Combat at Warp

deaftravis05

Okay, Enterprise shows us how small the warp field is. It's pretty small and it takes a lot of energy to double it.

The manuals say torpedoes can have a micro warp drive on them to allow for bursts at warp speed, meaning it's possible to use torpedoes in warp speed combats.

So, how does energy beams leave a warp bubble, maintain its speed (which is way faster than light) and enter another warp bubble to inflict damage? Objects without warp drive have been seen leaving the bubble and instantly dropping to sublight speeds. It is suggested that without protection it is fatal to leave the warp bubble... radiation, G forces, whatever. so shouldn't the beams, once it leaves the bubble, immediately transit to sublight? Forward firing ships would immediately be struck by their own beams.

artan42

The beams are travelling faster than light.​​

deaftravis05

no they're not. See, the ship inside a warp bubble is not moving faster than light. It's the bubble that's moving faster than light.

artan42

The warp bubble may be the way to make a ship travel faster than light, but it could be possible to transmit beams of energy faster without a warp bubble.​​

admiralnat

Star Trek Into Darkness suggests that firing weapons at warp isn't a problem...

k20vtec

So, how does energy beams leave a warp bubble, maintain its speed (which is way faster than light) and enter another warp bubble to inflict damage?
A very easy-to-understand reason
































they don't.

antonine3258

TNG we only ever saw torpedoes used in warp combat - TOS did use phasers, but combat at warp was for more commonplace, it's generally at sublight in the TNG era.

rooster707

admiralnat wrote: »

Star Trek Into Darkness suggests that firing weapons at warp isn't a problem...

Whether it makes sense or not, that was AWESOME.

starswordc

deaftravis05 wrote: »

Okay, Enterprise shows us how small the warp field is. It's pretty small and it takes a lot of energy to double it.

The manuals say torpedoes can have a micro warp drive on them to allow for bursts at warp speed, meaning it's possible to use torpedoes in warp speed combats.

So, how does energy beams leave a warp bubble, maintain its speed (which is way faster than light) and enter another warp bubble to inflict damage? Objects without warp drive have been seen leaving the bubble and instantly dropping to sublight speeds. It is suggested that without protection it is fatal to leave the warp bubble... radiation, G forces, whatever. so shouldn't the beams, once it leaves the bubble, immediately transit to sublight? Forward firing ships would immediately be struck by their own beams.

<insert technobabble explanation here>

jonsills

Phaser and disruptor beams travel at the speed of writing, so as to make space combat look exciting.

deaftravis05

that's what I thought, thanks Jonsills LOL

bioixi

You can achieve that by diverting more power to the phase decouplers and rearranging the deflector dish so you are in the same quantum resonance frequency.

mustrumridcully0

I think it was for a long time heavily implied or even mentioned on the show that phasers at warp don't work.
Star Trek as a whole isn't consistent here, however - TOS combat was apparently often done at warp, but then, the only special effect they could afford for most combats was the increased background noise from the warp drive and a lot of camera shaking, so they didn'T need to show it. TNG had combat at visual ranges with speeds more appropriate for naval ships (and perhaps planes) than space ships, but the background lore stated ranges of 300,000 km for phasers and high sublight speeds possible for maneuvering. So everything we hear, see and read must be taken with a grain of salt.

Still, if I had to pick something, whenever they start shooting phasers at warp without being in each other's warp bubble* - they found a way to allow a phaser shot to maintain a short-lived warp bubble so it could reach the other ship.

*) The Into Darkness Scene might actually be explained by that - the two ships are so close that their warp bubbles merge.​​

thunderfoot

Is it possible the warp bubble around the ship distends outward along the axis of the beam being fired until it contacts the warp bubble around the target?

k20vtec

thunderfoot006 wrote: »

Is it possible the warp bubble around the ship distends outward along the axis of the beam being fired until it contacts the warp bubble around the target?

Yes, I think this is the reason on-screen

deaftravis05

well, if that's the reason, then fighting at warp speeds would take a lot of power... more power to fire the beams than at sublight

thunderfoot

I was guessing in my previous post. It does explain some things, though.

If the warp bubbles are not in sync (At the same speed or tuned to the same frequencies) wouldn't this have an effect on damage output? As to the power output, the writers of all the series made it seem it takes nearly all the output of the warp core just to move the ship at warp. An antimatter warp core probably should put out an enormous amount of energy. In her novel Dark Mirror, Diane Duane has Geordi LaForge and Commander Hwii tell Captain Picard they have the warp core performing at 115% and then equate this figure to 1,500 terawatts. In the same novel, the inclusion device by which the Mirror Universe Ent-D pulled 'our' Ent-D across uses 800 terawatts again according to Geordi. I know, I know. 'Soft Canon' and all that.

So fighting at warp speeds would be an inefficient use of energy. Seems to me fighting at warp speeds would be all about knocking your enemy out of warp. Once they are sublight in normal space, you'd have more than enough energy to power the weapons and the shields and life support and emergency force fields and...

Dropping out of warp probably is one of those things where a Captain would want to gradually shed excess speed and energy. Or at least have a way to shunt it to where it did not break somethng. Having an enemy shoot the ship out of warp would probably lead to an uncontrolled exit which would damage the control systems and surfaces.

Fighting at warp would probably also entail having some very sophisticated Threat Vessel predictive subroutines in the fire control and defense computers. All in all, it seems to me this is probably a situation which is mostly avoided.

But I could be all wrong anyways. One of the nicer things about these sorts of specualtion threads is there is no one correct answer. Thanks, OP. My brain is engaged fully on this and I've now wasted the pefectly good beer buzz I was working on earlier, lol.

centersolace

deaftravis05 wrote: »

well, if that's the reason, then fighting at warp speeds would take a lot of power... more power to fire the beams than at sublight

Precisely why it isn't very common.

lilchibiclari

I think that this might work in a similar way to subspace radio. In subspace radio, the radio signal is emitted within a subspace layer and it gradually "surfaces" (i.e. moves into subspace layers closer to "normal" space, thus slowing down) as its energy is expended traveling through subspace (like a moving electromagnetic charge loses energy moving through a field). This is why you can have near-real-time communications across several hundred light years (average millions of times lightspeed), yet it supposedly would take 70 years for a signal to travel from the Enterprise-D in the Triangulum Galaxy to reach the Federation in "Where No One Has Gone Before" (average 40k lightspeed).

Anyway, if a similar phenomenon applies to the shots from energy weapons, then the shot will travel a distance at warp speed within subspace, slowing down and losing energy as it travels until it reaches its maximum range. If you can tune it to emerge into normal space at the desired range, and if your sensors can give you accurate real-time data on the range to your target, then you can tune the shots to emerge into normal space at the point where they would impact within your target's shields.

theraven2378

We did see Voyager using phasers at warp on several occasions