Phaser shots that miss...

[Gil T.Azell]

How far do the go before losing their effectiveness?
I asked because I haven't seen it asked before
and I saw a clip on you tube of some action from Journey to Babel

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuVaBb-j2tU&feature=feedrec[/yt]
same with missed Photon shots?

 

[Timo]

No real idea about phasers in vacuum... Save for the observed facts that

1) we have never seen a phaser beam fade out or otherwise terminate in vacuum, but

2) our heroes always try to fight their space phaser fights at minimum distance, which may well suggest the beams weaken out a lot with distance and will become harmless in just a few lightseconds, and

3) in "Balance of Terror" it was possible to set phaser bolts to explosively dissipate at a distance ("proximity blast mode"), suggesting the bolts are normally held together by some sort of a sheathing force, which may have a finite lifetime and thus spell explosive death to the phaser beam at a set distance.

As for photon torpedoes, they would probably have self-destruct charges that activate when there is no more fuel for maneuvering and trying to acquire another target. Plus a remote detonation option, although in wartime this would be a weakness if the enemy learned the detonation codes; scuttling thus is probably designed to be very difficult, explaining how our heroes had so much trouble with a maverick torp in "Genesis".

On the other hand, torpedoes supposedly use their warhead for fuel, at least according to the tech books. So basically a torpedo could be programmed to run until there is no more antimatter there, meaning that not only does the torp lose the ability to maneuver, it also has lost the ability to blow up, and can be left to its own devices.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Forbin]

^Well, you really don't want your spent photon torpedo casings floating around in space where, a) they can become a hazard to navigation, b) an enemy could pick them up and learn your targeting, propulsion, etc tech, or c) someone could rearm them and use them against you!

 

[Gary7]

Funny thing... lasers projected through space do not dissipate. Why would phasers? It's not like they're encountering anything that would cause friction and eventual dissipation.

 

[Lieut. Arex]

The beam would eventually diffuse. A finger-diameter laser fired from Earth spreads out to a few hundred miles in diameter at the distance of the Moon. A phaser would hold together better than that as they are combat-effective over tens of thousands of miles, but over several hundred thousand or a few million miles, they'd fade.

 

[Christopher]

^Well, you really don't want your spent photon torpedo casings floating around in space where, a) they can become a hazard to navigation, b) an enemy could pick them up and learn your targeting, propulsion, etc tech, or c) someone could rearm them and use them against you!

Space is huge enough that the odds of hitting a stray torpedo, or even detecting one amid the vast emptiness, would be infinitesimal. And there are plenty of other hazards to navigation out there, stray comets and meteoroids and dust clouds. A starship's navigational deflector could probably push aside a torpedo casing as easily as a natural hazard.

 

[Forbin]

^Well, you really don't want your spent photon torpedo casings floating around in space where, a) they can become a hazard to navigation, b) an enemy could pick them up and learn your targeting, propulsion, etc tech, or c) someone could rearm them and use them against you!

Space is huge enough that the odds of hitting a stray torpedo, or even detecting one amid the vast emptiness, would be infinitesimal. And there are plenty of other hazards to navigation out there, stray comets and meteoroids and dust clouds. A starship's navigational deflector could probably push aside a torpedo casing as easily as a natural hazard.

On Star Trek? The show where anybody crossing the Neutral Zone is found by three enemy ships in the first 5 seconds? The show where any crew member can bump into an estranged parent at a starbase a thousand light years from home? The show where a ship can get caught in a temporal wormhole and emerge directly in front of its namesake 40 years later?

SOMEbody's gonna hit that torpedo casing!

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

Funny thing... lasers projected through space do not dissipate. Why would phasers? It's not like they're encountering anything that would cause friction and eventual dissipation.

Isn't a phaser a "particle" beam? That could have friction.

 

[Vonstadt]

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space." - Douglas Adams

 

[22 Stars]

When i saw this thread, i thought it would be about the phaser shot in 'Wink of an Eye' on the bridge! Would have loved to see the crew's reaction to that thing going off.

 

[Greystone_06]

Phaser beams are ranged weapons and will lose cohesion over distance.

 

[Tan Ru]

I always imagined phaser shots as lightning bolts that went on forever.

 

[Gary7]

Sorry, I exaggerated... a laser beam does indeed dissipate, but very slowly over vast distances. Relative to combat proximity, it may appear as though it goes on and on until it hits something. I guess a phaser beam is comprised of more volatile energy particles that break down much faster.

 

[MarsWeeps]

3) in "Balance of Terror" it was possible to set phaser bolts to explosively dissipate at a distance ("proximity blast mode"), suggesting the bolts are normally held together by some sort of a sheathing force, which may have a finite lifetime and thus spell explosive death to the phaser beam at a set distance.

It's been awhile since I saw this episode but weren't the phaser shots really photon torpedoes? From what I remember, they looked and sounded like torpedoes firing. I always chalked it up to an early episode that didn't have the dialog match the weapons used on screen.

 

[blssdwlf]

2) our heroes always try to fight their space phaser fights at minimum distance,

That is not normally the case in TOS. The majority of times we've seen the TOS Enterprise fire at other ships are in the 70,000 km to 90,000 km range or beyond. There have been a couple of times that phasers were used at <2,000 km against missiles ("For the World is Hollow...").

I do agree with the other parts though:

which may well suggest the beams weaken out a lot with distance and will become harmless in just a few lightseconds, and

since that was hinted at in "The Doomsday Machine" with Decker wanting to attack at point-blank range instead of being far away.

Interestingly, we do know from "Obsession" that the Enterprise traveling at Warp 8, phasers won't reach a Warp 8 target ahead of the ship at a separation of 0.04 light years. But we don't know if that is a limitation of whatever is sheathed to allow the phaser beam to go FTL or if it is just the dissipation of energy.

 

[Lieut. Arex]

Well, 0.04 ly is about 240 billion miles (if my math's right), so I'd hope the beam would dissipate well before then. Elsewise you could hang out in a system's Oort Cloud and snipe targets on the inner planets.

 

[Christopher]

It's been awhile since I saw this episode but weren't the phaser shots really photon torpedoes? From what I remember, they looked and sounded like torpedoes firing. I always chalked it up to an early episode that didn't have the dialog match the weapons used on screen.

More like the other way around, since of course the dialogue came first. They were scripted as phasers, but BoT was the first episode that particular FX house did, and they didn't quite get what phasers were supposed to be, so they animated them as blips rather than beams. (It didn't help that the script, a pastiche of submarine-warfare movies, treated them like depth charges.) So they were "really" phasers, because that's what the characters said. The torpedo-like appearance was an error, or a variant concept. (Keep in mind that the idea of photon torpedoes hadn't yet been invented by the writers and producers. They weren't introduced until "Arena." So it's only with hindsight that we can look at that episode and say "Those look and sound like torpedoes.")

 

[Timo]

The idea of a phaser "beam" becoming a "blast" isn't much of a technobabble challenge, if we indeed believe in sheathing. This belief in fact addresses multiple issues: for example, we can then argue that the sheath may contain a glowing entity (say, a particle stream) that spills its energies sideways in visible light, without this meaning that the beam is in the process of spreading out. We could even start believing in curved sheaths, which initially project the streams of deadly particles at a divergent angle (as seen in TOS phaser firing VFX) and then curve inwards again to produce two parallel streams (as seen in TOS phaser impact VFX)!

What's a bit more difficult to understand in the "proximity" part of the "proximity blast" setting. How do the phaser bolts know when they are in proximity of their target? Depth charges are deployed in relatively confined spaces, but similar blind firing of PB phasers in the vastness of outer space would not be likely to create any "proximity" situations...

On the issue of the enemy picking up the signature a floating inactive photon torpedo, we'd need some evidence of the heroes or the villains of actual aired episodes doing something similar. AFAIK, they only manage to locate active, emitting objects - plus sometimes an inactive, shut-down starship, but only when they happen to stumble onto the same planetary orbit with the derelict.

So perhaps it wouldn't be a good idea to leave a dozen torps floating on a low but stable orbit above a frequently visited planet. But that's about that.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[blssdwlf]

For "proximity blast" setting, it could be based on detonating (sudden phaser sheath failure) at a preset distance (think flak bursts)

Rather than thinking of the phaser pulse as needing to sense when near it's target to detonate, the "proximity blast" is the damage mode from the phaser energy being released in a 360 sphere. They had a rough idea where the cloaked ship was, so it wouldn't be difficult to just saturate that volume of space with phaser flak aka proximity blast phasers set to release at a specific distance

And I like the idea of the "steerable" phaser beam paths. Kinda Space Battleship Yamato-ish

 

[Timo]

They had a rough idea where the cloaked ship was, so it wouldn't be difficult to just saturate that volume of space with phaser flak

This is probably what was intended - but the scope of the task wasn't properly appreciated there! Instead of the at best three explosions per second, one would probably need hundreds of thousands in order to compensate for the true "roughness" of the idea on enemy whereabouts...

Timo Saloniemi