Kinetic impulse weapons
Kinetic impulse weapons
"Full Impulse" is generally considered to be 0.25c.
The force of an impact of a Voyager-sized (700 kilotons) mass at that speed would be many times greater than that of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
And I think its reasonable to assume that 0.25c isn't a hard limit, but rather an agreed-upon speed limit for starships.
If you could make an object go even faster, that energy goes up by a few orders of magnitude.
0.9c sounds doable. I don't know about any faster, but maybe?
At that speed, the force of Voyager hitting a planet would be at least hundreds of times greater than the aforementioned asteroid. This sounds like it would completely sterilize the planet.
Which begs the question, why don't we see weapons like this in star trek? I'd figure the Federation wouldn't use them, but the Federation isn't alone.
One argument I tend to see when this comes up is, that the shields would block it. Which then makes you think, if they could block that, then what couldn't they block? It makes them pretty much invincible. So I don't think that's it.
Impulse engines are probably too large and expensive to put on something like that, and you might need big starship-grade ones to be able to get something moving that quickly.
You would also want a tough deflector system, so that it isn't immediately obliterated by the first piece of space dust that it runs into, and a nice computer so that it doesn't just fly off into the first star 'til morning, and at that point, it might just be too expensive to bother with. You're basically building a small starship at that point.
One argument I tend to see when this comes up is, that the shields would block it. Which then makes you think, if they could block that, then what couldn’t they block? It makes them pretty much invincible. So I don’t think that’s it.
At least in Trek, 24th century shields are extremely good at handling physical impacts. Even in a compromised state, with one of the shield processors having escaped and gone rogue, an ageing California class was able to take several hard impacts without so much as a scratch. They might have been able to resist indefinitely if their shields were performing optimally.
Earlier ones, like the ones fitted to the Kelvin-era Enterprise, are much weaker against physical impacts, such that the wreckage of a starship was able to still cause major damage to the outer hull, even with shields at full.
Shields are probably much weaker against energy fire, since they appear to be an outcropping of deflector screen technology, and as such, fare better against physical objects. A powerful energy weapon probably does a much better job at knocking down shields than just smacking them with the physical photon torpedo, even if the torpedo is fired at warp speeds.
@T156 this post makes me think of the “Infinite Mass Punch” in DC comics. https://vsbattles.fandom.com/wiki/User_blog:Matthew_Schroeder/Flash:_Explaining_the_Infinite_Mass_Punch
Wouldn’t a ship traveling at .25C firing a conventional missile effectively create the weapon that @kargarocP4 is describing?
I guess the rest of your points still stand regarding a deflector system for your conventional missile fired at sub-warp speeds.
At least in Trek, 24th century shields are extremely good at handling physical impacts. Even in a compromised state, with one of the shield processors having escaped and gone rogue, an ageing California class was able to take several hard impacts without so much as a scratch. They might have been able to resist indefinitely if their shields were performing optimally.
If addressing kinetic impacts this isn't part of the handwavium, then there's frankly very little way to enjoy Star Trek. I am just an old English major, but various sources put the Enterprise-D at about 4 million metric tons of mass. If you accelerate that to even 5% of c with impulse drives, it would impact with a force of about 2/3 or more of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, and that's just one ship operating well within the accepted performance of the impulse drives.
I don't think system complexity is the issue.
They put impulse engines on 22nd century shuttlepods on the NX-01. They weren't even that big, probably about the size of a small room at most. And that's the 22nd century - they'd probably be a lot better by the TNG era.
Why don't they use nukes? Or simple orbital impact? Probably considered a waste of a good planet or forbidden in treaties or something, but when the Dominion massacred Cardassia you'd think they wouldn't give a toss about that sort of thing.
My head canon at least is that impulse engines don't work alone to drive a 700 kilotonne ship to 0.25c. The deflector uses subspace to effectively lower the mass of the ship to something capable of being driven to those spreads. Otherwise Einstein comes and fucks with you.
There is an in universe hint of this in ENT 3x10, where the whole NX-01 Enterprise needs a force of 2500 Kilodynes to be pulled from a nebula. Which, if you do the math, results in the whole ship only weighing about 158 kg. Most of the times this is interpreted as a writing error, but could also be the result of some arcane technology such as inertial dampeners or the deflector dish.
You also have Emissary where the deflector is used to reduce the mass of the station.
Honestly I think the answer to “Why don’t we see weapons like this in Star Trek” is that they just have cooler weapons. I have to imagine that the energy weapons the average ship is packing could do similar, if not much more, damage to a planet, but could also do much less more precisely.
I agree with this. It's already in canon in TOS that a constitution class could destroy a planet it stands to reason later Starfleet designs are just as capable. Using shipboard phasers and torpedos instead of a relativistic mass allows the crew to fine tune the amount of damage they want to inflict from glassing a whole continent down to surgically stunning a gang of Chicago mobsters.
That gets me to thinking... Warp drive avoids relativistic concerns by creating a subspace bubble so you aren't going fast you're sort of warping space around you. If impulse gets you up to 0.5C as happened in one TOS episode, then the universe would be going 15% faster than you, and it increases from there. I'd want to limit solar system travel in that case!
In the Star Trek universe, if you're intent on "glassing" a planet, it's in one of two scenarios:
- The planet inhabitants can't fight off a single star ship, in which case you could just park in orbit and bombard to your heart's content, with the option of either precision strikes or complete annihilation, without expending anything other than the energy it takes to power the ship.
- The inhabitants can fight off a star ship, in which case they likely have the technology to detect such a weapon at sufficient range to intercept/destroy/redirect it, or planetary shielding powerful enough to stop it.
In the latter case, you could put the effort into adding a cloaking device to the weapon to get around that. But in that case, why not just use a regular cloaked ship to delivery some other payload? There are tons of examples in TNG of narrowly-averted planet-killing disasters only prevented by careful engineering. Probably way easier to actually cause the disaster. Examples include igniting the atmosphere, causing geographic instability/earthquakes/volcanic reactions, exploding the system's star, crashing a natural moon into the planet, unleashing a biological weapon...
I don’t know of the in universe explanation. My rationalization would be that any sufficiently advanced target you’d want to hit with this might have an advanced enough sensor network that it would be able to detect the attempt in time to do something about it.
Any target that wasn’t advanced enough you could presumably conquer without needing to make the planet uninhabitable.
Why not do like Hemmer and just beam out a chunk of the planet's core? Done strategically, this could have a similar impact to the bomb planted on Qo'nos in Discovery.
Why waste a whole Voyager when you can rig two quantum torpedoes to make the entire planet's atmosphere uninhabitable?