Forerunners in Star Trek

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Re: Forerunners in Star Trek

Post by Mike DiCenso » Mon Oct 03, 2011 5:39 pm

Praeothmin wrote:
AnticitizenOne wrote:What are the current firepower calcs for Star Trek ship weaponry? It would probably help to know, since sure Forerunner weaponry has been calculated to be in at least the teraton range based off of descriptions in Halo: Cryptum (the Forerunner novel).
Depends on who you ask here... ;-)
High triple digit KT to low GT...


By the way, the anime movie, Halo: Legends, does depeict the Forerunners capable of incredible things as well, not just the book...
But they'd still fall to the Borg, IMO...
Some would say that those are the typical firepower ranges for conventional ST powers. However, if we bring in claims of uber-firepower that's not backed up by one side, then it is perfectly all right to do so on the other. In this case, we can make claims of teraton firepower for Trek based off of Harry Kim's "destroy a small planet" line in VOY's "The Omega Directive", or the destruction of the Founder's homeworld down to the core with a fleet of 20 ships in DS9's "The Die is Cast".
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Re: Forerunners in Star Trek

Post by User1657 » Mon Oct 03, 2011 11:49 pm

Quotes from Spacebattles:
Have we ever seen a Fortress class actually open fire with it's main guns?

IIRC the multi-teraton - and that's an absolute minimum, not accounting for the facility's shields, which were probably significant - Halo blowy-uppy incident was caused by four cruisers.

Keep in mind an 800 metre long ovoid planet-breaker class ship can store 'several' cruisers inside itself. The Fortress class is mind bogglingly bigger than that.


So, yeah, based on that a Fortress class should have firepower that blows straight through 'ridiculous', ignores 'insane' and comes to a stop somewhere slightly beyond 'hilarious'.

Not to mention that we can infer a Fortress class carries billions of fighters. Which is also hilarious.
Well, we can infer some pretty lulzy estimates.

Just as a vague demonstration, here's one for you now:

Four cruisers can destroy a Halo in a multi-teraton event. Considering the shields are likely to be the most significant energy use factor against the facility, and considering the description of the results against the hull proper demonstrates a multiple teraton explosion, we'll pretend a cruiser has a maximum firing potential of 1 teraton. It's probably a lot more than that when you think about how defensive shields operate in relation to the hulls of ships in Halo(as in, the hull doesn't matter a fuck, the shield is the important bit).

We know "several"(no further specification given) cruisers can fit into an 800 metre planet-breaker(really, this name should tell you everything you need to know) class without dominating it's internal space(although with hardlight interiors this is difficult to judge). So we'll call a cruiser a 200 by 50 by 50 metre cuboid, resulting in a total volume of 500,000 m^3.

If that volume scales with a Fortress class, the dome at the front of the Fortress alone will account for a total firing potential of 524,000 teratons. This does not account for the rest of the ship's hull, which is probably the most significant part of the ship's volume(what with being the remaining 95% of the ship's length).


Yeah... We can get some pretty whacky shit out of Cryptum with only a cursory glance.

Like, multi-million teraton salvo potentials for a Fortress-class ship. Which is a hilarious, if by no means accurate, assesment.

That said, I do think the Forerunners should be hilariously powerful, it's sort of their thing. Stupendous over the top-ness. Build a planet to do a city's job, wipe out all life in the galaxy in a fit of pique, kill everything in the county with a hand gun kind of batshit insanity. It works for them.


EDIT: As I get the disturbing feeling somebody is going to get their panties in a twist about this estimate later in the thread(or try and quote me on it like it's serious business) I'm just going to add this edit to specify even more clearly than I did above that this is not intended to be accurate or representative. It is only intended to demonstrate that Cryptum contains a lot of inferred high yields. In a similar vein to how their infantry make cities go bye-bye.
http://forums.spacebattles.com/showthread.php?t=192340

That's all I have for now, but there's more.

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Re: Forerunners in Star Trek

Post by User1657 » Tue Oct 04, 2011 12:12 am

Sorry for the double post, but here are some quotes from Cryptum. May help:

Pages 11 and 51

Twenty kilometers away, the central peak of Djamonkin
Crater rose through the blue-grey haze, its tip outlined in
ruddy gold by the last of the setting sun.

Page 51

The mining ship was an ugly thing, sullen, entirely
practical. Its belly was studded with unconcealed grap-
plers, lifters, cutters, churners. If the master of this craft so
desired, its engines could easily convert all of Djamonkin
Crater into a steaming tornado of whirling rock and ore, sift-
ing, lifting and storing whatever components it wished to
carry back.
Page 100

From those inner secrets, the Forerunners have
prodded sufficient power to change the shape of worlds,
move stars, and even to contemplate shifting the axes of
entire galaxies. We have explored other realities, other
spaces – slipspace, denial of locale, shunspace, trick geo-
detics, natal void, the photon-only realm the Glow.
Page 143-144

The sensor images were impressive and strange. I had
never seen a quarantined steller system before. Such capa-
bilities were rarely displayed to young Builders. A planetary
system is mostly empty, even the greatest of worlds being lost

- page 144 -

in the immensity of billions of kilometers of space. Like their
former human allies, the San’Shyuum had evolved on a
water-rich world not far from a yellow star, within a temper-
ate zone that allowed only a narrow range of weather. Now,
however, ten thousand years after their defeat, the system
was surround by trillions of vigilants that constantly wove
in and out of space-time, sometimes so rapidly that they
seemed to shape a soild sphere. This sphere extended to a
distance of four hundred million kilometers from the star,
and thus did not encompass four impressive gas giants whose
orbit lay beyond that limit.
Page 145

“They retired the Deep Reverence here,” he murmured.
A magnified image appeared and was enhanced by specifi-
cations and other data. The Deep Reverence was an impres-
sive fortress-class vessel, fifty kilometers in length, its incept
data before the human-San’Shyuum war.
Page 197

The atmosphere below was a swirling soup of smoke and
fire. Warrior craft and automated weapon systems were
mostly to small to be visible, but I saw their effects – darting
beams of needle light, glowing arcs cutting across conti-
nents, gigantic, stamplike divots punched into the crust and
then lifted up, spun about, overturned. I had never seen
anything like this – but the Didact had.
Page 99

The display tracked our course. We were moving out-
ward along the great spiral arm that held both the Orion
complex and Erde-Tyrene – just a few tens of thousands of
light-years.

Hours at most would pass for us.
Page 134

HOURS LATER, WE emerged. The effects passed more
slowly than usual, indicating we had gone a very
great distance indeed, perhaps beyond the range of
normal particle reconciliation. There might be dilation ef-
fects when we returned.

I stood alone in the command center, looking out across
the tremendous, dim whirlpool of a galaxy, and called up a
chart to see where we were. Spirals and grids spread quickly.
At least this was our home galaxy. The ship was in a long,
obscure orbit, high above the galactic plane, tens of thou-
sands of light years from any feasible destination.
Halo: Cryptum page 314

The first fortress’s fighters moved in, surrounding one of the primed Halos and engaging its sentinels. Simultaneously, four cruisers sent white-hot beams to points around the targeted installation. Sentinels intercepted some of those beams, partially deflecting them but also absorbing and sacrificing. Other beams struck home, carving canyonlike gouges across the mottled inner surface and blowing blue-white plumes of debris and plasma from the edges. The interior spokes began to shimmer and fade. The Halo could not hold together against this onslaught. It bent inward, wobbled. Fascinated, I watched as huge sections of the ring twisted like ribbon, giving way to destructive nodes of resonance, then rippled in sinus waves—and separated with agonizing majesty.

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Re: Forerunners in Star Trek

Post by Mike DiCenso » Wed Oct 05, 2011 5:18 pm

Thanks for providing some of the requested information, though the source should always be verified. Does any of this fluff material jive in with the visual representations for firepower?
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Re: Forerunners in Star Trek

Post by User1657 » Wed Oct 05, 2011 7:46 pm

Well... we never actually see the Forerunners in-game since they died out long before the events of the games. We see their massive industry (the Halos, planets made of sentinels etc.), but apart from sentinels, which are basically drones, used on the ground, we don't see any ship firepower. So the book is the only real source we have on the Forerunners.

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Re: Forerunners in Star Trek

Post by Mike DiCenso » Thu Oct 06, 2011 7:31 am

The problem here now is timescales for the Forerunners' industry. Considering what they are starting off with, I don't see how what is mentioned in the books has as a bearing on immediate verus long-term prowess.

For example, do we have any clear cut statements how long it takes to build a single Halo ring or anything else?

Also, do you have more firepower examples, since the Halo description is fairly vauge with the "canyon like gouges" and so on. That could be on any scale.
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Re: Forerunners in Star Trek

Post by User1657 » Thu Oct 06, 2011 7:36 pm

Yes, we actually do have info on Halo rings. I don't have the quote with me right now, but I believe it's actually stated in one of the games (on a terminal or something) that construction of a Ring takes a couple months or so. Which is pretty damn impressive if you think about it.

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Re: Forerunners in Star Trek

Post by Mike DiCenso » Thu Oct 06, 2011 8:28 pm

With the original infrastructure the Forerunners had? Or something else? Because I don't recall that being the case in any of the Halo games, though I admit it's been a while.
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Re: Forerunners in Star Trek

Post by User1657 » Fri Oct 07, 2011 2:22 am

It was the Ark, basically a massive factory. The Ark was present during the time of the Forerunners (100,000 years before the events of the games), and stayed intact all those years. If that's what you were wondering.

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Re: Forerunners in Star Trek

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sat Oct 08, 2011 1:18 pm

I'm just not seeing the Forerunners rebuilding the core of the Ark to produce the Halo rings. The fact that the device had to be so huge may be necessary.
Now, as I said, it all comes down to the Forerunners staying low and doing their stuff. The problem being that they need to get their massive amounts of materials from systems.
In the first case, they could possibly bump into any random civilization at some point, which could also be in touch with some major regional powers.
Other than that, the second scenario may allow them the distance to observe the universe and consider which place is safer to begin the extraction of their materials.

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Re: Forerunners in Star Trek

Post by Mike DiCenso » Mon Oct 10, 2011 3:21 am

I think the transplanted Forerunners are capable of it, I'm just not convinced that the timescales for them putting together their infrastructure and building everything they need can be done as quickly as claimed. Thing about the game Halo is that the Covenant and Humans are dealing with already laid down leftovers of Forerunner technology and infrastructure. But what about the Forerunners being made to start almost from scratch as the OP lays out in it's scenario? If it takes hundreds, or even thousands of years, they'll be facing the might of the 31st century Federation, and that won't be very much fun.
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Re: Forerunners in Star Trek

Post by User1657 » Mon Oct 10, 2011 1:58 pm

I've heard a lot about the 31st Century Federation. What do we know about them exactly? How advanced are they?

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Re: Forerunners in Star Trek

Post by Mike DiCenso » Tue Oct 11, 2011 5:22 pm

Very. They have effective TARDIS technology. In ST:ENT's "Future Tense" they had a timeship which was only about 10 or so meters long, but much, much bigger on the inside. In VOY we learn the 29th century Federation single seat fighter-sized craft can destroy whole solar systems by sheer accident, and later in "Relativity", we learn that they have the ability to not only travel through time, but they can beam anybody, anywhere in the Milky Way galaxy with near impunity.
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Re: Forerunners in Star Trek

Post by User1657 » Wed Oct 12, 2011 3:01 am

Oh damn, sounds like they'd be on the level of even the Time Lords or Daleks! And that really is saying something.

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Re: Forerunners in Star Trek

Post by Mike DiCenso » Thu Oct 13, 2011 3:51 am

The 29th and 31st century Federation is not quite there, especially compared to the wanked up Time Lords of the newest Doctor Who series. But they could be definitely considered Junior Time Lords, that's for sure.
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