Discovery Shows TDiC-Level Planetary Bombardment

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Re: Discovery Shows TDiC-Level Planetary Bombardment

Post by 359 » Tue Jan 23, 2018 4:37 am

Khas wrote:You know, the TOS episode "A Piece of the Action" showed that starship phaser emitters can be set on "stun" if they need to be, so it's possible that the Bird-of-Prey deliberately lowered its disruptors' yields for the colony attack, simply because higher power wasn't needed.

Or, if they used torpedoes, we know from ENT that torpedoes can also have their yields dialed. Photonic torpedoes, could, at their lowest yield, blow the comm antenna off a shuttlepod without damaging the rest of it, while at their highest yield, would put a "three-kilometer wide crater in an asteroid".
While that is a possibility, it seems unlikely given the Klingons were attempting to eliminate a tactically important dilithium mining colony.

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Re: Discovery Shows TDiC-Level Planetary Bombardment

Post by Mike DiCenso » Tue Jan 23, 2018 5:32 pm

"While that is a possibility, it seems unlikely given the Klingons were attempting to eliminate a tactically important dilithium mining colony."

But the counter to that is that is obvious: They want to eliminate the colony, sure, but they also want to have the dilithium for themselves. They can't have that if they go around cracking the crust and leaving ejecta-spewing craters.
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Re: Discovery Shows TDiC-Level Planetary Bombardment

Post by Mike DiCenso » Tue Jan 23, 2018 5:42 pm

2046 wrote:On rewatch of the clip, the glow seems to flare a bit at the end of the run on at least some of the impactors, suggesting interaction with atmosphere. But, these are still weapons with large glow by default. I'd call it half an Ocala, by eyeball, and that place has city limits like six miles wide.
I'm not sure what you're seeing since I watched several of the torpedoes disappear just before the explosions go off. An example is one torpedo in the very upper left corner I was able to track reliably disappears a few frames before impact and detonation.
-Mike

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Re: Discovery Shows TDiC-Level Planetary Bombardment

Post by Mike DiCenso » Tue Jan 23, 2018 7:00 pm

Darth Spock wrote:
Tue Jan 23, 2018 1:43 am
When I first saw this my initial reaction was that the F/X crews had gone to the opposite extreme of the early TNG "gigawatts are scary" angle and were going to start in on a "gigatons are common" approach.
But I think JMS really hit the nail on the head in his comment above. This is a nice example to help dispel some of the "Star Trek weapons are pathetically weak" perceptions, but I agree that this display isn't as huge as it first appears.
When I actually tried to scale this thing, using the curvature of the horizon, locations of the blasts relative to cloud cover, times and distances of blast effects etc., I ended up with a lot of muddled results that tended to drag the figures down more than bolster them.
As large as the explosions seem, this example still actually suffers from a lot of the same criticisms of the TDiC bombardment. The lack of mushroom clouds is bothersome for starters, but typical in sci-fi. While the level of destruction initially appears ridiculously huge compared to the curvature of the horizon, it's the time factors that really hurt this example, everything reaches its apex too soon.
Ejecta is present, but seems too move too fast for mere seconds then visibly slows far too rapidly. Apparent shock waves move too quickly for the distances they appear to cover, and fizzle too soon as well. Fireball effects don't last long enough either. Only about 20 seconds after the detonations when the emperor opens a channel, there appears to be nothing left in the background but ordinary conflagrations on the planet's surface, with no lingering evidence of massive explosions having taken place. I am also unsure that the jagged glowing lines can reliably be identified as cracks in the crust, and may only be incendiary effects on the landscape caused by thermal radiation.

The noted the low orbit and angle of view likely affects the actual area of destruction as well. What initially struck me as an area equaling a good chunk of the continental U.S.A. or most of the European Union shrinks to about the size the state of Texas or the nation of France compared to a view from low orbit. I wouldn't expect a huge amount of distortion in the image but it is hard to pin the scale down exactly, you can see the camera isn't maintaining a single focus by the jumps in the following gif. Comparison to a view of Florida from the ISS:
Image

Accepting that no figure is going realistically match what was seen on screen in every respect, I tried to match as many of the details against the expected results from online nuclear calculators and the apparent distances involved. I found that as I plugged in numbers higher than about 300 megatons (and conversely, when going lower than about 3 MT) the results progressively generated far more inconsistencies than they seemed to solve.
The area being destroyed is clearly greater than the entire Florida peninsula as you've demonstrated. But let's get another perspective on this:

Area Ranked 22nd
• Total 65,755 sq mi (170,304 km2)
• Width 361 miles (582 km)
• Length 447 miles (721 km)


This level of area of destruction would only be the case, if the torpedoes were exactly destroying the state within its borders. Now, extrapolate that out to the obvious areas destroyed beyond that. This means that the Florida Keys, the Bahamas, a good portion of Cuba, and some of the states of Georgia and Alabama would be destroyed as well, too:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Flori ... 35!5m1!1e4

But there's more to it than that. The crust is actually being punctured down to the mantle and it is cracking. This is an extinction-level event comparable to the Chicxulub crater in size. So let's look at the numbers. One torpedo destroys an area of "only" 40 km wide and 40 km deep (the depth of the Earth's crust).

Therefore, assuming a perfect cylindrical hole, 50,265 cubic km (50,265,480,000,000 cubic meters) of material is vaporized or melted rather instantaneously. Now granite rock is 2,300 kg/cubic meters, a boiling point of 2500 K, and a specific heat of 720 J/Kg/K. This means a potential single torpedo attack of 47,574 gigatons or 47.5 teratons. That's just off the cuff calcs. For those thinking I high balled this, the asteroid destruction calculator on SDN would assume a perfectly spherical asteroid and the explosion placed right in the middle for maximum effect would give us around 250 teratons and a fragmentation energy of 64 gigatons.
-Mike

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Re: Discovery Shows TDiC-Level Planetary Bombardment

Post by Jedi Master Spock » Wed Jan 24, 2018 3:37 am

Khas wrote:
Tue Jan 23, 2018 3:31 am
Jedi Master Spock wrote:
Sat Jan 20, 2018 6:50 am
It's a lot less ambiguous than past examples (because the VFX are a lot more realistic than older VFX) but I would be hesitant to say that photon torpedoes should be considered to carry a yield much more than what they should given the heavily-reinforced datum that they are antimatter warhead missiles about the size of a coffin.
You know, I've been thinking about how photon torpedoes can have such high-yields despite being so small. And then I realized something that I hadn't thought of before - or in fact, I'd even heard before.

What if the high-yield photon torpedoes use electron-degenerate deuterium and positron-degenerate anti-deuterium, basically they store their stuff at white dwarf densities. You wouldn't need much space to hold a good amount at that density - a matchbox worth of the stuff has the mass of an elephant. I'd imagine these torpedoes would also have mass-lightening tech in them.

Sure, this has never been mentioned in the show, but it would explain quite a bit.
It would explain higher-yield examples - and with dial-a-yield capability, you can try to handle lower-yield examples as well, but there are a lot of complications that come from having super-high densities, and I don't think assuming we have a significantly more exotic form of "deuterium" really fits well.

If I had to explain weird effects and overages, I'd prefer to reach into subspace for weird "drawn out of space" energy somehow characteristic to certain intentional M/AM reactions than reach for rather than deuterium being something other than what we generally call deuterium.

Wesley handles a lot more than a matchbox of antimatter in TNG:"Peak Performance." Then we have an explicit mass - not volume or weight, mass -
in VOY:"Dreadnought."

Perspective is a real pain here. On the image Darth Spock posted, there's something like the lower 1/4-1/3 of Florida out of view off of the bottom of the image, and the further parts of Florida are at a much different scale than the nearer parts. That makes it hard to immediately gauge the amount of area being immediately obliterated even after superimposing the benchmark image - you'd have to sector it up to get a good scaling.

It is unquestionably high yield - things may evolve too quickly, but I think if you compare orbital bombardment scenes across different SF franchises, you'll find that most TV shows or movies will evolve too quickly.

What we have is a much more realistic-looking and detailed picture of destruction than in the past, but it's still cooked up "in lab" with an eye towards looking nice rather than being an actual simulation of the detonation of such-and-such of a yield. If we choose a best-match scenario, we're going to have to work with something that does not necessarily match in all particulars.

That said, if we have a good "on the ground" look at what things look like afterwards, we can do a lot more to deduce the intended effective yield. How thorough is the destruction of whoever / whatever was living on that planet?

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Re: Discovery Shows TDiC-Level Planetary Bombardment

Post by Darth Spock » Fri Jan 26, 2018 6:22 am

Mike DiCenso wrote:
Tue Jan 23, 2018 5:32 pm
359 wrote:"While that is a possibility, it seems unlikely given the Klingons were attempting to eliminate a tactically important dilithium mining colony."
But the counter to that is that is obvious: They want to eliminate the colony, sure, but they also want to have the dilithium for themselves. They can't have that if they go around cracking the crust and leaving ejecta-spewing craters.
-Mike
The Klingon assault in S1E4 was still wrecking the place, and that handful of BoPs wouldn't have enough troops to take over the dilithium production facilities. Moreover, it's a problem regardless of the Klingon tactics, seeing as the vessels were completely destroyed in atmosphere no more than a few kilometers from the then unshielded compound. Sure, it's obviously just an oversight as even low end 'Trek power estimates should have had enough antimatter stores on those ships to turn that "rescue" into a Pyrrhic victory, so it gets written off as "Hollywood." But the problem remains that for every high end example there's another low ball reference pulling ridiculously in the other direction. In fact, prior this TWI bombardment scene, an aggressive nerfing campaign could have been made based around the low yield weapons seen in the Voyager episode "Dragon's Teeth" with an explanation for planet-wide annihilations focused on dirty weapons.

Having gone through all that bluster... I did notice something in the video I had missed before. Given the erratic F/X I originally tried to just to match up the general sizes and comparative ratios of the destructive areas, dismissing some of the odd effects, including the rapid burning off of cloud cover. It appears however that the blasts may actually be boiling much of the nearby bodies of water completely dry, and the "cracked" crust lines I thought were perhaps flammable regions being ignited actually appear under (former) bodies of water, and likely were intended by the visual artist as magmatic fissures. Guesstimating the volume of water being vaporized would indeed require high gigatons, to say nothing of needing to heat the atmosphere well over 100 C and affect the planet's surface so deeply. So more conservative estimates suffer just as much if not more incompatibilities with this scene.

The problems remain however. Finding evidence supporting such radical yields here doesn't alleviate the internal contradictions elsewhere in the canon or incompatibilities with real world physics. Having new doubts about the possibility of these being sub-gigaton blasts, that would seem to leave two alternate explanations for this not being representative of normal weaponry:

1) Like phasers, torpedoes also use unconventional effects against targets in addition to DET. I'm already not a fan of this one, though it would help explain how multiple torpedo casings managed to be "consumed" without unfortunate blast effects on the surrounding area in the Voyager episode "Alliances."

2) These may not be conventional weapons the same as are commonly used in ship to ship combat. As already noted, the color is different from standard torpedoes in the primary time line, and their size may be excessively large. These are rather small details and hardly deal breakers, but combined with the disproportionate firepower to other examples, as well as status reports indicating apparent negative effects on the ship in orbit, it sounds as though this may not be a typical torpedo spread they would normally encounter and be able to tank against their shields.


Still, assuming this is the direction they plan to take and there isn't a technobable, unconventional weapon write off for this example, an explanation for the power density limitations JMS mentioned would be in order. I remember a thread by Lucky some years back regarding the use of dilithium as a power source. I don't really like the idea of scrapping real world science for blank check, write your own power figure magic crystals, but it sounds like one of the better explanations. It could also potentially provide a rationale for such a wide variety of stated power figures, being the result of pre and post dilithium power multiplication. Truthfully, I hope it doesn't come to that. I prefer those kind of write offs be saved for explaining away special techs of the week as opposed to supporting biggaton wank across the board. I guess time will tell.

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Re: Discovery Shows TDiC-Level Planetary Bombardment

Post by Jedi Master Spock » Sat Jan 27, 2018 2:57 pm

Darth Spock wrote:
Fri Jan 26, 2018 6:22 am
2) These may not be conventional weapons the same as are commonly used in ship to ship combat. As already noted, the color is different from standard torpedoes in the primary time line, and their size may be excessively large. These are rather small details and hardly deal breakers, but combined with the disproportionate firepower to other examples, as well as status reports indicating apparent negative effects on the ship in orbit, it sounds as though this may not be a typical torpedo spread they would normally encounter and be able to tank against their shields.
What sort of status report details are we looking at?

In "Q Who," the Enterprise is said to be at risk of destruction by firing its own torpedoes. To be fair, I think the Enterprise doesn't have its shields up at that point, but I think there may be some other references to minimum safe firing distances for photon torpedoes or effects from proximity detonations for what are clearly regular photon torpedoes as well.

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Re: Discovery Shows TDiC-Level Planetary Bombardment

Post by Darth Spock » Sun Jan 28, 2018 3:07 am

Jedi Master Spock wrote:
Sat Jan 27, 2018 2:57 pm
Darth Spock wrote:
Fri Jan 26, 2018 6:22 am
2) These may not be conventional weapons the same as are commonly used in ship to ship combat. As already noted, the color is different from standard torpedoes in the primary time line, and their size may be excessively large. These are rather small details and hardly deal breakers, but combined with the disproportionate firepower to other examples, as well as status reports indicating apparent negative effects on the ship in orbit, it sounds as though this may not be a typical torpedo spread they would normally encounter and be able to tank against their shields.
What sort of status report details are we looking at?
I still can't make out what all is being said, but this is what it sounded like to me:

Man 1: Local shock waves imminent.

Woman 1: (? Bearing ?) for impact.

Man 2: ??????????? (? power is fluctuating ?) ???????????

Man 1: All decks brace for impact.

Woman 1: Estimated yield ?????? ?????? and attempting to compensate for electro magnetic ( ? interference ?).

Man 1: Impulse drive is showing intermittent shorts.

Man 2: ??????????

Man 3: Incoming transmission. It's the emperor.
It's drowned out in the background, but the syllables following "estimated yield" sound like they could be "off the charts." But it's way too muffled for me to have any real confidence in that conclusion.

As for being in danger from their own torpedoes at too close a range, they appear to be at least a couple hundred km up here, perhaps 400 km on par with the ISS, compared to the few kilometers indicated by "Q Who" or "The Nth Degree," and the Discovery should have full shielding available here. Then again they were concerned about "shockwaves" from their antimatter contraption at an altitude of 30,000 km in TOS "Obsession," so who knows?

Of course, getting a look at the flagship that launched the attack, it seems increasingly likely this is not a standard production vessel: Image

I would still actually like to see a solid bombardment example from a Star Trek vessel's conventional weapons, but given the crazy bigatons that seem increasingly likely here, I'm just as happy this may end up as another one-off. Hey, the prime universe had the Genesis Device, the mirror universe gets a super ship with a baby star for a hood ornament. It's weird, but I have to admit it looks cool! As long as they're spending so much time in the mirror universe they may as well have some fun with an over the top aggressive design.

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Re: Discovery Shows TDiC-Level Planetary Bombardment

Post by 2046 » Mon Jan 29, 2018 5:24 am

Mike DiCenso wrote:
Tue Jan 23, 2018 5:42 pm

I'm not sure what you're seeing since I watched several of the torpedoes disappear just before the explosions go off. An example is one torpedo in the very upper left corner I was able to track reliably disappears a few frames before impact and detonation.
-Mike
Perhaps some disappear, but not all. (Thus far I have been watching only on mobile.)

Focus on the center and other closer/later ones.

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Re: Discovery Shows TDiC-Level Planetary Bombardment

Post by Darth Spock » Mon Jan 29, 2018 6:38 pm

2046 wrote:
Mon Jan 29, 2018 5:24 am
Mike DiCenso wrote:
Tue Jan 23, 2018 5:42 pm

I'm not sure what you're seeing since I watched several of the torpedoes disappear just before the explosions go off. An example is one torpedo in the very upper left corner I was able to track reliably disappears a few frames before impact and detonation.
-Mike
Perhaps some disappear, but not all. (Thus far I have been watching only on mobile.)

Focus on the center and other closer/later ones.
Agreed, I was able to follow every torpedo to detonation except for the one in the upper left most corner, and the camera cuts away before it detonates.

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Re: Discovery Shows TDiC-Level Planetary Bombardment

Post by 2046 » Wed Jan 31, 2018 7:44 pm

Incidentally, that ship is basically a mega-runabout, if that's a good representative angle. Looks like low nacelles, the same pylon angles, and the upper spine greebles.

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Re: Discovery Shows TDiC-Level Planetary Bombardment

Post by Picard578 » Thu Feb 01, 2018 7:46 am

Darth Spock wrote:
Fri Jan 26, 2018 6:22 am
Still, assuming this is the direction they plan to take and there isn't a technobable, unconventional weapon write off for this example, an explanation for the power density limitations JMS mentioned would be in order. I remember a thread by Lucky some years back regarding the use of dilithium as a power source. I don't really like the idea of scrapping real world science for blank check, write your own power figure magic crystals, but it sounds like one of the better explanations. It could also potentially provide a rationale for such a wide variety of stated power figures, being the result of pre and post dilithium power multiplication. Truthfully, I hope it doesn't come to that. I prefer those kind of write offs be saved for explaining away special techs of the week as opposed to supporting biggaton wank across the board. I guess time will tell.
Power density is actually not much of an issue; there is possibility of usage of ultra-dense deuterium. I'm not sure I have calculations anywhere any more, but I recall yield of 4 - 4,5 teratons being possible in a standard torpedo.

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Re: Discovery Shows TDiC-Level Planetary Bombardment

Post by Darth Spock » Sat Feb 03, 2018 5:24 am

2046 wrote:
Wed Jan 31, 2018 7:44 pm
Incidentally, that ship is basically a mega-runabout, if that's a good representative angle. Looks like low nacelles, the same pylon angles, and the upper spine greebles.
The Charon? The emperor's palace ship with the mini star-looking spore ball? I must have missed something?

Picard578 wrote:
Thu Feb 01, 2018 7:46 am
Power density is actually not much of an issue; there is possibility of usage of ultra-dense deuterium. I'm not sure I have calculations anywhere any more, but I recall yield of 4 - 4,5 teratons being possible in a standard torpedo.
Reaching 4 - 4.5 teratons would require jamming 200 tons of volatile, ultra-dense reactants into the nose of one of those torps. As noted earlier in the thread, the Cardassian dreadnought was already specifically stated as carrying a 1000+1000 kg M/AM warhead by mass, there's no ambiguity there. Considering Janeway's reaction to learning the payload, the specialized nature of the vessel, and the fact that the dreadnought carried its own complement of quantum torpedoes, I think that angle is all but dead.

Looking back to the bombardment of Harlak, It's hard to tell what exactly the writers may have had in mind, but assuming the weapon discharges aren't standard torpedoes, the Charon apparently uses the spore ball as essentially a zero point energy collector. I don't have any figures for what that should realistically generate, but those do tend to be a sci-fi favorite for unlimited power sources. Unless this get corroborated elsewhere, I doubt this example is going to help standard 'Trek weapon yields.

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Re: Discovery Shows TDiC-Level Planetary Bombardment

Post by Jedi Master Spock » Sun Feb 18, 2018 11:44 pm

Darth Spock wrote:
Fri Jan 26, 2018 6:22 am
Still, assuming this is the direction they plan to take and there isn't a technobable, unconventional weapon write off for this example, an explanation for the power density limitations JMS mentioned would be in order. I remember a thread by Lucky some years back regarding the use of dilithium as a power source. I don't really like the idea of scrapping real world science for blank check, write your own power figure magic crystals, but it sounds like one of the better explanations. It could also potentially provide a rationale for such a wide variety of stated power figures, being the result of pre and post dilithium power multiplication. Truthfully, I hope it doesn't come to that. I prefer those kind of write offs be saved for explaining away special techs of the week as opposed to supporting biggaton wank across the board. I guess time will tell.
I'm with my Mirror Universe counterpart here.

If we're going to try to present a scientific analysis as a foundation for science fiction, then unless the science fiction is written incredibly carefully (and even incredibly careful authors make some mistakes) you're going to have to reconcile apparent contradictions.

In this case, we have visual effects that are difficult to reconcile with our easily available models of what should happen if you dump a large amount of energy on a point at once. It's either too destructive, or the heat dissipates too fast, or something, and this happens pretty much every time we pry too deeply into the visual effects. These VFX are "better" - clearer in many ways - than old VFX, but they're still basically physics anomalies.

What we have, at the end of the day, really is about the story, and to make the story hang together, what we need here are torpedoes that are big and nasty enough to basically wipe out a roughly Florida-sized swathe of civilization on a planet in a few dozen shots. I think we can really justify something in the 1-100 gigaton range as being sufficient for that.

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Re: Discovery Shows TDiC-Level Planetary Bombardment

Post by Praeothmin » Tue Feb 20, 2018 1:50 pm

No matter how the destruction is achieved, it is there to see, and the effects are devastating...
In the vs argument, people can try to argue that these are not DEW, but the effects on physical matter is still impressive, so there's no reason to believe ship armor would be more efficient against these weapons than "normal" DEWs...

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