It's possible that the phaser is at a low enough setting, but at a high enough velocity of the particle, that the impact is converted into kinetic energy as opposed to being able to actually affect the target's cells.
According to the TNG technical manual (the canon source for most of this), at lower energy settings the Rapid Nadion Effect does not occur, and only thermal-UV effects of low-energy EM exposure are experienced (no vaporizing, sorry). This can variably 'taze', semi-sedate, or heat-shock a humanoid organism, depending on physiology, and may have little to no effect on hardy xenobiologies.
4:50, ships don't use optical sensors, they use subspace sensors (or something like that) which can instantaneously get data from a certain position, even if light takes a second to travel the distance between the sensor and the target
You forgot to go over phaser banks as opposed arrays!! There is a difference. Otherwise I’m new to the channel and I’m loving the content!! Btw nice defiant model!
At least for hand phasers, the closest you could get in real life would probably be a a weapon that combines both a laser and an electron or ion accelerator. You can use a laser as a guiding beam to create a vacuum along its path of travel. The second stage of the weapon fires an ion or electron beam down that path. Depending on the strength of the electron beam and laser you could either tase the target or bore a hole through them.
lasers/energy weapons unless they go faster then the speed of light are incredible slow due to the speed of light restrictions, targeting systems/crew skills make up the difference but still you will miss alot more when shooting at a moving target from longer ranges or trying to hit a fast agile target.
A Star Trek book I had as a kid after the motion picture came out described phasers as a cross between the penetrating power of lasers and the destructive impact of particle beam weapons, the phase had to be correct to cojoin the two, hence the name.
About the "visibility" of phasers: what if what you are seeing is a sort of optical illusion, while the real beam is invisible. This would mean that, what you said about the actual distances apart that ships fought, the phasers would work correctly. However, what you are seeing, is actually a delayed reaction of the phaser emissions interacting with individual atoms floating in space, which destroys those atoms, leaving a visible trail of these atoms that linger after the actual beam is long gone. Also, in films and on television, the ships "seem" to be closer or else it would be like actual battleships where they fight at ranges of up to 30 kilometers apart or more, and they are hard to see, let alone be in the same frame of a photograph.
An explanation is offered in a couple of the novels. The beams are essentially invisible as they travel through space, only visible at point of impact. While the missiles and torpedoes move far too fast for the eye to follow. But the starship crews (and the audience?) see these visual effects because they're being displayed on tactical panels and computer screens.
Phasers are described as being capable of traveling at .986c which is pretty damn close to the speed of the light itself. So the speed issue is kind of reeled in there, but at the same time the sensor issue might help balance of the "insta hit" factor that allows for some of the drama of the ship to ship battles. They do occasionally miss. In the end, phasers are more science fantasy than science fiction.
@@fusiondog77 Not according to what we see in The Ultimate Computer. All five starships are engaging at warp speeds, using phasers... and are nowhere near close enough for the warp fields to interact (which would be extremely hazardous for all ships so involved, as we saw when Enterprise and Columbia had to do this).
@@STNeish in the Enterprise episode the danger doesn't come from combining the Warp Fields that generate the Warp Bubbles that emanate across spacetime FROM the Warp Fields, stretching spacetime behind and contracting it in front over thousands or millions of kilometers. The danger comes from maintaining the Warp Fields using only one Warp Core and the stress of a complete system restart of the Enterprise. Warp Bubbles will naturally overlap when ships maneuverer near each other in Warp, especially in Warp Dog Fighting. The relative size of the ship's during combat implies they are only a few hundred kilometers away at most during most of those attack approaches. By definition they would have to be within phaser range and that entire distance would be within the Warp Bubble generated by even a Warp 1 Warp Field.
@@fusiondog77 Always loved The Ultimate Computer, one of the best episodes of the whole franchise, if you ask me. I've never actually seen the episode of Enterprise, just SFDebris' review, so I'll defer to your analysis. I miss older Trek... even Enterprise.
california wildfires a few years back- homes, tires etc were melted and immediate surroundings, grass, rubber around melted rims etc were unblemished let alone burnt!
They can detect other ships in real-time in other systems light years away, they defiantly have faster than light sensors. There have been bits of dialogue too numerous to mention with real-time positions of ships light years away, with the detection coming from an individual ship, not relayed by some specialist array - Voyager episodes, the TNG Enterprise far away from home, time traveling ships. And it's also necessary for photon torpedoes (much longer range and can be fired at warp) unless they are fired in the general direction and get a target lock as they approach, except that the firing ship locks on torpedoes before they launch. In fact a technological breakthrough (not sure when, and Kelvin timeline had it much earlier with the USS Vengeance) enabled phasers to be fired at warp, which shows that faster than light targeting is completely evolved to practical usage, and as phasers get longer and longer range, hitting won't be a problem, it's probably just that delivering enough destructive force to a ship with shields of similar technological development as yours will be ineffective, but against weaker opponents, goodbye at several light seconds. Even in the time of Enterprise series the Verteron array could hit Earth from Mars (light hours) at faster than light speeds. Another future breakthrough in beam confinement could be it doesn't degrade as quickly at range (But does eventually, otherwise sorry to those guys in the next sector), and in fact that is the slow evolution of weapons advancement. Anyway, FTL battles means FTL weapons with FTL targeting.
_Journey to Babel,_ _The Corbomite Maneuver,_ _The Ultimate Computer,_ _Arena,_ and various other episodes show that phasers do move FTL and can be fired from Warp in TOS.
Well, way back when there was only TOS and us fan club members we play acted out all this kind of stuff. In the episode where Spock shows the Enterprise under Captain Pike it seemed to have a number of older lasers (Number One has a laser emitter fired at that mountain) and a couple of much more powerful particle cannons. No torpedoes mentioned. There was a scientific theory in the 1970s about neutron bombs or beams, a sort-of radiation-free nuke, neutrons being a subatomic particle without charge that was known to fracture other atoms: very destructive (if you could somehow get a supply of them). We thought the refitted Enterprise's phasers must be like coherent particle beams: further raised in power orders of magnitude like the difference between a flashlight and a laser. Like a laser they could be tuned or focused to vaporize a pinpoint or disrupt in a wider beam.
Not sure Roddenberry (or his various consultants) was really informed on scientific principles/theories. TV show, spaceships, pewpewpew, special effects, budgets.
@@pwnmeisterage _"Not sure Roddenberry (or his various consultants) was really informed on scientific principles/theories. TV show, spaceships, pewpewpew, special effects, budgets."_ Considering that the information on Star Trek's scientific and technical accuracy is commonly available and easy to obtain, you should feel deeply ashamed typing this.
@@Idazmi7 lol tell me why I should be ashamed? I've watched all of Star Trek, enjoyed Star Trek, loved Star Trek, even proudly identified as a Trekkie ... I just refuse to blindly join the Cult of Gene or blindly worship every person/group ever involved in making the show. Why should fans ever be ashamed when showrunners produce crap? You don't need to argue that Star Trek attempted to use "commonly available" science to hold itself up, the bewildering scope of self-inconsistent Treknobabble nonsense shoots itself in the foot every time a particular episode or creative whim needs to change/discard/ignore whatever the show established was "scientifically valid" before.
@@pwnmeisterage _"lol tell me why I should be ashamed? I've watched all of Star Trek, enjoyed Star Trek, loved Star Trek, even proudly identified as a Trekkie"_ Your comments, both here and elsewhere, prove that false. _"I just refuse to blindly join the Cult of Gene or blindly worship every person/group ever involved in making the show. Why should fans ever be ashamed when showrunners produce crap? You don't need to argue that Star Trek attempted to use "commonly available" science to hold itself up, the bewildering scope of self-inconsistent Treknobabble nonsense shoots itself in the foot every time a particular episode or creative whim needs to change/discard/ignore whatever the show established was "scientifically valid" before."_ See? Let's totally ignore that the TOS continuity got support from JPL, RAND, NASA, and various universities, and ignore that Matt Jefferies was an aerospace engineer that served on the B-17, and instead focus on technobabble: an element that ran rampant after Gene's *death* because Gene wouldn't tolerate it if he was still alive to protest. You are not a Star Trek fan.
It would make sense for phaser emitters to incorporate some sort of linear particle accelerator. Assuming that these nadion particle are charged and can be harnessed in that way.
You should do a video on what are and how powerful a turbo laser is. So far there isnt really an in depth analysis of it. All we know it can vaporize a common astroid (esb). Be neat video.
The narrator commented on phasers missing their target. What did he just say??? TOS: there was one episode where the blue phaser lances from the ship missed! That was it! The episode is called "Journey to Babel." The Orion ship was too fast to hit until Kirk lured him closer to the ship. The phasers beams from the Enterprise were very accurate. The pulse phaser had trouble striking a cloaked Romulan ship, "Balance of Terror." Ensign Garrovick, from the episode "Obsession" missed the blood draining vampire cloud out of fear. The evil Kirk in "Enemy Within" missed his target with a phaser due to a Vulcan nerve pinch. Spock ordered his crewman to fire away from the subjects in "The Galileo Seven." So, can anyone detail a specific time when phasers missed their target in the original series?
Targeting sensors achieve a lock using software similar to what is currently used by fighter jets to put their 20mm rounds on target, in that the speed and vector of the enemy is calculated and a aiming point is displayed on the pilot's H.U.D.. The fact that the various particles used in all subatomic particle weapons must travel at speeds slower than c and therefor targeted ships are able to initiate evasive maneuvers, giving us the hit to miss ratio we see on screen. Particle weapons are practically useless warp speeds as once the beam reaches the outer perimeter of the warp field, the subatomic particles are left behind in a impotent trail. If you can, visualize spraying a can of Silly String out of car window traveling at highway speeds. So, particle weapons are only useful at warp if the ships are sharing a warp field. A tactic only useful if the targeted ship has a weaponry blindspot.
I have to point out that the phaser beams we see are for cool factor not scientific realism. Also the Defiants phaser strips are mounted in a ring on the top and bottom centre hull. Not the way you have them in your model. IT'S STILL A GREAT MODEL 😎
Maybe the light that you're seeing is it the actual laser beam itself it's the effect of the beam maybe it excites something that's in space that makes it glow
Optical targeting is not an issue on Starships. Indeed, no starship would ever even visibly See another vessel. Doing so would put you far too close for the relative speeds at which they travel. ( Yes I know Impulse speeds are sub-light, you're still talking about low percentages of Light Speed.)
You need to go back to the original series for the correct explanation as to what Phasers are. It is said they were the "Phasing" of Particle-Beam weapons with Lasers. When these two different technologies were combined it was discovered that the merging of the two energies had a synergistic effect on each giving the weapon the best of both worlds. The penetration abilities of a laser with the punch of a particle beam cannon.
One thing I need to know Is what are mega phasers? We seen them on the heavy frigate class star ship Reliant, which was taken over by Khan so he could try to attack the Enterprise and kill Kirk! what are Mega Phasers? They seem to be bigger versions of the normal phasers and had the bigger firing arc too! gave the Reliant more hitting power it seems than the Heavy Cruiser Enterprise?
The Reliant was actually a compact cruiser: more guns than Enterprise on a smaller hull. Megaphasers are just big phasers plugged into the Warp drives.
None of these space battles would happen where you see both ships on same screen. Thats for TV. . .A spacecraft like one of these would sneak into a solar system by using one of the planets to block its view, then once it detected an enemy it would fire at it from billions of miles. . .The way these battles are shown here are more like sailing ships in the 1700's where they got right up close to one another.
One of the better explanations I've read about phaser behavior is that they convert matter into neutrinos. That way, when someone is "vaporized," the resulting cloud of hot steam doesn't scorch people nearby. It doesn't fully explain how a megawatt phaser can create effects more consistent with something over 200 times more energetic, but it seems phaser effectiveness is heavily dependant on the target's composition -- namely, the higher the atomic weight, the less oomph you might expect.
@@pwnmeisterage You're confused. The hand held phasers have a stun setting. It literally says "Starship phasers" in the video. I'm unaware of this on a Starship. Do you have anything that says we're going to stun that enemy ship on any star trek show book or movie?
Phasers are phasers, no? Same technological methods, same applied physics and particle beams (or whatever), even if they're built on different scales. Or do you believe hand phasers are essentially a fundamentally different weapon which works through entirely different principles?
Not really explained in the Star Trek universe. Federation sensors operate on subspace (faster than light) frequencies. Perhaps that's how they are able to target and hit ships thousand of kilometers away almost in real time. Also, starship sensors can detect other ships traveling at warp using those same subspace sensors.
Also, thier computer systems work at subspace (ftl) speeds as well along with some of thier sensors. Besides fast targeting, needed for safe navigation in real space.
They can detect other ships in real-time in other systems light years away, they defiantly have faster than light sensors. There have been bits of dialogue too numerous to mention with real-time positions of ships light years away, with the detection coming from an individual ship, not relayed by some specialist array - Voyager episodes, the TNG Enterprise far away from home, time traveling ships. And it's also necessary for photon torpedoes (much longer range and can be fired at warp) unless they are fired in the general direction and get a target lock as they approach, except that the firing ship locks on torpedoes before they launch. In fact a technological breakthrough (not sure when, and Kelvin timeline had it much earlier with the USS Vengeance) enabled phasers to be fired at warp, which shows that faster than light targeting is completely evolved to practical usage, and as phasers get longer and longer range, hitting won't be a problem, it's probably just that delivering enough destructive force to a ship with shields of similar technological development as yours will be ineffective, but against weaker opponents, goodbye at several light seconds. Even in the time of Enterprise series the Verteron array could hit Earth from Mars (light hours) at faster than light speeds. Another future breakthrough in beam confinement could be it doesn't degrade as quickly at range (But does eventually, otherwise sorry to those guys in the next sector), and in fact that is the slow evolution of weapons advancement. Anyway, FTL battles means FTL weapons with FTL targeting.
Very true, but I would assume in a combat situation some form of ECM is employed so it would be harder to hit a ship at that range, like maybe making sensor ghosts or making the ship seem like its bigger than it actually is. Could be part of why they would use a bubble shape shield the enemy sees the bubble not the actual ship. Also even if the enemy weapon glances a hit at the shields if it goes through it won't hit the actual ship at those massive ranges. That and if both sides have those super luminal sensors, they might be able to have the ship make a quick dodge reaction on its own, to ensure it misses the ship as much as possible. Probably another reason they seem to always fight at closer range less chance to dodge and you're more likely able to fire direct blows as opposed to glancing shots.
I thought this actually was explained in Trek lore. The oft-mentioned "Picard Maneuver" apparently exploits a target's lack of FTL-capable sensors so the attacking ship briefly appears to be in the wrong place (or in two different places?) after a short FTL displacement. Some Datababble once described TNG computer cores operating inside "nonpropulsive warp fields" so the circuitry wouldn't be constrained by lightspeed limits. ... all that being said ... the "science" behind the Treknobabble did get increasingly inconsistent over time.
@@pwnmeisterage _"I thought this actually was explained in Trek lore. The oft-mentioned "Picard Maneuver" apparently exploits a target's lack of FTL-capable sensors so the attacking ship briefly appears to be in the wrong place (or in two different places?) after a short FTL displacement. Some Datababble once described TNG computer cores operating inside "nonpropulsive warp fields" so the circuitry wouldn't be constrained by lightspeed limits.... all that being said ... the "science" behind the Treknobabble did get increasingly inconsistent over time."_ The Picard Maneuver makes a ship appear in two places at once through "look-back time", which is a real phenomenon. When you look at the moon, you are seeing where it was 1.3 seconds ago, and the same applies to a starship at that distance. If that ship warps at you and stops right next to you, it will look like it duplicated itself for a bit longer than a second. That means the maneuver only works on bare visual detection systems: Kirk used something much like the "Picard Maneuver" a century before Picard had a starship, and it didn't work against a Romulan Bird-of-Prey because the crew saw when the Enterprise disappeared from their sensor screen. Also, Picard wasn't trying to confuse the enemy. He was panic attacking in a severely weakened ship, and the "Picard Maneuver" was a lucky side-effect of the enemy happening to not use anything but their eyes... which is monumentally stupid. As a result of being the first _Star Trek_ show to *_fire_* it's technical consultants and have no respect for stories already told, TNG started the "technobabble" trend and effectively defaced Star Trek lore later on.
- Hey, Gene, what do want to call this gun? - Laser. Wait a minute, what did we come up with for our torpedoes? - Photon torpedoes. - OK. Let's call it a photon gun. - I don't like that. What about "photon laser" ? - Shorten it. That should work.
5:00 The targeting systems are not analog. Unlike the turbolasers in SW, the targeting computer is capable of making the calculations to hit fairly precisely at those ranges.
By "fairly precise", you mean the kind of aim we used to land a person on the moon-- as in, hundreds of men and billions of dollars, precise. Not, "world's best sniper" or "guided missile cruiser" precise.
Yes, but to be fair, at those distances, the best sniper would actually be less precise than a computer. I suppose though, over time a person would get used to, and eventually be able to predict, how much leading would be necessary at 300,000 km. However, the amount of lead would be different with each new ship you encounter, likely. If it's a familiar target ...
@@Mephilis78 True. At the end of the day the two have very different emphasis from the eras upon which inspire them. SW from WWII and ST from the Cold War.
@@JAGraptor I never thought of Star Wars as being WWII-inspired, but rather WWII-derived (there's a creative difference). The best way I have to understand myself what Star Wars is, is 'A "Spaghetti Western" war drama in space.'
@@Mephilis78 I think that's a bit overthinking it. By TNG it's pretty clear (to us space freends) that an advanced, cooperative (not maniacal take-over-the-world) AI is helping to run the ship, running on a purely optical computer core inside a static warp field at FTL speeds. So it would be able to take sensor inputs and targeting commands, and come up with an appropriate firing solution and execute it within milliseconds of the command being input.
"Journey to Babel" TOS. Enterprise fires at a target 75,000 kilometers away. The phaser shot takes several seconds to hit the target, verifying they move slower than light. So, in TNG, I imagine it's like old WWII battleship warfare where you have to "lead" the target, and anticipate where the enemy will be when the volley or burst will make impact. Minor speculation, and seeing as it's all fiction I suppose the writers of TNG could just say they move faster because they're set at a stronger pulse. I Very much like your "garden hose" theory, as it does seem to answer a lot of these questions.
Light takes 0.25 seconds to traverse 75,000 km. It's just editing for effect so the audience has something to watch. In TNG during the series finale the Future-Enterprise v. Klingon battle has 9 seconds between the first shot fired and a ship exploding - but how many shots were fired? If you just count shots shown being fired and shots hitting as independent things it looks like 10 (you watch the Enterprise fire four times, you watch the Klingon ship get hit 5 times, and you see where the Klingon ship was hit by another shot). If you assume a shot fired is a shot that hit and left visible damage then there are 7 shots in total - blast #1 went through, blast #2 left a mark, blast #3 went through, blast #4 hit but was immediately followed by #5 going through then #6 and #7 hitting. But if you use audio cues that shifts a bit and we have no idea what happened to blast #1, can guess that blast #3 is what left the impact point on the back of the ship as the second clip of the Klingon ship starts, and end up with a count of 8. Which one is correct? *shrug* It's all editting, it's not meant to be taken at face value, if it was then Ds9 would be responsible for innumerable variants of just Klingon Bird-of-Prey looking ships. And with that in mind, editing being editing, my guess is that you're right about phasers being slower than light but that it isn't terribly significant in context because of the scales of what is being dealt with and how proportionally minimal the differences are.
So at 300,000 Km you'd be targeting an image that's already lagging one second behind _and_ your beam needs another second of travel to reach it. You'd never hit anything (which could manuever/evade) at that range with sensors and weapons operating within lightspeed constraints. I guess that's why Star Trek has superluminal sensors/phasers. And self-guided torpedoes. And point-blank dogfights. Don't need all three, but they play it safe, lol.
@@pwnmeisterage More importantly light diffuses like all waves and at the distance from the earth to the moon which is a minimum of a round 350,000 km a laser beam of 2.5 cm will spread to around 19 km on the surface, so you need all kinds of special optical focusing to insure that if you hit something it actually has an effect otherwise it's just a pretty light for your enemy to follow to a target.
@@pwnmeisterage Even at the close ranges of WW1/2 dogfighting, pilots had to "lead" targets and shoot in front of them. It's like that only more so. My pseudoscientific explanation for why battles in these sci-fi franchises are at such close range is that whatever bolts the weapons are shooting radiate heat and light like crazy, and are getting exponentially weaker as they travel, so you need to fire them at close range to do any damage. "Dumb" physical projectiles like railgun bolts are easily resisted by shields (which somehow use their own energy against them, like an immovable object), so are hopelessly obsolete, and guided missiles can be devastating, but can be decoyed or just shot down before they get to you.
That first phaser strike In Wrath of Khan is still my favorite, the way it cuts and melts the hull. I read they used a wax model to make it look that way..
The effects in that movie still hold up remarkably well. The only thing that really dates it is the Genesis simulation scene. THAT looks like 80s CGI. The rest of that movie looks real.
Splitting atoms does not necessarily lead to an explosive reaction on a macro level. Uranium 235 explodes because splitting it produces about 200MeV and two neutrons, those neutrons have a high likelihood of triggering a split in nearby uranium 235 atoms. Thus the effect is exponentially converting mass to energy. On the otherhand, splitting lighter elements like iron requires more energy then the atom outputs. So possibly nadion particles create some sort of field that temporarily lowers the energy needed to free other particles, allowing a high energy stream of plasma to knock them out of their orbits. It would also suggest it would a bad idea to hit large quantities of elements above ~200 on the periodic table with a phaser (although it would allow for very well controlled fission without needing to resort to something like control rods).
Yeah, the homophone behavior of dyslexia. Essentially my brain processes the text I read/write in a highly phoneticized way; bypassing critical review processes and making me blind to errors I make.
My guess is the TNG writers added the "nadion particle" as a technobabble macguffin to solve an energy shortage. Essentially just doing this with directed energy alone for very stable atoms would take a massive amount of energy. So much so that you would probably just start irradiating/melting/vaporizing everything (we're not just vaporizing things here, we're liberating particles...thats a lot of energy). So the mythical, short lived, artificially generated nadion particle comes into play to make it plausible. Or to steal a great phrase "How do nadion particles work? They work very well, thanks for asking."
With known science there is no explanation for a weapon that can cause a man or similarly massive object to glow and then disappear. If it is a vaporization process, then a man being turned to vapor in a few seconds would produce a huge explosion. If it disrupts the strong atomic force, you still have to deal with 150 lbs of free particles. Again, a huge explosion. The best explanation is to just say that it is based on an unknown future technology that phases matter out of existence. The original Outer Limits series had an episode named "Keeper of the Purple Twilight" where an inventor (with the help of an alien) developed a weapon that did just that.
0:47 I think the best case of phasers being more destructive than lasers is that one scene in TNG when the Enterprise encounters an alien ship that locks lasers onto them. The bridge crew all just look at each other confused, since lasers wouldn't even be able to get through their navigational shields. It's like the difference between a gun and a stiff breeze.
One of the main reasons that the speed at which the phasers travels can be seen by the human eye is because Star Trek was a TV program and they needed us too see them for creative purposes. Simple really. How they actually work on the other hand is intriguing. IN reality the speed they travel at would have been the speed if light due to there makeup.
It's repeatedly said that phasers are a light speed weapon, traveling at or near the speed of light, but not breaking the light speed barrier, like photon torpedoes. When fired at warp, they "snag" the warp field and carry it with them (torpedoes or the particle beam of the phaser array), allowing for warp speed use of these weapons, but only at a certain range before it "wears off" and the particles/torpedoes drop back out of FTL into subluminal speeds. On screen, it's also shown that the ships are right next to one another in the shot when the stated distance is in at least the thousands of kilometers range. Either the ships are much, much bigger than stated, much closer than stated, or this is just creative license to show a "cool space battle", because realistic space combat at the ranges involved would be dull and confusing to the viewer.
Yeah I know. I did say that they should actually travel at the speed of light and yes it's also said that space battles are done over hundreds if not thousands of kilometres. That said, just like how the speed of the phaser seemingly changes depending upon the scene is done for the exact same reason that ship battles are always shown with ships right next to each other. Its a TV/movie.
I suppose it could be handwaved "in universe" by pretending that all the space battles are seen through the perspective of the bridge viewscreen (or other display panels), with the starship computers helpfully highlighting all the "invisible" weapons fire. And not so much an issue when firing in/through an atmosphere.
Since phasers are so powerfull, then why arent ship battles ended in seconds, since phasers can destroy entire citys and cut continents in half? Edit: Turns out the hulls of federation ships are 20x times harder than diamonds
Shields absorb energy, why the ships survive such strikes, powered by the ships engines. When the power to keep the shields operable, unless the opposing ship has greater power, drain the shields output from the ship producing the shielding.
I always thought they worked not only by transferring energy (like all energy weapons), but by also eliminating the atons' intinsic fields when they can (disintegrate without the BOOM).
If Phasers can shoot 1 light second away and they travel at approximetly light speed then all the shots will be 2 seconds behind. 1 second from initially seeing the enemy and 1 second for the shot to travel that far. To avoid a shot at around 300km within 2 seconds would require a 10G maneuver. And since you can't tell you're being fired at until you're hit you ship would have to constantly change directions to remain safe. So space battles would be constant 10G maneuvers and shooting at where you think the enemy might go.
We already have high-intensity light beams that are powerful enough to vaporize small materials and leave burn marks on sheets of metal. Scientifically speaking, they are photons, or rays of electromagnetic particles, that are optically amplified (i.e. using a simple magnifier) to render them hotter and more intense. The process of creating these high-energy light beams is called “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation,” or in short: L.A.S.E.R. In real science a PHASER, is a beam of light, carrying subatomic particles accelerated at close to light speed, I don’t know what a nadion is, but I’m assuming Star Trek will say it’s a subatomic particle. A phaser is essentially a particle accelerator. Bombarding a target with billions of high energy subatomic particles. If we had the energy for that today it wold slice through a ships hull like a hot knife through butter. And to clarify at very long range combat say hundreds of thousands of km light would take about 1 second to hit, Targeting at very long range today against a moving target our computer targeting extrapolates your and the the targets speed direction altitude, range from target and calculates a box of where the fighter and or ship/ground target will be when the missile gets their in assuming Star Trek targeting systems do exactly the same and fire at where the ship is GOING to be at long range not exactly where it is, even today it has a success rate is about 95% I can imagine Star Trek is beyond that Ps I’m very looking forward to quantum torpedos and you trying to explain Zero point energy something I can barley grasp lol
@@resurrectedstarships Also because nobody knows it they produce an uncontrolled zero point energy powered explosion or instead produce quantum streams (the ones that almost destroyed the Enterprise one time by using its own shields and integrity fields against it).
Zero point energy is caused by a mathematical error. It does not, not will it ever, have an actual use. The mathematical error is called the inverse square law. The worst part about it is that it's nearly everywhere in physics. The Law of Universal Gravitation uses it. Relativity uses it in a bass-ackwards kind of way. Planck's Quantum Theory is based on it. To show how it's an error, I'll use the Law of Universal Gravitation as an example. The Law of Universal Gravitation says this: GMm F(g)=---------- r^2 where F(g) equals the force of gravity, G equals a conversion constant to convert mass to force, M equals the mass of one object (representative of the strength of the gravitational field) and m equals the mass of the second object (representative of how receptive the second object is to the gravitational field) and r equals the distance between the gravitational centers of the two objects. The problem comes in when you think about those centers. The strongest a gravitational field should be is at the center of the gravitational field, at r=0. Using the formula, however, the strongest a field should be is at GMm F(g)=----------- 1 Which is at r=1. If you enter the center, 0, into the formula, you get infinite force. That is why scientists think that you can get infinite energy from the zero point.
Phaser are used to cut through shields and complex alloy. Nukes can't bust through shields. A nuke hitting a shielded ship is like a racket hitting a tennis ball. The ball will never be destroyed no matter how hard you hit it
Good analysis and reasonable points all around. Since in TNG they are often able to detect obstacles ahead of them while at warp with enough time to stop or avoid them, I wonder why targeting a sublight target at 300K kilometers would be much of a challenge.
Just exemplifies why phasers are far superior and far more advanced than lazers with more than 10 times the max range. But, as usual a star wars fanboy has stolen these same stats and replaced the actual ranges and capabilities of lazers with them on a site called stardestroyer.net . The site the owner bans anyone that dares point out the false stats on anything. I know, I called him out on proton torpedo ranges and capabilities twice and he banned both accounts.
Hey Resurreected Starships in case you didnt know the targeting systems the military uses today can lock on and track a target and still hit even though it can take several seconds or even minutes for the missile or laser to hit the moving target but 9/10 times still manages to even though the target isnt in the same place as it was when the weapons system first locked on to it. So why cant ST sensor systems operate the same way? Or did you not think of that?
A hit rate of 9/10 times also seems a little dubious for missiles today. 65% sounds more realistic. But I do agree that ST sensors and target processing would be far more advanced than it is now. No need to be condescending about it, though.
Snipers do the same, they have to take in it account the forces of gravity, wind direction on a bullet, the time it will take for a bullet to arrive at it's target and where that target would have moved to if it is moving. All of that is done with their eyes and their brains.
Well yes. But the maximum range of most ships is less than 500 km. This is over 6000 TIMES that. Also star trek ships can move almost infinitely faster than any modern ships
Nadion particles are artificially created and can be charged with practically any type of energy or radiation to achieve the desired result, thus the settings on the phaser itself.
I have a headcanon for Phasers: when the Federation decided to adopt them as weapons they were the kind of weapon that would pay off in the long haul of research. Disruptors and such are short term weapons that do horrible amounts of damage but can be countered over time while the Phaser would be able to be adapted to any situation. Eventually they would be the best sort of weapon there is with enough calibration, which is what the Federation is all about in terms of science.
You obviously have no idea about 'leading the shot'. As a shooter of skeet, clay and real birds I have to aim where the target is _going to be_ when my shot gets there. If I shoot at the bird I will miss it in front or behind depending on its trajectory of flight compared to my fixed position. In a dog fight it's slightly more involved, but essentially the same.
A weapon that messes with electromagnetic bonds of atoms sounds like a disruptor. What about messing with the bonds between elementary particles, i.e. fissioning everything it touches? A weapon that nullifies gluons would be OP as hell.
i would imagine thats what they mean by "effective" weapon's range as in sure the phasers have a range of 300k km BUT at that range any moving target is pretty much un-targetable
"What is a 'Phaser?" That question has been (mostly) unanswered since "Star Trek" season 1. I figured that this was a kind of Plasma, though VGER was the only one actually using such on Klingons.
The "blast half a continent" comment was the lasers on the Original Pike Enterprise pre 2270/Kirk, pre Abramsverse. Remember Disruptors break down atoms and leave radiation. Star Trek inconsistently refers to Phaser Burn and Phaser Radiation. I'd like to know where the term Nadion came from, because I've heard it but I don't remember it. Targeting with Phasers is done by computer at long range. You have to specify manual.
Why the two types of main weapons? Phasers for sublight fighting, photon torpedos for fighting at warp speeds is the way they use to explain it. Although they don't follow that now.
IIRC, a lot of Star Trek print authors over the years have generally agreed on the following conceptualization of phasers and nadion particles: they disrupt molecular bonds, but what makes nadions really special is that they quickly transition into subspace after they're generated. They "boil away" into subspace. What happens when they strike conventional matter is that they break the matter apart doing direct disintegration damage and then "carry" the detached matter with them into subspace. This is why you don't see a huge explosion of steam for example, when organic matter is vaporized by a nadion phaser. Most visible pyrotechnics from phaser strikes is secondary physics at play - not the actual "disintegration" and subspace translation of molecules. Phasers work to "stun" living creatures at a lower power setting because a weaker stream of nadions doesn't tear apart solid matter - instead only energy is affected. Against most lifeforms this equates to electrical activity in the nervous system being simultaneously disrupted for a split second in the form of active electrons being boiled away into subspace throughout the body. It is conceptualized as far more efficient than an electrical stun weapon and seriously scrambles the nervous system resulting in first paralysis, then complete unconsciousness and possibly a light coma.
Because of a phaser's limited speed, perhaps this is why they use targeting computers? From the distance to the target in light-seconds as well as the velocity and trajectory of the enemy vessel, the ship's computer could be used to predict where the target will be when the phaser beam reaches that location. Or at least give you an area of highest probability.
The thing is, even if Trek states that ships are engaging each other at ranges of 100,000’s of km, the on screen depiction is only ever about 50km max. If they were shown firing at targets 100,000’s, you’d never be able to see anything, only weapon discharges disappearing into the distance. A great example of this is in the game Bridge Commander, where all battles are normally fought within 100km. Even at 100km, you can’t really see much of the enemy ship.
Whell you can just zoom in target on your screen. I think in 22 century cameras on starship can be as our Habble telescope. Asteroids are tausend if not milion km away and we can see it.
4:50 I guess this could actually explain why starships actually end up missing their target every so often, and why you see see many instances of ships like the Enterprise-D waiting until enemy vessels are at point blank range before returning fire (besides the fact that weapons deal more damage at closer range). It would also explain why maneuvering into an optimal firing position is actually important.
It takes a big man, or woman, to say in essence "I don't know"(1:08)🤔 But the commentator's explanation of what "Phasers" are is reasonable🤔 Good video👍
4:00 A lot of people forget that if I want to hit an object with and penetrate a bullet does have a limitation here penetration is limited to how much power can be packed in the chamber while with a laser or even phaser I just crank up my energy output in other words setting 2 and up and up.
One thing we need to remember about Nuclear weapons is that their destructive power is largely derived from the shockwaves they produce upon detonation. The initial blast has a lot of power in it, being able to literally vaporize matter, turning it into a plasma. There's also the extreme radiant thermal energy which gets released by the Plasma bloom created after Detonation (Before anything else even get's vaporized.) In a terrestrial environment there's a lot of stuff for a Nuke to work on, Air, Trees, houses, people, even the ground directly beneath ground zero, but in space there's almost nothing to push against, almost nothing to heat up, and because of that, if you drop the Tzar Bomba on the Moon, you'll get a nice little flash, but no bang... localized damage is what I'd expect from a Phaser induced nuclear detonation on a ship's hull... but other than that, the real power only takes place when you shoot a planet's surface with one. The More you know. :D
General classes of weapons: Explosive blast device (detonated near or in contact with the target), such as mines, missiles and torpedoes. These take minutes (hours or days) to reach the target. Kinetic energy (think armor-piercing shell, with or without blast effect). WW2 battleships could wait many seconds (or minutes) for an impact. Faster than torpedoes, but still slow. Directed energy (lasers, phasers, and subatomic particle "beams"). Blast (or other effect) only occurs at the target. Fast! Up to the speed of light. Visible to the audience is a big plus. Flexible settings (stun, kill, blast or vaporize) are a great way to avoid using "too much" force. Phasers and disruptors are the naval cannons of sci-fi.
Also consider the exact and careful aiming of a phaser on TOS "Piece of the Action" where they actually used a ships phaser to stun a hand full of men standing on some steps and the street nearby. Not only was that precise aiming, but also toned way down to a mere stun setting, which is the usual setting for a hand held phaser. Much to consider here.
Very good point. Since - from your example - the effect of the beam can be controlled very effectively, it can't simply be an energy weapon that causes nuclear fission in the target - or an explosion as a result of fission. Otherwise, even at the lower settings like the one you point out, the bodies of those people who were hit would simply disintegrate....and not maintain their cohesion. We've also seen phasers being used as drills on ST, so obviously it's not a process that results all of the time in nuclear fission. I DO think the beam disrupts the bonds that hold atoms together, but that - at its' lowest settings - the weapon simply transfers energy to the target; which can be used to simply stun people (probably by temporarily disrupting a person's nervous system).
I think the simplest explanation, is that Phasers are particle accelerator weapons. Afterall, in Enterprise, pretty much everyone uses Particle Beam Weapons, which at least on screen seem little different from Phasers. My head canon on this, is that Phasers ARE Particle Cannons and that Phaser is just the term used in Starfleet and as to Lore Reloaded's theory on the universal translator, the term is applied to all Particle Weapons regardless of make or specifications
No, Phasers are a specific type of particle weapon, one that uses nadions - that particle is what makes phasers so much more versatile and powerful despite the lower amount of pure energy needed to produce it; as opposed to Star Wars particle weaponry which require huge amounts of energy to get the relatively similar effect.
I personally always ignored the ranges they gave in Star Trek. "They're decloaking 20,000 km off the port bow!" They show the ship decloaking like 1.5km off the bow at max..... Whenever I try to write any stories based on ST or even other properties I always cut the engagement ranges by at least a factor of 100. More than likely, many of these engagements would be well within 100-200 km anyways.
The fan information flowing in the late 70's and 80's was that it was a particle beam and laser phased together. Particle beam and Laser, Phased. Phaser. That created some of the punch and penetration of plasma with the precision and range from the laser. Thnking over the physics, the ship are using compensation for motion as part of their targeting. Weapons charging is considered tantamount to shooting since the speed of light only allows you to detect the phaser as it arrives. There is a lot of violations of physics in sci-fi, so that is something to consider. Shell flight time from battleships can be targeted just fine, the same is probably done with phasers. It is possible for an ambush to happen in open space if the attacking ship has better sensors......
Actually, I think the targeting system uses mathematical formula to attempt to predict the location of the target. This also explains the misses, since a target can potentially change direction after the shot has been fired. Also, the phaser doesn't have to be so much slower than light, to be visible as it travels, to make it "take ages" to reach the target. As you said, if it takes light one second to go that distance, anything over 1 second is subluminal. Visibility is contextual, if you are physically able to see an object 300,000 km away...then the speed at which the phaser appears to travel will be in the context of the distance traveled. For example, if a plane flies past very close to you, it looks faster because of the short distance you see covered. If it is high in the sky, it looks slow because the visual context is a much higher distance. Just because something flying at near light speed would be impossible to see on earth, doesn't mean it would be impossible to see in space where the visible distance is much higher. There would be a parallax effect applying to the firing of phasers over long distances. Also, whether it's visible or not would depend on whether it reaches the target, before or after the brain can process the signal, as well.
Splitting normal atoms WOULD NOT cause a nuclear explosion like an atom bomb you need a critical mass of highly unstable atoms like uranium, and a special isotope at that, or plutonium, which is created in a cyclotron, or some other method, using the heavy uranium 238 Basically, the atoms aren’t close enough together and they don’t break apart as easily either So if it did cause fission, it would release some energy, but nothing like a nuclear bomb. It would be a fizzle at best. Awesome content man , love it subscribing after I press the send button
Yes, federation weapons use "subspace" sensors for targeting so not an issue as such. Even so, we already have predictive targeting so that's not an extreme thought.
Nuclear fission != nuclear explosion. Nuke explosions are the result of exponential chain reaction, not the isolated release of the nuclear strong force.
I never liked the constant single or double beam types. The left-right oscillating type in the 'original cast' movies, in my opinion, looked the best. Now we end with those red machine gun ultra fast thin vomit streams (it burns when I see) mated to just awful tweety bird chirps. These are supposed to represent a starships primary weapons and we hear a bunch of anemic "pew-pew-pew's"?...um yeah, hard pass. After Nero's ship takes a barrage of hits, he and his crew look at each other, then back to the screen and we hear the entire bridge crew doing their best to restrain their uproarious laughter: "*broken, deep snorting sounds* HAHAHA, are *gasp* are they kidding? HAHAHAHA. No, no, please stop, HAHAHA, *gasp* stop firing, we just had - had it washed-n-waxed *restrained giggling* you might scuff the finish, HAHAHA, two coats, *chortal-snicker* perfectly good *snicker-giggle-giggle* lunch hour *giggle-giggle* shot to hell, BWHAHAHA! 'Shot???' HA! get it? HAHAHA. Hey, hey, lower the *chortal* shields. Let's make them think they *snicker* they have a cha-HAHAHA-nce-hehe. Oh, and go by their port side real slow. Make sure they can see our deck 21 windows, I'm going to moon 'em, BWAHAHAHA! I wonder if this is the first Romulan pressed ham they've seen? HAHAHA!"
We aren't actually as far away from particle weapons as a lot of people think. We would just be far more likely to utilize Hadron particles The weapon would likely be powered by a collector and particle accelerator that utilizes magnetic fields to redirect the beam. It's also important to note that lasers are also particle beams because photons are particles. A phase or beam would also be far more likely to be blue because the necessary fusion would produce Cherenkov Ray's. The velocity of a phaser beam should be between .5c to .9c The recently see the beams on screen is because well it looks cool.
Phasers are a scam. In one scene Piccard literally step out of the path of a phaser beam fired only yards away. It's a bit like the guy with a hand gun who shoots dead a dozen trained mercenaries with full auto assault rifles.
3:20 we have a problem here. We must choose to use the technical manuals and lore OR the way they show on the screen, but not both. The SFX teams usually had enormous challenges to represent the scriptwriting and they frequently fell short. I love the show, but what we see on the TV is completely different from lore, like ships should interact from thousands of kilometers away, moving at relativistic speeds and would never really “fit our TVs” in a way we could see it propriety. So they usually showed ships, phasers, torpedoes and probes moving in real life naval speeds so we can follow the action. So we just can’t say “phasers are slower than lasers” and things like that based on visual cues. DS9 and Voyager were particularly bad at this and I think it has to do with Roddenberry being dead and not influencing the shows anymore.
P.H.A.S.E.R. = Plot-Helping Adjustable-Spec Energy Ray
I love it!
cool awesome!!!!
Nice
this is gold!
Lee Bee , how about Phased-Hydrogen-Amplification-Stimulation-Emmited-Radiation?
Now we just need to figure out how vapourising a person's cells can knock them unconscious without seriously harming them.
Its such a low setting that rather than vreaking anything down its a mild - strong shock
The lower setting disrupts the central nervous system, but doesn't vaporize anything. And electromagnetic beam taser.
It's got a mini transporter inside that puts the person back together again, only much sleepier.
It's possible that the phaser is at a low enough setting, but at a high enough velocity of the particle, that the impact is converted into kinetic energy as opposed to being able to actually affect the target's cells.
According to the TNG technical manual (the canon source for most of this), at lower energy settings the Rapid Nadion Effect does not occur, and only thermal-UV effects of low-energy EM exposure are experienced (no vaporizing, sorry). This can variably 'taze', semi-sedate, or heat-shock a humanoid organism, depending on physiology, and may have little to no effect on hardy xenobiologies.
4:50, ships don't use optical sensors, they use subspace sensors (or something like that) which can instantaneously get data from a certain position, even if light takes a second to travel the distance between the sensor and the target
I always figured that Nadions were essentially anti-gluons and they disrupted or destroyed the weak nuclear force bond in matter
Such as the death rays in original War of the Worlds.
You forgot to go over phaser banks as opposed arrays!! There is a difference. Otherwise I’m new to the channel and I’m loving the content!! Btw nice defiant model!
At least for hand phasers, the closest you could get in real life would probably be a a weapon that combines both a laser and an electron or ion accelerator. You can use a laser as a guiding beam to create a vacuum along its path of travel. The second stage of the weapon fires an ion or electron beam down that path. Depending on the strength of the electron beam and laser you could either tase the target or bore a hole through them.
lasers/energy weapons unless they go faster then the speed of light are incredible slow due to the speed of light restrictions, targeting systems/crew skills make up the difference but still you will miss alot more when shooting at a moving target from longer ranges or trying to hit a fast agile target.
A Star Trek book I had as a kid after the motion picture came out described phasers as a cross between the penetrating power of lasers and the destructive impact of particle beam weapons, the phase had to be correct to cojoin the two, hence the name.
About the "visibility" of phasers: what if what you are seeing is a sort of optical illusion, while the real beam is invisible. This would mean that, what you said about the actual distances apart that ships fought, the phasers would work correctly. However, what you are seeing, is actually a delayed reaction of the phaser emissions interacting with individual atoms floating in space, which destroys those atoms, leaving a visible trail of these atoms that linger after the actual beam is long gone.
Also, in films and on television, the ships "seem" to be closer or else it would be like actual battleships where they fight at ranges of up to 30 kilometers apart or more, and they are hard to see, let alone be in the same frame of a photograph.
An explanation is offered in a couple of the novels. The beams are essentially invisible as they travel through space, only visible at point of impact. While the missiles and torpedoes move far too fast for the eye to follow. But the starship crews (and the audience?) see these visual effects because they're being displayed on tactical panels and computer screens.
Phasers are described as being capable of traveling at .986c which is pretty damn close to the speed of the light itself. So the speed issue is kind of reeled in there, but at the same time the sensor issue might help balance of the "insta hit" factor that allows for some of the drama of the ship to ship battles. They do occasionally miss. In the end, phasers are more science fantasy than science fiction.
I actually know less about what a phaser is after watching this. Nice job.
One wrinkle often overlooked is that phasers can be used at warp speeds, therefore faster than light.
Only within the commingled warp bubbles of the two ships when they are within range. The spacetime within a warp bubble is still relativistic.
@@fusiondog77 Not according to what we see in The Ultimate Computer. All five starships are engaging at warp speeds, using phasers... and are nowhere near close enough for the warp fields to interact (which would be extremely hazardous for all ships so involved, as we saw when Enterprise and Columbia had to do this).
@@STNeish in the Enterprise episode the danger doesn't come from combining the Warp Fields that generate the Warp Bubbles that emanate across spacetime FROM the Warp Fields, stretching spacetime behind and contracting it in front over thousands or millions of kilometers. The danger comes from maintaining the Warp Fields using only one Warp Core and the stress of a complete system restart of the Enterprise.
Warp Bubbles will naturally overlap when ships maneuverer near each other in Warp, especially in Warp Dog Fighting. The relative size of the ship's during combat implies they are only a few hundred kilometers away at most during most of those attack approaches. By definition they would have to be within phaser range and that entire distance would be within the Warp Bubble generated by even a Warp 1 Warp Field.
@@STNeish Thanks for giving me an excuse to watch some good episodes though :)
@@fusiondog77 Always loved The Ultimate Computer, one of the best episodes of the whole franchise, if you ask me. I've never actually seen the episode of Enterprise, just SFDebris' review, so I'll defer to your analysis. I miss older Trek... even Enterprise.
california wildfires a few years back- homes, tires etc were melted and immediate surroundings, grass, rubber around melted rims etc were unblemished let alone burnt!
They can detect other ships in real-time in other systems light years away, they defiantly have faster than light sensors. There have been bits of dialogue too numerous to mention with real-time positions of ships light years away, with the detection coming from an individual ship, not relayed by some specialist array - Voyager episodes, the TNG Enterprise far away from home, time traveling ships.
And it's also necessary for photon torpedoes (much longer range and can be fired at warp) unless they are fired in the general direction and get a target lock as they approach, except that the firing ship locks on torpedoes before they launch.
In fact a technological breakthrough (not sure when, and Kelvin timeline had it much earlier with the USS Vengeance) enabled phasers to be fired at warp, which shows that faster than light targeting is completely evolved to practical usage, and as phasers get longer and longer range, hitting won't be a problem, it's probably just that delivering enough destructive force to a ship with shields of similar technological development as yours will be ineffective, but against weaker opponents, goodbye at several light seconds. Even in the time of Enterprise series the Verteron array could hit Earth from Mars (light hours) at faster than light speeds.
Another future breakthrough in beam confinement could be it doesn't degrade as quickly at range (But does eventually, otherwise sorry to those guys in the next sector), and in fact that is the slow evolution of weapons advancement.
Anyway, FTL battles means FTL weapons with FTL targeting.
_Journey to Babel,_ _The Corbomite Maneuver,_ _The Ultimate Computer,_ _Arena,_ and various other episodes show that phasers do move FTL and can be fired from Warp in TOS.
Well, way back when there was only TOS and us fan club members we play acted out all this kind of stuff. In the episode where Spock shows the Enterprise under Captain Pike it seemed to have a number of older lasers (Number One has a laser emitter fired at that mountain) and a couple of much more powerful particle cannons. No torpedoes mentioned. There was a scientific theory in the 1970s about neutron bombs or beams, a sort-of radiation-free nuke, neutrons being a subatomic particle without charge that was known to fracture other atoms: very destructive (if you could somehow get a supply of them). We thought the refitted Enterprise's phasers must be like coherent particle beams: further raised in power orders of magnitude like the difference between a flashlight and a laser. Like a laser they could be tuned or focused to vaporize a pinpoint or disrupt in a wider beam.
Thank you!
Not sure Roddenberry (or his various consultants) was really informed on scientific principles/theories. TV show, spaceships, pewpewpew, special effects, budgets.
@@pwnmeisterage
_"Not sure Roddenberry (or his various consultants) was really informed on scientific principles/theories. TV show, spaceships, pewpewpew, special effects, budgets."_
Considering that the information on Star Trek's scientific and technical accuracy is commonly available and easy to obtain, you should feel deeply ashamed typing this.
@@Idazmi7 lol tell me why I should be ashamed? I've watched all of Star Trek, enjoyed Star Trek, loved Star Trek, even proudly identified as a Trekkie ... I just refuse to blindly join the Cult of Gene or blindly worship every person/group ever involved in making the show. Why should fans ever be ashamed when showrunners produce crap? You don't need to argue that Star Trek attempted to use "commonly available" science to hold itself up, the bewildering scope of self-inconsistent Treknobabble nonsense shoots itself in the foot every time a particular episode or creative whim needs to change/discard/ignore whatever the show established was "scientifically valid" before.
@@pwnmeisterage _"lol tell me why I should be ashamed? I've watched all of Star Trek, enjoyed Star Trek, loved Star Trek, even proudly identified as a Trekkie"_
Your comments, both here and elsewhere, prove that false.
_"I just refuse to blindly join the Cult of Gene or blindly worship every person/group ever involved in making the show. Why should fans ever be ashamed when showrunners produce crap? You don't need to argue that Star Trek attempted to use "commonly available" science to hold itself up, the bewildering scope of self-inconsistent Treknobabble nonsense shoots itself in the foot every time a particular episode or creative whim needs to change/discard/ignore whatever the show established was "scientifically valid" before."_
See? Let's totally ignore that the TOS continuity got support from JPL, RAND, NASA, and various universities, and ignore that Matt Jefferies was an aerospace engineer that served on the B-17, and instead focus on technobabble: an element that ran rampant after Gene's *death* because Gene wouldn't tolerate it if he was still alive to protest. You are not a Star Trek fan.
It would make sense for phaser emitters to incorporate some sort of linear particle accelerator. Assuming that these nadion particle are charged and can be harnessed in that way.
You should do a video on what are and how powerful a turbo laser is. So far there isnt really an in depth analysis of it. All we know it can vaporize a common astroid (esb). Be neat video.
The narrator commented on phasers missing their target. What did he just say??? TOS: there was one episode where the blue phaser lances from the ship missed! That was it! The episode is called "Journey to Babel." The Orion ship was too fast to hit until Kirk lured him closer to the ship. The phasers beams from the Enterprise were very accurate. The pulse phaser had trouble striking a cloaked Romulan ship, "Balance of Terror." Ensign Garrovick, from the episode "Obsession" missed the blood draining vampire cloud out of fear. The evil Kirk in "Enemy Within" missed his target with a phaser due to a Vulcan nerve pinch. Spock ordered his crewman to fire away from the subjects in "The Galileo Seven." So, can anyone detail a specific time when phasers missed their target in the original series?
Targeting sensors achieve a lock using software similar to what is currently used by fighter jets to put their 20mm rounds on target, in that the speed and vector of the enemy is calculated and a aiming point is displayed on the pilot's H.U.D..
The fact that the various particles used in all subatomic particle weapons must travel at speeds slower than c and therefor targeted ships are able to initiate evasive maneuvers, giving us the hit to miss ratio we see on screen.
Particle weapons are practically useless warp speeds as once the beam reaches the outer perimeter of the warp field, the subatomic particles are left behind in a impotent trail. If you can, visualize spraying a can of Silly String out of car window traveling at highway speeds. So, particle weapons are only useful at warp if the ships are sharing a warp field. A tactic only useful if the targeted ship has a weaponry blindspot.
I have to point out that the phaser beams we see are for cool factor not scientific realism. Also the Defiants phaser strips are mounted in a ring on the top and bottom centre hull. Not the way you have them in your model. IT'S STILL A GREAT MODEL 😎
I prefer Klingon Disruptors.
I prefer the quantum discharge cannons that can destroy multiple ships at once.
They do sound cooler 😎
In STO I use Anti-proton that red is classic.
Subspace weapons are the best.
@@YamiFudo
I prefer the Shield-Eating blue beuaty of the tetryon
Very interesting, thank you.
Maybe the light that you're seeing is it the actual laser beam itself it's the effect of the beam maybe it excites something that's in space that makes it glow
Optical targeting is not an issue on Starships. Indeed, no starship would ever even visibly See another vessel. Doing so would put you far too close for the relative speeds at which they travel. ( Yes I know Impulse speeds are sub-light, you're still talking about low percentages of Light Speed.)
You need to go back to the original series for the correct explanation as to what Phasers are. It is said they were the "Phasing" of Particle-Beam weapons with Lasers. When these two different technologies were combined it was discovered that the merging of the two energies had a synergistic effect on each giving the weapon the best of both worlds. The penetration abilities of a laser with the punch of a particle beam cannon.
None of what you just said comes from the original show. Not one syllable.
It wasn't in the show, it was in the book about the show:
www.amazon.com/Making-Star-Trek-Stephen-Whitfield/dp/0345340191
One thing I need to know Is what are mega phasers? We seen them on the heavy frigate class star ship Reliant, which was taken over by Khan so he could try to attack the Enterprise and kill Kirk! what are Mega Phasers? They seem to be bigger versions of the normal phasers and had the bigger firing arc too! gave the Reliant more hitting power it seems than the Heavy Cruiser Enterprise?
The Reliant was actually a compact cruiser: more guns than Enterprise on a smaller hull. Megaphasers are just big phasers plugged into the Warp drives.
ive wathed, voyager TNG and TOS and phasers are always just fied in ONE Continuous beam , DS9 was different
None of these space battles would happen where you see both ships on same screen. Thats for TV. . .A spacecraft like one of these would sneak into a solar system by using one of the planets to block its view, then once it detected an enemy it would fire at it from billions of miles. . .The way these battles are shown here are more like sailing ships in the 1700's where they got right up close to one another.
One of the better explanations I've read about phaser behavior is that they convert matter into neutrinos. That way, when someone is "vaporized," the resulting cloud of hot steam doesn't scorch people nearby. It doesn't fully explain how a megawatt phaser can create effects more consistent with something over 200 times more energetic, but it seems phaser effectiveness is heavily dependant on the target's composition -- namely, the higher the atomic weight, the less oomph you might expect.
What do they know? Do they know things? Let's find out!
I like that it's an anti matter emitter beam. Utterly destroying matter...
A stream of antimatter particles seems unlikely to have a "stun setting".
@@pwnmeisterage You're confused. The hand held phasers have a stun setting.
It literally says "Starship phasers" in the video. I'm unaware of this on a Starship. Do you have anything that says we're going to stun that enemy ship on any star trek show book or movie?
Phasers are phasers, no? Same technological methods, same applied physics and particle beams (or whatever), even if they're built on different scales.
Or do you believe hand phasers are essentially a fundamentally different weapon which works through entirely different principles?
(Incidentally: In TOS, the Enterprise does actually use the starship phasers to stun people in a city-wide area. A couple times.)
@@pwnmeisterage yes the Chicago gangster one. I remember. That was people. Not another ship.
Not really explained in the Star Trek universe. Federation sensors operate on subspace (faster than light) frequencies. Perhaps that's how they are able to target and hit ships thousand of kilometers away almost in real time. Also, starship sensors can detect other ships traveling at warp using those same subspace sensors.
Also, thier computer systems work at subspace (ftl) speeds as well along with some of thier sensors. Besides fast targeting, needed for safe navigation in real space.
They can detect other ships in real-time in other systems light years away, they defiantly have faster than light sensors. There have been bits of dialogue too numerous to mention with real-time positions of ships light years away, with the detection coming from an individual ship, not relayed by some specialist array - Voyager episodes, the TNG Enterprise far away from home, time traveling ships.
And it's also necessary for photon torpedoes (much longer range and can be fired at warp) unless they are fired in the general direction and get a target lock as they approach, except that the firing ship locks on torpedoes before they launch.
In fact a technological breakthrough (not sure when, and Kelvin timeline had it much earlier with the USS Vengeance) enabled phasers to be fired at warp, which shows that faster than light targeting is completely evolved to practical usage, and as phasers get longer and longer range, hitting won't be a problem, it's probably just that delivering enough destructive force to a ship with shields of similar technological development as yours will be ineffective, but against weaker opponents, goodbye at several light seconds. Even in the time of Enterprise series the Verteron array could hit Earth from Mars (light hours) at faster than light speeds.
Another future breakthrough in beam confinement could be it doesn't degrade as quickly at range (But does eventually, otherwise sorry to those guys in the next sector), and in fact that is the slow evolution of weapons advancement.
Anyway, FTL battles means FTL weapons with FTL targeting.
Very true, but I would assume in a combat situation some form of ECM is employed so it would be harder to hit a ship at that range, like maybe making sensor ghosts or making the ship seem like its bigger than it actually is. Could be part of why they would use a bubble shape shield the enemy sees the bubble not the actual ship. Also even if the enemy weapon glances a hit at the shields if it goes through it won't hit the actual ship at those massive ranges. That and if both sides have those super luminal sensors, they might be able to have the ship make a quick dodge reaction on its own, to ensure it misses the ship as much as possible. Probably another reason they seem to always fight at closer range less chance to dodge and you're more likely able to fire direct blows as opposed to glancing shots.
I thought this actually was explained in Trek lore. The oft-mentioned "Picard Maneuver" apparently exploits a target's lack of FTL-capable sensors so the attacking ship briefly appears to be in the wrong place (or in two different places?) after a short FTL displacement.
Some Datababble once described TNG computer cores operating inside "nonpropulsive warp fields" so the circuitry wouldn't be constrained by lightspeed limits.
... all that being said ... the "science" behind the Treknobabble did get increasingly inconsistent over time.
@@pwnmeisterage
_"I thought this actually was explained in Trek lore. The oft-mentioned "Picard Maneuver" apparently exploits a target's lack of FTL-capable sensors so the attacking ship briefly appears to be in the wrong place (or in two different places?) after a short FTL displacement.
Some Datababble once described TNG computer cores operating inside "nonpropulsive warp fields" so the circuitry wouldn't be constrained by lightspeed limits.... all that being said ... the "science" behind the Treknobabble did get increasingly inconsistent over time."_
The Picard Maneuver makes a ship appear in two places at once through "look-back time", which is a real phenomenon. When you look at the moon, you are seeing where it was 1.3 seconds ago, and the same applies to a starship at that distance. If that ship warps at you and stops right next to you, it will look like it duplicated itself for a bit longer than a second. That means the maneuver only works on bare visual detection systems: Kirk used something much like the "Picard Maneuver" a century before Picard had a starship, and it didn't work against a Romulan Bird-of-Prey because the crew saw when the Enterprise disappeared from their sensor screen.
Also, Picard wasn't trying to confuse the enemy. He was panic attacking in a severely weakened ship, and the "Picard Maneuver" was a lucky side-effect of the enemy happening to not use anything but their eyes... which is monumentally stupid. As a result of being the first _Star Trek_ show to *_fire_* it's technical consultants and have no respect for stories already told, TNG started the "technobabble" trend and effectively defaced Star Trek lore later on.
- Hey, Gene, what do want to call this gun?
- Laser. Wait a minute, what did we come up with for our torpedoes?
- Photon torpedoes.
- OK. Let's call it a photon gun.
- I don't like that. What about "photon laser" ?
- Shorten it. That should work.
Photon torpedoes came long after, actually.
That has to be how it happened😂
Idazmi7 boooooo!!
@Blvkk
_"photons first came in TOS s2"_
False. Photon Torpedoes first appeared - by name - in _Arena,_ which was season 1, episode 18.
5:00 The targeting systems are not analog. Unlike the turbolasers in SW, the targeting computer is capable of making the calculations to hit fairly precisely at those ranges.
By "fairly precise", you mean the kind of aim we used to land a person on the moon-- as in, hundreds of men and billions of dollars, precise. Not, "world's best sniper" or "guided missile cruiser" precise.
Yes, but to be fair, at those distances, the best sniper would actually be less precise than a computer.
I suppose though, over time a person would get used to, and eventually be able to predict, how much leading would be necessary at 300,000 km. However, the amount of lead would be different with each new ship you encounter, likely. If it's a familiar target ...
@@Mephilis78 True. At the end of the day the two have very different emphasis from the eras upon which inspire them. SW from WWII and ST from the Cold War.
@@JAGraptor I never thought of Star Wars as being WWII-inspired, but rather WWII-derived (there's a creative difference). The best way I have to understand myself what Star Wars is, is 'A "Spaghetti Western" war drama in space.'
@@Mephilis78 I think that's a bit overthinking it. By TNG it's pretty clear (to us space freends) that an advanced, cooperative (not maniacal take-over-the-world) AI is helping to run the ship, running on a purely optical computer core inside a static warp field at FTL speeds. So it would be able to take sensor inputs and targeting commands, and come up with an appropriate firing solution and execute it within milliseconds of the command being input.
"Journey to Babel" TOS. Enterprise fires at a target 75,000 kilometers away. The phaser shot takes several seconds to hit the target, verifying they move slower than light. So, in TNG, I imagine it's like old WWII battleship warfare where you have to "lead" the target, and anticipate where the enemy will be when the volley or burst will make impact. Minor speculation, and seeing as it's all fiction I suppose the writers of TNG could just say they move faster because they're set at a stronger pulse. I Very much like your "garden hose" theory, as it does seem to answer a lot of these questions.
I don’t recall this scene. Have to watch again
Light takes 0.25 seconds to traverse 75,000 km. It's just editing for effect so the audience has something to watch. In TNG during the series finale the Future-Enterprise v. Klingon battle has 9 seconds between the first shot fired and a ship exploding - but how many shots were fired?
If you just count shots shown being fired and shots hitting as independent things it looks like 10 (you watch the Enterprise fire four times, you watch the Klingon ship get hit 5 times, and you see where the Klingon ship was hit by another shot).
If you assume a shot fired is a shot that hit and left visible damage then there are 7 shots in total - blast #1 went through, blast #2 left a mark, blast #3 went through, blast #4 hit but was immediately followed by #5 going through then #6 and #7 hitting.
But if you use audio cues that shifts a bit and we have no idea what happened to blast #1, can guess that blast #3 is what left the impact point on the back of the ship as the second clip of the Klingon ship starts, and end up with a count of 8.
Which one is correct? *shrug* It's all editting, it's not meant to be taken at face value, if it was then Ds9 would be responsible for innumerable variants of just Klingon Bird-of-Prey looking ships.
And with that in mind, editing being editing, my guess is that you're right about phasers being slower than light but that it isn't terribly significant in context because of the scales of what is being dealt with and how proportionally minimal the differences are.
LASERS are NOT instantanious as you claimed. At the 300, 000 Km range, a LASER would take 1 full second to travel that distance.
So at 300,000 Km you'd be targeting an image that's already lagging one second behind _and_ your beam needs another second of travel to reach it.
You'd never hit anything (which could manuever/evade) at that range with sensors and weapons operating within lightspeed constraints.
I guess that's why Star Trek has superluminal sensors/phasers. And self-guided torpedoes. And point-blank dogfights. Don't need all three, but they play it safe, lol.
One would hope thats taken into account
@@pwnmeisterage More importantly light diffuses like all waves and at the distance from the earth to the moon which is a minimum of a round 350,000 km a laser beam of 2.5 cm will spread to around 19 km on the surface, so you need all kinds of special optical focusing to insure that if you hit something it actually has an effect otherwise it's just a pretty light for your enemy to follow to a target.
You dumb fucks know light isnt a constant right?
@@pwnmeisterage Even at the close ranges of WW1/2 dogfighting, pilots had to "lead" targets and shoot in front of them. It's like that only more so.
My pseudoscientific explanation for why battles in these sci-fi franchises are at such close range is that whatever bolts the weapons are shooting radiate heat and light like crazy, and are getting exponentially weaker as they travel, so you need to fire them at close range to do any damage. "Dumb" physical projectiles like railgun bolts are easily resisted by shields (which somehow use their own energy against them, like an immovable object), so are hopelessly obsolete, and guided missiles can be devastating, but can be decoyed or just shot down before they get to you.
That first phaser strike In Wrath of Khan is still my favorite, the way it cuts and melts the hull. I read they used a wax model to make it look that way..
The effects in that movie still hold up remarkably well. The only thing that really dates it is the Genesis simulation scene. THAT looks like 80s CGI. The rest of that movie looks real.
So Phasers are The Lightsabers of The Star Trek Universe..elegant weapons for a more civilized culture...I Love That ...Great Video!
Splitting atoms does not necessarily lead to an explosive reaction on a macro level. Uranium 235 explodes because splitting it produces about 200MeV and two neutrons, those neutrons have a high likelihood of triggering a split in nearby uranium 235 atoms. Thus the effect is exponentially converting mass to energy. On the otherhand, splitting lighter elements like iron requires more energy then the atom outputs. So possibly nadion particles create some sort of field that temporarily lowers the energy needed to free other particles, allowing a high energy stream of plasma to knock them out of their orbits. It would also suggest it would a bad idea to hit large quantities of elements above ~200 on the periodic table with a phaser (although it would allow for very well controlled fission without needing to resort to something like control rods).
It might not even need the field you suggest, as the phaser might directly apply the energy to disrupt the nuclear bonds.
The only flaw I can see in this hypothesis is that you said "then" where you needed "than". I think you might be onto something.
Rather than traditional fission, it sounds like weakening or releasing of the strong nuclear force between protons and neutrons.
Yeah, the homophone behavior of dyslexia. Essentially my brain processes the text I read/write in a highly phoneticized way; bypassing critical review processes and making me blind to errors I make.
My guess is the TNG writers added the "nadion particle" as a technobabble macguffin to solve an energy shortage. Essentially just doing this with directed energy alone for very stable atoms would take a massive amount of energy. So much so that you would probably just start irradiating/melting/vaporizing everything (we're not just vaporizing things here, we're liberating particles...thats a lot of energy). So the mythical, short lived, artificially generated nadion particle comes into play to make it plausible. Or to steal a great phrase "How do nadion particles work? They work very well, thanks for asking."
Starship sensors are typically shown as superluminal in speed, often detecting ships and phenomena occurring as faster than light speeds.
With known science there is no explanation for a weapon that can cause a man or similarly massive object to glow and then disappear. If it is a vaporization process, then a man being turned to vapor in a few seconds would produce a huge explosion. If it disrupts the strong atomic force, you still have to deal with 150 lbs of free particles. Again, a huge explosion. The best explanation is to just say that it is based on an unknown future technology that phases matter out of existence. The original Outer Limits series had an episode named "Keeper of the Purple Twilight" where an inventor (with the help of an alien) developed a weapon that did just that.
0:47 I think the best case of phasers being more destructive than lasers is that one scene in TNG when the Enterprise encounters an alien ship that locks lasers onto them. The bridge crew all just look at each other confused, since lasers wouldn't even be able to get through their navigational shields. It's like the difference between a gun and a stiff breeze.
Which episode is this shown?
@@trentweston8306 th-cam.com/video/oLGDKVJlqL0/w-d-xo.html Season 2, Episode 4.
More like a bb gun and a thermonuclear ICBM.
Its wierd how energy weapons differ from sci fi universe to sci fi universe.
No, it's just fiction, this is standard. :D
Not really... all tech technologies in fiction only aid to tell the story as, when and how necessary. Everything is a story telling mechanic.
You mean from Fantasy universe to Fantasy universe, just like the Magic of Harry Potter differs from the Magic of the Once upon a Time series.
@@guillaumekaas6505 I suppose it's because writers want their universe to be unique
@@Sheilawisz star trek has solid roots in science, making it a sci-fi genra
Imagine a hadron supercollider weaponized?
@Jonny Croxville so you attack people who have the same ideas as you. Is that how you make your betas think you're smart?
@Jonny Croxville It's funny how you back off the moment I defend myself from your harassment. Your attacks have already been reported
lol they deleted their replies
One of the main reasons that the speed at which the phasers travels can be seen by the human eye is because Star Trek was a TV program and they needed us too see them for creative purposes. Simple really. How they actually work on the other hand is intriguing. IN reality the speed they travel at would have been the speed if light due to there makeup.
It's repeatedly said that phasers are a light speed weapon, traveling at or near the speed of light, but not breaking the light speed barrier, like photon torpedoes. When fired at warp, they "snag" the warp field and carry it with them (torpedoes or the particle beam of the phaser array), allowing for warp speed use of these weapons, but only at a certain range before it "wears off" and the particles/torpedoes drop back out of FTL into subluminal speeds.
On screen, it's also shown that the ships are right next to one another in the shot when the stated distance is in at least the thousands of kilometers range. Either the ships are much, much bigger than stated, much closer than stated, or this is just creative license to show a "cool space battle", because realistic space combat at the ranges involved would be dull and confusing to the viewer.
Yeah I know. I did say that they should actually travel at the speed of light and yes it's also said that space battles are done over hundreds if not thousands of kilometres. That said, just like how the speed of the phaser seemingly changes depending upon the scene is done for the exact same reason that ship battles are always shown with ships right next to each other. Its a TV/movie.
That's true but most of these discussions are "in universe" discussions about how the technology would work if it were real.
I suppose it could be handwaved "in universe" by pretending that all the space battles are seen through the perspective of the bridge viewscreen (or other display panels), with the starship computers helpfully highlighting all the "invisible" weapons fire. And not so much an issue when firing in/through an atmosphere.
I love how you bring in the Cheshire Cat, as if to say, "screw you science, I do what I want!"
Since phasers are so powerfull, then why arent ship battles ended in seconds, since phasers can destroy entire citys and cut continents in half?
Edit: Turns out the hulls of federation ships are 20x times harder than diamonds
The hulls can resist space-time level of destruction.
Shields absorb energy, why the ships survive such strikes, powered by the ships engines. When the power to keep the shields operable, unless the opposing ship has greater power, drain the shields output from the ship producing the shielding.
All those eons and no airbags we have collision avoidance lane radar advanced armor wow
I always thought they worked not only by transferring energy (like all energy weapons), but by also eliminating the atons' intinsic fields when they can (disintegrate without the BOOM).
If Phasers can shoot 1 light second away and they travel at approximetly light speed then all the shots will be 2 seconds behind. 1 second from initially seeing the enemy and 1 second for the shot to travel that far.
To avoid a shot at around 300km within 2 seconds would require a 10G maneuver. And since you can't tell you're being fired at until you're hit you ship would have to constantly change directions to remain safe.
So space battles would be constant 10G maneuvers and shooting at where you think the enemy might go.
I really like your speculation on how nadions work.
We already have high-intensity light beams that are powerful enough to vaporize small materials and leave burn marks on sheets of metal. Scientifically speaking, they are photons, or rays of electromagnetic particles, that are optically amplified (i.e. using a simple magnifier) to render them hotter and more intense. The process of creating these high-energy light beams is called “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation,” or in short: L.A.S.E.R.
In real science a PHASER, is a beam of light, carrying subatomic particles accelerated at close to light speed, I don’t know what a nadion is, but I’m assuming Star Trek will say it’s a subatomic particle.
A phaser is essentially a particle accelerator. Bombarding a target with billions of high energy subatomic particles. If we had the energy for that today it wold slice through a ships hull like a hot knife through butter.
And to clarify at very long range combat say hundreds of thousands of km light would take about 1 second to hit,
Targeting at very long range today against a moving target our computer targeting extrapolates your and the the targets speed direction altitude, range from target and calculates a box of where the fighter and or ship/ground target will be when the missile gets their in assuming Star Trek targeting systems do exactly the same and fire at where the ship is GOING to be at long range not exactly where it is, even today it has a success rate is about 95% I can imagine Star Trek is beyond that
Ps I’m very looking forward to quantum torpedos and you trying to explain Zero point energy something I can barley grasp lol
Which is why I did Phasers first. Quantum torpedoes will be harder.
@@resurrectedstarships Also because nobody knows it they produce an uncontrolled zero point energy powered explosion or instead produce quantum streams (the ones that almost destroyed the Enterprise one time by using its own shields and integrity fields against it).
PH.A.S.E.R. Photons Amplified by Stimilated Emission of Radiation. I suppose Nadeon is a type of Radiation.
Zero point energy is caused by a mathematical error. It does not, not will it ever, have an actual use.
The mathematical error is called the inverse square law. The worst part about it is that it's nearly everywhere in physics. The Law of Universal Gravitation uses it. Relativity uses it in a bass-ackwards kind of way. Planck's Quantum Theory is based on it.
To show how it's an error, I'll use the Law of Universal Gravitation as an example. The Law of Universal Gravitation says this:
GMm
F(g)=----------
r^2
where F(g) equals the force of gravity, G equals a conversion constant to convert mass to force, M equals the mass of one object (representative of the strength of the gravitational field) and m equals the mass of the second object (representative of how receptive the second object is to the gravitational field) and r equals the distance between the gravitational centers of the two objects.
The problem comes in when you think about those centers. The strongest a gravitational field should be is at the center of the gravitational field, at r=0. Using the formula, however, the strongest a field should be is at
GMm
F(g)=-----------
1
Which is at r=1.
If you enter the center, 0, into the formula, you get infinite force. That is why scientists think that you can get infinite energy from the zero point.
@@yazton731 Yup. The makers of Star Trek loved their photon weapons.
Phaser are used to cut through shields and complex alloy. Nukes can't bust through shields. A nuke hitting a shielded ship is like a racket hitting a tennis ball. The ball will never be destroyed no matter how hard you hit it
Good analysis and reasonable points all around. Since in TNG they are often able to detect obstacles ahead of them while at warp with enough time to stop or avoid them, I wonder why targeting a sublight target at 300K kilometers would be much of a challenge.
Just exemplifies why phasers are far superior and far more advanced than lazers with more than 10 times the max range. But, as usual a star wars fanboy has stolen these same stats and replaced the actual ranges and capabilities of lazers with them on a site called stardestroyer.net . The site the owner bans anyone that dares point out the false stats on anything. I know, I called him out on proton torpedo ranges and capabilities twice and he banned both accounts.
Luckily, that site is essentially dead now. The people from there still show up from time-to-time on other sites, taking their nonsense with them.
Hey Resurreected Starships in case you didnt know the targeting systems the military uses today can lock on and track a target and still hit even though it can take several seconds or even minutes for the missile or laser to hit the moving target but 9/10 times still manages to even though the target isnt in the same place as it was when the weapons system first locked on to it. So why cant ST sensor systems operate the same way? Or did you not think of that?
There is also the fact Star Trek ships during combat move at the very minimum at near light speeds, sometimes even fighting at warp speed.
A hit rate of 9/10 times also seems a little dubious for missiles today. 65% sounds more realistic. But I do agree that ST sensors and target processing would be far more advanced than it is now. No need to be condescending about it, though.
Snipers do the same, they have to take in it account the forces of gravity, wind direction on a bullet, the time it will take for a bullet to arrive at it's target and where that target would have moved to if it is moving. All of that is done with their eyes and their brains.
Well yes. But the maximum range of most ships is less than 500 km. This is over 6000 TIMES that. Also star trek ships can move almost infinitely faster than any modern ships
The acronym P.H.A.S.E.R. was actually a post-peoduction note: Please Have Another Special Effect Ready
If your "phaser projectiles" take a few seconds to reach the target, do what a Warship does: Aim in front of the expected flight path.
I wonder how hand held Phasers with stun settings work within your framework.
That’s about the most perfect “If and or maybe” explanation I ever heard.
Nadion particles are artificially created and can be charged with practically any type of energy or radiation to achieve the desired result, thus the settings on the phaser itself.
I have a headcanon for Phasers: when the Federation decided to adopt them as weapons they were the kind of weapon that would pay off in the long haul of research. Disruptors and such are short term weapons that do horrible amounts of damage but can be countered over time while the Phaser would be able to be adapted to any situation. Eventually they would be the best sort of weapon there is with enough calibration, which is what the Federation is all about in terms of science.
You obviously have no idea about 'leading the shot'. As a shooter of skeet, clay and real birds I have to aim where the target is _going to be_ when my shot gets there. If I shoot at the bird I will miss it in front or behind depending on its trajectory of flight compared to my fixed position. In a dog fight it's slightly more involved, but essentially the same.
A weapon that messes with electromagnetic bonds of atoms sounds like a disruptor.
What about messing with the bonds between elementary particles, i.e. fissioning everything it touches?
A weapon that nullifies gluons would be OP as hell.
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I don’t think there’s differences in phasers such as speed ect. We see it because it looks good on screen. I don’t think it’s deeper than that.
yes! do quantum torpedoes!
i would imagine thats what they mean by "effective" weapon's range
as in sure the phasers have a range of 300k km BUT at that range any moving target is pretty much un-targetable
Not that we can see at the speed of light, but we can see a bolt of lightning. And that's fl pretty damned fast!
there is no "old series" it is "the original series"
Everybody knows what phasers are. Fricking awesome, that's what they are.
Next up, video breakdowns on shields, each video covering a different sci-fi.
"What is a 'Phaser?" That question has been (mostly) unanswered since "Star Trek" season 1. I figured that this was a kind of Plasma, though VGER was the only one actually using such on Klingons.
The "blast half a continent" comment was the lasers on the Original Pike Enterprise pre 2270/Kirk, pre Abramsverse.
Remember Disruptors break down atoms and leave radiation. Star Trek inconsistently refers to Phaser Burn and Phaser Radiation.
I'd like to know where the term Nadion came from, because I've heard it but I don't remember it.
Targeting with Phasers is done by computer at long range. You have to specify manual.
Plasma canons came first so it's a improved version of the design
Why the two types of main weapons? Phasers for sublight fighting, photon torpedos for fighting at warp speeds is the way they use to explain it. Although they don't follow that now.
IIRC, a lot of Star Trek print authors over the years have generally agreed on the following conceptualization of phasers and nadion particles: they disrupt molecular bonds, but what makes nadions really special is that they quickly transition into subspace after they're generated. They "boil away" into subspace. What happens when they strike conventional matter is that they break the matter apart doing direct disintegration damage and then "carry" the detached matter with them into subspace. This is why you don't see a huge explosion of steam for example, when organic matter is vaporized by a nadion phaser. Most visible pyrotechnics from phaser strikes is secondary physics at play - not the actual "disintegration" and subspace translation of molecules.
Phasers work to "stun" living creatures at a lower power setting because a weaker stream of nadions doesn't tear apart solid matter - instead only energy is affected. Against most lifeforms this equates to electrical activity in the nervous system being simultaneously disrupted for a split second in the form of active electrons being boiled away into subspace throughout the body. It is conceptualized as far more efficient than an electrical stun weapon and seriously scrambles the nervous system resulting in first paralysis, then complete unconsciousness and possibly a light coma.
Because of a phaser's limited speed, perhaps this is why they use targeting computers? From the distance to the target in light-seconds as well as the velocity and trajectory of the enemy vessel, the ship's computer could be used to predict where the target will be when the phaser beam reaches that location. Or at least give you an area of highest probability.
The thing is, even if Trek states that ships are engaging each other at ranges of 100,000’s of km, the on screen depiction is only ever about 50km max. If they were shown firing at targets 100,000’s, you’d never be able to see anything, only weapon discharges disappearing into the distance. A great example of this is in the game Bridge Commander, where all battles are normally fought within 100km. Even at 100km, you can’t really see much of the enemy ship.
Exactly.
Whell you can just zoom in target on your screen. I think in 22 century cameras on starship can be as our Habble telescope. Asteroids are tausend if not milion km away and we can see it.
4:50 I guess this could actually explain why starships actually end up missing their target every so often, and why you see see many instances of ships like the Enterprise-D waiting until enemy vessels are at point blank range before returning fire (besides the fact that weapons deal more damage at closer range). It would also explain why maneuvering into an optimal firing position is actually important.
It takes a big man, or woman, to say in essence "I don't know"(1:08)🤔 But the commentator's explanation of what "Phasers" are is reasonable🤔 Good video👍
4:00 A lot of people forget that if I want to hit an object with and penetrate a bullet does have a limitation here penetration is limited to how much power can be packed in the chamber while with a laser or even phaser I just crank up my energy output in other words setting 2 and up and up.
One thing we need to remember about Nuclear weapons is that their destructive power is largely derived from the shockwaves they produce upon detonation. The initial blast has a lot of power in it, being able to literally vaporize matter, turning it into a plasma. There's also the extreme radiant thermal energy which gets released by the Plasma bloom created after Detonation (Before anything else even get's vaporized.)
In a terrestrial environment there's a lot of stuff for a Nuke to work on, Air, Trees, houses, people, even the ground directly beneath ground zero, but in space there's almost nothing to push against, almost nothing to heat up, and because of that, if you drop the Tzar Bomba on the Moon, you'll get a nice little flash, but no bang... localized damage is what I'd expect from a Phaser induced nuclear detonation on a ship's hull... but other than that, the real power only takes place when you shoot a planet's surface with one.
The More you know. :D
General classes of weapons:
Explosive blast device (detonated near or in contact with the target), such as mines, missiles and torpedoes. These take minutes (hours or days) to reach the target.
Kinetic energy (think armor-piercing shell, with or without blast effect). WW2 battleships could wait many seconds (or minutes) for an impact. Faster than torpedoes, but still slow.
Directed energy (lasers, phasers, and subatomic particle "beams"). Blast (or other effect) only occurs at the target. Fast! Up to the speed of light.
Visible to the audience is a big plus. Flexible settings (stun, kill, blast or vaporize) are a great way to avoid using "too much" force.
Phasers and disruptors are the naval cannons of sci-fi.
Also consider the exact and careful aiming of a phaser on TOS "Piece of the Action" where they actually used a ships phaser to stun a hand full of men standing on some steps and the street nearby. Not only was that precise aiming, but also toned way down to a mere stun setting, which is the usual setting for a hand held phaser. Much to consider here.
Very good point. Since - from your example - the effect of the beam can be controlled very effectively, it can't simply be an energy weapon that causes nuclear fission in the target - or an explosion as a result of fission. Otherwise, even at the lower settings like the one you point out, the bodies of those people who were hit would simply disintegrate....and not maintain their cohesion. We've also seen phasers being used as drills on ST, so obviously it's not a process that results all of the time in nuclear fission. I DO think the beam disrupts the bonds that hold atoms together, but that - at its' lowest settings - the weapon simply transfers energy to the target; which can be used to simply stun people (probably by temporarily disrupting a person's nervous system).
I think the simplest explanation, is that Phasers are particle accelerator weapons. Afterall, in Enterprise, pretty much everyone uses Particle Beam Weapons, which at least on screen seem little different from Phasers. My head canon on this, is that Phasers ARE Particle Cannons and that Phaser is just the term used in Starfleet and as to Lore Reloaded's theory on the universal translator, the term is applied to all Particle Weapons regardless of make or specifications
weldonwin yea but particle guns where considered antiquated by starfleet and werent used.
No, Phasers are a specific type of particle weapon, one that uses nadions - that particle is what makes phasers so much more versatile and powerful despite the lower amount of pure energy needed to produce it; as opposed to Star Wars particle weaponry which require huge amounts of energy to get the relatively similar effect.
Photon helping adjusting
I personally always ignored the ranges they gave in Star Trek. "They're decloaking 20,000 km off the port bow!" They show the ship decloaking like 1.5km off the bow at max..... Whenever I try to write any stories based on ST or even other properties I always cut the engagement ranges by at least a factor of 100. More than likely, many of these engagements would be well within 100-200 km anyways.
Phasers are not long range. If we’re talking about ship to ship combat at hundred/thousands of kilometers away, the ships are prolly using torpedoes
The fan information flowing in the late 70's and 80's was that it was a particle beam and laser phased together. Particle beam and Laser, Phased. Phaser. That created some of the punch and penetration of plasma with the precision and range from the laser.
Thnking over the physics, the ship are using compensation for motion as part of their targeting. Weapons charging is considered tantamount to shooting since the speed of light only allows you to detect the phaser as it arrives. There is a lot of violations of physics in sci-fi, so that is something to consider. Shell flight time from battleships can be targeted just fine, the same is probably done with phasers. It is possible for an ambush to happen in open space if the attacking ship has better sensors......
Actually, I think the targeting system uses mathematical formula to attempt to predict the location of the target. This also explains the misses, since a target can potentially change direction after the shot has been fired.
Also, the phaser doesn't have to be so much slower than light, to be visible as it travels, to make it "take ages" to reach the target. As you said, if it takes light one second to go that distance, anything over 1 second is subluminal. Visibility is contextual, if you are physically able to see an object 300,000 km away...then the speed at which the phaser appears to travel will be in the context of the distance traveled. For example, if a plane flies past very close to you, it looks faster because of the short distance you see covered. If it is high in the sky, it looks slow because the visual context is a much higher distance. Just because something flying at near light speed would be impossible to see on earth, doesn't mean it would be impossible to see in space where the visible distance is much higher. There would be a parallax effect applying to the firing of phasers over long distances. Also, whether it's visible or not would depend on whether it reaches the target, before or after the brain can process the signal, as well.
Splitting normal atoms WOULD NOT cause a nuclear explosion like an atom bomb
you need a critical mass of highly unstable atoms like uranium, and a special isotope at that, or plutonium, which is created in a cyclotron, or some other method, using the heavy uranium 238
Basically, the atoms aren’t close enough together and they don’t break apart as easily either
So if it did cause fission, it would release some energy, but nothing like a nuclear bomb. It would be a fizzle at best.
Awesome content man , love it subscribing after I press the send button
Yes, federation weapons use "subspace" sensors for targeting so not an issue as such. Even so, we already have predictive targeting so that's not an extreme thought.
Nuclear fission != nuclear explosion. Nuke explosions are the result of exponential chain reaction, not the isolated release of the nuclear strong force.
3:18 DUDE!!! Lightspeed is 299,792.458km/s, therefore === a phaser beam would travel that distance in 1 SECOND. The Technical manual tells you this.
I never liked the constant single or double beam types. The left-right oscillating type in the 'original cast' movies, in my opinion, looked the best. Now we end with those red machine gun ultra fast thin vomit streams (it burns when I see) mated to just awful tweety bird chirps. These are supposed to represent a starships primary weapons and we hear a bunch of anemic "pew-pew-pew's"?...um yeah, hard pass.
After Nero's ship takes a barrage of hits, he and his crew look at each other, then back to the screen and we hear the entire bridge crew doing their best to restrain their uproarious laughter: "*broken, deep snorting sounds* HAHAHA, are *gasp* are they kidding? HAHAHAHA. No, no, please stop, HAHAHA, *gasp* stop firing, we just had - had it washed-n-waxed *restrained giggling* you might scuff the finish, HAHAHA, two coats, *chortal-snicker* perfectly good *snicker-giggle-giggle* lunch hour *giggle-giggle* shot to hell, BWHAHAHA! 'Shot???' HA! get it? HAHAHA. Hey, hey, lower the *chortal* shields. Let's make them think they *snicker* they have a cha-HAHAHA-nce-hehe. Oh, and go by their port side real slow. Make sure they can see our deck 21 windows, I'm going to moon 'em, BWAHAHAHA! I wonder if this is the first Romulan pressed ham they've seen? HAHAHA!"
Always just assumed it was a particle beam meant for punching through as many bulkheads as possible.
We aren't actually as far away from particle weapons as a lot of people think. We would just be far more likely to utilize Hadron particles The weapon would likely be powered by a collector and particle accelerator that utilizes magnetic fields to redirect the beam. It's also important to note that lasers are also particle beams because photons are particles. A phase or beam would also be far more likely to be blue because the necessary fusion would produce Cherenkov Ray's. The velocity of a phaser beam should be between .5c to .9c The recently see the beams on screen is because well it looks cool.
Phasers are a scam. In one scene Piccard literally step out of the path of a phaser beam fired only yards away. It's a bit like the guy with a hand gun who shoots dead a dozen trained mercenaries with full auto assault rifles.
3:20 we have a problem here. We must choose to use the technical manuals and lore OR the way they show on the screen, but not both.
The SFX teams usually had enormous challenges to represent the scriptwriting and they frequently fell short.
I love the show, but what we see on the TV is completely different from lore, like ships should interact from thousands of kilometers away, moving at relativistic speeds and would never really “fit our TVs” in a way we could see it propriety.
So they usually showed ships, phasers, torpedoes and probes moving in real life naval speeds so we can follow the action.
So we just can’t say “phasers are slower than lasers” and things like that based on visual cues.
DS9 and Voyager were particularly bad at this and I think it has to do with Roddenberry being dead and not influencing the shows anymore.