“Full Impulse” is generally considered to be 0.25c.
The force of an impact of a Voyager-sized (700 kilotons) mass at that speed would be many times greater than that of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
And I think its reasonable to assume that 0.25c isn’t a hard limit, but rather an agreed-upon speed limit for starships.
If you could make an object go even faster, that energy goes up by a few orders of magnitude.
0.9c sounds doable. I don’t know about any faster, but maybe?
At that speed, the force of Voyager hitting a planet would be at least hundreds of times greater than the aforementioned asteroid. This sounds like it would completely sterilize the planet.
Which begs the question, why don’t we see weapons like this in star trek? I’d figure the Federation wouldn’t use them, but the Federation isn’t alone.
One argument I tend to see when this comes up is, that the shields would block it. Which then makes you think, if they could block that, then what couldn’t they block? It makes them pretty much invincible. So I don’t think that’s it.
My head canon at least is that impulse engines don’t work alone to drive a 700 kilotonne ship to 0.25c. The deflector uses subspace to effectively lower the mass of the ship to something capable of being driven to those spreads. Otherwise Einstein comes and fucks with you.
There is an in universe hint of this in ENT 3x10, where the whole NX-01 Enterprise needs a force of 2500 Kilodynes to be pulled from a nebula. Which, if you do the math, results in the whole ship only weighing about 158 kg. Most of the times this is interpreted as a writing error, but could also be the result of some arcane technology such as inertial dampeners or the deflector dish.
You also have Emissary where the deflector is used to reduce the mass of the station.
Which in turn was a redux of Geordi changing the gravitational constant of the universe
That gets me to thinking… Warp drive avoids relativistic concerns by creating a subspace bubble so you aren’t going fast you’re sort of warping space around you. If impulse gets you up to 0.5C as happened in one TOS episode, then the universe would be going 15% faster than you, and it increases from there. I’d want to limit solar system travel in that case!
Why don’t they use nukes? Or simple orbital impact? Probably considered a waste of a good planet or forbidden in treaties or something, but when the Dominion massacred Cardassia you’d think they wouldn’t give a toss about that sort of thing.
Honestly I think the answer to “Why don’t we see weapons like this in Star Trek” is that they just have cooler weapons. I have to imagine that the energy weapons the average ship is packing could do similar, if not much more, damage to a planet, but could also do much less more precisely.
I agree with this. It’s already in canon in TOS that a constitution class could destroy a planet it stands to reason later Starfleet designs are just as capable. Using shipboard phasers and torpedos instead of a relativistic mass allows the crew to fine tune the amount of damage they want to inflict from glassing a whole continent down to surgically stunning a gang of Chicago mobsters.
Why not do like Hemmer and just beam out a chunk of the planet’s core? Done strategically, this could have a similar impact to the bomb planted on Qo’nos in Discovery.
Why waste a whole Voyager when you can rig two quantum torpedoes to make the entire planet’s atmosphere uninhabitable?
