This. Based on the energy coming from the ends to meet at the firing point then the internal space would be from where the phaser equipment connects into the power grid. A long single strip would only have two power connects whereas multiple short ones would have many and thus use up more internal space.
The thing is that this can only explain the cases where a cascading effect runs over the whole array, not the cases where it starts somewhere on the array. For these, there would have to be additional power connects between individual emitter segments and since we see partial cascading effects start anywhere on an array, there must be many power connects along an array, maybe between every single emitter segment. That's why a long array would use up more internal volume than many short strips, so long as the combined length of them is not equal to the single long one.
Potentially more power, yes due to more emitters on the array. Still, the ship is power-limited by it's power supply so they'd really need a warp core upgrade or an extra warp core.
The Akira suffers more than the E-D if phaser strip length = power. The longest strip is on top and the next longest strip is below at only 1/3rd as long.
You do realize that my last theory supports your standpoint, do you?
Please follow my line of thought here:
You say that even very short strips can fire maximum power shots (maybe not the shortest, but say on the E-D the pylon strips, which have around 40 emitters according to Graham Kennedy) and the ship's power systems are the bottleneck.
I then asked myself why there are also very long arrays. You know what I think about the "redundancy theory", so I had to come up with a better theory, one that ideally could also explain why there are ships with shorter (split up) main arrays than would be possible, and also why even very short strips are sometimes split up.
That is exactly what my last theory explains.
The main reason for having very long arrays is to save internal volume. Where this is not a factor, shorter, more efficient arrays with additional rows of banks under them can be used. Where internal volume is a factor and no more banks are fitted, the shorter arrays are less powerful. But this is mitigated by the higher maneuverability of the ships using these, meaning they can maneuver fast enough so that all their main arrays can fire on the target.
Another reason is that having more emitters means that they can be operated on lower power levels, thereby increasing their lifetime. So in effect, when constantly operated at very high power levels, shorter arrays fail earlier or need more maintenance. This of course only applies to arrays which also have more banks than one.
One more reason for having very long arrays is their potentially higher firepower, if also fitted with additional rows of banks under them.
And this could be a reason for the Galaxy class ships in the dominion war to leave their saucers attached. Maybe the ones built during the war actually have additional banks. This plus your argument that more cargo space is good in the war now supports this theory.
An advantage of splitting up long arrays (as on the Intrepid class and others) and also very short arrays (as on the aft hull of the Galaxy class) is, as described in my last post, that the number of beams which can be fired from one array simultaneously, regardless of its length, is limited to 2, 3 or maybe 4 beams. Therefore having more arrays allows you to engage more targets simultaneously.
That's of course an assumption, but we can make it because aside from BoBW's antimatter spread there are no instances where more beams are fired from one array at the same time (AFAIK, if someone knows any, please tell me).
Summed up:
Advantages and disadvantages of having the longest possible main phaser arrays:
Advantages:
1. longer arrays save internal volume
2. they have increased emitter lifetime
3. they are potentially more powerful
4. with those more important advantages in mind, yes, they are also more redundant
Disadvantage:
1. they are less efficient
2. you can engage fewer enemies simultaneously
Advantages and disadvantages of having shorter (split up) main phaser arrays:
Advantages:
1. they are more efficient
2. you can engage more enemies at the same time
Disadvantages:
1. they use up more internal volume or you have to live with reduced firepower per array
2. if fitted with more phaser banks (buffers) they have reduced emitter lifetime (when constantly operated at high power levels)
3. if not fitted with more phaser banks you have to orientate the ship so that as many of them as possible can hit the target (this is mitigated by the higher maneuverability of those ships)
This explains the array configuration of every Starfleet ship class.
Oh and regarding old ships like the Ambassador, Niagara and Freedom classes, their arrays are just short because Starfleet couldn't couple more emitters together at that time. But they could have multiple banks underneath.
And that gave me a new idea for even older ships with ball-turret emitters:
As you described in an earlier post, in TOS the Enterprise seems to have 4 phaser banks which were discharged one after another or simultaneously through two emitters.
So maybe every pair of emitters has 4 banks on that ship. If it has more emitters on other parts of the ship these would have their own sets of banks. So phaser banks don't have to be interconnected throughout the ship, an idea I never really liked.
On TMP era ships they increased the number of emitters and with that also the number of phaser banks, culminating in the Excelsior class, where multiple emitter pairs (with multiple banks each) have overlapping firing arcs to concentrate as much firepower on one target as possible (or reasonable, because of the internal volume needed by so many phaser banks; as you said, they had to consider practicality).
Also, with ever more powerful warp cores (or energy systems in general) it may be simply impossible to channel all this energy through one or two emitters anymore, so the Excelsior had to have more of them to be able to utilize that power supply.
The invention of phaser arrays then changed that again, because they consisted of so many more emitters.
Why does it need to explain it if the full cascading effect isn't even present in all firing actions except for the initial one?
Because it is in several instances I know ("Star Trek First Contact", "Star Trek Nemesis", "DS9 : What You Leave Behind" (one Galaxy class in the background))
and also because the partial cascading effect has to be explained too.
Follow my line of thought here:
In the beginning, I saw the "glowing energy pulses" as the phaser energy itself accumulating and travelling along the array to the firing point where it is then released. The problem with this was that there would be a beam formed out of a small energy point which seems ridiculous. I compared that to opening up a (small) bottle and then a metres high fountain shoots out for several seconds.
So I had to come up with something else.
I came up with the "activation sequence". If the glowing pulses only indicate that the respective emitters are activated and produce a certain amount of phaser energy that is then stored in a conduit inside the array, and we cannot see the actual transfer of that energy to the firing point, then all the different variations of the cascading effect could be explained.
In the instances where the cascading effect runs over the whole array, either a maximum power discharge is generated or a weaker beam is produced by charging all emitters with lower power levels. The effect allows for both possibilities.
When the effect runs only over a part of an array, the reason is to produce a beam with higher efficiency (because the distance the cascading effect travels is shorter).
In that case, either a weaker beam is generated that uses only the part of the bank (energy buffers) lying under the emitters that are activated or a powerful beam is generated which uses the energy of the whole bank in a smaller number of emitters, also resulting in higher efficiency but also resulting in higher load on each emitter.
The second possibility would require that even the phaser banks can exchange and combine the energy stored in them. But this part of the theory is not required for the rest to work. We would then only have to accept that a beam that is fired after a partial cascading effect is neccessarily less powerful.
Even the cases where no cascading effect can be seen at all could be explained. Either it is only a single emitter firing (as would be plausible for the shots the E-E fired to find the Scimitar in "Nemesis") or the cascading effect happened offscreen and the charge was held inside the array a bit longer than usual. Another possibility is that there exists another, much slower way to charge the emitters (maybe all of them simultaneously) that produces no visible effect.
And then there are special cases like "Conundrum" where several short beams are fired from the E-D's ventral saucer array after only one cascading effect is seen.
The "activation sequence theory" explains this too. The produced phaser energy held in the conduit inside the array is simply split up and transferred to several firing points instead of one.
All in all, this theory explains:
1. what's so sprecial about phaser arrays (compared to ball-turret phasers): They're increasing firepower and emitter lifetime by spreading the load over many emitters
2. why there are ships with very long arrays
3. why there are also ships with shorter (split up) arrays
4. why there are also multiple very short arrays on most ship classes
5. why mostly long arrays are used, but even very short ones are sometimes
6. the cascading effect in its different variations
That seems a bit arbitrary, IMO. They are the same hardware (AFAIK) for long and short strips so they should be able to perform identically.
What I meant was this:
Imagine you have 3 or 4 large enemy ships and several enemy fighters in front of you.
If every phaser array regardless of its length can only fire 3 or 4 beams simultaneously and you fire these at the large enemy ships, you can't engage the fighters with that array at the same time. You would have to split up your weapons fire.
But yeah, this would be a so small disadvantage that it seems a bit arbitrary.
LOL YMMV. But I was surprised they kept that weird spot in the remastered "The Arsenal of Freedom" given that they altered "Encounter at Farpoint", "Darmok", etc.
Yeah, me too.
I do agree that phaser power is stored temporarily in the banks but I'm not sure if it is augmented by engine power or simply can only discharge what it has stored.
Both cases would work for my theory. But I would prefer the first one, because it would explain where the additional energy in "The Nth degree" and "A Matter of Time" came from.
But is this the case all the time when multiple shots are fired? And if it is on a downward trend, how can you differentiate between it being an issue with the phaser system and not the power system?
First, I think it would be more plausible if the issue is with the phaser system, because nothing happened between those shots that could have damaged the power systems.
But it certainly could be otherwise.
Another possibility would be that they deliberately reduced the firepower after the first shot.
No, I think you are correct that they were fighting with impulse power only in that battle.
LAFORGE: He hit our warp drive with his first shot. We've only got impulse, Captain.
...
DATA: We've exhausted our complement of photon torpedoes. Phaser banks are down to four percent, sir.
However, if phaser banks can be charged to fire more than what the engines can deliver all at once then the "down to four percent" shouldn't be an issue since they should be able to "charge up the banks to charge back up to 100%". Curiously they couldn't suggesting they were impulse power-limited.
Yeah, they seemed to be limited to impulse power. And at the end of the battle, they seemed to have lost that one too, because the ship could barely be moved with all energy rerouted to the (impulse) engines to ram the Scimitar.
And that's why I interpreted Data's statement about the status of the phaser banks as meaning that after this long battle, the banks are finally down to only 4%. It seemed to imply a gradual reduction of its charge over the whole length of the battle.
But it could also be possible that the impulse reactors failed exactly at a moment before the banks could be charged again after the previous shot.
In either case, I think the 4% should be the average charge of all banks taken together.
They seemed to have solved those two problems by "Night Terrors".
Yeah I forgot that one, although the discharge was much shorter.
The warp core overheated because it was pumping power into the deflector for minutes (they started as soon as they dropped out of warp) prior to firing the deflector dish. This would suggest that the deflector dish can store and channel way more than what the warp core can provide momentarily and the core overheated trying to keep up. In this case, the initial blast was probably more powerful and then suddenly less powerful as the buffered energy was used up and were relying on what the warp core could manage.
Also possible.
There's likely another reason why it's phrased differently in that the phasers draw their power from multiple sources like warp+impulse+batteries and it gets fed by their EPS grid. In "The Nth Degree" it's the same thing where the plasma is powering them as well. The main deflector dish however might only be fed by the warp core.
I would think that the phasers are always fed by the EPS grid, since this is the primary means of distributing energy in Stafleet ships.
For "The Nth degree" I like the idea most that they routed additional energy to the emitters to combine that with the energy stored in the phaser banks. And they shunted that plasma to only 40 emitters to get the highest possible efficiency.
And regarding the deflector dish, I think since they had to re-route the warp power to the deflector, it seems it is normally not supplied by the warp core. Although it is possible that by "warp power" they meant only that power which is normally reserved for the warp drive.
Not that I'm aware of. Which episode did you see a phaser buffer and augment an engine-powered phaser blast?
First, I meant discharging only the energy stored in the banks.
Second, I based my statement on one of your earlier posts where you explained how phaser banks worked in TOS.
But this is irrelevant now since I think phaser banks work like capacitors, not batteries. Although they have to be able to hold their energy rather long to explain how they could charge their banks with battery power in TWOK.
But wouldn't doubling the amount of particles mean also doubling the rate of expenditure of power and halving the time on target with the beam? In the end it's still the same amount of energy fired.
Doubling the power expenditure
or halving the time of exposure. The latter means doubling the intensity, bringing more energy per time onto the target and that would do more damage, because the target is not able to dissipate that much energy in that little time. It would mean melting instead of heating or vaporizing instead of melting.
At least that's how I understand it. If there's some professional here who knows it better, please tell me.
That doesn't change the evidence that the small strips were used on Voyager to attack a Borg ship. That same argument could be applied in that the Borg cube in "First Contact" appeared to have no shields as well
And it is not a problem anymore since short arrays now are not totally weak anymore but only a bit weaker, or maybe even not at all. They have other advantages and disadvatages now.
But of course it is open to further discussion in light of before unknown evidence. That's what a discussion forum like this one is for after all. And until this before unknown evidence is brought up, it should at least be considered that the theory could be true. You can't ask someone to first watch all of Star Trek in highest possible detail before considering his ideas. If he or she didn't do it, there would be nothing to discuss, and if he or she did it and all the evidence fits the theory there would be no need for further discussion.
On the contrary. There are plenty of folks here who have watched it more times that they can count and still discussion exists because we all have different perspectives.
And do all these other folks always know every bit of evidence off the top of their heads? Or do they have a "catalogue" of every evidence that could be relevant to their theories? I doubt that. And I doubt that this is in any way important, since this is a discussion forum where everyone registered can post if they knew some facts I forgot. In a way, everyone can be everyone else's "catalogue". That doesn't mean I don't have to consider any evidence in the first place, it only means that I don't have to know everything even before I post my first theory.
So if you have a problem with my theory disregarding any disproving evidence, be my "catalogue" and give me that evidence or tell me where I find it.
On the other hand it's like asking "Why has the Akira class no aft phasers?", "Why does the refit Constitution class seem to have no aft torpedo tube?" or even "Why is not every (war)ship completely covered in weapons?"
That's a different can of worms :P
Yeah. A can of Gagh of various sorts, some of them biting back when you try to eat them.
But as with anything, we don't know enough about the Akira to say she has no aft phasers. And to the same extent, we don't know enough of the refit-Enterprise to say she has no aft tube.
Going by the lack of the respective details on the models, we can.
And saying there are invisible weapons is kind of a moot point, IMHO.
You know how I regard the cases when weapons fire came from where no weapons are. But as before: YMMV.
