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Ravenwood240 said:
"That excuse only works for the Enterprise."
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"Sir, DS9 has encountered them too. As has DS7 and DS37. U.S.S. Voyager returned last month after getting lost in the Delta Quadrant for four years and has extensive records of such encounters as well. Which is... odd. U.S.S. Voyager isn't scheduled to be commissioned for another three months. She's still under construction. U.S.S. Dadalus has five recorded incidents with cosmic entitites, two with space-time anomolies, and one with an entirely new alternate timeline. U.S.S. Ulysius has had 53 encounters with anomolies of unknown types, six encounters with time travel, five encounters with Q, and fifteen encounters with previously undocumented cosmic entities. Oh, then there's that fully staffed space station that appeared last week in a geosychronus orbit above Jupiter back in Sol. Command is still trying to sort that one out, but they appear to be from yet another timeline. The Enterprise just has the longest running track record of such encounters."
 
FaerieKnight79 said:
The Enterprise just has the longest running track record of SURVIVING such encounters."
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FTFY

RecklessPrudence said:
Yes, that is the in-universe reasoning. Now a question for you, if I may. Why can't you let your thermal clips cool down in between firefights/while hiding behind cover, if you didn't need to eject them? Or, if they're an entirely different design that is specifically single-use, why the fuck isn't there still a built-in reusable one??!
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Two words. Two letters even. EA. But I think you're underestimating how long such a heat sink would need to cool, if you're going to be bringing physics and logic into this.

Foxy Boxes said:
That would be sensible, wouldn't it?

But no, they went from infinite ammo with cooldown periods, to limited ammunition in the form of one-use heat sinks.

You would get more ammo just carrying two old-school weapons to alternate between on cooldowns than the "better" system could ever give you for the same encumbrance.
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The reason you keep finding heat sinks all over is people keep doing emergency reloads all over the place, and by the time you come along they've cooled down into usability again.

As for carrying two weapons, two long arms would be heavy, and if pistols could perform equally with long arms, nobody would bother with anything but pistols. Needing a long arm but it's cooling down is not an optimal situation, nor is having only a pistol to swap to.
 
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Gindjurra said:
The reason you keep finding heat sinks all over is people keep doing emergency reloads all over the place, and by the time you come along they've cooled down into usability again.

As for carrying two weapons, two long arms would be heavy, and if pistols could perform equally with long arms, nobody would bother with anything but pistols. Needing a long arm but it's cooling down is not an optimal situation, nor is having only a pistol to swap to.
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Two things to keep in mind. First, no trained soldier is ever going to just drop their expended clip (or expended heat sink in this case) to the ground if it has the possibility of ever being reused.

Second of all, do you forget that even the non-soldiers you take along on missions can and do carry a pistol, shotgun/heavy weapon, machine gun/submachine gun, and a long arm... all at the same time? And they can carry this around all day long. This indicates ether weapons don't way much when in their compact 'stowed' form (somehow) or space suits double as power armor.
 
FaerieKnight79 said:
Second of all, do you forget that even the non-soldiers you take along on missions can and do carry a pistol, shotgun/heavy weapon, machine gun/submachine gun, and a long arm... all at the same time? And they can carry this around all day long. This indicates ether weapons don't way much when in their compact 'stowed' form (somehow) or space suits double as power armor.
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Did we play the same Mass Effect? Because I don't remember that happening.
 
Gindjurra said:
Did we play the same Mass Effect? Because I don't remember that happening.
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By endgame in ME1 (actually from nearly the beginning) you can have a full loadout of pistol, rifle, assault rifle, and shotgun. Depending on your class though, you'll probably gravitate to one or two weapons even if you carry them all. Actually, everyone has this loadout from what I remember. Not sure about ME3. I just barely played past the tutorial/prologue of it. But I think ME2 does the same thing. Just with limited ammo for arbitrary reasons and the addition of heavy weapons that take the shotgun slot if you take one along. Been a while, ME2 might limit you just a pistol, rifle/assault rifle, and heavy weapon/shotgun.
 
RecklessPrudence said:
Thing is, it's a fiddly bastard that requires extensive calibrations to each opponent and is, as so often with the Federation, rather more advanced than they can reliably control. So they prefer not to use it, if they can, relying instead on the secondary armament. But whenever there's an opponent they can't scratch with the advanced phasers or best-in-the-Alpha-quadrant torpedo launchers, their engineering crew calibrates their main gun and does one of a virtually innumerable number of exotic effects that all result in effectively the same outcome, that being blow the enemy away.
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I don't know if you've ever played Star Trek Online, and the canonicity of STO is ambiguous at best, but this statement is so very accurate. Depending on the bridge crew and the ship, I've been able to do things with the deflector dish that range from creating a feedback loop that attacks enemies with their own damage, to creating a gravitic anomaly that somehow only affects enemy ships and space critters. Not only can the deflector create rips in space, but these are rips in space that can read hostile intent. :p
 
FaerieKnight79 said:
By endgame in ME1 (actually from nearly the beginning) you can have a full loadout of pistol, rifle, assault rifle, and shotgun. Depending on your class though, you'll probably gravitate to one or two weapons even if you carry them all. Actually, everyone has this loadout from what I remember. Not sure about ME3. I just barely played past the tutorial/prologue of it. But I think ME2 does the same thing. Just with limited ammo for arbitrary reasons and the addition of heavy weapons that take the shotgun slot if you take one along. Been a while, ME2 might limit you just a pistol, rifle/assault rifle, and heavy weapon/shotgun.
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ME2 heavily locks down your weapon options by class; only the Soldier class can carry all weapons, even with the Advanced Weapons Training to add an extra option to your Shepard (Infiltrators can use everything except Shotgun and Assault Rifle, and you can pick one of the two as your Advanced Weapon. Or you can pick an overpowered Sniper Rifle to use, instead…). ME3 allows you to carry any and all types weapons again, but also allows you to not carry a specific weapon, which tied into the new Weight mechanic.
 
Raved Thrad said:
I don't know if you've ever played Star Trek Online, and the canonicity of STO is ambiguous at best, but this statement is so very accurate. Depending on the bridge crew and the ship, I've been able to do things with the deflector dish that range from creating a feedback loop that attacks enemies with their own damage, to creating a gravitic anomaly that somehow only affects enemy ships and space critters. Not only can the deflector create rips in space, but these are rips in space that can read hostile intent. :p
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Basically, the Deflector Dish is the true reason why there are so many goddamn space wedgies in the Star Trek universe. Older civilizations have probably been experimenting with the technology for far longer than the Federation itself.
 
FaerieKnight79 said:
Two things to keep in mind. First, no trained soldier is ever going to just drop their expended clip (or expended heat sink in this case) to the ground if it has the possibility of ever being reused.

Second of all, do you forget that even the non-soldiers you take along on missions can and do carry a pistol, shotgun/heavy weapon, machine gun/submachine gun, and a long arm... all at the same time? And they can carry this around all day long. This indicates ether weapons don't way much when in their compact 'stowed' form (somehow) or space suits double as power armor.
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I think the answer to 'drop it on the ground' is, scorchingly too hot to hold. Nobody wants to stick a red-hot metal bar in their pocket. Then it isn't a heat sink, you are a heat sink, and that is not a happy long term plan.

Of course now this reminds me of the little heat bottle omake, and really that would be a reasonable-ish solution. Have a pocked, (or bottle if you must) where you slip all the red hot heat clips designed specifically to prevent the easy radiation of heat, probably through infrared reflective material and vacuum gaps etc. Then later when it is handy you can then convert that waste heat to useful energy in some other method.

And now an even sillier thought. ME ships powered by thousands or tens of thousands of slowly cooling thermal clips instead of any kind of conventional reactors. The true cost of peace? an energy crisis!
 
RecklessPrudence said:
Federation starships have always been impressively armed, even in the NG era where Starfleet was adamant it was not a military - the other powers look at a Galaxy-class and say 'that's a damn battleship' while Starfleet protests that it is not, it's a heavy exploration ship!
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Then the Dominion War happened and the rest of the Alpha/Beta quadrants got to see what happens when the Federation says "fuck it, we're building actual warships for realsies this time" - you get a vessel with all the same guns as a Galaxy-class, plus two new experimental systems, plus actual flippin' armour¹, except it's significantly faster, vastly more manoeuvrable, less than a fifth of the size, and about a third of the cost to build. Oh and it somehow still has enough spare power to run a cloaking device on top of all that. Because, somehow, they shrunk the warp core from a Galaxy-class down to a third of the expected length while preserving the potential power output.


¹ Edit for those that don't get how big a deal this is: in Star Trek, weapons technology has vastly outpaced materials science. Ordinary metals basically stand zero chance of actually stopping a phaser blast without being literally dozens of metres thick.
As such, almost everyone's combat doctrine is that if you're out of shields, you're mission-killed, get out of thee before you become actual-killed which will be the next shot. When the Defiant class rolled out, the fact that it could continue to take hits after losing shields and frequently survive long enough for the engineers to repair and reignite the shields was absolutely game-changing. Everything everyone knew about how the Federation fights had to be rethought.
 
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Raved Thrad said:
I don't know if you've ever played Star Trek Online, and the canonicity of STO is ambiguous at best, but this statement is so very accurate. Depending on the bridge crew and the ship, I've been able to do things with the deflector dish that range from creating a feedback loop that attacks enemies with their own damage, to creating a gravitic anomaly that somehow only affects enemy ships and space critters. Not only can the deflector create rips in space, but these are rips in space that can read hostile intent. :p
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Never played STO, but not surprised to hear that, lol.
 
Raved Thrad said:
I don't know if you've ever played Star Trek Online, and the canonicity of STO is ambiguous at best, but this statement is so very accurate. Depending on the bridge crew and the ship, I've been able to do things with the deflector dish that range from creating a feedback loop that attacks enemies with their own damage, to creating a gravitic anomaly that somehow only affects enemy ships and space critters. Not only can the deflector create rips in space, but these are rips in space that can read hostile intent. :p
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There is a very simple explanation for this, and it's one Star Fleet goes out of its way to avoid ever mentioning or even hinting at: The deflector dish in fact only does one thing.

Summon Lizard​

Everything else that happens is because the Lizards do it. The dish is a physical embodiment of a very specific spell, one that Star Fleet is entirely reliant on, but hates the mere existence of. So they pretend it's just superscience that they, kind of, understand how to use, rather than magic which they don't :evil:
 
Aineko said:
Will you? Memory Alpha doesn't think so.
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TypoNinja said:
Uhhh.


That big bronze disc front and center? That's the main deflector.
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Yes, obviously they had a deflector dish in TOS, but it wasn't the multipurpose Swiss Army Knife universal problem-solver/Big Honking Space Gun that it was by TNG. Scotty didn't invent something to deflect particles at warp speed, they already had that for good reason, he invented adding the Summon Lizard function to it.
 
RecklessPrudence said:
Yes, obviously they had a deflector dish in TOS, but it wasn't the multipurpose Swiss Army Knife universal problem-solver/Big Honking Space Gun that it was by TNG.
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That was more narrative force than anything else.

Roddenberry made TOS as social commentary. Because it was science fiction he could get away with morality lessons they wouldn't let him air otherwise. He could make fun of racism openly with aliens while a network wouldn't let anyone make an episode talking about White Vs Black people. Because it was space future he got away with putting a black woman on the Bridge.

TOS was sci fi in part because it had to be to get away with talking about the things it talked about. It wasn't necessarily technology focused like a lot of science fiction is now.

That's not to say TNG doesn't do a lot of the same, but anybody's who's watched both can tell you they feel differently.
 
Regarding an alternative to Taylor's thermal bottle for the side story, the humans could have gone for steampunk aesthetics and instead of a presumably solid thermal clip, there could have been something like a Supersoaker replaceable water bottle on top or sides of the barrel of the gun to keep the gun cool and a pressure-release trap/valve(s) near the front that releases the resulting steam/vapor to the sides possibly making it look like a steampunk version of a muzzle brake (and depending if there is a recoil then maybe this system might be designed to help reduce recoil effects). Such users might make sure that they always have ways to access water to top off the water tanks that serve as ventable thermal mass whether from backpack or canteen to water spigots and taps or maybe VI robots in the form of mule sized steampunk robot camels with a water tank and quick connections for topping off the weapon water tanks.

Regarding the Star Trek deflector dish, it originally was just to protect from navigational hazards while the ship is moving at high speeds or faster than light (questionable canon also had where the deflector field also was shaped as scoops like Bussard Ram Scoop concept to feed into some versions of warp nacelles to provide effectively better fuel efficiency). When the recessed deflector design was established it is likely a lot of people noticed that the idea of spinal mounted weapon is somewhat obvious especially with the back of the navigational deflector dish being less than 30 feet from the matter-anti-matter intermix chamber and right in line with it in many designs. It is interesting that no fan design appears to have run with that idea and have two intermix chamber with the forward one able to feed directly into the navigational deflector dish system and the rearward one feeding both the the warp nacelles and a "secondary hull" sublight thrusters where most designs put a shuttle bay (which might make for interesting tactics for situations where warp travel might not be possible or where a mix might give unusual transportation options that are not obvious). There would be consideration of how much fuel could be shoved through the intermix chambers and whether the captain is willing to use up that much fuel and how much pain a bean counting bureaucrat can inflict when auditing his expenses.
 
Gindjurra said:
The reason you keep finding heat sinks all over is people keep doing emergency reloads all over the place, and by the time you come along they've cooled down into usability again.
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If that really were the case, all weapons would just have drum magazines, so that overheated heat-sinks can cool down quickly without being discarded.

It also doesn't line up with the gameplay we see: Partially used heat sinks don't replenish, and fully used heat sinks are always discarded, not just in emergency cases.

Gindjurra said:
As for carrying two weapons, two long arms would be heavy
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Not as heavy as carrying an effectively-unlimited amount of one-use ammunition.
 
Foxy Boxes said:
If that really were the case, all weapons would just have drum magazines, so that overheated heat-sinks can cool down quickly without being discarded.

It also doesn't line up with the gameplay we see: Partially used heat sinks don't replenish, and fully used heat sinks are always discarded, not just in emergency cases.

Not as heavy as carrying an effectively-unlimited amount of one-use ammunition.
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I can't remember where it was, but I'm sure I saw something that explained that the Thermal Clips used a material that underwent a phase-change or endothermic chemical reaction when heated to absorb the heat and store in within the molecular bonds. The thermal clips are still hot when they eject, but they have a maximum heat — like how water will only reach 100°C at standard pressure, no matter how much heat you pump in (any extra energy/heat is removed by the steam) — so they will cool down, but won't be re-usable after that; you'd have to "un-bake the cake", as it were.
 
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