What can beat the Andromeda Ascendant?

[Ouroboros]

I feel I should add that virtually any warship from around the multiverse with f.t.l sensors and tracking would have a significant advantage over Andromeda.

The combat value of FTL sensors is drastically reduced when you've got projectile travel speeds like Star Wars, Gate or most other visual sci-fi seems to.

A Wars or Gate style ship with FTL sensors might see the Andromeda first and without lag but good luck actually hitting it with anything. By the time you get close enough to actually engage with the slow blobs of doom the distance, and thus light speed lag, will be so minuscule as to be essentially irrelevant.

I'd expect a lot of the advantage of having instant data at say 4 light seconds, vs data 4 seconds old at 4 light seconds, would also be lost due to human crew reaction times and just the realities of the give order execute order chain. That's to say that a ship with a human or normal sentient crew with FTL sensors is still going to be slower to react at actual combat ranges than Andromeda's AI.

The Andromeda also deploys sensor drones to close in on its targets and feed more up to date targeting data to its incoming missile salvos. It's what enables some of its more extreme ranges against targets in its own universe despite being limited to light speed sensors.

[Crazy Tom]

It also has its gravity well projectors.

Which if memory serves, don't do anything except prevent hyperspace travel... not exactly pertinent to the current scenario.

[Gormagon]

In some cases they are used as defensive weaponry, I.E the Yuuzhan Vong used gravity wells to suck up both lasers and torpedoes. They can also be used as real space weapons to slow down enemy ships or "tear" off your force shields.

Its force shields are incredibly powerful anyway. I.E why it could use itself as a hammer. It also had literally hundreds of turbo laser and ion batteries that could even fire randomly to hit incoming missiles.

Watching Andromeda I seem to see that the Ascendant is really vulnerable if you can hit it. Unless they know exactly what you are firing at them and then in some cases they can adapt, like to that Nietzschean plasma cannon. But they needed a guy on the ground to deliver the specs. And I doubt Andromeda could absorb 10^31 joules or so from the Eclipses main battery.

[thekillman]

The problem isn't destroying the Andromeda. the problem is hitting it.

[Girlbot]

The problem isn't destroying the Andromeda. the problem is hitting it.

Exactly

[Gormagon]

.....used gravity wells to suck up both lasers and torpedoes. They can also be used as real space weapons to slow down enemy ships or "tear" off your force shields.

Gravity is an f.t.l weapon.

[Lt. Col. Mcoy]

Gravity is an f.t.l weapon.

Whoah, wait, what now? **Freaky Physics Alarm**

[thekillman]

gravity can "break" the speed of light, as the speed of light is imposed by energy indenting the fabric of space. Space, as you can put it, is thus outside the limit of c. Gravity is the warping of space, thus technically gravity is outside the speed of light.

the force of gravity however isn't faster than c. (IE, the force exerted by spatial warping differences)

[Gormagon]

Yeah^

[Crazy Tom]

Gravity is an f.t.l weapon.

Sigh...

*rubs temples tiredly*

Yeah^

What he means to say is that gravity propagates at the same speed as any other EM wave. Ergo, not FTL.

Side note, the Andromeda is designed to be that fragile on purpose, in the Andromeda verse you can't defend against RKKS, not really, the best way is to make your ships sufficiently redundant and porous so that shots can go right through without depositing a significant fraction of their total energy.

I'll also re-iterate that the Andromeda far, far outrages the Eclipse, since it can quite comfortably fire from several light minutes out, if not further, and rely on drones to guide its munitions in. If memory serves, ECM isn't exactly a big deal in Star Wars.

So we're back to the question of whether the Andromeda runs out of missiles before the Eclipse runs out of power. Somebody run crunch the numbers.

[Gormagon]

Sigh...

*rubs temples tiredly*



What he means to say is that gravity propagates at the same speed as any other EM wave. Ergo, not FTL.

You guys are smart enough to know what I meant.

[Lt. Col. Mcoy]

You guys are smart enough to know what I meant.

Actually, I'm not sure what you meant. If you knew it only propagates at c, what did you mean by FTL?

[Gormagon]

Gravity warps space. Ships exist in space.(Usually) A gravity weapon could possibly reach a vessel before a missile or plasma blast, not by traveling faster then C, but by warping the space itself.

[Crazy Tom]

Gravity warps space. Ships exist in space.(Usually) A gravity weapon could possibly reach a vessel before a missile or plasma blast, not by traveling faster then C, but by warping the space itself.

Ah, a metric weapon. Should have just said so.

[thekillman]

Point is, i believe the Eclipse does not have a metric weapon. It just messes with space enough to disrupt their form of FTL.

[LT. COL. John Sheppard]

Enterprise E or Nero's Narada

[Ouroboros]

Enterprise E or Nero's Narada

Nope. Kirk's Enterprise might actually have a shot though. It seems to do its fighting at warp speeds and TOS includes quite a few examples of them shooting at things beyond visual range, even with phasers.

It's kind of funny watching the original series. If you just treat them like two different shows and forget the fact the Ent D and E are supposed to come later, the ships in the original one are actually massively more capable in combat thanks to the whole FTL brawling thing. I don't think any other visual sci-fi has that and it's a total game changer. If you can't do it and your opponent can you basically auto lose.

[Crazy Tom]

Nope. Kirk's Enterprise might actually have a shot though. It seems to do its fighting at warp speeds and TOS includes quite a few examples of them shooting at things beyond visual range, even with phasers.

It's kind of funny watching the original series. If you just treat them like two different shows and forget the fact the Ent D and E are supposed to come later, the ships in the original one are actually massively more capable in combat thanks to the whole FTL brawling thing. I don't think any other visual sci-fi has that and it's a total game changer. If you can't do it and your opponent can you basically auto lose.

I never understood why they mucked about with phasers when torpedoes can close at FTL speeds. Wouldn't it be more effective to develop missile cruisers that can fire torpedoes at high warp? It's a fascinating idea because I'm only ware of a bare handful of 'verses where they have FTL combat.

[Ouroboros]

I'm not sure if torps in the new trek can go to warp or just stay at warp. The TOS ones obviously could though. I'm also thinking along the lines of they have excellent sensors, cheap anti matter production and small warp drives so why aren't we getting shuttle sized ship and planet killing missiles.

Throw a cloak on it if you're a Romulan or Klingon and you can effectively hold the entire quadrant hostage.

The whole alpha quadrant should basically be a big cold war in space with everyone afraid to really do anything hostile because they've all got their fingers on a button that'll send thousands of warp capable anti matter missiles flying at each other's populated planets.

This actually highlights one of the major reasons why the Andromeda tends to dominate so badly. It really gets the most out of the tech the universe that made it has available. That's to say it's pretty hard to speculate on seemingly obvious improvements to its design that were apparently just blindly overlooked.

The Andromeda isn't even a dedicated ship killer in its own setting. It's a command and control ship meant to coordinate fleets and be a sort of jack of all trades. Yet it still crushes.

[Crazy Tom]

I'm not sure if torps in the new trek can go to warp or just stay at warp. The TOS ones obviously could though.

They couldn't in TNG at least, I remember reading in the tech manual that they could only sustain the warp speeds they were fired from.

I'm also thinking along the lines of they have excellent sensors, cheap anti matter production and small warp drives so why aren't we getting shuttle sized ship and planet killing missiles.

Throw a cloak on it if you're a Romulan or Klingon and you can effectively hold the entire quadrant hostage.

The whole alpha quadrant should basically be a big cold war in space with everyone afraid to really do anything hostile because they've all got their fingers on a button that'll send thousands of warp capable anti matter missiles flying at each other's populated planets.

This actually highlights one of the major reasons why the Andromeda tends to dominate so badly. It really gets the most out of the tech the universe that made it has available. That's to say it's pretty hard to speculate on seemingly obvious improvements to its design that were apparently just blindly overlooked.

The Andromeda isn't even a dedicated ship killer in its own setting. It's a command and control ship meant to coordinate fleets and be a sort of jack of all trades. Yet it still crushes.

It's kind of sad that the most popular sci-fi shows are he ones that have so many obvious tech applications that are overlooked.