Photon Torpedo ???

[Forbin]

As someone who has made a hobby of the history of air combat and who currently works in the defense avionics industry, it always astounded me that the writers and trechnical advisors of Star trek had never heard of electronic countermeasures.

Torpedo coming? Jam the fucker's guidance system! Jam the shooter's targeting sensors! Pop a cloud of Space Chaff! Spoof the torpedo's sensors to make them think you're elsewhere! All stuff we can do now, but not in 300 years? pfah!

 

[Timo]

...Of course, all that might happen automagically whenever a torpedo or other hostile ordnance approaches. It's bad already when there has to be a man in the loop to raise the shields; hopefully no humanoid supervision is required for something as complex, time-critical and demanding as countermeasures.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Bosch571]

As someone who has made a hobby of the history of air combat and who currently works in the defense avionics industry, it always astounded me that the writers and trechnical advisors of Star trek had never heard of electronic countermeasures.

Torpedo coming? Jam the fucker's guidance system! Jam the shooter's targeting sensors! Pop a cloud of Space Chaff! Spoof the torpedo's sensors to make them think you're elsewhere! All stuff we can do now, but not in 300 years? pfah!

Maybe the guidance system in 24 isn’t that easily fooled.
In any case, the simple fact that we don’t see any point defense systems does indicate that there not worth it.

 

[JuanBolio]

As someone who has made a hobby of the history of air combat and who currently works in the defense avionics industry, it always astounded me that the writers and trechnical advisors of Star trek had never heard of electronic countermeasures.

Torpedo coming? Jam the fucker's guidance system! Jam the shooter's targeting sensors! Pop a cloud of Space Chaff! Spoof the torpedo's sensors to make them think you're elsewhere! All stuff we can do now, but not in 300 years? pfah!

Wouldn't work. All a torpedo would have to do is lock onto your ship's heat source. There's no way to hide that, and it would take something that puts out as much or more heat than your antimatter powered starship to decoy it. Countermeasures and stealth in space are really hard, if not impossible to achieve. There's simply no place - no where - to hide. A big, hot, nuclear-powered starship stands out on everyone's sensors for light-years in all directions.

 

[Forbin]

Wouldn't work. All a torpedo would have to do is lock onto your ship's heat source. There's no way to hide that, and it would take something that puts out as much or more heat than your antimatter powered starship to decoy it.

Google "IRCM"

Current helicopters have infrared countermeasures that jam heat-seeking MANPACs (shoulder-fired missiles like SA-7 and Stingers). All military aircraft have decoy flares that they fire away from the plane to distract heat-seeking AAMs.

Both have already existed for decades. The avionics firm I work for is currently proposing a new generation of IRCM for military choppers.

No reason to think 24th century science couldn't come up with decoys that mimic a starship's sensor cross section, albedo and heat signature.

 

[JuanBolio]

No - they wouldn't work in space. Read this page:

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3w.html

 

[shipfisher]

What is the air speed velocity of an unladen photon torpedo?

African or european torpedo?

 

[shipfisher]

And, retroactively, we could argue that the ovoid shape sliding into the ovoid hole in the display graphics of Chekov's torpedo-firing console in ST:TMP was a graphic representation of the torpedo casing.

I mean, the makers of ST:TMP probably intended this to be some sort of an aiming crosshairs or something. But in retrospect, it can just as well be interpreted as a graphic display of the loading prodecure, as the centerpiece of the graphic is a good match for the torpedo casing we later see in ST2:TWoK.

The only thing we know about a torpedo's top speed is that it is 75% greater than the speed of the ship launching it.

That's not an onscreen fact, tho, just backstage speculation.

And we know that probes launched from the torpedo tubes of a starship puttering about at impulse speed can span significant interstellar distances, suggesting the probes have the ability to independently accelerate to at least medium warp. It would be odd if the photon torpedoes would lack this capability. At least there should exist a long range variant of the torpedo that would be capable of such acceleration.

It's probably not a big feat at all to accelerate a small object like a torpedo to very high warp. They did it with K'Ehleyr's traveling coffin in "The Emissary", apparently without the help of a starship because otherwise K'Ehleyr would have been traveling aboard said starship. We might infer that the torpedo launchers of a starbase (say, like those on DS9) can spit out torpedoes so that they ultimately attain speeds up to warp 9 and can travel interstellar distances.

I'd like to think that torpedoes as such are fairly standardized, and most of them indeed look like that coffin prop that persists from the TOS movies to the DS9 and VOY episodes. However, it is probably possible to clip on a "booster" to enable the sort of speeds and ranges we saw with K'Ehleyr's ride. And it might be possible to fire "half-rounds", things half the length of the standard prop. Just because we don't see such things explicitly doesn't mean much, since we very seldom get to see into the innards of a torpedo launcher.

Timo Saloniemi

It stands to reason that no technical impediment (by TNG any way)would prevent torp-sized devices having full warp capability, but that the least complex drive unit that would suit the vast majority of tactical applications for the torps would be used. Would you power something you want to go boom with a Lambo V-12 when a Lada 4-banger would do the job?

You can bet that a few of "the good ones", with the ability to jump to warp on their own, are kept at the back of the torpedo bay in the few instances where a ship at sublight is targeting something at warp, although I suppose torp launchers might be able to generate an internal field to spit torps out at warp when required (maybe the more prominent TMP 1701 refit launcher was the first with this capability?)