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Tri-cobalt device |
The Original Series |
The first appearance of the tri-cobalt device was in the original series episode "A Taste of Armageddon". In the episode the planets Eminiar and Vendikar are fighting a centuries long war. In order to preserve their societies from the full destruction of the conflict, they conduct their attacks on one another entirely by computer; when the simulations suggest a hit the computers calculate the casualties and citizens are ordered to report to suicide booths for orderly disposal. A previous Federation ship which visited the planet fifty years earlier, the Valiant, was logged as a casualty in this manner and the Eminians destroyed the ship accordingly. During the Enterprise's visit, the Starship is also registered as having been destroyed by a tri-cobalt device.
We receive no information regarding the technology used in the weapon and no real assessment of how powerful they are. On the one hand, the Enterprise was apparently logged as being destroyed by a single hit. But the ship had no shields up at the time since the crew were unaware of the computerised battle going on; without shields even a simple nuclear weapon is capable of inflicting at least significant damage to the Enterprise, as seen in "Balance of Terror". Plus, the Eminians and Vendikans are using transporters to deliver their weapons, so for all we know they could have beamed the weapon directly into the bridge or the engineering spaces, bypassing any possible protection from the hull and structural integrity fields completely.
Also, bear in mind that this is a computer war with a simulated destruction of the ship, not an actual destruction. The Eminians would have no way to know the defensive capabilities of the Enterprise, no real basis on which to claim that a Vendikan weapon could have destroyed the ship. Most likely the computers would either assume that the Enterprise was the equal to Eminian ships, or assume that it was on a par with the Valiant of fifty years ago.
In general, Eminian - and by extension, Vendikan - weapons technology seems slightly inferior to the Enterprise. The Eminians use disruptors both as sidearms and for planetary defence. Despite apparently being sound based, these weapons could be fired at spacecraft in orbit. However, the Enterprise was able to withstand sustained fire from the planetary disruptors. When Kirk ordered the ship to destroy the Eminian civilisation, Scotty took the Enterprise out of range of the planetary weapons and prepared to fire on the surface, indicating that the ship's own phaser banks comfortably out-ranged the Eminian weapons.
Given this, I tended to think of the tri-cobalt device as a fairly primitive weapon. indeed, my first guess was that it was a type of nuclear weapon. This is probably what the Original Series writers had in mind, thinking of "tri-cobalt" as an improvement on the real world "cobalt bomb" talked of at the time, much as "di-lithium" was meant to be a super-tech replacement for the real world lithium.
Voyager |
The next solid mention of tri-cobalt weapons was in Voyager, when Janeway used two of them in the pilot episode "Caretaker" to destroy the Caretaker's array. Here's a couple of images of the firing; first the initial shot, seen from a distance :
Seven : | "Specify the yield of the tri-cobalt device." |
Computer : | "20,000 teracochranes." |
Seven : | "The Captain ordered Commander Tuvok to destroy the array. He fired two tri-cobalt devices. Are those weapons normally carried on Federation Starships?" |
Chakotay : | "No." |
Seven : | "Yet they were part of Voyager's arsenal. Why?" |
Chakotay : | "I can't explain that." |
Seven : | "I can. Neither phasers nor torpedoes are capable of creating a tear in subspace. A tri-cobalt device is." |
The ship shakes | |
Paris : | "What was that?" |
Tuvok : | "Unknown. But our shields are down to 82%" |
The ship shakes again | |
Tuvok : | "64%" |
Harry : | "I don't know what's causing it - there's nothing on sensors." |
Janeway : | "Janeway to Seven of Nine." |
Seven : | "Go ahead captain." |
Janeway : | "Are you picking anything up in astrometrics?" |
Seven : | "The inhabitants appear to have developed antimatter torpedo technology. I believe we're under attack." |
Shortly afterwards : the ship shakes again | |
Harry : | "The torpedoes are being fired at three-day intervals. They're making refinements each time, increasing the detonation yield." |
And later on... the heaviest explosion so far | |
Paris : | "What was that last one?" |
Harry : | "A tri-cobalt device." |
Paris : | "What will they think of next?" |
Star trek Insurrection |
Insurrection throws something of a spanner in the works; early in the movie, Riker and Troi are discussing the Son'a :
Riker : | "The Son'a have been suspected of producing mass quantities of the narcotic ketracel-white... their ships are rumored to be equipped with isolytic subspace weapons outlawed by the Second Khitomer Accord." |
Troi : | "Why would we be involved with these people?" |
Nara : | "Sir, they've detonated an isolytic burst... a subspace tear is forming!" |
Riker : | "On screen!" |
Perim : | "I thought subspace weapons were banned by the Khitomer Accord?" |
Riker : | "Remind me to lodge a protest!" |
Geordi (comm) : | "Commander, our warp core is acting like a magnet to the tear." |
Cut to engineering | |
Geordi : | "We're pulling it like a zipper across space." |
Riker (comm) : | "Options?" |
Geordi : | "Eject the core." |
The scene now cuts back and forth | |
Riker : | "Will that stop the tear?" |
Geordi : | "You got me, Commander." |
Riker : | "That's your expert opinion?" |
Geordi : | "Detonating the warp core might neutralize the cascade... but then again it might not. Subspace weapons are unpredictable. That's why they were banned!" |
Deep Space Nine |
Deep Space Nine never once mentions tri-cobalt devices, but it does offer an intriguing image. Let's take a look at the Dominion firing at Deep Space Nine in "A Call To Arms" :
Conclusion |
We are left with the big question of why we don't see Starfleet using tri-cobalt devices more often after "Caretaker", or indeed at all. They are more advanced than photons, presumably more powerful. We might argue that they are really hard to build and so are only available in extremely limited numbers. But can they really be so limited that they have never been seen again?
we might say that tri-cobalts are treated a bit like nuclear weapons today; very powerful, but restricted in their use for political reasons. Maybe the second Khitomer accords banned isolytic subspace weapons outright, and restricted the deployment of tri-cobalts heavily. Navy ships during the cold war era tended to carry mostly conventional weapons with a small number of nuclear ones, maybe Starships do the same.
But if the Dominion are using tri-cobalts openly in an actual shooting war, then surely Starfleet would follow suit - just as the USA would no doubt start issuing large numbers of nukes to their ships if they were engaged in a war where the enemy was doing the same. Problems of production, training, etc might still apply to limit the numbers somewhat, but surely these would not be insurmountable.
A much better possibility presents itself when we consider the quantum torpedo. This weapon was first seen in the episode "Defiant", when the stolen Defiant used them against Cardassian ships with considerable success. Previously the Defiant had been stated to carry photon torpedoes, on her first mission in "The Search". She would occasionally be mentioned as still carrying photons in the future - "Paradise Lost" shows her using photons for instance - but after "Defiant", the ship would almost always use her quantums.
"Defiant" is set in 2371, on stardate 48467.3. Voyager's "Caretaker" is set in the same year barely two months earlier, which puts it right before the quantum torpedoes made their debut and began to be used regularly.
The obvious conclusion is that Starfleet was looking for a photon torpedo replacement and decided to evaluate two different technologies, quantum torpedoes and tri-cobalt devices. As part of the evaluation process, at least some ships were issued with small numbers of these weapons; Voyager got a couple of tri-cobalts, Defiant may well have been carrying a couple of quantums even back in "The Search". For whatever reason, some time after Voyager was lost on 48467.3 Starfleet decided to go with the quantum rather than the tri-cobalt. In fact, you could even suggest that the weapon Tom Riker used on the stolen Defiant were the evaluation weapons that the ship carried, and that it was their success against Cardassian ships under combat conditions which made Starfleet choose them!
In fact, a really sneaky minded person might think that Section 31 set the Defiant up to be stolen precisely so that this kind of live-fire combat evaluation could be made. Maybe Tom Riker didn't leave to join the Maquis after all, maybe that was just a cover for his membership in Section 31...
So, what do we know for certain, and what am I only guessing at?
Well, we know for certain that tri-cobalts are more advanced/more powerful than photon warheads. ("Blink of an Eye")
We know for certain that they are subspace weapons. ("The Voyager Conspiracy")
We know for certain that subspace weapons are banned. ("Star Trek : Insurrection")
We can be reasonably sure that this ban came into force after "Caretaker", but not certain of this. The alternative is that Perim and Geordi are careless in their wording or that Starfleet and/or Janeway use illegal weapons, which you may or may not find believable.
We can be reasonably sure that the Dominion uses them. At the very least, they use something which looks identical to them. ("Call to Arms")
We can only speculate that Starfleet was evaluating tri-cobalts versus quantums and chose the latter, though it is a nice convenient and technobabble-free explanation of why Voyager had them when nobody else does.
Yellow text = Canon source | Green text = Backstage source | Cyan text = Novel | White text = DITL speculation |
Copyright Graham Kennedy | Page views : 24,770 | Last updated : 1 Jan 1970 |