www.ditl.org

With out the Negh'Vars their ability to take on planets and stations is severly reduced.

Very true as it would take as many as 5 vorcha's to equal the firepower of the Negh'vars forward weapons. I wonder what type of defensive systems Earth has. They were good enough to take on a fleet of breen ships. Those kinds of weapons would seem to be a smart basis on which something like the Negh was built.

It is unfortunate that we never saw Earth's defenses. Since it is so important, many here have argued TOO important for one planet, you'd figure it'd be heavily fortified. It'd have been interesting to see what kind of orbital defense platforms might be above Earth. Breen ships are so weakly shielded that they shouldn't have posed too big a challenge to an Earth that is as fortified as I'm suggesting (they did seem to get blown away pretty easily in battle scenes). Martok did mention that even the Klingons would think twice before attacking Earth, which could be taken to mean that the defenses are a strong deterrent.

The handful of Borg attacks on Earth would have been a good opportunity to see such defenses in action, but I suppose the producers didn't have a budget for creating orbital bases of a type never seen on-screen before. Even Spacedock could conceivably carry a huge arsenal!

As to the Negh'Var, it seems to be the only ship in the aplha quadrant designed to take out stations or planetary defenses (that we've seen, at least). I've always thought that Starfleet could have designed or modified the navigational deflectors of it's ships to do what Geordi rigged it to do in "BOBW," and give any ship that could be so modified a superphaser on the cheap. Then a Sov so modified would have an answer to the Mark-18's. Unfortunately, we've seen no evidence that the writers thought this way, though we've never seen a starfleet ship used in the role the Negh'Var was in "Way of the Warrior." DS9 was the most militant of the series and we've never had occasion to see starfleet attack an enemy station.

A starbase's weapons must be amazing as I have never heard of one being destroyed! And you're right on the money that even the Klingons wouldn't want to attack earth and that says something! Earth must have a truly massive amount of defensive systems!

I think it's a bit contrary to Starfleet's philosophy to design a weapon primarily for "air-to-surface" use, as it were. I'm not saying I agree with it; Starfleet has a lot of "philosophies" which make absolutely no sense, but which seem to dictate their policies in a lot of different fields.

A bunch of smaller guns like a Vorcha does not equal the hitting power of a big gun like the Negh'var. A million BB guns would do nothing to a tank but drive the people inside insane with the tinging noise, yet one RPG could blow it up.

It's a question of purpose. If you're attacking a fixed installation a/o landing troops, nothing beats a Negh'Var. For ship-to-ship combat, You can certainly substitute a few Vor'chas and make out in the deal.

Captain Picard's Hair wrote:It is unfortunate that we never saw Earth's defenses. Since it is so important, many here have argued TOO important for one planet, you'd figure it'd be heavily fortified.

That would indeed be logical. Unfortunately we've seen Earth several times during various series runs, and we've never heard so much as a peep about orbital defences. The best examples are probably "Homefront" and "Past Tense", when it would have been logical to mention any orbital platforms that existed. Nothing. The conclusion must be that Martok was refering to the difficulty of reaching Earth without being intercepted, not the defences of the planet itself.

Why do they have to be orbital. The range of phasers is enough to fire from the surface up into orbit. Maybe they just have ground based phasers for defence.

I was rather disappointed with what we saw of the Breen attack of Earth in "The Changing face of Evil," Martok's comment aside. Particularly, I was alarmed that it was possible for the Breen to inflict so much damage on the surface before their fleet was wiped out. Personally, I'd have envisioned shields that protect areas like Starfleet HQ and the other sensitive targets on the planet. The episode to me demonstrated an Earth with weaker defenses than a planet of it's importance should have.

The lack of shields isn't an issue of poor defences so much as capability - their surface shielding isn't good. In "Lessons", it was shown that it can withstand a firestorm, let alone nuclear-scale bombardment. It's probably something to do with interaction between the shield and the ground that prevents them from having surface defences as good as their starships.

Hmmm. There are obvious plot-driven reasons for that out-of-universe in that episode, but in-universe it is a problem for Starfleet. I guess this is what can happen to military technology in a series with the ethos of TNG.

At least in 'Endgame' they had sorted their act out - 28 ships [top of the line ones, too] were at Earth all in a moments notice.

Captain Picard's Hair wrote:Particularly, I was alarmed that it was possible for the Breen to inflict so much damage on the surface before their fleet was wiped out.

Much damage? They destroyed the Golden Gate bridge and damaged a few buildings. You'd expect a lot more damage from ships with megaton-level torpedoes and beam weapons with output in dozens of thousands of terawatts. This clearly implies at least a theatre shield of some kind, because such a small amount of damage could only be caused by leaks.

That makes sense, but the huge lack of defensive armament is a little troublesome, for a core world that has been claimed to be of such importance to the UFP.