Mith wrote:Mr. Oragahn wrote:Show me any of these races having records of fiercely fighting the Borg and defeating two of their mightest ships.
Cubes are not the strongest ships that the Collective have; Tactical are. Furthermore, the Borg have attacked Romulan settlements as well; who are just as advanced as the Federation is.
Tactical Cubes appeared later in the series, and were very rare. The mighty large Cubes still represented the most obvious and unstoppable assault force the Borg used.
As for the Romulans having to deal with the Borg, you're merely showing that the Romulans were concerned as well. Not proving that the UFP was a minor group.
You plan to go on for how long about this?
I'm sure you're exploited all possible arguments by now and you're still not showing anything to prove your initial assertion.
There are on ships. Which would make the weapon only super good against inert matter, worlds and that stuff, but terrible against shields.
By what evidence do you claim this?
It's part of the suggestion. Protomatter does wonders against matter. It seems to be fine to alter the state of matter. It doesn't mean it wouldn't be effective as part of a weapon against shielded ships, but it does not look like it's known for its effects on shields.
In the end, this is merely part of the theory, in addition to the main reason I mentionned protomatter.
Founder who can live in space. A schockwave that cracks rocks is not rating high on that list of menaces to advanced liquid forms which can live in space and adopt any form.
It's like pretending you destroy the water in a bathtub because you crack the tub.
Unfortunately, breaking them apart does kill them, as we've seen pieces of them getting seperated turning back into muck. The shockwave would have basically blown them into pices; like stirring pudding. The differnece is that pudding isn't alive; it isn't one single thing. You can split it into three bowls and then pour it back into one and nothing is different. For an organism however, doing that would more than likely wound if not kill it.
I've seen Founders turn into gas. That shockwave is, at best, going to exerce a pressure on them, but they have like a whole atmosphere to drift along and compensate for the overpressure.
I'd like to know the details about a Founder dying because its "drops" were spread out too far from each other.
Also, what happens if the shockwave happens to push a Founder into a hole or cave or so?
Even more, as the Link, the Founders are one and a great ocean. All a shockwave will do is create a tidal wave. The Founders at the surface might turn into spray and die, the other underneath would be fine, athough shocked and moved up and down.
The surface is solid. Yes you can crack it with a shockwave. That's all.
The mantle is another affair.
The only ways to destroy mantle is to either vapourize it, NDF it or cool it down, which none of the weapons have been doing or seen doing at the magnitude needed for such destruction. The most bizarre effect, NDF, would only be a danger if it would remove large quantities of matter, which would of course get noticed from the moment quantities of the crust would disappear, changing the mass of the planet and its external structure.
Not 100% true. First of all, it is probably possible to blow apart the mantle (ie, send the matter away with heavy explosives), but this is fairly impractical and incredibly stupid when you have disruptor cannons at your beck and call.
It's also terribly impossible to achieve for these people. The amount of matter to either vapourized in so few shots, or to NDF away, is mind boggling, and no Trek ship has reached anything close to that.
As for the phaser/disruptor trick, would probably work wonders on it. Remember that phasers have a heating component; to do what they do they need to heat the target. Well, the mantle is pretty hot all on its own. If we say that the phasers work in part by heating and then technobabble sub-space physics doing the rest of the work, well then the mantle is already doing some if not most of the work for you. By that respect, a handful of ships could easily destroy a mantle because part of the process that the phasers/disruptors use is already in the process.
That's fine if you only gloss over the amount of energy to turn the molten matter into gas, and even more to provide enough power to do so as to affect a mantle in its entirety.
From the moment they could that on a planet, they could fire the same stuff at ships, yet their weapons didn't show more potent against Dominion ships and I'm fairly sure Dominion ships don't rate in the high gigaton/teraton craze.
That's why your shockwave theory is better in that respect, but fails to consider that it won't kill things which are not solid.
I disagree; while not as effective against more solid targets, the subspace shockwave could very well kill the targets (the impact alone would turn them into pudding). The only way I could possibly see them surviving is if they turned into a gas of some sort. But against a target that is a liquid life form, it would work fairly well.
And into gas they can turn.
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Changeling
And have a certain resistance to disruptor shots, which are considered by many to be phasers with a different name. Phasers, the technobabble weapon by excellence when needs to be.
Either that's a pointless argument to make since only those weapons were used against the planet, or you're arguing that aside of the shockwave, phasers and torps would directly damage the mantle and account for most of the destruction. That is just so wrong, because it would require yields which consequences on the planet would have been clearly observed.
Even more, it would mean the major part of the damage would be made with the standard side of weapons, not the exotic shockwave add-on, which means you'd be arguing for an insane standard firepower.
Not really, we saw only the opening bombardment; the shockwaves were indeed massive, but they only fired a few torpeodes (out of like what, 300 each? For a nice rounding of 3,000 torpedoes?) and phaser/disruptor shots.
And? How does this disprove the
fact that there were no observable massive fireball, massive crust cracking, or indication of the sudden loos of 30% of the crust' mass?
It does not, the point fails there, flat.
Both weapons had the same effects.
Not per say true, I don't think we ever got a real visual on what the phasers/disruptors did.
We see no difference between the effects of disruptors and torps. The evidence pretty much says no difference. Claiming there is any, despite these weapons seen striking at different parts of the planet, would require solid evidence to counter the sameness which is observed.
It only weakens the theory even more.
Excuse me, but I asked a simple question. Or are you doubting that we should see such effects with gigatons of firepower.
Or do you think the plasma is special?
Your question is confusing because I have no idea what you're talking about context wise, but I'll take a stab.
These weapons may or may not be special; if it is Romulan Plasma weapons, well, they also use trilithium...which is known for stopping all reactions in a star. Possibly why one wouldn't see massive fireballs.
The whole plasma term in the name suggested that the damaged had to do with ionized gas, which unless it would be exotically and terribly cold for some reason, would more likely be very hot at some point in the weapon's design. Hence my request for fireballs.
Now, if it stops reactions, it's endothermic, and thus makes for an absolutely shitty weapon against rock. I don't even see how making the rocky crust cold qualifies as destruction.
Of course, the consumption of energy would be completely counter intuitive to the creation of a shockwave, for example.
But would fail at killing non solids, especially non solids which can turn in gas and live in space. You'd need something more significant than a kinetic wave.
Point on the gas argument, but again, the Founder would be broken up into a million pieces in his liquid form, which should be significant enough to kill it. The gas is a point, as is escaping to the atmosphere, but I'm not sure they knew that or had a better idea. Granted, they should have known it and perhaps they had a plan for it, but the attack was from surprise; they may have hoped that they Founders would be caught off guard quickly enough to take care of them.
Actually, you made me think of something rather cool for my idea.
Their first volley would have only destroyed 30% of the crust. What does it mean?
You can look at it by either thinking it's about surface area, overall quantity, or thickness.
In the first case, surface area, 30% of the crust being attacked (and yet without much terrible effects on the surface for what we could see from space), this would leave 70% intact until the next volley.
Which would simply leave too much time for Founders to actually adopt a way to resist to the attack.
In the second case, which is more akin to attacking the crust from a radial volumetric standpoint, where the 30% of destruction would correspond to the total volume of matter destroyed in the sphere of influence of each impact, the problem would remain the same as above, that is, leaving the Founders time to react. Turn to gas and poof, the shockwave are useless.
The third option, however, tackles the event from the perspective of the destruction being about the amount of surface thickness being damaged. Since protomatter reactions expand over the surface of worlds, it would be easily argued that what we saw was whatever of the surface crawling effect which managed to affect the cloud layer, while as the effect would spread, expand, and loose in power, would keep rolling across the hills, but without reaching high enough to pierece through the cloud layer and be noticed. Like flying under the radar below a certain altitude, the least powerful last seconds of the effects would be masked from view.
Eventually, the first volley would have
totally affected the
surface, but not the entirety of the
whole crust. Think as the 30% as the skin of an apple. Therefore, each new salvo would affect a deeper layer of the planet. Who knows that the protomatter would do. It would in theory affect any matter at the surface and turn it into something else. The Link would be most entirely affected (unless for some reason massive isolated pockets would be found in holes in the crust, but further bombardments would take care of this). The protomatter effect might even spread along the Link.
They faked their presence. That's *only* requiring a fake signal and jamming the rest. This is a far cry from claiming that the brown clouds are an optical illusion. Please provide evidence of this most far fetched claim.
Um, it basically was. Unless you want to explain why we saw large shockwaves like water in a pond killing the "Founders"? Of course, the fact that no one suggested anything was wrong is a point.
You realize that all this talk that's been going on for years, literally, is precisely to explain the existence of visual effects we take at face value, by considering that they happened, without pretending that they're a planetary scale illusion, right?
It also makes me wonder why you keep arguing then, why you think you need a theory of some kind, if this is an illusion, and anything can be an illusion and pretty much made up.
Again, sending signals to a planet to fake the emission that the Link would generate is much likely easier to do than suddenly create a whole visual illusion, and I'm sorry, but until you provide strong evidence for your illusion, this argument is moot.
Of course, I'm hard pressed to go check for every single episode featuring a torpedo going off or a disruptor hitting a target to see if all unshielded matter around is destroyed by a further subspace shockwave.
Not to mention that you don't "carry" a disruptor, and that from the moment you can fire it at this yield, you can fire it at the same yields against other targets.
I've already explained that we really didn't see any phsyical reactions to the disruptors...
This is extremely vague actually, and I don't recall we went deep into the headline topic of "Disruptors seen creating subspace shockwaves on targts!".
... and the mantle issue is fairly easy to wave off due to the special functions of the weapon itself.
No. Not at all. Read above, there's a vast difference of scale between what would be needed to achieve that, and what Trek ships are regularly capable of.
You realize that you're just saying these weapons were standard weapons with yields up. Which means, yes, these uber weapons would easily be standard weapons on thier own from the moment the Roms and Cards would enhanced their power, which by your logic, we've seen them do.
I am suggesting that most of the power that we saw was doen by the torpedoes, not the disruptors. Of course, since the weapon itself interacts differntly with matter than it does agianst shields and special materials, your argument is fairly silly.
Hardly, and we already went there, but I understand why you want to brush it off with your "silly" labels. But I'm OK to go into it
again (after that lenghty talk we had at SBC about it, before Kyosanom would become the ugly parade monster people would toss peanuts at).
As a point of comparison, the phasers of the E-D could dig a hole through hunders or thousands of kilometers of rock in little time, but the diameter wasn't enormous.
Now, when you consider the power of these phasers against shielded ships, you observe a certain ratio, and notice how many shots such weapons need to damage shields.
We could come with an arbitrary scale that against matter, the phaser can deal petawatts of damage, against shields, terawatts.
Then we move to TDiC disruptors. The scale is mangitudes superior, which obviously, would find a parallel in how it affects shields as well. It would be proportional.
With planetary destructive effects which would equal magnitudes worth the very high gigatons or sit right through the teraton scale, the disruptors would logically scale towards shields proportionally.
Yet, you're pretending that disruptors which could NDF and melt or vapourize 30% of a crust would offer no vastly overkill advantage against the traditional shields found on Jemhadar bugs.
Sure, you could say why not? Why couldn't the Romulans have more or less standard weapons capable of blasting 30% of a crust, but not offer any significant overkill advantage against the random advanced civilization's battleship?
My reply would be that I don't see how could develop such a weapon with massive gains about their effects on matter, yet offer no hugely major advantage against shielded or specially armoured targets.
My second reply would be that even if this was possible, the planet showed zero sign of such large scale NDF effects.
My third reply would be that these powerful torpedoes didn't have any particular greater effects to the point where the Romulan and Cardassian ships would have saved themselves more than if they had to rely on more conventional and traditional firepower.
Nevermind that these super cranked up weapons didn't make a difference against the typical Dominion ships.
Said high-level torpedoes would be incredibly expensive and would probably result in the other side using weapons. Basically the weapons that the Tal Shiar and the Obsidian Order were using were considered illeagle by the code of war and by the Alpha races in general.
Who gives? We're talking about saving their asses at any cost there. The very fact that they attempted destroying a planet pretty much screws any war conventions, so the question is completely moot.
Not to say that this escalation of firepower is most absurd when battles against ships only involve the safety of people aboard these ships. It would go the exact opposite way actually: firing the most powerful shots first.
It's so used as an easy cop out in debates but it's downright absurd and lame. It doesn't resist to any logic as long as space battles are concerned.
This is often considered to be the worst episode of Voyager. Its writer, Brannon Braga, in an interview on the DVD release of season 2, called the episode "a royal steaming stinker". The breaking of the warp 10 barrier is stated in the episode itself to be impossible, yet nonetheless happens; the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual had explained that warp 10 meant infinite speed and thus was effectively meaningless. As a result, the episode was later struck from canon, with Tom Paris explicitly saying in a later episode he'd "never been to transwarp."
Not only I take Voyager's numbers with a big grain of salt, but this is a gem, really.
Wow, now if only you had proof that it was struck from the canon, because all episodes, movies, and the like are canon, even if they suck ass. Paris saying that he never flew at transwarp is clearly false; he has, as was clearly proven by the episode itself.
Yet he said he didn't go there, and no one corrected him despite the whole fuzz this experiment turned out to be.
My point is that the people behind Voyager were clearly ready to literally ignore episodes they had previously written. This clearly deals a huge blow to the credibility of the data coming from this show.
So we're still stuck with two problems, one being the energy generation issue, which is nonsensical otherwise the UFP has ships running on potential exatons of energy, and secondly, how again are you supposed to remove the atmosphere with a single explosion which, although leaving a large scorch mark, didn't dent the planet like an apple.
That would be a crater actually. Of course, I would rather like to think they used some other method than just half an ounce of magic antimatter, perhaps using the antimatter was only a trigger for the sub-space bomb they put down there.
Subspace. The magic word. :/
And how does your "subpace" solves the problem that you need to deliver large amounts of energy equally and over a certain period to push the atmosphere away from a planet if in the end, you want to keep the planet rather intact safe for that singular and rather flat crater (which apparently cooled down stupidly fast btw)?
Seriously...
Warp fields are a cheat and don't look much relevant to the topic at hand.
A cheat? As in how?
As in they break the laws of physics and bend space. Once you can bend space time, and therefore all laws related to this ensemble, including anything about forces and gravity, you cheat them, you get to do things that more conventional technology and, above all, given amounts of energy wouldn't let you do.
Yeah, been there done that. Let me guess, they again used the exotic warpfield tech?
No.
They just changed the trajectory of that pulse thing without using the warp field?
Please point me to calcs showing by how much they changed the trajectory, and how long it took them to do so.
Again, this was adressed, you wank it out. He said smoking cinder, and there's no need for it to be absolutely ultra literal.
He didn't say smoking cinder; I was paraphrasing. He said cinder. I was guessing that he was refering to the planet's surface. Which would probably mean that the Defiant's entire invantory and firepower could do that to a planet given time. He didn't indicate that they could bring all that power to bear however; just that the ship could easily eradicate the planet's population.
Which is much open to interpretation.
A ship carrying a good number of quantum torps, a full stock of possibly low gigatons of antimatter top, which can be fired through hoses (phasers) to maximize efficiency (more surface touched, less focused explosions like with nukes) and has NDF effects to count on could indeed, with enough time, screw up a planet, no doubt about that.
But don't go thinking about worlds covered with oceans of newly formed super hot lava.
Depends what you mean by disputing the canon status. If it means "it's present in an episode but is ludicrous to the highest degree for a wide variety of reasons, from continuity to science plausibility", then yes, I dump it.
Despite the fact that canon doesn't contradict it? The fact that its clearly a powerful weapon stronger than what they normally use?
Canon doesn't contradict it? That's a joke. Your bomb, which threw the E-Nil far far away at such a speed, would have needed to be massively powerful.
But please, instead of being vague, give me the details of the calculation that would show how that multi megaton torp thrusted the E-Nil.
The UFP surely attempted to prove, despite the first failure, that it was a good tech at planetary scales, right. Where are those other planets fully terraformed with the help of one single device again?
You may also look at notes which tell you how to build a thing, but if there's an important detail you don't even understand, it's not going to work.
Possibly hundreds
Possibly
zero yes.
; we only have three known instances of terraforming.
On limited scales without clear descriptions of the methods or even involvement of protomatter.
The first was Wrath of Khan.
So you're leaving out the cave?
With the crew working on the Genesis device, before the issues. This example obviously
does not qualify as a proof of a decent legacy.
You're talking about the nebula.
It's even less relevant. The tech was used by a robber who knew nothing about the design, no matter how smart he was.
The secon was in TNG, which a few scienists are being killed off. We aren't really shown much, but they were apparently digging into the planet for some unexplained reason. Nor was there any evidence that they had actually introduced the Genesis device/ technology to the planet at any point.
Please more details.
The third indication is DS9, where we have protomatter, something that was part of the original Genesis device's design, used by a terraformer to re-ignite a star. Likelyhood of him using it on the other planets is also very possible, but not likely on such a massive scale. It is clear however, that the technology works.
But it was never established he used protomatter for those.
So here we are, have three examples, one of which we see no actual terraforming. The first is a failure, but was an unstable experiment that was performed by someone whose knowledge was 300 years out of date, performed in a nebula rather than on the planet, and create a planet and a star from scratch. There are so many issues here that any scientist would easily dismiss this as an accurate test of Genesis's potential since it was used in an uncontrolled enviroment (wrong one at that, it would be like trying to use a air plane in space and expecting the test to give you accurat results for normal travel on a planet) and opperated by a primitive who probably didn't do it right. Furthermore, only one or two of the scientists died from the results of STII and STIII and most of the intel was saved. Furthermore, there were caverns where the effects of genesis was shown to be working properly without problem that they could study even if all the people had died (which they didn't). Then we have a terraformer over a hundred years later who has performed many wonders with a quote that he uses the same substance that was part of the Genesis's matrix, suggesting that the two technolgies are the same, although the later more advanced. We see that his works are successful and that even his later and most ambitious test was also successful.
But according to your argument, protomatter is uber rare, is a lost technology,and apparently have no evidence of it working on a grand scale such as a planet, despite the fact that it worked on basically rebooting a star.
Protomatter is not a technology.
The technology is the tools to master and use protomatter in given ways.
So it could have been the equivalent of a giant ball of TNT for all we know.
All large explosions tend to cause sub-space shockwaves.
Not if they're, you know, non exotic watzizit.
The shockwave would travel through matter and break solids, it wouldn't exactly push it away.
In the end, we know nothing about the quantity of reactants that went up, so bringing this incident was not useful.
Pardon? It doesn't matter if the shield, granted by some holy miracle, would have protected that segment of the planet against an internal explosion (we'll also not notice the attempt at wanking up Klingon shields in the process), since what matters is how can that lump of stuff drifting in space can still retain the atmosphere and all the blue stuff at the surface like if the whole mass of the planet still existed.
Even if there was a shield (>_>) it would be looking like a huge opaque blob.
No, the explosion occured on Praxis; the Klingon moon that orbits their planet. Judging the shields of the planet by that would be pretty hard given we don't know the distance.
I thought you tried to rationalize the issue I brought by saying Praxis had shields.
Let's just say that Praxis was covered with an ore which was deep blue.
As I said above, without knowing the quantity of reactants which blew up, we know nothing about the power of this, and therefore this is entirely useless as to argue for super wankaton yields even in favour of the Klingons.
