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

[Christopher]

Deflector beams must sweep ahead of the ship in order to clear debris out of the ship's path, so they must by necessity need to travel faster than the ship.
If they can do it, why can't phasers?

Although the general assumption is that the navigational deflector operates at warp, I think that, realistically, it would make more sense if it were only used at impulse. According to the theoretical warp-drive models that physicists have come up with, the warp bubble itself would "catch" debris, which would build up along the forward edge of the bubble like dirt and bugs on a windshield. And when the ship came out of warp, all that dust and debris would be accelerated forward with enormous kinetic energy, which means it would probably destroy anything directly in the ship's path. So you'd never want to come out of warp pointing at anything friendly. (In which case, who needs phasers? )

 

[Ithekro]

At that point the deflector would be to clean the window so to speak, and also keep the stuff from accumulating (and not having to worry about where you stop the ship).

 

[Christopher]

At that point the deflector would be to clean the window so to speak, and also keep the stuff from accumulating (and not having to worry about where you stop the ship).

Yeah, I suppose, but there's still the problem of how something can travel forward from a warp bubble that's already moving faster than light. Anything that reached the forward edge of the warp bubble would instantly be swept backward relative to it.

Unless maybe the deflector beam sweeps back and forth across the leading edge like windshield wipers...

 

[Ithekro]

I was thinking as wipers, or sweepers maybe.


Though given how they are described, along with the weapons, they are go faster than light relative to the ship, or perhaps because it is relative the ship they can go out at their own speed regardless of 20th century laws of physics.

 

[Christopher]

Though given how they are described, along with the weapons, they are go faster than light relative to the ship, or perhaps because it is relative the ship they can go out at their own speed regardless of 20th century laws of physics.

Yeah, the shows always seem to assume that phasers can travel between ships in warp, but it's hard to see how that could make any physical sense, so it annoys me. That's just not how it works. FTL travel isn't just about going really fast. It isn't technically moving at all. It's actually not that different from the jokey explanation for Futurama's space drive -- you don't actually move, you make the universe move around you. Or rather, you gravitationally alter the topology of spacetime to decrease the effective distance between you and your destination.

In my novels, I sometimes throw in a handwave about ships "synchronizing their warp bubbles" to allow phaser combat, but even I don't really know what that means. If they were close enough to physically overlap their warp fields, like in "Divergence," then maybe, but that would limit combat to pretty much point-blank range. Then again, that is kind of what we see in the shows and movies -- battling starships flying at very close range, mere kilometers or meters apart, instead of the thousands or millions of kilometers that would be more likely in space. Normally, there's no good reason for ships to get that close unless they're docking, but it could make sense if they needed to be right up close to do battle. Although that explanation wouldn't work for close-range battles at impulse like in TWOK.

 

[Ithekro]

Sometimes you just have to accept the oddities in ones fiction as something not covered in our known sciences and just run with it. Otherwise you get forced to convolute the already convoluted to work within our understanding of physics, when quite clearly their technology breaks our understanding of physics already as of the 1960s when they are fighting at warp speeds well beyond normal earth bound visual ranges. Not even getting into FTL travel and transporters.

Writers have been, for decades now, attempted to explain the weapons of Star Trek. There are many different opinions over the last five decades it seems. I am not sure if any one theory has ever one out concerning phasers and photon torpedoes and how they work in warp or if they work in warp at all. Much less a consensus on if the lasers in "The Cage" are really lasers, or just phaser before the scriptwriters settled on that name. Or something Starfleet called "lasers". Or it they were just the old phase cannons from Enterprise just before the modern phasers came out.

 

[Christopher]

^I put the first pilot's "lasers" in the same category as "James R. Kirk" and "lithium crystals" -- just first-draft names that got superseded and decanonized. After all, obviously "phase pistols/cannons" are meant to be the ancestor of phasers, so why make a temporary swerve into calling them "lasers" when they don't even function like lasers? And the word "laser" was only spoken twice in the entirety of "The Cage," so it's easy enough to ignore.

 

[Ithekro]

Yet some fans cling to it (I don't after Enterprise came out. And marked off the FASA era laser and accelerator cannons as advanced version of the weapons in Enterprise, or inefficient versions of later Federation weaponry).

 

[soornge]

they cant and warp : u can argue it all u want but its physics if you travel the same speed as a bullet when you shoot the bullet the bullet doesnt go faster than you unless you fire it inside the ship : does no one rememeber the egg and train from misdle school physics: i promise its physics and the deflector doesnt sweep out ahead to clear debris in warp drive : the warp bubble curves regular space around the ship inside ahoving into subspace ir the gaps between curves the ship then moves through the curved space at a speed of x times light : omg this is like arguing that parsec is not a measurenof time in star wars chat go read the warp geomatry forum but i promise you if you travel faster than abullet and shoot agunnyou are shooting at yourself

 

[soornge]

deflectors with warp geometry dont work to clear debris from the warp field there is no debris in the warp
field

 

[Ithekro]

Navigational deflectors, as seen in the show, come on when an object gets into the flight path of a starship and redirects or possibly destroyed the object so that it does not impact the ship. This is automatic, but if it comes on for something major, it alerts the crew so they can figure out why their is some thing that large suddenly in their path.

In TMP, the wormhole and engine imbalance cut out the navigation deflector, which would normally have cleared the asteroid from the Enterprise's path, forcing them to use weapons on it since they could not avoid the impact, nor slow down in time to avoid it.

 

[RunawayStarShip]

In my novels, I sometimes throw in a handwave about ships "synchronizing their warp bubbles" to allow phaser combat, but even I don't really know what that means. If they were close enough to physically overlap their warp fields, like in "Divergence," then maybe, but that would limit combat to pretty much point-blank range.

In the simplest case, wouldn't superimposing the front edge of an Alcubierre warp bubble with the trailing edge of another result in flat space between the two vessels, creating one elongated warp bubble? Phaser combat within one bubble would work, right?

Then again, that is kind of what we see in the shows and movies -- battling starships flying at very close range, mere kilometers or meters apart, instead of the thousands or millions of kilometers that would be more likely in space. Normally, there's no good reason for ships to get that close unless they're docking, but it could make sense if they needed to be right up close to do battle. Although that explanation wouldn't work for close-range battles at impulse like in TWOK.

My personal theory is that close combat prevents the use of fully-loaded photon torpedoes, which are dangerous to starships at close range as indicated in "Samaritan Snare" and "The Nth Degree". (The weirder thing about "The Nth Degree" was Picard giving up on trying to outrun the probe at Warp 2... but I digress.) This allows the existence of photon torpedoes that can cause giant explosions on planets like in "Skin of Evil", torpedoes that can destroy a warship from afar in a single salvo as in "The Wounded", and those that cause gasoline explosions when used on screen when starships are in close combat.

As for why the Defiant and Enterprise-E would need presumably more powerful (or perhaps merely more effective?) quantum torpedoes in close combat if they can't use the full payload... I have no idea, since I have no idea how a quantum torpedo is supposed to function. (I also don't buy the idea of "extracting zero-point energy" from the DS9 Tech Manual since that's basically the energy of existence, so to speak.)

 

[Ithekro]

I was under the impression that quantum torpedoes were more effective at breaking through shielding, thus why they were designed as anti-Borg weapons, and were effective against the Dominion., and could do a whole lot to Cardassian and Klingon ships.

 

[Christopher]

In the simplest case, wouldn't superimposing the front edge of an Alcubierre warp bubble with the trailing edge of another result in flat space between the two vessels, creating one elongated warp bubble? Phaser combat within one bubble would work, right?

That's basically what I was talking about, but again, it requires point-blank interaction, so it doesn't work for longer-range combat.

As for why the Defiant and Enterprise-E would need presumably more powerful (or perhaps merely more effective?) quantum torpedoes in close combat if they can't use the full payload... I have no idea, since I have no idea how a quantum torpedo is supposed to function. (I also don't buy the idea of "extracting zero-point energy" from the DS9 Tech Manual since that's basically the energy of existence, so to speak.)

I think that's overly poetic. It's just the vacuum energy of the quantum foam, virtual particle pairs constantly being created and annihilated and cancelling out the changes in energy before they become measurable. The idea of "catching" that virtual energy before it fades and harnessing it as an endless power source has been used in plenty of science fiction. It's unlikely to be feasible, but it's no more absurd as a fictional premise than, say, using quantum entanglement for FTL ansible communication, or using quantum teleportation to teleport people instead of data.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Deflector beams must sweep ahead of the ship in order to clear debris out of the ship's path, so they must by necessity need to travel faster than the ship.
If they can do it, why can't phasers?

Relativistically speaking, any photons emitted from the ship will always move away from the ship at the speed of light in all reference frames. You're going to have a problem with targeting if the thing you're shooting at isn't ALSO moving at warp -- apparent distance/time distortion effects will totally screw with your firing solution -- but if you're shooting at something that is moving at a similar velocity (which, if you're still at warp, you'd pretty much have to be) then it's not really an issue.

 

[Darkwing]

Regarding shields stopping lasers: Even light shields are able to decohere the beam, making it an oversized flashlight, in a sort of prism effect.
As for Star Wars weapons, Lucas didn't think about the issue, and fans started claiming they weren't really lasers. That doesn't make them not-lasers. That just makes them lasers that do things they aren't supposed to able to do. The plasma explanation is relatively recent. Although I personally prefer the Shane/Lora Johnson explanation that lightsabers are containment fields for antimatter - that'll cut through just about anything!

 

[Christopher]

As for Star Wars weapons, Lucas didn't think about the issue, and fans started claiming they weren't really lasers. That doesn't make them not-lasers. That just makes them lasers that do things they aren't supposed to able to do.

I think, rather, that it makes them fantasy weapons that just happen to be called "lasers." Star Wars was never meant to be even slightly based in science. Lucas intended it as an entry in the "sword-and-planet" fantasy genre of Flash Gordon and John Carter of Mars, essentially sword-and-sorcery fantasy transposed into a fanciful outer-space setting. None of it was ever meant to have a logical explanation or connect to any realistic technology. The "lasers" could've just as easily been called "death rays" or "lightning projectors" or whatever for all the difference it made. It's just words.

 

[Mytran]

Aren't the sidearms in Star Wars usually referred to as "blasters"?

 

[Ithekro]

"Blasters", yes. The ship mounted heavy stuff was tended to be called "turbolasers". That was what the Rebel fighters were evading over the Death Star. Lightsabers get alternately called "laser swords" in both the Clone Wars and Rebels. They have ion cannons as well that can be small fighter sized or huge fleet disrupting superweapons.

 

[Mytran]

"Turbo" is a bit of a misnomer too though, since it has nothing to do with the recycling of gases to make an engine spin faster.

And yes; I know that "turbo" has come to mean "increased" when used in combination with anything other than an internal combustion engine, but that's kind of the point: If one word can change its definition over time, why can't another? Hence a "turbolaser" is neither turbocharged, nor a laser - just a highly accelerated beam weapon with a fancy name