TOS & TNG+

[Mike DiCenso]

Well, the E-D, if we use the E-1701's canon mass or Voyager's does not mass out at 5.5 million tonnes as per the TNG TM. The E-D would instead be around 6.5 to 24 million metric tons.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

A planet atmosphere doesn't suddenly burn as a whole just because of a variance of 60 gigawatts.

Right. Hence we're dealing with large energies for that, and we're also definitely doing serious drilling.

I still don't see how it makes a difference between stable atmosphere and sudden burning.
If a ship inputs enough energy into an atmosphere to burn it to the extent considered there, a variance of 60 GW would be the most stupidest thing to mention ever.
This variance factor does one thing: it reveals the bizarre critical mass "gasoline factor", a case where a minor change of power would suddenly trigger a reaction over a whole planet and burn an atmosphere.
I don't have the details of the episode in mind, but this is most weird.

I'm really having trouble seeing the justification for an our.

It depends on the evidence you use as per the volume it digs. If you consider the lens-like volume of ice that dissapeared, and look at the estimated whole size of the asteroid, there's a lot of volume there to "melt".
I ran numbers there, but I'll have to look where I put the image I used for the calcs.
It gave me a total of 1.6 hours. If you remove the station, you get roughly one hour.

It's surprising, but "sublimate" - the proper term for turning ice directly into vapor - is so rarely used.

Not for scientists of his caliber and the educated people in Trek ships. He should have said vapourize and it would have been better.

We do have a very real problem with the lack of collateral thermal damage, but we're going to have to introduce some technobabble element regardless. It may as well just explain one tiny thing (lack of thermal fringe effects) rather than lots of things (lack of fringe effects plus energy deficiency).

Which makes the weapon particularly hard to gauge then. It's not objective to extrapolate the power of the phaser based on the ice removed if the weapon had behaved like a giant laser or so, while it clearly doesn't, and where conservation of energy is obviously violated.

Thus far, the 8.5-10 km scaling I have in mind, obtained from the accurate pictures I linked, have me consider my initial opinion correct.

The volume is one issue; the composition of the asteroid is another. The smaller the asteroid, the more exotic its composition must be to have measurable magnetic and gravitational fields.

Which were erratic iirc, a thing which is not going to happen with a body mass, and nearby asteroids did't get pulled either. The Romulan melted rock at the entrance. I don't see much exotism there safe the presence of a phasing device which alone could have generated a new chain of exotic effects, since at this point.

With phasers that eat matter. It's also interesting to notice that while the Romulans could melt the rock without damaging the asteroid, the E-D couldn't use her phasers without taking a great risk at collapsing the chasm because the asteroid's structure was too unstable. The denser an object, the less brittle.

Not necessarily - nor is instability necessarily an issue of brittleness. Simply lack of bonding. A pile of precariously balanced chunks of steel aren't very brittle - but they could collapse easily.

The whole asteroid showed no sign of lack of bonding. If anything, it's the holes and cavities which weakened the structure, but then again how can it be that a phaser couldn't melt or eat rock at a low power without risking the safety of the ship's crew while the cavity was sealed with a weapon relatively fast. That operation has shown that the asteroid resisted the stress due to the sudden change of heat.
Even if the phaser had a too high power output, that's Trek, where anything can be tweaked for good.
What we've seen from Pen Pals clearly proves they could have drilled a hole.

But maybe what the Romulans did to the rock really weakened the structure, and made it crack here and there.
It's interesting to see that for some reason, the E-D's shields couldn't withstand the rather slow move of chunks of the asteroid if it were to collapse in any way.

What you used is a sound method, which would be quite useful in a better context, with effects of greater quality, but I disagree on the luminosity you considered.
We are nowhere there, even for the three or four frames long flash that precedes the blooming explosion.

Finally, the fireball itself largely exceeds the width of the flash, which is a severe problem notably due to how light scaterring works in an atmosphere, where the flash will dominate in terms of luminosity over a same area.

I don't believe I've measured the pre-bloom "flash." Got a good screencap?

Here's an archive of pictures:

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=39e9 ... edb9b072ff

Fireball duration is only important if we're dealing with an actual fireball, rather than [say] a thin shell of highly accelerated material.

Why shouldn't we get a proper lasting fireball for an explosion in atmosphere?
All the parameters are precisely in check to obtain such a result.
The explosion couldn't be subterranean to limit the expansion and presence of a fireball and yet generate a clearly visible flash.

I've largely dealt with the illumination model as a response to claims that it's not some kind of bloom or shockwave.

There's a thing to consider here, in that even the flash itself has nowhere the brightness of a sun. There's precisely a neon on the bridge to compare with.

Look at the brightness of a nuclear bomb. It's a very small amount of energy that winds up in the visual spectrum in any event; most either winds up above or below it, or in kinetic energy. There's a whole lot below, from bulk heating; there's a whole lot above in gamma rays, x-rays, etc. The visual band is a very narrow part of the EM spectrum.

Unless you're trying to create visual-range effects, it's pretty unusual to have a significant fraction of energy fall in that range.

It doesn't tell me where the 1% comes from though.

Then we still have to consider the creature itself, Armus, capable of shutting down many of a type 7 shuttle's systems, while the shuttle was away from Vagra II. Considering the lack of information for this planet, Troi's shuttle was more than likely capable of warp, thusly powered by a more than decent warp core. Which would surely add a decent amount of power to the final explosion.

Possible. That additional energy came from something other than the torpedo is the only means by which we can justify the SOE torpedo being sub-gigaton by any margin worth noting.

I disagree. It would be better to redo the calcs with the right distance from the planet (fulcrum wise), the real luminosity of that flash, and a strong evidence for only 1% of the yield making it to visible light.

But we still have a gigaton, possibly more, of energy being released in the event. We're simply now saying the yield came from a small shuttlecraft instead of a tiny torpedo. Given that the Enterprise was right on hand, I really don't think that the shuttle in question was fueled for warp, but I could easily be wrong.

The dialogue would rather suggest a significant journey from outside this system. Warp engines are logical here.

Armus struck me as being relatively inert, rather than explosive. Something that absorbs a lot of energy with minimal effect - very high specific heat. Are we even sure Armus died?

We don't know for sure, but based on his powers and understanding of becoming alone again, he'd have surely attempted something, anything actually, on the E-D, like it did with the shuttlecraft.

If Gene did, I think he underestimated the sheer volume of the galaxy. It's not just a question of going far - it's a question of passing through within several light years of space. I ran some calculations on that. The TOS-era Federation had nowhere near the sensor range and number of ships to actually chart the whole galaxy in short order.

Possible, I don't really have matter to dispute your estimations. But it still seems he deemed the speeds to fast. Sensors ranges and that stuff aren't exactly speaking much to audiences, however trip durations clearly make the difference in minds between taxi/subway and 17th century cruise.

The ounce of antimatter doesn't pale compared to TDIC; TDIC involves many orders of magnitude more energy.

How so? The explosion alone left a giant scar on the planet. The shots from heavy weapons in TDIC had nowhere that amount of power.
Of course, scientifically, it's just as bogus. A single explosion wouldn't kick an atmosphere away from a planet. No matter the yield. You'd turn the planet to rubble before that.

The sonic attack? Impossible to take seriously using any quantification of "decibel" ever used, and "decibel" is actually a very flexible unit.

Using decibels as power precisely, in this case, for a weapon, not only makes perfect sense, but fails to make any once we know it's both fired through an atmosphere, as it sits on the surface of a planet, and then fired through space.
The whole number is clearly absurd.

The million kilometer safe distance?
I'm checking the transcript of Drive here.
This is clearly a problematic case as well.
I didn't see the episode. They mention a shockwave at the end, while the explosion occured one point two million kilometres from Voyager's position. And the nebula was supposed to contain the explosion. What happened with that shockwave? Was the ship shaken?

I'm not sure - I think there was probably the traditional "shake," but it's been a long time - but it doesn't matter if it was or not. Simply having effects with that radius means incredible yields, even if it wasn't enough to shake the ship any.

That would again be Trek writers pulling numbers out of their mind without knowing a knick about they imply. A shuttle with such power, that's just laughable.
That's an initial power worth a sun. Bollocks.

To me the "aboves" from later Trek are only distant echoes of the TOS effect, artifacts.

Because of your perspective, IMO.

I'm afraid I do not see any evidence to believe the contrary.

You don't get that above when that blue ball transported by Kirk and maybe Spock was capable, once filled with AM from the warp core of the E-nil, to leave a continent scale scar across the surface of a planet with a 9.8 gravity and breathable atmosphere... which is gone as well. There's actually no cloud to observe at all, no haze of dust around the planet whatsoever.
Again, another nonsensical event? Sure, it looked nice, but is it possible? Nope.

Taking away the atmosphere of a planet is nowhere near blasting away the mantle.

It doesn't matter. It requires a lasting input of great power with a throughout spread. A singular explosion is the worst candidate scenario, it's impossible.
It's quicker to say oxygen has warp travel abilities.

It's also nowhere near the destructive effect of the movie-era Genesis device...

You mean the thing that took a while to build a planet and blow it up, and got lost in the end?

... or Soran's torpedo in "Generations,"...

The one stuffed with thrilium that stops fusion reaction in stars? Soren developped it, that stuff is unique and lost, no?

... or the E-D accidentally causing a nova in "Half a Life."

Yes, OK, they have some magic stuff that triggers novas, OK, no problem. I suppose only the UFP has access to that tech. I'm sure their enemies would have loved to roast Earth "by accident", or apply the same treatment to the Founders' world without mobilizing and risking a whole fleet.

Then there's the omega molecule crap in Voyager, which is absolutely ridiculous on a per unit mass basis.

Yes and no. There was that base which had a breach of omega particles which destroyed said base, and the extent of the damage wasn't so damning. Obviously the power is plot dialable as well.
More seriously, it probably takes certain conditions to fully release the energy of an omega particle.
It's also extremely theoretical, so most conceptions about this molecule are not exactly the most ground based stuff you could find on the scientific side of things, even Trek wise.

The only reason "Obsession" stands out is because we can easily tell the apparent scientific error (antimatter in atmosphere won't cause some chain reaction to blow off the atmosphere), while we're used to hearing anti-Trek debaters wave away the later examples with "Oh, well, that must have been a chain reaction."

It stands out because it pretends that taking an ounce of AM from a random warp core and putting it into some convenient graviball that was found in your average storage room could unleash an amount of energy that would still make the ICS blush.

If you actually make a solid case on a much more focused discussion, even a duel, readers will fairly know when the oponents are in denial and use unacceptable argumentation tactics, it's extremely easy to spot after all (we had some examples highlighted in the "other forums" section).

My curiosity is most genuine on that. If one person, Trekkie or not, claimed he/she had a strong set of evidence for 3 or 4 digits megaton range for UFP torps, the challenge would be for the other side to actually show that there's ample evidence to counter that claim.
For example, although I believe torps sit in the low 3 digits megaton range at best, they're also dialable, which offers a good margin of interpretation, notably for people like you who think they're more powerful than that.

If you had to start a debate with an active and effective Trek "nerfer" (w/o offense), who would you pick?

I'm honestly not sure. Most of them don't actually engage in serious debate. From what I recall, Aratech may have been my favorite of the SDN crowd visiting ST.com out of the ones I argued with, since he was actually willing to try and engage me in debate. Most of the Trek "nerfers" there were arguing mostly ad hominem.

I'm quite willing to engage in a "duel," as you term it, with just about anybody who disagrees with me.

This would require someone much more educated than me about Trek, but I'm fairly sure there's a wild pool of candidates out there.
As cliché as it may sound, why not Wong? After all, he has a considerable amount of material presenting a certain vision of Star Trek.
There has to be a purpose there. No matter the outcome of such a debate, it will be a good place to find traditionnal arguments debunked and new evidence considered.