Scimitar vs. Sovereign

[mlsnoopy]

The fact that the E-E fired all of its PT and probably QT, that they had only 4% of power for the phasers left before it got disabled made me thinking. That despite the impresive armement that the Scimitar had if you remove the cloake I doubt that it could survive being hit with something like 300 PT.

[Johnny Starfleet]

Without the cloak I think it would have been a much closer fight. Unfortunately we don't know a lot about how the Scimitar holds up to excessive punishment, but it's safe to say that the cloak was the real deterrent to damage in the fight. With that being said, I think the E-E crew did a pretty good job of holding up against an invisible enemy. I doubt there are any other crews / ships who would have done better under the circumstances.

[Teaos]

I forget which thread it happened in but recently we had a rather heated debate where two members, Thorin and Rochey rather soundly ripped apart the Scimitar as a ship.

Over all I think we did see quite a few hits on the Scimitar so that speaks well of its shields and armour... considering old Romulan ships had horribal shields they seem to have learned their lesson.

The power of its guns is a rather iffy thing though. As Thorin pointed out they didnt seem to do a hell of a lot of damage to the E-E but then again they might not have been going all out. But then it disables the two Romulan ships that arrive in like 2 shots. So either the E-E has really strong shields and the Norexean has really weak ones, or the Scimitar was holding back a bit against the E-E.

[kostmayer]

Well, they did want to take Picard alive, so it makes sense they'd be holding back a little.

[Teaos]

Yeah I agree with you but other seem to think they were going all out the whole time...

[Sionnach Glic]

Well, they did want to take Picard alive, so it makes sense they'd be holding back a little.

At one point in the battle Shinzon orders maximum firepower to be brought to bear on one of the Noraxeans helping the E-E. It's not that impressive.

I forget which thread it happened in but recently we had a rather heated debate where two members, Thorin and Rochey rather soundly ripped apart the Scimitar as a ship.

Actualy, what happened was that Thorin and Blackstar were arguing over the Scimitar's capabilities for close to ten pages, and then I got fed up with the arguing, found a video of the battle, and proceeded to bitchslap the Scimitar's reputation.

Since the original thread is now burried within the DS9 section, and it's somewhat relevant to the thread, I'll post my analysis again here. The time before each point is from the start of the battle to the end.

-----------------------------------
Time: 02:00 to 02:03
The Scimitar begins its attack. It appears to be firing a whopping two guns at the E-E.
This makes absolutely no sense to be doing unless you assume that all other guns can't hit the E-E while it's in that position. Initialy, this may indicate that Shinzon was worried that firing the rest of his guns would destroy the E-E, but this also makes no sense. We see the E-E take dozens of hits from these guns, so we know that there was no danger of the shields falling so quickly by accident.

Time: 02:06 to 02:12
Shinzon: "Target weapons systems and shields, I don't want them destroyed."

Time: 02:35 to 03:11
The E-E takes 13 hits to its dorsal shields without them failing during this period.

Time: 03:15 to 03:23
Data reports that the dorsal shields are failing ("We are losing dorsal shields"). Picard orders the ship to move out of the way. The E-E's dorsal surface takes another 4 hits during this period and still don't fail. This gives us a lower limit of 18 shots to take down the E-E's dorsal shield, but it's a bit more than that.

Time: 03:25 to 03:28
The E-E's ventral shields takes 2 hits. It should be noted that as soon as the E-E is out of the Scimitar's forward fire arc, no more disruptor shots are fired at it. This would indicate that most of the guns are located in a forward or aft positions. However, we are still left with the Scimitar firing the same two disruptors again and again at the E-E. I'm starting to wonder whether the other 50 guns are just fakes at this point, or if Geordi just decided to make it all up.

Time: 03:30 to 03:40
The Scimitar has sustained minimal damage. Riker orders Geordi to get the dorsal shields back up to its normal strength again. This would suggest that for all the beating it's taken, it won't be too hard to recharge them again.

Time: 04:55
The Valdore that the Romulan commander is on takes one hit.

Time: 05:03 to 05:15
The E-E and the Valdores attack. The E-E takes a further three hits. Oddly enough, despite the Scimitar being in a position where it can only hit the ventral surface of the E-E, the shield effects are on the dorsal hull. Some special effects guy goofed up there, I guess. I'll place those three hits as having hit the ventral hull.

Time: 05:15 to 05:22
You can hear at least another 5 impacts during this period. No idea where they hit.

Time: 05:28
Another hit to the ventral hull. Again, the shield effect is on the dorsal hull. The hell is going on here?

Time: 05:32 to 05:35
Aft shields are down to forty percent, despite being seen to have taken no hits. It's possible that the five shots we heard earlier hit here.
If we assume this to be true, this means that 5 shots can deal out 60% damage to the shields. But then how the hell was the dorsal hull able to take 13 without failing, and how come the ventral shields have taken 6 hits without even being commented on?

Time: 05:40 to 05:47
One Valdore takes two hits, shields remain up. Also, we see the Scimitar's aft armament firing. Again, it's a grand total of two guns.

Time: 05:50 to 05:58
Shinzon orders one Valdore to be targetted with all available firepower. It takes four hits. Assuming this is the ship we saw take 2 hits earlier, that's a grand total of 6 hits without shields failing.
Also, Shinzon orders all banks to fire. We see two guns firing. Go f***ing figure. Someone tell Geordi to go back to the Visor, because those eye implants weren't working when he read out the info on the Scimitar.

Time: 06:00 to 06:10
The shields on one Valdore fail after three hits. Assuming this is the same ship as before, that gives us nine shots before shield failure.
A further four shots take off one of the wings, leaving the rest of the ship intact.
Oh, and still no sign of any of those 50 other disruptor banks. We even see a POV shot from the Scimitar's bridge as "all" guns fire on the Valdore in question. We know it's all guns, because Shinzon ordered all guns to fire. We see, again, bolts coming from the same two spots on the ship's hull.

Time: 06:10 to 06:18
Forward shields down to 10%. As we've seen no shots hit the E-E's forward section, this damage was probably done by colliding with the severed Valdore wing.

Time: 07:00 to 07:10
Another display of Shinzon's tacitcal genius, as he orders his ship to turn off the cloak, stop moving, and stop returning fire until the Valdore is about a hundred metres away. Then he orders his gunners to fire.
And how does the crew deal with this threat? By firing one freaking gun at it. I'm assuming it's a torp launcher, as the shots are a different colour, and it's not coming from one of the two disruptor banks.
The Valdore goes down after taking somewhere between 12 - 15 shots. It's a bit difficult to make out due to the camera work. In any case, the shot simply blows a hole through the ventral hull. Not exactly that impressive.

Time: 07:20 to 07:28
Now we see Picard's tactical genius, as he seems to forget there's actualy a battle going on, and takes time out from worrying about getting blown up to chat with the commander of the Valdore. I'm not exagerating here, we see an external shot a moment later and the ship is either stationary or flying in a straight line. How nice of Shinzon just to sit there and wait while Picard finished talking to resume trying to kick the crap out of him again.

Time: 07:28 to 07:42
Well, the Scimitar's gunners come back from whatever lunch break they were on, as they actualy start shooting at the E-E again.
The E-E takes 4 hits to its dorsal shields before they fail.
We see the unshielded hull also take 6 hits. The results are highly unimpressive. They don't even blow sizeable chunks out of the ship. Hell, it's hard to see any damage at all beyond some scorching of the hull. Data reports that they are losing structural integrity on some decks, indicating that the shots probably breached the hull.

Time: 08:21 to 08:23
E-E takes a further 3 hits. This time to its ventral hull, which is also unshielded.

Time: 08:25 to 08:30
And that's why you don't put your bridge out in plain sight of the enemy.
Scimitar fires a further five shots at the E-E, but the gunner must be having a siezure, as the shots are going all over the goddamn place. Seriously, I think the only one that did hit the ship was the one that hit the bridge. The effects as it hits the bridge are also highly unimpressive. It blasts a hole through the wall that's about ten metres wide, max. And I know some of you are going to claim that that was just because it was heavily armoured, but we can see that the hull is no more than 1 - 2 metres thick.
Oh, and I love your tactics there, Shinzon. "I have to capture Picard to live. What'll I do now? Oh, I know! I'll shoot the very part of the ship he's standing on!"
Moron.
Oh, and we now have proof that the Scimitar now has at least 5 disruptor guns. Three forward, two aft.

Time: 09:27 to 09:40
Yeah, don't try actualy reacting to the big ship coming towards you, Shinzon.
Seriously, he's there staring at the E-E charging at him for thirteen seconds and does nothing until another crew member prompts him. And what does he order when he does react?

Time: 09:40
Hard to port. Right. You don't want to try....you know, reversing?

Time: 09:40 to 10:35
Huh, guess the whole "wallow around like a beached whale" tactic isn't that great at avoiding stuff. Who'd've ever guessed?
Seriously, the crew has a whole twenty or so seconds to move the ship out of the way after Shinzon gives the order. They move, at best, about ten degrees to port before getting hit. And keep in mind, they only rotate about ten degrees, they don't actualy seem to move anywhere!
Oh, and I can only conclude that the Scimitar's hull must be made out of reinforced cardboard given the way it crumpled like that. Actualy, when you consider its armaments that wouldn't be too surprising.....

Right, now my conclusion:
The Scimitar is nowhere near as powerful as people here are making out. Hell, it doesn't even appear to be as powerful as people in the universe itself are claiming. Even when Shinzon orders all guns to fire, we see two disruptors. Seriously, that's just freaking pathetic.
I have no doubt that Shinzon could have destroyed the E-E if he wanted to, but in moments? No, not at all. Even when he began targetting the Valdores with all the firepower at his disposal, they took numerous hits and weren't even destroyed, just knocked out of the fight. It took numerous hits just to blow the wing off one, and numerous hits to blast a chunk out of the ventral hull of the other. The E-E took numerous hits to its unshielded hull with nothing but some minor hull breaches on those areas to show for it. Even when the unshielded bridge itself was hit, the crew were more in danger from the decompression than the actual blast.
-------------------------------

Well, now that that's done, I guess I'll actualy adress the point of this thread.

Assuming the Scimitar's cloak was disabled, I'd still give it victory. Despite its far from stellar record, its shields managed to hold out for quite a while and its guns seem quite good at downing shields quickly.
I say Scimitar wins, but probably with heavy damage.

[Thorin]

My point was that the Scimitar isn't some fleet basher - and that it would have no reason not to go all out on the E-E until the E-E's shields were completely failing. And as Rochey said, when the Scimitar was ordered to go all out on the Warbirds, it wasn't exactly Borg-esque.

[Teaos]

My point was that the Scimitar isn't some fleet basher - and that it would have no reason not to go all out on the E-E until the E-E's shields were completely failing.

I dont know what Blackstar was arguing but I never thought of it as a single handed fleet destroyed, but in a fleet battle with support it would be a big factor.

And I and other have pointed out reason why it wouldnt go all out vs the E-E.

Now I think the Scimitar is quite a bit better than people here are making it out to be, not the uber starship fanboys fap to but pretty damn good.

I'm gonna do a Rochey and run down the battle.

The fight video I'm using

Sorry for the gay arse video but the one we were using before got removed since it violated terms of use and this is the only one left I could find.


First five seconds: Two shots, TWO SHOTS! To knock out the warp drive, whats that Thorin? You say it would be going all out from the start because it would have no hope of damaging the ship while shields are still up gee this must be like the fasted smack down in history, less than 5 seconds to prove you wrong. They can obviously damage the E-E through the shields and since he needs Picard alive he wouldn't want to risk killing him.

So yes I do think the Scimitar was holding back against the E-E, how much is debatable but as we will latter see it is a powerful ship.

22 seconds: Scimitar gets hit with about 3 phaser blasts.

30 seconds: E-E gets hit by 6 maybe 7 blasts from the big guns.

1 minute: Scimitar get hit by Romulan distruptor and at least 5 QT's.

1:08 : With a single salvo of the big guns it destroys a warbird.

1:20 : Scimitar gets swiped by Romulan disruptors.

1:35 : More Romulan disruptor hits.

1:37: 4 maybe 5 hits from the Scimitars big guns takes out the second warbird.

1:43: What looks like 2 more QT's hit the Scimitar.

1:47: 3 QT's and 3 phaser blasts hit the Scimitar in like a second.

1:53: Fire swapped, each one get hit about 3 times. I also believe this shows the Scimitar firing different guns than its main ones.

1:59: E-E gets hit 11 times by the secondary guns, Scimitar gets hit about twice.

2:11: Two or three hits from the guns, and judging from the colour not the big guns, takes out the Bridge almost. More evidence of them no going all out, they could have used the big guns and finished it.

And that's where this gay arse video cuts out pretty much.

So what did we learn today:

Thorin: We can blatantly see the Scimitar is holding back. This is evident by the amount of damage it does when it does go all out (knocking out two BoP's in a few hits and knocking out warp drive in 2 hits) and by them using the weaker guns during the battle when they could just as easily use the two big ones.

Rochey: We see several of the other 50 something guns firing during the battle, they fire at the E-E when she is behind the Scimitar and when they take out the bridge. So they don't just use the big guns. Just before the two minute mark we see good example of this, it looks as if two or three of the secondary guns are firing at once.

Conclusion:

This ship kicks arse, it might not kick fleet arse but it kicks arse. From what we see it could take on any two of any ship in the AQ and win hands down.

It shielding and armour are massive: The Scimitar gets hit with a minimum of 10 QT's and maybe more. That is massive, to my knowledge we have never seen anything other than a Borg Cube Survive anything like that.

She also get hit by at least half a dozen Romulan disruptor blasts and probably many more.

As well as at least 11 hits from the E-E's phasers.

And that's just what we see on visual, this is a shitty video that's been cut a bit and we see the ship rock in the internal shot indicating extra hits.

So the Scimitar seems to have superb shielding and armour.

Weapons: It has the two big guns up front which can knock out a warp core in two hits on a fully shielded ship and destroy a war bird in a few shots not something you wanna mess with.

It also has over 50 other weapons stated and we see several of them firing, really hard to judge the angles in the video, these weapons seem to be pretty damn powerful by themselves.

Its cloak it damn impressive and its agility is hugely impressive,

Even with Shinzons utterly crap tactics this ship kicked arse, put it in the hands of a half decent commander and this thing will turn the tide in any fleet action.

Conclusion: I wouldn't want to take on this ship with anything less than 4 to one odds and some damn good ships.

[kostmayer]

Couple of minor points which have probably already been raised but :-

The Scimitar took a fair pounding with its cloak up - most ships can't fire or raise shields or fire when cloaked - the Scimitar could do both. Uncloaked, would it have more power to channel into the shields and weapons?

Also, the fact that Shinzon waited until the second BoP had passed it before opening fire and disabling it, suggests that the Scimitar, like other Romulan ships, had most of its firepower concentrated forwards.

And flying into a region of space where communication would be lost with the rest of the fleet was even more foolish and negligent then Kirk not raising the damn shields

[Teaos]

The Scimitar took a fair pounding with its cloak up - most ships can't fire or raise shields or fire when cloaked - the Scimitar could do both. Uncloaked, would it have more power to channel into the shields and weapons?

Yeah I pointed out that it took at a minimum 10 QT's, a half dozen disruptor blasts, a dozen phaser blasts.

But thats a good point about funneling more power into shields if the cloak is down, cloaks are supposed to be insanely power hungry.

Also, the fact that Shinzon waited until the second BoP had passed it before opening fire and disabling it, suggests that the Scimitar, like other Romulan ships, had most of its firepower concentrated forwards.

Well it had the two massive guns foward but it did seem to have some secondary guns behind it. The E-E did a fly by once and got mailed by them.

[kostmayer]

Maybe Shinzon was waiting for optimum firing position to hit a tender spot. With all his allies in the Romulan military, its likely he'd have extensive technical information on Romulan vessels, and know where to hit them.

[Mithrandir]

Well, I hate it when known enemies conjur up "unbeatable" ships out of the nowhere. The Romulans were in the Dominion War as well - where did Shinzon get the resources to build this monster?

(I generally disliked large parts of Nemesis... This ridiculous Picard clone (who should have hair by the way, unless Picard went through a "wig phase" using continually thinner wigs. We have seen him with hair in "Tapestry" and also in that episode, where a flashback scene shows him bringing home Jack Crusher) - completely unbelievable (how would the Romulans know, that Picard would become an important officer??). That even more ludicrous B4. This glorified dune buggy "argo". No reference at all on the end of DS9 - Betazed was being held by the Romulans, Worf went back to Q'uonos...

Really, the more I write, the angrier I get! Compare this movie to Star Trek VI - Kirk and Company got a decent send off! This final scene with the final log and the "ride to the sun", followed by the signatures of the actors still gives me goosebumbs!

[katefan]

Well, I hate it when known enemies conjur up "unbeatable" ships out of the nowhere. The Romulans were in the Dominion War as well - where did Shinzon get the resources to build this monster?

(I generally disliked large parts of Nemesis... This ridiculous Picard clone (who should have hair by the way, unless Picard went through a "wig phase" using continually thinner wigs. We have seen him with hair in "Tapestry" and also in that episode, where a flashback scene shows him bringing home Jack Crusher) - completely unbelievable (how would the Romulans know, that Picard would become an important officer??). That even more ludicrous B4. This glorified dune buggy "argo". No reference at all on the end of DS9 - Betazed was being held by the Romulans, Worf went back to Q'uonos...

Really, the more I write, the angrier I get! Compare this movie to Star Trek VI - Kirk and Company got a decent send off! This final scene with the final log and the "ride to the sun", followed by the signatures of the actors still gives me goosebumbs!

I love the end of VI for numerous reasons, and it really annoys me that three of the characters came back for Generations. I would have been much happier had everyone just retired at this point and we never saw Kirk and co. again. I understand how the gang needs to pay the bills and all, but it still annoys me that the three appear in a movie that did not need them for the most part. Even Kirk's involvement feels unfairly anciliary, considering how his face is on the post with Picard's.

And Nemesis is crap from start to end. The jokes weren't funny, Worf's involvement pretty much pissed all over his involvement in DS9 (again), and Data's download of his Katra to B4 (a character that I loathed) was cowardly. If Spiner was getting tired of playing Data, then make a clean break and let Data die rather than the cheap memory download.

Yeah, talking about Nemesis gets me angry, too.

[Teaos]

Yeah Worf on the E-E annoyed me as well, he gave up an ambassidor job to work as chief tactical officer on the E-E...?

And I pretty much hated Generations as a movie but I can understand why they wanted Kirk in it. Its the type of story you need to end and they had the whole "pass the torch" thing.

[kostmayer]

I think the ending of Star Trek VI was more effective. The crew was getting ready to retire (and didn't seem totally unpleased at the prospect). Sulu had his own command and was already breaking rules. Kirk finally overcame his prejudice against the Klingons, and Spock got a swift boot to his ego.