right through the planet because you would be in subspace.
[12:44] Vessel One of Two Unimatrix 01 deals 1019527 (1157678) Kinetic Damage to you with Plasma Energy Bolt Explosion.
You simply recalibrate the secondary deflector array to emitt a high-frequency gizmodium beam to disrupt the other ships warp bubble !
It IS rather likely that we will be able to use Warp-like technologies in the future and move at speeds greater than light. HOWEVER, the problem is that the ship in question will not be MOVING at all. It is space that will be moving and only space.
The truth is that Star Trek does Warp Drive completely wrong but you have to cut them a little slack considering that when they first invented the idea the science behind such a thing was extremely fuzzy and so they were basically making stuff up. However, unless you create a field of energy that somehow makes it impossible to maintain a warp bubble I have never seen anything in Star Trek STOP a ship at warp without shooting its engines down. That is why the Breen were able to come and trounce all over Earth. The best you can do is have great defenses where the enemy will end up to defeat them. (This is why the DS9 battles that happen in mid space between DS9 and Cardassia Prime and such are totally stupid because the Feds could have easily just gone AROUND them)
Now comes the big problem with Warp in the show. Warp is not THRUST nor is it a
"Speed" in the traditional sense as you are not MOVING anywhere. So you cannot have a "Burst of Warp" because the moment you stop warping space you stop going anywhere because space stops moving. Space has no mass and therefore it really is not going to have inertia or momentum like you do.
Also if you are being chased at warp speed that means that another vessel is trying to shrink the space between you and it faster than you can expand that space which is a really odd thing to imagine to say the least. Things fired from one ship to another during this battle are going to get warped like mad in the space between and are not going to actually be moving any faster than normal oddly.
While it would be possibly to see space warping and thus know a ship was coming if the space was moving so fast as to make that ship go faster than the speed of light then actually detecting the ship itself and targeting it or dealing with it in any realistic way would be nearly impossible.
The thing that is most amusing is being able to Warp space like this should be usable as a massively devastating weapon. Can you imagine what would happen if you scrunched or expanded enemy ships? Planets? Bases? That would not be good for them to say the least.
Sadly, there are multiple instances of this "rule" being broken, and I don't think it was ever explicitly stated, either - just implied in certain episodes.
I want Gizmodium dual heavy cannons
Directed Energy Weapons fired on the nacelles have also been shown to temporarily throw off warp as well.
So put on your plot armor, Fire up those plot engines, We are going( or not going) where the narrative demands at the speed thats most cinematicaly appropriate, to engage in a battle thats most dramatic for the situation
For the Narrative !
Ooooh so close. We were looking graviton beam. Sorry. Thanks for playing though!
::WARNING:: This game is not intended for use as a source of self-esteem.
As someone crudely mentioned above. They fire a weapon(s) at them!
I hope STO get's better ...
2)Upload a virus.
3)Have the virus apply the space brakes.
Officially Nerfed In Early 2410
Cloaks are the biggest one. I mean, what's preventing Klingons from taking every single cloak-capable ship in their fleet and sending them to Earth, decloaking in earths orbit and bombing the planet to ruins?
In the DS9-episode Way of the Warrior we saw a huge Klingon fleet decloak ALL OVER the station, and Sisko&Co had no idea they were even there.
Sure, in Redemption they created a "tachyon detection grip" around a system to stop romulans from sneaking through, but it was an experimental tech and required a clumsy way to set it up.
Anyhow. I get it that cloak was supposed to emulate Submarines in space, or atleast that was the original intent with the cloaked Rommie BoP in TOS: Balance of Terror. But the analogy kinda falls flat since cloaked ships lack the weaknesses of submarines. Namely their inability to remain submerged for long periods of time or travel fast while submerged (talking about WWII era subs, I know modern day Nuc-subs can remain submerged till the end of the world if they feel like it).
Sure, Cloaked ships cant fire while cloaked. Except for the Scimitar. Or that one experimental BoP used by Chang in ST: VI (Whatever happened to that tech? Even if Chang was a renegade, it was a darn convenient tech) But that's a moot point since you can just transport a fleet to the target, decloak and alphastrike the target into oblivion *Shrug*
I always thought of this lol but then you could argue that the defending fleet put them selves in the way of the attacking fleet on purpose and would keep countering any attempts to avoid. This led on to me thinking that in reality a 3 dimensional border would be very difficult to protect and when they show the "Neutral Zone" in the shows it is always represented in 2 dimensions.
Now to the original poster It is well established in ST that a warp bubble is a fragile thing they were failing all the time so a barrage of weapons fire would probably breach the warp bubble and all ships fired upon in trek drop out of warp either themselves or because of the weapons fire so there must be risks of being fired upon at warp.
It is established directly early on in TNG (I do not remember the exact episode) the Photon torpedoes were developed for combat at warp based on the regular laws of motion and inertia in that if you throw a ball from a car travelling at 30MPH that ball is doing 30MPH and whatever speed you threw it at lets say 5MPH so it would be doing 35MPH. That is a very simplistic explanation but the same theory applied in Trek so if they were doing warp 9 and fired torpedoes then the torpedoes would be doing Warp 9 plus whatever speed they were fired at and that was Trek Canon however and as hasukurobi expertly pointed out if warp was possible inertia would not apply I always imagined the warp analogy more simply than what hasukurobi explained I tend to think of it like running in one spot on a very long carpet, you would run the carpet up behind you dragging the front of the carpet towards you and if you threw a ball in front of you on that carpet it may roll away a bit from inertia but you would eventually drag it back to wards yourself. Even if inertia did apply at warp it is unlikely that the speed a launcher could fire a torpedo would make a difference. So in ST Canon they would probably fire torpedoes.
As for Star Trek, it falls solidly in the 'ignore it' category. It doesn't try to think how things would be different and doesn't offer adequate countermeasures to realistically believe it would be how it is. In a universe with ridiculous speeds and no shortage of weapons that can destroy or depopulate a planet instantly, realistic Star Trek would be a very different place. Ships would need to be in place to meet any incoming threats immediately and even then every planet would need a shield generator to protect it for 5 seconds after they drop out of warp and before they are destroyed. The speed of warp also tends to leave very little time for going out to intercept them in deep space.
And even interception requires detection. In Star Trek, cloaking means that anything your enemy wants to destroy, will be destroyed.
Unfortunately for us, cloaking won't be necessary to get wherever you want undetected. Today warp travel is theoretically possible and undergoing feasibility testing at NASA, but we still don't have any reason to believe we could ever make FTL sensors. We won't be able to see ships until they have already arrived.
You just jump in behind them and catch up to them and blast them out of warp like in the last movie!
1.) Various means as noted.
Please add subspace field dampener's to the list - some where I seem to remember that term... Can't find it atm.
Create a subspace divergence field around the ship, this would duplicate/replicate that ship & crew, but not AM, then their quantum cohesion would break down and annihilate each other.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Subspace_divergence_field
Use a resonance burst from the deflector to destabilize it's warp field bubble.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Resonance_burst
Use a subspace field pulse to throw the ship into a different quantum universe <G>
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Subspace_field_pulse
Use a subspace isolation field to trap the ship and if the force field strength was high enough, you could collapse it upon that ship...
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Subspace_isolation_field
There's a way to beam through a ships shields... TNG-O'Brian did it. So beam over some bombs, etc. Basically - since traveling at warp requires extreme power - all you have to do is to drop that power generation, and there's many ways to do that.
2.) As everyone noted - many things
3.) "Match warp velocity for transport" <- Used many times, TNG, etc. Note at the end of this article.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Transporter
But - say if ship 1 (runner) can go .5 warp faster than ship 2 (chaser) - then there's almost no way for ship to to catch up since it can't go as fast as the ship it's chasing. Warp 9.975 seems to be a 'magic' number for a bunch of Fed ships and here - if a ship can run at 9.976 or greater, then many Fed ships can't even catch up; because if you want to catch a ship that has a head start you have to move faster than the ship you're chasing.
4.) There's no "explicit technology named" as such - but if you add the stuff up in #1, you can make such stuff, although that would fall under the control of those Red Shirt Tactical type people :?)
5.) That would fall under the realm of StarFleet Special Operations, and/or Section 31. As for cannon "StarFleet/Federation Council" - they wouldn't approve of such except for 'special circumstances' at which point it would fall back to SpecOps and/or Section 31 and ultimately StarFleet Command.
Corjet - ACTD StarFleet Corps of Engineers :?)
Conjoined, Re-emergence, and . . .
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]