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.