A few tech questions

[RB_Kandy]

This question refers mostly to TOS. Can a star ship fire phasers and or torpedoes while traveling at warp speed?

On thee old constitution class star ships, like Captain Kirk's ship, would the ship lose shields and phasers if the warp core went offline/shut off?

In the TOS days, has it ever been established how far weapons range is, and how far long distance scanners can penetrate?

How do coordinates work? For example, someone says "it's baring down on us at 255 x 145.9"
Am I correct in assuming that these figures are arrived at by drawing a 360 degrees circle horizontal and then 360 degree vertical. Or more accurately, 360 on axis X and 360 on axis Y, with axis Z being determined by comparing the two numbers?

 

[blssdwlf]

This question refers mostly to TOS. Can a star ship fire phasers and or torpedoes while traveling at warp speed?

Yes. The Enterprise has fired her phasers and torpedoes at both FTL and STL targets while at warp speed. Refer to "The Corbomite Maneuver", "Balance of Terror", "Elaan of Troyius", "The Ultimate Computer".

On thee old constitution class star ships, like Captain Kirk's ship, would the ship lose shields and phasers if the warp core went offline/shut off?

Depends.

If they lost main power AND their dilithium crystal bypass circuits were fried, then they would lose their phasers but not necessarily their shields -> see "Elaan of Troyius".

However, a ship with minimal or repaired damage and only impulse power can still have phaser and shields available -> see "The Doomsday Machine", "The Apple"

In the TOS days, has it ever been established how far weapons range is, and how far long distance scanners can penetrate?

Exactly how far? No. What we do know is that 0.04 LY is too far for phasers to reach from "Obsession".

"Extreme ranges" like in "Balance of Terror" seems to involve several seconds of phaser flight time.

Closer ranges that have been mentioned in dialogue are between 75,000 Km- 90,000 Km from "Journey to Babel" and "The Changeling".

"The Enterprise Incident" has dialogue of scanning out to 1 parsec searching for Romulan ships.

How do coordinates work? For example, someone says "it's baring down on us at 255 x 145.9"
Am I correct in assuming that these figures are arrived at by drawing a 360 degrees circle horizontal and then 360 degree vertical. Or more accurately, 360 on axis X and 360 on axis Y, with axis Z being determined by comparing the two numbers?

AFAIK that sounds correct. Horizontal degrees + "Mark" + Vertical degrees.

 

[Christopher]

I think the way bearings are usually given is 360 degrees in the horizontal plane and plus or minus 90 degrees in the vertical, so the second number should never be more than +/-90. Except they never seem to use negative numbers on Trek. I think there's a good explanation of bearings in the Introduction to Navigation booklet in the 1980 Star Trek Maps, but that's hard to come by these days. (I'd check, but I'm too sleepy right now.)

Just one thing -- they never used the term "warp core" in TOS. It was called the "matter-antimatter reactor" when it was referenced at all, though there was one reference in the animated series to "the engineering core." "Warp core" seems to have first appeared in TNG: "Deja Q," although there were references to the "engine core" going as far back as "Skin of Evil."

 

[Forbin]

And then the TNG tech manual threw a wrench into the works by declaring phasers as sublight only weapons, unable to work at warp, DESPITE our having seen it many times.

 

[Christopher]

^That's because TNG's creators understood what a lot of fans don't -- that since fiction is all just pretend in the first place, you can pretend that events in past episode happened differently, so you don't have to be trapped by their mistakes and bad ideas. Roddenberry himself did that as early as the second pilot, when he realized it had been a mistake to call the weapons "lasers" and changed it to "phasers" -- and again in TMP, when he had the Klingons redesigned and asked fans to accept that they'd always looked that way and TOS had misrepresented them due to inadequate makeup technology/budget.

The goal of Roddenberry and his co-developers on TNG -- though this was greatly de-emphasized following Roddenberry's death -- was to bring as much scientific credibility as they could to the premise, and that meant reinterpreting some of the tech to make it more plausible. (Roddenberry approached TNG as a soft reboot, discarding or reinventing those aspects of former continuity that didn't work for him.) For instance, they ditched the whole thing about transporters converting matter to energy -- which is ridiculous, since converting the mass of a typical human body to energy would give you an explosion of about 1500 megatons, or 30 times the size of the biggest nuclear bomb ever detonated -- and replaced it with the slightly more reasonable idea that it broke matter down into its constituent particles and transmitted them across space.

In the case of the weaponry, they could rationalize torpedoes by claiming they had mini-warp engines (or at least warp sustainers) onboard, but they couldn't come up with a sensible rationalization for a beam weapon travelling faster than light between two separate warp bubbles, so they just dismissed it for the sake of plausibility.

In my own Trek novels for Pocket Books, I've made a handwave about ships being able to exchange phaser fire at warp when their warp bubbles were "synchronized," implicitly when they were close enough for their warp bubbles to touch and merge. I doubt that explains every instance of phaser fire at warp, but it's something, at least.

 

[Timo]

they couldn't come up with a sensible rationalization for a beam weapon travelling faster than light between two separate warp bubble

...Yet they came up with a rationalization for why the "navigational deflector beam" traveled FTL. Or why communications did (which is funny enough, as communications and destructive power are closely associated in the case of "real" beam weapons, those using electromagnetic energies - say, communications lasers and destructive lasers).

Fully agreed on all the answers given in the first reply. Although to nitpick a bit:

Am I correct in assuming that these figures are arrived at by drawing a 360 degrees circle horizontal and then 360 degree vertical. Or more accurately, 360 on axis X and 360 on axis Y, with axis Z being determined by comparing the two numbers?

If a bearing to a target is given, or a direction of travel is chosen, then there is no "Z axis" as such. There's just a direction, and when you go in that direction for sufficiently long, you hit what you were aiming for. Which is why our heroes need to spell out the range separately if they want to tell Kirk exactly where the target for their weapons is, and they need to spell out the travel time if they want to tell him exactly how far they are going.

If a specific location in space is given, it should be given with three coordinates. AFAIK, this never happens in TOS: our heroes only give directions, and trust that their weapons or engines will carry them far enough to accomplish what is needed. It is only in early TNG that a location is specified in three dimensions, most notably in "We'll Always Have Paris". But the coordinates there are not given with the "degrees out of 360" formula at all (they all involve numbers higher than 360), and don't need to...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[blssdwlf]

And then the TNG tech manual threw a wrench into the works by declaring phasers as sublight only weapons, unable to work at warp, DESPITE our having seen it many times.

That limitation seems to have been ignored in Voyager and Enterprise.
Plus, no TNG episode AFAIK explicitly stated that phasers would not work at warp. Picard might just have favored the photon torpedo

Fortunately the OP asked about TOS

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I don't see why a phaser beam couldn't fall out of one ship's warp bubble, fly through the Einsteinian universe, and then into another ship's warp bubble to score a hit. Targeting would be a nightmare though, which might explain the difficulties of hitting the Orion suicide ship in Journey to Babel.

It might be reasonable to expect scattering, diffraction, or other dissipation, when leaving and entering the warp bubbles, but again TOS didn't really suggest that dissipation was the problem (cf Journey to Babel again).

One might also explain the differences between the behavior of phasers in TOS versus TNG in terms of a difference in beam quality, e.g. in terms of the exact plot of their respective nadion spectra, so that TNG phasers are more susceptible to breaking down when entering or leaving a warp bubble. But on the other hand, you'd think they could just "dirty up" the phasers (or alternately "clean them up") to fire at another ship at warp speed.

 

[Christopher]

I don't see why a phaser beam couldn't fall out of one ship's warp bubble, fly through the Einsteinian universe, and then into another ship's warp bubble to score a hit.

Well, it could if the targeted ship were behind the firing ship, since both ships at warp would outrace the beam at sublight. It would be an interesting computational exercise to make it work, but it could be possible. It would be entirely one-sided, though, since the trailing ship would be unable to return fire at the leading ship. It's conceivable a space battle could consist of two ships racing each other, jockeying to take the lead so that they'd be able to fire and the other ship wouldn't. But if either ship had a slower drive than the other, or suffered engine damage that slowed it down, then it would be doomed to defeat.

Well, it could also work if the ships were moving toward each other at warp, but such encounters would be necessarily brief. And a ship being fired on would have no incentive to head directly toward the attacker; its sure-fire (so to speak) strategy would be to fly away from the attacker and shoot "backward" at it.

It's an interesting idea, but it's not consistent with how warp combat has generally been depicted. Usually the ships are able to mutually exchange fire, and there's never any talk of trying to outpace the other or being unable to fire back.

It might be reasonable to expect scattering, diffraction, or other dissipation, when leaving and entering the warp bubbles, but again TOS didn't really suggest that dissipation was the problem (cf Journey to Babel again).

That would be another plausible difficulty, yes. There'd be a hell of a gravity-lensing effect at the warp boundary. You'd have to be able to compute the enemy ship's warp field shape precisely to compensate, and they could defect fire by continuously modifying the warp field. Again, a very interesting idea, but not consistent with what we've seen, alas.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Ah, well.

Thanks for the analysis on the different strategies, though. I think you covered the basics.

 

[publiusr]

In the same way that a plasma weapon is a smoke ring--its own field coil that could be drawn to a warp bubble of a retreating craft--if warp plasma is fired--the beam itself is warp acclerated after it leaves the emitter in much the same way as subspace radio works. In one novel early on--I think it was called hyperphasers.

 

[Knight Templar]

One fan publication suggested that the phasers actually had a component of their beams as tachyons, theoretical particles that travel faster than the speed of light.

Thus you could configure your phaser beams so they did travel faster than light and actually overtake and hit starships traveling at FTL speeds.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

In my fanfics I never have phasers being fired at warp. At FTL speeds, it would have to be torpedoes. But that's just the way I like things.