To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)
- Thread starter OneirosTheWriter
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- Sci-Fi
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- star trek exploration fully automated luxury gay space communism top level canon (canon) #hashtagcontent all-encompassing space amoeba cardassian boy bands cardassian magical girls darkest bureaucracy debate makes the qm cackle like palpatine hoh is an empire quest it has to be foreign infiltrators more ships ship happens singers delenda est starfleet this is not an empire quest ur waifu is collective?
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
If my explanation were a good one, it wouldn't get this level of pushback when I talk about it as such. My mental construct being an incomprehensible mess is all on me, not on anyone else.
If my explanation isn't a good one, I shouldn't be trying to write a story to flesh it out. Should just push the 'delete' button on my Matryoshka characters and have done with it.
If my explanation isn't a good one, I shouldn't be trying to write a story to flesh it out. Should just push the 'delete' button on my Matryoshka characters and have done with it.
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Nah dude it's a good explanation I'm sure people are just running thought experiments. I just agreed with you that Sydraxian marines would be way cooler than a gas leak, but a gas leak was also plausible.
Also while I mentioned the BSG miniseries, the episode where Cylons bordered was also baller.
Also while I mentioned the BSG miniseries, the episode where Cylons bordered was also baller.
Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
Rare. Exotic. Not dangerous. Because they aren't.
We don't have people dying constantly in ones and twos to accidental exposure in the shipyards or Leslie's section or Jefferies tubes. You can actually walk right up to the Warp Core and look at it, even touch it if it's not running at the moment. (And maybe if it is, it's just people don't like to; Odo slammed another Changling into the Defiant's warp core physically and if it wasn't for sabotage previously it might not have hurt them.) People aren't getting killed because somebody hooked up the coolant transfer system wrong or routed the EPS conduits to the wrong deck on a regular basis. The way you describe them they should be vastly more dangerous than they are; the Andorian Guard ship was not a common event. Hell, the Cardassians run ships operating with the same materials and rough principles we do and they're mostly crewed by conscripts. If you can kill people by pressing the wrong button regularly they must take massive casualties on a regular basis.
But apparently, they don't. And neither do we.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Eh, you never told me I wasn't making sense in the first place. If I'm going around being cranky because I feel like my wings got clipped, it wasn't on your account.
- Location
- the Moon
- Pronouns
- He/Him
.... In theory, if we were to make an Alculbier drive it would take the mass-energy of Jupiter to warp space to get the drive to match the speed of light. The warp core uses antimatter as a fuel source, a single gram of which is equivalent to an H-bomb. What makes our warp cores so safe is the mastery of the EM and gravity fields. disrupt those and you get something extremely energetic and highly radioactive in a place where organics are trying to exist.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
New research project unlocked: All or Nothing armor.
You're getting pushback because most of us are poorly-socialized angry internet nerds. Being obnoxious, nitpicky and boorish is a default state, and should not be taken personally.
Just stick your tongue out at your computer screen, verbally declare your detractors to be puddingheads, and write something interesting. Your blood pressure will almost certainly drop by several points. If the gamemaster chooses to integrate your material into future posts, cool! If not, it should still be a good read, and therefore an enjoyable contribution regardless.
UbeOne
Daydreaming CPU
- Location
- Philippines
- Pronouns
- She/Her
They're not doing that already?New research project unlocked: All or Nothing armor.
- Location
- Australia
Vote will close in FIVE HOURS.
Reason # 1 why access to Warp Cores is strictly controlled and civilian models are black boxed to hell and back.
- Location
- USA
Current vote, I think the 2nd and 3rd plans are the same now which would make it 21 to 17
Vote Tally : Sci-Fi - To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest) | Page 1276 | Sufficient Velocity
##### NetTally 1.7.6
[21] Plan: ◈Open force is broken, concentrate on burning the roots.
[10] Plan Maximum Detectives, Maximum Impact
[7] Plan: ◈ALL THE DETECTIVES but slightly different.
[4] Plan: ◈Rigellians
[1] Plan: ◈Ships, Ships, Amash Hagan and Vulcans
[1] steal the secret of nonlethal computer screens from the Sydraxians
Total No. of Voters: 44
Vote Tally : Sci-Fi - To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest) | Page 1276 | Sufficient Velocity
##### NetTally 1.7.6
[21] Plan: ◈Open force is broken, concentrate on burning the roots.
[1] Plan: ◈Ships, Ships, Amash Hagan and Vulcans
[1] steal the secret of nonlethal computer screens from the Sydraxians
Total No. of Voters: 44
pbluekan
Somethin's Fucky ...
- Location
- Trumpistan
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Not that I don't love the look of star trek vessels, especially the latter variations, but the base designs of starfleet vessels have so many obvious weak points it hurts.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
There's structural weaknesses, and then there's failure to internally subdivide.
I mean sure, the right well-placed shots could relatively easily sever the bulk of the ship's hull (the saucer) from the main engines (the engineering hull and nacelles). But that's a completely different order of problem from a situation where it is relatively easy to kill 300 crewmen out of 800 with a couple of "well placed" shots that do relatively limited damage to the hull.
The former would effectively constitute reducing a ship to 0 hull. A lot of crew could die, but the ship is wrecked at that point; you've inflicted sufficient damage to disable it entirely, for better or for worse.
The latter? Take things like that to their logical conclusion and you could fairly end up with a ship that's still physically capable of FTL travel, combat, and other functions- but is adrift and useless because it's full of dead bodies.
Now, that's certainly a plot we see in Star Trek sometimes, sure. But generally either because of something that happened outside of battle (a disease outbreak aboard), or because of an attack of a type that shields and hull metal don't defend against (such as psionics).
Otherwise, and assuming that ships this large and carefully built aren't death traps... The sheer size of the ship, and the existence of things like internal security force fields and pressure-tight internal bulkheads should make it very hard to do something like 'accidentally vent poisonite gas into five decks.' The ship's not just one big fragile balloon full of air where a toxic release at any one point should be enough to kill people half the ship's length away, or vent 200 people out into space because the balloon got 'popped' at a single point.
Someone should have to go out of their way to pull something like that off. Like internal sabotage, exotic weapons that can kill the crew right through armor plating and shields via radiation or telepathy or some kind of weird life force drain. Or boarding parties.
I mean sure, the right well-placed shots could relatively easily sever the bulk of the ship's hull (the saucer) from the main engines (the engineering hull and nacelles). But that's a completely different order of problem from a situation where it is relatively easy to kill 300 crewmen out of 800 with a couple of "well placed" shots that do relatively limited damage to the hull.
The former would effectively constitute reducing a ship to 0 hull. A lot of crew could die, but the ship is wrecked at that point; you've inflicted sufficient damage to disable it entirely, for better or for worse.
The latter? Take things like that to their logical conclusion and you could fairly end up with a ship that's still physically capable of FTL travel, combat, and other functions- but is adrift and useless because it's full of dead bodies.
Now, that's certainly a plot we see in Star Trek sometimes, sure. But generally either because of something that happened outside of battle (a disease outbreak aboard), or because of an attack of a type that shields and hull metal don't defend against (such as psionics).
Otherwise, and assuming that ships this large and carefully built aren't death traps... The sheer size of the ship, and the existence of things like internal security force fields and pressure-tight internal bulkheads should make it very hard to do something like 'accidentally vent poisonite gas into five decks.' The ship's not just one big fragile balloon full of air where a toxic release at any one point should be enough to kill people half the ship's length away, or vent 200 people out into space because the balloon got 'popped' at a single point.
Someone should have to go out of their way to pull something like that off. Like internal sabotage, exotic weapons that can kill the crew right through armor plating and shields via radiation or telepathy or some kind of weird life force drain. Or boarding parties.
I disagree- if you look at modern and historic ships (and battles) you will often see cases where a lucky hit resulted in disproportionate damage while leaving the basic structure of the ship relatively intact. You can never really fully accident proof a ship as complex as what we field...
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Most of the examples I can think of where a lucky hit caused damage on that scale, even if the hull was physically in one piece afterwards...
It didn't just kill people, it damaged something important. A lot.
If a WWII destroyer (or other ship) took a single hit that killed a quarter of the crew, that same hit probably also knocked out a lot of weapons, knocked out the engines, blew the bridge off, or otherwise massively compromised the ship's ability to keep functioning.
There is a simple commonsense reason for this. The crew is distributed throughout the ship. Destroying one small part of the ship may not do much damage to the ship's overall function, but by the same token its killing potential will be confined to a specific area and will kill only a small fraction of the crew. Conversely, anything that kills a large fraction of the crew must have released deadly forces throughout a large part of the ship's volume. In which case it probably knocked out a great many systems and important components.
This is why I'm arguing that hits which kill a large fraction of the crew, while inflicting merely ordinary amounts of hull damage, suggest that something odd is going on. The exact nature of the oddity varies, but there will generally be some oddity beyond "they got lucky and shot us in the crew instead of in the redundant lab spaces." Because you can't shoot a ship 'in the crew,' unless you do something out of the ordinary. Like a boarding party, or a psionic blast, or a neutron-bomb-esque weapon that 'kills people but leaves buildings standing.'
It didn't just kill people, it damaged something important. A lot.
If a WWII destroyer (or other ship) took a single hit that killed a quarter of the crew, that same hit probably also knocked out a lot of weapons, knocked out the engines, blew the bridge off, or otherwise massively compromised the ship's ability to keep functioning.
There is a simple commonsense reason for this. The crew is distributed throughout the ship. Destroying one small part of the ship may not do much damage to the ship's overall function, but by the same token its killing potential will be confined to a specific area and will kill only a small fraction of the crew. Conversely, anything that kills a large fraction of the crew must have released deadly forces throughout a large part of the ship's volume. In which case it probably knocked out a great many systems and important components.
This is why I'm arguing that hits which kill a large fraction of the crew, while inflicting merely ordinary amounts of hull damage, suggest that something odd is going on. The exact nature of the oddity varies, but there will generally be some oddity beyond "they got lucky and shot us in the crew instead of in the redundant lab spaces." Because you can't shoot a ship 'in the crew,' unless you do something out of the ordinary. Like a boarding party, or a psionic blast, or a neutron-bomb-esque weapon that 'kills people but leaves buildings standing.'
Gadjo
Doka
[X] Plan Maximum Detectives, Maximum Impact
Honestly looking at the situation, a boarding party is the only thing that makes sense unless the ship had a massive civvie population that was just milling around their quarters not getting into the crew's way during a fight. And that itself only makes sense if you assume all the civvie quarters are all in the same relatively unimportant ball that would not also knock out shitloads of important systems.
Honestly looking at the situation, a boarding party is the only thing that makes sense unless the ship had a massive civvie population that was just milling around their quarters not getting into the crew's way during a fight. And that itself only makes sense if you assume all the civvie quarters are all in the same relatively unimportant ball that would not also knock out shitloads of important systems.
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Fallenblades643
Seeker of the Divine Taste
AP shells through engineering spaces tended to kill all on hand engineering crews because it would blow out a steam pipe and boil anyone in the compartment. So, yeah, Loosing lots of crew to a bad shot is something that happens.
So you'd lose most of your engineering crew but only have reduced steam too one of your turbines.
There's also shots which might core say a living berth or the mess hall and kill a group of men, who do fuck all to a ships fighting capabilities.
The most crippling are blows to the bridge which gibs most officers, or a round into your weapon bays/turrets.
And kills the crew there. See the Iowas turret explosion to see how a misfire can kill 47 men, knock out 1 gun and leave the rest of it unaffected.
Or those shots which murdered large groups hole the medbays who where tending to large numbers of casualties who had not died.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Please remember, the main 'hit' on Endurance accounted for casualties equal to a quarter of the crew, on a ship several hundred meters long.
I get that single hits in the World War era could cause massive casualties all at once. I'm not completely stupid or ignorant, I am in fact aware of that. Including things like live steam on the rampage, hits on the bridge, and so on. All the engineers in one compartment dying? Believable. All the officers on the bridge or near it dying? Sure.
But a quarter of the entire crew, all at once, is extreme even by those standards. I honestly can't think of a case where that large a total proportion of the crew died from normal weapons fire in a historical warship, without massive hull-compromising events that gutted the ship (e.g. a magazine blowing up and breaking the ship in half).
Could it happen? Maybe, somehow. I could contrive an explanation for how such a disastrous thing could take place. As I have repeatedly said, that is not a thing which can be completely ruled out.
But it's not the way you'd expect things to work. And it's even more unlikely that things would work that way naturally on an Excelsior, where the crew is much smaller and distributed over a larger volume than in the comparatively cramped interior of a World War era naval vessel.
________________
So... do you actually disagree with my reasoning here? Because what it boils down to is:
"Losing a quarter of the crew all at once, to a hit that does not cripple the ship, strongly suggests that the enemy used some kind of unusual attack that is disproportionately likely to kill crew without causing hull damage."
If you disagree with that I'd be interested to hear of any historical counterexamples.
If you agree, then we're just bickering pointlessly.
I get that single hits in the World War era could cause massive casualties all at once. I'm not completely stupid or ignorant, I am in fact aware of that. Including things like live steam on the rampage, hits on the bridge, and so on. All the engineers in one compartment dying? Believable. All the officers on the bridge or near it dying? Sure.
But a quarter of the entire crew, all at once, is extreme even by those standards. I honestly can't think of a case where that large a total proportion of the crew died from normal weapons fire in a historical warship, without massive hull-compromising events that gutted the ship (e.g. a magazine blowing up and breaking the ship in half).
Could it happen? Maybe, somehow. I could contrive an explanation for how such a disastrous thing could take place. As I have repeatedly said, that is not a thing which can be completely ruled out.
But it's not the way you'd expect things to work. And it's even more unlikely that things would work that way naturally on an Excelsior, where the crew is much smaller and distributed over a larger volume than in the comparatively cramped interior of a World War era naval vessel.
________________
So... do you actually disagree with my reasoning here? Because what it boils down to is:
"Losing a quarter of the crew all at once, to a hit that does not cripple the ship, strongly suggests that the enemy used some kind of unusual attack that is disproportionately likely to kill crew without causing hull damage."
If you disagree with that I'd be interested to hear of any historical counterexamples.
If you agree, then we're just bickering pointlessly.
lbmaian
a thirsty squirrel
- Location
- USA
Right, continuing along the veins of treating everything as a nail to use the spreadsheet hammer on (*cough* ship design *cough*), I'll try to come up with an analysis spreadsheet for that battle.
Speaking of which, Oneiros just posted this in the SDB, so we probably won't be voting on a specific Ambassador design this coming quarter:
Speaking of which, Oneiros just posted this in the SDB, so we probably won't be voting on a specific Ambassador design this coming quarter:
Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
I have to agree with Simon on this. The only examples coming to mind are Japanese carriers at Midway, with aircraft support crew dying by the hundreds when bombs went off in the hangers. There is no equivalent to this situation that makes sense for an Excelsior.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Agreed. Plus, bombs going off inside the hangars of an aircraft carrier pretty well disables the carrier as a fighting ship, which brings me back to the more complicated form of my point.
There are lots of ways to hit a warship so that a quarter of the crew dies all at once.
It's just that all the normal ways of doing so will also result in the ship being functionally unable to keep fighting, because of the sheer amount of widespread destruction you had to unleash to do the job. Something critically important will get wrecked in the process of causing that much harm to the ship as a whole.
There are lots of ways to hit a warship so that a quarter of the crew dies all at once.
It's just that all the normal ways of doing so will also result in the ship being functionally unable to keep fighting, because of the sheer amount of widespread destruction you had to unleash to do the job. Something critically important will get wrecked in the process of causing that much harm to the ship as a whole.
- Location
- somewhere
I suspect the combat engine might be doing something like: Randomly roll casualties as a percentage of crew, round, subtract. This would tend to make low crew ships take very low casualties since usually they will be rounded down to zero. Upping the overall casualty rate to compensate ends up making high crew ships take unreasonably high casualties.
What could be done instead: Roll whether the crew takes a whole point worth of losses, probability scaled by crew. No distortion of expected losses by rounding, no single hits that cause unreasonably high losses.
What could be done instead: Roll whether the crew takes a whole point worth of losses, probability scaled by crew. No distortion of expected losses by rounding, no single hits that cause unreasonably high losses.
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- Location
- The Middle of the Howling Wilderness
The CODEX SYDRAXES CALLS THIS MANEUVER STEEL RAIN!
Typed on phone, so this will rough.
I have not gone and checked who scored the hits, I am assuming one of cruisers.
Extract from post battle analysis
At 1556 the Endurance found itself flanked by an Escort at 045,015 relative and a cruiser at 222,004 relative. While this allowed for the primary saucer hull to face the escort's fire, the cruiser unfortunately had a clear shot on the shuttle bay. The protective doors had been weakened by earlier disruptive fire and did not hold against this barrage.
All staff in the shuttle bay were killed instantly.
There was severe EPS blowout from the damage that transversed through all decks of the Engineering hull, resulting in plasma fires affecting all compartments within 15 metres of the port secondary conduit.
This is where the majority of casualties were taken with over 60% of crew in these areas killed and remainder needing extensive care. The medical teams should be congratulated for efforts in not loosing more people, but almost all the wounded will require reconstructive surgery and regeneration techniques, giving all of them a medical discharge if they do desire.
Backup system meant there was little loss in functionality for the short time period remaining in the battle, however would have required the vessel to withdraw if fighting had continued for more than another hour.
I have not gone and checked who scored the hits, I am assuming one of cruisers.
Extract from post battle analysis
At 1556 the Endurance found itself flanked by an Escort at 045,015 relative and a cruiser at 222,004 relative. While this allowed for the primary saucer hull to face the escort's fire, the cruiser unfortunately had a clear shot on the shuttle bay. The protective doors had been weakened by earlier disruptive fire and did not hold against this barrage.
All staff in the shuttle bay were killed instantly.
There was severe EPS blowout from the damage that transversed through all decks of the Engineering hull, resulting in plasma fires affecting all compartments within 15 metres of the port secondary conduit.
This is where the majority of casualties were taken with over 60% of crew in these areas killed and remainder needing extensive care. The medical teams should be congratulated for efforts in not loosing more people, but almost all the wounded will require reconstructive surgery and regeneration techniques, giving all of them a medical discharge if they do desire.
Backup system meant there was little loss in functionality for the short time period remaining in the battle, however would have required the vessel to withdraw if fighting had continued for more than another hour.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
A suitable omake for the "perfectly ordinary lucky enemy hit" version of how the Emdurance took such heavy crew losses. As opposed to the "Sydraxian marines rampaging through the corridors" version.
Suggestion to Oneiros:
If this is basically correct, start by determining what percentage of crew casualties you'd expect to see in a "typical" disabled ship. From that figure, it is possible to calculate the appropriate probability of losing a point of crew, per percentage point of Hull lost. The formula for crew loss probability would look something like:
P(casualty) = (total_crew_size) * (amount_of_damage_dealt/total_hull) * (constant),
Where 'constant' is tuned so that, for example...
Say, reducing a ship from 100% Hull to 0% Hull in 5% increments would cause half the crew to get killed, on average. For a ship the size of an Excelsior this would require eight casualty-causing hits out of twenty hull-damaging hits total, and plugging the numbers into the equation you need...
0.4 = 16*(2.5/50)*K
0.4 = .8*K
0.5 = K
I'm pretty sure that scales down reasonably well for small ships, though if I were setting up the engine myself I'd want to run simulations to make sure I'm not getting probability wrong.
Critical hits that kill lots of crew may not be such a bad idea as such, but honestly they don't really serve a function that wouldn't be better served by just having a flat increase in the value of "K" so that crew are killed by enemy fire more often all the time. Given that crew are fungible on most ships, hitting one damaged ship with superheavy casualties while another damaged ship gets off relatively lightly isn't going to make much mechanical difference from 'averaging out' the casualties across the two ships.
This is a good idea.
Suggestion to Oneiros:
If this is basically correct, start by determining what percentage of crew casualties you'd expect to see in a "typical" disabled ship. From that figure, it is possible to calculate the appropriate probability of losing a point of crew, per percentage point of Hull lost. The formula for crew loss probability would look something like:
P(casualty) = (total_crew_size) * (amount_of_damage_dealt/total_hull) * (constant),
Where 'constant' is tuned so that, for example...
Say, reducing a ship from 100% Hull to 0% Hull in 5% increments would cause half the crew to get killed, on average. For a ship the size of an Excelsior this would require eight casualty-causing hits out of twenty hull-damaging hits total, and plugging the numbers into the equation you need...
0.4 = 16*(2.5/50)*K
0.4 = .8*K
0.5 = K
I'm pretty sure that scales down reasonably well for small ships, though if I were setting up the engine myself I'd want to run simulations to make sure I'm not getting probability wrong.
Critical hits that kill lots of crew may not be such a bad idea as such, but honestly they don't really serve a function that wouldn't be better served by just having a flat increase in the value of "K" so that crew are killed by enemy fire more often all the time. Given that crew are fungible on most ships, hitting one damaged ship with superheavy casualties while another damaged ship gets off relatively lightly isn't going to make much mechanical difference from 'averaging out' the casualties across the two ships.