It might be possible to detect and evade a torpedo that's on a remote countdown (if they can detect incoming phaser or disruptor fire, a remote-controlled torpedo should be easy, IMO).
Perhaps. But wouldn't all torpedoes be "remote-controlled" anyway? That is, the option of remote control would always be available, the channel for an abort command always open. The enemy then couldn't tell whether the incoming torpedo is going to explode on impact, or at the push of a button, until at the moment the button was pushed - which would probably be too late.
Of course, perhaps the enemy computer could react to the abort command it hears, and optimize the shields in a split second. And perhaps it would react incorrectly when you did the detonation in an unconventional manner, such as firing a phaser at your torp.
But more importantly, all the explosions occurred at point-blank range which is different to the shockwave as depicted in the Voyager episode. The shockwave wasn't pivotal to the destruction of the cloud and amoeba creature.
Quite true. I was approaching this more from the direction of this "photonic shockwave" being something routine in all torpedo detonations. That is, I wanted to eliminate the idea that this never previously heard bit of technobabble would be something that nails down the specific techno-nature of the "Workforce" trick, when the trick could have been based on perfectly routine things instead.
Although writers can find it useful for creating temporal rifts, soliton and gravity wave disruptions and other fun and non-photonic stuff
True enough again. And while a "photonic shockwave" (i.e. an EM wavefront) is the thing a real m/am explosion would most probably create, it is very beneficial to think that such explosions in the Trek universe have profound "secondary" effects. These would help explain why photon torpedo explosions sometimes are much more powerful than one would expect them to be, sometimes much less so, despite taking place in seemingly neutral and well understood vacuum. We just have to accept that we
don't understand vacuum the way the 24th century people do - and that things of subspace or gravity nature are the underlying basis for much of Trek's technology which thus is quite susceptible to anything that rattles subspace or gravity.
But say "photonic shockwave", "photonic matter", etc in TOS and perhaps TNG and the characters might look at you funny
Yeah. But retconning "photonic shockwave" as the standard term for what bursts out from a photon torpedo explosion sounds like such a simple and elegant thing to do...
Of course, it would also be attractive to create some sort of a common interpretation for "photonics" in the 24th century. The word usually seems to refer to the basic nature of holograms; it might be something as generic as "the art of manipulating electromagnetic radiation to precise shapes". In which case the tools for that manipulation might include holoemitters and photon torpedoes alike, and the trick in "Workforce" would lie in the exact contouring of that EM wavefront.
They could've fired a "photonic missile" or "photonic charges" or a host of "photonic gear" that might not actually be the same as a matter-antimatter warhead "photon torpedo".
Perhaps. But we're dealing with a seriously undercrewed ship here: anything that requires unusual use of physical gear is going to be less probable than ever under these circumstances. A century prior, in ST6:TUC, it took the physical presence of two experts in the torpedo tube to create a special weapon. Even in the 2370s, it might not be possible to whip up a special "photonic warhead" just because a powerful AI in command of the ship's systems asks for one.
Which is basically why I want to root for maximally basic, standardized gear and approach here, ranging from the interpretation of "photonic shockwave" to the speculation on the kill hardware used. We'd be seeing the ship's standard systems in action, merely commanded by a tactically innovative new character.
Interestingly, a phaser detonating a photon torpedo doesn't seem all that different than a photon torpedo exploding just away from an enemy ship.
True. But photon torpedoes in general
are supposed to be good weapons for harming enemy ships. Perhaps nothing more was needed beyond a standard detonation - provided that the detonation happened at the correct spot? Note that Kim had had trouble penetrating the enemy shields, so the enemy kept attacking in a deadly coordinated formation; the ECH then uses this new tactic; and the enemy no longer attacks in a coordinated formation. We don't see the enemy destroyed by the effect, merely deterred; and when three more enemy units arrive to launch a new coordinated attack, the ECH sees retreat as the only option.
So perhaps the new tactic wasn't any more destructive than one would expect. Perhaps the means of detonation didn't increase the power of the explosion at all. Perhaps the effect the ECH aimed for, and achieved, was the disruption of the attack formation - a reasonable goal, and a plausible effect from the use of a single torpedo.
Timo Saloniemi
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