The Phaser Conundrum

[Phantom]

According to a couple of cut-away drawings in the DS9 Tech book, it looks like there is a "phaser control room" for the PPCs and a separat room for the torp launchers. Like everything else on the Defiant, they are very small.

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In the Praetors Name!

[darkwing duck1]

A couple of points: 1. in TNG, the Galaxy-class Enterprise had a torpedo room, which we saw in the episode (title escapes me) where Data romances a security officer. 2. in "Way of the Warrior" (DS9), Sisko gives the order "Weapons Stations: Fire at will!"

The simplest and true explanation is redundancy. There HAVE to be multiple ways to operate systems, in case of malfunction or damage. I'd be willing to bet those "autoloading" tanks mentioned earlier can be manually loaded in a pinch, and that the crew knows how to do it.

[Cessna]

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Brad:
"By the Persian Gulf, most tanks used an autoloader, so we're down to 3"

Thats still mainly Russian designs most western built MBTs with the exception of the French LeClerc still have 4 man crews.</font>

And as a former tank commander I can confidently state that a 4-man crew is far, far better than a three man crew. You have more people looking out of their hatches, trying to find the enemy. You have more "hands" for maintainence work. You can also use the "4th" position to bring along a non-tanker for your platoon - a corpsman/medic, radio specialist, etc.

And this can apply to Trek as well. Over-automation is not necessarily a good thing. What happens when the automated system breaks?

[tonyg]

Firing from the bridge isn't just a TNG thing. Sulu did this several times in TOS. One idea in TREK is that while it appears that the brdige crew and chief engineer do everything, the other several hundred crewmemebers are actually doing things.

I would expect that given Starfleet's emphasis on redundancy, weapon are probably automotated, but have "back Up crews" standing by in case something goes wrong.

Considering that "Balance of Terror" needed depth charages and came out before Photon Torpedoes were introduced, the proximity phasers used were probably torpedoes specialially modified so as to have a better chance of hitting an insvisible ship. THis would be similar to what happened in ST VI, although the modifications were different.