incredibly lulzy description of missile guidance I don't know if the Romulan ship was at warp in that scene, and suspect it wasn't. I imagine there is a concern about Enterprise flying into her own phaser shots if phasers can't go at warp speeds, but I am also not sure if she was firing directly ahead. The maximum range of phasers has not been stated (TNG manual gives a maximum effective range, but I figured this had to do with targeting), but the concerns about hitting seem to me as if they make this work OK.
Yeah, I was speaking generally, specifically at the time that TOS was in first runs. Then again, the Tomahawk does require some telemetry from a GPS satellite to get its position. By and large, though you are coorect.
JNG - I was at work and didn't take the time to listen to the audio in the link you posted when I wrote my reply. That is classic.
No, only the heavy ones like the Mk-48 ADCAP and some of the Eurotorps. The lighter ones like the Mk-54 (the kind of thing you'd launch from a destroyer or drop out of a helicopter) are basically fire and forget. I'm not sure what "originally" means, but the first radar-guided missiles fielded in the Cold War--the American Terrier and their Russian counterparts--were in use before Star Trek hit the airwaves, as were heat-seekers like the Sidewinder and the early anti-radiation missiles. Ballistic missiles already had their own guidance system; there's little else that COULD have guided them other than inertial navigation systems and gyroscopes like the original V-2. The most that AAM or SAM missiles get from their launch center is a radar beam shined on the target; the missiles actually read the REFLECTION from that radar beam, and then only because the radar is too heavy to mount on the actual missile. Newer missiles like the AMRAAM don't have this problem, they use their own internal radar. Not exactly... it would be more like taking the radar out of a semi-active missile and replacing it with an infrared camera, thereby converting the missile to a heat seeker.