Star Trek: Armada III begins with the first stirrings of the Dominion War and allows players to take command of five unique factions, the United Federation of Planets, the Klingon Empire, the Romulan Star Empire, the Cardassian Union/Dominion Alliance, and the Borg Collective. Explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly go where no one has gone before.
"Originally the Cardassians sent this thing to destroy a Maquis munitions base. We nicknamed it 'Dreadnought'. It's a self-guided tactical missile carrying a charge of a thousand kilos of matter and another thousand of antimatter."
"Enought to destroy a small moon."
"Now add to that one of the most sophisticated computer systems I've ever seen. They made this missile adaptable, evasive, armed with its own defensive weaponry. In other words, unstoppable."
"So, how did you stop it?"
"We didn't. It got through all our defences. It worked exactly like it was supposed to, except for one minor detail - it didn't go off."
"Leave it to the Cardassians to build such an incredibly advanced tactical weapon and then arm the warhead with an old kinetic detonator."
You kind of wonder why this isn't the standard. C'mon Feddies! Take a page from the old earth hand book and make yourself some first strike weapons!
The Terrans woulda done it.
I want to know where the FTL weapons are. Forget the Phasers and Photon Torpedoes, get yourself a nice big hunk of tungsten or depleted uranium, slap a warp drive on it and let the ****** fly!
No need for explosives when the projectile is moving several dozen, or several hundred times the speed of light.
That's actually a common misconception with how a warp drive would work. The device isn't actually flying at FTL speeds, physics isn't fond of such things, much rather the space between the ship and it's destination is made smaller in a kind of corridor. The ship flies at perfectly normal sub light speeds. Although, considering star trek has practical antimatter production, arguably the ultimate fuel, relativistic kill missiles should be simple!
C'mon Dominion! You've never shied away from Genocide before, Chuck a few dozen capsules of antimatter on the back of a ship. Have some Jem'ha'dar empty the cutlery draw into space and watch those tiny little death projectiles rip the Federation to bits in minutes!
All the anti matter in the universe couldn't get past the plot armor of the star trek crews.
I read a book where the Romulans set a small freighter to smash into the planet Coriban at warp speed. It caused devastating damage to the planet and forced the Coriban government to abstain from helping to form the Coalition of Planets, the precursor to the Federation.
Coridan Prime, as the world was often called, was on the verge of developing Warp-7 technology in 2155. Fearing that such an advancement in technology would give the Coalition of Planets the upper hand in the conflict that was brewing between the Coalition and the Romulan Star Empire and to prevent such advances from spreading to other Coalition worlds, the Romulan Empire launched a vicious attack on Coridan, flying a vessel into the planet at maximum warp. The explosion mixed with Coridan's abundance of dilithium, causing a fireball that spread across the planet, killing approximately half its population of three billion. The planet's surface was turned into an inferno of burning dilithium, consuming at least half of the planet's dilithium reserves and devastating its ecosystem for at least a century. Fearing further Romulan attacks, Coridan withdrew from the very Coalition it helped form. (ENT novel: The Good That Men Do)
Let's make things even simpler. Looking around Impulse drives are limited to 25% light speed. Now all you need are the impulse engines and thousands of easy to find space rocks. Good luck trying to stop all that flung at a planet.
There's actually a good explanation for this: Star trek ships fly at relativistic but not FTL speeds, so a galaxy class could pull perhaps a few percent of light speed without the use of its warp drive. This hitting a planet would still be devestating, but unlike a ship flying at FTL speed hitting an object it would not eliminate the entire solarsystem and possibly damage spacetime itself.
A deflector dish is still needed for a sublight ship to protect the vessel from random space particles. Also, as a warpdrive contracts space it also focuses everything in it, including radiation and such, meaning flying without a deflector shield would probably be pretty suicidal without rather a lot of sheer mass between you and the target.
Again, star trek is actually a bit questionable with physics but it still kind of adds up
Star Trek tries to be realistic from the scientific point of view, unlike Star Wars where all kind of crazy **** can occur for no reason other than plot. However, both have their moments where the pen is mightier than any weapon, emotion, science or even beings like Q, then again as a novice writer myself I can say that the pen is mightier than all things in this regard but its up to the writer to decide what is bs and what is not. Trust me when I say I have created some stupid **** and plots in my time you think J.J. Trek is bad lol you ain't seen some of the things that my brain has come up with. Anyways my point is its sci-fi it's going to have questionable attributes but Star Trek is probably the most realistic one compared to others like Star Wars or Halo. That's also not to say that the others are bad because they are not realistic either, I'm just saying that Star Trek is trying to keep it on the level and not go off the top all the time.
Star trek has some science, but all in all it's still pretty terrible. If you want hard sci-fi, Star trek is not where to get it. You'd be better served with the Expanse, or even the BSG remake even though both do have some errors.
After all, star trek has this slight tendency to routinely break the laws of physics. It has telepathy, which I don't recall ever being explained, it's better but it's really quite far from anything like hard science is the bottom line.
Romulan plasma torpedos in "Balance of Terror" were capable of chasing the Enterprise at warp, though they needed to be close enough to lock on first. I'm not sure if it would work when targeting something at interstellar distances.