How to fight the Borg

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Re: How to fight the Borg

Post by Mikey »

Coalition wrote:The fun part comes when you try to generate, store, and release the needed to achieve that.
Release, maybe. Generate and store? Complete non-issues. We are talking about starships with M/AM reactors that can propel an entire starship at hundreds of times c for weeks at a time.
Coalition wrote:Even more fun, at high fractions of c, you get into relativistic effects on the mass of the slug, making the energy needed much higher.
And stop signs are red. I never said anything about driving massive projectiles at high fractions of c. I just mentioned making weapons capable of driving hugely massive projectiles (and I considered it understood that I meant "with enough imparted energy to do lots of damage," but that doesn't mean a high percentage of c.)

True, the Borg didn't show the same vulnerability to impact damage (as opposed to directed-energy damage) in ship-to-ship combat that they did in HTH. However, they did seem to evidence a vulnerability to big pieces of their ships getting torn through, and that's the idea behind bringing back massive-projectile weapons.
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Re: How to fight the Borg

Post by SolkaTruesilver »

Railguns that generate a pseudo-warp effect to make the projectile reach warp speed would be neat, wouldn't you think? :Drool1:
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Re: How to fight the Borg

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SolkaTruesilver wrote:Railguns that generate a pseudo-warp effect to make the projectile reach warp speed would be neat, wouldn't you think? :Drool1:
I have to ask but assuming the Borg have a deflector it should push these things out of the way. There is functionally little difference between pushing away something when traveling at warp and pushing away something fired at you at near warp. The only real question would be if you were at to close of a range for the system to deflect the object in question.
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Re: How to fight the Borg

Post by SolkaTruesilver »

BigJKU316 wrote:
SolkaTruesilver wrote:Railguns that generate a pseudo-warp effect to make the projectile reach warp speed would be neat, wouldn't you think? :Drool1:
I have to ask but assuming the Borg have a deflector it should push these things out of the way. There is functionally little difference between pushing away something when traveling at warp and pushing away something fired at you at near warp. The only real question would be if you were at to close of a range for the system to deflect the object in question.
Even if the object is of consequent mass? We are not talking about micro-particules (which the Deflector is meant to deflect), but actual 2-ton sized projectiles.
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Re: How to fight the Borg

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SolkaTruesilver wrote:
BigJKU316 wrote:
SolkaTruesilver wrote:Railguns that generate a pseudo-warp effect to make the projectile reach warp speed would be neat, wouldn't you think? :Drool1:
I have to ask but assuming the Borg have a deflector it should push these things out of the way. There is functionally little difference between pushing away something when traveling at warp and pushing away something fired at you at near warp. The only real question would be if you were at to close of a range for the system to deflect the object in question.
Even if the object is of consequent mass? We are not talking about micro-particules (which the Deflector is meant to deflect), but actual 2-ton sized projectiles.
Well, I have no technical data on what size of object a defelctor can move but the Enteprise Nill tried to use it to move a pretty large asteroid at one point and that tech would be way behind what the Ent-E could presumably push off, let alone the Borg.
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Re: How to fight the Borg

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SolkaTruesilver wrote:Railguns that generate a pseudo-warp effect to make the projectile reach warp speed would be neat, wouldn't you think? :Drool1:
No.
SolkaTruesilver wrote:Even if the object is of consequent mass? We are not talking about micro-particules (which the Deflector is meant to deflect), but actual 2-ton sized projectiles.
The object wouldn't be of consequential mass. Remember good old Albert "Crazy-hair" Einstein? To repeat:
Coalition wrote:Even more fun, at high fractions of c, you get into relativistic effects on the mass of the slug, making the energy needed much higher.
A two-ton slug (of itself hardly practicable, given the limited size of PT's and QT's we've seen which are presumably of maximal mass to be easily handled) wouldn't be anywhere near two tons once accelerated to a high percentage of c.
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Re: How to fight the Borg

Post by SolkaTruesilver »

So... you do realise that if a deflector shield can simply wave away any mass coming their way, we just shot down the entire Kinetic Weapon field of weaponry?
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Re: How to fight the Borg

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SolkaTruesilver wrote:So... you do realise that if a deflector shield can simply wave away any mass coming their way, we just shot down the entire Kinetic Weapon field of weaponry?
Not really, but it would likely have to carry its own propulsion on the projectile, rather than be a fire and forget weapon. I would also point out that you see pretty much no kenetic weaponry in Trek. This might well be the reason.
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Re: How to fight the Borg

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If its carrying its own propulsion, its little more than a rather high speed PT/QT.
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Re: How to fight the Borg

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Reliant121 wrote:If its carrying its own propulsion, its little more than a rather high speed PT/QT.
I had originally said "mass driver," which seems to have been conflated identically with "rail gun." In the case of a rail gun projectile being outfitted with its own propulsion, there is still a big difference between that and torpedo - one has a warhead, the other doesn't. The whole idea was to provide an additional impact-based attack to complement the energy-based attack of the phasers and torps. If we are going to twist that idea into taking a massive projectile and accelerating it to the point of decreasing its mass enough to make it ineefective, why bother? If we are going to rather accept the mass-driver weapon as an adjunct to more traditional 'Trek weapons, then leave it be - slow enough to retain its impact capability and main damage-producing mechanism as distinct from other types of weaponry.
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Re: How to fight the Borg

Post by SolkaTruesilver »

A "mass driver", the way I see it, would be any way to propel a large mass to a speed high ennough to be treathening.

It can be simply a non-exploding missile with self-propultion, or a fire-and-forget weaponry like a railgun.

It's just that I am thinking, if we can already do pretty powerful railguns with modern technology, what the Federation could achieve with a 5-km long railgun powered by a M/AM reactor, with Duranium projectiles, no air resistance and (maybe) a warp field to allow strikes at warp-scale range. In short, I didn't meant to have the entire argument about mass driver being reduced to a railgun argument.
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Re: How to fight the Borg

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Mikey wrote:A two-ton slug (of itself hardly practicable, given the limited size of PT's and QT's we've seen which are presumably of maximal mass to be easily handled) wouldn't be anywhere near two tons once accelerated to a high percentage of c.
Huh? Mass increases as you approach c.
Coalition wrote:For engaging the Borg, based on First Contact, regular weapons work fine, you just need to use more of them. Enterprise alone lost in BobW, the fleet lost later on, but in First Contact they were damaging the Borg Cube
Agreed, although the damage was probably more due to numbers than any improvement in method - the fleet was using the same penny-packet attacks that they used at Wolf, and about as successfully.
the damage report Picard heard and took advantage of).
Huh? Data didn't specify where the cube was damaged specifically, merely that is was the outer hull. It had nothing to do with Picard's choice of target to concentrate the fleet's fire.
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Re: How to fight the Borg

Post by SolkaTruesilver »

Captain Seafort wrote: Huh? Data didn't specify where the cube was damaged specifically, merely that is was the outer hull. It had nothing to do with Picard's choice of target to concentrate the fleet's fire.
Indeed, quite the opposite. Data states that Picard's target makes no sense.
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Re: How to fight the Borg

Post by Captain Seafort »

SolkaTruesilver wrote:Indeed, quite the opposite. Data states that Picard's target makes no sense.
Not quite - he said that it didn't appear to be a vital area. Given that there's no evidence that it was, or that Picard was receiving tactical updates from the Borg, it's reasonable to assume that he picked a spot at random and relied on concentrated fire to punch a hole through the cube. It didn't matter where the blow was struck but how.
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Re: How to fight the Borg

Post by Tyyr »

In general the idea of shooting at one specific point on a Borg ship to make it blow up is nonsense.
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