Torpedo Launcher Question

[The Inquisitor]

I was just wondering if there was any reason why ships in Star Trek, Fed or otherwise, stick only with fore and aft torpedo launchers. Ships of old (including the original seafaring Enterprise if I remember correctly) had rows of cannon bristling down their sides.

Would it not make more sense to have a ventral, dorsal, port and starboard launcher also, so as to minimise the need to re-position during a combat situation?

 

[Trekker4747]

The torpedoes have their own propulsion and guidance systems and go wherever the tactical officer tells them to. So having more torpedo launchers in different directions might be a bit redundant to what the torpedoes can do on their own. And putting more launchers on the ship when it's supposed to be a "ship of peace" not even intended to go into battle situations or need weapons at all is kind of silly.

 

[Timo]

Those ships of old would never have mounted their cannon to the sides if they could have avoided it. Chase cannon at the bow and stern would have been far more practical for most styles of fighting. But it's not practical to mount large numbers of cannon firing forward and aft in a narrow hull as dictated by the laws of hydrodynamics, and since one cannon does virtually no damage alone, "broadsides" were created... And after this engineering solution was made, tactics evolved so that ships suddenly started firing to targets to the sides.

To get side cannon to bear on the enemy, the ship has to turn. It's no different from bringing bow or stern cannon to bear in that respect - except that in most battles, the enemy is either fleeing you or pursuing you. Starships would probably do well if they were built to be much wider than they are long... Hence mounting their "broadsides" fore and aft instead of to the sides.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[The Inquisitor]

Cheers guys. That pretty much answers my question!

 

[Anticitizen]

Also, two points:

- quantity doesn't equal quality,
and
- in space, there's not just a front, back, and two sides - there's an up and down.

The ships don't have side-mounted launchers in Trek, but they also don't have top and bottom mounted launchers. It's a given that adding more weaponry is going to subtract from available space and add to total tonnage, and that our intrepid Starfleet ship designers knew what they were doing. Assuming that torpedoes have a decent vectoring capability, the physical location of the launchers might not matter so much, as they can twist and turn after launch, unlike the fixed cannons of yore. In any case, phasers are the usual go-to weapon in Trek. I sometimes wonder why they bothered to introduce torpedoes at all, to be honest. It only complicated things.

 

[Timo]

Torpedo launcher placement is fairly logical compared with phaser placement, really. Why are the phasers in Kirk's days clustered near the axis of the saucer at top and bottom? that minimizes their field of fire and maximizes the shadowing effect of the saucer rim or the central bulges. Phasers mounted at the vertical (or near-vertical) rim would make more sense, especially if they could also fire "back" past the lip of the rim. Phasers mounted on the top or bottom surfaces of the rim, like the bow phasers of the NX-01, would also be an improvement over the guns near the axis.

Also, why are the TNG strips on the top and bottom surfaces of the saucer, rather than at the rim? The more lenticular shape of TNG saucers at least allows them a better field of fire directly ahead, but even minimally maneuvering targets need to be "handed over" from dorsal to ventral strip and back, complicating things. Or is this a feature rather than a bug, allowing for cooling time when two strips alternate?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[The Inquisitor]

Would the Phasers have any 'blind spots' or would they have a full 360 degree ark of fire? All good points about the torpedo launchers.

 

[Timo]

If we assume Kirk always had phasers at those locations we finally get to see in ST:TMP (and that they were just hidden by gunports during TOS and TAS), the ship would not need to maneuver in order to cover the entire celestial sphere with phaser fire. If he lacked phasers at ventral secondary hull, there just might be a blind cone to ventral aft even at a distance of several hundred kilometers, though.

Very close to the ship, there'd be obvious blind corners; a point-blank enemy could hide behind the nacelles or below the shuttlebay. Or fly between the ventral saucer phasers and the secondary hull, and hope the phasers would be rigged to prevent hits on the secondary hull and thus unable to fire in that direction. But to get that close, the enemy would have to fly through pretty good phaser coverage.

All the TNG era ships appear to have so many phaser strips that only the nacelles would provide any cover, and again only at very close ranges. In fact, one wonders why there are so many "unnecessary" strips there...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Anticitizen]

Very close to the ship, there'd be obvious blind corners; a point-blank enemy could hide behind the nacelles or below the shuttlebay. Or fly between the ventral saucer phasers and the secondary hull, and hope the phasers would be rigged to prevent hits on the secondary hull and thus unable to fire in that direction. But to get that close, the enemy would have to fly through pretty good phaser coverage.
Timo Saloniemi

And then, the ship's shields would likely nix that plan.

 

[Vance]

I was just wondering if there was any reason why ships in Star Trek, Fed or otherwise, stick only with fore and aft torpedo launchers. Ships of old (including the original seafaring Enterprise if I remember correctly) had rows of cannon bristling down their sides.

Phasers are cannon... Torpedoes are torpedoes. They're guided and can loop around and do all sorts of crazy maneuvers. Though they're portrayed on-screen as dumbfire.

 

[Anticitizen]

I was just wondering if there was any reason why ships in Star Trek, Fed or otherwise, stick only with fore and aft torpedo launchers. Ships of old (including the original seafaring Enterprise if I remember correctly) had rows of cannon bristling down their sides.

Phasers are cannon... Torpedoes are torpedoes. They're guided and can loop around and do all sorts of crazy maneuvers. Though they're portrayed on-screen as dumbfire.

Excepting STVI, of course. I'd like to see one of those full-scale DS9-style battle scenes clearly depicting guided torpedoes. A wide-angle shot of a field of ships maneuvering among the looping and twisting of torpedoes would look pretty cool.

The Romulan disintegrator torpedo from Balance of Terror is another (canon) exception, being able to chase down the Enterprise until it petered out due to reaching its maximum range.

Other times, you know that torpedoes HAD to be guided because that's the only way the plot would work, but you don't get to see it onscreen.

On the topic of phasers... the Defiant looked very cool weaving around firing its pulse phasers, but having to move your entire ship around in order to aim your phasers seems pretty damn impractical and tactically unsound, unless pulse phasers simply can't be aimed and they're significantly more powerful to the degree that would justify their use over the ENT-D 'ring of fire'...

 

[Timo]

A very fast-moving torpedo could afford to be unguided (or, more exactly, not to use its existing guidance systems much) in most of the Trek engagements. At long ranges, minimal course corrections would compensate for the maneuvering of the enemy; at short ranges, the enemy would not have time to dodge.

unless pulse phasers simply can't be aimed and they're significantly more powerful to the degree that would justify their use over the ENT-D 'ring of fire'...

They don't appear to be particularly powerful in conventional battle, but they do seem to be effective against the Jem'Hadar where standard phasers are not (at least initially). Possiby because they may have been designed to defeat the Borg by constantly varying their characteristics (so that each pulse is different) and this is how one finds the weak spots in Dominion shields, too.

Whether they can be steered or not... We do see them firing off-boresight in "Paradise Lost", namely about 50-60 degrees down from boresight, when Worf strafes the Lakota by flying along her upper surface. Perhaps they do require some sort of a barrel that's difficult to mechanically steer (much like the Jem'Hadar bow cannon seem to have mechanical steering, as per "The Ship", and thus tend to miss at times where Starfleet strips always find their target).

OTOH, it would have been much cooler to see Worf fly across the Lakota in a nose-down attitude, perhaps flipping end-over-end, to bring his (in this interpretation) absolutely boresight-limited guns to bear...

Timo Saloniemi