USS Kelvin weapons and power outputs/ strength

[Sovereign001]

Hey guys,

I've been reading a lot and it was time to become a member!

I've never seen a topic about this except something about torpedoes...


My question is, the weaponry of the USS Kelvin, the blue "pulses" we saw, apparently these were torpedo launchers? I've read it on memory alpha (this is a cannon site?). But let's say, if they are indeed torpedo launchers, probably microtorpedoes, they are launched very fast because they were shoothing non stop. But what is the power output of these weapons? 10 megatons? I know a photon torpedo of tng was around 64 a 70 megatons. But somewhere i have the feeling that this nuTrek is more powerful.. Don't know why, but the damage that the Kelvin could take was actually quite impressive.

So, how powerful would the phasers/pulses and torpedoes be in the nuTrek verse?

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

Not seeing a mention on Memory Alpha.

 

[Sovereign001]

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Torpedo_launcher

Here you go, you can see it at the picture below. It is difficult to find but there is normally a section with more information about it.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Memory Alpha is just a collection of information on a site which anyone can contribute to. Thus some dubious stuff sneaks in from time to time.

The old Intel "Boldly Go" website (I don't know if it's even still up and can't check coz I'm on my phone ATM) called them phasers, and I'm inclined to agree. Pulse phaser cannons in addition to the TOS-style beam phaser banks. Either that or some form of projectile weaponry, nuBSG-style. But I never thought they were photon torpedos, micro versions or otherwise.

Since the Kelvin should be common to both realities (albeit retconned into the continuity), I can't imagine it or it's weapons or defences being more powerful than those in TOS.

 

[Sovereign001]

True, i never believed they were torpedo launchers because like i said, they fired non stop. The enterprise in the movie shot torpedoes fast but not like the kelvin so.. that's why i never fully believed it.

About the power in nuTrek compared to prime universe. The strength in the nuTrek verse would be better because the kelvin should have taken scans from the narada vessel?

 

[M'Sharak]

...

The old Intel "Boldly Go" website (I don't know if it's even still up and can't check coz I'm on my phone ATM) called them phasers, and I'm inclined to agree. Pulse phaser cannons in addition to the TOS-style beam phaser banks. Either that or some form of projectile weaponry, nuBSG-style. But I never thought they were photon torpedos, micro versions or otherwise.

That Intel "Boldly Go" website quietly went quite some time ago, but most of the Kelvin details from it can be found screencapped here. Phaser turrets (capable of firing bolts and beams) get a mention, but there doesn't seem to be anything about torpedoes.

 

[F. King Daniel]

^Thanks! That brings back memories

 

[Timo]

The VFX for the white bolts fired by the Kelvin doesn't exactly yell "physical projectile", as the bolts start out as big oval blobs and then squeeze into narrower, more elongated ones. It's a great way to convey forward movement, and also a great way to give the effect some complex visual oomph where it counts (near the source) but a simple and manageable shape where it doesn't (away from the source, because the weapon impacts on the enemy curiously are of no importance here and indeed go unseen).

Of course, we might speculate on technologies where a projectile is fired and immediately deforms, much akin to certain penetrator munition technologies of today. But the movie gives us no particular incentive to believe in the Kelvin carrying torpedoes.

What incentive it does appear to give is thinking that the white pulses are "secondary" weapons - not in the sense of being the weaker of the two options, but in the sense of being used only when the "primaries" are not good enough. The initial battle goes badly when only the red beams are used, but those do appear to be the standard response to a threat, or at least to the threat of a gigantic adversary starship. The second engagement goes better when the white bolts assist. We might argue that the white bolts are a point-defense system especially capable of dealing with incoming missiles, which is why they are decisive against Nero. But we don't actually see the white bolts hit Nero's missiles much; the tide seems to turn simply because the red beams find the missiles better when fired by George Kirk than when fired by Robau.

No idea on megatonnage, because no incarnation of Star Trek has given us a good idea on that sort of thing. We only know that an internal explosion of a hundred megatons killed the Doomsday Machine, which was stated to be much tougher than Star Trek starships. From the looks of it, the weapons of the Kelvin never destroy anything bigger than the projectiles of the Narada; no damage is seen on the Narada herself until the ramming.

So the bolts and beams might be quite weak, or then hellishly powerful but wasting 99% of their power in killing these tiny projectiles. The fact that both Robau and Kirk fight a purely defensive battle keeps us from seeing their true power. OTOH, the fact that neither of the skippers seems to make a dent in the enemy ship, or even tries to, might indicate that they already know this to be hopeless - and perhaps also that the beams and bolts are at the lower end of Starfleet ship-to-ship weaponry and for that reason no match for the Narada, whereas standard Starfleet weaponry indeed is capable of handing enemy starships, even big ones...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The script for STXI calls them "photons," distinct from phaser beams, the latter being used to shoot down Narada's missiles. They are similar in color to Enterprise' photon torpedoes, though, so for consistency I'm thinking they're probably the same weapon.

This all generally leads me to think that Abrams' team is either bringing back the idea of caseless torpedoes, or Kelvin's launchers were some type of photon grenade launchers belt-fed from an internal magazine. Lately I lean towards the latter explanation only because it's easier to speculate how the photons are supposed to work, while energy-bolt/caseless photons get a bit fuzzy.

So the bolts and beams might be quite weak, or then hellishly powerful but wasting 99% of their power in killing these tiny projectiles. The fact that both Robau and Kirk fight a purely defensive battle keeps us from seeing their true power. OTOH, the fact that neither of the skippers seems to make a dent in the enemy ship, or even tries to, might indicate that they already know this to be hopeless - and perhaps also that the beams and bolts are at the lower end of Starfleet ship-to-ship weaponry and for that reason no match for the Narada, whereas standard Starfleet weaponry indeed is capable of handing enemy starships, even big ones...

What's interesting is that Narada largely stops firing around the same time Kelvin looses weapons, and the intensity of its missile barrage begins to thin out long before this. I half believe Kelvin did serious damage to the Narada before finally ramming it, but without sensors--and with half of his ship exploding around him--George Kirk had no way of knowing this even if he had the time to take a few scans, which he didn't.

 

[Timo]

We might also speculate that the Narada has real trouble reloading.

Consider her last stand against Spock's ramming run: "FIRE EVERYTHING!" means letting loose just a couple of dozen projectiles in one great swarm, even though it would be statistically rather odd for the ship to only have a couple of dozen missiles left - not enough for even one good battle of the types witnessed earlier on.

It's quite possible that the Narada, being essentially a civilian vessel, is unable to scale its weapons response up or down much. There's little if any difference between the "shoot to disable" first attack on the Kelvin and the "shoot to finish off" second attack, and both appear quite similar to the attack unleashed against the Enterprise later on. Nero's crew might be able to place a combat-modified mining projectile in every launching chute in, say, five minutes, and Nero would then fire off all of them at once to create at least a modicum of a military-rate offense.

No need to assume serious damage on the Narada from George Kirk's attack, then, when the ship seems resilient enough to the attacks of half a dozen ships of that caliber in the later engagement.

Of course, we have to wonder how the Narada dealt with a) the 47 Klingon ships or b) the local defenses of Vulcan or Earth if his only weapon could only fire about twenty times before time-consuming reloading. But we probably have to speculate on him possessing other weapons that were useless against starships but useful against starship formations (say, another drop of the red matter he had plenty in stock), and others that worked against surface defenders.

Timo Saloniemi