Pillar of Autumn vs. Enterprise-D

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Pillar of Autumn vs. Enterprise-D

Post by User1657 » Sun Jan 01, 2012 7:37 pm

So I’ve been having an argument with a member on another website, Cananatra, on the topic of the Pillar of Autumn vs the Enterprise-D. It’s always been pretty obvious in my mind that the E-D is superior, but if you could confirm whether or not his arguments are valid or complete lies, that would be helpful. His arguments are as follows:

“Federation ships can not take collisions, even with their shields up. They are utterly shit at it. Every time, Every single time in the series that a federation ship has been hit by anything, even grazed by another ship, they take horrific damage or even blow up. A 600 ton projectile doing an appreciable fraction of c is going to utterly rape the E-D.”

“The torpedoes may have the kick to do as you suggest, but you haven’t proven they could actually hit because in the series they miss a good 90% of the time against ships sluggishly moving around, movements that UNSC ships exceed. Nor have you proven that the enterprise can survive a strike from the MAC, when we see many times in TNG and DS9 that federation ships shields and armour can not stop such impacts.”

And the actual link is here: http://www.factpile.com/3759-pillar-of- ... ent-294625

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Re: Pillar of Autumn vs. Enterprise-D

Post by Mike DiCenso » Mon Jan 02, 2012 2:54 am

Well, this is your arguement you got into. Since your opponent has linked to outside material to "prove" his case, why not do the same and link to threads here?
“Federation ships can not take collisions, even with their shields up. They are utterly shit at it. Every time, Every single time in the series that a federation ship has been hit by anything, even grazed by another ship, they take horrific damage or even blow up. A 600 ton projectile doing an appreciable fraction of c is going to utterly rape the E-D.”

This is false. Just look at ST-vs-SW.Net and look at the kinetic energy essay page. Also look up the Jem'Hadar ramming incident here on SFJN. Basically it's been concluded that the attack ship detonated it's warp core on contact with the U.S.S. Odyssey, and Odyssey survived for several seconds afterwords, even with a huge chunk of her lower stardrive section blown away. Furthermore, in "Cause and Effect", the E-D was motionless, could not raise shields or had navigational deflectors due to a strange space anomaly. When the Bozeman struck her, it was to the starboard warp nacelle and that alone did not destroy the ship. A warp core breech did.

With shields up we have often seen Federation ships and other contemporary vessels deflect objects. The E-D deflects a shuttle attempting to ram it in "The Hunted" while in a prior episode, "Datalore", the E-D deflects the kilometers-sized Crystalline Entity with ease when it tries to attack the ship.

Not to mention you can cite every time the E-D goes to warp and her navigational deflectors keep her hull from having huge holes punched through her as well. And the deflector has been used to push a nearly Moon-sized asteroid in "The Paradise Syndrome".
“The torpedoes may have the kick to do as you suggest, but you haven’t proven they could actually hit because in the series they miss a good 90% of the time against ships sluggishly moving around, movements that UNSC ships exceed. Nor have you proven that the enterprise can survive a strike from the MAC, when we see many times in TNG and DS9 that federation ships shields and armour can not stop such impacts.”
Also blatently false. It's about almost exactly the opposite. A better than 90 percent success rate of hitting. Sounds like all your friend here is doing is cutting and pasting some SDN and SBC crap together and throwing it out at people, then hoping to win by the popularity fallacy among a swarm of Halo fans.
-Mike

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Re: Pillar of Autumn vs. Enterprise-D

Post by User1657 » Mon Jan 02, 2012 10:20 pm

I posted your responses and a link to this thread on the discussion page, currently awaiting a response from him.

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Re: Pillar of Autumn vs. Enterprise-D

Post by User1657 » Mon Jan 02, 2012 11:12 pm

His response was this:
I love how hard people try to save face by making shit up. Detonated the warp core? Excuse me? WTF? Every time we’ve seen a warp core detonate it has been lethal to everything nearby. Massive explosions and so on. Not a little dink bang on the front of a ship. Thanks for the effort but that fails.

As for cause an effect, they get hit, that hit causes a warp core breach that destroys the ship. How exactly is the hit not the cause of the ships destruction? Did the warp core just decided to spontaneously blow itself up completely independently from the hit? No it bloody well didn’t.
With shields up we have often seen Federation ships and other contemporary vessels deflect objects. The E-D deflects a shuttle attempting to ram it in “The Hunted” while in a prior episode, “Datalore”, the E-D deflects the kilometers-sized Crystalline Entity with ease when it tries to attack the ship.
I see your shuttle deflection and raise you debris strikes in the dominion war.
Also blatently false. It’s about almost exactly the opposite. A better than 90 percent success rate of hitting. Sounds like all your friend here is doing is cutting and pasting some SDN and SBC crap together and throwing it out at people, then hoping to win by the popularity fallacy among a swarm of Halo fans.
I don’t frequent either of those sites. I suggest you rewatch some St space battles. You will see numerous instances of manoeuvring ships dodging torpedoes, and even phasers upon occasion.

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Re: Pillar of Autumn vs. Enterprise-D

Post by Mike DiCenso » Tue Jan 03, 2012 6:01 am

And thanks a lot. Now we've got a potential site war on ours hands.

Look, here's the pics of the scene from Trekcore:

Just prior to impact:

Image
At Impact:
Image
Note that the attack ship is blowing apart, which is not what would happen in a regular collision. It is clearly exploding from the inside.

The explosion, note there is no crumpled wreckage, and lots of superheated red-hot vapor:

Image

The attack ship clearly exploded on contact or just prior to contact. For further reference look at the E-E and Scimtar collision where the two ships do not have exploding bow sections and no super-hot glow.

As for the Klingon issue, this is the E-D, a Federation starship versus the Pillar of Autumn. We're looking at what feats that ship and others of her class are capable of.
I don’t frequent either of those sites. I suggest you rewatch some St space battles. You will see numerous instances of manoeuvring ships dodging torpedoes, and even phasers upon occasion.
Please cite episodes and circumstances. Full context is required (weapons systems damaged, flying through a weird nebula or spatial annomaly, etc that might affect the situation).
-Mike
Last edited by Mike DiCenso on Tue Jan 03, 2012 6:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Pillar of Autumn vs. Enterprise-D

Post by Mike DiCenso » Tue Jan 03, 2012 9:10 am

I see your shuttle deflection and raise you debris strikes in the dominion war.
I found this dishonesty amusing. So you ignored this from "Datalore":

Image

Then tried to tried to pull some BS from DS9 about the Klingons in "Tears of the Prophets being hit by Jem'Hadar attack ships. Well, not only are we talking about the E-D, not the Klingons, but let's also remember that Deep Space Nine took a big hit when a Hideki crashed into it's shields and did all right in "Call to Arms" as seen here:

Image

Image

So, care to try again?
-Mike

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Re: Pillar of Autumn vs. Enterprise-D

Post by User1657 » Wed Jan 04, 2012 2:20 pm

No reply from him, that seems to have done the trick.

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Re: Pillar of Autumn vs. Enterprise-D

Post by Praeothmin » Wed Jan 04, 2012 6:22 pm

AnticitizenOne wrote:No reply from him, that seems to have done the trick.
Don't count on it, the Factpile Trolls are tenacious... :)

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Re: Pillar of Autumn vs. Enterprise-D

Post by Mike DiCenso » Wed Jan 04, 2012 7:35 pm

Oh just to head off the troll, here is the battle from "A Call to Arms".

- Starting at 3:53 all hits from the Dominion fleet hit the station for 100 percent accuracy. Deep Space Nine returns fire with three torpedoes shown flying off, one goes past a Cardassian Galor and two slam into it. To be fair, we'll assume that the Galor was the sole target of the attack. Two out of three possible hits is 60 percent accuracy. Which is 50 percent above your stated range of 10 percent.

- Next at 4:03, two torpedoes are shown hitting a JH attack ship and the big battlcruiser commandship. Hundred percent accuracy, with a single torpedo completely obliterating the smaller attack ship.

- At 4:09 a Hideki is hit by a phaser and severely damaged. One shot, one hit. 100 percent accuracy.

- At 4:32 three torpedoes are shown being fired. One hits a Galor, the other two go off. To be overly generously fair, I'll assume those two were not ment for other targets off-screen so two missed and one hit is 33 percent accuracy. Still not 10 percent.

- At 4:39, a single torpedo hits a Galor again. Being the only torpedo there in that scene, it is 100 percent accuracy.

- At 4:42 a JH attack ship is obliterated in a single hit by DS9's phaser shot. One shot fired, one hit is again 100 accuracy against a target that was doing better than 800 meters/sec in relative velocity. A second JH is obliterated just a second later. Again one shot, one kill, 100 percent accuracy.

- At 4:55 the Defiant comes under attack from three JH attack ships. Visually the attack ships fire some 8-10 shots with only one miss. The first miss by Dominion ships in the whole battle thus far. At the worst this is 88 percent accuracy. At best this is 90 percent.


- At around 5:18 we see up to 6 shots hit the Defiant with 100 accuracy.

- Not long after at 5:22 the Rotarran decloaks and unloads a couple dozen distruptor bolt shots at one attack ship, and all shots hit and destroy it. Hundred percent accuracy for General Martok!

- At 5:47 after taking a pounding by the Dominion fleet, Deep Space nine unloads several torpedoes at three attack ships with all but one hitting the ships. Given at least 10 torpedoes were fired, that's 90 percent accuracy.

- At 6:01, three Hideki strafe the outer docking ring area in a specific section per Dukat's orders, all phaser beams hit for 100 percent accuracy.

- At 6:04, At least four torpedoes hit a single JH attack ship, blowing it apart. No misses for 100 accuracy.

At 6:14, two DS9 phaser shots hit a JH attack ship, destroying it. No misses for 100 accuracy.

Everything else beyond that is mostly Dominion fleet strikes with all visually confirmable torpedo and beam weapon hits against DS9 for 100 accuracy. With the battle ending and the evacuation of DS9. The only serious misses by Dominion forces occur at this point with about 11 shots fired and missing. The Defiant and Rotarran's targets are not seen on-screen so no confirmation of hits or misses possible.

Further it is clear that there were hits off-screen as well since we get this:

DAMAR: This is a great victory for Cardassia.

DUKAT: And the Dominion.

WEYOUN: Over fifty ships lost, our spacedocks on Torros Three destroyed. A victory perhaps, but a costly one.


By strict visual accounting, only about 12 ships are confirmed severely damaged or destroyed, which means many of those torpedoes seen shooting off past ships are not necessarily missing their targets. Just from a visual accounting Federation phasers are 100 percent accurate in this battle, while photon torpedoes average 60-70 percent accurate. Again this is being generous and not taking into account that "misses" might actually be hits against a more distant vessel in a particular scene, except in the case of the Defiant and Rotarran which is very unusual given that until the end scene, the Dominion forces had a better than 99 percent accuracy overall.
-Mike

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Re: Pillar of Autumn vs. Enterprise-D

Post by Praeothmin » Wed Jan 04, 2012 7:57 pm

If you look at the battle closely, you will notice at one point the camera circles the station, and you can easily see dozens upon dozens of ships attacking it...

Between the 4:01 and the 4:13 timemark, we can see there are many, many ships...

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Re: Pillar of Autumn vs. Enterprise-D

Post by User1657 » Wed Jan 04, 2012 9:13 pm

He has made a new reply:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7NTr7PvdqE
That is a warp core breach. The explosion caused is far in excess of what we see happening in the ramming sequence. Additionally, any other time warp cores have been detonated ships have scrambled to get out of the way or be destroyed. Your theory that the ship detonated its core prior to impact, while fun, is not supported by known warp core detonations.
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As for the Klingon issue, this is the E-D, a Federation starship versus the Pillar of Autumn. We’re looking at what feats that ship and others of her class are capable of.
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Sure go ahead, ignore technologically similar events. Federation shields are obviously many times stronger than klingon shields. No doubt it would take a fleet of klingon ships to take down one federation ship, the shield strengths are so different.
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Please cite episodes and circumstances. Full context is required (weapons systems damaged damaged, flying through a weird nebula, etc that might affect the situation).
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Now you are really just being anal.
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I found this dishonesty amusing. So you ignored this from “Datalore”:
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I didn’t ignore anything from datalore. I’m sure you can provide the mass and relative velocity of the crystalline entity upon impact? Prove that it would actually have the same kind of impact as a ship, or large chunk of metal impacting at .4c would have? I know the answer to that, there is no way in hell the entity was doing .4c and to top that off that was a lovely little energy reaction, not a physical impact. If it had been a physical impact we’d have seen the entity collapse around the point of collision.
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Lastly, as for DS9. That has the power generation and shields to rival entire fleets. Hell we’ve seen it fight entire fleets more than once. To equate the shields on the E-D to those on DS9 is pure wank.

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Re: Pillar of Autumn vs. Enterprise-D

Post by Mike DiCenso » Wed Jan 04, 2012 10:42 pm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7NTr7PvdqE
That is a warp core breach. The explosion caused is far in excess of what we see happening in the ramming sequence. Additionally, any other time warp cores have been detonated ships have scrambled to get out of the way or be destroyed. Your theory that the ship detonated its core prior to impact, while fun, is not supported by known warp core detonations.
That is one kind of warp core breech. Each time a breech is shown, they tend to look different. Further, how do you explain the fact that JH attack ships can survive impacting into 90 meters of rock at high speed in "The Ship", yet blow apart with high energy explosions on impact with another ship? For reference:

Image
The attack ship buried deep in rock after an uncontrolled atmospheric entry from deep space at high velocity.

Image

The same JH attack ship being towed back to Federation territory at the end of the episode and is very intact.

Sure go ahead, ignore technologically similar events. Federation shields are obviously many times stronger than klingon shields. No doubt it would take a fleet of klingon ships to take down one federation ship, the shield strengths are so different.
Then in that case the shields of the Klingons were down, like with the Odyssey, or they had them optimized to defend against energy weapons, not kinetic attacks.
Now you are really just being anal.
Evasion and inability on your part so noted. I did it with the "Call to Arms" battle for DS9, so why can't you?
I didn’t ignore anything from datalore. I’m sure you can provide the mass and relative velocity of the crystalline entity upon impact? Prove that it would actually have the same kind of impact as a ship, or large chunk of metal impacting at .4c would have? I know the answer to that, there is no way in hell the entity was doing .4c and to top that off that was a lovely little energy reaction, not a physical impact. If it had been a physical impact we’d have seen the entity collapse around the point of collision.
Your lie and evasion so noted. We have seen solid objects hitting shields in Trek cause shield flare.


Image

Image

That is from "The Hunted" and "Nemesis" where the E-D bounces the Angosian shuttle and the E-E bounces a chunk of blasted Romulan Valdore off her nacelle. There is no energy sparkle or anything from the CE itself at all, but like with the other examples, the shields flare, thus disproving your worthless notion. Further, the mass of the CE, assuming it is something like quartz crystal will have a denisty of 2.66 g/cm3. This means that if we took all of the 3-4 km CE and compacted it down into a sphere it will probably mass out in the range of of at least ten million metric tons. In the episode the CE spins towards the E-D at about 300 meters/sec. So we can assume the following:

Conversions:

mass (m) = 10000000 ton metric = 10000000000 kilogram
velocity (v) = 300 meter/second = 300 meter/second


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Solution:

kinetic energy (K) = 4.5E+14 joule

Or the equivalent energy of a 450 kiloton nuke. Why do you care? The spikes are hitting the E-D shields. What makes this different is that like you taking your hand and swatting a balloon with your hand flat with 10 kgs of force it won't do much, but if you then take a needle and poke it with the same force, the balloon then pops. So that the E-D took that much KE directed into the shields like that into such a tiny point (a few square meters), is really damn impressive.
Lastly, as for DS9. That has the power generation and shields to rival entire fleets. Hell we’ve seen it fight entire fleets more than once. To equate the shields on the E-D to those on DS9 is pure wank.
This is true, but it is still an example of Cardassian shields (non-Federation shields, abeit shields modified by the Federation) blocking KE and given I have shown this as a counter example to your "Tears of the Prophets" one, it only goes to show you are unwilling to deal with counter evidence presented.

At any rate, I remind you of your original opening statement:

Federation ships can not take collisions, even with their shields up"

That has been handily disproven by my evidence.
-Mike

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Re: Pillar of Autumn vs. Enterprise-D

Post by User1657 » Thu Jan 05, 2012 1:01 am

His response to all of this was:
Though this particular tangent is truly riveting, and I do so enjoy debating through a proxy (whoever that chap is), it still does nothing to prove the shields capable of defending against a MAC impact.
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However post 516 clears up this issue. We have dialog from Worf when the enterprise was hit by 400Gigawatt blasts which dropped the shields in a couple of seconds. That puts their shields breaking strain overall at below what a MAC gives out.
For clarification, post 516 was:
Thought you might like this too:
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www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_XbWq49vUM&feature=related
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Two, one second 400 gigawatt particle beam blasts took the shields down.
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Or 800,000,000,000 Joules takes there shields down.
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Sounds like alot right, no not really: 800 Gigajoules is only the equivalent to… Dun, Dun, Dahhhhhh:
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191.2046…… Tons of TNT.
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Now that is truly pathetic.

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Re: Pillar of Autumn vs. Enterprise-D

Post by Mike DiCenso » Thu Jan 05, 2012 2:25 am

However post 516 clears up this issue. We have dialog from Worf when the enterprise was hit by 400Gigawatt blasts which dropped the shields in a couple of seconds. That puts their shields breaking strain overall at below what a MAC gives out.
Except it's contradicted by far higher events, such as Voyager sitting on the event horizon of a black hole in "Parallax", the E-D sitting for hours around an unstable G-type star and directly taking one of it's solar flares in "Relics". The latter example gives gigatons of EM dissipation to the E-D's shields. As per this set of calcs:
The E-D had suffered massive damage from being pulled inside the Dyson Sphere when they accidently triggered the comlink system that controled the space doors and their attendent tractor beams and was on auxilary power. Meaning they did not have main power to operate the shields fully, and we don't even know if the shields are at 23% of main power or of what they can be powered on secondary sources.

In fact, auxilary power was stated to be failing:

Ensign : 'We've lost main power, auxiliary power down to 20%.'

Worf : 'We are being pulled inside.'

Ensign : 'Auxiliary power failing.'

Data: 'The resonance frequency of the tractor beams is incompatible with our power systems. Warp and impulse engine relays have been overloaded. I am attempting to compensate.'

Ensign : 'The tractor beams have released us sir.'

Riker : 'Hold position here until we can get our bearing.'

Picard : 'Full sensor sweep Mister Data. Where are we?'

Data : 'Approximately 90 million km from the stars photosphere. I am reading a great deal of surface instabilityIt may be-'

Ensign : 'Sir. The inertial motion of the tractor beams is still carrying us forward. Impulse engines are offline and I can't stop our momentum. We're falling directly into the star.'


Also we get an early report on the surface instability of the star, again reinforcing that the output was not normal.

As for the 150,000 km issue, this is Graham Kennedy's calculations from DITL:

Assuming the former, we can calculate the power intensity incident on the Enterprise-D as :

Ei = 1.6 x 1026 / (4 x pi x (1.5 x 108) 2)
= 1.6 x 1026 / 2.83 x 1017
= 5.66 x 108 Wm-2

The area of the shields is not precisely known; however, they are approximately ellipsoid and measure some 750 x 250 metres when seen from the side. The ship should thus intercept approximately 147,281.25 m2. Therefore the total power on the ships shields would be :

P = 5.66 x 108 x 147,281.25
= 8.336 x 1013 Watts
= 83.36 TeraWatts

So in three hours, the shields would need to absorb a total of :

E = 8.336 x 1013 x 3600 x 3
= 9 x 1017 Joules


His assumptions are also conservative since the E-D does not have such small shield surface area since it's cross section would be an ellipse. So 147,281 x pi = 462,696.91 meters squared. That places the wattage well over 260 TW. Since the output of the star from the instability and solar flares was continuing to grow, these would only be very lower limits.
If the E-D could only handle 400 GWs of power, then the shields would have failed within seconds of being put up, whether the solar flares were adding to the star's output or not.

And this isn't the only time. The E-D flys close to a star, possibly a K-class supergiant in "Descent, Part 2", and Voyager flies between two pulsars in "Scientific Method".

So, care to try again? Or are you going to keep ignoring evidence. Furthermore, the E-1701 nudging a nearly Moon-sized asteroid in "The Paradise Syndrome" would mean that ship, over a century out of date by TNG standards, could manage over 1e23 J of KE. In "The Masterpiece Society", the E-D pushes with it's tractor beam a stellar fragement that massed out at 33,510,321,638,291,127,876,934,862.75 metric tons, and required 1.6755160819146E+28 joule at minimum to deflect it from a colony. These are actual feats carried out by the E-D and other Federation starships that negate your few pathetic examples.
-Mike

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Re: Pillar of Autumn vs. Enterprise-D

Post by Trinoya » Thu Jan 05, 2012 3:02 pm

*sigh* the 400 gigawatt thing. How quickly people forget that the following is true:

The 'weapon' used was some sort of jacketed stream of positrons and anti-protons. It hits with an effect never seen before and never seen again, and operates not just as an outlier, but as a TECH OF THE WEEK. A lot of people forget that the tech of the week stuff works both ways, for good or bad.

Second: A being CAPABLE OF WIPING AN ENTIRE SPECIES FROM EXISTENCE WITH A THOUGHT WAS THE ACTUAL POWER BEHIND IT.

I get that a lot of people don't like to acknowledge these things, but the fact is even if you discount that the person responsible for it was a god it still falls under "tech of the week never seen or used again even though it would be stupid to not use it since it is so effective against shields."

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