How Many Old Ships to Take a New One?

[2046]

I'll leave the reason why out for now so as to leave responses totally unbiased, but I wanted some additional thoughts regarding an issue I'm addressing in a page.

Let's assume you have a perfect target device that will record your weapons' firepower.

In a contest between vessels, how many NX Class ships would it take to equal:

1. A Constitution (no uber-Connie)
2. A Galaxy
3. (Or compare the above)
4. (you can throw an Intrepid in too, if you want)

Assume an equal number of torpedoes fired, equal phaser time, et cetera.

The general gist is to get a rough sense of firepower enhancement, if any, over the two centuries or so of Trek that we've seen.

An example that comes to my mind is "Prophecy"[VOY7]. A Klingon D-7, about a century old, attacks Voyager. While Voyager was certainly not in her prime at this point, neither could the Klingon ship have been . . . it had, after all, been headed toward the Delta Quadrant for decades. The Klingons were able to bring Voyager's port shields down by half with just a few shots. Certainly this should not be so if a two century gap represents some uber-improvement of like 50000 times in defensive technology. Even if we assume that within just one century one would see an improvement of 750 times, the D-7 ought to have been able to fire at Voyager for hours without effect. But that was not the case.

On the other hand, the T'Ong was largely ineffectual against the Enterprise-D in "The Emissary". However, the outposts in the sector would've been no match for the old warship. ("This is Commander Redshirt of Federation Outpost Wusstastic, requesting assistance!")

Also, as seen in "In a Mirror, Darkly"[ENT4], a mid-23rd Century Constitution Class ship could readily defeat the parallel universe's 22nd Century vessels similar to those from the normal universe, though how similar is of course debatable. That battle was pretty much a Connie-wank curbstomping, as well it should've been, though the torps seemed kinda lame.

The only other thing I can think of off the top of my head is the utter buttspanking Dominion weapons seemed to deliver against the Sitak and the Majestic in "Sacrifice of Angels", tearing through Miranda hulls like butter in a way Kirk's phasers and torpedoes didn't in ST2.

Any other potentially-useful examples come to mind?

[watchdog]

Well I would think that you'd need a small fleet to take out a connie, the wepons on the NX were never very impressive to me. I'd say about 10 NX to defeat the Constitution class, this is not a scientific thought I just plucked a number out of thin air. As to the so-called Uber-Connie, I recall a conversation some time ago with a friend of mine on how WWII era battleships were way tougher than any contemporary ships today and can survive a lot more punishment than modern ships due to having thicker armor, I always thought there might be something similar going on with the Constitution class compared to the Galaxy class. But then I also figured that all the extra windows seen on the hull of the galaxy class made the hull weaker than a Constitution class that did not have nearly as many windows, but what do I know.

[sonofccn]

Unless the mirror darkly connie is considered a uberconnie ten seems kinda low. IIRC the Defient was blowing NX class starships apart with one shot/one salvo and could take mutiple strikes with on problems. I would guess 20-30 ships. That should be enough to throw the needed firepower to overwhelm the connie in the needed timewindow before your fleet is reduced to scrape metal.

[Mike DiCenso]

2046 wrote:
Let's assume you have a perfect target device that will record your weapons' firepower.

In a contest between vessels, how many NX Class ships would it take to equal:

1. A Constitution (no uber-Connie)

At least 10 such vessels, based on the performance of the Defiant against the more advanced Mirror counterpart of the NX-class, as well as the Mirror Tholian, Vulcan, Andorian, and Tellerite starships. Likely it would take more than this.

2. A Galaxy

Given that a K'tinga was no serious threat to the E-D, it would take at bare minimum 100 NX-class starships to even have any kind of noticeable effect.

An example that comes to my mind is "Prophecy"[VOY7]. A Klingon D-7, about a century old, attacks Voyager. While Voyager was certainly not in her prime at this point, neither could the Klingon ship have been . . . it had, after all, been headed toward the Delta Quadrant for decades. The Klingons were able to bring Voyager's port shields down by half with just a few shots. Certainly this should not be so if a two century gap represents some uber-improvement of like 50000 times in defensive technology. Even if we assume that within just one century one would see an improvement of 750 times, the D-7 ought to have been able to fire at Voyager for hours without effect. But that was not the case.

On the other hand, a few shots from Voyager in return forced the Klingon vessel's crew to divert emergency power to the shields, and their emitters (weapons or shields?) were taken out.

On the other hand, the T'Ong was largely ineffectual against the Enterprise-D in "The Emissary". However, the outposts in the sector would've been no match for the old warship. ("This is Commander Redshirt of Federation Outpost Wusstastic, requesting assistance!")

What sort of outposts? We never get to see them at all, or hear much about their purpose. Are these full-blown military outposts? Or are they just simple science outposts, or what?

Also, as seen in "In a Mirror, Darkly"[ENT4], a mid-23rd Century Constitution Class ship could readily defeat the parallel universe's 22nd Century vessels similar to those from the normal universe, though how similar is of course debatable. That battle was pretty much a Connie-wank curbstomping, as well it should've been, though the torps seemed kinda lame.

Like the phasers, we never saw the torpedoes used against something that could gives us a sense of quantifiable firepower. Dispite some people's claims about the Defiant's photon torpedoes being used against the asteroid the Tholian drydock base was located in. All the hits are against the base drydock and it's surrounding superstructure:

http://ent.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... =96&pos=71

Given the fairly advanced nature of the Tholians in "Future Tense" [ST:ENT2], it's possible that their base's shields absorbed at least some of the energy of the torps, and the advanced nature of the structure's alloys made for greater resistance overall.

Certainly we see that the Avenger is unable to even scratch the Defiant's paint, despite being a more advanced version of the regular universe NX-class:

http://ent.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... 96&pos=623

http://ent.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... 96&pos=648

In the regular universe, the phase cannons initially have 500 GJ per cannon, which this means that an unshielded, unpowered Constitution can withstand quite a bit of punishment given the generally more militaristic and advanced nature of the Mirror NX class.
-Mike

[AFT]

An example that comes to my mind is "Prophecy"[VOY7]. A Klingon D-7, about a century old, attacks Voyager. While Voyager was certainly not in her prime at this point, neither could the Klingon ship have been . . . it had, after all, been headed toward the Delta Quadrant for decades. The Klingons were able to bring Voyager's port shields down by half with just a few shots. Certainly this should not be so if a two century gap represents some uber-improvement of like 50000 times in defensive technology. Even if we assume that within just one century one would see an improvement of 750 times, the D-7 ought to have been able to fire at Voyager for hours without effect. But that was not the case.

OK. Watching Prophecy as we speak. The D-7 hit Voyager six times, three to port, one aft, one dorsal and one off-screen (we only see the bridge shake on this one). If you’re too literal, they needed three shots to bring the port shields down to 50%. Voyager hit them twice. The first shot disabled the cloak. After this the Klingon captain ordered emergency power to shields. The second phaser shot knocked the forward emitters off-line and as Mike noted is not specified if those were shields or weapons emitters, but either way they rendered the ship defenseless with one shot even with emergency power diverted to shields. So, you can say that a light cruiser has about six times the firepower of a top of the line warship of a century previous. Not bad for little Voyager.

[Jedi Master Spock]

The D-7 and Voyager should be about the same hull tonnage, actually.

[AFT]

The D-7 and Voyager should be about the same hull tonnage, actually.

OK. Good point. You got me there. But I meant little relative to top of the line starships of Voyager’s era, like the Nebula or Galaxy class. Nonetheless, that doesn’t change the fact that one is a light cruiser and the other was the most powerful class of warship on the Klingon navy at its prime, not withstanding if it’s actual classification was heavy cruiser, battle cruiser or battleship. As far as canon is concerned, this class was at some point of time at the very top of the ships employed by the Klingon navy, while Voyager clearly it’s not.

[2046]

Now the explanation of why I thought this was of interest:

Tucker:
"When we slipped through your detection grid, we got a look at the weapon you're building. An impressive piece of engineering. Hell, it'd take at least a thousand starships like Enterprise to blow up an entire planet. You know, I'd like to see the telemetry from the probe you launched against Earth.
I assume you were watching the attack, calculating the blast yields. Boy, you must have been pretty damn excited. I mean, that beam cut one hell of a swath through Florida. That's the name of one of the places you destroyed. Florida. Did you actually see the cities burning, the houses, the people being vaporized? You know, I had a sister there . . . "

Tucker does not explain how long he thinks it would take for a thousand NX Class starships to destroy a planet, and his comments may have been simple bluster in an attempt to instill a bit of fear and doubt into the Xindi scientist Degra. After all, 10^29J is about a thousand times less than the gravitational potential energy of a planet, and thus that is approximately the energy Tucker is describing for an NX Class ship. However, we also know that even on an overload setting a two-gun phase cannonade results in just 10^13J ("Silent Enemy"[ENT1]), which suggests that about 10,000,000,000,000,000 (ten quadrillion) NX Class ships would be required if all fired their phase cannons at once to achieve the goal. With multi-megaton torpedoes this could be lessened significantly, but still not by a factor of trillions unless we wanted to assume just stupid-powerful torpedoes.

Then there's "The Die is Cast"[DSN3] and the attack on the Founder homeworld, featuring 20 Romulan and Cardassian ships manned by combat veterans and led by the intelligentsia (half-pun intended) of both empires.

The crust was to be destroyed within one hour. The mantle was to be destroyed within five. Therefore, we have six hours to destroy both the crust and the mantle. Given that it was thought Dominion reinforcements could reach the Founder's world in seven hours, this makes sense . . . the Jem'Hadar would find the naked core of their god's world, and nothing else.

If you assume Earth-like composition, projecting from that point to the destruction of the entire planet becomes problematic . . . the time factor involved couldn't be based on density, since the mantle is around one and a half times as dense but also contains a far greater amount of material (the inner and outer core constitute ~32.5% of the mass of the planet but ~16% of the volume, the mantle layers constituting ~67% of the mass and ~83% of the volume, the crust getting the small leftovers).

So, either the Founder's world had a much thicker crust (as some believe of Mars, which would also have consequences for the remainder of the interior), or density is not the driving factor (or perhaps the higher internal temperatures were helpful).

In any case, destruction of the core should not have taken an inordinate amount of time after this point, especially with the core being relieved of the pressure caused by the bulk of the rest of the planet bearing down upon it (which will affect the density of the material).

If you wanted to peg me to an estimate of how long it would have taken the ships to destroy the core, I'd say 5-15 hours (5 hours equalling the time for the mantle, with three times that for "wiggle room").

This would give the 20 ships the same basic effect as the Death Star or Xindi weapon in 11-21 hours. I commonly just round that up to a full day.

But here's the interesting thing . . .

Above, the thinking was that Tucker's thousand-ship comment seemed wrong. But was it really? After all, despite similar vessel construction methods and a similar technology base (phase(r) cannons, photon(ic) torpedoes, etc.), within about two centuries only 20 ships (albeit much larger and more powerful ones) could achieve the goal of complete planetary destruction within a single day.
 
Even assuming the 1000 NX Class ships could do the same in only a day, that's a 50-fold increase in firepower per ship. If the NX Class ships would require a month to take out the planet, then suddenly the difference is 1500 times. While there's never been a quantitative assessment of firepower improvements in the canon, it seems rather difficult to accept that 1500 NX Class starships would be required to take down a Cardassian Galor variant in a firepower contest.

Re: "Prophecy" and the Klingons damaging the shields . . . Certainly this should not be so if a two century gap represents a 1500-fold improvement in defensive technology. Even if we assume that within just one century one would see an improvement of 750 times, the D-7 ought to have been able to fire at Voyager for hours without effect. But that was not the case.

There's also the simple fact that we've frequently seen vessels quite long in the tooth, especially in Starfleet. It seems rather unlikely that a Dominion War-era Miranda Class starship could possibly have been upgraded to a level hundreds of times more powerful than an older Miranda like the Reliant from Star Trek II. Ships would have to spend all their time in dock being rebuilt from the inside out in such a circumstance, and each major new class would've been able to wipe the floor with dozens of ships from a decade or two prior. Obviously, that is not what we've seen.

Other issues come to mind and are worthy of comment, but in any case I think this might make it clear why I was curious to know the general ballpark range in everyone else's head. For me, something akin to a 50-fold increase sounds about right given the general gist of other examples, though it leads to a bit of an absurd conclusion.

(The "reality", of course, is simply that Trek writers simply have no idea how frakkin' huge a planet really is.)

[Mike DiCenso]

2046 wrote:

Re: "Prophecy" and the Klingons damaging the shields . . . Certainly this should not be so if a two century gap represents a 1500-fold improvement in defensive technology. Even if we assume that within just one century one would see an improvement of 750 times, the D-7 ought to have been able to fire at Voyager for hours without effect. But that was not the case.

There is another issue that needs to be considered here; unlike the T'Ong, the "Prophecy" battlecruiser's crew was not put into suspension (it was basically a multi-generation ship), and I seriously doubt that they would not have intentionally missed opportunities to upgrade their vessel, even if means using alien technologies. So I'am not entirely sure that the "Prophecy" example is necessarily a good one for our purposes, except to perhaps set a lower limit. The T'Ong works better as that ship is truely a "pure" example of a klingon vessel of the last century, whereas the the "Prophecy" D-7 may have had upgrades during it's journey.
-Mike

[2046]

I'm not real sure on that . . . the disruptor weapons were showing a Klingon signature, though I don't recall if any other weapon type was fired. In any case, we know the cloak had not had any significant improvement, given Voyager's trick against old tech that worked.

Given that it was a religious sect, I'd be hesitant to ascribe to them too much technical acumen. I'm sure they knew their ship well, but still.

[Praeothmin]

Of course, there is also the examples in ST VI:TUC and in ST: Gen.
In ST VI, it takes 5 torpedoes to destroy an unshielded Bird of Prey, where in ST:Gen, it takes only 1 torpedo to destroy the same kind of ship (and it is stated that the Duras sisters' ship is of an old type of Bird of Prey).

[Mike DiCenso]

Of course, there is also the examples in ST VI:TUC and in ST: Gen.
In ST VI, it takes 5 torpedoes to destroy an unshielded Bird of Prey, where in ST:Gen, it takes only 1 torpedo to destroy the same kind of ship (and it is stated that the Duras sisters' ship is of an old type of Bird of Prey).

Well, we know that the D-12 BoP had been retired because of their defective cloaking device plasma coils, but we don't know exactly for how long. Is this class of BoP 5, 10, 15, 20, ect years out of general service?
-Mike

[AFT]

Now the explanation of why I thought this was of interest:

Tucker:
"When we slipped through your detection grid, we got a look at the weapon you're building. An impressive piece of engineering. Hell, it'd take at least a thousand starships like Enterprise to blow up an entire planet. You know, I'd like to see the telemetry from the probe you launched against Earth.
I assume you were watching the attack, calculating the blast yields. Boy, you must have been pretty damn excited. I mean, that beam cut one hell of a swath through Florida. That's the name of one of the places you destroyed. Florida. Did you actually see the cities burning, the houses, the people being vaporized? You know, I had a sister there . . . "

Tucker does not explain how long he thinks it would take for a thousand NX Class starships to destroy a planet, and his comments may have been simple bluster in an attempt to instill a bit of fear and doubt into the Xindi scientist Degra. After all, 10^29J is about a thousand times less than the gravitational potential energy of a planet, and thus that is approximately the energy Tucker is describing for an NX Class ship. However, we also know that even on an overload setting a two-gun phase cannonade results in just 10^13J ("Silent Enemy"[ENT1]), which suggests that about 10,000,000,000,000,000 (ten quadrillion) NX Class ships would be required if all fired their phase cannons at once to achieve the goal. With multi-megaton torpedoes this could be lessened significantly, but still not by a factor of trillions unless we wanted to assume just stupid-powerful torpedoes.

Then there's "The Die is Cast"[DSN3] and the attack on the Founder homeworld, featuring 20 Romulan and Cardassian ships manned by combat veterans and led by the intelligentsia (half-pun intended) of both empires.

The crust was to be destroyed within one hour. The mantle was to be destroyed within five. Therefore, we have six hours to destroy both the crust and the mantle. Given that it was thought Dominion reinforcements could reach the Founder's world in seven hours, this makes sense . . . the Jem'Hadar would find the naked core of their god's world, and nothing else.

If you assume Earth-like composition, projecting from that point to the destruction of the entire planet becomes problematic . . . the time factor involved couldn't be based on density, since the mantle is around one and a half times as dense but also contains a far greater amount of material (the inner and outer core constitute ~32.5% of the mass of the planet but ~16% of the volume, the mantle layers constituting ~67% of the mass and ~83% of the volume, the crust getting the small leftovers).

So, either the Founder's world had a much thicker crust (as some believe of Mars, which would also have consequences for the remainder of the interior), or density is not the driving factor (or perhaps the higher internal temperatures were helpful).

In any case, destruction of the core should not have taken an inordinate amount of time after this point, especially with the core being relieved of the pressure caused by the bulk of the rest of the planet bearing down upon it (which will affect the density of the material).

If you wanted to peg me to an estimate of how long it would have taken the ships to destroy the core, I'd say 5-15 hours (5 hours equalling the time for the mantle, with three times that for "wiggle room").

This would give the 20 ships the same basic effect as the Death Star or Xindi weapon in 11-21 hours. I commonly just round that up to a full day.

But here's the interesting thing . . .

Above, the thinking was that Tucker's thousand-ship comment seemed wrong. But was it really? After all, despite similar vessel construction methods and a similar technology base (phase(r) cannons, photon(ic) torpedoes, etc.), within about two centuries only 20 ships (albeit much larger and more powerful ones) could achieve the goal of complete planetary destruction within a single day.

Even assuming the 1000 NX Class ships could do the same in only a day, that's a 50-fold increase in firepower per ship. If the NX Class ships would require a month to take out the planet, then suddenly the difference is 1500 times. While there's never been a quantitative assessment of firepower improvements in the canon, it seems rather difficult to accept that 1500 NX Class starships would be required to take down a Cardassian Galor variant in a firepower contest.

Re: "Prophecy" and the Klingons damaging the shields . . . Certainly this should not be so if a two century gap represents a 1500-fold improvement in defensive technology. Even if we assume that within just one century one would see an improvement of 750 times, the D-7 ought to have been able to fire at Voyager for hours without effect. But that was not the case.

There's also the simple fact that we've frequently seen vessels quite long in the tooth, especially in Starfleet. It seems rather unlikely that a Dominion War-era Miranda Class starship could possibly have been upgraded to a level hundreds of times more powerful than an older Miranda like the Reliant from Star Trek II. Ships would have to spend all their time in dock being rebuilt from the inside out in such a circumstance, and each major new class would've been able to wipe the floor with dozens of ships from a decade or two prior. Obviously, that is not what we've seen.

Other issues come to mind and are worthy of comment, but in any case I think this might make it clear why I was curious to know the general ballpark range in everyone else's head. For me, something akin to a 50-fold increase sounds about right given the general gist of other examples, though it leads to a bit of an absurd conclusion.

(The "reality", of course, is simply that Trek writers simply have no idea how frakkin' huge a planet really is.)

Now, I have to quote you: “Wow Dude”.

It seems to me that you are over thinking things with these example. Reading your own line of thoughts, you already answer your own question, more than probably it was a number that Tucker pull out of thin air to install some doubt on Degra without any real set of calculations to back it up, he probably just made it up on the spot. Besides you’re taking his statement in a too literal way. That’s why Prophecy seems to didn’t make any sense. Anyway this example shows that there has been a constant improvement through time on ST ships. A light ship is several times more powerful than a top of the line warship of a century previous. Comparing ships of the same category with the Klingon D-7, a Sovereign class for example, you get that there has been an improvement of as much as 50 times as you guessed. There is really no contradiction here. No need to split hairs.

[Jedi Master Spock]

Two particular TNG episodes to pay attention to are "Yesterday's Enterprise" and "Genesis."

"Genesis" says that the new model of torpedo is 11% stronger - this is an upgrade cycle seven years after the launch of the E-D. If you expect regular ugprade cycles on this order, you would only expect the same weapons in roughly the same cases to be 23x as powerful at the start of TNG as at their introduction in ENT, 25x by the end of TNG.

You'd expect a 4.3x upgrade from TOS to TNG; that seems pretty reasonable.

However, the ENT-TOS upgrade cycles changing from "photonic" to "photon" torpedos could easily include a large jump in technology - the humans of ENT seem ready for tech transfers from the Andorians and Vulcans, who are much more militarily advanced.

"Yesterday's Enterprise" has Tasha saying this:

TASHA
Deflector shield technology has
advanced considerably during the
war... our heat-dissipation rates
are probably double those of the
Enterprise-C, so we can hang in
a firefight longer...

Now, problematic is that the E-C is half the size of the E-D, especially since the E-C after being upgraded suddenly became a match for a bunch of contemporary warships.

If shields have doubled in potency over the past 22 years, then the upgrade cycle for shields would be twice the rate of weapons - here we're looking at a ~724 factor from 22nd to 24th century, which would still only be a factor of 27 from TOS to TNG or TOS to ENT.

If we assume that shield dissipation is generally related to area of the shield bubble - and that therefore the E-C would have had 66% of the shields were it on the same tech base, we get a ~10% upgrade on the seven year cycle, roughly the same as weapons.

Bearing in mind that the Connie (305m) is actually smaller than the Vulcan (600m) and Andorian (450m) ships it is engaging, the above model would actually suggest weaker shields for the Defiant than the giant Vulcan ship with its much larger shield bubble, while the idea that shields doubled in strength in 22 years and are generally proportional to area suggest that the Defiant would have several times the shield strength as the larger Klingon, Andorian, and Vulcan ships of the era.

[Praeothmin]

JMS wrote:

"Genesis" says that the new model of torpedo is 11% stronger - this is an upgrade cycle seven years after the launch of the E-D. If you expect regular ugprade cycles on this order, you would only expect the same weapons in roughly the same cases to be 23x as powerful at the start of TNG as at their introduction in ENT, 25x by the end of TNG.

If I understand correctly, you mean that if we expect regular upgrades of 11% per seven years?
If that is the case, then in the 200 years between "Enterprize" and TNG, at 29 upgrade cycles, that would be 29 times 11%, no?
Which would put the total photon torpedo upgrade at around 319%, would it not?
I have trouble following your numbers.
Could you clarify?

*Edit: I have just re-read the entire post, and just realized you meant the number of times the upgrades should have been done over the years, and not the percentage of the power upgrades that have been achieved...
Man I need to sleep... :)*