ASVS's First Topic--Federation vs Covenant

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Mr. Oragahn
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Re: ASVS's First Topic--Federation vs Covenant

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Fri Feb 12, 2010 2:13 pm

Mike DiCenso wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Surely, that's another problem. You density that's required to generate gees that would overpower engines which can leave Earth within a few minutes tops would be incredible.
How the asteroid in question didn't reach hydrostatic equilibrium is odd.
The whole thing is perhaps even more contradicted by the time the Romulan ship melts the cavity's entrance with disruptors. Did we see any gout of molten material fall towards the core of the asteroid, and hit the E-D for example?
Surely, if the gravity is so strong that a shuttle couldn't control entry and even exit, damaging the asteroid's integrity would have surely resulted in something much more hazardous than a cleanly sealed entrance. I would have expected something more like a rain of debris and a newly formed giant stalactite made of asteroid material, pointing "corewards".

Then, perhaps, and I may say once again, we're dealing with more Trek physics, aka pure nonsense.
Except that the molten material does flow "downwards' into the asteroid within minutes of the warbird's firing on it.
Minutes? I won't even ask for proof of that, since the fact that it needed minutes is all I need to tell you that there wasn't enough gees generated by the overall mass of that asteroid to prevent a shuttle from maneuvering, especially out.

The only other explanation is that the warbird pushed the material in with focused weapons fire, or with a tractor beam.
As for the nonsense of it, I agree, but nonetheless, it is a canon fact. So do we charge this up to FX incompetence for not making an asteroid that was larger and more spherical, or assume that Data is an idiot?
We perfectly know that the writers did this because they wanted the E-D inside. They could have pulled out an excuse like no, we won't send people in a shuttle, the environment is too risky and they couldn't defend themselves from the Romulans if things went wrong.
But no, Trek has to to do with physics nonsense. That's the problem.
The other problem is that nothing in that episode agrees with that excuse.
What I tend to do, but again that's not glorious, is ignore the one silly detail.
Again, the Stargate example I love to use is characters, including Carter and McKay, not raising an eyebrow when Hammond says that a low gigaton explosion could cause some mass extinction event on Earth.
I did some work on it. Roughly speaking I get a distance of warbird to camera in the 126 image of 7 km and from the E-D to camera of 886 meters. So about 6,100 meters seperates the two ships. Now that seems a bit small, and my math may be a bit faulty, but then I realized that the two ships are at an angle of some 30-45 degrees off the asteroid's center and this may throw everything off even more, as this may make the thing far larger since the distance would cover only across that section, not the whole asteroid.

As for the E-D as reliable yardstick, I would point out that the height of the ship is skewed here and no one source agrees on it how tall it is: some placing it only at 137 meters, while others estimate it at 150 meters, and the DS9 TM is way out there with 193 meters (not possible within the proportions we see). However within a meter every source places the ship at 641 to 642.5 meters. Call it 642 meters.

Using your images:


Image

Image

Image

Image


Measuring the chasm opening of 2.51" to the E-D length 1.85" (measuring from the narrowest parts of the chasm) I get 873 meters. Again using the images provided here, dividing 362.4 pixels by 34 I get a ratio of 10.66 to 1. 10.66 x 873 = 9.306 km. Measuring the wider parts of the chasm I can get the asteroid length up to 10 km. So that's a third to a full km or more longer using the ship's length, not height. Of course using one of the larger estimate averages for the ships height I can put it in that 10 km range. 160 meters x 5.78 = 924 m x 10.66 = 9,858.36 m.

Starting to get my point now?
The point is that there's a margin of error anyway, from the edges selected by viv to make the measure, from the blurriness of the picture, to the fact that taking the E-D's length while we see the portside nacelle sticking out behind the other, the fact the asteroid may be seen at an angle as well, etc.

I'm fine with the idea that it's around 9 km, more or less 1 km, I won't be retentive on that.
It still doesn't make much difference since contrary to you, I don't believe Riker pictured a giant plasma ball.
Mike DiCenso wrote: Among other things people in that thread, most suprisingly l33telboi missed, was that Kirk's statement was that a 97.835 MT explosion results from overloading a single starship's impulse engine. Thus 98 MT is a very lower limit there. But I digress. The interesting thing is the photon torpedo explosion examples which show that torpedoes rarely leave large fragments behind when they destroy asteroids and starships. The "Rise" incident was an anomaly, and was even as part of the plot acknowledged as one that was throughly investigated by the Voyager crew, and they soon discovered the asteroid there was made of artifical alloys and one natural one that was prone to fragmentation.

Thus one has to conclude that when Riker means the asteroid in "The Pegasus" is to be destroyed, he means mostly vaporized or reduced to tiny pieces vastly smaller than 10 meter chunks.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Nope. Because small asteroids largely vanish after being hit, it doesn't automatically translate in Riker thought that the big ass one would be largely vaporized.
That makes no sense. Assuming 100 megaton torpedoes as per the rise calculations, then 250 torpedoes x 100 MT = 25,000 MT or 25 gigatons. That's more than enough to signficantly vaporize a spherical asteroid of those dimensions, never mind an irregularly shaped one.
You say it doesn't make sense and legitimate this claim by picking interpretation from another episode?
Let me tell you that in Pegasus, there's just no problem with the idea that Riker didn't necessarily envision turning the asteroid into a plasma ball. Torpedo figures are probably stretched over a certain range.
Not to say that several gigatons is good enough to vaporize such a large asteroid because it's done efficiently. Wong's calculator assumes a perfecly homogeneous and spherical asteroid with a charge in its middle. That's totally different than firing volley after volley at the surface.
Now, assuredly, the best part of 250 torpedoes, even rated at 10 megatons, would surely turn this piece of rock into mincemeat no matter what.
On the other hand, if we look at it the other way, knowing that vaporization is possible such that only tiny bits remain, then 768 gigatons divided by 250 torps = 3 gigatons per torpedo. Riker's thought, as the dialog shows, is to utterly destroy the thing and the Pegasus to ensure not a single bit remained for Pressman or the Romulans. Under your scenario, Riker is an idiot who will just be happy with leaving behind large chunks and possibly large pieces of the ship.
He has enough torpedoes, even if rated at 10 MT, to blast all pieces into bits so small than the fused Pegasus couldn't hide in any of them.
On top of that, as noted earlier, Riker has no idea exactly what it will take. He gave an off the cuff option, one that ensures total destruction. We also cannot quantify exactly what "most of" the 250 torpedo loadout means. Is it 150, 165, 200 , or 249 torpedoes to do the job? Brian Young assumes 275 were expended (the number per the TNG TM, not the canon 250 number given in "Conundrum").

So what this comes down to is at very minimum "The Pegasus" points to low single digit megatons, and on the upper range low single digit gigatons.
-Mike
Riker is no specialized gunner, explosive engineer nor math genius either. You're putting too much stock into a man who was emotionally and professionally involved in this event, and just threw a figure in haste in order to convince people around him that it could be done and was the way to do it.
Were it coming from a non-involved technician reading what the computers tell him/her, there would be much less ambiguity and much less issues, although we would still not know what "destroy" meant.

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Re: ASVS's First Topic--Federation vs Covenant

Post by Mike DiCenso » Sat Feb 13, 2010 7:19 am

Mr. Oragahn wrote:Minutes? I won't even ask for proof of that, since the fact that it needed minutes is all I need to tell you that there wasn't enough gees generated by the overall mass of that asteroid to prevent a shuttle from maneuvering, especially out.
I say within minutes because we don't see the intial bombardment and flow down into the cavern. What happens is Riker and Pressman are arguing over the phase cloak device on the Pegasus when the asteroid and ship rock violently for about 3 seconds, then a call for their immediate return to the Enterprise comes in over their combadges. They beam out. The next scene has them charging onto the bridge and looking at the viewscreen showing the huge molten mass of rock flowing towards the ship, and the cut to commerical break. That means in the few seconds of beamout time, and the few mintues it would take for Pressman to hide the cloak in his quarters and then both he and Riker run to the bridge to see what is happenig constrains the flow time in the 4 km deep chasm to about 10 minutes.

As for the nonsense of it, I agree, but nonetheless, it is a canon fact. So do we charge this up to FX incompetence for not making an asteroid that was larger and more spherical, or assume that Data is an idiot?
Mr. Oragahn wrote:We perfectly know that the writers did this because they wanted the E-D inside. They could have pulled out an excuse like no, we won't send people in a shuttle, the environment is too risky and they couldn't defend themselves from the Romulans if things went wrong.

But no, Trek has to to do with physics nonsense. That's the problem.
The other problem is that nothing in that episode agrees with that excuse.
What I tend to do, but again that's not glorious, is ignore the one silly detail.
Again, the Stargate example I love to use is characters, including Carter and McKay, not raising an eyebrow when Hammond says that a low gigaton explosion could cause some mass extinction event on Earth.
Um, yes. But that still doesn't entirely allow us to ignore what was said any done any more than we can ignore the CME incident in "Echoes".

Mr. Oragahn wrote:The point is that there's a margin of error anyway, from the edges selected by viv to make the measure, from the blurriness of the picture, to the fact that taking the E-D's length while we see the portside nacelle sticking out behind the other, the fact the asteroid may be seen at an angle as well, etc.
For an 11% error? I don't think so. That's the difference between 8.92 km and 9.9 or so km. That translates to more than simple linear dimensions here as the width as well as the length with increase, and the volume will be cubed. Instead of 3.69E11 m^3, we now are up to 5.080E11 m^3. So 508 km^3 versus 369 km^3 means a 28% difference in volume. That's kind of significant.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:I'm fine with the idea that it's around 9 km, more or less 1 km, I won't be retentive on that.
It still doesn't make much difference since contrary to you, I don't believe Riker pictured a giant plasma ball.
Well, he needed to destroy the asteroid and quick with the Romulan warbird only minutes away, and it needed to be highly through as he did not know precisely where the Pegasus was in the asteroid. So maybe not a "plasma ball", but probably significant vaporization involved, especially where the Pegasus was concerned.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Nope. Because small asteroids largely vanish after being hit, it doesn't automatically translate in Riker thought that the big ass one would be largely vaporized.
Mike DiCenso wrote:That makes no sense. Assuming 100 megaton torpedoes as per the rise calculations, then 250 torpedoes x 100 MT = 25,000 MT or 25 gigatons. That's more than enough to signficantly vaporize a spherical asteroid of those dimensions, never mind an irregularly shaped one.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:You say it doesn't make sense and legitimate this claim by picking interpretation from another episode?
Let me tell you that in Pegasus, there's just no problem with the idea that Riker didn't necessarily envision turning the asteroid into a plasma ball. Torpedo figures are probably stretched over a certain range.
Not to say that several gigatons is good enough to vaporize such a large asteroid because it's done efficiently. Wong's calculator assumes a perfecly homogeneous and spherical asteroid with a charge in its middle. That's totally different than firing volley after volley at the surface.
Now, assuredly, the best part of 250 torpedoes, even rated at 10 megatons, would surely turn this piece of rock into mincemeat no matter what.
That would be 2.5 gigatons total, and while that would turn a good portion of the asteroid into chunks of debris, it would still fall short of his goal of total destruction to insure that the Pegasus would be utterly destroyed so that neither Pressman nor the Romulans could get ahold of anything.

As for using other episodes or movies, what do you expect? This episode is part of the larger continuity, and we have to take that into account. As that one SB.com thread you posted to showed, there are several examples of asteroid vaporization, or mostly vaporized in the canon. Add to the examples there, the asteroid destruction by two torpedoes in "The Cost of Living", where the E-D's torpedoes disappear as they head towards the asteroid, it is that big and destroy most of it with very little debris, except the 250 meter core, which was made of technobabble nitrium material, and required the use of the deflector dish beam to shatter it.
Mike DiCenso wrote:On the other hand, if we look at it the other way, knowing that vaporization is possible such that only tiny bits remain, then 768 gigatons divided by 250 torps = 3 gigatons per torpedo. Riker's thought, as the dialog shows, is to utterly destroy the thing and the Pegasus to ensure not a single bit remained for Pressman or the Romulans. Under your scenario, Riker is an idiot who will just be happy with leaving behind large chunks and possibly large pieces of the ship.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:He has enough torpedoes, even if rated at 10 MT, to blast all pieces into bits so small than the fused Pegasus couldn't hide in any of them.
Does he? Ten megatons is only going to reduce the asteroid if they are some how perfectly planted in the center of the thing for maximum efficency. At best you get 5 MT directed into the surface of it, and more like 2.5 MT. To be absolutely certain, you need "Rise", "Cost of Living", "Booby Trap", or ST:TMP level vaporization.
Mike DiCenso wrote:On top of that, as noted earlier, Riker has no idea exactly what it will take. He gave an off the cuff option, one that ensures total destruction. We also cannot quantify exactly what "most of" the 250 torpedo loadout means. Is it 150, 165, 200 , or 249 torpedoes to do the job? Brian Young assumes 275 were expended (the number per the TNG TM, not the canon 250 number given in "Conundrum").

So what this comes down to is at very minimum "The Pegasus" points to low single digit megatons, and on the upper range low single digit gigatons.
-Mike
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Riker is no specialized gunner, explosive engineer nor math genius either. You're putting too much stock into a man who was emotionally and professionally involved in this event, and just threw a figure in haste in order to convince people around him that it could be done and was the way to do it.
Were it coming from a non-involved technician reading what the computers tell him/her, there would be much less ambiguity and much less issues, although we would still not know what "destroy" meant.
Riker is the ship's XO, he's been trained and has years of experiance to know what the weapons in general should be able to do, though he has not had enough time to figure out exactly how much he needs to pull it off, nor states a definitive number. His goal is clear enough, however, and we can reasonably assume that he means "destroy" as in reduce the asteroid to sub-10 meter pieces at the very least to ensure that the Pegasus and it's secrets won't fall into the wrong hands. It's his margin of uncertainty which is probably driving him to be overly conservative in assuming it will take most of the torpedoes on board. But his goal is clear.
-Mike

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Re: ASVS's First Topic--Federation vs Covenant

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sat Feb 13, 2010 6:26 pm

Mike DiCenso wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Minutes? I won't even ask for proof of that, since the fact that it needed minutes is all I need to tell you that there wasn't enough gees generated by the overall mass of that asteroid to prevent a shuttle from maneuvering, especially out.
I say within minutes because we don't see the intial bombardment and flow down into the cavern. What happens is Riker and Pressman are arguing over the phase cloak device on the Pegasus when the asteroid and ship rock violently for about 3 seconds, then a call for their immediate return to the Enterprise comes in over their combadges. They beam out. The next scene has them charging onto the bridge and looking at the viewscreen showing the huge molten mass of rock flowing towards the ship, and the cut to commerical break. That means in the few seconds of beamout time, and the few mintues it would take for Pressman to hide the cloak in his quarters and then both he and Riker run to the bridge to see what is happenig constrains the flow time in the 4 km deep chasm to about 10 minutes.
That's still minutes. It still doesn't work, no matter what.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:We perfectly know that the writers did this because they wanted the E-D inside. They could have pulled out an excuse like no, we won't send people in a shuttle, the environment is too risky and they couldn't defend themselves from the Romulans if things went wrong.

But no, Trek has to to do with physics nonsense. That's the problem.
The other problem is that nothing in that episode agrees with that excuse.
What I tend to do, but again that's not glorious, is ignore the one silly detail.
Again, the Stargate example I love to use is characters, including Carter and McKay, not raising an eyebrow when Hammond says that a low gigaton explosion could cause some mass extinction event on Earth.
Um, yes. But that still doesn't entirely allow us to ignore what was said any done any more than we can ignore the CME incident in "Echoes".
It's not like I enjoy bringing Echoes at any possible occasion. My take on it was rather extreme to the point I suggested ditching the visuals entirely and just treat dialogue as if it came from a book.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:The point is that there's a margin of error anyway, from the edges selected by viv to make the measure, from the blurriness of the picture, to the fact that taking the E-D's length while we see the portside nacelle sticking out behind the other, the fact the asteroid may be seen at an angle as well, etc.
For an 11% error? I don't think so. That's the difference between 8.92 km and 9.9 or so km. That translates to more than simple linear dimensions here as the width as well as the length with increase, and the volume will be cubed. Instead of 3.69E11 m^3, we now are up to 5.080E11 m^3. So 508 km^3 versus 369 km^3 means a 28% difference in volume. That's kind of significant.
What do you mean by "I don't think so"? I'm saying that there's plenty of parameters that can precisely generate varying figures to the degree you say, especially if the asteroid is seen at an angle.
In the end, the number of torps needed to blast even one extra kilometer of asteroid is small, even if we go with 10 MT torps.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:I'm fine with the idea that it's around 9 km, more or less 1 km, I won't be retentive on that.
It still doesn't make much difference since contrary to you, I don't believe Riker pictured a giant plasma ball.
Well, he needed to destroy the asteroid and quick with the Romulan warbird only minutes away, and it needed to be highly through as he did not know precisely where the Pegasus was in the asteroid. So maybe not a "plasma ball", but probably significant vaporization involved, especially where the Pegasus was concerned.
Fire in the cracks, that's all. We've seen what a 10 MT buried charge can do against the Golevka asteroid in the simulation. It already breaks it into many pieces and completely vaporizes a core that's more than 200 meters wide. You'll just need a bit more since the charge is not totally buried. It will be easy to fire at the severed main debris after that, and can all be done within minutes. The simulation shows the destruction occurring within fractions of a second.

The reason Riker would fire into the cracks is the one that you have to accept. If he would do what's best with what the ship has, he'd look for maximum efficiency, and it's basic knowledge at this point that shooting inside is way better.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:You say it doesn't make sense and legitimate this claim by picking interpretation from another episode?
Let me tell you that in Pegasus, there's just no problem with the idea that Riker didn't necessarily envision turning the asteroid into a plasma ball. Torpedo figures are probably stretched over a certain range.
Not to say that several gigatons is good enough to vaporize such a large asteroid because it's done efficiently. Wong's calculator assumes a perfecly homogeneous and spherical asteroid with a charge in its middle. That's totally different than firing volley after volley at the surface.
Now, assuredly, the best part of 250 torpedoes, even rated at 10 megatons, would surely turn this piece of rock into mincemeat no matter what.
That would be 2.5 gigatons total, and while that would turn a good portion of the asteroid into chunks of debris, it would still fall short of his goal of total destruction to insure that the Pegasus would be utterly destroyed so that neither Pressman nor the Romulans could get ahold of anything.
I certainly don't think so, and you're operating from a calculator that adds much more volume than the asteroid had, since it had cavities and was elongated, not spherical.
As for using other episodes or movies, what do you expect? This episode is part of the larger continuity, and we have to take that into account.
Not when trying to know what Riker had in mind there. You can make references to other (disputed) interpretations after that, but not as a part of your argumentation. It should stand on its own.
As that one SB.com thread you posted to showed, there are several examples of asteroid vaporization, or mostly vaporized in the canon. Add to the examples there, the asteroid destruction by two torpedoes in "The Cost of Living", where the E-D's torpedoes disappear as they head towards the asteroid, it is that big and destroy most of it with very little debris, except the 250 meter core, which was made of technobabble nitrium material, and required the use of the deflector dish beam to shatter it.
Please forward a proper gauging, with high quality pictures, of Cost of Living's torps.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:He has enough torpedoes, even if rated at 10 MT, to blast all pieces into bits so small than the fused Pegasus couldn't hide in any of them.
Does he? Ten megatons is only going to reduce the asteroid if they are some how perfectly planted in the center of the thing for maximum efficency. At best you get 5 MT directed into the surface of it, and more like 2.5 MT. To be absolutely certain, you need "Rise", "Cost of Living", "Booby Trap", or ST:TMP level vaporization.
vivftp got some smaller estimates for Rise, and the asteroid in TMP was so weird that it could horribly mess up a ship's warp field. A total WTF, with WTF physics again.

Not to say that if I'm thinking of what you're thinking, the upper yields from some of these events would completely laugh at Riker's need of "most" torps.
Mike DiCenso wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Riker is no specialized gunner, explosive engineer nor math genius either. You're putting too much stock into a man who was emotionally and professionally involved in this event, and just threw a figure in haste in order to convince people around him that it could be done and was the way to do it.
Were it coming from a non-involved technician reading what the computers tell him/her, there would be much less ambiguity and much less issues, although we would still not know what "destroy" meant.
Riker is the ship's XO, he's been trained and has years of experiance to know what the weapons in general should be able to do, though he has not had enough time to figure out exactly how much he needs to pull it off, nor states a definitive number. His goal is clear enough, however, and we can reasonably assume that he means "destroy" as in reduce the asteroid to sub-10 meter pieces at the very least to ensure that the Pegasus and it's secrets won't fall into the wrong hands. It's his margin of uncertainty which is probably driving him to be overly conservative in assuming it will take most of the torpedoes on board. But his goal is clear.
-Mike
In "general" being the word. Unless they're used to engage that long asteroids routinely, he can't know what is needed without the help of a computer.
He had the opportunity to have torps even fired inside the asteroid if needed, and finish off the drifting debris.

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Re: ASVS's First Topic--Federation vs Covenant

Post by Mike DiCenso » Thu Feb 25, 2010 8:34 am

Mike DiCenso wrote: I say within minutes because we don't see the intial bombardment and flow down into the cavern. What happens is Riker and Pressman are arguing over the phase cloak device on the Pegasus when the asteroid and ship rock violently for about 3 seconds, then a call for their immediate return to the Enterprise comes in over their combadges. They beam out. The next scene has them charging onto the bridge and looking at the viewscreen showing the huge molten mass of rock flowing towards the ship, and the cut to commerical break. That means in the few seconds of beamout time, and the few mintues it would take for Pressman to hide the cloak in his quarters and then both he and Riker run to the bridge to see what is happeing constrains the flow time in the 4 km deep chasm to about 10 minutes.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: That's still minutes. It still doesn't work, no matter what.
But it's highly constrained to no more than 10 minutes on the outside. This is the point you keep missing. Even still, on Earth a downhill flow of lava is not in thousands of meters a second, even hundreds, but tens of meters as seen in these videos here and here. The stuff is a bit like taffy in viscosity. At 36 km an hour, that still requires some 6-7 minutes to flow down the tunnel. But again, that's a lower limit since we only see the molten rock flow for the first time when Riker and Pressman reach the bridge. For an asteroid of 9-12 km, that's unusually fast.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:We perfectly know that the writers did this because they wanted the E-D inside. They could have pulled out an excuse like no, we won't send people in a shuttle, the environment is too risky and they couldn't defend themselves from the Romulans if things went wrong.

But no, Trek has to to do with physics nonsense. That's the problem.
The other problem is that nothing in that episode agrees with that excuse.
What I tend to do, but again that's not glorious, is ignore the one silly detail.
Again, the Stargate example I love to use is characters, including Carter and McKay, not raising an eyebrow when Hammond says that a low gigaton explosion could cause some mass extinction event on Earth.
Mike DiCenso wrote:Um, yes. But that still doesn't entirely allow us to ignore what was said any done any more than we can ignore the CME incident in "Echoes".
Mr. Oragahn wrote: It's not like I enjoy bringing Echoes at any possible occasion. My take on it was rather extreme to the point I suggested ditching the visuals entirely and just treat dialogue as if it came from a book.
Nonetheless, it happened. The E-D is shaken by the magnetic and gravimetric disturbances. And in "Echoes", we have to accept what will happen to the planet, and therefore the visuals are either a part of some unsually coherent beam of plasma that will only widen out tens of millions of km from the star, or we have to reject it all together, or call McKay an idiot as people like Kane Starkiller would have us do and except that only a few gigawatts or so was shot out and intercepted by the Daedalus's shields. You can't have it the way you want just because one is your favorite franchise and the other isn't. So if you claim to go that way with Trek's "Pegasus", then we have to also go that way with SG.

Mr. Oragahn wrote:The point is that there's a margin of error anyway, from the edges selected by viv to make the measure, from the blurriness of the picture, to the fact that taking the E-D's length while we see the portside nacelle sticking out behind the other, the fact the asteroid may be seen at an angle as well, etc.
Mike DiCenso wrote:For an 11% error? I don't think so. That's the difference between 8.92 km and 9.9 or so km. That translates to more than simple linear dimensions here as the width as well as the length with increase, and the volume will be cubed. Instead of 3.69E11 m^3, we now are up to 5.080E11 m^3. So 508 km^3 versus 369 km^3 means a 28% difference in volume. That's kind of significant.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: What do you mean by "I don't think so"? I'm saying that there's plenty of parameters that can precisely generate varying figures to the degree you say, especially if the asteroid is seen at an angle. In the end, the number of torps needed to blast even one extra kilometer of asteroid is small, even if we go with 10 MT torps.
Which translates into tens of cubic kilometers, Oragahn. You're confusing linear dimensions with volumetrics again. A one km x one or two km difference linear means tens of cubic meters difference. That's a significant increase by at least a 100 megatons of required energy.

Mr. Oragahn wrote:I'm fine with the idea that it's around 9 km, more or less 1 km, I won't be retentive on that.
It still doesn't make much difference since contrary to you, I don't believe Riker pictured a giant plasma ball.
Mike DiCenso wrote:Well, he needed to destroy the asteroid and quick with the Romulan warbird only minutes away, and it needed to be highly through as he did not know precisely where the Pegasus was in the asteroid. So maybe not a "plasma ball", but probably significant vaporization involved, especially where the Pegasus was concerned.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Fire in the cracks, that's all. We've seen what a 10 MT buried charge can do against the Golevka asteroid in the simulation. It already breaks it into many pieces and completely vaporizes a core that's more than 200 meters wide. You'll just need a bit more since the charge is not totally buried. It will be easy to fire at the severed main debris after that, and can all be done within minutes. The simulation shows the destruction occurring within fractions of a second.

The reason Riker would fire into the cracks is the one that you have to accept. If he would do what's best with what the ship has, he'd look for maximum efficiency, and it's basic knowledge at this point that shooting inside is way better.
Yes, but that simulation shows that 10 megatons won't instantly vaporize an asteroid of that size as the SDN calculator estimates. And Riker did not say anything about shooting torpedoes down into the chasms, he says it will take most of the torpedoes to destroy the whole asteroid. Perhaps eventually he would realize that it would be easier and only one or two torpedoes are required, but it could also be that Riker suspected that the ship had phased into the soild rock of the asteroid and was out of reach by simply shooting a torpedo or two into it. We have seen in TNG's "Unnatural Selection", the Miranda class USS Lantree is vaporized by single torpedo fired at it by the E-D. If the Pegasus was sitting at the bottom of a chasm, only one should work as well too, especially given the Oberth class starship's smaller size compared to a Miranda.

So again, we have to conclude that Riker is being way overly conservative and wants to ensure total destruction of both the Pegasus and the asteroid it is inside.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: I certainly don't think so, and you're operating from a calculator that adds much more volume than the asteroid had, since it had cavities and was elongated, not spherical.
This is true, but it is in the ball park. Plus we are still uncertain whether or not vaporization is involved here or not, or blowing the asteroid into centimeter or smaller bits. All we can do is get a conservative estimate no matter what we do.
Mike DiCenso wrote:As for using other episodes or movies, what do you expect? This episode is part of the larger continuity, and we have to take that into account.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Not when trying to know what Riker had in mind there. You can make references to other (disputed) interpretations after that, but not as a part of your argumentation. It should stand on its own.
It does stand on it's own as a conservative estimate, and it shows Trek firepower in the gigatons, if you go with the middle and upper estimates. When combined with the other evidence, we can easily get gigatons because of the vaporization of other asteroids throughout Trek. The other examples help to quantify it.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Please forward a proper gauging, with high quality pictures, of Cost of Living's torps.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE4hEDDUw5w

Watch how the first torpedo disappears against the asteroid in fractions of a second, followed by the second. You can debate whether or not the little sparkly things are debris, but there is at least one visible dark colored small piece of debris, which I assume is the nitrium core.
Mike DiCenso wrote:Does he? Ten megatons is only going to reduce the asteroid if they are some how perfectly planted in the center of the thing for maximum efficency. At best you get 5 MT directed into the surface of it, and more like 2.5 MT. To be absolutely certain, you need "Rise", "Cost of Living", "Booby Trap", or ST:TMP level vaporization.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: vivftp got some smaller estimates for Rise, and the asteroid in TMP was so weird that it could horribly mess up a ship's warp field. A total WTF, with WTF physics again.
He got a lower end of 44 MT and upper range of 88 MT. Also the asteroid did not affect the E-1701's warp field, it was an intermix imbalance caused by inadequate testing, and the asteroid was drawn into the "wormhole" with the ship when warp was engaged.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Not to say that if I'm thinking of what you're thinking, the upper yields from some of these events would completely laugh at Riker's need of "most" torps.
Yes, but we have no idea what most means in this case. The use of 150 (enough to qualify as "most") torpedoes, each rated at 88 MT would be more than 13 gigatons. We can't be sure Riker really needs most of the 250 torpedoes, but remember he wants to insure total destruction of everthing so that the Pegasus will not fall into the wrong hands, and he did not calculate all this out, just gave an off the cuff estimate.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: In "general" being the word. Unless they're used to engage that long asteroids routinely, he can't know what is needed without the help of a computer.
He had the opportunity to have torps even fired inside the asteroid if needed, and finish off the drifting debris.
Again, as above, Riker needs to ensure the Pegasus will be destroyed. At this point he has no idea if the ship has phased totally inside the rock, or has drifted into the chasm as Data suggested. So he must be sure one way or the other. That is his intent clear and simple.
-Mike

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Re: ASVS's First Topic--Federation vs Covenant

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Fri Feb 26, 2010 6:20 pm

Mike DiCenso wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote: That's still minutes. It still doesn't work, no matter what.
But it's highly constrained to no more than 10 minutes on the outside.
What?
Hell, 1 minutes would already be too much. I'm afraid you don't realize how fast that stuff should be dropping if the forces could prevent a shuttle from exiting the asteroid.
This is the point you keep missing. Even still, on Earth a downhill flow of lava is not in thousands of meters a second, even hundreds, but tens of meters as seen in these videos here and here. The stuff is a bit like taffy in viscosity. At 36 km an hour, that still requires some 6-7 minutes to flow down the tunnel. But again, that's a lower limit since we only see the molten rock flow for the first time when Riker and Pressman reach the bridge. For an asteroid of 9-12 km, that's unusually fast.
This is erroneous. Lava flows along slopes, which is a total apples & oranges mistake. I'm talking about a free fall towards the core of the asteroid, with no air to slow the molten rock down, and that obviously under an acceleration that well superior to 1 g.
No matter how you slice it, it just doesn't work.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: It's not like I enjoy bringing Echoes at any possible occasion. My take on it was rather extreme to the point I suggested ditching the visuals entirely and just treat dialogue as if it came from a book.
Nonetheless, it happened. The E-D is shaken by the magnetic and gravimetric disturbances.
Yet the molten rock takes ages to drip. Yet it has cavities. Yet it has not came anywhere close to hydrostatic equilibrium.
And in "Echoes", we have to accept what will happen to the planet, and therefore the visuals are either a part of some unsually coherent beam of plasma that will only widen out tens of millions of km from the star, or we have to reject it all together, or call McKay an idiot as people like Kane Starkiller would have us do and except that only a few gigawatts or so was shot out and intercepted by the Daedalus's shields. You can't have it the way you want just because one is your favorite franchise and the other isn't. So if you claim to go that way with Trek's "Pegasus", then we have to also go that way with SG.
Your accusation of bias is completely out of touch, I'm afraid, and it would be better if you could avoid it when your arguments are not good enough to strike home in a way that baffles your wishful thinking.
You are terribly missing the point here. I didn't oscillate between reworking Echoes and outright ignoring it because the power figure was too little, but simply because it appeared to be entirely silly, and I preferred to assume a "real" CME than this beam.
My "by the book" interpretation was that the script could be bent to be understood in a way such as the ship intercepted a fraction of the stream, notably by extending its shield, but that was enough to protect the entire planet.
As for Kane S., I got him caught in his own contradiction, and him cherry picking the visuals he wanted to use, even splitting the visual evidence about the stream itself, and ignoring everything else, even the basic plot itself.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: What do you mean by "I don't think so"? I'm saying that there's plenty of parameters that can precisely generate varying figures to the degree you say, especially if the asteroid is seen at an angle. In the end, the number of torps needed to blast even one extra kilometer of asteroid is small, even if we go with 10 MT torps.
Which translates into tens of cubic kilometers, Oragahn. You're confusing linear dimensions with volumetrics again. A one km x one or two km difference linear means tens of cubic meters difference. That's a significant increase by at least a 100 megatons of required energy.
I'm not confusing anything. 1 extra kilometer of asteroid, would still easily be easily pulverized and partially vaporized by a couple more low megaton torpedoes, and that for the simple reason that they can be fired directly at the piece in question.
We're not dealing with one single centrally buried detonation that has to reach even further because of that extra kilometer of rock.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Fire in the cracks, that's all. We've seen what a 10 MT buried charge can do against the Golevka asteroid in the simulation. It already breaks it into many pieces and completely vaporizes a core that's more than 200 meters wide. You'll just need a bit more since the charge is not totally buried. It will be easy to fire at the severed main debris after that, and can all be done within minutes. The simulation shows the destruction occurring within fractions of a second.

The reason Riker would fire into the cracks is the one that you have to accept. If he would do what's best with what the ship has, he'd look for maximum efficiency, and it's basic knowledge at this point that shooting inside is way better.
Yes, but that simulation shows that 10 megatons won't instantly vaporize an asteroid of that size as the SDN calculator estimates.
And? One single charge was already enough to entirely vaporize a 200 m wide sphere of rock, melt beyond and crack the crust.
And Riker did not say anything about shooting torpedoes down into the chasms, he says it will take most of the torpedoes to destroy the whole asteroid.
You can't have it both ways, Mike. If he's going to throw all that is necessary to get rid of that rock, he's surely going to make sure he gets more bang out of his weapons.
He's not a retard.
Perhaps eventually he would realize that it would be easier and only one or two torpedoes are required,...
If the ship is located and if there is enough direct sigh at it, yep.
Otherwise, he's still going to have to blast the asteroid piece by piece.
... but it could also be that Riker suspected that the ship had phased into the soild rock of the asteroid and was out of reach by simply shooting a torpedo or two into it. We have seen in TNG's "Unnatural Selection", the Miranda class USS Lantree is vaporized by single torpedo fired at it by the E-D.
The ship you're talking about (Lantree?) didn't just blow up by the torpedo's sheer power. Obviously the ship's own antimatter added a lot to the final explosion.
There's still that reference I made here, which somehow remains a mystery.
Still, eventually the same could happen to Pegasus, her antimatter reacting once the containment is pulverized, and that would obviously help a lot as well.
If the Pegasus was sitting at the bottom of a chasm, only one should work as well too, especially given the Oberth class starship's smaller size compared to a Miranda.
So again, we have to conclude that Riker is being way overly conservative and wants to ensure total destruction of both the Pegasus and the asteroid it is inside.
He only was conservative in that he didn't know then where the Pegasus really was, and worked from the premise that he'd have to shoot at the asteroid. You think the entire asteroid would need to be vaporized, but that's silly.
If any fragment bigger than the ship would survive, they'd target and destroy it.
The very fact that they would have to use so many torpedoes pretty much proves that there would be many large debris left to track and destroy. They simply can't apply enough power to prevent debris from forming.
So it only turns into a game of shooting down the debris.
As pointed out above, since the Pegasus didn't explode, it's obvious its own antimatter will help finish her off.

There is, again, no need to pretend that a low end pulls a torp yield at medium (50-200 MT) to high megatons (many hundreds) when it's simply not necessary at all.

We will remember that we're disagreeing on the low end, which means I'm not holding the argument that the torps could not be of 50 MT or more, but just that it's not required as per the episode.

Mr. Oragahn wrote: I certainly don't think so, and you're operating from a calculator that adds much more volume than the asteroid had, since it had cavities and was elongated, not spherical.
This is true, but it is in the ball park.
It is not the ballpark. It's one single explosion, buried in the center of the asteroid. It pumps the firepower number up very quickly the more you thicken the asteroid.
Here we have a ship that's going to shoot at several points and hunt down the debris that will form, because you simply can't avoid that happening.
Plus we are still uncertain whether or not vaporization is involved here or not, or blowing the asteroid into centimeter or smaller bits. All we can do is get a conservative estimate no matter what we do.
Yes, and that conservative measure doesn't require more than cracking the asteroid until its fragment and whatever is left can be safely estimated as not being Pegasus mixed to rock.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Not when trying to know what Riker had in mind there. You can make references to other (disputed) interpretations after that, but not as a part of your argumentation. It should stand on its own.
It does stand on it's own as a conservative estimate, and it shows Trek firepower in the gigatons, if you go with the middle and upper estimates. When combined with the other evidence, we can easily get gigatons because of the vaporization of other asteroids throughout Trek. The other examples help to quantify it.
The upper estimate requires absolute vaporization of the asteroid. Yes, it reaches above gigatons as a total.
But that is if we agree that Riker believe his torps could do that.
A lower end would have Riker convinced that even that many torps could simply not vaporize so much rock, but would be more than enough to get rid of the .

Certain figures from Rise, like TMP, may provide higher figures. vivftp's Rise figures are somehow smaller.

For the notice, there's not much glow growth in Cost of Living after the torps are fired. May I say that the special effects were rather nicely done in that one.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: vivftp got some smaller estimates for Rise, and the asteroid in TMP was so weird that it could horribly mess up a ship's warp field. A total WTF, with WTF physics again.
He got a lower end of 44 MT and upper range of 88 MT. Also the asteroid did not affect the E-1701's warp field, it was an intermix imbalance caused by inadequate testing, and the asteroid was drawn into the "wormhole" with the ship when warp was engaged.
The asteroid surely had an effect, so much that they couldn't shut it down, that a distortion was growing, and that everything stopped when the rock was blasted.
But if you say it's the Enterprise's own technological glitch, then that saves some nonsense.

I'm still trying to figure out where the TMP calc comes from though.

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Re: ASVS's First Topic--Federation vs Covenant

Post by Mike DiCenso » Sat Feb 27, 2010 9:23 am

Mr. Oragahn wrote: The asteroid surely had an effect, so much that they couldn't shut it down, that a distortion was growing, and that everything stopped when the rock was blasted.
But if you say it's the Enterprise's own technological glitch, then that saves some nonsense.
Sorry for this way of responding piecemeal, but time and the fact that this is a totally seperate issue all together necessitates this form of response. Everything that happened was because of the wormhole effect. The asteroid had nothing at all to do with it. Here's the dialog:


KIRK: Mister Decker... Wormhole! ...Get us back on impulse power! Full reverse!

SULU: Negative helm control, Captain! Going reverse on impulse power!

UHURA: Subspace frequencies are jammed, sir. Wormhole effect!

DECKER: Negative control from inertial lag will continue twenty-two point five seconds before forward velocity slows to sub-light speed.

ILIA: Unidentified small object has been pulled into the wormhole with us, Captain! Directly ahead!

KIRK: Forcefields up, full! Put object on viewer. ...Manual override on helm.

SULU: No manual response!

ILIA: Navigational deflectors coming up.

DECKER: Wormhole distortion has over-loaded main power systems!

ILIA: Navigational deflectors inoperative, Captain. Directional control also inoperative.

KIRK: (slowly, distorted) Time to impact?

ILIA: (slowly, distorted) Twenty seconds.

KIRK: (slowly, distorted) Mister Chekov, stand by on phasers.

DECKER: (slowly, distorted) No! ...Belay that phaser order! ...Arm photon torpedoes.

CHEKOV:(slowly, distorted) Photon torpedoes ...armed.

ILIA: (slowly, distorted) Object is an asteroid, reading mass point seven.

CHEKOV: (slowly, distorted) Targeting asteroid.

ILIA: (slowly, distorted) Impact in ten seconds. ...Impact in eight seconds

DECKER: (slowly, distorted) Fire torpedoes!

ILIA: (slowly, distorted) ...Six.

CHEKOV: (slowly, distorted) Torpedoes away.

ILIA: (slowly, distorted) ...Four.

SULU: Helm control restored, sir.


Even under full reverse on impulse power they were expecting the ship not to drop to sublight for 21 seconds, the asteroid was pulled in with them, and the asteroid's collding with the Enterprise would occur slightly before or after they dropped to sublight. But the wormhole was going to go away on it's own regardless. The destruction of the asteroid and the coming out of the wormhole simply were coincidence. Had the phasers been operational, it would have been blasted much sooner, and the ship would still have been in the wormhole for several seconds anyway.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:I'm still trying to figure out where the TMP calc comes from though.
What TMP calc? It's difficult to judge the size of the TMP asteroid because the torpedo disappears long before it reaches it. The only thing we can get is a very lower limit estimate.
-Mike
Last edited by Mike DiCenso on Mon Mar 01, 2010 5:48 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: ASVS's First Topic--Federation vs Covenant

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sun Feb 28, 2010 11:20 pm

Mike DiCenso wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote:I'm still trying to figure out where the TMP calc comes from though.
What TMP calc? It's difficult to judge the size of the TMP asteroid because the torpedo disappears long before it reaches it. The only thing we can get is a very lower limit estimate.
-Mike
Which is?
Besides, thanks for the script quote.

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Re: ASVS's First Topic--Federation vs Covenant

Post by Roondar » Mon Mar 01, 2010 3:27 pm

On the subject of Vivftp's calculations, they are seriously flawed in that they (like just about any calculation made on any of these sites since, well, ever) forget to take into account that pixels for TV/movies are not square.

The same goes for the scaling of the asteroid in Pegasus.

The 4:3 aspect ratio means that a pixel is 1,33 times as tall as it is wide.

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Re: ASVS's First Topic--Federation vs Covenant

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Mar 01, 2010 3:49 pm

His last calcs are based on DVD caps, lengths are measured within a software, where pixels would be square.

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Re: ASVS's First Topic--Federation vs Covenant

Post by Roondar » Mon Mar 01, 2010 5:04 pm

Mr. Oragahn wrote:His last calcs are based on DVD caps, lengths are measured within a software, where pixels would be square.
To be fair I sincerely doubt this. No image software I've ever used converts pixels into square for measuring. In fact, even software that allows you to use square pixels tends to only use them while drawing and not while showing sizes.

Besides, if the pixels where square in his pictures/measurements we would see them as square (meaning the aspect ratio would look f'd up because PC screens are not square either) or we could measure his pixelcounting to not actually be add up (which doesn't happen).

DVD caps have no real relevance on this, the ST:TNG DVD's are quite obviously 4:3 and captures made from them are also in this aspect ratio.

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Re: ASVS's First Topic--Federation vs Covenant

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Tue Mar 02, 2010 3:40 pm

I'm afraid you will have to be a bit clearer with this because I sincerely don't see where you're going.
If the video is shot at 4:3 and he made a screen capture while displaying the video with the proper ratio, his cap should not be skewed in any way.

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Re: ASVS's First Topic--Federation vs Covenant

Post by Roondar » Tue Mar 02, 2010 4:37 pm

Mr. Oragahn wrote:I'm afraid you will have to be a bit clearer with this because I sincerely don't see where you're going.
If the video is shot at 4:3 and he made a screen capture while displaying the video with the proper ratio, his cap should not be skewed in any way.
Yes... You are, of course, correct.
I was thinking of scaling images without taking that into account. Appologies.

More on topic:
Mr. Oragahn wrote:I'm not confusing anything. 1 extra kilometer of asteroid, would still easily be easily pulverized and partially vaporized by a couple more low megaton torpedoes, and that for the simple reason that they can be fired directly at the piece in question.
We're not dealing with one single centrally buried detonation that has to reach even further because of that extra kilometer of rock.
A couple more meaning how many?
See, Mike is correct in that adding 1 KM to the asteroid means those torpedoes will have to target multiple cubic KM's of extra rock to get rid of.

Besides: your yields assume that the torpedoes bury themselves, right?
If they aim at the big fissures that might partially work, but even so thats a lot of empty room where vapor can form without interacting with the rest of the asteroid. If anything, having large open spaces means it'll become harder to get rid of the asteroid like that.

After all, any vapor formed will choose the path of least resistance to move through while expanding - which will increase minimum needed yield by quite a bit if taken into account. A centrally burried charge is far, far more effective than any other option - wether it is at vaporising or shattering makes no difference in that department.

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Re: ASVS's First Topic--Federation vs Covenant

Post by Mike DiCenso » Tue Mar 02, 2010 9:25 pm

Roondar wrote: A couple more meaning how many?
See, Mike is correct in that adding 1 KM to the asteroid means those torpedoes will have to target multiple cubic KM's of extra rock to get rid of.

Besides: your yields assume that the torpedoes bury themselves, right?
If they aim at the big fissures that might partially work, but even so thats a lot of empty room where vapor can form without interacting with the rest of the asteroid. If anything, having large open spaces means it'll become harder to get rid of the asteroid like that.

After all, any vapor formed will choose the path of least resistance to move through while expanding - which will increase minimum needed yield by quite a bit if taken into account. A centrally burried charge is far, far more effective than any other option - wether it is at vaporising or shattering makes no difference in that department.
That's correct, Roondar, one of the problems with dropping the torpedoes down the chasms is that it would almost be just the same as detonating them at the asteroid's surface. For example, the chasm the E-D went into was wide enough at one point that the 642 meter ship was able to just turn around around and face back up along the tunnel right before engaging the phase cloak. So a 700 meter chasm with a torpedo going off inside it would provide quite a bit of empty volume for the antimatter-matter explosion energy to expand out into. With the the energy dropping off over the square of the distance, the torpedoes energies in actually reaching rock would be at least 16 times less than what it would if it were buried in the rock ala "Amageddon". So even if the torpedo directly impacts on the rock before detonation, the energies from half the explosion at minimum still have to travel hundreds of meters to reach more rock and at several orders of magnitude less strength. So that's not terribly efficent, and does indeed up the yields needed for each torpedo considerably.
-Mike

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Re: ASVS's First Topic--Federation vs Covenant

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Wed Mar 03, 2010 12:17 am

Roondar wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote:I'm not confusing anything. 1 extra kilometer of asteroid, would still easily be easily pulverized and partially vaporized by a couple more low megaton torpedoes, and that for the simple reason that they can be fired directly at the piece in question.
We're not dealing with one single centrally buried detonation that has to reach even further because of that extra kilometer of rock.
A couple more meaning how many?
Considering what a single buried 10 MT nuke does, and considering we don't need to go there, and that you must use a couple more surface impacts to obtain similar effects, I don't see how we'd burst out of the allowed margin that sits between half of the torpedo complement and nearly all of it.
See, Mike is correct in that adding 1 KM to the asteroid means those torpedoes will have to target multiple cubic KM's of extra rock to get rid of.
Which are grouped into blocks. That makes them easy to target, and anything that's big enough to be part of the ship in question has to be shot at again.
Since the ship is ought to tougher than typical space rock, the rock in question will be gone before the Pegasus is destroyed, which just makes the targetting even easier once the target is even clearer.
Besides: your yields assume that the torpedoes bury themselves, right?
No, but if I wanted to be nastier, I could since we know torps can do such a thing. :]
It would make the destruction even faster and much more efficient. What low kiloton nukes buried under a few hundred feets can do to a ground in a 1g environment is rather impressive.
If they aim at the big fissures that might partially work, but even so thats a lot of empty room where vapor can form without interacting with the rest of the asteroid. If anything, having large open spaces means it'll become harder to get rid of the asteroid like that.
It's still better than anything because the energy can only radiate towards the "outside", so it's still more efficient, plus when firing inside a cavern, there's no chance that energy will be wasted, as there will always be a wall to meet for each particle.
After all, any vapor formed will choose the path of least resistance to move through while expanding - which will increase minimum needed yield by quite a bit if taken into account. A centrally burried charge is far, far more effective than any other option - wether it is at vaporising or shattering makes no difference in that department.
A buried enough detonation is obviously better, assuming it got deep enough towards the asteroid core. A detonation inside a large cavern comes second, and a surfacic impact on the outside comes last.

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Re: ASVS's First Topic--Federation vs Covenant

Post by Roondar » Wed Mar 03, 2010 10:04 am

Mr. Oragahn wrote:
Roondar wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote:I'm not confusing anything. 1 extra kilometer of asteroid, would still easily be easily pulverized and partially vaporized by a couple more low megaton torpedoes, and that for the simple reason that they can be fired directly at the piece in question.
We're not dealing with one single centrally buried detonation that has to reach even further because of that extra kilometer of rock.
A couple more meaning how many?
Considering what a single buried 10 MT nuke does, and considering we don't need to go there, and that you must use a couple more surface impacts to obtain similar effects, I don't see how we'd burst out of the allowed margin that sits between half of the torpedo complement and nearly all of it.
I'm pretty darned certain that you can't compare centrally buried explosives with non burried ones. It's a downright unfair comparisom.

Just for starters: you lose half the yield with a surface detonation.
And thats not counting (because I have no real data on this) that the effectiveness of subsurface detonations is known to be 'rather more effective' than surface ones.

The 'science' in Armageddon is seriously flawed, but they did get that bit mostly right - surface explosion means expanding gasses go where they like, which is away from the rock, not towards it.
See, Mike is correct in that adding 1 KM to the asteroid means those torpedoes will have to target multiple cubic KM's of extra rock to get rid of.
Which are grouped into blocks. That makes them easy to target, and anything that's big enough to be part of the ship in question has to be shot at again.
Since the ship is ought to tougher than typical space rock, the rock in question will be gone before the Pegasus is destroyed, which just makes the targetting even easier once the target is even clearer.
Yeah, but Riker didn't say it would take most of their torpedoes to blow the asteroid in progressively smaller chunks until they destroyed the Pegasus - he eyeballed the thing and said it would take most torpedoes they carried to destroy the asteroid -and conveniently the Pegasus with it-, knowing full well his career was on the line. He'd want to overkill, not underkill.

Besides, this doesn't change the fact that blowing up an extra couple of cubic KM at the kind of yields your advocating is not 'a couple more' but rather 'a whole lot more'.

Or that you haven't actually managed to establish that the simulation you've quoted can be upscaled the way you are doing now - we have no real way of knowing if using low-mt near-surface explosions will crack an asteroid that is a whole lot bigger into pieces like that. In my view it's just as likely it'll open a fissure at the 'weakest spot' to 'let off steam' as it where - like 'smaller' explosions tend to do inside enclosures when used on earth.
Besides: your yields assume that the torpedoes bury themselves, right?
No, but if I wanted to be nastier, I could since we know torps can do such a thing. :]
It would make the destruction even faster and much more efficient. What low kiloton nukes buried under a few hundred feets can do to a ground in a 1g environment is rather impressive.
I dunno, you seem to be basing your figures on results of a simulation of a centrally burried explosive going off inside an asteroid. And you seem to use those results to claim a lowest-possible destroy explanation on the asteroid as you could possibly make fit.

And yes, burried low KT nukes are quite impressive - yet show nowhere near the kind of effects what we'd need here to destroy the asteroid in under 250 odd blasts.
(BTW, the effects of lower gravity on crater sizes and the like I've seen so far seem to be based on kinetic impacts - do you have figures for explosive charges instead?)
If they aim at the big fissures that might partially work, but even so thats a lot of empty room where vapor can form without interacting with the rest of the asteroid. If anything, having large open spaces means it'll become harder to get rid of the asteroid like that.
It's still better than anything because the energy can only radiate towards the "outside", so it's still more efficient, plus when firing inside a cavern, there's no chance that energy will be wasted, as there will always be a wall to meet for each particle.
Of course it's better than the other options (even though you are wrong - the exit is also a valid direction for particles to go so there will be plenty of wasted energy) but it's far, far less efficient than burried charges. As in orders of magnitude less.
After all, any vapor formed will choose the path of least resistance to move through while expanding - which will increase minimum needed yield by quite a bit if taken into account. A centrally burried charge is far, far more effective than any other option - wether it is at vaporising or shattering makes no difference in that department.
A buried enough detonation is obviously better, assuming it got deep enough towards the asteroid core. A detonation inside a large cavern comes second, and a surfacic impact on the outside comes last.
Quite true, but a detonation inside the cave is not a close second - it'll deliver several orders of magnitude less energy to any specific spot other than the ones quite close to point of impact. Yields requirements will still rise dramatically as a result. I'm pretty much convinced (considering the size of the caverns and that it has openings to the outside) that the difference between surface detonation and in-cave detonation are much smaller than you're thinking. There is really quite a lot of open space to carry vapor not to mention that radiation intensity will go down really, really fast with expanding distances.

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