STID: Where were those torpedoes being fired from?
- Thread starter weissmr
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'Xactly.
One wonders - what were those chutes for, originally, if the long range torps/drones are a novelty for Scotty?
They connect directly to the shuttlebay, as does that side door from which Mudd's ship emerges. But they are shown to be more or less exactly torpedo-sized. What was the legitimate payload that these chutes and their adjoining cranes were originally supposed to handle? And if part of Scotty's problem is with militarization of his poor ship, what civilian technology would have called for broadside delivery?
Or did the chutes get delivered in the hours after the penthouse attack, too? Did Scotty sign his approval of them?
Timo Saloniemi
One wonders - what were those chutes for, originally, if the long range torps/drones are a novelty for Scotty?
They connect directly to the shuttlebay, as does that side door from which Mudd's ship emerges. But they are shown to be more or less exactly torpedo-sized. What was the legitimate payload that these chutes and their adjoining cranes were originally supposed to handle? And if part of Scotty's problem is with militarization of his poor ship, what civilian technology would have called for broadside delivery?
Or did the chutes get delivered in the hours after the penthouse attack, too? Did Scotty sign his approval of them?
Timo Saloniemi
'Xactly.
One wonders - what were those chutes for, originally, if the long range torps/drones are a novelty for Scotty?
They connect directly to the shuttlebay, as does that side door from which Mudd's ship emerges. But they are shown to be more or less exactly torpedo-sized. What was the legitimate payload that these chutes and their adjoining cranes were originally supposed to handle? And if part of Scotty's problem is with militarization of his poor ship, what civilian technology would have called for broadside delivery?
Or did the chutes get delivered in the hours after the penthouse attack, too? Did Scotty sign his approval of them?
Timo Saloniemi
We know probes are the same case as torpedoes in prime.
Aside from that it's not that they are torpedoes, it's that they are not standard torpedoes, he's getting funny readings off them, and no one will tell him why or let him see inside them.
So he refusea to have them aboard a ship he is responsible for the running of,as he doesn't know they won't affect his engines, and thinks they might...or he doesn't like the idea of mystery weapons that could be anything...biological weapons etc. Could even be Genesis torpedoes. (given everything else in this film they probably were Genesis torpedoes in an earlier draft)
It's not the warhead that Scotty officially worries about, but the fuel. Which turns out to be plot-relevant: the "fuel tanks" are off limits to Scotty because they aren't fuel tanks any more.
If the chutes are optimized for launching something the propulsion system of which is alien to Scotty, this does make one wonder. Are they in fact there for launching something completely different for which they also happen to be optimized? Are standard torpedoes of the time fired in broadsides from these "swim-out" tubes? Since we never really saw a torpedo fired in any of the movies (that is, no prop or VFX was ever specified to be a torpedo in flight), I guess we're free to speculate.
Timo Saloniemi
If the chutes are optimized for launching something the propulsion system of which is alien to Scotty, this does make one wonder. Are they in fact there for launching something completely different for which they also happen to be optimized? Are standard torpedoes of the time fired in broadsides from these "swim-out" tubes? Since we never really saw a torpedo fired in any of the movies (that is, no prop or VFX was ever specified to be a torpedo in flight), I guess we're free to speculate.
Timo Saloniemi
The Enterprise finally upgrades the torpedo tubes to a VLS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_launching_system
RAMA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_launching_system
RAMA
The Dilithium chamber ejection system already is that, center line to the secondary hull, taking up the area that would occupy.
The broadside tubes don't necessarily mean a linear launch system for the super torpedoes. They might exit the tubes and orient themselves at sublight then engage their own mico-warp drives. 16 tubes (8 each side) means 16 simultaneous launches each with a long range target.
4.5 launches per tube at just the 72 the Enterprise carried, means 72 targets up to a lightyear out at least, fired in less than a minute. That's enough to be going on with.
The broadside tubes don't necessarily mean a linear launch system for the super torpedoes. They might exit the tubes and orient themselves at sublight then engage their own mico-warp drives. 16 tubes (8 each side) means 16 simultaneous launches each with a long range target.
4.5 launches per tube at just the 72 the Enterprise carried, means 72 targets up to a lightyear out at least, fired in less than a minute. That's enough to be going on with.
If you are firing at a long range target with projectiles that accelerate autonomously, you needen't worry about your firing rate. Just spit out the torps one after another in a launch sequence that takes a minute or more, then have them fly towards their target for the next fifteen minutes in such a formation that they all arrive at the same time.
Firing rate never was a major thing in the adoption of VLS to naval warfare anyway - it would be rare to fire more than two missiles at the same time. More important are the ability to tolerate storage in harsh conditions for years at an end, elimination of the dead weight of launch machinery, and (as a vitally necessary "side effect" that in fact is a prime motivator) the ability to launch and then do extremely sharp turns to hit targets anywhere around the ship.
Timo Saloniemi
Firing rate never was a major thing in the adoption of VLS to naval warfare anyway - it would be rare to fire more than two missiles at the same time. More important are the ability to tolerate storage in harsh conditions for years at an end, elimination of the dead weight of launch machinery, and (as a vitally necessary "side effect" that in fact is a prime motivator) the ability to launch and then do extremely sharp turns to hit targets anywhere around the ship.
Timo Saloniemi
True, but there's probably room for both slow and rapid reloads depending on the situation and payload. Starfleet, or Khan, may have foreseen the tubes being used for a few variations of guided weapon or even non-weaponry pods.
Or even a mass evacuation system if they want to use those small one man pods Kirk was shoved into in the first movie.
They do resemble ballistic launch systems, just horizontal rather than vertical. But in space that matters very little. And something we wouldn't have seen on the older universe ships, their design and size being limiting factors for years.
The closest thing was the Achilles Class from Star Trek: Dominion Wars, she had 8 rows of micro-quantum torpedo launchers installed on the upper hull, but the torpedoes were designed to 'swarm' a target at sublight, taking independent approaches to it but communicating with each other the entire time.
Or even a mass evacuation system if they want to use those small one man pods Kirk was shoved into in the first movie.
They do resemble ballistic launch systems, just horizontal rather than vertical. But in space that matters very little. And something we wouldn't have seen on the older universe ships, their design and size being limiting factors for years.
The closest thing was the Achilles Class from Star Trek: Dominion Wars, she had 8 rows of micro-quantum torpedo launchers installed on the upper hull, but the torpedoes were designed to 'swarm' a target at sublight, taking independent approaches to it but communicating with each other the entire time.
The torpedoes come out of the forward nacelle.
That's certainly my preferred interpretation of the "ion pod" thing from TOS: a pod deployed from a chute somewhere in the shuttlebay area, where there basically never are any witnesses - just as shown in TOS-R.
Just what I was about to type. Since they're perfectly concealed behind sliding panels, there might be dozens more elsewhere, not just the shuttlebay flanks and the neck...
What should matter in space is that the mothership is typically accelerating in some direction, and accelerating hard. Simple "swim-out" should never be an option: torpedoes and probes would hit the walls of the chutes, shuttles would wobble as soon as they left the deck and its short-range gravity, etc.
Exactly. Prime Kirk's ship might have afforded just four of these things, near the shuttlebay, as in "Court Martial"-R...
There's always Akira, with what looks like dispenser carousels for a ridiculous number of torps in the dorsal pod... Perhaps there are certain types of enemy whose day could be ruined by a saturation attack, even though Klingons, Cardassians and Romulans aren't among them?
Timo Saloniemi
Of course, there was that time when the Enterprise fired its captain at the Vengeance.
... it's a space station.
If they're not long range then you have a quicker reaction firing rate, and on top oft hat you have all the other benefits of VLS, which includes increased survivability and more weapons available to fire at any one time.
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