Is there any expanded universe stuff that explains why close range sorties happen, like, ever? Is this a Minovsky particle thing where warp drive unavoidably dilutes radar? Cause otherwise this makes no sense.
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It's purely for audience convenience. In TOS they mention some pretty decent ranges.
Yeah. Their weapons are most effective at "short to medium" range. They literally say this all the time. Even their torpedoes can just get shot out of the sky if they are too far away and most ships don't have any fighters or support ships to open up any other tactical options. Its all either a slugfest, hit and run or some kind of BS with space magic deflector dishes.
So it's because of effective point defenses? Weird.
Even beam weapons like phasers can miss, which should only be possible if there's some form of passive countermeasures being run. This would also explain why aiming manually is actually a thing that in some situations can be more effective.
Might be that phasers are slower than light, but they have FTL sensors.
Wouldn't explain how close up attacks would miss, but long range phaser attacks like in
should be very avoidable.
I do love me some age of sail broadside slugfests, though.
Looks cool
Hard scifi is for men who like hard wieners
I still maintain projectiles weapons are better than Fasers or Disruptors, especially when you take matter replication into effect.
You could literally make thousands of rocks and just hurl them from almost lightyears away.
>You could literally make thousands of rocks and just hurl them from almost lightyears away
Mass Drivers you say?
One of these days I will get off my ass and watch Babylon 5, but today is not that day.
Hoping that's how Space Napoleon over there ethnically cleansed a planet.
Navigational deflectors make that idea useless. It's one of the first pieces of tech that needs to be developed for interstellar travel of any kind to be viable, otherwise ships turn into swiss cheese. The power cost of replicating thousands of rocks is astronomically higher than the power cost of the shields needed to deflect them.
I disagree for a couple reasons
1. We've seen the mass can still deal damage to deflectors and cause actually tons of problems, hell if we really want to remove the deflectors as an issue phasing the matter into another state which is how they transmit messages via subspace removes all of those issues.
2. Mass generates energy so in effect this would mean that these rocks would still have a force of a phaser behind them (This actually might be how phasers work by propelling a piece of mass the size of a grain of sand or something but I really need to check up on the lore more).
3. I don't buy the energy as an issue as a cup of coffee doesn't cause any negative effect on a ships energy usage and while I said 'rocks' which implied meteor-sized rocks, a fricking grain of sand would be more than enough.
There is a philosophical reason of course though - you cannot call particle weapons defensive in anyway.
Still would've been nice to see them use them against the Borg once or twice.
It's not the mass that deals damage, it's the matter-antimatter warhead in the mass that deals damage. A single photon torpedo is more powerful than Tsar Bomba in a much more compact and non-radioactive form. It's like how real life torpedoes don't do their main damage by the tube of metal hitting the enemy ship, but by the explosive stored inside. We are several centuries past the age of flinging cannonballs around.
That, and kinetic weapons are harder to defend against. Your forcefield can adapt to counter the frequency of a beam weapon, but a bullet or magnetically propelled grain of sand forces the shield to use full power to block the shot.
Except that, IRL, there are no forcefields which can stop beams.
Two rays of light pass right through each other.
Anyway, SF shields (like light sabers) require energy-types which go just so far and no farther. Otherwise, they'd just radiate away instead of forming a protective bubble. We call that "radio waves".
I know I'm a killjoy.
The only semi-realistic show I can think of is The Expanse. Point-defense against incoming projectiles.
And even that's only semi-realistic.
The railguns wouldn't be effective. The ships already travel at 1000s of km/sec. The additional velocity from a 100 gee mass-driver running the length of a ship is trivial. In a typical encounter the ships would to too far apart to hit anything with an unguided projectile and then past each other in 2 or 3 seconds.
Curiously, no one ever thinks to use the drive-plume as a weapon. I once figured the Donnager, at 4 gravities, was emitting around 60 megatons (roughly a Tsar Bomba)/second in its exhaust -- a plasma jet at several percent of cee. You should approach the enemy tail-first. That would also disintegrate incoming missiles.
> Except that, IRL, there are no forcefields which can stop beams.
That we know of
Star Trek has extrasolar flights in the 90s, their space travel tech improved much faster than IRL
I've been reading SF a loooooong time.
Writers severely underestimated the difficulties of interstellar flight.
It was "My ship can make Pluto in a couple of weeks. If I strap on extra fuel tanks, Centauri ought to be a snap."
Even Heinlein (who was good at Newtonian ballistics) got it wrong.
A torchship with near-total mass-conversion could run at a constant 1 gee from Earth to Pluto with an initial mass-ratio of 1.04. That is, 100 tons of ship would need just 4 tons of fuel. Trivial.
But it'd take a mass-ratio of about 40 for the Centauri trip under those conditons. At 1.5 gee, a mass-ratio of 74.
Yet, in "Time for the Stars", the Lewis & Clark just floats high in the water after expending all her reaction-mass.
>Except that, IRL, there are no forcefields which can stop beams.
IRL, there are no forcefields at all. There's also no apparent practicality in close quarters ship combat, and yet it happens in stories a lot for some reason.
Parody or no, it's still wild that they made this a real thing.
I'm furious that the development they gave the Pakleds is stuck in a shitty Rick and Morty knock off.