Phaser/warp power

[Mike DiCenso]

Well, if it's not the Cube, it's something else, because I certainly remember, maybe erroneously, a calculation based on a beam fired from that dish leading to some gigaton figure, and I'd even say that I saw it here first, not at SBC.]

I have no idea how that is even possible given what happened in BoBW. The deflector weapon is never used again on anything again we can calculate. The next closest thing I can thing of is when they use the deflector to fire a technobabble beam at the technobabble composition core of a large asteroid to destroy it. But again, how can you get anything from it since we don't know anything about the physical properties of nitrium (the dense, technobabble substance the asteroid core was made of) to be able to get anything useful from it, except assume it's something like iron, or normal rock and go from there as a lower limits calc.

Maybe could it be that the comm system on the E-D is solely powered by an independant fusion reactor?

Possibly. An independant power source would make good operational sense in the advent that main power systems are knocked off-line. Either way, a single terawatt of power production for the entire ship is so completely out of line compared to other quotes that we cannot consider it.

Thanks.
But this doesn't answer much regarding the sense of all that. Note that the use of "exoskeleton" is even more puzzling here. It's like she said my power armour can withstand that stuff... but then you ask the lady if she's on crack, cuz there's no power armour to be seen.
If anything, I'd have expected a line about synthskin or something relative to a reinforced epidermis or so. Or endoskeleton.

She has on her left hand an exoskeleton structure. You can see it in this image here. If you don't think that's enough to withstand millions or billions of gigawatts, fine. Just remember that Seven is still thinking in terms of what she used to be able to do as a full drone, not as she is in her mostly human state.
-Mike

[Cocytus]

The DVD subtitles also say "millions of gigawatts," for whatever that's worth.

The "Masterpiece Society" event is probably one of the highest-end figures you could derive. The fragment is basically a miniature neutron star which has, as per Data, a density of 100,000,000,000 kilograms per cubic centimeter. Eyeballing the fragment at around 4 kilometers in diameter, it's volume would equal about 3.4E16 subic centimeters, which would equal about 3.4E27 kilograms, or as much as 6.8E17 Enterprise-Ds. Accelerating that mass by 5 meters/second^2 would give you a force of 1.7e28 newtons. Multiplying that by, say, 60 meters would give you an energy imparted to the fragment by the E-D of 1.02E30 newton-meters, or joules. Dividing by 4.184E15, we get about 250 trillion megatons. Of course, I pulled the acceleration and distance figures out of thin air, but in any case, Geordie's estimation of the core was off by a few orders of magnitude. The episode only tells us that they're changing it's heading by 1.2 degrees, which is a little odd. A neutron star isn't a ship, it has no engines, no thrust vector. They couldn't push the front hemisphere in one direction and expect the back hemisphere to follow. They'd simply be imparting rotational energy to the fragment, so the beam had to be centered on the fragment's center of mass. In other words, they would have had to have pushed it a certain distance, such that by the time it passed Moab its gravity would only exert enough force to cause quakes of around 8.7 (the stated tolerance of the biosphere, though that was undoubtedly increased with the extra reinforcement the Enterprise engineers provided)

Now, we know in this case that they were tying all the power they had into the tractor beam, such that life support failure was imminent. They would have been running the core at its absolute to-the-point-of-breach power production capability. We know from another episode that the E-D has at least nine fusion reactors which power other systems. In fact, most of its functions are not in fact served by the warpcore. "The Nth Degree" and "Hero Worship" both establish the core doesn't power the shields, so its unlikely it powers the communications system either. Ships like the E-E, Voyager, Delta Flyer, etc. have ejected their cores and still maintained life-support, sublight engines and other systems. In any event, given that they DID move the fragment some distance, this example can serve as an estimate of the peak power production of the entire ship.

[Mike DiCenso]

Now, we know in this case that they were tying all the power they had into the tractor beam, such that life support failure was imminent. They would have been running the core at its absolute to-the-point-of-breach power production capability. We know from another episode that the E-D has at least nine fusion reactors which power other systems. In fact, most of its functions are not in fact served by the warpcore. "The Nth Degree" and "Hero Worship" both establish the core doesn't power the shields, so its unlikely it powers the communications system either. Ships like the E-E, Voyager, Delta Flyer, etc. have ejected their cores and still maintained life-support, sublight engines and other systems. In any event, given that they DID move the fragment some distance, this example can serve as an estimate of the peak power production of the entire ship.

This seems to run contrary to TOS, where the impulse engines could also power the shield and other systems, but were substantially weaker than they were when powered by the warp engines. In fact, warp drive seemed to be the prefered power source for most systems. In ST:TMP, the refit Constitution design increased phaser power by directly powering them through the warp drive.

In the TNG-era, the Defiant as per "The Sound of Her Voice", powered the phasers via warp power, though when at warp speed, there was a trade-off between speed and phaser power. In ST:Insurrection, the E-E was made substantially weaker without her warp core. The fact that she could still use shields and phasers is only a reasonable back-up capability given the TOS precident. She also went up against the Son'a battleships using a bunch of ignited technobabble metreon gas to disable or destroy them , and then went and beat up on the less powerful remaining flagship and collector.
-Mike

[Mike DiCenso]

Inheritance, if anything, shows tunnel digging with no evidence of heat. That's a cheat on physics, with unknown energy inputs.

Actually, if you have the full sequence from "Legacy", which is what I believe you're refering to, it does show some kind of waving material spraying out of the expanding tunnel, and it signficantly denser as time goes by. That could be super-heated material, or is ment to be plasma escaping upward into the air. At the very least it's dust, but then that would be odd as it would mean the phaser beam is grinding the solid granite into a fine powder, and that does take a fair amount of mechanical work to do in it's own right. However it's a really damn weird way for phasers to work.
-Mike

[Jedi Master Spock]

As I have pointed out previously, BOBW clearly involves maximum power output, and as I have also pointed out, conservation of energy dictates that a GCS's maximum warp core output is almost certainly in excess of 400 EW.

This is assuming that the tritanium-hulled GCS is only about as dense as the duranium-hulled Intrepid class.

I'll review. Descent - warp power directly away from a local system Sun. Assuming a 5 million ton mass, an interruptible speed of c with no actual kinetic energy, and a local g field of 270 m/s^2 gives a warp power of 400 exawatts. Density similar to the CCS gives thousands of exawatts, as does using "low" warp factor speeds.

Relics involves a 100 second trip from a 150,000 km orbit to a 200,000,000 km orbit. If we're talking a 5 million ton ship, a constant power draw, no actual kinetic energy, and a Sun-like star, this is about 1.5e11 J/kg * 5e9 kg = 7.5e20 J in 100 seconds or 7.5 exawatts... with 60% impulse power. Granted, the star in question is quite probably less massive (and also smaller in radius), but full peak impulse power still has to fall in the exawatt range.

Deja Q involves taking a e16 kg moon and reducing its effective mass to next to nothing while very deep in a planetary gravity well - if we neglect all other effects outside of the local system of planet+moon, that's a 4e16 kg * 6.3e7 J/kg potential difference - or about 2.5e24 joules, assuming Bre'el IV to be Earth-like.

And applying the warp field to the moon does not take very long. If the timeframe of the warp field operation is more than 10 minutes or so, then it must also take into account the potential relative to the local system sun, which will increase this by somewhere around an order of magnitude. In short, we're looking at thousands - possibly tens of thousands - of exawatts.

"Deja Q" also gives us another figure - seven hours of warp nine power to pull the thing into a stable high orbit. That's 25e4 seconds. Run the same change in potential (pulling the moon into a stable high orbit will be slightly less energy than almost-completely disappearing the mass) and you get warp 9 power channeled through the tractor beam being an effective 100 exawatts.

It would be foolish to place the BOBW deflector beam weapon at anything less than a hundred exawatts, and a hundred gigatons per second (420 EW) is perfectly reasonable to gauge by actual performance [conservation of energy figures] as well as dialog [12.75 EW for idle, serious variance in warp core output.]

Total yield hitting the Borg cube is appropriately measured in teratons.

A hundred people being wrong does not make them right, either.

No, but in this case they (or should I say we) are right and you're wrong. That's just the way it is. You have your transcript and that's all fine and dandy. But I've not only seen the episode itself but seen an actual poll on what people hear. And it is billions.

But I'am not going to argue, what I am going to do is default to the millions statement since it allows for a more reasonably fair and conservative estimate of the plasma power in the one conduit.

Saying billions is really millions is not conservative. It's incorrect. You don't seem to be willing to accept this, fine then. I'm not going to argue the point further then this because it’s obvious you’ve made up your mind.

There are two problems here - one is that both figures could make sense given the other dialog references and the situation, and the second is that "m" and "b" can sound very close to each other as starting letters - as close as any two consonants in the English language. (Both are voiced consonants that start off with sealed lips, distinguished only by a slight variance in timing and a little bit of an explosive puff of air.)

Without a lot of backstage information, we don't know which was actually intended (the released scripts are often inaccurate), and there's some legitimate dispute as to which is actually spoken by the recording.

[Roondar]

I'm not so sure you can take the weight difference created by the Warpfields of the E-D as being equal to the energy potential difference though.

See, we don't know how subspace works apart from it allowing some seriously odd stuff. We can't actually asume that conservation of momentum and conservation of energy are valid in a realm where other laws of physics don't apply normally either.

[l33telboi]

I'm not so sure you can take the weight difference created by the Warpfields of the E-D as being equal to the energy potential difference though.

See, we don't know how subspace works apart from it allowing some seriously odd stuff. We can't actually asume that conservation of momentum and conservation of energy are valid in a realm where other laws of physics don't apply normally either.

I agree with that. Remember however that there are those that absoultely demand that CoM and CoE be considered at all times, so it's certainly a point worthy of bringing up. On a related note, I'm still laughing at the idea that one should ignore Mass Effect technology in the game Mass Effect.

[l33telboi]

Without a lot of backstage information, we don't know which was actually intended (the released scripts are often inaccurate), and there's some legitimate dispute as to which is actually spoken by the recording.

It's doesn't even remotely sound like million. He clearly says billion.

[Mike DiCenso]

A hundred people being wrong does not make them right, either.

No, but in this case they (or should I say we) are right and you're wrong. That's just the way it is. You have your transcript and that's all fine and dandy. But I've not only seen the episode itself but seen an actual poll on what people hear. And it is billions

.

I have the episode, too, and I hear Kim clarly say "millions", not "billions", that and coupled with not just one, but several different transcripts that also say "millions", the only correct answer can be millions of gigawatts.

But I'am not going to argue, what I am going to do is default to the millions statement since it allows for a more reasonably fair and conservative estimate of the plasma power in the one conduit.

Saying billions is really millions is not conservative. It's incorrect. You don't seem to be willing to accept this, fine then. I'm not going to argue the point further then this because it’s obvious you’ve made up your mind.

Again, I have heard the line for actual, and he says "millions". The scripts and transcripts all give "millions". So it is not incorrect, and the intention of the writers (or rather the science advisor who stuck it in there for the writers) is clear. Thus it is a reasonable conservative power statement for the Intrepid class.
-Mike

[l33telboi]

Again, I have heard the line for actual, and he says "millions". The scripts and transcripts all give "millions". So it is not incorrect, and the intention of the writers (or rather the science advisor who stuck it in there for the writers) is clear. Thus it is a reasonable conservative power statement for the Intrepid class.
-Mike

You wouldn't mind providing links to these 'multiple' transcripts and the script then. Given that you earlier didn't mention any of them, I'm guessing you're making things up.

Oh, and in the meanwhile. Here's a link to that thread I mentioned earlier, where the question of whether you hear billions or millions is asked. Billions win by crushing majority. On a site where most would be motivated to click millions simply because of their dislike for Trek.

[Mr. Oragahn]

I'd like to point out that it's laughable that the gauntlet 7o9 had on her hand would provide a reliable insulator. It's full of holes. Even my old socks would do better.

[Jedi Master Spock]

I'm not so sure you can take the weight difference created by the Warpfields of the E-D as being equal to the energy potential difference though.

As far as "real" space is concerned, it is - gravitational forces are reduced by that much, placing the object in a much shallower potential well. By definition, the binding energy has been reduced by orders of magnitude.

See, we don't know how subspace works apart from it allowing some seriously odd stuff. We can't actually asume that conservation of momentum and conservation of energy are valid in a realm where other laws of physics don't apply normally either.

Perhaps not, but I prefer to only assume energy is being drawn from subspace into realspace in unusual cases with potentially dangerous consequences for future use of subspace tied to the region (e.g., Omega molecule).

If even something as common as a warp field actually draws energy from subspace and dumps energy back into subspace, all bets are off. It's not so hard to turn a warp field into a de facto power generator in that case.

Conservation laws are so fundamental to our understanding of physics that if we toss them out, we're not going to have much of a basis for comparison across different SF universes. I prefer to only assume mass/energy is not being conserved within normal space when absolutely required to.

However, note that the towing problem for "Deja Q" still suggests a few hundred exawatts without applying a warp field to the moon and using an ad hoc routing of sub-maximal warp power through the tractors, which are not designed for it.

The towing problem of "The Masterpiece Society" is also quite energetic regardless of what figures we plug into it, as is - going back to TOS - "The Paradise Syndrome." Then there's "Operation: Annihilate!" which really does require a brief flash of a whole lot of stored power being used at once.

In "Small Step," Voyager runs into 30 EJ of subspace energy; in "Riddles," the Ba'Neth are using nine EW for a cloaking field.

Even the NX-01 seems likely to benchmark in the exawatt range in "Singularity," passing through a system of blue giants and one black hole - although that case isn't nearly as hard and fast, as the NX-01 probably had a warp field of some strength up while it passed the black hole.

Then, from TNG's "Peak Performance," we have our most direct measure of warp power, where a fist-sized chunk of antimatter is used to give two seconds of warp 1 power for a Voyager sized ship.

Warp 9+ is much more energetic than warp 1, by all indications. We have few good measures of the maximum power generation of a Federation starship - but the only bits of evidence regarding maximum power generation that don't fit with what I'm saying are a couple highly inconsistent TNG dialog references that place maximum power generation far too low for the Enterprise to actually do anything - two regarding the starship, including one from the above-mentioned "The Masterpiece Society," and one regarding a shuttle. Our fourth dialog reference in TNG is perfectly consistent.

For example, inconsistent with the "Dauphin"'s terawatt dialog, we have "Good Shepherd." Torres routes five additional terawatts through the sensor system.

So... yes, I'm pretty sure of what peak warp core production is if we don't throw CoE out the window, and it's in the range of hundreds to thousands of exawatts. Fuel storage and consumption suggest that I lean to the low end of that, or around 400 exawatts, a hundred gigatons a second.

It's doesn't even remotely sound like million. He clearly says billion.

It sounds like a very rushed "million" to me, but as I said, the two consonants are very close. 5 PW running through the conduit while Voyager isn't really doing much doesn't rule out higher generation figures.

[2046]

I think there's a problem here similar to phasers and "POOC"ing . . . actual yield versus effective yield.

A phaser can effectively vaporize a dude, but it ain't real vaporization. "Aha," you say, "you're trying to say that this is some sort of physics cheat, but in fact there is real motion, not fake vaporization!"

And you're right, but it's still a 'cheat'. When the ship jumps to lightspeed, we do not say (based on relativity) that it therefore must have a reactor capable of generating infinite power, though present physical laws would argue that it must be so.

If it's cheating then, why not elsewhere?

Applying a mass-lightening warp field on smaller scales must be taken similarly, and I would argue that the case is the same with antigravs.

[Jedi Master Spock]

I think there's a problem here similar to phasers and "POOC"ing . . . actual yield versus effective yield.

A phaser can effectively vaporize a dude, but it ain't real vaporization. "Aha," you say, "you're trying to say that this is some sort of physics cheat, but in fact there is real motion, not fake vaporization!"

And you're right, but it's still a 'cheat'. When the ship jumps to lightspeed, we do not say (based on relativity) that it therefore must have a reactor capable of generating infinite power, though present physical laws would argue that it must be so.

If it's cheating then, why not elsewhere?

Applying a mass-lightening warp field on smaller scales must be taken similarly, and I would argue that the case is the same with antigravs.

Having the ship effectively travel faster than light is indeed cheating (hence why I don't assume any actual kinetic energy for impulse/warp travel) - but there are several key differences between this, the impossibility of FTL, and phasers.

FTL to STL transitions are impossible in our normal spatial metric. Therefore, warp drive gets "around" the lightspeed barrier somehow; these ships are not traveling at lightspeed in normal space.

If we knew for sure the final state of phasered targets, we would be able to calculate phaser yields precisely. We do know the final and initial state of ships that turn on a warp drive, travel, and then travel out; thus, we know the change in energy of the ship precisely.

Further, this is of immense easily applicable use. If the E-D can draw thousands of exawatts from subspace using its warp coils, that in and of itself is easily turned into a power generator of massive capabilities. A perpetual motion machine, in fact. Phased matter seems to be mostly transformed and transitioned; there's no real usable energy production that we can be sure of. Same thing with antigrav. Having free antigrav that doesn't obey CoE means you can generate loads of free power. Given the portability of antigrav tech, in fact, you can make very small perpetual motion machines.

As I pointed out, "Deja Q" gives another benchmark that doesn't involve warp fields at all - simply conventional tractoring - which falls in the hundred-exawatt range for warp 9 (not maximum warp power). The difference between that and the warp field power requirements can be explained largely in terms of efficiency and the use of the full maximum capabilities of the core, more than can be safely routed through tractors.

[Cocytus]

Now, we know in this case that they were tying all the power they had into the tractor beam, such that life support failure was imminent. They would have been running the core at its absolute to-the-point-of-breach power production capability. We know from another episode that the E-D has at least nine fusion reactors which power other systems. In fact, most of its functions are not in fact served by the warpcore. "The Nth Degree" and "Hero Worship" both establish the core doesn't power the shields, so its unlikely it powers the communications system either. Ships like the E-E, Voyager, Delta Flyer, etc. have ejected their cores and still maintained life-support, sublight engines and other systems. In any event, given that they DID move the fragment some distance, this example can serve as an estimate of the peak power production of the entire ship.

This seems to run contrary to TOS, where the impulse engines could also power the shield and other systems, but were substantially weaker than they were when powered by the warp engines. In fact, warp drive seemed to be the prefered power source for most systems. In ST:TMP, the refit Constitution design increased phaser power by directly powering them through the warp drive.

In the TNG-era, the Defiant as per "The Sound of Her Voice", powered the phasers via warp power, though when at warp speed, there was a trade-off between speed and phaser power. In ST:Insurrection, the E-E was made substantially weaker without her warp core. The fact that she could still use shields and phasers is only a reasonable back-up capability given the TOS precident. She also went up against the Son'a battleships using a bunch of ignited technobabble metreon gas to disable or destroy them , and then went and beat up on the less powerful remaining flagship and collector.
-Mike

The Defiant was dumping the phaser reserves into the warp system to increase their speed in order to reach captain Cusack in time. This doesn't mean the phasers are powered by the drive. In fact, we see in "Behind the Lines" Sisko, and later Dax, making a ceremony out of displaying the power cells for the phasers in the Mess Hall, further proof that they don't run off the warpcore, but off of replaceable packs. And a discrepancy with TOS is hardly proof against this assertion. After all, you pointed out what I missed in the other thread, that 23rd century Starfleet can't recrystallize dilithium, but 24th century Starfleet can. It's not a stretch to say that the 24th century has better power generators besides simply the warpcore, and can run more systems independently in case the warpcore goes offline or is dumped. After all, in the Constitution redesign, an antimatter imbalance renders phasers inoperable. Successive designers undoubtedly looked for ways to minimize the dependence of critical systems, (shields, weapons, sublight propulsion) on the warpcore.