Planetary Defenses in Star Trek

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2046
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Re: Planetary Defenses in Star Trek

Post by 2046 » Tue Jan 17, 2017 2:07 pm

I had forgotten that this was a long-standing windmill of yours. (Note: the mention of the duration is not a statement of its truth value, FFS.)

Also forgotten was my previous thought that the shield generator could make sense as explosion source provided one recognized that any explosion inside the dome would effectively create a pressure cooker.

So, the alternatives are that the Enterprise would destroy everything with bleedthrough energy, cracking open a dome that requires starship weaponry to penetrate, or that an internal explosion was a possibility that might kill everyone.

Whatever the case, while it may not be ideal under all circumstances and conditions, there's certainly nothing wrong with the basic concept, especially where one could use it outdoors and further from one's population center.

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Re: Planetary Defenses in Star Trek

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Fri Jan 20, 2017 4:28 pm

2046 wrote:That was another long post with a lot of extraneous stuff, so I'm gonna hit the highlights to try to focus in on the meat amd potatoes.
Yet such attributes, both being world-encompassing and impenetrable when attacked by a powerful weapon, all rolled into one super shield, have not been observed yet.


Elba II comes rather close. The Enterprise failed to cut through at a weak point despite repeated phaser strikes before Kirk and Spock resolved the issue themselves. And that at a mere asylum under a dome that housed just over a dozen loonies. It is hardly beyond the pale to assume, even with no other evidence, that major world defenses might have sterner stuff.
Assumption being the word. They could. Only if we knew why such a shield was put above this asylum to begin with. And then this will open a can of worms about whether this asylum and its super poisonous world are more worthy than, say, a distant military outpost, which seem to only get regional shields at best, as per the material that has been posted by others in this thread.

Also, regarding the sturdiness of that shield (that is, capable of withstanding the full firepower of one warship or more), you also conveniently forget the other parts of the script that don't mesh with that picture; with knowledgeable characters, including Scott, considering it quite posssible to get through the shield:
SCOTT: We could blast our way through the field, but only at the risk of destroying the Captain, Mister Spock and any other living thing on Elba Two.

[...]

SCOTT: Doctor, I told you we couldn't do it without killing everyone in the asylum dome

[...]

SCOTT: Well, there's one last thing we might try. Perhaps the ship's phasers can cut through a section of the force field at its weakest point. Where did you say that was located, Mister Sulu?
It is absolutely clear that Scotty does consider it more than doable to get through the field –he doesn't say they couldn't get through it, period– but that the energy delivered onto it by the Enterprise would be so devastating that it would also kill the people they were trying to save.
And that concern was still very valid in their minds despite the fact that they tried to drill through it by shooting at a point on the opposite side of the world!
You completely disregard that too.

Then, how do we know that they're not putting everything in the attempt that failed? Because it's written in plain text above. If they were to brute-force their way through the field, it would kill people inside the dome. So they aim for a weakspot, use narrow beams, and try to get through knowing fully well, as per Scotty's previous remarks, that they must be careful about the power they put into that. Considering Scotty's two first lines of dialogue I quoted, that he says they could get through it but it would kill all people, it is quite clear that they wouldn't put everything into the weapons because of how dangerous the operation is. That's precisely why they weakest point in the field seemed a good option.

Moreover, any rarely seen technology you wish to deny is subject to the same argument you make, meaning your argument is fundamentally flawed. "Yet such attributes, both being potentially-Borg-Cube-destroying and emerging from the deflector dish, have not been observed yet." Or how about the Dominion sun-destroying doodad from GooBashir, et cetera. If not actually an argument from ignorance it at least comes close.
This cannot be an argument from ignorance. You have to provide solid evidence that something does certainly exist. I don't have to prove a negative here.
There's a difference between characters stating that a technology exists and an assumption that it does.
Likewise, there's a difference between a given variety of technology that is shown to exist in one single unit, in one specific place, and the assumption of a more widespread use of it or something similar elsewhere.
So, along with my earlier rundown, I'd say, barring a brilliant counterargument as yet unseen, I reject your denial that Elba II's planetary shield is not demonstrative of Federation planetary shields.
Reject all you want because you have hardly provided any solidity to your counterclaim. You aren't even adressing elements I have provided since two posts, like Scott's remarks. In fact you do precisely what you accused the Warsies of doing regarding the Death Star and Alderaan's shield, skimming over crucial elements and building an ad hoc flawed summary, a shortened fancy version of what really happened.
Also, while we're at it, although the Nihydron and Mawasi vessels got short shrift, the fact remains that Voyager was hardly an epically shielded vessel by comparison, as you claim. None of the temporally-shielded ships hit by the beam held up terribly well. It would take steonger shields to be protected from direct strike.
Incorrect. I haven't made such a claim about Voyager's epic shielding. In fact, I have said several times that she got seriously damaged when shot at by the time weapon, yet proved better than what the other species had. This alone was in fact the basis of an argument I made to consider that I don't believe the Nihydron and Mawasi would have a shield technology as good as that of the UFP, but in fact one likely inferior.
You assume the protection will be perfect.


Nope. That is neither stated nor implied. Chakotay said planets can be protected. That means exactly that. You've claimed it means less. That doesn't mean I claim it means more.
Indeed, the perfection of the defense is certainly neither stated nor implied, thank you for seeing this.
The implication, though, comes from your position. In order to claim that "protect their planets" means they'll update some "planetary shields" with the temporal data and get a full coverage, this is by definition the perfect protection, because it covers the entire planet.
But as you said, it is neither stated nor implied in Chakotay's line.
You simply assume that a protected planet means a 100% coverage. Use of the english language would disagree, as I demonstrated. Say, again, that on battlefield in medieval times, a soldier of your camp sees that you only have a sword so he points towards a group of downed comrades and tells you to grab one of their shields on the floor to protect yourself, are you going to become pedant and argue that the shield cannot possibly protect the entirety of your body due to the physical size of the defensive object and the overall surface area of your larger body? Will you be splitting hairs when on the edge of short exchanges, when someone says that by adding reactive armour to tanks, tanks can be protected, yet you'd argue that no, they only get greater chances of survival if fired at from a given angle, by a given type of ordnance and only after a limited number of shots? Most people wouldn't, because most people aren't some anally retentive and pendantic Tuvoks (that's not an insult, it's a description of how an anally retentive and pendantic Tuvok would say). Etc. I'm not going to scour the entire internet to provide a torrent of fitting examples. Essentially I'm not saying "your" interpretation is invalid –it was mine too at first– but I'm showing it's not as exclusive of other interpretations as you may think.

Besides, as I pointed out, the chronology takes place over several months. That's enough time to deploy theater shields, have some more and move as many people as possible under them.

Part of having Annorax stand down is precisely done by Chakotay trying his best to deceive Annorax into thinking that the battle to come is pointless, that he'll probably be damaged (with destruction obviously implied) and that he won't be able to endanger the home worlds anymore (because ships and unspecified other assets would get the shield upgrade).


We are in agreement (except for "deceive", since there is none, really) right up until you start adding things there at the end in parentheses. The result of the additions is confusion and self-contradiction.

Indeed, let's dispense with the claim that Chakotay was bluffing. He suggested to Annorax that Janeway wouldn't attack unless she could hit the weapon-ship. This was true. Chakotay didn't spill the fact of how (inside intervention nerfing the extratemporal protection the weapon-ship enjoyed), but the statement itself is not inaccurate.
Chakotay knew that Janeway was only attacking because the plan was to shoot down the Krenim ship after her temporal core got turned off from the inside, following the message sent by Paris. A thing Annorax couldn't think of.
Chakotay made a statement that sounded true and could have been true but he knew it was total BS because that was just not why Janeway & Pals were coming.
That is a textbook application of bluff. You let the opponent believe something that could be true and have him fold whilst knowing it's pure hogwash because your hand actually sucks.
That is hardly a reliable foundation to assert ownership over a very specific type of grandiose technology that isn't even directly cited!
First of all, the Ram Izad didn't get the upgrade.


And what, praytell, made you think I thought otherwise? The point was that Annorax went along merrily incurring even with temporally-shielded Voyager running amok. Ergo, the mere existence of temporally-shielded objects does not, in and of itself, break the calculations.
I mention the upgrade because it would generate an interference with the temporal weapon's effect.
This is what happens right after the attack on the Garenor homeworld: at first, all seems OK, but then the wake reaches a temporally shielded Voyager, we get this:
[Krenim Timeship - Bridge]

OBRIST: Something went wrong. The entire Krenim Imperium, it's reverted to a pre-warp state.
ANNORAX: Not possible. Our calculations were perfect.
OBRIST: I may have an explanation. There's an anomalous temporal reading twenty light years from here. It's coming from a vessel.
ANNORAX: What vessel?
OBRIST: Component zero four nine beta. A ship called Voyager.
ANNORAX: That ship was classified as an inert component. It shouldn't be generating a temporal field.
OBRIST: But it is. And it was enough to throw off our calculations.
ANNORAX: Take me to them.
Voyager was TWENTY LIGHT YEARS away from the Garenor home world, logically the wake was more than thinly stretched by that time, yet that little tiny interaction in the middle of nowhere completely smoked the oh so perfect calculations, so much that the Krenim Imperium literally went back to a pre-warp age, that of good old space rockets. Need I say more?
More seriously, the sheer grammatical structure of Chakotay's lines isn't really adequate, because at no point he refers to the alien species themselves before eventually using "they" as a replacement for them. I highlighted the entities he mentionned.
But let's have that slide.


No, let's not, because it is important you understand *why* you are wrong. It was an unreasonable abuse of context. By your argument, I could say something like "if the captain of the USS Carl Vinson has transmitted computer virus defense to their allies, they can protect their servers" . . . and yet you insisted that only the French and English ships accompanying the Vinson could be the executors of the protection.
You're actually wrong. An accurate example would be this:
"if the captain of the USS Carl Vinson has transmitted computer virus defense to their countries, they can protect their nations."
Doesn't sound very good, does it?
Remember, home world = planet for all intents and purposes in the original sentence.
But then, again, I can let it slide and understand the sentence more like "blah blah, their planets can be protected", their being the aliens.
That's really quite stupefyingly absurd. The protection is not copy-protected. The fact that Janeway could transmit it at all after loading it on alien hardware proves that.

This sort of argumentation on your part, frequent in this thread, is why I was dismissive of and deriding your claims.
LOL, "frequent."
That is the only case I have been nitpicky about the grammatical structure of a character's dialogue throwing stuff in a hurry and extremely tense situation.
(And, as a side note, you even go so far as to suggest there is no evidence for any groups beyond those ships, which is just rejectionism.)
No, it's called english because that was is seen by reading the transcript. Chakotay's formulation requires that we fiddle a bit with the interpretation and even fill the blanks. Which just weakens the reliability of his statement.
And since it was part of a bluff anyway...

Finally, let's return to the simple fact is that a temporally-shielded building or ship or fleet or whatever simply does not equal a protected planet.
Of coourse if you protect one city... but that's why I suggested protecting assetS. The episode even proves that there would be ample time for defenses to be both updated and reinforced.
You are just reaching for absolutism when it is not warranted.

Besides, the alien guys had weeks to be prepared and all they can provide in terms of ships in order to defend their home words is a nothing more than a pair? The other worlds weren't even shooting or sending anything at all, including the first one that literally had the temporal ship descend through the atmosphere and sitting above a city!
What the hell makes you think the Nihydron and Mawasi would even have anything remotely close to the super defensive shield that would represent a considerable fleet in terms of total shield strength?
Using the Ram Izad as an example, let's suppose they had a temporally-shielded battlefleet in orbit, and Annorax accounted for it in calculations. What's the result of an attack? A battlefleet of artifacts from a [s]dead[/s] never-existed civilization hovering atop a verdant and unspoiled world, or a colony of somebody else . . . whatever. Only the shielded remain.

So what, praytell, are these components going to do now? What do they represent bit some missing material from the new timeline? Given the actual and successful removal of the Ram Izad despite Voyager's temporally-shielded existence, we can hardly claim any magical temporal whiplash that throws all Annorax's plans to the dirt. Indeed, if he needed to de-exist a specific ship or object with only starship-grade shields, he could.. Thus, again, ypur claim is without merit.
I thought the ships could intercept the beam. I watched some fragments of the episode on youtube and the beams seems to go on, hardly deflected by any shield. In fact, no shield reacts at all, which is not the case for example when the chronoton torpedoes were hitting Voyager. All in all, the shielding seemed to anchor the ship to the continuum so it wouldn't be removed.
So a defense by ships only would be useless. What about ground shielding then?

We know the shielding doesn't make the ship imperveous to the weapon. Besides, you said the Krenim crew had all time on their side.
If we ignore completely the proved aspect of the calculations being screwed massively by the interference of shielded elements, regardless of how remote they are when interacting with an incursion wake, it just means the temporal weapon just has to sit on top a planet and pee until the shield down there gets depleted, one unit at a time.
Therefore, Chakotay would have been making shit up because even he would have known that the Krenim weapon couldn't be stopped.
For your point to work, we'd have to assume, contrary to all evidence from the episode, that the weapon would actually fail. It didn't. It only saw her effect diminished against a ship that had updated her shielding AND fiddled with her deflector dish too. We don't even know if calculations also matter against ships. For one, Voyager belongs to a whole different sector than the one the Krenim were affecting, contrary to the Nihydron and Mawasi.
Two of those alien ships, belonging to the same species, get shot at by the temporal ship. They disappear in less than two seconds.
The beam was observed being shot up to four seconds non stop against a planet, but it appeared to be able to shoot for a longer duration against Voyager, considering that the characters had enough time to say that after starting being hit:
KIM: I'm reading a massive energy build-up. Some kind of weapon.
JANEWAY: Shields.
(The time incursion beam is aimed directly at Voyager.)
SEVEN: Temporal shields are weakening.
KIM: Captain, that energy beam. It's pushing Voyager out of the space-time continuum.
JANEWAY: He's trying to erase us from history.
SEVEN: I've scanned their propulsion system. Their vessel's mass prevents them from exceeding warp six. We can escape.45
TUVOK: Captain, I must remind you our structural integrity is still impaired. If we go to warp now, the damage to Voyager will be extreme.69
KIM: What about Tom and Chakotay?
JANEWAY: We'll have to come back for them. All hands clear the outer sections and prepare for wide-scale breaches. Tuvok, activate the transverse bulkheads.99
SEVEN: Temporal shields are failing.
JANEWAY: Engage warp seven.
KIM: They're not in pursuit.
TUVOK: We're losing the outer hull. Transverse bulkheads are holding.
(Pieces of hull fly off into the camera.)
I don't have the episode at hand so I'm going to assume something like three words a second. Voyager gets shot for two seconds on screen. Considering how long it takes characters to react to attacks, I'll assume Seven speaks after those two seconds. Say the exposure ends just before they punch the warp drive. That's 103 words, a bit more than 34 seconds.

Let's then assume that the home world of the species that lost two ships by temporal removal had a shield that was, say, a thousand times greater than the shielding of one single ship. For reference, that is a type of shield strength never ever seen within the UFP to begin with.
It may sit within the realm of what a Borg Cube is worth of.

So let's see how many shots it would take:

A: number of ship-shields that can be erased within two seconds by exposure to the temporal weapon.
B: strength of the completely over-the-top alien planetery shield, measured in groups of two ship-shield units (the beam can erase two alien ships at once).
C: longest observed duration of a temporal beam shooting.

Result (in shots) = A * B / C
R = 2 * 500 / 34
R = 29.4117

That is disregarding the fact that the beam wasn't even remotely phased by the presence of two ships within its volume (nor by Voyager's silhouette) and that it seems it could be firing at Voyager for a longer duration. In fact, Annorax wouldn't even have bothered if the weapon ship didn't have the ability to get rid of Voyager in a battle.
Her shields were failing anyway so something like 40~45 seconds top would have taken care of the UFP ship.
Now, are we going to pretend that the Krenim genociders couldn't cram something like 30 shots or less within, what? one or two months? Or even a full year?
Guys were already doing that for a whole century and not even exactly bored with it.

So we go back to the point that Chakotay was trying to buy time but wasn't looking for being very accurate.
Besides, Annorax didn't really think highly of Chakotay's inputs beyond the fact that he saw them as "promising, but premature".
Dude probably got used not to pay too much attention to the local new fish.
You can waste as much time as you like quoting and commenting in yellow trying to pee on things (maybe Elba II was a loser and low-energy?),
So what? That wouldn't even begin to prove that reliable planetary shields exist within the UFP.
... but the facts remain unchanged no matter how much resistance typing you do. It is quite simple. SonofCCN was correct.
No. He would have to do what you haven't done since a couple posts now: address the parts of the dialogue from that TOS episode you keep blatantly ignoring.

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Re: Planetary Defenses in Star Trek

Post by 2046 » Sat Jan 21, 2017 2:58 am

Oh yay, you're tripling-down.

First, just a note that I am "blatantly ignoring", "conveniently forget"ting, and "completely disregard"ing nothing. That is mere projection, just as is the claim -- from the guy arguing the 'Warsie' line in the 'Warsie' way, no less -- that I am doing "precisely what you accused the Warsies of doing". I alone am properly addressing Scotty's statements. It is you who refuse to take them at face value and would rather insert your own fabricated dreamworld in place of them, a common theme in this thread.

Second, I find your pattern of argumentation wherein you make straw men to be completely tiresome. I tried to chalk it up to you simply misunderstanding but you have done it an awful lot, and been called on it more than enough times to start reading more carefully.

Case in point is your spending *literally* paragraphs against my statement that"{t}he Enterprise failed to cut through at a weak point despite repeated phaser strikes before Kirk and Spock resolved the issue themselves." You pretend this is a claim on my part that the Elba shield was impervious to attack. I made no such claim; my statement is perfectly accurate.

Third, you *are* engaged in argument from ignorance by your own criteria that I must prove the existence of a thing. Elba II has a planetary shield despite everyone here agreeing that it is overkill for the facility it is protecting. Ergo, they exist.

Next, your arguments from grammatical ignorance are just sad. As demonstrated, shielding a few buildings and ships doesn't mean squat . . . it would be akin to Voyager putting temporal shields around the bridge only. Your insistence to the contrary is merely resistance to reason.

Similarly, your countries-nations analogy is crap. Try capitals and nations/territories and you're closer to the obvious meaning (depending on whether Chakotay was suggesting colonies or not).

And no, it was not a bluff. Consider every movie scene where the badguy is holding the disarmed good guy at gunpoint and the good guy says "surrender or be shot". The badguy doesn't surrender, perhaps even says the good one's bluffing, then gets blown away by the sneaky good ally. The good guy wasn't bluffing. Neither was Chakotay. It is not a bluff to keep details of how the threat will become reality to oneself.

Further, I find it offensive that you are making ludicrous claims about an episode you just admitted to not bothering to work from. This is probably why you don't understand how Voyager's temporal shields disrupted the weapon-ship's calculations. Timing is everything . . . Voyager turned them on just as the weapon-ship fired, so the previously-inert component Voyager suddenly became non-inert. Later, however, the Ram Izad were wiped away and calculations held because Voyager could be accounted for, even without her position being known. Thus, your claim of shields magically scrapping calcs is dead wrong, and as this is your sole explanation for how small shielded objects can upset Annorax and force him to quit, so is your claim based on it.

I am being as nice here as I can, but the simple fact is that you are refusing to admit clear and indefensible errors in reasoning. It's as if you're declaring modern car headlights don't exist because all you're willing to admit are flashlights from 1917 and you refuse to admit that more powerful lights could be mounted on automobiles, despite more powerful lights (for the time) having been mounted on 1917 autos already.

Stop embarrassing yourself, I beg you.

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Re: Planetary Defenses in Star Trek

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sat Jan 21, 2017 2:35 pm

Just to add to the quick calc I did before...
Mr. Oragahn wrote: So let's see how many shots it would take:

A: number of ship-shields that can be erased within two seconds by exposure to the temporal weapon.
B: strength of the completely over-the-top alien planetery shield, measured in groups of two ship-shield units (the beam can erase two alien ships at once).
C: longest observed duration of a temporal beam shooting.

Result (in shots) = A * B / C
R = 2 * 500 / 34
R = 29.4117

That is disregarding the fact that the beam wasn't even remotely phased by the presence of two ships within its volume (nor by Voyager's silhouette) and that it seems it could be firing at Voyager for a longer duration. In fact, Annorax wouldn't even have bothered if the weapon ship didn't have the ability to get rid of Voyager in a battle.
Her shields were failing anyway so something like 40~45 seconds top would have taken care of the UFP ship.
Now, are we going to pretend that the Krenim genociders couldn't cram something like 30 shots or less within, what? one or two months? Or even a full year?
Guys were already doing that for a whole century and not even exactly bored with it.
Twenty nine shots at thirty four seconds, that's less than a total of sixteen minutes and a half of constant firing. With shot durations worth a minute, it would take less than seventeen shots.
Would one make the claimed planetary shield ten thousand times worth a ship-shield (ten times more than the figure I used), it would take less than three hours of pounding to cleanly erase an civilization's entire presence from spacetime. By one single ship. Admitedly, that's quite meaner than a twenty four hours long Base Delta Zero or even a General Order 24...

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Re: Planetary Defenses in Star Trek

Post by 2046 » Sat Jan 21, 2017 8:46 pm

Wow, dude. Just wow. You are attempting to compare firepower based on beam duration alone for a weapon that selectively erases anything from molecules to all traces of a civilization. Is that in megajoules or what?

Even when you do this extraordinarily precarious maneuver, you still come up with a weapon that would have to fire multiple times, with no indication that the thing even could do so in the requisite manner. Better yet, even while arguing this point, you concede that the beam can't be blocked by a temporally-shielded ship (meaning it can shoot past one against an undefended planet), thereby negating yet another of your own arguments.

So, let's review:

1. The weapon-ship can perform successfully-calculated incursions against targets even with temporally-shielded objects around.
2. Temporally-shielded ships don't block the incursion beam.
3. No ship has been observed to have shielding that can stop the beam for more than, say, a minute.

So, you have provided no functional argument as to how a smattering of temporally-shielded ships and buildings in any way represents an impediment to Annorax or protection against the incursion beam. Instead, you are left with nothing but a vain hope that something wouldn't work for some unfathomable reason, a hypothesis not supported by anything, all because of your gymnastic denialisms versus Chakotay's plain statement and its meaning.

Again, you must stop embarrassing yourself, because you're making me want to help you do it.

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Re: Planetary Defenses in Star Trek

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sat Jan 21, 2017 11:57 pm

2046 wrote:Oh yay, you're tripling-down.

First, just a note that I am "blatantly ignoring", "conveniently forget"ting, and "completely disregard"ing nothing. That is mere projection, just as is the claim -- from the guy arguing the 'Warsie' line in the 'Warsie' way, no less -- that I am doing "precisely what you accused the Warsies of doing". I alone am properly addressing Scotty's statements.
It is you who refuse to take them at face value and would rather insert your own fabricated dreamworld in place of them, a common theme in this thread.
The problem lies in the two other issues I raised several times.
Here are these two problems:

1. If they can't get through the field without needing to shoot so hard at it that they couldn't avoid killing people underneath, despite the very strong nature of the dome, why these smart people didn't quickly consider trying to shoot at it elsewhere before someone even reported the weakness quite some time later? Are they dumb?

2. Why would McCoy be concerned about the lives of these people if they were shooting through a weakness on the other side of the planet?

My explanations:

1. So are they so dumb? That's like if you knew some people were stuck inside a 400 meters wide dome made of bricks and mortar, and crouching next to the circular and bent wall (there would even be a red cross on the external side of the dome to indicate where the people are located right behind it inside the fort), saviours armed with rocket launchers would be considering using their weapons to fire at the red mark on the wall to blow a hole through it, but one of them would point out that it would kill the civilians right behind the wall. Yet they would not immediately think about trying to use their weapons on another section of the wall so they'd get a nice hole but wouldn't be turning the refugees into a bloody goo. After a debriefing of the event, a high ranking officer would ask them why they actually didn't try that immediately and we'd learn that the saviours knew that the way the dome was built, no matter where you'd blow a hole in its wall, the entire thing would have collapsed. But they found a crack on the other side and tried to damage the wall with lower yield rockets, but to no avail.
-- Or just to take another example to illustrate the complete unlikeliness of such a lack of alternative. We have a family that has been held hostage and is now stuck inside a building's wide loft and there may be a fire in the living room and the kitchen. There are two sturdy massive metal doors of equal strength, a blue one and a red one, leading to different rooms of that loft and quite distant from each other but connected to the same external public corridor. A SWAT team is here and knows about the two doors and has a good idea of the loft's layout. The civilians are known to be behind the blue one, tied and all that so they can't move and the SWAT must use C4 to get through the doors anyway. They lament that they can't get through the blue one because the explosion would kill the civilians who are right behind it. Blowing through the red door wouldn't kill them, and it's like a dozen meters on their left, but nobody in the team suggests to blow the conspicuous red door until the experimented chief explosive engineer realizes, a while later, that the windows on the other side of the loft are weaker and they should try it that way. So no one else ever had the idea to try to blow up the red door. The simple question would be, are they retarded? The answer would be, yes, completely! The second option is so obvious even a miserable monkey would think of it but nope, it eludes the competent and experienced crew, so MR. BigBrainz looks like a genius when he proposes to go through the weaker window after repeating twice that they couldn't get through the blue door.
So, why the people aboard the Enterprise didn't try to shoot at another spot when they knew that with brute force, it could get through?
It's quite obvious that by the time of Scotty's second (somewhat irritated) remark, he still had not thought of trying another spot. That despite the fact that a lot of time has actually passed between the first and second remark (the action cuts back to stuff inside the dome for quite some time, judging by the transcript left, that's a full quarter of the episode's length!). It's literally baffling. Putting yourself in their shoes... you know you could get through the world-wide field, but want to avoid hitting the dome the moment you'd finally punch through said force field. OMG how can we do that? HOW???? Think Scotty! ... Think! Hurrr no has teh brainz. Can't does that cuptain! :( :( :(

Answer: because shooting right on top of the dome (which is totally dangerous, obviously) or shooting like 50 km south from it wouldn't make a difference. That is the only reason why these smart people wouldn't even make the suggestion about shooting elsewhere with the firepower necessary to pierce the shield. This can only explained with them having the data about the field under their noses and already knowing that with full power, any rupture in the field –regardless of the section they'd be shooting at– would simply doom the people under the dome because something like a surge in the generator (inside that same dome) would happen and it would blow up. Otherwise you wouldn't care, you'd aim fifty kilometers eastwards with your scopes and give everything you'd have. And as per Scotty's words, they could get through, but this time the excess of firepower wouldn't land anywhere close to the flippin' dome! Duh.

2. Why was McCoy so concerned about the lives of Kirk, Spock and else, despite the dome in question being on the far opposite side of the goddamn planet and no one was looking at him like he were a doofus with an eye in the middle of the front for such a retarded remark?

Answer: because McCoy and others know by then that any rupture in the field done by firing at it with full power, regardless of where it is done, represents a lethal danger to people located beneath a heavily hardened dome that can only be breached by direct application of a starship's firepower (remember that a nuclear-level explosion a couple yards away from it didn't even threaten its structure at all).

That is why the shield generator, used under such circumstances, is a masssive liability. It shouldn't.
In a proper legal case, these two massive oddities found in the behaviours of knowledgeable and smart people would be spotted and discussed at length.

Also, I remember that you made the antigrav phenomenon some kind of irrelevant technobabble thingy, but that is something you wouldn't expect to happen under a defensive shield either, considering how this tech is ubiquitous across the Federation's major worlds. This also makes that field even more weird and unique.
You could claim that the planet produces that effect, but Occam's razor would consider such an oddity easier to explain by the presence of an unnatural element such as the force field.

All in all, at complete face value, we have smart characters behaving well below their expected level of competence (to be polite), and a shield never seen anywhere else and afflicted by some truly silly properties.
I try to make sense out of this mess. Of course the unstable generator is not mentionned in the episode, but then it makes two prominent and clever Starfleet officers share the competence level of a village idiot.
Up to you.
And anyway, it would still be upon you to prove that not only other planetary shields exist within the UFP with certitude, but that they also wouldn't share those two annoying properties: a single starship (not even a warship) can punch through if she gets nasty about it and it creates an antigrav field that pins down all your fancy vehicles using that tech.
I guess that's why Kirk kept a keen interest on four wheeled relics from a bygone age.
Second, I find your pattern of argumentation wherein you make straw men to be completely tiresome. I tried to chalk it up to you simply misunderstanding but you have done it an awful lot, and been called on it more than enough times to start reading more carefully.
Case in point is your spending *literally* paragraphs against my statement that"{t}he Enterprise failed to cut through at a weak point despite repeated phaser strikes before Kirk and Spock resolved the issue themselves." You pretend this is a claim on my part that the Elba shield was impervious to attack. I made no such claim; my statement is perfectly accurate.
I know the ship failed to cut through it. I even made it clear again several posts ago (the one with yellow bits). I didn't deny it.
If there's been some confusion, sorry about it.
Third, you *are* engaged in argument from ignorance by your own criteria that I must prove the existence of a thing. Elba II has a planetary shield despite everyone here agreeing that it is overkill for the facility it is protecting. Ergo, they exist.
Ergo it exists. Singular.
Next, your arguments from grammatical ignorance are just sad. As demonstrated, shielding a few buildings and ships doesn't mean squat . . . it would be akin to Voyager putting temporal shields around the bridge only. Your insistence to the contrary is merely resistance to reason.
Good thing that the last time you pointed out at the uselessness of shielding a few buildings, I said that it wouldn't be limited to a few buildings.
I even said at least twice that they'd have time to build up their defenses considering the time that elapses between the events.
Similarly, your countries-nations analogy is crap. Try capitals and nations/territories and you're closer to the obvious meaning (depending on whether Chakotay was suggesting colonies or not).
Actually it's spot on. You still don't get it.
Capitals and nations/territories wouldn't work. Chakotay uses "home worlds" and "planets", a home world being a planet with a special status.
If you wanted to use "capitals", you'd have to use "cities", since a capital tends to be a city with a special status too.
To recycle the sentence with more word swapping:

"if the captain of the USS Carl Vinson has transmitted computer virus defense to their capitals, they can protect their cities."

Which brings us back to either the USS Carl Vinson or the capitals being able to protect their cities.

You'll notice that one of the options I mentionned included the possibility that the home worlds held power over several planets. But that would just fly in the face of the fact that both Nihydron and Mawasi had so few ships to provide that it wouldn't speak well of such an expansion throughout their local spaces.
And no, it was not a bluff. Consider every movie scene where the badguy is holding the disarmed good guy at gunpoint and the good guy says "surrender or be shot". The badguy doesn't surrender, perhaps even says the good one's bluffing, then gets blown away by the sneaky good ally. The good guy wasn't bluffing. Neither was Chakotay. It is not a bluff to keep details of how the threat will become reality to oneself.
As far as the bad guy is concerned, it is a bluff. The good guy presents a threat that relies on the only possibility that he has someone else aiming at the bad guy. It's up to the bad guy to believe the good guy. Whether he was telling the truth or not, from the perspective of the person who has to be convinced or deceived, it does not matter. It's a mind game. It is a bluff.
Still, IMO, it is not exactly the same case as what we had in VOY because the threat didn't imply that someone else other than the people facing the gun (Janeway & Pals) could shoot Annorax down. Chakotay made the suggestion that Janeway could cause damage, although he knew that they were coming on the basis of an entirely different reason; not that Janeway had a secret weapon to use (or another super duper ship that would come out of nowhere), but that she was counting on someone inside to sabotage the target. So he presented a possibility but he knew it wasn't true. You can't make it more a bluff than that, really.

Besides, even if Chakotay was playing extra spicy by slightly hinting at the possibility that Annorax could be betrayed from within (but I think it would be needlessly risky and completely undermine the chances of the mutiny), it would still be a bluff because Annorax would have no way to know if it were true or not.

The following definition perfectly fits with this:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bluff#3

Definition of bluff

transitive verb

1a : to deter or frighten by pretense or a mere show of strength <bluffed them into surrendering>b : deceive <bluff her way in without a ticket>c : feign <The catcher bluffed a throw to first.>

2 card games : to deceive (an opponent) by a bold bet on an inferior hand <was bluffed out of a winning hand>
intransitive verb

: to bluff someone : act deceptively <You can tell when he is bluffing.>
And out of curiosity, I clicked on the link below that definition:
http://www.learnersdictionary.com/definition/bluff
1 bluff /blf/ verb
bluffs; bluffed; bluffing
Learner's definition of BLUFF
1
: to pretend that you will do something or that you know or have something in order to trick someone into doing what you want
[no object]

Don't listen to his threats—he's just bluffing. [=he will not really do what he threatens to do]
She says someone else has made her a higher offer, but I think she's bluffing.
He's a terrible card player—you can always tell when he's bluffing. [=when he's pretending that he has better cards than he actually has]

[+ object]

Don't listen to his threats—he's just bluffing you.
I managed to bluff my way into the show without a ticket. [=I got into the show by bluffing]
I bluffed my way through the interview.

2
[+ object] US : to pretend to do or make (something)

The catcher bluffed [=faked, feigned] a throw to first base.

2 bluff /blf/ noun
plural bluffs
Learner's definition of BLUFF
[count]
: a false threat or claim that is meant to get someone to do something

She says someone else has made her a higher offer, but I think it's just a bluff.

call your bluff
If you have made a bluff or a threat and people call your bluff, they tell you to do the thing you have threatened to do because they do not believe that you will really do it.

When she threatened to quit her job, her boss called her bluff and told her she could leave if she wanted to.
Still, if with all this, you don't see a bluff, so be it, we'll just agree to disagree then because I'm done.
Further, I find it offensive that you are making ludicrous claims about an episode you just admitted to not bothering to work from.
Don't be offended for such things! Geez. Besides, I did read the transcript several times, read Memory Alpha's entire description of the episode and watched several youtube videos about it too in order to get as much visual clues as possible. That's probably more than many debaters usually do when they jump into those kind of discussions you know, so chill.
This is probably why you don't understand how Voyager's temporal shields disrupted the weapon-ship's calculations. Timing is everything . . . Voyager turned them on just as the weapon-ship fired, so the previously-inert component Voyager suddenly became non-inert.
They turned them on as the wake was approaching, not just as the weapon-ship fired.
I'm talking about the Garenor event here (day 65), btw. This is when Annorax's crew detected an anomaly after everything started well; that is, before the interaction between the temporal incursion's wake and a temporally shielded Voyager.

As an unrelated sidenote: the wake seems to cross 20 LY within a day. That's a FTL speed of 7300c. Voyager could not outrun that.
Later, however, the Ram Izad were wiped away and calculations held because Voyager could be accounted for, even without her position being known.
Thus, your claim of shields magically scrapping calcs is dead wrong, and as this is your sole explanation for how small shielded objects can upset Annorax and force him to quit, so is your claim based on it.
How do we know that? It's possible that somehow, updated calculations could compensate for that, even if the characters say nothing of it, yes, since there's a lack of unplanned effects, but we don't even know if Voyager was caught in the wake after that specific shot against Ram Izad (day 207, more than four months and a half after that of Garenor) and there's no mention of it. An interaction might have happened like it might have not. We don't know the maximum effective range of each wake. Thus far, we know for sure that it is at least 20 LY and that's about it. Voyager could have been beyond that distance:
Day 226; 19 days later, the temporal weapon ship (TWS, should have used that acronym before) is located 50 LY away from Voyager.
Day 257; 31 days later, they attack the TWS which apparently hasn't moved much.
We don't even know why a temporal disturbance could offset the effects so much. It could be very random. For sure, Voyager was totally unrelated to Garenor's history.
All we know is that the calculations worked this time, but without knowing exactly why Voyager was such an insane game changer nor knowing if Voyager interacted with the next wake, we cannot attibute the correct outcome to a new set of updated calculations for sure.
I am being as nice here as I can, but the simple fact is that you are refusing to admit clear and indefensible errors in reasoning. It's as if you're declaring modern car headlights don't exist because all you're willing to admit are flashlights from 1917 and you refuse to admit that more powerful lights could be mounted on automobiles, despite more powerful lights (for the time) having been mounted on 1917 autos already.
That analogy really is terrible, isn't it? Like if I were stuck in the past, denying observed and well documented decades of technological evolution (I wouldn't, because we have ample evidence, contrary to Trek), or that to mirror the relation between the UFP and people in the delta quadrant, that we should assume that tech mastered or owned in country A would also be found in country B. Or that I'd be denying that we'd have observed more powerful lights already being mounted back in 1917 (and what would that refer to? more powerful planetary shields? haven't seen them, sorry), etc.
Stop embarrassing yourself, I beg you.
Thanks for your worries. :)



Additionnal data:
Regarding Gambit Part 1, a longer quotation would provide a clue about the strength of the local shield protecting the ruins and the outpost:
BARAN: Our next objective should prove an interesting challenge. We're headed for the Sakethan burial mounds on Calder Two.
PICARD: What? Calder Two isn't just another archaeological site, you know. It's a Federation outpost there.
BARAN: I don't see that as a problem.
PICARD: It's defended by Starfleet. You don't think they're just going to stand by while we walk in there and take whatever we want.
BARAN: I'm familiar with the tactical situation.
VEKOR: What are their defences?
BARAN: Nothing to worry about. They have a type four deflector shield protecting the outpost and the ruins.
PICARD: They also have a minimum of two phaser banks and possibly photon torpedoes. Is that enough to worry about?
TALLERA: How do you know so much about this outpost?
PICARD: Because I tried to smuggle a Sakethan glyph stone out of there nearly two years ago. I barely got away in one piece.
BARAN: Our weapons are more than a match for their defences. I anticipate that we'll be able to destroy the outpost within fifteen minutes. Then we'll send in Tallera and the landing party to secure the relics.
Enterprise-D and the mercenary ship seemed to be of equal power, based on descriptions of the episode. The mercenary ship used disruptors.


2046 wrote:Wow, dude. Just wow. You are attempting to compare firepower based on beam duration alone for a weapon that selectively erases anything from molecules to all traces of a civilization. Is that in megajoules or what?
I haven't used those units. The logic is straight forward.
I observe how long the updated alien ships survive against the TWS' beam and look at how long a planetary shield would resist based on two shield strengths, which I consider rather generous since what we see from these alien doesn't speak well of their ability to come up with the required quality of shield technology.


Btw, as for the calcs I made before, there's another thing to point out about the last space battle in VOY's Year of Hell: the two alien ships started vanishing about 10~12 frames after they got hit by the TWS' beam. That's how long we can consider their shields held up. At a framerate of 29.97 fps (file readable with the following codec: H264, MPEG-4 AVC, and taken from here), that's about .4 seconds (instead of 2 seconds as per my initial parameters).
So my former results would be divided by 5.

We move from 16 minutes to only 3.2 minutes (192 s) of constant firing to get through a planetary shielding worth of a thousand ship-shields (between 4 to 6 shots), and therefore about half an hour of constant pounding if the planetary shield was 10,000 times stronger than an alien ship's shield (an insanely generous strength we'd love to see even once in Trek).
I actually wonder if even the Borg themselves enjoyed these kind of multiples on their Cubes, as far as buffed up single shield generators are concerned.
The point, though, is that even IF those planetary shields existed, they wouldn't offer any worthwhile defense, making Chakotay's claim all the more exhuberant. We could always excuse this inaccuracy on how premature his estimates tend to be, as per Annorax's comment.
Anyway, in other words, nice try Chak', but Annorax didn't bite. :)

Even when you do this extraordinarily precarious maneuver, you still come up with a weapon that would have to fire multiple times, with no indication that the thing even could do so in the requisite manner.
We know, at least, that it could shoot every five days. Garenor is erased on day 65, Voyager attacked on day 70. That's 73 shots a year.
Known capable beam duration is 34 seconds and some more since the beam was still firing when Voyager left by warp on her last leg.
Better yet, even while arguing this point, you concede that the beam can't be blocked by a temporally-shielded ship (meaning it can shoot past one against an undefended planet), thereby negating yet another of your own arguments.
It can be blocked for a limited period. Voyager did better there. This is discussed above.

Now, unless you provide strong evidence that the Mawasi and Nihydron, who couldn't spare more than two ships each (!) to attack a murderous ship that could not just devastate a planet but literally erase an entire species and their assets from history, regarldess of how far they had spread, by one-shooting at the right spot on their respective home worlds, would yet have the resources to build and power planetary shields of extreme strength despite all that they displayed argues literally against such assumptions, I think my figures are already very generous.
Hell, have you seen how long one of the alien ships of the last pair lasted against the conventional weapons fired by the TWS? One torpedo to the nacelle and that ship was completely screwed, veering sideways and plunging into Voyager. Their shields were so frail they couldn't block enough of the bleedthrough after the very first shot. There is simply no reason to believe these guys would have anything particularly impressive in terms of shielding. Period. Their shield tech simply sucks.
Chakotay claiming that a shield upgrade would render the TWS useless was really desperate. But since he was bluffing, that's not so grave.
So, let's review:

1. The weapon-ship can perform successfully-calculated incursions against targets even with temporally-shielded objects around.
2. Temporally-shielded ships don't block the incursion beam.
3. No ship has been observed to have shielding that can stop the beam for more than, say, a minute.
1. see above as to why looking only for updated calcs as to why it worked well against Ram Izad is insufficient.
2. not exactly. They do, but for a limited amount of time. They, however, completely block the wake as far as we know.
3. exact.
So, you have provided no functional argument as to how a smattering of temporally-shielded ships and buildings in any way represents an impediment to Annorax or protection against the incursion beam.
As I said earlier on in this post, I didn't say that a few buildings would be protected.
Instead, you are left with nothing but a vain hope that something wouldn't work for some unfathomable reason, a hypothesis not supported by anything, all because of your gymnastic denialisms versus Chakotay's plain statement and its meaning.
May you explain what you mean by "something", as emphasized by me above, please?


Anyway, watching some videos, we see that the vast majority of the removal of a species and its assets is actually done by the wake itself, not direct contact with the beam.
Also, no shield drop was reported after Voyager was hit by the wake when the ship was shielded.
If we consider a network of regional shields, which is a technology I've been willing to give these aliens, we'd see that they would probably be only worth low values of ship-shields, perhaps between 20 to 100 at most (at 100 SS, it takes less than 20 seconds to get through the shield, which is well below the known capable duration of the beam). So we actually find ourselves in this interesting case where the TWS could easily get through one of those theater shields, but as the wake would spread, said wake would not manage to erase the other protected assets.

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2046
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Re: Planetary Defenses in Star Trek

Post by 2046 » Sun Jan 22, 2017 1:32 am

I'm not feeding the trolling time vampire. You've dropped to "lol Trek characters are dumb" (what was that about arguing like a 'Warsie' again?), refuse to acknowledge that Chakotay wasn't bluffing by quoting definitions that prove you're wrong because no deception was involved, pretending that you didn't just spend paragraphs straw-manning me about whether the Enterprise could defeat Elba's planetary shield, and now newly pretending that there's a behavioral difference now between beam and wake insofar as temporal shields when no rational evidence exists. Oh yeah, and you just invented the claim that the temporal wake only has a range of 20LY despite it restoring an empire that spreads across 5000 parsecs.

Oh, and "nations/territories" is correct, because while cities = planets, a space civilization doesn't exactly have rural areas. The closest land analog would be if people could only live in domed structures a la Elba II, so it'd be "capital dome" and "domes".

Put simply, you are layering failed ad hoc rationalizations atop intentional misunderstanding atop logical fallacy atop abject denialism, your position being as gymnastic as any Olympian so long as you can keep denying the existence of planetary shields when *we've f***ing seen one*. Even when I try to give you a simple analogy you just deny it or straw-man it. You might as well deny the TOS phaser rifle next.

I'm not only done with your flagrantly false argument and its corollary disingenuous resistance typing, but I also think you owe me an apology for the waste of my time (and that of every reader).

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Re: Planetary Defenses in Star Trek

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Wed Jan 25, 2017 7:49 pm

2046 wrote:I'm not feeding the trolling time vampire.
Thanks for the insult, really. I thought the idea was to drop them? :)
You've dropped to "lol Trek characters are dumb" (what was that about arguing like a 'Warsie' again?),...
Oh, so when did this kind of argument not work? I remember that when debating against SW, it was a very valid thing to do, notably to reject claims about stupidly crazy firepower figures, to point out that some claims over super tech could only be made legit at the cost of having normally very competent and clever characters suddenly becoming afflicted with down syndrome.
Now it's used against Trek and you're not happy. I see.
... refuse to acknowledge that Chakotay wasn't bluffing by quoting definitions that prove you're wrong because no deception was involved,
I consider that they actually prove me right. In fact, you didn't even try to show how they prove me wrong, did you?
I think my point is clear. Chakotay tried to have Annorax stand down by presenting threats that Chakotay himself knew weren't true (for example, he knew that Voyager & Pals weren't attacking because they suddenly had a super weapon to defeat the TWS but simply because they timed their assault on the basis of a successful mutiny inside the ship).
So yes, it was a bluff. I could probably pick two dozen poker analogies but I don't think we'd go anywhere with that.
So for the sake of good manners, we'll just have to agree to disagree then.
pretending that you didn't just spend paragraphs straw-manning me about whether the Enterprise could defeat Elba's planetary shield,
That was a wild accusation, I thought. But I decided to review the second part of the thread to see what happened and I think I know now.
I was refering Elba II from the beginning as an example for what we could expect for the aliens' defensive abilities (even saying "elbaic principles" at some point). What you did on your side is that you took a look at Elba II outside of that context.
So in the post you probably think of, I was following an idea already started on the former page, where I said it would not be a good thing to make claims about planetary shields in favour of the alien species Voyager met based on the principles observed from the planetary shield on Elba II and its noted weakness.
I considered, then, that for your position to make sense regarding Chakotay's words, it required the so called aliens' planetary shields to be capable of resisting the time beam as to provide a serious defense (since you rejected the bluff, it meant Chakotay was speaking the truth and that's also why I said your argument required perfect protection, whether we agree on that or not). Meaning that they'd have to be considerably stronger, once temporally updated, than what Voyager demonstrated, despite the fact that the aliens ship had much inferior shielding. And so when using Elba II as an example, it would require the shield over that planet to be capable of repelling well more than the firepower of one warship (I even say warship in the post I link to and as you know, I wasn't refering to the Enterprise, which I don't consider a warship –neither does Kirk). But as per Scott's words, it was not going to happen. So yes, we were simply replying to each other by using two different argumental contexts. OK.

Still, regarding Elba II alone, we have:
- a more than well expected simple tactical suggestion not being made, reaching beyond total incompetence (read: entirely fueled by plot induced stupidity), including an usual genius stuck like a broken record on the unique and obsessive idea of shooting at a shield in one single spot for like a full quarter of an episode, despite the danger represented by firing at that very spot. Remember, the problem wasn't really that there was no obvious weakness at that time, but that shooting through the shield would also hit the dome underneath, to which the solution was rather very obvious but apparently very arcane to the crew.
- an odd tactical and medical assessment made by a very competent doctor being very concerned about the survival rates of people who haven't the remotest chance of ever being hurt by what the Enterprise is about to do: trying to put a hole through a weaker area of the planetary shield on the side of the planet opposite to the asylum, as if that had any kind of chance to ever reach the people under the dome.

Both of which wouldn't happen if the shield's design and mechanics were that sound and standard, if only because any other type of shielding hasn't suddenly made very competent characters drop IQ points on sight.

So what we have is a case of some kind of force field, behaving as a planetary shield, that clearly appears to deactivate antigravitationnal technology (detrimental to those who'd benefit from the protection) and which can be reasonnably expected to be quickly defeated by a single warship's firepower anyway. And which makes competent characters behave in a dumb fashion.

Adding to that, I will say that you don't properly consider all the aspects of this case and that you have clearly prefered not to address the relevant lines of dialogue, contrary to your usual pugnacity about almost over-analyzing one character's words or one person's words as demonstrated all over your very website and outside of it.
Also, adding to that, you use Elba II to make a wild generalization regarding the passive defensive abilities of the UFP based on that single case alone.
If anything, going with assumptions, would one expect such a supposedly ubiquitous shielding ability to be clearly referenced more than once. It's not like Trek had tons of occasions to do so!
and now newly pretending that there's a behavioral difference now between beam and wake insofar as temporal shields when no rational evidence exists.
I am not pretending. That is what I recently realized.
If only for the fact that the full brunt of the beam is ought to be more intense than a minute section of the resulting ripple, for starters. There's obviously a difference between a rock and the expanding ripple it creates when thrown in a pond.
I above all noticed that the beam had an immediate effect on Voyager, as reported by characters, while the wake (once Voyager was shielded) didn't trigger any kind of remark like "shield down by xx%" or "it seems the wake began to displace us out of spacetime but the ship held on".
Because a report of that nature was made when hit by the beam.
Oh yeah, and you just invented the claim that the temporal wake only has a range of 20LY despite it restoring an empire that spreads across 5000 parsecs.
It would need to be fast enough to cover at least an entire semi-width of the complete Imperium within a day.

http://www.chakoteya.net/Voyager/407.htm
Year of Hell wrote:(day 65)
[Krenim Timeship - Bridge]

OBRIST: We are within range of the Garenor homeworld.
ANNORAX: Set temporal coordinates. Full power to the weapon. Prepare for total erasure of the species.
OBRIST: Targeting the focal point. Ready.
ANNORAX: Fire.
(The ray spreads around the planet then off into space.)
OBRIST: Temporal incursion in progress.
ANNORAX: Trace elements?
OBRIST: Diminishing.
ANNORAX: Counter indications?
OBRIST: None so far. Organisms and structures are being eradicated.
ANNORAX: Track the temporal wavefront as it passes through the system. I want to monitor every change in the timeline as it occurs.
OBRIST: Yes, sir.
If it weren't for the observed range of 20 LY, that alone would somewhat imply that the range is limited to a system, otherwise we'd expect Annorax to want to keep an eye on more than the "system".
In fact, if the wake were very fast, Annorax wouldn't even have had enough time to ask for the wavefront to be tracked as it would already be well beyond the system's border by the moment he'd give this command.
It would be retarded from him as a commander, but I undertsand that you don't mind main characters behaving in retarded ways just as long as it suits your arguments.

Anyway, in order to use the same ratio I used earlier on (3 words per second), we notice that between the moment the beam is fired and Obrist's final report, we have a count of 18 words.
So that's 6 seconds before Annorax orders Obrist to track a wake that's clearly still inside the stellar system, most likely well within said system.
How big would that system be? Ours is 39.44 AU wide. That's 6.24e-4 LY. Let's make it 100 AU, or 1.581e-3 LY.
Judging by Annorax's wording, said wake still seems to need to cover a significant distance inside the system. To be generous, let's say it has already covered half of it, although this goes clearly counter to what is implied. Let's round that at 50 AU because we don't know where Garenor is and there's still the entire other side of the system to cover anyway, and we're going to pretend that Garenor was near the middle of it, like Earth (1 AU from Sol).

So the wake had already crossed 50 AU over 6 seconds, or 8.333 AU/s. Therefore the wake takes .12 seconds to cover 1 AU.
Light takes about 8 minutes (480 seconds) to cover 1 AU. The wake is 4000 times faster, so the FTL speed of the wake is 4000c.
Yes, it could only cover four thousand light-years per year, or only 10.959 LY per day.

Even with my more generous figure from earlier on (7300c), the wavefront is still not fast enough to cover a whole half of the entire Imperium's potential territory within a year.
This means that the wake simply cannot need to cover such a vast territory for all the effects to kick in, because the full reports post-incursion always come within the day of the shot (including the 98% restoration one).
So for all intents and purposes, yes, 20 LY might be close to the wake's maximum range and the rest is just pure guessing ... and the writers didn't think that through and that's not their job and there goes the reliable evidence anyway.
Oh, and "nations/territories" is correct, because while cities = planets, a space civilization doesn't exactly have rural areas.
There's no logic in that! o_O
A civilization being capable of sending very advanced ships in deep space doesn't preclude the use of crop fields.
I mean, come on. Are you now literally making up a new bold claim, that all the home worlds in question were ecumenopolises?

I also remember a shot from TOS, possibly from the remastered version, with two people picknicking in the countryside and we could can plenty of crop fields in the background, plus some futuristic structures here and there in the distance. Besides, you'd then have to prove that this new twisted logic applies to Earth to begin with! Or say, Romulus.
The closest land analog would be if people could only live in domed structures a la Elba II, so it'd be "capital dome" and "domes".
What the hell?
You clearly don't understand a rather simple concept here. I explained all of this in detail, down to how a home world is a planet with a special status (duh), then used Chakotay's dialogue word for word and used the same relation between both subjects in the sentence to correct your failed analogy regarding the use of capitals in place of home worlds, where you tried to equate capitals with nations/territories, when the correct relation is "capital" and "city", because a capital is a city with a special status. Please pay attention.

There's no way you can possibly deny my point (well, yes, you can, just as you can deny obvious bluffing), aside from precisely not replying to anything I said. Which seems to clearly be your favoured method by now, added to your intial use of snipping.
Put simply, you are layering failed ad hoc rationalizations atop intentional misunderstanding atop logical fallacy atop abject denialism, your position being as gymnastic as any Olympian so long as you can keep denying the existence of planetary shields when *we've f***ing seen one*.
Talking about strawmen... I have simply not denied once in this thread the existence of the shield over Elba II. :)
Even when I try to give you a simple analogy you just deny it or straw-man it. You might as well deny the TOS phaser rifle next.
Violins please! Your analogy is utterly false. Reply to my post or stop complaining.
I'm not only done with your flagrantly false argument and its corollary disingenuous resistance typing, but I also think you owe me an apology for the waste of my time (and that of every reader).
Looking for support now? That really does sound desperate. :)
I wish you had spent more time actually replying!

Iscander
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Re: Planetary Defenses in Star Trek

Post by Iscander » Thu Jan 26, 2017 12:48 am

Starting to repost these quotes for future reference.

First info dump post covers the conventional stuff.

Shields: Structure, Theater, Planetary
Weapons: Surface, Orbital

Federation Member Worlds
ST XI “Star Trek”

NERO: You will give me the frequencies to disable Earth's defenses. Centaurian slugs. They latch onto your brainstem, and release a toxin that will force you to answer. Frequencies please, sir.
PIKE: Christopher Pike, Captain, USS Enterprise, serial number...
ST I “The Motion Picture”

CHEKOV: All planetary defense systems have just gone inoperative.
TNG S4E1 “Best of Both Wolds pt2”

SHELBY: The Borg have dropped out of warp, sir. Jupiter outpost nine two reported visual contact at twelve hundred hours, thirteen minutes.
RIKER: Planetary defenses?
SHELBY: Responding. No reports on effectiveness but I can't believe that against the Borg…
[LATER…]
WORF: It is confirmed. The Borg have broken through the Mars defense perimeter.
TNG S5E8 “Unification pt2”

WORF: The Vulcan defense vessels are also responding. The Romulan force is retreating toward the Neutral Zone.
DS9 S4E11 “Homefront”

LEYTON: I don't know, but if you ask me, there's only one possible explanation.
ODO: Sabotage.
SISKO: The changelings.
ODO: Take down the power relays, and you neutralize sensors, transporters, surface-based defense installations.
SISKO: In other words, Earth is defenseless.
LEYTON: If the Dominion attacks now, we don't stand a chance.
DS9 S6E19 “In the Pale Moonlight”

SISKO: According to initial reports, the invasion force must have come from somewhere in the Calandra Sector.
DAX: Did Starfleet Intelligence know anything about the buildup?
WORF: No. They believed Calandra was too far from the Dominion supply lines to be a threat.
SISKO: There's plenty of blame to go around. The Tenth Fleet was supposed to be protecting Betazed and its outlying colonies, but it was caught out of position on a training exercise. What's worse, Betazed's own defense systems are obsolete and undermanned. The planet was theirs in less than ten hours.
KIRA: With Betazed in the hands of the Jem'Hadar, the Dominion is in a position to threaten Vulcan, Andor, Tellar, Alpha Centauri.
Federation Colonies and Outposts
TOS S1E14 “Balance of Terror”

HANSEN [OC]: Outposts two, three, and eight are gone. Unknown weapon. Completely destroyed, even though we were alerted. Had our deflector shield on maximum. Hit by enormous power. First attack blew our deflector shield. If they hit us again with our deflector shield gone. Do you read me, Enterprise?
[LATER…]
HANSEN [on viewscreen]: Enterprise, can you see it? My command post here. We're a mile deep on an asteroid. Almost solid iron. And even through our deflectors, it did this. Can you see?
[LATER…]
KIRK: Do you have phaser capacity? We're still out of range.
HANSEN: Negative. Phasers gone. Weapons crew dead.
KIRK: Make a challenge. Warn that ship off.
TOS S1E18 “Arena”

KIRK: Can you tell me what happened?
MAN: Scanners reported a ship approaching. We get them now and then. They're all welcome to use our facilities. You know that.
KIRK: Yes, I know.
MAN: They came in space normal speed, using our regular approach route, but they knocked out our phaser batteries with their first salvo. From then on we were helpless. We weren't expecting anything! Why should we? We didn't have anything anyone would want.
TOS S3E14 “Whom the God’s Destroy”

SCOTT: Immediate probe. Is the force field in place, Mister Sulu?
SULU: Yes, sir. Solidly.
UHURA: (at Spock's station) Life continues to exist on the planet.
MCCOY: Got to break through it somehow.
SCOTT: Doctor, I told you we couldn't do it without killing everyone in the asylum dome.
MCCOY: I know it, Scotty.
SCOTT: Well, there's one last thing we might try. Perhaps the ship's phasers can cut through a section of the force field at its weakest point. Where did you say that was located, Mister Sulu?
SULU: On the far side of the planet, Mister Scott.
TOS S3E18 “The Lights of Zetar”

UHURA: Sir, I'm unable to establish contact with the planetoid. I'm hailing on all frequencies. No response.
SPOCK: It is of little consequence, Captain. Memory Alpha has no protective shields.
KIRK: No shields?
SPOCK: None, Captain. When the library complex was assembled, shielding was considered inappropriate to its totally academic purpose. Since the information on the Memory planet is available to everyone, special protection was deemed unnecessary.
TNG S5E13 “The Masterpiece Society”

HANNAH: Good news, Aaron. We should be able to change the course of the core fragment, but we'll also need to fortify the structure. And we're going to need help to do it.
LAFORGE: We'll need to bring down engineering crews from the Enterprise to work with your people for the next forty eight hours.
CONOR: Engineering crews?
LAFORGE: They have to install five new shield generators and power supplies.
HANNAH: Fifty officers are waiting for your approval to transport down. We don't have much time, Aaron.
TNG S7E4 “The Gambit pt1”

DATA: But it is only a small science station. It has limited defensive capabilities. I do not believe it could withstand an attack from the mercenary ship. Mister Worf. Send a message to the Federation outpost on Calder Two. Advise them that if a ship matching the mercenary vessel approaches, they should attempt to delay it until our arrival. Ensign, take us out of orbit. Set course for the Calder system. Warp nine.
[LATER…]
VEKOR: What are their defenses?
BARAN: Nothing to worry about. They have a type four deflector shield protecting the outpost and the ruins.
PICARD: They also have a minimum of two phaser banks and possibly photon torpedoes. Is that enough to worry about?
Klingon
ENT S2E19 “Judgment”

ORAK: Captain Duras, tell the tribunal about your encounter with the accused.
DURAS: I am no longer a captain.
ORAK: Explain.
DURAS: I am a second weapons officer serving on the Ty'Gokor defense perimeter.
ENT S4E16 “Divergence”

REED: They're firing on the colony.
T'POL: Target their disruptors!
[Laboratory]
(The room rocks to weapons fire.)
ARCHER: How strong are the shields around this place?
K'VAGH: Not strong enough. You said you had two ships in orbit!
TNG S3E17 “Sins of the Father”

DATA: Commander, I have discovered the basis of the charges against Worf's father. Apparently the Klingons recently captured a Romulan ship with logs that provided new information on the Khitomer attack. They clearly indicate a transmission from the outpost to the Romulan ship moments before the shields went down.
LAFORGE: From Worf's father?
DATA: They do correspond to Mogh's personal security code.
RIKER: How can we be sure these records haven't been falsified?
[LATER…]
[Great Hall]
DURAS: The Romulans lowered the outpost shields themselves. They were given the defense access code! The record clearly show the Romulan patrol ship receiving a personal transmission from Mogh seconds before the shields fell.
DS9 S4E2 “Way of the Warrior pt2”

DAX: Captain, I'm receiving a priority one message from Starfleet Intelligence. The Klingons are refusing to give up several of the Cardassian colonies they seized during the invasion. They're fortifying their positions and deploying orbital defense systems.
KIRA: Looks like the Klingons are here to stay.
DS9 S5E1 “Apocalypse Rising”

SISKO: According to Starfleet intelligence, Chancellor Gowron has relocated Klingon military headquarters to Ty'Gokor.
WORF: That will make our job more difficult. Ty'Gokor is located in an asteroid field deep in Klingon space. It is probably the most heavily fortified installation in the Empire.
SISKO: There are at least thirty warships stationed there at any given time and the entire asteroid field is protected by a tachyon detection grid.
O'BRIEN: Which means there's no way we can get a cloaked ship within transporter range.
DS9 S5E1 “Apocalypse Rising”

DAMAR: Personally, I think we'd be better off launching an orbital assault on Gowron's command center. A full spread of photon torpedoes would take care of him, the Klingon High Command and everyone else within a few hundred kilometers.
ODO: You should ask Dukat for some shore leave. I think you've been in space too long.
DAMAR: Why? Because I'm willing to spill a little Klingon blood to get the job done?
O'BRIEN: Shelling Ty'Gokor won't get the job done. You'd be lucky to launch one torpedo before they shot you down. Besides, even a dozen won't penetrate the shielding around the command center.
Romulan
DS9 S7E1 “Images in the Sand”

KIRA: The hospital isn't the problem.
ROSS: Then what is?
KIRA: The seven thousand plasma torpedoes the Romulans have secretly deployed there.
Cardassian
DS9 S4E14 “Return to Grace”

DAMAR: Sir, we're approaching the outpost on Korma, or what's left of it.
DUKAT: What are you talking about?
DAMAR: From what we can tell, it's been attacked. The planetary defense systems have been disabled. Every building has been destroyed.
[LATER…]
DUKAT: Because the outpost's planetary defense weapons are system five disruptors. They were never designed to operate aboard a moving spacecraft, and this cargo bays were never designed to hold them.
DS9 S6E26 “Tears of the Prophets”

DAMAR: Not as vulnerable as you think. We don't need starships to protect Chin'toka. Not anymore. These are our new unmanned orbital weapon platforms. Their hulls are protected by regenerative forcefields and their arsenals consist of a thousand plasma torpedoes.
Dominion
DS9 S7E7 “Once More Unto the Breach”

MARTOK: I'm going to send the Malpara and Ning'tao in ahead of the rest of the squadron. They'll make a single strafing run on the base and then head out of the system. When the enemy sends out their repair crews to assess the damage, then the rest of the squadron will decloak. With any luck, we'll catch them not only unprepared but with their entire damage control effort underway.
[LATER…]
KOLANA: Their shields are down to sixty five percent. Three Cardassian cruisers are in spacedock, orbiting the far side of the planet. Two of them are getting underway. The Malpara and the Ning'tao have completed their attack.
KOLANA: The Malpara is gone. No survivors. Ning'tao is heading out of the system. The Cardassians are pursuing.
MARTOK: Leaving their base unprotected. Helm, take us in. Bring us to a hover three hundred meters above the base. Stand by to decloak on my command.
SYNON: Holding at three hundred meters.
MARTOK: Scan the base.
KOLANA: They've dispatched damage control teams. Two defense batteries are out and they've just dropped their primary shield grid.
MARTOK: Decloak the ship and open fire.
Random Alien Species
TNG S1E17 “When the Bough Breaks”

Captain's log, stardate 41509.1. Either by chance or intent, we've been led to the planet Aldea, which appeared out of nowhere, hidden behind a sophisticated shielding device.
[Bridge]
DATA: Sensors indicate that the shield is electromagnetic, a complicated light refracting mechanism.
PICARD: A cloaking device?
DATA: Aye, sir.
LAFORGE: It's got to be pretty sophisticated to hide an entire planet .
TNG S5E14 “Conundrum”

DATA: Sensors show several objects in our path, sir. They are twenty nine meters in length and are unmanned.
MACDUFF: According to Starfleet records, they're sentry pods programmed to defend their Central Command.
RIKER: I'm reading forty seven of them around the perimeter.
PICARD: Tactical analysis, Mister Data.
DATA: The pods are equipped with fusion-generated pulse lasers and minimal shielding.
VOY S2E12 “Resistance”

KIM: I've been studying their orbital sensor net. It surrounds the entire planet. This is the most sophisticated system I've ever seen. It monitors everything we do. There's no way of disabling it from orbit.
CHAKOTAY: So much for a surprise attack.
KIM: We may still be able to surprise them, even if they do see us coming. We can modify the main deflector to send out dozens of radion beams which should penetrate the prison shields. One of them will carry our transporter signal but the sensor net won't be able to distinguish which one, so the Mokra won't know the exact location we're beaming to.
CHAKOTAY: And they won't know where to concentrate their defenses.
KIM: That's the best head start I can give you.
CHAKOTAY: Then it'll have to do. How long will it take to modify the deflector?
KIM: I can do it right now.
CHAKOTAY: Chakotay to Paris. Is the rescue team ready?
PARIS [OC]: Standing by.
CHAKOTAY: Prepare for transport.
KIM: Deflector ready, Commander.
CHAKOTAY: Initiate the radion beams.
KIM: Sending out the first volley. It's working. They're getting through the shields.
CHAKOTAY: Begin the transport.
KIM: Transporter room two, synchronize your confinement beams to (Boom!) That came from the surface.
CHAKOTAY: Maximum shields. Damage report.
KIM: Shields at ninety percent. It's a precision hit right to the source of the beams. Main deflector is now offline. We're being hailed from the surface.
CHAKOTAY: On screen.
AUGRIS [on viewscreen]: Your attempt to penetrate our defenses is a hostile act against the Mokra Order. There are now eighty five phased ion cannons targeted at your ship. If you don't withdraw from Mokra space in two minutes, we will open fire.
VOY S7E8 “Nightingale”

LOKEN: Our world has been under an Annari blockade for three years. The planet is protected by a shield grid, but it's almost impossible to get our ships in or out.
VOY S7E23 “Homestead”

NEELIX: Hypothetically, if they wanted to defend the asteroid, how would they do it?
TUVOK: To begin with they would need to establish some kind of perimeter.
NEELIX: You mean shields?
TUVOK: Yes. The miners are monitoring the asteroid. If they detected the Talaxians erecting a shield, they would attempt to stop them.
[LATER…]
NEELIX: I know from personal experience that you have forcefield emitters. We could use them to establish a shield grid. We'd need to deploy a series of them on the asteroid's surface, along bisecting diameters. Sixteen emitters should be enough to form a grid.
OXILON: Even if you're right, it'd take weeks to dig that many tunnels to the surface.
NEELIX: Commander Tuvok suggested that we could modify the emitters so they could be fired from torpedo tubes on your ship and planted in the surface.
OXILON: As soon as the miners realized what we were doing, they'd attack.
NEELIX: I could provide cover from my ship. But you're right, we'd have to work quickly.
DEXA: We could route power to the emitters directly from the core. They'd have a permanent energy supply.

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Re: Planetary Defenses in Star Trek

Post by Iscander » Thu Jan 26, 2017 12:55 am

Second Info dump re-post: Mines

Cloaked mines seem to be pretty common. Enough so that even Starfleet is in on the game.
ENT S2E3 “Minefield”

REED: It's armed with tricobalt explosives. I think it's a mine. And judging by the firepower, something similar damaged our ship.
ARCHER: Can you tell if it's active?
REED: No reason to believe it's not.
T'POL: Captain, it's lodged near Impulse Reactor Two. An explosion anywhere near there could disable Enterprise.
ARCHER: What if we polarized the adjacent hull plating?
REED: We don't know how it's triggered. Somebody has to go out there and defuse it, and it should be me. I have the ordnance training.
ARCHER: I've never heard of a minefield with just two mines. Are the quantum beacons still mounted on the grappler arm?
TRAVIS: I believe so.
ARCHER: Lower them into position, then modify the viewscreen. Activate the beacon.
T'POL: They were designed to penetrate Suliban cloaking devices. I'll try shifting the phase variance.
[LATER…]
[Bridge]
T'POL: I'm detecting something in the gamma spectrum, phase variant point zero zero seven five.
(A large number of mines appear on the viewscreen.)
[Hull]
REED: Its surface is pockmarked. Probably micrometeorite impacts. It seems to have been in orbit for some time. The spikes are magnetic. Two of them have locked onto the hull.
ST II “The Wrath of Khan”

UHURA: Captain, ...I'm getting something on the distress channel.
SAAVIK: On speakers!
KOBAYASHI MARU VOICE: Imperative! This is the Kobayashi Maru, ...nineteen periods out of Altair Six. We have struck a gravitic mine and have lost all power. ...Our hull is penetrated and we have sustained many casualties.
TNG S6E11 “Chain of Command pt2”

JELLICO: Starfleet now believes the Cardassians are preparing to invade Minos Korva. I'm convinced their invasion fleet is hiding in the McAllister Nebula. I intend to hit them before they leave it.
LAFORGE: Captain, what if you're wrong? What if the Cardassians are in that nebula to conduct scientific research?
JELLICO: You'd have to have some pretty good evidence to convince me of that.
CRUSHER: You're still gambling hundreds of lives.
JELLICO: This discussion is moot. The plan has been approved and we are going ahead. Mister Data, by your calculations, how long could the Cardassian ships stay in the nebula?
DATA: In seventeen hours their hull degradation will reach dangerous levels. They will have to leave before that.
JELLICO: All right. Worf, prepare a series of five hundred antimatter mines with magnetic targeting capabilities.
DS9 S4E15 “Sons of Mogh”

SISKO: Do you have any idea what caused the explosion?
BASHIR: Well, the radiation burns were the result of exposure to gamma rays. My guess is they were hit by a photon torpedo.
SISKO: A torpedo?
O'BRIEN: From the fracture pattern of the damage, I'd say something exploded about ten kilometers off their port quarter.
DAX: But torpedoes leave ion trails, and the Defiant didn't pick up any in the vicinity.
KIRA: And the Drovana was cloaked. Even Klingon torpedoes can't track vessels operating under cloak.
WORF: Mines. They hit a mine.
O'BRIEN: That's why there weren't any ion trails.
DAX: And cloaked mines can't be detected by any known sensor array.
KIRA: But there have been at least a dozen ships moving in and out of the system since that explosion. Why haven't they struck any mines?
WORF: The type of mine currently used by the Klingons remains dormant until it is armed by a coded subspace signal.
O'BRIEN: The mine that damaged the Drovana must've malfunctioned or been set off prematurely.
DAX: If we're right, there could be thousands of mines out there right now and we'd have no way of knowing it.
BASHIR: Mining a star system is an act of war. I didn't think the Klingons were ready for that.
SISKO: At the moment we can't even prove these mines exist. But if war comes, the Klingons would be able to cut off Deep Space Nine and the entire Bajoran system.
DS9 S5E26 “Call to Arms”

SISKO: We're going to mine the entrance to the wormhole, prevent the Dominion from bringing any more reinforcements to Cardassia.
[LATER…]
O'BRIEN: What about pulse mines? We could equip them with variable geometry detonators.
DAX: Not good enough. Dominion ships can wait at the mouth of the wormhole and pick them off one by one.
O'BRIEN: What if we cloaked them?
DAX: Cloaking doesn't always work against the Dominion.
O'BRIEN: Maybe cloaked ships don't, but I'm thinking a lot smaller. Each mine no more than a meter across.
DAX: Mines that small don't have a lot of power. It would take dozens of them to disable a warship. We'd run out of mines before they ran out of ships. Rom, are you here?
ROM: Cloak. Small. Dozens. I heard every word.
O'BRIEN: Well, something's wrong. You haven't touched your food.
ROM: It's my stomach. Ever since Captain Sisko agreed to officiate at our wedding, I haven't had much of an appetite.
O'BRIEN: I thought you wanted Captain Sisko to marry you.
ROM: I did. But now that he's said yes, it's become so real. I'm going to get married!
DAX: Not for another two weeks. And in the meantime, we have work to do.
ROM: But what if Leeta turns out to be just like Nog's mother? What if I can't make her happy? What if this is the biggest mistake of my life? What if
O'BRIEN: Rom.
ROM: Self-replication. That's the only answer.
DAX: Self-replication?
ROM: If the mines are going to be small, we'll need a lot of them. And we'll need a way to replace them quickly if the Jem'Hadar try to blast their way through. And, uh-oh. I forgot to request new quarters. Mine are too small. Where are Leeta and I going to live?
DAX: Rom, I think you're on to something.
ROM: I know I am. I've measured them three times. There's nowhere to put her prayer mandala.
O'BRIEN: We could equip each mine with a replicator unit.
DAX: No matter how many the Jem'Hadar destroy, there'd always be more.
O'BRIEN: We'll program them to swarm detonate. Twenty or thirty mines to each ship.
ROM: The only problem is you'll have to wait until the entire minefield is deployed before you activate it. Otherwise the proximity sensors could cause premature detonation. Where's Leeta going to put all her clothes? I don't have enough closet space.
DAX: I'd better go talk to Sisko.
O'BRIEN: I'll go draw up some specs.

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Re: Planetary Defenses in Star Trek

Post by Iscander » Thu Jan 26, 2017 1:02 am

Third info dump re-post. Transporter scramblers/inhibitors/jammers.

Not as useful in most debate scenarios but important to how warfare is viewed in Star Trek.
I've left out some more localized examples like the Cardassian booby trap transporter scramblers
ST VI “The Undiscovered Country”

KLINGON COMMANDANT: This is the gulag Rura Penthe. There is no stockade, no guard tower, no electronic frontier. Only a magnetic shield prevents beaming. Punishment means exile from prison to the surface. On the surface, nothing can survive. ...Work well and you will be treated well. Work badly and you will die.
ST IX “Insurrection”

DATA: It is a transport inhibitor. ...It will help prevent spaceships from beaming anyone off the surface.
PICARD: These veins of kelbonite running through the hills will interfere with their transporters, and when the terrain forces us away from the deposits, then we'll use transport inhibitors as a compensation. The mountains have the heaviest concentration of kelbonite. Once there it will make transport virtually impossible.
DS9 S5E4 “Nor the Battle to the Strong”

KIRBY: It won't be here for days, and in the meantime we're looking at a ground war which is just what the Klingons want. According to a lieutenant I talked to, they've got so many transport scramblers online that we can't beam troops anywhere.
[LATER…]
BURKE: My platoon. The Klingons had us pinned down. We couldn't beam out because they had a transport scrambler running. We called for a hopper. As soon as it set down, the Klingons came after us. CO ordered me and Brice to lay down cover so the squad could get up the ramp. By the time Brice got in, the Klingons were practically on top of us. The hopper was taking such a pounding, I didn't think it would make it off the ground.
DS9 S6E16 “Change of Heart”

LASARAN [on monitor]: Don't work your brain too hard, Klingon, I've taken care of everything. Three days from now, at exactly seventeen thirty hours local time, I will leave the base and walk into the jungle. It'll be at least two days before they know I'm missing. All you have to do is get me off the planet. Now, there are transporter scramblers protecting Soukara, so you can't beam me aboard your ship. You're going to have to land and meet me at a rendezvous point on foot. I'm sending you all the information you'll need to avoid the Dominion sensors on the ground. Follow my instructions, meet me at the rendezvous point and have a ship waiting.
I think this is everything I had posted before.

As always, I will add more when I find them.

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Re: Planetary Defenses in Star Trek

Post by sonofccn » Thu Jan 26, 2017 4:51 am

Going to be honest, I feel more than a little inadequate with titans of the old days like Mr. O and 2046 slugging it out. Because of that and, for better or worse, because I don't think I could possibly improve or say any better what 2046 has already argued I just want to tip my hat to both of you, apologize to Mr. O for any time he may feel I wasted and withdraw accepting our mutual difference of opinion.
2046 wrote:Also, I would like to quote and second sonofccn's summary of the situation, made in this thread before I sullied it with my nefarious presence:


Thanks! Can't say I ever expected you to be quoting me. Now I kind of wish I had spent more time and effort making it sound grand and elegant rather than the perfunctory mangled mess of sentences I typically trade in.

-Respectfully, Sonofccn

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Re: Planetary Defenses in Star Trek

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Thu Jan 26, 2017 2:42 pm

Regarding planetary defenses, I wonder if the nuTrek has been particularly generous in that domain.
All in all, we've seen ships attack or threaten main worlds with total impunity. For example, with the Naranda, we have to presume that the supership got rid of all Vulcan ships and even blaster silos by shooting from an orbital position before starting to drill into the planet.
Nero attacks Earth and it is the same story. Writers must have wedged a line refering to how Nero punched through all of Earth's defenses or something. Problem being that right before the ship starts shooting the drilling beam, we see pedestrian wandering about like if it were a normal busy day with no sign of a threat at all. Or more precisely, with the kind of battle that would have happened before Nero begun shooting at San Francisco bay, you'd expect most of the plazas and streets to have been cleared by now.
In Into Dorkness, the Klingon home world is once again presented as so poorly defended that a ship can park close to the planet and not be threatened, and can literally enter the atmosphere and only begin to be chased by light patrol ships!
Then two Federation ships literally duke it out in orbit of the moon and nobody lifts an eyebrow.
nuTrek 3 may seem to be the most reasonnable movie out of the three new, by showing a high profile station being well shielded.

Is there an implicit agreement going on in Trekdom that those new movies are so full of plot holes and nonsense that, technically, nobody gives a damn about them and would rather ignore them wholly?

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Re: Planetary Defenses in Star Trek

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Thu Jan 26, 2017 2:48 pm

sonofccn wrote:Going to be honest, I feel more than a little inadequate with titans of the old days like Mr. O and 2046 slugging it out. Because of that and, for better or worse, because I don't think I could possibly improve or say any better what 2046 has already argued I just want to tip my hat to both of you, apologize to Mr. O for any time he may feel I wasted and withdraw accepting our mutual difference of opinion.
No need to apologize. :)

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Re: Planetary Defenses in Star Trek

Post by Iscander » Sat Jan 28, 2017 4:52 am

Mr. Oragahn wrote:Regarding planetary defenses, I wonder if the nuTrek has been particularly generous in that domain.
All in all, we've seen ships attack or threaten main worlds with total impunity. For example, with the Naranda, we have to presume that the supership got rid of all Vulcan ships and even blaster silos by shooting from an orbital position before starting to drill into the planet.
Nero attacks Earth and it is the same story. Writers must have wedged a line refering to how Nero punched through all of Earth's defenses or something. Problem being that right before the ship starts shooting the drilling beam, we see pedestrian wandering about like if it were a normal busy day with no sign of a threat at all. Or more precisely, with the kind of battle that would have happened before Nero begun shooting at San Francisco bay, you'd expect most of the plazas and streets to have been cleared by now.
In Into Dorkness, the Klingon home world is once again presented as so poorly defended that a ship can park close to the planet and not be threatened, and can literally enter the atmosphere and only begin to be chased by light patrol ships!
Then two Federation ships literally duke it out in orbit of the moon and nobody lifts an eyebrow.
nuTrek 3 may seem to be the most reasonnable movie out of the three new, by showing a high profile station being well shielded.

Is there an implicit agreement going on in Trekdom that those new movies are so full of plot holes and nonsense that, technically, nobody gives a damn about them and would rather ignore them wholly?
In the case of Vulcan, it seems like the Narada, at least the drill, was jamming communications so badly the Vulcan may not have know they were under attack. With the Narada in orbit and drill deployed, Vulcan high command only reported the seismic disturbances in their distress call.
ST XI “Star Trek”

CHEKOV: (shipwide broadcast) May I have your attention, please. At twenty-two hundred hours, telemetry detected at an anomaly in the neutral zone. What appeared to be a lightning storm in space.
[Engineering]
CHEKOV: (on monitor) Soon after, Starfleet received a distress signal from Wulcan High Command that their planet was experiencing seismic actiwity.
[Shuttlebay]
CHEKOV: (on monitor) Our mission is to assess the condition of Wulcan, and to assist in the ewacuations if necessary.
With the jamming in place, any defenses Vulcan may have had, would have been as deaf and blind as the Starfleet relief fleet was and it wasn't able to report being under attack once they were in system and the Enterprise couldn't tell what was going on until they dropped out of warp into its debris field.
ST XI “Star Trek”

PIKE: Scan Vulcan space, check for any transmissions in Romulan.
MALE LIEUTENANT: Sir, I'm not sure I can distinguish the Romulan language from Vulcan.
PIKE: (to Uhura) What about you? Do you speak Romulan, Cadet?
UHURA: Uhura. All three dialects, sir.
PIKE: Uhura, relieve the lieutenant.
UHURA: Yes sir.
PIKE: Hannity, hail the USS Truman.
HANNITY: All the other ships are out of warp, sir, and have arrived at Vulcan, but we seemed to have lost all contact.
UHURA: Sir, I pick up no Romulan transmission, or transmission of any kind in the area.
KIRK: It's because they're being attacked.
When the Narada attacked Earth, Nero apparently got the defense codes from Pike.
ST XI “Star Trek”

NERO: You will give me the frequencies to disable Earth's defenses. Centaurian slugs. They latch onto your brainstem, and release a toxin that will force you to answer. Frequencies please, sir.
PIKE: Christopher Pike, Captain, USS Enterprise, serial number...
[LATER…]
KIRK: Then, what would an angry, future Romulan want with Captain Pike?
SULU: As Captain, he does know details of Starfleet's defenses.
Best guess for everyone being asleep at the wheel in "Into Darkness" is they were trying to figure out what was going on. The Enterprise never got a signal out to ask for help or explain what the Vengeance was.
ST XII "Into Darkness"

KIRK: Lieutenant Uhura, contact Starfleet. Tell them we were pursued into the Neutral Zone by an unmarked Federation ship.
UHURA: Comms are down, sir.
CAROL: Permission to come on the bridge.
KIRK: Doctor Marcus.
CAROL: He's gonna catch up with us, and when he does, the only thing that's going to stop him destroying this ship is me, so you have to let me talk to him.
KIRK: Carol, we're at warp. He can't catch up with us.
CAROL: Yes, he can. He's been developing a ship that has advanced warp capabilities, and I
SULU: Captain! I'm getting a reading I don't understand.
(Vengeance is chasing Enterprise through the slipstream, sorry, warp space. Weapons are fired, causing a hull breach in Enterprise's starboard side. Then the nacelles are hit and Enterprise drops out of warp.)
KIRK: Where are we?
SULU: We're two hundred thirty seven thousand kilometers from Earth.
(Well inside lunar orbit.)
KIRK: Damage report!
SULU: Weapons are way down. Shields are dropping.
DARWIN: We're defenceless, sir.
As far as the Qo'nos example, I guess we are supposed to believe the klingons would mostly ignore a civilian transport setting down in an abandoned region of the planet. Maybe the klingons let them in orbit because they claimed to be arms dealers.
ST XII "Into Darkness"

SPOCK: We are being pursued by a D-4 class Klingon vessel.
KIRK: I thought this sector was abandoned!
UHURA: It must be a random patrol.
ST XII "Into Darkness"

SULU [OC]: Please have the trade ship we confiscated during the Mudd incident last month fuelled and flight ready. Captain Kirk is en route to you now.
SPOCK: Ready to deploy, Captain.
KIRK: Lieutenants, lose the red shirts. You are K'normian arms dealers. Put those on.
HENDORFF: Sir?
KIRK: Look, if this thing goes south, there can be nothing tying us to Starfleet. Unless of course you want to start a war, Mister Hendorff.
HENDORFF: No, sir.
SECURITY: No, sir.
KIRK: Good. Me neither.
NuTrek: plot holes - definitely or very poorly handwaved at best with more interest in pacing. But as you say, no one really seems to care about NuTrek.

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