Why do Torpedoes rarely explode near the target?

[TiberiusMaximus]

Fair enough. But as mentioned above...if it would do X amount of damage to one shield section, the total amount of damage it could do to the entire shield system could not be greater than X.

Say we stick with the example of 80 "damage points." If it would do 80 damage points to Section 1, then spreading the energy out between Section 1 and Section 2 would still only result in 80 damage points (40 each), not 160 damage points (80 each.)

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Ok sorry I missed this post. And that's where the trouble lies:
If you detonated it near, why would it do "60 on shield A, 50 on shield B, 30 on shield C, 20 on shield D, 10 on shield E." ?

If it can only do 80 damage on one shield when fully detonated on it, it would only do something like 30 at A, 20 at B, 15 on C, 10 on D and 5 on E.
That would be more like it. You can't go above 80 and create more energy simply by detonating it couple of meters away.

If you are targeting a tank, you need to deliver a tremendous amount of energy on the smallest possible point, not spread the damage all over the tank - that's not going to penetrate the armor.

Thing is, the way you treat explosive damage is that your total damage is the only damage a explosion can ever do.

The thing with spherical explosives in real life is that the explosive force goes in ALL directions in a sphere. Damage to any surface is relative to distance away from explosion. Since there are lots of surface area within a bubble shield to be covered, you can spread alot more total damage by doing it across a bigger surface area.

It has already been established that 1 shield section can absorb a finite amount of damage, if you target the edges where multiple shield sections connect, and explode so that the blast covers all those sections, you can potentially be hitting them in multiple sections for higher aggregate damage.

The thing with you using a tank analogy to apply to shields is that the logic doesn't work in quite the same way. All defense in life, be it physical armor or shields, require the offensive attack to get past a certain level of offensive power before damage can register. Once you get past that part, your damage is based on how you spread the damage. Be it concentrated in a small pin point area, or spread over a larger area. That's all determined by how you are doing the damage.

Yes bullets focus all of their energy at the tips and spread out. I would assume phaser beams function in a similar way.

Explosives however work by doing massive damage to an area.

Anything short of lodging a torpedo into a hull and detonating, which still requires you to knock down the shields first, you need to get rid of the enemy shields ASAP.

What I'm suggesting is a different way of getting rid of the shields ASAP.

To do this, you will do more total damage to multiple sections of the shield so that the enemy has to use more energy to defend itself.

On average 1 bee is not very deadly unless you are allergic. A giant swarm of bee's stinging you continuously will wear any creatures defenses down.

 

[EmperorTiberius]

Kamen, if you have actually figured out how to double that energy, you need to come over and be my friend. I'll provide you with shelter, best food, women, entertainment, whatever you want, just show me the formula

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Fair enough. But as mentioned above...if it would do X amount of damage to one shield section, the total amount of damage it could do to the entire shield system could not be greater than X.

Say we stick with the example of 80 "damage points." If it would do 80 damage points to Section 1, then spreading the energy out between Section 1 and Section 2 would still only result in 80 damage points (40 each), not 160 damage points (80 each.)

The thing is you're treating it like Video game logic, I'm basing mines off how explosives work over surface area.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Kamen, if you have actually figured out how to double that energy, you need to come over and be my friend. I'll provide you with shelter, best food, women, entertainment, whatever you want, just show me the formula

It's not doubling energy, it's based off of physics.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Here's a simple test for you to do at home folks.

Get two large sheets of paper towels.

These paper towels will represent a large section of shields on a enemy vessel.

Now get a water spray bottle that is set to wide mist.

1) Take the first sheet, make sure it is held perfectly still and taught, then fire at a section point blank (make sure the nozzle is right next to the paper)
You've noticed how you penetrated the paper towel right!
If you keep firing at the exact same area, you would be blasting through the hole in the shields and hitting what is behind. Imagine if it took far more than 1 shot to get past the same point on the shield, if it took 12 shots just to get past the same point on the shield.

Now imagine a enemy who is competant and continuously re-inforcing the shield, moving around so that you can't hit the exact same point without having to move around the vessel itself and trying to hit the exact same point.

2) Take the second sheet of paper, hold it taught, and fire at it from about 2-3 inches away from the surface. You won't penetrate it on the first hit most likely, but if you hit it enough times, you'll form a giant hole over time.

The principle is to puncture a larger section of shields down or make the enemy use more energy to defend themselves.

The enemy only has a finite amount of energy at any given time, even with reactors generating new energy into it's energy reserves.

If they have to spend more energy to defend themselves, that means they have less energy for other systems.

You will eventually wear them down and puncture a big hole for you to do direct damage.

 

[C.E. Evans]

I think there's a difference between air-to-air missiles and subspace-propelled torpedoes fired between shielded starships moving at either warp or impulse.

The two examples you provided are instances in which torpedoes are used to scatter multiple smaller craft rather than take out vessels of comparative size. Such tactics might not work on bigger or stronger vessels which may be able to better withstand or deflect such blasts.

See above post for what I mean in exploding torpedoes near it's target vs crashing torpedoes into the shields.

I don't think it really changes what I said.

 

[TiberiusMaximus]

The thing is you're treating it like Video game logic, I'm basing mines off how explosives work over surface area.

Uh, no, you're the one who mentioned "damage points." Star Trek space combat is not a videogame, the shields don't use "damage points."

Also, I don't see how your test applies to the situation. I'm not saying that wearing down the shields wouldn't work, I'm saying that the total energy delivered by the photon torpedo does not increase when it is spread out. Sure, exploding it outside the shields will spread the damage out. But you said:

If you have the torpedo crash into the shield, it does 80 points to 1 surface.
However if you let it explode near the shield and let the damage spread out across multiple surfaces, lets say it'll do 60 on shield A, 50 on shield B, 30 on shield C, 20 on shield D, 10 on shield E.
In total it would do 170 damage.

That seems to be implying that the torpedo delivers 75% of it's energy on shield A, 62.5% of it's energy on shield B, and so on. That clearly adds up to more than 100%, which is where you've lost me and Emperor Tiberius. The math doesn't seem to add up.

You're basically saying that exploding the torpedo just before it hits the shield would spread the damage out over a greater area, right? That I agree with. But the total amount of damage delivered in that way can't possibly be greater than the total amount of damage delivered by a direct impact.

I'm also not sure the logic works for another reason. The closer the torpedo is when it explodes, the more damage it does, right? And the torpedo explodes the minute it impacts the shields, right? So if it explodes on contact with the shields, then it's actually closer to the shield emitters than if it explodes 2 meters away from the shields. Wouldn't that do more damage?

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

The thing is you're treating it like Video game logic, I'm basing mines off how explosives work over surface area.

Uh, no, you're the one who mentioned "damage points." Star Trek space combat is not a videogame, the shields don't use "damage points."

Also, I don't see how your test applies to the situation. I'm not saying that wearing down the shields wouldn't work, I'm saying that the total energy delivered by the photon torpedo does not increase when it is spread out. Sure, exploding it outside the shields will spread the damage out. But you said:

If you have the torpedo crash into the shield, it does 80 points to 1 surface.
However if you let it explode near the shield and let the damage spread out across multiple surfaces, lets say it'll do 60 on shield A, 50 on shield B, 30 on shield C, 20 on shield D, 10 on shield E.
In total it would do 170 damage.

That seems to be implying that the torpedo delivers 75% of it's energy on shield A, 62.5% of it's energy on shield B, and so on. That clearly adds up to more than 100%, which is where you've lost me and Emperor Tiberius. The math doesn't seem to add up.

You're basically saying that exploding the torpedo just before it hits the shield would spread the damage out over a greater area, right? That I agree with. But the total amount of damage delivered in that way can't possibly be greater than the total amount of damage delivered by a direct impact.

I'm also not sure the logic works for another reason. The closer the torpedo is when it explodes, the more damage it does, right? And the torpedo explodes the minute it impacts the shields, right? So if it explodes on contact with the shields, then it's actually closer to the shield emitters than if it explodes 2 meters away from the shields. Wouldn't that do more damage?

You're treating the shields as 1 solid continuous shield piece when in reality it is at least 6 pieces for Starfleet vessels.

If shields were 1 solid piece and any direction you hit the shield from would absorb all the damage, I would concur that exploding it on impact should be better.

But from all the things shown on screen, there are 6 sides to a shield on a Starfleet Vessel.

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Deflector_shield
Top, Bottom, Left, Right, Forward, Rear
forward, starboard, port, aft, dorsal, and ventral

Doing damage to 1 section of the shield doesn't affect the other 5 unless you explode it right at the joint between sections.

Given it's box like distribution, you can probably detonate the torpedo at the joint between 3 sections and have 3 pieces affected.

Explosions IRL are spherical unless it's a shaped charge. I'm sure we can all agree on that.

Energy from the explosion that doesn't face any shields will be lost since the force / energy is radiating into space.

Explosions done in the center of 1 shield section can do only a finite amount of damage at best, even with colliding.

If you explode it at the joint between 3 sections, you'll have 3 sections of shields taking massive damage.

The original issue I had was that most torpedoes look like it's ramming instead of exploding.

If they were ramming and somehow all the energy was being distributed to the shields with no lost into space, I would be all for ramming.

But from the VFX on screen, most torpedoes aren't even exploding, they're colliding with the shields and having a minor amount of energy radiate around the point of impact.

ST:VOY have shown the explosive effects of torpedoes detonating mid flight. Why not use it to affect more surface area for total aggregate damage?

 

[SilentP]

If you explode it at the joint between 3 sections, you'll have 3 sections of shields taking massive damage.

Or more likely you're having the strength of the detonation split 3 ways between the 3 sections. The energy of the detonation isn't applied in it's full strength against each individual shield facing, it's shared between the different facing.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

If you explode it at the joint between 3 sections, you'll have 3 sections of shields taking massive damage.

Or more likely you're having the strength of the detonation split 3 ways between the 3 sections. The energy of the detonation isn't applied in it's full strength against each individual shield facing, it's shared between the different facing.

That might just happen. However if the torpedo just wimpers and rams a shield with a minor shield glow with minor damage instead of a massive explosion, not even delivering the full potential of a photon torpedo, I would rather have it explode right next to the joint than just collide.

If it manages to some how miraculously deliver all it's energy on impact, then that would be the way to go.

The VFX never makes it convincing that the torpedo is even exploding or conveying all the power that is should have into the shields of it's target

We know for a fact that it can explode and it is proven that 1 torpedo has the damage potential of a H-Bomb if not more.

 

[T'Girl]

We know for a fact that it can explode and it is proven that 1 torpedo has the damage potential of a H-Bomb if not more.

Not a H-bomb by any means.

We've seen a torpedo strike and explode against a unshielded target, and the apparent explosive force would seem to be more closely equal to a few tonnes of (modern day) conventional explosives.

A "H-bomb" sized fireball in a vacuum would be many hundreds of meters in diameter. And would briefly engulf the entire ship, even if it were shielded.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Photon_torpedo

The explosive yield (of the type-6 torpedo) could be set to ten different levels. Level 1 was just a fireworks display, level 5 was the standard yield of one kilogram antimatter charge, and level 10 violated strategic arms limitation treaties.

We know that a standard Photon Torpedo is a Matter / Anti-Matter explosive warhead.

We do know that the amount of explosive can be programmed in there.

http://edwardmuller.com/calculator.htm

By using standard physics calculations, a payload of 1.5 kilograms equals to about 64 megatons.The second type, at maximum yield, achieves the level of destructive force of an antimatter pod rupture. Antimatter is stored as liquid or slush on starships. (pg. 69) Density of mere liquid antideuterium is around 160 kilograms per cubic meter. According to this comparison the high annihilation rate energy release would be comparable to about 690 gigatons. For the sake of plausibility the affected blast area at these intensities might be extremely small. Visual effects on-screen would seem to confirm this.

They must be really holding back on the destructive force on those torpedoes.

 

[Captain Rob]

I would like to have seen a different type of torpedo that's like a cluster bomb. For example: Just before the torpedo reaches it's target. It dispenses a dozen or two dozen smaller warheads that can independently target different parts of an enemy vessel. That would have come in handy during the war with the Founders. But I'm sure that the Federation has some sort of treay against those types of weapons.

 

[MacLeod]

The thing is you're treating it like Video game logic, I'm basing mines off how explosives work over surface area.

Uh, no, you're the one who mentioned "damage points." Star Trek space combat is not a videogame, the shields don't use "damage points."

Also, I don't see how your test applies to the situation. I'm not saying that wearing down the shields wouldn't work, I'm saying that the total energy delivered by the photon torpedo does not increase when it is spread out. Sure, exploding it outside the shields will spread the damage out. But you said:

If you have the torpedo crash into the shield, it does 80 points to 1 surface.
However if you let it explode near the shield and let the damage spread out across multiple surfaces, lets say it'll do 60 on shield A, 50 on shield B, 30 on shield C, 20 on shield D, 10 on shield E.
In total it would do 170 damage.

That seems to be implying that the torpedo delivers 75% of it's energy on shield A, 62.5% of it's energy on shield B, and so on. That clearly adds up to more than 100%, which is where you've lost me and Emperor Tiberius. The math doesn't seem to add up.

You're basically saying that exploding the torpedo just before it hits the shield would spread the damage out over a greater area, right? That I agree with. But the total amount of damage delivered in that way can't possibly be greater than the total amount of damage delivered by a direct impact.

I'm also not sure the logic works for another reason. The closer the torpedo is when it explodes, the more damage it does, right? And the torpedo explodes the minute it impacts the shields, right? So if it explodes on contact with the shields, then it's actually closer to the shield emitters than if it explodes 2 meters away from the shields. Wouldn't that do more damage?

You're treating the shields as 1 solid continuous shield piece when in reality it is at least 6 pieces for Starfleet vessels.

If shields were 1 solid piece and any direction you hit the shield from would absorb all the damage, I would concur that exploding it on impact should be better.

But from all the things shown on screen, there are 6 sides to a shield on a Starfleet Vessel.

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Deflector_shield
Top, Bottom, Left, Right, Forward, Rear
forward, starboard, port, aft, dorsal, and ventral

Doing damage to 1 section of the shield doesn't affect the other 5 unless you explode it right at the joint between sections.

Given it's box like distribution, you can probably detonate the torpedo at the joint between 3 sections and have 3 pieces affected.

Explosions IRL are spherical unless it's a shaped charge. I'm sure we can all agree on that.

Energy from the explosion that doesn't face any shields will be lost since the force / energy is radiating into space.

Explosions done in the center of 1 shield section can do only a finite amount of damage at best, even with colliding.

If you explode it at the joint between 3 sections, you'll have 3 sections of shields taking massive damage.

The original issue I had was that most torpedoes look like it's ramming instead of exploding.

If they were ramming and somehow all the energy was being distributed to the shields with no lost into space, I would be all for ramming.

But from the VFX on screen, most torpedoes aren't even exploding, they're colliding with the shields and having a minor amount of energy radiate around the point of impact.

ST:VOY have shown the explosive effects of torpedoes detonating mid flight. Why not use it to affect more surface area for total aggregate damage?

Are we in agreement that hitting the shield directly with a torpedeo does more damage to one single section of a shield?

If so that means you could potnetially collapse one section of the shield more quickly than multiple sections. All it could take is one shot to get through that unshielded section. Torpedeos aren't always fire and forget weapons they could be targeted so that they track to hit the unshielded side (true that could mean they could be shot down).

Also with one section of shield down it makes it more predicatable in which way a ship will take evasive maneauvers so as to keep the unshielded section away.

Meanwhile while you are trying to collapse multiple shield sections the enemy is firing at you trying to bring your shields down.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Are we in agreement that hitting the shield directly with a torpedeo does more damage to one single section of a shield?

The original argument is that the torpedoes look like it's ramming the shields and barely doing significant damage with either minor boom or a shield impact sparkle vs on screen displays of torpedoes exploding mid flight doing massive damage.

I'm not sure how the damage is distributed when a torpedo hits a shield, the on screen effects and words spout out by people don't give enough evidence to draw a solid conclusion.

If so that means you could potnetially collapse one section of the shield more quickly than multiple sections. All it could take is one shot to get through that unshielded section. Torpedeos aren't always fire and forget weapons they could be targeted so that they track to hit the unshielded side (true that could mean they could be shot down).

Also with one section of shield down it makes it more predicatable in which way a ship will take evasive maneauvers so as to keep the unshielded section away.

Meanwhile while you are trying to collapse multiple shield sections the enemy is firing at you trying to bring your shields down.

Torpedoes don't look like they move fast enough or dodge enough to avoid enemy fire.

We haven't seen point defense like fire that are on modern day CIWS systems onboard US Naval vessels.

Torpedoes haven't shown intelligence to dodge enemy attacks.

Lots of flaws within Starfleet portrayal of their weapons.

 

[T'Girl]

memory-alpha

Remember, Memory Alpha is basically a Star Trek fan site.

While an occasionally useful reference, KamenRiderBlade you need to hold much of what you find there in suspicion, unless it came directly from the show. The people who run the Memory Alpha site love to engage in extrapolation, and to post their own personal opinions and theories on Star Trek matters.

The explosive yield (of the type-6 torpedo) could be set to ten different levels.

Which episode please?

a standard Photon Torpedo is a Matter / Anti-Matter explosive warhead.

Yes.

We do know that the amount of explosive can be programmed in there.

How do "we" know this? In one Voyager's episodes, when Janeway wanted an unusually powerful blast out of a photon torpedo (80 isotonnes?), it was necessary to dismantle the torpedo's inner workings and replace some of the components to effect the increase.

It wasn't a matter of programming.

By using standard physics calculations, a payload of 1.5 kilograms equals to about 64 megatons.

They must be really holding back on the destructive force on those torpedoes.

One of the ways that they could be "holding back" is if the torpedoes aren't carrying very much antimatter in the first place. A fraction of a single gram.

Something I personal (this is a opinion) came up with a while back is that the "iso' in isotonnes come from ISO = Incredible Small Obolus. Obolus is latin for tiny amount. Iso is like a BTU, an very small unit of measure.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

While an occasionally useful reference, KamenRiderBlade you need to hold much of what you find there in suspicion, unless it came directly from the show. The people who run the Memory Alpha site love to engage in extrapolation, and to post their own personal opinions and theories on Star Trek matters.

I do make sure to double check and triple check with all the information I know and knowledge I've extrapolated, I don't just blindly believe everything they write.

Yes.

How do "we" know this? In one Voyager's episodes, when Janeway wanted an unusually powerful blast out of a photon torpedo (80 isotonnes?), it was necessary to dismantle the torpedo's inner workings and replace some of the components to effect the increase.

It wasn't a matter of programming.

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/The_Voyager_Conspiracy_%28episode%29
I recall that Seven stated that Tuvok was able to program the Tri-Cobalt Torpedo to have a yield above what was necessary to destroy the Caretaker in the very first episode when she was trying to convince Janeway there was some sort of conspiracy. Yet Tuvok was able to set the yield by pressing a few buttons

Also in that same episode of Voyager, going above a normal programmable limit would logically mean they have to do some special adjustments to the warhead to get it above the maximum blast specifications.

If you think of it this way, a normal torpedo payload is anywhere from 0-100% normal damage. All you really need to do to swap blast damage strength is swap the Anti-matter tank which is just a liquid tank holding Anti-Matter in a special magnetic tank. But if you were to go above what the tank can hold, you might need to adjust alot of electronics / mechanical components within the torpedo casing just to fit the larger warhead payload. Ergo the need for a special hand tailored job. Torpedoes are smaller than your average coffin and every cubic meter of space within the torpedo is used for something, so space must be very tight. Any sort of adjustment outside of standard parameters must be a custom job.

One of the ways that they could be "holding back" is if the torpedoes aren't carrying very much antimatter in the first place. A fraction of a single gram.

Something I personal (this is a opinion) came up with a while back is that the "iso' in isotonnes come from ISO = Incredible Small Obolus. Obolus is latin for tiny amount. Iso is like a BTU, an very small unit of measure.

I do agree that they must not be carrying alot of Anti-Matter within those torpedoes.

I think they used "ISO" just so they can have no unit of measurement for fans to correlate against.

Kind of how they like to use "Quad" as the unit instead of "Bytes" for data size measurement.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

________1 Kg of Anti-Matter = 42.96 Megatons = 42,960,000 tons
_________1 g of Anti-Matter = _____________ = ____42,960 tons
________________Little Boy = 1_6 Kiloton blast = ____16,000 tons with blast range of 1.6 Km
_________________Fat man = _21 Kiloton blast = ____21,000 tons
Tsar Bomba Tested Damage = 50 Megaton blast = 50,000,000 tons with blast range of 35 Km
Tsar Bomba Maximum Damage = 100 Megaton blast = 100,000,000 tons

Just to give you an idea of scale.

Galaxy Class Length = 642.51 meters

 

[TiberiusMaximus]

Or more likely you're having the strength of the detonation split 3 ways between the 3 sections. The energy of the detonation isn't applied in it's full strength against each individual shield facing, it's shared between the different facing.

Exactly. That's what I've been trying to say all along - you could either have one shield face absorb the whole amount, or 3 shield faces absorb 1/3 each.

The original argument is that the torpedoes look like it's ramming the shields and barely doing significant damage with either minor boom or a shield impact sparkle vs on screen displays of torpedoes exploding mid flight doing massive damage.

I'm not sure how the damage is distributed when a torpedo hits a shield, the on screen effects and words spout out by people don't give enough evidence to draw a solid conclusion.

That doesn't seem to have stopped you from drawing a solid conclusion.