Battlestar Pegasus vs. NX-01

[Mr. Oragahn]

There's a massive difference between ordering a firing solution and preparing the guns themselves for firing. In Star Trek it's the difference between a captain ordering the phasers and photon torpedoes armed on Red Alert, and then actually having the tactical officer target a specific ship, or specifc targets on said ship.

You've been assuming that nothing was prepared, and that it took all time between the arrival in the combat zone and whatever moment in the future, before Apollo orders the guns to stand by, to have the ammo ready, and that this would apply to nuclear ordnance.

Now that I've seen how it goes with the G, I can accept that it could work that way with the P, hastened by a percentage due to automation.
I can accept the idea that it takes maybe a minute to deploy and allow the use of nukes. That's hardly such a bad point.

It only applies to nuclear ordnance. It takes them like a minute maybe, two at best, from the moment they start the procedure. Ok.
It's not that important, since we agreed that both sides wouldn't directly rely on superior forms of firepower from the get go.

Actually, in the mini-series, the Galactica's port flight pod is suffers heavy damage to the forward section (the ship is nearly lost due to the secondary effects from the internal fires and such) from the nuke launched by a mere Cylon raider, and suggesting strongly that a hit by a 50 kt nuke is sufficent cause dangerously threatening damage to a battlestar.

Not surprising regarding the level of damage seen in Water.
A fully armoured, 30 years younger and more massive warship like the Pegasus, eats several bigger cylon nukes and doesn't get as much damage.
There's a difference between armour and no armour, and likely old armour and far better modern armour.

Ah, yes, I remember. A port side which lacks the external layers of armor, and which the exposed structure can be destroyed from the inside by a mere pack of C4 (Water).

Not really. Part of the area struck has a fair amount of armor covering the upper surface. The roughly 40 x 100 meter section right below the ship's name plate still bears the blackened scar from the nuke blast. Take a look this overhead image of the port flight pod (still pristine in this image):

http://media.battlestarwiki.org/images/8/8b/Hanger.JPG

1. I'll check where the missile really hits. I don't have the miniseries DVD yet. I'll come back on that later on, unless you have screenshots in stock. But I seem to recall the missile hitting somewhere in the vicinity of the nacelle's middle section. Might be wrong, but screencaps would settle this.

2. Fire has been rampant and running inside. It basically damages the superstructure from the inside. The armour plates not directly hit but holding to the ship in the fire zone won't be of any use. With internal explosions, these plates will be blown away, without necessarily being destroyed.
That's like hurting a soldier who holds a shield. The shield drops, but it's not destroyed. However, the soldier is injured, badly or not.

We're not talking about a younger and fully armoured warship.

Maybe. But the Galactica was stated to be enough on her own to still be able to seriously damage the Pegasus, and leave her vunerable to Cylon attack. The Big G maybe older, but she still is quite capable and comparable. A raider launched kilotons yeild nuke can threaten a battlestar, if it should get past the flak gun screen.

Once rearmed, the Galactica was able to engage basestars. It's not that a stretch that even if the G was to be completely destroyed in the process, it would still severely damage the Pegasus. It could concentrate on a specific point, like something related to FTL drives, and leave the Pegasus stuck there, open to a cylon attack, if it means the absolute destruction of the Galactica.
There are many ways even for a superior ship like the Pegasus to take critical damage from well placed rounds, especially with the Adamas and Starbuck leading the dance.

Given what we see of the big G's flight pod damage. The explosion covered a roughly 40 x 100 meter elliptical area (I'am actually undersizing the blast damage some given the size of the 615 m long flight pod). But give that, a 40 x 100 area would give us 4,000 meters square surface area "burned" by the 50 kt nuke. That's 210,000 gigajoules divided by 2 (only half the explosion will go to the big G flight pod), then spread the remaining 105, 000 GJ over 4,000 square meters, or 26.25 GJ per meter square.

Now an NX class phase cannon on overload can manage about 5 TJ per meter^2, or 120 times more energy delivered to the armor than the nuke. The NX-01 could, in theory, drill through the Galactica's armor, if not the Pegasus'.

According to the script, that nuke exploded like half a mile away from the hull.
Although that would mean the exposed surface was incredily weaker, considering how weak it would become, 1 square meter couldn't withstand a couple tons of TNT. Again, that's in line with sort of C4 destroying the inner layers of the Galactica.

The fact that the nuke explosion will happen within a fraction of a second will actually mean much more power than a Trek canon. The yield is not all.

Yes, there is that. But the explosion will be gone in a fraction of a second. As I calculated above, 26.25 GJ is the energy actually being delivered. So really, 1/100th of a second will mean 2.25 TW, which will be gone seconds. The phase cannon beam, on the other hand, can continously fire, and dwell on a specific spot.

But if we're correct, we're talking about a megaton explosion. Doesn't matter if it doesn't last for several seconds, it still largely outclasses many phase cannons combined.
If the Pegasus starts to mess around with megaton level nukes, even the best phaser duration will be no match in regards of the total yield and above all, power of a single nuke.
A barrage of such nukes will be hell for the NX.
The Galactica has a dozen tubes ready to fire simultaneously. The Pegasus probably has as much tubes if not more.

But this is the NX-01 merely trying to "brute force" it's way past armor, which is a waste of time. Firing at specific targets with a mind to disabling the Pegasus is the more logical way to go, and the NX-01's sensors, dispite being more primitive than the other Trek series' ships, still can read weapons and other specific potential targets.

It can't make hazardous guesses.
It needs to know what to look for, what those things. It needs to be feed with necessary data to recognize such structures.
It won't in this case. It will learn it the hard way.

You can't hotlink like that.

Could you please remove the hotlink from your post as well please, I edited my post.

Anyway, even if we go with your scaling, how does that help your case for megaton-level nukes?

Volume, sir. ;)
If a kiloton cylon nuke is only contained within the warhead part of a missile that's shorter than a Raider's wing (stern to bow), then a missile that is big as the one I'm pointing at should theoritically and logically hold enough volume to reach yields of several megatons.
As I said, such missiles are as big as the multiple megaton level bombs created in the 40-50s.
It would be literally absurd to claim that the Cylons didn't even come with something largely better than our crude first attempts, with such a large nuclear missile.

What's the best resistance the hull can come with once polarized?

We don't know. The NX class has stayed in long firefights with the superior Klingon and Vulcan ships, but that doesn't tell us much since the those vessel's beam weapon firepower has never been quantified the way the NX class has. We just know that they are much more powerful.

More powerful to what extent exactly, otherwise it's a no limit fallacy, and you could literally claim any resistance level for polarized hull.

How do we know that?

Because it has been stated and shown over and over that Vulcan and Klingon technology is generally much better than Earth 22nd century tech. The Klingons in "Judgement" even consider the NX-01's phase cannons as "Low-yield particle cannons".

At a time when the cannons only spat 500 GJ each? Season 2, episode 19.

Ah, no. This is about what is established in the stories, and there are no alternate universe nBSG stories. But there are plenty of ST Mirror universe stories. However, to avoid complications, I'll go with the presumption that this is the regular universe, peace and exploration NX-01.

The OP didn't specify the use of any special mirror/alternate universe. As far as I'm concerned, all versuses use the regular universe by default, unless the OP specifically uses altverses.

Attack from warp. Please prove it's a natural tactic, especially when it should be useful to the NX-01 when it's in great danger.

Not terribly useful when other starships can follow you into warp. The tactic works best when you are up against an opponent who cannot do that, as happened in TOS' "Elann of Troyius":

http://www.st-v-sw.net/STSWwarpturn.html

Yeah, mostly TOS stuff, and largely ignored/retconned for the grandeur of an insane amount of space battles, notably many from DS9, and that's only because I've not seen much of Trek, but I'm sure you can pick many more cases where the warp straf would have been an advantage.
It's a simple cop out, and if you want to use it, then you should have done so from the beginning.
Not that it would have changed my opinion on it anyway, but we just can see how Trekkies don't feel at ease with swinging this left and right.
You know why you didn't forward it. It utterly lacks consistency and support. That's why you literally never see it used by the Trek side, because for any example they could bring in to support it, the opposite side will likely come with a dozen cases to dispute it, and laugh at such an exceptional and unusual concept.

Plus any escape to warp to flee away from warheads should be considered more than a mere evasive manoeuver, but literally that, fleeing. Withdrawing.

That said, the Pegasus jumps away (like 40 LY in less than two minutes), and repairs itself, and both ships loose contact and it's a draw.

Yes, a draw is also possible.

Clearly.

That's just going to be particles sent into ejected plasma. How's that supposed to arrange anything?

Because the beam could remain more coherent and become less dispersed than a laser. The forward phase cannon batteries firing at a large asteroid while the ship is in the accretion disk:

http://ent.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... 69&pos=559

Note all the gas and debris, and yet the phase cannon beams remain fine and effective. The rock after being shattered:

http://ent.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... 69&pos=560

http://ent.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... 69&pos=561

No problems there.

Actually, do we have any proof that the phase cannons are able to output more than this level of energy through such a mash? It just broke that 100m wide asteroid (at most) into a few very big bits which ended being largely more than 10 meters wide each. That's barely better than a Viper's missile.
For that event, it's way below 1 kiloton total for both phase cannons combined. Why leave so large blocks of rock when they could have been turned into smaller and less dangerous bits? And shot again to be sure that they'd become negligible? Plus how a hull that's polarized and supposedly able to withstand kilotons still afraid from scratching against asteroids. The NX does not seem to be flying particularily fast in there.
Wouldn't that show that such an environment puts a limit on how effective phase cannons are.

What are the specific details of that incident where Archer and another guy protected themselves from an explosion with that polarized hull? Like initial yield, distance from the explosion, type of weapon and area of the hull plate in question.

Were I in command of an NX, I would be targetting the launch and landing bays ASAP. They engines also are potentially vunerable to having a photonic torpedo or two sent "up the tailpipe" as well, thus bypassing the armor, if need be.

The vast majority of Vipers will already be out in space. That would be too late.

Vipers can intercept them. Flak can shoot them down. Ejecta may even burn them.

Photonic torpedoes are not the same as BSG missles or the older ST:ENT Triton class spatial torpedoes. They are an early form of photon torpedo, and may even have their own form of shielding as evidenced by their glow:

http://www.st-v-sw.net/STSWtorpsh.html

Ok, it glows. And then? :)
What's the shield's capacity, if it has any relevance regarding battle?
Why Vipers can't shoot it down? Why flak can't shoot it down?
Evidence of such toughness is required before indirectly making that claim and expecting the other side to accept it.

I'm talking about that episode where there's a bipedal lizard in the Enterprise, and where in the end, a Kirkized Archer is killed drinking poison after having sex with the asian chick.
It's from the episode for which you even linked to screencaps.

That's IaMD part 2 you're talking about. What "naval tactics" are you talking about about?

I've seen the things with the NX-01 making moves which are nothing particularily impressive. Stretched curves, fighting at spitting ranges, like her enemies, etc.

Or, that:

http://ent.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... 81&pos=412

Probably an example among many.
Spitting range.
Beam misses at critically close range. Fires torpedoes while being less than 1 km away from the target.
If the NX-01 is the slowest vessel, then why doesn't the faster one quickly end the NX-01's misery with some fancy warp strafin' and all that?

See, it's just a lame cop out. It's nice to note it, Robert has done a good job pointing a few occurances, but's literally the unfixable oddity that can't be argued for in any honest debate (no offense).

Here is the NX-01 approaching the black hole early in the episode:

http://ent.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... m=69&pos=1

The projected flight path:

http://ent.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... m=69&pos=1

Later when they are flying through the debris laden acccretion disk:

http://ent.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... m=69&pos=1

http://ent.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... 69&pos=493

Ok, it's inside. However, it's not as impressive as I thought it would be. I expected a maelstrom of plasma. But it's just gases and big lumps of rock. Yet, it's still a dangerous environment, and the ship has to shoot down big asteroids in its way.
The black hole itself seems so small that we actually don't see the EH, yet there seems to be suns being swallowed... well.

The nukes are there for planetary bombardment. The fighter carried nukes are for attacking a captial ship en masse, and providing a screen should large nukes be deployed or to defend against fighters carrying nukes (as was shown in the mini-series).

That's the only point that remains to be clarified: how those nukes move in space. Targeting a moving ship would not be a problem if the nukes had enough acceleration and cornering. At least, cylon nukes can, from what I saw in The Captain's Hand. It's only about manoeuvering. A minimum cornering would be good to boot, especially when considering the lack of incredible maoeuvers pulled out by the "superior" NX-01 in that mirror ep.

The windows and all other surfaces seem to also be polarized as well. The open impulse engine exaust ports are not, but those are very small targets, and it would probably take a very dedicated attack by the vipers to get a hit inside them.
-Mike

Dedicated like what? They have many Vipers, with missiles able to shatter asteroids many tens of meters wide, up to the point of making their core glow yellow. Viper pilots aren't morons.
By the moment they realize their attacks against the hull are pointless, they'll automatically search for weak points, and enginesare an obvious and large one.

The NX-01 won't have time to deal with both the Pegasus and the fighters, especially seeing how it misses targets that supposedly "move too fast".

[l33telboi]

I can't remember who made that claim. Was it in an episode? From dialogue, or an observation plus calcs?

I believe it's from the same episode where the torps are actually installed, Reed comments on them, saying they can do anything from creating a crater x meters wide in an asteroid (or was it moon?) or take out the sensors on a shuttlepod. Some people plugged that figure into Wong's cratering calculator and came out with 39 megatons, if memory serves.

Funnily, the author of the NX article at wikipedia believes torps are actually of the same level of phase cannons IIRC. But, again, it's wiki. Can't ask. Can't know.

Well, there has to be at least some difference, otherwise there would be no need for torps at all, as they are slower then phasers and need to actually be constructed before fired. Besides, take their size, even modern nuclear warheads would have a larger yield then phase-canons when placed inside a carrier the size of photorps.

Tomahawks are for instance said to be able to carry a payload of a triple digit kiloton warhead.

There's still the rest of "heavy damage" noticed by the romulan scanners even before the warp core fails. Obviously, the hull dissipates enough, but seems to fail somewhere, which is enough to damage the structure. Sounds like KE against an armoured suit. The suit can handle the shock, but the meatbag inside can get knocked off.

It could be that they're simply refering to damage to the hull-plating. As in the whole "Hull-plating down to x percent." We have seen the Enterprise when it's been heavily damaged. And it's far from the pristine shape it is in this episode.

Any picture of the visible damage? Trekcore doesn't seem to have any inbetween shot about that.

There is no visible damage to the ship that gets torped, here, let me get you a pic or two.





The quality of the vids i have is quite bad, but i at least can find nothing visually wrong with the ship. The first pic, where you see debris, is from the first drone, after being destoroyed. And you really get a better image if you see that scene in motion. The second pic, is the ship just before the torp impacts.

Anyway, we know that both ships were exchanging fire to damage each other, likely to down one and make it an easy job for the NX to wipe the slate clean.

Actually, that's the funny thing, one of the drones seems to be attacking the first one, while it in turn seems to be trying to flee from the attacking one. The second one, the one that is ultimately destroyed by the other drone, tries to fire back, but keeps missing, while in the meantime the other drone scores direct hits with all but one shot. I'm not sure exactly how many hits the drone that is torped takes, both the cut to a bridge scene, as well as the nature of the beams themselves make it hard to see.

All in all, what we see on the screen is the one that was torped getting considerably less hits on it then the other. Which would also explain why one of the drones is visibly in bad shape, on fire and such, just before it is destroyed. While the other one, seems to have no such problems.

Maybe the Romulans still had some control over one of the ships, that would explain why the ships were still trying to avoid each others fire and why one of the ships was fleeing from the other.

If one ship could be that damaged by beams, the other would as well.
Those beams do deal noticeable damage:

That's from the drone that takes the brunt of the damage. Unlike the other it has taken visible damage and is ultimately destroyed.

That's why claiming that torpedoes are vastly powerful because they managed to finish off a ship which was the target of such beams is incorrect.

It doesn't prove anything, no. But it does invalidate my original thought that the yield in the torps would be much less because of displayed effectiveness.

Crippled might not be the right word, but it's been said to be damaged. With structure all suffering from many small hull breaches, a dierct hit by a torpedo would be devastating, especially if the smurf chick lowered the drone's defenses, which is even more possible.

A lot of things are possible. But the drone, as far as i can see, doesn't appear to have any hullbreaches.

Aenar is not a reliable episode for such ramblings.

Which is why i asked if anyone else has seen any episodes like that, where torps and phasers have been used on the same target. I only brought up Aenar because i happened to see it just now.

[Mr. Oragahn]

I believe it's from the same episode where the torps are actually installed, Reed comments on them, saying they can do anything from creating a crater x meters wide in an asteroid (or was it moon?) or take out the sensors on a shuttlepod. Some people plugged that figure into Wong's cratering calculator and came out with 39 megatons, if memory serves.

Thanks to RSA's website, I've learnt that it was in The Expense, season 2.

[Armoury]

REED: Photonic torpedoes. Their range is over fifty times greater than our conventional torpedoes, and they have a variable yield. They can knock the comm. array off a shuttlepod without scratching the hull or they can put a three kilometre crater into an asteroid.
TUCKER: How long is it going to take to reconfigure the tubes?
REED: We've got three teams working on it. They promise me it'll be done before we leave Spacedock, but I've got to start integrating them into the power grid.
TUCKER: Let's go.

A 3000 m wide crater. According to Wong's calculator, the cratering energy is 1.3 MT.
Some people have apparently decided to use the fragmentation energy yield instead, which is apples and oranges. For info, the proposed yield for that part was 27 MT.

Funnily, the author of the NX article at wikipedia believes torps are actually of the same level of phase cannons IIRC. But, again, it's wiki. Can't ask. Can't know.

Well, there has to be at least some difference, otherwise there would be no need for torps at all, as they are slower then phasers and need to actually be constructed before fired. Besides, take their size, even modern nuclear warheads would have a larger yield then phase-canons when placed inside a carrier the size of photorps.

Tomahawks are for instance said to be able to carry a payload of a triple digit kiloton warhead.

Indeed. Not that wiki is 100% reliable anyway, they're hardly mention where they get their stuff from, which we shouldn't even be asking for to begin with.

There's still the rest of "heavy damage" noticed by the romulan scanners even before the warp core fails. Obviously, the hull dissipates enough, but seems to fail somewhere, which is enough to damage the structure. Sounds like KE against an armoured suit. The suit can handle the shock, but the meatbag inside can get knocked off.

It could be that they're simply refering to damage to the hull-plating. As in the whole "Hull-plating down to x percent." We have seen the Enterprise when it's been heavily damaged. And it's far from the pristine shape it is in this episode.

Any picture of the visible damage? Trekcore doesn't seem to have any inbetween shot about that.

There is no visible damage to the ship that gets torped, here, let me get you a pic or two.





The quality of the vids i have is quite bad, but i at least can find nothing visually wrong with the ship. The first pic, where you see debris, is from the first drone, after being destoroyed. And you really get a better image if you see that scene in motion. The second pic, is the ship just before the torp impacts.

The problem remains the same. Be it the romulan drone or the Enterprise, both can take damage, even heavy damage, without showing signs of hull destruction, and yet it gets degraded, up to the point were seconds later, internal systems such as the warp cores are damaged and disabled.
So nevermind if those comments either refer to defenses' degradation (polarization reduction for example), or structural damage, or even both, because in the end, despite the utter lack of visual damage for some of the targets, they do get damaged to significant extents.

( ^ This paragraph is intended to cover all replies regarding hull damage and romulan interfire.)

Anyway, we know that both ships were exchanging fire to damage each other, likely to down one and make it an easy job for the NX to wipe the slate clean.

Actually, that's the funny thing, one of the drones seems to be attacking the first one, while it in turn seems to be trying to flee from the attacking one. The second one, the one that is ultimately destroyed by the other drone, tries to fire back, but keeps missing, while in the meantime the other drone scores direct hits with all but one shot. I'm not sure exactly how many hits the drone that is torped takes, both the cut to a bridge scene, as well as the nature of the beams themselves make it hard to see.

All in all, what we see on the screen is the one that was torped getting considerably less hits on it then the other. Which would also explain why one of the drones is visibly in bad shape, on fire and such, just before it is destroyed. While the other one, seems to have no such problems.

Maybe the Romulans still had some control over one of the ships, that would explain why the ships were still trying to avoid each others fire and why one of the ships was fleeing from the other.

Some disturbance over the controls. That's largely plausible.

Crippled might not be the right word, but it's been said to be damaged. With structure all suffering from many small hull breaches, a dierct hit by a torpedo would be devastating, especially if the smurf chick lowered the drone's defenses, which is even more possible.

A lot of things are possible. But the drone, as far as i can see, doesn't appear to have any hullbreaches.

Many micro hull breaches would be plain enough. We could not see them from that distance, but some damage would unavoidably exist by the moment the drone would be hit by another drone beam.
Otherwise the "naughty" drone would have never been that damaged by drone beams to boot.

[Mike DiCenso]

Mr. Oragahn wrote:

REED: Photonic torpedoes. Their range is over fifty times greater than our conventional torpedoes, and they have a variable yield. They can knock the comm. array off a shuttlepod without scratching the hull or they can put a three kilometre crater into an asteroid.
TUCKER: How long is it going to take to reconfigure the tubes?
REED: We've got three teams working on it. They promise me it'll be done before we leave Spacedock, but I've got to start integrating them into the power grid.
TUCKER: Let's go.


A 3000 m wide crater. According to Wong's calculator, the cratering energy is 1.3 MT.
Some people have apparently decided to use the fragmentation energy yield instead, which is apples and oranges. For info, the proposed yield for that part was 27 MT.

A bit of a correction here; the number you cite above is for the cratering energy of an ice asteroid of 3 km wide. The other numbers for hard granite and iron asteroids are 3.9 and 127.5 MT respectively. The average of all three is 44 MT, which is pretty close to what other people have calculated as an upper limit to the NX class photonic torpedoes.
-Mike

[l33telboi]

A 3000 m wide crater. According to Wong's calculator, the cratering energy is 1.3 MT.
Some people have apparently decided to use the fragmentation energy yield instead, which is apples and oranges. For info, the proposed yield for that part was 27 MT.

Ah, my bad. I shouldn't have been so quick to take things at face-value. Though i could also have been mistaken about where the yields were taken from.

Suffice to say that these figures do seem to mesh quite well when considering the larger picture.

Phase-canons at 0.1KT or 1KT, spatial torpedoes at 26KT and photonic torpedoes at 1.3MT.

EDIT: Oops, didn't read Mike's post before i posted mine. Sorry 'bout that.

[Mr. Oragahn]

A bit of a correction here; the number you cite above is for the cratering energy of an ice asteroid of 3 km wide. The other numbers for hard granite and iron asteroids are 3.9 and 127.5 MT respectively. The average of all three is 44 MT, which is pretty close to what other people have calculated as an upper limit to the NX class photonic torpedoes.
-Mike

Damn, spending so much time on that Masks thing and thinking that the column under fragmentation energy was still about rock, I automatically ignored the other two former columns. :/
Typing at late didn't help either.
More questions though. Where are the calcs for the photonic torps? How have they calculated that?
Nickel-iron asteroids aren't that common, so I'll rule out that 127.5 MT figure, but I could agree on a 2 digit megaton figure between 30 and 40 MT.
Sorry for the disturbance.

My former conclusion would have me consider that the NX has the advantage here. The Pegasus may win, but the favor percentage goes to the Enterprise.

The Pegasus is too much of a slow battleship, too big, and still remains vastly exposed to enemy fire. Its advantage in the fighter cover is balanced by lack of firepower.
If the fighters don't quickly engage the NX and don't quickly realize that they have to aim at those gaping holes that the impulse engines are, they'll either get ignored or shot down in masse.
The NX will probably fire and fire against on the Pegasus, unnoticing the weak flak.
The nukes themselves, if they take a while to position, would probably radiate some signature the NX could spot, and the Enterprise would fire at those tubes ASAP.
My main point in favor of the NX is that I have not seen evidence that the Pegasus could deploy efficient nuclear ordnance in time. Not that it wouldn't be powerful enough, but I'm afraid it would possibly be too late for the nukes to have a chance to be of relevance.

If only those Vipers could carry warheads able to pack hundreds of kilotons of firepower each, then I'd go for the Pegasus without a doubt.

The Enterprise is already too advanced here. So unless I find data that supports higher firepower for the fighters and the ability to carry powerful warheads, I'll consider that the Pegasus looses.

[Praeothmin]

Incidentaly, Reed's comment about the Photonic Torpedoes also give us canon proof of the variable yields of Photon torpedoes, accounting for all the different power figures calculated (well, most of them anyway :)... ).

[Mike DiCenso]

If you read this thread carefully, you find that the claim of double-digit photonic torpedoes comes from calculations based on Reed's dialog from the episode "The Expanse" with Tucker about how the yeild can go from "knocking the comm array of a shuttlepod without scratching the hull" to being powerful enough to put a "three kilometer crater into an asteroid". Just run the cratering energies into Wong's asteroid calculator, and you'll see a pretty wide range of yeilds from very low single digit megatons to modestly high triple-digit megatons.

From way back when the episode first aired people ran various number-crunching on what it would take to put a 3 km wide crater in an asteroid:

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts ... db8972c4e8

Most people were content with around 20-30 MT as a maximum yeild for the photonic torpedoes. Also, Reed's statement is about as clear as it gets that photonic torpedoes and presumably the later photon torpedoes have variable yeilds, thus explaining away a wide range of inconsistancies in the yeilds we actually see.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

A friend told me that the season 1 compagnon guide says Vipers can carry nukes, similar to cylon nukes.

I've seen the first 3 eps of season 3, and we see that Raptors can also launch missiles (though this time they were drones, but the system is uncannily similar).

Vipers mk II can carry at least two missiles. Maybe four. Mk VIIs likely carry teh same number, if not more.

That would literally swing the balance the other way in favour of the Pegasus.

Vipers VII and Raptors would drop a rain of 50 KT nukes on the Enterprise's face.

It would pose a grave danger to the NX, and buy enough time for the Pegasus to deploy nukes.