posted
Why blow them up when you can have their ship, it's technology and all it's computer secrets?
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
Just beam the bridge crew into space. Or beam anestetic gas through the ship. Or just beam the air and all it's pressure off the ship. Or just beam everyone's skin off for a great psychological weapon when your enemies find their derilict ship... Or beam over 100,000 stinging insects....
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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posted
Yes, but then you're just getting into stuff that would be done by some creepy psycho captain. In your typical battle, space or otherwise, your objective is to destroy the other guy, or get him to surrender. Not to find new and exciting means of watching him die in abject torture.
Registered: Mar 1999
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WizArtist II
"How can you have a yellow alert in Spacedock? "
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posted
Mirror Captain Kirk would've done it.
-------------------- There are 10 types of people in the world...those that understand Binary and those that don't.
Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
Well, you could always just beam large chunks of his ship away....say the lid off his warpcore.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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posted
Perhaps the relative merits of using transporters as weapons should be its own thread? Just a thought.
-------------------- If the crew discover I'm really just Dennis the donut boy, I'm finished.
Registered: Jun 2005
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WizArtist II
"How can you have a yellow alert in Spacedock? "
Member # 1425
posted
One other thing... why couldn't you just beam in a singularity and just have the ship colapse on itself? or form some of those subspace "tears" that gave us the crewman in the deck scene of TNG?
-------------------- There are 10 types of people in the world...those that understand Binary and those that don't.
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WizArtist II
"How can you have a yellow alert in Spacedock? "
Member # 1425
posted
BTW.... didn't Bear or Benford(possibly Clairmont?) write a book where the Earth was destroyed and some chosen survivors chase down the culprits? One of the scenes if I remember is that a trap is set and some of the fighters and crew are turned into antimatter so that they blow up when they contact with the mother ship
-------------------- There are 10 types of people in the world...those that understand Binary and those that don't.
Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
Yes. That's Greg Bear's (incredible) book Anvil of Stars.
Bad guys set a trap for the revenge-seeking crew of humans by turning the attacking bombships into antimatter (a couple of which impact with the main ship on their return).
Of course, those same bad guys had rigged the solar system's star to nova as part of that same trap- they were not fucking around.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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posted
Well, if you can create instant black holes anywhere you want them, you're probably beyond starship combat as a meaningful strategy, and well on your way to throwing stars around to solve your astropolitical problems.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
I always thought the whole "artifical singularity" was well beyond Trek's technology level. At least for the Romulans.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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posted
Either way, I'm not sure it's even possible to beam a black hole. The practical problems like getting one on the pad without imploding the whole ship aside, I doubt a transporter beam is capable of ripping apart the atoms of a super-compressed singularity, never mind reassembling them.
If you're going to use contained singularities as a weapon, it'd be more practical to use them as mines, where they won't indiscriminatly suck your own ship into oblivion or if you really want to commit a war crime, they'd be devistating in a planetary bombardment. To be honest, I can see more peaceful applications for such a devise. Like ignighting a gas giant into a star to bring new life to a dying system. Or to cleanly obliterate a rogue moon on a collision course before it enters an inhabited system. Of course there is the small problem of what to do with the black hole after you've used it. One might assume that the artificial singularities that the romulans use cannot sustain themselves without some form of containment field, hence us not seeing black holes sprout everytime we've seen a Warbird blow up.
posted
I think there's a significant difference between being able to make one at all, and being able to do it on a whim at the spur of a moment. We don't know what the Romulans have to go through to create one. And we don't really know what they mean by "artificial." Just that they're man-, well, Romulan-made, or do they differ from a real black hole in some weird subspace voodoo way?
Registered: Mar 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Sol System: I think there's a significant difference between being able to make one at all, and being able to do it on a whim at the spur of a moment. We don't know what the Romulans have to go through to create one. And we don't really know what they mean by "artificial." Just that they're man-, well, Romulan-made, or do they differ from a real black hole in some weird subspace voodoo way?
Artificial as in "Romulan-made" and requiring outside support systems to maintain. I like Reverend's point that given the history of Romulan self destructive tendencies, you'd expect to see more black holes hanging around after a battle.
I agree that current Star Trek battles look like remakes of "Iron Ships and Wooden Men", but maybe that's not so bad. At least they don't have a "God Gun", though the "Q" might qualify in that regards.
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