Travis Edmunds wrote: > > How about a Berserker? (Mr. Blankenship should know what that is) > > >If you think Tinman and a Leviathan gunship are too outlandish, how about > >the Scimitar from Star Trek: Nemesis? It took two Romulan Warbirds and the > >Enterprise E just to cripple the ship (and the battle resulted in the > >Romulan Warbirds and the Enterprise E being even more crippled than the > >Scimitar, only an internal attack on the Scimitar resulted in its > >destruction). > > Nothing is too outlandish, as long as it adheres to some unwritten, > unofficial rules. As long as we're talking about starships, it makes no > sense to say something like "Q could take em all".<lol> > > But even sentient creatures like the Crystaline Entity are valid. > > Let me pose a scenario. Lets say you colonize a system (this is a > conglomeration of any and all fictional Universes that you can dream up). > You have ten million "drones" working for you, just to begin some > rudimentary industry, whatever. Anyway you have the Edo Guardian orbiting > your planet (looks like a phased cloke, could possibly be > inter-dimensional). Suddenly you detect a Borg tactical cube on an intercept > course with your planet. You have the Edo Guardian protecting you, but are > you afraid? Do you have faith in the ability of the Edo Guardian to protect > you and your planet. If not then what other singular craft or in some cases > entity would you want for defensive purposes?
This is interesting. The best starship for offense might well not be best for defending a planet. For offense, you might want to impose some size limitations. I can probably produce stories that have STARS being moved--a star would make a pretty good weapon. Certainly the _Cities in Flight_ series by James Blish has a planet, piloted as a starship and used as a weapon. Comparing starships from different universes is difficult, to say the least. I would probably go with Sleeper Service, featured in _Excession_ by Ian Banks. Dimensions in the tens of kilometers, with many thousands of "full-sized" starships in its bays. Crew optional, since it's run by a superhuman AI. I guess the ships have shields, since force fields are used a lot in the Culture. They also have "matter transmission" and antimatter, which already gives one pretty powerful weapons. These seem to be fairly standard, so I assume they are all admissible. The weapon that you might not allow is 'gridfire', which remotely induces the vacuum in a location to manifest large amounts of energy. ---David _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l