Maybe I am wrong, but given how phaserstripes work on ships why does the number of said stripes tell you anything?Mikey wrote: Yep. Basically, what I mentioned above. However, it still stands that the Sov had more - a lot more - and they were oriented in a more tactically-minded fashion.
According to memory alpha (which I believe is an accepted canon source, in this case it dosen't matter, we have the physical model) the: Sovereign started with 12 phaser arrays and received 4 more prior to Nemesis.
Galaxy started with 11 (twelve with cobra head) arrays and received two addiational during the DW.
So I wouldn't count 2-3 smaller arrays "a lot more" I would even go further and say that if one is to count the actual emitters, the GCS would still come out on top by a rather large margin. I think I remember that GK once messured the length and amount of a GCS' stripes and emitters, I am not sure the equivalent figures exist for the SOV.
One launcher firing a maximum of 4 in sequenze, all the other ones are - as far as we know - one shot/time compared to two launchers firing bursts of 10/time. (I admit the 10 per launcher comes from the TNG Tech Manual, iirc the largest burst we see on the show was about 7 or 8 photons.). Given the size difference between the GCS'launchers and the largest SOV launcher it is not a big stretch at all that they distributed a bunch of smaller, less capable launchers around the ship. So there is a difference if one likes to theorycraft how many torps one ship can launch/time and from what direction etc, but it might be not "as night-and-day" as you would have it.Mikey wrote:And the difference in number and placement of torp launchers - even aside from the presence of QT's - is night-and-day.
Now that is actually the crux of the matter, I know it is widely accepted that this is so........but why? Why is it so obvious (eg. what did I miss?) What clues do we have other than that it looks neat? Firing a few torpedoes at a cube isn't that badass and consequently she was always outmatched. Purely from watching the movies I never would have guessed that her role is any different from any other Enterprise so far, it's only secondary sources like videogames claiming her to be some sort of super-battleship-borg-counter unit. The ONLY ship-classes we know of which got designed with primarily a tactical role in mind are the Defiant and the Prometheus iirc.Mikey wrote:It seems pretty obvious that the Sov is primarily a warship, and is better at conducting war