Does literally everyone go to Stardestroyer.net?

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Kor_Dahar_Master
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Re: Does literally everyone go to Stardestroyer.net?

Post by Kor_Dahar_Master » Wed Jun 30, 2010 1:26 pm

It seems that Kirk has heard about the ST vs SW issue and has decided to take care of it personally........



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Re: Does literally everyone go to Stardestroyer.net?

Post by Youngla0450 » Thu Jul 01, 2010 2:20 am

Kor_Dahar_Master wrote:It seems that Kirk has heard about the ST vs SW issue and has decided to take care of it personally........



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Kirk kissing Leia????? Well, Kirk is a womanizer. He has been known to mess with a lot of women throughout his career, even as Captain, or as Admiral! Some bad man!

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Oh boy...

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Fri Jul 02, 2010 12:11 am

On the topic of SDN, here's a laughable thread:
http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=142124
I really love the vision they have developed of SFJN. Feels like someone picked a giant canvas and drew strawman on it.
If they had anything like, you know, a fraction of the balls and honest curiosity they claim to have - and obviously genuinely good arguments - they'd more than welcome to present their positions here and defend them.
But I figure it would be too much to risk, they might return to SDN... tainted!

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Re: Does literally everyone go to Stardestroyer.net?

Post by Kor_Dahar_Master » Fri Jul 02, 2010 7:49 am

ST VI. Cannonball torpedoes.
I always thought that they were a good example of how photon torps CAN direct their blast simularly to a shaped charge.
Voyager's "Alliances" shows not one, not two, but three photon torpedoes hit a Kazon ship, in atmosphere, hovering 2-3 stories over a city, and the blasts were positively tiny.

This was of course where Voyager's torpedo cache was rather limited, and replacing them wasn't so simple as just heading over to the nearest starbase.

so why fire low yield torpedoes x 3 when, under their claims, a few phaser hits would have sufficed.
I have hhad this argument shown to me before by a guy i know on youtube in fact i think he was arguing with the guy who proposed it.....he ignores the fact that there was:

1. A population below and as a ship can move a phaser beam would hit the population below if the ship moved before it was fully expended.

2. Torps are guided so they would not have to worry about issue 1.

3. 3 low yield torps vs 1 higher yield.....quite simple.......1 higher yield torp would blast the ppl they were trying to save and others in the area and or knock off debris from the building onto those below.

But then the same guy claims the 200+ gigaton weapon stats in SW are accurate and the reason we NEVER see effects consistant with that much energy hitting any sort of material is because of............Heisenberg compensators........before you say anything....I KNOW...LOL.

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Re: Does literally everyone go to Stardestroyer.net?

Post by Mike DiCenso » Fri Jul 02, 2010 9:53 pm

Also given that there is a large body of evidence showing photon torpedoes and phaser causing immense levels of damage, or the potential of damage on a catastrophic planetary level throughout Trek, I think it's safe to say that there is more evidence for higher yield Trek weapons over Wars. For Trek we have the following:

1.) "The Die is Cast" [DS9]; explosions from a bombardment of 20 Romulan and Cardassian ships created a number of explosions hundreds of kilometers in diameter and shockwaves racing across the Founder's homeworld at thousands of km per second. At minmum, that is high megaton firepower per each torpedo and phaser fired, and teraton range on the upper end of the scale. A briefing prior to the bombardment stated that the bombardment would destroy the planet's crust in an hour, and the entire mantle in 5.

2.) "Booby Trap" [TNG]; Several torpedoes fired from the E-D hit and vaporize asteroids in the debris field formed by a destroyed planet. The explosions from the torpedoes continued to expand out and consume additional asteroids before the scene cut, and all dispite the aceton assimilators that drained energy.

3.) "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" : The Enterprise fires a torpedo that vaporizes a fairly modest sized asteroid threatening the ship while it was trapped in the wormhole created by the antimatter imbalance.

4.) "Mirror, Mirror" [TOS]: The Mirror Enterprise phasers were enough to destroy Halkon cities in what are implied as single shots form the main phaser banks. Luckily the Regular Universe crew put a stop to it.

5.) "Skin of Evil" [TNG]: A single torpedo fired from the E-D down onto the surface of the planet where the entiry Armus was at to destroy the shuttlecraft that had crashed there so he could at some point use it to escape, creates an explosion hundreds of kilometers in diameter that would require half a gigaton of explosive energy.


6.) "A Matter of Time" [TNG]: The E-D must carefully manage the power output of a phaser blast intended to start a reaction that would clean the Pentharan atmosphere of high concentrations of concentrations volcanic dust to within varience of no more than 60 GW, or they would literally burn off the planet's atmosphere. As it was, we see the phaser blast initiate a reaction that turned the thick layer dust covering the planet into glowing plasma.


7.) "Living Witness" [VOY]: A single torpedo is said to be capable of destroying an entire city within seconds.


8.) "Rise" [VOY]: A single torpedo can vaporize a 250 x 400 meter asteroid made of iron and nickel instantly. When the torpedo fragments the asteroid instead, it sets off an investigation that eventually discovers that the asteroid was not natural, but a construct made of highly resistant alloys.


9.) "The Cost of Living" [TNG] : Two torpedoes cause massive amounts of vaporization and some fragmentation on an asteroid so large that the torpedoes disappear before well before hitting it.

10.) "Return to Grace" [DS9] : The phaser on a cardassian freighter that was not considered very powerful was still able to target and mostly vaporize a modest sized asteroid from nearly 400,00 km.

These are just ten examples that I can think of right off the top of my head that completely contradict the idea that torpedoes and phasers are only "cannon ball" strength, or low kilotons.
-Mike
Last edited by Mike DiCenso on Sat Jul 03, 2010 1:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Does literally everyone go to Stardestroyer.net?

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sat Jul 03, 2010 12:56 am

Mike DiCenso wrote:Also given that there is a large body of evidence showing photon torpedoes and phaser causing immense levels of damage, or the potential of damage on a catastrophic planetary level throughout Trek, I think it's safe to say that there is more evidence for higher yield Trek weapons over Wars. For Trek we have the following:

1.) "The Die is Cast" [DS9]; explosions from a bombardment of 20 Romulan and Cardassian ships created a number of explosions hundreds of kilometers in diameter and shockwaves racing across the Founder's homeworld at thousands of km per second. At minmum, that is high megaton firepower per each torpedo and phaser fired, and teraton range on the upper end of the scale. A briefing prior to the bombardment stated that the bombardment would destroy the planet's crust in an hour, and the entire mantle in 5.
I remember pointing out that the computer estimation raises a serious problem on the power needed for the performance here. Needing 5 hours (wasn't it six?) to destroy a mantle when it takes 1 to get the crust destroyed has odd implications on the geology of the planet: the crust would be considerably thick. Impossibly thick, actually.
Now sorry for the time machine trip I'm going to take you through here, but some of the points I made back then are still valid imho:
http://www.starfleetjedi.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3981
http://www.starfleetjedi.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3992

Then you have the local 2007 TDiC thread, and the newer "in defense of TDiC" thread.

The point is that visuals may be rationalized with some convoluted but workable theory about special weapons which were only good against a planet, or perhaps even that very planet, not against ships. Exotic weapons, in other words. In this thread (which I think mirrored some exchange I had with Mith at SBC), I've been arguing that a protomatter-enhanced NDF reaction was used [1], which had the advantage of explaining why they'd be near to totally useless against shielded targets and thus explaining why that fleet was owned by the Dominion ships, while Mith argued on subspace perhaps mixed to NDF as well, and that's all. That's just as far as it seems it can be pushed to fit.

The computer estimation is totally bogus if you want to claim DET here: It requires the firepower of mini Death Stars.
2.) "Boob Trap" [TNG]; Several torpedoes fired from the E-D hit and vaporize asteroids in the debris field formed by a destroyed planet. The explosions from the torpedoes continued to expand out and consume additional asteroids before the scene cut, and all dispite the aceton assimilators that drained energy.
Boob trap? :]
4.) "Mirror, Mirror" [TOS]: The Mirror Enterprise phasers were enough to destroy Halkon cities in what are implied as single shots form the main phaser banks. Luckily the Regular Universe crew put a stop to it.
Considering that, from your description, I can totally figure kiloton level phasers doing the job - and let's not fiddle with the added effect from the NDF phenomenon - it doesn't seem to be such an useful case.
5.) "Skin of Evil" [TNG]: A single torpedo fired from the E-D down onto the surface of the planet where the entiry Armus was at to destroy the shuttlecraft that had crashed there so he could at some point use it to escape, creates an explosion hundreds of kilometers in diameter that would require half a gigaton of explosive energy.
The VFX are not totally reliable. But go here in order to read a deeper analysis of the event, if you wish.
6.) "A Matter of Time" [TNG]: The E-D must carefully manage the power output of a phaser blast intended to start a reaction that would clean the Pentharan atmosphere clean of high concentrations of concentrations volcanic dust to within varience of no more than 60 GW, or they would literally burn off the planet's atmosphere. As it was, we see the phaser blast initiate a reaction that turned the thick layer dust covering the planet into glowing plasma.
If anything, aside from the odd effect of putting an atmosphere on fire the way it did it - I think we had a thread on that - the variance would certainly contradict the TM's low gigawatt figure for phasers anyway.
7.) "Living Witness" [VOY]: A single torpedo is said to be capable of destroying an entire city within seconds.
"Within seconds" always sounded odd. Looks like the effect is not so powerful and takes time. A high megaton nuke, for example, wouldn't need seconds to get the job done. A smaller yield would, as the blast would then have to cover a certain distance over a given time that would be measured in seconds.
8.) "Rise" [VOY]: A single torpedo can vaporize a 250 x 400 meter asteroid made of iron and nickel instantly. When the torpedo fragments the asteroid instead, it sets off an investigation that eventually discovers that the asteroid was not natural, but a construct made of highly resistant alloys.
Is it possible to vaporize an entire asteroid that large with a single explosion on the surface? Aren't there practical limits, regardless of the yield, to how much energy which can be carried through matter at a given speed?
Episode trailer, if it's worth anything.
9.) "The Cost of Living" [TNG] : Two torpedoes cause massive amounts of vaporization and some fragmentation on an asteroid so large that the torpedoes disappear before well before hitting it.
The core was "composed of nitrium and chondrite" and that seemed enough to prevent a good enough destruction to protect the planet within the +40 seconds they had on their hands [2].
Unrelated: The mention of a "disruptive nuclear effect" is appreciated. Sounds NDFish. Perhaps people should say DNE instead of NDF? It would be more canonical I guess.
10.) "Return to Grace" [DS9] : The phaser on a cardassian freighter that was not considered very powerful was still able to target and mostly vaporize a modest sized asteroid from nearly 400,00 km.
Err... more like turned to many glowing fragments. Wasn't that the episode which WILGA started a thread for, with his pictures looking like we watched the scene through goggles or something?
These are just ten examples that I can think of right off the top of my head that completely contradict the idea that torpedoes and phasers are only "cannon ball" strength, or low kilotons.
-Mike
Overall, I agree. The claims are... well... absurd. Even vivftp's calcs for Rise returned low ends at three digits in the kiloton range and low megaton range, and more for the higher figures, and he tends to be considered a tame Trekkie in comparison to Mith for example.
Last edited by Mr. Oragahn on Sat Jul 03, 2010 7:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Does literally everyone go to Stardestroyer.net?

Post by Khas » Sat Jul 03, 2010 2:16 am

Mr. Oragahn wrote: Boob trap? :]
Was that the episode where Ro and Troi walked around topless? If so, then how the hell did I miss that one? :)

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Re: Does literally everyone go to Stardestroyer.net?

Post by Mike DiCenso » Sun Jul 04, 2010 8:11 pm

Mr. Oragahn wrote: I remember pointing out that the computer estimation raises a serious problem on the power needed for the performance here. Needing 5 hours (wasn't it six?) to destroy a mantle when it takes 1 to get the crust destroyed has odd implications on the geology of the planet: the crust would be considerably thick. Impossibly thick, actually.
Now sorry for the time machine trip I'm going to take you through here, but some of the points I made back then are still valid imho:
http://www.starfleetjedi.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3981
http://www.starfleetjedi.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3992

Then you have the local 2007 TDiC thread, and the newer "in defense of TDiC" thread.


The point is that visuals may be rationalized with some convoluted but workable theory about special weapons which were only good against a planet, or perhaps even that very planet, not against ships. Exotic weapons, in other words. In this thread (which I think mirrored some exchange I had with Mith at SBC), I've been arguing that a protomatter-enhanced NDF reaction was used [1], which had the advantage of explaining why they'd be near to totally useless against shielded targets and thus explaining why that fleet was owned by the Dominion ships, while Mith argued on subspace perhaps mixed to NDF as well, and that's all. That's just as far as it seems it can be pushed to fit.

The computer estimation is totally bogus if you want to claim DET here: It requires the firepower of mini Death Stars.
Whatever you want to claim is going on, it is still a rather impressive display of firepower from rather commonly available ST capital ships and weaponary. Also you keep forgetting that there are ways of producing that level of firepower using matter-antimatter, and the fact the all the ships used the Romulan quantum singularity power technology, make any DET issues moot. I'm not saying they may not have used any special weaponary, but the attempts to dismiss what was said and done in TDiC are getting a bit tiresome. Your attempst at claiming magic NDF are not highly substantiated given what we know about how phasers and torpedoes work. And the other fact of the matter is that you have to consider that the shields of opposing vessels are capable of taking the punishment from such weapons, even if it is just one or two shots.
Mike DiCenso wrote:4.) "Mirror, Mirror" [TOS]: The Mirror Enterprise phasers were enough to destroy Halkon cities in what are implied as single shots form the main phaser banks. Luckily the Regular Universe crew put a stop to it.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Considering that, from your description, I can totally figure kiloton level phasers doing the job - and let's not fiddle with the added effect from the NDF phenomenon - it doesn't seem to be such an useful case.

Again, as you well knw by know there is no NDF, just disintigration as per "In A Mirror, Darkly, Part 2", and we know from "The Mind's Eye" and other episodes that comparatively tiny phaser and other rifle sized weapons can output megawatts to gigajoules, thus there is a signifcant DET component to phasers. Furthermore, the orders were to exterminate the Halkans for their defiance. That means more than kiloton yield effects are needed. Megatons at minimum
Mike DiCenso wrote:5.) "Skin of Evil" [TNG]: A single torpedo fired from the E-D down onto the surface of the planet where the entiry Armus was at to destroy the shuttlecraft that had crashed there so he could at some point use it to escape, creates an explosion hundreds of kilometers in diameter that would require half a gigaton of explosive energy.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:The VFX are not totally reliable. But go here in order to read a deeper analysis of the event, if you wish.

As JMS in that very thread put it regarding that:

"More to the point, we have some information about the yield of a purposefully detonated CCS impulse engine - about 100 megatons. Given the SOE explosion is difficult to model significantly under a gigaton under any model (e.g., assuming the circle is a flash of light and the explosion releases a typical fraction of its yield as light, assuming it's a thin shell of accelerated debris, assuming it's a fireball, etc) we need the shuttle to be carrying antimatter fuel in order to contribute significantly to the explosion. "
No matter how you slice it, it's a big kaboom.

Mr. Oragahn wrote:If anything, aside from the odd effect of putting an atmosphere on fire the way it did it - I think we had a thread on that - the variance would certainly contradict the TM's low gigawatt figure for phasers anyway.
Yes, and do recall that it was stated that the varience was a critically narrow margin, indicating that the phaser output energies as a total were much greater.
Mike DiCenso wrote: 7.) "Living Witness" [VOY]: A single torpedo is said to be capable of destroying an entire city within seconds.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:"Within seconds" always sounded odd. Looks like the effect is not so powerful and takes time. A high megaton nuke, for example, wouldn't need seconds to get the job done. A smaller yield would, as the blast would then have to cover a certain distance over a given time that would be measured in seconds.
Oh yes it would. If the city is large enough, even a Tsar Bomba type weapon would require a couple of seconds for the blastwave and heat effects to utterly destroy a city the size of New York. Given that we saw little of the Kyrian-Vaskan cities, we can assume all over the place, and this was for a 25 isoton torpedo, not the 200 isoton ones. Suffice to say, I think we can reasonably get kilotons to megatons out of that example.
Mike DiCenso wrote:8.) "Rise" [VOY]: A single torpedo can vaporize a 250 x 400 meter asteroid made of iron and nickel instantly. When the torpedo fragments the asteroid instead, it sets off an investigation that eventually discovers that the asteroid was not natural, but a construct made of highly resistant alloys.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Is it possible to vaporize an entire asteroid that large with a single explosion on the surface? Aren't there practical limits, regardless of the yield, to how much energy which can be carried through matter at a given speed?

Yes there would be. But the dialog from the episode was clear that the debris would be very small in size, only a centimeter in size.
Mike DiCenso wrote:10.) "Return to Grace" [DS9] : The phaser on a cardassian freighter that was not considered very powerful was still able to target and mostly vaporize a modest sized asteroid from nearly 400,00 km.
Mr.Oragahn wrote:Err... more like turned to many glowing fragments. Wasn't that the episode which WILGA started a thread for, with his pictures looking like we watched the scene through goggles or something?
You are the only one who claimed such a thing in this thread here. But even you were all for kiloton and megaton range firepower in this example.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Overall, I agree. The claims are... well... absurd. Even vivftp's calcs for Rise returned low ends at three digits in the kiloton range and low megaton range, and more for the higher figures, and he tends to be considered a tame Trekkie in comparison to Mith for example.
What is forgotten is that it actually takes more firepower there than just what was calculated, if only for the fact that the explosion is occurring at the surface of the asteroid.
-Mike

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Re: Does literally everyone go to Stardestroyer.net?

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sun Jul 04, 2010 10:57 pm

Mike DiCenso wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote: I remember pointing out that the computer estimation raises a serious problem on the power needed for the performance here. Needing 5 hours (wasn't it six?) to destroy a mantle when it takes 1 to get the crust destroyed has odd implications on the geology of the planet: the crust would be considerably thick. Impossibly thick, actually.
Now sorry for the time machine trip I'm going to take you through here, but some of the points I made back then are still valid imho:
http://www.starfleetjedi.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3981
http://www.starfleetjedi.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3992

Then you have the local 2007 TDiC thread, and the newer "in defense of TDiC" thread.


The point is that visuals may be rationalized with some convoluted but workable theory about special weapons which were only good against a planet, or perhaps even that very planet, not against ships. Exotic weapons, in other words. In this thread (which I think mirrored some exchange I had with Mith at SBC), I've been arguing that a protomatter-enhanced NDF reaction was used [1], which had the advantage of explaining why they'd be near to totally useless against shielded targets and thus explaining why that fleet was owned by the Dominion ships, while Mith argued on subspace perhaps mixed to NDF as well, and that's all. That's just as far as it seems it can be pushed to fit.

The computer estimation is totally bogus if you want to claim DET here: It requires the firepower of mini Death Stars.
Whatever you want to claim is going on, it is still a rather impressive display of firepower from rather commonly available ST capital ships and weaponary. Also you keep forgetting that there are ways of producing that level of firepower using matter-antimatter, and the fact the all the ships used the Romulan quantum singularity power technology, make any DET issues moot. I'm not saying they may not have used any special weaponary, but the attempts to dismiss what was said and done in TDiC are getting a bit tiresome. Your attempst at claiming magic NDF are not highly substantiated given what we know about how phasers and torpedoes work. And the other fact of the matter is that you have to consider that the shields of opposing vessels are capable of taking the punishment from such weapons, even if it is just one or two shots.
Are you willing to debate TDiC in detail? We can do that in the appropriate thread. Heck, I'll quote that bit and bump the latest TDiC thread for that occasion. Check it out in a couple of hours after this post.
Mike DiCenso wrote:4.) "Mirror, Mirror" [TOS]: The Mirror Enterprise phasers were enough to destroy Halkon cities in what are implied as single shots form the main phaser banks. Luckily the Regular Universe crew put a stop to it.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Considering that, from your description, I can totally figure kiloton level phasers doing the job - and let's not fiddle with the added effect from the NDF phenomenon - it doesn't seem to be such an useful case.
Again, as you well knw by know there is no NDF, just disintigration as per "In A Mirror, Darkly, Part 2", and we know from "The Mind's Eye" and other episodes that comparatively tiny phaser and other rifle sized weapons can output megawatts to gigajoules, thus there is a signifcant DET component to phasers. Furthermore, the orders were to exterminate the Halkans for their defiance. That means more than kiloton yield effects are needed. Megatons at minimum
I know very little about that episode. However I know that NDF does exist, and the E-D has demonstrated that ability very well, and hand phasers from the TOS era can also make voluminous objects disappear "magically". So I don't see what you're going with here.
Regarding the yields of type I to III phasers, you'll soon see that the gigajoule claim has little substance at all.
Finally, high amounts of energy, like in the low thousand terajoules, are more than enough to get rid of cities very violently and demonstratively. There is absolutely no reason at all to claim that's evidence for megaton level firepower. I stand my case, the reference doesn't put the low end in the megaton range.
Mike DiCenso wrote:5.) "Skin of Evil" [TNG]: A single torpedo fired from the E-D down onto the surface of the planet where the entiry Armus was at to destroy the shuttlecraft that had crashed there so he could at some point use it to escape, creates an explosion hundreds of kilometers in diameter that would require half a gigaton of explosive energy.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:The VFX are not totally reliable. But go here in order to read a deeper analysis of the event, if you wish.

As JMS in that very thread put it regarding that:

"More to the point, we have some information about the yield of a purposefully detonated CCS impulse engine - about 100 megatons. Given the SOE explosion is difficult to model significantly under a gigaton under any model (e.g., assuming the circle is a flash of light and the explosion releases a typical fraction of its yield as light, assuming it's a thin shell of accelerated debris, assuming it's a fireball, etc) we need the shuttle to be carrying antimatter fuel in order to contribute significantly to the explosion. "
No matter how you slice it, it's a big kaboom.
Yes, we have a large explosion, but how large is the question. Above all, it doesn't change a thing to what I said about the visual effects though [1], like for example how the flash shouldn't be a flash since it should last longer than what the first burst did. Or that the second phase also vanished too fast, or that by calculating the intensity from what we saw, you're still in the megaton range. The figures I obtained, my measuring the intensity of the light source form the planet, at the point of impact, are measured in watts, and since the events last even less than a second, sometimes only a couple of frames, the real peak value would only be a fraction of them, perhaps less than a tenth. The highest value was around 300 MT/s and the burst used to measure this lasted four frames on 25, of which only the first two were the most intense. That's less than 50 megatons, and such an explosion would have no issue to reach so high in the sky anyway.
Mike DiCenso wrote: 7.) "Living Witness" [VOY]: A single torpedo is said to be capable of destroying an entire city within seconds.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:"Within seconds" always sounded odd. Looks like the effect is not so powerful and takes time. A high megaton nuke, for example, wouldn't need seconds to get the job done. A smaller yield would, as the blast would then have to cover a certain distance over a given time that would be measured in seconds.
Oh yes it would. If the city is large enough, even a Tsar Bomba type weapon would require a couple of seconds for the blastwave and heat effects to utterly destroy a city the size of New York. Given that we saw little of the Kyrian-Vaskan cities, we can assume all over the place, and this was for a 25 isoton torpedo, not the 200 isoton ones. Suffice to say, I think we can reasonably get kilotons to megatons out of that example.
I reject the 200 isoton torpedo. There is absolutely no reason to claim beyond a doubt that 200 isotons was the figure per torpedo, and not the total. 7o9's formulation is much closer to someone saying "we have 40 bombs here, totaling 14.2 tonnes" than it would be to a formulation such as "we have 40 bombs here, 14.2 tonnes a piece". People are general enticed to use "[yield] each", "[yield] a piece" or "[yield] per bomb" when the yield is for each bomb.
As for the cities, since we know nothing about their sizes, it's pretty moot. Remember, you're looking for solid facts, not extrapolations and may I say hopeful agreements over what you'd deem lowball figures.
Mike DiCenso wrote:8.) "Rise" [VOY]: A single torpedo can vaporize a 250 x 400 meter asteroid made of iron and nickel instantly. When the torpedo fragments the asteroid instead, it sets off an investigation that eventually discovers that the asteroid was not natural, but a construct made of highly resistant alloys.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Is it possible to vaporize an entire asteroid that large with a single explosion on the surface? Aren't there practical limits, regardless of the yield, to how much energy which can be carried through matter at a given speed?
Yes there would be. But the dialog from the episode was clear that the debris would be very small in size, only a centimeter in size.
The problem is that we know how energy expands and works, so we can't both acknowledge the limits imposed by thermodynamics and on the other hand dismiss them because of a bit of dialogue, when we want to measure a weapon which is measured assuming it obeys physics.
The other problem is that the higher figures solely hinge on taking Chakotay's words literally, even if leaving only centimeter sized fragments would still require a tremendous level of energy.
Mike DiCenso wrote:10.) "Return to Grace" [DS9] : The phaser on a cardassian freighter that was not considered very powerful was still able to target and mostly vaporize a modest sized asteroid from nearly 400,00 km.
Mr.Oragahn wrote:Err... more like turned to many glowing fragments. Wasn't that the episode which WILGA started a thread for, with his pictures looking like we watched the scene through goggles or something?
You are the only one who claimed such a thing in this thread here. But even you were all for kiloton and megaton range firepower in this example.
I may have overstated the final figure. There's a lot of glowing particles and larger glowing debris, and just as many which barely shine against the blackness of space actually.

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Re: Does literally everyone go to Stardestroyer.net?

Post by Mike DiCenso » Fri Jul 09, 2010 8:53 pm

Mr. Oragahn wrote: Are you willing to debate TDiC in detail? We can do that in the appropriate thread. Heck, I'll quote that bit and bump the latest TDiC thread for that occasion. Check it out in a couple of hours after this post.
No, not particuarly at this time as most of the salient points on both sides have already been brought up.
I know very little about that episode. However I know that NDF does exist, and the E-D has demonstrated that ability very well, and hand phasers from the TOS era can also make voluminous objects disappear "magically". So I don't see what you're going with here.
Because NDF, that is "Nuclear Disruption Force" is something different from what is canonically stated to be a disintegration weapon as per Mirror Archer's statements from "In a Mirror, Darkly". Where Wong and the other Warsies get NDF from is the dubious TNG TM, and they ran with it, like they did other erroneous information from that book to make their case for weak Star Trek firepower by claiming that ST weapons were only kilowatts or megawatts, nor gigawatts and terawatts because they had magic NDF.
Regarding the yields of type I to III phasers, you'll soon see that the gigajoule claim has little substance at all.
However, we know that isn't quite true as a phaser rifle was outputing a little over 1 megawatt in "The Mind's Eye", while in "Who Watches the Watchers", a small phaser bank required 4.2 gigawatts to power it, and a breen rifle could cut through several gigajoules of shielding as described in "Business as Usual".
Finally, high amounts of energy, like in the low thousand terajoules, are more than enough to get rid of cities very violently and demonstratively. There is absolutely no reason at all to claim that's evidence for megaton level firepower. I stand my case, the reference doesn't put the low end in the megaton range.
Yes, they would, depending on the size of the target city a couple megatons from each phaser bank on the ISS Enterprise would be enough to do the job, though it would risk survivors in outlying areas.
Yes, we have a large explosion, but how large is the question. Above all, it doesn't change a thing to what I said about the visual effects though [1], like for example how the flash shouldn't be a flash since it should last longer than what the first burst did. Or that the second phase also vanished too fast, or that by calculating the intensity from what we saw, you're still in the megaton range. The figures I obtained, my measuring the intensity of the light source form the planet, at the point of impact, are measured in watts, and since the events last even less than a second, sometimes only a couple of frames, the real peak value would only be a fraction of them, perhaps less than a tenth. The highest value was around 300 MT/s and the burst used to measure this lasted four frames on 25, of which only the first two were the most intense. That's less than 50 megatons, andsuch an explosion would have no issue to reach so high in the sky anyway.

[quoteI reject the 200 isoton torpedo. There is absolutely no reason to claim beyond a doubt that 200 isotons was the figure per torpedo, and not the total. 7o9's formulation is much closer to someone saying "we have 40 bombs here, totaling 14.2 tonnes" than it would be to a formulation such as "we have 40 bombs here, 14.2 tonnes a piece". People are general enticed to use "[yield] each", "[yield] a piece" or "[yield] per bomb" when the yield is for each bomb.
As for the cities, since we know nothing about their sizes, it's pretty moot. Remember, you're looking for solid facts, not extrapolations and may I say hopeful agreements over what you'd deem lowball figures.[/quote]

Reject all you want but the dialog makes it clear, especially in regards to the context of the Borg suggestion to use a much more powerful mine:

SEVEN: A multikinetic neutronic mine. Five million isoton yield.

TUVOK: An explosion that size could affect an entire star system.

SEVEN: Correct. The shock wave will disperse the nanoprobes over a radius of five light years.

JANEWAY: That's somewhat larger than I had in mind. You're proposing a weapon of mass destruction.

SEVEN: We are.

JANEWAY: Well, I'm not. You'd be endangering innocent worlds.

SEVEN: It would be efficient.

TUVOK: We'd need approximately fifty trillion nanoprobes to arm this mine. It would take the Doctor several weeks to replicate that amount. You are losing this conflict. Are you willing to risk further delay?

JANEWAY: Right now your enemy believes it is invulnerable. If we create smaller weapons using our torpedoes and destroy a few of their bio-ships, it may deter them, convince them to give up this war.

SEVEN: You are individuals. You are small, and you think in small terms. But the present situation requires that we consider your plan. Voyager's weapons inventory. Photon torpedo complement thirty-two class six warhead. Explosive yield two hundred isotons.



Note the context there, a single multikinetic neutronic mine that can blast can spead the nanoprobes over several light years and has a yeild of 5 million isotons. Tuvok and Janeway nix the plan for a variety of reason, forcing 7 of 9 and the Collective to reconsider the torpedoes, and note how she states it; "explosive yield two hunded isotons", which is as for an individual torpedo, not as a total yeild for the group. There is no way she could have been expecting Voyager to be able to fire off all 32 of them simultaneously for a 200 isoton explosion.

Mike DiCenso wrote:8.) "Rise" [VOY]: A single torpedo can vaporize a 250 x 400 meter asteroid made of iron and nickel instantly. When the torpedo fragments the asteroid instead, it sets off an investigation that eventually discovers that the asteroid was not natural, but a construct made of highly resistant alloys.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Is it possible to vaporize an entire asteroid that large with a single explosion on the surface? Aren't there practical limits, regardless of the yield, to how much energy which can be carried through matter at a given speed?

The problem is that we know how energy expands and works, so we can't both acknowledge the limits imposed by thermodynamics and on the other hand dismiss them because of a bit of dialogue, when we want to measure a weapon which is measured assuming it obeys physics.

The other problem is that the higher figures solely hinge on taking Chakotay's words literally, even if leaving only centimeter sized fragments would still require a tremendous level of energy
It is made plain that the dialog is between two characters, Chakotay and Kim:

CHAKOTAY: That asteroid should have been vaporised. What happened?

KIM: Not sure. Sensors showed a simple nickel-iron composition. We shouldn't be seeing fragments more than a centimetre in diameter.


The fact is that literally or not, we have two very concise statements, the later is specific on the level of fragmentation. When the level of destruction was not what was expected, it stated a major investigation. So yes, it takes a freaking helluva lot of energy to fragment an asteroid that much, but it is what the crew was expecting for destroying a nickel-iron asteroid.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:I may have overstated the final figure. There's a lot of glowing particles and larger glowing debris, and just as many which barely shine against the blackness of space actually.
I don't see much except for tiny sparkling bits, and they are far, far too small to account for most of the asteroids' starting mass.
-Mike

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Re: Does literally everyone go to Stardestroyer.net?

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Fri Jul 09, 2010 11:50 pm

Mike DiCenso wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote: I know very little about that episode. However I know that NDF does exist, and the E-D has demonstrated that ability very well, and hand phasers from the TOS era can also make voluminous objects disappear "magically". So I don't see what you're going with here.
Because NDF, that is "Nuclear Disruption Force" is something different from what is canonically stated to be a disintegration weapon as per Mirror Archer's statements from "In a Mirror, Darkly".
I checked it out and he just says "the maximum setting can actually disintegrate a person".
It's like... erm... you can understand this different ways.
Where Wong and the other Warsies get NDF from is the dubious TNG TM, and they ran with it, like they did other erroneous information from that book to make their case for weak Star Trek firepower by claiming that ST weapons were only kilowatts or megawatts, nor gigawatts and terawatts because they had magic NDF.
Depends on the weapons.
Regarding the yields of type I to III phasers, you'll soon see that the gigajoule claim has little substance at all.
However, we know that isn't quite true as a phaser rifle was outputing a little over 1 megawatt in "The Mind's Eye", while in "Who Watches the Watchers", a small phaser bank required 4.2 gigawatts to power it, and a breen rifle could cut through several gigajoules of shielding as described in "Business as Usual".
A small phaser bank is still ought ot be bigger than a phaser rifle. Phaser bank is a term that's generally used for weapons capable of damaging starships. A small phaser bank could logically be good enough to repel a small starship, like a shuttle. The value is actually enjoyably accurate enough.
As for the CRM-114, it's not a phaser rifle, it's a heavy weapon which, by its description, is capable of tracking moving vehicles and can get rid of surface emplacements, which would make it the equivalent of a stinger. It's a very impressive weapon on paper - assuming Quark was not lying through his teeth in order to sell this toy - but it's plenty of unknowns and it's not a bog standard phaser rifle by any stretch of the imagination.
Finally, high amounts of energy, like in the low thousand terajoules, are more than enough to get rid of cities very violently and demonstratively. There is absolutely no reason at all to claim that's evidence for megaton level firepower. I stand my case, the reference doesn't put the low end in the megaton range.
Yes, they would, depending on the size of the target city a couple megatons from each phaser bank on the ISS Enterprise would be enough to do the job, though it would risk survivors in outlying areas.
We don't know the size of the cities. So I can claim they're small. I can claim they're Hiroshima sized circa 1940. We don't even know if the destruction is supposed to be absolute or not.
I reject the 200 isoton torpedo. There is absolutely no reason to claim beyond a doubt that 200 isotons was the figure per torpedo, and not the total. 7o9's formulation is much closer to someone saying "we have 40 bombs here, totaling 14.2 tonnes" than it would be to a formulation such as "we have 40 bombs here, 14.2 tonnes a piece". People are general enticed to use "[yield] each", "[yield] a piece" or "[yield] per bomb" when the yield is for each bomb.
As for the cities, since we know nothing about their sizes, it's pretty moot. Remember, you're looking for solid facts, not extrapolations and may I say hopeful agreements over what you'd deem lowball figures.
Reject all you want but the dialog makes it clear, especially in regards to the context of the Borg suggestion to use a much more powerful mine:

SEVEN: A multikinetic neutronic mine. Five million isoton yield.

TUVOK: An explosion that size could affect an entire star system.

SEVEN: Correct. The shock wave will disperse the nanoprobes over a radius of five light years.

JANEWAY: That's somewhat larger than I had in mind. You're proposing a weapon of mass destruction.

SEVEN: We are.

JANEWAY: Well, I'm not. You'd be endangering innocent worlds.

SEVEN: It would be efficient.

TUVOK: We'd need approximately fifty trillion nanoprobes to arm this mine. It would take the Doctor several weeks to replicate that amount. You are losing this conflict. Are you willing to risk further delay?

JANEWAY: Right now your enemy believes it is invulnerable. If we create smaller weapons using our torpedoes and destroy a few of their bio-ships, it may deter them, convince them to give up this war.

SEVEN: You are individuals. You are small, and you think in small terms. But the present situation requires that we consider your plan. Voyager's weapons inventory. Photon torpedo complement thirty-two class six warhead. Explosive yield two hundred isotons.


Note the context there, a single multikinetic neutronic mine that can blast can spead the nanoprobes over several light years and has a yeild of 5 million isotons. Tuvok and Janeway nix the plan for a variety of reason, forcing 7 of 9 and the Collective to reconsider the torpedoes, and note how she states it; "explosive yield two hunded isotons", which is as for an individual torpedo, not as a total yeild for the group. There is no way she could have been expecting Voyager to be able to fire off all 32 of them simultaneously for a 200 isoton explosion.
Not necessarily. It can refer to the entire payload's yield, which she precisely just cited. Mind you, it's not exactly important either, as the iso[---] is a nonsense nomenclature: a few isograms can't power sonic showers, but 630 isograms can power a ship for FTL interstellar travel over 30,000 LY, over two weeks (or perhaps I should use this evidence that FTL travel is actually very cheap in energy).
It is made plain that the dialog is between two characters, Chakotay and Kim:

CHAKOTAY: That asteroid should have been vaporised. What happened?

KIM: Not sure. Sensors showed a simple nickel-iron composition. We shouldn't be seeing fragments more than a centimetre in diameter.


The fact is that literally or not, we have two very concise statements, the later is specific on the level of fragmentation. When the level of destruction was not what was expected, it stated a major investigation. So yes, it takes a freaking helluva lot of energy to fragment an asteroid that much, but it is what the crew was expecting for destroying a nickel-iron asteroid.
You're right.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:I may have overstated the final figure. There's a lot of glowing particles and larger glowing debris, and just as many which barely shine against the blackness of space actually.
I don't see much except for tiny sparkling bits, and they are far, far too small to account for most of the asteroids' starting mass.
-Mike
There's plenty of brown stuff flying away in the lower half of the screen, and plenty of glowing bits in the upper and right side of the screen. As the material cools down, we can see much more dots and shimmering fragments.
In retrospect I'd argue that only a small fraction was vaporized. If it's Kane who disagreed with the observations in another thread, then he was right.

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Re: Does literally everyone go to Stardestroyer.net?

Post by Mike DiCenso » Sun Jul 11, 2010 8:08 pm

Mr. Oragahn wrote: I checked it out and he just says "the maximum setting can actually disintegrate a person".
It's like... erm... you can understand this different ways.
Not really, not in the context of what we are discussing here. A NDF weapon would be doing somehting completely different from the disintigration mode of an actual phaser. In TOS' "Obsession" Kirk tells his men to set their phasers to "disruptor beam", again indicating that this mode is not a normal part of the phaser stun and kill functions.
Mike DiCenso wrote:Where Wong and the other Warsies get NDF from is the dubious TNG TM, and they ran with it, like they did other erroneous information from that book to make their case for weak Star Trek firepower by claiming that ST weapons were only kilowatts or megawatts, nor gigawatts and terawatts because they had magic NDF.
Mr Oragahn wrote:Depends on the weapons.
How so? We have seen phasers act like DET weapons on many occasions, and on others as per changes in settings, it disintigrates things. We have a clear cut statement on a phaser rifle's output from TNG's "The Mind's Eye" that places it at 1.05 MW, which interestingly enough is about a thousand times more powerful than the TNG TM's kilowatts output for a phaser rifle, and there is nothing indicated that the phaser is doing anything more than a routine, continous firings over nearly a minute that will not exaust the power pack anytime soon, further implying higher output is possible.

Mr Oragahn wrote:A small phaser bank is still ought ot be bigger than a phaser rifle. Phaser bank is a term that's generally used for weapons capable of damaging starships. A small phaser bank could logically be good enough to repel a small starship, like a shuttle. The value is actually enjoyably accurate enough.
But the size of such a shuttle phaser bank is interesting in that it cannot be too much larger than ahand held rifle given the clear space limitation we see, particularlly on the smaller end shuttles, such as the type-F from TOS.
Mr Oragahn wrote:As for the CRM-114, it's not a phaser rifle, it's a heavy weapon which, by its description, is capable of tracking moving vehicles and can get rid of surface emplacements, which would make it the equivalent of a stinger. It's a very impressive weapon on paper - assuming Quark was not lying through his teeth in order to sell this toy - but it's plenty of unknowns and it's not a bog standard phaser rifle by any stretch of the imagination.
Except that it would have been very bad business from Quark's cousin to be doing that, and neither of them discuss ripping people off by selling them any sort of bogus or underperforming weapons. The weapon in that scene was was even demonstrated by Quark against a variety of targets on the holodeck. More interesting is that this weaon was not much bigger, if at all, then a real-life sub-machine gun. Plus I would find it strange that the Federation or anyone else would allow the Breen to make such a weapon without they themselves having something similar in capability on hand.
Mike DiCenso wrote:Yes, they would, depending on the size of the target city a couple megatons from each phaser bank on the ISS Enterprise would be enough to do the job, though it would risk survivors in outlying areas.
Mr Oragahn wrote:We don't know the size of the cities. So I can claim they're small. I can claim they're Hiroshima sized circa 1940. We don't even know if the destruction is supposed to be absolute or not.

As for the cities, since we know nothing about their sizes, it's pretty moot. Remember, you're looking for solid facts, not extrapolations and may I say hopeful agreements over what you'd deem lowball figures.
But the goal was total extermination of the Halkan peoples:

SPOCK: Status of mission, Captain?
KIRK: No change.

SPOCK: Standard procedure, Captain? (Kirk nods) Mister Sulu, you will programme phaser barrage on Halkan cities.

SULU [OC]: Yes, Mister Spock.

SPOCK: Their military capability, Captain?

KIRK: None.

SPOCK: Regrettable that this society has chosen suicide. Mister Kyle, you were instructed to compensate during the ion storm.


Kirk's orders from the Empire as relayed to him by Uhura:

UHURA: No storm damage, sir. All stations report normal. (quietly) You're ordered to annihilate the Halkans unless they comply. No alternative.


Again a third time later on Kirk reiterates the level of expected destruction here:

KIRK: It is useless to resist us.

THARN [on viewscreen: We do not resist you.

KIRK: You have twelve hours to consider your position.

THARN [on viewscreen: Twelve years, Captain Kirk, or twelve thousand. We are ethically compelled to deny your demand for our dilithium crystals, for you would use their power to destroy.

KIRK: We will level your planet and take what we want. That is destruction. You will die as a race.

THARN [on viewscreen: To preserve what we are.

KIRK: We will not argue. Twelve hours. No more. Close communications. Turn phasers off.


Clearly the Halkans were expected to be utterly wiped out as a species. This means that simple kiloton level shots here and there are not going to cut it.
Mr Oragahn wrote:Not necessarily. It can refer to the entire payload's yield, which she precisely just cited. Mind you, it's not exactly important either, as the iso[---] is a nonsense nomenclature: a few isograms can't power sonic showers, but 630 isograms can power a ship for FTL interstellar travel over 30,000 LY, over two weeks (or perhaps I should use this evidence that FTL travel is actually very cheap in energy).
That particular instance is off, but it is not clearly the same measurement of power or anything else, furthermore, there is no context provided, I suspect you of trying to manipulate things here. The 630 isograms are of what? Antimatter? Some extradimensional alien critter, which was the case in "Equinox". It appears to be a unit of weight.
Mr Oragahn wrote:There's plenty of brown stuff flying away in the lower half of the screen, and plenty of glowing bits in the upper and right side of the screen. As the material cools down, we can see much more dots and shimmering fragments.
In retrospect I'd argue that only a small fraction was vaporized. If it's Kane who disagreed with the observations in another thread, then he was right.
At 5:45 on this YouTube video from RtG, we can see in the first "weak" phaser shot that destroys the first asteroid that most of the asteroid is gone, with only about 20 or so glowing pieces, and a couple of which appear big because they are headed towards the camera at high speed. The rest is so small it cannot possibly enough to account for the rest of the missing mass.
-Mike

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Re: Does literally everyone go to Stardestroyer.net?

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sun Jul 11, 2010 10:44 pm

Mike DiCenso wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote: I checked it out and he just says "the maximum setting can actually disintegrate a person".
It's like... erm... you can understand this different ways.
Not really, not in the context of what we are discussing here. A NDF weapon would be doing somehting completely different from the disintigration mode of an actual phaser. In TOS' "Obsession" Kirk tells his men to set their phasers to "disruptor beam", again indicating that this mode is not a normal part of the phaser stun and kill functions.
So have we seen what the disintegration mode of a phaser is?
Have we seen what the TOS phasers do when they're specifically said to be set on disruptor mode?
If not, there's not much to be said here. Not to say that disintegrate could simply mean blow into chunks, which a weapon rated a a couple megajoules, which would be its max yield, would have no problem to achieve at all. Those energies are of the level that's enough to kill a contemporary tank. How do you think a body would react when hit with that?
Well, very badly.

Still, in no way this means we can dismiss the NDF effect. You would call that a theory, eventually derived from a badly inspired bit from the TM, but many people find it apt to explain what goes on.
Mike DiCenso wrote:Where Wong and the other Warsies get NDF from is the dubious TNG TM, and they ran with it, like they did other erroneous information from that book to make their case for weak Star Trek firepower by claiming that ST weapons were only kilowatts or megawatts, nor gigawatts and terawatts because they had magic NDF.
Mr Oragahn wrote:Depends on the weapons.
How so? We have seen phasers act like DET weapons on many occasions, and on others as per changes in settings, it disintigrates things. We have a clear cut statement on a phaser rifle's output from TNG's "The Mind's Eye" that places it at 1.05 MW, which interestingly enough is about a thousand times more powerful than the TNG TM's kilowatts output for a phaser rifle, and there is nothing indicated that the phaser is doing anything more than a routine, continous firings over nearly a minute that will not exaust the power pack anytime soon, further implying higher output is possible.
Considering that you didn't specify which weapons you were talking about, it was impossible for me to weigh their claim. I don't know what kind of phaser Trekkies would peg at E9~12 W which SDN would peg at e3~6 W. It wouldn't be hand guns, it would be capital ship weapons. I suppose it could only be heavy phasers as mounted on large shuttles.
Without more information, I can't tell what's wrong.
Mr Oragahn wrote:A small phaser bank is still ought ot be bigger than a phaser rifle. Phaser bank is a term that's generally used for weapons capable of damaging starships. A small phaser bank could logically be good enough to repel a small starship, like a shuttle. The value is actually enjoyably accurate enough.
But the size of such a shuttle phaser bank is interesting in that it cannot be too much larger than ahand held rifle given the clear space limitation we see, particularlly on the smaller end shuttles, such as the type-F from TOS.
Hardly. Even a class F shuttle has plenty of room to cram a phaser bank much larger than a rifle, and would have the advantage of running on the power of fusion or antimatter.
The rifle is small and only runs on power cells.
Mr Oragahn wrote:As for the CRM-114, it's not a phaser rifle, it's a heavy weapon which, by its description, is capable of tracking moving vehicles and can get rid of surface emplacements, which would make it the equivalent of a stinger. It's a very impressive weapon on paper - assuming Quark was not lying through his teeth in order to sell this toy - but it's plenty of unknowns and it's not a bog standard phaser rifle by any stretch of the imagination.
Except that it would have been very bad business from Quark's cousin to be doing that, and neither of them discuss ripping people off by selling them any sort of bogus or underperforming weapons. The weapon in that scene was was even demonstrated by Quark against a variety of targets on the holodeck. More interesting is that this weaon was not much bigger, if at all, then a real-life sub-machine gun. Plus I would find it strange that the Federation or anyone else would allow the Breen to make such a weapon without they themselves having something similar in capability on hand.
The way the Breen handle their ground warfare doesn't dictate the way UFP does. The Breen could be looking for a versatile all in one weapon, while the UFP would tend to be more specific and only the heavy weapons only when necessary.
I don't recall UFP personnel being forced to take shields rated at a couple gigajoules. It seems to be specific to the type of targets some of the Breen engage.
As for the size itself, it isn't that meaningful with such a fancy weapon. You could have two weapons, two launchers of the same size, but one meant to deal with light vehicles (explosive or HE) and not exactly sophisticated, and the other equipped with advanced micro-fusion warheads and all sorts of tacticool stuff.
Mike DiCenso wrote:Yes, they would, depending on the size of the target city a couple megatons from each phaser bank on the ISS Enterprise would be enough to do the job, though it would risk survivors in outlying areas.
Mr Oragahn wrote:We don't know the size of the cities. So I can claim they're small. I can claim they're Hiroshima sized circa 1940. We don't even know if the destruction is supposed to be absolute or not.

As for the cities, since we know nothing about their sizes, it's pretty moot. Remember, you're looking for solid facts, not extrapolations and may I say hopeful agreements over what you'd deem lowball figures.
But the goal was total extermination of the Halkan peoples:

SPOCK: Status of mission, Captain?
KIRK: No change.

SPOCK: Standard procedure, Captain? (Kirk nods) Mister Sulu, you will programme phaser barrage on Halkan cities.

SULU [OC]: Yes, Mister Spock.

SPOCK: Their military capability, Captain?

KIRK: None.

SPOCK: Regrettable that this society has chosen suicide. Mister Kyle, you were instructed to compensate during the ion storm.


Kirk's orders from the Empire as relayed to him by Uhura:

UHURA: No storm damage, sir. All stations report normal. (quietly) You're ordered to annihilate the Halkans unless they comply. No alternative.


Again a third time later on Kirk reiterates the level of expected destruction here:

KIRK: It is useless to resist us.

THARN [on viewscreen: We do not resist you.

KIRK: You have twelve hours to consider your position.

THARN [on viewscreen: Twelve years, Captain Kirk, or twelve thousand. We are ethically compelled to deny your demand for our dilithium crystals, for you would use their power to destroy.

KIRK: We will level your planet and take what we want. That is destruction. You will die as a race.

THARN [on viewscreen: To preserve what we are.

KIRK: We will not argue. Twelve hours. No more. Close communications. Turn phasers off.


Clearly the Halkans were expected to be utterly wiped out as a species. This means that simple kiloton level shots here and there are not going to cut it.
Which still doesn't tell us the size of the cities. Considering that there's only one ship, they couldn't target all of them if some were located around the planet. It would take more time. Which makes me think of something... did they ever say that they'd fire only once at each city?
Mr Oragahn wrote:Not necessarily. It can refer to the entire payload's yield, which she precisely just cited. Mind you, it's not exactly important either, as the iso[---] is a nonsense nomenclature: a few isograms can't power sonic showers, but 630 isograms can power a ship for FTL interstellar travel over 30,000 LY, over two weeks (or perhaps I should use this evidence that FTL travel is actually very cheap in energy).
That particular instance is off, but it is not clearly the same measurement of power or anything else, furthermore, there is no context provided, I suspect you of trying to manipulate things here. The 630 isograms are of what? Antimatter? Some extradimensional alien critter, which was the case in "Equinox". It appears to be a unit of weight.
No need to get that complicated. You can randomly pick an isoton reference and end with the same problem. You have 10 isotons that make nice concussion explosions, and you have 54 isotons that blast a planet. You have transporters which carry million or trillion isotons, which I'm sure could be worth destroying a city or a good quarter of a star system.
That's why you could keep insisting that each class 6 is worth 200 isotons, most people would shrugg. I've seen plenty of people break their teeth on that nonsensical scale. I've tried it myself, it was a waste of time.
Mr Oragahn wrote:There's plenty of brown stuff flying away in the lower half of the screen, and plenty of glowing bits in the upper and right side of the screen. As the material cools down, we can see much more dots and shimmering fragments.
In retrospect I'd argue that only a small fraction was vaporized. If it's Kane who disagreed with the observations in another thread, then he was right.
At 5:45 on this YouTube video from RtG, we can see in the first "weak" phaser shot that destroys the first asteroid that most of the asteroid is gone, with only about 20 or so glowing pieces, and a couple of which appear big because they are headed towards the camera at high speed. The rest is so small it cannot possibly enough to account for the rest of the missing mass.
-Mike
The gif WILGA made is actually much more solid evidence of the large fragmentation of the asteroid. If you go fullscreen with the YT video, you can see all the debris as well. They're so little energy imparted to them that they don't even get much dispersed.

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