Starfleet Jedi

It is the year 2380. At the edge of Federation space, a massive vessel has been spotted. After attempts of contact had failed, the vessel destroyed an outlier colony, its evil intentions now known. Investigation of the colony's destruction reveals the presence of the Magog Worldship (from the series Andromeda) and of the Magog fleet. The Federation, Klingons, and the Romulans, after an extensive investigation to find out more about this enemy, are now aware of the intentions of the Magog and are preparing defenses for the eventual onslaught to come. The Federation/Klingon/Romulan Alliance has been rebuilt and is preparing for war against a foe that may be even worse than the Borg.

Can the FKR Alliance destroy the Magog Worldship and beat back the Magog, or will it be able to destroy the major Alpha/Beta Quadrant powers and render their inhabitants as merely food and egg carriers? Any treaties that prevent the use of certain weapons are now null in the face of this threat. That means that Subspace weapons, Genesis weapons (if they still have them), Trilithium torpedoes, etc. are usable without any repercussions by the other powers in the AQ/BQ in order to combat the Magog.

I'm not familiar with Andromeda that much to be honest.

The key here would be how long it'd take said ship to go to FTL speeds. If that takes a while (say 30 seconds to a few minutes) then a simple Trilithium missile aimed at the average star while said ship is close-ish to the star should suffice?

If they're faster I suppose it depends on just how effective the A-Q powers can do evil subspace stuff to destroy spacetime and hence the contents thereof, being one worldship.

Just two basic ideas. I'll conceed that I have no clue just what that ship can do though. I'm thinking it's pretty bad tho ;)

From what I remember, the best bet to disable the Worldship temporarily is to fire star-killing weapons (Nova Bombs in Andromeda, Trilithium Torpedoes in Star Trek) at the artificial sun inside the Worldship, and hope that the Point Singularity Projections they launch don't kill you first. Genesis weapons may be useful, and possibly the only thing, short of the Q or the beings on the order of the Organians or the Prophets to hurt the Abyss (maybe). The other problem will be the massive numbers of Swarm Ships (unshielded, but maybe in the millions since the Worldship has billions if not trillions of Magog in it) the Magog have, however shields may stop the boarding parties for a time.

Discussion at A-Q headquarters after reading the previous post:

"We're screwed..." (spoken in a dull, negative way)
"Don't be so pessimistic!"
"We're screwed!" (spoken in a vibrant, upbeat manner)

Basically, if that is the best and only way to temporarily stop them, I don't think the A-Q powers will be able to even scratch the surface of the thing.

Having read more about the Magog Worldship on Wikipedia, I think that Genesis weapons might be able to destroy it, or at least cause significant damage to it. They may be able to take out the Abyss, but I'm not certain about that. Take out the Abyss, though, and you can take out the Worldship since the Abyss is why a Nova weapon wouldn't destroy the ship since the artificial sun did go nova. Most of the energy was simply absorbed by the Abyss. Failing Genesis, the Organians may be able to take it out, or the Prophets. The problem would be getting them involved in the first place unless the Magog Worldship goes straight for Bajor or the Organians directly.

Now for the specifics of the ships, as far as I remember, and have read on Wikipedia. The Worldship has PSP projectors, as mentioned before, and houses trillions of Magog. It is the size of a small solar system and consists of a minature artificial sun and several hollowed out planets. The Abyss, the being that likely created the Magog and is their god, also can create avatars, humanoid beings with unknown amounts of power (they can be killed by normals with energy weapons, or other weapons from what I remember), and other normal agents. I don't know how hard it will be to get agents in the AQ/BQ, though. While it has great defensive capabilities, it offensive capabilities are, as far as I remember, unknown. The most I remember it doing is throwing fireballs at Dylan Hunt and his crew in an episode I can't remember. The Abyss was killed in the series, by being burned by a sun, but the sun may have been special since it had an avatar. To me, that means that it is likely that if the Prophets all got together, they may be able to kill it, if that is necessary. The Abyss is also able to posses people. As for the abilities of the Magog Swarm Ships, they have PSP projectors, but no shields. Their strength is in numbers and their MO is to swarm a ship and land on it, board the ship and kill/eat their crew and use the beings onboard as carriers of their eggs. For personal weapons, they have a gauss gun that fires smart bullets that can home in on their targets. They are stronger than humans, and can spray a paralytic toxin from their mouths, and have clawed hands. However, they are no more durable than humans and can be killed by a bullet easily enough.

You're all kidding right?

I mean honestly the people going, "were screwed," you're kidding, right?

If it was just the federation against the thing then it wouldn't be such a quick battle and frankly, the losses would be significantly higher on the federation side (it may even end up being more than one battle) but this all comes down to, "Okay, we arm one thousand ships with star busters, go in, and kill it."

Sure, it's big, it's bad, it has 80 billion magog who want nothing more than to lay eggs in people on board the ship, and frankly its weapons can roast a galaxy class pretty quickly... but it will only take ONE, ONE BOMB to destroy this.

ONE.

The battle will literally be over in mere minutes... Especially if people choose to warp in near the sun...

Don't get me wrong, a lot of ships will be lost in the engagement, in fact if we go with a number of 1,000, I'd say maybe only 400 get out (at best) but this is a case of collective forces of the three largest factions in the alpha quadrant... Not only are they not going to care about sacrificing the lives needed when they realize just how bad the Magog are but they are going to go into this with every last bit of force they can muster...

Now, I'd avoid bringing in questions of the abyss and what not or you might as well throw Q, Prophets, and a few others into the fray... super beings are never fun to argue with no matter how we look at them.

Since "the people" going "we're screwed" means me, I'll clarify:

I've never seen the show.
I've been told here that using a starkilling weapon on it merely disables the ship for a while.

This does not fill me with confidence about the Federation's (or any other A-Q power) chances.

But, like I said - I know nothing about the Magog or their ships so I'm probably not the best person to argue how the debate goes.

Ah, I see then. To clarify some points on this ship:

The ship is extremely badass, don't get me wrong. I mean, were talking like three shots (at most) to destroy a galaxy class ship. Still, the moment you disable its sun it has to use its independent craft to get from point A to point B. This will suck since "slipstream" (there version of faster than light travel) doesn't work on normal physics and probability... and since no one in star trek uses it the Magog will find it nearly useless (the more people who use it, the more 'correct' it becomes).

Once disabled any of the three powers attacking it have the means to wipe out the surviving ships and population. The radiation weapon from Nemesis comes to mind.

Ironically at the end of the day the wost threat would be if any Magog manage to actually escape... a problem that the federation would be quick to assist with for moral reasons. One Magog could easily begin a whole new generation of threats if he was left unchecked long enough. Still, on a whole... the moment that sun is gone... the battle was over since the Magog should be completely and utterly stranded... failing federation compassion (read: incompetence).

You people are out of your skulls if you think the A-B Quadrants have a chance in hell against this thing.

Also a Nova Bomb and Trilithium Torpedo are not the same thing.

Trilithium stops fusion. Stoping fusion won't make a star go nova.

A Nova Bomb staop gravity. Stopping gravity will make a star go nova.

And, I'm not sure if the star is really a star.

We know it was created, but do we know if it is real?

Remember later in the series when Dylan travel inside an artifical star?

Just a point here. Stars maintain their size and shape by balancing the outward pressure of the energy generated by nuclear fusion with the inward pull of gravitational attraction. If one were to stop fusion, then the inward pull of gravity would no longer be counteracted, and the star would collapse until electron degeneracy maintained it i.e. a white dwarf. Stopping gravity, however, would mean nothing would counteract the outward force of fusion, and the star would simply fly apart, possibly similar to an emission nebula. Neither mechanism would produce a supernova.

A supernova requires specific criteria to be met. The sun, for example, is too small to go nova. It will end its life as an emission nebula after a red giant phase. Massive stars, however, burn much faster. They must do so in order to maintain equilibrium between their greater gravity and fusion pressure. However, once they have converted all their hydrogen to helium, they begin to shrink. This, in turn, raises the core temperature and allows the star to begin fusing heavier elements, like oxygen, carbon, neon, etc. As soon as the star begins to fuse iron, fusion ceases to be exothermic, and there is no longer sufficient energy to counteract gravity. An inert iron core is built up which, once it crosses the Chandrasekhar limit, collapses into a neutron star and expels all the outer layers in a tremendous explosion i.e. a supernova. Further collapse of the resultant remnant into a black hole can occur if the contraction of the core exceeds the core's Scwartzchild radius, or additional matter builds up to exceed the outward thrust of neutron degeneracy (which maintains a neutron star against gravitational collapse just as electron degeneracy does for a white dwarf. There is a neutron degeneracy mass limit analagous to the Chandrasekhar limit, but I don't know what it is called.)

Two points: One, I never said it would cause the star to go nova. In fact, I believe I used the word disable in one of my posts.

Second: It has no means to attack once the star is destroyed. It can no longer project its power at all, even with the use of smaller slipstream based craft (per the function of slipstream). In short, once the star, the main power source, is out of the equation, it is merely a question of time and patience.

Ah, Andromeda. The first two seasons still rank as among my most favorite of any sci-fi show...but I quit watching after the third when it got stupid :p

I hear Andromeda ended, ironically perhaps, on the same exact day Star Trek Enterprise ended. I remember flipping through channels after the end of Enterprise and landing on Sci-Fi, and was like, "woah, this is still on? Oh, looks like I'm watching the last few seconds of the whole series."

But my nostalgic musics are for another thread.

The Magog Wordship is an incredible feat of engineering, perhaps on the same scale as a Dyson Sphere - we're talking about connecting a few worlds here and there on a physical network structure and putting a sun in the middle to create a ship! I do recall Magog being a threat to space-fairing warships, which means they have at least some means of repulsing enemy ships before they get to the worldship through boarding action.

And just to clarify what a Point Singularity Projector is, they basically fire miniature black holes. The first time Andromeda went up against one, it went clean through the ship and caused the whole crew to crap bricks. Against unshielded targets, the PSP's only limitation is the ability of its targeting system to target a ship's vital systems such as its engine reactor, as the small size of a PSP requires extreme accuracy to get a disabling shot on the first try (this is pretty much the only thing that saved Andromeda on its first encounter). It would be interesting to see how a shielded target like a Federation starship would be able to do against one.

I haven't seen quite enough Andromeda to judge well, but I do remember the episode where they fired a nova bomb at the worldship, and it failed to kill it.

It is true that you don't really seem to have shields around ships in Andromeda, and transporters are at best highly experimental (I think Harper cooked up something of an experimental transporter one episode); however, something that can survive having a miniature sun detonated with a sun-killing missile at its core is going to be pretty hard to stop.

Possible? I suppose it might be possible to destroy the worldship using trilithium or Genesis based technology - or to exterminate the Magog by Genesis-terraforming the worldship, probably via suicidal Klingon boarding crews, but turning back the Magog is not going to be easy.

And even if you blow up the worldship... how big is the Magog fleet again?

Trinoya wrote:Two points: One, I never said it would cause the star to go nova. In fact, I believe I used the word disable in one of my posts.

Second: It has no means to attack once the star is destroyed. It can no longer project its power at all, even with the use of smaller slipstream based craft (per the function of slipstream). In short, once the star, the main power source, is out of the equation, it is merely a question of time and patience.

I was responding to Omniback's post directly above mine.

In any event, whatever physics by which the weapon operates, the trilithium torpedo does causes stellar collapse. I've only seen a few episodes of Andromeda, but if DeathNote's description is accurate, the point singularity projector requires precise targeting to be effective, and ST capital ships are highly maneuverable. A fast ship like the Defiant might be able to deliver the trilithium torpedo which, as we can infer from Generations, has a warp-capable stage to reach the star very quickly. Failing that, they could simply bombard the planets with tricobalt devices or transphasic torpedoes, or poison them with trilithium resin or an atmospheric plasma reaction as in "For The Uniform" and "The Chase," respectively.