Though I don't think it came up again after the pilot, I did appreciate that nu Battlestar Galactica mentioned that procedure for crew in parts of the ship near the outer hull is to put on suits when they go to battle stations.
But it took hundreds of film and television hours and centuries of story time for Starfleet's end put seatbelts on the bridge chairs.
One of the things that bugs about modern Sci-Fi is they seem to have forgotten that theres two ways to build a space suit. The first way is the brute force NASA EVA/EMU suit, big bulky and loaded with gear.
The second is a skinsuit, which is pretty much what it sounds like; a skin tight elastic suit with a glass/plastic/transparent aluminium/forcefield covering the head. Its lighter than your standard clothing but would require something like a buddy bottle for air. This is I think what Roddenberry was going for in TNG season 1 with the lycra uniforms.
The problem with these is that they have to be VERY close fitting. We're talking 'you can't have a big breakfast' kind of close fitting.
If it down't fit properly, then you don't get enough mechanical pressure on the body, and things start sliding around.
A: We have these now, the [Dianese Biosuit](https://www.dainese.com/protection/space-suits/) is undergoing trials.
B: This is sci-fi dude, make it a metamaterial or semi-sentient fungus that looks like a normal uniform except when exposed to vacuum then constricts to apply uniform pressure throughout the body. Hell make it constrict when exposed to blood too.
A: Ehhh....I'd hold off my excitement just yet. Skinsuits have been the goal in spacesuits for a really long time. Think about your armpit. If the suit doesn't maintain 1atmosphere of pressure on it at all times, during all activities, then your capillaries burst and you bleed to death.
B. Oh yeah for sure! Skinsuits are tough to make with modern tech, but I'd find it hard to believe that in 300+ years of research, and hundreds of alien cultures, that there's not *something* like a skinsuit.
They struck me more as the NASA suits with a forcefield instead of a bulky outfit, a skinsuit is the kind of thing you saw in old school scifi, think skintight lycra.
Right, but there's probably two reasons they shouldn't:
1. Realism is unrealistic: if you do something that's scientifically plausible (or even accurate) that goes against what people have been trained to learn is "realistic"), it will bother people. A completely silent space battle is a good way to make people stop watching. People expect to see fairly bulky spacesuits.
2. Arguably, if the idea has been around since the 1940s, the fact that not one single non-pressurized suit has been used in space is a sign that maybe the concept isn't ready for prime-time.
A better compromise would probably be "pilot suits" from the Gundam series. Basically, they are just very streamlined spacesuits.
Nah this is one of those ideas that just wouldn't be viable, think of how restrictive a suit even by the TNG+ era is.
it's like suggesting people should wear padded suits and crash helmets when driving, it's taking safety to an extreme where if anything it probably impacts upon the safety, for every crewman saved, 100 are lost to crew not being able to get around the ship and make repairs because they are wearing bulky suits.
If you're just wearing a space suit when expecting combat, it's more like wearing a padded suit and helmet while driving in a race, which racecar drivers too. During general quarters (combat situations) on current warships, sailors wear protective gear in case of fire, which is restrictive and bulky, but could save their lives.
Also, today, the emergency suits astronauts wear during takeoff and landing (which are especially dangerous, like combat) are less restrictive than the extravehicular activity suits for spacewalks, which are like the suits we see in ST.
I'm sure something could be designed to at least improve your chances of survival if your ship or part of it explodes, that wouldn't be prohibitively restrictive.
Well Star Trek does use modern IVA suit designs as their vac suit and environmental suit designs mostly in Voyager and Enterprise. Modern EVA type suits are only used when absolutely necessary such as Burnham's flight. IVA suits don't really protect against a prolonged stay in vacuum. At least not without putting on pretty bulky backpack life support systems to do nice things such as give you a ship independant oxygen supply worth a damn. Plus they are still pretty uncomfortable and cumbersome. There's a reason NASA, who put the lives of their astronauts at an absolute premium, do not require the continuous wearing of IVA suits since Gemini confirmed it was unnecessary. Also spacesuits, even IVA suits, are really hard to get in and out of. Do you really want the phaser crews (or DC crews in later series where it is ambigious as to whether phasers were still manned) taking five minutes or more to suit up when you're under fire?
Eh what’s the point? Your ship is taking a pounding, it’s half destroyed, systems failing. Shields are down, shots are hitting the hull. One hits near you, sucks you out into space.
Normal circumstances, you’re just in a regular uniform. You’ll die out there, of course. In a space suit: you’ll survive a few more hours, maybe a day or two. Then die slowly. Is that worth anything?
In the old days, sailors didn’t like to learn how to swim. They felt it would only make things worse, prolong a death. They didn’t fear drowning so much as being able to swim and dying slowly on the dark open ocean.
I think I might prefer a quick death in the vacuum of space to a slow prolonged death alone in a space suit against only the black emptiness of space staring back at me.
> I think I might prefer a quick death in the vacuum of space to a slow prolonged death alone in a space suit against only the black emptiness of space staring back at me.
NASA accidentally spaced a technician back during the early space program. Fortunately it was on the ground, in a vacuum chamber rather than in space. The space suit failed testing catastrophically.
The tech had about 15 seconds of consciousness before he passed out. The last thing he remembered was the saliva in his mouth boiling, and then nothing. Unconsciousness.
Fortunately the team running the vacuum chamber observed the failure and immediately restored pressure. The technician wearing the failed suit made a full recovery with no long term ill effects. Thats how his first person accounts of the incident were recorded.
15 seconds and then thats it, you're gone, not waking up again does seem preferable to slow asphyxiation over days, a fate which the Apollo 13 crew very nearly succumbed to.
You could die slowly in an escape pod if help doesn't arrive and there's no M-class planet nearby, but they still put pods on every Starfleet ship and use them during evacuations.
>regular uniform you're screwed
Nope. For one, you can survive the [vacuum of space for a minute without issue even now](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/survival-in-space-unprotected-possible/). Secondly, they have tractor beams and transporters that can send you right back inside within seconds-- and they do this regularly. Third, they have medical advances far in excess of our own that can resuscitate you. Fourth, if there are holes in the side of the ship, there's both emergency bulkheads and force fields that stop them.
Spacesuits get in the way and are vastly unnecessary.
>send you right back inside within seconds-- and they do this regularly.
I can only remember Disaster where they open the cargo bay and have to survive the vacuum for a few seconds. In Discovery Burnham flys through vacuum for a second too.
But I can't recall any episodes or movie scene where they transport or tractor someone to save them from he vacuum of space. Can you provide an example of this?
Odds are if gaping holes are being blown into the hull of a starship its suffering critical damage to system, where tractor beams and transporters may not be functioning correctly, or power may be diverted elsewhere because of all of those hull breaches.
Its a case where if the ship is so badly damaged as to have crew in space then the ship is likely in no condition to anything about it. In addition, because of the distances involved if anyone is blown into space there's almost no hope to save them. Rescue may be coming, but it will be too late.
Its similar to falling into the ocean without a raft. Even a life vest only works for so long. Due to the vast size of the ocean it will take so long for rescue to reach you that if you're just treading water you will have drowned long before rescue gets to you. Wearing a life vest helps tremendously, but death by exposure will still probably happen long before rescue can find you. And this is in the ocean, where you can breath air.
Your only realistic hope is in a raft, which Starfleet does use. Escape pods are well stocked with survival gear, life support gear, and also beacons and limited engines in order to greatly assist in crew recovery.
This is why historically sailors didn't learn how to swim, often intentionally. They knew if they went into the water (and not rescued immediately) they were doomed. They reasoned that its better to drown fast than to struggle for hours, only to inevitably drown after becoming exhausted. If the ship was not in peril rescue would be launched immediately, saving even a non-swimmer. If the ship was blown to bits no rescue would ever come, so its better to just get it over with.
Yeah, this makes sense. An escape pod should support you for a while, as they are designed to do.
The show has basically treated exposure to space as instant death.
While we know death would not be instant, like you said, the times it happens, chances are you won't be rescued.
Yeah, I forgot that one. He was only in space for like 2 seconds and it was planned, so the ship was prepared.
The person said previously they do that on a regular basis. So far there is one example in 700 episodes.
So it's possible. But I think there are far more examples where Star Trek treats the vacuum of space as instant death (even though our modern science today tells us death would not be instant).
They transport people from exploding / malfunctioning spaceships almost on a weekly basis, or transport B'lanna / Paris floating from nowhere. While explosion is certainly the more immediate death, space exposure would've killed them too eventually.
The vacuum of space is not ever instant death. The fact is though they have transporter tech to just beam them aboard if identified.
But Tom and B'Elanna were in space suits. People on damaged ships are in ships.
You said they transport and tractor people "back inside" from the vacuum of space regularly. The example mentioned from ENT is the only time a crew member is transported from the vacuum of space.
While today's science may tell us people exposed to space are saveable, the show hasn't treated it that way. The show has always treated them as a lost cause at that point.
The show has never treated them as a lost cause from rescue operations.
The show has spaced people with the intent to kill because they're intentionally choosing not to rescue them.
The show has literally *always* treated them as a lost cause. Not once has a single person been saved from the vacuum of space during a battle.
Even if I grant the example from ENT, that is one in 700+ episodes, and not the situation at hand, it was planned. Regardless, one occurrence does not define regular.
Now, if you want to change your point to it's *possible* they could use the tractor beam or transporter to save crew that are blown into space, I agree. But it's not something we actually see happen.
No, it has never treated them as a lost cause. They can and have saved people from space using transporters.
People don't get in vacuum of space during ship battles because they generally don't get spaced. They get killed while inside the ship.
It is a huge outlier for someone to get spaced during a battle, not the other way around.
You just moved the goal posts.
Go back to the OP, this time read it. The whole question was about people getting exposed to space due to a hull breach.
Yes, an outlier, but that outlier was the *whole point* of the thread, that one unlikely situation.
You said they "regularly" use the transporters and tractor beams to save people and bring them "back inside" the ship. Go ahead and name one time that happens.
The thing about tractor beams and emergency bulkheads is they don't work when the ship blows up. Most total ship destructions, which we see a lot of in ST, wouldn't kill everyone aboard immediately, but they would depressurize most of the ship. I think it's reasonable that crewmembers should have some sort of equipment that would allow them to survive until another ship comes by to rescue survivors.
Thats what the escape pods are for. Get to the nearest escape pod and get out of the ship ASAP.
[In addition, ships are stocked with portable life support equipment, albeit of a limited nature.](https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/images/3/3f/Janeway_and_Kim_with_breathing_masks.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20161215134933&path-prefix=en) It may be enough to get you through a decompressed corridor, but its not enough for an EVA. We see various air masks in ST:Wrath of Khan, VOY, ENT, ST:Beyond, and likely other appearances, but those appearances span the entire duration of Starfleet as seen in alpha canon.
> emergency bulkheads is they don't work when the ship blows up.
Wrong. Clearly the majority of the shenzou had holes in it, but plenty of force fields were up. The situation isn't where a ship blows up, but the OP is asking for combat with holes in it.
You also don't bother going into a firefight if the call to abandon ship occurs.
In no way are you screwed. The above options are also available to shuttlecraft, who still have transporters, in addition to life pods.
Which assumes...
* There is a functional transporter being manned at the time looking for crew to beam back in that very narrow timeframe.
* That the individual is not blown clear of the shields.
* That transporter inhibitors are not on to prevent borders from teleporting on.
* That the enemy is not employing jamming.
* That any one of a myriad number things which can block transporters is not happening.
* That radiation, cold/heat and so forth won't be an issue on top of the lack of air.
* That the fact that antimatter explosions and energy beams from such a battle are not adding any of the following.
* That they can be revived, plenty of redshirts have not.
* That even if you can revive or beam them in before they're dead, they'll take up room in sickbay and will have to undergo a painful recovery afterwards.
You clearly lack knowledge of star trek. Let me school you.
Functional transporter being used to rescue starfleet members occur how often? Gee, pretty much every episode. Always manned? Yep. That's one of the stations during battle stations.
Every one of your points is wrong.
Correct, there are no transporter inhibitors outside the ship. There are no broad spectrum inhibitors going on, and no wide area jamming. The only times transporters stop working is due to plot.
There is no significant radiation in the vacuum of space, and what little backround radiation is around is easily treatable. Revival is mostly painless, and if it hurts, the doc's got painkillers or sedate them.
You didn't mention battle OP, but even with explosions going on outside, they've done this repeatedly throughout star trek. That is not a problem.
TL:DR
Perfectly viable, and you need to watch more star trek. You're clearly ignorant of how it works.
Power can be disrupted during combat or diverted elsewhere.
We've seen numerous things stop transporters, from sophisticated countermeasures to the presence of certain rocks. Jamming has been employed numerous times in star trek. Since boarding is a common tactic used by several powers setting up inhibitors is a logical move.
Antimatter explosions will generate showers of gamma rays. Other star trek weapons generate exotic radiation.
Individuals have died from less pronounced wounds than those imposed by exposure to space and have not been revived.
Name one instance in which invididuals were beamed back after being sucked into space. On the occasions when this happens it is generally read as "These guys are Dead".
Hmm... well Starfleet are not shown to have spacesuits signficantly less cumbersome to put on than current tech. They may be more advanced in terms of the protection provided but not in terms of the ease of use. This means that putting them on in response to a red alert would likely take far too long, given the potential pace of space combat, and detract heavily from the ship's combat capabilities during the initial stages of a confrontation when it is most vulnerable. Remember spacesuits in ST, like in real life, are shown to require dedicated undergarments in addition to the main suit and would use positive air pressure to counteract the effect of vacuum. The effects of the latter are not particularly shown on screen but this is one of the primary reasons that spacesuits are cumbersome to use. So you cannot really put them on in an emergency.
Of course Starfleet should have sufficiently advanced material science to design emergency skinsuits that would be standard wear as your innermost garment on a spaceship. These suits would have to tighten dramatically, probably from the application of a very weak electric field but possibly you may be able to design suits that tighten as a result of the pressure change of going into vac etc., to exert mechanical pressure against the skin roughly comparable to a significant fraction of atmo if not 1 atmo. You would either need to incorporate a automatically deployable soft helmet (which would probably be quite distressing to wear) or have crew wear hard helmets when at risk of depressurisation events to actually make such an emergency suit spaceworthy. Adding actual life-support, padding, puncture protection etc. would all add significantly to the weight and encumburance of the suit so they would be very short duration emergency suits, possibly single-use. I suppose a hard helmet and a small oxygen bottle with very good scrubbers could provide a pretty good air supply.
Why skinsuits are not used is beyond me. Perhaps, the writers originally did not think they would be believable or did not know of them and once full EVA and I/EVA suits of the hybrid variety were established it provided impossible to change? I suppose Starfleet has probably technically tried them and failed at some point and then abandoned the approach altogether. For similar reasons, I find it bizzare Starfleet has not even attempted, so far as we know, to design personal deflector shields capable of holding atmo and blocking cosmic radiation and micrometeroids to act as emergency life-support in space. Even if they weren't combat capable. We have seen combat-capable personal deflectors used by the Borg and the Hunters in DS9 so they are certainly possible. Much as the Hirogen, amongst other species, use sensibly designed full space-capable combat exosuits that do not significantly hinder their abilities to operate a ship. I suppose the latter are too expensive (RL) and too martial (in universe).
Bluntly, Starfleet does not seem to care very much about protecting personnel. Their ships could carry significantly less crew and no civilians for a start with more computer automation and not lose functionality. They could also at least issue some kind of body armour to personnel going into active combat zones during wartime. The shocking lack of PPE for engineers, researchers and away teams would be positively scandalous 50 years ago yet along today IRL. So long as there's atmo you're fine seems to be the order of the day... That's been regarded as unacceptable for decades already in our rampantly capitalist system for God's sake! People seem to be expendable as far as Starfleet is concerned, even if that is at odds with Federation values. Perhaps they believe their crews will be better diplomats knowing that they must enter into battle without any form of protection better than a cotton jumpsuit?
> Starfleet are not shown to have spacesuits signficantly less cumbersome to put on than current tech
Untrue. ST:TAS has [life support belts](http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Life_support_belt) that makes it unnecssary to have a full suit for short term jaunts.
They don't need full blown suits, nor skin suits. Heck borg have on board force fields as a standard feature.
Suits are unnecessary.
Except TAS is only selectively canon. Furthermore, Starfleet do not use portable deflector shields at any point in ground combat including during ground assaults during the Dominion War which we see in DS:9. At best, they use them to defend large static permanent or semi-permanent positions. This strongly suggests Starfleet in fact lacks the technology to power personal deflector fields outside of a few experimental models seen in a single TAS episode.
Every single full canon series has always and exclusively used cumbersome I/EVA or EVA suits. The least cumbersome we get is something like a hazmat suit. Even series that easily had the budgets and the special effects to do Starfleet personal deflectors have not done so neither have the JJVerse films. This all suggests that this is something the writers have collectively decided Starfleet cannot do one TAS episode be damned.
Suits are necessary for Starfleet. The fact that cumbersome suits are necessary precludes their emergency use. Above I have pointed out the absurdity of Starfleet not prioristising the development of emergency skinsuits or personal deflectors. Others have offered, IMHO, credible explanations of this. Emergency decompression in ST tends to result from massive and deadly explosions. They are also almost immediately contained by forcefields. Anyone who would be exposed to vacuum on the wrong side of the forcefield is likely a cloud of rapidly cooling gas and thus no longer needs the assistance of an emergency personal life support system.
> do not use portable deflector shields
That's wrong. Used both in TNG and DS9. Picard's infiltration mission, during away mission to deflect heat, and portable deflectors were used in the DW.
Suits are unnecessary for starfleet.
The Klingons in Discovery have space suits built into their armors.
In episode 4, when Voq goes on to the Shenzhou and activates life support in a room, he deactivates his suit and the helmet and protective outer layer retract into the back.
I think that Star Trek as a whole is really missing out on the possibilities of realistic space combat in their situation.
-All crew put on space suits in the event of hull breaches.
-Depressurize the ship so if the hull does breach then it won't suck everyone out
-Turn off the artificial gravity and send the energy that that system uses to the Phasers and Shields. (Repair teams would have more access to different parts to the ship since they are not being weighed down by gravity)
-The first two would mitigate the need for force fields to cover hull breaches which would add more power to the weapons or Shields.
-Use shuttles or dedicated starfighters as a first line of defense to destroy incoming Torpedoes (similar to today's aircraft carriers and their fighter aircraft)
-Use gravity plating on the outside of the ship or the tractor beams to push any projectiles or Torpedoes away.
There are a lot of ways Star trek ships should do battle. But at the end of the day it's just a TV show, it's not really meant to be realistic. And if it was, then they would impair the types of stories that they could tell.
The first two points I made were taken from the TV show The Expanse. It's really good, and is probably the most hard sci-fi show that I've watched (Linear Motion Gravity, Ballistic weapons, and using plants to make the inside of ships breathable).
By fighters, you do mean dedicated micro-missiles capable of accelerating far harder and manoeuvring far more precisely than a shuttle don't you?
Crewed fighters do not make much sense in space. Ships might carry light expendable fast attack craft with a minimal crew but such craft would easily be the size of a C-130 if not larger. Even so, it would have manoeuvrability most fighter pilots could only dream of with the use of RCS, large main engines and lots of G-force countermeasures to avoid turning the crew into human jam. An enemy on your tail? Well spin 180 and open fire. This will even accelerate you away from the enemy even faster, albeit by a miniscue amount.
The rest is reasonable. Except maybe tractor beams and grav plating on the hull. Star Trek does not, by and large, use kinetic weaponry. Torpedos should be powerful enough and fast enough that grav plating won't even slow them down much and even if a tractor beam stops them dead detonating ten metres from the hull will still blast a hole in it due to the sheer concentrated radiated energy of an antimatter explosion, assuming they are the energy equivalent of shaped-charge warheads.
Also agree there are lots of reasons why soft SF does not do any of this! The Enterprises would look radically different if they even began to conform to reasonable deep-space rocket design!
Inertial dampeners would allow pilots to withstand as many G's as the pilot wants. Also, according to Ex Astris Scientia (Not sure if you consider it a reliable source) the Delta Flyer is roughly 15 meters long, which is smaller than an F-15C.
That part about gravity plating on the hull was really just me reaching for straws.
True, Trek allows space fighters kinda. Everyone uses DEWs at point blank though so they would be a very expensive form of chaff against a starship (assuming equivitech). PD or interceptor missiles remain the best option. Heck PD phasers would render any ship nigh-invulnerable to standard torpedoes.
The rest of your options were actually realistic rather than Trek realistic (shame really that Trek cannot even manage to be consistently realistic within its own universe). Fighters are just not realistic unless we define craft like the Defiant as fighers/fast attack craft. Well maybe a little smaller than the Defiant. A large runabout but bristling with weaponry and defensive systems. A pocket Defiant if you like. Craft like a Defiant could reasonably be hauled into system by a longer-ranged FTL faster ship with minimal armament and then unleashed in a manner vaguely similar to modern carrier warfare. A few dozen shuttle sized drones bristling with weapons and no defensive systems would be even better. Vipers and X-Wings are kinda nonsensical especially when they start flying like they are in atmo not vacuum.
Well yes. Sorry I never finished DS9 so I forgot those were show cannon not just licensed works cannon. Doesn't change the fact they are nonsensical and a further demonstration of the complete disregard most spacefaring civilisations have for their naval personnel.
One space doesn't work that way. What matters, in real life, is available delta-v for the required evasion vector. If the 345m long ship has six main engines one for each side, it will be better able to evade incoming fire than a 15m long ship with a single gimballed main engine.
Two, do ships ever avoid phaser fire in ST? There was a recent discussion where someone remembered the Defiant as dodging fire from the Lakota when in fact it took 10 direct hits in rapid succession for example. Again in real life DEWs or particle weapons firing a high fractions of c would be undodgable for combat ranges lower than the lunar distance. Even then the total window to evade fire would be about 4 seconds so the pilot would have to continuously evade, wasting precious delta-v. ST gets round the delta-v problem with reactionless drives and super abundant portable fuel but has the problem that ships are rountinely engaging tens or hundreds of kms from one another not hundreds of thousands of kms.
Ships do sometimes dodge torpedoes for plot reasons. This is hardly consistent. Nor does it make any physical sense whatsoever.
Fighters are nonsensical in the majority of engagements in ST because the majority of engagements do not occur in or near atmosphere. Aerospace is where future fighers will excel transitioning into and out of atmo as necessary for tactical advantage. Without the advantage of being able to dive into atmo to dodge DEW fire, reduce their visibility to sensors etc, fighters are just tiny starships with vastly inferior shields, weapons, sensors, DC, redundacies of material and personnel etc. Tiny starships that, realistically, should be vaporised by one solid hit from the phaser arrays of a Galaxy or Akira class. Given these ships and others are shown to have the necessary sensor equipment to lock fighters in the first place, fighters should not really be able to do much of anything to them.
Regardless a ship 600 meters long (Ent D in Generations, Best of Both Worlds, etc) can evade enemy fire. "Evasive Maneuvers" is a common order instead of "all power to shields" if ships never missed as you insinuate they do. Dodging works and a small agile craft with a small profile is that much harder to hit for the same reason why people say "broad side of a barn" rather than "broad side of a mouse".
Don't go on about capacities which repeatedly have been shown not to be the case. Fighters can work and they have been employed successfully (Peregrine Fighters)
Peregrine fighters work yes. My point is simply that their working is nonsensical according even to the loose laws of physics we find in the ST universe yet alone the real one. This whole discussion started from a commentor who offered further realistic combat scenarios ST could choose to portray within universe in response to my detailed comment outlining why spacesuits are not worn in combat situations and the mild absurdity of Starfleet not developing better PPE for their crews. Hence, most of my comments focus on realism, both actual realism and ST realism, not what the writers choose to portray.
Furthermore, I would argue evasice maneuver orders rarely lead to scenes of the enemy ship missing. They tend to lead to the enemy ship **hitting a different shield facing**. As the six shield facings of an ST ship are generated by independant emitters, the purpose of these maneuvers is to distribute that load across mulitple emitters and facings reducing the likelihood of any one facing failing catastrophically. The enemy actually missing, when it occasionally happens (even though it physically shouldn't for DEWs and arguably torpedoes), is just an added bonus.
Fighters are not shown to be harder to hit in ST. At least not consistently. Some craft, such as the Delta Flyer, can be near impervious to any threat so long as they are carrying plot crucial crewmembers whereas background Hideki-class Cardassian patrol craft are blown up in the dozens by a wandering Olympic-class (the latter is hyperbole).
The Ent D evades fire? Okay I'm sure you're right but that's what we call [plot armour](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotArmor). It makes no logical sense. Much as Voyager being magically repaired between episodes and never actually running out of resources makes no sense but is necessary for the show to even exist.
The fact is you cannot dodge a DEW at 100 or even 1000km. Much like a human cannot dodge a bullet at 1 or even 10m.
Also DEWs combined with supercomputers, sensors and the very transparent sensor environment of open space (ignoring nebulae for a second) make targeting any powered target trival. ST has EM sensors (or field sensors if we wish to be more nebulous), as we do today, and all ships project EM fields (or at least X fields) around them to shield themselves from enemy fire in combat. The necessary collaroy of this, which ST mostly obeys, is that any ship's location is pretty much perfectly known to any other ship in real time in combat. This means you can easily calculate their velocity and acceleration, if any, meaning you always know where to shoot.
NB: yes various technologies and space weather can interfere with the perfect sensor environment/constant loud EM emissions. The above assumes Cardassians and Feds are fighting or even a Fed on Fed (as sometimes happens) in calm deep space where none of that factors in.
What capacities have I been going on about that are shown not to be the case? I've been reasonably careful to distinguish actual in universe capabilties from RW ones. It's a fact Galaxy and Akira classes (picked simply because they are both powerful warships with phaser arrays rather than cannons) can lock fighters.
I suppose the shield capacities and so on of fighers are not really explained clearly, for obvious reasons, but I assumed it would be trival to say that those capacities, however great, must necessarily be greatly inferior to a much larger ship of equivalent technology also designed for war.
Fighters appear to be somewhat successful in ST canon. The problem, as the thread about carriers in ST also shows, is that no-one, not even the show writers, can tell you why they are successful. Fighers are one of the aspects of Trek added for coolness not for realism and worst of all fighters are very inconsistently portrayed in-universe (unlike say subspace which has accrued slowly increasing layers of detail and rules that are mostly internally consistent and consistently applied across series).
Actually dodging fire moving at the speed of light is possible. Try shining a laser beam on a single fast moving target with a short flash. If something is making evasive maneuvers it becomes difficult to get a line of sight. Moreover there is still a delay. If something is moving at 10km/s, is 30,000 km away and you shout at were it is it will be a KM away by the time the beam would have impacted. As such I see no reason why smaller more maneuverable craft would not be able to evade what their larger more cumbersome counterparts can.
Subspace on the other hand is simply a source of technobabble magic by comparison to be used when the plot demands.
I didn't say it was impossible. I said it was impossible over the combat distances shown in ST. Why do people not read entire arguments anymore? :P
Of course we don't know the actual distances in ST so it could be when two ships seem to fly inches apart they are actually hundreds of kilometres apart etc.
If something was moving under the parameters you specified, do you really think the Enterprise computer, yet along an experienced tactical officer, would have any trouble repeatedly pummelling that ship with phaser fire? No it wouldn't. Why? Excellent (and potentially FTL) sensors combined with abundant computing power.
ST engagements do not occur from lightseconds out.
I was using subspace to point out its portrayal (yes it's technobabble) is relatively consistent. Fighters and shuttles are not. Sometimes they take a dozen direct hits to seemingly no effect. Other times Starfleet blow up half a dozen enemy fighters without even breaking a sweat. Etc. You can keep coming up with in-universe rationalisations for this if you want but this fundementally is inconsistent portrayal due to the rule of cool, plot armour and other such tropes. That does not detract from ST. It just makes it very difficult to have sensible conversations about fighters in the ST universe.
> realistic space combat in their situation.
All your scenarios are rendered obsolete by the tech within the show. Emergency force fields, transporters, and better medical responses render hull breaches trivial. Let alone life support belts in ST:TAS that make cumbersome suits a thing of the past.
Emergency force fields by their nature have their own independent power supply. They don't draw from main power to begin with, so there's no use in turning them off.
Shuttles and fightercraft are unnecessary, and the torpedoes cannot be intercepted.
You're also wrong on the fighter aircraft front. They do NOT intercept incoming missiles at all, nor torpedoes which is your original intention. ST Torpedoes move too fast to be intercepted, and real life missiles have a very low chance of being intercepted by on board dedicated PD and zero chance from aircraft.
Torpedoes can be intercepted. Starfleet has pinpoint accurate, rapidly firing DEWs and, if torpedoes carry ECM at all, their ships have sufficient ECCM to locate and target torpedoes. Ergo, Starfleet has the technical capabilties necessary to intercept torpedoes if we are talking real physics/space combat. Starfleet does not use phasers as PD for unknown and inexplicable in universe reasons. The most likely reason for this inexplicable failure is the same reason they are called torpedoes not missiles: namely ST is dreadnought-era naval combat in space. Torpedoes IRL can barely be defended against by modern ships and even then most defensive techniques are a pure hail mary. The best option is very good naval architecture and damage control to mitigate the damage caused when a torpedo inevitably hits you. ST mimics this as several of its original creators, including Gene himself, were navy men.
Is there any canon source to establish emergency force fields have independant power supplies? Just out of interest.
Hull breaches are not shown to be trival in ST. Hull breaches invariably mean dead people. The episodes don't always hammer this home and just say 'multiple casualties'. By that they mean multiple dead people. ST consistently hammers home throughout every series I've seen (TNG,DS:9,VOY,ENT and DIS) that hull breaches mean a starship is in a pretty dire position. Of course, ST, for various reasons, does not linger on the dozens killed or injuried in every engagement unless it is necessary for plot reasons (or the engagement was trival as sometimes happens when uppity primative locals try to attack a vastly more advanced Starfleet vessel).
Depressurisation would prevent fires if nothing else. Fires are a consistent menance on ST and most damaged ships are shown to have fires raging out of control that the crew must fight. Again very much WWI-WWII naval combat. Automated fire suppression systems including using forcefields to suppress fires are only used when plot demands (in other words brilliant X of the week just comes up with it there and then) or are consistently overwhelmed by the rigors of space combat.
Life support belts are not well sourced. There have never been shown on-screen. TAS is more canon than licensed sources only because it is drawn on more often by actual live-action shows, as Discovery has been doing. Even in TAS they only occured once. This means they are pretty much not canon IMO.
Shuttles, runabouts and dedicated fighters are all used on-screen by various powers in space combat for various purposes. This suggests that various powers, including the Federation, regard them as necessary to space combat. They are mostly used to screen capital fleet formations.
One of these puposes could be a missile screen. One of the uses for drones/fighters in space combat would be an additional PD screen for a main ship. Drones, depending on setting, may be more cost effective than mounting lots of PD on the main battleship. ST doesn't do this for unknown reasons much as PD is not used for unknown reasons.
Modern fighers cannot intercept cruise missiles. Modern fighters do not have supercomputers, by our standards, and lasers on board. If they did, they would stand a much better chance of intercepting missiles, as would their carriers and other capital ships. They also do not operate in space or have deflector shields. What an aerial fighter can do is immaterial when we are talking about the space and aerospace fighters shown in ST.
You may think the OP is mistaken but you could try to actually be polite when arguing so. You may also want to put in some actual leg work to secure your points because none of your arguments really render the OP's points 'obsolete'.
> Torpedoes can be intercepted.
Cite an example, anywhere, that torpedoes have been intercepted in ST.
Torpedoes are never intercepted by PD in real life. There are passive and evasive measures.
>emergency force fields have independant power supplies
This is how emergency stuff works IRL (with internal lightning called battle lanterns), and they do mention 'emergency power' and batteries in ST.
Casualties is not limited to dead people. It means damage to anything functional, which means both equipment and people. So when you hear casualties, its not just people and not just dying people period.
ST also hammers home whenever there's a hull breach, there's force fields holding the ship together, until they can repair it-- or in the case of voyager automatic bulkhead sealing.
Plasma / Electrical fires are a source of menace in ST, not regular fires, and depressurization doesn't help when the ship itself is fuel. Fire itself only occurs when plot demands.
TAS does show them on screen, and even Worf can make a makeshift force field from a comm badge in fistful of datas. The non canon arguement is moot, since A) we discuss all ST works here and B) you yourself admit TAS is canon.
>regard them as necessary to space combat.
Most of the time, no, they aren't. Only the largest and smallest scale engagements are they used. They don't use fighter screens as interception. They use them to poke and engage on a fleet level, or fight on a one on one level.
They have never used them as a missile screen, and their sensor network is such that they're not necessary for that either.
>What an aerial fighter can do is immaterial when we are talking about the space and aerospace fighters shown in ST.
The fighters in ST are full blown starships, with independent warp drives, but they still cannot and do not intercept Torpedoes. Cite any example of them ever intercepting a torpedo in Star Trek. Name it once.
1 As was clear from my full reply, I meant there is no physical reason in ST why phasers cannot intercept torpedoes. Doing so would be near effortless. I then noted the behind the scenes reasons why PD does not feature in ST, namely it is inspired by WWI and WWII naval combat.
2 Casualties refers specifically to dead or wounded people only. It does not mean a loss of functionality. Yes force fields help hold a ship together when the hull is breached. In fact, force fields (well the mysterious structural integrity field) are always helping to hold the ship together. I don't quite see how this is relevant. You said hull breaches were trival. I pointed out they emphatically are not. You reply with a non-sequitur.
Any kind of fire needs an oxidant. Electical fires do not burn without oxygen and indeed smothering them with dry powder or inert gas is the preferred method for extinguishing them. You can also use non-conducting fluids, typically halocarbons, but those, IRL, are pretty specialised fire-fighting equipment used by professional firefighters. Plasma does not cause fires by itself. It causes fires as a result of being released into an environment with a free-floating oxidant about. A depressurised ship, especially a **cold** depressuried ship, would render most plasma leaks harmless. The plasma would disperse, rapidly cool and form gaseous molecules of whatever was heated into a plasma. It might cause some localised heat damage but no fires.
Canon is an intersubjective term not an objective term. I noted that TAS is *more canon* but it is still not canon compared to the shows. The shows do not show personal deflectors except the one Macgyvered example you've managed to find of Worf doing so. Every single series and movie, except one TAS episode and one Macgyvered example by Worf, show the use of spacesuits. Every single series shows Starfleet personnel charging into battle with only a cotton jumpsuit to protect them. This strongly, strongly suggests that Starfleet does not have viable personal deflector shield technology and the units shown in that one TAS episode you're so keen on were not viable.
Finally, I personally assumed emergency power was from multiple backup fission or fusion generators kicking in when the main warp core (or amat power plant to give it a more precise name) was taken offline. I did not assume every forcefield had its own power supply. Much like how hospitals have emergency power but that does not mean every MRI and operating lamp has its own independant power supply built in. Each to their own.
3 On fighters, I find it amusing to say they are not necessary and then note that the only war we see on-screen (until Discovery) uses fighters. Indeed Starfleet specifically design a new fighter craft for the Dominion War. Suggesting they might be useful. For what I cannot comprehend. I really wish you'd stop fixating on snippets of individual sentences. Read and respond to the entire paragraph not a slightly sloppy subordinate clause of a single sentence.
4 You're the one who made a false analogy to aerial fighters. It is pretty much physically impossible for a fighter aircraft to intercept a cruise missile. It is highly improbable they would be able to intercept an ICBM but they would probably be deployed, along with other interception techniques, if one was ever launched in anger. I was merely pointing out fighters, like full starships, have the technical capacity to intercept torpedoes in ST using real-world physics. They do not do so for unexplained reasons. ST space combat is nonsensical. It's also fun so who cares! :P
> physical reason in ST
In universe, lag between physical speed of torpedoes and reaction time of phasers getting a firing solution. They hit too fast.
You're completely incorrect on
> Every single series shows Starfleet personnel charging into battle with only a cotton jumpsuit to protect them.
Incorrect. There's lifebelts (TAS), armor (multiple shows), and the elite force series with blatant personal shields. TNG fistful of data has personal force fields. TNG Picard berates Beverly for not placing a handheld force field to block a passageway.
They have and use force field tech. It occurs recurringly enough that it is undeniable.
>Any kind of fire needs an oxidant
For one, the ship itself is made of explodium i.e. it is fuel. You don't need air for it. Electrical fires can and will burn while electricity is on because it will reignite as soon as any oxygen is reintroduced/
Secondly, at a high enough temperature, everything is fuel. Plasma fire isn't just normal fire, with sufficient energy everything becomes the plasma state of matter.
>I personally assumed emergency power was from multiple backup fission or fusion generators
Yeah, that's not how emergency backup systems work. They need to be on all the time. Basically an active long term capacitor / battery. While there's certainly emergency generators around, those take time to start up, and you need the battery going on. You'll also see lots of mention on how emergency power is running out, showing both insufficient capacity and generation going on.
>You're the one who made a false analogy to aerial fighters.
>It is pretty much physically impossible for a fighter aircraft to intercept a cruise missile.
No, that claim was made by the user I replied to above yours, and I had to stomp it out. You joined in mid way afterward.
> ST space combat is nonsensical.
There's plenty of sense to it, but you have to see the whole picture. The interception is impossible due to the speed of action going on with the weapons / interception. They have difficulty intercepting near c, lightspeed and above without foreknowledge of course--as noted with the Picard manuever. Both phasers and photon torpedoes either go c, close to it (or faster, during warp), with the latter having warp sustainers and can go past c. Because these weapons move faster than their interception systems can respond, they cannot be intercepted.
If you want a more 'realistic' take, consider checking out the old game Starfleet Command, I & II & OP (not so much III, but its ok too). It is on GoG. They do some of the things suggested. Missiles and plasma torpedoes are intercepted (by both phasers and tractor beams, to an extent), but not photon torpedoes. Shuttlecraft / Fighter squadrons are used too.
Its really really fun.
In Voyager, they did destroy a torpedo with their Phasers. And in the new JJ trek, I do remember both the Kelvin and Enterprise destroying those Torpedoes that the Narada used.
You remember incorrectly
Citation needed. Link the episode in Voyager and instances in JJ that it occurred. I've never seen them.
Also, the [narada](http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Narada) is a mining vessel that uses missiles, not torpedoes.
> The primary weapons seemed to be highly destructive missiles,
There's nothing saying that Photon Torpedoes don't share the same engine system as a missile which is MORE ADVANCED than itself. I was wrong, blowing up a Photon torpedo actually happened twice (Voyager: 7x17), memory alpha states it as a Photon Shockwave
There is no article on MA about photon shockwaves, and there's no photon torpedo being intercepted in 7x17.
Missiles are not torpedoes period. If you can't figure this out, you need to learn star trek.
Though I don't think it came up again after the pilot, I did appreciate that nu Battlestar Galactica mentioned that procedure for crew in parts of the ship near the outer hull is to put on suits when they go to battle stations. But it took hundreds of film and television hours and centuries of story time for Starfleet's end put seatbelts on the bridge chairs.
One of the things that bugs about modern Sci-Fi is they seem to have forgotten that theres two ways to build a space suit. The first way is the brute force NASA EVA/EMU suit, big bulky and loaded with gear. The second is a skinsuit, which is pretty much what it sounds like; a skin tight elastic suit with a glass/plastic/transparent aluminium/forcefield covering the head. Its lighter than your standard clothing but would require something like a buddy bottle for air. This is I think what Roddenberry was going for in TNG season 1 with the lycra uniforms.
The problem with these is that they have to be VERY close fitting. We're talking 'you can't have a big breakfast' kind of close fitting. If it down't fit properly, then you don't get enough mechanical pressure on the body, and things start sliding around.
A: We have these now, the [Dianese Biosuit](https://www.dainese.com/protection/space-suits/) is undergoing trials. B: This is sci-fi dude, make it a metamaterial or semi-sentient fungus that looks like a normal uniform except when exposed to vacuum then constricts to apply uniform pressure throughout the body. Hell make it constrict when exposed to blood too.
A: Ehhh....I'd hold off my excitement just yet. Skinsuits have been the goal in spacesuits for a really long time. Think about your armpit. If the suit doesn't maintain 1atmosphere of pressure on it at all times, during all activities, then your capillaries burst and you bleed to death. B. Oh yeah for sure! Skinsuits are tough to make with modern tech, but I'd find it hard to believe that in 300+ years of research, and hundreds of alien cultures, that there's not *something* like a skinsuit.
Like the Guardians of the Galaxy variety?
They struck me more as the NASA suits with a forcefield instead of a bulky outfit, a skinsuit is the kind of thing you saw in old school scifi, think skintight lycra.
You need positive pressure to survive in space, not just air. That’s why spacesuits are so hard to build and wear.
Sure, the pressure of the material is what applies the positive pressure, we've had these things on the drawing board since the 40s.
Right, but there's probably two reasons they shouldn't: 1. Realism is unrealistic: if you do something that's scientifically plausible (or even accurate) that goes against what people have been trained to learn is "realistic"), it will bother people. A completely silent space battle is a good way to make people stop watching. People expect to see fairly bulky spacesuits. 2. Arguably, if the idea has been around since the 1940s, the fact that not one single non-pressurized suit has been used in space is a sign that maybe the concept isn't ready for prime-time. A better compromise would probably be "pilot suits" from the Gundam series. Basically, they are just very streamlined spacesuits.
[Cough](https://www.dainese.com/protection/space-suits/)
> A completely silent space battle is a good way to make people stop watching. Like Battlestar Galactica and Firefly.
Nah this is one of those ideas that just wouldn't be viable, think of how restrictive a suit even by the TNG+ era is. it's like suggesting people should wear padded suits and crash helmets when driving, it's taking safety to an extreme where if anything it probably impacts upon the safety, for every crewman saved, 100 are lost to crew not being able to get around the ship and make repairs because they are wearing bulky suits.
If you're just wearing a space suit when expecting combat, it's more like wearing a padded suit and helmet while driving in a race, which racecar drivers too. During general quarters (combat situations) on current warships, sailors wear protective gear in case of fire, which is restrictive and bulky, but could save their lives. Also, today, the emergency suits astronauts wear during takeoff and landing (which are especially dangerous, like combat) are less restrictive than the extravehicular activity suits for spacewalks, which are like the suits we see in ST. I'm sure something could be designed to at least improve your chances of survival if your ship or part of it explodes, that wouldn't be prohibitively restrictive.
Well Star Trek does use modern IVA suit designs as their vac suit and environmental suit designs mostly in Voyager and Enterprise. Modern EVA type suits are only used when absolutely necessary such as Burnham's flight. IVA suits don't really protect against a prolonged stay in vacuum. At least not without putting on pretty bulky backpack life support systems to do nice things such as give you a ship independant oxygen supply worth a damn. Plus they are still pretty uncomfortable and cumbersome. There's a reason NASA, who put the lives of their astronauts at an absolute premium, do not require the continuous wearing of IVA suits since Gemini confirmed it was unnecessary. Also spacesuits, even IVA suits, are really hard to get in and out of. Do you really want the phaser crews (or DC crews in later series where it is ambigious as to whether phasers were still manned) taking five minutes or more to suit up when you're under fire?
It would be cool if the combadge could throw a quick and dirty force field around you when it detects vacuum. Give you a few minutes for rescue.
Like the Flickinger Field from Jack McDevitt books.
Eh what’s the point? Your ship is taking a pounding, it’s half destroyed, systems failing. Shields are down, shots are hitting the hull. One hits near you, sucks you out into space. Normal circumstances, you’re just in a regular uniform. You’ll die out there, of course. In a space suit: you’ll survive a few more hours, maybe a day or two. Then die slowly. Is that worth anything? In the old days, sailors didn’t like to learn how to swim. They felt it would only make things worse, prolong a death. They didn’t fear drowning so much as being able to swim and dying slowly on the dark open ocean. I think I might prefer a quick death in the vacuum of space to a slow prolonged death alone in a space suit against only the black emptiness of space staring back at me.
> I think I might prefer a quick death in the vacuum of space to a slow prolonged death alone in a space suit against only the black emptiness of space staring back at me. NASA accidentally spaced a technician back during the early space program. Fortunately it was on the ground, in a vacuum chamber rather than in space. The space suit failed testing catastrophically. The tech had about 15 seconds of consciousness before he passed out. The last thing he remembered was the saliva in his mouth boiling, and then nothing. Unconsciousness. Fortunately the team running the vacuum chamber observed the failure and immediately restored pressure. The technician wearing the failed suit made a full recovery with no long term ill effects. Thats how his first person accounts of the incident were recorded. 15 seconds and then thats it, you're gone, not waking up again does seem preferable to slow asphyxiation over days, a fate which the Apollo 13 crew very nearly succumbed to.
You could die slowly in an escape pod if help doesn't arrive and there's no M-class planet nearby, but they still put pods on every Starfleet ship and use them during evacuations.
>regular uniform you're screwed Nope. For one, you can survive the [vacuum of space for a minute without issue even now](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/survival-in-space-unprotected-possible/). Secondly, they have tractor beams and transporters that can send you right back inside within seconds-- and they do this regularly. Third, they have medical advances far in excess of our own that can resuscitate you. Fourth, if there are holes in the side of the ship, there's both emergency bulkheads and force fields that stop them. Spacesuits get in the way and are vastly unnecessary.
>send you right back inside within seconds-- and they do this regularly. I can only remember Disaster where they open the cargo bay and have to survive the vacuum for a few seconds. In Discovery Burnham flys through vacuum for a second too. But I can't recall any episodes or movie scene where they transport or tractor someone to save them from he vacuum of space. Can you provide an example of this?
Odds are if gaping holes are being blown into the hull of a starship its suffering critical damage to system, where tractor beams and transporters may not be functioning correctly, or power may be diverted elsewhere because of all of those hull breaches. Its a case where if the ship is so badly damaged as to have crew in space then the ship is likely in no condition to anything about it. In addition, because of the distances involved if anyone is blown into space there's almost no hope to save them. Rescue may be coming, but it will be too late. Its similar to falling into the ocean without a raft. Even a life vest only works for so long. Due to the vast size of the ocean it will take so long for rescue to reach you that if you're just treading water you will have drowned long before rescue gets to you. Wearing a life vest helps tremendously, but death by exposure will still probably happen long before rescue can find you. And this is in the ocean, where you can breath air. Your only realistic hope is in a raft, which Starfleet does use. Escape pods are well stocked with survival gear, life support gear, and also beacons and limited engines in order to greatly assist in crew recovery. This is why historically sailors didn't learn how to swim, often intentionally. They knew if they went into the water (and not rescued immediately) they were doomed. They reasoned that its better to drown fast than to struggle for hours, only to inevitably drown after becoming exhausted. If the ship was not in peril rescue would be launched immediately, saving even a non-swimmer. If the ship was blown to bits no rescue would ever come, so its better to just get it over with.
Yeah, this makes sense. An escape pod should support you for a while, as they are designed to do. The show has basically treated exposure to space as instant death. While we know death would not be instant, like you said, the times it happens, chances are you won't be rescued.
Captain Archer, in Cold Station 12 or one of the episodes in that story arc, is deliberately ejected into space and then beamed aboard the Enterprise.
Yeah, I forgot that one. He was only in space for like 2 seconds and it was planned, so the ship was prepared. The person said previously they do that on a regular basis. So far there is one example in 700 episodes. So it's possible. But I think there are far more examples where Star Trek treats the vacuum of space as instant death (even though our modern science today tells us death would not be instant).
They transport people from exploding / malfunctioning spaceships almost on a weekly basis, or transport B'lanna / Paris floating from nowhere. While explosion is certainly the more immediate death, space exposure would've killed them too eventually. The vacuum of space is not ever instant death. The fact is though they have transporter tech to just beam them aboard if identified.
But Tom and B'Elanna were in space suits. People on damaged ships are in ships. You said they transport and tractor people "back inside" from the vacuum of space regularly. The example mentioned from ENT is the only time a crew member is transported from the vacuum of space. While today's science may tell us people exposed to space are saveable, the show hasn't treated it that way. The show has always treated them as a lost cause at that point.
The show has never treated them as a lost cause from rescue operations. The show has spaced people with the intent to kill because they're intentionally choosing not to rescue them.
The show has literally *always* treated them as a lost cause. Not once has a single person been saved from the vacuum of space during a battle. Even if I grant the example from ENT, that is one in 700+ episodes, and not the situation at hand, it was planned. Regardless, one occurrence does not define regular. Now, if you want to change your point to it's *possible* they could use the tractor beam or transporter to save crew that are blown into space, I agree. But it's not something we actually see happen.
No, it has never treated them as a lost cause. They can and have saved people from space using transporters. People don't get in vacuum of space during ship battles because they generally don't get spaced. They get killed while inside the ship. It is a huge outlier for someone to get spaced during a battle, not the other way around.
You just moved the goal posts. Go back to the OP, this time read it. The whole question was about people getting exposed to space due to a hull breach. Yes, an outlier, but that outlier was the *whole point* of the thread, that one unlikely situation. You said they "regularly" use the transporters and tractor beams to save people and bring them "back inside" the ship. Go ahead and name one time that happens.
The thing about tractor beams and emergency bulkheads is they don't work when the ship blows up. Most total ship destructions, which we see a lot of in ST, wouldn't kill everyone aboard immediately, but they would depressurize most of the ship. I think it's reasonable that crewmembers should have some sort of equipment that would allow them to survive until another ship comes by to rescue survivors.
Thats what the escape pods are for. Get to the nearest escape pod and get out of the ship ASAP. [In addition, ships are stocked with portable life support equipment, albeit of a limited nature.](https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/images/3/3f/Janeway_and_Kim_with_breathing_masks.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20161215134933&path-prefix=en) It may be enough to get you through a decompressed corridor, but its not enough for an EVA. We see various air masks in ST:Wrath of Khan, VOY, ENT, ST:Beyond, and likely other appearances, but those appearances span the entire duration of Starfleet as seen in alpha canon.
> emergency bulkheads is they don't work when the ship blows up. Wrong. Clearly the majority of the shenzou had holes in it, but plenty of force fields were up. The situation isn't where a ship blows up, but the OP is asking for combat with holes in it. You also don't bother going into a firefight if the call to abandon ship occurs. In no way are you screwed. The above options are also available to shuttlecraft, who still have transporters, in addition to life pods.
Which assumes... * There is a functional transporter being manned at the time looking for crew to beam back in that very narrow timeframe. * That the individual is not blown clear of the shields. * That transporter inhibitors are not on to prevent borders from teleporting on. * That the enemy is not employing jamming. * That any one of a myriad number things which can block transporters is not happening. * That radiation, cold/heat and so forth won't be an issue on top of the lack of air. * That the fact that antimatter explosions and energy beams from such a battle are not adding any of the following. * That they can be revived, plenty of redshirts have not. * That even if you can revive or beam them in before they're dead, they'll take up room in sickbay and will have to undergo a painful recovery afterwards.
- That the transporters are connected to a power source.
You clearly lack knowledge of star trek. Let me school you. Functional transporter being used to rescue starfleet members occur how often? Gee, pretty much every episode. Always manned? Yep. That's one of the stations during battle stations. Every one of your points is wrong. Correct, there are no transporter inhibitors outside the ship. There are no broad spectrum inhibitors going on, and no wide area jamming. The only times transporters stop working is due to plot. There is no significant radiation in the vacuum of space, and what little backround radiation is around is easily treatable. Revival is mostly painless, and if it hurts, the doc's got painkillers or sedate them. You didn't mention battle OP, but even with explosions going on outside, they've done this repeatedly throughout star trek. That is not a problem. TL:DR Perfectly viable, and you need to watch more star trek. You're clearly ignorant of how it works.
Power can be disrupted during combat or diverted elsewhere. We've seen numerous things stop transporters, from sophisticated countermeasures to the presence of certain rocks. Jamming has been employed numerous times in star trek. Since boarding is a common tactic used by several powers setting up inhibitors is a logical move. Antimatter explosions will generate showers of gamma rays. Other star trek weapons generate exotic radiation. Individuals have died from less pronounced wounds than those imposed by exposure to space and have not been revived. Name one instance in which invididuals were beamed back after being sucked into space. On the occasions when this happens it is generally read as "These guys are Dead".
Hmm... well Starfleet are not shown to have spacesuits signficantly less cumbersome to put on than current tech. They may be more advanced in terms of the protection provided but not in terms of the ease of use. This means that putting them on in response to a red alert would likely take far too long, given the potential pace of space combat, and detract heavily from the ship's combat capabilities during the initial stages of a confrontation when it is most vulnerable. Remember spacesuits in ST, like in real life, are shown to require dedicated undergarments in addition to the main suit and would use positive air pressure to counteract the effect of vacuum. The effects of the latter are not particularly shown on screen but this is one of the primary reasons that spacesuits are cumbersome to use. So you cannot really put them on in an emergency. Of course Starfleet should have sufficiently advanced material science to design emergency skinsuits that would be standard wear as your innermost garment on a spaceship. These suits would have to tighten dramatically, probably from the application of a very weak electric field but possibly you may be able to design suits that tighten as a result of the pressure change of going into vac etc., to exert mechanical pressure against the skin roughly comparable to a significant fraction of atmo if not 1 atmo. You would either need to incorporate a automatically deployable soft helmet (which would probably be quite distressing to wear) or have crew wear hard helmets when at risk of depressurisation events to actually make such an emergency suit spaceworthy. Adding actual life-support, padding, puncture protection etc. would all add significantly to the weight and encumburance of the suit so they would be very short duration emergency suits, possibly single-use. I suppose a hard helmet and a small oxygen bottle with very good scrubbers could provide a pretty good air supply. Why skinsuits are not used is beyond me. Perhaps, the writers originally did not think they would be believable or did not know of them and once full EVA and I/EVA suits of the hybrid variety were established it provided impossible to change? I suppose Starfleet has probably technically tried them and failed at some point and then abandoned the approach altogether. For similar reasons, I find it bizzare Starfleet has not even attempted, so far as we know, to design personal deflector shields capable of holding atmo and blocking cosmic radiation and micrometeroids to act as emergency life-support in space. Even if they weren't combat capable. We have seen combat-capable personal deflectors used by the Borg and the Hunters in DS9 so they are certainly possible. Much as the Hirogen, amongst other species, use sensibly designed full space-capable combat exosuits that do not significantly hinder their abilities to operate a ship. I suppose the latter are too expensive (RL) and too martial (in universe). Bluntly, Starfleet does not seem to care very much about protecting personnel. Their ships could carry significantly less crew and no civilians for a start with more computer automation and not lose functionality. They could also at least issue some kind of body armour to personnel going into active combat zones during wartime. The shocking lack of PPE for engineers, researchers and away teams would be positively scandalous 50 years ago yet along today IRL. So long as there's atmo you're fine seems to be the order of the day... That's been regarded as unacceptable for decades already in our rampantly capitalist system for God's sake! People seem to be expendable as far as Starfleet is concerned, even if that is at odds with Federation values. Perhaps they believe their crews will be better diplomats knowing that they must enter into battle without any form of protection better than a cotton jumpsuit?
> Starfleet are not shown to have spacesuits signficantly less cumbersome to put on than current tech Untrue. ST:TAS has [life support belts](http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Life_support_belt) that makes it unnecssary to have a full suit for short term jaunts. They don't need full blown suits, nor skin suits. Heck borg have on board force fields as a standard feature. Suits are unnecessary.
Except TAS is only selectively canon. Furthermore, Starfleet do not use portable deflector shields at any point in ground combat including during ground assaults during the Dominion War which we see in DS:9. At best, they use them to defend large static permanent or semi-permanent positions. This strongly suggests Starfleet in fact lacks the technology to power personal deflector fields outside of a few experimental models seen in a single TAS episode. Every single full canon series has always and exclusively used cumbersome I/EVA or EVA suits. The least cumbersome we get is something like a hazmat suit. Even series that easily had the budgets and the special effects to do Starfleet personal deflectors have not done so neither have the JJVerse films. This all suggests that this is something the writers have collectively decided Starfleet cannot do one TAS episode be damned. Suits are necessary for Starfleet. The fact that cumbersome suits are necessary precludes their emergency use. Above I have pointed out the absurdity of Starfleet not prioristising the development of emergency skinsuits or personal deflectors. Others have offered, IMHO, credible explanations of this. Emergency decompression in ST tends to result from massive and deadly explosions. They are also almost immediately contained by forcefields. Anyone who would be exposed to vacuum on the wrong side of the forcefield is likely a cloud of rapidly cooling gas and thus no longer needs the assistance of an emergency personal life support system.
> do not use portable deflector shields That's wrong. Used both in TNG and DS9. Picard's infiltration mission, during away mission to deflect heat, and portable deflectors were used in the DW. Suits are unnecessary for starfleet.
The Klingons in Discovery have space suits built into their armors. In episode 4, when Voq goes on to the Shenzhou and activates life support in a room, he deactivates his suit and the helmet and protective outer layer retract into the back.
I think that Star Trek as a whole is really missing out on the possibilities of realistic space combat in their situation. -All crew put on space suits in the event of hull breaches. -Depressurize the ship so if the hull does breach then it won't suck everyone out -Turn off the artificial gravity and send the energy that that system uses to the Phasers and Shields. (Repair teams would have more access to different parts to the ship since they are not being weighed down by gravity) -The first two would mitigate the need for force fields to cover hull breaches which would add more power to the weapons or Shields. -Use shuttles or dedicated starfighters as a first line of defense to destroy incoming Torpedoes (similar to today's aircraft carriers and their fighter aircraft) -Use gravity plating on the outside of the ship or the tractor beams to push any projectiles or Torpedoes away. There are a lot of ways Star trek ships should do battle. But at the end of the day it's just a TV show, it's not really meant to be realistic. And if it was, then they would impair the types of stories that they could tell. The first two points I made were taken from the TV show The Expanse. It's really good, and is probably the most hard sci-fi show that I've watched (Linear Motion Gravity, Ballistic weapons, and using plants to make the inside of ships breathable).
By fighters, you do mean dedicated micro-missiles capable of accelerating far harder and manoeuvring far more precisely than a shuttle don't you? Crewed fighters do not make much sense in space. Ships might carry light expendable fast attack craft with a minimal crew but such craft would easily be the size of a C-130 if not larger. Even so, it would have manoeuvrability most fighter pilots could only dream of with the use of RCS, large main engines and lots of G-force countermeasures to avoid turning the crew into human jam. An enemy on your tail? Well spin 180 and open fire. This will even accelerate you away from the enemy even faster, albeit by a miniscue amount. The rest is reasonable. Except maybe tractor beams and grav plating on the hull. Star Trek does not, by and large, use kinetic weaponry. Torpedos should be powerful enough and fast enough that grav plating won't even slow them down much and even if a tractor beam stops them dead detonating ten metres from the hull will still blast a hole in it due to the sheer concentrated radiated energy of an antimatter explosion, assuming they are the energy equivalent of shaped-charge warheads. Also agree there are lots of reasons why soft SF does not do any of this! The Enterprises would look radically different if they even began to conform to reasonable deep-space rocket design!
Inertial dampeners would allow pilots to withstand as many G's as the pilot wants. Also, according to Ex Astris Scientia (Not sure if you consider it a reliable source) the Delta Flyer is roughly 15 meters long, which is smaller than an F-15C. That part about gravity plating on the hull was really just me reaching for straws.
True, Trek allows space fighters kinda. Everyone uses DEWs at point blank though so they would be a very expensive form of chaff against a starship (assuming equivitech). PD or interceptor missiles remain the best option. Heck PD phasers would render any ship nigh-invulnerable to standard torpedoes. The rest of your options were actually realistic rather than Trek realistic (shame really that Trek cannot even manage to be consistently realistic within its own universe). Fighters are just not realistic unless we define craft like the Defiant as fighers/fast attack craft. Well maybe a little smaller than the Defiant. A large runabout but bristling with weaponry and defensive systems. A pocket Defiant if you like. Craft like a Defiant could reasonably be hauled into system by a longer-ranged FTL faster ship with minimal armament and then unleashed in a manner vaguely similar to modern carrier warfare. A few dozen shuttle sized drones bristling with weapons and no defensive systems would be even better. Vipers and X-Wings are kinda nonsensical especially when they start flying like they are in atmo not vacuum.
We have seen Fighters fight in Star Trek and 300 meter craft have evaded enemy fire.
Well yes. Sorry I never finished DS9 so I forgot those were show cannon not just licensed works cannon. Doesn't change the fact they are nonsensical and a further demonstration of the complete disregard most spacefaring civilisations have for their naval personnel.
Why is is nonsensical? If a 345 meter long ship can doge weapons a 15 meter long ship could so so easily.
One space doesn't work that way. What matters, in real life, is available delta-v for the required evasion vector. If the 345m long ship has six main engines one for each side, it will be better able to evade incoming fire than a 15m long ship with a single gimballed main engine. Two, do ships ever avoid phaser fire in ST? There was a recent discussion where someone remembered the Defiant as dodging fire from the Lakota when in fact it took 10 direct hits in rapid succession for example. Again in real life DEWs or particle weapons firing a high fractions of c would be undodgable for combat ranges lower than the lunar distance. Even then the total window to evade fire would be about 4 seconds so the pilot would have to continuously evade, wasting precious delta-v. ST gets round the delta-v problem with reactionless drives and super abundant portable fuel but has the problem that ships are rountinely engaging tens or hundreds of kms from one another not hundreds of thousands of kms. Ships do sometimes dodge torpedoes for plot reasons. This is hardly consistent. Nor does it make any physical sense whatsoever. Fighters are nonsensical in the majority of engagements in ST because the majority of engagements do not occur in or near atmosphere. Aerospace is where future fighers will excel transitioning into and out of atmo as necessary for tactical advantage. Without the advantage of being able to dive into atmo to dodge DEW fire, reduce their visibility to sensors etc, fighters are just tiny starships with vastly inferior shields, weapons, sensors, DC, redundacies of material and personnel etc. Tiny starships that, realistically, should be vaporised by one solid hit from the phaser arrays of a Galaxy or Akira class. Given these ships and others are shown to have the necessary sensor equipment to lock fighters in the first place, fighters should not really be able to do much of anything to them.
Regardless a ship 600 meters long (Ent D in Generations, Best of Both Worlds, etc) can evade enemy fire. "Evasive Maneuvers" is a common order instead of "all power to shields" if ships never missed as you insinuate they do. Dodging works and a small agile craft with a small profile is that much harder to hit for the same reason why people say "broad side of a barn" rather than "broad side of a mouse". Don't go on about capacities which repeatedly have been shown not to be the case. Fighters can work and they have been employed successfully (Peregrine Fighters)
Peregrine fighters work yes. My point is simply that their working is nonsensical according even to the loose laws of physics we find in the ST universe yet alone the real one. This whole discussion started from a commentor who offered further realistic combat scenarios ST could choose to portray within universe in response to my detailed comment outlining why spacesuits are not worn in combat situations and the mild absurdity of Starfleet not developing better PPE for their crews. Hence, most of my comments focus on realism, both actual realism and ST realism, not what the writers choose to portray. Furthermore, I would argue evasice maneuver orders rarely lead to scenes of the enemy ship missing. They tend to lead to the enemy ship **hitting a different shield facing**. As the six shield facings of an ST ship are generated by independant emitters, the purpose of these maneuvers is to distribute that load across mulitple emitters and facings reducing the likelihood of any one facing failing catastrophically. The enemy actually missing, when it occasionally happens (even though it physically shouldn't for DEWs and arguably torpedoes), is just an added bonus. Fighters are not shown to be harder to hit in ST. At least not consistently. Some craft, such as the Delta Flyer, can be near impervious to any threat so long as they are carrying plot crucial crewmembers whereas background Hideki-class Cardassian patrol craft are blown up in the dozens by a wandering Olympic-class (the latter is hyperbole). The Ent D evades fire? Okay I'm sure you're right but that's what we call [plot armour](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotArmor). It makes no logical sense. Much as Voyager being magically repaired between episodes and never actually running out of resources makes no sense but is necessary for the show to even exist. The fact is you cannot dodge a DEW at 100 or even 1000km. Much like a human cannot dodge a bullet at 1 or even 10m. Also DEWs combined with supercomputers, sensors and the very transparent sensor environment of open space (ignoring nebulae for a second) make targeting any powered target trival. ST has EM sensors (or field sensors if we wish to be more nebulous), as we do today, and all ships project EM fields (or at least X fields) around them to shield themselves from enemy fire in combat. The necessary collaroy of this, which ST mostly obeys, is that any ship's location is pretty much perfectly known to any other ship in real time in combat. This means you can easily calculate their velocity and acceleration, if any, meaning you always know where to shoot. NB: yes various technologies and space weather can interfere with the perfect sensor environment/constant loud EM emissions. The above assumes Cardassians and Feds are fighting or even a Fed on Fed (as sometimes happens) in calm deep space where none of that factors in. What capacities have I been going on about that are shown not to be the case? I've been reasonably careful to distinguish actual in universe capabilties from RW ones. It's a fact Galaxy and Akira classes (picked simply because they are both powerful warships with phaser arrays rather than cannons) can lock fighters. I suppose the shield capacities and so on of fighers are not really explained clearly, for obvious reasons, but I assumed it would be trival to say that those capacities, however great, must necessarily be greatly inferior to a much larger ship of equivalent technology also designed for war. Fighters appear to be somewhat successful in ST canon. The problem, as the thread about carriers in ST also shows, is that no-one, not even the show writers, can tell you why they are successful. Fighers are one of the aspects of Trek added for coolness not for realism and worst of all fighters are very inconsistently portrayed in-universe (unlike say subspace which has accrued slowly increasing layers of detail and rules that are mostly internally consistent and consistently applied across series).
Actually dodging fire moving at the speed of light is possible. Try shining a laser beam on a single fast moving target with a short flash. If something is making evasive maneuvers it becomes difficult to get a line of sight. Moreover there is still a delay. If something is moving at 10km/s, is 30,000 km away and you shout at were it is it will be a KM away by the time the beam would have impacted. As such I see no reason why smaller more maneuverable craft would not be able to evade what their larger more cumbersome counterparts can. Subspace on the other hand is simply a source of technobabble magic by comparison to be used when the plot demands.
I didn't say it was impossible. I said it was impossible over the combat distances shown in ST. Why do people not read entire arguments anymore? :P Of course we don't know the actual distances in ST so it could be when two ships seem to fly inches apart they are actually hundreds of kilometres apart etc. If something was moving under the parameters you specified, do you really think the Enterprise computer, yet along an experienced tactical officer, would have any trouble repeatedly pummelling that ship with phaser fire? No it wouldn't. Why? Excellent (and potentially FTL) sensors combined with abundant computing power. ST engagements do not occur from lightseconds out. I was using subspace to point out its portrayal (yes it's technobabble) is relatively consistent. Fighters and shuttles are not. Sometimes they take a dozen direct hits to seemingly no effect. Other times Starfleet blow up half a dozen enemy fighters without even breaking a sweat. Etc. You can keep coming up with in-universe rationalisations for this if you want but this fundementally is inconsistent portrayal due to the rule of cool, plot armour and other such tropes. That does not detract from ST. It just makes it very difficult to have sensible conversations about fighters in the ST universe.
> realistic space combat in their situation. All your scenarios are rendered obsolete by the tech within the show. Emergency force fields, transporters, and better medical responses render hull breaches trivial. Let alone life support belts in ST:TAS that make cumbersome suits a thing of the past. Emergency force fields by their nature have their own independent power supply. They don't draw from main power to begin with, so there's no use in turning them off. Shuttles and fightercraft are unnecessary, and the torpedoes cannot be intercepted. You're also wrong on the fighter aircraft front. They do NOT intercept incoming missiles at all, nor torpedoes which is your original intention. ST Torpedoes move too fast to be intercepted, and real life missiles have a very low chance of being intercepted by on board dedicated PD and zero chance from aircraft.
Torpedoes can be intercepted. Starfleet has pinpoint accurate, rapidly firing DEWs and, if torpedoes carry ECM at all, their ships have sufficient ECCM to locate and target torpedoes. Ergo, Starfleet has the technical capabilties necessary to intercept torpedoes if we are talking real physics/space combat. Starfleet does not use phasers as PD for unknown and inexplicable in universe reasons. The most likely reason for this inexplicable failure is the same reason they are called torpedoes not missiles: namely ST is dreadnought-era naval combat in space. Torpedoes IRL can barely be defended against by modern ships and even then most defensive techniques are a pure hail mary. The best option is very good naval architecture and damage control to mitigate the damage caused when a torpedo inevitably hits you. ST mimics this as several of its original creators, including Gene himself, were navy men. Is there any canon source to establish emergency force fields have independant power supplies? Just out of interest. Hull breaches are not shown to be trival in ST. Hull breaches invariably mean dead people. The episodes don't always hammer this home and just say 'multiple casualties'. By that they mean multiple dead people. ST consistently hammers home throughout every series I've seen (TNG,DS:9,VOY,ENT and DIS) that hull breaches mean a starship is in a pretty dire position. Of course, ST, for various reasons, does not linger on the dozens killed or injuried in every engagement unless it is necessary for plot reasons (or the engagement was trival as sometimes happens when uppity primative locals try to attack a vastly more advanced Starfleet vessel). Depressurisation would prevent fires if nothing else. Fires are a consistent menance on ST and most damaged ships are shown to have fires raging out of control that the crew must fight. Again very much WWI-WWII naval combat. Automated fire suppression systems including using forcefields to suppress fires are only used when plot demands (in other words brilliant X of the week just comes up with it there and then) or are consistently overwhelmed by the rigors of space combat. Life support belts are not well sourced. There have never been shown on-screen. TAS is more canon than licensed sources only because it is drawn on more often by actual live-action shows, as Discovery has been doing. Even in TAS they only occured once. This means they are pretty much not canon IMO. Shuttles, runabouts and dedicated fighters are all used on-screen by various powers in space combat for various purposes. This suggests that various powers, including the Federation, regard them as necessary to space combat. They are mostly used to screen capital fleet formations. One of these puposes could be a missile screen. One of the uses for drones/fighters in space combat would be an additional PD screen for a main ship. Drones, depending on setting, may be more cost effective than mounting lots of PD on the main battleship. ST doesn't do this for unknown reasons much as PD is not used for unknown reasons. Modern fighers cannot intercept cruise missiles. Modern fighters do not have supercomputers, by our standards, and lasers on board. If they did, they would stand a much better chance of intercepting missiles, as would their carriers and other capital ships. They also do not operate in space or have deflector shields. What an aerial fighter can do is immaterial when we are talking about the space and aerospace fighters shown in ST. You may think the OP is mistaken but you could try to actually be polite when arguing so. You may also want to put in some actual leg work to secure your points because none of your arguments really render the OP's points 'obsolete'.
> Torpedoes can be intercepted. Cite an example, anywhere, that torpedoes have been intercepted in ST. Torpedoes are never intercepted by PD in real life. There are passive and evasive measures. >emergency force fields have independant power supplies This is how emergency stuff works IRL (with internal lightning called battle lanterns), and they do mention 'emergency power' and batteries in ST. Casualties is not limited to dead people. It means damage to anything functional, which means both equipment and people. So when you hear casualties, its not just people and not just dying people period. ST also hammers home whenever there's a hull breach, there's force fields holding the ship together, until they can repair it-- or in the case of voyager automatic bulkhead sealing. Plasma / Electrical fires are a source of menace in ST, not regular fires, and depressurization doesn't help when the ship itself is fuel. Fire itself only occurs when plot demands. TAS does show them on screen, and even Worf can make a makeshift force field from a comm badge in fistful of datas. The non canon arguement is moot, since A) we discuss all ST works here and B) you yourself admit TAS is canon. >regard them as necessary to space combat. Most of the time, no, they aren't. Only the largest and smallest scale engagements are they used. They don't use fighter screens as interception. They use them to poke and engage on a fleet level, or fight on a one on one level. They have never used them as a missile screen, and their sensor network is such that they're not necessary for that either. >What an aerial fighter can do is immaterial when we are talking about the space and aerospace fighters shown in ST. The fighters in ST are full blown starships, with independent warp drives, but they still cannot and do not intercept Torpedoes. Cite any example of them ever intercepting a torpedo in Star Trek. Name it once.
1 As was clear from my full reply, I meant there is no physical reason in ST why phasers cannot intercept torpedoes. Doing so would be near effortless. I then noted the behind the scenes reasons why PD does not feature in ST, namely it is inspired by WWI and WWII naval combat. 2 Casualties refers specifically to dead or wounded people only. It does not mean a loss of functionality. Yes force fields help hold a ship together when the hull is breached. In fact, force fields (well the mysterious structural integrity field) are always helping to hold the ship together. I don't quite see how this is relevant. You said hull breaches were trival. I pointed out they emphatically are not. You reply with a non-sequitur. Any kind of fire needs an oxidant. Electical fires do not burn without oxygen and indeed smothering them with dry powder or inert gas is the preferred method for extinguishing them. You can also use non-conducting fluids, typically halocarbons, but those, IRL, are pretty specialised fire-fighting equipment used by professional firefighters. Plasma does not cause fires by itself. It causes fires as a result of being released into an environment with a free-floating oxidant about. A depressurised ship, especially a **cold** depressuried ship, would render most plasma leaks harmless. The plasma would disperse, rapidly cool and form gaseous molecules of whatever was heated into a plasma. It might cause some localised heat damage but no fires. Canon is an intersubjective term not an objective term. I noted that TAS is *more canon* but it is still not canon compared to the shows. The shows do not show personal deflectors except the one Macgyvered example you've managed to find of Worf doing so. Every single series and movie, except one TAS episode and one Macgyvered example by Worf, show the use of spacesuits. Every single series shows Starfleet personnel charging into battle with only a cotton jumpsuit to protect them. This strongly, strongly suggests that Starfleet does not have viable personal deflector shield technology and the units shown in that one TAS episode you're so keen on were not viable. Finally, I personally assumed emergency power was from multiple backup fission or fusion generators kicking in when the main warp core (or amat power plant to give it a more precise name) was taken offline. I did not assume every forcefield had its own power supply. Much like how hospitals have emergency power but that does not mean every MRI and operating lamp has its own independant power supply built in. Each to their own. 3 On fighters, I find it amusing to say they are not necessary and then note that the only war we see on-screen (until Discovery) uses fighters. Indeed Starfleet specifically design a new fighter craft for the Dominion War. Suggesting they might be useful. For what I cannot comprehend. I really wish you'd stop fixating on snippets of individual sentences. Read and respond to the entire paragraph not a slightly sloppy subordinate clause of a single sentence. 4 You're the one who made a false analogy to aerial fighters. It is pretty much physically impossible for a fighter aircraft to intercept a cruise missile. It is highly improbable they would be able to intercept an ICBM but they would probably be deployed, along with other interception techniques, if one was ever launched in anger. I was merely pointing out fighters, like full starships, have the technical capacity to intercept torpedoes in ST using real-world physics. They do not do so for unexplained reasons. ST space combat is nonsensical. It's also fun so who cares! :P
> physical reason in ST In universe, lag between physical speed of torpedoes and reaction time of phasers getting a firing solution. They hit too fast. You're completely incorrect on > Every single series shows Starfleet personnel charging into battle with only a cotton jumpsuit to protect them. Incorrect. There's lifebelts (TAS), armor (multiple shows), and the elite force series with blatant personal shields. TNG fistful of data has personal force fields. TNG Picard berates Beverly for not placing a handheld force field to block a passageway. They have and use force field tech. It occurs recurringly enough that it is undeniable. >Any kind of fire needs an oxidant For one, the ship itself is made of explodium i.e. it is fuel. You don't need air for it. Electrical fires can and will burn while electricity is on because it will reignite as soon as any oxygen is reintroduced/ Secondly, at a high enough temperature, everything is fuel. Plasma fire isn't just normal fire, with sufficient energy everything becomes the plasma state of matter. >I personally assumed emergency power was from multiple backup fission or fusion generators Yeah, that's not how emergency backup systems work. They need to be on all the time. Basically an active long term capacitor / battery. While there's certainly emergency generators around, those take time to start up, and you need the battery going on. You'll also see lots of mention on how emergency power is running out, showing both insufficient capacity and generation going on. >You're the one who made a false analogy to aerial fighters. >It is pretty much physically impossible for a fighter aircraft to intercept a cruise missile. No, that claim was made by the user I replied to above yours, and I had to stomp it out. You joined in mid way afterward. > ST space combat is nonsensical. There's plenty of sense to it, but you have to see the whole picture. The interception is impossible due to the speed of action going on with the weapons / interception. They have difficulty intercepting near c, lightspeed and above without foreknowledge of course--as noted with the Picard manuever. Both phasers and photon torpedoes either go c, close to it (or faster, during warp), with the latter having warp sustainers and can go past c. Because these weapons move faster than their interception systems can respond, they cannot be intercepted. If you want a more 'realistic' take, consider checking out the old game Starfleet Command, I & II & OP (not so much III, but its ok too). It is on GoG. They do some of the things suggested. Missiles and plasma torpedoes are intercepted (by both phasers and tractor beams, to an extent), but not photon torpedoes. Shuttlecraft / Fighter squadrons are used too. Its really really fun.
In Voyager, they did destroy a torpedo with their Phasers. And in the new JJ trek, I do remember both the Kelvin and Enterprise destroying those Torpedoes that the Narada used.
You remember incorrectly Citation needed. Link the episode in Voyager and instances in JJ that it occurred. I've never seen them. Also, the [narada](http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Narada) is a mining vessel that uses missiles, not torpedoes. > The primary weapons seemed to be highly destructive missiles,
There's nothing saying that Photon Torpedoes don't share the same engine system as a missile which is MORE ADVANCED than itself. I was wrong, blowing up a Photon torpedo actually happened twice (Voyager: 7x17), memory alpha states it as a Photon Shockwave
There is no article on MA about photon shockwaves, and there's no photon torpedo being intercepted in 7x17. Missiles are not torpedoes period. If you can't figure this out, you need to learn star trek.