The mines are not stationary, they move. They're designed to swarm detonate on ships. Any ship that tries to shoot the minefield will cause mines to go towards it and blow it up. Then the surviving mines can use the wreckage from the ship to replicate new mines. Trying to shoot the mines from farther away would be pointless because they'd just miss and the mines could use energy from the weapons fire to make more mines. Also, the mines were difficult to detect because they were so small. And how can the Federation fleet go around the Dominion fleet? The Dominion fleet was not stationary, they can move. If the Federation fleet split up to go around the Dominion fleet, the Dominion can just intercept them. If the Federation decides to split their big fleet into 60 groups of 10 ships each to try to go around the Dominion fleet. The Dominion can split their up their fleet into groups of 20 ships each and catch the Federation ships.
yes it's a good idea that they can dodge weapons fire from afar. and if a ship comes too close they'll destroy it. still it begs the question if these mines are so powerful why didn't the Defiant produce more of them in many other episodes when they were fighting Dominion ships . just drop a whole bunch of them around the ship every time Dominion ships are approaching . one excuse is they had to be powered by an outside energy source , and could draw power from the wormhole itself , and wouldn't work for long in empty space with no power source
as for the fleet battle in Sacrifice of Angeles , it never made much sense to me why the need to break through the middle of the enemy fleet . Sisko's only plan was to provoke the Cardassians to break formation to open a hole to "punch through" . why not split your own fleet to the sides and that will force the Dominion to split their own ships as well . why the need to all ships to be so tightly close together . unless they were somehow combining their shields and had to be in close proximity for it to work , and splitting the fleet up would make each ship's shields much weaker
@@NitpickingNerd It's very likely that the self replicating mines don't distinguish between friends and enemies. They put the minefield there to deny the Dominion access to the wormhole because they knew the Dominion was going to take the station and no friendly ships will go near the wormhole for a long time.
@@NitpickingNerd splitting the fleet is a big risk because they can't guarantee the ships will arrive at DS9 at the same time so what happens if the Dominion decides to station a significant portion of its fleet at DS9? If the Federation splits its fleet into 10 groups of 60 ships. The Dominion can have half its fleet at DS9 and the rest split into smaller groups to slow the Federation fleet. That way, the Federation fleet arrives at DS9 in small waves and get blown apart by the big Dominion fleet there.
The deployed mines could start with a certain amount of matter/anti-matter fuel to complete the rest of the minefield, and then each parent mine would transport a proportion of that fuel to the daughter mine, which would then transports a proportion to its fuel to its own daughter mine mine, etc... on and on, with each new mine exponentially increasing the rate of mine production. You wouldn't need a large anti-matter/matter reactor core, like on starships, because you're not trying to generate a warp field around a huge ship, but instead just do some small scale replication. 1kg of anti-matter and 1kg of matter would give out 180 petajoules of energy, or ~45 megatons of TNT (equivalent with the most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated), so that should give you some sort of indication of how much energy you could theoretically store inside these mines and use for the purpose of replication. Who knows how volumous the fuel is too (theoretically, it could be incredibly compact, like the size of a sugar cube, and yet have the mass of 1kg). Surely that's enough energy potential to power a cloaking device, small-scale shield, replicator, transporter and the explosive force itself. I think we have a tendency to underestimate the potential power output of matter/anti-matter reactions, because it's just so incredibly huge compared to what we're able to generate today. A matter/anti-matter reactor would even make nuclear fusion reactors obsolete, because of how much more energy (and efficiently) they can theoretically produce.
If each mine gives a portion of its energy to it's daughter mine, and so on then pretty soon you run out of energy no matter how much you begin with. There needs to be a way to replenish the energy or matter supply, for example if the minefield was in a trek-type asteroid belt (yes I know IRL asteroids are millions of km apart). Another solution would be how ICBMs work, you have a combination of real warheads and dummies which are indistinguishable from another. Dummy mines would be easy to replicate and take the Dominion a long time to dismantle, if there are enough real mines scattered about they would still have to proceed with caution.
@@capuchinhelper The point is that matter/anti-matter reactions are so energetic that it could provide enough energy to sustain minefield replication long enough to give the Federation time to launch a counter-attack. It doesn't have to be an infinite energy supply; just finite enough to do the job.
Yes the tollan had phase technology to walk or send objects through things. Stargate SG-1 season 9,10 there were personal cloaking devices and a ancient laptop device which Sam used to take things out of phase.
Not to nitpick the nitpicking nerd but the Klingon's mined the Bajoran system to prevent the Federation from sending reinforcements to the sector, as a precursor to a Klingon invasion, not in case of a war with The Dominion. :P
Yeah but the idea itself could have been useful to stop the Dominion . So why didnt they do that after getting rid of the fake Martok and making peace with the Klingons
Maybe the mines can draw energy from the wormhole due to their proximity. It's an artificialy created phenomenon anyway meaning it needs to be kept stable with some kind of force/energy anyway I think the concept of mines in space only makes sense if they lay inert but then activate some kind of propulsion once a proximity sensor is activated to actually fly towards the approaching ships and detonate close to impact. To prevent the mine from being shot/disabled the time between propulsion and detonation has to be kept short and to prevent sensors they have to be small, with small energy signature and still with enough payload to wreak havok. Space is vast, thus mines around an entire solar system would have to be spread out in an incredibly broad area only making it feasible if one mine is enough for covering thousands of cubic kilometers.
The phase cloak is a great suggestion. I don't that an individual mine could be literally self-replicating, so it's the neighboring mines or the whole minefield that is replicating the replacement mines as needed. Starfleet didn't need an infinity of mines, they just needed enough that could replicate fast enough to make it not worth it to the Dominion to try rushing the minefield from the Gamma Quadrant side. The Dominion can't risk attacking the minefield from the Alpha Quadrant side without endangering the wormhole and probably can't risk a bunch of warp core breeches if they tried running the field from the other side either. They could just try inert flak cannons though. It doesn't work without the phase cloak.
I thought the Dominion mines cloak into a layer of subspace like the think tank on Voyager. So i think the Dominion mines were cloaked in a layer of subspace then they get pulled out of subspace and detonate. I find the phase cloak- cloaks in normal space and gives you the ability to pass through objects. Something hidden in a layer of subspace comes out of subspace at some point so it's not phase cloaked. Next the Klingons put a minefield nearby the bajoran system as a training ground there is nothing mentioned to say they were putting it around them entire solar system to stop the Dominion. Next DS9 Visionary the station explodes and it causes the Wormhole to be destroyed. Next "Based on the figures given in the DS9 technical manual, the field laid out by the Defiant contained some 165,000 mines altogether." Now in DS9 In Purgatory's Shadow (part 1) graviton emitters were Sabotage. In part 2 By Inferno's Light. "O'BRIEN: The emitters had the exact opposite effect to what we'd intended. They were supposed to collapse the wormhole's spatial matrix and close it forever. Instead, they made the matrix even more stable. Not even trilithium explosives could destroy it now." So the Wormhole is now harder to destroy. Next. For more technobabble i believe there is even more information on this mindfield if you read the Deep Space Nine technical manual. Which I have never read.
Conservation of mass/energy and Star Trek don't seem to go together all too well. See Odo's shapeshifting shenanigans... (Turns into a mouse or humanoid, is said to be "heavier than he looks" but can easily be carried around when e.g. in the form of a bag, never eats or drinks or even sunbathes, just "regenerates" for a few hours in liquid state every now and then...)
Indeed, it would take the mass of at least a few planets to surround a solar system in mines and be effective. Maybe even the mass of a star it’s self. Never thought about how impossible that would be before. Good point.
Maybe they weren't self replicating mines. It was a trick. Half the mines were hidden in subspace, and one would emerge from subspace to replace each destroyed mine. So there were a finite number of mines, but it appeared as if they replicated. They hinted at this info on the Siege of AR-558 with subspace weapons. If the Dominion had launched drones at the minefield, eventually all the mines would've been used up. But they never tried anything so conventional. Of course the flaw with that theory, is that when the minefield was destroyed all at once, the remaining subspace mines should've emerged to replace them.
the Dominion could just tractor beam a bunch of asteroids at the minefield to thin them out . so yeah it never made sense why the minefield was so impenetrable unless it was phased cloaked / hidden in subspace
Solar power, that's the only explanation that makes sense. They are solar powered and use conventional explosives which is replicable. There is a device mentioned in the TNG tech manual that can produce small amounts of antimatter a day, if they deployed the mines with one of those devices, and a small amount of antimatter each so they can't be rushed straight away, then they soak up solar power and slowly convert their deuterium tanks into antimatter, becoming more effective the longer they are left. Maybe there are tanker mines that do all that and transfer the new antimatter to the original mines and the replacement replicated mines.
@@NitpickingNerd cloaked ships can see out, which wouldn't be possible for the same reason. Mines need to detect things to throw themselves at, so they should be able to see out, and that's why I reckon they could use solar power.
@@andrewbutton2039 they use subspace sensors to "see" and in TOS it was kind of like being in a submarine battle since their own vision / sensors was very limited while cloaked. even if the mines had the ability to collect solar energy I don't think it's enough energy to replicate new mines quickly
I begin to suspect he was a member of section 31 . it was actually him who encouraged Bashir to "pretend" to join section 31 . admiral Ross was also working with section 31 and was very close to Sisko .
The mines are not stationary, they move. They're designed to swarm detonate on ships. Any ship that tries to shoot the minefield will cause mines to go towards it and blow it up. Then the surviving mines can use the wreckage from the ship to replicate new mines.
Trying to shoot the mines from farther away would be pointless because they'd just miss and the mines could use energy from the weapons fire to make more mines.
Also, the mines were difficult to detect because they were so small.
And how can the Federation fleet go around the Dominion fleet? The Dominion fleet was not stationary, they can move. If the Federation fleet split up to go around the Dominion fleet, the Dominion can just intercept them. If the Federation decides to split their big fleet into 60 groups of 10 ships each to try to go around the Dominion fleet. The Dominion can split their up their fleet into groups of 20 ships each and catch the Federation ships.
yes it's a good idea that they can dodge weapons fire from afar. and if a ship comes too close they'll destroy it.
still it begs the question if these mines are so powerful why didn't the Defiant produce more of them in many other episodes when they were fighting Dominion ships . just drop a whole bunch of them around the ship every time Dominion ships are approaching .
one excuse is they had to be powered by an outside energy source , and could draw power from the wormhole itself , and wouldn't work for long in empty space with no power source
as for the fleet battle in Sacrifice of Angeles , it never made much sense to me why the need to break through the middle of the enemy fleet . Sisko's only plan was to provoke the Cardassians to break formation to open a hole to "punch through" . why not split your own fleet to the sides and that will force the Dominion to split their own ships as well . why the need to all ships to be so tightly close together . unless they were somehow combining their shields and had to be in close proximity for it to work , and splitting the fleet up would make each ship's shields much weaker
@@NitpickingNerd It's very likely that the self replicating mines don't distinguish between friends and enemies. They put the minefield there to deny the Dominion access to the wormhole because they knew the Dominion was going to take the station and no friendly ships will go near the wormhole for a long time.
@@NitpickingNerd splitting the fleet is a big risk because they can't guarantee the ships will arrive at DS9 at the same time so what happens if the Dominion decides to station a significant portion of its fleet at DS9?
If the Federation splits its fleet into 10 groups of 60 ships. The Dominion can have half its fleet at DS9 and the rest split into smaller groups to slow the Federation fleet. That way, the Federation fleet arrives at DS9 in small waves and get blown apart by the big Dominion fleet there.
The deployed mines could start with a certain amount of matter/anti-matter fuel to complete the rest of the minefield, and then each parent mine would transport a proportion of that fuel to the daughter mine, which would then transports a proportion to its fuel to its own daughter mine mine, etc... on and on, with each new mine exponentially increasing the rate of mine production.
You wouldn't need a large anti-matter/matter reactor core, like on starships, because you're not trying to generate a warp field around a huge ship, but instead just do some small scale replication.
1kg of anti-matter and 1kg of matter would give out 180 petajoules of energy, or ~45 megatons of TNT (equivalent with the most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated), so that should give you some sort of indication of how much energy you could theoretically store inside these mines and use for the purpose of replication.
Who knows how volumous the fuel is too (theoretically, it could be incredibly compact, like the size of a sugar cube, and yet have the mass of 1kg). Surely that's enough energy potential to power a cloaking device, small-scale shield, replicator, transporter and the explosive force itself.
I think we have a tendency to underestimate the potential power output of matter/anti-matter reactions, because it's just so incredibly huge compared to what we're able to generate today. A matter/anti-matter reactor would even make nuclear fusion reactors obsolete, because of how much more energy (and efficiently) they can theoretically produce.
If each mine gives a portion of its energy to it's daughter mine, and so on then pretty soon you run out of energy no matter how much you begin with. There needs to be a way to replenish the energy or matter supply, for example if the minefield was in a trek-type asteroid belt (yes I know IRL asteroids are millions of km apart).
Another solution would be how ICBMs work, you have a combination of real warheads and dummies which are indistinguishable from another. Dummy mines would be easy to replicate and take the Dominion a long time to dismantle, if there are enough real mines scattered about they would still have to proceed with caution.
@@capuchinhelper The point is that matter/anti-matter reactions are so energetic that it could provide enough energy to sustain minefield replication long enough to give the Federation time to launch a counter-attack. It doesn't have to be an infinite energy supply; just finite enough to do the job.
The phase cloak reminds me of that phase bomb from Stargate SG-1 that the Tollan made for Anubis.
Yes the tollan had phase technology to walk or send objects through things. Stargate SG-1 season 9,10 there were personal cloaking devices and a ancient laptop device which Sam used to take things out of phase.
Not to nitpick the nitpicking nerd but the Klingon's mined the Bajoran system to prevent the Federation from sending reinforcements to the sector, as a precursor to a Klingon invasion, not in case of a war with The Dominion. :P
Yeah but the idea itself could have been useful to stop the Dominion . So why didnt they do that after getting rid of the fake Martok and making peace with the Klingons
I loved the cloaked minefield, it was basically an iris for DS9
Maybe the mines can draw energy from the wormhole due to their proximity. It's an artificialy created phenomenon anyway meaning it needs to be kept stable with some kind of force/energy anyway
I think the concept of mines in space only makes sense if they lay inert but then activate some kind of propulsion once a proximity sensor is activated to actually fly towards the approaching ships and detonate close to impact. To prevent the mine from being shot/disabled the time between propulsion and detonation has to be kept short and to prevent sensors they have to be small, with small energy signature and still with enough payload to wreak havok. Space is vast, thus mines around an entire solar system would have to be spread out in an incredibly broad area only making it feasible if one mine is enough for covering thousands of cubic kilometers.
The phase cloak is a great suggestion. I don't that an individual mine could be literally self-replicating, so it's the neighboring mines or the whole minefield that is replicating the replacement mines as needed. Starfleet didn't need an infinity of mines, they just needed enough that could replicate fast enough to make it not worth it to the Dominion to try rushing the minefield from the Gamma Quadrant side. The Dominion can't risk attacking the minefield from the Alpha Quadrant side without endangering the wormhole and probably can't risk a bunch of warp core breeches if they tried running the field from the other side either. They could just try inert flak cannons though. It doesn't work without the phase cloak.
I thought the Dominion mines cloak into a layer of subspace like the think tank on Voyager. So i think the Dominion mines were cloaked in a layer of subspace then they get pulled out of subspace and detonate.
I find the phase cloak- cloaks in normal space and gives you the ability to pass through objects. Something hidden in a layer of subspace comes out of subspace at some point so it's not phase cloaked.
Next the Klingons put a minefield nearby the bajoran system as a training ground there is nothing mentioned to say they were putting it around them entire solar system to stop the Dominion. Next DS9 Visionary the station explodes and it causes the Wormhole to be destroyed.
Next
"Based on the figures given in the DS9 technical manual, the field laid out by the Defiant contained some 165,000 mines altogether."
Now in DS9 In Purgatory's Shadow (part 1) graviton emitters were Sabotage. In part 2 By Inferno's Light. "O'BRIEN: The emitters had the exact opposite effect to what we'd intended. They were supposed to collapse the wormhole's spatial matrix and close it forever. Instead, they made the matrix even more stable. Not even trilithium explosives could destroy it now."
So the Wormhole is now harder to destroy.
Next. For more technobabble
i believe there is even more information on this mindfield if you read the Deep Space Nine technical manual. Which I have never read.
Conservation of mass/energy and Star Trek don't seem to go together all too well.
See Odo's shapeshifting shenanigans...
(Turns into a mouse or humanoid, is said to be "heavier than he looks" but can easily be carried around when e.g. in the form of a bag, never eats or drinks or even sunbathes, just "regenerates" for a few hours in liquid state every now and then...)
Ny next video will be about Odo shapeshifting :)
@@NitpickingNerd Awesome!
Indeed, it would take the mass of at least a few planets to surround a solar system in mines and be effective. Maybe even the mass of a star it’s self. Never thought about how impossible that would be before. Good point.
The mines in Trek aren't stationary, they have simple sensors and propulsion systems that allow them to detect ships and move towards them.
Maybe they weren't self replicating mines. It was a trick. Half the mines were hidden in subspace, and one would emerge from subspace to replace each destroyed mine. So there were a finite number of mines, but it appeared as if they replicated. They hinted at this info on the Siege of AR-558 with subspace weapons. If the Dominion had launched drones at the minefield, eventually all the mines would've been used up. But they never tried anything so conventional.
Of course the flaw with that theory, is that when the minefield was destroyed all at once, the remaining subspace mines should've emerged to replace them.
the Dominion could just tractor beam a bunch of asteroids at the minefield to thin them out . so yeah it never made sense why the minefield was so impenetrable unless it was phased cloaked / hidden in subspace
Solar power, that's the only explanation that makes sense. They are solar powered and use conventional explosives which is replicable. There is a device mentioned in the TNG tech manual that can produce small amounts of antimatter a day, if they deployed the mines with one of those devices, and a small amount of antimatter each so they can't be rushed straight away, then they soak up solar power and slowly convert their deuterium tanks into antimatter, becoming more effective the longer they are left. Maybe there are tanker mines that do all that and transfer the new antimatter to the original mines and the replacement replicated mines.
If they are cloaked all the time then light bends around them ...
@@NitpickingNerd cloaked ships can see out, which wouldn't be possible for the same reason. Mines need to detect things to throw themselves at, so they should be able to see out, and that's why I reckon they could use solar power.
@@andrewbutton2039 they use subspace sensors to "see" and in TOS it was kind of like being in a submarine battle since their own vision / sensors was very limited while cloaked.
even if the mines had the ability to collect solar energy I don't think it's enough energy to replicate new mines quickly
i never did understand the self replicating minefield. it always confused me
Nerrrrrd!
that's my last name. first name is Nitpicking
Sisko did alot of things anyway 😁
I begin to suspect he was a member of section 31 . it was actually him who encouraged Bashir to "pretend" to join section 31 . admiral Ross was also working with section 31 and was very close to Sisko .
@@NitpickingNerd Creating the alliance with romulans with fakes was a section 31 mission
hhhhhhh