Starfleet Jedi

For this reason I tend to ignore most "official" values and I take dialog <insert number> lines with a grain, no, a tablespoon of salt.

Many across all the series have been iffy, but overall there are some remarkably consistent values, like the 3.75 billion gigawatt number from True Q that matches up very well with those from Voyager's Revulsion, the millions of terajoules from Fair Haven, and 30 million terajoules from One Small Step, among others. Many of the lower numbers, like the infamous 400 GW from The Survivors just don't match up with what the ships are seen visually capable of doing to other vessels or to asteroids or planets. And on top of that we know that weapons can be varied in yield from just enough to knock a com array off a shuttle to putting kilometers wide craters in asteroids, etc.

Hi everyone, on the various Star Trek wikias they always give 25,000 megajoules as photonic torpedoes, while for quantum torpedoes they give 10 ^ 5 megajoules. I converted the figure into Megatoni and Gigatoni on the online converter and the result has a negative exponent, try to check you too, I leave the link:

https://www.google.com/search?biw=1280& ... CAs & uact = 5

it seems strange to me because I remember a photon torpedo should have about 50 megatons

Yeah, a lot of official Star Trek sources seem to favor oddly low weapon yields. I have one of those novelty Haynes Owner's Manuals for the Klingon Bird of Prey and I think it says the cannons are rated somewhere in the tens of megajoules or megawatts or something, I forget. It's not much, relatively speaking. I wouldn't personally put much stock in "official" numbers. As for the 50 megaton number, I think that's just a rough approximation from its supposed payload of 1.5 kg of antimatter, rounded down for various inefficiencies, again from an "official" source. Granted, a lot of those smaller numbers are actually consistent with on screen dialogue and even what's shown in combat, but I wouldn't necessarily jump to any conclusions one way or the other, whether it's for continent melting phasers or heavy weapons barely up to the standards of modern conventional ordnance.

unfortunately they are always stingy with details

My new personal favorite energy scale mishap is a line from DIS: "An Obol for Charon": "Okay there's more where that came from. We've got a hundred giga-electron-volts surging through the local relays."

For clarity of scale: one GeV is just 1.6*10^(-10) Joules. So one hundred GeV is just about a hundred-millionth of a joule. A moderate static shock you can get from doorhandles, etc, is on the scale of millijoules [10^(-3) J]. So a static shock is about 10 million times more energy than the threatening arcs and discharges around engineering were just described as.

For this reason I tend to ignore most "official" values and I take dialog <insert number> lines with a grain, no, a tablespoon of salt.