TOS & TNG+

[Mr. Oragahn]

There are two different ways of scaling the asteroid seen in "The Pegasus"; the first is using the 642.5 m x 470m x 142m E-D when it is entering the volcanic chasm, and then try to find the chasm in the overall views of the asteroid to determine it's size. This is the method that Brian Young and at least one other person have done; one undersizing the asteroid at about 8 km, the other making it slightly larger at just under 9 km. Of course in both cases the two went with an assumption on which of the several visible chasms was the one the E-D enters, and both chose the largest one in proportional size relative to the rest of the asteroid.

Wong, disengeniously used the Young scaling to claim the asteroid is only 5.1 km by simply using the smallest dimension of the irregular shaped asteroid, in addition to picking a spot that is the largest proportionately to the overall asteroid. The long axis of the asteroid, using his 5.1 km scaling of the short axis, would actually be closer to 8.809 km.

The other way, which produces a much larger size for the asteroid, is to scale the 1.341 km x 1 km x .4 km D'Derdiex warbird Terix to the asteroid in the scenes where the warbird is scanning the asteroid, looking for the Pegasus, and the E-D hides the Pegasus by putting out a field of technobabble particles, and leaving the scene for a time to make it look like there nothing of interest. At various points throughout the warbird is shown in close proximity, using a similar approach to the above-mentioned E-D scalings, the asteroid becomes signficantly larger, somewhere between 33 and 50 km at the upper end of the warbird scalings. The lower end tends towards 18 and 25 km.

The method used below seems rather accurate:





I cannot remember where I picked those scalings though.

The fact that Dreadnought wasn't simply a missle, but an armed starship in it's own right has to be considered in the final possible damage it could inflict. The warhead alone could release an explosion with a yeild up to 43 gigatons. But as I calculated here, the warp core of a starship could contain enough antimatter to produce an explosion of nearly 4 gigatons on the conservative end of things. Imagine what the antimatter in the core and the reactant storages pods would release all together in addition to the warhead itself!

It would be absurd to focus on the warhead charge of the weapon if it ran on a power source which would add significantly to the whole destruction. For a weapon with a yield of 43 gigatons, even claiming low gigatons worth of warpcore fuel is quite pulled.
It's not exactly meant to travel for that long either.

It's a lot like the warp speed issues. DS9 shows speeds similar to TOS's quantifiable speeds, and TNG in many cases shows faster speeds than TOS; it's just that TNG and VOY happen to also include a number of slow speeds, and those debaters claiming that Trek warp speeds are slow concentrate on Voyager.

It's also a point that the Voyager crew wasn't the brightest Starfleet had to offer.

That has nothing to do with how fast Voyager can go. Even an average compent crew should be able to figure out that they go so fast for so long with their ship. But it was established in episodes like "The Year of Hell, Part I" and "Hope and Fear", that when they got improved navigational data for the Delta quadrant, it could or did shave several years off of the journey home. Conversely, a navigational obstacle could add months or years.
-Mike[/quote]

But Voyager's travel time was purely theoretical when first made, iirc, since they didn't know where they were. They couldn't know about the obstacles or shortcuts. They could only work from speed charts.

[Mike DiCenso]

It solely boils down to what you think a full spread volley means. If It get it right, those BoPs have one major launch tube, even maybe just one, so firing a volley there would be hard unless it meant a succession of torpedoes.
Which as far as I'm concerned, can extend up to the full release of all torpedoes in a chain of successive launches.

Not really. Look again at the quote I provided, in particular O'Brien's reponse to Damar. He states flatly that even a dozen or so torpedoes won't be enough to penetrate the fortress' shields. That pretty much caps what the BoP can do. We have also seen several times in TNG and DS9 what a full spread of torpdoes means: between 4-5 torpeodes from top-of-the-line starships like the Defiant, E-D, and E-E.

There is no other way to define it since it is well-defined and demonstrated in the series and movies.
-Mike

[Mike DiCenso]

There are two different ways of scaling the asteroid seen in "The Pegasus"; the first is using the 642.5 m x 470m x 142m E-D when it is entering the volcanic chasm, and then try to find the chasm in the overall views of the asteroid to determine it's size. This is the method that Brian Young and at least one other person have done; one undersizing the asteroid at about 8 km, the other making it slightly larger at just under 9 km. Of course in both cases the two went with an assumption on which of the several visible chasms was the one the E-D enters, and both chose the largest one in proportional size relative to the rest of the asteroid.

Wong, disengeniously used the Young scaling to claim the asteroid is only 5.1 km by simply using the smallest dimension of the irregular shaped asteroid, in addition to picking a spot that is the largest proportionately to the overall asteroid. The long axis of the asteroid, using his 5.1 km scaling of the short axis, would actually be closer to 8.809 km.

The other way, which produces a much larger size for the asteroid, is to scale the 1.341 km x 1 km x .4 km D'Derdiex warbird Terix to the asteroid in the scenes where the warbird is scanning the asteroid, looking for the Pegasus, and the E-D hides the Pegasus by putting out a field of technobabble particles, and leaving the scene for a time to make it look like there nothing of interest. At various points throughout the warbird is shown in close proximity, using a similar approach to the above-mentioned E-D scalings, the asteroid becomes signficantly larger, somewhere between 33 and 50 km at the upper end of the warbird scalings. The lower end tends towards 18 and 25 km.

The method used below seems rather accurate:

The images and scaling you provided are vivftp's from SB.com. It has several problems, namely it does not take into account lightning differences in the images used, so he winds up making the mistake of choosing the larger chasm structure, rather than the smaller, very similar one to the left of it, which would result in doubling the asteroid's size to around 12 x 18 km. In both his and Wong's case they assume that the asteroid is going to be merely shattered, and that there will not be signficant vaporization/melting involved in it's destruction.
-Mike

[Jedi Master Spock]

I can't remember what AMOT is about, but I know for sure that Masks certainly does not point to high figures. Much on the contrary.

"A Matter of Time" involves drilling for carbon dioxide pockets. It's most famous for the .06 terawatt maximum variance, and the threat to accidentally burn off the planet's atmosphere.

It certainly does.

For every cubic kilometer of typical comet-density snowball (.5 g/cc) that is turned into dissipating vapor, you have to come up with 600-700 megatons of energy. If you're superheating it - one possible explanation for the luminous yellow effect in the melt zone and the swift dissipation of gases - that can nearly double.

We have an initial state, we have a final state. The scaling of the comet is disputed, but regardless of which scaling you use, we have a multi-gigaton event.

Other phaser drilling events are hard to gauge because we don't know for fact if it requires 10 joules of energy to make dissapear a given amount of rock that would get vapourized with 10 joules of energy.
Pegasus is very open ended, but certainly does not even approaches the craziest stuff of TOS.

Does it?

This asteroid looks to be larger and more massive than the ones destroyed by the Romulans in "Balance of Terror." It possibly even exceeds the volume of rock melted by the Enterprise's maximum strength phaser blast in "The Paradise Syndrome," and I suspect there's going to be a higher energy density involved in the putative "Pegasus" incident.

In fact, the "blast out of the asteroid using phasers" plan involves quite a bit of firepower too. We're dealing with on the order of a cubic kilometer of rock here.

The whole visual is illogical. You say it's hard to argue for sub gigaton, solely based on the size of that flash. But it's equally hard to argue for such yields based on the duration of that flash.
Besides, didn't they land again and check out what happened?

As I said, it's a bloom, not a flash... but I also modeled it as a flash of light. Same results.

Guess what? Solar intensity illumination at a 187.5 km radius means your source is putting out 4*pi*(187,500m)^2*1.4 kW/m^2 = 620 terawatts of radiation in the visible range. Overall, we see about a petajoule of luminous energy right there. And what percentage of the energy of a matter/antimatter weapon is going to go out in the visible spectrum in two seconds?

Well, in general, based on what we know about M/AM reactions and nuclear tests within atmosphere... initial visual flash is going to be a pretty small fraction of the yield. Maybe 0.1% if you're lucky. Whoops. We went over a gigaton, again.

Of course, there's a little bit of flex in those figures, but not much. I went over this a lot at ST.com in horrific detail. No matter what physical phenomenon you model that little beige circular thing as, barring unreasonable assumptions (such as assuming the planet is nowhere near Earth-sized) wind up in the general neighborhood of e18-e19 joules based on the scale and speed of effect.

I'm curious about how you obtain those figures though. I'd probably pick the figures on your website with a much more open heart if I had no checked Masks to see that your gigaton phaser estimation was a pure invention which is heavily contradicted by the very episode, when watched, not seen through one or two screencaps.

Pure invention? Hardly.

Prone to error? Yes. "Masks" is not a very precise incident. It's also a 10% power incident, and my final conclusion (on my website) is that a short burst with about a gigaton yield should be possible is one that's quite far away from the high end of the range dictated by the MOE.

That works out to taking about 6-7 seconds per cubic kilometer of comet.

Besides, the point is making the averages when there are great variances. TNG+ has many references, and you can find a middle ground with eventually top petawatt ranges from warp core, a percentage of that being diverted to phasers, and two digits, maybe three digits for torps; although again in theory a low gigaton torp should be no problem there.

The problem is what kind of average I take. If I take the arithmetic mean, then if I count Spock's claim to be able to split in two pieces something half the size of the moon, and divide by a hundred cases in which little is done, then I'm still in the multi-gigaton range - and it's a very weak example to start with, especially since the phasers don't have that huge of an effect.

The real problem to be how Gene Rodenberry has retconned certain aspects of Trek. The most obvious recton being the flight speeds.

I don't believe he actually retconned those. The TOS "backstage" scale is one of the slowest scales available, and had nothing to do with actual TOS speeds. Likewise with TNG.

Eventually, that ounce of antimatter thing could be rationalized if we really pushed it hard, by implying volume, a high concentration, checking out what 10,000 cobalt bombs means in that context, and that the atmosphere itself only needed a something to start going through an exotic chain reaction.

Still, there's that sound wave of jaw dropping power, where rationalization is harder.

And the matter of how much atmosphere the planet has, how large the planet is... et cetera. I'm inclined to treat that one as a simple scientific error, personally.

But as a whole, the pattern is that for TOS, rationalization is used to lower figures, while in most of TNG and late Trek, it's used to increase them.

Er... not really. As a rule, I rationalize far fewer examples than I discard. I mostly take figures, discard all the ones that I can't fit to within a generous MOE, and then run with what seems reasonable from there in making my final estimate. I also consider the relative strength of the example. SOE is quite strong as a "lower bound" type estimate, but it is not very precise.

I have chosen a gigaton as a probable maximum torpedo yield not based on the maximum possible yield seen in effects. A reasonable estimation for every firepower example includes a number of ranges that go well past the gigaton mark when considered carefully - but the amount of antimatter stored on a torpedo seems sharply limited.

TDIC I choose to discard when analyzing firepower. The order of magnitude of firepower required to physically disassemble a planet is simply not compatible with the other cases. Similar with STV. That sheer speed and range is very difficult to reconcile with most later examples.

"Where Silence Has Lease" gives one of the highest speeds of any episode... and it's for warp 2. I prefer to place that one in the outlier column as well, though I may consider it when picking my median path.

You call them problematic, I suppose, in the context where someone would like to make all yields worth of the TOS craze.

Like I said, there really aren't more low-yield than high-yield examples in the TNG+ era. TDIC is the singular most egregious example, but some of the most high-energy events happen in Voyager and DS9. I pointed out just how much more lethal the Delta Flyer's projected warp core breach is than the detonation of Dreadnought's warhead.

Huh, from what I've read, TOS enabled speeds which had ships cross a galactic radius in less than a day.

OK, please read this page. While there are a number of examples that seem pretty loose, every incident in which the old Constitution-class Enterprise definitely travels 30,000 or more light years within one day involves hijacking. All but STV involve highly advanced aliens. As I've said, STV should be discarded as an outlier. Speeds in TOS under conventional warp power in general do not exceed 1 million times lightspeed, although they sometimes come close, and usually are not sustained for more than a couple thousand light years at a stretch.

As a whole, TNG+ really got below that.

Below and above.

TNG has the second-fastest top speeds (next to STV) and the largest volumes of inanimate matter destroyed by Federation phasers, and comes a close second to "Generations" for most destructive use of weapons by a Federation-level character (solar destruction). TNG also requires higher reactor power than any other series, as mentioned previously.

DS9 has the singularly highest actually used bombardment firepower example, hands down, in TDIC. Planets only ever blew up on their own in TOS. Or got eaten by a certain ancient alien superweapon that the Federation couldn't possibly duplicate, but even the alien superweapons got bigger. Supernovas as collateral damage for the Q, anybody?

Voyager explicitly gives the highest hazard-to-mass ratio for a vessel with the Delta Flyer in "Drive." Do you know how many teratons you need to destroy all light vessels within a million klicks? Just killing unprotected humans at that distance is difficult.

But, in the end, maybe Trek on the average can have yields tickling the gigaton range without any problem.

If you really want to see if this reality works better than the more moderate ones argued by other people, you could still try to talk to a debator from SDN, or SBC, and actually defend that position.

Maybe you (JMS) could get some decade old misconceptions corrected, and possibly increase the averages.

So, what do you say? This would surely revive the debate.

I've talked with some SDN/SB residents of the anti-Trek persuasion on ST.com. Mostly, they don't seem to listen to the evidence regarding any high power or high speed example, preferring to try to rationalize it away in various irrational ways.

If you want a true average, I could throw them all together and average, but I'd probably wind up with something unreasonably high thanks to the occasional truly ridiculous example.

[Mith]

Wouldn't episodes dedicated to specific hardware of feats of the ship be taken as more solid examples rather than an off hand claim, save for it being stupidly absurd to the rest of the evidence.

For example, The Perfect Society and Deja Q are major examples of tractor beam technology.

[Mith]

But as I said, at that point he didn't factor in the shield, so blast radii and tremors would matter against structures.
If the major buildings were hardened to unfathomable extents - which would require proof - they'd just concentrate a few nukes there, and proceed with air blast damage for the rest.
Plus fires would finish the job if there's anything left up.

That's irrelevant, really one way or the other. However you slice it, the combined firepower of the 4-5 or so torpedoes the BoP could be expected to fire in a single spread would quite handily exceed the yeild of Tsar Bomba's 50 MT. There is just no getting around this.
-Mike

It solely boils down to what you think a full spread volley means. If It get it right, those BoPs have one major launch tube, even maybe just one, so firing a volley there would be hard unless it meant a succession of torpedoes.
Which as far as I'm concerned, can extend up to the full release of all torpedoes in a chain of successive launches.

A full spread at most is about 4-5 torpedoes, and since it was a raider Bird of Prey, it might have had a burst type configuration. Or they would have modified it.

So your idea is wrong. Besides, Miles already said that even if they launched 12 torpedoes at the base, it still wouldn't take down the shields, and his very method of making the point is akin to saying "even if you fire twice that many torpedoes, you still wouldn't do it", so at most, it could be 4-6, and Miles assumed they were going with the highest number. In any case, the range of that damage is 200-900 kilometers, with 450 kilometers being a mid level guess of damage. That's pretty damn heavy firepower for a raider to be carrying around.

[Mith]

As for the TDiC and the strane effects that we get from the torpedoes, I think we can actually solve this.

In all the instances of explosions with torpedoes, we tend to get very little in the way of actual mushroom clouds, as in Skin of Evil and The Die is Cast, despite the fact that the explosions just don't make sense. Skin of Evil's explosion wasn't in any way mushroom shaped, and lasted too shortly. TDiC shows us some small red flashes, but massive shockwaves that quickly expand over a great portion of the planet.

Interestingly, I think the ST powers have created the torpedoes so that the real brute power is in the shockwave, but not just an ordinary one per say, but a sub-space shockwave. We saw that a sub-space shockwave doesn't care about space, or the limitation of STL. This may not require much in the way of actual explosives, perhaps even in the MT range, but the effects are devistating. It doesn't matter if there's a funky effect to a sub-space sockwave, it is something that clearly holds physical substance, and moving at exceptionally high speeds. Nor does claiming that it has little mass help either, since we see in Generations that sub-space shockwaves on those levels are easily capable of destroying planets, and even in the case of a more distant hit, push around an Intrepid class starship. So clearly, these shockwaves hold a degree of physical presence.

So what happens when you use such weapons on a planet bombarment? Well, the actual exposion of the fireball does very little, but that hardly matters, since the first part of the bombardment is to destroy the Founders on the surface, not tear up the crust. Since most of the power from a nuke comes from the shockwave, it makes perfect sense for ST powers to rely upon these sub-space shockwaves which can move through the void of space, and can travel at FTL speeds.

For smaller torps like the Class V and VI, we wouldn't see much of a shockwave, but from the Class X, which we saw in Scorpion, we do see it, and one massive wave at that.

In the end, it doesn't matter that the shockwaves on the surface may not be normal shockwaves, or caused by pure DET, since we have evidence that they hold resonable mass within normal space, and that the increased speed would more than make up for it.

If we could manage to scale down the explosive power of the Generations event and compare it to an actual shockwave that a supernova might create, and then downsize it to something seen in TDiC, we should have a rough calculation.

[Jedi Master Spock]

Large-yield mushroom clouds don't have so much of a stem, and we can't really tell the difference very well from a high altitude orbit.

We can rationalize seemingly contradictory data post facto just fine, but I prefer to put this around step five of the process of coming up with good explanations.

1. Analyze and quantify as many events as possible. Include margins of error and consider reasonable alternative models, although not overly complex ones. Models should be falsifiable and should not rely on mass delusion or mass insanity to function.
2. Analyze all qualitative information that has bearing on the issue, as well as prior analysis in related fields. Review peers' materials to make sure you haven't missed anything important.
3. Construct a series of simple models based on qualitative information. At this point, we may use the simple models to determine which figures are statistical outliers and what natural groupings of data points exist. These simple models will be useful in step 4.
4. Construct a "best fit" model that combines simplicity, strength, and lets you keep as much material as possible. Balancing those is actually very tricky.
5. Then, and only then, may you reconsider all discarded events and proceed to "rationalize" them using models that would not ordinarily be worth considering.

Wouldn't episodes dedicated to specific hardware of feats of the ship be taken as more solid examples rather than an off hand claim, save for it being stupidly absurd to the rest of the evidence.

For example, The Perfect Society and Deja Q are major examples of tractor beam technology.

See step 4.

In order to throw out the issue of pulling the moon up from a decaying orbit, we have to discard an awful lot of the "Deja Q" episode. Similarly, in order to discard the tractor beam pull of "The Masterpiece Society," I need to discard most of that episode. In order to discard the "terawatt" power generation reference of "The Dauphin" from consideration in building my simple model, I actually only need to discard that bit of data. Nothing else depends on it.

Once we've discarded the line and built our model, then we go back and look at the line with an eye towards rationalization. It's very easy to fit the line back into everything by assuming that it isn't referring to the total power the ship can generate, but the total power the ship's comm system can put out in a signal.

Understand the distinction? Anything can be rationalized if you're willing to make your explanation complex enough, so the real measure of the strength of an explanation is its cumulative simplicity - fitting the most data in the least complex fashion.

[Mike DiCenso]

Wouldn't episodes dedicated to specific hardware of feats of the ship be taken as more solid examples rather than an off hand claim, save for it being stupidly absurd to the rest of the evidence.

For example, The Perfect Society and Deja Q are major examples of tractor beam technology.

Mith, don't you mean "The Masterpiece Society"?
-Mike

[Mike DiCenso]

Huh, from what I've read, TOS enabled speeds which had ships cross a galactic radius in less than a day.
As a whole, TNG+ really got below that.

Only ever in ST5 did anything like that happen, and then it is uncertain if the ship actually went to the true center of the galaxy. On the other hand, we have TNG's "The Chase", which has the route to a number of different planets pointed out by Picard's friend Professor Galen on a map of the Milky Way galaxy that would indicate a distance between 30,000 to 40,000 light years must be traversed. Galen also indicates in dialog that a starship can travel that in "weeks".
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

The images and scaling you provided are vivftp's from SB.com. It has several problems, namely it does not take into account lightning differences in the images used, so he winds up making the mistake of choosing the larger chasm structure, rather than the smaller, very similar one to the left of it, which would result in doubling the asteroid's size to around 12 x 18 km. In both his and Wong's case they assume that the asteroid is going to be merely shattered, and that there will not be signficant vaporization/melting involved in it's destruction.
-Mike

It's actually very accurate. There are four patterns which viv points to, but there are many more which we can spot as well, when you consider that the asteroid has spun.
I could make those patterns clearer if you wish to, but I'd rather be sure you've looked at the pic properly before I go into the trouble of fiddling and uploading pictures.

I can't remember what AMOT is about, but I know for sure that Masks certainly does not point to high figures. Much on the contrary.

"A Matter of Time" involves drilling for carbon dioxide pockets. It's most famous for the .06 terawatt maximum variance, and the threat to accidentally burn off the planet's atmosphere.

A planet atmosphere doesn't suddenly burn as a whole just because of a variance of 60 gigawatts.

It certainly does.

For every cubic kilometer of typical comet-density snowball (.5 g/cc) that is turned into dissipating vapor, you have to come up with 600-700 megatons of energy. If you're superheating it - one possible explanation for the luminous yellow effect in the melt zone and the swift dissipation of gases - that can nearly double.

We have an initial state, we have a final state. The scaling of the comet is disputed, but regardless of which scaling you use, we have a multi-gigaton event.

Maybe on the long term, but the whole a major issue was not about the total energy needed there, but the power. Evidence varies greatly, from dozens of seconds to far more than one hour.
We also have the problem that Geordi talked about melting the comet, which is surprising coming from a man with his pedigree. The other problem is that these weapons are phasers, not mere lasers, with effects such as "eating" matter without much expected heat radiation when vapourising the corresponding volumes of targets.

Besides, talking about the overall energy, it all depends on the volume of ice, and that's not only obtained by gauging the width of the comet, but also by considering the size of the big station stuck inside, which was composed of several monolithic sections.

Pegasus is very open ended, but certainly does not even approaches the craziest stuff of TOS.

Does it?

This asteroid looks to be larger and more massive than the ones destroyed by the Romulans in "Balance of Terror." It possibly even exceeds the volume of rock melted by the Enterprise's maximum strength phaser blast in "The Paradise Syndrome," and I suspect there's going to be a higher energy density involved in the putative "Pegasus" incident.

Thus far, the 8.5-10 km scaling I have in mind, obtained from the accurate pictures I linked, have me consider my initial opinion correct.

In fact, the "blast out of the asteroid using phasers" plan involves quite a bit of firepower too. We're dealing with on the order of a cubic kilometer of rock here.

With phasers that eat matter. It's also interesting to notice that while the Romulans could melt the rock without damaging the asteroid, the E-D couldn't use her phasers without taking a great risk at collapsing the chasm because the asteroid's structure was too unstable. The denser an object, the less brittle.

As I said, it's a bloom, not a flash... but I also modeled it as a flash of light. Same results.

Guess what? Solar intensity illumination at a 187.5 km radius means your source is putting out 4*pi*(187,500m)^2*1.4 kW/m^2 = 620 terawatts of radiation in the visible range. Overall, we see about a petajoule of luminous energy right there. And what percentage of the energy of a matter/antimatter weapon is going to go out in the visible spectrum in two seconds?

Well, in general, based on what we know about M/AM reactions and nuclear tests within atmosphere... initial visual flash is going to be a pretty small fraction of the yield. Maybe 0.1% if you're lucky. Whoops. We went over a gigaton, again.

Of course, there's a little bit of flex in those figures, but not much. I went over this a lot at ST.com in horrific detail. No matter what physical phenomenon you model that little beige circular thing as, barring unreasonable assumptions (such as assuming the planet is nowhere near Earth-sized) wind up in the general neighborhood of e18-e19 joules based on the scale and speed of effect.

What you used is a sound method, which would be quite useful in a better context, with effects of greater quality, but I disagree on the luminosity you considered.
We are nowhere there, even for the three or four frames long flash that precedes the blooming explosion.
Besides, brightness, or lack of thereof, is not the only parameter to consider. Flash and fireball duration are just as important, and these severely disagree with such a level of firepower.
Finally, the fireball itself largely exceeds the width of the flash, which is a severe problem notably due to how light scaterring works in an atmosphere, where the flash will dominate in terms of luminosity over a same area.

Then, as a second part of this case, we have to consider how antimatter really does act upon reaction, and how pions behave.
Knowing little about such reactions, I googled around.
I propose that excerpt from wikipedia:

Over 99.9% of the mass of neutral antimatter is accounted for by antiprotons and antineutrons. Their annihilation with protons and neutrons is a complicated process. A proton-antiproton pair can annihilate into a number of charged and neutral relativistic pions. Neutral pions, in turn, decay almost immediately into gamma rays; charged pions travel a few tens of meters and then decay further into muons and neutrinos. Finally, the muons decay into electrons and more neutrinos. Most of the energy (about 60%) is carried away by neutrinos, which have almost no interaction with matter and thus escape into outer space.

The overall structure of energy output from an antimatter bomb is highly dependent on the amount of regular matter in the area surrounding the bomb. If the bomb is shielded by sufficient amounts of matter, the gamma rays are absorbed and the pions slow down before decaying. Part of the kinetic energy is thus transferred to the surrounding atoms, which heat up.

In a case where no matter would be present, we are told that around 50-60% of the energy is lost through neutrino radiation.
However, the casing of a torpedo would be most important to guarantee a maximum efficiency to prevent the low interactions muons and neutrinos from sucking out all the energy, as much as the gamma rays from flying away until they get stopped by denser elements.

Basically, the presence of the ground, the atmosphere and the torpedo's own shuttle would lead to a greater amount of matter being heated up, which has me strongly question the luminosity of the flash in this case representing only 0.1% of the weapons's yield, if we are lucky.

Then we still have to consider the creature itself, Armus, capable of shutting down many of a type 7 shuttle's systems, while the shuttle was away from Vagra II. Considering the lack of information for this planet, Troi's shuttle was more than likely capable of warp, thusly powered by a more than decent warp core. Which would surely add a decent amount of power to the final explosion.

As I said, we have to completely consider the creature's abilities.
Armus could withstand phaser shots easily, would actually feed on their energy... so we can't even know how much energy it's been previously absorbing, it could even be possible that the desert state of the planet would be a result of the vampire creature.
It also was generating a field blocking the E-D's transport beam (even if the E-D was running on low power due to maintainance).
It could use telekinesis and even phasing objects away. It ate Riker and turned him into nothing, but could still torture him, whatever form it was under at that time.
That creature alone seems to be the sum of perverted power from a whole civilization of individuals who seemed to possess powers.

An impressive aspect, however, is how fast the torpedo closed on the planet.

Taking your 187 km range, this would correspond to roughly 1.7 second.
I am not sure if this would fit with the vast majority of torpedo speeds though.

Besides, the point is making the averages when there are great variances. TNG+ has many references, and you can find a middle ground with eventually top petawatt ranges from warp core, a percentage of that being diverted to phasers, and two digits, maybe three digits for torps; although again in theory a low gigaton torp should be no problem there.

The problem is what kind of average I take. If I take the arithmetic mean, then if I count Spock's claim to be able to split in two pieces something half the size of the moon, and divide by a hundred cases in which little is done, then I'm still in the multi-gigaton range - and it's a very weak example to start with, especially since the phasers don't have that huge of an effect.

Of course this would certainly not be an average of the vast bulk of TNG+ references.

The real problem to be how Gene Rodenberry has retconned certain aspects of Trek. The most obvious recton being the flight speeds.

I don't believe he actually retconned those. The TOS "backstage" scale is one of the slowest scales available, and had nothing to do with actual TOS speeds. Likewise with TNG.

I've heard a complete different story about it. It would probably be worth its own detailed investigation, but I read people reporting Gene wanted the speeds to be slower, otherwise there couldn't be much exploration - which is absolutely right.

Eventually, that ounce of antimatter thing could be rationalized if we really pushed it hard, by implying volume, a high concentration, checking out what 10,000 cobalt bombs means in that context, and that the atmosphere itself only needed a something to start going through an exotic chain reaction.

Still, there's that sound wave of jaw dropping power, where rationalization is harder.

And the matter of how much atmosphere the planet has, how large the planet is... et cetera. I'm inclined to treat that one as a simple scientific error, personally.

In what sense?

But as a whole, the pattern is that for TOS, rationalization is used to lower figures, while in most of TNG and late Trek, it's used to increase them.

Er... not really. As a rule, I rationalize far fewer examples than I discard. I mostly take figures, discard all the ones that I can't fit to within a generous MOE, and then run with what seems reasonable from there in making my final estimate. I also consider the relative strength of the example. SOE is quite strong as a "lower bound" type estimate, but it is not very precise.

I have chosen a gigaton as a probable maximum torpedo yield not based on the maximum possible yield seen in effects. A reasonable estimation for every firepower example includes a number of ranges that go well past the gigaton mark when considered carefully - but the amount of antimatter stored on a torpedo seems sharply limited.

TDIC I choose to discard when analyzing firepower. The order of magnitude of firepower required to physically disassemble a planet is simply not compatible with the other cases. Similar with STV. That sheer speed and range is very difficult to reconcile with most later examples.

"Where Silence Has Lease" gives one of the highest speeds of any episode... and it's for warp 2. I prefer to place that one in the outlier column as well, though I may consider it when picking my median path.

But what appears to be outlier material from TOS seems to also correspond to ungodly magnitudes, either about this ounce of antimatter or the sonic attack. Even TDIC pales against that.

You call them problematic, I suppose, in the context where someone would like to make all yields worth of the TOS craze.

Like I said, there really aren't more low-yield than high-yield examples in the TNG+ era. TDIC is the singular most egregious example, but some of the most high-energy events happen in Voyager and DS9. I pointed out just how much more lethal the Delta Flyer's projected warp core breach is than the detonation of Dreadnought's warhead.

The million kilometer safe distance?
I'm checking the transcript of Drive here.
This is clearly a problematic case as well.
I didn't see the episode. They mention a shockwave at the end, while the explosion occured one point two million kilometres from Voyager's position. And the nebula was supposed to contain the explosion. What happened with that shockwave? Was the ship shaken?

Huh, from what I've read, TOS enabled speeds which had ships cross a galactic radius in less than a day.

OK, please read this page. While there are a number of examples that seem pretty loose, every incident in which the old Constitution-class Enterprise definitely travels 30,000 or more light years within one day involves hijacking. All but STV involve highly advanced aliens. As I've said, STV should be discarded as an outlier. Speeds in TOS under conventional warp power in general do not exceed 1 million times lightspeed, although they sometimes come close, and usually are not sustained for more than a couple thousand light years at a stretch.

As a whole, TNG+ really got below that.

Below and above.

To me the "aboves" from later Trek are only distant echoes of the TOS effect, artifacts.
You don't get that above when that blue ball transported by Kirk and maybe Spock was capable, once filled with AM from the warp core of the E-nil, to leave a continent scale scar across the surface of a planet with a 9.8 gravity and breathable atmosphere... which is gone as well. There's actually no cloud to observe at all, no haze of dust around the planet whatsoever.
Again, another nonsensical event? Sure, it looked nice, but is it possible? Nope.

Voyager explicitly gives the highest hazard-to-mass ratio for a vessel with the Delta Flyer in "Drive." Do you know how many teratons you need to destroy all light vessels within a million klicks? Just killing unprotected humans at that distance is difficult.

I'm not aware of this case. What's the reference exactly?

But, in the end, maybe Trek on the average can have yields tickling the gigaton range without any problem.

If you really want to see if this reality works better than the more moderate ones argued by other people, you could still try to talk to a debator from SDN, or SBC, and actually defend that position.

Maybe you (JMS) could get some decade old misconceptions corrected, and possibly increase the averages.

So, what do you say? This would surely revive the debate.

I've talked with some SDN/SB residents of the anti-Trek persuasion on ST.com. Mostly, they don't seem to listen to the evidence regarding any high power or high speed example, preferring to try to rationalize it away in various irrational ways.
If you want a true average, I could throw them all together and average, but I'd probably wind up with something unreasonably high thanks to the occasional truly ridiculous example.

The main and obvious problem being that your posts were diluted into a thread which, if it's the one I'm thinking about, was galaxy-cluster wide.

If you actually make a solid case on a much more focused discussion, even a duel, readers will fairly know when the oponents are in denial and use unacceptable argumentation tactics, it's extremely easy to spot after all (we had some examples highlighted in the "other forums" section).

My curiosity is most genuine on that. If one person, Trekkie or not, claimed he/she had a strong set of evidence for 3 or 4 digits megaton range for UFP torps, the challenge would be for the other side to actually show that there's ample evidence to counter that claim.
For example, although I believe torps sit in the low 3 digits megaton range at best, they're also dialable, which offers a good margin of interpretation, notably for people like you who think they're more powerful than that.

If you had to start a debate with an active and effective Trek "nerfer" (w/o offense), who would you pick?

[Mr. Oragahn]

The images and scaling you provided are vivftp's from SB.com. It has several problems, namely it does not take into account lightning differences in the images used, so he winds up making the mistake of choosing the larger chasm structure, rather than the smaller, very similar one to the left of it, which would result in doubling the asteroid's size to around 12 x 18 km. In both his and Wong's case they assume that the asteroid is going to be merely shattered, and that there will not be signficant vaporization/melting involved in it's destruction.
-Mike

It's actually very accurate. There are four patterns which viv points to, but there are many more which we can spot as well, when you consider that the asteroid has spun.
I could make those patterns clearer if you wish to, but I'd rather be sure you've looked at the pic properly before I go into the trouble of fiddling and uploading pictures.

I can't remember what AMOT is about, but I know for sure that Masks certainly does not point to high figures. Much on the contrary.

"A Matter of Time" involves drilling for carbon dioxide pockets. It's most famous for the .06 terawatt maximum variance, and the threat to accidentally burn off the planet's atmosphere.

A planet atmosphere doesn't suddenly burn as a whole just because of a variance of 60 gigawatts.

It certainly does.

For every cubic kilometer of typical comet-density snowball (.5 g/cc) that is turned into dissipating vapor, you have to come up with 600-700 megatons of energy. If you're superheating it - one possible explanation for the luminous yellow effect in the melt zone and the swift dissipation of gases - that can nearly double.

We have an initial state, we have a final state. The scaling of the comet is disputed, but regardless of which scaling you use, we have a multi-gigaton event.

Maybe on the long term, but the whole a major issue was not about the total energy needed there, but the power. Evidence varies greatly, from dozens of seconds to far more than one hour.
We also have the problem that Geordi talked about melting the comet, which is surprising coming from a man with his pedigree. The other problem is that these weapons are phasers, not mere lasers, with effects such as "eating" matter without much expected heat radiation when vapourising the corresponding volumes of targets.

Besides, talking about the overall energy, it all depends on the volume of ice, and that's not only obtained by gauging the width of the comet, but also by considering the size of the big station stuck inside, which was composed of several monolithic sections.

Pegasus is very open ended, but certainly does not even approaches the craziest stuff of TOS.

Does it?

This asteroid looks to be larger and more massive than the ones destroyed by the Romulans in "Balance of Terror." It possibly even exceeds the volume of rock melted by the Enterprise's maximum strength phaser blast in "The Paradise Syndrome," and I suspect there's going to be a higher energy density involved in the putative "Pegasus" incident.

Thus far, the 8.5-10 km scaling I have in mind, obtained from the accurate pictures I linked, have me consider my initial opinion correct.

In fact, the "blast out of the asteroid using phasers" plan involves quite a bit of firepower too. We're dealing with on the order of a cubic kilometer of rock here.

With phasers that eat matter. It's also interesting to notice that while the Romulans could melt the rock without damaging the asteroid, the E-D couldn't use her phasers without taking a great risk at collapsing the chasm because the asteroid's structure was too unstable. The denser an object, the less brittle.

As I said, it's a bloom, not a flash... but I also modeled it as a flash of light. Same results.

Guess what? Solar intensity illumination at a 187.5 km radius means your source is putting out 4*pi*(187,500m)^2*1.4 kW/m^2 = 620 terawatts of radiation in the visible range. Overall, we see about a petajoule of luminous energy right there. And what percentage of the energy of a matter/antimatter weapon is going to go out in the visible spectrum in two seconds?

Well, in general, based on what we know about M/AM reactions and nuclear tests within atmosphere... initial visual flash is going to be a pretty small fraction of the yield. Maybe 0.1% if you're lucky. Whoops. We went over a gigaton, again.

Of course, there's a little bit of flex in those figures, but not much. I went over this a lot at ST.com in horrific detail. No matter what physical phenomenon you model that little beige circular thing as, barring unreasonable assumptions (such as assuming the planet is nowhere near Earth-sized) wind up in the general neighborhood of e18-e19 joules based on the scale and speed of effect.

What you used is a sound method, which would be quite useful in a better context, with effects of greater quality, but I disagree on the luminosity you considered.
We are nowhere there, even for the three or four frames long flash that precedes the blooming explosion.
Besides, brightness, or lack of thereof, is not the only parameter to consider. Flash and fireball duration are just as important, and these severely disagree with such a level of firepower.
Finally, the fireball itself largely exceeds the width of the flash, which is a severe problem notably due to how light scaterring works in an atmosphere, where the flash will dominate in terms of luminosity over a same area.

Then, as a second part of this case, we have to consider how antimatter really does act upon reaction, and how pions behave.
Knowing little about such reactions, I googled around.
I propose that excerpt from wikipedia:

Over 99.9% of the mass of neutral antimatter is accounted for by antiprotons and antineutrons. Their annihilation with protons and neutrons is a complicated process. A proton-antiproton pair can annihilate into a number of charged and neutral relativistic pions. Neutral pions, in turn, decay almost immediately into gamma rays; charged pions travel a few tens of meters and then decay further into muons and neutrinos. Finally, the muons decay into electrons and more neutrinos. Most of the energy (about 60%) is carried away by neutrinos, which have almost no interaction with matter and thus escape into outer space.

The overall structure of energy output from an antimatter bomb is highly dependent on the amount of regular matter in the area surrounding the bomb. If the bomb is shielded by sufficient amounts of matter, the gamma rays are absorbed and the pions slow down before decaying. Part of the kinetic energy is thus transferred to the surrounding atoms, which heat up.

In a case where no matter would be present, we are told that around 50-60% of the energy is lost through neutrino radiation.
However, the casing of a torpedo would be most important to guarantee a maximum efficiency to prevent the low interactions muons and neutrinos from sucking out all the energy, as much as the gamma rays from flying away until they get stopped by denser elements.

Basically, the presence of the ground, the atmosphere and the torpedo's own shuttle would lead to a greater amount of matter being heated up, which has me strongly question the luminosity of the flash in this case representing only 0.1% of the weapons's yield, if we are lucky.

Then we still have to consider the creature itself, Armus, capable of shutting down many of a type 7 shuttle's systems, while the shuttle was away from Vagra II. Considering the lack of information for this planet, Troi's shuttle was more than likely capable of warp, thusly powered by a more than decent warp core. Which would surely add a decent amount of power to the final explosion.

As I said, we have to completely consider the creature's abilities.
Armus could withstand phaser shots easily, would actually feed on their energy... so we can't even know how much energy it's been previously absorbing, it could even be possible that the desert state of the planet would be a result of the vampire creature.
It also was generating a field blocking the E-D's transport beam (even if the E-D was running on low power due to maintainance).
It could use telekinesis and even phasing objects away. It ate Riker and turned him into nothing, but could still torture him, whatever form it was under at that time.
That creature alone seems to be the sum of perverted power from a whole civilization of individuals who seemed to possess powers.

An impressive aspect, however, is how fast the torpedo closed on the planet.

Taking your 187 km range, this would correspond to roughly 1.7 second.
I am not sure if this would fit with the vast majority of torpedo speeds though.

Besides, the point is making the averages when there are great variances. TNG+ has many references, and you can find a middle ground with eventually top petawatt ranges from warp core, a percentage of that being diverted to phasers, and two digits, maybe three digits for torps; although again in theory a low gigaton torp should be no problem there.

The problem is what kind of average I take. If I take the arithmetic mean, then if I count Spock's claim to be able to split in two pieces something half the size of the moon, and divide by a hundred cases in which little is done, then I'm still in the multi-gigaton range - and it's a very weak example to start with, especially since the phasers don't have that huge of an effect.

Of course this would certainly not be an average of the vast bulk of TNG+ references.

The real problem to be how Gene Rodenberry has retconned certain aspects of Trek. The most obvious recton being the flight speeds.

I don't believe he actually retconned those. The TOS "backstage" scale is one of the slowest scales available, and had nothing to do with actual TOS speeds. Likewise with TNG.

I've heard a complete different story about it. It would probably be worth its own detailed investigation, but I read people reporting Gene wanted the speeds to be slower, otherwise there couldn't be much exploration - which is absolutely right.

Eventually, that ounce of antimatter thing could be rationalized if we really pushed it hard, by implying volume, a high concentration, checking out what 10,000 cobalt bombs means in that context, and that the atmosphere itself only needed a something to start going through an exotic chain reaction.

Still, there's that sound wave of jaw dropping power, where rationalization is harder.

And the matter of how much atmosphere the planet has, how large the planet is... et cetera. I'm inclined to treat that one as a simple scientific error, personally.

In what sense?

But as a whole, the pattern is that for TOS, rationalization is used to lower figures, while in most of TNG and late Trek, it's used to increase them.

Er... not really. As a rule, I rationalize far fewer examples than I discard. I mostly take figures, discard all the ones that I can't fit to within a generous MOE, and then run with what seems reasonable from there in making my final estimate. I also consider the relative strength of the example. SOE is quite strong as a "lower bound" type estimate, but it is not very precise.

I have chosen a gigaton as a probable maximum torpedo yield not based on the maximum possible yield seen in effects. A reasonable estimation for every firepower example includes a number of ranges that go well past the gigaton mark when considered carefully - but the amount of antimatter stored on a torpedo seems sharply limited.

TDIC I choose to discard when analyzing firepower. The order of magnitude of firepower required to physically disassemble a planet is simply not compatible with the other cases. Similar with STV. That sheer speed and range is very difficult to reconcile with most later examples.

"Where Silence Has Lease" gives one of the highest speeds of any episode... and it's for warp 2. I prefer to place that one in the outlier column as well, though I may consider it when picking my median path.

But what appears to be outlier material from TOS seems to also correspond to ungodly magnitudes, either about this ounce of antimatter or the sonic attack. Even TDIC pales against that.

You call them problematic, I suppose, in the context where someone would like to make all yields worth of the TOS craze.

Like I said, there really aren't more low-yield than high-yield examples in the TNG+ era. TDIC is the singular most egregious example, but some of the most high-energy events happen in Voyager and DS9. I pointed out just how much more lethal the Delta Flyer's projected warp core breach is than the detonation of Dreadnought's warhead.

The million kilometer safe distance?
I'm checking the transcript of Drive here.
This is clearly a problematic case as well.
I didn't see the episode. They mention a shockwave at the end, while the explosion occured one point two million kilometres from Voyager's position. And the nebula was supposed to contain the explosion. What happened with that shockwave? Was the ship shaken?

Huh, from what I've read, TOS enabled speeds which had ships cross a galactic radius in less than a day.

OK, please read this page. While there are a number of examples that seem pretty loose, every incident in which the old Constitution-class Enterprise definitely travels 30,000 or more light years within one day involves hijacking. All but STV involve highly advanced aliens. As I've said, STV should be discarded as an outlier. Speeds in TOS under conventional warp power in general do not exceed 1 million times lightspeed, although they sometimes come close, and usually are not sustained for more than a couple thousand light years at a stretch.

As a whole, TNG+ really got below that.

Below and above.

To me the "aboves" from later Trek are only distant echoes of the TOS effect, artifacts.
You don't get that above when that blue ball transported by Kirk and maybe Spock was capable, once filled with AM from the warp core of the E-nil, to leave a continent scale scar across the surface of a planet with a 9.8 gravity and breathable atmosphere... which is gone as well. There's actually no cloud to observe at all, no haze of dust around the planet whatsoever.
Again, another nonsensical event? Sure, it looked nice, but is it possible? Nope.

Voyager explicitly gives the highest hazard-to-mass ratio for a vessel with the Delta Flyer in "Drive." Do you know how many teratons you need to destroy all light vessels within a million klicks? Just killing unprotected humans at that distance is difficult.

I'm not aware of this case. What's the reference exactly?

But, in the end, maybe Trek on the average can have yields tickling the gigaton range without any problem.

If you really want to see if this reality works better than the more moderate ones argued by other people, you could still try to talk to a debator from SDN, or SBC, and actually defend that position.

Maybe you (JMS) could get some decade old misconceptions corrected, and possibly increase the averages.

So, what do you say? This would surely revive the debate.

I've talked with some SDN/SB residents of the anti-Trek persuasion on ST.com. Mostly, they don't seem to listen to the evidence regarding any high power or high speed example, preferring to try to rationalize it away in various irrational ways.
If you want a true average, I could throw them all together and average, but I'd probably wind up with something unreasonably high thanks to the occasional truly ridiculous example.

The main and obvious problem being that your posts were diluted into a thread which, if it's the one I'm thinking about, was galaxy-cluster wide.

If you actually make a solid case on a much more focused discussion, even a duel, readers will fairly know when the oponents are in denial and use unacceptable argumentation tactics, it's extremely easy to spot after all (we had some examples highlighted in the "other forums" section).

My curiosity is most genuine on that. If one person, Trekkie or not, claimed he/she had a strong set of evidence for 3 or 4 digits megaton range for UFP torps, the challenge would be for the other side to actually show that there's ample evidence to counter that claim.
For example, although I believe torps sit in the low 3 digits megaton range at best, they're also dialable, which offers a good margin of interpretation, notably for people like you who think they're more powerful than that.

If you had to start a debate with an active and effective Trek "nerfer" (w/o offense), who would you pick?

[Jedi Master Spock]

A planet atmosphere doesn't suddenly burn as a whole just because of a variance of 60 gigawatts.

Right. Hence we're dealing with large energies for that, and we're also definitely doing serious drilling.

Maybe on the long term, but the whole a major issue was not about the total energy needed there, but the power. Evidence varies greatly, from dozens of seconds to far more than one hour.

I'm really having trouble seeing the justification for an our.

We also have the problem that Geordi talked about melting the comet, which is surprising coming from a man with his pedigree. The other problem is that these weapons are phasers, not mere lasers, with effects such as "eating" matter without much expected heat radiation when vapourising the corresponding volumes of targets.

It's surprising, but "sublimate" - the proper term for turning ice directly into vapor - is so rarely used.

We do have a very real problem with the lack of collateral thermal damage, but we're going to have to introduce some technobabble element regardless. It may as well just explain one tiny thing (lack of thermal fringe effects) rather than lots of things (lack of fringe effects plus energy deficiency).

Besides, talking about the overall energy, it all depends on the volume of ice, and that's not only obtained by gauging the width of the comet, but also by considering the size of the big station stuck inside, which was composed of several monolithic sections.

IIRC, the comet is rather larger than the station; even if it filled a third or half of the volume, that's a fraction of an order of magnitude change.

Comets usually are multiple cubic kilometers. I will grant the scaling is a bit imprecise on the screen, though, they usually are.

Thus far, the 8.5-10 km scaling I have in mind, obtained from the accurate pictures I linked, have me consider my initial opinion correct.

The volume is one issue; the composition of the asteroid is another. The smaller the asteroid, the more exotic its composition must be to have measurable magnetic and gravitational fields.

With phasers that eat matter. It's also interesting to notice that while the Romulans could melt the rock without damaging the asteroid, the E-D couldn't use her phasers without taking a great risk at collapsing the chasm because the asteroid's structure was too unstable. The denser an object, the less brittle.

Not necessarily - nor is instability necessarily an issue of brittleness. Simply lack of bonding. A pile of precariously balanced chunks of steel aren't very brittle - but they could collapse easily.

What you used is a sound method, which would be quite useful in a better context, with effects of greater quality, but I disagree on the luminosity you considered.
We are nowhere there, even for the three or four frames long flash that precedes the blooming explosion.

Finally, the fireball itself largely exceeds the width of the flash, which is a severe problem notably due to how light scaterring works in an atmosphere, where the flash will dominate in terms of luminosity over a same area.

I don't believe I've measured the pre-bloom "flash." Got a good screencap?

The bloom isn't that far away from the daylight surface, IIRC, considering the variability of the day-side in brightness.

Besides, brightness, or lack of thereof, is not the only parameter to consider. Flash and fireball duration are just as important, and these severely disagree with such a level of firepower.

Fireball duration is only important if we're dealing with an actual fireball, rather than [say] a thin shell of highly accelerated material.

I've largely dealt with the illumination model as a response to claims that it's not some kind of bloom or shockwave.

Over 99.9% of the mass of neutral antimatter is accounted for by antiprotons and antineutrons. Their annihilation with protons and neutrons is a complicated process. A proton-antiproton pair can annihilate into a number of charged and neutral relativistic pions. Neutral pions, in turn, decay almost immediately into gamma rays; charged pions travel a few tens of meters and then decay further into muons and neutrinos. Finally, the muons decay into electrons and more neutrinos. Most of the energy (about 60%) is carried away by neutrinos, which have almost no interaction with matter and thus escape into outer space.

Assuming the charged pions get that far. As I've discussed before, these can and do interact with matter.

The overall structure of energy output from an antimatter bomb is highly dependent on the amount of regular matter in the area surrounding the bomb. If the bomb is shielded by sufficient amounts of matter, the gamma rays are absorbed and the pions slow down before decaying. Part of the kinetic energy is thus transferred to the surrounding atoms, which heat up.

In a case where no matter would be present, we are told that around 50-60% of the energy is lost through neutrino radiation.
However, the casing of a torpedo would be most important to guarantee a maximum efficiency to prevent the low interactions muons and neutrinos from sucking out all the energy, as much as the gamma rays from flying away until they get stopped by denser elements.

Basically, the presence of the ground, the atmosphere and the torpedo's own shuttle would lead to a greater amount of matter being heated up, which has me strongly question the luminosity of the flash in this case representing only 0.1% of the weapons's yield, if we are lucky.

Look at the brightness of a nuclear bomb. It's a very small amount of energy that winds up in the visual spectrum in any event; most either winds up above or below it, or in kinetic energy. There's a whole lot below, from bulk heating; there's a whole lot above in gamma rays, x-rays, etc. The visual band is a very narrow part of the EM spectrum.

Unless you're trying to create visual-range effects, it's pretty unusual to have a significant fraction of energy fall in that range.

Then we still have to consider the creature itself, Armus, capable of shutting down many of a type 7 shuttle's systems, while the shuttle was away from Vagra II. Considering the lack of information for this planet, Troi's shuttle was more than likely capable of warp, thusly powered by a more than decent warp core. Which would surely add a decent amount of power to the final explosion.

Possible. That additional energy came from something other than the torpedo is the only means by which we can justify the SOE torpedo being sub-gigaton by any margin worth noting.

But we still have a gigaton, possibly more, of energy being released in the event. We're simply now saying the yield came from a small shuttlecraft instead of a tiny torpedo. Given that the Enterprise was right on hand, I really don't think that the shuttle in question was fueled for warp, but I could easily be wrong.

As I said, we have to completely consider the creature's abilities.
Armus could withstand phaser shots easily, would actually feed on their energy... so we can't even know how much energy it's been previously absorbing, it could even be possible that the desert state of the planet would be a result of the vampire creature.
It also was generating a field blocking the E-D's transport beam (even if the E-D was running on low power due to maintainance).
It could use telekinesis and even phasing objects away. It ate Riker and turned him into nothing, but could still torture him, whatever form it was under at that time.
That creature alone seems to be the sum of perverted power from a whole civilization of individuals who seemed to possess powers.

Armus struck me as being relatively inert, rather than explosive. Something that absorbs a lot of energy with minimal effect - very high specific heat. Are we even sure Armus died?

An impressive aspect, however, is how fast the torpedo closed on the planet.

Taking your 187 km range, this would correspond to roughly 1.7 second.
I am not sure if this would fit with the vast majority of torpedo speeds though.

The orbital altitude is much higher than 187 km.

The curious thing about photorps is that they usually require something like 2 seconds to reach the target, regardless of whether the target is 500m away or 300,000 km away.

Of course this would certainly not be an average of the vast bulk of TNG+ references.

As I said - which kind of average? All it takes is one truly ridiculous outlier to skew a mean.

I've heard a complete different story about it. It would probably be worth its own detailed investigation, but I read people reporting Gene wanted the speeds to be slower, otherwise there couldn't be much exploration - which is absolutely right.

If Gene did, I think he underestimated the sheer volume of the galaxy. It's not just a question of going far - it's a question of passing through within several light years of space. I ran some calculations on that. The TOS-era Federation had nowhere near the sensor range and number of ships to actually chart the whole galaxy in short order.

In what sense?

In what sense? I'm not sure what you mean by this. I'd class it in the same sense as fears that detonating a single nuclear bomb would explode the Earth's atmosphere - simply impossible to justify as spoken.

But what appears to be outlier material from TOS seems to also correspond to ungodly magnitudes, either about this ounce of antimatter or the sonic attack. Even TDIC pales against that.

The ounce of antimatter doesn't pale compared to TDIC; TDIC involves many orders of magnitude more energy. The sonic attack? Impossible to take seriously using any quantification of "decibel" ever used, and "decibel" is actually a very flexible unit.

The million kilometer safe distance?
I'm checking the transcript of Drive here.
This is clearly a problematic case as well.
I didn't see the episode. They mention a shockwave at the end, while the explosion occured one point two million kilometres from Voyager's position. And the nebula was supposed to contain the explosion. What happened with that shockwave? Was the ship shaken?

I'm not sure - I think there was probably the traditional "shake," but it's been a long time - but it doesn't matter if it was or not. Simply having effects with that radius means incredible yields, even if it wasn't enough to shake the ship any.

To me the "aboves" from later Trek are only distant echoes of the TOS effect, artifacts.

Because of your perspective, IMO.

You don't get that above when that blue ball transported by Kirk and maybe Spock was capable, once filled with AM from the warp core of the E-nil, to leave a continent scale scar across the surface of a planet with a 9.8 gravity and breathable atmosphere... which is gone as well. There's actually no cloud to observe at all, no haze of dust around the planet whatsoever.
Again, another nonsensical event? Sure, it looked nice, but is it possible? Nope.

Taking away the atmosphere of a planet is nowhere near blasting away the mantle. It's also nowhere near the destructive effect of the movie-era Genesis device, or Soran's torpedo in "Generations," or the E-D accidentally causing a nova in "Half a Life." Then there's the omega molecule crap in Voyager, which is absolutely ridiculous on a per unit mass basis.

The only reason "Obsession" stands out is because we can easily tell the apparent scientific error (antimatter in atmosphere won't cause some chain reaction to blow off the atmosphere), while we're used to hearing anti-Trek debaters wave away the later examples with "Oh, well, that must have been a chain reaction."

I'm not aware of this case. What's the reference exactly?

G2K did some technical analysis on the episode here.

Basically, the Delta Flyer was set to blow up by one of Harry Kim's many alien girlfriends. Paris and Torres are having a relationship crisis on board the Delta Flyer, which turns out to be fortunate. They finally get married at the end of it. I actually remember watching this one; it was a very gripping episode in some ways, even if the set-up for the race was a bit contrived.

The main and obvious problem being that your posts were diluted into a thread which, if it's the one I'm thinking about, was galaxy-cluster wide.

A good point.

If you actually make a solid case on a much more focused discussion, even a duel, readers will fairly know when the oponents are in denial and use unacceptable argumentation tactics, it's extremely easy to spot after all (we had some examples highlighted in the "other forums" section).

My curiosity is most genuine on that. If one person, Trekkie or not, claimed he/she had a strong set of evidence for 3 or 4 digits megaton range for UFP torps, the challenge would be for the other side to actually show that there's ample evidence to counter that claim.
For example, although I believe torps sit in the low 3 digits megaton range at best, they're also dialable, which offers a good margin of interpretation, notably for people like you who think they're more powerful than that.

If you had to start a debate with an active and effective Trek "nerfer" (w/o offense), who would you pick?

I'm honestly not sure. Most of them don't actually engage in serious debate. From what I recall, Aratech may have been my favorite of the SDN crowd visiting ST.com out of the ones I argued with, since he was actually willing to try and engage me in debate. Most of the Trek "nerfers" there were arguing mostly ad hominem.

I'm quite willing to engage in a "duel," as you term it, with just about anybody who disagrees with me.

[Mike DiCenso]

Then we still have to consider the creature itself, Armus, capable of shutting down many of a type 7 shuttle's systems, while the shuttle was away from Vagra II. Considering the lack of information for this planet, Troi's shuttle was more than likely capable of warp, thusly powered by a more than decent warp core. Which would surely add a decent amount of power to the final explosion.

Possible. That additional energy came from something other than the torpedo is the only means by which we can justify the SOE torpedo being sub-gigaton by any margin worth noting.

But we still have a gigaton, possibly more, of energy being released in the event. We're simply now saying the yield came from a small shuttlecraft instead of a tiny torpedo. Given that the Enterprise was right on hand, I really don't think that the shuttle in question was fueled for warp, but I could easily be wrong.

Given the dialog on how the shuttlecraft was being effected, it may not have had a warp drive on board, or it was drained in power in such a way that it could not have contributed to the explosion seen at the end. Especially considering the appearance of the shuttle's wreckage, any antimatter pods would be insanely tough, assuming the hadn't been ejected prior to the crash. The condition of the shuttle:

http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... vil037.jpg

http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... vil040.jpg

The dialog mentioning only impulse power, but no warp drive:

TROI : This is Counsellor Troi. I'll relay, sir. The pilot is busy. We've lost most of our impulse power.

The orbital altitude is much higher than 187 km.

Very minimum at least 1,000 km based on the visuals:

http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... vil036.jpg

This image, and others like it throughout the episode show that the viewscreen depiction of the torpedo impact is not some weird artifact of whatever kind of camera system they use.

You don't get that above when that blue ball transported by Kirk and maybe Spock was capable, once filled with AM from the warp core of the E-nil, to leave a continent scale scar across the surface of a planet with a 9.8 gravity and breathable atmosphere... which is gone as well. There's actually no cloud to observe at all, no haze of dust around the planet whatsoever.
Again, another nonsensical event? Sure, it looked nice, but is it possible? Nope.

Actually it was Kirk and Garrovick that carried the antimatter charge down to Tyco IV. Spock stayed up on the Enterprise during the whole thing.

The actual explosion is never seen on-screen in any version, and the new remastered version FX shows the Enterprise breaking orbit of the planet with a big huge crater from the explosion.
-Mike

[Praeothmin]

Speaking of yields, not so long ago, I had mentioned that Voyager had been it by a species 8472 beam and that that beam had imparted angular motion to the vessel (if I remember correctly, JMS had calculated roughly 70 Gigatons for the hit).

The thread at that time was due to the calculations on SDN that showed the Falcon getting hit by a HTL bolt and being moved, putting the HTL bolt roughly around 1 Gigaton.
That incident had reminded me of a similar one in ST VI: TuC, when the Bird of Prey was moved by a Photon Torpedo impact (which I had loosely calculated at 7 Gigatons).
This had then reminded me of the Voyager episode with the aforementioned incident.

Recently, I was watching DS9 battles on youtube (and can't link because I'm at work) and I seemed to see ships being rocked, pushed to the side, or having angular motion imparted to them after hits by Phasers and Torpedoes alike.
Ships like the Excelsior class, massing way more then a small Bird of Prey like the one in ST VI, and I thought that these incidents also showed great firepower for ST.

And then I also remembered SW space battles, where we didn't see any capital ships get rocked by those Teratons of supposed firepower.
I mean, I know that SW Imperial Star Destroyers mass a lot more then a ST Galaxy class, but still, I'd imagine that the ultra-powerful HTL would still affect them more then seen in the movies, given the incredible resistence of their armor... :)