Ion Cannons vs. Vong Ships

Since the whole purpose of Ion Cannons is to fry the opposing ships electrical systems, and the Vong only use biotech, would ion cannons have any effect on their ships?

Even if they don't have any effect, I imagine using them as decoys to draw the dovin basals away would be effective.

Any thoughts?

 

They definitely wouldn't have any effect on Vong ships, since ion cannons don't seem to directly affect the crews/pilots of the ships they disable. The GFFA may have been able to use them to distract the Vong, but only for a short while; after a few times of being fooled, the Vong would realize that blue weapons don't harm them.

 

There have been a few times where Ion cannons has been used directly on living beings and it essentially shorted out their nerves.

Sorry can't think of one off the top of my head. But I think one time it involved mara.

Apparently in most ships the crew area is shielded from ion blasts.

 

I would assume it would damage the nervous system of Vong vessels.

 

Since ion blasts are primarily electrical, what reason is there to think they would have no effect? If a fry you with a taser that is designed for killing mobile phone systems, it'll still hurt. Ditto for ion cannons on a Vong ship, they won't sort out any systems, instead they'll make a Vong ship feel like its being fried.

JB

 

Vong ships have thick hides; ion cannons may not be able to punch through.

 

But they can feel. Enough said.

 

Have Vong ships ever reacted to pain in a way that would give opponents an advantage? Vong ships are bred for combat, so it's natural for them to have a high or absolutely no pain threshold.

 

I'm not so sure DG, given the Vong belief in regard to pain I can quite see them wanting the ships to suffer.

JB

 

I think it was in I, Jedi where Corran or Mara used ion cannons against Sith creatures...

EDIT:
Here it was- Corran

For the last two monsters I switched to the ion cannon. The initial shot from it caught the third monster in the pelvis. The blue ion bolt shattered into hundreds of little lightning tendrils. The bolt fired all of the creature's nerves at once, making the creature's limbs spasm. Its tail jerked backward and forward so violently that it stabbed itself. The creature's heads struck at its own tail, tearing great jagged hunks out of it, then its wings folded in on it and the falling beast splattered itself down the pyramid's north side.

It seems like it worked pretty well against those living creatures...

 

Wedge also used the TIE Defender's ion cannons versus Krennel's ground troops in Isard's Revenger, rendering crewmen unconscious.

In several NJO books they mention using ion cannons, so we can but assume that ion cannons disable Vong ship nervous systems

 

the ion cannon would do probably half of the damage of what it does to the sw capital ships if it were against a vong ship but to disable the weapons on the vong ships you would have to shoot plazma gun ports for an ion cannon to win against it or it would end up like serpindel and the wookie

 

It's forbidden for the NJO to be creative.

How many times did you ever see a Jedi throw an objects at a vicious Vong warrior? No, they just light their blade and charge on for hand to hand combat---and wonder why they get their sheep heads sheared.

Just as it's forbidden for fantasy books to have something other than farmer-origin heros, super swords and dragons in their titles. Or creatures other than the LOTR cliche. Compared to the amount of books with original material, it's a trivial few.

 

It's forbidden for the NJO to be creative.


I'll second that. The first victims of each star wars book seem to be reason and intelligence.

 

I believe one of the books did show ion cannons being used against Vong ships and they were doing pretty much the same thing as turbolasers.

 

Hey, speaking of people in Star Wars never do smart stuff, how come when fighting General Greivous the Jedi don't jsut use the force to make his joints fall apart? They seem to be able to do that to other droids; or use the Force to smash him into a wall or something.

 

Can't remember what book it was, but Mara and Anakin tried to use blasters set to stun on Vong, with zero effect. I can't remember the exact quote about nervous systems, but maybe it's the same deal with ships and Ion Cannons...

 

Maybe it has to do with the crab armor, or the power setter of the blaster?

In Ruin, I think Anakin threw a few objects at the Vong warriors on Ithor, and at Garqi, someone sealed off the plasma cannon of a coralskipper with a metal plate.

What effect would an ion cannon have on an yammosk? (or a good massage?)

 

Exactly what I mean, Darth Sloth. That was Balance Point. It's enough that the average Vong warrior is taller and far heavier than a human; and to put ice to cake, they can't be stunned.

Why not just make them indomitable and be done with it?

 

Accually, I would think that it would sort of act as a stunner, because nerves conduct electical signals to the brain. Isn't that how stunners work? Or even earth tasers?

 

Aye, in BP, they try and fail to stun a Vong - Anakin uses a Stokhli stick instead (*snort!*)...

Somewhere earlier (DT, I think, or maybe in AoC), it's said that the 'living' CNS of a Vong ship is simply buried too deep beneath the hide for ion canon to have any effect, and the "gravitic" technobabble systems are, I think, supposed to be unaffected - I suspect that cap-ship ion-canon batteries should mess with coralskippers, though...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

>>"Hey, speaking of people in Star Wars never do smart stuff, how come when fighting General Greivous the Jedi don't jsut use the force to make his joints fall apart? They seem to be able to do that to other droids; or use the Force to smash him into a wall or something."<<

Grievous can dodge Force pushes so it stands to reason he can dodge these too.



In Jedi Outcast the DEMP gun is effective against organics.

EDIT:

"This gun fires high-powered ion bursts that wipe out electrical systems. It is very effective against droids and electrical devices, although the latest version can also cause damage to living tissue."

 

Perhaps there's something special about the neural tissue of the Vong ships that makes them harder to damage than say, human nervous systems.

 

That would explain why they can't be stunned in the standard way.

 

I'd like to second the idea that the Vong ship's have hides that are too thick for the ion cannons to do any damage.

I think that in SBS when they're planning the mission, somebody asks if the ship they're being transported on wouldn't notice the YVH droids attaching to its underside, and Jacen(I think it was Jacen) says that they Vong ships couldn't feel that b/c they can't have nerve endings on the surface of the ship b/c they'd be frozen by space

However, I bet ion cannons could be effective against Vong ground troops. I realize that Mara and Anakins stun bolts didn't do anything in BP, but an ion cannon is a lot stronger.

At like, Dantooine, or Borleias, for example, maybe they could've found an old ion cannon, and used it to take out waves of Vong troops. Just a thought