Atekimogus wrote:
Do we though?
I mean when it comes to photon torpedos....when do you reach the practical limit of needed destructive power? Since they operate on the same principel the only way to make them more powerfull would be making them bigger. They seem to have the same size from the TMP to TNG area.
Indeed what we do see are ships with two launchers capable of launching one torpedo each going to ships being able to launch 10 torpedoes at once. Hence I would assume that the TMP area torpedo has roughly the same punch as a TNG area torpedo, the difference being mostly in targeting electronics and what have you.
Not necessarily
Two factors can mainly intervene in explosive power: the amount of reagent and the reaction efficiency.
given the amount of matter and antimatter in a photon torpedo according to current physics a torpedo has a maximum power of about 60 megatons, but this imagining a efficiency of the reaction of 100%, which is theoretically impossible (and we can imagine it is also in the twenty-third and twenty-fourth century).
You can think for example that the first models of photon torpedo had a maximum efficiency of 1%, so the photon torpedo would have a maximum power of about 600 kilotons, later models have gradually increased this efficiency to bring it (I'm inventing numbers, mind you) 90% at the time of TNG, here that we have reached over 50 megatons, and a power increase of 90 times without changing the amount of reagents, but only the technology with which they are built.
Obviously this means that in TNG there is little room for improvement for photon torpedoes without increasing in size (which can lead to costs ... for example in terms of the ability to engage fast targets ... or some other tecnobabble ...), here are the quantum torpedoes ... that using zero point energy are no longer subject to this limitation ... and the first model has a power of 100 megatons, 50 from antimatter and 50 from new system ... and the limitation is exceeded.
I do not say that this has happened, but that, in my opinion, seems to me to be a logical progression of the technology in question.
Then mind you ... I do not think to remember an explosion of torpedoes in ST that gives the (visual) idea of being of tens of megatons, at least in ship-to-ship combat.
I always assumed (though it has never been confirmed afaik, mostly because they were just used simultaniously) that Quantum Torpedoes are - for example - not stronger than Photon Torpedoes. Maybe even quite less powerfull. Their thing being that it is impossible for the Borg to adapt to because of Quantum....hence their usefullness.
the DS9 TM (not canon, of course!) explicitly contradicts this, and nothing in the canon seems to confirm it (but as we have already said about it the canon is very inconsistent, think of the Mark VI of Voyager)