I find this statement erronious. It seems to assume that a Type-XII emitter has the same energy capacity as a Type-X. Presumably a single Type-XII can channel significantly more energy than a Type-X thus achieving the same or greater power output over the whole array. Also, there's nothing to say that the emitter technology hasn't changed. The introduction of pulse phaser technology used on the Defiant may have found applications in conventional beam emitters which allowed for greater throughput.
Hardly so. Remember, the
emitter is only a single component of the phaser assembly, and the last stage, the stage that refines and directs the phaser energy. The emitter crystals themselves are all made of the same material, and have been around for well over a hundred years. Starfleet is probably at the peak physical limits in what can be achieved with phaser emitter crystals by TNG, especially with their advanced manufacturing technology.
The thing that appears to be the critical limiting factor in phaser power are the parts of the phaser beneath the emitter crystal, the parts that convert the EPS plasma into phaser energy. In "The Nth Degree" Geordi shunts all available plasma straight into a section of phaser emitters on the array, bypassing the normal intermediate stage that the TNG:TM describes, and that is implied in the scene. The emitters themselves appear to be able to handle direct plasma channeling for a greater output effect, but that this causes serious problems for heat and wear that make that useful only as a limited, one-off trick, and there is an intermediary stage that refines the raw plasma into something that the emitters can more easily handle. These would likely be the 'pre-fire chambers' that the TNG:TM describes, and the components that Rick Sternbach said had been miniaturized to fit into the smaller emitter housings that we see on the Sovereign class.
Again, I believe you're compairing apples to oranges. There's nothing to indicate that the Sovereign's main launcher isn't capable of preloading and simultaineous fire, even pre-upgrades. Since we only actually see a Sovereign using torpedoes (prior to Nemesis) in FC, there's nothing to say that it can't fire ten torpedoes from a single launcher. The shp is certainly large enough that it could. We know for certain that it can fire volleys of at least three or four torpedoes and the reloading times are probably inconsequential (they certainly are come Nemesis as the Enterprise unloaded a substantial number - regardless of whether it had a full complement - of torpedoes in what, 20-30 mins)
Except their size, the fact that we have only seen them fire bursts of three with long durations in between salvos, and the fact that the torpedoes fired by the E-E and other ships with similar launchers have always been slow-moving, while the E-D's torpedoes have almost always been fired with a very high starting velocity. The Galaxy's launchers are much longer assemblies, allowing them to preload more torpedoes and accelerate them to higher speeds like a railgun.
Furthermore, The E-E fired torpedoes in Insurrection against two pursuing Son'a battleships, a perfect time to use her launchers' full capacity, yet she was observed firing a pair of torpedoes, one at a time. And again in Nemesis, she never demonstrated more than bursts of three torpedoes with long wait times between bursts from individual launchers, even after the Scimitar's cloak had been disrupted, when massive salvos like that would have definitely been called for. Those torpedoes have all also been fired at much lower velocities.
Lastly, the designers' description of the Sovereign in FC was that she had 4 photon torpedo launchers capable of firing 12 torpedoes (excluding the quantum launcher, which was mentioned separately), which precisely fits with each launcher being capable of firing bursts of 4 torpedoes. And with the quantum launcher, nicely places the Sovereign's at-launch torpedo firepower into the range of what we would expect from a Heavy Cruiser of her size.
Oh, and Rick Sternbach, one of the ship's designers, himself said that the Sovereign was a Heavy Cruiser designed to replace the Excelsior, not a Battleship designed to replace the Galaxy.
