sonofccn wrote:Paradise Syndrome {TOS} wrote:SPOCK: Doctor, that asteroid is almost as large as your Earth's moon. Far enough away, the angle necessary to divert it enough to avoid destruction is minute, but as the asteroid approaches this planet, the angle becomes so great that even the power of a starship
So straight off the bat we are talking about a fairly large plantary body. JMS has suggested the scaling doesn't quite match up, only about half the stated value IIRC through I may be wrong, but regardless the rock is big.
The big problem with the asteroid in "The Paradise Syndrome" is that it's
not spherical. This is a little bit of an issue, since
irregular bodies tend not to be all that large. If anything, the new remastered asteroid is
even more oblong than the original.
The dialogue couldn't be clearer, but the visuals are problematic. Taking both the dialogue and visuals to be correct requires a rather generous interpretation of "almost," an unnoticed re-sizing of Earth's moon (perhaps the Xindi shrank it?), or a fairly exotic structure / formation history of the asteroid in question, the latter of which calls into question any yield estimates based on actual effect.
As for Deja Q we have this:
Deja Q {TNG} wrote:RIKER
Couldn't we just blow it into
harmless chunks?
DATA
The total mass of the moon would
remain the same, Commander. And
the impact of thousands of
fragments would spread destruction
over an even wider area.
Blasting the moon to rubble was not an issue, keeping the splintering debris from raining down was. Just having fun, plugging out moon's diameter, I didn't see anything regardings size in my look through and this is just for fun, into Wong's asteriod calculator it spits out 4.200E+7 gigatons or 42000000 gigatons if I remember my old scientific notation for fragmentation. Divid by 29 hours, how long until they estimated the moon would crash, and get 1448275 gigatons or 1448 teratons or about a 1 PT per hour. Stir in some stock phrases like "lower limit, conservative" and that " it could have taken them less than 29 hours" and presto your done.
Well, it's too bad we actually have a good idea of how big the Bre'el moon ought to be based on the combination of its tidal and impact effects.
Tidal effects suggest e18-e19 kg; impact effects suggest e(16 +/- 1) based on a comparatively low speed; since many of our assumptions are tied to the size, mass, and composition of Bre'el IV, its atmosphere, and its oceans, along with the geology of the impact site in particular, we should shoot for something in the e17-e18 kg range - that is to say, about 1/100,000th the size of Earth's moon.
This is Pegasus again isn't it? The asteriod that Riker want to at least vaporize.
Well he wanted to remove all traces of the starship Pegasus but yes there is likely to be much ineffiecent waste of vaporizing the asteriod, 9KM I think in size, plus Riker has to do it before the Romulans swoop in and have a chance to meddle so this is a very off the cuff, rushed job as opposed to a careful and efficent strike. I don't think it supports PT scale weapnry if that is what your trying to push through.
Pegasus is a very loose event IMO. 9 km is the lower end of scalings from the visuals, IIRC, but we've seen that starship hulls are very tough. Riker
does have to insure destruction of a vessel in the interior of a highly irregular asteroid with numerous internal chambers venting to the outside directly, and it's not going to be a very efficient process.
Lucky wrote: Rama Post 573 http://forums.spacebattles.com/showthread.php?t=176730&page=23 wrote: Sans the fact that every instance in which the Federation were incapable of vaporizing asteroids without significant amounts of energy being involved even for them such as in Pegasus, Deja Q and The Paradise Syndrome, one instance in which a torpedo with an increased yield (by 11%) barely fractured the asteroid it impacted in Genesis (let alone turning the entire nearby field to vapor), that the E-D could not destroy an asteroid with a dense iron core even with several subsequent following torpedoes in Cost of Living, that the E-D had to supplement the aid of a minor solar prominence to destroy a vessel that their weapons were utterly useless against in Descent, part II, similarly three Dominion attack craft are destroyed whilst sitting on the leading edge of a CME during the episode Shadows and Symbols, that Voyager was forced to ground herself when under attack from Turien weapons that generated barely gigajoule range blasts when used in atmosphere during the episode Dragon's Teeth. Then there's the fact that we see one Bajoran Raider and two Interceptors dog fighting over the surface of a planet in The Siege.
Pegasus: involved a magic asteroid that had gravitational and magnetic fields more hazardous then a star, and Riker a guy known for seemingly not knowing what his ship can do and underestimating it wanted to remove any sign the Pegasus was ever there as fast a possible. That tells us logically anything, but a high end interpretation of what Riker intend is out of the question, and that implies gigatons if the asteriod was mundane which it was not.
I mentioned TPS already; the "Cost of Living" asteroid is actually large enough that the photon torpedoes disappear before hitting it, which makes it rather larger than the "Rise" asteroid at a minimum. It actually seems to be rather large, and
is mostly destroyed, the remainder surviving due to Treknobabble construction. "Nitrium" is not iron.
It's rather odd that Rama says that the Federation
is incapable of vaporizing asteroids when most episodes indicate clearly that "normal" asteroids - ones not made of Treknobabble materials - would be destroyed easily.
Dragon's Teeth What are the properties of Turien weapons?
It's Turei, not Turien. The yield is not stated. Some key lines:
TUVOK: They are targeting our shields with a resonance pulse. It's altering the harmonics. We're being pushed out of the corridor.
...
PARIS: Direct hit. Our warp drive is offline.
TUVOK: Shields down to eighty two percent. Sixty percent.
PARIS: They're closing.
CHAKOTAY: We could use some clever suggestions about now.
SEVEN: There's a planet eight million kilometres ahead, uninhabited but the atmosphere is charged with radiogenic particles.
CHAKOTAY: How radiogenic?
SEVEN: Three thousand isorems.
CHAKOTAY: If we route enough power to the shields we can survive in that, but maybe our friends can't.
TUVOK: Shields at fifty three percent.
As we see, the Turei used a shield-altering weapon, and the Turei managed to disable the warp drive shooting
through the shields. In response, Voyager goes to a hostile environment. It's as if Rama hasn't actually seen the episode, merely read a summary of it on SDN.
What is Rama talking about? I don't think I have heard of the episode before.
So how much energy would hit the ship at the safe distances in Allegiances, and is there anything odd about it?
"Allegiance" gives a pulsar:
PICARD 2: What do we know about that pulsar?
DATA: A great deal, sir. It is a rotating neutron star of approximately four point three five six solar masses.
Unfortunately, pulsars come in a wide variety of flavors. Not only does he have the episode name slightly off ("Allegiance" not "Allegiances"), but he has the distance entirely wrong. It's 20 million kilometres that is cited as dangerous:
PICARD 2: Helm take us in to twenty million kilometres.
WESLEY: Aye, sir.
RIKER: Mister Worf, divert enough power to the shields to offset the increased radiation and magnetic fields.
DATA: Sir, at twenty million kilometres, our shields will only be effective for eighteen minutes.
PICARD 2: Noted, Mister Data.
Neutron stars can be
rather intensely bright.
And what is this astroid made of that lets it survive things warships can't? The Defiant had to be 800 kilometers from the blast.
It really is as if Rama hasn't seen the epsiode and is only reading the SDN spin of it third-hand.
Rama Post 573 http://forums.spacebattles.com/showthread.php?t=176730&page=23 wrote: We then also have the Federation fleet forced to turn the defense turrets surrounding Chintoka on their own buried generator in Tears of the Prophets. These are weapons that have been seen gutting Galaxy-class warships during the battle, and yet their own weapons barely even pound sections of the rocky surface.
So they had to exploit a weakness in a shield to destroy it. That speaks well of the shield, but says little about UFP capabilities.
Once the shields went down, the asteroid went up in a blinding flash of incandescent light.
The problem is that the asteroid
was shielded very heavily. Once again, it's as if Rama hadn't seen the episode at all.
Rama Post 573 http://forums.spacebattles.com/showthread.php?t=176730&page=23 wrote: There's also the fact that the only known Starship power generation figures we have for the Warp Core (10E12 and 10E18 watts respectively) are nine orders of magnitude away from making exaton level power levels (10E27) anywhere near realistic at a minimum, and fifteen orders of magnitude at a maximum interpretation of the quote.
The only known power generation figures for a starship are not for it's maximum output, but for when it is just sitting in orbit.
Maximum output isn't going to be more than e21W. e12W is frankly impossible given what the E-D does on a regular basis, so it's a little silly to even bring it up, but it is actually mentioned in dialogue.
Rama Post 573 http://forums.spacebattles.com/showthread.php?t=176730&page=23 wrote: That's so cute! Look at you trying to use real-world science, and fail at doing so!
Here's a hint genius. Look up inverse-square law, which states that whatever energy is transmitted omni-directionally in her totality, only a fraction is going to be absorbed into the surface area of a smaller object at a greater distance.
Which means that if a main-sequence star going nova has a surface area of 6.08E12 km^2, and Voyager has a surface area of 0.103 km^2, the surface of Voyager will only absorb 1.69E-12% (or 0.00000000000169%) of the total energy of the supernova. Which is still quite a lot of energy, but still never actually happened.
Why do I have the feeling Rama is missing something?
Right, he's avoiding actually doing a simple multiplication step that maxes him look silly. The conventional part of supernova explosion is an e44 joule wave of hot matter. 1.7e-14 * e44 = 2e30 joules.
Et cetera. I could go on; but I won't. The basic upshot is that Rama is exhibiting total unfamiliarity with the episodes being referenced (not surprising; Rama seems to hate Star Trek), and isn't actually following through on the math when it counts. The result is severe misrepresentation of the evidence.
Cpl Facehugger wrote:Slayer, can the trolling. Rama has pretty conclusively demolished your points, so saying "But all those examples you cited that disprove my claims are wrong, as shown by this one outlier event that never actually happened" is poor conduct.
Thank you for your cooperation.
And, of course, disputing this rather cruddy argument - which included several screens of copypasta from Wong's website, to boot - is "trolling."
The outliers here are the handful of references that Rama has managed to described reasonably accurately.
