If lasers are antiquates by the TNG era how are Photon Torpedoes still relevant?

It's pretty obvious that "photon" torpedoes must use something other than light - maybe the name is a reference to their speed in relation to earlier projectiles.

 

^ I kind of think "photon" is just a brand name or a product name at this point (kinda like Russia's "Proton" rocket, or how the SpaceX Falcon 9 is not falcon-shaped and has a drastic shortage of feathers).

I almost think that photon and quantum torpedoes are basically the same weapons and quantum torpedoes are just BIGGER.

 

different weapons have different purpose. (reed says in ENT 2x26* a photon torpedo can dig a crater or disable a shuttle communication with no damage**)

*I felt like I was quoting the Bible.
**Malcolm forgot this at Azati Prime

 

I read laser weapons will be hardy used on battlefield because they would cauterize the wound

 

Any source of energy is going to be destructive if it's powerful enough, so no ship is ever going to be "immune" to an entire category of energy. The walls of your house may be immune to the force of a garden hose, but a tsunami could still destroy it. So it's not about the type of energy being used.

A powerful enough laser could surely damage a ship as badly as a phaser or torpedo could, but societies that haven't yet mastered phasers or disruptors are probably only capable of so much laser efficiency and would find it prohibitively difficult to make shipboard lasers more powerful than a certain maximum. You might actually need to use an antimatter explosion to power a sufficiently intense laser, in which case it's simpler just to use the antimatter itself as a weapon. Presumably phaser and disruptor technology allow greater efficiency than laser tech and are able to get past that bottleneck, which is why they're favored.

I learned something interesting a few years back: If the hull of a ship is exposed to an intense enough burst of energy, then its surface molecules can flash-vaporize from the sheer heat, and that will be effectively equivalent to a small explosion on the hull. So I've used that in a couple of my Star Trek novels to justify why a weapon hitting the shields would make the ship tremble.

Also, if shields are force fields, then it stands to reason there would be some force exchange between the shields and their generator. Think of two like magnetic poles repelling each other -- moving one closer can push the other back, even though they aren't in physical contact. So some of the force of an impact against the shields might propagate to the shield generators and then to the rest of the ship, even if the shields absorb most of it. Maybe the shields and generators act like "crumple zones" -- they don't absorb all the impact, but they absorb enough of it to make it survivable.

Photon torpedoes are antimatter weapons. The first person to theorize about antimatter rockets in the 1950s, Eugen Sänger, referred to them as "photon rockets," because they would use the momentum of a beam of gamma rays as their source of impulse. I would speculate that whoever coined the term "photon torpedo" was basing it on that. Although the way The Making of Star Trek explains it is that they're "energy pods of matter and anti-matter contained and held temporarily separated in a magno-photon force field."

 

I beg to differ. Certain TYPES of weapons cannot be yielded with the kind of power needed for a specific category. A main battle tank is immune to all kinds of swords and axes, but if you could build a sword big enough and construct a swinging mechanism powerful enough to threaten a tank, you've basically invented an entirely new class of weapon anyway.

That could well be the difference between a laser and a photon torpedo -- that the latter detonates like a directed-energy shaped charge and sprays a coherent x-ray beam directly at the target -- but I kind of doubt that's the case; like the above example, a gigantic robot-wielded anti-tank sword would be far more expensive and far less efficient than, say, a Hellfire missile.

That's the thing, I think there's a theoretical upper limit to how powerful you can make a laser with any modern materials before the laser itself actually becomes an overly complicated bomb. Even with explosive-pumping, even using antimatter, there IS a hard theoretical limit to how much energy they can actually produce in a single pulse. I believe that a bomb-pumped laser powerful enough to be competitive with a halfway-decent starship phaser would be significantly more hazardous to its operators than its intended target.

Plus, putting that kind of energy into a laser-like weapon would still be less effective than dumping it into a PHASER like weapon, so that would again rule out gamma rays as a weapon type.

If you combine the mass-reducing/subspaciness of Treknology with an antimatter-fueled rocket, what are you left with except for an extremely fast-burn kinetic kill vehicle that develops high velocity very quickly while also giving off a lot of radiation whenever it's armed or fired?

 

Unlike Star Trek, Star Wars isn't supposed to be in English. It's been translated for us from some exotic tongue using easy to digest terminology.
An X-Wing isn't really called an X-Wing. If they have an X shaped letter in their alphabet, it's called something different.
The same goes for lasers, it's just an easy to understand term.

 

The "X" in the Aurebesh alphabet looks like a triangle -- I always found it odd that the tie-in creators who invented that alphabet didn't insist on an X-shaped letter for X. But the Roman alphabet has been seen in the Star Wars movies, so it exists in that universe too.

And sometimes words that literally mean one thing get broadened or misinterpreted to mean something else. For instance, we use "neon lights" to refer to gas discharge lamps in general, even though they actually use a wide range of different gases to produce different colors, with only the red-orange ones using actual neon. And people still talk about "filming" or "taping" things even though both those physical media are pretty much obsolete. (At least, I think they still do.) It's very, very common in SF movies and TV -- predating Star Wars and extending far beyond it -- to use "laser" as a misnomer for any kind of ray gun. After all, there were ray guns in sci-fi long before lasers were invented, so once they were invented, people started associating their name with the whole panoply of ray guns. (Star Trek tried to avoid this, though. After using "laser" in the first pilot, Gene Roddenberry had second thoughts and changed it to "phaser" because he figured viewers would recognize that lasers didn't actually work that way and would complain about it. Which shows that he either overestimated the public's education or underestimated their suspension of disbelief.)

 

The way I imagined is pretty simple. If the navigational deflector produces a general repelling force, it is a small step to imagine it working like an antigravity field which can repel photons. If it bends photons away, then an infinite amount of light can be shot at the Enterprise and will never touch the ship. The power cost to run the system is the same no matter what is interacting with the field.

There are all sorts of things wrong with that, in regard to why it is probably not that, but given the tech they have it is not completely far fetched. For instance, they have cloaking devices, which should definitely grant laser immunity as long as their basic function is that of wrapping EM radiation around the ship.

The problem there is it seems that antimatter is a very basic part required for making interstellar starships practical. The bigger issue is Enterprise and its lack of laser weapons, with it having plasma weapons just before the NX launch and going to phasers, regardless of the dropped R. We have to believe that Starfleet for some reason went to lasers after phase weapons and back to them as phasers. This doesn't seem to be a straight power issue. We can also ignore the whole TOS laser issue, as was intended with Klingon foreheads. It's not a solution I particularly like.

I think its simpler for the shaking of the ship to be nothing more than the hull resonating after the shields are hit. The shields should transfer momentum of an impact or explosion into the hull, so a strong enough impact would cause the hull to ring like a bell. In Trek ships this could manifest as the quick violent shaking as the inertial dampeners try to cancel the pulse, making it longer but less violent.

I recall Gene's reasoning for changing lasers to phasers being that he realized lasers would become mundane in a few decades, or years. He wanted avoid Star Trek becoming dated so quickly. I believe the same reasoning is behind the switch from lithium to dilithium. Lithium is used in real life fusion reactors for energy collection, but if fusion had followed promises it would have been common within a couple decades. Televised scifi didn't have lithium as a major element, as far as I recall.

 

Perhaps. My own suspicion is that someone noticed that as real-world things, lasers were impossible to trademark, while a 'phaser' could be licensed to and paid for by toy makers and the like. But then especially in the early 70s a lot of stuff with what we'd now consider distinctly Star Trek intellectual property got away with it, so perhaps I'm being overly suspicious on this point.

 

well, ST wasn't exactly a success at the time. And then it's not the word phaser who sell the gadget, but their design.

 

Also bear in mind that TV and film merchandising as we know it hadn't really come into being at that point. Decisions wouldn't have been made in terms of what might be marketable. GR was quite open about wanting a lot of his tech to be couched in terms that were sufficiently similar to real world ideas and devices to carry a certain familiarity, but sufficiently different to avoid people making predictions about their capabilities and possible obselecense.

 

That didn't stop Star Wars and countless other franchises from calling their sci-fi weapons "lasers." I'm sure there have been many toys marketed as "lasers," notably Lazer Tag (although they did change the spelling, presumably for trademark reasons).

After all, "car" and "house" are pretty generic labels, but countless toy cars and toy houses have been sold. It's not the name that matters so much as the design and the brand name.

 

...Was the X-Wing originally intended to be called the X-Wing at all? In ANH, there are two wings of fightercraft, the X Wing and the Y Wing - and it just happens that the design of the fightercraft comprising the X Wing features a certain X-shaped part (while the craft of Y Wing have no Y-shaped parts whatsoever).

How does it work in the actual movies? Do we ever hear of a craft called an X-Wing? How about 'em toons? Is it purely a backstage/tie-in bit of terminology?

As for photon torpedoes, isn't that a Klingon name, as per "Sleeping Dogs"? Was Photon a famous warrior, perhaps?

Timo Saloniemi

 

May be so; perhaps I am being overly suspicious. I don't remember hearing of any memos where the Trek producers discussed what the naming of any of their stuff might imply for licensed products. Which is a mark in favor of explaining things by worrying about the audience knowing what lasers can do.

 

I could be wrong but I am fairly certain no one thought Star Trek merchandise would be a money maker until John and Bjo Trimble pointed out the opportunities after they were hired to work the mail room. I think that would be in the third season and the earliest action figures and dolls I can find seem to be of 70's vintage, not the late 60's.

 

In the films, an Imperial officer calls Luke's fighter "X-Wing class" when he tells Vader that he's approaching Cloud City. That's the only specific example I can recall off-hand.

And the Y-Wing certainly is Y-shaped. Look at the top-down view. The cockpit is the bottom of the "Y" and the engines are the forked top.

 

Does that make the Millenium Falcon a "Q Wing Class"?

Yeah yeah, Corellian Freighter, I know.......

 

Nope. Something "moving" because of a subspace field does not build up inertia. It is not moving at all but riding a displacement wave so it would not allow for a KKV type weapon. Same reason ships stop when their Impulse drives go off line instead of drifting.

 

Exactly.



The B-Wing still a mystery to me though.