Why Are Phaser Strips This Way?
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- Опубліковано 3 гру 2022
- Phaser arrays, strips or emitters are the go to for Starfleet ships from the 22nd century onwards, even preceded by the Phase Cannon. The phaser on starships are basically the same principle as the handheld versions, just a lot more powerful.
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Phaser strips were a genius invention, both in Universe and as a concept for whichever writer or VFX artist came up with them.
Probably based of of phased array radars from irl.
Yeah it looks cool seeing the energy travel qcross the hull before it shoots out.
I can't agree. They mean that every segment of a strip has to be able to handle the output of the entire strip... instead of having ONE emitter that can do the same thing. Nah. That's not good engineering.
@@TenchiJeff shame Star Trek Online doesn't do that :/
Almost
The converging energy before the strip fired is a an under-appreciated effect.
***PICARD S3 SPOILER!!!I***
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It was AMAZING to see that SFX being used in Picard
If only star trek online could use those effects
thats not a spoiler@@alliegarneau
@@patricklenigan4309it's possible that it's an engine limitation
The colour is based on frequency. In Best of Both Worlds, when Data starts rotating the Enterprise phaser frequencies the beam also changes colour.
yep good point indeed.
@@krzosu also good that someone had the idea to change the colour in that scene
As someone who has recently rewatched this two-parter, i can confirm
Glad they added that detail. Science is so much work in real life and in tv and film there's such a great opportunity there to make up great science details in your sci fi
I think they altered the look in one of the Barcley episodes as well. Geordi did something to make the Phasers "as hot as we can make 'em" to try and stop an alien probe, if memory serves?
A weapon that can cover an enormous arc around the vessel, fire in multiple directions at once, *and* distribute heat loading to increase operational life is an ingenious weapon. And that's before you get into other neat tricks of phasers, such as rapid frequency changing or enormously variable yield.
Too bad that great idea wasn't invented HUNDREDS OF YEARS AGO by the British and French.
And that no one ever thought of putting many cannons on multiple big turrets that can rotate, so as to be able to fire in all directions.
What I love the idea of the phaser strips because it sets federation ships apart from other ships in the setting, but also from nearly all other ships in media. A beautiful design choice
I always liked the Phaser Strips of Next Generation Star Trek most, I believe. Especially the "buildup sequence" shortly before it fires. Always seemed to be the smarter weapon.
i say each ship that has Phaser Strips had a unique way to charge there emitters up, in TNG because of how massive the Enterprise D/Galaxy Class is, of course its charge up is two coming from both sides, they are that big and would be more of an efficent way to charge up... but personally for me, i like Voyagers, because while in some cases the Beam of Phaser Energy just, comes out, when we do see Voyager actually Charge up a Phaser Emitter (mainly the Saucer's phaser strips) its only a single chargecoming from one side of the strip
I liked the way voyager phasers were more powerful once they were modified by seven they seemed more effective than before
I suspect Andrew Probert and the design team had an understanding, conscious or otherwise, that technology trends towards fewer moving parts. So when it came to weapons, they took the phaser to its logical conclusion - a weapon with no moving parts at all. It's a really cool idea especially at the time, and an example of how early TNG design was futuristic in the purest sense that it really tried to explore how things were going.
I think if they continued with that trend past TNG era, we might have seen something like phaser hull plating, or multipurpose emitters that work as phasers and sensors or deflectors.
That pretty much parallels real-world radar development, at least for military applications.
@@MonkeyJedi99 Exactly. In the cases when I've made my silly post-TNG fan ship designs, I follow a similar rule and use nonmoving parts (looking like phased array radars). Of course, the designers also get some inspiration from aircraft - I wish they'd take some inspiration from some of these newer components at some point.
Star Trek used futurists.
French futurists in the 16th or 17th century came up with remote viewing screens for admiring ladies. They dreamt up camgurls centuries ago.
Or at least self healing Nano armor on their ships by the time of the Dominion War.
Gene Roddenberry came up with the concept of "unchained technology". With means no buttons, flat smooth surfaces, programmable computer screens with touch sensitivity, etc. I mean the designers took it to it's logically conclusions
I’ve always thought it was cool how they could have one huge beam or ten smaller ones. Also that shot with the phaser beams searching in the nebula is one of the few redeeming qualities of Nemesis.
I've always thought that's a way phasers should be used as a combined range finder for the torpedoes and as a point defense system.
@@RussellBowesthat’s how the Enterprise D handled the fighters when they lost their memories to Commander McDuff
@@RussellBowes yeah the fact they don’t have a ciws type weapon to take out torpedoes despite regularly shooting them down when plot convenient pisses me off, torpedoes do a ton of damage and clearly you can shoot them down so why don’t you. Modern navy ships are based around missile defense why don’t we still have that in the future
@@Utubesuperstar Let alone how small the photon torpedoes are physically (about a meter long), vs how few are carried by the Ent-D (about 250). I'd like to see a comment about how during the Dominion War the number of photon torpedoes carried was increased by an order of magnitude, along with similar increase in antimatter storage to fuel them.
@@Utubesuperstar That happened in the 2009 reboot movie, and I think was the only example of that.
The adaptability of phasers is closely aligned with the Federation doctrine of non-lethal combat when possible.
We come in peace, shot to kill? :)
@@Stormcrow_1
Starfleet: "I have a multitool. It has n different functions. Thera are n+1 ways it can be used to kill you."
Alien: "How can it have more ways to kill me than functions?!"
Starfleet:
Alien: "About that non-aggression treaty you were talking about..."
@@Tezunegari If I take this into the real world; A drill has one function. I can think of at least 3 ways to kill someone with a drill.
I think that Starfleet officer needs some more training.
I saw a theory once that suggested the reason why phasers were orange then changed to blue then back to orange was because Starfleet struggled to meet demand during the Romulan War so the Andorians supplied weaponry to new ships and their tech just hung around in Starfleet ships until the TOS era
It very well could be but remember andoria is part of the federation
Given that phasers in TOS (not the remaster)were inconsistent colour wise Starfleet probably didn't actually change the colour afterwards but just decided to default to a orange frequency.
Well, you guys would be wrong. Red and Orange colors in the Light Spectrum has the highest Frequency, which is why they use those colors. Green and Blue has some of the lowest in the scale.
@@ileria3 You have it backwards Blue are the higher frequencies while Red is the lowest just look at a light spectrum chart that includes things like wavelength and frequency shorter the wavelength higher the frequency. Or you could just think about how Violet leads to UV which leads to X-Rays then Gamma Rays.
I kind of see it like that
I also see it as during the TOS era, starfleet was much more reliant on the Federation's member worlds contributing to the fleet, which means you get the warrior species (andorians) contribute to a ship's weapon systems, the vulcans contribute to their defensive systems like shields, and the Tellarites contributed to their propulsion systems.
Later down the line, Starfleet became much more self sufficient as the bigger they got.
Anecdotal note: Star Trek Online used the same engine as Champions online, and Cryptic forgot to disable power customization initially. So with a console/text commands you could change the phaser colour to whatever you wanted. Hot pink neon phasers were sexy.
HOLY SHIT THAT WOULDVE BEEN AMAZING.
They should have kept that
One thing I miss from earlier phasers was actually seeing their wider utility. From being able to stun enemy combatants from orbit to the "depth charge" bursts used against the Romulan Bird of Prey (would have been perfect to "paint" the Scimitar's position in Nemesis), it would help to sell phasers as being as multi-utility at the ship scale as at the personnel scale.
I got a kick out of TOS using them from orbit to stun a few city blocks.
This is one (minor) thing that annoys me about Discovery -- 1000 years in the future and they're still using phasers, with TOS sound effects, but with nowhere near the utility aside from pew-pew. Even the TOS phasers could stun from orbit. TNG had phasers drilling into planets, acting as a scalpel, and intercepting missiles, Voyager had phasers opening portals, and DS9 even had phasers carrying out a prophesy (as they do). TNG probably used phasers as large-scale tools half as much as they were used as weapons.
I always love how the phasers on the Enterprise D first form semi circles and then join together to fire a single beam. I always thought it was cool
The phaser has to make money somehow.....
Phaser? I don't even know her.
@@zirconia21 She covers a wide field.
The phaser is putting itself though nursing school
There's also all the little phasers to feed.
Actually the greatest advantage of the array is the distribution of heat loading. Whilst traditional ball phaser turrets could theoretically fire indefinitely as long as they have power there is a limit to The continuous fire that they can put out before thermal loading forces them to stop and cool off. A Galaxy class starship's phaser system theoretically has 45 minutes of continuous fire before the phasers overwhelm the liquid coolant loops and force the ship to ceasefire to offload heat.
I'd guess the ship would run out of energy way before overheating then...
@@anlumo1 Or run out of things to shoot at!
Don't get me started on heat management in science fiction. A Galaxy class ship generates multiple terawatts at idle and far more at maximum warp or in combat.
That means it has at the minimum gigawatts of heat to get rid of but we never see radiators.
My headcacon is that the impulse engines are those radiators which is why they glow constantly even when the ship isn't moving.
@@markfergerson2145 I mean yeah I can't make sense, like they dump energy into the thrusters. Or that they simply have stupidly efficient things
@@markfergerson2145 What we percieve as "not moving" is actually keeping a stationary point in a moving system.
I always thought that the phaser banks gave a good sense of power, the repeated volley of phaser energy coming out like a machine gun (kinda like the Defiant's phaser cannons), but there's just something satisfying about phaser strips, how the beam travels across the hull of the ship without having to change which set of banks is firing and just swinging around like a lightsaber to do damage. I'm torn either way :D
Phaser strips allowing multi directional fields of fire are excellent as ultimately they give 360 degree fields of fire. Meaning the ship isn't disadvantaged from any direction
This has impacts like no extreme vulnerability for a Federation fleet to "crossing the T" tactic
Since it does not have traditional broadside in phaser array terms. Although front and rear torpedo arcs might consider otherwise.
To me it seems the Federation seeks to give its ships like the Galaxy, Intrepid and Sovereign classes (note the Defiant does have aft mounted phaser strips) 360 degree defense. Which it considers more important. To allow for continuous firing during manoeuvres
I always enjoyed the strip, quite a clever weapon
I always loved how the Enterprise would fire its phasers in TNG. So cool and futuristic. The only downside is the phasers were only as strong as the plot demanded.
The Galaxy class also has strips on the secondary hull. One along the underside arraigned horizontally, and two on the nacelle pylons. I think there are also some shorter ones on the flat bit between the pylons ventral and dorsal. For a exploration ship it was virtually bristling with them.
Yes; The Galaxy class has 12 strips in the standard configuration, 14 in the Dominion war refit version (adding one on top of each engine Nacelle).
Indeed so. 12 in total. A veritable fortress. Sadly, only as strong/effective as the writers needed for any particular episode
It wasn't just an exploration vessel, it also served as the Federation's front line, essentially doing the task the Constitution did in its time; a ship capable of matching any vessel an opposing power could throw at them. The Federation designed the Excelsior in the hopes of replacing the Constitution class but was unable to achieve the same performance standard the Constitution did in it's time (due to the transwarp drive, being a core part of the Excelsior design, but was scrapped because of how easily Scotty could completely disable an entire ship with one in Star Trek III) and ended up struggling to keep up with the counterparts produced by other Galactic powers as a result.
I think the prevailing theory for why the Ambassador's life span was so short is because it was just a test bed for brand new technology for their end goal, the Galaxy class. Once the Ambassador showed how successful the use of this new tech was the Galaxy class project was put in full swing, the Ambassador class was cut short to allocate resources to the Galaxy class when construction of the Galaxy class began to allow it to be operational as soon as possible across Federation space. The Galaxy became the first ship since the Constitution class that was truly able to meet the bar of performance set by the Constitution class.
A deep space explorer can't count on reinforcements quickly, so being able to hold it's own is actually pretty smart.
@@Kelorel That theory makes sense, especially when you take into account the ST:TNG technical manual, which says that the _Galaxy_ project started (I think) on a drawing board nearly 20 years before the _Enterprise_ launched.
The dual banks in ships would have been harder and more intense refits to change over , so built the ship from the ground up with the strip
I've always thought it was weird that they didn't put strips along the outermost-facing regions of the nacelles. Considering the amount of power flowing to them anyway, it seems like a design oversight.
Whats the one place you don't want to encourage your enemy to shoot at? Your engines. That's why.
If you put weapons along your engines, they are now a doubly inviting target...
The Dominion War refit Galaxy's did have them on the top part of the Nacelles. Most likely to cover them from above from any Dominion fighter wanting to kamikaze them in an obvious weak spot.
@@bipolarminddroppings I was gonna make some a somewhat snarky comment about how often Starfleet ships get their nacelles shot up anyway (especially the starboard ones, for some reason), but you're right, If they're getting shot up and damaged that much _without_ weapons emplacements on them, there's no need to encourage someone to shoot at them _more._ Although, you'd think they'd add extra shield emitters around the nacelles instead...
the warp coils probably emit so much subspace radiation that ether its almost impossible to create a stable beam and the phaser energy disperses or the Nadion particles generated so close disrupts the coils and cause a field collapse.
we only see something similar on Dominion war era Galaxy class ships and even then it looks like the phaser strip is mounted onto something else and not embedded directly into the Nacelle, maybe to improve firing arcs or shield the two from affecting each other for safety.
@@bipolarminddroppings I don't buy that for a second. Every time an enemy has wanted to destroy a federation ship instead of capture it, they've targeted the most vulnerable sections anyway. Repurposing the power draw for extra firepower would make way more sense.
Great video. I was wondering, (and you covered it) if the array would still function if a section of it was damaged. I mean, it would totally suck if it worked the way of old Christmas tree lights, where one burns out and the whole thing is dead. Good thing that is not the case!
The phaser strips provide a tactical advantage that turrets/banks simply do not. By providing a much wider field of fire than a fixed emplacement, a starship with phaser strips can maneuver more freely during combat without losing the ability to fire on a target (which may itself also be maneuvering). This is especially important on larger starships. Small ones like the Defiant-class don't need this functionality as much. But the big starships with saucers benefit greatly.
That slow buildup from the Galaxy class really gives it the feeling of being able to pack a punch.
You mentioned the Constellation class using the old style Phaser banks. I had the impression that the Constellation was based on the advancements from the Constitution Refit Project, and was in most respects simply a beefed up more powerful more versatile ship, and didn't have much advancements over the Constitution Refit.
If I remember my readings, the first Constellation ship entered service when the Excelsior was still in it's early testing, around the time of Star Trek II, III.
The Excelsior was a significant technological improvement over both ships, and was slightly better than the Constellation in most ways.
Both the Constellation and Excelsior used Phaser Banks, as they both from that era of ships.
The Ambassador evolved from the Excelsior, and does indeed appear to be the first ship using the new Phaser Strips.
Overall of all the ships in Starfleet, I would say pound for pound the best is the Excelsior, being in service for over 100 years, and then getting a second major upgrade in the form of the Excelsior II in the late 2390s or early 2400s.
I do love these, especially since they are more adaptable than disruptors - for example when a Galaxy-Class was firing on a Cardassian ship during the Dominion war they could go for less firepower (Cardi ships aren't that durable and technologically they lag behind the Federation, too!), but multiple-shots! Hell, this way a phaser-strip could pull point-defense-duty (hundreds of low powered bolts or beams to intercept enemy torpedos for example, sadly never seen on the shows!)
Federation weapons are very much like modern US military systems. Kira said it best in DS9 4x14:
"This is a Cardassian phase disruptor rifle. It has a 4.7 megajoule power capacity, 3 millisecond recharge, two beam settings... It's a good weapon. Solid, simple, you can drag it through the mud and it will still fire.
Now this... this is an entirely different animal. Federation standard issue. A little less powerful but it's got a lot more options. Sixteen beam settings. Fully autonomous recharge, multiple target acquisition, gyro-stabilized, the works. It's, um... a little more complicated, so it's not as good a field weapon, too many things can go wrong with it."
The Federation has the resources to produce state-of-the-art, highly sophisticated technology, AND the logistics and knowledge necessary to sustain it. An F-35 is a highly expensive, capable precision instrument requiring many hours of maintenance per flight hour, a Saab or MiG-29 is designed to take off from some rural highway with minimal maintenance.
This is obviously an oversimplification, but it highlights why Cardassia on its own was never a real threat to the Federation. The Federation is economically *orders of magnitude* more capable than the Cardassian Union (and probably any other Alpha Quadrant power by the late 24th century), and it took the Dominion occupation to make them a threat. This is, clearly, the same with the current state of a theoretical US versus Russia conflict. The economies are not even measurable.
Fun fact Dominion polaron weapons were first called "Polarized Disruptors" not shure if they kept that designation in future appearances.
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You would think at least one other race of beings would also have phaser strips. I think it's kind of odd that the Federation is the only galactic power that truly sees the advantage in them.
According to Spacedock, the Ambassador class was the first federation starship to have phaser strips. It's a shame we didn't see the Ambassador class in the Dominion War, but I liked your in-universe explanation for why it wasn't seen (too old to be state of the art like the Galaxy and Sovereign, but too expensive to perform menial tasks like the Miranda and Excelsior).
Starfleet is the only organization using phaser strips, because they are the only ones using phasers. Most prefer the simpler but less versatile disruptor.
In my view, the reason the Federation is the only galactic power to use phaser strips ultimately comes down to two things. The Federation's design philosophy and the Federation's operational standards. The Federation's design for their starships are always designed to allow a ships a degree of versatility, allowing it to perform a variety of tasks. The strip style allows infinitely more options to a vessel than the banks do and that's the main reason they're used primarily by the Federation because each starship needs to be able to handle more delicate tasks which the strips are more able to compensate for where banks are not nearly as capable.
This doesn't mean banks are inferior to strips, as banks are much cheaper, simpler but still just as powerful as strips are, which we see in several engagements Starfleet vessels have had with alien ships. I do imagine other galactic powers eventually adopting the strip design to a degree, but likely not as reliant on them due to the difference in cost and ease of installation (and likely maintenance) the use of strip style weapons come with.
The Federation is also one of the few powers more obsessed with exploring deep space, and when you keep venturing into deep space you need to make sure you ship has every advantage it possibly can so it can handle the difficulties deep space throws at those who wander. No other major power is nearly as concerned with that like the Federation is.
As I mentioned in my post, they're a characteristically Starfleet idea: If phaser strips have a disadvantage it's that they're complicated and expensive (mass, volume, materials, not dollars), and Starfleet _loves_ throwing resources and raw technological supremacy to compensate for their... overall design shortcomings. Other factions might have a specific idea of what their ships need to do and an overall doctrine, Starfleet doctrine is 'if we throw enough science at it, we can make our ships a Master of All Trades'.
Does it work? ... eh. They're good, not quite good enough that others can't keep up with them with ships that are, frankly, probably cheaper.
That said, though it's kind of cheating, the Borg use a similar technology of distributed emitters concentrating to an arbitrary point, though they have a whole _wall_ rather than a strip. It's not clear if they had this technology prior to encountering the Enterprise, but it seems... honestly pretty likely.
Also the Federation is not the only faction to use phasers: While the advantages of a phased nadion beam as opposed to a decoherent nadion stream are... unclear, but seemingly relatively minor (probably focus at extreme range, where most people would be wanting to use torpedoes), we know that many factions use phasers in at least some roles. The Ferengi and Cardassians being two prominent examples. The Cardassians succinctly demonstrate the 'at least some roles' caveat with the _Galor_ class ships having both disruptors and phasers. It's also worth noting that, while not 'canon', DS9 technical manual lists phaser strips as one of the technologies the Cardassians are experimenting with.
Basically the entire flavor of this channel right there in the title
Taking a hard look at the Star Trek franchise and saying
"Why are you...the way that you are?"
For good or for ill.
Hear me out: what if future Starfleet would implement phaser-array Systems into the Hull, or parts of the Hull directly? That would look cool and would make it possible for the beam to be much bigger/intenser if needed and would instantly make the field of vision for it multidirectional.
Though not Trek, Orion’s Arm does have something like this, specifically Optical Phased Arrays that can cover a ship’s hull and generate a powerful laser beam, or model the surroundings for optical camouflage.
I made some ships where there were phaser plates/panels which were hull panels that could act as phasers. Imagine covering the entire ship in those and just launching a giant beam at something.
Honestly, the ball turret of "phaser" banks had the same field of fire, but they opted for the appearance of higher tech in TNG.
When firing several beams from a strip, I'd assume it's being used as a point defense against a swarm of smaller weaker ships. Then you can basically fill the area around a vessel with phaser beams to clear small attack vessels.
The enterprise-D did exactly that in the episode "conundrum". A great looking effects shot from 1991 television! 🙂
@@Chronix- beat me to it!
They can also be used that way to shot oncoming torpedoes, but are never shown to do this.
Neat, I always thought the phaser array was a track that several omnidirectional cannons traveled upon. Glad to learn something new.
Now that's a neat idea, I wonder if it's been used anywhere
@@lucky-segfault4219 the mining ship at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 has just that, with the laser emitters traveling along the hull on little tracks
The Phaser style from the Wrath of Khan are my favorite. The sound gets my spine tingling.
Phaser? I barely even knew her!
Best of Both Worlds categorically proves the colour of the Phaser is linked to the frequency because if you pay attention to the scene where the Enterprise fires its phasers at the Borg Cube on a rotating frequency the colour of the Phasers varies with each shot, even going colours we don't generally see like Green.
One note- there was a limit to how many strip "sections" could be used to chain phaser strength insofar as being channeled out thru an emitter. (In other words, you can chain the energy, but each emitter can only handle so much output without suffering damage.) Otherwise, ships like the Sovereign "breaking" the strips instead of having pure circular/elliptical "loops" would make no sense (coming after the -Hotel- Galaxy-Class's much longer strips).
I wondered that too.
Phaser Strips for the federation makes more sense than cannons, as starfleet is predominately a defensive force (with some serious offensive capabilities, when needed), as the leave little to no blind spots mimicking the animal kingdom where predators usually have more forward facing eyes which are better for hunting, while prey usually have eyes positioned to reduce blindspots (such as on the side)
I will add that the term "phaser array" is the technical term for these types of phasers, at least according to the Tech Manual for The Enterprise D - where we first saw them in use. Though the first few episodes of Season One of TNG only showed them using the new photon torpedo's - it wasn't until episode 21, "The Arsenal of Freedom", did we see the phasers in action.
Yes, I am old enough to remember seeing the first broadcast of TNG on Tv, though not old enough to have seen TOS, except in reruns. (Thank you, Lucille Ball (I Love Lucy) who funded the pilot aired episode of TOS when CBS wouldn't).
After playing STO and the escort class of ships, turrets were my bread and butter. 360 fire range where i would pick a cluster and just fly through. It was so devisating to mobs
Hi Certified. Great Star fleet mundane (taken for granted)technological breakdown. Thank you.
Love the video and animations you used.
Could you do a video on the Cardassian ship Phasers and how they differ from Federation Phasers?
I think that the STII phasers fired as bolts instead of solid streams is because the power was taken directly from the warp drive and not a battery bank. The warp power was probably too much for the ball turrets, and they had to have a cool down period in between each bolt.
Thank you for such an informative video. I’ve always wondered how, and when they made the jump from the turrets to strips.
They could make an overkill design by covering a whole saucer section, the top part at least, with phaser strips. Would be interesting to see an enemy captain wide eyed seeing a Federation starship whole saucer section glowed before a barrage of phaser beams tore his ship apart. Of course, ship might run out of power with just the first couple of barrages.
Sometimes frontloading all your firepower works better than having a sustainable barrage. It depends on the situation. That kind of strategy would obliterate the Borg. Can't adapt if you're dead in the first shot. This was definitely highlighted in their first encounter with the Borg. They did a ton of damage initially, but didn't follow through so the Borg regenerated and adapted, and the rest is history.
Great vid Ric!
So how do these compare to the newer ships past the Picard era? The Stargazer looks to be a mix of turrets and strips. Looks like less strips than you expect. By the 31st I couldn't tell where they were firing from. I figured they fire from the hull but I didn't see anything on this. Anyone have the answer?
"I'm not sorry" - don't be. For some reason this made me laugh.
Phaser banks have appeared on the Warp Nacelles of Starfleet vessels before although as said rare. The most obvious example was the Galaxy Class during the Dominion War and most likely where the term Galaxy X class came from. Turn an already deadly vessel (when commanded properly eh Riker) into even a more bad ass battleship to get vengeance for the Odessey. Come to think of it Galaxy Class and Galaxy Wings were rather potent in absence of seeing the Sovereign Class in action!
Still sad we didn’t get to see a Sovereign wreck face in the Dominion war. Just one as a fleet flag ship, pumping out quantoms and spraying fire
The phaser strip is low-key brilliant.
It may be ignored in Sci-Fi at times, but generally speaking, a powerful gun is a big gun (a phaser, while very technically advanced compared to dumb ol' firearms, still counts as a 'gun' in this context'). Big guns are heavy, if you want to put them in a turret it needs to be a big turret. All of this adds up to a huge, heavy system. You're limited in where you can put turrets because you need to make space in the hull for the mechanisms, and limited in how many turrets you can include because they're extremely expensive (in every way: mass, volume, and materials). And each turret can, of course, only do what that turret is capable of. You may be able to scale power down in the case of phasers, but never up - you can't fire a Type VII blast from a Type VI mount (well, okay, maybe you can... once).
The phaser 'bank' and its ball turret, which includes just a steerable emitter, is a vast improvement over the previous phase cannons where the entire assembly is turreted, but still limited. However, it is still limited. This pattern is quite realistic for an energy weapon, which doesn't have to be directly inline with its 'action' like the barrel of a gun. But even an energy weapon benefits from a bigger turret - in the real world in terms of focus and therefore range, as well as the energy-per-area passing through the optics (too much risks overheating and breaking down the system). And of course while you can in theory redirect a beam from anywhere in the ship, in practice that's a recipe for disaster, so you'll want your 'collimator' close to the emitter, if not actually physically locked to it.
You could also sacrifice the turret as a whole in favor of just sticking the biggest phaser you can down the length of the ship and aiming it by steering - half the principle behind the Defiant's Pulse Phasers, and similarly seen in other smaller Federation craft like the Peregrines. A lot of other factions do this too, with fixed weapons (or a mixture of fixed and turreted) weapons on their battle corvettes (an overall design concept which I maintain is the King of Battle in the ST milleu).
Alternatively, the phaser strip. The phaser strip is genius. You need a turret to have an effective angle of fire on a large ship, but turrets are a pain. So instead, break the turret down in multiple emitters with a much smaller angle of fire, directing energy to wherever it's needed. You can make the emitters quite big because they don't need to move, and you can even risk more charge through them because they're redundant. What this means, in other words, is that you can put the kind of power you'd need an impractically big turret (admittedly, the Federation's judgement of 'an impractically big turret' might be a bit conservative) for into a strip, which can fire with coverage that'd require 2-3 of those turrets. A phaser strip, quite simply, not only does the job of entire battery of banks or conventional turrets, but it does it better, with more power and more endurance. (Accuracy... maybe? Accuracy in practice is determined by sensor & computing quality, but it could be that traverse time is the main reason we don't see *really* big turrets from anyone.)
It's also more reliable, being able to path around battle damage (at reduced effectiveness, but that's better than nothing), and I can't imagine a ship having great difficulty replicating a replacement emitter, while they might have trouble with banks that are much bigger individually. (Okay, it'd be a more involved process than that - they'd replicate replacement parts, assemble them in... I can't remember if the Ent-D cargo bay canonically has a shuttle door, but it should, and take out a C-Bee with a work crew to put it in place.) Their main disadvantage is that while they're better than a turret and accomplish the work of several turrets... they are kind of a huge commitment in themselves, certainly outcosting (again, mass, volume, materials) a single turret unit (let alone a fixed emitter) which could theoretically offer the same firepower. Which honestly makes them characteristically Starfleet, given their habit of sparing no expense compensating for an overall design doctrine best described as 'disjointed', and even they use them sparingly on smaller ships. I will say that in terms of design tax and refitting, they're... probably not actually that much worse than the old phaser banks. Converting between the two would be a pain in the ass, but I guarantee you there's a lot of stuff that goes behind those phaser banks, and phaser strips as a whole unit can be replaced roughly as easily. Maybe easier?
... also I'm pretty sure if you really wanted you could make a version that bolts on to the outside of the hull instead of being recessed.
This ability to "transfer their charge" to the next emitter is the reason the Galaxy class is THE most fearsome weapon platform that the Federation has released during the TNG era. With 933 emitter elements in its main dorsal array, the Galaxy class was far more than an apartment or luxury cruise ship in space. And once her warp containment issues were fixed, she really was a monster.
No other Federation ship during this era packs this kind of punch.
Keep in mind that Miniaturization isn't the same at this point in time as the tech is now a mature tech and isn't going to be seeing significant firepower or performance increases or size reductions. See current mature Internal Combustion Engine tech vs Computers, which as a newer tech are seeing massive strides in power and reductions in size.
So the number of arrays wasn't so important, but we as gamers have made it a point of thinking that the number of hardpoints is what reflects its combat ability. This mistake in mechanics now, sadly, bleeds into everything.
If the Enterprise E had been equipped with a couple of phaser turrets in addition to the strip arrays, she may have fared better against the Scimitar. Instead of waiting for the phaser sweeps to locate the warbird and THEN hit it with torpedoes, they could have had the turrets continually trace the warbird's path, arguable more efficiently than the strips.
Don't see how it would have made a difference tbh, we see that the E can adjust the angle of attack while firing in first contact while shooting the Cube (or as a friend who only knows sci-fi as Star Wars called it, the Doom Dice)
And we know that phasers can be sustained. I can't see any reason they couldn't just poke it with one on low power and keep it on target or something.
My going head canon is one of two things.
1. Starfleet knows of a common exploit of sustained phaser fire, where a ship can use it's shields to push energy back through the phaser to damage it/the ship and teaches crews to keep phasers to bursts.
2. The cloaking system actually sends out multiple electronic warfare packets that constantly screw a phasers targeting system into firing at sensor ghosts, to the point that it's almost impossible to keep a phaser pointing in the right direction.
Though the idea of a set of turrets along side the phaser strips isn't exactly meritless. There's probably lots of ways a single(double?) more powerful emitter could come in handy.
Seeing “Wrath of Khan” style stutter fire pulse phasers from the Enterprise-E lancing into the Scimitar would’ve been immensely satisfying.
No.
You might have a point, but maybe not for the reason you think. While I disagree that turrets would be better at tracing the Scimitar's path than a phaser strip, phaser turrets did have a more obscure use back in TOS that could have come in handy when fighting the Scimitar.
I think the entire idea of the phaser strips is that each emitter along the strip can function as a turret at the cost of lower overall output but better coverage, or you could combine their power to reach phaser turret levels, so what you say about the turrets should be just as easily achieved with the phaser strips being used as smaller but more numerous turrets. What confounds me is why they don't rapidly sweep individual beams across their field of fire, reducing the chances of a cloaked vessel using the vastness of space to slip between two beams fired straight with an angle between them, like we had in Nemesis. It's like having a target that can possibly be between two points, and at an unknown distance, but only searching for that object by firing at the two points exactly, despite having a beam weapon, which is essentially a pulse weapon with an insane fire rate and muzzle velocity. You get a gun that shoots fast enough, and it's basically firing a beam of bullets, so the way I think of phaser beams is that if you are trying to take down numerous smaller targets or finding something invisible, treat it as you would if your ship had a CIWS or one of the Expanse's PDCs on it. Don't just fire bursts of ammo along the same vectors at fixed points, using a machine gun as a sniper rifle (what we see the E doing, shooting a bunch of straight lines around itself), actually turn the turret as needed so that your spray of ammo (in this case, rapid-nadion pulses) cover a wider area. In essence, you can think of a beam weapon as just a full-auto pulse/energy bullet weapon as the fire rate of the weapon approaches infinity.
The entire point of having a cloaked vessel is to make it hard for anything to trace their path, and with a massive strip of independently targetable phaser emitters each being essentially a less powerful phaser turret, you would expect them to fire each one separately and at lower power, using them to sweep the area like a radar, and registering any hits. More possible emitters are analogous to more turrets in this case, and you'd sacrifice power in order to find the target faster. There's no guarantee that a phaser turret could trace the warbird better than a phaser strip, especially considering that the Scimitar ended up reducing the Enterprise's weapons down to... what... 6%, was it, during the battle? Even if phaser turrets could have tracked the Scimitar better, they would have been easier pickings for the Scimitar to disable. If the entire point of a phaser strip is to have any point along its length be a possible turret, and even several of them at once, it shouldn't make a functional difference whether you have a phaser strip or just a lot of phaser turrets mounted next to each other, except the strip is supposed to allow said turrets to share power with each other to produce bigger blasts.
The main advantage of a turret, though, in my opinion, comes from the TOS episode "Balance of Terror", IIRC... I think that's the one where the Enterprise's phaser turrets were used to fire "Proximity blasts", IIRC. They were using these to hunt a cloaked Romulan Bird-Of-Prey, and they are exactly what they sound like: phaser blasts that explode after travelling a set distance, with a large radius of effect. They were designed by writers to be the similar in function to depth charges against submarines (in our case, cloaked ships). If each turret were to spew these towards the general location of the Scimitar, there might have been better results, seeing as they are designed for this type of warfare. Phaser strips have, to this point, not shown this ability on-screen, so...
What bugs me is how phasers are portrayed in this battle, since they're basically just show as point-and-shoot cannons whose beams cannot be adjusted much as they fire. A beam weapon is functionally identical to having the world's fastest-firing CIWS but with infinite muzzle velocity. When you are searching for an invisible target that you know to be nearby, and you have such a weapon, you don't just fire bursts of machine gun fire at certain points around the ship and leave everything in-between untouched, you systematically spray down everywhere they might be... and with phaser strips, each section of the strip should be its own CIWS. You could get much better coverage that way, and once you have their general direction, you blanket that direction with a cone of lower-power phaser beam sweeps. You'll lose the damage potential of the phaser strips, but you won't lose the target, and you'll be fully using your obscene number of emitters. The key isn't firing a "sweep" as in a bunch of separate beams on the same plane, the key is firing one beam and aiming that beam to cover the entire plane and using all the other emitters you have to do similar, and once one plane is swept, you adjust the angle ever so slightly and do it again, without releasing the beam. Think about a CNC machine of any sort constantly moving its head across a designated area, except you're doing it with as many constant phaser beams as your phaser strips have emitters and trying to paint a pattern on space. Is it foolproof? No. Space is still too big, and with enough distance, the Scimitar can still avoid this, especially if phaser beams lose power over range, which we assume they do since they are constantly glowing down their entire length and therefore have to be losing power at least as visible light. Is it better coverage than the phaser sweep that the E actually did that wouldn't have even worked in modern naval warfare? Yes. The only downside I can think of to this method is, as mentioned, if phaser beams have significant power falloff over range, since firing each of the strip's emitters separately would then drastically reduce their effective range. I'm not smart enough and lack the data to determine what the optimal sweeping strategy for the Enterprise E would be, but the Enterprise has the data, and they had Data, so it's inexcusable they just used 2D naval combat tactics when their weaponry should've allowed them to turn into a deadly disco ball and find the Nemesis no matter where it was, as long as it was within reasonable range, which it always seemed to be. In essence, using their phaser emitters to turn the ship into a gigantic phaser-based radar.
@@ananonymousnerd.2179 while I agree in principle, I don’t think the ship computer would have the power to use every single emitter in the strip to find the cloaked vessel. Data, I think, did it right in his firing pattern
The phaser strip type emitter was the Federations greatest advancement in directed energy weapon technology. Not only was it a scalable weapon that allowed longer strips to output far more power than other types of emitter's before it's time but it could also change the frequency and multitude of the beam to allow for it to be used for multiple tasks. The irony I always felt about Starfleet ships was that for vessels designed for exploration and scientific discovery, they were far better armed then their neighboring counterparts.
With the charge being built up along the length of the strip, that opens up the possibility of having a spiral pattern going in decreasing circles around a Saucer section, for a seriously over the top phaser layout with the strip being far longer than the π of the Saucer.
It may even be a failed prototype or just a overpowered concept that never went into production.
Often overlooked, the refit Constitution class had 4 individual (not paired) phaser emitters on the bottom of the secondary hull, and 2 just above the shuttle bay doors. Spherical coverage was pretty complete unless you were almost close enough to be touching the hull.
I’m wondering if a part of the phaser strip is damaged, does the array skip over the damaged area? Or will there be a separation from where it can charge?
Damage to the phaser array efectivly shortens it. you get less powerfull main fire, but at least it is still usable. unlike a turret that is prone to becoming jammed or stuck as well as having its weapon damaged.
We Don't Know (tm)
We have an explanation of how they work in the TNG Tech manual but it's not canon.
It says there's a big EPS power duct that runs the length of a strip and gates to power each emitter segment. As long as the duct and gating elements aren't too badly damaged, the strip still works with some segments damaged.
Interesting. We have something similar on Capital Freighters in Eissentam too, a simple, dual purpose Defense Turret, which can flawlessly switch between Phase Beam and Photon Cannon firing modes.
Pretty cool, huh?
given the lack of obvious phaser strips or banks/turrets on the 32nd century starship fleet makes me suspect that the future of the technology integrated the emitter array into the very skin of the ship, allowing a beam to be fired from nearly any point, and greatly increase the amount of phaser charge that can be built up before the beam is fired.
I always loved the pulsed phasers from Star Trek 2. They were the best.
One advantage of a phaser strip is that they allow you to functionally have lots of individual phaser emitters that cover a wide field of fire, but in practice _any_ of them can project the combined firepower of _all_ of them.
It's like having a quantum superposition of turrets. They all collectively exist within one another. It makes it impossible to catch a ship at a disadvantage because it doesn't have to have all of its weapons _facing_ you for them to _all shoot you at once_ so to speak.
Simple but love it, always "beam" iconic indeed. Good to know more about'm.
Ric I love that pun at the end :D
Their power output is very low. The Type 10 is only 5.1 MW, which I thought was a misprint in the TNG Technical Manual. On the Galaxy class there are 200 upper emitters, giving a total possible output of 1 GW. The Phaser cannon on the Defiant has an array of stacked emitters, each of which can fire at a slightly different frequency, enabling it to more easily pierce a force field. The output is 40 MW, per cannon I think. So maybe 5 Type 10 stacked in each. The Phase cannon on the NX1 were rated at 500 MW each, and outputted 5 GW when they shorted. The rifle type Romulan weapon has an output of 7 MW I think they stated, in an TNG episode. The rifle shown in Voyager, where they were going to buy the Isokinetic cannon, was said to have an output of 9 MW. So I am sure the 5.1 MW in the TNG Guide was an error. Perhaps it was supposed to be 5.1 GW, which a 20 foot by 20 foot emitter could be rated at, when a man sized phase cannon is also 5 GW when overpowered. That would give an output from 200 emitters of 1 TW, about the energy released by 250 tons of TNT. Sounds more plausible.
i cant think of one reason turrets are used on smaller ships.
power
the smaller the ship the less power it had. they may not have had the space and power to run a full phaser array on a shuttlecraft. but that was just a random thought.
My favorite sci-fi weapon of all time, the legendary phaser array!
In my mind there are only really three reasons to keep the old style ball phasers.
1) Saving space - The most powerful strips seem to also be the largest, with blasts from the Galaxy class's saucer strips being the most powerful. At least, in theory. Since the choice of both the Enterprise D, E, and Voyager tend to all favor blasts from the largest strips before using the smaller ones. If the charge increases as it passes along the array, then this would make sense. BUT, this is just my observation. So for the biggest bang, you want the biggest strips... which takes a lot of space. The ball phaser mounts offer full power shots without the extra charge time, at the expense of requiring more power from the deuterium reactors and/or warp core, and requiring more cooling systems.
2) Versatility - While we see the arrays being used for some innovative new techniques such as the anti-matter bursts, older Trek seems to suggest that these older phasers had a few more firing options. Perhaps not standard, but in the hands of experienced engineers they could fire "charges" of the nadion particles, similar to the plasma torpedoes in Halo.
3) Manual control - While we do see phaser arrays being used with manual targeting, the array simply MUST require automated systems and targeting computers to function. Otherwise charges don't line up, and the unexplained method of aiming the beam would be quite challenging. Meanwhile, the ball is just a turret. This would make manual firing much easier to control, though requiring more personnel to fire more than one at a time. While not ALWAYS useful, given how often subsystems seem to fail in the average episode of Trek, having a backup must be nice.
And of course, for older starships that would be cost prohibitive to install arrays on.
Lemme know if that sounds at all reasonable, or if I'm just being a rambling fool at 2am. :V
I did wonder how they worked. Thank you.
I’ve “ beam” looking forward to your videos. :)
and yet Star Fleet mostly takes the brunt of the projectiles thrown at them, wish they wrote the Phaser Strips of a more Point Defense System, honestly its works perfectly as such
I think some of both could be interesting for war time ship or something, a larger ship for example might have a variety of turrets scattered around its hull for some extra firepower. Also for stations the turrets could be quite useful, not to mention phaser and torp mines. and the like.
I remember back when we didn't have no fancy phase arrays. We had rocks! We just tossed them out a window as we went by. It was good enough for us!
i've been wondering, what is the shield ability your ship is using in these videos? the one with the white rings moving front to back.
I believe that’s the Aegis set that you get from the crafting system. It was the first set of it’s type, and is considered to be pretty weak nowadays. The effect you are seeing iirc depicts a stacking defense buff vs whatever energy weapon the current target is using.
@@LMoftheCoast Ah, that is why i dont recognize it. Never got around to crafting that one. Thanks
There is always an advantage to multi-functional weapons. The Phasors strips can fire full power 'main gun' levels beams but can also fire dozens of smaller PD beams as needed. It may not be intentional, but it means ships equipped with them could be displaced to a reality where missiles, fighter or drone swarms are common place and actually keep up.
Harder to "take out their weapons array" when the emitter is movable, unlike turrets that are fixed in place.
I think phaser strips as a concept is a genius weapon for interstellar 360⁰ environment.
It's possible to have total coverage around your vessel better than any other ship in Star Trek or any other franchise.
There's no denying the sci-fi element of the Phaser Strip technology. The idea of a saucer being able to fight a stream of particles in a 360 direction with seemingly no blindspot if I phrase it like that. That being said, I much prefer from an aesthetic sense the original way of doing it. A set of cannons pointing a direction and going pew. That being said said, that being, I looove when you see the power travel along the circle, meeting in one spot and just spewing out a powerful blast.
I like to compare phaser strips to active electronically scanned radar. Fewer moving parts than than their mechanically directed predecessors, more options for mounting them.
The weapons coverage on the constitution really reminds me of that scene in ds9 where we saw an excelsior can have you under fire no matter where you are.
If you were sorry at 5:55, I would have been disappointed! Two thumbs up!
I have to admit that I prefer turrets, you still get a complete firing arc as well as equip each turret with its own generator so there is no central point of failure.
It may have been the old TNG Technical manual, i can't recall at the moment, but i think i've read somewhere that a phaser array could continue working even after 90% of the individual emitters were destroyed, which would give a starship unheard of levels of redundancy, even if at reduced capacity. I mean, completely disabling the offensive capability on a Fed ship, must be a pain. Your enemy is more likely to exhaust its energy reserves, then you destroying enough of its phasers.
And that's one of the main themes they went for with the Federation. The back ups have back ups that also have back ups. A Klingon vessel may hit harder, but good luck knocking a Fed ship out of the fight with their backups and Miracle Worker engineers. "Gul Dukat : I've found it wise to never underestimate the Federation's technical skill - or Captain Sisko's resourcefulness."
@@bacail good quote!
Seems to me they would be ideal for point defense, something I've not noticed get used much in Star Trek...
That beam pun gets a like
As far as I can tell the Phaser Strips on something like the Prometheus run hot and so don't have to pre-charge.
You can tell this kind as the middle of the strip glows slightly orange.
Could also just be how they hastily rigged the model during production. Instead of having to create external particle glow effects for a one off ship, you could instead create recessed lighting inside the strips and then just program a light or chain of lights to shoot through it.
slips, strips, and bars
Phaser colour change due to frequency means that you could potentially have an invisible beam to the naked eye at really high or really low settings. (Yes, It's a TV show, and invisible phasers wouldn't look as cool)
Also, As seen when the Duras sisters bug LeForge's visor, they bypass Enterprise's shields by knowing the exact frequency, so wouldn't cycling phaser frequencies all the time be the best option? Are there potential downsides to this (power output, emitter design constraints) ? Also shown in that episode is the Enterprise's shield frequency being a static value, so why wouldn't they rotate those frequencies by default?
Just thinking now, could you have 2 sets of shielding at 2 differing frequencies (that don't cancel each other out of course) to stop incoming attacks better?
Not making an Epic Mealtime reference here was a missed opportunity. "Phaser strips and phaser strips and phaser strips."
It could be that the phaser array isn't backwards compatible with the ship design of pre-Ambassadar-Class starships without a significant overhaul of the ship. This was why we don't see any older ships being equipped with arrays. However, this doesn't mean that development of phaser banks would end, because there's still a huge number of ships that are still using them, so it makes sense to continually develop and improve on phaser bank technology in order to keep them modernized. However, I can see over the decades as more and more modern ships are developed and the older ships are retired, it makes sense that less and less resources are put aside to further develop phaser bank technology as the resources would be better off further improving phaser array tech.
I wonder the reason Starfleet advances so much so fast is because humans are new to space travel and have a bunch of what ifs. While older species have become docile.
It also could be a trait inherent to humanity and few other species.
I remember a scene where the Ferengi talk about how humans got warp drives in like less than half the time it took them.
Like how the ferengi are commercial focused and the vulcans are logic focused. Humans are curiosity focused and/or better problem solvers. Sure everyone is a little curious and can solve problems but humans are just innately better at solving problems and developing things.
well, humans are basically smart / rational Klingons were very good with war and destruction. but understand you dont need to end your life at the age of 20 in a battle when you can just talk your way out
Romulans are anything but 'docile'
It's because of the collaboration between the united species. The other powers in the galaxy don't do that.
My head canon for why starfleet exploration ships can go toe to toe with their neighbor's warships is that because they're so focused on exploration and keep running into weird stuff, they're more advanced and can fit more capabilities into the same space. Usually they use this to build ships just strong enough to defend themselves and put the rest into science and utility, but the Defiant is an example of what happens when the federation makes something who's primary focus is kicking but.
I think a combination between banks and strips would be most efficient, the exact ratio between banks and strips should be determined by the size and manoeuvrability of the vessel
That has beam a good break down.
I always wondered what makes the superphasers on a miranda class different from regular ship phasers, they are the ones mounted onto the sides of the rollbar, are they just way more powerful, or is there more?
So each ship is outfitted with a miniaturized Hadron collier... awesome
Would you consider Starfleet ships to be Q ships? The phaser strips are hard to notice and could be overlooked, and few if any would realize your ship is armed.
Trek seems to operate in a universe where 'sensors' can tell you just about everything up to and including what the captain of the enemy ship had for breakfast that morning, barring 'scrambling', I doubt visual cues would help much, especially given the banks and turrets are also very small too. It's not the same as seeing a 35cm artillery gun on a ship's neck, versus a pile of crates through binoculars.
@@kauske True, I didn't think about that.
I like the phase canons as they look like....basically just guns
I like the oscillating phasers better (as seen on the Reliant, the Enterprise refit and...did 1701 - A ever fire it's phaser banks?).
No. _The Wrath of Khan_ was the only time we ever got to see phasers used in the TOS era movies. After that, a grand total of _six_ photon torpedoes were fired from the _Enterprise_ between Star Treks 3-6.