Fireing all their weapons?

[Jimmy_C]

Since when do numbers that large actually mean anything in trek? Anything over a thousand is basically dramatic license. 12.75 Billion gigawatts is comparable with the total amount of power received by Earth from the sun. IIRC that's nearly as powerful as V'Ger. It is also 1000x the total amount of power consumed by humans on average in 2004. If every number stated on the show was used as evidence, nothing would make sense at all!

 

[Newtype_A]

Jimmy_C said:
Since when do numbers that large actually mean anything in trek? Anything over a thousand is basically dramatic license. 12.75 Billion gigawatts is comparable with the total amount of power received by Earth from the sun.

It also happens to be roughly the amount of power you get when you combine about seventy kilograms of matter with seventy kilograms of antimatter every second. I'm willing to concede that this is merely the upper limit of Enterprise' reactor output, so that when the engines are idling it produces a fraction as much power--say, five hundred million gigawatt for a nice round number; Enterprise would get that kind of power by reacting three kilograms of matter with three kilograms of antimatter every second. In that case, the 400 gigawatt upper limit of phaser banks is still just a drop in the bucket.

Jimmy_C said:
IIRC that's nearly as powerful as V'Ger.

You don't. V'ger is said to generate a "twelfth power energy field," the exact meaning of which is never explained, except that Decker mentions "Thousands of starships couldn't generate that much..."

Jimmy_C said:
It is also 1000x the total amount of power consumed by humans on average in 2004.

Which may or may not have something to do with our inability to travel faster than light

 

[stormturmoil]

maybe it's a heat management issue; firing all those elements at once has got to create some serious heat release, and regarldess of how good cooling may be, it can't be all that good on a Starship, since the only way to actually get rid of the heat is via radiation. That being the case, maybe you can only fire so many heat generating systems at the same time in the same area before you start to get thermal overloads and components turning hot and runny as the cooant system can't keep up...

 

[Deks]

stormturmoil said:
maybe it's a heat management issue; firing all those elements at once has got to create some serious heat release, and regarldess of how good cooling may be, it can't be all that good on a Starship, since the only way to actually get rid of the heat is via radiation. That being the case, maybe you can only fire so many heat generating systems at the same time in the same area before you start to get thermal overloads and components turning hot and runny as the cooant system can't keep up...

No ... that's far from being an issue actually.
The only instance of heat problems with the phaser systems was in a Voyager book which was non canon.
In short, Janeway programmed the computer to fire rapid continuous phaser beams beyond the safety limit at enemy ships giving the phaser system no time to cool off which almost resulted in an overload ... and even then, the ship was continuously firing maximum bursts for a prolonged time before it was forced to shut down.

Under 'standard' situations though, if you want to fire from multiple phaser strips at maximum power from each strip at an enemy target, you can ... just give the system a few seconds to recharge (and presumably cool off which seems logical).
We saw the ships being able to do it (firing multiple beams at the same time) and basically doing it when they were drastically outmatched.

the only reason we see the Feds using one beam or so per engagement was because of their policy to try and disable an enemy ship if they can, not destroy it ... and due to the CGI teams making mistakes.

 

[Timo]

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.

That would seem to support the idea that the ship only has enough power to fire one bank at a time.

I mean, Spock wanted maximum effect on the target. Why not fire all the banks simultaneously if that were an option? There could be a bottleneck in how much power a single emitter can channel before overheating, but this would make it all the more attractive to fire all the emitters at once.

The scene rather makes it look as if Spock pumps maximum destruction through one bank for as long as the bank can take it, then switches to another bank to continue channeling the maximum output of the ship. This regardless of whether "banks 1, 2 and 3" are at the exact same location, or distributed across the ship.

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.

One has to wonder how much the type of the weapon affects the ability of the shields to withstand the fire. After all, like Newtype points out, 400 gigawatts is way below what can be achieved with a standard photon torpedo, and even volleys of torpedoes can be blocked by the same shields.

Worf did go to the exceptional trouble of specifying the opponent's weapons as emitting "particle energy". And he did point out that the damage from the beam was superficial as such, but had an unexpected effect on the shields. Mere 400 gigawatts of everyday phaser energy might not be a valid weapon in 24th century combat, and only a phaser that taps into a significant fraction of the ship's total power output would stand a chance at hurting the enemy.

In any case, it may well be that the reactor provides a lot more power than the weapons can pour out, either singly or in a broadside. But that doesn't mean that a broadside would be more energetic than a single shot. The bottleneck may be the secondary EPS loop that powers the guns. The total power available through that may be channeled through a single emitter just as well as being shared across dozens, and the end result is still the same: available power, not weapon throughput, limits the destructive effects, and a single optimally placed beam thus is preferable to multiple ones in the general case.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Timo]

Oh, and BTW:
Fire all weapons!

That's three phaser beams only, not five. And it still seems to be the maximum total number for any starship, unless one counts the four pulses that the Defiant usually spits out at a time. A great number of Voyager strips have been fired in rapid sequence, but not simultaneously; at most two beams are lit at any given moment.

Timo Saloniemi