Pirates of the Coal Sack #28

Mar 02, 2024

Thirty-one pages. Forty-six minutes. There’s a lot happening in a very short period of time here, and most of it on the bridge. I hope it didn’t get claustrophobic. This is really a space battle issue, with very little room for anything else, but it seemed like time. And the Battle of Earth is one of the biggest battles in Federation history, even discounting that the Federation is on both sides of it.

I still managed to get some character touches in. Song’s objection to rescuing the senators will be a topic of later discussion; it nearly turned into a four page digression, but I felt like there wasn’t enough time (either for the crew or for the readers) to deal with the issues more than superficially, so that’ll be something for the future. And Galens’ relationship with her mother, and by extension the crew’s relations with the senators, will be a significant topic. I feel bad that the Sisters didn’t get any camera time this issue, but there just wasn’t a logical place or time for their reunion.

I did like giving Phoenix some external scale. We never see starships near objects whose size we really know, so they remain somewhat amorphous. Letting the ship loom over Senator Galens’ ten-bedroom mansion was satisfying. The purpose of a planetary shield isn’t to stop a planetary bombardment. Covering an entire planet with a shield that strong is beyond the energy resources of even a major world like Earth.

The purpose is to slow down an invasion, force a landing force to be channeled through a few breaches, and facilitate ground-based defense. Key locations like San Francisco and Paris are protected by their own, much tougher, shields; they’re easier to take by ground assault than by bombardment. But to make that assault you have to penetrate the planetary shield.

Nor are planetary defenses always operational. On a ship, one gets accustomed to always having the enormous energies of a warp drive available. To bring city and planetary shields on line, other parts of the planet have to be blacked out. Industry stops. Lights dim. The whole power grid has to go into war-fighting mode, and that leaves the planet open to siege. Even shore batteries, with their own reactors to recharge their electro-plasma systems, rely on the power grid to reach optimal rates of fire.

And shore batteries can’t really defend a planet. A warship can stand off with its warp drive extending the range of its weapons and bombard the planet while remaining out of range of the planet or orbital weapons. It’s not possible to put warp coils on a planet, and putting them on an orbital platform is essentially making it a ship. But a ship landing troops has to come within range of shore guns; they exist to thwart landings, not bombardments.

The faster a ship goes, the less maneuverable it is. At flank speed, it basically can’t turn without putting major stress on the hull. The structural integrity field can reduce that, but Relentless didn’t have time to divert power to hers; Phoenix did. So Phoenix came out of her violent maneuver shaken up but basically undamaged, while Relentless did herself an injury. Then when she crash stopped, that imposed more hull stress, ultimately knocking out half her power.

USS Enterprise, USS Reliant and MIDAS array models by Marc Bell. I have lost the source for the Baker-class destroyer that is the basis of the C-class destroyer.