Too many ships on the dance floor

[SolkaTruesilver]

Good point, though is there evidence that a shuttle can go that fast? We do know that starships can (well, they've been stated to, I'm not sure about visual evidence), but a shuttle is much smaller, and may not be able to fit the fuel and power requirements for such speeds.

Doesn't Star Trek use mass lighteners toallow theirships better acceleration (and inertial dampeners so the crew survives)?

If so, then a shuttle with high acceleration is actually dropping its mass at the same time. This will reduce the damage delivered, as the higher acceleration has less effective mass to work with.

I.e. a shuttle designer wants their shuttle to accelerate twice as fast. He has to use existing impulse technology. So he quadruples the effect of the mass lightener, giving him double the acceleration. If it hits something, the acceleration is twice as high (meaning 4 times the damage from the Kinetic energy equation), but with 1/4 the mass, that 4* high gets reduced back to 1.

But.. but.. wait a minute, I'm getting confused. You can simply reduce your mass to reach easily high speed, and then restore your mass while not loosing any kinetic energy?

I knew Star Trek science was absurd, but this takes the cake...

[Captain Seafort]

But.. but.. wait a minute, I'm getting confused. You can simply reduce your mass to reach easily high speed, and then restore your mass while not loosing any kinetic energy?

No, his point is that even a ship travelling at high speed would have very little KE.

[Tyyr]

You don't need much mass to have a shit load of kinetic energy. Remember, the squared term in the KE equation is velocity, not mass. Reduce the mass of the .05 shuttle to 1/100th of what it really is and you're down to about a 3 megaton bomb, which will still gouge out a good portion of a city.

In the Trek manuals 0.25c is supposedly chosen to avoid time dilation effects. The sort of "duh" moment is that you have to exceed 0.5c to even start to have noticeable dilation effects and even then we're not talking much that would be hard to adjust to. Also, with their warp drive most starfleet ships don't spend a great deal of time puttering around at full impulse. If they need to go anywhere much more than a few million kilometers they just hit the gas on the warp drive.

[Captain Seafort]

Also, with their warp drive most starfleet ships don't spend a great deal of time puttering around at full impulse. If they need to go anywhere much more than a few million kilometers they just hit the gas on the warp drive.

Try a few billion km. Even in BoBW, when they were chasing the Borg to Earth, the E-D still slowed to impulse outside Saturn's orbit.

[SolkaTruesilver]

You don't need much mass to have a s**t load of kinetic energy. Remember, the squared term in the KE equation is velocity, not mass. Reduce the mass of the .05 shuttle to 1/100th of what it really is and you're down to about a 3 megaton bomb, which will still gouge out a good portion of a city.

But it still is as hard (energy-wise) to get a 10-ton shuttle to reach 6,000 km/h than to make a 100-ton shuttle to reach 1,897 km/h. Both will have the same amount of KE, as you already invested that much energy to accelerate it.

I don't see how diminishing the mass to get more speed gives you a more powerful KE. You can't win.

[Tyyr]

But it still is as hard (energy-wise) to get a 10-ton shuttle to reach 6,000 km/h than to make a 100-ton shuttle to reach 1,897 km/h. Both will have the same amount of KE, as you already invested that much energy to accelerate it.

I don't see how diminishing the mass to get more speed gives you a more powerful KE. You can't win.

Because no one is arguing that.

[SolkaTruesilver]

But it still is as hard (energy-wise) to get a 10-ton shuttle to reach 6,000 km/h than to make a 100-ton shuttle to reach 1,897 km/h. Both will have the same amount of KE, as you already invested that much energy to accelerate it.

I don't see how diminishing the mass to get more speed gives you a more powerful KE. You can't win.

Because no one is arguing that.

Then I am at loss about what is exactly argued here.

[Captain Seafort]

Then I am at loss about what is exactly argued here.

They use mass-lightening to achieve greater acceleration than they'd otherwise be capable of. This means that a ship with a rest mass of (say) 10 tons will only have an effective mass of (again, for example) a few kilos for the purposes of determining the KE of an impact. Therefore the risk of people flitting round teh galaxy in WMDs isn't quite as great as it might first appear.

[SolkaTruesilver]

Then I am at loss about what is exactly argued here.

They use mass-lightening to achieve greater acceleration than they'd otherwise be capable of. This means that a ship with a rest mass of (say) 10 tons will only have an effective mass of (again, for example) a few kilos for the purposes of determining the KE of an impact. Therefore the risk of people flitting round teh galaxy in WMDs isn't quite as great as it might first appear.

Oh, so I was just repeating the points said earlier..

Anyway. I still think it looks pretty expensive to own your own ship, even in Trek. I still think it's like owning a small business, and you NEED an income to make it keep running (or whatever passes as an income in Trekverse).

I don't see how a starship captain would dare accept to crash his possession just as a weapon, when there are much more efficient way of dealing mass destruction.

[Mikey]

Yeah, and I don't see how a person could blow up a bunch of schoolchildren to make a political point... yet, there it is.

[Lighthawk]

Aye, the type of person who would utilize a weapon of mass destruction against civilian targets general isn't the type of person who is in a sane and rational state of mind.

[SolkaTruesilver]

Yeah, and I don't see how a person could blow up a bunch of schoolchildren to make a political point... yet, there it is.

Blowing up schoolchildren isn't very costly to the organisation that cause it. It's an efficient way to spread terror.

Hijacking a 747 to ram it into towers isn't very costly to the organisation that cause the highjacking.

Buying a 747 to ram it into civilian population IS very costly, and said ressource could be better spent elsewhere.

In the case of a hichjacking, it's a short-term situation. It's not an asset "aquired" by the terrorists, it's just a temporary weapon. If you steal a starship, you have it for much longer, and there is much, much better ways to use that asset as a terrorist organisation than waste it blowing up stuff, when you could blow up stuff must less wastely.

The terrorists are fanatics, not crazy. Their leaders are still rational in their crazyness.

[Mikey]

People who murder children or other uninvolved innocents in order to make a political vocalization are irrational, as would be people who expend exorbitant amounts of resources to accomplish such goals.

[Deepcrush]

Mass murder isn't rational, and that won't change no matter how you try to spin it.

[Tyyr]

And you're not talking about buying a 747 to crash into a building. You're talking about buying one to destroy a city or more. And hell, who says you have to buy it? Steal it. The terrorists on 9/11 sure as hell weren't holding the pink slips on those airplanes.