Ok, I did today my daily Event mission, then I had a "WTF" moment.
The last part is defending the Satelite Control Station from 100 exploding dilithium freighters.
And here is my big problem:
1) The freighters explode - with more power than warp core breach of fully powered and armed warship
- is dilithium, or even dilithium ore explosive? As I understand it, it's not fuel for the ships, but material for creating shielding in matter-antimatter reaction chamber - it should have actually an anti-explosive properties. And we use "minning laser" to mine it at Vlugta asteroid mine! If it would be that volative it should explode during mining operations, and maybe blow the whole asteroid with it!
2) The dilithium is precious enough to be a currency in STO, and here we have 100 freighters sacrificed in kamikaze-style attack. I can't imagine any nation - even star-spanning empire making so costly attack. And here we have only house of Mo'Kai and their allies. Heck, I would not use that much nitrogen-based fertilizers for such attack, and they use dilithium ?! With that much dilithium they should be able to hire enough mercenaries, that they could just steam-roll any opposition...
So the mission may be fun, and pretty, but the logic of this attack... just make me astonished at the alien logic of... well.. aliens after all
Comments
All speculation on my part .
Dilithium crystals are used as a kind of control valve or regulator (Cameron 'lifted' the idea for his Unobtainium in Avatar). It would be sort of like using ships full of reactor control rods (not even fuel rods) as nuclear bombs, entirely ridiculous.
Now we see 100 freighters named "Dilithium freighter" coming to one place at the same time?
It is suddenly so common stuff, that there are hundreds freighters needed for it?!
From what i know, Rura Penthe is a dilithium mine, so it's quite possible there is a fleet of haulers moving dillitium to the fleet and to other powers. Well is a forced labor dilithium mine.. but it's a mine...
Could imply that raw dilithium could be volitile.
Yeah, seems that Dilithium coud be unstable in raw form, or become unestable in an uncontrolled mater/antimater reaction..
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Yes, it is a precious resource, in fact in TOS when Joanne Linville's character mentioned they were a poor but proud people that is what she was talking about. I thought Nemesis blundered badly by having Remus a dilithium source, but in light of the supernova stuff later on it does make sense from one of the Nemesis lines which described all the suffering and tragedy the miners went though to scrape up a pitiful few crystals or something to that effect.
It could be that Remus is a lousy source of crystals, and the crystals may even be mostly inferior ones, but if they are the only ones available in a large enough area it would neatly explain why the Romulans settled Romulus in the first place if their colony ships were running low and they realized they were too far into a dil-poor area to backtrack, and it would preserve the facts already established about their being poor, and the need to develop the quantum point singularity technology.
It would also explain why they took the risk of settling an area with star of questionable stability, especially since time could have made them complacent about it so they stopped keeping as close a watch and did not leave long ago when they should have with the development of the singularity technology.
If the writers of PIC knew the background material better and listened to any science advisors they may or may not have they could have even fixed Abram's FTL supernova nonsense by having "hobus" or whatever as a distant binary companion of the Romulan sun. Those can orbit each other at a distance of light months, which would have been about right timing wise if they adjusted some of the other plot points a little to speed things up.
Anyway, TOS showed the value of dilithium in other episodes too, like Mudd's Women with the dilithium miners willing to live in really nasty conditions because the crystals were so vital.
which means the supernova was either UNnatural - or the writing crew is so utterly incompetent, they didn't even bother to do that little bit of research
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
something like dust in a flour mill or sugar mill can actually explode. that tablespoon of sugar won't neither withh the cup of flour, but in the factories the dust sure can
Yeah, but that because it creates fuel-air mix and the dust got great reaction surface versus actual mass of dust particle, so it is easy to ignite.
Here we are in space - there should not be enough air (or any other reactive element) to create fuel-air mix.
And I still can't imagine having an actually that explosive substance in matter-antimater reaction chamber.
The nuclear reactor control rods work through (I think) blocking (and maybe "catching") free fast moving neutrons, so the reaction can not spread.
But the matter-antimatter reaction should work through actuall annihilation on contact between matter and antimatter - right?
I know it is game and sci-fi game to that, so it does actually not need to follow logic and science, and maybe they are so advanced, that they find another way to do things, but Star Trek was always proud, that they follow science somewhat.
STO - not so much. Example: why the ships in zero-g and no atmo would tilt sideways during turning? (and only when moving, not when turning when stopped). That makes no sense!
To counter it's interia and depending where it's RCS ports are, it makes perfect sense to bank throughout a turn, it would stress the hull too much 'flipping on the spot' to change direction. Everything still has mass in space, gravity or not. Star trek has it bang-on (Star Trek Online doesn't quite have it). If the ship has relative zero speed, it also makes sense to not do this.
possibly though I took Akaar's lines to mean he hijacked official Haulers via his virus. that said how much dilithium you typical starship actually carries? To me it seems that your average Starfleet of KDF starship wouldn't typically carry more then few kilos worth of Dilithium, few tons at most. While those freighters were probably carrying hundreds or even thousands of tons of dilithium per freighter.
Also dilithium can still be relatively speaking rare and there still be more then enough to fill the 100 or so freighters we destroy, it's a big galaxy after all.
On top of that... if they were just loaded with explosives... he would have been planning this op for a LONG time, and had already managed to secure not only all those haulers, but loaded them with explosives rather than Dilithium. That I find hard to believe. Why hyjack them with his virus if he's already got control of them? And how would he hide the amount and type of explosives needed?
No... I think they were hauling raw Dilithium Ore. And based on the blast waves, raw ore is volitile. Starships use refined Dilithium crystals in warp cores.
You have a point there. I just watched the ENT episode last night where they were mining "dilithium" and they were not mining crystals, instead it was a white crumbly sandstone-like substance.
It is possible that the crystals do form naturally sometimes (like on Troyius) but that most industrial crystals are manufactured by processing some kind of weird compound containing (fictional) elements with subspace properties that could cause an energy-releasing quantum breach of some sort under the right conditions. And it may be possible to create those conditions by corrupting whatever field they normally use to damp the possibility of those conditions out.
That would explain the weird blast pattern, the fact that the Praxis explosion was FTL, and even the robotic cracking station way back in The Cage if refining and crystalizing it was hazardous enough that the Federation preferred to do it without risking people.
And it would fit the simple brute force style of the Klingons to refine the stuff on the spot on Praxis instead of carting bulky ore elsewhere because of a tiny possibility of it blowing up in their faces at praxis but not have a processing station on a slave labor
rock like Rura Penthe where a civilian population would just be another possible escape vector, and using prisoners to refine it might result in one blowing up a valuable resource out of spite even though it killed them in the process.
And since dialog in The Undiscovered Country mentions a subspace aspect it could explain why Qu'nos was not vaporized completely by such a wide-reaching explosion on their doorstep, the normal-space part of the explosion could be rather limited but the subspace part further reaching and only a problem for ships and whatnot actively using subspace fields like exist while the warp cores are active (even when idle).
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqGnAIgzUTY
They even mention that the shockwave involved Subspace.
slavery is stupid - as a general concept, but especially when you have access to robotics
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
> Dilitium is a made up material that can do whatever plot needs it to do. They exploded en masse according to the Michael Burnham show at some point in the future of STO.
>
> You know what my problem with this mission is? It's written as if we are feddie bears. Why are we disabling and capturing prison escape ships? If this is suppose to be from the KDF point of view, those ships should be vaporized as they try and escape.
You seem labor under assumption that Klingons have serial killer style inability to not kill, rather then a dislike of "straw death" and thus generally not wanting to spare their enemies. However if instead of just looking for another reason to bash the majority of playerbase, you looked into those rumors about Klingon intelligence you'd found out them to be true.
You'd also find out that Klingons are perfectly capable and willing to spare their targets should it suit their goals. Like here it has 2 major benefits to J'mpok's rule first he doesn't needlessly antagonize the Federation (please do note this TFO happens before J'mpok got his hands on J'ula's super weapon), second it sends the message that J'mpok does consider Akaar (and by extension J'ula) a worthy opponent (since he didn't consider the transports worth killing).