Part I. Firepower discrepancy
Your problem is that you assume firepowers in all the other episodes in the megaton range.
My problem is that I don't see how two rather significant factions in the Trek universe, the Romulans and Cardassians, can pretend have easy access to technologies which let them fire weapons in the teraton range, be they torpedoes or beams, and just not rule the universe.
The quantum torpedoes, those famous and so called hard to quantify weapons (isotons and all that), were shown to be actually rare within the UFP, since if I'm not wrong, only the Defiant style ships, which aren't numerous (there were what, two or three of them, in total) and the Sovereign class had some of them, and not many per ship, again, while they largely rely on more traditional pulse guns, phasers and photon torpedoes, which have never been reasonably rated beyond the megaton range. In fact, for all the yields and settings I've seen calculater in the last months, it often ranges between 20 and 150 megatons. Maybe once I saw a 200 MT estimation.
I'm talking about common sense. Just how factions with weapons which are betwen 3 and 6 orders of magnitude higher, and thus likely have defenses just as though, just don't turn out to be the absolute rulers, able to steamroll over any other faction or alliance, especially if they can supposedly build a fleet dedicated to planet busting missions in no time?
I'm asking for consistency, and all I see is Trekkies clutched to that one rare episode of a kind, really, in the faint hope of one day making it pretty much accepted everywhere, probably jaleous in a way of how certain Warsies dishonestly managed to force stupid numbers.
The question is, do you want to become as despisable as the likes of SD.net, as long as you'll be able to swim in an ocean of wank anytime you want?
More. Memmory Alpha's page on
The Die is Cast reveals that at the end of
the battle of the Omarion Nebula, the Dominion does consider that the only remaining threats are the Klingons and the UFP.
Two sides which, as far as I've read, have hardly been painted as the most powerful factions in the galaxy, well, especially the Klingons. It would seem to be an odd thought to have, considering the attempted demonstration Cardassians and Romulans tried to make.
Another funny point, apparently, is how in the first battle of Chin'toka, the asteroid proected by its own shield, and housing the cardassian generator for the whole network of defense platform, was too strong for UFP, Romulan and Klingon weapons... and was almost entirely vaporized when the generator exploded.
This puts a cap on how much energy it could provide, under normal conditions, for the phasers and shields of the battle platforms.
I'm relativly new in the debate and don't know many other threads with calculations about the firepower of Star Trek ships. I'm sorry, but you have to show me such threads with calculations or start with me again at the beginning.
I started the same way as you did, and I'm relatively very new to Trek as well. A good start is probably to type a fey key words in google, with eventually refining your search by forcing certain sites (go in advanced search options).
You can try metaengines (Copernic, I used it a lot a couple of years ago, it's very good to store results), or directly search on the sites in question.
I did that a lot on Spacebattles, though there's no denying that this place is largely infested with Wars wankers, and had strong affinities with SD.net from time to time.
That said, there still were Trekkies which were making very good points.
I've also read the explanation and numbers at Robert's site. Despite his somehow obsessive nature, and contrary to the claims of Wong and his pets, he
does have many good points, and well documented pages.
Also, check out
this thread. You'll see yields quite lower than those provided by SFJ and RSA.
My problem is that there are few events in Star Trek which let one calculate firepowers because it is only calculable if a ship fires on an unshielded, not armoured target. That doesn't happen often.
And the few instances in which it happens are showing firepowers far higher than in the megaton range as the episodes, I have brought to mind, are showing.
Which cases, precisely?
An error you did was to claim that Inheritance and Legacy proved that phasers
vaporized x quantities of crust material per second.
Trouble is that whatever it does, it is not vaporization at all, or very little.
It's the NDF system. It disintegrates matter, and there's just no proof that you need as much power to do so than you'd need to precisely vaporize an equal amount of matter.
From Inheritance, we do know that somehow, the process generates heat.
We also see that the drilling process is so... weird, that there's a "feedback pulse along the particle beam", possibly due to some magnesite ore. Huh, so some raw and rather fairly natural ore can trigger a chain reaction that will go up along the beam, faster than particles go down, and even shake the ship for several seconds, up to the point where Riker considering it necessary to cut off the beam (and with all the dramatic music behind).
If anything, this alone should prove the particularily extravagant nature of the weapon in question.
On an average, and this is important to realize, all calcs I've seen which were tangible did lie in the first fifth part of the megaton range. Sometimes low, sometimes high.
Insofar I object your starting position that rates weapons in the megaton range.
Okay, but with what do you intend to defend your position, precisely, especially if you admit not knowing enough about this?
We have episodes that shows clearly that the weapons have far higher firepower than you presume. I don't know episodes which are contradicting these.
Please name such episodes and explain how you calculate in these episodes the upper limit of firepower.
Robert has done a couple of calcs regarding asteroid blasting for example.
I saw Legacy. It took roughly seven seconds to drill the equivalent of 300 m, from 1.3 km to 1.6 km. That's 42.85 meters per second. Likely at a rate lower than in Inheritance, to avoid torching the surrounding place in the underground city maze.
The phasers themselves needed to be modified, and this required a two hours job IIRC.
The hole itself, by judging of the size of what appears to a sort of street, and by the stories of the buildings in ruins, wouldn't be more than 10 meters wide.
As for Inheritance, there's something that strikes my curiosity.
See, JMS says that 10 kilometers of rock would be drilled within 19 seconds.
That makes an average value of 526.31 m/s.
Yet, it takes, from dialogue, 5 seconds to go through 2,000 meters of matter. That's 400 meters per second.
They better to, cause in one of the scripts I've found, and I don't know if there's a special longer DVD version of the episode, that lower rate was supposed to happen after an increase of firepower by 12%.
Later on, after the pretty much weird magnesite affair, it takes 6-7 seconds to get across 2 km of matter.
- Vs Spacebattles related -
Please notice that the magnesite ore slowed down the process considerably, at it took them 32 seconds to get over 2 km of matter. 62.5 m/s. So what, a tightly focused beam considerably looses efficiency as it passes through natural ore?
Somehow, I wouldn't be surprised if phasers would suck terribly against good ol' armour. Wit hsome chance, you might even damage a Trek ship with some shizmit reverse pulse or whatelse.
Yes, I understand why sometimes, people complain about how the technobabbly puts them off.
Ok, just having cheap shots. :)
What we have to remember is such feats are only applicable once phasers are recalibrated. The phaser beam, from the outside, don't look particularily different from all the other shots we get during battles, yet the beams in those two examples are modified, and likely for the same reasons. Inheritance coming after Legacy, it is likely that Geordie replicated his previous method, used in Legacy, to "tighten" the beam.
Beams under normal conditions would likely not be as effective, especially in terms of intensity.
---
Ah, yes. Besides, since they were manually beating the process, they possibly ended the firing a second too late. When you consider that they never automated this process, and had characters say ok, we're at X meters down, stop firing. - Aye sir! *presses som'thing on the console 1.846 seconds later, it's likely, logically speaking, that they would have drilled beyond the strictly necessary lenght.
The dialogue reports, in the light of these procedures, and regarding the first drilling, that the process raised the first pocket's magma's temperature by almost 300 degrees C, and that it will takes hours for the magma to cool down.
I won't even comment on what the pcokets look like when they're inside, it just doesn't look like solidified magma. It's just dirt, and you wonder where the hell all the heat went.
And why the hell they actually targeted magma pockets... when they waited for it to cool down, while the rest of the mantle was specifically solid cool.
Yet, for the sake of simplicity, we'll pretend that the magma they wanted to boost with infused plasma was lying under their feet, under the soil of those caverns.
Ah, we'll also ignore the shots from Data looking up the latest created shaft... which looks
nothing like a multikilometer long hole! ;)
...
Ultimately, you know I'm going to ask you for proof of the much superior yields for standard weaponry as well, and from the most future orientated shows (TNG, DS9, eventually early seasons of VOY).
This had me visit Robert's
power generation page.
What is most interesting is the quotes from late Voyager, with power generation figures going up to 5 petawatts.
That's two orders of magnitude below JMS's figure for the Inheritance event.
For TNG, Robert argues for a power generation of 147 terawatts (1.5 grams/second). - huh, this is wrong, btw. You get more energy than that for that amount of AM.
This would show that JMSpock' phaser firepower figures are many many orders of magnitude above what the TNG's Enterprise could reasonably provide.
Part II. The bombardment effects
I have wrote in my very first post to this thread:
- I considered it even for possible, that the photon torpedos weren't supposed to explode at once, but that they were - for the time being - only placed in the mantle and that all torpedos should explode later in a certain sequence or all at once for a greater effect.
We have seen only effects from the phasers/disruptors and no effects from the torpedos. That could mean that they aren't exploded because it was planned that they explode all at once to create a huge explosion around the core which would hurl the shattered mantle and crust from the core into space.
Which would not correspond to the computer's estimation and plan. "All at once" is not 6 hours, and all at once means yields which are simply absurdingly too high.
That the torpedos are able to penetrate the crust allone was shown in
PEN PALS. The phaser wouldn't be necessary to drill holes for the torpedos.
Interestingly, it seems that planets can explode on their own because they become unstable, since "unusually high levels of dilithium in the crust" form "a matrix which creates a piezoelectric effect that is tearing the planets apart".
Just how much of
dilithium, exactly?
These were used to attack the crust or mantle at once. I propose that they have been fired at the planet, have first drilled holes in the crust and a bit in the mantle and that they have there discharged their destructive energy and caused huge explosions which would shatter crust and mantle.
That's what I have wrote already in the very first post of this thread:
- What, if the phasers/disruptors weren't adjusted to cause maximum damage at the surface, but to discharge most of their destructive energy deep in the mantle or crust of the planet. What we have seen on the surface of the planet from orbit would have been merely side effects.
Holes = cheminey = exhaust port. If anything powerful detonates down the shaft, the huge pressure and expansion of hot gas will go up. Simple physics.
If the explosions are deep enough under the surface, so that they barely reach it and only shock waves are propagating through crust and mantle, there wouldn't be ejections. Shock waves allone carries only energy and no matter. The shock wave would raise and drop the matter along the amplitude and break it hereby but it would not transport matter along the direction of propagation.
If there are underground explosions, the explosives went down there by drilling holes.
Holes = cheminey = exhaust port.
Maybe one could understand the quote that it would need an hour until the crust, which was not directly attacked but only suffers from the side effects of the phasers/disruptors, which were drilling holes through it to directly attack the mantle, was vanished. But it was already to 30 % shattered after the first volley.
Exactly, which highlights the lack of consistency between dialogue and visuals, as I've been saying all along.
Besides, if the destruction of the crust was an expected side effect of the destruction of the mantle, I would not actually see how it matters how long it will take to destroy the crust, as the destruction of the mantle will obliterate the crust anyway.
There's also the point about what happens on screen hardly represent 30% of the crust.
The fleet was not prepared for a battle. It is possible that they have squeezed every bit energy in their for this specific attack optimized weapon systems and have neglected the shields. After all, they had have their cloacking devices.
Possible.
However, it is absurd that with reactors able to generate enough energy to cause teraton level shockwaves, shortly after dropping cloaks, that they can't immediately regenerate all systems, especially since the bombardment was planned to continue until the mantle would be destroyed.
The Defiant has fired at shielded Jem Hadar fighters. You don't know how much power her phasers had because you don't know how strong the shields were.
Unless you prove that the Defiant has pulse weapons which range in the gigaton range, my point still remains.
VFX errors are possible. If the showing of the surface wasn't totally correct - what you have to show yet - it could be ignored because we undoubtly know what was intended.
As I have to show yet?
You deliberately evaded the question about the very way the ripples progress, and how they stagnate at a certain distance, but still wiggle more or less, and how new ripples are even created without further bombardment.
Care to explain this, especially in the context of a much solid mantle?
Yes, as you see, you are also expected to prove how your theory explains most peculiar visual phenomenoms.
Appendix: The status of the Founders' homeworld
You seems to not know that you speak of the second homeworld.
Maybe you should follow the link, I have already provided about the
Founders' homeworld at
Memory Alpha. There is a First Founders' homeworld, which was attacked and a Second Founders' homeworld, on which Sisko was in
Broken Link.
You are showing again that you try to debate something from which you knows not enough.
Ok, there's another
homeworld after the assault. Still, the pictures of the first one show a very bright source of light. The lit crescent shows that the surface can be sufficienly lit, and in fact, just as much as the one of the second homeworld.
I have nothing more to add to this, unless it should, in any way, have direct consequences on the events of TDIC.