test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
Idea - Beam Array ‘booster’ for show accurate ship phasers
daviboi1983
Member Posts: 9 Arc User
Hey,
I’ve had an idea that I personally would love to see in game.
Instead of loading up my ship with multiple beam arrays that all fire simultaneously in a battle, how about having a new weapon type which is a beam array booster?
For example, I could have 1 beam array and 3 boosters which would mean visually, my ship would fire a single beam at a time, but it would deal the equivalent DPS as 4 arrays.
I think this would make the game more show accurate and reduce the space battle visual clutter.
Likewise with cannons.
Curious what others think of this?
I’m sure it wouldn’t be for everyone but would be totally optional.
I’ve had an idea that I personally would love to see in game.
Instead of loading up my ship with multiple beam arrays that all fire simultaneously in a battle, how about having a new weapon type which is a beam array booster?
For example, I could have 1 beam array and 3 boosters which would mean visually, my ship would fire a single beam at a time, but it would deal the equivalent DPS as 4 arrays.
I think this would make the game more show accurate and reduce the space battle visual clutter.
Likewise with cannons.
Curious what others think of this?
I’m sure it wouldn’t be for everyone but would be totally optional.
0
Comments
The game is programmed to fire each slot one after another in sequence, but before each prior slot cycle has finished firing (with exception to Torps and Mines). This is actually more accurate to canon, and represents the technological improvement from TV canon, which was evident in Voyager, that would fire phasers from different banks before the last cycle finished.
I read it more as change in Policy rather then a tech upgrade, during more of TNG the policy was to fire 1 big shot to spook the enemy away (Starfleet doesn't like to fight if don't have to after all), but with the various wars in the mid/late 24th and early 25th the Starfleet policy changed to several shots for a quicker and cleaner mission kill.
Most issues I have with fx and sfx come from consoles, ground kit modules, and traits. I primarily fly close like im making an attack run and as soon as im up close and personal a bunch of orange and purple tornadoes, blue space flatulence, multiple black holes, and lightning bolt gw's pop in, i cant see, my headphones are full of loud sound and im in the middle of it, its difficult to make efficient flight paths for the next pass, or i simply run into something. To note im not a zip around player one shotting.
I think the best option for fx/sfx spam is to make the "anomalies" more opaque or let the player adjust the opaqueness or even let the player turn off the effect. On ground i think its even worse, i cant see anything at all, there's many times when I have to wait until it goes away or run out of the effects area. It's also difficult to hear what the mission npc is telling me what the objectives are. Not trying to sound mean but it has turned me totally off tfo's, I use to hit the random button all night when that option was introduced, after the spam, maybe ive hit that button twice in the last 4 months, and maybe a few dozen times in the last cple of years. well in fairness some of that is also the random button on many occasions has thrown me into the same two tfos over and over, sometimes ignoring cool downs, looking at you endeavors.
It means less of a punch on any given target, but it is worth it if it puts at least some of the other ships into evasive instead of attack. In a way, the equivalent in STO would be choosing between beam overload and fire at will.
Unfortunately, the devs were rushed so they used the engine developed for Champions Online which, like most other games of the time, uses the idea of self-powered weapons instead of dividing the allocation of a fixed energy source to them and other systems.
E: the post above mine also doesn't make any sense, weapons are powered by the weapon power setting which draws from the ship's overall power pool, you can see the bar going up and down as your energy weapons fire and draw power from the weapon power allotment. The reason they don't fire 16 beams per second at a single target in the show isn't any fictional technical limitation, it's because it isn't as cool.
phoenixc regularly uses in universe explanations for things, not game mechanics. And there probably were some technical limitations in the 90s when they were using physical models. We saw a FEW times that more than one beam can be fired, depending on the circumstances. Best of Both Worlds is an example of a Galaxy Class going all out from multiple emitters. We also see elements of that during the big fleet battles in the Dominion War. There was also Star Trek Nemesis, and what the Enterprise had to do to try and land hits against a ship she couldn't see, so she just rapid blind fired until she landed a hit, and focused on that area.
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if Strip style Phaser Arrays are capable of going Pulse Wave mode as well because of their flexibility. However for the most part we really only ever see one beam fired because... most fights in Star Trek are 1v1, and it makes more sense to concentrate all that power into a single point rather than spread it out. A good analogy would be a scene from The Lost World: Jurassic Park. The rexes wrecked the camper HQ, and half of it is dangling over a cliff. Dr. Harding is splatted against the glass rear window, but its not cracking under her weight. Why? Because she's laying flat against it. Her entire weight is spread out. It only starts cracking when she starts trying to push herself up, and thus focusing her entire weight on her hands and knees rather than across her entire body.
So Phaser Arrays ARE capable of multi vector firing or rapid firing. We just tend to only see a focus fire mode.
Technically, the realworld reason they didn't fire a lot of beams at once is that in the 1960s beam SFX was very expensive. You're right about it looking better with a single twin beam though. The pre-Kelvin movies and various Berman-era spinoff series most likely kept the number of beams to a minimum as a nod to the original more than the "cool" factor since at the time they came out Star Wars was still considered the template for cool space combat.
While the game system does use a certain amount of power pool mechanics, it is done like Star Fleet Battles did, where each weapon is capable of handling only a fraction of the total weapon power available, so to get the most effect you have to fire more beams.
In TOS it was the most complicated since the weapons were powered from the impulse stacks and they added capacitor banks on top of that to squeeze out the most damage without adding ever bigger impulse systems, but they could only get a few full power shots out before exhausting the banks (which, oddly enough are called "phaser banks" instead of "power banks" or whatever) and they end up having to divert power from other systems to get the banks charging faster and provide more of the power from the impulse stacks to the weapons at the moment of firing.
The two track phasers on the bottom of the TOS saucer could take all the energy available, there was never a need to fire more than just those two unless the target went out of arc (like above the saucer, or the ventral rear (where the secondary hull would block line-of-sight). The stinger turret, rear torpedo tubes, and dorsal phasers were there to cover the blind spots of the main battery, not to add more damage against the same target or whatever, the way STO (and SFB) does.
The movies simplified things: sometime in the mid-to-late 2270s they took out the direct feed from the impulse engines and instead made a direct connection to the warp core, but the same general principle still held so they could put out all the offensive power available in just one or two beams, and firing the others just spread the total damage potential out, it didn't add to it.
Also, on the refits they handled the blind spot problem in a different way than TOS did, or at least on the saucer anyway. Everywhere there is a turret on the top of the saucer rim that lines up with one on the bottom, those two are actually the same phaser, just with two emitters that can be switched between.
That switch from powering weapons and shields with the impulse stacks to a direct feed from the warp core is also supposedly the reason they do not fight at warp very often from TMP onwards since the warp drive itself and the weapons and shields would compete for power from the core.
The few times they actually do chase battles after that they usually used torpedoes since they do not take a lot of power to fire, though a few episodes like The Wounded where the USS Phoenix chased a Cardassian freighter and her destroyer escort down at something like warp seven and, without slowing down, killed the destroyer with torpedoes, and then the freighter with "another system" (presumably phasers since it was a standard Starfleet ship) at close to 300,000km range.
Considering the relatively low top speed of known Cardassian ships the freighter and her escort were probably moving close to (or at) flank and so the Cardassian warship would have had its shields weakened by the power draw of the warp drive and probably could not have produced a beam that would do more than barely scratch the USS Phoenix's shields at that point.