Why aren't they firing?

[Salvek]

Having the ships fire all their weapons at the same time would go against all Trek precedent. The TOS ship never fired more than two guns at the same time, despite the dialogue specifying plenty of separate weapons. Why call it a bug when it's such a prominent feature?

Failing to fire more than one bank of weapons would make perfect sense if all of the ship's power could be channeled through a single bank. Is there any reason to think it could not? All dialogue treats the total phaser armament of a ship as one integrated entity: if individual emplacements are mentioned at all, it's because they have been knocked out without depriving the ship of overall phaser capacity, or because they are advantageously positioned for firing. Firepower as such never depends on the number of emplacements - it depends on power supply and its possible hiccups.

This doesn't explain why only one ship out of ten in a formation is firing, of course. We could argue that ships share power and channel everything through the lead ship, but dialogue support for the idea is nonexistent. OTOH, dialogue opposition to it is absent, too...

Firing both one phaser and all the bearing torpedo tubes at the same time makes sense, because torpedoes cannot be "channeled". Firing multiple beams at the same target only happens twice: "BoBW" (where two of the three beams come out of nowhere, from places that don't have phaser emitters!) and "Sacrifice of Angels" (where one strip spits out two beams into the enemy).

Timo Saloniemi

H Timo

I can see by your other posts, your a man who likes the Trek Naval Tech and clearly knows your stuff

My issue is more they do not fire at all-it undoes in my opinion that the series has established Combat veterans of the two most feared intelligence organs in Alpha (Romulans are a martial society and the Cardassians are from a military junta.) Yes they were surprised -but not paralysed with fear

I would expect return fire to give a sense that these forces were dangerous -instead going by whats shown we just belive unless your the defiant -you do nothing.

Now as the other poster stated it was the FX tech at the time that is the culprit.

Your ship sharing weapon Power concept throws me-So to clarify a formation of 10 ships -a combat occurs-all ships channel their power to the lead ship? I know you say its not stated or not stated against in script-but its an odd concept how reliable is power transfer (I understand sheilds-and its shown often the extension to other vessels)

I mean you have 10 mobile weapon platforms but you tie them down to one ship? I can see a variant of a shield ship a vessel that has a more powerful power outpout and its designed to extend coverage to other ships but still it seems limiting

interesting.

 

[Timo]

There might be some tactical uses for having ten mobile and survivable power sources hooked to a single weapon, but most Trek battles don't feature those uses. So the idea of power sharing is IMHO too far out there to seriously be considered as an explanation for the failure to fire. It might work in some other scifi context, though. (The Species 8472 planet-killer featured something of the sort...)

I guess there are easier ways to explain the failure to fire back in "The Die is Cast"... Such as saying that the Cardassian and Romulan ships were sabotaged in the construction phase already. After all, a Changeling was in charge of the mission, and may have also been in charge of delivering key Romulan technologies to the Obsidian Order for their surprisingly powerful ships. If, say, every one of the ships was powered by a quantum singularity (and we see Dax' computer screen fill with dozens upon dozens of those even though there are only a handful of Romulan warbirds in evidence), and the singularities are a very complex "black box" technology that very few Romulans and no Cardassians understand, then it might be possible even for a single Changeling agent to have all these powerplants rigged with a kill switch. Hell, "Colonel Lovok" could openly tell his "fellow" Romulans to install such kill switches because the Tal'Shiar wants to have an insurance against Obsidian Order betrayal!

It would then take time for the Romulans to sort out the trouble before they could start firing back, and our heroes and the camera would have left the scene at that point already. And the Cardassians might never figure out how to restore power.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Myasishchev]

Can't kill a quantum singularity/black hole. The output's constant. It's probably why antimatter reactors are far more prevalent.

Also, I think the inability to shut down Rommy power sources was a plot point once, although I can't place it.

They could've sabotaged them in other ways, of course.

 

[Timo]

Indeed, one of the most important things a QS powerplant has to manage is moderating the output. And the complex plumbing required for that is probably highly suspect to sabotage; just like an antimatter powerplant, such a machine has to have all sorts of limiters and safeties to prevent uncontrolled release of power, and all the saboteur has to do is encourage those limiters and safeties a bit.

Making a QS powerplant blow up (or down, dependin') is probably a much more demanding operation, thanks to all those safeties. We can see easily enough that Romulan ships are not in the general habit of imploding when fatally wounded, so the safeties probably work just fine in the general case. So "Colonel Lovok" wouldn't have had literal kill switches to the ships of his armada, just kill switches to the weapons and drives of those ships...

Timo Saloniemi