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Tyyr wrote:And the problem is that you have to somehow corner a ship that has a significant speed advantage (5 to 10 knots) and can see you ten times farther away than you can see it.

Like if you knew where it was or was going to be.

Tyyr wrote:Honestly the gigantic container ships are just wasteful. All you really need is a few thousand tons of capacity for your weaponry. If I got to pick what I'd use I'd go for something like the Maersk B Class. Smaller, but have a top speed of 36 knots and can cruise at 29.

Eh, I just went with the Edith Maersk for size disparity. She's literally 4 times the length of a Colossus.

Teaos wrote:Same thing with the modern day cargo ship back in the 1800's. Fill a few old fashioned ships up with all the explosives you can and charge it. One will get through if you send enough especially if the terrain is with you, like the English channel or straights of Gebralta.

You'd need literally every ship you could throw at it, all massed at once. Meanwhile, the excocets and harpoons are destroying a ship every ten or fifteen seconds.

A modern cargo ship, armed to the brim with modern weapons, could single-handedly fight (and possibly destroy) every navy on Earth from 1884. At once.

Tsukiyumi wrote:Like if you knew where it was or was going to be.

It's still not likely. Assuming my radar only has a horizon of 50 miles, and if I'm taking this CS back I'm not settling for a mast mount I'd have a small airforce of UAV's including blimp mounted radar for a range of 100+ miles, that's still going to take your fleet three hours to close the distance on me to a point where you can attack. That's three hours during which I can finish whatever I was doing, presumably refueling, and get the hell out of there. With my 5+ knot speed advantage so long as you never get closer than 5 miles you can't touch me. You can try to spin a scenario where I have to take the CS down a long narrow straight to fuel up so you could trap me in it but I'm smart enough to avoid those places like the plague.

You'd need literally every ship you could throw at it, all massed at once. Meanwhile, the excocets and harpoons are destroying a ship every ten or fifteen seconds.

A modern cargo ship, armed to the brim with modern weapons, could single-handedly fight (and possibly destroy) every navy on Earth from 1884. At once.

It probably could, though I'd want to drag the fight out over several days if I could to provide time to reload the launchers and just give everyone a break. The big deciding factors are fuel and ammo. There's nothing really the navies of that time could do to oppose it aside from the aforementioned waiting it out.

Ships in 1884 fought at very close ranges of about 3000 yards or less. Guns were slow firing and accuracy was poor. Training was suspect at best.

You have a cargo container and depending on which one, they can vary from equal or greater speed than most 1880's ships. You mount the equipment and the weapons of today, I have no doubt that even a single missile can sink or mission cripple any ship in the 1880's world. We are talking about ships with while substantial armor, was small and had poor subdivision.

Not only that, but all the ships would literally have no idea where the missiles are coming from.

Tsukiyumi wrote:That's why I said "outfitted with modern naval guns". Just a pair of Mark 45s would toast anything from the 1800's. The Narada, even discounting the comics, was obviously up-gunned at some point, unless the Romulans like to arm their mining ships to the teeth.

It'd be a good idea for any captain to get as many weapons as possible for any cargo ships, especially considering how often 'only ship in the quadrant' syndrome happened.