Gigaton-level phasers?

[Mike DiCenso]

While it is true that some of the estimates and references are found only here on the SFJN forum, JMS' pages on the main site do contain reference and estimate material. So for example, you click on "TOS" and "Weapons", you then click on the little green arrow boxes and it will take you down to the references. Here's an example:

The plasma torpedo, seen in "Balance of Power," disintegrated quite thoroughly the fourth UFP outpost it attacked; this outpost was "a mile deep on an asteroid. Almost solid iron." With the first shot, the Romulan ship took out the deflectors and damaged the station severely; the second shot then disintegrated the asteroid and outpost into "dust and debris" - by "forcing an implosion." To crush a two mile diameter asteroid mostly comprised of iron into dust using glowing hot plasma requires a great deal of work. Considering the presence of some debris, the yield could be guessed at being perhaps only a hundred gigatons or so - a truly impressive sum, particularly for a ship as small as the Romulans'. It is not surprising in the least that the ship appears to have the capability to fire only 5-10 (probably 9) shots before needing to refuel.

The ability to travel for more than 10 seconds at warp speed puts the range of the plasma torpedo well beyond that of any other conventional weapon in TOS - in all probability falling somewhere between an AU and a substantial fraction of a light year. It is worth noting that a phaser blast is thought to be able to disperse the plasma torpedo in mid-flight, rendering it less useful against battle-prepared starships. This may explain why it is not seen frequently.

In "A Taste for Armageddon," Kirk states bluntly: "In two hours, the Enterprise will destroy Eminiar 7." In this particular context, it appears as though the Enterprise has quite enough firepower to level all civilization of Eminar 7, which has been fortifying and stockpiling weapons for the past 500 years, in a fairly short span of time. Similar reference to this capability occur in "Bread and Circuses" and "Operation: Annihilate!" Kirk agonizes over obliterating a human colony with a million people in order to destroy the neural parasites that have infested it in the latter, while in the former, an ex-captain, worried, notes that the Enterprise would be able to wipe out the 20th century version of a planetary Roman Empire.

Incidentally, we could use this to check our yield estimates. We may estimate that destroying Eminar 7 involves levelling reinforced concrete buildings over perhaps a total of 1-25% of the planet's surface; with efficient thermal weaponry, this may be somewhere around ~20kt per square kilometer. With a surface area for an Earthlike planet of about a half billion, this gives us - very generally - 100 gigatons to perhaps 2.5 teratons or so that the U.S.S. Enterprise is expected to deliver in short order. This is generally agreeable with our rough estimates of phaser and photon torpedo yields from various episodes.

In "The Alternative Factor," we are treated to a view of the Enterprise firing from a reasonably high orbit (see images below). As most of the planetary disc is visible in this shot, taken from a perspective just behind the Enterprise, this episode establishes that the Enterprise can fire several thousand miles and through an atmosphere without appreciable beam dispersal or accuracy problems. Note the crystal clear, narrow, and apparently undispersed beam striking the craft on the ground. In "A Piece of the Action," the Enterprise makes a very effective wide-beam stun strike from orbit.



Phasers are seen firing, readied to fire, or otherwise implied to be able to fire at warp speed in "Obsession," "Arena," "The Carbomite Maneuver," "The Ultimate Computer," and "Balance of Terror."

"The Paradise Syndrome" shows Spock trying to split into pieces an asteroid stated to be nearly the size of Earth's moon using phasers after failing to deflect it sufficiently using the ship's deflector screens. Even considering that he was attempting to take advantage of a "weak spot" in the asteroid, as well as the asteroid being somewhat less than actually moon-sized, this would require zettajoules of imparted energy if not yottajoules to pull off - i.e., the equivalent of gigatons to teratons of TNT. The actual effect achieved is somewhat less impressive; the first normal phaser blast used on the asteroid produces a splash of glow about a third the diameter of the asteroid; a full broadside with the phasers only causes a small square of the asteroid to glow molten red.



If the asteroid's longer dimension is a bit over 1700 km, then the area melted is about 70 km across and roughly square. The heat of fusion for lava is generally similar to the energy required to heat the rock ~300 kelvins; granite generally melts at about 925 kelvins; if we approximate it as being granite chemically and having a bulk density of 2 tons per cubic meter, melting a 70 km cube out of the asteroid gives only ~130-160 exajoules for a full power broadside by the Enterprise. With four phasers being fired on full power here, that's a maximum strength blast of 30-40 EJ per phaser - 7-10 gigatons. Considering that it may not have truly been an entire 70 km cube melted, but likely a smaller fraction, we should call it perhaps 1-10 gigatons for a ship's phaser on full blast.

In "Changeling," the order to fire is given along with a range of 90,000 kilometers, resulting in a direct hit on a target smaller than a typical human. In "Obsession," we learn that even while moving at high warp, phasers cannot fire 0.04 light years. In "The Tholian Web," the Tholian vessel stands off at a range of 90,000 km, producing immediate threat to the Enterprise. In "Spectre of the Gun:" phaser crews are ordered ready before a slowly approaching vessel reaches 45,000 km. In "Spock's Brain," phaser crews are standing by before the range to an unknown approaching vessel closes to 43,000 km. In "Journey to Babel," phasers are fired just after closing to 75,000 kilometers. In "The Deadly Years," Romulan vessels are stated to be at 50-100,000 km from the Enterprise while attacking it.

In "Changeling," the energy capacity of the Enterprise's shields against Nomad's attacks is shown as 450 times the yield of a photon torpedo. If we assume that the plasma torpedo had very roughly the amount of energy required to blow the Enterprise's shields in one shot, then it is roughly 450 times as strong. This would give us about 225 megatons per torpedo with a very wide margin for error. This could very easily be an overestimate even if the plasma torpedo really is ~100 gigatons, as it is suggested that the plasma torpedo would outright destroy the Enterprise, while the energy of 450 photon torpedos took down the shields without destroying it. The difference in effect may also represent the plasma torpedo being a very effective weapon for its yield against the defensive technologies of Starfleet rather than a strict yield disparity between the two. However, the 225 megaton yield does not, in light of the phaser power above, appear particularly excessive; its relatively diminuative nature may explain very well the considerably rarer use of photon torpedos than phasers, as phasers will generally suffice.

In "Arena," we are treated to a rare weapon, a small blue ball identified as a photon grenade. Whatever they are, 1200 yards and just on the other side of a solid rock ridge is "pretty close for one of these little jewels," which is rather unusual; 1200 yards is almost a safe firing distance for a kiloton nuke on flat ground (first degree burns out to radii of up to 1320 yards). This suggests that those small blue balls may have as much as a kiloton yield.

Hand phasers are observed to effectively disintegrate people on numerous occasions. They may also be overloaded to great effect, as in "The Conscience of the King"- to quote: "This is the captain. There's a phaser on overload. If it blows, it'll take out the entire deck." Phasers may also be used to stun. They may also be used to heat or blast rocks, walls, and most normal substances; certain exotic substances and creatures are resistant to light phasers.

Did you see any of this while navigating through the pages?
-Mike

[User1401]

Not on this page, which reached by the "Weaponry" link on the side. But fair enough, there are references on the website.

[Praeothmin]

Not on this page, which reached by the "Weaponry" link on the side. But fair enough, there are references on the website.

That's simple:
You were actually looking at the general comparison page.
When you want actual examples, click on the actual serie or movie, then the topic you wish to look at, such FTL, or Weaponry.

[Mike DiCenso]

Yes, as Praeothmin and I pointed out, it's a coordinate system of page navigation, Stargazer. So click the "Weapons" (Or whatever topic your interested in) tab, then click a series or movie tab you're interested in knowing more about, and then you'll get all the references and detailed discussion.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

As I see it, the question of determining the phaser power of a GCS is tricky for several reasons. Phasers are unusual weapons that have been known to do fairly unusual things, which complicates the question of yield. You'll hear talk about nadion effects and the like - so before we do any meaningful analysis, we have to first address the common myth that phaser yield and phaser effect are completely separate.

On high settings, a hand phaser typically disintegrates a human. From "The Galileo Seven", we know that seven TOS era hand phasers have enough juice to lift an extra 150 pounds clear off a planet to escape it before it blows up. That's 600 megajoules right there - if you have 100% energy efficiency in liftoff, which is simply not going to happen. Realistically, since shuttles use thrusters, this points to multi-gigajoule energy capacities. The fact that overloading phasers are a major hazard, the sustained long-term discharge of 1.05 megajoules per second in "The Mind's Eye," even the fact that Data uses micro-fusion cells are all quite compatible with this.

The shuttle uses thrusters, but they're pointed at the back, no? What's actually lifting the shuttle? Physics raping engines plus powered antigravitation?
The shuttle had absolutely no energy left at all?

So then we want to look at phaser effect. TOS era hand phasers, on high settings, tend to make people completely disappear. The energy required to vaporize someone is around 100 megajoules. Truly spectacular hand phaser shots in TNG have gigajoule-range energy effects, but TNG phasers should have much better batteries, too. From this and similar evidence, we can conclude that the power used by a phaser and its apparent effect (including "phaser" vaporizations) should be very close to each other in terms of energy.

What's the gigajoule demonstration?
And how do we know for sure that the phaser delivers so many megajoules to dissolve someone into nothingness?

That established, we can now look at the actual yield of a GCS phaser bank. We have several ways of getting at this problem - four, in fact. To my eye, the highest figures also come out of the strongest methods.

Power Generation

From a conservation of energy standpoint, the fact that a GCS can exit a system very quickly (as in "Relics") from a cold start indicates that a GCS has a very high rate of peak power generation. Even warp-speed displacement within a gravity field (as in "Descent") requires hundreds, possibly thousands, of exawatts.

But then, if they could use the warp engine, while virtually immobile, to affect the mass of a moon they tried to move with tractor beams in Deja Q.
Why couldn't they use the same on their own ship?
They considerably lowered the mass of the moon with the warp field, down to "two point five million metric tonnes", a moon which mass could easily and naturally be worth hundreds of billions if not trillions of tonnes of rock. They can apply such fields to object in normal space.
Now, considering that a small quantity of AM from Wes' school science project could allow for a very short timed warp jump, and considering that we're not talking about going to warp at all but only a fraction of light, I don't see why it wouldn't work for the GCS just to get a boost to get out of a system with a quantity of AM which wouldn't be that far from the quantity consumed by the old UFP ship Riker and Wes used for their battle training.

Also, we see the Enterprise flying away from the nebula where Khan was killed with rainbow engines at full. Yet it doesn't look like FTL much, even if the camera is moving away from the nebula.
Talk about weird things.

In terms of quotations, "Deja Q" gives us our only realistic specific power output for a GCS - 12.75 exawatts when the warp core isn't being pushed. There are occasional references to terawatt-range power outputs, but since a terawatt isn't enough energy to get something the size of a GCS out of Earth orbit very quickly, we pretty much have to throw those out. There are also a few references to petawatt/exawatt range figures in Voyager (such as the quotation being disputed here), but "Deja Q" is the important one for our purposes. To make a long story short, we have to conclude that GCS can pull hundreds of gigatons of energy per second through the warp core.

If we assume that 1-10% of maximum power can be routed to phasers - which seems reasonable - we conclude phasers should put out multiple gigatons per second.

It's also quite interesting to note that phasers aren't considered to lighten the moon. Surely if one ship can destroy an entire civilization only on phasers, or drill a wide shaft through more than a thousand kilometers of mantle, there would be enough energy and NDF power to peel off many layers of that dangerous moon.

True Q's 12.75 exawatt figure is exactly just as fishy.
You can try "watt per day" or "watt per hour" on Internet and notice how you'll find plenty of examples of sources listing power production capacity in regards to what's achieved over a prolongated period.

A couple of examples from a "watt per day" search:

http://www.solar-innovation.com/customers/mwasaro.html

52 Solar Panels x 115 Watt (picture 2, 3, 4) at the time being reach ca. 6 KW per hour, resp. 32 KW per day. Combined with further 2 wind generators a total output of

36 000 Watt per day is achieved. The battery output is 4800 AH. The maximum inverter output on permanent run is 6.5 KW/h.

http://www.sunwize.co.in/photovoltaic_systems.htm

Let us say you have a house with 4 light bulbs, each light bulb uses i.e. 30 Watts/per hour, you light up your house with 4 light bulbs for 4 hours per day - that means you need 480 Watts per day for all 4 light bulbs. Still with me ?
Let us say you use a TV set by 60 Watts per hour, you watch TV for 5 hours per day ? Then you will need 300 Watts per day. Plus your 4 light bulbs you end up with 780 Watt per day electricity consumption.
Now let us add an energy eater: 1 cooler, power consumption 40 Watts per hour, that makes it in one day 880 Watts per day.

One solar panel of 110 Watts produces by 10 hours of sunlight each day - 1100 Watts or 1.1 kW

http://www.hcl-asia.com.hk/EnProductshow.asp?ID=198

Therefore, each machine consumes 2,500 watt per day or electricity rate is RMB2.25 per day.

http://www.save-today-survive-tomorrow.com/pedal.asp

With Over 100 Millions people using Bi Cycles and pedaling away 4-6 Km per day either for work or health reasons and with potential to generate about 20 Watts per KM pedaled ( 100 Watt per day- In 5 Km) the potential for generation is over 10 Million KW per day ( 100 Million x 0.1 KW) or about 3000 Million KW (10 Million x 300 Days)Per Annum.

Or in other words, over 100 Millions people using Bi Cycles and pedaling away 4-6 Km per day [...] with potential to generate about 100 Watt per day- In 5 Km.

http://www.ethiopianreview.com/articles/1818

It generates a 7.3 mega watt per day,

http://energyreviews.info/solar-power-e ... -for-sale/

These cells generate approximately about 1 watt per day each. You would need around 400-500 watts per day to feed the average modest 3 bedroom house using efficient light bulbs and appliances.

You can also get some ridiculously complicated elaborations such as those:

The article doesn’t say, but by my calculations this $62,000 of city money bought about 8,000 watts of installed PV at $8/Watt. A generous estimate would be that this array will yield about 50 kilowatt-hours per day, or about 1500 kilowatt-hours per month in sunny southern California. (Insolation at Palm Desert is about 6000 Watt-hours per square meter per day. Roughly speaking, each installed watt will then yield about 6 Watt-hours per day. So, 8000 installed watts X 6 watt-hours per installed watt per day gives 48,000 watt hours per day or 48 kilowatt-hours per day.) This is important to Clark because

*yawn*
Etc.
No need to pay attention to the per hour cases, they're just about the same.
Let's just imagine the full sentence now, with per hour.

"We are presently generating twelve point seven five billion gigawatts per hour".

Doesn't look out of place anymore, eh? ;)

Which means the terawatt figure is quite just as solid when you also take into consideration antigrav tech and warp fields which magically divide masses between a thousand and a million of what they formerly and naturally were (as long as you don't abuse the thing, you know).

Phaser effects on inert bodies

More directly, we have several events in which phasers are used to drill rock, such as "Inheritance" and "Legacy." (See here for the most recent discussion we had on the topic here on SFJ).

Here is the (brief) discussion of the TNG phaser drilling incidents on the main website. These incidents involve disintegrating a lot of rock. The quick summary is that a gigaton of phaser energy a second is about enough to disintegrate one seventh of one cubic kilometer of rock per second - a rate of material disappearance that fits pretty reasonably for all four rock-related incidents in TNG, from the E-D's presumed ability to blast its way out of the asteroid in "The Pegasus" on up to the sustained drilling into the mantle of "Inheritance."

Those are NDF, and getting out of the big asteroid wouldn't require melting large quantities of rock at all. The Romulans had only shut the entrance.
Pen Pals clearly shows what's going on with phasers set on NDF and drilling a neat hole through the ground, at a high speed.

There's also a comet in "Masks." Here, we really aren't talking about as much energy, but the E-D is firing its phasers at an explicitly stated 10% rate. As Mike DiCenso indicated above, "Masks" involved only a short duration phaser sweep, and the comet should be several cubic kilometers. The estimate on the main website is a bit higher, since it assumes the comet was vaporized and then superheated, but this also suggests around gigaton per second firepower. Here's the thing with "Masks," though: While vaporizing the comet is a lower-energy event than the phaser drilling cases, it is unique in explicitly indicating the task was accomplished with 10% phaser power.

Everything indicates that "melting" the ice (as dsecribed by mister Laforge himself) would clearly break said ice at such temperatures. It could only be a very slow process. Not to say that that while it seems to take a couple seconds only by dialogue, the way ice disappears on screen shows it's actually going to take a while, like way more than an hour.
There's also the fact that once the beam is shut down, you see ice surrounding the station continuing to shrink on its own... inwards. Besides, considering that the E-D barely moved during the operation, there was a large amount of ice which was out of sight of the E-D's phasers since it would be located behind the station. Yet you don't see any spike of ice left either.

We also have one incident in TOS - "The Paradise Syndrome" - in which CCS phasers are used to blast something made of rock. There are a number of problems with the incident, such as the fact that the rock in question is supposed to be half the size of Earth's moon, but isn't remotely near spherical, but the stated goal of fracturing an extinction-event asteroid, and the literal documentarian reading of what "actually" happened (melting a 70 km patch on a strangely non-symmetric large asteroid), point to high energy levels. Since GCS phasers should be stronger than CCS phasers, this actually points towards stronger than GT/sec phasers on a GCS, but it's in there.

These are fairly flexible incidents on the whole. If you're willing to wave a hand over "Inheritance" and say that it's not drilling nearly as deeply as the Okudagram suggests, and minimize "The Paradise Syndrome" by shrinking the asteroid to something that we wouldn't be surprised to be non-spherical, you can justify anything from hundreds of megatons per second to tens of gigatons per second.

At the same time with PS they were firing at a fissure and was considered the asteroid's weakest point. The fissure couldn't be relevant against a thing of the size of Earth's moon if the fissure wasn't massively large in regards to their plans to split the thing.

Comparison with photon torpedoes/General firepower

There's a major problem with trying to compare phasers with photon torpedoes: There's no actual agreement on which should produce a greater fraction of total firepower.

We do know that total firepower of a CCS is enough to completely obliterate a planetary civilization, but we don't actually know how phasers and photon torpedoes compare. We know that they tend to think of photon torpedoes for blasting asteroids, for example ("Rise" and "Pegasus" both demonstrate that thinking), and we know that for the NX-01, phase cannons were weaker than photonic torpedoes.

However, that doesn't tell us that phasers are weaker or stronger than photon torpedoes on the whole. Photon torpedoes almost certainly deliver a faster pulse of energy, and a different kind of energy; phasers do the whole "magic disintegration" number, while photon torpedoes blow things up conventionally.

Since photon torpedoes themselves should have a maximum yield falling around 100 MT - 1 GT, and can also be fired at substantially lower yields, with a GCS easily being able to fire an average of a torpedo a second, we could suggest that phasers are 10 MT/s-10 GT/s - somewhere within an order of magnitude of the raw power of the torpedoes.

General Order 24 strongly suggests going no lower even if you're minded to be minimalist, since even the updated CCS doesn't carry all that many photon torpedoes (only enough to obliterate a hundred cities or so), meaning that the destruction of an advanced planetary civilization can be carried out largely with CCS phasers in a fairly short timeframe.

I'm of the opinion phasers are the main weapon of most Federation ships, with torpedoes being used for special effect. This explains why something the size of a GCS only carries a couple hundred of them, to me, and why we don't see the use of torpedo-boat style warships; however, others carry the opposite opinion, and there's not really anything in the canon to make sure of either.

If NDF allows to drill through a thousand km of rock or more in a relatively short time, the same effect affecting the same volume but spread over the surface of a planet would surely put any civilization out of misery.

Hull damage

One of the most curious cases of calculation is trying to compute phaser yield from actual hull damage. We know that GCS hulls are mainly tritanium, and in "Star Trek: Generations," we get a unique close look at the damage done by a phaser strike when shields aren't helping - each bolt that land puts a gaping hole across several decks, as seen in screencaps (see here for screenies) and indicated in dialogue. It's worth noting that with the shields useless, the phasers actually did a lot more damage than the photon torpedoes - photon torpedoes might be more useful for knocking down shields, but they did very little to the GCS hull.

Now we have to know how thick the tritanium cladding on the outer hull is. Let's say about 30 cm, for the moment. Each blast is stripping away several hundred square meters of tritanium hull and then damaging the fringes, so call it 100 cubic meters of tritanium phaser-"vaporized" per blast - it's peeling/blasting away a little more than that, but that seems to be about how much is actually disintegrated (the photon torpedoes do a little less hull damage, we might note).

That leaves us with one more piece of information: How tough is tritanium? This is the real unknown. This is what we do know, from "Obsession" and "Arsenal of Freedom." Tritanium is 21.4 times as hard as diamond. Tritanium can be heated to 12,000 degrees Celsius without showing any sign of melting. Even thin tritanium plates and bulkheads are basically invulnerable to UFP hand phasers, which regularly emit blasts strong enough to disintegrate humans in a beam about a square centimeter.

Now, we would expect about 50 gigajoules of phaser energy to disintegrate a cubic meter of iron. If tritanium is only ten times as hard to disintegrate as iron, as we might guess from the temperatures we've seen tritanium heated to, then we're looking at a pretty low end of about ten kilotons per blast.

On the high end, however, we've heard Yar standing there with a hand phaser looking at a partially melted plate of tritanium and say that UFP weapons can't do that. That phaser that she's packing can put 100 megajoules of disintegration energy in a beam a centimeter wide, and yet can't even melt - let alone disintegrate - a tritanium plate a few centimeters thick? If 100 MJ/cm^2 were sufficient to punch a hole through several centimeters of tritanium, disintegrating several hundred square meters of tritanium cladding several tens of centimeters thick would require close to a gigaton. And that's an outdated D12, not a GCS.

Really, though, since we don't know much about tritanium, we can't rule out much on hull damage, but the way that phasers destroy things (efficient disintegration with minimal collateral damage) and the incredible durability of tritanium against hand phasers lines up neatly with the gigaton figures.

Actually it's the torpedoes which did most of the damage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPR4pNQGNYk
The blasts of those torpedoes also leave the hull glowing like when hit by phasers. It's possible those torps were charged with NDF stuff. The energy bolts didn't seem to have any such effect. They seemed to be old style plasma burps.

Besides, those varying interpretations about power generation and firepower are a fraction of the figures which can be obtained, and they don't fit well with a rather exceptionally clear figure we were given about the Cardassian "Dreadnought"'s maximum 42.962 e3 MT warhead. Needless to say that the warhead alone, being the most potent part of the ship, would easily dwarf whatever AM the ship would carry as fuel. That same ship could destroy other interception crafts of similar size, laugh at Voyager's weapons and even threaten Voyager. Of course that's an old discussion I already had with WILGA, and Voyager is a smaller ship. I'd have to find a link to the discussion to avoid starting another one here.

[Jedi Master Spock]

The shuttle uses thrusters, but they're pointed at the back, no? What's actually lifting the shuttle? Physics raping engines plus powered antigravitation?
The shuttle had absolutely no energy left at all?

Not absolutely no energy; but was low on fuel.

Check out trekcore; the shuttle looks to be using aft thrusters to leave the planet rather than magic antigravity.

What's the gigajoule demonstration?

We have several options. The rock disintegrations here; the incredible aquaduct destruction of "Ensigns of Command"; and finally Riker's comment about bringing down a building with widebeam setting sixteen in "Frame of Mind."

And how do we know for sure that the phaser delivers so many megajoules to dissolve someone into nothingness?

We don't. That's our conclusion from the destructive effects, the apparent capacity of the phasers, and the assumption that you only get a fairly small number of high-powered shots out of a phaser power pack.

But then, if they could use the warp engine, while virtually immobile, to affect the mass of a moon they tried to move with tractor beams in Deja Q.
Why couldn't they use the same on their own ship?
They considerably lowered the mass of the moon with the warp field, down to "two point five million metric tonnes", a moon which mass could easily and naturally be worth hundreds of billions if not trillions of tonnes of rock. They can apply such fields to object in normal space.

"Deja Q" is in and of itself an example of power generation using the same technique.

"Deja Q" was one of the cornerstones of my original analysis here. Fundamentally, all the energy needed to lift the moon out of its low "about to smash the planet" orbit up into a high stable orbit needed to come from the E-D.

The easiest method was to route it directly through the normal warp engines to apply a warp field to the moon, and that puts a very high figure on the power of the warp engines. Conservation of energy dictates that mass-lightening doesn't make energy appear out of nothing, and that means that mass-lightening is very energy intensive.

The only way out of these power generation figures is assuming that UFP ships very freely violate conservation of energy every time the warp core is turned on.

Now, considering that a small quantity of AM from Wes' school science project could allow for a very short timed warp jump, and considering that we're not talking about going to warp at all but only a fraction of light, I don't see why it wouldn't work for the GCS just to get a boost to get out of a system with a quantity of AM which wouldn't be that far from the quantity consumed by the old UFP ship Riker and Wes used for their battle training.

I gauge that at 7.5 petawatts. The GCS should be about five times as massive; if peak power for the E-D is 400 EW, that means it has 10,000 times the power necessary to achieve warp 1.

Given that's a typical nominal difference cited between warp speeds, that's not at all strange.

Conversely, using my current mass estimate for the Constellation class and plugging in that original estimate of 7.5 PW for warp 1, that gives us the local g allowable for an engine whose peak strength is Warp 1 to reach warp as ... *drumroll* 0.0125 m/s^2, meaning that the Pheonix should have needed to put at least 80,000 km between it and Earth before breaking through the warp barrier. Which it almost certainly did.

Now, can you reduce the requirement by heading in-system with a warp field already on, or by spending some time charging the warp field up before actually hitting the "engage!" button? Yes. There's that much flexibility built into the calculations. However, it's a flexibility that simply isn't called for in most circumstances, and the ship still needs to come up with the energy even when the power requirements are bent by charge-up times. In "Descent" they're hiding in the sun; having a warp field active to help the Borg track them would not have been helpful. In "Relics" the need to escape the system comes up fairly suddenly. In "Deja Q" we explicitly know the warp field is applied from nothing.

It's also quite interesting to note that phasers aren't considered to lighten the moon. Surely if one ship can destroy an entire civilization only on phasers, or drill a wide shaft through more than a thousand kilometers of mantle, there would be enough energy and NDF power to peel off many layers of that dangerous moon.

Presuming that the matter is phased out of existence entirely. More likely, the effect of the phaser is to redistribute that matter.

Which means the terawatt figure is quite just as solid when you also take into consideration antigrav tech and warp fields which magically divide masses between a thousand and a million of what they formerly and naturally were (as long as you don't abuse the thing, you know).

The terawatt figure is literally impossible. The energy has to come from somewhere.

Those are NDF, and getting out of the big asteroid wouldn't require melting large quantities of rock at all. The Romulans had only shut the entrance.

The Romulans had melted the entrance shut. My contention is that appeal to NDF does not and should not reduce the presumed energy involved. We simply don't have any indication of the number of orders of magnitude required for terawatt phasers (6+), and precious little indication for anything beyond a single order of magnitude of variation in apparent NDF effect against rock or metal and comparable vaporization effects (I can think of precisely two solid examples, one of which is TDIC, and one "quasicanonical" indication, which is reading too closely into a briefly-visible Okudagram).

Everything indicates that "melting" the ice (as dsecribed by mister Laforge himself) would clearly break said ice at such temperatures. It could only be a very slow process. Not to say that that while it seems to take a couple seconds only by dialogue, the way ice disappears on screen shows it's actually going to take a while, like way more than an hour.
There's also the fact that once the beam is shut down, you see ice surrounding the station continuing to shrink on its own... inwards. Besides, considering that the E-D barely moved during the operation, there was a large amount of ice which was out of sight of the E-D's phasers since it would be located behind the station. Yet you don't see any spike of ice left either.

I'm not going to deny that phasers act oddly in how they selectively distribute energy.

At the same time with PS they were firing at a fissure and was considered the asteroid's weakest point. The fissure couldn't be relevant against a thing of the size of Earth's moon if the fissure wasn't massively large in regards to their plans to split the thing.

Even assuming that the moon wasn't actually connected at all, and was two separate rocks that happened to be resting against each other, being able to split it requires immense yield based on gravity alone.

Actually it's the torpedoes which did most of the damage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPR4pNQGNYk
The blasts of those torpedoes also leave the hull glowing like when hit by phasers. It's possible those torps were charged with NDF stuff. The energy bolts didn't seem to have any such effect. They seemed to be old style plasma burps.

Look very closely at the hull. The torpedoes are fired first, and leave smaller holes in the hull. It's the subsequent phaser hits which cause breaches across decks 31-35 and put a giant hole in one of the nacelles.

Besides, those varying interpretations about power generation and firepower are a fraction of the figures which can be obtained, and they don't fit well with a rather exceptionally clear figure we were given about the Cardassian "Dreadnought"'s maximum 42.962 e3 MT warhead. Needless to say that the warhead alone, being the most potent part of the ship, would easily dwarf whatever AM the ship would carry as fuel. That same ship could destroy other interception crafts of similar size, laugh at Voyager's weapons and even threaten Voyager. Of course that's an old discussion I already had with WILGA, and Voyager is a smaller ship. I'd have to find a link to the discussion to avoid starting another one here.

I disagree, but going to a specialized thread is probably a good idea.

[Mith]

Besides, those varying interpretations about power generation and firepower are a fraction of the figures which can be obtained, and they don't fit well with a rather exceptionally clear figure we were given about the Cardassian "Dreadnought"'s maximum 42.962 e3 MT warhead. Needless to say that the warhead alone, being the most potent part of the ship, would easily dwarf whatever AM the ship would carry as fuel. That same ship could destroy other interception crafts of similar size, laugh at Voyager's weapons and even threaten Voyager. Of course that's an old discussion I already had with WILGA, and Voyager is a smaller ship. I'd have to find a link to the discussion to avoid starting another one here.

[/quote]

Um...how large do you assume the warhead is? Because we've seen the UFP get some pretty big bangs from some pretty small objects. You can't just choose one superweapon and present it as the best example when you have (silly) examples like Obsession or such.

Really though, torpedo yields, as per Apocalypse Rising, have a max yield at 1,025 megatons or one gigaton. I think that's a pretty fair higher yield torpedo and it still keeps it low enough that the 42 gigaton warhead is still a big deal--but honestly, it isn't that impressive. Logically, if a BoP has enough antimatter storage onboard that it could bombard a target with a dozen torpedoes, a GCS should and so should Voyager.

Personally I prefer the TMs here to clear this up, as they give what the productions staff thought of as an isoton, mainly that 18.5 isotons is equal to 45.88 megatons for a standard torpedo. This would put Voyager's 200 isoton torpedoes at 496 megatons. It's also worth noting that although the VFX was bad in TNG, the DITL does calc the Skin of Evil thing at 500 megatons roughly. Of course, it's also worth noting that said 500 megaton torpedoes were of little use against the Dreadnought weapon itself...

Granted, if we assume that Voyager's entire arsenal had a max yield of 500 megatons (ie, Class VI were suggested to be stronger than the standard photon torpedo...), it would still come as far as only 15 gigatons, less than half the total yield of the warhead on Dreadnought. Of course, with a ship like the Enterprise D, where they have like, 250 torpedoes, you'd get something along the lines of 125 gigatons...but then again it's doubtful that the Enterprise D was carrying an entire arsenal of torpedoes with that sort of yield capability. More likely only a small portion of its armament were capable as such, with smaller torpedoes like 18.5 isotons being the majority, say 200 of them. That gives us about 9 gigatons for them and 25 gigatons for the Class VI for a total of 34 gigatons or so. Still less than what the Dreadnought warship carried.

So those are the sort of figures I'd go with. Likely Voyager was armed with a higher weapon capability given the growing tensions then between the established powers--or perhaps Voyager's lower aresenal required that her torpedoes be capable of providing a greater yield, where as a GCS during peacetime would be able to carry more than enough firepower with just 45.88 megatons to get most targets to back off (ie, a full volley from the forward launcher would be a 229.4 megatons in a short order) or use more powerful torepedoes for larger targets or during times of war.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Besides, those varying interpretations about power generation and firepower are a fraction of the figures which can be obtained, and they don't fit well with a rather exceptionally clear figure we were given about the Cardassian "Dreadnought"'s maximum 42.962 e3 MT warhead. Needless to say that the warhead alone, being the most potent part of the ship, would easily dwarf whatever AM the ship would carry as fuel. That same ship could destroy other interception crafts of similar size, laugh at Voyager's weapons and even threaten Voyager. Of course that's an old discussion I already had with WILGA, and Voyager is a smaller ship. I'd have to find a link to the discussion to avoid starting another one here.

Um...how large do you assume the warhead is? Because we've seen the UFP get some pretty big bangs from some pretty small objects. You can't just choose one superweapon and present it as the best example when you have (silly) examples like Obsession or such.[/quote]

Obsession is silly beyond useful. Come on, TOS writers never even knew what the hell antimatter was, right?
Obsession makes no sense. The explosion makes no sense. I really keep a huge distance between sane Trek and TOS stuff. Obsession isn't alone there. You remember that even more silly episode with a ground to orbit sound weapon which barely threatens the Connie yet would have a power worth destroying an entire star system or something like that?
Make an "TOS: Obsession" thread where we'll put all we can put there, and I bet my hat that you'll never rationalize what you see.
So I just happily ignore this.
I don't even see the point of bringing it. For example, the guys behind the TM (technical manual?) clearly ignored it as well when they gave torps a yield of a couple dozen megatons or so, right?

Really though, torpedo yields, as per Apocalypse Rising, have a max yield at 1,025 megatons or one gigaton.

Perhaps not, actually.

Personally I prefer the TMs here to clear this up, as they give what the productions staff thought of as an isoton, mainly that 18.5 isotons is equal to 45.88 megatons for a standard torpedo. This would put Voyager's 200 isoton torpedoes at 496 megatons.

Unless 7o9 was talking about the sum of all isoton yields here, which is a valid way to look at it (that's from vivftp iirc).

It's also worth noting that although the VFX was bad in TNG, the DITL does calc the Skin of Evil thing at 500 megatons roughly. Of course, it's also worth noting that said 500 megaton torpedoes were of little use against the Dreadnought weapon itself...

We have a Skin of Evil thread somewhere there as well. The FX effect is, indeed, not top class. There are some aspects of it which allow for a large yield, and some which point to a lower one.
It's still one of the greatest demonstrations though, and that even for torp range and speed. Compare that to most torpedo speeds, it's literally a huge outlying higher end.

Granted, if we assume that Voyager's entire arsenal had a max yield of 500 megatons (ie, Class VI were suggested to be stronger than the standard photon torpedo...), it would still come as far as only 15 gigatons, less than half the total yield of the warhead on Dreadnought.

But the warhead is not the power source, and if the power source was relevant, it would be mentionned. 15 gigatons are enormous relative to the warhead's yield. So it's impossible its fuel stock of AM can be that high, it simply doesn't make sense. You could already reach for one order of magnitude less and then it would start getting logical.

Of course, with a ship like the Enterprise D, where they have like, 250 torpedoes, you'd get something along the lines of 125 gigatons...but then again it's doubtful that the Enterprise D was carrying an entire arsenal of torpedoes with that sort of yield capability. More likely only a small portion of its armament were capable as such, with smaller torpedoes like 18.5 isotons being the majority, say 200 of them. That gives us about 9 gigatons for them and 25 gigatons for the Class VI for a total of 34 gigatons or so. Still less than what the Dreadnought warship carried.

9 gigatons per torp?
Pass the pot, bro.

So those are the sort of figures I'd go with. Likely Voyager was armed with a higher weapon capability given the growing tensions then between the established powers--or perhaps Voyager's lower aresenal required that her torpedoes be capable of providing a greater yield, where as a GCS during peacetime would be able to carry more than enough firepower with just 45.88 megatons to get most targets to back off (ie, a full volley from the forward launcher would be a 229.4 megatons in a short order) or use more powerful torepedoes for larger targets or during times of war.

I usually go with DS9 photon torps at two digits megatons, low three when on the high end.

[Mith]

Obsession is silly beyond useful. Come on, TOS writers never even knew what the hell antimatter was, right?
Obsession makes no sense. The explosion makes no sense. I really keep a huge distance between sane Trek and TOS stuff. Obsession isn't alone there. You remember that even more silly episode with a ground to orbit sound weapon which barely threatens the Connie yet would have a power worth destroying an entire star system or something like that?
Make an "TOS: Obsession" thread where we'll put all we can put there, and I bet my hat that you'll never rationalize what you see.
So I just happily ignore this.
I don't even see the point of bringing it. For example, the guys behind the TM (technical manual?) clearly ignored it as well when they gave torps a yield of a couple dozen megatons or so, right?

Yeah, I know it's silly. I made a note of that, remember?

Nor am I suggesting that the Obsession bomb is anything more than a really, really powerful superweapon. You have them in every sci-fi. My point was that although Dreadnought was an impressive bomb, it wasn't the biggest nor the most effective one in terms of getting the job done.

Perhaps not, actually.

Which contains numerous problems such as 1) we're never told the compound is split up like that, nor is there a reason to believe it is 2) there's no indication of matter-antimatter generators 3) without issue 1, there's no reason to pace out the torpedoes.

Also, I consider the 1 gigaton example to be a rarity in Trek weapons. As in, these were orbital bombardment weapons.

Unless 7o9 was talking about the sum of all isoton yields here, which is a valid way to look at it (that's from vivftp iirc).

Except vivftp's interpretation takes a very loose idea of what Seven actually said.

We have a Skin of Evil thread somewhere there as well. The FX effect is, indeed, not top class. There are some aspects of it which allow for a large yield, and some which point to a lower one.
It's still one of the greatest demonstrations though, and that even for torp range and speed. Compare that to most torpedo speeds, it's literally a huge outlying higher end.

I consider 500 mt to be the highest level weapons that they use against other ships, presumably only during wartime or battles.

But the warhead is not the power source, and if the power source was relevant, it would be mentionned. 15 gigatons are enormous relative to the warhead's yield. So it's impossible its fuel stock of AM can be that high, it simply doesn't make sense. You could already reach for one order of magnitude less and then it would start getting logical.

As in Voyager's weapons? How is that supposed to be impossible and why must it have been mentioned?

Of course, with a ship like the Enterprise D, where they have like, 250 torpedoes, you'd get something along the lines of 125 gigatons...but then again it's doubtful that the Enterprise D was carrying an entire arsenal of torpedoes with that sort of yield capability. More likely only a small portion of its armament were capable as such, with smaller torpedoes like 18.5 isotons being the majority, say 200 of them. That gives us about 9 gigatons for them and 25 gigatons for the Class VI for a total of 34 gigatons or so. Still less than what the Dreadnought warship carried.

9 gigatons per torp?
Pass the pot, bro.

What?! No! You read that wrong (or I wrote it wrong). The 9 gigatons was the total count for the Enterprise D's 45 megaton arsenal, not 9 GT per torpedo! Where did you get that from?

I usually go with DS9 photon torps at two digits megatons, low three when on the high end.

I disagree for various reasons of course, but there we go. I think the standard photon torpedo is 45 megatons, but then again, it's Starfleet and their idea of a standard torpedo is probably used for demoliton or scarring off pirates, raiders, or other lower technological enemies while they reserve the more powerful torpedoes for stronger enemies.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Obsession is silly beyond useful. Come on, TOS writers never even knew what the hell antimatter was, right?
Obsession makes no sense. The explosion makes no sense. I really keep a huge distance between sane Trek and TOS stuff. Obsession isn't alone there. You remember that even more silly episode with a ground to orbit sound weapon which barely threatens the Connie yet would have a power worth destroying an entire star system or something like that?
Make an "TOS: Obsession" thread where we'll put all we can put there, and I bet my hat that you'll never rationalize what you see.
So I just happily ignore this.
I don't even see the point of bringing it. For example, the guys behind the TM (technical manual?) clearly ignored it as well when they gave torps a yield of a couple dozen megatons or so, right?

Yeah, I know it's silly. I made a note of that, remember?

Then why mention it?

Nor am I suggesting that the Obsession bomb is anything more than a really, really powerful superweapon. You have them in every sci-fi. My point was that although Dreadnought was an impressive bomb, it wasn't the biggest nor the most effective one in terms of getting the job done.

It was the biggest conventional bomb. That said, I'll make an Obsession thread. We already have one about the ATR-4107. Any bump is welcomed I suppose. :)

Which contains numerous problems such as 1) we're never told the compound is split up like that, nor is there a reason to believe it is 2) there's no indication of matter-antimatter generators 3) without issue 1, there's no reason to pace out the torpedoes.

I added a post which rather highlights the problem of going with the idea that we should go with the certain death over radius X scenario.

Also, I consider the 1 gigaton example to be a rarity in Trek weapons. As in, these were orbital bombardment weapons.

It seems to be about conventional weapons. Or do you think that they'd prepare special weapons for this operation? Dunno, but I'm eager to read your latest opinion on this in the other thread.

Unless 7o9 was talking about the sum of all isoton yields here, which is a valid way to look at it (that's from vivftp iirc).

Except vivftp's interpretation takes a very loose idea of what Seven actually said.

If you read the dialogue, it's not loose at all. She doesn't elaborate. She gives a figure, as blunt as it is, after counting the torps. It's absolutely possible that she gave the total yield.

But the warhead is not the power source, and if the power source was relevant, it would be mentionned. 15 gigatons are enormous relative to the warhead's yield. So it's impossible its fuel stock of AM can be that high, it simply doesn't make sense. You could already reach for one order of magnitude less and then it would start getting logical.

As in Voyager's weapons? How is that supposed to be impossible and why must it have been mentioned?

I don't get what you mean here, but I invite you to bump the Dreadnought thread.

Of course, with a ship like the Enterprise D, where they have like, 250 torpedoes, you'd get something along the lines of 125 gigatons...but then again it's doubtful that the Enterprise D was carrying an entire arsenal of torpedoes with that sort of yield capability. More likely only a small portion of its armament were capable as such, with smaller torpedoes like 18.5 isotons being the majority, say 200 of them. That gives us about 9 gigatons for them and 25 gigatons for the Class VI for a total of 34 gigatons or so. Still less than what the Dreadnought warship carried.

9 gigatons per torp?
Pass the pot, bro.

What?! No! You read that wrong (or I wrote it wrong). The 9 gigatons was the total count for the Enterprise D's 45 megaton arsenal, not 9 GT per torpedo! Where did you get that from?

Ok -no pb. :)

[Mith]

Then why mention it?

My point is their super weapons are all over the place.

It was the biggest conventional bomb. That said, I'll make an Obsession thread. We already have one about the ATR-4107. Any bump is welcomed I suppose. :)

Meh, it's old.

I added a post which rather highlights the problem of going with the idea that we should go with the certain death over radius X scenario.

I'll check it out.

It seems to be about conventional weapons. Or do you think that they'd prepare special weapons for this operation? Dunno, but I'm eager to read your latest opinion on this in the other thread.

No, but we do know that they take antimatter from current stock (or at least at the time of Enterprise they did). I wouldn't be surprised if that BoP's firepower was a bit higher than usual though, Dukat had stolen it and used it as a weapon against the Klingons.

If you read the dialogue, it's not loose at all. She doesn't elaborate. She gives a figure, as blunt as it is, after counting the torps. It's absolutely possible that she gave the total yield.

Possible? Yes. Likely? No. For one thing, do the math. It would mean that the torpedoes had a yield of 6.67 isotons each. That's lower than your standard photon torpedo--and we know that Class VIs are supposed to be stronger. Kinda hard when the standard is 18.5 isotons.

I don't get what you mean here, but I invite you to bump the Dreadnought thread.

You mentioned that Voyager's arsenal should have been mentioned if it would come anywhere close to that of the Dreadnoughts. Ie, 15 gigatons would be the total output for Voyager's torpedoes (actually, by those numbers a bit higher because they supposedly have Class X torpedoes...).

EDIT: Also, I would once again like to point out that 200 isotons can't be that often used. Ie, the Quantum Torpedoes have a yield of 50-71.8 isotons or 124-178 megatons.

[Mike DiCenso]

Check out trekcore; the shuttle looks to be using aft thrusters to leave the planet rather than magic antigravity.

Actually that's when Spock jettisoned the fuel overboard to create a "distress flare". The dialog about the shuttlecraft lifting off does not state much of anything about thrusters or what manner of propulsion the ship uses to leave the planet. The only thing referenced is that the mention of "boosters" as in the bit of dialog here:

SPOCK: That is a most illogical attitude. Orbit in one minute, Mister Scott. Fuel status?

SCOTT: Fifteen pounds psi. Approximately enough for one orbit, sir.

MCCOY: After that?

SCOTT: Tapping our boosters ended our last chance for a soft landing.

BOMA: You mean a burn-up?

SPOCK: It is the usual end of a decaying orbit.

MEARS: I don't want to die up here.

SPOCK: Infinitely preferable to the kind of death we'd be granted on the planet's surface, I should think.

The boosters were used when one or more of the creatures rushed in on the craft and held it down. Given how big they were, some 3.66 meters tall, they must have easily each weighed 300-500 kg.

The only other evidence comes from this dialog here:

SPOCK: Mister Scott, how much power do we have left in the ship's batteries?

SCOTT: They're in good shape, but they won't lift us off, if that's what you're getting at.

SPOCK: Will they electrify the exterior of this ship?
SCOTT: That they will, Mister Spock!
(He dashes to the rear compartment and puts on big rubber gloves)

SPOCK: Get to the centre of the ship. Don't touch the plates. Be sure you're insulated. Stand by. Are you ready, Scott?

SCOTT: Ready, Mister Spock.

SPOCK: All right. Go. (Scott uses a spanner or something to short out the battery connections) Again! Again!
(It goes quiet and still outside)

SCOTT: I daren't use any more. Not and be sure of ignition.

SPOCK: I believe we've used enough. Mister Scott. I suggest you continue draining the phasers.

SCOTT: Aye.

The fuel or something must be ignited by the batteries. This makes it all seem more like a conventional rocket than some kind of antigravity lift.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

Then why mention it?

My point is their super weapons are all over the place.

That I get but they are totally pointless, as nonsense one shot weapons which don't fit with continuity when we're trying to define standards.

It was the biggest conventional bomb. That said, I'll make an Obsession thread. We already have one about the ATR-4107. Any bump is welcomed I suppose. :)

Meh, it's old.

It doesn't matter at all.

If you read the dialogue, it's not loose at all. She doesn't elaborate. She gives a figure, as blunt as it is, after counting the torps. It's absolutely possible that she gave the total yield.

Possible? Yes. Likely? No. For one thing, do the math. It would mean that the torpedoes had a yield of 6.67 isotons each. That's lower than your standard photon torpedo--and we know that Class VIs are supposed to be stronger. Kinda hard when the standard is 18.5 isotons.

We don't know what isotons are and how they scale up, in relevance to what.
For example, are isotons a measure relative to subspace?

[Mr. Oragahn]

The shuttle uses thrusters, but they're pointed at the back, no? What's actually lifting the shuttle? Physics raping engines plus powered antigravitation?
The shuttle had absolutely no energy left at all?

Not absolutely no energy; but was low on fuel.

Check out trekcore; the shuttle looks to be using aft thrusters to leave the planet rather than magic antigravity.

Once they're far in space. It seems antigravity is best suited for VTOL, like some force that's really good against the direction of gravity, but at some point is pointless and then shifting to thrusters is necessary/better.
It's hard then, for me, to picture exactly how we can assess that the ship took gigajoules from the hand phaser.

Besides, the dialogue posted by Mike seems to suggest something closer to these people charging up some system in order to kick start some engine.

What's the gigajoule demonstration?

We have several options. The rock disintegrations here; the incredible aquaduct destruction of "Ensigns of Command"; and finally Riker's comment about bringing down a building with widebeam setting sixteen in "Frame of Mind."

1. A NDF. Cna't be gauged.
2. EoC, which I addressed in detail on this website here. It seems you didn't have access to anything better than a few blurry screencaps, because the episode really tells a very different story (I believe there already were problems with your interpretations of the screencaps btw).
3. A NDF wide beam setting would exactly be capable of that I think. You're literally slicing off the building's base, with the advantage that NDF spreads much better than an explosion, in a cleaner way, with what looks like a minimal initial input. What was the size of the building exactly? Could a phaser blast match the power of a TNT explosion? Here's an example:

College Hall Destroyed

College Hall was demolished in a bomb blast at 3:46 am on November 8, 1991. The huge explosion also badly damaged Jafet Library and Assembly Hall. Altogether, some 40 buildings on campus suffered from the force of 100 kilos of TNT.

But then, if they could use the warp engine, while virtually immobile, to affect the mass of a moon they tried to move with tractor beams in Deja Q.
Why couldn't they use the same on their own ship?
They considerably lowered the mass of the moon with the warp field, down to "two point five million metric tonnes", a moon which mass could easily and naturally be worth hundreds of billions if not trillions of tonnes of rock. They can apply such fields to object in normal space.

"Deja Q" is in and of itself an example of power generation using the same technique.

"Deja Q" was one of the cornerstones of my original analysis here. Fundamentally, all the energy needed to lift the moon out of its low "about to smash the planet" orbit up into a high stable orbit needed to come from the E-D.

The easiest method was to route it directly through the normal warp engines to apply a warp field to the moon, and that puts a very high figure on the power of the warp engines. Conservation of energy dictates that mass-lightening doesn't make energy appear out of nothing, and that means that mass-lightening is very energy intensive.

The only way out of these power generation figures is assuming that UFP ships very freely violate conservation of energy every time the warp core is turned on.

Isn't what always happen? With ships "crushing" the universe in so far as to reach c and then move beyond relative c?
It's pretty much required. Otherwise, if we used something like E=mc² to speculate about how much energy would be required to sufficiently lighten a ship, the logic would already be borked and lead to stupidly high numbers in order to make a difference. And it of course gets totally ridiculous when applying this to the big asteroid since its mass was reduced by so many orders of magnitude.
Clearly the explanation is technobabblish beyond hope, since even E=mc² feels extremely raw and solves nothing.

Now, considering that a small quantity of AM from Wes' school science project could allow for a very short timed warp jump, and considering that we're not talking about going to warp at all but only a fraction of light, I don't see why it wouldn't work for the GCS just to get a boost to get out of a system with a quantity of AM which wouldn't be that far from the quantity consumed by the old UFP ship Riker and Wes used for their battle training.

I gauge that at 7.5 petawatts. The GCS should be about five times as massive; if peak power for the E-D is 400 EW, that means it has 10,000 times the power necessary to achieve warp 1.

Given that's a typical nominal difference cited between warp speeds, that's not at all strange.

Conversely, using my current mass estimate for the Constellation class and plugging in that original estimate of 7.5 PW for warp 1, that gives us the local g allowable for an engine whose peak strength is Warp 1 to reach warp as ... *drumroll* 0.0125 m/s^2, meaning that the Pheonix should have needed to put at least 80,000 km between it and Earth before breaking through the warp barrier. Which it almost certainly did.

Now, can you reduce the requirement by heading in-system with a warp field already on, or by spending some time charging the warp field up before actually hitting the "engage!" button? Yes. There's that much flexibility built into the calculations. However, it's a flexibility that simply isn't called for in most circumstances, and the ship still needs to come up with the energy even when the power requirements are bent by charge-up times. In "Descent" they're hiding in the sun; having a warp field active to help the Borg track them would not have been helpful. In "Relics" the need to escape the system comes up fairly suddenly. In "Deja Q" we explicitly know the warp field is applied from nothing.

Needless to say that I always found the numbers associated to warp speed rather odd.
In The Emiszsary, we had a modified space class-eight probe able to fit a tall Klingon-human hybrid female. The probe was just above two meters long. The thing had been flying at warp 9 and the distance covered by the probe was nothing short, since from the initial probe's course, they actually rerouted it so 6.1 hours.

Making things simple, the probe would have a volume above one cubic meter, but let's stick to 1 m³.
Looking at RSA's volumetrics page, a GCS has a length of 643 meters. I won't take a greater value to measure the warp bubble's volume because the GCS's height and width are inferior to the length.
Which means using an ellipsoid formula would return a volume value inferior to that of a sphere that's 643 meters wide. Nonetheless, I go for the sphere.

To summarize, that makes a high end by using a volume for the prove that's inferior to what it would be, and a volume for the E-D's warp bubble that's greater than what it should be.
And it will be an even greater high end for two other reasons: assuming that the probe has not been drifting for a longer amount of time, plus a generous figure for the stored energy the prove could tap.

That is also assuming that what defines the power requirements is the bubble size and not its frontal cross section. Then, the volume we get for a sphere that's 643 meters wide is 1.392 e8 m³.

The probe was fairly empty inside, no more than a shell with cushioned inner walls. The bits and bobs on the outside surely were what assured more of the guidance and power systems, plus a bit of the life support... and with no evidence that the thing was fitting with anything as good as an antimatter core.

The probe couldn't even claim producing the power output of a small shuttle.
On the pieces strapped to the shell on the outside, the longest of them wouldn't measure more than a couple dozen cubic centimeters. That would be the equivalent of picking perhaps ten phaser rifles and adding their volumes in order to get one monolithic volume.

It appears rather fair to assume that one of the larger pieces would be related to the power production, if not several of them.
I wouldn't see any reason to assume that the energy reserve of the probe would exceed a maximum stock of say, 1000 GJ of stored energy there (which is frankly ludicrously high considering the equivalent in phaser rifles volume).
With 21,960 in 6.1 hours, you get a constant power of 45.537 megawatts.

Multiply this by 1.392 e8 and you get a power requirement of 63.4 e8 MW, or in a correct nomenclature, 6.34 e15 W.

I'm yet to find a way to scale this down to the 2 seconds at warp 1 jump executed by Riker with his old UFP ship in that battle simulation, but I wouldn't be surprised that it would fit with the volume of that blue wax thing Wes used (assuming the blue thing is the AM, not a containment of some kind).

Needless to say that out figures differ a lot, unless I missed something.

It's also quite interesting to note that phasers aren't considered to lighten the moon. Surely if one ship can destroy an entire civilization only on phasers, or drill a wide shaft through more than a thousand kilometers of mantle, there would be enough energy and NDF power to peel off many layers of that dangerous moon.

Presuming that the matter is phased out of existence entirely. More likely, the effect of the phaser is to redistribute that matter.

Redistribute? Where? How?
For all intents and purposes, at the very least the phaser would destroy the target if it were a normal weapon. I see nothing in all NDF cases which even prove that matter is just redistributed in a way that still matter to the target that was previously hit. Phasers leave big holes, if not erase totally the target (same with disruptors) and such masses and simply considered gone for good.

There clearly is a discrepancy with the cases of massive phaser drilling and other similar events.

Which means the terawatt figure is quite just as solid when you also take into consideration antigrav tech and warp fields which magically divide masses between a thousand and a million of what they formerly and naturally were (as long as you don't abuse the thing, you know).

The terawatt figure is literally impossible. The energy has to come from somewhere.

Wasn't the terawatt figure attributed to what was channeled to the main dish at some point? I don't see how that specific reference couldn't fit with a more global peak power production in the petawatt range.
The examples of wording I provided, some being more technical than others, clearly show that assuming a capacity power production in the exawatt range from that piece of dialogue is a high end.

Those are NDF, and getting out of the big asteroid wouldn't require melting large quantities of rock at all. The Romulans had only shut the entrance.

The Romulans had melted the entrance shut.

Considering that it was meticulously done and that it was only melted, there's a clear limit to the power which can be claimed for this incident.

My contention is that appeal to NDF does not and should not reduce the presumed energy involved. We simply don't have any indication of the number of orders of magnitude required for terawatt phasers (6+), and precious little indication for anything beyond a single order of magnitude of variation in apparent NDF effect against rock or metal and comparable vaporization effects (I can think of precisely two solid examples, one of which is TDIC, and one "quasicanonical" indication, which is reading too closely into a briefly-visible Okudagram).

But nothing proves that the weapons deliver the energy, instead of the energy coming from whatever odd phenomenon the weapons work by.
An analogy would be lighting up a pool of fuel with one match. The energy released by the combustion of the match's head would be an infinitesimal value of the overall release of energy.
It's a nice analogy because we also see the fire spread across the pool from the point of contact with the flamed projectile, just like the NDF effect generally sphreads from the point of impact of the beam.

Everything indicates that "melting" the ice (as dsecribed by mister Laforge himself) would clearly break said ice at such temperatures. It could only be a very slow process. Not to say that that while it seems to take a couple seconds only by dialogue, the way ice disappears on screen shows it's actually going to take a while, like way more than an hour.
There's also the fact that once the beam is shut down, you see ice surrounding the station continuing to shrink on its own... inwards. Besides, considering that the E-D barely moved during the operation, there was a large amount of ice which was out of sight of the E-D's phasers since it would be located behind the station. Yet you don't see any spike of ice left either.

I'm not going to deny that phasers act oddly in how they selectively distribute energy.

Yes, and that's one of the reasons why I don't use Masks to find a value for weapon power, and only look at it to say look what can a ship do to an ice comet of size X with its phasers, over time Y.

At the same time with PS they were firing at a fissure and was considered the asteroid's weakest point. The fissure couldn't be relevant against a thing of the size of Earth's moon if the fissure wasn't massively large in regards to their plans to split the thing.

Even assuming that the moon wasn't actually connected at all, and was two separate rocks that happened to be resting against each other, being able to split it requires immense yield based on gravity alone.

Yes, but this time it were visuals which didn't show anything impressive at all. The magnitude of the effect you'd expect from a weapon that splits such a moon would be phenomenal.
It goes without saying that by measuring the width of the beams, the moon appears to be extremely small.
I'd like to discuss this case further if you wish to, but I think the remastered TOS would be a better source.

Actually it's the torpedoes which did most of the damage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPR4pNQGNYk
The blasts of those torpedoes also leave the hull glowing like when hit by phasers. It's possible those torps were charged with NDF stuff. The energy bolts didn't seem to have any such effect. They seemed to be old style plasma burps.

Look very closely at the hull. The torpedoes are fired first, and leave smaller holes in the hull. It's the subsequent phaser hits which cause breaches across decks 31-35 and put a giant hole in one of the nacelles.

First of all, there are numerous impacts which occur but which we don't see as the film shows what goes on on the E-D's bridge at that moment.
There could be a number of extra torps which were fired.

The first two torpedoes hit the starboard side, on the upper side of the main section, near the neck junction on the length axis.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPR4pNQGNYk#t=0m20s

The two pulses hit on the opposite side of the main section, but this time slightly underneath the lateral pinched ridge of the main section. From there on, the ship keeps turning so the starboard side can't be hit anymore.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPR4pNQGNYk#t=0m30s

The other two pulses hit the left nacelle on the portside. Debris are seen flying away but the damage doesn't appear excessive.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPR4pNQGNYk#t=0m44s

The Klingon ship has found itself partially having the E-D's starboard side in direct LOS, but doesn't hit with the pulse weapons.
Interestingly, we can see the impacts where the torpedoes formerly hit, and they're large, easy to see. More holes are present next to the two former ones. Their size suggests that the Klingon had fired more torpedoes before switching to pulse weapons. It's possible the Klingon ship had a limited stock of such weapons.
A pulse also hit the base of the nape. If you're fast enough, you can see this area right before the pulse hits. The interaction with the shield generates a flash that illuminates the nape and we can see its outline. Then you can get a view of the destruction left by the pulse impact, and it's nothing like the holes left by the torpedoes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPR4pNQGNYk#t=1m54s

Clearly, the pulse weapons weren't capable of dealing as much damage as the torpedoes, and that Klingon ship was extremely ouclassed if it couldn't rely on its torpedoes.

Besides, those varying interpretations about power generation and firepower are a fraction of the figures which can be obtained, and they don't fit well with a rather exceptionally clear figure we were given about the Cardassian "Dreadnought"'s maximum 42.962 e3 MT warhead. Needless to say that the warhead alone, being the most potent part of the ship, would easily dwarf whatever AM the ship would carry as fuel. That same ship could destroy other interception crafts of similar size, laugh at Voyager's weapons and even threaten Voyager. Of course that's an old discussion I already had with WILGA, and Voyager is a smaller ship. I'd have to find a link to the discussion to avoid starting another one here.

I disagree, but going to a specialized thread is probably a good idea.

Well I honestly can't see how there can be room for disagreement here, but there's still a thread here.

[Jedi Master Spock]

Once they're far in space. It seems antigravity is best suited for VTOL, like some force that's really good against the direction of gravity, but at some point is pointless and then shifting to thrusters is necessary/better. It's hard then, for me, to picture exactly how we can assess that the ship took gigajoules from the hand phaser.

Besides, the dialogue posted by Mike seems to suggest something closer to these people charging up some system in order to kick start some engine.

Returning to the episode directly might clarify things. I did my analysis mainly from a very fast read of transcripts before. The episode may be viewed in entirety here.

This is where we first have the mention of the problem:
SCOTT: Very bad, Mister Spock.
SPOCK: In what way?
SCOTT: We've lost a great deal of fuel. We have no chance at all to reach escape velocity. And if we ever hope to make orbit, we'll have to lighten our load by at least five hundred pounds.
SPOCK: The weight of three grown men.
SCOTT: Aye, you could put it that way.
MCCOY: Or the equivalent weight in equipment.
SPOCK: Doctor McCoy, with very few exceptions we use virtually every piece of equipment aboard this craft in attaining orbit. There's very little excess weight, except among the passengers.
BOMA: You mean three of us must stay behind.
SPOCK: Unless the situation changes radically, yes.
Note that the shuttle is unable to reach escape velocity, but is able to reach orbit.

One crewman dies, and then the crew finds some equipment they can get rid of:
SPOCK: Perhaps if you were to channel the second auxiliary tank through the primary intake valve.
SCOTT: It's too delicate. It may not be able to take the pressure as it is.
MCCOY: (coming in from rear compartment) This should save us at least fifty pounds, Mister Spock.
SPOCK: Excellent, Doctor.
MEARS: We should be able to scrape up another hundred pounds.
SPOCK: Which would still leave us at least one hundred and fifty pounds overweight.

Then we get the bad news:

SCOTT: Pressure's dropping. We're losing everything.
SPOCK: What happened?
SCOTT: One of the lines gave. The strain of coming through the atmosphere and the added load when we tried to bypass. Yes, that's done it. We have no fuel.
SPOCK: That would seem to solve the problem of who to leave behind. Consider the alternatives, Mister Scott.
SCOTT: We have no fuel! What alternatives?
All the fuel is gone, according to Scotty.

SCOTT: I can adjust the main reactor to function with a substitute fuel supply.
SPOCK: That's all very well, but we don't have a substitute supply.
SCOTT: Aye, we do. Our phasers. I can adapt them and use their energy. It'll take time, but it's possible.
MCCOY: Trouble is, they happen to be our only defence.
SPOCK: They would also seem to be our only hope.
SCOTT: Aye.
SPOCK: (after brief thought) Yeoman, your phaser.
MEARS: But what if the creatures attack again?
SPOCK: They won't attack for at least several hours. By then, with luck, we'll be gone.
SCOTT: If I can get a full load, we should be able to achieve orbit with all hands. Not that we can maintain it long.
SPOCK: We don't have to maintain it very long, Mister Scott. In less than twenty four hours, the Enterprise will be forced to abandon its search in order to make a rendezvous. If we can't maintain orbit after that time, it won't make any difference. If we burn up in a decaying orbit or die here on the planet's surface, we shall surely die. Doctor, your phaser. Go to work, Mister Scott.

I'm afraid this actually is going to wind up being quite a bit of energy, since we're having to lift an entire Galileo class shuttle with fuel drained from the phasers. One redshirt wanders off; they need all the phasers to lift off:

MCCOY: I don't know. He'll risk his neck locating Gaetano and if he finds him, he's just as liable to order him to stay behind. You tell me.
BOMA: Do you really think the ship will ever leave?
MCCOY: Well, it won't unless we get these phasers back.

Once actually lifting off, they encounter some further difficulties:


SCOTT: What are you doing?
SPOCK: Our boosters.
SCOTT: We'll never be able to hold orbit.
SPOCK: Would you rather stay here?
SCOTT: No, Mister Spock.

Spock turns on the boosters early. The shuttle may have started attempting to lift off on repulsor power, but the boosters [thrusters] were required to actually lift off. From the interior, the shuttle is vibrating roughly; from the exterior, we see that the shuttle is moving forward, not upwards, and we have a line of glowing rectangles on the shuttle aft. So yes, the shuttle is using thrusters. As a result of having to use boosters just to lift off, the craft is only able to make a single orbit, with forty five minutes until it starts to decay.

Overall, in other words, the phaser power packs had enough energy that could be turned into fuel that, with conventional thrust, was able to put an 8m shuttlecraft into orbit. Not 150 pounds; the entire craft is being accelerated to a low orbit. Say the shuttle is ten tons total mass (that would give overall density on the order of 0.2 g/cc, IIRC); then the kinetic energy it would have at about 6 kps (which is pretty much insufficient to achieve a stable LEO) would be 180 gigajoules. This is slightly unrealistically low because of the amount of work that has to be done overcoming atmospheric drag, but let's say that's treknobabbled away or that it's actually a rather small planet.

I'm afraid that while my original estimate doesn't reflect what actually happened in the episode, my original conclusions about hand phasers are robust against increases of hand phaser energy capacity by 1.5-2 orders of magnitude. I am forced to revise my estimates of how many high-powered shots a hand phaser is able to make.

What I'm requiring here is that phaser disintegration requires about as much energy as traditional vaporization. If it requires more energy, our phaser energy estimates are going increase as well. What you need is for phaser disintegration to require less energy than vaporization, and that's simply not going to line up with TOS phaser power packs having tens of gigajoules of energy.

1. A NDF. Cna't be gauged.
3. A NDF wide beam setting would exactly be capable of that I think. You're literally slicing off the building's base, with the advantage that NDF spreads much better than an explosion, in a cleaner way, with what looks like a minimal initial input. What was the size of the building exactly? Could a phaser blast match the power of a TNT explosion? Here's an example:

That's circular logic. I re-present to you this segment of the argument:

Hand phasers have gigajoule-range power storage. (Corrected: Tens of gigajoules)
They are nevertheless only capable of gigajoule-range destruction through firing. (Converting disintegration to vaporization as necessary.)

Conclusion: Phaser disintegration requires similar energy to chemical vaporization. (Caveat: Possibly more, but we don't want to go there because of what happens on the ship level.)

2. EoC, which I addressed in detail on this website here. It seems you didn't have access to anything better than a few blurry screencaps, because the episode really tells a very different story (I believe there already were problems with your interpretations of the screencaps btw).

I agree that assessing the pipes as literally heated to incandescently hot is not necessary. It has been discussed several times on these forums, yes. I can't recall where.

However, we are producing thousands of cubic meters of steam bursting a very long metal pipe, and this makes for a high energy estimate; no matter how we slice EoC, it's an event representing on the order of gigajoules of apparent destruction. We can get several gigajoules out of pipe heating if we interpret the glow as heating; we will also get several gigajoules out of several thousand cubic kilometers of high-pressure steam. We will not go below 1 gigajoule of released thermal energy; we would have to work very hard to go over 10 gigajoules of released thermal energy. This is, in other words, substantially less energy than one TOS era phaser could supply in "Galileo Seven," and we do not expect that Data was able to fire a large number of shots with this type of destructive effect. He had to modify the phaser in order to make this shot.

Isn't what always happen? With ships "crushing" the universe in so far as to reach c and then move beyond relative c?

No, it isn't. Since FTL travel is basically impossible, we're going to have to bend everything in a pretzel to get there, so we don't worry about "real" energy requirements for that.

It's pretty much required. Otherwise, if we used something like E=mc² to speculate about how much energy would be required to sufficiently lighten a ship, the logic would already be borked and lead to stupidly high numbers in order to make a difference. And it of course gets totally ridiculous when applying this to the big asteroid since its mass was reduced by so many orders of magnitude.
Clearly the explanation is technobabblish beyond hope, since even E=mc² feels extremely raw and solves nothing.

Mass lightening in the real universe could be used to draw a lot of energy very quickly out of a gravity field. Look up a bunch of old perpetual motion machine patents. If you had a mass lightening field that let you violate conservation of energy in a static situation (as required by your hypothesis) you'd be able to make almost all of them work.

Logically speaking, if Treknology can do that, you wouldn't need deuterium or antideuterium supplies at all. If we're to make any sort of sense, we're going to have to start with conservation of energy, and assuming it's only violated when absolutely necessary. Otherwise, we wind up in "Obsession" super-antimatter territory.

Needless to say that I always found the numbers associated to warp speed rather odd.

In The Emiszsary, we had a modified space class-eight probe able to fit a tall Klingon-human hybrid female. The probe was just above two meters long. The thing had been flying at warp 9 and the distance covered by the probe was nothing short, since from the initial probe's course, they actually rerouted it so 6.1 hours.

Making things simple, the probe would have a volume above one cubic meter, but let's stick to 1 m³.

Looking at RSA's volumetrics page, a GCS has a length of 643 meters. I won't take a greater value to measure the warp bubble's volume because the GCS's height and width are inferior to the length.
Which means using an ellipsoid formula would return a volume value inferior to that of a sphere that's 643 meters wide. Nonetheless, I go for the sphere.

To summarize, that makes a high end by using a volume for the prove that's inferior to what it would be, and a volume for the E-D's warp bubble that's greater than what it should be.
And it will be an even greater high end for two other reasons: assuming that the probe has not been drifting for a longer amount of time, plus a generous figure for the stored energy the prove could tap.

That is also assuming that what defines the power requirements is the bubble size and not its frontal cross section. Then, the volume we get for a sphere that's 643 meters wide is 1.392 e8 m³.

I think this is a flawed assumption. The power requirements should be driven by mass, not volume.

The probe was fairly empty inside, no more than a shell with cushioned inner walls. The bits and bobs on the outside surely were what assured more of the guidance and power systems, plus a bit of the life support... and with no evidence that the thing was fitting with anything as good as an antimatter core.

The probe couldn't even claim producing the power output of a small shuttle.
On the pieces strapped to the shell on the outside, the longest of them wouldn't measure more than a couple dozen cubic centimeters. That would be the equivalent of picking perhaps ten phaser rifles and adding their volumes in order to get one monolithic volume.

It appears rather fair to assume that one of the larger pieces would be related to the power production, if not several of them.
I wouldn't see any reason to assume that the energy reserve of the probe would exceed a maximum stock of say, 1000 GJ of stored energy there (which is frankly ludicrously high considering the equivalent in phaser rifles volume).
With 21,960 in 6.1 hours, you get a constant power of 45.537 megawatts.

Multiply this by 1.392 e8 and you get a power requirement of 63.4 e8 MW, or in a correct nomenclature, 6.34 e15 W.

I'm yet to find a way to scale this down to the 2 seconds at warp 1 jump executed by Riker with his old UFP ship in that battle simulation, but I wouldn't be surprised that it would fit with the volume of that blue wax thing Wes used (assuming the blue thing is the AM, not a containment of some kind).

Needless to say that out figures differ a lot, unless I missed something.

Here is your second problem:

Power requirement to reach warp speed, especially within system, is wholly different from power required to maintain warp speed, especially outside of a system.

I don't anticipate that warp travel requires constantly these high power levels. I'm assuming instead that warp travel requires essentially the bare minimum of energy required to change the gravitational potential energy of an object. That's a lot of power in-system; in other areas, however, it may be very little power, and once you've applied the warp field of appropriate strength, changing your effective mass to something quite near zero, maintaining it should require quite a bit less energy once you're out into open space. I don't think the E-D has the fuel necessary to maintain peak power output for more than a couple hours. On the other hand, it's possible for them to get up to close to warp nine and coast there for several hundred years in the intergalactic void.

But let me give you the "corrected" figure based on mass and not volume: 7.5 PW/2 million tons gives 3.75 megawatts/kg for "warp 1" power. x1000 for warp 9 power, x250 kg, x6.1 hours x3600 seconds/hours = 20.6 petajoules. We can easily hide that much antimatter in little modules inside the hull of the probe.

I don't see this as a problem. So what if we don't see the power supplies? Antimatter containment can be pretty compact.

Redistribute? Where? How?

In a "phased" form, still affected by gravity and to a degree non-phased matter (see episodes involving crew "out of phase"), which then de-phases slowly, atom by atom. By slowly we could mean a scale of seconds. No explosion, but the net result is the introduction of "X" vapor. As, for example, suggested by what we see in "Masks," where we have a very visible vapor cloud.

Wasn't the terawatt figure attributed to what was channeled to the main dish at some point?

Doesn't matter. With terawatt peak power production, the original million-ton Enterprise would have required ten days to get from orbital space dock around Earth to out of the system. Suddenly, just transporting the away team up from maximum transporter range requires a significant fraction of full warp power. That maximum evacuation transporter speed used to evacuate colonists from hanging in high orbit? It's actually using pretty near to maximum warp power.

It's true that we have several references to peak power in the terawatt range. However, in each of those epsiodes, we already see implicit contradictions of that figure, and power generation that low simply will not work.

Considering that it was meticulously done and that it was only melted, there's a clear limit to the power which can be claimed for this incident.

Not quite.

First, the Romulans melt an unknown amount of rock. We're not sure of the type or the precise quantity. There's more than an order of magnitude of play in the figures already.

Second, we know that the E-D can blast that hole wide open again, but this would cause bad things to happen. (Massive energy discharge, enclosed space, et cetera et cetera.) There are several orders of magnitude of play in this figure depending on the type of blasting involved.

But nothing proves that the weapons deliver the energy, instead of the energy coming from whatever odd phenomenon the weapons work by.

Except that we have a pretty good idea how much energy those weapons are supplied with. This is precisely the point of the argument you're attempting to address. We have very strong circumstantial evidence that puts the energy consumed by these weapons on the same level as the energy delivered.

Not only is it a reasonable null hypothesis to assume in the first place, we actually have evidence falling in line with it. We have no evidence against it; almost all the arguments offered invoking NDF have amounted to a hollow argument by ignorance.

It's been repeated quite a bit, and there is a bit in the TNGTM that backs it up - but the TNGTM is not the least bit canon [or consistent with the show, for that matter].

Yes, but this time it were visuals which didn't show anything impressive at all. The magnitude of the effect you'd expect from a weapon that splits such a moon would be phenomenal.
It goes without saying that by measuring the width of the beams, the moon appears to be extremely small.
I'd like to discuss this case further if you wish to, but I think the remastered TOS would be a better source.

IMO, scaling from beam width is a ridiculous choice.

First of all, there are numerous impacts which occur but which we don't see as the film shows what goes on on the E-D's bridge at that moment.
There could be a number of extra torps which were fired.

Dubious. Everything we see aligns with the idea that they opened up with torpedoes and then followed up with disruptors/phasers.

More holes are present next to the two former ones.

More, and notably, larger.

We see the second time the BoP fires. It's bolts, not torpedoes. Then we cut straight to the bridge, which rocks once, and then we have the damage report indicating that hit dealt damage across five decks. We couldn't have a clearer-cut case if we tried; those larger holes next to the initial torpedo hits are the only ones that look large enough to span five decks, and we know precisely that the second volley opened up a breach that ran for five whole decks.

I'll suggest this to you: Rather than being less destructive, other bolt impacts hit at a steeper angle, penetrating more deeply instead of skidding across a long span of hull as the second attack did. They may also have impacted a better-armored section (such as on the nacelle).