TOS Torpedo Launchers

[Bry_Sinclair]

On many schematics of ships from the TOS era, the torpedo launchers are located right under the main bridge. Does anyone else think that is a major design flaw?

If a hostile ship is targeting their weapons, a direct hit would take out their most powerful ordnance and command centre in one hit.

Is there a reason for why they were located so close together?

 

[Mytran]

Photon Torpedoes weren't part of the original design concept, so it is likely that once they'd been invented someone simply picked a couple of convenient holes on the sketch and said "yup, that's where they go!"

Unfortunately, no one seems to have passed the word onto the FX department...

 

[Sgt_G]

Yes, that was, in my opinion, a very dumb design feature in the deck plans. Sadly, the folks at Amarillo Design Bureau (ADB) kept that placement when they developed the miniatures for the Star Fleet Battle / Federation Commander games. I advocated moving them to the bottom of the saucer, as we saw on TV, but was told "what's done is done and there's no going back now". :-(

 

[Avro Arrow]

If that kind of antimatter explosion goes off inside your own ship, does it really matter *where* it's located?

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

If that kind of antimatter explosion goes off inside your own ship, does it really matter *where* it's located?

That is very true. If your torpedoes or antimatter pods at hit then you're already dead and just don't know it yet, lol.

 

[aridas sofia]

Is there a reason for why they were located so close together?

The same reason the bridge is so exposed at the top of the saucer. That region is at the center of the weblike saucer deflector grid. It is counterinstinctive but upon reflection makes sense: that region is the toughest, best defended part of the ship. That's also why the medical facilities, the computer core, the main officers' quarters etc are lcated below the bridge in the center of the saucer. And that's why it makes sense a primary weapons emplacement is located there as well, just below the bridge. (That isn't debateable, btw. Unless you follow the idea that what was onscreen in TAS means nothing. They show a phaser emplacement in that spot right below the bridge.)

Franz Joseph (following what was in The Making of Star Trek, IIRC) showed a photon torpedo emplacement there below the bridge. The rest of us followed those sources. Phasers and photon torpedoes there at the center of the deflector grid, right below the bridge.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Remember, photon torpedoes were originally conceived as energy weapons, as per Making of Star Trek. The old FJ Enterprise blueprints refer to "photon torpedo generators" on deck two, rather than the launch tubes and whatnot associated with them post-Wrath of Khan.

 

[Timo]

The one thing canonically "wrong" about saucertop torpedo launchers would be the explicit presence of launchers at the corresponding bottom position. But top and bottom launchers could coexist - we have heard mention of forward torpedoes up to #6, and the context in both "Journey to Babel" and "The Changeling" suggests those are tube numbers rather than, say, numbers for individual pieces of ordnance. If one wants to squeeze six tubes to the bottom of the saucer, feel free, but moving two of them elsewhere might be helpful...

The thing about high-mounted torps probably "wrong" technology-wise would be that they are maximally distant from the main powerplant there. Why is that a bad idea? Because supposedly antimatter is a key ingredient in photon torpedoes, and long leads between the powerplant and the launchers are likely to be more vulnerable than the "citadel" concept of packing all of this dangerous stuff closely together (and then slapping some armor and/or shielding on it). But "Errand of Mercy" tells us there are "antimatter pods" on Deck 11, a location that in modern analysis coincides with the saucerbottom launchers...

And that's why it makes sense a primary weapons emplacement is located there as well, just below the bridge.

Or perhaps a secondary emplacement. After all, it would be nice to have some reason for the preferred use of certain guns over others. And TNG "The Battle" introduces the concept of dedicated "main" phasers; TAS might have given us a good glimpse of some "secondary" ones there.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

Torpedoes are loaded with matter and antimatter, which is what gives them their destructive power. The only time the ships antimatter would be needed would be for the warp core to power the firing mechanism in the tubes themselves.

 

[Timo]

No case of torpedo use in Trek has required us to think that these would be "pre-loaded" weapons. Rather, there are many references to the need to "arm" the torpedoes before firing. For example "The Changeling" has Kirk order torpedoes to be "prepared", after which Sulu declares them "armed", after which Kirk has him "ready" one of them, and then "fire". Feeding the highly volatile explosive into the warhead at the last moment would be a good reason for this lengthy preparation time - not to mention a splendid alternative to keeping the doomsday weapons in explosive state throughout a five-year mission!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Sgt_G]

I'm working on a set of Trek deck plans, and I made the torpedo tubes some twenty meters long, plus another fifteen meters or so of power-supply equipment to arm the warheads. They will be a pure-energy weapon with a small physical sensor/fuse package to detonate it when it is close enough to the target. It's like a hand-grenade: almost still counts.

 

[Albertese]

Where on board do you fit your 35 m (115 ft) long PT assembly?

--Alex

 

[aridas sofia]

If you take Jefferies's "hatch language" seriously, he is using the same colors for the hatch just rear of the bridge as he does on what is clearly a fuel hatch along the keel of the secondary hull and on the nacelle undersides and secondary hull backbone of the Phase II model. Is he saying there is matter and antimatter that close to the bridge? He may be if he intended weapons up there right below the bridge (and possibly on the same deck as the "fuel" hatch aft of the bridge. (In fairness, this likely also is meant to serve the impulse engines, but hey... it is right there next to the bridge, not way back aft near the impulse drive.

 

[Timo]

Then again, the canon translation for that language nowadays is that yellow lined with red stands for cargo loading doors...

Which is an acceptable match for the other occurrences of those markings. The square aft of the bridge might be there for bringing aboard scientific instrumentation for FJ-style labs, say. And the saucer bottom square that lacks the red lining might be a "harmless" door, an airlock, that lacks the "risk" associated with hatches from which something major or fast may suddenly emerge (ultraviolet sats from the bottom roundel, say).

Clearly the red lining is a hazard marking of some sort, similar to the "loose propeller blades will cut this plane in half along this line" markings on aircraft - and there is even a "prop warning" line on the saucer at the nacelle positions. But nothing hazardous seems associated with the very bottom vertex of the saucer, even though we know for a fact that the main weapons fire from there! Are the marked areas even worse than that, then? Or do the assorted colors generally denote benign features, being so bright simply because deep space stevedores need to see them clearly during very routine loading and offloading ops?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Norsehound]

Its interesting how everyone accepts the FJ location for the Photon Torpedoes, where stock photo pretty much always shows them being emitted from the bottom of the saucer.

I'm unusual I guess because I liked the premise that Photons were not physical capsules like we see in Trek II, but rather the energy blobs that were established originally in the series and first movie. So the apparatus on the top deck isn't an ammunition storehouse, but an energy projector that saps antimatter from engineering and prepares it for firing. Conventional speaking when talking about projectiles carried over to discussing photons in spite of the fact that they're really energy weapons.

Perhaps during the TMP refit the new capsule version were introduced as a more powerful means to deliver the fancy antimatter bombs to target. Interestingly enough the 25th anniversary Adventure game has the TOS Enterprise running into a package delivery weapons system found on an alien derelict, and Scotty adapts this weapon later.

 

[Timo]

If we want to consider Trek outside TOS at all, we face the issue of ENT already showing the physical torpedo casings in use in the 22nd century.

Beyond that, I doubt TOS "would" ever have treated the torpedoes as nonphysical if the issue actually arose. The audience would have expectations; the show had catered to those very 1960s expectations until then; and a torpedo would be an obvious prop TPTB would be itching to build if there existed a dramatic excuse. We know there are dedicated phaser crews (working very much like the people in charge of firing WWII era turret guns, even when they don't handle physical shells), so we would assuredly also get torpedo crews (who would now have an excuse of handling actual, exciting props).

Its interesting how everyone accepts the FJ location for the Photon Torpedoes, where stock photo pretty much always shows them being emitted from the bottom of the saucer.

I have only one reason for disbelieving in the FJ location in addition to the onscreen location. Well, two, really, facets of the same issue:

1) The onscreen torps came from a location where there was nothing visible to mark the launchers. The FJ location has markings, namely the two portholes.
2) TAS uses those same markings for phasers.

Onscreen facts would have us believe that torpedo launchers either have their muzzles covered by "gunports" except at the very moment of firing, or then do not involve muzzles at all (say, they might generate the glowing weapon some distance outside the hull, perhaps outside the ship's shields). In comparison, the FJ location is either too primitive ("naked" muzzles) or way too primitive (physical muzzles where magitech ought to materialize the torps instead).

Personally, I prefer to think of Kirk's torp launchers as direct successors of Archer's: small round holes in the hull, only now with a dog flap over them. The same goes for phasers: they pop up from beneath their trapdoors, and the modern ones are simply less visually distinct than the 22nd century predecessors. But in the 2270s, naked guns suddenly come into fashion. Psychological warfare to make the Klingons respect Starfleet more?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[uniderth]

If we want to consider Trek outside TOS at all, we face the issue of ENT already showing the physical torpedo casings in use in the 22nd century.

That would be an issue if Enterprise was part of the Star Trek franchise; but it's not, so there's no reason why it should be an issue.

 

[Sgt_G]

Where on board do you fit your 35 m (115 ft) long PT assembly?

It's not the typical saucer design. This is the first rough-draft in Sketchup (I was learning how to work the program). The main body is 100 meters wide and 165 meters long, and the tail adds another 60 meters (overall including warp engines, it's 325 meters long). A pair of photons will go on the upper sloped face about ten meters back from the nose. I have tons of room for them.

 

[Albertese]

^^^
Ah. Somehow I had assumed you were trying to fit them into the TOS E, which would be problematic.

--Alex

 

[Norsehound]

Well, "Phase Pistols" don't necessarily mute the existence of the hand lasers in the Cage do they? I think it isn't a stretch to imagine the Federation switching to another medium for basically the same kind of explosive. Besides, ENT photons exist because the creative team didn't have the imagination to think of something new and retrconned classical Photons 100 years earlier.

I don't have a problem with the hole emitters. Photon torpedoes are inherently more powerful weapons than phasers, so they need a larger apparatus to fire a more destructive bolt *shrug*.