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Starfleet Design Bureau

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Fouredged Sword said:
Yes, but this nessicitates we build more smaller ships and fewer larger ships. We would be forced to keep ships small to maintain maneuverability and then get hit a second time with the small ship stick as we need more and more expensive phasors for large ships.

Meanwhile if we go with gimballed phasors we can get away from small ships entirely and build cruisers and battlecruisers.

And basically ALL of our future enemies are likely to employ cloaks. Being able to shoot backwards seems really useful.
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If anything the prospect of getting hit by cloaked enemies pushes me in the other direction; from canon, gimballed weapons are stored inside the hull, presumably lest someone defang you with your shields down, and require time for a physical mechanism to open the doors and extend the weapon out.

Not to mention, again, that once in combat they're a great dangly bit for someone to try to shoot off.

Embedded, focused emitters will have faster response times in whatever firing arc they possess and more durability under fire.

Large ships can afford to mount them to cover all arcs, and maneuverability will be the order of the day for escorts up through light cruisers, as it was this past time.
 
Fouredged Sword said:
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.
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Personally I think it's odd to bring this up as if it was an example which supported your argument, given that it's a small ship class with heavily focussed weapon arcs getting jumped by multiple smaller and more agile ships, I.E. close to the worst-case scenario in terms of a lack of coverage. If you had asked some of the people fear-mongering here to say what would happen in that scenario, then they'd insist it was a death sentence. But actually the Sharks had to manoeuvre a bit to keep our guns on-target, and then our superior firepower blew them away.

If anything it proves that this is in fact quite manageable even in a disadvantageous match-up. And in most other scenarios, more firepower on-target is strictly advantageous.
 
We also built the Selachii with a ridiculously high maneuverability factor specifically to offset any disadvantages that came with a forward-focused firing arc. That is not a merit on the type of phasers we had, but on the design we made to work around the limited coverage of Type-1 phasers in the array we placed them in. That's about all I'll try and argue as I'm mainly voting based on vibes and the 'what if?' factor.
 
[X] Type-2 Gimballed Cannon

I really want that focused emitter but the applications seem too specialized to me, while the gimball seems more useful to more ship varieties.
 
I've... gotta agree here. This seems like a complete non-sequitur. What's your reasoning behind the statement?
 
Iirc there was something a post or two ago about our torpedoes becoming obsolete. Perhaps the focused blaster could be a replacement for those?
 
Frankly, if that's the design of the Gimbal mounts, it suggests that they can actually be replaced when underway if they suffer damage, while the emplaced emitters likely require yard time if they get shot off.

And given the scale of a phaser compared to the size of the hull, if something's capable of shooting off a gimbal mount, it's going to be capable of shooting an emplaced emitter off.
 
Skippy said:
You mean the fight we won?
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I mean this is fundamentally the thing, isn't it? The Selachii fight, in theory, should have been an embarrassment that showed the superiority of wide-angle weapons over narrow focused ones, with a warship facing down enemies of notably superior maneuverability. And yet, it acquitted itself quite well, because maneuverability and coverage aren't the be-all-end-all of combat concerns, especially given the 2-phasers-at-a-time limitation and the fact that ships in Star Trek aren't modern naval warships or fighters, and the first-shot P-K is not actually very high.

[x] Type-2 Focused Emitter
 
landcollector said:
I disagree. Fragility is more than just battle damage, those gimbals and other moving parts *will* seize or break down at inopportune moments.
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Only if Starfleet slacks on maintenance or designs a shitty gun mount. Reliable mechanical systems arent that hard to design if you know what you are doing, and Starfleet very much does.

Hell, we already KNOW Starfleet can design effective gimbal mounts. We had them a literal century ago on the Skate.
 
Roaming_Guardian said:
Only if Starfleet slacks on maintenance or designs a shitty gun mount. Reliable mechanical systems arent that hard to design if you know what you are doing, and Starfleet very much does.

Hell, we already KNOW Starfleet can design effective gimbal mounts. We had them a literal century ago on the Skate.
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Even reliable mechanical systems can fail, you are imo being foolish by discounting the possibility entirely.
 
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