Rehabilitating The Die is Cast

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Moff Tarquin
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Rehabilitating The Die is Cast

Post by Moff Tarquin » Tue Feb 02, 2016 2:34 am

This thread is right what it says on the tin. My program has three stages, which are (in descending order of difficulty): 1) explanation of discrepancies between different pieces of dialogue, 2) explanation of "discrepancies" between dialogue and visuals, 3) demonstration that the episode is in good company with the rest of Trek.

So, as we all know, the initial projection is that it will take one hour to destroy the crust and five hours to destroy the mantle. Then, when they get to the planet, after about five seconds of firing, the Romulan chick reports that 30% of the planet's crust has been destroyed. At that rate, some seventeen seconds of continuous fire would have destroyed the entirety of the crust. In other words, the demolition appears to have been going two hundred times faster than anticipated. This is actually the easy problem to solve: it would take an hour to melt or vaporize the crust (necessary in order to get at the mantle), but in those five seconds, they managed to substantially fragment 30% of it. The issue is equivocation.

The real difficulty comes in trying to figure out why it would take one hour to destroy the thirty kilometer thick crust, but only five hours to destroy the three thousand kilometer thick mantle. The mantle makes up 67% of earth's mass, the crust only makes up 0.5%. The second phase of the operation thus appears to be 26.8 times as effective per unit time. My own suggestion is that they never actually attempted to destroy the crust directly: it was merely collateral damage during the destruction of the mantle. We know that torpedoes are capable of drilling deep into rock, and we also know that they are capable of surviving the temperatures and pressures of stars with some modification, so it's hardly unreasonable to expect the fleet to set them off deep within the mantle from the get-go.

Which brings us to the visuals: if the torpedoes are going off hundreds or even thousands of kilometers underground, we wouldn't expect to see fireballs, we wouldn't expect to see debris launched into orbit, and we wouldn't expect to see gigantic glowing craters. We'd expect to see magnitude 11+ earthquakes. What would a magnitude 12 earthquake look like from orbit? Maybe we'd see a butt-load of dust kicked up into the atmosphere, maybe we'd see shockwaves moving across the planet's surface, but we wouldn't see much else at first. Maybe if we waited a while, we'd see some magma seeping up between newly-formed cracks in the crust, but it wouldn't happen instantly, and we wouldn't even see that if the crust was underwater - instead, we'd see massive clouds of steam.

Now, combine the "everything was underwater" hypothesis that has already been discussed ad nauseum over the course of the debate with the "all torpedoes were set off hundreds or thousands of kilometers underground" hypothesis: we'd expect to see vapor kicked up into the atmosphere, shockwaves traveling across the planet's surface, and possibly massive clouds of steam. All of which are consistent with the odd ring-like effects we see onscreen.

Here's my own personal hypothesis as to what the Tal-Shiar timeline would have looked like:

0:00 - Open fire on Dominion homeworld. Disruptors either a) boil away large portions of the oceans (producing large amounts of steam), killing millions of founders directly, or b) fire upon faultlines in the planet's crust, accelerating destruction of the crust and increasing the violence of earthquakes. Torpedoes are fired and set off 500 km below sea level or deeper, at positions selected to produce maximal seismic devastation. The appearance of the planet for the first few minutes will be more or less unaffected.

0:15 - Either as a result of disruptor fire or magma moving upwards through cracks in the crust, the entirety of the ocean has now been vaporized. Through gaps in the now almost total cloud-cover, the glow of magma can be seen. Disruptors and torpedoes are fired more or less indiscriminantly. Disruptors target remaining pieces of the crust, torpedoes are still detonated in the depths of the mantle.

1:00 - The few solid portions of the crust are gone, having melted in the magma covering the planet or having been blown to bits/vaporized/disappeared by disruptors. The water-based clouds have been replaced by an atmosphere of vaporized mantle material - silica vapor is produced as torpedoes explode, then is displaced as the hollow detonation region collapses. The radius of the planet has been noticeably reduced.

6:00 - Bits of slag float on an ocean of molten metal under a very dense atmosphere of silica vapor. The Great Link has been destroyed - and then some.

As far as I know, this timeline is entirely consistent with everything we see and hear, as well as with the physics of the situation. It would take on the order of 1e30 J to pull off - that's some 250 exatons of TNT. Over a period of six hours, that's on the order of ten petatons every second from the entire fleet, or 500 teratons per second per ship worth of firepower.

"But Tarquin," You're saying. "Isn't that completely beyond anything else we ever see in Star Trek?" The short answer: no. For the long answer, hold on for another couple of paragraphs.

From TNG: Booby Trap:
WESLEY: This was the final battle, wasn't it? 

DATA: Neither side intended Orelious Nine to be the decisive conflict. 

WESLEY: There's not much left, is there. 

DATA: The destruction is remarkable considering the primitive weapons of the period.
Image

Now, it's probably the case that the authors intended to imply that almost the entirety of Orelious Nine was destroyed in the conflict, but let's assume that only a portion of the planet was blown into space. In fact, let's assume that it was only the crust that was launched into space. That would take 1.5e30 J.

Now let's assume that the two armies had a combined fleet of 1000 capital ships, each of which was capable of carrying 1000 "primitive weapons," and each of which made 1000 bombing runs during the "decisive conflict." Each of those bombs would have to have a yield of 1.5e21 J.

These weapons would have had yields of over 350 gigatons each, and Data is looking down his nose at them. That has to say something about the heavy ordnance the Alpha-quadrant powers are capable of bringing to bear. But it doesn't say anything specific. For that, we need another concrete incident.

The other incident comes from the episode Broken Link in DS9.
WORF: Garak. Just as I thought. 

GARAK: Don't tell me. I overlooked one of the security monitors. 

WORF: You were trying to override the launch controls for the quantum torpedoes. 

GARAK: I was hoping to gain control of the phasers as well. I just hadn't got around to it yet. Don't you see? We have an opportunity here. A chance to end the Dominion threat once and for all. We have enough firepower on this ship to turn that planet into a smoking cinder. Personally, I think that would be a very good thing. 

WORF: And what about Odo, and Captain Sisko and Doctor Bashir? 

GARAK: They'll die. And once the Jem'Hadar ships realise what we're doing, so will we. But what are our lives compared to saving the entire Alpha Quadrant? 

WORF: We are not here to wage war. 

GARAK: I'm not talking about war. What I'm proposing is wiping out every Founder on that planet. Obliterating the Great Link. Come now, Mister Worf, you're a Klingon. Don't tell me you'd object to a little genocide in the name of self-defence? 

WORF: I am a warrior, not a murderer. 

GARAK: What you are is a great disappointment. 

(They fight. Worf finally gets the upper hand.) 

WORF: You fight well for a tailor.
Garak thinks that, even surrounded by Dominion warships, the Defiant has a chance at obliterating the ocean-like Great Link.

Note that the Defiant was being escorted by as many as seven battlebugs:
Image

The Defiant would last, at most, five minutes. Probably closer to thirty seconds, really.

To sterilize all of earth's oceans (heat them to boiling) - which amount to some 1.335e9 cubic kilometers - it would take some 6.6e26 J. So the question is, just how big is the Great Link?

If it's the size of the Baltic sea (2.1e4 cubic kilometers) it would "only" take 1.0e22 J. If it's the size of the Pacific ocean (6.6e8 cubic kilometers) it would take a whopping 3.3e26 J.

Sterilizing the Pacific ocean in thirty seconds would require some 1.1e25 W - 2.7 petatons per second. Sterilizing the Baltic sea in five minutes 3.5e19 W - 8.7 gigatons per second. The geometric mean of the two - a reasonable "middle ground" - is 2.0e22 W - 4.9 teratons per second. More than enough to turn the planet into a smoking cinder, and about 1/100 of the power observed in TDiC - which, given that the Defiant is about 1/400 the volume of a D'deridex and 1/20 the size of a Galor, is entirely reasonable.

So both times planetary bombardment of the founders was discussed in DS9, it is implied that warships are capable of putting out out planet-busting levels of firepower. Which is impressive consistency for Star Trek.

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Re: Rehabilitating The Die is Cast

Post by Mike DiCenso » Tue Feb 02, 2016 7:43 am

There are other examples to be sure, such as the "near accidental" ways in which a Trek starship can utterly wipe out a planet on its own, or deliberately through use of weapons. One such example comes from "A Matter of Time", in which we see the E-D attempt to carry out a cleaning operation on an Earth-like planet's upper atmosphere to remove a large amount of volcanic dust that is blocking out all sunlight. For the first time in Trek history we get a specific number relating to phaser firepower:

WORF: Commander La Forge is hailing you from the surface, sir.
DATA: Patch him through, please.
LAFORGE [on monitor]: Have you rerun the phase reversal figures, Data?
DATA: There were no errors, Geordi. The variance must be no more than point zero six terawatts.
LAFORGE [on monitor]: Well, I don't see any other choice. We'll continue to run the numbers down here but I doubt we'll come up with anything different. You better inform the captain of the good news and the bad news. La Forge out.
(Rasmussen pockets a tricorder)
RASMUSSEN: Which do you suppose he's going to want to hear first?


Then later Data brings Picard (and the audience) up to speed on the plan:


PICARD: The good news.
DATA: The motion of the dust has created a great deal of electrostatic energy in the upper atmosphere. With a modified phaser blast, we could create a shock front that would encircle the planet and ionise the particles.
PICARD: That would be like striking a spark in a gas-filled room.
DATA: With one exception, sir. The particles would be converted into a high energy plasma which our shields could absorb and then re-direct harmlessly into space.
PICARD: Turn the Enterprise into a lightning rod?
DATA: Precisely, sir.
PICARD: And the bad news?
DATA: If our phaser discharge is off by as little as point zero six terawatts, it would cause a cascading exothermal inversion.
PICARD: Meaning?
DATA: We would completely burn off the planet's atmosphere.


So at anytime a large Federation ship wishes, it can use its main phasers to potentially burn off a planet's atmosphere! Picard tries to get help from time traveller Professor Rasmussen, and we get some more ideas of how much that 60 GW range variance means to the total output:

PICARD: I imagine you know why I've asked you here.
RASMUSSEN: Yeah, I have a fairly good idea.
PICARD: I'm faced with a dilemma. There is a planet beneath us which is slowly turning to ice, and unless we do something about it, I'm told that in a matter of weeks thousands, maybe tens of thousands, will die.
RASMUSSEN: That'd be a shame.
PICARD: Yes, it would. It would be quite a shame.
RASMUSSEN: So, what's your dilemma?
PICARD: Commander La Forge has a possible solution. The margins of error are extremely critical, but if successful, there'll be no more threat.
RASMUSSEN: And if it's not successful?
PICARD: Every living thing on the planet will perish.


Extremely critical. As in that represented a very tiny portion of a vastly greater whole, and we see the operation in action, of course, it's quite impressive!

I once worked out how much energy that represented, but I can't find the numbers. I do recall it was at least in the hundreds of gigatons, and that was based on the 22 cubic km of dust the Krakatoa volcano of 1883 threw into Earth's atmosphere. Obviously the actual amount will be much greater, but you have to start somewhere.
-Mike

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Mr. Oragahn
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Re: Rehabilitating The Die is Cast

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Feb 08, 2016 2:15 am

Mike, those colours! I'm bewitched!

Quick note: I proposed a theory wherein the weapons were using Genesis-sauce particles and destroyed surface didn't mean blasted, but altered (by the Genesis-like effect).
I think Mith suggested that subspace would also explain the super propagation of waves in a way that wouldn't be possible physically wise.

Have fun!

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Re: Rehabilitating The Die is Cast

Post by sonofccn » Mon Feb 08, 2016 4:19 am

Moff Tarquin wrote:One of the things I believe very strongly is that most shields in Sci-Fi DO NOT work by an "absorption and re-emission" system. The shields from Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye work that way. But when we look at Star Trek, at any rate, there are several reasons to think that this ISN'T what's going on. Number one, the terms "shields" and "deflector shields" can be treated as synonyms under many circumstances, indicating that the point of a shield isn't so much "absorb it before it hits the hull" as it is "make sure it doesn't hit the hull in the first place." This is further backed up by the fact that we have at least one okudagram that mentions gravitons in the context of shields, indicating that shields work by distorting space time around the ship - which would indeed lend itself to "deflection" of projectiles.

More to the point, every time a hit lands on the shields, the ship shakes and we see effects on the bridge - sparks, small explosions, etc. This indicates that not all of the impact of a blow is "absorbed." However, it's entirely reasonable to assume that the hit has been "diffused," and that a shot that would have blown a hole in the ship just shakes it around and dents it a bit.

Finally, in the episode "Survivors," Worf refers to the act of "reassembling" the shields, indicating that, even if there isn't baryonic matter out there, there's definitely some sort of persisting structure to the shield that is altered by incoming weapon fire.

All of this together points to a view of shields that is far more interesting and physically realistic than the "hit points" "catastrophic existence failure" model. My personal view is that the percentages we constantly hear are either a) a complex measure of the structural integrity of the persisting shield structure, or b) a measure of how much juice is left in the capacitors that power the shields. I sort of waffle between the two views depending on what kind of a mood I'm in.

To understand my view, imagine a transparent riot shield. It will stop incoming fists almost with impunity. A bullet has a real possibility of getting through, but (depending on the variety of shield) there's also a real possibility that it will be stopped or deflected. A laser operating in visible wavelengths will pass through it almost like it isn't there - bypassing it, if you will.

In an analogy to Star Trek shields, I would say that fists and suchlike are analogous to most energy weapons. Bullets are analogous to high powered energy weapons (in the tens of exawatts, like the phaser in "Masks"), sufficiently large/fast kinetic impactors, antimatter annihilation weapons, and sufficiently large nukes. The shield can save your life, give you one or two more chances than you would have had without it, but it can only do so much. This is particularly easy to understand if the primary mode of action is diffusion or deflection: an energy weapon of sufficient power will cause problems because it will heat the hull substantially, and a nuclear explosion is already mostly "diffused" over a wide surface. Finally, the laser is analogous to something like a phased polaron beam - the shield is just transparent to it. Jacketed antimatter a la "Survivors" may or may not be analogous to the lasers, depending on a) what "Jacketed antimatter" is, b) whether the "forty megawatts" and "four hundred gigawatts" were measures of actual energy deposition on the shields, or a measure of the kinetic energy of the "jacketed antimatter," and c) how much of the entire encounter was just an illusion.
Well this may be a mite beyond my depth, so if you’ll bear with me, what exactly is a “absorption and re-emission” shield system? Myself being unfamiliar with the Verse of “The Motes in God’s eye”.

My personal theory in regards to shields, such as it can be called a theory, is that they, for all intents and purposes, create a physical barrier between the ship and outside space. A barrier which, as it is pulverized by enemy fire, allows more and more to slip through the “cracks” as it were.

In regards to shields and deflector shields being used interchangeable, while we have seen things skip off of shields, off the top of my head the most notable would be Roga Danar antics from "The Hunted" {TNG-03}, the shields themselves do not appear to impart noticeable velocities to inbound objects. Observed phaser strikes, photon torpedoes etc simply seem to hit a barrier without being noticeably redirected. Similarly the Crystaline Entity could be in contact with the shield without being repulsed or apparently harmed.

Diffusion, similar, does not appear to occur when we’ve observed phaser strikes and torpedoes hit on shielded objects. They appear to explode/splatter as if hitting solid objects rather than harmlessly dispersing.

As for Survivors, it is a problematic episode. Straightforward, barring what I would consider unreasonable assumptions, it shows some four hundred gigawatts of particle energy, if properly applied, can knock down a Galaxy class starship's shields. On the other hand it involved a nigh-all powerful being. Personally I wouldn’t rely too heavily on it.
Moff Tarquin wrote:Note that McCoy doesn't say that the ship is "powerful enough to wipe out a shielded outpost," but "powerful enough to wipe out a planet." This would appear to indicate that, despite the fact that the asylum may be alone down there, even against a more earth-like civiization, Enterprise could blast a planet back into the stone age in short order.

Note 1) even on the far side of the planet, the best option open to Enterprise is to "cut through" a section of the forcefield - as opposed to "blasting through" - indicating that a brute force strike would still be risky to the asylum on the other side of the planet. 2) even with the precision strike method, McCoy is still worried about a "margin of safety" for the people below. This indicates that either a) there are colonies on the side of the planet opposite the asylum - in which case killing "every living thing on Elba II" becomes a heck of a lot more impressive, or b) McCoy is under the impression that a weapon strike on one side of the planet is capable of adversely effecting an asylum on the other side of the planet - which, while not conclusive proof a brute force strike would be capable of effecting the entire planet, certainly indicates that Enterprise's capabilities far exceed anything achievable with current technology - which in turn casts doubt on any photon torpedo yield - indeed, any phaser energy - south of a hundred megatons.

Alone, each remark is inconclusive. Together, however, they make a powerful case for an Enterprise capable of wiping an Industrial civilization off of the map completely.
Well to answer in order

1. I do not doubt the Enterprise is capable of wiping out an Earth like civilization in short order. However to destroy cities to an unspecified degree does not require much more than kiloton scale weaponry. Likely even less, phasers most likely being far more efficient and directed than Omni-directional bombs.

2. For reference Elba II is a lifeless rock with a toxic atmosphere, there is no one on the planet but the asylum. Yes McCoy, and the others, are worried that even attacking the weakest point on the far side of the planet could have negative consequences for the asylum. The means either A.) The forward phasers are of such power that they can accidently “core” through a planet of presumed Earth like size or B.) The shield generator, located on site in the asylum, would suffer some explosive failure due to the strain of handling the phaser cutting through it. Option B would prevent a contradiction between this episode and, to name one example, the “Paradise Syndrome” where the Enterprise could not break up a roughly Earth sized moon in a timely manner.
Moff Tarquin wrote:The biggest issue with it being some kind of superweapon is that Data says "The destruction is remarkable considering the primitive weapons of the period."

Today, with our "big bombs of death" in the tens of megatons, and even our precision missiles have yields in the hundreds of kilotons, we can look down our noses at the Hiroshima bomb. There is no indication that any Trek power, even in the twenty-fourth century, would look down its nose at the Xindi superweapon. They do, however, look down their noses at whatever did that to Orelious Nine.

In any case, we can be confident that, if the Federation wanted to, it could produce a weapon capable of even more impressive effects.
Well all Data is saying is the weapons, while primitive, were surprisingly powerful. We might very well say the same for Little Boy. A gravity dropped, unguided, crude gun-type fission device developed by a society where computers still meant men doing math with slide rulers. A Tomahawk cruise missile is lightyears ahead of it in sophistication yet Little Boy was vastly more powerful.

Similarly, while capable of generating massive amounts of power through a chain reaction, I truly doubt there was a system or piece of equipment onboard the Xindi superweapon which the Federation couldn’t have improved upon with faster, more complex computers or long range and accurate sensors or what have you.

As well it is completely possible the planet's destruction was in part accidental involving chain reactions triggered by a vastly less powerful but unlucky shot. Planets have exploded in Trek on their own accord after all.

Lastly, Yes the Federation has exploded stars and planets, usually by accident, and if they wanted too could churn out all kinds of planet busters. That, in itself, does not mean their starships are rated to withstand even a fraction of such energies.
Moff Tarquin wrote:1) LaForge prefixes the "terawatt range" comment with "normally." Given that moving the neutron star quite literally pushed the Enterprise-D to its limits, we can safely assume that power output in the thousands of yottawatts is not "normal."
2) LaForge does not say that the power output of the starship is in the terawatt range, he says that the plasma is "kicked up into" the terawatt range, which is a rather peculiar phrasing. So we have a little bit of wiggle room - perhaps we have a terawatt being produced for every kilogram of plasma leaving the reactor, or something along those lines.
3) Is a device that produces, say, 12.75 billion gigawatts "in the gigawatt range"? If so, then just about any power above a trillion watts is consistent with LaForge's dialogue.
1. Even accepting the warpcore got pushed up "Four hundred percent" it would still be spit in the wind. The two figures are simply ludicrous in relation to each other.

2. I’m not sure how much wiggle room there is. The context of the discussion is power generation, specifically the warp core. It seems unlikely he would be referring to the output of a kilogram of plasma flowing out of the reactor if there was hundreds if not thousands of kilograms at any given moment.

3. No. 12.75 billion gigawatts would not be something usually expressed in the gigawatt range. It well exceeds it, obviously.
Moff Tarquin wrote:Strictly speaking, the amount of energy required to heat-kill the Great Link could be lower by an order of magnitude. We know that the reach "peak liquidity" at 17 degrees Celsius from "The Begotten," as opposed to the 4 degrees of most of our oceans, so we can already shave about 15% off of the figure. Add in the fact that you probably wouldn't need to go all the way to boiling, and you could probably cut the figure in half.

On the other hand, pulse phasers and quantum torpedoes are not the most efficient means of heating something. The most important factor, IMHO, is that each individual torpedo has to be sufficient to take out thousands upon thousands of cubic kilometers of Great Link, and Garak wasn't even a hundred percent sure he could get the phasers online.

Think for a moment about modern nuclear strategy. To cover thirty thousand square kilometers with 5 psi overpressure, you can either use a single 2.8 gigaton bomb (AFAIK, impossible with current nuclear stockpiles), or you can use a thousand 88 kiloton bombs, with a combined yield of 88 megatons (something the U.S. could do within the month if it really had to).

If the Defiant had 5e23 thermal charges with one joule each, it could probably sterilize the Great Link with "only" 5e23 J. But it doesn't. It has a number of quantum torpedoes not exceeding three hundred. Which means that it could take many orders of magnitude more energy to eliminate the Great Link with quantum torpedoes than it would take to heat the Mediterranean sea to boiling.

If you would like to continue discussion of this point, feel free to bring this line of discussion over to my "Rehabilitating The Die is Cast" thread!
I suppose my next question would be how do we go about quantifying the Great Link? Something which looked like this on its original world. Now this looks more impressive but do was have any indication it isn’t, say an inch deep?
Moff Tarquin wrote:I really think that the images speak for themselves.

From what I understand, the planet was set off by bounty hunters who were trying to disable Voyager, but Janeway escaped by pumping more power to the shields and blowing up the debris field with Voyager's phasers (the debris included some kind of technobabble gas. For that matter, the planet was blown up with technobabble), which served very effectively to distract the bounty hunters' vessel.
Ah, thank you. Certainly is one of the higher showings.

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Re: Rehabilitating The Die is Cast

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Feb 08, 2016 10:35 pm

A quick comment here, I'll read the entirety of the thread later on.
sonofccn wrote:As for Survivors, it is a problematic episode. Straightforward, barring what I would consider unreasonable assumptions, it shows some four hundred gigawatts of particle energy, if properly applied, can knock down a Galaxy class starship's shields. On the other hand it involved a nigh-all powerful being. Personally I wouldn’t rely too heavily on it.
The issue is that it would have to be convincing, and the entity would most likely have an idea of what it would take to deal with such ships.
So there remains a possibility that one could indeed get through the shields of such a ship with that kind of power, but it involves using a trick that is out of reach for most civilizations, even for the UFP, who still use more or less brute force. After all, didn't they keep improving on the photon torpedoes throughout the entire show? Yields, focus, range, etc.?

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Re: Rehabilitating The Die is Cast

Post by Moff Tarquin » Tue Feb 09, 2016 3:48 am

sonofccn wrote:
Moff Tarquin wrote:One of the things I believe very strongly is that most shields in Sci-Fi DO NOT work by an "absorption and re-emission" system. The shields from Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye work that way. But when we look at Star Trek, at any rate, there are several reasons to think that this ISN'T what's going on. Number one, the terms "shields" and "deflector shields" can be treated as synonyms under many circumstances, indicating that the point of a shield isn't so much "absorb it before it hits the hull" as it is "make sure it doesn't hit the hull in the first place." This is further backed up by the fact that we have at least one okudagram that mentions gravitons in the context of shields, indicating that shields work by distorting space time around the ship - which would indeed lend itself to "deflection" of projectiles.

More to the point, every time a hit lands on the shields, the ship shakes and we see effects on the bridge - sparks, small explosions, etc. This indicates that not all of the impact of a blow is "absorbed." However, it's entirely reasonable to assume that the hit has been "diffused," and that a shot that would have blown a hole in the ship just shakes it around and dents it a bit.

Finally, in the episode "Survivors," Worf refers to the act of "reassembling" the shields, indicating that, even if there isn't baryonic matter out there, there's definitely some sort of persisting structure to the shield that is altered by incoming weapon fire.

All of this together points to a view of shields that is far more interesting and physically realistic than the "hit points" "catastrophic existence failure" model. My personal view is that the percentages we constantly hear are either a) a complex measure of the structural integrity of the persisting shield structure, or b) a measure of how much juice is left in the capacitors that power the shields. I sort of waffle between the two views depending on what kind of a mood I'm in.

To understand my view, imagine a transparent riot shield. It will stop incoming fists almost with impunity. A bullet has a real possibility of getting through, but (depending on the variety of shield) there's also a real possibility that it will be stopped or deflected. A laser operating in visible wavelengths will pass through it almost like it isn't there - bypassing it, if you will.

In an analogy to Star Trek shields, I would say that fists and suchlike are analogous to most energy weapons. Bullets are analogous to high powered energy weapons (in the tens of exawatts, like the phaser in "Masks"), sufficiently large/fast kinetic impactors, antimatter annihilation weapons, and sufficiently large nukes. The shield can save your life, give you one or two more chances than you would have had without it, but it can only do so much. This is particularly easy to understand if the primary mode of action is diffusion or deflection: an energy weapon of sufficient power will cause problems because it will heat the hull substantially, and a nuclear explosion is already mostly "diffused" over a wide surface. Finally, the laser is analogous to something like a phased polaron beam - the shield is just transparent to it. Jacketed antimatter a la "Survivors" may or may not be analogous to the lasers, depending on a) what "Jacketed antimatter" is, b) whether the "forty megawatts" and "four hundred gigawatts" were measures of actual energy deposition on the shields, or a measure of the kinetic energy of the "jacketed antimatter," and c) how much of the entire encounter was just an illusion.
Well this may be a mite beyond my depth, so if you’ll bear with me, what exactly is a “absorption and re-emission” shield system? Myself being unfamiliar with the Verse of “The Motes in God’s eye”.
[fanboy]You should go to your library and order the book right now, because it is amazing and any science fiction fan will enjoy it. Also a good book: "Footfall." This latter has the hard sci-fi equivalent of the Defiant: The Michael, a warship that takes to the skies atop a series of exploding nuclear weapons that it also uses to pump gamma ray lasers. [/fanboy]

Anyways, in "The Mote in God's Eye," the primary defensive mechanism of a starship is its Langston Field, which absorbs the energy of laser fire and nuclear detonations. It has only so much energy it can absorb before it fails (and unlike most science-fiction shields, when the shields fail, they explode, destroying the ship).

Ideally, instead of failing and destroying the ship, it would radiate the energy it absorbs as heat at a relatively low rate.

Any energy absorbed prior to the field reaching "full capacity" has no real effect on the ship beneath.

For whatever reason, whenever vs debaters talk about shield systems, the default position appears to be something along the lines of a Langston Field that absorbs incoming weapons fire and re-emits it in some form, and has a fixed maximum "capacity" that cannot be exceeded on pain of shield failure.

This is manifestly not what we see in most science-fiction franchises.
My personal theory in regards to shields, such as it can be called a theory, is that they, for all intents and purposes, create a physical barrier between the ship and outside space. A barrier which, as it is pulverized by enemy fire, allows more and more to slip through the “cracks” as it were.
I think that's a reasonable enough theory. I really do believe that something like that has to be what's going on for anything to make sense.
In regards to shields and deflector shields being used interchangeable, while we have seen things skip off of shields, off the top of my head the most notable would be Roga Danar antics from "The Hunted" {TNG-03}, the shields themselves do not appear to impart noticeable velocities to inbound objects. Observed phaser strikes, photon torpedoes etc simply seem to hit a barrier without being noticeably redirected. Similarly the Crystaline Entity could be in contact with the shield without being repulsed or apparently harmed.

Diffusion, similar, does not appear to occur when we’ve observed phaser strikes and torpedoes hit on shielded objects. They appear to explode/splatter as if hitting solid objects rather than harmlessly dispersing.
It depends on what the shield is doing. While we certainly don't see phasers being refracted, we do see them go from "moving towards the shield" to "moving along the surface of the shield." If we assume that energy weapons in Trek work along similar lines to real world particle beams, this is a very strange thing to be seeing. If a laser gets stopped by a physical object, it doesn't "splatter" at all. Instead, it gets absorbed or reflected. This is manifestly not what's going on with Star Trek shields.

What we see probably isn't deflection, but it's certainly redirection.
As for Survivors, it is a problematic episode. Straightforward, barring what I would consider unreasonable assumptions, it shows some four hundred gigawatts of particle energy, if properly applied, can knock down a Galaxy class starship's shields. On the other hand it involved a nigh-all powerful being. Personally I wouldn’t rely too heavily on it.
Fair enough.
Moff Tarquin wrote:Note that McCoy doesn't say that the ship is "powerful enough to wipe out a shielded outpost," but "powerful enough to wipe out a planet." This would appear to indicate that, despite the fact that the asylum may be alone down there, even against a more earth-like civiization, Enterprise could blast a planet back into the stone age in short order.

Note 1) even on the far side of the planet, the best option open to Enterprise is to "cut through" a section of the forcefield - as opposed to "blasting through" - indicating that a brute force strike would still be risky to the asylum on the other side of the planet. 2) even with the precision strike method, McCoy is still worried about a "margin of safety" for the people below. This indicates that either a) there are colonies on the side of the planet opposite the asylum - in which case killing "every living thing on Elba II" becomes a heck of a lot more impressive, or b) McCoy is under the impression that a weapon strike on one side of the planet is capable of adversely effecting an asylum on the other side of the planet - which, while not conclusive proof a brute force strike would be capable of effecting the entire planet, certainly indicates that Enterprise's capabilities far exceed anything achievable with current technology - which in turn casts doubt on any photon torpedo yield - indeed, any phaser energy - south of a hundred megatons.

Alone, each remark is inconclusive. Together, however, they make a powerful case for an Enterprise capable of wiping an Industrial civilization off of the map completely.
Well to answer in order

1. I do not doubt the Enterprise is capable of wiping out an Earth like civilization in short order. However to destroy cities to an unspecified degree does not require much more than kiloton scale weaponry. Likely even less, phasers most likely being far more efficient and directed than Omni-directional bombs.
On the contrary, the number of torpedoes carried by the Enterprise do not number more than 100. If it had hundreds of thousands of these munitions, perhaps it would be plausible to place them in the kilotons. However, if we assume that (say) 1% of the planet needs to be covered in 5 psi overpressure, then each photon torpedo needs to cover 50,000 square kilometers. Using Carey Sublette's Nuclear Weapons FAQ:
1 psi Window glass shatters
Light injuries from fragments occur.
3 psi Residential structures collapse.
Serious injuries are common, fatalities may occur.
5 psi Most buildings collapse.
Injuries are universal, fatalities are widespread.
10 psi Reinforced concrete buildings are severely damaged or demolished.
Most people are killed.
20 psi Heavily built concrete buildings are severely damaged or demolished.
Fatalities approach 100%.

Suitable scaling constants for the equation r_blast = Y^0.33 * constant_bl
are:

constant_bl_1_psi = 2.2
constant_bl_3_psi = 1.0
constant_bl_5_psi = 0.71
constant_bl_10_psi = 0.45
constant_bl_20_psi = 0.28

where Y is in kilotons and range is in km.
We can calculate that each torpedo has a yield of 5.6 gigatons. If we raise the required overpressure to 20 psi, the yield is in excess of 90 gigatons.

I have played around on a site called "NukeMap," and hitting earth with a series of 100 6 gigaton nuclear weapons at populous cities such that there is minimal overlap leaves enough work for the (we presume relatively less powerful) phasers to do. In addition to leaving heaps of rubble where the hundred largest cities on earth once stood, firestorms would cover central Europe, the East Coast of the United States, and substantial portions of China and Southern Asia. However, most of Eastern Europe and substantial portions of the central United States, large portions of Africa, and much of South America would be fairly intact and require phaser work.

2. For reference Elba II is a lifeless rock with a toxic atmosphere, there is no one on the planet but the asylum.
The asylum is the only habitation that we are made aware of in the episode, but there could easily be other domed colonies elsewhere on the planet.

Yes McCoy, and the others, are worried that even attacking the weakest point on the far side of the planet could have negative consequences for the asylum. The means either A.) The forward phasers are of such power that they can accidently “core” through a planet of presumed Earth like size or B.) The shield generator, located on site in the asylum, would suffer some explosive failure due to the strain of handling the phaser cutting through it. Option B would prevent a contradiction between this episode and, to name one example, the “Paradise Syndrome” where the Enterprise could not break up a roughly Earth sized moon in a timely manner.
Given that we haven't seen overloaded shield generators explode in Star Trek, we have to choose option C: that the firepower of the Enterprise is so great that blasting through the shields on one side of the planet would cause lethal effects on the other side of the planet, propagated atmospherically or seismically, not by coring through the planet.
Moff Tarquin wrote:The biggest issue with it being some kind of superweapon is that Data says "The destruction is remarkable considering the primitive weapons of the period."

Today, with our "big bombs of death" in the tens of megatons, and even our precision missiles have yields in the hundreds of kilotons, we can look down our noses at the Hiroshima bomb. There is no indication that any Trek power, even in the twenty-fourth century, would look down its nose at the Xindi superweapon. They do, however, look down their noses at whatever did that to Orelious Nine.

In any case, we can be confident that, if the Federation wanted to, it could produce a weapon capable of even more impressive effects.
Well all Data is saying is the weapons, while primitive, were surprisingly powerful. We might very well say the same for Little Boy. A gravity dropped, unguided, crude gun-type fission device developed by a society where computers still meant men doing math with slide rulers. A Tomahawk cruise missile is lightyears ahead of it in sophistication yet Little Boy was vastly more powerful.
Bad example. Until recently, the tomahawk missile could be mounted with a variable yield W80 thermonuclear warhead. The maximum yield? 150 kilotons, some ten times the yield of Little Boy.

"More advanced" means "smarter and smaller, but - if need be - capable of far superior power."
Similarly, while capable of generating massive amounts of power through a chain reaction, I truly doubt there was a system or piece of equipment onboard the Xindi superweapon which the Federation couldn’t have improved upon with faster, more complex computers or long range and accurate sensors or what have you.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. The Sphere Builders helped the Xindi build that one, and IIRC they were time travelers.
As well it is completely possible the planet's destruction was in part accidental involving chain reactions triggered by a vastly less powerful but unlucky shot. Planets have exploded in Trek on their own accord after all.
Possible, but in the absence of a good reason to assume chain-reaction (other than "it couldn't have done all that by itself, could it?") I tend to assume DET.
Lastly, Yes the Federation has exploded stars and planets, usually by accident, and if they wanted too could churn out all kinds of planet busters. That, in itself, does not mean their starships are rated to withstand even a fraction of such energies.
Except for the Intrepid, apparently.
Moff Tarquin wrote:1) LaForge prefixes the "terawatt range" comment with "normally." Given that moving the neutron star quite literally pushed the Enterprise-D to its limits, we can safely assume that power output in the thousands of yottawatts is not "normal."
2) LaForge does not say that the power output of the starship is in the terawatt range, he says that the plasma is "kicked up into" the terawatt range, which is a rather peculiar phrasing. So we have a little bit of wiggle room - perhaps we have a terawatt being produced for every kilogram of plasma leaving the reactor, or something along those lines.
3) Is a device that produces, say, 12.75 billion gigawatts "in the gigawatt range"? If so, then just about any power above a trillion watts is consistent with LaForge's dialogue.
1. Even accepting the warpcore got pushed up "Four hundred percent" it would still be spit in the wind. The two figures are simply ludicrous in relation to each other.
My argument would be that the warpcore almost never runs at "one hundred percent," and that its "normal" output may indeed be far less than "one percent."

But even if you don't accept that, you have to weigh an off-the-cuff statement against an actual achievement of the ship. If something has to give, it's the off-the-cuff statement.
2. I’m not sure how much wiggle room there is. The context of the discussion is power generation, specifically the warp core. It seems unlikely he would be referring to the output of a kilogram of plasma flowing out of the reactor if there was hundreds if not thousands of kilograms at any given moment.
I, for one, find it odd that he's referring to the "power of the plasma" in the first place, but for some reason, that's what he's doing.

3. No. 12.75 billion gigawatts would not be something usually expressed in the gigawatt range. It well exceeds it, obviously.
Then why measure it in units of gigawatts?
Moff Tarquin wrote:Strictly speaking, the amount of energy required to heat-kill the Great Link could be lower by an order of magnitude. We know that the reach "peak liquidity" at 17 degrees Celsius from "The Begotten," as opposed to the 4 degrees of most of our oceans, so we can already shave about 15% off of the figure. Add in the fact that you probably wouldn't need to go all the way to boiling, and you could probably cut the figure in half.

On the other hand, pulse phasers and quantum torpedoes are not the most efficient means of heating something. The most important factor, IMHO, is that each individual torpedo has to be sufficient to take out thousands upon thousands of cubic kilometers of Great Link, and Garak wasn't even a hundred percent sure he could get the phasers online.

Think for a moment about modern nuclear strategy. To cover thirty thousand square kilometers with 5 psi overpressure, you can either use a single 2.8 gigaton bomb (AFAIK, impossible with current nuclear stockpiles), or you can use a thousand 88 kiloton bombs, with a combined yield of 88 megatons (something the U.S. could do within the month if it really had to).

If the Defiant had 5e23 thermal charges with one joule each, it could probably sterilize the Great Link with "only" 5e23 J. But it doesn't. It has a number of quantum torpedoes not exceeding three hundred. Which means that it could take many orders of magnitude more energy to eliminate the Great Link with quantum torpedoes than it would take to heat the Mediterranean sea to boiling.

If you would like to continue discussion of this point, feel free to bring this line of discussion over to my "Rehabilitating The Die is Cast" thread!
I suppose my next question would be how do we go about quantifying the Great Link? Something which looked like this on its original world. Now this looks more impressive but do was have any indication it isn’t, say an inch deep?
If they wanted us to think it's only as deep as a kiddie pool, they wouldn't have made it stretch from horizon to horizon.

Every description I've found of the Great Link compares it to a sea or an ocean. While it's consistent with what we see to say that it's ankle-deep, it's not consistent with the spirit of what we see - and given my narratological methodology, the spirit of what we see can be as important as, or more important than, the details of what we see. If the details can be reconciled, than we can keep them. But authorial intent as revealed in the plot and the dialogue reigns supreme.
Moff Tarquin wrote:I really think that the images speak for themselves.

From what I understand, the planet was set off by bounty hunters who were trying to disable Voyager, but Janeway escaped by pumping more power to the shields and blowing up the debris field with Voyager's phasers (the debris included some kind of technobabble gas. For that matter, the planet was blown up with technobabble), which served very effectively to distract the bounty hunters' vessel.
Ah, thank you. Certainly is one of the higher showings.
So much for not being "rated to withstand even a fraction of such energies," eh?

For whatever it's worth, I don't think that most Trek ships could handle a multiple-teraton torpedo detonate within several kilometers of them. Gigatons applied over a period of seconds via phasers (or an exploding planetoid)? Sure. Teratons applied over a period of microseconds? Nope. This is how I explain the knife-fight ranges we often see in fleet battles: by closing in to within several kilometers of your adversary, you make it impossible for them to one-hit-kill you without one-hit-killing themselves as collateral damage.

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Re: Rehabilitating The Die is Cast

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Tue Feb 09, 2016 9:35 pm

Relevant but off-topic; In Stargate Atlantis, the city of Atlantis has a shielding system that definitely does have a capacity to absorb energy, channel it and dump it into LALALAND (or capacitors). The shield does deflect, it produces a solid shell too, but in one episode it was used in an inverted way to protect the city's main spire by encasing the control room's stargate before it went nuclear. Then the gate exploded and all the shield relays were devoted to sucking the energy out of the contained fireball. The shield wasn't designed that way but it still managed to hold on. When the protective membrane fell, there was little energy left within the fireball, although it did wreck a good fraction of the control room.

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Re: Rehabilitating The Die is Cast

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Tue Feb 09, 2016 9:58 pm

sonofccn wrote: Well to answer in order

1. I do not doubt the Enterprise is capable of wiping out an Earth like civilization in short order. However to destroy cities to an unspecified degree does not require much more than kiloton scale weaponry. Likely even less, phasers most likely being far more efficient and directed than Omni-directional bombs.
And any large city would likely easily be leveled by a dozen Fatman bombs dropped at appropriate distances or less.
2. For reference Elba II is a lifeless rock with a toxic atmosphere, there is no one on the planet but the asylum. Yes McCoy, and the others, are worried that even attacking the weakest point on the far side of the planet could have negative consequences for the asylum. The means either A.) The forward phasers are of such power that they can accidently “core” through a planet of presumed Earth like size or B.) The shield generator, located on site in the asylum, would suffer some explosive failure due to the strain of handling the phaser cutting through it. Option B would prevent a contradiction between this episode and, to name one example, the “Paradise Syndrome” where the Enterprise could not break up a roughly Earth sized moon in a timely manner.
Option B is obviously more adequate here.
The entire planet safe for the asylum is an entire poisonous stink hole.
3. No. 12.75 billion gigawatts would not be something usually expressed in the gigawatt range. It well exceeds it, obviously.
The thing with figures provided in watts is that there is no indication that they refer to a continuous stream of energy delivery.
If we were looking at a system shooting pulses down a power conduit, each pulse being a small fraction of a second would push the wattage through the roof, yet the total energy per second wouldn't be so stellar.
Don't some warp core show some kind of pulse system in fact?
I suppose my next question would be how do we go about quantifying the Great Link? Something which looked like this on its original world. Now this looks more impressive but do was have any indication it isn’t, say an inch deep?
A good question would be if it covers the entirety of the planet. Assuming it does, even a one inch thickness is still going to require lots of energy, even if one is to treat the Great Link as nothing more than a mass of water.

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Re: Rehabilitating The Die is Cast

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Tue Feb 09, 2016 10:31 pm

MT wrote: For whatever it's worth, I don't think that most Trek ships could handle a multiple-teraton torpedo detonate within several kilometers of them. Gigatons applied over a period of seconds via phasers (or an exploding planetoid)? Sure. Teratons applied over a period of microseconds? Nope. This is how I explain the knife-fight ranges we often see in fleet battles: by closing in to within several kilometers of your adversary, you make it impossible for them to one-hit-kill you without one-hit-killing themselves as collateral damage.
With the levels of energy you're talking about, any short range detonation would have all ships' shields in the close vicinity to flare up every single time a torpedo would blow up against another ship's shield.
On the contrary, the number of torpedoes carried by the Enterprise do not number more than 100. If it had hundreds of thousands of these munitions, perhaps it would be plausible to place them in the kilotons. However, if we assume that (say) 1% of the planet needs to be covered in 5 psi overpressure, then each photon torpedo needs to cover 50,000 square kilometers.
Let's not forget phasers. They can be set to a very large angle and have been seen to dissolve matter with far more efficiency than doing it through traditional mechanical work, material heating.
It's not exactly hard to imagine what a large angle shot from orbit could do, after a prolongated firing, to an entire region when one remembers what personnal phasers on certain settings can do to people and their gear.
The asylum is the only habitation that we are made aware of in the episode, but there could easily be other domed colonies elsewhere on the planet.
I read the script several months ago and if there is one thing sure it's that there's practically no reason to believe the asylum to be one amongst many other inhabited zones. If anything, evidence of other inhabited zones is quite necessary.
Given that we haven't seen overloaded shield generators explode in Star Trek, we have to choose option C: that the firepower of the Enterprise is so great that blasting through the shields on one side of the planet would cause lethal effects on the other side of the planet, propagated atmospherically or seismically, not by coring through the planet.
We haven't seen one single shield pushed so far as to encase an entire world either.
Perhaps there's a very good reason that is never done: because the device that you rely on for protection is now a bomb that will kill you all if the shield fails.
It's even worse if one single ship managing to poke a single tiny whole into the entire bigger-than-a-planet shell makes the shielding device blow up. It makes the shield extremely dangerous, absolutely unwise to use it under such circumstances.
However, considering the delusional nutcase who was running the entire circus down there and how he tried to trick other people, lied to them and bluffed, it suddenly becomes possible that one person would be mad enough to push a planetary shield to such limits.

I think I'll have to provide a link to the rather recent thread I partook in that was covering the Elba II case.
Bad example. Until recently, the tomahawk missile could be mounted with a variable yield W80 thermonuclear warhead. The maximum yield? 150 kilotons, some ten times the yield of Little Boy.

"More advanced" means "smarter and smaller, but - if need be - capable of far superior power."
Not necessarily. The level of sophistication of a weapon is hardly measured solely on its firepower. In fact, most of the evolutions done today all deal with better guidance, penetration, autonomy and survival, from infantry level to air bombs or even greater, long range missiles. Yields barely enter the equation these days.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. The Sphere Builders helped the Xindi build that one, and IIRC they were time travelers.
Indeed, it's quite a fence to jump here to assume that because it was used in the past, "modern" UFP would easily crack its components and even have a joy at upgrading them, considering who helped the Xindi in making it.
My argument would be that the warpcore almost never runs at "one hundred percent," and that its "normal" output may indeed be far less than "one percent."
A margin of excess might be considered, but claiming that a power plant is usually used at 1% of less of its capabilities sounds rather odd.
I, for one, find it odd that he's referring to the "power of the plasma" in the first place, but for some reason, that's what he's doing.
Wouldn't that just be a technician's way to talk about the pwoer carried by plasma through the conduits? Nothing really weird there.

Oh, just before we miss that one:
On the other hand, pulse phasers and quantum torpedoes are not the most efficient means of heating something.
They actually are. The widespread angle of a phaser bank would be the best way to homogeneously heat up a surface at large. Anything else would be far less efficient.
If they wanted us to think it's only as deep as a kiddie pool, they wouldn't have made it stretch from horizon to horizon.
Yet if that was the way it were, that thin, stretched over the entire planet or so, it would precisely be the way it would look like.
Besides, Interstellar. Remember the planet with the huge tides? Until they arrived, all we were to see was a vast sea that was less than half a meter deep.
Still, I don't think it matters much.
If I get the crux of your calculation, you're using classicaly physics to obtain a firepower figure, while the episode has clearly shown waves crossing over vast areas: waves so fast that if they had anything to do with regular physics, they'd have heated up the matter to boiling point and most likely, because of that too, ejected a lot of matter into space, which would have easily been visible from space.
In fact, any kind of conventional firepower necessary to create tides that would propagate over the entire horizon would have produced such fireballs that no one would have ever defined the Trek side from having such normal yet insane firepower.

That's why applying regular firepower to TDiC is not a reasonable thing to do in my book.

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Re: Rehabilitating The Die is Cast

Post by Jedi Master Spock » Thu Feb 11, 2016 4:07 am

sonofccn wrote:Well this may be a mite beyond my depth, so if you’ll bear with me, what exactly is a “absorption and re-emission” shield system? Myself being unfamiliar with the Verse of “The Motes in God’s eye”.
It's a Niven & Pournelle hard SF classic. The shield technology is mainly just a detail in the fabric of the story, but basically, shields glow (and, in the case of the improved version made by the Moties, expands) to re-radiate the energy they take in. Or, in other words, the shield acts like a thermal black body.
My personal theory in regards to shields, such as it can be called a theory, is that they, for all intents and purposes, create a physical barrier between the ship and outside space. A barrier which, as it is pulverized by enemy fire, allows more and more to slip through the “cracks” as it were.
That would be an absorption model (more or less).
Mr. Oragahn wrote:
Given that we haven't seen overloaded shield generators explode in Star Trek, we have to choose option C: that the firepower of the Enterprise is so great that blasting through the shields on one side of the planet would cause lethal effects on the other side of the planet, propagated atmospherically or seismically, not by coring through the planet.
We haven't seen one single shield pushed so far as to encase an entire world either.
I think that episode ("Whom Gods Destroy") is as clear of a case as we could get in terms of having a planetary shield. There really doesn't appear to be much else on the planet except for the asylum - the whole planet has a toxic atmosphere and the asylum is very deliberately isolated. Since there don't appear to be any other facilities on the planet, the fact that the opposite side of the planet is still affected by the shield, while being the weak point of said shield, implies a planetary shield projected from that facility.

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Re: Rehabilitating The Die is Cast

Post by Moff Tarquin » Fri Feb 12, 2016 3:33 am

Mr. Oragahn wrote:
MT wrote: For whatever it's worth, I don't think that most Trek ships could handle a multiple-teraton torpedo detonate within several kilometers of them. Gigatons applied over a period of seconds via phasers (or an exploding planetoid)? Sure. Teratons applied over a period of microseconds? Nope. This is how I explain the knife-fight ranges we often see in fleet battles: by closing in to within several kilometers of your adversary, you make it impossible for them to one-hit-kill you without one-hit-killing themselves as collateral damage.
With the levels of energy you're talking about, any short range detonation would have all ships' shields in the close vicinity to flare up every single time a torpedo would blow up against another ship's shield.
My position is that torpedoes in "knife fight range" situations are set to ~10 gigatons. That fits in well with the 2 gigaton/second phaser firepower we see in episodes like Masks. Under such assumptions, shield flares would only occur if hundreds of megatons were deposited upon the shields in short order. In short, the benchmark for "what causes a shield flare" has been moved up.
On the contrary, the number of torpedoes carried by the Enterprise do not number more than 100. If it had hundreds of thousands of these munitions, perhaps it would be plausible to place them in the kilotons. However, if we assume that (say) 1% of the planet needs to be covered in 5 psi overpressure, then each photon torpedo needs to cover 50,000 square kilometers.
Let's not forget phasers. They can be set to a very large angle and have been seen to dissolve matter with far more efficiency than doing it through traditional mechanical work, material heating.
That would be the case IF we assumed that "disappearing" took less energy than blowing something up. I, for one, take the opposite view. The only real way we can have this sort "disappearing" happen in real life is if either a) everything gets turned into neutrinos, or b) phasers on high settings literally make matter go "out of phase," temporarily or permanently, in the weird "no physical interaction" sense that most sci-fi franchises use the phrase to describe. Given that neither effect has been observed in particle accelerators, we can presume that either a) the sorts of energies (per individual particle, measured in electron volts) modern particle accelerators are capable of generating pale in comparison to the sorts of energies phasers are capable of generating, or b) the physics of Star Trek are so radically different from the physics of the real world that any attempt at calculating anything for the Star Trek universe is pointless.

Ludicrously powerful or disconnected from our physics entirely. Take your pick.
It's not exactly hard to imagine what a large angle shot from orbit could do, after a prolongated firing, to an entire region when one remembers what personnal phasers on certain settings can do to people and their gear.
TNG era phasers are capable of "disappearing" about 400,000,000 tons/second at 10% power. That's about 4,000,000,000 tons per second at 100% power, assuming that "disappearing" scales linearly.

Over here they guestimate that Los Angeles weighs 12,000,000,000 tons. So the phasers of the Enterprise-D could indeed "disappear" Los Angeles in three seconds or so.

But wait. While 10 exawatts is a "fair guesstimate" for TNG phaser firepower (under the assumption that "disappearing" water takes no more energy than vaporizing it), we know for a fact that energy weapons two hundred years earlier were limited to a power of five terawatts. If we take the geometric mean of the two figures (assuming that the "rate of progression" in energy weapon power is roughly constant), TOS phaser power would be in the vicinity of 7 petawatts - which could only disappear about 3,000,000 tons per second (incidentally, these numbers would indicate that laser weapons in the 2040's would have outputs on the order of 3.5 gigawatts, which fits in reasonably well with current levels of technological progression). Disappearing Los Angeles during the TOS era would have taken close to an hour. Multiply that by every particularly populous city on the planet, and we're talking about an operation that would take several days. And then there's all the small towns scattered across the planet that you have to destroy as well. And there's the agricultural base that needs to be destroyed in order to really ensure that this civilization ends. And somewhere in some base your scanners haven't detected yet - or one that your computers have mistakenly identified as a "low priority target" - there's a group of people that could be capable of mounting a counteroffensive. Maybe it's under a mountain. Maybe it's in the middle of nowhere, far from population centers. Maybe it's at the bottom of the ocean. Wherever it is, it has time to figure out a way to stop you. You can't give them that time, especially not if they're actively hostile to the Federation.

Once we start including farmland in the equation, the numbers required to pull off General Order 24 skyrocket. Suddenly, instead of destroying the 5,000,000 square kilometers of cities on an earth-like planet, you have to destroy that AND the 20,000,000 square kilometers of farmland. Instead of taking days to phaser civilization to dust, it will take weeks - which is unacceptable. The only way to reduce the amount of time to carry out General Order 24 to a tactically potent level is to assume that the torpedoes are doing most of the heavy lifting - and since there are only about a hundred of them, each of them must have a yield well into the gigatons.
The asylum is the only habitation that we are made aware of in the episode, but there could easily be other domed colonies elsewhere on the planet.
I read the script several months ago and if there is one thing sure it's that there's practically no reason to believe the asylum to be one amongst many other inhabited zones. If anything, evidence of other inhabited zones is quite necessary.
Given McCoy's concern with leaving a "margin of safety" for the people below the shield, we have basically two options: either there are people on the side of the planet opposite the asylum, in which case the fact that blasting through the force field would kill every living thing on the planet becomes all the more impressive, or there are not, in which case McCoy is worried that a weapons strike on one side of the planet will destroy the asylum on the other side, which would arguably be even more impressive. Take your pick.
Given that we haven't seen overloaded shield generators explode in Star Trek, we have to choose option C: that the firepower of the Enterprise is so great that blasting through the shields on one side of the planet would cause lethal effects on the other side of the planet, propagated atmospherically or seismically, not by coring through the planet.
We haven't seen one single shield pushed so far as to encase an entire world either.
Perhaps there's a very good reason that is never done: because the device that you rely on for protection is now a bomb that will kill you all if the shield fails.
It's even worse if one single ship managing to poke a single tiny whole into the entire bigger-than-a-planet shell makes the shielding device blow up. It makes the shield extremely dangerous, absolutely unwise to use it under such circumstances.
However, considering the delusional nutcase who was running the entire circus down there and how he tried to trick other people, lied to them and bluffed, it suddenly becomes possible that one person would be mad enough to push a planetary shield to such limits.
Emphasis added.
1) Even on ships, shields are not produced by a single projector, but by a grid of deflectors covering the hull. That's what the grid on the hull of every post-TMP ship is supposed to be: the shield generators. Even if their designation as such by the designers of the ships isn't enough for you, we often have different portions of the shield (aft, fore, port, starboard, etc.) taking damage separately, which - while admittedly not conclusive - certainly indicates that different generators are devoted to protecting different sections of the ship. On your theory, a mere ship requires multiple distinct elements covering each section of its hull, but an entire planet can be covered by a single shield generator.
2) In episodes like "Year of Hell" "Dagger of the Mind," the absence of planetary shields elicits surprise.
3) The idea that the shield generator, and not the ship's weapons, would be the cause of the asylum's destruction implicitly contradicts McCoy's sentiment of "How can we be powerful enough to wipe out a planet and still be so helpless?"
4) At the end of the day, the italicized "perhaps" is the cornerstone of this entire theory. Perhaps this shield generator is different from all the others in that it is centralized and dangerously explosive - but there is no real reason to think that this is the case. From my perspective, the whole "explosive shield generator on Elba II" concept is a contrived theory designed specifically to avoid the implication that, in the Trekverse, capital ships can cause mass extinctions as quickly as they can empty their torpedo bays.
I think I'll have to provide a link to the rather recent thread I partook in that was covering the Elba II case.
Be my guest.
Bad example. Until recently, the tomahawk missile could be mounted with a variable yield W80 thermonuclear warhead. The maximum yield? 150 kilotons, some ten times the yield of Little Boy.

"More advanced" means "smarter and smaller, but - if need be - capable of far superior power."
Not necessarily. The level of sophistication of a weapon is hardly measured solely on its firepower. In fact, most of the evolutions done today all deal with better guidance, penetration, autonomy and survival, from infantry level to air bombs or even greater, long range missiles. Yields barely enter the equation these days.
Emphasis added.
You cannot deny that a one ton bomb today is significantly more powerful than a one ton bomb from the forties. In addition to better guidance, etc. we have indeed improved the yield.

A primitive weapon of any given size is going to have a dramatically inferior yield to an advanced weapon of the same size.

I wouldn't be so sure of that. The Sphere Builders helped the Xindi build that one, and IIRC they were time travelers.
Indeed, it's quite a fence to jump here to assume that because it was used in the past, "modern" UFP would easily crack its components and even have a joy at upgrading them, considering who helped the Xindi in making it.
Precisely my point.
My argument would be that the warpcore almost never runs at "one hundred percent," and that its "normal" output may indeed be far less than "one percent."
A margin of excess might be considered, but claiming that a power plant is usually used at 1% of less of its capabilities sounds rather odd.
Odd, yes, but arguably necessary to explain the Enterprise's moving neutron stars around.
I, for one, find it odd that he's referring to the "power of the plasma" in the first place, but for some reason, that's what he's doing.
Wouldn't that just be a technician's way to talk about the pwoer carried by plasma through the conduits? Nothing really weird there.
I cannot predict how a 24th century technician would talk about anything, and that's precisely the point. There is plenty of room for interpretation, especially in light of what the supposedly "terawatt-range" reactor accomplishes later in the very same episode.
Oh, just before we miss that one:
On the other hand, pulse phasers and quantum torpedoes are not the most efficient means of heating something.
They actually are. The widespread angle of a phaser bank would be the best way to homogeneously heat up a surface at large. Anything else would be far less efficient.
Has the Defiant ever displayed the ability to set its pulse phasers to widebeam? I'm not aware of it ever having done so, but if I'm wrong, feel free to correct me.

But I'll humor you for a moment. The Defiant is much smaller than the Enterprise D, but it is also much more combat oriented, so we'll assume that it is capable of putting out the same phaser firepower as a Galaxy class starship's phaser array - roundabout ten exawatts or the equivalent thereof. We will assume the Great Link is about the size of the Baltic Sea, and that it needs to heat the entire thing from 17 degrees Celsius to about 65 degrees Celsius - making the Founders considerably more tolerant of high temperatures than their "solid" counterparts, but not capable of handling literally boiling temperatures. Conveniently, it also cuts the energy from the 1.0e22 J required to heat the Baltic Sea from 4 degrees C to boiling in half.

So 5e21 J / 1e19 W = 500 s.

I don't know about you, but I seriously doubt that the Defiant could last for a full eight minutes and twenty seconds against seven battlebugs without even trying to return fire for a second. And, of course, there's every reason to think that the pulse phasers on the Defiant are not more powerful than a Galaxy class starship's phaser array, but less.

Clearly, Garak is going to be relying on the quantum torpedoes to be supplying the bulk of the firepower in this operation.

In any case, allow me to engage in some rather more precise calculations regarding the firepower of the Defiant based on what Garak expected to be able to do in "Broken Link."

We will assume that the Great Link is comparable in size to the Baltic Sea (which is one of the smallest seas on the planet). So, a surface area of roundabout 3.77e11 square meters, and an average depth of 55 m.

Given the specific heat capacity of water (4.184 kJ/kg*K), the density of water (1000 kg/cubic meter), and our required change in temperature (48 degrees), we can calculate the necessary amount of energy required per cubic meter: 2.0e8 J/cubic meter. Given the depth of Great Link is by assumption 55 meters, we can conclude that 1.1e10 joules need to be applied to every square meter of the Great Link in order to sterilize it.

Now, is this an average energy intensity, or is it a minimum? Let us suppose it were an average. Then there would be regions where the intensity would be so great as to flash-boil a region of the Great Link (these regions would be directly below the Quantum torpedoes) surrounded by regions that had "just enough" to sterilize them, surrounded by regions that were only sterilized to a handful of centimeters. Sure, this situation would leave us with huge shockwaves propagating through the Great Link, but given that solid homogeneous tissues are resistant to blast effects, it is likely that significant numbers of Founders would survive. This hardly counts as "wiping out every Founder on the planet."

Therefore, the entire 3.77e11 square meter surface of the Great Link must be covered with an energy intensity of 1.1e10 J per meter squared or more.

Now we need to work out how much of the Great Link needs to be sterilized by each torpedo.

Imagine a hexagonal grid overlaid over the surface of the Baltic Sea such that there are one hundred of them over the sea itself. One hundred is probably a good "guesstimate" of the number of torpedoes the Defiant carries at any given time, considering that ships a hundred times its size only carry around twice as many. At any rate, a torpedo would be detonated at the center of each hexagon. Each hexagon has an area of 3.77e9 square meters. The regions at the corners are the spots farthest away from the epicenter of the explosion, about 38.1 km. Since each corner is shared by three hexagons, we may assume that each bomb must cast an intensity of (11/3) gigajoules per square meter at that point 38.1 kilometers away from the epicenter of the detonation.

The next bit involves some trigonometry.

Imagine a right triangle ABC. The right angle is at point B. Leg BC is horizontal, leg AB is vertical.

leg AB = h = the height above the surface of the Great Link that the torpedo is detonated at.

leg BC = 38,100 m

let "theta" = angle ACB

The explosion occurs at point A.

Consider the equation I = Y/(4*pi*R^2)

Where I equals the intensity in J/square meter, Y equals the yield in joules, and R equals the distance from the explosion in meters.

For our purposes, the hypotenuse AC = R.

Interestingly, we can express theta and R in terms of h as follows:

theta = arctan(h/38,100 m)

R = h/sin(theta) = h/sin[arctan(h/38,100 m)]

The previous equation for intensity only applies when the surface in question is at right angles to incident rays. In this case, the rays are striking the surface at angle theta. So:

I*sin(theta) = 1.1e10 J / 3 square meters

rearranging things a bit:

I = 1.1e10 J / (3*sin(theta))

Then we substitute:

Y/(4*pi*R^2) = 1.1e10 J / (3*sin(theta) square meters)

More rearranging and substituting:

Y = pi * [4.4e10 J / (3*sin[arctan(h/38,100 m)] square meters)] * (h/sin[arctan(h/38,100 m)])^2

Basically, what's going on here is two things: as the height increases, theta approaches 90 degrees (which means that the torpedo has to be less powerful to get the required 11/3 gigajoules per square meter), but R approaches infinity (which means that the torpedo has to be more powerful to get the required 11/3 gigajoules per square meter). Which means that there's some h that is neither too far up nor too far down such that Y is at a minimum.

When I first started this calculation, I was all like "once I get the equation, I'll take the derivative, find the zeroes, figure out which one is the minimum, and then I'll be done!" And then it came out as that monster, so I decided to cheat and use my graphing calculator instead. So between about 25 km and 29 km, the value is 1.7e20 J. That's 41 gigatons per quantum torpedo.

This calculation is made under several assumptions, including the following:

1) That the pulse phasers do not contribute to the overall firepower. It is probable that this is not the case. Assuming (again) that all four pulse phasers put together can equal the firepower of a Galaxy class starship's ventral phaser array, and assuming that they can fire for no more than a minute (a reasonable survival time when the Defiant is surrounded by no less than seven battlebugs), they can sterilize (at most) 5.5e10 square meters, leaving 3.2e11 square meters for the torpedoes. Leg BC becomes 35.2 km, giving us a yield of 1.5e20 J, or 36 gigatons. This is, quite literally, as low as we can go.

2) The Defiant has time to fire a hundred quantum torpedoes. It is probable that this is not the case. If we cut the number of torpedoes in half, the minimum yield rises to 3.5e20 J, or 84 gigatons.

3) All one hundred quantum torpedoes detonate at the same time. It is possible that this could be the case, if quantum torpedoes fired early were programmed to move more quickly than quantum torpedoes fired later, but it's not particularly probable. If the torpedoes detonate one at a time, each individual torpedo would have to provide the full 11 gigajoules per square meter all on its own, increasing the yield to 5.2e20 J, or 124 gigatons. Also, there would be substantial displacement of large portions of the Great Link with every detonation, meaning that later torpedoes would have to deal with a greater depth of Founder, increasing the required yield further still.

4) The depth of the Great Link is constant. It is probable that this is not the case. If it were roughly as variable as the depth of the Baltic sea, a non-homogenous spread of torpedoes would be ideal, with maximum torpedo density over maximum depth of Founder-goo. I am unsure how this factor would effect the calculation, but I am fairly confident that it would not lower my figures by an order of magnitude.

5) The energy released by each torpedo is exclusively in the form of thermal radiation. This is, to my understanding of the physics involved, impossible. If we include blast effects (which, as mentioned before, would not be particularly harmful to the homogenous founders), we will have to increase the yield of quantum torpedoes substantially. A 50/50 split between blast and thermal effects like that seen in conventional nuclear weapon, for example, would require us to double the yield.

6) That Founder material on the top of the Great Link will transmit as much heat energy downward as is necessary to sterilize the material below. This is exceedingly improbable. It is far more likely that upper layers would ablate (4e6 J/square meter is enough to cause human flesh to flash into steam, flaying it to the bone), and while this ablation would cause shock waves to run through the Founders below, these shockwaves would likely not be damaging to the homogenous changelings, and most of the heat energy would be carried upwards into the planet's atmosphere. I am unsure of exactly how this would effect my calculations, but it could easily raise the yield of the quantum torpedo by an order of magnitude.

7) That the Great Link is only the size of the Baltic Sea. Given that the "reference range" of seas and oceans available to the makers of Deep Space Nine ranges from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean, this is likely a low end figure. We could just as easily pick, say, the Red Sea, which has a surface area of 4.38e11 square meters and an average depth of 490 meters. It would require 9.8e10 J/square meter to sterilize. Leg BC would equal 41,100 m. The torpedo yield would rise to 1.8e21 J, or 430 gigatons. If we pick the Mediterranean sea (which conveniently has a volume roughly equivalent to the geometric mean between the volume of the Pacific Ocean and the volume of the Baltic Sea), which has a surface area of 2.5e12 square meters and an average depth of 1500 meters. It would require 3.0e11 J/square meter to sterilize. Leg BC would equal 98,100 m. The torpedo yield would rise to 3.1e22 J, or 7.4 teratons. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine what sorts of yields we would be looking at if, instead of taking oceans from the lower half of the scale, we were to take oceans from the upper half.

8) That the physical and thermodynamic properties of Founder fluid are comparable to those of liquid water. Given what we know about Founders (for instance, their apparent ability to alter their mass/size more or less at will), this is unlikely. It is impossible to tell how this would effect the calculation, but I am confident that it would not lower the yield by an order of magnitude.

So, in the end, the lowest figures we can get for torpedo yield that are consistent with "Broken Link" are in the double-digit gigatons.
If they wanted us to think it's only as deep as a kiddie pool, they wouldn't have made it stretch from horizon to horizon.
Yet if that was the way it were, that thin, stretched over the entire planet or so, it would precisely be the way it would look like.
It would also look precisely like that if it were a hundred kilometers deep.

Besides, Interstellar. Remember the planet with the huge tides? Until they arrived, all we were to see was a vast sea that was less than half a meter deep.
Never seen it. In any case, there is no evidence that the Founder homeworld has tides any greater than Earth does.
Still, I don't think it matters much.
If I get the crux of your calculation, you're using classicaly physics to obtain a firepower figure,
Actually, I'm using it to obtain a firepower figure from "Broken Link," in order to show that "The Die is Cast" fits in well with the rest of Trek.
while the episode has clearly shown waves crossing over vast areas: waves so fast that if they had anything to do with regular physics, they'd have heated up the matter to boiling point and most likely,
But of course, these aren't waves. Given the way that they slow down at a fixed distance from the point of origin, it is far more likely to assume that we're seeing some kind of "stuff" propogating away from the epicenter and slowing down as it does so, or (more likely) is the visible effect on the surface of something going on underground.

because of that too, ejected a lot of matter into space, which would have easily been visible from space.
If the explosions occurred underground, and the phasers were triggering fault-lines, then we wouldn't expect to see any ejecta, we wouldn't expect to see any fireballs, and we wouldn't expect to see any magma showing through the crust. In fact, we would need an explanation for seeing anything from orbit in the first place.

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Re: Rehabilitating The Die is Cast

Post by sonofccn » Fri Feb 12, 2016 5:59 am

Still working on my main replies, likely have it posted Friday evening or Saturday.

But I noticed your reply and thought I might chip in my two cents.
Moff Tarquin wrote:But wait. While 10 exawatts is a "fair guesstimate" for TNG phaser firepower (under the assumption that "disappearing" water takes no more energy than vaporizing it), we know for a fact that energy weapons two hundred years earlier were limited to a power of five terawatts. If we take the geometric mean of the two figures (assuming that the "rate of progression" in energy weapon power is roughly constant), TOS phaser power would be in the vicinity of 7 petawatts - which could only disappear about 3,000,000 tons per second (incidentally, these numbers would indicate that laser weapons in the 2040's would have outputs on the order of 3.5 gigawatts, which fits in reasonably well with current levels of technological progression). Disappearing Los Angeles during the TOS era would have taken close to an hour. Multiply that by every particularly populous city on the planet, and we're talking about an operation that would take several days. And then there's all the small towns scattered across the planet that you have to destroy as well. And there's the agricultural base that needs to be destroyed in order to really ensure that this civilization ends. And somewhere in some base your scanners haven't detected yet - or one that your computers have mistakenly identified as a "low priority target" - there's a group of people that could be capable of mounting a counteroffensive. Maybe it's under a mountain. Maybe it's in the middle of nowhere, far from population centers. Maybe it's at the bottom of the ocean. Wherever it is, it has time to figure out a way to stop you. You can't give them that time, especially not if they're actively hostile to the Federation.

Once we start including farmland in the equation, the numbers required to pull off General Order 24 skyrocket. Suddenly, instead of destroying the 5,000,000 square kilometers of cities on an earth-like planet, you have to destroy that AND the 20,000,000 square kilometers of farmland. Instead of taking days to phaser civilization to dust, it will take weeks - which is unacceptable. The only way to reduce the amount of time to carry out General Order 24 to a tactically potent level is to assume that the torpedoes are doing most of the heavy lifting - and since there are only about a hundred of them, each of them must have a yield well into the gigatons.
1. I feel your putting the cart a little ahead of the horse in regards to Exawatt phasers. While I would agree Masks does lends credence and support to Gigaton yield phasers it certainly not without its issues. First and foremost you are arguing that the forward phasers of the Enterprise-D take a substantial fraction of the "TrueQ" quote, one of the higher explicit power figures for Trek that I'm aware of. Even accepting that they weren't pushing the engines, at a redline of 400% phasers would still be eating up a big chunk of total power.

2. At the risk of impoliteness, you assumptions on General Order 24 have a Saxtonian feel to them. Not only have you, essentially, declared every single blade of grass strategically important but you have also brought up hypothetical counter-measures which you assume a starship must be able to overcome.

This is not likely to be a persuasive argument to any but those already convinced.

3. From Mirror Mirror {TOS-02) as taken from here We learn the technologically identical Terran Empire:
Mirror Mirror wrote:SPOCK: At norm, Mister Kyle. Controls at neutral.
KYLE: Yes, sir.
SPOCK: Status of mission, Captain?
KIRK: No change.
SPOCK: Standard procedure, Captain? (Kirk nods) Mister Sulu, you will programme phaser barrage on Halkan cities.
Photon torpedoes might not ever be used for "soft" targets like cities.

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Re: Rehabilitating The Die is Cast

Post by sonofccn » Sun Feb 14, 2016 10:11 pm

Moff Tarquin wrote:It depends on what the shield is doing. While we certainly don't see phasers being refracted, we do see them go from "moving towards the shield" to "moving along the surface of the shield." If we assume that energy weapons in Trek work along similar lines to real world particle beams, this is a very strange thing to be seeing. If a laser gets stopped by a physical object, it doesn't "splatter" at all. Instead, it gets absorbed or reflected. This is manifestly not what's going on with Star Trek shields.

What we see probably isn't deflection, but it's certainly redirection.
Lasers do not splatter, no, but phasers do glow and encompass when they strike their target. What we see with shields is not radically different, I would think.
Moff Tarquin wrote:On the contrary, the number of torpedoes carried by the Enterprise do not number more than 100. If it had hundreds of thousands of these munitions, perhaps it would be plausible to place them in the kilotons. However, if we assume that (say) 1% of the planet needs to be covered in 5 psi overpressure, then each photon torpedo needs to cover 50,000 square kilometers. Using Carey Sublette's Nuclear Weapons FAQ:
{Snip}
We can calculate that each torpedo has a yield of 5.6 gigatons. If we raise the required overpressure to 20 psi, the yield is in excess of 90 gigatons.

I have played around on a site called "NukeMap," and hitting earth with a series of 100 6 gigaton nuclear weapons at populous cities such that there is minimal overlap leaves enough work for the (we presume relatively less powerful) phasers to do. In addition to leaving heaps of rubble where the hundred largest cities on earth once stood, firestorms would cover central Europe, the East Coast of the United States, and substantial portions of China and Southern Asia. However, most of Eastern Europe and substantial portions of the central United States, large portions of Africa, and much of South America would be fairly intact and require phaser work
Ultimately I would question the need for generating 5 psi over even 1% of the world. If Little Boy was dropped on New York today, the city would be effectively destroyed as a metropolis center regardless if there were still building standing upright. There would be fires, chaos, looting. The survivors would need food, medical supplies, etc. It would likely be quite taxing for the United States to shift people to noncontaminated areas, provide all the needed resources and what have you. And if every major city in the US had got bombed well, no help would be coming. For all practical, if not geographical, purposes the United States would cease to be.
Moff Tarquin wrote:The asylum is the only habitation that we are made aware of in the episode, but there could easily be other domed colonies elsewhere on the planet.
If there had been anyone inside the protective shield, the Enterprise likely would have contacted them before trying the risky shield penetration gambit. The lack of such occurrence would strongly suggest the asylum was the solitary settlement on the planet.
Moff Tarquin wrote:Given that we haven't seen overloaded shield generators explode in Star Trek, we have to choose option C: that the firepower of the Enterprise is so great that blasting through the shields on one side of the planet would cause lethal effects on the other side of the planet, propagated atmospherically or seismically, not by coring through the planet.
Option C is no different from option A. You are still arguing that phasers have the accidental margin to devastate the far side of the planet. Essentially bleed through damage. And the facility is fairly tough. Per the episode:
Whom Gods destroy wrote:GARTH: Well done. Well, Captain, you continue to resist. How stupid of you. Put him in that chair right here. I've arranged a small entertainment. I wouldn't want him to miss any of it. Well, Captain, even you must admit that I'm a genius. What you see here is my latest invention. This is an explosive, the most powerful one in history. If I were to drop this flask, the resulting explosion would vaporise this planet. Now do you see why it is ridiculous to resist me? Well, perhaps you require the demonstration I've arranged. Watch closely.
(Shutters open to show the planet surface on a screen.)
GARTH: Now, it is true that she is deadly as a poisonous serpent, but she is also a beautiful woman, and you have held her in your arms, Captain. I've ordered my men to drive her out of the protective dome. And, of course, she would choke to death on the outside in minutes.
(On the screen, Marta is struggling against two figures in environment suits.)
GARTH: But I've arranged a more merciful end for her because after all, Captain, she is my consort. One tiny crystal implanted in her necklace, a portion of this explosive no bigger than a grain of sand. I propose to detonate it from here.
(Marta is left alone, choking.)
GARTH: Poor girl. Poor, dear, suffering child. I will help her now.
(Boom!)

[Bridge]

SULU: There's been an explosion on Elba Two!
SCOTT: Point nine five!
MCCOY: It must've wiped out everything.
SCOTT: Immediate probe. Is the force field in place, Mister Sulu?
SULU: Yes, sir. Solidly.
UHURA: (at Spock's station) Life continues to exist on the planet.
A "Point nine five" explosion, something Bones thinks is enough to wipe out everyone down on the planet, doesn't even scratch the asylum. So I have hard time believing seismic activity or even ripping the atmosphere off ala Obsession would instantly kill everyone without hope of rescue as is implied in the episode. And this would only be an accidental fraction of the phasers full power, yet this is the same ship that can't destroy or easily divert a moon sized rogue planet.

And while we have, to my knowledge, never seen a shield generator explode we do know that 1.) Federation tech can explode under the right circumstances ala the frequent exploding consoles and 2.) We have seen reactors explode for various reasons, suddenly amping up to try and strengthen/maintain the farthest, weakest point might tax it such that it may go critical.

Obviously, option B is not a perfect solution but it makes a better fit with all the evidence.
Moff Tarquin wrote:Bad example. Until recently, the tomahawk missile could be mounted with a variable yield W80 thermonuclear warhead. The maximum yield? 150 kilotons, some ten times the yield of Little Boy.

"More advanced" means "smarter and smaller, but - if need be - capable of far superior power."
The fact the Tomahawk cruise missile is capable of supporting a nuclear warhead, as could almost every delivery platform in the US armed forces I believe, does not alter or discredit my argument that a Tomahawk is a vast technological improvement over Little Boy. Indeed, the nuclear warhead is likely the least advanced part of whole affair, likely being quite recognizable to the right people in the late 40's and early 50's while its electronics would represent a quantum leap forward.

As for being more advanced always being capable of "far superior power", I would find that a dubious argument. The Tsar Bomb was detonated in the 60's and was a relatively straight forward and simple gravity bomb type. A Tomahawk missile would likely have every technological advantage it has over Little Boy but has no hope of matching the firepower.
Moff Tarquin wrote:I wouldn't be so sure of that. The Sphere Builders helped the Xindi build that one, and IIRC they were time travelers.
Perhaps, but the superweapon was largely built with local resources. So while no doubt guided and aided by the Sphere Builders, the Xindi weapon is a 22nd century built device.
Moff Tarquin wrote:Possible, but in the absence of a good reason to assume chain-reaction (other than "it couldn't have done all that by itself, could it?") I tend to assume DET.
The fact we know planets can explode on their own, or be triggered to do so ala Think Tank, compels us to consider the possibility. There is simply no reason to assume the planet was busted up purely and totally by conventional arms as per your argued theory.
Moff Tarquin wrote:Except for the Intrepid, apparently.
Well I did say in and of itself. And it is the correct summation. Having nukes does not instantly and by its own existence grant you nuclear-firepower proof battleships.
Moff Tarquin wrote:My argument would be that the warpcore almost never runs at "one hundred percent," and that its "normal" output may indeed be far less than "one percent."

But even if you don't accept that, you have to weigh an off-the-cuff statement against an actual achievement of the ship. If something has to give, it's the off-the-cuff statement.
1. One may of course rationalize almost any statement. I myself find it unlikely Laforge was referring to an infinitesimal fraction of the warp core output.

2. We don't know if the Enterprise brute forced moved the stellar fragment or if they somehow cheated physics. Your analysis hinges on a brute force power model and the only explicit power figure given in the episode falls vastly short of your calculation. I do not mean to be the disagreeable "that guy" but at the very least that is some cause for concern that there may be something more going on than we might, initially, believe.
Moff Tarquin wrote:I, for one, find it odd that he's referring to the "power of the plasma" in the first place, but for some reason, that's what he's doing.
The plasma should contain the usably harnessed energies which can now be transferred through the rest of the ship. Its a little odd he's referring to that instead of the matter/anti-matter reaction itself but I don't see any grievous technical error or inherent wrongness.
Moff Tarquin wrote:Then why measure it in units of gigawatts?
Well a range would imply a bracketed area, in this case gigawatts. Conversely while unorthodox stating it in such a manner it is perfectly accurate to describe 12.75 Exawatts as 12.75 billion gigawatts . The total power being referred to wouldn't be changed. And Data can keep it all perfectly straight where we'd likely get confused and slipped numbers around.
Moff Tarquin wrote:If they wanted us to think it's only as deep as a kiddie pool, they wouldn't have made it stretch from horizon to horizon.

Every description I've found of the Great Link compares it to a sea or an ocean. While it's consistent with what we see to say that it's ankle-deep, it's not consistent with the spirit of what we see - and given my narratological methodology, the spirit of what we see can be as important as, or more important than, the details of what we see. If the details can be reconciled, than we can keep them. But authorial intent as revealed in the plot and the dialogue reigns supreme.
I can't speak for the writer's intent. I can only observe that seeing as the founders were previously quite content to be something the size of a pond makes me leery of assuming their now comparable to the Baltic sea Colorful uses of the word "sea" and/or "Ocean" not with standing. Further the restraints of the episode itself, Garak likely only going to get a salvo or two before being overwhelmed, would suggest a very concentrated, easily exercised Great Link.

Ultimately, my issues are any "Broken Link" calculations hinges upon assumptions made upon a substance we have little understand of and whose dimensions are either vague or utterly unknown. This is not a strong or particularly solid foundation to
rest one's hat on or build as the centerpiece for a firepower paradigm.
So much for not being "rated to withstand even a fraction of such energies," eh?
Well this is the same ship and crew who think a thousand kilograms of anti-matter is a big bomb. Consistency never was Voyager's strong suit. ;)
Moff Tarquin wrote:For whatever it's worth, I don't think that most Trek ships could handle a multiple-teraton torpedo detonate within several kilometers of them. Gigatons applied over a period of seconds via phasers (or an exploding planetoid)? Sure. Teratons applied over a period of microseconds? Nope. This is how I explain the knife-fight ranges we often see in fleet battles: by closing in to within several kilometers of your adversary, you make it impossible for them to one-hit-kill you without one-hit-killing themselves as collateral damage
For whatever its worth, while not without its merits, from what we've observed of fleet battles no one is particularly shy about using torpedoes at "knife-fight" ranges. Also under a paradigm of shields notably < torpedoes you would expect the torpedo boat concept would have resurfaced especially if you’re a backwater race like the Cardassians who couldn't hope to win a phaser fight with a Galaxy class.

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Re: Rehabilitating The Die is Cast

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Feb 15, 2016 12:15 am

Jedi Master Spock wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote:
Given that we haven't seen overloaded shield generators explode in Star Trek, we have to choose option C: that the firepower of the Enterprise is so great that blasting through the shields on one side of the planet would cause lethal effects on the other side of the planet, propagated atmospherically or seismically, not by coring through the planet.
We haven't seen one single shield pushed so far as to encase an entire world either.
I think that episode ("Whom Gods Destroy") is as clear of a case as we could get in terms of having a planetary shield. There really doesn't appear to be much else on the planet except for the asylum - the whole planet has a toxic atmosphere and the asylum is very deliberately isolated. Since there don't appear to be any other facilities on the planet, the fact that the opposite side of the planet is still affected by the shield, while being the weak point of said shield, implies a planetary shield projected from that facility.
I mean, beyond that episode.

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Re: Rehabilitating The Die is Cast

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Feb 15, 2016 2:22 am

My position is that torpedoes in "knife fight range" situations are set to ~10 gigatons. That fits in well with the 2 gigaton/second phaser firepower we see in episodes like Masks. Under such assumptions, shield flares would only occur if hundreds of megatons were deposited upon the shields in short order. In short, the benchmark for "what causes a shield flare" has been moved up.
2 GT/s is a level of firepower that seems beyond ridiculous, even for that setting.
If that's the episode wherein the E-D was melting ice around some base, I don't know what we can say of visuals. The script doesn't give such positive evidence, and those visuals actually show something that is miles away from what you'd get by shooting gigatons into ice.
But then again perhaps it's another episode I have in mind.
That would be the case IF we assumed that "disappearing" took less energy than blowing something up. I, for one, take the opposite view. The only real way we can have this sort "disappearing" happen in real life is if either a) everything gets turned into neutrinos, or b) phasers on high settings literally make matter go "out of phase," temporarily or permanently, in the weird "no physical interaction" sense that most sci-fi franchises use the phrase to describe. Given that neither effect has been observed in particle accelerators, we can presume that either a) the sorts of energies (per individual particle, measured in electron volts) modern particle accelerators are capable of generating pale in comparison to the sorts of energies phasers are capable of generating, or b) the physics of Star Trek are so radically different from the physics of the real world that any attempt at calculating anything for the Star Trek universe is pointless.

Ludicrously powerful or disconnected from our physics entirely. Take your pick.
That's a common point of contention but anyone who looks at Star Trek will see an universe where small bits of plot-stuff can do vast things outside of the purely physical abilities of normal, logical stuff. McGuffins and all that. Then of course there could be high levels of energy involved in each little phaser act, but how do we know for sure that this literally far fetched and very fictional mechanism that seems to dump matter into a plotbin largely gets most of its energy from the weapon, when you have cases of chain reactions lying around? Heck, even a normal day to day chain reaction such as combustion proves that you don't have to claim a match held all a stack of wood's worth of total energy to turn most of it to ashes. We simply cannot know for sure what goes on when those made up weapons could simply exploit a kind of chain reaction that goes on its own, cascading through several phases, only needing a science-bending nudge at the beginning. Same goes on when some Klingon gets shot by a phaser or disruptor and clearly dissolves progressively. Or when S8472 blow a planet up with an input that, although impressive, is magnitudes away from what is needed to achieve that kind of cataclysm.
What is the evidence that waving matter away, even the total mass of a man, wouldn't actually take hundreds of gigajoules of "untappable" energy? Surely, one could easily expect that the process to sort of erase matter away in that fashion could easily requires mountains of energy in comparison to the levels needed to even flash boil someone off.
I for one would never claim vaguely high power levels for Stargate SG-1's zatnikatel guns solely on a lose principle of correspondance with water boiling.
TNG era phasers are capable of "disappearing" about 400,000,000 tons/second at 10% power. That's about 4,000,000,000 tons per second at 100% power, assuming that "disappearing" scales linearly.
Quite an interesting figure there. Where does it come from?
Over here they guestimate that Los Angeles weighs 12,000,000,000 tons. So the phasers of the Enterprise-D could indeed "disappear" Los Angeles in three seconds or so.
How much area would that cover if it were to be applied to, say, the topsoil of a planet plus some trees?
TOS phaser power would be in the vicinity of 7 petawatts...
Surely, TOS was quite advanced in comparison to the late ENT era, but by how much? Back in ENT, their fancy phase banks had freshly reached the low terawatt level and the NX-01 was not exactly that outclassed by the local sector's competition. Yet they were exploiting a king of power tech was that roughly the same as what the UFP has been using for centuries; antimatter annihilation.
We've seen the Connie own ENT-ships easily but there weren't that many of them at a single time and a simple advantage of about ten times in most important domains such as power generation, shields and phasers would easily lead to such a superiority. Yet that would certainly not push TOS-level ship power plant tech to petawatt levels.
Disappearing Los Angeles during the TOS era would have taken close to an hour. Multiply that by every particularly populous city on the planet, and we're talking about an operation that would take several days.
Unless it triggers a chain reaction. Unless you apply that energy in a more raw fashion and cause massive fires. Or a bit of both.
A ship that could flash-level a hundred of the biggest cities on a planet or more with torpedoes, plus ignite fires on a large surface due to wide angle shooting mode, and perhaps even disrupt matter in a way that would literally poison or interrupt any kind of potential exploitation or life cycle of most of the targeted world's exposed surface, would probably leave any planet in a poor, sorry state, easily into ruined territorry.
And then there's all the small towns scattered across the planet that you have to destroy as well. And there's the agricultural base that needs to be destroyed in order to really ensure that this civilization ends.
What worked against the extremist interpretations of BDZ also works here. I.E., a large rain of kiloton level weapons would indeed ruin much of our Earth. And any Trek ship would possess more than that kind of firepower. You want to end civilization? You don't even need to aim for all the arable land. Pollution, ash, radiation, lack of light will do most of the work. Hitting the main water source in glaciers will do to. You don't need to boil them away, just poison them.
Indiscriminate deposits of extreme thermal firepower are not the only ways to ruin a world on a large scale. Lower levels mixed to a better application and better targets will do too.
And, again, let's nor forget wildfires. Good exploitable planets with rich life come with plant life too. They quite go hand in hand. Yet massive wildfires, once started, are one of the hardest things to put down. The best part of it is that on our planet, they start with very little inputs.
Now imagine what could be done if you had at your disposal the genocidal weapons of a ship sitting in orbit. You wouldn't actually waste time hitting deserts. You'd ruin the forests and the rivers. You might shoot at some underweater fault lines too and create as many tsunamis as you could too, and perhaps try to release into the seas hydrocarbons or other natural yet poisonous elements.
Just consider the ecological disasters that happened during the last century and the ever so minimal levels of input needed to trigger them.
And somewhere in some base your scanners haven't detected yet - or one that your computers have mistakenly identified as a "low priority target" - there's a group of people that could be capable of mounting a counteroffensive. Maybe it's under a mountain. Maybe it's in the middle of nowhere, far from population centers. Maybe it's at the bottom of the ocean. Wherever it is, it has time to figure out a way to stop you. You can't give them that time, especially not if they're actively hostile to the Federation.
A parameter that cannot be accounted for. Obviously no ship would be able to destroy a world alone if it would first have to defeat bases and local navies of similar power level.
Besides, I don't think that missing one single base is going to nullify the concept of ruining an entire world.
And where are we with the hyperbole and bluffing anyway?
It's not like there's been any solid, technical description of what really goes on with G.O. 24.
The only way to reduce the amount of time to carry out General Order 24 to a tactically potent level is to assume that the torpedoes are doing most of the heavy lifting - and since there are only about a hundred of them, each of them must have a yield well into the gigatons.
Why? We do know that a widespread dispersal of thermal damage or phaser disruption would be far more effective than delivering excessive firepower on single points.
Plus a ship has quite a large stock of fuel to power the phasers.
Given McCoy's concern with leaving a "margin of safety" for the people below the shield, we have basically two options: either there are people on the side of the planet opposite the asylum, in which case the fact that blasting through the force field would kill every living thing on the planet becomes all the more impressive, or there are not, in which case McCoy is worried that a weapons strike on one side of the planet will destroy the asylum on the other side, which would arguably be even more impressive. Take your pick.
There was a margin of safety just as much as they weren't sure of what would happen if they tried to poke that shield. In fact the tone of the script has them rather worried, sure that more bad than good would come out of it. Yet at some point they're desperate and they try.
My pick is quite simple: they were worried for the asylum's people because the one single shield generator pushed that far, to levels never seen anywhere else, couldn't handle the war-level firepower. Plus a lot of logic and safety measures flew right through the window the moment it was clear that the people down there were led by a really mad guy. In fact, either he knew what were the risks of casting the shield yet did it, or he didn't know. On one side it's pure madness, on the other it's pure ignorance, which tells us that no counter argument to "my" pick could be based on an assessment of the logic of the mad guy's plan or sanity, if he had any left.
Emphasis added.
1) Even on ships, shields are not produced by a single projector, but by a grid of deflectors covering the hull. That's what the grid on the hull of every post-TMP ship is supposed to be: the shield generators. Even if their designation as such by the designers of the ships isn't enough for you, we often have different portions of the shield (aft, fore, port, starboard, etc.) taking damage separately, which - while admittedly not conclusive - certainly indicates that different generators are devoted to protecting different sections of the ship. On your theory, a mere ship requires multiple distinct elements covering each section of its hull, but an entire planet can be covered by a single shield generator.
2) In episodes like "Year of Hell" "Dagger of the Mind," the absence of planetary shields elicits surprise.
3) The idea that the shield generator, and not the ship's weapons, would be the cause of the asylum's destruction implicitly contradicts McCoy's sentiment of "How can we be powerful enough to wipe out a planet and still be so helpless?"
4) At the end of the day, the italicized "perhaps" is the cornerstone of this entire theory. Perhaps this shield generator is different from all the others in that it is centralized and dangerously explosive - but there is no real reason to think that this is the case. From my perspective, the whole "explosive shield generator on Elba II" concept is a contrived theory designed specifically to avoid the implication that, in the Trekverse, capital ships can cause mass extinctions as quickly as they can empty their torpedo bays.
1. So Elba II would have a network of shield generators covering an entire planet, for one single asylum? That is certainly very, very hard to believe. Perhaps we'd need to dig the script again to get a proper idea of how unpopulated the planet is, but as far as I can remember, it didn't make me think there were any other settlement aside from the domed asylum, even during normal times.
2. What kind of surprise? Or more precisely, what is it that's to understand by "planetary shield"? Are the surprised people always expecting a full planetary coverage? Because if they were just expecting *some* kind of protection, be it an array of weapons, counter measures (jamming or anti-missile ordnance) or even a local theater shield, we'd be a far cry from the planetary sphere case.
3. Not at all. The case of an exploding shield generator pushed to untolerable levels would clearly make them powerless too. That wouldn't leave them without the power to ruin a planet, yet they'd have no way to preserve the life of the people they'd be trying to save. In fact, the overall idea of that line would clearly be that genocidal firepower could not solve their problem here. Or in other words, they could be as powerful as they'd like, brute force wouldn't be the solution.
4. It's in fact quite divorced from the topic of mass extinction, which can be achieved with much less than what I think you're arguing for. Then again, I'm also sure that all we have about those claims of massive destructions are nothing more than characters either making threats, musing through one line or trying to impress someone. We've seen more solid evidence.
But to get back to the point, the argument solely aims at showing that Elba II doesn't provide a reliable case of planetary shielding. In fact, thinking of it, a single deposit of gigaton-level firepower in one spot wouldn't exactly cause that mass extinction level at all. It would certainly destroy a lot of stuff, but there's a limit to that. Why do I say that? Because it would require the Enterprise to have something more like near teraton level, or even post-teraton level weapons aboard since apparently, poking a hole through the shield would kill all life. Meaning that the moment they'd breach the membrane, even if they did their best to shut down all weapons, they'd have had to deliver at once, on a single spot, that much firepower. And that is simply not going to fly.
It's even worse if you consider that killing all life, in the case of Elba II, meant poking the shield on the other side of the domed asylum's location, which itself would require a direct application of energy from a starship to be cracked, not an indirect one, in order to seriously threaten the life of the people inside. The implication is just totally silly.

Note that by late DS9, things might have seriously changed for the UFP regarding the topic of planetary passive defenses.

For the link, there it is: http://www.starfleetjedi.net/forum/view ... 8&start=30
Damn, I forgot how the plot was totally nuts. :)
As you'll notice, it's not an episode without contradictions. The writers obviously penned certain sentences for sheer shock value and it's funny how certain claims made regarding this episode's technical side really become tragically humourous.
As I thought too, a simple logic also proves that all life = life under the asylum's dome.
Emphasis added.
You cannot deny that a one ton bomb today is significantly more powerful than a one ton bomb from the forties. In addition to better guidance, etc. we have indeed improved the yield.

A primitive weapon of any given size is going to have a dramatically inferior yield to an advanced weapon of the same size.
I'm afraid the emphasis wasn't needed here. It's meant as "not always". One might prefer a stick of dynamite thrown by hand; another might prefer a rifle that can shoot an explosive armour piercing bullet that can find its way home, dodging multiple obstacles over a range of four hundred yards for example (I infused a bit of high tech in the mix for good measure). One has more boom, but the other is quite more efficient up to a large variety of targets and will do the job, more often btw.
Or like having a gigaton nuke that can barely be mounted on a low tech rocket that uses combustion of hydrocarbons for propulsion, and a megaton super advanced torpedo with guidance systems and shields, and a interstellar range. Yield aside, the superiority of the second weapon is undisputable in most cases.
Odd, yes, but arguably necessary to explain the Enterprise's moving neutron stars around.
Yes, I hear you, but since it's massively stupid (not you, the concept it implies), even from a purely design perspective only, I'd happily ditch the neutron shard outlier for the sake of consistency and logic any time.
Has the Defiant ever displayed the ability to set its pulse phasers to widebeam? I'm not aware of it ever having done so, but if I'm wrong, feel free to correct me.
I haven't watched enough of ST to tell. It's a matter of aperture size at the end of the hose I guess. That you fire a beam or drops shouldn't make much of a diffrence in your garden hose's versatility. :)
But I'll humor you for a moment. The Defiant is much smaller than the Enterprise D, but it is also much more combat oriented, so we'll assume that it is capable of putting out the same phaser firepower as a Galaxy class starship's phaser array - roundabout ten exawatts or the equivalent thereof. We will assume the Great Link is about the size of the Baltic Sea, and that it needs to heat the entire thing from 17 degrees Celsius to about 65 degrees Celsius - making the Founders considerably more tolerant of high temperatures than their "solid" counterparts, but not capable of handling literally boiling temperatures. Conveniently, it also cuts the energy from the 1.0e22 J required to heat the Baltic Sea from 4 degrees C to boiling in half.

So 5e21 J / 1e19 W = 500 s.

I don't know about you, but I seriously doubt that the Defiant could last for a full eight minutes and twenty seconds against seven battlebugs without even trying to return fire for a second. And, of course, there's every reason to think that the pulse phasers on the Defiant are not more powerful than a Galaxy class starship's phaser array, but less.
We still don't know much about the Great Link overall volume, do we?
Also, when a Founder loses a bit of its mass, what happens?
And more, since they're a Great Link, what happens if you hurt them at once when they're all linked?
Is there any kind of trauma that would psychically kill the "patient" without even having to blast the equivalent of his brains out?
Also, what kind of hand phaser firepower does it take to kill a walking Founder for example?

Other points:
Now, is this an average energy intensity, or is it a minimum? Let us suppose it were an average. Then there would be regions where the intensity would be so great as to flash-boil a region of the Great Link (these regions would be directly below the Quantum torpedoes) surrounded by regions that had "just enough" to sterilize them, surrounded by regions that were only sterilized to a handful of centimeters. Sure, this situation would leave us with huge shockwaves propagating through the Great Link, but given that solid homogeneous tissues are resistant to blast effects, it is likely that significant numbers of Founders would survive. This hardly counts as "wiping out every Founder on the planet."
They're not in solid form but a fluid one as far as I've seen. In fact, Odo in a weak state needs a box to rest into. That's most likely their easiest and most comfortable form.
Calcs n' stuff
It would be smarter to actually have the torpedoes plunge into the GL's volume. The destruction would be far more intense.
Now, that's certainly not going to make the calculation either, and it's also going to involve a considerable consideration regarding the phenomenon known as coupling.

You assume that something like the equivalent of boiling water is necessary, but what happens with the massive and sudden exposure to radiations?
It would also look precisely like that if it were a hundred kilometers deep.
But also if it were only less than a meter deep, that's the point. Looking at the aspect of it to affirm a certain impressive depth is not right.
But of course, these aren't waves. Given the way that they slow down at a fixed distance from the point of origin, it is far more likely to assume that we're seeing some kind of "stuff" propogating away from the epicenter and slowing down as it does so, or (more likely) is the visible effect on the surface of something going on underground.
None would be slowing down. Seismic waves for one hardly slow down the way the ripples did in the episode. Of course they don't move as fast either or matter would literally be vapourized.
So it's clearly exotic, which is antithetic to raw energy and simple matters of brute force.
If the explosions occurred underground, and the phasers were triggering fault-lines, then we wouldn't expect to see any ejecta, we wouldn't expect to see any fireballs, and we wouldn't expect to see any magma showing through the crust. In fact, we would need an explanation for seeing anything from orbit in the first place.
But if nothing would be seen from space, then the level of damage wouldn't be enough at all.
And since we did see stuff, but since said stuff is nonsensical from a modern physics POV, we're back at fancy weapons, Genesis-like (and even the Genesis wave wasn't that fast, but it's a starting point).

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