TOS Torpedo Launchers

[aridas sofia]

Then again, the canon translation for that language nowadays is that yellow lined with red stands for cargo loading doors...

Only if the remastered special effects are considered more canon than the original effects, right?

It always surprised me that Mike Okuda allowed that round hatch to be used for the launching of probes in the remastered fx. He must have known Jefferies' intentions. The hatches are clearly marked as fuel locations on the Jefferies/Jennings Phase II drawings. On the Phase II model the round yellow hatches outlined in red are on the underside of the nacelles! And it isn't as if there weren't other hatches along the keel that could serve as launch bays for the phosphorescent satellites being distributed around Deneva. Indeed, the more aftward hatches arguably tie (via the hangar) into the... flight deck.

No... I call mistake on that retcon. The round hatch on the underside of the TOS Enterprise is a fuel port.

 

[aridas sofia]

Its interesting how everyone accepts the FJ location for the Photon Torpedoes, where stock photo pretty much always shows them being emitted from the bottom of the saucer.

As I noted above, if you accept TAS, the FJ location is a phaser mount. At least on the TAS version of Enterprise. If a phaser can be mounted up there and if you believe, as you've stated, that TOS photon torpedoes don't have the large casings shown in TWoK, then it isn't hard at all to imagine some Constitution class starships (or their derivative designs) from having photorps up there instead.

As for the casings preceding TOS on ENT, let's say in the ancient 2150s, the first photorps required atomic-powered rocket boosters. By the much-more advanced 2260s, there were photorps of many kinds, all of which were much smaller than the ENT-era weapons, and some of which lacked casings altogether. By the 2280s, the TWoK chiclet casings (and their elaborate launchers) were introduced to facilitate warp capable torpedoes.

 

[Timo]

Only if the remastered special effects are considered more canon than the original effects, right?

Umm, how so? There are no original effects to offer a competing definition for the colors.

And it isn't as if there weren't other hatches along the keel [..] The round hatch on the underside of the TOS Enterprise is a fuel port.

There's also a unique paint job down there that might be our best candidate for an "insert/extract warp core here" orifice (assuming Kirk's ship only had one centralized antimatter thingamabob that needed such refilling and "That Which Survives" style emergency jettisoning) - the light grey square, also lined in red, that sits right next to the pylon junction. The yellow markings are not unique, and are placed in awkward parts of the ship: we have the original critique against fuel loading right next to the bridge, and OTOH the nacelles lack yellow markings altogether (the unseen Phase II / Constitution (II) design notwithstanding).

As for torp casings, it's sorta fun that the ancient 21 inch naval torpedo very much survives till this day - and dictates the dimensions of things as varied as mines, nuclear depth charge -throwing rockets, antiship missiles, decoys and underwater and aerial drones.

I'm not sure I'd agree the "Archer torp" ever went out of fashion as the principal projectile weapon of Starfleet, even if the propulsion system and the warhead were modernized hundreds of times, sometimes radically. But I'm sure Kirk carried a more varied arsenal than Archer did, even though the simplistic dialogue refers to no variety whatsoever (save for the existence of "probes" possibly launched from the same tubes).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[aridas sofia]

Umm, how so? There are no original effects to offer a competing definition for the colors.

The remastered fx portray Jefferies' fuel hatch as a launch port for satellites. The old fx do not. They leave the question open. Thus one needs to accept the new fx over the old fx to have any canon basis upon which to claim that Jefferies' stated intention that the yellow and red hatches are for fuel is incorrect.

 

[Albertese]

Umm, how so? There are no original effects to offer a competing definition for the colors.

The remastered fx portray Jefferies' fuel hatch as a launch port for satellites. The old fx do not. They leave the question open. Thus one needs to accept the new fx over the old fx to have any canon basis upon which to claim that Jefferies' stated intention that the yellow and red hatches are for fuel is incorrect.

I don't recall seeing the MJ drawings where anything is labeled as a fuel port. Can you post the image or a link? that would be fascinating to see.

--Alex

 

[Timo]

Thus one needs to accept the new fx over the old fx to have any canon basis upon which to claim that Jefferies' stated intention that the yellow and red hatches are for fuel is incorrect.

But that's not at all what you were claiming - that VFX would be in competition with VFX over the issue.

TOS and TOS-R in general do not compete: the latter shows activities where the former does not, but there is no conflict in that. Say, a hatch that stays closed (TOS&TOS-R) is once seen open (TOS-R) -> it is a hatch. Red light is emitted by the impulse engines during some accelerations (TOS-R) but not others (TOS&TOS-R) -> impulse engines do glare red during some, supposedly especially violent, accelerations.

Naturally, both forms of VFX trump someone's offscreen intentions. And that's particularly welcome when other offscreen considerations make it unattractive to support such intentions.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mister_Atoz]

I know what I'm about to say is heresey, and also a little off topic, but...

Do we have any on screen dialogue that 100% confirms that Photon Torpedoes use anti-matter?

I know all the background sources say they use anti-matter, but I can't think of any on screen references that confirms it. TOS doesn't have any, and I can't think of any in TNG, but VOY, DS9 and ENT may have.

It would be easier if we didn't have to speculate on how the anti-matter gets to the torpedo. Anti-matter just seems like a hassle, particularly for something expendable as a torpedo.

In my head, i've already "retconned" photon torpedoes to use some other type of warhead that produces gamma rays rather than ant--matter which needs a constant power source to keep from blowing itself up.

 

[uniderth]

That and even at high enough velocities an inert mass could inflict more damage than an explosive.

 

[Lakenheath 72]

In "Obsession", an antimatter bomb destroyed the cloud creature. If the photon torpedoes had antimatter, the use of them by the Enterprise when it fired them at the creature would have killed it. However, the creature was not harmed by the torpedoes.

 

[Mytran]

Thing is; by the time a M/AM Photon Torpedo explodes, it doesn't have any antimatter inside, since that has already reacted with the stores of matter on board. All that gets delivered to the target is a large amount of energy - so all we can say for certain is that the Obsession creature isn't affected by the destructive energy itself. Who knows; maybe it siphons off a portion of that energy to deflect the rest?

Kirk's final solution was to introduce pure antimatter directly to the creature. In that case, the antimatter was reacting directly with the creature's gaseous form, literally ripping it apart and irrevocably converting each atom into nothing but energy and gamma rays. There's no comeback from that!

Does this prove that TOS Photorps don't contain antimatter? No. However, more telling is that when Kirk wants an "ounce" of antimatter they don't strip down a Photorp casing and take the fuel cell from there; instead they go direct to the main engines. Make of that what you will

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I know what I'm about to say is heresey, and also a little off topic, but...

Do we have any on screen dialogue that 100% confirms that Photon Torpedoes use anti-matter?

I know all the background sources say they use anti-matter, but I can't think of any on screen references that confirms it. TOS doesn't have any, and I can't think of any in TNG, but VOY, DS9 and ENT may have.

Data describes "antimatter detonations" in that stupid episode with the two-dimensional fish things and Troi lost her powers and found she was useless. Voyager has more than a few references to it as well, particularly "Friendship 7."

ENT is ironic in that STARFLEET never describes what photon(ick!) torpedoes really are, but then Archer fires a bunch of them at Duras (out of a freaking airlock for some reason) and Duras' weapons officer looks at his screen and yells
"Antimatter warheads!"

It would be easier if we didn't have to speculate on how the anti-matter gets to the torpedo. Anti-matter just seems like a hassle, particularly for something expendable as a torpedo.

That and the fact that antimatter is a crappy thing to use as a warhead in the first place. The reaction products are basically a shitload of hard x-rays and charged particles, exactly the kind of stuff that all modern shields are designed to deal with just by virtue having to travel faster than light.

I've always assumed that photon torpedoes were one of two things:

1) Weaponized Warp Drive: Basically, a disembodied warp nacelle with a guidance system and a nasty inferiority complex. Flies to a target as fast as it can and slams into it at high warp. Damage mechanism: self explanatory.

2) Weaponized deflector shield: A very powerful shield generator with a guidance system and an impulse engine attached. The forcefield is designed to cause any object that touches it to be accelerated outwards at something like 200 gravities (which is basically what an "isoton" describes: the amount of acceleration imparted by the warhead on one ton of solid mass). Most of the time, the forcefield releases that energy all at once when it strikes a large enough target, other times it can be programmed to expand that forcefield in a spherical radius and "whack" everything in the area nearby. All in all, the destruction caused by a photon torpedo tends to be directly proportional to the mass of its target: thick/heavy target = big boom, thin/flimsy target = little boom.

I lean towards the second option mostly these days since I have never observed photon torpedoes being able to go to warp on their own (Lord knows they should by now) and also the need for specialized launchers, which can only be explained by the fact that the torpedoes need to activate their "warhead" fields BEFORE they launch and the launch tubes are specifically designed to contain that force without being ripped apart themselves. Finally, then, we have an explanation for why starships even USE specialized torpedo launchers instead of just popping them off into space like pez dispensers.

 

[Timo]

Having antimatter aboard would be no surprise even then. After all, it is the preferred power source for starships, which aren't supposed to simply explode, either. Why not have it power your chosen "second-stage" torpedo warhead, too?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[mos6507]

antimatter is a crappy thing to use as a warhead in the first place.

Matter-antimatter explosions in Trek are meant to be powerful. Either you accept this or you don't. It's part of the magic of Trek tech, among many other things that we're asked to accept. Naturally, we've got 50 years of Trek to argue about and people have developed their own head-canon. But as far as I'm concerned, the way photons work in TOS was a reflection of the model not being built with torps in mind, something that was eventually remedied with the refit and all subsequent starship designs. I'd be happy to see someone prove otherwise by providing some hard evidence from the making of TOS to indicate that the torps were more of a pulsed beam weapon rather than a physical object that glowed.

The incongruity of whether torps are guided or not and whether they explode or penetrate hulls like cannonballs going through the hull of a tall-ship in Master and Commander (Trek VI) are also problematic.

 

[Timo]

I don't see why the "guided or not" argument should arise. After all, the things do hit maneuvering targets just fine, unless they are exceptionally maneuvering such as the Orion vessel in "Journey to Babel". And even there, the heroes initially think they can make a hit, or else they wouldn't bother to fire.

There are no plot instances where somebody would try and dodge a torpedo or zigzag to avoid a hit, either...

Also, all the "torpedoes are pitifully weak" instances in the various shows are against shielded targets, meaning it's more an argument of "shields are surprisingly strong". All except one, that is - and in ST6:TUC, we have the perfect excuse that the torpedoes used by Chang were never meant to do much damage.

It's part of the magic of Trek tech

With precedent ITRW: if you put a lot of energy in one spot at one moment, funny things happen in the right conditions. Such as fusion when you detonate a fission bomb.

A torpful of antimatter might make enough of a hole in subspace to release untold extra energies. And when you use sufficiently many torpfuls, you get a deeper hole down to a whole new level, as per "Yesterday's Enterprise"...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

antimatter is a crappy thing to use as a warhead in the first place.

Matter-antimatter explosions in Trek are meant to be powerful.

Photon torpedoes aren't. Not to the degree with which a matter/antimatter reaction should be.

There's one of two reasons for this: either this is an unintended Truth in Television and the radiation product from the torpedo dissipates so quickly that they do almost no damage at all without a direct hit (and most of their energy is released in the form of x-rays that the camera doesn't even see) or the torpedoes are using something other than matter/antimatter for their warheads.

I'd be happy to see someone prove otherwise by providing some hard evidence from the making of TOS to indicate that the torps were more of a pulsed beam weapon rather than a physical object that glowed.

Didn't we kind of already establish that with "Balance of Terror?" the "proximity blast" phasers are basically just photon torpedoes before the terminology was developed, much like Pike's "Time Warp Factor Seven" or "Switch to rockets, we're blasting out!"

The incongruity of whether torps are guided or not and whether they explode or penetrate hulls like cannonballs going through the hull of a tall-ship in Master and Commander (Trek VI) are also problematic.

Torpedo-as-missiles can detonate or penetrate, depending on its firing mode (selectable probably). Torpedoes as pulse weapon IS kind of problematic, though, which is probably why they stopped using phasers for this.

On the other hand:

the Mass Effect universe features a variety of weapon systems and incendiary devices that are essentially holographic constructs packed with deadly payloads (Shep fires a missile that is basically a spinning hologram with a chunk of burning napalm in the middle of it). In which case, it's entirely possible that a photonic torpedo is exactly what it sounds like: a holographic bottle of something nasty, hurled at an enemy target at high speed.

 

[Go-Captain]

There is no reason the antimatter of photon torpedoes can't just be surrounded with plutonium and a disproportionate amount of hydrogen. That would help absorb the less useful high energy particles to create more useful high energy particles.

the Mass Effect universe features a variety of weapon systems and incendiary devices that are essentially holographic constructs packed with deadly payloads (Shep fires a missile that is basically a spinning hologram with a chunk of burning napalm in the middle of it). In which case, it's entirely possible that a photonic torpedo is exactly what it sounds like: a holographic bottle of something nasty, hurled at an enemy target at high speed.

Those are actually glowing ceramic constructs built by the omnitools out of omni gel, same as the omnitool blade. It doesn't really make sense, since they really do just look like holograms.

 

[Mytran]

...antimatter is a crappy thing to use as a warhead in the first place. The reaction products are basically a shitload of hard x-rays and charged particles, exactly the kind of stuff that all modern shields are designed to deal with just by virtue having to travel faster than light.

Pardon my ignorance on the subject, but then where is the "energy" that we would expect to be released when an atom is completely annihilated? I know that "energy" by itself is a misnomer as it needs to in a form, but would that form be lots and lots of heat? Heat, after all is what you get from a fission and a fusion reaction - is that what you meant by "charged particles? which result from a M/AM reaction?

And if it is (massive amounts of) heat , would that be enough to have an impact on a ship's shields - they can't fly too close to the sun, for example.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

There is no reason the antimatter of photon torpedoes can't just be surrounded with plutonium and a disproportionate amount of hydrogen. That would help absorb the less useful high energy particles to create more useful high energy particles.

Yeah, but you'd need ALOT of it for that, way more than you can really fit in a photon torpedo casing.

the Mass Effect universe features a variety of weapon systems and incendiary devices that are essentially holographic constructs packed with deadly payloads (Shep fires a missile that is basically a spinning hologram with a chunk of burning napalm in the middle of it). In which case, it's entirely possible that a photonic torpedo is exactly what it sounds like: a holographic bottle of something nasty, hurled at an enemy target at high speed.

Those are actually glowing ceramic constructs built by the omnitools out of omni gel, same as the omnitool blade. It doesn't really make sense, since they really do just look like holograms.

The omnitool blade is, yes, but most of the other crap produced by omnitools are actually kinetic barrier constructs (much like the tool's interface itself). The only reason they're even VISIBLE is for the safety and/or tactical coordination of the person(s) who fire them (much like normal kinetic barriers are invisible unless somebody shoots you, and Tech Armor only looks like anything at all so your buddies know to stay the hell away from you during a firefight).

Point is, if you can manipulate forcefields to the degree described in Mass Effect and to a lesser extent Star Trek (see "mobile emitter") then an energy-based projectile weapon isn't so far fetched. The photon torpedo casing could just as easily be a massive "mobile emitter" that traps a bunch of scariness in a large and powerful forcefield envelope and then releases it when it hits something.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

...antimatter is a crappy thing to use as a warhead in the first place. The reaction products are basically a shitload of hard x-rays and charged particles, exactly the kind of stuff that all modern shields are designed to deal with just by virtue having to travel faster than light.

Pardon my ignorance on the subject, but then where is the "energy" that we would expect to be released when an atom is completely annihilated?

That energy is imparted on the reaction products. A proton and an antiproton annihilate, the result is a spray of subatomic particles flying away from the reaction at extremely high velocities and/or with an extreme amount of kinetic energy. Most of those particles decay immediately into other particles that also emerge from the secondary reactions with still more kinetic energy. And of course there is a certain amount of x-ray photons emitted, which is as close to "pure energy" as you get in real science.

is that what you meant by "charged particles? which result from a M/AM reaction?

Mostly muons and quarks, actually. Plus, the fact that you're anihilating protons and antiprotons means the electrons that were orbiting it are now flying all over the place, so on a macro-scale the reaction becomes an electrically-charged plasma with a bunch of weird shit going on inside it.

And if it is (massive amounts of) heat , would that be enough to have an impact on a ship's shields - they can't fly too close to the sun, for example.

Well heat has to be transferred through some kind of medium. I don't think infrared radiation in and of itself actually does much to shields, but a huge flux of charged protons flying out of, say, a solar flare or a star's corona would likely erode them pretty quickly. We know that shields have trouble with high energy plasmas (hence the Romulans continue to it as a weapon system even in the 24th century) so probably it has something to do with deflector shields themselves being electrically conductive. If you hit a shield with something that has a really huge magnetic moment or a very high electrical charge, you might overload the shield generators or otherwise destabilize the shield itself.

As for heat alone, I kind of doubt it. Just contact with a very hot medium -- molten lava, for example -- probably wouldn't do anything to the shields, but a superheated plasma might do some damage, more by virtue of its electrical conductivity than its temperature.

 

[Mytran]

Thanks for indulging me Crazy_Eddie.
So, a M/AM really does produce a highly energised plasma, huh? I must admit I thought that was just speculation on behalf of the TNG backstage crew to try and explain away those odd intermix ratios that came up on the show sometimes (why would you ever need more than 1:1?) You've also opened the door to some interesting speculation on how the shield might operate (and what they're vulnerable to) - fabulous how it all comes back to gravity, electromagnetism and other star-stuff.

Incidentally, it does make me realise what wonderful pieces of kit the Warp Engines are if they can make use of the "plasma mush" you describe. X-ray photons may be close to "pure energy" but from the sound of things they don't make up the majority of the output from a M/AM reaction. Food for thought indeed!