The Light Works (Star Trek)

[Hammerfest]

These guys have done some awesome work of the last 15 years. They often like to take events in the various Star Trek series and reinterpret them in their pictures. This image is of the war game exercise between the Enterprise-D and the Hathaway from the episode TNG: Peak Performance.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Interesting how it appears the Hathaway is facing the Enterprise dog-fight style when 1. phasers on Starfleet ships are omni-directional, so facing is irrelevant unless you are using torpedoes (which can only be fired out of launch tubes fore and aft, with limited mid-flight turning capability), and 2. the simulated battle between the Enterprise and Hathaway banned torpedoes altogether, so the entire dogfight situation in the picture makes no sense whatsoever unless the helmmen were trying to ram each other...

Anyways, it's rule of cool, and the picture is just cool.

[Vayshan]

Facing isn't irrelevant if you're trying to hit a particular spot on the other ship

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Facing isn't irrelevant if you're trying to hit a particular spot on the other ship

Starfleet ship phasers can hit any critical system on any other Starfleet ship from any direction, given the saucer and nacelle design and the negative space that entails. If they were going up against a super-massive object such as Borg cube, where a single side can obscure the line of sight of the other 5 sides at once, then yes facing would be important.

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Facing in such a situation would only matter if either ship needed to launch a torpedo, and you save torpedoes for the part when the enemy shields have depleted and it's time for a finishing blow (as phasers are effective against shields and torpedoes ineffective, while phasers deal minimal damage to exposed hulls while torpedoes just blow said hulls to smithereens).

[Vayshan]

Starfleet ship phasers can hit any critical system on any other Starfleet ship from any direction, given the saucer and nacelle design and the negative space that entails. If they were going up against a super-massive object such as Borg cube, where a single side can obscure the line of sight of the other 5 sides at once, then yes facing would be important.

- - - Updated - - -

Facing in such a situation would only matter if either ship needed to launch a torpedo, and you save torpedoes for the part when the enemy shields have depleted and it's time for a finishing blow (as phasers are effective against shields and torpedoes ineffective, while phasers deal minimal damage to exposed hulls while torpedoes just blow said hulls to smithereens).

Starfleet vs Starfleet didn't really happen much did it Most Starfleet ships have a low profile and make getting hit from the front or aft more difficult as from above or below. The torpedo vs shield thing has never really been settled and in most cases shields were perfectly effective to withstand torpedo impacts. Phasers deal quite a lot of hull damage, plenty of scenes from the Dominion war where ship's hull are burned away by the impact of a beam weapon, or the first confrontation between the Enterprise D and the Borg Cube, it blew whole chucks out of the hull with only phasers.