Mr. Oragahn wrote:
Yet nothing proves they rely on anything else.
When the Borg Sphere threated Earth in First Contact, and after having the Cube coming close to the planet and well before the Sphere even attempted to travel time, the UFP had more than enough time to aim phasers or torpedoes cannons at the Borg. Nothing was shot.
When the Whale Probe came close to that big space station, and later Earth, not even a single beam or projectile was shot, if only as a final deterrent, despite the alien ship being known to be potentially highly dangerous.
Did we even see torpedoes fired at V'ger?
Well first this appears to be an argument of absence of evidence equals evidence of absense which I do not agree is a wholly logical, rational path to take. We, after all, can not be privy to all actions, thoughts or reasonings in play during your examples.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AbsenceOfEvidenc ... eOfAbsence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_ ... of_absence
I see your point, but context does matter, things can't be generalized.
When something is logically expected, its repeated absence reinforces the idea that it is absent as a whole.
The more the test is done and the results always return an absence instead of a presence, the more this actually forms an evidence of absence in itself.
The only appeal to ignorance there could be would involve some extremely convoluted reason about how the non use of defensive measures, yet when absolutely needed, would descend from bizarre choices and exceptionally odd circumstances.
Second judging from this
image the Borg Sphere appears to still be quite some distance from Earth judging by how large it appears in comparison. Off the cuff and using the Mark I eyeball I wouldn't say the Sphere has to be within weapons range nor that said hypothetical gunnery officer has to fire the split second the Borg sphere enters range.
By the time it's entering the time vortex thingy, it seems to be a lil' bit closer.
Also, wouldn't this, by your own admission, be inside the effective range of a long range beam weapon or even more, a torpedo silo? And what would prevent a Borg ship from firing a megaton beam right into a city as soon as it comes out of warp, even before any shield could conceivably be raised?
Aren't torpedoes supposedly coming with long range as long as they can adjust their trajectory?
The battle was so intense and the consequences so high that there would be no reason for Earth not to track the Borg and fire torpedoes as soon as possible.
One would say possible means a shorter range than what we see. Problem is, what we see is more than enough for any ship to start shooting guided ordnance at a planet.
Third the Whale Probe's "message" played hell with Star Fleet systems. It seems illogical to assume phasers would be an exception.
Unless the Probe's effect had a range of many, many Earth diameters, there's little reason for not seeing shots coming at it. Even stray shots if calibration was screwed over, doesn't matter. The "ship" makes no communication that can be decipherer, deactivates all nearby ships and stations and is headed for Earth.
That alone would have made the entire Federation extremely worried about the intention of that giant maki roll.
Fourth I know nothing concerning the Motion Picture, never could sit through it, so please post what you feel is revelent information.
Well, to summarize, the heroic Enterprise manages to enter the super "cloud" surrounding the alien supership (as large as Earth's orbit), but was then unable to communicate.
Meanwhile, V'ger still went on, entered the Sol system, and fired super energy balls towards Earth. Balls far more powerful than anything fired at the Klingon flotilla or the UFP sensor station.
In other words, the UFP was facing an immense enemy that proved to be hostile anytime an engagement happened, including a mere probing, killing humans and Klingons alike, and the thing was aimed at Earth and wouldn't reply.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:
But then again such a ship still has to reach the planet and managed to survive.
As for the cloaks, if you talk about Klingons, I don't recall them being used while at warp. Which means they'd be fairly obvious when arriving. Besides, for some reason, that supposedly massive advantage hasn't allowed to steamroll their opposition. It's most efficient if you don't know they're coming, so you're not actively looking for them.
In other words, all of these end-of-world scenarios can only happen if the attackers manage to push through all the enemy territory while traveling at non discrete warp speeds.
This is nothing like having to face a foe who can literally slip under the radar up to your door mat.
First and foremost you have not established the apparent ease in detecting your bog standard warp bound starship. An example or two of them detecting an opposing starship at range would be apreciated.
First of all, I base this largely on the fact that warp involves a ship moving through
real space, even if some form of subspace is involved to build a field around the ship at some point.
The simple fact that real space is warped is a huge indicator of something is moving in. Even if you don't see the thing that moves, you see its trail.
But perhaps I'm missing something here.
Secondly, your claim hardly simplifies the situation, as it means
any warp capable ship or weapon could easily sneak onto any other faction, ship, base or world and unleash hell before everyone's morning buzzers would go off.
Now, a little search on the web gave me this:
http://en.memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Ionization_trail
http://en.memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Warp_signature
It also reminded me of the very plot of First Contact: the Vulcans passing close to the Sol system and detecting a warp signature: which means it can be detected at long range, largely allowing for preemptive actions against any arrival, and that already back before even the
Adventures of Captain Archer and the Frontier Busters.
We learn that Moon's gravity would even block Ent-E's warp departure from the Vulcans' sensors (at least, those they had back then).
http://scifi.stackexchange.com/question ... st-contact
With knowing such weaknesses and tricks, gravity fields would be extra-scanned, for sure.
This, to me, represents enough evidence that warp trips aren't that discrete.
On an unrelated note: "Even when traveling at impulse the ship left behind a warp trail. (ENT: "Broken Bow")"
This would strongly support my opinion that superior impulse speeds are achieved with the help of the warp systems in some way.
Second the episode "The Defector" {TNG-03} hinges on Klingon ships being able to travel while cloaked since Picard covertly brings two Bird of Preys with him into the Neutral Zone.
There certainly has to be some significant drawback to that, or a limitation to the cloaking system.
First, because even IF a planetary shield was available to Earth, it wouldn't be up at all time. It would take massive amounts of energy to cover more than the planet's diameter at all time and provide the same level of strength at any point on the force field. So since it's expected the shield not to be up at all time, any warp capable cloaked ship would have no trouble to even enter Low Earth Orbit and bomb an entire nation in the blink of an eye.
It is even worse for guns and silos, as they're active defense measures and can only be used when a target is known.
Which brings us back again to the inherent vulnerability of relying solely on the interception model of defense.
Only if we know for sure that interception isn't sufficient. Do we? Let's see.
The cloaking system could have such a limitation that if you're not probing the space for it, you wouldn't see it. In other words, it's largely efficient against passive detection systems.
It's quite unlikely that the regions around important worlds of the UFP and other high traffic points are not monitored actively.
Space is big so we can buy that two cloaked ships moving at warp managed towards the rather vast Neutral Zone weren't spotted.
This article at MA hints at how the cloaking tech is not impenetrable, and that when it is to current sensor tech, it's source of much worries.
Then later, in the early 24th century, you have the treaties banning such tech.
Finally, on the spot, in the altverse, by 2259, there already was a treaty in place banning such tech.
Also, lots of the advances in cloaking tech and sensors capable of breaching their fields were gifts from the future.
So we can safely consider that interception is a very potent method of stopping enemy ships.
Perhaps, I only remember they weren't big ships I think.
Then we have a problem because we never get to see the Breen attack, only its aftermath, so I truly have no idea what example your talking about.
I thought some had at least crashed to some degree on the planet. Ok, anyway, whatever happened, no shield stopped those loons from doing some damage.
Now, iirc, the damage was quite limited, so it's possible the ships were shot down and only some debris hit the planet.
No matter what, >stuff< did reach the surface. That largely discards the planetary shield
theory.
Mr. Oragahn wrote::
It's fairly possible that the alt-UFP has spent less resources on cultural expansion and discovery, but it's also very much expected and quite well shown on screen, twice, that they considered outer space and even greater dangerous place than previously thought.
In other words, there's little logic to be found in them not having seriously put most efforts on weapon and defenses development, and newtonian propulsion I'd say too, since they didn't care about building the Monsterprise on Earth.
Bar a few odd cases, like the choice of pulse weapons over phasers (the Defiant uses a lot of them anyway, which was a more warlike vessel so perhaps there's a sliver lining here), there's no reason to ditch those movies. If anything, they represent a buffier Trek.
You presume the only point of depature is after the Naranda arrives. Due to time travel happy antics that is, at best, a risky assumption. Just taking Kirk, whose life we know has been altered, he traveled to the 30's, 60's and 80's and the odds of each of those instances being exactly the same in NuTrek as it was in the Prime-Trek's timeline is remote.
And each change begets further changes down the timestream.
But then it would mean each time an episode or a movie featured time travel, previous chronology would be considered prime, anything after that event would be alternative.
How is Kirk time traveling in future times (at a date that is beyond the scope of the two new movies) affecting the argument here?
If anything, anytime the crew returns to 'actual' time, it's a whole assumption that everything was like it was before. Past events could have been somewhat different in some respects, yet not too different to prevent the normal time events from occuring. Like in the new movies, wherein most of what is expected from the global canvas does actually happen (although there will be much major differences now, because the Naranda wasn't entirely stopped and Vulcan was removed, and the relations with Romulus and anything related to its peculiar star are also going to lead to major political story arcs).
Btw, as far as we can observe, the overall geopolitical situation in the new movies isn't different from the original timeline, which itself was hit a bajillion times by way too many time splits that could have affected it in ways we'll never be able to know.
All in all, NuTrek isn't going to dodge V'ger or the whale probe. Nor that it matters much because this is talking about future events and the real issue here is knowing if the alt-timeline is that different from the prime one, and to what extent.
It was a freak accident which sent the Enterprise back in "Tomorrow is Yesterday" {TOS-01}after all and without that and therefore knowledge of sling shotting around a Star to effect time travel Kirk may not be able to travel back in time during "The Voyage Home" which could mean transparent aluminum isn't "invented" by the same man or time as Prime-Trek's.
That, itself, could be a major event that would make anything posterior to *that* movie a new timeline.
Actually, the eugenics wars and all that clearly point to a "past" which is very different from what we know.
Star Trek clearly has a major arc and some core rules, and it quite stops here.
Now, for all we know, the Naranda's arrival was only 20 years before the first new ST movie, right? It's going to be quite a logical stretch here to claim that all the weapons and defenses from some 20 years prior were particularly backward to what they'd be in the prime timeline 20 years later. After all, the Naranda event sits between way-after-ENT to two-decades-before-TOS.
I don't see how the tech you think the UFP has in terms of passive defenses would be so utterly absent from "curent" alt-timeline (255x) just because NARANDA!
If anything, logic absolutely dictates a need for a strong defense system to stop things which are clearly eering way too close to the level of an Out of Context Problem.
Any defense and weapon protocol would have been put on steroids due to the sheer shock of this insane event, not the reverse.
So the fabled super minds of the UFP would have largely been moved to any kind of science and research that would favour major breakthroughs into defenses and weapons.
So I would stand by my statement NuTrek is an alternate-Timeline and has no concrete bearing on Prime-Trek.
I work from what can be compared (and to the limits of knowing how utterly restricted the budget of TOS was in comparison to the rest of Trek).
The "prime" old Spock did reference the battle against Khan. So his timeline seems to be identical enough to the one built by many shows and movies.
Then you have a reference to captain Archer and his dog. Plus we have all the characters of primeline, showing that events have not been disturbed far enough to prevent their birth, growth and reunion as the future crew of the USS Enterprise, and they all have personnalities in line with the prime timeline too.
Edited for better junctions with points made in...
Part II