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"Aye aye, Captain. Firing all torpedoes."

Cases moved to loading chambers.

"All of them, dammit!"

All four loading chambers get used.

Reactants filled into torpedoes.

"Fire, now!"

Torpedoes moved to launch tubes.

"Fire!"

Oops. Warp core is offline. Can't get the power to the launcher...

"*sigh* Open hailing frequencies. Tell them that we surrender..."

haha yes, I love star-trek and one my favorite parts about is trying to find plot holes honestly, you could imagine how frustrating episode 8 and 9 of Star Wars were for me, sure they were cinematic but mannnnnnnnn the plot hole bull crap in them..

 Flinty wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
Oh yea, I know it was an FX budget thing most likely, it just struck me as odd. I would have preferred fleets of Akiras, sabres, and steam runners in the last season, showing they'd run through or stowed all the explorer ships, and this is what the real Federation Navy looks like.

There are two options when it comes to DS9:
1. The Federation just didn’t use those ships, or the Sovereigns and Intrepids, in the war. They also didn’t fire torpedo volleys. They are the dumb.
2. They did all that stuff, but due to chance (vfx constraints), we just happen to be seeing the parts of the battle where they aren’t visible.

I prefer option 2.

As for why phasers seem to be used more by galaxies, keep in mind the photon torpedo has not changed in size, and this in theoretical maximum payload, since Khan while phasers have gone through many marks, had larger power plants, and been collumated. It’s not until the quantum torpedo that torpedo effectiveness has caught up to “modern” technology.

Also, it’s a darn shame how many potential technologies Starfleet just ignores. The subspace teleporter from that episode banned in the UK could pass through shields and transport bombs, for example.

Indeed. An angry Fed Navy would use:
*Transmatter cloaks (Pegasus)
*Genesis Torpedoes. (STII)
*Time warfare. (STIII, STOS)
*Subspace torpedoes (ST whatever...I never saw it) and Antiship mines (Houdinis but biggie sized)
*Dedicated guided antimatter missiles with Transmatter cloaks, and shields and something more on the order of a multigigaton warhead.
*Dedicated missile cruisers carrying the above.

They would cloak into enemy space with unmanned missile cruisers, which would deploy cloaked Gen torps and gigaton torps in spam waves. Even if the enemy defeats the cruisers, their planets are all gone, or now turned into planet sized Carne Asadas. mmm...carne asade....

That doesn't include Captain Lensflare's "red matter." Don't like someone? shoot five thousand black holes at him.

They could even go back in time with transmatter cloaked vessels, and plant them in the middle of potential enemy planets. At the signal they just go off.

And at that point they are no longer the federation...

Sure they are. The Federation was born in the Romulan War. In the Dominion War is the first existential war for the Federation since maybe the Romulans, and did interesting things like engineering a biovirus to wipe out their enemy utterly, which...worked. Against the Borg threat, they developed a slew of pure war vessels. They're also allied with the Klingons, arguably the most predatory power in the Alpha Quadrant.

Eh Klingons haven't been a real threat in a long while. By the time they start to join the Federation their Empire is already stagnating and their society is steadily going through a change. It's not an easy change and they keep flipping between going back to "the old ways" and "moving forward".

I think for them what they realised is that an Empire built on war and constant expansion eventually reaches a point where it cannot keep growing and remain stable at the same time and the Klingons have inevitably chosen stability.
Plus look at their neighbours; Klingons are not war-shy, but they basically wound up against opponents who would present serious opposition and could, with the right tactics, win. Or unite and beat the Klingons. At that point you either go in swinging blades and hope; or you make peace.






Also a thought to why they don't fire all torpedoes at once. Perhaps its training and doctrine instilled in them because torpedoes are a lower energy demanding weapon with limited numbers of shots. Couple that to the fact space is big, really big. If you get beating up in a fight, even if you win, you've still got to limp home.
If you blew all your torpedoes in the first fight you've nothing saved for the second or third fight.

Granted the counterpoint is that by withholding firepower potential you also run a higher risk of taking more damage in the first encounter; leaving you potentially worse off.




In the end its up there along with how the anti-gravity generator seems to never break; the Federation never uses seatbelts on ships (barring one or two occasions) and even has standing crew positions as normal during battle; how they never have any breakers installed on the bridge (seriously the number of electrical burns!); how in most episodes all ships line up perfectly in the same orientation every time.

Overread, the problem I see in watching Star-trek is that so many of the fights are so nail-biting close, that firing all the torpedoes from a tactical sense makes a ton of sense, but this might also just be that its TV and these types of fights are very uncommon in actuality, like for instance I doubt Picard and his enterprise really had 1000 nail-biting close calls if this were in reality and no a TV series

bat702 wrote:
Overread, the problem I see in watching Star-trek is that so many of the fights are so nail-biting close, that firing all the torpedoes from a tactical sense makes a ton of sense, but this might also just be that its TV and these types of fights are very uncommon in actuality, like for instance I doubt Picard and his enterprise really had 1000 nail-biting close calls if this were in reality and no a TV series

Exactly. There's even quite a few episodes that start out "after/on the way from/we just finished" etc... details and then the adventure sparks into something else. So I'm sure they did a lot of surveys and studies and diplomatic meetings that all went fairly well if totally boring and uneventful. The series just picks out the most important and key events that happen to the crew.

I think the other thing is that we never really get a sense of how big the galaxy is in start trek. Some series do it better - Firefly does a good show of how you're out on the fringe and limited for choice; Battlestar is built on the concept etc... ST just never really gives that sense of scale and size. So we get comfortable with the idea that the Enterprise is just a stone's throw from heading home or at least to some allied world or starbase to resupply and get support.

Isn’t DS9 only like a weeks travel from earth? And it’s out on the fringes?

The warp engines get faster as the distance gets vaster.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
The warp engines get faster as the distance gets vaster.

not sure what you mean but the difference between warp 9.8 and 9.9 is definitely exponential

Some points on "why don't the Federation just do X":
1) Basically any time the Federation does something very awful it's either Section 31, which is very specifically designed to be awful but for "good reasons", or Sisko gets mad at Eddington again and commits war crimes.
2) The Federation doesn't understand cloaking tech and both the Romulans and Klingons aren't going to share it with a tenuous at best ally. They specifically signed treaties to not develop the tech to keep the Romulans pacified and the Pegasus was a breach of this treaty sanctioned by a rogue officer.
3) Subspace weapons are banned by the Khitomer accords and the only factions we see using them are the So'Na who didn't sign it and the Dominion.
4) Starfleet is an exploratory "navy", the Enterprise-D has many guns but is an exploration ship with families and many science labs. It's very rare for Starfleet to make a warship which is why the Defiant was so special.
5) Starfleet and the Federation as a whole represent the Utopian ideal of a peaceful, democratic society that relies on diplomacy to solve its problems. The Federation, unlike most other galactic powers, never seeks war but often falls into conflict because these other powers are more often than not very bad guys. The Klingons only allied with the Feds because their economy was awful and broke the peace when the Feds wouldn't support an unprovoked war. The Romulans are xenophobic racial supremacists and the Cardassians are the same but worse. The Dominion is led by a group with a misguided notion that Order = No free will. Picard's one failing IMO is that there's a fleet of heavily armed single design starships ready to beat up some Tal-Shiar splinter group at a moment's notice.
6) To ignore all of the above would give you the Terran Empire, which was a fascist empire that fell to infighting and numerous uprisings. DS9 showed the Terrans as cowed and broken people that absolutely got what they deserved. Enterprise and Discovery showed just how awful the Terrans were even to their own.

A lot of this seems to just boil down to "Why doesn't the Federation just commit war crimes and violate all its treaties?". For the same reasons modern nations don't violate the Geneva Conventions, someone will kick your teeth in for being bad.

bat702 wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
The warp engines get faster as the distance gets vaster.

not sure what you mean but the difference between warp 9.8 and 9.9 is definitely exponential

He means that as the size of Starfleet and the Galaxy they explore gets bigger, the warp factor speeds increase. This allows the show to maintain a general sense of similar distance and story design. Ergo the speeds they travel by DS9 are likely a lot faster than they were in Original Series because everywhere is so much further away that to maintain the story structure and social s tructure the speeds have to increase. Which is interesting because one of the few "long reaching" storylines of TNG was a pair of episodes focused on them capping the warp speed at lower than max due to the potential for planetary scale damage caused by regular high warp speed travel. It's something that appeared there and sort of kicked around but never really got heavily established, but every so often I believe it gets a mention.

Because it would be kind of dumb just to launch every single torpedo. If all of them miss you are now left waiting to fully reload.

Mostly photon torpedoes use antimatter for warheads, and anti matter doesn't grow on trees. It's also the ship's fuel supply and main power supply.

Too many torpedoes, too little fuel and power for the ship.

I think you are missing the point, there are so many close call battles on the TV show, where any ship captain you would suppose would launch WAY more torpedoes in these close call occasions

Yep, the only reasons for not going rock 'n' roll with the torpedoes in a sticky situation has either got to be a mechanical/technical issue or a storywriting issue (or an FX budget one); it can't be a logistical, tactical or strategic one. Even if it's a tactical doctrine that's drilled into the crew, I find it hard to believe that that doctrine would stand up to "we're all going to die!" moments.

There are so many occasions where there's nothing to lose by firing everything you've got, especially where such a decision could prevent you, your ship, your crew, your mission and your precious stock of torpedoes from turning into a rapidly expanding cloud of gas and particles.

Maybe that's why it seems like the first salvo always seems to take the warp core or weapons offline, just so the writers don't have to deal with this sort of thing.

 Chillreaper wrote:
Yep, the only reasons for not going rock 'n' roll with the torpedoes in a sticky situation has either got to be a mechanical/technical issue or a storywriting issue (or an FX budget one); it can't be a logistical, tactical or strategic one.

IIRC they didn't have many shield impacts in DS9 because of the time/cost of rendering them.

I do also remember at least one battle scene from late on in the dominion war where the crew noted the defiant had fired most/all of it's torpedoes.

Star Fleet Battles handles it well. It takes time and energy to charge the torpedo; it's simply impossible to load ALL the torpedoes all at once.

There's also a limited number of launch tubes, and that's where the charging facilities are. A Federation Heavy Cruiser has for tubes and therefore can only charge four at a time. Once the torpedo is launched, a new torpedo can be cycled in quickly, but again charging the torpedo.

Consider it 'taking antimatter from containment and installing it in the torpedo shell' more than anything else. The only place it can be done safely is in the launch tube... and doing it anywhere else will take more time and has a significant risk of blowing your whole ship up.

If you have a double barrel 12 gauge and 40 shells, why don't you fire all 40 at once?


Starfleet ships only have a certain number of torpedo tubes, and that is why shots are in salvos.

 Vulcan wrote:
Star Fleet Battles handles it well. It takes time and energy to charge the torpedo; it's simply impossible to load ALL the torpedoes all at once.

There's also a limited number of launch tubes, and that's where the charging facilities are. A Federation Heavy Cruiser has for tubes and therefore can only charge four at a time. Once the torpedo is launched, a new torpedo can be cycled in quickly, but again charging the torpedo.

Consider it 'taking antimatter from containment and installing it in the torpedo shell' more than anything else. The only place it can be done safely is in the launch tube... and doing it anywhere else will take more time and has a significant risk of blowing your whole ship up.

As an old SFB player, this was my thought as well. They take power over 2 turns to prime and fire, although you can hold them in the tubes by feeding them more energy. And the power requirements are not small, so reloading all tubes while you are keeping the shields reinforced, maneuvering, etc. was not easy.

 Nevelon wrote:

 Vulcan wrote:
Star Fleet Battles handles it well. It takes time and energy to charge the torpedo; it's simply impossible to load ALL the torpedoes all at once.

There's also a limited number of launch tubes, and that's where the charging facilities are. A Federation Heavy Cruiser has for tubes and therefore can only charge four at a time. Once the torpedo is launched, a new torpedo can be cycled in quickly, but again charging the torpedo.

Consider it 'taking antimatter from containment and installing it in the torpedo shell' more than anything else. The only place it can be done safely is in the launch tube... and doing it anywhere else will take more time and has a significant risk of blowing your whole ship up.

As an old SFB player, this was my thought as well. They take power over 2 turns to prime and fire, although you can hold them in the tubes by feeding them more energy. And the power requirements are not small, so reloading all tubes while you are keeping the shields reinforced, maneuvering, etc. was not easy.

Or even impossible, if you're in the original DD...