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Driven by Apathy
Formerly known as Brain_Caster
This, very much. Solve that problem, and gimballed cannons suddenly become the clearly superior choice. If we assume that the problem can't be solved, focused phasers might be better, but I think that would be overly pessimistic.
[X] Type-2 Gimballed Cannon
High probability of always being less powerful and more fragile than a same generation focused design variant though imo. I do not like this path.
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her/They/Them
[x] Type-2 Focused Emitter
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
Yeah, I kept editing my post as I thought through it, but it seems that we're pivoting between going with full scary Big Gun theory or if we're going to go with more, lighter guns with a higher rate of fire to get the same result as our foundational phaser principle.
Strunkriidiisk
THE LEGEND
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
As a general thought on this - gimballed weapons mean a ship can make longer passes than with focused weapons, since any given mount can track further and any given ship is likely to have more phaser mounts to continue raking an opponent with before needing to reorient. While the individual shots are less powerful, the ship can probably make more of them in a pass and so the actual damage is likely to be similar.
Realistically in most cases, this choice is likely to even out over time - focused weapons are going to kill heavy ships more quickly with burst damage but struggle against manoeuvrable opponents (even mounted on a High/VHigh Manoeuvrability design, combat with ships that are similar in handling is likely to involve a long period of tail-chasing as each vessel tries to get a clear shot); while turrets will have lower but more constant output and be better able to deal with more nimble targets but might struggle to focus fire effectively on a heavier platform. All in all I would expect things to come out more or less even at the end of things, given the variety of hostile parties and other dangers in Star Trek; I'd say just think of this as an aesthetic vote rather than deciding which is 'correct,' since either format is going to have strong points and weak points.
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Actually, I modeled it up and it looks pretty cool. Here is the general idea modeled onto a Sagramatha.
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I'mma knife you, come at me bro!
For some reason I pictured spheres that had continuous phaser strips on them. Extend them out from the hull and get all the firing angles. As someone else said though I'd expect future developments for the gimballed would decrease the size of the exposed and maneuverable part of the turret and boost damage. For the focused style I'd expect improvements to costing or coverage to make it more attractive that way.
For non-canon advancements I think a deflector array that could operate from smaller emitters would be cool. Have four spread out and use a ton of math to make it behave like a much larger dish. Being able to nestle warp engines in like cardassians do would open up some fun options. If we had both we could make big changes to the federation's Aesthetic. Clear up a bunch of firing arcs currently limited by secondary hulls or nacelle placement.
Edit: Smaller highly maneuverable targets you can't hit with torpedoes feel like they couldn't stand up to phaser fire especially if you can track them.
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It's a much more restrictive mount with fewer moving parts.
Type 1s are Cost 3. You wanting 2.25x the damage for 1x or at most 1.33x the cost is frankly unreasonable.
Also, more mounts needed + massively more expensive means that I'd rather take the type 1 than mount the focused type 2 on anything but a high maneuverability ship.
- Location
- california
[X] Type-2 Gimballed Cannon
StriderInCosmos
Wanderer in the Worldsea
- Location
- Somewhere in... Terminal Dogma? I think?
I could see this being an interesting path to follow. While there is certainly going to be more math involved, it not only nets us some very interesting new designs, but it offers some small amount of redundancy as well; put one deflector out somehow, and while the other deflector(s) might be able to take you home at a slightly slower speed (much like multiple nacelles have increased redundancy).
The Federation could gain a reputation for some real space tanks.
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You mean the fight we won?
Yes, against a single ship of our size and a gaggle of what amounts to militarized runabouts.
We won. The Shark is a good ship.
But we did just literally see the drawback of not having 100% coverage.
- Location
- Lake Wobegon
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
[X] Type-2 Focused Emitter
- Location
- United States
[X] Type-2 Focused Emitter
Driven by Apathy
Formerly known as Brain_Caster
What I especially like about gimballed phasers is that if the "only two can fire at the same time" problem can be solved, this would enable us to make use of the Star Destroyer principle in our half-saucer designs - in fact, the half-saucer shape would be even better than the Star Destroyer pyramid for that.
Place a pair of cannons on top of the saucer. One on the left and one on the right, both pointed slightly towards the front. Place them so that they have sufficient coverage to fire maybe 10 degrees towards the opposite side in front of the ship - thanks to the half-saucer shape of the ship, this is perfectly possible. Now place a bunch of cannons on the bottom of the saucer, more or less symetrically to those on top.
You can now fire all 4 phasers at any target directly in front of the ship, while also having very decent coverage on the sides.
There'd still be a 110 degrees blind-spot at the back of the ship - but that's much better than what we currently have with the Selachii, and you wouldn't even need to shake the enemy completely off your tail to bring them into the firing arcs of at least 1 phaser.
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pheonix89
Wants to be Seven Of Nine
- Location
- North American Plaguelands
- Pronouns
- She/Her
As you may note, the requirement to do that was for the lunatics we were fighting to fly their ship apart.
Like, literally.
Someone else tried to do the same thing and they spontaneously disassembled.
Yes, but only because they too lacked aft guns. If they had aft guns they would have gotten a free shot on us after the nose pass without turning at all.
We see this a couple of times now. An initial clash of ships involves a nose to nose shooting phase and a tail to tail shooting phase. Having powerful forward weapons is a must, but not having aft weapons means we forgo shooting after the pass entirely, and we will not wipe the enemy out in the first phase entirely.
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