Scimitar vs. Sovereign

[Sionnach Glic]

Were the 27 torpedo launchers mentioned along with the 52 disruptors?

[kostmayer]

Yeah, its when the Scimitar first uncloaks, and Picard orders a tactical analysis of the ship.

[Thorin]

a) He asks for Picard to surrender himself
b) He tells his crew to target weapons systems and shields as he doesn't want the Enterprise destroyed
c) He sends a boarding party to retrieve Picard

can't we just agree that he was holding back, but he was just doing a piss poor job of it?

No, because there was no reason to. He wasn't scared of hurting the E-E (even though the hull impacts showed that all damage was superficial anyway), so why would he hold back until it was actually nearing destruction? He sends a boarding party to get Picard... Right before trying to blow him up. You can still target specific systems and still be going all out - particularly if one of the systems is "shields". I mean come on - how can you NOT hit the shields when they're encompassing the entire ship?!

And regarding aiming for the bridge - he did, it showed a schematic of the E-E on the Scimitar, with the bridge quite literally circled out (though a bullseye would have been preferable )

[Deepcrush]

Picard calls it a "Predator".

Are you kidding? The shields are f***ing epic! I did a run down on the amount of damage the thing took and it was huge. Close to a dozen QT's and literally dozens of phaser and disruptor balsts. NOTHING bar a Borg cube has come close to that sort of damage.

Oh, teaos... we've also seen a Breen ship take four QTs to go BOOM... your epic shields on this wannabe super battleship are about as epic as the crap I took after dinner.

The Scimitar shows classic Romulan features...
Great weapons, Cloak that always seems ahead of what SF is ready for... but, followed by poor shields and armour.

[Mikey]

Yeah, I mentioned somewhere that the shields didn't look like anything more than typical shields scaled up - 'Trek has a long history of "bigger = more powerful," and these shields don't seem to have any technical advantage other than a bigger power plant.

[Deepcrush]

Even with that they don't seem to be able to take the same beating that the Sov took. Dispite the larger power plant.

[Captain Seafort]

Cloak that always seems ahead of what SF is ready for...

That cloak was utter shite - the damn thing was visible as it dropped out of warp.

[Sionnach Glic]

It was also visible when it flew around at some points.
And even better, the shots it fired were perfectly visible. Anyone with a freaking telescope would have been able to perfectly track the Scimitar's course during that battle!

[Deepcrush]

Maybe the Sov just doesn't have a window to use...

That would just be to easy...

[kostmayer]

I was thinking that when I was rewatching the battle. You could detect its position when it fired well enough to hit it with a phaser blast or two. Once that makes it visible, any tracking system worth should be predict its speed and direction.

That said, it was still able to both raise its shields and fire when cloaked - most cloaked ships can't do either.

And I'm not sure you can call its shields weak, it took quite a pounding from the Enterprise.

[Deepcrush]

Yes it does, but seeing its size and the amount of power it must have had, there's no reason why those spaced out hits should have drained a third of its shields. We still get a ship who's shields are under powered for its size.

[mlsnoopy]

You could detect its position when it fired well enough to hit it with a phaser blast or two

I belive that Worf reported that they can detect where it fires from, but can't get a lock.

Once that makes it visible, any tracking system worth should be predict its speed and direction.

Isn't that exactly what they were doing. Some missed but they also got a few direct hits.

[Mikey]

Isn't that exactly what they were doing. Some missed but they also got a few direct hits.

Not quite. What was mentioned here was targetting the Scimitar by tracking the origin of its fire; what the E-E did was fire in sweeping arcs, and seeing where shots actually impacted something.

[katefan]

What I would have liked to have seen was Word and Geordi coming up with ways to counteract a "perfectly" cloaked ship rather than make Worf look like a complete idiot. A good tactical officer comes up with solutions to probelms and he seemed completely unable to form any effective strategy.

Here is one idea; seed space with chaff. Wherever there is a distrubance in the field, that is where the cloaked ship is. Kirk did something similar in Balance of Terror when he was able to track the Romulan ship as it passed through the tail of a comet. Or another idea would have been to employ the anti-cloak pinger used in the Voyager ep. Riddles to find the Ba'Neth Station. It would have been neat to see Worf approach Geordi:

Worf: I have an idea. How much of the Voyager logs have you read?
Geordi: Not much. Why?
Worf: There was an incident with a race known as the Ba'Neth...

Would have made for some nice continuity as well as showing Worf as competent and having a guest appearance that did not make me gag like seeing Janeway with Admiral pips on her collar.

[kostmayer]

What was the episode where Riker buys an alloy or something off a freighter, beams it into space and then blasts it - revealing a cloaked ship that was nearby?

Long range detectors are one thing, but there must be some method of picking up a cloaked ship at close quarters.

I suppose one problem with the Scimitar is that its shields were up whilst cloaked. Other times (as in Star Trek V and VI), the ship is unshielded so once you hit it once, its takes pretty severe damage, and you've a nice big explosion to target.