Would a photon torpedo move forever through space

[jaime]

Any lack of guidance system a photorp may, um, lack, is strictly because of writers with no knowledge of current military missile tech, who are too lazy to look it up. We have ship-launched missiles NOW that can fly 1500 miles, dodge terrain, and jam their warhead into a specific window. We have air-to-air missiles that can be fired off-aspect and home on heat, radar return, or the shape of the plane that the pilot winked at with his helmet-mounted sight. We have fire-and-forget, beyond-visual-range radar-guided missiles that can switch to IR (heat-seaking) for their terminal run. We have contact fuses, proximity fuses, timed fuses, radio command fuses. AND we (and the enemy) have countermeasures for it all.

Nice post. You know by the end of that I was reading it in the voice of Hudson from Aliens. Ultimate Badass. Which when I watch I keep expecting him to burst into song and sing 'greased lightning'.

Originally weren't photon torpedoes supposed tube purely made of energy before twok retconned them?
An energy bottle of matter/antimatter that decayed over time?

Phasers presumably can have some kind of inbuilt range over which the energy harmlessly dissipates....we see them doing this at short range in nemesis more or less.

 

[Captain Rob]

In TOS they were shown on screen to be like balls of plasma energy like the ones VGer used but a lot less powerful. But some dialog in the show seems to suggest that they were physical objects. Being called "torpedoes" and being fired from tubes. And I believe there were references to them being loaded into the tubes as well. I don't recall the episode. Being called a torpedo to me would indicate independent sustainable propulsion and internal guidance. Otherwise you could just call them rockets or missiles.

 

[jaime]

In TOS they were shown on screen to be like balls of plasma energy like the ones VGer used but a lot less powerful. But some dialog in the show seems to suggest that they were physical objects. Being called "torpedoes" and being fired from tubes. And I believe there were references to them being loaded into the tubes as well. I don't recall the episode. Being called a torpedo to me would indicate independent sustainable propulsion and internal guidance. Otherwise you could just call them rockets or missiles.

I can't remember where I saw the torpedoes described as I mention, but I think it may have been the making of book. I don't think guidance is necessary for a torpedo, but I see where you are coming from.
Whilst modern torpedoes are more in keeping, I do think the older type were more advanced.

 

[Timo]

A couple of points:

1) If torpedoes weren't guided, they would never hit anything at all, even at the engagement distances shown let alone the engagement distances specified in the dialogue. The speed differential between the launching ship and the target would guarantee that.

2) In TOS, we can't dodge the fact that something was loaded into a torpedo tube before firing. A projectile? A cartridge that would go off and fire the "pure energy" warhead itself? That the warhead was guided speaks for the former IMHO, but we can't tell for sure.

Telling TOS dialogue comes from "The Changeling": first photon torpedoes are ordered to Condition Red, then comes the command "prepare photon torpedo", to which the response is "photon torpedoes armed" (or perhaps "photon torpedo's armed" , and then Kirk commands "ready photon torpedo number two" ("ready"), and "Fire!" ("torpedo away").

This is consistent with how a submarine would do it: despite the clipped language and ambiguity on plural/vsingular, all the torpedo tubes would be readied with an armed torpedo inside, after which the skipper could choose from those torps, specifying that tube 2 should send its projectile away, and then give the actual firing command.

3) Language on the nature of photon torpedoes is ambiguous in the old backstage books. That they would be "pure energy" is something that would certainly have been forgotten the first time the script called for interaction with torpedoes (modifying one for plot needs, trying to stop one from blowing up, stealing one, being dramatically hurt while working with one, whatever), because 1960s tech would demand for prop-based rather than VFX-based torps in live action scenes, and because the writers would want to present the audience with something familiar anyway. This just never came to be, alas.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Shawnster]

Under the old Franz Joseph Designs game Star Fleet Battles, photon torpedoes were envisioned as purely energy weapons fueled by the ship's warp power. As long as a ship had warp power, it could arm and fire torpedoes. Phasers, on the other hand, could be powered by any of the ship's power systems.

Then Star Trek: TMP came out and stated that phasers were powered by warp power. When the Enterprise warp engines went into imbalance, phasers were offline and they had to fire a photon torpedo.

Star Trek II: TWOK was the first Trek to explicitly show a solid torpedo casing being loaded into a tube. I've heard/read (on here) this was because Nick Meyer wanted to depict the "running the guns out." This also gave them a coffin for Spock.

After ST:TWOK we've seen torpedo casings a number of times.

 

[DonIago]

Does anyone know whether, beyond illustrating Kirk's inexperience with the new ship, there was a behind-the-scenes reason to have the E fire a torpedo rather than use phasers?

 

[Terok Nor]

It's nice to imagine a stray photon torpedo from Voyager may have collided with a ship carrying Neelix some time after he left the series.

 

[Ithekro]

Does anyone know whether, beyond illustrating Kirk's inexperience with the new ship, there was a behind-the-scenes reason to have the E fire a torpedo rather than use phasers?

Gives them an excuse to show off the new torpedo tubes they put on the model. Also notice that they only movie where they fire phasers in Star Trek II. I guess they just didn't want to use that kind of effect.

 

[jaime]

Does anyone know whether, beyond illustrating Kirk's inexperience with the new ship, there was a behind-the-scenes reason to have the E fire a torpedo rather than use phasers?

Because only the new phasers were running via the warp engines, old ones didn't, kirk did t know this. Because the engines were imbalanced, the phasers would have blown them up. Hence the torpedo.

 

[DonIago]

That's in-universe, not behind-the-scenes.

 

[DonIago]

Gives them an excuse to show off the new torpedo tubes they put on the model. Also notice that they only movie where they fire phasers in Star Trek II. I guess they just didn't want to use that kind of effect.

I wonder whether, as an effect, phasers were more expensive or less practical than photon torpedoes.