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Deck 35
Tactical Systems

 

 

Ablative Armor

Ablative armor was originally developed for the USS Defiant; the Borg had proven their ability to penetrate Federation shields with ease during their encounter with the Enterprise at system J-25, and the Defiant designers wanted the ship to have a degree of protection even if the shields should be overcome in the expected future encounters.

The value of the Armor was proven when the Defiant came up against Dominion forces. Like the Borg, the Dominion were able to penetrate Federation shielding systems relatively easily in the first years of hostility between the two powers, and the Defiant's ablative Armor allowed the ship to withstand attacks that would have otherwise caused significant damage. Recently there has been a massive revolution in this technology with the appearance of the ablative Armor generator. This device was given to the crew of the USS Voyager by a future version of Admiral Janeway, who traveled back in time to the ship in order to assist them in returning home from the Delta Quadrant. The generator involves a series of devices placed onto the hull of a vessel; when activated these replicate a layer of Armor over the surface of the ship. The effectiveness of Armor is considerable. The system Voyager employed was able to withstand a simultaneous attack by several Borg cubes. One of the most useful features of this system is that as it can be materialized and dematerialized as needed, even weapons systems can be covered over when they are not actually in use. This gives a much greater degree of coverage than any standard Armor protection which must leave permanent apertures to operate such systems through.

Space Station Ian Fleming has been the Federation test subject for this new ablative armor generator.

Shields

The shield system provides the Ian Fleming with its principle protection against both violent natural phenomena and enemy weapons fire. Most shield systems are composed of highly focused spatial distortions which contain an energetic graviton field. The shield itself is projected by a set of transmission networks located on the hull of the ship; when matter or energy strikes the shield, field energy is concentrated at that point to create an intense localized spatial distortion.

Shields are carefully tuned to create windows which allow matter and energy to pass through under certain specific circumstances - for example, visible light below a certain intensity is allowed to pass through unhindered. This allows the crew of a vessel to see out whilst the shields are up - or more importantly, to use visible light sensor systems. This window renders the shields invisible to the naked eye under normal circumstances. Other windows exist to allow sensors and weapons to operate through the shields.

For over a century after the invention of the shield it was impossible to use transporters to beam to or from a shielded location, but to an extent this limitation has now been circumvented. In general sensor and weapon windows are insufficient to allow beaming; whilst technically there is nothing to prevent a ship opening a window in its own shields of sufficient size to allow transport, in practice such windows are almost always large enough to be detected and exploited by enemy vessels and it is far simpler just to drop the shields briefly altogether. The more modern Starfleet shield designs have now reached a point at which transporters can be operated via a large wide frequency window which is briefly opened over the hull emitters. This gives greater flexibility in using the transporter during high threat situations, but it remains a somewhat risky proposition - should an enemy score even a near miss on such a window the effects on the ship would be considerable.

Beaming through an opponents shields is an altogether more difficult proposition, but this can be accomplished successfully if the transporter operator has a detailed knowledge of the shield configuration s/he is attempting to beam through. A notable example of this is the occasion when the USS Enterprise managed to beam a crew member on board the USS Phoenix whilst that vessel was engaged in unlawful operations within Cardassian space, or the Defiant's use of the transporter to board the Constitution class USS Enterprise whilst that ship was modulating its shields for sensor operation . Such operations remain the exception rather than the rule, however - and against the unknown shield configuration of an enemy vessel, beam through remains impossible. The most recent advance in shielding systems is the Regenerative shield. This system is in use with the most modern generation of Starfleet vessels, and was employed by the Dominion in the planetary defense network around Chintaka. The regenerative shield allows a portion of the enemy fire to be diverted through the shield generator to reinforce the shield layer - the amount of damage that a weapon impact does is thus greatly reduced. The effectiveness of the reinforcement depends on the shield generator design, but typically the effectiveness of a shield will be increased several fold by the addition of regenerative capacity.

Mines

The most recent development in Federation mine technology is the Type 21 mine developed by an engineering team on Deep Space Nine under Chief Miles O'Brien. At one meter in diameter this is one of the smallest mines in use by the Federation. It contains a photonic charge equal to several hundred grenades rather than a matter/antimatter charge, along with a micro impulse system and sensor system capable of scanning out to a radius of two thousand kilometers. This very limited range and destructive capability is more than offset by the use of both a cloaking device and a replicator system on the mines; when a target is detected the mines calculate the number required to destroy it, and allocate that number to the task. Once the target is destroyed the mines in that area latch onto the wreckage of both mines and target and use it in their on-board replicators to construct new mines. This allows the field to actually increase in size and density substantially whenever a target is attacked. This type of minefield is exceptionally difficult to clear; the use of a cloaking system on the mines means that an enemy can never be sure that every mine has been destroyed in a weapons barrage. Should only a handful survive to destroy another target, hundreds or even thousands more mines are quickly replicated and the field can be back up to full strength within hours.

Quantum Torpedoes
The Ian Fleming is equipped with 75 torpedo tubes. Distributed evenly throughout the Administrative, Habitat and Operations Segments of the Station. The Station is capable of delivering a devastating volley of over 6000 torpedoes.

Introduced in the late 2360s, the quantum torpedo was part of the range of projects which formed Starfleet’s response to the threats represented by the Borg and renewed activity by the Romulans. Starfleet wanted to develop a warhead which offered firepower in the 50+ isoton range without penalizing the agility of the weapon.

Starfleet R&D quickly decided to focus on a zero point energy system. Initial testing yielded a negative energy balance – it took more energy to initiate the zero point reaction than that reaction generated in turn. This problem was eventually surmounted and a 52.3 isoton quantum warhead was detonated at the Groombridge 273-2A facility.
The device works by generating an eleven dimensional space time membrane which is twisted into a string similar in structure to a super string. This process calls large numbers of subatomic particles into existence, liberating correspondingly large amounts of energy in the form of an explosion.
The production torpedo is of similar size to the standard photon torpedo and is made of a shell of densified tritanium and duranium foam coated in an ablative layer and an anti-radiation polymer coating. Great attention has been paid to making the weapon stealthy in operation by minimizing the number of penetrations through the casing and by treating those which have been made.

The warhead itself comprises a zero-point field reaction chamber, which is formed from a teardrop shaped crystal of rodinium ditellenite jacketed with synthetic neutronium and dilithium. A zero-point initiator is attached to this; the initiator is made of an EM rectifier, a wave guide bundle, a subspace field amplifier, and a continuum distortion emitter. The emitter creates the actual pinch field from a conical spike 10-16 meters across at the tip.

The zero-point initiator is powered by the detonation of an up rated photon torpedo warhead with a yield of 21.8 isotons. The m/am reaction occurs at four times the rate of a standard warhead; the detonation energy is channeled through the initiator within 10-7 seconds and energizes the emitter, which imparts a tension force upon the vacuum domain. As the vacuum membrane expands over a period of 10-4 seconds, an energy potential equivalent to at least 50 isotons is created. This energy is held by the chamber for 10-8 seconds and is then released by the controlled failure of the chamber wall.

The propulsion and guidance systems of the quantum torpedo also represent improvements over the standard photon. The computer system is based around bio-neural gel packs, allowing more efficient data processing and so improved guidance capability.

Most quantum torpedo launchers are simple modifications of photon launchers. The first model introduced on the Defiant was a quantum version of the Pulse fire torpedo tube, which can fire an average of one torpedo per second. The Sovereign class introduced a quantum burst fire tube - a variant on the type 4 photon burst fire model capable of launching a dozen torpedoes simultaneously.

Also introduced on the Sovereign class is the rapid fire turret; this allows torpedoes to be fired directly at a target, rather than having to maneuver toward it after launch - a measure which cuts down the torpedo flight time against targets at short range. The Sovereign turret is capable of firing four torpedoes per second, a rate of fire higher than any other model of torpedo tube in service. Both systems are now installed on the Ian Fleming.

Phasers and Disruptor Cannons

The Ian Fleming has type XI phaser rings on the The Administrative, Habitat and Operations Segments as well as 80 Type X phaser hardpoints distributed on all four Segments.

The phaser is the standard Federation beam weapon system. This type of weapon came into common use c.2255, replacing the laser weapons then in service. Phaser is an acronym for PHASed Energy Rectification, a term which referred to the original process by which stored or supplied energy was converted to another form for release toward the target without any need for an intermediate energy transformation. Although this term is something of a holdover, it remains true in modern phaser systems. Phaser energy is released by the rapid nadion effect. Rapid nadions are short-lived subatomic particles which can liberate and transfer strong nuclear forces within a class of crystals called fushigi-no-umi.

The Ian Fleming has four massive Disrupter Cannons place above and below the fore and aft Hangar Segments.

Disruptors follow the same basic principle as the Federation Phaser in that they cause the target to transition violently out of this continuum. But the Disruptor uses slow nadions rather than rapid nadions in generating the energy beam. This gives the disruptor a considerably lower energy conversion efficiency than the Starfleet phaser. This is partially offset by a moderate reduction in the size of the hardware required for the weapon itself - the space freed up by this allows a higher power weapon to be installed in the same space. The Federation phaser is therefore considered to be more sophisticated and generally more effective than the disruptor, which relies on brute power to overcome its efficiency failings.Like phasers, disruptor weapons can fire sustained beams or pulses depending on the exact configuration of the hardware.

Cloaking Device

A cloaking device is an energy screen generator used to render an object (typically, a space vehicle) invisible to the eye and to most sensor systems. This is accomplished by gravitational lensing, the creation of a distorted image of an object when it's light is focused by gravity. In the case of a cloaking device, the light is focused so that the object's index of refraction (the phase velocity of radiation in free space divided by the phase velocity of the same radiation in a specified medium) matches its surroundings, making the object transparent. Cloaking a Station requires precisely balancing the irradiative emissions from the warp energy systems (the modified warp core system located on the Ian Fleming is for cloaking device use only. The Ian Fleming is not capable of Warp travel), dissipating all electromagnetic radiation, gravitational fields and other energy emissions emanating from the Station, and distorting space in such a way that electromagnetic radiation and energy emissions are directed around the Station.