posted
I don't think large caliber main gun armaments were used to try and hit incoming aircraft but rather to create splashes high and large enough to either knock down the aircraft or force it to break off an attack run. Obviously this only works with relatively low level attacks (torpedo bombers for instance).
Even if it's not possible to counter torpedoes with a CIWS, the lack of decoys or ECM in Trek does seem surprising.
-------------------- "I am an almost extinct breed, an old-fashioned gentleman, which means I can be a cast-iron son-of-a-bitch when it suits me." --Jubal Harshaw
Registered: Feb 2002
| IP: Logged
posted
That's how I read it as well. There was, however, a sort of exception to that rule. King George V once used her 14" main armament to fire at Stuka's who were approaching at a couple of thousand feet prior to diving on the ship. The desired effect from this wasn't a water splash but rather to create severe turbulence in the air around the aircraft from the passage of the shells. Apparently it was effective enough to disperse the attack, although whether this was down to the effects of turbulence or simply the psychological impact on the pilots remains a point of discussion to this day.
Registered: Jul 2006
| IP: Logged
quote:Originally posted by Timo: if you have enough power for both shields AND CIWS, you dismiss the CIWS and route the power to stronger shields, as this is the better defense.
...
Mind you, Kirk does try to shoot down an incoming torp in ST2 - but only because his shields are down. And the attempt is futile to begin with. Timo Saloniemi
If you choose to rely only on shields you disadvantage yourself in two ways. - You must do without a layered defence which has the advantage of gradually degrading an enemy attack the closer it gets before it actually impacts on you. - You have created a single point of catastrophic failure. If your shields go down, you're toast. With a combined CIWS and shields approach, the loss of one system doesn't leave you completely vulnerable.
However, as you say, Trek never seems to have agreed with that reasoning. Kirk might have had an easier time of it if he'd fired a high yield torpedo equipped with a proximity fuse towards the incoming torpedo. Essentially, this would be a rudimentary missile defence system. We've seen micro torpedos used on vessels such as the Runabouts. Maybe, if we abandon the pulse phasers as being too underpowered to be effective (as you point out with regard to the Jem Hadar attack) and convert our phaser hoses into micro photon turrets with a rapid rate of fire and plentiful ammunition supplies, we get a photon torpedo machine gun! How would a hail of those have effected our Jem Hadar attack ship? One brief burst from a type 10 phaser might not dissuade them, but a continuous hail of anti-matter warheads might be a different matter. Especially if we then go one better and equip them with proximity fuses. Think ack ack in space with warheads of several megatons each! Nasty.
Registered: Jul 2006
| IP: Logged
quote:Originally posted by Lurker Emeritus: Instead, we get what is obviously just a redress of the hangar bay, with enough empty room for a dance floor and full orchestra, a great big widescreen TV in the middle and... strangely, an almost total absence of actual torpedo's but for one or two here and there. First time I saw it I couldn't figure out what I was looking at.
I was thinking that the wheeled racks we occasionally see are all fully loaded and under the decking. When needed, a rack is elevated to the "deck" and wheeled to where ever it's needed. Stored racks of torpedos are more secure with their safetys on below-decks (I always hated the silly manual loading system shown in STII).
as to the launchers themselves, considering the distances that should be involved in starship combat, the ship's "spine" and "belly" should house rows of launch tubes. ...and torpedos should be far more autonoumously guided than they are shown to be, with a "friendly safety" feature that will not detonate anything except the chosen target.
That being said, it's important that they dont make the torpedos like the silly "oildrum" missiles shown so often in anime that follow a target like a flailing school of Piranha.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
| IP: Logged
This would be a good rationale for the addition of so many short-barreled torpedo launchers to the E-E during/after the Dominion war.
Prior to this, there might well have been a doctrinal disbelief in proximity defense phasers: devoting resources to those would have been seen as redundant when primary phasers were available to pick on the incomings before they hit the shields.
Shields in turn need not be a single point of failure, but a layered defense unto themselves. For a possible scenario, when the surge capacitors fail, there are still the primary generators, then the backup generators, then the tertiary generators and the plasma expansion discharger, then the EPS surge loops and backfeed buffers... To say that a system like that would be a single failure point would be akin to saying that AEGIS is a single failure point for the Ticonderoga class.
Modern tank drivers generally don't wear steel-plate armor and carry swords for the sake of "layering" in passive and active protection, either... At some point, one should give up those defensive technologies that give diminishing returns, and concentrate on those that work.
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
Printer-friendly view of this topic
