The phasers are firing...slowly

[Arpy]

I just read a remark in another thread about how the phaser blasts in NEM seemed to travel too slowly, and I felt the same when I saw the movie. Now, phasers always seem to go slower than they should - the speed of light. This is especially apparent in scene with hand phasers where you should see the beam appear virtually instantaneously from phaser to target. I felt underwhelmed by the phasers in the latest Star Trek movie as well. The movie was great, but, like in this one scene, the Enterprise is rapid-firing phasers biplane-like. The blasts look like gooey spurts of blurry light. When they hit target, they splash pointlessly.

I wish they'd do more about giving the phasers more verisimilitude, make them seem more realistic. It needs to matter, visually, when they're fired. It needs to be immediately bracing, at once marvelous and dreadful. You need to hope with your crew that their weapon will hit target, and to feel viscerally its unsettling destructive ability.

So, this is one thing that I've noticed effect my Trek experience. What are some of yours?

 

[Timo]

I don't see how lightspeed phasers would be any more realistic than bullet-speed ones. Phaser beams are fictional, and they don't display much light-like behavior in other respects - why should their speed be that of light?

Also, much of Trek space battle takes its inspiration from the grand battles of old sailing ships. Those had rather pitiful weapons - seventy or eighty of those cannon firing simultaneously at point-blank range might chip some wood off the enemy sides, or then not. Battles were about perseverance, not about lucky shots. Personally, I think this sort of battle offers more possibilities for drama than the WWI style of cruiser battle where the first shot to connect might well be the one that settles the entire fight.

Then again, variety is always a good thing, too. Perhaps a few battles could go the WWI route (incredibly penetrating weapons that just have great difficulty scoring hits), and a few the Cold War surface route (one-sided saturation attacks by unerring weapons mean total devastation if even one of the missiles gets through), or the classic sub vs. ship route (a lurking enemy will succeed in killing you if he gets to fire first, but he's vulnerable to your bombardment) or the modern sub vs. sub one (two stealthy opponents each hope to fire the first, decisive shot, but not at the cost of exposing themselves) - even when the majority of combat is of the dramatically flexible and convenient Napoleonic style where hours upon hours of bombardment and maneuvering can lead to all sorts of dramatic turns and twists without necessarily being completely fatal to either side.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Deks]

Their speed should be that of the speed of light because the Phaser range has been stated to be 300 000 km on-screen.

How exactly do you expect phasers to be effective if they cannot reach their targets fast enough?

 

[Timo]

Gunshells in the naval battles of the past century took the better part of a minute to reach their distant targets. That didn't weaken their effectiveness much; the target might in theory try an evasive maneuver, but in practice the attacker could always lay a pattern of fire that was inescapable where a single shell was not.

Theoretically, with warp speed starships, it shouldn't matter much whether a phaser beam takes one second or thirty-five to cross 300,000 kilometers: the target would be capable of evasion in either case. In practice, a pattern of fire, a good predictive routine, and the use of shorter than maximum ranges in most cases, would still make the slower phasers lethal enough.

The prominent feature of phaser beams really is that their speed is variable, though. We don't know how and within what limits it can be varied, but we do know that the beams that move slowly enough to be seen in some cases move fast enough to catch a warp-speed target in others. It's probably a matter of pumping in enough power: not worth the effort in the general case, but necessary if the target is especially fast.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[maneth]

Yes indeed. And all that is dwarfed by the fact that there's not enough matter to scatter light in space, so a light weapon couldn't be seen even if its effects could. Still, that's just artistic license, since we're unlikely in the extreme to ever get FTL travel.

 

[indolover]

Yes indeed. And all that is dwarfed by the fact that there's not enough matter to scatter light in space, so a light weapon couldn't be seen even if its effects could. Still, that's just artistic license, since we're unlikely in the extreme to ever get FTL travel.

This.

it's like a torch. If one is in a dark room, and one switches the torch on, you would see the light hit the target instantaneously.

A phaser from the Enterprise wouldn't have the same dramatic effect.

 

[sojourner]

TOS was actually more accurate than later trek in this respect. Phasers were shown as a blue beam that "connected" to the target with no travel time.

 

[RyuRoots]

Phasers != Lasers, therefore, why would you ever inherently expect them to be the speed of light? This misconception seems to have happened with every science-fiction beam weapon EVER that isn't called one.

 

[Myasishchev]

Their speed should be that of the speed of light because the Phaser range has been stated to be 300 000 km on-screen.

How in the world does this follow? A laser's range isn't limited to one light-second.

Theoretically, with warp speed starships, it shouldn't matter much whether a phaser beam takes one second or thirty-five to cross 300,000 kilometers: the target would be capable of evasion in either case.

Assuming they were LS weapons, active evasion would be impossible even with FTL. A laser beam is not visible until it reaches you. I suppose maybe they have active FTL sensors (they're pretty inconsistent on this count), but these are much more difficult to reconcile with any physics than the premise-necessary, squint-and-it-makes-sense warp drive.

In any event, I've always consider phasers to be more like 10-50% lightspeed weapons. That already provides a hell of a lot of kinetic energy, and is already extraordinarily fast, so .99c or FTL isn't likely to much improve actual lethality.

But even at 10% lightspeed, crossing 100km should seem instantaneous to a human being.

 

[Arpy]

Yes indeed. And all that is dwarfed by the fact that there's not enough matter to scatter light in space, so a light weapon couldn't be seen even if its effects could. Still, that's just artistic license, since we're unlikely in the extreme to ever get FTL travel.

Phasers emit nadions, not photons. I don't have a problem seeing them. Hearing sound in space on the other hand...seeing starships bank when they turn like they're wading through water on the other hand...

The latest Trek movie pointed this out during the orbital dive scene - you heard the characters dive more and more the deeper into atmosphere they plummeted. That was cool. The realism there make me sit up a little - shit was real.

Hearing ships in space can have its charms anyway. Maybe I'm just used to its wrongness and enjoy a good, if incorrect, sound effect. Phasers though are too important. If their effect sucks, if it has no punch, it brings down the overall universe.

Trek's had many different phaser effects. Some faster, some slower, some that glowed brighter, darker, in different colors, with different textures, sounds... There's no reason they couldn't do it better.

The phaser effects are only one thing that detracts from my overall Trek experience. Not a lot. Not unreasonably. But it does. What are some of yours?

 

[scotpens]

Phasers != Lasers, therefore, why would you ever inherently expect them to be the speed of light?

Because all energy in the electromagnetic spectrum travels at the same speed.

Unless, of course, phaser beams aren't electromagnetic energy, but some other type of energy or force that doesn't exist in the known universe.

 

[T'Girl]

Because all energy in the electromagnetic spectrum travels at the same speed.

Depending on the environment, the speed usual given for light is in a vacuum, light is of course slower at sea level Earth and propagates slower still through water.

In the episode Wink of a Eye, Kirk in his accelerated state shoots his phaser at the bimbo of the week. The beam takes about four or five seconds to travel twelve feet, bimbo just steps out of the way.

Okay if one hour passes on the ship, while Kirk (in his accelerated state) experiences one week, that would mean that a normal phaser puts out a beam at half the velocity of my little Kahr purse pistol (1030 fps at 15 feet).

In the TNG episode Conspiracy, after Lieutenant Commander Dexter Remmick is taken over by a larval form goa'uld, he shoots at Picard and Riker who, after the beam is fired, duck out of the way.

 

[Sector 7]

Although I did not coin the phrase, it is nonetheless true: Ships- and, apparently, phasers- travel at the speed of plot. This is as good an explanation as any.

 

[Deks]

Phasers != Lasers, therefore, why would you ever inherently expect them to be the speed of light?

Because all energy in the electromagnetic spectrum travels at the same speed.

Unless, of course, phaser beams aren't electromagnetic energy, but some other type of energy or force that doesn't exist in the known universe.

Well ... truth be told, Phasers are Nadion particle based weapons which might give them properties.

As for the earlier question how does the fact that the phaser range is 300 000 km = that the speed at which the beam takes is equal to 1 second ...
Well, it is my theory that since we are dealing with a warp capable culture that has the ability to blow up planets with a properly configured torpedo sized warhead, fires Phasers and torpedoes at Warp speeds ... it's reasonable to think that at sublight, these weapons are designed for accuracy, long range and deadly force (when necessary).

A maximum effective range of phasers is also 300 000 km ...
Of course this statement alone doesn't facilitate the theory that the beams should be 1 light second fast, however it's reasonable to extrapolate they should be as such because it's not beyond the technological level of the Federation.

Same goes for torpedoes ... if you want to have a reasonable extrapolation of how battles would go, then sure, you can show phasers as appearing instantly at their destination (provided the target isn't over 300 000 km away) and torpedoes as only pulses of light flashing at the torpedo tubes but without seeing the actual torpedoes (which would also instantly hit their target).

If 1 quarter of light speed is the maximum impulse velocity of Federation ships, then these ships ARE indeed painfully slow to any form of evasion of directed energy weapons or torpedoes.

And just because WE in reality use weapons that are slow in reaching their designated targets, doesn't mean the reference stands for a species that uses technology which is centuries (if not thousands of years) more advanced than what we have now.

 

[maneth]

Yeah, I suppose the advantage of having a weapon based on a particle that doesn't exist, like the nadion, could explain its unusual properties.