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Thread: Cambat?????

  1. #1
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    Lightbulb Cambat?????

    Okay I a putting tpgether a source book/adventure and I need some help. I need to know +/-'s of underwater effects on a ship. I figured one of you guys out there can help with this. The guide will be submited to trekrpg and thus free for everyone so if there is anyone who would like to help me out ny more on it let me know....

  2. #2
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    Sensor range would be restricted by the water. That also helps if you're trying to run a combat with a submarine feel.

    Weapon ranges will be shortened as well. Phaser beams will be boiling away the water that they're travelling through and losing power/damage until they don't have enough juice left to do any damage. The superheated water vapor along the path of the phaser beam will leave a tell-tale trail of bubbles that may interfere with sensors.

    Torpedos would probably be stealthier than phasers, but their range will also be limited due to water friction. And remember that underwater explosions make concussion waves that dissipate much slower than atmospheric blasts, so don't be too close to the torp when it goes off.

    If you are using shields to keep the water out of your ship, you won't be able to use the transporter.

    Communications will probably be as limited as sensors.

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  3. #3
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    that sounds great...what about movement how would it be restricted..I figured ships were not made to go under water but what if one crashed in it...ect. How on earth would the deflector dish work?????

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    Most ships have problems flying through nebula and atmospheres.

    It would probably be best to have a ship specially designed for underwater use. It would essentially be one of today's submarines, but with better materials & more comfortable insides

    - no sense using shields to keep the water out, when you can just make the hull air-tight.
    - hull breaches much more critical problems underwater than in space. (in space, you lose one compartment of air, and have one atmosphere of pressure on internal walls. Underwater, you have hundreds to thousands of atmospheres of pressure on the internal walls)
    - movement is heavily restricted due to friction with water.
    - shields would be tough to hold up if you're moving at all.
    - weapons would be altered as in previous posts, (heavy range penalties, slow torpedoes, water/phaser effects)
    - life support could run with almost zero power if it's an M-class oxy world & you don't have odd aliens on board.
    - battle would likely be more of a cat-and-mouse game, since there is heavy interference for most sensors.
    - lots of opportunity for monsters to attack from the deep
    - subspace communications would be adversely affected, but with a few base stations on the planet surface, you should be able to relay a comm channel from anywhere to anywhere, (unless theres some diruptive mineral around for plot reasons)

    - if a space vessel crash-landed on a water-world, I would suspect that it would either sink from damage and be crushed by the water pressure, or have to float around like a life raft.
    ie. if the SIF generators go down, any ship larger the defiant (roughly) will crush under its own weight. The ship sinks & crushes into a ball, or looks like the Titanic if it fills with water before it can be crushed.
    If the structure holds, the air inside will possibly keep the ship afloat, but barely. Most federation ships are not designed with shapes that would work as boats. something like a defiant might manage, but skipping across the water would pound the hull with a vengeance. Any other shape, and the ship would manoeuver like a two-story house in a flood
    Basically, if you crash-landed on this ocean, abandon ship quickly, or use thrusters to drift towards shore at a walking pace.
    Warning! get rid of your antimatter somehow, or the planet won't support any life in a few minutes!!!
    (transport it into orbit?)

    thats all I can think of right now.

  5. #5
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    Lightbulb

    The biggest problem you're going to have with a space-borne vessel crashing on (in?) a water planet is this: space vessels are designed to keep atmospheres in (at normal pressure), not keep tons-per-square-inch of water out.

    While starships hulls are designed well, and can stand great forces acting upon it (largely thanks to the SIF), if it lands on a body of water it's going to sink (I don't care how bouyant it may be with all that air inside it, it will eventually go under due to its own weight - and the fact that it crashed, it didn't get placed carefully on the water's surface).

    As it goes down, the ship will be subjected to enormous pressures acting upon it from the outside. Eventually, the SIF will be overloaded, shields will fail, etc... and at that point, the ship will be crushed. End of Story.

    Any starship that is built for travel in all environments - space, air, water - will have one horribly thick (and heavy!) hull, very strong SIF and shields, and a huge powerplant - let's face it, a ship built to take that sort of punishment is going to weigh tens of thousands of tons before you put any systems and equipment in.

    Then you can start worrying about sensors, weapons, shielding, crew, etc...

    Just my $0.02.

    Also - as a rough rule, you could state that any starship crashing into a body of water and being submerged (assuming that said vessel is not designed for underwater activities), then I would give it 1 day per size before its systems failed and the ship was crushed. Thus, as Size 1 ship could last for 1 day, a Size 2 ship could last for 2 days, etc...

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    Actually, I would give the smaller ships more survival time than the large ships.

    Imagine a shuttlecraft underwater. The boxy things would probably float, and they can hold up without much (if any SIF)

    Its the mass going up with the cube of the size, and the strength going up with the square of the size.
    Get too big, and you crush under your own weight. The little guys will last longer.

    Still, I think the main question is What do you do with the ANTIMATTER??? Cracking an A/M pod on a planet is going to kill all life on the surface real quick. Imagine the world's complete nuclear arsenal going off at the impact site.
    I would suggest getting rid of it before you go down, leave it in deep space, or at least a semi-stable orbit.

  7. #7
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    <font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by suicide junkie:
    Actually, I would give the smaller ships more survival time than the large ships.</font>
    I guess that depends on how you look at it. Bigger ships have more power available, and stronger shields. Sure, bigger ships are more likely to sink faster, but then if the ship's crashed, the size of the ships really becomes a side issue.

    Stronger shields, stronger SIFs, stronger superstructure will enable bigger ships to survive underwater longer (but not an awful lot longer) than smaller ships; hence my conclusions in my previous post.

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  8. #8
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    what about this can you use the bussard collector to lower a ship much like a submarine uses ballast tanks...I am sure that would just make the thing more heavy in the rear but that with the deflector dish could make a ship survive a bit longer should it crash and still have a few systems working

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    <font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Stronger shields, stronger SIFs, stronger superstructure will enable bigger ships to survive underwater longer (but not an awful lot longer) than smaller ships; hence my conclusions in my previous post.</font>
    The problem is that the larger ships are using their SIF to the max when they're flying around in space. The hull also experiences no inertia (IDF) & hence no serious forces. They're not going to stand a chance underwater.
    A shuttlecraft, on the other hand, is just a tiny metal box, and can hold its own a lot better, even without power. I don't think they even need/have SIF generators.

    You can stack shuttlecraft like cardboard boxes. You'll never get big ships in a stack.

  10. #10
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    But if you keep it on the submarine analogy.

    Then the bigger the ship the more extensive/hardened the hull can be and thus have a much higher crush depth rating.

    Add SIF, then they should be able to survive for sometime.

    Certainly a shuttle could survive quite a while but at what depth? Its crush depth would certainly be alot less then a much bigger vessel.

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  11. #11

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    For an episode guideline you are looking at Voyagers '30 Days' and DS9's 'Starship Down'
    The submarine warfare analagy works equally well (if not better) in the atmosphere of the gas giant. And Starship Down will give you an idea of how a larger starship will fare underwater.

    30 Days is far more accurate. There is a line saying that the Flyer can be rigged with immersion shielding and modifications for underwater operation in about a day, to which Janeway admits it will take a week for the neccesary modifications for Voyager.

    So there it is. The canon knowledge that a starship cannot operate underwater without modifications...

    ~Thanks for the episode name Brian K.

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  12. #12

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    For an episode guideline you are looking at Voyagers '30 Days' and DS9's 'Starship Down'
    The submarine warfare analagy works equally well (if not better) in the atmosphere of the gas giant. And Starship Down will give you an idea of how a larger starship will fare underwater.

    30 Days is far more accurate. There is a line saying that the Flyer can be rigged with immersion shielding (as mentioned in Spacedock) and modifications for underwater operation in about a day, to which Janeway admits it will take a week for the neccesary modifications for Voyager.

    So there it is. The canon knowledge that a starship cannot operate underwater without modifications...

    ~Thanks for the episode name Brian K.

    ------------------
    Dan.

    "A couple of thoughts from a random mind!"

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