TOS & TNG+

[Mith]

I've been wondering, so many people have claimed that TOS is so different from TNG+ in yields that it's not even reasonable to believe the two are part of the same universe. Now, there have been incidents of absurdly high yields in TOS, I admit that, but surely it isn't as bad as some people claim?

So, I want to make a list of all the TOS upper scales, and all the TNG+ incidents, simply so we can see just how poorly/well they match up.

To be fair, I also want to see the low yields that can't just be explained away.

High Yields

TDiC: No matter where you look at it, destroying the crust in an hour, and the mantle in six is downright impressive for 20 starships.

Broken Link: The Defiant is said to have enough firepower to reduce the Founder Home World to a cinder.

The Survivors: Alien ship was stated to have enough firepower to pulverize a planet.

Troubles and Tribulations (sp? It was a DS9 episode): Worf stated that a Klingon fleet obliterated the Tribble Home World. Granted, little information on this event.

Deja Q: Came up with a plan to push away a falling moon

The Perfect Society: Managed to divert a stellar core

A Time to Stand:

O'BRIEN'S COM VOICE
I've got eighty-three empty
canisters standing by.
(a beat)
And one not so empty. Ninety
isotons of enriched ultritium
should take out the entire storage
facility and anything else within
eight hundred kilometers.

Anyone else have anything to add?

[Mike DiCenso]

There is this interesting bit of dialog from "Apocalypse Rising" [DS9, Season 5]:

DAMAR
Personally, I think we'd be better
off launching an orbital assault
on Gowron's Command Center. A
full spread of photon torpedoes
would take care of him, the
Klingon High Command and everyone
else within a few hundred
kilometers.

ODO
You should ask Dukat for some
shore leave. I think you've been
in space too long.


DAMAR
Why? Because I'm willing to spill
a little Klingon blood to get the
job done?

O'BRIEN
Shelling Ty'Gokor won't get the
job done. You'd be lucky to
launch one torpedo before they
shot you down. And even a dozen
wouldn't penetrate the shielding
around the command center.

SISKO
(cutting off the debate)
Thank you for the input, Mister
Damar, but we'll stick to our
original plan.

Being able to effectively nuke everything in an area hundreds of kilometers wide speaks of at least moderate to high end megaton range firepower from several combined torpedoes. For a comparison the 50 megaton yeild Tsar Bomba fireball reached up to 40 km wide.

All that from a ship barely at the smaller end of the Trek capital ship size range. This also would put planetary defense shielding in the the mid megaton to 1 gigaton range at minimum since it is noted by O'Brien that that will be insufficent to penetrate the fortress' defenses.
-Mike

[Mith]

There is this interesting bit of dialog from "Apocalypse Rising" [DS9, Season 5]:

DAMAR
Personally, I think we'd be better
off launching an orbital assault
on Gowron's Command Center. A
full spread of photon torpedoes
would take care of him, the
Klingon High Command and everyone
else within a few hundred
kilometers.

ODO
You should ask Dukat for some
shore leave. I think you've been
in space too long.


DAMAR
Why? Because I'm willing to spill
a little Klingon blood to get the
job done?

O'BRIEN
Shelling Ty'Gokor won't get the
job done. You'd be lucky to
launch one torpedo before they
shot you down. And even a dozen
wouldn't penetrate the shielding
around the command center.

SISKO
(cutting off the debate)
Thank you for the input, Mister
Damar, but we'll stick to our
original plan.

Being able to effectively nuke everything in an area hundreds of kilometers wide speaks of at least moderate to high end megaton range firepower from several combined torpedoes. For a comparison the 50 megaton yeild Tsar Bomba fireball reached up to 40 km wide.

All that from a ship barely at the smaller end of the Trek capital ship size range. This also would put planetary defense shielding in the the mid megaton to 1 gigaton range at minimum since it is noted by O'Brien that that will be insufficent to penetrate the fortress' defenses.
-Mike

Wow, that's a very impressive quote. The Bird of Prey has one of the smallest armaments in Trek (not to mention over a hundred years old to boot!), so I doub that her photons would be as high yield as that of a Galaxy class starship.

[Mike DiCenso]

Well, this particular BoP was based on the hundred year old design, but it is not necessarily that old, and may be at most a few decades old.

But yes, the "Apocalypse Rising" quote there is too often overlooked.
-Mike

[Mith]

Well, this particular BoP was based on the hundred year old design, but it is not necessarily that old, and may be at most a few decades old.

But yes, the "Apocalypse Rising" quote there is too often overlooked.
-Mike

Well, that much is true, it isn't per say that old, but the design is ancient. I suspect a lot of refits, but that still leaves is with a great deal of firepower for something as small as a Bird of Prey, which would probably be using lighter torpedoes.

In any case, a full spread makes things interesting. One could easily do that with a few 50 MT torpedoes in the right areas (causing their shockwaves to nearly overlap is a very effective method, and that's why you should use multiple warheads with lower yields, rather than one big ass bomb). Still, the fact that a scout ship would have access to that, makes me wonder what something like the Galaxy could use.

[Mike DiCenso]

Actually, the BoP Gul Dukat and crew had captured in "Return to Grace" was not a scout. It is a larger raider vessel with a klingon crew of 36, which more than double the 12 person crew of Kruge's scout BoP from ST3. In fact, it's pretty well known that there are several sizes and classes of BoP.
-Mike

[Mith]

Actually, the BoP Gul Dukat and crew had captured in "Return to Grace" was not a scout. It is a larger raider vessel with a klingon crew of 36, which more than double the 12 person crew of Kruge's scout BoP from ST3. In fact, it's pretty well known that there are several sizes and classes of BoP.
-Mike

Might have been an uprated scout (ie, they made it bigger as technology advanced), or it could be a raider type ship.

[Mike DiCenso]

It was a raider, as that it was it was doing in Cardassian space in "Return to Grace", attacking ships and planetside facilities.
-Mike

[Jedi Master Spock]

The "some people" that you refer to are simply dead wrong.

Laying waste to a world - see "The Chase" for a single Klingon ship doing that. It wipes out (almost) all life on a world; this is probably what happened to the Tribble homeworld. See "Return to Grace" for an example of the limits of BoP firepower; a battlecruiser was necessary to threaten an underground Cardassian base that a bird of prey could not effectively target.

See also "Tears of the Prophets," in which plasma torpedoes are used to destroy a rather large asteroidal moon with not too many hits.

Actually, if we consider "Pegasus" carefully, the asteroid is likely to be larger and more massive, and any attempt to destroy the Pegasus within the asteroid is likely to involve a lot of wasted energy. It turns out that "Pegasus" isn't any worse than "Rise" regarding yields. The fact that they could blow up the fairly massive moon of "Deja Q" is quite similar, actually. Both asteroids are tens of kilometers wide and probably at least in the e16 kg range of mass.

If we're going to talk about ambiguous references, the Delta Flyer's warp core, breached, has a minimum safe distance of a million kilometers in "Drive." Remember "A Time to Stand"'s 800 kilometer radius, which suggests a gigaton/multi-gigaton explosion? This is a million times the surface area. Considering the Delta Flyer is of similar density to water, that's somewhere close to annihilating the entire mass of the Delta Flyer.

Then there's "Dreadnought." On the ridiculously high end, it supposedly could blow up a small moon, and is a warp powered vessel in its own right - should be more dangerous than an exploding Delta Flyer; on the low end, it's a superweapon whose warhead is a mere thousand kilograms of antimatter - which means 2000 kg of matter annihilated, releasing 1.8e20 joules - 43 gigatons.

As I've pointed out, "Legacy," "Inheritance," "Pegasus," "Masks," and "A Matter of Time" either discuss or display phasers getting rid of multiple cubic kilometers of material. As I have also pointed out, "Skin of Evil" is very difficult to construct a sub-gigaton model for, and in numerous cases, conservation of energy dictates pretty large warp core outputs. There's also an episode in which they're looking at a giant crater

TOS is not actually that remarkably full of high yield incidents compared to the above. There's only three seasons of stuff.

There's the plasma torpedo, which pretty much has to be a multi-gigaton weapon, as it destroys multiple cubic kilometers of nickel-iron asteroid.

There's "The Paradise Syndrome," which suggests a full power all-phasers blast at around 30-40 gigatons, but the asteroid seen onscreen doesn't seem like it should be half the size of Earth's moon as stated in dialog. Pushing it around also requires a lot of energy.

There's "Operation: Annihilate!" in which Kirk agonizes over killing a million colonists, and then applies a ridiculous amount of ultraviolet radiation to them instead. "Bread and Circuses," "A Taste for Armageddon," and "Whom Gods Destroy" talk about planetary bombardments, which are fairly loose, but suggest a lot of total firepower.

In "The Doomsday Machine," photon torpedoes are suggested as a possible brute force solution to taking out the machine, but since antimatter is inert, they have to use impulse engines at ~100 MT per engine.

It's not really that TOS incidents are more energetic than anything seen later on; it's that the people who concentrate on low-ball incidents (namely, the relatively lackluster explosions seen in "Genesis," the "Dauphin" and "Masterpiece Society" dialog references, the small phaser "power packs" used by the Defiant, the slow-charging "600 GW... 900 GW" satellite of "Battle Lines," the low-energy death of the Enterprise in TSS, the unremarkable Borg Sphere attack of "First Contact," and the unimpressive 10-isoton concussion shells of "The Ship") and low-ball interpretations (namely, of "Pegasus," "Rise." and "Star Trek V") can't find anything in TOS proper to support them.

There simply isn't anything in TOS that you can try to work a quantifiable low yield from regardless of how badly you twist it, while there are several problematic incidents in TNG+. If you try to find reasons to ignore all the high yield TNG+ incidents or create low-ball interpretations of them, then - and only then - TOS looks high yield.

It's a lot like the warp speed issues. DS9 shows speeds similar to TOS's quantifiable speeds, and TNG in many cases shows faster speeds than TOS; it's just that TNG and VOY happen to also include a number of slow speeds, and those debaters claiming that Trek warp speeds are slow concentrate on Voyager.

[Mike DiCenso]

In "The Doomsday Machine," photon torpedoes are suggested as a possible brute force solution to taking out the machine, but since antimatter is inert, they have to use impulse engines at ~100 MT per engine.

In the episode itself, the idea of using photon torpedoes is never even brought up, which I find very odd, even with the Planet Killer's ability to render antimatter inert (reverse spin the charge and turn it into normal matter?).

phaser "power packs" used by the Defiant, the slow-charging "600 GW... 900 GW" satellite of "Return to Grace," the low-energy death of the Enterprise in TWOK,
.

A couple corrections, JMS: The powering up satellite is from "Battle Lines" [DS9, Season 1], and the loss of the E-1701 is from ST3: The Search for Spock.
-Mike

[Jedi Master Spock]

In "The Doomsday Machine," photon torpedoes are suggested as a possible brute force solution to taking out the machine, but since antimatter is inert, they have to use impulse engines at ~100 MT per engine.

In the episode itself, the idea of using photon torpedoes is never even brought up, which I find very odd, even with the Planet Killer's ability to render antimatter inert (reverse spin the charge and turn it into normal matter?).

phaser "power packs" used by the Defiant, the slow-charging "600 GW... 900 GW" satellite of "Return to Grace," the low-energy death of the Enterprise in TWOK,
.

A couple corrections, JMS: The powering up satellite is from "Battle Lines" [DS9, Season 1], and the loss of the E-1701 is from ST3: The Search for Spock.
-Mike

I stand very corrected. I should sleep more often. It is worth emphasizing several times that photon torpedoes are useless within an antimatter-deactivating field, though.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Being able to effectively nuke everything in an area hundreds of kilometers wide speaks of at least moderate to high end megaton range firepower from several combined torpedoes. For a comparison the 50 megaton yeild Tsar Bomba fireball reached up to 40 km wide.

I don't think the fireball did reach that far. Burns or air blast, on the other end, yes, easily.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Broken Link: The Defiant is said to have enough firepower to reduce the Founder Home World to a cinder.

Various degrees of interpretation.
When you have several torps and the ability to fire many phaser pulsers backed up by a warp core possibly containing hundreds of kg of antimatter or maybe more, you have more than enough firepower to turn a planet into a burning waste land if you fire intelligently.

The Survivors: Alien ship was stated to have enough firepower to pulverize a planet.

It was an episode involving a sort of god-like entity which could decide that forty megawatts worth of pseudo firepower could suddenly threaten the shields of the E-D when they didn't previously.

Deja Q: Came up with a plan to push away a falling moon

By using a combination of two systems with wonky physics, right?

The Perfect Society: Managed to divert a stellar core

And yet failed to slightly budge a moon?

A Time to Stand:

O'BRIEN'S COM VOICE
I've got eighty-three empty
canisters standing by.
(a beat)
And one not so empty. Ninety
isotons of enriched ultritium
should take out the entire storage
facility and anything else within
eight hundred kilometers.

Anyone else have anything to add?

But the visuals show something different. Instead of having a sudden powerful explosion which would be the only possible way for the chemical explosive to live up to its pretense, the asteroid base is actually damaged by a few first very puny explosions when the explosives go off.
I don't exactly know how those things work, especially for chemicals, but obviously there was something funky at play there.
I'd like this bit covered because it's important to get fixed on the mechanism of this element.

Apocalypse Rising:

There's be little surprise that a large base would be powered by a more hefty power source, whatever it is.
It was a Bird of Prey. Klingons and Starfleet see things differently when it comes to starships, and who to put in them.
We've seen BoP pose a threat to the E-D in one on one engagements, like with the Duka sisters if I'm correct.
It's possible that a Galaxy-class could be a tad better or not.
In the end, if such a ship carried, say, a total of +100 torpedoes, a Klingon crew onboard such a ship would have no problem to take care of targets over a hundred of kilometers wide area, with torps in the 2 digits megaton range. Remember that Damar didn't account for the shield in his figure. Odo corrected him there.

Laying waste to a world - see "The Chase" for a single Klingon ship doing that. It wipes out (almost) all life on a world;

It was a chain reaction continuing on its own, no?
The Klingon ship couldn't fire when cloaked.

See also "Tears of the Prophets," in which plasma torpedoes are used to destroy a rather large asteroidal moon with not too many hits.

The torps only did moderate damage. The power source on this asteroid is responsible of its own destruction.

Actually, if we consider "Pegasus" carefully, the asteroid is likely to be larger and more massive, and any attempt to destroy the Pegasus within the asteroid is likely to involve a lot of wasted energy. It turns out that "Pegasus" isn't any worse than "Rise" regarding yields. The fact that they could blow up the fairly massive moon of "Deja Q" is quite similar, actually. Both asteroids are tens of kilometers wide and probably at least in the e16 kg range of mass.

What was the size of the asteroid Pegasus? I have pictures of the scalings, but not the size of the E-D (height) nor the size of the asteroid.
Wasn't it around 10 km?

If we're going to talk about ambiguous references, the Delta Flyer's warp core, breached, has a minimum safe distance of a million kilometers in "Drive."

Possibly due to a lethal concentration of particles estimated low enough at such a distance.
The range itself is not believable. An explosion of a mere Delta Flyer couldn't possibly represent a real danger to structures at a million kilometers, even if that was the radius of the spreading sphere.

Then there's "Dreadnought." On the ridiculously high end, it supposedly could blow up a small moon, and is a warp powered vessel in its own right - should be more dangerous than an exploding Delta Flyer; on the low end, it's a superweapon whose warhead is a mere thousand kilograms of antimatter - which means 2000 kg of matter annihilated, releasing 1.8e20 joules - 43 gigatons.

It's not ridiculous. A small moon can be small, as it's put.
If you want to check out the likely absolute low end interpretation of a small moon, check out Dactyl.

The fact that the ship and its power were considered impressive and pointed out as a big menace clearly gives a nice reference for what to expect from ships and smaller weapons in general.
It also means that the warhead's own explosive yield would be considerably more important than the power source used for beam weapons and shields.

I'll talk about the rest later on.

[Mike DiCenso]

Being able to effectively nuke everything in an area hundreds of kilometers wide speaks of at least moderate to high end megaton range firepower from several combined torpedoes. For a comparison the 50 megaton yeild Tsar Bomba fireball reached up to 40 km wide.

I don't think the fireball did reach that far. Burns or air blast, on the other end, yes, easily.

The initial Tsar Bomba fireball, no. That was about 9.2 km in diameter according the chart on wikipedia. However, we don't know if Damar is stating that the fireballs from the BoP's photon torpedoes are that big, or if the overall effects from the shockwaves, ect are that big. If it's just inital fireballs, the combined torpedo spread firepower would be up into the gigaton range!
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

Being able to effectively nuke everything in an area hundreds of kilometers wide speaks of at least moderate to high end megaton range firepower from several combined torpedoes. For a comparison the 50 megaton yeild Tsar Bomba fireball reached up to 40 km wide.

I don't think the fireball did reach that far. Burns or air blast, on the other end, yes, easily.

The initial Tsar Bomba fireball, no. That was about 9.2 km in diameter according the chart on wikipedia. However, we don't know if Damar is stating that the fireballs from the BoP's photon torpedoes are that big, or if the overall effects from the shockwaves, ect are that big. If it's just inital fireballs, the combined torpedo spread firepower would be up into the gigaton range!
-Mike

But as I said, at that point he didn't factor in the shield, so blast radii and tremors would matter against structures.
If the major buildings were hardened to unfathomable extents - which would require proof - they'd just concentrate a few nukes there, and proceed with air blast damage for the rest.
Plus fires would finish the job if there's anything left up.