What is this "no weapons in deep warp" stuff? All the shows save for TNG have featured phaser fights at warp speed, and TNG in its pilot episode already had torpedo firings at such a high warp speed that the ship had never even been tested at that speed. Even TNG had some beam weapon action at extreme warp, although it was the enemies doing the firing (say, "Q Who?").
Examples of phaser firings at extreme warp include TOS "Balance of Terror" (when Kirk has recovered from the plasma weapon and flies back towards the Romulans), VOY "Message in a Bottle" (the fight between the fleeing
Prometheus and the chasing
Bonchune), and ENT "Fallen Heroes" (by the fictional universe's internal chronology, apparently the first time the Earthling heroes used phasers at warp - and they did so at their best warp and were surprised that everything didn't go perfectly right from the start).
applied warp dog-fights don't happen .., Why?
A "dogfight" would involve twisting and turning, which is unlikely to happen at high warp because the very point of going to high warp is to get the hell away from your enemy, or to chase after a fleeing enemy. Warp battles thus aren't dogfights, but chases. And a chase fight can take place whenever the hunter is faster than the prey, and is a commonplace event in all Trek shows.
However, at moderate warp speed, we can see some twisting and turning in the fights. Say, VOY "Basics", where the Kazon wear down the hero ship for their devious coup de grace.
As for the other question,
What might a "raw" warp field do to say the transporter that they would have such problems with warp beamings?
That's a toughie. We know that various intricate things such as communications beams and sensor beams do get through warp fields, but perhaps they are somewhat scrambled in the process and suffer from bandwidth limitations and whatnot. Possibly a transporter pattern is orders of magnitude more complex, bulky and sensitive than comm or sensor beams - we gather as much in, say, "Message in a Bottle" where a holographic program, already known to be among the more complex computational challenges for a starship, is said to be able to squeeze through the Hirogen commnet while a transporter pattern cannot.
We do have reason to think that things like comms and sensors involve the same fictional "subspace" physics that are the bread and butter of warp drive. Obviously, a powerful subspace field like a warp field would have detrimental effects on other subspace fields and emissions. However, transporters aren't really said to be based on subspace stuff; indeed, a subspace transporter is something of a novelty in the TNG era. Then again, transporters seem to rely heavily on that other fictional field, "phasing" - and phasing in turn is important for phasers (doh!) which are blocked by shields, which in turn appear to have subspace effects. So perhaps phasing and subspace interact just as annoyingly as subspace and subspace?
Other challenges for warp beaming involve maintaining lock (the target of a sublight beaming may move around at a few thousand kilometers per second, but the target of a warp beaming may move worse), dealing with range (a seconds-long beaming process may have to start light-minutes away from a stationary target), and perhaps obtaining good targeting data (if you beam from a warping ship to a warping ship, your sensors are doubly compromised even if the enemy isn't throwing up special countermeasures).
Timo Saloniemi
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