Federation Starship Phasers & Jem'Hadar ships?

[Unicron]

As far as pulse phasers go, my understanding has always been that a pulse burst can deliver more damage than a comparable beam, because the emission is delayed and the phaser pulse builds up for a few seconds longer. But they have less range than traditional beam phasers, because the pulse dissipates quickly.

 

[Timo]

Re: Federation Starship Phasers & Jem'Hadar ships?

Could be that, too. But is "damage" the function of energy delivered per unit of time (that is, power), or is it the function of total energy delivered? A series of pulses would hold no advantage if it's the latter: a burst of ten shots in ten seconds would only deliver the exact same energy as a continuous beam sustained for ten seconds.

Damage might come from power if it's a question of overwhelming the shields. The faster you deliver your energy, the less chance the shield has of repairing itself. But if shields can't repair themselves in a timescale of a few seconds, then a ten-second beam again trumps ten second-long pulses. And I'd argue that shields don't repair themselves that fast, else why do Worf or Tuvok say "shields down to 75%" when they should be constantly and very quickly reading a litany such as "shields hit, now sevenfive, seveneight, eightone, eightfive, another hit, sixtwo, sixnine, sixanotherhit, threethree, threefive..."?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[LaxScrutiny]

Re: Federation Starship Phasers & Jem'Hadar ships?

There must be dis/advantages to both pulse and sustained phasers, else why have both?

We see pulse weapons on the Defiant, a smaller ship, and I've always thought it was to get a bigger bang out of a smaller package. The pulse indicates that between shots the power level builds, so there is higher power at the beginning of the shot. A sustained beam from the same size ship would only allow less power at even strength.

I think Timo is correct, over time the sustained beam delivers more energy, but the pulse may exceed a given shield's ability to dissipate the energy over a certain length of time. Note, we always see some sparks fly inside a ship even when shields are at 90%. The pulse may force a little more of that power through the shields each shot.

 

[poloronbeam]

Re: Federation Starship Phasers & Jem'Hadar ships?

<<Their situation is quite similar to the Enterprise-D in Generations versus the D-12 Bird of Prey. Their adversary was also able to shoot through their shields and quickly one by one of their systems was taken offline. From what we saw of the Enterprise they only fired phasers once (as far as I can remember) and that was their only return fire during the entire battle (apart from that final torpedo).>>


<<That said the Odyssey might have damaged or destroyed one or two attack ships because I don't remember seeing more then one attack ship in any of the battle scenes after their first run on the Odyssey. Also how do you explain the Jem'Hadar not pursuing the runabouts after the Odyssey is gone?>>

These two situations kind of illustrate the difference of what is actually shown "on-screen" and what is said in dialog that may expand on what is shown.

For example, in "Generations" we are shown that the Ent-D only fired once. However, in the scene before the gets the BOP shields to drop (by activating their cloaking device) the Klingon Weapons Officer tells one of the Duras sisters that "Our shields are holding". Holding against what? The only time that we have seen this comment in Star Trek is when something was impacting against the shields.

So based on this dialog, it's pretty certain that the Ent-D was still firing on the BOP, even though we are shown it only firing once (not including the final photon torp shot).

It's kind of the same thing in "The Jem'Haddar". Although we only see one ship active (the one that rammed the Odessey), Dr. Bashir clearly states that ONE of the Jem'Haddar ships was making a run for the Odessey, so clearly there had to be at least two ships still intact for this comment to make any sense.


<<Sure they want Eris to go to DS9 but that doesn't mean they can't destroy the other two runabouts or at least give them a little chase.[/quote]>>

The other remaining ships may have been damaged or playing "possum" in order to implement the Founders plan of spying on the Federation via Eris. If they were not damaged and continued to fire on the runabouts, then they would endangered the plan by getting into a firefight with the runabouts and thus risking killing Eris.

Also, since the Founders seem to have had a lot of knowledge about the Federation, it possble that they knew or would have heard rumors about a Changeling abord DS9, and suspected or confirmed that this Changeling may have been aboard one of the runabouts. Could that also explain why the Jem'Haddar didn't deliver a fatal blow to the Runabout after it had sustain serious damage?

What is interesting is, "what if" Sisko & Eris had beamed aboard the Odessey instead of one of the runabouts? Would the Founders desire to "make a point" by destroying the Odsessey overcome their desire to gather information throught Eris?

 

[WalkinMan]

Re: Federation Starship Phasers & Jem'Hadar ships?

What is interesting is, "what if" Sisko & Eris had beamed aboard the Odessey instead of one of the runabouts? Would the Founders desire to "make a point" by destroying the Odsessey overcome their desire to gather information throught Eris?

I think that the Dominion would have used conventional methods to destroy the Odyssey (continue firing weapons and cripple the ship, then use it for targeting practice). In typical Starfleet fashion, at some point they would abandon the Odyssey. Eris would be aboard an escape pod, along with other crew (if not--she could beam off secretly). The runabouts would still survive, the escape pods would get picked up, and the same goals were achieved--Odyssey destroyed (making the point), and Eris inserted as spy.

 

[Deks]

Re: Federation Starship Phasers & Jem'Hadar ships?

What is interesting is, "what if" Sisko & Eris had beamed aboard the Odessey instead of one of the runabouts? Would the Founders desire to "make a point" by destroying the Odsessey overcome their desire to gather information throught Eris?

I think that the Dominion would have used conventional methods to destroy the Odyssey (continue firing weapons and cripple the ship, then use it for targeting practice). In typical Starfleet fashion, at some point they would abandon the Odyssey. Eris would be aboard an escape pod, along with other crew (if not--she could beam off secretly). The runabouts would still survive, the escape pods would get picked up, and the same goals were achieved--Odyssey destroyed (making the point), and Eris inserted as spy.

I think that Eris or any other Vorta/Jem'Haddar were viewed by the Founders as expendable as long as their cloning facilities were intact.
If anything I sort of viewed the Founders as the ones who don't care about the 'solids' too much (as they were portrayed as such) and indeed considered them as expendable and a source of threat ... which is why they resorted to genetic engineering in order to instill into the solids who serve under them to worship them as gods.

 

[WalkinMan]

Re: Federation Starship Phasers & Jem'Hadar ships?

Yeah it's likely they had a contingency---if Eris is killed, yet the Odyssey destroyed, they got one objective completed, and they could just clone another Eris and/or another Vorta species to attempt infiltration.

In any case, Sisko and Quark figured out Eris was a spy...thus rendering the Dominion's first attempt unsuccessful. In many ways, it was the 'simple, easy' version--use a Vorta, no surgical alteration, etc.

They eventually resorted to changeling infiltrators and informants.

Anyhow, back to the main topic, I think that it's a huge credit to Federation science that they adapted their shields to the polaron beams, although no doubt reverse-engineering the captured Jem'Hadar fighter helped that. I suppose the Dominion did not fight hard enough to prevent that capture--although a dying Founder was involved. It does seem however that in the war, the Dominion did not upgrade their ships much until the Breen weapons.

 

[davisn456]

Re: Federation Starship Phasers & Jem'Hadar ships?

I'm new to the site, so forgive me if I've overlooked a point that someone else has already made.

I think this point nailed the entire conversation:

These two situations kind of illustrate the difference of what is actually shown "on-screen" and what is said in dialog that may expand on what is shown.

Here are a few observations based on that point:

- After Jake and Nog return to the runabout, and the Odyssey arrives, Chief O'Brien beams aboard and says, "Having trouble getting it out of orbit?" Nog replies, "How did you know?" At no point during the external scenes of the battle does the planet appear, therefore, it reasonable to assume that the Odyssey and the other two runabouts never entered orbit of the planet. Therefore, Sisco, Quark, and Eris could have only beamed aboard the runabout that is still in orbit, and this runabout never joins the battle. The Jem'Hadar knew exactly where they were the entire time.

- The first targets that the Jem'Hadar attack on the Odyssey are the port nacelle and the port side of the support section between the saucer and stardrive section. This immediately disabled warp drive, and likely disabled the forward torpedo launchers. Obviously the first pass was designed to immediately disable the ship, and the Jem'Hadar likely had design specifications to plan their targets accordingly. This may also explain why no torpedos are fired during the battle. At that point, the captain orders shield power to be diverted to weapons.

- The only visible weapons fire from Odyssey occurs on two occasions. One is at the very start of the battle. Two phaser bursts from the port side of ventral phaser array located on the saucer successfully hit a Jem'Hadar ship on the port nacelle. A second time, the same phaser array attacks another Jem'Hadar ship (or possibly the same one from earlier) on the starboard engine.

- The runabouts continue to attack the same Jem'Hadar ship for a period of time, and at one point, a glowing spot appears on the forward section near the forward weapons array. It quickly disappears, likely indicating that the shields simply absorbed all of the weapons fire and none reached the hull. None of the fighters showed any external evidence that they had any significant damage during the entire battle.

- While it isn't clearly stated, I find it highly unlikely that the Odyssey destroyed any of the fighters, and at absolute most, maybe one of them.

- When the Jem'Hadar ship rams the Odyssey, the entire point is to leave the Runabouts to run home with tails tucked and for survivors to tell stories of the Dominion to frighten everyone back home. Eris is then left to work as a spy to continue to spread the fear, and to seek out information to better plant changelings in the Federation in the future. Obviosly Sisco and Quark figure out what Eris was there to do, and she makes her quick exit.

- While it may have been nice to see the Odyssey moving a little more than it was during the explosion, Galaxy class ships aren't designed to maneuver like fighters. That's evident in the way the Enterprise D also performed in previous battles. Galaxy class ships have phaser arrays all over the place so they can basically sit still and fire in every direction. We didn't see any evidence that they ever operated any other way than this until the later seasons of DS9, when a few Galaxy class ships were used on the outer rim of the Federation battle fleets to take out other capital ships.

- On the Defiant, and why Galaxy class ships don't have pulse phasors...I could be wrong about this, but it appears that the pulse cannons on the Defiant only fire in one direction, correct? If that's the case, they're only going to be effective in two scenarios: One, if the ship can spin around and fire straight ahead quickly, or two, if the cannons are mounted on rotating turrets. Turrets sticking out all over a capital ship like the Galaxy class is really impractical, which is probably why the R&D people in the Federation came up with phaser arrays in the first place.

Just my two cents...I'm sure there's lots of room to poke holes, but it's only an opinion!

 

[poloronbeam]

Re: Federation Starship Phasers & Jem'Hadar ships?

<<- While it may have been nice to see the Odyssey moving a little more than it was during the explosion, Galaxy class ships aren't designed to maneuver like fighters. That's evident in the way the Enterprise D also performed in previous battles. Galaxy class ships have phaser arrays all over the place so they can basically sit still and fire in every direction. We didn't see any evidence that they ever operated any other way than this until the later seasons of DS9, when a few Galaxy class ships were used on the outer rim of the Federation battle fleets to take out other capital ships.>>

Agreed.

Regarding the ramming of the Odyssey, and why the Odyssey appeared to be stationary when it was rammed, a non "special effects" rationale is that the bugship may have been traveling at full impulse (.99c?) while the Odyssey, due due to the damage that it sustained, may have been turning on manuvering thrusters or severely reduced impulse speed. As such, the Odyssey may have only appeared to be stationary because its velocity was much slower relative to the velocity bugship.

<<On the Defiant, and why Galaxy class ships don't have pulse phasors...I could be wrong about this, but it appears that the pulse cannons on the Defiant only fire in one direction, correct?>>

I think that is correct. From what I was able to interpret from the episodes is that the 4 pulse cannons contained at least as much firing power in one volley as a Galaxy class ship in one phaser array shot, with the added ability of being able to fire several volleys in the time that it would take a GCS to fire one phaser array shot.

But as you mentioned, its limitation is that the cannons can only fire in one direction, so its maneuverability to make this effectively work is the key.

<<Turrets sticking out all over a capital ship like the Galaxy class is really impractical, which is probably why the R&D people in the Federation came up with phaser arrays in the first place.>>

Agreed. The Klingons and Romulans really seem to gravitate toward a "mostly forward" firing arc design. This may also give an additional explaination as to why their ships tend to travel in "packs" more so than Federation ships do.

 

[Timo]

Re: Federation Starship Phasers & Jem'Hadar ships?

There are still a few question marks regarding the engagement, such as the rules followed by Keogh. Did he initially try to fight only "passively", to discourage the enemy? Or did he aim for a kill from shot one? There is some reason to think he'd go for the former. After all, he is a Starfleet officer... And he would not be privy to the discussions Sisko had had with the Jem'Hadar about their ruthless motivations.

Another question is how much of the battle went unseen. It probably goes without saying that any Trek battle features more phaser fire than is shown, because phaser VFX is expensive. OTOH, Keogh might have held back on torpedoes because those are often said to be problematic proximity weapons: they'd hurt the Odyssey herself in the worst case, and the runabouts with some probability. And Keogh wouldn't fire at long ranges if his rules of engagement called for a gentle touch at first.

Also left unclear is what happened after the Odyssey blew up. The remaining Jemmies, if any, might have warped out. Or they might have remained there, hovering menacingly over the runabouts. Either way, our heroes should have wondered why they were let go so easily - and while they would quickly have understood that they were to spread the word of Jem'Hadar might, it should have been natural for them to suspect further hidden agendas there. A glance or two toward Eris, and the seeds of suspicion would be there... And interrogation should immediately begin. How long Eris could keep up the damsel-in-distress cover remains questionable.

From what I was able to interpret from the episodes is that the 4 pulse cannons contained at least as much firing power in one volley as a Galaxy class ship in one phaser array shot

Actually, shouldn't we argue that the pulses contained significantly if not infinitely more power than the Galaxy beam, since the beam was shown to have no effect while the pulse volley had devastating effect?

It would be just as reasonable to argue that, thanks to good if one-shot intelligence from Founder agents, the Jem'Hadar shields were tuned specifically to resist (specific Odyssey, general Galaxy or general Starfleet capital ship) phaser beams, and that fairly minimal R&D would reveal such tuning and allow its circumvention. Thus, Starfleet beams in later episodes would be just as devastating as the Defiant pulses.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Bosch571]

Re: Federation Starship Phasers & Jem'Hadar ships?

Even stranger is that we never see a bug ship survive an attack again, at least not until Rocks and Shoals (I’m sure that the fact that our heroes where on it has nothing to do with it). I guess that the oddeseys weapons where for some reason ineffective and that Starfleet corrected it before the war (just like they did with the shields).

DS9 never seemed too concerned with the relative strength of ships, all ships except for “hero ships” and the occasional galaxy class seems to get one shotted. One episode we see a long battle between the defiant and the Lakota the next we see many excelsior class ships getting destroyed by the first shot that hits them. I guess it comes with the transition to more fighter stile combat in the later seasons of ds9.

 

[Deks]

Re: Federation Starship Phasers & Jem'Hadar ships?

Even stranger is that we never see a bug ship survive an attack again, at least not until Rocks and Shoals (I’m sure that the fact that our heroes where on it has nothing to do with it). I guess that the oddeseys weapons where for some reason ineffective and that Starfleet corrected it before the war (just like they did with the shields shields).

DS9 never seemed too concerned with the relative strength of ships, all ships except for “hero ships” and the occasional galaxy class seems to get one shotted. One episode we see a long battle between the defiant and the Lakota the next we see many excelsior class ships getting destroyed by the first shot that hits them. I guess it comes with the transition to more fighter stile combat in the later seasons of ds9.

The CGI guys practically made the combat for the sake of the visual representation, but also we must note that those same CGI guys never made shields for other ships in the battle scenes, which was one of the reasons I guess we saw so many ships being destroyed.

What I particularly disliked was how the Mirandas were picked off.
Had those ships and the Excelsiors underwent same upgrades as the Lakota prior to the war, they wouldn't have fallen so easily.
Like this, SF was essentially sending old ships with crews to certain deaths ... unless of course they were remotely controlled (which is unlikely).

 

[Timo]

Re: Federation Starship Phasers & Jem'Hadar ships?

I guess that the oddeseys weapons where for some reason ineffective and that Starfleet corrected it before the war

One could actually assume that first encounters are always lopsided, but second encounters are more or less even. After all, phasers and shields are both highly malleable devices, and their retuning seems to have a major effect on their performance. It just happened that the extent of required retuning exceeded Starfleet's abilities in the first Starfleet/Dominion meeting in "Jem'Hadar", so the corrective measures had to wait until the second encounter in "The Search".

all ships except for “hero ships” and the occasional galaxy class seems to get one shotted.

Before the Dominion War, there were very few warship-to-warship or warship-to-station battles in DS9. And the ships in the one big battle we did saw, "Way of the Warrior", died at highly dissimilar and characteristic rates. A tiny BoP would blow up at one hit from the station's new phasers; a K't'inga battle cruiser might take four torpedo hits to die; a Vor'cha would at worst get singed a bit; and a Negh'var would persist with nary a scratch.

What single-shot wonders were there, really? The Miradorn were hoist to their own single petard, but actually it took an entire explosive nebula to kill them. The runabouts never managed to blow up anybody, and it only made sense that they would die from the first shot of a T'Lani cruiser. Internal sabotage blew up various civilian vessels, but that's neither here nor there.

In the Dominion War, yeah, much of Starfleet goes one-shot. But IMHO that only demonstrates teh kewl awesomeness of Dominion guns. And the single shots that seemingly kill Excelsiors or Akiras or Mirandas indeed look like there was some real power behind them, as the sustained beams slowly carve up the saucers. No "death by stock footage explosion" wimpiness there.

One episode we see a long battle between the defiant and the Lakota the next we see many excelsior class ships getting destroyed by the first shot that hits them.

Here at least it was clear that the two Starfleet ships weren't shooting to kill each other.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[WalkinMan]

Re: Federation Starship Phasers & Jem'Hadar ships?

Interesting points above---further questioning the effectiveness of having runabouts 'escort' the Odyssey...for instance the idea that torpedoes were not used because of risk hitting the runabouts, the lack of impact the runabouts had (VFX showing slight damage), and I think even Keogh might have expressed some skepticism. I think it's telling that runabouts were not seen in this type of capacity afterwards. It seems like the runabouts were no more than little flies flitting around the mothership...and if perhaps the Odyssey had been sent alone into battle, the Dominion might have spared more of the Odyssey crew (escape pods?). The idea that Keogh was using a more restrained approach at first is also plausible. Still, if the Odyssey had saucer separated I'm guessing two Jem'Hadar ships would have rammed the separate sections.

I'd loved to have seen a Galaxy Class ship take on bug ships in an identical situation later on in the war; the closest I think is in "What You Leave Behind" where IIRC a Galaxy Class phaser shot takes out a bug ship quite easily.