B5, ST & SG stuff (ships, firepower, bits and bangs)

[Mike DiCenso]

The whole question is how shields work and if the auxiliary power has anything to do with the percentage.
Generally, once the shields take a severe hit, they don't recover in the following minutes.
Does the percentage indicate a given amount of energy left to cope with any further attack, or is it relative to the structural integrity of the shielding system, and so at 0% it's definitely burned out (all emitters fried for example)?
When shields are back at near 100%, are we told they are recharged, or are we told they're repaired?

Thoughout Trek there are contradictory pieces of evidence as to how the shields work. This is the earliest reference I know of that shields are power dependent and perhaps can be drained, not simply damaged:

From TOS' "The Doomsday Machine:

SPOCK: Deflector shields at full power. They can't take much more of this.

DECKER: Helmsman, hold your course. Stand by all phaser banks.

SULU: Aye, aye, sir.

(The planet killer fires at them.)

SPOCK: Deflectors holding, but weakening. We must retreat, Commodore. The energy drain

DECKER: I'm in command here, Mister Spock. Maintain your course, helmsman. Get us in closer.


It's tough to say whether or not the shields are a battery with power or capacitors that can handle a set energy from the dialog, but this is the first time that the shields are tied in with a significant energy drain of some kind, either from a power store for the shields to draw off of, or from the ship's own direct powering of it where they can be ramped up to some level that is considered full power.

The next reference to draining occurs in TNG with the first offical encounter with the Borg:

WORF: The beam is draining our shields.
RIKER: If they pull down our shields, we're helpless.

The shields are drained, not damaged.

Later in the same episode, another Borg weapon does something similar and we here again the same:

WORF: Captain, the enemy vessel is firing on us. There are no reports of any damage to the Enterprise.

DATA: Captain, the target was not the ship. The weapon was designed to drain the shields.

WORF: Confirmed. Shield effectiveness has been reduced twelve percent.

In TNG's "The Nth Degree", the shields act more like Kane's model, with a set capacity that can be overloaded and the shields appear to be powered directly from either impulse or warp engines:

LARSON: Commander, warp power has been transferred to the shield grid.

LAFORGE: Yeah, but by whom?
(Reg wanders over and presses a control next to La Forge, then returns to his own panel)

LAFORGE: Barclay, what are you doing?

BARCLAY: Lieutenant Barclay to Captain Picard. You can fire photon torpedoes.

Most of the time in the TNG era we hear of shields being knocked "down x percent" or whatever. In DS9's "The Way of the Warrior" we have a rare example of a stated targeting of actual shield generators that can allow a section of the shields to be taken down.
-Mike

[Kane Starkiller]

Whatever the exact nature of the shields the main point is that during the three hours shields would have plenty of time to shed excess energy and at no time would they be required to handle 100,000TJ.
The fact that shields were being damaged but would only collapse in 3 hours means that the radiation impacting them was only slightly above the shields reradiation capacity so the degradation of the shields was slow.
If you hit shields with less power than it's ability to shed heat you will never damage it. If you hit it with power slightly greater than it's ability to shed heat it will start to degrade loose it's strength and after a while collapse. If 100,000TJ across 3 hours is enough to collapse the shields that must mean the actual energy required to collapse them is only a tiny fraction of the 100,000TJ since during the 3 hours they would have plenty of time to shed much of the excess heat.
1000TW beam fired by a Shadow ship would thus break through the shields almost instantly.

[Mike DiCenso]

The nature of the shields is critical since if it acts as a battery that is drained with time, it means that you have hundreds of thousands to millions of terajoules to "spend". Hours if you are suffering a steady drain of a few tens to hundreds of terawatts, or seconds if hit by hundreds of thousands of terawatts. In other words, the abnormally unstable G-type star in "Relics" was able to wear down heavily damaged and on backup power shields over hours and during that time the intensity of the solar flares was expected to increase, not remain steady. The shields being at 23 percent of whatever, means the total capacity of the shields would be 4.347 * 67,000 TJ = 291,249 TJ assuming normal stellar output and the the radiation is measured from the center of the sun, which would add anything up to another 400,000 km. If measured from the surface, this would raise it up to around 900,000 TJ, and the shields would then have a total capacity of 3,913,000 TJ.

Either way, you are arbitrarily picking a number, and in your case you are picking a fraction of the total capacity that allows a Shadow BC to blow through a GCS' shields in a matter of a second. At 348 TW (83 kt), a BC would have to sustain fire for up to 14 minutes to burn through that.
-Mike

[Kane Starkiller]

The nature of the shields is critical since if it acts as a battery that is drained with time, it means that you have hundreds of thousands to millions of terajoules to "spend". Hours if you are suffering a steady drain of a few tens to hundreds of terawatts, or seconds if hit by hundreds of thousands of terawatts.

No it doesn't since, as I already explained, it will have plenty of time to shed the excess energy to surrounding space. 100,000TJ (or 300,000TJ) is at no point or at any short interval handled by the shields.
If I go sunbathing at 100W/m2 say that I could lie for 3 hours before getting sunburns. The total energy my skin would absorb is around 1MJ. Does that mean that my "skin capacity" is 1MJ? That if I get shot by a 1cm wide 50kW laser beam it would take 20 seconds to cause me skinburns? You have absolutely no basis for this power and intensity independent shield model and we have canon evidence.
BoPs, Jem'Hadar ships and Borg ship from Descent all got instantly destroyed by a TW level radiation coupled quick release of TJ-1000TJ energy level from flares. This is clear evidence that even a large Borg ship, which is superior to a Galaxy, has an upper reradiation limit rated in TW and total shield capacity on the order of 1000TJ while smaller ships have capacities on the order of no more than 10TJ-100TJ.

In other words, the abnormally unstable G-type star in "Relics" was able to wear down heavily damaged and on backup power shields over hours and during that time the intensity of the solar flares was expected to increase, not remain steady. The shields being at 23 percent of whatever, means the total capacity of the shields would be 4.347 * 67,000 TJ = 291,249 TJ assuming normal stellar output and the the radiation is measured from the center of the sun, which would add anything up to another 400,000 km. If measured from the surface, this would raise it up to around 900,000 TJ, and the shields would then have a total capacity of 3,913,000 TJ.

I'm afraid I don't follow. What do you mean if the radiation is measured from the center of the sun?

Either way, you are arbitrarily picking a number, and in your case you are picking a fraction of the total capacity that allows a Shadow BC to blow through a GCS' shields in a matter of a second. At 348 TW (83 kt), a BC would have to sustain fire for up to 14 minutes to burn through that.

348TW simply to vaporize it. The beam is not at any point stopped by the Narn cruisers nor does it loose any intensity nor is there any flickering on the exiting side meaning it's several times more powerful. What you claim is total capacity is nothing of the sort as I've already shown.
We know that even Borg ships can't withstand 1000TJ if applied in short order. Which brings us back to the obvious explanation I've given: reradiation capacity is slightly below the radiation. Thus if the radiation is 5TW the reradiation capacity is, for example, 4.95TW then after 3 hours Enterprise's shields would pile up 500TJ and collapse.
Again: Shadow beam would easily break through the shields.

[PunkMaister]

As I recall about the SG-A flare episode the shields did hold but were not preventing the excess heat being generated to be transferred to the hull.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Gas pressure alone is not all. There are magnetic fields to take into consideration.
So that's about two things you dismiss: magnetic field and the obvious nonsensical thickness of the stream.
Would you rather simply work from dialogue?

Magnetic field is not a straight line but a loop and can't explain jet's coherence. I didn't dismiss it.

They seem to explain the flares more or less aptly though. :)

What does it mean that thickness is "obviously nonsensical"?

The way it's rendered in the episode. Fluffy yellow blobs that calmly drift away. That, and other aspects of the VFX.

There is no reason not to work with both dialogue and visuals. This is not a radio drama.

OK.

The episode establishes 500 Sv. Not 100 Sv. Nor 20 Sv.
Your figure was totally off, yes, by six orders of magnitude.

And I didn't even bother trying to find out how much energy would be necessary to reach people the closer to the poles one would be, as I treated the intensity in an "omnizenith" way, like if sunlight was coming at 90° ontop of every single square meter of the exposed side of the planet, which would only make the figures considerably bigger (the reason we have hot deserts at the equator and ice caps at the poles). I clearly didn't bother with solar angles, which would only greatly increase numbers. Here it's said that for UVB irradience "there is an approximate 50-fold increase as the solar altitude increases from 10 to 90°."
A value confirmed by the observed differences notified here, p. 163, irradiance charts based on ZSA, with values varying by several OoMs.

The episode doesn't establish 500Sv. The episode shows McKay predicting that it could be 50,000rems. Since he didn't know how long it will last he couldn't be sure about the final irradiance.

This will be addressed later.

And you still haven't shown why it would be necessary for the radiation to possess more than TW total power.

I did, through the calcs, to fit with 500 Sv. Of course, if you dismiss those calcs, obviously there won't be much evidence anymore.

And how does that help? Not only flares and CMEs are noticeable for the copious amounts of x-rays they release (high temp plasma), so there's less reasons to go with UV.
That, and UV are between x-rays and visible light, and around 9~10% of visible light reaches the surface, based on the sunlight duration during perfect sunshine conditions.
Of course that being outside of cloudy days!

Let's remember the numbers.

Assuming our human had his skin completely unwrapped, you have 1.8 m² of skin to hit with energy. That's already a conservative premise, since there are zones of the human body which wouldn't get as much energy as some others.
I got 22,222 J/m². With half of Lantea being like Earth, we need at the very least 5.667 e18 J. That's assuming each square meter at sea level gets the maximum output with zero absorption, and by assuming that there's a star shining right above each square meter hit by the burst.

So, let's see what we get if we deal with visible light.
Since less than 10% make it to sea level, we'd got with at the very least 5.667 e19 J.
Over 23 hours, that's 684.42 e12 W for our stream.

Now, since we're moving down the wavelength, into the UV, we can look at how much UV is being absorbed by the atmosphere.
Subtypes, UVA, UVB, UVC.
Sources, natural:
"The Sun emits ultraviolet radiation in the UVA, UVB, and UVC bands. The Earth's ozone layer blocks 98.7% of this UV radiation from penetrating through the atmosphere. 98.7% of the ultraviolet radiation that reaches the Earth's surface is UVA. (Some of the UVB and UVC radiation is responsible for the generation of the ozone layer.)"
That's roughly in line with what this source says.

Then we take a lookt at the UV index, which lets get an idea of how much energy is absorbed by subtype. On the ranges that are truly damaging to the skin, UVC and UVB, only the second reaches the ground surface, and in very small quantities, but they remain relevant nonetheless.

For the kicks, there is an UV index weather forecast calculator here, for US regions:
"Each point on the index scale is equivalent to 25 milliwatts/square meter of UV radiation at the earth's surface for UV wavelengths between 290 and 400 nanometers."
ZIP codes here.

This source says that "at an altitude of around 2,000 metres the amount of UV radiation can be up to 30% higher than at sea level."

Page 7 of this document:
"The UV irradiance increases with altitude because the amount of absorbers in the overlaying atmosphere decreases with altitude. Measurements show that the UV irradiance increases by 6-8% per 1000 m increase in altitude."
Some other sources say 7%, one even goes to say 14% per kilometer.
Reports +9%/km.

As EUV, pages 10 and 13 of this document would indicate that you shouldn't even count on it, and would be quicker to put the atmosphere on fire. We can also look at the extreme left of the curve, where wavelengths reach below 50 nm. It also has formulas to calculate absorptions.
Index of all files about planetary atmospheres. Insane amount of data!
This source reports various UVAE figures, from 2 to 25% /km from other sources, to their own narrowed down to 8-13%/km for UVB.
And if this is of interest to anyone, observations about underwater irradience.

I'd probably go back to this book, page 163:
"...large ozone absorption at 305 nm," which is up there on the UVB scale.

If we take a look at the ozone layer, we get an even better idea

For example, a constant increase by 9% over 40km (1.09^40) would correspond to a final difference of 31.41.
We're above the reduction for visible light, and this brings our former 23-hours long rate to 2,149.76 e12 W.

That's if we go with the ionizing radiation wavelengths that would suffer lesser absorption rates. A lower end, in other words.

The absorption rates for UV radiation are obviously given independently from total spectrum absorption so there is no justification for you first multiplying the power by 10 before even entering into UV discussion.

I treated UVB alone. I have shown how even using visible light, further right on the spectrum, would already require multiplying the number by ten, just to get the necessary energy at sea level, and we know that absorption increases when we move to the left side of the spectrum, inside the UV band and X-ray. UVA are just similar to sunlight, and I have shown that UVB suffer from greater absorption, and UVC don't make it to the ground.
So I'm rather sure my demonstration works very well here.

Not to mention that you assume the Ozone layers, which are responsible for most of the absorption, are similar for both planets.

The Athosians lived for the best part of a full year or two on the mainland, cultivated food there, and no one got sick of radiation. Besides, people didn't get sick when they walked outside of Atlantis' skyscrapers either. Obviously absorption works more than well.

You give a number of 6% increase for UV radiation but then go with 9% and call that a lower limit even though 6% increase only gives a factor of 10 and not 31.

Because the much more completed studies I linked to show that the absorption rates are closer to 9% and more. 11% gives x65, and I won't annoy you with the greater percentages, for which some were above 20%.
Still, at 6%, you already get a factor of slightly above 10, so again 10 is your absolute lowest limit, and this only corresponds to the UV close to visible light.

And all of this is again based on an assumption that the final duration of the radiation (which was completely unknown to McKay) ended up being lethal for the life on the planet.

See later v v v

Methinks the planet-sized bright explosion should be a good clue of the moment the ejection occured.

Again what is your evidence that the jet only erupted after the collapse.

The dialogue below, for starters;

CALDWELL: Position, Doctor. The shields are up. We need the extra power from that ZeePM now.

McKAY (irritably): Yes, yes. I just need to ...

(He turns from the crystal panel and trails off as he sees the wall screen.)

McKAY: Oh no.

SHEPPARD: What?

McKAY: The prominence is fully collapsing into the photosphere.

Brace yourselves.

And the point that I don't see how a large and white, moon-sized explosion on the surface of the sun wouldn't correspond to the jet's debut.
If it wasn't the case, if the explosion occurred while the jet was already en route, then the explosion in question would have added something consequential to the jet at some point, but the stream remained constant all the time.

And of course, I didn't calculate how much energy the ship would take by being so close to an explosion of that size.

Well, on that you're totally wrong, since we have evidence that ZPM have enormous amounts of energy in stock.
That said, other examples are irrelevant. Let's focus on our single Echoes case.

We did focus on the example and all you presented is insistence that we shouldn't use the upper limit of the jet energy content because is "weird" and that we should use sterilization of the planet as a lower limit even when there is no evidence the actual radiation burst was sufficient in energy.

Some examples:
The fact that the hull was already getting damaged, despite the shield being up, was a good indication.
The same shield that could take at least one of those 200 MT shots from a Ha'tak? The same shield that could withstand a rain of hiveship-bolts making flashes largely visible from space.
The same hull which withstood a powered dive into a planet's atmosphere, shields down, suffered very little damage to the hull, as seen in one of the last episodes of SGA, when Todd leaves the 304 headed straight for the surface, barely saved in time by Sheppard repeating the "Failsafe" maneuver with one of the Travellers' ship.

Other examples are not irrelevant since they provide additional independent upper limits. And they are not in thousands of TW let alone megatons/s.

- Man-portable Naqahdah Generator Mark-I provides two to three digits gigawatts of energy. Can be overloaded into at least double digits kiloton bombs.
- A ZPM powered shield withstands a 15~22 megatons nuke detonated just above Atlantis, proving that the ZPM can deliver petajoules and withstand a power eight OoMs greater than the energy figure for such a yield.
- The Tria uses a ZPM, while flying at 99.999c, to decelerate, which from the Daedalus' perspective, was breaking at 23 gees. E20~21 W. I had done an old calc, but couldn't find it. Nattuo quickly gave it a shot here.
- A ZPM-less old and damaged Aurora-class ship, with barely enough juice left for shields, could withstand for a couple seconds a blast like this one that originated from a caldera in a super volcano where a Lantean outpost was built, tapping geothermal energy to power a shield. The explosion proved less powerful though than what McKay expected (he said it would level a continent and made his shield estimation from that perspective). The Orion was sitting right on top of that. Which gives a nice idea of what a ZPM could add to such a ship.
- Several statements that ZPMs could at the very least blast planets.
- A reactor that worked at 50%, had the power of 12 ZPMs, charged up for a couple tens of minutes, finally overloaded and blew up, vaporizing the planet and destroying 5/6 of the local star system.
- A ZPM being a power source that enables dialing a galaxy on the other side of the universe, which output was at least matched by the power core found at Icarus Base, on the unnamed planet featured in SGU's first episode. The core overloaded and blew the planet up (yes, again).
- Etc.

I think it should be obvious.
The first part relates hydrogen ions with electron densities. If they're proportional and if there's nearly as many H+ as there are electrons in those blasts, then your figures would be completely off by many orders of magnitude.

The second example would be even more telling. Your result correspond to the densities measured in the vicinity of Earth.
The measures come from the Space Weather Prediction Center.
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/index.html
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ace/ace_rtsw_data.html

Peaks would be measured in tens of protons per cc, or tens of millions of protons per cubic meter. You got a figure such as 10^13 particles/m³.
Even if peaks corresponded to flares and other CMEs, what we get would only be a fraction of the orignal density, as the bursts would expand across space until they cross Earth's path.
Unless I'm missing something, this means your result corresponds to a proton density near Earth, and the particle density of a typical flare or CME would be many orders of magnitude above that, within the corona of Sol.

But this is not a typical flare or a CME is it? This is the whole point of disagreement: your insistence on using power, energy and densities of large CMEs when nothing like that happened in the episode. I really don't see how you expect to contradict the calculations I performed with completely unrelated data.
Secondly tens of millions is 10^7. How is this similar to my number of 10^13 particles? Stars are composed mostly of hydrogen so proton density is the particle density.

I messed up 6 OoMs here, while doing the convertions. That sucks. ^_^' Tsshh...
Anyway, let me drop the proton density argument and take another look at the energy ratio.

Measurements at Earth put the density at 10~20 e6 protons/m³ when, I suppose, there's been a recent and particular solar event. The rest of the time, that's around 1 million protons or less.
Since you got 10^13 p/m³, the volumetric expansion, for the stream you calculated, is a rate x e6/AU.

Your figure (3.2 e9 W) still strikes me as ridiculously too low. The exposed surface area of Earth is 2.55 e14 m².
I = 1.255 e-5 W/m².

Let's compare some figures here. This page says:

Since cosmic rays are a kind of radiation, they can hurt people and machines. Lucky for us, Earth's magnetic field and atmosphere protect us from most cosmic rays. On average, people get hit with about 2.3 millisieverts of radiation each year. A millisievert is a unit for measuring radiation. It is abbreviated mSv. Cosmic rays make up about 0.2 mSv of the radiation we get each year. That isn't very much; less than 10% of the total.

So on the 2.3 mSv we get each year, 2.1 mSv correspond to EMR and 0.2 to cosmic rays (that's the two sources of energy).

According to this source, the lowest absorption rate brings down the intensity of sunlight from +1300 W/m² to 1000 W/m² at sea level.
Those 1000 W/m² would logically account for the 2.1 mSv/year.

So the resulting energy intensity at sea level woud be 95.238 W/m². 90% of cosmic rays would be protons.
Therefore the radiation intensity due to protons hitting the top of the atmosphere, would roughly be, at sea level, of 85.714 W/m².

Without even looking into atmospheric absorption, if we directly compared your value to this one, we'd see that yours is 6,829,800 times smaller.

Which would bring your adjusted 3.2 GW power value up to 21,855,360 GW.

When taking absorption into account, we see that cosmic rays, much like short wavelength photons, are stopped high in the atmosphere, so although I'm not able to provide a ratio here, it's expected that the true figure would be greater as well, perhaps considerably.

Besides, this is without counting on the fact that this is an averaged regular intensity, nothing like what punctually results from massive solar flares and other CMEs.

Globally, what we see is that with your figure, everybody would have been safe. They would have not bothered intercepting the stream at all if it had been only that weak. And even if they were in doubt, they would have not bothered remaining in the path of the stream after realizing how non-powerful it was once it started hitting the shield, especially if some gigawatts would be a threat to their ship.
Even if the stream were to suddenly become more powerful, there would be nothing they could do about it anyway.

Other than that, people were in a city. The city alone, with its walls, would have the capacity to provide a modicum of protection. I'm not even talking about life on the other side of the planet, or anything living in the ocean, which wouldn't even feel radiation (underwater irradiance document, -12%/5 meters). All they had to do with your inadequately low numbers was to sink Atlantis again, and sit under the shield, and use the unaffected side of the planet to grow plants and else (and that at a time when contact with Earth was already re-established, so they weren't that isolated any more).

Yellow outside, literally white in the center, as seen when it impacts the shield.

Yes therefore it had high temperature (I assumed 10,000K) thus it must have low density otherwise it would expand.

The sun ejected a stream of self contained plasma. An elongated stable toroid or something, or the sun generated some kind of Gauss tunnel or some such.
That's how far we can go to give a semblence of explanation. I hope you don't mind 1/2 pseudo-science.

If he didn't think the shield would hold on for more than some minutes, and since he considered that people would get irradiated up to 500 SV, then it means the total energy has not changed, and you have only reduced the duration, and therefore increased power. This doesn't really help you, I'm afraid.

Again: power is dependent on kinetic energy the particles got when the flare collapsed and the EM radiation is dependent on the internal energy the particles got when the flares collapsed. If this total energy is known to Rodney, how can the duration be unknown?

Because he wouldn't know the power.

Rate of EM radiation and velocity are directly governed by the total energy and temperature. Since he didn't know the duration he couldn't know what is the original energy.

He compared what he knew from the former super CME, the study of samples, and it gave him an idea of the radiation energy level to expect.

They studied samples. That's how they knew of the precedent MEE.

In other words they knew what happened and what might happen again but had no conclusive proof.

Safe those psychic whales which somehow knew something tragic would happen.
The fact that they just had to stay in the city or sink it to be safe was a good indicator.
See above for the stupidity of actually bothering intercepting a stream of ions which the planet would be better at deflecting naturally, and which if they penetrated the atmosphere, would only heat up the upper layers, since it's nothing more than hydrogen ions.

There are enough calcs putting torps in the multi-megaton range.

I already dealt with this with varying warheads.

Varying warheads which are set to megatons. I don't see where you are going with this.
Are you going to tell me that they purposedly dial their torps down?

There is no illusion, and your evaluations of durations are rather erroneous, to say the least.
We see the beam first hits the bow of the cruiser, then keeps going down and meets with the stern. The beam was obviously coming at a ~10° angle above the cruiser's plate, from behind. Oddly, it completely fails to penetrate the ship and cause greater damage until it does hit the stern, as evidenced by the lack of explosion until the beam gets there. Logically we'd suggest that the armour resisted, which would fit with what comes next.
Once the beam locks on the engines, it lingers there, energy being poured into the same spot, the beam pushing through but nothing special happens despite the fact that the beam would be going thru the soft guts. Suddenly the cruiser pops!

That's quite different from the other beam that shows no problem to bisect the cruiser in the foreground, and that despite the fact that wherever it hits, it comes into contact with armour.

It's clear and indisputable evidence that the beam hitting the cruiser in the background was less powerful.

It's not erroneous. I have the episode on my computer. I counted frame by frame and it takes 24 frames for the beam to appear at the underside of the ship. At the very first frame of the contact there is a bright flash at the bow of the ship and we see the vaporized material expanding from the bow and then the beam appears into the cameras view from above as it slices downwards.

The beam is already visible before it even hits the cruiser in the background.

I advise you to watch the actual episode in greater quality than that on the youtube.

What is there more in the DVD than what is already seen on the video?
The cruiser in the foreground totally fails to stop the beam. At no point you see the beam being interrupted, and that despite the beam still having to go through two layers of armour most of the time.
This is in stark contrast with the beam hitting the ship in the background. The beam hits the bow, then runs down the back of the cruiser, until it locks onto the thrusters. Then we get the flash of an explosion, and the beam keeps pouring energy into the engine section, certainly a weakspot.
Only five frames later we start to see the purple beam poking its head among the explosions, under the bow.
And that, not because it's coming into the frustrum from the top. The beam starts to appear at a point that's several pixels away from the superior edge of the screen.
Which means that what prevented the beam from appearing on the other side of the ship, below the bow, was not the beam's vector that would still put it out of frame, but because it was struggling to get through some mundane stuff that would have ZERO reason to be much more armoured.
Of course the beam had to go through a large portion of the ship's length, but in comparison to hull armour, this should not pose any problem.
Shadow beams slice through enemy ships and a lot of the beam is wasted. That doesn't stop such beams from going through a layer of the ship, then vertically through the superstructure, and come out on the other side, where there's another layer of armour.

But shields working at 23% of whatever juice they get from the ship is different if the shields receive energy from the fusion plant instead of the warpcore.

Says who? Worf reported the shields are at 23%. Are we supposed to assume that in every episode a certain percentage is different than in previous one based on the exact damage the ship has received? This doesn't make any sense, all the information that the captain needs is what is the state of the shield compared to it's nominal value not some weird number requiring him to perform multiplications in his head.

Unless the captain knows what each type of power plant is capable of. That said, I'd go with you with the quite simpler option.

[Mike DiCenso]

The nature of the shields is critical since if it acts as a battery that is drained with time, it means that you have hundreds of thousands to millions of terajoules to "spend". Hours if you are suffering a steady drain of a few tens to hundreds of terawatts, or seconds if hit by hundreds of thousands of terawatts.

No it doesn't since, as I already explained, it will have plenty of time to shed the excess energy to surrounding space. 100,000TJ (or 300,000TJ) is at no point or at any short interval handled by the shields.

It will? Or will it instead have a mostly set amount of energy to draw on and if you exceed that by pumping in say 100,000 TJ a second, it will collapse the shields faster. You have failed to dispute this model and dialog I provided confirms that shields drain, not necessarily take damage, unless you specifically target the generators or other related systems. You try to make an analogy to sunbathing, but you ignore critical dialog along the way and other circumstances.

If I go sunbathing at 100W/m2 say that I could lie for 3 hours before getting sunburns. The total energy my skin would absorb is around 1MJ. Does that mean that my "skin capacity" is 1MJ? That if I get shot by a 1cm wide 50kW laser beam it would take 20 seconds to cause me skinburns? You have absolutely no basis for this power and intensity independent shield model and we have canon evidence.
BoPs, Jem'Hadar ships and Borg ship from Descent all got instantly destroyed by a TW level radiation coupled quick release of TJ-1000TJ energy level from flares. This is clear evidence that even a large Borg ship, which is superior to a Galaxy, has an upper reradiation limit rated in TW and total shield capacity on the order of 1000TJ while smaller ships have capacities on the order of no more than 10TJ-100TJ.

But if somehow the radiation was being increased signficantly (the case in "Relics") it would skew that model. In every case, you doggedly cling to this "steady state" radiation notion and handwave away anything else. In every case with both SG and ST alike, you cling to a solar flare model for what are clearly bizzare events that either have to be ignored or totality of physics must be applied to them, and you wind up with vastly higher power levels the ships are exposed to. To sum up:

1.) You ignore the full context of the situation. The E-D being damaged and crippled in "Relics", the ship was fine without shields until the G-type star became abnormally unstable, and began expelling matter and energy on a level that required shields and even then did not stay steady, but continued to grow in output such that the shields in three hours would collapse or not be able to protect the ship. The same with the SG example where a flare would cause a mass-extinction event on a planet, dispite many tens of millions of km between the star and the planet as well as it's atmosphere and magnetic field.

2.) Earlier you demonstrated that you will handily go out of your way to ignore higher level events, like Voyager sitting at the edge of a black hole without breaking a sweat, or power generation figures ("True Q", "Revulsions", "Riddles", ect) that don't meet up with your expectations.

In other words, the abnormally unstable G-type star in "Relics" was able to wear down heavily damaged and on backup power shields over hours and during that time the intensity of the solar flares was expected to increase, not remain steady. The shields being at 23 percent of whatever, means the total capacity of the shields would be 4.347 * 67,000 TJ = 291,249 TJ assuming normal stellar output and the the radiation is measured from the center of the sun, which would add anything up to another 400,000 km. If measured from the surface, this would raise it up to around 900,000 TJ, and the shields would then have a total capacity of 3,913,000 TJ.

I'm afraid I don't follow. What do you mean if the radiation is measured from the center of the sun?

The Sun's energy originates at it's core, not at it's surface as you know. It takes millions of years for the energy to radiate to the surface. If you measure form the core (adding an additional 400,000 km to the R squared equation), you get nearly 67,000 TJ. If you measure from the surface, you get 900,000 TJ since the distance results in dispersing of the star's energy over less distance.

Either way, you are arbitrarily picking a number, and in your case you are picking a fraction of the total capacity that allows a Shadow BC to blow through a GCS' shields in a matter of a second. At 348 TW (83 kt), a BC would have to sustain fire for up to 14 minutes to burn through that.

348TW simply to vaporize it. The beam is not at any point stopped by the Narn cruisers nor does it loose any intensity nor is there any flickering on the exiting side meaning it's several times more powerful. What you claim is total capacity is nothing of the sort as I've already shown.

Even if we go with your 1,000 TW number, or even ten times that, it would still take 1.4 minutes of continual firing to knock the shields down. And you still haven't shown anything since as always, you keep ignoring how the shields work and often the context of what is happening in both SG as well as ST.

On top of that, we can add in numerous other examples that support my model rather than yours, but since you ignore Voyager hanging out at a black hole's event horizon, you probably will also ignore the E-1701 in TOS "Tomorrow is Yesterday" sling shot around a black hole, or more impressively Spock Prime's ship and the mining ship Narada's black hole journeys in Star Trek 2009 as well.

Furthermore we have the E-D in "A Matter of Time" soaking up with shields and nav deflector gigatons of ionized plasma and redirecting it out into space within 30 seconds.

We know that even Borg ships can't withstand 1000TJ if applied in short order. Which brings us back to the obvious explanation I've given: reradiation capacity is slightly below the radiation. Thus if the radiation is 5TW the reradiation capacity is, for example, 4.95TW then after 3 hours Enterprise's shields would pile up 500TJ and collapse.
Again: Shadow beam would easily break through the shields.

We know nothing of the sort. As Mr. Oragahn has continued to demonstrate, your concept of what is going on is based on selective applications of physics rather than the whole, and as a result has skewed the results. You have not accounted for the highly visible and dense flares, dispite the fact that you claim density and energy levels which would barely leave them visible, if at all.
-Mike

[Kane Starkiller]

They seem to explain the flares more or less aptly though. :)

How?

The way it's rendered in the episode. Fluffy yellow blobs that calmly drift away. That, and other aspects of the VFX.

I still don't see any physical reasoning only more subjective opinions.

I treated UVB alone. I have shown how even using visible light, further right on the spectrum, would already require multiplying the number by ten, just to get the necessary energy at sea level, and we know that absorption increases when we move to the left side of the spectrum, inside the UV band and X-ray. UVA are just similar to sunlight, and I have shown that UVB suffer from greater absorption, and UVC don't make it to the ground.
So I'm rather sure my demonstration works very well here.

The Athosians lived for the best part of a full year or two on the mainland, cultivated food there, and no one got sick of radiation. Besides, people didn't get sick when they walked outside of Atlantis' skyscrapers either. Obviously absorption works more than well.

Because the much more completed studies I linked to show that the absorption rates are closer to 9% and more. 11% gives x65, and I won't annoy you with the greater percentages, for which some were above 20%.
Still, at 6%, you already get a factor of slightly above 10, so again 10 is your absolute lowest limit, and this only corresponds to the UV close to visible light.

The fact that Athosians lived on the mainland doesn't necessarily prove that Ozone layer is similar but that the star itself doesn't have the same power output as our sun or it's bigger but cooler so the amount of UV radiation under normal circumstances will be lesser.
Secondly we have lost track of the original point: standard radiation itensity at the surface of the yellow star is around 50MW/m2. There are no natural mechanisms to increase that power intensity to 260GW/m2 which would be required for Daedalus to absorb 2000TW. This limitation is separate and independent from McKays predictions. MY goal was to show that you can actually squeeze the mass extinction prediction with the known limitation on power intensity.

And the point that I don't see how a large and white, moon-sized explosion on the surface of the sun wouldn't correspond to the jet's debut.
If it wasn't the case, if the explosion occurred while the jet was already en route, then the explosion in question would have added something consequential to the jet at some point, but the stream remained constant all the time.

And of course, I didn't calculate how much energy the ship would take by being so close to an explosion of that size.

Well the jet was very small. It's easily possible they didn't see it until it came close enough and the collapse itself turned out not the be that dangerous. In any case since even large flares themselves are much less dense than air while the total energy released by the flare might be huge the actual energy ship's shields would receive won't exceed the standard radiation of the star.

Some examples:
The fact that the hull was already getting damaged, despite the shield being up, was a good indication.
The same shield that could take at least one of those 200 MT shots from a Ha'tak? The same shield that could withstand a rain of hiveship-bolts making flashes largely visible from space.
The same hull which withstood a powered dive into a planet's atmosphere, shields down, suffered very little damage to the hull, as seen in one of the last episodes of SGA, when Todd leaves the 304 headed straight for the surface, barely saved in time by Sheppard repeating the "Failsafe" maneuver with one of the Travellers' ship.

What is the source for 200MT Ha'tak weapons? Secondly speaking of flashes visible from space:

About 10 seconds later:

- Man-portable Naqahdah Generator Mark-I provides two to three digits gigawatts of energy. Can be overloaded into at least double digits kiloton bombs.
- A ZPM powered shield withstands a 15~22 megatons nuke detonated just above Atlantis, proving that the ZPM can deliver petajoules and withstand a power eight OoMs greater than the energy figure for such a yield.
- The Tria uses a ZPM, while flying at 99.999c, to decelerate, which from the Daedalus' perspective, was breaking at 23 gees. E20~21 W. I had done an old calc, but couldn't find it. Nattuo quickly gave it a shot here.
- A ZPM-less old and damaged Aurora-class ship, with barely enough juice left for shields, could withstand for a couple seconds a blast like this one that originated from a caldera in a super volcano where a Lantean outpost was built, tapping geothermal energy to power a shield. The explosion proved less powerful though than what McKay expected (he said it would level a continent and made his shield estimation from that perspective). The Orion was sitting right on top of that. Which gives a nice idea of what a ZPM could add to such a ship.
- Several statements that ZPMs could at the very least blast planets.
- A reactor that worked at 50%, had the power of 12 ZPMs, charged up for a couple tens of minutes, finally overloaded and blew up, vaporizing the planet and destroying 5/6 of the local star system.
- A ZPM being a power source that enables dialing a galaxy on the other side of the universe, which output was at least matched by the power core found at Icarus Base, on the unnamed planet featured in SGU's first episode. The core overloaded and blew the planet up (yes, again).
- Etc.

I can't really respond to most of those if I don't know at least the names of the episodes.

I messed up 6 OoMs here, while doing the convertions. That sucks. ^_^' Tsshh...
Anyway, let me drop the proton density argument and take another look at the energy ratio.

Measurements at Earth put the density at 10~20 e6 protons/m³ when, I suppose, there's been a recent and particular solar event. The rest of the time, that's around 1 million protons or less.
Since you got 10^13 p/m³, the volumetric expansion, for the stream you calculated, is a rate x e6/AU.

Your figure (3.2 e9 W) still strikes me as ridiculously too low. The exposed surface area of Earth is 2.55 e14 m².
I = 1.255 e-5 W/m².

Let's compare some figures here. This page says:

Since cosmic rays are a kind of radiation, they can hurt people and machines. Lucky for us, Earth's magnetic field and atmosphere protect us from most cosmic rays. On average, people get hit with about 2.3 millisieverts of radiation each year. A millisievert is a unit for measuring radiation. It is abbreviated mSv. Cosmic rays make up about 0.2 mSv of the radiation we get each year. That isn't very much; less than 10% of the total.

So on the 2.3 mSv we get each year, 2.1 mSv correspond to EMR and 0.2 to cosmic rays (that's the two sources of energy).

According to this source, the lowest absorption rate brings down the intensity of sunlight from +1300 W/m² to 1000 W/m² at sea level.
Those 1000 W/m² would logically account for the 2.1 mSv/year.

So the resulting energy intensity at sea level woud be 95.238 W/m². 90% of cosmic rays would be protons.
Therefore the radiation intensity due to protons hitting the top of the atmosphere, would roughly be, at sea level, of 85.714 W/m².

Without even looking into atmospheric absorption, if we directly compared your value to this one, we'd see that yours is 6,829,800 times smaller.

Which would bring your adjusted 3.2 GW power value up to 21,855,360 GW.

When taking absorption into account, we see that cosmic rays, much like short wavelength photons, are stopped high in the atmosphere, so although I'm not able to provide a ratio here, it's expected that the true figure would be greater as well, perhaps considerably.

Besides, this is without counting on the fact that this is an averaged regular intensity, nothing like what punctually results from massive solar flares and other CMEs.

Globally, what we see is that with your figure, everybody would have been safe. They would have not bothered intercepting the stream at all if it had been only that weak. And even if they were in doubt, they would have not bothered remaining in the path of the stream after realizing how non-powerful it was once it started hitting the shield, especially if some gigawatts would be a threat to their ship.
Even if the stream were to suddenly become more powerful, there would be nothing they could do about it anyway.

Other than that, people were in a city. The city alone, with its walls, would have the capacity to provide a modicum of protection. I'm not even talking about life on the other side of the planet, or anything living in the ocean, which wouldn't even feel radiation (underwater irradiance document, -12%/5 meters). All they had to do with your inadequately low numbers was to sink Atlantis again, and sit under the shield, and use the unaffected side of the planet to grow plants and else (and that at a time when contact with Earth was already re-established, so they weren't that isolated any more).

The problem is I base my upper limit on density on direct observation and laws of physics you base your lower limit on the assumption that McKay's predictions came true even though he himself had no clue about the duration. I already stated, on the first page I believe, that the particle stream itself has little chance of causing damage to the planet.

The sun ejected a stream of self contained plasma. An elongated stable toroid or something, or the sun generated some kind of Gauss tunnel or some such.
That's how far we can go to give a semblence of explanation. I hope you don't mind 1/2 pseudo-science.

Toroid that has a radius of 150 million km? Sun can't generate a magnetic field of that size and strength and which will keep the jet coherent. You want to mix and match real science (from which you draw huge energy and power levels) with pseudoscience (with which you can "explain" away the observed limitations on the power level).

Again: power is dependent on kinetic energy the particles got when the flare collapsed and the EM radiation is dependent on the internal energy the particles got when the flares collapsed. If this total energy is known to Rodney, how can the duration be unknown?

Because he wouldn't know the power.

Yes he would. The power was the energy that Daedalus was receiving each second. The fact that he didn't know what the total duration would be even though he knew the power means he didn't know the total energy since E=P*t.

He compared what he knew from the former super CME, the study of samples, and it gave him an idea of the radiation energy level to expect.

IF it was repeated again. There is no evidence that that kind of destructive CME actually repeated.

Safe those psychic whales which somehow knew something tragic would happen.
The fact that they just had to stay in the city or sink it to be safe was a good indicator.
See above for the stupidity of actually bothering intercepting a stream of ions which the planet would be better at deflecting naturally, and which if they penetrated the atmosphere, would only heat up the upper layers, since it's nothing more than hydrogen ions.

Didn't I already deal with the whales on the first page when you said you weren't using whales as any kind of evidence? Let me repeat it again: the fact that they could predict (or sense) a large flare doesn't mean they could accurately predict the final energy content of the flare.

Varying warheads which are set to megatons. I don't see where you are going with this.
Are you going to tell me that they purposedly dial their torps down?

No I am saying that they are different warheads. I already went through this in detail. I get the feeling you're not even reading my posts before replying. Standard warhead has a yield limited by what we've seen solar radiation and flares do to their ships. They can likely build multimegaton warheads but their size and mass is in question. Could it fit in a standard photon casing without drastically reducing the performance of the photon torpedo and allowing it to be shot down. This could be the reason why they don't usually use larger warheads.

What is there more in the DVD than what is already seen on the video?
The cruiser in the foreground totally fails to stop the beam. At no point you see the beam being interrupted, and that despite the beam still having to go through two layers of armour most of the time.
This is in stark contrast with the beam hitting the ship in the background. The beam hits the bow, then runs down the back of the cruiser, until it locks onto the thrusters. Then we get the flash of an explosion, and the beam keeps pouring energy into the engine section, certainly a weakspot.
Only five frames later we start to see the purple beam poking its head among the explosions, under the bow.
And that, not because it's coming into the frustrum from the top. The beam starts to appear at a point that's several pixels away from the superior edge of the screen.
Which means that what prevented the beam from appearing on the other side of the ship, below the bow, was not the beam's vector that would still put it out of frame, but because it was struggling to get through some mundane stuff that would have ZERO reason to be much more armoured.
Of course the beam had to go through a large portion of the ship's length, but in comparison to hull armour, this should not pose any problem.
Shadow beams slice through enemy ships and a lot of the beam is wasted. That doesn't stop such beams from going through a layer of the ship, then vertically through the superstructure, and come out on the other side, where there's another layer of armour.

The beam slices through the ship in one second and with no impediment.

It will? Or will it instead have a mostly set amount of energy to draw on and if you exceed that by pumping in say 100,000 TJ a second, it will collapse the shields faster. You have failed to dispute this model and dialog I provided confirms that shields drain, not necessarily take damage, unless you specifically target the generators or other related systems. You try to make an analogy to sunbathing, but you ignore critical dialog along the way and other circumstances.

That shields have a certain set capacity was never a point of dispute. A block of iron has a certain set capacity of energy it can absorb before getting vaporized as does humans skin. What you are suggesting is not only a shield with certain capacity (which I'm not disputing) but also a shield which has no reradiation capacity and is immune to changes in power intensity. Thus you can take relatively low power levels and combine with arbitrarily long time intervals to produce high total energy levels which you then conclude are it's "shield capacity".
If I positioned a 1m2, 1cm thick plate of unknown metal facing the sun around Earth's orbit after billion years it would receive 10GT of energy. Using your model that the particular metal has no reradiation capacity I could argue that regardless of what is the power or intensity of a laser beam you'd need to impart 10GT to damage it. Your model makes no sense even had it nod been disproven by the events I listed.

But if somehow the radiation was being increased signficantly (the case in "Relics") it would skew that model. In every case, you doggedly cling to this "steady state" radiation notion and handwave away anything else. In every case with both SG and ST alike, you cling to a solar flare model for what are clearly bizzare events that either have to be ignored or totality of physics must be applied to them, and you wind up with vastly higher power levels the ships are exposed to. To sum up:

1.) You ignore the full context of the situation. The E-D being damaged and crippled in "Relics", the ship was fine without shields until the G-type star became abnormally unstable, and began expelling matter and energy on a level that required shields and even then did not stay steady, but continued to grow in output such that the shields in three hours would collapse or not be able to protect the ship. The same with the SG example where a flare would cause a mass-extinction event on a planet, dispite many tens of millions of km between the star and the planet as well as it's atmosphere and magnetic field.

2.) Earlier you demonstrated that you will handily go out of your way to ignore higher level events, like Voyager sitting at the edge of a black hole without breaking a sweat, or power generation figures ("True Q", "Revulsions", "Riddles", ect) that don't meet up with your expectations.

1. I didn't ignore the context. I accounted for Enterprises shields being at 23% I just don't accept your reasoning that 23% itself was a fraction of a fraction of a fraction.
Secondly the power level calculated is a rough order of magnitude so there is no point in accounting for increase in power since the original power is not precise and power increase doesn't translate into order of magnitude increase as you imply.
2. I didn't ignore the "Parallax" I carefully explained that it couldn't be a black hole. Power generation figures stated only once and has no bearing on the episode or they are clearly wrong. For example "Revulsions" where Seven calmly claims that her exoskeleton can withstand 1MT/s power when Galaxy class can't. It's not the problem that they don't match up to my expectation but the observed events in the episode.

The Sun's energy originates at it's core, not at it's surface as you know. It takes millions of years for the energy to radiate to the surface. If you measure form the core (adding an additional 400,000 km to the R squared equation), you get nearly 67,000 TJ. If you measure from the surface, you get 900,000 TJ since the distance results in dispersing of the star's energy over less distance.

I still don't follow you. It doesn't matter from where you measure. Using Sun as a benchmark it's power generation is 4*10^26. If Enterprise was at 150,000km altitude that is 44.5MW/m2. At the surface the power intensity would be 65MW/m2. Since Sun has a radius of 695,500km and Enterprise was at 150,000km that means that the intensity would decrease by a factor of [(695,500+150,000)/695,500]^2 or 1.47 which brings us back to 44.5MW/m2.

Even if we go with your 1,000 TW number, or even ten times that, it would still take 1.4 minutes of continual firing to knock the shields down. And you still haven't shown anything since as always, you keep ignoring how the shields work and often the context of what is happening in both SG as well as ST.

See above. This is all dependent on your insistence that shields don't reradiate and thus you can use arbitrarily long time interval to come up with arbitrarily high energy capacity.

On top of that, we can add in numerous other examples that support my model rather than yours, but since you ignore Voyager hanging out at a black hole's event horizon, you probably will also ignore the E-1701 in TOS "Tomorrow is Yesterday" sling shot around a black hole, or more impressively Spock Prime's ship and the mining ship Narada's black hole journeys in Star Trek 2009 as well.

Furthermore we have the E-D in "A Matter of Time" soaking up with shields and nav deflector gigatons of ionized plasma and redirecting it out into space within 30 seconds.

The objects from "Parallax" and "Star Trek" were clearly not black holes as we understand the term. How close was Enterprise to the black hole when it performed the slingshot?

We know nothing of the sort. As Mr. Oragahn has continued to demonstrate, your concept of what is going on is based on selective applications of physics rather than the whole, and as a result has skewed the results. You have not accounted for the highly visible and dense flares, dispite the fact that you claim density and energy levels which would barely leave them visible, if at all.

Mr. Oragahn continued to claim that limitation on density are somehow wrong without backing it up with any evidence. You are doing the same.
My argument comes straight from direct observation and application of physical laws on what I've seen: the jet is visible and not expanding. If you claim that my conclusion about pressure (which is based directly on observed lack of expansion and gas laws) is wrong then you are basically claiming that either gas laws are incorrect or that visual sequence contradicts itself since you are claiming that it's impossible for the jet to be visible and not expanding at the same time. It's up to you to prove that.

[Mr. Oragahn]

They seem to explain the flares more or less aptly though. :)

How?

Magnetic fields are relevant to flares, although not everything is understood, and that was my point.

The way it's rendered in the episode. Fluffy yellow blobs that calmly drift away. That, and other aspects of the VFX.

I still don't see any physical reasoning only more subjective opinions.

Oh, sure, you want me to explain why that is total BS?
No way. It's all too obvious on its own.

I treated UVB alone. I have shown how even using visible light, further right on the spectrum, would already require multiplying the number by ten, just to get the necessary energy at sea level, and we know that absorption increases when we move to the left side of the spectrum, inside the UV band and X-ray. UVA are just similar to sunlight, and I have shown that UVB suffer from greater absorption, and UVC don't make it to the ground.
So I'm rather sure my demonstration works very well here.

The Athosians lived for the best part of a full year or two on the mainland, cultivated food there, and no one got sick of radiation. Besides, people didn't get sick when they walked outside of Atlantis' skyscrapers either. Obviously absorption works more than well.

Because the much more completed studies I linked to show that the absorption rates are closer to 9% and more. 11% gives x65, and I won't annoy you with the greater percentages, for which some were above 20%.
Still, at 6%, you already get a factor of slightly above 10, so again 10 is your absolute lowest limit, and this only corresponds to the UV close to visible light.

The fact that Athosians lived on the mainland doesn't necessarily prove that Ozone layer is similar but that the star itself doesn't have the same power output as our sun or it's bigger but cooler so the amount of UV radiation under normal circumstances will be lesser.

The first suggestion is not going to work since the living conditions are obviously Earth-like, so it gets the same intensity of energy, and the second one is hard to sustain with a star that looks like this (that's from Echoes as well).
The system itself apparently was capable of sustaining the life on two worlds. Second planet. I didn't check it myself so take this as you want.

Secondly we have lost track of the original point: standard radiation itensity at the surface of the yellow star is around 50MW/m2. There are no natural mechanisms to increase that power intensity to 260GW/m2 which would be required for Daedalus to absorb 2000TW. This limitation is separate and independent from McKays predictions. MY goal was to show that you can actually squeeze the mass extinction prediction with the known limitation on power intensity.

It's an exceptional event that already occured before, so it doesn't matter. It's a fact, such things happen in this star system.
And I think that your goal doesn't match the reality of the episode either.
Thus far, we have studied all aspects of the phenomenon, trying to establish the required energies for each type of radiation, or particle emission, in order to know what would irradiate someone to 500 Sv, due to the exposion to this exceptional event.

One important thing to note is that from the former link, it says that people get hit with a total of 2.3 millisieverts per year.
This would mean that on the sum of sunlight and particles that hit the top atmosphere, a stupidly small fraction of this actually happens to correspond to ionizing energies.
Compare this with the 500 Sv people would be subjected to.
That's a factor of 217,391.3.

Every single angle of study has proved that your figures were too low. Your 3.2 GW of protons was millions of times too low. Sunglight based figures proved, at the very least, to be 10 times too low, and that was working from 999 TW. Study of other wavelengths proved that factors would be greater than ten, and that was when working with energy intensity, without checking if such energies would actually result into any considerable radiation. Considering the total of Sv we get every year, those figures obviously appear to be way too low below the acceptable values.
Not to say that the ratios only got incredibly higher when working with shorter wavelengths.

That is where we are, with shielding figures sitting at the very least in the petawatt range.

And the point that I don't see how a large and white, moon-sized explosion on the surface of the sun wouldn't correspond to the jet's debut.
If it wasn't the case, if the explosion occurred while the jet was already en route, then the explosion in question would have added something consequential to the jet at some point, but the stream remained constant all the time.

And of course, I didn't calculate how much energy the ship would take by being so close to an explosion of that size.

Well the jet was very small. It's easily possible they didn't see it until it came close enough and the collapse itself turned out not the be that dangerous.

The jet would have no reason to depart before the collapse. The collapse was the likely result of the build up of energy.

In any case since even large flares themselves are much less dense than air while the total energy released by the flare might be huge the actual energy ship's shields would receive won't exceed the standard radiation of the star.

That is typically wrong, for the simple fact that such flare would fail to provide the necessary radiation energies.
At this point, you can consider the debate settled, and get ready for a broken disc mode.

Some examples:
The fact that the hull was already getting damaged, despite the shield being up, was a good indication.
The same shield that could take at least one of those 200 MT shots from a Ha'tak? The same shield that could withstand a rain of hiveship-bolts making flashes largely visible from space.
The same hull which withstood a powered dive into a planet's atmosphere, shields down, suffered very little damage to the hull, as seen in one of the last episodes of SGA, when Todd leaves the 304 headed straight for the surface, barely saved in time by Sheppard repeating the "Failsafe" maneuver with one of the Travellers' ship.

What is the source for 200MT Ha'tak weapons?

There But For the Grace of God. A Ha'tak destroys some cities on the East coast. Ships were, for all intents and purposes, working on the same principles. All weapons did. Realities were extremely close to each other.

Secondly speaking of flashes visible from space:

About 10 seconds later:

What am I supposed to do with a source of light which width is but a fraction of the Battlecrab's wingspan?
See the beam's width right ontop of the sort of fireball. Scales are FUBAR. Same with the episode where Centauri ships attack the Narn planet.
Same with the Warhammer 40,000K Firewarrior cutscene, and so many other cases across all SF.
I'm excruciatingly pained that people working on expensive high tech 3D tools like Maya or XSI can't even understand that.

The problem is I base my upper limit on density on direct observation and laws of physics you base your lower limit on the assumption that McKay's predictions came true even though he himself had no clue about the duration. I already stated, on the first page I believe, that the particle stream itself has little chance of causing damage to the planet.

McKay saw no problem in claiming that even a blast of protons that would contribute to irradiation of people up to 50,000 rems would be narrow enough to be stoppped by a 304, regardless of the ship surviving or not.
This simply means your calcs don't fit with the episode. Period.

The sun ejected a stream of self contained plasma. An elongated stable toroid or something, or the sun generated some kind of Gauss tunnel or some such.
That's how far we can go to give a semblence of explanation. I hope you don't mind 1/2 pseudo-science.

Toroid that has a radius of 150 million km?

No, 100 m.

Sun can't generate a magnetic field of that size and strength and which will keep the jet coherent. You want to mix and match real science (from which you draw huge energy and power levels) with pseudoscience (with which you can "explain" away the observed limitations on the power level).

I'm just throwing wild guesses. I don't really care at this point, since it was considered a reality by McKay.

Again: power is dependent on kinetic energy the particles got when the flare collapsed and the EM radiation is dependent on the internal energy the particles got when the flares collapsed. If this total energy is known to Rodney, how can the duration be unknown?

Because he wouldn't know the power.

Yes he would. The power was the energy that Daedalus was receiving each second. The fact that he didn't know what the total duration would be even though he knew the power means he didn't know the total energy since E=P*t.

You are assuming the total energy was fixed. McKay originally from a figure, but he never said that was a maximum, like he never said it was a minimum.
You're also assuming he knew of the power of the stream at that very moment, while the stream had just begun hitting the ship. And if that wasn't enough, you're assuming the power would be constant.

He compared what he knew from the former super CME, the study of samples, and it gave him an idea of the radiation energy level to expect.

IF it was repeated again. There is no evidence that that kind of destructive CME actually repeated.

Depends on the evidence you go with. With extraepisodic evidence, we know that for a fact.
Within the episode, we know that a proton stream would need to be powerful, if only just to match what hits our planet.

Safe those psychic whales which somehow knew something tragic would happen.
The fact that they just had to stay in the city or sink it to be safe was a good indicator.
See above for the stupidity of actually bothering intercepting a stream of ions which the planet would be better at deflecting naturally, and which if they penetrated the atmosphere, would only heat up the upper layers, since it's nothing more than hydrogen ions.

Didn't I already deal with the whales on the first page when you said you weren't using whales as any kind of evidence? Let me repeat it again: the fact that they could predict (or sense) a large flare doesn't mean they could accurately predict the final energy content of the flare.

Flares are something natural. So are CMEs, and that star is obviously one of a kind.
All these whales were gathering underneath Atlantis. They wouldn't do such a thing just to get some protection from a solar fart rated at 3.2 GW of protons.

Varying warheads which are set to megatons. I don't see where you are going with this.
Are you going to tell me that they purposedly dial their torps down?

No I am saying that they are different warheads. I already went through this in detail. I get the feeling you're not even reading my posts before replying.

Sorry if I actually forgot that bit. It doesn't sound really intuitive, nor logical, really.

Standard warhead has a yield limited by what we've seen solar radiation and flares do to their ships.

Says who? And why would they cap their torps way under the yields they use to blast asteroids? Especially when it often takes several torps to get rid of a ship?

They can likely build multimegaton warheads but their size and mass is in question.

That's something new to me. Arguments I never read. Torpedo casings have always been more or less of the same calibre.

Could it fit in a standard photon casing without drastically reducing the performance of the photon torpedo and allowing it to be shot down. This could be the reason why they don't usually use larger warheads.

There is no evidence that they use larger warheads to blast asteroids.

What is there more in the DVD than what is already seen on the video?
The cruiser in the foreground totally fails to stop the beam. At no point you see the beam being interrupted, and that despite the beam still having to go through two layers of armour most of the time.
This is in stark contrast with the beam hitting the ship in the background. The beam hits the bow, then runs down the back of the cruiser, until it locks onto the thrusters. Then we get the flash of an explosion, and the beam keeps pouring energy into the engine section, certainly a weakspot.
Only five frames later we start to see the purple beam poking its head among the explosions, under the bow.
And that, not because it's coming into the frustrum from the top. The beam starts to appear at a point that's several pixels away from the superior edge of the screen.
Which means that what prevented the beam from appearing on the other side of the ship, below the bow, was not the beam's vector that would still put it out of frame, but because it was struggling to get through some mundane stuff that would have ZERO reason to be much more armoured.
Of course the beam had to go through a large portion of the ship's length, but in comparison to hull armour, this should not pose any problem.
Shadow beams slice through enemy ships and a lot of the beam is wasted. That doesn't stop such beams from going through a layer of the ship, then vertically through the superstructure, and come out on the other side, where there's another layer of armour.

http://www.b5tech.com/science/weapons/d ... cut013.jpg
http://www.b5tech.com/science/weapons/d ... cut014.jpg
http://www.b5tech.com/science/weapons/d ... cut015.jpg
http://www.b5tech.com/science/weapons/d ... cut016.jpg
http://www.b5tech.com/science/weapons/d ... cut017.jpg
http://www.b5tech.com/science/weapons/d ... cut018.jpg
The beam slices through the ship in one second and with no impediment.

Good thing that you just discovered that the DVD didn't have a cropped image.
When you made appeals to greater image quality, and suggested me to watch the DVDs, while at the same time saying you had the episode on your PC, you clearly were not telling me that a whole fraction of the material was lacking. Not to say that in terms of quality, those pictures, supposedly taken from the DVD, hardly rate any better than those I took from the episode I got from an old IDE-HDD I plugged back for the occasion.

That said, they definitely debunk my claim. I did ask myself why the hell the VFX guys didn't consider showing the whole cruiser. Well, they actually.

[Kane Starkiller]

Magnetic fields are relevant to flares, although not everything is understood, and that was my point.

Yes however that in no way explains how you think a magnetic field could explain the focus of the jet.

Oh, sure, you want me to explain why that is total BS?
No way. It's all too obvious on its own.

How is it obvious? What part do you consider to be physically impossible?

The first suggestion is not going to work since the living conditions are obviously Earth-like, so it gets the same intensity of energy, and the second one is hard to sustain with a star that looks like this (that's from Echoes as well).
The system itself apparently was capable of sustaining the life on two worlds. Second planet. I didn't check it myself so take this as you want.

The living conditions are close enough so that we can't see any difference. Again it is entirely possible the Ozone layer is thinner combined with lower UV radiation from the star under standard conditions. I didn't say the intensity is lesser but that the fraction of the UV and higher spectrum radiation is lower.

It's an exceptional event that already occured before, so it doesn't matter. It's a fact, such things happen in this star system.
And I think that your goal doesn't match the reality of the episode either.
Thus far, we have studied all aspects of the phenomenon, trying to establish the required energies for each type of radiation, or particle emission, in order to know what would irradiate someone to 500 Sv, due to the exposion to this exceptional event.

One important thing to note is that from the former link, it says that people get hit with a total of 2.3 millisieverts per year.
This would mean that on the sum of sunlight and particles that hit the top atmosphere, a stupidly small fraction of this actually happens to correspond to ionizing energies.
Compare this with the 500 Sv people would be subjected to.
That's a factor of 217,391.3.

Every single angle of study has proved that your figures were too low. Your 3.2 GW of protons was millions of times too low. Sunglight based figures proved, at the very least, to be 10 times too low, and that was working from 999 TW. Study of other wavelengths proved that factors would be greater than ten, and that was when working with energy intensity, without checking if such energies would actually result into any considerable radiation. Considering the total of Sv we get every year, those figures obviously appear to be way too low below the acceptable values.
Not to say that the ratios only got incredibly higher when working with shorter wavelengths.

That is where we are, with shielding figures sitting at the very least in the petawatt range.

Yes it occurred before and will likely occur again just like volcanoes, tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes. That doesn't mean that we'll always be able to accurately predict the final energy released by those events.
Normally humans receive only 2.3 mSv/year because the total fraction of the high EM radiation compared to total EM radiation of the sun is extremely low. A high energy event would likely emit a much higher percentage of it's energy in high EM spectrum thus irradiating humans without the need for the total energy to rise orders of magnitude.
Again your petawatt figure relies on McKay being right and it's quite obviously wrong since there is no way for natural processes on the surface of the star to somehow compress that kind of energy in radius of 50m.

The jet would have no reason to depart before the collapse. The collapse was the likely result of the build up of energy.

Pure assumptions on your part.

That is typically wrong, for the simple fact that such flare would fail to provide the necessary radiation energies.
At this point, you can consider the debate settled, and get ready for a broken disc mode.

This debate started running in circles the moment you started responding to my calculations with subjective comments like "it's weird", "obviously wrong" and elevating McKays predictions (which by his own admission were anything but precise) above the observed events in the episode.

There But For the Grace of God. A Ha'tak destroys some cities on the East coast. Ships were, for all intents and purposes, working on the same principles. All weapons did. Realities were extremely close to each other.

I already covered this during our Star Trek discussion. The fact that Ha'tak was mentioned to drop an equivalent of 200MT nuke on a city doesn't mean it's shields are rated at 200MT/s or that it's standard weapons are 200MT any more than Ohio class submarine can withstand 1MT point blank initiations.

What am I supposed to do with a source of light which width is but a fraction of the Battlecrab's wingspan?
See the beam's width right ontop of the sort of fireball. Scales are FUBAR. Same with the episode where Centauri ships attack the Narn planet.
Same with the Warhammer 40,000K Firewarrior cutscene, and so many other cases across all SF.
I'm excruciatingly pained that people working on expensive high tech 3D tools like Maya or XSI can't even understand that.

I don't see where is the problem. The beam points away from the camera and towards the planet below and behind the ship and is then obscured by the glare. Thus we don't see it taper off in the distance. What is the problem with Centauri ship attacks?

McKay saw no problem in claiming that even a blast of protons that would contribute to irradiation of people up to 50,000 rems would be narrow enough to be stoppped by a 304, regardless of the ship surviving or not.
This simply means your calcs don't fit with the episode. Period.

Are you claiming that McKay is omniscient? That he can't possibly wrong and I right? You could squeeze 50,000 rems over long enough time period and power which ultimately McKay didn't know. He himself was not at all convinced that Dadealus could withstand the firepower and the ship's hull started getting blown off. What if the jet was 10% more powerful and had a 10% greater duration? It was a desperate move and they got lucky.

No, 100 m.

How exactly would it reach Earth then? Or are you saying jet's crossection is actually a toroid or something?

I'm just throwing wild guesses. I don't really care at this point, since it was considered a reality by McKay.

At no point do McKays prediction require the kind of power and energies originally claimed for this episode. (teratons IIRC)

You are assuming the total energy was fixed. McKay originally from a figure, but he never said that was a maximum, like he never said it was a minimum.
You're also assuming he knew of the power of the stream at that very moment, while the stream had just begun hitting the ship. And if that wasn't enough, you're assuming the power would be constant.

So he didn't know either the total duration or power but you claim he knew the total energy? You are welcome to prove that.

Depends on the evidence you go with. With extraepisodic evidence, we know that for a fact.
Within the episode, we know that a proton stream would need to be powerful, if only just to match what hits our planet.

What extra episodic evidence?

Flares are something natural. So are CMEs, and that star is obviously one of a kind.
All these whales were gathering underneath Atlantis. They wouldn't do such a thing just to get some protection from a solar fart rated at 3.2 GW of protons.

This is the exact same argument Mike DiCenso uses with Relics: strange one of a kind star. None of this changes the obvious limitations on stellar power intensity and flare densities. I already dealt with whales: they sensed a flare and flare did happen. None of this changes the question of whether they could predict the total radiation. If the total width of the jet was only, say, 100km when it hit Earth they would still come to Atlantis for protection wouldn't they?

Sorry if I actually forgot that bit. It doesn't sound really intuitive, nor logical, really.

Really? Not logical? Even though US and Russian navies do it all the time with their missiles?

Says who? And why would they cap their torps way under the yields they use to blast asteroids? Especially when it often takes several torps to get rid of a ship?

Says the independent events that put upper limit on ship's durability. They would install less massive warheads to improve the chances of it reaching the target without being shot down. Asteroid isn't going anywhere not to mention that I'm no convinced Star Trek asteroid blasting incidents point to multimegaton yields.

That's something new to me. Arguments I never read. Torpedo casings have always been more or less of the same calibre.

Yes casings not warheads. We see them installing 54 isoton warheads in a torpedo casing in "Omega" and then Janeway comes and tells them to increase the yield to 80 isotons and then they take the warhead out.

There is no evidence that they use larger warheads to blast asteroids.

If those asteroids are in the megaton range and ships get destroyed by TW-TJ range power/energies and we see ships take several photon torpedoes without being destroyed than that is obvious evidence the asteroid blasting photon torpedoes were more powerful.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Magnetic fields are relevant to flares, although not everything is understood, and that was my point.

Yes however that in no way explains how you think a magnetic field could explain the focus of the jet.

I mentioned magnetic fields as part of the process in normal conditions.
The... thing... that came to life in Echoes is totally abnormal, and I'm afraid nothing would explain that. It happened before, and would happen again, that's all we know for fact.

Oh, sure, you want me to explain why that is total BS?
No way. It's all too obvious on its own.

How is it obvious? What part do you consider to be physically impossible?

*sigh*
Pretty much anything from the way the stream bounces off the shield to the blobs that drift away, etc. I find it amusing how you're using an utmost absolute stance on physics to appreciate the implication of such events, but fail to see the issues in the video and the way the VFX team portrayed a stream of fiery protons being diverted by an ovoid surface.

The first suggestion is not going to work since the living conditions are obviously Earth-like, so it gets the same intensity of energy, and the second one is hard to sustain with a star that looks like this (that's from Echoes as well).
The system itself apparently was capable of sustaining the life on two worlds. Second planet. I didn't check it myself so take this as you want.

The living conditions are close enough so that we can't see any difference. Again it is entirely possible the Ozone layer is thinner combined with lower UV radiation from the star under standard conditions. I didn't say the intensity is lesser but that the fraction of the UV and higher spectrum radiation is lower.

Based on what exactly, aside from you reaching to find an excuse to dismiss the figures?

It's an exceptional event that already occured before, so it doesn't matter. It's a fact, such things happen in this star system.
And I think that your goal doesn't match the reality of the episode either.
Thus far, we have studied all aspects of the phenomenon, trying to establish the required energies for each type of radiation, or particle emission, in order to know what would irradiate someone to 500 Sv, due to the exposion to this exceptional event.

One important thing to note is that from the former link, it says that people get hit with a total of 2.3 millisieverts per year.
This would mean that on the sum of sunlight and particles that hit the top atmosphere, a stupidly small fraction of this actually happens to correspond to ionizing energies.
Compare this with the 500 Sv people would be subjected to.
That's a factor of 217,391.3.

Every single angle of study has proved that your figures were too low. Your 3.2 GW of protons was millions of times too low. Sunglight based figures proved, at the very least, to be 10 times too low, and that was working from 999 TW. Study of other wavelengths proved that factors would be greater than ten, and that was when working with energy intensity, without checking if such energies would actually result into any considerable radiation. Considering the total of Sv we get every year, those figures obviously appear to be way too low below the acceptable values.
Not to say that the ratios only got incredibly higher when working with shorter wavelengths.

That is where we are, with shielding figures sitting at the very least in the petawatt range.

Yes it occurred before and will likely occur again just like volcanoes, tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes. That doesn't mean that we'll always be able to accurately predict the final energy released by those events.

The ship's bow was suffering extensive damage. It's a ship that uses trinium, 100 stronger than steel, plus perhaps some naqahdah (think of the enduring stargates as an example).
We know that iron's specific heat starts at 0.45 J/g/C°, is also close enough to steel's, and steel melts at 1535 C°.
Specific heat can climb to 0.65 J/C° per gram at 800 C, and up to 0.72 J/C° per gram at 1400 C, but let's keep the low end value for this, and pretend that we start at 0°C.
For the heat of fusion, 1 kg of steel turns to liquid with 272 kJ.

Low end energy needed to melt 1 kg of steel: E_low = 0.45 e3 x 1535 + 272 e3 = 962,750 J.
A value that is interesting to compare to those.

A very low low end, since it usually takes a couple of megajoules to achieve this in reality. We can, for the sake of simplicity, work with a melting energy of 1 MJ/kg.
Densities of steel.

7.86 g/cc (pure iron), for a 1 m² plate that would be 10 centimeter thick, would weigh 786 kg. So that's 786 MJ to melt it, and therefore 78,600 MJ to melt the same volume of a trinium (and perhaps alloyed with naqahdah) plate. And of course twice that if the plate is twice as thick. Plus the fact that it's a very low end.
The hull was taking damage. Even one of the F-302 bay took damage.

Should we believe that the shield is so miserable that on the 3.2 GW it's taking, it can't even prevent enough energy from spilling through so much as to deposit 78.6 GJ/m² anywhere onto the hull?

I mean, even if we take the figure for steel, 768 MJ /m² for plates 10 cm thick, and work from the intensity of the stream, which is 100 meters wide, and has a crosssection's area of 7.8540 e3, we get 407.44 KW/m² for the intensity of the stream's crosssection.
To get an intensity of 768 MJ/m² on the hull, assuming the shield stopped nothing, it would take 1884.94 seconds for the metal to reach the required temperature and energy level (that of course without counting the metal shedding heat to nearby plates and inwards over that time).
That's 31.41 minutes.
If the shield stops 90% of the energy, then 40.744 KW/m² gets through, and it takes ten times longer, or 5.23 hours.
And finally, it takes 52.3 hours if the shield only lets 1% of the energy pass through.

That's for steel, not even the trinium-naqahdah alloy that's used, which would require increasing power figures by two OoMs.

We could also compare this calculation to this event.

And that's not counting the fact that we're talking about a stream of more "simplistic" matter, which contrary to photons, especially high energy ones, will be coming into contact with the atmosphere and react like matter does, the atmosphere adopting the behaviour of a barrier: the faster something hits a fluid, the harder the fluid acts against the penetrating element.
You calculated a density of e-14 kg/m³ for the stream in the corona. But what about momentum? There are asteroids which weigh more than thousands of kilos per cubic meter and which get blasted by the atmosphere if they come too fast and too sharply into it. How are particles, coming in faster, but the overall mass they represent being extremely more diffuse, ever get anywhere deep enough?

I don't even recall we tried to estimate how much energy the stream would radiate as heat on its way to Lantea btw. At 4000 km/s, it would take 37,399.5 to cover 1 AU.
That's a lot of time for a plasma to cool down naturally during its trip.
This may prove interesting, as well as an important factor to your figure, since you assume that the 3.2 GW in the coronal region will not be lost to some degree when hitting Lantea.
A degree which may be significant.

Normally humans receive only 2.3 mSv/year because the total fraction of the high EM radiation compared to total EM radiation of the sun is extremely low. A high energy event would likely emit a much higher percentage of it's energy in high EM spectrum thus irradiating humans without the need for the total energy to rise orders of magnitude.

Ah? Do you have a relevant absorption figure for infrareds?

Again your petawatt figure relies on McKay being right and it's quite obviously wrong since there is no way for natural processes on the surface of the star to somehow compress that kind of energy in radius of 50m.

It doesn't matter, because it already happened before, and McKay was convinced that based on what he knew of the star and the precedent event, 50,000 rems could be delivered to the planet by starting out as a stream narrow enough to be intercepted by the shield of a 304.
So science or not, this funky star made it happen once already.

The jet would have no reason to depart before the collapse. The collapse was the likely result of the build up of energy.

Pure assumptions on your part.

Why would the jet depart for the planet if what maintained it in place didn't collapse yet, exactly?

McKAY: It's a coronal mass ejection on a scale that dwarfs anything our sun has ever emitted. Apparently the sun in this solar system goes through an unusually turbulent sunspot cycle every fifteen thousand years or so. The Ancients have records of this class of CME occurring twice before.

SHEPPARD: The ship was very close to the sun when it happened.

McKAY: It's a massive prominence. It arced up and then collapsed when the magnetic field surrounding it weakened. We're talking an intense proton stream travelling at over four thousand kilometres per second.

And...

McKAY: The magnetic field around it is already beginning to weaken.

When that prominence collapses, the coronal mass ejection will occur. It'll erupt from a very small area – a mere pinprick in comparison to the total sun's surface, but it'll immediately begin to fan out. Within a few million miles, the blast wave will cut a swathe wide enough to take out this entire planet.

SHEPPARD: How much time do we have?

ZELENKA: The prominence will collapse any moment now. After that, we have less than an hour before the radiation wave hits us.

That is typically wrong, for the simple fact that such flare would fail to provide the necessary radiation energies.
At this point, you can consider the debate settled, and get ready for a broken disc mode.

This debate started running in circles the moment you started responding to my calculations with subjective comments like "it's weird", "obviously wrong" and elevating McKays predictions (which by his own admission were anything but precise) above the observed events in the episode.

A proton stream of 3.2 GW wouldn't even threaten Earth, even if it entirely deposited its energy and heated up the surface (again, 3.2 e9 W / 2.55 e14 m², we get much more via mere sunlight alone).
Just as much as you tried to downplay the importance of EMR by claiming that Lantea has little ozone and the sun emits very little UV, you should perhaps also pretend that the planet has little atmosphere and a weak magnetic field, so that would explain how it can survive to the weaker cosmic rays as well, and thus be threatened by 3.2 GW of protons.

There But For the Grace of God. A Ha'tak destroys some cities on the East coast. Ships were, for all intents and purposes, working on the same principles. All weapons did. Realities were extremely close to each other.

I already covered this during our Star Trek discussion. The fact that Ha'tak was mentioned to drop an equivalent of 200MT nuke on a city doesn't mean it's shields are rated at 200MT/s or that it's standard weapons are 200MT any more than Ohio class submarine can withstand 1MT point blank initiations.

I didn't claim 200 MT/s for the shield, but clearly, a ship that can fire that much energy, even if only once in a while, would have no reason not to fire energy in that region, even just 10% of this, when fighting against another Ha'tak, especially when we see them exchanging bolts without one shooting each other. In a matter or life or death, no one would have a reason to hold back.
Hell, the same logic would still apply if they only fired 1 megaton of energy, or even one kiloton, which is still 312.5 seconds at 3.2 GW.
Of course, this is evidence from another episode, and I would refer to Enemies, where a bog standard Ha'tak sits close to a bright blue giant. With the Ha'tak sitting one diameter away from the photosphere, we have a total of 3 radii, each radius being, for a low power blue giant, 7 times greater than Sol's, which is R_sol = 6.955 e8 m.
So that's a final radius of 1.46055 e10 m². Surface area at that distance would therefore be 2.6807 e21 m².

A low end luminosity would be 25 times Sol's, 25 x 3.846 e26 W, L_bg = 9.615 e27 W.

The intensity, one diameter away from the photosphere, would be 3,586,749 W/m².

Dimensions of a Ha'tak. They're sort of low end, but I never consider a Ha'tak larger than ~700 meters. It doesn't mean the VFX people don't fuck the scales up regularly though.

Shield dimensions.

The ship's width I use is 675.88 m, and the height is 255.9 meters.
The dimensions of the shield are those above, times 1.06. It's an oblate spheroid.
Width: 716 m.
Height: 271 m. (shield height would actually be greater since the base of the pyramidal core would stick out of the shield otherwise).

That's a SA of 1,011,141 m². Taking half of it, 505,570 m².
So the shield takes a total of 1,813,352,691,930 W.
1.813 TW.

With the added fact that if it can sit that close to a blue giant for ten hours (and one hour without shields), it has no reason to be threatened by a solar flare from a star of the main sequence close to ours.

Finally, a BC-304 rates higher than this super low end, and even more with a ZPM.

What am I supposed to do with a source of light which width is but a fraction of the Battlecrab's wingspan?
See the beam's width right ontop of the sort of fireball. Scales are FUBAR. Same with the episode where Centauri ships attack the Narn planet.
Same with the Warhammer 40,000K Firewarrior cutscene, and so many other cases across all SF.
I'm excruciatingly pained that people working on expensive high tech 3D tools like Maya or XSI can't even understand that.

I don't see where is the problem. The beam points away from the camera and towards the planet below and behind the ship and is then obscured by the glare. Thus we don't see it taper off in the distance.

Huh. It barely tappers for 99.99% of its whole length. Scales are fucked up. Period. It makes that rockball smaller than a fraction of the Death Star.
And I recall that there were circular structures being hit there, on the ground, and it didn't look big either. Don't you have a video or pictures of this?

What is the problem with Centauri ship attacks?

A problem of scale as well. Bombs supposedly reaching the atmosphere, and then the surface. Both contradicted by their ejection speed and their size before they explode.

McKay saw no problem in claiming that even a blast of protons that would contribute to irradiation of people up to 50,000 rems would be narrow enough to be stoppped by a 304, regardless of the ship surviving or not.
This simply means your calcs don't fit with the episode. Period.

Are you claiming that McKay is omniscient? That he can't possibly wrong and I right? You could squeeze 50,000 rems over long enough time period and power which ultimately McKay didn't know. He himself was not at all convinced that Dadealus could withstand the firepower and the ship's hull started getting blown off. What if the jet was 10% more powerful and had a 10% greater duration? It was a desperate move and they got lucky.

That's not the point. The point is that in this universe, with this star, a blast delivering 50,000 rems could be narrow enough to be stopped by a 304's shield.
Even if it lasted 23 hours, 3.2 GW would provide a total 264.96 e12 J.

No, 100 m.

How exactly would it reach Earth then? Or are you saying jet's crossection is actually a toroid or something?

I'm suggesting that at the time it hit the ship, it was some kind of super-toroid. That's just a wild guess.
I also read about solar tornadoes that look like tubes of twirling fire. Anyway, it doesn't matter, because it's a fact in that universe, such bizarre things can take place.

You are assuming the total energy was fixed. McKay originally from a figure, but he never said that was a maximum, like he never said it was a minimum.
You're also assuming he knew of the power of the stream at that very moment, while the stream had just begun hitting the ship. And if that wasn't enough, you're assuming the power would be constant.

So he didn't know either the total duration or power but you claim he knew the total energy? You are welcome to prove that.

Can we treat the episode as if it was Rodney's first time in a 304? Before coming up with a plan, he'd first want to know what the ship is at the very least capable of.

Flares are something natural. So are CMEs, and that star is obviously one of a kind.
All these whales were gathering underneath Atlantis. They wouldn't do such a thing just to get some protection from a solar fart rated at 3.2 GW of protons.

This is the exact same argument Mike DiCenso uses with Relics: strange one of a kind star. None of this changes the obvious limitations on stellar power intensity and flare densities.

Yes it does, because it did happen, and with what McKay had at hand's reach, he knew that such a stream could exist, no matter how baffling it is.

I already dealt with whales: they sensed a flare and flare did happen. None of this changes the question of whether they could predict the total radiation. If the total width of the jet was only, say, 100km when it hit Earth they would still come to Atlantis for protection wouldn't they?

The whales would just need to take a dive to get cover from the UV (12%/5 meters) and those whales were rather very smart, with extremely good genetic memories about something that occurs every 15 millenia.

Sorry if I actually forgot that bit. It doesn't sound really intuitive, nor logical, really.

Really? Not logical? Even though US and Russian navies do it all the time with their missiles?

They are regulated, ordered not to use nuclear weapons. The UFP slinging antimatter weapons completely nixes this idea and makes your claim ridiculous. There's not much difference, on such terms, between a punchy kiloton warhead and a low megaton one.

Says who? And why would they cap their torps way under the yields they use to blast asteroids? Especially when it often takes several torps to get rid of a ship?

Says the independent events that put upper limit on ship's durability. They would install less massive warheads to improve the chances of it reaching the target without being shot down.

I don't see where less massive warheads would help, when the room that's allowed for warheads is already very small, and we're talking about a few kilos of M/AM more to get yields in the megatons.
In other words, compared to the speeds the torps are capable of: peanuts.

Asteroid isn't going anywhere not to mention that I'm no convinced Star Trek asteroid blasting incidents point to multimegaton yields.

Conservative calcs can lead to such numbers. You can always look through this website and get them, and bump the threads in question if you want to, any valid criticism being more than welcomed.

That's something new to me. Arguments I never read. Torpedo casings have always been more or less of the same calibre.

Yes casings not warheads. We see them installing 54 isoton warheads in a torpedo casing in "Omega" and then Janeway comes and tells them to increase the yield to 80 isotons and then they take the warhead out.

They were going to destroy a pack of those Omega particles.
That said, as I have observed myself, the depiction of power of those OP isn't that consistent.
You can, for example, check out an alien lab/base on the ground of some planet, which got blown up by such particles leaking. The degree of destruction is not exactly that awesome.

There is no evidence that they use larger warheads to blast asteroids.

If those asteroids are in the megaton range and ships get destroyed by TW-TJ range power/energies and we see ships take several photon torpedoes without being destroyed than that is obvious evidence the asteroid blasting photon torpedoes were more powerful.

Yes, but then, again, I don't see any valid reason as to why they wouldn't use more powerful warheads for naval combat.

[Mike DiCenso]

They were going to destroy a pack of those Omega particles.
That said, as I have observed myself, the depiction of power of those OP isn't that consistent.
You can, for example, check out an alien lab/base on the ground of some planet, which got blown up by such particles leaking. The degree of destruction is not exactly that awesome.

Here is the dialog on the damage done to the moon:

TUVOK: An M class moon. We're in visual range.

JANEWAY: On screen.

TUVOK: There's a subnucleonic reaction occurring in the upper atmosphere. It is apparently emanating from a structure on the moon's surface.

JANEWAY: Can your sensors penetrate the atmosphere?

KIM: Stand by.

JANEWAY: My God.

KIM: Over three hundred thousand square kilometres destroyed.

JANEWAY: Scan the structure. Are there any Omega molecules remaining?

TUVOK: I can't tell. Several sections of the outpost are still shielded.

KIM: I'm detecting lifesigns.

CHAKOTAY: How many?

KIM: A few dozen maybe. It's hard to get a clear reading.

JANEWAY: Harry, can we transport to the surface?
KIM: I can get you there but conditions in the structure aren't good. There are high levels of radiation.

So an unknown number of particles or a particle escaped and destroyed 300,000 square km, leaving intense radiation. That's pretty impressive, even all it did was irradiate the surface. The facility had some kind of shielding, so it's hard to say what would have happened to normal structures, but everything around the place looked completely devastated. Also here's the screen caps showing Voyager approaching the moon:

http://voy.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbna ... 71&page=11

Images 10 and 12 are of importance, especially the overall view of the moon itself showing the massive irradiation and surface area devastation.
-Mike

[Roondar]

There is no evidence that they use larger warheads to blast asteroids.

If those asteroids are in the megaton range and ships get destroyed by TW-TJ range power/energies and we see ships take several photon torpedoes without being destroyed than that is obvious evidence the asteroid blasting photon torpedoes were more powerful.

Yes, but then, again, I don't see any valid reason as to why they wouldn't use more powerful warheads for naval combat.

And even if the UFP (being peace-loving and all) would decide to do that, I'm pretty darned certain that the other side (Romulans, Klingons, Dominion, Borg, etc) would definetly not refrain from using the hardest hitting torpedoes they could use. What, with the whole 'them being bad-ass and not caring about playing nice and all' thing they have going.

Of course, this doesn't even count the sheer lunacy of the UFP allegedly having long-range weapons at least an order of a magnitude (or more) more powerful than they ever use in ship to ship combat... And then not using them when Earth is about to be invaded by new-age zombie dudes from space.

Or not using them when insanely large fleets of ships show up that apperantly can't take the normal ship-to-ship weapons at all that well.

Or not using them when ever they need more firepower in general.

[Mike DiCenso]

Flares are something natural. So are CMEs, and that star is obviously one of a kind.
All these whales were gathering underneath Atlantis. They wouldn't do such a thing just to get some protection from a solar fart rated at 3.2 GW of protons.

This is the exact same argument Mike DiCenso uses with Relics: strange one of a kind star. None of this changes the obvious limitations on stellar power intensity and flare densities.

Yes it does, because it did happen, and with what McKay had at hand's reach, he knew that such a stream could exist, no matter how baffling it is.

Kane still keeps trying to handwave away the unusual circumstances of the episodes we cite. In "Relics", a G-type star shows unusual instability and is throwing out all kinds of hard radiation and matter expuslions. I am not sure a G-type star when it begins to transition from fusing hydrogen to fusing helium does this sort of thing before throwing off it's outer layers. But either way the star's behavior is not normal for it's type.

In the Stargate example "Echoes" we have some pretty weird stuff which matches up well with McCay's dialog. Also the flare did not last indefinitel over hours or days as one would expect if it was a mere 3.2 GW as Kane wants everyone to believe, but rather it lasts minutes as it strikes the Daedalus's shields indicating that it would only require a few minutes to lethally irradiate the Lantean planet such that all plant and animal life would die, even down to a significant depth of the ocean, and by this point the CME was expected to have dissipated out to several millions of kilometers. When it reaches the Daedalus after having travelled at most a few million km from the source star, it is only several hundred meters, maybe a kilometer wide, and it is highly dense and luminiescent. This is obviously not a normal CME, and is acting more like a giant particle beam in this case. Were I the SGA crew, I'd be thinking maybe someone is messing around with the star ala what the Klingons did to destroy a Dominion shipyard in "Shadow and Symbols."

So we only have a few choices here; either except what happens in the episode and use normal CME and solar flares as very lower limits. Or we have to totally toss out the examples because they go so against our current understanding of physics and cosmology. Thirdly, we can create a synthesis of the two, though that presents some rather interesting challenges in and of itself.
-Mike

[Kane Starkiller]

I mentioned magnetic fields as part of the process in normal conditions.
The... thing... that came to life in Echoes is totally abnormal, and I'm afraid nothing would explain that. It happened before, and would happen again, that's all we know for fact.

You keep repeating these subjective impressions of the jet as if they will in any way alter the limitations on it's power. They won't.

*sigh*
Pretty much anything from the way the stream bounces off the shield to the blobs that drift away, etc. I find it amusing how you're using an utmost absolute stance on physics to appreciate the implication of such events, but fail to see the issues in the video and the way the VFX team portrayed a stream of fiery protons being diverted by an ovoid surface.

But you tried to use absolute science when you thought it would imply enormous energy figures didn't you? Basically plugging energy figures for large CMEs? Now that I have pointed out clear limitations dictated by the physical laws all of a sudden physics isn't good enough. That is called intellectual dishonesty. Needless to say you still haven't provided any reasoning as for what is wrong with the plasma jet as depicted in the episode. It obviously isn't a CME but that itself is not a reason to pretend it didn't happen.

Based on what exactly, aside from you reaching to find an excuse to dismiss the figures?

You are describing yourself now. Just below you claim that since we are dealing with "Stargate universe" we should accept that the stars have the possibility of shooting high density jets that don't expand even though that's physically impossible. At the same time you insist that Ozone layer must be the same for this planet even though there are no physical laws dictating how thick the Ozone layer must be based simply on the appearance of the planet.

The ship's bow was suffering extensive damage. It's a ship that uses trinium, 100 stronger than steel, plus perhaps some naqahdah (think of the enduring stargates as an example).
We know that iron's specific heat starts at 0.45 J/g/C°, is also close enough to steel's, and steel melts at 1535 C°.
Specific heat can climb to 0.65 J/C° per gram at 800 C, and up to 0.72 J/C° per gram at 1400 C, but let's keep the low end value for this, and pretend that we start at 0°C.
For the heat of fusion, 1 kg of steel turns to liquid with 272 kJ.

Low end energy needed to melt 1 kg of steel: E_low = 0.45 e3 x 1535 + 272 e3 = 962,750 J.
A value that is interesting to compare to those.


A very low low end, since it usually takes a couple of megajoules to achieve this in reality. We can, for the sake of simplicity, work with a melting energy of 1 MJ/kg.
Densities of steel.


7.86 g/cc (pure iron), for a 1 m² plate that would be 10 centimeter thick, would weigh 786 kg. So that's 786 MJ to melt it, and therefore 78,600 MJ to melt the same volume of a trinium (and perhaps alloyed with naqahdah) plate. And of course twice that if the plate is twice as thick. Plus the fact that it's a very low end.
The hull was taking damage. Even one of the F-302 bay took damage.

Should we believe that the shield is so miserable that on the 3.2 GW it's taking, it can't even prevent enough energy from spilling through so much as to deposit 78.6 GJ/m² anywhere onto the hull?

I mean, even if we take the figure for steel, 768 MJ /m² for plates 10 cm thick, and work from the intensity of the stream, which is 100 meters wide, and has a crosssection's area of 7.8540 e3, we get 407.44 KW/m² for the intensity of the stream's crosssection.
To get an intensity of 768 MJ/m² on the hull, assuming the shield stopped nothing, it would take 1884.94 seconds for the metal to reach the required temperature and energy level (that of course without counting the metal shedding heat to nearby plates and inwards over that time).
That's 31.41 minutes.
If the shield stops 90% of the energy, then 40.744 KW/m² gets through, and it takes ten times longer, or 5.23 hours.
And finally, it takes 52.3 hours if the shield only lets 1% of the energy pass through.

That's for steel, not even the trinium-naqahdah alloy that's used, which would require increasing power figures by two OoMs.

We could also compare this calculation to this event.


And that's not counting the fact that we're talking about a stream of more "simplistic" matter, which contrary to photons, especially high energy ones, will be coming into contact with the atmosphere and react like matter does, the atmosphere adopting the behaviour of a barrier: the faster something hits a fluid, the harder the fluid acts against the penetrating element.
You calculated a density of e-14 kg/m³ for the stream in the corona. But what about momentum? There are asteroids which weigh more than thousands of kilos per cubic meter and which get blasted by the atmosphere if they come too fast and too sharply into it. How are particles, coming in faster, but the overall mass they represent being extremely more diffuse, ever get anywhere deep enough?

I don't even recall we tried to estimate how much energy the stream would radiate as heat on its way to Lantea btw. At 4000 km/s, it would take 37,399.5 to cover 1 AU.
That's a lot of time for a plasma to cool down naturally during its trip.
This may prove interesting, as well as an important factor to your figure, since you assume that the 3.2 GW in the coronal region will not be lost to some degree when hitting Lantea.
A degree which may be significant.

First I would like some evidence that this trinium is 100 times stronger than steel. (which steel?)
Secondly what do energies taken to produce 1kg of various materials have to do with this discussion?
Thirdly the shield was not only taking the kinetic energy of the plasma jet but also the standard radiation from the sun. It seems that the shields are less effective against impacts by objects with mass like protons than the EM radiation.
Fourthly the plates were not melted entirely but were blown off which means you have no basis for calculating the energy needed to melt the entire plate. Materials start to loose structural integrity as they are heated up so the hull could collapse long before it was actually melted.
Fifth what you think that short atmospheric descent proves? The speeds did not seem more than 100km/s and the ship was still in the upper atmosphere.

Ah? Do you have a relevant absorption figure for infrareds?

Why? They are low frequency radiation and are not dangerous.

It doesn't matter, because it already happened before, and McKay was convinced that based on what he knew of the star and the precedent event, 50,000 rems could be delivered to the planet by starting out as a stream narrow enough to be intercepted by the shield of a 304.
So science or not, this funky star made it happen once already.

Again: the fact that it happened before doesn't give him the crystal ball. Saying that the star is "funky" doesn't somehow change the limits on it's energy content.

Why would the jet depart for the planet if what maintained it in place didn't collapse yet, exactly?

McKAY: It's a coronal mass ejection on a scale that dwarfs anything our sun has ever emitted. Apparently the sun in this solar system goes through an unusually turbulent sunspot cycle every fifteen thousand years or so. The Ancients have records of this class of CME occurring twice before.

SHEPPARD: The ship was very close to the sun when it happened.

McKAY: It's a massive prominence. It arced up and then collapsed when the magnetic field surrounding it weakened. We're talking an intense proton stream travelling at over four thousand kilometres per second.

And...

McKAY: The magnetic field around it is already beginning to weaken.

When that prominence collapses, the coronal mass ejection will occur. It'll erupt from a very small area – a mere pinprick in comparison to the total sun's surface, but it'll immediately begin to fan out. Within a few million miles, the blast wave will cut a swathe wide enough to take out this entire planet.

SHEPPARD: How much time do we have?

ZELENKA: The prominence will collapse any moment now. After that, we have less than an hour before the radiation wave hits us.

How does this changes the fact that you have no evidence that jet erupted only after the main collapse?

A proton stream of 3.2 GW wouldn't even threaten Earth, even if it entirely deposited its energy and heated up the surface (again, 3.2 e9 W / 2.55 e14 m², we get much more via mere sunlight alone).
Just as much as you tried to downplay the importance of EMR by claiming that Lantea has little ozone and the sun emits very little UV, you should perhaps also pretend that the planet has little atmosphere and a weak magnetic field, so that would explain how it can survive to the weaker cosmic rays as well, and thus be threatened by 3.2 GW of protons.

No matter how many times you accuse me of dishonesty the fact that you utterly failed to find any problems with gas laws or the calculations means that any other objections are irrelevant and mean that McKay was wrong.
Furthermore it is you who is dishonest not me since you are claiming that there is a narrow jet that is somehow high powered yet at the same time claim that the idea that Lantea has a weaker magnetic field and thinner Ozone layer is somehow outlandish.

I didn't claim 200 MT/s for the shield, but clearly, a ship that can fire that much energy, even if only once in a while, would have no reason not to fire energy in that region, even just 10% of this, when fighting against another Ha'tak, especially when we see them exchanging bolts without one shooting each other. In a matter or life or death, no one would have a reason to hold back.
Hell, the same logic would still apply if they only fired 1 megaton of energy, or even one kiloton, which is still 312.5 seconds at 3.2 GW.

Except you have no evidence that ship's primary energy weapons were responsible for that blast as opposed a device they dropped on those cities.

Of course, this is evidence from another episode, and I would refer to Enemies, where a bog standard Ha'tak sits close to a bright blue giant. With the Ha'tak sitting one diameter away from the photosphere, we have a total of 3 radii, each radius being, for a low power blue giant, 7 times greater than Sol's, which is R_sol = 6.955 e8 m.
So that's a final radius of 1.46055 e10 m². Surface area at that distance would therefore be 2.6807 e21 m².

A low end luminosity would be 25 times Sol's, 25 x 3.846 e26 W, L_bg = 9.615 e27 W.

The intensity, one diameter away from the photosphere, would be 3,586,749 W/m².


Dimensions of a Ha'tak. They're sort of low end, but I never consider a Ha'tak larger than ~700 meters. It doesn't mean the VFX people don't fuck the scales up regularly though.

Shield dimensions.


The ship's width I use is 675.88 m, and the height is 255.9 meters.
The dimensions of the shield are those above, times 1.06. It's an oblate spheroid.
Width: 716 m.
Height: 271 m. (shield height would actually be greater since the base of the pyramidal core would stick out of the shield otherwise).

That's a SA of 1,011,141 m². Taking half of it, 505,570 m².
So the shield takes a total of 1,813,352,691,930 W.
1.813 TW.

With the added fact that if it can sit that close to a blue giant for ten hours (and one hour without shields), it has no reason to be threatened by a solar flare from a star of the main sequence close to ours.

Finally, a BC-304 rates higher than this super low end, and even more with a ZPM.

This calculations puts it on the same order of magnitude as those from the "Echoes". It is likely that shields are more susceptible to particle streams hence why Daedalus only started experiencing trouble when the jet hit. Furthermore we have further evidence that reradiation capacity of the shields is in the TW range thus they would be overloaded after 10 hours. None of this gives the ship any chance to withstand 1000TW beam at the intensity of over 10 million MW/m2.

Huh. It barely tappers for 99.99% of its whole length. Scales are fucked up. Period. It makes that rockball smaller than a fraction of the Death Star.
And I recall that there were circular structures being hit there, on the ground, and it didn't look big either. Don't you have a video or pictures of this?

The fact that you say "period" means nothing. I'm not interested in your subjective image analysis which you tried to use before to claim the Narn cruiser was not cut in half. Either provide evidence or concede.

A problem of scale as well. Bombs supposedly reaching the atmosphere, and then the surface. Both contradicted by their ejection speed and their size before they explode.

Obviously they fired several rocks in generally same directions hence as one rock vanishes from view the rocks that were fired before already impacted the surface. Thus it seems that the rock suddenly accelerated. No need to dismiss the video footage.

That's not the point. The point is that in this universe, with this star, a blast delivering 50,000 rems could be narrow enough to be stopped by a 304's shield.
Even if it lasted 23 hours, 3.2 GW would provide a total 264.96 e12 J.

And yet I'm dishonest for suggesting that Ozone layer might be thinner? In any case if the laws of physics operate differently then you shouldn't use them in the first place. Maybe the molecules of human beings in this universe get destabilized by 0.000001rems? Maybe rem doesn't mean the same thing in this universe? Etc. etc.

I'm suggesting that at the time it hit the ship, it was some kind of super-toroid. That's just a wild guess.
I also read about solar tornadoes that look like tubes of twirling fire. Anyway, it doesn't matter, because it's a fact in that universe, such bizarre things can take place.

None of this has any effect on the upper limit I calculated. The fact is what we've observed: a jet which doesn't expand thus putting an upper limit on it's density and temperature. Everything else is, as you say, your wild guesses.

Can we treat the episode as if it was Rodney's first time in a 304? Before coming up with a plan, he'd first want to know what the ship is at the very least capable of.

This doesn't answer my question: how can he not know power or time yet know the energy?

Yes it does, because it did happen, and with what McKay had at hand's reach, he knew that such a stream could exist, no matter how baffling it is.

You are fusing your unsupported claims with actual events. Yes, the jet did in fact occur but no there is no evidence for your firepower claims. The firepower is limited by my calculations and not in any way disproven by you. Yes the stream existed and yes it was limited by gas laws.

The whales would just need to take a dive to get cover from the UV (12%/5 meters) and those whales were rather very smart, with extremely good genetic memories about something that occurs every 15 millenia.

Again: what is your evidence they accurately predicted the final strength of the jet? It's entirely possible that there were such powerful jet or jet's which lasted much longer. None of that proves this particular one turned out to be as powerful as they feared.

They are regulated, ordered not to use nuclear weapons. The UFP slinging antimatter weapons completely nixes this idea and makes your claim ridiculous. There's not much difference, on such terms, between a punchy kiloton warhead and a low megaton one.

First I must point out: the fact that solar events can harm ships PROVES that their shield strength is in TJ range. There is no way around this. If a photon torpedo doesn't penetrate the shields that means it's in TJ range and that's all there is to it. The idea of different warheads serves as an explanation for why not all photon torpedoes have the same strength but whatever the explanation the fact from above doesn't change.
I have already stated that larger warheads mean the photon torpedo would become more massive and thus easier to shoot down.

I don't see where less massive warheads would help, when the room that's allowed for warheads is already very small, and we're talking about a few kilos of M/AM more to get yields in the megatons.
In other words, compared to the speeds the torps are capable of: peanuts.

How do you know what is the efficiency of the photon torpedo warhead? A few kg might be enough in theory but there is no guarantee it will work in practice. For all we know if they want a multimegaton explosion they would need to take out certain guidance or engine equipment from the torpedo to make more room.

Conservative calcs can lead to such numbers. You can always look through this website and get them, and bump the threads in question if you want to, any valid criticism being more than welcomed.

All I'm aware is "Rise" from Voyager dependent on photon torpedo glow being 10m wide and asteroid vaporized to get into high megaton range. What other incidents do you know?

Yes, but then, again, I don't see any valid reason as to why they wouldn't use more powerful warheads for naval combat.

How exactly does this change the obvious limitations on their shields? Understand that when I proposed the multiple warhead types scenario I was merely trying to provide a possible explanation to a known state of affairs: that shields get overwhelmed by TW levels of power and that it takes more than one photon torpedo to take the shields down. You cannot somehow change the upper limit imposed upon the shields by attacking my explanation for the photon torpedo.

Kane still keeps trying to handwave away the unusual circumstances of the episodes we cite. In "Relics", a G-type star shows unusual instability and is throwing out all kinds of hard radiation and matter expuslions. I am not sure a G-type star when it begins to transition from fusing hydrogen to fusing helium does this sort of thing before throwing off it's outer layers. But either way the star's behavior is not normal for it's type.

You still haven't shown how these "unusual circumstances" affect my numbers. The star is still obviously yellow limiting it's power intensity and the total energy Enterprise would receive and the density of the flares is still limited by laws of physics. None of this changes because the star entered a period of heightened activity. Heightened activity doesn't mean megatons/s/m2 or something. Unless you can show (with numbers) how any of the dialogue changes the upper limits (which are calculated with a precision of a rough order of magnitude to begin with) then you have no case.

In the Stargate example "Echoes" we have some pretty weird stuff which matches up well with McCay's dialog. Also the flare did not last indefinitel over hours or days as one would expect if it was a mere 3.2 GW as Kane wants everyone to believe, but rather it lasts minutes as it strikes the Daedalus's shields indicating that it would only require a few minutes to lethally irradiate the Lantean planet such that all plant and animal life would die, even down to a significant depth of the ocean, and by this point the CME was expected to have dissipated out to several millions of kilometers. When it reaches the Daedalus after having travelled at most a few million km from the source star, it is only several hundred meters, maybe a kilometer wide, and it is highly dense and luminiescent. This is obviously not a normal CME, and is acting more like a giant particle beam in this case. Were I the SGA crew, I'd be thinking maybe someone is messing around with the star ala what the Klingons did to destroy a Dominion shipyard in "Shadow and Symbols."

Again: "unusual", "pretty weird stuff" etc. etc. And then you accuse me of handwaving.
3.2 GW is not "what I want everyone to believe" but what I calculated and posted the calculations here. None of you tried to even touch those calculations instead attempting to perform various indirect attacks like insisting that McKay is infallible even though he clearly didn't know what will finally happen.
Secondly whatever the Klingons did in "Shadow and Symbols" doesn't change the limitations on stellar material density and temperature of the upper photosphere and the resulting energy upper limit.

So we only have a few choices here; either except what happens in the episode and use normal CME and solar flares as very lower limits. Or we have to totally toss out the examples because they go so against our current understanding of physics and cosmology. Thirdly, we can create a synthesis of the two, though that presents some rather interesting challenges in and of itself.

None of my calculations make the events in any of these examples impossible. The only problem (for you) is that it results in numbers you find too low. That however doesn't change the validity of the numbers.