Star Trek Weapons and Technology Discussion

[Lucky]

http://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/ ... 529/page-4

2) While this is again, evidence that they can wield gigaton firepower, it contradicts other issues like Deja Q, Pegasus, and numerous other episodes where massive gigaton firepower would have easily of solved their problem.

I'm confused as to how gigaton or higher firepower would have altered the events in Deja Q and Pegasus?

The problem in Deja Q was that the moon needed to be moved away from the planet.
Deja Q
SCIENTIST [on viewscreen]: No, it has a ferrous crystalline structure and it will be able to withstand tidal forces, Captain

RIKER: Could we blow it into pieces?

DATA: The total mass of the moon would remain the same, Commander, and the impact of thousands of fragments would spread destruction over an even wider area.

PICARD: How long before impact?

DATA: Twenty nine hours, sir. Projecting it somewhere on the western continent. That would destroy an area eight hundred kilometres in radius.

SCIENTIST [on viewscreen]: That damage would be insignificant, Captain, compared to the seismic repercussions massive landquakes, and tsunami.

GARIN [on viewscreen]: The force would raise a cloud of dust around the planet, leading to a significant temperature reduction. We could be looking at our own ice age.

How would gigaton or higher firepower have helped? Perfect vaporization is a myth. You would end up with chunks hitting the planet, and the Moon in question was already near its last orbit.



The Pegasus
DATA: This asteroid contains several deep chasms large enough for a starship to enter. It is possible the Pegasus drifted into the asteroid's gravitational field and was pulled down into one of the fissures.
_____
RIKER: Into the asteroid?

PRESSMAN: That's right. Put this fissure on the main viewer. This chasm is large enough for us to manoeuvre in. Besides, if we ever hope to salvage the Pegasus, we're going to need a starship to do it.

PICARD: Mister Data?

DATA: It is theoretically possible, sir, but I am unaware of any prior situations where a starship was taken so deeply inside a planetary body. There may be unforeseen difficulties.

In The Pegasus the asteroid has an impossibly high gravitational field, and they even talk about it as if it was a planet. This is not a mundane object by real world standards.

To make matters worse what Riker says doesn't make sense. There is no way they could have fired majority of torpedos they had on board in the time they had.

That figure is wrong either way, 821.2 gigawatts per square meter is egregiously high.

The thermal energy of a cubic metre of corona gas is less than 0.003 joules, it's incredibly hot, but at the same time it's a diffuse gaseous region in a vacuum. Likewise given that the Dyson sphere possessed 60% of Earth's orbital diameter the emission intensity would have to be on the low end of a typical (otherwise the surface would be a vitrified mess) G class star and that even at the core the fusion power density is less than 300 joules/sec-m^3 (which decreases as the radial distance increases).

Assuming typical stellar luminosity for now an orbit of 10,000km (rather low in the atmosphere) the profile area of the E-D is absorbing roughly 60 MW/m^2, with a profile region of just less than 250,000m^2 (given her rounded shape and odd angles it's far less); totalling at at a maximum radiation absorption rate of 15 TW and 11.6 kilojoules of thermal energy and a roughly comparable transitional kinetic energy (stars are surprising cold given their spectral density). Assuming an appropriate luminosity for the diameter of the sphere, actual emissions absorbed by the E-D would be roughly 6 TW.

According to Data, at 23% the shields would only last three hours, thus indicating that at full strength the maximum absorption rate over 100% of the lifespan of the shields is a grand total of 129 PW (or 31 megatons for the total strength of the shields over twelve hours). Assuming Trek shields aren't based on some retarded percentile principle where the crew continuously allows the shields to drop to zero and kill them rather than dump the waste heat elsewhere, which would realistically put their maximum rate of absorption at less than 6 TW (otherwise the waste radiation gets cycled and dumped harmlessly elsewhere), or more precisely 6 KW/cm^2.

How does this relate to a solar prominence? Well much like the material around it the material within a prominence is incredibly diffuse, assuming a maximum density of ejected stellar matter then the E-D is only absorbing radiation at an intensity of 160 MW/m^2. Even if the E-D is withstanding the brunt of that power for the three hours before their shields become useless, which sounds like a lot in principle, but in reality is only a few megatons of energy dispersed over a long period of time.

Time is in fact the the mitigating factor here.

How does Rama come to these conclusions? I don't recall ever being told how powerful the solar flares were in Relics, or how quickly they increased in power?

I also can't see where Rama tried to calculate the energy from the magnetic fields. They were stated to be a threat as much as the radiation.

Why do these calculations seem familiar to me? It's like I've seen them before.

[Mike DiCenso]

Probably because he's picking a regurgitation of Wong's calculations, which in turn picked the lowest possible numbers to get away with. Just go back read the discussion from this thread and all it is linked to. Graham Kennedy's calcs for "Relics" puts the lower end of the energy absorbed at 69 megatons.
-Mike

[Lucky]

Probably because he's picking a regurgitation of Wong's calculations, which in turn picked the lowest possible numbers to get away with. Just go back read the discussion from this thread and all it is linked to. Graham Kennedy's calcs for "Relics" puts the lower end of the energy absorbed at 69 megatons.
-Mike

That is what I thought when I read Rama's post, but wanted someone to confirm that it looked that way.


You don't have any thoughts on what level of firepower would be needed to make changes to the Star Trek setting?

[Mike DiCenso]

"Make changes to the Star Trek setting"? What do you mean?
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

When I was still active at SBC, and a bit after my ban, it was clear that Ramapedia used to pick his knowledge from the internet and pass it as his, often trying to coat what he grabbed in some pompous verbal forms which at times didn't even work, language wise. That he decided to parrot Wong while saying nothing of the source isn't surprising.

[Lucky]

"Make changes to the Star Trek setting"? What do you mean?
-Mike

It is often argued that the ICS numbers don't make sense with what is seen in the various levels of Star Wars canon.

It is often argued that if War hammer 40,000 forces have a certain level of firepower then they would have no reason to have super weapons for Exterminatus.

So what is the maximum level of firepower Star Trek can have without contradicting the plot and such?

[Mike DiCenso]

Its simple. Given the way Star Trek works, the most powerful examples of firepower are among the highest canon by default. It then comes down to looking at how many such examples exist compared to lower examples, and what their respective contexts are are. Basically what we always do here at SFJN and what many people elsewhere do, with the exceptions that some people will cherrypick the lowest examples, or present out of context information.
-Mike

[Mike DiCenso]

Actually, reading through the thread, lots of things bother me, such as Mith presenting what happened in "Balance of Terror":

Assuming a 1,200 - 2,000 meter asteroid (the base was said to be buried in a 1 km asteroid and the outpost presumably needs to survive on its own for some time, so it probably has to be of moderate size for food storage, living areas, weapons, shuttles, and such and so forth), the uber weapon of doom for the NCC 1701 in Balance of Terror had a yield between 1.7 megatons to 8 megatons. The weapon was so powerful that the Enterprise actually tried to warp out of the area to get away from a single weapon rather than letting it splash against the shields. Even weakened to say, a fraction of its original yield, the weapon still hit the Enterprise pretty hard.

It is worth noting that this weapon is supposed to have caused an implosion, but plasma torpedoes stopped acting like since TNG and it's kind of silly anyways, and science lab was probably working off of data from a pretty fucked up outpost, so it may not have been all that accurate. It's also worth noting that the asteroid didn't really look like it'd imploded, but rather exploded.

First off, the asteroid Outpost 4 was built "on" (presumably all the other outposts as well) was stated by the outpost's own commanding officer to be:

HANSEN [on viewscreen]: Enterprise, can you see it? My command post here. We're a mile deep on an asteroid. Almost solid iron. And even through our deflectors, it did this. Can you see?

The asteroid is at least a mile (1.609 km), and made mostly of iron. If we assumed Outpost 4 was buried into the exact center of the asteroid, then the total diameter would be at least 3.2 km. Furthermore, Mith has conveniently forgotten the results of the total destruction done to the prior outposts attacked by the Romulan warbird. Here's Spock's readings:

SPOCK: Sweeping the area of Outpost two. Sensor reading indefinite. Double-checking Outpost three. I read dust and debris. Both Earth outposts gone, and the asteroids they were constructed on, pulverised.

That is quite impressive. An entire miles wide asteroid reduced not to chunks of rock, but to dust. That requires an enormous amount of mechanical energy to pull off, especially in such a ridiculously short span of time as we seen when the Romulan's final attack on Outpost 4. This is effectively as if the plasma weapon had vaporized the asteroid, and remember that the first attack blew out the deflector and crippled the base, but still saved Outpost 4 from being destroyed, which gives us some indication that shields, at least for a fixed base like that can take a lot of punishment. Using Wong's asteroid destruction calculator, the bare minimum energy involved is 33 megatons, if it were made of mere igneous rock and broken up into 10 meter fragments. However, since the asteroid was made mostly of iron and was pulverized to dust, the likely energy was 249 gigatons. And remember, Outpost 4's deflector held out against most of that on the first attack.

The only debris picked up from Outpost 4 itself was a tiny chunk of formerly very hard metal (possibly an alloy) that was reduced to fragile brittleness by the plasma weapon.

Also Mith is wrong in that there was any kind of external view of the destruction. The only view was inside with intensely bright light surrounding the doomed Commander Hanson and his control room, which in no way contradicts Spock and the Enterprise lab's theoretical assessment of the weapon.
-Mike

[Lucky]

Its simple. Given the way Star Trek works, the most powerful examples of firepower are among the highest canon by default. It then comes down to looking at how many such examples exist compared to lower examples, and what their respective contexts are are. Basically what we always do here at SFJN and what many people elsewhere do, with the exceptions that some people will cherrypick the lowest examples, or present out of context information.
-Mike

Well there is a difference between what can make sense verses what can be proven.

It doesn't really matter what a planet based or even station based weapons system can do or a one off super weapon can do in this case.

For example, it wouldn't make sense for a single Federation starship with the standard shipboard weapons to be able to turn an Earth like planet into an asteroid field in a reasonable amount of time. Conversely it is repeatedly implied that fleets of starships can turn an Earth like planet into an asteroid field with standard weapons, but you never seem to see evidence of it even in TDIC.

[Mith]

Actually, reading through the thread, lots of things bother me, such as Mith presenting what happened in "Balance of Terror":

Assuming a 1,200 - 2,000 meter asteroid (the base was said to be buried in a 1 km asteroid and the outpost presumably needs to survive on its own for some time, so it probably has to be of moderate size for food storage, living areas, weapons, shuttles, and such and so forth), the uber weapon of doom for the NCC 1701 in Balance of Terror had a yield between 1.7 megatons to 8 megatons. The weapon was so powerful that the Enterprise actually tried to warp out of the area to get away from a single weapon rather than letting it splash against the shields. Even weakened to say, a fraction of its original yield, the weapon still hit the Enterprise pretty hard.

It is worth noting that this weapon is supposed to have caused an implosion, but plasma torpedoes stopped acting like since TNG and it's kind of silly anyways, and science lab was probably working off of data from a pretty fucked up outpost, so it may not have been all that accurate. It's also worth noting that the asteroid didn't really look like it'd imploded, but rather exploded.

First off, the asteroid Outpost 4 was built "on" (presumably all the other outposts as well) was stated by the outpost's own commanding officer to be:

HANSEN [on viewscreen]: Enterprise, can you see it? My command post here. We're a mile deep on an asteroid. Almost solid iron. And even through our deflectors, it did this. Can you see?

The asteroid is at least a mile (1.609 km), and made mostly of iron. If we assumed Outpost 4 was buried into the exact center of the asteroid, then the total diameter would be at least 3.2 km. Furthermore, Mith has conveniently forgotten the results of the total destruction done to the prior outposts attacked by the Romulan warbird. Here's Spock's readings:

SPOCK: Sweeping the area of Outpost two. Sensor reading indefinite. Double-checking Outpost three. I read dust and debris. Both Earth outposts gone, and the asteroids they were constructed on, pulverised.

That is quite impressive. An entire miles wide asteroid reduced not to chunks of rock, but to dust. That requires an enormous amount of mechanical energy to pull off, especially in such a ridiculously short span of time as we seen when the Romulan's final attack on Outpost 4. This is effectively as if the plasma weapon had vaporized the asteroid, and remember that the first attack blew out the deflector and crippled the base, but still saved Outpost 4 from being destroyed, which gives us some indication that shields, at least for a fixed base like that can take a lot of punishment. Using Wong's asteroid destruction calculator, the bare minimum energy involved is 33 megatons, if it were made of mere igneous rock and broken up into 10 meter fragments. However, since the asteroid was made mostly of iron and was pulverized to dust, the likely energy was 249 gigatons. And remember, Outpost 4's deflector held out against most of that on the first attack.

The only debris picked up from Outpost 4 itself was a tiny chunk of formerly very hard metal (possibly an alloy) that was reduced to fragile brittleness by the plasma weapon.

Also Mith is wrong in that there was any kind of external view of the destruction. The only view was inside with intensely bright light surrounding the doomed Commander Hanson and his control room, which in no way contradicts Spock and the Enterprise lab's theoretical assessment of the weapon.
-Mike

You could do me a favor and not treat me as some sort of Warsie.

In any case, yes, I did make some mistakes in regards to Balance of Terror. They're hardly anything to get overly upset about. Or to create a thread. It still doesn't really alter the entire point of what I was discussing--that Star Trek doesn't have gigatons of energy to toss around.

[Lucky]

You could do me a favor and not treat me as some sort of Warsie.

In any case, yes, I did make some mistakes in regards to Balance of Terror. They're hardly anything to get overly upset about. Or to create a thread. It still doesn't really alter the entire point of what I was discussing--that Star Trek doesn't have gigatons of energy to toss around.[/quote]
Since you are acknowledging this thread exists, could you be so kind to reply to the OP? It is directed towards you after all.

[Mike DiCenso]

You could do me a favor and not treat me as some sort of Warsie.

In any case, yes, I did make some mistakes in regards to Balance of Terror. They're hardly anything to get overly upset about. Or to create a thread. It still doesn't really alter the entire point of what I was discussing--that Star Trek doesn't have gigatons of energy to toss around.

You're not being treated like a Warsie, a series of mistakes are being pointed out. However now that you bring that up, I would politely point out, that in order to argue against high Trek energy generation and firepower, you are at times using some of their more grievous methods. But Rama, is as usual, the most serious offender, with his/her/its regurgitation of Wong's propaganda.

The BoT mistakes do seriously affect your proposition since it is a clear cut demonstration of extremely powerful weapons and one being used by a slow and underpowered vessel by even TOS' standards. That weapon, again as demonstrated when all the proper dialog and context is accounted for, clearly shows firepower for Trek in the hundreds of gigaton range.

There is simply no real way around that.

A multi-mile wide iron asteroid was crushed in seconds to dust. Your assertion that the asteroid was only a kilometer or so wide was clearly wrong, and your descriptions of the effects were very wrong, hence your conclusion that the asteroid only needed a few tens of megatons to destroy was also equally wrong as a result.

Worst of all, Mith. No fact checking. You never bothered to go to Chrissie's Transcripts, or look on Trekcore for confirmation. I know you can do better than that.

If anything, BoT confirms the possibility of high megation to low gigaton Trek firepower and power generation. Even if we assumed that the plasma torpedo dissipated to less than 1 percent of it's original energy level by the time it caught up to the Enterprise, that still would mean the she absorbed around 2 gigatons. Given the weapon's nature, it means the Enterprise was in relatively bad shape by the time the Romulans mined her with the nuke charge.

Oh, by the way, Tlonak is likely none other than our very own KirkSkywalker.
-Mike

[Khas]

Actually, I've talked to T'lonak on both ASVS and deviantArt, and going from what I remember of KSW, they're not the same person.

Besides, would KSW really be clever enough to come up with an account that wasn't two words put together with the first letter of each capitalized, like "SpaceWizard" or "UniversalNetGuru" or "SarahStar" or "AdmiralWolverineLightningBolt"?

Besides, I've mentioned KSW a few times there, and he hasn't really given those threads any flak. And he's apologized to Brian, after flipping out. Would KirkSkywalker EVER do something like that? Especially to a Warsie, and especially to an ICSer? Hell no. KSW was too much of an egotist to do something like this.

[Mike DiCenso]

Possibly, but it might depend on whether or not KSW is trying something different after getting banned from here. But certain things about what T'lonk is doing is almost right out of KSW's playbook, like sticking to his pet non-canon theory on how Trek tech works, quoting Roddenberry-era TOS material, badly misquoting character dialog, and last but not least, flipping out when no one likes it or questions it.

The only real thing I see different here is that T'lonk, unlike KSW is trying to present evidence.
-Mike

[Khas]

Well, T'lonak has admitted he has a bit of a temper. Something KSW would never do. Not to mention, I've never seen him flamebait anyone before.