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The Official Jaynz Thread - Tech Issues

Vance

Vance

Vice Admiral
In Memoriam
To try to avoid spam, I'm going to keep all the Jaynz tech stuff in one thread for now. So any issues will go here.

That said, I've been working on some number crunching from officials sources for the explosive yields and raw power of the Enterprise's weapons. The most reliable information I got for the TMP phaser is as follows:

Code: 
 TT990X Phaser Bank Weapons System
                 Date of Design: 2269
                 Date of Service: 2271
                 Range: 250,000km
                 Burst: 0.5 seconds of output
                 Power Output: 140 gigawatts
                 Explosive Yield: 167.30 tons per burst

Does this sound okay? It seems a little low for me for the final yield (though the power output is exceptional). To put this in perspective, however, the Surry nuclear power plant produces 1.6GW of energy and is one of the most powerful in the world. The TMP's impulse engine (a hard fusion reactor), doing the math, supposedly has a power output of 110GW. That's... insanely high. (The USS Nimitz, today, only produces 190MW of power)
 
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I don't have a problem with higher upper scales. There are folks in the Star Wars community that make trek phasers out to be weak, view the Die is Cast as apocryphal. If NX-01 can vaporize a mountain at highest yield, so should Enterprise.
 
Vance said:
Does this sound okay? It seems a little low for me for the final yield (though the power output is exceptional). To put this in perspective, however, the Surry nuclear power plant produces 1.6GW of energy and is one of the most powerful in the world. The TMP's impulse engine (a hard fusion reactor), doing the math, supposedly has a power output of 110GW. That's... insanely high. (The USS Nimitz, today, only produces 190MW of power)
Click to expand...

Dunno. Do those numbers take in account that Kirk was gonna use phasers on that large asteroid that got sucked into the wormhole in TMP? In TOS, the entire output of the ship (with the engines disconnected) could be channeled through the phasers and in TMP, channeling through the engines supposedly increases power output. The TMP phasers would then be capable of outputting the ship's power plus a little extra (assuming it wasn't being split off for shields and/or maneuvering power)...

I'd say those numbers might be even too low :)
 
The problem is that I'm using 100 percent energy flow-through. So I've got an immense 'pocket reactor' with just the impulse engines that could power much of North America today with little problem. But that yield, based on a phaser's definition and explanation of power-to-damage, comes out fairly weak in the tons of explosions - compared to what we see on screen.

I'm going to have to look at this problem some more. The damage is certainly nothing to slouch at by contemporary standards, but it seems like something's off here somehow. Phasers seem like they should yield more for the energy pumped into them at their maximum settings, even for TOS.
 
There could also be other secondary powerplants throughout the ship.

And phasers probably wouldn't use a direct feed from their power source. Holding in capacity seems like the best bet - particularly considering that they're fired in very brief bursts according to these specs.

Or phasers use an exotic effect to impart damage that doesn't have a direct relationship of energy draw to hitting power. Something like the Little Doctor from Ender's Game, but dialed down a bit?

YMMV, I'm no expert.
 
I'm going to add the phaser capacitors (we hear about them being charged and drained) in the write-ups. But even then I'm dealing with a huge amount of power for not a whole lot of relative punch.

The problem is that simple railguns would deliver much better payloads with much less power. There's going to have to be some effect change with a phaser that has some sort of disruption on the target in order for the yield to be worth while.

(Wouldn't explain why the Feds would use Phase Lasers or Lasers up until 2252, though.)
 
...But we can always say they only use lasers as sidearms.

Or as additional functions of standard sidearms, as it were - after all, the "The Cage" sidearm has three barrels, only one of which might be a laser. Another could be a standard kill phaser, seen in action in "What Are Little Girls Made Of?", while the final one could be a stun phaser or some yet different type of weapon.

There are some weird references in Trek literature and even in canon Trek (e.g. "Return to Grace" and "Silent Enemy") about phasers having an output in joules, not in watts. Yet phasers are not pulse weapons: the amount of joules to come out of the barrel would depend on how long one presses the trigger. So perhaps the joules don't indicate output after all, but instead refer to a "caliber" of sorts: a phaser may have a power output of X watts, delivering a phasing effect at a phasing energy level of Y joules. This would be comparable to a laser having an output of X watts at a wavelength of Y nanometers.

Like said above, phasers probably do much more than merely deliver heat into the target. The watts and joules given might be largely unrelated to the level of destruction delivered, and more interesting to the user in terms of "operating requirements".

Timo Saloniemi
 
Or joules is a measure of the phaser's capacitor/energy consumed per trigger or pre-calculated total energy deliverable on target. Rather than saying, "I think I squeezed the trigger for 0.32 seconds" it could be "this phaser can deliver (or consume) x joules per full trigger squeeze before having to recycle". Even though the TNG phasers aren't considered pulse weapons they could have an imperceptible recycle between pulses.

But I do agree that it's also the energy effect as well since phasers generate different levels of destruction based on amount of energy delivered, range and what settings were used for effectiveness. In TOS, there appeared to be settings for silicon targets vs human or I'd suppose "generic materials". I wouldn't be surprised that there is an anti-starship setting that is automatically set during space combat :)

As to TMP ship phasers, we've only seen them used against another starship and at a reduced power setting (TWOK) and hinted at a certain capability in TMP. You could guesstimate that the TMP phasers could output enough effective energy to destroy the asteroid in the wormhole and still have power to spare for other ship's systems.

TOS only showed one "full power, all ship's power fully used" phaser firing in "The Paradise Syndrome". The other times phasers were used the ship's energy was split among other systems like shields and engines (or the ship's power were already severely drained) so it is hard to gauge the full destructive power of the ship's phasers.
 
Vance said:
(The USS Nimitz, today, only produces 190MW of power)
Click to expand...

Not accurate. The correct number is much higher than that. I'd provide a source, but they are all on paper and have "NOFORN - CONFIDENTIAL" stamped all over them.

- Sean, former Nuke on the USS Nimitz.
 
Chaos Descending said:
Vance said:
(The USS Nimitz, today, only produces 190MW of power)
Click to expand...

Not accurate. The correct number is much higher than that. I'd provide a source, but they are all on paper and have "NOFORN - CONFIDENTIAL" stamped all over them.
Click to expand...

The information I got came from Janes' Fighting Ships (2008). I can check some other sources, but it's hard to see Janes being far wrong in this respect... With the Surry at 1.6GW I'm having a hard time imagining the Nimitz requiring 1/8th of that power output. :S
 
I have nothing bad to say about your source, but they're only as accurate as the info they're allowed to have.

Each of Nimitz's two reactors generates 550 MW at 100% reactor power.

That's a total of 1.1 GW, of course.
 
Chaos Descending said:
I have nothing bad to say about your source, but they're only as accurate as the info they're allowed to have.

Each of Nimitz's two reactors generates 550 MW at 100% reactor power.

That's a total of 1.1 GW, of course.
Click to expand...

Is that thermal or electrical? From what I understand there is a large difference in the numbers. Electrical power plants would have their output in electricity and a shipboard plant would be thermal wouldn't it?
 
Vance is correct. Nimitz has two A4W reactors, and Enterprise has eight A2W reactors. A2W reactors are about on par with submarine reactors, outputting somewhere around 150 MW thermal.

Birdog said:
Is that thermal or electrical? From what I understand there is a large difference in the numbers. Electrical power plants would have their output in electricity and a shipboard plant would be thermal wouldn't it?
Click to expand...

Addressing this post again:

Nuclear reactors are always rated in thermal power output.

Electrical generating stations are rated in electrical power output.

Nuclear Power Plants (Electrical) tend to be rated in both.

The published power ratings for example the Nimitz class power plants seem to only take into account the amount of power consumed by the main engines themselves and usefully employed by the propellers, which is far less than what the reactors themselves are capable (rated) for generating.
 
Chaos Descending said:
Vance is correct. Nimitz has two A4W reactors, and Enterprise has eight A2W reactors. A2W reactors are about on par with submarine reactors, outputting somewhere around 150 MW thermal.
Click to expand...

I seem to recall reading that Enterprise only runs two of them at a time, is that correct?
 
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