Earth planetary defenses

[The Squire of Gothos]

IIRC, my old copy of the Star Trek technical manual rates phasers all the way from the hand held devices up to ship based weaponry. Phasers for planetary defence were rated 10X, which I guess meant off the scale.

As Doctor Strangelove noted, if you're not going to move your weapon, you don't need to worry about how big it is. Doubtless there'd be very discrete looking, but horribly powerful devices dotted over Earth and the Moon. No need to worry about a power plant sharing power between engines and lifesupport, just a phaser bank with a large power source for it and nothing else.

 

[SoM]

You'd think the atmopshere would be relevant though - not just because it would blunt the beam, but because you wouldn't want to be doing horrible things to your atmosphere, even inadvertently.

As a result, I'd expect that most or all of the defences would be in/on orbit emplacements and the Moon, rather than ground-based.

 

[T'Girl]

You'd think the atmopshere would be relevant though - not just because it would blunt the beam, but because you wouldn't want to be doing horrible things to your atmosphere, even inadvertently.

A energy beam weapon capable of impacting a small target like a ship hundreds of thousands or millions of kilometers away wouldn't be bothered by a hundred kilometer deep atmosphere. The phaser beam might ionize the atmosphere directly in it's pathway and result in some localized thermo effects. But faced with the alternatives between foreign attack and polluting your own atmosphere, fuck the environment.

A angular confinement beam used during the brief time period the beam passes through the atmosphere would solve a lot of the problems.

 

[Maurice]

In TMP, Uhura states that V'Ger has disabled the planetary defenses. I don't remember the exact line, but she does make a statement to that effect. So, in or around 2270, Earth did have planet based defenses.

CHEKOV: All planetary defense systems have just gone inoperative!

 

[nx1701g]

I know that they're not canon, but some of the novels suggest that Earth has an orbital defense grid including weapons platforms similar to those used by the Cardassians and ground based defense systems.

 

[Omega_Glory]

In TMP, Uhura states that V'Ger has disabled the planetary defenses. I don't remember the exact line, but she does make a statement to that effect. So, in or around 2270, Earth did have planet based defenses.

CHEKOV: All planetary defense systems have just gone inoperative!

Well, I knew it was someone.

 

[Timo]

Atmospheres do stop phaser-like rayguns when they are thick enough (see VOY "Extreme Risk"). But thick enough means tens of thousands of kilometers of gas. And we have never seen much in the way of pressure or heat waves or devastating whirlwinds when starships rain destruction through the atmosphere from above; beams firing in the opposite direction might not be all that harmful, then, either.

The problem with firing past the horizon is relevant, though, so satellite-based gunnery emplacements might be preferable for reasons of economy alone. They'd also be less of an incentive for the polite enemy to fire at surface installations such as cities; the enemy might choose to only (attempt to) destroy the defensive sats, then threaten with firing at the surface if Earth didn't comply. This wouldn't happen if the defensive weapons were on the surface...

Defensive satellites would probably be stealthy rather than (or in addition to) being thickly armored. So it would only be natural that we never saw any of those on Earth orbit. Indeed, it would be simple enough to place a million starships about a thousand kilometers above Earth so that not a single one would be in camera view... Especially if said ships were painted black. Something like ten thousand phasersats would fit there quite invisibly, then.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Maurice]

...it would be simple enough to place a million starships...

"Simple" and "a million starships" don't exactly go together.

 

[Timo]

Well, assume a million starships. That's how one simplifies problems in science.

Wizards conjure things into existence. But they need a pointy hat and a wand for that. Scientists only need that special word.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Herbert1]

You would think that Earth and the core worlds of the Federation would be much better protected, but if they were it would eliminate the plots of most of the Star Trek motion pictures of the Earth being in jeopardy needing to be saved at the last minute by the USS Enterprise and our heroes.

So in the interest of story telling possibilities, I imagine that planetary defenses are intentionally kept wimpy or the bulk of the defense duties for Earth and the core worlds is the responsibility of starships that are usually engaged elsewhere and are out of interception range.

 

[Timo]

To be sure, all the enemies that have actually threatened Earth have been "supervillains" of sorts: V'Ger, the Whale Probe, the Borg.

Defenses need not be wimpy in order to succumb to such a villain; indeed, ST:TMP tries to impress us with dialogue about how tough V'Ger is (it can shut down Earth's defenses!) while ST4:TVH can actually afford to show us how tough the Whale Probe is (it kills a starship on screen without breaking a sweat, and then dialogue adds half a dozen other victims), and "BoBW" gives us the best dialogue-effects combo TV money could buy back then (a bit thin on the effects side, perhaps, but they already gave us Wolf 359 earlier in the ep!).

A "conventional" enemy only poses a threat to Earth in a single plotline: the Breen attack manages to pockmark San Francisco, but is repelled otherwise, and the attacker doesn't survive. That's sort of acceptable, as it's supposed to be a Pearl Harbor analogy about surprise attacks and propaganda tricks, without implying that Pearl Harbor was lacking in defenses.

We never see starships gloating over the Breen wreckage, interestingly enough. Perhaps the attack was repelled without the help of starships?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[USS Jack Riley]

You would think that Earth and the core worlds of the Federation would be much better protected, but if they were it would eliminate the plots of most of the Star Trek motion pictures of the Earth being in jeopardy needing to be saved at the last minute by the USS Enterprise and our heroes.

So in the interest of story telling possibilities, I imagine that planetary defenses are intentionally kept wimpy or the bulk of the defense duties for Earth and the core worlds is the responsibility of starships that are usually engaged elsewhere and are out of interception range.

Perhaps Starfleet has decided that its best defense is forward deployment. It doesn't matter than it doesn't work, they are just stuck in that "we're here to study and not to destroy" mode.

 

[Timo]

So far, we lack evidence that starships would be a good way to defend a planet against starships. We've never seen it happen, after all.

We've seen space fortresses almost stop a starship invasion, until our heroes figured out a way to shut down those fortresses. We've seen our heroes consider an attack against such fortresses plus starships (around Cardassia) costly to the extreme, even when they did not hesitate to attack just the starships a few moments before. We haven't seen a bunch of starships successfully defend a planet (unless one counts ST:FC where Picard defeated the Borg solely through the use of inside information).

In contrast, we have seen a bunch of starships more or less successfully stop an invasion by meeting the enemy in deep space, far away from the enemy's target planet. Cardassians stopped the Klingons in "Way of the Warrior"; the Dominion almost stopped the Feds and the Klingons in "Sacrifice of Angels"; Starfleet was convinced that stopping the Borg would best be done with a fleet of ships positioned at Wolf 359, not next to Earth's possible (or Jupiter's confirmed!) fortresses.

Possibly it's hopeless to keep the enemy from scoring goals with weapons of mass destruction if the defender plays goalie with a few hundred starships clustered around the target planet. But the defender might intercept the enemy outside the range of the enemy's WMDs. The enemy might try and run around the defenses at warp, but that would lead to a warp chase battle where ships seem to be surprisingly vulnerable to being forced out of warp. So delivering a WMD by doing a dash would be less likely to succeed than delivering it by proceeding into the defender's star system, meeting the defender there, and then firing the weapon past the defender.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

You would think that Earth and the core worlds of the Federation would be much better protected

I wouldn't, not during peacetime, and not in the absence of an immanent threat.

Picture this: even on a Cold War footing, U.S. air defenses were localized in a handful of strategically positioned missile batteries and air bases that most people barely knew existed. In the absence of the Soviet Union, we now make due with the far more mobile Patriot system, whose many missile batteries are usually sitting in a bunker somewhere waiting for a reason to be deployed.

Similar example: during the Vietnam War, Hanoi had some of the most formidable air defenses in history, with rings anti-aircraft missiles and gunnery thick enough to shoot down a bird of prey. These days those missile batteries are virtually non-existent; when you're not expecting to be bombed by a flight of A-6s three times a day, the cost of maintaining them just doesn't seem justifiable.

So I figure that during times of, say, Dominion War or possible threat from the Borg those defenses would be signifigantly bolstered as more batteries/systems are brought online. But not "just because," and definitely not for the sheer reasoning of keeping the "core worlds" protected.

 

[Timo]

Then again, no nation on Earth is capable of a complete surprise attack. There'd be signs of preparing for war at the border if peacetime were to turn into an invasion - signs it would be impossible to miss, probably months but possibly years in advance.

The situation in Trek is a bit different. A powerful enemy might invade with perhaps less than a day of warning - the Whale Probe appeared to be that fast (or to be coming from a suitable direction, perhaps through the Romulan Neutral Zone which may sit relatively close to Earth), and the Borg and V'Ger only gave less than a week of warning as well. There might be no such thing as "peace" in Trek, even if one ignores certain bolsterous Klingon Ambassadors.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Then again, no nation on Earth is capable of a complete surprise attack. There'd be signs of preparing for war at the border if peacetime were to turn into an invasion - signs it would be impossible to miss, probably months but possibly years in advance.

Only if you preclude the possibility of one nation just out-of-the-blue deciding to invade another nation, which we usually do, because (fortunately) comic book villains rarely become active heads of state. If, on the other hand, Doctor Doom suddenly became the president of China, a sudden cruise missile attack against Washington D.C. could be carried out with little or no warning and no time to activate the patriot batteries needed to defend the capitol.

Now, if we lived in a solar system where every other planet was inhabitted and those aliens occasionally decide to invade other planets for reasons that make sense only to them, the situation would be a TAD more comparable to the Trek situation. The situation in the case of, say, War of the Worlds is analogous to the Borg invasion in that nobody really knew for sure that the Borg were coming until they were already there, and by then it was a rolling juggernaut heading straight for ground zero.

I think we can take for granted that invasions and full-scale wars usually follow specific types of situations and precursors and rarely happen out of the blue. Even the Dominion didn't immediately send an Armada storming through the wormhole to surprise attack Earth, they spent a couple of years screwing around, gathering intelligence, cozying up to the Cardassians and undermining the Obsidian Order and the Tal'Shiar first.

 

[Timo]

If, on the other hand, Doctor Doom suddenly became the president of China, a sudden cruise missile attack against Washington D.C. could be carried out with little or no warning and no time to activate the patriot batteries needed to defend the capitol.

Not really, as China doesn't have cruise missiles with intercontinental range (nobody does), and doesn't have launch positions for shorter-ranged weapons. Creating those launch positions would take at least a month (activating and sailing a sub or a ship) and would be quite observable. Moreover, China is a known armed opponent, so there are some preparations in place against it anyway; Starfleet would constantly have known armed opponents, too, and most of them in a greater state of readiness than China can maintain.

It's a separate issue whether cruise missiles could be defended against at all. Patriots aren't particularly good for the job, and locating, intercepting and shooting down each of the buggers with aircraft is a defensive strategy that is easily saturated... Thankfully, Star Trek doesn't seem to have comparable weapons; our one example of an interstellar missile in "Dreadnought" was no faster or stealthier than a starship, and was vulnerable to the same countermeasures. The putative cloaked Maquis missiles would have required more detection finesse, but again would supposedly have been comparable to starships in terms of "how do we shoot them down?".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[publiusr]

Surface fortifications would be the first targeted. A planet would have weapons on all sides, so an invading task force concentrates fire, a single target at a time, on nearest land/orbit based batteries. Warp under the orbital batteries, and a planets own orbital defenses might hit the planet and not the ship.

Now the Dominion-enhanced Cardassion weapon platforms are very powerful with planet-based energy beamed directly to whatever orbiting weapon was closest to a ship--thus almost turning the tide.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

If, on the other hand, Doctor Doom suddenly became the president of China, a sudden cruise missile attack against Washington D.C. could be carried out with little or no warning and no time to activate the patriot batteries needed to defend the capitol.

Not really, as China doesn't have cruise missiles with intercontinental range (nobody does)

But they do have plenty of submarines that could sneak up and launch them. Assuming Doctor Doom doesn't do broadcast alot of militant rhetoric or make an announcement declaring his intentions, he could easily put those boats in position before anyone suspected there was a reason to beef up defenses.

Thankfully, Star Trek doesn't seem to have comparable weapons; our one example of an interstellar missile in "Dreadnought" was no faster or stealthier than a starship, and was vulnerable to the same countermeasures.

In the same way a cruise missile is no faster than a conventional aircraft and is also vulnerable to the same countermeasures.

Presumably, the interesting thing about Dreadnaught is that it isn't vulnerable to the sort of countermeasures that would normally defend against phasers and photon torpedoes. More than likely this would render it immune to all of the NORMAL planetary defenses (System Five disruptors and whatnot) and would require a fairly powerful starship to intercept it.

Only thing is, Dreadnaught isn't cruise-missile sized, so that rules it out too.

 

[Timo]

China doesn't have the means to secretly deploy its submarines; there are no swim-out submarine pens in old Soviet style that would prevent US sats from spotting a deployment, and "routine patrol" is not a Chinese deployment mode at present. So basically, we have some elements of Star Trek's stealth applying to our naval warfare, but they are less effective and suffer from "associated vulnerabilities" that Trek ignores.

The same is more or less true of cruise missile warfare: the technological means to shoot them down exist in theory, but a saturation attack could easily be mounted, or an attack could be launched where there are no defenses and no real way of deploying them. In Trek, if a defensive technology exists, the ability to overwhelm or circumvent it is typically glossed over.

As for the Dreadnought, its size relationship to starships appears more or less the same as the relationship of a cruise missile to those aircraft that are intended to shoot it down... And while the episode hinged on the idea that the Strangelove-style Bomb was nigh-unstoppable and had to be pampered and deceived rather than outright destroyed, I can't believe the weapon would have been the match of standard Alpha Quadrant system defenses. Had it been, the balance of warfare back in Alpha would have been quite different. Rather, it was the shortcomings of the Delta Quadrant system defenses, combined with the shortcomings of Janeway's own private Starfleet Delta Annex, that led to the plot complication...

Timo Saloniemi