Cardassian Dreadnought

[Flectarn]

And same applies to that episode with the E-nil repeatedly hit by a sound wave... in space... so powerful still that it would destroy an entire star system, multiple times.

eh, not any worse then the Seismic Charge from Attack of the Clones. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Seismic_charge

[Jedi Master Spock]

While the super-antimatter explanation is powerful enough to explain a number of problematic incidents, it also violates one of the most fundamental physical principles. Throw conservation of matter/energy out the window, and you don't have much left to lean on for future analysis.

And same applies to that episode with the E-nil repeatedly hit by a sound wave... in space... so powerful still that it would destroy an entire star system, multiple times.

eh, not any worse then the Seismic Charge from Attack of the Clones. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Seismic_charge

Er. No.

See, the seismic charge is a funky weapon with a reasonable onscreen yield. The ICS naturally is off by several orders of magnitude in describing its yield, but that's normal.

The sound wave incident? Problematic not only because sound doesn't propagate through a vacuum, but the energy density was an obscene number of decibels. Since decibels are a logarithmic scale, IIRC the best RL comparison to the energy that the incident translated to would be the Big Bang. There's no comparison.

[Flectarn]

*shrug* can't say i've seen that episode, so, unfamiliar with the particulars

[Jedi Master Spock]

*shrug* can't say i've seen that episode, so, unfamiliar with the particulars

There aren't really many. The sonic weapon is fired, the Enterprise in space, and it's "18 to the 12th" decibels... i.e., 1.2e15 decibels, but since +10 decibels is a factor of ten increase, that's more than 10^(10^15) times the base value. In other words, 1 followed by a quadrillion zeros.

For sound decibels, that's traditionally 10^-12 W/m^2 (the limit of healthy human hearing) but even if we made the base unit some minimum quanta of energy per unit space, and assumed the sonic weapon was some minimum quanta of area in cross-section, we'd still have what mathematicians would describe as a large number of what cosmologists would call large universes worth of energy funneling through the Eminar weapon.

There aren't many lines of dialog quite as absurd as that one.

[Flectarn]

ouch, that is quite an absurd statement.

though I have an equally absurd explanation. obviously they've developed a reactor that generates power by annihilating alternate universes.

[Mike DiCenso]

Forget the wanked out ICS or WH40K numbers; this would place Trek in the Culture, or Photino Bird and Xeelee range. ;-)
-Mike