I wonder... Photon torpedoes may or may not have tailpipes, although they do have those four prominent holes astern that look like rocket engine nozzles. But "tailpipe" is a strange expression for a rocket nozzle. Shuttles may have tailpipes if Birds of Prey have them, but I'm really hunting for the source of a colloquialism here, not going by the assumption that "tailpipe" is a real technical term pertaining to 23rd century spacecraft. Scotty's boat might have a tailpipe of the sort familiar from today, yes. But would Uhura ever have seen an antique car like Druncle Kirk's?
Well, gas is loose atom nuclei with electrons orbiting them. Ionized gas is loose atom nuclei and loose electrons that aren't orbiting anything any more because they have received so much extra energy that they have been shaken loose. One might expect those loose electrons to exist in an excited state, that is, they could lose a quantum of energy at any moment and become less excited. And you could then use a sensor that picks up that quantum of energy (essentially a burst of electromagnetism, perhaps a flash of light) and homes your torp in on it.
One would expect space to be full of excited electrons if two starships are buzzing around, tho. So the sensor would have to be tuned to notice specific sorts of energy quanta, those typical of BoP gas burps... And the sensor would also have to be connected to some sort of a brain that would have a look at the spatial distribution of all the detected quanta, and make a clever guess as to how that distribution of gas would best lead the torp to where the BoP is burping it out. But that shouldn't be particularly difficult to do.
Timo Saloniemi
