Starfleet Jedi

What is your impression of this thread.

As I have been able to observe, meaningful remarks start to appear at page 2, and the best stuff is in page 3.

Apparently, I'd say that this torpedo managed to sort of "drill" into the hull of the Defiant.
Now, considering the shape of the torpedo's head, it wouldn't be surprising that its blunt tip would smash through the armour of certain ships, however, the hole is way too neat.
Which brings me back to the idea that it's been NDF'ed somehow.
Would fit with those few theories about certain torpedoes able to drill through matter, like the ground.

I would've thought it obvious that there was technobabble at play in that example, given that the hull withstands pressures in excess of 9 tonnes per centimeter in the very same episode, not to mention that the torpedo pops into the room without featuring even the slightest leak from the gas giant atmosphere outside.

(Wong claims this is a brittle failure + shear incident, but that's nonsensical . . . there's virtually nothing around the torpedo that was once part of the wall (where'd it go?), no deformation of the wall except within a couple of inches of the torpedo, no deformation of the torpedo or its light little thin access panel, no trace of anything on the floor, and curious scorch marks on the wall itself. That's it.

We don't get to see the outside hull, but given the duranium and tritanium construction of starship interiors I rather doubt the inside wall behaved in a vastly different manner than the hull.)

Meanwhile, Star Wars hulls can be crashed through by CGI toilets, bent and warped by robot feet, and so on and so forth. The thread you linked to was simply another desperate ploy.

I'm curious about the unit they gave for pressure. The same one popped up in ENT once, but I can't seem to find any source on what exactly it means. Is it real or made up?

The torpedo could have been an armor-piercing torpedo, with us only seeing the hardened-shell, with the softer surface having been stripped away during armor penetration...

l33telboi wrote:I'm curious about the unit they gave for pressure. The same one popped up in ENT once, but I can't seem to find any source on what exactly it means. Is it real or made up?

GSC is a real unit of measure that describes pressure in grams per square centimeter. It was first mentioned in TOS' "Who Mourns for Adonais". The next use came, of course, in DS9's "Starship Down", and finally in ST:ENT's "Sleeping Dogs".
-Mike

Praeothmin wrote:The torpedo could have been an armor-piercing torpedo, with us only seeing the hardened-shell, with the softer surface having been stripped away during armor penetration...

Given the apparently oval shape of the torpedo pre impact, and the almost cylindrical shape of the warhead second afterwards, I would have to say that there is something going on with the torpedo impacting the hull, and allowing it to burrow through.
-Mike

Or perhaps the torpedo got through because the hull pressure was so great the extra stress from the torpedo was just enough.

It's not like they left the gas giant when they got hit by it. And it's not like they didn't have any trouble with hull integrity due to the pressure either.

I.E. The hull was still under tremendous stress when it was hit by that torpedo. Assuming that the torpedo was the sole force working on the hull and was 100% responsible for getting through is more than a tad silly given the actual environment the ship was in at the time.

Roondar wrote:Or perhaps the torpedo got through because the hull pressure was so great the extra stress from the torpedo was just enough.

If that was true, we'd expect the weakened hull to be ripped off, with a big gaping hole over the section, not a neat protruding wall lamp.

It's more likely that to compensante the greater stress, the structural integrity fields were strenghtened, explaining the lower damage.

The external pressure would keep pushing the projectile inside, maintaining it in place.

Lucas makes conscious tributes to the dogfighters of WWI and WWII all the time, and frequently seems inspired by WWII era materials.

The strange thing to me is that this passes without notice in a thread in a "Star Trek versus Star Wars" section.

I agree wholeheartedly that tributes to prior eras of warfare often work marginally well in a space battle setting.

Well, even if the torp was only partly responsible for getting through the hull, it might have been coated with some kind of 'hull dissolving' compound.