Do phaser arrays amplify energy, or merely direct it?

[Crazy Eddie]

Evek's accusation is that Starfleet wasn't doing their job of keeping heavy weapons out of the hands of the Maquis.

No, he's accusing them of PROVIDING weapons to the Maquis.

And he did specify the nationality when he said "photon torpedoes and Type-8 phasers," the former of which is a weapon the Cardassians are not known to use, and the latter is clearly a Federation weapon design.

What other designations are used by different races to differentiate them?

Cardassians have referred to "System-5 disruptors" or "Galor-class phaser banks." There's Kivas Fajo's "Varon-T disruptor," and Romulan, Breen and Klingon weapons are almost always referred to as "disruptors" even when labeled with a subtype.

"Type-8 phaser" appears in only one other place in trek history, and that's the MSD of the Enterprise-B.

Sure, his English language teachers.

Considering Worf was raised by two Russians, what makes you think he speaks English?

As to whether the universal translator is just used from birth then that's a different question entirely since it would imply that learning isn't necessary (and teachers too).

Worf wasn't BORN to the Rozhenkos. He was born and raised by Klingons until the Khitomer Massacre, after which he was raised by humans. His first language--which he still speaks--is Klingon; if he learned ANY human language he would have learned the language of his family and used the translator to talk to everyone else.

But since their are teachers that young Alexander had to go to learn from which Worf did before it's safe to imply he learned rather than relies on the universal translator...

But learned WHAT? Again, we HEAR English because of the translator, but what language is Worf ACTUALLY speaking?

For that matter, what language is Picard speaking?

WW2 fighters carried weapons up to 37mm cannons. Modern day fighters carry the smaller 20mm and 30mm variety.

With firing rates ten to twenty times higher than their WW-II counterparts, even at comparable calibers (The bigass GAU-8 on the A-10 Warthog). And this ignores the fact that MOST air superiority fighters of that era were equipped with .50-cal machineguns where fast-firing 20 to 30mm cannons are now standard.

I was just pointing out that your insistence to equate the main phasers of the E-D to 5" guns is a flawed comparison when there are no major weapons like fighters to supplant the cruisers and big ships of Star Trek. Star Trek is still a big ship vs big ship affair.

Fighters didn't supplant cruisers and battleships. Fighters supplanted GUNS AND TORPEDOES, which removed the battleship from the field as it was not capable of carrying those types of weapons.

Basically, we phased out the big battleship guns because something a lot more effective came along (namely carrier attack planes and various types of missiles). If phasers are not yet obsolete in the 24th century, however, then the battleship analogy doesn't really fit the situation and the "big gun/little gun" thing even less so.

Do we have enough information to determine each ships':

1. Firing arcs
2. Acceleration (forward, reverse, etc)
3. Turn rate (pitch, yaw, roll)
4. Crew reaction time

All thoroughly irrelevant. What we're testing here is a very simple concept: whether or not it is easy or hard to maneuver one ship within the phaser blind spot of another during a combat situation. The details come later after you've roughed out a baseline.

A verifiable flawed data just produces noise.

... from which useful information can be refined. Noise, in this case, is preferable to silence.

You mean Malcolm saying "We can only maintain this speed for thirty more light years."

I meant what I said, thank you very much.

It's a confusion of units here. Joules is not a measure of power just as kilograms is not a measure of time OR distance. He's leaving something out and it's not clear what.

We're given the maximum power output in joules...

No we're not, because "joules" isn't a unit of power. That's like saying "We're given a time limit in kilograms minus the time variable."

The 400GW did no visible damage to the E-D.

What, in the entire history of TNG, has ever caused "visible" damage to the Enterprise-D?

Hypothetically, if you started from the dubious 400GW number then a Romulan Warbird (TNG) would have it's big green pulse weapon in the 93 GW range per pulse since it knocked the E-D's shield down to 70% in three hits.

I think your math is off on that one. If 400GW is enough to knock out the shields (more than enough, probably) then if the damages scale linearly--and we don't know that they do--the closer estimate would be 30 to 40GW for each disruptor pulse (each one shaving off 10%). But that, again, ignores the unique effects of specific weapon types against shields and deflectors; to wit, disruptors have always been depicted as marginally effective against shields but highly effective against an unprotected hull.

For a Vorcha we don't really know her strength relative to the E-D. Was there such an episode where the E-D fought a Vorcha?

The battle from "Redemption Pt-1" used modified stock footage from Yesterday's Enterprise, within which the Vorcha's main disruptor cannon is able to destroy an unshielded cruiser-sized bird of prey with a single shot. Their second shot against the other ship is blocked when the shields are reactivated just in time.

That puts the Vorcha's main disruptor weapon AT LEAST on par with the Galaxy class' phasers. Considering its performance in DS9 against both the space station and the Jem'hadar, that main disruptor cannon is likely to be far more powerful.

The problem again, 400GW = no physical damage on the E-D.

"Thermal damage to the hull" is physical damage.

1GW would be well less than 1% if you're using the 400GW number (1 / 400GW). It would be even smaller for a higher shield capacity.

Depends on the weapon. Also depends on what the shield percentage was when the Husnok fired on them the second time.

Well then, it would appear you're SOL in showing 400GW will leave any external damage and not blast holes in the ship.

Dialog STATED the ship sustained external damage. Your only claim AGAINST it is that the ship didn't "look" damage. The problem with that is that it NEVER DOES, even when we clearly see the ship getting pounded on all sides by disruptor blasts and half the ship is already on fire, e.g. "Yesterday's Enterprise" or "Timescape". In the former case, half the ship is on fire and they're a handful of minutes from being blown to bits and yet no visible damage is present anywhere on the hull.

Now those Cardassian remote plasma sentries in DS9 blasted holes in the galaxy class ships...

By which time the series was using CGI models and could afford to show visible damage to starships (but had, inexplicably, STOPPED showing any indication of the existence of shields).

Hell, even the Saratoga didn't show any VISIBLE damage when the Borg tore it a new asshole at Wolf-359, and neither did Enterprise when the Borg sliced into its engineering section--twice--breaching the hull to the extent that the entire section had to be evacuated.

"Visible damage" or the lack thereof isn't revealing in this case.

 

[blssdwlf]

Evek's accusation is that Starfleet wasn't doing their job of keeping heavy weapons out of the hands of the Maquis.

No, he's accusing them of PROVIDING weapons to the Maquis.

And he did specify the nationality when he said "photon torpedoes and Type-8 phasers," the former of which is a weapon the Cardassians are not known to use, and the latter is clearly a Federation weapon design.

Yes Cardassians don't have photon torpedo guidance systems. However, the Klingons and Pygorians have photon torpedoes as well as the Federation. Clear as mud. A Cardassian was describing a type-8 phaser weapon. Since Cardassians aslo use phasers it isn't clear that it was a Federation weapon. And yes, we can circle around this point for a very long time

What other designations are used by different races to differentiate them?

Cardassians have referred to "System-5 disruptors"

Disruptors not phasers. Alright, what other designations are used by different races to differentiate phasers?

or "Galor-class phaser banks."

Spoken by a human. Which may not translate to how a Cardassian would designate their phasers.

There's Kivas Fajo's "Varon-T disruptor," and Romulan, Breen and Klingon weapons are almost always referred to as "disruptors" even when labeled with a subtype.

And they're all disruptors and not phasers. Until a Cardassian labels their own phasers with something else, we're left with "Type 8 Phasers" for Cardassian phasers.

"Type-8 phaser" appears in only one other place in trek history, and that's the MSD of the Enterprise-B.

Which is for Federation speakers

Considering Worf was raised by two Russians, what makes you think he speaks English?

Because he has no accent

Worf wasn't BORN to the Rozhenkos. He was born and raised by Klingons until the Khitomer Massacre, after which he was raised by humans. His first language--which he still speaks--is Klingon; if he learned ANY human language he would have learned the language of his family and used the translator to talk to everyone else.

Or he could have learned his human family's language and "Federation english". Or his human family could have encouraged him to learn the primary language used by the Federation which happens to sound just like english

But learned WHAT? Again, we HEAR English because of the translator, but what language is Worf ACTUALLY speaking?

For that matter, what language is Picard speaking?

Don't know. We would have to find out if they were wearing a UT back in the TNG episodes or back when Worf was being raised. However, does that mean anytime we hear an accent in TNG that it's a different language but just being translated?

With firing rates ten to twenty times higher than their WW-II counterparts, even at comparable calibers (The bigass GAU-8 on the A-10 Warthog). And this ignores the fact that MOST air superiority fighters of that era were equipped with .50-cal machineguns where fast-firing 20 to 30mm cannons are now standard.

You mean most AMERICAN air superiority fighters of WW2 used .50 caliber machineguns. The FW-190, BF-109, Hurricane, Tempest, La-5, La-7, A6M, Spitfire VB/C, FAU-1C, and Yak had 20mm cannons. The P-38 carried a 20mm in addition to her .50s. The BF-109G, Me-163, Me-262, had also a 30mm.

The A-10 Warthog is not an air superiority fighter and has special AP ammo.

However, a Star Trek starship compares most to a naval warship with turrets, not air combat fighters and fixed-forward guns.

Fighters didn't supplant cruisers and battleships. Fighters supplanted GUNS AND TORPEDOES, which removed the battleship from the field as it was not capable of carrying those types of weapons.

Which supplanted cruisers and battleships. Our modern day "cruisers" are missile cruisers. Since Star Trek's big ships still fight other big ships obviously no fighters did any supplanting of guns and big guns are still necessary to bring down other big ships.

All thoroughly irrelevant. What we're testing here is a very simple concept: whether or not it is easy or hard to maneuver one ship within the phaser blind spot of another during a combat situation. The details come later after you've roughed out a baseline.

That's bull. The baseline is the performance data as observed from the show. Without any performance data or firing arc information you're just making junk up on how difficult it is to maneuver a ship that is not from Star Trek.

... from which useful information can be refined. Noise, in this case, is preferable to silence.

Then by all means, go make up your own noise and expect to be called out for it.

I meant what I said, thank you very much.

It's a confusion of units here. Joules is not a measure of power just as kilograms is not a measure of time OR distance. He's leaving something out and it's not clear what.

And when Worf says we're hit with Gigawatts of power, he's leaving something out to in order to determine how much actual Joules are delivered. <shrugs>

No we're not, because "joules" isn't a unit of power. That's like saying "We're given a time limit in kilograms minus the time variable."

No, it's like saying "We're given a time limit in energy minus the time variable."

What, in the entire history of TNG, has ever caused "visible" damage to the Enterprise-D?

The Borg with the precise (and small) cut into the hull. And the Romulan Warbird from "Timescape". That's about it. What other ships supposedly hit the ship with it's shields down with full powered weapons?

I think your math is off on that one. If 400GW is enough to knock out the shields (more than enough, probably) then if the damages scale linearly--and we don't know that they do--the closer estimate would be 30 to 40GW for each disruptor pulse (each one shaving off 10%).

Not my math, my memory From "Tin Man", shields lost 70% from 7 hits (corrected from 3 hits)
400GW * 0.7 = 280GW
280GW / 7 hits = 40GW

In "Timescape", again, the first 6 hits knock the shields down to 27% or 48GW per pulse. Although the pulses were grouped in a burst of 3 hits in a span of 1s or so. Of course, there were those direct hits on the E-D... 200GW or so of disruptor energy doesn't appear to blow anything off the hull.

But that, again, ignores the unique effects of specific weapon types against shields and deflectors; to wit, disruptors have always been depicted as marginally effective against shields but highly effective against an unprotected hull.

Like in "Timescape" where they are effective against both shields but not so much the hull?

The battle from "Redemption Pt-1" used modified stock footage from Yesterday's Enterprise, within which the Vorcha's main disruptor cannon is able to destroy an unshielded cruiser-sized bird of prey with a single shot. Their second shot against the other ship is blocked when the shields are reactivated just in time.

Unshielded BOP? The YE E-D from the alternate timeline blasted a BOP to bits with her shields up... Are you comparing it to the regular timeline E-D?

"Thermal damage to the hull" is physical damage.


Depends on the weapon. Also depends on what the shield percentage was when the Husnok fired on them the second time.

Well then, it would appear you're SOL in showing 400GW will leave any external damage and not blast holes in the ship.

Dialog STATED the ship sustained external damage. Your only claim AGAINST it is that the ship didn't "look" damage. The problem with that is that it NEVER DOES, even when we clearly see the ship getting pounded on all sides by disruptor blasts and half the ship is already on fire, e.g. "Yesterday's Enterprise" or "Timescape". In the former case, half the ship is on fire and they're a handful of minutes from being blown to bits and yet no visible damage is present anywhere on the hull.

In the case of YE, the shields were buckling but had not failed yet on the E-D. In "Timescape" there is clear hull scarring on the front of the E-D since the shields would've been down. They apparently had some time to repair the ship when they were to deliver the Romulan survivors to the NZ.

Now those Cardassian remote plasma sentries in DS9 blasted holes in the galaxy class ships...

By which time the series was using CGI models and could afford to show visible damage to starships (but had, inexplicably, STOPPED showing any indication of the existence of shields).

Still, damage is damage. "Timescape" shows that TNG did put damage on the ship when warranted.

Hell, even the Saratoga didn't show any VISIBLE damage when the Borg tore it a new asshole at Wolf-359,

The camera cut away from the impact point at the bottom of the ship so there is no way to ascertain any visible damage to the Saratoga. Subsequent shots when they escaped the ship was from the rear, again no way to see what it looked like from the front of the ship.

and neither did Enterprise when the Borg sliced into its engineering section--twice--breaching the hull to the extent that the entire section had to be evacuated.

The Borg cutting beam glow pretty much obscures the secondary hull damage. In later shots we don't get a chance to see the hole cut out.

"Visible damage" plays a part even in the TNG series. We know the Romulans can scar the ship even it's not fatal. The E-D just didn't take all that much to knock out with her shields up

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Because he has no accent

Neither do the Kazon. I suppose that's because the Kazon language just happens to be identical to English.

Don't know. We would have to find out if they were wearing a UT back in the TNG episodes or back when Worf was being raised. However, does that mean anytime we hear an accent in TNG that it's a different language but just being translated?

Actually, I've always figured that the only time you hear an accent is when a character is speaking in a language WITHOUT the benefit of the universal translator (Chekov, for example, probably learned enough English to have comfortable conversations with his mostly north-American shipmates).

There's canon support for this too, such as in "Ceasefire" when Soval tells T'pol that she's picked up a slight terran accent. Since they're both speaking English at the time, it's clearly IMPLIED that they're actually speaking to each other in Vulcan and that WE are hearing a translation. Soval is listening to T'pol's Vulcan and it sounds more like the translator's (and in tern, Hoshi's) Vulcan than a native speaker's Vulcan.

But the basic question is whether or not you think it's weird that a born and raised frenchman is speaking English with a british accent. It's either because he learned English in the UK, or because he's using the European model of the UT while Riker and Worf are using a North American brand.

You mean most AMERICAN air superiority fighters of WW2 used .50 caliber machineguns. The FW-190, BF-109, Hurricane, Tempest, La-5, La-7, A6M, Spitfire VB/C, FAU-1C, and Yak had 20mm cannons...

In addition to the .50s, yes. And again, modern-day cannon armaments are several times more powerful than their WW-II counterparts, as are their missile/bomb loads far more effective at longer ranges and with greater accuracy.

However, a Star Trek starship compares most to a naval warship with turrets...

Or bomber formations with mounted defensive guns.

Which supplanted cruisers and battleships. Our modern day "cruisers" are missile cruisers. Since Star Trek's big ships still fight other big ships obviously no fighters did any supplanting of guns and big guns are still necessary to bring down other big ships.

Which is where the analogy totally breaks down: in modern naval combat, big guns AREN'T necessary, so the analogy to "big gun battleship" doesn't hold up. To be sure, we don't really know if the battleship guns would have remained effective if air power hadn't come into its own as a naval weapon system; guided missiles and torpedoes might have rendered them just as obsolete for the exact same reasons.

The flip side of this is the fact that directed energy weapons have been the mainstay of space forces since human beings were still murdering each other with fixed bayonets. Not alot seems to have changed in all that time, except that humans have acquired better technology now along with their neighbors. In that context, it's likely that the phaser weapons of the E-D aren't appreciably more powerful than weapons of 100 or 200 years earlier, but bring something ELSE to the table that provides a considerable tactical advantage. Once again, thermal efficiency, range and accuracy were listed as possibilities that you might want to look at.

That's bull. The baseline is the performance data as observed from the show.

We don't HAVE any relevant performance data from the show. What we're trying to test is something we have never seen before.

More to the point: it's a SHOW. It will depict whatever the writers want it to depict, one way or the other. We're testing for plausibility of the concept in and of itself, remember?

And when Worf says we're hit with Gigawatts of power, he's leaving something out to in order to determine how much actual Joules are delivered.

Worf didn't actually mention joules, so I'm not sure what you're talking about.

No, it's like saying "We're given a time limit in energy minus the time variable."

Which is, of course, gibberish.

The Borg with the precise (and small) cut into the hull. And the Romulan Warbird from "Timescape". That's about it. What other ships supposedly hit the ship with it's shields down with full powered weapons?

The Klingon ships in "Yesterday's Enterprise," the Cardassian ship in "The Chase" and the pirate ship in "Gambit."

Moreover, the Borg cutting beam is described as cutting through two different sections on three different decks; that's no "small" cut, but it leaves no visible damage to the hull. The same thing happens in "Disaster" when a quantum filament apparently breaches the hull in several places but leaves no visible sign of it.

This also happens several times in Voyager, in particular Basics Part-I where the Kazon repeatedly hit Voyager's "starboard ventral," causing no VISIBLE damage but producing an exploitable weakness in the ship's systems. Something similar happens to the Defiant in "The Search" where Jem'hadar fighters rain weapons fire all over Defiant's hull, filling the ship with flames, but not making a visible mark on the hull.

Not my math, my memory From "Tin Man", shields lost 70% from 7 hits (corrected from 3 hits)
400GW * 0.7 = 280GW
280GW / 7 hits = 40GW

Which assumes
1) Romulan disruptors have identical effects on shields as husnok weapon and
2) That 400GW is EXACTLY the amount of power required to take down the shields, not more and not less.

Neither assumption is justified.

Like in "Timescape" where they are effective against both shields but not so much the hull?

Actually they were pretty effective against the hull DESPITE the presence of the shields, as one hapless ensign--and Commander Riker--found out the hard way.

Unshielded BOP? The YE E-D from the alternate timeline blasted a BOP to bits with her shields up... Are you comparing it to the regular timeline E-D?

No.

Again, both shots are identical, the only difference is that the YE bird of prey lost its shields almost immediately after phaser contact.

In the case of YE, the shields were buckling but had not failed yet on the E-D.

They pretty much HAD failed by this point, as Data mentions half a minute earlier "Shields bucking, they will not..." a sentence that is probably meant to end "... withstand another direct hit," which is exactly what happens, and exactly why he never finishes it.

In "Timescape" there is clear hull scarring on the front of the E-D...

In the freezeframe, yes. But not in any of the following scenes.

Hell, even the Saratoga didn't show any VISIBLE damage when the Borg tore it a new asshole at Wolf-359,

The camera cut away from the impact point at the bottom of the ship so there is no way to ascertain any visible damage to the Saratoga.[/quote]
It's visible to the camera when the escape pods are pulling away. No visible damage, only flash and lightning (like what happened to the Enterprise and the BOP in The Search for Spock). It's basically identical to what we see later in the same episode, where DS9 also shows no visible damage despite a visually spectacular explosion in the lower core.

The Borg cutting beam glow pretty much obscures the secondary hull damage. In later shots we don't get a chance to see the hole cut out.

That's because there wasn't a hole, because the FX guys--as usual--didn't bother to paint one. They rarely do, which is why we invariably use damage reports--DIALOG cues--not visual cues to assess damages from battle.


Do you even know what your position is anymore, because I don't. I think you're just being augmentative because you don't like the Tech Manual and you like the idea that the length of a phaser array means anything even less. But the visual, background and source materials all suggest that SOME form of amplification is occurring, which is the entire point of putting your phaser banks in arrays in the first place (since they fire in sustained beams and not pulses). If it were not so, there would be no point in HAVING those arrays in the first place.

 

[blssdwlf]

Because he has no accent

Neither do the Kazon. I suppose that's because the Kazon language just happens to be identical to English.

LOL, why not

Don't know. We would have to find out if they were wearing a UT back in the TNG episodes or back when Worf was being raised. However, does that mean anytime we hear an accent in TNG that it's a different language but just being translated?

Actually, I've always figured that the only time you hear an accent is when a character is speaking in a language WITHOUT the benefit of the universal translator (Chekov, for example, probably learned enough English to have comfortable conversations with his mostly north-American shipmates).

Yet in TOS the UT was a hand carried device or something built into the ship's comm systems and not the portable ones we see in DS9. Chekov would be speaking untranslated.

There's canon support for this too, such as in "Ceasefire" when Soval tells T'pol that she's picked up a slight terran accent. Since they're both speaking English at the time, it's clearly IMPLIED that they're actually speaking to each other in Vulcan and that WE are hearing a translation. Soval is listening to T'pol's Vulcan and it sounds more like the translator's (and in tern, Hoshi's) Vulcan than a native speaker's Vulcan.

Or she's speaking English with a non-Vulcan accent. It is not unusual for a speaker to lose their native accent after being immersed in a foreign land and learning a new language.

But the basic question is whether or not you think it's weird that a born and raised frenchman is speaking English with a british accent. It's either because he learned English in the UK, or because he's using the European model of the UT while Riker and Worf are using a North American brand.

In TNG it is hard to say without knowing if everyone carried a UT or not.

In addition to the .50s, yes. And again, modern-day cannon armaments are several times more powerful than their WW-II counterparts, as are their missile/bomb loads far more effective at longer ranges and with greater accuracy.

Does a single 20mm round from WW2 hit with the same strength as a single 20mm round from now?

Or bomber formations with mounted defensive guns.

And how common were bomber vs bomber scenarios?

Which is where the analogy totally breaks down: in modern naval combat, big guns AREN'T necessary, so the analogy to "big gun battleship" doesn't hold up. To be sure, we don't really know if the battleship guns would have remained effective if air power hadn't come into its own as a naval weapon system; guided missiles and torpedoes might have rendered them just as obsolete for the exact same reasons.

Yet in Star Trek, big guns ARE necessary. Perhaps you should re-examine your Star Trek is modern naval combat analogy?

The flip side of this is the fact that directed energy weapons have been the mainstay of space forces since human beings were still murdering each other with fixed bayonets. Not alot seems to have changed in all that time, except that humans have acquired better technology now along with their neighbors. In that context, it's likely that the phaser weapons of the E-D aren't appreciably more powerful than weapons of 100 or 200 years earlier, but bring something ELSE to the table that provides a considerable tactical advantage. Once again, thermal efficiency, range and accuracy were listed as possibilities that you might want to look at.

Or just simply multiple simultaneous fire due to having an array of emitters

We don't HAVE any relevant performance data from the show. What we're trying to test is something we have never seen before.

It's a show that is no longer being produced. The data is there if you care to look as it won't be changing (or altered) soon.

More to the point: it's a SHOW. It will depict whatever the writers want it to depict, one way or the other. We're testing for plausibility of the concept in and of itself, remember?

Then it shouldn't be so hard to respect what the writers have depicted, eh?

Worf didn't actually mention joules, so I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Then how do you measure the amount of delivered energy?

The Klingon ships in "Yesterday's Enterprise," the Cardassian ship in "The Chase" and the pirate ship in "Gambit."

YE -> responded to further down
"The Chase" -> SIF protected the nacelle. Internal damage only. If that's the best the Cardassian warships can do or were they just trying to slow them down?
"Gambit" -> their weapons were sabotaged causing minimal damage. Not full powered shots against the hull.

Moreover, the Borg cutting beam is described as cutting through two different sections on three different decks; that's no "small" cut, but it leaves no visible damage to the hull.

And in "Q Who" the Borg cutting beam cut through 3 sections and 3 decks and we saw a closeup of how clean (and small) the incision is. From the lack of closeups and obscuring glow of the cutting beam in "BOBW" we are not able to say there is no damage.

The same thing happens in "Disaster" when a quantum filament apparently breaches the hull in several places but leaves no visible sign of it.

It's not weapons fire and what should a hull breach from a quantum filament look like? A big rip (which it apparently is not) or a bunch of cracks leaking air?

This also happens several times in Voyager, in particular Basics Part-I where the Kazon repeatedly hit Voyager's "starboard ventral," causing no VISIBLE damage but producing an exploitable weakness in the ship's systems.

In "Basics" all the starboard ventral hits prior to the fight where they are captured the shields were always up with only internal damage reported.

Something similar happens to the Defiant in "The Search" where Jem'hadar fighters rain weapons fire all over Defiant's hull, filling the ship with flames, but not making a visible mark on the hull.

In the same vein, Defiant shows almost no visible damage when struck by phaser fire from Lakota and the Klingons in "Way of the Warrior". Go ablative armor, keeps the hull clean too

Which assumes
1) Romulan disruptors have identical effects on shields as husnok weapon and
2) That 400GW is EXACTLY the amount of power required to take down the shields, not more and not less.

Neither assumption is justified.

On #2, then why are you trying so hard again to put phaser power so low again?

Actually they were pretty effective against the hull DESPITE the presence of the shields, as one hapless ensign--and Commander Riker--found out the hard way.

That just means they were effective in dealing internal damage.

No.

Again, both shots are identical, the only difference is that the YE bird of prey lost its shields almost immediately after phaser contact.

They pretty much HAD failed by this point, as Data mentions half a minute earlier "Shields bucking, they will not..." a sentence that is probably meant to end "... withstand another direct hit," which is exactly what happens, and exactly why he never finishes it.

I just watched it and two things: the Klingons tell Picard to
"surrender and prepare to be boarded" and the camera pulls back where further hits on the E-D don't tell us if there is external damage (lack of close-ups) and/or if the Klingons still want to capture the ship rather than destroying it.

In the freezeframe, yes. But not in any of the following scenes.

Having watched it, the "dark spot" at the impact point is there during the disruptor hits. It is only in the final scene where they are heading to the RNZ where we see the bottom front of the saucer cleaned up.

Hell, even the Saratoga didn't show any VISIBLE damage when the Borg tore it a new asshole at Wolf-359,

The camera cut away from the impact point at the bottom of the ship so there is no way to ascertain any visible damage to the Saratoga.

It's visible to the camera when the escape pods are pulling away.

And how are you able to see that? The escape pods exit from the rear of the Saratoga and we're never shown a frontal view?

Do you even know what your position is anymore, because I don't.

I could ask the same for you. First you argue that the E-D phaser weapons are low GW weapons and you use the 400GW example from "The Survivors" as an upper range. Then you argue it's not a good example. Then you argue that there has never been any physical damage to the E-D, etc.

I think you're just being augmentative because you don't like the Tech Manual and you like the idea that the length of a phaser array means anything even less.

Whatever the length of the array means, it isn't likely to be power output as suggested by the TM. And the TM is wrong on the power output altogether. The TM is however good in causing tech arguments though

But the visual, background and source materials all suggest that SOME form of amplification is occurring, which is the entire point of putting your phaser banks in arrays in the first place (since they fire in sustained beams and not pulses). If it were not so, there would be no point in HAVING those arrays in the first place.

If they fire in sustained beams and there is some amplification process shouldn't the array continue glowing for the entire time the beam is on?

The only time the phaser array appears to differentiate from the traditional single point emitter is in it's ability to fire at multiple targets (even if it's on the same target ship) simultaneously which we've seen in both TNG and DS9. The whole visual of the energy moving around to the firing point could just be a simple "searching for the best emitter for the best firing angle".

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Does a single 20mm round from WW2 hit with the same strength as a single 20mm round from now?

Generally, no. The cannons on modern fighters have two to three times the muzzle energy as their 1940s counterparts and--more importantly--have ten times the firing rate.

Yet in Star Trek, big guns ARE necessary.

Phasers aren't guns.

Or just simply multiple simultaneous fire due to having an array of emitters

It would be nice if they ever actually did this often enough to have it make sense.

It's a show that is no longer being produced. The data is there if you care to look

For the scenario we're talking about, no concrete data actually exists.

Then it shouldn't be so hard to respect what the writers have depicted, eh?

The WRITERS do not determine the details of the VFX shots, nor set design or modeling details. Likewise, they've never depicted what a 24th century toilet looks like but that won't prevent us from speculating on how they probably work.

Then how do you measure the amount of delivered energy?

Real world? You'd have to know something about the nature of the energy weapon and its target and from this calculate how much energy would be deflected or absorbed.

Trek world? Not much to go on other than dialog, and filling in the blanks with guesses or assumptions is hazardous when it comes to the details like this.

"The Chase" -> SIF protected the nacelle. Internal damage only. If that's the best the Cardassian warships can do or were they just trying to slow them down?
"Gambit" -> their weapons were sabotaged causing minimal damage. Not full powered shots against the hull.

Which contrast with TUC, where a photon torpedo hits the fully shielded Enterprise and leaves a visible car on the hull but no internal damage. Ironically, the problem continues with the Excelsior, which ALSO takes a direct torpedo hit, but they couldn't afford to add damage details to the model so they depicted the damaged Excelsior using leftover "damage control" scenes from the editing process.

And in "Q Who" the Borg cutting beam cut through 3 sections and 3 decks and we saw a closeup of how clean (and small) the incision is.

Significantly, the incision is no longer present in the later external shots of the Enterprise. They didn't have the time or the resources to actually place that damage on the filming model in a way that would have been plausible (since most of the external VFX shots used recycled elements from earlier in the series and only the "cutting into the hull" closeup was original).

In the same vein, Defiant shows almost no visible damage when struck by phaser fire from Lakota and the Klingons in "Way of the Warrior". Go ablative armor, keeps the hull clean too

Except that ablative armor SHOULD leave visible scarring on the hull far more obvious than resistive armor. It should actually look considerably WORSE despite the complete lack of internal damage (see "One Little Ship").

On #2, then why are you trying so hard again to put phaser power so low again?

Because of the precedents sited: the very few times any concrete numbers are given for weapon outputs it's always in the megawatt to gigawatt range. The SINGULAR exception is "A Matter of Time," where the actual phaser output is never given, only a "variance" of immense magnitude which is apparently difficult to control.

All of these taken as a whole suggest the Enterprise' main phaser output probably wouldn't be more than five to ten times the output of the blast that took down the runabout in "The Battle Lines." (Compare USS Challenger vs. Delta Flyer in "Timeless").

That just means they were effective in dealing internal damage.

And you are, I take it, prepared to explain how weapons can cause "internal damage" without leaving so much as a scratch on the hull?

I just watched it and two things: the Klingons tell Picard to
"surrender and prepare to be boarded" and the camera pulls back where further hits on the E-D don't tell us if there is external damage (lack of close-ups) and/or if the Klingons still want to capture the ship rather than destroying it.

The one thing the visuals make abundantly clear is that Enterprise's shields are down and she is taking those disruptor blasts right on the chin. The one thing that is equally clear is that those disruptor blasts leave no visible marks on the hull.

Which is what USUALLY happens in TNG and the first half of DS9 and Voyager. It wasn't until digital models started getting more use that external damage started to appear in TV episodes; prior to that, adding external damage was an expensive and time consuming process that was a huge liability because you could only build so many miniatures and it wasn't always feasible to keep redressing them all the time.

And how are you able to see that? The escape pods exit from the rear of the Saratoga and we're never shown a frontal view?

We do get a good view of the underside before the ship explodes. No external damage to that spot.

I could ask the same for you. First you argue that the E-D phaser weapons are low GW weapons and you use the 400GW example from "The Survivors" as an upper range. Then you argue it's not a good example. Then you argue that there has never been any physical damage to the E-D, etc.

First of all, YOU'RE the one claiming that there's never been any physical damage to the Enterprise. I said there's rarely been any VISIBLE damage to the Enterprise because visible damage is hard to depict with filming miniatures, so that even when the ship is STATED as being severely damaged to the point of needing a complete overhaul, you will never see any sign of it on the skin.

Second of all, "The Survivors" was listed as a good example of an extreme upper limit of the kinds of firepower a starship could be expected to encounter; it is, in other words, the boundary of "too much power" and any standard energy weapon is almost certainly FAR less powerful.

The lack of visible damage is a VFX trend that persists right up through DS9's second season, where they start using more and more sophisticated tricks for showing damage (lightning effects, glowy fireball spots) and finally switch to CGI renders that gave them the flexibility to do all kinds of funky things they could never do before.

I think you're just being augmentative because you don't like the Tech Manual and you like the idea that the length of a phaser array means anything even less.

Whatever the length of the array means, it isn't likely to be power output as suggested by the TM.

And your sole defense of the "isn't likely" claim is that it would encourage enemies to attack more often from a rear aspect, a claim you are entirely unwilling to support with even the simplest tests and can only back up with your--apparently--vast knowledge of the intricacies of space combat.

Either way, if it isn't power output you've yet to give a plausible case for what ELSE it might be.

If they fire in sustained beams and there is some amplification process shouldn't the array continue glowing for the entire time the beam is on?

The array doesn't glow, only a portion of it ever does, apparently following the firing order of each emitter. Evidently we only see the glow when they BEGIN to fire and never again after that.

The whole visual of the energy moving around to the firing point could just be a simple "searching for the best emitter for the best firing angle".

A new guess from you. I note again that as far as you're concerned it could be just about anything OTHER than amplification.

 

[blssdwlf]

Does a single 20mm round from WW2 hit with the same strength as a single 20mm round from now?

Generally, no. The cannons on modern fighters have two to three times the muzzle energy as their 1940s counterparts and--more importantly--have ten times the firing rate.

The Hispano 20mm from WW2 fired 130g 20mm rounds with a muzzle speed of 880m/s and the modern M61 Vulcan 20mm fired 102g 20mm rounds with a muzzle speed of 1,030m/s. The difference in KE is 3,770 J with both rounds at 50,336 J and 54,106 J respectively. That doesn't sound like 2x to 3x the muzzle energy.

Firing rate at 10x does sound right though.

Yet in Star Trek, big guns ARE necessary.

Phasers aren't guns.

KIRK: Then prove it. Give me that phaser gun. If there's any human left in you, give it to me.

BAILEY: Bridge to Phaser Gun Crew.

KIRK: Phaser guns, stand by to fire.

It would be nice if they ever actually did this often enough to have it make sense.

Multiple beams from the same strip would depend on the firing scenario. It would be nice if the E-D was attacked by hordes of fighters or missiles all the time.

For the scenario we're talking about, no concrete data actually exists.

We've got how many episodes of the hero ships? I think you can pull enough relevant performance data to get a reasonably accurate simulation of those ships.

The WRITERS do not determine the details of the VFX shots, nor set design or modeling details. Likewise, they've never depicted what a 24th century toilet looks like but that won't prevent us from speculating on how they probably work.

Why are you arguing against yourself?

newtype_alpha wrote: "It will depict whatever the writers want it to depict, one way or the other."

Perhaps you meant, the show will depict whatever the production crew want to depict?

In anycase, the visuals and dialogue are there. Just think of yourself as a military analyst studying footage to determine a ship's combat capability

Real world? You'd have to know something about the nature of the energy weapon and its target and from this calculate how much energy would be deflected or absorbed.

Which energy is measured in... Joules

Trek world? Not much to go on other than dialog, and filling in the blanks with guesses or assumptions is hazardous when it comes to the details like this.

Yet you're perfectly comfortable with guesses or assumptions in simulating a combat scenario with an arcade game?

Which contrast with TUC, where a photon torpedo hits the fully shielded Enterprise and leaves a visible scar on the hull but no internal damage. Ironically, the problem continues with the Excelsior, which ALSO takes a direct torpedo hit, but they couldn't afford to add damage details to the model so they depicted the damaged Excelsior using leftover "damage control" scenes from the editing process.

No internal damage would suggest no exploding walls/conduits and smoke. Even with shields up there appears to be internal damage with exploding walls/conduits and smoke, scar or no scar.

Significantly, the incision is no longer present in the later external shots of the Enterprise. They didn't have the time or the resources to actually place that damage on the filming model in a way that would have been plausible (since most of the external VFX shots used recycled elements from earlier in the series and only the "cutting into the hull" closeup was original).

What scene in "BOBW" would have been close enough and not obscured to show the hit on the secondary hull? Do you have a screen capture or time index?

Except that ablative armor SHOULD leave visible scarring on the hull far more obvious than resistive armor. It should actually look considerably WORSE despite the complete lack of internal damage (see "One Little Ship").

Uhm, the impulse engines and the warp engines were damaged in the attack in "One Little Ship". There was internal damage. Also, these are Dominion weapons hits, not Federation phasers or Klingon disruptors. What the damage should look like when the ablative armor is hit is what we get in the series.

Because of the precedents sited: the very few times any concrete numbers are given for weapon outputs it's always in the megawatt to gigawatt range. The SINGULAR exception is "A Matter of Time," where the actual phaser output is never given, only a "variance" of immense magnitude which is apparently difficult to control.

How many times were weapons outputs for starships cited?

"The Survivors" - 40MW to 400GW antiproton Husnock/Dowd
"A Matter of Time" - 60GW phaser variance would be bad.
"Conundrum" - Lysian destroyer disruptor capacity 2.1 MJ, no match for the E-D
"Battle Lines" - 900MW takes out runabout shields, damage to ship.
"Silent Enemy" - 500GJ Phase cannons

About 5 times. "The Survivors" is debatable due to alien interference. "Battle Lines" is against a Runabout. "Conundrum" is regarding an inferior alien ship.

"A Matter of Time" isn't competing with that many counter-examples.

And you are, I take it, prepared to explain how weapons can cause "internal damage" without leaving so much as a scratch on the hull?

Explain? No. There just are weapons that can do that

The one thing the visuals make abundantly clear is that Enterprise's shields are down and she is taking those disruptor blasts right on the chin. The one thing that is equally clear is that those disruptor blasts leave no visible marks on the hull.

At the distance from the camera, No, it's not equally clear that there are no visible marks on the hull. Also, we're talking about an alternate universe of the E-D where the Klingons and the E-D's technology may not correspond to the un-altered versions.

We do get a good view of the underside before the ship explodes. No external damage to that spot.

No we do not get a good view of the underside, especially of the front of the ship. Are you even checking your info?

First of all, YOU'RE the one claiming that there's never been any physical damage to the Enterprise. I said there's rarely been any VISIBLE damage to the Enterprise

No, you were pretty absolute about it. No "rarely".

newtype_alpha wrote: "I hope you're not referring to a visible/cosmetic scar on the hull like we see in the movies, because you're SOL in that department; nothing EVER leaves a visible scar in the series even when the ship is clearly stated to have suffered major damage."

And I agreed up to a point. Obviously when checking further into it, there are examples of damage to the ship and I shouldn't have agreed so quickly.

blssdwlf wrote: "Well then, it would appear you're SOL in showing 400GW will leave any external damage and not blast holes in the ship. Now those Cardassian remote plasma sentries in DS9 blasted holes in the galaxy class ships so it would seem that with the exception of the Borg, the E-D didn't encounter anything that blasted a hole out of the ship during it's series run."

because visible damage is hard to depict with filming miniatures, so that even when the ship is STATED as being severely damaged to the point of needing a complete overhaul, you will never see any sign of it on the skin.

Unless it's "Timescape". I wonder what other episodes we've missed signs of damage...

Second of all, "The Survivors" was listed as a good example of an extreme upper limit of the kinds of firepower a starship could be expected to encounter; it is, in other words, the boundary of "too much power" and any standard energy weapon is almost certainly FAR less powerful.

Upper limit? Worf was having problems re-assembling the shields and the Douwd was interfering with the battle. If Worf said shields failed and wasn't trying to re-assemble them I'd have more confidence that it could be used as an "upper limit".

And your sole defense of the "isn't likely" claim is that it would encourage enemies to attack more often from a rear aspect, a claim you are entirely unwilling to support with even the simplest tests and can only back up with your--apparently--vast knowledge of the intricacies of space combat.

I claim nothing of vast knowledge. Just pointing out what's been depicted and where your claims don't match up. I would support any simple test if accurate performance data was used. That would mean finding something other than the arcade game you want to use. Perhaps we will have to write a simple simulation.

blssdwlf wrote: "I think that the secondary hull's phasers should be on par with the saucer phasers just to have parity in delivered phaser power otherwise everyone would just attack the ships from the lower aft direction."

newtype_alpha wrote: "Everyone DOES attack from the lower aft direction, especially in sneak attacks. On the other hand, you cannot always--or even usually--control the direction you attack from unless you can convince your opponent to hold still for a couple minutes so you can get into an ideal attack position."

Yet, in the "sneak attack" scenarios we have not found any evidence that supports the "from the lower aft direction".

Either way, if it isn't power output you've yet to give a plausible case for what ELSE it might be.

If they fire in sustained beams and there is some amplification process shouldn't the array continue glowing for the entire time the beam is on?

The array doesn't glow, only a portion of it ever does, apparently following the firing order of each emitter. Evidently we only see the glow when they BEGIN to fire and never again after that.

What we see is the phaser glow begin on the ends of the array travel to a discharge point and then to the target. If the array was part of an amplification process then we should see the array continue to glow as energy is traveling from the ends to the discharge point. Since it is not doing that, arguing that it is amplifying the beam doesn't hold unless it only amplifies the initial pulse and the continuous beam is of a far lower power.

The whole visual of the energy moving around to the firing point could just be a simple "searching for the best emitter for the best firing angle".

A new guess from you. I note again that as far as you're concerned it could be just about anything OTHER than amplification.

It's a guess from observation of what the phaser array is doing. Amplification is still unsupported in dialogue and in VFX, IMHO.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Does a single 20mm round from WW2 hit with the same strength as a single 20mm round from now?

Generally, no. The cannons on modern fighters have two to three times the muzzle energy as their 1940s counterparts and--more importantly--have ten times the firing rate.

The Hispano 20mm from WW2

Was one of the most powerful air-mounted canon armaments of its era. The M60 Vulcan is NOT its modern equivalent.

There's also something to be said for effect. 600 joules of thermal energy is enough to warm up a small cup of coffee; 600 joules of kinetic energy is the force packed by a matchbox car if you push it off the kitchen table. But 600 joules of hard x-rays absorbed into your body will kill you just about instantly.

Multiple beams from the same strip would depend on the firing scenario. It would be nice if the E-D was attacked by hordes of fighters or missiles all the time.

Who said anything about fighters or missiles? If the emitters aren't collectively amplifying the discharge, then each INDIVIDUAL emitter is capable of a full-power discharge, no?

So if you're going up against a bird of prey that's somehow managed to disable your shields, that would be an ideal time to lock, say, 60 of your nearly 800 phaser emitters on that target and fire them all at once. If you're not getting a 60x amplification from all the emitters combined, you could still get a 60x increase in delivered power by firing off more emitters.

And if you're not going to do THAT, what's the point of putting phasers in an array? To use your favorite analogy, it would be like mounting 9 16-inch guns on the Iowa class but only giving it the ability to fire a single barrel in any thirty-second period.

We've got how many episodes of the hero ships? I think you can pull enough relevant performance data to get a reasonably accurate simulation of those ships.

Are you kidding? We don't even know how the helm controls work.

In anycase, the visuals and dialogue are there. Just think of yourself as a military analyst studying footage to determine a ship's combat capability

Star Trek isn't real. Information that isn't depicted, for all intents and purposes, doesn't exist. Maybe that's what you're not understanding in this exchange?

What we were discussing here is whether or not the act of avoiding another ship's phaser coverage is even POSSIBLE, let alone doable enough to give you a tactical advantage. I've already named two different contexts--both just as fictional as Star Trek--where this does not hold true. You have come up with a million reasons why you don't want to treat those contexts as valid... the only one that matters here is that you don't really want to be wrong.

Yet you're perfectly comfortable with guesses or assumptions in simulating a combat scenario with an arcade game?

Yes, since the guesses and/or assumptions can be taken into account there. It's easier to examine data than some guys imagination.

What scene in "BOBW" would have been close enough and not obscured to show the hit on the secondary hull? Do you have a screen capture or time index?

Second laser attack, same as the first (recycled footage). The beam is hitting near the first row of windows below the neck.

Beginning of the episode. Note the first row of windows. No visible damage.

End of the episode. Note again the first row of windows. No visible damage.

And there's always Family, a couple of days later. No visible damage.

I guess Geordi evacuated engineering in Part-I for no good reason?

Uhm, the impulse engines and the warp engines were damaged in the attack in "One Little Ship". There was internal damage.

But no EXTERNAL damage. Nothing visible.

"A Matter of Time" isn't competing with that many counter-examples.

And yet it's the only (and highly extreme) outlier.

Explain? No. There just are weapons that can do that

Apparently, only when they feel like it.

No we do not get a good view of the underside, especially of the front of the ship.

Your own screencaps show the underside, including the sensor dome where the Borg laser beam hits them in the first place. There isn't a scratch on it, which is pretty amazing for a beam that supposedly strikes the warp core (which is, in fact, in the AFT compartment of the ship).

And I agreed up to a point. Obviously when checking further into it, there are examples of damage to the ship and I shouldn't have agreed so quickly.

The only example in all of TNG is "Timescape" and that mark is gone as soon as the freeze-frame ends.

Upper limit? Worf was having problems re-assembling the shields and the Douwd was interfering with the battle. If Worf said shields failed and wasn't trying to re-assemble them I'd have more confidence that it could be used as an "upper limit".

It's enough to know that Enterprise's phasers have never knocked out an enemy's shields--even temporarily--with a single shot, nor have they ever come remotely close.

I claim nothing of vast knowledge. Just pointing out what's been depicted and where your claims don't match up. I would support any simple test if accurate performance data was used. That would mean finding something other than the arcade game you want to use. Perhaps we will have to write a simple simulation.

Fine.

START with the arcade game and then you'll know where improvements need to be made.

The thing I'm seeing in this situation, though, is that you're unwilling to do even THAT much. It's almost as if you know what the results will be and you want to invalidate a preliminary data set before it's even collected.

What we see is the phaser glow begin on the ends of the array travel to a discharge point and then to the target. If the array was part of an amplification process then we should see the array continue to glow...

Technically we're not even sure what causes the glow in the first place. We know the purpose of the visual effect, though--which, according to the producers, is supposed to indication phaser energy being generated and concentrated from many emitters to a single point--and that is essentially amplification.

It's a guess from observation of what the phaser array is doing.

Looks to me like an observation of what you've already decided a phaser array ISN'T doing.

 

[Timo]

Time for more hipshots:

Cardassian ships haven't been seen firing torpedo-style weapons, that's true - but in "Tribunal", the Hideki that intercepts the O'Briens is said to have established a "photon lock" on our heroes. And in "Ensign Ro", the two Galors fire decidedly bolt-type weapons (of the same purple color as the Cardassian beam weapons of the era, as seen in "The Wounded").

http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/s5/5x03/ensignro275.jpg

Might be Cardassians have inferior torpedoes. Might be they have weapons they themselves don't consider photon torpedoes, even if a runabout computer identifies them as such. But Cardassians, like Romulans, are quoted by our heroes (or their computers) as having photon tech, giving us hints on how the heroes apply the terminology.

On the issue of backstage sources and some dialogue insisting that phasers have an output in joules, we don't get far if we try to interpret this as the total energy of a pulse discharge (because pulses of a "standard" length are actually quite rare in Trek, and because the figures make little sense when we time the discharges). But we could easily sidestep the issue and say that joules give the "caliber" of the shot in some scifi sense, and that this is completely unrelated to the output in joules but crucial for things like penetration or range. Phasing takes energy, after all. And phasing can happen to various degrees, and reach various "phased realms". A gun that phases into X joules might have effects that differ from those of a gun that phases into Y joules, when both pump out a T-second beam at Z watts. Indeed, that's pretty much how we measure laser output today: the output power and the wavelength are given separately, and the former is given the units of power while the latter is often defined in units of energy rather than length or frequency.

In the end, weapons output given in joules does not carry direct plot implications about destructive power. It is mere filler technobabble, with indirect effects at most. Even the "Silent Enemy" thing about joules is only introductory boasting, and is not brought up again when our heroes discuss the actual effect of the weapons.

"It's rated for a maximum power output of five hundred gigajoules."

So, perhaps it is rated to pump out maximum power (an unknown quantity, dependent on what Reed and Tucker plug it into) when it's tuned for a 500 GJ beam "frequency", and can only handle lower power levels when tuned otherwise? That'd also agree with what happens in the episode: the beam has a greater "yield" when the "phase modulators" are affected by alien technology, even though the actual power pumped into the weapon is a known quantity that comes from the ship's own resources. The alien technology isn't supplying the power, as its output is given as mere 600 MJ.

Reed just says "of" when "at" would be more accurate...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[blssdwlf]

Generally, no. The cannons on modern fighters have two to three times the muzzle energy as their 1940s counterparts and--more importantly--have ten times the firing rate.

The Hispano 20mm from WW2

Was one of the most powerful air-mounted canon armaments of its era. The M60 Vulcan is NOT its modern equivalent.

newtype_alpha wrote: "The cannons on modern fighters have two to three times the muzzle energy as their 1940s counterparts".

The Hispano 20mm from WW2 was widely used in the 1940s. Perhaps you're confusing the .50 cals and 7.76s from WW2?

Who said anything about fighters or missiles?

newtype_alpha wrote: "It would be nice if they ever actually did this often enough to have it make sense."

When would you need to fire multiple beams at multiple targets from the same array? Apparently when attacked by many fighters or missiles. ("Conundrum" being a good example.) Or in a big battle like in DS9. However, for the run of TNG, the E-D rarely saw that kind of action.

If the emitters aren't collectively amplifying the discharge, then each INDIVIDUAL emitter is capable of a full-power discharge, no?

Yes. That's what I'm thinking they would be capable of.

And if you're not going to do THAT, what's the point of putting phasers in an array? To use your favorite analogy, it would be like mounting 9 16-inch guns on the Iowa class but only giving it the ability to fire a single barrel in any thirty-second period.

What's the point of putting a bunch of phasers on the TOS E when she can fire all of her power output through one pair of emitters? The phaser array's main distinction from the point emitter is that it can fire simultaneously at multiple targets. It might have to split it's power between the multiple beams, but that would appear to be the point.

Are you kidding? We don't even know how the helm controls work.

That doesn't detract from observing how fast the ships can accelerate, turn or the weapons arcs.

Star Trek isn't real. Information that isn't depicted, for all intents and purposes, doesn't exist. Maybe that's what you're not understanding in this exchange?

I understand perfectly. What you are missing is that the information is there if you look since much of the relevant performance data is depicted.

What we were discussing here is whether or not the act of avoiding another ship's phaser coverage is even POSSIBLE, let alone doable enough to give you a tactical advantage.

You never did get back to me on the phaser blind spots of the NX-01. Does it even have any?

I've already named two different contexts--both just as fictional as Star Trek--where this does not hold true. You have come up with a million reasons why you don't want to treat those contexts as valid... the only one that matters here is that you don't really want to be wrong.

You've related experiences playing an arcade game that doesn't simulate accurate performance from Star Trek. If you're worried about being right or wrong, then perhaps you should get a better simulation tool.

Yes, since the guesses and/or assumptions can be taken into account there. It's easier to examine data than some guys imagination.

Well, far better than some guys bad arcade experience

Second laser attack, same as the first (recycled footage). The beam is hitting near the first row of windows below the neck.

Beginning of the episode. Note the first row of windows. No visible damage.

Yet the laser cut from "Q Who" showed a small, clean incision (no scarring) and would have stayed in place if it were not for the Borg tractor beam extracting the decks.

The screen cap Beginning would be difficult to spot that kind of damage from that angle and that distance.

http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/s2/2x16/qwho171.jpg

http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/s2/2x16/qwho172.jpg

End of the episode. Note again the first row of windows. No visible damage.

At this distance with the Borg cutting beam? No. You wouldn't be able to see it.

And there's always Family, a couple of days later. No visible damage.

Where are you getting a couple of days later? When did they say that?

And yet it's the only (and highly extreme) outlier.

Out of 5 examples, 2 of which are specific to smaller and inferior vessels. The remaining 3 examples, although including the older NX-01, would put "The Survivors" as the outlier.

Your own screencaps show the underside, including the sensor dome where the Borg laser beam hits them in the first place. There isn't a scratch on it, which is pretty amazing for a beam that supposedly strikes the warp core (which is, in fact, in the AFT compartment of the ship).

And the camera switches away from the impact point not allowing us to see if there was any scarring or damage to the front underside. Subsequent shots do not show the front underside.

As to what the beam strikes, we only know that the internal damage effected the warp core - not that it directly hit the warp core. Plus all the other explosive internal damage that apparently damaged all the hallways and the bridge and Sisko's quarters.

The only example in all of TNG is "Timescape" and that mark is gone as soon as the freeze-frame ends.

Once time is moving forward, the E-D is still struck by the disruptor bolts that leave scarring. The only time we see the front of the ship again is at the end where they are heading to the RNZ and by that time the front is cleaned up.

It's enough to know that Enterprise's phasers have never knocked out an enemy's shields--even temporarily--with a single shot, nor have they ever come remotely close.

You are meaning an enemy of equivalent capability? Because the phasers blasted the Lysian destroyer without breaking a sweat.

Fine.

START with the arcade game and then you'll know where improvements need to be made.

What improvements can be made? Do you have the source code to Encounters? Can you make the improvements to the game? If not, then it is a dead end. The answers will be wrong and you have no way to correct for them.

The thing I'm seeing in this situation, though, is that you're unwilling to do even THAT much. It's almost as if you know what the results will be and you want to invalidate a preliminary data set before it's even collected.

You want to use bad data and I'm calling you out for it. As I've said before, use a different and accurate tool set to experiment with.

What we see is the phaser glow begin on the ends of the array travel to a discharge point and then to the target. If the array was part of an amplification process then we should see the array continue to glow...

Technically we're not even sure what causes the glow in the first place. We know the purpose of the visual effect, though--which, according to the producers, is supposed to indication phaser energy being generated and concentrated from many emitters to a single point--and that is essentially amplification.

You're basing your assumption that it is an amplification on something that you don't even know what causes the glow in the first place? Okay

It's a guess from observation of what the phaser array is doing.

Looks to me like an observation of what you've already decided a phaser array ISN'T doing.

Until you're able to show that it is amplification from dialogue or fx then yeah, it sure isn't "amplifying" anything.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The Hispano 20mm from WW2

Was one of the most powerful air-mounted canon armaments of its era. The M60 Vulcan is NOT its modern equivalent.

newtype_alpha wrote: "The cannons on modern fighters have two to three times the muzzle energy as their 1940s counterparts".

The Hispano 20mm from WW2 was widely used in the 1940s...

And was largely replaced in the early 1940s by more advanced weapons that used lighter projectiles to achieve superior firing rates and better accuracy, which is one of the reasons for the longevity of the Oerlicon 20mm. Its more modern counterpart would be the M39, which was mostly supplanted by the fast-firing M-61 Vulcan in the same way the M39 supplanted the Hispano.

Of course, if we're following that analogy then phaser arrays would be the equivalent of a gatling gun for starships, in which case a lower output for individual emitters ought to be expected; the array is combining the output of many small emitters for greater cumulative effect than would normally be achieved by a single larger weapon.

When would you need to fire multiple beams at multiple targets from the same array?

Who cares? The better question is, when do you need to fire multiple beams at the SAME target from the same array?

Yes. That's what I'm thinking they would be capable of.

Then why install a ring of several hundred small arrays on the bottom of the ship?

What's the point of putting a bunch of phasers on the TOS E when she can fire all of her power output through one pair of emitters? The phaser array's main distinction from the point emitter is that it can fire simultaneously at multiple targets. It might have to split it's power between the multiple beams, but that would appear to be the point.

The problem is they never actually do this from a SINGLE array. The beams only ever fire one at a time even when shooting at multiple targets.

The only time I recall ever seeing more tan one phaser beam from the same array it was in "Sacrifice of Angels" when a Galaxy class put two phaser beams into the bridge of a Galor class. Which begs the question of why, if they were capable of that, they didn't do that ALL the time with as many beams as needed to do the job?

That doesn't detract from observing how fast the ships can accelerate, turn or the weapons arcs.

Other than the fact that those observations are 1) Highly inconsistent (sometimes it's fast, sometimes it's slow) and 2) subject to a variety of fairly obvious FX errors (phaser beams coming from places where there are no emitters).

Star Trek wasn't PRODUCED to be a faithful representation of what might really be happening, so trying to extract data from the visuals would be like using a Van Gough painting to calculate the spectral class of a star.

What you are missing is that the information is there if you look since much of the relevant performance data is depicted.

The PERFORMANCE data is not depicted because it wasn't meant to be depicted. That's not what the FX producers had in mind when they were doing this stuff.

You never did get back to me on the phaser blind spots of the NX-01. Does it even have any?

It does in Encounters (two really big ones) which is why it makes a good case study for the test. Enterprise-A has one too, but it's very very small.

Well, far better than some guys bad arcade experience

If you want me to believe that your imagination trumps trumps ANY solid data we might collect, we might as well end this conversation here.

Yet the laser cut from "Q Who" showed a small, clean incision (no scarring) and would have stayed in place if it were not for the Borg tractor beam extracting the decks.

The screen cap Beginning would be difficult to spot that kind of damage from that angle and that distance.

You are maybe overlooking the incredibly obvious fact that the FX team made no effort whatsoever to PLACE that damage on the model, nor would they if the Borg had hit them with a train of photon torpedoes.

Why? Because almost every external shot in that episode was RECYLED FOOTAGE. They were not at the point yet where they could cheaply play around with the models between episodes (even the cutting scene from Q-Who required the construction of a whole new miniature just for five seconds of new footage).

And the camera switches away from the impact point not allowing us to see if there was any scarring or damage to the front underside. Subsequent shots do not show the front underside.

Saratoga wasn't hit on the front underside, it was hit on the sensor dome, and the visual effect covers the whole thing. Ironically, the FX show phaser beams coming from the exact same location a few seconds earlier.

Once time is moving forward, the E-D is still struck by the disruptor bolts that leave scarring.

But the scarring isn't there anymore in the following scenes, particularly when the runabout is moved in front of the energy beam.

What improvements can be made?

You can measure how responsive a particular vessel is to controls, the turn rate, acceleration rate, and so on, because in the gam these are FIXED quantities that do not very from episode to episode. Several tests in a row can determine whether or not these fixed quantities have any bearing on how easy it is to remain in the targeting blind spot of an enemy vessel.

Once you have that data (i.e. a ship with X characteristics is able to remain in the blind spot for Y amount of time at Z range) you can compensate for possible inaccuracies (longer firing range, better sensors, better vessel reaction time, etc). You can try to compute what things the game got wrong and to what extent and factor that in as a "handicap," and if you REALLY want to go the extra mile, use the resulting data to program your own simulation in Dreamweaver or something.

You want to use bad data and I'm calling you out for it.

You want to use NO data and I'm throwing that back in your face. Bad data is superior to NO data because bad data can be corrected once you know the circumstances of its collection.

For your part, you're not even able to quantify WHY the simulation would be inaccurate; you've only been able to say that it doesn't "look right" and listed a bunch of situational nitpicks that have nothing to do with what we're trying to simulate. It would be like me proposing a test of a new cholesterol medication on mice and you objecting "That's a useless test! Everyone knows mice don't eat cheeseburgers!"

You're basing your assumption that it is an amplification on something that you don't even know what causes the glow in the first place?

The glow is indicate of the individual arrays being activated. As I said two posts ago, we do not know what part of the activation of the array causes the glow, whether or not they would continue to glow if they were active, or whether or not the glow is the result of their CEASING to be active. Nor do we understand why the glow is not ALWAYS present when the array is fired.

The only thing we know for sure is what the PRODUCERS thought it meant, and they made it clear that the effect was supposed to imply energy being gathered from many arrays onto a single point.

 

[blssdwlf]

Was one of the most powerful air-mounted canon armaments of its era. The M60 Vulcan is NOT its modern equivalent.

newtype_alpha wrote: "The cannons on modern fighters have two to three times the muzzle energy as their 1940s counterparts".

The Hispano 20mm from WW2 was widely used in the 1940s...

And was largely replaced in the early 1940s by more advanced weapons that used lighter projectiles to achieve superior firing rates and better accuracy, which is one of the reasons for the longevity of the Oerlicon 20mm. Its more modern counterpart would be the M39, which was mostly supplanted by the fast-firing M-61 Vulcan in the same way the M39 supplanted the Hispano.

The Hispano 20mm stayed in service through to the Korean War. I had asked if a 20mm round from WW2 hit with the same power as a modern 20mm round. You picked the lighter 20mm rounds which would be at most 2.5x the muzzle energy but neglected the popular Hispano which was almost on par and the even more powerful Vya 20mm.

Of course, if we're following that analogy then phaser arrays would be the equivalent of a gatling gun for starships, in which case a lower output for individual emitters ought to be expected; the array is combining the output of many small emitters for greater cumulative effect than would normally be achieved by a single larger weapon.

Not me. You're the one suggesting the aircraft comparison.

Who cares? The better question is, when do you need to fire multiple beams at the SAME target from the same array?

AFAIK, that has only happened once, in the "Sacrifice of Angels" battle. Funny enough, the 2nd Galaxy-class opted to only fire single beam shots from the same array instead of doing what the 1st Galaxy-class did with 2 beams from the same array. This would appear to be at the discretion of the Captain and/or tactical officer or whatever available power they had for the phasers.

Then why install a ring of several hundred small arrays on the bottom of the ship?

You mean several small arrays on the secondary hull? Why not? More emitters mean increased ability to engage multiple targets simultaneously. That's the main distinction that I see in the operation of a phaser array vs a single emitter. The question is whether the ship can power more than one emitter at a time at "full power" or does it mean firing multiple shots from an array would divide the power up between the number of firing elements.

The problem is they never actually do this from a SINGLE array. The beams only ever fire one at a time even when shooting at multiple targets.

"Never" is not true. We've seen them fire multiple beams simultaneously from a single array when engaging drones from "Conundrum". You even point out "Sacrifice of Angels" although it is against a single target. The problem is not how few we see this done but when would they need to do this. The E-D hasn't been in many combat scenarios where she would need to fire at many targets.

The only time I recall ever seeing more tan one phaser beam from the same array it was in "Sacrifice of Angels" when a Galaxy class put two phaser beams into the bridge of a Galor class. Which begs the question of why, if they were capable of that, they didn't do that ALL the time with as many beams as needed to do the job?

How many times have we seen the E-D engage a Galor-class ship with the specific goal to destroy it? I only recall the E-D going "all out" against the Husnock ship from "The Survivors" and in "Best of Both Worlds" against the Borg.

Other than the fact that those observations are 1) Highly inconsistent (sometimes it's fast, sometimes it's slow) and 2) subject to a variety of fairly obvious FX errors (phaser beams coming from places where there are no emitters).

Had it not occur to you that the phaser beams coming from places where there are no emitters (or arrays) are from the not-"Main Phasers"?

Or the sometimes fast, sometimes slow movement that things are happening "in universe" and not an FX error?

The PERFORMANCE data is not depicted because it wasn't meant to be depicted. That's not what the FX producers had in mind when they were doing this stuff.

It doesn't matter what the FX guys had in mind since we're looking at it from an in-universe POV and the end results. Also, it's not just FX alone but the combination of VFX and dialogue.

It does in Encounters (two really big ones) which is why it makes a good case study for the test. Enterprise-A has one too, but it's very very small.

In Encounters, ok. But does the NX-01 have a blind spot in the series? Or can you determine one by examining the model? The same goes for the E-A. If you don't know that, then what happens in Encounters is meaningless for analyzing the series.

If you want me to believe that your imagination trumps trumps ANY solid data we might collect, we might as well end this conversation here.

Describing what happened in the show trumps any of the wrong data you'll collect with that arcade game. You might as well stop arguing for Encounters as it isn't helping your cause.

You are maybe overlooking the incredibly obvious fact that the FX team made no effort whatsoever to PLACE that damage on the model, nor would they if the Borg had hit them with a train of photon torpedoes.

Why? Because almost every external shot in that episode was RECYLED FOOTAGE. They were not at the point yet where they could cheaply play around with the models between episodes (even the cutting scene from Q-Who required the construction of a whole new miniature just for five seconds of new footage).

The background of how things were produced doesn't change what has been depicted on the screen. The more obvious fact is that we're not close enough to see any damage, especially from that type of incision.

Saratoga wasn't hit on the front underside, it was hit on the sensor dome, and the visual effect covers the whole thing. Ironically, the FX show phaser beams coming from the exact same location a few seconds earlier.

Saratoga was hit from the front on the sensor dome and the camera cuts away before any damage was shown. The hit sequence was well less than a second. Since we never see the front underside of the Saratoga afterwards, you cannot say there was no external damage to the ship.

For comparison, this Excelsior-class was hit by the beam and after a second of time passes damage started to appear towards the front of the impact point. The beam dwelled longer and exploded the front half off the saucer. We don't know how long the beam dwelled on the Saratoga but apparently not long enough to blow off half of the saucer. The second beam that struck the Saratoga did destroy the ship.

But the scarring isn't there anymore in the following scenes, particularly when the runabout is moved in front of the energy beam.

Look again. There is a large dark spot at the impact point.

http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/s6/6x25/timescape361.jpg

You can measure how responsive a particular vessel is to controls, the turn rate, acceleration rate, and so on, because in the gam these are FIXED quantities that do not very from episode to episode. Several tests in a row can determine whether or not these fixed quantities have any bearing on how easy it is to remain in the targeting blind spot of an enemy vessel.

And what scale is the game at? When a ship accelerates are you measuring in pixels? Firing ranges? Are the blind spots accurate? Rotation rates? Top speeds? What power availability and damage levels on the ship?

Once you have that data (i.e. a ship with X characteristics is able to remain in the blind spot for Y amount of time at Z range) you can compensate for possible inaccuracies (longer firing range, better sensors, better vessel reaction time, etc). You can try to compute what things the game got wrong and to what extent and factor that in as a "handicap," and if you REALLY want to go the extra mile, use the resulting data to program your own simulation in Dreamweaver or something.

And that is your problem in using Encounters. You can't handicap a ship. Or correct for what isn't accurate. The game is a fixed arcade game that you can't compensate for.

It would be better to start off with a simulation where the parameters can be adjusted to be accurate.

You want to use bad data and I'm calling you out for it.

You want to use NO data and I'm throwing that back in your face. Bad data is superior to NO data because bad data can be corrected once you know the circumstances of its collection.

You can't correct for the inaccuracies in the arcade game. So it is still useless bad data. You'd probably get better data if you pulled out two SFB miniatures and play fight with them

For your part, you're not even able to quantify WHY the simulation would be inaccurate; you've only been able to say that it doesn't "look right" and listed a bunch of situational nitpicks that have nothing to do with what we're trying to simulate. It would be like me proposing a test of a new cholesterol medication on mice and you objecting "That's a useless test! Everyone knows mice don't eat cheeseburgers!"

Then what is the top speed of the ships in Encounters?
The phaser range?
Are the firing arcs accurate?
The acceleration?
The scale of the ships and the battle map?

You're basing your assumption that it is an amplification on something that you don't even know what causes the glow in the first place?

The glow is indicate of the individual arrays being activated. As I said two posts ago, we do not know what part of the activation of the array causes the glow, whether or not they would continue to glow if they were active, or whether or not the glow is the result of their CEASING to be active. Nor do we understand why the glow is not ALWAYS present when the array is fired.

Now that we're digging into it, how do you even know that the glow is to "indicate the individual arrays are being activated"? You just said you don't know what causes the glow.

The only thing we know for sure is what the PRODUCERS thought it meant, and they made it clear that the effect was supposed to imply energy being gathered from many arrays onto a single point.

Did you mean gathered from the end points of an array onto a single point? I don't see any energy jumping between arrays

The producers of TNG also thought that phasers didn't work at warp. Yeah, right

 

[blssdwlf]

Time for more hipshots:

Cardassian ships haven't been seen firing torpedo-style weapons, that's true - but in "Tribunal", the Hideki that intercepts the O'Briens is said to have established a "photon lock" on our heroes.
...
Might be Cardassians have inferior torpedoes. Might be they have weapons they themselves don't consider photon torpedoes, even if a runabout computer identifies them as such. But Cardassians, like Romulans, are quoted by our heroes (or their computers) as having photon tech, giving us hints on how the heroes apply the terminology.

Good find on the Cardassian photons

There is also "Return to Grace" where Worf tells Kira that the Federation did not want the Cardassians to obtain from her "photon torpedo guidance systems" (but has shared it with Bajor and the Klingons). The Cardassians could just have inferior torpedoes or haven't found a way to miniature them and built big versions ("Dreadnaught") instead

Add the Miradorns also as photon torpedo users and Bolians as either users or traders of photon launchers...

On the issue of backstage sources and some dialogue insisting that phasers have an output in joules, we don't get far if we try to interpret this as the total energy of a pulse discharge (because pulses of a "standard" length are actually quite rare in Trek, and because the figures make little sense when we time the discharges).
...
In the end, weapons output given in joules does not carry direct plot implications about destructive power. It is mere filler technobabble, with indirect effects at most. Even the "Silent Enemy" thing about joules is only introductory boasting, and is not brought up again when our heroes discuss the actual effect of the weapons.

"It's rated for a maximum power output of five hundred gigajoules."

So, perhaps it is rated to pump out maximum power (an unknown quantity, dependent on what Reed and Tucker plug it into) when it's tuned for a 500 GJ beam "frequency", and can only handle lower power levels when tuned otherwise?

I agree, it takes some creativity to account for the Watts and Joules use on the shows.

Knowing the Watts can tell us how many Joules per second a weapon is outputting or shields are absorbing/deflecting. That's good for continuous beams. Unfortunately the Husnock ship fired pulses

On the other hand, energy pulses tends to be easier accounted for by knowing the total Joules delivered to target. Unfortunately, the NX-01 fired beams

But since most Star Trek weapons are not simple lasers, there is also the magic factor that each weapons possess that gives them the ability to vaporize/disrupt targets. So you are right in saying the Joules/Watts is meaningless unless it could be tied to observed effects/dialogue. ("Blowing up Mount McKinley" would still require more energy than what the episode would suggest.)

That'd also agree with what happens in the episode: the beam has a greater "yield" when the "phase modulators" are affected by alien technology, even though the actual power pumped into the weapon is a known quantity that comes from the ship's own resources. The alien technology isn't supplying the power, as its output is given as mere 600 MJ.

I got a sense that the "overload" was a result of the alien device interfering with the surge control from the impulse engines. There was already a risk that the control would not work.

REED: Bypass the EPS grid.
TUCKER: Why?
REED: Well, we could draw power for the cannons directly from the impulse engines.
TUCKER: Are you trying to make this blow up in your face?
REED: The relays were rated to handle that much power.
TUCKER: What if there's a surge?
REED: I've thought of that. These inverters were designed to cut in at the first sign of an overload.
TUCKER: We've got to do this by the book, or we'll end up blowing a bigger hole in ourselves than the bad guys.
REED: I've run a dozen simulations. It's an acceptable risk.
​

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The Hispano 20mm stayed in service through to the Korean War.

So did the Iowa's 16-inch guns. That doesn't make them modern weapons, now does it?

You mean several small arrays on the secondary hull? Why not? More emitters mean increased ability to engage multiple targets simultaneously.

Not if you only ever fire one emitter at a time. And that scenario--firing several emitters at multiple targets at once--is something we have have NEVER seen, in fact the closest we ever get to seeing that is "Conudrum" where the phasers quickly shoot down a swarm of lysian battlepods... very quickly, but still one at a time.

The problem is not how few we see this done but when would they need to do this.

And the answer is "almost never." It would be different if phasers were known to have a role as a point defense weapon for shooting down enemy torpedoes and missiles (a la STXI) but in TNG this does not seem to be the case.

Like I said before, whether or not phaser arrays would work that way in NuTrek is a different subject entirely. We're trying to figure out how they would work in TNG.

Had it not occur to you that the phaser beams coming from places where there are no emitters (or arrays) are from the not-"Main Phasers"?

It did, except that the first time we hear the term "main phasers" the beam is shown coming out of Picard's yacht. This is CLEARLY a VFX error, as are most of those other instances.

Or the sometimes fast, sometimes slow movement that things are happening "in universe" and not an FX error?

They're inconsistencies, not errors. Similar to the extremely notable lack of shields in any major fleet action in DS9. It was done intentionally to make the battle seem more exciting, but it DOES represent a glaring inconsistency.

It doesn't matter what the FX guys had in mind since we're looking at it from an in-universe POV and the end results.

The end results were intended to be pretty colors and visually pleasing visuals, not a realistic portrayal of the ship's performance characteristics. That's the difference between a TV show and a console game: the TV show has to be pretty, the game has to be pretty AND consistent.

You know as well as I do that Star Trek has been many things, but one thing it has rarely been is consistent (except insofar as the frequent reuse of FX shots, but that's a different thing entirely).

In Encounters, ok. But does the NX-01 have a blind spot in the series?

Considering all three phase cannons were mounted on the ventral side of the ship, theoretically its entire dorsal axis should be one freaking enormous blind spot.

Failing that (assuming dorsal cannons installed) there are two large ones in the aft quarters where the nacelles block the firing line from the aft cannons. That seems to be exactly what is represented in the game too.

Or can you determine one by examining the model? The same goes for the E-A.

Enterprise-A would have two small ones port and starboard aft in similar locations to NX-01, but the placement of the nacelle pylons (plus the aft phasers over the shuttle bay) makes them a great deal smaller.

Describing what happened in the show trumps any of the wrong data you'll collect with that arcade game.

The scenario we're describing never happened in the show, not even for NX-01, where it theoretically SHOULD have happened at least once (still the issue with FX errors; in "Shockwave" we see the Enterprise somehow firing ventral phasers at two suliban pods ABOVE the saucer section).

If you can find a situation in the show that closely relates to what we're talking about here, then you can argue from the visuals alone. Otherwise, a game simulation is your only option.

Of course, if you don't like Encounters we can always use an even more realistic simulation. Legacy, for instance, wherein remaining in the phaser blind spot of an enemy vessel is just about impossible.

Saratoga was hit from the front on the sensor dome and the camera cuts away before any damage was shown.

The damage NEVER would have been shown because that model was never designed to show any damage. Unlike the Excelsior model, which was created in the first place just so it could be blown up.

This is why TNG and early DS9 never show visible damage, even on ships that are known through dialog to BE damaged: modifying existing models (or building new ones) is expensive and time consuming. We didn't get to see that regularly until DS9 started using more sophisticated CG models.

And what scale is the game at? When a ship accelerates are you measuring in pixels? Firing ranges? Are the blind spots accurate? Rotation rates? Top speeds? What power availability and damage levels on the ship?

Irrelevant. We're testing the extent to which those blind spots net any tactical advantage in the first place. You're trying to dispute the details when we you haven't even proven the concept yet.

And that is your problem in using Encounters. You can't handicap a ship. Or correct for what isn't accurate.

Yes you can. You collect the data and you get a spread of numbers. You can adjust the numbers up and down by a factor you can calculate (say, if you think the Encounters bird of prey is too slow or if you think its firing range is too short). You can't do ANY of that until you collect the data, though.

Which, of course, you don't want to do because we already know what the results will be, don't we?

Now that we're digging into it, how do you even know that the glow is to "indicate the individual arrays are being activated"? You just said you don't know what causes the glow.

You are thinking maybe it's just a coincidence that it only happens when the phasers fire?

Did you mean gathered from the end points of an array onto a single point?

I meant exactly what I said, thank you very much,.

I don't see any energy jumping between arrays

Neither do I. I'm talking about what the FX team of the show intended it to mean.

The producers of TNG also thought that phasers didn't work at warp.

And a few years later, they changed their minds.

Consistency!

 

[blssdwlf]

The Hispano 20mm stayed in service through to the Korean War.

So did the Iowa's 16-inch guns. That doesn't make them modern weapons, now does it?

Which has nothing to do with the question about 20mm weapons from WW2 and modern day 20mm weapons. (And the Iowa's 16 inch gun could still be used today. Just because the ship-class itself has been retired does not make the gun obsolete.)

You mean several small arrays on the secondary hull? Why not? More emitters mean increased ability to engage multiple targets simultaneously.

Not if you only ever fire one emitter at a time. And that scenario--firing several emitters at multiple targets at once--is something we have have NEVER seen, in fact the closest we ever get to seeing that is "Conudrum" where the phasers quickly shoot down a swarm of lysian battlepods... very quickly, but still one at a time.

Then perhaps you haven't seen it in a while? Here is a screen cap to jog your memory and you can see two beams from the same array at the same time at two targets:

And the answer is "almost never." It would be different if phasers were known to have a role as a point defense weapon for shooting down enemy torpedoes and missiles (a la STXI) but in TNG this does not seem to be the case.

Actually, TNG and TOS did use the phasers for shooting down missiles. (See "The Price", "For the World Is Hollow..." and "Patterns of Force".) However I have not (to my knowledge) seen any photon torpedo shot down or attempted to be shot down. And of course, "Conundrum" for the drones.

Like I said before, whether or not phaser arrays would work that way in NuTrek is a different subject entirely. We're trying to figure out how they would work in TNG.

When I mentioned TNG-R, it is the rumored re-do of the VFX for TNG, not NuTrek.

It did, except that the first time we hear the term "main phasers" the beam is shown coming out of Picard's yacht. This is CLEARLY a VFX error, as are most of those other instances.

Is it an error or is it just another "main phaser bank" that doesn't look like an array?

http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/s1/1x02/farpoint2_208.jpg

They're inconsistencies, not errors. Similar to the extremely notable lack of shields in any major fleet action in DS9. It was done intentionally to make the battle seem more exciting, but it DOES represent a glaring inconsistency.

I know you've repeated that many times, but did it occur to you that these are conformal shields like those sported on the TOS Movie Enterprise?

The end results were intended to be pretty colors and visually pleasing visuals, not a realistic portrayal of the ship's performance characteristics. That's the difference between a TV show and a console game: the TV show has to be pretty, the game has to be pretty AND consistent.

Encounters is an arcade console game that tries to be play balanced and consistent to itself. It's not a simulation game where it tries to be consistent to the ships depicted in the show. 1941 is a pretty and consistent game but it is not a simulation of WW2 warbirds.

You know as well as I do that Star Trek has been many things, but one thing it has rarely been is consistent (except insofar as the frequent reuse of FX shots, but that's a different thing entirely).

Why not gather data and map out the series and see what data there is to see how consistent it is? I've only sampled a small percentage of TNG/DS9/ENT/VOY to know that there is data to use. And once you have data, then you can figure out something easy, like what the phaser blind spot looks like

Considering all three phase cannons were mounted on the ventral side of the ship, theoretically its entire dorsal axis should be one freaking enormous blind spot.

Failing that (assuming dorsal cannons installed) there are two large ones in the aft quarters where the nacelles block the firing line from the aft cannons. That seems to be exactly what is represented in the game too.

From what we know, 3 cannons were installed in "Silent Enemy" but there are physically at least 14 openings (6 dorsal, 6 ventral +2 more ventral that are not shown on any of the models I've seen) where the cannons have been seen to pop out from suggesting that either there are more than 3 cannons installed after that episode or the same 3 cannons are free to move around to the different openings. To my knowledge, I've not seen more than 3 cannons fire at the same time from the NX-01 though but I haven't seen every battle yet.

If we tally up all the known firing locations we get this for the NX-01 phase cannon blind spot which would not fit another NX-class let alone a Klingon BOP. A Suliban small craft could fit there though, but it would have to fly a tight formation and not veer too much up or down. The blind spot doesn't extend very far either. Encounters, IIRC, treats the blind spot to infinity - that's another mark against it.

Enterprise-A would have two small ones port and starboard aft in similar locations to NX-01, but the placement of the nacelle pylons (plus the aft phasers over the shuttle bay) makes them a great deal smaller.

The blind spot is so small if you were to attempt to get that close you would trigger the collision detection routines in the Encounters game. Plus, the ship would be as small as a Suliban cube ship.

The scenario we're describing never happened in the show, not even for NX-01, where it theoretically SHOULD have happened at least once (still the issue with FX errors; in "Shockwave" we see the Enterprise somehow firing ventral phasers at two suliban pods ABOVE the saucer section).

If you can find a situation in the show that closely relates to what we're talking about here, then you can argue from the visuals alone. Otherwise, a game simulation is your only option.

After watching several Enterprise episodes the only conclusion I can draw is that the NX-01 phase-cannon "blind spot" is not exploitable by anything larger than a Suliban small craft or a shuttle. This is not something you can simulate with Encounters.

Of course, if you don't like Encounters we can always use an even more realistic simulation. Legacy, for instance, wherein remaining in the phaser blind spot of an enemy vessel is just about impossible.

Or it just might be impossible because the blind spot is too small to be exploited by another ship. A small craft perhaps.

The damage NEVER would have been shown because that model was never designed to show any damage. Unlike the Excelsior model, which was created in the first place just so it could be blown up.

That still does not indicate that there would have been no external damage since we never see the front bottom of the Saratoga.

Irrelevant. We're testing the extent to which those blind spots net any tactical advantage in the first place. You're trying to dispute the details when we you haven't even proven the concept yet.

I'm not disputing the scenario. Just the tool (Encounters). How the ships perform is very relevant to the scenario since it depends on how well a ship can maneuver to stay at a specific bearing from the other ship. The second issue is whether those blind spots are even accurate in the game (or exist).

Yes you can. You collect the data and you get a spread of numbers. You can adjust the numbers up and down by a factor you can calculate (say, if you think the Encounters bird of prey is too slow or if you think its firing range is too short). You can't do ANY of that until you collect the data, though.

You can't make a ship in Encounters go faster than it's base speed + temporary bonus pack + crewman bonus. You can pretend to adjust it by using your imagination but then you'd be arguing against yourself.

You are thinking maybe it's just a coincidence that it only happens when the phasers fire?

As you've pointed out, the glow doesn't happen everytime the phasers fire and I've confirmed it by seeing that it doesn't always glow prior to firing.

I meant exactly what I said, thank you very much,.

I don't see any energy jumping between arrays

Neither do I. I'm talking about what the FX team of the show intended it to mean.

So are you saying that the energy is being pooled from all the other arrays into the firing array? Or are you defining a single strip as containing more than 1 array?

newtype_alpha wrote: "energy being gathered from many arrays onto a single point"

The producers of TNG also thought that phasers didn't work at warp.

And a few years later, they changed their minds.

Consistency!

Are you talking about "Fallen Hero" where Reed explains that he hadn't figured out to fire the phase cannon at warp without disrupting the warp engines? Because by "Future Tense" that problem had been fixed and firing phasers at warp isn't a problem anymore. Or are you thinking of something else?

 

[Timo]

...On that last point, the wording in "Fallen Hero" indicates that phasers were always supposed to be capable of warp firing, and that Reed is tackling a completely unexpected problem that is unique either to the ship type, the individual vessel, the specific phaser type, or even the individual weapon.

Archer: "Would the phase cannons be more effective?"
Reed: "Undoubtedly, but we can't fire them at warp."
Archer: What do you mean, we can't fire them at warp?"

As for the number of phase cannon aboard, we could argue there were only three before the ship returned to Earth in "The Expanse", but essentially all the gunports in the saucer would then be sharing the same single weapon, as there'd be two stuck in the booms. After the ship departs Earth again, we begin to see the ship fire a phaser from the "warp stabilizer pod" gunport (which is actually a docking port rather than a gunport, but if you don't tell, I won't, either). Since the main body of the ship continues to fire from varying combinations of three gunports per episode, we'd have to speculate on a minimum of four cannon now, with one of them stuck in the pod and two in the booms, with the fourth roaming.

It's IMHO much simpler to just think that, since Reed's team was capable of creating two out of the three cannon of "Silent Enemy" from scratch (that is, random spare parts and materials), they could eventually cobble together all the other missing cannon as well, the ship thus being stocked with about a dozen when it returned to Earth in "The Expanse". Even though Reed in "Silent Enemy" says the Enterprise was "designed to carry three of them", that doesn't mean the ship was designed to be incompatible with fifteen. The remaining dozen might simply have been intended to hold other types of modular weapon (the plasma peashooters of "Broken Bow") or equipment (the dorsal airlock of "Minefield") initially, a bad choice of balance that was later overridden.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Which has nothing to do with the question about 20mm weapons from WW2 and modern day 20mm weapons. (And the Iowa's 16 inch gun could still be used today. Just because the ship-class itself has been retired does not make the gun obsolete.)

The gun IS obsolete. It's still relatively effective against targets that come into its firing range. Then again, so is a bayonet...

Then perhaps you haven't seen it in a while? Here is a screen cap to jog your memory and you can see two beams from the same array at the same time at two targets

Watched in live action the overlap is less than a quarter of a second; one beam terminates just as the other one fires, hence the battlepods are destroyed in quick order, one at a time.

Actually, TNG and TOS did use the phasers for shooting down missiles.

TOS did on a few occasions. TNG did ONLY in "The Price" and this for a projectile that wasn't aimed at the ship (and so doesn't really count as "point defense" as such).

I have not (to my knowledge) seen any photon torpedo shot down or attempted to be shot down.

It's implied to be possible -- and, in fact, a common use for phasers -- in Balance of Terror.

When I mentioned TNG-R, it is the rumored re-do of the VFX for TNG, not NuTrek.

You didn't mention TNG-R, and since neither of us have seen it, it doesn't matter much for this discussion.

Is it an error or is it just another main phaser bank that doesn't look like an array?

It's an error.

I know you've repeated that many times, but did it occur to you that these are conformal shields like those sported on the TOS Movie Enterprise?

No. TNG used the "bubble shield" effect almost exclusively throughout its first four seasons with almost no deviations; it is one of the few things it DOES do consistently. The lack of a visible shield barrier almost always implies "shields down."

Encounters is an arcade console game that tries to be play balanced and consistent to itself. It's not a simulation game where it tries to be consistent to the ships depicted in the show.

You still haven't posted a meaningful example of where it is inconsistent with the show. Just situational nitpicks that don't apply to what we're testing.

Why not gather data and map out the series and see what data there is to see how consistent it is?

Because the data we're after is not represented anywhere in Trek canon. The show's FX can provide background and give us some tools to adjust for possible ranges of data, but what we're trying to figure out is to what extent a particular vessel can maneuver within -- and REMAIN -- in the weapons blind spot of another vessel. The FIRST thing we need to do is prove the concept and get a set of extremely rough data. Refining the test to provide more accurate results comes later. In other words, we're testing the Photon Pill on a lab mouse first before we try and test it on a rhesus monkey.

After watching several Enterprise episodes the only conclusion I can draw is that the NX-01 phase-cannon &quot;blind spot&quot; is not exploitable by anything larger than a Suliban small craft or a shuttle.

Another irrelevant nitpick, since we're not testing gaps in coverage, but a lack of coverage from the FORWARD PHASERS (which is, in this case, what the blind spots are being used to simulate). That's the proof of concept you need to demonstrate. The relative weakness if the aft phaser banks would only be a tactical advantage if a starship were able to enter and remain in the exclusive firing arc of those banks for a significant period of time. What we would be testing with Encounters (or Legacy, if you prefer) is to what extent that is even possible, and if it is, whether or not the time in that firing arc counts as "significant."

Suffice to say that data modeling ALONE would render this a moot question. For a firing arc limitation of, say, fifteen degrees, a starship that is capable of turning its bow at a ponderous five degrees per second would be able to bring its main phaser banks to bear almost immediately; the aggressor vessel would have only three seconds to maneuver to remain within that firing arc, assuming he knows instantly which way his enemy is turning; at a distance of one hundred kilometers, that means he would have to cover 150 to 300km in three seconds in order to remain in that gap. He would, in essence, have to instantly accelerate to 50 to 100km/s, in exactly the right direction, at exactly the right time, in order to remain in that gap. And this further ignores the fact that a much smaller maneuver--say, a two or three degree pitch-up or pitch down--could eliminate that gap entirely and allow the main phasers to fire an "over the shoulder" aft shot at the same target.

IOW, it's considerably easier to do in the console game than the mathematics suggest. But Star Trek doesn't always follow the normal expectations of mathematics (or logic, for that matter) and Encounters has enough of those little quirks built into it to make it a pretty interesting test. But maybe you're right. Maybe we should stick to the mathematics and calculate the probability from there.

So how large are the coverage "blind spots" of the Enterprise D's saucer arrays?

That still does not indicate that there would have been no external damage since we never see the front bottom of the Saratoga.

There would have been no external damage because the FX team would never have placed any. Not until about season 3 or 4 when they had a bigger budget to play with.

So are you saying that the energy is being pooled from all the other arrays into the firing array?

No. All the emitters in a single array (hundreds of them) all fire in sequence, and the collective energy from all of them is discharged in a single beam.

Are you talking about &quot;Fallen Hero&quot; where Reed explains that he hadn't figured out to fire the phase cannon at warp without disrupting the warp engines?

No, since they already used phase cannons at warp in "Shockwave Pt-II." The rule "no phasers at warp" was part of the writer's guide for Early TNG episodes, which is why they always fire torpedoes at warp speeds instead of using phasers. DS9 was the first to break this rule (The USS Centaur firing on their stolen jem'hadar fighter) and Voyager and ENT shortly followed suit.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

...On that last point, the wording in "Fallen Hero" indicates that phasers were always supposed to be capable of warp firing, and that Reed is tackling a completely unexpected problem that is unique either to the ship type, the individual vessel, the specific phaser type, or even the individual weapon.

Archer: "Would the phase cannons be more effective?"
Reed: "Undoubtedly, but we can't fire them at warp."
Archer: What do you mean, we can't fire them at warp?"

As for the number of phase cannon aboard, we could argue there were only three before the ship returned to Earth in "The Expanse", but essentially all the gunports in the saucer would then be sharing the same single weapon, as there'd be two stuck in the booms. After the ship departs Earth again, we begin to see the ship fire a phaser from the "warp stabilizer pod" gunport (which is actually a docking port rather than a gunport, but if you don't tell, I won't, either). Since the main body of the ship continues to fire from varying combinations of three gunports per episode, we'd have to speculate on a minimum of four cannon now, with one of them stuck in the pod and two in the booms, with the fourth roaming.

It's IMHO much simpler to just think that, since Reed's team was capable of creating two out of the three cannon of "Silent Enemy" from scratch (that is, random spare parts and materials), they could eventually cobble together all the other missing cannon as well, the ship thus being stocked with about a dozen when it returned to Earth in "The Expanse". Even though Reed in "Silent Enemy" says the Enterprise was "designed to carry three of them", that doesn't mean the ship was designed to be incompatible with fifteen. The remaining dozen might simply have been intended to hold other types of modular weapon (the plasma peashooters of "Broken Bow") or equipment (the dorsal airlock of "Minefield") initially, a bad choice of balance that was later overridden.

Timo Saloniemi

On the other hand, it is never made clear that plasma cannons and phase cannons MUST have different visual effects. Enterprise is obviously armed with plasma cannons (we see them firing pulses in "Broken Bow") but even when they're used they're never actually mentioned in dialog, nor is there any indication that they ONLY fire in pulses (they're beams in "Marauders" among other places). It's entirely possible that NX-01 is equipped with three phase cannons and ten plasma cannons, the latter being less than half the output of the phase cannons and firing from much smaller emitters that we never actually see.

 

[Timo]

It's just that three is such an, uh, odd number for this particular ship design, with its rather explicitly even gunports. It would make little sense, tactically, dramatically or otherwise, for Starfleet to e.g. put a phase cannon in the dorsal portside gunport only, while leaving the starboard one make do with a plasma gun.

It's quite possible that the ship has a mixture of weapon types aboard, even if it's just a mixture of phase guns of varying strengths. But I don't see merit in trying to argue that only three gunports would hold the "Silent Enemy" type of phase cannon, either before or after the upgunning at Earth.

Which makes Reed's words difficult to swallow, as both reason and visual evidence go against them. Unless Reed means that the ship was designed to carry three pairs of them, and misspoke... We do see a pair firing in that very episode, not a single gun. That'd be an odd verbal mistake for him to make, but it would cover at least some bases: before "The Expanse", we'd witness one gunpair on the lower saucer near the torpedo tubes, one gunpair in the lower pylons, and one gunpair at the extreme bow flanking the deflector (and firing both up and down).

As for plasma guns firing beams, well, I don't really recall canon examples. "Marauders" doesn't seem to feature beams of any sort. "Horizon" shows elongated bolts rather than beams, even if the color is similar to that of the phaser beams of the era. "Detained" shows the shuttlepod firing beams, while "Shadows of P'Jem" features dialogue on the pod's "plasma weapons" - but the beams never appear in connection with the dialogue, and we have seen the shipboard rifles upgraded with dual barrels, allowing the pods to have dual armament as well.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[blssdwlf]

Which has nothing to do with the question about 20mm weapons from WW2 and modern day 20mm weapons. (And the Iowa's 16 inch gun could still be used today. Just because the ship-class itself has been retired does not make the gun obsolete.)

The gun IS obsolete. It's still relatively effective against targets that come into its firing range. Then again, so is a bayonet...

A 16" round still blows stuff up effectively with greater range and a nuclear warhead option that 5" guns don't have. No longer in use, but not no longer useful

Then perhaps you haven't seen it in a while? Here is a screen cap to jog your memory and you can see two beams from the same array at the same time at two targets

Watched in live action the overlap is less than a quarter of a second; one beam terminates just as the other one fires, hence the battlepods are destroyed in quick order, one at a time.

You say "overlap", I say "simultaneous". There were two beams active at the same time firing against two different targets. The order of destruction for the pods are irrelevant.

TOS did on a few occasions. TNG did ONLY in "The Price" and this for a projectile that wasn't aimed at the ship (and so doesn't really count as "point defense" as such).

The E-D was shooting the missile down to protect the wormhole. So it counts as "point defense".

It's implied to be possible -- and, in fact, a common use for phasers -- in Balance of Terror. You didn't mention TNG-R, and since neither of us have seen it, it doesn't matter much for this discussion.

In TOS, they were attempting to shoot down a Romulan plasma torpedo. However, in "The Deadly Years" there was no attempt made to do so although it could have been due to the Commodore's lack of orders.

What incidents show a ship firing at a Photon torpedo with phasers?

It's an error.

Or it's a part of the main phaser system. Which would then open the door to the idea that the E-D's main phasers include both point emitters and the array strips.

No. TNG used the "bubble shield" effect almost exclusively throughout its first four seasons with almost no deviations; it is one of the few things it DOES do consistently. The lack of a visible shield barrier almost always implies "shields down."

In TNG perhaps. But we're talking about DS9 which follows TNG. Shield usage can also change for the circumstances.

You still haven't posted a meaningful example of where it is inconsistent with the show. Just situational nitpicks that don't apply to what we're testing.

The phaser blind spot for the NX-01 and Enterprise-refit in Encounters is inconsistent with the show.
You can't fly backwards, etc.

Because the data we're after is not represented anywhere in Trek canon. The show's FX can provide background and give us some tools to adjust for possible ranges of data, but what we're trying to figure out is to what extent a particular vessel can maneuver within -- and REMAIN -- in the weapons blind spot of another vessel. The FIRST thing we need to do is prove the concept and get a set of extremely rough data. Refining the test to provide more accurate results comes later. In other words, we're testing the Photon Pill on a lab mouse first before we try and test it on a rhesus monkey.

Well since the ship's phaser blind spot doesn't correspond to the game's blind spot and isn't really exploitable by another ship we're left with only seeing if a ship can maintain a specific bearing from it's target ship at a specific range.

Another irrelevant nitpick, since we're not testing gaps in coverage, but a lack of coverage from the FORWARD PHASERS (which is, in this case, what the blind spots are being used to simulate).

So what is it that you're trying to test again? The phaser coverage of the NX-01 and Enterprise-refit show that another ship can't really exploit it. Are you changing the goal to see how well two ships can keep their forward phasers to each other?

That's the proof of concept you need to demonstrate. The relative weakness if the aft phaser banks would only be a tactical advantage if a starship were able to enter and remain in the exclusive firing arc of those banks for a significant period of time.

When you watch "Bound", the NX-01 is unable to maneuver yet the Orion ship moved around the forward and aft directions. In "Shockwave" the enemy ships didn't seem to care all that much about what direction they were attacking the NX-01 despite having an apparent maneuverability advantage. And since they use the same phase cannons in the aft section and the forward section on the NX-class I would argue that the aft phasers are just as strong as the forward ones.

I would also argue that the TMP Enterprise's phasers are the same for all emitters since they have the same physical appearance.

What we would be testing with Encounters (or Legacy, if you prefer) is to what extent that is even possible, and if it is, whether or not the time in that firing arc counts as "significant."

After illustrating the phaser blind spot of the NX-01 and TMP-Enterprise I don't think there is any significant phaser coverage weakness. And since I believe the phasers on those ships have equal capability I don't think there is any advantage to staying in one spot relative to the target ship for defensive purposes (unless you take out all the weapons that are facing you )

Even in circumstances where the defending ship loses maneuverability the attacking ships seem to circle around. The only "smart" ones appear to be the ones that repeatedly attack a specific shield to bring it down quicker.

Suffice to say that data modeling ALONE would render this a moot question. For a firing arc limitation of, say, fifteen degrees, a starship that is capable of turning its bow at a ponderous five degrees per second would be able to bring its main phaser banks to bear almost immediately; the aggressor vessel would have only three seconds to maneuver to remain within that firing arc, assuming he knows instantly which way his enemy is turning; at a distance of one hundred kilometers, that means he would have to cover 150 to 300km in three seconds in order to remain in that gap. He would, in essence, have to instantly accelerate to 50 to 100km/s, in exactly the right direction, at exactly the right time, in order to remain in that gap. And this further ignores the fact that a much smaller maneuver--say, a two or three degree pitch-up or pitch down--could eliminate that gap entirely and allow the main phasers to fire an "over the shoulder" aft shot at the same target.

For the NX-01 and TMP-Enterprise, the blind spot disappears very quickly away from the ship, about 100 meters away.

IOW, it's considerably easier to do in the console game than the mathematics suggest. But Star Trek doesn't always follow the normal expectations of mathematics (or logic, for that matter) and Encounters has enough of those little quirks built into it to make it a pretty interesting test. But maybe you're right. Maybe we should stick to the mathematics and calculate the probability from there.

The test in Encounters would only be valid for Encounters (or that game). It's not a simulation nor does it try to be.

So how large are the coverage "blind spots" of the Enterprise D's saucer arrays?

The only place that the E-D's saucer arrays have a blind spot is below and aft of the secondary hull. The small strips and medium length strip on the bottom however cover that blind spot.

edit: there is an "infinite" blind spot for the Saucer phasers created by the warp pylons. It extends backwards and at a down angle. The saucer phasers also have a blind spot directly below the secondary hull but only a small and/or narrow ship could fit there.

There would have been no external damage because the FX team would never have placed any. Not until about season 3 or 4 when they had a bigger budget to play with.

I understand from an "out-of-universe" POV. However, in-universe there is nothing that says there was no external damage. For all we know, in order to save on costs they didn't paint the damage on because the FX team framed the camera shot to not have that area visible to the camera.

So are you saying that the energy is being pooled from all the other arrays into the firing array?

No. All the emitters in a single array (hundreds of them) all fire in sequence, and the collective energy from all of them is discharged in a single beam.

Ok Just checking.

Are you talking about &quot;Fallen Hero&quot; where Reed explains that he hadn't figured out to fire the phase cannon at warp without disrupting the warp engines?

No, since they already used phase cannons at warp in "Shockwave Pt-II." The rule "no phasers at warp" was part of the writer's guide for Early TNG episodes, which is why they always fire torpedoes at warp speeds instead of using phasers. DS9 was the first to break this rule (The USS Centaur firing on their stolen jem'hadar fighter) and Voyager and ENT shortly followed suit.

Ahh I see. You're talking about from TOS to TNG they made the change and not TNG to DS9. Funny enough I remember a thread about the no phaser at warp rule in TNG and IIRC, Timo, points out that no TNG episode confirms that in dialogue. Instead we are left with instances where Picard just used torpedoes at warp.

 

[blssdwlf]

It's just that three is such an, uh, odd number for this particular ship design, with its rather explicitly even gunports. It would make little sense, tactically, dramatically or otherwise, for Starfleet to e.g. put a phase cannon in the dorsal portside gunport only, while leaving the starboard one make do with a plasma gun.

Another interpretation could be that the ship was designed to carry and fire up to 3 phase cannons at a time. Or there really was only 3 to start with in "Silent Enemy' and they have very fast and efficient rail system to move these phase cannons around to all 14 gunports.

However the ship is constantly undergoing upgrades so I would expect that the NX would eventually have the same number of phase cannons as gun ports.

As for plasma guns firing beams, well, I don't really recall canon examples. "Marauders" doesn't seem to feature beams of any sort. "Horizon" shows elongated bolts rather than beams, even if the color is similar to that of the phaser beams of the era. "Detained" shows the shuttlepod firing beams, while "Shadows of P'Jem" features dialogue on the pod's "plasma weapons" - but the beams never appear in connection with the dialogue, and we have seen the shipboard rifles upgraded with dual barrels, allowing the pods to have dual armament as well.

I just watched "Marauders" and don't recall seeing a ship fire plasma cannons.