Fireing all their weapons?

[sunnyside]

I'm just curious if a ship other than the defiant class ever fired all it's weapons simultaniously. I know that the galaxy could fire torps and phasers at the same time, but I don't know about fireing both the rear and forward launchers while using upper and lower phaser arrays. Same for some of the other ships.

Actually I'm having a hard time remembering if the defiant actually got to fire everything at the same time, but I'm pretty sure it did.

ANyway if not could it be reasonable that such ships can't fire all their weapons at the same time, which would explain why they don't cram more weapons onto the things.

 

[Vanyel]

The Enterprise D did fire all her forward capable weapons in Best of Both Worlds.

The Enterprise E, fired lots of her weapons simultaneously during Nemesis.

 

[sunnyside]

For the record I just rewatch some of the DS9 battle scenes and those ships certainly didn't seem to be fireing everything. So I guess there must be a reason (tech wise or artistically) why not.

 

[Jack Bauer]

I suppose one reason why they don't is the expense of the CGI for weapons fire.

 

[Jimmy_C]

I bet the limiting agent in most battles in Star Trek is the power generation ability of the ships. It seems they often change how power is distributed. Such as redirecting energy from the shields to the weapons. So they could power all the weapons at 10% each (and try to affect as large an area as possible) or fire one weapon at 100% (and try to cut through a small area). Both have advantages and disadvantages. If you can get an opponent to distribute shield energy equally over his entire ship, you could possibly make it easier to cut through one spot for example. And vice versa (make him fortify one area, then fire at the lesser shielded areas).

 

[Deks]

That doesn't make sense though.

The warp core provides more than enough energy so a starship can fire all of it's weapons at the same time ... though keep in mind the Feds aim to disable mostly and not destroy.

The problem is with the CGI crew that only showed ships firing all of their weapons at the same time on VERY few occasions.
Weather if it's due to the budgets or what not is beyond me, but blaming the CGI guys for this is reasonable since the CGI seldom corresponded to the technological capabilities of a starship.

 

[Timo]

The warp core provides more than enough energy so a starship can fire all of it's weapons at the same time

Now does it? We never see Kirk fire a broadside in TOS - it's always just one twin bank at a time, although sometimes multiple banks are fired in sequence. Khan either holds back or lacks the means to fire more than two beams at once, too. "Best of Both Worlds II" is the only time we see three beams emanate from the same starship (and two of those seem to be VFX errors, coming from locations that do not have emitters!).

It could very well be that the amount of available power is the chief limiting factor here. Whenever a target proves resilient to fire, the solution never is to add more phaser beams - it's always to crank up the single beam already in use. But there seldom seems to be a significant margin for increasing beam power. Sure, that could be because the emitter can't channel more, but this wouldn't explain why multiple emitters aren't added to the fray.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[sunnyside]

I should probably re-watch the stuff again. I forgot the long reload times. It seems to take maybe 3 sec to be able to fire a galaxy phaser bank again and maybe like 5 sec to fire another galaxy photon torpedo burst. So they could just be cycling through weapons.

 

[Deks]

Enterprise-D fired on the Borg in one occasion with numerous phaser beams and torpedoes at once.

Later on though, we rarely saw such performances ... and why ?
because of the CGI guys.
CGI in Trek was on more than one occasion heavily out of sync with starships capabilities.

 

[sunnyside]

That just seems weird though. I can understand that showing ship damage and the like could be expensive. However just showing a ship firing multiple weapons at the same time or multiple weapon hits seems like cheap CGI. I mean the tech has been around since the 60's.

 

[Santaman]

Also.. if you fire at a target in front of you then firing your aft tubes and phasers is kinda a bit pointless...

 

[sunnyside]

Well some around here argue the torps should be able to work their way around. But still in those big DS9 fleet actions there would be targets in every direction. Also a number of ships seem to have "kill zones" where phaser arcs overlap. But I don't think I've seen a galaxy for instance firing both it's top and bottom banks at a target directly in front of it. I've seen voyager fireing a bunch of banks at the same time, but it wasn't fireing torpedos, and was shooting at little shuttlecraft type things.

 

[Newtype_A]

Timo said:

The warp core provides more than enough energy so a starship can fire all of it's weapons at the same time

Now does it? We never see Kirk fire a broadside in TOS - it's always just one twin bank at a time, although sometimes multiple banks are fired in sequence.

That, again, comes down to VFX errors. Especially in Paradise Syndrome where spock orders the firing of about a half dozen phaser banks which, visually, all fire from the exact same place.

What's more, in balance of terror we have our first and I suppose only look into the "phaser control room" where all of the ship's weapons are apparently directly controlled, with release authority sometimes set to the bridge (like the torpedo room on a submarine). A phaser control room would be completely unnecessary on a ship that can only fire one phaser bank at a time; if you have it, then you have five or six different gun crews that can aim five or six different weapons independently without the tactical officer doing all the work.


There's no way we can argue for any capabilities or limitations of starships at this point, because it's one of the things in trek VFX that happens alot and makes no sense. You might as well argue that the range of Enterprise-D's phasers is a couple thousand meters since that's the farthest they ever appear to be on screen.

If anything, I think the better explanation is that Starfleet has an aversion, for some reason, to having an entire department whose sole purpose is targetting weapons, and makes the tactical officer do all the work; since he can only lock on to one target at a time--and since he only has one hand and so many fingers--usually that means he can only fire one or two phasers at a time at that single target.

 

[Deks]

We do know for a fact that a maximum phaser range is 300 000 km under standard circumstances.

Weapons over such distances have never been showed on screen though due to the fact that the CGI department wanted to show things up close and personal for the 'cool' factor.

Torpedoes should have a range of multiple million kilometers due to their warp capabilities.

Now imagine this ... if torpedoes were fired at a target ... visually, they should not be seen at all if they are traveling at warp velocity from a starship at impulse.

Phasers can easily reach a ship in 1 second over a distance of 300 000 km.

If the CGI department displayed those on screen, it would have been visually better actually.

But they could have also portrayed ships up close if they wanted to, since vessels under impulse velocities can reach a target which is 300 000 km away in seconds.

Visual inconsistency in the CGI ... nothing more.

 

[Jimmy_C]

It isn't CGI, since the CGI has been usually consistent in this regard with the SFX from before they used computers. You don't know that the warp core has enough power for multiple weapon systems, actually. We've seen phasers fired from starships to a planet's surface, so that's at least 100km, probably more. 300,000 km is insanely far away, though.

It still doesn't make sense to use 10 weapons when you can use one with 10x the intensity to fire at 1 target. Would you rather use a mallet or a sword to puncture a shield?

 

[Deks]

300 000 km is 'insanely far away' ?
Not since they stated that such distances are an effective maximum range of phasers ... plus must I repeat that the Enterprise D fired numerous phaser beams and torpedoes at the same time in BOBW at a Borg cube, thus effectively demonstrating how Fed ships are capable of such a feat ?

Warp cores differ depending on a class of ship ... but each class should be able to fire all weapons at the same time with no problem since their weapon systems are also class specific with a power source capable of feeding enough energy to accomplish such a feat.

Btw ...
The Enterprise D if I am not mistaken fired from at least 5 of it's phaser strips (since those were the ones facing the cube) on a Borg cube in a pattern of 1 beam per strip.
I highly doubt they can channel a power output of all their phaser strips through 1 strip alone.
Having said that ... each strip most likely has a maximum phaser power output it can handle.
Each strip is capable of firing multiple beams at the same time ... no doubt by splitting the power for example between 2 beams by 50% if they are fired from the same strip at the same time.

If the Enterprise-D was capable of channeling all maximum power outputs from all of it's phaser strips through only 1 strip ... then I highly doubt they would fire from at least 5 different locations at the same time at the Borg.
They fired all their available weapons at the Borg with maximum power output from each strip and of course torpedoes.

The Feds though rarely use full weapons on a target because they almost always aim to disable and not destroy.
Now also add the fact that CGI portrayal of a star-ship firing it's phasers was not always accurate.
They fired a phaser beam from a torpedo tube on the Enteprise-D, and on at least 2 occasions from an aft docking port on Voyager.

They usually showed us the 'cool' factor ... not the accurate factor.

Plus they also admitted how they knew the weapons capabilities of a starship and over which distances it can fire them, but they again used a different approach for the 'cool' factor.

 

[sunnyside]

Now I need to get a copy of BOBW, as at the least seeing that would be cool.

And it does make sense that ships wouldn't be able to fire all their weapons. Usually your target won't be in all your weapon arcs. So if you have room you could just add weapons until you hit the limit in at least the forward arc (such that if you fire a full salvo at one target you couldn't be fireing at others).

However considering how much they packed into the defiant I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that the Galaxy was "undergunned" maybe for political reasons(mission of exploration and piece) and could fire everything without having to even shut off the holodecks. Sounds like maybe at least the one episode supports that. So maybe it was just cheap CGI after all that kept the ships from blossoming with phaser and torp fire in DS9.

 

[Thomas E. Johnson]

sunnyside said:

However considering how much they packed into the defiant I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that the Galaxy was "undergunned" maybe for political reasons(mission of exploration and piece) and could fire everything without having to even shut off the holodecks. Sounds like maybe at least the one episode supports that.

I've always had that feeling., but for a different reason. The Galaxy Class was designed to do so many different mission types with one basic vessel design. I think they bit off more than they could chew with its design, and had to make compromises in the tactical dept. in order to satisfy all the other criteria that the ship had to meet.

 

[Vanyel]

I always thought it'd make sense if the tactical officer had a few crewmen under him that would carry out his firing commands. Each crewman would have a set of weapons for himself and be able to direct them manually or with computer assistance.

 

[Newtype_A]

Jimmy_C said:
You don't know that the warp core has enough power for multiple weapon systems, actually.

I'll venture that we do: the Husnok ship that attacks Enterprise in "the survivors" clobbers them (in the second round) with a 400 gigawatt blast; that's enough to completely collapse their shields with just the first shot. Since this is clearly beyond the capabilities of Enterprise' phasers even on a good day, we'll say that's the upper limit for one of their weapons. Which is a good bet, considering NX-01 was able to put almost 200 gigawatts into the Quantum Beacons.

Enterprise-D's warp core, according to Data, produces 12.75 BILLION gigawatts. Therefore, if every one of the ship's ten phaser banks puts out 400 gigawatts, then firing all of them at once would use one millionth of the ship's total power output.

So yes, we do know the warp core has enough power for multiple weapon systems. Even assuming the warp engines account for most of that energy, "transfer warp power to weapons" would solve that problem in a jiffy (they do most of their fighting at impulse anyway; besides, TMP Enterprise apparently does this by design).

Jimmy_C said:
It still doesn't make sense to use 10 weapons when you can use one with 10x the intensity to fire at 1 target.

Why not simply use 10x intensity in all ten weapons, then? Once again, the ship isn't exactly hurting for power; what's four hundred thousand gigawatts out of TWELVE BILLION?