Killer Debris....

posted on December 24th, 2009, 5:31 pm

I'll just say... MASS.

I highly doubt that at impulse a Borg vessel would keep up with most faction's vessels.... and I also disregard all physics within Voyager though

posted on December 24th, 2009, 5:43 pm

in tng q had a way of reducing the mass of an asteroid. not voyager so it counts by ur no voyager rule
also intertial dampeners on starfleet vessels i believe fiddle with a vessels mass.
i bet the borg have seen some lovely technology to assimilate which would allow them to go vroom.

posted on December 24th, 2009, 5:57 pm

Well, the Borg have a lot of technology, but they aren't Q.  And when they aren't at warp (e.g. in First Contact) they aren't moving that fast.  In Voyager it's hard to say if they were at warp or not.

posted on December 24th, 2009, 6:03 pm

in first contact we only saw the battle when they had already reached earth, which means they didnt need any speed.

in bobw they dropped out of warp at the edge of our solar system and continued at impulse to earth, maybe some1 smarter than me could look at the times in that episode and see how fast they were really going.

posted on December 24th, 2009, 6:14 pm

in tng q had a way of reducing the mass of an asteroid. not voyager so it counts by ur no voyager rule
also intertial dampeners on starfleet vessels i believe fiddle with a vessels mass.
i bet the borg have seen some lovely technology to assimilate which would allow them to go vroom.

The way they reduced the mass was by projecting a low level warp field and then towing it with something else, which makes little sense in the way ships normally move to be honest. Furthermore since clearly vessels have different impulse speeds and all don't travel at 99% the speed of light, obviously the physics weren't thought of very thoroughly in those instances 

We know how fast it takes the Enterprise (Kirk's Enterprise mind you) at impulse to get out of the solar system, and we know how fast it took the Cube to get into the solar system at impulse... Kirk's was considerably faster.

posted on December 24th, 2009, 6:20 pm

if u dont trust voyager i dont trust anything kirk did

i still maintain that the borg had plenty of cool stuff, if the good guys can bend the laws of physics to win the day, the borg can also bend them to go fast.

posted on December 24th, 2009, 7:00 pm

Well, by that logic, the Borg can do anything, but they can't.  They have some limitations.

posted on December 24th, 2009, 7:04 pm

we've seen them make a rift to fluidic space, travel through time like it was nothing hard, make a massive transwarp network, build thousands of massive cube shaped ships, and thousands of spheres. they arent Q powerful, but they are close. Q (john de lancie) told Q (keegan de lancie) "dont provoke the borg" as if the Q respect that the borg have power.

posted on December 24th, 2009, 7:49 pm

Well, remember that you have to make a distinction between the Borg and the voyager zombie wannabes. 

As far as impulse goes, I remember reading that impulse is much slower that we might assume.  I think it was in the memory alpha discussion section on impulse, but I remember seeing an argument that it really couldn't be much more than 1/4 the speed of light because of time-dialation effects.  The faster you go, the slower your reactions are inside the ship.  At near light speeds, everything inside the ship would be at a near stand still, while the rest of the world would be normal.  Basically, the enemy would have all day to fire on you before you could give any course corrections because everything is happening much slower for you.  1/4 the speed of light still gives something like 8% time-dialation.  Don't know how accurate this is, maybe someone who knows more about this can weigh in.  It makes sense though.  We've seen ships go from full impulse to warp one (the speed of light), and it was clearly faster, indicating that there is a large leap from full impulse to warp. 

posted on December 24th, 2009, 7:55 pm

i agree, im no expert but having ships near light speed would seem silly. how long would it take to slow down lol

another point why the borg may appear faster in the mirror than they actually are is that to assimilate people you first need to get near them. the tractor beam they use takes a few seconds to defeat shields before u have the enemy captured. if they were really slower than every1 then to escape you could just run at impulse. the borg could use warp to overtake you, but the second they engage warp they would go flying past and you could just turn and go the other way.

imagine a cube doing the picard manoeuvre they assimilated it and called it the locutus manoeuvre

posted on December 25th, 2009, 5:45 am

Well, remember that you have to make a distinction between the Borg and the voyager zombie wannabes. 

As far as impulse goes, I remember reading that impulse is much slower that we might assume.  I think it was in the memory alpha discussion section on impulse, but I remember seeing an argument that it really couldn't be much more than 1/4 the speed of light because of time-dialation effects.  The faster you go, the slower your reactions are inside the ship.  At near light speeds, everything inside the ship would be at a near stand still, while the rest of the world would be normal.  Basically, the enemy would have all day to fire on you before you could give any course corrections because everything is happening much slower for you.  1/4 the speed of light still gives something like 8% time-dialation.  Don't know how accurate this is, maybe someone who knows more about this can weigh in.  It makes sense though.  We've seen ships go from full impulse to warp one (the speed of light), and it was clearly faster, indicating that there is a large leap from full impulse to warp. 

I don't think we see any time dilation effects in any Star Trek episodes, which is really odd given that every single ship has different maximum impulse velocities. Then again, it can be difficult to explain, and since the maximum velocities of starships are always given to be ridiculous figures it wouldn’t make any sense anyway (for instance, if a vessel comes out of warp, it is still slowing down from a veeeeeery fast speed which should give it relativistic effects… and supposedly the Intrepid’s maximum impulse velocity is something like 90% the speed of light…). Guess we have to abandon logic again and just go with whatever we feel like, as otherwise things in Star Trek would cause a lot of problems. . Can you imagine it? If every starship had to slow down to engage in battle from Warp 1, and that takes a few seconds apparently, then it would be a simple matter of firing a projectile in those few seconds because the starship could not possibly know until it was too late.

So, onto the main idea…What you are describing is mostly correct: when discussing relativistic speeds (which technically is any velocity at all in relation to another object - of course, whether you notice the discrepancy depends on the magnitude of the velocity: astronauts in orbiting craft are experiencing time quantifiably differently than us for instance) you must do so in relation to the observer. Personnel onboard a starship that is traveling fast - say 1/3 the speed of light - experience time just as those on a spacestation that is moving at zero velocity relative to the starship. However, in comparison to eachother, if you are taking observations from the point of view of the spacestation personnel, time is obviously moving “normally”. However, from their point of view, time onboard the starship would be moving hardly at all. This is why if a starship were to accelerate to very fast velocities away from earth and then return, the occupants of the starship would seem to hardly age at all, while those on the earth would be wizened old men. So indeed, reaction time would be null as you said from the point of view of a “stationary” object. Incidentally, this can do some really cool stuff when you near the schwarzschild radius of a black hole.

posted on December 25th, 2009, 6:07 am

Yeah, that's what I was getting at.  I should have made that clearer.   I was thinking of it because Stargate Atlantis (another complete waste of time as far as I'm concerned  ) had an episode that does exactly as you describe.  An ancient warship is traveling at near light speed, and everything seems frozen in time from the point of view of the main characters.  The episode itself had some flaws, like the ship itself had stopped if I remember, but it was one of the few examples of time dialation being done with a star ship in scifi.

In a battle situation, if you're going so fast that you're "relatively" ::) slower than the other ship, then that would definitely be a disadvantage. 

Can you imagine it? If every starship had to slow down to engage in battle from Warp 1, and that takes a few seconds apparently, then it would be a simple matter of firing a projectile in those few seconds because the starship could not possibly know until it was too late.

That would suck!  I guess we could always channel more power into the main deflector and the Heisenburg Compensators!

posted on December 25th, 2009, 1:25 pm

Borg ships with fast Impulse implies they are in a hurry. They don't need to be fast because of their habbit of chasing endlessly wears the target down. If drones don't run, ships shouldn't.

posted on December 25th, 2009, 6:56 pm

i agree making them fast would make them op. FO cant go for star trek canon realism. the borg being slower is more sensible in FO due to their heavy weapons. if we gave them the speed that their technology is probably capable of then they would simply kill all everything. all our base would belong to them  they would add our bases to their own 

posted on December 25th, 2009, 7:45 pm

Lol myles, no one was talking about balancing