VorchaN at Patrol level

[Greg Smith]

TNG often went for the 'single phaser beam staying on target while moving along the collimator ring while the ship turned' cool effect.

Interestingly the DS9 battle in 'Way of the Warrior' was done with models. 40+ ships done with models! Trek didn't really get into CG until very late on.

 

[Alexb83]

WotW was models? I never realised that! Pretty amazing considering that - but yeah, the battles in Sacrifice of Angels etc. and those in first contact were much, much better all in all. I would imagine that the Odyssey was just a re-use of the Enterprise-D model, but she sat stationary and fired all her phaser arrays continually.

Voyager, despite being a terrible, terrible series did have some reasonable battle scenes where the ship made good use of its weapons arrays. It always struck me as somewhat odd that the weapons officer on the bridge could realistically control all the various weapons from one console, with no VR display or anything to give them 3-d perception of what was where. The B5 version of having either gunnery crews (or with the Minbari) a more point and click all-round battle interface are more realistic.

 

[Lord David the Denied]

WotW was models? I never realised that! Pretty amazing considering that - but yeah, the battles in Sacrifice of Angels etc. and those in first contact were much, much better all in all. I would imagine that the Odyssey was just a re-use of the Enterprise-D model, but she sat stationary and fired all her phaser arrays continually.

Voyager, despite being a terrible, terrible series did have some reasonable battle scenes where the ship made good use of its weapons arrays. It always struck me as somewhat odd that the weapons officer on the bridge could realistically control all the various weapons from one console, with no VR display or anything to give them 3-d perception of what was where. The B5 version of having either gunnery crews (or with the Minbari) a more point and click all-round battle interface are more realistic.

Well, in the films at least, they mention phaser rooms and phaser operators, so I suspect the single tactical officer on the bridge is relaying orders via the computer to the phaser operators.

On the other hand, it could be that the computers are so advanced by that time that a single officer can realistically control the entire ship's defence from shield modulations to weapons targetting, firing priorities and so on.

Anyway... back to B5 :wink:

 

[Ripple]

Well one last Star Trek comment...

Maybe they just didn't want to direct power to all those arrays and instead concentrated a lot in one, rest to shields. You really only throwing power, does it matter if it goes through one channel or twenty?

That could even explain the borg use of multiple arrays...each array could only throw one 'frequency'...use lots harder for the borg to adapt.

Lots of arrays are good when you have ships all around you, each targets separately but of no additional value on a single target except to give redundancy..

Gah..babbling... just remember, these are energy weapons not guns. Up to a certain point you can just put more power through the same weapon, where as a gun you have to change up caliber to increase damage (or rate of fire...). So more channels does not necesarrily mean more damage inflicted.

Rpple

 

[Lord David the Denied]

There's only so much juice a phaser array can handle. A Starfleet type-X phaser array is a nasty, evil thing, but two type-X arrays is better... :wink: