posted
My apologies if this has been discussed before, but I was watching "The Doomsday Machine" (I think that was the ep) on the Sci-Fi Channel last week. After Commodore Decker assumed command of the Enterprise while Kirk was stuck aboard the Constellation (love those shaking nacelles!) he ordered the bridge crew to ready "main phaser banks." Does this imply that the Enterprise possessed lesser phaser banks? Secondary armament, perhaps?
I could understand an order to raise the main defense shields; it would make sense for there to be backup shielding somewhere aboard ship. But, backup phasers?
Any ideas?
Robert
------------------ Everything in life I ever needed to know I learned from The Simpsons.
posted
It could be a simple reference to the phasers that they use the most often - ie. the forward banks. In three years, the Enterprise only ever fired forward in some arc.
Mark
------------------ "Why build one, when you can have two at twice the price?"
posted
SEEN to fire, Mark. Dialogue has Kirk ordering "midships phasers" at one point, and I think I remember an order for aft phasers, but don't hold me to that.
--Jonah
------------------ "It's obvious I'm dealing with a moron..."
posted
The episode "Balance of Terror" defined the armaments of the USS Enterprise as being on the starboard, port, rear, and front of the saucer. (Rf. Chapter 2)
posted
Rear of the saucer? Difficult firing arc. What is the source of this info...? Remember we had Kirk order phaser banks one and two, and saw VFX from the bottom front of the saucer, and then banks three and four, and saw VFX from the bottom front of the saucer. So even if we know the LOCATIONS, we still don't know the numbers for sure -- but there are at least four forward ventral phaser banks, whatever might be elsewhere.
--Jonah
------------------ "It's obvious I'm dealing with a moron..."
posted
"Balance of Terror" also referred to torpedo tubes 4 and 6, suggesting at least six such weapons aboard.
One wonders if the armament of the Enterprise was organized so that a great many "phaser generators" would all fire though a single common emitter. If that emitter was steerable enough (and the ventral saucer spot did offer rather good coverage, assuming a corresponding weapon was placed on the aft dorsal surface of the saucer), and building of emitters was expensive yet building of generators was cheap, then this sort of weaponry would make sense.
Personally, I'm all for "creatively interpreting" the visuals and saying that the ship had a more varied armament roughly on the lines of the usual fanfic view: emitters around the top and bottom vertices of the saucer, and possibly some more at the bottom of the secondary hull or atop the shuttlebay as in the refitted ship. We just happened to blink when those weapons fired. Or Kirk ordered starboard phasers to fire, and they did - and the camera was late in catching this, so by the time we got exterior view, Kirk had already ordered "cease fire on starboard banks, switch to forward banks". Which we never heard since we were already out of the ship.
posted
It's a long shot, but can anyone extrapolate anything from the Fire Control Room in "Balance of Terror?"
------------------ "I rather strongly disagree, even if I share the love of Dick. Speaking of which, that would be the most embarrasing .sig quote ever, so never use it."
posted
All we conclude from that room is that Enterprise thinks she's a submarine. From what we can see, the phaser control room only has buttons. So to fire a phaser you need to radio down to this room and have someone there push a button. Why can't they just put the same buttons on the bridge? It's not as if you have to physically load a packet of photons into a tube and pull a firing trigger.
------------------ When you're in the Sol system, come visit the Starfleet Museum
posted
Or, considering that the phasers overloaded rather easily in that episode, we might say that these weapons were really prissy primadonnas. Perhaps there would have been a risk of the entire ship blowing up if the phasers were fired in sub-optimal condition? So a man-in-the-loop system was created, in which a person sitting next to the machinery had to okay each and every firing.
The "point man" would coordinate with a phaser crew dedicated to constant repairs and pampering of the weapon, and would decide when and whether to execute the firing orders, based on how his phaser crew was currently managing with the finicky thing.
posted
And speaking of "main phasers" - the only other time I remember hearing that terminology was in connection with the Stargazer in TNG "The Battle". That ship did have apparent primary and secondary guns - the primaries would have been the twin emitters mounted dorsally and ventrally, while the secondaries would probably have been the five single emitters on the dorsal side.
Since the Enterprise-refit had twin and single emitters, too, and only used the twin ones in the movies, one might say the single ones were secondary. Extending this to the TOS ship and her invisible phaser emitters, it would mean that the saucer phasers were the main ones and the putative ones on the secondary hull perhaps "auxiliary phasers".
posted
Balance of Terror also tells us that the weapons crew don't know the differences between "phasers" and "torpedoes".
(Yeah, I know the shots didn't look exactly like Photon Torps, but they shore has hell didn't look like either of the two regular phaser shots, one of which had been seen before this episode.)
------------------ "And Mojo was hurt and I would have kissed his little boo boo but then I realized he was a BAD monkey so I KICKED HIM IN HIS FACE!" -Bubbles
posted
Not to be a critic, (but aren't we all?), but who is to say that a single emitter is less powerful than a double? Just because there happen to be two at one location doesn't mean a thing, really. It just means that one particular location is more strategic than another. Besides, regardless of how many emitters there were, they all look the same. Sort of like little balls inset into the hull.
Registered: Nov 2000
| IP: Logged
posted
There's no particular reason to say that single ball-turrets are weaker than double ones - or that short phaser strips are weaker than long ones. It's just convenient to think that the Stargazer had a two-tier phaser system since the dialogue implies this, and the most obvious division would be into twin and single emitters.
We have seen the short phaser strips of TNG-era ships fire about just as often as the long ones, and there hasn't been any mention of them being "secondary" weapons. They fire when the target is at an angle optimal for their use (a situation we mostly see in Voyager, since TNG did not have quite as violently maneuvering opponents and DS9 did not feature strip-phaser ships in a central role).
In contrast, single-ball turrets almost never fire. The only time these "secondary" weapons have been seen firing IIRC was DS9 "Paradise Lost" where the modified-Excelsior USS Lakota used her ventral phasers (which consist of four single turrets). Then again, the Lakota also fired phaser beams from at least three locations that did not have phaser emitters of any sort!
posted
"Darmok". Strangely, the phasers were also blue. Hmm.
TO be fair, the Lakota was suppossed to have been heavily upgraded. They could have added new phaser emitters.
------------------ "And Mojo was hurt and I would have kissed his little boo boo but then I realized he was a BAD monkey so I KICKED HIM IN HIS FACE!" -Bubbles
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