Photonic Torpedoes vs Nuclear Weapon in Romulan War?

[bryce]

I don't know whether to put this in the Enterprise forum, to General Trek forum, or here in the book forum (since it asks about events in the novels)...so mods feel free to kick it somewhere else. (Thanks!)

Do the Enterprise era books about the Romulan War every try to explain why Spock said that nuclear weapons were used in the war, but in Enterprise they had photonic torpedoes?

Spock also described no ship-to-ship visual communication and ships that were to small to have brigs to keep captured war prisoners in. His whole description of the Romulan was was so different from the technology we saw in Enterprise!

Ugh...I wish Enterprise had never introduced "phase pistols" and "photonic torpedoes"! And it would have actually made sense if Starfleet ships only had ship-to-ship visual comms with other Starfleet ships who had the same communication protocols, and ships of allied races like the Vulcans and the Denobulans, who Starfleet would have worked out ways for the ships computers to "handshake" with and "talk" to each other. (And maybe with any really advanced races with higher technology would could crack Starfleet protocols easily.) Other races they encountered, it should have at least taken some *time* for Starfleet to figure out how to translate their radically different visual signal broadcasting encoding!

I guess in Enterprise, Spock's line about no ship-to-ship visual comms was retconned to just mean that the Romulans were highly secretive and reclusive, and didn't allow visual communication with their ships - which *was* consistent with their established psychology and behavior...but I still think that visual communication should have been very rare, and only with previously contacted species (or very, very advanced species.)

And I guess in the books the have introduced the much smaller Daedalus class design - and explained their "primitive" look by having them be *older* hull designs that were reactivated into service and upgraded and mass produced because they could be very cheaply and quickly compared to newer ship designs. (I always thought that, before Enterprise came out, the Daedalus hull design looked like a very logical precursor to the TOS Constitution class design! I could easily see the connection. And when Enterprise came out, I always hoped that we would at least see a version of the Daedalus class design as the precursor to the NX class...the Delta-shaped ships were cool too, but I wanted to see a Daedalus or two as well!)

And the Daedalus class design does look like it would be too small to hold prisoners, so that is explained too.

But what about the nukes vs. torpedoes? Is that every explained in the books?

My own personal theory about this is based on the idea that antimatter supplies were limited in the 22nd century - and both starships and photonic torpedoes needed antimatter. So Starfleet has to either manufacture antimatter themselves - or buy it from somewhere else. During the Romulan War, I take it the Vulcans and other species took a neutral position, and may not have wanted to supply antimatter to the Federation, so they would have had to fall back on their own limited production capacity. And building new antimatter productions facilities would have taken time and resources. Remember, Starfleet was much smaller back then, fewer ships...plus they in the 22nd century, it probably wasn't as efficient as it would later be. sure Starfleet would ramp up AM production when the war started, but that would still take time and resources - and even then, Earth still probably could only manufacture limited quantities of precious antimatter.

So, Earth Starfleet in the 22nd century would have had a dilemma - they would have been left with one of two choices of how to use the limited quantity of antimatter they had and could make, and that was to...

1, Make a few (relatively bigger) antimatter-powered starships packed full of antimatter fueled photonic torpedoes...or...

2, Make a LOT of antimatter powered starships stocked full of still very destructive and effective *nuclear weaponry* (probably the "spacial torpedoes" from ENTs first 2 seasons)...and a small supply of the photonics for very sparing use.

I think maybe Earth Starfleet decided not to put all of it's eggs in one basket, by making a few starships - which one gone, took a lot longer to rebuild and replace, and the loss of one would be the loss of a large portion of the small fleet...but instead decided to make a lot of the cheap and fast to build, smaller Daedalus class ships, and stock them full of mostly nukes, because they knew that they would probably suffer heavy losses in the war, and the more ships they had the better.

Eh, anyway, that's just my fanwanky theory. I haven't read the Romulan War/Enterprise era books, so I don't know if they address this - or just ignore Spock's like about nuclear weapons in the Romulan War all together.

 

[Nob Akimoto]

The Romulans use old fashioned contact fusion warheads to destroy some of the United Earth Starfleet ships. There's not really any good reason given for it, but presumably a heavily salted fusion weapon might actually have a much greater yield than a small matter/anti-matter warhead could. And if weapons like photonic torpedoes are geared more toward piercing graviton based shields, then their effectiveness against polarized hull plating might not be as great. So thermonuclear weapons might, in fact be better weapons against UESF ships.

 

[Christopher]

There was no way Enterprise, with the dramatic and logistical demands of a weekly series, would've hamstrung its technological depictions merely to avoid inconsistency with a few lines of dialogue in a single TV episode from decades earlier. No ongoing fictional franchise in history has ever been so unwilling to retcon itself, no matter how much some fans may wish it would be. The demands and needs of the new story you have to tell always transcend the niggling details of an older story. If you have to change the assumptions to make the story work, so be it. And if you can't figure out a way to reconcile the inconsistency onscreen/in prose, that's fine, because it'll just inspire fandom to come up with a hundred different reconciliations of their own.

Even TOS itself was a work in progress, undergoing constant reinvention. There are a lot of things in early TOS episodes that were contradicted or changed by later episodes -- the Enterprise being an Earth ship instead of a Federation ship, Spock being a "Vulcanian," etc. "Balance of Terror" was a very early episode from that period when the rules of the universe were still being laid out. It was only the seventh post-pilot episode produced, which means it was probably written before the first season even began filming. So it represents a very early, unformed, prototype version of the universe, which means that some of its details are difficult to reconcile with the richer universe that evolved in its wake. That's just the way things happen in the creation of an ongoing series, because you usually don't get the chance to go back and revise the earlier installments to fit with the richer, better ideas you developed later. So those early episodes are better interpreted as rough drafts than immutable, divine gospel. You can accept that they happened, but maybe not every last detail happened exactly as shown.

 

[Elias Vaughn]

Why can't photonic torpedoes just be nuclear weapons? Just because they weren't *called* miniature h-bombs...

 

[Christopher]

Why can't photonic torpedoes just be nuclear weapons?

Because they aren't. Photonic torpedoes, like photon torpedoes, are established in dialogue to be antimatter weapons. (Indeed, I figure photonic torpedoes are photon torpedoes -- that the name just got shortened over time.)

But we do know that NX-01 still had the older "spatial torpedoes" in its armory even after photonics were introduced. And we know from "Minefield" that spatial torpedo warheads are similar to tricobalt mines. A tricobalt explosive is probably meant to be a nuclear device, given the similarity to the concept of a cobalt bomb (although that's a nuclear weapon with inert cobalt added entirely for the purpose of being turned into extra-potent radioactive fallout -- but I assume the name was chosen because of the implicit nuclear-weapons connection). Thus it would be reasonable to deduce that spatial torpedoes are low-yield tactical nukes.

 

[Nob Akimoto]

Of course "tricobalt devices" were stated in Voyager to be a subspace weapon of some sort, though they seemed mostly to be really big demolition charges in other uses.

Photonic torpedoes probably are simply a more primitive form of photon torpedoes, perhaps reverse engineered from the photorps used by Klingons.

 

[Elias Vaughn]

Why can't photonic torpedoes just be nuclear weapons?

Because they aren't. Photonic torpedoes, like photon torpedoes, are established in dialogue to be antimatter weapons.

I'll admit ignorance on how nuclear weapons actually work, but is there any reason a photonic torpedo can't just do with antimatter what a conventional nuclear weapon does with matter?

 

[Christopher]

Photonic torpedoes probably are simply a more primitive form of photon torpedoes, perhaps reverse engineered from the photorps used by Klingons.

Sure, no doubt they advanced over time, but I assume they're exactly the same basic technology, with only the name being elided over time -- like how "cellular telephones" and "cell phones" are the same thing. I figure the same goes for phase pistols and phasers -- same technology, fewer syllables.

Why can't photonic torpedoes just be nuclear weapons?

Because they aren't. Photonic torpedoes, like photon torpedoes, are established in dialogue to be antimatter weapons.

I'll admit ignorance on how nuclear weapons actually work, but is there any reason a photonic torpedo can't just do with antimatter what a conventional nuclear weapon does with matter?

Because that's not how antimatter weapons work.

A nuclear weapon uses nuclear fission or fusion to release energy. Fission happens when heavy atomic nuclei break down into lighter ones whose combined mass is a bit less than the original, with that extra mass being released as energy. Fusion happens when two lighter nuclei are forced together into one whose total mass is a bit less than the sum of the originals, so that again that leftover mass is released as energy. The amount of energy released is at most only a few percent of the total mass-energy of the reaction mass -- I think the maximum for hydrogen fusion is 7%.

Matter-antimatter annihilation is a completely different process. When matter and antimatter meet, they cancel each other out, converting both the particle and the antiparticle entirely into energy. This is why antimatter weapons like photon torpedoes are so much more powerful than nuclear weapons -- because they theoretically convert 100 percent of the reaction mass into energy rather than just a few percent. A single gram of matter -- the mass of a paper clip -- combined with an equal amount of antimatter would (if the reaction were complete and nothing left over) release an amount of energy a bit over twice that of the Nagasaki bomb. (Although in practice it'd probably be a lot less, because the explosion would itself blow a lot of the reaction mass apart before it could annihilate.)

So no -- nobody is going to confuse an antimatter weapon with a nuclear weapon any more than they'd confuse a brick of C4 with a firecracker.

 

[publiusr]

And the AIMSTAR anti-matter system is something I can see in the not too distant future: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIMStar

So a weaponized version of that that came into use during the Romulan war isn't all that incredible.

By and large, nukes are easier to store--no need for a magnetic bottle. So I would say they were used most often, replaced at the end.