Resistence is futile!(and other invasions stories)

[Mr. Oragahn]

A ship may have achieved warp with fusion cores, but what kind of ship? How long, at what speed?

"Balance of Terror" indicates that the ship is "impulse" powered. What comes to my mind are the FTL impulse examples.

I'm lost. I get the feeling we're talking about two different things, one which includes ships reaching FTL speeds with impulse engines??
I'm simply interested in those strong and undisputable cases of fusion powered FTL drives (warp drives) which we could study with certainty.

It depends if the fuel is already highly compressed and how the torpedo's energy reaches the fuel containment unit(s).

I don't think it would be highly compressed. Deuterium is probably stored in the same form as antideuterium - cold mostly-frozen slush.

Perhaps. I don't know much about Trek's containment technology.
That said, their wonderful technology in antimatter storage would suggest that the UFP also came with something very good for storing fusion fuel.
Looking at DS9 could be a good starting point. I don't think the UFP would be lagging behind the Cardassians in terms of fusion based power generation and storage of the adequate fuels, and we noticed that DS9 could pull enough power to deal with the fleet bombardments the station has been subjected to.

Also, I'd readily bet that the tanks used for deuterium storage aren't small at all, and their entire load would more than likely provide more than 100 megatons of energy.

After all, we'd be looking towards something like antimatter triggered pure fusion, with the fuel containment device being breached on one side first, the other side continuing to act like the container it's designed to be, the fuel being the tamper on its own. One side is breached and saturated by all gamma rays, neutrons and, globally, copious amounts of energy in the petajoules.
Why wouldn't that be enough to trigger a reaction when even crude fission detonations - the device part of a stage nuclear device is refined, but the "fusion" part much less in comparison - achieve this with far smaller initial yields?

The problem I see from the little I know is the reaction being too weak and neutrons being "dampened". But how do we know that would happen for sure and literally kill the reaction, despite the initial explosion?

Under the right circumstances, it would - but I don't think those circumstances qualify. It's very difficult to just blast something and have it start fusing.

Unless the material is blasted into an obstacle. Or even better, blasted into a cavity. Cavities such as the lastly exposed other half of the fuel tank, and any matter beyond, including ground and rock in which the ship was partially embedded in.
It's of course dependant on where the fuel tank is located. It's likely going to be at the aft of the ship, and looking at the way the ship was wedged into the rock mound, with the cockpit visible, depending on how the torpedo gets through whatever shuttle material on its path before it reaches the fuel tank(s), the effects could vary dramatically.
So we are, in fact, not sure about what would happen if that shuttle used a fusion core to power its warp nacelles.

If it uses antimatter, there's much less issues here.

Our mixture is going to be filled with vaporized hull material and is unlikely to still have enough kelvins of sheer temperature to fire off the fusion fuel meters later by heat and normal blast wave pressure unless it is already a very high yield device.

So here's our conundrum. In order to fuse deuterium with deuterium in a thermonuclear reaction, we want to flash heat it to 400,000,000 kelvins. In order to do that, we need to pump it with multiple terajoules per kilogram. This is why it's practically impossible to set off a D-D reaction using mere fission without using tricks to come up with high pressure; to put that in context, we basically need to be applying kilotons per kilogram to the fuel.

If we do that, then spontaneous fusion will start to happen. If you want it to happen quickly and therefore more completely, then you want significantly higher plasma temperatures; modern fusion weapons manage about a 50% efficiency in getting reactants to go off only by creating gigabars of pressure - a very difficult proposition that we're not going to get close to with our temperatures.

When we consider what our output is and what's going to absorb it, we're in a bit of trouble. We're putting out a lot of hard gammas, basically (and pions that whack into something after passing through about 90 g/cm^2 of material, on average, which will probably have an end product of hard gammas again) and so the shuttle hull - and fuel tank - will probably melt or be vaporized before the deuterium gets hot enough to start fusing. Now, if our device is really high yield, we could well have the gigakelvin fireball at a couple meters' radius, that we want in order to get a substantial secondary thermonuclear yield, but then we're back to the high yield problem; we're not really talking a couple megatons at that point.

It solely depends on the quantity of matter on the path and how much energy that hull and the shuttle's inner structure can absorb.
Still, detonating a multi-megaton torpedo on a shuttle strikes me as terribly overkill. Perhaps this is a wrong impression, but how many terajoules per kg of deuterium are we talking about?
Torps, back then, were still omnidirectional blast weapons I think (Data may have brought focused blasts later on iirc).

I find it a stretch, for the moment, that a Tsar Bomba or more detonated on contact with a small and already damaged target would fail to
These shuttles barely have any shields, and most of structural strength would likely come through the application of a S.I.Field. In an inert state, I don't get the feeling that the shuttle would be particularly strongly armoured.

Also, considering that such a shuttle would achieve a decent cruise warp speed for such long periods, if using deuterium, if would obviously have to carry a consequent amount of it.
No matter if the reaction is not totally efficient, I consider it unlikely that detonating an efficient multi-megaton antimatter device ontop of a compressed hydrogen fuel tank allowing interstellar transit would lead to nothing.

I don't think it'll significantly enhance the yield. You could get a small bonus on top of your yield, but not likely to be much.

It depends on the quality of the reaction, if parameters for hyperpressure are met and how much deuterium there would be. At the very best, we could expect 6.3 e14 J/kg, or 4.2 times less if we only get fission instead of a spectacular pp chain style fusion.

That would be interesting. What would the hull strength be?

Off the top of my head, hull strength will probably be around 10x iron with Treknobabble materials.

Wow, that's high. Are you sure this hull strength applies to mere shuttles?

But that was the engine. Not the whole fuel tank or whatever is used to store fuel, and that's on a ship that largely relies for M/AM reactions for its more power hungry systems.
The E-Nil's engine can only deal with a finite quantity of fuel at a given moment, and they didn't have other solutions left, since the DDM *cough* "neutered" *cough* antimatter.

The engine of a much larger ship, something that would probably carry as much fuel as the entire shuttle.

Yeah but that's still the engine. Ultimately, we don't know enough about power consumption for fusion cores, allowing for warp travel for small crafts, and we don't know enough fuel storage.
I tried to look for other small crafts capable of long trips, like the modified probe in Emissaries, but I don't know what it was running on. If it used AM to fly at warp 9 for so long, I'd find it odd that one of the E-D's medium-long range shuttles, allowing for long trips independantly of the mother ship, would come with "crude" a fusion core.

How visible and big do we know the explosion would even be. Just because Picard is standing in front of the screen means that he expected to see the explosion, and even if that's so, he has the luxury of having a high tech screen, thus a high resolution, which means the smallest explosion would not be limited by the screen's ability to show it, but by the captain's sight while standing in front of it. Besides, how white would the flash be, while originating from the shadowy part of the planet?

Most interesting is that even if we took the flash's outmost boundaries as those of a fireball, even more than 200 torpedoes would not cover even an entire continent on Earth.

The fireballs wouldn't cover, but the destructive effects would be enough to do a pretty good job of depopulating a continent, and are a rather larger radius than the fireball itself.[/quote]

But that would still fall terribly short of the mass planetary destruction claim, lest slagging.

Besides, here's something I did from the flash of SoE:

• • 

Of course, that's just for the kicks of using the flash in a most biased, selective and ultimately useless way.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Doesn't work. That kind of acceleration would have allowed all Cubes to outrun the expanding cloud of matter that once was a planet. We're talking about an acceleration wherein a Cube goes from zero to a speed where it travels its own length per second within one or two frames.
Explanation: that kind of burst is exceptional and cannot be sustained more than the equivalent of one or two frames.

Right, in other words we're handwaving it away? What exactly is this contradiction you're talking about anyway? That the cubes got caught by the debris of the exploding planet?

Could you just please drop those random accusations of handwaving when I make my cases clear: I even try to accept it, but only within what was demonstrated by other Cubes in the same episode.
It's an unique feat, and thus requires a rationalization. It could very well be limited to "cruise" travel mode only.

Now some numbers.

Say the cube is 3 km wide. Taking a better look at the clip I have, I see that the Cube overtook the USS Voyager at a speed of a full length / 4 frames.
That's 3000 m / 0,12 s, or 18,750 m/s.
Considering that the scanning Cube resumed its course, and even perhaps tried to catch up the others, it's fair to consider that it resumed its initial relative speed.
The Cube accelerated in such a fashion that the room it took on screen was reduced to 2/3 of what it once was within 10 frames.
In terms of perspective, that's more than enough to be sure that by that time, the Cube had already fully covered its own length.
This gives the ship, err... and acceleration of 46,875 m/s².

So the Cubes couldn't get away from a planet that was about to explode and which they were already quite far away from?

Here we have an example of a typical Cube fest against a much dangerous enemy. Not much fancy wizzbangs. This also contradicts my former statement that Cubes were sitting ducks in combat. But that depends on the threat level. Against S8472, we see them doing what's necessary to win (some would say their best).

Obviously, there's no sign of that super linear boost the curious Cube pulled off earlier in the episode.
Hence why it's logical and legitimate to consider it an exception at best, and try to understand why it is an exception. The point is that it's not a capability displayed in battle.

It is. Because fireball duration assumes that the nuclear fireball has an unlimited amount of air to travel through, and it assumes air density doesn't decrease the higher up the ball is flung.
The formula is flawed for explosions that are in the gigaton plus range. If you want to use this formula, then I want to see an explanation that factors in the fireball hitting the 'roof of the sky', if you want to put it in a poetic way.

The formula is certainly not perfect, but logic will reveal that part of the explosion that started on the ground expanded sideways, and thus has not reached the higher regions of the atmosphere like the top of the explosion would. That and the fact that in absolutely no way whatsoever this would make the energy suddenly vanish. The fireball duration is largely determined by the amount of energy radiated by the air that's already been heated up, and obviously, the larger the explosion, the more air it will reach upwards and sideways. There's just no way to cut it.

You cannot have a short plume of flames and a short timed fireball with the claimed gigaton knocking yield. The flames will only obey the local physics (air density, gravity, momentum) and that's all. Energy won't vanish magically.

Not only it would be necessary, for you, to first show that the event is indeed beyond one gigaton, but the upper atmospheric pancaking effect is totally irrelevant because for an explosion to go that far up in the sky, it has to be very powerful

Yeah, about a gigaton or so. The Tsar Bomba, at full yield (100 megatons) was supposed to have been strong enough to do this on its own, as an example.

Of course, you have not even proved that the fireball pancaked at all. You even refuted the second phase of the VFX as being the fireball, which is pretty much the only thing you could use as an argument that the explosion was powerful. Surely, you're not going to get anywhere by pretending that the 3-4 frames long flash was a pancaked fireball that happened to last, huh, only that much time.
It literally makes zero sense.

and thus will emit copious amounts of energy for long long times, and that, we didn't get it in the episode.

A nuclear bomb releases its energy somewhere between a nano-second and a micro-second. After that, how the explosion behaves is entirely dependant on its surroundings.

Yes, that we know. It doesn't mean the created fireball suddenly disappears within 3-4 frames.
Again, that's a shitty effect, and I'm puzzled that you attempt to make it valid despite being clearly deeply flawed. All that is left is picking berries by dismissing some bits and prefering others.
That's just so rubbish that it's just as good... actually it's quite worse than dismissing the whole thing.

Like I said, a flash that stays for three frames or so makes no sense when even a minor megaton nuke will shine for much more time before the fireball cools down to levels where we can see the mushroom cloud itself without being blinded by the light diffused through the atmosphere.

Seeing something from within the atmosphere and seeing it from extremely high orbit are two completly different things.

Yes, but that hardly makes your claim any better.

You cannot declare that SoE's explosion "it's close enough" when you have, a few sentences earlier, admitted not even remembering how it looks like in the episode.

Of course I can. If you can say "it's not close enough" I can say "it's close enough", because the difference between this and any other explosion in sci-fi is completly arbitrary.

No, that's bull and you're being fairly obtuse in this nonsense. I dismiss it because it's largely inaccurate, after having looked at it many times, and tallied this with what we know of large scale explosions, and what we can safely expect from light scattering in atmosphere.
What you do on the other hand is making a baseless opinion and treating it as fact, and pretending that's what I'm doing, while you don't even remember how the effect looks like, and have not even seen the effect itself in a while.

It's apples and oranges.

There are no explosions that look realistic in sci-fi when it comes to multi-megaton stuff.
Thus, drawing a line between what's good enough and what isn't is entirely up to the person drawing the line.
It's subjective, in other words.

Pure horsepoo. Some are just much more convincing than others.
Hell, the one from T2 was deemed good enough for a long time, and that was years ago, before studios going crazy about nukes in atmosphere effects.

It doesn't even take much efforts. Anyone can get a hand on Tsar Bomba and Trinity videos for example.

No, because that's just you playing games when you know fully well that we're all considering all the material we already talked about at length here and at SBC.

Every single time I see you encountering something that can be quantified, you analyse it in the same way: You set out assuming it can't be more then a few megatons at the most, and then you try to get the evidence to fit that assumption. You did it last SBC thread, and you've done it twice this thread already (tar monster and the defiant). The reasoning behind this is always the same: Higher numbers "don't fit" because of the rest of the evidence.

The hell. You may actually bump the appropriate SBC thread if you still have an axe to grind about me being "unfair" wah wah.
I actually dugg material about craters in order to deal with Reed's comment, and I'm sorry if it rains all over your 50 MT claims (which I accepted as fact for quite a while btw), because all I did was show that it was not so sure, while at the same time clearly acknowledging the existence of yields greater than 50 megatons for other incidents in later Trek.

I'm certainly not holding my breath know to see how far this can go into mediocrity.

I don't happen to suddenly reset my memories about past debates, contrary to what you seem to suggest, and such memories don't tell me there's any reason to logically and even seriously consider Obsession and the sound wave of doom to be acceptable and fit with most of Trek material.

I don't reset my memories either, which should be obvious from what I'm saying right now. And as a point in my favor, I tend not to strawman other people like you're currently doing by always appealing to the soundwave, even though I haven't so much as mentioned it yet.

I mention the sound wave incident, along the other cases, because they're part of the extreme outliers package.
You'll also notice that by reading what you quoted, I was being fairly general here.

Yet it's very simple. We have example of real nuclear atmospheric explosions to look at. We have made up large scale explosions which, for some of them, do look like "close enough" and, with logic, we can assert what would reasonnably happen in basic conditions with a single bomb releasing energy in an atmosphere.

That doesn't answer my question in the least. Who made you the guy that says "This is close enough and this isn't"? Yes, I realize some explosions look more realistic then others, but that's beside the point.

It is the point. :|

What I'm asking is why you think you have the authority to draw the line between "this is ok" and "this isn't ok".
The answer is: No one did.

That question is absurd because I never felt I was bestowed with such authority. Just doing my job as a debater. Can you say as much?

You seem to think that I considered this example unfit just because. That's preposterous, and that's borderline arguing that I have a "nerf Star Trek" agenda.

No offense, but this is exactly the way you come off, when you repeatedly state "this doesn't fit with the rest of the material, let's ignore it."

Well no offense, but maybe you could pay attention to what I say before going all defensive and borderline paranoid at Defcon 5.

Occam would primarily laugh at the idea of trying to get a yield out of a ludicrous decades old explosion effect.
That's where he'd stand first and foremost.

Alright then. Let's go with intent rather then visuals. Star Trek ships now fly around at fractions of c, engage each other at ranges around thousands of kilometers and TDiC is to my knowledge the only incident of planetary destruction where we have firm non-visual relient statements on what a starship can do.
Of course, this is not your intent, is it? Your intent is to analyse visuals when they suit you and ignore then when they don't.

You realize that nearly from the start of this "discussion", you have contributed very little to the analysis of the material, and instead mainly relied on direct attacks on me through redundant misinterpretations, strawmen and now lies? Perhaps you may want to actually "disengage" and just let it go?

The SoE event is certainly not the most problematic case I'd expect you to carry overboard, and you know it.

Then why are you trying so hard to dismiss it in various ways?

Good try sweetie, but you're dodging my request. Go defend Obsession, the sound wave case and overloading shuttles that threaten capital ships over vast distances if you think they're that rock solid.

I obviously expect you to try to argue in favour of the clearly outerish yields, in the like of Obsession, the space sound wave with a crazy power, and even on a smaller rank, TDiC, which is already seen as a super wank high end and barely accepted once unhealthy extreme doses of "rare" and "NDF" crop up in the posts.

That's still a strawman. And a rather blatant one at that.

Oh, really?

To be honest, your method of analysis itself is pretty firmly rooted in what you think is reasonable or not. Take the crashed shuttle we just talked about - Analyzing the scene and following Occam's razor brings us to the conclusion that the torpedoes are extremely powerful. What's your immediate response to this? To try and somehow find ways to make it seem less powerful rather then just accept the obvious. Your justification? "It's more reasonable". This is what I'm taking issue with, I've seen you say the same thing for literally dozens of arguments now, "it's a higher showing, let's ignore it."

If it was a question of just one higher showing, or even just two, I'd accept that. But right now it seems to be used pretty regularly for all the arguments that don’t seem to conform to your views on matters.

... which you have largely demonstrated as being, in other words, anything that I randomly declared unfit.

That you decided to solely spend a bit more time of the crashed shuttle, in one of your posts, doesn't wash away your previous accusations, I'm sorry.

OK, I'm cutting the rest of it cause it's pointless.
If you think you have something useful to present, please do so.

[Jedi Master Spock]

I'm lost. I get the feeling we're talking about two different things, one which includes ships reaching FTL speeds with impulse engines??
I'm simply interested in those strong and undisputable cases of fusion powered FTL drives (warp drives) which we could study with certainty.

Well, that the ship uses fusion is the most common interpretation of "Balance of Terror." That's as strong as we get - that and the various impulse FTL references. "Relics," "Best of Both Worlds," "Balance of Terror," and "Where No Man Has Gone Before" all put impulse at potentially FTL, and we know from many references that impulse is usually fusion powers.

The thing about shuttles is that we have seen occasional discussion of what they have - microfusion thrusters that burn deuterium and krellide storage cells ("In Theory"). While it is possible that some shuttles do have antimatter power, there's just no reference to that possibility in the canon.

Perhaps. I don't know much about Trek's containment technology.
That said, their wonderful technology in antimatter storage would suggest that the UFP also came with something very good for storing fusion fuel.
Looking at DS9 could be a good starting point. I don't think the UFP would be lagging behind the Cardassians in terms of fusion based power generation and storage of the adequate fuels, and we noticed that DS9 could pull enough power to deal with the fleet bombardments the station has been subjected to.

They do a very good job of containing antimatter, but they don't store it densely. I'll note that the E-D usually powers its shields from its fusion generators - "Hero Worship," IIRC.

Also, I'd readily bet that the tanks used for deuterium storage aren't small at all, and their entire load would more than likely provide more than 100 megatons of energy.

100 megatons of energy requires fusing 700 kg of deuterium into helium. That's about four and a half cubic meters of deuterium slush. As I said before, even weapons designed for it usually don't achieve more than 50% reaction efficiency. In an essentially unpressurized scenario, as this is, even 10% would be truly remarkable.

TNG shuttles are around 26 cubic meters in volume, most of that the hollow interior. Fitting four and a half cubic meters of deuterium inside the hull is a small stretch. Fitting nine is next to impossible. Forty five or more? No, and a 100 megaton energy level is a severe stretch as well. As I said, it's very difficult to model under a gigaton. Doing so requires setting aside a few assumptions, e.g., the normal timeline of a fireball, as Graham Kennedy does on DITL.

Unless the material is blasted into an obstacle. Or even better, blasted into a cavity. Cavities such as the lastly exposed other half of the fuel tank, and any matter beyond, including ground and rock in which the ship was partially embedded in.

The problem is that the cavity will probably already have been melted/flash-vaporized by the leading edge of gamma rays a couple nanoseconds before the deuterium hits fusion-range temperatures. You will probably get megabars of pressure, but not the sort of gigabars you need.

It's of course dependant on where the fuel tank is located. It's likely going to be at the aft of the ship, and looking at the way the ship was wedged into the rock mound, with the cockpit visible, depending on how the torpedo gets through whatever shuttle material on its path before it reaches the fuel tank(s), the effects could vary dramatically.
So we are, in fact, not sure about what would happen if that shuttle used a fusion core to power its warp nacelles.

If it uses antimatter, there's much less issues here.

Pretty much, it has to use antimatter - and in order to be significant, the shuttle needs to be carrying a lot of antimatter. If you're lucky, you might get a couple extra megatons out of shuttle deuterium.

It solely depends on the quantity of matter on the path and how much energy that hull and the shuttle's inner structure can absorb.
Still, detonating a multi-megaton torpedo on a shuttle strikes me as terribly overkill. Perhaps this is a wrong impression, but how many terajoules per kg of deuterium are we talking about?
Torps, back then, were still omnidirectional blast weapons I think (Data may have brought focused blasts later on iirc).

On the whole? Oh, something like 7 to reach the minimum fusion temperature. You get 600 out if the whole thing fuses, but if you want it to fuse at a fast rate, you want to sharply increase the energy you dump into it or put it under billions and billions of atmospheres of pressure.

So, no. There's not going to be enough deuterium reacted efficiently enough to make a significant difference in the yield at hand. You need antimatter, and no small amount of it, to justify having the shuttle contribute to the yield.

It depends on the quality of the reaction, if parameters for hyperpressure are met and how much deuterium there would be. At the very best, we could expect 6.3 e14 J/kg, or 4.2 times less if we only get fission instead of a spectacular pp chain style fusion.

Well, I've run the numbers. I can't see the shuttle contributing more than 1-10 megatons under the best conditions if it's fusion powered, and this incident tends to push a gigaton.

Wow, that's high. Are you sure this hull strength applies to mere shuttles?

The estimates range 10-100x in general for the tough hull materials. Our main shuttle strength incidents are crashes and "Minefield." I'm comfortable with saying it's significantly more than the structural strength of steel. It's not tritanium, but it should be at least several times, and 10x isn't out of the question at all.

In "Coda," we have a VOY shuttle cooked to 4,000 degrees (presumably Celsius); it is fine, even though that's almost triple the melting point of steel. In "Rise," we have a hard Mach 2.1 landing that fails to smash the shuttle into small pieces. Or even cause any structual damage. In "The Omega Directive," Paris modifies a shuttle to resist 12,000 kelvins, which would be around seven times the melting point of steel, and is in the range of temperatures we see the Enterprise's hull handling. I would be surprised if the specific heat by volume wasn't much higher, as well. So... ten times as durable, when we're talking about nukes and antimatter bombs? Perfectly reasonable for a shuttle.

Yeah but that's still the engine. Ultimately, we don't know enough about power consumption for fusion cores, allowing for warp travel for small crafts, and we don't know enough fuel storage.
I tried to look for other small crafts capable of long trips, like the modified probe in Emissaries, but I don't know what it was running on. If it used AM to fly at warp 9 for so long, I'd find it odd that one of the E-D's medium-long range shuttles, allowing for long trips independantly of the mother ship, would come with "crude" a fusion core.

It was a modified photon torpedo. I expect it used antimatter, but shuttles don't travel at warp 9. We've only heard of shuttles using krellide cells and fusion.

But that would still fall terribly short of the mass planetary destruction claim, lest slagging.

Besides, here's something I did from the flash of SoE:

• • 

Of course, that's just for the kicks of using the flash in a most biased, selective and ultimately useless way.

Yes, but even when we just treat it as a flash of light, there's usually a very small fraction of yield that goes to illumination. I went over it many times with Darth Servo on ST.com; frankly, we're looking at the close neighborhood of a gigaton again.

I prefer the dust plume model - what we see isn't the fireball, but a shockwave of debris or something similar. In that case, the speed with which it appears suggests - again - somewhere around a gigaton. In order to reduce it, we need to move outside of the documentarian model and to a less literal interpretation of the VFX; if we do that, we can justify lower figures, like 100 MT.

[sonofccn]

Kirk and Spock carried antimatter mortar rounds in some suitcase on a battlefield of some sort?
Wesley carried some antimatter in a glorified fishbowl that would allow like two seconds of warp speed for an UFP capital ship.
I think I recall Sisko functional, missile shaped, antimatter based devices, perhaps storage devices or mines, I can't recall.
AsI said to l33telboi, their faith in their antimatter containment abilities is strong

They have much faith in thier storage capabilities and I wouldn't question them putting antimatter reactors on shuttles however we have seen several shuttles depower and pancake into a planetary body with zero reactor breaches. A fusion reactor would be the easier of the two to explain this since if I understand it correctly it could be shut down in an emergency, your antimatter payload has to be kept in confinment or jettisioned.

I don't recall saying such a thing.

You want to argue that the ship has enough firepower to slag the whole planet, which would require a firepower that's not seen anywhere else.

That is how I interpeted this statment. If I am in error please explain what you meant.

Yes, they do. I acknowledged them. Now, I rejected those which were obviously absurd, and tried to cram the super high end of near wank like TDiC into a reasonnable interpretation that would fit with the majority of weapons that most people place in middle two or three digits megatons.

Which is the same as ignoring it. TDIC can not be reconicled to megatonage range.

The point I'm making is that the E-D and in another case, her saucer section, withstood nearby massive warp core explosions. These warp cores were not those of a flimsy shuttle, but of capital considerable UFP ships.
Obviously the shuttle overload incident is just as ridiculous as it gets, and to make things clear, anyone taking it at face value needs to get his head checked, unless you want to pretend a shuttle's warp core can unleash novas when overloading.

My point was that reactors unleash as much power as plot demands same as weapons. So in one episode a shuttle red lining is a danger one million miles away and in another a warship's can go off point blank and it isn't a problem. All we can do is put each incident in thier respective slots, low, medium, high, insane and see which one has the most in it at the end of the day.

[sonofccn]

They do a very good job of containing antimatter, but they don't store it densely. I'll note that the E-D usually powers its shields from its fusion generators - "Hero Worship," IIRC.

That's something I always thought was odd. In TOS the M/AM reactor powered almost everything, refrence Elaan of Troylus and the lossing of weapons with greatly weakened shields, while in TNG and beyond IIRC warp power was only added to other systems in emergency scenarios. One would think it would be the lesser advanced 23rd century ship that relied more on fusion generators then the 24th century.

[l33telboi]

Could you just please drop those random accusations of handwaving when I make my cases clear:

It's very very simple:

The visuals show us a cube accelerating, measuring that acceleration leads us to conclude that the cube is very good at accelerating. This should be the end of it - case closed, so to speak. The handwaving comes in when someone starts trying to think up ways to dismiss this as evidence for some arbitrary reason, as you are doing right now.

It's an unique feat, and thus requires a rationalization. It could very well be limited to "cruise" travel mode only.

Or this is simply their maximum acceleration. Is there any reason at all to think it isn't? There is nothing odd or outlandish about this at all, even normal cars have very great acceleration capabilities, but you don't expect to see them accelerate at their maximum capacity as standard procedure.

So the Cubes couldn't get away from a planet that was about to explode and which they were already quite far away from?

You realize of course that the planet threw fragments from itself in the 1,000km to 10,000km/s region, yes? So again, where's the problem? I mean it doesn't even end there. The Borg didn't even know 8472 was about to blow that planet up.

Here we have an example of a typical Cube fest against a much dangerous enemy.

I'm sorry but one scene is not enough evidence to establish typical behaviour. And it's certainly not enough evidence to start saying something is contradicted.

Di you notice that in the scene we don't see a single acceleration or deceleration? Are you going to suggest Borg cubes can't accelerate or decelerate next?

The argument stands for high maximum accelerations stand.

The formula is certainly not perfect, but logic will reveal that part of the explosion that started on the ground expanded sideways, and thus has not reached the higher regions of the atmosphere like the top of the explosion would. That and the fact that in absolutely no way whatsoever this would make the energy suddenly vanish.

That's something you simply can't say. If you want to talk about visuals, then the flash itself proves there was a certain amount of energy involved. So it's rather inane to say that visuals don't support high yield - because it's exactly the visuals that require them.

You can point out that explosion behaved strangely, but I can point out that it still carried a lot of energy. See?

The fireball duration is largely determined by the amount of energy radiated by the air that's already been heated up, and obviously, the larger the explosion, the more air it will reach upwards and sideways. There's just no way to cut it.

Like I've already pointed out - Fireball duration is affected by both the decreased density of the upper atmosphere, as well as the increased surface area of the fireball. So if you're going to dispute this the least you could do is explain why you're disputing it.

You cannot have a short plume of flames and a short timed fireball with the claimed gigaton knocking yield. The flames will only obey the local physics (air density, gravity, momentum) and that's all. Energy won't vanish magically.

And yet I can prove that that energy was there, using the visuals. See the problem? If there's a flash of that magnitude there, then there also has to be a vast amount of energy. No energy - no flash. Simple, yes? This is why it's foolish to try and say that visuals dispute the larger numbers, because it's the visuals that point-blank shows us that energy is there in the first place.

Of course, you have not even proved that the fireball pancaked at all.

I'm simply saying that your fireball duration argument is silly. Why? Because at higher yields, fireball duration and size won't scale with Wong's calculator anymore.

You even refuted the second phase of the VFX as being the fireball, which is pretty much the only thing you could use as an argument that the explosion was powerful.

No. The flash is all I need to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

The only counter-argument you have is saying: "let's ignore visuals". And if you do that, well... that opens up a lot of option for the token crazy trekkie, doesn't it? Suddenly all those high-yield incidents where the visuals aren't quite right can be handwaved away.

Surely, you're not going to get anywhere by pretending that the 3-4 frames long flash was a pancaked fireball that happened to last, huh, only that much time.

No, and if someone were to interpret it as such then it would only prove that they haven't got the slightest idea about what I'm talking about at all, and shouldn't be debating this at all.

Yes, that we know. It doesn't mean the created fireball suddenly disappears within 3-4 frames.

Who knows how something like this will look from orbit. There's a very good chance that dust will obscure the fireball, etc.

Again, that's a shitty effect, and I'm puzzled that you attempt to make it valid despite being clearly deeply flawed. All that is left is picking berries by dismissing some bits and prefering others.

No. I can actually accept that entire visual as accurate, and still prove my case. This is what you don't seem to understand. Even if it looks weird and doesn't conform with what you think a high-yield detonation will look like, I can still prove the energy was there.

No, that's bull and you're being fairly obtuse in this nonsense. I dismiss it because it's largely inaccurate, after having looked at it many times, and tallied this with what we know of large scale explosions, and what we can safely expect from light scattering in atmosphere.

No, what I'm saying is the simple truth.

1. There is no explosion like this that looks 100% accurate in visual sci-fi.
2. The explosion in SoE isn't 100% accurate.

You're faced with three choises:

1. Dismiss all explosions in visual sci-fi history as inaccurate and technobabble.
2. Accept all explosions in visual sci-fi history as accurate, and simply work with what you have.
3. Draw an arbitrary line between what's accurate enough and what isn't.

You've chosen option 3. Problem is: Option 3 is entirely subjective. If you say "it's not accurate enough" I'll say "It's accurate enough". And there's nothing anyone can do about it.

Pure horsepoo. Some are just much more convincing than others.

Oh yes. Some explosions look more realistic then others. I won't deny that. But like I pointed out, and you keep ignoring, it's the line between what's realistic enough and what isn't that I'm calling you on.

For instance, let me do this to demonstrate my point:

Hell, the one from T2 was deemed good enough for a long time, and that was years ago, before studios going crazy about nukes in atmosphere effects.

T2 nukes are pure technobabble because they're not accurately depicted. The shockwaves travel too slowly to be shockwaves and buildings do not crumble like in that video when hit by the shockwave.

It's utter poppycock and should be dismissed immedietly.

See what happened there? I said it's not accurate enough and pointed out why, but you think it is accurate enough. The only difference between our two opinions is... opinion. Subjective opinion.

I actually dugg material about craters in order to deal with Reed's comment, and I'm sorry if it rains all over your 50 MT claims (which I accepted as fact for quite a while btw), because all I did was show that it was not so sure, while at the same time clearly acknowledging the existence of yields greater than 50 megatons for other incidents in later Trek.

This is actually one of the things that I was referring too.

There is no way to get lower then the double digit megatons if we assume Reed is correct. Absoultely no way. I can prove this by using formulas that are considered correct by modern scientists, and have gone through countless revisions in order to be ever more correct.

There wasn't so much as a single valid argument you made during that thread. What you did do, however, was to basically say that modern scientistis all over the world are wrong.

Do you understand how abysmally dumb saying something like that is?

And this again stemmed from what I said above. You started out assuming the figure had to be wrong, and then tried to make the evidence fit that conclusion. First you started by talking about gravity, even though you didn't realize that the formula takes this into account. Then you started talking about pieces floating apart, at which point I pointed out that the formula only assumes that the material will be broken apart, not actually thrown away. Etc.

I mention the sound wave incident, along the other cases, because they're part of the extreme outliers package.

No. You're mentioning them because you're strawmanning my position. I've repeatedly said that I'm not talking about the soundwave, I've even pointed out that I haven't even mentioned it in this thread. And yet you keep on acting as if I'm arguing in favor of the soundwave incident.

That makes your argument a strawman. And a rather transparent one at that.

That question is absurd because I never felt I was bestowed with such authority.

Oh? Then why are you saying SoE isn't close enough and T2 is close enough, even though both are flawed?

You realize that nearly from the start of this "discussion", you have contributed very little to the analysis of the material, and instead mainly relied on direct attacks on me through redundant misinterpretations, strawmen and now lies? Perhaps you may want to actually "disengage" and just let it go?

My objective in this thread is to point out your flawed method of analysis, yes. You don't like that? Boohoo. So far the only one to actually go to personal attacks is you, however.

Good try sweetie, but you're dodging my request. Go defend Obsession

BZZZ

Strawman.

and overloading shuttles that threaten capital ships over vast distances if you think they're that rock solid.

BZZZ

Strawman.

That you decided to solely spend a bit more time of the crashed shuttle, in one of your posts, doesn't wash away your previous accusations, I'm sorry.

What previous accusations? When I said obsession was a-ok? *looks around thread*

Well gee. That doesn't seem to have happened yet.

[Mr. Oragahn]

I'm lost. I get the feeling we're talking about two different things, one which includes ships reaching FTL speeds with impulse engines??
I'm simply interested in those strong and undisputable cases of fusion powered FTL drives (warp drives) which we could study with certainty.

Well, that the ship uses fusion is the most common interpretation of "Balance of Terror." That's as strong as we get - that and the various impulse FTL references. "Relics," "Best of Both Worlds," "Balance of Terror," and "Where No Man Has Gone Before" all put impulse at potentially FTL, and we know from many references that impulse is usually fusion powers.

Below is what I can assemble from the scripts. I can't watch the episodes so it's impossible for me to know if a reference is made about impulse engines used to power warp drives while a ship is obviously moving at warp speed:

• Balance of Terror (TOS): An episode which, by the script, looks like it's full of crispy details and interesting information, like the Romulan ship still carrying old style nuclear weapons.
  Scotty said the ship's power source was "simple impulse". The impulse based FTL trip is, as far as I can tell, only concerning the Romulan ship, which is leaps and bounds ahead of the E-NIL technology wise, but lacking in terms of firepower outside of its main new super weapon, since regular phaser shots can damage it. We don't know the size of this Romulan bird's reactor, nor how much fuel the ship carries. The Romulan plasma tech was also very advanced and powerful, taking down the E-NIL's shields and that of outposts in one shot. I don't recall the UFP coming anywhere close to that only on fusion based power generation, through the use of plasma/phasers.
  In all words, it's not an indication of the advancement of UFP technology.
• Relics (TNG): I didn't find the reference about any ship flying at warp on power from the fusion core embedded within the impulse engine. On a side note, have you ever found a way to rate the E-D's shields from that episode?
  We also learn that the E-D's phasers are powerless against the sphere's carbon-neutronium hull.
• Best of Both Worlds (TNG): First and foremost, I spotted that a nebula, which composition was "eighty-two percent dilithium hydroxyls... manganese, chromium ... should provide an effective screen against [the Borg Cube's] sensors." Now, I can't find any reference to fusion core powering warp drives.
• Where No Man Has Gone Before (TOS): Here's what I foud. "Star date 1312.9. Ship's condition--heading back on impulse power only. Main engines burned out. The ship's space-warp ability--gone. Earth bases, which were only days away are now years in the distance." While possibly providing a rough idea of their FTL speeds, it doesn't say that they managed FTL transit with their impulse core. What is more murky is this part, coming earlier in the episode: "The Valiant had encountered a magnetic space storm and was being swept in this direction. The old impulse engines weren't strong enough."
  Any reason to think it means the ship was moving at warp then, with the warp drive fed with energy from the core within the impulse section?

The thing about shuttles is that we have seen occasional discussion of what they have - microfusion thrusters that burn deuterium and krellide storage cells ("In Theory"). While it is possible that some shuttles do have antimatter power, there's just no reference to that possibility in the canon.

But that was one of E-D's standard onboard shuttles. Short to medium ranges at best. They're not ought to be representative of the shuttle of SoE.
Besides, even long range probes would seem to use AM for their trips, as we observed as a strong likeliness.

Perhaps. I don't know much about Trek's containment technology.
That said, their wonderful technology in antimatter storage would suggest that the UFP also came with something very good for storing fusion fuel.
Looking at DS9 could be a good starting point. I don't think the UFP would be lagging behind the Cardassians in terms of fusion based power generation and storage of the adequate fuels, and we noticed that DS9 could pull enough power to deal with the fleet bombardments the station has been subjected to.

They do a very good job of containing antimatter, but they don't store it densely. I'll note that the E-D usually powers its shields from its fusion generators - "Hero Worship," IIRC.[/quote]

PICARD
If we had transferred all that
warp power to the shields, it
would've torn the ship apart.

Seems to say shields are also powered by that warp power.

Also, I'd readily bet that the tanks used for deuterium storage aren't small at all, and their entire load would more than likely provide more than 100 megatons of energy.

100 megatons of energy requires fusing 700 kg of deuterium into helium. That's about four and a half cubic meters of deuterium slush. As I said before, even weapons designed for it usually don't achieve more than 50% reaction efficiency. In an essentially unpressurized scenario, as this is, even 10% would be truly remarkable.

Few had the luxury of starting the reaction with a multi-megaton trigger.

Interestingly, the Technical Manual thingy claims deuterium is stored as pellets. I wonder where the author got that concept from. In Relics, when working on the old ship's power, Scotty or Geordi had been working on deuterium tanks and cryo pumps.
I never thought I'd get so involved in nerdy talks about the method of storage of deuterium in a fictional shuttle's tanks.

I don't think the initial blast wave within fractions of seconds will pressure matter high enough on its own, but heating up the particles as to make them collide fast enough to get fusion, if pressure is not high enough, requires more energy. That's where I'm yet to find a figure. When you mentionned x terajoules per kilo of deuterium to reach fusion stage, what were the pressure parameters?

TNG shuttles are around 26 cubic meters in volume, most of that the hollow interior. Fitting four and a half cubic meters of deuterium inside the hull is a small stretch. Fitting nine is next to impossible. Forty five or more? No, and a 100 megaton energy level is a severe stretch as well. As I said, it's very difficult to model under a gigaton. Doing so requires setting aside a few assumptions, e.g., the normal timeline of a fireball, as Graham Kennedy does on DITL.

Any link?

Unless the material is blasted into an obstacle. Or even better, blasted into a cavity. Cavities such as the lastly exposed other half of the fuel tank, and any matter beyond, including ground and rock in which the ship was partially embedded in.

The problem is that the cavity will probably already have been melted/flash-vaporized by the leading edge of gamma rays a couple nanoseconds before the deuterium hits fusion-range temperatures. You will probably get megabars of pressure, but not the sort of gigabars you need.

Unless, perhaps, the matter that's sublimated and ionized expands and pushes our deuterium backwards towards the center of the explosion. The rock "cliff" is like an abundant matter of dense casing, contrary to a thermonuclear bomb which casing is fairly slim. It's a natural obstacle on its own, perhaps literally offering a caldron effect... we may obtain a deflection.
If the energy released there comes in spades as to be an overkill amount of energy to heat up the deuterium tank, when the back of the tank will be vapourized, the deuterium itself will already be hot enough. It's only a question of how fast and how much energy is delivered.

It's of course dependant on where the fuel tank is located. It's likely going to be at the aft of the ship, and looking at the way the ship was wedged into the rock mound, with the cockpit visible, depending on how the torpedo gets through whatever shuttle material on its path before it reaches the fuel tank(s), the effects could vary dramatically.
So we are, in fact, not sure about what would happen if that shuttle used a fusion core to power its warp nacelles.

If it uses antimatter, there's much less issues here.

Pretty much, it has to use antimatter - and in order to be significant, the shuttle needs to be carrying a lot of antimatter. If you're lucky, you might get a couple extra megatons out of shuttle deuterium.

It entirely depends on how much AM the shuttle would carry, then. When the AM is out, the surrounding matter would do the rest of the job. You'll not obtain a perfect explosion, in terms of power, but I don't see why you wouldn't max out all the possible energy out of this AM when release on the surface of a planet, in an atmosphere, and a couple of kilos and you get your nice fireworks.

It solely depends on the quantity of matter on the path and how much energy that hull and the shuttle's inner structure can absorb.
Still, detonating a multi-megaton torpedo on a shuttle strikes me as terribly overkill. Perhaps this is a wrong impression, but how many terajoules per kg of deuterium are we talking about?
Torps, back then, were still omnidirectional blast weapons I think (Data may have brought focused blasts later on iirc).

On the whole? Oh, something like 7 to reach the minimum fusion temperature. You get 600 out if the whole thing fuses, but if you want it to fuse at a fast rate, you want to sharply increase the energy you dump into it or put it under billions and billions of atmospheres of pressure.

So, no. There's not going to be enough deuterium reacted efficiently enough to make a significant difference in the yield at hand. You need antimatter, and no small amount of it, to justify having the shuttle contribute to the yield.

To make it simpler and quick, and since you obviously have a good head start on this question, how much power and energy would be needed to make 1 kg of deuterium reach a sure fusion stage at an initial pressure of roughly 100 kPa?

It depends on the quality of the reaction, if parameters for hyperpressure are met and how much deuterium there would be. At the very best, we could expect 6.3 e14 J/kg, or 4.2 times less if we only get fission instead of a spectacular pp chain style fusion.

Well, I've run the numbers. I can't see the shuttle contributing more than 1-10 megatons under the best conditions if it's fusion powered, and this incident tends to push a gigaton.

I agree on the expectable energy release, but I'd like to echo the fact that the gigaton figure only exists if we accept the idea that the burst of light would be that strong, as "sun strong". The episode shows a dimmer burst, with a partial "dusty" hue. The yellow/brownish colour could be due to the atmosphere, but this would mean the light is already weak to be affected by the atmosphere.

Wow, that's high. Are you sure this hull strength applies to mere shuttles?

The estimates range 10-100x in general for the tough hull materials. Our main shuttle strength incidents are crashes and "Minefield." I'm comfortable with saying it's significantly more than the structural strength of steel. It's not tritanium, but it should be at least several times, and 10x isn't out of the question at all.

In "Coda," we have a VOY shuttle cooked to 4,000 degrees (presumably Celsius); it is fine, even though that's almost triple the melting point of steel. In "Rise," we have a hard Mach 2.1 landing that fails to smash the shuttle into small pieces. Or even cause any structual damage. In "The Omega Directive," Paris modifies a shuttle to resist 12,000 kelvins, which would be around seven times the melting point of steel, and is in the range of temperatures we see the Enterprise's hull handling. I would be surprised if the specific heat by volume wasn't much higher, as well. So... ten times as durable, when we're talking about nukes and antimatter bombs? Perfectly reasonable for a shuttle.

OK. We could work from both 10x and 50x the strength of steel.

Yeah but that's still the engine. Ultimately, we don't know enough about power consumption for fusion cores, allowing for warp travel for small crafts, and we don't know enough fuel storage.
I tried to look for other small crafts capable of long trips, like the modified probe in Emissaries, but I don't know what it was running on. If it used AM to fly at warp 9 for so long, I'd find it odd that one of the E-D's medium-long range shuttles, allowing for long trips independantly of the mother ship, would come with "crude" a fusion core.

It was a modified photon torpedo. I expect it used antimatter, but shuttles don't travel at warp 9.

I don't know what warp speeds the shuttles are capable of. Obviously it wouldn't be anything that would stretch Troi's trip to a week sweating in the same cabin-like ship. Hell, even one day would seem to be a total stretch.

But that would still fall terribly short of the mass planetary destruction claim, lest slagging.

Besides, here's something I did from the flash of SoE:

• • 

Of course, that's just for the kicks of using the flash in a most biased, selective and ultimately useless way.

Yes, but even when we just treat it as a flash of light, there's usually a very small fraction of yield that goes to illumination. I went over it many times with Darth Servo on ST.com; frankly, we're looking at the close neighborhood of a gigaton again.

What are the sources that define how much light, and then visible light, would be released for a given yield, or a given reaction?
We know the FAS nuke page, but it's not enough.

There's also the big problem that the emission of light would still be an affair longer than 3~4 frames. I don't see how this can be cut. And that's when dealing with the flash alone, not even the bizarro and much larger non circular expanding matter.

I prefer the dust plume model - what we see isn't the fireball, but a shockwave of debris or something similar. In that case, the speed with which it appears suggests - again - somewhere around a gigaton. In order to reduce it, we need to move outside of the documentarian model and to a less literal interpretation of the VFX; if we do that, we can justify lower figures, like 100 MT.

We see two things. Which one are you talking about here?

[l33telboi]

What are the sources that define how much light, and then visible light, would be released for a given yield, or a given reaction?
We know the FAS nuke page, but it's not enough.

There's also the big problem that the emission of light would still be an affair longer than 3~4 frames. I don't see how this can be cut. And that's when dealing with the flash alone, not even the bizarro and much larger non circular expanding matter.

Flash of light = EM radiation from the nuke, or thermal radiation on Wong's calculator.

And the flash shouldn't last long at all.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Kirk and Spock carried antimatter mortar rounds in some suitcase on a battlefield of some sort?
Wesley carried some antimatter in a glorified fishbowl that would allow like two seconds of warp speed for an UFP capital ship.
I think I recall Sisko functional, missile shaped, antimatter based devices, perhaps storage devices or mines, I can't recall.
AsI said to l33telboi, their faith in their antimatter containment abilities is strong

They have much faith in thier storage capabilities and I wouldn't question them putting antimatter reactors on shuttles however we have seen several shuttles depower and pancake into a planetary body with zero reactor breaches. A fusion reactor would be the easier of the two to explain this since if I understand it correctly it could be shut down in an emergency, your antimatter payload has to be kept in confinment or jettisioned.

Yes, fusion cores are better suited for these crashes. Then, again, it all depends if the ship suffers enough damage, before we start talking about getting its guts heavily damaged. AM tanks would logically be one of the last things to break. They use AM in their massive ships, yet let's remember we're talking about Trek here, the show where consoles explode and random pieces of equipment get breached or malfunction because of a hit to the shields. Obviously AM storage is über secure. Again, Wesley's academic project. Compare that to our situation wherein, today, there are entire countries ready to pull the trigger because one nation might have enriched uranium. And Wes didn't have a negligible quantity either: it powered a capital ship's warp drive for around 2 seconds.

I don't recall saying such a thing.

You want to argue that the ship has enough firepower to slag the whole planet, which would require a firepower that's not seen anywhere else.

That is how I interpeted this statment. If I am in error please explain what you meant.[/quote]

Ah, I see the issue. I'm talking about the ship's firepower. For what I've seen of Trek, I don't recall evidence showing or hinting at the Defiant being capable of slagging a planet with its standard weapon load.

Yes, they do. I acknowledged them. Now, I rejected those which were obviously absurd, and tried to cram the super high end of near wank like TDiC into a reasonnable interpretation that would fit with the majority of weapons that most people place in middle two or three digits megatons.

Which is the same as ignoring it. TDIC can not be reconicled to megatonage range.

No, it's not the same, and if you had paid more attention to what I said, you'd obviously have understood that I did not argue about megaton firepower for the weapons used against the Founders' world, but, on the contrary, extremely special weapons. I argued about that at length with Mith or WILGA, with a suggestion that these weapons, obviously great against a planet, sucked big times even against your bog standard Jem'ha'dar Bug shields. I argued they could have used protomatter for the occasion.

The point I'm making is that the E-D and in another case, her saucer section, withstood nearby massive warp core explosions. These warp cores were not those of a flimsy shuttle, but of capital considerable UFP ships.
Obviously the shuttle overload incident is just as ridiculous as it gets, and to make things clear, anyone taking it at face value needs to get his head checked, unless you want to pretend a shuttle's warp core can unleash novas when overloading.

My point was that reactors unleash as much power as plot demands same as weapons. So in one episode a shuttle red lining is a danger one million miles away and in another a warship's can go off point blank and it isn't a problem. All we can do is put each incident in thier respective slots, low, medium, high, insane and see which one has the most in it at the end of the day.

Which, again, putting cubes into squares is what I did, and that incident is beyond insane. And it was 1.2 M km.

[Mr. Oragahn]

What are the sources that define how much light, and then visible light, would be released for a given yield, or a given reaction?
We know the FAS nuke page, but it's not enough.

There's also the big problem that the emission of light would still be an affair longer than 3~4 frames. I don't see how this can be cut. And that's when dealing with the flash alone, not even the bizarro and much larger non circular expanding matter.

Flash of light = EM radiation from the nuke, or thermal radiation on Wong's calculator.

That I know, but it doesn't give the slightest hint about the percentages of various light emissions relative to their respective wavelengths.

And the flash shouldn't last long at all.

Well that's rather vague. Let's try to understand how long the "flash" would last for a nuclear explosion.

The outer layer initially absorbs much of the radiation from theisothermal sphere and hence the apparent surface temperature of the fireball and the amount of radiation emitted from it decreases after separation. But, as the shock front advances still farther, the temperature of the shocked air diminishes and it becomes increasingly transparent. As the shock front temperature drops below 6,000° K, thermal radiation decreases when the shock front becomes transparent to radiation from the interior. This occurs between 10 –5 and 10 –2 seconds after detonation. At about 0.1 second after detonation, the shock front becomes sufficiently transparent that radiation from the innermost, hottest regions becomes visible, producing a second thermal peak. This results in an unmasking of the still incandescent isothermal region and an increase in the apparent surface temperature of the fireball. This phenomena is referred to as breakaway. Before the second peak begins the fireball has radiated only about one quarter of its total energy. About 99 percent of the total thermal energy is contained in the second pulse. The duration of this pulse depends on the yield of the weapon and the height of burst (HOB); it ranges from only about 0.4 s for a 1 kT airburst to more than 20 s for a 10 MT explosion.

The rate of thermal emission from the fireball is governed by its apparent surface temperature. The thermal output of a nuclear air burst will then occur in two pulses), an initial pulse, consisting primarily of ultraviolet radiation, which contains only about 1% of the total radiant energy of the explosion and is terminated as the shock front moves ahead of the fireball, and a second pulse which occurs after breakaway.

• • 

Both theory and experiment indicate that the dominant thermal pulse can be adequately represented by a blackbody at a temperature between 6,000° and 7,000° K, which places the peak of the spectrum near the boundary between the ultraviolet and the visible regions of the spectrum. The shape of the Planck spectrum is such that most of the radiation is contained in the visible and infrared regions.

Another source goes even farther here:

The energy of a nuclear explosion is released in a number of different ways:
[...]

• direct thermal radiation, most of which takes the form of visible light;

(Within the context of a 1 MT nuclear explosion example:)

Thermal Radiation
Approximately 35 percent of the energy from a nuclear explosion is an intense burst of thermal radiation, i.e., heat. The effects are roughly analogous to the effect of a 2-second flash from an enormous sunlamp. Since the thermal radiation travels at the speed of light (actually a bit slower, since it is deflected by particles in the atmosphere), the flash of light and heat precedes the blast wave by several seconds, just as lightning is seen before the thunder is heard.

So basically, you have between 50% and 100% of these 35% which is visible light, and the most damaging part of the light pulse for this case is considered to be similar to a two seconds long exposure.

One frame would barely have time to catch the photons of the first pulse before the next frames would catch light from the emerging second pulse, and the second pulse, which contains the vast bulk of the energy, would obviously shine longer than 3~4 frames.

Also, consider that the flash is at its peak during the first two frames, the second being the brightest, the last two ones being clearly fainter.

Using the relative scale, if 12 represents 12 seconds, then the second peak is obviously beyond half a second. That's already more than 12.5 frames on 25.
If the we consider that 12, on that scale, represents the full noticeable range of the second pulse, which in the case of a 10 MT warhead would decay over 20 seconds, then the peak of the second pulse seems to occur even later.

Before the fireball tickles the highest reaches of the atmosphere where air is rare, it will still start from the ground, and thus heat up all the air from there, up to the skyroof.

Now, for the intensity:

A l-Mt explosion could cause flashblindness at distances as great as 13 miles [21 km] on a clear day, or 53 miles [85 km] on a clear night. If the flash is focused through the lens of the
eye, a permanent retinal burn will result.

85 km on a clear night! That means that while looking at the 1 MT explosion, you'd be blinded even when standing 85 km away from it, and while looking through 85 km of atmosphere.
Just consider what that means when you're looking at a massive detonation while standing above it in space, and that there's much less air to block light once the fireball has "eaten" all as it expanded in all directions from the ground.
The yield claimed here is a thousand times this. Let's say the E-D was 5,000 km away from Vagra II.
The brightest spot of the "flash" is under the half of pure white:

• • 

The screencap contains sources of pure white, like for the bridge's "neons" nested in the roof. So whites are not toned down.

So doing what JMS did, and assuming sun light corresponds to a pure white level on the grey scale, then for half that intensity, we get:

S = 4 x pi x (5 e6 m)² x 0.7 kW/m² = 219.911 e15 W

Roughly 220 petawatts. That's 52.58 megatons/s.

If the explosion was that intense for a full second and stopped after a second, if the former nuclear ratio is usable, and if I'm not mistaken while going down this path, depending on how much of the whole light radiated (35%) is composed of visible light (from 50% to 100%, to be blunt), the total energy of the explosion is between three and six times this, margin of error and unknowns aside.

Then, of course, this being a figure of power, we have to consider that the "flash" is only visible during four frames, and shines that much only during one frame (0.04 s).
So at best, a closer energy figure would be found by either multiplying the power figure by 0.16 (four frames) or 0.04.

Multiplying the power six times and then by 0.16, we get a total energy yield of 50.4768 megatons.

PS: Besides, you'll excuse me for ignoring your other post. It's obviously not going to be much useful to this topic, and we're probably not going to agree about the essence of certain principles, nor on what we deem to be misinterpretations and strawmen on each other's part. Since I prefer the times when we were capable of much more civilized exchanges, I hope you won't mind.

[sonofccn]

Yes, fusion cores are better suited for these crashes. Then, again, it all depends if the ship suffers enough damage, before we start talking about getting its guts heavily damaged. AM tanks would logically be one of the last things to break. They use AM in their massive ships, yet let's remember we're talking about Trek here, the show where consoles explode and random pieces of equipment get breached or malfunction because of a hit to the shields.

A hit to the shield is on a differnt level compared to an emergency crash landing and it is on the biggers ships that we just how tempermental matter/antimatter reactors are. This of course does not disprove anti-matter reactors but simiply leaves a question mark.

Ah, I see the issue. I'm talking about the ship's firepower. For what I've seen of Trek, I don't recall evidence showing or hinting at the Defiant being capable of slagging a planet with its standard weapon load.

I see.

No, it's not the same, and if you had paid more attention to what I said, you'd obviously have understood that I did not argue about megaton firepower for the weapons used against the Founders' world, but, on the contrary, extremely special weapons. I argued about that at length with Mith or WILGA, with a suggestion that these weapons, obviously great against a planet, sucked big times even against your bog standard Jem'ha'dar Bug shields. I argued they could have used protomatter for the occasion.

Oh I read it and grasped the concept.There is little to no supporting evidence for your theroy however. There is no reason to assume they are employing anything other then normal weaponry. So per TDIC cannon fodder Keldon cruisers can frag M class planets. I don't think that fits with most of the evidence but it is a high firepower example.

Which, again, putting cubes into squares is what I did, and that incident is beyond insane. And it was 1.2 M km.

just to be clear I use the term insane merely as my own personal view on firepower scale. I would term the Culture as insane on my chart but that doesn't mean I consider it invalid merely insanly powerful. So in the episode in question it shows uber anti-matter in full swing leading to insane level trek, Taste of Armegedon and TDIC being two other citizens of that group, which can only be discredited if after the all the tallying is done it is shown to be in the minority of examples. You can't try and find excuses why these high end examples must conform to the lower ones any more then I should try and find an excuse to rise lower examples to mesh with the higher ones.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Oh I read it and grasped the concept.There is little to no supporting evidence for your theroy however. There is no reason to assume they are employing anything other then normal weaponry.

Within the rest of Trek, yes, there is: the yields and expected effects.

So per TDIC cannon fodder Keldon cruisers can frag M class planets. I don't think that fits with most of the evidence but it is a high firepower example.

Yes, within the episode's own reality. But my theory was presented to gap TDiC with the rest of Trek.
The thread was titled "In defense of TDiC" I think.

Which, again, putting cubes into squares is what I did, and that incident is beyond insane. And it was 1.2 M km.

just to be clear I use the term insane merely as my own personal view on firepower scale. I would term the Culture as insane on my chart but that doesn't mean I consider it invalid merely insanly powerful. So in the episode in question it shows uber anti-matter in full swing leading to insane level trek, Taste of Armegedon and TDIC being two other citizens of that group, which can only be discredited if after the all the tallying is done it is shown to be in the minority of examples. You can't try and find excuses why these high end examples must conform to the lower ones any more then I should try and find an excuse to rise lower examples to mesh with the higher ones.

Yes, I can, and it's called consistency. If the majority establishes a region for weapon yields, then it's clear that outliers should be explained to fit with the reality of this range.

That or make debates which are solely restricted to these few cases when it comes to firepower, but you're only establishing an exceptional canon policy.

[l33telboi]

The yield claimed here is a thousand times this. Let's say the E-D was 5,000 km away from Vagra II.

Assuming the methodology is correct, and you're right about the gray-scale thing, this still seems somewhat off. In the scene the planet looks to be more then a planetary diameter away, which would be 12,000km and more, given its near-earth like properties.

This would also make your end result jump by quite a lot.

[Mr. Oragahn]

The yield claimed here is a thousand times this. Let's say the E-D was 5,000 km away from Vagra II.

Assuming the methodology is correct, and you're right about the gray-scale thing, this still seems somewhat off. In the scene the planet looks to be more then a planetary diameter away, which would be 12,000km and more, given its near-earth like properties.

This would also make your end result jump by quite a lot.

The methodology is not going to be watertight since it's already flawed about the duration of visible light emission.
Still, with the greater distance, we should get 1,266.69 e15 w.
JMS initially used a distance below 200 km and worked from the principle that only a thousandth of the energy made it into visible light.

[Jedi Master Spock]

Below is what I can assemble from the scripts. I can't watch the episodes so it's impossible for me to know if a reference is made about impulse engines used to power warp drives while a ship is obviously moving at warp speed:

• Balance of Terror (TOS): An episode which, by the script, looks like it's full of crispy details and interesting information, like the Romulan ship still carrying old style nuclear weapons.
  Scotty said the ship's power source was "simple impulse". The impulse based FTL trip is, as far as I can tell, only concerning the Romulan ship, which is leaps and bounds ahead of the E-NIL technology wise, but lacking in terms of firepower outside of its main new super weapon, since regular phaser shots can damage it. We don't know the size of this Romulan bird's reactor, nor how much fuel the ship carries. The Romulan plasma tech was also very advanced and powerful, taking down the E-NIL's shields and that of outposts in one shot. I don't recall the UFP coming anywhere close to that only on fusion based power generation, through the use of plasma/phasers.

I wouldn't say "leaps and bounds." They have a couple new tricks up their sleeve, but their drive systems aren't one.

In all words, it's not an indication of the advancement of UFP technology.

[*] Relics (TNG): I didn't find the reference about any ship flying at warp on power from the fusion core embedded within the impulse engine. On a side note, have you ever found a way to rate the E-D's shields from that episode?
We also learn that the E-D's phasers are powerless against the sphere's carbon-neutronium hull.

[*] Best of Both Worlds (TNG): First and foremost, I spotted that a nebula, which composition was "eighty-two percent dilithium hydroxyls... manganese, chromium ... should provide an effective screen against [the Borg Cube's] sensors." Now, I can't find any reference to fusion core powering warp drives.

In both these cases, it's a matter of fitting time to distance. The elapsed time is too short for the distance traveled under impulse to be STL.

[*] Where No Man Has Gone Before (TOS): Here's what I foud. "Star date 1312.9. Ship's condition--heading back on impulse power only. Main engines burned out. The ship's space-warp ability--gone. Earth bases, which were only days away are now years in the distance." While possibly providing a rough idea of their FTL speeds, it doesn't say that they managed FTL transit with their impulse core. What is more murky is this part, coming earlier in the episode: "The Valiant had encountered a magnetic space storm and was being swept in this direction. The old impulse engines weren't strong enough."
Any reason to think it means the ship was moving at warp then, with the warp drive fed with energy from the core within the impulse section?

It's mere years away at the border of the galaxy? Over a thousand light years away?

But that was one of E-D's standard onboard shuttles. Short to medium ranges at best. They're not ought to be representative of the shuttle of SoE.
Besides, even long range probes would seem to use AM for their trips, as we observed as a strong likeliness.

It's a fairly similar design of shuttle.

Seems to say shields are also powered by that warp power.

Not quite. What it shows is that they were considering diverting warp power to the shields - but didn't. What are the shields running on currently and normally? The fusion generators.

Few had the luxury of starting the reaction with a multi-megaton trigger.

That's why we might even get that much. With a multi-megaton trigger, your fuel tank could look a bit like a tamper and explode (from the gamma and pions in the leading edge) swiftly enough to compress the deuterium - but that assumes the deuterium completely fills the tank. The increased distance will compensate some for the increased yield, and other factors damping it in comparison will be the fuel tank only being mostly full, not having a nice "sparkplug" as we see in the traditional Tellar-Ulam design, and also using liquid or frozen deuterium instead of Li-6 deuteride. Lithium-6 deuteride pellets are better than pure liquid deuterium for getting a bomb going.

Interestingly, the Technical Manual thingy claims deuterium is stored as pellets. I wonder where the author got that concept from. In Relics, when working on the old ship's power, Scotty or Geordi had been working on deuterium tanks and cryo pumps.
I never thought I'd get so involved in nerdy talks about the method of storage of deuterium in a fictional shuttle's tanks.

I don't think the initial blast wave within fractions of seconds will pressure matter high enough on its own, but heating up the particles as to make them collide fast enough to get fusion, if pressure is not high enough, requires more energy. That's where I'm yet to find a figure. When you mentionned x terajoules per kilo of deuterium to reach fusion stage, what were the pressure parameters?

Slightly fuzzy. See, that's the kinetic energy per particle you need for fusion to happen at all. Pressure and temperature turn out to be two sides of the same thing. You could have a fusion reaction occur in a thin wispy plasma - but since collisions that hit just right are difficult to achieve, it would happen at a ridiculously low rate.

Unless, perhaps, the matter that's sublimated and ionized expands and pushes our deuterium backwards towards the center of the explosion. The rock "cliff" is like an abundant matter of dense casing, contrary to a thermonuclear bomb which casing is fairly slim. It's a natural obstacle on its own, perhaps literally offering a caldron effect... we may obtain a deflection.
If the energy released there comes in spades as to be an overkill amount of energy to heat up the deuterium tank, when the back of the tank will be vapourized, the deuterium itself will already be hot enough. It's only a question of how fast and how much energy is delivered.

Things would have to line up almost perfectly to get a significant yield out of it.

To make it simpler and quick, and since you obviously have a good head start on this question, how much power and energy would be needed to make 1 kg of deuterium reach a sure fusion stage at an initial pressure of roughly 100 kPa?

At that pressure, it basically won't happen. In order to have that pressure, you need a very low density of particles (ideal gas law). When we heat things up to the sort of megakelvins we'd get from a point-blank multi-megaton explosion, we get megabars of pressure as a matter of course.

I agree on the expectable energy release, but I'd like to echo the fact that the gigaton figure only exists if we accept the idea that the burst of light would be that strong, as "sun strong". The episode shows a dimmer burst, with a partial "dusty" hue. The yellow/brownish colour could be due to the atmosphere, but this would mean the light is already weak to be affected by the atmosphere.

Possibly. I'll go through what you've posted on that later.

I don't know what warp speeds the shuttles are capable of. Obviously it wouldn't be anything that would stretch Troi's trip to a week sweating in the same cabin-like ship. Hell, even one day would seem to be a total stretch.

Even low-warp can be high-speed sometimes. Oddities of Trek.

What are the sources that define how much light, and then visible light, would be released for a given yield, or a given reaction?
We know the FAS nuke page, but it's not enough.

So right here, I'll tell you that what you want is Stefan-Boltzmann and Planck. From the fireball dynamics, NFAQ will tell you what temperature you have at the two key peaks of the fireball and approximately what portion of the total power of the device is being dissipated; the black body radiation equations give you the fraction of light being distributed.

There's also the big problem that the emission of light would still be an affair longer than 3~4 frames. I don't see how this can be cut. And that's when dealing with the flash alone, not even the bizarro and much larger non circular expanding matter.

There are two thermal peaks involved in a fireball. The first one (the peak associated with hydrodynamic separation at 300,000 degrees C) tapers to a minimum after 100 milliseconds for a megaton device, 10 for a 20 kiloton device. Now, it's quite possible that the type of device here will affect the timing of the actual separation - pions and gammas are likely to leak straight through the torpedo casing in some numbers, by chance or by design - and so we have a rough guess rather than a firm nailing. And sometimes these equations don't extrapolate well to much higher yields.

1% of the thermal yield (which is to say closer to 0.5% of the total yield) will come during the first pulse, and the first pulse will peak at 300,000 degrees - at which temperature a vanishingly small fraction of the energy is expressed in the visual range. When I said less than one part in a thousand of the total yield, I was performing a dry understatement by more than an order of magnitude when we understand what part of the fireball process this would correspond to. Which flew right over Darth Servo's head, since he hadn't gone to the trouble of integrating Planck's law, and I had. 90% of the energy is emitted at frequencies over ten times higher than the purplest light we can see.

The visual effects still aren't a great fit - and we could estimate the yield based on the timing of the flash - fortunately we don't see the presumed formation of the actual fireball, which would become visible a few seconds later. I prefer just modeling it as an incandescent shell of dust and debris being ejected from the atmosphere for that reason.

We see two things. Which one are you talking about here?

What two things do we see? I just notice one, really...