Phasers & photons vs shields & hull.

[Q99]

I think that wasn't to damage the Borg, it was to create massive amounts of interference on their sensors and "blind" them - antimatter signatures which were designed to disguise the shuttle's power systems. A kind of blinding flak, if you will.

The Borg's tractor beam started trying to lock on to the explosions thinking they were the shuttle. They then cut the power to the shuttle and the Borg missed them.

https://youtu.be/uy8wqywAkrg?t=1m21s

Yep. Upthread it was suggested for finding cloaked ships as well, but if you can semi-reliably get as close as the Saucer was to the Cube, you don't really need much help to begin with.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Re: Redemption Part II:

Actually I'm pretty sure Data knew the Romulan ship's position - he just needed to expose them visibly to both the rest of the Federation fleet and make the Romulans know they'd been seen - hence why he set the yields so low.

Otherwise you're left with the absurd idea that he blind-fires three torpedoes and gets a hit on three different cloaked ships.

[Lord Revan]

Re: Redemption Part II:

Actually I'm pretty sure Data knew the Romulan ship's position - he just needed to expose them visibly to both the rest of the Federation fleet and make the Romulans know they'd been seen - hence why he set the yields so low.

Otherwise you're left with the absurd idea that he blind-fires three torpedoes and gets a hit on three different cloaked ships.

I suspect he had an incling as to where they were but he didn't know their exact position, hence the low yield "illumination" torps, in essense Data knew that Romulan ships were most likely in this region but he didn't know the exact cordinates hence he couldn't just fire to disable or use technobabble beam to expose the romulans as he didn't know enough for a direct hit, only for a "close enough" hit kind of how depth charges are used IIRC, you don't just randomly dump them into the ocean and hope they happen to hit a sub, but rather you use them when you got a fairly decent picture as to where the sub probably is so even if you don't score a direct hit you probably hit close enough to reveal the sub (most often by forcing it to surface).

[Crazedwraith]

The Scene in question.

Those torpedo detonations are extremely close to the warbirds. The also locations them with sensors before firing on them. Albeit the other officer doesn't recognise them as such.

[Q99]

Yep, that definitely is targeted.

Once you narrow down the possibilities like that, setting a weapon to proper spread makes sense, but he needed that sensor analysis comparison.

[Lord Revan]

yeah it definetly wasn't a case of "fire at random location and pray that you hit something", Data seemed to have pretty clear indication as to where the warbirds most likely were even if he couldn't detect them directly and targeted the torps to that location.