Star Trek: The Quadratic War

[Hotfoot]

Leave it to a Kirk to start a war with the Klingons

[LadyTevar]

Leave it to a Kirk to start a war with the Klingons

Gotta keep up the Family Traditions!
Next I have to steal something militarily important from the Romulans.

[Hotfoot]

There IS a fleet tender just sort of sitting there.

[frigidmagi]

Yes, I know I'm cutting a number of you off at the knees. But we are on the clock and as Hotfoot said, we got that fleet tender just sitting there, along with a number of other ships. We got to grab what we can, organize what we can and get gone.

Afterwards I promise everyone will get their chance to wax on my captain's and his crew's shortcomings to his face. Keep in mind if I'm lying, you can always ensure my ship has an accident later.

[Josh]

Well shit, I didn't realize we were live.

POSTED!

[White Haven]

Josh, are you doing an 'and I was here all along' entry, or are you going to do something as an entrance?

[White Haven]

As for double-posting between the two meetings, if we can get replies wrapped up soon, we shouldn't have to. Leyton's little meeting was never going to last long due to simple IC time pressure, and that makes things so much simpler than dancing the retcon tango due to timeline shenanigans.

[LadyTevar]

I'm willin to let the boys have their Pre-Meeting.

[General Havoc]

Josh, I'm afraid you're not actually at the meeting in question, as your ship was never introduced to the fleet. We can discuss your arrival in any terms you like, but for now, you will have to by one means or another show up in the same area of the badlands as the rest of them.

[Charon]

Act of Q!

[Josh]

My bad. I thought when Frigid jumped to the meeting it meant we were all there.

Bear with me, it's been a few years and I'm a wee bit rusty.

[White Haven]

[Josh]

That stuff has the sweetest smell. I could inhale it all day long.

...perhaps that explains a few things.

Late dramatic addition to the crew:

Zarv Gleck
Tellarite
Communications Officer

A Tellarite comms officer might seem an unusual choice, but as a former comms system engineer in civilian life, Gleck is uniquely qualified to handle communications and signalling equipment. This technological wizardry has enabled the ship communications in a variety of adverse conditions and more than makes up for his occasional diplomatic gaffe.

[General Havoc]

It's cool Josh. You still haven't screwed up as badly as DS.

[Josh]

Just wait.

I'm a much bigger fuckup than Allen.

[White Haven]

For clarification, Leyton's not talking about 'we'll all accelerate it with our engines' being a problem, but rather 'we'll all use our deflectors to alter the tender's mass so we can push it.' Yaknow, the part that's exceedingly fiddly treknobabble, rather than standard warp-towing.

[General Havoc]

There is nothing "standard" about the type of warp-towing you are preparing to do, and it is vaguely canonical to affect shit's mass with deflector arrays. Generally though you can only do so to YOUR ship.

I'm prepared to tolerate a certain level of deflector technobabble insanity, but only a certain level. People who abuse technobabble to render their ships infinitely dense, give them negative net mass, or project them into the Andromeda Galaxy using SCIENCE will find that SCIENCE works both ways.

[LadyTevar]

It's technobable, but it's useful technobable.

[White Haven]

Well, I thought Alyrium's 'this could theoretically work, but has an incredibly tiny margin for error' take on it was quite sensible. Which is why Leyton thinks it's a fantastically bad idea given the 'oh dear god why' maintenance status of all of our ships.

[Cynical Cat]

Enterprise tried warp bubble tricks with a fucking moon. One ship, one moon. A tender and multiple ships has got to be easier.

Tev

1) You weren't there for the conversation between Layton, Cretak, and Kadon.

2) It's Kadon.

[General Havoc]

Yes, Hotfoot pointed that out to me, but Enterprise was dragging a moon, something considerably more durable than any ship. Office-building-sized pieces of said moon could have been gouged out by passing micrometeorites and nobody would have noticed or cared. To drag the ship at high warp under tractor tow when it's so much more massive than you requires a great deal more finesse than Enterprise evidenced if you want something resembling a functional ship to come out at the other end (not that the tender much resembles that right now). Particularly given that this is the Badlands, where subspace distortion and active plasma storms are an hourly occurrence, you're going to need to work together to get this to work.

Yes, this is an arbitrary ruling, but frankly, I'm not comfortable with every ship having the casual ability to re-arrange solar systems using nothing but their own deflector and warp core. It is far too easy to extend such a capability to allow people to latch onto a borg Cube with their tractor and tear it bodily in half by going to warp, or worse yet, accelerate a rock the size of Pluto to Warp 6 and hurl it into a Cube formation (or some other installation). I know the moon trick was canonical, but so was Voyager's "existing in every point of reality at once at Warp 10" trick. I won't be allowing that particular one either.

[Cynical Cat]

Whatever you say, but there was nothing casual about moving that (very tiny) moon not very far and the tractor trick couldn't possibly work using the technique anyway.

[Comrade Tortoise]

There is nothing "standard" about the type of warp-towing you are preparing to do, and it is vaguely canonical to affect shit's mass with deflector arrays. Generally though you can only do so to YOUR ship.

The solution is of course to get the ship's deflector array up and running to decrease its own effective mass (something Tlorn has acknowledged). Warp towage is itself standard practice in the Star Trek universe, it has to be, otherwise they could never get battle damaged ships back to spacedock for repairs.

[General Havoc]

Whatever you say, but there was nothing casual about moving that (very tiny) moon not very far and the tractor trick couldn't possibly work using the technique anyway.

Warp towage is itself standard practice in the Star Trek universe, it has to be, otherwise they could never get battle damaged ships back to spacedock for repairs.

I'm not an expert on what went down in that episode, and I'm not trying to wall legitimate options off from people. It's just the massive mass disparity that worries me in terms of future implications. I don't want the solution to every borg concentration to be "throw a moon at them".

... well okay, I don't want that to be the solution yet at least.

Tell you all what though, I'll alter my ruling: You can tow the thing with a single ship at warp under normal circumstances, provided two things:

1: You are not in the damn Badlands. The plasma storms and subspace distortions implied in this place screw all calculations over with a rusty rasp. In order to get the thing out of your current location, you will need multiple ships working in concert. Once you get to New Bajor or beyond, this will no longer apply (unless you try and drag it into another similarly-extreme environment).

2: You will have to get some kind of rudimentary deflector and structural integrity field working on the tender. Without the former, one ship's deflector array is simply not going to be able to protect a tender that large from interstellar dust and micrometeoroids. Were the tender a normal ship, your deflectors could manage it, but the largest ship you have in your fleet is a quarter of the size of the tender by volume (it's built around a lot of wasted space. Romulan design and all). As to the STF, without it, the ship will simply disintegrate at warp.

Moreover, if you want people to actually survive the trip into warp while onboard the tender, then you will also need to restore power to the inertial dampeners, or replace them somehow. The ship can make it with only an STF (as I understand it, that's the entire point of a structural integrity field), but the crew would be liquified by the process of going to warp. Of course if you're dead-towing the thing, it doesn't necessarily need a crew, but I don't know if you intend to have repair crews working on it while you move it out.

[Cynical Cat]

You even see warp towage in DS9 when ass kicked Feddie fleets are dragging their wounded after fighting the Dominion.

By the way Tortoise, you live a lot longer than 15 seconds in vacuum. 15 seconds is how much time of useful consciousness you have if you start sucking hard vacuum but if they can save your ass in under two minutes you'll recover fairly quickly.