Thursday, September 6, 2007

Blow em up...

Early in the 6th season of Star Trek: DS9 the Federation placed a large series of mines blocking off the entry of the wormhole to the Delta Quadrant. Rather than your ordinary space mines these were self replicating ones. So each time they blew up a mine the nearby mines would replicate a new mine. Well, after a while the Dominion with the help of Damar figured out a way to deactivate the mines ability to replicate so they could take the mines out in one swoop after they were all disabled. The Resistance on DS9 (currently under Dominion control) tried a couple different ways of stopping the mine field from being disabled.

What they should have done was blow them up. The mines are self-replicating, and due to the week long process of disabling them all, they could have bought some time by blowing the mines up. The non-replicating ones would clearly be less fit than the replicating mines. If you take out a replicating mine you get another replicating mine. If you take out a non-replicating mine, you get a replicating mine in its place.

They could have done well to try to destroy the mine field early while they were being disabled. Sure, they protected the deflector dish and the weapons control, but it wouldn't be hard to shoot stuff at some mines and blow them up. The replicating mine wildtype would take over the pool of mines quite rapidly.

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