TOS Photon Torpedo

[CuttingEdge100]

Captain Robert April,

Nick Meyer loves physical switches, and he didn't care for the touchscreens of the TMP bridge set.

Yes, but in TMP the helmsman had an actual throttle...


Vance,

While probably true, I think in those cases you would WANT the physical toggle switch - it's much more failsafe than a touchscreen.

Agreed.

Interestingly the F-35 will have a panoramic touch-screen, which strikes me as bizarre on a plane where the pilot would be routinely pulling 9g+ loads, regardless, it's true. Still to the best of my knowledge, various buttons on the throttles and stick will be conventional buttons, though I could be wrong.

 

[mtblillie]

^^^ yes this is true. In fact, having at least a rather large portion of the avionics being touch-screen and computer interface rather than dials, guages and buttons are becoming more common. Even having the traditional "six pack" gauges replaced by a computer screen is becoming standard, they call it a "glass cockpit."

 

[Captain Robert April]

Captain Robert April,

Nick Meyer loves physical switches, and he didn't care for the touchscreens of the TMP bridge set.

Yes, but in TMP the helmsman had an actual throttle...

Which didn't exactly go over all that well at the time, IIRC, hence, why it was gone by the time of TWOK.

Naturally, JJ and his clueless hacks put it on their bridge...

 

[Gagarin]

Naturally, JJ and his clueless hacks put it on their bridge...

Lame.
I don't even like the movie, and that's a lame comment.

I'm not sure what would have been better - the throtle, or the 'scope' viewer that pops up. I thought the throttle was a nice touch.

 

[T'Girl]

In TMP, Sulu seem to be using the throttle as a throttle. In Star Trek Eleven, Sulu instead seems to be using the throttle more as a two position switch. Maybe some sort of large safety switch.

Something to keep the nuEnterprise's half assed crew from accidentally taking the ship into warp.

 

[Timo]

...Or then Sulu simply throws caution into the wind in STXI, because it's an emergency and the engines aren't quite as untrustworthy as in ST:TMP. Perhaps these starships wouldn't do that SW/Galactica style immediate hyperjump thing unless their helmsmen threw the throttle directly from zero to eleven?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[seekertwo]

So.....how do these explanations apply to the "microtorpedoes" on the Runabouts and the Delta Flyer?....

 

[Captain Robert April]

Stick the 24th Century equivalent of an Estes rocket engine on a photon grenade. Instant micro photon torpedo.

 

[mephit]

Personally, I think I'm mostly in agreement with T'Girl in thinking the TOS photon torps were something like a "caseless" design. I look at it slightly differently, though.

I see a small control unit that projects a containment field of some kind (subspace, magnetomic, whatever) that is two bubbles touching each other (think two soap bubbles that have joined leaving a membrane through the middle). One contains matter fuel, the other antimatter fuel. Not only is this your bomb, it's also your propulsion in and of itself. You don't need a separate propulsion system. You just need a control unit that can allow a small section of the containment field to become porous and allow some matter and antimatter to react just outside the field. This would act like an orion pulse motor, creating an outward push to drive the torp forward. The field itself would act as the drive shield.

Not only does this make the torp itself pretty simple (basically just a field generator, possibly a method to harvest power off the M/AM reaction, and a little bit of brains) it also allows you to have multiple levels of power very easily. After all, if you have a close target, there's no point in wasting AM (which I'm assuming is harvested from the same onboard tanks as those which drive the warp motors) on a huge charge when a smaller one will take it far enough and leave plenty of bang. You put as much M/AM into the containment field as you need. Depending on how fine the field generator's control is, it's even guideable since all you really have to do is release fuel in the proper direction to push the torp in whatever direction you want.

When it hits an opposing object, screen or shield the control unit is destroyed, nullifying the containment field and big badaboom. Alternatively, you can set a timer or range at which the torp will explode. All pretty simple, considering the field and computer technology shown throughout Trek.

It also matches pretty well with what was shown on-screen, i.e. a small, intense point of light traveling at high speed. You'd have a small control unit, a basically invisible containment field and a high-energy M/AM reaction. Pretty much all you'd see is the glow. It would also start out slow but be able to very swiftly accelerate to relativistic speeds since there's no need for inertial dampers or anything like that. I could see the launch "tubes" being pretty much slingshots to start the torps moving and allow the M/AM reaction to begin just outside the ship, rather than inside it.

 

[TIN_MAN]

I'd like to think that the spherical antimatter device used in "Obsession" was actually a photon torpedo warhead taken out of the weapon and mounted on antigravs.

Agreed, this is also consistent with the photon grenade used in "Arena", it being just miniature versions of same? Sorry if this has been mentioned before, but I didn't re-read the whole thread.

 

[Kemaiku]

I don't mind either really.

The cased design of later (and from Enterprise earlier) torpedoes works just fine on its own, but I can believe easy enough that the Constitution class used an energy based spatial detonation charge similar to contemporary designs used by the Klingons and Romulans, and attempt to emulate their weapons.

A later reversion to the case based torpedoes again after disappointing results or too high a yield from the charge versions, shown by the TOS torpedoes rocking the ship even at range at times, works fine too.

 

[blssdwlf]

I'd like to think that the spherical antimatter device used in "Obsession" was actually a photon torpedo warhead taken out of the weapon and mounted on antigravs.

Agreed, this is also consistent with the photon grenade used in "Arena", it being just miniature versions of same? Sorry if this has been mentioned before, but I didn't re-read the whole thread.

I'd imagine then that those photon grenades would carry a minute amount of antimatter and perhaps it's containment field is powered by siphoning off it's own fuel and it'd have a limited shelf life unless it was reloaded periodically. I wonder if that would be the case for photon torpedoes then... (it would seem not since the shows seem to suggest that the setting power sequence is done when they are loaded.)

 

[Timo]

We do see in DS9 "Tribunal" that the stealing of photon torpedo warheads is something the Maquis would consider worth doing.

Is that because a warhead taken from storage already possesses great destructive potential (i.e. is loaded with antimatter, or, say, contains a fancy gadget that creates an antimatter explosion at impact)? Or is it merely because even B'Elanna Torres couldn't manufacture an empty photon torpedo warhead without massive advanced industrial facilities, yet any klutz of a Maquis mechanic could load a readymade warhead with antimatter from the endless stores the Maquis already possess for operating their starships?

The latter is a distinct possibility if we consider the Tech Manual talk about the warhead being an intricate mesh of miniature forcefields, capable of mixing matter and antimatter in the most efficient way possible. We haven't seen engineers in the field pull off anything quite that complex.

Whether photon grenades are just small photon torpedoes depends on our definition of "photon". What really is photonic about a photon torpedo? The classic idea that it "creates a lot of photons" when exploding in a m/am annihilation blast is a bit clumsy. Perhaps you don't need antimatter at all in order to be "photonic"? That would make Kirk's blue balls from "Arena" a bit more plausible...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[blssdwlf]

^LOL - "blue balls" - Must be a monday morning

Oh right - well, that kinda circles around to what is a TOS photon torpedo and/or photon grenade? Is it an antimatter charge or something altogether different where antimatter is optional? Wasn't there a Voyager episode that showed different kind of warheads like a gravitic charge, etc that could be dropped into a photon torpedo? Would they still call it a photon torpedo?

 

[Timo]

They might, even if there was no technological basis to it. They aren't sticklers to correct language, really. And the military loves to abuse its acronyms and cool trade names anyway. Say, a Harpoon missile is still a Harpoon in most parlance even when it has totally lost its anti-shipping role and connotations and has become the SLAM-ER land attack missile.

They don't explicitly call their space coffins "torpedoes" or even "torpedo casings", to be sure, even though that's what they are. And a Class 9 Probe isn't called a torpedo-with-sensor-payload even though that's what it obviously is.

In the name of overall tech continuity, and the explicitness of the earliest photon torpedoes being antimatter weapons in ENT, I'd like to think that antimatter warheads indeed are the one common thing for all the various torp designs that may stand centuries apart and come from various different cultures. By that token, a quantum torpedo would be identified by her novel type of warhead, and a pulse wave torpedo would similarly be a type of weapon that uses a pulse wave warhead. But Trek certainly remains open for other interpretations, as well as for the exact nature of the antimatter warhead that by internal chronology was introduced in ENT (after having been seen in Klingon hands first) and then evolved but persisted for two centuries.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[T'Girl]

What really is photonic about a photon torpedo?

The torpedoes used in Star Trek have nothing to do with type of fish. Yet, the word torpedo comes from the Torpedo fish originally.

Photon could just be a family of weapons systems, which were replaced in time with the Quantum family of weapons systems.

 

[Captain Robert April]

^ Makes the most sense of any other explanation out there.