Starship design history in light of Discovery
- Thread starter INACTIVEUSS Einstein
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More old-style beauty shots and slow passes by the camera. We got almost none of those in Season 1 and the series could have benefitted from feeling more like the others in the franchise in that regard.
Just a small physics-note: Nuclear weapons in space are barely an improvement over regular rockets. They're just a small ball of heat and energy, but the impulse may kick the target out of the most critical region anyway. What remains is the impact energy of the rocket, and a heat ball that is very localized. To really work wonders, a nuclear weapon needs a pressurized atmosphere, where it can generate a devastating shockwave. That's not possible in space.
So it stands to reason, that the nuclear weapons used in the Earth Romulan-war were used on planets. Or - as shown in the episode - as a self-destruction device inside the pressurized starship, where it would completely rip everything inside apart.
But for space battle purposes, it's absolutely realistic that a photon torpedo - putting all it's energy as close to the impact surface as possible - is still the most effective weapon possible, while at the same time doing FAR less damage than a nuclear explosion would do on ground or a submarine torped only near a target. Basically: The higher the surrounding pressure (water > air > space), the bigger the boom.
Vacuum is really weird.
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Discovery spits them out in random directions that can't really come from a linear launcher, and they seem smaller and faster.
I wouldn't mind them stating they were loaded a few at a time into a cluster launcher that burst fires them, and that they're a micro torpedo varient of some kind. Which they could still do, and have the Enterprise fire much bigger red standard ones for a dramatic factor later.
Don't forget, DSC torpedoes sound different, like they're in slow motion & more echo-y.
Star Trek online has torpedoes coming out of the RCS thrusters on the Crossfield’s saucer
I’m guessing because there are no other visible hard points on the ship
Wouldn't that necessarily follow if the launchers are attached to the spinning surfaces of the saucer?
I mean, the spinners do have those odd boxes attached, making the spinning mechanism all the more complex for having to provide clearance for the boxes in the neck gap. Supposedly the boxes are absolutely vital, then, and not just air conditioning units bolted on willy-nilly.
We have seen up close how this ship can "dispense" projectiles (the agri-carriers) as opposed to "firing" them - perhaps a science vessel has dozens upon dozens of chutes for deploying instrumentation and disposing of experiments gone awry and whatnot, and when the call to arms came, Starfleet provided those chutes with "swim-out" type torpedoes?
The first time the hero ship fired projectiles, they already emerged at a slightly funny angle, going "down" to scuttle the Glenn. We then saw her sowing those bombs that killed the BoPs above the Corvan II mine while allowing the ship to do Lone Ranger and disappear before the miners could identify her. She used transporters for making the bombs appear at ventral bow. Perhaps that's how she launches torps as well...?
Timo Saloniemi
Agreed. It’d be cool to see the origin of the Q-torp in DSC, especially if they link it to “regeneration” and Starfleet had been working on reverse engineering them since then.
Not that the ENT episode matters mind you, I’d be happy seeing Michael Burnham invent quantum torpedoes.
As much as I’d defend Trekkers getting upset over minutiae, in this instance the answer is “no”
I think more the potential use of a more advanced torpedo in DSC than should exist. But I’d actually prefer that quantum torpedoes be introduced as a way to beat the Klingons following the war and those were the torpedoes we saw on TOS because some of them were blue like the quantums we saw on DS9 and FC. I’d love to see transphasic torpedoes on DSC. if they truly bring in the Borg (which would be cool) then we could have scenes where stamets invents them - future Janeway had to get the classified details for them by timetravelling to the 23rd century so she could build them in the delta quadrant. I love canon links!
I love this analogy
Since Star Trek ships were originally akin to old naval ships with cannon, this analogy is apt
That's true, but it doesn't fix the scene in ST V: The Final Frontier where the Enterprise fires a photon torpedo at the "God" entity and it blows up while Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are just a few dozen meters away, coming out of it totally unscathed.
What's wrong with that? Surely close space support is a role Starfleet wants to perform to the hilt, so they would have hardware that's up to the task. And an explosive device with easily adjustable amount of explosive stuff aboard would seem a nice fit - especially if there's no known damage booster such as a fragmenting shell in evidence.
(If the underground explosion results in radiation, big deal - they have a pill for it in the 23rd century.)
Timo Saloniemi
(If the underground explosion results in radiation, big deal - they have a pill for it in the 23rd century.)
Timo Saloniemi
Well, of course the God entity absorped the energy of the photon torpedo! And Kirk knew that! Because.... because....well, ....because he had read the script?
I figure the torpedo penetrated some distance underground before detonating.
The scene in "The Expanse" explains it perfectly:
REED: Photonic torpedoes. Their range is over fifty times greater than our conventional torpedoes, and they have a variable yield. They can knock the comm. array off a shuttlepod without scratching the hull or they can put a three kilometre crater into an asteroid.
Didn't Kirk order "full spread" or something like that? Maybe Spock ignored his command. But then why would Kirk order something like that in the first place?
Nope, we just heard him start of with "Listen carefully," and then we went over to watch Spock and Sybok's goodbye. For all we know, he told them to load a barrel of holy water from the ship's chapel into the torpedo tube and drop it on their heads.Didn't Kirk order "full spread" or something like that? Maybe Spock ignored his command. But then why would Kirk order something like that in the first place?
Way off topic but it always bugged my how the new Battlestar Galactica handled nukes. Ronald D. Moore wanted to use nukes because it seemed scarier to the audience than photon torpedoes. It always bugged me how they would use nukes and bullets but have an instantaneous FTL drive. I just wanted to get that off of my chest.