Phaser Arrays?

[SilentP]

A question specifically around how arrays deal with being damaged. It's been a while since I've seen some of the footage, but I remember watching scenes in TNG where the Ent-D fires it's phasers, you see two 'surges' come from opposite ends of the array 'strip' and when they meet you get the phaser burst.

I can't remember if it's actually necessary for the two 'pulses' to be there, but are they? It would make it a real problem if you did, since if you were to suffer a hit, say a 1/3 of way, you could have potentially lost the entire array.

Or is the array capable of firing anywehere along the 'strip' and only part that are directly damanged are unable to fire?

 

[Tigger]

I believe we saw multiple pulses just "appear" in Conundrum when the E-D engages the drones. We might have seen the same in Best of Both Worlds during the mission to recover Picard.

It's possible that maximum power is attained by feeding energy in from the entire array so the beam traverses them all to "hook them up".

Or perhaps they "pre-charge" the emitters so that the beam, which looks stationary from our longer-range PoV, is actually moving back and forth across emitters during sustained fire so as to not overly wear any single one of them with a sustained burst being put through it.

 

[Timo]

Indeed, there is reason to believe that the "charging" effect is related to high-power blasts, while lack of "charging" is related to the need to squeeze off a shot or several very rapidly. We virtually never see the effect in the later TNG or DS9, but then again, those late episodes mainly depict heated combat situations where shots indeed are fired very rapidly.

Alternately, the effect might have been visible in early models of the phaser strip only, and is actually considered a malfunction or a wasteful side effect.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Green Shirt]

Indeed, there is reason to believe that the "charging" effect is related to high-power blasts, while lack of "charging" is related to the need to squeeze off a shot or several very rapidly.
Timo Saloniemi

Reminds me of the difference between winding your arm like a windmill about 5 times before throwing a big knockout punch vs. a quick tactical jab from close to the body.

 

[RapidNadion]

Not that Voyager's arrays are identical, but we have seen her phasers fire in three separate manners: Two blobs into beam, single blob into beam, and beam-from-no-blobs.

I'd agree that the speed and presence or absence of the pre-fire "blob collision" affects the energy delivered by the beam. In a 7th season episode of DS9, during one of the massive battle scenes, we see a Galaxy pull right in front of a Galor and give it the full dorsal saucer array treatment - traveling blobs of anger and all - and it seems to pack quite a punch.

(Non-canon alert) The TNG Tech manual backs up some of the theories stated before this post, indicating that the "linear phaser array's" advantage is that it allows all of the power from all of the elements in the array to be channeled into a single beam. If I remember correctly, the speed of the "blob collision" is (or was intended to, at some point) related to the power output of the beam.

 

[Timo]

...However, the TNG Tech Man cannot be taken literally on the claim that longer strips are automatically more powerful thanks to having more elements that can contribute.

If that were true, then most of Starfleet's engineers should be rounded up and phasered down for high treason. After all, they have built the starships all wrong, needlessly cutting long strips into series of smaller ones, such as with the main dorsal and ventral strips of Voyager. It should be absolutely forbidden to cut the strip and insert something trivial like a navigational deflector or a sensor array or a torpedo launcher in the cut.

Perhaps the adding up of emitter contributions works to a certain degree, after which there's no point in making the strips even longer? In that case, the maximum "addable" length should of course be the same as the shortest strip on a given starship - which isn't very long on a Galaxy or an Intrepid... The long main strips must enjoy some other advantage from being long.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Anwar]

Don't we see a Galaxy-Class shooting two phaser blasts at once from it's Array in "Sacrifice of Angels"?

 

[Timo]

Yup - and at the same target at that (although at different spots on that target). The first one is fired without the racing-blobs effect. So perhaps the gunner decided that the beam didn't pack enough oomph, and rather than shutting it down and starting all anew, merely added another racing-blob-less beam that did the trick?

A second Galaxy also fires a "quickie" into that target, creating one of the very few clear "kills" in the entire war: for the first time, it appears that a Galor really explodes, rather than just glowing in the light of gasoline explosions for a while but surviving intact. Although the camera does turn away in such a fashion that the latter could still be true...

Sisko immediately chastises the "Galaxy wing" for staying too tightly together, as indeed it seemed that three ships of that class sailed past this one Galor and fired at nothing else. But seeing the slim results of the barrages, perhaps it does take three Galaxies to inflict any damage on large ships shielded by Dominion technology? And perhaps the effect would have been better with one carefully applied racing-blobs beam?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Anticitizen]

It would have been a step backward from TOS tech if Galaxies couldn't fire two phaser beams at the same time.

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

The long main strips must enjoy some other advantage from being long.

Timo Saloniemi

Wider firing arcs and the ability to fire more beams at any given moment, I'd gather.