What happened to the target projectile weaopon?

[Tyler]

posted on June 2nd, 2010, 12:54 pm

Last edited by Tyler on June 2nd, 2010, 1:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Torps are slower than Phasers when fired at both Impulse and Warp. It takes a few seconds for them to reach the target, while Phasers hit almost instantly.

Hitting them with phasers is only a problem if the targetting sensors aren't good enough, which they aren't with most ships.

posted on June 2nd, 2010, 2:29 pm

yup as tyler said when ships are not at warp torps are fired sublight. only when a ship is travelling at warp does the torp continue at warp to hit its target.

now phasers at warp are a different can o' worms all together. first they work, then they dont, then they do again its madness

i prefer to assume they dont, and that any appearances of them firing at warp are inconsistencies.

on a separata note, @ dom earlier when you and zebh first got guide staff positions (good decisions devs  it looks nice on them) the colour of your names was white and i did a double-take thinking you had deleted your account, now its blue similar to optec etc

[Tyler]

posted on June 2nd, 2010, 2:44 pm

Last edited by Tyler on June 2nd, 2010, 2:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I've always seen the 'no Phasers at Warp' being exclusive to the Constitution Class, because it was caused by the Refit it went through.

Since Kirk expected Phasers to work at FTL and had to be told that the redesign prevented that, it seems they worked previously. Later ships would likely be designed differently, with different (and more advanced) tech.

[Nebula_Class_Ftw]

posted on June 2nd, 2010, 3:04 pm

Last edited by Nebula_Class_Ftw on June 2nd, 2010, 3:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Torps are slower than Phasers when fired at both Impulse and Warp. It takes a few seconds for them to reach the target, while Phasers hit almost instantly.

Hitting them with phasers is only a problem if the targetting sensors aren't good enough, which they aren't with most ships.

Targeting sensors that can't track a single object moving (usually) in a straight or slightly arced line? Modern technology has missile interceptors that work by launching a missile to hit the incoming missile, as in not an instant travel time like phasers but more like a photon torp hitting another photon torp (it's called the Patriot Missile, though during the Gulf war many of them had problems as a result of slow clocks that screwed up timing.) It uses radar; what the hell is Starfleet using? Vacuum tubes and film cameras?

You meant that torpedos use ECM right? Even so, ships supposedly use ECM and yet the phasers never miss them (except for that one DS9 episode in the alt. universe which was really stupid and also an episode of Voyager that was a typical Voyager episode.)

As to why we never ever see photons get shot down I'd say it's just the writers never bothering to think for a moment about the full potential of their technology (remember in TNG, there was a kid dying of an infection, the transporter has bio-filters that can remove every single foreign organism...) There was an episode in which a torpedo was shot down by point defense, but that was in Enterprise, it was a spatial torpedo, and presumably a lot slower than a photon. It was still amazing to finally see point defense in Star Trek.

Similar to the MVAM argument, modern technology and software can actually do a very good job at tracking things, but sci-fi writers have no sense of computing ability nor scale.


Phasers at warp? They worked at warp as far as I remember, only there were design flaws in both the Constitution refit (which Tyler just mentioned, Ninja'd again damnit) and NX-01 that made it impossible to use phasers/phase-cannons and Warp engines at the same time. Presumably if those flaws were worked out (Archer sure was mad about phasers...err phase-cannons not working while he was being chased; Kirk probably wasn't too happy either about his phasers.)

[Tyler]

posted on June 2nd, 2010, 3:09 pm

Last edited by Tyler on June 2nd, 2010, 3:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Shooting Torps down depends on knowing where they're going to come from (difficult against a fleet, where they could come from anywhere), their speed (which is a lot faster than any modern counterpart) and how far they are from their target when fired.

In FO, the ships won't know where they come from since they could come from any ship in the fleet, are often fired from moderatly close range and reach the target quickly. In similar conditions, it would take 5 minutes for a Galaxy to shoot them down, and they're the best of their era. Then there's the bit about automated systems telling the difference between enemy torps and yours.

That's without counting ECM.

posted on June 2nd, 2010, 3:32 pm

the nx 01 could fire phase cannons at warp, it was clearly seen in an episode.

then in tos the unrefitted enterprise could fire at warp. then the refit meant it couldn't.

then it gets complicated. we usually see torps used for warp engagements. these warp engagements are rarer though, tos had lots of warp engagements, tng era battles mostly happened at sublight. there is certainly no conclusive evidence of either. we see lots of phaser fire at warp, yet we have people explicitly stating they can't work at warp.

i prefer to think that they can't work at warp unless you are close enough to extend your warp field so that the phaser beam can stay in your field. it would explain some of the sightings we've seen of phasers at warp.

phasers are beams of nadion particles, whatever they are lol. but if they are particles only then i find it unlikely that they can have their own warp field. if they could travel at such high speeds then why not fire them at warp sometimes when not at warp. would be like hitscan. but sometimes we see travel time at impulse, implying that phasers travel at sublight speeds.

i am of the opinion that torps can travel at warp due to warp sustainers that let them "steal" a little of the launching ships warp field for a short while, allowing them to reach their target.

a beam of particles wouldn't have a warp sustainer, so it wouldn't steal a field like that.

posted on June 2nd, 2010, 3:47 pm

So the sensors can't tell which ship fired the torp? What kind of wizardry is preventing the sensors from telling which ship fired a bright red glowing ball? You are human, the computer is not human; don't apply your own confusion from the sheer number of ships to the computer.

You only need a current position, direction, and velocity to intercept it with phasers. You don't need to know where it came from at all except for determining if it's your torp or not.

I'd think you would be able to tell your own torps apart from those of the enemy too, all you'd have to do is monitor your ships and detect them launching, or have a ship send a signal when it's launching to announce to the other ships. Have the systems assume any torp not apparently launched from your ships is an enemy torp. Problem solved.

As far as it being faster than modern stuff, it would have to be traveling at ridiculous velocity to reach the ship before the computer can calculate where it will be (keep in mind it takes a few seconds to get to the target and modern computers have computation speeds in the gigahertz) and computers are doubling in computing speed every 18 months. There is a limit to that growth, but we'll almost certainly be in the trillions of computations per second by the mid 21st century, now imagine computing speed in the 24th century.

I find it ludicrous that a computer with a trillion or so computations per second wouldn't be able to track and determine a position for something that takes a few seconds to arrive. Where does this 5 minute thing come from? I'd be willing to be the computer I'm using right now could plot an interception of a photon torpedo in a lot less time than that.

posted on June 2nd, 2010, 3:54 pm

the several seconds thing is from generations i believe, a missile launched by soren was fast enough that the enterprise had to take several seconds to target it, like 12 ish.

several things are wrong with that scene from generations. firstly we see it launched, it has what appears to be a chemical based engine. like a rocket. yet it can reach its sun in around 10-15 seconds. which if you assume that planet was the same distance from its sun as earth is from ours then that would make it stupidly fast. yet we could still see the missile a second or two before it hit the sun lol

plus your laptop couldn't intercept a photon torpedo. it doesn't have a phaser system.

posted on June 2nd, 2010, 3:57 pm

Maybe I misheard Generations?

It's all about the conditions at the time. Computers are fast, not perfect. They have to find a torp, trace it to the origin, predict the destination, then figure out the best place to lead the target. Stuff which takes time; there's a reason it's rarely bothered with.

Telling the difference would also require the addition of accessing the database, matching the torpedo and determining if the firing ship is on your side. That adds additional time.

You seem to be mistaking 'advanced' with 'perfect/unlimited'. They're advanced, but have limits.

posted on June 2nd, 2010, 3:57 pm

Distance from Earth to Sun: about 8.5 Lightminutes. His missile had to have been travelling faster than light unless the sun to planet distance is insanely small. Again, Sci-fi writers have no sense of scale nor computing ability.

It's not a laptop, and I'm not saying it could intercept it, but with the right software it could plot the interception, so if it was connected to a phaser array it could intercept the photon torp.

posted on June 2nd, 2010, 3:59 pm

Plotting the course is only one part of it.

It's all plot convenience, so why are we even arguing?

posted on June 2nd, 2010, 4:01 pm

...so why are we even arguing?

we're star trek fans, we always argue

posted on June 2nd, 2010, 4:02 pm

Good point.

posted on June 2nd, 2010, 4:03 pm

Well, not everything in Star Trek makes complete sense.  We have technology now that we didn't have back when Star Trek was created (or at least wasn't as widely known).

Going back to point defense:

In a large battle, saying a ship could detect a torpedo firing, and out of potentially dozens of torpedoes determine that the torpedo is heading for that ship (and those dozens could also be going for that same ship), while both are moving, and the torpedo will take only seconds to hit its target (and firing at it in close range wouldn't help - it would have some sort of blast radius) while the ship's weapons are already firing at other targets, is a bit much.

Patriot missiles have a lot more time to figure it out (whether they need it or not), they don't have to worry about the explosion causing damage, they only have to deal with one missile at a time, and they aren't already firing at other targets.

posted on June 2nd, 2010, 4:09 pm

Perfect? So you're saying it takes so damn long because the computer is constantly making mistakes in the computation? There can be bugs in the software and such, which can cause massive problems. But computers are procedural, they execute a set of commands.

Those limits are constantly being pushed farther and farther, you think the limits of a 24th century computer will be at finding out where an object came from, and where it's going to be in a second when it's moving at several thousand miles per hour (or more)? You don't need to access a database to find otu if it's your torpedo or not, didn't you read my explanation of how to identify friendly torpedoes? And even so that wouldn't add nearly as much time as you think it would.

Predicting the destination, velocity, and determining origin do take time, but not nearly as much time as you think. All a computer has to do to find those is execute a tracking program, which it could do very quickly.


I think in order to settle this we're going to need access to two supercomputers, a simulation of a photon torpedo (done by one of the supercomputers), a tracking program for the second supercomputer using inputs based on the simulation (but not giving it access to all the data in the simulation, just what a ship with sensors would detect in Star Trek), and a few seconds.

EDIT: Ninja's four times, so I'm gonna strikethru everything but the last paragraph.