A self-replicating swarm of fighter drones would be far more devastating than almost all of the weapons we see in the Star Trek universe. You could send a few off to some random uninhabited solar system to suck it dry and come back with literally trillions of small unmanned drones capable of overwhelming entire civilizations with ease. Of course, there’s always the threat of them going rogue or being taken over by someone else.
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SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Yeah they never really use transporters and replicators to their fullest capabilities. Knock out their shields, beam the enemy crew to the brig (if you’re good) or into space (if you’re not so good).
Why bother with torpedoes? Just teleport bombs right on the enemy target.
They had self-replicating mines on DS9, why not self-replicating computer controlled starships? Send infinite waves of automated starships at the enemy?
Have your most elite Jem Hadar squad stand on the transporter pad and beam down infinite copies of them down to the planet. They’re cloning them anyway, doesn’t seem like the Dominion would have moral qualms about this.
AeroLemming@lemm.ee 1 year ago
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Yeah that’s trending towards the grey goo scenario, isn’t it?
But it’s also similar to how the Borg operate too. Also I think the OST had the Doomsday Machine episode that had something about a weapon killing the civilization that made it. I think there was a TNG episode like that too.
So it’s kinda covered, just not exactly the replicator scenario. But that’s fine, it’s better to have characters as a threat rather than machines. Controversial opinion, but I even found the Borg to be boring after Best of Both Worlds.
DarkGamer@kbin.social 1 year ago
Of course, there’s always the threat of them going rogue or being taken over by someone else.
In lower decks they explored this a little with the Texas class automated ships. They weren't self-replicating but they showcased the risks of such a technology.
cheery_coffee@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
DS9 got so close to the horrors of a Trek tech war.
Cardassian had autonomous platforms and Federation self-replicating mines, they just need to be combined.
There was even a weapon the transported bullets at their velocity, so you could yeet massive items with high kinetic energy.
Imagine an autonomous replicating fleet that sends waves of drones at you at warp 9, the industrial replicators churn out more and more ships.
There are a lot of things that block transporters that could be deployed to reduce shenanigans, but you can still replicate/transport 1 ton tungsten rods into space above your enemies to fuck them up.
Nobody has droids so to create a stalemate you just have to create enough chaos enemy ground troops can’t advance while you block their transporters.
foo@programming.dev 1 year ago
For a while in star gate Atlantis humans were just teleporting nukes into enemy ships until they mcguffined a solution.