I've seen starships on the shows fire either phasers or photon torpedoes while travelling at high warp speeds. For me, this begs the question: how fast is the rate of fire and round velocity on those things? They obviously have to be faster than the speed of light, but exactly how much faster? Has there ever been an official word on either a phaser or a torpedo's velocity or R.O.F.? With weapons having such a high velocity & rate of fire, wouldn't close-range or sub-light combat be considered suicide? Thanks in advance for any info or opinions you can give.
Rates of Fire for Weaps in Trek???
- Thread starter glock27
- Start date
Rate of fire for a beam weapon is more or less meaningless - a phaser beam can be argued to have an infinite rate of fire as long as the beam is sustained, or then a flat zero rate.
For photon torpedoes, it seems the launchers of all the Trek eras can spit out bursts of 2-4 torps within about two seconds, because that's what looks cool. Unless we assume these scenes are shot in slow motion, we typically get a rate of fire of one torp per second, because the 4-bursts are fired from a pair of tubes, left-right-left-right, again because that looks cool (and is what e.g. submarines of yore used to do, to balance the "recoil" of firing). The E-E fires a four-burst from a single tube (the apparent dedicated q-torp turret below the saucer) in ST:FC, though, indicating about double the rate of fire.
Nobody dabbles in sustained firing of, say, ten torpedoes at such rates, though; we don't know if that's because the launchers can't fire more than 2-4 torps per tube befor having to stop to reload/cool/whatever, or because there's no tactical advantage to firing a longer volley. The latter view is easily defensible: if the first four are going to hit, it's probably enough to do the trick anyway, and if they miss, it's lots of ammo wasted. A volley might hit only partially, with the first, last or first and last torps missing - but a longer volley in such a case doesn't increase the number of hits, merely the odds of hits, and again means lots of ammo wasted.
Phaser beams also tend to stop firing a bit before the audience is satisfied with the results. Does that mean that the beam cannot be sustained for more than the few seconds we see? Or that it cannot dwell on a maneuvering, perhaps jamming target even if it can be sustained? Or is it again a tactical decision, not loitering long enough to allow the enemy to respond in kind?
Muzzle velocity is the more difficult thing to judge. We can easily see that phaser beams travel at different velocities in different cases. Hand phaser beams move at about the same speed as paintball paint, way slower than bullets; stun beams might move even more slowly than kill beams, giving us a bit of leeway with "Wink of an Eye" where a stun beam is easily sidestepped by a (really) fast-moving opponent at five paces! Yet starship phasers fire their beams at what looks like 500-1000 m/s relative to the firing ships, or rifle/cannon velocities. It's again a "this looks cool" issue: the phaser beam must cross the width of our view in no fewer than three frames of film, no more than ten, in order to look "fast-moving" yet "powerful". Anything faster than that might no longer look moving at all, not to mention it would lose the roundhouse punch effect of a certain degree of "deliberation of motion"...
We could argue that phaser beams are the faster, the higher their power setting. Or we could argue that phasers are basically just weaponized transporters, and the thing that stays constant is time-to-target; if the target is far away, the beam travels faster to get there "in time".
When fired at warp, phasers and torpedoes leave the firing ship at exactly the same speed as if fired at sublight or standstill. The difference seems to be in how warp drive defeats Einsteinian relativity: anything shoved forth at warp stays at warp under proper circumstances, so the speed of the ship is added to the speed of the departing round.
We seldom see very long range shots while also being told the actual range and the travel time. Only two meaningful examples come to mind: in ENT "Terra Prime", a phaserlike beam fired from Mars reaches the Moon within what sounds like ongoing dialogue, thus probably moving at least a lightminute per second, or 50-100 times lightspeed - and in ST:TMP, Klingon torpedoes fired from across apparent 1 AU (half the visible diameter of the 2 AU V'Ger cloud) or 40 AU (half the diameter, but the movie dialogue originally specified an 82 AU cloud!) almost reach their target within a few dozen seconds at most, indicating either speeds similar to the "Terra Prime" beam, or then speeds ten to fifty times faster. Such weapon speeds would easily allow two ships at warp speed and relative proximity to exchange shots, as we often see happen.
OTOH, there's no indication that high velocity or high rate of fire would make close ranges any more dangerous than long ranges. Torpedoes appear to pack the same destructive punch regardless of whether they have traveled a hundred meters or a hundred lightminutes. And dodging a torp at impulse seems just as easy or difficult as doing so at warp. Phasers don't seem particularly destructive at very long ranges, though, and indeed shipboard phasers haven't been used beyond distances of about a lightsecond. It's quite possible they suffer from an inverse-square law or similar dilution-with-distance, dictating a return to sailing ship era cannon combat doctrines where point-blank shots are much more penetrative than short- let alone medium-range ones, and the closer you get, the more damage you do.
"Official word" on phaser and torpedo velocities doesn't count for much, it seems: many sources e.g. claim that phasers move at the speed of light, which is demonstrably false not only because we can see how much slower they often are, but also because we witness incidents of dodging an already fired beam, and OTOH because we witness incidents of the beam reaching its target much faster than light. It's also claimed that a torpedo cannot add even one full warp factor to its initial speed, yet we do see torpedo-like probes that travel at very high warp even when fired from standstill (TNG "The Emissary": probe at the high nines even when fired from a starbase that lacked starship assets; various interstellar probes fired by the E-D in an explicit sublight/standstill scene). Probably the official parties are just sprouting disinformation in order to keep threat forces from gaining the upper hand on Starfleet by purchasing a Tech Manual...
Timo Saloniemi
For photon torpedoes, it seems the launchers of all the Trek eras can spit out bursts of 2-4 torps within about two seconds, because that's what looks cool. Unless we assume these scenes are shot in slow motion, we typically get a rate of fire of one torp per second, because the 4-bursts are fired from a pair of tubes, left-right-left-right, again because that looks cool (and is what e.g. submarines of yore used to do, to balance the "recoil" of firing). The E-E fires a four-burst from a single tube (the apparent dedicated q-torp turret below the saucer) in ST:FC, though, indicating about double the rate of fire.
Nobody dabbles in sustained firing of, say, ten torpedoes at such rates, though; we don't know if that's because the launchers can't fire more than 2-4 torps per tube befor having to stop to reload/cool/whatever, or because there's no tactical advantage to firing a longer volley. The latter view is easily defensible: if the first four are going to hit, it's probably enough to do the trick anyway, and if they miss, it's lots of ammo wasted. A volley might hit only partially, with the first, last or first and last torps missing - but a longer volley in such a case doesn't increase the number of hits, merely the odds of hits, and again means lots of ammo wasted.
Phaser beams also tend to stop firing a bit before the audience is satisfied with the results. Does that mean that the beam cannot be sustained for more than the few seconds we see? Or that it cannot dwell on a maneuvering, perhaps jamming target even if it can be sustained? Or is it again a tactical decision, not loitering long enough to allow the enemy to respond in kind?
Muzzle velocity is the more difficult thing to judge. We can easily see that phaser beams travel at different velocities in different cases. Hand phaser beams move at about the same speed as paintball paint, way slower than bullets; stun beams might move even more slowly than kill beams, giving us a bit of leeway with "Wink of an Eye" where a stun beam is easily sidestepped by a (really) fast-moving opponent at five paces! Yet starship phasers fire their beams at what looks like 500-1000 m/s relative to the firing ships, or rifle/cannon velocities. It's again a "this looks cool" issue: the phaser beam must cross the width of our view in no fewer than three frames of film, no more than ten, in order to look "fast-moving" yet "powerful". Anything faster than that might no longer look moving at all, not to mention it would lose the roundhouse punch effect of a certain degree of "deliberation of motion"...
We could argue that phaser beams are the faster, the higher their power setting. Or we could argue that phasers are basically just weaponized transporters, and the thing that stays constant is time-to-target; if the target is far away, the beam travels faster to get there "in time".
When fired at warp, phasers and torpedoes leave the firing ship at exactly the same speed as if fired at sublight or standstill. The difference seems to be in how warp drive defeats Einsteinian relativity: anything shoved forth at warp stays at warp under proper circumstances, so the speed of the ship is added to the speed of the departing round.
We seldom see very long range shots while also being told the actual range and the travel time. Only two meaningful examples come to mind: in ENT "Terra Prime", a phaserlike beam fired from Mars reaches the Moon within what sounds like ongoing dialogue, thus probably moving at least a lightminute per second, or 50-100 times lightspeed - and in ST:TMP, Klingon torpedoes fired from across apparent 1 AU (half the visible diameter of the 2 AU V'Ger cloud) or 40 AU (half the diameter, but the movie dialogue originally specified an 82 AU cloud!) almost reach their target within a few dozen seconds at most, indicating either speeds similar to the "Terra Prime" beam, or then speeds ten to fifty times faster. Such weapon speeds would easily allow two ships at warp speed and relative proximity to exchange shots, as we often see happen.
OTOH, there's no indication that high velocity or high rate of fire would make close ranges any more dangerous than long ranges. Torpedoes appear to pack the same destructive punch regardless of whether they have traveled a hundred meters or a hundred lightminutes. And dodging a torp at impulse seems just as easy or difficult as doing so at warp. Phasers don't seem particularly destructive at very long ranges, though, and indeed shipboard phasers haven't been used beyond distances of about a lightsecond. It's quite possible they suffer from an inverse-square law or similar dilution-with-distance, dictating a return to sailing ship era cannon combat doctrines where point-blank shots are much more penetrative than short- let alone medium-range ones, and the closer you get, the more damage you do.
"Official word" on phaser and torpedo velocities doesn't count for much, it seems: many sources e.g. claim that phasers move at the speed of light, which is demonstrably false not only because we can see how much slower they often are, but also because we witness incidents of dodging an already fired beam, and OTOH because we witness incidents of the beam reaching its target much faster than light. It's also claimed that a torpedo cannot add even one full warp factor to its initial speed, yet we do see torpedo-like probes that travel at very high warp even when fired from standstill (TNG "The Emissary": probe at the high nines even when fired from a starbase that lacked starship assets; various interstellar probes fired by the E-D in an explicit sublight/standstill scene). Probably the official parties are just sprouting disinformation in order to keep threat forces from gaining the upper hand on Starfleet by purchasing a Tech Manual...
Timo Saloniemi
IIRC, in both "Arsenal of Freedom" and "Yesterday's Enterprise" the ship fires a spread of five that leaves the forward torpedo tube in one and then splits; in "Encounter at Farpoint", the aft tube spits out eight torps in relatively slow succession.
No ten-torp volleys, though. Not even in ST:FC from that Akira that ought to have enough tubes to put out a swarm of dozens.
Timo Saloniemi
No ten-torp volleys, though. Not even in ST:FC from that Akira that ought to have enough tubes to put out a swarm of dozens.
Timo Saloniemi
Compared with the other ones, yes. Although it's probably the fastest one-tube spread after the E-E quantum one from ST:FC; the Akira one from that movie is a typical multi-tube affair with higher overall output rate.
Again allowing for the vagaries of possible slow motion, of course.
Timo Saloniemi
Again allowing for the vagaries of possible slow motion, of course.
Timo Saloniemi
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