collimated phaser arrays

[Justicar]

The more interesting question is, since the phaser strip is more efficient than the ball-turret design (or else presumably post-Ambassador ship designs would have reverted back to ball-turret phasers...), why would not earlier ships be retrofitted to phaser strips?

Cost. Return on investment. The USAF B-52 has been slated, numerous times, to get new engines, but they always cancel the plans. What they have works just fine, lasts a long time.

I am thinking that even though the warp core channels energy directly to the phasers, that the power requirements (both in amount and sustainability) for phaser strips are such that only the presumably larger warp cores of the Ambassador-and Galaxy, et al, could do the job.

I don't think so. Power is power, energy is energy, regardless of the source. Not having as large a source would simply result in a lower intensity beam fired for a shorter duration.

Which possibly gets us back to cost and ROI.

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

That's one of the reasons why I made some changes to the design that sparked this conversation. Frex, I added a big-honking riser section to the saucer.

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

I don't believe we need to go to that level of scriptwriting...

 

[Plecostomus]

Keep the babble simple. You could argue you need special software to coordinate the firing across segments and that software requires a very recent type of core to work.

Another level of babble would be the software coordinates sensor readings and coordinates the firing sequence across multiple strips and locations on a single strip. Again it comes down to hardware limitations.

 

[Timo]

Power is power, energy is energy, regardless of the source.

Well, not really. Which is why it's so damn difficult to create an Europe-wide train network: one has to change locomotives at every national border, or then build expensive hybrid locomotives, because each nation supports a different electric power network, incompatible with the other nation's electric engines.

The power needs of a strip phaser might be so distinct from those of ball turret phasers that every component of the power system would have to be built anew, apart perhaps from the central reactor itself.

Other such real-world phenomena could be applied on this issue, to create a long list of difficulties in refitting a ball turret ship to a strip ship. But this isn't necessarily the only way to justify Starfleet's hesistancy of moving from ball turrets to strips. It could just as well be argued that strips aren't sufficiently better than ball turrets to justify the change.

I mean, we don't have evidence that strips would provide more powerful beams than balls do. We don't have evidence that strips would be more accurate, or capable of firing at a greater number of targets at the same time. It could be that strips are built onto modern ships chiefly because they are easier and cheaper to manufacture by modern methods - the same reason we build touch controls into home appliances instead of push-buttons, even though push-buttons function just as well and usually better: it is expensive to do push-buttons with modern manufacturing methods, but cheap to do touch controls.

Thus, there is no good reason to "upgrade" the old stuff, because such a move would not improve the performance. But there's no good reason to "downgrade" the new stuff, either, because the modern style is the one that best fits modern construction methods.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JNG]

Sticking strips onto the surface of even old models would not have been too tough, so I believe there is a Treknical reason why the old ships are not refitted with collimated phaser arrays, and never have been shown to be. If the power network is built around supplying all those emitters independently and they are chained to be able to direct the output of multiple segments simultaneously, it seems to be that retrofitting a ship not designed for that could be a real headache! Hope they've got a lot of those "Squid" power strips around You might be able to just make "surface" changes and centralize the power distribution, but I imagine you could lose power to the whole array much more easily if you did that. There might be other safety concerns related to it as well, not only in a battle.

 

[Justicar]

I believe you are mistaken, Timo. Power is the rate at which Work is performed or Energy is transmitted. It's (SI) unit of measurement is the Watt, which is Joules/sec, which is Kgm^2/s^2/s.

Energy is the ability to do Work or cause change. The (SI) unit of measurement is the Joule.

Work is the amount of Energy transferred by a Force. The (SI) unit of measurement is the Joule.

IOW, power is power, energy is energy. The problem you're describing is related to storage and transmission, with incompatibility due to competing standards from disparate organizations. Today you need a bridge of some sort, AC to DC, step transformers, phaser converters, etc.

But power is still power, energy is still energy, and a starship would, at worst, have a similar bridge.

Upgrading a weapons system is not comparable to upgrading your dishwasher. Your dishwasher is inconsequential. A new weapon system has to perform better (reliability, ease of use, accuracy, destruction delivered, some combination thereof) to warrant the cost of the upgrade. That right there tells us that, yes, strips are better than ball turrets.

 

[Timo]

I don't see how quoting abstract physics will help solve the fundamental incompatibility problems of starship power systems. The power flowing through an Excelsior may well be fundamentally different from the power flowing through an Akira, and it might be utterly impossible for one ship to even recharge the shuttles of the other, let alone swap phaser assemblies.

And new weapon systems do not perform better than old ones. New weapon systems are designed to fit current doctrine and economical reality for best serving the current fighting needs. Thus, modern naval cannon are significantly and deliberately weaker than old ones. Modern naval interceptor aircraft have been carefully designed to be inferior to older ones in speed, range and firepower. Modern assault rifles have decisively shorter range and inferior penetrating power compared with the rifles of yore. If modern admirals and generals were offered weapons that had the superior performance of their WWII equivalents, they would turn those down because using them would mean losing the next war.

Since we observe no superior performance on the strips, and there definitely is no a priori reason to assume superiority in that respect, we might just as well decide that strips aren't better performers and thus aren't refitted onto ball-turret ships.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Justicar]

Again, you simply don't understand power, energy, work or electricity. Until you do it's really not worth discussing.

Do I really need to go through example by example and explain why you're mistaken? Do you really believe that the 1944 USS Missouri would beat the 1991 USS Missouri? Or Los Angeles class submarine? Or an Arleigh Burke class destroyer? Or that a P-51, F-86, F-4 or F-14 would beat an F-22? Because that's exactly what you've said and that's simply not true. Same goes with assault rifles. You really believe that, despite the evidence to the contrary? I would show you the kinetic kill equation but you've already said "arbitrary physics" don't have a place here. That's convenient.

There is direct evidence that strips do more damage than turrets. Newer Starfleet vessels are significantly larger and more powerful than their predecessors in every way. That is simply not up for debate. When engaged in combat with each other the result of their battles are comparable to the results of a battle between older ships. IOW, a new ship would gut an old ship.

I'm sorry if I've said something to upset you, but I think you need to take a step back and examine your stance. Frankly, the arguments you're supplying are indefensible.

 

[Vance]

Alright, just watch watched TWOK again, on an HDTV. First, I don't see Reliant's phasers behaving like Vance is describing.

I'm not arguing that the VFX are the same, but instead stating that the rollbar phasers track along the bulbs going down the side, going from 'one link in the chain to the next' as it targets the Enterprise's engineering hull. It's this behaviour, the tracking from bulb to bulb, that is reminiscent of the phaser strips on the Enterprise-D 60 years later.

If you look at the model for the rollbar phaser, there are four (I think) 'phaser bumps' that go along the side of the cowling. There's only one really good shot where the phaser's aren't just dumb-firing straight-ahead, and that's the one I'm talking about.

 

[Vance]

There is direct evidence that strips do more damage than turrets.

Actually not within the same age, unfortunately. The Excelsior class vessels in TNG through DS9 were performing on par with the Galaxy class, for instance. Indeed, Sisko was more afraid of an Excelsior in a few episodes than a Galaxy.

Whatever the phaser types used on the Excelsiors in TNG's time (which I assume would be modernized at some point), they didn't seem to be inferior in any respect to the strips on the Galaxy. The only thing I can give, at this point, is that phaser strips seem to allow for superior targeting than the ball-turrets did, but even that is debatable.

 

[Justicar]

Alright, just watch watched TWOK again, on an HDTV. First, I don't see Reliant's phasers behaving like Vance is describing.

I'm not arguing that the VFX are the same, but instead stating that the rollbar phasers track along the bulbs going down the side, going from 'one link in the chain to the next' as it targets the Enterprise's engineering hull. It's this behaviour, the tracking from bulb to bulb, that is reminiscent of the phaser strips on the Enterprise-D 60 years later.

Yup, that's what I thought you meant. I'm just not seeing it. Sorry. Not saying you're wrong, just saying that I haven't seen what you're describing.

I haven't watched DS9 beyond the first season, so can't comment much. I hear it gets better by the 5th season or so, but I'm not wasting that much time on mediocre TV. Too many other things to do. That said, Sisko being more afraid of an Excelsior than a Galaxy is...odd. It certainly doesn't have anything to do with the technology employed.

It also goes against something that you've been adamant about in the past (in previous discussions), in that any ship named Enterprise is the most powerful ship in the fleet at the time of her construction. I find it unlikely that an 80 year old vessel would be upgraded (assuming this is even possible) to be more fearsome than Starfleet's flagship (class).



re: power... combustion of fossil fuels (gasoline, diesel, natural gas), solar, wind, hyrdo, fission, fusion and matter/anti-matter reactions are fundamentally different ways of generating power, but the end result is identical. There's simply no such thing as a fundamentally different kind of energy. It's just a matter of having an appropriate bridge to the grid. On Enterprise (CVN-65) we had fission reactors, diesel-electric motors, diesel-electric generators, steam turbine-electric generators, AC/DC converters, DC/AC converters and batteries all plugged into the grid at once.

 

[Plecostomus]

What I see here is a fundamental difference in how we all view the Star Trek universe, we are trying to make comparisons on how things ought to be based on our own personal experiences. It makes things difficult to say the least.

In MY version of things, torpedo yields max out at about 75 megatons for a quantum, Starfleet decided to research ways of bypassing shields rather than increasing yields to insane levels.

Phasers... as time goes on the principle behind the beam weapons change in response to new technology and changing tactical needs.

We go from a phased electromagnetic pulse weapon to a quantum solid-state laser to a multi-ability phased energy system to an exotic phased-array particle cannon over time.

The phasers on the Excelsior class could be an older more destructive less versitle sytem than the Galaxy class. They were designed in an era where energy delivered over the beam dwell-time is signficantly more than a modern phased particle array. The Excelsior weapons are far less versitle and can't be dampened down like the new systems. The new systems allow you to delever a system-disrupting jolt rather than massive amounts of thermal damage and/or atomic disruption.

The system on the Galaxy Class delivers "only" 250 megawatts but it can spread that across five targets at once per array as opposed to the Excelsior being able to only engage as fast as the targeting system can unmask a turret, cycle the servos to lock on and deliver enough beam dwell to damage the target. This proved to be a liability when engaging the Dominon at first as the Dominon shields were quite a bit more robust than what Starfleet was used to. As the situation evolved so did the weapons.

That's why we seefleet operations on screen. We got the array ships engaging multiple targets while the "turret" ships deliver crippling/killing blows where needed.

The Galaxy class and her sisters were designed post Cardassian and Talarian conflits where individual ships were forced to engage packs of threat vessels, Starfleet wanted to limit destruction remember they are PC/Touchy-feely-lets-be-friends at this point so they designed the new generation of weapons accordingly. Post Dominon and Borg we see newer systems that can deliver more destruction per unit of time (pulse phasers, more powerful arrays) for the time being, until the tactical situation changes again.



Sorry if this is a bit scatterd and unfocused I'm on the phone and doing CAD work at the same time.

 

[Vance]

Yup, that's what I thought you meant. I'm just not seeing it. Sorry. Not saying you're wrong, just saying that I haven't seen what you're describing.

Like I said, it's only really visible in one shot, the first as the Reliant comes alongside the Enterprise. Really, though, it's a matter of taste. No matter what, though, there's nothing to indicate that the rollbar phasers are more powerful than the turrets (making me wonder why Kahn relied on them so much), so the logical (yeah i know) conclusion is that they're 'new tech', more efficient, or something - SOMETHING that's more beneficial, since the yields definately aren't.

It also goes against something that you've been adamant about in the past (in previous discussions), in that any ship named Enterprise is the most powerful ship in the fleet at the time of her construction. I find it unlikely that an 80 year old vessel would be upgraded (assuming this is even possible) to be more fearsome than Starfleet's flagship (class).

Well, the hulls are just frames. The question is what's INSIDE. Note that I said that the Excelsiors had to have been modernized. That means better drives, newer phasers, etc, than from when they were laid down. Just because the frame's the same, doesn't mean than an Excelsior from TUC would be the same in power as one from TNG.

By rights, the Galaxy classes should have been the most powerful ships in the TNG era, and they were, right up until the battles in DS9. DS9, somewhat oddly, really makes the Galaxy class look pretty weak, popping like popcorn at points, while the Excelsiors fight and win above their weight constantly. Of course, this is because the Galaxy isn't the HERO ship of DS9, and some 'false drama' can be created by blowing up Galaxy-class vessels.

 

[Justicar]

Star Wars is fantasy and that universe runs on magic juice.

Star Trek is science fiction. That doesn't mean make believe. It means that while the stories are not based on actual events, the universe is rational, based on known science and plausibility for the future.

Your commentary on directed energy weapons is interesting in that you've basically proven my point. The method of generating the beam may be fundamentally different for each, but the output of each is still measured using the same units.

I can't keep this up. If people want to believe that physics don't apply then there's not much reason to discuss it and we'll just have to go our separate ways. Sorry.

 

[JNG]

The Galaxy class and her sisters were designed post Cardassian and Talarian conflits where individual ships were forced to engage packs of threat vessels, Starfleet wanted to limit destruction remember they are PC/Touchy-feely-lets-be-friends at this point so they designed the new generation of weapons accordingly.

All the time, I see fans claiming that the Enterprise-D is intentionally downgunned due to some sort of peace initiative, the "touchy-feeliness" you mention. This makes no particular sense to me; is there any canonical evidence whatsoever to support it? Also, the TNG Technical Manual and series references pretty clearly place the design phase of the Galaxy class during the ongoing Cardassian wars.

Back to main topic: I do expect the phaser arrays are more powerful than their predecessors, but only because they can combine the output of many small emitter segments to be so when necessary. Aside from being decentralized and retaining some phaser capability despite damage, they would retain the ability to employ only one lil' emitter for lesser applications. I can't imagine that the individual emitters have lost the ability to be dialed down either, and NCC-1701's shipboard phasers could be set to stun, so they can clearly go pretty low; Voyager pulled some trick where the phaser beam was visible but nondestructive, which supports the idea that this capability hasn't been lost. It doesn't seem likely that interim phasers, like those on an Excelsior-class starship, would have lost it. The highly variable yield of phasers and torpedoes suits the nature of Starfleet defensive operations, where I assume the minimum necessary force is typically applied.

 

[Plecostomus]

The reason for the "down-gunned-ness" is political. Starfleet is first and foremost an exploration force not a military force-projection service. If Starfleet built a bigger and better fanservice battleship after each and every conflict it would rapidly become Star Wars with huge battleships slugging it out, hoards of fighters everywhere and needless debates about ion-cannons vs turbolasers.

Star Trek is about the Human Adventure. Boldly Going Where No One Has Gone before and all that. It's best told from a small to moderately powerful ship that relies on the chutzpah and moxie of its crew rather than the crew relying on its arsenal of ever-increasing firepower. Yes you can tell war stories but there are OTHER stories to tell that don't require the use of weapons.

Arsenal Of Freedom is one of my favorite episodes because of this. Geordie didn't try to outgun the Echo-Papa drone, he out-smarted it and kicked it's ass. Same with Picard on the surface. He defeated the drones by thinking not by shooting. Think about the lesson the Borg episodes teach. You CAN NOT defeat them with firepower. You have to get creative.

Frankly if you go into a first contact situation with a battleship you are going to scare the shit out of whoever you are trying to contact. "Hi. We come in peace." The new race will scan your Planetcracker Dreadnought and interpolate your message as "P43aR OUR 1ee+ P4a53rs!" Yeah that's not going over well.

Likewise, Starfleet officers are supposed to be trained to avoid conflict, so one could argue they are issued less powerful weapons so they are "forced" to seek alternate solutions. Yes you COULD blow up the Snot Monster with a phaser, or replicate a giant tissue and soak it up, OR you could try to seek peaceful contact. Only after that fails do you reach for your weapon.

We all differ on our views of how Starfleet thinks and operates and unless we all agree to a common ground (HA! HAHAHA! HAAAAAAAAAH!) there is no point in these debates getting heated and personal. Lets keep terms like "dumb" and "stupid" out of the debate and just present ideas and/or facts as we may?

 

[Vance]

I disagree to a point. When the British Navy went out to new ports, they didn't seen undergunned schooners. When the US went to have diplomatic talks with Japan, they didn't send dignies. When going into unknown and often-dangerous "first contact" missions, you sure as hell send the best you can out to them! Ships and crews are not expendable, and you never, ever, are going to say to your brave men and women "we could have armed your shipped better, and easily afforded it, but fuck it, we wanted to look nice for the Klingons instead".

Anyone that advocates deliberately undergunning your ships and crews in the name of 'appearing friendly to strangers and hostiles', particularly in a universe as insanely dangerous as Star Trek, is a moron. Simply put.

 

[Plecostomus]

Oh the ships are quite powerful but they are not the massive force-projection juggernauts that many fans seem to advocate. 200 torpedoes each with a 50 megaton equivalent warhead? 250 megawatt magic beam? Ability to deflect and disperse similar amounts of incoming energy? Hardly defenseless.

You don't need Scimitar-scale firepower for peaceful contact, nor do you need hundreds of ships carrying doomsday scale weapons.

 

[Vance]

Oh the ships are quite powerful but they are not the massive force-projection juggernauts that many fans seem to advocate. 200 torpedoes each with a 50 megaton equivalent warhead? 250 megawatt magic beam? Ability to deflect and disperse similar amounts of incoming energy? Hardly defenseless.

You don't need Scimitar-scale firepower for peaceful contact, nor do you need hundreds of ships carrying doomsday scale weapons.

As I've stated, even Kirk's Enterprise was carrying 'doomsday scale weapons', which each torpedo the equivalent to the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima!

But, that's part of fandom that you're dealing with (an issue in which I want to write about later for Jaynz), the idea of one-upping one-another with new and more powerful ships. Having redrawn and organized some 1000 different starships, it was impossible for me not to notice the sheer number of designs that basically said "Like the Enterprise, but MORE SO!" in some respect, regardless of era.

The Enterprise, in TOS and TNG, was one of the most powerful ships of her time. It's important to keep that in mind when saying things like "it was made nice-nice to be politically correct". They were heavy cruisers of their period, and it was only the 1990s Hollywood sense of political correctness that white-washed otherwise.

 

[Plecostomus]

That Jaynz stuff rocks BTW.

Ahem.

By "doomsday scale" weapons I'm referring to petawatt phasers, 500 gigaton warheads, "deflector dish" cannons and other such nonsense.

As I mentioned before a few times, I've worked with industrial lasers and recently dabbled with a controlled plasma cutter. Until you actually see a laser of less than five thousand watts cut through inches of hard stainless steel like butter you have NO idea of the scale of these units.

Of course I don't know YOUR background, for all I know I could be talking to a laser-physicist.

As much fun as this debate is I have to get this TV I saved from the trash-heap up and running. Idiot threw it away because he didn't want to mess with a converter box. 36" TV less than 10 years old for free. *boggle*

 

[Timo]

Again, you simply don't understand power, energy, work or electricity. Until you do it's really not worth discussing.

Huh? I understand basic physics fine - it's sort of my profession, after all. What I also understand just fine is that the oversimplifications that you make are enough to negate your arguments. You can't claim with a straight face (like you originally did) that if you supply a bit less input power, you still manage to power up Device X, just with a bit less output power from it. Real world machinery does not work like that. Compatibility issues trump trivial power=energy x time equations here.

Do I really need to go through example by example and explain why you're mistaken? Do you really believe that the 1944 USS Missouri would beat the 1991 USS Missouri?

What sort of a straw man is that? I was not arguing that modern ships are poorer combatants, but the exact opposite: the modern naval vessel wins wars because its guns are weaker than those of the old naval vessel. The standard 4.5 or 5 inch naval cannon of today factually loses to the 16 inch barrels of yore, and the 1991 Missouri would indeed be immediate toast in a gunfight with her WWII counterpart. But modern military leaders have chosen the factually weaker cannon because it allows the modern ships to be armed with potent weapons of other sorts, and to be built in a manner that is affordable.

In theory, a WWII battleship armed with its original gear plus modern missiles might sound like a good proposition. In practice, such a vessel would guarantee defeat in modern war - because the effort of her construction (especially of her now utterly useless elements, such as bulk and waterline armor) would significantly weaken the navy in question, in comparison with a navy that built a dozen aluminum-hulled weaklings instead.

There is direct evidence that strips do more damage than turrets.

Show it.

Newer Starfleet vessels are significantly larger and more powerful than their predecessors in every way. That is simply not up for debate.

But of course it is. Star Trek in the 24th century is built on the same dramatic premises as Star Trek in the 23rd (or 22nd), so the apparent power of the vessels is basically the same in all the shows, quite regardless of pseudotechnological concerns. Which makes it damn difficult to find evidence that the newer ships would be better, and really easy to carry an argument on the issue.

True, the new ships are larger. But they don't defeat their enemies more quickly, or devastate certain benchmark targets such as unshielded planetary installations faster, or move between stars in shorter periods of time. This is dictated by the nature of Star Trek drama first and foremost, and we are left to argue how this can be. And one simple and powerful argument is "Look at the real world!". Things do not go citius, altius, fortius in reality: most things just tread water, with novel disadvantages to countermand modern advantages.

To state that strip phasers are demonstrably better than ball turrets is a false statement. It is perfectly possible to argue that there are differences, and it is a good idea to argue that something about strip phasers makes them more desirable. But higher performance isn't something you can demonstrate from onscreen evidence, the only admissible sort.

When engaged in combat with each other the result of their battles are comparable to the results of a battle between older ships. IOW, a new ship would gut an old ship.

See how easy it is to defeat that sort of circular reasoning? Just refer to onscreen evidence. New ships have been demonstrated as not gutting old ships: a 23rd century Klingon battle cruiser can go toe-to-toe with a 24th century Intrepid class technological marvel, as in VOY "Prophecy", thanks to being in the same size category and thus apparently (despite the century of development) in the same firepower category. And ball turrets and strip phasers observably perform equally well against Dominion forces in DS9 battles, demonstrating that the technologies as such are competitive, even if (and that's a non-demonstrated if) a non-modernized 23rd century ball turret might lose to its 24th century turret and strip counterparts.

Timo Saloniemi