www.ditl.org

How is a starship's phaser or beam weapon output determined?

Pluck an impressive sounding number out of the air. Make sure you confuse power and energy units, each and every time.

It's what the writers do.

For my sci-fi, I like to keep in mind that 4.28 petajoules of energy is roughly equal to one megaton. Helps me visualize the scale of that sort of energy discharge.

Dang, I thought you used a twenty-sided die for that.

To be serious...

With some modification, Enterprise phase pistols could fire at least "ten megajoule" shots.... but they say joules not watts even though they're talking about power. And it's a long duration shot, so who knows if it's ten megawatts and they just said it wrong, or it's ten megajoules total and the power is that much lower. (The dialogue kind of indicates the former, though.)

The ship's phase cannon could fire 400 Gigajoule shots, but some modifications allowed them to fire shots ten times this powerful, i.e. 4 Terajoules. Again they talked about this as power even though they're energy figures... but shots from phase cannon last roughly one second anyway so it doesn't make much difference.

We know a TNG Type 3 rifle had an output of around one megawatt. It's not stated what setting this is on, though the Enterprise figures (and common sense, given that they're just testing it) indicate that it's a low one.

Riker and Geordi once said a 4.2 gigawatt reactor was enough to power a "small phaser bank". Meanwhile another episode established that it's pretty hard to control the E-D's phaser output to within 60 GigaWatts.

Make of it what you will. Truthfully the writers just make it up as they go along...

To add a further example, tThere's also the <400TW calc from Deja Q and BoBW: the former shows warp 9 power to be around 20PW, and the latter shows the deflector weapon (likely to be around the same output) to be equal or greater than 50 times more powerful than their phasers.

Tsukiyumi wrote:For my sci-fi, I like to keep in mind that 4.28 petajoules of energy is roughly equal to one megaton. Helps me visualize the scale of that sort of energy discharge.

Don't forget that you'll need a lot more than a 4PJ DEW shot to equal a 1Mt nuke, given the far lower power.

You could go by visual evidence too.

McAvoy wrote:You could go by visual evidence too.

That gets hard since phasers work on wacky magic fairydust technology, so we don't really know what it is they are doing to things.

McAvoy wrote:You could go by visual evidence too.

Visual evidence is useless - DET weapons wouldn't produce the effects we see from phasers. The infamous lack of vapour from phaser "vaporisation" being the most obvious problem.

So... use figures that use incorrect terminology instead. Gotcha.

Also future material wouldnt react anyway that we can judge visually.

McAvoy wrote:So... use figures that use incorrect terminology instead. Gotcha.

Starfleet's incompetence is a well-worn road. This is pretty minor compared to other examples.

Uh-huh. Gotcha. So we the people who are viewing from the outside must be literal and not use a dash of common sense when dealing with coming up with figures?

So... in Star Trek universe weapons use magic unicorn fart dust to power its weapons which explains lack of vapor and low power.

McAvoy wrote:Uh-huh. Gotcha. So we the people who are viewing from the outside must be literal and not use a dash of common sense when dealing with coming up with figures?

Yes, otherwise you may as well make it all up. Once you start choosing what to belief and what not to, you are doing that anyway. If you are going to do that you may as well be watching Star Wars, that's what their fans do.