posted
In ST:TMP (not the special edition), when the klingons are firing on V'Ger, the torpedoes (although shiny and with very cool sound effect, one I wish they'd used more indeed) are IMO much too big in scale, compared to the torpedoes we've seen upclose, closest example being in Spock's burial scene (don't go misty-eyed now!).
I don't imagine the torpedoes of the klingon battlecruisers of the time were spherical by design, but the thing looks to smooth and firm to be just a projected energy field surrounding the missile.
So, has it been altered in any way in the SE? Or does anyone have any Trexplanation to the odd cannonballs of the house of Knuck'lHeD's?
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Anyway, I'd always assumed that this was simply the way the torpedoes looked when they were fired, and they really weren't that much bigger than the Starfleet counterparts. It's true that on Klingon ships the exit ports for torpedoes are really big (several decks in the case o fthe D7/K'tinga) but to have actual torpedoes that big wouldn't make much sense. I'd always assumed that it was simply a really big glow charateristic of the torpedoes of the era.
On the other hand, We don't exactly see them fire torpedoes from there otherwise; in the TNG era they tended to be switched to red beam weapons on the K'Tingas at least, and in at least one episode ("Redemption II") a BoP fired a comparitively tiny torpedo out of its gaing maw. Otherwise, Klingon torpedoes are few and far between, instead favoring BoP wing disruptors and nose-mounted disruptors on K'Tingas and Vor'Chas instead. So then, perhaps they really *were* giant, planet-busting torpedoes? I mean, Knuck'lHeD was firing at a ginormous CLOUD, for no other real purpose than that it was there. May be he purposefully used the really big torpedoes to try to put a dent in it?
posted
That's so Klingon! Q: "Why did you destroy that mountain?" A: "Because it was there." Nicely sums up the difference between human and Klingon views of "extreme sports"...
Personally, I find it dramatically pleasing to think that it takes a machine half the size of a starship to launch these tiny balls o' death. If torpedo launchers were puny little self-contained tubes like those in FASA blueprints, not much larger than yer average iron lung, why wouldn't Starfleet install 362 launcers per ship? Surely there would be tactical demand for a few more than we saw.
I would imagine Klingon ships to be built around the primary weapon systems, with very little added beyond the requirements of those systems. If they knew how to build a smaller torpedo launcher of that potency, they would build a smaller ship to carry it. Probably about 50% of a Klingon ship's volume is weapons and drive systems, 40% their support systems, and 10% crew space.
posted
Ah, you're probably right about their singleminded engineering-ways. They hinted at it in TUC, as well, with the current state of their war machine. But this was the first movie with the "new" klingons, before that, the klingons relied on stealth and guile, did they not?
Has the opening scene been polished in any way, in the Special Edition? More backdrop? More debris passing the ships, to illustrate high speed? Because when they're "retreating" from V'Ger it looks like they move in the speed of pregnant supertankers. Impulse engines indeed...
Interesting note about the torps. The supertorp-idea probably is noncanon, but it sounds a bit more feasible, unless they simply had especially big energy-fields surrounding them when brought live. Now I'm going to be more complicated, to test your mettle. Why did the weapons stations of the klingon tactical operators rotate, in a horisontal fashion? The phaserbanks I understand, because they have a wider field of fire, but the torpedo launchers are stationary! It's not like they have 'Millennium Falcon'-turrets. They should only need to observe the area it's pointing at, shouldn't they?
-------------------- "I'm nigh-invulnerable when I'm blasting!" Mel Gibson, X-Men
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posted
I gather they were for controlling the disruptor turrets, not the torpedoes. Even if we never saw any disruptor fire, the K't'inga models did have those tiny thingies that fanfic blueprints call disruptor turrets. And IIRC, we never saw who actually fired the torps - the gunners in the swiveling chairs, or some other personnel?
Kruge's BoP in ST3 had a single rotating gunner's chair as well, but that one was not used for controlling the torpedo launches against the Grissom and the Enterprise. Instead, we saw that the torpedo gunner was stationed in the pit in front of Kruge. Had Kruge ordered disruptors to be fired, the gunner in the swiveling chair would probably have acted.
Klaa's ship, of course, had the gunnery station integrated with Captain's chair, and all later sets seem to have omitted the separate gunnery chairs (except perhaps for the Duras sisters BoP in "Generations", which had two "Captain's chairs", one with a gunnery rig). Advances in targeting automation, allowing the manual control system to be removed?
Or is it just that the later BoPs (and all other ship classes) have been larger vessels, with a separate deck for gunnery control?
Timo Saloniemi
[ June 07, 2002, 02:02: Message edited by: Timo ]
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posted
quote:Originally posted by Timo: If torpedo launchers were puny little self-contained tubes like those in FASA blueprints, not much larger than yer average iron lung, why wouldn't Starfleet install 362 launc[h]ers per ship?
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posted
Humm... perhaps the big "tube" we see on many Klingon vessels is in fact a concentrated amount of tubes so that they can fire 5 torpedoes at once without having to load them all into the same launcher [something the Klingons might not have been able to do?].
This allows them to have the same "standard" sized torpedo casing that we've seen in Star Trek [about a meter long] and still hold true to the Klingon addage of "there is no such thing as a small weapon."
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quote:Originally posted by Nim Pim: Has the opening scene been polished in any way, in the Special Edition? More backdrop? More debris passing the ships, to illustrate high speed? Because when they're "retreating" from V'Ger it looks like they move in the speed of pregnant supertankers. Impulse engines indeed...
It's been polished in the sense that it's brighter and cleaner than any other version of the scene, but there are no added effects of any kind.
posted
Perhaps these huge torpedo launchers are similar to the Romulan plasma weapon from "Balance of Terror"? It is quite plausible that during the Klingon/Romulan alliance they exchanged more than just cloaking technology.
Indeed the VFX from ST:III & ST:V seam to indicate that Kruge and Klaa's BoP is armed with an energy based torpedo launcher. We don't actually see a Bird of Prey fire "normal" looking photon torpedoes until ST:VI (chronologically) I also recall that the launchers them selves differ in design from the ship's first appearance to what we see in late TNG and onwards. Also the Battle cruisers' launchers seen in the movies also seam to glow as they power up, much like the early Birds of Prey.
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