The Excelsior - uncovering the design
- Thread starter yotsuya
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These look so good
Yeah, they definitely look like megaphaser muzzles to me.
My only gripe with the Mega Phaser Muzzle is that it isn't a Ball Turret of sorts pointing in the correct direction of fire.
For them to fire the beam off-angle and not have the Muzzle of the barrel pointed in the direction makes it look goofy.
At least with Phaser Strips, you can understand why they're curved, because of EM shaping the angle of fire.
But if you have a muzzle of a barrel, you expect the projectiles to go straight, not to veer off the moment it leaves the muzzle.
If you're going to do that, then use a different mechanism to emit your energy blast.
For them to fire the beam off-angle and not have the Muzzle of the barrel pointed in the direction makes it look goofy.
At least with Phaser Strips, you can understand why they're curved, because of EM shaping the angle of fire.
But if you have a muzzle of a barrel, you expect the projectiles to go straight, not to veer off the moment it leaves the muzzle.
If you're going to do that, then use a different mechanism to emit your energy blast.
Agreed. I don't think ILM thought that one through fully when they built it. They probably saw some random greeble detailing on the Reliant model (the megaphasers), thought it looked "kewl" and added them to the Excelsior model, not fully understanding what they were or what their limitations would be with a fixed hard-point placement like that.
Just imagine how cool two large single barrels that can swivel to face it's target would look
One on each opposite end.
Then they can show the Reliant doing a Broad Side attack with all 4x barrels aiming at range.
I think they did something like that very concept with the Intro Darkness Dreadnought USS Vengeance. It had two spherical weapons pods mounted on either side of the main deflector array. I believe they were also detachable and operated as independent weapons drones to provide multi-vector attack modes while in combat. Sadly, I don't think we saw much of their full abilities in the final cut of the movie.
They never used it, it sat there doing nothing.
On the model there are greebles, purpose unknown. But they are most like the Reliant mega phasers. And such a weapon could have a very small aiming nozzle recessed in the tip. As I've been drawing these ships (TOS through Excelsior), I've had to picture how technology advances. The phasers in TOS are reset so you don't see them on the hull surface. The TMP phasers are a ball on the surface. The mega-phasers are more like a larger version of the TOS phaser. So it all makes sense in the larger scheme of things.
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And regarding the discussion of phaser vs. photon torpedo vs. probe...
I think the similarities are pretty clear.
I'm certainly prepared to believe that that is what they were intended to be, but the location is so problematic for them actually being that.
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We glimpse them in one shot, but yeah, we barely see the Vengeance's full capabilities.
I recall that Jackill uses some megaphasers for some of his designs, albeit as "snap on" Reliant style cylinders and not like the physical details of the Excelsior model. It's certainly logical that there could be multiple models, or that the Excelsior could have had an experimental version.
ILM built the Reliant, so they should have known and probably would have. The we assume that, although these turrets don't really move on the model, they could turn to aim, that would resemble the way the turrets worked on the Kelvin. Maybe that is what the designers were thinking about when they designed the Kelvin. I'm not pushing to make the 11th-13th movies canon, but if a design feature fits, it is worth referencing.
I could definitely see them popping out and swiveling on a kind of gamble to acquire a better firing arc.
The turrets of the normal phasers don't move either. Totally static on the Refit Enterprise, Reliant, and Excelsior.
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Was that just a limitation of the filming model though? I always assumed that they were little swivelly turrets. Though if they were solid state hemispherical emitters that would be an interesting first step on the way to the big phaser emitter strips of the 24th century.
yes, a limitation of the model, same as with the megaphaser tips and the Excelsior photon torpedo tubes (the TMP Refit and Reliant ones glowed red).
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The interesting thing about the photon torpedo tubes is that their distinctive design is a historical quirk left over from the time the Enterprise refit was designed. By the time the Excelsior first appears in Star Trek III it had been definitively established that photon torpedoes were physical objects that were launched through linear accelerator tubes, but at the time the Constitution refit was being designed for The Motion Picture Andrew Probert believed photon torpedoes to be forcefield-enclosed blobs of warp plasma spun off from the warp core itself by those glowing red emitters – kind of making them the "megaphaser cannons" of their day. The Miranda as a kitbash of the Constitution refit followed the same design cues, but almost no other class of starship has glowing photon torpedo launchers – the only one I can think of off the top of my head is the Intrepid.
*Edited for spelling.
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