collimated phaser arrays

[Justicar]

Hi All,

I have a tech/timeline question and was hoping you could help me out. When does the Federation go from the paired phaser emitters (ala Ent-A) to the collimated phaser arrays/strips (ala Ent-D)? I don't just mean when do they become standard in the fleet, but when would be the earliest they'd start to be deployed? That could include prototype, upgrades to pre-existing ships, new construction, etc.

I ask because I'm working on a non-canon resin model and I've been searching for ways to differentiate it, rather than continuously recycling pre-existing parts. If it matters, I've tentatively placed this ship's launch as 2298.

Thanks in advance.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

I would guess around the time the Enterprise C was commissioned which was around 2332 (at least as said on Memory Alpha).


CuttingEdge100

 

[StolenThunder]

Firing (haha) this over to Trek Tech.

 

[Timo]

The specifics of this are going to be really assumption-ridden no matter what...

We might assume that registry numbers are roughly chronological, at least on the 24th century. We could then observe that the lowest-registered ships with strip phasers are the Ambassadors at NCC-10000 or so, while the highest-registered ships that still retain turret phasers are the highest-registered Excelsiors or Excelsior kitbashes, at around NCC-52000. But perhaps the Ambassadors originally had turrets, and were only refitted with strips just in time for the first onscreen appearance of that type in 2344 ("Yesterday's Enterprise")?

We might also assume that the strips were very difficult to install on small or medium types. After the Ambassadors, with onscreen registries ranging from 10000 to 26000, the next class with strips would be the equally large Niagara, with registries around 28000 but also around 59000. It's first with the Steamrunner at 54000 that we see strips on a medium type.

Then there remains the problem of establishing how these registries match calendar years. We know that NCC-57000 already existed in 2347, in time for the backstory of "The Wounded", so the strip phasers of medium ships came before that - and this holds true even if we don't assume chronological registries, because the ship with NCC-57000 did have strips. And we can suspect that the Ambassador class didn't debut until the early 24th century. But we can't narrow it down better than that by onscreen references, and the recent Tech Manuals don't get much more exact than that, either.

To be sure, there's a confusing reference in the DS9 TM about the strip phasers of DS9 being recycled hardware from old Soyuz class ships. But we heard and saw in "Cause and Effect" that the Soyuz class was retired in the 2280s, and that it had turrets rather than strips in the 2270s...

In short, your version works just fine for the earliest introduction of this technology, but (by these assumptions) Starfleet apparently keeps on using turrets in parallel with strips for a long time, the first quarter of the 24th century at least, and doesn't introduce all that many small or medium classes with strips until the 2340s.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JNG]

I suspect that, as the Galaxy was the summit of a generation of technology rather than the debut of a whole lot of new and visually unfamiliar elements, the Ambassador was probably the summit of hers, meaning that I imagine smaller ships started debuting some of the features we see in her years and years before.

I'd personally place Ambassador possibly as late as 2335-2340 and have smaller ships start featuring littler versions of the phaser strips on the hulls maybe ten years before that.

They may not become universal, though; as far as I can tell, for example, the Norway-class ships do not have any. You've got a lot of leeway.

 

[Vance]

The first time we see 'collimaters', effectively, would be on the USS Reliant in TWOK. (Watch the movie, they behave EXACTLY the same as the phaser strips later). At that point, they're pretty new, and obviously not in common service. So, we have a date for the 2270s for their first use. (Making some big assumptions, natch.)

Regular use seems to come between the launch of the Excelsior class (B), which uses the standard 'ball turrets' all over the frickin' place, and the Ambassador (in the 2340s), which uses the strips. It's possible that the weapon design hadn't matured enough over ball turrets for the Excelsior age (2285-2320), but it had for large vessels by the 2340s.

 

[Plecostomus]

Refitting of the new collimated arrays could be limited to ships that have the internal space below the hull to fit the new equipment. Instead of a discrete room with the phaser-hoobie and the power conduit you now have machinery/equipment spread across several compartments or across a void area below the inner and outer hulls.

The Soyuz class Miranda-like-ship could have been retired and another Soyuz class could have taken it's place... or maybe componants from the Soyuz class could have been recycled and reassembled as collimated arrays.

 

[Justicar]

Thanks for all the answers. There's some interesting thinking there. In no particular order...

@Vance -- I don't disbelieve you; I'm just not sure I understand. You mean the rapid-fire/pulse firing Reliant used? I was thinking more along the lines of the Ent-D, where a bright point starts at each end of the strip, then each moves toward the center, joining and firing. You would consider those to be, for all intents and purposes, the same?

@Union Elf -- Interesting point on space requirements. I wonder what the benefits and detractions from strips over turrets are?

@JNG -- That's more or less my understanding, that certain ships were the culmination of various technologies that had been developed and deployed in previous ships. Memory Alpha lists the Ent-C as being destroyed in 2344. Apocrypha under the Ent-B listing lists the Ent-C as being commissioned in 2332 (as CuttingEdge pointed out).

@Timo -- I think I understand what you're getting at, but I'm not sure I can agree. One thing you didn't cover was how the recycling of ship names/registries fits into this, e.g. 1701-C. I don't know if there's onscreen evidence to support this or not, but I would assume that if 1701 is continuously recycled, then other registries would be as well. IOW, I'm not sure that a strict adherrence to registry-code as timeline can be used to here. But it is a good way of looking at it.

In general, I think I agree most with what JNG has had to say. I'd like to say that Vance has the best take (and indeed he might), I'm just concerned that that would be self-serving. I would at least like to be able to justify it in my own mind. I might make the model anyway, just because I think it'll look cool, but I would probably consider it to be a refit type deal.

Anyway, thanks for responding everybody. Definitely have something to think about.

 

[Vance]

I don't disbelieve you; I'm just not sure I understand. You mean the rapid-fire/pulse firing Reliant used? I was thinking more along the lines of the Ent-D, where a bright point starts at each end of the strip, then each moves toward the center, joining and firing. You would consider those to be, for all intents and purposes, the same?

Look carefully at the 'rollbar' phasers on the Reliant. They track and flow just like the later collimaters. They're not rapid-firing, they're flowing down the links. (The best shot to watch for is the first one, where the banks start at the fore, and track back along the length of the emitter banks.)

The behavior stuck with me when I was attempting to draw them correctly (no one ever does, it seems, even the official schematics are off on them). They're not exactly the same as TNG, naturally, but they can easily be seen as a precursor of technology.

 

[Timo]

Umm, perhaps. Good observations in any case!

What this part of the model really seems to have in the way of phaserlike features is the forward and aft points to those "rollbar shoulder" cylinders, plus two standard ball turrets on the outer/upper side of each cylinder. Those ball turrets are even marked the "standard" way: each is flanked by yellow, red-lined squares, much like the twin banks on the saucer are.

In the first battle, Khan seems to fire a pulse from the forwardmost of the side ball turrets in the portside cylinder, both on his first and second volley, rapidly paired with another pulse from the aftmost side ball turret - not really different from Kirk firing a pulse from the lower bow twin bank, first from the portside turret, then the starboard one. No fire seems to be coming from the forward vertex of the cylinder, and we are indeed left to doubt whether that vertex is a phaser emitter at all.

In the nebula battle, the forward (and perhaps also aft) vertices of both cylinders glow white-hot. Khan's forward fire in the head-on encounter does seem to come from these forward vertices now, but it could just as well be that it's slight VFX drift and the forwardmost cylinder-side ball turrets are once again to blame.

So essentially we could be talking conventional ball turret technology, installed on the side of a cylinder whose forward and aft ends aren't a novel kind of phaser emitter at all, but rather some sort of sensors, deflectors, heat dissipators, or even simple searchlights. FWIW, the cylinder ends have the same sort of nested structure of concentric cylinder shapes that the bow of Kirk's secondary hull does...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JNG]

^Is it wrong to want the terminology "megaphaser" to die either way?

 

[Timo]

You mean that "megaphaser" isn't appropriate for a weapon that at point blank range causes less damage in two volleys than standard ones previously did in one long range shot?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Justicar]

^Is it wrong to want the terminology "megaphaser" to die either way?

Yes. Yes it is.

Here's how I think of it: Heavy cruiser is a type of ship, while Constitution is a class within that type. Similarly, "megaphaser" and "phaser" are types of directed energy weapons, each coming in various classes. Yes, I know that phasers are normally listed as "Type **." AFAIC that's simply a change in terminology, e.g., not being consistent. It's the methodology that's important. Note that I'm not saying that I'm right, just that that's how I think about it.

You mean that "megaphaser" isn't appropriate for a weapon that at point blank range causes less damage in two volleys than standard ones previously did in one long range shot?

Timo Saloniemi

Hasn't it been established that directed energy weapons that are used within a nebula (and other space phenomena) have their capabilities diminished? Sometimes dramatically so? That could be due to attenuation, defraction, diffusion, having the targeting computer frakked due to electromagetic storm surges, etc.

Regardless, remember that plot > physics.

 

[Timo]

...Except that the diminished capabilities were evident primarily outside the nebula, not inside it.

Basically, there's nothing to suggest that the roll bar ball turrets were any "better" than the saucer ball turrets. Only that they were the ones the most conveniently located for firing at a target off the portside bow.

Beyond that, one can argue that Khan's initial battle shots were meant to wound, not kill; Kirk's initial ones were from a badly crippled ship; and those nebula battle shots of his that didn't cause major damage were meant to wound. This only leaves Khan's nebula battle shots, which were on the wimpy side unless we evoke the "nebula damps phasers" theory.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Justicar]

Alright, just watch watched TWOK again, on an HDTV. First, I don't see Reliant's phasers behaving like Vance is describing. Maybe I'm missing something, but three of watched the battled scenes several times (including in slow motion and frame by frame) and none of us saw it.

Also, Reliant only fires phasers from the front rollbar (with a rather large arc to the side). She doesn't fire any other phasers. Her phasers outside the nebula do a lot more damage than the salvo from within the nebula. Yes, the latter resulted in knocking the main engines offline, but that was a jury-rigged repair to a section that was already directly hit.

I don't think "shooting to wound vs. shooting to kill" can be argued, at least not when they're in the nebula. Those were clearly stated as "best guess" shots.

I suppose it's all rather academic, in that what one does with a fan ship really isn't all that important (i.e. the point of my question). I think it's probably stretching it for me to use collimator strips, but I'll probably end up doing it just because I think it'll look good. Well, I'll actually end up doing both.

Anyway, thank you everyone for your thoughts.

 

[Unicron]

* chuckles about megaphasers *

I've always tended to view those as sort of heavier phasers than are often carried, to give some of the frigate and destroyer designs more punch without having to devote space to more torpedo systems. I think Ships of the Star Fleet had one design (perhaps it was the Daran?) that carried such a system in place of torpedoes, since it saved space and resources.

 

[Timo]

Yup. Or to nitpick, it was the Knox, a closely related design.

However, I'm definitely seeing what Vance is seeing, just reading it differently. Khan's first shot doesn't originate merely from the bow emitter of the portside phaser cylinder: as more and more of those brief pulses come out, their point of origin wanders to the side of that cylinder, where there indeed are two distinct phaser turrets in the model. It would seem that, although some of the effects in this movie were done on the cheap by recycling TMP elements, the bright colors people were in very good cooperation with the modelmakers and the motion control folks, and put their phaser flashes right where the designers had intended. No such drift is observed when the beams are supposed to come from Kirk's saucer phaser turrets, for example, so it's unlikely to be a VFX error.

As for these cylinders possessing stronger phasers than the saucer... No technological objections. Indeed, many theoretically weak warships of yore were utilized for mounting superpowerful guns, not necessarily as compensation for their weakness but because it would have been wasteful to put this special powerful shore bombardment artillery aboard a more capable ship-to-ship combatant. So if we want to think that Khan's ship was weaker than Kirk's to start with, she might have been a preferred platform for some heavy metal. Not that I'd see any reason to think of the [i]Reliant[/I] as inferior to the refitted Enterprise to begin with.

The evidence of distinctly greater firepower from the cylinders is still missing, though. In the nebula, Kirk shows what phasers can really do even when fired at "wound" when he neatly guts Khan's portside nacelle with a single shot, then goes for some overkill with that torpedo that knocks the lost nacelle completely off. But all of the shots fired in the movie are still in the same general ballpark: cuts through some hull metal, makes a mess of the innards, doesn't come out from the other side. That's way weaker than what phasers in TOS or TNG tended to do against unshielded targets (because the VFX technology only allowed the showing of massive devastation, not the blowing of minor holes in hulls), or how the DS9 weapons savaged their victims.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[SicOne]

I'm sure the phaser strip idea was used on a prototype before being worked into the Ambassador-class design (can you imagine an Oberth-class fitted with a small strip in the front of the laboratory module? Something like that could be a nasty surprise for a lurking Bird-of-Prey a la Star Trek 3) as proof-of-concept.

The more interesting question is, since the phaser strip is more efficient than the ball-turret design (or else presumably post-Ambassador ship designs would have reverted back to ball-turret phasers...), why would not earlier ships be retrofitted to phaser strips? Can you picture a refit-Constitution-class or Excelsior-class fitted with strips? Or the USS Lakota in "Paradise Lost", squaring against the Defiant with strips instead of balls?

I am thinking that even though the warp core channels energy directly to the phasers, that the power requirements (both in amount and sustainability) for phaser strips are such that only the presumably larger warp cores of the Ambassador-and Galaxy, et al, could do the job. There is nothing to say that an Excelsior, for example, couldn't be refitted with a more powerful warp core (or even a second warp core, just for weapons systems/shields), but there must be a reason we haven't seen refitted earlier ships with strips.

 

[Vance]

It's tough to say how big a ship would have to be for the 'strips' as we see them in TNG, but we don't know TOO much about how they're laid out (the error-ridden TNG tech manual aside). I don't see why an Excelsior wouldn't be laid out with them as part of an uprating, for instance (aside from the studio not wanting to alter the model), or maybe a Miranda or Constitution class ship... it really depends on, internally, how much more volume these things take.

 

[Praetor]

There could also be power concerns... maybe there has to be some special EPS subprocessor installed as part of the warp core for them to work, or somesuch and older ships just aren't compatible, so instead Starfleet developed alternate, equivalent versions of the turret phasers that are not as versatile and almost as powerful?