Brian Young's Stargate Atlantis Analysis

[Mike DiCenso]

You are right about that, Lucky. It's all too common in the Versus debates. Mostly I attribute this to the enviroment and culture places like SDN and SBC have cultivated where they (read the Adminstrators and mods) believe in a foregone conclusion, and encourage those who share that with them to openly lie, while presenting that lie as though it were indisputable fact.

Brian Young's Atlantis calcs page is a perfect example of one of these sham analysis we've seen all too often. Even those of us who aren't as up on the Stargate franchise caught his BS. But to others who are causually looking at his pages, they might miss that, especially if they infrequently watch the show. To someone who does watch the SG shows and does extensive analysis of the the tech, like Mr. Oragahn does, the scam is as plain as day.

It is also possible Brian was making this page to pander to the Warsies who would just eat this stuff up and never question it as long as it helps make it look like SW is technologically superior to SG in most or all respects.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

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?

It often happens. For example, it was obvious that Monster104 was going through Stargate by the time he was arguing against it (while supporting Halo most of the time). He was not hiding the fact that he was going through each season of SG-1.
Even recently, in some thread he posted, he pointed out that he had watched, and kept watching more of Stargate. I couldn't help but point out that it must have been hard for him to force his own gentle persona through such a torture, if it was to vomit all over Stargate like he was doing.

Same crap with Kyosanim and Point45. Same issues with Dr. Strangelove, who was parroting some age old nonsense about Stargate in regards to the weapons and structural integrity of Ha'taks. The kind of stuff that would impress newcomers, but just makes old timers sigh.

Brian Young is doing something similar, albeit in a way a notch more honest at first.
Towards the end of the SDN thread, he's returning and replying to some counter arguments by, formerly, announcing that now he has watched episode [X], and goes on to find the devil in the details. What he was essentially doing was patching up his ignorance, and using the episodes he had not known anything about, but which were referred to by his opponents, to defeat them in return and eventually point out details which, on the global order of things, would help him in a way or another.
His analysis of the Asuran beam's power contains errors, but it's also good enough on its own. His problem is that he was a bit too proud of having found an Achilles' Heel in the Gatedom and just had to make his new project public, while displaying the distinctive trait of someone feigning politeness and parsimony at each turn, but being prone to random snaps when replying to people and dramatically lacking the humility expected from someone who knows very little about what he's dealing with.
Ego driven, he has put too much of his own time into this majestic page to accept a sincere criticism about how it's relatively fine on its own (the beam part, there are many errors in his other observations of SG, as I pointed out), but that it simply doesn't stick with the rest of Stargate's canon. Hence his new crusade to watch every single episode - presented as a possible problem to his work - which he will surely dice piece by piece in order to find the sweet cherry-picked evidence that supports him, instead of, you know, observing the facts and then, and only then, coming with theories that work with the whole. It's of course totally dishonest, but considering the nonsense he has once again pasted about Star Wars, we can hardly be surprised.
I wish him good luck, he'll need it.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Mister Young? Mister Young? Do you copy? This is Houston. Do you read me?
...
It's official. B. Young just can't let it go.
Even when squarely shown that some weapons are nothing normal, he really wants to establish some absurd resilience ratios between different objects like if the weapons were basic DET.
Part of Brian Young's Silly Quest of the Ultimate Nerfing, we get to read about an argument on the weapon Anubis used to destroy Ha'taks and the pyramid on Abydos. I feel sorry for Chris. He's done all he could do to show BY that the weapon was totally odd and hardly DET the way we understand it, but it doesn't count. BY dismisses any evidence he doesn't like as "irrelevant". For him, a Ha'tak is considerably weaker than a stone pyramid. Heck, the shields of a 304 are inferior to that asteroid from "First Strike".
Sure thing Brian. And he dares say that Chris doesn't understand what he's talking about?
I'd add that when Anubis used his weapon against the Ha'taks, the thing fired energy arcs that jumped from one ship to another. Ha'taks weren't immediately destroyed, as we can notice a latency of more than half a second before they begin to blow up.

Oh and the super weapon destroyed a stargate. Actually, it's precisely stated in "Fallen" that the weapon targets the stargates. Chance that most of the energy during the attack against Abydos went into destroying the stargate?
A lot. Yet it didn't prevent the destruction of Abydos from being very odd. Very cool, but completely nuts from a physics standpoint.
Not to say that the writers had already established the multi-gigaton blast as fact since "Redemption" opened the sixth season, and "Full Circle" finished it.
You can look up all the evidence I already presented about the toughness of the stargates, especially when connected (as it was the case with the Abydosian one) to see that Young's claims are not serious.

Another thing. They went through an exchange of the weird CME of "Echoes". Well, I already went through that too many times, notably here against Kane Starkiller.
I just want to add that the star is definitely odd. See, in "Daedalus Variations", that star was supposed to have expanded into a red giant.
The Daedalus was parked in orbit above an alt-Lantea, with the star very close to them. The star was a considerable threat to the ship, heating the interior. The problem is, when a star expands into a red giant like it's supposed to have happened, its boundaries become much less messy, hazy. And such stars are actually much less intense. This would have provided a low end making the 304's toughness very low.
However, the star in the episode wasn't such a fluffy red giant. As we can briefly see, its surface is very sharply outlined, and this is the trademark of the much more powerful red super giants, which brings the intensities into the neighborhood of values such as those seen in "Exodus".
If you want to filter Echoes through scientific standards, then you have to ignore everything that is curious or impossible about the CME and treat it just as a powerful CME, where the 304 is just a mere spot against it, but will create a hole in the gigantic wall of plasma that will be enough, once near to Lantean, to actually have expanded to a diameter big enough to miss the planet.
Think of an umbrella (oh fuck, why do I have that shitty Rihanna song in my head now?? it has even managed to replace the pavlovian imagery of Resident Evil).

Another thing. A single ZPM has proven enough to slow down and protect Atlantis as it was falling at a fast speed through the atmosphere of their new planet. You can see that at the end of the episode "Lifeline". Needless to say that the drag of a nearly flat 3.6 km wide disc is going to be immense.
When they existed hyperspace, the city was already moving at more than one Atlantis width per second, and kept falling. McKay pointed out that they were going in too hard.

I'll probably cover more of "First Strike", "Adrift" and "Lifeline" later on, because we've seen shields display odd properties, we've seen ZPMs being drained and we have plenty of other details to obtain numbers.
See, this barely controlled entry was even more severe than the one from "Enemy at the Gates", where the city was, once again, coming in at full widths per second, but this time it was presenting its thinner profile. The case of "Lifeline" is the most impressive of all.

Oh and he's also claiming that the nukes that we saw blow up in "No Man's Land" - remember the big blue flashes and fireballs? - didn't explode but were all destroyed by the Wraith, and the other evidence of that is that the Daedalus couldn't have not withstood the energy from that distant explosion...
I mean, no. That's just too silly. Has he even bothered calculating the intensity of the radiation over that distance, per chance?
Nope.

At this point all of his positions are purely ego-driven, and it's no surprise that his arguments veer on the side of insanity. He's just not listening anymore.
We lost him.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Reporting an oopsie.
I meant:"The problem is, when a star expands into a red giant like it's supposed to have happened, its boundaries become much more messy, hazy."

[Lucky]

Mister Young? Mister Young? Do you copy? This is Houston. Do you read me?
...
It's official. B. Young just can't let it go.
Even when squarely shown that some weapons are nothing normal, he really wants to establish some absurd resilience ratios between different objects like if the weapons were basic DET.
Part of Brian Young's Silly Quest of the Ultimate Nerfing, we get to read about an argument on the weapon Anubis used to destroy Ha'taks and the pyramid on Abydos. I feel sorry for Chris. He's done all he could do to show BY that the weapon was totally odd and hardly DET the way we understand it, but it doesn't count. BY dismisses any evidence he doesn't like as "irrelevant". For him, a Ha'tak is considerably weaker than a stone pyramid. Heck, the shields of a 304 are inferior to that asteroid from "First Strike".
Sure thing Brian. And he dares say that Chris doesn't understand what he's talking about?
I'd add that when Anubis used his weapon against the Ha'taks, the thing fired energy arcs that jumped from one ship to another. Ha'taks weren't immediately destroyed, as we can notice a latency of more than half a second before they begin to blow up.

Oh and the super weapon destroyed a stargate. Actually, it's precisely stated in "Fallen" that the weapon targets the stargates. Chance that most of the energy during the attack against Abydos went into destroying the stargate?
A lot. Yet it didn't prevent the destruction of Abydos from being very odd. Very cool, but completely nuts from a physics standpoint.
Not to say that the writers had already established the multi-gigaton blast as fact since "Redemption" opened the sixth season, and "Full Circle" finished it.
You can look up all the evidence I already presented about the toughness of the stargates, especially when connected (as it was the case with the Abydosian one) to see that Young's claims are not serious.

Another thing. They went through an exchange of the weird CME of "Echoes". Well, I already went through that too many times, notably here against Kane Starkiller.
I just want to add that the star is definitely odd. See, in "Daedalus Variations", that star was supposed to have expanded into a red giant.
The Daedalus was parked in orbit above an alt-Lantea, with the star very close to them. The star was a considerable threat to the ship, heating the interior. The problem is, when a star expands into a red giant like it's supposed to have happened, its boundaries become much less messy, hazy. And such stars are actually much less intense. This would have provided a low end making the 304's toughness very low.
However, the star in the episode wasn't such a fluffy red giant. As we can briefly see, its surface is very sharply outlined, and this is the trademark of the much more powerful red super giants, which brings the intensities into the neighborhood of values such as those seen in "Exodus".
If you want to filter Echoes through scientific standards, then you have to ignore everything that is curious or impossible about the CME and treat it just as a powerful CME, where the 304 is just a mere spot against it, but will create a hole in the gigantic wall of plasma that will be enough, once near to Lantean, to actually have expanded to a diameter big enough to miss the planet.
Think of an umbrella (oh fuck, why do I have that shitty Rihanna song in my head now?? it has even managed to replace the pavlovian imagery of Resident Evil).

Another thing. A single ZPM has proven enough to slow down and protect Atlantis as it was falling at a fast speed through the atmosphere of their new planet. You can see that at the end of the episode "Lifeline". Needless to say that the drag of a nearly flat 3.6 km wide disc is going to be immense.
When they existed hyperspace, the city was already moving at more than one Atlantis width per second, and kept falling. McKay pointed out that they were going in too hard.

I'll probably cover more of "First Strike", "Adrift" and "Lifeline" later on, because we've seen shields display odd properties, we've seen ZPMs being drained and we have plenty of other details to obtain numbers.
See, this barely controlled entry was even more severe than the one from "Enemy at the Gates", where the city was, once again, coming in at full widths per second, but this time it was presenting its thinner profile. The case of "Lifeline" is the most impressive of all.

Oh and he's also claiming that the nukes that we saw blow up in "No Man's Land" - remember the big blue flashes and fireballs? - didn't explode but were all destroyed by the Wraith, and the other evidence of that is that the Daedalus couldn't have not withstood the energy from that distant explosion...
I mean, no. That's just too silly. Has he even bothered calculating the intensity of the radiation over that distance, per chance?
Nope.

At this point all of his positions are purely ego-driven, and it's no surprise that his arguments veer on the side of insanity. He's just not listening anymore.
We lost him.

Why do they always harp on CMEs? When the things are clearly not CMEs as we know them, or stated not to be CMEs?

[Mr. Oragahn]

Why do they always harp on CMEs? When the things are clearly not CMEs as we know them, or stated not to be CMEs?

Well the trouble is, this episode is claiming a natural phenomenon, although spectacular and exceptional, behaves in ways we know couldn't happen naturally, because it's merely claiming that it's a super duper CME, not some magical singularity whatever.
We know that the characters, in universe, think this is possible. McKay, for example, clearly didn't doubt that the super CME would be that focused, for some odd reason. I speculated that he largely built his hypothesis based on the facts he gathered from the Lantean database and what occurred fifteen hundred years before. The same thing happened, and it so surprised the Lanteans that a science vessel was hit, and the pilot barely made it into hyperspace to get to the city in time and have them raise the shield and expand it. The pilot was severely burned. In a way, it's quite a miracle that a ship that didn't manage to protect its crew was still capable of flying and even jump to hyperspace, return to normal space, enter the atmosphere and land in urgency.
And somehow the psychic whales knew this was going to happen and seeked refuge underneath the city. This heavily implies that the atmosphere and the depth of water at which the whales lived would prove irrelevant in protecting them.
I spent a god awful lot of time with Kane Starkiller proving that no matter how you tackled this, it still meant a lot of energies were involved.

One option was to ignore most of the bad science and just pretend it was a big CME by sticking with dialogue. With dialogues, you don't even get McKay drawing something on the board.
It didn't change much to the energy the Daedalus would have to deflect since whatever would hit the ship would still correspond to a near immediate mass extinction event. When you think you can detonate nukes in low orbit and they don't scorch the surface of Earth, you can imagine that the level of energy we would speak of wouldn't be low.

The other way was to stick with what McKay said, and the idea that the CME was that focused. However, it doesn't get around the fact that the visual sequence of the imapct was just a big nonsense.
Kane's rebuttal largely hinged on ignoring several visual elements, as well as ignoring the facts about the absorptions rates of various high frequency photons.

The problem with the CME is that it's a two part phenomenon, with photons and plasma, and one obviously travels faster than the second. However, by the episode, it seems that the Daedalus never had to cope with a huge burst of high energy photons and other ultra fast particles. The only problem was the plasma stream, which is another oddity, but which seriously renders any discussion about absorption rates moot, since the plasma in question would have to brute force its way through the atmosphere of the planet. Therefore, we're forced to also forget about the burst of photons and other high speed decay particles, for which we have to believe they were diffused enough by the time the explosion took place. Of course there are natural forces which would greatly affect protons while having little effects on photons, and considering the distance at which the 304 stood, if the photonic burst on the photosphere was more or less non-focused, then by the inverse square rule, it's largely possible that whatever hit the 304's shields wasn't of concern.

[Lucky]

Why do they always harp on CMEs? When the things are clearly not CMEs as we know them, or stated not to be CMEs?

Well the trouble is, this episode is claiming a natural phenomenon, although spectacular and exceptional, behaves in ways we know couldn't happen naturally, because it's merely claiming that it's a super duper CME, not some magical singularity whatever.
We know that the characters, in universe, think this is possible. McKay, for example, clearly didn't doubt that the super CME would be that focused, for some odd reason. I speculated that he largely built his hypothesis based on the facts he gathered from the Lantean database and what occurred fifteen hundred years before. The same thing happened, and it so surprised the Lanteans that a science vessel was hit, and the pilot barely made it into hyperspace to get to the city in time and have them raise the shield and expand it. The pilot was severely burned. In a way, it's quite a miracle that a ship that didn't manage to protect its crew was still capable of flying and even jump to hyperspace, return to normal space, enter the atmosphere and land in urgency.
And somehow the psychic whales knew this was going to happen and seeked refuge underneath the city. This heavily implies that the atmosphere and the depth of water at which the whales lived would prove irrelevant in protecting them.
I spent a god awful lot of time with Kane Starkiller proving that no matter how you tackled this, it still meant a lot of energies were involved.

One option was to ignore most of the bad science and just pretend it was a big CME by sticking with dialogue. With dialogues, you don't even get McKay drawing something on the board.
It didn't change much to the energy the Daedalus would have to deflect since whatever would hit the ship would still correspond to a near immediate mass extinction event. When you think you can detonate nukes in low orbit and they don't scorch the surface of Earth, you can imagine that the level of energy we would speak of wouldn't be low.

The other way was to stick with what McKay said, and the idea that the CME was that focused. However, it doesn't get around the fact that the visual sequence of the imapct was just a big nonsense.
Kane's rebuttal largely hinged on ignoring several visual elements, as well as ignoring the facts about the absorptions rates of various high frequency photons.

The problem with the CME is that it's a two part phenomenon, with photons and plasma, and one obviously travels faster than the second. However, by the episode, it seems that the Daedalus never had to cope with a huge burst of high energy photons and other ultra fast particles. The only problem was the plasma stream, which is another oddity, but which seriously renders any discussion about absorption rates moot, since the plasma in question would have to brute force its way through the atmosphere of the planet. Therefore, we're forced to also forget about the burst of photons and other high speed decay particles, for which we have to believe they were diffused enough by the time the explosion took place. Of course there are natural forces which would greatly affect protons while having little effects on photons, and considering the distance at which the 304 stood, if the photonic burst on the photosphere was more or less non-focused, then by the inverse square rule, it's largely possible that whatever hit the 304's shields wasn't of concern.

Yet it gets repeated it seems as if it was never debunked, and the person troting it out has not seen the episode, or even bothered to look into what happened in the episode.

How many times have you seen someone bring up Decent part two as a low showing for the Borg ignoring the fact there is no real world equivalent to a solar fusion eruption?

[Mr. Oragahn]

Yet it gets repeated it seems as if it was never debunked, and the person troting it out has not seen the episode, or even bothered to look into what happened in the episode.

As we've seen, despite claiming having gone through the Stargate shows, his methodology largely relies on making claims on things he knows little about, and patching up afterward, withe same degree of selection of facts. That's wrong on so many levels.

How many times have you seen someone bring up Decent part two as a low showing for the Borg ignoring the fact there is no real world equivalent to a solar fusion eruption?

What do you mean?

[2046]

{Young displays} the distinctive trait of someone feigning politeness and parsimony at each turn, but being prone to random snaps when replying to people {...}

In fairness, old and oft-embattled old-timers can sometimes have little patience, no matter how good-natured they are.

It's a potential failing, yes, even if the old-timer's position is correct. After all, it's all too easy for people to fall into the trap of arrogant presumption of the stupidity of your opponent(s), whether that arrogance is true in reality or merely by appearance. Or, in other words, a short fuse can sometimes be an error unto itself, manifesting as refusal to listen, sometimes to good ideas.

The line between limitless patience and limitless time-wasting is a fine one, however, as there are indeed time vampires happy merely to slurp for its own sake.

The trick is knowing who deserves patience and who's just being a jackass . . . assuming the old-timer is not himself a jackass who couldn't care either way.

[Mr. Oragahn]

{Young displays} the distinctive trait of someone feigning politeness and parsimony at each turn, but being prone to random snaps when replying to people {...}

In fairness, old and oft-embattled old-timers can sometimes have little patience, no matter how good-natured they are.

It's a potential failing, yes, even if the old-timer's position is correct. After all, it's all too easy for people to fall into the trap of arrogant presumption of the stupidity of your opponent(s), whether that arrogance is true in reality or merely by appearance. Or, in other words, a short fuse can sometimes be an error unto itself, manifesting as refusal to listen, sometimes to good ideas.

The line between limitless patience and limitless time-wasting is a fine one, however, as there are indeed time vampires happy merely to slurp for its own sake.

The trick is knowing who deserves patience and who's just being a jackass . . . assuming the old-timer is not himself a jackass who couldn't care either way.

He enjoyed all the patience from other debaters he deserved. Had it been me, said patience would have ran short seeing what his intentions were. He has shown to pay no attention to anything that hurts his point (and it's damn well easy to shoot his entire long tirade, as I've shown), and he reconsiders nothing, and along that, endlessly repeats that it's the other people who don't get it. Yup, rite mate. It's not even honest in the slightest way. The page looks like it's been bolted by two different brains, really. How can you understand how to calculate the energy necessary to break through an asteroid of a given composition with a beam weapon, and on the other hand still see asteroid vaporizations in AOTC? There's quite a huge disconnection there. Old timer or not, I don't care.

[Lucky]

Yet it gets repeated it seems as if it was never debunked, and the person troting it out has not seen the episode, or even bothered to look into what happened in the episode.

As we've seen, despite claiming having gone through the Stargate shows, his methodology largely relies on making claims on things he knows little about, and patching up afterward, withe same degree of selection of facts. That's wrong on so many levels.

Sounds like you are describing Mike Wong's work only you left out bold faced lier.

How many times have you seen someone bring up Decent part two as a low showing for the Borg ignoring the fact there is no real world equivalent to a solar fusion eruption?

What do you mean?

If you google "solar fusion eruption" you will only find VS debates and Star Trek/Sci-Fi sites. A Solar Fusion Eruption is a purely fictional thing that we are told next to nothing about, and is therefor unquantifiable beyond one being able to destroy a badly damaged Enterprise-D or a seemingly unshielded Borg cube.
http://www.chakoteya.net/NextGen/253.htm

Dishonest or poorly informed debaters will call the Solar Fusion Eruption a CME or solar flare in order to try to claim the Borg and by default Star Trek is weaker then it is, and hope no one notices the lie.

Examples:
http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tec ... ield1.html

http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Dat ... mit=Submit

http://forums.spacebattles.com/showthread.php?p=5275218

Kind of shows how worthless StarDestroyer.net is for reliable information.
_____
Was http://www.babtech-onthe.net/stargate/atlantis1.html taken down?

[Khas]

BabTech is going offline.

[Mike DiCenso]

Permanently?
-Mike

[Khas]

Well, given the fact that it's being archived in "The Guardian of Forever" over on ASVS, looks like it.

[2046]

Well, given the fact that it's being archived in "The Guardian of Forever" over on ASVS, looks like it.

Is that like my Obsidian Order Project? They totally have the better name.