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

[User1356]

The CME from Echoes, is far too bizarre to make a claim off of either way.
The fact everyone doesnt run in fear from GT range tau'ri nukes, is probably a better indication of SG defences

[Kane Starkiller]

0.0004 kg* striking the vessel at 1 km/s (the visuals) every second. What, you need me to spell out the kinetic energy formula for you?

* That's your estimate of the mass involved, but you subsequently admitted it would be lower, so the real energy is probably below 1 joule per second.

And the evidence?

And using the standard figure for coronal density is fucked because they’re not inside the corona you twat. Furthermore the jet would have to travel through empty space to get to the planet. Which means the pressure of the jet has to be roughly on par with total and complete vacuum. This in turn means the energy being delivered to the planet will drop to less then a trillionth of a joule.

Solar corona can extend beyond a solar diameter and density doesn't suddenly drop do zero at 1 million km mark from the star. No space is actually empty but has a measurable density. If the density is lower the plasma jet will be less energetic. Which means shields are even less powerful but doesn't disprove my argument since my argument was concerned with upper limits.

Perhaps I didn’t make it clear enough for you: It means your argument is self-defeating. Because you're claiming that less then 1 joule of energy is capable of killing all life on planet earth. This is not possible. Neither is it possible that less then a joule of energy is capable of destroying a BC-304.

I'm not claiming that less than 1 joule is capable of destroying life on Earth this is your own distortion to try and make my argument seem ridiculous. Rodney himself pointed ou that flare could last for hours. Thus even at low power levels organisms could end up absorbing lethal doses of radiation. Try to differentiate between the visible particle stream of the plasma jet and gamma ray radiation which would naturally be moving at the speed of light.

Because he estimated the entire planet would die. Then he estimated that the ship might be able to prevent it. What happened? The ship barely prevented it. Thus his predictions came true.

He got lucky. He didn't know whether the flare would last seconds or hours and a minute after the ship was impacted it's hull already started to fall off. Had the flare truly lasted for hours the ship would be destroyed several times over.

Are you so fucking dumb that you need me to explain the difference between power and energy to you? You know - watts and joules?

Don't try and confuse the issue. You claimed that somehow the total energy content of the future flare was known to Rodney but the rate of the release was subject to change from seconds to hours. What is this mechanism that would modify the behavior in such a manner?

Alright. Why don't we start by looking at something gaseous with the density of, say, 1 kg/m^3. How do you imagine something like that would look to the human eye? I mean this is something more then a trillion times more dense then your hypothetical jet. And since your jet is clearly visible, then this should be a trillion times more visible, no?

So is there some gas near you, right now, that might be around 1 kg/m^3?

Clouds, fog, smog etc.

You're right in a way, it'd be pretty impossible for us to spot the difference between 7,000 kg/m^3 and 7,000,0000,000,000,000 kg/m^3 with our eyes. So hypothetically that could be the density of the jet we saw.

No it couldn't. I've proven it using gas pressure calculations. Pay attention.

Because in that thread I suggested we shouldn't look at visuals exclusively. Your methodology however suggests we should look at visuals exclusively. I'm just forcing you to follow through on that logic and do it uniformly for the entire quantification.

I stand by what I said just now however: That jet moved no more then 1 km/s according to visuals.

Not true. You claimed that the screencaps you posted proved the speed of that jet was in the thousands of km/s. I have no problem with dialogue unless it's contradicted by visual evidence.

I'm just forcing you to follow your own methodology to completion. Which leads us to conclude that less then a joule of energy threatened to kill all life on a planet much like earth. You're trying to up the figure slightly because you know just how retarded you would look if you came out and said that a planet could be killed with less then a joule of energy, thus you try to increase the velocity to higher then the visuals show.

If we take your densities as fact, and apply the velocity of the jet to it, then what I'm saying becomes undeniable physical fact.

Undeniable physical fact. You got that part right. Try to understand that I have proven the constraints on the jet plasma using well established physical relations. If they show that planet could not be threatened that makes Rodney look like a fool not me. Furthermore you continue to ignore my point that it could've been x-ray or gamma radiation rather than kinetic energy of the plasma jet was what was threatening the planet. The ship was bombarded by: usual radiation from the sun+plasma jet particle stream+possible x-ray/gamma radiation from the collapse of the flare.
My argument disproved the notion that plasma jet particle stream itself carried millions of megatons of energy as some claimed.

His prediction was that the planet would be destroyed but the ship might be able to deflect the flare. What happened? The ship barely managed to deflect the flare. That means he was right in his estimation.

If the flare had been trillions upon trillions of times weaker, then he would've said: "Lol guys, let's go home, this thing literally couldn't kill a single human even at this range."

He wasn't right but lucky. As I already pointed out if the flare continued for hours the ship would be toast. Plasma jet was weak but that itself was never powerful enough to threaten the planet anyway. Even huge CMEs don't threaten planets, the only conceivable threat would be from x-rays and such.

This is something I will forever remind you of in every debate henceforth. That you literally suggested that a pistol shot could destroy a BC-304. It’s so stupid that you don’t even need to say anything more then so to point out just how braindead your arguments get.

Why are you being so dishonest? In the very next paragraph I show that this is not possible because of the ambient radiation from a star.

As I said: Your figures are self-defeating. Sunlight is more dangerous then this CME, if we're to believe your figures.

Not if it emitted an unusual amount of gamma rays and such. I showed many times that they would be lethal to organic beings even at a fraction of power that reaches us in the form of visible light.

No. The figures would range from 200 joules to less then 1 joule. Why? Because you're assuming 4,000 km/s jet velocity even when visuals show us that it doesn't exceed 1 km/s.

I continue to be amazed at your newfound revelation that jet cannot be faster than 1km/s when you yourself posted screncaps for which you claimed prove higher speeds.
In fact you even claimed that my 100km/s were disproven by your screencaps.

Of course not. You're just a poor misunderstood fan, aren't you? :(

You have serious issues.

Of course not. You really are a Fiver at heart. It's just that you exclusively argue against B5 and exclusively argue for SW, no matter the topic. Because that's what Fivers do, apparently.

I'm arguing for B5 now am I not?

Oh they do. You're suggesting that if I shot a pistol at the ground, all life on the planet dies, and that if we shoot a pistol at a BC-304 it dies. That speaks volumes of the validity of your argument.

Never said any such thing your dishonesty notwitstanding.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Well I'm sorry you find yourself arguing against two people at the same time, especially when me and L33t are almost saying the same thing, but assuming you're honest here, then there has to be a piece of the logic you are critically missing, something simple which yet eludes you, so I hope that the following post will solve this, because there's really nothing more complicated to it than what has already been said.

Both visuals and dialogue prove it.

I meant that 4000km/s speed doesn't compensate for the lack of expansion because of the distances involved: million km or more. Thus the plasma would still have time to expand had it had the pressure.

Indeed, in an accurate scientific way, the plasma would have expanded naturally as long as the blast would carry the particles outwards into space.
Any gas in vacuum would tend towards the typical ISM density (ISM = interstellar medium).

But if we go with visuals, we see a focused jet. As I pointed out, it's so focused that it actually starts from a large plotch on the sun, which would probably already be large enough to engulf Earth alone, and is funneled into a tube that's barely a hundred meters wide (well, less than the Daedalus' shield width anyway, and I work with these dimensions, which fit reather well with several other measurements).
It contracted.

We already know that this jet is impossible based on what we've seen about stars. CME are not turbo lasers, they're stellar farts.
It should have not happened, and you cannot claim any density for this stream and run with it because even the ISM density doesn't even fit with what happened.

See below for your density figure:

Although this is totally irrelevant to the fact that matter was constantly ejected over minutes, let me add something here: even without visuals, the characters were reporting that the ship was struggling with the ejected matter. This would never happen with the typical gas density in a corona.
We can infer that the density was considerably greater here.

I never claimed it had the same density as the corona. As I calculated the density would be greater. I already calculated the energy that could be striking the ship: 3.2GW which is not a small amount of power by any means.

Impressive to an ant, not to a ship in Stargate.
In light of the event, of what happens on screen, on the need to use a ZPM, on the fact that the blast alone would have enough power to kill life all over the planet, in virtue of of logic and countless other figures, it's a pathetic output. Even a portable naqahdah generator Mk-I can provide dozens of times this power.

The density you used wouldn't shake a ship like it did. Not to say that at such densities, there wouldn't be any stream to look at.

With a typical CME liberating a total of 20 billion tons of matter, were we to use this number, in relation to the super-CME's speed, the total kinetic energy of that weird focused stream would be 1.6 e28 joules, or roughly 3.8241 e6 teratons.

It's quite silly, but what can I say?
Nothing, but that's what you get with visuals and dialogue.

It's a highly oceanic planet, and the last blast would have killed plant life and oxygen producing life forms, no matter how deep they would be.
Would doses of 50000 rem manage to reach that deep into the ocean?

It doesn't need to be 50,000 rem. 1000 rem will kill a human as I already said.

But it still is 50,000 rem in the show. Besides, a rem is not a unit of energy used to measure the total energy of say an earthquake, a car collision or a bomb's explosion.
It is an unit used for measures of equivalent dose. It is the amount of absorbed dose (50,000 rem here) times certain factors relative to the subject, as described here.
It is an unit used in light of the mass of a body, most of the time used for an individual. Using rems for the entire planet makes no sense, and 50,000 rems applied to half the whole world would be gazillions orders of magnitude below even the daily does from background noise.
From the context of the show, at the very least your subject of study and concern would obviously be your average human at sea level.
But that's the basic starting point, because we could think of oxygen producing lifeforms as well, which would be less massive than a human in general, and thus mean even higher energy levels.
50,000 rem is 500 Sv (sieverts).
1 Sv = 1 J/kg = 1 m²/s²
So you have an average human body taking 500 J/kg of radiation. With a 80 kg man, that's 40,000 joules.

Now, working on the total surface area of typical human, 1.8 m², you have 40 e3 J/ 1.8, so the intensity, at sea level, is 22,222 J/m².
Going with a planet like Earth and a radius of 6371 km, the energy is:
5.1 e14 m² x 22,222 joules, thus 1.13332 e19 J.

This would correspond to the particles hitting the planet a few minutes after the burst occurred, and that's fairly ignoring that such energy wouldn't really make it through the ocean and kill the life down there, and obviously totally fail to kill the life on the rest of Lantea.

There still remains the plasma stream, which would arrive much later on.

Furthermore 50,000 rem was a prediction by McKay. Whether the actual jet stream carried the total energy of 50,000 rem per human is never revealed.

Just like the speed figure. Doesn't matter though, because even with 1 Sv, you still obtain a radiation energy figure in the high petajoules.

Rodney didn't even know whether the jet would last a few seconds or a few hours. 50,000 rem was thus most likely a worst case scenario.

You got it wrong. Even with the second-long burst, it would have still killed life. So anyway you know you're looking at more than 1000 rems anyway (50 times less than the figure I used), which gives high petajoules.

Well then I don't get what you're trying to say. Your position doesn't make sense to me. You complained about people claiming big numbers, but if we go with visuals and dialogue, then this is quite what happened, no matter how unscientific it was, and that blast at that point had enough energy to kill life. The stream had more to do with ejecta from a near perfect powerful ion thruster than a chaotic CME.
No one tried to explain how the stream, that started from a large patch on the photosphere, was tunneled into such a narrow jet. It would require a focusing magnetic field of biblical force, literally mimicking the equivalent of a tokamak's stream thrown at a starship.

That's TV SF written in a rush: you can consider yourself lucky when it seems to make sense.
That said, considering the amount of technical details that have been flying in SGU, it may be possible that there's a modicum of scientific advisory brought to the writing room.

How do visuals point to high yield again? I already demonstrated the jet had an infinitesimal density and pressure thus limiting the total power. The calculations are in my post above. The dialogue consists of predictions of how powerful the ejection could be but in the end Rodney has no idea within 3 orders of magnitude what the total energy released would be.

Your calculations may be correct, but their premise is absolutely wrong, so it makes your calculations quite meaningless.

[l33telboi]

And the evidence?

The evidence for the jet velocity? The fact that the jet moves less then a ship length per frame. For it to move at thousands of kilometers per second would mean we wouldn't see it approaching the ship at all. You can also see this velocity as the jet spreads out to the sides, which, hillariously enough, you pointed out but now seem to have forgotten.

Solar corona can extend beyond a solar diameter and density doesn't suddenly drop do zero at 1 million km mark from the star.

The solar corona doesn't have an end an a beginning and an end, so saying it can extend beyond a solar diameter is poppycock. It's just a gradual decrease in stellar matter from the surface of the star. And in this case, we're so far from the star that using the coronal density (which is usually still considered rather close to the star), isn't valid.

No space is actually empty but has a measurable density. If the density is lower the plasma jet will be less energetic. Which means shields are even less powerful but doesn't disprove my argument since my argument was concerned with upper limits.

Yes, I know there's no perfect vacuum in space, just something that's extremely near it. In this case for the jet to remain coherent all the way to the planet, it would mean that the space between the planet and the sun has to be the same pressure. We're literally talking about a jet of near-empty space hitting the planet. It would be impossible for such a thing to cause a mass extinction event. Similarly the energy hitting the ship would be less then 1 joule.

Ergo your theory on the pressure of the jet is both self-defeating and handily disproved just by taking a look at the visuals.

I'm not claiming that less than 1 joule is capable of destroying life on Earth this is your own distortion to try and make my argument seem ridiculous.

Oh but you are. If we follow your methodology to conclusion that's exactly what you're suggesting. The problem is that you're not following your methodology to conclusion. You know how laughable it is if you did, so you try to arbitrary up the figures a bit to make it seem a bit more plausible.

That's the exact same thing that's done with the Sharlin in B5. The real figures come in so low that they disprove themselves, thus the token idiot will up the figures a bit and call it 'an upper limit', to give the whole thing more credibility. Heedless of the fact that the real figure is so many orders of magnitude lower, that the whole thing becomes self-defeating.

Thus even at low power levels organisms could end up absorbing lethal doses of radiation.

Not this shit again. You completely ditched all the flaws I pointed out in regards to this being death by radiation poisoning. It doesn't work. You can't give the whole planet radiation poisoning simply because of the atmosphere, the line-of-sight issues, the underwater life, the fact that the tops of vegetation will absorb the radiation leaving what's underneath unharmed, etc.

He got lucky. He didn't know whether the flare would last seconds or hours and a minute after the ship was impacted it's hull already started to fall off. Had the flare truly lasted for hours the ship would be destroyed several times over.

Wait, what? You do realize that the episode itself tells us it lasted several hours, right? Or is this another one of those things you're going to ignore because it doesn't fit with your vision?

Don't try and confuse the issue.

I'm not. I'm just laying down simple physical truths to you. Rodney was never uncertain of the energy in the flare. He estimated it would be enough to kill all life on the planet - case closed. What he didn't know was how long the jet would last, i.e. the power involved.

Clouds, fog, smog etc.

And thus my point is proved. Fog, smog and clouds are transparent when they're viewed nearby. For instance, you can be walking down the street of a smog filled city and you'll see the street in front of you just fine, but the buildings far away look shrouded. And in this case we have a jet a few hundred meters from our eyes, that is completely opaque. Had that been a jet of fog, or smog, then we wouldn't have been able to spot it.

And of course, all of those things are denser then normal air. So we've established that you need to go over 1kg/m^3 just for things to become opaque, and yet here you are, suggesting that something with a density of 0.0000000000001 kg/m^3 is supposed to be visible to the eye from extremely close by. As if a solid wall moving towards you.

Undeniable physical fact. You got that part right. Try to understand that I have proven the constraints on the jet plasma using well established physical relations.

Try to understand that I have proven that the visuals contradict this, and that the figures obtained by your methodology are self-defeating.

He wasn't right but lucky. As I already pointed out if the flare continued for hours the ship would be toast.

The flare did continue for hours you moron. We see the flare hitting the ship. The we the episode cuts back to Atlantis and people say the flare should've hit by now. Then the episode cuts back to the ship where the flare is still going. And before all this the people on atlantis estiamated it would hours for the flare to cross the distance.

Why are you being so dishonest? In the very next paragraph I show that this is not possible because of the ambient radiation from a star.

And before that you're saying that something less energetic then 1 joule was a problem for the ship and would destroy a planet. Live with the fact that I'm forever going to hold this over your head. Not to mention that your ambient radiation from the star calculation is fucked (again), since it doesn't incorporate the correct distance from the star.

Not if it emitted an unusual amount of gamma rays and such. I showed many times that they would be lethal to organic beings even at a fraction of power that reaches us in the form of visible light.

If the real problem is gamma-rays, then your entire argument based on the jet is nothing more then one massive red-herring. And also, I've pointed out why your gamma-ray calculation is fucked.

You have serious issues.

I'm just laughing at the idiot fanboy trying to come off as neutral.

I'm arguing for B5 now am I not?

Not against your pet franchise, you're not.

Never said any such thing your dishonesty notwitstanding.

Of course not. You realize that everyone would laugh at you if you did. That's why you arbitrarily upped the figures a bit so it wouldn't seem so ludicrous. But unfortunately for you, I was there to point out that if we follow your logic to its conclusion, then you are indeed saying that something with an energy-equivalent of one pistol shot at planet earth and all life dies.

[Kane Starkiller]

Indeed, in an accurate scientific way, the plasma would have expanded naturally as long as the blast would carry the particles outwards into space.
Any gas in vacuum would tend towards the typical ISM density (ISM = interstellar medium).

But if we go with visuals, we see a focused jet. As I pointed out, it's so focused that it actually starts from a large plotch on the sun, which would probably already be large enough to engulf Earth alone, and is funneled into a tube that's barely a hundred meters wide (well, less than the Daedalus' shield width anyway, and I work with these dimensions, which fit reather well with several other measurements).
It contracted.

We already know that this jet is impossible based on what we've seen about stars. CME are not turbo lasers, they're stellar farts.
It should have not happened, and you cannot claim any density for this stream and run with it because even the ISM density doesn't even fit with what happened.

There is no evidence that the entire mass that collapsed was somehow compressed into the jet. In fact it's quite impossible for all that mass to somehow spontaneously converge to a 100m wide jet and then somehow retain coherence. There simply are no forces that could do it. So you dismiss my calculations even while admitting they are correct because of something that it is impossible on it's face without even bringing in my calculations.

Impressive to an ant, not to a ship in Stargate.
In light of the event, of what happens on screen, on the need to use a ZPM, on the fact that the blast alone would have enough power to kill life all over the planet, in virtue of of logic and countless other figures, it's a pathetic output. Even a portable naqahdah generator Mk-I can provide dozens of times this power.

The density you used wouldn't shake a ship like it did. Not to say that at such densities, there wouldn't be any stream to look at.

With a typical CME liberating a total of 20 billion tons of matter, were we to use this number, in relation to the super-CME's speed, the total kinetic energy of that weird focused stream would be 1.6 e28 joules, or roughly 3.8241 e6 teratons.

It's quite silly, but what can I say?
Nothing, but that's what you get with visuals and dialogue.

No that is not what you get with either visuals or dialogue. All your numbers hinge on your unsupported and furthermore physically impossible proposition that somehow the huge CME was compressed into a jet 100m wide and then retained it's coherence. It's impossible.

But it still is 50,000 rem in the show. Besides, a rem is not a unit of energy used to measure the total energy of say an earthquake, a car collision or a bomb's explosion.
It is an unit used for measures of equivalent dose. It is the amount of absorbed dose (50,000 rem here) times certain factors relative to the subject, as described here.
It is an unit used in light of the mass of a body, most of the time used for an individual. Using rems for the entire planet makes no sense, and 50,000 rems applied to half the whole world would be gazillions orders of magnitude below even the daily does from background noise.
From the context of the show, at the very least your subject of study and concern would obviously be your average human at sea level.
But that's the basic starting point, because we could think of oxygen producing lifeforms as well, which would be less massive than a human in general, and thus mean even higher energy levels.
50,000 rem is 500 Sv (sieverts).
1 Sv = 1 J/kg = 1 m²/s²
So you have an average human body taking 500 J/kg of radiation. With a 80 kg man, that's 40,000 joules.

Now, working on the total surface area of typical human, 1.8 m², you have 40 e3 J/ 1.8, so the intensity, at sea level, is 22,222 J/m².
Going with a planet like Earth and a radius of 6371 km, the energy is:
5.1 e14 m² x 22,222 joules, thus 1.13332 e19 J.

This would correspond to the particles hitting the planet a few minutes after the burst occurred, and that's fairly ignoring that such energy wouldn't really make it through the ocean and kill the life down there, and obviously totally fail to kill the life on the rest of Lantea.

There still remains the plasma stream, which would arrive much later on.

Yes I already calculated the figure on the first page. As I pointed out several times Rodney had no idea whether the flare would last seconds or hours therefore he couldn't actually know the final energy level absorbed by the planet. 50,000 rems was probably a worst case scenario.

Just like the speed figure. Doesn't matter though, because even with 1 Sv, you still obtain a radiation energy figure in the high petajoules.

Yes over an unknown time period. Since the final jet only lasted for minutes and not hours as Rodney thought possible it's obvious that the jet ultimately ended up being on the lower scale of energy content.

You got it wrong. Even with the second-long burst, it would have still killed life. So anyway you know you're looking at more than 1000 rems anyway (50 times less than the figure I used), which gives high petajoules.

No one said any such thing. 50,000 rem is a total energy figure absorbed by an organism. Organism doesn't need to absorb a lethal dose in 1 second for it to kill it.

Your calculations may be correct, but their premise is absolutely wrong, so it makes your calculations quite meaningless.

What premise? That pressure of the surrounding corona and the jet must be equal? There is no other force which could keep the jet focused. And there is especially no force which could somehow scoop up billions of tons of matter and focus it into a thin jet and keep it coherent as you suggest.

The solar corona doesn't have an end an a beginning and an end, so saying it can extend beyond a solar diameter is poppycock. It's just a gradual decrease in stellar matter from the surface of the star. And in this case, we're so far from the star that using the coronal density (which is usually still considered rather close to the star), isn't valid.

Let me just use this paragraph to answer your basic point rather than each of your paragraphs individually since it all basically comes down to this: if you can somehow lower the numbers then laws of physics suddenly don't count. This is not how it works.
To review:
1. We see that the jet is 100m wide and not hundreds of thousands of km wide as a large CME. There are no mechanisms on a star to somehow compress the mass of a CME in a thin jet.
2. A jet was not expanding as it moved through corona of the star and possibly beyond. This further limits the density and temperature of the jet and thus it's energy.

Neither of these points was challenged by you directly nor have you even made a slightest attempt. Neither of these points was invented by me. Jet's width is directly observed and the conclusion about it's energy content comes directly from gas laws which are not my invention but thoroughly verified laws tested through almost 200 years of use.

Since you are perfectly aware you cannot challenge these two facts you instead try to make them seem ridiculous by lowering the numbers. The problem is laws of physics and direct observation cannot be ridiculous and aren't suddenly "wrong" no matter how low the numbers are.

Furthermore I have also shown that at the distance from the star the ship would still receive MW/m2 level of power. You dispute the exact number claiming that the distance was over million km. Obviously I don't know exactly what the exact distance from the star was, was it 1 million, 2 million or 1.754 million km nor do I know exactly what is the power output of the star. The point was to calculate a rough order of magnitude not to claim that 8MW/m2 is the perfectly correct indisputable number.

Since the ship was already bombarded by radiation from the star then the jet could simply be the hair that broke the camel's back or the shield was destabilized from the high temperature particle stream. No need to declare the observed events and laws of physics incorrect. And there certainly is no reason to use your ridiculous method to lower the numbers until you dismiss the jet and then somehow turn around and claim the energy was actually huge.

And thus my point is proved. Fog, smog and clouds are transparent when they're viewed nearby. For instance, you can be walking down the street of a smog filled city and you'll see the street in front of you just fine, but the buildings far away look shrouded. And in this case we have a jet a few hundred meters from our eyes, that is completely opaque. Had that been a jet of fog, or smog, then we wouldn't have been able to spot it.

And of course, all of those things are denser then normal air. So we've established that you need to go over 1kg/m^3 just for things to become opaque, and yet here you are, suggesting that something with a density of 0.0000000000001 kg/m^3 is supposed to be visible to the eye from extremely close by. As if a solid wall moving towards you.

How are clouds denser than air if they float in the air? I could give more examples: smoke from a chimney, smoke from a cigarette. All lighter than air, all not transparent. But none of this has anything to do with you proving that the jet in question cannot be transparent. Come back when you have actual evidence and calculations.

The flare did continue for hours you moron. We see the flare hitting the ship. The we the episode cuts back to Atlantis and people say the flare should've hit by now. Then the episode cuts back to the ship where the flare is still going. And before all this the people on atlantis estiamated it would hours for the flare to cross the distance.

No they didn't. They said that flare would collapse any moment and then it would take less then an hour for the radiation to reach them.
But how does the total duration of the flare change the fact that Rodney didn't know how long it would last and thus the total content of the energy? How does the total duration of the jet stream change it's power level which are constrained at TW level at the most generous as I have shown and you haven't challenged any of the calculations directly?

[Mr. Oragahn]

Indeed, in an accurate scientific way, the plasma would have expanded naturally as long as the blast would carry the particles outwards into space.
Any gas in vacuum would tend towards the typical ISM density (ISM = interstellar medium).

But if we go with visuals, we see a focused jet. As I pointed out, it's so focused that it actually starts from a large plotch on the sun, which would probably already be large enough to engulf Earth alone, and is funneled into a tube that's barely a hundred meters wide (well, less than the Daedalus' shield width anyway, and I work with these dimensions, which fit reather well with several other measurements).
It contracted.

We already know that this jet is impossible based on what we've seen about stars. CME are not turbo lasers, they're stellar farts.
It should have not happened, and you cannot claim any density for this stream and run with it because even the ISM density doesn't even fit with what happened.

There is no evidence that the entire mass that collapsed was somehow compressed into the jet.

Depends which source we use. The dialogue has McKay saying they would intercept the stream before it would fan out, which is actually a hint to what happened, and this exactly what happened in fact. The visuals show all the visible matter start from a large super area and then hit the ship in the form of a tube that's narrower than the shield.
If the stream lost any mass, it is negligible in light of what is seen, because the fact that the fact this supposed waste is totally seen is a good hint that the density is negligible.

In fact it's quite impossible for all that mass to somehow spontaneously converge to a 100m wide jet and then somehow retain coherence. There simply are no forces that could do it.

Yes, there are. You just need a force field strong enough to do it. And don't be scared by the term. A magnetic field is a force field.
It's just that they don't exist naturally and it's scientifically bogus. But that we agree on.
Notice, again, how I said that I preferably went down the road of the super CME being a super blast that already expands.
However - and thanks for ignoring this simple point - I already said that even in such a case, the fraction of the super CME that Daedalus intercepted would have destroyed life on the planet.

So you dismiss my calculations even while admitting they are correct because of something that it is impossible on it's face without even bringing in my calculations.

Your calcuation is stupid. You don't kill life with gigawatts.
I even proved that even with 1000 rems, you'd get high megatons, near gigaton levels of energy being intercepted.

Impressive to an ant, not to a ship in Stargate.
In light of the event, of what happens on screen, on the need to use a ZPM, on the fact that the blast alone would have enough power to kill life all over the planet, in virtue of of logic and countless other figures, it's a pathetic output. Even a portable naqahdah generator Mk-I can provide dozens of times this power.

The density you used wouldn't shake a ship like it did. Not to say that at such densities, there wouldn't be any stream to look at.

With a typical CME liberating a total of 20 billion tons of matter, were we to use this number, in relation to the super-CME's speed, the total kinetic energy of that weird focused stream would be 1.6 e28 joules, or roughly 3.8241 e6 teratons.

It's quite silly, but what can I say?
Nothing, but that's what you get with visuals and dialogue.

No that is not what you get with either visuals or dialogue. All your numbers hinge on your unsupported and furthermore physically impossible proposition that somehow the huge CME was compressed into a jet 100m wide and then retained it's coherence. It's impossible.

Hello?
I already said so! But that's what happened.
Even the premise you used for your calc would be impossible, and no one would have bothered intercepting a couple of gigawatts for crissake.
Just try to look at your own calcs and see how absurd they are.
Earth is constantly hit by 1.38 kW/m². Over a surface area of 2.55 e14 m². Even with one watt, that's already several terawatts for the exposed side of our planet.
We're already above your measly gigawatt figure every darn second of your life, yet I don't recall any NASA mission which goal was to intercept the sun's rays and other winds.

But it still is 50,000 rem in the show. Besides, a rem is not a unit of energy used to measure the total energy of say an earthquake, a car collision or a bomb's explosion.
It is an unit used for measures of equivalent dose. It is the amount of absorbed dose (50,000 rem here) times certain factors relative to the subject, as described here.
It is an unit used in light of the mass of a body, most of the time used for an individual. Using rems for the entire planet makes no sense, and 50,000 rems applied to half the whole world would be gazillions orders of magnitude below even the daily does from background noise.
From the context of the show, at the very least your subject of study and concern would obviously be your average human at sea level.
But that's the basic starting point, because we could think of oxygen producing lifeforms as well, which would be less massive than a human in general, and thus mean even higher energy levels.
50,000 rem is 500 Sv (sieverts).
1 Sv = 1 J/kg = 1 m²/s²
So you have an average human body taking 500 J/kg of radiation. With a 80 kg man, that's 40,000 joules.

Now, working on the total surface area of typical human, 1.8 m², you have 40 e3 J/ 1.8, so the intensity, at sea level, is 22,222 J/m².
Going with a planet like Earth and a radius of 6371 km, the energy is:
5.1 e14 m² x 22,222 joules, thus 1.13332 e19 J.

This would correspond to the particles hitting the planet a few minutes after the burst occurred, and that's fairly ignoring that such energy wouldn't really make it through the ocean and kill the life down there, and obviously totally fail to kill the life on the rest of Lantea.

There still remains the plasma stream, which would arrive much later on.

Yes I already calculated the figure on the first page. As I pointed out several times Rodney had no idea whether the flare would last seconds or hours therefore he couldn't actually know the final energy level absorbed by the planet. 50,000 rems was probably a worst case scenario.

And as I already said, even under mere seconds, ALL cases were mass extinction events anyway.
So even with 1000 rems - the basic requirement to kill a human - instead of 50,000 rems, you still get hundreds of megatons of total energy (my result /50).
And that would come terribly short of killing life to any great extent, especially aquatic life.

Just like the speed figure. Doesn't matter though, because even with 1 Sv, you still obtain a radiation energy figure in the high petajoules.

Yes over an unknown time period. Since the final jet only lasted for minutes and not hours as Rodney thought possible it's obvious that the jet ultimately ended up being on the lower scale of energy content.

See above. Even seconds worth of radiation completely dwarfs your estimation by at least 8 orders of magnitude.

You got it wrong. Even with the second-long burst, it would have still killed life. So anyway you know you're looking at more than 1000 rems anyway (50 times less than the figure I used), which gives high petajoules.

No one said any such thing. 50,000 rem is a total energy figure absorbed by an organism. Organism doesn't need to absorb a lethal dose in 1 second for it to kill it.

No, but a human surely dies at 1000 rems. Time is completely irrelevant, since the ship would stay there as long as necessary.
A EMR blast that delivers 1000 rems to a human leads to many hundreds of megatons of energy over the whole planet.
That is what the ship would have to intercept, at the very least, and that regarless of the shape, regardless of time.

Your calculations may be correct, but their premise is absolutely wrong, so it makes your calculations quite meaningless.

What premise? That pressure of the surrounding corona and the jet must be equal? There is no other force which could keep the jet focused. And there is especially no force which could somehow scoop up billions of tons of matter and focus it into a thin jet and keep it coherent as you suggest.

Which is what I keep saying.
But your calculation provides a power figure that would totally fail at even harming Earth, which is exposed to much more energy per second than what your calculation returns.

[Kane Starkiller]

Depends which source we use. The dialogue has McKay saying they would intercept the stream before it would fan out, which is actually a hint to what happened, and this exactly what happened in fact. The visuals show all the visible matter start from a large super area and then hit the ship in the form of a tube that's narrower than the shield.
If the stream lost any mass, it is negligible in light of what is seen, because the fact that the fact this supposed waste is totally seen is a good hint that the density is negligible.

We see the matter collapse onto the surface of the star and then a jet erupts from the surface of the said star. There is absolutely no evidence all that collapsed matter reerupted in the form of the said jet nor is it even possible that a huge CME can somehow be compressed into a superdense jet stream.

Yes, there are. You just need a force field strong enough to do it. And don't be scared by the term. A magnetic field is a force field.
It's just that they don't exist naturally and it's scientifically bogus. But that we agree on.
Notice, again, how I said that I preferably went down the road of the super CME being a super blast that already expands.
However - and thanks for ignoring this simple point - I already said that even in such a case, the fraction of the super CME that Daedalus intercepted would have destroyed life on the planet.

Except the magnetic field would have to be impossibly strong. Not to mention that the magnetic field's of a star would make a loop that brought it back to the start rather than a jet that shoots straight to the planet.
Your simple point is a prediction by Rodney: no evidence he was right in the end.

Your calcuation is stupid. You don't kill life with gigawatts.
I even proved that even with 1000 rems, you'd get high megatons, near gigaton levels of energy being intercepted.

I pointed time and time again that there is a difference between what Rodney thought will happen and what actually happened. Just because the calculations of an observed event don't mesh with Rodney's prediction doesn't somehow disprove the calculations. It means Rodney was wrong. Furthermore rem is a measure of energy and gigawatts are a measure of power. If the flare lasts long enough then organic life would still receive large doses of gamma and x-ray radiation.

Hello?
I already said so! But that's what happened.
Even the premise you used for your calc would be impossible, and no one would have bothered intercepting a couple of gigawatts for crissake.
Just try to look at your own calcs and see how absurd they are.
Earth is constantly hit by 1.38 kW/m². Over a surface area of 2.55 e14 m². Even with one watt, that's already several terawatts for the exposed side of our planet.
We're already above your measly gigawatt figure every darn second of your life, yet I don't recall any NASA mission which goal was to intercept the sun's rays and other winds.

Se above. There is a difference with power output and total absorbed radiation. Visible light radiation is not comparable to x-ray and gamma radiation. I can lie on the beach all day and absorb on the order of 10 MJ of energy. If I absorb that equivalent in gamma rays I'm dead meat.

And as I already said, even under mere seconds, ALL cases were mass extinction events anyway.
So even with 1000 rems - the basic requirement to kill a human - instead of 50,000 rems, you still get hundreds of megatons of total energy (my result /50).
And that would come terribly short of killing life to any great extent, especially aquatic life.

I still await for your evidence that they thought 50,000 rems will be absorbed within seconds as opposed to it being the total radiation the flare might release. I say might because Rodney ultimately didn't know how long it will last. Also why do you think that Rodney's predictions of how powerful the flare would be should override the actual observed behaviour of the flare.

See above. Even seconds worth of radiation completely dwarfs your estimation by at least 8 orders of magnitude.

You keep claiming that 50,000 rems would be absorbed within seconds without any evidence.

No, but a human surely dies at 1000 rems. Time is completely irrelevant, since the ship would stay there as long as necessary.
A EMR blast that delivers 1000 rems to a human leads to many hundreds of megatons of energy over the whole planet.
That is what the ship would have to intercept, at the very least, and that regarless of the shape, regardless of time.

Yes but if that energy is spread across many hours than the actual power is relatively low. 1000MT across, say, 4 hours is 70kt/s even if we accept that the final flare would actually cause a mass extinction. We can't even accurately predict earthquakes and tsunamis why should we trust that Rodney can predict the final energy level of a forming flare with such accuracy?
When you compare that with, at least, 10kt/s concentrated Shadow beam and the fact that it was likely 100kt/s since it sliced through Narn ships with no resistance it becomes clear that Shadow ships could indeed harm even a ZPM powered Daedalus.

Which is what I keep saying.
But your calculation provides a power figure that would totally fail at even harming Earth, which is exposed to much more energy per second than what your calculation returns.

The particle stream itself couldn't cause damage no. But the possible x-ray or gamma radiation could.

[Mr. Oragahn]

We're going nowhere with that. Just state your position clearly, so we may close this topic which has nothing to do with the thread in question.

Eventually, I may even see with JMS if he'd prefer to cut the Echoes blah blah and clip it there.

[Kane Starkiller]

My position is simple: the incident in Echoes in no way points to multigigaton or multiteraton energy levels that were initially claimed and which were derived by using the properties of massive CMEs hundreds of thousands of km wide and applying them to a small 100 meters wide jet of plasma.
In fact there are no natural mechanisms on a star which can create energy and power densities claimed to be contained in that jet. The upper limit on what the Daedalus absorbed is in TW or perhaps tens or hundreds of TW.
This puts their shields on a similar level as Shadow battlecrab weaponry. Maybe the shields can be easily pentrated by one battlecrab maybe several would be needed. We can't know for certain based on this single event since we can only get into a few orders of magnitude accuracy.

Thus Shadows as a race, considering the number of vessels they posses, are at least equal to any conventional race in Stargate and probably more powerful since most seem to posses only a handful of ships but don't hold me to that because I haven't watched many of Stargate episodes.
Furthermore since Star Trek also features similar incidents: DS9 Relics, TNG Descent, DS9 Dogs of War (the one when they blow the Dominion shipyard with plasma eruption), TNG Redemption where two BoPs are destroyed by a photosphere plasma eruption etc. it's ships can also be threatened and destroyed by Shadow battlecrabs.

[Mr. Oragahn]

My position is simple: the incident in Echoes in no way points to multigigaton or multiteraton energy levels that were initially claimed and which were derived by using the properties of massive CMEs hundreds of thousands of km wide and applying them to a small 100 meters wide jet of plasma.

Yes, there are many problems with that.

In fact there are no natural mechanisms on a star which can create energy and power densities claimed to be contained in that jet.

This is correct.
However, I'd like to know how you explain what characters say and what we see.
There is simply no way the stream could have been that visible if it had been of a density similar to the density of coronal gases.

The upper limit on what the Daedalus absorbed is in TW or perhaps tens or hundreds of TW.

Your figure was around 3.2 GW. How is it that it has changed into a terawatt ranged figure?

And what evidence is ignored for TW to become an upper end?

Let's use the 50,000 rems-derived figure, and divide it by two for a half of the planetary surface.
I obtained a total of 5,666.6 e15 joules. This is not lowerable.
23 hours, which would be the longest duration, would be 82,800 seconds.

This gives us a power of 68.437 TW.
There, your upper end happens to be, in truth, the lower end of the spectrum, and in fact a lower end that's waaaaay below the lower end.

Yet, the rem figures doesn't take into account how many radiations would be absorbed or deflected by the atmosphere before actually hitting a human at sea level.

Let's take a look at the sunlight, again.
This time I'll be lazy and rapturously quote wikipedia:

Sunlight, in the broad sense, is the total frequency spectrum of electromagnetic radiation given off by the Sun. On Earth, sunlight is filtered through the Earth's atmosphere, and solar radiation is obvious as daylight when the Sun is above the horizon.

When the direct solar radiation is not blocked by clouds, it is experienced as sunshine, a combination of bright light and radiant heat. The World Meteorological Organization uses the term "sunshine duration" to mean the cumulative time during a period, that an area receives direct irradiance from the Sun of at least 120 watts per square meter.

You already have less than 10% of the intensity that hits the top atmosphere.

Direct sunlight has a luminous efficacy of about 93 lumens per watt of radiant flux, which includes infrared, visible, and ultraviolet light.

The range of emissions you spoke of earlier on, gamma and X-ray radiations, are largely filtered out.

X-ray astronomy is an observational branch of astronomy which deals with the study of X-ray emission from celestial objects. X-radiation is absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere, so instruments to detect X-rays must be taken to high altitude by balloons, sounding rockets, and satellites. X-ray astronomy is part of space science.

...

X-rays start at ~0.008 nm and extend across the electromagnetic spectrum to ~8 nm, over which Earth's atmosphere is opaque.

...

Although the more energetic X-rays, photons with an energy greater than 30 keV (4,800 aJ), can penetrate the air at least for distances of a few meters, the Earth's atmosphere is thick enough that virtually none are able to penetrate from outer space all the way to the Earth's surface (they would have been detected and medical X-ray machines would not work if this was not the case). X-rays in the 0.5 to 5 keV (80 to 800 aJ) range, where most celestial sources give off the bulk of their energy, can be stopped by a few sheets of paper; ninety percent of the photons in a beam of 3 keV (480 aJ) X-rays are absorbed by traveling through just 10 cm of air.

*

X-rays? Insignificant.

Gamma rays are absorbed by the atmosphere and must be studied from a space telescope.

...

Most gamma rays coming from space are absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere, so gamma-ray astronomy could not develop until it was possible to get detectors above all or most of the atmosphere using balloons and spacecraft.

...

Very energetic gamma rays, with photon energies over ~30 GeV, can also be detected by ground based experiments. The extremely low photon fluxes at such high energies require detector effective areas that are impractically large for current space-based instruments. Fortunately such high-energy photons produce extensive showers of secondary particles in the atmosphere that can be observed on the ground, both directly by radiation counters and optically via the Cherenkov light the ultra-relativistic shower particles emit. The Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescope technique currently achieves the highest sensitivity. The Crab Nebula, a steady source of so called TeV gamma-rays, was first detected in 1989 by the Whipple Observatory at Mt. Hopkins, in Arizona in the USA. Modern Cherenkov telescope experiments like H.E.S.S., VERITAS, MAGIC, and CANGAROO III can detect the Crab Nebula in a few minutes. The most energetic photons (up to 16 TeV) observed from an extragalactic object originate from the blazar Markarian 501 (Mrk 501). These measurements were done by the High-Energy-Gamma-Ray Astronomy (HEGRA) air Cherenkov telescopes.

*

Even measuring such powerful photons require large surface areas which are impractical for space based intruments, and are not even directly measured on the ground.

Right there, I don't even know how powerful the gamma rays would need to be, and how many of there must be to started being noticed by the human body.
Obtaining a precise value of atmospheric absorption of even the most powerful gamma rays may help.

Solar constant
A 1903 Langley bolograph with an erroneous solar constant of 2.54 calories/minute/square centimeter.
Solar irradiance spectrum at top of atmosphere, on a linear scale and plotted against wavenumber.

The solar constant, a measure of flux, is the amount of incoming solar electromagnetic radiation per unit area that would be incident on a plane perpendicular to the rays, at a distance of one astronomical unit (AU) (roughly the mean distance from the Sun to the Earth). When solar irradiance is measured on the outer surface of Earth's atmosphere, the measurements can be adjusted using the inverse square law to infer the magnitude of solar irradiance at one AU and deduce the solar constant.

The solar constant includes all types of solar radiation, not just the visible light. It is measured by satellite to be roughly 1.366 kilowatts per square meter (kW/m²). The actual direct solar irradiance at the top of the atmosphere fluctuates by about 6.9% during a year (from 1.412 kW/m² in early January to 1.321 kW/m² in early July) due to the Earth's varying distance from the Sun, and typically by much less than one part per thousand from day to day. Thus, for the whole Earth (which has a cross section of 127,400,000 km²), the power is 1.740 e17 W, plus or minus 3.5%. The solar constant does not remain constant over long periods of time (see Solar variation), but over a year varies much less than the variation of direct solar irradiance at the top of the atmosphere arising from the ellipticity of the Earth's orbit. The approximate average value cited, 1.366 kW/m², is equivalent to 1.96 calories per minute per square centimeter, or 1.96 langleys (Ly) per minute.

The Earth receives a total amount of radiation determined by its cross section (pi·RE²), but as it rotates this energy is distributed across the entire surface area (4·pi·RE²). Hence the average incoming solar radiation, taking into account the angle at which the rays strike and that at any one moment half the planet does not receive any solar radiation, is one-fourth the solar constant (approximately 342 W/m²). At any given moment, the amount of solar radiation received at a location on the Earth's surface depends on the state of the atmosphere and the location's latitude.

The solar constant includes all wavelengths of solar electromagnetic radiation, not just the visible light (see Electromagnetic spectrum). It is linked to the apparent magnitude of the Sun, --26.8, in that the solar constant and the magnitude of the Sun are two methods of describing the apparent brightness of the Sun, though the magnitude is based on the Sun's visual output only.

Remember that Earth is hit by petawatts of energy. When I said terawatts, it was after working from the abstract idea that the top atmospheric sunlight intensity was only of 1 W/m², just to give an idea.
If your figure, suddenly adjusted up to the TW range, came from the lower limit you read in my post (and I don't see anywhere else it could come from), you were wrong using it.

It all starts at the very least at a total of 1.74 e17 W over the entire exposed side of the planet.
Then, of course, if the event lasts hours, with 23 of them, you have a total of 14,407.2 e18 joules.

Then of course, you need to best that quite a lot, for your radiation to get through.

Just to give a silly sub-low end figure; If we worked with the range of EMR which reach the ground in any noticeable fashion (this leaves X-rays and gamma-rays out), assuming you'd be ionized by said sunlight, to get 22,222 J/m², you need to get more than ten times this amount of energy hitting the atmosphere, over the complete spectrum. 56.66 e18 J, in other words.

Quite likely, and in all logic, for your gamma-rays or X-rays to become relevant, you're going to need to seriously amp up the energy over those ranges.

The figure could get so high, I wouldn't be surprised to easily reach the teraton range again, if not more.

This puts their shields on a similar level as Shadow battlecrab weaponry. Maybe the shields can be easily pentrated by one battlecrab maybe several would be needed. We can't know for certain based on this single event since we can only get into a few orders of magnitude accuracy.
Thus Shadows as a race, considering the number of vessels they posses, are at least equal to any conventional race in Stargate and probably more powerful since most seem to posses only a handful of ships but don't hold me to that because I haven't watched many of Stargate episodes.

Your figure is incorrect. Besides, they were using a ZPM.
Although from your pov it would mean things would be even worse with vanilla starships, from mine, there's no way to gauge anything to reach any conclusion.

Furthermore since Star Trek also features similar incidents: DS9 Relics, TNG Descent, DS9 Dogs of War (the one when they blow the Dominion shipyard with plasma eruption), TNG Redemption where two BoPs are destroyed by a photosphere plasma eruption etc. it's ships can also be threatened and destroyed by Shadow battlecrabs.

Indeed, for all the nonsense Wong puts up on his webpages, he also happens to be right from time to time, and he did find some low ends. However, his error is that he only focuses on them.

[Jedi Master Spock]

Provide calculations and evidence behind your 200 joules energy figure.

0.0004 kg* striking the vessel at 1 km/s (the visuals) every second. What, you need me to spell out the kinetic energy formula for you?

* That's your estimate of the mass involved, but you subsequently admitted it would be lower, so the real energy is probably below 1 joule per second.

I'm not interested in your vague claims like "effectively zero". I have used the standard figure for coronal density

And using the standard figure for coronal density is fucked because they’re not inside the corona you twat. Furthermore the jet would have to travel through empty space to get to the planet. Which means the pressure of the jet has to be roughly on par with total and complete vacuum. This in turn means the energy being delivered to the planet will drop to less then a trillionth of a joule.

And if your numbers are correct that means that the ship is even less resistant than I calculated.

Perhaps I didn’t make it clear enough for you: It means your argument is self-defeating. Because you're claiming that less then 1 joule of energy is capable of killing all life on planet earth. This is not possible. Neither is it possible that less then a joule of energy is capable of destroying a BC-304.

What mechanism could cause such uncertainties in the rate of the energy release? And this still doesn't make Rodney more credible: if he had no idea how long the flare would last why should we trust in his estimate of the total energy

Because he estimated the entire planet would die. Then he estimated that the ship might be able to prevent it. What happened? The ship barely prevented it. Thus his predictions came true.

even if we accept your bizarre notion that the duration of the flare is somehow not connected with it's energy content.

Are you so fucking dumb that you need me to explain the difference between power and energy to you? You know - watts and joules?

Bullshit? Because you say so? Provide some evidence, numbers and physical formulas and we'll talk.

Alright. Why don't we start by looking at something gaseous with the density of, say, 1 kg/m^3. How do you imagine something like that would look to the human eye? I mean this is something more then a trillion times more dense then your hypothetical jet. And since your jet is clearly visible, then this should be a trillion times more visible, no?

So is there some gas near you, right now, that might be around 1 kg/m^3?

I didn't think you were talking about physical state when you called it solid. This is why I was declaring it subjective. And now you just pick arbitrary numbers from thin air. 7000kg/m3? Why not 7,000,0000,000,000,000kg/m3?

You're right in a way, it'd be pretty impossible for us to spot the difference between 7,000 kg/m^3 and 7,000,0000,000,000,000 kg/m^3 with our eyes. So hypothetically that could be the density of the jet we saw.

You are as dishonest as usual. In this thread you insisted that the plasma jet moved at thousands of km/s complete with screencaps which you claim prove your point but now when I actually agree that my method of measuring the speed might not have been accurate you turn around.

Because in that thread I suggested we shouldn't look at visuals exclusively. Your methodology however suggests we should look at visuals exclusively. I'm just forcing you to follow through on that logic and do it uniformly for the entire quantification.

I stand by what I said just now however: That jet moved no more then 1 km/s according to visuals.

See above. You are describing yourself now. It is you who had to lower the numbers in a desperate attempt to have them dismissed.

I'm just forcing you to follow your own methodology to completion. Which leads us to conclude that less then a joule of energy threatened to kill all life on a planet much like earth. You're trying to up the figure slightly because you know just how retarded you would look if you came out and said that a planet could be killed with less then a joule of energy, thus you try to increase the velocity to higher then the visuals show.

If we take your densities as fact, and apply the velocity of the jet to it, then what I'm saying becomes undeniable physical fact.

So? Who said Rodney has a crystal ball? If the flare turned out not to be energetic enough then he was wrong.

His prediction was that the planet would be destroyed but the ship might be able to deflect the flare. What happened? The ship barely managed to deflect the flare. That means he was right in his estimation.

If the flare had been trillions upon trillions of times weaker, then he would've said: "Lol guys, let's go home, this thing literally couldn't kill a single human even at this range."

And if the plasma jet indeed had 200 J/s energy content then that is very damning for the Daedalus.

This is something I will forever remind you of in every debate henceforth. That you literally suggested that a pistol shot could destroy a BC-304. It’s so stupid that you don’t even need to say anything more then so to point out just how braindead your arguments get.

Ambient radiation from a star at that distance would be roughly 8MW/m2 so the flare had to be more energetic to matter to Daedalus.

As I said: Your figures are self-defeating. Sunlight is more dangerous then this CME, if we're to believe your figures.

Depending on actual coronal density it could be 30GW or 300GW or even TW level.

No. The figures would range from 200 joules to less then 1 joule. Why? Because you're assuming 4,000 km/s jet velocity even when visuals show us that it doesn't exceed 1 km/s.

Liking SW is not the same as being a Warsie the way you use the term.

Of course not. You're just a poor misunderstood fan, aren't you? :(

Secondly SDN is not a physical place so I can't really "hang out".

Of course. Because a place has to be physical in order to “hang out”.

Christ.

It's not an act

Of course not. You really are a Fiver at heart. It's just that you exclusively argue against B5 and exclusively argue for SW, no matter the topic. Because that's what Fivers do, apparently.

I trust my arguments speak enough for me

Oh they do. You're suggesting that if I shot a pistol at the ground, all life on the planet dies, and that if we shoot a pistol at a BC-304 it dies. That speaks volumes of the validity of your argument.

For the second time in this thread, l33telboi, I'm reminding you that insults are against the board rules here. Please cool it.

[Kane Starkiller]

This is correct.
However, I'd like to know how you explain what characters say and what we see.
There is simply no way the stream could have been that visible if it had been of a density similar to the density of coronal gases.

How do you know? I showed the calculations to support my claim of low density and temperature. They show the stream could actually be 100 times or more denser than the corona depending on the temperature ratios. Furthermore hot gas will also emit large amounts of light as it cools down so it doesn't need to be as dense as gases on room temperature in order to be visible.

Your figure was around 3.2 GW. How is it that it has changed into a terawatt ranged figure?

And what evidence is ignored for TW to become an upper end?

Let's use the 50,000 rems-derived figure, and divide it by two for a half of the planetary surface.
I obtained a total of 5,666.6 e15 joules. This is not lowerable.
23 hours, which would be the longest duration, would be 82,800 seconds.

This gives us a power of 68.437 TW.
There, your upper end happens to be, in truth, the lower end of the spectrum, and in fact a lower end that's waaaaay below the lower end.

Yet, the rem figures doesn't take into account how many radiations would be absorbed or deflected by the atmosphere before actually hitting a human at sea level.

My GW level figure was calculated for the kinetic energy of the particle stream. The one people claimed will be millions of megatons or whatever by using the mass of the actual CMEs. Additional components like standard radiation from the sun and gamma ray bursts released by the collapse of the flare would further up the figure but not above rough TW level.

Remember that Earth is hit by petawatts of energy. When I said terawatts, it was after working from the abstract idea that the top atmospheric sunlight intensity was only of 1 W/m², just to give an idea.
If your figure, suddenly adjusted up to the TW range, came from the lower limit you read in my post (and I don't see anywhere else it could come from), you were wrong using it.

It all starts at the very least at a total of 1.74 e17 W over the entire exposed side of the planet.
Then, of course, if the event lasts hours, with 23 of them, you have a total of 14,407.2 e18 joules.

Then of course, you need to best that quite a lot, for your radiation to get through.

Just to give a silly sub-low end figure; If we worked with the range of EMR which reach the ground in any noticeable fashion (this leaves X-rays and gamma-rays out), assuming you'd be ionized by said sunlight, to get 22,222 J/m², you need to get more than ten times this amount of energy hitting the atmosphere, over the complete spectrum. 56.66 e18 J, in other words.

Quite likely, and in all logic, for your gamma-rays or X-rays to become relevant, you're going to need to seriously amp up the energy over those ranges.

The figure could get so high, I wouldn't be surprised to easily reach the teraton range again, if not more.

Earth is hit by petawatts of visible light. That is not the same as being hit by petawatts of gamma rays which would presumably be released by the collapse of the flare and it's collision with the stellar surface. I already went through this.
Secondly how do you jump from 10^19J that would irradiate a human with lethal doses to teraton level or over hundred times?

Your figure is incorrect. Besides, they were using a ZPM.
Although from your pov it would mean things would be even worse with vanilla starships, from mine, there's no way to gauge anything to reach any conclusion.

Then show how they are incorrect. Is the gas pressure formula incorrect? Are my figures for coronal density and temperature incorrect? There is no way such a narrow stream can carry as much power either in the form of kinetic energy of particles or gamma or visible light radiation. If that means the planet won't be sterilized that means Rodney was wrong. After all the fact that whales detected an incoming flare doesn't mean they can actually predict the power level of the jet or that Rodney can do the same.
EDIT: What do you mean there is no way to determine ZPMs enhance the shields? What was the point of bringing the ZPM then? They explicitly state they would need the extra power to the shields that the ZPM would provide and Rodney mentions it would be even better if they had all three (obviously).
I mean are you saying ZPM actually decreased the shield strength of the ship?

Indeed, for all the nonsense Wong puts up on his webpages, he also happens to be right from time to time, and he did find some low ends. However, his error is that he only focuses on them.

I can't think of any incidents where ST shields endured much larger energy levels.

[Mr. Oragahn]

This is correct.
However, I'd like to know how you explain what characters say and what we see.
There is simply no way the stream could have been that visible if it had been of a density similar to the density of coronal gases.

How do you know? I showed the calculations to support my claim of low density and temperature. They show the stream could actually be 100 times or more denser than the corona depending on the temperature ratios. Furthermore hot gas will also emit large amounts of light as it cools down so it doesn't need to be as dense as gases on room temperature in order to be visible.

Have you looked at the episode recently?
The stream is more opaque than the Watergate.

My GW level figure was calculated for the kinetic energy of the particle stream. The one people claimed will be millions of megatons or whatever by using the mass of the actual CMEs. Additional components like standard radiation from the sun and gamma ray bursts released by the collapse of the flare would further up the figure but not above rough TW level.

Oh yes they would, for all the reasons I listed.

Remember that Earth is hit by petawatts of energy. When I said terawatts, it was after working from the abstract idea that the top atmospheric sunlight intensity was only of 1 W/m², just to give an idea.
If your figure, suddenly adjusted up to the TW range, came from the lower limit you read in my post (and I don't see anywhere else it could come from), you were wrong using it.

It all starts at the very least at a total of 1.74 e17 W over the entire exposed side of the planet.
Then, of course, if the event lasts hours, with 23 of them, you have a total of 14,407.2 e18 joules.

Then of course, you need to best that quite a lot, for your radiation to get through.

Just to give a silly sub-low end figure; If we worked with the range of EMR which reach the ground in any noticeable fashion (this leaves X-rays and gamma-rays out), assuming you'd be ionized by said sunlight, to get 22,222 J/m², you need to get more than ten times this amount of energy hitting the atmosphere, over the complete spectrum. 56.66 e18 J, in other words.

Quite likely, and in all logic, for your gamma-rays or X-rays to become relevant, you're going to need to seriously amp up the energy over those ranges.

The figure could get so high, I wouldn't be surprised to easily reach the teraton range again, if not more.

Earth is hit by petawatts of visible light. That is not the same as being hit by petawatts of gamma rays which would presumably be released by the collapse of the flare and it's collision with the stellar surface. I already went through this.

Again: "The solar constant includes all types of solar radiation, not just the visible light. It is measured by satellite to be roughly 1.366 kilowatts per square meter (kW/m²)."

There's logically no reason for the gamma-rays and X-rays not to reach the top of the atmosphere since there's no obstable between Earth and the Sun, and the only reason for a lack of gamma-rays and X-rays would be that the light that emanates from the sun would lack photons within those wavelengths.

See here:

Given the amount of energy radiated by the sun and the average Earth-sun distance of 149.5 million kilometers, the amount of radiation intercepted by the outer limits of the atmosphere can be calculated to be around 1,367 W/m2. Only about 40% of the solar energy intercepted at the top of Earth's atmosphere passes through to the surface. The atmosphere reflects and scatters some of the received visible radiation. Gamma rays, X-rays, and ultraviolet radiation less than 200 nanometers in wavelength are selectively absorbed in the atmosphere by oxygen and nitrogen and turned into heat energy. Most of the solar ultraviolet radiation with a range of wavelengths from 200 to 300 nm is absorbed by the concentration of ozone (O3) gas found in the stratosphere. Infrared solar radiation with wavelengths greater than 700 nm is partially absorbed by carbon dioxide, ozone, and water present in the atmosphere in liquid and vapour forms. Roughly 30% of the sun's visible radiation (wavelengths from 400 nm to 700 nm) is reflected back to space by the atmosphere or the Earth's surface. The reflectivity of the Earth or any body is referred to as its albedo, defined as the ratio of light reflected to the light received from a source, expressed as a number between zero (total absorption) and one (total reflectance).

Secondly how do you jump from 10^19J that would irradiate a human with lethal doses to teraton level or over hundred times?

I considered it more than likely, because the rems is relative to intoxication by radiation, the bulk dose counted in grays, which is relatie to X-rays and gamma-rays.
Those two same wavelengths that, for some, don't make it through the atmosphere, and for other, so barely that measuring them is still done in orbit, or done by measuring after effects throughout the atmosphere.

Your figure is incorrect. Besides, they were using a ZPM.
Although from your pov it would mean things would be even worse with vanilla starships, from mine, there's no way to gauge anything to reach any conclusion.

Then show how they are incorrect. Is the gas pressure formula incorrect? Are my figures for coronal density and temperature incorrect? There is no way such a narrow stream can carry as much power either in the form of kinetic energy of particles or gamma or visible light radiation.

Stop saying that, you're tiring. We all know it makes fuck sense in light of science. The point is that either you admit what's impossible happened, or you ditch the whole episode, which wouldn't be a problem to me. But don't try to shoehorn figures that fit with nothing.

If that means the planet won't be sterilized that means Rodney was wrong.

See, that's shoehorning your figure. Rodney was right, it happened before, and did again then.

After all the fact that whales detected an incoming flare doesn't mean they can actually predict the power level of the jet or that Rodney can do the same.

The whales are not the problem at all.

Indeed, for all the nonsense Wong puts up on his webpages, he also happens to be right from time to time, and he did find some low ends. However, his error is that he only focuses on them.

I can't think of any incidents where ST shields endured much larger energy levels.

But we know it can withstand shots from weapons, phasers or torpedoes, which are rated well above that. They are all over this website and even present at SB.com, within vivftp's own threads. vivftp tends to provide lower figures, but they still totally dwarf the numbers Wong obtained. There's obviously a bracket, and the question is one of probabilities averages. You take those which are the closest to each other and the more numerous, because they represent a more coherent groups that outnumbers other incidents. ST has its fair share of torpedoes blasting asteroids.

[Kane Starkiller]

Have you looked at the episode recently?
The stream is more opaque than the Watergate.

I never disputed that. It obviously isn't transparent. But you still haven't shown that it wouldn't be opaque at the densities I calculated. Furthermore it is entirely possible it's opacity doesn't stem from the fact that it blocks light but from the fact the particles in the jet stream themselves emit light due to their large temperature thus the only thing we can make out is bright light.

Again: "The solar constant includes all types of solar radiation, not just the visible light. It is measured by satellite to be roughly 1.366 kilowatts per square meter (kW/m²)."

There's logically no reason for the gamma-rays and X-rays not to reach the top of the atmosphere since there's no obstable between Earth and the Sun, and the only reason for a lack of gamma-rays and X-rays would be that the light that emanates from the sun would lack photons within those wavelengths.

Yes normally a star of Sun type emits only a tiny fraction if it's total light in x-ray or gamma ray part of the spectrum. However presumably a violent collapse of a flare would release a larger percentage of gamma rays. I assume this to be charitable to Rodney. It doesn't in any way change the fact that 100m wide jet of plasma or radiation will be limited in it's power content.

I considered it more than likely, because the rems is relative to intoxication by radiation, the bulk dose counted in grays, which is relatie to X-rays and gamma-rays.
Those two same wavelengths that, for some, don't make it through the atmosphere, and for other, so barely that measuring them is still done in orbit, or done by measuring after effects throughout the atmosphere.

Look no offense but what you consider likely is your subjective opinion. I see no objective reason to jump from 10^19J to 10^21J. And again: it doesn't change the limitations on the actual jet I already demonstrated many times.

Stop saying that, you're tiring. We all know it makes fuck sense in light of science. The point is that either you admit what's impossible happened, or you ditch the whole episode, which wouldn't be a problem to me. But don't try to shoehorn figures that fit with nothing.

It makes sense in the light of science it observes limitation on it's pressure and density I have demonstrated. That is the whole point. You insist it's denser than the laws of physics allow and then claim it doesn't make sense. Of course it doesn't. This is why I am correct and you are not.

See, that's shoehorning your figure. Rodney was right, it happened before, and did again then.

How can you possibly know he was right? He had no clue how long the flare would last in the end. The flare never reached the planet. What is your evidence he was right?

The whales are not the problem at all.

What do you mean by that? I merely observed that their alarm doesn't necessarily mean they actually predicted the strength of the flare.

But we know it can withstand shots from weapons, phasers or torpedoes, which are rated well above that. They are all over this website and even present at SB.com, within vivftp's own threads. vivftp tends to provide lower figures, but they still totally dwarf the numbers Wong obtained. There's obviously a bracket, and the question is one of probabilities averages. You take those which are the closest to each other and the more numerous, because they represent a more coherent groups that outnumbers other incidents. ST has its fair share of torpedoes blasting asteroids.

Obviously any spacefaring civilization can build multimegaton weapons. US navy could install 100kt warheads on all it's SM-2 and SM-3 missiles on an Arleigh Burke. That would give it the firepower of 8MT. That doesn't mean a Burke can withstand such firepower.
The possibility that major Star Trek civilizations can install 1MT or 100MT warhead on a photon torpedo has no bearing on the defensive capabilities of their shields which are constrained by independent events.
USS Cole was almost sunk by a small terrorist boat carrying decidedly non-nuclear weapons, no matter what kind of high-yield nuclear weapons USS Cole receives in the future won't change that fact and the established upper limit on the strength of it's hull.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Have you looked at the episode recently?
The stream is more opaque than the Watergate.

I never disputed that. It obviously isn't transparent. But you still haven't shown that it wouldn't be opaque at the densities I calculated.

They are your result. Prove that we would see anything at such densities.

Furthermore it is entirely possible it's opacity doesn't stem from the fact that it blocks light but from the fact the particles in the jet stream themselves emit light due to their large temperature thus the only thing we can make out is bright light.

Perhaps, or not. It's up to tell me why I should accept your calcs and assume that they would somehow fit with the idea that we would see the stream.
You're having an issue about double standards here, and l33telboi pointed it out a long time ago: how can it be that a stream that starts from a sun spot that is visible from that distance, can be naturally compressed into such a narrow stream, at which point the respective pressures of the corona and the stream would match?
If you cannot explain that, your calculation was pretty much pointless.

Again: "The solar constant includes all types of solar radiation, not just the visible light. It is measured by satellite to be roughly 1.366 kilowatts per square meter (kW/m²)."

There's logically no reason for the gamma-rays and X-rays not to reach the top of the atmosphere since there's no obstable between Earth and the Sun, and the only reason for a lack of gamma-rays and X-rays would be that the light that emanates from the sun would lack photons within those wavelengths.

Yes normally a star of Sun type emits only a tiny fraction if it's total light in x-ray or gamma ray part of the spectrum. However presumably a violent collapse of a flare would release a larger percentage of gamma rays.

What is important to know is
This diagram shows what normally passes through the atmosphere and where it stops.
Needless to say that to be radiation poisoned while sitting in Atlantis, you're going to need to be exposed to a fuckton of hard X-rays and gamma-rays, and only atmospheric absorption figures for such wavelengths can tell us what figures we need to look for. Why I think it's going to be huge is for the simple fact that even the punchiest wavelenghts like hard X-rays barely pass through meters of the atmosphere.

I assume this to be charitable to Rodney. It doesn't in any way change the fact that 100m wide jet of plasma or radiation will be limited in it's power content.

I think we should really separate the radiation pulse from the plasma blast. For the plasma blast, we need the density, and I'll actually to see how you demonstrate that your calcs would result in such a thick and visible stream.
It would be a good thing if I were you, to look at densities of solar flares and the density of the photosphere material, which we know are much more visible.
THis Google-scanned book talks about solar flares. A few pages down from the one you'll get to, you can read examples of jets even narrowed to 3 km wide.

Besides, l33telboi asked you this, and I don't remember if you replied or not, but what is your stance on the visuals? Because they don't really show anything moving at 40,000 km/s either, and the effect actually looks like crap, especially the bits of blob that are deflected by the shield!

I considered it more than likely, because the rems is relative to intoxication by radiation, the bulk dose counted in grays, which is relatie to X-rays and gamma-rays.
Those two same wavelengths that, for some, don't make it through the atmosphere, and for other, so barely that measuring them is still done in orbit, or done by measuring after effects throughout the atmosphere.

Look no offense but what you consider likely is your subjective opinion. I see no objective reason to jump from 10^19J to 10^21J. And again: it doesn't change the limitations on the actual jet I already demonstrated many times.

As pointed out above, the jet is independant of the radiations. The radiations will cross space at c. The "jet" moves at 40,000 km/s.
Sure, the shield is supposed to stop both, but they can be calculated separatedly. The first by figuring out what's necessary to poison people at sea level, the other by figuring out why you started to do, but which in my opinion suffers from being stuck between two opinions on the matter, which seem to be ignore the episode or take what we saw at face value.
Are you trying to make sense of what we saw, or are you running of some other premise, by selecting only some elements from the event?
That and you haven't demonstrated yet that with the pressures you used, the stream would be visible, so for the moment it's more a standby than anything else.

Stop saying that, you're tiring. We all know it makes fuck sense in light of science. The point is that either you admit what's impossible happened, or you ditch the whole episode, which wouldn't be a problem to me. But don't try to shoehorn figures that fit with nothing.

It makes sense in the light of science it observes limitation on it's pressure and density I have demonstrated. That is the whole point. You insist it's denser than the laws of physics allow and then claim it doesn't make sense. Of course it doesn't. This is why I am correct and you are not.

You are no more correct than me in trying to explain by science that what we saw could be explained naturally. We'll see if you manage to show that your calculation can result into a visible stream.
If not, then I guess you'll have to say we ignore visuals.

See, that's shoehorning your figure. Rodney was right, it happened before, and did again then.

How can you possibly know he was right? He had no clue how long the flare would last in the end. The flare never reached the planet. What is your evidence he was right?

Do you need a multi-kilometer wide asteroid to hit Earth to know that it would destroy life?
What he said about the stream and so on, and that after having time to verify the Lantean database, was based on the idea that he was right.
So in his mind, there could have been a stream that would kill life on the planet. And yes, in his mind, and based on the time he had to verify all that and the archives, he was convincing that this life threatening stream could be stopped by the ship before it fanned out.
And, finally, based on this, he considered that the ZPM would be necessary.

So it doesn't matter if he was right in the end, because all he assumed to happen, which actually did happen like he predicted, is what you need to use for your calcs. You cannot ditch whatever pleases you, like the fact that it would kill life on the planet for hundreds of years, because it has nothing to do with what was even theorized to happen. And McKay was convinced that the ship could withstand that onslaught. If you're trying to demonstrate that what was planned to happen in the show was scientifically impossible, then good job, because that's what I said from the beginning, and proves your calc useless.

The whales are not the problem at all.

What do you mean by that? I merely observed that their alarm doesn't necessarily mean they actually predicted the strength of the flare.

I never considered the whales proof of anything, so I still don't see what you're trying to do here.

But we know it can withstand shots from weapons, phasers or torpedoes, which are rated well above that. They are all over this website and even present at SB.com, within vivftp's own threads. vivftp tends to provide lower figures, but they still totally dwarf the numbers Wong obtained. There's obviously a bracket, and the question is one of probabilities averages. You take those which are the closest to each other and the more numerous, because they represent a more coherent groups that outnumbers other incidents. ST has its fair share of torpedoes blasting asteroids.

Obviously any spacefaring civilization can build multimegaton weapons. US navy could install 100kt warheads on all it's SM-2 and SM-3 missiles on an Arleigh Burke. That would give it the firepower of 8MT. That doesn't mean a Burke can withstand such firepower.
The possibility that major Star Trek civilizations can install 1MT or 100MT warhead on a photon torpedo has no bearing on the defensive capabilities of their shields which are constrained by independent events.
USS Cole was almost sunk by a small terrorist boat carrying decidedly non-nuclear weapons, no matter what kind of high-yield nuclear weapons USS Cole receives in the future won't change that fact and the established upper limit on the strength of it's hull.

Oh, with the slight difference that ST ships have shields which can withstand contact detonation from such weapons. I'm actually baffled that I need to point that out. These are weapons with at least very high terajoules, to many petajoules, and powers several orders of magnitude above such numbers.