#ioncannon

So, recently, my husband was telling me about a scenario that came up in a text group he’s a part of.  They’re awesome friends, but sometimes, they come up with the funniest topics.  This just so happened to not really be one of them. I mean, it’s kind of silly, just because it’s about a fictional universe, but it got me thinking about real possible ideas.  Here’s what happened:

The guys (as I shall refer to them from here onward) were talking about Star Trek, and it just so happened that one of our closest friends (let’s call him Ioan) had brought up the idea of what happened to all of the missed shots taken in space fights.  What about all that laser fire, ion cannon shots, and whatever else they had in their armory-you can comment about it below, and we can continue the discussion there?  What about those MISSES?

Ioan theorized that maybe, the Enterprise, and any and all other Federation ships, could have possibly caused the demise of other planets, or even possibly, war with other species because of those missed hits.

Here’s what I got (at about 11pm, and that’s important because evidently I’m smart when I’m really tired).  First, let’s talk about the shields.  Are they made to block a certain type of energy (or heat), light, or possibly sound?  And why are the lasers fired at said ships usually red?  They obviously don’t seem to have much of an effect on the shields, seeing as how you usually have to shoot the ship a LOT.  And I mean A. LOT.  Once you have a grasp on the shields, then you can go on to talk about the laser fire and ion cannons (for sanity’s sake, these are the only two weapons we’ll discuss here. Comment down below to talk about more).  

Why are the lasers red?  What is the main property of the ion cannons (as I never had a grasp on that, except that they were supposed to be more powerful)?  Why do they shoot lasers and ion cannons?  Why are the lasers and ion cannons different colors?  How is it that they haven’t changed the properties in the laser fire to match the effectiveness of the ion cannons?

Okay, enough questions.  These are just ones I don’t have answers to.  But, here’s another thought:  If the lasers are red because they are a certain temperature, then it’s safe to assume they don’t have to be that hot, and are thus a close-range type of weapon.  Then maybe, the ion cannons are a blue because they are a long-range type of weapon.  This would help make the colors difference make sense.  The lasers wouldn’t have to be as hot as the ion cannons because they’re used for close-range (to compare, a pistol vs. a sniper rifle), where as the ion cannons are used for long-range attacks.

So, if that’s the case, and the shields are used to block the (heat) energy of the ion and laser fire, then we can start to calculate (I’m not doing that here, I’m not a scientist) the range of impact of the laser fire and the ion cannons.  In space, we know that there’s no regulation of temperature; hence, why we need space suits.  Since we know that (from what we’ve heard of second-hand from astronauts, and either they’re all lying, or that’s really the truth), we can figure out that the red lasers would not have as long/wide a range of impact as the blue ion cannon shots that get fired.

Now, taking all of this information and putting it together, we can figure out that the possibility of laser fire actually doing much damage is fairly low, but the impact possibility of the ion cannon shots is greater.  Not infinite, but greater.  The lasers have a greater chance of cooling off and having little to no impact on matter as long as they exceed their damage zone.  The same can be said for the ion cannon shots.

Thus, I think it’s safe to postulate that the likelihood of laser or ion cannon fire negatively impacting other species/accidentally causing a war or an inter-”spacional” incident would be pretty slim.  I say this because typically, the fire fights happen within a close proximity, and they don’t usually take place within any planet’s atmosphere.  Now, as always, there’s exceptions.  There’s the red blob (can’t remember what it’s called) from the revived Star Trek franchise, movie one, where the Romulans (probably spelled incorrectly too, I’m not a die-hard fan, please don’t kill me!) used the red matter to create a black hole and destroy Vulcan, a rather sizable planet.  This was discovered to be a sort of unique substance, so I’m ruling that out as being a substance that can be easily weaponized. Otherwise, there’s usually not many, if any, instances where laser fire (or other weapon fire) from a ship-to-ship skirmish would have any notable, negative impact on a species, planet, or even solar system.