Why doesn't the federation have weapons platforms?

[Kute]

I'm imagining some big stationary turrets around important planets/starbases capable of shooting hundreds of quantum torpedos a second. I know Borg cubes have power supplies that are almost inexhaustible but if we're imagining ships that can take thousands of torpedoes then it's just silly to hope to defeat them anyways.

that's my biggest problem with star trek tech. the conventional weaponry and dogfighting. put a bunch of quantum torpedos or anti-matter bombs in a shuttlecraft and warp it into the warbird or whatever

Self-preservation will never die, not even in the 24th century

 

[tau136]

That runs totally counter to the Roddenberry ethos & the continually restated & reinforced culture of the Federation. Not only has their leitmotif been peaceful exploration & encounter since 1st & 2nd inceptions (NC1701-D & NX-01) but the very identity of the Federation is bound up in living up to the perception of being a pacifistic conglomeration - realities of the universe notwithstanding.

 

[Timo]

Then again, no other Star Trek civilization uses that sort of weaponry, either. Clearly, it is not technologically viable, or at least one of the evil bad phooie-phooie villains would have it by now.

Obviously, firing more torpedoes or bigger torpedoes would produce a bigger bang. But would that really be helpful? The current number of torpedoes fired is sufficient for dealing with most adversaries - similarly, a nuclear submarine of today doesn't fire a hundred torpedoes at an enemy sub, or a thousand missiles at an enemy city. And the Borg have already shown that they can easily ("Q Who?") adapt to photon torpedoes - which means they have the ability to "adapt" to simple explosive power, thus boding ill for any attempts at using more of that power.

If a hundred torpedoes is the limit of what the Borg can take, then just have ten ships, each firing the usual ten torps. That's a far tougher problem for the Borg than a single super-station, since at the very least it involves defending in ten directions, or firing back at ten targets. And it doesn't inconvenience the Starfleet side nearly as much as the construction of a superweapon would. All the more important because the Borg, well, adapt: any effort spent on superweapons is wasted after the first use of said weapon. But no effort is wasted if one merely improves one's starships, which have multiple uses unrelated to the Borg.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Santaman]

^^I'm a little bit sick and tired about the whole Borg adapt thing, so they're capable of repelling a photon torpedo explosion? hardly anything to adapt to, its antimatter/matter going kboom, so adapt what? Hit them with 1000 times the matter/antimatter and they'll be vaporised, 1000 times not enough? then 10.000 times, at a given level of explosive force there simply isn't anything to adapt to.

As for weapon platforms, all nice and well but they're rather static, just block all trafic from and to the planet and then wait... after a while they'll give up.

 

[Timo]

^I'm a little bit sick and tired about the whole Borg adapt thing, so they're capable of repelling a photon torpedo explosion?

Yeah, we reach...

Perhaps the Borg adapt to photon torpedoes by figuring out how to detonate them at a safe distance? A few dozen meters might make all the difference with vacuum explosions.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[ProtoAvatar]

The borg shields seem able to stop efficiently only a limited range of armaments at a time - but, once they adapted to these armaments, they're practically invulnerable.
Everyone else's shields protect against pretty much everything simultaneously, but against nothing exceptionally well.
Different weapons philosophies - and technologies.

In the case of photon torpedos, the borg adapt, obviously, to gamma radiation.
Perhaps they don't even deflect or absorb it (like everyone else is doing, according to trek lore). Maybe they send the explosion into subspace (borg shields were referred to as 'subspace fields'); maybe they transform this radiation into neutrinos or another harmless particle; etc.

Whatever they're doing, it protects the cube much better than starfleet&co's shields, and it works progressively better as the modulation (ex - exact frequency/ies) of the offensive weapon is more precisely known.

 

[Wingsley]

Lest we forget: the notion of throw-everything-at-em orbital weapons platforms has indeed already been tried to great effect by the Dominion-Cardassian-Breen alliance, perhaps most dramatically shown in the DS9 episodes "The Tears of the Prophets" and "What You Leave Behind". They were indeed effective, but they were by no means fullproof.

 

[Timo]

...Also, the way war is generally fought (or, more importantly, not fought!) in the Trek universe suggests that near-invulnerable fixed fortifications really are a strategically decisive measure taken by every advanced culture. Otherwise, single starships could and would terminate enemy cultures in a heartbeat, a capacity our hero and villain ships have readily demonstrated against primitive adversaries.

Earth planetary defenses are often mentioned even if never seen. If they consist of smallish phaser and torpedo satellites comparable to the Cardassian system, this would only be expected: they'd be way to small to be seen in a random shot, and probably carefully camouflaged in any case.

Since we never see combat on Earth's doorstep outside ST:FC, we might argue that ST:FC was an exception because the furball of starships was already making a difference, and any involvement by the fortifications would have caused blue-on-blue hits but would not have contributed significantly to the victory. In all other combat (such as the unseen fight against the Breen), the forts would rip apart the invading fleets, or then be silenced by godlike superenemies such as V'Ger or the Borg before there was a chance to act.

I still don't see any use for "hundreds of quantum torpedoes per second", though. They'd just end up blowing up each other - if the enemy were to be harmed by torps at all, surely it would be wiser to fire just a few, each of decisive strength, and to saturate the enemy countermeasures by some other method, cheaper than the expenditure of ten thousand q-torps?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Wingsley]

Just keep in mind that Sisko and company were able to defeat the orbital platforms in one major battle by identifying and destroying their central power source. So this kind of defense can be neutralized.

 

[neozeks]

Just keep in mind that Sisko and company were able to defeat the orbital platforms in one major battle by identifying and destroying their central power source. So this kind of defense can be neutralized.

I hope Starfleet is wise enough to provide every platform with it's own power source. The Cardassians were racing against the clock at Chintoka so they took a shortcut by using just one power source but that proved to be their undoing.

Of course, with enough ships every defence can be neutralized.

Since we never see combat on Earth's doorstep outside ST:FC, we might argue that ST:FC was an exception because the furball of starships was already making a difference, and any involvement by the fortifications would have caused blue-on-blue hits but would not have contributed significantly to the victory.

Or the Cube was simply destroyed before it entered the weapons range of the platforms.

 

[ProtoAvatar]

Just keep in mind that Sisko and company were able to defeat the orbital platforms in one major battle by identifying and destroying their central power source. So this kind of defense can be neutralized.

Sisko&co proved incapable to destroy the central power source of the cardassian weapon platforms with their weapons.

They were forced to resort to a technobabble trick (making this generator look like a federation ship in order for the weapon platforms themselves to destroy it).
This trick will NOT work again. Betting that you'll find a new random trick the next time you are up against such weapons is a fool's plan.
And if not for this trickery, the weapon platforms would have annihilated the allied fleet.

 

[Wingsley]

True enough. Just remember the whole key here is the Borg's adaptability. I'll bet it's not fullproof either, so it would be an enormous gamble as to whether such weapons would put the Borg out of action first or if the Borg could hold out long enough to either detect and disable the platforms' power source or to assimilate the platforms. If the platforms were really good, it would still be touch-and-go with the Borg.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Just keep in mind that Sisko and company were able to defeat the orbital platforms in one major battle by identifying and destroying their central power source. So this kind of defense can be neutralized.

Sisko&co proved incapable to destroy the central power source of the cardassian weapon platforms with their weapons.

They were forced to resort to a technobabble trick (making this generator look like a federation ship in order for the weapon platforms themselves to destroy it).
This trick will NOT work again. Betting that you'll find a new random trick the next time you are up against such weapons is a fool's plan.
And if not for this trickery, the weapon platforms would have annihilated the allied fleet.

Techobabble trickery is standard operating procedure for Starfleet. It's a cost saving measure: they can't afford the overhead for special weapons R&D, so they just teach their engineers to McGuyver shit into existence when they need it and then conveniently forget about it when they're done.

I kinda figure that's the whole point of Shelby's presence on the Enterprise. Starfleet was probably training a whole special corps of officers specifically trained to [tech] shit up against the Borg. That tactic has been fairly effective for the past two hundred years; why go through the trouble of developing new tactics and new weapons for a specific enemy when you can just [tech] them to death every other episode?

Anyway, this whole discussion is really just academic. Fixed fortifications will ONLY ever exist as a plot device, nothing more and nothing less. Their capabilities, also, will be strictly given by the needs of plot: Eminar's ground-based disruptors have a shorter range than Enterprise's phasers because Kirk's about to glass their entire planet with General Order 24. Chin'toka's weapons platforms need to be vulnerable to a [tech], so they're vulnerable to a [tech]. Maybe somebody will dream up a "guns of navarone" knockoff and devise a planetary defense system whose one and only weakness is twelve ex-cons and flatulent Klingon; or maybe they'll get cute, and we'll see a planet defended by one massive orbital weapons platform that can only be destroyed by dropping a photon torpedo into a small thermal exhaust port two meters wide...

The in-universe reason is simple technical diversity. There's a million ways to attack a planet and a million ways to defend it: if you can think of a thousand of those ways, you're probably a member of the Q continuum.

 

[Timo]

Or the Cube was simply destroyed before it entered the weapons range of the platforms.

This is possible - visuals suggest that the Cube was no closer to Earth than the Chin'toka fortifications were to that planet.

But that's a bit worrisome. It should be possible to fire phaser beams across such a distance - so what good does it do to tie down the enemy at this distance, if he can still take potshots at your planet from there? Phaser beams can't be intercepted, except by shields; at least with projectile weapons such as photon torpedoes or nukes or poison/disease dispensers or kinetic killers, we could argue that the fortifications would shoot them down no matter where they were fired from...

I guess we have to believe that phaser bombardment from this distance can be protected against. But it was apparently highly devastating in "The Die is Cast", from a distance that appeared even larger (or then the planet was so much smaller that it confuses us).

Fixed fortifications will ONLY ever exist as a plot device, nothing more and nothing less.

And they are so very, very good for that application. They don't move around, so they don't bother our heroes in location X. They don't have obvious secondary uses, so they are only seen in action when they are of real dramatic use - when we want to see starship carnage next to an important planet. If we want to see the starships but not the carnage, we can easily say the planet is not important enough, because it's already been established there are expenses involved in creating and maintaining the forts, both for the villains and the heroes. And if we want to sidestep the defenses, we can easily give the sidestepping capability to any supervillain worth the name: our heroes already could sorta do it in "Tears of the Prophets", Nero could torture the required codes out of a hero in STXI, the Borg or V'Ger should by all rights be capable of hacking their way into any system because they are cybervillains by their very nature, and so forth.

Really, the existence of the fortifications in the deep background is something Star Trek has long needed for coherence - and now that this existence has been confirmed (and immediately also retconned to Trek past - Betazed's fortifications were "out of date", automatically giving them some history), the specifics given for the forts make them ideal plot devices for remaining in the deep background and not blocking the limelights.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[ProtoAvatar]

True enough. Just remember the whole key here is the Borg's adaptability. I'll bet it's not fullproof either, so it would be an enormous gamble as to whether such weapons would put the Borg out of action first or if the Borg could hold out long enough to either detect and disable the platforms' power source or to assimilate the platforms. If the platforms were really good, it would still be touch-and-go with the Borg.

About the borg:
"The borg shields seem able to stop efficiently only a limited range of armaments at a time - but, once they adapted to these armaments, they're practically invulnerable.
Everyone else's shields protect against pretty much everything simultaneously, but against nothing exceptionally well.
Different weapons philosophies - and technologies.

In the case of photon torpedos, the borg adapt, obviously, to gamma radiation.
Perhaps they don't even deflect or absorb it (like everyone else is doing, according to trek lore). Maybe they send the explosion into subspace (borg shields were referred to as 'subspace fields'); maybe they transform this radiation into neutrinos or another harmless particle; etc.

Whatever they're doing, it protects the cube much better than starfleet&co's shields, and it works progressively better as the modulation (ex - exact frequency/ies) of the offensive weapon is more precisely known."

An effective tactic against the borg is to hit them as hard as you can with your first hit - because, during your second or third hit, your weapon becomess useless.

This is why Starfleet proved its tactical incompetence by ignoring this tactic - for example, they always wasted their new phaser modulation with a few phaser shots instead of, from the start, channeling a deflector discharge hundreds of times more powerful, destroying a large part of the borg ship.

In this context, orbital weapon platforms can be more efficient against borg than starships - primarily because their phasers/weapons are more powerful than those mounted on ships (the main advantage of these fortifications seems to be that they have an arbitrarily large power source and don't have to make compromises pertaining to warp drive&co).

 

[Crazy Eddie]

^ Well, if you go by the original premise of the Borg, the real way they "adapt" was by letting one of their drones get killed and then sending another drone with a device to neutralize that weapon. Theoretically they should attack planets the same way: a hundred cubes arrive and attack two or three at a time, the planet uses its best new weapons to obliterate the first, the second one devises defenses against it. If by some miracle the defenders are able to destroy the second cube, the third has an even better defense. By the time the fourth cube comes along, your weapons are TOTALLY useless, and there's still 96 cubes behind it to contend with.

 

[Wingsley]

The thing is, we've never seen the Borg attack a single planet with a large fleet of their collective-hives, have we?

IIRC, it's always a small number of ships, typically just one. And when they're assimilating a planet, they don't hang back. They attack. I think in "Dark Frontier", there were two cubes and the Queen's ship and that was it. Even when up against the Fluidic Space creatures, the Borg all attacked at once.

 

[ProtoAvatar]

^ Well, if you go by the original premise of the Borg, the real way they "adapt" was by letting one of their drones get killed and then sending another drone with a device to neutralize that weapon. Theoretically they should attack planets the same way: a hundred cubes arrive and attack two or three at a time, the planet uses its best new weapons to obliterate the first, the second one devises defenses against it. If by some miracle the defenders are able to destroy the second cube, the third has an even better defense. By the time the fourth cube comes along, your weapons are TOTALLY useless, and there's still 96 cubes behind it to contend with.

And even in this situation (which, as we repeatedy saw on the show, is not the borg modus operandi) Starfleet's idiotic refusal of using overwhelming force on a cube from the start is plain strategic incompetence.

For example - let's say starfleet's ships have a new phaser modulation.
They use their standard phasers with this modulation on the borg cube, barely scratching it before the cube adapts.

That, when they could have used a far more powerful phaser dicharge (via deflector or some other means), effectively destroying the cube before the collective adapts.
In this way, you can actually make a difference with your new weapons/modulations/etc, instead of wasting them for no gain.
And, if another cube appears - there are always different phaser modulations.

 

[Timo]

It should be noted, though, that this doesn't really happen in Star Trek. In the episodes or movies, Starfleet does not engage in space battles with Borg ships.

There are two notable exceptions, "Best of Both Worlds" (where a deflector-based weapon was used without hesitation or mercy at maximum power, but utterly failed anyway, and a fleet of ships engaged the Cube but did so offscreen) along with its extension in "Emissary" (where we did see the beginning of the fleet engagement and confirmed that it happened without the advantage of a new weapon), and ST:FC (where a fleet of ships was seen inflicting damage on the Cube, but its initial engagement was offscreen).

We don't have any onscreen instances of Starfleet attacking a Borg vessel piecemeal with a potentially destructive new weapon, then. Except in "Q Who?" where our heroes did not yet understand the basic nature of the Borg; the relentless use of the standard Starfleet phaser might have defeated the Borg in that episode.

Our VOY heroes often fight the Borg, but their intention never is to destroy a Borg vessel; nothing would be gained by such an act. They don't have the benefit of new superweapons, either; none of the "modifications" or "remodulations" whey might possess seems to make a difference even in the opening stages of the engagement. Once or twice they successfully employ novel weapons, not in ship-to-ship action but in bolder strikes against the foundations of the Collective; they don't hold back in those instances.

The accusation of tactical or strategic incompetence seems to be directed against noncanon material, then - perhaps novels or comic books involving the Borg?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[ProtoAvatar]

Timo, the strategy I mentioned is to be used NOT only with a 'new weapon' but even with something as minor as new phaser/torpedo modulations.
Even when you don't have these you should use it - considering that the first shots from your standard weapons always go through the borg's shields (and if these first shots pack a strong enough punch, you could disassemble the borg in seconds).

In 'best of both worlds', the cube only survived enterprise's deflector discharge because Picard fed the collective the necessary information.
At the wolf 358 battle, starfleet ships most definitely did NOT try to use overwhelming force from the start on the borg - meaning, their strategy displayed incompetence.

In 'first contact', what we heard (the first shots of the battle) and what we saw when enterprise reached earth indicates that starfleet used a strategy comparable to the one from wolf 358 - only it had some new weapon settings which made the difference. Crass strategic incompetence on display, again.