Eleven thousand dead. Do you know where your old man was on that day? He was on that Borg Cube, setting the world on fire!
Liam Shaw
Would the Borg have won the Battle of Wolf 359, without the assistance of Jean-Luc Picard aka Locutus of Borg?
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I’d like to think the fleet would last longer and some captain would have realized that ramming a Borg cube at 0.5 to 1c relativistic speed. Would’ve been the equivalent of millions of photon torpedoes hitting it at once.
Raming speed with a warp core breach and deactivating all antimatter contaiment inside the cube would have split the cube in half if not fully destroyed it.
Kinetic weapons are overlooked in Star Trek. A ship the size of Voyager moving at 0.5c relativistic speed would impact with the force of approximately 1,882,170,172 Megatons (if my math is correct). A photon torpedo or high end real world nuclear warhead is around 50-60 megatons. I doubt there'd be molecules left of the Borg cube. Maybe even all the atomic bonds would be split apart with that much energy.
I doubt there'd be any life on any of the surrounding starships. Within a few hundred thousand Km of the collision.
Definitely, brings up a question I had: Are photon torpedoes contact or proximity fused? Which brings up a second question: Would a torpedo do more damage from kinetic impact at c or from the anti-matter/matter annihilation? I assume that the kinetic energy isn't able to be calculated at c, but 99.99% ought to be close enough.
They appear to have both options for detonation. They’d make better kinetic weapons. Assuming they weigh around 500kg. At near light speed. They’d hit with over 5,300 megatons while their antimatter yield is only 64 megatons.
Thanks for running the math! So now the next question, that can't be answered, given enough distance to target, would it be better to use all the antimatter as propellant to accelerate to a higher speed? I'm assuming this can't be answered as there's no way to calculate anything related to warp drive or for speeds faster than c. For 'close' to real world, perhaps it would about even out? The kinetic energy contained in the fuel would approximately equal the energy gained by accelerating the device. But, isn't it pretty much assumed that warp tech/magic involves gaining many orders of magnitude more energy out in kinetic energy than the drive generates from anti-matter annihilation, through the magic of the warp bubble?
Warp has its own destructive problems.All I know is that with warp. The object isn’t moving through space. Space is moving around the object.
At relativistic speeds. You hit on one of the problems of Star Trek. The enormous energies required for impulse speed (0.25c, Voyager). A torpedo going at just full impulse would require much more antimatter than the warhead carries to accelerate.