IIRC they reused some of the "arsenal of death" VFX in some early season scenes. They did a lot of volley firing in early TNG, ranging from Yesterday's Enterprise to Best of Both Worlds. It seems like the emphasis changed a bit between seasons and shows as they went from a focus on relative static ships firing lots of things at once, to high speed maneuvering plus relatively low rates of fire. There's probably stylistic reasons for it, as well as the slow move toward CGI. Doing big battle scenes with too much VFX makes the scene look excessively busy, too, which might have something to do with the lack of it.
Which is why I interpret Jaeger's 15 tubes as an attempt to circumvent the trope. We never specifically see it, but they're not the hero ship, so we also don't see them lose all tubes on a single hit, either. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
According to memory alpha...(not cannon I know) the Galaxy Class was launched in the (late)2350s. The Akira class was Launched in early 2370's. so thats nearly a ten year gap. Starfleet became aware of the Borg in 2365 (memory alpha), so the ONLY reason I can see the 15 torpedo tubes reasoning is that the Akira fires a Torpedo Orgy basically at a borg cube, hoping for a knockout punch. possibly working in concert with defiant class ships. still seems over the top but thats the only reasoning I could find behind such a large amount of tubes on a medium sized ship. considering most other fed ships have 2-3 tubes that can fire in bursts, it sort of renders the whole broadside cannons thing moot. its like replacing a machine gunner with a WWI rifle line.
15 photon torpedoes doesn't make sense unless you go with the hypothetical DITL torp magazines that have 640 torpedoes in them. And even then, you'd need to radically alter the pod geometry to get more than 2560 torps in there (half of the article's example of a reasonable number for an Intrepid class ship).
^^^ Not unless they figured out a way to miniaturize an industrial replicator at the center of the weapons pod to keep pumping out torpedoes. Thus, necessitating only the smallest size magazine for queuing purposes. Their only limits, at that point, would be the amount of deuterium they have on hand to make up the casing, the antimatter to make up the warhead and the speed at which a fixed number of torpedoes could be replicated per minute under combat operations.
Could there be lines of photon torpedoes in the hull struts connecting the torpedo pod to the rest of the ship? Kind of like ammunition belts for machine guns? I tend to think of the Miranda-class torpedo pod in such terms, with the majority of the torpedo magazine extending down the rollbar. There's not a helluva lot of magazine space in the torpedo pod, either for the Akira or the Miranda.
With all due respect, despite the designer's intentions for that many torpedo launchers to cover so many lateral fields of fire (and hey, what about targets above/below the Akira?), I can't really see a whole lot of space for torpedo magazines in the primary hull when a lot of that internal space is needed to support shuttlecraft/fightercraft operations. Unless, that is, the torpedoes are already stacked up in the tube nose-to-rear, a la Metalstorm. Even then, photon torpedoes are very maneuverable and it doesn't make much sense from my viewpoint to install all of these unnecessarily redundant launchers. A torpedo pod that has multiple launchers covering fore and aft should be able to spit out enough torpedoes to keep a threat occupied quite handily.
Was it ever determined how big the Akira-class is? I think there were a lot of different ways to calculate it by comparing items like the size of the bridge module and/or escape pods, but I had heard there was a discrepancy between designed size and what the VFX folks actually did. Like, 400+ meter design vs 250+ meter VFX, something like that.
I think it was e biggest of its cousins in First Contact but still smaller than the Enterprise-E. I think it was more on par with the Ambassador or Nebula with regard to length. As with all things, Ex Astris has an article about it with size comparison charts. It is in kind of a gray area. As for it being a carrier, yes it does have what appears to be landing bay doors in back of the saucer and force-field protected launch bay doors in a cut-in at the front of the saucer.
137th Gebirg, thanks for the link to the Ex Astris article. 440m seems to be the generally recognized and legitimate figure. I also did some digging in my office and came up with the Starship Spotter book from 2001, which gives stats of 464.4m long x 316.7m wide x 87.4m tall. Starship Spotter also gave a figure of 15 torpedo tubes for the Akira, which I think we're all agreed on, but this has me wondering where they're all located? Another question about this class, though...why are the warp nacelles canted? I guess an argument can be made that it doesn't matter why they're canted and that they work just fine, but all other designs we've seen have straight up-and-down nacelles, not canted at an angle. I was curious if there was any kind of Trekplanation about it?
^ Well, the Steamrunner and Sabre classes, which also had their debut in FC, also have canted nacelles.
I'm looking at what are supposed to be "doors" on the front of the saucer...and I'm only seeing 3 small things that look like view ports, if anything it looks almost like a "ten foward" area. Plus, just look at the windows on the saucer, she just looks too small to carry a meaningful amount of fighter craft...
http://www.modelermagic.com/?p=17454 Here are LOTS of wonderful pics of the Akira-class CG model used in First Contact. The hatch on the lowest level of the bridge dome gives good scale reference.
I guess that's what they eventually became in the production model. For Alex Jaeger's original concept, however - in his own words: The forward-facing launch bays got scaled down and turned into massive windows. They're bigger in scale than the other portholes around the surface, which is why they sometimes appear as if they're something else, like launch tubes. If he claimed BSG as inspiration, he likely envisioned small fighter craft coming out the front as opposed to full-size shuttles, which is probably why the openings are smaller in front than in back. As for the location of the photon tubes, amusingly, the model itself seems to have more than 15, based on the production renders at Modeler Magic (thanks for the link, KDID!). In the pod alone, I've counted 12 - 4 in the front, 4 in the port-side-aft and 4 in the starboard-side-aft. Additionally, there also appears to be 4 pairs of lateral tubes on the outer edge on the top and bottom sides of the saucer, both port and starboard, as marked by the same red warning lines that exist on the pod around those tubes, bringing the number to 20. Finally, we saw photons also emitting from the lower section of the dome around the area of the forward navigational sensor during the battle at Earth, which would imply 1 or 2 more forward-facing tubes, at minimum, bringing the total number of photon launchers to 21 or 22! However, in Jaeger's words: So I guess he never thought those lateral objects on the sides of the saucer were photon launchers, even though the markings on the model indicate they might be. They are clearly shown in his various concept images. Don't really know...
If these pics come from the original cgi. (I thought I read somewhere, the studio lost the original CGI files. I could be mistaken however.) while these do look more like launching tubes, just eyeballing it, the openings look far too small for Peregrine fighters to fit through. I'm starting to wonder if this ship was originally envisioned to be much larger (Maybe the saucer was originally supposed to have the circumference of a Galaxy saucer? with the rest of the ship scaled accordingly?) Maybe the suits at the studio saw some early shots and said "make it smaller, the Enterprise needs to be the biggest ship of all of them." so the "launch tubes" became windows. Of course thats all a theory.
^^^ For what it's worth, in the Jaeger interview, he says: So yes, it is entirely possible that it was supposed to be much larger than what was eventually built, and able to support launch tubes of that size. As for the lost files, I believe that was for the Norway class. Those files were apparently corrupted and unrecoverable. The Akira model, however, went on to be used quite frequently in DS9 during the Dominion War long after the events in First Contact and I think the Steamrunner could also be seen occasionally in the background as well.