Phaser Turrets vs Strips

[Crazedwraith]

So.... what does this have to do with Turrets vs Strips?

Yeah exploding consoles is silly. We all know exactly why it happens though. There's no Watson explanation. Just Doylist. They thought exploding consoles made for cheap drama.

[Prometheus Unbound]

I suspect you could fill a book with all the design flaws found in Trek ships... hell, you should write one. "Spaceship Building and Design-- What Star Trek Taught Us NOT to Do"

Maybe I should ><

I think I'd need an editor, though.

[Elheru Aran]

So.... what does this have to do with Turrets vs Strips?

Yeah exploding consoles is silly. We all know exactly why it happens though. There's no Watson explanation. Just Doylist. They thought exploding consoles made for cheap drama.

I suspect you could fill a book with all the design flaws found in Trek ships... hell, you should write one. "Spaceship Building and Design-- What Star Trek Taught Us NOT to Do"

Maybe I should ><

I think I'd need an editor, though.

Well I'm up for it

I suspect a separate thread might be worth it though. You could write a series of posts regarding specific issues, like you just did with the bridge roof-dome-thingy, and eventually it could be collated into a web page of some sort if you wanted to archive it. It wouldn't be publishable-- Paramount would never let you do it, obviously-- but it would be *excellent* as a reference.

[Prometheus Unbound]

I'd love to. Seriously.

Maybe we should pick a topic and I'll bitch about it for 3000 words, then it can be condensed into something coherent

[Eternal_Freedom]

Since we seem to be on the topic of bridge design and bad ideas, I would like to point out that even the original BSG, absurdly cheesy as it was, avoided this trope except in situations where it made sense. Not only does it have big damn armoured doors to seal off the bridge window in combat, IIRC we only see serious damage on the bridge 4 times - the Atlantia in "Saga of a Star World" - when she is being shot to pieces, including hits near the bridge, and blows up moments later and the Galactica in "Living Legend," "Fire in Space" and "The Hand of God." in the first and last cases, the damage appears to be mostly smoke from fires and maybe some electrical shorts. "Fire in Space" practially wreck the place (and brings the roof down on Adama) but only because a suicide-bombing Raider explodes a second before it actually rammed the bridge.

I can't really comment on B5, but the exploding instrumentation on SG1/Atlantis does match up to late ST standards at times - even then though it's mostly shorts and sparks, sometimes small fires and that omnipresent white venting fog (seriously, what the hell is that stuff?). Though I suspect SG1/Atlantis went that route because that's what ST was doing recently so that's what people expected, ala the "coconut effect."

[Alyrium Denryle]

I can't really comment on B5

In B5 it happens occassionally, but not like in Trek.

There are a few instances in Whitestar class ships when they get horribly wrecked. And in those cases, it is less consoles and more structural collapse, which makes sense when they hit a piece of debris bridge first.

Another instance on B5 itself when a burning fragment of a narn heavy cruiser slams into the blast doors protecting the bridge (or a recently disabled starfury does the same thing). And then it is mostly small electrical shorts and damage you might expect from an impact that knocks components loose.

When the Lexington is hit by Minbari in the In the Beginning, and again, this is mostly structural damage from impulse shock. Same thing when missiles hit the Agamemnon in Endgame

[Borgholio]

Well I'm up for it

I suspect a separate thread might be worth it though. You could write a series of posts regarding specific issues, like you just did with the bridge roof-dome-thingy, and eventually it could be collated into a web page of some sort if you wanted to archive it. It wouldn't be publishable-- Paramount would never let you do it, obviously-- but it would be *excellent* as a reference.

Count me in as well. If we make a coherent enough work, we might even be able to get Mike to add it to the main site next to the Turbolaser commentaries.

SDN.net Starship Design Commentaries

I like it.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Well I'm up for it

I suspect a separate thread might be worth it though. You could write a series of posts regarding specific issues, like you just did with the bridge roof-dome-thingy, and eventually it could be collated into a web page of some sort if you wanted to archive it. It wouldn't be publishable-- Paramount would never let you do it, obviously-- but it would be *excellent* as a reference.

Count me in as well. If we make a coherent enough work, we might even be able to get Mike to add it to the main site next to the Turbolaser commentaries.

SDN.net Starship Design Commentaries

I like it.

Hell, me as well. That would be a lot of fun.

Gotta have both plausible in-universe explanations for it, and taking the piss out. That would be best, I think.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Sounds intriguing. I'll offer what help I can.

[Borgholio]

Created a thread :

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=165253

Let's have at it.

[Zwinmar]

Personally, I do not understand the design of wide open spaces everywhere on ship. Compartmentalization exists for a very good reason.

[Simon_Jester]

'Near'? The damned thing is at the very top of the saucer for no good reason. Hell this gets worse for nuTrek. Not only is the bridge still in that same stupid position but the main viewscreen is also a bigass window!

If there IS a reason for it to be there, then there is ALSO a reason to mount an extra set of shield generators right next to it, not so? Likewise structural integrity field generators. And sensor arrays, at least some of which should ideally be near the bridge to reduce signal latency.

Complaining about WHY DO THEY PUT THE BRIDGE THERE is a standard Bitching About Star Trek moment, and frankly the only real reason for that is because Gene Roddenberry wanted to do a cool camera zoom in on the Enterprise bridge from outer space.

But if we accept as objective fact that the bridge IS in that exposed position, it makes it all the more likely that there need to be high voltage power lines behind the walls of the bridge itself. Which does pose some hazard to the bridge crew, yes- but it also reduces hazard to the bridge crew by reducing the risk that the bridge will be destroyed by enemy action.

In which case, all you need to do is put vents in the sides of the consoles so that the gas can expand in a direction that doesn't involve the hapless operator. This is of course more difficult for the wall-mounted panels than the free standing type...

Blowout panels would be a logical design modification, yes.

On the other hand, plenty of real weapon systems were engineered in real life without adequate blowout protection to save the operator in the unlikely, unlucky event of an explosion. So if the problem is "battle damage, once in a while, causes the necessary high voltage power lines near the bridge to short out in a way that causes explosive release of energy through a bridge console..."

This is not a problem Starfleet has to be unusually stupid to have not foreseen. Any more than it takes exceptional stupidity to design rifles that are too fragile to be reliable in infantry combat, or adopt experimental weapons that aren't fully debugged because it is 'necessary' to rush them into combat, or to forget to guard an important strategic position during a battle so that the enemy gains an advantage of position. All these are things that real people do, including qualified professionals now and then. So railing at Starfleet for 'stupidity' because they do it is unfair.

The plasma thing is still fricking dumb. You're basically running your computers off a high explosive? Something like that.

The fact of the matter is that they're using a highly dangerous method of computing, which is largely unnecessary for what they're doing, which means that frequently they're more or less literally exploding themselves in the foot.

Did you even READ the thread?

We don't know what the computational requirements of a starship are like. Are the bridge consoles and the machinery behind them just there so they can "push button, fire weapons?" Or do they actually do computations? If so, how complicated are those computations? We know that the Enterprise in all her incarnations has sensors that can pinpoint individual beings on an entire planet in a reasonable span of time, that can derive a variety of surprisingly specific information from planets at a range of light-hours or more. The ship has navigational systems that are intended to identify hazards light-years away while nestled inside an FTL drive that literally warps the fabric of time and space, and targeting systems that can lock on to all manner of strange and unknown sensor signatures to deliver weapons fire.

Meanwhile, the ship's computer continues to function the vast majority of the time, even when the ship is stuck in an energy-draining force field, being toyed with by alien gods, bathed in radiation from cosmic anomalies, or having nuclear weapons lobbed at it.

And we seldom if ever see the computer struggling or saying "it's going to take a while to finish these computations." We don't see little spinning hourglasses or whatever. Instead, Majel Barrett the machine just up and responds with an answer to nearly every question put to it.

While it is conceivable that all this can be done with low-power computers, it is far from certain. If the people on Star Trek say they need high-voltage power systems to run their computers, I believe them.

I can accept that the main computer of the ship may require such technology... in which case, insulate it strictly from the rest of the ship by layers of armour; the main computer should be well protected anyway. But simple piloting and weapons commands? No. You don't need a plasma conduit to tell the ship 'shoot a torpedo at this target'.

But that wouldn't be gee-whiz, now would it...

Is it even a good idea to have ONE main computer? Wouldn't that be an awfully specific weak point compared to a distributed network of computers? If they did design ships that way, and some episode had a bad guy show up and gut the ship's computer systems by destroying a single isolated system... wouldn't we be chewing THAT out as an example of bad design and "more Trektardedness" or whatever?

Again, if Starfleet says it needs distributed sets of high power computers throughout the ship in order for the ship to perform its functions, I believe them.

And this doesn't even address the reasonable possibility that the thing that explodes in a 'console explosion' isn't even the computer console itself, it's an unrelated system that just happens to be physically nearby.

If a water main breaks and a huge jet of water shoots out of the ground under a mailbox, flooding the surrounding intersection, are you going to criticize the city for building a mailbox that "runs on" high pressure water?

Because when a power main breaks and power shoots out of the wall under a computer console, zapping the surrounding area, you just did criticize the engineers for building a computer that "runs on" the stuff in the power main.

Still an example of terrible engineering. I get the existence of high power systems, but if they're *designed* to explode-- and after a few blown consoles they should damn well know what's going on-- they should explode *away* from the bridge. Shield generator protecting the bridge pops? Fine, have an explosion on the hull near the bridge... but people in the bridge shouldn't be having the equivalent of a hand grenade going off in their faces.

Consoles don't actually blow up very often. Not even once a season- in other words, less than once a year on ships that are being shot at by a variety of dangerous phenomena many times in that year. The consoles aren't designed to explode, and it happens on unusual occasions. For all we know, there are measures in place designed to reduce the risk of this happening, and we only see the rare times when those measures fail. Just like how real tanks and warships have systems in place to reduce the risk of their ammunition magazine catching fire and exploding... but sometimes that still happens.

We already do this with tanks and armored vehicles. Any shell hit that penetrates the magazine will tend to explode outside the back of the tank instead of inside where it will turn the crew into chunky salsa. It's just good design practice.

The Russians build tanks that are unusually vulnerable to magazine explosions compared to Western tanks, for reasons that seem good to them- for instance, it lets them design the tank with a smaller target profile, making it less likely to get hit in the first place.

They may be wrong to do that. But it's not in any way unrealistic stupidity to intentionally design a system with less-than-perfect safety measures to protect the crew from admittedly unlikely catastrophic equipment failures.


But I guess that goes right along with hull armor, having a bridge exposed on deck 1, and windows large enough to potentially decompress a whole deck in minutes as designs that they just didn't feel were worth it for some reason.[/quote]

Then the Intrepid - jesus christ. Every time something taps the ship, there's sparks, explosions, consoles blowing out, white smoke (is that meant to be the fire suppressant system?) flying out everywhere, obscuring views... and spraying into the faces of people using the consoles. Literally spraying in their faces sometimes. Other times it just slowly vents like someone's put too much dry ice in a container behind the computer monitor. Weird thing to do but there we go.

What the hell kind of design philosophy is this? Seriously.

Well, I can rationalize it, which is not to say there isn't a stupid design choice going on.

And the Galaxy doesn't escape. Installing that new bridge module for Generations seems to have introduced literal rocks into the bulkheads. Literally rocks are embedded into the bulkheads and explode all over people.

The following is from the first shots after the initial two torpedoes. At this stage, Engineering is fine (although a hit was nearby).

The BoP fires on Engineering again:

And so of course, the new station added to the right of Helm immediately blow up from the side

And propels him across the bridge to land in front of the captain. That's over 8 feet. And a somersault. Naturally...

The Helm station then spontaneously explodes, knocking out poor Lt Jae...

That's about 3 seconds into the battle. The battle lasts 2 minutes. I think I could keep doing this but you get the idea.

Note that this is, as I recall, a Bird of Prey that can shoot right through Enterprise's shields as if they weren't there. And the bridge is in an exposed location on the hull of the ship. That's almost ideal circumstances for enemy fire to cause damage and casualties on the bridge.

Voyager can have shields up just fine and yet have explosions 5 feet from the warp core. It's mental.

I know why it's done, but even a cursory glance must make some people go "eh?" The ship is nearly a kilometer long. It's huge. A torpedo on the back is not ... sorry, should not make anything on the bridge do anything to throw people out their chairs, kill them or otherwise incapacitate them.

Honestly yes, the only ship we've seen that should be that vulnerable is the Defiant which is just plain physically smaller. An Intrepid is smaller than a Galaxy but not by that much.

The thing is, while there is not a plausible explanation for literally every gratuitous bridge injury in the whole series, there IS a plausible explanation for how explosions can be a thing that happens when the ship is under fire, and for why some of these explosions can be on the bridge.

[Zwinmar]

As for the computer deal above:
Ok, so they need power and a lot of it to run in but, why do they need the display screen made of comp.B? Just run a wire from the screen down to the actual computer, its not hard, hell that iss what my computer does.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Note that this is, as I recall, a Bird of Prey that can shoot right through Enterprise's shields as if they weren't there. And the bridge is in an exposed location on the hull of the ship. That's almost ideal circumstances for enemy fire to cause damage and casualties on the bridge.

Except the BoP isn't firing at or even near the bridge; the shots we see all strike the engineering hull or the nacelles. only at the very end do they shout "target their bridge!" which is right before the whole forced-cloaking-torpedo-kill idiocy.

As for computers needing power, I dunno if it's canon or not, but in one of the TOS books ("Crisis on Centaurus" to be precise) it's stated that the E-Nil's main computer bank (in 2265 or so) is more powerful than all the computers on Earth in 2200. Now I have no idea what computing power Earth had in 2200, but I suspect that if you total up the power consumption of all the present-day supercomputers and erver farms you'd wind up with a huge amount of power being used. Futuristic starship computers drawing that much power is quite conceivable.

[Tribble]

At least according to the TNG TM the bridge was on the top of the saucer so that it could be easily swapped out during an upgrade.

[Prometheus Unbound]

Such a shitty reason (they can transport out babies from the womb) for covering Gene's "that's what shields are for" vision.

[NecronLord]

Gene's vision was in no way unreasonable for its time. In TOS a ship could just be phasorised by a good hit without shields, at least in one episode I can think of. In real life no feisbale starship could be armoured really.

[Sea Skimmer]

Depends what you consider feasible. Steel tanks full of hydrogen that also serves as propellent could provide armor against fairly high yield nuclear weapons and certainly anything else, and this is this the same way a lot of our armored vehicle armor works, such as the front hull of the M1 tank. Use a baffled fuel tank as a form of reactive armor. The tank even has a light to tell you when the engine starts draining the forward fuel tanks, initially it only draws fuel from the rear tanks because people in the 1970s were not idiots.

If you had Trek like technology then all kinds of armoring would be possible and provide protection against relevant levels of weapons yields, it's just you would not be able to have many preforations. Armoring against modern weapons becomes very hard when you are forced into low volume solutions, but a space ship has no hard volume restrictions.

Do remember Bikini atoll data indicated that US battleships from the First World War would have been able to steam away from the first nuclear test with the crew inside the main armor still alive, and the engines and boilers remained in working order. This would have been true to nearly the edge of the actual fireball, which for a 15kt nuke is a distance of about 100 meters. Direct hit would be game over...but its a ship from WW1.

Now if 100 megaton bombs were the primary weapon, armor might be a waste of time, not because it has no chance of working (this depends on ship size) but because other methods are certain to be cheaper. But Trek weapons have just never been anywhere near that firepower on anything like a consistent basis. Certainly phasers don't output that kind of raw effective power, while Trek has always operated on the logic that missile type weapons are highly destructive, so much so that captains are reluctant to fire them and kill 100% of the enemy crews.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Now if 100 megaton bombs were the primary weapon, armor might be a waste of time, not because it has no chance of working (this depends on ship size) but because other methods are certain to be cheaper. But Trek weapons have just never been anywhere near that firepower on anything like a consistent basis. Certainly phasers don't output that kind of raw effective power, while Trek has always operated on the logic that missile type weapons are highly destructive, so much so that captains are reluctant to fire them and kill 100% of the enemy crews.

The problem for your thesis is that a photon torpedo on max yield in the TNG era is a 64 mt antimatter warhead that directly impacts the hull when shields are down. Granted, I would LOVE to see that presented accurately, but that is what it is supposed to be. Phasers are what, 10-15 kt directed energy weapons, with all that energy concentrated onto a few square meters?

You cannot armor against that. In the TOS era before they switched shield designs (given the VFX in the TOS era films with respect to weapon hits on shielded ships) they could even shield against them fully.

Between advanced materials science, ridiculous redundancy,and the SIF they manage to make such hits without shields...kinda survivable. But jesus christ.

[Q99]

The problem for your thesis is that a photon torpedo on max yield in the TNG era is a 64 mt antimatter warhead that directly impacts the hull when shields are down. Granted, I would LOVE to see that presented accurately, but that is what it is supposed to be. Phasers are what, 10-15 kt directed energy weapons, with all that energy concentrated onto a few square meters?

Highly variable power. The first fully-charged blast of a Galaxy's main phaser array hits way harder than subsequent phaser shots or ones fired from smaller arrays.

Between advanced materials science, ridiculous redundancy,and the SIF they manage to make such hits without shields...kinda survivable. But jesus christ.

The SIF effectively makes the hull a second shield. Just unlike the primary, you take a lot more secondary damage if you rely on it.

[Sea Skimmer]

The problem for your thesis is that a photon torpedo on max yield in the TNG era is a 64 mt antimatter warhead that directly impacts the hull when shields are down.

The problem with that claim is the evidence for it is 1) not really canon and 2) in contradiction with canon so many times that it cannot be ignored, though in some cases rather higher yields are indicated. That said either the average yields are much lower or the energy is released in a form that causes much of it to disperse without obvious effect, and armor is completely dependent on the type of energy it must resist. If you ignore that you ignore all logic and science in the matter. You start citing megatons and kilotons below. Those figures mean nothing without a damage mechanism. Think about how much solar energy a tank parked in the Iraqi sun resists in a day...

Granted, I would LOVE to see that presented accurately, but that is what it is supposed to be.

Phasers clearly don't function on the basis of direct thermal or radiation interaction with the target. Note the utter shitload of times we see them hit hulls without blowing giant holes in the ship. So rather explicitly it is possible with Trek tech if nothing else, to make solid structures that can withstand the breaching effects of phasers. In some cases they do breach the hulls but that's been the exception rather then the rule, which rather strongly indicates that the hulls do matter.

Phasers are what, 10-15 kt directed energy weapons, with all that energy concentrated onto a few square meters?

I suspect the peak energy density of a large shaped charge is actually higher but I feel not like measuring it right now. But that goes back to the point I already made, the type of energy matters. Nuclear weapons for example can pass a large portion of their energy straight through a foot thick steel plate without breaching it, making high volume armor very viable. This will also be true of many forms of anti matter reactions. Fast neutrons can breach steel plates with shattering force, to a point, and yet said fast neutrons can also be readily absorbed and converted to thermal energy by borated foam useless as any other form of protection. Shaped charges overwhelmingly beat nuclear weapons for penetrating armor. 1 ton neutron bomb on contact might breach 100mm of steel, depending on the steel. A 1 ton shaped charge would breach more like five or six meters of steel.

You cannot armor against that.

We designed ICBM silos in the 1980s that were expected to only be disabled when they fell into the crater of high megaton range nuclear blasts. This led to work on how to max the silos fire missiles while canted 45 degrees. Said silos were two steel tubes sandwiching borated concrete in basic design.

Back in the beloved 1950s the DOE also built a steel sphere covered in graphite which withstood a 15 megaton bomb point blank, it burned off some of the graphite only. So yeah actually you can armor against such energy levels. It is a question of how much mass and volume is allowed, and importantly in a realistic context, how much the armor is allowed to cost. Trek ships are pretty big and if you have a mass lighting field then mass might not matter much at all. Perhaps shields offer better protection for the mass, but they offer rather uneven protection. Random crap blowing up all over the ship isn't inspiring for a shields up situation. Passive protection on Trek ships is clearly insufficient when they can be rendered hors de combat without hull breaches.

Between advanced materials science, ridiculous redundancy,and the SIF they manage to make such hits without shields...kinda survivable. But jesus christ.

Or they just have really dumb Soviet like design practices where engineers declare they only care for pure science, and then are allowed to do whatever they fancy without proper review and consideration for practical factors or realistic experience. In fact I think that's exactly what's going on in the Federation.

[J Ryan]

Is it possible that Federation ships have ENT style "polarised hull plating" (whatever the hell that was), to act as a last line of defence when losing the shields? That might explain why some shots to the hull seemed to be tanked, whilst other similar hits go straight through.

Clearly they never mention it in any of the episodes due to the writers never having thought of the concept, but depending on how bulky and or power hungry the technology is it could work as a last ditch effort.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Is it possible that Federation ships have ENT style "polarised hull plating" (whatever the hell that was), to act as a last line of defence when losing the shields? That might explain why some shots to the hull seemed to be tanked, whilst other similar hits go straight through.

Clearly they never mention it in any of the episodes due to the writers never having thought of the concept, but depending on how bulky and or power hungry the technology is it could work as a last ditch effort.

My guess would be that advancements in Structural Integrity Fields just made that redundant.

[Batman]

Or SIF is just a more advanced form of it.

[Borgholio]

The SIF was made up to explain how Trek ships can perform the maneuvers they do without breaking up due to structural stresses. I suppose it makes sense that the SIF is capable of reinforcing and strengthening the outer hull as well as structural support members.