Another versus Thread: Who would have guessed. (Covenant vs. Federation edition)

[An Enemy Spy]

I have been a fan of Halo since I was a wee lad, barely out of diapers (not really. Halo didn't exist when I was 7.) and I have recently started getting into ST:TNG.

A federation colony is destroyed by a strange force of aliens. Before the attack commences, a message is sent in perfect English. Your destruction is the will of the gods, and we are their instrument. War breaks out.

Which side would win?

[warty goblin]

Much as I like the Covenent, they can't fire their weapons while moving at superluminal speeds, which is a major disadvantage. On the other hand, they're probably bigger industrially, and instantanious FTL is always nice. On the third hand, they're dumb as a brick, but so is most of the Federation.

[Lupy]

The Federation can beat the Borg in controlled amounts, and the Covenant are like Gerber's level 1 babyfood Borg.

[Texas_Ben]

On the other hand, they're probably bigger industrially

All I really feel needs to be said on that subject, is Industrial Replicators.


I give this to the Covenant on the ground; Personal shields, Heavy weapons, actual tactics, and armored vehicles. Though to be fair to trek, we mostly hear about rather than see ground engagements in trek media, so it's hard to get an accurate picture of their full capabilities. I do remember one episode of DS9 in which Quark was selling weapons, and he demonstrated some hard-hitting anti-armour weapons so obviously such things exist in the Trekverse, but we don't (or at least I don't) know if the Federation uses them or how they would stack up against those used by the Covenant. Anyways, Covenant win on the ground.

However, Federation probably wins in space. Covenant ships use plasma weapons, and plasma weapons that are poorly-adapted clones of forerunner technology at that. While they are very effective against the unshielded ships of the UNSC, they would probably fare very poorly against the shields used by the Federation... Plasma cannons, which are probably the best analogue for covenant weapons in the Trekverse, are super-weak... used by freighters and civillian craft for self-defense. Granted, the plasma weapons used by covenant ships are probably several orders of magnitude more powerful, but federation ships are equipped with shields which are capable of shrugging off blasts from photon torpedoes... I can't remember their exact yield off the top of my head, but I believe it to be measured in megatons, which is not wimpy.

So yeah, covies win the ground war, Trek wins the space war.

[An Enemy Spy]

I would give the space war to the Covies based on the sheer numbers of their fleets. They're capable of sending fleets of hundreds of ships at the enemy. What constitutes a massive Federation fleet?

Seriously, I haven't seen enough episodes to know yet.

[Tavar]

It's a tricky question. Some of the Deep Space Nine Fleets are huge, but on the other hand the big Fleet that was destroyed by the Borg with Picard as Locutus was something like 40 ships.

[Drakyn]

I've got to say that the covenant are doomed to lose. They're designed to lose. They're the wet dream of every armoured military spaceperson who's ever wanted to have a really big fight against an enemy that has numbers AND tech yet is still so incredibly stupid that you have a fighting chance. And yet they're intimidating enough that if you give them enough early-on (preferably offscreen) victories, they seem like a credible threat, so you get extra cool points when you win.
Also, remember that any tech advantage the covenant have will be both (a) much slimmer than it was in Halo and (b) probably very easily copied and made to work properly/better/both.

[Tavar]

There's really only one tech advantage, and that's more strategic in nature than anything else: slipstream seems to be much faster than warp.

Well, actually, I take that back. There's also the fact that Star Fleet really doesn't have any decent Ground combat force, which would give the Covenant some victories, but I'm not sure if it's enough.

[chiasaur11]

There's really only one tech advantage, and that's more strategic in nature than anything else: slipstream seems to be much faster than warp.

Well, actually, I take that back. There's also the fact that Star Fleet really doesn't have any decent Ground combat force, which would give the Covenant some victories, but I'm not sure if it's enough.

So, the combat would be the Bizarro version of combat evolved?

[Texas_Ben]

I would give the space war to the Covies based on the sheer numbers of their fleets. They're capable of sending fleets of hundreds of ships at the enemy. What constitutes a massive Federation fleet?

I remember in DS9 hearing about several fleets numbering over 100 ships... I was poking around on Memory Alpha, looking to confirm that, and the only direct reference to fleet numbers was 7th fleet, which had 112 ships. Watching DS9 I got the impression that Starfleet was losing 20-100 ships every month or so, and while it was definitely taking it's toll on them, remember they still managed to pull it together and win the Dominion war, so they still maintained enough ships to go on the offensive and win.

Anyways, as to fleet sizes, I guess a fair method of comparison is to look at how many ships they throw at a major operation-- Operation return, in which the Federation moved to retake the wormhole, consisted of a task force of some 627 ships, according to Memory Alpha. The Covenant fleet at the Battle of Reach, the largest engagement in the war, numbered 314 ships.

So the Federation has the Covenant outmanned.

I can't find any hard numbers on the power-level of covenant weapons, but I did read that the range of the Covenant energy projector is approx. 100,000km. The range of Federation torpedoes is stated to be 300,000km, so really, weapon power doesn't matter all that much since the federation can just sit back and shoot at them from outside their range.

Edit:
So here are some hard numbers on weapon power:
Photon torpedo is about 64 megatons at full yield, or 2.678E17 J
Still don't know about the Energy projector, but we can assume that it is more powerful than a ship-mounted MAC cannon. Halopedia tells me that a ship-mounted MAC gun fires a 600,000kg slug at .4c. That gives us (If my math is right) an energy of 4.32x10^21 J, which is siginificantly higher. Since covenant weapons have proved to be significantly more powerful than UNSC weapons, we can assume that their weapons are at least that powerful, probably more.

So Covenant ships pack a mean punch, but Federation ships have triple the range, and probably much better speed and maneuverability... impulse drive can take you to .8c, and with inertial dampers you're going to get some slick manuverability.

tl,dr:
Federation still wins in space, Covenant still win on the ground.

[Renegade Paladin]

The Federation loses on every single possible grounds; the Covenant's tech base is simply much higher than the Federation's, despite their stupidity.
Much as I like the Covenent, they can't fire their weapons while moving at superluminal speeds, which is a major disadvantage.
If the Federation could do this reliably, they would do it more. You'll notice they... don't.
The Federation can beat the Borg in controlled amounts, and the Covenant are like Gerber's level 1 babyfood Borg.
The Borg send one ship at a time. The Covenant suffers no such limitations, and unlike any Alpha Quadrant power, their ships have sufficient firepower to turn a world's surface into glass in a matter of hours. This is no mean feat; the Federation can't hold a candle to that level of firepower. Reference, TNG S1E26, "The Neutral Zone," when the Romulans realize that it could not have been the Federation destroying their colonies in the proximity of the Neutral Zone because the level of destruction was greater than what Starfleet could achieve, and "greater than what Starfleet could achieve" was nowhere near glassing the planet. It was the destruction of a few towns.

[Texas_Ben]

The Federation loses on every single possible grounds; the Covenant's tech base is simply much higher than the Federation's, despite their stupidity.
[Citation Needed]. The Federation has teleporters, Inertial dampeners, Replicators, Time Travel (when demanded by the plot they can do it on a whim), all of which they actually understand. The covenant has cheap knock-offs of forerunner tech.


If the Federation could do this reliably, they would do it more. You'll notice they... don't.
Photon torpedos are warp-capable (http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Photon_torpedo). And they do fire them at warp fairly often, usually when pursuing another vessel.


The Covenant suffers no such limitations, and unlike any Alpha Quadrant power, their ships have sufficient firepower to turn a world's surface into glass in a matter of hours. This is no mean feat; the Federation can't hold a candle to that level of firepower. Reference, TNG S1E26, "The Neutral Zone," when the Romulans realize that it could not have been the Federation destroying their colonies in the proximity of the Neutral Zone because the level of destruction was greater than what Starfleet could achieve, and "greater than what Starfleet could achieve" was nowhere near glassing the planet. It was the destruction of a few towns.
Starfleet weapons are shown as being on par with Romulan and Cardassian weapons, and a combined fleet of the Romulan Tal Shiar and Cardassian Obsidian order rendered a planet uninhabitable within the space of a few volleys of torpedoes.

*Edit* I was in a rush before, couldn't say everything I wanted to.
As already established, Federation ships, while not packing the same amount of raw firepower that covenant ships do (See my previous post in which I ran the numbers on that), they are certainly not slouches in the damage-dealing, and with 3x the range of the longest-reaching covenant weapon (Covenant energy projectors have a range of 100,000km), they're going to get cut to pieces long before they are even in range.

[Renegade Paladin]

[Citation Needed]. The Federation has teleporters, Inertial dampeners, Replicators, Time Travel (when demanded by the plot they can do it on a whim), all of which they actually understand. The covenant has cheap knock-offs of forerunner tech.
Even cheap knock-offs of Forerunner tech are far and away beyond anything the Federation can bring to bear; the Forerunners were a galaxy-spanning civilization, as the Covenant are after them. Compared to either, the Federation is in its infancy.

Starfleet weapons are shown as being on par with Romulan and Cardassian weapons, and a combined fleet of the Romulan Tal Shiar and Cardassian Obsidian order rendered a planet uninhabitable within the space of a few volleys of torpedoes.
No, they thought they did. In point of fact, they did no such thing and their sensors were being fooled by a spy in the fleet. Furthermore, the visuals are not consistent with the destruction being reported by their tactical officers.

[hamishspence]

I could be wrong- but wasn't the Original Series Enterprise quite capable of glassing the surface of a planet on its own?

[Renegade Paladin]

I could be wrong- but wasn't the Original Series Enterprise quite capable of glassing the surface of a planet on its own?
If it was, why was the Genesis Device such a big deal?

[hamishspence]

Because it was one, single, tiny missile? Rather than all the energy of the phasers and photon torpedoes firing for days on end?

And because it created an explosion that could destroy ships (and life) within a whole system- hence the need to flee at warp speed to avoid it.

That said- power in the Trek-verse can vary somewhat. In the Mirror Universe it speaks of Kirk destroying a planet in order to suppress a rebellion, and the Enterprises phasers are supposed to be able to level cities easily.

[Texas_Ben]

No, they thought they did. In point of fact, they did no such thing and their sensors were being fooled by a spy in the fleet. Furthermore, the visuals are not consistent with the destruction being reported by their tactical officers.
Their sensors were being fooled into thinking that the planet was chock-full of founders when it was in fact abandoned. I'm pretty sure that they would know the destructive capabilities of their weapons ahead of time. It's not like they just up and one day said "Oh we're gunna DO THIS THANG, you in, romulans?". No, they were perfectly capable of rendering a planet uninhabitable within the space of a few minutes, it's just that... well, the planet was already uninhabited so they didn't really accomplish much.

And as to visuals not being consistent with what is happening, that's just sort of how trek rolls. I can't count the number of times in which they say that another ship is "Arbitrary number of kilometers away" when they are sitting nose-to-nose.

*Edit* Oh yeah, and that time they caught Garak trying to launch the Defiant's quantum torpedoes and wipe out the founders. So you know that one ship by itself is capable of doing heavy damage via orbital bombardment.

But this entire tangent about orbital-to-ground firepower is irrelevant; The Federation doesn't glass planets, because that's not how they do things[/i].

[Renegade Paladin]

Photon torpedos are warp-capable (http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Photon_torpedo). And they do fire them at warp fairly often, usually when pursuing another vessel.
Just found the citation I was looking for. Nonsense. TNG S2E47, "Peak Performance." While running a battle simulation (which Riker dismissed as irrelevant early in the episode, saying that tactical skill is minor for a starship captain, when such skill is what keeps him and his ship from becoming a rapidly expanding debris field, an attitude I find telling with respect to the Federation's military competence), a simulated Romulan warbird warped up to the Enterprise but then dropped out of warp to fire torpedoes. A decidedly non-simulated Ferengi vessel did the exact same thing later in the episode. If warp strafing was such a gigantic advantage that they have access to, why don't they do it? Has there been any instance of a ship at warp attacking a ship not at warp, as opposed to firing at another ship going at relatively the same (warp) speed?

[An Enemy Spy]

Anyways, as to fleet sizes, I guess a fair method of comparison is to look at how many ships they throw at a major operation-- Operation return, in which the Federation moved to retake the wormhole, consisted of a task force of some 627 ships, according to Memory Alpha. The Covenant fleet at the Battle of Reach, the largest engagement in the war, numbered 314 ships.


Actually, the biggest fleet was the one that went with the Unyielding Heirophant. And it was implied that there are many many more ships.

[Texas_Ben]

I didn't include the fleet around the Unyielding Heirophant because I wasn't sure if all 500 ships were all planned to be committed to a single operation or if they were just hanging around the big refitting and staging area space station thing. It's been awhile since I read the books.

[golentan]

Just found the citation I was looking for. Nonsense. TNG S2E47, "Peak Performance." While running a battle simulation (which Riker dismissed as irrelevant early in the episode, saying that tactical skill is minor for a starship captain, when such skill is what keeps him and his ship from becoming a rapidly expanding debris field, an attitude I find telling with respect to the Federation's military competence), a simulated Romulan warbird warped up to the Enterprise but then dropped out of warp to fire torpedoes. A decidedly non-simulated Ferengi vessel did the exact same thing later in the episode. If warp strafing was such a gigantic advantage that they have access to, why don't they do it? Has there been any instance of a ship at warp attacking a ship not at warp, as opposed to firing at another ship going at relatively the same (warp) speed?

I was under the impression that they don't conventionally fire at warp because they can't actually target between the two. It's not impossible, it's just much more difficult. The main advantage to FTL weapons systems is that you can go to warp and use them on an approaching enemy, preventing someone from doing something like, say, accelerating a vessel to some ridiculous value of C, de-warping, and smashing planets like eggshells because you can kill such lunatics while they're in warp.

Or, say, smash a covenant fleet before they realize that they need to turn on their shields (assuming warp takes you to or near slipspace).

I only actually know halo. I'm a fail geek, I've seen a total of 2 hours of star trek programs in my life. But having done a grand total of 5 minutes of research on this subject, I'm siding with the feds. The covenant, for all their big talk, have a woeful number of actual confirmed planets, a miniscule number of ships per engagement, and field inefficient versions of their own weapons. They have to GUESS were they're going. Seriously, humans inhabited a sphere. The covenant couldn't stick a pin in the center to save their life, finding the core by accident. And then from there, it takes them how many months to find Earth from *ALPHA FRICKIN CENTAURI?!* (okay, Epsilon Eridani. 10 light years, that's less than a couple hours with the covenant drives, and they couldn't manage a survey crew doing this.) Meanwhile the federation can use intelligent navigation techniques, a few idiots on a wandering starship excepted. The covenant can't possibly field FTL weapons, while the federation maybe can. The federation has longer range in real space, and fields antimatter warheads. I want to emphasize this. Anti. Matter. Warheads. As standard armament. I work the yield to be several orders of magnitude greater than the specifications for UNSC MAC guns.

[Texas_Ben]

federation has longer range in real space, and fields antimatter warheads. I want to emphasize this. Anti. Matter. Warheads. As standard armament. I work the yield to be several orders of magnitude greater than the specifications for UNSC MAC guns.
While (As you may have guessed) I am definitely with you on the fact that the Federation steamrolls the covenant in space, I also ran the numbers on Photon Torpedos vs. MAC rounds just for some comparison (on the assumption that UNSC and Covenant weapons are similar in power levels)

Photon Torpedos are stated to have a yield of 64 Megatons, which according to Wolfram Alpha is 2.678x10^17 J (joules) (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=64+Megatons+of+TNT+).

A MAC cannons fire a 600,000 kg projectile at .4c. Again according to Wolfram Alpha (and in agreement with my earlier calculations I did by hand) the MAC round has 4.32x10^21 J (joules) (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Kinetic+Energy&a=*C.Kinetic+Energy-_*Formula.dflt-&a=*FS-_**KineticEnergyFormula.K-.*KineticEnergyFormula.m-.*KineticEnergyFormula.v--&f3=600000+kg&f=KineticEnergyFormula.m_600000+kg&f4=1.2e8+m%2Fs&x=9&y=12&f=KineticEnergyFormula.v_1.2e8+m%2Fs) of energy. Since we can reasonably assume that the covenant weapons are as powerful as UNSC weapons, the Covenant firmly win in the area of firepower.

However, there is still the issue of attack range. The LONGEST-RANGE weapon in the Covenant arsenal is the Energy projector, and, insofar as I know, most ships aren't even equipped with those, instead having pulse lasers and plasma torpedoes. Photon torpedoes have three times the range of the Covenant Energy Projector, and pretty much every ship carries them.

[Renegade Paladin]

I was under the impression that they don't conventionally fire at warp because they can't actually target between the two. It's not impossible, it's just much more difficult. The main advantage to FTL weapons systems is that you can go to warp and use them on an approaching enemy, preventing someone from doing something like, say, accelerating a vessel to some ridiculous value of C, de-warping, and smashing planets like eggshells because you can kill such lunatics while they're in warp.
Which is far less valuable than theoretical warp strafing.

Or, say, smash a covenant fleet before they realize that they need to turn on their shields (assuming warp takes you to or near slipspace).
That's a very large assumption, and one we know to be false; the two propulsion systems work on entirely different stated principles. Warp drive essentially bends space/time to achieve its effect, while slipspace is another dimension where superluminal travel is possible; there's no reason to presume they would interact.

I only actually know halo. I'm a fail geek, I've seen a total of 2 hours of star trek programs in my life. But having done a grand total of 5 minutes of research on this subject, I'm siding with the feds. The covenant, for all their big talk, have a woeful number of actual confirmed planets, a miniscule number of ships per engagement, and field inefficient versions of their own weapons.
The Federation tends to field a miniscule number of ships per engagement; during a full scale emergency on the Klingon-Romulan frontier (TNG S5E101, Redemption Part 2) the Federation could not muster more than twenty or so ships. Considering that the Romulan border during that era was the source of the Federation's greatest conventional military threat, you'd think they'd have a significant part of their fleet in the vicinity, and if that's a significant part of their fleet, it doesn't say much to their fleet strength. And that's even without the infamous 40 ship task force sent to engage the existential threat posed by the Borg cube in Best of Both Worlds; if that's the best they can do to respond to the imminent invasion and assimilation of Earth then they obviously do not have a very numerous starfleet.

They have to GUESS were they're going. Seriously, humans inhabited a sphere. The covenant couldn't stick a pin in the center to save their life, finding the core by accident. And then from there, it takes them how many months to find Earth from *ALPHA FRICKIN CENTAURI?!* (okay, Epsilon Eridani. 10 light years, that's less than a couple hours with the covenant drives, and they couldn't manage a survey crew doing this.) Meanwhile the federation can use intelligent navigation techniques, a few idiots on a wandering starship excepted.
In their defense, 10 light years is a huge distance. Surveying deep space isn't nearly as easy as you seem to think it is.

The covenant can't possibly field FTL weapons, while the federation maybe can. The federation has longer range in real space, and fields antimatter warheads. I want to emphasize this. Anti. Matter. Warheads. As standard armament. I work the yield to be several orders of magnitude greater than the specifications for UNSC MAC guns.
In order: I don't see any reason so far to believe that the Federation can engage non-warping targets from warp. If the Federation has longer range in real space, why do they engage their enemies at point blank range all the time? And finally, saying "It's antimatter!!1!" doesn't mean anything. Matter/antimatter annihilation is a powerful force, yes, but it's not a magic win button. Its power is directly dependent upon the amount of matter and the amount of antimatter annihilated; it is entirely possible for a simple mass driver to do more damage than an antimatter warhead if it flings a large enough mass at a high enough velocity to impart more energy on target than the matter/antimatter annihilation of the warhead can deliver.

[warty goblin]

While surveying space in a sphere with radius ten light years is a rampant pain in the ass due to the staggering volume that represents, that also strikes me as the stupid way to look. I wonder how hard it would be to observe stars for unnatural/unusual emmisions in their spectra, such as might be caused by the radios and other communications of an intelligent species. One probably isn't going to be able to to actually watch Survivor: Reach from ten light years away doing this, but figuring out that all is not normal over there seems to me to be pretty likely.

I'd need to crunch the numbers to be sure, but frankly I don't have the time or energy to look up the relevant equations/factiods at the moment.

[golentan]

The full list of stars within 15 light years of Reach.


UV Ceti: 5.20938 light-years, class M5.5e V
Tau Ceti: 5.45637 light-years, class G8p V
Teegarden's Star: 5.86235 light-years, class M6.5 V
Omicron(2) Eridani: 6.4346 light-years, class K1e V
Gliese & Jahreiss 1061: 6.89562 light-years, class M5.5 V
YZ Ceti: 7.11849 light-years, class M4.5 V
Sirius: 7.8483 light-years, class A1 V
Luyten 1159-16: 8.04064 light-years, class M4.5e V
Kapteyn's Star: 8.50394 light-years, class M0 V
Luyten Half-Second 1723: 9.04234 light-years, class M3.5 V
V577 Monoceri: 9.4513 light-years, class M4.5e V
van Maanen's Star: 9.80982 light-years, class DZ7 wd
Sol: 10.4968 light-years, class G2 V
Bonner Durchmusterung -3°1123: 10.8247 light-years, class M1.5n V
Giclas 99-49: 11.2697 light-years, class M3.5 V
Procyon: 11.4872 light-years, class F5 IV-V
Lacaille 9352: 11.5147 light-years, class M2e V
Luyten's Star: 11.5977 light-years, class M3.5n V
Cordoba Durchmusterung -37°15492: 11.7532 light-years, class M4 V
Giclas 158-27: 12.0446 light-years, class M5.5n V
Luyten Palomar 771-095: 12.1952 light-years, class M3
Ross 47: 12.4662 light-years, class M4n V
82 Eridani: 12.4799 light-years, class G5 V
Groombridge 34: 12.6086 light-years, class M1.5n V
Alpha and Proxima Centauri: 12.6261 light-years, class G2 V
Ross 248: 12.6833 light-years, class M5.5e V
Gliese 229: 12.6889 light-years, class M1n V
Heintz 299: 12.7524 light-years, class M4 V
EZ Aquarii: 12.7616 light-years
Eggen/Greenstein white dwarf 45: 13.8588 light-years, class DZ9 wd
Epsilon Indi: 14.0762 light-years, class K5e V
Bonner Durchmusterung +6°398: 14.2895 light-years, class K3 V
DX Cancri: 14.3687 light-years, class M6.5e V
Steph 538: 14.686 light-years, class M3 V
Luyten 730-18: 14.729 light-years, class M3 V-VI
Luyten Palomar 944-20: 14.8015 light-years, class M9 V

They showed up to reach with 300+ capital ships. Who knows how many support vessels that requires. You're telling me that they are so mindblowingly incompetent that they can't afford to, on facing what is obviously a core world due to military buildup and a visible from space urban population 10 times larger than anything they had encountered, perform a quick analysis of surrounding systems and spend the 6 hours round trip and 36 small ships that it would take to find earth from a quick scan of easily visible stars using the massive parallax that starships with sensors adequate to engage an enemy in space can provide?

10 light years is huge, yes. But unless humanity's homeworld is located on a comet they don't need to care about that, do they? They just need to survey the environments humans have been proven to live in. Planetary systems, around stars, do a quick check for chatter and you're off. If a probe doesn't return, send a forceful followup mission. That's without even using any method for ruling out some of the radioactive hellholes around here.

I think you just made the Federation's case that much stronger.

Yeah. Both sides field relatively small fleets. But the federation is at best a local power, while the covenant claims galactic status. That's what I meant by pathetic numbers. And the federation seems to be bigger than the UNSC (150 species? That's half as many homeworlds as earth had colonies, without factoring in colonies), and has the benefit of better weapons and shielding. The covenant had trouble with the UNSC, not "We're going to lose" trouble but "take a 15 year war of attrition to win" trouble. If the feds can stretch the war of attrition longer, they have the benefit that they keep advancing while the covenant stands still. Because if the covenant improves beyond minor tweaks it means that they've lost their dogma, which means they're no longer the covenant, and all the subservient species stop sending troops and go home.

And you're saying with shielding, better weapons, better numbers, teleportation ("hey, prophet. I just sent your bridge staff a present. Be careful unwrapping it, the contents are sensitive.") and theoretical warp strafing (because it is theoretically possible I'm given to understand) they don't have enough fight in them to survive?

[Renegade Paladin]

The full list of stars within 15 light years of Reach.


UV Ceti: 5.20938 light-years, class M5.5e V
Tau Ceti: 5.45637 light-years, class G8p V
Teegarden's Star: 5.86235 light-years, class M6.5 V
Omicron(2) Eridani: 6.4346 light-years, class K1e V
Gliese & Jahreiss 1061: 6.89562 light-years, class M5.5 V
YZ Ceti: 7.11849 light-years, class M4.5 V
Sirius: 7.8483 light-years, class A1 V
Luyten 1159-16: 8.04064 light-years, class M4.5e V
Kapteyn's Star: 8.50394 light-years, class M0 V
Luyten Half-Second 1723: 9.04234 light-years, class M3.5 V
V577 Monoceri: 9.4513 light-years, class M4.5e V
van Maanen's Star: 9.80982 light-years, class DZ7 wd
Sol: 10.4968 light-years, class G2 V
Bonner Durchmusterung -3°1123: 10.8247 light-years, class M1.5n V
Giclas 99-49: 11.2697 light-years, class M3.5 V
Procyon: 11.4872 light-years, class F5 IV-V
Lacaille 9352: 11.5147 light-years, class M2e V
Luyten's Star: 11.5977 light-years, class M3.5n V
Cordoba Durchmusterung -37°15492: 11.7532 light-years, class M4 V
Giclas 158-27: 12.0446 light-years, class M5.5n V
Luyten Palomar 771-095: 12.1952 light-years, class M3
Ross 47: 12.4662 light-years, class M4n V
82 Eridani: 12.4799 light-years, class G5 V
Groombridge 34: 12.6086 light-years, class M1.5n V
Alpha and Proxima Centauri: 12.6261 light-years, class G2 V
Ross 248: 12.6833 light-years, class M5.5e V
Gliese 229: 12.6889 light-years, class M1n V
Heintz 299: 12.7524 light-years, class M4 V
EZ Aquarii: 12.7616 light-years
Eggen/Greenstein white dwarf 45: 13.8588 light-years, class DZ9 wd
Epsilon Indi: 14.0762 light-years, class K5e V
Bonner Durchmusterung +6°398: 14.2895 light-years, class K3 V
DX Cancri: 14.3687 light-years, class M6.5e V
Steph 538: 14.686 light-years, class M3 V
Luyten 730-18: 14.729 light-years, class M3 V-VI
Luyten Palomar 944-20: 14.8015 light-years, class M9 V

They showed up to reach with 300+ capital ships. Who knows how many support vessels that requires. You're telling me that they are so mindblowingly incompetent that they can't afford to, on facing what is obviously a core world due to military buildup and a visible from space urban population 10 times larger than anything they had encountered, perform a quick analysis of surrounding systems and spend the 6 hours round trip and 36 small ships that it would take to find earth from a quick scan of easily visible stars using the massive parallax that starships with sensors adequate to engage an enemy in space can provide?
You're presuming that it is in fact obvious that Reach was a core world. They don't know anything about humanity's disposition; for all the Covenant knows, they'd been glassing minor outposts and Reach was but one of many other planets. The population of Reach does not in any way tell them they're close to the human homeworld.

10 light years is huge, yes. But unless humanity's homeworld is located on a comet they don't need to care about that, do they? They just need to survey the environments humans have been proven to live in. Planetary systems, around stars, do a quick check for chatter and you're off. If a probe doesn't return, send a forceful followup mission. That's without even using any method for ruling out some of the radioactive hellholes around here.

I think you just made the Federation's case that much stronger.
Yes, but just because Reach was ten light years from Earth doesn't mean it had to be. The distance could easily have been much larger, and the Covenant had no way to tell whether it actually was or not. They had no way of knowing that sending a ship to every star within ten light years would be anything other than a wild goose chase.

Yeah. Both sides field relatively small fleets. But the federation is at best a local power, while the covenant claims galactic status. That's what I meant by pathetic numbers. And the federation seems to be bigger than the UNSC (150 species? That's half as many homeworlds as earth had colonies, without factoring in colonies), and has the benefit of better weapons and shielding. The covenant had trouble with the UNSC, not "We're going to lose" trouble but "take a 15 year war of attrition to win" trouble. If the feds can stretch the war of attrition longer, they have the benefit that they keep advancing while the covenant stands still. Because if the covenant improves beyond minor tweaks it means that they've lost their dogma, which means they're no longer the covenant, and all the subservient species stop sending troops and go home.
Yes, and pathetic numbers for a galactic power would still steamroll the Federation. They fielded hundreds of capital ships to Reach, any one of which had the firepower to smash any given Federation starship with impunity. That's the lynchpin of the whole thing right there; Covenant ships are heavily armed and shielded in a standard of "heavily armed and shielded" that has a much higher baseline for comparison than Star Trek.

And you're saying with shielding, better weapons, better numbers, teleportation ("hey, prophet. I just sent your bridge staff a present. Be careful unwrapping it, the contents are sensitive.") and theoretical warp strafing (because it is theoretically possible I'm given to understand) they don't have enough fight in them to survive?
Covenant capital ships are heavily shielded; transporters would be useless. This is a major plot point of the Halo story, you know; the UNSC is grossly overmatched and only survives because of the vastness of space and ignorance of the Covenant re: the locations of their colonies.

And no, I'm not saying that with all of those things they don't have enough fight in them to survive; I'm saying they don't have enough fight in them to survive because, aside from teleportation that is easily blocked by pretty much anything down to and including several meters of dirt and a magnetic field, they don't have those things. They do not have better numbers (what part of only mustering 40 ships to counter a threat to their capital escaped you?), they do not have better weapons, and warp strafing is both unproven and possibly useless even if it works because a photon torpedo is orders of magnitude less powerful than weapons that Covenant shielding routinely shrugs off with ease. That is why the Covenant wins this scenario.

[golentan]

Covenant capital ships are heavily shielded; transporters would be useless. This is a major plot point of the Halo story, you know; the UNSC is grossly overmatched and only survives because of the vastness of space and ignorance of the Covenant re: the locations of their colonies.


I don't think you understand the point I was making. The federation uses antimatter warheads as standard weaponry. There is no theoretical maximum yield. Which means they can build a warhead weighing 2 kilograms and it will have a blast greater than a mac gun, with less cost involved. At longer range. With a faster reload time. From warp (because even if they can't shoot from there, they can teleport from there and the covenant can only develop countermeasures if they survive to report). They don't have to land it inside (though that would be awesome) they just need to get it near enough. And starfleet seems to be mildly military at best, a full federation mobilization should be a lot more impressive. And they have longer Realspace Range listed.

It should have been obvious reach was a core world. Humans live in sphere. Denser population closer to center of sphere. Entire rest of sphere destroyed before battle of reach. Suddenly: Large Fleet, heavy population, massive last ditch battle and evacuation effort. Covenant reasoning: ????

At least scout. Don't discover earth months later when one of your top three leaders goes there with a token defense force and winds up conquering the place by accident.

[Renegade Paladin]

I don't think you understand the point I was making. The federation uses antimatter warheads as standard weaponry. There is no theoretical maximum yield. Which means they can build a warhead weighing 2 kilograms and it will have a blast greater than a mac gun, with less cost involved.
Alright, you made the claim, let's see the numbers. How much energy is released by two kilograms of antimatter interacting with an equivalent mass of matter? Don't be shy; you've obviously done the calculations if you're making the claim. Right?

Hint: There is a theoretical maximum yield, and that maximum is defined by the potential energy release of total annihilation of the mass of antimatter. That you think that there's no maximum limit just because there's antimatter involved shows that you don't understand how it works.

[golentan]

An antimatter warheads sole limit is the amount of reaction mass.

The given yield of a MAC is 1.7 teratons. It has a maximum effective range of 100,000 km given UNSC targeting.

The energy is released as photons. An antimatter catalyzed fusion reaction of 10^18 protons gives a one kiloton yield. Since the yield scales linearly, this gives a one teraton reaction for 1.68 kg. Thus a 1.7 teraton weapon (easier to handle than a pure matter/antimatter reaction but has other problems) has a payload of 2.8 kg. This is what I was thinking of when I did my post.

This is taken from wiki, but checking it against the mass energy equivalence I think I dropped some stuff. I remembered the value of a kilogram of antimatter as ~90 petajoules and did a mental flip to petatons. I think I wound up just calculating the simultaneous trigger mass without the reaction fuel itself.

The actual weight of an equivalent warhead without adding kinetic energy using a pure matter/antimatter reaction is 5000 tons. Assuming you can't use the enemy for reaction mass or impart velocity, of course, in which case the weight drops by half or more. That's still greater than the weight of a 600 ton MAC round.

Actually, now I can't figure out how the UNSC can fire those puppies. Equal and opposite reaction, they should pick up fractions of C in a second, jellying the crew unless they can impart artificial gravity (can't think of another way to manage) on the order of thousands of Gs with perfect precision.

...

I may have to switch my vote to covenant for the win here.

[Texas_Ben]

Federation[/I] tends to field a miniscule number of ships per engagement; during a full scale emergency on the Klingon-Romulan frontier (TNG S5E101, Redemption Part 2) the Federation could not muster more than twenty or so ships. Considering that the Romulan border during that era was the source of the Federation's greatest conventional military threat, you'd think they'd have a significant part of their fleet in the vicinity, and if that's a significant part of their fleet, it doesn't say much to their fleet strength. And that's even without the infamous 40 ship task force sent to engage the existential threat posed by the Borg cube in Best of Both Worlds; if that's the best they can do to respond to the imminent invasion and assimilation of Earth then they obviously do not have a very numerous starfleet.
A few things: It was a full-scale emergency along the Klingon-Romulan border, not the Federation-Romulan border. And if your ally is being attacked, you're going to go help them out, sure, but you aren't going to commit all your forces, or even a sizeable chunk of them, especially since the Klingons have a very strong military to begin with.
And as to the battle at Wolf 359: They assembled 40 ships to take out just one Borg ship. They had to do so on short notice, and as it was Starfleet's first real encounter with the Borg they had no way of knowing how dangerous they were.

And there are plenty of examples of the Federation engaging in combat with task forces comprising of hundreds of ships, most notably during the Dominion war. For example, (And one I've already brough up, no less), over 600 ships were involved in Operation return.

Likewise, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that the Covenant are in the habit of throwing huge fleets at every problem. The fleet at reach, consisting of 314 Covenant ships, was the largest fleet engaged by UNSC forces during the war. The average fleet size was much much smaller than that. A few examples:
Battle of Sigma Octanus IV --24 Ships
Battle of Sigma Octanus IV --12 Ships
Battle of Installation 00 --31 Ships
Battle of Jericho VII --36 Ships
Battle of Earth --45 Ships
Battle of Onyx --54 Ships

Which points to the average fleet size being between 20-50 ships, with them throwing a couple hundred ships at large operations.
Also, while poking around on the Halo wiki for those numbers, I found that the Fleet of Particular Justice, which was the fleet present at Reach and later at Installation 04 was the 3rd largest fleet fielded by the covenant. So if their third-largest fleet was around 300 ships and their largest, the Fleet which was defending High Charity, was also stated to be "Several hundred", we can assume that the overall Covenant fleet strength is several thousand ships.

Starfleet's fleet strength, according to this (http://www.asdb.net/asdb/docs/sotsf/SOTSF4.pdf) was 3,500 pre-dominion war, So we can put the Federation and Covenant at similar numbers as far as fleet strength is concerned.

Since the federation weapons outrange covenant weapons by a considerable margin (300,000km vs 100,000km for their longest-ranged weapon, plasma torpedoes have a significantly shorter range than even that), they are perfectly capable of whittling them down before they close the distance... If indeed they can do so at all: I can't find anything on Covenant ships, but Federation ships can reach .8c at full impulse. Since the covenant ships aren't capable of dodging MAC rounds, which travel at .4c, it's a safe bet that .8c is well beyond their capabilities.

Even if they could close the distance, I find it highly unlikely that they could even hit the Federation ships. UNSC ships were capable of dodging plasma torpedoes fired by the Covenant, and they needed to overcome their inertia before they can move. Federation Starships are equipped with inertial dampers, which means that they can change direction on a whim. That plasma torpedo? Whoosh, nothing but net... er, space.



The given yield of a MAC is 1.7 teratons. It has a maximum effective range of 100,000 km given UNSC targeting

Except that it isn't. They give you everything you need to calculate the kinetic energy of a MAC round... that is, it's mass and it's velocity.
With a mass of 600,000kg and a Velocity of .4c, the Kinetic energy is equal to (.5)MV^2. Plug it all in, and you get this (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=kinetic+energy&a=*C.kinetic+energy-_*Formula.dflt-&a=*FS-_**KineticEnergyFormula.K-.*KineticEnergyFormula.m-.*KineticEnergyFormula.v--&f3=600000+kg&x=0&y=0&f=KineticEnergyFormula.m_600000+kg&f4=.4c&f=KineticEnergyFormula.v_.4c). Convert that to Gigatons of TNT (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Convert+4.32x10^21+J+to+Gigatons+of+TNT), and you fall short of 1.7 teratons by quite a bit.

The MAC discussion is incindental, however, since it serves merely to establish a baseline for weapon power in the Haloverse. Which doesn't really matter since Covenant weapons are out-ranged by fed

Also, my earlier figure may not have been correct: The yield of Photon torpedoes may be as high as 690 Gigatons (http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Photon_torpedo#Technical_Manuals).

[golentan]

Okay, so we're now at baseline power of

2 photon torpedoes
Somewhere between 50 megatons and up to 1.38 teratons (could I see confirmation on this? I can only find measurements in terms of isotons, which are not a useful unit probably by deliberate act)
Very long range
Basic armament
Able to burrow through stars
Rapid Refire Rate
Several tubes per vessel.

Typical MAC gun
1.03/1.7 teratons (they lied to us evidently)
Mid range at best with massive AI required
Take several hits to destroy covenant vessels
Slow refire rate
One gun per vessel (typical)
Still "How do they fire these?" (important question, answers some more questions about halo technical competence though raises the question of "why not use gravy guns?")

This is important because it does determine whether the Feds can damage the covenant. The answer seems to be "Yes, and they can monty python them in real space and possibly using FTL."

And the feds seem to be big enough to take the covenant armed forces if they have the weaponry to be effective. Again, ~150 core worlds, +colonies. Largish fleets. I'm trusting the trekkies on that last one, but if you have actual fleet strength numbers in generality I'd appreciate. Also, it bears mentioning that most trek ships are evidently not primarily military vessels (possessing civilian populations, extraneous systems, and other features that COULD in a large war be replaced with additional military features).

Now, given the utility technology the federation has, they have other advantages. So I do see this as boiling down to how long does it take a volley of torpedoes to hole a covenant cruiser. If the covenant can glass a world and move on before being destroyed, they can win by simply burning down the federation's base (if torpedoes have a yield in the megaton range). If, on the other hand, the federation has weapons within an order of magnitude of a MAC, they are victorious.

[Texas_Ben]

Somewhere between 50 megatons and up to 1.38 teratons (could I see confirmation on this? I can only find measurements in terms of isotons, which are not a useful unit probably by deliberate act)
From Memory Alpha (http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Photon_torpedo#Technical_Manuals):
The second type, at maximum yield, achieves the level of destructive force of an antimatter pod rupture. Antimatter is stored as liquid or slush on starships. Density of mere liquid antideuterium is around 160 kilograms per cubic meter. According to this comparison the high annihilation rate energy release would be comparable to about 690 gigatons. For the sake of plausibility the affected blast area at these intensities might be extremely small. Visual effects on-screen would seem to confirm this.

And let's not forget that in addition to Photon torpedoes, the Feds have the newer, and much more deadly Quantum torpedoes. I've been limiting my discussion to photon torpedoes since they are much easier to find numbers on, but in the shows and movies we see quantum torpedoes destroy targets in 1-2 hits that can weather several hits from photon torpedoes, suggesting that they are much more powerful.

Another point of comparison: Many smaller covenant ships are armed with Pulse lasers, which everything I can find on them says they are an anti-ship weapon with output in the Kilowatt range. Federation ships are armed with Phasers, with energy output measured in Megawatts. Since it would be pretty stupid to mount an anti-ship weapon incapable of damaging other ships, we can assume that phasers would be very effective at least against smaller Covenant ships like frigates and destroyers.



Again, ~150 core worlds, +colonies. Largish fleets. I'm trusting the trekkies on that last one, but if you have actual fleet strength numbers in generality I'd appreciate. Also, it bears mentioning that most trek ships are evidently not primarily military vessels (possessing civilian populations, extraneous systems, and other features that COULD in a large war be replaced with additional military features).
Are you asking for fleet sizes for the Covenant or the Federation? I have provided several examples for both demonstrating that they both operate in similar numbers. I can dig up more if you want, but it takes time so please specify exactly the information you want.

The most egregious offender I can think of insofar as not being a good military vessel is concerned is the Galaxy class, and I'm going to put that down to TNG being a product of the touchy-feely late 80's. Starfleet possesses several ship classes designed explicitly for combat, such as the Akira and Sovereign classes, and all the newer (And older!) ship classes we see are much much less cushy.
Not that the Galaxy class was a slouch in the firepower department--It fulfilled a heavy cruiser/battleship role in Starfleet, and performs that role admirably from what we see of the Dominion war (I'm referencing DS9 almost exclusively for this thread, as you may have noticed. That's because DS9 is basically the only time we get to see Starfleet on a war footing, rather than in super-idealistic "LETS EXPLOAR TEH GALIXY AND DIPLOMACY PPL")


Again, on the subject of weapons: UNSC ships can dodge Covenant plasma torpedoes. Since they are not using inertial dampers and are MUCH slower than Federation ships, it stands to reason that the Covenant would have a hard time even hitting a Federation ship with anything other than Energy projectors, which are only on their largest ships (Battlecruisers, Assault Carriers, and the like)

And because it hasn't been brought up yet, Federation Attack Fighters are armed with Phasers and Photon/Quantum torpedoes: I put them as more than a match for Seraph fighters, and more than capable of inflicting heavy damage on larger Covenant ships, Frigates and Destroyers especially (Which are the most common Covenant ship types).

Combine the Federation's much greater weapons range, speed, and manuverability, and you have a situation where the Covenant are getting kited around and never even get to fire a shot, because every time they get close... oops! Went to warp 9 and reappeared behind you out of your weapons range but well within theirs.

[golentan]

By fleet strength I meant solid numbers. Starfleet has 9 fleets apparently, but it's unclear how many vessels are in each from (again) my google search. Starfleet has around 3500?

The covenant seems to have the number of ships the plot requires, but if there is an available actual number I'd find that helpful. High Charity had an escort of hundreds, for example, and I don't know if the reason for their small engagement numbers in the war against humanity was because the elites felt it to be more sporting or some such nonsense. I don't even know how to guesstimate their actual numbers, but I'd put it between 500 and 10,000 (guessing around 2000).

I'm switching my vote back to the Federation, in case you hadn't guessed. And I don't think it's switching.

[Texas_Ben]

By fleet strength I meant solid numbers. Starfleet has 9 fleets apparently, but it's unclear how many vessels are in each from (again) my google search. Starfleet has around 3500?

Page 39-46 breaks down each fleet by composition (http://www.asdb.net/asdb/docs/sotsf/SOTSF4.pdf), but those numbers are, near as I can tell, post-dominion war. On page 16 you can find a chart detailing StarFleet strength by year, we're assuming 2375 (Since putting them at post-dominion war levels of readiness is about as fair as saying the Covenant are at post human-covenant war levels of strength.

At any rate, there is nothing I hate more than a Vs.Thread that gets reduced to number crunching. So let's put the space battle aside for the time being. It will be more fun talking about a land war.

I know it contradicts what I said before, but Federation wins on the ground. Thanks to transporters they have a unique tactical advantage of being able to strike anywhere at any time.

[Talkkno]

The Federation has not demonstrated any type of combined arms warfare and doesn't even bother to give there infary any type of armor.
Transporters can easily be disrupted by electromagnetic radiation.

[Texas_Ben]

I really only said that in an attempt to spark non-space related conversation. I can't conceive of any possible way for the federation to win on the ground, mostly because all trek media has been focused on Starfleet, so we have about as much information about Federation land tactics and equipment as you would expect to have information on the Army from watching a show about the Navy.

[Seraph]

I really only said that in an attempt to spark non-space related conversation. I can't conceive of any possible way for the federation to win on the ground, mostly because all trek media has been focused on Starfleet, so we have about as much information about Federation land tactics and equipment as you would expect to have information on the Army from watching a show about the Navy.

because its utterly impossible for ships to make use of orbital bombardment, amirite?

for that matter, I'm pretty sure that at least one of the trek series had an away team save themselves from an angry mob by having the enterprise set the ship-board phasers to stun and knocking the mob out from orbit.

[hamishspence]

A Piece Of The Action- the one with the gangster planet.

Technically- the planet's population specialize in emulating others, but at the time, what they were emulating, was a gangster book.

[Renegade Paladin]

On the ground side, I'm pretty sure the Master Chief's armor is made out of the same material that the Federation uses for packing crates, which makes him invulnerable. :smallbiggrin:

[Texas_Ben]

On the ground side, I'm pretty sure the Master Chief's armor is made out of the same material that the Federation uses for packing crates, which makes him invulnerable. :smallbiggrin:

Which begs the obvious question, what is our good friend the Chief doing fighting for the covenant?

At any rate, you should know by now that Armor is useless... A material can be completely impregnable, but the instant you shape it into a breastplate and slap it on a guy, it ceases to offer any protection whatsoever. Exceptions made in the case of super-elite troops like the Master Chief, in which case they will spend an entire episode discovering the phlebotnium necessary to defeat the impregnable defenses of doom. In all subsequent encounters, his armor will be useless, like the rest of armors.

Additional exceptions for the hunters, since they of course have the weak spot for MASSIVE DAMAGE.

[Drakyn]

While we're getting on the meta side of the issue, I still maintain that the covenant is basically custom-tailored to lose. Beyond the probable ground troop advantage, they're basically...stupid. They are characterized by being stupid; too stupid to elaborate on their tech - which they had to find - or even make it run properly. If both sides have anything like equal numbers, and star trek tech isn't a billion years behind the covenant's, they win. And the pieces of tech they have that ARE superior (scarabs or whatever) can just be reverse-engineered and made to run five times better than whatever they're using.

[Renegade Paladin]

While we're getting on the meta side of the issue, I still maintain that the covenant is basically custom-tailored to lose. Beyond the probable ground troop advantage, they're basically...stupid. They are characterized by being stupid; too stupid to elaborate on their tech - which they had to find - or even make it run properly. If both sides have anything like equal numbers, and star trek tech isn't a billion years behind the covenant's, they win. And the pieces of tech they have that ARE superior (scarabs or whatever) can just be reverse-engineered and made to run five times better than whatever they're using.
Reverse engineering doesn't work if you don't have an understanding of the principles the machine runs on; it isn't a magic cure-all. If you handed a fully functional F/A-18 to Glenn Curtiss, (http://www.glennhcurtissmuseum.org/educational/glenn_curtiss.htm) he wouldn't be able to reverse engineer it because, despite being a pioneer in naval aviation, he would have no understanding of jet propulsion, radar, composite materials, and any number of other things integral to the fighter's functioning. Just because they have a piece of Covenant technology doesn't mean they'll be able to just up and build one of their own in anything resembling a reasonable time frame.

[Drakyn]

Both the covenant AND the Haloverse humans managed it (the former just well enough to copy, the latter to actually make it work better), and at least the covenant were pretty uneducated in general when they got it. Haloverse humans were far below their tech level and managed to reverse a bunch of it after a while, and I'm fairly sure that star trek's lot are a bit ahead of where they were at first contact. Point is, if this isn't over inside a very short timeframe, both sides are going to be trying to adapt to the other enough to get some sort of edge. And it isn't going to be the zealous thickies that does it first, because they don't really do change well.

[Renegade Paladin]

Even if their capabilities are generally ahead of the UNSC's at first contact (and in some areas they are, but militarily is not one of them), unless the technology actually works on similar principles to their own, which it doesn't appear to, they won't have a common basis to engineer from.

[chiasaur11]

Both the covenant AND the Haloverse humans managed it (the former just well enough to copy, the latter to actually make it work better), and at least the covenant were pretty uneducated in general when they got it. Haloverse humans were far below their tech level and managed to reverse a bunch of it after a while, and I'm fairly sure that star trek's lot are a bit ahead of where they were at first contact.

To be fair, Haloverse humans have Cortana and her ilk, Bungie style smart AIs.

I mean, Cortana isn't quite Durandal, but she is up to the standards you'd expect for somebody he'd pay child support for. Which basically means really freaking scary.

[Drakyn]

Even if their capabilities are generally ahead of the UNSC's at first contact (and in some areas they are, but militarily is not one of them), unless the technology actually works on similar principles to their own, which it doesn't appear to, they won't have a common basis to engineer from.

What I'm saying is that when you have a fight between two sides where neither can immediately steamroll the other, the odds are most likely with the one that has the greatest capacity to learn and adapt. And the covenant are really, really, really bad at both. If it turns into a prolonged fight with anything resembling even odds, I can't see how it can go to their advantage.

[AstralFire]

Eh.

Not necessarily.

The covenant are really good at imitating. They have an entire race that specializes in it. Insanely well. The reverse-engineered and improved covenant technology only remained an advantage for the humans by restricting who had had access to it - 33 of the best special forces units in the galaxy. The covenant are relatively poor (though incapable) of innovation, but they are amazing imitators. I find it entirely likely that the Federation's tech gets completely absorbed by the covvies thanks to the Engineers before the reverse happens.

Additionally, cultural restrictions about messing with the tech no longer apply because the Federation's technology is not descended from or related to Forerunner technology. The covies were already very far along on their attempts to reverse engineer Smart AIs, and the UNSC was trying very hard to keep that tech out of their hands, too.

[golentan]

Reverse engineering doesn't work if you don't have an understanding of the principles the machine runs on; it isn't a magic cure-all. If you handed a fully functional F/A-18 to Glenn Curtiss, (http://www.glennhcurtissmuseum.org/educational/glenn_curtiss.htm) he wouldn't be able to reverse engineer it because, despite being a pioneer in naval aviation, he would have no understanding of jet propulsion, radar, composite materials, and any number of other things integral to the fighter's functioning. Just because they have a piece of Covenant technology doesn't mean they'll be able to just up and build one of their own in anything resembling a reasonable time frame.

That's a terrible example. Give curtis a modern military craft and he may not be able to build another one. But he will take one look at it and revise wing design (It flies with a single metal surface? Madness! We must emulate), maybe start looking at rocket engines or try to figure the principles of jet propulsion, and produce an uparmored product that might be on par with 50s era craft before the end of world war 1. And you can bet he'd turn over composites to chemists and engineers, maybe start work on the electronic components (prepping the ground for reasonable computers 20-30 or more years early. Difference engines where common use and the base principles were there).

You don't have to duplicate something to use it to massively improve things. Through learning, emulation, and other mechanisms you can improve.

[Drakyn]

Eh.

Not necessarily.

The covenant are really good at imitating. They have an entire race that specializes in it. Insanely well. The reverse-engineered and improved covenant technology only remained an advantage for the humans by restricting who had had access to it - 33 of the best special forces units in the galaxy. The covenant are relatively poor (though incapable) of innovation, but they are amazing imitators. I find it entirely likely that the Federation's tech gets completely absorbed by the covvies thanks to the Engineers before the reverse happens.

Additionally, cultural restrictions about messing with the tech no longer apply because the Federation's technology is not descended from or related to Forerunner technology. The covies were already very far along on their attempts to reverse engineer Smart AIs, and the UNSC was trying very hard to keep that tech out of their hands, too.

I knew about the engineers, but did NOT know they tended to absorb new things readily - I thought they were pretty much habituated. And I also didn't know about the AI-replication. Thanks. That does put a definite changer on my perspective - although of course, no matter how well the engineers can duplicate the stuff, it's not going to be operated by the best or brightest.

[Renegade Paladin]

That's a terrible example. Give curtis a modern military craft and he may not be able to build another one. But he will take one look at it and revise wing design (It flies with a single metal surface? Madness! We must emulate), maybe start looking at rocket engines or try to figure the principles of jet propulsion, and produce an uparmored product that might be on par with 50s era craft before the end of world war 1. And you can bet he'd turn over composites to chemists and engineers, maybe start work on the electronic components (prepping the ground for reasonable computers 20-30 or more years early. Difference engines where common use and the base principles were there).

You don't have to duplicate something to use it to massively improve things. Through learning, emulation, and other mechanisms you can improve.
It's actually not terrible at all, because while yes, he could recognize that it flies with a single metal surface, he doesn't have access to the modern metallurgy techniques that allow that to work (there would be massive problems with metal fatigue much sooner than on modern jets), nor engines to provide a high enough thrust-to-weight ratio to propel a solid metal wing that he could make while still having enough lift to take a useful amount of fuel and ordnance along. And what's more, he's not a metallurgist anyway, so the odds that he'll actually realize this are pretty low. He's certainly not going to churn out jet fighters with radar and homing missiles anytime soon. It would certainly speed jet engine development, but not so soon as to have production combat aircraft by the end of the first world war.

[golentan]

Metal fatigue shouldn't be a problem with regular maintenance. Engine strength is trickier, but again, there is a marvel of futuristic precision engineering sitting there on your table waiting to be researched. Radar was at least a glimmer in someone's eye by 1904.

Monoplanes were already being built, but in smaller numbers because of reduced lift. Part of which can be overcome by studying a more advanced aircraft's wings. You aren't going to be putting something out anywhere near on par with an F/A-18, but I don't see why that keeps you from releasing an ME-262 20 years early. Again, just having it there tells you worlds about what avenues to explore for a successful design and underlying principles.

It's like the steam engine. The first steam engine was built before the fall of the roman empire, but was dismissed as impractical compared to cheap slave labor. Now, when they had said that, if a locomotive had come through at 40 miles an hour and the conductor shouted "Hey, cute design. This baby runs on something like that" (in latin of course) do you think maybe we'd be talking about the roman road system, or their rail system right now? Knowing what to look for is at least half the battle in taking a principle and turning it into technology.

Similarly, the fact that humans are able to reverse engineer things in Halo implies that they (or one of the other hundred plus member species of the federation) should be able to do the same if they can get ahold of some gear in this mashup. Because the humans in the federation have shown more ability to take principles and turn them into technology. Halo has holograms, Trek has holodecks. Halo is a scarcity society, Trek is post scarcity. Halo has artificial gravity (judging by starship scenes), Trek uses it in everyday life. The only thing Trek is worse at is militarization, and it's not clear that they are worse in a significant way.

The early engagements of the Covenant war were straight up fleet battles with world sterilization, yes? Ground forces were rare (boarding parties less so), and nobody even saw an elite until Reach. The UNSC hadn't had a major fleet engagement in forever. In the beginning of Halo 2, they as much as say so. "Space combat was all theory until a couple years ago." Compare to Trek, where all of the conflicts (or almost all) are space based, and they've been fighting skirmishes and border wars and full on fleet engagements for anywhere from decades to centuries depending on where you stick the pin in the timeline.

Holy wall of text, batman!!!

[Texas_Ben]

Halo has artificial gravity (judging by starship scenes), Trek uses it in everyday life.
Only the Covenant; the books make reference to the fact that UNSC ships simulate gravity by having large internal spinning disks.

Someone made reference to the UNSC being way ahead of the Federation militarily: Are you mad? Covenant pulse lasers can destroy the most heavily armored of UNSC ships in 20 hits or so, and phasers alone are an order of magnitude more powerful.

Anyways, as to the reverse-engineering thing: The Federation is a science and technology powerhouse, it's what they do. The Federation puts as much effort into research & development as most other settings put into their militarization efforts. It's why their tech base is so high (I mean seriously, transporters and replicators and holodecks are ho-hum). Trek is a fun matchup against a lot of other settings because despite their rediculous tech-base they aren't a militant society; They just put their technology to what they see as more constructive uses.
But in any discussion about reverse-engineering, the gloves come off and the full weight of their considerable scientific capabilities are brought to bear. Expect to see federation shields (The one area I'd say the covenant have a distinct advantage is in the area of shielding-- Their weapons, although short-ranged, are very powerful, so it follows that their shields are equally powerful) beefed up considerably within a few months. As to the reverse-engineering capabilities of the Covenant well, they've had how long to study and reverse-engineer Forerunner technology (which is arguably at a technology tier that is higher than that of the federation, and is at the very least equal), and yet they are only at their current technology level?

[Mr. Mud]

Federation is composed of humans. Tsquared is Human.

/thread. :smalltongue:.

[AstralFire]

Religious restrictions there, though. A single covenant engineer encountered a damaged human car, dissembled it, and completely reassembled it within working condition in a handful of minutes having likely never seen it before - it was first contact with the engineer species, which was only deployed since that covenant team was on a search-before-destroy mission as opposed to immediately glassing. Similarly, a single covenant engineer found Master Chief's majorly tweaked (and damaged) armor and just about instantaneously understood how it worked, fixed the shielding, and made it work better than it had before. (It was then immediately shot, for security reasons.)

The reason the Covenant are so far behind the Forerunners also probably owes to the scarcity of Forerunner tech remnants outside of the Halos, which weren't discovered until extremely recently in the game timeline. Get the covenant a single Federation starship to study and the results won't end well.

[Stormthorn]

The Federation can beat the Borg in controlled amounts, and the Covenant are like Gerber's level 1 babyfood Borg.

This sort of silly fandom comment makes these threads into dangeorus places.

How are the Covenant Borg?
How are a hundred billion Covenant in any way like a "controlled amount" of borg?
What is a controlled amount of Borg? 10? 300?
How do you "beat" the borg?

[Texas_Ben]

How do you "beat" the borg?


Covenant would actually have a really easy time of beating the borg, I imagine. I know that wasn't the question asked, but I thought it was fun to think about. I mean the borg have been shown to be very vulnerable to boarding parties and melee attacks... Two things the covenant are fans of.

[warty goblin]

Covenant would actually have a really easy time of beating the borg, I imagine. I know that wasn't the question asked, but I thought it was fun to think about. I mean the borg have been shown to be very vulnerable to boarding parties and melee attacks... Two things the covenant are fans of.

Although most of the Covenent like energy weapons, which aren't the hottest thing to use against Borg. Most of the brute guns would probably work OK, and maybe the needler, but the plasma guns would fail pretty miserably.

[Stormthorn]

I think in this matchup groundwar isnt important. A Cov holy war tends to follow this path:

Find planet.
Land.
Destroy Population.
Steal Tech (with their Engineers, most likely) not deemed too unholy.
Collect Forunner Junk.
Go back into orbit.
Boil oceans, melt crust.
Find next planet.

It was stated in one of the Halo novels that even when a ground war was won the Covenant would ultimatly "glass" the planet rather than try to retake it or leave it alone.

So if the Federation wins, it becomes a fight in space over the glassing of the planet.
If the Covenant wins, they glass the planet. Feds must now fight with their ships alone.

Either way, the Feds and Cov fight in space.


The reason the Covenant are so far behind the Forerunners also probably owes to the scarcity of Forerunner tech remnants outside of the Halos, which weren't discovered until extremely recently in the game timeline. Get the covenant a single Federation starship to study and the results won't end well.
Keep in mind two things:
Engees are Forunner tech and this used sparingly.
If this is a holy war, they wont use 99% of the Federation stuff they find, because it is the tech of the infidel.


To be fair, Haloverse humans have Cortana and her ilk, Bungie style smart AIs.
Humans in the Halo setting have very good AI's.
Covenant do not. They have OK AI entities. But they sometimes get things like Guilty Spark when they dig up Forrunner stuff.
Guilty Spark is a ball of metal and light about two feet wide.
He can fly, shoot lasers that punch through Spartan shielding, has a personality, and can manage all the systems on a freakin Halo ring while controlling a few million flying repair/combat robots.
And thats for a Forunner AI that has gone off the deep end. Imagine him a few tens of thousands of years ago when he wasnt suffering from dementia.

[Texas_Ben]

Although most of the Covenent like energy weapons, which aren't the hottest thing to use against Borg. Most of the brute guns would probably work OK, and maybe the needler, but the plasma guns would fail pretty miserably.

The needler would be absolutely devastating vs. the Borg.

And the Covenant use plasma weapons, which aren't quite the same thing as phasers, so there's a chance that they'll have problems adapting to it... I get the feeling that a large part of why the borg are so dangerous in the trek-verse is the lack, for whatever reason, of personal energy shielding being used by other major factions. The Covenant, however, are used to dealing with the things. And, once again, things like energy swords, grav hammers, and the good old plasma rifle bashed into the head trick work plenty well.
And grunts and jackals can shoot those plasma pistols pretty damn fast. I wonder how many shots their personal shields can eat before failing? Not enough, I imagine.

Lets not even talk about the devastation that would be done by Hunters (likely unable to be assimilated, too) in the cramped quarters of a Borg ship.

[Stormthorn]

Lets not even talk about the devastation that would be done by Hunters (likely unable to be assimilated, too) in the cramped quarters of a Borg ship.

No. Lets. I wanna see some cyborgs get mauled by a 5,000 pound alien berserker wearing pieces of tank armor.

[golentan]

No. Lets. I wanna see some cyborgs get mauled by a 5,000 pound alien berserker wearing pieces of tank armor.

I concur. And their decentralized nature should make them that much harder to assimilate. I really want to see a cage match between hunters and borg crew now.

And the covenant even has really awesome boarding craft, too. They could totally storm a borg cube with a bunch of hunters.

The needler I'm fairly sure wouldn't be as effective. The homing function would probably be jammable.

[Renegade Paladin]

Someone made reference to the UNSC being way ahead of the Federation militarily: Are you mad? Covenant pulse lasers can destroy the most heavily armored of UNSC ships in 20 hits or so, and phasers alone are an order of magnitude more powerful.
The problem here is that while the first part of your statement is correct, the second one is not. Starship phasers are empirically incapable of destabilizing a hollow asteroid (ref TNG S7E164, "The Pegasus"), something which a MAC round (or Covenant weaponry, for that matter) would do with ease.

[warty goblin]

The problem here is that while the first part of your statement is correct, the second one is not. Starship phasers are empirically incapable of destabilizing a hollow asteroid (ref TNG S7E164, "The Pegasus"), something which a MAC round (or Covenant weaponry, for that matter) would do with ease.

And yet elsewhere hand phasers can put out disturbing amounts of energy.

Looking for any consistancy in Star Trek is going to work as well as finding a molecule that doesn't have any protons.

[Renegade Paladin]

And yet elsewhere hand phasers can put out disturbing amounts of energy.
And still not even singe packing crates. :smalltongue: Not that hand phasers have anything at all to do with starship weaponry.

[Texas_Ben]

The needler I'm fairly sure wouldn't be as effective. The homing function would probably be jammable.

It wasn't so much the homing effect I was talking about, but the fact that it is a physical attack, which the Borg have been shown to have trouble resisting... a physical attack which penetrates, and subsequently detonates. In the Halo games the Needler is a joke, but that's because you're a heavily shielded and armored beast.

@Renegade Paladin:
Poking around on the internet I found in several different locations that phasers have an energy output in the Megawatt range, so those were the numbers I've been using. As someone else pointed out, looking for consistency in Trek is kind of futile.

[hamishspence]

Aren't modern lasers approaching 1 megawatt or more of power?

[Dr. Bath]

Try more than a Petawatt (you were only out by a factor of nine :smallwink:). Admittedly these massively powerful lasers that we now have are absolutely gigantic, so not much use as weaponry.

[hamishspence]

I was thinking of weapons-grade lasers- like the 100 kilowatt Northrop Grumman one.

If we are already nearly at the point of fielding a battlefield megawatt laser- it does not seem unrealistic that the Federation 200+ years on would have multi-megawatt beam weapons.

[Texas_Ben]

The point of contention isn't so much how powerful phasers are, but how much more powerful phasers are than covenant pulse lasers.

[hamishspence]

Do we ever see phasers being fired at "full power" at an object- such as an asteroid or a planet, in the various series?

If, for example, a Starfleet ship phaser can be expected to take hours to bore its way down a few km, it may be on the weak side compared to a beam weapon that can vaporise matter by the cubic km within seconds.

That is- if the covenant have that kind of firepower.

We don't really know how much oomph the various shields and other defenses can block.

[Seraph]

Do we ever see phasers being fired at "full power" at an object- such as an asteroid or a planet, in the various series?

If, for example, a Starfleet ship phaser can be expected to take hours to bore its way down a few km, it may be on the weak side compared to a beam weapon that can vaporise matter by the cubic km within seconds.

That is- if the covenant have that kind of firepower.

We don't really know how much oomph the various shields and other defenses can block.

I don't know about ship phasers, but there is one scene in TNG where Worf uses a hand phaser to disintegrate several cubic meters of solid rock in a matter of seconds.

[hamishspence]

I lean to the view that a starship phaser is a scaled-up version of the hand phaser.

We know that it has a stun-setting- capable of suppressing several blocks, in A Piece of the Action.

The Worf scene isn't the only one- in The Cage, combined hand phaser fire blows the top off a small mountain.

They don't see it though- until the Talosians drop their illusions.

[Storm Bringer]

In several episodes, galaxy class ship lasers have been used to bore into the crust of the planet. not in a covenant glassing sort of way, but more of a precsion drilling manner.

the shown power is very vairable.

[Joran]

In several episodes, galaxy class ship lasers have been used to bore into the crust of the planet. not in a covenant glassing sort of way, but more of a precsion drilling manner.

the shown power is very vairable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Matter_of_Time_%28Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation %29

Indeed it is. Trying to find any consistency in a show that spans at 5 series, 11 movies, and 35 years is short of impossible.

However, in this episode, the phasers, if modulated incorrectly, could have burned away the entire world's atmosphere. I wonder why no one tried to do this during a war.

A Federation, without scruples, could also develop a biological weapon to wipe out an alien species. In fact, they did so against the Founders.

[Seraph]

However, in this episode, the phasers, if modulated incorrectly, could have burned away the entire world's atmosphere. I wonder why no one tried to do this during a war.



been years since I saw the dominion war arc of DS9, so I may be wrong. But, weren't most of the contested worlds Federation or whatnot? that's a fair impetus not to glass the planet, since you're trying to save it, not conquer it.

in all honesty glassing planets doesn't seem like a sensible strategy in the trek universe, which is probably why it isn't done. a Scorched Earth approach is useless against a foe with replicator technology; the Federation doesn't need vast agricultural planets or extended supply lines to keep their worlds and fleets afloat, they can turn raw mass into pretty much any resource they need. all rendering a planet uninhabitable does is, well, render it uninhabitable; all it denies your enemy is a place to put civilians, and the Federation isn't exactly short of worlds to fill.

[Joran]

been years since I saw the dominion war arc of DS9, so I may be wrong. But, weren't most of the contested worlds Federation or whatnot? that's a fair impetus not to glass the planet, since you're trying to save it, not conquer it.

in all honesty glassing planets doesn't seem like a sensible strategy in the trek universe, which is probably why it isn't done. a Scorched Earth approach is useless against a foe with replicator technology; the Federation doesn't need vast agricultural planets or extended supply lines to keep their worlds and fleets afloat, they can turn raw mass into pretty much any resource they need. all rendering a planet uninhabitable does is, well, render it uninhabitable; all it denies your enemy is a place to put civilians, and the Federation isn't exactly short of worlds to fill.

Well, I thought more of a ruthless, implacable foe to the Federation doing something like vaporizing an entire world's atmosphere just to prove a point.

However, previous to the Dominion War, the Maquis did a pretty good job of rendering some planets completely uninhabitable to Cardassian life by detonating biogenic weapons in the atmosphere. Likewise, Sisko, who was probably a little unhinged at this moment, detonated his own biogenic weapon in a world's atmosphere, rendering it uninhabitable to human life...

The Federation has some nasty, nasty stuff that isn't confined to just phasers and photon torpedoes. Heck, they have access to nanotechnology, so they could just reduce some planets to gray goo.

[Stormthorn]

I suggest we determine phaser power by taking the lowest power shown and the highest power shown and averaging them.

I think the Feds would lose because Covenant would have their planets glassed before they figure out whats happening.

Of course, we have to ask when in the covenant timeline this fight is taking place. Post Halo series they are weak and much less militant.
Pre Halo they didnt use their drives to make slipspace jumps inside of gravity wells, which would be a devestating anti-city surpise attack tactic.

Covenant ships are very fast with their FTL technology. According to Halopedia it took them an hour to travel 38 Light years. 912 in a day.

Memory Alpha (the Trek wiki) puts warp 9.9 at about 60 1/2 light years in a day.
At what warp factor do most Fed ships go?

[Joran]

I suggest we determine phaser power by taking the lowest power shown and the highest power shown and averaging them.

I think the Feds would lose because Covenant would have their planets glassed before they figure out whats happening.

Of course, we have to ask when in the covenant timeline this fight is taking place. Post Halo series they are weak and much less militant.
Pre Halo they didnt use their drives to make slipspace jumps inside of gravity wells, which would be a devestating anti-city surpise attack tactic.

Covenant ships are very fast with their FTL technology. According to Halopedia it took them an hour to travel 38 Light years. 912 in a day.

Memory Alpha (the Trek wiki) puts warp 9.9 at about 60 1/2 light years in a day.
At what warp factor do most Fed ships go?

I think most Federation ships go around Warp 6 or 7 when not traveling in an emergency. In an emergency, the advanced ships can go Warp 9 so for extended periods of time, but I don't think many ships can go warp 9.5 or upwards for any long length of time.

It also depends on the timeline of the Federation. TNG-era Federation has fewer "warships" with the Galaxy as the prime standard; the TNG Federation was mostly concerned with exploration. Post DS9/Voyager, there are many more warship designs, such as the Defiant and the Akira, which don't have much of a role outside of combat.

Likewise, TNG-era Federation has mostly photon torpedoes while the DS9/Voyager era have quantum torpedoes, which are supposedly much more powerful.

[Texas_Ben]

It also depends on the timeline of the Federation. TNG-era Federation has fewer "warships" with the Galaxy as the prime standard; the TNG Federation was mostly concerned with exploration.
Taking the Galaxy class as a specific example, I'd say that their research and exploration functions are in addition to their combat capabilities, rather than compromising combat abilities for said functions. The Galaxy class is very large, and certainly no slouch in combat (filling the role of heavy cruiser within the fleet). It is my line of thinking that it is so large because the designers built it to have top-of-the-line research and exploration capabilities (Seriously, they have a rediculous number of labs and observatories and whatnot on board) without sacrificing combat capabilities. After all, when engagement range is measures in thousands of kilometres, what's a few hundred metres?

[Stormthorn]

Taking the Galaxy class as a specific example, I'd say that their research and exploration functions are in addition to their combat capabilities, rather than compromising combat abilities for said functions. The Galaxy class is very large, and certainly no slouch in combat (filling the role of heavy cruiser within the fleet). It is my line of thinking that it is so large because the designers built it to have top-of-the-line research and exploration capabilities (Seriously, they have a rediculous number of labs and observatories and whatnot on board) without sacrificing combat capabilities. After all, when engagement range is measures in thousands of kilometres, what's a few hundred metres?

True. Size doesnt matter much at that range.

Which is why the largest Cov ships can be measured in miles. Their flagships tend to be around 5,000 meters long (Shadow Of Intent).
But size does matter for survivability. If their is even a tiny chance that a Fed vessel could survive a Photon Torpedo hit with its shields down then the Cov ships almost certainly will.

Also, i think for this war photon torperdoes are mostly useless unless they have really really good shielding themselves.
Cov employ point defense lasers.

[Texas_Ben]

Which is why the largest Cov ships can be measured in miles. Their flagships tend to be around 5,000 meters long (Shadow Of Intent).
But size does matter for survivability. If their is even a tiny chance that a Fed vessel could survive a Photon Torpedo hit with its shields down then the Cov ships almost certainly will.
It isn't a question of how well they survive one hit with their shields down, but how well they survive being hammered by volley after volley of torpedoes with their shields down, since that is kind of how combat goes. And it's likely that their shields aren't going to do them all that much good; If I recall correctly, Covenant ships need to drop their shields for a split second to fire their weapons. Trek has taken advantage of this type of split-second drop numerous times in the past, usually with klingon or romulan ships leaving or entering cloak, so there is precedent. Also, since the only areas that will be unshielded during that time are right around the weapons arrays, chances are the covenant ships get defanged pretty quick.


Also, i think for this war photon torperdoes are mostly useless unless they have really really good shielding themselves.
Cov employ point defense lasers.
They do. The shields on a photon torpedo are powerful enough to let it burrow inside a star. I don't see point defense lasers coming anywhere near that level of power.

[Stormthorn]

Trek has taken advantage of this type of split-second drop numerous times in the past

Funny you should mention that. When i was just cruising through Memory Alpha i noticed that Trek ships take several seconds to even come on.

Also, i doubt the trek beam weapons could down a cov ship in that short a time frame, although it is always possible. No way could their torpedoes do it since they move slow.
Probably not as slow as covenant ones though.

Massed barrages. Hmm. No, they couldnt survive a barrage with shields down. Neither side could I would suppose.

It would help if we had a megaton yield given for Photon torpedoes.
EDIT:
Or how strong Fed shields are.

Covenant shields can withstand about 3.919E+21(J, Newtonian) or 4.462E+21 (J, Relativistic)

[warty goblin]

On photon torpedos moving slowly, its a bit hard to tell in outer space. The reference points (stars) tend to be so distant that its very hard to discern camera movement. This in turn makes judging velocity a real pain. I agree they don't seen like the most sprightly of things, but then the Enterprise moving a considerable fraction of c under impulse power doesn't either.

Bottom line, I simply don't think the evidence is good enough to really make a conclusion on torpedo velocities.

[Renegade Paladin]

On photon torpedos moving slowly, its a bit hard to tell in outer space. The reference points (stars) tend to be so distant that its very hard to discern camera movement. This in turn makes judging velocity a real pain. I agree they don't seen like the most sprightly of things, but then the Enterprise moving a considerable fraction of c under impulse power doesn't either.

Bottom line, I simply don't think the evidence is good enough to really make a conclusion on torpedo velocities.
Or we could just time it. Let's take Star Trek VI, The Undiscovered Country.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCWjKH7o2Bo#t=03m06s

I mean, Chang had time to stare at it for awhile and then quote Shakespeare before it hit. :smalltongue:

[golentan]

Or we could just time it. Let's take Star Trek VI, The Undiscovered Country.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCWjKH7o2Bo#t=03m06s

I mean, Chang had time to stare at it for awhile and then quote Shakespeare before it hit. :smalltongue:

But what range was that at? I mean, honestly the best summary of space combat I've ever heard was: "You sit there, fire weapons, throw in some jinking, and wait five minutes to find out if you've blown up. Then another five to see if they have."

[Texas_Ben]

Funny you should mention that. When i was just cruising through Memory Alpha i noticed that Trek ships take several seconds to even come on.
Come on? Uh... what? I don't really know what you're saying here, could you please clarify?



Also, i doubt the trek beam weapons could down a cov ship in that short a time frame, although it is always possible. No way could their torpedoes do it since they move slow.
They don't have to bring it down, they only have to disable it's weapons. And you need to remember, what you see and what you get with trek are two entirely different things. I point you to the Picard maneuver, in which a ship goes to warp 9 for a split second, appearing to be in two places at once. When we see it happen in the show, it's rediculous, taking several seconds in total, when the actual amount of time the ship would appear to be 2 places would be infinitesimal. What we can learn from this is:
1. What we see is not how it is-- After all, if we saw an engagement at a range of hundred of thousands of miles portrayed realistically, it would just look like a ship shooting into space; And if we saw their movement speed portrayed realistically (full impulse is .8c) we wouldn't see much of anything, maybe a blur now and then. And that would be boring, and not exciting to watch.

2. The fact that a tactic like the Picard manuever works tells us that even a 3rd rate military power (the Ferengi) have weapons and instrumentation sensitive enough that they can detect the fact that the ship appears to be in 2 places at once, and be majorly thrown off by it. That being the case, hitting the covenant's weapons arrays when they drop their shields for a few seconds to fire? Well, should be easy. And once they've got no weapons, well, then you just have a huge and ponderously slow blimp, just waiting to be taken out.

[GoC]

why don't they do it?
I was skimming and happened to see this sentence. It doesn't matter what the context is, the answer always is:
Because they're stupid.

Star Trek is inconsistent and the federation are elitist idiots.
Due to this it's not possible to do a vs. thread involving them as their plot-induced stupidity is not something we can predict (ignoring the inconsistent weapon yields). Remove it all? Then you've got a Culture level threat.

[Stormthorn]

Come on? Uh... what? I don't really know what you're saying here, could you please clarify?

oops. I lef tout the word shield didnt I? A page mentioned something about a ship having to activate (called Raising, i think) the energy shields (as opposed to Cov shields, which are on for all but one tiny fraction of a secodn when they fire or when they are powered down) which means if the Cov get the drop on them they will be dead before their shields become active.

Although I think if the Cov play it smart their wont be many space battles. Why fight an enemy when your ships can go so much faster? Attack a nearby system, and then when help arrives bypass their fleet and glass Earth.

[Texas_Ben]

(as opposed to Cov shields, which are on for all but one tiny fraction of a secodn when they fire or when they are powered down)
[Citation Needed]. Not that whether or not Covenant shields are on *all* the time is important, since in a combat situation they will be.

As to the time it takes to raise shields... not even an issue. The Federation has REDICULOUS sensors (Unlikely to get the drop on them), and it takes longer for the 1st officer to shout RAISE SHIELDS! than it does to actually raise them.

Also, I just wanted to clarify; "raise shields" just means "turn those suckers on!", at which point they are on. I got the impression form your post that you might be thinking that they needed to raise or lower shields every time they wanted to block a hit. If that wasn't the case, I'm sorry for misunderstanding.

Interesting thought, ill fleshed-put because it is 2am and I'm tired:
The Federation could probably detect the Covenant while they were in slipspace... quite alot of their technology uses "subspace", and in the beginning of Halo 1 we hear cortana tell Keys that "No one could have missed the hole we tore in subspace". So, operating on the assumption that they can detect the covenant in slipspace, and are capable of thoroughly manipulating subspace to their will, it is not entirely far-fetched that they could devise a methods of:
1. Inhibiting slipspace jumps within certain areas say, within a star sytem... Disallows the covenant from doing a pinpoint jump into the middle of federation formations or anything like that; they would need to approach form outside the system, allowing plenty of time to be picked off by the superior-ranged weapons of the Federation.

2. Forcing ships in slipspace into realspace, allowing the Feds to have battles on their terms.

3. Disrupting slipspace travel in nasty and unpredictable ways. This definitely happens in the Haloverse itself, and who really knows what the outcome is? Nothing good for the Covenant, I bet.

[Texas_Ben]

(as opposed to Cov shields, which are on for all but one tiny fraction of a secodn when they fire or when they are powered down)
[Citation Needed]. Not that whether or not Covenant shields are on *all* the time is important, since in a combat situation they will be.

As to the time it takes to raise shields... not even an issue. The Federation has REDICULOUS sensors (Unlikely to get the drop on them), and it takes longer for the 1st officer to shout RAISE SHIELDS! than it does to actually raise them.

Also, I just wanted to clarify; "raise shields" just means "turn those suckers on!", at which point they are on. I got the impression form your post that you might be thinking that they needed to raise or lower shields every time they wanted to block a hit. If that wasn't the case, I'm sorry for misunderstanding.

Interesting thought, ill fleshed-put because it is 2am and I'm tired:
The Federation could probably detect the Covenant while they were in slipspace... quite alot of their technology uses "subspace", and in the beginning of Halo 1 we hear cortana tell Keys that "No one could have missed the hole we tore in subspace". So, operating on the assumption that they can detect the covenant in slipspace, and are capable of thoroughly manipulating subspace to their will, it is not entirely far-fetched that they could devise a methods of:
1. Inhibiting slipspace jumps within certain areas say, within a star sytem... Disallows the covenant from doing a pinpoint jump into the middle of federation formations or anything like that; they would need to approach form outside the system, allowing plenty of time to be picked off by the superior-ranged weapons of the Federation.

2. Forcing ships in slipspace into realspace, allowing the Feds to have battles on their terms.

3. Disrupting slipspace travel in nasty and unpredictable ways. This definitely happens in the Haloverse itself, and who really knows what the outcome is? Nothing good for the Covenant, I bet.

[Prime32]

If all else fails, the Federation can synthesise some Omega (http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Omega_molecule) and selectively destroy subspace, meaning that FTL travel is only possible through certain routes (which the Covenant would be unable to detect).

[kamikasei]

Because they're stupid.

Star Trek is inconsistent and the federation are elitist idiots.
Due to this it's not possible to do a vs. thread involving them as their plot-induced stupidity is not something we can predict (ignoring the inconsistent weapon yields). Remove it all? Then you've got a Culture level threat.

This man is wise and all should heed his words.

The Federation as a political and military entity, and Star Trek science and tech (in terms of what they know how to do, and in terms of how easy/hard any given thing (say, blowing up asteroids) is to do), are so utterly mutable and ill-defined as to be impossible to pin down in any useful way for a discussion.

[Oslecamo]

Hmm, wouldn't this be the time someone screams that Star Trek wins because of their FIGHTING ADVENTURING SPIRIT! and something like THIS IS THE DRILL SHIP THAT WILL GO WHERE NOBODY HAS BEEN BEFORE!


After all, technically they're specialists in beating the crap of new civilizations they find. :smalltongue:

[Prime32]

This man is wise and all should heed his words.

The Federation as a political and military entity, and Star Trek science and tech (in terms of what they know how to do, and in terms of how easy/hard any given thing (say, blowing up asteroids) is to do), are so utterly mutable and ill-defined as to be impossible to pin down in any useful way for a discussion.Heck, in some episodes Federation starships can travel precisely through time by orbiting a planet at the right speed. (in others it's extremely rare and difficult)

Then there's that time Voyager destroyed a Borg Cube with a single photon torpedo...

[Joran]

It would help if we had a megaton yield given for Photon torpedoes.
EDIT:
Or how strong Fed shields are.

Covenant shields can withstand about 3.919E+21(J, Newtonian) or 4.462E+21 (J, Relativistic)

Well, Star Trek long ago stopped using real world units for their computing power and explosive power. They realized it'd just make them look silly since technology will always render the numbers obsolete.

Photon torpedoes are stated to have a yield of 25 isotons which can destroy a city in seconds. They're also stated to travel at warp, which means point defense systems are probably worthless (irregardless of what's shown on screen). There have been plot elements in which the ships fire torpedoes at warp at each other, so I'm willing to believe that they travel faster than the speed of light based on dialogue and plot rather than trying to time and guess how fast the photon torpedo is going.

That said, the quantum torpedo is supposedly much harder hitting but not every ship can fire them. Also, there's the "transphasic torpedoes" that Voyager fired at the Borg in the last episode that managed to destroy entire cubes in one hit. And yes I agree wholeheartedly that Star Trek is too widely inconsistent to even nail down simple facts for comparison.

[Texas_Ben]

That said, the quantum torpedo is supposedly much harder hitting but not every ship can fire them.

I was under the impression that Quantum torpedoes were perfectly capable of being fired from standard torpedo tubes, but due to the fact that they are new technology and the Federation was involved in a costly war when they were introduced, they weren't issued to all ships.

That's just my take on it though, I could be wrong.

[Prime32]

Photon torpedoes are stated to have a yield of 25 isotons which can destroy a city in seconds.
[...]
Also, there's the "transphasic torpedoes" that Voyager fired at the Borg in the last episode that managed to destroy entire cubes in one hit.First, 25 isotons = 25 tons. :smalltongue: Second, transphasic torpedoes seem to be anti-adaptation weapons rather than being particularly more powerful.

[Seraph]

It was already established by Texas Ben on the first page that photon torpedoes have an upper yield of over 60 megatons. note that this is 10 megatons more than the most powerful nuke ever made by humans, and a federation ship is liable to be armed with hundreds of these.

also, Photons are known to be armed with shields, that's why they glow bright orange.

[Renegade Paladin]

It was already established by Texas Ben on the first page that photon torpedoes have an upper yield of over 60 megatons. note that this is 10 megatons more than the most powerful nuke ever made by humans, and a federation ship is liable to be armed with hundreds of these.
Actually no, it's 40 megatons less powerful than the Tsar Bomba, but that bomb was dial-a-yield, and they tested it at half yield to avoid wiping out the airplane it was dropped from.

[Joran]

I was under the impression that Quantum torpedoes were perfectly capable of being fired from standard torpedo tubes, but due to the fact that they are new technology and the Federation was involved in a costly war when they were introduced, they weren't issued to all ships.

That's just my take on it though, I could be wrong.

Well, apparently photon torpedo tubes can be modified to shoot quantum torpedoes; so says Voyager.

Not sure how long the modification would take; the U.S.S. Lakota, an Excelsior-class ship (which dates back to Kirk's era) was able to be outfitted with quantum torpedoes and phasers on the scale of the Defiant.


First, 25 isotons = 25 tons. Second, transphasic torpedoes seem to be anti-adaptation weapons rather than being particularly more powerful.

Yes, I realize that iso = 1 ;) According to Memory Alpha, the torpedoes on the Voyager had a yield of 200 isotons. So, we know 25 isotons = destroy city level, so, Voyager's torpedoes are 8 times as powerful.

/sigh. Of course, the yields are widely inconsistent and in made-up units, so "it blows up something with the power of plot and special effects" is probably the most accurate statement you can make.

So, the quick takeaway is that they travel faster than light (significant warp factors), they have shields (they've traveled inside a sun), and they blow the heck out of anything they hit.

[Seraph]

Actually no, it's 40 megatons less powerful than the Tsar Bomba, but that bomb was dial-a-yield, and they tested it at half yield to avoid wiping out the airplane it was dropped from.

really? I always heard that the tsar was standard 50 megs, and that getting it to 100 was a jury-rig sort of thing. even so, 60+ megatons a shot, hundreds of shots a ship is nothing you sneeze at, especially considering how fast a single federation ship can unload torpedoes.

[Stormthorn]

[Citation Needed]. Not that whether or not Covenant shields are on *all* the time is important, since in a combat situation they will be.

As to the time it takes to raise shields... not even an issue. The Federation has REDICULOUS sensors (Unlikely to get the drop on them), and it takes longer for the 1st officer to shout RAISE SHIELDS! than it does to actually raise them.
-snip a bit-
If that wasn't the case, I'm sorry for misunderstanding.

Interesting thought, ill fleshed-put because it is 2am and I'm tired:
The Federation could probably detect the Covenant while they were in slipspace... quite alot of their technology uses "subspace", and in the beginning of Halo 1 we hear cortana tell Keys that "No one could have missed the hole we tore in subspace". So, operating on the assumption that they can detect the covenant in slipspace, and are capable of thoroughly manipulating subspace to their will, it is not entirely far-fetched that they could devise a methods of:
1. Inhibiting slipspace jumps within certain areas say, within a star sytem... Disallows the covenant from doing a pinpoint jump into the middle of federation formations or anything like that; they would need to approach form outside the system, allowing plenty of time to be picked off by the superior-ranged weapons of the Federation.

2. Forcing ships in slipspace into realspace, allowing the Feds to have battles on their terms.

3. Disrupting slipspace travel in nasty and unpredictable ways. This definitely happens in the Haloverse itself, and who really knows what the outcome is? Nothing good for the Covenant, I bet.

Good point. just becuase we always see Cov shields on doesnt mean they are.
Also, as to the idea of it taking an insignificant time to raise shields:

It takes time to activate a deflector shield. A refit Constitution-class starship needs exactly 13.5 seconds to lower and raise its shields when taking a shuttlecraft onboard via its tractor beam, though this includes the time required to tractor in the shuttle during an automated docking; flying the shuttle in manually reduces this time significantly. (Star Trek V: The Final Frontier)
So unless "significantly" is 13.4 of those 13.5 seconds saved then, yea, it is a factor.

It wasnt the case.

And those things the Feds 'might' be able to do is a big maybe. Cov slipspace might not be the same as the feds subspace just because it is refered to the same.
And I doubt a war with the federation would drag on long enough to develope those sorts of technologies. Maybe the Borg could do it fast enough. Maybe.

In fact, the difficulty of manipulating slipspace (or perhaps just the absolute limits of its manipulation) is well established, since the Forunners (much more advanced than either faction here) themselves couldnt do much more with it than UNSC and Covenent can. This from people who can build artificial stars and devise machines that can destroy all life in an entire galaxy in a matter of minutes.


It was already established by Texas Ben on the first page that photon torpedoes have an upper yield of over 60 megatons. note that this is 10 megatons more than the most powerful nuke ever made by humans, and a federation ship is liable to be armed with hundreds of these.

Thats...absolutly pathetic. I mean, it can easily destroy a city in seconds but covenant shields can survive a bit over a teraton of energy punched into a very small spot*. So perhaps if Fed techonolgy produced bombs twenty thousand times more powerful they would have a fighting chance.


I always heard that the tsar was standard 50 megs,
It was never assembled or tested at 100 megatons. Although it was designed with the idea of being used at 100 megatons.


So, the quick takeaway is that they travel faster than light (significant warp factors), they have shields (they've traveled inside a sun), and they blow the heck out of anything they hit.
At those speeds and shield levels they will hit the Covenant 100% of the time when not in slipspace (in Halo ships only move at relativly normal speeds when not in slipspace) and they will do almost no damage. Covenant shields recharge. Even if the warheads were ten times more powerful you would need to his the ship with thousands of them in a matter of minutes. To down one ship. A ship the size of Enterprise only holds a few hundred at most.

Covenant are bastards but i think that they would win here.

*Usualy takes at least two ship based MAC rounds to down a cov ship. One to weaken the shields, and another to punch through and blow the sucker apart. MAC rounds are, i believe, at 1.17 teratons.

[Seraph]

At those speeds and shield levels they will hit the Covenant 100% of the time when not in slipspace (in Halo ships only move at relativly normal speeds when not in slipspace) and they will do almost no damage. Covenant shields recharge. Even if the warheads were ten times more powerful you would need to his the ship with thousands of them in a matter of minutes. To down one ship. A ship the size of Enterprise only holds a few hundred at most.

Covenant are bastards but i think that they would win here.

*Usualy takes at least two ship based MAC rounds to down a cov ship. One to weaken the shields, and another to punch through and blow the sucker apart. MAC rounds are, i believe, at 1.17 teratons.

cool not doing any math whatsoever there, bro.

if a photon torpedo has a yield of 64 megatons, and a MAC cannon has a yield of 1.17 teratons, we can figure out how many photon torpedoes match a MAC slug.

by my calculations, it takes a little over 18 photon torpedoes to match a MAC slug. that means, by your calculations, it'll only take about 37 photon torpedoes to destroy one covenant ship.

If I wanted to be real mean, I'd point out that it probably wouldn't even take that, since the vaunted regenerating covenant shields would have had time between MAC shots to get some power back, but they won't have that time while under a constant torpedo barrage. however, that takes more calculation and speculation than I feel like making at the moment, so I'll let that pass.

Now, a single ship can fire at least four torpedoes a second from their main torpedo bank. some ships, like the Akira-class (which sports somewhere from 12 to 15 photon torpedo tubes) are capable of salvos that make macross look like a dude in a jeep with a single RPG.

just to take the akira as an example, if it's capable of firing three torpedoes per tube a second, a single Akira-class would be able to destroy roughly 1.2 covenant ships per second.

Obviously the federation fleet isn't entirely missileboats like the Akiras, but as far as I can tell, they are one of the workhorses of the fleet. so, yeah, The covenant aren't nearly as indestructible as you're saying.

[golentan]

if a photon torpedo has a yield of 64 megatons, and a MAC cannon has a yield of 1.17 teratons, we can figure out how many photon torpedoes match a MAC slug.

Megatons to teratons. It goes Mega, Giga, Terra, so it's actually off by a factor of 1000 there. And that's assuming that the covenant can't recharge shields over time (which would make sense). Since it's a "White shield" rather than "Black Shield," and a persistent shield rather than an instant shield, your recharge rate would be directly proportional to your non-maneuvering and weapons dedicated energy output, and how much of your ship you cover at any given moment. Being such massive ships capable of taking hits that could slug out significant parts of continents across relatively small cross sections, recharging should take quite some time but would still be relatively rapid compared to fractions of a percent of the weaponry they can take.

Texas ben gave us a maximum yield for Photon Torpedoes, with citation, of 690 Gigatons, though, which does put two Photons over 1 MAC, so if we're using that figure things are very different from a lighter warhead, which could be used for planetary bombardment but might not be employed in space?

[Seraph]

Megatons to teratons. It goes Mega, Giga, Terra, so it's actually off by a factor of 1000 there.

hm. my bad, the key I was using lied to me.

[Talkkno]

People have been an ignoring an important issue that the Covenent has far superior stragtic moblity. Meaning they can largely go around any fed fleets sent to fight them.

[king.com]

People have been an ignoring an important issue that the Covenent has far superior stragtic moblity. Meaning they can largely go around any fed fleets sent to fight them.

Didnt that already get covered by the crazy long range sensor tech of the Feds?

I think the main question which would determine things is how the covenant shields go against the fed shields. I mean will phasers + plasma even interact with their opposition shield structures (hopefully assuming they are using the same sort of systems which is a big leap in itself)?

[Talkkno]

Didnt that already get covered by the crazy long range sensor tech of the Feds?

I think the main question which would determine things is how the covenant shields go against the fed shields. I mean will phasers + plasma even interact with their opposition shield structures (hopefully assuming they are using the same sort of systems which is a big leap in itself)?

Even if they have wanked out sensors, they either have either the choice of having there outer colonies and system blown to ash while the huddle in there core systems. Or rush to defend to them, leaving there main systems vunerable to attack. Even if they detect them, theres no way they can catch up to Covenentb before they glass them all.

[Stormthorn]

Even if they have wanked out sensors, they either have either the choice of having there outer colonies and system blown to ash while the huddle in there core systems. Or rush to defend to them, leaving there main systems vunerable to attack. Even if they detect them, theres no way they can catch up to Covenentb before they glass them all.

Not to mention that their sensors are unlikely to be able to detect a ship in sixth or seventh level slipspace.


cool not doing any math whatsoever there, bro.

No shown math. I did a lot of math before making that post. Figured out exactly how much stronger than a photon torpedo a MAC round was and whatnot. Figured out how many would be needed. Looked up how many different sized ships carried.

Also, your math is wrong.
1000 megatons goes into a gigaton. And 1000 gigatons goes into a teraton, which is the level the MAC operates at.

[golentan]

Even if they have wanked out sensors, they either have either the choice of having there outer colonies and system blown to ash while the huddle in there core systems. Or rush to defend to them, leaving there main systems vunerable to attack. Even if they detect them, theres no way they can catch up to Covenentb before they glass them all.

Hold up, that's not a given.

We've already covered the lack of the Covenant's ability to identify and assault enemy systems effectively.

Secondly, great speed isn't always sufficient to overcome a region. The rule for rapid siege is you must have the ability to have superior forces strike multiple locations from your basecamp (not clear given covenant task force strengths), or the ability to travel between points with superior forces more rapidly than any response group can be scrambled (which is hard within any 3 dimensional space of conflict, more so the greater it's surface area/volume). Mobility matters on who can strike were, but is progressively less important when you're defending with short supply lines.

[Renegade Paladin]

Hold up, that's not a given.

We've already covered the lack of the Covenant's ability to identify and assault enemy systems effectively.

Secondly, great speed isn't always sufficient to overcome a region. The rule for rapid siege is you must have the ability to have superior forces strike multiple locations from your basecamp (not clear given covenant task force strengths), or the ability to travel between points with superior forces more rapidly than any response group can be scrambled (which is hard within any 3 dimensional space of conflict, more so the greater it's surface area/volume). Mobility matters on who can strike were, but is progressively less important when you're defending with short supply lines.
We've covered the Covenant's difficulties in identifying enemy systems without records and charts; the Cole Protocol was quite effective for the UNSC. The Federation doesn't have it. The Covenant will get whatever they want the first time they capture a Starfleet vessel... or any vessel, for that matter.

[Joran]

At those speeds and shield levels they will hit the Covenant 100% of the time when not in slipspace (in Halo ships only move at relativly normal speeds when not in slipspace) and they will do almost no damage. Covenant shields recharge. Even if the warheads were ten times more powerful you would need to his the ship with thousands of them in a matter of minutes. To down one ship. A ship the size of Enterprise only holds a few hundred at most.

Covenant are bastards but i think that they would win here.

*Usualy takes at least two ship based MAC rounds to down a cov ship. One to weaken the shields, and another to punch through and blow the sucker apart. MAC rounds are, i believe, at 1.17 teratons.

Well, that's not taking into account that photon torpedoes are traveling at warp speed, which is going to add a lot of kinetic energy into the mix. Likewise, quantum torpedoes being supposedly more powerful than photon torpedoes (but never stated how much more powerful).

Also, if transphasic can bypass shields then it doesn't really matter.

There's a lot we don't know about the Federation militarily despite having 21 years of TNG/DS9/Voyager on TV. How many orbital defenses do the Federation planets have? Are they on the order of a DS9? Or are they on the order of what we saw in the most recent Star Trek movie, basically non-existent.

How large is the Federation fleet after the war? How many older designs are there vs. newer gunboat style?

[Texas_Ben]

How large is the Federation fleet after the war? How many older designs are there vs. newer gunboat style?
Putting Federation fleet strength at post Dominion war levels is about as fair as putting Covenant fleet strength at post Human-Covenant/Covenant Civil War levels. IIRC, The Federation lost between 1/2 and 2/3 of their fleet in that war.

And I'm horribly ill, so I won't be able to offer a response to the rest of the stuff until tomorrow at least.

[kamikasei]

Well, that's not taking into account that photon torpedoes are traveling at warp speed, which is going to add a lot of kinetic energy into the mix.

This does not follow at all. It's a (sub-)space-warping faster-than-light drive, there's no reason it would give the thing being propelled a lot of kinetic energy to shed when it hits something. (What the hell it is warp does is another of those "bloody hell, writers, you really should have nailed this down at least enough to tell a story around" details.)

[hamishspence]

Books like The Science of Star Trek tried to get a rough idea of what it meant- usually involving a bubble of space-time, which can move faster than light- but the object in the bubble, does not, relative to the area of space around it.

It's not barred by all physics theories, but it does require exotic things like negative matter.

[kamikasei]

No, I know what a "warp drive" in a general sense means. I'm thinking things with narrative importance, such as: what happens to nearby objects when you turn it on? Do things sufficiently close get carried along with you, caught within the warp field as they can be enclosed within your shields? What happens to things lying across the warp field? Is the field diffuse or concentrated? Can going to warp be used as a weapon? When and how do you have to refrain because of danger to your surroundings?

I say "narrative importance", but really it's just that the tech isn't sufficiently well defined in terms of what is within its power, what is impossible for it, and what are the consequences of its use. For that matter, most Treknology is similar (see: transporters).

[Texas_Ben]

Do things sufficiently close get carried along with you, caught within the warp field as they can be enclosed within your shields?

This one at least has an answer I think: I can't recall the exact episodes, but I seem to remember warp fields being extended around disabled vessels on at least one occasion. Which tells me yes, anything inside the warp field is going along with you.

[Joran]

This one at least has an answer I think: I can't recall the exact episodes, but I seem to remember warp fields being extended around disabled vessels on at least one occasion. Which tells me yes, anything inside the warp field is going along with you.

In the episode where Q was human (Deja Q), they wrapped a warp field around a moon to attempt to push it. Star Trek doesn't do a good job of explaining the tech; I can answer all those kinds of questions of Babylon 5's jump gates for instance, but not Star Trek.

The inconsistencies are what drive me batty. In DS9, a Vulcan affixed a transporter to the end of a sniper rifle and the bullet maintained its momentum when it was beamed, so it still killed people.

In the newest Star Trek movie and multiple other instances, people falling have been beamed and yet still didn't go splat on the transporter pad.

[hamishspence]

I figured that might have to do with beaming something in- lots of precautionary systems.

Whereas its easy to do nasty things when beaming something out.

[Seraph]

In the newest Star Trek movie and multiple other instances, people falling have been beamed and yet still didn't go splat on the transporter pad.

I kinda figured that the reason the transporter crew was having so much trouble locking on to them is that they were inexperienced and didnt know how to get rid of the kinetic energy.

[kamikasei]

I kinda figured that the reason the transporter crew was having so much trouble locking on to them is that they were inexperienced and didnt know how to get rid of the kinetic energy.

I figured it was just that they were a moving target :P

(Which would make sense, except that relative motion between a person on a planet's surface and an orbiting ship is never referenced as a problem elsewhere.)

[Storm Bringer]

The Covenant will get whatever they want the first time they capture a Starfleet vessel... or any vessel, for that matter.

Assuming that purguing the databanks is not a standard action on threat of capture (IRL it would be, but this is star trek), assuming the hard drives are not damaged/corrupted by battle damage, assuming a security encryption is not placed on the computers (like in first contact), assuming the Covenant can operate and understand Feddie techology (turn off the universal translators and thiers no granatee that they'll understand whatever english has evloved into in star trek)..........

assuming they try and capture rather thans simply destory.


I aggree that this it might happen, but it would require a stroke of luck.


plus, your assuming that the slipspace that the Covenant travel though is a demension that the trekkies are unware of. it's quite possible, but equally likey, the trekkies know of it and can sense activity in it (they built several super-sensitive sensor arrays TNG era with a the ability to pick up passing ships at a usful distance for protection agianst insterstallar attack, namly the borg)

[AstralFire]

If Trek was aware of it, they'd use it; slipspace is considerably faster than Warp Drives. Heck, I think even UNSC Shaw-Fujikawa drives are faster than Warp.

[Stormthorn]

If Trek was aware of it, they'd use it; slipspace is considerably faster than Warp Drives. Heck, I think even UNSC Shaw-Fujikawa drives are faster than Warp.

Exactly.

And if we did assume the Feds know of slipspace then we assume the Covenant also know about the Warp travel and are choosing not to use it for its vulnerabilities.
But even if the feds do know of slipspace they cant use it, or they would be doing so. And they cant catch the covenant ship as it goes by. And, even worse, even at warp speed the Cov ship will arrive before the warning.

Also, i say we leave kinetic energy out of the photon torpedo discussion unless someone wants to whip out an advanced physics text and calculate how much kinetic energy something going several times the speed of light has.
Because if the answer is "a lot" then its valid. If its "infinite" its not, since the first torpedo impact would impart more energy than their is in the universe and propably cause lots of problems for both sides. If the answer is "undefined" then its not valid either.

[leafman]

I know it is a point that hasn't been mentioned since page one and I'm new to the debate but the Fed isn't the only side with anti-matter weaponry. The Convenant fields an anti-matter bomb pretty often. They used a few to take out the Athens and Malta Orbital Defense Stations in the first battle of Earth and almost managed to take out the Cairo but MC removed the bomb and destroyed an assault carrier. It is also speculated that anti-matter charges were used to disable the Pillar of Autumn's MAC cannon.

I think the covvies have this fight in the bag if they use hit and run tactics and capitalize on their speed. Even if destroying Federation planets doesn't hurt the Federation's military power, it would still be a massive blow to their morale.

[Stormthorn]

I think the covvies have this fight in the bag if they use hit and run tactics and capitalize on their speed. Even if destroying Federation planets doesn't hurt the Federation's military power, it would still be a massive blow to their morale.

This isnt generaly how the Covenant operate. Of course, if the Federation act as intelligently as they did in the early shows then the Covenant still have this one in the bag.

[leafman]

This isnt generaly how the Covenant operate. Of course, if the Federation act as intelligently as they did in the early shows then the Covenant still have this one in the bag.

True, but we also haven't seen how the Covenant react to superior navy firepower. My thinking is that guerilla warfare isn't a completely foreign concept to them.

Edit: Did I kill this thread? I'm sorry if I did :smallfrown: