Smart Phasers and Dead Switches

[Timo]

Constant beams can be "walked" onto target if the initial aim is off.

Now this is the mysterious thing: phaser beams are virtually never "walked" onto their targets. (Indeed, the only successful instance I can think of is from "Arsenal of Freedom" where a trio of heroes deliberately "caged" an enemy to prevent it from maneuvering, then swung the flanking beams to join the center beam at the target. Klingons swinging their disruptors in ST6 is not an example of successful use...)

In contrast, despite the absence of any sort of sighting devices, the phasers fairly accurately hit targets that the user has had at least a moment to contemplate. That is, if you jump into view, then dodge out, the phaser may miss you. But if the phaser user has enough time to take aim, there will be a hit, regardless of whether the user actually did take aim. Apparently, the sidearms do the aiming by themselves, or at least fine-tune the initial coarse aim to ensure a hit.

Why don't they "walk" the beams? Perhaps there is massive inertia in doing so. That is, the beam might not be a mere ray of light (as pretty much everything about their behavior speaks against them being that), but rather some sort of an "energy rod" connecting the gun and its target, and while holding the "rod" takes no more muscle power than holding the gun, swinging the "rod" strains your muscles to the extreme. Alternately, the beam is a conduit that takes some time to establish, and if you keep moving it, it never settles and never allows the actual deadly energies to flow from the gun to the other end.

Apart from that, I undersign that the phaser does appear superior to anything we have or plan on having today. No doubt Trek-level technology could produce even better weapons, like the Tantalus field that forgoes messy gunslinging and simply makes the enemy go away, but phasers really are pretty good weapons.

Except for snipers: the beam immediately gives away your position, and it moves at a snail's pace, probably allowing your victim to dodge it if he stands more than a hundred meters away. Plus we don't know if the thing has a range limit. The Gorn did some pretty good sniping in "Arena" from tactically significant distances, perhaps but not necessarily with phasers, but all other such action has been at close quarters.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ithekro]

The transporter equipped slugthrower would seem to solve the sniper's problem, as well as be able to not only shoot around corners, but through walls and decks.

 

[Timo]

It's something of a halfway solution, though - anybody capable of building a transporter-assisted slugthrower ought to be capable of building a transporter gun that omits the slug. Just directly beam a hole into the victim and be done with it!

Incidentally, this may be what phasers are - weaponized transporters. Due to the use of greater energies with greater abandon, the path between the "pad" (gun) and the target glows a lot, but essentially the device moves "phased" energy from gun to target in "phase space" without actually passing it through any of the realspace points in between (save for some insignificantly small leakage that makes the beam glow).

There probably should already be a phaser setting for firing through walls in that case, though. But the underlying technologies and relating terminology sound similar.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CuttingEdge100]

The phasers are remarkably powerful, from what I remember level 16 would basically vaporize 650 cubic inches/centimeters of rock (setimentary is the most common) with approximately a 0.28 second shot.

I'm thinking that's enough power to blow up buildings. That's better than some missiles we got. Phaser rifles would really only be useful for improved aim not really needed for more firepower.

 

[drt]

I always figured the rifles' larger power-packs allowed more high power shots than the hand phasers were capable of firing.

 

[C.E. Evans]

I've favored the idea that rifle phasers weren't any more powerful than hand phasers, but they could last at least twice as long before their power packs were drained and were ideally suited for missions that required a bit more than just self-defense. Rifles could also have special targeting and/or firing systems though, IMO.

 

[Timo]

From Kira's private terrorist training camp scene with Ziyal, we do know the standard Starfleet rifles have special targeting and firing systems, multiple target acquisition, stabilizers and whatnot.

We just don't canonically know whether the smaller sidearms have those as well... Multitargeting is one of the competencies of Type 2 ("Cathexis"), as is off-boresight firing that might be considered stabilization (of the beam). Perhaps there are degrees to this, with Type 3 targeting sixteen victims at a time while Type 2 can cover six at most?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CuttingEdge100]

BTW How much energy would it take to vaporize 650 cubic meters of sandstone or shale in 0.28 seconds?

 

[Deks]

What about regenerative power sources?
It is possible that Phaser rifles can last longer in a fight... but I would surmise they'd might be capable of longer SUSTAINED bursts of power.
A hand phaser could last a bit less time... but ultimately, I find it highly unlikely these things wouldn't have power sources that regenerate very quickly using a variety of subspace technologies and extracting power directly from whichever environment they are in.

 

[Timo]

BTW How much energy would it take to vaporize 650 cubic meters of sandstone or shale in 0.28 seconds?

A random googling turned up a paper saying it takes about 6,000 calories per gram, or up to 15,000 calories per cubic centimeter, thus 650x15X10^9 calories. That's about 10^13 calories... or 40 terajoules.

Add whatever you need to account for energy wasted when vaporized material is expelled from the hole in the mountain, and then divide by time to get required power. That's way more wattage than quoted for starship main phasers in various sources.

However, let's note that rock removed by phaser shows no signs of being vaporized. It doesn't turn into heat, it doesn't expand into gases, it simply goes away. The energies involved in that might be either immense or minimal, as we have no idea what actually happens, besides it being called "phasing".

A hand phaser could last a bit less time... but ultimately, I find it highly unlikely these things wouldn't have power sources that regenerate very quickly using a variety of subspace technologies and extracting power directly from whichever environment they are in.

We know there exists a thing called "regenerative phaser" (the answer to "energy dampening fields or radiogenic environments"), but we don't know if that means the phaser recharges its batteries out of thin air, or at all. We don't see such a thing happening, and clearly such tech wasn't there back in "Omega Glory" yet (but neither were "regenerative phasers", so the two could still mean the same thing).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Deks]

Correct... but don't you find it a bit daft that SF wouldn't have regenerative power cells by default even in the 23rd century?

Besides... phasers were never really portrayed as losing power in the field, even after prolonged use.
The only instance we saw phasers potentially needing power cells was during that idiotic DS9 episode 'Siege of AR-558' (which dumbed down quite a lot, and DS9 in general during the war dumbed down a whole lot more on a large scale)

 

[Ithekro]

Or could it be that the Dominion used a type of field or weapon that disables the regenerative properties of the Federation power cells, and Starfleet had to design something replacable in combat to deal with the chance of their phasers running dry?

They did have to change a lot of technical things in Starfleet to deal with the Dominion's technological, combat oriented, advancements.

 

[Saturn0660]

I don't buy that at all. Otherwise Voyager wouldn't have been so worried about power use. If phasers have regenerative power cells then why not everything else.

 

[Mytran]

You can't get energy out of nothing - a "regenerative" power cell would have to extract its energy from somewhere, be it solar, kinetic etc

 

[Timo]

I guess it might be possible for a Federation-level civilization to have a technology for sucking energy out of "small sources". But if the technology doesn't feature a way to circumvent the laws of thermodynamics, then powering up a flashlight that way might require destroying entire continents - the process would necessarily be that inefficient.

Then again, many Trek doodads do seem to defy conventional thermodynamics. But "free energy" is not a good idea to be included in Star Trek, because it would invalidate so many plotlines. And weapons that get their energy from their surroundings would be far too destructive: they could be aimed at the nearest rock, and the energy-sucking effect would then destroy the enemy, while the rock only mildly heated!

As for phasers running out of oomph, this explicitly happened in "Omega Glory". We even get a quantitative estimate that neatly jibes with the other instances of the phasers not running empty: a couple of Phaser IIs are drained by felling thousands of unprotected infantry at non-vaporizing mode.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Deks]

I don't buy that at all. Otherwise Voyager wouldn't have been so worried about power use. If phasers have regenerative power cells then why not everything else.

Realistically, Voyager should never have had any energy or resource issues at all.
If you think about it, virtually any SF ship equipped with transporters and replicators could easily park in an uninhabited star system, tap into solar radiation for power (Which would be routed to the transporters), and replicate whatever it needed in order to affect repairs, upgrades, conduct scientific research (by replicating necessary materials, etc).
Heck, even without replicators, transporters alone could be used on virtually hunks of rocks which are composed of raw matter.
They could disassemble them into base elements, and reconfigure them in the matter stream to form whatever they want and then materialize it.

Plus I never bought the idea of manual labour in the 23rd and 24th century.
We already have the technology to automate anything we desire (because Humans mainly work in either repetitive or highly specialized jobs - both of which, computers surpassed us in over 10 years ago).

The concept of repairs being done manually in space is ludicrous - unless automated repair systems are disabled/damaged, but we never get this indication to begin with.

In the novels for example (and early TNG on TV), such repair and self-maintaining capabilities were mentioned for SF ships.

So I chuck Voyager's resource issues as nothing more as lazy writers who had 0 clue on how to write compelling stories for the setting in question.
If you noticed... even Ds9 ended up ignoring or dumbing down A LOT of the technology and science that Feds had at their disposal.

 

[Deks]

Or could it be that the Dominion used a type of field or weapon that disables the regenerative properties of the Federation power cells, and Starfleet had to design something replacable in combat to deal with the chance of their phasers running dry?

They did have to change a lot of technical things in Starfleet to deal with the Dominion's technological, combat oriented, advancements.

Simple explanation:
Dampening field with variable frequencies.
Demonstrated effective against energy based weapons in terms of completely disabling them.
However... it would be easier to say the field merely disables regenerative properties of power cells in Federation weapons... meaning they'd either have to find a way to work around the dampening field properties in the long run, or replace power cells regularly (the first option seems far more preferable to the second one... and much more likely to ensue once you understand what you are dealing with - and these people are supposed to have specialists who can account for multiple possibilities ... which also gives an insight as to why effectively every piece of Federation technology is so versatile to begin with).

 

[Ithekro]

It also depends on how recently the Dominion could have started using such a field, or of they change it regularly to deny the Federation one of their easy engineering solutions they are kind of known for that last century or two.

The swapping power packs seems to be a relatively rare thing we see late in the war. It seems like a quick fix practical field solution over a long term engineering solution.

Though the Federation does seem to have dealt with the problem of the Dominion beam weapons and Federation shields being partly useless. As well as being able to get phasers and torpedoes to more effectively penetrate Dominion shields to balance out the battlefield regardless of the high early losses of the war.

 

[Timo]

If you think about it, virtually any SF ship equipped with transporters and replicators could easily park in an uninhabited star system, tap into solar radiation for power (Which would be routed to the transporters), and replicate whatever it needed in order to affect repairs, upgrades, conduct scientific research (by replicating necessary materials, etc). They could disassemble them into base elements, and reconfigure them in the matter stream to form whatever they want and then materialize it.

Three major problems, in descending order of severity:

1) Transporters don't work that way. Manipulation of whatever is beamed up is not trivial - it supposedly takes effort, and that effort might consume more resources than they could gain, at least in the starting phases of the process.

2) The process might be a net consumer of energy anyway.

3) For those two seasons the ship had problems with energy and other resources, they were constantly being harassed by the locals (mainly Kazon). Repairs had to be conducted on the fly, and going to star systems, even uninhabited ones, for resources might not have been possible. (Remember that they did go places, and typically hit an adventure five minutes into their visit.)

Plus I never bought the idea of manual labour in the 23rd and 24th century.

We hear time and again that these people are bored out of their skulls. Many probably beg to be allowed to turn screws and hammer nails.

The concept of repairs being done manually in space is ludicrous - unless automated repair systems are disabled/damaged, but we never get this indication to begin with.

Umm, everything about the Voyager is disabled or damaged during the first two seasons.

In the novels for example (and early TNG on TV), such repair and self-maintaining capabilities were mentioned for SF ships.

We never learned what they might accomplish - but "Q Who?" made it clear that Borg-level hands-off repair was well beyond the UFP's means.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Timo]

As well as being able to get phasers and torpedoes to more effectively penetrate Dominion shields

Might be they never figured out how to make torpedoes capable of penetrating Dominion shields, explaining why those are basically never used in battle. Except by the Defiant, but that ship might suffer from not having other options. Her pulse phasers seem potent enough, but not capable of long range fighting - and perhaps her beam phasers are too wimpy to serve as an alternative, so she has to spit out q-torps to little or no effect.

We could also argue that the Feds realized they have to fight at point-blank distances to let their phasers penetrate, further explaining/excusing the combat VFX.

Timo Saloniemi