Brian Young's Stargate Atlantis Analysis

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Estrecca
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Brian Young's Stargate Atlantis Analysis

Post by Estrecca » Wed Nov 24, 2010 11:07 am

An old hand in the pro-Wars side of the versus debate has decided to make some analysis of Stargate technology. The methodology selected to do so is based in using the Asuran Stargate weapon deployed against Atlantis as the absolute high end of what Stargate power generation technology can accomplish and extrapolate everything else from there.

For reader's convenience.

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Re: Brian Young's Stargate Atlantis Analysis

Post by Praeothmin » Wed Nov 24, 2010 5:00 pm

Funny how he forgets about "Rise" in ST, ignores the fact that Riker wanted to completely destroy the Asteroid and everything inside to prevent Romulans from getting the Pegasus...
That he ignores ST VI, where Torpedoes imparted angular momentum to a BoP...

Funny how he says almost all the asteroids fired upon by Slave-1 were vaporized in 1 shot, while the movie clearly shows us most asteroids were fragmented, and required multiple shots to do so.
Funny how he states, with absolute certainty, that the MF is actually closer to 35-40 meters long when most VFX show it at a maximum of 24-26 meters, how the asteroids in TESB were vaporized in almost a second, and were not necessarily all vaporized, how the shots that vaporized the asteroids didn't all come from LTLs or MTLs, but that some did come from HTLs...

In other words, he cheats in his analysis...

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Re: Brian Young's Stargate Atlantis Analysis

Post by Mike DiCenso » Wed Nov 24, 2010 9:49 pm

Interesting to see Brian Young is still alive and involved in the Versus debates, if only in a peripheral way. Also not terribly suprising he still clings to his bad old ways.

* Brian still incorrectly makes the assumption that Riker's goal of destroying asteroid Gamma 601 in "The Pegasus" merely needed to involve fragmentation, and no vaporization, or melting. That's very disingenuous of him as usual since we have seen in ST:TMP and elsewhere in Trek large-scale vaporization of asteroids.

* Brian tries to underscore the failure of the E-D's phasers in "Booby Trap" to overwhelm and destroy the ascetone assmilator devices buried inside several of the asteroids. What he fails to note is that the devices drain energy, and phaser beams are a form of energy, though not likely anywhere near on the same scale of photon torpedoes, of which several were used later to destroy a large portion of the asteroid field along with the 600 meter Promellian battlecruiser. It is very clear with regards to the phasers that they did make the asteroids glow, dispite having their energy simultaneously soaked up by the assmilators and turned rapidly into dangerous radiation directed back at the E-D.

Difficulty scaling the asteroids struck by the phasers in "Booby Trap"? Not likely. The one in the still image being hit is 1.22" on the long axis, while the beam is .26" in diameter, or a ratio of 4.69 to 1. We know that the phaser beams are at least 6 meters wide (the width of the phaser strip itself), and assuming they do not widen as sometimes phasers haven been know to, we have an asteroid no less than 28 meters long and 18-20 meters wide. The melt energies for an asteroid of that size is approximately 71-117 terajoules depending on whether the asteroid was composed of rock or iron. So a brief phaser shot was able to do that, even though a large amount of it's energy was being siphoned away by the assmilators.

* Brian's claim of the ship and asteroid being fragmented is only marginally true. Most of the asteroids and the Promellian ship were utterly vaporized. That much is apparent in the video.

* Brian continues to try and perpetuate the myth of the Pegasus asteroid being only 5 km wide and mostly hollow. Considering he and others have scaled the asteroid to larger sizes, that's very disingenuous. 9 x 6.5 km is the commonly accepted size now. The volume of the fissure the E-D went into can be reasonably extrapolated to 1 billion cubic meters, which is a tiny fraction of the overall volume of the asteroid. As has been calculated here, the volume of the fissure was less than one percent of that.

* Brian once again cherrypicks a few screen shots from AoTC to make it look as though Slave-I is vaporizing asteroids. However, as has been demonstrated here in the "AOTC: Slave-I's firepower and Aethersprite's shields" thread, that silly claim is easily debunked. Gigajoule range firepower is the best you get.

* Brian also continues to try and show off the same, tired old outdated images from his website, that were provided by Wayne Poe all those years ago to make it look as though the asteroids in TESB were bigger than they really are. The image he provides of the ISD vaping the one asteroid gives us ample means of scaling independent of the unreliable Falcon scalings. Using the same technique there as was done for the E-D asteroid scaling, we find that the asteroid being "vaped" in TESB is .61 hundreths of an inch on it's long axis, the beam hitting it is .26 hundredth of an inch in diameter, including the glow. This means that the asteroid on it's long axis is some 2.35 times wider than the TL beam. Rarely in SW have we seen the TL beams wider than a couple of meters. The subsequent images provided on Brian's page demonstrate this quite well. Thus the asteroid being hit is not likely more than 5 meters diameter, and the energies involved would be no more than 1-7 kilotons.

* Finally Brian coviently forgot that in "The Pegasus", the Romulan warbird Terix melted enough rock to plug up that billion cubic meter tunnel and trap the E-D inside. If not for the danger of collapse, the E-D herself could have cut another tunnel of similar size to escape.

So good ol' Brian is up to his usual tricks and lies to inflate Star Wars ships beyond what they can really do, and reduce the opposition with careful cherrypicking of the evidence. How pathetic.
-Mike

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Re: Brian Young's Stargate Atlantis Analysis

Post by Lucky » Thu Nov 25, 2010 9:54 am

Is he using what appears to be an anti-shield weapon to judge standard fire power for Stargate?

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Re: Brian Young's Stargate Atlantis Analysis

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Thu Nov 25, 2010 10:23 pm

Estrecca wrote:An old hand in the pro-Wars side of the versus debate has decided to make some analysis of Stargate technology. The methodology selected to do so is based in using the Asuran Stargate weapon deployed against Atlantis as the absolute high end of what Stargate power generation technology can accomplish and extrapolate everything else from there.

For reader's convenience.
Thanks for the link!
That's the kind of stuff that would really make me want to get my own website up.

The pity being that seeing the way he handles a franchise I actually know fairly well, it makes me ponder the accuracy of all his other observations about Babylon5. I know there are some of them I'd disagree with, like the one about nukes destroying Shadow Battlecrabs.
At times, I even forget this website is Young's. Knowing his take on Star Wars vs Star Trek, I should be more cautious. For example, his SWvST section on the links page doesn't count RSA's website.

Regarding the Atlantis Asteroid page, I took a look at the structure of the link. I got there, but I have no idea how to get to the Atlantis or Stargate page by normal browsing means.

Actually I don't know why he calls it an Atlantis page, as it has some analysis of AOTC and ST:ENT, and lots of erroneous data. I wondered if this was due to the age of the webpage, but since it debuts with an analysis of "First Strike", and this episode officially aired the 06.22.07 in the US, and about a year later on syndication, the last update, if there's been any, can't be prior to this date, easily.

Just before going into the details of the SGA material, I just got to point out that he peddles the same ol' nonsense about the so called vaporization of asteroids in AOTC. I covered that a while ago in 2007, both here and at SBC (AOTC: Slave-I's firepower and Aethersprite's shields, AOTC: Slave-I's firepower and Aethersprite's shields - Part II, and more at SW and the ICS. For the 9000+th time and SW and the ICS. For the 9000+th time (Part 2)).

I have not looked at the E-D related part, but I'm sure Trekkies here will cover that one properly.

So, let's see what he says about Stargate. I'll assume that he knows at least a good number of things about Stargate as a whole, otherwise I wouldn't honestly know why he decided to pick that lone very example. Now, if there's a dishonest motive behind that page, it wouldn't be too hard to see why he picked that one: it's the most used case of low end firepower to estimate the power of a ZPM, and that's been debunked just so many times it's not funny.
I suspect to have to read the same amount of nonsense though.

I'd would also remind people to check out the following thread - ZPM discrepancies... power levels, overloads and else - to see how the question of ZPMs isn't an easy one.
Brian Young wrote: Analysis of Replicator Beam

In the Stargate Atlantis episode First Strike, the season 3 finale, the Replicators attack Atlantis with a unique weapon. A vessel was stripped down to the engine, navigation system, and shield, and a stargate was placed inside. When activated, the Replicators fired a beam through this stargate, not only threatening the city directly, but also preventing escape through the city’s own stargate. The beam also powered the stargate to allow it to stay open well beyond the normal 38 minute timeframe. A well-played checkmate which allows the convenient calculation of firepower, power generation, etc.
Stargates can absorb almost any energy that hits them. A continuous input of energy can maintain a stargate open. We'll see more of that later.

Brian Young wrote: In response to this threat, Dr. McKay submerged the city in an attempt to attenuate the beam. When this tactic proved only marginally successful, it was decided the best option was to retreat to another planet. To do this with only one functioning ZPM, they had to draw power from a underwater station, and divert power from the shields to the engines. The beam therefore needed to be blocked to allow the shields to be dropped. A squadron of F-302s was dispatched to tow an asteroid into the beam’s path.

As asteroids are a natural object, and their physical properties are largely understood, this allows an order of magnitude calculation on the firepower of the beam in question. We must first determine the approximate size of the asteroid.

http://www.babtech-onthe.net/stargate/asteroid1.jpg

In this image, the pilot’s face is clearly visible, and he sits in the approximate center of the cockpit of this F-302. If the pilot’s head is 20 centimeters wide (average Human head), the cockpit is approximately 1.3 meters wide.

http://www.babtech-onthe.net/stargate/asteroid2.jpg

In this image, we see an F-302 at an approximate right angle to the asteroid in question. It has grappled on to the asteroid in preparation for towing. If the cockpit is 1.3 meters wide (9 pixels in this image), the entire fighter is approximately 10 meters wide (70 pixels). The visible portion of the asteroid is ~42 meters tall (294 pixels), this being most of its height. It is ~54 meters wide (376 pixels), this may be slightly conservative (the fighter is on the near side of the asteroid), but close to the actual value, as the fighter is in contact with the asteroid via cable and positioned close to the edge.

http://www.babtech-onthe.net/stargate/asteroid3.jpg

In this image, if the asteroid is approximately 54 meters wide, the beam is melting an area approximately 3 meters in diameter on impact. The asteroid blocked the beam completely for 139 seconds (just over 2 minutes) of screen time. The beam did not penetrate the asteroid until it nearly reached the edge, when heat expansion caused pieces to break off. This enabled the beam to hit the rising city seconds sooner than expected, damaging the control tower, and injuring key characters. To view the clip, click on the following image:

http://www.babtech-onthe.net/stargate/atlantis5.mov
I'd beg to disagree with the size, although it's not important.
F-302s are larger (1, 2).
BY didn't account for the perspective, namely that the pilot's head is not glued to the cockpit, but found well behind.
That said, the shots I used have a problem, in that the helmet is too small. Eventually, that may make the craft even longer (assuming the ratio between the helmet width and the X-302's length doesn't change).


Brian Young wrote: If we generously assume that the asteroid is a sphere with a diameter of 60 meters (rounding up), it would mass approximately 890 million kilograms. A uniform delivery of approximately 1.6 megatons would be needed to vaporize this mass of iron. Of course, the beam did not vaporize the asteroid, nor did it melt through it in the approximate 2 minutes of dwell time. In this image, we see the edges breaking off of the asteroid due to heat expansion. Only then does the beam penetrate the asteroid. The amount of penetration the beam did achieve is open to speculation, but the damage appears to the naked eye to be relatively superficial, as indicated by the arrow above.

If we generously assume that the beam did cut all the way through the asteroid, and assume that it actually vaporized a column 3 meters thick and 60 meters in diameter, approximately 500 terajoules (120 kilotons) were delivered to the asteroid during the two minutes, with an average firepower of over 4 terawatts. (pi*R²*L)*7870[density of iron]*7.6[megajoules/kilogram to vaporize iron in space (very low starting temperature, but zero atmospheric pressure)]/1,000,000[to convert megajoules to terajoules]

For comparison, the "Little Boy" bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in the last days of World War 2 released approximately 15 kilotons, leveling an estimated 60,000 buildings. The calculations above include some very generous assumptions, but can't be treated as an actual upper limit. However, the result should be considered very generous - if the energy delivered by the beam were greater, the asteroid would have been an ineffective barrier. But it is likely the energy delivered to the asteroid was of a similar magnitude to the energy released by Little Boy, in the high gigajoule to low terajoule range. Even though these calculations are generous, information below indicates a ZPM can output power close to this magnitude, and Dr. McKay stated this weapon would require many of them. Therefore, the firepower was logically on this order of magnitude.

It is doubtful maintaining an open stargate or maintaining shields around the satellite required more power than the beam delivered to the target. If the Replicators were capable of many times greater firepower, they could have destroyed Atlantis during the stargate's standard 38 minute cycle, without the need to provide it with extra power. The primary goal was the destruction of Atlantis, after all.
For starters, assuming the asteroid contains iron is normal. It's an asteroid that's been cratered itself, and shows patches of brown over its surface (clicky). In other words, it is that solid.

A figure in the terawatts is certainly not out of question.
And that's without considering the obvious fact that the beam is not just about a normal DET. There's obviously much more going on.
We still notice that the beam was not stopped by the ocean's water located above the city. How much water was there above the city?
The coast was never visible from the city, and even Sheppard, when taking a puddle jumper to go to the closest shore where Athosians settled, took a bit of time to get there:
The Storm wrote: ATLANTIS’ PLANET. John and Teyla are in a Puddlejumper, flying over the ocean.

SHEPPARD
Haven’t been to the mainland in a while. How’s everybody settling in?

TEYLA
Halling believes the first crops will have a good yield.

SHEPPARD
You still miss home?

TEYLA
There is still talk of returning, even though I’ve told them the Wraith have scorched Athos bare in revenge for our resistance.

SHEPPARD
Well, maybe in time this place will start to begin to feel like home.

(Teyla sees something in front of and to the right of the Jumper. She stares at it.)

TEYLA: Do you see that?
(John looks up from his controls and sees a huge black storm cloud in the distance.)

SHEPPARD
That can’t be a storm – it stretches across the whole horizon.

TEYLA
I’ve never seen something like that from so high.

SHEPPARD
I’ve seen a lot of things from this altitude, but nothing like that. (He activates comms.) Atlantis base, this is Jumper One. We’re gonna change our heading to investigate a storm.

ATLANTIS CONTROL ROOM.

WEIR (into comms)
Major, this is Weir. We didn’t copy that. You’re breaking up.

SHEPPARD (over comms)
I said there’s ... (static) ... ermanence headed right ... (static) ... the weather forecasting.

WEIR (to the tech sitting at the control panel)
Did he just say ‘weather forecasting’?!

JUMPER ONE. The Jumper has now risen higher and is flying over the top of the cloud. From the shape of the cloud, it’s clearly a hurricane.

TEYLA
Do all storms look like this from above?

SHEPPARD
No. (He calls up a display.) This must cover twenty percent of the planet.

TEYLA
Is it headed towards the mainland?

SHEPPARD
Tracking right towards the settlement.

TEYLA (looking concerned for her people)
And after that?

SHEPPARD
Straight to Atlantis.
The puddlejumper wasn't exactly flying slowly either.
So obviously, being that far from the coast would allow the cityship to sit a couple kilometers below the surface. Many hundreds of meters of water is the bare minimum here.

So it's clear that there would have been several main spire heights above Atlantis.
And if you feel like needless arguing, here's direct evidence.
The main spire is more than 600 meters high, from city-floor level. It doesn't account for the stuff below the city, that's quite thick and imposing, and we're not even adding the gap between the shield's roof and the apex of the main spire.
You easily have some kilometers of water there. With a beam that's several meters wide, how could you not need copious amounts of terawatts, if so much water had to be vaporized?
It's also very obvious that for a beam that reaches that far deep inside the ocean, the amount of water vaporization is actually very minimal. Not so DET it seems.
That's logical, since the asteroid proved enough to stop the beam for a while. The moderate amount of water vaporized feels in line with this fact.

Sidenote: I never noticed that the Wraith had scorched the planet bare.

Besides, it's impossible to know how much of the energy transfered was powering the stargate. We do know from "Redemption" that this amount can be low, as three orders of magnitude below normal levels:

We've seen that in "Redemption", wherein the smallest power was sufficient to complete the trick. The input was so small that the SGC sensors had to be recalibrated to see the periodical blip of energy every two or three seconds.
Redemption Part I wrote: INT—SGC CONTROL ROOM

[Lt. Simmons is working at a terminal as Carter enters the room.]

LT. SIMMONS
Major…there's a rise in power being retained by the Gate's internal capacitors of .1%.

CARTER
Well, while there's an open wormhole, the value tends to fluctuate by at least that much anyway.

LT. SIMMONS
Not for the last 12 minutes, it hasn't.

CARTER
Go to Gate diagnostic screen four.

LT. SIMMONS
Normal…no incoming energy readings.

CARTER
Increase sensitivity by 50%.

[A few blips appear on the computer graph.]

CARTER
What was that?

LT. SIMMONS
Could be interference in the line between the Gate and computer.

CARTER
There it is again. Increase sensitivity by 200%.

LT. SIMMONS
That's well within the accepted margin of error for the sensors.

CARTER
I know, try it anyway.

[A pattern of blips appears on the computer graph.]

CARTER
I admit it's a pretty small anomaly, but it could be contributing to the power build up in the Gate.

LT. SIMMONS
But, uh…

CARTER
Errors are random, Lt. Whatever this is, it has a distinct pattern.

LT. SIMMONS
Right.
Notice that the dialogue is wrong here, for two reasons.
First, visuals indicate that the sensitivity was increased 50 times and again 200 times.

Normal scale
x50
x200

Thanks to stargate1971.com for the awesome amount of qood quality screencaps!

Secondly, an increase of 50% isn't even doubling the scale sensitivity.
x2 is equivalent to an increase of 100% of the initial value (initial value +100% of the initial value), or 200% of the initial value.
Multiplying the sensitivity by 50 is equivalent to 5000% of the initial value, or the an increase by 4900%. That's an order of magnitude and five.
On screen, the measurements go from 10 to 90. The smaller graduations go by two (0, 2, 4, 6, ...).
Much likely, the range from 0 to 10 and from 90 to 100 are not displayed. Easily a scale in percents. What we see is therefore 80%.
An increase of the sensitivity by +50% would have increased the size of the graph by 0.5, and therefore brought the overall size of the graph at 80% x1.5, or 120%.
Knowing that the screen only displays 80% of the scale, we would see 96% of the scale. That's an actual factor of 1.2.
Now, on the default sensitivity scale, the readings indicated a flatline at around 15%.
With the zoom by x50, the flatline was measured at a notch below 20%, more like 19%, with the blips climbing as far up as 28-30%. That's a difference of 9-11%. That said, it's most likely because they zoomed onto the crest of the flatline, so most of the flatline's original thickness isn't visible on the new view, and is located below the screen, so to speak.

An increase of 50% of the initial scale would have proved insufficient. See, if an increase of +50% is sufficient to show blips being about 9-11% high, then with the factor we found above, the blips would have appeared as 1.2 times smaller, 7.5-9.16%, and therefore the blips should have been very visible with the default scale.

Now, divide 9-11% by 50, and you get 0.18-0.22%, which is not even a full small graduation, which explains why it wasn't seen.

Now take a look at the quanties of energy a stargate can normally channel, and you'll see that those blips would still rate in the high terawatts. At least in a case of a stargate staying connected that long.
We know that the magnitude of energy isn't necessarily relevant since in "Chain Reaction", the stargate disconnected some time after the 38 minutes, and that was after the planet being turned to plasma.
Brian Young wrote: http://www.babtech-onthe.net/stargate/atlantis1.jpg

This event must have been considered very impressive by the members of the Atlantis Expedition, as Dr. McKay stated it would require "a black hole or an unlimited number of ZPMs" to power the beam/stargate. This is noted in the image above, taken from the episode with subtitles turned on. To view the clip, click on the image.
This is where things get funny.
It's a well known fact that ZPMs can provide humongous amounts of energy.
3 ZPMs proved capable of protecting a large portion of Lantean when the inhabitants of the city, eons ago, stretched the shield over a large area. Any area that was hit suffered the effects of mass extinction.
The Arctarus core, was providing the power of 12 ZPMs at 50%, and after a dozen of minutes or two, the overload vaporized the planet and destroyed 5/6ths of the local star system.

Brian Young wrote: This provides a possible upper limit on the power output of a ZPM, but certainly for the other power generation technology available to the Expedition. In the Stargate SG-1 episode The Road Not Taken, Colonel Carter said she needed more power to hide the alternate-universe-Earth from the Ori using an alien device. She said she needed 700 gigawatts more, but was unable to produce that much power. She was using a naquadah generator and a nearly-spent ZPM at the time. She reported her tests suggested the ZPM had been taxed too much by a previous battle with the Ori, and it was unable to produce the necessary power. She was clearly disappointed by the tests, suggesting she expected the ZPM to provide the 700 gigawatts. The President of the United States used drastic measures to provide the power. If even several naquadah generators were capable of outputting the 700 gigawatts, Colonel Carter could have simply built more, she being the scientist who built the prototype 7 years before in the Season 3 episode Learning Curve.
First of all, she wouldn't even bother using a naqahdah generator Mk-I if it wasn't providing power in the gigawatt range, otherwise its addition would have been completely irrelevant.
They also had Prometheus available, named Air Force One.
Secondly, they were quite short on resources, and despite having a 304 available, the Daedalus, they kept it up there patrolling.


The whole planet was in a state of an advanced warm war. The US had taken quite drastic measures to prevent public protests, such as instating martial law, but that didn't help.
They had gone far enough to need to bomb some Irish village with F-302s. There had been riots and deaths in the US over food, water and fuel.
Hardly a situation where they could obtain resources as easily as before, such as naqahdah, which requires going to other planets. The Ori's conquest might have been very advanced in that reality.
See:
The Road not Taken wrote: CARTER
You know, I've also been going over several mission reports. You abandoned the Alpha Site. You cut ties with the Jaffa. You pulled back on almost everything!

HAMMOND
(defensively)
We didn't have a lot of choice! We devoted our full resources to planetary defense!
It's going to be hard to come with naqahdah in such conditions.
The fact that in this alt-reality, they only had one naqahdah generator to spare, when in normal SG-1, they could bring a plenty to any foreign planet, should be telling.

Why they didn't use those two ships to provide extra-power is a plot hole, since it would have obviously been suggested if it had been of any use. Perhaps they didn't have the capacity to plug the ships to the SGC. But why wouldn't they plug the ZPM, the portable Mark-I into the Daedalus?

There's another problem with his analysis. It's 700 GW above what they were already getting, and that for a prolongated period of time. Actually, an undefinite period of time.
And in regards to power, those first generation portable generators are quite capable: Stargate: Power and lifespan of naqahdah generators.

Just to kick away from stupid low end 'hand grenade" firepower attempt, in "The Road Not Taken", Landry said:
LANDRY
I understand you're dealing with a little power shortage. How much do you need?

CARTER
Uh, well, about 700 gigawatts. That's roughly eighty percent of the power generating capacity of the continental United States.

LANDRY
So, it's doable then.

CARTER
(gulping)
I'm sorry. I don't understand.

HAMMOND
We've known about the condition of the ZPM for some time, Colonel. In addition to our Major Carter's research, as a backup we've been building an infrastructure to channel energy to the Ancient chair directly from the U.S. power grid.

[Landry finishes signing some papers an aide brought him, then leads Hammond and Carter to the table.]

LANDRY
Not enough to give us the upper hand in a shooting battle against a whole fleet, but if your plan works, there won't be any battles at all.
(to Charlie)
Charlie, I need a speech explaining to the American people why it's a good thing they'll be without power for an undisclosed period of time.
700 GW + whatever they were already providing would be insufficient to engage the Ori ships above. It's quite obvious, considering what a single Ori ship withstood in "The Pegasus Project": an energy level that proved superior enough to ~26 megatons, necessary to make the intergalactic wormhole jump from a normal stargate to an Ori supergate.

Let's also notice the "undisclosed period of time" here.

Let's notice that they had difficulties to provide power to the device. By the time they reached above 90%, the power buildup was slowing down. It's quite interesting because it means they even needed to charge the damn thing before running it, otherwise the field would collapse.
Carter pointed out that 700 GW was about 80% of this US' power production, and Landry told her that they had built an infrastructure to tap that energy.
Obviously that grid of them wasn't so much pristine. A lack of hydrocarbons would easily explain it.
Brian Young wrote: Also note the fact that the Atlantis Expedition had several similar naquadah generators, but were unable to effectively power the city without at least one ZPM. Naquadah generators therefore produce much less power than a ZPM, perhaps by an order of magnitude or more. This is not surprising, as the generators were constructed using modern day Earth technology, and are no larger than a boombox. However, naquadah generators have proven very useful for more than their portability. In the episode Space Race, an alien from an advanced civilization, which was apparently not being threatened by the Goa'uld, actively sought out Samantha Carter and her naquadah generators to power his space ship in a race. Therefore, even this small, portable generator is powerful enough to earn respect among the most advanced races in the Milky Way galaxy.
I like the way that's twisted.
First. The city was more than well powered with naqahdah generators. It was functioning well, sensors were on, lights and life support. Even the energy prisons and transport cages (pod to pod beaming tech) worked.
Secondly, the portable naqahdah generator was given to Warrick. Warrick is not representative of the technological advancement of the Hebridan society (mix of Serrakins and Humans, and some hybrids). The Seberus itself hardly was a high quality ship, and the naqahdah generator used first to help the ship get out when stranded on some alien planet, was deemed good when it supplemented the ship's other systems.
They also were out of credits, unable to buy such things as a "long range scanning control unit".

And perhaps one line to settle them all:
Space Race wrote: CARTER
With all your science and engineering I'm a little surprised that you don't have a power source that rivals this.

EAMON
Oh they exist, we just couldn't afford one.
Moving on.

Brian Young wrote: Also interesting to note is that modern nuclear power plants typically generate approximately one gigawatt of electricity. It would thus require several hundred of them to meet Colonel Carter's 700 gigawatt requirement, or thousands to power the weapon the Replicators fired through the stargate. In The Road Not Taken, most of the power generated by the United States was required to power the alien device.
It actually required more, since they were 700 GW short, and they barely managed to charge the device properly, even according to Carter's requirements. Meaning they possibly did not have access to much US-made power to begin with.

Brian Young wrote: In The Seige part 2, the Marines reported they had brought with them the new Mark II naquadah generator, which produced 600% greater power than the original. They used it to power Atlantis' chair until the ZPM arrived aboard the Daedalus. This generator was able to power the drones to counterattack the Wraith ships, but was unable to power the shields. Prior to this, a team of scientists reactivated an Ancient defense platform to ambush the incoming Wraith ships in part 1. This platform was used in the war 10,000 years prior, and was now completely out of power. They used a single naquadah generator (original) to power the platform. As the episode involving the Ori took place after this, the 700 gigawatt upper limit applies to the Mark II generator, as Colonel Carter would have had access to them even before one was transported to Atlantis. This is logical, as even the Mark II generator was unable to power the shields, and was a poor substitute for a ZPM. The Mark II therefore must only output a fraction of the power available from a ZPM (estimated below as high gigawatt to low terawatt range).
Yes, a Mk-II is a poor substitute for a ZPM, notably because it's going to run out of power very quickly, since it runs at 600% of the Mk-I's max, and that duration ended out to be some minute.
Again, for proper figures, look here.
It doesn't change a thing to the fact that in the alt-reality, they were extremely short on all possible resources, and isolated themselves. They turtled.
There is nothing logical in what he says. As I pointed out above, if they had those power sources available in TRnT, they'd have used them, instead of using just one Mark-I.

I also suppose that if we want to go through a DET analysis of what happened in "Siege Part II" - why not? that's what he does for "First Strike" after all - then let's remember that the naqahdah generator had enough energy to feed the weapon to shoot down three Hiveships.
See one beam bisecting a Hiveship. If you want to run some DET calcs, let's just remember that those ships, among other things, are several kilometers wide, have regenerative hulls which can tank point blank megaton nuclear detonations and withstand several shots from cannons capable of doing at least that and free falling through an atmosphere without burning up, and that while having the biosystems damaged by a virus.
Now estimate how much energy is necessary to burn through that kind of ship.

Brian Young wrote: As the beam being fired on Atlantis by the Replicators was apparently in the high gigawatt to low terawatt range, and Dr. McKay felt this, powering the shields, and maintaining an open stargate would require many ZPMs, it is likely a ZPM cannot output power beyond a few terawatts. However, as noted above, Colonel Carter was disappointed the ZPM could not produce the necessary 700 gigawatts. Therefore, it is likely a ZPM can output at least several hundred gigawatts, but no more than a few terawatts. Compared to modern technology, this is, as stated in the clip above, "an insane amount of power." It easily exceeds the power generation capability of the United States or any other modern country, all from a device small enough to carry by hand.
Wouldn't be the fact that the beam would finish draining their ZPM in 29 hours what led McKay to think they had some equivalent system on the other side?
Let's remember that the Odyssey fired missiles at the Asuran satgate, yet that barely dented the shields, which were also powered by whatever kept coming from the other side. By then, they had 26 megatons shaped nukes.
First Strike wrote: McKAY
The shield's taking its power from the beam. Look, I registered a slight drop in output when you fired on it.
[...]

McKAY
I said "slight" – as in point zero zero two. Look, I doubt *any* amount of firepower is gonna collapse it while that beam is active.
".002".
Yes, something that dangerous threatens Atlantis, and you think they would not fire nukes?
Brian Young wrote: In The Seige, Marines reported the Daedalus was en route to Atlantis, and was using the ZPM to arrive within 4 days. The same ship normally requires 3 weeks to travel the same distance. The ZPM therefore allowed the ship to travel at least 5 times faster than normal. As Atlantis is approximately 3 million light years from Earth, Daedalus was traveling at approximately 275,000,000 times the speed of light.
Let's point out that the Odyssey seems to have traveled even faster when using both a ZPM and the Asgard core. The Ori had no problem to tail them closely.
Brian Young wrote: Also interesting to note is the efficiency of ZPMs. Drawing zero point energy, the ZPM requires no discernable fuel. This makes the ZPM a safe alternative to other, more destructive power generation schemes, such as naquadah generators, which require very careful handling of volatile fuels.
Naqahdah isn't volatile until you shove a nuke into a pile of it. Otherwise any planet with naqahdah on it would have long exploded because of some stupid lightning bolt hitting a hand sized bit of raw naqahdah as the one lifted by Daniel.
Weapon grade naqahdah is the stuff used for power, weapons and shields. It's used aboard Goa'uld ships. Raw naqahdah is obviously not suited for powering cores. It's full of crap.
Brian Young wrote: The Replicators' beam struck the Apollo's shields for only an instant, but caused enough damage to require a retreat. However, Atlantis' shields were estimated to protect the city for nearly 30 hours (29 hours plus the stargate's 38 minute cycle). To view this discussion, click here. Atlantis' shields are thus much more resilient than those of a United States Air Force starship. This is further proven by encounters with Wraith Hive ships, when an Air Force starship can withstand only a few minutes of bombardment, whereas Atlantis was estimated to withstand days with a single ZPM in The Seige.
Depends on what he means by a few minutes. Daedalus was seen coping with the firepower of two Hiveships in "Allies" and "The Hive" without flinching much. Well in "Allies" they had taken hits to the hull before that.
But the Daedalus back then was not doing anything else but sitting there and taking shots. It's obvious it could limit herself to powering the shield, since the only weapons available were nukes and railguns, hardly requiring huge amounts of power.
The shields also had to protect the city from the detonation of a thermonuclear bomb after the bombardment, as an illusion of self-destruction was attempted. The yield of this bomb is not known. Earth did have access to naquadah-enhanced bombs with a yield of 1200 megatons, but it is unlikely this bomb had such a high yield. If a terawatt-range bombardment can threaten the city, a gigaton explosion would certainly defeat the shields. However, a thermonuclear bomb must have a yield at least in the kiloton range, or it would not work at all.

If Atlantis' shields could withstand nearly 30 hours of terawatt-range bombardment, the shields would have absorbed megatons of energy. If the beam delivered one terawatt of continuous firepower, it would have delivered approximately 26 megatons in 30 hours.
When the Asuran's satgate fired at the city, the beam hit the shield and started depleting the ZPM. Not too long after that, McKay pointed out that they had 29 hours of energy left in the ZPM.
That's about 104,400 seconds.

Taking BY's figure of 4 TW, we get a total of 4.176 e2 petajoules (for 29 hours).
That would bring ZPM's energy reserve about 100 MT worth of energy in a ZPM (and not 26 megatons as he claims), and that's supposedly near an "upper limit", "very generous".
That's just not going to work. The single ZPM, used by the Tau'ri to protect their city from a point blank >20 MT detonation, tanked this without blinking. If the energy reserves of the ZPM had been dramatically taxed, I think it would have been worth a frantic report from McKay, as usual.

We also know that an Aurora ship not powered by a ZPM, and in terrible condition, could still sit in the middle of an explosion of this magnitude and withstand its energies for about 4.1 seconds.
McKay estimated it at being about ten thousand times greater than what blew St Helens:
Inferno wrote: SHEPPARD
You said the blast from the eruption would wipe out half the continent.

McKAY
It will, and after four point one seconds of those extreme temperatures and pressures, our shields will be depleted.
Based on wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_er...unt_St._Helens), the overall released energy was 24 megatons, including 7 for the blast (shockwave, pressure and kinetic energy) the rest being thermal energy.

So you're either looking at an explosion of 70 gigatons or 240 gigatons.

A ZPM powered Aurora is way more powerful than a crippled and badly powered one.

Heck, even the first Aurora they found, which was in poor condition and missed its entire bow, was still capable of providing life support and maintained the stasis pods and VR online. The ship itself was still capable of providing enough energy for a powerful overload that vaporized herself and the two nearby Wraith cruisers (Wraith cruisers which are tough enough as to rest for tens of thousands of years on the deepest point of the ocean bed of Lantea, where the crust was particularly thin, and remain perfectly sealed - on a semi related note, that ship alone could overload and blow a hole in the crust that would have multiplied the original blast a thousand times an destroyed Atlantis, which was certainly not above that ship).

Brian Young wrote: Note the city was being powered by only one ZPM at the time. The Daedalus had delivered a ZPM at the beginning of season 2, but that ZPM was depleted in McKay and Mrs. Miller. A small group of Ancients were discovered traveling at nearly lightspeed in The Return, and they delivered a new ZPM to Atlantis upon their arrival and take-over. This is confirmed by Colonel Sheppard's report to Dr. Weir, when he said the stargate could be dialed to Earth, "thanks to the Ancients' new ZPM." That was 10 episodes before the one in question.
Let's just point out that the Tria, the Lantean Aurora-class warship, was stated slamming the breaks at 23g; obviously from Atlantis' position, not from the Tria's perspective, otherwise they'd never ever slow down before Sheppard's friends would die of old age!
The Tria was flying at 0.999c or more (calcs from other bits of dialogue about age and time indicate a higher speed). Needless to say, a terawatt power source will never allow a ship to provide 23g of deceleration.

Oh, and as I pointed out years ago, in "McKay and Mrs Miller", the ZPM was entirely depleted at a rate of 2% per second. This simply allowing to dismiss BY's entire page, simply because it would mean that if he estimated a total of 100 MT of energy in stock for 29 hours at least (and not 26 MT), that's 2 megatons per second.

Or, if we pick his upper end of 4 TW, the ZPM has a maximum theoretical stock of energy of 200 TJ.
For the reminder, an overloading Mark-I naqahdah generator would be worth ~83.68 TJ.
Brian Young wrote: As the Wraith attacked Atlantis in The Seige with 10 Hive ships (Daedalus had destroyed 2 Hive ships before they arrived), and Dr. McKay estimated their shields could withstand days of the bombardment, the Replicator beam must have been more powerful than bombardment by even 10 Hive ships. The city was being powered by one ZPM during each incident. Therefore, whether due to range or power generation, a single Hive ship is capable of delivering a bombardment to a ground target of no greater than a few hundred gigawatts, being at least an order of magnitude less than the Replicator beam. In Enemy at the Gate, the series finale, a Hive ship was powered by a ZPM. It was able to jump to Earth and threaten the planet directly. Dr. McKay stated the main disadvantage the Wraith had against Ancient technology was inefficient power generation, which the ZPM negated. Listen to that discussion here - audio only to reduce download time.
Yes, a few hundred gigawatts of firepower. God bless him, he granted the Wraith a firepower greater than mere hand grenades, at least.
I guess the Lanteans putting a shield over an area of a planet, powered by geothermal power, and risking blowing up with the energy of tens of thousands of Castle Bravo, would be necessary against ships having few hundred gigawatts of firepower.
Obviously.
Brian Young wrote: In the Season 4 opener Adrift, puddle jumpers had to clear a path through an asteroid field to provide safe passage for the helpless Atlantis. Single drones were able to fragment asteroids similar in size to the puddle jumpers, and some a bit larger, perhaps 10-15 meters in diameter. The drones penetrate a target before they explode, and this was seen in the episode in question. Fragmenting an asteroid 15 meters in diameter with a buried explosive requires approximately 3.5 tons of TNT, or 15 gigajoules. This is much greater than the explosive yield observed in other episodes, where drones explode very close to characters, causing no injury. Perhaps drones are intelligent enough to automatically adjust their yield to specific targets? Otherwise, the actual impact of the drones may have been sufficient to assist in fragmenting the asteroids. As drones are effective against individuals on the ground, as well as capital warships, the former seems most likely. Click here to view the clip.
For one, I'd love to see his scalings first.
Drone yields have regularly varied in power. They're precisely pre-charged weapons. They are capable of making large explosions against Hiveships, Ha'taks and even Wraith cruisers.
Drones have a wide variety of behaviours. They're seen eating matter away by punching through solid objects (Kull warriors in "Lost City Part II", a city ship roof in "The Tower"), push stuff and explode after that ("Sateda") or sort of brute force their way through ice ("Rising Part I").

We also have our own calcs here:
SGA 4x01 & 4x02 Quantification thread *Spoilers*. See page 2, with the calcs (a bit old, some characters are damaged). 28.1 GJ per drone is the energy obtained from the KE alone, without the energy needed to break the asteroid and whatever lost in heating.
Don't miss out the following thread either, equally important:
SDN: To Ender, about Lantean drones.

Brian Young wrote: There is much evidence to suggest Atlantis, and its counterpart occupied by the Replicators, are the most powerful single space ships in the Pegasus galaxy. Each is powered by 3 ZPMs, supplying at least a few terawatts of power. A constant bombardment in the high gigawatt to low terawatt range (as evidenced by the effects on an asteroid) is enough to threaten Atlantis when powered by a single ZPM.
And yet BY knows a nuke was detonated just on top of the city's shield, and the mushroom was just as large as the shield itself (> 3.6 km), with a certain amount absorbed by the shield.
I wouldn't even dare point out that since we've never seen a ZPM drained faster than by 2% per second, in order to cope with the power of a multi-megaton nuke, a ZPM which can only be drained at 2% of its entire potential per second, would need to be able to transfer 2 e25-27 W to the shield, at least.
Why does he forget that?
Also, the cityship was good simply because it relied on 3 ZPMs. We've seen that several ships can be enhanced with ZPMs. 304s can, Auroras can. Hiveships can. On all three, at least the first two ones are far more recent and built with battles in mind, which never was the case for cityships.
The Replicators were able to build Aurora Class warships, designed by the Ancients, but they had all been destroyed by series end, minus a few owned by pirates. The next most powerful warships in that galaxy are the Wraith Hive ships. However, even 10 Hive ships were unable to threaten Atlantis as effectively as the Replicator beam, suggesting each ship is at least an order of magnitude less powerful. Wraith ships have no shields, and their hulls provide little protection from high-yield weaponry.
They actually do very well. Hulls are regenerative, and some of the Hives we've seen can survive against another Hiveships for quite some time. The Hiveships in "No Man's Land" had been damaged by that forced long intergalactic trip (we know Hiveships need to have a break after being subjected to hyperspace radiations, which for some reason damage them). You'll notice the nukes that hit the Hiveship didn't cause much external damage. And that same Hiveship was later on seen being used by the Tau'ri.
It seems likely the Wraith were able to conquer their galaxy because there were no other powerful spacefaring races once the Ancients fled. They rule a primitive galaxy through fear. Their most advanced subjects, the Genii, were only beginning to understand nuclear physics during the series run.
They also systematically destroy societies that begin to become too advanced. A level of technology as found in the most developed Terran countries during the 20th century begins to make them nervous.

Brian Young wrote: Thor's starship that crashed into Earth's oceans in the season 3 finale Nemesis was also stated to have engines that output power in the low terawatt range. Thor stated the ship had four engines, each capable of "a maximum of 1 billion kilojoules..." the rest of his sentence is difficult to hear over comments made by Colonel O'Neill. View the clip here. Assuming Thor said "one billion kilojoules per second," from each of the four engines, the ship produced a maximum of about 4 terawatts, comparable to the beam fired through the stargate by the Replicators.
Quite an assumption.
These are the engines. When you state a power for engines, it's relative to what it's mainly meant to do: provide mechanical force or motion. However, that's only useful in the case of moving the ship around. Providing terawatts of power to move a ship which obviously has inertia dampeners and some degree of mass lightening, it's good enough.
Let's also forget that those four engines are truly enormous, and much more advanced that Tau'ri made portable naqahdah generators. Those four big engines run all the length of a Biliskner-class warship that's more than 1 km long.
Even if you assume that a Mark-I provides only a maximum of 1 GW, don't you think it's a bit odd each of those massive engines would only provide a thousand times the output of a small core that's about 60 cm long, or boombox sized as BY put it?
If you treat a Mark-I as a 60 cm long and 20 cm wide cylinder, it's 1.885 e-2 m³ big. A thousand times that is a volume of 18.85 m³.
Now if we assume that one of those large Asgard cylindrical engines is about 200 meters long, they'd have to be 0.4 meters wide only to be share the same volume as found just above.
Obviously, since they're bigger, they're ought to produce quite more power.

Of course it becomes even more ridiculous if you go with his assumption that a ZPM's peak output is 700 gigawatts, while a Neutrion-Ion generator would output 1 TW.
Image

And why not assume that it's not per second, but per gram or kilogram of fuel, for example? Because, you know, if we begin to claim that our little grey friend wanted to be accurate, he'd use watts directly, instead of joules per second.
Heck, with such liberties, what's stopping us from claiming he was about to say 1 billion kilojoules per nanosecond?
All Earth units, of course. :)
Brian Young wrote: Whenever more power than the terawatt range is required in the franchise run thus far, a black hole is sought out or created, even by the Asgard and the Ori, the most advanced races seen in the show.
Based on what?
The ZPM powered Tria deceleration for example would clearly disagree with that.
The Ha'tak shields and firepower calcs disagree with that as well.
The fact that gigaton nukes are so easy to produce is just another indicator. Why pretend shields, at best powered by low terawatts, are any relevant in a context where ships can easily threaten their enemies with at the very least megaton nukes?
And black holes can release many petawatts of power.
A ZPM is more than enough to maintain an intergalactic wormhole.
Brian Young wrote: So how does this asteroid-busting capability compare to the technology in other Science Fiction franchises?

*snip B5, Trek and Wars stuff*
Brian Young wrote: In summary,

* Naquadah generators are useful for both portability and providing enough power output to be used in a starship race. They are limited to a strict upper limit of 700 gigawatts, but probably much less. Still much more advanced than modern day technology.
* The Mark II generator outputs several times more power than the original, but still falls within this limit.
* A ZPM can likely output at least 700 gigawatts, but possibly as high as a few terawatts.
* Drones can apparently alter their yield according to their target, releasing as little energy as a mortar, or more energy than a 2,000 pound bomb.
* Thor's flagship before the O'Neill Class output about 4 terawatts at max power.
* The Replicators were able to bombard Atlantis with a beam carrying high gigawatt to low terawatt range power, threatening to defeat the shields in less than a day and a half.
* The Wraith bombarded Atlantis with several Hive ships, but with much less power, threatening to defeat the shields in a few days.
* The most powerful vessels of the "young races" in Babylon 5 carry greater firepower than the Replicators' beam, but they are more limited by range.
* The most powerful vessels operated by the United Federation of Planets have shields comparable to those of Atlantis, but greater firepower than the Replicators' beam.
* Jango Fett's Slave1 has far greater firepower than the Replicators' beam, without counting the missiles and seismic charges, indicating it has a power source far in advance of even the ZPM.
* An Imperial Star Destroyer vastly outguns everything else combined.
Wait, is it me or did he pick all possible so called low ends for all universes and spin doctored them, and did the inverse for Star Wars?
Seriously, when did he finish typing this?
Last edited by Mr. Oragahn on Sun Nov 10, 2013 9:26 pm, edited 4 times in total.

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Re: Brian Young's Stargate Atlantis Analysis

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Thu Nov 25, 2010 10:36 pm

Ah, found it. He produced this page very recently.
Lucky wrote: Is he using what appears to be an anti-shield weapon to judge standard fire power for Stargate?
What happens is that people call that a shield draining weapon when this event is placed within the context of the entire canon material.
If you worked from that episode alone, you would be right to some degree (see: VFX errors) in claiming that the city was threatened by that beam via pure DET.
Well, in a way, because as I pointed out, a DET beam would certainly need at the very least many terawatts to be able to continuously punch through that much oceanic water, and that much power would actually show on the surface. Yet effects are very tame.
There's also a considerable discrepancy between the effects done to the planet when seen from space, and the effects done to the planet when seen from the surface of the ocean.

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Re: Brian Young's Stargate Atlantis Analysis

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Fri Nov 26, 2010 12:04 am

Another bit which I think begs for you're going to like that.
Brian Young wrote: The Star Wars Roleplaying Game rated the Millennium Falcon at 26.7 meters long, which was an understatement. The Falcon is closer to 35-40 meters long in actual scaling. In any event, even if we use the understated 26.7 meter figure, this asteroid is similar in length, making its diameter approximately half that of the asteroid in First Strike. It began vaporizing immediately on impact, and in fact, is already a glowing white mass before the turbolaser pulse has finished impacting (only the very tip has impacted in this frame). As this is the first frame of impact, and the asteroid is already a glowing white sphere where it was a solid rock the frame before, this indicates the asteroid vaporized between film frames, 1/24 second. As it is still a relative sphere, it vaporized before it could fragment due to heat expansion. It took only 7 more frames (1/3 second) before the vapor dispersed and became invisible. The speed at which this vaporization occurs indicates the pulse carries many times more energy than is necessary to vaporize this asteroid. But how much more?

http://www.babtech-onthe.net/stargate/asteroid14.jpg

This shot came from a similar gun. A pulse has just hit the Millennium Falcon, knocking the ship off course. This is significant because a massless beam must be extremely powerful to impart momentum to a physical object. For instance, imagine how powerful your flashlight would need to be to knock your house off its foundation! Michael Wong, a mechanical engineer, calculated this shot would have to carry at least 14580 terajoules (3.5 megatons) to accomplish such a task. Of course, this ignores the stabilizing ability of the Falcon's engines, and the fact the ship was shielded. The Incredible Cross-Sections books list similar point defense guns on other, smaller warships at 6 megatons per shot. Either figure is 25-45 times more energy than is necessary to vaporize an asteroid 26.7 meters in diameter. This is consistent with the image of the asteroid vaporizing when only the front tip of the pulse had impacted.
SDN: Kinematics Analysis of Millenium Falcon Turbolaser Impact wrote: We can estimate from the above snapshot that the turbolaser approached at an angle of roughly 30 degrees. This means that the energy estimate must be divided by sin(30°) to account for geometric factors. Therefore, the energy of the TL bolt would be 14580 TJ.

Conclusion

If turbolasers use mass-less particles such as photons (eg. if their operating principle is similar to lasers), and my estimate for the Millenium Falcon's mass is correct, then turbolasers carry approximately 14580 TJ of energy. The turbolaser appears to strike during a single 1/30-second NTSC frame in this sequence, but to be conservative we should assume that the bolt duration is roughly 1/15 seconds. Therefore, the corresponding turbolaser power level is 218700 TW.

As an aside, the rotational kinetic energy of an object is 0.5Iw² at non-relativistic rotational speeds. Therefore, 3.902E8 joules of rotational kinetic energy were added to the Millenium Falcon. However, the physics of collisions involve conservation of linear or angular momentum rather than conservation of kinetic energy, which only happens in elastic collisions.
And TIE fighters, like most fighters of that size, would have a firepower in the terajoule range. Considering that the Millennium Falcon's shields had failed to cope with the entirety of the TIE fighters' fire in ANH, and considering that the ICS makes it clear that the hull of a ship is capable of withstanding quite a high fraction of the firepower the shields of the same ship can withstand, obviously the Millennium Falcon's hull can withstand some petajoules of energy.

It goes without saying that the ICSes also give ships of the size of the Millennium Falcon shielding abilities in the high exawatt range (Naboo Cruiser: 6 e18 W, Padmé's Starship: 2 e18 W). This being power dissipation rate, weapons in the kiloton range but delivering their energy within millionths of a second or less would saturate such shielding rates. Slave-I and the Aethersprite are given a few kilotons of firepower on their main guns. However, in the ROTS:ICS, small details reveal that point defense batteries are rated in the megatons. The same kind of PD guns that supposedly fired on the MF, even if in this case the PD guns on the IH are ion cannons. Not to say that megaton bombs would deliver their energy within fractions of a second. You could always say that they dial them down to kilotons, but then what kind of small ship would require a firepower measured in the megatons?

So the low end is to claim that in order to threaten a ship like the Millennium Falcon, the small fighters and ships such as Slave-I need to deliver their kilotons of firepower within microseconds, which doesn't really fit well with the movies that show lengthy beams at typical movie framerates.
The high end is to go with Wong's figure exactly measured up to 2~3 digits in the petajoule range.

Now, with this in mind, and going with the low end in order to be *cough* conservative *cough*...

[quote=""The Empire Strikes Back" novelization"]
Before Han could make a carefully honed retort, the Falcon was jolted by a blast of Imperial laser fire that flashed outside the cockpit window. They could all see the squad of Imperial stormtroopers rushing with drawn weapons into the far end of the ice hangar. Han knew that the Falcon's dented hull might resist the force of those hand weapons, but would be destroyed by the more powerful bazooka-shaped weapon that two of the Imperial troopers were hurriedly setting up.
[/quote]

I present you the following infantry heavy weapon model, the multi-kiloton E-Web heavy repeating blaster:

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Re: Brian Young's Stargate Atlantis Analysis

Post by Nowhereman10 » Fri Nov 26, 2010 4:02 am

Mr. Oragahn wrote:Wait, is it me or did he pick all possible so called low ends for all universes and spin doctored them, and did the inverse for Star Wars?
Seriously, when did he finish typing this?

Oh you just noticed that, huh? Yeah, he did that, dude. He did.

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Re: Brian Young's Stargate Atlantis Analysis

Post by Mike DiCenso » Fri Nov 26, 2010 4:34 am

Nowhereman10 wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Wait, is it me or did he pick all possible so called low ends for all universes and spin doctored them, and did the inverse for Star Wars?
Seriously, when did he finish typing this?

Oh you just noticed that, huh? Yeah, he did that, dude. He did.
Nothing new here, really. Brian does make some good observations, as well as come up with some interesting ideas, but he has had a particularly bad habit of cherrypicking the lower numbers of an opposing franchise, and then presenting it as a "generous upper limit" since I first met him in the debates back in the 90's.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:The pity being that seeing the way he handles a franchise I actually know fairly well, it makes me ponder the accuracy of all his other observations about Babylon5. I know there are some of them I'd disagree with, like the one about nukes destroying Shadow Battlecrabs.
Yes, I've been rethinking that for some time, though as far as I've been able to determine, the 500 megaton nuke destruction of the Shadow warships and the 2 MT bombs used to destroy the Minbari Sharlin-class Black Star cruiser do not appear to be wildly off base with regards to their conclusions. The fact is that the bombs in either situation were not point blank, and did not appear to be directed weapons, so there is only so much energy that can go into those ships from the explosions.
-Mike

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Re: Brian Young's Stargate Atlantis Analysis

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Fri Nov 26, 2010 12:18 pm

I'm adding this to the rebuttal. I'll link to the following thread once more, this time with its title in the link: Ha'tak firepower and shields : a summary.
In that small thread, there are figures about the amount of energy a stargate can store.

It happens to be particularly relevant to the ZPM's power capacity, since we have another event we can use here; it's the destruction of Atlantis' stargate in "First Contact".

Zelenka said the explosion would be equivalent to a dozen nuclear explosions. We've seen that the explosion in "Redemption Part I & II" was estimated at 2-3 GT. The final explosion proved to be much more powerful. I have updated the other thread with a calculation on "Exodus". The point is rather simple: a stargate can easily store thousands of petajoules of energy, and the one in Atlantis was entirely vaporized when it exploded.

The bursting stargates were causing lots of trouble on other planets too:
The Lost Tribe wrote: KATANA
It was the first colony we'd built on the surface of a planet in a hundred generations, and it was levelled in an instant. I was in orbit when it happened. We could see the explosion from space.
I've never witnessed anything that powerful.

ZELENKA
Mmm. The Gates are made of naqahdah. When they become unstable, the size of the explosion is unimaginable.

KATANA
We lost three thousand people and two ships, including our Ancient vessel. Larrin would have come herself but ...
It really seems that despite having to be logically made out of the most depleted naqahdah possible, as well as being very tough, even that type of naqahdah can enhance explosions dramatically, up to the multi-gigaton range.
Well, when I say dramatically, it's actually very little for something like near 30 tons of naqahdah, in comparison to the small quantity of raw naqahdah used for the Goa'uld busters. The construction flavour naqahdah, used for stargates for example, would seem to be like hundreds of times less powerful than even a raw sample (the raw sample could be exceptionally rich in the high energy isotope). It may literally be million times weaker than weapon grade naqahdah or more.

The shield was collapsed onto the stargate in urgency. They had like between 19 and 60 seconds to do it (levels were rising damn fast, another sign of high power).
Obviously the shield was designed to deflect energies and object coming from outside, and its maximum efficiency logically obtained when conforming to the by default volumetric shape, that is, the dome. Shield emitters were frying up, trying to extinguish the mini sun they tried to contain (another proof that energy is literally dumped into Lalaland, or subspace as we call it when we're serious).

The ZPM was powering the shield by that time.
So it's absolutely clear that the ZPM has thousands of petajoules of energy in stock, at the very least. This event didn't even drain the ZPM btw.
Considering we know that a ZPM can be drained as fast as 2%/s, we see that it can easily transfer dozens of megatons per second, as a low end.

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Re: Brian Young's Stargate Atlantis Analysis

Post by Lucky » Sun Nov 28, 2010 11:49 pm

Mr. Oragahn wrote:The pity being that seeing the way he handles a franchise I actually know fairly well, it makes me ponder the accuracy of all his other observations about Babylon5. I know there are some of them I'd disagree with, like the one about nukes destroying Shadow Battlecrabs.
Mike DiCenso wrote:Yes, I've been rethinking that for some time, though as far as I've been able to determine, the 500 megaton nuke destruction of the Shadow warships and the 2 MT bombs used to destroy the Minbari Sharlin-class Black Star cruiser do not appear to be wildly off base with regards to their conclusions. The fact is that the bombs in either situation were not point blank, and did not appear to be directed weapons, so there is only so much energy that can go into those ships from the explosions.
-Mike
His methods of analysis work well for B5 because the weapons are almost all things we in the real world have a reasonably good understanding of already, and the materials things are made of are as far as I recall almost all materials we already know the properties of. There is very little in the way of unknowns, the stated yields are consistent, and there is next to no technobabble things unless you start to deal with the First ones..

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Re: Brian Young's Stargate Atlantis Analysis

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Wed Dec 01, 2010 2:59 am

Got to read SDN's thread, and it's five pages long by now.
When everything he said can easily be debunked by pointing out a few facts and using basic logic to point out the holes of his theory (as you can see at the bottom of that post, which is nothing more than what I already said, but in a longer form).

Anyway. Brian Young is defending his numbers, and there are a few things he has said to do so which need to be addressed.

First I don't know why he's insisting. We know that a ZPM can be depleted very fast, under a minute if it's drained at 2%/s. This pretty much blasts his power output estimation around a couple terawatts sky high. He has already admitted that the ZPM can stock gigatons of energy.

Secondly, both sides over there are also focusing on the whole "we need 3 ZPMs to take or we're stuck there" issue, disregarding the mere fact that many other races, notably less advanced ones, have already achieved atmosphere reentry and escape from planetary gravity wells with ships being several kilometers wide or long (Goa'uld, Wraith, Gadmeer), or that even the Lanteans can make Auroras come down into an atmosphere, hover above the ground and rise as well, and those ships are over a kilometer in length, and not powered by ZPMs by default.
Hell, even Destiny, which by all means seems to be a considerably older project put on hold and resurrected some time after Atlantis left, manages to effortlessly fight against the gravity of a star, while powering a shield and taking a bath into the photosphere. Yup, only that. Oh, and while having taken formal damage to its superstructure.
So obviously the power is not the issue, as I already pointed out ages ago in the ZPM discrepancies thread at SBC and elsewhere.
The limitation has to comes from something else that yet remains to be addressed by the writers.
There's also the fact that a ZPM plus the power from the geothermal mobile plant proved sufficient
First Strike wrote: ZELENKA
Every possible scenario ends in failure. There is nowhere on the face of this planet that that thing cannot kill us.

(John and Rodney stare at each other as they both get the same idea at the same time.)

SHEPPARD
You don't think ...?

McKAY
No.

SHEPPARD
Old girl too banged up?

McKAY
No, the Replicators fixed all the damage we did with the drones. We just don't have the power.

SHEPPARD
Yeah, but ideally ...

McKAY
... it may be the only way.

ZELENKA (with no idea what they're talking about)
What?

(John looks at Rodney again.)

SHEPPARD
The drilling platform. You guys have it operational down there, right?

McKAY
Close enough, but we couldn't bring it with us.

ZELENKA
Bring it where?

SHEPPARD (to Rodney)
We don't need to. We just need a boost.

McKAY
You might be onto something here.
So they just need a boost. Somehow the ZPM could handle the rest of the trip upwards once they'd have built enough momentum and cleared enough of the air pressure.
First Strike wrote: DRILLING PLATFORM. Doctor Coleman talks with Rodney over the radio.

COLEMAN
Well, luckily the umbilical's already in place.

McKAY
Yes, I know. Look, are you capable of outputting the power we need or not?

COLEMAN
We just started drilling into the crust. I can get you nine percent of the way there.

(In the Atlantis Control Room, Rodney sinks back in his chair and looks up at John in despair.)

McKAY
There goes *that* plan.

SHEPPARD
Can't the ZeePM make up the difference?

McKAY
Ah, no. The ZedPM's a little busy powering the shield at max.

(John grimaces, then gets another idea.)

SHEPPARD
What if it didn't have to?

McKAY
What?

SHEPPARD
What if we could take the strain off the shield momentarily?

McKAY
Well, we'd need about a minute. Why? What do you have in mind?
It appears that having the ZPM run along the geothermal plant's output for a minute is good enough to make the plan work.

First Strike wrote: CORRIDORS. John and Rodney are walking along.

McKAY
Alright. Zelenka is doing a final pass over all the coding we've done, but so far it's looking good. The underwater drilling platform's power output has been dialed up as high as it'll go, and the crew down there have been beamed up to the Apollo.

SHEPPARD
We're gonna wreck that thing, aren't we?

McKAY
What, the drilling platform? Oh, *hell*, yes! But thirty percent of our total power requirements are gonna be consumed in the first ten seconds of flight. The station will provide us with that power right up until we snap the umbilical, at which point we switch over to the ZedPM. Now, if we can interrupt the satellite's beam – which is greatly taxing our power levels – we should be able to squeeze out just enough power to actually do this thing.
Assuming he meant power as, well, that thing that's measured in watts, it's quite a bit of a headache to understand his statement. Not to say that the whole umbilical point is also curious, because they're talking about snapping it at some point in flight, which supposes that they'll do it when the city is already up in the air.

First Strike wrote: McKAY
Asteroid is entering the beam.

(Above the planet, the asteroid intersects the beam, breaking its contact with the city below. The beam starts to carve into the rock, breaking large chunks off it. In the ocean below, the surface of the water becomes agitated as the city continues to rise. The top of the shield breaks the surface and the central tower rises into the daylight. A tidal wave travels away in all direction as the city lifts to the surface of the ocean.)

McKAY
We're on the surface. Fire the stardrive.

(In the Chair Room, John concentrates. The ocean boils and steam rises as the stardrive fires up.)

McKAY
We're not flying high enough. It's stalling out!

(In the Chair Room, John's eyes snap open and he lifts his head.)

SHEPPARD
It's not working.

McKAY
What are you doing wrong?

SHEPPARD
Sure, blame me. We don't have enough power.

McKAY
Oh, sure, blame *me*!

SHEPPARD
It's not working. What other reasons could there be?

McKAY
I have no more power to give you!

WEIR
Shut it off.

McKAY
What?

WEIR
Lower the shield.

McKAY
We're about to go into space! If you plan on breathing, we're gonna need the shield.

SHEPPARD
Turn it back on at eighteen thousand feet. We just need the boost to get started, no?

(Rodney's eyes widen.)

McKAY
That might work.

(He turns to another console and starts typing frantically. Above the planet, the satellite beam continues to carve its way across the asteroid. In the Chair Room, Rodney's voice comes over the radio.)

McKAY
OK, I did it. Give it all you've got.

(John closes his eyes and lays his head back. The city – now without its shield – heads up into the sky. As it leaves the ocean, the vibrations cease. Rodney and Elizabeth gaze upwards.)

McKAY
That's it!

(Teyla lets go of the console she has been clinging to. Rodney stares upwards, his eyes wide and a smile on his face.)

McKAY
We're flying!

(The city continues to rise. Elizabeth smiles and walks towards the rear window at the top of the stairs. Ronon walks to the edge of the Control Room, Teyla a little way behind him. Elizabeth gazes out of the window, awe-struck.)

(Suddenly alarms sound.)

McKAY
That's it. Time's up. Raising the shield.

(He types, and, as Atlantis continues to rise into the air, the shield begins slowly to deploy from the bottom of the city.)

(In space, the beam reaches a weak spot in the asteroid and burns straight through, heading down toward the planet again. It lances towards the central tower of the city ... and the shield has not yet risen all the way. Elizabeth winces and raises her arms to cover her face as the beam lashes through the window, smashing the glass and sending her flying backwards. Glass rains down on everyone as Elizabeth crashes to the floor down in the Gateroom. The shield finally raises all the way but the damage is already done. Rodney's console explodes as part of the wall collapses.)

(In the Chair Room, John – unaware of the chaos in the Control Room – lies back with his eyes closed, much calmer now.)

SHEPPARD
Taking us into hyperspace.
In the episode, at no time do we see any physical trace of the umbilical. That said, the only moment we get to see the underside of the city is after the shield has been lowered and the ship started to rise. Obviously, buoyancy took care of bringing the city back to the surface, but from there they were not able to get very high.
Assuming that the camera stays at the same altitude, we see that the city was managing to lift off (1, 2), but wasn't getting enough power to do it fast enough.
Clearly, the geothermal plant, if it still was connected, wasn't providing enough power. Nor was the ZPM, and that even after the beam got blocked by the asteroid.
Yet we know that the shield, when it's not taxed, consumes very little energy at all, so the city should have kicked up suddenly the moment the beam ceased to hit the shield.
Most obviously, something wrong was going on, and simply lowering the shield solved the problem.

What we can conclude is that even when free of any supposed strain, the shield prevented the available power from being used for the stardrive.
That said, it's not without an explanation. When Atlantis was flying through hyperspace, we could see that the top of the shield was still marked by the beam's effect.
Although it's hard to explain, but apparently it was necessary to shut the shield down to let it purge whatever was stacked at the top of the shield (once again proving the odd nature of the Asuran weapon). It's like if the weapon wounded the shield, and the only way to shut the leak was to simply close the shield altogether.
This effect didn't prevent the ship from reaching orbit and going into hyperspace once hit again by the beam, but we know that the shield, if it had been purged, was exposed to the beam effect for a much shorter period of time. It's possible that the wound's effect was only getting worse over time if it was kept open, and the shield needed a metaphorical break.

What is clear though is that once the shield was shut down, the city climbed and we didn't see any physical cord connecting the city to the plant underwater.

McKay didn't look convinced that the plant would be helpful anyway, merely allowing for a small help. He counted on the ZPM there, but he needed to allow the ZPM to work for some time.
What we see, however, is that once the ZPM - the city's unique and main power source outside of the respectively nimble naqahdah generators - got free, it had no problem to lift the city, basically proving the 3 ZPMs prerequisite hypothesis completely false.

There's also something to be said about hyperspace power requirements. If a F-302 can't get a working hyperdrive without relying on a naqahdria core, when we know that portable naqahdah generators could easily be strapped to the fighter and provide several gigawatts of power each, should we really believe that a cityship that's over 3.5 km wide could be pushed into hyperspace for a long journey with a mere 4 TW feed or less?
That's not even talking about the fact that puddle jumpers can power drones up to two digit gigajoules without any problem.

Thirdly, I'll talk about the gatebuster yield.
He assumes that it would be, at best, about 3 gigatons a piece. That's quite a silly assumption. Naqahdah alone would almost provide that much energy by strapping two 1.2 GT nukes together.
There's also the question of why he acknowledges the fact that Mitchell said the nuke would vaporize everything within a 100 miles radius, and yet goes on with calculations that simply don't work.
For example, Wong's nuke calculator shows that you need 12-13 to vaporize - read:blast - stuff over that range. That's the usual low end meaning of the term. The problem here is that it produces a fireball that's never going to be close what we saw, even if pancaked. The Ori shield, at the moment of the detonation, would need to be a few kilometers up in order for the fireball to spread sideways that far, and that wouldn't even work because the shield would still absorb a huge quantity of the Mark IX. An even greater one, in fact.
But when you want to vaporize matter, literally, this won't be enough. Hence a ground contact fireball calc that returns 812 GT over that range, because anything short of a fireball's temperature isn't really going to complete the feat.
And such a fireball radius is largely supported by the episode, where we see it stretch over a huge area and glow for a while, that after having been partially absorbed by the Ori shield.

Finally, what about the fact that if Atlantis could only count on 3 4 TW ZPMs during its last days of resistance against the Wraith, ten thousand years ago, merely dropping a hiveship at free fall speed on the city would have completely smacked Atlantis, shield or not?
Wait. Why even sacrifice a ship?
We know the Wraith actually like to lob asteroids, as seen in "Siege Part II" when they obviously suspected the Tau'ri from having placed mines in orbit (there's no way to tell how powerful the Wraith knew the nukes were).
This is quite interesting by the way, since it should give us an indication that if the Wraith did it just to clear a path to a geosynchronous orbit above Atlantis, they surely must have tried it at some point during the war, and judging by the speed at which the thing flew, the shield would have had to cope with megatons of kinetic energy.
Falling rocks are, after all, one of the cheapest and yet most powerful ways to deal damage to a planet or whatever's on its surface.

The idea that the Wraith never managed to break the 12 TW shield of Atlantis is hopelessly silly at this point of the debate. Yet Brian Young clinges to it.
Don't ask.
What's equally absurd is to see Brian Young continue to argue about the low terawatt output of a ZPM as an upper limit, despite knowing about the fact that a ZPM managed to power the city's shield and soak up, over a couple seconds, nearly the totality of the energy of a fireball worth of several gigatons, minus some megajoules.

Eventually, if he's doubting the possiblity that the stargate's explosion was that powerful, here's a bit of the script in addition to what I already talked about in my former posts:
Lost Tribe wrote: ATLANTIS AUXILIARY CONTROL ROOM. Katana has arrived.

KATANA
It was the first colony we'd built on the surface of a planet in a hundred generations, and it was leveled in an instant. I was in orbit when it happened. We could see the explosion from space.
I've never witnessed anything that powerful.

ZELENKA
Mmm. The Gates are made of naqahdah. When they become unstable, the size of the explosion is unimaginable.

KATANA
We lost three thousand people and two ships, including our Ancient vessel. Larrin would have come herself but ...
See, his whole thing doesn't work. If a ZPM can only output 4 TW, then anything that provides more than 4 TW will defeat the shield. That's assuming that 100% of the ZPM goes to the shield's management of "enemy" energy.
So? What?
Well, isn't it obvious at this point? A mere Hiroshima is enough to fuck the shield up.


*SIGH*

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Re: Brian Young's Stargate Atlantis Analysis

Post by Kor_Dahar_Master » Wed Dec 01, 2010 9:17 am

If the beam he seems to base all his calcs on was as weak as he claims it would never have reached the city when they sank it let alone been hardly uneffected be the amount of water it had to travel through.

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Re: Brian Young's Stargate Atlantis Analysis

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Wed Dec 01, 2010 1:50 pm

Yes, he insists that the beam is pure DET and can so easily go through water because said water is that transparent, yet doesn't find it odd that what he treats as a laser can be seen in space and is far from being a smooth edged beam at all. Go figure.
Now page 6 and it's not getting any better.

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Re: Brian Young's Stargate Atlantis Analysis

Post by Lucky » Fri Dec 03, 2010 3:48 am

Mr. Oragahn wrote:Yes, he insists that the beam is pure DET and can so easily go through water because said water is that transparent, yet doesn't find it odd that what he treats as a laser can be seen in space and is far from being a smooth edged beam at all. Go figure.
Now page 6 and it's not getting any better.
Do you eve get the feeling that often an extreme pro or anti some series debater hasn't actual seen what he she is debating for or against?

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