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Captain Seafort wrote:

Mikey wrote:Stop ramming tactics? Ramming is not a viable tactic, and has only been shown as rare act of desperation. It is certainly not a fleet-wide strategic method. Composing a fleet to deal with a tactic your opponent(s) won't use doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Tell that to the E-D in "Cause and Effect", or the Odyssey, or the Kazon mothership in "Caretaker" or the Klingon ships in "Tears of the Prophets" or the Krenim weapon in "Year of Hell", or the Scimitar. Ramming has been demonstrated time and again to be an effective tactic.

And Every one of those there was NO Choice left for the Attackers...

It Was the only solution

D. Sergez wrote:

Captain Seafort wrote: Tell that to the E-D in "Cause and Effect", or the Odyssey, or the Kazon mothership in "Caretaker" or the Klingon ships in "Tears of the Prophets" or the Krenim weapon in "Year of Hell", or the Scimitar. Ramming has been demonstrated time and again to be an effective tactic.

And Every one of those there was NO Choice left for the Attackers...

It Was the only solution

The ramming in "Cause and Effect" wasn't even deliberate, and the Jem'Hadar could have destroyed the Odyssey by continuing to fire on it - the ramming was simply a demonstration of the lengths they were prepared to go to.

My point was that, regardless of the destruction of the attacking ships in all cases except "Cause and Effect" and "Nemesis", in every case but "Nemesis" the target ship was destroyed. There have been several incidents of collisions in real life, and in none of them was the larger vessel sunk.

RMS Olympic (passenger liner) vs. HMS Hawke (cruiser) - both survived
RMS Queen Mary (passenger liner) vs. HMS Curacoa (cruiser) - the cruiser was sunk, the QM was barely damaged.
KMS Admiral Hipper (heavy cruiser) vs. HMS Glowworm (destroyer) - Glowworm sank, Hipper was badly damaged but survived.
HMS King George V (battleship) vs. HMS Punjabi (destroyer) - Punjabi sunk, KGV damaged.

Of those, admittedly only the Glowworm-Hipper incident was an attack, with the Olympic-Hawke collision caused by the cruiser being sucked bow-first into the side of the liner, and the other two being cases of the larger ship ramming the smaller in poor weather. To those to have to add various incidents of ships ramming and sinking submarines with none-fatal damage to themselves.

Conclusion - modern ships, even civilian ones, can withstand being hit by smaller ships. Why can't ST ships, with their shields and SIF?

Modern ships aren't travelling as fast, they don't have warp cores capable of "12.74 billion gigajoules" exploding

Thorin wrote:Modern ships aren't travelling as fast, they don't have warp cores capable of "12.74 billion gigajoules" exploding

Neither do Trek ships - their output is somewhere around the low-Terawatt range (per "The Dauphin" and "Masterpiece Society"). Modern ships don't SIF and deflector shields, which the Klingons had in "Tears of the Prophets", and they were still ripped apart.

Deflector shields probably stop being effective after a certain point, when the object one wishes to deflect is sufficiently massive.