posted
Can anybody tell me when phaser strips like those of the Enterprise-C & Enterprise-D first went into service aboard starships? Which is better the turret type phasers or the phaser strips?
posted
the earliest ship class we have seen that had strips was the Ambassador class. considering that Starfleet quit using the phaser turrets and transitioned to strips....i'll let you figure out which type is better.
posted
Also, y'know, installing phaser strips probably involves a bit more work than just paining red curved lines on the hull.
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Registered: Mar 1999
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quote:Originally posted by LET CAPTAIN = MIKE THEN GOTO 10: hmmmm yes they never did say the phasers were upgraded did they. maybe you just made that up.
"That's an awful lot of firepower for an Excelsior Class ship!" - O'Brien, post-Lakota-phasery-goodness
-------------------- . . . ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
posted
O'Brien's firepower comment could be referring to simply the number of phasers. Adding more phaser = more firepower regardless of whether the individual phasers have been made more powerful or not. We know that the Lakota had phasers where no Excelsior model has ever had phasers, and where no other Excelsior has ever been shown firing phasers.
The new phasers on the Lakota (or those that we saw fire at least) were all on the aft-dorsal region - the area with the least phaser coverage in Excelsiors (there are no phasers covering that area on the original model and whilst the Enterprise-B MSD adds some, it's been impossible to tell whether they actually existed on the CGI as well). Adding phasers there would be a sensible move to protect the ship against small agile opponents - like JH bugs, Maquis Raiders and Defiant class escorts. Hey, I wonder who the conspirators were planning to fight?
The Lakota's new phasers were 'invisible' so maybe they have the same power as the original Excelsior phasers but in a smaller package? That would be an 'upgrade' of sorts but without changing the performance.
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Registered: Mar 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Identity Crisis: O'Brien's firepower comment could be referring to simply the number of phasers.
Doesn't follow from the episode. The Lakota had just fired two shots from her ventral saucer phaser banks, bringing Defiant's port shields down to 60%.
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posted
^I concur, the Lakota's phaser performance didn't result from a lot of shooting, but rather really powerful shots.
In any case, the biggest differences between strip and turret phaser are coverage and practicality. Strip phaser's advantage in coverage is self explainitory, but the practicality aspect needs some explaining.
Everything being equal, the biggest difference between an emitter from a strip and one from a turret is prefire chamber size. Strips uses coupling effect to harness phaser power from multiple emitters, so their chambers are relatively small.
Turret phasers most likely are isolated to each emitter, so they would require a much larger prefire chamber, or a set of much larger prefire chambers, to equal the power of a long strip. As a result, this takes up internal volume of a starship considerably, especially when you consider that turret phaser's poorer arc requires more of them on a ship to form a proper coverage, eating even more into the ship's interior.
Strip phasers, on the other hand, requires far less internal volume, but instead a rather large amount of surface area on a ship's exterior.
You can foreseeably build a powerful modern turret phaser, it'd just not be as effective overall as a strip phaser. However, for smaller ships, where they lack the surface area for long phaser strips, turret phasers, and fixed phasers (ie. Defiant) are still a very viable option.
There are also issues of phaser cool down, power requirement, accuracy, etc, which I'll not go into now.
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Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
There's also the question of design engineering. The strip phasers require a LOT of redundant power feeds to supply the individual emitters in the collimated (linear) arrays. The older ships that were designed with the smaller number of individual turrets, on the other hand, would simply not have enough room to install the additional power feeds without gutting half the saucer section in order to do it.
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Registered: Nov 2000
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posted
Germany in World War II, wanted to refit the Schranhorst (spl) and Gneisau (also spl) which at the time had 9 11" guns. Plans were made to remove those guns and put in 6 15" guns in their place. Lesser guns but far more powerful, in the same place. If the same ship was to be fitted with 9 15" guns then it would have involved removing the barbette and the structural supports around the turrets to make them large enough to suppport triple turrets with a large gun size.
It's easier to fit a more powerful gun of the same size then to fit a more powerful gun while at the same time having to gut out the surrounding area to support it.
Registered: Jul 2000
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