A few weapon questions.

[Timo]

I imagine cities being protected with shields, rendering useless artillery, tanks, etc. Starships would be large enough to carry effective weapons, and small arms might persist.

The shows try to be consistent about the troops in the field not having the benefit of shielding, though. We see an improvised personal shield in "A Fistful of Datas", and it can't even stop the full wrath of a six-shooter, only a few shots thereof; we get no idea whether non-improvised devices, such as those referred to in "Homefront"/"Paradise Lost", would be any more effective.

Yes - you are lowering the flux.

Assuming there's flux involved. The terminology about "beams" might be completely misleading there, and nothing is flowing from the emitter to the target in physical reality, nor being diluted if spread across a wider area or volume.

Since phasers are subatomic particle/energy weapons

Or then not. Thankfully, we never get a good or comprehensible description. For all we know, these guns rearrange the laws of probability around the target or whatever.

He was said to have wiped out thousands, but he did it by draining at least two power packs. That's still extremely impressive. 2,000 divided 2 or 3 times, that's a low end of 1,000 per pack to 667 per pack, the high end of 19,000 dead would be 9500 to 6334 per pack. I used 2,000 to 19,000 because anything less or more would be, strictly speaking, hundreds or tens of thousands.

We don't get exact performance figures, really. When Tracey says he killed "thousands", he also says he drained four phasers. Not power packs, but phasers. And when our heroes earlier on discover two power packs among "hundreds" of corpses, supposedy correctly identified as Tracey's own "reserve belt packs", we get no idea of the correlation between body count and number of packs - usually, TOS phasers don't leave corpses, so were these "hundreds" what remained of tens of thousands due to small aberrations in the process? Or were there just hundreds of attackers, none vaporized because Tracey wanted to spare power? This was considered a smaller-scale attack than the one for which the "thousands" of Yang were now amassing, but it might not have consumed two packs - it may simply have been the last hundred-man sally in a row of dozens that finally did in the two packs.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Shark]

I'd totally forgotten about Tracey's use of multiple Power packs and/or Phasers. Still, that's a pretty impressive number. Or a frightening one.

Also take into account the rather low Photon Torpedo yield in Star Trek V. While not expressed in dialog, whomever programmed the torpedo attack could have also lowered it's yield to protect the landing party.

 

[Timo]

And Kirk did spend some time on the phone while God was ranting and raving: just calling for a torpedo to be fired might not require such a prolonged conversation.

TOS weapons were scary. A landing party equipped with those pistols could probably wipe out modern armies before they could react. And even after they reacted, guns like that ought to be powerful defenses, too: theoretically they could be fired up blindly but at widebeam to stop any incoming ballistic nuclear warheads, even.

Probably aiming never is important with phasers: what counts is the setting you choose for the target material to be vaporized. As per ST6, if you aim at a kettle full of dough or whatever, you apparently can selectively vaporize the kettle and the dough, or just the kettle. The phasing effect doesn't jump from one material to another (say, from Klingon to surrounding air or the floor below) unless you tell it to. So setting the phaser to "metallic nuclear warhead" and aiming it at the sky really should work.

...Now, would setting the phaser to "air" be the equivalent of detonating a FAE over the battlefield? How many power packs for making all the air above, say, Chicago disappear? And if what's left is vacuum, what's the physical effect of the thunderclap of air again falling down on the ground?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Shark]

That is a pretty scary prospect. Good catch noticing the selective vaporization in ST:VI.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

...Now, would setting the phaser to "air" be the equivalent of detonating a FAE over the battlefield? How many power packs for making all the air above, say, Chicago disappear? And if what's left is vacuum, what's the physical effect of the thunderclap of air again falling down on the ground

At the rate at which phasers actually remove things from existence? Probably the inexplicable onset of a 30mph wind sustained for several minutes. Also known as "Tuesday afternoon," this being Chicago and all.

A better issue is the fact that phaser beams in TOS tend to be continuous and can be swept across a target without seeming to loose much of their effectiveness. So a Type-2 phaser set to its maximum power is effectively a light saber with a thousand-yard blade. That or cyclops without his glasses.

If you're not trying to completely vaporize your targets (just incinerate a large enough part of them to cause them to die) you could sweep a phaser beam through an on rushing hoard like firehose, just laying waste to everything in sight. It would be a terrifying thing to have to try and fight, UNLESS you are either carrying protection (personal forcefields) that reduce the effectiveness of a phaser beam to almost nothing without prolonged contact. Or, alternately, you and your fellow barbarians have figured out that phasers have a limited power supply and the Big Bad doesn't have nearly enough power to kill all of you.

In the former case, this finally explains why phasers are used the way they are. You can sweep a phaser beam across a room full of people and most of them will just glower at you like "What an asshole;" personal shields are probably standard equipment in Starfleet uniforms by now, and a phaser has to be concentrated on a specific point in order to successfully push through them. Some types of clothing might have that as a feature as well in situations where personal shields might not be reliable enough or energy efficient enough (Starfleet radsuits, duty uniforms, cosmic-ray resistent pajamas, etc).

 

[Timo]

A better issue is the fact that phaser beams in TOS tend to be continuous and can be swept across a target without seeming to loose much of their effectiveness.

This sweeping business is an enduring mystery. TOS couldn't afford to show VFX of sweeping beams, but the later shows have hesitated from doing so as well. Basically the only time a hand weapon beam was swept for tactical effect was in ST6:TUC, where some of the Klingon guards swept their death rays in an attempt to catch Kirk and McCoy in the middle of a beam-out (which is a bit weird as they were not moving targets or anything). A non-tactical sweep was in turn shown in "In the Hands of the Prophets" where a phaser was swept aside, and the beam had little effect at the structures it hit as the result of this deflection.

A "sweep" is in practice always accomplished by widening the beam, not by moving it (say, when cleaning a room of Changelings). Why is this? Does a beam really need time to "settle" and loses all effectiveness if swept?

Phasers generally don't need to be sustained on a target for long in order to have lethal effects. Very short blasts can kill strong and healthy targets (including those wearing Starfleet super-pajamas) - so why not a slow sweep, still fast enough to defeat an angry mob? We'd basically have to argue that the destructive effect is not in linear dependence to dwell time, but instead there's a "threshold" of onset, prior to which the phaser does no harm.

Or then the beam resists movement, meaning only starships and certain lesser vehicles can sweep their beams, while it takes superhuman strength to twist a hand phaser at high speed when the beam is on. This might actually help explain how our heroes can so neatly cut through walls: the phaser beam keeps itself steady through this magical inertia.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Go-Captain]

We don't get exact performance figures, really. When Tracey says he killed "thousands", he also says he drained four phasers. Not power packs, but phasers. And when our heroes earlier on discover two power packs among "hundreds" of corpses, supposedy correctly identified as Tracey's own "reserve belt packs", we get no idea of the correlation between body count and number of packs - usually, TOS phasers don't leave corpses, so were these "hundreds" what remained of tens of thousands due to small aberrations in the process? Or were there just hundreds of attackers, none vaporized because Tracey wanted to spare power? This was considered a smaller-scale attack than the one for which the "thousands" of Yang were now amassing, but it might not have consumed two packs - it may simply have been the last hundred-man sally in a row of dozens that finally did in the two packs.

Timo Saloniemi

It's simple, we have a quote in regard to how many dead, and we have a quote in regard to how many phasers were used, plus visuals of drained power cells which supports the use of multiple phasers. Other facts simply aren't applicable because they are unknown, only the known can be worked with.

I forgot it was four phasers, rather than just the number of power packs, but all that changes is the number to divide the kill count. It does not change the process I used previously. I provided a low end and high end for the kill count as based on the general phrase of "thousands," which gives us the most likely values based on the information available.

2,000-19,000, each divided by 4 is 500-4750 dead per phaser.

 

[Timo]

It's simple, we have a quote in regard to how many dead, and we have a quote in regard to how many phasers were used, plus visuals of drained power cells which supports the use of multiple phasers. Other facts simply aren't applicable because they are unknown, only the known can be worked with.

So then we have to take into account the following: two packs = hundreds of corpses, four phasers = thousands killed. The former actually gives 500 dead as the high end.

We can then either say (by combining the two results and equating a phaser with a power pack) that a phaser is drained after creating 500 dead (specifically in the form of corpses!), or (by combining the two results and minding the different terminology in them) that a phaser power pack is drained in that feat but only the use of nine or ten packs results in the phaser itself becoming drained. Semantics play quite a major role here.

Yet actually we do have to work with the unknown, as it's not plausible to take the given facts at face value. Namely, we definitely cannot assume the phasers and packs mentioned were fully charged when the fighting described began. Tracey had been defending the Kohms for a long time already, after all. The "high end" could and should be significantly higher, then.

Yet since Tracey ever demanded three extra power packs per phaser, it's a bit unlikely he had nine to spare for each of his existing guns, this in turn supporting a lower estimate for the "thousands"...

So it seems the only thing we can really count on is the low end estimate. But what weight should we put to the fact that in Tracey's story, the phasers were drained first and the thousands were killed later? Did he also have other means of slaughter? The Kohms did have weapons, and they had been preparing for this final fight for ages, with the expert help of the starman.

Also, we have no proof that Tracey only used two packs to kill the initial hundreds. An equally likely scenario (actually, statistically more likely) is that he drained two packs and a good deal of a third. And, further, that other phaser users did at least an equal amount of firing, meaning the finding of Tracey's personal packs just implies the failure to find other pairs of packs elsewhere.

So the low end estimate becomes rather meaningless, too. All due to factors more significant than a casual mention of "hundreds" or "thousands".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mytran]

Maybe he used the power of a single phaser to collapse a nearby cliff onto his enemies? That way the statement is still correct, even if Tracey killed them with a phaser through third party means.

 

[Timo]

I don't think we really need to worry about any particular statement. All of those in "Omega Glory" are really vague, spoken in a hurry or in an emotional outburst, accusatory or defensive and therefore dubious, or all of the above. It's just that the statements offer quite a bit of room for interpretation, and through that may defeat our best attempts at guesstimating.

No doubt Tracey would have invented all sorts of defenses that did not drain his precious resources. And he would have known he would be facing "thousands" eventually. But it's also possible he was taken by surprise in many of his engagements and forced to spend his resources even when he didn't wish to. At least the fight against the "thousands" included a Yang feint that took Tracey by surprise, "luring him out to the open" and supposedly forcing him to do hasty self-defense rather than organized village defense.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Unicron]

A better issue is the fact that phaser beams in TOS tend to be continuous and can be swept across a target without seeming to loose much of their effectiveness.

This sweeping business is an enduring mystery. TOS couldn't afford to show VFX of sweeping beams, but the later shows have hesitated from doing so as well. Basically the only time a hand weapon beam was swept for tactical effect was in ST6:TUC, where some of the Klingon guards swept their death rays in an attempt to catch Kirk and McCoy in the middle of a beam-out (which is a bit weird as they were not moving targets or anything). A non-tactical sweep was in turn shown in "In the Hands of the Prophets" where a phaser was swept aside, and the beam had little effect at the structures it hit as the result of this deflection.

A "sweep" is in practice always accomplished by widening the beam, not by moving it (say, when cleaning a room of Changelings). Why is this? Does a beam really need time to "settle" and loses all effectiveness if swept?


Timo Saloniemi

There was also a brief sweep by Sisko and Kira in the beginning of "Way of the Warrior" when they were drilling with Odo, though arguably the phasers weren't on a conventional setting in that case.

 

[Go-Captain]

There is another sweep in TNG, when Geordi is brainwashed by Romulans to act as an assassin. When he makes the assassination shot his arm is knocked aside and the beam sweeps upward, locked to the phaser's movement in Geordi's moving hand, rather than being locked to the target.

It leads me to believe sweeping shots are discouraged in training. Rather than for the sake of conserving energy, which is a possibility, I think it might be for avoiding drastic collateral damage when using high power settings. Imagine sweeping a beam on maximum vaporize, it could collapse a building, or several.

 

[Deks]

Do we know how wide the phaser beam is? Is it one block wide or larger? What's the radius of blast for a photon torpedo?

We have several examples from TNG, DS9 and even Voyager.
TNG 'Skin of Evil' (Season 1), had a photon torpedo fired at a planet's surface with an air blast radius being roughly 150 km... while the actual fireball seems to encompass a radius of 50 km, which someone calculated to be roughly between 87 and 144 gigatons.

There was an episode of TNG with Data's mother (forgot the name of the episode) where the Enterprise fired at a planet's surface for about 19 seconds and dug through about 3000 kilometers in that time... the width of the phaser beam was said to have dug out a shaft with the radius of 50 meters.
The weapons calculations from that episode were estimated in a gigaton range (between 10 and 20 gigatons per second).

Phaser beam width can be obviously manipulated, so we don't know if 50 meters is the widest (probably not - considering that hand phasers and rifles had the ability to fire beams in a wide radius).

I would imagine that the effects on different starships would be better if you focus the beam as tightly as possible... however, some other materials might be more susceptible to wide-beam - so it would be situation dependent.

In episode 'Masks' (season 7 TNG), the Enterprise fired for about 11 seconds to vaporize the ice, and it was estimated again that the necessary yield to accomplishing this would be in the 1.1 gigaton range per second (this however was at 10%).

Ds9 has a visual example of a less than 20 ships from Cardassian and Romulan intelligence agencies destroying 30% of planetary crust in an opening salvo.
This also corroborates high gigaton figures (actually, hundreds of gigatons, if not a lot more).

Voyager was able to modify a photon torpedo to produce yields sufficient enough to 'blow up a small planet' at 54 isoton explosion, while Janeway later ordered an increase in yield to 80 isotons.

Granted, this was a gravimetric torpedo, so the design had to have been modified, along with the yield to accommodate the Omega molecule neutralization (so, increasing from 54 to 80 isotons was a revised estimate, based on the number of particles... and I would imagine you cannot just fire a torpedo at 200 isotons 'just to be safe'... it would require precision).

7 of 9 also stated that Voyager had Type 6 photon torpedoes which were capable of 200 isoton yields.


Since the technical manuals aren't canon, Trek seems to favour high yields a lot more than low yields (which don't really make any sense), especially when you take into account use of dilithium for regulating M/AM reactions (which might also affect its output significantly... and SF was bound to improve upon the technology in over 200 years of its existence to the point where it would be finely tuned).

These links might give you a better idea of how much firepower we are dealing with:
http://starfleetjedi.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=6443&view=next

http://www.starfleetjedi.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1460

http://picard578.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/ufp-photon-torpedo-yield.html

 

[Timo]

It leads me to believe sweeping shots are discouraged in training. Rather than for the sake of conserving energy, which is a possibility, I think it might be for avoiding drastic collateral damage when using high power settings.

I'd prefer that explanation, too, if not for the fact that the two cases where a kill shot is deflected this way create no collateral damage! There's some charring in DS9 "In the Hands" (and it disappears in the next shot!), but no plaster falls from the ceiling in TNG "The Mind's Eye"...

In general, phasers don't seem to do much unintended damage. Which is probably thanks to them being selective in their effects, ST6:TUC style: if set to kill people, they don't blow up barrels or drill holes in paintings. So why not sweep? If you want to sweep, you want a lot of people to get killed. Or stunned.

There was an episode of TNG with Data's mother (forgot the name of the episode) where the Enterprise fired at a planet's surface for about 19 seconds and dug through about 3000 kilometers in that time..

3000 meters, actually - otherwise, they'd be poking holes in the very core of the planet!

As regards calculations on the power needed to vaporize stuff, I'd argue those are off the mark, as we never see stuff vaporized. If we did, we'd also see vapor! And released heat, and stuff like that. Phasers don't boil matter, they "phase" it, whatever that means, and we have no equations for calculating how much energy that should take. For all we know, three AAA batteries will do the trick...

(Okay, we have one comparison point for what a hand phaser might be storing in its power pack: a handful of those guns allows a shuttlecraft to lift off and ascend to space in "The Galileo Seven". But we don't know how shuttlecraft work, either - if it's via gravity manipulation, then that again defies known equations and is known to be a low-power process in other contexts.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Deks]

We may not see vapour, but we did see phasers vaporize 30% of a Borg cube without a vapour effect.

Plus, where exactly did we see vapour when phasers vaporized people?
We did not.

So yes, phasing would occur, but you would likely still need sizeable chunk of raw power to make it happen.
And while phasers are capable of vaporizing, they do so in a highly controllable effect.
You'd still need seriously high power output figures to do that (gigaton range does seem to fit this analysis - much more than mere megaton range).

 

[Wingsley]

Don't forget that in the TOS Tv Series episode A Piece of the Action the Ships phasers were set to Stun and Stunned a City Block.

I subscribe to the theory that phasers (both the sidearms and the heavy ship-to-ship weapons) are capable of firing pulsed shots, much of modern lasers now do on Earth. A laser can, in theory, fire 100,000 shots per second.

Phasers and supposed to be phased particle-beam weapons, if I understand how they've been presented in TREK.

So when Kirk fired at the Ice Age cavemen in "Spock's Brain", just as when the Enterprise fired on the attacking gangs in "A Piece of the Action", or on the temple/power source in "Who Mourns For Adonais?", or on Vaal in "The Apple", we may not be seeing a single continuous particle beam. Instead, we could be seeing a series of super-high-speed shots being automatically set to broadcast over a wider area. This likely consumes more power, but could be effective at beating back an attacking enemy.

 

[Timo]

You'd still need seriously high power output figures to do that

That's the question - do you really?

We know that transporters can still make people disappear (and reappear) when a ship is in serious power problems - say, in ST4. We don't have quantitative data on the power problems, though. All we can tell is that as far as starship applications and systems go, the make-disappear devices called transporters are low on the power totem pole.

Are the make-disappear devices called phasers higher up? Debatable - Kirk's shot-to-hell ship in ST2 could squeeze off a few shots from "batteries", a technology that never powered the ship's propulsion systems or shields in any episode or movie.

The physics of making people and things disappear into "phase space" are unknown to us at this date. Is the effort "phasing" of a piece of matter even proportional to the size of the piece? (Probably, or else Scotty wouldn't have been so excited about beaming up the whales and the water in ST4.)

Our one relief here could be that the heroes fight with weapons more recognizable than phasers, too. If torpedo yield can be calculated, then the destructive power of phasers might be argued to be comparable. But that might not work too well: a tank today might be attacked by guns, mines, poison gas or electromagnetic pulses, and only the first two would obey the same set of natural laws and give us data about delivered energies vs. armor thickness, while the last two might actually be far more destructive.

Also, the apparent output of the putative "matter-antimatter annihilation warheads" in Trek is sometimes well past the limit of the fantastic. Perhaps sufficiently big annihilations actually trigger phasing-like phenomena that boost the effect?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[blssdwlf]

Kirk's shot-to-hell ship in ST2 could squeeze off a few shots from "batteries", a technology that never powered the ship's propulsion systems or shields in any episode or movie.

The Enterprise's propulsion system (actually the whole ship) is on batteries on the final leg to the miners in "Mudd's Women". They also use the batteries to maintain orbit. No shields though.

 

[Timo]

Oh, right, thanks! Although one wonders whether this means that Kirk's earlier "auxiliary impulse engines" is supposed to be the same thing as "down to battery power" (meaning Kirk correctly assessed his remaining resources) or different (meaning Kirk failed to appreciate he'd lose auxiliary impulse before reaching orbit).

The totem pole of power consumption there is interesting, as usual: the ship's life support drops down to "batteries" before propulsion does. Echoes (prechoes?) of all those VOY adventures where skimping on life support power makes a difference for propulsive or weapons power?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Sgt_G]

For what it's worth to this discussion: In the game Star Fleet Battles, ships have four minds of power systems: Warp Drive Engines, Impulse Drive Engines, Auxiliary Power Reactors or Auxiliary Warp Reactor (an upgrade some ship receive during the late period of the Star Fleet Universe timeline), and Batteries.

Warp: creates power that can be used to move the ship at faster-than-light warp-speeds, power Photon Torpedoes and a handful of other weapons/systems that require Warp-power, and power any other system on the ship.

Impulse: creates power that can be used to move the ship at light-speed, and power other systems on the ship that don't require Warp-power.

Auxiliary Power (APR): creates power that can be used to power systems on the ship that don't require Warp-power, but can-not be used to move the ship.

Auxiliary Warp Power (AWR): creates power that can be used to power systems on the ship even those that require Warp-power, but can-not be used to move the ship.

Batteries: do not create power but rather stores power generated by the above systems, for a short period of time (same game-turn) can store Warp/Impulse power that can be used to change ship's movement and/or add power to systems that require Warp-power.