Too many ships on the dance floor

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Re: Too many ships on the dance floor

Post by Coalition »

Mark wrote:Even then, its all relevent. As was mentioned before, in a small town if four people die in a fire, it impacts everybody. In a big city, four people die, and your lucky if it even makes the news. On a global scale for us, seven billion dead is unbelievable, but on a galactic scale with hundreds of other worlds with similar populations, its going to lose some impact.
Good catch. In "Tales of the Bounty Hunters", there is a reference to a star going nova and killing an entire species. It got less attention than Alderann being destroyed 10 years earlier, and Fett never heard about it. The basic comment is that things like that happen in the galaxy, and are barely noticed.

So relative scale would still take effect.


For Star Trek, remember the pirates with the stealthed ship that Picard joined for a while in Gambit? Low level stealth, all they need is some extra weaponry to turn into a stealth bomber attacking colonies.
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Re: Too many ships on the dance floor

Post by Tyyr »

stitch626 wrote:At least in the Federation its sort of hard for civilians to get a hold of the fastest and largest ships.
Yeah, but still a small shuttle traveling at only .05C could potentially vaporize a city. It really comes down to how fast ships in Trek are at impulse speeds.

Of course, that's ignoring the fact that Trek ships use anti-matter for their warp engine fuel which has a real world destructive capability of about 13 megatons per kilogram.
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Re: Too many ships on the dance floor

Post by stitch626 »

Hmmm, perhaps ships cannot fly at any substantial speed within atmosphere (due to air resistance, which we know shields do not sufficiently protect against, from several eps).
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Re: Too many ships on the dance floor

Post by Lighthawk »

stitch626 wrote:Hmmm, perhaps ships cannot fly at any substantial speed within atmosphere (due to air resistance, which we know shields do not sufficiently protect against, from several eps).
At the speed we're talking about, they only need to fly within the atmosphere for a second or less. As long as the shields hold for that instant until they reach the ground, they're good.
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Re: Too many ships on the dance floor

Post by Tyyr »

stitch626 wrote:Hmmm, perhaps ships cannot fly at any substantial speed within atmosphere (due to air resistance, which we know shields do not sufficiently protect against, from several eps).
Doesn't really matter. At .05C the time it takes to go from first contact with the upper atmosphere to impact on the ground is about two hundredths of a second (19 milliseconds). At 0.25C the time is down to the surface is 3.8 milliseconds. Even if you assume that nothing impacts the ground that the vehicle is just vaporized you're not doing yourself any favors. The energy is still there. Only instead of impacting the surface it's expended in the atmosphere. So you get an airburst detonation instead of a ground burst which depending on the height could potentially be worse than just hitting the ground in terms of total destruction.

Really though it's still likely to hit the ground. There's just not enough time to transmit the heat throughout the structure of the shuttle and vaporize the whole thing in 19 milliseconds or less. The outer few millimeters of the hull are likely incandescent plasma but most of the shuttle will still hit the ground.
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Re: Too many ships on the dance floor

Post by stitch626 »

Good point, though is there evidence that a shuttle can go that fast? We do know that starships can (well, they've been stated to, I'm not sure about visual evidence), but a shuttle is much smaller, and may not be able to fit the fuel and power requirements for such speeds.
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Re: Too many ships on the dance floor

Post by Tyyr »

In Trek we don't really know. I don't think anywhere in the shows or a movie that they've stated just how fast they are at impulse. Most of the tech books peg full impulse at .25c but those aren't official.
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Re: Too many ships on the dance floor

Post by Mikey »

Lighthawk wrote:
stitch626 wrote:Hmmm, perhaps ships cannot fly at any substantial speed within atmosphere (due to air resistance, which we know shields do not sufficiently protect against, from several eps).
At the speed we're talking about, they only need to fly within the atmosphere for a second or less. As long as the shields hold for that instant until they reach the ground, they're good.
Good point, but even if there was a high-friction atmosphere that managed to vaporize the ship before surface contact (not likely, as Tyyr mentions,) think Tunguska - now multiply that by about 10 or 15.
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Re: Too many ships on the dance floor

Post by Mark »

stitch626 wrote:Good point, though is there evidence that a shuttle can go that fast? We do know that starships can (well, they've been stated to, I'm not sure about visual evidence), but a shuttle is much smaller, and may not be able to fit the fuel and power requirements for such speeds.

In DS9, we saw Dr. "whatshisface's" shuttle slam into and ingnite that star at a pretty good clip (fast enough to outrun Prometheus and her tractor beam at least), so it can be done.
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Re: Too many ships on the dance floor

Post by stitch626 »

Mark wrote:
stitch626 wrote:Good point, though is there evidence that a shuttle can go that fast? We do know that starships can (well, they've been stated to, I'm not sure about visual evidence), but a shuttle is much smaller, and may not be able to fit the fuel and power requirements for such speeds.

In DS9, we saw Dr. "whatshisface's" shuttle slam into and ingnite that star at a pretty good clip (fast enough to outrun Prometheus and her tractor beam at least), so it can be done.
Must of missed that ep...
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Re: Too many ships on the dance floor

Post by Lazar »

So for a fusion-powered interplanetary ship with a top speed of .01c, what do you think would be a plausible acceleration?
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Re: Too many ships on the dance floor

Post by SolkaTruesilver »

stitch626 wrote:
Mark wrote:
stitch626 wrote:Good point, though is there evidence that a shuttle can go that fast? We do know that starships can (well, they've been stated to, I'm not sure about visual evidence), but a shuttle is much smaller, and may not be able to fit the fuel and power requirements for such speeds.

In DS9, we saw Dr. "whatshisface's" shuttle slam into and ingnite that star at a pretty good clip (fast enough to outrun Prometheus and her tractor beam at least), so it can be done.
Must of missed that ep...
Me too. Can somebody gives a few pointers?
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Re: Too many ships on the dance floor

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Lazar wrote:So for a fusion-powered interplanetary ship with a top speed of .01c, what do you think would be a plausible acceleration?
You've got the question backwards - the concept of "top speed" as anything other than a legal limit or as a means of describing fuel capacity is nonsensical in even interplanetary space.

If your keen to really delve into the mathematics of this, have a look at this.
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Re: Too many ships on the dance floor

Post by Captain Seafort »

SolkaTruesilver wrote:
In DS9, we saw Dr. "whatshisface's" shuttle slam into and ingnite that star at a pretty good clip (fast enough to outrun Prometheus and her tractor beam at least), so it can be done.
Must of missed that ep...
Me too. Can somebody gives a few pointers?
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Re: Too many ships on the dance floor

Post by Coalition »

stitch626 wrote:Good point, though is there evidence that a shuttle can go that fast? We do know that starships can (well, they've been stated to, I'm not sure about visual evidence), but a shuttle is much smaller, and may not be able to fit the fuel and power requirements for such speeds.
Doesn't Star Trek use mass lighteners toallow theirships better acceleration (and inertial dampeners so the crew survives)?

If so, then a shuttle with high acceleration is actually dropping its mass at the same time. This will reduce the damage delivered, as the higher acceleration has less effective mass to work with.

I.e. a shuttle designer wants their shuttle to accelerate twice as fast. He has to use existing impulse technology. So he quadruples the effect of the mass lightener, giving him double the acceleration. If it hits something, the acceleration is twice as high (meaning 4 times the damage from the Kinetic energy equation), but with 1/4 the mass, that 4* high gets reduced back to 1.
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