quote:Originally posted by Mucus: A large shell of attack drones covering the Mars orbit would be a real waste of time and effort. Talk about spreading out your forces and materials.
Hell no, what's a few thousand unmanned drone grouped into constellations in the face of Federation's industrial capacity? Drop in the bucket. And with space warfare, you need a system that covers all approach to the entire solar system. The enemy can come from above or below the ecliptic, despite ST's facination with 2D-rizing solar system travel.
quote:It would make much more sense, that Starfleet with its back to the wall and its fleet destroyed at Wolf 359 would improvise and push a planetary defence system into the Borg's way.
In that little time? After observing Borg tractor tactics? On top of the sheer chance that the Borg would pass by Mars, when the planets could be anywhere else in their orbital path besides lying between Wolf 359 and Earth? Not bloody likely.
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Hannibal ex portis. If you get past the outer solar system defenses, it's highly unlikely you can will be stopped.
Given the amount of area a drone system would have to cover to effectively guard just the planetary plane, it would make more sense to have a few older vessals coordinated at Mars than a automated defense system.
Besides...on Sept 11th, there were only 16 fighter jets covering the entire United States. Now there's over a hundred. I don't think the Federation had much of a defensive grid anyway.
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quote:Originally posted by David Templar: And with space warfare, you need a system that covers all approach to the entire solar system. The enemy can come from above or below the ecliptic, despite ST's facination with 2D-rizing solar system travel.
Exactly, you just pointed out the problem with your extravagant idea yourself. History has shown that pratically any static defence on Earth can either be circumvented (Maginot Line) or broken through with sheer concentration of arms (Atlantic Wall). Thats why every successful generation of military technology tends to be more mobile and more flexible than before. Space just compounds the problem, actually, mathematically it would square the problem. (cube the problem?)
Read OSC for better reasoning along these lines.
As for improvising the solar defence....well yeah. Starfleet has consistently shown that it can devise new devices and even new rules of physics in the last five minutes of an episode, I hardly think that retrofitting three drones in a last ditch stand would be beyond their abilities. However, it hardly means that they expected to succeed. Last ditch, hopeless, noble stands aren't exactly foreign to human culture.
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quote:Originally posted by Free ThoughtCrime America: Hannibal ex portis. If you get past the outer solar system defenses, it's highly unlikely you can will be stopped.
True, but I never said the MDP is for stopping. More like slowing and bleeding.
quote:Given the amount of area a drone system would have to cover to effectively guard just the planetary plane, it would make more sense to have a few older vessals coordinated at Mars than a automated defense system.
It'd make sense to have BOTH. Mobile units backed up by layered static defenses.
quote:Besides...on Sept 11th, there were only 16 fighter jets covering the entire United States. Now there's over a hundred. I don't think the Federation had much of a defensive grid anyway.
Apples and oranges. Apples and oranges.
quote:Originally posted by Mucus: Exactly, you just pointed out the problem with your extravagant idea yourself. History has shown that pratically any static defence on Earth can either be circumvented (Maginot Line) or broken through with sheer concentration of arms (Atlantic Wall). Thats why every successful generation of military technology tends to be more mobile and more flexible than before. Space just compounds the problem, actually, mathematically it would square the problem. (cube the problem?)
And ironically, you just pointed out a problem to your own argument. Maginot Line was a line, with two ends, and ultimately failed due to French short sightedness. A shell completely encircles, no ends like that. The Atlantic Wall was undermanned and under equipped, among other things, and D-Day worked only because Hitler was an idiot, and German had lost air superiority.
I didn't mean for the MDP to be an impenetrable wall, in any case. At the very least, it will attrition the enemy units attempting to enter the inner solar system, and disrupt their attempts to maintain proper battle formation and coherence by swarming them like hornets and forcing them to respond.
quote:Read OSC for better reasoning along these lines.
Huh?
quote:As for improvising the solar defence....well yeah. Starfleet has consistently shown that it can devise new devices and even new rules of physics in the last five minutes of an episode, I hardly think that retrofitting three drones in a last ditch stand would be beyond their abilities. However, it hardly means that they expected to succeed. Last ditch, hopeless, noble stands aren't exactly foreign to human culture.
They could have had swarms of shuttles and other auxiliaries packed with a hundred different types of explosives, freighters with jerry rigged armaments, towed the Spacedocks into the Borg's path, assemble half baked exotic weaponaries that they believed the Borg haven't seen before... But no, they threw three unmanned drones which were just big torpedoes at the Borg Cube... Somehow I have a hard time believing that Starfleet would act on such a limited, conventional, and utterly stupid and pointless venture. If they wanted a bang, they could have few a couple antimatter tankers into the Cube. No, the MDP has to be something pre-existing. It's way too conventional to have been a last ditch attempt to stop the Borg.
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The surface area of the Mars Sphere is 1.49E+26 km2, or 44.48 A.U.2, while the volume of this is 1.58E+25 km3, or 4.72 A.U.3.
What kind of defense system would anyone suggest placing in this volume of space?
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I think you've overestimated the area of the Mars sphere, Ritten. With a mean radius of 1.524 AU, the area should be closer to 6.5 E+17 square kilometers, or 29.186 square AUs (even at Mars' maximum distance from the sun, the area is only about 7.8E+17 square klicks). I did a little ballpark figuring with fixed outposts on the mean radius sphere's perimeter, each able to cover out to a radius of phaser range (1 light-second). I came up with more than 578,000 outposts needed to cover the whole area.
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Not from the perspective that there wasn't a defensive perimeter in place. When was the last time something nearly got to Earth before the cube, anyway? Why would they waste the expense of having more than a couple of ships guarding Earth?
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Seriously though, if nothing else then the MDP would be made up largely of sensor monitoring stations and long ranged weapons platforms. Presumably larger, fixed phaser banks and torpedo launchers could conceivably have a longer effective range than the smaller less powerful ship mounted weapons. Similar in a sense to the huge artillery guns that could fire shells clear across the English channel during WWII.
posted
Personally I would think that any weapons platforms would be in planetary orbit for ease of maintainance etc. The rest would be sensor platforms and mobile defences scattered around the sphere. When an enemy is detected, the mobile defenses (drones, second line starships) converge on the threat. And hopefully destroy it.
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Registered: Feb 2002
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Ok, assuming that each MDP drone can do 0.92c for 10 minutes, and are grouped into tight constellations, each covering the area of their endurence, how many constellations are needed to cover 85% of the orbital shell?
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posted
Actually, if one non-Federation space staion facing imminent attack can churn out a few thousand cloaked self-replicating mines in a few hours. . .
posted
"Expense" doesn't just mean money. Expense also means raw materials and energy which go into producing the stuff. It's just that in today's society we use money as a standard form of exchange for the work, resources, time, and energy that we put in.
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posted
Why do you defend empty space? Planetary defense, OK, but we know that the inner planets are not the only ones inhabitated (Jupiter station, probably moon colonies, and we heard of either Neptune or Pluto having some research facilities, too). If the enemy entered the system, you can only try to concentrate your force to protect the planets or you try to protect the areas around the relative position around the planet (several small spheres instead of one large sphere covering the inner system).
Even if the MDP is/was supposed to be the "large sphere" type of thing I still doubt there are any weapon platforms, even sensors of ships, out there. The drones were stationed and launched from Mars or the Mars-orbit (probably the latter; allthough we don't know exactly how populated the red planet is or how powerful the warheads are, I wouldn't wanna have one of those things parked in my backyard). And sensors are advanced enough to cover whole sectors of space. The close net of stations we use to have in mind when thinking about sensor grids doesn't apply on Trek. So why would anyone place an immense amount of battlestations out there (what's the maximum attack range of phasers? 300,000 kilometers?) if a learger fleet would shoot them down without any problem? Even if they could cover the whole area (surface, I'm not talking about the volume of the sphere) what could they do to "defend" (destroy or seriously harm the enemy thread) the solar system?
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