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GrahamKennedy wrote: As for the Stukas. Remember the aliens were building weapons to help the germans win the war - or to serve their own purposes, in fighting off Earth foes. They had them in mind as ground attack units, most likely, and the Stuka was pretty good at that in its day. Then they find themselves up against a Starship. I'm sure they would have loved to have some ME-109s to send. Hell I'm sure they would have loved to have a clutch of F-22s on hand. But they hadn't known they would be in this battle so they didn't have them. They went with what they did have.

Yep. I'd agree with you. Remember that these plasma weapons, while really advanced, are pretty bulky. I chalk that up to the fact that you can't run a plasma cannon off of your average internal combustion engine! So the weapons had to carry their own power supplies, obviously.

If you put such a bulky weapon on an ME-109, for example, you would probably lose a lot of the maneuverability/speed that a fighter needs to be effective, simply due to the bulky, non-aerodynamic thingy hanging off of the wing. So what they would gain in firepower, they'd probably lose in the ability to actually bring it to bear. Remember that their "expected" targets are allied fighters/bombers. Yes, bombers would be easy to hit, but not before breaking through the screen of aforementioned fighters.

So it would make sense to start the upgrades with something already slow and which doesn't need a lot of maneuverability to hit its targets. Hence the choice of first upgrading the Stuka. At any rate, whether by design choices, required sensor resolution, or damage, Enterprise was floating around like a Zeppelin, so the Stukas almost worked even though they were completely unprepared to really engage a starship

GrahamKennedy wrote: As for the Stukas. Remember the aliens were building weapons to help the germans win the war - or to serve their own purposes, in fighting off Earth foes. They had them in mind as ground attack units, most likely, and the Stuka was pretty good at that in its day. Then they find themselves up against a Starship. I'm sure they would have loved to have some ME-109s to send. Hell I'm sure they would have loved to have a clutch of F-22s on hand. But they hadn't known they would be in this battle so they didn't have them. They went with what they did have.

But that doesn't change the fact that Stukas would have been simply unable to intercept anything. The Stukas depicted on screen are JU-87 A/B models, meaning a top speed of 386 km/h, though we don't know how heavy the cannon pod are. They have no agility, their climb rate is poorer than my mother's old Volvo, and it takes them a while to even get up to full speed!

It doesn't matter if they were ordered to intercept Enterprise; unless they were either stationed immediately adjacent to the facility or were already flying above it they would not have been able to get there in time. Even if they were able to, they would not have been able to engage in aerial combat.

I can't quite remember that episode too well, how much advance warning did the aliens have? It could be that the Stukas were the only aircraft nearby and they just had to make do.
They might also have been the only things capable of hurting the NX.

The aliens may have had a few of them on station to protect their facility, too. Remember Enterprise was flying SO slow that pretty much anything would have caught it, even a Stuka, (but you're right, we are assuming they were already on station to protect the facility) Also, thankfully for the aliens, the Enterprise is a big target at the ranges that we saw in the episode, and it didn't do awful much to evade them. Besides, in the air Enterprise is not in her element. She could run circles around the Stukas if they could magically work in open space, but for whatever reason, at that one instance, your mother's Volvo probably could have maneuvered better in the atmosphere than Enterprise did. It was hardly aerial combat, think more like attacking a big tank that's flying through the air like a brick.

A nice thought. "Enterprise flies like a brick"
Wait 150 years and tell it to Archer.

DBS wrote:The aliens may have had a few of them on station to protect their facility, too. Remember Enterprise was flying SO slow that pretty much anything would have caught it, even a Stuka, (but you're right, we are assuming they were already on station to protect the facility) Also, thankfully for the aliens, the Enterprise is a big target at the ranges that we saw in the episode, and it didn't do awful much to evade them. Besides, in the air Enterprise is not in her element. She could run circles around the Stukas if they could magically work in open space, but for whatever reason, at that one instance, your mother's Volvo probably could have maneuvered better in the atmosphere than Enterprise did. It was hardly aerial combat, think more like attacking a big tank that's flying through the air like a brick.

I don't buy that. There's no way the Enterprise could not have maneuvered in an atmosphere, even at dense lower altitudes. She's a ship that is capable of pulling hairpin turns at impulse, and in the process withstand several thousand g-forces (at least) even while heavily damaged. I find it difficult to believe that such a ship can't withstand 10 or 15 g-forces in an atmosphere. Nothing changes. If anything, less engine output would be required because Enterprise has all sorts of surfaces that could generate lift.

Which is why I wonder why they couldn't have simply flown at 5,000km/h or more, decelerate for a few seconds to toast the facility, and then accelerate back to 5,000km/h again. She is certainly capable of withstanding the g's.

She's a ship that is capable of pulling hairpin turns at impulse,

I think 'hairpin' might be overstating it a little. More like a slow gracefull curve.

And yes, there is no reason the Enterprise could not have outrun them. Thank the writters for giving us that bit of stupidity.

I Am Spartacus wrote:
I don't buy that. There's no way the Enterprise could not have maneuvered in an atmosphere, even at dense lower altitudes. She's a ship that is capable of pulling hairpin turns at impulse, and in the process withstand several thousand g-forces (at least) even while heavily damaged. I find it difficult to believe that such a ship can't withstand 10 or 15 g-forces in an atmosphere. Nothing changes. If anything, less engine output would be required because Enterprise has all sorts of surfaces that could generate lift.

Which is why I wonder why they couldn't have simply flown at 5,000km/h or more, decelerate for a few seconds to toast the facility, and then accelerate back to 5,000km/h again. She is certainly capable of withstanding the g's.

I agree with you in principle. The Enterprise was obviously going faster than that when she first entered the atmosphere, and no doubt her maneuverability should have kept her out of trouble.

But she didn't.

Speculation so far has been that it had something to do with the damage she had sustained. (of course then how could it enter the atmosphere at all?). There could also be something to do with the possibility that impulse engines might damage the environment, (I know that is not ever mentioned, but it might have been a big concern for them since they were flying over New York!). Limited to maneuvering thrusters, I could see performance being limited in the atmosphere. A further possibility might be that the targeting sensors would be unable to resolve the target with the accompanying turbulence at high speed. One would think they should be able to, but that might have something to do with the aforementioned damage (or the re-entry)?

Yes, the Enterprise has performance characteristics that should have made ANY aircraft of the 20th century (or even today) utterly unable to touch it, even with alien weapons! But because of the way it was flying, even Stukas were able to catch it and attack it!

I leave the reason for this discrepancy as an exercise for the fan.

Alright, we'll just write this up as a YATI and move on.

Too late! You started this.

The Bf-109 (When those planes were built, it was Bayeurische Fleugzugwerke, not Messerschmidt) was one of the top air-to-air combat planes of WWII, but was just not capable of mounting anything as large and heavy as the cannons on the Stukas looked. Any Luftwaffe plane of the time capable of mounting those weapons would have been similarly out of its role - the Ju-88, et.al.

JU-88 was a multirole plane that was used in the fighter role. There were plenty of others as well: ME-110, ME-410, HE-219, FW-187, et al. Later models of the ME-109 had a maximum take off weight of up to 7400 kg, though discussion of such is pointless since we don't know the weight of the cannon. It is, however, safe to say that a ME-109 could have mounted one of the cannon along the centreline hardpoint, though with an appreciable loss of agility and speed if only due to the added drag.

It would still have been more capable of air to air combat than a JU-87B, though, which had actually been retired by the time the episodes took place.

But it's already been established that the writers chose the Stuka because they thought it looked cool and that no one would bother to point out the obvious stupidity of it.

You could perhaps be charitable and assume that somebody knew about the Stuka's tankbuster role and mounted the cannon in the same place as the genuine 37mm guns - the 109 only ever carried 20mm cannon.

#1 - It could be possible that the plasma cannon was originally intended as an air-to-surface weapon, which makes the Stuka the perfect platform.

#2 - We maybe shouldn't focus as much on the capabilities of the Stuka. As a real-world example from the same era, Claire Chennault's Flying Tigers acheived outstanding success exclusively using the P-40 Tomahawk - technically, one of the worst-performing and least reliable fighters of the era.

Does anyone have maybe a YouTube link to the fight scene? To refresh my memory.