General Order 24: the Tactical Environment of Eminiar 7

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Moff Tarquin
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General Order 24: the Tactical Environment of Eminiar 7

Post by Moff Tarquin » Sun Feb 28, 2016 3:19 am

This will be an analysis of General Order 24 on the basis of the only situation in which we have seen it issued: against Eminiar 7 in "A Taste of Armageddon." I intend to highlight the Eminian defenses and how they effect the scope of General Order 24. In particular, I intend to show that the possibility of implementing General Order 24 in the presence of hardened targets and interplanetary strike capabilities entails Constitution Class firepower figures that are several orders of magnitude than are generally accepted.

First off, the raw data:
SPOCK: We know very little about them. Their civilisation is advanced. They've had space flight for several centuries, but they've never ventured beyond their own solar system. When first contacted more than fifty years ago, Eminiar Seven was at war with its nearest neighbour.
KIRK: Anything else?
SPOCK: The Earth expedition making the report failed to return from its mission. The USS Valiant. Listed as missing in space.
1) The Eminians have not yet left their solar system, and, if they are not pre-warp, they do not make use of warp drive.
2) The USS Valiant disappeared while exploring the Eminian system. It is likely that it was destroyed by crossfire between Eminiar and Vendikar.
ANAN: We have been at war for five hundred years.
KIRK: You conceal it very well. Mister Spock?
SPOCK: Sir, we have completely scanned your planet. We find it highly advanced, prosperous in a material sense, comfortable for your people, and peaceful in the extreme. Yet you say you are at war. There is no evidence of this.
ANAN: Casualties among our civilian population total from one to three million dead each year from direct enemy attack. That is one reason, Captain, why we told you to stay away. As long as your ship is orbiting our planet, it is in severe danger.
SPOCK: With whom are you at war?
ANAN: The third planet in our system, called Vendikar. Originally settled by our people and now a ruthless enemy. Highly advanced technologically.
3) The Eminians are engaged in a 500-year long interplanetary "lukewarm war."
KIRK: Mea, if this is an attack, may I ask what weapons the enemy is using?
MEA: Fusion bombs, materialised by the enemy over their targets.
4) The delivery mechanism for these (currently simulated) weapons is a transporter-like device operating over interplanetary ranges. Oh, and Kirk is aware of this fact. So is Spock.

This deserves a few quick comments. On the "Rehabilitating TDiC" thread, I was saying things like:
And somewhere in some base your scanners haven't detected yet - or one that your computers have mistakenly identified as a "low priority target" - there's a group of people that could be capable of mounting a counteroffensive. Maybe it's under a mountain. Maybe it's in the middle of nowhere, far from population centers. Maybe it's at the bottom of the ocean. Wherever it is, it has time to figure out a way to stop you. You can't give them that time, especially not if they're actively hostile to the Federation.
and:
Think of Stargate SG-1's version of the Cheyenne Mountain Complex. It's only marginally higher-tech than our version, but it's a full kilometer under the mountain, and as long as it survives, the apocalypse can be canceled.

A base of a similar tech level only a few kilometers deeper still might not be completely safe from phaser assault, but it would certainly be difficult to detect, and (as before) would be capable of responding in kind to an orbital assault.

As a matter of fact, plausible mid-future range technology (ie, the kind that could be expected of a pre-warp, pre-force-field civilization) can produce some pretty impressive stuff. A civilization capable of waging an interplanetary war with weapons of mass destruction would be expected to have substantial ability to launch surface-to-orbit warheads (be it by rocket, Project Orion, Verne gun, mass-driver, laser launch, or combination thereof) in a fairly short period of time, significant military assets deep underground, and ludicrously powerful surface-to-orbit energy weapons. Interestingly, the last is without a doubt present on Eminar seven.
My point was this: "If General Order 24 is too slow, then the Eminians would have time to devise a way to attack the Enterprise before it could finish the job." But this isn't so, not because such a counterattack is unlikely, but because the Eminians don't need to come up with a way to hit the Enterprise - they could start beaming fusion bombs at the Enterprise using nothing but the infrastructure and weaponry they already have!
SAR: Look, Anan. (another flare on another screen)
ANAN: Yes, I see it. They were warned.
SAR: Just as it happened fifty years ago.
ANAN: Alert a security detachment. They may be needed.
Sure enough, the Eminians destroyed the USS Valiant fifty years ago to comply with the treaty.
MEA: Don't you see? If I refuse to report, and others refuse, then Vendikar would have no choice but to launch real weapons. We would have to do the same to defend ourselves. More than people would die then. A whole civilisation would be destroyed. Surely you can see that ours is a better way.
5) While the war is currently fought with simulated weapons, the societies are on the brink of fighting it for real. At any moment, Eminiar and Vendikar could start teleporting fusion bombs at each other across hundreds of millions of kilometers.
SECURITY [OC]: The Federation prisoners have attacked their guard and escaped. They are armed. Disintegration station number twelve destroyed, Councilman, apparently by disruptor fire.
ANAN: All security personnel, Federation prisoners have escaped. They are to be found. They are armed. If they resist, do what is necessary. Planetary disruptor banks, calculate orbit of star cruiser now circling. Stand by to fire. Full power.
SECURITY [OC]: Councilman, planetary disruptor banks locked onto target. Standing by.
ANAN: In ten seconds, open fire. Destroy the star cruiser. Those are the orders of the Council.
6) The Eminians have very powerful energy weapons defending their planet.
MCCOY: Well, I guess that answers our questions, Mister Scott. They're not very friendly, are they?
SCOTT: Aye, but what about our Captain and the landing party down there somewhere?
MCCOY: We get them out.
SCOTT: If they're alive, and if we can find them. That's a big planet.
MCCOY: Not too big for the Enterprise to handle if it has to.
SCOTT: We can't fire full phasers with our screens up, and We can't lower our screens with their disruptors on us. Of course I could treat them to a few dozen photon torpedoes.
7) The Enterprise can "handle" the planet if it has to. Wonderful bit of foreshadowing, that. Note that McCoy has no reason to exaggerate the capabilities of the Enterprise to Scotty, so this places the proposition that General Order 24 is a bluff in doubt.
8) At the time of this episode, the Enterprise cannot fire its phasers at full power while its shields/screens are up.
9) The Enterprise can, however, fire photon torpedoes through its screens.
KIRK: I'm not interested in discussing our differences. You don't seem to realise the risk you're taking. We don't make war with computers and herd the casualties into suicide stations. We make the real thing, Councilman. I could destroy this planet.
ANAN: Why do you think I don't let you talk to your ship ?
10) Anan's impression of the Enterprise's capabilities are in line with McCoy's.
SPOCK: Orbit out to maximum phaser range and stand by for further orders. Spock out.
11) Spock expects phaser fire from the Enterprise to be useful.

I'm going to quote the next exchange at length, as it is where the order is delivered, and it contains several tactically relevant facts.
KIRK: Oh, no. You were quite accurate. I plan to prove it to you. ANAN: Open a channel to the Enterprise. You give me no choice, Captain. We are not bandits, but you force us to act as bandits.
SCOTT [OC]: This is the USS Enterprise.
KIRK: Scotty, General Order Twenty Four. Two hours! In two hours!
ANAN: Enterprise, this is Anan Seven, First Councilman of the High Council of Eminiar.

[Bridge]

ANAN [OC]: We hold your Captain, his party, your Ambassador and his party prisoners.

[Council Room]

ANAN: Unless you immediately start transportation of all personnel aboard your ship to the surface, the hostages will be killed. You have thirty minutes. I mean it, Captain.
KIRK: All that it means is that I won't be around for the destruction. You heard me give General Order Twenty Four. That means in two hours the Enterprise will destroy Eminiar Seven.
ANAN: Planetary defence System, open fire on the Enterprise!
SECURITY [OC]: I'm sorry, Councilman. The target has moved out of range.
ANAN: You wouldn't do this. Hundreds of millions of people.
KIRK: I didn't start it, Councilman, but I'm liable to finish it.
(Meanwhile Spock and his group are moving through the corridors. Fox's aide gets injured in one weapons exchange so they leave him behind.)
SAR: Councilman, I received a message from Vendikar. Our time is nearly up. Our quota is short by several thousand. They accuse us of reneging on the treaty.
ANAN: You see? It's started.
KIRK: You're wrong. It hasn't begun.
SECURITY [OC]: Councilman, Disintegrator station eleven has been destroyed. Guard positions in tunnels eight and ten fail to answer. Earth party reported seen in corridor 4A.
KIRK: You have less than two hours, Councilman.
ANAN: What I want or don't want has nothing to do with it. Escalation is automatic. You can stop it!
KIRK: Stop it? I'm counting on it.

[Bridge]

SCOTT: Open a channel, Lieutenant. This is the commander of the USS Enterprise.

[Council Room]

SCOTT [OC]: All cities and installations on Eminiar Seven have been located, identified, and fed into our fire-control system. In one hour and forty five minutes

[Bridge]

SCOTT: The entire inhabited surface of your planet will be destroyed.

[Council Room]

SCOTT: You have that long to surrender your hostages.
ANAN: What can I do? Somebody, please tell me.
12) The Enterprise's phasers outrange the Eminian disruptors.
13) There are hundreds of millions of people on Eminiar 7.
14) Scotty, having heard nothing more than "General order twenty-four in two hours," knows exactly what to do. This indicates that, if General Order 24 is a bluff, it is a codified, pre-arranged bluff. This seems rather unlikely, especially since everybody on both sides already seems to think that the Enterprise can do something along these lines anyways.
15) Scotty expects the entire inhabited surface of the planet to be destroyed, every city and installation wiped off the map, if he has to carry out the order.
16) Despite having the ability to spam fusion bombs across interplanetary distances, Anan believes that there is nothing he can do to stop the Enterprise.

Now, from 4, we can get:
17) Kirk also believes, despite knowing that Eminiar 7 can spam fusion bombs across interplanetary distances, that the Enterprise can still totally devastate the planet.
18) The Enterprise cannot lower its screens as long as the Eminians can still beam fusion bombs at it.

From 8 and 18 we get:
19) The Enterprise cannot fire its phasers at full power until the Eminian war machine has been neutered.

From 11 and 19 we get:
20) Spock expects the Enterprise to be able to neuter the Eminian war machine without being able to fire its phasers at full power.

From 9, 18, and 20 we get:
21) Spock expects the Enterprise to be able to neuter the Eminian war machine using primarily or exclusively its torpedoes.

And finally, from the fact that Spock has a very good idea of the Enterprise's capabilities, we can infer:
22) The Enterprise can neuter the Eminian war machine using primarily or exclusively its torpedoes.

This is a very different thing from the typical interpretation of General Order 24 as the capacity of a Constitution Class Starship to wipe out civilization on a pre-warp planet. As a matter of fact, General Order 24 entails that a Constitution Class Starship is capable of wiping out civilization on a planet locked in an interplanetary war! That is a very different thing, and a far more difficult thing.

Unfortunately, it is also a difficult thing to quantify. But we have a reasonable proxy in the United States at the height of the Cold War. In the 1970's, the U.S. relied on three separate nuclear weapons platforms: the B-52 bomber, the Minuteman missile, and the affectionately-named fleet of ballistic missile submarines known as the "Forty-One for Freedom."

Currently, we have two naval bases where subs are stationed, five-ish points where subs are patrolling at any given time, two or three USAF bases where B-52's can be launched from, and about 450 Minuteman silos in three missile fields, with each silo 4-5 miles away from its neighbors. In the 1970's, we had about 1000 silos. I'm not sure what the figures would be for any of the other factors at the time, but going with the current figures can't hurt.

So, we have 100 photon torpedoes, and we're going to use them to disable the United States' capability to launch nuclear weapons in 1974. We're going to hit three USAF bases, five subs, and two USN bases, in addition to the missile fields. It'll take ten torps to neutralize the subs and planes, so we have 90 torpedoes left to neutralize 1000 hardened bunkers. The fact that we can do it is to be taken as a given. The question is how big our torpedoes are going to have to be.

We can get an idea from some of the equations in here.

LR = 460(Y/H)^(1/3)

Where LR is lethal radius in meters, Y is yield in megatons, and H is the hardness of the target in thousands of PSI. A suggested value for H is 2 kpsi for American missile silos. We will assume that is the case. Now we need to figure out LR.

If we assume that the silos are separated from one another by ~6 km. Then we can treat each silo as corresponding to a circle of 3 km radius. That's an area of 28.3 square kilometers. Since we have a thousand silos to blast, we have a total area of some 28,300 square kilometers. Each of our 90 photon torpedoes has to cover an area of 314 square kilometers, or a circle with radius 10 km.

We can rewrite the above equation as follows:

Y = H * (LR/460)^3

With H = 2 kpsi and LR = 10,000 m, Y = 20,547.38226 megatons.

Each of our torpedoes has to have a yield of 20 gigatons!

If we go with the current stockpile of 450 missile silos, H = 2 kpsi and LR = 6700 m, which gives Y = 6,179.892332 megatons.

Disarming America today would entail the use of 6 gigaton torpedoes. And that's for taking out the WMD capability of a modern superpower! A superpower capable of projecting their weapons over interplanetary distances would be orders of magnitude more difficult to disarm.

The biggest vulnerability of an ICBM is that its silo has to open to the air. The Eminians can beam their bombs to Vendikar, so their bomb storage areas can be far deeper underground - and (more importantly) far better disguised. While bombers are unlikely due to the technology available, if submarines can be fitted with suitable transporter units, we can be confident that they will be employed. If there is any concern at all about a counterforce strike from Vendikar, we can safely assume that the number, variety, and hardness of bomb-beaming platforms employed by the Eminians vastly exceed anything even contemplated during our cold war.

In any event, if multiple hardened targets separated by distances on the order of several kilometers have to be destroyed by each torpedo, there is no possible way to avoid TOS torpedo yields well into the gigatons.

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Mr. Oragahn
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Re: General Order 24: the Tactical Environment of Eminiar 7

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Feb 29, 2016 6:01 pm

Moff Tarquin wrote:This will be an analysis of General Order 24 on the basis of the only situation in which we have seen it issued: against Eminiar 7 in "A Taste of Armageddon." I intend to highlight the Eminian defenses and how they effect the scope of General Order 24. In particular, I intend to show that the possibility of implementing General Order 24 in the presence of hardened targets and interplanetary strike capabilities entails Constitution Class firepower figures that are several orders of magnitude than are generally accepted.

First off, the raw data:
SPOCK: We know very little about them. Their civilisation is advanced. They've had space flight for several centuries, but they've never ventured beyond their own solar system. When first contacted more than fifty years ago, Eminiar Seven was at war with its nearest neighbour.
KIRK: Anything else?
SPOCK: The Earth expedition making the report failed to return from its mission. The USS Valiant. Listed as missing in space.
1) The Eminians have not yet left their solar system, and, if they are not pre-warp, they do not make use of warp drive.
2) The USS Valiant disappeared while exploring the Eminian system. It is likely that it was destroyed by crossfire between Eminiar and Vendikar.
It is quite interesting that despite being a seemingly pre-warp group of people, they could destroy a ship that predates the Constitution-class by only half a century.
ANAN: We have been at war for five hundred years.
KIRK: You conceal it very well. Mister Spock?
SPOCK: Sir, we have completely scanned your planet. We find it highly advanced, prosperous in a material sense, comfortable for your people, and peaceful in the extreme. Yet you say you are at war. There is no evidence of this.
ANAN: Casualties among our civilian population total from one to three million dead each year from direct enemy attack. That is one reason, Captain, why we told you to stay away. As long as your ship is orbiting our planet, it is in severe danger.
SPOCK: With whom are you at war?
ANAN: The third planet in our system, called Vendikar. Originally settled by our people and now a ruthless enemy. Highly advanced technologically.
3) The Eminians are engaged in a 500-year long interplanetary "lukewarm war."
The death poll amounts of 1 to 3 million people for the whole planet.
For the reminder, Manhattan currently boasts a population 1.636 million heads.
For civilizations using beaming devices with interplanetary ranges to deliver fusion bombs right on top of their targets, you'd expect far more casulaties. Something's fishy.
KIRK: Mea, if this is an attack, may I ask what weapons the enemy is using?
MEA: Fusion bombs, materialised by the enemy over their targets.
4) The delivery mechanism for these (currently simulated) weapons is a transporter-like device operating over interplanetary ranges. Oh, and Kirk is aware of this fact. So is Spock.
Here comes already one important detail. At this point, nothing indicates that the weapons and devices mentionned are factual. We don't even know what the treaty contains and how both planets came to agree to the simulated use of such devices. In other words, we don't know for fact that they own fusion bombs or even any capability to transport devices over such distances.
Besides, since they don't know what weapons are used, Kirk & co can't object to the answer given by Anan. Anan, at this point, is enumerating the facts as they've been agreed upon by both parties, without mentionning that all of this procedure is purely virtual.

I'll cut the TDiC related stuff to avoid repeating or derailing this thread.
My point was this: "If General Order 24 is too slow, then the Eminians would have time to devise a way to attack the Enterprise before it could finish the job." But this isn't so, not because such a counterattack is unlikely, but because the Eminians don't need to come up with a way to hit the Enterprise - they could start beaming fusion bombs at the Enterprise using nothing but the infrastructure and weaponry they already have!
Yet bomb teletransportation is not used in battles, despite the obvious advantage. So this is not an acceptable argument.
Besides, as told in the other thread, anytime you're going to assume the existence of threatening base hidden somewhere, if not more, you're going to dramatically and quite artificially increase the numbers regarding the firepower.
Oh, it's an underground base; without even discussing about the idea of a ship having the occasion to approach its planetary target, what if then it's not one but two bases? Then, for good measure, add an orbital station that can cloak (who knows?).
Everytime the counter attack gets bigger, the attacking ship needs to have bigger and faster weapons to destroy more in less time. At this point it becomes fairly arbitrary because you could then say that if such weapons existed, obviously worlds would do everything possible to protect themselves by default: planet-encompasing shields always on, beam cannons already idling, ready to fire within seconds, anti-torpedo interception weapons equally ready at any time, etc. Therefore, to have a chance to overcome those defenses AND survive, the attacking ship needs even more power, both in weapons and defenses. By then, you're probably already thinking about something like a Death Star which could tank any fire whilst snuffing a whole planet within seconds unhampered. There just is no limit to it the moment you want to fiddle with numbers by accounting for possible defenses.
SAR: Look, Anan. (another flare on another screen)
ANAN: Yes, I see it. They were warned.
SAR: Just as it happened fifty years ago.
ANAN: Alert a security detachment. They may be needed.
Sure enough, the Eminians destroyed the USS Valiant fifty years ago to comply with the treaty.
Are there more details to what just happened there? Like dialogue leading right to that point?
This may be a more solid proof of bomb beaming, assuming that's what really happened and not a shot from a disruptor bank or even a simulation.
It's hard to know if the warning is part of the entire fake setup, an obligatory measure regarding the treaty which can be observed by both sides.
A measure which then becomes a real threat.
MEA: Don't you see? If I refuse to report, and others refuse, then Vendikar would have no choice but to launch real weapons. We would have to do the same to defend ourselves. More than people would die then. A whole civilisation would be destroyed. Surely you can see that ours is a better way.
5) While the war is currently fought with simulated weapons, the societies are on the brink of fighting it for real. At any moment, Eminiar and Vendikar could start teleporting fusion bombs at each other across hundreds of millions of kilometers.
Well, they will launch real weapons.
SECURITY [OC]: The Federation prisoners have attacked their guard and escaped. They are armed. Disintegration station number twelve destroyed, Councilman, apparently by disruptor fire.
ANAN: All security personnel, Federation prisoners have escaped. They are to be found. They are armed. If they resist, do what is necessary. Planetary disruptor banks, calculate orbit of star cruiser now circling. Stand by to fire. Full power.
SECURITY [OC]: Councilman, planetary disruptor banks locked onto target. Standing by.
ANAN: In ten seconds, open fire. Destroy the star cruiser. Those are the orders of the Council.
6) The Eminians have very powerful energy weapons defending their planet.
And as we see, when it comes to the real war, they use disruptor banks. Not a single mention of preparing bombs for use against the ship.
MCCOY: Well, I guess that answers our questions, Mister Scott. They're not very friendly, are they?
SCOTT: Aye, but what about our Captain and the landing party down there somewhere?
MCCOY: We get them out.
SCOTT: If they're alive, and if we can find them. That's a big planet.
MCCOY: Not too big for the Enterprise to handle if it has to.
SCOTT: We can't fire full phasers with our screens up, and We can't lower our screens with their disruptors on us. Of course I could treat them to a few dozen photon torpedoes.
7) The Enterprise can "handle" the planet if it has to. Wonderful bit of foreshadowing, that. Note that McCoy has no reason to exaggerate the capabilities of the Enterprise to Scotty, so this places the proposition that General Order 24 is a bluff in doubt.
8) At the time of this episode, the Enterprise cannot fire its phasers at full power while its shields/screens are up.
9) The Enterprise can, however, fire photon torpedoes through its screens.
7. You're missing the fact that it's a no limits fallacy if you take it as a general statement. And that supposes that he was refering to an assault and survival against the planet's defenses, not about the idea of actually having to find the people down there.
It is also strange that they don't even know where their team is, doesn't even have a roughest idea of it, and can't even track them. Have the biosignal readings from orbit always been that limited?
8. You mean at the time of this season? It's an interesting fact and has severe implications for UFP ships predating this Entreprise.
9. Yes. Apparently the encased nature of a torpedo would allow a crew to circumvent the issue posed by the membrane a shield is.
KIRK: I'm not interested in discussing our differences. You don't seem to realise the risk you're taking. We don't make war with computers and herd the casualties into suicide stations. We make the real thing, Councilman. I could destroy this planet.
ANAN: Why do you think I don't let you talk to your ship ?
10) Anan's impression of the Enterprise's capabilities are in line with McCoy's.
It seems. But let's not get to firm on an impression gotten from someone who's clearly panicking and facing a nearly unprecedented situation, one that could result in complete chaos with both worlds having far more to lose.

Sidenote: I must say that if for one moment, you can forget the aesthetics of the show and push that script into a modern production, that would make a hell of a Trek movie. You'd just have to flesh it out. Of course a whole part of the plot would need to be reworked because the premise is quite pants on head retarded. The moment two warring parties would device to shift to simulations, it would make no sense for them to agree to kill people nonetheless, unless it was some kind of pathetic excuse for population control both sides agreed on.
SPOCK: Orbit out to maximum phaser range and stand by for further orders. Spock out.
11) Spock expects phaser fire from the Enterprise to be useful.
Yes, plus the ship would have the advantage of being mobile against Eminar's beam weapons. Plus even a miss from the Enterprise would still hit somewhere on the planet.
I'm going to quote the next exchange at length, as it is where the order is delivered, and it contains several tactically relevant facts.
KIRK: Oh, no. You were quite accurate. I plan to prove it to you.
ANAN: Open a channel to the Enterprise. You give me no choice, Captain. We are not bandits, but you force us to act as bandits.
SCOTT [OC]: This is the USS Enterprise.
KIRK: Scotty, General Order Twenty Four. Two hours! In two hours!
ANAN: Enterprise, this is Anan Seven, First Councilman of the High Council of Eminiar.

[Bridge]

ANAN [OC]: We hold your Captain, his party, your Ambassador and his party prisoners.

[Council Room]

ANAN: Unless you immediately start transportation of all personnel aboard your ship to the surface, the hostages will be killed. You have thirty minutes. I mean it, Captain.
KIRK: All that it means is that I won't be around for the destruction. You heard me give General Order Twenty Four. That means in two hours the Enterprise will destroy Eminiar Seven.
ANAN: Planetary defence System, open fire on the Enterprise!
SECURITY [OC]: I'm sorry, Councilman. The target has moved out of range.
ANAN: You wouldn't do this. Hundreds of millions of people.
KIRK: I didn't start it, Councilman, but I'm liable to finish it.
(Meanwhile Spock and his group are moving through the corridors. Fox's aide gets injured in one weapons exchange so they leave him behind.)
SAR: Councilman, I received a message from Vendikar. Our time is nearly up. Our quota is short by several thousand. They accuse us of reneging on the treaty.
ANAN: You see? It's started.
KIRK: You're wrong. It hasn't begun.
SECURITY [OC]: Councilman, Disintegrator station eleven has been destroyed. Guard positions in tunnels eight and ten fail to answer. Earth party reported seen in corridor 4A.
KIRK: You have less than two hours, Councilman.
ANAN: What I want or don't want has nothing to do with it. Escalation is automatic. You can stop it!
KIRK: Stop it? I'm counting on it.

[Bridge]

SCOTT: Open a channel, Lieutenant. This is the commander of the USS Enterprise.

[Council Room]

SCOTT [OC]: All cities and installations on Eminiar Seven have been located, identified, and fed into our fire-control system. In one hour and forty five minutes

[Bridge]

SCOTT: The entire inhabited surface of your planet will be destroyed.

[Council Room]

SCOTT: You have that long to surrender your hostages.
ANAN: What can I do? Somebody, please tell me.
12) The Enterprise's phasers outrange the Eminian disruptors.
13) There are hundreds of millions of people on Eminiar 7.
14) Scotty, having heard nothing more than "General order twenty-four in two hours," knows exactly what to do. This indicates that, if General Order 24 is a bluff, it is a codified, pre-arranged bluff. This seems rather unlikely, especially since everybody on both sides already seems to think that the Enterprise can do something along these lines anyways.
15) Scotty expects the entire inhabited surface of the planet to be destroyed, every city and installation wiped off the map, if he has to carry out the order.
16) Despite having the ability to spam fusion bombs across interplanetary distances, Anan believes that there is nothing he can do to stop the Enterprise.
12. More importantly, those vaunted beamed fusion bombs suddenly don't exist anymore. This certainly nixes any diea that these weapons ever existed. They more than likely were made up, like a bit of science fiction added to the treaty. The whole setting is quite ridiculous on its face so why not?
13. Which is certainly less than India (1.236 Bn) or China (1.375 Bn). Yet, if most of the population of Eminar 7 were to be condensed on one continent, it would be easier to target them.
14. It wouldn't be the first time Kirk has a codified bluff (wasn't something similar in the case of Elba II?). Besides, both sides agree that the Enterprise can hurt the planet badly, and that what would make a bluff so efficient, but it doesn't tell us much about what it could do in a short amount of time aside from, at least, leveling cities with torpedoes and phaser beams.
15. Yes, which is, as I said elsewhere, far less than the total armageddon you've been going for.
16. Then why would he believe that his disruptor beams could? The only logical conclusion is that those fusion bombs never really existed, or at least their transportation is far more classical and old school than claimed (remember the "launch weapons" part). It's also interesting that they have access to disruptors.


It's also spectacular how they have so much trouble stoping Spock & Friends. Heck, they supposedly can beam bombs across the vastness of space, but can't locate them with enough precision as to beam them elsewhere. Heck, they can't even stop them at all.
It is equally noteworthy to see how so many suicide centers are so close to each other, at least stations 12, 11 and perhaps down to 8 and therefore all down to station 1.

Now, from 4, we can get:
17) Kirk also believes, despite knowing that Eminiar 7 can spam fusion bombs across interplanetary distances, that the Enterprise can still totally devastate the planet.

18) The Enterprise cannot lower its screens as long as the Eminians can still beam fusion bombs at it.

From 8 and 18 we get:
19) The Enterprise cannot fire its phasers at full power until the Eminian war machine has been neutered.

From 11 and 19 we get:
20) Spock expects the Enterprise to be able to neuter the Eminian war machine without being able to fire its phasers at full power.

From 9, 18, and 20 we get:
21) Spock expects the Enterprise to be able to neuter the Eminian war machine using primarily or exclusively its torpedoes.

And finally, from the fact that Spock has a very good idea of the Enterprise's capabilities, we can infer:
22) The Enterprise can neuter the Eminian war machine using primarily or exclusively its torpedoes.
17. He doesn't really know much actually. He may infer some oddity in that the casualties are so low despite the technology used. Neither Eminar 7 nor Devinkar spam bombs in their simulations. Their entire simulated war is a contraption to get a barely evolving number of people into the suicide centers.

18. Not the bombs, the disruptors. Right from the transcript: "We can't lower our screens with their disruptors on us." Odd, no mention of beaming bombs. Or maybe not odd at all. There's actually far more evidence now that Eminar 7 doesn't have any real capability to beam bombs and this method of delivery only exists within the simulation, perhaps for convenience to get things done fast.

19. Considering the level of firepower they'd still get out of halved phasers if they were sitting between 100 to 1000 TW or a bit more at maximum level, that's not much of a loss. A single wide 50 TW shot at a more evenly spread Manhattan (say a circle), with a total surface area of 53,648,000 square meters, would still deliver 932 KJ per square meter. That would *only* be about nine hundred times superior to sunlight intensity above the stratosphere of Earth iirc (it's 1.something KW /m²)! :) :)
At this point we're not even talking about cancerous sunburns anymore, are we?

20. Of course, he had the ship put at maximum phaser range, so later the ship is confirmed sitting outside of the range of Eminarian defenses. He certainly has nothing to fear from Devinkar either, logically. He can kill them all across a week if he wants to.

21. No, he expects nothing as such. Spock only orders maximum phaser range through whatever communication device he was using. It is Scott who later considers using a dozen torpedoes for some unspecified purpose, since it predates Kirk's order for GO 24. It's in reaction to them being fired upon.

22. Well, we can't, because you made a number of crucial errors there.

This is a very different thing from the typical interpretation of General Order 24 as the capacity of a Constitution Class Starship to wipe out civilization on a pre-warp planet. As a matter of fact, General Order 24 entails that a Constitution Class Starship is capable of wiping out civilization on a planet locked in an interplanetary war!
I very much doubt there's such a specific mention in the official paper for GO 24. ;)

GO 24 is for all intents and purposes an order for a unique purpose, mass destruction, by targeting quite specific resources as far as we can tell, although characters, when not in the need of being military-technical, summarize it down something like "f**k you all with pious fire."
There is no evidence that a ship is expected to achieve it regardless of the defenses it will face.
Unfortunately, it is also a difficult thing to quantify. But we have a reasonable proxy in the United States at the height of the Cold War. In the 1970's, the U.S. relied on three separate nuclear weapons platforms: the B-52 bomber, the Minuteman missile, and the affectionately-named fleet of ballistic missile submarines known as the "Forty-One for Freedom."
They really do love to stitch the word freedom to any weapon or campaign of utter destruction, don't they? :)
Currently, we have two naval bases where subs are stationed, five-ish points where subs are patrolling at any given time, two or three USAF bases where B-52's can be launched from, and about 450 Minuteman silos in three missile fields, with each silo 4-5 miles away from its neighbors. In the 1970's, we had about 1000 silos. I'm not sure what the figures would be for any of the other factors at the time, but going with the current figures can't hurt.

So, we have 100 photon torpedoes, and we're going to use them to disable the United States' capability to launch nuclear weapons in 1974. We're going to hit three USAF bases, five subs, and two USN bases, in addition to the missile fields. It'll take ten torps to neutralize the subs and planes, so we have 90 torpedoes left to neutralize 1000 hardened bunkers. The fact that we can do it is to be taken as a given. The question is how big our torpedoes are going to have to be.
Aside from the fact that as proved, there's no reason to omit the use of phasers, it is a bizarre question to ask. Most of these targets would be taken down by a firepower ranging from the mid megajoule range to, perhaps a few dozens gigajoules for some carpet bombing of an installation on the outside or quite exposed silos. Hardened underground bases would require the most of the firepower with full perforating and drilling abilities, or at least very focused fire delivery (phasers, again, would do a formidable job there).
Nothing that couldn't be done with kiloton or low megaton weapons.
We can get an idea from some of the equations in here.

LR = 460(Y/H)^(1/3)

Where LR is lethal radius in meters, Y is yield in megatons, and H is the hardness of the target in thousands of PSI. A suggested value for H is 2 kpsi for American missile silos. We will assume that is the case. Now we need to figure out LR.

If we assume that the silos are separated from one another by ~6 km. Then we can treat each silo as corresponding to a circle of 3 km radius. That's an area of 28.3 square kilometers. Since we have a thousand silos to blast, we have a total area of some 28,300 square kilometers. Each of our 90 photon torpedoes has to cover an area of 314 square kilometers, or a circle with radius 10 km.

We can rewrite the above equation as follows:

Y = H * (LR/460)^3

With H = 2 kpsi and LR = 10,000 m, Y = 20,547.38226 megatons.

Each of our torpedoes has to have a yield of 20 gigatons!

If we go with the current stockpile of 450 missile silos, H = 2 kpsi and LR = 6700 m, which gives Y = 6,179.892332 megatons.

Disarming America today would entail the use of 6 gigaton torpedoes. And that's for taking out the WMD capability of a modern superpower! A superpower capable of projecting their weapons over interplanetary distances would be orders of magnitude more difficult to disarm.

The biggest vulnerability of an ICBM is that its silo has to open to the air. The Eminians can beam their bombs to Vendikar, so their bomb storage areas can be far deeper underground - and (more importantly) far better disguised. While bombers are unlikely due to the technology available, if submarines can be fitted with suitable transporter units, we can be confident that they will be employed. If there is any concern at all about a counterforce strike from Vendikar, we can safely assume that the number, variety, and hardness of bomb-beaming platforms employed by the Eminians vastly exceed anything even contemplated during our cold war.

In any event, if multiple hardened targets separated by distances on the order of several kilometers have to be destroyed by each torpedo, there is no possible way to avoid TOS torpedo yields well into the gigatons.
Way to inflate your numbers!

You have argued that both sides, UFP and the other folks, agree on the Consitution-class' firepower, but not blinked at the idea that a spam of fusion bombs resulted in so little casualties.
So obviously they'd rather agree that the firepower is somewhat threatening but not as great as you claim.
Your methodology is completely flawed and shows its limits, as I described at the beginning.
What if they had only a dozen silos and a few densely populated cities in the same region of the planet? Surely nothing prevents that and those extrapolated figures would melt like ice in hell.
Or, to have fun the other way round, why do you assume such a little quantity of weapons? Why not claim a million missile silos, protected by the best materials available to more advanced societies? Why not consider that the entire planet is dotted with them, plus disruptor cannons?
Heck, if you really believe they can beam bombs from planet to planet, why not consider even more incredible parameters, the kind such transportation tech would allow? The next question would be where are you going to stop, what is the convenient limit you'll settle on for your numbers to somewhat appear fair and reasonable when they certainly aren't?

You know, it's a good thing you came here to test your numbers in a rather isolated and sort of secure place, because if you had proposed such extravagant numbers elsewhere, I think the reception would have been fairly cold and brutal.

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Re: General Order 24: the Tactical Environment of Eminiar 7

Post by Moff Tarquin » Tue Mar 01, 2016 2:33 am

Mr. Oragahn wrote:

The death poll amounts of 1 to 3 million people for the whole planet.
For the reminder, Manhattan currently boasts a population 1.636 million heads.
For civilizations using beaming devices with interplanetary ranges to deliver fusion bombs right on top of their targets, you'd expect far more casulaties. Something's fishy.
It's fairly simple actually. They have gigantic disruptors and they can detect when a beam is incoming:
MEA: They will materialise there. Remember your instructions; They are to be treated correctly, nothing more.
It's like our "Star Wars" project, except it actually worked... sometimes. So in addition to simulated fusion bombs, there's no reason there shouldn't also be simulated point defense.
Here comes already one important detail. At this point, nothing indicates that the weapons and devices mentionned are factual. We don't even know what the treaty contains and how both planets came to agree to the simulated use of such devices. In other words, we don't know for fact that they own fusion bombs or even any capability to transport devices over such distances.
Besides, since they don't know what weapons are used, Kirk & co can't object to the answer given by Anan. Anan, at this point, is enumerating the facts as they've been agreed upon by both parties, without mentionning that all of this procedure is purely virtual.
It wasn't Anan but Mea. But that's just a quibble.

Unfortunately, so is your objection. At the end of the day, they're still worried about real WMDs coming over. That entails that 1) the Vendikar have weapons, and 2) the Vendikar have a means of delivering the weapons across interplanetary distances. Since there seems to be a MAD type thing going on, there's no doubt that the same applies to Eminiar. Even if the details are different, the facts are the same: Eminiar has a stock of interplanetary WMDs.

Yet bomb teletransportation is not used in battles, despite the obvious advantage. So this is not an acceptable argument.
We also know that beaming through shields is iffy at best, which is more than sufficient as an explanation.
Besides, as told in the other thread, anytime you're going to assume the existence of threatening base hidden somewhere, if not more, you're going to dramatically and quite artificially increase the numbers regarding the firepower.
Oh, it's an underground base; without even discussing about the idea of a ship having the occasion to approach its planetary target, what if then it's not one but two bases? Then, for good measure, add an orbital station that can cloak (who knows?).
Actually, I'd be surprised if there were fewer than a thousand bases, plus decoys to make Vendikar waste weapons. That would be pretty standard for an interplanetary cold war using WMDs. But cloaking orbital stations seem unlikely, as there is no evidence of cloaking devices in the episode, nor is there any reason to think that cloaking devices would be pretty standard for a pre-warp civilization.
Everytime the counter attack gets bigger, the attacking ship needs to have bigger and faster weapons to destroy more in less time. At this point it becomes fairly arbitrary because you could then say that if such weapons existed, obviously worlds would do everything possible to protect themselves by default: planet-encompasing shields always on,
There is no evidence that Eminiar has planetary shields, therefore there is no reason to think that the Enterprise would have to blast through such shields. In fact, barring extraordinary evidence of authorial intent from another source, I would go ahead and add "force fields" to the list of technology the Eminians don't have, the list that already includes "warp drives" and"cloaking devices."
beam cannons already idling, ready to fire within seconds,
That... actually appears to be the case for Eminiar.
anti-torpedo interception weapons equally ready at any time,
Unless somebody provides evidence that the beaming-detection technology that they are known to have would allow them to track moving torpedoes and give the order to fire before they got to their targets, I don't think the Eminian point defense system is up to the job. Anyways, torpedoes are shielded, and the Eminian disruptors appear to have trouble with shields.
etc.
Unless "etc." is your way of referring to a network of dozens of bomb factories, a hundred backup control centers, and a thousand bomb-beaming platforms, all connected by two-meter-thick steel blast doors that will fall the instant a sufficiently rapid change in temperature or pressure is detected, I'm probably going to try to rule out whatever you intend to insert there. Explicitly so, if possible.

Therefore, to have a chance to overcome those defenses AND survive, the attacking ship needs even more power, both in weapons and defenses. By then, you're probably already thinking about something like a Death Star which could tank any fire whilst snuffing a whole planet within seconds unhampered. There just is no limit to it the moment you want to fiddle with numbers by accounting for possible defenses.
I'm not accounting for "possible defenses," I'm accounting for "defenses that a pre-warp, pre-force-field, pre-cloaking-device, pre-'etc' civilization capable of mounting an interplanetary cold war would likely have."
Are there more details to what just happened there? Like dialogue leading right to that point?
This may be a more solid proof of bomb beaming, assuming that's what really happened and not a shot from a disruptor bank or even a simulation.
I would assume that the Valiant was destroyed by a disruptor beam sucker-punch, based on Anan's reliance on them for a quick, painless kill. I would also assume that, upon examining the wreckage, Eminair came to realize just how close they had come to extinction. More on that in a moment.

7. You're missing the fact that it's a no limits fallacy if you take it as a general statement.
You're missing the literary point of the line: by having McCoy mention that the Enterprise can "handle" the planet, the author neutralizes the potential "ass-pull-ness" of General Order 24.
And that supposes that he was refering to an assault and survival against the planet's defenses, not about the idea of actually having to find the people down there.
In its immediate context, it could indeed go either way. But in the larger context of the plot, it's obvious foreshadowing.
It is also strange that they don't even know where their team is, doesn't even have a roughest idea of it, and can't even track them. Have the biosignal readings from orbit always been that limited?
I don't know. The Eminians are very humanlike, which could cause problems, and having the shields up may interfere with sensors as well as phasers.

Yes, plus the ship would have the advantage of being mobile against Eminar's beam weapons. Plus even a miss from the Enterprise would still hit somewhere on the planet.
In my interpretation of General Order 24, I have always limited the scope of the destruction to cities, industrial centers, agricultural centers, and military assets (plus collateral damage, which would be considerable). A hit "somewhere on the planet" doesn't necessarily contribute anything to General Order 24, other than perhaps collateral damage.
12. More importantly, those vaunted beamed fusion bombs suddenly don't exist anymore. This certainly nixes any diea that these weapons ever existed. They more than likely were made up, like a bit of science fiction added to the treaty. The whole setting is quite ridiculous on its face so why not?
Because of the fear that real weapons would come to be exchanged, which is a major plot point.
13. Which is certainly less than India (1.236 Bn) or China (1.375 Bn). Yet, if most of the population of Eminar 7 were to be condensed on one continent, it would be easier to target them.
I myself suggested a comparison to 1970's era united states.
16. Then why would he believe that his disruptor beams could? The only logical conclusion is that those fusion bombs never really existed, or at least their transportation is far more classical and old school than claimed (remember the "launch weapons" part). It's also interesting that they have access to disruptors.
He was hoping for a quick kill before the Enterprise could strike back.

As for why he doesn't even mention the possibility of beaming bombs at the Enterprise, the reason is simple: he knows the shields can withstand disruptor fire for a significant period of time, so it stands to reason that a single bomb would not end the fight. And if there's a drawn out battering of the Enterprise, there can be no doubt that what he's hoping for - no weapons striking his beloved Eminiar - cannot be achieved. So long as the Enterprise functions, he cannot achieve his goals, despite all the power he has.
19. Considering the level of firepower they'd still get out of halved phasers if they were sitting between 100 to 1000 TW or a bit more at maximum level, that's not much of a loss. A single wide 50 TW shot at a more evenly spread Manhattan (say a circle), with a total surface area of 53,648,000 square meters, would still deliver 932 KJ per square meter. That would *only* be about nine hundred times superior to sunlight intensity above the stratosphere of Earth iirc (it's 1.something KW /m²)! :) :)
At this point we're not even talking about cancerous sunburns anymore, are we?
If he could get a single terawatt-level beam out, given normal phaser width, he would have been able to burn out all the disruptors in a period of minutes a couple of commercial breaks ago. Unless, of course, the disruptor emitters are made of something substantially stronger than the focusing elements in plausible mid-future energy weapons, something I'm explicitly trying to avoid.
20. Of course, he had the ship put at maximum phaser range, so later the ship is confirmed sitting outside of the range of Eminarian defenses.
As long as he's not out past Vendikar, he's still within range of the Eminian offense, which must be taken into account.

GO 24 is for all intents and purposes an order for a unique purpose, mass destruction, by targeting quite specific resources as far as we can tell, although characters, when not in the need of being military-technical, summarize it down something like "f**k you all with pious fire."
There is no evidence that a ship is expected to achieve it regardless of the defenses it will face.
But there is evidence that the Enterprise is expected to achieve it while dealing with a planet locked in an interplanetary cold war, complete with interplanetary WMDs and mutually assured destruction, with all of the defenses and offensive weapons that entails.

I will be completely clear on this point: the Enterprise would not be able to perform GO24 on Eminiar if it was using photon torpedos, planetary shields, or any other technology of a comparable tech-level. The resources of a planet just dwarf the resources of a single ship by too much.

However, the primary datapoint for GO 24 involves the destruction of the entire inhabited surface of a planet capable of sending WMD's to a neighboring planet.

And, it bears noting, that the ability to target a single ship at several tens of thousands of kilometers is utterly trivial compared to the ability to target a city at several hundred million kilometers.
They really do love to stitch the word freedom to any weapon or campaign of utter destruction, don't they? :)
Yes. But one wonders what the fleet of Ohio class submarines was supposed to be called. "Eighteen for Opression"?
Aside from the fact that as proved, there's no reason to omit the use of phasers,
As proved, the phasers can't even deliver a terawatt with the shields up, and a nuke-beaming system - or hell, a missile-based system! - capable of striking a target on the other side of the solar system will have absolutely no trouble dealing with something in its own orbital space. So, as proved, the shields need to be up, and the phasers are limited to far less than 0.01% full power.
it is a bizarre question to ask. Most of these targets would be taken down by a firepower ranging from the mid megajoule range to, perhaps a few dozens gigajoules for some carpet bombing of an installation on the outside or quite exposed silos. Hardened underground bases would require the most of the firepower with full perforating and drilling abilities, or at least very focused fire delivery (phasers, again, would do a formidable job there).
Nothing that couldn't be done with kiloton or low megaton weapons.
The problem is that there are a thousand hardened targets (American missile silos are hardly vulnerable, they are generally hardened to the point that only a shot within a few tens or hundreds of meters can take them out), and only a hundred or so torpedoes to deal with them all. Phasers, while perhaps capable of striking soft targets on widebeam at sub-terawatt powers, will be next to useless against hardened targets.

Way to inflate your numbers!
I did no such thing. If I had wanted to inflate my figures, I could have constructed something I considered to be a viable interplanetary launch platform distribution and techlevel. I could have bumped up the separation dramatically (in fact, a silo separation closer to 8 km would have been entirely justified), and used SIFCON-HFC-2 as a silo building material, which can be hardened to more than 10,000 PSI. And that's without breaking the stringent techlevel constraints I've been observing, or even working within them to the full degree possible.

Imagine an installation or set of installations ten or more kilometers underground. We'll call it "The Hellacious Assault Thicket", or "THAT". It consists of many elements, many functional, many designed solely to appear like functional elements to Vendikaran sensors. There are thirteen redundant bomb factories, each of which is self-sufficient, along with five decoys. There are 47 redundant C4I centers, along with 108 decoys. There are eight hundred beaming stations, each associated with a sizable stockpile of bombs, along with eleven hundred decoys. Moreover, there are fifteen hundred SIFCON-HFC-2 hardened silos containing interplanetary ballistic missiles, along with seventeen hundred SIFCON-HFC-2 hardened silos containing decoy missiles meant solely to distract Vendikar's point defenses. No two silos are closer than 12 kilometers. The missile fields stretch across Eminiar's equator, interrupted only by the ocean. Every corridor that connects one or more "nodes" (decoys or functional facilities) has at least one two-meter thick solid steel portcullis along its length. If any sensor in any facility registers a sharp increase in temperature or pressure, or goes offline altogether, all the portculli drop. Moreover, there are fifty-six beam-capable submarines, and seventy-three IPBM capable submarines patrolling the oceans at any given time.

Trying to calculate how much firepower it would take to destroy THAT would be inflationistic. Moreover, since disarming America would be the lower bracket, disarming THAT would plausibly be the upper bracket. Note also that the above meets my stringent techlevel assumptions: with the exception of the beaming technology (which the Eminians appear to have), THAT would be well within our ability to build. In fact, THAT would likely be closer to a typical interplanetary cold-war strategic weapons platform system than the analogy to our pitiful intercontinental strategic capabilities I operated under the assumption of. In other words, the "actual" Eminian defenses are far more likely to be like THAT than like America's strategic weapons.
What if they had only a dozen silos and a few densely populated cities in the same region of the planet? Surely nothing prevents that and those extrapolated figures would melt like ice in hell.
There is every reason to think that they would be concerned about a disarming first strike from Vendikar if - God Forbid! - real weapons ever came to be exchanged. There is therefore every reason to presume that strategic weapons platforms are present in great number and widely distributed. This is basic nuclear strategy, and at the end of the day, the entire episode is clearly a deconstruction of MAD, so I see no reason why we shouldn't apply those sorts of principles to Eminiar and Vendikar.
Or, to have fun the other way round, why do you assume such a little quantity of weapons? Why not claim a million missile silos, protected by the best materials available to more advanced societies? Why not consider that the entire planet is dotted with them, plus disruptor cannons?
Because a calculation based on THAT would be justly subject to charges of (the bad kind of) inflationism.
Heck, if you really believe they can beam bombs from planet to planet, why not consider even more incredible parameters, the kind such transportation tech would allow? The next question would be where are you going to stop, what is the convenient limit you'll settle on for your numbers to somewhat appear fair and reasonable when they certainly aren't?
There is no "convenient limit" that I'm stopping at when I get a big enough figure. There is a hard limit set by what it takes to destroy the military capacity of a civilization in an interplanetary cold war, and I am expanding my figures to fill that bubble - and go no further.


I think that my central point:
If there is any concern at all about a counterforce strike from Vendikar, we can safely assume that the number, variety, and hardness of bomb-beaming platforms employed by the Eminians vastly exceed anything even contemplated during our cold war.

In any event, if multiple hardened targets separated by distances on the order of several kilometers have to be destroyed by each torpedo, there is no possible way to avoid TOS torpedo yields well into the gigatons.
Still stands.

Now, the questions I would like you to answer:
1) If there are no stockpiles of weapons armed and ready for deployment, why is the threat of immediate exchange of real weapons hanging over everybody's heads?
2) If there exist platforms that can send weapons of mass destruction against cities at hundreds of millions of kilometers, what would stop them from being used against a ship at several tens of thousands of kilometers?
3) Would the possibility of a counterforce strike from Vendikar be a plausible factor to take into account when modeling the nature of Eminiar's strategic weapons platforms? If so, why wouldn't we expect strategic weapons platforms in comparable numbers, separations, and hardnesses to those employed in America's Cold War when 1970's America appears to have been similar in many ways to the civilization on Eminiar?
4) If Scotty could send a beam of 50 TW in power planetwards with shields up, what would have stopped him from frying the disruptors?
5) Would using the strategic weapons on the Enterprise while its shields were up reliably prevent "Millions of people horribly killed. Complete destruction of our culture here and yes, the culture on Vendikar. Disaster, disease, starvation, horrible, lingering death, pain and anguish!" which is what Anan feared? If not, why should it matter that it wasn't mentioned?
6) If the answer to the first part of question five is "no," would that automatically entail that Scotty should throw caution to the wind and lower the shields for effective phaser fire?

And finally,
7) Would you be willing to collaboratively model interplanetary cold war with me using the equations in this source in order to come up with a "more reasonable" model of what Eminiar's strategic weapons capabilities should look like?

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Re: General Order 24: the Tactical Environment of Eminiar 7

Post by Moff Tarquin » Wed Mar 02, 2016 3:25 am

A note about the collaborative modeling:

It would basically be rocket science. First, we'd have to come up with a range of sizes, escape velocities and stellar orbits for Eminiar and Vendikar. After that, we come up with a range of GDPs and a range of percentages of GDP that can be put towards military spending, largely on the basis of comparison to America. We'd then be mapping out the sorts of missile technologies (ranging from the chemfuel and ion-drive propulsion we use in modern probes to more speculative drives like Project Orion), relying heavily on this site to make our missiles realistic, that would be capable of getting from one planet to another. We wouldn't be working much with the beaming stuff because a) there's no way to rigorously model that and b) you dispute it anyways. Methods of getting missiles into orbit will range from the mundane (basic chemfuel multi-stage set-ups) to the exciting (rocket sleds and mass drivers) to the exotic (Project Orion being another favorite here, along with the Verne Gun alternative). We'd play mix-and-match with orbital delivery methods and missile drive technologies, and come up with a table of "average time to target" or somesuch based on considerations of orbital mechanics. Once we have that, we use the "START treaty" equations to start figuring out what an exchange of interplanetary strategic weapons would look like with the "best" (judged by plausibility of engine design and effectiveness of orbital-delivery/drive combination) missiles. We'll also work in how "strategic defense initiative" type systems (nominally laser-based, but really with reference to the short-range heavy disruptors) effects the big picture. Once we have that down, we figure out what sorts of warhead yields, bunker/silo hardnesses, and target distributions make sense in these sorts of conditions.

It's a pretty big project, but if we're going to get bogged down with our exchange (and if the TDiC rehabilitation thread is any guide, we're going to get pretty bogged down within two or three exchanges), we might as well make it constructive. A lot of our disagreements seem to be at least partially based on what we bring to the discussion, and this sort of collaboration, while probably not capable of bringing us to agreement, would at least make our assumptions more explicit. And that would be a great leap in progress.

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Re: General Order 24: the Tactical Environment of Eminiar 7

Post by sonofccn » Wed Mar 02, 2016 6:57 am

Just a couple of thoughts.

1.) I would have to say Eminiar 7 and Vendikar are not in a Cold War governed by MAD ala the US-USSR. Indeed it is Kirk bringing MAD into the equation which forces Eminiar 7 to the peace talks. The two planets instead had explicitly formed a work around to Mutually Assured Destruction via their simulated combat which allowed both societies to "painlessly" go on. There is no reason to assume they have fusion bombs stockpiled or even the immediate infrastructure to build such, and certainly incentives not to develop/maintain weapons technology which could physically harm their opponent and risking upsetting the whole arrangement. Further:
A Taste of Armageddon wrote:KIRK: Yes, I do. I've given you back the horrors of war. The Vendikans now assume that you've broken your agreement and that you're preparing to wage real war with real weapons. They'll want do the same. Only the next attack they launch will do a lot more than count up numbers in a computer. They'll destroy cities, devastate your planet. You of course will want to retaliate. If I were you, I'd start making bombs. Yes, Councilman, you have a real war on your hands. You can either wage it with real weapons, or you might consider an alternative. Put an end to it. Make peace.
Kirk, whose knowledge and understanding of the situation you previously cited, doesn't seem to believe Eminiar 7 has a ready stockpile of "fusion bombs".

2.) Regarding interplanetary transporters, unless I'm missing something Mea doesn't specify from where the fusion bombs are transported only that they are from the "enemy". Indeed, looking at it the line appears more to be about precision, their beaming their weapons directly on target, than anything else. It could easily be from simulated ships tens of thousands of kilometers from Eminiar 7. Further we know Eminiar 7 at least has simulated spaceborn assets, the exploding satellite which "destroyed" the Enterprise for instance.

3.) Phasers not being usable at full power with shields is an odd data point, even more so considering photon torpedoes are completely unaffected, one which seems inconsistent with every other time the ship is shown firing phasers during combat situations without any indication their dropping shields. I would say such a point is on par with "The Changling" having the Enterprise take the equivalent of, IIRC, 270 of its photon torpedoes before cracking. An outlier in other words.

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Re: General Order 24: the Tactical Environment of Eminiar 7

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Wed Mar 02, 2016 3:03 pm

sonofccn wrote:Further:
A Taste of Armageddon wrote:KIRK: Yes, I do. I've given you back the horrors of war. The Vendikans now assume that you've broken your agreement and that you're preparing to wage real war with real weapons. They'll want do the same. Only the next attack they launch will do a lot more than count up numbers in a computer. They'll destroy cities, devastate your planet. You of course will want to retaliate. If I were you, I'd start making bombs. Yes, Councilman, you have a real war on your hands. You can either wage it with real weapons, or you might consider an alternative. Put an end to it. Make peace.
Kirk, whose knowledge and understanding of the situation you previously cited, doesn't seem to believe Eminiar 7 has a ready stockpile of "fusion bombs".
Very good catch!
As always, a complete parsing of the quoted sources usually paints a very different picture.
It's very well confimed in episode by the simple fact that only ground-to-orbit disruptors are used.
2.) Regarding interplanetary transporters, unless I'm missing something Mea doesn't specify from where the fusion bombs are transported only that they are from the "enemy". Indeed, looking at it the line appears more to be about precision, their beaming their weapons directly on target, than anything else. It could easily be from simulated ships tens of thousands of kilometers from Eminiar 7. Further we know Eminiar 7 at least has simulated spaceborn assets, the exploding satellite which "destroyed" the Enterprise for instance.
Another good point. I was wondering if they had simulated weapon banks in orbit. And it's true that nothing is said about what is exactly sending those bombs.
3.) Phasers not being usable at full power with shields is an odd data point, even more so considering photon torpedoes are completely unaffected, one which seems inconsistent with every other time the ship is shown firing phasers during combat situations without any indication their dropping shields. I would say such a point is on par with "The Changling" having the Enterprise take the equivalent of, IIRC, 270 of its photon torpedoes before cracking. An outlier in other words.
Could be too, but maybe the loss isn't that massive?

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Re: General Order 24: the Tactical Environment of Eminiar 7

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Wed Mar 02, 2016 4:01 pm

I'd like to keep this post as condensed as possible. No more confetti posts.
Based on what I said and the details brought up by sonofccn, and upon a rereading of the transcript, there's no proof that either world has stockpiles of fusion bombs.
If anything, evidence solidly argues against that: from Kirk's suggestion about building bombs now to Eminar 7 only using disruptors.
Contrary to your claims, there is zero reason not to beam bombs, even next to the ship. You even claimed that both planets could spam fusion bombs. If they believe their disruptors can damage a ship, so would their bombs.

Note, btw, that if they were beaming bombs from planet to planet, the Enterprise could have never been outside of weapon range since Spock ordered their ship to be parked at maximum phaser range, thus caping how far the ship could be: probably some thousands of kilometers at best and, anyway, always within the range of those supposedly beamed bombs.
Since this never happened, we clearly have enough evidence to reject the idea that those planets have fusion bombs ready.
They've been playing their simulation for hundreds of year as I understand, or something to that effect.

What worries those people is that they know they'll have to build weapons as they'll assume the other side will too because of the breach of protocols regarding the treaty of simulated war.
And that is all we need to know. Likely, both worlds will be making bombs at the same pace if they have the same tech level and roughly equal resources.
Heck, even if Vendikar did have such stockpiles, we have enough evidence that Eminar 7 simply doesn't.
In the end, it doesn't matter if they shoot at each other within seconds, days or weeks. They'll do it and that's enough to cause terror.

A point you regularly miss is that based on your idea that a GO 24 must be achieved no matter what the moment the order is given, then the amount and quality of defense on or around the target would make the firepower figures quite volatile.
There is nothing fair or logical, even less reasonable about this methodology. If maximizing the chances of a GO 24 is part of GO 24 (which we have no proof of), then based on the tech that exists, the firepower that would need to be available to any Federation ship capable of orbital bombardment would theoretically need to be in the multiples of hundreds of teratons, in order to be sure to be able to reproduce the K-T extinction even all over a planet's surface and also deep down enough for hardened positions, all that within seconds before the defender could retaliate.
And this has nothing to do with the defenses Eminar 7 actually has because we're talking about the principles that support your methodology. Even if Eminar 7 doesn't have those defenses, not all worlds are Eminar 7, and other worlds that would be included as logical targets of a GO 24 could be post-warp worlds too, quite more advanced.

It is also completely nonsensical for another simple reason. It would mean that a starship actually has enough firepower to defeat any and all defenses of any targeted world all by itself, for all life has to perish.
So let's see. A world has a hundred military bases shielded and equipped with thousands of torpedo silos? Plus just as many phaser banks and else? These bases are sitting under kilometers of rock and layers of reinforced materials too? Oh and one of their cities actually is well protected under one of their best shields? Perhaps even an entire solid dome of transparent awesome steal?
Something akin to your T.H.A.T. case. Or greater, in fact.
Wait. Said world also has orbital weapons and a fleet of ships? Plus millions of civilian spacecrafts? Well, there it goes: for a UFP ship to survive and achieve GO 24 before anyone can flee, it has to be able to destroy all of these targets, military and civilian. The military ones must go first of course. So yes, it can target and destroy all of these assets in an alpha strike.
Bravo. You've just turned Star Trek into an universe where any ship has to be more powerful than anything it faces, all forces combined to infinite +1!!
And of course the defenders will have any military technology of the same level allowing them to deal with such threats (hence my general point about super planetary shields and all sorts of other top notch defenses).
Thus, as they were that powerful, the UFP ship needs in turn to be even MOAR POWAFULL!!!!1!!

It's a completely broken logic, a vicious circle locked in an ever looping and increasing feedback.

As demonstrated in the paragraph above, you specifically took the relatively low tech USA as a model because as you admited, harder targets (quite expected in Trek) would inflate the numbers even higher. That is a convenient way to make your method look fair and reasonable, by actually avoiding the more likely average case of advanced planet any UFP battle-capable ship would be facing. That is what I mean by that convenient limit. In other words you're pitting a modern super carrier against a group of isolated African villages to gain a modicum of parsimony in what would be needed in this campaign of destruction, like if you had to budget it before the congress, but at the complete and utter expense of honesty.

This argument was nuts for Star Wars' Base Delta Zero. It is equally nuts for General Order 24.
Not to say that such firepower numbers would simply not fit with anything seen later on in Star Trek.

GO 24 is an order that exists in a vaccuum, is a general purpose and eers on the theoretical side. It's an objective, nothing more, and it's up to the crew to complete it if they want and if they can.
GO 24 is not a contextual procedure that accounts for any possible scenario, even the Dyson Sphere case or else.

As for random technical points:

1. How do you know phasers cannot even channel 1 TW through the Connie's shields? All I read was that she simply couldn't fire at full power through them.
2. Phasers are, on the contrary, far more adequate against hardened targets than torpedoes. Outside of their NDF effect which is a great advantage, they can apply concentred fire in a very dense spot for a long time, which is far more efficient for drilling through defenses. For an equal yield, bombs will be less effective. They can count on blast, especially if detonated on contact, but it's still a massive waste of energy and can only be countered, to some degree, by a great yield. But torpedoes offer other advantages, mainly guidance and great range.
3. We actually have no reason to believe that both Eminar 7 and Vendikar have a vast array of weapon platforms.
4. A grouped positioning of populated areas would certainly make any threat of attack even greater, as all your live assets are easier to get hit at once.
Yes. But one wonders what the fleet of Ohio class submarines was supposed to be called. "Eighteen for Opression"?
...
The Doomsday Cucumbers perhaps?
And finally,
7) Would you be willing to collaboratively model interplanetary cold war with me using the equations in this source in order to come up with a "more reasonable" model of what Eminiar's strategic weapons capabilities should look like?
Huh, that's a lot of work. I'm afraid I won't be able to do any of that.

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Re: General Order 24: the Tactical Environment of Eminiar 7

Post by Moff Tarquin » Thu Mar 03, 2016 2:23 am

sonofccn wrote:Just a couple of thoughts.

1.) I would have to say Eminiar 7 and Vendikar are not in a Cold War governed by MAD ala the US-USSR. Indeed it is Kirk bringing MAD into the equation which forces Eminiar 7 to the peace talks. The two planets instead had explicitly formed a work around to Mutually Assured Destruction via their simulated combat which allowed both societies to "painlessly" go on. There is no reason to assume they have fusion bombs stockpiled or even the immediate infrastructure to build such, and certainly incentives not to develop/maintain weapons technology which could physically harm their opponent and risking upsetting the whole arrangement.
1) if that were the case, why on earth does Eminiar have those gigantic disruptors, if not as an insurance policy against any incoming weapons? What is the Planetary Defense System defending against? If it's a holdover from back when there were real weapons being exchanged, then there's every reason to think that there are other holdovers.
2) if that were the case, why is everybody acting like they're under the sword of Damocles?

Further:
A Taste of Armageddon wrote:KIRK: Yes, I do. I've given you back the horrors of war. The Vendikans now assume that you've broken your agreement and that you're preparing to wage real war with real weapons. They'll want do the same. Only the next attack they launch will do a lot more than count up numbers in a computer. They'll destroy cities, devastate your planet. You of course will want to retaliate. If I were you, I'd start making bombs. Yes, Councilman, you have a real war on your hands. You can either wage it with real weapons, or you might consider an alternative. Put an end to it. Make peace.
Kirk, whose knowledge and understanding of the situation you previously cited, doesn't seem to believe Eminiar 7 has a ready stockpile of "fusion bombs".
His understanding of the situation extends to what he's been told: these people are launching (materialising?) fusion bombs at each other, this is only simulated, there is risk of it turning real, etc. Building more bombs could indeed be to make a stockpile, but it could also be to replenish a soon-to-be-expended stockpile, and both the game theory of the situation (if you can build x and use it on me, then I have every reason to start building my own x right now because I don't know whether or not you have started building your x) and the sense of impending retribution if the treaty isn't kept up both point towards the latter.
2.) Regarding interplanetary transporters, unless I'm missing something Mea doesn't specify from where the fusion bombs are transported only that they are from the "enemy". Indeed, looking at it the line appears more to be about precision, their beaming their weapons directly on target, than anything else. It could easily be from simulated ships tens of thousands of kilometers from Eminiar 7.
I want to avoid attributing space-based assets to Eminiar and Vendikar if at all possible. You need silos (to put your weapons in) and hardened bases (to put the people who push the red button of death in) in an interplanetary cold war. You don't necessarily need space-based assets if your delivery system is robust enough, and there are plenty of robust plausible mid-future technologies available (Project Orion, the Verne gun, mass drivers, laser launch...) even before we get to the whole "beaming" thing. Indeed, if there is anything even remotely related to MAD going on here (and given the period, there's no way this episode ISN'T a commentary on the Cold War), even if there are interplanetary beaming devices, they will still have "conventional" delivery platforms, just like we kept our B-52 fleet up and running after the ICBM was perfected.

Further we know Eminiar 7 at least has simulated spaceborn assets, the exploding satellite which "destroyed" the Enterprise for instance.
Given that one of the ways one could "inflate" the numbers is by adding space-based assets into the equation, I'm confining my analysis with the assumption that space-based assets contribute very little to Eminiar's actual strategic weapons capability.

3.) Phasers not being usable at full power with shields is an odd data point, even more so considering photon torpedoes are completely unaffected, one which seems inconsistent with every other time the ship is shown firing phasers during combat situations without any indication their dropping shields.
Be that as it may, on the day they went to Eminiar, their phasers couldn't be fired at full power while the shields were on.
I would say such a point is on par with "The Changling" having the Enterprise take the equivalent of, IIRC, 270 of its photon torpedoes before cracking. An outlier in other words.
The key there is "the equivalent of." Sometimes, gigawatts can bring down shields. Other times, gigatons can't. As a general rule, what kind of energy is hitting the shields seems to be more important than how much energy is hitting the shields.

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Re: General Order 24: the Tactical Environment of Eminiar 7

Post by Moff Tarquin » Thu Mar 03, 2016 3:27 am

The first point I'd like to make is that it is extremely odd to have a "Planetary Defense System" if the other guy doesn't have an "Interplanetary Offense System." And if the other guy has an Interplanetary Offense System, you'd damn well better have your own. There is literally no reason for the situation between Eminiar and Vendikar to be just as symmetric as the situation between the USA and the USSR. Even a cursory understanding of game theory dictates that, if one of them even can be in a position to launch real weapons, the other one will be scrambling to be in the same position. There is MAD if the treaty is broken. That's the whole premise of the episode. MAD doesn't work if you don't have an iron fist in that velvet glove of yours.

Moreover, having something that can solve the problem and not using it is practically Trek's calling card. I don't think that we can get anything from that line of argument, other than "they forgot" or something equally lame. At least my explanation ("it wouldn't solve the problem") makes sense: if the shields are up, it will take many bombs to destroy the Enterprise, which will give the Enterprise time to fire its phasers on low power at soft targets and use its photon torpedoes to destroy whatever it damn well pleases, which in turn means that Eminiar has to face the horrors of war whether or not it offers resistance.

Eminiar 7, a world not having obvious force fields, warp capability, or a significant space presence, but still engaged in interplanetary war, is our only datapoint for GO 24. Therefore, our evaluation of GO 24 should be based on the ability to take out a pre warp, pre force field civilization with minimal space presence that is nevertheless capable of engaging in an interplanetary war. It should not be based on the ability to take out modern day earth, nor should it be based on the ability to take out anyone with force fields, warp drives, or space navies.

So:
It is also completely nonsensical for another simple reason. It would mean that a starship actually has enough firepower to defeat any and all defenses of any targeted world all by itself, for all life has to perish.
So let's see. A world has a hundred military bases shielded and equipped with thousands of torpedo silos? Plus just as many phaser banks and else? These bases are sitting under kilometers of rock and layers of reinforced materials too? Oh and one of their cities actually is well protected under one of their best shields? Perhaps even an entire solid dome of transparent awesome steal?
Something akin to your T.H.A.T. case. Or greater, in fact.
Wait. Said world also has orbital weapons and a fleet of ships? Plus millions of civilian spacecrafts? Well, there it goes: for a UFP ship to survive and achieve GO 24 before anyone can flee, it has to be able to destroy all of these targets, military and civilian. The military ones must go first of course. So yes, it can target and destroy all of these assets in an alpha strike.
Bravo. You've just turned Star Trek into an universe where any ship has to be more powerful than anything it faces, all forces combined to infinite +1!!
An evaluation including the bolded elements would be flawed because nothing about an interplanetary cold war implies phasers, shields, orbital weapons, or space fleets. However, the non-bolded elements are arguably implied, though perhaps in rather lesser numbers. We are only dealing with a few hundred million people, after all. Replace "torpedo" with an appropriate interplanetary WMD delivery system (be it beaming, laser launch, Orion, etc.), replace "phaser banks" with "phase weapon," "laser," or "disruptor," replace "hundreds" with "a hundred," replace "thousands" with "one thousand," and you have a typical interplanetary cold war scenario at the tech-level and resource-level implied by the episode - our only example, might I remind you, of General Order 24. There are no examples of GO 24 being delivered by name against more advanced societies, nor are there any examples of GO 24 being delivered by name against less advanced societies.

In any case, if "1970's America with interplanetary weapons instead of intercontinental ones" is a hard lower limit, THAT is a hard upper limit. Note the emphasis on hard. Anything beyond THAT would probably either exceed the tech-level or the resource-level implied by the episode.
As demonstrated in the paragraph above, you specifically took the relatively low tech USA as a model because as you admited, harder targets (quite expected in Trek) would inflate the numbers even higher. That is a convenient way to make your method look fair and reasonable, by actually avoiding the more likely average case of advanced planet any UFP battle-capable ship would be facing. That is what I mean by that convenient limit. In other words you're pitting a modern super carrier against a group of isolated African villages to gain a modicum of parsimony in what would be needed in this campaign of destruction, like if you had to budget it before the congress, but at the complete and utter expense of honesty.
Actually, I'm calculating what it would take for a supercarrier to take out an African village in order to derive a lower limit for what it would need in order to take out the entire country of Mozambique (which is what I actually want it to be able to do), and then making it absolutely crystal clear that calculations regarding what it would take to eliminate the entire continent of Africa have no place here.

In other words, I'm using the example of a not-so-advanced planet to show that it would take even more to take out a moderately-advanced planet, then denying that GO 24 would work against an advanced-advanced planet.
1. How do you know phasers cannot even channel 1 TW through the Connie's shields? All I read was that she simply couldn't fire at full power through them.
We know that the power setting the Connie was capable of using through its shields was inadequate to fry the focusing elements of the Eminian disruptors. This places severe limits on the amount of power (or, what amounts to the same thing for hardened targets, how well the power can be concentrated) the phasers can get through the shields.
2. Phasers are, on the contrary, far more adequate against hardened targets than torpedoes. Outside of their NDF effect which is a great advantage, they can apply concentred fire in a very dense spot for a long time, which is far more efficient for drilling through defenses. For an equal yield, bombs will be less effective. They can count on blast, especially if detonated on contact, but it's still a massive waste of energy and can only be countered, to some degree, by a great yield. But torpedoes offer other advantages, mainly guidance and great range.
The only evidence I'm willing to accept for "non-standard" energy transfer methods for phasers is the fact that they leave no body, but don't kill everybody in the same room. Visuals are guilty until proven innocent, in my book. But if you want to talk about that, we should do so on the TDiC thread.

At any rate, given that the intensity of phaser fire the Enterprise was capable of achieving was too low to damage the disruptors (which would have had to have had relatively exposed focusing elements in order to fire upon the Enterprise), I highly doubt that they would have been useful under these conditions.
3. We actually have no reason to believe that both Eminar 7 and Vendikar have a vast array of weapon platforms.
Between the cultural milieu of the script's author, the "sword of Damocles" demenor of the Eminians, and basic considerations of game theory, we have HUGE reasons to believe that Eminiar and Vendikar both have, at the very least, well spread out weapons platforms of at least two types, hardened to the maximum practical degree. The sort of logic you use with respect to the lack of mention of the possibility of attacking the Enterprise could, in many situations, be used just as effectively to "disprove" the existence of the transporter, tricorder, or replicator. This is a standard Trek plot hole, so the disconnect between what people can do and what they actually do cannot enter into our evaluation of what they can do, sans explicit statement that they can't do something.
4. A grouped positioning of populated areas would certainly make any threat of attack even greater, as all your live assets are easier to get hit at once.
You mean like America's Eastern Seaboard? You can pick how you distribute your weapons, but you're pretty much stuck with your cities where they are.
And finally,
7) Would you be willing to collaboratively model interplanetary cold war with me using the equations in this source in order to come up with a "more reasonable" model of what Eminiar's strategic weapons capabilities should look like?
Huh, that's a lot of work. I'm afraid I won't be able to do any of that.
More's the pity. I might try to whip something up, but don't complain if it doesn't incorporate stuff that you would have included.

As far as I can tell, my central points still stand. If Eminiar and Vendikar can both launch real weapons, and both know that the other can launch real weapons, they will both have stockpiles of real weapons, ready to launch, stored in hardened facilities spaced so as to make killing more than one with a single weapon difficult for the other power. And at the end of the day, no amount of "absence of evidence" can change that fact, and the fact that the episode was aired during the Cold War as a deconstruction of the Cold War means that we should probably interpret it in light of the Cold War.

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Re: General Order 24: the Tactical Environment of Eminiar 7

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Fri Mar 04, 2016 6:29 pm

Moff Tarquin wrote:
sonofccn wrote:
A Taste of Armageddon wrote:KIRK: Yes, I do. I've given you back the horrors of war. The Vendikans now assume that you've broken your agreement and that you're preparing to wage real war with real weapons. They'll want do the same. Only the next attack they launch will do a lot more than count up numbers in a computer. They'll destroy cities, devastate your planet. You of course will want to retaliate. If I were you, I'd start making bombs. Yes, Councilman, you have a real war on your hands. You can either wage it with real weapons, or you might consider an alternative. Put an end to it. Make peace.
Kirk, whose knowledge and understanding of the situation you previously cited, doesn't seem to believe Eminiar 7 has a ready stockpile of "fusion bombs".
His understanding of the situation extends to what he's been told: these people are launching (materialising?) fusion bombs at each other, this is only simulated, there is risk of it turning real, etc. Building more bombs could indeed be to make a stockpile, but it could also be to replenish a soon-to-be-expended stockpile, and both the game theory of the situation (if you can build x and use it on me, then I have every reason to start building my own x right now because I don't know whether or not you have started building your x) and the sense of impending retribution if the treaty isn't kept up both point towards the latter.
It doesn't read "build more bombs". For all intents and purposes, they have zip at that moment.
Or at the very least a couple of them, not enough, which they aren't even ready to deploy in urgency.
2.) Regarding interplanetary transporters, unless I'm missing something Mea doesn't specify from where the fusion bombs are transported only that they are from the "enemy". Indeed, looking at it the line appears more to be about precision, their beaming their weapons directly on target, than anything else. It could easily be from simulated ships tens of thousands of kilometers from Eminiar 7.
I want to avoid attributing space-based assets to Eminiar and Vendikar if at all possible. You need silos (to put your weapons in) and hardened bases (to put the people who push the red button of death in) in an interplanetary cold war. You don't necessarily need space-based assets if your delivery system is robust enough, and there are plenty of robust plausible mid-future technologies available (Project Orion, the Verne gun, mass drivers, laser launch...) even before we get to the whole "beaming" thing. Indeed, if there is anything even remotely related to MAD going on here (and given the period, there's no way this episode ISN'T a commentary on the Cold War), even if there are interplanetary beaming devices, they will still have "conventional" delivery platforms, just like we kept our B-52 fleet up and running after the ICBM was perfected.
Safe that it's an upgraded comment on the world war because it does precisely involve beaming tech and can even target spaceships with beam weapons on the ground.
So tightly limiting your scenario to an URSS-v-USA scenario is quite artificial.

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Re: General Order 24: the Tactical Environment of Eminiar 7

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Fri Mar 04, 2016 6:52 pm

Let's try another route.
GO 24 applied to Eminar 7 = cities and installations targeted. Inhabited surface will be destroyed by the bombardment from a single UFP ship such as Constitution-class USS Enterprise.

Now, rewinding this a bit, more precisely jumping half a century earlier, we have the case of an UFP ship that went there to, was probably very politely warned like it happened in the episode, so her crew would most likely have raised shields and be prepared for a worsening situation. We don't know what kind of ship the USS Valiant was.
In the end, the UFP ship was destroyed before she could even fleet at warp. The planet, for all we know, would have only used disruptors against targets in orbit.

With this in mind, how long could the 50 years younger Enterprise hope to survive?
Since you say the ship couldn't count on phasers (and technically, phasers can only target that many cities and installations at once) and since torpedoes would be shot at a rate of two per second at most, likely less from what I remember, do yuo think she could deliver all her firepower before being shot at?

What is interesting to consider is that if GO 24 has been around by the time of the USS Valiant and if her captain had passed the same order, considering that she was shot down, what firepower you would give her?

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Re: General Order 24: the Tactical Environment of Eminiar 7

Post by Goper » Mon Mar 14, 2016 7:30 am

Perhaps another possibility regarding the Valiant is that they were "destroyed" in the war simulation, and the Captain and crew willingly sacrificed themselves to prevent a war, instead of going against the two planets as Kirk did.

Regarding the utility of beaming bombs against the Enterprise, may I postulate that the Eminians may have found it difficult to position their bombs close enough to the Enterprise (a target that can change its vector at will) to have a significant effect, especially since their sensor and transporter technologies were likely to be less precise than the Federation's? After all, even distances of a few hundred metres can greatly diminish the effect of a detonation on a target.

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Re: General Order 24: the Tactical Environment of Eminiar 7

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Mar 14, 2016 3:15 pm

Goper wrote:Perhaps another possibility regarding the Valiant is that they were "destroyed" in the war simulation, and the Captain and crew willingly sacrificed themselves to prevent a war, instead of going against the two planets as Kirk did.

Regarding the utility of beaming bombs against the Enterprise, may I postulate that the Eminians may have found it difficult to position their bombs close enough to the Enterprise (a target that can change its vector at will) to have a significant effect, especially since their sensor and transporter technologies were likely to be less precise than the Federation's? After all, even distances of a few hundred metres can greatly diminish the effect of a detonation on a target.
Materializing a nuke at a specific height and within the rough center of a 10 km wide city, over interplanetary ranges, ought to allow for depositing nukes close to a ship floating at thousands or even tens of thousands of km with serious accuracy.
Plus Mofftaq argued that they could spam fusion bombs, so even a 50% ratio miss wouldn't hurt much.

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Re: General Order 24: the Tactical Environment of Eminiar 7

Post by Goper » Tue Mar 15, 2016 4:32 am

I don't believe it was stated that the Enterprise would remain in its current trajectory if the Eminians began to fire at them; it's likely that it would perform evasive maneuvers to reduce the hit rate of the Eminian bombs instead. Even if the Eminians were indeed capable of beaming bombs to a neighbouring planet, they would have been hitting a target that has a predictable trajectory. With this unknown factor added in, it gets hard to determine how accurate the Eminians would be if they attempted to hit the Enterprise. Imo, there are also too many things we don't know about the situation. We don't know how accurate the Eminians would be if they tried to transport bombs to Vendika (assuming they have the capability to transport bombs). We don't know how fast they can transport their bombs. We also don't know how much damage their bombs would do to the Enterprise even if they scored a direct hit; it's possible that their planetary disruptors were actually more powerful than their bombs, but were limited by their range.

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Re: General Order 24: the Tactical Environment of Eminiar 7

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Thu Mar 31, 2016 1:24 pm

Goper wrote:I don't believe it was stated that the Enterprise would remain in its current trajectory if the Eminians began to fire at them; it's likely that it would perform evasive maneuvers to reduce the hit rate of the Eminian bombs instead. Even if the Eminians were indeed capable of beaming bombs to a neighbouring planet, they would have been hitting a target that has a predictable trajectory. With this unknown factor added in, it gets hard to determine how accurate the Eminians would be if they attempted to hit the Enterprise.
Most likely indeed. The predictability of the path is something important, but I don't recall evasive maneuvers to be exceptionally agile from such large ships of that era.
Even if evasion would be attempted, this wouldn't be a sufficient excuse not to try by the way.
Much would boil down to the algorithm responsible for calculating the trajectories of targets. After centuries of "firing" the same way at the same targets moving in the exact same way, they would certainly have no reason to be particularly good at using the same (specualtive) technology in real warfare. Not to say that considering the context of their fake war, they don't even need to know how to do it, they just have to agree that they can and send messages over the distance, pinging the enemy HQ that they hit the City of Zarblot in B5.

I may be playing Devil's advocate here. I wasn't the one who argued that the Eminians possessed any real capability in such transportation, and above all a large stock of beamable bombs ready to deploy within minutes all over a planet.
There's quite a reason that disruptors were used when a real threat came about.
Imo, there are also too many things we don't know about the situation. We don't know how accurate the Eminians would be if they tried to transport bombs to Vendika (assuming they have the capability to transport bombs). We don't know how fast they can transport their bombs. We also don't know how much damage their bombs would do to the Enterprise even if they scored a direct hit; it's possible that their planetary disruptors were actually more powerful than their bombs, but were limited by their range.
Yes, or at least more efficient since disruptors deposit all their energy in a single tight spot, whereas bombs don't.

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