Two major elements need to be adressed.
First, the firepower consistency, which is quite a very tough point as far as Trek goes. I've read enough on boards to see that it's just a huge mess. The isoton stuff is probably the best symptom.
Secondly, the attack on the Founders' homeworld itself, by looking at the visuals, and by considering the dialogue as well.
But just before doing so, I'd like to remind you that I'm not limiting myself to the evaluation of just one theory. I'm looking at everything I know that has been said about this episode. There's likely a lot of stuff taht I'll miss, but this thread is about TDIC in general, and any hypothesis proposed thus far.
So don't be surprised if it looks like I'm not always adressing your arguments.
Part I. Firepower discrepancy
This alone would probably require a huge thread, and sincerely, I think that if none decides to create one for each major firepower related calculation or debate, I'll do it.
Includes all talks about Inheritance, Legacy, eventually Pegasus and Masks, but I've already been through them thank you, but if it needs to be done, it will.
But not only that. The isoton unit is a problem of its own kind, and brining it as a form of support for a theory, when not even one Trekkie seems to agree or know what an isoton is, is just pointless and irrelevant.
Though not being a Trekkie, and not knowing as much stuff about Trek as the lot of you do, I still have read many discussions which involved Star Trek to certain extents.
These readinds helped me, over several months, to appreciate the value of a broad range of claims. I've read the complaints about how Wars' highest yields are favoured, while Trek's lowest ones are.
Point being, we know just how far a certain segment of the debating Wars fandom goes actually. We've seen the absurd numbers, the distorsions, the infamous cherry picking, and the people being paid to write that kind of stuff.
However, it's not because they're doing stupid stuff that others have to try to behave similarily.
That said, I'll reply to the points which are related to firepower.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Any evidence that these ships are special, and that the civilisations in question are even able to build weapons in the high gigaton/teraton yields, as (awkwardly) suggested by the episode?
You'll have to explain, as well, why those powerful new phasers and torpedoes were never used after that, and how they all returned to megaton yields thereafter.
I think it is not to me to prove anything. We all have seen the episode. You want to exlude it from canon or continuity. You have to prove that it is incompatible.
I don't want to exclude it from canon. I simply exclude any rationalization that does not work, and leave calcs in limbo until something sensical comes out.
You want me to show that these yields are impossible?
What about providing evidence that the Romulans ships were able to deliver such firepower before and after TDIC?
The fleet were build especially for this one mission. A new class, the
Keldon class was used. Its perfomance was not seen before. We don't know what they are able to do. But we could see that some big Cardassian Warships have made short work with older ships like the Miranda class which suggest an increase of weapons power which the shields of the Mirandas weren't matched.
We don't know the purpose of the secretly built Keldon class, besides apparently being made just for being a better ship.
Now, claiming that such a ship would suddenly be many thousand times more powerful than prior cardassian ships is just fan wank.
It's like the Century Condor is a modified YT-1600. It has 4 turbolasers, 6 laser cannons, 6 missile launching tubes, goes six times faster than the Millenium Falcon, and has shields twice less powerful than those of a blockade runner!
The fact that the Defiant could significantly damage one with one of the firstest generation of quantum torpedoes should tell enough about a Keldon's shields. And as such, it would put a large limit on how much firepower a Keldon's phasers can have. Yet, when those beams hit the Founders' worlds, it produces those x100 km wide ripples.
Come on, the Cardassians never appeared to be the ultimate foe in the universe, and the UFP could go face to face with them and make a good impression, that with their most traditional weaponry.
Knowing that this traditional weaponry (photon torps and phasers, plus a few other variants) are often listed in the megaton range, what makes you think that the Cardassians managed to suddenly reach a whole new level of awesomeness, and devlop weapons in the teraton range?
And after that, where are these weapons supposed to be? Why didn't the Romulans and Cardassians steamroll over their enemies if they could so easily attain such levels of firepower?
One would only have to made the torpedos and their ramps bigger. Because it is known that the torpedos doesn't need a warp field sustainer or a guidance system or other gadgets one could have done without them and would have created more place for the war head.
Possibly, but not by that much up to the point of increasing yields just so many times, when many standard torps, even the most powerful ones, are calculated at a few hundreds megatons top.
The fleet were build especially for this one mission. A new class, the
Keldon class was used. Its perfomance was not seen before. We don't know what they are able to do. But we could see that some big Cardassian Warships have made short work with older ships like the Miranda class which suggest an increase of weapons power which the shields of the Mirandas weren't matched.
We don't know the purpose of the secretly built Keldon class, besides apparently being made just for being a better ship.
Now, claiming that such a ship would suddenly be many thousand times more powerful than prior cardassian ships is just fan wank.
It's like the Century Condor is a modified YT-1600. It has 4 turbolasers, 6 laser cannons, 6 missile launching tubes, goes six times faster than the Millenium Falcon, and has shields twice less powerful than those of a blockade runner!
The fact that the Defiant could significantly damage one with one of the firstest generation of quantum torpedoes should tell enough about a Keldon's shields. And as such, it would put a large limit on how much firepower a Keldon's phasers can have. Yet, when those beams hit the Founders' worlds, it produces those x100 km wide ripples.
Come on, the Cardassians never appeared to be the ultimate foe in the universe, and the UFP could go face to face with them and make a good impression, that with their most traditional weaponry.
Knowing that this traditional weaponry (photon torps and phasers, plus a few other variants) are often listed in the megaton range, what makes you think that the Cardassians managed to suddenly reach a whole new level of awesomeness, and devlop weapons in the teraton range?
And after that, where are these weapons supposed to be? Why didn't the Romulans and Cardassians steamroll over their enemies if they could so easily attain such levels of firepower?
One would only have to made the torpedos and their ramps bigger. Because it is known that the torpedos doesn't need a warp field sustainer or a guidance system or other gadgets one could have done without them and would have created more place for the war head.
Possibly, but not by that much up to the point of increasing yields just so many times, when many standard torps, even the most powerful ones, are calculated at a few hundreds megatons top.
Who says that they have used only megaton yields weapons before or after THE DIE IS CAST. Please show an event of this epoche which clearly shows that they have only megaton yields weapons.
Because since TNG and some DS9 stuff, I have never seen that amount of firepower. Most calcs that I've seen here and there always rate weapons in the megaton range, and certain attemps have been made to suggest, for the most powerful toys, to be in the low gigaton, but not many people insist on them.
Such an example is Masks, and... huh, that's just another horrible piece of visual nonsense.
Again please show an event of this epoche which clearly shows that they have only megaton yields weapons.
Since you're more apt to find Trek stuff, you could, on the same hand, find
solid proofs, from TNG and later, that they have such levels of firepower and used them at multiple times.
No, I don't see it. You have shown that you don't know episode like
Inheritance and
Legacy. But you claim that there was never shown fire power in that dimension.
Jedi Master Spock has made some calculation concerning
Inheritance which you can find
here. He speaks of 100-300 petawatts of sustained power for drilling settings for vaporizing a hundred meter column of rock at 500 meters per second...
23.9 to 71.7 megatons per second... and as such, we're a very far cry from the TDIC claims...
... while in
Inheritance they have vaporized 200 kilometers per second - without causing tectonic ripples. They have tried to be very careful. Maybe you want to exlude this episode as well.
I'll love to check out those claims as well.
Last time I checked the gigaton claim from Masks - and this required that I grabbed the episode - it didn't take much time to spot the flaws, and see that once more, we were dealing with a rather suspicious piece of poor consistency between visuals, dialogue and pacing.
So excuse me if, for the moment and until I read the transcript and see the sequence, I have doubts about the 200 km deep hole in 1 second.
The episode
Booby Trap begins with a conversation between Data and Wesley Crusher about the end of Orelious Nine.
- [quote="In the script of "Booby Trap" it was"]WESLEY and DATA standing at the window looking out the windows at a field of immense flotsam and jetsam moving by, the remains of a planet destroyed in a battle long ago...
This was the final battle, wasn't it?
(acknowledges)
Neither side intended Orelious Nine to be the decisive conflict.
Not much of it left, is there...
The destruction is remarkable considering the primitive weapons of the period.
Even primitive weapons - from the perspective of Starfleet - were able to destroy a whole planet.[/quote]
1. So primitive weapons, according to the UFP, are able to bust a planet. I suppose this explains why the Federation's much more advanced and mass produced antimatter filled warheads, right there for you from a civilized age, float around 50~150 megatons a piece.
2. What about the weapons those Orelious guys used and their real amount? The quote makes it clear that they're surprised the Orelious did that with primitive weapons. This means they've stockpiled insane amounts of warheads.
3. Of course, what do we know about the caracteristics of that now gone planet?
Part II. The bombardment effects
If they would be some hundred or even thousand kilometres under the surface there wouldn't be any fireballs or suchlike visible - only shock waves.
Let's see evidence of this.
Besides, as I said, they make holes for torps to go through (a theory, again, which needs to be verified, by looking at the trajectories of both types of weapons).
Then, the torps detonate not far underneath the crust.
We're talking about near teraton, or severe teraton stuff.
And you find it logical that, first, that the crust is not seen breaking *a bit* or blown up, and that secondly, there's just no ejecta coming out from the very holes they drilled to fire the torps through?
Please explain.
Of course, if you consider that the torps will detonate like hundreds of even thousand of kilometers under the surface, how does it fit with the initial phase, which was about destroying the crust, and
thereafter, destroy the mantle?
Where is it adressed under consideration that the mantle too could be solid? All I have seen were comments about magma and lava which should be visible in your opinion.
If the mantle is solid, ok, let's say it is for a moment.
After all, you're right, why not, this can be true as well, even if I find it odd for a planet of that size.
Even IF it was all solid, it would not make it less problematic to have absolutely no massive ejecta coming out from the very holes they've drilled.
There are other problems in your claim.
1. How can explosions create tectonic ripples which can be seen from space - which as I said, mean insane altitude peaks?
2. How could such ripples move through the ground in such a way that they are as clear near the center as they are far away from it, and then stagnate at a certain distance? Their magnitude should considerably weaken over the distance, but it does not, until it reaches a certain range, and then the ripples don't even diffuse... they stop.
3. How could more ripples still be generated, with the same magnitude, without further explosions?
4. Just how is the solid crust supposed to be maleable enough to let the eruption of moutain high ripples happen, instead of being cracked and/or blasted up in the air?
When nukes explode in the ground, they create a dome, and if there's enough force, they blow a hole out.
Besides, you have to explain to me just how shaking the ground, no matter the magnitude, is supposed to destroy the crust?
And no, breaking the crust into small bits that will just settle back is meaningless regarding the safety of the planet's layers, and largely irrelevant to the biosphere of a world inhabited by beings whom can live in space for just undefined periods of time.
And the same question applies to the mantle, especially if it's just as solid and way thicker.
Maybe the torpedos are able to break through the crust allone.
Then why bother drilling holes, especially if not all torps will go into them?
You're weakening your own hypothesis, and showing you don't really know where you're going with it.
They were used in a similar fashion in
PEN PALS. The were also already fired into a sun in
Half a Life. The torpedos are very very robust.
Firing in the sun is something else, and the Half Life incident... I can't verify it for the moment.
Not that I would bother, frankly, considering that there are more important aspects of your theory you need to defend to make it possible.
Note: Ah, there's a point I missed. The sheer fact that your theory requires a detonation under the crust, yet the first report mentions that only 30% of the crust was destroyed in the opening volley, and
nothing else, not even a tiny little wee bit of mantle. Weird, if weapons were detonated under the crust,
inside the mantle. You'd actually expect the mantle to take most of the damage.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Fourth, the torpedoes are supposed to detonate under the crust, so in the mantle, with such power that it's able to create ground ripples of the size of the Alps if not more (!), and moving at many hundreds of kilometers per second (!!), yet there's absolutely no supermassive ejecta where the wholes were made??
Not to say that I pretty much doubt you could create tectonic ripples that way anyway, as I believe that with such forces, the effects would be pretty much different.
Now you are only guessing. If you want to exclude the episode from canon or continuity you should prove that subsurface detonations in high gigaton/teraton yields would look elsewise.
And than we could debate if we have to assume an VFX error which we could maybe ignore.
You're heavily mistaken.
You'll notice that
you claimed that such a thing would be possible from the get go, without ever showing how, nor proving why.
And I should accept it, just because you say it's a theory that would be possible, and should happen that way?
Sorry, that's not the way it goes. I want to see calculations. Detailed explanations with scientific backup, not wild guesses passed off as facts.
Please, provide evidence to back up your theory and actually prove that it is possible.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:And in the end, how in the hell can a crust be destroyed if it's just, huh, "tickled" with tectonic ripples which don't even crack it apart?
How would that posea problem to beings who can live in the harsh conditions of space, forever if they want to?
You don't really mean that.
If a shock wave pass through the crust with an amplitude "of the size of the alps" the solid crust will shatter in innumerable many pieces. Nothing could survive such a shockwave - but maybe the founders. And that's why the fleet wanted to destroy the whole planet and not only bombard the surface.
You're evading the point. Even if it kills the Founders, which is not relevant to the enumeration of geological effects on the planet, how are we supposed to consider that the crust is destroyed with those effects?
And how, if destroying 30% of the crust only does that (the ripples), are you going to destroy the mantle?
Assuming you can even shatter the mantle, just how is that supposed to destroy it?
At the very best, you'll make it warmer and melt it here and there, create a couple of pockets of hot gases. Nothing worth the drama.
See, this is extremely inconsistent, illogical and absurd.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Destroying 30 of a crust in 1 hour, and destroying the whole mantle in 6.
They have destroyed 30 percent of the crust in the first volley that has lasted only a few moments and not 1 hour.
Exactly. So much for the computer's estimations!
However, as I said in the vs debate, let's say that it takes between 30 seconds and one minute to destroy 100% of the crust.
By the same 6:1 factor, it takes 3 to 6 minutes to destroy the entire mantle.
And of course, once more, just how do you destroy a mantle, without actually... busting it out away from the core?
We're talking about levels of energy which are just a very few orders of magnitude below e32 joules.
Are you sure you want to defend such claims?
Mr. Oragahn wrote:While you can eventually destroy a crust by cracking it evenly, you'll need to much more to actually start to destroy a mantle. We're talking about vapourization here.
Why do we talking about vapourization here?
It would be enough to shatter the planet and to leave an asteroid field behind.
Ok, you don't need to vaporize it
if it's solid. However, once again, to turn the planet into an asteroid field, you need to overcome gravitational binding energy to a significant extent, or the planet will remain there, as a planet. Though this top total energy will be lower at mantle depth than at the surface, it will still be a very impressive amount of energy.
In the end, to strip the planet off its mantle, even if you only planned to crack, you'd need much more energy than what's required to shatter an equal mass of many small kilometer sized asteroids, because to push bits aparts and away from the core, you'd need much more energy than to shatter an equal mass of many asteroids, which are not attracted by anything safe their own low gravity.
That's a continuation of the point above.
Besides, how can 30% of the crust be destroyed, when the all ripples don't even remotely cover 30% of the surface?
I've seen people claim that there were other ships on the other side of the planet.
Never seen any proof of that. Nothing like a ship count from the battle that ensues.
Talking about the battle, why would the Cardassians and Romulans be so panicked if their weapons were in the teraton range, and if they has so many ships?
When the Defiant drops in, we see that it blasts several enemy vessels without much effort, and that with weapons which were, again, rated in the megaton range.
Finally, I'd like to hear a good explanation about the behaviour of the ripples.
A ripple is rather constantly visible, no matter the range from the point of origin. This is odd, considering that the ripples should diffuse over the distance.
I'd also like to know how the ripples are supposed to halt at a certain distance, without disappearing.
More, just what's the explanation behind the fact that the ripples are still pretty active many many seconds after the volley has been fired, and how can it be that there are new shockwaves? appearing?
Appendix: The status of the Founders' homeworld
Just a last note about the nature of the world in question, and the sources of light.
Who is like God arbour wrote:
Does that mean that the planet is not a rogue planet and the light source is a sun? If not it is irrelevant. It is able to provide some light but not enough to illuminate the surface of the planet as was shown by the other pictures. The pictures I have invoked are showing that the surface of the planet it as dark as one could expect from a rogue planet. And it's safe to say that it's not enough light for photosynthesis.
There are two instances which would apparently disagree with that.
First, when Sisko went on this world, and was stuck on this small island, and saw Odo being judged by the fluid guys.
The other, which probably happened much earlier, being when Odo and the miss bossy boots meet on this planet, in a kind of villa.
I'm 100% sure the lighting is certainly not as dark as in the single picture you provided.
However, not knowing which episodes to look for, I'll just ask you to help me on that. You'd obviously know better than me which episodes these are.
Whatever lights up this planet in TDIC, there
is light anyway.
