TMP, TNG starships and torpedo bays

[Crazy Eddie]

Might be a defensive turret installed when it became obvious that those small Dominion "battlebug" attack ships didn't yield to standard phasers... A desperation move rather than a well-integrated weapons system.

While not used in American ships (mostly because the USN uses single-hull designs rather than double hull-within-a-hull design), Russians build external torpedo tubes into the outer hull which are not reloadable in combat. In fact, it would be a challenge to reload them outside of port, since you'd have to haul a torpedo out of the hull, then insert it into the external tube, without falling off the front of the ship.

So I'm entirely willing to entertain the idea that the docking bay tubes are either one-shot (or even cluster shot, like a MLRS) external tubes, or some kind of prototype weapon that just happened to be field testing onboard Enterprise that really wasn't a conventional torpedo.

AFAIK, no Russian boats have torpedo tubes in the configuration that you've described. They all go into the inner hull, usually at the top of the bow, with the exception of the Severodvinsk class, which uses the same torpedo tube configuration as our boats (at least according to the published publicly released diagrams).

I know of several older designs retrofitted to this configuration; the Typhoon and Akulas, for example, have these small torpedo tubes built into the outer hull that can be loaded with lightweight torpedoes, supposedly for the purpose of quickly launching and intercepting enemy torpedoes (a sort of underwater CIWS). Some Chinese submarines--which are essentially smaller knockoffs of Russian designs--are also designed this way.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The idea that you're calling out individual munitions is so incredibly clunky, it's borderline asinine.

As already noted, the Kriegsmarine does exactly this when ordering weapons release; though they are specifically referring to a tube number, the actual words used are "torpedo one, torpedo two," etc. It's just a language convention, it doesn't need to be based on any real logic (language rarely is).

Besides, American submarines sometimes do this for missiles, probably because those missiles can't be reloaded at sea and you kind of HAVE to keep track of them if you're using them alot. Is it beyond the realm of possibility that the TOS torpedo launchers were just really hard to reload? Like a Virginia's VLS tubes or something?

 

[STR]

I'm fully willing to grant that "Fire Torpedo 1" can stand-in for 'fire tube 1.'

I would argue against the idea that the Enterprise (any of them) has something akin to a VLS. In fact, one of Roddenberry's clever ideas was that almost everything was accessible from inside. Additionally, indications (and I'd argue intent if it wasn't such a subjective argument) are that it's similar to a submarine torp tube, but without the 5 minute reload cycle.

 

[Timo]

The matter is mostly ambiguous - but I'd argue that "The Changeling" tilts the balance in favor of there being submarine-style numbered tubes into which undifferentiated projectiles can be pushed for launching. After all, in that episode, Kirk first orders a single torpedo prepared for launching, without specifying a number - and then suddenly orders "torpedo 2" fired. This would be possible if a torpedo were first prepared and then pushed into tube 2 (out of several possible tubes, all of which are accessible from the area where torpedoes are prepared, and can be quickly loaded). It would not be possible if each torpedo sat in its own VLS box, because then odds are that Kirk's little people would not have prepared VLS box 2 for him, or at least Kirk would have had no reason to expect that specific box to have been the one they prepared. Preparing a number of boxes would be contrary to his initial order, plus it would be contrary to the way VLS boxes are currently operated: they ought to be left alone until use, because their power lies in the fact that they remain maintenance-free until "woken up" but not beyond that.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[kkozoriz1]

Perhaps the launchers each have a magazine that could hold, say, three torpedos at a time. Starboard could be One, three and five while port is two, four and six. Maybe it's faster to fire a single tube until it's magazine is empty rather than switching tubes. Therefore firing two, four and six would empty out the port magazine in rapid succession.

 

[STR]

If it's a magazine, it's not a tube. You only count the actual launchers on ships. A magazine would just be part of Tube 1.