Star Trek VS Other Sci-Fi unfair?

[Admiral Breetai]

Somewhat OT: whenever taking on upper tier (relative to visual sci fi) franchises such as WH40K, few question SW ICS calcs being taken into account. But when challenging a lower tier (in terms of power) franchise like ST or B5, 90% of the debate turns into Trekkies bashing SW weapon yields.

the ICS is not supported by the films any one who claims other wise in a debate is inviting an argument about fire power and deliberately lying about the films

[Lucky]

No any real claim that Trek was made more "realistic" is just plain silly. Its a tv show in essence projecting the romaticism and sense of exploration of like the 18th and 19th century out into the wild frontiers of space. Accurate "realistic" combat was the least of the writers concerns.

The context was ship to ship combat, and I have no idea where you are getting 19th century in space from.

Secondly the use of cheap, expendable auxillery crafts to swarm and take down larger vessels is not inherently "unrealistic"/inferior to a more 19th century order of battle as Trek demostrates. Smaller ships have lower mass and are therefore easier to accelerate and alter course IIRC, momentum is a killer in space I'm told, and due to their lesser investment can be built in high numbers and maintained for a fraction of your big warship.

Star Trek's cheap and expendable auxillery crafts are call probes and torpedos. They tend to be as good if not better then manned craft, and a ship like the Enterprise-D could launch 5 or 6 a second, and carried hundreds.

Please explain what you mean by "19th century order of battle"? I don't recall warships in the 19th century zipping around at high fractions of the speed of light like fighters of at worst the WW2 era.

Momentum and mass are not an issues for any ship I can recall in Star Trek, and I don't recall most if any ship in Star Trek using reaction drives for STL propulsion. Most if not all powers in Star Trek seem to use exotic reactionless drives that go from 0 to near light speed in seconds if that.

The Federation can build a lot more torpedos and probes far more cheaply then fighters that are only good for annoying even second or third rate powers.

Fighters in Star Trek are nigh useless as shown in Deep Space9. They seem only good for pissing the other guy off, and dyeing fast. A single Defiant is worth far more then it's mass in fighters, and is far more useful in the long run. It takes something like 5 to 10 people to crew a Defiant class, but has the defensive and offensive capabilities of a much larger ship.

Lastly while they have demostrated popping warships at three hundred thousand kilometers they do not demostrate such ranges all the time and it is foolish to assume otherwise. In several battles they closed very close up.

I said Star Trek has those ranges, and they do use them even if not 100% of the time. There are very obvious reasons why such ranges would not be used all the time in Star Trek like the fact that every ship can easily just warp out of the way, but against a setting with no real time FTL sensor tech such ranges become viable options, and the target will never see the attack until after it hits.

No, they merely have to hit with similar firepower or such.

If the fighter based weapons of a setting are powerful enough to take down a larger capital ship then:

1) Why aren't the capital ships using the same weapons? Clearly the weapons on the fighter must be armed with weapons and defenses that could be just as easily mounted on the capital ships.

2) Why are the larger ships engaging in combat rather then just dropping off the fighters, and running away


3) Why aren't the fighters shot down before they can fire? Honestly, I have a hard time figuring out how many settings can have such poorly designed point defense unlike Star Trek and the real world. Either AA has to be very bad, or the fighters have to be stupidly hard to damage, but that begs the question as to why fighters would be harder to damage then larger ships.

4) What's to stop a Star Trek ship from just blowing up torpedos in the center of the swam, and taking them all out at once? There's good reason fighters suck in Star Trek even if Star Trek Fighters would be nigh unstoppable monsters in other setting.

I find this statment hard to believe. Not only that a run of the mill starship is more manuverable than a Peregrin fighter. In addition fifty such vessels would employ only fifty pilots a fraction of what a normal sized vessel would require in wartime and a fragment of the resource comitment and when one is scrubbed the rest of the squadron functions without loss.

In space size and shape don't matter when it comes to speed and maneuverability. All that matter is the thrust to mass ratio, and Star Trek has as standard technologies that take momentum out of the equation.
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Fighters require large numbers of support staff, supply lines for fuel and the all important anti-capital ship torpedos, and carriers or bases needed fun the fighters to function because there is no way the pilots can spend very long in a tiny fighter relative to a ship..

Each fighter needs it's own warp core, warp drive, seemingly two impulse engines life support, computer cores, sensors, shields ect,
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Each fighter will die to one or two hits even if facing a crappy Cardassian war ship. Ships in Star Trek can easily fire at least once per-second, and some have much higher rates of fire such as 5 photon torpedos at once per-second.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jq21Y1e4cBI&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d734afLFPds&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zonqRRcFkzk&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHuXIUWjpXg&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5sfQtMbvxw&NR=1

Cardassian ships have little trouble targeting a Federation fighter when they bother to shoot at them. (I truly despise DS9 visuals.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoIFUJxJwcQ

If I have only fifty people to crew my ships I would rather have two Defiant class ships that can take all comers with half the normal crew on each then 50 fighters that can in theory be destroyed in fifty seconds, and have very limited endurance, range, and no usefulness when the fighting is over.

Keep in mind that Dr. Beverly Crusher was able to crew a Galaxy Class ship by herself in an increasingly panicked state by just giving vague verbal commands.

So? As long as they inflicted damage beyond their cost they are doing their job.

Judging from this, which appears to be more or less the battle with only new audio spliced over, starting @ 1:40 we are talking about squadrons of four or five fighters attacking a cruiser and losing about one or two fighters per pass it seemed to me. Very small comitment and they seemed to be doing some real damage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SArkbW6nthg

I'd say look carefully, and you will see the Federation fighters being killed at a rate of about every other, but like most of the DS9 Fleet battles the visuals make no sense. When the larger ships bother to target the fighters, the fighters dies insanely quickly. Sisko treats the fighters as only good for pissing people off

In Wounded they could "see" the Maxwell's ship but they couldn't engage it at all and there is no indication they had the "resolution" to even start some sort of firing pattern.

Wounded is proof of real time FTL sensors, and combat ranges in the hundreds of thousands of kilometers for ships of the same tech base

Please cite the revelant portions of Basics, pt.1 where they engaged at millions of kilometers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtW_zz6XXG4
Voyager is at warp.

At 1:58 the first kazon torpedo reaches Voyager, and then the captain order the crew to not return fire

At 2:14 Voyager drops out of warp

16 seconds pass between the first torpedo and dropping out of warp. Jainway gives the order not to return fire about 2 seconds after the first torpedo.

Light moves about 300,000 kilometers a second.

Assuming Voyager was only moving at about the speed of light we get, and Voyager's torpedos only came into range when the captain gave the order not to fire: 300,000*14 = 4,200,000

4,200,000 kilometers is the extreme low end maximum range for UFP photon torpedos, and this is while ships are maneuvering at relativistic speeds if not FTL.

For Emissary being basically a photon torpedo is immaterial. We have seen combat. We know the ranges they engage at and cross system warp capable torpedoes are the exception not the norm.

Emissary is proof that the UFP can fit a warp drive capable of warp 9 in a photon torpedo.

Basica part 1 is proof of FTL photon torpedos, and I'm sure there are others..

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Going by this logic, Star Trek propulsion systems make all kinds of wonky visual effects like ships seeming to appear closer then they are, appear to change size, appear to move more slowly then they are....

Do you honestly want to go down the road of visuals are always right when Star Trek's own canon policy says otherwise?

Both Torpedos and phasers are used at warp implying they are FTL

We can see phasers they don't move at FTL except inside a warp bubble. Striking a sublight target from warp implies extremely fine precision in targeting not super fast weaponry.

Visual effects artists often screwup in Star Trek, or have no real way of portraying some things accurately.

The warp field only extends a short distance from the hull. This is something that has always been consistently shown. http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Warp_field

If you think about it, a faster then light thing will seem to move at light speed at most because we can't see the effects until after the FTL thing has past.
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Don't phasers and photon torpedos seemingly always take about the same amount of time to reach the target visually?

Actually Toress makes it seem it requires more than merely turning on your shield. She had to modify, and presumbly so did Mr. Spock, it to fool radar. But this is all here or there we are not talking about pitting a starship against 20th century Earth and 40k, Stargate, Starwars etc all have sensors far surpassing mere radar.

Star Trek Earth has better technology then real world Earth because you have time travels bringing technology to the past. We also have examples of the Enterprise sitting in orbit around near warp capable planets, and no one notices them.
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/First_Contact_(episode)

Toress was modifying the shields of a shuttle that was going to be traveling through atmosphere at high speeds. It also seems that she is just runing computer programs to modify the shields.

Spock was using the shields to hide a ship outside the atmosphere in orbit.

One should also take into consideration that shields differ depending on a ships size. The Delta Flier's shields can't be used on a ship the size of Voyager for example.
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Star Trek has ECM that works on visual wavelengths as well as the other sensors on the ships, but that does not count as a cloak.

Why should we assume that just because they have faster then light travel they have better sensor tech then real world Earth?

Star Wars seems to have less advanced technologies then the real world often like sensors. The Mark-1 eyeball is king there.

Don't some groups in 40K use slave labor to aim and load the guns? If the feared bolter is any sign then 40K has horribly designs.

Star Gate Earth seems often to use modern tech where ever possible at least until they got the good stuff from the Asgard. Some groups use on the Mark-1 eyeball still

I'm not aware of many reality warpers living inside the Federation, merely telepaths. A race like the Betazoid is a poor substitue for for a jedi or a psyker.

I think you are exaggerating a bit. If there had been a Betazoid in episode one of Star Wars everyone would have known who the bad guys where. We actually see Betazoids pick out assassins at a glance in "Manhunt", and we come across 1 maybe 2 races they can't read.

I seem to recall Spock mind controlling a guy while he was in a prison cell through the sealed door, but it's been so long since I saw that episode...

We know both Betaziods and Vulcans can transmit emotions and information to people possible hundreds of yards away.

We know that a psychically weak Human/Betazoid hybrid can sense emotions several planetary diameters away.

There are also a number of ways the UFP could give humans jedi and psyker like powers, but choose not for reasons not made clear. Heck, it's seemingly not until post Voyager that the UFP starts using cybernetic enhancements as standard. for some reason.

Picard didn't seem very surprised to find an NROB in "Survors" or in the "skin of evil".

There is also at least one planet off limits because the race are jerks with psychic powers.
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It took 4 jedi masters to read one guys mind, and jedi often walk right by their targets without realizing it. Jedi/force precognitive abilities are also overrated since even non-force users can deflect blaster bolts with melee weapons, and they are often caught by surprise.

Force users might have a wider array of abilities, but they are far less reliable, and are not without limits as shown by uber high end force user Yoda struggling to lift the X-wing, or ventress needing all her concentration to force choke someone.
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I only know 40K from what I see in VS debates, very little game play, and reading a little wiki really.

So what are their limits? I've heard everything to gods made flesh which does not make sense, to being very rare, and often specialized.

Unfortantly, if such things exist in any number, are only useful for dealing with prisoners not a combat situation.And the first guy who tries to put one on a jedi will jump back with at least one arm less than what he started with.

You're missing the point, anti-psi devices exist because psi-powers are not uncommon, and are in fact at time engineered into humans.

1. We don't really know the limits of the God Emperor. Its all myth and legend. On one hand he can be strangled by a Ork Warboss. On the other he can curbstomp a guy who can flay a squad of space marines with nary a thought.

Sounds like Skin of Evil type power level to me.

2. THe only Ocampa I can think of that could roughly be called similar would be Kes. She developed her powers far beyond what was normal of her race so your comparison is immaterial.

There are two groups of Ocampa. The one Kes came from never learned to use their psi-powers, but the other group light years away did, and have powers similar to Kes.

The guy did a crummy job. Empty assertions that Trek was more realistic and therefore "better", assuming high end feats, unsupported claims such as trillions of betazoids like members and erronous data besides. Half a life was about restarting a dying star not a planet, the only trek episode with scientist must die because he's too old that I am aware of, in Tinman Tam Elbrun was a betazoid and an unusually powerful one etc.

Looks more unsourced to me more then anything. I've seen worse often from anti-Star Trek people.

[mojo]

i hate it now when people argue that jedi help anything ever in the debate. i used to think the jedi were the absolute shit. when i first came here i spent ages arguing that anakin could take over the enterprise by himself.

then i saw episode 3. the ABSURD ease with which the jedi were wiped from the face of the galaxy ruined it for me. jesus christ, they were absolutely annihilated. and anakin's involvement in this, the main reason i was looking forward to the movie? yeah, he killed some kids and called it a day. took four billion clone troopers with him to the fucking jedi temple, just in case there was a problem. then he killed some kids, then he had a sandwich and went to bed. good job! boy, watch out for those jedi and sith! DANGEROUS.

[mojo]

it would not require star trek tech and high strategy to take out the jedi and the sith. take the guys from any episode of 'COPS' and you're golden. the power rangers could take the jedi and the sith at the same time without their giant animal robots. heck, without their suits and whatnot, either. just toss any five teenagers of varied ethnicity and gender at anakin and it's over. i think I could take anakin skywalker in a fair fight. just touch him with a pillow and he will die.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Momentum and mass are not an issues for any ship I can recall in Star Trek, and I don't recall most if any ship in Star Trek using reaction drives for STL propulsion. Most if not all powers in Star Trek seem to use exotic reactionless drives that go from 0 to near light speed in seconds if that.

Those fusion engines are rather obvious, don't you think?
Plus they don't fight at near light speed. They fight by moving around at the speed of sound at best.
AS for those super accels, I don't know what you're talking about, but the most obvious explanation of the few cases we got to witness is simple: a mix of STL and warp fields.

Fighters in Star Trek are nigh useless as shown in Deep Space9. They seem only good for pissing the other guy off, and dyeing fast.

Which is quite a shame, because they could be very good as harassing bombers. The trouble with fighters is that you're willing to sacrifice some of them, while with a big ship, the advantage of number if all fused into one thing: shields. As long as shields are up, which is quite the equivalent of having plenty of fighters, no one is harmed (in theory).
However, it means you put all your eggs in the same basket, can only go in one direction at a time, may not be able to use all your weapons at once against one or several targets, and means that you have to use large amounts of fuel to move the entire ship, and it's not particularly cost efficient, especially if your ship is a jack of all trades design, which is the case in 99.99% of UFP ships.
Fighters (of the size of a small bus, that is) could carry a large amount of torpedoes (they're not very big) and be built to launch them in volleys. Considering how few torps it generally takes to hurt a cap ship, I could see a very good point in having carriers in Trek. In fact, I'd largely use torpedo boats if I looked for purely military ships.

A single Defiant is worth far more then it's mass in fighters, and is far more useful in the long run. It takes something like 5 to 10 people to crew a Defiant class, but has the defensive and offensive capabilities of a much larger ship.

It's also unstable, no?
Plus the comparison isn't fair, as capital ships in the UFP long used to be a waste of space military wise. They weren't pure military ships. A ship larger than the Defiant, perhaps 2 times her volume but with the same power capacity, would probably make it more stable without considerably too large yet.

I said Star Trek has those ranges, and they do use them even if not 100% of the time. There are very obvious reasons why such ranges would not be used all the time in Star Trek like the fact that every ship can easily just warp out of the way, but against a setting with no real time FTL sensor tech such ranges become viable options, and the target will never see the attack until after it hits.

How do you expect to warp out of the way against a phaser beam that is meant to travel thousands of km in a few seconds? There's just nowhere enough time, humanly speaking, to get out of the way fast enough.
Now, the use of warp in battle would allow for greater ranges, but we can see why it's not used.
Warp requires massive amounts of power. It's all the more power that you don't put into your sensors, shields, weapons, SIF and STL thrusters.
It also means that if your ship gets hit, it gets hit with a warp shield up, which is ought to send it flying away at stupid speeds in some hard to control fashion, all the while the enemy ship is looking at you being sent rolling in such an embarrassing way, and just has to keep tracking your drift.
Plus if weapons, and somehow shields, may tap the warp power at the same time you're flying at warp, it would simply momentarily decrease the power diverted to the warp field itself, weakening it and potentially slowing the ship down in some hard to predict way, making for a very hazardous course to keep track of for the helm.
There's also the fact that something moving at warp would easily miss a target if only diverting by a fraction of a radiant.
Besides, why waste hours playing cat and mouse at STL warp when two ships simply have to blow each other and can do that at simple STL, faster, with all systems at full, with less of those brain-crunching maneuvers?
Finally, there's the mere question of human reflexes.

4) What's to stop a Star Trek ship from just blowing up torpedos in the center of the swam, and taking them all out at once? There's good reason fighters suck in Star Trek even if Star Trek Fighters would be nigh unstoppable monsters in other setting.

I doubt they'd be that stupid. In ST, it would be a very well known defensive measure to fire a torp in the middle of a swarm, so swarm would most likely seldom formed, and attacks would be multi-vectorial.
Not to say that fighters would fire their torps ASAP, and disengage before having to wait for the target's own torps to arrive and meet your squadron. Heck, if you think that warp is so well used, fighters could simply warp-jump repeatedly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jq21Y1e4cBI&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d734afLFPds&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zonqRRcFkzk&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHuXIUWjpXg&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5sfQtMbvxw&NR=1

Huh, some of those are fan-made animations.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtW_zz6XXG4

Why the heck is it so dark on that bridge??

Voyager is at warp.

At 1:58 the first kazon torpedo reaches Voyager, and then the captain order the crew to not return fire

At 2:14 Voyager drops out of warp

16 seconds pass between the first torpedo and dropping out of warp. Jainway gives the order not to return fire about 2 seconds after the first torpedo.

Light moves about 300,000 kilometers a second.

Assuming Voyager was only moving at about the speed of light we get, and Voyager's torpedos only came into range when the captain gave the order not to fire: 300,000*14 = 4,200,000

4,200,000 kilometers is the extreme low end maximum range for UFP photon torpedos, and this is while ships are maneuvering at relativistic speeds if not FTL.

The obvious problem is that if the Kazon torps fired on an intercept course were flying at STL, then Janeway was downright retarded to ram into them, because there's no way it would be efficient to expect STL objects to hit a ship moving at FTL warp.
If the torpedoes that hit Voyager - while Voyager was at FTL warp - were also launched with a warp field on, then we're dealing with nothing more than the usual torpedo at FTL warp syndrome, nothing particularly impressive as it hit at ship at FTL warp as well.
What is good though is the thousands of km ranges, all of which during the Voyager got hit.
But then, after that, visuals, as always...
Problem is, if you want to go with dialogue only, which is quite stupid for a visual entertainment, you'll have to do the same with Star Wars. For example, with a Death Star that does pop planet purely on DET (if you disregard the EU, and some people here don't even allow it as a lower form of canon).

Emissary is proof that the UFP can fit a warp drive capable of warp 9 in a photon torpedo.

But with the torp moving linearly. It's still plenty enough against most SF targets though.

[Admiral Breetai]

it would not require star trek tech and high strategy to take out the jedi and the sith. take the guys from any episode of 'COPS' and you're golden. the power rangers could take the jedi and the sith at the same time without their giant animal robots. heck, without their suits and whatnot, either. just toss any five teenagers of varied ethnicity and gender at anakin and it's over. i think I could take anakin skywalker in a fair fight. just touch him with a pillow and he will die.

to be fair..a couple power rangers and their sentai counter parts run at lightspeed and can punch a thousand plus tonned animal into orbit and some of their villains have been enormously powerful psykers/magicians so..saying they could beat they Jedi isn't exactly an indicator of much in the way of 'these guys suck"

a decent sentai team for example could very well punk out most sci fi armies alone..with out the back up of their mechs and the rangers..are often stronger I doubt an army of klingons or Fed soldiers would fare much better

[sonofccn]

The context was ship to ship combat, and I have no idea where you are getting 19th century in space from.

Therumancer argued that Trek had more realistic combat and seemed to imply that granted it an advantage. As to the 18-19th century quip you do realize Star Trek drew part inspiration from Hortio Hornblower right? The spirit of exploration and adventure and the like.

Star Trek's cheap and expendable auxillery crafts are call probes and torpedos. They tend to be as good if not better then manned craft, and a ship like the Enterprise-D could launch 5 or 6 a second, and carried hundreds.

Yes however the subtle point would be that the Enterprise-D has to close within a certain range to fire on the enemy who can return fire. Placing a torpedo or two aboard a vastly cheaper, smaller vessel allows you to put capitol ship firepower in range without risking your expensive warships.

Now I'm not really arguing that gunboats are a needed or overly useful item in the Trek naval forces. My beef such as it is would be anyone claiming that the mere use of auxillery vessels is unrealistic, which since we don't have giant space armadas yet we don't have a single clue what a realistic space armada will look like anyway, and that it is inherently inferior to one who doesn't.

Please explain what you mean by "19th century order of battle"? I don't recall warships in the 19th century zipping around at high fractions of the speed of light like fighters of at worst the WW2 era.

I mean they tend to group smaller warships with larger battleships and move in and slug it out with the enemy number compared to Star Wars which visually is more heavily inspired by WWII and has all manner of fighters swarming around independent of their parent ship. My argument is twofold, one the writers were not attempting nor cared to try and demostrate realistic battle, in fact many times taking cues from Star Wars to have dramatic spacebattles, and two should we ever have epic spae battles I doubt very much they will look anything like Trek.

Momentum and mass are not an issues for any ship I can recall in Star Trek, and I don't recall most if any ship in Star Trek using reaction drives for STL propulsion. Most if not all powers in Star Trek seem to use exotic reactionless drives that go from 0 to near light speed in seconds if that.

And I was speaking as much in the general sense as specificly Star Trek. Therumancer argued auxillery vessels were inherently unrealistic compared to Trek's "realistic" battles and citing arguments based in real world physics. Bringing up handwavium Treknology only further underscores my point Trek was not meant to be a realistic view of starship battles.

The Federation can build a lot more torpedos and probes far more cheaply then fighters that are only good for annoying even second or third rate powers.

While the Cardasion fleet overall was annoyed I think the ships struck seemed to be taking some real damage far more than the proverbial bug bite. As well a fighter can be deployed from beyond engagment range, as evident had Sisko closed to fire torpedoes from his warships it would have defeated the purpuse of his plan.

Fighters in Star Trek are nigh useless as shown in Deep Space9. They seem only good for pissing the other guy off, and dyeing fast. A single Defiant is worth far more then it's mass in fighters, and is far more useful in the long run. It takes something like 5 to 10 people to crew a Defiant class, but has the defensive and offensive capabilities of a much larger ship.

A single Defiant has a compliment of fifty crewmembers for normal operations and for any tour of duty of any duration. Just in comparison to that alone I can have five man squadrons assault ten warships in the same time the Defiant can engage one ship.

As to the mass question I don't know how many fighters I could pulled out of the Defiant, if you are aware I would gladly welcome the information.

I said Star Trek has those ranges, and they do use them even if not 100% of the time. There are very obvious reasons why such ranges would not be used all the time in Star Trek like the fact that every ship can easily just warp out of the way, but against a setting with no real time FTL sensor tech such ranges become viable options, and the target will never see the attack until after it hits.

First off everything we've seen of Trek suggest the Federation and thier rivals like to close the gap and slug it out as opposed to standing off at maximum range and sniping at each other. Building from that it is erronous to assume that in any random battle a Fed ship will simply hold anchor at 300,000 KMs and blast away and is therfore superior to the "yahoo factor" warships its engaging.

Secondly at the above mentioned range we are talking about a light second delay assuming an ISD's sensors are strictly sublight affairs. Coupled with a short hyperspace hop hardly an advantage worth writing home about and far from a certified war winner.

1) Why aren't the capital ships using the same weapons? Clearly the weapons on the fighter must be armed with weapons and defenses that could be just as easily mounted on the capital ships.

Well in real life I believe battleships tended towards shells because they could be thrown farther than a torpedo while a torpedo bomber was useful because it could take off from its carrier from a much greater distance, beyond the battleship's ability to shoot the carrier or even reliably have a foggy idea where it was, close to firing range in a relativly cheap delivery system and launch the bomb at the expensive warship.

2) Why are the larger ships engaging in combat rather then just dropping off the fighters, and running away

Speaking of Trek? Who's to say the "carriers" didn't. Far as I know we never learned what if anything carried the fighters or if they flew in under their own power. If you are asking why the Federation has battleships engage at all why not? Even today the US Navy has destoyers and things who supposed to engage other enemy vessels, "fighters" are merely a tool in your arsenal they are not a one size fits all wonder weapon.

Why aren't the fighters shot down before they can fire? Honestly, I have a hard time figuring out how many settings can have such poorly designed point defense unlike Star Trek and the real world. Either AA has to be very bad, or the fighters have to be stupidly hard to damage, but that begs the question as to why fighters would be harder to damage then larger ships.

Uh those Cardassion warships were not exactly overwhelming owning the Federation Fighters. They took out on average one ship per pass while being chewed up. Better than Star Wars but hardly some super AA.

As to the general case they tend to be smaller than the vessel they are attacking and can close closer than a larger warship could before they can be effectivly hit. In addition the corner stone of their use is their disproportionate of investment. Say you wax nine of the ten "strike crafts" I send after your warship but the tenth lives long enough to release his torpedo and blows open your warship. The cost of my ten "fighters" plus munitions is a fraction of your battleship and I have a net gain in the loss ratios.

4) What's to stop a Star Trek ship from just blowing up torpedos in the center of the swam, and taking them all out at once? There's good reason fighters suck in Star Trek even if Star Trek Fighters would be nigh unstoppable monsters in other setting.

Space is big, fighters I presume have at least rudimentry sensors, can scatter and trying to do a "flak burst" such as you describe ties up a weapon system for a few seconds and ensures you have one less torpedo to fire at my warships.

In space size and shape don't matter when it comes to speed and maneuverability. All that matter is the thrust to mass ratio, and Star Trek has as standard technologies that take momentum out of the equation.

And those same standard technologies are presumbly built in the Federation Fighter but anyway lets get down to the brass tacks. I provided video evidence of the little buggers flittering around cardassian warships it is up to you to provide evidence that a run of the mill warships could match those manuvers. No the Defiant doesn't count, it isn't a run of the mill design. I'll wait.

Fighters require large numbers of support staff, supply lines for fuel and the all important anti-capital ship torpedos, and carriers or bases needed fun the fighters to function because there is no way the pilots can spend very long in a tiny fighter relative to a ship..

And starships as well required ports of call, anti-cap munitions and supplies. Logistics are nothing new or inherently unique to a "fighter".

Each fighter needs it's own warp core, warp drive, seemingly two impulse engines life support, computer cores, sensors, shields ect,

Same as any ship.

Each fighter will die to one or two hits even if facing a crappy Cardassian war ship. Ships in Star Trek can easily fire at least once per-second, and some have much higher rates of fire such as 5 photon torpedos at once per-second.

And such wanton waste of heavy ordanence ensures my warships have an easier time destroying yours.

If I have only fifty people to crew my ships I would rather have two Defiant class ships that can take all comers with half the normal crew on each then 50 fighters that can in theory be destroyed in fifty seconds, and have very limited endurance, range, and no usefulness when the fighting is over.

That is your choice. Me I'd likely take the fifty fighters who will destroy and badly injure ten warships as opposed to your two undermanned Defiants who may be overwhelmed and forced to retreat.

Keep in mind that Dr. Beverly Crusher was able to crew a Galaxy Class ship by herself in an increasingly panicked state by just giving vague verbal commands.

If that is the episode I'm thinking of ordering the computer to set course for a world if a far cry from conducting a military operation.

I'd say look carefully, and you will see the Federation fighters being killed at a rate of about every other, but like most of the DS9 Fleet battles the visuals make no sense. When the larger ships bother to target the fighters, the fighters dies insanely quickly. Sisko treats the fighters as only good for pissing people off

I have never claimed Federation Fighters don't die easily, the entire point is not that they are heavily armored war machines who can shrug off enemy fire but as a launch platform for munitions. As to Sisko he expected the fighters to give the Cardies a bloody nose and lure them out of position, hardly something he could expected if the fighters were not doing some damage and what we see shows explosions blossoming across the Galor cruiser's hulls.

Wounded is proof of real time FTL sensors, and combat ranges in the hundreds of thousands of kilometers for ships of the same tech base

Yes...I didn't mean to imply otherwise. But astronomically speaking 300,000 KMs is quite small and you don't need real time sensors to determin there is an enemy warship hanging out at that range.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtW_zz6XXG4
Voyager is at warp.

Will watch when I return home but if the ships were at warp that is immaterail for a "standard" range. Warp by its vary nature of allowing you to cheat lightspeed would extend photon torpedoes ranges greatly, making them if only briefly FTL munitions obviously.

While you can easily argue an ISD has no chance in hell of stopping a barrage from a warp drive starship that has less to do with range and more to do with a completely alien "pocket universe" interacting with their material one. But I don't think that's what you are arguing.

Emissary is proof that the UFP can fit a warp drive capable of warp 9 in a photon torpedo.

In theory. We don't know enough about the internal workings of a photon torpedo to say you could squeeze a warp drive in without issue. Simply being casket sized objects is not sufficent.

Basica part 1 is proof of FTL photon torpedos, and I'm sure there are others..

Fired from warp IIRC. Far differnt from this scenario you seem to envision of some warship lurking millions of miles away accuratly targeting and shooting down enemy vessels.

Going by this logic, Star Trek propulsion systems make all kinds of wonky visual effects like ships seeming to appear closer then they are, appear to change size, appear to move more slowly then they are....

Do you honestly want to go down the road of visuals are always right when Star Trek's own canon policy says otherwise?

I have no problem understanding its a TV show and that discrepancies will occur as we switch from physical model to CGI or to stock footage etc. However I assume the visuals are not trying to lie to me and if they put two warships at single digit KMs apart they intended it to be that way. I can not disregard it, can not pretend they are really hundreds if not millions of KMs apart without just cause.

and I would love the link the canon policy that says visuals should be disregarded.

The warp field only extends a short distance from the hull. This is something that has always been consistently shown.

Which doesn't change they typically fire warp weapons while at warp however they do it. The rest can be chalked up to outliers because it doesn't gel with how they engage fleet combat.

If you think about it, a faster then light thing will seem to move at light speed at most because we can't see the effects until after the FTL thing has past.

From our point of view the damage would preceed the "beam" since we would see the weapon traveling the results at roughly the same time. However phasers are slower than light taking a comparativly delayed and slow passage to hit the offending target.

Don't phasers and photon torpedos seemingly always take about the same amount of time to reach the target visually?

But at typically cited ranges, in the thousands not millions, taking just a few seconds to reach your target implies sublight speeds. Fast yes but sublight.

Star Trek Earth has better technology then real world Earth because you have time travels bringing technology to the past.

Immaterial. In your quotes the crew speak of what they knew of the time period in question, of spy sats and radar not uber future tech.

We also have examples of the Enterprise sitting in orbit around near warp capable planets, and no one notices them

Which was preplanned and very well may not have required anything more than spoofing radar.

Toress was modifying the shields of a shuttle that was going to be traveling through atmosphere at high speeds. It also seems that she is just runing computer programs to modify the shields.

Janeway spoke of modulating the shields as well and I'm perfectly fine with it being an alteration in the computer's controls of the shield harmonics or what have you but its a far differnt cry from merely raising shields and your are defautly invisible to radar.

Star Trek has ECM that works on visual wavelengths as well as the other sensors on the ships, but that does not count as a cloak.

Where do they have ECM in the visual wavelengths?

Why should we assume that just because they have faster then light travel they have better sensor tech then real world Earth?

Lets see they perfected FTL drives, anti-gravs, artifical intelligence, energy weapons, freaking death stars and the industrial hurdles it takes to building something of that magnitude but I guess anything above radar just kicked their rumps. :)

Star Wars seems to have less advanced technologies then the real world often like sensors. The Mark-1 eyeball is king there.

I'm not saying Star Wars is the greatest sensors wise but they have them...give me until tomorrow and I'll see what I can dig up.

Don't some groups in 40K use slave labor to aim and load the guns? If the feared bolter is any sign then 40K has horribly designs.

40k is middle ages in space, its their thing.

I think you are exaggerating a bit. If there had been a Betazoid in episode one of Star Wars everyone would have known who the bad guys where. We actually see Betazoids pick out assassins at a glance in "Manhunt", and we come across 1 maybe 2 races they can't read.

Reading the minds of two random terrorists is a far cry from picking anything out of the mind of Palpy. As well I was also talking about the ability to lift things up and hurl them with the power of your mind or peer into the future.

I seem to recall Spock mind controlling a guy while he was in a prison cell through the sealed door, but it's been so long since I saw that episode...

He implanted a suspicion they were escaping far from mind controlling the guy and its an ability we seldom seen since.

We know both Betaziods and Vulcans can transmit emotions and information to people possible hundreds of yards away.

Lightyears for Vulcans in the episode with the giant space Ameba. But that was during a very dramatic and fatal experiance.

There are also a number of ways the UFP could give humans jedi and psyker like powers, but choose not for reasons not made clear. Heck, it's seemingly not until post Voyager that the UFP starts using cybernetic enhancements as standard. for some reason.

The issue is they don't use their tech that way, it doesn't occur to them to alter themselves such and generally they find the idea morally repugnent.

Picard didn't seem very surprised to find an NROB in "Survors" or in the "skin of evil".

Demi-gods are all over the place yes but it was argued the Federation had trillions of lifeforms better than jedi. Not that there were would be gods floating through the cosmos who could destroy the Empire with a thought.

It took 4 jedi masters to read one guys mind, and jedi often walk right by their targets without realizing it. Jedi/force precognitive abilities are also overrated since even non-force users can deflect blaster bolts with melee weapons, and they are often caught by surprise.

Not every jedi has equal powers. Some are better at certain things others are really good at hacking people to death with glowing sabers of doom.

Force users might have a wider array of abilities, but they are far less reliable, and are not without limits as shown by uber high end force user Yoda struggling to lift the X-wing, or ventress needing all her concentration to force choke someone.

Yoda was also nearly dead then to be fair. He did a little better in AOTC.

So what are their limits?

Oh I'm not in a much better position than you but on a basic scale they can make your head explode with a thought. Neither Vulcans nor betazoids can do this as far as I know.

You're missing the point, anti-psi devices exist because psi-powers are not uncommon, and are in fact at time engineered into humans.

I'm not disagreeing that psi-capable races exist. My arguments are what is the basis for Trillions and that a race like the betazoids occupy only a single niche of what a jedi can in theroy do.

Sounds like Skin of Evil type power level to me.

Which is a "god" like being as far above Troi as a human is above an ant.

There are two groups of Ocampa. The one Kes came from never learned to use their psi-powers, but the other group light years away did, and have powers similar to Kes.

Refresh my memory what did the second camp of Ocampa accomplish with their mind.

Looks more unsourced to me more then anything. I've seen worse often from anti-Star Trek people.

I would say poorly researched with basic facts misremembered from episodes coupled with highly selective and maximalistic interperations of everything Trek based.

[Mike DiCenso]

Momentum and mass are not an issues for any ship I can recall in Star Trek, and I don't recall most if any ship in Star Trek using reaction drives for STL propulsion. Most if not all powers in Star Trek seem to use exotic reactionless drives that go from 0 to near light speed in seconds if that.

Mass and momentum have been problems, at least in certain circumstances for Trek ships, and ship's impulse engines and thrusters do operate on a forum of reaction drive. In "The Paradise Syndrome" [TOS, Season 3], the E-1701 has issues with trying to move a nearly Earth's Moon-sized asteroid, while much later in "Booby Trap" [TNG, Season 3] the E-D not only applies thrust from the impulse engines to overcome momentum and give enough velocity to escape the asteroid field and the aceton energy assimilator traps, but the combined gravity of the asteroids slows the ship down enough that Picard has to make use of one to provide a gravity-assist swing of a large asteroid.

Momentum is an issue in TNG's "Evolution" following the unintentional disruption of the E-D's systems by the nanites, the ship is left out of control and fallng towards the matter stream flowing between a red giant star and it's companion neutron star. The crew manage to regain control of the E-D enough to point the main impulse engines into the velocity vector to try and prevent the collision, but the inertia is too much, and the ship hits the matter stream. Fortunately the crew is able to raise shields.
-Mike

[Lucky]

Those fusion engines are rather obvious, don't you think?

Huh? What are you talking about?

Plus they don't fight at near light speed. They fight by moving around at the speed of sound at best.

They also change size too.

AS for those super accels, I don't know what you're talking about, but the most obvious explanation of the few cases we got to witness is simple: a mix of STL and warp fields.

You need to prove the technobabble you wish to assume the UFP uses is used. Even technobabble requires power to run, and that means you need to show it being done as standard.

I've mentioned Titan's Turn several times on this board, and no one ever looks it up?

Chain of Comand Part 2
http://www.chakoteya.net/NextGen/237.htm
[Shuttlecraft]
JELLICO: Been awhile since I flew one of these. You're a pilot yourself, aren't you Geordi? 

LAFORGE: Yes, sir. 

JELLICO: I began my career as a shuttle pilot, on the Jovian run. Jupiter to Saturn and back once a day, every day. 

LAFORGE: Is that right? I was on that run myself for a while. 

JELLICO: Then you must've done Titan's Turn. 

LAFORGE: Oh, yeah. You set a course directly for Titan, hold it until you're just brushing the atmosphere, throw the helm hard over and whip around the moon at point seven c. 
JELLICO: And pray like hell nobody saw you.
LAFORGE: You know, this trip into the nebula's going to need someone who can do Titan's Turn in their sleep. These mines need to be laid within two kilometres of the Cardassian ships. But the particle flux from the nebula will blind all the sensors except for this proximity detector. You're going to need one heck of a pilot to pull that off. 

JELLICO: Is that you? 
LAFORGE: I could do it, but truthfully, the man you want is Commander Riker. He's the best there is.

The Best of Both Worlds Part 2
http://www.chakoteya.net/NextGen/175.htm
[Bridge]
SHELBY: Captain, the Borg have entered Sector zero zero one. 
(A little later, Riker and Worf enter) 
SHELBY: The Borg have dropped out of warp, sir. Jupiter outpost nine two reported visual contact at twelve hundred hours, thirteen minutes. 
RIKER: Planetary defences?
SHELBY: Responding. No reports on effectiveness but I can't believe that against the Borg 
RIKER: Ensign Crusher, at their current speed, when will they reach Earth? 
WESLEY: Twenty seven minutes. 
RIKER: The soonest we could intercept?
WESLEY: Forty two minutes, sir.
RIKER: Riker to Data.
[Bridge]
(The cube is met by three ships, which are immediately destroyed) 
WORF: It is confirmed. The Borg have broken through the Mars defence perimeter. 
WESLEY: Enterprise now approaching Terran system, sir. 
RIKER: Slow to impulse. Time to intercept? 
WESLEY: Twenty-three minutes, fourteen seconds, sir.
[Bridge]
TROI [OC]: Data has made first contact with Captain Picard. 
RIKER: Can you communicate with him, Data?
[Data's lab]
DATA [OC]: I have been unable to create a neural path around the Borg implants, sir. It is Captain Picard himself who has somehow managed to initiate contact.
[Bridge]
WORF: Sir, the Borg have halted their approach to Earth. 
SHELBY: I think we got their attention. 
RIKER: Time to intercept?
WESLEY: Two minutes, four seconds, sir. 
RIKER: They're worried. They're worried because we've got access to Picard. Mister Data, we have two minutes to figure out what we can do with it.
[Data's lab]
DATA: Sir, it is clear the Borg are either unwilling or unable to terminate their subspace links. 
CRUSHER: That may be their Achilles heel, Captain. Their interdependency.
[Bridge]
RIKER: What do you mean, Doctor?
CRUSHER [OC]: He's
[Data's lab]
CRUSHER: Part of their collective consciousness now. Cutting him off would like asking one of us to disconnect an arm or a foot
[Bridge]
CRUSHER [OC]: We can't do it.
SHELBY: They operate as a single mind. 
RIKER: One jumps off a cliff, they all jump off? Data, is it possible to plant a command into the Borg collective consciousness?
[Data's lab]
DATA: It is conceivable, sir, but it would require altering the pathway from the root command
[Bridge]
DATA [OC]: To affect all iterative branch points in the 
RIKER: Make every effort, Mister Data. 
DATA [OC]: Sir
[Data's lab]
DATA: What command shall I try to plant?
[Bridge]
RIKER: Something straightforward, like disarm your weapons systems. 
WORF: Visual contact with the Borg. 
SHELBY: On screen.
RIKER: Magnify.
WORF: Sensors reading increased power generation from the Borg. 
RIKER: Red alert. Load all torpedo bays. Ready phasers. 
WORF: Aye, Captain. 
RIKER: Status of Borg weapons? 
WORF: Their weapon systems are fully charged. 
RIKER: Data?
[Data's lab]
DATA: Attempting to re-route subcommand paths, Captain. Defence systems are protected by access barriers.
[Bridge]
WORF: Borg attempting to lock on tractor beam. 
RIKER: Rotate shield frequencies. Data, report?

Which is quite a shame, because they could be very good as harassing bombers. The trouble with fighters is that you're willing to sacrifice some of them, while with a big ship, the advantage of number if all fused into one thing: shields. As long as shields are up, which is quite the equivalent of having plenty of fighters, no one is harmed (in theory).

The problem with sacrificing ships the way you suggest is that those loses need to be replaced, and that means training new pilots and building new ships. Are you really saving resources if you have to spend months replacing half or more of your fleet after every battle?

However, it means you put all your eggs in the same basket, can only go in one direction at a time, may not be able to use all your weapons at once against one or several targets, and means that you have to use large amounts of fuel to move the entire ship, and it's not particularly cost efficient, especially if your ship is a jack of all trades design, which is the case in 99.99% of UFP ships.

If you use fighters you have to send them all in one direction anyway, but you also have to send have to send support staff, send replacement ships and pilots... You end up with a long an easily disrupted supply line. point defense is very good remember.

On the other hand you can have a single Intrepid or Defiant operating unsupported for months to years on their own thereby reducing costs to only the crew, ship, initial munitions, initial fuel, and initial shuttles. Heck, the crew can actual upgrade their ships on their own.

The biggest problem with fighters is they are useless once the fighting is over, and can't deal with the oddly common negative space wedgies.

ighters (of the size of a small bus, that is) could carry a large amount of torpedoes (they're not very big) and be built to launch them in volleys. Considering how few torps it generally takes to hurt a cap ship, I could see a very good point in having carriers in Trek. In fact, I'd largely use torpedo boats if I looked for purely military ships.

If you want to make a "fighter" in Star Trek, you would logically take a Runabout, and change the modules to a torpedo launcher and a large magazine for the torpedos..
http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb2 ... Design.jpg

It's also unstable, no?

The Defiant class worked perfectly well, and that includes the mildly flawed prototype that the class is named for. We see many of the class in action, and they functioned perfectly.

Plus the comparison isn't fair, as capital ships in the UFP long used to be a waste of space military wise. They weren't pure military ships. A ship larger than the Defiant, perhaps 2 times her volume but with the same power capacity, would probably make it more stable without considerably too large yet.

Most Federation ship classes are designed to go off into uncharted space for years on end, and deal with anything they come in contact with They can carry a lot of cargo for that reason. They have to be jacks of all trades and at least competent at all of them.

The Defiant class was designed to blow stuff up, and then they tossed in a lab or two as an after thought, those negative space wedgies will get you if you don't have those science labs..

In all honesty, if almost any group tried to invade the Star Trek universe they would possibly lose more ships to the strangeness of the week then to combat.

How do you expect to warp out of the way against a phaser beam that is meant to travel thousands of km in a few seconds? There's just nowhere enough time, humanly speaking, to get out of the way fast enough.

Real time faster then light sensors, and computers., but if you want to go by on screen feats I seem to recall something about Bones running at super-human speeds in Star Trel-V, and Federation humans have little trouble piloting shuttles at .7 the speed of light straight at a planet.... You know, Titan's Turn. A few seconds to react should be like hours to a modern human. ^_^

Now, the use of warp in battle would allow for greater ranges, but we can see why it's not used.
Warp requires massive amounts of power. It's all the more power that you don't put into your sensors, shields, weapons, SIF and STL thrusters.

SIF aren't always on.

Shields are powered by fusion reactors. last time I checked

Torpedos are self powering once fired, and excellerate to catch up to the target.

The only thing you would need to divide the warp power between is phasers and the warp drive, and phasers also get power from fusion reactors.

It also means that if your ship gets hit, it gets hit with a warp shield up, which is ought to send it flying away at stupid speeds in some hard to control fashion, all the while the enemy ship is looking at you being sent rolling in such an embarrassing way, and just has to keep tracking your drift.

Which never happens when we see warp combat.

Plus if weapons, and somehow shields, may tap the warp power at the same time you're flying at warp, it would simply momentarily decrease the power diverted to the warp field itself, weakening it and potentially slowing the ship down in some hard to predict way, making for a very hazardous course to keep track of for the helm.

Only phasers use warp power.

There's also the fact that something moving at warp would easily miss a target if only diverting by a fraction of a radiant.

Which would explain why we have so few even possible examples of warp strafing even though there is no reason in universe for it not to happen, but we are talking about Star Trek VS other setting, and many of them are limited to strategic FTL and or FTL sensors often.

Besides, why waste hours playing cat and mouse at STL warp when two ships simply have to blow each other and can do that at simple STL, faster, with all systems at full, with less of those brain-crunching maneuvers?

We aren't talking Star Trek VS Star Trek. Many settings lack tactical FTL, or anything like a warp drive.

Finally, there's the mere question of human reflexes.

Titan's turn, and Bones running at something like 60 miles an hour in Star Trek-V.

I doubt they'd be that stupid. In ST, it would be a very well known defensive measure to fire a torp in the middle of a swarm, so swarm would most likely seldom formed, and attacks would be multi-vectorial.
Not to say that fighters would fire their torps ASAP, and disengage before having to wait for the target's own torps to arrive and meet your squadron. Heck, if you think that warp is so well used, fighters could simply warp-jump repeatedly.

We see Sisko fire a torpedo at two ships, and has it set to explode between them causing minor damage to both. I believe JMS got something like a gigaton for the yield.

Huh, some of those are fan-made animations.

Only the Kirk era ones, sorry about that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d734afLFPds

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYYDa7aN-Qg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtW_zz6XXG4

Why the heck is it so dark on that bridge??

Voyager's bridge was often kind of dark, but it was never explained. I guess since they were rationing power they might not turn on all the lights.

The obvious problem is that if the Kazon torps fired on an intercept course were flying at STL, then Janeway was downright retarded to ram into them, because there's no way it would be efficient to expect STL objects to hit a ship moving at FTL warp.
If the torpedoes that hit Voyager - while Voyager was at FTL warp - were also launched with a warp field on, then we're dealing with nothing more than the usual torpedo at FTL warp syndrome, nothing particularly impressive as it hit at ship at FTL warp as well.
What is good though is the thousands of km ranges, all of which during the Voyager got hit.
But then, after that, visuals, as always...

We've been over this exact scene before. >_< The Kazon torpedos were acting like flak shells. We are seeing near misses.

There is no reason the assume the Kazon torpedos had been moving at slower then light speeds.

There is no reason to assume Voyager ran the torpedos over.

It doesn't matter how fast the Kazon torpedos moved because it has no baring on the maximum range of Voyager's torpedos, and after being fired the torpedos would excellerate beyond the speed the ship Voyager was going.

Problem is, if you want to go with dialogue only, which is quite stupid for a visual entertainment, you'll have to do the same with Star Wars. For example, with a Death Star that does pop planet purely on DET (if you disregard the EU, and some people here don't even allow it as a lower form of canon).

You mean like I honestly try to do. Using your visuals are always reliable you end up with many nonsensical things like ships changing size for no reason, ships changing design for no reason, dialog not making a lick of sense for no reason.... If the characters consistently say they are doing X, or can do Y then they are doing X, or can do Y unless we are given a reason to think otherwise, but inconsistent visuals are not proof of anything beyond the visuals are unreliable. Visual; effects artists all to often go for the rule of cool(in their eyes at least) then what matches what the characters are saying or doing. One just can't assume visuals are 100% correct 100% of the time because the people are flawed. You may even find inconsistencies in a single script. Logically you would want to use as many data points as possible.

It only makes sense to go by what the characters state the capabilities of their technologies are first, and then go back and analyze the visual data because the characters should know what their technology can do. inata

The Death Star's super laser has never been DET going by dialog alone in the movies, movie novelizations, and extended universe. The very fact Alderran stayed in orbit says it's not D.E.T.

"Luke had seen the shattered remnants of Alderaan and knew that for those in the incredible battle station that the entire moon would present simply another abstract problem in mass-energy conversion"(ANH novel, p. 178).

Ultimately your analyze of a series is dictated by what the canon policy is for that given series.

For Star Trek only the events are canon which means neither dialog or visuals are canon so long as they contradict plot.

For Star Wars the latest version of the movies are the highest canon.

[Lucky]

Therumancer argued that Trek had more realistic combat and seemed to imply that granted it an advantage. As to the 18-19th century quip you do realize Star Trek drew part inspiration from Hortio Hornblower right? The spirit of exploration and adventure and the like.

Your entire point is a red herring? Your point has nothing to do with combat.

Yes however the subtle point would be that the Enterprise-D has to close within a certain range to fire on the enemy who can return fire. Placing a torpedo or two aboard a vastly cheaper, smaller vessel allows you to put capitol ship firepower in range without risking your expensive warships.

That of course leads to shorter ranges since everything will be lower quality, far less powerful sensors, and adds supply lines that are easily disrupted.

The fact that what you suggest is not done would imply it doesn't work

Now I'm not really arguing that gunboats are a needed or overly useful item in the Trek naval forces. My beef such as it is would be anyone claiming that the mere use of auxillery vessels is unrealistic, which since we don't have giant space armadas yet we don't have a single clue what a realistic space armada will look like anyway, and that it is inherently inferior to one who doesn't.

I'll assume that by gunboat you mean a small but heavily armed craft like a Defiant class or possibly the Prometheus class. The Defiant class was an attempt to squeeze the most power possible into the tiniest frame possible, and still have it be effective.

While I hate using this line of reasoning: Why does no one in Star Trek use cheap expendable auxiliary craft in combat? While most powers might see it as wasteful to throw lives away in such craft the Dominion would see not have such a problem, but they still don't use such ships. If even those who would happily throw the lives of their solders away for any advantage don't use them then we may assume the idea does not work well for reason that may not appear on screen. Jem'hadar are easily made in days, blindly loyal, and happy to die.

I mean they tend to group smaller warships with larger battleships and move in and slug it out with the enemy number compared to Star Wars which visually is more heavily inspired by WWII and has all manner of fighters swarming around independent of their parent ship.

Where are you getting the idea that the Federation groups smaller ships with larger ones, and that they move in to slug it out with the other guy? That's not the idea we get from most battles.

My argument is twofold, one the writers were not attempting nor cared to try and demostrate realistic battle, in fact many times taking cues from Star Wars to have dramatic spacebattles, and two should we ever have epic spae battles I doubt very much they will look anything like Trek.

What makes you think the visual effect teams gave a rat's ass about what is written in the scripts, or about making visuals that even make sense when compared to other visuals in the same spin off? Just glancing at a number of scenes you will see the VFX crews didn't care about the scripts.

And I was speaking as much in the general sense as specificly Star Trek. Therumancer argued auxillery vessels were inherently unrealistic compared to Trek's "realistic" battles and citing arguments based in real world physics. Bringing up handwavium Treknology only further underscores my point Trek was not meant to be a realistic view of starship battles.

Fighters are unrealistic often because of point defense systems exist in Star Trtek.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goalkeeper_CIWS

How fighters can survive in a setting like Star Wars without someone purposely designing the defensive systems not to work is beyond me.

While the Cardasion fleet overall was annoyed I think the ships struck seemed to be taking some real damage far more than the proverbial bug bite. As well a fighter can be deployed from beyond engagment range, as evident had Sisko closed to fire torpedoes from his warships it would have defeated the purpuse of his plan.

In the "Wounded" a SINGLE photon torpedo destroys a Shielded Cardasian warship, and the Nebula had taken a direct hit from the Cardasian phasers.

In "Sacrifice of the Angels" we see unshielded Cardasian warships of the same design as in the "Wounded" taking several volleys of fighter grade weapons, returning fire, and destroying a fighter with every other shot.

In "The Jem'Hadar" we see a Galaxy class and three Runabouts engage three Jem'Hadar attack ships. The Runabouts are useless.

A single Defiant has a compliment of fifty crewmembers for normal operations and for any tour of duty of any duration. Just in comparison to that alone I can have five man squadrons assault ten warships in the same time the Defiant can engage one ship.

Where does that number come from? I don't recall ever seeing any sign of a crew of 50, and we often seem to see Defiants crewed by far less.. You just need about 9 to crew the bridge, and then maybe 1 to 10 in engineering.

As to the mass question I don't know how many fighters I could pulled out of the Defiant, if you are aware I would gladly welcome the information.

Going by this page: http://st-v-sw.net/STSWvolumetrics.html#mozTocId697772

A Defiant has an estimated mass of about 69,000 to 267,000 tones.

A Federation attack fighter has an estimated mass of about 260 to 1,000 tones.

So, according to the above page it would take about 69 to 1,027 Federation Fighters to equal the mass of one Defiant class.

The problem is that ships/fighters are a lot more then just hulls. You've got warp cores, impulse engines, weapons.... We know that the mirror verse chose to build a Defiant rather then a Defiant's mass in smaller ships which they had the designs for.

First off everything we've seen of Trek suggest the Federation and thier rivals like to close the gap and slug it out as opposed to standing off at maximum range and sniping at each other. Building from that it is erronous to assume that in any random battle a Fed ship will simply hold anchor at 300,000 KMs and blast away and is therfore superior to the "yahoo factor" warships its engaging.

I'd like to see these examples you have failed to ever try to describe. From what I recall Federation ships at least close to effective range, and fire when they get a lock. There is a difference between maximum range, and effective range.

Secondly at the above mentioned range we are talking about a light second delay assuming an ISD's sensors are strictly sublight affairs. Coupled with a short hyperspace hop hardly an advantage worth writing home about and far from a certified war winner.

Phasers and Photon torpedos have always been FTL. This is like arguing that you can dodge a super-sonic weapon by listening for the sound it makes.

Hyperspace jumps take seconds to minutes to plot, it takes seconds to turn the hyper-drive on, and it takes seconds to enter hyper-space. If such a thing was as simple as you want it to be, why is the tactic not used?

Well in real life I believe battleships tended towards shells because they could be thrown farther than a torpedo while a torpedo bomber was useful because it could take off from its carrier from a much greater distance, beyond the battleship's ability to shoot the carrier or even reliably have a foggy idea where it was, close to firing range in a relativly cheap delivery system and launch the bomb at the expensive warship.

That isn't what we see in most Sci-Fi settings I can think of. What we see generally is the "fighters" fly ahead of the carrier while the target does the same.

The idea is what is called a combat carrier I think. It's not used in the real world because you need runways of a certain size, so it's just more practical to build a fighting ship and a carrier. Most Sci-Fi would not have the runway problem.

Speaking of Trek? Who's to say the "carriers" didn't. Far as I know we never learned what if anything carried the fighters or if they flew in under their own power. If you are asking why the Federation has battleships engage at all why not? Even today the US Navy has destoyers and things who supposed to engage other enemy vessels, "fighters" are merely a tool in your arsenal they are not a one size fits all wonder weapon.

Well, we never see any sign the Federation Fighters use a carrier, they have their own warp drives, and the only time we see them that I recall has them leaving a star base.

Fighters aren't really shown to be much more effective then runabout as I recall. Why the Federation has purpose built fighters is beyond me. Runabouts are designed to be modular after all.

Uh those Cardassion warships were not exactly overwhelming owning the Federation Fighters. They took out on average one ship per pass while being chewed up. Better than Star Wars but hardly some super AA.

Check "Sacrafice of the Angels" again. You will note that no one fires on the Federation fighters until after they make their attack run, and when the larger ships do fire on the fighters the fighters die to about every other shot.

The Federation fighters only did as well as they did because the defenders let them for some reason if you go by the visuals. It's the sort of thing that makes you just ignore what is shown on screen for a series. Ultimately the fighters are shown to score direct hits, on unshielded ships, and still can't even disable those ships, but a single defiant could have raped all of those ships.

As to the general case they tend to be smaller than the vessel they are attacking and can close closer than a larger warship could before they can be effectivly hit. In addition the corner stone of their use is their disproportionate of investment. Say you wax nine of the ten "strike crafts" I send after your warship but the tenth lives long enough to release his torpedo and blows open your warship. The cost of my ten "fighters" plus munitions is a fraction of your battleship and I have a net gain in the loss ratios.

Think about how well all those tiny disposable ships the federation threw at the Borg cubes did.

Think about how well the Lysian sentry pods did against the Enterprise-D

Think about the Nebula being able to target a Runabout in "Non Sequitur". 5,000 kilometers while trying to disable/capture.

In Star Trek you are talking about sensor systems that can make out hundred meter objects at at least tens of light years. I seem to recall even visual evidence of a Nebula class firing on a Runabout from thousands of Kilometers away, and it was trying to carefully disable the Runabout. Non Sequitur

Nomad was hit at 90,000 kilometers

If it's cheap and disposable then it's likely not going to be worth building in Star Trek unless it's the super alien of the week's one shot toy. No ship I know of in Star Trek is made of mundane stuff. Even shuttles are titanium or Duranium. We've seen cheap and disposable like you speak of, and it doesn't even slow down

There are some settings like Babylon 5, Neo Battlestar Galactica where a humble federation shuttle can simply ram everyone into submission.

Space is big, fighters I presume have at least rudimentry sensors, can scatter and trying to do a "flak burst" such as you describe ties up a weapon system for a few seconds and ensures you have one less torpedo to fire at my warships.

The Delta Flyer's warpcore exploding was stated to threaten everything for a million kilometers, and even after using some sort of nebula to contain the blast ships 2 million kilometers away still felt the blast.

In "Basics, Part 1" the Kazon were hitting Voyager with flak while Voyager was millions of kilometers away maneuvering at Warp. Voyager could have done the same thing.

In Generations the planet and Klingon ship were likely about eight light minutes from the star
:
[Enterprise-D bridge]
RIKER: Maybe they're not out there.

PICARD: They're just trying to decide whether a twenty year-old Klingon Bird-of-Prey can be a match for the Federation flagship.
TROI: Perhaps they're on the surface.

WORF: Sir, according to my calculations, a solar probe launched from either the Klingon ship or the planet's surface will take eleven seconds to reach the sun. However, since we do not have an exact point of origin, it will take us between eight and fifteen seconds to lock our weapons onto it.

RIKER: That's a pretty big margin of error. Much too big.

PICARD: Mister Data, how long before the ribbon arrives?

And those same standard technologies are presumbly built in the Federation Fighter but anyway lets get down to the brass tacks. I provided video evidence of the little buggers flittering around cardassian warships it is up to you to provide evidence that a run of the mill warships could match those manuvers. No the Defiant doesn't count, it isn't a run of the mill design. I'll wait.

You provided evidence that even when firing on unshielded(lazy VFX crew?) Cardassian warships that let them fire on them for no good reason(lazy VFX crew?) the fighters can't kill the larger ships, and that the ships they just attacked would kill about 1 third of the fighters, and to make things worse those fighters seemingly have to close to single digit kilometers in order to be in range which means that if the target's warpcore blows up the fighters are dead anyway.

Those larger ships can one shot Cardassian warships from light seconds away with a good hit, and even in the crap visuals that DS9 suffered under those larger Federation ships were seen at about worse using two hit.

The big problem is that warheads and reactors don't always scale up or down in a linear fashion.

And starships as well required ports of call, anti-cap munitions and supplies. Logistics are nothing new or inherently unique to a "fighter".

Last time I checked the only reason for a Federation ship to need to dock is for shore leave for the crew, or extreme damage. We know from "Chain of Command" that an understaffed engineering crew can seemingly almost rebuild the ship in days, and we know from Voyager that Federation ships can build their own munitions and shuttles. Voyager also proves that generally Federation ships are insanely reliable because Voyager's hinges never once needed any maintenance.

Generally Federation ships refuel by flying through space hence the bussard collectors.

Star Fleet has nearly no supply lines the way they do things in canon.

Same as any ship.

You're missing the point, building lots of small warp cores for example may use more resources then building on big warp core. We don't know how dilithium usage scales, and dilithium is relatively rare.

And such wanton waste of heavy ordanence ensures my warships have an easier time destroying yours.

Expect that heavy ordinance happens to be phaser/disruptor beams which the ship will not run out of, and likely does not even have to be fired at full power.

That is your choice. Me I'd likely take the fifty fighters who will destroy and badly injure ten warships as opposed to your two undermanned Defiants who may be overwhelmed and forced to retreat.

Except the fighters lack the power to do what you plan to do, and the Defiants can take on entire space forces in some cases. What you suggest might work in Star Wars canon, but in Star Trek canon it didn't work that way.

Fighters in Star Trek canonly lack the firepower to easily badly damage warships. We see it on screen, and we are told this by Sisko.

The Defiants would not be undermanned. Star Fleet canonly sticks far more crew on their ships then they need. "Chain of Command" shows you can easily cut the engineering staff by a third on a Galaxy class for example.

If that is the episode I'm thinking of ordering the computer to set course for a world if a far cry from conducting a military operation.

Well it is implied the only reason that is all she can do is because she lacks the training, and that one person with the proper training could crew the entire ship. Anyway, my point stands that you don't need anywhere near the standard crew size to crew a Federation ship.

I have never claimed Federation Fighters don't die easily, the entire point is not that they are heavily armored war machines who can shrug off enemy fire but as a launch platform for munitions. As to Sisko he expected the fighters to give the Cardies a bloody nose and lure them out of position, hardly something he could expected if the fighters were not doing some damage and what we see shows explosions blossoming across the Galor cruiser's hulls.

Thank you for admitting that Sisko sent the Federation fighters to insult the Cardassians.

We see explosions blossoming across the Galor hulls because the Galors are being hit with torpedos, and not because the Galors are being badly damaged. We also see the ships that are hit return fire without a problem. You seem to think that because there is an explosion the attack must have been effective, but that is not the case.

Yes...I didn't mean to imply otherwise. But astronomically speaking 300,000 KMs is quite small and you don't need real time sensors to determin there is an enemy warship hanging out at that range.

The Enterprise-D watched the fight from light years away in "The Wounded". It's just hard proof of FTL sensors.

Look at Generations for range, accuracy, and weapons speed.

WORF: Sir, according to my calculations, a solar probe launched from either the Klingon ship or the planet's surface will take eleven seconds to reach the sun. However, since we do not have an exact point of origin, it will take us between eight and fifteen seconds to lock our weapons onto it.

Star Trek weapons travel light minutes in seconds.

Will watch when I return home but if the ships were at warp that is immaterail for a "standard" range. Warp by its vary nature of allowing you to cheat lightspeed would extend photon torpedoes ranges greatly, making them if only briefly FTL munitions obviously.

There is no cheat. Star Trek weapons are FTL since planets don't have warp fields. What we see is what has already happened.

While you can easily argue an ISD has no chance in hell of stopping a barrage from a warp drive starship that has less to do with range and more to do with a completely alien "pocket universe" interacting with their material one. But I don't think that's what you are arguing.

What pocket universe are you talking about? Warp drives are real/normal space FTL. Navigational deflectors are why things like rail guns and mundane particle beams are useless in Star Trek.

Broken Bow
TUCKER: Beautiful. Lock it off right there. (wipes a fingerprint off the warp console) 

REED: I believe you missed a spot. Commander Tucker, Ensign Travis Mayweather. He just arrived. 

TUCKER: Our space boomer. 

TRAVIS: How fast have you gotten her? 

TUCKER: Warp four. We'll be going to four five as soon as we clear Jupiter. Think you can handle it? 

TRAVIS: Four point five. 

REED: Pardon me, but if I don't realign the deflector, the first grain of space dust we come across will blow a hole through this ship the size of your fist. 

TUCKER: Keep your shirt on, Lieutenant. Your equipment'll be here in the morning.

Alliances
TUVOK: Captain, my readings indicate the navigational deflector has sustained massive damage. It will be necessary to repair it before we can achieve more than thruster power.

Year of Hell, Part 2
JANEWAY: Engines. 

TORRES: I'm doing my best. 

KIM: Captain, with the deflector down those micro-meteoroids are beginning to erode the hull. 

JANEWAY: Emergency power to the deflector. 

TUVOK: None available. 

JANEWAY: I'll be in Deflector control. 

TUVOK: Captain. That entire section has been designated hazard level four. 

JANEWAY: I know.

The Cage
TYLER: It's coming at the speed of light, collision course. The meteorite beam has not deflected it, Captain.

ONE: Evasive manoeuvres, sir?

PIKE: Steady as we go.

In theory. We don't know enough about the internal workings of a photon torpedo to say you could squeeze a warp drive in without issue. Simply being casket sized objects is not sufficent.

A class 8 probe is the same size as a photon torpedo. They ripped out the internals, and replaced them with a female humanoid and life support, and it still warp capable.
In Generations torpedos travel light minutes in seconds, and no one is at warp.
WORF: Sir, according to my calculations, a solar probe launched from either the Klingon ship or the planet's surface will take eleven seconds to reach the sun. However, since we do not have an exact point of origin, it will take us between eight and fifteen seconds to lock our weapons onto it.

Firing at warp does not matter. I don't know where you got that idea that firing at warp matters.

Fired from warp IIRC. Far differnt from this scenario you seem to envision of some warship lurking millions of miles away accuratly targeting and shooting down enemy vessels.

Generations.
WORF: Sir, according to my calculations, a solar probe launched from either the Klingon ship or the planet's surface will take eleven seconds to reach the sun. However, since we do not have an exact point of origin, it will take us between eight and fifteen seconds to lock our weapons onto it.

I have no problem understanding its a TV show and that discrepancies will occur as we switch from physical model to CGI or to stock footage etc. However I assume the visuals are not trying to lie to me and if they put two warships at single digit KMs apart they intended it to be that way. I can not disregard it, can not pretend they are really hundreds if not millions of KMs apart without just cause.

You haven't watched much DS9 have you? A prime example of why visuals are not to be trusted is in Deep Space 9 "A Call To Arms" where Cardassian and Dominion ships are shown to have a maximum weapons range of 10 kilometers. Then there is Way Of the Warrior where dialog and character action is contradicted by the visuals.

The fact of the matter is that the stated capabilities of things in Star Trek are at times impossible to show, the VFX crew don't know what it should look like, they lack the technology to get it right, or they just don't have the time/money. The fact of the matter is the VFX teams are often sloppy. The obvious things usually don't matter(ships always being right side up for example), but sometimes the visuals make no sense. They are just eye candy to give a vague idea as to what is going on.

and I would love the link the canon policy that says visuals should be disregarded.

I never claim such a thing. So do not twist my words. It's a fact that visual effects are likely to be altered at a later point in time, but dialog has in Star Trek's history only been altered once.

It's a fact the writers and VFX teams were limited by budget and time, and could not do what they intended.

Commenting on phaser firepower, Ronald D. Moore said: "The weapons are way too powerful to present them in any realistic kind of way. Given the real power of a hand phaser, we shouldn't be able to show ANY firefights on camera where the opponents are even in sight of each other, much less around the corner! It's annoying, but just one of those things that we tend to slide by in order to concentrate on telling a dramatic and interesting story." (AOL chat, 1997)

Here we have the writers saying that what is on screen is not always reliable.

07.10.2003
How do the Star Trek novels and comic books fit into the Star Trek universe? What is considered Star Trek "canon"?

As a rule of thumb, the events that take place within the live-action episodes and movies are canon, or official Star Trek facts.

If only the events are canon then neither visuals or dialog is canon.

Which doesn't change they typically fire warp weapons while at warp however they do it. The rest can be chalked up to outliers because it doesn't gel with how they engage fleet combat.

It's to bad we only see abnormal combat. 500 meters is abnormally close and dangerous to both sides for combat in Star Trek. You want to use the outliers as the standard even when the evidence is unreliable to start with.

It takes place in DS9 so we can just ignore it on the grounds that the VFX team didn't even try to show thing in an accurate fashion.. You can tell by the lack of shield flares.

From our point of view the damage would preceed the "beam" since we would see the weapon traveling the results at roughly the same time. However phasers are slower than light taking a comparativly delayed and slow passage to hit the offending target.

What we see is slower then light sometimes. There has always been an invisible component to phasers, and humans in Star Trek are super-human by our standards since they think nothing of Titan's turn.

But at typically cited ranges, in the thousands not millions, taking just a few seconds to reach your target implies sublight speeds. Fast yes but sublight.

Except for the fact they they travel light minutes in seconds., and move faster then ships at FTL.

Are you honestly taking stock footage over common feats?

Immaterial. In your quotes the crew speak of what they knew of the time period in question, of spy sats and radar not uber future tech.

It's their past, none of it is uber tech because it is what was always there. It would seem like uber tech to us, but Star Trek Earth has always had better tech then it's real world counter part even in TOS.

There is also evidence that Knight Rider Earth is Star Trek Earth. ^_^
http://www.poobala.com/standteam.html

Which was preplanned and very well may not have required anything more than spoofing radar.

Why would it matter if the E-D planned to sit in orbit over a planet? The problems would be the same.

A civilization about to build it's first warp drive would have better options then just electromagnetic sensors. They most certainly would have gravity sensors for example.

Janeway spoke of modulating the shields as well and I'm perfectly fine with it being an alteration in the computer's controls of the shield harmonics or what have you but its a far differnt cry from merely raising shields and your are defautly invisible to radar.

Where do they have ECM in the visual wavelengths?

"Tomorrow is Yesterday"

SPOCK: We've achieved a stable orbit out of Earth's atmosphere. Our deflectors are operative, enough to prevent our being picked up again as a UFO. And Mister Scott wishes to speak to you about the engines.

Then there is the fact the Voyager crew altered the shields on a shuttle to make it look like a fighter.

Lets see they perfected FTL drives, anti-gravs, artifical intelligence, energy weapons, freaking death stars and the industrial hurdles it takes to building something of that magnitude but I guess anything above radar just kicked their rumps. :)

Neo BattleStar Galactica has something that seems to be comparable to modern radar.

Again why should we assume that just because they have certain super seeming tech that they should be super in all ways for no reason? Super tech can often be chalked up to some fictional material for example. I suggest you read about a story called "The Road not taken".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_N ... ort_story)

I'm not saying Star Wars is the greatest sensors wise but they have them...give me until tomorrow and I'll see what I can dig up.

Star Wars for example has unreliable and short range magnetic field sensors, infrared sensors, something like radar, and visual sensors as standard during combat. They seem to favor the human eye as the targeting system of choice though for some reason.

One really strange thing about Star Wars is that they have an oddly large number of Stone age seeming cultures/nations who are seemingly an important part of the Republic. Ryloth possibly being one such near stone age culture.

40k is middle ages in space, its their thing.

I'm well aware of that, but my point is that the use of even super-human slaves limits the effectiveness of the ships.

Being middle ages in space does not excuse the horrible design that is the bolter. Gyro-jet weapons are not good for close combat from what I've read. Something like a PAW-20 or XM25 would be better, and that is what the they was in the Fire Warrior video game.

Bolter from the Fire Warrior video game
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4BD8uiT ... re=related

PAW-20(a weapon fit for a space marine)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu87AxzBf3Y

Gyro Rocket Pistol(as I understand it this is what a bolter is suppose to be)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpOcdyxvUvc

Reading the minds of two random terrorists is a far cry from picking anything out of the mind of Palpy. As well I was also talking about the ability to lift things up and hurl them with the power of your mind or peer into the future.

Having never met them before she walked into the transporter room, and knew exactly what they planed to do. That is light years beyond what forces powers can do, and she does it to everyone short of two races If she could not read a human then she would know something is wrong.

Force TK is not a free action. It takes effort, and lots of concentration. It's nothing that is unusual in Star Trek.

Force precog wank is tiring to hear because force visions are unreliable at best. Jedi actually say the force is unreliable, and Palpatine was reckless.

He implanted a suspicion they were escaping far from mind controlling the guy and its an ability we seldom seen since.

Your point? No jedi or sith have ever been able to do such a thing to my knowledge, and Spock is not all that powerful.

Lightyears for Vulcans in the episode with the giant space Ameba. But that was during a very dramatic and fatal experiance.

That would put weak Vulcan like Spock on par with one of the most powerful Jedi ever.^_^

The issue is they don't use their tech that way, it doesn't occur to them to alter themselves such and generally they find the idea morally repugnent.

Titan's turn is done manually. think about the reflexes the standard federation shuttle pilot must have. it kind of reminds me of that run Dr. Mckoy took in that movie.

JELLICO: Then you must've done Titan's Turn. 

LAFORGE: Oh, yeah. You set a course directly for Titan, hold it until you're just brushing the atmosphere, throw the helm hard over and whip around the moon at point seven c. 

JELLICO: And pray like hell nobody saw you.

Why the implant is so impressive is never made clear.
"End Game"

EMH: My scans of the Admiral's cerebral cortex turned up something interesting,

JANEWAY: What is it? 
EMH: I'm not sure. I've never seen this kind of implant before.

JANEWAY: Alien technology?

EMH: The microcircuitry has a Starfleet signature.

ADMIRAL: Of course it does. 

EMH: Admiral?
ADMIRAL: You invented it, twelve years ago from my perspective.

EMH: I'm sorry, Admiral, I didn't realise.

ADMIRAL: What, that I was eavesdropping? I may be old, but my hearing's still excellent thanks to your exemplary care over the years.

EMH: So, this implant I'm going to invent. What does it do? 

ADMIRAL: It's a synaptic transceiver. It allows me to pilot a vessel equipped with a neural interface.

EMH: Fascinating. Tell me, what other extraordinary breakthroughs am I going to make?

Demi-gods are all over the place yes but it was argued the Federation had trillions of lifeforms better than jedi. Not that there were would be gods floating through the cosmos who could destroy the Empire with a thought.

And we already coved the fact that trillions is likely an exaggeration, and that federation psychics are at least as good as jedi. The Federation has planets worth of being that are par with even high end force users like Aniken, Yoda, Ahsoka, and Obi won.

Not every jedi has equal powers. Some are better at certain things others are really good at hacking people to death with glowing sabers of doom.

Given Star Wars focuses on only the most powerful of the powerful force users we can safely assume most force users are less capable then the ones we see.

The fact that you don't need force training to deflect blaster bolts really makes it clear that jedi aren't that uber in close combat.

Yoda was also nearly dead then to be fair. He did a little better in AOTC.

Yoda again struggled to lift that hunk of metal in AOTC

Yoda and Palpatine going all out at the end of ROTS showed both struggling to move the senate seats.

Yoda then again struggles to lift the X-wing in ROTJ.

We have a pattern

Oh I'm not in a much better position than you but on a basic scale they can make your head explode with a thought. Neither Vulcans nor betazoids can do this as far as I know.

The problem is that anyone with TK can in theory make someone's head explode with a thought. It tells us nothing of the limits, and it doesn't seem to be used often in 40K.

I'm not disagreeing that psi-capable races exist. My arguments are what is the basis for Trillions and that a race like the betazoids occupy only a single niche of what a jedi can in theroy do.

I didn't read trillions as literal, but rather hyperbole in the post.

Unless we know the population of the federation we can't know how many psi powered individuals the Federation has. We know the number is likely in the billions at least, and tat even humans have psychic powers in Star Trek as every human is tested for psychic powers, and psi powers are so common and well documented that tricorders scan for psi energy.

In theory jedi can do a lot, but they rarely do use their powers when they logically should, and those of any relevance only seem to number in the thousands.

Where no Man has Gone Before

SPOCK: Swept past this point, about a half light year out of the galaxy, they were thrown clear, turned, and headed back into the galaxy here. I'm not getting it all. The tapes are pretty badly burned. Sounds like the ship had encountered some unknown force. Now, orders, counter orders, repeated urgent requests for information from the ship's computer records for anything concerning ESP in human beings. 

KIRK: Extrasensory perception. Doctor Dehner, how are you on ESP? 

DEHNER: In tests I've taken, my ESP rated rather high. 

KIRK: I'm asking what you know about ESP. 

DEHNER: It is a fact that some people can sense future happenings, read the backs of playing cards and so on, but the esper capacity is always quite limited.

The Muse
O'BRIEN: I'll tell Odo to have his search parties reconfigure their tricorders to scan for psionic energy.

Besides, everyone knows there is no such thing as force powers in Star Wars. It's all just the clever application of common technology.^_^
http://www.rogermwilcox.com/force_skeptics.html

Which is a "god" like being as far above Troi as a human is above an ant.

I think we have very different standards as to what god like is. Armus was extremely limited as to what it could do or it would not have been in need of a ship. What does god need with a star ship?

Refresh my memory what did the second camp of Ocampa accomplish with their mind.

Tanis taught Kes how to control life force, and talked about living in a subspace layer that was pure thought. It seems Kes's abilities are not abnormal at least if they get training. A list of Ocampa psi powers reads like a list of force powers turned up to 11.

I would say poorly researched with basic facts misremembered from episodes coupled with highly selective and maximalistic interperations of everything Trek based.

I stand by unsourced with a bit of hyperbole thrown in.

[Lucky]

Mass and momentum have been problems, at least in certain circumstances for Trek ships, and ship's impulse engines and thrusters do operate on a forum of reaction drive. In "The Paradise Syndrome" [TOS, Season 3], the E-1701 has issues with trying to move a nearly Earth's Moon-sized asteroid, while much later in "Booby Trap" [TNG, Season 3] the E-D not only applies thrust from the impulse engines to overcome momentum and give enough velocity to escape the asteroid field and the aceton energy assimilator traps, but the combined gravity of the asteroids slows the ship down enough that Picard has to make use of one to provide a gravity-assist swing of a large asteroid.

Momentum is an issue in TNG's "Evolution" following the unintentional disruption of the E-D's systems by the nanites, the ship is left out of control and fallng towards the matter stream flowing between a red giant star and it's companion neutron star. The crew manage to regain control of the E-D enough to point the main impulse engines into the velocity vector to try and prevent the collision, but the inertia is too much, and the ship hits the matter stream. Fortunately the crew is able to raise shields.
-Mike

Could you provide some quotes, or video clips? I don't recall it being clear as to how thrust was being created in those episodes, and we know the federation uses anti-gravity thrusters.

Coda
COMPUTER: Warning. Hydrazene gas leak.
JANEWAY: Altitude twelve kilometres, hull temperature four thousand degrees. We have to reduce speed. 

CHAKOTAY: I'll try the emergency anti-grav thrusters. Kathryn. Kathryn! Kathryn! Kathryn! No!

[sonofccn]

@Lucky

Response noted, reply in 24-48 hours.

[Praeothmin]

you'll have to do the same with Star Wars. For example, with a Death Star that does pop planet purely on DET

Except that even in the movie, we clearly see two explosions, and the planet's debris field isn't big enough, and the planet's debris does not act like it should had it been fired upon by a shitload of direct energy...

[Lucky]

@Lucky

Response noted, reply in 24-48 hours.

No need to rush.

[sonofccn]

Your entire point is a red herring? Your point has nothing to do with combat.

My point would be that Star Trek wasn't made to be realistic. That the things which shaped it were culled from older phases and events from our own history no more "accurate" than Lucas's pulling old Buck Roger seriels and WWII battle footage. That to argue Trek is more "realistic" is fool hardy.

That of course leads to shorter ranges since everything will be lower quality, far less powerful sensors

1. You are assuming a notable and revelant drop, by what are you basing this off of? What evidence?

2. As well I only need for it to be able to target and hit an enemy warship at the combat range said target can hit it.

and adds supply lines that are easily disrupted.

Supply lines are a fact of war, have been since time immortal and they are not more easily disrupted than my enemies. Perhaps stronger, I can spare larger more powerful ships for convoy duty because they are not all tied up on the front.

I'll assume that by gunboat you mean a small but heavily armed craft like a Defiant class or possibly the Prometheus class. The Defiant class was an attempt to squeeze the most power possible into the tiniest frame possible, and still have it be effective.

The Defiant is a destroyer to the Galaxy's cruiser. By Gunboat I mean something like this. Small, expendable craft packing high firepower.

While I hate using this line of reasoning: Why does no one in Star Trek use cheap expendable auxiliary craft in combat?

Since we are arguing about the small auxiliary Federation fighter this line makes no sense.

While most powers might see it as wasteful to throw lives away in such craft the Dominion would see not have such a problem, but they still don't use such ships. If even those who would happily throw the lives of their solders away for any advantage don't use them then we may assume the idea does not work well for reason that may not appear on screen. Jem'hadar are easily made in days, blindly loyal, and happy to die.

Immaterial. We are arguing the feasibility of "strike craft" in the Trek verse and if it is "realistic" or not. That any races choose to use them or not is largely academic to our purposes. I merely have to show evidence that my interpretation is soundly supported by the available evidence.

Where are you getting the idea that the Federation groups smaller ships with larger ones, and that they move in to slug it out with the other guy?

All of DS9 battles where Galaxy class starships would mingle with Mirandas and Excelsiors and go toe to toe with the Dominon opposites?

What makes you think the visual effect teams gave a rat's ass about what is written in the scripts

Because its their job? I'm not a FX guy but I imagine completely disregarding the scripted events would tend to get you fired.

Just glancing at a number of scenes you will see the VFX crews didn't care about the scripts.

What scenes?

Fighters are unrealistic often because of point defense systems exist in Star Trtek.

Sigh. So I reinforce that I was speaking of the "real world" and a possible advantage that Therumancer was disregarding in pronouncing "strike craft" useless and you go off on a tangent about Trek's point defense systems. Very well. All I need to point out the one time we saw state of the art "fighters" engaging a modernish ship they did not overwhelmingly destroy the "strike craft" while their hull was pitted.

In the "Wounded" a SINGLE photon torpedo destroys a Shielded Cardasian warship, and the Nebula had taken a direct hit from the Cardasian phasers.

Not quite. From the episode

DATA
The Phoenix is beginning evasive
maneuvers.
(beat)
It has positioned itself outside
the weapons range of the opposing
ship.
(beat)
The Phoenix has powered up with
both phasers and photon
torpedoes.
(beat)
The Phoenix is firing photon
torpedoes.

On the screen, the Phoenix has turned and is engaged
with the warship. The blips flutter a moment on the
screen... and then the Cardassian ship simply
disappears.

So we are looking at four or more torpedoes to destroy a solitary warship not just one torpedo.

In "Sacrifice of the Angels" we see unshielded Cardasian warships of the same design as in the "Wounded" taking several volleys of fighter grade weapons, returning fire, and destroying a fighter with every other shot.

Actually was the destroyed warship in the Wounded identified as a Galor cruiser I can't remember and quick check through the script with search couldn't find the word Galor. We never see the warship.

Irregardless you are comparing the performance of a multi-hundred meter long vessel to a very tiny handful of barely two digit meter long vessels. If they could replicate the instant knockout they'd be far more powerful than a Nebula to the point building anything larger than a fighter for combat would be maddenly insane.

In "The Jem'Hadar" we see a Galaxy class and three Runabouts engage three Jem'Hadar attack ships. The Runabouts are useless.

The Galaxy class was useless as well. Should we assume the Galaxy class is not an effective ship as well?

Where does that number come from?

I pulled it from memory alpha, could be taken from a technical manual or something I suppose. I'd gladly switch over to a craft we have a canon crew number for say the Enterprise-D.

I don't recall ever seeing any sign of a crew of 50, and we often seem to see Defiants crewed by far less..

We seldom if ever see 400 on Kirk's Enterprise or 1000 on the Enterprise-D but we know they are there.

You just need about 9 to crew the bridge, and then maybe 1 to 10 in engineering.

And this is from which source again?

The problem is that ships/fighters are a lot more then just hulls. You've got warp cores, impulse engines, weapons....

Which no more invalidates anything than the PT boats needing engines invalidated them.

We know that the mirror verse chose to build a Defiant rather then a Defiant's mass in smaller ships which they had the designs for.

The Defiant is a good, rugged ship. Likely with thier limited resources it was superior than waves of "strike craft" they lacked the materials and manpower to replenish.

I'd like to see these examples you have failed to ever try to describe.

1.equinox part II

2.equinox part II

Two starships, one pursuing the other, closing to short distance.

3. Peak Performance

Ferengi attack the Enterprise thinking they are protecting something valuable while not hundreds of thousands of kilometers away

4.Rascals

Bird of preys decloak and attack the Enterprise-D at a piddling distance

5. First Contact(Movie) Attacking the Borg cube and doing it while in visual range.

None of which disproves their combat range of 300,000 of course simply that for one reason or another they prefer to close in to engage.

Phasers and Photon torpedos have always been FTL. This is like arguing that you can dodge a super-sonic weapon by listening for the sound it makes.

Actually I was refering to the actual ship. It would only have a second delay at most before the ISD sees it far from the claim that a Federation starship could simply sit too far back and plink away without being observed.

Hyperspace jumps take seconds to minutes to plot, it takes seconds to turn the hyper-drive on, and it takes seconds to enter hyper-space

Did I deny that it takes some seconds to a minute or so? However against an alert and battle ready Star Destroyer you get one maybe two shots before your range advantage vanishes in a hail of hyperspace radiation. Assuming lightspeed sensors which you have not proven.

That isn't what we see in most Sci-Fi settings I can think of. What we see generally is the "fighters" fly ahead of the carrier while the target does the same.

Even in Star Wars fighters typically close nearer to the target than their parent craft however pathetic that is, now yes Sci-fi is in love with aviation-cruiser hybrids but from what I've seen two ships will shell at each other while "strike crafts" fly towards the big ships to blast them.

Well, we never see any sign the Federation Fighters use a carrier, they have their own warp drives, and the only time we see them that I recall has them leaving a star base.

I don't recall them leaving a starbase, which episode if I may ask.

Check "Sacrafice of the Angels" again. You will note that no one fires on the Federation fighters until after they make their attack run, and when the larger ships do fire on the fighters the fighters die to about every other shot.

Which would only further support my stance, thank you.

The Federation fighters only did as well as they did because the defenders let them for some reason if you go by the visuals.

No going by visuals the fighters came in too fast, were too small and too agile to effectively target farther out. No need to imagine nonsensical slag just because it doesn't mesh with how you believe combat should be.

Ultimately the fighters are shown to score direct hits, on unshielded ships, and still can't even disable those ships

1. They were only attacking five to a ship, a pittance no matter which way you slice it compared to a Defiant much less anything else, simply to inflict damage would prove their worth

2. Since we only fleetingly see the cardassion ships I fail to see how you can make a determination on how disabled they were or not.

but a single defiant could have raped all of those ships.

No. Just no. From Defiant DS9 season 3

KIRA: Listen to me. Those three ships up ahead are going to lock onto our neutrino leak and open fire. That means you'll have to fight back.
RIKER: With this ship it'll be a short fight, I promise you that.
KIRA: Let's say you disable or even destroy those three ships up ahead of us. Fighting them at all is going to slow us down and then those ten ships behind us are going to catch up, and not even the Defiant can win against those odds.

Kira expresses doubt as to wether the Defiant could beat three Keldon warships and could not win against ten Galor cruisers.

From Sacrifice of Angels DS9 season six

Starfleet ships are being ripped apart. Defiant is under constant bombardment.)
DAX: Sir, we've just lost the Sitak and the Majestic. We're on our own, Ben.
O'BRIEN: Comm's back online.
NOG: Four enemy ships directly ahead.
SISKO: Evasive manoeuvres, pattern Omega. We're going through.
(Defiant weaves between the big Cardassian ships, pursued by Jem'Hadar fighters.)
DAX: That's one down.
SISKO: Can you shake the other three?
DAX: I'm trying.
BASHIR: We've lost aft shields. Forward shields are down to fifteen percent.
GARAK: Wouldn't this be a good time to cloak?
O'BRIEN: The cloaking system's fried.

With the fleet backing her the Defiant has been bloodied to hell. On her lonesome the Cardasion warships would have murdered her.

Think about how well all those tiny disposable ships the federation threw at the Borg cubes did.

Sigh. Once again I speak of "Reality", ie. the general case as opposed to Trek specific, and you bring up Trek again. Anyway the Borg cubes ran roughshod over just about everything.

Think about how well the Lysian sentry pods did against the Enterprise-D

They were more than a century out of date, you might as well use a Sopwitch Camel as an example of how an F-22 is too slow and easily shot down to be of use.

Think about the Nebula being able to target a Runabout in "Non Sequitur". 5,000 kilometers while trying to disable/capture.

You must prove the Nebula could shoot at this distance but say the Runabout couldn't for this to matter.

In Star Trek you are talking about sensor systems that can make out hundred meter objects at at least tens of light years.

Irrevelent. They can't hit anything but at the most infintismal fraction of that distance.

No ship I know of in Star Trek is made of mundane stuff. Even shuttles are titanium or Duranium.

Those are the mundane materials of Trek. Take shuttle crafts I think its safe to say they are each only a small fraction of the cost of the parent ship, or the Enterprise-D blew the cost of her construction several times over the cost of the show, and they come with sensors, phasers, warpdrive and all the other bells and whistles.

We've seen cheap and disposable like you speak of, and it doesn't even slow down

No we haven't. At least not in your examples. The only one that comes close would be the runabout and that was a solitary craft versus a Nebula class cruiser. I'm not arguing that a single "fighter" can bring down a Federation cruiser so the example isn't that big of a problem.

There are some settings like Babylon 5, Neo Battlestar Galactica where a humble federation shuttle can simply ram everyone into submission.

No. Really, no. nBSG has nuclear capability I believe with their strike craft capable of carrying kiloton scale IIRC and Babylon 5 similar has nuclear weaponry at their disposal. A shuttle might be an interesting problem but either verse would destroy it at some point.

The Delta Flyer's warpcore exploding was stated to threaten everything for a million kilometers, and even after using some sort of nebula to contain the blast ships 2 million kilometers away still felt the blast.

Which is a warpcore and is an overpowered example. To be threat to ships which can shrug off nuclear scale yields at a radius of a million klicks implies a very, very big bang. Doesn't mesh with the greater whole of Trek.

In "Basics, Part 1" the Kazon were hitting Voyager with flak while Voyager was millions of kilometers away maneuvering at Warp. Voyager could have done the same thing.

Which is one example. I've shown you like five so yours is an outlier.

In Generations the planet and Klingon ship were likely about eight light minutes from the star

I don't have a problem with a torpedo being capable of faster than light travel, with Mike Dicenso reminding me of photon torps hauling butt through a star, but that doesn't mean they are used at light-minute ranges or always travel at such a speed.

You provided evidence that even when firing on unshielded(lazy VFX crew?)

Or they had already blasted down the shields by the time we looked. :)

Cardassian warships that let them fire on them for no good reason(lazy VFX crew?)

No they presumbly didn't fire because they couldn't get a good lock on the fighters not that the Cardassians were delibertly trying to lose the conflict.

and to make things worse those fighters seemingly have to close to single digit kilometers in order to be in range which means that if the target's warpcore blows up the fighters are dead anyway.

So did Sisko's fleet by that logic. The two armadas should have instantly been vaporised once a solitary vessel was breeched. Since they weren't I think its safe to say we can assume the Voyager episode Drive is in error. Likely a careless bit on part of the writer who put too big of a number without checking to see if it was consistent with the rest of the Verse.:)

Those larger ships can one shot Cardassian warships from light seconds away with a good hit, and even in the crap visuals that DS9 suffered under those larger Federation ships were seen at about worse using two hit.

Same with the Federation vessels as well. Neither fleet was shown overwhelmingly superior to the other. Likely we are only catching snippets of a raging fleet battle and shields on the various vessels had already been battered down.

We know from "Chain of Command" that an understaffed engineering crew can seemingly almost rebuild the ship in days

What did they do then in the episode?

we know from Voyager that Federation ships can build their own munitions and shuttles.

We also know from Voyager that denied ports of call a starship becomes very power hungry and they had to ration energy and everything just to scrape by. A testiment to Federation forsightedness that it could survive at all but hardly proof it doesn't require a logistic chain.

Voyager also proves that generally Federation ships are insanely reliable because Voyager's hinges never once needed any maintenance

Never?

NEELIX: Well, you're not alone. None of the crew seemed especially enthusiastic about it. What's the problem with er, the plasma injectors? I've been getting myself up to speed on Federation warp propulsion.
TORRES: The plasma flow in the manifold seems to be constricted.
NEELIX: Ah. Have you thought of phase locking them to the dilithium matrix?
TORRES: That was the first thing I did.

Sounds like a regular run of the mill maintenance problem.

Generally Federation ships refuel by flying through space hence the bussard collectors.

Where is it stated their primary source of fuel is through the bussard collectors? Do all starships even have them?

You're missing the point, building lots of small warp cores for example may use more resources then building on big warp core. We don't know how dilithium usage scales, and dilithium is relatively rare.

The fact they build shuttles which are warp capable implies it isn't too mammoth of a cost to build a small warp drive. Granted your limited to lower warp speeds but that isn't a big concern, you let your big ships chase after any fleeing enemies.

Expect that heavy ordinance happens to be phaser/disruptor beams which the ship will not run out of, and likely does not even have to be fired at full power.

You talked of photon torpedoes and even using phasers you are still tying up mainweapons that otherwise could be used against the rest of my fleet. As well if you can prove the Cardies were using low powered beams please do so, they appeared to look like normal phasers fire to me and I see no reason to assume they were massively dialed down.

Except the fighters lack the power to do what you plan to do

I would have to disagree.

and the Defiants can take on entire space forces in some cases

No. Ten Cardasion warships are overwhelmingly superior to one Defiant. She's a tough ship but she can be beaten.

What you suggest might work in Star Wars canon, but in Star Trek canon it didn't work that way.

Since I'm basing it off of what occured in a Trek episode I can't agree with the above. :)

Fighters in Star Trek canonly lack the firepower to easily badly damage warships. We see it on screen, and we are told this by Sisko.

No Sisko wanted to harry and blooden the Cardassian warships and we see explosions across the ship's hulls and its done by a tiny squadron outmassed several times over by the Galor cruiser they are attacking.

The Defiants would not be undermanned

Show me where its canoncially stated its typical crew compliment and we can talk.

Star Fleet canonly sticks far more crew on their ships then they need.

This is from where...?

"Chain of Command" shows you can easily cut the engineering staff by a third on a Galaxy class for example.

Cutting an engineering team while mostly not at battle is far differnt from cutting your crew in half and than going up against a far more numerous battlefleet.

Well it is implied the only reason that is all she can do is because she lacks the training, and that one person with the proper training could crew the entire ship.

Where is this implied.

Anyway, my point stands that you don't need anywhere near the standard crew size to crew a Federation ship.

To merely get from point A to point B? No. They've gotten crews down to tens of people for older vessels regulated to mudane and minor duties but that is far cry from going into battle, have reserve crews to replace fatalities, having repair crews standing by to try and patch your ship togather as it pounded over and over again.

Thank you for admitting that Sisko sent the Federation fighters to insult the Cardassians.

No. He sent them to give them a bloody nose. There is a difference.

We see explosions blossoming across the Galor hulls because the Galors are being hit with torpedos, and not because the Galors are being badly damaged.

And you can descern this how? By what criteria are you determining that these are only scratching the hull?

We also see the ships that are hit return fire without a problem.

So? Are you trying to claim a damaged ship could never, ever fire back?

You seem to think that because there is an explosion the attack must have been effective, but that is not the case.

Well if you can show me a patch where the explosions fades away and we have pristine hull beneath you will have a case until then Occam's razor I believe sides with me.

The Enterprise-D watched the fight from light years away in "The Wounded". It's just hard proof of FTL sensors.

Which is great and all but they couldn't open fire through. When you can only shoot at 300,000 KMs having a ten light year line of sight isn't all that super terrific.

Look at Generations for range, accuracy, and weapons speed.

So a nonfederation weapon against a freaking star as part of a preplanned preperation to explode said star they can shoot at light minute ranges. So being generous thats two vs all of my examples, the Sacrifice of Angels battle, the Wounded and likely just about any other episode I bothered to look up.

What we see is what has already happened.

Proof.

What pocket universe are you talking about?

Warp drive folds space around your vessel allowing you to cheat physics. One might still interact with real space but I don't think strictly speaking it is real space.

Navigational deflectors are why things like rail guns and mundane particle beams are useless in Star Trek.

Navigational deflectors protect you from stray debris yes but no ones has claimed railguns don't work because of them to my knoweldge and they don't seem to stop ramming attacks.

As well I hope you are not trying to claim light speed strenght for the strenght for debris struck while at warp, there is no evidence to my recollection that inside the warp bubble space is moving any faster than the space outside it.

A class 8 probe is the same size as a photon torpedo.

Which doesn't tell us anything. A photon torpedo is not a class 8 probe. Which you still don't seem to understand all the class 8 probe tells us is the Federation has the capability to build a torpedo that could travel at high warp speed. Stick to observed photon torpedo feats, at least than we can make guesses on what standard issue "shells" can do.

Generations.
WORF: Sir, according to my calculations, a solar probe launched from either the Klingon ship or the planet's surface will take eleven seconds to reach the sun. However, since we do not have an exact point of origin, it will take us between eight and fifteen seconds to lock our weapons onto it.

A solitary data point does not an argument make.

You haven't watched much DS9 have you? A prime example of why visuals are not to be trusted is in Deep Space 9 "A Call To Arms" where Cardassian and Dominion ships are shown to have a maximum weapons range of 10 kilometers.

Mistakes happen, what does the script describe of the scene in question.

The fact of the matter is that the stated capabilities of things in Star Trek are at times impossible to show, the VFX crew don't know what it should look like, they lack the technology to get it right, or they just don't have the time/money.

That's life. What makes it on screen is canon, if we just start picking and choosing what we like we are no better than Stardestroyer.net.

The fact of the matter is the VFX teams are often sloppy.

So are writers. Its the human condition. I mean frankly once we start going down this road what makes the writers correct? How do we know they have a better understanding of the Verse than say the FX guys who actually build it? I mean one writer might think engaging at warp at billions of kilometers against a stationary ship is a good idea without realizing it conflicts with the series as a whole. Even TOS strafed sublight targets from warp instead of blasting them relentlessly from multi-light hours.

I never claim such a thing.

you said:

Do you honestly want to go down the road of visuals are always right when Star Trek's own canon policy says otherwise?

So what canon policy places dialoge above visuals or even makes a distinction between?

It's a fact that visual effects are likely to be altered at a later point in time, but dialog has in Star Trek's history only been altered once.

This is not a canon policy. I'm also pretty sure scripts go through a lot of revision before they are filmed.

It's a fact the writers and VFX teams were limited by budget and time, and could not do what they intended.

So both groups are limited by the medium. So? That doesn't make the visuals less canon. Intent in the end means nothing only what makes it up on the screen counts.

07.10.2003
How do the Star Trek novels and comic books fit into the Star Trek universe? What is considered Star Trek "canon"?

As a rule of thumb, the events that take place within the live-action episodes and movies are canon, or official Star Trek facts.

If only the events are canon then neither visuals or dialog is canon.

That is an asinine reading of that quote. How praytell if only the events are canon but not the visuals or dialog can we know of the events?

It's to bad we only see abnormal combat.

You have provided two examples of lightminute or greater ranges. I presented four visuals showing far shorter firing, we have the Wounded, we have the Nomad example,etc. The only abnormal combat are your examples.

You want to use the outliers as the standard even when the evidence is unreliable to start with.

Then how come I have a mountain of examples showing a light second or less and you have two?

It takes place in DS9 so we can just ignore it on the grounds that the VFX team didn't even try to show thing in an accurate fashion.. You can tell by the lack of shield flares.

No. You can not just ignore DS9 because you don't like what it shows. I don't believe in strictly literaly interpetating the visuals but I will not discarde canon material because I think its wrong.

What we see is slower then light sometimes. There has always been an invisible component to phasers

When? Where?

and humans in Star Trek are super-human by our standards since they think nothing of Titan's turn.

No. We've observed them running, pressing buttons, moving, fighting etc. They are not super-human. They are bog standard completely ordinary humans with no hieghtened reflexes or endurance not found in a baseline human. At best the Titan's turn merely is an indicator of good starship sensor/handling not of humanity.

Except for the fact they they travel light minutes in seconds., and move faster then ships at FTL.

Sometimes but not always. There appears to be a time delay between firing and them kicking up to high speed or something.

Are you honestly taking stock footage over common feats?

I choose to take canon over a single event.

It's their past, none of it is uber tech because it is what was always there. It would seem like uber tech to us, but Star Trek Earth has always had better tech then it's real world counter part even in TOS.

I am going to ask for evidence for any of this uber tech, evidence for uber tech in terms of sensors and evidence that when Janeway and co say radar they really mean uber tech number six.

Why would it matter if the E-D planned to sit in orbit over a planet? The problems would be the same.

To make those modifications Voyager did? Rather than simply by raising shields they are defacto invisible to radar.

A civilization about to build it's first warp drive would have better options then just electromagnetic sensors. They most certainly would have gravity sensors for example.

You will provide evidence for this assumption.

"Tomorrow is Yesterday"

SPOCK: We've achieved a stable orbit out of Earth's atmosphere. Our deflectors are operative, enough to prevent our being picked up again as a UFO. And Mister Scott wishes to speak to you about the engines.

Then there is the fact the Voyager crew altered the shields on a shuttle to make it look like a fighter.

On Radar which is not usually refered to as the visual wavelenght/spectrum.

Again why should we assume that just because they have certain super seeming tech that they should be super in all ways for no reason?

Why assume the reverse? If you have evidence provide it until then stop assuming galactic societies haven't progressed beyond radar.

I suggest you read about a story called "The Road not taken".

I've read it. Its a cute story but it has no bearing on our argument.

Star Wars for example has unreliable and short range magnetic field sensors, infrared sensors, something like radar, and visual sensors as standard during combat. They seem to favor the human eye as the targeting system of choice though for some reason.

No. Provide evidence they use radar, not something thematicly like radar, otherwise this argument disintergrates under its own weight. You wish to claim they have lightspeed only sensors you must prove it.

I'm well aware of that, but my point is that the use of even super-human slaves limits the effectiveness of the ships.

They aren't. They rely on brute strength and firepower not finess.

Being middle ages in space does not excuse the horrible design that is the bolter.

You are talking about a society that gives its elite soldiers chainsaws and electrofied meele weapons as good secondary weapons. Logic, rationality, etc are all left at the door for 40k.

Having never met them before she walked into the transporter room, and knew exactly what they planed to do.

Yes. She could read them however she can't always pierce so deeply.

From manhunt season two

MRS. TROI
This is the most remarkable man.
I have never met anyone quite
like him.

PICARD
I don't suppose you have.

MRS. TROI
He's strong. I feel no thoughts
from him... nothing. I've never
known a man so able to keep his
true feelings completely hidden.

So finding what she presumes to be a human she finds it odd but not unduly alarming that he can completely hide his thoughts from her. Judging from her phrasing one could also assume she has met others who have attempted but merely hadn't been as succesful as the holo character. So no I don't think Troi could just walk past Palpy and peer into his mind.

Force TK is not a free action. It takes effort, and lots of concentration. It's nothing that is unusual in Star Trek.

TK is extremely rare in Federation citizens. Betazoids can't do it nor can Vulcans as far as I'm aware.

Force precog wank is tiring to hear because force visions are unreliable at best. Jedi actually say the force is unreliable, and Palpatine was reckless.

Force precog is a stated and observed power and is fully beyond betazoid capability. Any impartial comparison must at least note it.

Your point? No jedi or sith have ever been able to do such a thing to my knowledge, and Spock is not all that powerful.

Spock being the only one ever to display this power hints at him being abnormal and more powerful than regular breed.

That would put weak Vulcan like Spock on par with one of the most powerful Jedi ever.^_^

Actually it was presumbly the dying vulcans who broadcasted, Spock was merely a reciever. Obiwan's disturbance in the force line hints at a far greater ability since we have no reason to assume anyone on Alderean was projecting any thoughts/emotions.

Titan's turn is done manually. think about the reflexes the standard federation shuttle pilot must have

Very good sensors and controls on the shuttle but humans are humans. Unchanged and not super-human.

Why the implant is so impressive is never made clear.

So it doesn't exist in the "Modern" time period and the very fact it existed at all seemed to surprise the hell out of the EMH. Once again Trek people don't go into modifiying themselves they prefer to remain "pure" and the very fact that future Janeway has a chunk of alloy in her brainpan is enough to rouse the EMH's curosity.

And we already coved the fact that trillions is likely an exaggeration

That would not logically being taken by what was said.

and that federation psychics are at least as good as jedi.

A single race in a certain narrow field possibly.

The Federation has planets worth of being that are par with even high end force users like Aniken, Yoda, Ahsoka, and Obi won.

Which race again can move things with their mind?

Given Star Wars focuses on only the most powerful of the powerful force users we can safely assume most force users are less capable then the ones we see.

Even canon fodder can call on the force to move objects, Troi can't.

The fact that you don't need force training to deflect blaster bolts really makes it clear that jedi aren't that uber in close combat.

Where praytell is this stated? I don't remember a lot of people deflecting blaster bolts in the movies that weren't Jedi.

Yoda again struggled to lift that hunk of metal in AOTC

A solid chunk of metal can be quite heavy. So?

Yoda and Palpatine going all out at the end of ROTS showed both struggling to move the senate seats.

I don't recall them struggling heavily, in the same vein of Yoda in the swamp, to throw senate seats around.

We have a pattern

Yes lifting far heavier things than Troi ever could with her mind.

The problem is that anyone with TK can in theory make someone's head explode with a thought.

Neither Vulcans or Betazoids have TK and that was on the lower end of a pysker ability. On the extreme high end they are reality warpers and if discovered are supposed to be destroyed on sight along with the planet their on.

Unless we know the population of the federation we can't know how many psi powered individuals the Federation has.

Relativly speaking they should make up a tiny minority. Telephatic races appear to be the exception not the norm in the Federation.

We know the number is likely in the billions at least

We don't know. We don't know how many betazoids there are. We can not say there are X many.

tat even humans have psychic powers in Star Trek as every human is tested for psychic powers

And as observed throughout the course of Trek human psychic power on average is about 0 watts. It is a very rare human with psychic powers in Trek, far more rare than a jedi or psycker in thier respective Verse.

and psi powers are so common and well documented that tricorders scan for psi energy.

Which proves tricorders are very good not that the Federation is tripping over telepaths.

In theory jedi can do a lot, but they rarely do use their powers when they logically should, and those of any relevance only seem to number in the thousands.

And conversely the Federation has made no attempt to distinctly utilize betazoids in their armed forces. How many have we actually observed in starfleet? Is it even more than a hundred? Frankly its losing proposition. The Federation simply doesn't think along those lines. They don't fight the way you want them to fight, they don't act the way you want them to act.

I think we have very different standards as to what god like is

I put it in quotes for a reason. However he has powers far beyond a standard being and doesn't work for the Federation.

Tanis taught Kes how to control life force, and talked about living in a subspace layer that was pure thought. It seems Kes's abilities are not abnormal at least if they get training. A list of Ocampa psi powers reads like a list of force powers turned up to 11.

Quotes?

I stand by unsourced with a bit of hyperbole thrown in.

We'll have to disagree then.