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In The Cage (for those who may not have seen it), Captain Pike is abducted by the Talosians and the crew are unable to blast their way into the Talosian base with their hand lasers. Back on board the ship they say "That entry may have stood up against hand lasers, but we can transmit the ship's power against it, enough to blast half a continent!" They decide to try this, and subsequently ship this little gadget down...



Now this always struck me as intriguing. First off, the thing is powered from orbit. Not only do they state it during the briefing but whilst it's in use they actually call the ship asking them to increase the power. I guess that's not THAT unusual, we have seen ships supply power to things before by firing a beam of energy through space - it's how the E-D fed the Farpoint station creature for example. But as I recall this is the only case where a weapon has been powered this way. Also there's no visible beam coming down from the ship, but then tractor beams were routinely invisible during TOS, so why not energy beams too.

It also occurs to me to wonder what type of weapon this is. They are using hand lasers at this point, so the simple answer seems to be that this is likely a laser cannon... but the hand lasers have red beams, and this thing has a blue beam. Could be that phaser cannon were in use before phaser hand weapons... maybe.

Lastly, though, I wonder just what this thing IS. As a ground weapon, it pretty much sucks. That we can see, it doesn't float or fly, it doesn't have wheels or tracks or legs - it just sits there. There's no cabin or shelter of any kind for the operators - and indeed everybody retreats to a significant distance and hides behind rocks whilst it is firing. The beam emittor portion is mounted on some sort of articulated arm which, by the look of it, would allow it some degree of elevation, maybe traverse too. But it's clearly not a ground-based weapons system in the way that something like a tank or even a towed artillery piece is.

Here's what I think it is : I think it's one of the ship's own laser cannon. I think they disconnected it and beamed it down to the surface as a way to get maximum firepower onto the target; couldn't use it from orbit as they would be firing down into the underground base, which may well kill Pike; they had to get it down on the ground so they could fire parallel to the ground - actually, slightly up away from the base itself.

If it's one of the ship's cannon, it makes sense that it wouldn't be at all designed for "surface warfare" as such; this is entirely an improvised use of the weapon. It would also make sense that they have to beam power down to it from orbit, since you wouldn't expect any portable power source to easily power a major ship's weapon.

This is all purely speculative. There's no evidence for or against it, especially. So this thread is purely about what people's gut feeling is. So am I right or am I not?

I suspect a drill or something and the power; some form of microwave.

It'd make sense for phaser cannons to be in use as ship weapons first, then eventually miniaturized. As for its mobility, maybe it's got anti-gravs on the base?

I always assumed it was some sort of drill kept on board for those emergency drilling operations.

I think it has to be one of the ship's lasers. If it's a drill, it's a crappy design. If everyone has to retreat and go hide behind a rock to use it safely, then having the control panel where it is moronic. Who puts the controls to a device so close to operational part of said device that standing at the controls and working them is dangerous? It would make sense if it was one of the ship's weapons that they ripped out though in that case, normally there would be a bulkhead between the control panel (manual override perhaps, or just a maintaince panel?) and the emitter.

True.

It's also been probably a decade since I actually watched that episode.

1. Regarding its shape and articulation, there's a pretty sweet Google SketchUp model here:

http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/ ... 7a183337d9
or the weapon alone:
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/ ... 7a183337d9

While we never see the front of the weapon in reality, I would wager it's entirely possible that the front armature rotates, allowing easy upward firing.

2. Unless they had information that the underground complex was very large (i.e. spanning beyond the horizon from ground level), then it doesn't make sense to think that they would've needed to bring one of the ship's weapons down. Phasers would have no trouble firing through the atmosphere, even if the ship was placed at a sufficient angle.

2a. Of course, if these really were lasers, then there could be issues shooting through so many kilometers of soupy atmosphere. We're still working on such issues now, though we're pretty good at dealing with it for low-power applications. Extremely high-energy lasers, however, can ionize and otherwise screw up the atmosphere, causing the beam to effectively block itself by being too powerful. We're working on that, too.

However, the Trek canon strongly suggests that lasers should not have been in use.

3. Wireless invisible power transfer technology is something that was virtually forgotten until DS9's Cardassian Orbital Weapons Platforms. I've been planning to either blog about the "Cage" weapon and its relation to those or make a page on it for awhile.

That said, it's intriguing, because unlike the usual power transfer beams seen in TNG, or a wire/conduit system like we might otherwise expect, this technology is not obviously physically blockable, nor is there any evidence of any beam from orbit that is being received by the weapon (after all, where is the receiver, and if there's so much energy, where's any leakage or other evidence of thermodynamic inefficiency?).

I presume it's like some sort of subspace Tesla coil effect, but in this example it seems to stress the sending unit something fierce. The alternative is that we take your comment on "beam power down to it" literally, and assume that some sort of transporter-like effect is being used to power it, like beaming plasma directly into a conduit constantly. That would be sufficiently inefficient and wacky to make it strain the ship.

4. It may float normally, given that the big large base is certainly thick enough to house antigravs. Indeed, it would make sense that it wasn't shown floating, since it may not be a good idea in general to float while firing enormous wind-producing blasts.

That said, I would agree that it is probably not intended as a ground combat weapon on the front lines of a ground war, unless some very specific conditions were in play.

That is, we're imagining some small group of men trudging about the countryside hauling this thing to try to get it into position to shoot the badguys from line-of-sight, meaning they'd be under fire. In that case, it would be worse than a horse-drawn artillery piece, because (a) you'd clearly be within range of your enemies while setting up, unlike even horse-drawn artillery (unless you were setting up while the enemy already had their artillery set), and (b) it would still require a starship or other ground site producing power, meaning you're hauling this thing around and you can't even use it without a ship to operate it. No ship, no boom-boom.

To my mind, then, a weapon like that would best serve in a role similar to mobile ICBM launchers or Iraq's mobile SCUD launchers, inasmuch as being a mobile and potentially hard to detect defense platform serving as a piece of a larger defense pie. For an example, a shielded colony like Ajilon Prime could've had such weapons on its shield periphery, powered by the same generators powering the shield, meaning the operators would be protected behind the colony shields. If for some reason the shield bubble needed to be tightened or perhaps if a generator was weakening, the antigravs could be turned on and the cannon moved to a safer or otherwise superior location. And, during non-alert conditions, the cannon would not be in a fixed location and thus an enemy could not simply drop in from warp and strike a pre-planned set of coordinates to take out the assorted cannons.

It might also be a siege weapon. One can imagine ground troops at a forward base with on-site power production and wireless power transmission using it to wear down the shields of a colony town like those on Ajilon Prime from a fairly safe location without having to tie up an entire starship for the purpose over a long period of time.

In ether case, the same sort of single-point-of-failure problem that would later bedevil the Cardie OWPs would also apply here. On the other hand, if you did have to lose a cannon to the enemy, it would be a reasonably simple matter to shut it down . . . just stop powering it, or overload it on its power frequency, or whatever.

(And yes, such a thing could also be used as a mega-drill, but not a great one. As dangerous as its use seemed to be, and with the wireless power transmission requirement, drilling laterally from underground (as often happens now) would seem completely unworkable.)

However, the Trek canon strongly suggests that lasers should not have been in use.

Weren't they using lasers throughout the 22nd and well into the 23rd? How is it that lasers should not have been in use. Do you mean by being outdated or etc?

Could be talking about how they started using phasers in Enterprise which pushes their date of introduction WAY back from where it was previously thought to be.

Tyyr wrote:Could be talking about how they started using phasers in Enterprise which pushes their date of introduction WAY back from where it was previously thought to be.

True, but in TOS we see them in use. So there has to be a "reason" as to why. Maybe they found Phaser tech in the 22nd still to touch to mass produce or just unreliable?

Tyyr wrote:Could be talking about how they started using phasers in Enterprise which pushes their date of introduction WAY back from where it was previously thought to be.

Precisely. From hand units to ship-mounted ones, and even in regards to other races with whom Earth would unite, particle weapons were the norm waayy back, with the Earth ones even being called phase weapons.

The only reference to lasers as weapons, though, was in regards to a few lesser races in TNG and the weapons from "The Cage", which means that for Starfleet purposes it is a unique idea, representing a break in either technological or terminological continuity (from an in-universe sense).

The drill, or other non-military tool, idea makes a lot of sense. The ship's cannon makes a bit less to me, because that land-based carriage seemed readily available. But, to play devil's advocate, it could certainly be their version of towed artillery. Obviously, with transporter tech it wouldn't have to be "towed" per se, and it isn't necessarily dependent on wireless power transfer; the dialogue indicated that it could be, and was, powered from the ship in orbit, but never says that it must be. It could easily have internal power, but can be fed through wireless transfer for high-draw usages. The 360-degree targeting screen and movable armature (as well as the black discs under the "balls") certainly could indicate the same type of solution adjustments we have today.

The "phaser v. laser" question is a bit thornier. It's easy to say that "laser" is just a holdover in terminology or a colloquialism, in the same way we use the word "rifle" for almost any longarm or "handgun" and "pistol" interchangeably. However, this seems a bit facile to me. I have no issue with beam color of the device, as I can easily imagine lasers using different chemicals in the 23rd century than our bog-standard neon-argon or whatever. ENT really muddied the issue, with lasers being specified in TOS: "The Cage" and then ENT showing particle-beam weapons being common - even long in the tooth(!) - and "phase weapons" coming into vogue. I don't buy the idea that phase weapons were widespread for ship's use that much before their use as personal weapons, because we saw both concurrently in ENT. Rather, I tend to believe (pretend, I guess) that phase weapons were never widespread at all after ENT; rather, the laser was popular (due to reliability, being tried-and-true, etc.) until the phase weapon was refined into the TOS phaser - much more control of setting, perhaps better fire control/internal aiming assistance, or whatever.

Personaly I always thought it was some sort of heavy weapon, designed to be deployed to defend a specific location.

Sionnach Glic wrote:Personaly I always thought it was some sort of heavy weapon, designed to be deployed to defend a specific location.

Though from the episode, not heavy enough (well, it is hard to get through an illusion ).

Oh yeah?

Before:



After:



That's a bloody big hole.

As for it's role, I'm with SG - it's probably intended as a heavy fixed weapon emplacement along the lines of the DF-9.