Why Are Phaser Strips This Way? 

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

***PICARD S3 SPOILER!!!I*** . .. … …. ….. …. … .. . 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

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.

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?

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

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 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.

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.

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.

HOLY SHIT THAT WOULDVE BEEN AMAZING.

They should have kept that

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wondered that too.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.