That and what makes more sense, having a couple ships fully stocked or having a limited number on several ships.
photon torpedo vs Quantum torpedo
- Thread starter cwl
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That and what makes more sense, having a couple ships fully stocked or having a limited number on several ships.
That wasn't a problem for the Defiant. Why would it be a problem for the Enterprise?
Because AMRAAMs aren't SUPPOSED to phase out sidewinders. ASRAAM was supposed to do that, and it hasn't because it was CANCELLED and won't be phasing out anything any time soon. Sidewinders are still being used because AMRAAM is as BVR missile and is not very effective at close range.
Well the Defiant was stationed at DS9, the Federations first contact point should the Dominion try anything. It makes sense that it should be receiving sufficient ammo. As JNG pointed out, according to the DS9 TM, in 2375 the Defiant and DS9 were receiving half the quantum torpedoes being manufactured.
1) Defiant was being used as a technology testbed prior to Sisko getting her for DS9, not an operational starship
2) E-E is a much larger ship, has 5-7 single fire tubes mounted on various places around the hull, 4 burstfire tubes mounted fore and aft at the bottom of the hull, and the burstfire quantum tube mounted under the saucer. I think its safe to assume that the Enterprise carries quite a few more torpedoes than the Defiant.
1) Defiant wasn't armed with quantum torpedoes when Sisko got her, only conventional photons
2) E-E as designed appears to have only the one, the big launcher next to the Captain's Yacht. Additional launchers would seem to be superfluous and were only added for "kewlness" value.
Besides the overall point: unless quantum torpedoes are a "quantum leap" beyond photons (pun intended) it doesn't make sense to hand them out a dozen at a time. It would be like sending a soldier into battle with ten armor piercing bullets and 200 conventional rounds.
And if that gets taken out or the target is out of its firing range? Weapons coverage has nothing to due with "kewlness", its about staying alive in combat.
You've had thirty years of starship design--Constitution class, Miranda class, Galaxy Class, Nebula Class, the list goes on--to ask questions like that. It's a little late for that now.
Enterprise-E had five torpedo launchers as originally designed, and the added ones, some of which even swivel, must be working from limited "magazines" of torpedoes that almost certainly are not reloadable in combat and probably cannot propel the torpedoes nearly as effectively either.
I wouldn't be surprised if Defiant carried about the same number of torpedoes as Enterprise-E. After all, the former is a purpose-built combat vessel and would dedicate a much greater percentage of its available space to munitions.
Is there any particular evidence that Defiant didn't come from the yards with quantum torpedoes? Like the author of "The Search" novelization, I assumed she did. It is possible instead that the torpedoes were just beginning limited fleetwide deployments and Defiant, an incomplete vessel that had failed to meet Starfleet standards, just happened to get some. But it seems more likely that the anti-Borg project was always to carry some supply of Q-torps, had been engaged in their testing, and just hauled 'em along when she went off to face real live bad guys.
I wouldn't be surprised if Defiant carried about the same number of torpedoes as Enterprise-E. After all, the former is a purpose-built combat vessel and would dedicate a much greater percentage of its available space to munitions.
Is there any particular evidence that Defiant didn't come from the yards with quantum torpedoes? Like the author of "The Search" novelization, I assumed she did. It is possible instead that the torpedoes were just beginning limited fleetwide deployments and Defiant, an incomplete vessel that had failed to meet Starfleet standards, just happened to get some. But it seems more likely that the anti-Borg project was always to carry some supply of Q-torps, had been engaged in their testing, and just hauled 'em along when she went off to face real live bad guys.
But that's very much the point...
Using your infantryman analogy - Phasers are like bullets... photon torpedoes are like grenades... and quantum torpedos are like anti-armor rockets.
The analogy falls apart compared to the way quantum torpedoes are actually used. To extrapolate this into a naval analogy, quantum torpedoes would be the nuclear-tipped version of the Tomahawk while photons would be a conventional warhead in a TASM. It makes sense that a warship would only have a dozen nukes on board, if the weapons are rarely used anyway and a single one is more than enough to do the job; on the other hand, quantum torpedoes AS SEEN aren't nearly powerful enough to justify the apparent expense and complication in manufacturing them.
In other words, a quantum torpedo powerful enough to justify only using twelve of them would be able to destroy an entire ship with a single shot; in that case, you're looking at something like a low-powered genesis device or an artificial "quantum filament" or whatever it was that nearly destroyed Enterprise in "Disaster."
Basically: if you can hit a Dominion or a Romulan battleship with a spread of quantum torpedoes without destroying or even disabling it, then quantum torpedoes are NOT powerful enough to justify their scarcity; they're not anti-armor rockets, they're just fancy bullets.
At what point did we see "full spreads" of quantorps used (and where they didn't destroy their target)?
I'm not saying it didn't happen at some point, necessarily... we all know that writers and production staffers often end up misusing tech which was actually well-thought-through. We've also see ships that randomly change scale, the same actor playing multiple characters, foam rocks, and lots of latex foreheads.
But it is very clear that the INTENT of "quantum torpedoes" was that they were to be far more powerful than "mere" photon torpedoes.
DS9 TM assigned them a yield about two and a half times that of a standard photon torpedo. So they'd be good news, but not really game-changing.
Defiant usually fired her quantum torpedoes in pairs. We saw Enterprise-E let loose with four at a time, but I don't think we ever saw more than that.
Defiant usually fired her quantum torpedoes in pairs. We saw Enterprise-E let loose with four at a time, but I don't think we ever saw more than that.
Well, the DS9 "tech manual" is chock-fulla errors, anyway... I'd be disinclined to treat it as Gospel.
In order to get a 2.5x yield, you'd really only need to make a photon torpedo a bit longer (say a centimeter or so)... and that's assuming that the entire existing package is packed 100% efficiently. Increase the amount of antimatter in suspension by 2.5x, increase the amount of matter in suspension by the same amount, and increase the speed at which they are combined by an order of magnitude or so (to minimize the effects of explosive expansion, which results in some portion of the reactant never actually reacting!) and you're done. No need for a more advanced technology.
Further, it seems to me that Starfleet certainly already has different sizes and payloads for torpedoes (see the runabouts).
Maybe DS9 (and other "ground" stations for that matter) has massive "uber-photon-torpedoes" with a yield hundreds of times of the typical starship-carried torpedo... and the starship-carried Quantorp is 2.5x one of THOSE, while being tremendously smaller.
Valiant against a battleship, Enterprise against the Scimitar, Defiant against a Keldon class cruiser.
Sure, just like the Akira was intended to be a through deck aircraft carrier.
But it didn't end up that way, so we're left to wonder what the hell they REALLY are. Apparently Starfleet R&D was making promises they couldn't keep.
I'll clarify. The yield figure I referred to above was given in isotons, and isotons must be some sort of multiplier for there to be a maximum isoton limit for any matter/antimatter explosion as it claims. So its version of a Q-torp is a two-stage device that fits in a casing similar in size to a standard photon torpedo and uses a photon torpedo warhead as the first stage (jiggered for greater speed, as you happened to also bring up), but takes that and uses it to energize some sort of strange quantum tomfoolery that gives you the higher overall yield mentioned previously. So the book's version of it makes sense for a follow-on weapon in that respect.
I don't treat the book as gospel either, but I try to give due consideration to the parts that seem sensible when most of the errors are pretty obvious and pretty easily separated from the rest. I do feel confident the writers didn't have much of an idea about the functioning principles of quantum torpedoes and that if a script had needed a [TECH] to this effect, it's this stuff from Sternbach/Okuda that would have been plugged in. Aside from being entertaining reads on their own, this is where a lot of the value of the Tech Manuals comes from.
As for DS9 having giant torpedoes, I would have liked this, but oddly enough, it seems it was using a good number of microtorpedoes. Not sure why this would be, but I'm sure we can come up with something if a thread on the station's weapons upgrades got going. I personally would be surprised if there were too many different torpedo sizes in use, since the variable yield of the relatively-compact standard casing is one of its best benefits, even runabouts and shuttles have been shown to be able to deploy them when specially equipped to do so, and microtorpedoes are so tiny (about like a stick of RAM) that I have wondered if even man-portable launchers for them exist.
Perhaps quantum torpedo tech was still highly classified, too, and in order to prevent the tech from falling into enemy hands, was only selectively deployed. :
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^ I'd buy that. In fact, I would again speculate that the reason for their scarcity may be that quantum torpedoes are specialized to cause heavier damage to people like the Borg or the Dominion, so a normal (non-specialist) starship would only have a few dozen of them in its arsenal normally.
