Do phaser arrays amplify energy, or merely direct it?

[blssdwlf]

Which doesn't change that in BOBW they couldn't fire the main deflector dish immediately.

Yes they could. The "arming sequence" took a matter of seconds, if that; the only thing that prevented them from firing it was their desire to NOT vaporize Captain Picard and the away team in the process.

Nope, at least 2 minutes. If you watch the beginning of Part 2, you'll see that they still have another 8 seconds of charging time before it is ready to fire.

LAFORGE: Deflector power approaching maximum limits. Energy discharge in six seconds.
​

From WHAT?

From NOT WHAT?

Precision is used to prevent misunderstandings, not to restate things that everyone in the room already knows.

And how do you know that everyone on the bridge already knows?

In "The Wounded" there was no guessing or approximation as far as the overlay was concerned regarding the two ship's weapons ranges. In "Sons and Daughters" there was room for approximation since they added "estimated" into the dialogue.

By "they" you mean "Alexander," the ship's resident rookie who fifteen minutes later locked himself into the engine room. As it stands, Alexander's penchant for precision is already irritating enough when Martok asks him "What of the Jem'Hadar?" and Alexander answers "Which one?"

Which doesn't change that when the range is "estimated", it is in the dialogue.

It doesn't change the fact that firing range BY DEFINITION is an approximation; strictly speaking its a function of probability, not the actual reach of those weapons. This is what the Rotarran's tactical officer means when he says "They're out of range." He isn't saying their disruptor bolts will mysteriously vanish before they hit the target, he's saying that the Jem'hadar ship is too far away for him to score a hit.

Or that being "out of range" the weapon energy will no longer be of any effect or dissipate into something harmless even if it struck it's target.

What's not clear from "Shunt all the plasma"? It's all the plasma the ship has

See, it's that second part you're injecting in there as if it's clear when it isn't. "All the plasma the ship has" isn't stated in that line; it's just as likely to be "all the plasma in the dorsal capacitor bank."

They're trying to max out their phasers onto the drone. If they had plasma left over in other banks, they would've used extra strips and fired extra beams. They did not. Instead, they put "All The Plasma" into one phaser beam to increase power. Since the ship runs on plasma then the only answer is "all the plasma" the ship has.

Geordi isn't meaning to make himself understood by the audience, he means to make himself understood by Barclay in particular, who -- unlike the audience -- knows EXACTLY what he's talking about.

Which again, is "all the plasma". Laforge and Barclay do not exchange any information on specifically which system the plasma is coming from which leaves us with all the plasma the ship has to spare for the phaser beam.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

What you are talking about are improvements in weaponry

No I am not. You do not use kinetic projectiles the same way you use directed energy weapons; it's an entirely different type of weapon requiring an entirely different set of tactics. It's almost as great as the difference between airborne infantry and cavalry.

Ships bring guns and torpedoes to fight against other ships and from the looks of pre-ENT

Pre-ENT is what we have NOW, and the late 21st/early 22nd century technology is an improvement on that. Earth Starfleet in the Pre-ENT era is known canonically to use "primitive atomic weapons and primitive space vessels" which would have included advanced versions of the types of kinetic kill vehicles we currently use today. That is an entirely different kind of combat with entirely different kinds of tactics wherein your weapons become more effective the higher your relative velocity.

What severe damage are you talking about?

The damage it took Kirk and his Vulcan accomplices three months to repair.

4 phaser banks simultaneously through the standard pair of emitters on the Enterprise.

I've already conceded that you're unable or unwilling to recognize how utterly retarded that sounds, but you ARE smart enough to realize that TOS managed to pad about thirty seconds of FX footage into three seasons of television. The more literally you try to interpret that footage, the less sense it makes.

The strength of the field of fire is irrelevant for both ships when a single beam in TNG or a pair of beams from TOS can channel all the power of the firing ship.

No it can't, as per Paradise Syndrome, where FOUR phaser banks can channel the full power of the engines and a single bank cannot.

And if he energized phasers it would've tipped Kruge off

Right. So if Kruge had approached from the rear aspect, Kirk would have had to energize phasers, thus tipping Kruge off.

We do know Stargazer's final position to the E-D since we're shown where it drops out of warp. The tractor beam doesn't even engage until a few seconds after the Stargazer has stopped.

Incorrect. The tractor beam locks onto Stargazer while it is still moving forward; after grabbing the ship, Stargazer is shown listing slightly port and then starboard as its engines struggle against the hold of the beam.

If it is like the TOS Enterprise it can channel all it's power through a pair of emitters

And you're still going to try and claim that phaser banks and phaser EMITTERS are two completely different things, which is just plain idiotic. Either way it doesn't apply to Stargazer, which is NOT the TOS Enterprise.

As Timo points out, the FX doesn't support any scattering of the disruptor but actually causing it to miss the Defiant.

Yes, deflecting it away from the ship or otherwise screwing with the Klingons' targeting mechanisms. Either way, it doesn't have much to do with their field of fire and everything to do with the interference from the beam.

And I've proved that ships have 360 firing arcs

Of course they do. Just not from their main weapons, which is the point. The fact that this isn't relevant to a tactical analysis has to do with the nature of the tactics themselves; your objection was that it SHOULD be relevant, but you never did get around to backing that up.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Nope, at least 2 minutes. If you watch the beginning of Part 2, you'll see that they still have another 8 seconds of charging time before it is ready to fire.

The weapon is already armed and ready by the time Riker orders them to fire; it takes eight seconds to build up the discharge, much the way a phaser bank takes .5 to 1 second to circle the array and spit out a beam.

It's actually likely that the deflector was ready a few seconds after they adjusted the frequency and closed the circuits to the warp drive.

And how do you know that everyone on the bridge already knows?

Same reason I can assume that an English teacher knows how to read: he wouldn't be there if he didn't.

Which doesn't change that when the range is "estimated", it is in the dialogue.

It's only in dialog when spoken by someone like Alexander or (early TNG) Data who have a tendency of being pendantic. OTOH, neither Riker nor Wesley use the word "estimate" to describe the time to intercept the Borg ship or its arrival time over Earth, despite the fact that this cannot be anything OTHER than an estimate.

Or that being "out of range" the weapon energy will no longer be of any effect or dissipate into something harmless even if it struck it's target.

Because even if that WERE the case, those weapons would follow a power law where they dissipate gradually, not INSTANTLY. The effective range of those weapons would still be an estimate of their effectiveness, such that a certain range is given as "If we hit them it won't do enough damage" and anything closer than that is "If we hit them it WILL do enough damage." In that case there would be some evidence that phasers and/or photon torpedoes cause more damage at close range than they do at a distance; we already know from "Balance of Terror" that this is not the case, in fact the only weapon we know of that has that feature is the plasma torpedo from the same episode.

Either way, "effective range" is BY DEFINITION an estimation of the maximum distance at which a particular weapon can reliably strike its intended target. And even this is different from a weapon's PRACTICAL firing range, which is again different from its OPTIMUM firing range. Hell, some weapons even have a MINIMUM firing range for the same reasons (torpedoes and missiles in particular).

They're trying to max out their phasers onto the drone. If they had plasma left over in other banks they would've used extra strips and fired extra beams.

What does that mean "left over?" It's not as if the phaser banks are "loaded" with plasma and then fire it out into space.

Since the ship runs on plasma

The ship runs on electricity. Plasma is a medium for conducting high voltage electricity through the ship.

Which again, is "all the plasma"

And he again doesn't specify from what system he's drawing that power, whether it's the phaser power subsystem or even the power feeds from that particular array. There are a great many things he could be referring to; "all the plasma on the entire ship" is the least likely of these.

Laforge and Barclay do not exchange any information on specifically which system the plasma is coming from

Nor do they have to. Barclay knows what Geordi is talking about; in fact he knows it so well that he doesn't even let Geordi finish his sentence and he seems annoyed that he even bothered to tell him in the first place.

You've got to wonder how that sentence would have ended if Barclay hadn't interrupted him? Maybe "Divert all the plasma from the capacitor charging array into those emitters."

 

[blssdwlf]

Nope, at least 2 minutes. If you watch the beginning of Part 2, you'll see that they still have another 8 seconds of charging time before it is ready to fire.

The weapon is already armed and ready by the time Riker orders them to fire; it takes eight seconds to build up the discharge, much the way a phaser bank takes .5 to 1 second to circle the array and spit out a beam.

It's actually likely that the deflector was ready a few seconds after they adjusted the frequency and closed the circuits to the warp drive.

Nah. Laforge starts charging it 2 minutes prior to Riker calling it to fire and even after the order still takes 8 seconds to build up to the max power to fire.

Which doesn't change that in BOBW they couldn't fire the main deflector dish immediately. You'll notice that they have already dropped out of warp before charging up the deflector and two minutes go by.

WESLEY: Sir, they've done it. The Borg ship is dropping out of warp.
RIKER: Go to impulse.
WESLEY: Aye, sir.
LAFORGE: Diverting warp energy to main deflector.
RIKER: Move us to within forty thousand kilometres. Match velocity. Commence arming sequence. Increase deflector modulation to upper frequency band.
​

2 minutes and some seconds go by...

RIKER: Is the deflector ready?
LAFORGE: It's ready.
​

From this point to the time Riker orders the deflector to charge up it is more than 2 minutes till it is ready to fire. That is more energy than the ship puts out at any one time. They need more power than their weapons can provide which also happens to be more power than the ship puts out at any one time.

And how do you know that everyone on the bridge already knows?

Same reason I can assume that an English teacher knows how to read: he wouldn't be there if he didn't.

Just like I can assume that the ship's computer can determine the firing angles of the other ship's weapons from the sensors. If they can count the number of weapons they know where the weapons are and where they can fire.

It's only in dialog when spoken by someone like Alexander or (early TNG) Data who have a tendency of being pendantic. OTOH, neither Riker nor Wesley use the word "estimate" to describe the time to intercept the Borg ship or its arrival time over Earth, despite the fact that this cannot be anything OTHER than an estimate.

It would appear then that in Star Trek they only apply the word "estimate" under specific circumstances not to your liking.

Because even if that WERE the case, those weapons would follow a power law where they dissipate gradually, not INSTANTLY. The effective range of those weapons would still be an estimate of their effectiveness, such that a certain range is given as "If we hit them it won't do enough damage" and anything closer than that is "If we hit them it WILL do enough damage." In that case there would be some evidence that phasers and/or photon torpedoes cause more damage at close range than they do at a distance; we already know from "Balance of Terror" that this is not the case, in fact the only weapon we know of that has that feature is the plasma torpedo from the same episode.

In "Return to Grace", it is implied that distance does affect damage potential for Klingon Disruptors. The closer they are, the more damage.

DUKAT: Full power to forward shields.
KIRA: At this distance your shields won't mean much.

and in "The Doomsday Machine", Decker's new plan is to get much closer to destroy the machine with phasers.

DECKER: I made a mistake then. We were too far away. This time I'm going to hit it with full phasers at point-blank range.

Either way, "effective range" is BY DEFINITION an estimation of the maximum distance at which a particular weapon can reliably strike its intended target. And even this is different from a weapon's PRACTICAL firing range, which is again different from its OPTIMUM firing range. Hell, some weapons even have a MINIMUM firing range for the same reasons (torpedoes and missiles in particular).

You left out the other part of the definition for "effective range" where it includes the threshold to reliably damage or kill its intended target.

What does that mean "left over?" It's not as if the phaser banks are "loaded" with plasma and then fire it out into space.

The ship runs on electricity. Plasma is a medium for conducting high voltage electricity through the ship.

Which again, is "all the plasma"

And he again doesn't specify from what system he's drawing that power, whether it's the phaser power subsystem or even the power feeds from that particular array. There are a great many things he could be referring to; "all the plasma on the entire ship" is the least likely of these.

There could be a great many things he could be referring to, but since he says, "All the plasma" without specifying and he is trying increase the phaser output past it's "full" setting to destroy a dangerous target then the answer would be from the "entire ship". It isn't unusual since they discharge "ALL the EPS taps" into the phasers in "A Matter of Time".

Laforge and Barclay do not exchange any information on specifically which system the plasma is coming from

Nor do they have to. Barclay knows what Geordi is talking about; in fact he knows it so well that he doesn't even let Geordi finish his sentence and he seems annoyed that he even bothered to tell him in the first place.

You've got to wonder how that sentence would have ended if Barclay hadn't interrupted him? Maybe "Divert all the plasma from the capacitor charging array into those emitters."

It would've gone like this

LAFORGE: Attempting to now, Commander. Isolate phasers eighty to one twenty. Shunt all the plasma from the power grid
BARCLAY: To the emitters. Yes, sir, I'm already on it. Ready.
LAFORGE: Phasers are as hot as we can make them, Captain.

rather than

LAFORGE: Attempting to now, Commander. Isolate phasers eighty to one twenty. Shunt all the plasma from other arrays
BARCLAY: To the emitters. Yes, sir, I'm already on it. Ready.
LAFORGE: I've increased the phaser power, Captain. Next time just fire the other strips at the same time.

or

LAFORGE: Attempting to now, Commander. Activate all phaser strips.
BARCLAY: Yes, sir, I'm already on it. Ready.
LAFORGE: I've got as many phasers that we can fire at the same time ready, Captain.

 

[blssdwlf]

What you are talking about are improvements in weaponry

No I am not. You do not use kinetic projectiles the same way you use directed energy weapons; it's an entirely different type of weapon requiring an entirely different set of tactics. It's almost as great as the difference between airborne infantry and cavalry.

It all plays the same to me. There isn't that much of a difference between kinetic projectiles and torpedoes except for the guidance systems.

Ships bring guns and torpedoes to fight against other ships and from the looks of pre-ENT

Pre-ENT is what we have NOW, and the late 21st/early 22nd century technology is an improvement on that. Earth Starfleet in the Pre-ENT era is known canonically to use "primitive atomic weapons and primitive space vessels" which would have included advanced versions of the types of kinetic kill vehicles we currently use today.

"Primitive atomic weapons" would not automatically include kinetic kill vehicles. Just saying

That is an entirely different kind of combat with entirely different kinds of tactics wherein your weapons become more effective the higher your relative velocity.

How's that any different from getting hit by a photon torpedo at .6c?

The damage it took Kirk and his Vulcan accomplices three months to repair.

The only damage that appears to have been addressed was to Scotty's stomach via replacement of the food packs. Well that and the time to translate Klingon labels and convert it to something that the crew could fly home in.

I've already conceded that you're unable or unwilling to recognize how utterly retarded that sounds, but you ARE smart enough to realize that TOS managed to pad about thirty seconds of FX footage into three seasons of television. The more literally you try to interpret that footage, the less sense it makes.

I just call it as it is shown.

No it can't, as per Paradise Syndrome, where FOUR phaser banks can channel the full power of the engines and a single bank cannot.

As I said, 4 phaser banks simultaneously through the standard pair of emitters on the Enterprise. So for older ships, two emitters, two beams. The strength of the field of fire is irrelevant for both ships when a single beam in TNG or a pair of beams from TOS can channel all the power of the firing ship.

Right. So if Kruge had approached from the rear aspect, Kirk would have had to energize phasers, thus tipping Kruge off.

And the whole battle would've played out differently.

Incorrect. The tractor beam locks onto Stargazer while it is still moving forward; after grabbing the ship, Stargazer is shown listing slightly port and then starboard as its engines struggle against the hold of the beam.

The screen shots would disagree. The Stargazer stops off to the E-D's bow offset to the port side (from the bridge) and it doesn't go very far before it is tractored which we see. So we do know where the ship ends up.

And you're still going to try and claim that phaser banks and phaser EMITTERS are two completely different things, which is just plain idiotic. Either way it doesn't apply to Stargazer, which is NOT the TOS Enterprise.

Yep. In "Balance of Terror", phaser 1 and 2 fires 3 pulses each from the same locations. In "For the World is Hollow..." phaser 1 and 2 are fired at the same time in a double beam strike against the missiles. In "The Paradise Syndrome", phasers 1 thru 4 are fired sequentially through the same pair of emitters and then simultaneously through the same pair.

As to Stargazer, if it follows the same as TOS or TNG then it would likely be a full phaser strike via one or two beams (plus 6 torpedoes). Still, since we never did see a re-enactment or an external flashback, the phasers could work differently...

As Timo points out, the FX doesn't support any scattering of the disruptor but actually causing it to miss the Defiant.

Yes, deflecting it away from the ship or otherwise screwing with the Klingons' targeting mechanisms. Either way, it doesn't have much to do with their field of fire and everything to do with the interference from the beam.

Which is effecting the disruptor's field of fire.

And I've proved that ships have 360 firing arcs

Of course they do. Just not from their main weapons, which is the point. The fact that this isn't relevant to a tactical analysis has to do with the nature of the tactics themselves; your objection was that it SHOULD be relevant, but you never did get around to backing that up.

No, my point was that it would be relevant if there were some differentiation between the main weapons and their firing arcs. Since the weapons are able to fire at the same strength, there is no relevancy. That has nothing to do with the nature of the tactics.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Laforge starts charging it 2 minutes prior to Riker calling it to fire

LaForge starts ARMING it two minutes prior. We do not actually know when he finished that process.

Are you intentionally ignoring the fact that almost the entirety of that two minutes was consumed by the away team's abortive rescue mission?

Which doesn't change that in BOBW they couldn't fire the main deflector dish immediately.

I doubt the arming sequence for the deflector is any longer than that for the photon torpedoes, in which case it would have been ready by the time Shelby's team started firing their phasers.

More to the point, if the deflector is drawing power more than the ship can put out "at any one time" then it's drawing that power from some sort of capacitor bank and NOT the warp core. We know this isn't the case, because the deflector blast is drawing so much power that it completely overheats the main reactor in a manner not completely unlike what happened to the Enterpise in "Paradise Syndrome," which is funny, because it was the use of prolonged maximum warp plus the main deflector that was the origin of the problem back then as well.

That is more energy than the ship puts out at any one time.

This one isn't open to interpretation, blssdwlf. If the deflector was firing off "built up" energy than there wouldn't be any load on the warp core. Clearly there was, so you're wrong.

Just like I can assume that the ship's computer can determine the firing angles of the other ship's weapons from the sensors.

I'm sure there are all kinds of amazing things the ship's computer could be programmed to do if the need arose. That's a different question from whether or not it has, would, or should.

If they can count the number of weapons they know where the weapons are and where they can fire.

"Where they can fire" is not so simple a calculation. Again, just because I know where your arms are doesn't mean I know which way they can and cannot bend.

It would appear then that in Star Trek they only apply the word "estimate" under specific circumstances not to your liking.

They only apply the word "estimate" when they're trying to annoy their superiors.

In "Return to Grace", it is implied that distance does affect damage potential for Klingon Disruptors. The closer they are, the more damage.

DUKAT: Full power to forward shields.
KIRA: At this distance your shields won't mean much.

and in "The Doomsday Machine", Decker's new plan is to get much closer to destroy the machine with phasers.

Which doesn't change the fact that the attenuation of those weapons would be a gradual falloff of power, not a sudden cliff where the beam vanishes altogether within fifty meters.

You left out the other part of the definition for "effective range" where it includes the threshold to reliably damage or kill its intended target.

I didn't leave it out at all. I already stated upthread that that threshhold is a function of what someone considers "reliably." The effective firing range could be calculated VERY differently between two different sources if one considers a P/K value of 50% to be acceptable and another calculates for 60%.

There could be a great many things he could be referring to, but since he says, "All the plasma" without specifying

Again, why would he need to specify when the guy he's talking to already knows what he's asking him to do?

It isn't unusual since they discharge "ALL the EPS taps" into the phasers in "A Matter of Time".

"All the EPS taps" and "All the plasma" are two different things.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

What you are talking about are improvements in weaponry

No I am not. You do not use kinetic projectiles the same way you use directed energy weapons; it's an entirely different type of weapon requiring an entirely different set of tactics. It's almost as great as the difference between airborne infantry and cavalry.

It all plays the same to me. There isn't that much of a difference between kinetic projectiles and torpedoes

There's a rather huge difference since kinetic projectiles do not have warheads and the damage they cause is proportional to their closing velocity. In this sense, a ship will do less damage firing at you from a stationary position than it will from a high-speed slicing approach; this is the opposite case with directed energy weapons, where prolonged contact will cause more damage and you want to be as close to the enemy and with the least amount of relative motion possible without presenting too easy a target.

It's an entirely different type of combat altogether.

"Primitive atomic weapons" would not automatically include kinetic kill vehicles.

"Primitive space vessels" would. By implication, they would be armed with the same kind of weaponry as the ships that fought in World War-III.

How's that any different from getting hit by a photon torpedo at .6c?

Because the photon torpedo delivers its damage from the energy release of a matter/antimatter reaction; the damage it causes is a function of the torpedo's setting and NOT its relative velocity. So whether it hits you at .6C or .6kph, the damage it causes depends on the yield setting of the warhead first and foremost.

The likely reason for this is that all modern starships have deflector systems capable of pushing away ordinary projectiles hurtling towards them even at relativistic velocities; a photon torpedo can swim through those deflectors and still get within the effective blast radius of the target, even if it has to cover the last thousand meters at fifty kilometers per hour.

The only damage that appears to have been addressed was to Scotty's stomach via replacement of the food packs. Well that and the time to translate Klingon labels and convert it to something that the crew could fly home in.

No.

KIRK: Mister Scott!
SCOTT: Aye sir?
KIRK: How soon can we be underway?
SCOTT: Give me one more day, sir. Damage control is easy. Reading Klingon, That's hard.

I just call it as it is shown.

What is shown isn't meant to be taken literally, and you look kind of silly pretending that it was.

And the whole battle would've played out differently.

Significantly, it would have played out differently that Kruge intended. The key element to this engagement isn't his direction of approach, but whether or not he has the element of surprise. Kruge doesn't suspect for an instant that Enterprise can see him, so he doesn't take the ship's possible fields of fire into account. Significantly, neither does Chang, except in Chang's case that assumption is the correct one.

The pattern, here, is that the relative strength of main vs secondary weapons isn't worth consideration 99% of the time. That would mean the relative strength (in fact, POTENTIAL strength) of the saucer section's phaser banks wouldn't rate serious consideration either.

The screen shots would disagree. The Stargazer stops off to the E-D's bow offset to the port side (from the bridge)

Stargazer doesn't stop, though. Remember, the whole plan is to track Stargazer by using the compression wave in front of it as an aiming point. The idea is to grab it with a tractor beam BEFORE it's in firing position, which is exactly what they do. The most you can say is that Stargazer begins to decelerate right when it gets grabbed, but is still flying forward when the tractor beam hits it.

Which is effecting the disruptor's field of fire.

No, just its accuracy. It wouldn't be affecting its field of fire unless it were physically screwing with its aiming mechanism.

And I've proved that ships have 360 firing arcs

Of course they do. Just not from their main weapons, which is the point. The fact that this isn't relevant to a tactical analysis has to do with the nature of the tactics themselves; your objection was that it SHOULD be relevant, but you never did get around to backing that up.

No, my point was that it would be relevant if there were some differentiation between the main weapons and their firing arcs.

And there is. Starships with no aft torpedoes have that bigass blind spot in coverage with their torpedo launchers. Starships with no aft disruptors (the 23rd century Klingon and Romulan bird of prey, to name a few) have these blind spots for both torpedo AND disruptor weapons since all of their main weapons point directly in front.

Since the weapons are able to fire at the same strength

This is doubtful, since we know that phaser arrays are capable of discharging multiple emitters through a single beam. Ultimately, it's the fact that the output of multiple emitters will still be stronger than the output of a single one, regardless of the number of physical energy beams projected.

The simple fact is that, given equal outputs, a large collection of emitters can channel a larger amount of power than a smaller number of the same types. If the short strips have the same types of emitters, then even if each of them could channel the full power from the ship's entire power grid, the longer arrays would be able to channel even MORE power just by virtue of their ability to distribute the load more evenly. That means the only way the short strips could have equal power to the longer ones is if the galaxy class doesn't have enough power to max out the longer ones.

If you want to prove equal power of the short strips, you would need to find a situation where "all the plasma" or "all the EPS taps" are put into a phaser beam that fires from the SHORT STRIPS instead of the main phaser arrays on the saucer.

 

[blssdwlf]

Laforge starts charging it 2 minutes prior to Riker calling it to fire

LaForge starts ARMING it two minutes prior. We do not actually know when he finished that process.

Laforge starts charging it 2 minutes prior to Riker calling it to fire and even after the order still takes 8 seconds to build up to the max power to fire.

Which doesn't change that in BOBW they couldn't fire the main deflector dish immediately. You'll notice that they have already dropped out of warp before charging up the deflector and two minutes go by.

WESLEY: Sir, they've done it. The Borg ship is dropping out of warp.
RIKER: Go to impulse.
WESLEY: Aye, sir.
LAFORGE: Diverting warp energy to main deflector.
RIKER: Move us to within forty thousand kilometres. Match velocity. Commence arming sequence. Increase deflector modulation to upper frequency band.
​

2 minutes and some seconds go by...

RIKER: Is the deflector ready?
LAFORGE: It's ready.

...

RIKER: Mister Worf? Fire.
LAFORGE: Deflector power approaching maximum limits. Energy discharge in six seconds.
WORF: Firing, sir


​

From this point to the time Riker orders the deflector to charge up it is more than 2 minutes till it is ready to fire. That is more energy than the ship puts out at any one time. They need more power than their weapons can provide which also happens to be more power than the ship puts out at any one time.

Are you intentionally ignoring the fact that almost the entirety of that two minutes was consumed by the away team's abortive rescue mission?

Are you intentionally ignoring the fact that it still took them 2 minutes to charge up?

Which doesn't change that in BOBW they couldn't fire the main deflector dish immediately.

I doubt the arming sequence for the deflector is any longer than that for the photon torpedoes, in which case it would have been ready by the time Shelby's team started firing their phasers.

How is that when it still took a few seconds to max out the deflector even after Riker orders it to be fired?

More to the point, if the deflector is drawing power more than the ship can put out "at any one time" then it's drawing that power from some sort of capacitor bank and NOT the warp core. We know this isn't the case, because the deflector blast is drawing so much power that it completely overheats the main reactor in a manner not completely unlike what happened to the Enterpise in "Paradise Syndrome," which is funny, because it was the use of prolonged maximum warp plus the main deflector that was the origin of the problem back then as well.


This one isn't open to interpretation, blssdwlf. If the deflector was firing off "built up" energy than there wouldn't be any load on the warp core. Clearly there was, so you're wrong.

If the deflector fired off all of it's energy in one massive pulse, then yes, there wouldn't be any load on the warp core. But since it was a continuous beam then I would expect not only a load on the warp core but a very quick meltdown since the main deflector's energy drain would have exceeded the core's ability to keep up with the deflector and that is pretty much what happened.

COMPUTER: Warning. Warp reactor core primary coolant failure.
LAFORGE: Can't maintain it much longer, Commander.
COMPUTER: Warning. Exceeding reaction chamber thermal limit.
RIKER: Cease fire.
​

I'm sure there are all kinds of amazing things the ship's computer could be programmed to do if the need arose. That's a different question from whether or not it has, would, or should.

"Where they can fire" is not so simple a calculation. Again, just because I know where your arms are doesn't mean I know which way they can and cannot bend.

Fortunately for weapons its a bit simpler to calculate on the range of motion The capability to determine firing arcs is not outside of the sensor and computing capabilities of most ships in Star Trek.

They only apply the word "estimate" when they're trying to annoy their superiors.

Or relay to said superiors an amount of uncertainty that would warrant their attention. Or the information is exact enough that there is no estimation.

Which doesn't change the fact that the attenuation of those weapons would be a gradual falloff of power, not a sudden cliff where the beam vanishes altogether within fifty meters.

Or be a calculated threshold where the energy was no longer of any damage potential except for maybe a "nudge".

I didn't leave it out at all. I already stated upthread that that threshhold is a function of what someone considers "reliably." The effective firing range could be calculated VERY differently between two different sources if one considers a P/K value of 50% to be acceptable and another calculates for 60%.

Perhaps you didn't leave it out in the general discussion. You did leave it out of the definition that I was replying to:

newtype_alpha wrote: "Either way, "effective range" is BY DEFINITION an estimation of the maximum distance at which a particular weapon can reliably strike its intended target. And even this is different from a weapon's PRACTICAL firing range, which is again different from its OPTIMUM firing range. Hell, some weapons even have a MINIMUM firing range for the same reasons (torpedoes and missiles in particular)."

There could be a great many things he could be referring to, but since he says, "All the plasma" without specifying

Again, why would he need to specify when the guy he's talking to already knows what he's asking him to do?

So Barclay already knew to use all the plasma the ship has. Excellent

It isn't unusual since they discharge "ALL the EPS taps" into the phasers in "A Matter of Time".

"All the EPS taps" and "All the plasma" are two different things.

Maybe not or maybe same

LAFORGE: Attempting to now, Commander. Isolate phasers eighty to one twenty. Shunt all the plasma from all the EPS taps
BARCLAY: To the emitters. Yes, sir, I'm already on it. Ready.
LAFORGE: Phasers are as hot as we can make them, Captain.

DATA: Yes, sir. After an eight point three second burst from the dish, we'll discharge all the plasma from all the EPS taps through the phasers.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Laforge starts charging it 2 minutes prior to Riker calling it to fire

LaForge starts ARMING it two minutes prior. We do not actually know when he finished that process.

Laforge starts charging

Arming, not charging. It doesn't start charging until Riker orders Worf to fire.

Are you intentionally ignoring the fact that it still took them 2 minutes to charge up?

That's not a fact. From what we know it took them fifteen seconds to arm it and two minutes to wait for the away team to come back with Picard. If you include the time it took to charge up to fire then the minimum time for the arming sequence is about 23 seconds.

How is that when it still took a few seconds to max out the deflector even after Riker orders it to be fired?

Geordi closed the circuits to the warp drive two minutes earlier; he didn't start sending power to the deflector until Worf pulled the trigger. The entire time between "arming sequence" and "Mister Worf, fire!" is spent programming the deflector to function as a weapon and waiting for Shelby to come back with Picard. The only thing we don't know is what proportion of each.

It's a little like saying that the Enterprise didn't spend three hours building up power in its EPS taps before discharging through the phasers in "A Matter of Time." The connection to the EPS taps had been made earlier, obviously, but the power wasn't discharged until after the deflector pulse.

If the deflector fired off all of it's energy in one massive pulse, then yes, there wouldn't be any load on the warp core. But since it was a continuous beam then I would expect not only a load on the warp core but a very quick meltdown since the main deflector's energy drain would have exceeded the core's ability to keep up with the deflector and that is pretty much what happened.

Which means it didn't discharge two minutes worth of buildup, or even eight seconds worth of buildup. It discharged the direct and immediate output of the warp core, power that would normally be channeled to the warp engines at warp 9.8 or so.

Fortunately for weapons its a bit simpler to calculate on the range of motion

No it isn't. Even if those weapons are mechanically steered, you have to know something about the physical arrangements of the aiming mechanisms, the servos and gimbals, and in some designs you'd even have to take gimbal lock into account. For an electronically steered weapon you're dealing with differential equations and phase angles, even assuming you know the physical arrangement of the emitter structure, which you cannot know without directly examining the device.

And that's before you get into the issue of the ship's physical shape, which you can only account for with a detailed an d hyper-accurate three-axis scan of the ship's surface area along with equally accurate plots of its weapon emplacements, overlaid with the known fields of fire of its aiming mechanisms, precise to within five to ten meters.

If I had that kind of detailed information about the enemy ship's tactical systems, a two-degree blind spot behind his port nacelle would be the LEAST of his problems.

The capability to determine firing arcs is not outside of the sensor and computing capabilities of most ships in Star Trek.

Neither is the ability to compute the value of Pi to three billion digits. But much like the information about their weapons' fields of fire, there aren't alot of situations where that information would be useful.

Or relay to said superiors an amount of uncertainty that would warrant their attention.

In which case they make a special point to highlight that uncertainty when giving a report. For example in the Deadly Years Sulu says

We're surrounded by Romulan vessels. Maximum of ten. Range fifty to a hundred thousand kilometres.
​

He doesn't say "estimated range" anywhere in that line, because that would be superfluous. Nor does he say something like "Their approximate ranges are between fifty to a hundred thousand kilometers." Brevity is a virtue when somebody's shooting at you, and you do not include information that your CO doesn't need or already has.

Or be a calculated threshold where the energy was no longer of any damage potential except for maybe a "nudge".

And how much energy is that? .5 Isotons or 1? Or 2? Or 3.5? When does a "nudge" become a "small amount of damage" and what range is that?

Either way, it's an estimate based on a number of factors, and if it's calculated anything like the real world it also depends on what you're shooting at, in which case that weapons range overlay is an estimation based on the Phoenix's EM cross section and what is known of the Cardassian ship's maximum sensor resolution (and vice versa).

So Barclay already knew to use all the plasma the ship has.

He already knew to shunt the plasma from whatever system Geordi was connecting to. You still haven't backed up your assumption that it was the entire ship.

 

[blssdwlf]

No I am not. You do not use kinetic projectiles the same way you use directed energy weapons; it's an entirely different type of weapon requiring an entirely different set of tactics. It's almost as great as the difference between airborne infantry and cavalry.

It all plays the same to me. There isn't that much of a difference between kinetic projectiles and torpedoes

There's a rather huge difference since kinetic projectiles do not have warheads and the damage they cause is proportional to their closing velocity. In this sense, a ship will do less damage firing at you from a stationary position than it will from a high-speed slicing approach; this is the opposite case with directed energy weapons, where prolonged contact will cause more damage and you want to be as close to the enemy and with the least amount of relative motion possible without presenting too easy a target.

It's an entirely different type of combat altogether.

"Primitive space vessels" would. By implication, they would be armed with the same kind of weaponry as the ships that fought in World War-III.

Because the photon torpedo delivers its damage from the energy release of a matter/antimatter reaction; the damage it causes is a function of the torpedo's setting and NOT its relative velocity. So whether it hits you at .6C or .6kph, the damage it causes depends on the yield setting of the warhead first and foremost.

The likely reason for this is that all modern starships have deflector systems capable of pushing away ordinary projectiles hurtling towards them even at relativistic velocities; a photon torpedo can swim through those deflectors and still get within the effective blast radius of the target, even if it has to cover the last thousand meters at fifty kilometers per hour.

Except that photon torpedoes can also be fired at almost no yield and still strike with kinetic impact in TWOK. And we also know that phasers possess kinetic energy as well:

From "The Ultimate Computer":
KIRK: Already sounded the Red Alert. All right, Mister Sulu, phasers one one hundredth power. No damage potential, just enough to nudge them.

and the hand phaser hits where the Klingon is kicked up into the air in TSFS and poor Laforge getting hit repeatedly in "Samaritan Snare".

No.

Yes. Tell us what was damaged again on the BOP?

What is shown isn't meant to be taken literally, and you look kind of silly pretending that it was.

I think we both look silly just arguing back and forth. It's not stopping you or me from continuing the debate

Significantly, it would have played out differently that Kruge intended. The key element to this engagement isn't his direction of approach, but whether or not he has the element of surprise. Kruge doesn't suspect for an instant that Enterprise can see him, so he doesn't take the ship's possible fields of fire into account. Significantly, neither does Chang, except in Chang's case that assumption is the correct one.

Or Kruge is a Klingon and doesn't care if he lives or dies only that he goes out in an exhilarating blaze of glory. Kruge's attack scenarios are covered in any case. If Kirk energizes phasers then Kruge has to deal with 360 phasers and the attack would play out differently. If Kirk fired torpedoes at point-blank range with the Enterprise's shields down, they would have to be extremely low-powered which would not be able to destroy the BOP or prevent it from firing. If Enterprise raised shields before Kruge decloaked, then the battle would play out differently with the option for more powered up torpedoes against the BOP. So as long as the Enterprise's shields remained down and her phasers off, Kruge's attack direction would be safe.

Chang has nothing to do with direction of attack since he's firing while cloaked with no way that he knows of for counter-fire to hit him. But he's at least smart enough to keep moving around to avoid getting predictable.

The pattern, here, is that the relative strength of main vs secondary weapons isn't worth consideration 99% of the time. That would mean the relative strength (in fact, POTENTIAL strength) of the saucer section's phaser banks wouldn't rate serious consideration either.

Or the weapons have equal capability of delivering full phasers in all directions, like the circles projected on the screen in "The Wounded"

Stargazer doesn't stop, though. Remember, the whole plan is to track Stargazer by using the compression wave in front of it as an aiming point. The idea is to grab it with a tractor beam BEFORE it's in firing position, which is exactly what they do. The most you can say is that Stargazer begins to decelerate right when it gets grabbed, but is still flying forward when the tractor beam hits it.

The most I can say is that Stargazer stopped right where it was shown on the bridge screen before it gets grabbed which follows the description of the Picard Maneuver.

PICARD: Well, I did what any good helmsman would have done. I dropped into high warp, stopped right off the enemy vessel's bow and fired with everything I had.

No, just its accuracy. It wouldn't be affecting its field of fire unless it were physically screwing with its aiming mechanism.

You say accuracy, I say field of fire. Since the disruptor was no longer able to easily and effectively hit the Defiant, the field of fire was affected.

No, my point was that it would be relevant if there were some differentiation between the main weapons and their firing arcs.

And there is. Starships with no aft torpedoes have that bigass blind spot in coverage with their torpedo launchers. Starships with no aft disruptors (the 23rd century Klingon and Romulan bird of prey, to name a few) have these blind spots for both torpedo AND disruptor weapons since all of their main weapons point directly in front.

Again, you don't know if 23rd century BOPs have no aft disruptor coverage. And second, disruptors and phasers are just as dangerous as torpedoes.

Since the weapons are able to fire at the same strength

This is doubtful, since we know that phaser arrays are capable of discharging multiple emitters through a single beam. Ultimately, it's the fact that the output of multiple emitters will still be stronger than the output of a single one, regardless of the number of physical energy beams projected.

I'd argue that "full phasers" can be fired from any number of emitters from 1 to a whole strip as we can see from "Darmok". "The Nth Degree" tells us that it takes a small number of emitters to fire all the ship's power. Importantly, it doesn't tell us it takes an entire strip of emitters to fire all the ship's power, just an isolated group.

The simple fact is that, given equal outputs, a large collection of emitters can channel a larger amount of power than a smaller number of the same types. If the short strips have the same types of emitters, then even if each of them could channel the full power from the ship's entire power grid, the longer arrays would be able to channel even MORE power just by virtue of their ability to distribute the load more evenly. Thus the only way the short strips could have equal power to the longer ones is if the longer strips is if the galaxy simply can't find enough power to max out the longer ones.

If you want to prove equal power of the short strips, you would need to find a situation where "all the plasma" or "all the EPS taps" are put into a phaser beam that fires from the SHORT STRIPS instead of the main phaser arrays on the saucer.

Not necessarily equal power maximum power so I'm not in disagreement. With "The Nth Degree" and "Darmok" the E-D looks to be able to fire "full phasers" through any emitter, even the point ones. It would require a grouping of 40 emitters to fire "all the EPS taps" which would suggest the longer strips and I'm fine with that. In either cases, one beam would suffice. In combat conditions it would be more likely that shield power consumption would prevent "all the plasma"/"EPS taps" from being used for a "more than full phasers" attack in the majority of cases.

 

[blssdwlf]

LaForge starts ARMING it two minutes prior. We do not actually know when he finished that process.

Laforge starts charging

Arming, not charging. It doesn't start charging until Riker orders Worf to fire.

That's not a fact. From what we know it took them fifteen seconds to arm it and two minutes to wait for the away team to come back with Picard. If you include the time it took to charge up to fire then the minimum time for the arming sequence is about 23 seconds.

Geordi closed the circuits to the warp drive two minutes earlier; he didn't start sending power to the deflector until Worf pulled the trigger. The entire time between "arming sequence" and "Mister Worf, fire!" is spent programming the deflector to function as a weapon and waiting for Shelby to come back with Picard. The only thing we don't know is what proportion of each.

It's a little like saying that the Enterprise didn't spend three hours building up power in its EPS taps before discharging through the phasers in "A Matter of Time." The connection to the EPS taps had been made earlier, obviously, but the power wasn't discharged until after the deflector pulse.

Which means it didn't discharge two minutes worth of buildup, or even eight seconds worth of buildup. It discharged the direct and immediate output of the warp core, power that would normally be channeled to the warp engines at warp 9.8 or so.

Laforge starts sending power to the deflector very early on and is charging it 2 minutes prior to Riker calling it to fire and even after the order still takes 8 seconds to build up to the max power to fire. I've bolded the dialog where he diverts warp energy to the deflector

Which doesn't change that in BOBW they couldn't fire the main deflector dish immediately. You'll notice that they have already dropped out of warp before charging up the deflector and two minutes go by.

WESLEY: Sir, they've done it. The Borg ship is dropping out of warp.
RIKER: Go to impulse.
WESLEY: Aye, sir.
LAFORGE: Diverting warp energy to main deflector.
RIKER: Move us to within forty thousand kilometres. Match velocity. Commence arming sequence. Increase deflector modulation to upper frequency band.
​

2 minutes and some seconds go by...

RIKER: Is the deflector ready?
LAFORGE: It's ready.

...

RIKER: Mister Worf? Fire.
LAFORGE: Deflector power approaching maximum limits. Energy discharge in six seconds.
WORF: Firing, sir
​

No it isn't. Even if those weapons are mechanically steered, you have to know something about the physical arrangements of the aiming mechanisms, the servos and gimbals, and in some designs you'd even have to take gimbal lock into account. For an electronically steered weapon you're dealing with differential equations and phase angles, even assuming you know the physical arrangement of the emitter structure, which you cannot know without directly examining the device.

And that's before you get into the issue of the ship's physical shape, which you can only account for with a detailed an d hyper-accurate three-axis scan of the ship's surface area along with equally accurate plots of its weapon emplacements, overlaid with the known fields of fire of its aiming mechanisms, precise to within five to ten meters.

If I had that kind of detailed information about the enemy ship's tactical systems, a two-degree blind spot behind his port nacelle would be the LEAST of his problems.

Which is pretty much how it plays out in Star Trek. Since there are rarely any "good" blind spots that ships can exploit and they can deliver equal power (updated: "full phasers") in all directions then picking a specific firing arc to attack isn't going to be one of your options unless there was a specific goal in mind like in "Partuition".

Neither is the ability to compute the value of Pi to three billion digits. But much like the information about their weapons' fields of fire, there aren't alot of situations where that information would be useful.

Equating the computation of PI to infinity to a tactical analysis of a ship's fields of fire is... silly

In which case they make a special point to highlight that uncertainty when giving a report. For example in the Deadly Years Sulu says

We're surrounded by Romulan vessels. Maximum of ten. Range fifty to a hundred thousand kilometres.
​

He doesn't say "estimated range" anywhere in that line, because that would be superfluous. Nor does he say something like "Their approximate ranges are between fifty to a hundred thousand kilometers." Brevity is a virtue when somebody's shooting at you, and you do not include information that your CO doesn't need or already has.

In that example, by saying "Maximum of..." and "Range X to Y" already says that he's giving Kirk a range of values and is covered in dialogue. That's still doesn't detract from "The Wounded"'s weapons range display or Picard's and Data's dialog where they do not give such indication.

Or be a calculated threshold where the energy was no longer of any damage potential except for maybe a "nudge".

And how much energy is that? .5 Isotons or 1? Or 2? Or 3.5? When does a "nudge" become a "small amount of damage" and what range is that?

Whatever that energy value might be is taken account in the range calculation It would be nice if the bridge officer told us though.

Either way, it's an estimate based on a number of factors, and if it's calculated anything like the real world it also depends on what you're shooting at, in which case that weapons range overlay is an estimation based on the Phoenix's EM cross section and what is known of the Cardassian ship's maximum sensor resolution (and vice versa).

Among those factors would also be the amount of energy necessary to damage the other ship, since you're making those assumptions of factors

So Barclay already knew to use all the plasma the ship has.

He already knew to shunt the plasma from whatever system Geordi was connecting to. You still haven't backed up your assumption that it was the entire ship.

The dialogue backs me up. "All the plasma" You still haven't backed up your assumption that it wasn't from the entire ship

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Except that photon torpedoes can also be fired at almost no yield and still strike with kinetic impact in TWOK.

And you can stick a bayonet on an assault rifle and stab a guy in the chest with it. That does NOT mean a rifle is used the same way as a sword.

And we also know that phasers possess kinetic energy as well

And bullets can cause piercing wounds. That, again, does not mean swords and rifles are the same thing.

They are NOT used the same way, not with the same tactics and not with the same kinds of ships.

Yes. Tell us what was damaged again on the BOP?

Who knows? Whatever it was, it was enough that Kirk and crew couldn't immediately chance a flight back to Earth.

Or Kruge is a Klingon and doesn't care if he lives or dies only that he goes out in an exhilarating blaze of glory.

At this point, Kruge cares. His motive isn't to go out in a blaze of glory, but to seize the Genesis weapon "for the preservation of our race" or something. He didn't get into his quasi-suicidal phase until after Kirk had killed all his men

If Kirk fired torpedoes at point-blank range with the Enterprise's shields down, they would have to be extremely low-powered which would not be able to destroy the BOP or prevent it from firing.

Which raises another interesting point: Is Kruge actually in a position to know that? Remember that the whole "a torpedo detonation could destroy us!" wasn't established until Q Who, and was never mentioned again afterwards; even assuming it is true of TMP-era photon torpedoes, what makes you think Kruge is aware of that?

Chang has nothing to do with direction of attack since he's firing while cloaked with no way that he knows of for counter-fire to hit him.

Same as Kruge, actually. As far as Chang knows, his cloaking device is masking his position and allowing him to maneuver with impunity. But if, just before firing, Enterprise had suddenly detected and located his neutron surge, he would have suddenly been hit by a barrage of torpedoes that would have cut his Shakespearan gloating disastrously short.

If the enemy already knows where you are, you can't control your attack direction since he can always turn and face you long before you're close enough to fire. If you assume you are undetected, attack direction doesn't matter because it will all be over before he can do anything about it. The only difference between Chang and Kruge is that Kruge was wrong.

Or the weapons have equal capability of delivering full phasers in all directions, like the circles projected on the screen in "The Wounded"

The circles indicated nothing of the kind, especially considering the Phoenix ultimately destroyed the cardassian ship with photon torpedoes, not phasers.

The most I can say is that Stargazer stopped right where it was shown on the bridge screen

It didn't, though. Cut to the exterior shot and it's still racing forward just before it gets caught.

You say accuracy, I say field of fire. Since the disruptor was no longer able to easily and effectively hit the Defiant

It WAS able to hit the Defiant, just not as accurately as before. It's field of fire wasn't affected (effective range, maybe).

Again, you don't know if 23rd century BOPs have no aft disruptor coverage.

I know they have no dorsal or ventral disruptor coverage, though.

I'd argue that "full phasers" can be fired from any number of emitters from 1 to a whole strip as we can see from "Darmok"

I would say it depends on the emitter. Defiant's point emitters, obviously, can fire at maximum output, but a single emitter on an array probably cannot; full power would therefore require the combined output of MANY emitters to add up to a single powerful discharge.

Do you believe that a single emitter in a phaser array can output "full phasers" all by itself?

Not necessarily equal power maximum power so I'm not in disagreement. With "The Nth Degree" and "Darmok" the E-D looks to be able to fire "full phasers" through any emitter, even the point ones. It would require a grouping of 40 emitters to fire "all the EPS taps" which would suggest the longer strips and I'm fine with that. In either cases, one beam would suffice. In combat conditions it would be more likely that shield power consumption would prevent "all the plasma"/"EPS taps" from being used for a "more than full phasers" attack in the majority of cases.

Which, in the end, suggests the longer strips on the saucer section are potentially far more powerful than any standard phaser bank, as I've been saying.

It's important to note, though, that that supercharged maximum isn't always or even usually appropriate in a combat situation where a standard charge will usually suffice. It would nicely explain the shorter strips on the more combat-oriented battle section or the Ambassador class vessels, which may not need high output as much as they need high accuracy or rate of fire.

I am again compelled to point out that in the JJ-Verse, a phaser array would fire like a bank of flak guns and unleash a flood of Defiant-style phaser pulses thick enough to walk on.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Laforge starts sending power to the deflector very early on and is charging it 2 minutes prior to Riker calling it to fire

Incorrect. Riker asks "Is the deflector ready?" and Geordi answers with a decisive "It's ready." Not "Thirty more seconds..." not "Needs to charge up a bit more."

It's ready. Which means Riker could have obliterated Shelby's team or he could have sat there and argued with Locutus for twenty minutes and it still would have taken eight seconds to build up to a discharge.

Which is pretty much how it plays out in Star Trek. Since there are rarely any "good" blind spots that ships can exploit and they can deliver equal power (updated: "full phasers") in all directions

I just asked you to back that up in the previous post: can the short strips actually channel "full phasers"? Is their maximum output equal to the longer strips?

I ask this, remember, because the only way that could be so is if the maximum output of the larger phaser array far outstrips the maximum output of the ship's power supply.

Equating the computation of PI to infinity

I didn't say infinity. And it's a simple mathematical calculation for a computer, one that just happens to take a few seconds to complete. There are situations where it would be beneficial, but like the calculation of the other ship's fields of fire, not many.

In that example, by saying "Maximum of..." and "Range X to Y" already says that he's giving Kirk a range of values and is covered in dialogue.

Right. He doesn't HAVE to specify that these are estimates; Kirk already knows that.

Whatever that energy value might be is taken account in the range calculation

Which, again, means these are ESTIMATES of firing ranges, not concrete figures that both ships must necessarily obey.

You still haven't backed up your assumption that it wasn't from the entire ship

That's because I don't have to prove a negative; YOU are the one claiming it was the entire ship, and the dialog doesn't bear this out since neither of them specify from what systems they are drawing that power from.

 

[blssdwlf]

Laforge starts sending power to the deflector very early on and is charging it 2 minutes prior to Riker calling it to fire

Incorrect. Riker asks "Is the deflector ready?" and Geordi answers with a decisive "It's ready." Not "Thirty more seconds..." not "Needs to charge up a bit more."

It's ready. Which means Riker could have obliterated Shelby's team or he could have sat there and argued with Locutus for twenty minutes and it still would have taken eight seconds to build up to a discharge.

Saying the deflector is ready doesn't indicate how long the actual firing takes place. What we do know is that Laforge starts to divert energy to the deflector 2 minutes before Riker says "fire". After he orders the deflector to be fired, 8 more seconds of build up was required to max out the deflector to the point it can discharge. That still equals 2 minutes to charge up the deflector which is much more energy than the ship can put out at once.

Which is pretty much how it plays out in Star Trek. Since there are rarely any "good" blind spots that ships can exploit and they can deliver equal power (updated: "full phasers") in all directions

I just asked you to back that up in the previous post: can the short strips actually channel "full phasers"? Is their maximum output equal to the longer strips?

I point to "Darmok" where a single point emitter channeled "full phasers". I see no reason that the short strips cannot do the same. Whether the short strips can channel "all the plasma" the ship has that would depend on if there are at least 40 emitters in a short strip.

I ask this, remember, because the only way that could be so is if the maximum output of the larger phaser array far outstrips the maximum output of the ship's power supply.

That would be likely since it took only 40 emitters to channel the ship's power. Back to the OP, it doesn't appear that the emitters are doing any amplifying and just merely channeling the power.

I didn't say infinity. And it's a simple mathematical calculation for a computer, one that just happens to take a few seconds to complete. There are situations where it would be beneficial, but like the calculation of the other ship's fields of fire, not many.

I find it rather funny that you don't believe a tactical officer would calculate the other ship's field of fire as part of their tactical analysis.

Right. He doesn't HAVE to specify that these are estimates; Kirk already knows that.

Kirk knows that because the dialogue specified a range of values. If the dialogue said, "Captain, Romulan ship will be in firing range in 20 seconds" - that's not an estimation. If the dialogue said, "Captain, Romulan ship will be in firing range in approximately 20 seconds" - that's an estimation. Easy to spot, eh

Whatever that energy value might be is taken account in the range calculation

Which, again, means these are ESTIMATES of firing ranges, not concrete figures that both ships must necessarily obey.

I haven't found any examples where dialogue stating another ship will be "in firing range in X seconds" or "within firing range in Y distance" to have been incorrect. If they are estimates - they are very accurate estimates that both ships obey.

You still haven't backed up your assumption that it wasn't from the entire ship

That's because I don't have to prove a negative; YOU are the one claiming it was the entire ship, and the dialog doesn't bear this out since neither of them specify from what systems they are drawing that power from.

"Give me all the money." I don't need to prove where the plasma is coming from since the dialogue plainly states it is "all the plasma" and that's all the plasma from the ship since no other systems are specified.

 

[blssdwlf]

Except that photon torpedoes can also be fired at almost no yield and still strike with kinetic impact in TWOK.

And you can stick a bayonet on an assault rifle and stab a guy in the chest with it. That does NOT mean a rifle is used the same way as a sword.

But it can be used the same way as a short spear

And we also know that phasers possess kinetic energy as well

And bullets can cause piercing wounds. That, again, does not mean swords and rifles are the same thing.

Well if you compare swords to rifles, then yeah.

They are NOT used the same way, not with the same tactics and not with the same kinds of ships.

I'm not so sure. Kinetic weapons would be used alot like torpedoes while lasers would be used as the "guns". It doesn't strike me to be that different from "particle cannons" and torpedoes or phasers and torpedoes.

Who knows? Whatever it was, it was enough that Kirk and crew couldn't immediately chance a flight back to Earth.

Did you forget about re-training Spock's mind? The BOP could've just sat there for three months until Spock was cleared to travel again.

It wasn't because the BOP couldn't achieve full power since they had that with a push of a button at the end of TSFS.

At this point, Kruge cares. His motive isn't to go out in a blaze of glory, but to seize the Genesis weapon "for the preservation of our race" or something. He didn't get into his quasi-suicidal phase until after Kirk had killed all his men

How do we know when Kruge became quasi-suicidal? He seems to be a "it's a good day to die" kind of Klingon that likes wrestling with large mutant space creatures with his bare hands.

Which raises another interesting point: Is Kruge actually in a position to know that? Remember that the whole "a torpedo detonation could destroy us!" wasn't established until Q Who, and was never mentioned again afterwards; even assuming it is true of TMP-era photon torpedoes, what makes you think Kruge is aware of that?

Klingons also have photon torpedoes. Why wouldn't they be aware of this?

BTW, it was mentioned again (and overcame) in "The Nth Degree".

RIKER: We can't use photon torpedoes. An explosion this close could cripple us.
​

...
​

LAFORGE: I don't know how he did it, but shield strength has been increased by three hundred percent.
LAFORGE: It should be enough, Captain.
PICARD: Mister Worf. Photon torpedoes. Maximum yield, full spread.
​

Same as Kruge, actually. As far as Chang knows, his cloaking device is masking his position and allowing him to maneuver with impunity. But if, just before firing, Enterprise had suddenly detected and located his neutron surge, he would have suddenly been hit by a barrage of torpedoes that would have cut his Shakespearan gloating disastrously short.

That's not the same. Kruge must decloak and expose his position in order to fire. Chang does not. The neutron surge is only detectable at very close range (as per dialogue) and it didn't appear that Chang got anywhere close enough to be detected.

The circles indicated nothing of the kind, especially considering the Phoenix ultimately destroyed the cardassian ship with photon torpedoes, not phasers.

360 torpedoes

It didn't, though. Cut to the exterior shot and it's still racing forward just before it gets caught.

Cut to the exterior shot and we see the E-D is moving forward and catches the Stargazer which is stopped relative to the E-D. Notice that the stars are moving right-to-left, indicating the E-D is the one that is moving.

It WAS able to hit the Defiant, just not as accurately as before. It's field of fire wasn't affected (effective range, maybe).

Based on the definition of "field of fire", the Defiant was affecting the area (or in this case volume of space) that the Vor'cha could cover effectively with its disruptor.

I know they have no dorsal or ventral disruptor coverage, though.

And again, how do you know they don't have it?

I'd argue that "full phasers" can be fired from any number of emitters from 1 to a whole strip as we can see from "Darmok"

I would say it depends on the emitter. Defiant's point emitters, obviously, can fire at maximum output, but a single emitter on an array probably cannot; full power would therefore require the combined output of MANY emitters to add up to a single powerful discharge.

We know from "Darmok" that a point emitter could fire "full phasers". I see no reason that a single emitter on a strip not be able to do so. We know from "The Nth Degree" that it takes 40 emitters to channel "all the plasma" the ship has.

Do you believe that a single emitter in a phaser array can output "full phasers" all by itself?

Yes.

Not necessarily equal power maximum power so I'm not in disagreement. With "The Nth Degree" and "Darmok" the E-D looks to be able to fire "full phasers" through any emitter, even the point ones. It would require a grouping of 40 emitters to fire "all the EPS taps" which would suggest the longer strips and I'm fine with that. In either cases, one beam would suffice. In combat conditions it would be more likely that shield power consumption would prevent "all the plasma"/"EPS taps" from being used for a "more than full phasers" attack in the majority of cases.

Which, in the end, suggests the longer strips on the saucer section are potentially far more powerful than any standard phaser bank, as I've been saying.

Well, no and yes. No, you've been saying that they are more powerful because they have more emitters for amplifying the phaser energy and that isn't the case. Yes, they are potentially more powerful because they are likely to contain at least 40 emitters making them able to channel the ship's power.

It's important to note, though, that that supercharged maximum isn't always or even usually appropriate in a combat situation where a standard charge will usually suffice. It would nicely explain the shorter strips on the more combat-oriented battle section or the Ambassador class vessels, which may not need high output as much as they need high accuracy or rate of fire.

I wonder if there has been enough detail shown where we could get a count of how many emitters there are in a strip so we can get an in-universe count of the emitters per strip.

I am again compelled to point out that in the JJ-Verse, a phaser array would fire like a bank of flak guns and unleash a flood of Defiant-style phaser pulses thick enough to walk on.

You could walk on these phaser pulses

Which isn't too bad compared to the JJ-Verse phasers.

Granted, they're parallel universes so they probably don't work their phasers the same way much like the warp drive doesn't look or act the same. But I see no reason that phasers in the non-JJ-verse can't fire at lower power to engage incoming missiles.

Oh, and I did find one episode where phasers were considered for use against a photon torpedo that was moving away from the ship - "Genesis". The malfunctioning torpedo went beyond phaser range though.

WORF: One of the torpedoes has veered off course. It appears to be a malfunction in the guidance system.
PICARD: Abort and destroy.
WORF: The torpedo is not responding. Subspace detonator will not engage.
RIKER: Lock on phasers.
WORF: The torpedo is out of range.
RIKER: Even for your newly improved phasers?
PICARD: Maintain a sensor lock on the torpedo, Mister Worf. We'll have to go after it.
​

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Saying the deflector is ready doesn't indicate how long the actual firing takes place. What we do know is that Laforge starts to divert energy to the deflector 2 minutes before Riker says "fire".

What we DON'T know is when the deflector was ready. Could be ten seconds after he transferred power, could be thirty, could be fifty.

The only thing we know for sure is that the deflector is ready BEFORE Riker asks the question. This means those eight seconds you keep mentioning aren't part of the "getting ready" phase, they're part of the FIRING phase, and it would take the same amount of time no matter when he gave the order.

I point to "Darmok" where a single point emitter channeled "full phasers"

I didn't ask you about a point emitter, I asked about the short strips.

I see no reason that the short strips cannot do the same.

Because the short strips have a smaller number of emitters than the larger ones. So if a short strip with, say, 20 emitters can handle "full phasers", a long strip with 200 emitters can handle "full phasers x10."

So either the short strips cannot handle that much power, or the Enterprise cannot generate enough power to max out the larger arrays. The latter would contradict Best of Both Worlds; if it couldn't max out the larger arrays, the deflector blast would be only slightly stronger than an ordinary phaser blast.

That would be likely since it took only 40 emitters to channel the ship's power.

You still haven't backed up your claim that it was the SHIP's power, much less your claim that only those 40 emitters were discharged.

Back to the OP, it doesn't appear that the emitters are doing any amplifying and just merely channeling the power.

With at least 40 emitters channeling their power into a single beam, instead of all firing a single beam at the same target... that's amplification, since the beam gets a power gain from each emitter it passes through.

I find it rather funny that you don't believe a tactical officer would calculate the other ship's field of fire as part of their tactical analysis.

Why would you expect him to? Tactical officers in real world naval combat never bother to do this. Pilots in air combat don't bother to do this. Army infantry and marine riflemen don't bother to do this. It's enough that they can keep track of their OWN fields of fire and get their weapons on target as precisely as possible.

In Star Trek, when it comes to analyzing the other guy's weapons -- assuming you even have TIME to analyze them -- the only thing you need to know is how long your shields can protect you if and when he opens fire.

Kirk knows that because the dialogue specified a range of values. If the dialogue said, "Captain, Romulan ship will be in firing range in 20 seconds" - that's not an estimation.

Yes it is. It's based on the speed of the romulan ship, the calculation of its weapons range, and the assumption that nothing unexpected will happen to the Romulan's course and speed (or the Enterprise) in the next twenty seconds. The uncertainty in the estimate is inherent in the situation, and the extent to which an officer is familiar with those uncertainties is the difference between a rookie and a seasoned veteran.

I haven't found any examples where dialogue stating another ship will be "in firing range in X seconds" or "within firing range in Y distance" to have been incorrect.

Sure you have. In Best of Both Worlds, Wesley says they won't be able to intercept the Borg for another 42 minutes. Later, the Borg halt their approach to Earth, which shortens the intercept time; Wesley's estimate (and it IS that) was incorrect.

If they are estimates - they are very accurate estimates that both ships obey.

Starfleet is good at this estimation thing; their guesses are often accurate, but far from infallible.

"Give me all the money." I don't need to prove where the plasma is coming from since the dialogue plainly states it

"Give me all the money." Doesn't specify all the money from WHAT. All the money from my wallet? All the money from the bank? All the money in my hand? All the money on the entire ship?

That information isn't provided, and you pretending it is doesn't really prove anything.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

But it can be used the same way as a short spear

Which doesn't change the fact that armies whose principle weapon is a short spear do NOT fight the same way or with the same tactics as armies equipped with assault rifles. It's an entirely different paradigm with entirely different rules, not least of which is the situational rules which govern when it is advisable to try and stab the other guy in the chest.

I'm not so sure. Kinetic weapons would be used alot like torpedoes

No, they would not. They would require a larger minimum distance to build up speed once fired and would be at their most potent when attacking the other ship at extremely high velocities; attacks using KKVs would be quick and overwhelming, releasing dozens of weapons in a single attack while closing at meteoritic velocities of tens or hundreds of kilometers per second. Combat formations will also be very different; starships will spread out into larger arrays so that you can only attack one ship at a time and then have to worry about intercepting fire from neighboring vessels being lobbed into your attack vector. If you're fighting in orbit of a planet, then you're moving into perpendicular orbits to other ships at the highest velocities possible in which case you won't have a chance to make a second attack and you have a handful of seconds to launch as many weapons as you can to try and kill him.

Torpedoes are fired in short salvos at relatively low velocities, combined with persistent and concentrated fire from directed energy weapons to overwhelm his defenses. Battles can last tens of minutes, and the opposing vessels must purposefully move in and out of each engagement range.

Did you forget about re-training Spock's mind? The BOP could've just sat there for three months until Spock was cleared to travel again.

IIRC, Kirk wasn't planning to bring Spock with him at first, and bringing him in the first place was Spock's idea.

It wasn't because the BOP couldn't achieve full power

Full impulse power on an engine that sounded like an overheated bus.

Those repairs must have been expensive.

How do we know when Kruge became quasi-suicidal? He seems to be a "it's a good day to die" kind of Klingon that likes wrestling with large mutant space creatures with his bare hands.

Only if he doesn't expect to win.

Klingons also have photon torpedoes. Why wouldn't they be aware of this?

Because he was planning to fire HIS torpedoes are point blank range the instant he decloaked? I doubt he was going to stop and raise shields before he let his first shot off the chain.

Anyway, I'm not at all convinced the "too close for torpedoes" thing actually holds true for the TOS era. It DEFINITELY doesn't hold true in ENT.

That's not the same. Kruge must decloak and expose his position in order to fire.

It IS the same, since Kruge -- like Chang -- is convinced that the Enterprise won't return fire. If Kirk had blanketted the surrounding space with his phasers, Chang could have been proven just as wrong as Kruge.

360 torpedoes

By that logic, a bird of prey has 360 degree coverage because it's capable of turning really really fast.

Cut to the exterior shot and we see the E-D is moving forward and catches the Stargazer which is stopped relative to the E-D.

Nope. In frame, Stargazer is moving, not the Enterprise.

Funny you mentioning the stars, though; at those relative velocities, either the Enterprise is slowly turning in space (and the camera is turning with it) or both ships are hurtling through space at several hundred thousand times the speed of light while this exchange is taking place (or else the stars wouldn't be moving at all).

Based on the definition of "field of fire", the Defiant was affecting the area (or in this case volume of space) that the Vor'cha could cover effectively with its disruptor.

Incorrect. The Vor'cha could effectively cover the entire area at all times (which is why it was still able to hit Defiant several times). The tractor beam caused a reduction in accuracy within that field, something which could just as easily be caused by sensor jamming, a cloaking device, or beaming Dax onto their bridge to give a blowjob to the tactical officer.

And again, how do you know they don't have it?

Because none of their known weapons emplacements point upwards or downwards.

You have any evidence for invisible weapons in the proper locations?

We know from "Darmok" that a point emitter could fire "full phasers". I see no reason that a single emitter on a strip not be able to do so.

Okay then.

A single emitter can handle full phasers.

40 emitters could, therefore, handle 40x full phasers.

200 emitters could output 200x full phasers.

If this is correct, the longer arrays should still have a greater maximum output than the short strips. If you are still holding to the position that they do not, this is only possible if the Enterprise' maximum power output is not high enough to generate the 200x full phasers the long strips are capable of.

THIS CANNOT BE THE CASE, because we already know that the main phasers on the Enterprise are firing at their upper limit against the Borg in "Best of Both Worlds" and the ship's burn-out-your-engines maximum can only be channeled through the deflector.

Well, no and yes. No, you've been saying that they are more powerful because they have more emitters for amplifying the phaser energy and that isn't the case.

When you channel a single signal through multiple emitters before final transmission, producing a power gain at each stage, that is called "amplification."

I am again compelled to point out that in the JJ-Verse, a phaser array would fire like a bank of flak guns and unleash a flood of Defiant-style phaser pulses thick enough to walk on.

Granted, they're parallel universes so they probably don't work their phasers the same way much like the warp drive doesn't look or act the same. But I see no reason that phasers in the non-JJ-verse can't fire at lower power to engage incoming missiles.

I'm sure they could. The point of this exchange has been that "fire at low power to engage incoming missiles" or even "fire a standard charge to repeatedly hammer their shields" are power settings used far more often and are a more important consideration when installing phaser banks. The aft banks won't usually need to fire more than a standard charge because anything scary enough to warrant that kind of output would be more effectively attacked with torpedoes.

 

[blssdwlf]

Saying the deflector is ready doesn't indicate how long the actual firing takes place. What we do know is that Laforge starts to divert energy to the deflector 2 minutes before Riker says "fire".

What we DON'T know is when the deflector was ready. Could be ten seconds after he transferred power, could be thirty, could be fifty.

The only thing we know for sure is that the deflector is ready BEFORE Riker asks the question. This means those eight seconds you keep mentioning aren't part of the "getting ready" phase, they're part of the FIRING phase, and it would take the same amount of time no matter when he gave the order.

Those are two different things. One is charging the deflector to the point it is ready to fire and we know that it takes 2 minutes. You can argue that it might be faster, but you won't be able to prove that. The second thing is that the 8 seconds to top off the deflector charge doesn't take away the fact that it took them 2 minutes to charge it up. It still boils down to the deflector firing more than the ship can output at once.

I point to "Darmok" where a single point emitter channeled "full phasers"

I didn't ask you about a point emitter, I asked about the short strips.

And I don't see a difference between a point emitter and the short strip emitters.

Because the short strips have a smaller number of emitters than the larger ones. So if a short strip with, say, 20 emitters can handle "full phasers", a long strip with 200 emitters can handle "full phasers x10."

Or a single emitter on a short strip can handle "full phasers" and a segment of 40 emitters on a long strip can handle "all the plasma" the ship can pump into it.

So either the short strips cannot handle that much power, or the Enterprise cannot generate enough power to max out the larger arrays. The latter would contradict Best of Both Worlds; if it couldn't max out the larger arrays, the deflector blast would be only slightly stronger than an ordinary phaser blast.

The latter wouldn't contradict BOBW. The main deflector was identified as the only component that can handle "that much power at controlled frequencies" plus unlike the phasers, it is storing much more energy for the blast than the ship can output at one time - which in turn means more power than the phasers could possibly put out as well.

You still haven't backed up your claim that it was the SHIP's power, much less your claim that only those 40 emitters were discharged.

I don't need to. It's in the dialogue and it's as simple as copy+paste

LAFORGE: Attempting to now, Commander. Isolate phasers eighty to one twenty. Shunt all the plasma
BARCLAY: To the emitters. Yes, sir, I'm already on it. Ready.
LAFORGE: Phasers are as hot as we can make them, Captain.
​

With at least 40 emitters channeling their power into a single beam, instead of all firing a single beam at the same target... that's amplification, since the beam gets a power gain from each emitter it passes through.

No, that's just channeling. Amplifying would indicate the power was increased by the emitters themselves which was never stated in the dialogue. Plus, if the emitters were amplifying the blast, then they would've included all the emitters. Instead they increased power to a small number of emitters to channel the phaser blast.

Why would you expect him to? Tactical officers in real world naval combat never bother to do this. Pilots in air combat don't bother to do this. Army infantry and marine riflemen don't bother to do this. It's enough that they can keep track of their OWN fields of fire and get their weapons on target as precisely as possible.

LOL. The reason why real world combatants keep track of the enemy's fields of fire is so they can yell, "Send Alpha-1 to FLANK the enemy."

In Star Trek, when it comes to analyzing the other guy's weapons -- assuming you even have TIME to analyze them -- the only thing you need to know is how long your shields can protect you if and when he opens fire.

You're making the assumption that the computer doesn't do that for them. Heck, the entire viewscreen is synthetic so why wouldn't the computer be able to generate fields of fire?

Yes it is. It's based on the speed of the romulan ship, the calculation of its weapons range, and the assumption that nothing unexpected will happen to the Romulan's course and speed (or the Enterprise) in the next twenty seconds. The uncertainty in the estimate is inherent in the situation, and the extent to which an officer is familiar with those uncertainties is the difference between a rookie and a seasoned veteran.

In "The Deadly Years", they still gave a range of distances for Kirk - and that's a seasoned veteran speaking to the Captain. If there was a need to indicate it was an "estimate" or "range", it would be in the dialogue.

Sure you have. In Best of Both Worlds, Wesley says they won't be able to intercept the Borg for another 42 minutes. Later, the Borg halt their approach to Earth, which shortens the intercept time; Wesley's estimate (and it IS that) was incorrect.

And that is covered in the dialogue. The whole bit in context:

RIKER: Ensign Crusher, at their current speed, when will they reach Earth?
WESLEY: Twenty seven minutes.
RIKER: The soonest we could intercept?
WESLEY: Forty two minutes, sir.
​

Your example shows that they identified specific variables and were given specific answers. The dialogue indicates that if any of that were to change, then the answer would change. And that plays out as Riker checks the ETA routinely as circumstances change.

WORF: Sir, the Borg have halted their approach to Earth.
SHELBY: I think we got their attention.
RIKER: Time to intercept?
WESLEY: Two minutes, four seconds, sir.
​

If they are estimates - they are very accurate estimates that both ships obey.

Starfleet is good at this estimation thing; their guesses are often accurate, but far from infallible.

"Give me all the money." I don't need to prove where the plasma is coming from since the dialogue plainly states it

"Give me all the money." Doesn't specify all the money from WHAT. All the money from my wallet? All the money from the bank? All the money in my hand? All the money on the entire ship?

That information isn't provided, and you pretending it is doesn't really prove anything.

Which funny enough is the problem with your argument. Any information regarding plasma from a specific system isn't provided. And absent a specific system, it just proves its from all of them.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

It still boils down to the deflector firing more than the ship can output at once.

Much more importantly, it's more than the PHASERS can output at once. That is the whole reason for using the DEFLECTOR in the first place instead of just spending two and a half minutes charging up the phaser banks for one massive shot.

This indicates that the ship COULD, in fact, max out the large arrays and they cannot channel any more power even if every single one of their emitters discharged simultaneously.

The smaller arrays do not have that number of emitters, and therefore wouldn't be able to handle the same output.

And I don't see a difference between a point emitter and the short strip emitters.

Similar to the difference between a really big gatling gun and a really big rifle.

Or a single emitter on a short strip can handle "full phasers" and a segment of 40 emitters on a long strip can handle "all the plasma" the ship can pump into it. The latter wouldn't contradict BOBW. The main deflector was identified as the only component that can handle "that much power at controlled frequencies" plus unlike the phasers, it is storing much more energy for the blast than the ship can output at one time - which in turn means more power than the phasers could possibly put out as well.

But not more power than the SHIP can put out, and leaves the problem for you: if the Enterprise still has power to spare even when the phasers are firing at maximum (and it does, as per Best of Both Worlds) then the longer strips are more powerful than the shorter ones.

I don't need to. It's in the dialogue

I don't see "all the plasma the ship has" in the dialog. It's not in the script either. Nothing there specifies what systems Barclay is drawing that power from, so -- again -- nothing at all to indicate he's drawing it from the entire ship.

No, that's just channeling.

It would only be channeling if it was coming from a SINGLE emitter and being passed on to a final firing point.

Instead, we have ALL of them firing at once, combining their power into a single beam. That is amplification.

Amplifying would indicate the power was increased by the emitters themselves

It is increased. One beam channels the signal to the next, which adds its own power to the same signal with the same output characteristics, and passes it on to the next. Rinse, repeat... amplification.

Plus, if the emitters were amplifying the blast, then they would've included all the emitters.

A few days ago I would have given you the benefit of the doubt, but we both know you have no intention of backing this up, don't we?

LOL. The reason why real world combatants keep track of the enemy's fields of fire is so they can yell, "Send Alpha-1 to FLANK the enemy."

That's keeping track of YOUR fields of fire, not his. A flanking maneuver means you're overlapping two fields from friendly forces for greater effect on your enemy.

You're making the assumption that the computer doesn't do that for them.

Like I said, I'm certain that it COULD. But we haven't seen a shred of evidence so far that it DOES, much less that it SHOULD. There really aren't that many ways that information would be useful.

In "The Deadly Years", they still gave a range of distances for Kirk - and that's a seasoned veteran speaking to the Captain. If there was a need to indicate it was an "estimate" or "range", it would be in the dialogue.

That's my point: it WAS a range of distances, and Sulu never bothered to specify it as such. Kirk knew what Sulu was talking about without having to be told.

Your example shows that they identified specific variables and were given specific answers. The dialogue indicates that if any of that were to change, then the answer would change.

And yet Wesley doesn't say "If their speed and course remains constant, forty two minutes."

Variation on a theme. It's very similar to how Stiles adds that little sarcastic "Assuming, of course, that we don't turn back..." in "Balance of Terror." He isn't saying that for Kirk's information, he's saying it to be a dick.

Which funny enough is the problem with your argument. Any information regarding plasma from a specific system isn't provided. And absent a specific system, it just proves its from all of them.

So if you told me "Open my gmail account. Transfer all of the spam to my inbox", you didn't specify WHAT spam, so I should assume you mean all the spam the internet has.

 

[blssdwlf]

But it can be used the same way as a short spear

Which doesn't change the fact that armies whose principle weapon is a short spear do NOT fight the same way or with the same tactics as armies equipped with assault rifles. It's an entirely different paradigm with entirely different rules, not least of which is the situational rules which govern when it is advisable to try and stab the other guy in the chest.

If those assault rifles ran out of bullets it would look very similar to short spears

I'm not so sure. Kinetic weapons would be used alot like torpedoes

No, they would not. They would require a larger minimum distance to build up speed once fired and would be at their most potent when attacking the other ship at extremely high velocities;

Huh? If the kinetic weapon is still accelerating after it left the barrel then it's operating more as a powered weapon, like a torpedo.

attacks using KKVs would be quick and overwhelming, releasing dozens of weapons in a single attack while closing at meteoritic velocities of tens or hundreds of kilometers per second. Combat formations will also be very different; starships will spread out into larger arrays so that you can only attack one ship at a time and then have to worry about intercepting fire from neighboring vessels being lobbed into your attack vector. If you're fighting in orbit of a planet, then you're moving into perpendicular orbits to other ships at the highest velocities possible in which case you won't have a chance to make a second attack and you have a handful of seconds to launch as many weapons as you can to try and kill him.

That's not indicative that it will be different from ships closing with phasers and torpedoes exchanging fire. Old ships armed with "projectile" guns and nuclear torpedoes would still have to close to bring their weapons to have any chance of hitting their targets.

Torpedoes are fired in short salvos at relatively low velocities, combined with persistent and concentrated fire from directed energy weapons to overwhelm his defenses. Battles can last tens of minutes, and the opposing vessels must purposefully move in and out of each engagement range.

Although in Star Trek, those torpedoes aren't all that slow. Perhaps in ENT they're slow but in TOS, it was only a matter of seconds for one to cross 90,000 kilometers at sublight.

IIRC, Kirk wasn't planning to bring Spock with him at first, and bringing him in the first place was Spock's idea.

Which isn't in the movie, IIRC.

Full impulse power on an engine that sounded like an overheated bus.

Full power is full power

Only if he doesn't expect to win.

That face showed a bit of uncertainty

Because he was planning to fire HIS torpedoes are point blank range the instant he decloaked? I doubt he was going to stop and raise shields before he let his first shot off the chain.

He was going for a disabling shot with the torpedo. I doubt it would have been a full powered shot.

Anyway, I'm not at all convinced the "too close for torpedoes" thing actually holds true for the TOS era. It DEFINITELY doesn't hold true in ENT.

With Enterprise's shields down, it would have been too close for full power torpedoes. Otherwise, we'd see the large torpedo explosion from TMP.

It IS the same, since Kruge -- like Chang -- is convinced that the Enterprise won't return fire. If Kirk had blanketted the surrounding space with his phasers, Chang could have been proven just as wrong as Kruge.

Kruge is convinced that Kirk wouldn't open fire with full powered torpedoes because his shields were still down. That is not like Chang where it was a real possibility that Kirk might just fire blindly. However, firing blindly would prolong the fight and it was fortunate for Chang that Kirk was in a hurry to get to the planet below.

By that logic, a bird of prey has 360 degree coverage because it's capable of turning really really fast.

Or that torpedo could turn around at some point.

Nope. In frame, Stargazer is moving, not the Enterprise.

Funny you mentioning the stars, though; at those relative velocities, either the Enterprise is slowly turning in space (and the camera is turning with it) or both ships are hurtling through space at several hundred thousand times the speed of light while this exchange is taking place (or else the stars wouldn't be moving at all).

It's the same with TWOK. They probably aren't stars that are moving, just something that we use for identifying movement. In anycase, the Enterprise is moving with the camera so the Stargazer will appear to be moving relative to the Enterprise. The Enterprise would've ran over the Stargazer if it were not for that tractor beam

OTOH, if the camera was following the E-D as it rotated around the camera's axis then again, Stargazer was "stopped" and the E-D was moving towards it.

Incorrect. The Vor'cha could effectively cover the entire area at all times (which is why it was still able to hit Defiant several times). The tractor beam caused a reduction in accuracy within that field, something which could just as easily be caused by sensor jamming, a cloaking device, or beaming Dax onto their bridge to give a blowjob to the tactical officer.

Any kind of interference, even of the hot Jadzia kind, would still affect the effectiveness of the Vorcha's field of fire. That's affecting the field of fire.

Because none of their known weapons emplacements point upwards or downwards.

If we can't see their aft disruptors, what makes you think we can see their dorsal or ventral ones?

Okay then.

A single emitter can handle full phasers.

40 emitters could, therefore, handle 40x full phasers.

200 emitters could output 200x full phasers.

If the ship had that kind of power output, then yes. But alas, it only has enough for 1x full phasers + the difference from "all the plasma" the ship has.

If this is correct, the longer arrays should still have a greater maximum output than the short strips. If you are still holding to the position that they do not, this is only possible if the Enterprise' maximum power output is not high enough to generate the 200x full phasers the long strips are capable of.

I've been holding the position that the ship has only enough power to fire one beam's worth of full phasers at a time in combat conditions for a while

THIS CANNOT BE THE CASE, because we already know that the main phasers on the Enterprise are firing at their upper limit against the Borg in "Best of Both Worlds" and the ship's burn-out-your-engines maximum can only be channeled through the deflector.

That is the case. The main deflector channels out more power than the ship can generate at one time because it can buffer the energy. That doesn't contradict the phasers which handles the ship's power as it comes.

When you channel a single signal through multiple emitters before final transmission, producing a power gain at each stage, that is called "amplification."

When you channel a single signal through multiple emitters before a final transmission, you're just channeling the signal. There is no dialogue that I've found to indicate any power gain at each stage.