posted
I need I favor. Please, could someone with quality VHS tapes of "Shattered Mirror" and "Paradise Lost" make highest-resolution framegrabs of the shots where the Defiant is firing photon torpedoes from strange locations. I really need the frames that show the time the launch point starts to glow yellow, and after that, the first frame that shows a torpedo leaving. Or use your judgement -- the point is to figure out the exact locations from which the torpedoes were launched.
Scenes:
1) Paradise Lost: The Defiant banks away from the Lakota and toward the viewer, firing a photon torpedo aft.
2) Shattered Mirror: the Defiant fires a forward photon torpedo from somewhere on the underside while battling the birds of prey around the station.
3) Shattered Mirror: the Defiant is together with the Maquis-raider, and fires an aft torpedo from somewhere on its tail.
posted
Although I have no means to make screen captures, I can tell you that they wouldn't help.
The torpedo fired in "PL" is certainly the clearest but the way the Defiant is banked at the time makes it very ambiguous as to an origin point. I have watched and freeze framed this bit many times though, and it always seems to come from the rear half of the deck 3 underside.
The fwd photorp that's fired at the BoP in "SM" is also very ambiguous. At the time the torpedo is fired the Defiant is so far away from the camera that even the most high res capture wouldn't reveal any detail. All I can say is that the photorp appears to originate from somewhere in the central ventral area. This case is very similar to the initial beam phaser in "PL" where the Defiant is just so far away.
The aft torpedo in "SM" is probably the most annoying. The Defiant is an OK length from the camera but somehow the lighting of the torpedo completely obscures where it comes from. The torpedo seems to come out of nowhere. My best guess is that it comes from Drexler's impulse engine but It's not possible to be sure.
posted
I remembered that there was a nice tractor beam scene in "For the Uniform" so I had another look at it tonight. It's the bit where Eddington's raider has shot up a Cardassian transport/freighter and the Defiant has to save it from the gravitational pull of the poinsoned planet.
Anyway, the Defiant tractor beam origin point can be seen with amazing clarity here. It comes from the widget on the extreme aft of the underside - between the yellow RCS and the short strip. At least that's one less widget that can be a torp launcher.
Looking at what's left, could those two short strips (the one I previously mentioned and the one just aft of the shuttlebay) be some type of new fangled torp launchers? They are the closest looking features to the shoulder quantorp launchers. The near central strip would satisfy the torp VFX from "PL" and the first torp from "SM". The far aft strip would satisfy the later torp from "SM". Yes, I know it takes a leap of faith but I'm just working with what we've got.
posted
I've seen all the launches except for the SM forward launch on media files. The "Paradise Lost" launch I'd definitely put in the forward half of the ship. When I observed this, I had rewound the media file fifteen times and got the impresssion that it was fired from the bottom side of the starboard quantum launcher aft! Of course, once I freeze-framed the thing, I saw that that was an illusion, caused by the expanding orange glow that covers the forward quantum launcher. Unless the torpedo can emit a 100m glow, the PL aft torpedo came from somewhere in the front. For the sake of simplicity, let's assume this came from the shuttlebay launcher, although I'd be just as willing to accept the illusion that it came from the bottom half of the forward quantum launcher.
That leaves us with the aft torpedo from SM. On the media file I watched, the entire tail glowed yellow for one frame, and then the torpedo came from somewhere. In the script, Bashir complains that O'Brien's crew wouldn't let him into the "aft torpedo bay". How about a big one in the tail instead of all the impulse engines?
So, we'd have the two quantum launchers, the shuttlebay launcher that can fire both ways, and the tail aft launcher, ignoring the probe launch.
Registered: Sep 2001
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posted
I've seen all the launches except for the SM forward launch on media files. The "Paradise Lost" launch I'd definitely put in the forward half of the ship. When I observed this, I had rewound the media file fifteen times and got the impresssion that it was fired from the bottom side of the starboard quantum launcher aft! Of course, once I freeze-framed the thing, I saw that that was an illusion, caused by the expanding orange glow that covers the forward quantum launcher. Unless the torpedo can emit a 100m glow, the PL aft torpedo came from somewhere in the front. For the sake of simplicity, let's assume this came from the shuttlebay launcher, although I'd be just as willing to accept the illusion that it came from the bottom half of the forward quantum launcher.
That leaves us with the aft torpedo from SM. On the media file I watched, the entire tail glowed yellow for one frame, and then the torpedo came from somewhere. In the script, Bashir complains that O'Brien's crew wouldn't let him into the "aft torpedo bay". How about a big one in the tail instead of all the impulse engines?
So, we'd have the two quantum launchers, the shuttlebay launcher that can fire both ways, and the tail aft launcher, ignoring the probe launch.
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posted
Oh, and the near-central strip would be the shuttlebay launcher then. I don't think we need the far aft strip -- a launcher somewhere in the tail is good enough in my opinion.
Registered: Sep 2001
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posted
Now I rewatched the "Paradise Lost" clip again, rewinding endlessly on my computer. You can download it at Maximum Defiant (12.1 MB). I'm convinced beyond doubt that the simplest explanation is that this torpedo was fired from the bottom half of the forward starboard quantum launcher aft.
Latest theory: I'd ignore "Shattered Mirror". After all, it's a wonder that mirror O'Brien was able to construct the Defiant from scratch without changing a thing or two out of necessity. Forget about all the invisible shuttlebay and tail launchers -- they're irrelevant to our universe. Let's have two aft launchers in the bottom halves of the triangular modules, and two forward in the top halves. That way, when Dax says that they'd lost the aft torpedo launchers, it would just be the ones in the bottom halves of the shoulder modules.
The only problem is that we've seen forward quantums fired from the bottom halves in "For the Uniform" (presumably because the scene showed a bottom view of the Defiant, and the torpedoes simply looked better). We could ignore this slight discrepancy in favor of overall consistency.
Registered: Sep 2001
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posted
No, I'm gonna have to disagree with you here. The torpedo fired in "PL" could not come from anywhere in the fwd half of the ship. My visual evidence is an official CIC release of the episode, being run on a Panasonic 6 head jog & shuttle VCR, and displayed on a Sony Wega 68cm TV. I've watched this scene frame by frame probably a dozen times now. It is actually possible to single out the frame of the initial firing glow, the glow of the origin point, before the torpedo itself glows. And, like I've said before, the initial glow is in the aft of the ship but no further back than the step.
Also, I'm not willing to ignore the quantorp scene in "For the Uniform". I think it's perfectly reasonable that the ventral cuts would serve the same purpose as the dorsal ones. I've mentioned this before, but It wouldn't surprise me if the remaining cuts could fire quantorps sideways too.
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