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We've seen The Dominion use ramming tactics - most notably against The Odyssey, but also pretty effectively against the Klingon's during the Dominion War. Might be that in every instance involving ramming the targets shields were down, but to my mind being rammed by a ship, no matter how big, shouldn't be anywhere near as damaging as a Phaser or Photon blast.

kostmayer wrote:We've seen The Dominion use ramming tactics - most notably against The Odyssey, but also pretty effectively against the Klingon's during the Dominion War. Might be that in every instance involving ramming the targets shields were down, but to my mind being rammed by a ship, no matter how big, shouldn't be anywhere near as damaging as a Phaser or Photon blast.

There was also the E-E ramming Scimitar in Nemesis. The effectiveness of ramming would naturally depend on the velocity of the ramming ship at the time of impact. Given the prevalence of relatively short-range battle tactics in Trek most of the instances of ramming we've observed weren't as energetic as they might have been.

kostmayer wrote:We've seen The Dominion use ramming tactics - most notably against The Odyssey, but also pretty effectively against the Klingon's during the Dominion War. Might be that in every instance involving ramming the targets shields were down, but to my mind being rammed by a ship, no matter how big, shouldn't be anywhere near as damaging as a Phaser or Photon blast.

Trek ships in general have always been unusually vulnerable to kinetic attacks. They can shrug off megatons of gamma radiation from PTs, but they can be crippled or killed by sub-kT ramming. It's also seen in the complete inability of Borg drone shields to do anything against KE, and the E-D's shields being knocked out by only hundreds of gigwatts of "particle energy". The likely solution is that KE is the Achilles heel of shield technology

Mikey wrote:They already use those things, albeit with lesser commonly-used speeds - they're called photon/quantum torpedoes. I don't ever recall hearing the maximum speed of a PT or QT.

They seem to depend on the speed of the launch ship. Torps fired at sublight stay at sublight, torps fired at warp stay at warp. But in both cases flight times seem to be only a few seconds, most of the time. But as the probe I linked shows, that really shouldn't be the case.

However, I believe the OP was questioning why we haven't seen a massive object such as an asteroid fitted with long-range warp drives and used as a planet-smashing relativistic impact weapon, not why we haven't seen longer-range or higher-speed torpedoes.

Don't really see much point. There are plenty of nasty weapons available in Trek as it is, why bother flying asteroids around the place?

GrahamKennedy wrote:Don't really see much point. There are plenty of nasty weapons available in Trek as it is, why bother flying asteroids around the place?

My point exactly.

GrahamKennedy wrote:

However, I believe the OP was questioning why we haven't seen a massive object such as an asteroid fitted with long-range warp drives and used as a planet-smashing relativistic impact weapon, not why we haven't seen longer-range or higher-speed torpedoes.

Don't really see much point. There are plenty of nasty weapons available in Trek as it is, why bother flying asteroids around the place?

I would expect asteroid warfare to be a phase that civilizations pass through and manage to survive if they're lucky. There is a point where you can attach a low-powered ion drive with no more advanced theoretical underpinnings than what we have today to an extinction-event-sized rock and alter its trajectory over the course of a decade or so to drop it onto a planet. The tech levels we see on Star Trek are past that point, and up to where that extinction-event-sized rock is easily sliced and diced by a passing starship.

There's too much easy KE available from just dropping a rock down a gravity well for it to be completely ignored. Maybe someone got a really bright idea for how to get into the chewy molten center for mining, and that's what happened to Praxis.

This might need its own thread:

I think there are some other interesting aspects of technology implications that Trek has. When a ship moves at warp or comes out of warp, when a person is transported from one place to another, what happens to their inertia? Can I dampen something's inertia as a weapon? Can I add inertia to something?

Gravity generation/repulsing, can I crush foes to death or send them flying away? Can I hang a prison cell, upside down over a chasm or a large gravity field so that if a prisoner escapes he becomes immobile/dead? The same questions for tractor beams.

What about warp fields, can I damage things by tugging at them with a warpfield?

Heat dumping, how does a starship shed its excess heat? Can it gain heat by reversing the process? Can I use this for climate control? Can I even recover some of it to use in other applications?

Transporters, the implications alone suffice.

Shields, can I use them to excavate earth or rend asunder a foe?