Power densities

[Coalition]

Noticed some things weird about the Dominion ships. From the main site:
DITL Home -> Fleets -> Dominion -> (select the ships)

For the Dominion Attack ship, it has the following stats:
Mass: 2,450 tons
Weapons: 8,750 TW
Shields: 256,500 TJ

The Dominion Battlecruiser:
Mass: 4,215,000
Weapons: 75,000 TW
Shields: 2,565,000 TJ

I got bored and began comparing the numbers, dividing offensive TW and defensive shield TJ ratings by the masses of the respective ships. Ton for ton, the Attack ship is over a hundred times more dangerous than the Battlecruiser.

The Attack ship has the following combat stats:
8,750 TW / 2,450 tons = 3.57 TW/ton
256,500 TJ / 2,450 tons = 104.7 TJ/ton

While the Battlecruiser has:
75,000 TW / 4,215,000 tons = .0178 TW/ton
2,565,000 TJ / 4,215,000 tons = .609 TJ/ton

If you compare the above numbers, the Attack Ship has two hundred times as much offensive firepower per ton, and about 170 times as much shielding per ton. What is all the extra tonnage going to?

(I apologize in advance if this is the wrong location to post this)

[Mark]

Welcome to the forum Coalition!!!

With that, I'll now let my eyes cross. Another numbers person.

[Mikey]

I'd say there's far more power generation equipment, shield and weapons machanisms, and "empty" mass - quarters, crew facilities, sensor pallets, etc.

[Tsukiyumi]

Might be a lot of space taken to transport troops as well.

[Sionnach Glic]

Welcome to the site.

It's actualy not that strange that the Attack Ship is more powerful tonne for tonne than the Battleship. The Attack Ship is probably a short range vessel, designed for quick raiding missions near Dominion lines. They probably have a mimimum of everything on board, with little redundancy and a skeleton crew. On the other hand, the Battleship would be designed for protracted missions and to fight in prolonged battles. As such, they'd have numerous redundant systems, extra crewmen, fuel, damage control systems and all manner of other equipment that would take up a lot of the mass of the ship.

[Coalition]

First, thanks to all the welcomes. I'll admit my 'nitpic' would not be possible without all the work to gather the information, so I'd also like to say thank you to the Webmaster himself, Mr. Graham Kennedy.

Second, you are probably right, that the Fighter is a short-range vessel. But the ratio is so skewed, the Battlecruiser likely has to be a carrier (carrying Attack Ships) or transport. Just on tonnage alone, if you build one less battlecruiser, you could have 2000 more Attack ships, with over one hundred times the combat power. Based on Strength ranking, that is 40-50 Galaxy class Starships. Imagine the Dominion conquering not just Betazed, but also another 49 planets, all of them main ship production centers or other critical systems (I am assuming other planets would need twice as many ships as Betazed). Even if they are not conquered, gutting the Federation of 1/3 of its main planets means the Federation dies. If you had those 2000 Attack Ships, and DS9 kills half of them on their attack run, the remaining half can bring down DS9's shields in one second (DS9 shield strength in TJ divided by Attack ship offense in TW).

If it is extra fuel and supplies, then the battlecruiser would have 5 years of endurance from internal supplies, while the Attack ship would have less than two weeks. At this point it is less of a Battlecruiser, and more of an armed freighter. The battlecruiser is ~1700 times more massive, but only 10 times as dangerous. If this is a warship, then 99% of the mass is wasted.

At this point, you can go with total Federation fleet strength of ~2.6 million, the Klingon fleet strength of ~700,000, and figure that it would take a little over 14,000 Attack ships to equal the Federation and Klingons. That is only 8 Battlecruisers worth of raw material diverted to Attack Ship production. The Romulans only add another 450,000 Strength, or another 2000 Attack ships, from a ninth Battlecruiser. Get an assembly line going, and you can crank those Attack ships out faster than the F/K/R alliance can kill them. With the Attack Ship's ability to land and take off from a planet, you can have the assembly line on the ground, and not have to worry about vacuum training your workers, environmental issues, or extra arm space. If the Cardassians converted all their ship production to Attack Ships, they could make 57,000 per year. The Federation would have to build 13,000 Galaxy star ships (or ~8500 Defiants) each year to equal that Strength.

In case any of you are wondering, yes, I put together a spreadsheet that lists each ship by faction and name, lists their tonnage, offensive TeraWatt and defenseive TeraJoule ratings, the ratios of TW/ton and TJ/ton, and then I multipled the TW/ton and TJ/ton together to give me a combat ranking. After that I made a second sheet, tweaking the tonnges and TW & TJ levels until each race, adding a column that compared TW and TJ for that ship to give a 'seconds-to-die' ranking (how long it would take a ship to kill itself aka TJ/TW), until the different ships were close to each other. As an example, the Klingon STD was less than 10 (the best defense is to kill your opponent), while the Federation STD was over 25 (we will protect the families that we bring into a war zone). The Dominion STD was 10-20, while the Romulans were in the low 20s (one of their principles is to cover the bases, and the most important base is the one you sit on). If anyone wants, I can email it to them (please contact me via PM, so we don't clutter the forum).

[Captain Seafort]

Topic split. This is too interesting a debate to allow to fade away.

[Mark]

Seafort found something to sink his teeth into. Did anyone FEEL his eagerness in his split post?

[Mikey]

I admire the dedication an thought you've put into this, Coalition. I must say a couple of things.

#1 - 5 years' worth of supplies (especially ammo) is not outre for a ship destined to be sent to prosecute a war on the other side of the galaxy.

#2 - A straight up arithmetical equivalency of "x attack ships per battlecruiser" is fallacious. While there may be such an equivalency as far as resource-intensiveness, it doesn't hold for efficacy. Even if (as a hypothetical example) 10 attack ships = the strength index of 1 battlecruiser, that one battlecruiser would probably more effective against a fixed installation (for example) than 50 attack ships. Or, against an equivalent enemy class.

#2 - Have you considered publishing your spreadsheet to the inter-web?

[Sionnach Glic]

That's an interesting system of counting, Mikey.

[Captain Seafort]

Alright, after a few calculations I've confirmed that the decreased mass-power ratio for larger ships not only makes sense, but is confirmed by historical trends. The scale of the difference, however, is not.

Using WW2 warships as a comparison, there's a clear trend of decreasing firepower per ton as ships displacement increases, with the ratio for destroyers being, on average, about three times that of battleships. The trend is most clearly marked at the lower end of the scale, with destroyers, light cruisers and heavy cruisers showing significant drops in their firepower-displacement ratio as their displacement rises. Battleships don't seem to be as badly affected, with their average ratio being only slightly lower than that of heavy cruisers.

Conclusion: The principle's right, but the extent of it isn't. Going by Trek canon there's clearly a similar effect in play, as the Dominion Battleship was twice the length of a GCS (roughly eight times the volume) but only three times as strong. This seems to follow the historical trend much better.

[Mark]

My eyes are crossing again...........

[Captain Seafort]

Would you like me to discuss the minutiae of the individual navies characteristics?

[Mark]

[Lt. Staplic]

another point I'd like to bring.

It's possable to increase the volume of a ship (tonns) without increaseing the surface area to much, hence the sheilds wouldn't need to be to much more powerful to still get the same amount of protection per square foot/meter/metre. In wich case the power to volume ratio would fall dramaticly, but it isn't a true representation of the power of the ship compared to one with a similar surface area and far less volume.