Resistence is futile!(and other invasions stories)

[l33telboi]

Quite mobile like what? For all I've seen about Cubes fighting, their maneuvers are akin to flying straight. A 3 km wide cube is a rather very easy target in such conditions.

They do tend to fly in straight lines, though they rotate and have a fairly impressive acceleration.

The flash lasts three to four frames, and is followed by a large distorted explosion (instead of a massive round fireball) that last for about one second (23 frames before camera cut, close to complete fade out), and it above completely surpassed the size of the flash itself, which is simply not possible.

And yet... it happened. And I wouldn’t recommend saying that something is impossible when it comes to nukes seen from orbit. The truth is that we know very little about such things.

That and the fact, as I said, that the creature hit was capable of mustering energies letting it bring grasp an UFP shuttle and sort of crash it some fifty meters next to it. Who knows what would happen when hitting such a thing with a torp?

You're saying the majority of the energy came from the creature, and only a small part of that from the torp? Is there any indication that the creature was capable of generating such energies? Pulling a shuttle from the air isn't quite that impressive.

Plus the fact that the shuttle was still there, and in all likeliness, was warp capable, and thus its own fuel would need to be accounted for.

Is it warp capable?

What's arbitrary here exactly?

We're talking about cases which have to fit and above all make sense. It's not a question of looking attractive, it's a question of understanding the implication of what an episode claims. It's absurd to insist on high ends like the blue ball on repulsors that leaves a continent wide crater in Obsession in a way that makes zero scientific sense for what is nothing more than a major antimatter explosion, or in another episode, the Nil that can withstand sound waves in space that would be so powerful they could vapourize countless planets in a fraction of a second but don't even harm the atmosphere of the planet they were fired from. These are the illogical outliers.

No. It's absurd to claim that everything you don't like is a 'higher showing' and then simply dismiss them because of that. When you have to repeatedly reply by saying 'that's a higher showing, we have to ignore it', then we're no longer talking about outliers, we're talking about deliberately ignoring a large section of canonical material.

And you do realize that to date there has yet to be a single 100% accurate depiction of an explosion on a planetary surface in fiction. Where does the line go between ‘this is absurd’ and ‘this is not absurd’?

There are more reasonnable high ends which are miles below that kind of nonsense, and generally argue for high petajoule or low exajoule/watt abilities, but they're pretty much secular for all I recall (like the E-E's warp core power generation capacity cited by Data).

"Reasonable?" And who gets to decide what's reasonable and what's not? If you turn this into a debate on what everyone think is reasonable, then you're pretty much just going by gut feeling. You say one thing is reasonable, someone else says something else is reasonable.

Debate becomes ridiculous since anyone can say pretty much say anything and then justify it by simply claiming "it's reasonable." That's what I'm trying to get across here, why do you think you have some arbitrary right to dismiss certain pieces of canon with the justification that you think it's more and less reasonable? If you did that, then someone else could dismiss what you're saying because they find it less then reasonable.

To make it clear though, I’d have no problem someone telling others about their subjective viewpoints, but claiming someone else is wrong simply because you have a subjective viewpoint would be more then I could stomach.

You can't debate when it comes to subjective matters.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Quite mobile like what? For all I've seen about Cubes fighting, their maneuvers are akin to flying straight. A 3 km wide cube is a rather very easy target in such conditions.

They do tend to fly in straight lines, though they rotate and have a fairly impressive acceleration.

I recall only one single time a Cube capable of showing an impressive yet bizarre acceleration, as it resumed its course to follow the Cube flotilla on its route towards some unknown enemy (S8472).
Other than that, their flying and maneuvering is pretty much conventional.

The flash lasts three to four frames, and is followed by a large distorted explosion (instead of a massive round fireball) that last for about one second (23 frames before camera cut, close to complete fade out), and it above completely surpassed the size of the flash itself, which is simply not possible.

And yet... it happened. And I wouldn’t recommend saying that something is impossible when it comes to nukes seen from orbit. The truth is that we know very little about such things.

That's an appeal to ignorance that has no place here. An explosion in atmosphere will turn out to produce both flashes and fireballs. Light will travel well beyond the limits of the fireball, so the boundaries of the flash as we can see them diffused throughout the atmosphere will outreach the fireball's radius by an absurdly large range. The greater the magnitude of the explosion, the longer both of them will last, and of course the bigger they'll be. Not only that, but the fireball will obviously expand in a spherical fashion.
The antimatter explosion on this random planet failed on all these accounts.

That and the fact, as I said, that the creature hit was capable of mustering energies letting it bring grasp an UFP shuttle and sort of crash it some fifty meters next to it. Who knows what would happen when hitting such a thing with a torp?

You're saying the majority of the energy came from the creature, and only a small part of that from the torp? Is there any indication that the creature was capable of generating such energies? Pulling a shuttle from the air isn't quite that impressive.

I'm saying it's a possibility. I don't consider that a creature that can entirely block beaming is weak. Blocking the beaming abilities of a capital ship, as far as I can recall, has taken the application of powerful high technology, usually under the form of shields. Then I don't see how you can say that Armus did to the shuttle is unimpressive. That shuttle was travelling across the system, possibly came in high orbit of the planet at best. These long range shuttles have their own shields (but they would not need to be switched on then). They're, however, capable of great accelerations, leaving atmosphere easily, and also warp capable. That and pulling the shuttle towards the planet from such a great distance, to land it close to the tar pond.
No, I call that very impressive.

Plus the fact that the shuttle was still there, and in all likeliness, was warp capable, and thus its own fuel would need to be accounted for.

Is it warp capable?

What would a non warp capable shuttle do in such a system?
How could it even be there first?

What's arbitrary here exactly?

We're talking about cases which have to fit and above all make sense. It's not a question of looking attractive, it's a question of understanding the implication of what an episode claims. It's absurd to insist on high ends like the blue ball on repulsors that leaves a continent wide crater in Obsession in a way that makes zero scientific sense for what is nothing more than a major antimatter explosion, or in another episode, the Nil that can withstand sound waves in space that would be so powerful they could vapourize countless planets in a fraction of a second but don't even harm the atmosphere of the planet they were fired from. These are the illogical outliers.

No. It's absurd to claim that everything you don't like is a 'higher showing' and then simply dismiss them because of that. When you have to repeatedly reply by saying 'that's a higher showing, we have to ignore it', then we're no longer talking about outliers, we're talking about deliberately ignoring a large section of canonical material.

And rightfully so when one applies logic. One with a clear ming would neither take it at face value nor consider it serious that the Nil's shields could cope with a ground based interplanetary defense sound weapon that is powerful enough to destroy many planets in just one shot. It's not even funny, it's a retarded plot.

And you do realize that to date there has yet to be a single 100% accurate depiction of an explosion on a planetary surface in fiction. Where does the line go between ‘this is absurd’ and ‘this is not absurd’?

Some are obviously closer to reality than others.
Or are you going to go in wank mode and pretend that a minor pick from the Nil's AM reserves would be enough to fuel what would have easily been a 100 teratons explosion event?
The position of such outliers is like having the Golden Bridge represent the average of most events, and Moscow being the position of such outliers.

There are more reasonnable high ends which are miles below that kind of nonsense, and generally argue for high petajoule or low exajoule/watt abilities, but they're pretty much secular for all I recall (like the E-E's warp core power generation capacity cited by Data).

"Reasonable?" And who gets to decide what's reasonable and what's not? If you turn this into a debate on what everyone think is reasonable, then you're pretty much just going by gut feeling. You say one thing is reasonable, someone else says something else is reasonable.
Debate becomes ridiculous since anyone can say pretty much say anything and then justify it by simply claiming "it's reasonable." That's what I'm trying to get across here, why do you think you have some arbitrary right to dismiss certain pieces of canon with the justification that you think it's more and less reasonable? If you did that, then someone else could dismiss what you're saying because they find it less then reasonable.

Don't be absurd. You know what I mean by reasonnable. It's based on what has been talked about and analyzed, not mere baseless opinion.
If you want to turn this into argumentation on opinion or on people instead of focusing on arguments, your choice, not mine. It's just shifting goalposts and building strawmen.
Now try to carry those wankish pro-Trek claims to other boards see how well they survive. Don't think that because you're on SFJN you have a free pass for wank. ;)

To make it clear though, I’d have no problem someone telling others about their subjective viewpoints, but claiming someone else is wrong simply because you have a subjective viewpoint would be more then I could stomach.
You can't debate when it comes to subjective matters.

Well that's because you have not paid attention, obviously. I also appreciate the idea you could think I'm dumb or dishonest enough to use that kind of "logic", despite the fact you know that I've talked about Trek yields at length. But never mind, that's your inner Trekkie coming out, so clear thinking seems to take a back seat in such times.

[l33telboi]

I recall only one single time a Cube capable of showing an impressive yet bizarre acceleration, as it resumed its course to follow the Cube flotilla on its route towards some unknown enemy (S8472).
Other than that, their flying and maneuvering is pretty much conventional.

I believe it's in the very same episode that we see a cube accelerate away from a planet blowing up, showing some rather impressive accelerations, not sure though, it’s been quite some time since I saw the episode. So yes, impressive acceleration.

That's an appeal to ignorance that has no place here. An explosion in atmosphere will turn out to produce both flashes and fireballs. Light will travel well beyond the limits of the fireball, so the boundaries of the flash as we can see them diffused throughout the atmosphere will outreach the fireball's radius by an absurdly large range. The greater the magnitude of the explosion, the longer both of them will last

Fireball duration is one of those arguments that have existed for far too long and should be dead and buried by now, like the absurd 'nukes in space will cause big long and obvious flashes in space' argument that was popular some time ago. Fireball duration will be greatly affected when a nuke goes beyond the gigaton range, because of the pancaking nature of it when it hits the less dense upper atmosphere.

Also, if your description of the scene is accurate (fireball after the flash) then it also means that it's not a fireball, because those are created at the same time as the thermal flash (caused by it, as it were).

and of course the bigger they'll be. Not only that, but the fireball will obviously expand in a spherical fashion.

Out of all the various explosions seen in movies and stuff, this one is just about the most realistic when it comes to how a really large nuclear fireball will look like. The whole thing will hit the roof of the atmosphere faster then you can snap a finger, and then spread out like an umbrella. Of course the explosion there is much more powerful then something in the gigaton range, but it gives you an idea.

The antimatter explosion on this random planet failed on all these accounts.

We see the light from the explosion. To create light that intense you need a certain amount of energy. That's simple fact. No ifs, no buts, no nothing. If there's light of that magnitude, then the energy also has to be present. This means the following: The visuals show that this bomb is just as powerful as suggested. You can claim that it's technobabble if you really want, but that doesn't change the energy involved.

Or you can be subjective about the thing and either declare that it’s either “close enough” or “not close enough” to what a nuke should look like in order to be accepted. I declare it “close enough”, what about you?

I'm saying it's a possibility. I don't consider that a creature that can entirely block beaming is weak. Blocking the beaming abilities of a capital ship, as far as I can recall, has taken the application of powerful high technology, usually under the form of shields.

In other words: No, there's nothing to indicate the creature was capable of such power generation. Blocking beaming sometimes require a grand total of zero power generation. And even technologically it seems very easy, remember those transporter inhibitors they were carrying around in Insurrection? Those didn't seem to power hungry to me.

Then I don't see how you can say that Armus did to the shuttle is unimpressive. That shuttle was travelling across the system, possibly came in high orbit of the planet at best. These long range shuttles have their own shields (but they would not need to be switched on then). They're, however, capable of great accelerations, leaving atmosphere easily, and also warp capable. That and pulling the shuttle towards the planet from such a great distance, to land it close to the tar pond.
No, I call that very impressive.

Impressive, sure. Impressive to the point where we should think there are hundreds of megatons involved? No. We don't even know enough specifics to say for sure if this was impressive at all.

What would a non warp capable shuttle do in such a system?
How could it even be there first?

I haven't seen the episode in a while, I'm not familiar with the surroundings of the crash. That's why I asked you if it's warp capable. Was it in the system alone? Did it get there on its own?

And rightfully so when one applies logic. One with a clear ming would neither take it at face value nor consider it serious that the Nil's shields could cope with a ground based interplanetary defense sound weapon that is powerful enough to destroy many planets in just one shot. It's not even funny, it's a retarded plot.

I'm not talking about the sonic weapon, I'm talking about the higher showings in general, which should be obvious if you just read what I said and the fact that we’re arguing about the tar monster at the moment. So I'll ask you again: Who made you the ultimate arbitrator on what's reasonable and what's not? The answer is no one. Thus if you say something isn't reasonable then only required response to defeat that argument is: Yes, it is.

Some are obviously closer to reality than others.

I already asked you: Where does the line go? Are you the one who gets to decide "this is reasonable and this is not"? Are you the one that gets to decide when the special effects are close enough to the real thing and when they’re not?

Or are you going to go in wank mode and pretend that a minor pick from the Nil's AM reserves would be enough to fuel what would have easily been a 100 teratons explosion event?

What I'd do? I'd analyze that scene just the way it is. If it really shows an event that would require the equivalent of 100 teratons of TNT in terms of energy, then yes - I'd say that's evidence for extremely large fuel stores on the ship. If it's contradicted by something else, fine, so be it, we'd have to either mesh the two incidents or then decide on which one is more likely.

What I wouldn’t do is immediately dismiss it and not even consider it.

Don't be absurd. You know what I mean by reasonnable. It's based on what has been talked about and analyzed, not mere baseless opinion.

To be honest, your method of analysis itself is pretty firmly rooted in what you think is reasonable or not. Take the crashed shuttle we just talked about - Analyzing the scene and following Occam's razor brings us to the conclusion that the torpedoes are extremely powerful. What's your immediate response to this? To try and somehow find ways to make it seem less powerful rather then just accept the obvious. Your justification? "It's more reasonable". This is what I'm taking issue with, I've seen you say the same thing for literally dozens of arguments now, "it's a higher showing, let's ignore it."

If it was a question of just one higher showing, or even just two, I'd accept that. But right now it seems to be used pretty regularly for all the arguments that don’t seem to conform to your views on matters.

Now try to carry those wankish pro-Trek claims to other boards see how well they survive. Don't think that because you're on SFJN you have a free pass for wank. ;)

In case of the crashed shuttle, I’d most certainly point out the same things I did here. And on other boards the rule ‘visuals are king’ is usually in effect, which would make me correct by default. Would there be objections? Hell yes. Would I care? Only if the counter-arguments make sense. I’m not too interested in popular opinion.

If you want to turn this into argumentation on opinion or on people instead of focusing on arguments, your choice, not mine. It's just shifting goalposts and building strawmen.

But never mind, that's your inner Trekkie coming out, so clear thinking seems to take a back seat in such times.

I realize that you’re somewhat emotionally invested in this stuff, but I’m not going to start bickering about it, and you can generally expect me to snip crap like this from this post forward. Believe it or not, but I do have a good deal of respect for you, despite the fact that we obviously disagree on some things.

[sonofccn]

If you see Armus as an engine of some sort, that can do certain things in exchange of certain power, and that at the moment he was fired at, he was pissed off and not wanting to be alone and possibly in full rage and trying to prevent anyone from leaving, he could be totally charged up, psychic powers or not.

We don't know anything about his power. There is no reason to assume even if he was powering up for it to behave the way you are suggesting. IIRC Picard wasn't sure he even killed him, the attack was to destroy the shuttle to keep anyone from invetigating the wreckage, and placed a warning beacon before they left the system. Armus could have been fine for all we know beyond getting a sun tan.

It's extremely unlikely that the pods, which didn't leak AM obviously, would have added nothing to the explosion. Since we're talking about a shuttle capable of crossing systems and carrying a highly ranked delegate, we're certainly not looking at a piss poor sluggish shuttle either, which means a good warp speed, thus a certain high consumption of energy, and the adequate fuel reserves for this.

WHile I think all shuttles were warp capable by TNG I can't recall if they have ever been said to have M/AM reactors. We know fusion can power a warp vessel and regardless of the delegate on board it was a bog standard shuttle same as anyone else would have recieved so nothing specail there. Considering how often those shuttles crash and don't explode and knowing how tempermental the M/AM reactor is they may be fusion powered.

I'm just weary of TOS based arguments. It brings me to a position which you lot won't like, but that's the way it goes, because it has me only accept what fits with the newer Trek, which in general seems less far fetched in the power of regular equipment and other devices.

I would agree post TOS generally showed lower power. That doesn't invalidate any of it however. It's one thing to personally feel that X gels with the universe, as I do, but you can't simply say you are correct and anything above X is invalid.

But please define what you meant by "super weapon of that time". Do you mean something that can bust a mile long asteroid in one or two shots was deemed a rare and extremely overkill Romulan weapon back then?

Per the episode both the cloak and the plasma torpedo power were not previusly encountered. These were the super breakthroughs Romulans believed would ensure thier victory of the federation, sending one ship out as a test. In the episode context I would say yes that firepower was rare.

It is, but it's only obvious from the moment you think about it for a moment. It was nothing more than an antimatter bomb on steroids. Have you considered the energies needed to remove the atmosphere of a planet in one shot, from a single bomb?

I know it requries an insane level power, much less from IIRC a gram of explosive, but the same could be said for many sci-fi forces. One can only dismiss it as an outlier not on breaking physics grounds.

A teutology is not a good argument. He's merely saying the ship can do X, and thus this is enough firepower to destroy the Great Link. You want to argue that the ship has enough firepower to slag the whole planet, which would require a firepower that's not seen anywhere else.

1. Actually we have both discussed several examples that show that kind of firepower. Obsessions,TDIC, A taste of Armagedon, the TNG episode written in binary( required going warp to distance for Enterprises reactor exploding) etc. Do these gel with the rest of the universe, possibly not but the firepower has been observed before hand.
2.I am not arguing that Broken Link has to be seen a certain way simply that it is completly valid to be interpeted that way. As I said Broken Link is very flexible depending on what you are trying to obtain ranging from setting forest fires on the surface to slagging the surface to molten goo.

Taking Wong's nuclear calculator, assuming fireball causes and behaviour would be fairly similar, and taking a 100 MT device, we get a ground contact fireball radius of 4.4 km, thus an area of 60.82 km².
The Founders' planet doesn't seem to have that much watery areas, so it's mostly dry. Earth has a surface area of 510,072,000 km².
You'd need 8,386,583 torpedoes to blanket the whole planet with fire, and roughly 27,313 torps if you deemed "3rd degree burns" thermal radiation good enough to kill Founders.

I'm giving you an opportunity to accept a good enough firepower capability without dismissing it entirely by tagging it of being pure hyperbole.

Wouldn't this ismply mean one would need a more powerful torpedo? A 100 megatons just doesn't cut it to scorch the entire surface of a world.

[Mr. Oragahn]

If you see Armus as an engine of some sort, that can do certain things in exchange of certain power, and that at the moment he was fired at, he was pissed off and not wanting to be alone and possibly in full rage and trying to prevent anyone from leaving, he could be totally charged up, psychic powers or not.

We don't know anything about his power. There is no reason to assume even if he was powering up for it to behave the way you are suggesting. IIRC Picard wasn't sure he even killed him, the attack was to destroy the shuttle to keep anyone from invetigating the wreckage, and placed a warning beacon before they left the system. Armus could have been fine for all we know beyond getting a sun tan.

Good point.
Reading more about the pilot, Picard literally destroyed the shuttle to prevent Armus from leaving, clearly implying that Armus could survive the detonation. Tough, eh?

WHile I think all shuttles were warp capable by TNG I can't recall if they have ever been said to have M/AM reactors. We know fusion can power a warp vessel and regardless of the delegate on board it was a bog standard shuttle same as anyone else would have recieved so nothing specail there. Considering how often those shuttles crash and don't explode and knowing how tempermental the M/AM reactor is they may be fusion powered.

Fusion devices require more fuel and room to provide as much power as M/AM reactions. Considering how Wesley could study AM for his student project and how easy it's to carry, I find it odd that shuttles would not be equipped with something that clearly appears to be so mundane.
Nevertheless, if it was fusion, all the fuel at hand would be put under immense pressure and heat within small fractions of a second.
It was a Type-7 shuttle.
They're still equipped with escape transporters, I assume one-shot transporters. Plus some deflector shields, and perhaps phasers.

I'm just weary of TOS based arguments. It brings me to a position which you lot won't like, but that's the way it goes, because it has me only accept what fits with the newer Trek, which in general seems less far fetched in the power of regular equipment and other devices.

I would agree post TOS generally showed lower power. That doesn't invalidate any of it however. It's one thing to personally feel that X gels with the universe, as I do, but you can't simply say you are correct and anything above X is invalid.

Of course I can if TOS material is obviously in another league in regards to the larger bulk of Trek material. And that doesn't only apply to TOS, it can apply to Voyager, as seen with the shuttle overload, but it's that TOS, for all I know thus far, does contain very extreme oddities that Trekkies cite from time to time, without seemingly paying enough attention to the material they cite.
That creates problems.

But please define what you meant by "super weapon of that time". Do you mean something that can bust a mile long asteroid in one or two shots was deemed a rare and extremely overkill Romulan weapon back then?

Per the episode both the cloak and the plasma torpedo power were not previusly encountered. These were the super breakthroughs Romulans believed would ensure thier victory of the federation, sending one ship out as a test. In the episode context I would say yes that firepower was rare.

Is there a way to get a clip of that new version of the episode, to see how the asteroid gets destroyed?

It is, but it's only obvious from the moment you think about it for a moment. It was nothing more than an antimatter bomb on steroids. Have you considered the energies needed to remove the atmosphere of a planet in one shot, from a single bomb?

I know it requries an insane level power, much less from IIRC a gram of explosive, but the same could be said for many sci-fi forces. One can only dismiss it as an outlier not on breaking physics grounds.

There are two arguments which just don't work. First, the others do it so I do it. Sorry, that does not work, and the standards of exclusion of absurd extreme low or high outliers apply to all.
I ignore First Contact's Borg peashots at Earth and would either say they never happened or the ship was broken, nevermind if any ship of that size would obviously have no problem to come with anything beyond hefty hand grenade explosions.
I also ignore Stargate Atlantis' super solar flare nonsense that kills all life on planets, because no matter how much we try, solar flares don't turn into filaments that have a cross section smaller than that of a section of a Tau'ri warship. It's retarded. What they should have shown, and talked about, was a plan to intercept most of the flare by being very close to the sun and stretching shields as much as possible, to cast a large enough cone. Not that shit solar toothpaste effect we got served with. I get that the writers Googled solar flare of doom and that's all. Hell, the episode itself shows the circular burst on the photosphere already being multiple times larger than Jupiter. :/
That kind of nonsense, that can obviously be used for wankery, I ditch it.

A teutology is not a good argument. He's merely saying the ship can do X, and thus this is enough firepower to destroy the Great Link. You want to argue that the ship has enough firepower to slag the whole planet, which would require a firepower that's not seen anywhere else.

1. Actually we have both discussed several examples that show that kind of firepower. Obsessions,TDIC, A taste of Armagedon, the TNG episode written in binary( required going warp to distance for Enterprises reactor exploding) etc. Do these gel with the rest of the universe, possibly not but the firepower has been observed before hand.

So are we saying that some odd cases are right because they're "supported" by other equally odd cases?

TDiC may eventually be explainable through the argument of exceptional and very specific weapons, which explains why all these Romulan and Obsidian Order ships were doing crap against Jemhadar Bugs despite the fact that the Defiant was well capable of dispatching several of them very quickly. This is used to show that the ships for this mission were not fitted for standard combat, but for an unique purpose planetary destruction operation.

A Taste of Armageddon has General Order 24 cited. But in what context is its definition given? In an attempt to coerce people to drop weapons? if that's the case, would Kirk risk using the word "most" instead of "all"?
Does it ever explicitly defines how far and literal killing all life has to be taken? Does it say it's going to be done as the immediate effect of a bombardment?

As for warp core explosions, the E-D formerly stood not too far from another capital ship exploding due to warp core overload, and the saucer section itself withstood the warp core overload in that other film.

2.I am not arguing that Broken Link has to be seen a certain way simply that it is completly valid to be interpeted that way. As I said Broken Link is very flexible depending on what you are trying to obtain ranging from setting forest fires on the surface to slagging the surface to molten goo.

That's why it's most often cited when people start pulling claims which clearly side with the ICS-slagging side of things?

Taking Wong's nuclear calculator, assuming fireball causes and behaviour would be fairly similar, and taking a 100 MT device, we get a ground contact fireball radius of 4.4 km, thus an area of 60.82 km².
The Founders' planet doesn't seem to have that much watery areas, so it's mostly dry. Earth has a surface area of 510,072,000 km².
You'd need 8,386,583 torpedoes to blanket the whole planet with fire, and roughly 27,313 torps if you deemed "3rd degree burns" thermal radiation good enough to kill Founders.

I'm giving you an opportunity to accept a good enough firepower capability without dismissing it entirely by tagging it of being pure hyperbole.

Wouldn't this ismply mean one would need a more powerful torpedo? A 100 megatons just doesn't cut it to scorch the entire surface of a world.

I used a 100 MT torpedo because it's good enough. The use of greater yields will fail to increase fireball radius far enough, so much that you'd have to claim absolutely absurd yields, for little gain in terms of number of torpedoes you'd need to drop.

Even with 1 Gigaton nuclear warheads, and assuming 3rd degree thermal radiation to be sufficient, you still end with more than 4100 torps.
There's no way to cut it.

[l33telboi]

Fusion devices require more fuel and room to provide as much power as M/AM reactions. Considering how Wesley could study AM for his student project and how easy it's to carry, I find it odd that shuttles would not be equipped with something that clearly appears to be so mundane.

Fusion reactors (rather then just the fuel) are also probably a whole lot smaller, cheaper and more simplistic. Using fusion as a fuel-source is by default cheaper then antimatter. And that's not getting into the details on the differences in how you store antimatter and simple deuterium.

Of course I can if TOS material is obviously in another league in regards to the larger bulk of Trek material. And that doesn't only apply to TOS, it can apply to Voyager, as seen with the shuttle overload, but it's that TOS, for all I know thus far, does contain very extreme oddities that Trekkies cite from time to time, without seemingly paying enough attention to the material they cite.

That doesn't change the fact that you can't ignore evidence. What you're doing right now is simply throwing out stuff randomly, instead of just taking each and every piece of information and then saying "this says this" and "that says that".

There are two arguments which just don't work. First, the others do it so I do it. Sorry, that does not work, and the standards of exclusion of absurd extreme low or high outliers apply to all.

No, what he's saying is something that's universally accepted in versus debating. If canon says one thing and science says another, then canon wins. That's why stuff like Red Matter and faster then light travel isn't immedietly dismissed on the basis of "science doesn't work that way".

I used a 100 MT torpedo because it's good enough. The use of greater yields will fail to increase fireball radius far enough, so much that you'd have to claim absolutely absurd yields, for little gain in terms of number of torpedoes you'd need to drop.

Then the figure is completly arbitrary.

Even with 1 Gigaton nuclear warheads, and assuming 3rd degree thermal radiation to be sufficient, you still end with more than 4100 torps.
There's no way to cut it.

Then this is one incident that places the yield of a torp at more then a gigaton, isn't it? You want to say it doesn't mesh with the rest of canon, then do so. But the fact that you won't even acknowledge that it is a higher showing isn't something anyone has to take seriously. Generally I'd go about that whole thing completly differently though, just assume the bombardment would've been capable of eliminating all life on the planet in short order.

[Jedi Master Spock]

Fusion devices require more fuel and room to provide as much power as M/AM reactions. Considering how Wesley could study AM for his student project and how easy it's to carry, I find it odd that shuttles would not be equipped with something that clearly appears to be so mundane.
Nevertheless, if it was fusion, all the fuel at hand would be put under immense pressure and heat within small fractions of a second.
It was a Type-7 shuttle.
They're still equipped with escape transporters, I assume one-shot transporters. Plus some deflector shields, and perhaps phasers.

If you drop a 100 MT nuke on top of a fusion reactor, you're not likely to get much of a reaction. If the shuttle only is fusion powered, it won't contribute significantly to the explosion. The deuterium fuel is highly unlikely to reach the heat and pressure needed to react; more likely, it will simply be scattered.

I'd have to run some numbers and check some assumptions about hull durability to be dead certain that even if you managed to explode in the exact right spot, causing fusion reactions in surrounding matter will require an extremely high yield, which would make it a moot point.

More to the point, we have some information about the yield of a purposefully detonated CCS impulse engine - about 100 megatons. Given the SOE explosion is difficult to model significantly under a gigaton under any model (e.g., assuming the circle is a flash of light and the explosion releases a typical fraction of its yield as light, assuming it's a thin shell of accelerated debris, assuming it's a fireball, etc) we need the shuttle to be carrying antimatter fuel in order to contribute significantly to the explosion.

And that is the only viable way to reduce the SOE torp yield.

[sonofccn]

Good point.
Reading more about the pilot, Picard literally destroyed the shuttle to prevent Armus from leaving, clearly implying that Armus could survive the detonation. Tough, eh?

He is a god more or less, something Trek has in obscene numbers it seems.

Fusion devices require more fuel and room to provide as much power as M/AM reactions. Considering how Wesley could study AM for his student project and how easy it's to carry, I find it odd that shuttles would not be equipped with something that clearly appears to be so mundane.

True but shuttles wouldn't need to generate nearly as much energy as a starship nor maintain it for as long distance. M/AM is fairly common and widespread in the Federation and the only reason I even harbor the possibility a shuttle might be fusion is how often they crash and don't blow up. Granted in many cases the shuttles can be repaired and flown home again but it still boggles the mind how something as volitatle as anti-matter could be safely contained in a wrecked and battered shuttle.

Of course I can if TOS material is obviously in another league in regards to the larger bulk of Trek material. And that doesn't only apply to TOS, it can apply to Voyager, as seen with the shuttle overload, but it's that TOS, for all I know thus far, does contain very extreme oddities that Trekkies cite from time to time, without seemingly paying enough attention to the material they cite.
That creates problems.

I do not have issue with acknowledging outliers, taste of armagedon being the top of the list, but you have appeared to assume a certain figure and dismiss all higher showings.

Is there a way to get a clip of that new version of the episode, to see how the asteroid gets destroyed?

I'll take a look around youtube as such when I get back home, I currently have only the original classic TOS episodes.

There are two arguments which just don't work. First, the others do it so I do it. Sorry, that does not work, and the standards of exclusion of absurd extreme low or high outliers apply to all.
I ignore First Contact's Borg peashots at Earth and would either say they never happened or the ship was broken, nevermind if any ship of that size would obviously have no problem to come with anything beyond hefty hand grenade explosions.

I simply request that all evidence be acknowledged and weighed and the one with the most evidence for it wins. So First Contact is recorded and tallied next to Obsession.

So are we saying that some odd cases are right because they're "supported" by other equally odd cases?

You claimed such firepower had never been seen before acting like this was a tiny lonely outlier. It isn't. I am not saying the "odd cases" are right but they exist.

A Taste of Armageddon has General Order 24 cited. But in what context is its definition given? In an attempt to coerce people to drop weapons? if that's the case, would Kirk risk using the word "most" instead of "all"?
Does it ever explicitly defines how far and literal killing all life has to be taken? Does it say it's going to be done as the immediate effect of a bombardment?

Actually I believed that was the episode where the Enterprise withstood planet busting sound waves ( in space!) and was unaffected. If I am remembering my episode names wrong, please correct me.

As for warp core explosions, the E-D formerly stood not too far from another capital ship exploding due to warp core overload, and the saucer section itself withstood the warp core overload in that other film.

As I said firepower, or reactor power in this case, is all over the board.

I used a 100 MT torpedo because it's good enough.

There is no good enough. There is a lower limit to meet Garak comment and there is an upper limit. A 100 megatons wouldn't suffice with scorching the top soil of the planet as you demonstrated. You can't shoe horn every example to meet what you feel gels with the universe.

[Mike DiCenso]

Okay. So how did all of this degenerate off into a discussion of photon torpedoes and the like? I thought this is supposed to be a discussion of several scenarios involving the Borg invading several different SF franchise universes and how well they would fare in them.
-Mike

[GStone]

Because we always degenerate somehow?

[Mr. Oragahn]

I recall only one single time a Cube capable of showing an impressive yet bizarre acceleration, as it resumed its course to follow the Cube flotilla on its route towards some unknown enemy (S8472).
Other than that, their flying and maneuvering is pretty much conventional.

I believe it's in the very same episode that we see a cube accelerate away from a planet blowing up, showing some rather impressive accelerations, not sure though, it’s been quite some time since I saw the episode. So yes, impressive acceleration.

Doesn't work. That kind of acceleration would have allowed all Cubes to outrun the expanding cloud of matter that once was a planet. We're talking about an acceleration wherein a Cube goes from zero to a speed where it travels its own length per second within one or two frames.
Explanation: that kind of burst is exceptional and cannot be sustained more than the equivalent of one or two frames.

That's an appeal to ignorance that has no place here. An explosion in atmosphere will turn out to produce both flashes and fireballs. Light will travel well beyond the limits of the fireball, so the boundaries of the flash as we can see them diffused throughout the atmosphere will outreach the fireball's radius by an absurdly large range. The greater the magnitude of the explosion, the longer both of them will last

Fireball duration is one of those arguments that have existed for far too long and should be dead and buried by now, like the absurd 'nukes in space will cause big long and obvious flashes in space' argument that was popular some time ago. Fireball duration will be greatly affected when a nuke goes beyond the gigaton range, because of the pancaking nature of it when it hits the less dense upper atmosphere.

It's not a dumb argument. Not only it would be necessary, for you, to first show that the event is indeed beyond one gigaton, but the upper atmospheric pancaking effect is totally irrelevant because for an explosion to go that far up in the sky, it has to be very powerful, and thus will emit copious amounts of energy for long long times, and that, we didn't get it in the episode.
Fireball and accessorily light emission duration are not absurd concepts when talking about explosions in atmosphere. We happen to have a much better idea of what things would look like in such conditions. Like I said, a flash that stays for three frames or so makes no sense when even a minor megaton nuke will shine for much more time before the fireball cools down to levels where we can see the mushroom cloud itself without being blinded by the light diffused through the atmosphere.

Plus, looking at this explosion from space would only make it clearer, as we would precisely see how far light "saturates" the atmosphere.

Also, if your description of the scene is accurate (fireball after the flash) then it also means that it's not a fireball, because those are created at the same time as the thermal flash (caused by it, as it were).

Which as I said precisely proves how bogus the whole effect is.
A lone and longer flash would have been far more accurate.

and of course the bigger they'll be. Not only that, but the fireball will obviously expand in a spherical fashion.

Out of all the various explosions seen in movies and stuff, this one is just about the most realistic when it comes to how a really large nuclear fireball will look like. The whole thing will hit the roof of the atmosphere faster then you can snap a finger, and then spread out like an umbrella. Of course the explosion there is much more powerful then something in the gigaton range, but it gives you an idea.

Looks nice but then what? That effect would look circular from above, not oddly shaped. It's still one detonation after all, and it's going to win over natural air streams.

The antimatter explosion on this random planet failed on all these accounts.

We see the light from the explosion. To create light that intense you need a certain amount of energy. That's simple fact. No ifs, no buts, no nothing. If there's light of that magnitude, then the energy also has to be present. This means the following: The visuals show that this bomb is just as powerful as suggested. You can claim that it's technobabble if you really want, but that doesn't change the energy involved.

Or you can be subjective about the thing and either declare that it’s either “close enough” or “not close enough” to what a nuke should look like in order to be accepted. I declare it “close enough”, what about you?

You cannot declare that SoE's explosion "it's close enough" when you have, a few sentences earlier, admitted not even remembering how it looks like in the episode.

I'm saying it's a possibility. I don't consider that a creature that can entirely block beaming is weak. Blocking the beaming abilities of a capital ship, as far as I can recall, has taken the application of powerful high technology, usually under the form of shields.

In other words: No, there's nothing to indicate the creature was capable of such power generation. Blocking beaming sometimes require a grand total of zero power generation. And even technologically it seems very easy, remember those transporter inhibitors they were carrying around in Insurrection? Those didn't seem to power hungry to me.

Point. I didn't see Insurrection mind you, and I acknowledged the strength of Amrus in its likely ability to survive the explosion anyway, in a post following yours.
So I'll ignore other points about Amrus.

I haven't seen the episode in a while, I'm not familiar with the surroundings of the crash. That's why I asked you if it's warp capable. Was it in the system alone? Did it get there on its own?

Yes to all. There was a rendez vous somewhere in that sector.

I'm not talking about the sonic weapon, I'm talking about the higher showings in general, which should be obvious if you just read what I said and the fact that we’re arguing about the tar monster at the moment. So I'll ask you again: Who made you the ultimate arbitrator on what's reasonable and what's not? The answer is no one. Thus if you say something isn't reasonable then only required response to defeat that argument is: Yes, it is.

No, because that's just you playing games when you know fully well that we're all considering all the material we already talked about at length here and at SBC. I don't happen to suddenly reset my memories about past debates, contrary to what you seem to suggest, and such memories don't tell me there's any reason to logically and even seriously consider Obsession and the sound wave of doom to be acceptable and fit with most of Trek material.
That's where reason lays.

Some are obviously closer to reality than others.

I already asked you: Where does the line go? Are you the one who gets to decide "this is reasonable and this is not"? Are you the one that gets to decide when the special effects are close enough to the real thing and when they’re not?

Yet it's very simple. We have example of real nuclear atmospheric explosions to look at. We have made up large scale explosions which, for some of them, do look like "close enough" and, with logic, we can assert what would reasonnably happen in basic conditions with a single bomb releasing energy in an atmosphere.

Or are you going to go in wank mode and pretend that a minor pick from the Nil's AM reserves would be enough to fuel what would have easily been a 100 teratons explosion event?

What I'd do? I'd analyze that scene just the way it is. If it really shows an event that would require the equivalent of 100 teratons of TNT in terms of energy, then yes - I'd say that's evidence for extremely large fuel stores on the ship. If it's contradicted by something else, fine, so be it, we'd have to either mesh the two incidents or then decide on which one is more likely.

What I wouldn’t do is immediately dismiss it and not even consider it.

You seem to think that I considered this example unfit just because. That's preposterous, and that's borderline arguing that I have a "nerf Star Trek" agenda.
I just don't happen to agree with Trekkies pulling some odd events and pretending that ships are capable of pulling hundreds of teratons from fractions of fuel reserves.

If you think I'm wrong, then show me where the whole averaged Trek proves that ships such as the E-Nil can offer, with a spoon pick from its fuel reserves, the equivalent of hundreds of teratons worth of AM.

Don't be absurd. You know what I mean by reasonnable. It's based on what has been talked about and analyzed, not mere baseless opinion.

To be honest, your method of analysis itself is pretty firmly rooted in what you think is reasonable or not. Take the crashed shuttle we just talked about - Analyzing the scene and following Occam's razor brings us to the conclusion that the torpedoes are extremely powerful.

Occam would primarily laugh at the idea of trying to get a yield out of a ludicrous decades old explosion effect.
That's where he'd stand first and foremost.

What's your immediate response to this? To try and somehow find ways to make it seem less powerful rather then just accept the obvious. Your justification? "It's more reasonable". This is what I'm taking issue with, I've seen you say the same thing for literally dozens of arguments now, "it's a higher showing, let's ignore it."

I never spoke of SoE derived yields as unreasonnable.

If it was a question of just one higher showing, or even just two, I'd accept that. But right now it seems to be used pretty regularly for all the arguments that don’t seem to conform to your views on matters.

Now try to carry those wankish pro-Trek claims to other boards see how well they survive. Don't think that because you're on SFJN you have a free pass for wank. ;)

In case of the crashed shuttle, I’d most certainly point out the same things I did here. And on other boards the rule ‘visuals are king’ is usually in effect, which would make me correct by default.

The SoE event is certainly not the most problematic case I'd expect you to carry overboard, and you know it.
Not to say that you'll find people who consider intent or dialogue standing on higher grounds, and specifically about SoE, you'd pretty much meet the same problems about the quality and accuracy of the SoE explosion as you did there.

I obviously expect you to try to argue in favour of the clearly outerish yields, in the like of Obsession, the space sound wave with a crazy power, and even on a smaller rank, TDiC, which is already seen as a super wank high end and barely accepted once unhealthy extreme doses of "rare" and "NDF" crop up in the posts.

Good luck sir. :)

But never mind, that's your inner Trekkie coming out, so clear thinking seems to take a back seat in such times.

I realize that you’re somewhat emotionally invested in this stuff, but I’m not going to start bickering about it, and you can generally expect me to snip crap like this from this post forward. Believe it or not, but I do have a good deal of respect for you, despite the fact that we obviously disagree on some things.

I see you start pretending this is about emotional knee jerking and "opinions", but thus far you pretty much have made very little attempt to address most of these cases on their own by thinking scientifically, and instead went on harping about how I declared myself the God of Reason, which was nothing more than you misreading my post and making assumptions about the body of evidence I based on opinion upon, which you assumed to be pretty much equal to hot air.

As we saw, that's not the case at all.

Fusion devices require more fuel and room to provide as much power as M/AM reactions. Considering how Wesley could study AM for his student project and how easy it's to carry, I find it odd that shuttles would not be equipped with something that clearly appears to be so mundane.

Fusion reactors (rather then just the fuel) are also probably a whole lot smaller, cheaper and more simplistic. Using fusion as a fuel-source is by default cheaper then antimatter. And that's not getting into the details on the differences in how you store antimatter and simple deuterium.

Good points safe that storing is obviously not a problem at all. The way Trek powers mess with AM is actually completely crazy, but they seem so sure of their containment technology that we'd call that nothing more than fundamentalism.

Of course I can if TOS material is obviously in another league in regards to the larger bulk of Trek material. And that doesn't only apply to TOS, it can apply to Voyager, as seen with the shuttle overload, but it's that TOS, for all I know thus far, does contain very extreme oddities that Trekkies cite from time to time, without seemingly paying enough attention to the material they cite.

That doesn't change the fact that you can't ignore evidence. What you're doing right now is simply throwing out stuff randomly, instead of just taking each and every piece of information and then saying "this says this" and "that says that".

Of course, that's your problem. You pretend that I do it randomly, which is not the case, and anyone with an ounce of logic would laugh at the idea of prepared Voyager being menaced by a shuttle's overloading core located some hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, if not millions.

There are two arguments which just don't work. First, the others do it so I do it. Sorry, that does not work, and the standards of exclusion of absurd extreme low or high outliers apply to all.

No, what he's saying is something that's universally accepted in versus debating. If canon says one thing and science says another, then canon wins. That's why stuff like Red Matter and faster then light travel isn't immedietly dismissed on the basis of "science doesn't work that way".

Red Matter is allowed because we don't know how it works. When something happens in a way that should not happen, because the premise is fairly simple, the case itself becomes extremely dubious and weak as evidence. And sorry, but you can say canon treats it as fact, but versus debaters would laugh at anything absurd, safe when used as favourable evidence by those who see it fit for their arguments. Like, "OMG, one single underground low gigaton explosion will destroy all life on Earth!" claimed when surrounded by a legion of extremely bright scientists, including who already did blow a sun up.
Stargate SG-1, Redemption.
Equally, if one character were to say that a mundane kiloton nuke would level all of Arkansas, we'd have an honest and intellectual right to ignore that.
There just are cases when it just does not work.

I used a 100 MT torpedo because it's good enough. The use of greater yields will fail to increase fireball radius far enough, so much that you'd have to claim absolutely absurd yields, for little gain in terms of number of torpedoes you'd need to drop.

Then the figure is completly arbitrary.

Nope. We'd have to pick a handful of low teraton torps for the Cardassian's joyful claim to start making sense, and that's only if you settle on 3rd degree thermal burn, which does not literally{/i] fit with the idea of turning a whole planet into a cinder. Oh, of course, we won't ignore that "fact" then... until we start to pit it against the rest of Trek.
Bull. Shit.

Even with 1 Gigaton nuclear warheads, and assuming 3rd degree thermal radiation to be sufficient, you still end with more than 4100 torps.
There's no way to cut it.

Then this is one incident that places the yield of a torp at more then a gigaton, isn't it?

The beauty of it is that of course, we have room to argue that it's mere hyperbole in the heat of an exchange to convince someone of laying as much waste of a community of special people living on a planet as possible, trying to strike as many kills as possible for the highest achievable Foudner holocaust.

You want to say it doesn't mesh with the rest of canon, then do so.

Like I have nothing better to do than go through all of what I, you and plenty of other people have gone through here and at SFJN, just for your amusement.
Get over it.

But the fact that you won't even acknowledge that it is a higher showing isn't something anyone has to take seriously.

What? Stop lying for a second. I precisely acknowledged that with the highest and absolutely literal interpretation of it, it makes it a high showing.
I just happen not to think it works.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Just a side note. Contrary to Memory Alpha's cliam, the shuttle in Skin of Evil does clearly not appear to be a type 7 shuttlecraft at all.
Also, do we have any evidence of a craft, no matter how small it would be, managing to achieve warp for some interstellar journey, to cover several light years in a very short amount of time?
I don't think Troi even spent one single week in that cramped shuttle, makes little sense.

A ship may have achieved warp with fusion cores, but what kind of ship? How long, at what speed?

We're speaking of a high prifile shuttle going on its own, passing through an isolated planetary system at some point. Obviously considering the absolute lack of any other activity safe for Armus and the Enterprise, the shuttle would not be there because of a short range jump from some planet.
It would be there following a consequent trip of at least several light years from the nearest system, and that's assuming there would be anything worth it in that system.

Assuming Cochrane's Phoenix was powered by a fusion drive, it still was capable (and thus needed) a power system allowing for warp plasma conduits and plasma injectors. And it only achieved light speed for a few seconds.

Fusion devices require more fuel and room to provide as much power as M/AM reactions. Considering how Wesley could study AM for his student project and how easy it's to carry, I find it odd that shuttles would not be equipped with something that clearly appears to be so mundane.
Nevertheless, if it was fusion, all the fuel at hand would be put under immense pressure and heat within small fractions of a second.
It was a Type-7 shuttle.
They're still equipped with escape transporters, I assume one-shot transporters. Plus some deflector shields, and perhaps phasers.

If you drop a 100 MT nuke on top of a fusion reactor, you're not likely to get much of a reaction. If the shuttle only is fusion powered, it won't contribute significantly to the explosion. The deuterium fuel is highly unlikely to reach the heat and pressure needed to react; more likely, it will simply be scattered.

It depends if the fuel is already highly compressed and how the torpedo's energy reaches the fuel containment unit(s).
After all, we'd be looking towards something like antimatter triggered pure fusion, with the fuel containment device being breached on one side first, the other side continuing to act like the container it's designed to be, the fuel being the tamper on its own. One side is breached and saturated by all gamma rays, neutrons and, globally, copious amounts of energy in the petajoules.
Why wouldn't that be enough to trigger a reaction when even crude fission detonations - the device part of a stage nuclear device is refined, but the "fusion" part much less in comparison - achieve this with far smaller initial yields?

The problem I see from the little I know is the reaction being too weak and neutrons being "dampened". But how do we know that would happen for sure and literally kill the reaction, despite the initial explosion?

Also, considering that such a shuttle would achieve a decent cruise warp speed for such long periods, if using deuterium, if would obviously have to carry a consequent amount of it.
No matter if the reaction is not totally efficient, I consider it unlikely that detonating an efficient multi-megaton antimatter device ontop of a compressed hydrogen fuel tank allowing interstellar transit would lead to nothing.

I'd have to run some numbers and check some assumptions about hull durability to be dead certain that even if you managed to explode in the exact right spot, causing fusion reactions in surrounding matter will require an extremely high yield, which would make it a moot point.

That would be interesting. What would the hull strength be?

More to the point, we have some information about the yield of a purposefully detonated CCS impulse engine - about 100 megatons.

But that was the engine. Not the whole fuel tank or whatever is used to store fuel, and that's on a ship that largely relies for M/AM reactions for its more power hungry systems.
The E-Nil's engine can only deal with a finite quantity of fuel at a given moment, and they didn't have other solutions left, since the DDM *cough* "neutered" *cough* antimatter.

Given the SOE explosion is difficult to model significantly under a gigaton under any model (e.g., assuming the circle is a flash of light and the explosion releases a typical fraction of its yield as light, assuming it's a thin shell of accelerated debris, assuming it's a fireball, etc) we need the shuttle to be carrying antimatter fuel in order to contribute significantly to the explosion.

And that is the only viable way to reduce the SOE torp yield.

How visible and big do we know the explosion would even be. Just because Picard is standing in front of the screen means that he expected to see the explosion, and even if that's so, he has the luxury of having a high tech screen, thus a high resolution, which means the smallest explosion would not be limited by the screen's ability to show it, but by the captain's sight while standing in front of it. Besides, how white would the flash be, while originating from the shadowy part of the planet?

Most interesting is that even if we took the flash's outmost boundaries as those of a fireball, even more than 200 torpedoes would not cover even an entire continent on Earth.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Fusion devices require more fuel and room to provide as much power as M/AM reactions. Considering how Wesley could study AM for his student project and how easy it's to carry, I find it odd that shuttles would not be equipped with something that clearly appears to be so mundane.

True but shuttles wouldn't need to generate nearly as much energy as a starship nor maintain it for as long distance. M/AM is fairly common and widespread in the Federation and the only reason I even harbor the possibility a shuttle might be fusion is how often they crash and don't blow up. Granted in many cases the shuttles can be repaired and flown home again but it still boggles the mind how something as volitatle as anti-matter could be safely contained in a wrecked and battered shuttle.

Kirk and Spock carried antimatter mortar rounds in some suitcase on a battlefield of some sort?
Wesley carried some antimatter in a glorified fishbowl that would allow like two seconds of warp speed for an UFP capital ship.
I think I recall Sisko functional, missile shaped, antimatter based devices, perhaps storage devices or mines, I can't recall.
AsI said to l33telboi, their faith in their antimatter containment abilities is strong.

Of course I can if TOS material is obviously in another league in regards to the larger bulk of Trek material. And that doesn't only apply to TOS, it can apply to Voyager, as seen with the shuttle overload, but it's that TOS, for all I know thus far, does contain very extreme oddities that Trekkies cite from time to time, without seemingly paying enough attention to the material they cite.
That creates problems.

I do not have issue with acknowledging outliers, taste of armagedon being the top of the list, but you have appeared to assume a certain figure and dismiss all higher showings.

This is an erroneous impression, for sure.

There are two arguments which just don't work. First, the others do it so I do it. Sorry, that does not work, and the standards of exclusion of absurd extreme low or high outliers apply to all.
I ignore First Contact's Borg peashots at Earth and would either say they never happened or the ship was broken, nevermind if any ship of that size would obviously have no problem to come with anything beyond hefty hand grenade explosions.

I simply request that all evidence be acknowledged and weighed and the one with the most evidence for it wins. So First Contact is recorded and tallied next to Obsession.

And tallied to all other incidents as well.

So are we saying that some odd cases are right because they're "supported" by other equally odd cases?

You claimed such firepower had never been seen before acting like this was a tiny lonely outlier. It isn't.

I don't recall saying such a thing.

I am not saying the "odd cases" are right but they exist.

Yes, they do. I acknowledged them. Now, I rejected those which were obviously absurd, and tried to cram the super high end of near wank like TDiC into a reasonnable interpretation that would fit with the majority of weapons that most people place in middle two or three digits megatons.

As for warp core explosions, the E-D formerly stood not too far from another capital ship exploding due to warp core overload, and the saucer section itself withstood the warp core overload in that other film.

As I said firepower, or reactor power in this case, is all over the board.

The point I'm making is that the E-D and in another case, her saucer section, withstood nearby massive warp core explosions. These warp cores were not those of a flimsy shuttle, but of capital considerable UFP ships.
Obviously the shuttle overload incident is just as ridiculous as it gets, and to make things clear, anyone taking it at face value needs to get his head checked, unless you want to pretend a shuttle's warp core can unleash novas when overloading.

I used a 100 MT torpedo because it's good enough.

There is no good enough. There is a lower limit to meet Garak comment and there is an upper limit. A 100 megatons wouldn't suffice with scorching the top soil of the planet as you demonstrated. You can't shoe horn every example to meet what you feel gels with the universe.

As said to l33telboi, you'd need much much greater yields to be able to take the claim literally.
Do they mesh with overall Trek? Unless someone called Surtis Caxton would write down into some very official Guide for people aged 60 and more, I doubt it.

[Jedi Master Spock]

A ship may have achieved warp with fusion cores, but what kind of ship? How long, at what speed?

"Balance of Terror" indicates that the ship is "impulse" powered. What comes to my mind are the FTL impulse examples.

It depends if the fuel is already highly compressed and how the torpedo's energy reaches the fuel containment unit(s).

I don't think it would be highly compressed. Deuterium is probably stored in the same form as antideuterium - cold mostly-frozen slush.

After all, we'd be looking towards something like antimatter triggered pure fusion, with the fuel containment device being breached on one side first, the other side continuing to act like the container it's designed to be, the fuel being the tamper on its own. One side is breached and saturated by all gamma rays, neutrons and, globally, copious amounts of energy in the petajoules.
Why wouldn't that be enough to trigger a reaction when even crude fission detonations - the device part of a stage nuclear device is refined, but the "fusion" part much less in comparison - achieve this with far smaller initial yields?

The problem I see from the little I know is the reaction being too weak and neutrons being "dampened". But how do we know that would happen for sure and literally kill the reaction, despite the initial explosion?

Under the right circumstances, it would - but I don't think those circumstances qualify. It's very difficult to just blast something and have it start fusing. Our mixture is going to be filled with vaporized hull material and is unlikely to still have enough kelvins of sheer temperature to fire off the fusion fuel meters later by heat and normal blast wave pressure unless it is already a very high yield device.

So here's our conundrum. In order to fuse deuterium with deuterium in a thermonuclear reaction, we want to flash heat it to 400,000,000 kelvins. In order to do that, we need to pump it with multiple terajoules per kilogram. This is why it's practically impossible to set off a D-D reaction using mere fission without using tricks to come up with high pressure; to put that in context, we basically need to be applying kilotons per kilogram to the fuel.

If we do that, then spontaneous fusion will start to happen. If you want it to happen quickly and therefore more completely, then you want significantly higher plasma temperatures; modern fusion weapons manage about a 50% efficiency in getting reactants to go off only by creating gigabars of pressure - a very difficult proposition that we're not going to get close to with our temperatures.

When we consider what our output is and what's going to absorb it, we're in a bit of trouble. We're putting out a lot of hard gammas, basically (and pions that whack into something after passing through about 90 g/cm^2 of material, on average, which will probably have an end product of hard gammas again) and so the shuttle hull - and fuel tank - will probably melt or be vaporized before the deuterium gets hot enough to start fusing. Now, if our device is really high yield, we could well have the gigakelvin fireball at a couple meters' radius, that we want in order to get a substantial secondary thermonuclear yield, but then we're back to the high yield problem; we're not really talking a couple megatons at that point.

Also, considering that such a shuttle would achieve a decent cruise warp speed for such long periods, if using deuterium, if would obviously have to carry a consequent amount of it.
No matter if the reaction is not totally efficient, I consider it unlikely that detonating an efficient multi-megaton antimatter device ontop of a compressed hydrogen fuel tank allowing interstellar transit would lead to nothing.

I don't think it'll significantly enhance the yield. You could get a small bonus on top of your yield, but not likely to be much.

That would be interesting. What would the hull strength be?

Off the top of my head, hull strength will probably be around 10x iron with Treknobabble materials.

But that was the engine. Not the whole fuel tank or whatever is used to store fuel, and that's on a ship that largely relies for M/AM reactions for its more power hungry systems.
The E-Nil's engine can only deal with a finite quantity of fuel at a given moment, and they didn't have other solutions left, since the DDM *cough* "neutered" *cough* antimatter.

The engine of a much larger ship, something that would probably carry as much fuel as the entire shuttle.

How visible and big do we know the explosion would even be. Just because Picard is standing in front of the screen means that he expected to see the explosion, and even if that's so, he has the luxury of having a high tech screen, thus a high resolution, which means the smallest explosion would not be limited by the screen's ability to show it, but by the captain's sight while standing in front of it. Besides, how white would the flash be, while originating from the shadowy part of the planet?

Most interesting is that even if we took the flash's outmost boundaries as those of a fireball, even more than 200 torpedoes would not cover even an entire continent on Earth.

The fireballs wouldn't cover, but the destructive effects would be enough to do a pretty good job of depopulating a continent, and are a rather larger radius than the fireball itself.

[l33telboi]

Doesn't work. That kind of acceleration would have allowed all Cubes to outrun the expanding cloud of matter that once was a planet. We're talking about an acceleration wherein a Cube goes from zero to a speed where it travels its own length per second within one or two frames.
Explanation: that kind of burst is exceptional and cannot be sustained more than the equivalent of one or two frames.

Right, in other words we're handwaving it away? What exactly is this contradiction you're talking about anyway? That the cubes got caught by the debris of the exploding planet?

It's not a dumb argument.

It is. Because fireball duration assumes that the nuclear fireball has an unlimited amount of air to travel through, and it assumes air density doesn't decrease the higher up the ball is flung.

The formula is flawed for explosions that are in the gigaton plus range. If you want to use this formula, then I want to see an explanation that factors in the fireball hitting the 'roof of the sky', if you want to put it in a poetic way.

Not only it would be necessary, for you, to first show that the event is indeed beyond one gigaton, but the upper atmospheric pancaking effect is totally irrelevant because for an explosion to go that far up in the sky, it has to be very powerful

Yeah, about a gigaton or so. The Tsar Bomba, at full yield (100 megatons) was supposed to have been strong enough to do this on its own, as an example.

and thus will emit copious amounts of energy for long long times, and that, we didn't get it in the episode.

A nuclear bomb releases its energy somewhere between a nano-second and a micro-second. After that, how the explosion behaves is entirely dependant on its surroundings.

Like I said, a flash that stays for three frames or so makes no sense when even a minor megaton nuke will shine for much more time before the fireball cools down to levels where we can see the mushroom cloud itself without being blinded by the light diffused through the atmosphere.

Seeing something from within the atmosphere and seeing it from extremely high orbit are two completly different things.

You cannot declare that SoE's explosion "it's close enough" when you have, a few sentences earlier, admitted not even remembering how it looks like in the episode.

Of course I can. If you can say "it's not close enough" I can say "it's close enough", because the difference between this and any other explosion in sci-fi is completly arbitrary. There are no explosions that look realistic in sci-fi when it comes to multi-megaton stuff. Thus, drawing a line between what's good enough and what isn't is entirely up to the person drawing the line.

It's subjective, in other words.

No, because that's just you playing games when you know fully well that we're all considering all the material we already talked about at length here and at SBC.

Every single time I see you encountering something that can be quantified, you analyse it in the same way: You set out assuming it can't be more then a few megatons at the most, and then you try to get the evidence to fit that assumption. You did it last SBC thread, and you've done it twice this thread already (tar monster and the defiant). The reasoning behind this is always the same: Higher numbers "don't fit" because of the rest of the evidence.

I don't happen to suddenly reset my memories about past debates, contrary to what you seem to suggest, and such memories don't tell me there's any reason to logically and even seriously consider Obsession and the sound wave of doom to be acceptable and fit with most of Trek material.

I don't reset my memories either, which should be obvious from what I'm saying right now. And as a point in my favor, I tend not to strawman other people like you're currently doing by always appealing to the soundwave, even though I haven't so much as mentioned it yet.

Yet it's very simple. We have example of real nuclear atmospheric explosions to look at. We have made up large scale explosions which, for some of them, do look like "close enough" and, with logic, we can assert what would reasonnably happen in basic conditions with a single bomb releasing energy in an atmosphere.

That doesn't answer my question in the least. Who made you the guy that says "This is close enough and this isn't"? Yes, I realize some explosions look more realistic then others, but that's beside the point. What I'm asking is why you think you have the authority to draw the line between "this is ok" and "this isn't ok".

The answer is: No one did.

Just as you can say "this isn't close enough" I can say "this is close enough".

You seem to think that I considered this example unfit just because. That's preposterous, and that's borderline arguing that I have a "nerf Star Trek" agenda.

No offense, but this is exactly the way you come off, when you repeatedly state "this doesn't fit with the rest of the material, let's ignore it."

Occam would primarily laugh at the idea of trying to get a yield out of a ludicrous decades old explosion effect.
That's where he'd stand first and foremost.

Alright then. Let's go with intent rather then visuals. Star Trek ships now fly around at fractions of c, engage each other at ranges around thousands of kilometers and TDiC is to my knowledge the only incident of planetary destruction where we have firm non-visual relient statements on what a starship can do.

Of course, this is not your intent, is it? Your intent is to analyse visuals when they suit you and ignore then when they don't.

The SoE event is certainly not the most problematic case I'd expect you to carry overboard, and you know it.

Then why are you trying so hard to dismiss it in various ways?

I obviously expect you to try to argue in favour of the clearly outerish yields, in the like of Obsession, the space sound wave with a crazy power, and even on a smaller rank, TDiC, which is already seen as a super wank high end and barely accepted once unhealthy extreme doses of "rare" and "NDF" crop up in the posts.

That's still a strawman. And a rather blatant one at that.

I see you start pretending this is about emotional knee jerking and "opinions", but thus far you pretty much have made very little attempt to address most of these cases on their own by thinking scientifically,

IMO, I was going about things rather scientifically when I pointed out the over-simplistic ways you use to quantify fireballs. I also think I was doing a proper job at pointing out the logical inconsistancies in your arguments, when you sometimes say 'let's look at visuals' and other times say 'let's ignore visuals', etc.

Good points safe that storing is obviously not a problem at all.

Antimatter requires more elaborate storage setup by default. You can store deuterium in a cup. This is just basic scientific fact.

The way Trek powers mess with AM is actually completely crazy, but they seem so sure of their containment technology that we'd call that nothing more than fundamentalism.

Doesn't change the fact that storing deuterium is easier.

Of course, that's your problem. You pretend that I do it randomly, which is not the case, and anyone with an ounce of logic would laugh at the idea of prepared Voyager being menaced by a shuttle's overloading core located some hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, if not millions.

Personally I'd laugh at the idea of faster then light travel.

But.

Evidence seens to say it's possible, so what can you do?

Red Matter is allowed because we don't know how it works.

No, Red Matter is allowed because it exists in canon.

When something happens in a way that should not happen, because the premise is fairly simple, the case itself becomes extremely dubious and weak as evidence.

Canon equals fact. There's nothing dubious about it.

And sorry, but you can say canon treats it as fact, but versus debaters would laugh at anything absurd, safe when used as favourable evidence by those who see it fit for their arguments. Like, "OMG, one single underground low gigaton explosion will destroy all life on Earth!" claimed when surrounded by a legion of extremely bright scientists, including who already did blow a sun up.

That's not a particularly hard problem to solve: She was referring to secondary effects.

Not that I understand why you always seem to want Stargate into this. And naturally, it's just dialogue. She could've misspoken. Simple as that.

Nope. We'd have to pick a handful of low teraton torps for the Cardassian's joyful claim to start making sense

Then this means that this particular episode is evidence for low teraton torpedoes, isn't it? But see, you don't want to acknowledge that. You simply want to dismiss it, saying that it's at the most evidence for megaton-range torpedoes.

How well does this fit with the rest of canon? Who knows.

The beauty of it is that of course, we have room to argue that it's mere hyperbole in the heat of an exchange to convince someone of laying as much waste of a community of special people living on a planet as possible, trying to strike as many kills as possible for the highest achievable Foudner holocaust.

It's possible, of course. But in itself the episode suggests no such thing. So it's an assumption we'll resort to only if this doesn't mesh with the rest of the evidence.

Like I have nothing better to do than go through all of what I, you and plenty of other people have gone through here and at SFJN, just for your amusement.

I never asked you too. I'm asking you to go through the evidence you're analysing right now properly.

What? Stop lying for a second. I precisely acknowledged that with the highest and absolutely literal interpretation of it, it makes it a high showing. I just happen not to think it works.

You quite literally tried to say this is a display of at most megaton-scale stuff a while ago.