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Savings on special effects aside, what is the purpose/intent behind equipping ships with phaser strips, as opposed to fixed or movable turrets?

Imagine if you built in a few "universal" turret emplacements instead of the phaser strips - assuming you included robust power delivery systems, (or even just available space in the form of a power conduit of some kind), you could easily send a ship to spacedock to replace the current turret emplacements with better ones or different weapons altogether...

While it was never stated explictly, it could be a matter of firing arcs for fixed turrets as strips seem to be several emitters in a row. As for moveble turrets you'd have to have rails or what for the turrets to move in so it's simpler and faster just to have several emitters as the strips seems to be able to rapid fire (presumebly low power) shots at practically any point of the strip. It just seems to give better overall flexibility.

For starters, a fixed turret isn't a turret, it's a fixed mount (unless you mean a turret moving around the hull on rails or something?)
Also, a turret you have to physically align with the target to shoot it, which takes time. Phaser strips can shoot everything they have line of sight on.

There's limited evidence that it would be useful to do this on larger Starfleet vessels. A fast attack ship like a Defiant profits from fixed pulse phasers, but if you took the Defiants' main guns and mounted them in a turret... frankly, on a ship more like the Enterprise that might be close to the largest feasible main guns you could mount on the ship in a turret, since it's not realistic to build turrets half the size of the ship itself or anything.

And yet the Enterprise can mount phaser strips that seem to pack as much punch (at least) as Defiant. Granted that Enterprise is much larger, but she also has more durability and much greater targeting flexibility from the all-around strip armament.

Simon_Jester wrote:There's limited evidence that it would be useful to do this on larger Starfleet vessels. A fast attack ship like a Defiant profits from fixed pulse phasers, but if you took the Defiants' main guns and mounted them in a turret... frankly, on a ship more like the Enterprise that might be close to the largest feasible main guns you could mount on the ship in a turret, since it's not realistic to build turrets half the size of the ship itself or anything.

And yet the Enterprise can mount phaser strips that seem to pack as much punch (at least) as Defiant. Granted that Enterprise is much larger, but she also has more durability and much greater targeting flexibility from the all-around strip armament.

At least in TNG, we see that there's this sort of powering-up animation where energy streams across the phaser array, until it reaches the desired emanation point - in some shots, it appears like these strips consist of discrete units/cells connected in-line. If you were to simply dot individual ones of these over the surface of the ship, could they all fire simultaneously? Do we ever see the same strip firing more than 1 shot simultaneously?

I'm also thinking about how a few bubble turrets could cover firing arcs without taking up as much of the ship's surface area.

Strips seem to grant wider angle, and like biostem notes, it looks like longer strips can pool more power. Often the first shot a Galaxy class fires in a battle seems to gather from all along the strip and inflict more damage than normal. So I'd say they're a more flexible weapon in multiple ways.

Also, less to break. Moving parts invariably need maintenance, beams can fire any which way from emitters without anything large moving.

Hm, I suppose if you were going to do something turret-esque with the same 'gathering power' thing, a dome shape would be another option...

This. https://www.youtube.com 11:32.A Galaxy fires two simulataneous shots from the dorsal saucer array.

That link is broken btw.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDLjtp2Ummw 11:31. A Galaxy fires two simultaneous blasts blasts from the dorsal saucer strip.

Batman wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDLjtp2Ummw 11:31. A Galaxy fires two simultaneous blasts blasts from the dorsal saucer strip.

Enterprise-D has done that too:



(24 seconds)


Voyager has done this too:




Seems all phaser strips are capable of it. And no reason why not.






Old connies used to be able to fire at two targets at once.

biostem wrote:At least in TNG, we see that there's this sort of powering-up animation where energy streams across the phaser array, until it reaches the desired emanation point - in some shots, it appears like these strips consist of discrete units/cells connected in-line.

They are, according to the TNG Tech Manual. It's the combined shooty-zapping power of all the units in a strip that marks something like a Galaxy-class ship's phasers as "we're not telling you how powerful they are" level. And yes, this means a single strip can shoot more than one beam at once, although fewer units per beam means lower power per shot. Presumably the only limit is how many simultaneous targetting solutions the ship's computers can handle, and how much you're willing to divide the power of the whole strip.

Not sure about aiming; IIRC it's done the same way as phased-array radar does its trick with a flat emitter instead of a parabolic dish.

Tbh even the NX-01 had in theory the capability to attack more then 1 target at once due to having at least 2 phase cannons as default, whether it actually had the targeting capability to do that I can't say atm but it certainly had the theoretical capability due to having at least 2 weapons mounts that move independent of each other.

so I don't see why the Galaxy or later would loose that capability and that's ignoring the evidence that suggest or outright states that they have multi-target capability on the strips. Also didn't the Sovereign class (Aka USS Enterprise NCC-1701-E) fire more then 1 beam at once in Nemesis when trying to find the Scimitar?

Lord Revan wrote:Also didn't the Sovereign class (Aka USS Enterprise NCC-1701-E) fire more then 1 beam at once in Nemesis when trying to find the Scimitar?

1:15

If you pause at 2:38 for a couple of frames yo can see two shots being fired at once as well.

Lord Revan wrote:Tbh even the NX-01 had in theory the capability to attack more then 1 target at once due to having at least 2 phase cannons as default,

Not just in theory


00:44
Definitely has multiple target acquisition and in a couple of the instances they're firing at more than one target at once (00:50).

They do it again in... I think it's Zero Hour but I can't find a clip for it



Also some other bits and bobs:


1:21 - Voyager firing on two targets at once
2:02 - Janeway REALLY wants someone dead and dead quickly
2:31 - Total ship coverage of weapons
3:02 - Multiple targets at once
3:22 - multiple beams at once, targeting different areas
4:14 - multiple beams at once, targeting different areas

And of course


Very clearly targetting three different things at once (pylon phasers are going straight forward and converging at one point, torpedoes are going somewhere else and the top phaser is firing at the top of the Borg ship.



Everything from TOS Connies to TNG Galaxy class, to Intrepid to Defiant... NX class - all of them have had multiple target acquisition as standard and all of them have fired on different targets at the same time (sometimes two targets on the same ship, but the principle is the same).

I don't see that Turrets are a requirement for Federation ships at all. The only one to be shown using it is the NX. Even by TOS time, they had 360 "balls" that emitted phasers in any direction. Turrets went the way of the dodo some time after 2160.

So the NX-series is just about the only Starfleet class with turrets... hm. Interestingly, the NX-series is also shown to have some problems with combat, because it has dinky little weapons by interstellar standards compared to enemies like the Klingons of the same era.

Maybe the problem is, simply, that a turret-mounted beam weapon isn't competitive in firepower. It can't match either large fixed mount cannon or array/strip weapons with larger physical emitter size.

SpottedKitty wrote: They are, according to the TNG Tech Manual. It's the combined shooty-zapping power of all the units in a strip that marks something like a Galaxy-class ship's phasers as "we're not telling you how powerful they are" level. And yes, this means a single strip can shoot more than one beam at once, although fewer units per beam means lower power per shot. Presumably the only limit is how many simultaneous targetting solutions the ship's computers can handle, and how much you're willing to divide the power of the whole strip.

Not sure about aiming; IIRC it's done the same way as phased-array radar does its trick with a flat emitter instead of a parabolic dish.

There was the one episode where the E-D took down something like a half-dozen smaller lower-tech ships (they were mindwiped and convinced they were the enemy) in a single rapid-firing series of shots.

Prometheus Unbound wrote:

Lord Revan wrote:Tbh even the NX-01 had in theory the capability to attack more then 1 target at once due to having at least 2 phase cannons as default,

Not just in theory

it had been a while since I last saw any ENT episodes so I was only sure that they had at least 2 turrets but wasn't sure if they actually had shot multiple targets.

Lord Revan wrote:

Prometheus Unbound wrote:

Lord Revan wrote:Tbh even the NX-01 had in theory the capability to attack more then 1 target at once due to having at least 2 phase cannons as default,

Not just in theory

it had been a while since I last saw any ENT episodes so I was only sure that they had at least 2 turrets but wasn't sure if they actually had shot multiple targets.

They have 13 or 15 turrets in total i believe.

Prometheus Unbound wrote:

Lord Revan wrote:

Prometheus Unbound wrote:
Not just in theory

it had been a while since I last saw any ENT episodes so I was only sure that they had at least 2 turrets but wasn't sure if they actually had shot multiple targets.

They have 13 or 15 turrets in total i believe.

NX-01? They had three. Two forward and one aft.

Borgholio wrote:

Prometheus Unbound wrote:

Lord Revan wrote:it had been a while since I last saw any ENT episodes so I was only sure that they had at least 2 turrets but wasn't sure if they actually had shot multiple targets.

They have 13 or 15 turrets in total i believe.

NX-01? They had three. Two forward and one aft.

Officially but the SFX was very inconsistent about where those three were.

DITL of all sources has a look at it.

Borgholio wrote:

Prometheus Unbound wrote:

Lord Revan wrote:it had been a while since I last saw any ENT episodes so I was only sure that they had at least 2 turrets but wasn't sure if they actually had shot multiple targets.

They have 13 or 15 turrets in total i believe.

NX-01? They had three. Two forward and one aft.

See the reply above this one

Turns out it was 12.

Yeah I read the analysis and it's pretty convincing. I kinda chalk it up to inconsistent VFX though, since any design team that actually has a fixed design for the ship done in advance will have planned this.

Borgholio wrote:Yeah I read the analysis and it's pretty convincing. I kinda chalk it up to inconsistent VFX though, since any design team that actually has a fixed design for the ship done in advance will have planned this.

<nod> I think we didn't really see consistent shooting spots until the little paired phaser "blister turrets" appeared in the movie-era Constitution-class rebuild. Think of how many different places phaser beams and photon torpedoes were shot from in TOS. And the NX ships didn't even have visible beam weapons; a hatch opened and the emitter popped out.

Phaser strips are a ship designers dream, turrets are technology from the 1860s that greatly increase moving parts count and in real life breakdown all the time and require hoards of maintenance because of how damn hard it is to make large objects move quickly and yet stop utterly precisely on demand.

I think the only advantage of a turret would be if you can somehow compress or accelerate the beam to increase it's destructive power. Although given what we see in ST, that doesn't appear to be possible under normal conditions since nobody after ENT seemed to use turreted mounts. In the TNG series finale, the future Enterprise-D had that spinal mount phaser that was incredibly powerful, but I don't know if that was due to accelerating a normal phaser beam or if it was just a very long tube with a ton of emitters in it all working together...