Species of the week: Voth

[Teaos]

They were said to be anti borg but I dont see how they would only work for against them. They seemed to go bang in a rather big way, this would lead you to believe that they can be used on anything.

And yeah I think the advancement has a lot to do with all the different species working together.

[Thorin]

We also can't make absolute statements about the power of transphasics without knowing how they work - they could well be a specialised anti-Borg weapon, rather than simply having greater firepower.

Completely true - we don't know. But either way the Federation has become significantly more powerful than the Borg. Also through it's ablative armour - which isn't just anti-borg.
But I'd say transphasics are definitely not solely anti-borg. They do indeed have a rather large bang - it seems that transphasic torpedo explodes with a radius similar to the size of the cube itself - if you look at the 2nd torpedo fired, or the one where the cube is destroyed in one. It looks like one continious blast, not one that somehow does something specifically anti-borg.

[Captain Seafort]

We also can't make absolute statements about the power of transphasics without knowing how they work - they could well be a specialised anti-Borg weapon, rather than simply having greater firepower.

Completely true - we don't know. But either way the Federation has become significantly more powerful than the Borg.

No we don't - we know the Federation has developed the ability to defeat the Borg.

Ablative armour is certainly a very effective system, as Janeway demonstrated when she held off a Negh'var in a shuttle, at least temporarily. The torpedoes, on the other hand, can't really be judged solely by the destruction of the cubes, other than to say that one or two of them can destroy a Borg cube. That does not necessarily translate to being able to destroy any ship, or to having a huge yield, since all Trek ships tend to suffer from the "one hit and they go bang" mentality. For example, at the Battle of Jutland HMS Queen Mary was destroyed by a single shell that struck a turret, and caused a cordite flash down into the magazine, which exploded. Would you conclude from this that a German 11" or 12" shell has a yield comparable to a magazine full of cordite charges and 13.5" rounds?

[Teaos]

I know the Borg were changed quite a bit in Voyager but they still seem to have the ability to soak up a lot of damage and not have a single failure point (Exept in rare occasions like FC).

Visually they seem to have a huge yeild and there is no eviednce that they work just against the Borg.

[Captain Seafort]

Visually they cause huge explosions. There's no evidence one way or the other to say whether that's the warhead or something in the cube going bang. Since FC demonstrates that cubes suffer from progressive damage in the sameway as Fed ships, and Dark Frontier shows that they automatically self-destruct if key systems are damaged, it's well within the bounds of probability that those are secondary explosions.

[Teaos]

I dont have any of the footage at the moment but undoubtedly it is on Youtube. But the explosions from memory were centered at the exact point of impact. This leads you to believe that it is the yield of the Torpedo.

[Captain Seafort]

I dont have any of the footage at the moment but undoubtedly it is on Youtube. But the explosions from memory were centered at the exact point of impact. This leads you to believe that it is the yield of the Torpedo.

No, it leads to the conclusion that the impact of the torpedo was responsible for the explosion, which I've never disputed. The dispute is whether the explosion was the actual warhead (your belief), or stuff exploding due to damage from the warhead (mine). If it hits a magazine, and the magazine explodes, do you conclude that it was actually the torpedo that caused the huge explosion?

[Teaos]

But for it to be some internal component exploding it would require to coincidence of the Torpedo hitting the exact spot of the component each time. If it caused a magazine a bit away from the impact to explode the explosion would be centered their.

[Captain Seafort]

It's not as if we know the exact coordinates of the torpedo explosion or the centre of the main explosion. We can tell that they're in roughly the same place by eyeballing it, but that's nowhere near acurate enough to tell whether they overlap exactly. The centres of the two explosions could be dozens of metres apart.

[Teaos]

Ok how could they be specific to the Borg? What could they do to them that they couldnt do to anyone either naturally or with some minor modifications.

[Captain Seafort]

We don't know that they are Borg-specific. The Borg are, however, the only species we've seen them used against, and so are the only species we know they are effective against. They may rely on the Borg self-destruct tendency demonstrated in Best of Both Worlds and Dark Frontier. They may rely on some aspect of Borg shields revealed by Seven or Picard. They may rely on the decentralisation of Borg ships, with numerous power sources rather than a single well-protected one. They may be just as effective against any ship. We just don't know.

Incidentally, looking at this (7:47 - 7:55), it appears that the torpedoes detonated on the surface, with the initial fireballs dissipating within seconds, before the main explosion destroys the cube frm within (originating somewhere near its centre of mass).

[Teaos]

It looks to me as if the torpedo hits causes massive damage to the cube with its own impact as to my eye all of the explosions seem to center on the impact site. Then the Borg cube explodes due to the massive damage.

http://www.ditl.org/index.php?daybody=/ ... php?20.1&1

Here are still shots from DITL of the moments of impact. All the explosions seem to center on the torpedo hits. The one that hits center seems to detonate a bit inside the cube blasting out of two of the sides. This ties in with the transphasic name which may mean they penitrate and explode inside causing massive damage by by-passing the armour. That would work on anyone.

On a side note I love how the Borg queen says the crew has obvious imperfections... a little bit of an understatement.

[Tsukiyumi]

Nice find, Seafort. I haven't seen that since the original airing. Remember, on another thread, we discussed the possibility of the Transphasic torps being a purely anti-Borg weapon, which I find likely for a number of reasons.

For one thing, 'Admiral Janeway' (shudder) would've brought technology to acomplish her goal (getting past the Borg). While the ablative armor might be standard issue on ships of her era (it was on a freaking shuttle), there's no way to know if the torpedoes were. If they were general-purpose, why didn't 'Future Kim' use them against the Klingons instead of firing multiple phaser blasts? If they use raw power only, you could detonate one a kilometer away from a Neghvar and cripple it.

Also, in the aforementioned scene with the cubes, you can see a secondary explosion on the opposite side of the cube half a second after the first torp impact (which is rather small), indicating internal systems going up. The second cube does light up like a Ford Pinto with one shot, but it's possible that impact was in a more critical area.

The way I see it, there's no clear way to tell, since they couldn't be bothered to explain anything about this tech in that episode. One ten second line could've solved this: " Transphasic Torpedoes. They're designed to overload the Borg's most critical systems."

-or-

" Transphasic Torpedoes. They have three hundred times the yield of your Photon Torpedoes."

Wow. That was so hard. I can't see any way they couldn't have squeezed that into the two-hour episode...

[Teaos]

If they were general-purpose, why didn't 'Future Kim' use them against the Klingons instead of firing multiple phaser blasts?

Cause starfleet generally try not to detroy ships just disable them and scare them off.


On another note I just notices how massively thick that armour is. Just by eye it seems to be at least 10 meters thick. That is unless it is not solid but more of a bubble or armour around the ship. There is no possible way Voyager could carry enought stock to generate that much armour.

[Tsukiyumi]

Cause starfleet generally try not to detroy ships just disable them and scare them off.

That's why I mentioned detonating them at a good distance.

And, yeah the super-armor... Yet another magic subspace effect, or something to that effect, I imagine. Good eye on that one, Teaos. Even if it was a direct energy-to-matter system, it would seriously deplete their warp core. Of course, they couldn't be bothered to explain that either. I don't even think they mentioned the torpedoes until they fired them; I don't recall.