posted
Yes indeed, but I'm not saying it could fire for a whole minute, it was just a measurement. But the Ent-D fired, what, 10-15 torps in succession at Q in "Farpoint". A Constellation upgraded and preserved in todays' fleet (like the two Mirandas flanking the Defiant in "SoA") would probably be able to pull off a short five-second burst in the fire session I described. I don't imagine her magazines could take more than 20-30 per launcher, anyway.
Registered: Aug 1999
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8 torps at Q, about one a second. This versus the full spread we've seen fired several times out of the forward launcher -- ten torps fired at once that then diverge to track independently.
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
Registered: Feb 2001
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Last night I did some homework and decided to pry open The Making of Star Trek for the first time in an eternity to see what it said about the ship's weaponry.
"The ship's phaser banks are located on the underside of the saucer shaped hull, and therefore deck 11 contains the the ship's phaser controls and other related equipment and facilities. Phasers can also be fired from the area atop the saucer-shaped hull, in an area surrounding the bridge, but primary control facilities and equipment are located on deck 11."
The Making of Star Trek, p. 190
Now, the phrasing on the second sentence is a little strange, because you can read it two ways:
1) that there are phaser banks in the area surrounding the bridge (which kind of makes sense considering that would put banks around the two glowing domes, top and bottom), or
2) that all the phasers, related equipment and fire control are on deck 11, you can also fire the phasers from the bridge
I'm starting to lean towards the idea that deck 11 is basically the ship's battery and contained all the primary weapons, and maybe there were auxillary phaser banks around the bridge. Both configurations would leave a weaponry blind spot dead aft though, so if there was ever a mention of aft phasers those would have to be in the secondary hull.
All this is, of course, contradicted by the diagrams of the ship as shown in the same book, because it shows the main phaser at least two decks above where the text description puts it.
Furthermore,if you look at the cutaway drawing, there's not 11 decks in the saucer anyway!
The above is a cleanup of a scan from The Making of book, and I'm still working on finishing it up, so some details aren't there yet. The deck numbers are mine. (Note that I don't think the space immediately below the bridge is intended to be a deck...it's too freaking small.)
I think there's some argument to be made for this drawing being canon, because the side view of the Enterprise in the bridge turbolift alcove appears to match it (there are numerous arches just below the bridge --not added to my drawing yet -- that are pretty evident when the camera gets close to the diagram.
It's too bad Matt Jeffries died, cause right around that time he passed Andy Probert and I were talking about trying to find him and ask him a lot of questions about the origins of the designs, etc. Sigh.
-------------------- "Well, I mean, it's generally understood that, of all of the people in the world, Mike Nelson is the best." -- ULTRA MAGNUS, steadfast in curmudgeon
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted
This ties in nicely with some ENT-era stuff, actually. Whenever Enterprise fired her phase cannons as part of a serious command (i.e. Archer says "Fire!"), they'd almost always use the main cannon mounts on the underside of the ship. But in other instances, when the ship is generically "in combat", they use secondary mounts for defensive or dispersion fire - in other words, smaller phase cannons that we don't see (and the VFX model doesn't have).
Perhaps something like this could have retcon-evolved its way into TOS?
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