Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
There's a scene in the movie where the USS Vengeance is chasing the Enterprise, forcing its way into the Enterprise's "warp bubble".
Khan said it was a unique capability of the Vengeance, but I thought all ships had that capability even in the TOS era? For example, in Arena, the Enterprise chases and trades fire with the Gorn vessel while at warp.
Would Vengeance's Gatling gun and big torpedo launchers give it much of a tactical advantage?
Weapons fire during warp is not a 'unique ability' of ships in the original timeline. There are almost too many instances to mention, but the TNG episodes Q Who and New Ground come to mind.
In Q Who the Enterprise uses its aft torpedo launcher while fleeing a Borg cube at high warp.
In New Ground, Enterprise-D again uses the aft torpedo launcher to try and disrupt the 'warp wave' which is quickly growing beyond its intended scope.
Notably, in a TOS setting, the Enterprise (post refit) fires a torpedo at an asteroid that's trapped in the wormhole they accidentally created during Star Trek: The Motion Picture. They are incapable of shutting down the engines properly so not only are they firing while at warp, they've no choice but to do so.
As mentioned, the TOS episode Arena sees a warp firefight between the Enterprise and a Gorn ship.
So, classically, this is not that big a deal. However, there are enough "new rules" in the tangent universe that maybe this is indeed a unique trait of FederAbrams starships.
Would the Vengeance's Gatling gun and big torpedo launchers really give it much of a tactical advantage?
Yes.
In the alternate reality, this isn’t a well-developed (or at least, well-known) capability, so you have the element of surprise. As pointed out in the comments and Stick’s answer, by this point in the original timeline, Federation ships already had these “advanced warp capabilities”. But in the alternate reality, they apparently don’t.
For Kirk, the idea that you could be pursued at warp speed (let alone attacked) seems impossible:
Carol, we’re at warp; he can’t catch up with us.
Cue something big, dark and scary catching up with them. Indeed, the only reason that the Enterprise isn’t destroyed in seconds is because Carol Marcus and Scotty are both in the right place at the right time. If you were attacking, say, a Klingon vessel, then that’s unlikely to save them.
When Kirk and Spock talk to Khan in the brig, he acknowledges that the course of Starfleet development changed in the alternate reality:
But as a result of the destruction of Vulcan, your Starfleet began to aggressively search distant quadrants of space. My shift was found adrift; I alone was revived.
We’re told earlier in the film that Starfleet confiscated Scotty’s trans-warp beaming equation, and then it ends up with Khan (who’s also working on their top-secret weapons projects). It’s easy to imagine that warp-capable weapons systems were likewise kept secret, so that you can use them for surprise attacks in a war. That one explanation for the discrepancy between timelines.
(And if you kill anybody who witnesses these weapons, then it’s a pretty easy secret to keep.)
In the original timeline, where everybody knows about these weapons and takes appropriate precautions against them, perhaps it’s not much of an advantage. When it comes as a complete surprise to your enemies? Maybe more so.
The weapons that the USS VENGEANCE fire on the ENTERPRISE: the first two shots are phaser topedos and the others are phaser artillery. The VENGEANCE also has two mounted cannons below the ship which fire quantum beams. The beams can reach up to 50 km. The tactical disadvantage of the weapons are they are controlled on the bridge then connected to the comp room. Anybody can enter the comp room and shut the weapons down.
