Stupid Alien Designs + Worthless Concepts

[CharlesPhipps]

That's a sign of an author who's tried to think it through rather than going with "well this looks cool, no more thought needed!" An interesting example of thinking things through is the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where all sorts of absurd extrapolations and considerations are given to things, in a manner that wouldn't work in a non-comic work but are what elevates it to brilliance.

I tend to think of the Bat'Leth as basically a Shogun samurai thing anyway (which is good because TNG was all about saying the Klingons were Japanese-Vikings instead of communists). The Bat'leth is a symbol of your status as a Klingon nobleman versus an active weapon and is used for:

* Sports (Bat'leth competition)
* Ritual duels
* Status symbol
* Holodeck games

It's why you wouldn't see the Klingons in TOS wielding them because it's a relic of a previous age and lost glories. A Klingon waving around a replicated one would have the same reaction as a super weeb and his $2000 "real" katana.

I mean, you could use it combat but either that's because you're out of phasers and are Rambo-ing it up or you're facing guys without guns. It actually works in Star Trek: Online because people have personal shields and they ignore shields but that is its own canon.

[GreyICE]

I tend to think of the Bat'Leth as basically a Shogun samurai thing anyway (which is good because TNG was all about saying the Klingons were Japanese-Vikings instead of communists). The Bat'leth is a symbol of your status as a Klingon nobleman versus an active weapon and is used for:

* Sports (Bat'leth competition)
* Ritual duels
* Status symbol
* Holodeck games

It's why you wouldn't see the Klingons in TOS wielding them because it's a relic of a previous age and lost glories. A Klingon waving around a replicated one would have the same reaction as a super weeb and his $2000 "real" katana.

I mean, you could use it combat but either that's because you're out of phasers and are Rambo-ing it up or you're facing guys without guns. It actually works in Star Trek: Online because people have personal shields and they ignore shields but that is its own canon.

Okay, but why is the weapon so unutterably crap? A Japanese katana was inferior to the longsword, it's true, but it's not massively inferior. Lesser metallurgy contributes to most of it, with the rest being defined down to the longsword being possibly the most refined weapon in history. The katana is a passable saber variant, although rather defined by the fact the Japanese didn't have horses - most sabers are meant to be used one handed from horseback, something that matters less without a horse. Still, it's not a terrible weapon, even if certain anime-obsessed idiots overrate it highly.

The Bat'leth on the other hand... it's crap. It's crud. It's poop. There's no real way to use it in a fight. It's not down to "Klingons are stronger" or any of that shit, it's down entirely to leverage, reach, and power - three things that are defined by physics, and bipeds only work one way with them. An unbelievably strong biped might have a twelve pound "supersize claymore" or something hysterically ridiculous, but they're still going to end up having human-looking weapons. You'd have to get into entirely different physiology to get away from what we know about killing other bipeds in close combat (one of our species favorite activites for five thousand years).

[CharlesPhipps]

The Bat'leth on the other hand... it's crap. It's crud. It's poop. There's no real way to use it in a fight. It's not down to "Klingons are stronger" or any of that shit, it's down entirely to leverage, reach, and power - three things that are defined by physics, and bipeds only work one way with them. An unbelievably strong biped might have a twelve pound "supersize claymore" or something hysterically ridiculous, but they're still going to end up having human-looking weapons. You'd have to get into entirely different physiology to get away from what we know about killing other bipeds in close combat (one of our species favorite activites for five thousand years).

I think at some point you just have to acknowledge suspension of disbelief. I mean, I could make up a story about the fact that its primarily designed to block attacks, which makes it unlike a sword (and is kind of interesting imagery in that the Klingons have a less aggressively designed weapon) or that it was uniquely made to kill Hur'q who need long scythe-like attacks but the irony is that I actually don't. Real life martial arts include a bunch of weapons that are actually useless for anything other than ceremony or health or spiritualism.

Maybe Kahless made the Bat'leth to symbolize a sword without being practical but they use it anyway. Otherwise, I just treat it like the lightsaber.

[McAvoy]

Tbh, Klingons gotta be among the dumbest aliens in sci fi. Like the board DS9 in the Way of the Warrior and they just rush the defending security officers with blade weapons where they can be cut down by phaser fire. Yeah yeah they have an over emphasis on personal combat but no way in hell can they be a invading force that takes over planets of that is how they take over something like DS9.

In Dune they justify all the knife fighting with the fact shields don't work against blades and lasers can result in atomic explosions.

Yeah that works story wise but in Trek the hand held weapons don't have that power and personal shields are non existent. I do think they have the tech to give shields but I also think they have the tech to give their security or ground troops some sort of armor.

Kinda almost feel like Starfleet has the capability to create their own version of Iron Man suits.

[CharlesPhipps]

Yeah that works story wise but in Trek the hand held weapons don't have that power and personal shields are non existent. I do think they have the tech to give shields but I also think they have the tech to give their security or ground troops some sort of armor.

Kinda almost feel like Starfleet has the capability to create their own version of Iron Man suits.

Its the weird juxtaposition of Star Trek tech. They are both weaker and stronger than a lot of science fiction franchises.

They don't have anything resembling mechs or robots but a single Federation ship can Death Star a planet.

[McAvoy]

Yeah that works story wise but in Trek the hand held weapons don't have that power and personal shields are non existent. I do think they have the tech to give shields but I also think they have the tech to give their security or ground troops some sort of armor.

Kinda almost feel like Starfleet has the capability to create their own version of Iron Man suits.

Its the weird juxtaposition of Star Trek tech. They are both weaker and stronger than a lot of science fiction franchises.

They don't have anything resembling mechs or robots but a single Federation ship can Death Star a planet.

Maybe not destroy a planet like the Death Star but they can certainly at least make a planet a giant glass ball. Trek also has the same issue as other science fiction TV series. As in, weapons that are supposed to be atomic bomb range has the visual look of a conventional missile attack of today's tech.

In some cases like Star Wars, technology like ships, weapons and even droids have been around for thousands of years without much of a improvement. More or less it seems to me. Where Trek like the humans have been in space for a few hundred years and other powers are similar in tech level.

[GreyICE]

Yeah that works story wise but in Trek the hand held weapons don't have that power and personal shields are non existent. I do think they have the tech to give shields but I also think they have the tech to give their security or ground troops some sort of armor.

Kinda almost feel like Starfleet has the capability to create their own version of Iron Man suits.

The Iron Man suit is its own sort of stupid (the comic book kind, as opposed to the Star Trek kind). Lets discuss a real weapon - the Impulse drive. It can accelerate a shuttle or ship to 0.75c. 75% of the speed of light.

At 225,000,000 m/s, the impact force of a single kilogram is 4x10^17 joules. The Dinosaur killing asteroid was around ~10^25 joules (100 trillion tons of TNT) so we just need 10^8 kilograms to equal that. That's 10,000 tons. Fortunately the Enterprise D is 4x10^7 tons (4x10^10 kg). So all we need to do is to grab a few asteroids with a tractor beam, slap a cloaking device and a power source on them, go to full impulse slowly, and chuck them. Computers being what they are, a single starship could set up a couple of extinction-level events on a planet in a few hours. Just do it from outside the solar plane, wait a few days, and boom goes the dynamite.

What we're really looking at is they should be fighting a war on a level where infantry and people moving about is simply obsolete, and battles occur in the eyeblinks of AIs, the darkness infinities of self-replicating machines, the horrors of nanoplagues and genetically engineered viruses and neural-hijacking memetics. It should be a war where suddenly planets cease to exist as undetected objects smash into them with incomprehensible force, an ongoing dark war of booby trapped planets and deadly countermeasures. Civilizations should vanish in eyeblinks, extinction simply a common phenomena against this sort of force.

That doesn't fit Star Trek's tone at all, so instead we don't do that.

[McAvoy]

That works if you are planning on wiping out the entire planet. Not just it's intelligent inhabitants but wild life, plant life and any infrastructure the planet has.

TOS has an Order that glasses a planet if they are that much of a threat.

But if you are planning on invading the planet, preserve the cities or towns and its native people, you are not going to glass the planet.

So you need infantry, armored vehicles and air superiority vehicles.

As far as Trek Iron Man armor, it would work as infantry armor. It woukd be like the Mars armor from The Expanse. You would be able to take on environments where it woukd be deadly to humans, Klingons or whoever.

[CharlesPhipps]

So you need infantry, armored vehicles and air superiority vehicles.

In Honor Harrington, they pointed out that orbital superiority with precision was a game over as you simply could not be touched and anyone who opposed you was toast. So a group that didn't surrender under such conditions had no protections under the rule of law.

[McAvoy]

So you need infantry, armored vehicles and air superiority vehicles.

In Honor Harrington, they pointed out that orbital superiority with precision was a game over as you simply could not be touched and anyone who opposed you was toast. So a group that didn't surrender under such conditions had no protections under the rule of law.

It is true. In Trek, at least for the Federation they do have the accuracy to fire from orbit to eliminate enemy positions. It's one of the reasons why Trek doesn't have fighters or shouldn't.

But if you think about it, if a ship cmcan fire from orbit that means they have superiority in that area of space or entire planet. So basically the planet is already on the losing side of an invasion. Something completely different if space above the planet was still being contested. Or the planet has shields or whatever planetary defenses.

This is no different then today having air superiority and being able to bomb and missile the hell out of the ground at will.