Gravity Weapon

posted on January 8th, 2010, 2:51 pm

So i just had an idea for a new weapon/ship. The ship be a suicide ship that would fly to an enemy base or anywhere that you think could use a little softening up. When its special was triggered the ship would disable engines in the area and the pull then toward itself and then shortly there after blow up dealing a small amount of area damage. (not enough to destroy any ship because i dont want people to use it as a nuke) anyway let me know what you think

posted on January 8th, 2010, 2:55 pm

........... wouldn't it just be easier to use a microblackhole maker weapon that would critically damage anything within a medium range radius? Plus there would be a chance that the ship would blow up but the blackhole creation would fail. That would easily balance it out.

posted on January 8th, 2010, 2:55 pm

it sounds possible as it was done in vanilla with several races. the only one i think would work would be the cardy missile. maybe as a map object, and only one allowed because they are very expensive, and definitely not as powerful as in voyager, maybe a weak defense of a monsoon, and no offense.

posted on January 8th, 2010, 3:56 pm

This seems to be fairly similar to the IS bomb (disabling shields and dealing damage). The engine pulling is unique, but I'd prefer to see an ability just simply pull enemy vessels closer rather than deal damage too... there are enough of these damage dealers in my opinion 

posted on January 8th, 2010, 6:06 pm

sounds like a good romulan weapon.  maybe even something to considder for when a warbird blows up.  they are powered by an artificial black hole, who is to say what happens if that goes critical

posted on January 13th, 2010, 5:54 pm

Crikey, imagine the cumulative effect if more than one warbird was destroyed in quick succession. EXPLODEEXPLODEEXPLODEEXPLODEEXPLODE, everybody dies, DRAW!

I like the idea of a grasping ship which can snipe at individual targets in a fleet to get them on their own. Definitely a Romulan weapon. I can just see the face on the victims face as their prized, well guarded, super-battleship is dragged from the safety of it's fleet to get utterly mobbed and destroyed by a fleet of cloaked Romulans hiding on the other side of a nebula of something.

posted on January 13th, 2010, 6:18 pm

like a long range tractor beam?

you have given me an idea for another thread i'm about to start. thank you

posted on January 13th, 2010, 6:36 pm

sounds like a good romulan weapon.  maybe even something to considder for when a warbird blows up.  they are powered by an artificial black hole, who is to say what happens if that goes critical

A big explosion! but that's about it. the singularity is rather small so it just collapses on itself when the ship goes.

posted on January 13th, 2010, 6:44 pm

i'm all about the implosion, but whats to say it couldnt take a few ships with it that were too close when it went critical

posted on January 13th, 2010, 8:07 pm

That seems more like a disadvantage to the Romulans that they don't really need.  Warbirds are more likely to be near friendly ships than enemy ones.

posted on January 14th, 2010, 3:39 pm

that would be the beauty of it!

maybe it would help you, maybe it would totally screw you.

dealers choice 

posted on January 14th, 2010, 3:45 pm

Friendly fire when you die... hard to balance that properly.

posted on January 26th, 2010, 10:20 pm

Friendly fire when you die... hard to balance that properly.

I agree... you would want this effect to be implemented for all vessels if at all... in order to preserve balance. Also larger ships should probably create a larger blast radius and smaller ships a smaller blast radius... just from a realism and balance perspective. You would not want the explosion from a venture to do heavy damage because people would just spam the cheapest fastest ships and the enemy would essentially destroy themselves. Also this would be hell on any ships with short weapons range because  their short weapons would mean a lot of ships would be blowing up closer to them...

[mimesot]

posted on January 27th, 2010, 8:32 am

Last edited by mimesot on January 27th, 2010, 9:34 am, edited 1 time in total.

sounds like a good romulan weapon.  maybe even something to considder for when a warbird blows up.  they are powered by an artificial black hole, who is to say what happens if that goes critical

Who is to say this ... most likley Steven Hawking.

Black holes don't go critical. Black holes are not bombs or such things. Stars in a final state are in an unstable state, far from equilibrium and may evolve to a supernova. In contrast black holes are THE final state of collapsing mass, most near to total equilibrium (Which would be reached if the whole universe would be condensed in one unifiying black hole). It can do nothing except slowly emitting hawking-radiation and dissove over a long period of time (which is te energy source of the quantum singularity technology).

If there is a gravitational effect depends on the size of the black hole. It must not bee too massy, otherwise the gravitational pull would destroy the mountings of the force generators that shield the ship & crew from the enormous gravitation. On the other hand it must me big enough to have a pull of several G in the typical fighting distance. Is that possible?

Surely not in real StarTrek, where Phasers have a relevant range of 100000km. As the law of gravity goes with 1/radius² this means that the gravitation is 10000000000000000 times weaker at the enemies ship than in 1m vicinity of the enrgy generator. So if there was even a small gravitational effect on the enemy, the ship that carries the quantum singularity would surly collapse instantly. In the games proportions fighting distances are usually about 5-10km. In 10km distance the force is "only" 10000000 times weaker than in 1m distance to the singularity. In case tritanuim was 1000 times tougher than modern steel it would endure at a max tension of 510000 N/mm². If we made (i know thats not what we see in th show) a 10m radius void bubble around the Quantum singularity, a construction with the gravitation controllers yould probably withstand the forces, when the Quantum singulaity still generates a force of 1N/m in 10km distance. These are just estimations in orders of magnitude, but this shows that it could at least be possible in StarTrek (and absolutly rubbish in the real world).

The mass of such a singularity would be 1,5*10^17kg (for comparation Earth: 6*10^24kg, Cheops pyramid: 6*10^9kg. You'd need loads of inertia-compensators to move this. Most interesting (and again different to the shows) is the size of such a back hole: 0,2nm which is invisibly small. Its lifetime is 4,2*10^26 years, so it would survive there much longer than the universe exists (a good reason, why it is told that you can't deactivate a quantum singulaity). The ernergy bound in this singularity is 1,35*10^34 J. Meaning its energy output is 3000000 J/year = 10000J/day is not very good.

Conclusion: Quantum singulatities (of this size) can be used for the purpose, but they are really really unhandy. 

(Calculation mistakes included)

posted on January 27th, 2010, 8:53 pm

All of that's true, but of course when all that matter from ships, torpedo, etc gets sucked into the event horizon and begins emitting gamma ray bursts... that could surely be quite dangerous to nearby ships