Star Trek VS Other Sci-Fi unfair?

[Lucky]

Star Trek VS Other Sci-Fi unfair?

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.

The circumstances in Star Trek are similar to those from the age of sailor(as I've heard it called). The ships are often a long way from home, and at least at times can't contact their superiors when they may need to in real time

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.

1) Size matters when it comes to warhead yields, reactors out puts, and sensors in the real world, and we see the same thing in Star Trek, or they would not build huge subspace telescopes like the Argus Array.

Sensors are limited by their power out put, and how much light or what ever they can take in at one time. Bigger more powerful sensors will always be better then smaller less powerful sensors built with the same level of technological advancement.

Smaller reactors put out less power. A reactor has to be of a certain size in order to reach a certain efficiency, and a smaller reactor will have smaller reactions.. We know that a 4.2 gigawatt reactor is about as tall as Riker's legs are long, and likely about 3 or 4 feet across.
http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... ers029.jpg
http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbna ... =51&page=2
http://www.chakoteya.net/NextGen/152.htm

The Smallest warp core I know of is from the Delta Flyer/Delta Flyer II, and that thing could take out ships just by breaching near by. When it blew up ships 1.2 million kilometers away felt it so we can rule out warp cores as the Federation attack fighters power source unless you want to ignore all the visuals.

The smallest fusion reactor we see is about 3 feet by 3 feet by 3 feet, and only has an out put of 4.2 giga-watts. Now the problem is that 4.2 giga-watts is only enough to power a small phaser bank. Clearly the Federation would need to use an extremely high end fusion reactor, but that would make the fighter rather expensive.

2) The observed effective range for the fighters is no more then ten kilometers at best, but enemy range is much higher if they bother to fire.

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.

You seem to have never heard of the Star Trek spin off called Voyager where it is proven that badly damaged, under supped, under crewed ship can go 23 years with no support.

The USS Valiant was trapped behind enemy lines again showing need for supply lines.

What you suggest is that the Federation have fixed bases for the fighters to operate from, or the Federation build something like a Venator from Star Wars, and then resupply it with fighters and pilots after every mission after every mission because most of them are going to die quickly. That sounds very expensive to me.

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

Then by your standards there are no gunboats in Star Trek.

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

Given they are called Academy Flight Training Craft one...
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/File:Ac ... rainer.jpg
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Academy_flight_trainer

They appear in one battle, and never appear again. It certainly looks like the Federation does not use them, but was testing an idea that utterly failed to be effective. The Federation didn't even expect the fighters to be able to defeat the Cardassian ships. A weapon system that is only good for annoying your enemies is a failure .

Sacrifice Of the Angels
GARAK: He's hoping to get them to break formation and so they'll after the Federation fighters. He knows the Jem'Hadar will stand their ground, but the Cardassians just might get angry enough to take the bait.

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.

Well I have yet to see you prove the Federation actually makes use of a useless weapon system. How often do you think the Federation just wants to annoy the guys they are fighting for their lives with Academy Flight Training Craft armed with weapons that are nearly useless?

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

First you are using Deep Space Nine fleet battle as if they actual show what is going on, and we know they don't. They are just meaningless eye candy that makes no sense.

Secondly we only see what can be spared at the moment,. Sisko didn't even get all the ships he wanted. You are assuming there is rime or reason for why certain types of ships are grouped together with no proof of it.

We know there are Galaxy Wings and Cruiser Wings for example.
Sacrifice of the angels
SISKO: Sisko to all ships. Cruiser and Galaxy wings, drop to half impulse. You too, Commander.

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

What scenes?

They disregard the script a lot in Deep Space nine for no reason at times. Keep in mind that the script says that 500 meters is dangerously close when a ship is exploding.

- "A Call to Arms"[DSN5] (2373)
A Dominion fleet heads toward DS9, intent on its capture.  At last, the war begins. 
This, however, is an unusual example.  Damar reports that they will enter weapons range in one minute.   However, the scene immediately preceding shows the Dominion fleet approaching to within perhaps a dozen kilometers of the station.   (The problem in reality was a bit of overliteralism among the VFX crew . . . the script said the fleet was headed for the station, so at the end of a fleet flyover shot the ever-crappy VFX supervisor David Stipes inserted the station at a distance, as if the audience was too stupid to know where the fleet was going.)
• Observed Maximum Range:  10km (Dominion/Cardassian weaponry)

You'll note that we know that the ships in question in the botched scene had weapons ranges in the hundreds of thousands of kilometers.
• http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... ms_504.jpg
• http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbna ... 38&page=13
• The space battles in Way Of the Warrior. for example:
Notice how they are fighting at point blank range, and then move to point blank range
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as55NormWzg

Note how the Klingon fleet is in clear view, but the characters can't see it.
Note how the station is being swarmed, and randomly attacked, but they order to target the lead ships.
Note how after being ordered to target lead ships they seem to fire randomly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V_tp5C27TQ

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.

Sacrifice of the angels is what you are talking about, right? The scene were the Dominion and Cardassians let the barely armed Academy Flight Training Craft fire on the Cardassian ships, and at best do minor damage, and then get blown to bits by the Cardassian ships they just fired on?

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

First the way torpedos is spoken it could just mean that the Phoenix is going to use the torpedos it has on board, and does not necessarily mean it has fired more then one torpedo.

How do you figure the Phoenix fired no less then 4 torpedos?

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.

The Galor seems to be the best ship the Cardassians have, and their most common ship. They aren't going to send anything, but their most powerful ships against the Phoenix.

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.

I expect the 3 or 4 Academy Flight Training Craft to use 1 to 5 torpedos like the Phoenix did, and to at least take the target out of the fight, but we know they can't do that. The Trainers seem to be meant to kill the capital ships with paper cuts.

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

Given we see Galaxy class being effective, I think it's rather obvious they are effective ships. We have one example of a Galaxy class caught with it's pants down, but we have never seen shuttles, Runabouts, or Flight Trainers being very useful against larger ships.

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.

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

Keep in mind that Star Fleet has 3 to 4 shifts a day, and that means you only need 12.5 to 16.66666667 to actually run a Defiant if you assume a crew of 50. The problem is though, unlike the Enterprises a defiant has almost nowhere for the unseen crew to be when off duty.

The standard crews of the Enterprises includes people who have nothing to do with running the ships like geologists remember.

Did Kirk ever get replacements for the red shirts who died?

And this is from which source again?

Well I came up with the number 19 for the possible minimum crew for a Defiant by taking the number of seats on the bridge, and then adding 1 to 10 engineers because that is what I recalled seeing in the engineering section. The number is surprisingly close to what you get if you divide 50 by the number of shifts there are in a day.

If you have 3 shifts then you end up with 16.6666667 people on duty on a given shift, and if you have 4 shifts then you have 12.5 people on duty during a given shift assuming a crew of 50.

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.

They weren't so short on man power that they couldn't have maned the small craft.

1.equinox part II

2.equinox part II

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

Combat started at 30,000 kilometers with Voyager targeting the Equinox's warp core, and you are talking about two ships that have been badly damaged at least once, low on supplies, and have not been to a dry dock.

I may be misremembering, but i thought Voyager wanted to capture the crew of the Equinox?

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.

One obvious problem with those visuals is that the ships are all right side up.

How far away are the ships in those pictures?

This is going to sound annoying to you, but have you read this page? http://st-v-sw.net/STSW-WeaponRange-Trek.html

You seem to be focusing on rather flawed outliers.

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.

Star Wars for example only has ranges in the hundreds of Kilometers, and if we are being generous single digit thousands of kilometers.


We know the Federation can target FTL objects from light minute s away, and destroy them.

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.
Earth is about eight light minutes from Sol.

The planet in the movie seemed rather Earth like, and the Star the planet orbited seemed rather Sol like. we can assume the planet is about as far from it's star as Earth.

The Solar probe was going to take 11 seconds to reach the star.

Light travels about 300,000 kilometers a second

300,000*60= 18,000,000*8= 144,000,000/11= 13,090909.1 kilometers a second

The Solar Probe was able to travel 13,090,909.1 km/s, and that makes it FTL, but the Enterprise-D could shoot it down if they could get a targeting lock on it before it reached the star. Clearly Star Trek has light minute ranges, and FTL weapons that are not dependent on the ship's FTL system. The ranges Star Trek ships fight at has nothing to do with not being able to reach the target with the weapons.

We know Star Trek ships are deceptively fast since they normally seem to quickly reach high fractions of the speed of light(best of both worlds, Chain of Command), and we know that Star Trek ships use their FTL system to dodge weapons fired at them(Balance Of Terror, and a few other episodes I can't recall the names of).

Just turing on the shields actives some form of ECM(Tomorrow is Yesterday, Future End, Second Skin)

So the above proves Star Trek combat ranges are governed by the target's ability to dodge, and ECM.

Something like a Star Destroyer will in all likelihood not have ECM that will be very effective since it seems limited to the E.M. radiation, is down right huge, and not very maneuverable. It's not going to see a ship light seconds away, and traveling at 70% the speed of light or higher.

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.

I was talking about hyperdrives being used tactically. If you use your hyperdrive, you will be telegraphing that you are going to use your hyperdrive, and I vaguely recall the tactic only used once, and it was very hard to do.

What is this hyperspace radiation you are talking about? I have seen all the Star Wars movies, and most of the Clone wars CGI show, and they never show anything like what you are describing.

We know from Cat and Mouse that Star Wars ships have unreliable magnetic field sensors that have a very short range, ands. The only thing we know Star Wars cloaks hide the ship from is visual sensors. I don't recall any evidence that Star Wars uses any exotic sensor tech by real world standard, and the mark one eyeball is a very popular sensor. I seem to recall the naked eye being better then many sensor systems in Star Wars. Doesn't Princess Leia see the Executioner before the Millennium Falcon's sensors at the end of TESB novelization?

I already proved FTL sensors for the Federation. They can see a FTL missile in Generations, they watch a battle that is happening light years away in The Wounded, and any warp capable power in Star Trek must have FTL sensors or they would be blind while moving at faster then light speeds, but if you must have a quote here: Voyager: Scorpion KIM: I'm reading two Borg vessels. Make that three, four, no, five. Fifteen Borg vessels. Distance two point one light years and closing!

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.

It's actually not uncommon for the mother ships to sit back, and let the fighters do the work in Star Wars and many other series

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

Federation Flight Trainers are only big enough to fit about two people at most, and beyond the cockpit there can't be much room inside. They are parasite craft. They have to have less room for the crew then a standard shuttle because of the huge engines, reactors, and weapons.

As I recall the fleet seen in Sacrifice of the angels met up at Star Base 375, and then headed to Deep Space-9.

Which would only further support my stance, thank you.

How does the Federation Flight Trainers only being successful because the other let them land hits help you prove they are an effective weapons system? According to the visuals the Cardassians and Dominion forces just sit there with shields down, let the flight trainers land hits, and then the ships hit blast the flight trainers to bits.

The battle we see in Sacrifice Of The Angels shows that even with the enemy letting them hit unshielded hulls the Flight Trainers could not disable or destroy the target. Even when the enemy is helping them the flight trainers aren't credible threats.

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.

Except that isn't what we see. The defending force didn't even both to put up shields when they knew the attack was coming, and we know the Cardassians had no trouble targeting the Flight trainers from the video.

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.

This argument is horrible. Think about what you are saying.

1) Q Who: DATA: Without our shields, at this range there is a high degree of probability that a photon detonation could destroy the Enterprise.

Given what we see in Sacrifice of the Angels I expect the unshielded Cardassian ships to be at least so badly damaged by the Fighters that they can't fight

2) We see only tiny internal explosions. We see the targeted ships return fire. We have knowledgeable characters expect the fighters to be nothing more then an insult. What more do we need, the Trainers suck as weapons systems?

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.

Wow, I've never seen a Straw man this drastic. I must not have been clear as to what I meant.

Normally the Cardassian fleet would never be able to mass like that, and The Trainers would never have been able to take that beating.

We see the Phoenix have it's way with the Cardassian fleet to the point they have to ask the Federation for help.

We also have: DS9: Defiant: DUKAT: Are you telling me that one of the most heavily armed warships in this quadrant is now in the hands of Maquis terrorists? Do you have any idea what kind of response this will provoke from the Central Command?

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.

That would be your fualt for not being clear as to what you are talking about.

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.

And B-17 and P-51 were the most deadly craft in an old flight simulator I use to play. The Lysian drones died about as quickly as the Federation flight Trainers did, but Picard wasn't as generous.

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

Why do you want me to prove the Runabout couldn't return fire? We don't even know if that model of Runabout was armed, and we know for a fact smaller craft like a runabout, flight trainer, and shuttle pod are nearly useless in combat..

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

Sensor resolution is very important for targeting, and hitting what you are aiming at. If they can see it they can aim at it

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.

Tritanium and Dilithium are not found on every planet, and seemingly the same is true for Duranium.

Those shuttles and such are nearly defenseless, have nearly no room for cargo, and often have no weapons. Those parasite craft that are armed are nearly useless , and characters actually feel extremely insulted for being attacked by them in a war. The only thing they can do is run if they are lucky.

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.

Take your fingers out of your ears, open your eyes, and stop going la la la la as loud as you can. The Trainers couldn't even take down unshielded ships that let them have free shots. A single fighter should be able to take down an unshielded ship with a single hit because we are specifically told that it only takes one federation photon torpedo to destroy an unshielded Galaxy Class vessel.

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.

Even if a shuttle has only has a mass 1 tonne(1000 kg), and is only going 0.7c it will have 3.595*10^19 joules of kinetic energy.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=re ... calculator

A navigational deflector is designed to remove everything from the shuttle's path, we know from TOS that Star Ships can go backwards at FTL speeds, and we know from Voyager that the navi deflector protects the side as well. There are no weapons in NBSG that can defeat a navigational deflector, and the only powers who might be able to get through one in Babylon 5 with standard weapons would be the first ones. Yields mean nothing if the energy can't reach the target. Didn't an enterprise era shuttle survive a nuke?

Settings like Babylon 5 and NBSG have no way to target something that is moving at high fractions of the speed of light let alone faster then light objects as far as I know.

The stresses caused by performing Titan's turn are insane. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but at 70% the speed of light it does not matter much if you hit a solid or gas, but Federation shuttles have no problem dealing with the stresses of flying through Titan's atmosphere at .7c, and that ignores the insane G-forces.

We see ship verse planet many times in Star Trek, and the ships tend to come out of it with little damage while already damaged.(Skin of Evil, Muse, The Ship...)

All forms of shields in Star Trek do not seem to transfer much if any energy/momentum back to the projector.

So when I said a humble Federation shuttle could ram certain settings into submission I meant the shields would protect it while shredding the other ship. At the very least it could cause major damage to planets by flying through the atmosphere.

Even the weak Enterprise era shuttles are extremely difficult to damage, and well armed by many setting's standards.

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.

Last time I checked the Delta Flyer's warpcore is the only one we see explode, and many implode

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

No you haven't, and if the examples you provide are the ones I'm thinking of you missrepresented the battle..

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.

I've never claimed it is practical in Star Trek to use your weapons at maximum range, but there are multiple examples of

Torpedos always seem to go the same speed no matter what(Stupid stock footage). Why should we assume they ever go slower then FTL?

What episode was Mike talking about?

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

I highly doubt that given the orders the fighters had been given.
Sacrifice of the Angels
SISKO: Forget the Klingons. Our job is to get to Deep Space Nine and prevent the Dominion reinforcements from coming through the wormhole, and that's what we're going to do. Attack fighters, tactical pattern Theta. Concentrate your fire on the Cardassian ships, and then split off into squadrons and run like hell.

The fighters are ordered to make a quick attack, and then run away, and it still doesn't change the fact that the fighters were expected to not be effective, and visuals show them unable to destroy unshielded ships.

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.

There is no evidence of that, and there is a lot wrong with the battle in general like the lack of shields. If there had at least been a few shots i'd agree, but there were no shots fired at an obvious target that visuals showed to be single digit kilometers. The scene is just to badly done to get data from.

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.:)

This is heavily edited, but it shows exactly what Sisko was doing, and yes the visuals make no sense.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwKnvRPIrl0

Sisko's fleet had to get to DS9 as fast as possible, and could not avoid the enemy fleet that was specifically there to stop/slow him down. Why the Dominion/Cardassian fleet was so close together, and no one turns on their shields makes no sense.

The fighters how ever we only have sacrifice of the Angels, and in universe are told they are pretty much useless.

The fact of the matter is DS9 visuals don't match up with the rest of the verse at least as badly if not worse then drive, heck they don't match up with other DS9 episodes often.. Warpcores going boom have always been a threat to be near, normally they seem to implode, and normally they are not being pushed as hard as they can go when they blow up. What we see is the Delta Flyer's warpcore lose containment when it is being pushed as hard as it can be.

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.

The problem with your argument is that we should see the first wave of fighters make their first attack, and we have no reason to believe otherwise, and besides no one has shields up so why should we believe what we see is accurate?

What did they do then in the episode?

It's the famous 4 lights episode.

Picard goes off on a dangerous mission because the Cardassians are acting up, and possibly designing some really dangerous weapon that he is somehow uniquely suited to destroy.

Picard's replacement starts making all kinds of sudden and seemingly unneeded changes just before a possible war breaking out, acts like an ass, and does some seemingly conflicting/insane things like below.

JELLICO: Power transfer levels need to be upgraded by twenty percent. The efficiency of your warp coils is also unsatisfactory. 

LAFORGE: Coil efficiency is well within specifications, Captain. 

JELLICO: I'm not interested in the specs, Geordi. The efficiency needs to be raised by at least fifteen percent. 

LAFORGE: Fifteen percent. 

DATA: That is an attainable goal, but it will require realigning the warp coil and taking the secondary distribution grid offline. 

JELLICO: Very good, Data. That's exactly what I want you to do. 

LAFORGE: If we take this grid offline, we're going to have to shut down exobiology, the astrophysics lab and geological research. 

JELLICO: We're not on a research mission. Get it done in two days. 

DATA: I believe that is also an attainable goal. If we utilise the entire Engineering department, there should be sufficient manpower available to complete the task. 

LAFORGE: Sure, if everybody works around the clock for the next two days. 

JELLICO: Then you'd better get to it, Geordi. It looks like you have some work to do. Data.


LAFORGE: Commander, he's asked me to completely reroute half the power systems on the ship, change every duty roster, realign the warp coils in two days, and now he's transferred a third of my department to Security. 

RIKER: If it makes you feel any better, you're not alone. Captain Jellico has made major changes in every department on the ship. 

LAFORGE: Yeah, well, I don't mind making changes and I don't mind hard work, but the man isn't giving me the time I need to do the work. Someone's got to get him to listen to reason.

Somehow in spite of only having 2 thirds of his standard number of engineers he still got the job done, and seemingly got the normal maintenance done as well. Star Fleet engineers are gods like.

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 was only suppose to be taking the proverbial three hour tour, was not fully crewed, and was seemingly not fully supplied.

Considering the crew could just set down on a planet, and could fabricate, and install new warp coils would indicate that they can rebuild just about anything on the ship if they can get the raw materials. Sure it took a kiloton of a rare mineral, but they did it.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/File:Sh ... rpcoil.jpg
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Gallicite

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.

No, the hinges on Voyager are never talked about, and seemingly never damaged. They logically should be the thing on the ship most likely to break, but they never failed, and seemingly never need any type of maintenance. It's a joke.

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

Do you want quotes, or will Memory Alpha be good enough?
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Bussard_collector
They are designed to suck up large quantities of gas. Simple logic dictates they are used for collecting hydrogen, and we are specifically told they are doing just that a few times.

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.

Last time I checked not all shuttles were warp capable.

The problem is warp drives at least the version Voyager had seemed to require rare and exotic materials. They were only able to find a kiloton of the stuff that makes up the warp coils on one planet They are hardly expendable craft.

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.

You are suggesting that the federation make fighters in place of actually useful and effective ships. If they waste time and resources on what is at best a mild distraction they can't build the useful ships. On top of that you want to waste larger amounts of resources building carriers that aren't meant for battle, and you want to build easily targeted bases. Those nearly useless fighters you are so in love with are resource hogs while those capital ships can take care of themselves nearly indefinitely.

I would have to disagree.

You can disagree all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that you have no evidence that the fighters in Star Trek are practical, and we have hard evidence fighters in Star Trek are useless. The way they are used in DS9 proves that the UFP would have been better off just making more torpedos.

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

I guess that's why the Cardassians shit themselves at the prospect of facing a single defiant. You seem to love trying to portray the outlier as the standard.

Your talking about Sacrifice of the Angels, and at a point were the Defiant had already taken massive damage, correct?

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

No you are doing what STSW does, and that is ignore the evidence you don't like.

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.

You've never seen Sacrifice of the Angels I take it, or you would not be saying the above because that isn't what happened. Sisko sent the flight trains knowing they were worthless, and wanted to annoy/insult the Cardassians, it's bluntly stated in the episode.

The explosions we see are the weak and useless torpedos the flight trainers are firing, and not the Cardassian ships.

The Flight trainers only did as well as they did because the defending fleet let them.

There were multiple waves of flight trainers.

There is about 12 flight trainers per formation. There were about 4 or 5 waves of fighters. That's about one defiant worth of flight trainers, about a Defiants worth of crew according to memory alpha, and they couldn't kill one Cardassian war ship, and to top it off 48 fighters is the lowest number there possibly could be..

I suppose we can chalk up both sides not just launching torpedos in the enemies direction to VFX screw up since the visuals don't make sense with well known capabilities on both sides.

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

We are never told how big the standard crew of a defiant is. We know for a fact that only a third or forth of the crew will be on duty. Technically you only need the bridge crew to fly the ship. A Galaxy Class only needs a crew of 4 or 5 if the battle bridge is any indication.

This is from where...?

Everting can be run from the bridge of the ship, and a Galaxy class battle bridge has 4 consoles, and a place for the captain. Many if not most of a Galaxy class's crew are pure science officers.

Voyager was not fully crewed, and had entire decks turned off.

It seems like there was at least one episode of DS9 where only the main characters take out the defiant. You only need the engineering teams if something breaks, and only part of a crew will be on duty at any given time.

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.

The engineering department's staff were cut while they had an insanely heavy work load as shown above. The third of the engineers had been transfered to security(which may explain why many security officers in star trek aren't that good).

Where is this implied.

Remember Me
CRUSHER: Computer, we are going to apply precise diagnostic methodology. Once we've cataloged the symptoms, we will proceed to determine the illness, and find the cure. We will start with the assumption that I am not crazy. If I am, it won't matter one way or the other. Computer, read the entire crew roster for the Enterprise. 

COMPUTER: Doctor Beverly Crusher. 

CRUSHER: Have I always been the only member of the crew of the Starship Enterprise? 

COMPUTER: Affirmative. 

CRUSHER: If this was a bad dream, would you tell me? 

COMPUTER: That is not a valid question. 

CRUSHER: Like hell it's not.
[Corridor]
(checking all the rooms she passes) 

CRUSHER: What date did I report on board? 

COMPUTER: Stardate 41154. Fourteen hundred hours, three minutes. 

CRUSHER: That sounds about right. Computer, is there more than one USS Enterprise? 

COMPUTER: This vessel is the fifth starship to bear the name USS Enterprise. It is currently the only one in service. 

CRUSHER: What is the primary mission of the Starship Enterprise? 

COMPUTER: To explore the galaxy. 

CRUSHER: Do I have the necessary skills to complete that mission alone? 

COMPUTER: Negative. 

CRUSHER: Then why am I the only crew member? Aha, got you there. 

COMPUTER: That information is not available.

If one person had the proper training they could single handedly run the entire Enterprise-D, but realistically no one person will have the needed training.

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.

There are only five seats on the battle bridge of the E-D. You likely only need 4 or 5 to fly a defiant as well.

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

GARAK: He's hoping to get them to break formation and so they'll after the Federation fighters. He knows the Jem'Hadar will stand their ground, but the Cardassians just might get angry enough to take the bait.
It's bluntly stated that Sisko expects the flight trainers to merely ager the Cardassians.

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

We can tell that the Cardassian ships are not being badly damaged because they don't explode, have large hole in them, and shoot the crap out of the flight trainers.

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

If the flight trainers were effective then the unshielded Cardassian ships would have been so damaged that they would not be able to return fire. It only takes one UFP torpedo to destroy a Galaxy class, and the same is true for a Galor.

A paper cut is annoying, but I'm in no danger of dyeing. Slash my belly open, and I'm out of the fight and likely going to die.

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.

You 're the one making the claim that the fighters are effective, but you are right now admitting that you lack the evidence?

The funny thing is the flight trainers are suppose to be using quantum torpedos as I recall.

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.

And what does sensor range have to do with weapons range which has been confirmed to be at least in the low millions of km?

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.

All your examples have flawed(to put it nicely) visuals, and you at least once misrepresented a battle. Your credibility is pretty low at the moment.

Sacrifice of the angels has flawed visuals to the point of being useless. No one has shields up for no apparent reason for example, the ships are to close together to for fill their stated mission of stopping Sisko...

One of your examples is a Ferengi marauder which according to Quarck is not a war ship, and we know next to nothing about.

Why should I except your suspect evidence? You have not proven those scenes are accurately representing what is going on.

You seem to be confusing effective range with maximum range. Things like ECM which is heavily used(just turn on shields at worst), and the targets ability to maneuver limit ranges in Star Trek. There is no reason to assume effective ranges seen in Star Trek would be the effective ranges against other settings. You can keep trying to low ball combat ranges in Star Trek but that will just make you look like an idiot.
http://st-v-sw.net/STSW-WeaponRange-Trek.html

Proof.

I've already proven that Federation Torpedos and Phasers are FTL You on the other hand have not proven that their speed varies.

You can not see an object that is traveling at faster then light speeds until after it reaches you if at all for the same reason it is impossible to hear a super sonic thing go by. Therefore we are seeing the effects of phasers/torpedos/disrutors after they have hit and done their thing at least on the capital ship scale. Just seeing an object moving near the speed of light would be difficult at best.

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.

That's not how warp tends to be describe though.

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.

Your knowledge of Star Trek has repeatedly been shown to be poor.

Aside from the obvious impulse drive propelling the ships easily to 70 to 80 % of the speed of light in atmosphere we have quotes that specifically state what will happen if a ships hit things at warp.

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.

I could have sworn I posted this quote in this thread already, and you ignore the quote from Chain of Command... What ever your point of view the navigational deflectors are a very good defense against any unguided object.

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.

You right, a class 8 probe is very different from a torpedo in that a torpedo has everything on the inside while the only class 8 probe I know of had a person inside with life support.

A solitary data point does not an argument make.

Now your memory is going.

Two missle/torpedos that are FTL from Generations and neither launched from something at warp, They also seem to have ranges in excess of those seen in The Wounded.

we have the class 8 probe that is FTL launched from a Star Base.

We have Basics which has both Federation and Kazon torpedos as FTL with at minimum millions of kilometers range.

We have many battles fought at warp.

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

DS9 visuals have so many mistakes that most people ignore DS9 visuals, but you've never watched it or much of Star Trek from what I'm reading in this thread.

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 events are canon. There is a difference between the events and what is shown on screen.

The VFX teams at their best aren't trying to be 100% accurate, and because of this you can twist visuals to mean nearly anything you want them to mean.

The dialog tends to be the closest thing to what the author's intent can be. The characters should know what their equipment can do after all. While one comment may not necessarily be reliable similar statements backing each other up is.

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?

The writers are the guys who actually create the universe, and the VFX teams are suppose to do what they say basically.

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.

You lost me, what are you talking about?

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?

You are making things up now since that in no way says what you claim, and you even admitted that visuals are not always correct.

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

No I quoted the Star Trek canon policy, and it says that neither dialog or visuals are canon. Only the EVENTS are canon.

You are failing at simple logic here. If you have proof that certain sources of information can be drastically inaccurate then that source is secondary to the one that is more consistent. Visuals are all over the place, but dialog is more consistent.

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.

It means we don't see what's actually going on because of it. Hence why event are canon, but not the details.

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?

The event is not the detail that you have admitted can be extremely flawed. The events are the plot, the big picture, the general story line. The events are never wrong, but the details can be, and the dialog and visuals(meaning special effects) are the details.

Star Trek is like a docudrama or docufiction, hence the events are not exactly what is shown on screen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docudrama
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docufiction

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.

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

Shorter ranges do not disprove a maximum range that is observed multiple times. I have clearly been saying that Star Trek has repeatedly shown ranges in the Billions of kilometers, but does not use them in combat. Just because ships fight at shorter distances dose not in any way disprove the much longer ranges that could be used against other settings.

You on the other hand have been arguing(weather you realized it or not) that because there is evidence of shorter ranges used in combat these longer ranges don't exist That has to be one of the most asinine arguments I've ever heard..

ECM and maneuvers near or beyond the speed of light makes hitting things very hard. A large number of settings would not be able to effectively use ECM or dodge

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.

Fine, but then you need to prove there aren't any massive goofs like in Sacrifice of the Angels, The Die is Cast, A Call To Arms....

When? Where?

TOS, The Omega Glory
A phaser beam hits a computer near Spock, and he is badly hurt. It was some sort of radiation poisoning type thing.

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.

If reflexes didn't matter then Jellico wouldn't have cared who was piloting the shuttle.

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.
.7c = 70% the speed of light in a vacuum = about 210,000 km/s
Titan's upper atmosphere is about 975 km from it's surface
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCTmv-9GkE

We have Picard dodge a conspicuously slow seeming phaser beam in "Conspiracy".

Dr.Mckoy seemingly ran something like 60 miles an hour in Star Track 5

In "Remember me" Dr.Crusher's subconscious creates a world based on her fears by manipulating a warp bubble she is trapped in.

Wesley Crusher can manipulate warp fields with his mind to the point of seemingly stopping time.

Then we have humans piloting ships while at FTL speeds.

Wesley is an extreme case of normal human abilities, and we would not expect an ability that is possible not consciously activated to be active at all times. You also rarely do things to the best of your abilities.

Obviously Star Trek humans are all super human since they are all rated for psychic powers, and we have the strange warp field manipulation powers, but if all humans have those powers then they aren't super.

It's kind of fun to find evidence of stuff the writers likely never intended.^_^

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

Torpedos seemingly always move at the same speeds relative to the ships. Visuals are pretty much meaningless because of the use of stock footage, and the fact that if they tried to show torpedos moving at near light speeds we would see nothing.

I choose to take canon over a single event.

All I'm seeing you do is ignore multiple data points in favor of of not backing up your argument with evidence. Stock footage is not evidence, and we know visuals are unreliable given you wouldn't see anything. Provide some evidence to back your claim that phaser and torpedos travel at different speeds.. You seem to do the old "because I say so" bit.

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.

I'm guessing Earht advanced much more quickly in the 70s, 80s, and 90s

The Eugenics wars happen in the 90s. This alone tells you how much more advanced Star Trek is.

THe Millennium Gate to be finished in 2012.

Nomad was designed and launched in the early 2000s

Tomorrow Is Yesterday implies a trip to Saturn in the early 2000s

There seems to have been artificial gravity in the 1990s. TOS: "Space Seed"


Some things that may have pushed along human technical advancement
Roswel was Quark going back in time and crashing.

Carbon Creek crash was some Vulcans crashing(not time travelers).

You have Kirk going back in time to steal some whales, and leave behind a phaser as I recall.

There was at least one person who went back in time, and started a major technology corporation. VOY: "Future's End"

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

No matter what the ships have to be able to hide from optical sensors since we can see smaller objects in orbit with the naked eye, and modifications like Voyager did was likely just typing some stuff into a computer like we see in Descent.

You will provide evidence for this assumption.

To use a Warp drive, and not be blind while using it you need to have FTL sensors, but E.M radiation is limited to the speed of light. It would probably be a good idea to have an FTL sensor on a craft that only goes at Impulse since they tend to go at high fractions of the speed of light.

Now then, in order to create a warp drive you seemingly need to have some understanding of subspace(what ever that is), and fine control of gravity. That right there gives you sensors that that are not EM based. You don't even necessarily need a warp drive to create subspace communication systems(pen-pals)

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

The problem is that visual sensors are also what they had to hide from, and in Tomorrow is Yesterday they had already been identified visually. It doesn't make sense to hide from only one form of sensor when you know they will likely just be using optical telescopes to look for you as well. Stealth was not unknown in 1969

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

I find it a rather asinine idea to assume a group has a technology they just don't use even when it would be useful for no reason.

Many FTL systems(or at least what is done with them) do not necessitate FTL sensors, or at least ones that have anything to do with real space.

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

It's very relevant in that it is a Sci-Fi setting where most galactic powers lack even modern Earth's technological level.

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.

If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, looks like a duck, and bleeds like a duck then I highly doubt it is a lion

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

It doesn't matter how powerful your weapons are if you can't hit the target. If 40K ships are really are zipping around at high factions of c then I highly doubt a human can reliably hit the other ship, and may not be able to see anything. Really when you read enough 40K fluff you start to wonder if things run solely on belief.

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.

That is actually realistic, well sort of. Real world militaries give their soldiers knives, tomahawks, small shovels, and such as secondary weapons.

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

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.

You're kind of taking that situation out of context I think. She is talking to a friend of Picard, Why should she worry, and not being able to read someone is a fetish for her's.

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

There are like 150 species in the UFP, and we only see a tiny percentage of them.

That does not change the fact that Star Trek powers have anti-TK technologies, and a guy like Quark can spot it on sight.

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

It's a stated power humans have in Star Trek.

The problem is that this procog didn't help save the Jedi, or the Sith, and it never seems to factor in to them winning battles.

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

I've never seen anything that points to Spock be unusually powerful.

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.

Except everyone has some force power, and there are people who are "strong" in the force who never get training. The force is described as an energy field that links and is generated by all living things.

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

Titan's Turn is performed manually. What Titan's turn does imply is the likely hood of time dilation technology.

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.
.7c is 210,000 kilometers a second
1/210,000= 4.7619048E-06= .0000047619048
1 km every .0000047619048 seconds

Titan's upper atmosphere is about 975 kilometers from the surface.
975*.0000047619048= 0.00464285718

The pilot of the shuttle will have about 0.00464285718 seconds before hitting Titan, but human reaction times are about 0.19 seconds for light and and 0.16 for sound if I'm reading this right. I'm not sure even world record holders could do it.

http://biae.clemson.edu/bpc/bp/Lab/110/ ... 20Stimulus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsU5AMxvlKg#t=45s

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.

The Federation at the time of Voyager could make cybernetic interfaces. The EMH's design is somehow different from what Star Fleet has at the time in an undefined way.

That would not logically being taken by what was said.

Actually when someone throws out large and vague numbers that sound larger then makes sense they normally are hyperbole.

A single race in a certain narrow field possibly.

Standard humans can block blaster bolts just like Jedi in Star Wars.

Many races(humans included) in Star Trek have Jedi like abilities, and many surpass force users in the telepathic areas.

The one force power we see very little of is telekinesis in Star Trek, but at the same time telekinesis is implied not to be uncommon in Star Trek since characters are aware of what anti-TK devices look like. Force users often don't make use of TK or any force powers.

Which race again can move things with their mind?

Vorta,

possibly Vulcans (Star Trek 3),

Ocampa,

Platonians do to Kironide,

what ever Gem was,

possibly the Vain,

Humans after being exposed to certain things,

The genetically engineered children on Darwin station imply a knowledge of what genetic facts grant such abilities.

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

Since when do canon fodder have force powers in Star Wars? Every Jedi, Sith, and Night sister has years of training behind them, and is a rare and elite unit. There are only something like 10,000 Jedi, 2 Sith, and maybe 10 to 20 Night Sisters as of the Clone Wars.

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

It's in either Star Wars the clone wars season 3 episode 5 or 6. At least one of Duchess Satine's guard deflects blaster bolts with his staff.

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

It proves that size matters, and that there are limits to what force users can do.

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

It took a lot of concentration to do what they did, and they were both physically straining.

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

What does Troi have to do with high end force users being limited?

Give her the right drug and she would be able to throw down with the best of them.

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.

Star Trek 3 seems to have some sexy Vulcan priestesses using TK. It would certain explain Vulcan strength.

The problem is that Trek reality warpers is they can do things like make it so you never existed in the first place, or kill your entire species light years away, and nuke it from orbit is likely not to work. It really reflects badly if you can nuke reality warpers from orbit.

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

Except that humans aren't counted as psychic, but have psychic powers.

As we can't know the population of the Federation beyond the fact it has well over 9,000,000,000.

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

Even assuming only a modern Earth level of medical technology we can safely assume that each home world has at least one billion people living on it, and there has been at least one insanely overpopulated planet.

It is safe to assume that each race has at least 1,000,000,000.

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.

Where No Man Has Gone Before
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.

That sure sounds like psychic powers on the level of a Jedi to me.

40K psykers have to be extremely rare.

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

It means the Federation has extensively studied psychics, and know exactly how those powers work. The UFP can engineer humans with extreme psychic powers remember(Darwin station).

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.

How would you identify betazoids unless you were told they are betazoids? A large number of species outwardly appear to be human.

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

How do you figure Armus had powers far beyond the standard being?

What does it matter weather or not Armus was a UFP member?

Quotes?

Voy: Cold Fire
TANIS: Nearby. But she's so different from the entity you knew. He was only interested in maintaining the status quo. He kept our people servile and weak. Suspiria taught us how to develop our psycho-kinetic skills that had lain dormant for so long. We have abilities far beyond anything you can imagine. 

KES: Like what? 

TANIS (telepathically): We can enhance life. And that's only the beginning, Kes. I have to return to the station. We’ll talk again.

TANIS: And I'm sure you care for them very much. I'm sure they're wonderful people. They certainly seem that way to me, but it's time that you began to accept how different you are from them. The people on this ship, they live their lives trapped inside their primitive skulls, depending on flesh and bone to tell them what the universe is like. They don't know what it is to see beyond the physical. Touch it. This is how they know the universe. They touch the flower and nerve impulses travel up their arm to the brain, and in their mind they sense the moisture of the petals, the texture of the leaves, the sharpness of the thorns, and think they know what it feels like. But they don't. Now touch it. Reach out with your thoughts. Feel it for the very first time. Think of nothing but the flower. It's the only object in the universe. Know it. Know it in a way only an Ocampa can. Can you see it? 

KES: Yes. It's more than seeing. It's more than touching. I know this flower. 

TANIS: You can do more. Reach out, feel all the life in this room. 

KES: Yes, I can feel it! I know them all! They're so beautiful! 

TANIS: They can be more beautiful. Bring the fire! How did it feel? 

KES: They're dead. They're all dead. Amazing. 

TANIS: You felt life, you embraced its essence with your mind and then you transformed it. There's nothing else like it in the universe. 

KES: I killed those plants. Just like I almost killed Tuvok. But I don't want to hurt anybody.


TANIS: A place the humanoids on this ship call a subspace layer. A place of pure thought, pure energy. A place of the mind. Think about it, Kes. When you're ready, Suspiria will embrace you. Goodnight.

We'll have to disagree then.

Then we disagree.

[mojo]

that was impressive. that must have taken hours.

[Lucky]

that was impressive. that must have taken hours.

Likely days actually, I'm not a fast typist, and hunting down the information can take a lot longer then most people would expect, but I have other things I need t do in the real world.

It's kind of strange what you can find if you start to carefully analyze a TV show. I didn't realize the standard member of star fleet was super-human by real world standards until I started actually typing up this post, but now humans going hand to hand with Klingons doesn't seem that strange.

[mojo]

that was impressive. that must have taken hours.

Likely days actually, I'm not a fast typist, and hunting down the information can take a lot longer then most people would expect, but I have other things I need t do in the real world.

It's kind of strange what you can find if you start to carefully analyze a TV show. I didn't realize the standard member of star fleet was super-human by real world standards until I started actually typing up this post, but now humans going hand to hand with Klingons doesn't seem that strange.

i never got that kind of idea from the show myself, but what do i know? i'm the most casual of st fans. there are tng eps i've never seen, and i enjoyed ALL the tng movies. even nemesis and the one with the purple bazooka.

[mojo]

in fact the one with the bazooka and the colony of people that never got any older is one of my favorites, because it feels so much like an ep of the show to me.

[Lucky]

that was impressive. that must have taken hours.

Likely days actually, I'm not a fast typist, and hunting down the information can take a lot longer then most people would expect, but I have other things I need t do in the real world.

It's kind of strange what you can find if you start to carefully analyze a TV show. I didn't realize the standard member of star fleet was super-human by real world standards until I started actually typing up this post, but now humans going hand to hand with Klingons doesn't seem that strange.

i never got that kind of idea from the show myself, but what do i know? i'm the most casual of st fans. there are tng eps i've never seen, and i enjoyed ALL the tng movies. even nemesis and the one with the purple bazooka.

Well, I'm not really much a Star Trek fan myself, burt one thing that always bothered me was that the Federation never seemed to use their knowledge to give everyone superpowers, and that humans seemed to be the weakest, and most helpless species around yet somehow they went toe toe with species that are suppose to be stronger and tuffer, but after looking carefully I noticed that humans in Star Trek are super-human in subtle, but important ways that would give them large advantages.

[Mike DiCenso]

Well, I'm not really much a Star Trek fan myself, burt one thing that always bothered me was that the Federation never seemed to use their knowledge to give everyone superpowers, and that humans seemed to be the weakest, and most helpless species around yet somehow they went toe toe with species that are suppose to be stronger and tuffer, but after looking carefully I noticed that humans in Star Trek are super-human in subtle, but important ways that would give them large advantages.

At least Deep Space Nine gave us some kind of an explanation for it since the paranoia over the rise of genetic supermen, like Khan, made Earth and later the Federation enact laws against such things.

In RPG terms, humans in ST have always been compenstated for by being given a high luck factor, and craftiness. This is never more better personified than in ST 2009 when Kirk kills Ayel. Ayel was stronger, sure. But Kirk managed to sneak the Romulan's gun away from him, and shoot him with.
-Mike

[sonofccn]

@ Lucky. Reply noted. Response pending, estimated 24-48 through it may take longer.

[mojo]

@ Lucky. Reply noted. Response pending, estimated 24-48 through it may take longer.

for once, noone can possibly complain.

[Mith]

Hmm...

Bringing Star Trek into any kind of debate like this with other popular science fiction universes resolves the conflict right off the bat.

You need to broaden your horizons. Societies like the Time Lords against the 24th UFP would end very quickly in favor of the Time Lords. Probably before the UFP is aware it's at war.

The thing to understand is that most popular science fiction universes are designed to appeal to the "yahoo" factor with zipping space fighters going up against huge capital ships and similar things. Star Trek on the othr hand was designed around a much more realistic version of space combat, especially when you understand it.

Yes and no. To an extent, all sci-fi has a "yahoo factor" in which they pander to the audience. Some are a little better than others, but Trek is hardly the best in this scenario. It is better than say, 40k and Wars in how it handles it. In some areas.

The thing to understand is that in space things like mass and weight don't matter after a certain level of development.

Yes they do and the rest of your argument contradicts that.

Space fighters are more or less impractical, as cool as they might be, because speed is a matter of power output.

That depends on what you use them for. And yes, Trek does have fighters. A fighter is useful for many reasons. 1) it's capable of creating multiple targets for the enemy, 2) they're cheaper and faster to build, 3) they can effectively add more "guns" to your force and 4) they're often more agile due to smaller size.

The humn logic of "smaller means faster" doesn't apply, as a big ship, with bigger engines, and a bigger power plant is going to be able to move faster than a small ship with a smaller power plant. What's more a small ship having less energy isn't going to be able to produce weapons that are viable against a bigger ship while powering it's other systems.

It's called a torpedo. It doesn't matter if that ship delivers 20% of what a normal torpedo would because you now have twenty individual targets making that shot instead of one or two--and in order to destroy them, you have to waste time shooting at them.

This is why in Star Trek's canon you really don't have space fighters, though various video games and such have added them. Simply put the fighters could never catch a ship to engage it.

Trek does have fighters, though they are in a greatly reduced role. In a mass fleet engagement, you do see fighters. Because they're cheap, able to slip between larger ships, and faster to build. More so than the massive ships.

You might say "okay, but we're dealing with concepts, and obviously these other forces have things like Space Fighters whcih somehow work"... but that gets into another not-so-little point. Despite how things look in Star Trek at times, the battles are taking place at ranges of tens of thousands or even millions of miles. They aren't the kind of close range engagements that allow the use of space fighters, where guns are firing a couple of miles, or some really ginornous weapon might be able to fire a couple thousand.

There is no reason that a fighter's torpedo or phaser bank can't have relatively the same range and ability as a capital ship.

It's also important to note that in Trek, the blast radius on the weapons is also crazy. Remember that back in the original series when Kirk did that whole mafia episode he stunned multiple city blocks by sitting his ship's phasors to stun. In "The Next Generation" there was an episode whe the crew was being psychicly manipulated (by this alien disgused as a crew member that just appeared and yet was somehow accepted as having been there all along) so they would use the weapons on their ship to resolve a war between that race and another relatively primitive species. It was pointed out that a single federation Torpedo can pretty much wipe out a continent, and they could have resolved a war that had been going on centuries with a trivial effort.

That's not a blast radius. It's an area of effect. Subtle, but very different. The phasers were set so they could cover a larger area, where as a blast effect is stronger at the center and weaker at the edges.

And not Trek torpedo of a typical configuration can destroy a continent.

The point of this is that against most other science fiction universes, a Star Trek level ship, from any species, can pretty much sit back at a ridiculous range, beyond what most of those civilizations are probably capable of with sensors, and pretty much sweep their guns back and forth and kill everything. No chance of a counter attack, and really even without a cloaking device in play it's unlikely that the guys on the receiving end would even know what hit them. It would be one second their fleet was there, another second massive energy pulses come in and blow everything to chunks.

It's more complicated than that, but yes, Trek does have a rather large weapon range. Especially their torpedoes.

Blowing up planets is also a trivial matter for Star Trek, it's just that even the bad guys don't see a point in doing it (a waste of perfectly good planets that could be conquered). Indeed, one of the things The Federation does is use their technology to REPAIR planets and stars and such, with the chance of destroying them by accident in the course of the repairs being the risk. There was a whole episode of TNG based around such a planetary repair, with the central drama that a scientist from that planet working with them was due for execution due to his age, and requested asylum until his work was done (A variation on "Logan's Run"). Pretty much every ship in Trek is potentially a "Death Star" capable of coring a planet if they really want to.

Wrong. Governments in Trek can destroy planets. Possibly one or two mad scientists. But as a rule, your average bad guy can't. And even the UFP's technology in regards to restoring planets and stars are still rather in the beginning stages. This isn't something that they do on a regular basis.

On the field of special abillities, most other science fiction universes have orders of guys with special powers who are fairly rare. While they don't show up as cast regulars, Star Trek has entire races of powerful psionics like the Betazoids who can **** brains if they want to (but usually when they are around, combat isn't the episode theme).

To my knowledge, a Betazoid has never mentally assaulted someone. Nor are their abilities actually presented in any combat situation. I would suspect that they'd be of great use if Starfleet made use of them like that, but it seems the Federation doesn't.

You might wind up with like one Jedi or psionic per planet per generation in most science fiction universes, in Trek they have trillions of them living in their own little mini-empires.

Try billions. Nor are most Trek empaths or telepaths as powerful as a Jedi or a 40k telepath. The former would win 100% of the time against 90% of Trek's telepaths and the later would win 100% of the time against 99.5% of Trek's telepaths. And I only give them that much on the presumption that there's a really powerful telepath that I'm forgetting.

This is to say nothing of the rare psychic of other races as well that does the same basic thing, in TNG they had an episode called "Tinman" where there was a really powerful human psychic working with The Federation.

The kid in tinman, while incredibly capable, also had very little control. He was constantly tortured by the fact that he couldn't shut anyone out. His abilities were also not all that impressive. We know that he could sense and communicate in light years, which is incredibly impressive, but not more so than 40k empaths, which have communicated over those ranges before (and possibly larger ones) and require a great deal more mental discipline given the danger of warp daemons.

In terms of personal weapons and the general nature of technology, the reason why phasors are called "phasors" is because they use what are called "phased particles" or simply put they manipulate a broad spectrum of matter and energy through multiple dimensions. This is why a phasor is supposed to be capable of such diverse, and physics defying things, because by phasing particles it can perform limited changes to reality. This is also how phasors can be "modulated" to penetrate shields and such, by sending the energy to it's target through a parallel dimension the target doesn't have a counter-energy field availible to stop. Weapon and shield modulations and frequencies being a matter of trying to match or avoid relative dimensions and power outputs. What this means is that most defenses used by various science fiction races, either personal or on ships, are largely irrelevent. Crude energy shields and such DO exist in Trek (again think of the primitive space faring races where a couple of Torpedos would have ended a war that was going on for centuries) they just don't matter a hill of beans against the real empires that the stories revolve around. Arguably most science fiction universes would count as "primitive starfaring civilizations".

This is a whole mess of made-up technobabble.

The point is that when you look at the numbers, and the way the concepts are defined (and demonstrated in the series) there really isn't much popular televised/movie-based science fiction you can stack Trek up against (there are however things in books).

Wrong. Doctor Who for one. And not all popular sci-fi are TV based. The Asgard sure as hell would probably inflict terrible damage upon the UFP and if they weren't in shambles from the Replicators, outright crush them, the Klingons, the Cardassians, and the Romulans without breaking a sweat, should they choose to.

If you say whip out the old ship book from Last Unicorn Games for "Star Trek: TNG" and say the ship stats from D20 Star Wars, and look at what the weapon ranges have listed in actual distance (ignoring game mechanics which aren't compadible) you can sort of see where I'm coming from. The same applies to pretty much any science fiction universe that has some kind of hard info for it. RPG mechanics generally seeking to emulate stuff from tech manuals and released design notes for the canon. Sometimes they are pointless when the only measurement is subjective to the game, but if you have solid, real-world distances and such definded, it becomes usable for making a point.

I've played RPGs a great deal. Combat ranges in games are typically absolutely terrible. Only a few games such as 40k even given an inkling of an idea that the ranges aren't supposed to be at all accurate on game board terms in but the broadest sense (ie, ship A has a longer range than ship B). Guns, bows, and even siege weapons are all typically shown to have terrible ranges in video games and RPGs.

Also incidently, I'm not a huge Trek fan, I like a lot of science fiction universes a heck of a lot better than Trek. I'm simply trying to be objective. Most people who get into these things tend to think in terms of "OMG, the Death Star can destroy planets" or Inquisitors inflicting extrminatus, which are epic things in their own universes, and while they might sort of have the realities of trek in the back of their mind from various episodes they saw, it rarely "clicks" that stuff like that really isn't epic in Trek, it's stupidly easy, it's just viewed as a pointless waste.

To a degree, I agree with your sentiments. Yes, the Death Star is vastly overrated and rather laughably silly compared to what the UFP can do. And even Exterminatus varies in its capabilities, since it ranges from orbital bombardment to super weapon. It's typically no more impressive than Trek. But 40k and Trek are about even in that area, it's just that the former tends to be rather more liberal in its use than the later.

Nobody is going to level a valuable type M planet without the most extreme reasons for doing so. In cases where a planet is infested by something they can't deal with, they will usually just quarantine it and check back once in a while to see if it's gone, or if they can find a way to deal with the problem.

Correct, so long as you're the UFP. If you're the Klingon Empire it seems, obliterating the Tribble Homeworld is something they've actually done (ie, mass planetary bombardment).

[sonofccn]

1) Size matters when it comes to warhead yields, reactors out puts, and sensors in the real world, and we see the same thing in Star Trek, or they would not build huge subspace telescopes like the Argus Array.

If we were talking about counting stray hydrogen in another star system sure. But we are talking about spotting a warship at 300,000 kms and if you are claiming a small craft would be blind at that range it falls to you to prove it.

The Smallest warp core I know of is from the Delta Flyer/Delta Flyer II, and that thing could take out ships just by breaching near by. When it blew up ships 1.2 million kilometers away felt it so we can rule out warp cores as the Federation attack fighters power source unless you want to ignore all the visuals.

Drive is idiotic. Punching it into Wong's old Nuke calculator to get third degree burns at just under a milion kilometers would require 1000000000000 megatons. As well we have Contagion where at 1:33 the sister ship explodes and at 1:41 the E-D is rocked by debris hitting from said ship implying the Enterprise is within a million klicks of a ship who's suffered a fatal matter/antimatter reaction and is still standing.

2) The observed effective range for the fighters is no more then ten kilometers at best, but enemy range is much higher if they bother to fire.

Bzzzt. We see them engage at ten kilometers however so do Sisko and his ships. Everyone fought short range in that battle so you will need actual evidence if you wish to suggest these ships could only shoot at ten kilometers.

You seem to have never heard of the Star Trek spin off called Voyager where it is proven that badly damaged, under supped, under crewed ship can go 23 years with no support.

I remember they had chronic power shortage and had to put up with Neelix cooking. Hardly evidence Federation ships don't need a port of call.

The USS Valiant was trapped behind enemy lines again showing need for supply lines.

True but everyone seemed really impressed with them whole still being there.

JAKE
Look, I'm not trying to insult
anyone. Really. I'm actually
very impressed by what you've
done. I mean, you're my age and
I can barely work a food
replicator. You're operating a
warship in enemy territory. And
you've been doing it for eight
months.

NOG
It's... unbelievable. You've
spent eight months behind enemy
lines.

What you suggest is that the Federation have fixed bases for the fighters to operate from, or the Federation build something like a Venator from Star Wars, and then resupply it with fighters and pilots after every mission after every mission because most of them are going to die quickly. That sounds very expensive to me.

Eh cheaper than sending Nebulas to die.

Given they are called Academy Flight Training Craft one...
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/File:Ac ... rainer.jpg
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Academy_flight_trainer

Uh those trainers in the second link are not the Attack Fighters Sisko used. They appear to have a differnt hull appearnce but even granting you there is a flight trainer variant of the Attack Fighter all that proves is that they have a trainer variant to teach the flyboys how to fly these warmachines. hardly surprising. Anyway Sisko calls them Attack-Fighters as you quoted further down not sucicdal trainers who have no buisness in this battle so they are Attack-Fighters.

They appear in one battle, and never appear again.

Really? Wanna make a bet?

It certainly looks like the Federation does not use them, but was testing an idea that utterly failed to be effective.

That has been proven now to be untrue.

A weapon system that is only good for annoying your enemies is a failure .

No Sisko intended for elements of the Cardie fleet to break out of formation, we have no information how badly damaged the attacked ships would be. They could be out of comission quite easily what with holes blown into their hull.

Well I have yet to see you prove the Federation actually makes use of a useless weapon system. How often do you think the Federation just wants to annoy the guys they are fighting for their lives with Academy Flight Training Craft armed with weapons that are nearly useless?

The fact they used it proves they have made use of it. I don't call ripping holes in ones hull merely annoyance anymore than I consider being shot a mere annoyance and far from being useless the actual episode showed those tiny little fighters kicked cardie butt.

Secondly we only see what can be spared at the moment,. Sisko didn't even get all the ships he wanted. You are assuming there is rime or reason for why certain types of ships are grouped together with no proof of it.

Still they grouped big ships with little ships and moved into range of their enemies guns to slug it out. As opposed to sending waves of strike craft from beyond engagment range or dueling with sub analogues if they were attempting to emulate a more modern template.

They disregard the script a lot in Deep Space nine for no reason at times. Keep in mind that the script says that 500 meters is dangerously close when a ship is exploding.

Thats one example.

You'll note that we know that the ships in question in the botched scene had weapons ranges in the hundreds of thousands of kilometers.
• http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... ms_504.jpg
• http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbna ... 38&page=13
• The space battles in Way Of the Warrior. for example:
Notice how they are fighting at point blank range, and then move to point blank range
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as55NormWzg

Note how the Klingon fleet is in clear view, but the characters can't see it.
Note how the station is being swarmed, and randomly attacked, but they order to target the lead ships.

What am I looking for? What errors with the script are there?

Sacrifice of the angels is what you are talking about, right? The scene were the Dominion and Cardassians let the barely armed Academy Flight Training Craft fire on the Cardassian ships, and at best do minor damage, and then get blown to bits by the Cardassian ships they just fired on?

Yep and we disagree heavily on what it shows. I consider this fairly effective for a handful of training craft as you insist on calling them.

First the way torpedos is spoken it could just mean that the Phoenix is going to use the torpedos it has on board, and does not necessarily mean it has fired more then one torpedo.

Firing multiple torpedoes would still be the more likely outcome.

How do you figure the Phoenix fired no less then 4 torpedos?

Assumption I truly admit based off of the E-D tending to fire off clutches of four. But I freely admit we don't know how many torpedoes exactly they fired.

The Galor seems to be the best ship the Cardassians have, and their most common ship. They aren't going to send anything, but their most powerful ships against the Phoenix.

Except this wasn't an ideal situation but only the ship they had in range to intercept the Phoenix

MACET
And accomplishing nothing.
(looks at screen)
Can you show me the location of
our other ships?

PICARD
Mister Data.

Data manipulates controls, and other red blips appear
on the screen... one of them within striking distance
of the Phoenix.

MACET
You see... we have a warship which
could intercept the Phoenix before
it's too late. If you will give
us the transponder frequency.

And its just that such overkill doesn't mesh with how Cardies ships are presented later, at one shot apiece the defiant should be able to eat several dozen before needing a refill. Assuming its a weaker warship allows us to better merge everything togather. It was just an idea through, I'm not wedded to the idea.

I expect the 3 or 4 Academy Flight Training Craft to use 1 to 5 torpedos like the Phoenix did, and to at least take the target out of the fight, but we know they can't do that.

I would agree that would make them better weapons of war but for some reason they didn't go down that route. They went with weaker torpedoes but the damage they inflicted is still far outside the cost of a handful of little strike crafts.

Given we see Galaxy class being effective, I think it's rather obvious they are effective ships. We have one example of a Galaxy class caught with it's pants down, but we have never seen shuttles, Runabouts, or Flight Trainers being very useful against larger ships.

No, the point being that is an unfair example, what with the Dominion possesing weapons which cut right through shields. here @ 12:49 a runabout gets shot repeatedly by a dominon battlebug without exploding into debris, happy now?

Keep in mind that Star Fleet has 3 to 4 shifts a day, and that means you only need 12.5 to 16.66666667 to actually run a Defiant if you assume a crew of 50.

Yes and since for a tour of any duration your men need to sleep and eat they have to be rotated. So if you leave port with a crew of twelve you will have less than twelve working the bridge at any one time because the rest are off duty.

The standard crews of the Enterprises includes people who have nothing to do with running the ships like geologists remember.

Thats life. Its the best guesses we have for a fully manned vessel.

They weren't so short on man power that they couldn't have maned the small craft.

Manned and replaced battle losses. Fighters and pilots are going to die, the defiant is much more likeier than any single fighter to make it home with its hull intact and its crew alive. If you have limited resources it would be the superior option.

Combat started at 30,000 kilometers with Voyager targeting the Equinox's warp core, and you are talking about two ships that have been badly damaged at least once, low on supplies, and have not been to a dry dock.

What range it started at is irrevelent. They closed to much closer range which reinforces what I've already told you. Star Fleet or Trek races in general do not sit back at maximum range trying to snip their opponet, they like to come in close.We can spin reasons while all night but the fact is they do. Also nice when it suits your arguments you think Voyager is low on supplies.

I may be misremembering, but i thought Voyager wanted to capture the crew of the Equinox?

So? Can you not shoot to disable systems at greater ranges?

Bridge]

PARIS: Thirty thousand kilometres and closing.
JANEWAY: Target their power core.

Ah yes, aiming to take out the power core at thirty thousand kilometers. So I see no reason to close unless it something that they do.

One obvious problem with those visuals is that the ships are all right side up.

Why would that be a problem?

How far away are the ships in those pictures?

Not thousands of kilometers which is all I need to prove.

This is going to sound annoying to you, but have you read this page?

Yes, years ago. He's who got me interested in versus debates. Well him and Wong but I digress. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be looking at, he records multiple instances of firing ranges, something I have not doubted.

You seem to be focusing on rather flawed outliers.

How praytell are they flawed? And they are not outliers, they are examples that for one reason or another Federation vessels and rivals don't sit out at colosal ranges sniping at each other. At no point do I suggest they couldn't shoot farther merely that they for some reason are not.

Star Wars for example only has ranges in the hundreds of Kilometers, and if we are being generous single digit thousands of kilometers.

"'Small military craft of some sort. It's hard for us to see them now, and if we didn't have the mil-spec sensors, we couldn't see them at all.'" [ "Ambush at Corellia", p. 159 ]

"'They just performed a preprogrammed maneuver, heading straight for us. Except we're a million kilometers back of where we out to be.'" [ "Ambush at Corellia", p. 160 ]

C-canon example of sensors at million klicks, for a small ship. As recorded here

Add in a tactical hyperjump and you've closed with the opposing ship.

The Solar Probe was able to travel 13,090,909.1 km/s, and that makes it FTL, but the Enterprise-D could shoot it down if they could get a targeting lock on it before it reached the star. Clearly Star Trek has light minute ranges, and FTL weapons that are not dependent on the ship's FTL system. The ranges Star Trek ships fight at has nothing to do with not being able to reach the target with the weapons.

You have one example. Two bringing up the Voyager episode, there are more examples of sublight-minute ranges on Darkstars page plus I have an equally canon event in Call to arms showing maximum range at vastly smaller distances.

We know Star Trek ships are deceptively fast since they normally seem to quickly reach high fractions of the speed of light(best of both worlds, Chain of Command),

In the dead of space they can sometimes burn rubber but in combat when we ever have anything remotely stationary to compare them too they are not gunning it that fast.

and we know that Star Trek ships use their FTL system to dodge weapons fired at them(Balance Of Terror, and a few other episodes I can't recall the names of).

Actually TOS pushed that but later series dropped it. And then we have this from Valiant

NOG
All right. When I go to impulse,
raise the forward shields and
transfer auxiliary power to the
phasers.

JAKE
We're dropping out of warp?

NOG
If we have to fight, I'd rather
do it at impulse. At least we'll
have an edge in maneuverability.

The battle bugs in case your curious follow them to sublight.

NOG
Here they come.

The ship is ROCKED HARD and some consoles in the back
begin to SPARK and smoke.

14 EXT. SPACE - A JEM'HADAR FIGHTER (OPTICAL)

moving at impulse, comes streaking in and FIRES at the
Runabout. The Runabout FIRES back.

Which does make a certain amount of sense. Fighting at warp against a none warp target, say a small agile one, can't be the easiest thing the world to do.

Just turing on the shields actives some form of ECM(Tomorrow is Yesterday, Future End, Second Skin)

Against radar unless you have more evidence you would like to present. And it requires modification.

So the above proves Star Trek combat ranges are governed by the target's ability to dodge, and ECM.

No that is your assumption trying to hold onto your millions of kilometers ranges against a rather hefty amount of evidence of far shorter ranges.

It's not going to see a ship light seconds away, and traveling at 70% the speed of light or higher.

Evidence an attacking ship would be doing 70% the speed of light?

I was talking about hyperdrives being used tactically. If you use your hyperdrive, you will be telegraphing that you are going to use your hyperdrive, and I vaguely recall the tactic only used once, and it was very hard to do.

From ROTS novel

"[Grievous's escape vessel ...] would then make a series of randomized microjumps to prevent being tracked before entering the final jump to the secret base on Utapau."

as taken from here.

Microjumps are fully within the capability of hyperdrives.

What is this hyperspace radiation you are talking about?

here

We know from Cat and Mouse that Star Wars ships have unreliable magnetic field sensors that have a very short range, ands. The only thing we know Star Wars cloaks hide the ship from is visual sensors.

First define what you mean by visual sensors because to me that means a video camera, second provide transcripts, video ect to back up your claim.

don't recall any evidence that Star Wars uses any exotic sensor tech by real world standard

It falls to you to prove they don't since you are arguing they are limited to radar. You make the claim you prove it.

I already proved FTL sensors for the Federation.

Did I doubt that? No, I've argued they can't shoot that far which is a difference.

How does the Federation Flight Trainers only being successful because the other let them land hits help you prove they are an effective weapons system?

because they failed to shoot down the fighters and got ripped apart by them. A fairly succesful run all things considered.

According to the visuals the Cardassians and Dominion forces just sit there with shields down, let the flight trainers land hits, and then the ships hit blast the flight trainers to bits.

It is only your assumption that they sat their with their shields lowered like lambs to be slaughtered. That doesn't make sense within the context of the episode and can be discounted on that merit. Please stop its becoming childish.

1) Q Who: DATA: Without our shields, at this range there is a high degree of probability that a photon detonation could destroy the Enterprise.

Yes. One standard issue torpedo found aboard the Enterprise could tear apart the E-D. That is a fairly consistent datapoint, leading to the repeated trick of pretending to surrender and targeting by manual at the enemy ship when they try to board.

Given what we see in Sacrifice of the Angels I expect the unshielded Cardassian ships to be at least so badly damaged by the Fighters that they can't fight

They obviously fired weapons weaker than a torpedo carried aboard a Galaxy class starship which is a pity but doesn't make the fighters not useful only less useful then if they'd been properly designed.

We see only tiny internal explosions.

Small explosions? Short of the entire ship exploding I don't see how the explosions could be any bigger.

We have knowledgeable characters expect the fighters to be nothing more then an insult

No. Sisko wanted to infurate, anger, enrage the Cardies. He bloodied them with feints in hope of drawing elements away from the line. I didn't even find the word insult in the script so i don't understand where you are getting this tanget from.

Wow, I've never seen a Straw man this drastic. I must not have been clear as to what I meant.

You spoke of the Defiant being able to take them all on, of it being able to fight fleets. I was reminding you the Defiant is just a warship, not some uber-god and if you sent in enough Defiant class warships to do what Sisko intended it would have required a very serious comitment and they'd would have been a blood bath.

Normally the Cardassian fleet would never be able to mass like that,

Why praytell?

and The Trainers would never have been able to take that beating.

Actually if I had say fifty attack-fighters I think they could take ten Galors. Wouldn't have many fighters left afterwards but I think they'd could pull a victory.

We see the Phoenix have it's way with the Cardassian fleet to the point they have to ask the Federation for help.

Uh the phoenix was mostly attacking starbases and freighters. I'm not sure he faced any warships but the one battle the Enterprise observed, afterall Gul Macet wouldn't have been so surprised of his warship being trounced if the Phoenix had already eaten through ship after ship. As well what you are arguing would make the Defiant the weakest warship in the fleet since it was threatened by a small handful of such ships.

DUKAT: Are you telling me that one of the most heavily armed warships in this quadrant is now in the hands of Maquis terrorists? Do you have any idea what kind of response this will provoke from the Central Command?

No one is saying the Defiant is not a tough warship, except you of course with your argument Cardies are one shot kills, through that is a bit of a hyperbole since the Lakota was able to give her a good little scrape and she was an old refit.

The Lysian drones died about as quickly as the Federation flight Trainers did, but Picard wasn't as generous.

Not even close. Here from 0:58 to 0:59 five or six pods are destroyed. Far better than what the Cardies accomplished.

Why do you want me to prove the Runabout couldn't return fire?

Because thats your argument. That the Runabout is at a severe disadvantage range wise so provide evidence to support your assertion.

Sensor resolution is very important for targeting, and hitting what you are aiming at. If they can see it they can aim at it

No they can't. Look back at Wounded. They could see the entire battle unfurl but they couldn't engage in it. Ergo sight exceeds combat range.

Tritanium and Dilithium are not found on every planet, and seemingly the same is true for Duranium.

So? It is still used the way we use steel in our warships. It would be like complaining of using titanium in a fighter.

Those shuttles and such are nearly defenseless, have nearly no room for cargo, and often have no weapons.

The point being they carry warp drives, something you suggested without evidence is very expensive.

characters actually feel extremely insulted for being attacked by them in a war.

No angry. Hot blooded, enraged. Those are the words you are searching for. Insulted is never mentioned.

The only thing they can do is run if they are lucky.

Never said a shuttle should do anything else. But they have warpdrive and they don't break the bank. So unless you have evidence warp drive is expensive and crippling so drop your argument that it is.

Take your fingers out of your ears, open your eyes, and stop going la la la la as loud as you can.

Funny that is what I feel like saying to you.

The Trainers couldn't even take down unshielded ships that let them have free shots.

No enemy warships failed to destroy inbound fighters who relentlessly pounded their shields away and ripped apart the warships before flying back to the fleet. Pound per pound those little attack-fighters are some helluva strong warmachines.

Two can play the assumption game my friend and mine doesn't involve making the Cardies drool monkies.

A single fighter should be able to take down an unshielded ship with a single hit because we are specifically told that it only takes one federation photon torpedo to destroy an unshielded Galaxy Class vessel.

A full sized one which they obviously don't carry. They carry smaller, weaker ones. They still tore the snot out of the warships, at this point I'm not sure what more they could do to impress you.

Even if a shuttle has only has a mass 1 tonne(1000 kg), and is only going 0.7c it will have 3.595*10^19 joules of kinetic energy.

You assuming its mass isn't altered with all that mass lightening and anti-grav thrusters. A very big assumption.

A navigational deflector is designed to remove everything from the shuttle's path, we know from TOS that Star Ships can go backwards at FTL speeds, and we know from Voyager that the navi deflector protects the side as well.

It will attempt to but assuming it can't fail is a no limits fallacy.

There are no weapons in NBSG that can defeat a navigational deflector

No weapons?

DATA
That would be inadvisable, sir.
The asteroid field is unusually
dense -- the Enterprise is too
large to navigate through it
safely.

This is the asteriod field by the way. They don't appear to be whizzing at super FTL velocites unleashing ubertons of yields and yet the Enterprise isn't advised to just fly through it implying the actual shields rated for combat not just the deflector screen would have issue with all that solid matter bumping against them. Conversely you are arguing that a shuttle could effortlessly take a high speed, comparativly concerated slug to its gut without issue.

Didn't an enterprise era shuttle survive a nuke?

Quarter kiloton at a few meters I believe and it was only part of a shuttle being effectivly used to shield two humans behind it. A contact explosion would have blown the shuttlepod to hell, just like it blew a nice sized hole in the Enterprise-NX hull with one.

Settings like Babylon 5 and NBSG have no way to target something that is moving at high fractions of the speed of light let alone faster then light objects as far as I know.

Luckliy they don't appear to fly at signifigant fractions of c a lot, at least not in combat.

The stresses caused by performing Titan's turn are insane. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but at 70% the speed of light it does not matter much if you hit a solid or gas, but Federation shuttles have no problem dealing with the stresses of flying through Titan's atmosphere at .7c, and that ignores the insane G-forces.

Wouldn't know. Personally I prefer going with observed incidents things we can see or can observe the effects of. Back tracking off of a throw away line of dialoge the writer likely didn't think through can lead us far astray of the true universe.

We see ship verse planet many times in Star Trek, and the ships tend to come out of it with little damage while already damaged.(Skin of Evil, Muse, The Ship...)

They hold togather quite well but observed impacts are not going at obscene velocities. They are tough, super powerful compared to our science but not untouchable.

So when I said a humble Federation shuttle could ram certain settings into submission I meant the shields would protect it while shredding the other ship.

That would kill your shuttle and if its mass has been reduced so that it can hop about at high speed may not even make the Galacta wobble.

At the very least it could cause major damage to planets by flying through the atmosphere.

Example of it causing massive damage to a planet? Evidence it could survive the fraction of trying to fly that fast in atmosphere?

Even the weak Enterprise era shuttles are extremely difficult to damage, and well armed by many setting's standards.

No. They can take a quarter kiloton, a direct hit with a kiloton would kill them. They are armed with phase canons which to the best of my knowledge have this as their best observed feat in terms of raw damage. Not superpowerful.

Last time I checked the Delta Flyer's warpcore is the only one we see explode, and many implode

We've seen ships explode before and since, they don't normally require a million klick radius.

No you haven't, and if the examples you provide are the ones I'm thinking of you missrepresented the battle..

The five screencaps I provided you. All showing Trek ships closing to spitball ranges.

I've never claimed it is practical in Star Trek to use your weapons at maximum range, but there are multiple examples of

You have been arguing that a Trek ship will just sit on the end of its maximum range and try to bombard an ISD or some such. They do not, as a matter of course, appear to do that.

Torpedos always seem to go the same speed no matter what(Stupid stock footage). Why should we assume they ever go slower then FTL?

Because we see them maybe? I know you don't like it but visuals are canon. I'm just trying to make everything fit.

What episode was Mike talking about?

Half a life. They fly through the star to its core and restart it, briefly before it explodes.

I highly doubt that given the orders the fighters had been given.

Makes more sense than what you've been pushing.:)

The fighters are ordered to make a quick attack, and then run away,

Yes, they are trying to make an opening in the line not fight a pitched battle you know.

and visuals show them unable to destroy unshielded ships.

They mauled them pretty good, they might have finished going up after we cut off we can't say.

There is no evidence of that

They couldn't hit them for some reason and being too small and nimble makes more sense then they let themselves be killed.

If there had at least been a few shots i'd agree, but there were no shots fired at an obvious target that visuals showed to be single digit kilometers.

We have mere seconds of footage, of them being right ontop of the Cardies, and you arguing we should see them shooting further out when we don't see anything at that distance? That doesn't make sense.

The scene is just to badly done to get data from.

No, merely doesn't mesh with what you believe combat should be.

Sisko's fleet had to get to DS9 as fast as possible, and could not avoid the enemy fleet that was specifically there to stop/slow him down.

Yes.

Why the Dominion/Cardassian fleet was so close together

Because that is how battles are fought. Here they are preparing for what they thought was a Borg cube. again here is them attack the Borg in First Contact and we see multiple ships not thousands of miles apart while doing so. and here is a fleet of 22nd century warships defending Earth from a presumed Xindi attack.

The fact of the matter is DS9 visuals don't match up with the rest of the verse at least as badly if not worse then drive

The lack of obvious shield is irksome but not overly difficult to reconcile. Drive however isn't. It is an obscene figure which if true would render conventual combat useless. Just send a runabout towards the enemy and blow its tank.

Warpcores going boom have always been a threat to be near, normally they seem to implode, and normally they are not being pushed as hard as they can go when they blow up.

Your stretching. You could at least bring up the Binary episode as supporting evidence instead of supposing without evidence that every other time we see a ship explode it only releases one millionth of the power a vastly smaller craft put out.

The problem with your argument is that we should see the first wave of fighters make their first attack

We see only a fragment, easy enough to suggest other passes were made. Hell we don't even know what the attack pattern they are using is supposed to be.

and besides no one has shields up so why should we believe what we see is accurate?

Oh no. What we see is accurate. It can be nothing else because it is canon and can only be ignored if contridicted by other canon which you have done a poor job of doing. Mostly appeals to a single example and claiming the visuals are not to be trusted.

It's the famous 4 lights episode.

Yes I know the episode. I just did not see the need to dig for your evidence.

Somehow in spite of only having 2 thirds of his standard number of engineers he still got the job done, and seemingly got the normal maintenance done as well. Star Fleet engineers are gods like.

He had to realign the warp coils and reroute power to other systems which normally involves pressing some buttons. That is far cry from remodling a ship and doing it with a reduced compliment was extremely taxing.

Voyager was only suppose to be taking the proverbial three hour tour, was not fully crewed, and was seemingly not fully supplied.

You are arguing against yourself. Either Voyager didn't need supplies because it can fabricate everything easily or Voyager needs supplies because everything spent running basic fuctions can't be used for something else. Say photon torpedoes or replicators.

Considering the crew could just set down on a planet, and could fabricate, and install new warp coils would indicate that they can rebuild just about anything on the ship if they can get the raw materials.

If you can find the resources and after some time processing them sure. Seems like an awful amount of trouble through and I'm not seeing an advantage over a fleet actually supplied by logistics and doesn't have to spend time after battles hunting down stray resources.

No, the hinges on Voyager are never talked about, and seemingly never damaged. They logically should be the thing on the ship most likely to break, but they never failed, and seemingly never need any type of maintenance. It's a joke.

I assumed you meant engines which was the only way I could make your statment make sense.

Do you want quotes, or will Memory Alpha be good enough?
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Bussard_collector

Okay so Voyager does have them, still had power issues through its run so they can't be that great. Likely just a sop to get some enviromental tax credit or something.

Last time I checked not all shuttles were warp capable.

I think its safe to assume however the ones on the Enterprise which people actually use to travel to other star systems on likely have warp drive through.

The problem is warp drives at least the version Voyager had seemed to require rare and exotic materials.

Actually they saw to refit the engines they could use Gallcite or whatever its called. We don't know if thier engines are even composed of that stuff normally and once again shuttles, runabouts etc are built with warp drive meaning it is not crippling expensive to the Federation whatever they use.

They are hardly expendable craft.

And yet they lose them all the time and the Federation didn't go bankrupt. Seriously you are trying to argue warp drive is some super expensive device when they stick it on freaking shuttles and you argue for warp capable torpedoes. Take a step back and think about that. You expect a munition to be cost effective to traverse at FTL speeds but a shuttle won't be.

You are suggesting that the federation make fighters in place of actually useful and effective ships.

Can we please go back to the argument? You babbled about the high rate of fire of various ships. I pointed out that using those weapons you are taking up your big guns to swat at my fighters freeing up my big ships from taking damage. You now vault into a strawman trying to push your line that they are weak little wastlings while avoiding the arugment you are responding too. Namely merely by engaging the little buggers you just let them win.

Those nearly useless fighters you are so in love with are resource hogs while those capital ships can take care of themselves nearly indefinitely.

You haven't proved they are resource hogs and you very much haven't proved that Capitol ships can take care of themselves indefinitely in fact you are arguing against it by making warp materials very rare.

You can disagree all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that you have no evidence that the fighters in Star Trek are practical

No that is not a fact. That is your opinon which you are entitled to just as I am to mine. What is a fact is we have observed fighters blowing fiery holes into Cardie warships while they could mount no serious defense. That is a fact. The number of fighters that made the attack is a fact.

and we have hard evidence fighters in Star Trek are useless.

If you have hard evidence please present it. All you have done so far is claim the visuals are lieing to us and that they are not doing enough damage for your tastes. Short of insta killing them I doubt anything would and then you'd cry foul and say the visuals are wrong.

way they are used in DS9 proves that the UFP would have been better off just making more torpedos.

Except if they had used torpedoes from their fleet thier fleet would have been shot to pieces. So no it would not have been better.

I guess that's why the Cardassians shit themselves at the prospect of facing a single defiant. You seem to love trying to portray the outlier as the standard.

Cool it lucky. I am providing canon examples but please if you have an example of the defiant killing tens of dozens of cardie ships please present it.

Your talking about Sacrifice of the Angels, and at a point were the Defiant had already taken massive damage, correct?

I'm talking in general. The Defiant can be beaten, she is not superpowerful.

No you are doing what STSW does, and that is ignore the evidence you don't like.

Feel free to report me is you feel as such. But the only one ignoring evidence he doesn't like would be you.

You've never seen Sacrifice of the Angels I take it, or you would not be saying the above because that isn't what happened.

Yes I have buddy.

SISKO
Forget the Klingons. Our job is
to get to Deep Space Nine and
prevent the Dominion
reinforcements from coming through
the wormhole.
(determined)
And that's what we're going to do.
(to com)
Attack-fighters, tactical pattern
Theta. Concentrate your fire on
the Cardassian ships, then split
off into squadrons and run like
hell.

3 OMITTED

4 ANOTHER ANGLE

NOG
(to Garak, sotto)
Why is he only targeting the
Cardassian ships?

GARAK
He's hoping to get them to break
formation and go after the
Federation fighters. He knows the
Jem'Hadar will stand their ground,
but the Cardassians just might get
angry enough to take the bait.

NOG
(on board)
Which would open a hole we can
punch through.

DS9: "The Sacrifice of Angels" - REV. 9/23/97 - TEASER 3.

4 CONTINUED:

GARAK
What an education you're getting.

NOG
(to Sisko, off his
console)
Attack-fighters in Theta
formation. Cruiser and Galaxy
wings, at half impulse.

SISKO
(to com)
Sisko to attack-fighters. Prepare
to engage on my command.

Sisko wants the fighters to harass the enemy line. Not insult which is something you have pulled from your own bias.

The explosions we see are the weak and useless torpedos the flight trainers are firing, and not the Cardassian ships.

If you can prove this please do so.

There were multiple waves of flight trainers.

Multiple waves are eventually sent in. We are watching presumbly the first wave on some attack run and they kick the Cardies up and down.

There is about 12 flight trainers per formation.

About five or so fighters attacking per capitol ship, several more in the general area but there are a lot of warships to engage.

There is about 12 flight trainers per formation. There were about 4 or 5 waves of fighters. That's about one defiant worth of flight trainers, about a Defiants worth of crew according to memory alpha, and they couldn't kill one Cardassian war ship, and to top it off 48 fighters is the lowest number there possibly could be..

Would you mind giving me a time stamp where we see fifty fighters attacking a solitary Galor? Because I'm not seeing it.

I suppose we can chalk up both sides not just launching torpedos in the enemies direction to VFX screw up since the visuals don't make sense with well known capabilities on both sides.

What are you talking about? Sisko isn't in range to fire torpedoes, he sent the fighters in instead.

We are never told how big the standard crew of a defiant is. We know for a fact that only a third or forth of the crew will be on duty. Technically you only need the bridge crew to fly the ship. A Galaxy Class only needs a crew of 4 or 5 if the battle bridge is any indication.

I'm not sure. Are you actually trying to argue a crew count in the single digits?

Everting can be run from the bridge of the ship, and a Galaxy class battle bridge has 4 consoles, and a place for the captain. Many if not most of a Galaxy class's crew are pure science officers.

Until something breaks and your running halfway across the ship to fix a relay. Put please give me a canon statment where they state they send warships out with a crew measured in the low single digits and I'll be happy. I'll accept it. Your musings however are not canon.

It seems like there was at least one episode of DS9 where only the main characters take out the defiant.

Episode name? I mean there are a lot of episodes of DS9,without context I can't say anything on the matter.

The engineering department's staff were cut while they had an insanely heavy work load as shown above.

Which is still a far cry from trying to run a ship on a skeleton crew.

If one person had the proper training they could single handedly run the entire Enterprise-D, but realistically no one person will have the needed training.

She forced the computer into a logic error, IE she was the sole crewmember but could not perform the ship's stated duty. That in no way implies it is possible for a single person to be able to do that.

There are only five seats on the battle bridge of the E-D. You likely only need 4 or 5 to fly a defiant as well.

You also need engineering and people to replace those people when they have to sleep. Sorry you just are not going to be able to cut down the likely ship compliment to the levels you want.

It's bluntly stated that Sisko expects the flight trainers to merely ager the Cardassians.

yes angry. From being harassed by the strike-craft. Far cry from being merely insulted. If they could pose no damage, no threat why would the Cardies be angry? They'd laugh their butts of at the silly human but instead they had huge explosions all across their warships and became enraged.

We can tell that the Cardassian ships are not being badly damaged because they don't explode

Uh several ships have taken damage and not exploded. The defiant in the episode for instance. Being damaged is differnt from being destroyed.

have large hole in them

Provide visual evidence of a hull being hit and then showed not to be damaged. Do this and I will conceed.

shoot the crap out of the flight trainers.

No they don't. They get maybe one shot per pass, that is not shooting the Cr$p out of them.

If the flight trainers were effective then the unshielded Cardassian ships would have been so damaged that they would not be able to return fire.

That your assumption. This grows tiresome. Provide evidence no damage was inflicted or yield the point.

You 're the one making the claim that the fighters are effective, but you are right now admitting that you lack the evidence?

No I'm pointing to the giant explosions on the hull as damage. You are saying these are not really damage, merely useless torpedoes exploding against the undamaged hull. So prove your claim.

The funny thing is the flight trainers are suppose to be using quantum torpedos as I recall.

If you have them called this in lines of dialoge then we would have a real contridiction. Where is this?

And what does sensor range have to do with weapons range which has been confirmed to be at least in the low millions of km?

Again with this? You have two examples. Dark Stars page shows far lower showings, indeed as I said the great bulk of examples show light-second or lower. Call to arms shows extremely low range and its as canon as your examples.

All your examples have flawed(to put it nicely) visuals, and you at least once misrepresented a battle.

This grows tiresome. I have not misrepresented a battle. I posted a screencap of two warships shooting at each at piddling range which should not happen under your assumptions of space combat. I at no time offered the image as proof against maximum range only that they did not prefer it. And the visuals are canon and the "flaws" as far as I can descern are failing to meet what you expect of the episode.

Your credibility is pretty low at the moment.

That's it. I have been insulted again and again in this post. I have had evidence thrown aside because it is "flawed". Not only can we not agree on what is canon apparently but even looking at the exact same footage we come to differnt judgments. I see no more point in going forward and you have become increasingly beligerient to the point of vexing me considerably. So respond, don't respond Lucky. I will not bother further. We shall not agree on this topic and nothing I could summon up can change that. So good day.

[Praeothmin]

but we have never seen shuttles, Runabouts, or Flight Trainers being very useful against larger ships.

Yes we have, as three Runabouts were sent with the GCS to find and fight with the Dominion bugs…

told that it only takes one federation photon torpedo to destroy an unshielded Galaxy Class vessel.

And where are we told that?

but it doesn't change the fact that you have no evidence that the fighters in Star Trek are practical

Except for the fact they are used many times in battles in DS9, and you have no evidence they are not…

[Mike DiCenso]

but we have never seen shuttles, Runabouts, or Flight Trainers being very useful against larger ships.

Yes we have, as three Runabouts were sent with the GCS to find and fight with the Dominion bugs…

Actually, no they weren't. The runabouts were sent because they were the only things available, and in the actual battle with the attack ships, they got their asses kicked. They only reason they were not outright destroyed is because the Dominion wanted to send a message to the Federation, and destroyed the Odyssey instead.
-Mike

[Praeothmin]

Yes, they got their asses kicked, just like the GCS, because they were all, for all intents and purposes, unshielded against the Dominion ships...

How different would their perfomances had been had they had shields?

We know Runabouts aren't that weak...

[Mike DiCenso]

I don't think the runabouts would have fared much better with shields. If you want an example of the post-shield modifications battle between a runabout and an attack ship, just rewatch the opening of "Valiant" again. Jake and Nog's runabout gets it's butt stomped until the U.S.S. Valiant shows up.
-Mike