Ship Strength Calculator [2]

[Graham Kennedy]

Graham, I've been meaning to ask you this for a long time. Can any one phaser array channel the FULL total power of her beam weapons into one blast, or does that figure need to be divided by the number of banks or arrays a ship has?

We don't know for sure, but my presumption is that yes, one phaser can fire the entire phaser power of the ship. My reasoning for this is that we very rarely see more than one array used at once. The classic use of arrays in Trek consists of a ship firing one beam from one of its main arrays. If each array only fired a fraction of the power, then it would be much more sensible to fire from every array that had a bead on the target.

[Sionnach Glic]

Makes sense.

[Thorin]

So by that logic the rapid fire launcher could continiously knock out 4 torpedos in a second? Just a stream of them for a minute would mean 240 torpedos!

[Graham Kennedy]

So by that logic the rapid fire launcher could continiously knock out 4 torpedos in a second? Just a stream of them for a minute would mean 240 torpedos!

In theory at least, yes.

In practice, it wouldn't surprise me if there were practical limitations; overheating and/or wear problems with the tube, say. Kinda like a machine gun.

[Thorin]

It just seems that it's ridiculous that a tube could do that...
I mean even with the burst fires, you'd expect a longer reload - yes we've seen them fire in bursts of 3, wait a second, another burst of 3... But then after, say, 18 have come out, you'd expect a longer reloading cycle.

And - trying not to sound pushy - how about the option to chose between quantums and photons?