TOS & TNG+

[Mith]

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.

Actually, it said all life on the world, unless they had inorganic animals on that planet.

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

Point.

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.

Another good point.

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.

I think the real threat was the fact that it was a sucide ship heavily armed and shielded.

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.

It's also a point that the Voyager crew wasn't the brightest Starfleet had to offer.

[Mith]

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.

Except the guy saying it also wanted to kill all the Founders on the planet before the large group of Jem'hadar ships tore them a new one. Given the massive sub-space shockwaves from TDiC, this would be possible if the Defiant managed to fire enough times.

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.

But it was meant to imitate an enemy ship. I also envoke the Atlantis Defense on the weak weapon that they used, since the E-D's shields were being affected in a manner never seen before (Worf said that he was having trouble re-assembling the shield, and when the weapon hit the hull, there was just some kind of thermal damage), and we've seen the Enterprise D and its other incarnations take a heavier beating than that.

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

Not really, mainly just one system. I believed they installed higher power converters to the tractor beam, and then used their warp field to reduce the mass of the moon.

And yet failed to slightly budge a moon?

Deja Q occured in 2366, and The Perfect Society occured in 2368, it's possible that the Enterprise D had some adjustments made to her tractor beam in case they had to deal with that issue again, and do keep in mind, they barely managed to do so, and only barely enough from causing massive problems on the planet (which still suffered massive earthquakes).

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.

It's possible that the Jem'Hadar may have discovered it, and tried to destroy it, since we do know that they wouldn't lower the security net to let the imposter bug ship leave.

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.

Except in that case, the sisters told the guy they were working for, that there was no way in hell that a Bird of Prey could stand up to a Galaxy class starship, and really the only thing that saved them was that Riker didn't immediately order a full spread of photon torpedoes. To be fair to Riker though, he may have thought that Picard was on the bird of prey, or hoping that Picard could smooth things out (which often happened in the show, so it was a proven thing). Eventually however, he decided that technobabble was a better idea (I disagree, but Riker is a bit flashy, going with the effective straight up method isn't his style), and where as the Enterprise D's hull was able to take two photon torpedoes, the Bird of Prey went down instantly.

In essence, wasn't a fair fight, since Riker didn't really unleash the full fury of the Enterprise, and he didn't have any shields to work with either (although he should have just ordered Geordie to remodulate the shield...).

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.

Except Damar said a "full spread of torpedoes", not a hundred. From what we've seen with Picard's orders as to what a spread is, it's about five or six torpedoes.

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

It was a chain reaction weapon, but I'd rather have that Bird of Prey than the Death Star, since I can basically perform the exact same function, and don't have an exposed tail pipe.;)

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

The asteroid was also heavily shielded, so that isn't a surprise.

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?

At least 10km, although it could have been larger, since a non-too specific picture of it on a display screen gave us an image that it was potatoe shaped, thus meaning it could have been very big indeed.

Also, it is a point that Riker wasn't actually acting all that rationally. If we assume he meant half the full complement of their torpedoes, there would be no way for the Enterprise D to have fully obliterated the asteroid before the Romulans got there, even with their x5 torpedo launcher.

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.

More likely the sub-space shockwaves, not to mention that the Delta Flyer is a bit of a special ship that's closer to a torpedo boat than an actual runabout or shuttle.

[Mike DiCenso]

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.

That's irrelevant, really one way or the other. However you slice it, the combined firepower of the 4-5 or so torpedoes the BoP could be expected to fire in a single spread would quite handily exceed the yeild of Tsar Bomba's 50 MT. There is just no getting around this.
-Mike

[Mike DiCenso]

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.

Actually, it said all life on the world, unless they had inorganic animals on that planet.

More to the point, Worf's dialog stated that the tribble's homeworld was not merely sterilized, it was "obliterated", and that it required an "armada" of ships. How many ships constitutes an armada for the klingons is anyone's guess, or how long it took to destroy the tribble homeworld.

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

Point.

I'am not sure that's so great an example as the ODPs specifically targeted various structures on the moon's surface, which then set off a series of chain-reaction explosions throughout the base and the moon before the final large explosion. However, it is fairly impressive that the ODPs were able to punch through shields that even the Defiant and several other starships could not penetrate in a combined strafing run attack.
-Mike

[Cocytus]

Adding to these examples, in "For the Uniform" Sisko fires two quantum torpedoes at the Maquis colony Solosos III. The torpedoes had cargo pods with trilithium resin attached to them, which would poison the atmosphere of the planet. Per the visuals, this can be assumed to be an earth-type planet. The blue fireballs fall within the "Skin of Evil" range, while the shockwaves are similar to those observed in TDIC. Gigaton range, easily. With that example, Garak's statement in "Broken Link" makes perfect sense. In "What You Leave Behind" Worf stated that, after quite a lot of heavy combat, the Defiant was "down to 45 quantum torpedoes." 45 impacts of the kind seen in "For the Uniform," strategically placed, could ably devastate a planetary surface. (In case anyone's interested, John Hersey's book Hiroshima contains six eyewitness accounts of the event. I offer it since discussion is considering the effects of nuclear weapons.)

And yet failed to slightly budge a moon?

Deja Q occured in 2366, and The Perfect Society occured in 2368, it's possible that the Enterprise D had some adjustments made to her tractor beam in case they had to deal with that issue again, and do keep in mind, they barely managed to do so, and only barely enough from causing massive problems on the planet (which still suffered massive earthquakes).

They did indeed adjust the tractor beam in the Masterpiece Society. Instead of a constant stream of power, the beam in this case was altered to compress power into a series of rapid pulses, which allowed them to maintain the same level of power transfer (which is gigantic, see my rough calcs from the Phaser/Warp Power thread for an idea) without burning out the tractor emitters immediately. The redesign was based on the operating mechanics of Geordie's VISOR, a fact he notes to Hannah Bates.

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.

Except in that case, the sisters told the guy they were working for, that there was no way in hell that a Bird of Prey could stand up to a Galaxy class starship, and really the only thing that saved them was that Riker didn't immediately order a full spread of photon torpedoes. To be fair to Riker though, he may have thought that Picard was on the bird of prey, or hoping that Picard could smooth things out (which often happened in the show, so it was a proven thing). Eventually however, he decided that technobabble was a better idea (I disagree, but Riker is a bit flashy, going with the effective straight up method isn't his style), and where as the Enterprise D's hull was able to take two photon torpedoes, the Bird of Prey went down instantly.

In essence, wasn't a fair fight, since Riker didn't really unleash the full fury of the Enterprise, and he didn't have any shields to work with either (although he should have just ordered Geordie to remodulate the shield...).

Riker knew Picard wasn't on the Bird-of-Prey. Part of their agreement with the Duras sisters was that Picard would be transported to Soran's location to talk to him. And immediately prior to the attack, remember Riker was having Data try to penetrate the planet's atmoshperic interference to scan for Picard's lifesigns. (And Data was having waaaaaay to much fun doing so). I mentioned this in a thread quite a while ago, but right before the attack begins, an engineer reports to Geordie that the port plasma relays are fluctuating, and the third hit the ship sustains is a disruptor blast to the Engineering hull's portside, possibly damaging power transfer systems and compromising the ship's ability to respond. That same hit causes a large explosion on the bridge, possibly indicating a destructive surge sent through the EPS system. I have trouble believing that if Riker had the ability to respond, he wouldn't do so. After all, he KNEW Picard (albeit assimilated) was on the cube in BoBW, and he fired the improvised deflector weapon anyway. Something must have happened to prevent him from fully responding. And, as a matter of clarification, Riker ordering Geordie to remodulate the shields would do nothing, since the VISOR was how the Duras sisters were observing the Enterprise, and they would be immediately aware of any changes he made.

[Mr. Oragahn]

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.

That's irrelevant, really one way or the other. However you slice it, the combined firepower of the 4-5 or so torpedoes the BoP could be expected to fire in a single spread would quite handily exceed the yeild of Tsar Bomba's 50 MT. There is just no getting around this.
-Mike

It solely boils down to what you think a full spread volley means. If It get it right, those BoPs have one major launch tube, even maybe just one, so firing a volley there would be hard unless it meant a succession of torpedoes.
Which as far as I'm concerned, can extend up to the full release of all torpedoes in a chain of successive launches.

[Mr. Oragahn]

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.

I can't remember what AMOT is about, but I know for sure that Masks certainly does not point to high figures. Much on the contrary.
Other phaser drilling events are hard to gauge because we don't know for fact if it requires 10 joules of energy to make dissapear a given amount of rock that would get vapourized with 10 joules of energy.
Pegasus is very open ended, but certainly does not even approaches the craziest stuff of TOS.

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

The whole visual is illogical. You say it's hard to argue for sub gigaton, solely based on the size of that flash. But it's equally hard to argue for such yields based on the duration of that flash.
Besides, didn't they land again and check out what happened?

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.

I'm curious about how you obtain those figures though. I'd probably pick the figures on your website with a much more open heart if I had no checked Masks to see that your gigaton phaser estimation was a pure invention which is heavily contradicted by the very episode, when watched, not seen through one or two screencaps.

Besides, the point is making the averages when there are great variances. TNG+ has many references, and you can find a middle ground with eventually top petawatt ranges from warp core, a percentage of that being diverted to phasers, and two digits, maybe three digits for torps; although again in theory a low gigaton torp should be no problem there.

The real problem to be how Gene Rodenberry has retconned certain aspects of Trek. The most obvious recton being the flight speeds.

Eventually, that ounce of antimatter thing could be rationalized if we really pushed it hard, by implying volume, a high concentration, checking out what 10,000 cobalt bombs means in that context, and that the atmosphere itself only needed a something to start going through an exotic chain reaction.
Still, there's that sound wave of jaw dropping power, where rationalization is harder.

But as a whole, the pattern is that for TOS, rationalization is used to lower figures, while in most of TNG and late Trek, it's used to increase 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.

You call them problematic, I suppose, in the context where someone would like to make all yields worth of the TOS craze.

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.

Huh, from what I've read, TOS enabled speeds which had ships cross a galactic radius in less than a day.
As a whole, TNG+ really got below that.

But, in the end, maybe Trek on the average can have yields tickling the gigaton range without any problem.

If you really want to see if this reality works better than the more moderate ones argued by other people, you could still try to talk to a debator from SDN, or SBC, and actually defend that position.

Maybe you could get some decade old misconceptions corrected, and possibly increase the averages.

So, what do you say? This would surely revive the debate.

[Mike DiCenso]

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.

There are two different ways of scaling the asteroid seen in "The Pegasus"; the first is using the 642.5 m x 470m x 142m E-D when it is entering the volcanic chasm, and then try to find the chasm in the overall views of the asteroid to determine it's size. This is the method that Brian Young and at least one other person have done; one undersizing the asteroid at about 8 km, the other making it slightly larger at just under 9 km. Of course in both cases the two went with an assumption on which of the several visible chasms was the one the E-D enters, and both chose the largest one in proportional size relative to the rest of the asteroid.

Wong, disengeniously used the Young scaling to claim the asteroid is only 5.1 km by simply using the smallest dimension of the irregular shaped asteroid, in addition to picking a spot that is the largest proportionately to the overall asteroid. The long axis of the asteroid, using his 5.1 km scaling of the short axis, would actually be closer to 8.809 km.

The other way, which produces a much larger size for the asteroid, is to scale the 1.341 km x 1 km x .4 km D'Derdiex warbird Terix to the asteroid in the scenes where the warbird is scanning the asteroid, looking for the Pegasus, and the E-D hides the Pegasus by putting out a field of technobabble particles, and leaving the scene for a time to make it look like there nothing of interest. At various points throughout the warbird is shown in close proximity, using a similar approach to the above-mentioned E-D scalings, the asteroid becomes signficantly larger, somewhere between 33 and 50 km at the upper end of the warbird scalings. The lower end tends towards 18 and 25 km.

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.

I think the real threat was the fact that it was a sucide ship heavily armed and shielded.

The fact that Dreadnought wasn't simply a missle, but an armed starship in it's own right has to be considered in the final possible damage it could inflict. The warhead alone could release an explosion with a yeild up to 43 gigatons. But as I calculated here, the warp core of a starship could contain enough antimatter to produce an explosion of nearly 4 gigatons on the conservative end of things. Imagine what the antimatter in the core and the reactant storages pods would release all together in addition to the warhead itself!

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.

It's also a point that the Voyager crew wasn't the brightest Starfleet had to offer.

That has nothing to do with how fast Voyager can go. Even an average compent crew should be able to figure out that they go so fast for so long with their ship. But it was established in episodes like "The Year of Hell, Part I" and "Hope and Fear", that when they got improved navigational data for the Delta quadrant, it could or did shave several years off of the journey home. Conversely, a navigational obstacle could add months or years.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

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.

I can't remember what AMOT is about, but I know for sure that Masks certainly does not point to high figures. Much on the contrary.
Other phaser drilling events are hard to gauge because we don't know for fact if it requires 10 joules of energy to make dissapear a given amount of rock that would get vapourized with 10 joules of energy.
Pegasus is very open ended, but certainly does not even approaches the craziest stuff of TOS.

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

The whole visual is illogical. You say it's hard to argue for sub gigaton, solely based on the size of that flash. But it's equally hard to argue for such yields based on the duration of that flash.
Besides, didn't they land again and check out what happened?

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.

I'm curious about how you obtain those figures though. I'd probably pick the figures on your website with a much more open heart if I had no checked Masks to see that your gigaton phaser estimation was a pure invention which is heavily contradicted by the very episode, when watched, not seen through one or two screencaps.

Besides, the point is making the averages when there are great variances. TNG+ has many references, and you can find a middle ground with eventually top petawatt ranges from warp core, a percentage of that being diverted to phasers, and two digits, maybe three digits for torps; although again in theory a low gigaton torp should be no problem there.

The real problem to be how Gene Rodenberry has retconned certain aspects of Trek. The most obvious recton being the flight speeds.

Eventually, that ounce of antimatter thing could be rationalized if we really pushed it hard, by implying volume, a high concentration, checking out what 10,000 cobalt bombs means in that context, and that the atmosphere itself only needed a something to start going through an exotic chain reaction.
Still, there's that sound wave of jaw dropping power, where rationalization is harder.

But as a whole, the pattern is that for TOS, rationalization is used to lower figures, while in most of TNG and late Trek, it's used to increase 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.

You call them problematic, I suppose, in the context where someone would like to make all yields worth of the TOS craze.

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.

Huh, from what I've read, TOS enabled speeds which had ships cross a galactic radius in less than a day.
As a whole, TNG+ really got below that.

But, in the end, maybe Trek on the average can have yields tickling the gigaton range without any problem.

If you really want to see if this reality works better than the more moderate ones argued by other people, you could still try to talk to a debator from SDN, or SBC, and actually defend that position.

Maybe you (JMS) could get some decade old misconceptions corrected, and possibly increase the averages.

So, what do you say? This would surely revive the debate.

[Mr. Oragahn]

There are two different ways of scaling the asteroid seen in "The Pegasus"; the first is using the 642.5 m x 470m x 142m E-D when it is entering the volcanic chasm, and then try to find the chasm in the overall views of the asteroid to determine it's size. This is the method that Brian Young and at least one other person have done; one undersizing the asteroid at about 8 km, the other making it slightly larger at just under 9 km. Of course in both cases the two went with an assumption on which of the several visible chasms was the one the E-D enters, and both chose the largest one in proportional size relative to the rest of the asteroid.

Wong, disengeniously used the Young scaling to claim the asteroid is only 5.1 km by simply using the smallest dimension of the irregular shaped asteroid, in addition to picking a spot that is the largest proportionately to the overall asteroid. The long axis of the asteroid, using his 5.1 km scaling of the short axis, would actually be closer to 8.809 km.

The other way, which produces a much larger size for the asteroid, is to scale the 1.341 km x 1 km x .4 km D'Derdiex warbird Terix to the asteroid in the scenes where the warbird is scanning the asteroid, looking for the Pegasus, and the E-D hides the Pegasus by putting out a field of technobabble particles, and leaving the scene for a time to make it look like there nothing of interest. At various points throughout the warbird is shown in close proximity, using a similar approach to the above-mentioned E-D scalings, the asteroid becomes signficantly larger, somewhere between 33 and 50 km at the upper end of the warbird scalings. The lower end tends towards 18 and 25 km.

The method used below seems rather accurate:





I cannot remember where I picked those scalings though.

The fact that Dreadnought wasn't simply a missle, but an armed starship in it's own right has to be considered in the final possible damage it could inflict. The warhead alone could release an explosion with a yeild up to 43 gigatons. But as I calculated here, the warp core of a starship could contain enough antimatter to produce an explosion of nearly 4 gigatons on the conservative end of things. Imagine what the antimatter in the core and the reactant storages pods would release all together in addition to the warhead itself!

It would be absurd to focus on the warhead charge of the weapon if it ran on a power source which would add significantly to the whole destruction. For a weapon with a yield of 43 gigatons, even claiming low gigatons worth of warpcore fuel is quite pulled.
It's not exactly meant to travel for that long either.

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.

It's also a point that the Voyager crew wasn't the brightest Starfleet had to offer.

That has nothing to do with how fast Voyager can go. Even an average compent crew should be able to figure out that they go so fast for so long with their ship. But it was established in episodes like "The Year of Hell, Part I" and "Hope and Fear", that when they got improved navigational data for the Delta quadrant, it could or did shave several years off of the journey home. Conversely, a navigational obstacle could add months or years.
-Mike[/quote]

But Voyager's travel time was purely theoretical when first made, iirc, since they didn't know where they were. They couldn't know about the obstacles or shortcuts. They could only work from speed charts.

[Mike DiCenso]

It solely boils down to what you think a full spread volley means. If It get it right, those BoPs have one major launch tube, even maybe just one, so firing a volley there would be hard unless it meant a succession of torpedoes.
Which as far as I'm concerned, can extend up to the full release of all torpedoes in a chain of successive launches.

Not really. Look again at the quote I provided, in particular O'Brien's reponse to Damar. He states flatly that even a dozen or so torpedoes won't be enough to penetrate the fortress' shields. That pretty much caps what the BoP can do. We have also seen several times in TNG and DS9 what a full spread of torpdoes means: between 4-5 torpeodes from top-of-the-line starships like the Defiant, E-D, and E-E.

There is no other way to define it since it is well-defined and demonstrated in the series and movies.
-Mike

[Mike DiCenso]

There are two different ways of scaling the asteroid seen in "The Pegasus"; the first is using the 642.5 m x 470m x 142m E-D when it is entering the volcanic chasm, and then try to find the chasm in the overall views of the asteroid to determine it's size. This is the method that Brian Young and at least one other person have done; one undersizing the asteroid at about 8 km, the other making it slightly larger at just under 9 km. Of course in both cases the two went with an assumption on which of the several visible chasms was the one the E-D enters, and both chose the largest one in proportional size relative to the rest of the asteroid.

Wong, disengeniously used the Young scaling to claim the asteroid is only 5.1 km by simply using the smallest dimension of the irregular shaped asteroid, in addition to picking a spot that is the largest proportionately to the overall asteroid. The long axis of the asteroid, using his 5.1 km scaling of the short axis, would actually be closer to 8.809 km.

The other way, which produces a much larger size for the asteroid, is to scale the 1.341 km x 1 km x .4 km D'Derdiex warbird Terix to the asteroid in the scenes where the warbird is scanning the asteroid, looking for the Pegasus, and the E-D hides the Pegasus by putting out a field of technobabble particles, and leaving the scene for a time to make it look like there nothing of interest. At various points throughout the warbird is shown in close proximity, using a similar approach to the above-mentioned E-D scalings, the asteroid becomes signficantly larger, somewhere between 33 and 50 km at the upper end of the warbird scalings. The lower end tends towards 18 and 25 km.

The method used below seems rather accurate:

The images and scaling you provided are vivftp's from SB.com. It has several problems, namely it does not take into account lightning differences in the images used, so he winds up making the mistake of choosing the larger chasm structure, rather than the smaller, very similar one to the left of it, which would result in doubling the asteroid's size to around 12 x 18 km. In both his and Wong's case they assume that the asteroid is going to be merely shattered, and that there will not be signficant vaporization/melting involved in it's destruction.
-Mike

[Jedi Master Spock]

I can't remember what AMOT is about, but I know for sure that Masks certainly does not point to high figures. Much on the contrary.

"A Matter of Time" involves drilling for carbon dioxide pockets. It's most famous for the .06 terawatt maximum variance, and the threat to accidentally burn off the planet's atmosphere.

It certainly does.

For every cubic kilometer of typical comet-density snowball (.5 g/cc) that is turned into dissipating vapor, you have to come up with 600-700 megatons of energy. If you're superheating it - one possible explanation for the luminous yellow effect in the melt zone and the swift dissipation of gases - that can nearly double.

We have an initial state, we have a final state. The scaling of the comet is disputed, but regardless of which scaling you use, we have a multi-gigaton event.

Other phaser drilling events are hard to gauge because we don't know for fact if it requires 10 joules of energy to make dissapear a given amount of rock that would get vapourized with 10 joules of energy.
Pegasus is very open ended, but certainly does not even approaches the craziest stuff of TOS.

Does it?

This asteroid looks to be larger and more massive than the ones destroyed by the Romulans in "Balance of Terror." It possibly even exceeds the volume of rock melted by the Enterprise's maximum strength phaser blast in "The Paradise Syndrome," and I suspect there's going to be a higher energy density involved in the putative "Pegasus" incident.

In fact, the "blast out of the asteroid using phasers" plan involves quite a bit of firepower too. We're dealing with on the order of a cubic kilometer of rock here.

The whole visual is illogical. You say it's hard to argue for sub gigaton, solely based on the size of that flash. But it's equally hard to argue for such yields based on the duration of that flash.
Besides, didn't they land again and check out what happened?

As I said, it's a bloom, not a flash... but I also modeled it as a flash of light. Same results.

Guess what? Solar intensity illumination at a 187.5 km radius means your source is putting out 4*pi*(187,500m)^2*1.4 kW/m^2 = 620 terawatts of radiation in the visible range. Overall, we see about a petajoule of luminous energy right there. And what percentage of the energy of a matter/antimatter weapon is going to go out in the visible spectrum in two seconds?

Well, in general, based on what we know about M/AM reactions and nuclear tests within atmosphere... initial visual flash is going to be a pretty small fraction of the yield. Maybe 0.1% if you're lucky. Whoops. We went over a gigaton, again.

Of course, there's a little bit of flex in those figures, but not much. I went over this a lot at ST.com in horrific detail. No matter what physical phenomenon you model that little beige circular thing as, barring unreasonable assumptions (such as assuming the planet is nowhere near Earth-sized) wind up in the general neighborhood of e18-e19 joules based on the scale and speed of effect.

I'm curious about how you obtain those figures though. I'd probably pick the figures on your website with a much more open heart if I had no checked Masks to see that your gigaton phaser estimation was a pure invention which is heavily contradicted by the very episode, when watched, not seen through one or two screencaps.

Pure invention? Hardly.

Prone to error? Yes. "Masks" is not a very precise incident. It's also a 10% power incident, and my final conclusion (on my website) is that a short burst with about a gigaton yield should be possible is one that's quite far away from the high end of the range dictated by the MOE.

That works out to taking about 6-7 seconds per cubic kilometer of comet.

Besides, the point is making the averages when there are great variances. TNG+ has many references, and you can find a middle ground with eventually top petawatt ranges from warp core, a percentage of that being diverted to phasers, and two digits, maybe three digits for torps; although again in theory a low gigaton torp should be no problem there.

The problem is what kind of average I take. If I take the arithmetic mean, then if I count Spock's claim to be able to split in two pieces something half the size of the moon, and divide by a hundred cases in which little is done, then I'm still in the multi-gigaton range - and it's a very weak example to start with, especially since the phasers don't have that huge of an effect.

The real problem to be how Gene Rodenberry has retconned certain aspects of Trek. The most obvious recton being the flight speeds.

I don't believe he actually retconned those. The TOS "backstage" scale is one of the slowest scales available, and had nothing to do with actual TOS speeds. Likewise with TNG.

Eventually, that ounce of antimatter thing could be rationalized if we really pushed it hard, by implying volume, a high concentration, checking out what 10,000 cobalt bombs means in that context, and that the atmosphere itself only needed a something to start going through an exotic chain reaction.

Still, there's that sound wave of jaw dropping power, where rationalization is harder.

And the matter of how much atmosphere the planet has, how large the planet is... et cetera. I'm inclined to treat that one as a simple scientific error, personally.

But as a whole, the pattern is that for TOS, rationalization is used to lower figures, while in most of TNG and late Trek, it's used to increase them.

Er... not really. As a rule, I rationalize far fewer examples than I discard. I mostly take figures, discard all the ones that I can't fit to within a generous MOE, and then run with what seems reasonable from there in making my final estimate. I also consider the relative strength of the example. SOE is quite strong as a "lower bound" type estimate, but it is not very precise.

I have chosen a gigaton as a probable maximum torpedo yield not based on the maximum possible yield seen in effects. A reasonable estimation for every firepower example includes a number of ranges that go well past the gigaton mark when considered carefully - but the amount of antimatter stored on a torpedo seems sharply limited.

TDIC I choose to discard when analyzing firepower. The order of magnitude of firepower required to physically disassemble a planet is simply not compatible with the other cases. Similar with STV. That sheer speed and range is very difficult to reconcile with most later examples.

"Where Silence Has Lease" gives one of the highest speeds of any episode... and it's for warp 2. I prefer to place that one in the outlier column as well, though I may consider it when picking my median path.

You call them problematic, I suppose, in the context where someone would like to make all yields worth of the TOS craze.

Like I said, there really aren't more low-yield than high-yield examples in the TNG+ era. TDIC is the singular most egregious example, but some of the most high-energy events happen in Voyager and DS9. I pointed out just how much more lethal the Delta Flyer's projected warp core breach is than the detonation of Dreadnought's warhead.

Huh, from what I've read, TOS enabled speeds which had ships cross a galactic radius in less than a day.

OK, please read this page. While there are a number of examples that seem pretty loose, every incident in which the old Constitution-class Enterprise definitely travels 30,000 or more light years within one day involves hijacking. All but STV involve highly advanced aliens. As I've said, STV should be discarded as an outlier. Speeds in TOS under conventional warp power in general do not exceed 1 million times lightspeed, although they sometimes come close, and usually are not sustained for more than a couple thousand light years at a stretch.

As a whole, TNG+ really got below that.

Below and above.

TNG has the second-fastest top speeds (next to STV) and the largest volumes of inanimate matter destroyed by Federation phasers, and comes a close second to "Generations" for most destructive use of weapons by a Federation-level character (solar destruction). TNG also requires higher reactor power than any other series, as mentioned previously.

DS9 has the singularly highest actually used bombardment firepower example, hands down, in TDIC. Planets only ever blew up on their own in TOS. Or got eaten by a certain ancient alien superweapon that the Federation couldn't possibly duplicate, but even the alien superweapons got bigger. Supernovas as collateral damage for the Q, anybody?

Voyager explicitly gives the highest hazard-to-mass ratio for a vessel with the Delta Flyer in "Drive." Do you know how many teratons you need to destroy all light vessels within a million klicks? Just killing unprotected humans at that distance is difficult.

But, in the end, maybe Trek on the average can have yields tickling the gigaton range without any problem.

If you really want to see if this reality works better than the more moderate ones argued by other people, you could still try to talk to a debator from SDN, or SBC, and actually defend that position.

Maybe you (JMS) could get some decade old misconceptions corrected, and possibly increase the averages.

So, what do you say? This would surely revive the debate.

I've talked with some SDN/SB residents of the anti-Trek persuasion on ST.com. Mostly, they don't seem to listen to the evidence regarding any high power or high speed example, preferring to try to rationalize it away in various irrational ways.

If you want a true average, I could throw them all together and average, but I'd probably wind up with something unreasonably high thanks to the occasional truly ridiculous example.

[Mith]

Wouldn't episodes dedicated to specific hardware of feats of the ship be taken as more solid examples rather than an off hand claim, save for it being stupidly absurd to the rest of the evidence.

For example, The Perfect Society and Deja Q are major examples of tractor beam technology.

[Mith]

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.

That's irrelevant, really one way or the other. However you slice it, the combined firepower of the 4-5 or so torpedoes the BoP could be expected to fire in a single spread would quite handily exceed the yeild of Tsar Bomba's 50 MT. There is just no getting around this.
-Mike

It solely boils down to what you think a full spread volley means. If It get it right, those BoPs have one major launch tube, even maybe just one, so firing a volley there would be hard unless it meant a succession of torpedoes.
Which as far as I'm concerned, can extend up to the full release of all torpedoes in a chain of successive launches.

A full spread at most is about 4-5 torpedoes, and since it was a raider Bird of Prey, it might have had a burst type configuration. Or they would have modified it.

So your idea is wrong. Besides, Miles already said that even if they launched 12 torpedoes at the base, it still wouldn't take down the shields, and his very method of making the point is akin to saying "even if you fire twice that many torpedoes, you still wouldn't do it", so at most, it could be 4-6, and Miles assumed they were going with the highest number. In any case, the range of that damage is 200-900 kilometers, with 450 kilometers being a mid level guess of damage. That's pretty damn heavy firepower for a raider to be carrying around.