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Captain Seafort wrote:

m52nickerson wrote:Even when going for that big one shot hit you would still have to come within range of your enemies weapons.

So what? You'd be cloaked, so your opponent would have no way of knowing where you were. Unless you just wallowed around within spitting distance firing a continuous stream of tracer.

...but remember that the Enterprise could not track the Scimitar by its incoming fire.

Take a supporting wall. If you put a large hole in that wall you probably will not buckle the entire thing. Most of the wall is still intact. One the other had if you continually put small holes in that wall you will weaken its overall straight and possibly cause it to fail. Yes I know a wall in not exactly equivalent to a shield, but it that best way I can explain were I'm going.

The biggest problem with the theory is that shields, unlike walls, regenerate.

Assume you have a shield with a capacity of 5 MJ and a recharge rate of 1 MW. Firing a 1 MJ shot every second would be a waste of time - the shield would recharge at the same rate as it was being depleted. If, however, you fired a 6 MJ shot every six seconds, you'd require no more power, but you'd knock out your opponent's shields and have enough energy left over to damage the ship itself. This is a pretty simplistic example, but I think it make the point.

m52nickerson wrote:

Mikey wrote:Stitch makes a good point, but there's the issue with an isolated tactical analysis of the Scimitar - it's capabilities can never be seen separate from Shinzon's incompetence.

Or the fact that he had to try to take Picard instead of just destroying the ship.

m52nickerson wrote:...he still had him and would have succeeded if it were not for Data impersonating B-4.

m52nickerson wrote:...but remember that the Enterprise could not track the Scimitar by its incoming fire.

....but if the those shields were just one MJ stonger the affects would be nil. Now if each successive hit caused slightly more damage because of the disturbance caused the last shot your cumulative damage would be multiplied. Please see the example I gave to Rochey. It would be like the difference between taking a hit while braced for it, or taking the same hit while unprepared.

Cloaking the movements of the wings could be one reason that multiple smaller cloaking devises were used.

Do you think the thelaron generator would give off more energy then the singularities used to power Warbirds? To me it seems that if at all possible allowing the Scimitar to charge and fire the thelaron weapon would be a top priority. That way it could sneak right up to an enemy, planet or ship, and take it out no fuss no muss. It might have even been that the designers designed that ship to do this then later discovered that the conventional weapons could also be used while cloaked, whether that was 6 weapons or a portion of 52.

All that may be true for a one on one situation, but against multiple enemies that steadily becomes harder.

....and we don't see a lot of super large heavy weapons in Trek. Most of the ships carry numbers of smaller weapons. Just like anything else each would have a place.

his is why a wall was a bad example. A shield is more fluid. Maybe a better example is in fighting, as in Boxing or MMA. If you are a very heavy handed fighter but slow, you have to get that one punch knock out. If you hit your opponent and don't knock him out he may be able to recover and block the next punch. Yes you do some damage, but he is still standing. Now if you are quicker, but not a powerful you can connect with a decent punch then follow it up with an even better one because your opponent can recover even a little bit, and so on until you get your knock out.

So each successive hit on the shields would cause more of a reduction in the shields straight. Lets say 5 disruptors hitting a shield at the same time would reduce that shield 5%. No if the same 5 disruptors hit the shield one at a time, the first doing 1%, then the next 1.2%, 1.4%, 1.6% and 1.8% the total reduction would be 7% reduction in shield straight.

Tsukiyumi wrote:

m52nickerson wrote:...he still had him and would have succeeded if it were not for Data impersonating B-4.

Except that wouldn't have worked if he'd just captured all of them at the first meeting.

Captain Seafort wrote:

m52nickerson wrote:...but remember that the Enterprise could not track the Scimitar by its incoming fire.

Then how exactly do you explain the pasting the Scimitar got even before Troi's mind trick? Either the E-E and the Romulans were tracking it despite the cloak, or they were extrapolating its position some other way.

They were tracking it through the impacts of there phasers with the scimitars shields. It was stated that they could not tract were the Scimitar was by it's incoming fire. Picard ordered a full sweep of the area with the phasers and to then fire the torpedoes at any impact. Later when the Romulans showed up Worf was ordered to coordinates with the other tactical officers and give them coordinated of those impacts. Once the ship was found they could track it by continuously hitting it. The Enterprise only really lost the scimitar again after the two Romulan ships were disabled and they lost that constant fire. That is when Troy had to help find the ship.

....but if the those shields were just one MJ stonger the affects would be nil. Now if each successive hit caused slightly more damage because of the disturbance caused the last shot your cumulative damage would be multiplied. Please see the example I gave to Rochey. It would be like the difference between taking a hit while braced for it, or taking the same hit while unprepared.

The power output of the two alternatives I suggested were identical. Even if those shields' capacity were, say, 6.5 MJ, there will be weaker ships out there that will be destroyed by a single 6 MJ volley. Strip away your opponent's escorts and you leave his ship vulnerable. Use the heavies to strip away most of the shielding, then send in light forces to chip away at it or go in for the kill. Moreover, the example I gave was extremely simplistic, to make the point. In the event, the fact that ships always suffer damage before their shields collapse shows that a fraction of a weapon's energy must bleed through. The more powerful the weapon, the more powerful the bleed through.

Rochey wrote:

Cloaking the movements of the wings could be one reason that multiple smaller cloaking devises were used.

Quite possible.

Do you think the thelaron generator would give off more energy then the singularities used to power Warbirds? To me it seems that if at all possible allowing the Scimitar to charge and fire the thelaron weapon would be a top priority. That way it could sneak right up to an enemy, planet or ship, and take it out no fuss no muss. It might have even been that the designers designed that ship to do this then later discovered that the conventional weapons could also be used while cloaked, whether that was 6 weapons or a portion of 52.

Given the Romulans have decades, if not centuries, of experience hiding emissions from their quantum singularities, while the thelaron weapon is brand new, I don't think it'd be perfectly cloakable. Particularly when you consider the sheer amount of power it would take to force radiation through space across the entire surface of a planet in lethal doses. At the very least, it's going to alert everyone in the system the second it fires.

Oh your right about that there is no doubt it would be noticed when fired, but at that point it would be two late. I guess it comes down to do different energy sources require different cloaking methods.

All that may be true for a one on one situation, but against multiple enemies that steadily becomes harder.

Space is big. Very very big. Anyone with an ounce of tactical sense could slip through an entire fleet undetected while picking off ships here and there.

Unless those ships were laying down screens of fire looking for a hit.

....and we don't see a lot of super large heavy weapons in Trek. Most of the ships carry numbers of smaller weapons. Just like anything else each would have a place.

That's due more to the expense and power requirements of such weapons than some effect with the shields. To power something like the phaser lance would take an ungodly amount of energy. Not all ships can provide that much power. There's also the fact that you need to cover all angles of aproach to your ship. Having one big super-gun that can kill anything in one hit is useless if it can only fire forward. It'd be far smarter to instead have (say) six guns 1/6th the power to cover all angles of the ship and reduce blindspots.

I agree.

his is why a wall was a bad example. A shield is more fluid. Maybe a better example is in fighting, as in Boxing or MMA. If you are a very heavy handed fighter but slow, you have to get that one punch knock out. If you hit your opponent and don't knock him out he may be able to recover and block the next punch. Yes you do some damage, but he is still standing. Now if you are quicker, but not a powerful you can connect with a decent punch then follow it up with an even better one because your opponent can recover even a little bit, and so on until you get your knock out.

So each successive hit on the shields would cause more of a reduction in the shields straight. Lets say 5 disruptors hitting a shield at the same time would reduce that shield 5%. No if the same 5 disruptors hit the shield one at a time, the first doing 1%, then the next 1.2%, 1.4%, 1.6% and 1.8% the total reduction would be 7% reduction in shield straight.

And have you any proof of this effect? It's never been seen or mentioned in any episode.

Oh your right about that there is no doubt it would be noticed when fired, but at that point it would be two late. I guess it comes down to do different energy sources require different cloaking methods.

Unless those ships were laying down screens of fire looking for a hit.

That is why I brought up the Prometheus. Its design let the ship put more firepower more constantly on an enemy. This is perhaps why that ship was designed to separate and not just designed with larger weapons. Also look at the Defiant's pulse phasers. This could be why those weapons are so effective, each small bust does more and more damage. I will admit other then those examples it is only a hypothesis.

Rochey wrote:

Oh your right about that there is no doubt it would be noticed when fired, but at that point it would be two late. I guess it comes down to do different energy sources require different cloaking methods.

Even if (emphasis on the "if") they could only detect it when it had fired, that'd still require the Scimitar to be able to defend itself if discovered. If it was found and destroyed, that'd be a massive amount of resources and money wasted.

We know it did. Whether it be the 52 stated or the 6 or so seen it did have the means to defend it self if it could not imedatly warp away after firing. The alternative would have the Scimitar fighting off any defences around a planet before decloaking and firing the thelaron weapon.

Unless those ships were laying down screens of fire looking for a hit.

Then pull out of weapons range and wait until they stop firing. They can't keep firing like that indefinitely, as the E-E showed, and with a fleet of ships they wouldn't be just firing randomly (otherwise there'd be the danger of hitting their own ships).

No but they could cordinate there fire to cover a large area. Plus with multiple ships once the Scimitar was hit only a couple of ships have to keep hitting it to continue to trake it.

That is why I brought up the Prometheus. Its design let the ship put more firepower more constantly on an enemy. This is perhaps why that ship was designed to separate and not just designed with larger weapons. Also look at the Defiant's pulse phasers. This could be why those weapons are so effective, each small bust does more and more damage. I will admit other then those examples it is only a hypothesis.

The pulse phasers may just put out more energy per pulse than a continous beam over a certain amount of time. It doesn't require some weird shield effect to work.
As for the Prometheus, the ship was designed to seperate into three parts. Ergo, it would need three times as many weapons on it as other ships to ensure that each section could be effective in combat. Again, no weird effect with shields is required.