Mike DiCenso wrote:Did you even read the articles linked to on the temporal disruptors? We're talking about knowning exactly when and where the GSV will come out of hyperspace (this also assumes that hyperspace cannot be accessed by a sufficently advanced Trek power: i.e. the Borg transwarp, or Voth transwarp). The temporal disruptors will be there before the GSV, not fired at it or anything, and they will be out of phase with the rest of the universe making their detection difficult.
I'm assuming they can't access it. I'm also assuming the GSV can't access transwarp, etc. I see no reason to think a ship from a totally alien setting should be familiar with technobabble it hasn't ever heard about.
And I did read the article. So all right, the Culture ship runs right into them without detection. It still hops back into hyperspace after a nanosecond or so. Unless they can destroy its entire mass virtually instantaneously they aren't really a threat to it.
Don't get the impression I like the Culture or anything, by the way. I think it's crap. But in vs debates they're king. They're just that wanked.
Source for this? The temporal disruptor mines allow you to do just that. Destroy the thing in one go with a massive disruption.
It's in the novel "Excession" I believe -- at any rate that's the one with most fleet-level combat AFAIK. Sorry I can't be more precise I only borrowed the book, never bought it.
Is there evidence that the reaction of the disruptors is near instantaneous? Any effect that takes any significant time to propagate will be avoided by a Culture ship due to its heinously fast reaction times.
Why do you presume that the GSV would be able to target anywhere in the ST Milky Way galaxy with impunity while it sits in hyperspace? I do know that the scanning range of Culture ships has limits, and it must move about, or change position in realspace from time-to-time.
No, its FTL mode of transit is in hyperspace. From which it can also target weapons at realspace targets. The range is limited (more so for physical weapons than affectors), but that doesn't mean it has to expose itself. It can just zoom around in hyperspace and do one-way interactions against whatever world or ship it doesn't like.
As for the Krenim timeship, the weapon was fast enough that it wiped out an entire planetary civilization in seconds. A GSV is much smaller than a planet. Furthermore, being outside time gives an advantage that the crews of those ships could work on the problem of developing sufficent defenses and weapons to affect the GSV, then going back in time and delivering that tech prior to it's appearance in the ST-verse in the first place.
This is basically a Xelee-type strategy.
IIRC it only wiped out the civilization, not the planet as such. Now I'm not sure I remember quite how urbanized it was, but unless it was a Coruscant style planet, the civilization quite probably massed less than a Death Star equivalent, and certainly not more by a billion orders of magnitude. Which is how much heavier it would need to be for the beam to work against uber Culture reaction speeds. (1 nanosecond=1/1,000,000,000th of a second.)
Developing new technology sounds unquantifiable to me, so I don't see how it can be rationally discussed in the context of the scenario.
No, the Xelee and Photino Birds, Downstreamers, Time Lords, ect are nearly as bad, or far worse.
-Mike
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Time Lords maybe. Xeelee and Photinos have a massive scale that allows them to defeat just about anyone else by drowning them in mass and energy, but their tech as such isn't nearly as monstrous as the Culture. ICS Star Wars could plausibly take a heavy toll on them before getting swamped. With the Culture, no one might even notice it's attacked them before they're brainwashed or wiped out.
