"Report on what is canon", "technically canon"... please learn to read.
Lol.
"The tech manuals are written by ST production staff, same as the Encyclopedia (Mike Okuda). Since their contents report on what is canon, they are technically canon." - Harry Lang, Senior Director of Viacom Consumer Products Interactive division, posts on StarTrek.com forum, January 2005.
I know you might have thought that a brilliant strategy, but it really just shows how stupid you really are. And I have little patience for these sort of word games. The first part of the sentence justifies the latter part; which is, they are canon. We KNOW that the contents that they report on are canon, because as the previous sentence indicates, they were written by production staff.
Technical Manuals are writers' guide. Writers were free to, and did, completely disregard them. The best you can say is that TMs are "canon so long as they do not contradict anything shown on screen"... which is as good as saying that they are not canon, considering how much TV shows and movies contradict the manuals (and also themselves, but that is another discussion).
Yes. And?
Your argument doesn't solve the issue. It's not that there are no long-range engagements in Star Trek. That does happen. The question that takes place is, which is accurate to the setting and why? Someone has already brought up The Wounded and you invented some reason why it's an outlier that shouldn't apply. Which is all you actually care about; not finding the truth, but kneecapping the opposition.
What the TM does is settle the issue. Yes, undoubtedly short-range engagements happen. Maybe even often. Probably for good reasons. No, that doesn't eliminate the strategic advantage that a ship might employ.
That is supposed to prove what? It has no relation to your original claim.
We know gravitons are a component of shields.
Don't play games with me. Shields are not a matter cloud and have never been described as such in the show. That's a fan theory and while certainly a good one,
is in no way canonical.
TNG TM:
"Heat dissipation on each generator is provided by a pair of liquid helium coolant loops with a continuous-duty rating of 750,000 MJ. Four backup generators are located in each hull, providing up to twenty-four hours of service at 65% of nominal rated power."
When a character is saying something like "shields at 30%" or some such, they are describing the effective output of the generator. And those generators, while limited in other ways, are primarily limited in their ability to dissipate 384 megawatts of energy, the heat generator is limited to ~750,000 MJ before the generator begins to break because it's too hot. It's an obvious heatsink system,
with that heat eventually radiated into space.
And yes, gravitational fields might be what shields are. But if that is all that shields are, how do you explain... literally everything about the shields? Why are shields shown as a membrane instead of a field? Why are they shown physically glowing when weapons or objects hit them? Why is only the area of impact shown as glowing? Why are shields invisible when active but when struck, glow in the area of impact? Why weapons dissipate immediately upon hitting the membrane instead of gradually dispersing as would be the case if the shields really were a field? Why objects bounce off the glowy membrane thing? Why do we see shields brushing against each as if they were solid objects other instead of area of effect which gradually grows stronger? Why are shields locational in nature (forward, left, right, aft shields)? Why do they weaken in percentages when struck by weapons fire? (OK, that last one might be explained by shields being powered by a capacitor instead of directly by the warp core).
Yes, yes--
I've also read Wong's article on shield portrayals being inconsistent.
In fact, we have a natural phenomenon which behaves almost exactly like Star Trek shields. And guess what it is?
Scientists Discover Star Trek Style Invisible "Shield" Thousands Of Miles Above Earth
www.iflscience.com
That could certainly fit the bill for what we see in the show.
Except that isn't the
actual canon explanation. Which is I'm sure, something you should actually cared about, given your previous interest in keeping stuff in canon.
The actual explanation is this:
11.8 Deflector Shields
"The tactical deflector system is the primary defensive system of the Galaxy class starship. It is a series of powerful deflector shields that protect both the spacecraft and its crew from both natural and artificial hazards.
Like most forcefield devices, the deflector system creates a localized zone of highly focused spatial distortion within which an energetic graviton field is maintained. The deflector field itself is emitted and shaped by a series of conformal transmission grids on the spacecraft exterior, resulting in a field that closely follows the form of the vehicle itself. The field is highly resistive to impact due to mechanical incursions ranging from relativistic subatomic particles to more massive objects at lesser relative velocities. When such an intrusion occurs, field energy is concentrated at the point of impact, creating an intense, localized spatial distortion.
To an observer aboard the starship, it appears that the intruding object has "bounced off" the shield. A zero-dimension observer on the intruding object would, however, perceive that his/her trajectory is unaffected, but that the location of the starship has suddenly changed. This is somewhat analogous to the spatial distortion created by a natural gravity well and is typically accompanied by a momentary discharge of Cerenkov radiation, often perceived as a bright blue flash. The deflector is also effective against a wide range of electromagnetic, nuclear, and other radiated and field energies."
As for the reason why we don't see the matter shields are made of unless it is struck by weapons, there is actually an explanation inherent in one of properties of the shields: namely, frequency. Star Trek shields are not a permanently active wall. They have a frequency, as do weapons (phaser discharge you see is not a continuous beam but rather a burst of a large number of individual beams). Ships fire out of the shield by matching the weapons frequency to shields, and incoming fire can bypass shields by matching the frequency. This implies that either shields are either on/off active (which would make sense if they really were an energy field, but - see above) or else that the shield "membrane" is really a rotating "donut" of matter, and weapons frequency is matched to donut's rotation in order to bypass it. So even assuming that whatever matter shields are made of should be physically visible (and considering it is obviously something exotic, that is a tall order), fact that shields are not in fact a solid "wall" means that you could still see through them.
So where is the actual matter that you insist that the shields are made of?
Which still does not mean you get to go "oh, we will simply ignore everything that has been shown".
It's a TV show. I have no problem dismissing what we see as well, production mistakes, poor writing decisions, and dramatic action shots for the audience. I mean, I would argue that Picard's accent is not British, because his character is French. Yet in the show, he clearly has a British accent.
No, she is almost certainly talking either about taking hits while closing in or about Jem'Hadar battlebugs' warp cores exploding. And yes, I never denied the engagement began at longer range. But consider that maximum effective engagement range of Star Trek ships tends to be in the order of 100 000 - 200 000 kilometers - it is clear that they only rarely utilize this theoretical capability, for whatever reason.
And now you've switched to handwaving instead of the more obvious conclusion; that there are tactical reasons why someone would want to engage at longer ranges, but also why they might engage at closer range. In the case of Kira, it doesn't really matter why she said what she said--clearly the indication was that they were going to take damage because of it. The main importance is that the bugs engaged at least as far as a hundred thousand kilometers. Sisko CHOSE to engage at 500 meters for maximum firepower effect.
Which by the way, visually doesn't add up either and is an example of continuity errors that crop up in TV shows, if one prefers the Wong approach. These ships cross a hundred thousand kilometers in a few seconds, but onescreen, are clearly not moving at such speeds. Did they hit the brakes at the last moment?
In fact, that is easy to explain in fleet battles - Federation tends to be outnumbered, and its ships tend to have good all-around firepower whereas Dominion and Cardassian ships are both forward-focused by all appearances (well, Cardassians shouldn't be, except VFX team screwed up and decided that deflector dish is really a phaser coil). It is in Federation's best interest to close to shorter range.
Some problems there.
1) Starfleet was not always outnumbered in every engagement.
2) That seems an over-simplistic approach as to why they would close during engagement. It can be just as probable that they would do so for the sake of reaching a strategic objective or simply to reduce response time or inflict more damage.
3) Federation ships are torpedo heavy. I don't think canonically, we've seen any major ship as having the capacity to fire the sort of bursts that we know the Galaxy and other Federation ships are capable of. It also doesn't explain why the enemy doesn't try to avoid close-range engagements.
It is in fact, most probable given what we see in the actual show:
A Matter of Honor
TACTICS: The Enterprise has raised its shields.
RIKER: That's normal procedure when entering into a suspicious situation. It's not an act of aggression. The Enterprise will not fire first.
KARGAN: Then they are fools, for we will.
RIKER: You'll get only one shot.
KARGAN: We'll only need one. Stand by on phasers and torpedoes. Prepare to fire them simultaneously.
RIKER: I recommend you don't fire until you're within forty thousand kilometers.
KLAG: Why?
RIKER: It will cut down their response time.
And even then, Riker had suggested that they wait until a *mere* 40,000 km.
But that explanation does not explain why so many starships are apparently designed for short-range engagements: both Defiant and Klingon Birds of Prey utilize pulse cannons, as do some other alien ships - and while Klingons may be excused by cloaking device ambush tactics, Defiant was not designed with cloaking device in mind. So, why? The only explanation here is that short-range battles are, in fact, a rule rather than the exception.
See, A Matter of Honor sort of knee-caps you my dude. If that were the case, the Klingon captain in the Bird of Prey would probably have waited until they were much closer. Instead, Riker's the one that suggests they wait until they're within 40,000 km to cut down on ship response time.
In fact, going over stated ranges, they tend to paint a very different picture than one 500-meter range battle you're trying to pass off as standard.
The Search:
O'BRIEN: One hundred thousand kilometres.
KIRA: That's well within range of their weapons, Commander.
DAX: Should I alter course?
100,000 km? Well within weapon's range.
Equinox Part 2
PARIS: Thirty thousand kilometers and closing.
JANEWAY: Target their power core
30,000 km. And Janeway felt comfortable designating a target on the ship and not just the ship itself.
Basics:
TUVOK: They are randomly detonating torpedoes in our flight path.
KIM: Shields are holding. No damage.
JANEWAY: Hold your fire, Mister Tuvok. They may have torpedoes to waste. We don't.
PARIS: Thirty seconds to intercept.
JANEWAY: Take us out of warp.
PARIS: Engaging impulse engines.
JANEWAY: Power to all weapon systems. Stand by phasers.
TUVOK: Kazon vessel ten thousand kilometers off our starboard bow.
JANEWAY: Not yet.
TUVOK: Six thousand kilometers.
JANEWAY: Not yet.
TUVOK: Five thousand, three, two thousand.
Here, Janeway decides to hold fire until 2,000 km.
Non-Sequitur
KIM: They're going to try to do everything they can to stop us. They think we're trying to steal this prototype.
PARIS: They're closing to five thousand kilometers.
KIM: Shields down to seventy percent. Fifty percent.
KIM: Twenty nine percent.
PARIS: I thought you said this ship was new and improved.
KIM: It is, but it looks like they haven't finished working on the defensive systems. In fact, some of the safety interlocks aren't even in place. A few more of those hits and I don't.
KIM: We're losing antimatter containment. Attempting to stabilize the field.
PARIS: We're approaching the coordinates of the time stream.
KIM: The containment field is weakening. We could be looking at a core breach.
PARIS: The ship's closing to three thousand kilometers.
So here we see a ship close to 5,000 km before engaging the runabout.
The Changeling
SPOCK: Unknown, Captain. Nothing within sensor range. Something now, Captain. Very small. Bearing one two three degrees, mark one eight. Range ninety thousand kilometers.
KIRK: That's our target, Mister Sulu. Prepare photon torpedo.
90,000 km engagement range.
Journey to Babel
CHEKOV: Here he comes. Range decreasing. Speed dropping close to sublight.
KIRK: Hold your fire, Mister Chekov.
CHEKOV: Phasers locked on target. Range closing. Seventy five thousand kilometers.
KIRK: Fire.
Phasers are fired at 75,000 km.
Patterns of Force
SPOCK: Captain, it's an unmanned probe which seems to be carrying a warhead.
KIRK: Stand by phasers.
CHEKOV: Phasers ready.
KIRK: Range, Mister Chekov?
CHEKOV: Two thousand kilometers, closing fast.
Phasers fired at a missile at 2,000 km.
So let's see.
Large ships like the Nebula class engage at around 300,000 km for maximum range, as do their Cardassian counterparts. Jem'Hadar attack ships engage at around 100,000 km. Klingon BoP looking to ambush a target is told to hold off until 40,000 km to cut down on response time. Janeway orders targeted shots on Equinox's warpcore at 30,000 km. In fighting one opponent, she waits until 2,000 km. And a runabout was engaged at 5,000 km. TOS has two instances of engaging between 70,000 to 90,000 km. And targeting a missile at 2,000 km.
So going by the statements given in the show:
Max Effective Range: 100,000 to 300,000 km
Effective Combat Range: 30,000 to 40,000 km
Precise Targeting (or small targets): 2,000 to 5,000 km
Absurd Point Blank Range: 500 meters
The situations and the logic given in the episodes for those situations suggest as much. So yes, a Galaxy Class can absolutely engage you at 300,000 km, but it may withhold fire or prefer an optimal range of 30,000 to 40,000 km for peer engagements, at a range where they can cut down response time and make effective attacks at key parts of the ship. Meanwhile, very precise targeting or attacking small targets seems to prefer a range of 2,000 to 5,000 km.
So a ship like the Defiant is probably most effectively engaged at 2,000 to 5,000 km because of its size and maneuverability. Fighters and BoPs probably have a similar limit.
Technical Manuals are not canon. They are a writers' guide, which writers are free to ignore.
They are canon. I'm sorry that someone with a position of authority says you're wrong.
They also contradict established facts heavily. In TNG:TM, we are shown that Enterprise has gone through a very slow and drawn out construction process... which is not what is implied by the series (in fact, ship was finished in a year). There is also the fact that starship firepower shown on screen is significantly greater than what is implied by the Technical Manual.
The phasers are NDF. How is this at all a contradiction?
When was it stated that the ship took only a year to build? That seems unlikely given that she was the second of her class, which would have required a great deal of technical work to make sure a new ship functioned properly.
Kira describes Cardassian rifle as having 4,7 MJ output, with 3 milisecond recharge time and 2 beam settings. I really don't know why "3ms recharge time" would be relevant if it were recharge time of a power unit. But if we assume it is the recharge time of the capacitor, meaning that each individual pulse has output of 4,7 MJ, then total output would be 0,003 s * 4,7 MJ = 1,57 GW output.
Lol, so some chick that weighs 90 pounds wet can fire off a 1.57 gigawatt weapon? That's even funnier when you consider that a Cardassian warship is firing off a 700 MW energy weapon in The Wounded.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/m...ision/latest?cb=20140123093659&path-prefix=en
So the warship gets a dinky 700 MW energy cannon and the untrained child gets a 1.57 gigawatt rifle. Seems legit.
Wait, you want me to take that seriously? A number based on how many Yangs killed?
P24th century phaser rifle was
tested at output of 1 MW, and we see examples which suggest
significantly higher per-shot outputs (5 MJ for a roughly 1-second burst, so maybe 2,5 - 5 MW, and you might even go up to
gigajoules-per-burst).
A couple things. That "rifle" is a Phaser III, so it having a higher output than the TM's stated figure for Phaser I and II is not a contradiction. Second, it's possible that the writer mixed up which unit he was thinking about. Phaser I is limited to setting 8, whose discharge energy is 15,000 for 1.75 seconds. Now, that might be interpreted as 15 KJ for 1.75 seconds or 8.5 KWs. works pretty well with what it says in the TM of phasers being limited to around 10 KW, whereas setting 16 on phaser II would be much higher.
There is an odd contradiction between setting 16 and the phaser rifle though. At 1.55 MJs for .28 seconds, a continuous test would suggest they could get a higher result. Of course, there's no immediate indication that the rifle must be at full power. And it would match with the Cardassian rifle of 4.7 MJ capacity, with the rifle being 5.5 MWs at full power.
Of course, given the style in which the TM writer(s) put information down, it may be that 1.55 stands for watts instead of joules. That's odd to me, but that's also the way he does his shield generators (he doesn't say 473,000 MJ for 170 milliseconds, but MW). In which case, you have a bit of an inversion; setting 8 would be 15 KWs (that does suggest a self-contradiction, assuming he mixed the two units, but it's only by .5 MWs) and would discharge for a total of 26.25 KJs, but setting 16 would be 1.55 MWs for .28 seconds, so the total energy delivered is 723 KJs.
This is different to the arrays, mind you, as I state elsewhere, the phaser arrays can fire for 45 minutes without problem, so the ship-born elements are 7x stronger than the small arm units.
So we see that hand-held phasers are literally thousands of times more powerful than what they should be according to the TNG manual.
.01 MWs would be 10 kilowatts. While that clearly isn't where the phaser bottom's out, we have Setting 7, which is 4.9 KJ for 1.75 seconds, Setting 8 at 15 KJ for 1.75 seconds. For Setting 8, that's about 8.5 KWs, but given the language:
By comparison, the small personal phasers
issued to Starfleet crew members are Type I and II, the latter
being limited to 0.01 MW.
It's fairly close. And as I said, while it doesn't bottom out there, most phasers in use generally aren't put to a setting higher than 8, as that's the lowest human vaporization setting.
As for shipboard phasers? Looking
here and admittedly eyeballing, just the primary phaser array ought to have some 460 phaser emitters. Which is to say,
more than twice than what ST:TNG TM says it has.
You're assuming those grooves correlate with emitter segments. We have no idea how those segments are divided up. At 200 emitter segments, each with generating 5.1 MWs, that's 1,020 MWs, which favors well with the 700 MW output display of the Cardassian warship. It works well with TNG's Survivors, where a 40 MW weapon was dismissed, whereas a 400 GW weapon was considered a major threat. DS9's Battlelines also is in line, as a weapon satellite targeting a Runabout charges to 900 MWs before taking out the ship.
Doctor Soran in Generations is said to have a 50 GW shield generator, which sounds off (and excessive) until we realize that a generator on a GCS is rated at 473,000 MWs for 170 seconds. Now, if we assume that to mean a total output of 80.4 GJs for a single generator, with 7 phase-locked to provide a total of 562.87 GJs of defensive energy, we again see the TM well in-step with the show; 400 GWs at once is pretty large compared to what most ships can throw around in an energy weapon and for the Enterprise D, it basically skull-fucked the shields*. In the case of Soran's shield generator, it'd have a max peak output of 8.5 GJs and assuming a similar design to the GCS, is probably designed for about a normal output of 40 KWs.
*It is worth noting that the weapon had 400 gigaWATTS, not 400 gigajoules. If you look at the special effects, it's a single pulse, not necessarily a continuous beam. So the fact that the ship would be limited to 3.331 gigajoules per millisecond is nothing to be concerned with, so long as the ship can match the 473 GW (for 170 milliseconds) with the enemy ship's 400 GW, since it seems that this is the rate at which the energy is being delivered, not necessarily the total energy.
EDIT -- It's worth noting that when Quark was involved in those black market arms deals, he sold a shitload of Breen CRM 114s to one guy, which was stated to penetrate 4.6 GJ shields. Keep in mind the sort of firepower a weapon like that would need. And consider again, how this man would be standing if he fired one. It'd double as a high-powered jet engine. Yet, if we consider that the writers were probably thinking of shields along the same way as the TM (which was based off their writer's guides), then 4.6 GJ is probably 4.6 GW at peak loads for the shields, which assuming they functioned on the same numbers as the GCS shield generators, would imply that a shield generator would have a typical output of 3.7 MWs.
Business as Usual
QUARK: The Breen CRM one-fourteen works equally well against moving vessels or surface emplacements. It's guaranteed to cut through reactive armor in the six to fifteen centimeter range, and shields to four point six gigajoules.
Since according to Quark, these are supposed to be surface emplacements AND moving vessels (presumably shuttles, hoppers, and skimmers--but possibly runabouts and fighters) and in his statement, he suggests it would cut through reactive armor--it would lend credibility to my theory as to how the shields work. That in turn, gives the statement more sense. At 4.6 GJs, my concern isn't going to be if it cuts through any kind of reactive armor 15 cm thick, my concern is if it'll gut Walmart half a block away. My interpretation fixes this strange disconnect, as 3.7 MWs is something you might have on a shuttle or skimmer, is around the energy of a modern tank round (which can be foiled by reactive armor), and is not so absurdly powerful that the weapon should launch the user over a twelve-story building.
Also, Technical Manual states that "Individual emitter segments are capable of directing 5.1 megawatts.". Except we see that handheld weapons are more powerful than that.
Absolutely no hand-held weapon is that strong. The effects are a result of NDF and the stated outputs, even for Kira's rifle, is still lower. It also lacks the range, focus, and endurance of the larger units. Those ship units can handle being fired for 45 minutes before they're effectively spent. That's 13.77 GJs of firing endurance for one of those units. Phaser I storage is 7.2 MJ and Phaser II is 45 MJ. In which case, a phaser II would be exhausted after a *mere* 29 seconds of fire (assuming it didn't melt from overheating or something--the discharge for Setting 16 is for .28 seconds). Ship phasers have far greater range and far greater endurance.
Yes, I know that the TM says 7.2*10^6 and 4.5*10^7, but it's most probable that the author was thinking megajoules and wrote it despite having already done so. Sort of how someone might say "It's the El Diablo" when 'the' would be redundant.
And from "Who Watches The Watchers" (TNG), we know that 4,2 GW reactor can power a small phaser bank. Galaxy-class phaser bank ought to be far more powerful. How much more powerful? Who knows. 10 GW, 20 GW, 25 GW... might be hundreds of GW per emitter for all we know.
Phaser 'bank' would refer to the whole array. The individual emitters are 'elements' of that array. And that's assuming 100% efficiency, which is probably not the case. That's not including things like powering the things that make the phaser bank work, like targeting, the containment beam, ect. And since it's planetside, we know that those sort of arrays are actually STRONGER than shipboard ones and that then brings into question if it's a small phaser bank for a ground sight or a starship.
Hmmm, yes. Because the warp core is going to be expending enough energy to roast a country every second while it...does nothing? Shields aren't up, phasers aren't firing, and they're using the impulse engines, which draw on fusion reactors. Data's line was cut off, we really have no idea where he was going with that figure.
So yeah, so much for Technical Manual being accurate to canon.
Oh yeah, you got me on the ropes alright. Dialogue suggests common engagements between thousands to tens of thousands of km, with maximum ranges at 100,000 to 300,000 km, weapon capacity roughly where the TM suggests it to be as indicated by at three episodes, and your only attempt at disproving the TM's canon status is by trying to mince-meat a man's sentence to fill your own selfish ends.
Oh yeah, really sweating this one!