STAR TREK: A Long Road (Voyager Fix It Quest)

Can we get a map of the solar system then? Cause I am thinking we can do a flanking threat with the Val Jean backing the station with a minefield, Voyager out on the obvious flank, but with aux fighter craft poised somewhere to strike from a 3rd direction to get that juicy port/starboard warpbubble hits.

So if they engage the station, we get a 3 way pincher strike, if they go for Voyager, we get a tasty flank rake from fighter craft as the Val Jean breaks to engage. Would want to know what would go where to do that though and what we could make use of.

DragonCobolt said:

The main problem is...creating an energy source that triggers as a matter/antimatter warp reactor convincingly is...to...build something of equal complexity and difficulty.

Stealth in space is possible (with cloaking) but faking a ship is hard because ships are very energetic.

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

How feasible would convincingly faking the telltale signs of a cloaked ship being in the area be by comparison?

DragonCobolt said:

A tale of two torpedoes

Lets say both torpedoes roll the same dice, exactly! So, the Photon and the Quantum get 1, 6, 5, 5, 3, 5 ((the quantum gets an extra 4, but we can ignore it cause 4s add nothing.) They're firing full spread for maximal damage. They're shooting at a target with 14 shields!

The Photon does 6/3/3/3/3 damage. Assuming the enemy's resistance is dropped very low from some momentum spends, that's gonna be 2 breaches (1 for doing 5+, and 1 for high caliber), then 2 more for dropping them to 0 shields and high yield, then another 2 for doing damage to a ship without shields and high yield. 6 breaches in total! Not bad!

The Quantum meanwhile does 9/5/5/5/5 damage, meaning it does 2 breaches (5+ damage, high yield), then 3 breaches (5+ damage, high yield, dropping shields to 0), then 3 breaches (0 shields, high yield, 5+ damage) for each other hit, for a total of 14 motherfucking breaches.

9 of those are to the structure, and 1 to the engine. Assuming a scale 4 ship, that'd destroy their structure at 5 breaches, then each additional breach hits the engine, which would destroy the engine, with 5 total breaches to it, meaning they have a 50% chance of just having their warp core fail and their SHIP EXPLODE INSTNATLY.

Holy shit!

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

I'm starting to get the feeling we should treat Voyager breaking out the Quantums as an escalation along the lines of Galactica breaking out her nukes.

DragonCobolt said:

8 Deployable auxilary craft* - you can produce Shuttle-9s which are...unofficially high speed one person fighter craft for use against enemies without fast tracking quantum-array phase weapons. The documentation says they're "scout and exploration service vehicles" but they have the handling capacity of fighter craft. They can be loaded with photons.

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

I completely forgot about asking you about this earlier but shouldn't Voyager being a Sovereign mean that she has the bigger Type 11s?

Also on the topic of Sovereigns, shuttles, and fighters according to Memory Beta the Enterprise-E was eventually equipped with McCall-class shuttles which were made to fulfill the role of fighter craft. What's particularly funny about this though is that exact same shuttle design was later reused by its artist for the shuttles in the Picard show.

That could mean that either the design has been canonized or that the Picard show is itself beta canon.

[X] Plan: Deep Strike Protocol
-[X] Prep Phase:
--[X] Pod Station acts as a Firebase
--[X] Mine the approaches to the Pod Station
--[X] Use the Pod Station to saturate the direction of the approaching fleet in high energy particles to jam their sensors
-[X] Strike Phase:
--[X] Have Voyager mimic their trick to disrupt detailed scans at range while at warp
--[X] Have all shuttles riding in the wake of Voyager, to be as hidden as possible and fully armed.
--[X] The Val Jean following in parallel while cloaked, their sensor readings fed to Voyager to give as perfect timing as possible
--[X] Perform a interstellar drive by on the approaching fleet, Voyager and all craft using a full volley timed to broadside the Vidiian Fleets Warp Bubble
--[X] The Val Jean reacts to their change in formation to perform a follow up blow to bleed them, before dropping back into cloak and going to warp
-[X] Voyager, Val Jean, and strike craft make their way back to the Binary Star Flank Anchor Point at maximum warp

I got time, so I'll explain this. I think the worst thing we can do is cede the initiative to whatever their battleplans are and instead we should seek to get in the first strike on them and break off before they can properly respond. If they know not to use fighter craft against us, the last thing they should expect would be a squadron of them hiding behind the bulk of Voyager in our warp bubble. By that same respect, submarine tactics are best when they aren't looking for said stealthed ships, such as responding to an attack run by an "exploration vessel" and a bunch of attack craft. Avoiding breaking out in a full out engagement in interstellar space so we can rally at a flank point should let us respond to whatever follows, since mining the approaches to the station should buy time if they ignore us and rush the station.

I have no idea how to plan a space battle.

Good luck everyone. I'm rooting for ya!

@DragonCobolt

How many factors faster at warp are we than them?

Because I think that @SweetJackal has the right idea, except there's not necessarily a reason to only hit them once. If we're at Warp 9.6 and they're limited to Warp 6 by their escorts, we're going four to five times faster than them. Even if they're at Warp 7, the upper end for ships of the TOS/Movies era*, we're still going more than twice as fast.

So instead of thinking of this like a naval battle, let's think of this like an air battle, in three dimensions. And what do you do when you have an energy advantage? You boom and zoom.

The Val Jean and Voyager, without slowing down, should criss-cross their path multiple times, hitting them from the side. If they try to go to warp, we hit them again. (And the Val Jean is fucking invisible to their sensors.) If they stay at sublight, then they can enjoy running out of fuel in space, I guess - they have to go to warp eventually. (Or we try Picard Manoeuvring them.) We can outmanoeuvre them, and we should take maximum advantage of this until they get to the Pod. Ideally, we probably focus on picking off the smaller ships - the cruisers without escorts are not a terrible threat to us, it's being mobbed by overlapping fields of fire that's the threat.

One consequence of this plan is that the shuttles should probably be detached to defend the Pod - they will not be able to keep up with us at Warp, and while we could try some kind of complicated thing dragging them in our "wake", that feels too risky to try in combat. Leaving a bit of a margin of security to defend the Pod seems prudent, though. We could leave some industrial replicators there to continue our mining efforts as well - the longer we delay the fleet, the better-defended the Pod becomes.



*(I'd really look quizzically at their torpedo boats managing that, honestly. Like if this were Starship Design Bureau Quest and someone proposed TOS era torpedo boats, I'd expect the GM to ask us to pick between being super short-ranged, or only capable of like Warp 5.)

Skippy said:

So instead of thinking of this like a naval battle, let's think of this like an air battle, in three dimensions. And what do you do when you have an energy advantage? You boom and zoom.

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

The problem here is that space is neither an ocean nor the sky.

The concept of an energy advantage exists in air combat because of a number of physical constraints that do not exist in space.
1) You can trade altitude for speed and vice versa
2) If you have too little altitude or speed, you crash
3) Maneuvers will cost you altitude, speed or both

In space, none of those things hold
1) Altitude is not a relevant factor
2) A spaceship can sit perfectly contently going nowhere at all
3) A ship can (in sublight) turn on it's own axis and fly backward if it has too.

This has effects for your Boom n Zoom strategy.
In airborne combat, the Boom'n'Zoom works because it sets up the attacker to get their guns on the target, while making it much too expensive (or dangerous) for the defender to do the same (flipping your plane around is not exactly healthy).

In (Star Trek) space, many of these limitations do not apply. The defender does not need to worry about losing momentum, because Star Trek ships have long passed the point where their ships are limited by reaction mass for delta-v. Similarly, they also do not have to worry about aerodynamic effects. So they can freely orient their ship to face us head-on.

Consider too that Boom'n'Zoom worked because it approached enemies from behind, whereas here, we have to approach form the flank. This is a serious problem, because the tactical situation is symmetrical. If I approach your course at a 90 degree angle, then you are approaching mine at a 90 degree angle. All that changes the difference between attacker and target is the timing.

Finally, this should then make you reconsider whether going faster is an actual advantage.

Ships were literally stretched outwards, meaning that beams and torpedoes could strike more of their surface area than they normally would, doing even more damage. This was why ships hated to fight at warp unless they were heading right towards, right away, or at relatively slow warp speeds - slower warp bubbles were easier to turn.

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

Going faster means that we become both a bigger target, and slower to maneuver.

This gives the enemy the ability to turn towards us, which changes the relative position of two ships at intercept. Our vessels will arrive to early, meaning that rather than having the ability to fire into their flanks before passing safely behind them, we will pass in front of them (opening us up to a devastating flank attack), before they pass behind us (where we can't hit them).

And even if we try to counter-turn to avoid it, it won't work, because the fact that they are slower ensures that they are more maneuverable.

Can we set up some of our shuttles as missiles? B'Elana has worked on the Dreadnaught, that might help. I'm wondering if we can load them with some sort of specialized warhead that will disrupt their own sensor disruption we we can get a good look at what they're hiding in their wake.

10ebbor10 said:

This gives the enemy the ability to turn towards us, which changes the relative position of two ships at intercept. Our vessels will arrive to early, meaning that rather than having the ability to fire into their flanks before passing safely behind them, we will pass in front of them (opening us up to a devastating flank attack), before they pass behind us (where we can't hit them).

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

This does depend on the enemy seeing us. Could we have the Val Jean take advantage of the stretch?

Torgamous said:

This does depend on the enemy seeing us. Could we have the Val Jean take advantage of the stretch?

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

Sure. But then we run into the problem of throwing a single ship against multiple.

The enemy can position their ships in a formation where going after one vessel means exposing your flanks to others.

Spart117MC said:

I completely forgot about asking you about this earlier but shouldn't Voyager being a Sovereign mean that she has the bigger Type 11s?

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

no, because they're ugly (also, first released in 2375)

Skippy said:

How many factors faster at warp are we than them?

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

I will say 2 factor faster.

CyberEnby said:

Can we set up some of our shuttles as missiles? B'Elana has worked on the Dreadnaught, that might help. I'm wondering if we can load them with some sort of specialized warhead that will disrupt their own sensor disruption we we can get a good look at what they're hiding in their wake.

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

You can, but...don't, the rules for ramming are really not great. Like...genuinely, I am tempted to go in and modify them and add in a few qualities to the damage (like, at LEAST give it piercing 2 or something.) But even so it'd be not so great.

...I forgot to hit post and reply, this has been sitting in my computer without hitting send for like AN HOUR oops!

DragonCobolt said:

no, because they're ugly (also, first released in 2375)



I will say 2 factor faster.



You can, but...don't, the rules for ramming are really not great. Like...genuinely, I am tempted to go in and modify them and add in a few qualities to the damage (like, at LEAST give it piercing 2 or something.) But even so it'd be not so great.

...I forgot to hit post and reply, this has been sitting in my computer without hitting send for like AN HOUR oops!

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

What if we rig one of the shuttles to do a super high-speed fly-by of the fleet to get behind their disruption field? Can we set it for remote control/autonomous operation and absolutely red-line the warp drive to make it GOFAST?

CyberEnby said:

What if we rig one of the shuttles to do a super high-speed fly-by of the fleet to get behind their disruption field? Can we set it for remote control/autonomous operation and absolutely red-line the warp drive to make it GOFAST?

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

Yeah, that'd be the normal way that warp capable fighters attack!

10ebbor10 said:

The problem here is that space is neither an ocean nor the sky.

The concept of an energy advantage exists in air combat because of a number of physical constraints that do not exist in space.
1) You can trade altitude for speed and vice versa
2) If you have too little altitude or speed, you crash
3) Maneuvers will cost you altitude, speed or both

In space, none of those things hold
1) Altitude is not a relevant factor
2) A spaceship can sit perfectly contently going nowhere at all
3) A ship can (in sublight) turn on it's own axis and fly backward if it has too.

This has effects for your Boom n Zoom strategy.
In airborne combat, the Boom'n'Zoom works because it sets up the attacker to get their guns on the target, while making it much too expensive (or dangerous) for the defender to do the same (flipping your plane around is not exactly healthy).

In (Star Trek) space, many of these limitations do not apply. The defender does not need to worry about losing momentum, because Star Trek ships have long passed the point where their ships are limited by reaction mass for delta-v. Similarly, they also do not have to worry about aerodynamic effects. So they can freely orient their ship to face us head-on.

Consider too that Boom'n'Zoom worked because it approached enemies from behind, whereas here, we have to approach form the flank. This is a serious problem, because the tactical situation is symmetrical. If I approach your course at a 90 degree angle, then you are approaching mine at a 90 degree angle. All that changes the difference between attacker and target is the timing.

Finally, this should then make you reconsider whether going faster is an actual advantage.


Going faster means that we become both a bigger target, and slower to maneuver.

This gives the enemy the ability to turn towards us, which changes the relative position of two ships at intercept. Our vessels will arrive to early, meaning that rather than having the ability to fire into their flanks before passing safely behind them, we will pass in front of them (opening us up to a devastating flank attack), before they pass behind us (where we can't hit them).

And even if we try to counter-turn to avoid it, it won't work, because the fact that they are slower ensures that they are more maneuverable.

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

Fair point. My thought was that our greater speed means that the time where our most vulnerable aspect is exposed to them is a lot shorter than the time in which their most vulnerable aspect is exposed to us. But reviewing what DC said, yeah, it feels like it would be quite hard to make this work with a non-cloaked vessel.

Also, da map!

Cloaked vessel drops off technobabble "warp field reactive" mines in the path of the incoming fleet?

Just spitballing.

Edit: Oh, use the deflecfor dish to bounce the uh. Stuff that comes out of pulsar ever 42ish seconds. Into a [technobabble] ampifier that interacts with the fleets warpfield, or their sensor jaming effect.

If need be, use the other ship to deploy a [thingy] that extends and modulates and concentrates the binary systems's electromagnetic field into the path of the fleet to make the pulsar stuff possible.

Well if we do want more technobabble, a Pulsar is a type of neutron star and neutron stars contain what we know as Exotic Matter.

Exotic Matter is scary stuff, as it is in essence viral matter. In theory it changes matter that touches it to be it, in the same state as it. Like how putting a magnet against an iron nail can make the nail magnetic, as an extremely oversimplified example.

So you could in theory teleport Exotic Matter out of the nearby Pulsar and into space, then use a tractor beam to maintain containment of it to move it somewhere (like into the path to the pod or dropping it into the Vidiians warp bubble)

Let's see if they have done enough science to know what it is and what to do about it?

Edit: For more funky science, we already have telepathic inhibitors for Vulcans so they can protect themselves from psionic noise- what if we could add a psionic amplifier to the deflector dish of the Val Jean, give the Cardi Cruiser a Psionic Scream effect to hit crew?

Hit 'em with a physics phage and our ships psychically screaming as we send ships into battle, sounds pretty metal.

Right now do not quite have spoons for a plan, will try to make one tomorrow morning if there is not one.

Think a basic idea is having Voyager meet them at the binary system, and the Val Jean sitting ready to hit them in the flank if they go for it - if they don't go for it, then Voyager will hit them in the flank, and then the Val Jean will hit them where they're vulnerable if they turn to attack us, or keep going. We probably want some kind of contingency to try and see past what they're hiding - keeping the Val Jean as a cloaked observer might be it, honestly, but we could maybe try putting some probes in place to see around? Detaching our shuttles to defend the Pod still seems reasonable, I think.

...That kind of is a plan actually, isn't it? ...Fine, writing up before sleep:

[X] Plan Left Hook
-[X] What does the Voyager do?
--[X] Anchor a flank by heading to the Binar Star System (lots of asteroids and cover)
-[X] What does the Val Jean do?
--[X] Hit them in interstellar space, cloaked - classic submarine tactic, bleed em a litte.
-[X] Rough Battle Plan
-[X] If they bypass the binary system, then Voyager hits them from the side, and the Val Jean pounces. If they go for Voyager, the Val Jean hits them from the side.
-[X] What do your strike craft do?
--[X] Deploy all of them to support...
---[X] ...the Pod
-[X] What does the Pod do?
--[X] Provide a fire base - all guns, all torpedoes
--[X] Place a minefield around the Pod to protect it. (Diff 2 Check)
-[X] What is your plan to see through the jamming?
--[X] Try to use our superior speed to place sensor probes ahead of their position, but slightly "behind" them by the time we are about to engage, and bounce a signal off that.
--[X] Alternately, try bouncing a signal off of the pulsar, or have the Val Jean take a look from behind just before we engage.


This is pretty straightforward, and not trying for a super fancy method of seeing past their jamming, or nerd-sniping the zipheads. I think sometimes simplicity is good, especially as a lot of this will prolly go out the window once we make contact. The options I've laid out for the jamming are a variety of not mutually exclusive options, because I think those are the things the crew would probably try. If anyone else wants to make a plan, feel free to use this format, I tried to base it on how DC formatted the vote.

Asteroids seem more advantageous for us than a pulsar - hampering sensors and shields is actually kinda bad for us, the guy with better sensors and better shields.

[X] Plan Left Hook

I can get behind that. My only question is why only deploy six shuttles and not all 8?

[X] Plan Left Hook

Spart117MC said:

[X] Plan Left Hook

I can get behind that. My only question is why only deploy six shuttles and not all 8?

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

My thought was that leaving your starship with no shuttles is probably something the Captain's Handbook says not to do, unless you need to like, perform SAR operations in an area where transporters can't be used, or something. But honestly you're probably right, right now we need all the firepower we can get. Will amend it to have them all at the station.

It's possible Voyager has more shuttles and only the Type-9s were listed because they're the only ones with the performance profile of half-way decent combatant. Plus there's the captain's yacht.

We should see if we Voyager can manufacture runabouts if we intend to use strike craft again in the future. Danubes aren't going to be winning fights with full sized spaceships that more often than Type-9s but the things are certainly more survivable than the smaller shuttles.

Spart117MC said:

It's possible Voyager has more shuttles and only the Type-9s were listed because they're the only ones with the performance profile of half-way decent combatant. Plus there's the captain's yacht.

We should see if we Voyager can manufacture runabouts if we intend to use strike craft again in the future. Danubes aren't going to be winning fights with full sized spaceships that more often than Type-9s but the things are certainly more survivable than the smaller shuttles.

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

I imagine the limiting factors here are probably dilithium and energy.

In this version of the setting, replicators can essentially build all parts of starships except for the dilithium needed for the reactor. So if our auxiliary craft are warp-capable, dilithium (which slowly degrades in use) is one big limiter. The other one is finding the energy to use to replicate the ships and run them. Obviously this is less of an issue given we can turn rocks into energy using our replicators, but I imagine that there is a certain "throughput" of rocks-> energy we can manage without having to spend more time eating asteroids and less on the move, so we probably do have effectively an energy budget constrained in terms of how we spend our time, rather than abundance of energy resources.

Of course, we could also deploy drones to gather and eat rocks for us, and to search for dilithium, to beat both of these limitations - but then we are becoming a Von Neumann swarm, not a Federation starship. (Also, smaller ships can't travel nearly as fast at warp as bigger ones, so we'd also need like, large warp-capable carrier drones, basically we'd become some sort of robot armada.) Probably one reason why this is not good, other than the Federation presumably having strong norms against Von Neumanning everywhere you go, is that this would make us more interesting to the Borg, who can play this game better than we can.

But yeah, augmenting or improving our strike craft fleet, within the limits of how much of our energy and dilithium budget we can allocate, seems like a good idea. Possibly even auxiliary craft which are not warp-capable and don't use dilithium, since this is likely to be more scarce. Much less flexible, but a good augment for the Val Jean especially, since it finds taking on multiple opponents a lot harder. (Also launching a bunch of suicide drones preloaded with photon torpedo magazines would enhance its alpha strike a lot, which is particularly beneficial for a cloaked vessel.)

You cannot make runabouts! That requires the "Expanded Shuttlebay" feature - which also means you double the amount you can support at any one time (putting you to 13 total (10 from Voy, 3 from Val Jean.) The idea is that you can only support so many at any one time because they require crew, organization, coordination, and supplies that ships aren't equipped with normally. You can manufacture small shuttles, but larger runabouts take larger industrial facilities - it's technically possible for your ship to kitbash one together...buuuuuuuuut since you don't have the expanded shuttlebay feature, Starfleet didn't load you with the schematics. Like...why would they?

I'd assume that we do have some larger shuttles like the Type-11 from Insurrection, but those might not be as useful for as strike craft for this sort of operation. They are quite a bit larger than the Type-9, closer to runabouts without the midsection, which might be why the Sovereign doesn't have runabouts by default, along with the much smaller bay than the Galaxy which can barely fit a Danube.