The Pegasus Redux

[Mike DiCenso]

I notice something, a nitpick: Data states that the Pegasus was pulled in by the "gravitational field" of a 5km asteroid. Does anyone else find that strange? A 5km asteroid would have no noticeable gravitational field.

UNLESS it was made of some super-dense material, which would therefore be harder to destroy.

Actually, Data says nothing other than such a thing is possible:

DATA: I have confirmed Geordi's readings. The resonance signature is originating from somewhere beneath the asteroid's surface.

PRESSMAN: Beneath the surface? How's that possible?

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

I highlighted Data's conditional modifier there. He's stating a possible scenario, not an absolute fact. Later we get a better understanding of what happened since the Pegasus was still phase cloaked and drifting through the asteroid when it decloaked for whatever reason:

[Engineering]

LAFORGE: Commander, we've routed the impulse engines through the plasma conduits, but you'll have to watch the intercooler levels. If they get too high, we'll blow the entire relay system.

RIKER [OC]: Understood.

[Bridge]

RIKER: I think that's what happened twelve years ago. The cloak blew out the plasma relays on the Pegasus after we left the ship. The plasma ignited in space, and it looked as if the ship had been destroyed.

PRESSMAN: So the ship drifted into this system still in a phased state, and when it passed through this asteroid...

RIKER: The cloak failed, and half the ship materialised in solid rock.

LAFORGE [OC]: La Forge to Bridge.

So once again we have SWST not properly following what was said and done in the episode.
-Mike

[StarWarsStarTrek]

There you go again dismissing without providing a reason why. Having magnetic properties that can mess up a millions of metric ton starship or several tons shuttlecraft... spacecraft that I might remind you that have withstood stellar magnetic fields many orders of magnitude more powerful than the Earth indicates that the asteroid is not normal in any sense of the word. In order to generate a field of that magnitude, you'd have to have something on the order of a large black hole at the center of this asteroid to produce gravitational and magnetic disturbances big enough to shake the E-D or throw a shuttlecraft.

Your obvious ignorance of the episode in question is rather glaring. You need to step back and admit this instead of trying to twist around the information people are giving to you. Which by the way, would grounds for being issued another dishonesty warning should you continue to go down that route.

This is circular logic. You are claiming that the obviously rock asteroid has some sort of black hole/large gravitational signature to it (which still would have no effect on its durability unless if its gravity field were planetary sized) because the Enterprise has withstood uber-magnetic fields before. The latter you have not supported. Where has the Enterprise withstood super magnetic fields?

Um, no. Read what I wrote again. You said that 600 kt (0.6 MT) to 5 megatons is what you get from shattering the asteroid. And no, 7.5 MT is not that close. It's 50 percent above the 5 MT estimate you provided, which is quite signficant as an increase. Furthermore, the torpedoes detonate within milliseconds, so that wattage will be insanely high.

With fan calculations, a 50% difference is very close. The pro Trek high end (IMO, wanked) photon torpedo calculations vary from 100 to 1000 gigatons.

The 30 megaton figure is stellar radiation taken over a large amount of time. Presumably, the burst limit of the Enterprise's shields are significantly lower.

Crissakes, dude. This is blatently fallcious in every possible way. How do you know, for example, that shattering the Pegasus would leave such a small amount of material behind? How could Riker or anyone else know that by doing so that within any small piece that there would not also be surviving pieces of material useful to the Romulans or other enemies of the Federation?

If that were the case, Riker would have specified vaporize or melt. Merely saying "destroy" when he really meant "vaporize" could have screwed up the operation had they gone through with the plan. This is either an example of fragmentation or very horrible communication.

"Destroy" is not assumed to mean "vaporize" in speech. If somebody recommends destroying a worn out factory, nobody assumes it to mean vaporize.

Except that it would not accomplish the objectives. That has been made plain and simple to you. You are assuming that, and you are deliberately twisting things to try and make it seem as though the Pegasus would be so utterly destroyed by a few megatons. The fact of the matter is that we have other episodes to compare this to. In fact we have also Star Trek: The Motion Picture where the 23rd century refit Enterprise mostly vaporizes a large asteroid with a single torpedo. All of this ties together as part of one continuity, you know.

1.) ST:TMP asteroid mostly vaporized. Check

2.) "Booby Trap" [TNG]: several asteroids and a large ship vaporized, one torpedo for each asteroid and the ship. Check

3.) "Skin of Evil" [TNG]: Explosion from single torpedo detonation hundreds of km wide indicating 500-1000 MT.

4.) "Rise" [VOY]: Asteroid hundreds of meters long and made of nickel and iron can be vaporized such that only a few tiny bits of debris less than one centimeter survive. Check.

5.) "For the Uniform" [DS9]: Each of the two quantum torpedoes fired at a Maquis planet produced explosions in the hundreds of km and continent sized shockwaves indicatiing 500-1000 MT of firepower.

I could go on and on. The point is clear and easily understandable. When Riker means destroy, he very likely means each torpedo is going to be doing some signficant amounts of vaporization and melting of the asteroid to ensure total and complete destruction of the Pegasus

What? He "very likely" means is where your argument goes. Would Picard know that "destroy" means "vaporize"? Would Riker make such an obvious failing in communication?

They are issues, but only if you are dishonest about it. First off, given that the asteroid could generate enough gravity for a total collapse of the chasm to occur, that's mighty impressive.

Gravity? Why gravity?

1.) You are clearly unfamilar with the episode, or pretend to be, so you do not have any idea the scale of what you are talking about.

2.) I just posted the dialog of Worf talking about cutting their way out. The only reason it is not viable is due to Data's warning about a possible instability of the chasm. Thus phasers can cut enough for the E-D to escape, and rebutting your earlier assertion.

I already addressed this in an edit of my post. If the chasm collapsing is so deadly, then that means that the Enterprise is incapable of surviving a collapse of rock or simply ramming through. The same ramming can penetrate hulls and sometimes even shields.

But let's address your KE issue for the E-D. They were in a chasm 4 kilometers long. If the whole thing collapsed from the E-D cutting her way out with phasers, that would be at least a billion cubic meters falling on them from above, likely much more than that. Given the odd gravity of the asteroid, and assuming a low rock density of only 2.5 metric tons per meter cubed, we would have 2.5 billion tons falling on the E-D. Let's make it at a leisurely 20 meters a second, which would then be expressed as:


m = 2500000000 ton metric = 2500000000000 kilogram
v = 20 meter/second = 20 meter/second

Solution:

kinetic energy (K) = 5 x 10e14 joules

Basically the E-D soaks 5,000 TJ of KE.

And while this might be dangerous to the E-D, it's not automatically fatal. By contrast, the asteroid colliding with the ISD in TESB imparted 36 TJ of KE, destroying the bridge tower and quite possibly the rest of the ship with it.

Excuse me?

The ISD's shields were down. When it's shields are up, no ISD's were even phased by terajoule level asteroids hitting them repeatedly. If the Enterprise can really take gigaton level blasts like you claim, why would less than a megaton of kinetic energy by so deadly that Data recommends against it?

And that's a point too; they did not cut through because they were afraid of the chasm collapsing, implying that 5000 TJ would be deadly even to a shielded Enterprise.

They have been posted in threads you have participated in several times as well as numerous past ones. The chasm the E-D was in is no less than 3,000 meters long. We know this because when the E-D uses the phase cloak to move through the rock, Worf calls off the distance travelled and the distance remaining to the surface, and the rest of the chasm where the E-D was sitting trapped in was a good kilometer or more long based on the fact that the E-D is 642 meters long and at least 470 meters wide. But I'll even be generous and go with Graham Kennedy's more conservative estimate:

The volume of asteroidal material melted can be calculated by the equation :

V = pi x average radius of fissure2 x depth of fissure
= 3.142 x 3002 x 3000
= 3.142 x 3002 x 3000
= 848,340,000 cubic metres.

Assuming that the asteroid is rock the density, boiling point and specific heat capacity should be approximately 2,300 kg/cubic metre, 2500 K, and 720 J/Kg/K respectively. The energy required to melt this volume can be calculated thus :

E = 8.4834 x 108 x 2300 x 2500 x 720
= 3.512 x 1018 Joules

That's about 8.36 gigatons for a little more than 0.8 billion cubic meters of rock.

1. You got the context of my question wrong. I was asking for calculations supposedly refuting that the asteroid was largely hollow.

2. What are you even talking about? When the Romulans "destroyed the entrance"? Destroying the entrance means blocking the entrance with rocks. It does not require any melting of rocks. More likely, they could simply collapse a bunch of rock on top the entrance; what does this have to do with melting the chasm block CREATED by this? Are you referring to when they suggested cutting through? Because not only is there no time frame specified, but there is no need to cut through all of the rock instead of simply an Enterprise shaped hole.

Are you really this dense? The Romulan warbird did it. To seal in the E-D. In order to fill a 3,000 m x 700 m tunnel with molten rock you have to have at least 800 million cubic meters, and given other scalings up to a billion cubic meters. The E-D herself is 470 meters wide, which means any tunnel they carve has to be at least 500 meters wide to allow a proper escape.

And? There is no time frame specified; it isn't even guaranteed that they need to melt the rock, instead of fragmenting it so that the Enterprise can ram through.

None of what you're saying makes any sense. Picard only waited for a few hours so that cloaking device could be installed. But you're either out of ignorance or intentially misreprensenting the episode's events.

1.) The E-D arrives on the scene under Admiral Pressman to find and if possible salvage the Pegasus.

2.) The warbird Terix under Sirol's command shows up, also looking for the ship.

3.) Both parties exchange pleasantries and go about the search under the cover of doing geological research.

4.) The E-D discovers the Pegasus, but finds that it is buried deep inside a large asteroid.

5.) The warbird starts coming over to see what the E-D has found, so very quickly everyone comes up with options. Riker's is to just destroy everything to ensure the Romulans don't get anything of the Pegasus.

6.) The E-D manages to use a technobabble trick to fool the warbird, then comes back the next day and enters the asteroid to get at the Pegasus. They travel down several kilometers into the asteroid and find the other ship half stuck in solid rock. Pressman and Riker beam over and retrieve the phase cloak prototype.

7.) The warbird fires on the asteroid for a few seconds while Pressman and Riker as still on the Pegasus. They beam back immediately and reach the bridge just in time to see hundreds of millions of cubic meters of rock flowing into the chasm.

8.) Sirol contacts Picard and offers to help evacuate the crew, but Picard puts it off in order to solicit options from the crew (Worf makes the suggestion to use the phasers to cut their way out). Riker then reveals the true nature of the mission and tells Picard about the cloaking device, which is installed on the E-D within 9 hours and used to escape.

You have a better sense of context now? Please keep this in mind as well as read up on the episode at Memory Alpha or Wikipedia because this is just inexcusable on your part.
-Mike

You don't get it. You were assuming that it would only take a few seconds for the Enterprise to cut through the rock as they suggested...for no reason. The Enterprise had hours to wait; what suggests that they could cut through in seconds? How do you know that it would not take minutes, hours or even days?

[Mike DiCenso]

This is circular logic. You are claiming that the obviously rock asteroid has some sort of black hole/large gravitational signature to it (which still would have no effect on its durability unless if its gravity field were planetary sized) because the Enterprise has withstood uber-magnetic fields before. The latter you have not supported. Where has the Enterprise withstood super magnetic fields?

No it is not. This is another example of you deliberately twisting what people say in order to get around not having to properly address their points. If you watched "The Pegasus" on YouTube the way you claim you were going to, then you'd understand the issues here, furthermore you would also understand how bizarre the situation is given that you are probably very aware of the fact that the E-D and other Federation starships have flown quite close to stars. We have been discussing an example of that in the shields thread you started a few days ago, you know, "Relics", and another example "Descent, Part 2". That means the E-D was close to two different stars, one an oddly unstable G-type star, the other a very massive and hot star, both of which are going to be throwing out massive magnetic fields.

Now, stop this arguing from ignorance tactic, it is getting old fast, and will be held against you as proof of your dishonest debating.

So my point, simply speaking, is that conditions within the asteroid gravimetrically and magnetically were not normal. Something is odd here that can't be explained through our current understanding of planetary science.

With fan calculations, a 50% difference is very close. The pro Trek high end (IMO, wanked) photon torpedo calculations vary from 100 to 1000 gigatons.

The 30 megaton figure is stellar radiation taken over a large amount of time. Presumably, the burst limit of the Enterprise's shields are significantly lower.

Those are not wanked. Even you have acknowledged the scalings of the "For the Uniform" explosions, and the yeilds associated with it. The 100 megatons is based on several scalings and That's incontrovertiable.

The 30 megaton figure you cling to like a drowning man desperately grasping at a piece of flotsom in a storm has seldom been duplicated by most other people looking honestly at "Relics". See Graham Kennedy's analysis that I've linked to in the shield thread and posted excerpts from as an example. It's conclusion is over 2.5 times Wong's numbers, and that was Graham being conservative.

So what it boils down to is that you are trying desperately to validate Wong's numbers by any and all means possible, because to do otherwise means having to acknowledge that Star Trek shields, even damaged and run low level secondary power source can tank huge amounts of power. Furthermore the "burst limit" as you call it does does not fit with what we know about shields in Trek, which is to say that they act more like capacitors or batteries, storing up a large amount of energy, then releasing that in variable amounts depending on what they are defending against. So a photon torpedo will drain the shields quickly compared to being close to a G-type star because the torpedo can release a lot of energy very quickly compared to the star.

Nothing mysterious about this.

If that were the case, Riker would have specified vaporize or melt. Merely saying "destroy" when he really meant "vaporize" could have screwed up the operation had they gone through with the plan. This is either an example of fragmentation or very horrible communication.

"Destroy" is not assumed to mean "vaporize" in speech. If somebody recommends destroying a worn out factory, nobody assumes it to mean vaporize.

Except, as I pointed out before, using a large number of examples, that destroying something with torpedoes often means vaporization. You can try and dance around this all you like, but the facts are quite plain for any and all to see. The context is very critical because Riker wants the Pegasus totally destroyed so no one can have it.


What? He "very likely" means is where your argument goes. Would Picard know that "destroy" means "vaporize"? Would Riker make such an obvious failing in communication?

What? He "very likely" means is where your argument goes. Would Picard know that "destroy" means "vaporize"? Would Riker make such an obvious failing in communication?

See, this is what gets you in trouble, you don't even know a damn thing about the story or anything else. Picard isn't the one asking for options, it's Admiral Pressman who asked for options as the warbird closed in. Pressman and Riker served together and Pressman's later angy talkdown to Riker about destroying the Pegasus implies that the ship would be totally destroyed. There is no fragmentation involved here. Not to mention, once such an operation got underway, it wouldn't take much for Riker or anyone else to order the weapons to full yeild or make clarifications.

Gravity? Why gravity?

Don't play dumb. If you need this basic a science lesson then we're not going to be able to proceed. This also smacks of you being dishonest and trying to dance around the issue. Gravity is everything here, to get enough gravity to threaten the E-D with a large-scale cave-in, the gravity and therefore the density of the asteroid has to be quite large for it's size.

I already addressed this in an edit of my post. If the chasm collapsing is so deadly, then that means that the Enterprise is incapable of surviving a collapse of rock or simply ramming through. The same ramming can penetrate hulls and sometimes even shields.

See my calcs, which by the way, I've been providing, while you have done nothing but handwave.

Excuse me?

The ISD's shields were down. When it's shields are up, no ISD's were even phased by terajoule level asteroids hitting them repeatedly. If the Enterprise can really take gigaton level blasts like you claim, why would less than a megaton of kinetic energy by so deadly that Data recommends against it?

And that's a point too; they did not cut through because they were afraid of the chasm collapsing, implying that 5000 TJ would be deadly even to a shielded Enterprise.

Or it would trap them, forcing them to just sit there for hours or days on end with shields up. Did that ever occur to you.

As for the ISD, what special information do you have, from either the movie or the novelization of TESB that says the shields for the ISD were down? In any case, 36 TJ is several orders of magnitude below the 5,000 TJ of the E-D. See the problem? Or maybe you don't want to because to do so will make you realize just how damn tough the E-D is compared to an ISD.

1. You got the context of my question wrong. I was asking for calculations supposedly refuting that the asteroid was largely hollow.

2. What are you even talking about? When the Romulans "destroyed the entrance"? Destroying the entrance means blocking the entrance with rocks. It does not require any melting of rocks. More likely, they could simply collapse a bunch of rock on top the entrance; what does this have to do with melting the chasm block CREATED by this? Are you referring to when they suggested cutting through? Because not only is there no time frame specified, but there is no need to cut through all of the rock instead of simply an Enterprise shaped hole.

1.) I see you've not been paying any attention when I have posted those calculations. I'll just cheat a bit and make you do some work. Go here to Wong's calculator page and type in 9,000 meters for the diameter. You'll get 3.820E+11 meters cubed in the volume window. That's 3,800,000,000,000 cubic meters. Nearly 4 trillion cubic meters just in case you can't figure it out. So since I used Graham Kennedy's numbers before, and you surely read his calculations for the tunnel's size. If not, read them again to see how he calculated that, then divide that into the number above. The asteroid's overall volume is 4,470 times greater than the chasm's volume.

Do you understand now? Asteroid Gamma 601 was not "mostly hollow". Far from it.

And? There is no time frame specified; it isn't even guaranteed that they need to melt the rock, instead of fragmenting it so that the Enterprise can ram through.

This is stupid. This shows you are playing up the ignorance card for all it is worth.

You claim to have watched "The Pegasus", then you have the gall to tell me that the Romulan warbird did not melt the chasm entrance?





Okay everyone, pay attention... SWST says that what you see above is not melted rock!

You don't get it. You were assuming that it would only take a few seconds for the Enterprise to cut through the rock as they suggested...for no reason. The Enterprise had hours to wait; what suggests that they could cut through in seconds? How do you know that it would not take minutes, hours or even days?

Why not? In TNG's "Legacy", the E-D cuts a hole 1.6 km deep and 70 meters wide to allow a landing party to beam into a deep underground city where Federation citizens are being held hostage. The drilling operation only takes 13 seconds to do, and they were not doing anything other than making a tunnel for transport.

In "Inheritance", the E-D cuts a hole at least 5 meters wide and 2,500 km deep to drill down to a planet's core so that equipment can be set up to reliquify it. This is accomplished in about 22 seconds.
-Mike

[Praeothmin]

When it's shields are up, no ISD's were even phased by terajoule level asteroids hitting them repeatedly.

And you will of course provide evidence of this, such as the events, the asteroid's strenght calculations, etc...

[Admiral Breetai]

And you will of course provide evidence of this, such as the events, the asteroid's strenght calculations, etc...

I'd like to see clips form the films supporting this too

[Picard]

About "Pegasus", in military terms.

OBJECTIVE: Destroy old starship embedded in rock along with very small but very important piece of equipment

AVALIABLE ASSETS: One Galaxy class starship

AVALIABLE TIMEFRAME: Very short. OPFOR operations detected in area.

So:

1) Enterprise was operating in potentially hostile area (neutral zone). It would be logical that torpedo complement was refilled prior to mission
2) they could not just fragment asteroid and destroy fragments with phasers - timeframe is quite limited, and destruction had to be complete to preserve secrecy (not even Picard knew about cloak). Only other option is complete vaporization of asteroid. I don't think they even knew precise location of Pegasus.
3) events such as "Rise", "Skin of Evil" and few others exclude anything lower than few hundred megatons per torpedo as possible value
4) starship hulls are at least partially constructed from tritanium, and...
http://picard578.hostoi.com/startrek-vs ... rials.html
http://picard578.hostoi.com/startrek-vs ... asers.html
http://picard578.hostoi.com/startrek-vs ... edoes.html

In any case, 36 TJ is several orders of magnitude below the 5,000 TJ of the E-D.

Source? Just interested.