Warp Battles
- Thread starter Cjde
- Start date
Torpedoes that have their own Warp Drives or Warp Sustainers can be fired at long range.
Or when they merge their Warp Bubbles and get "Up Close & Personal" and fire Beam Weaponry.
Or when they merge their Warp Bubbles and get "Up Close & Personal" and fire Beam Weaponry.
I figured in TOS, both phasers and photon torpedoes have a range of ~100,000 km (~1/3 light second). Battles between ships are in the tens of thousands of kilometers, so, I think merging warp bubbles are not the answer.
We also see both phaser and torpedo shots take more than one or two seconds from shooting to hitting the target, so, maybe something else is afoot (or maybe this is only dramatic license
) such that the speed of these weapons is less than 1/2 the speed of light. I feel combat consists of using your sensors and targeting computer to intercept the target (whether moving sublight or warp speeds), basically, you try to simply put the weapon effect in front of the target betting on that ship (and its command crew if they are in the loop) not being able to react fast enough to dodge the blast and runs into it.
I ginned up this graphic to put a sense of distances involved:
We also see both phaser and torpedo shots take more than one or two seconds from shooting to hitting the target, so, maybe something else is afoot (or maybe this is only dramatic license
) such that the speed of these weapons is less than 1/2 the speed of light. I feel combat consists of using your sensors and targeting computer to intercept the target (whether moving sublight or warp speeds), basically, you try to simply put the weapon effect in front of the target betting on that ship (and its command crew if they are in the loop) not being able to react fast enough to dodge the blast and runs into it.I ginned up this graphic to put a sense of distances involved:
Last edited:
I figured in TOS, both phasers and photon torpedoes have a range of ~100,000 km (~1/3 light second). Battles between ships are in the tens of thousands of kilometers, so, I think merging warp bubbles are not the answer.
We also see both phaser and torpedo shots take more than one or two seconds from shooting to hitting the target, so, maybe something else is afoot (or maybe this is only dramatic license
I ginned up this graphic to put a sense of distances involved:
I agree that merging warp bubbles, especially in TOS, is not the answer.
I have a different take but very similar thoughts to yours.
There appears to be a range where ships at warp or sublight almost never miss which is under 100,000 Km. And there are ranges that is well beyond 100,000 Km where the odds for landing a hit are not 100%. For example, in "Balance of Terror", the Enterprise's proximity phasers are still in range while outside of the Romulan's plasma torpedo range which is almost 2 minutes at warp. "Obsession" does put a maximum phaser range of less than "0.04 Light Years". If you include TMP, torpedoes those can range up to 40 AU (or 1 AU if it is the Director's Edition) for a very large target not dodging at warp.
As to time-of-flight I think it is a bit subjective for the speed of the weapons as there is usually a camera cut from when they are fired to when the target is hit or reacts. But I do agree that they are probably being fired into the path of the target as the range and relative speed difference increases.
I stick with the TNG Technical Manual, and they say that the Phasers are:
To me, that means that the phasers can effectively hit & do damage to the target, it isn't a particle beam cohesion problem, or a sensor targeting problem; but the fact that in the time span of 1 second, most targets of similar size & manueverability would be able to move enough that your hit rate would be acceptable.
To me, "Acceptable Levels of Hit" would be (> 60% or "D-" levels if you use Grade School Letter Ranking).
But at those ranges, you shouldn't expect too much, simply hitting the target is "Good Enough" since you're at the point in a fight where you're wearing each others shields down, it's a war of attrition.
You haven't gotten to the point where one side needs to decide if the fight is worth continuing, or going in close & take risks to change the tide of the fight, or should they retreat and run away to live and fight another day.
Remember, at those distances, it takes the phaser beam ~1 second to reach the target at that range.
Then there's the fact that the ship is depending on "Super Luminal Sensors" to see where the target is moving.
Obviously, if you're depending on raw light to come back and give you feed back, it takes 1 second for a beam to get there, another second for any reaction to happen.
That's 2 seconds in total to see if your beam hits/miss/gets deflected/etc. That's not counting the latency any computer enhanced imagery would be needed to process that incoming light and presenting the targeting HUD, that adds latency, no matter how you slice it.
Ask any gamer if 2 seconds of latency in a fast paced FPS is viable, I can gurantee you that at 2 second lag is near impossible to practically hit any target.
Assuming the target isn't moving in a predictable pattern or is standing still, that they are actively trying to dodge your phasers by jerking around randomly in a 2D plane, relative to your beam emissions, it become VERY hard to hit a target that is actively trying to dodge your shots and fire back.
During the TNG era, any phaser battles at warp, they have been in spitting distance with each other usually.
Very much WVR (Within Visual Range) combat.
Like when the Prometheus-class is being stolen by the Romulans, the phaser fight was so close, that you could chuck a baseball in a EV suit and reasonably expect to hit the broad side of the targeted ship.
Even at a leisurely 5c, a 300m ship can move 1.5 million km in a second. The firing ship wouldn't be able to aim directly at the target even if it was 300,000 km away as by the time the beam arrived the ship is already gone. The only way for a phaser (or disruptor) to work in a FTL situation is to be also FTL and fast enough to make dodging at 100,000 km away nearly impossible.
The same would apply for sensors while at warp. We don't hear about the need to merge warp fields for sensors to work out to dozens of light years
However, I'm just thinking specifically of TOS. Post-TOS the tech for the stories got changed up so that warp, impulse, phasers, etc all work differently than in TOS even though the changes are a bit unnecessary, IMHO.
Personally, I think the (8)2 AU diameter is the whole wispy bulk of the cloud seen in the first shot of the movie, and again when the Enterprise first gets to it, while the "tornado" section with the distinctive shape is probably much smaller (given that you can't even see it from the whole scope of the cloud).
You can't use visual effects to estimate distances in-universe, the dialog makes it clear that the exterior shots are figurative. Plus, the logic, except for NEM, battles at warp speed typically had the pursuer knock the pursuer out of warp, then come out later without having overtaken them.
Battles at warp speed never made much sense. The ships are so small cosmically and moving so fast that dodging either phaser fire or torpedoes at warp would only require the mildest 'twitch' in course or speed, generating enormous displacements in almost zero time.
Could a ship firing at warp hit a subwarp, almost stationary target? Maybe. If the target was big enough and stationary enough. Still a tough fire control problem requiring FTL sensors to even contemplate.
Just like warp speed, Trek battles happen at the whim of plot.
Could a ship firing at warp hit a subwarp, almost stationary target? Maybe. If the target was big enough and stationary enough. Still a tough fire control problem requiring FTL sensors to even contemplate.
Just like warp speed, Trek battles happen at the whim of plot.
That's news to me, I treat VFX Canon as equivalent to Lore Canon.
Knocking them out of Warp traps them in that local area, plus you can use Torpedoes & Beam Weaponry to their full potential.
It's almost always advantageous to have a STL battle instead of a running FTL battle.
There have been too many times when we've heard "the enemy ship is ten thousand kilometers away" and cut to the exterior when they're five or six ship-lengths apart.
That's not the part that I take issue with, it's that, if the following ship drops out of warp five seconds after the damaged ship does, it'll still be behind them instead of having overtaken them by hundreds of thousands or millions of kilometers (again, except for NEM, where they show the Scimitar passed the Enterprise and had to turn back around once it dropped to sublight).
Short of "Direct Contradictions", I treat most VFX as Visual Canon unless there is a quoted contradiction.
If the pilot of the chasing vessel was paying attention, they would be following the vessel at speed and be keeping pace with the vessel, ahead of the Captain's orders.
Ergo, the moment the target starts slowing down or shifting out of FTL, the pilot would do the exact same thing, LONG before the Captain gives the order.
Ideally, phasers should be pretty useless at warp and photon/quantum torpedoes would be the only viable FTL weapon, IMO. But because they just had to have phasers behave at warp the same way they do at sublight, we have to assume that a ship's warp field is as conveniently big as the plot of a story requires it to be in order for phasers to hit an enemy vessel in another conveniently compatible warp field.
It's a bit more pronounced in later Trek because the powers that are in charge believe it is cooler to see ships slug it out at point-blank (and miss!) for no particular reason than fight at a distance, IMHO.
Examples:
Lantree at 40 Km
Romulan Scout at 5 Km
Yes, in "Elaan of Troyius" we see a Klingon Battlecruiser (warp) successfully hit a much slower, but maneuvering, Enterprise (impulse) with disruptors.
In "Journey to Babel" we see an Enterprise (with no power to the engines) hit with phasers an Orion ship approaching at above light speed.
FTL combat in TOS was one of the special aspects of the show signifying that they had fantastic technology (in the same way the Enterprise sported thin pylons for the warp nacelles.) YMMV.
Last edited:
Warp Fields generally should all follow similar principles of operation, regardless of Warp Engine types.
We've seen merging of Warp Fields in ST: ENT, you have to get pretty damn close to merge Warp Fields, that causes shaking throughout the vessel.
Otherwise, if you're close, but not close enough to merge Warp Fields, then that's a whole other proposition like what we saw with the USS Prometheus being hi-jacked and having a "Very Close Range" phaser battle at warp speeds.
Also Warp Fields have a Logarithmic Power Scaling relative to distance away from the Warp Engine Emission point.
While they may function the same, I don't they are exactly the same, especially if they are from different civilizations.
That's kind of what I meant. The warp fields have to somehow merge together in order for a phaser beam to pass unaffected between ships. If they're not merged, a phaser beam has to leave one warp field, enter sublight, and then enter the other ship's moving warp field, all without losing any energy in the process. From FTL to STL and then back to FTL again.
The fundamental principles should be similar enough that you can merge warp fields with Warp Drives between nearly any civilizations or get close to each other.
The thing I've seen is that the Warp Field isn't a binary On/Off, there's a gradual change to the intensity of the Warp Field, ergo we're able to see the USS Prometheus running battle at Warp Speeds when ships are close enough. Given how wide I've shown warp fields to spread apart from the ship, you can see ships easily have warp fields touching w/o merging of the Warp Bubbles.
Every FTL Phaser battle, if you pay attention to the ships spacing, everybody looks like they're ≤ 1 km distance from each other.
In terms of space battles, that might as well be a "Knife Fight" in a phone booth.
It goes well beyond Space Combat CQC or CQB.
It's the equivalent of 2x soldiers literally being ≤ 100 meters away from each other and shooting at each other while manuevering.
That's your take on it, and that's totally fine. I myself think it's a lot more complicated than that and involves a bit of handwaving to make it plausible, but I'm not going to argue it.
Similar threads
