B5, ST & SG stuff (ships, firepower, bits and bangs)

[Kane Starkiller]

They are your result. Prove that we would see anything at such densities.

What do you mean? It's all right there in the episode: we see that it's not transparent and we see that it's not expanding. When we apply gas laws on the fact that it's not expanding we arrive at certain densities. It's all direct observation and laws of physics at work here. There is nothing "mine" about the results.

Perhaps, or not. It's up to tell me why I should accept your calcs and assume that they would somehow fit with the idea that we would see the stream.

See above. Here you even admit that it's "perhaps and perhaps not" in other words you have no idea yet you challenge the results that were derived by directly applying the physical laws at directly observed events?

You're having an issue about double standards here, and l33telboi pointed it out a long time ago: how can it be that a stream that starts from a sun spot that is visible from that distance, can be naturally compressed into such a narrow stream, at which point the respective pressures of the corona and the stream would match?

When did I say the jet was the result of compression? This was your contention and is impossible. All we see is that a jet erupts after the collapse.

What is important to know is
This diagram shows what normally passes through the atmosphere and where it stops.
Needless to say that to be radiation poisoned while sitting in Atlantis, you're going to need to be exposed to a fuckton of hard X-rays and gamma-rays, and only atmospheric absorption figures for such wavelengths can tell us what figures we need to look for. Why I think it's going to be huge is for the simple fact that even the punchiest wavelenghts like hard X-rays barely pass through meters of the atmosphere.
If you cannot explain that, your calculation was pretty much pointless.

This diagram is given for standard solar radiation where the percentage of x-rays and gamma rays is small.
Look here.
The intensity of the visible light at say 500nm emitted by the Sun, for example, is 850W/m2 at the top of the atmosphere. The intensity of light at 250nm is 25W/m2. In other words even ultraviolet radiation of that wavelength only accounts for less than 2% of the total radiation emitted by sun.
X-ray radiation which is 0.1nm-10nm is not even on the chart and intensity drops to zero at 220nm or so. Thus the standard intensity of the x-ray radiation that arrives at the top of the atmosphere is on the order of milliwats per square meter or so.
This is the intensity that corresponds to the chart you have provided.
A 100m wide TW level radiation will have an intensity of 30W/m2 if it spread out to Earth's hemisphere which means it would be far more penetrative.

I think we should really separate the radiation pulse from the plasma blast. For the plasma blast, we need the density, and I'll actually to see how you demonstrate that your calcs would result in such a thick and visible stream.
It would be a good thing if I were you, to look at densities of solar flares and the density of the photosphere material, which we know are much more visible.
THis Google-scanned book talks about solar flares. A few pages down from the one you'll get to, you can read examples of jets even narrowed to 3 km wide.

Besides, l33telboi asked you this, and I don't remember if you replied or not, but what is your stance on the visuals? Because they don't really show anything moving at 40,000 km/s either, and the effect actually looks like crap, especially the bits of blob that are deflected by the shield!

For density and transparency see above: they are direct result of observation and the laws of physics.
These jets narrowed to 3km, what is their density? How do they override the density constraints on the particular jet from the episode?
Finally regarding the visuals, as I already told l33telboi I formerly claimed that jet moves at no more than 100km/s relative to the ship but have realized that the angle of the camera makes the speed difficult to gauge. Since I was ultimately interested in upper limit I decided to go with 4000km/s.

As pointed out above, the jet is independant of the radiations. The radiations will cross space at c. The "jet" moves at 40,000 km/s.
Sure, the shield is supposed to stop both, but they can be calculated separatedly. The first by figuring out what's necessary to poison people at sea level, the other by figuring out why you started to do, but which in my opinion suffers from being stuck between two opinions on the matter, which seem to be ignore the episode or take what we saw at face value.
Are you trying to make sense of what we saw, or are you running of some other premise, by selecting only some elements from the event?
That and you haven't demonstrated yet that with the pressures you used, the stream would be visible, so for the moment it's more a standby than anything else.

Didn't Rodney say 4000km/s? I have already separated the kinetic energy of the plasma stream and the radiation. Regardless of the sterilization requirement there are constraints about the intensity of either. However as I have shown to cause mass extinction doesn't require more than TW level radiation hitting Daedalus.

You are no more correct than me in trying to explain by science that what we saw could be explained naturally. We'll see if you manage to show that your calculation can result into a visible stream.
If not, then I guess you'll have to say we ignore visuals.

You still haven't shown a single error in my calculations nor have you managed to challenge the gas laws I utilized. You simply repeating that my calculations are incorrect doesn't make it so.
It's actually a nice trick in how you change "not transparent" into "visible" to make it sound like it's not proving a negative you're asking me to do just now and several times in this thread. In any case it's irrelevant and dealt with above.

Do you need a multi-kilometer wide asteroid to hit Earth to know that it would destroy life?
What he said about the stream and so on, and that after having time to verify the Lantean database, was based on the idea that he was right.
So in his mind, there could have been a stream that would kill life on the planet. And yes, in his mind, and based on the time he had to verify all that and the archives, he was convincing that this life threatening stream could be stopped by the ship before it fanned out.
And, finally, based on this, he considered that the ZPM would be necessary.

So it doesn't matter if he was right in the end, because all he assumed to happen, which actually did happen like he predicted, is what you need to use for your calcs. You cannot ditch whatever pleases you, like the fact that it would kill life on the planet for hundreds of years, because it has nothing to do with what was even theorized to happen. And McKay was convinced that the ship could withstand that onslaught. If you're trying to demonstrate that what was planned to happen in the show was scientifically impossible, then good job, because that's what I said from the beginning, and proves your calc useless.

But you still haven't demonstrated that what he thought will happen actually happened. Did the flare actually last as he predicted? He didn't even know. What was his assumption of the duration of the flare upon which he based his prediction about mass extinction? We don't know. And McKay was lucky in his prediction that Daedalus would survive: the ship started falling apart, what would an hour more do to the ship?
My calculations do not prove that jet was scientifically impossible. It's the other way around. My calculations derive the scientifically possible upper limit on the jet's density.
It is your insistence on higher density that takes it into the realm of impossibility. Do not use your mistakes to discredit my argument.

Oh, with the slight difference that ST ships have shields which can withstand contact detonation from such weapons. I'm actually baffled that I need to point that out. These are weapons with at least very high terajoules, to many petajoules, and powers several orders of magnitude above such numbers.

But you can't tell what is the yield of a particular photon torpedo by looking at it any more than you can tell whether a Tomahawk is nuclear tipped or conventional by looking at it fly.
If we see a Burke get hit by a missile that could be nuclear or conventional tipped, and survive, we conclude it was a conventional one not that there is a contradiction with USS Cole bombing.
Analogously when we see a Star Trek ship, which we know can be damaged or destroyed by TW level power, take a hit from a photon torpedo and survive we conclude that the particular torpedo had a less powerful warhead not that the previously observed event is contradicted.

[Mike DiCenso]

Oh, with the slight difference that ST ships have shields which can withstand contact detonation from such weapons. I'm actually baffled that I need to point that out. These are weapons with at least very high terajoules, to many petajoules, and powers several orders of magnitude above such numbers.

But you can't tell what is the yield of a particular photon torpedo by looking at it any more than you can tell whether a Tomahawk is nuclear tipped or conventional by looking at it fly.
If we see a Burke get hit by a missile that could be nuclear or conventional tipped, and survive, we conclude it was a conventional one not that there is a contradiction with USS Cole bombing.
Analogously when we see a Star Trek ship, which we know can be damaged or destroyed by TW level power, take a hit from a photon torpedo and survive we conclude that the particular torpedo had a less powerful warhead not that the previously observed event is contradicted.

This analogy fails given that it is clear in many instances, such as "Relics" and "Descent, Part 2" that the ship has already suffered damage to it's shields and systems. In the case of "Relics", the E-D was capable of withstanding the the star's pre-flare output at an altitude of around 150,000 km without shields whatsoever, and when the flares started (stated to be increasing over time), the shields were at 23% and being powered only by secondary sources. And even then, the shields were expected to hold out 3 hours, absorbing millions of terajoules of energy before collapse. We also know from episodes like "The Nth Degree that it takes a full spread of full yield torpedoes to knock down shields and damage a Galaxy class starship, indicating that Federation starships are capable of withstanding at least tens of megatons. Even as far back as the 2150's, a relatively primitive Klingon BoP's foward shields withstood photonic torpedo hits of at 50% yield in "The Expanse". Given the clear statement by Lt. Reed that a single torpedo was capable at full yield of putting a 3 kilometer crater into an asteroid, that indicates high kiloton to at least single megaton range capacity for even early shield systems.

Are there lower limit examples for Trek. Yes. But unlike B5 ship strength, there are enough examples of low and high end shield and armor strength to have to force some kind of explanation for what we see. B5 meanwhile, only has low-end examples. The easy destruction of the Black Star because of a two megaton proximity blast places a definite upper limit on the best of the Young Races' starships, and the 500 MT blast that destroyed a Shadow ship, again due to a proximity blast where the vessel would only absorb 10-60 megatons of the blast's total energy places hard limits on even the advanced tech of the First Ones.
-Mike

[Kane Starkiller]

This analogy fails given that it is clear in many instances, such as "Relics" and "Descent, Part 2" that the ship has already suffered damage to it's shields and systems. In the case of "Relics", the E-D was capable of withstanding the the star's pre-flare output at an altitude of around 150,000 km without shields whatsoever, and when the flares started (stated to be increasing over time), the shields were at 23% and being powered only by secondary sources. And even then, the shields were expected to hold out 3 hours, absorbing millions of terajoules of energy before collapse.

At that altitude given in Relics the ship would receive around 5TW spread across the entire shield area. As I have already explained in depth flares would not increase the amount of energy received by the ship by orders of magnitude since they likely carry even less energy per surface unit than the radiation. That is around 100,000 TJ or 24MT during 3 hours for 23% shields. Thus full shields should be able to withstand between 5TW during 6 hours or 20TW during 3 hours.
In "Descent" they utilize metaphasic shielding which is stated to collapse in 5 minutes which accounts for damage sustained to their shields bringing the total energy absorbed to 1000TJ-10,000TJ. The Borg ship, superior to Galaxy, was completely obliterated by the energy release on the order of megaton.

We also know from episodes like "The Nth Degree that it takes a full spread of full yield torpedoes to knock down shields and damage a Galaxy class starship, indicating that Federation starships are capable of withstanding at least tens of megatons. Even as far back as the 2150's, a relatively primitive Klingon BoP's foward shields withstood photonic torpedo hits of at 50% yield in "The Expanse". Given the clear statement by Lt. Reed that a single torpedo was capable at full yield of putting a 3 kilometer crater into an asteroid, that indicates high kiloton to at least single megaton range capacity for even early shield systems.

As I already stated the issue is what particular warhead is a particular torpedo using.
We know that even late 24th century BoPs can be destroyed by the combination of TW level radiation from a star and energy carried by photosphere matter from "Redemption". Clearly they cannot withstand megatons of energy being delivered in a fraction of a second. Thus, either that particular warhead had much lower energy or Reed overestimated the capabilities of the warheads.

Are there lower limit examples for Trek. Yes. But unlike B5 ship strength, there are enough examples of low and high end shield and armor strength to have to force some kind of explanation for what we see. B5 meanwhile, only has low-end examples. The easy destruction of the Black Star because of a two megaton proximity blast places a definite upper limit on the best of the Young Races' starships, and the 500 MT blast that destroyed a Shadow ship, again due to a proximity blast where the vessel would only absorb 10-60 megatons of the blast's total energy places hard limits on even the advanced tech of the First Ones.

When ship's shields are overwhelmed by a certain amount of power that is an upper limit on it's defensive capability and not a lower limit. While there are incidents in which photon torpedoes could have larger yield this is easily explained by larger warhead which we know they can install in "Omega" for example.
In the episode "Treachary, faith and the great river" we have a scene where Jem'Hadar fighter fires at a 100m comet, it's beam is blocked and it ends up putting a 30m wide gash in it. At that time they were trying to destroy a Runabout and we know that they are not capable of destroying it with a single shot thus their weapons were likely at maximum or close to it. It would take around 50 tons of TNT to crater a 100m comet but since this was not a centrally buried explosive but a beam the actual requirement would be on the order of 500t or more. In any case it again puts a rough upper limit on the firepower of a ship that is a major threat to Alpha Quadrant powers.
Other notable examples would be Reliant firing at Enterprise which didn't have shields. Even the second time it fired and destroyed it's port photon launcher the phaser penetration was extremely limited, no more than 5 meters deep or the starboard photon would also be incapacitated, 2m wide gash. Compare this to 750m (some sources indicate even over 1km) long Narn vessels cut in half effortlessly. Jem'Hadar ships from the episode "Jem'Hadar" also failed to cause significant damage to effectively shieldless Odyssey. These incidents also indicate that level of protection provided by the Star Trek ship shields is not orders of magnitude greater than that provided by it's armor.

Shadow beam is at least 80kt/s (vaporizing 750m long, on average 15m thick Narn cruiser at 10m width). Assuming 5% is actual metal and all else air that is 44 million kg of iron which requires 80kt to be vaporized. Since the beam cut through the Narn ships consistently without any impediment, flickering or visible decrease in strength on the other side the actual output is at least several times larger likely an order of magnitude.
That is on the order of 1000TW focused in a beam 10m wide and will definitely cause massive damage to a Galaxy class.
10-60MT is 50,000TJ-300,000TJ or the level of energy which threatens Galaxy even when absorbed over a time period of 3 hours and 10 times the rough upper limit for the energy that obliterated the Borg ship. Shadow ship absorbed it in fraction of a second bringing the power level at maybe even million TW.

[Mike DiCenso]

At that altitude given in Relics the ship would receive around 5TW spread across the entire shield area. As I have already explained in depth flares would not increase the amount of energy received by the ship by orders of magnitude since they likely carry even less energy per surface unit than the radiation. That is around 100,000 TJ or 24MT during 3 hours for 23% shields. Thus full shields should be able to withstand between 5TW during 6 hours or 20TW during 3 hours.
In "Descent" they utilize metaphasic shielding which is stated to collapse in 5 minutes which accounts for damage sustained to their shields bringing the total energy absorbed to 1000TJ-10,000TJ. The Borg ship, superior to Galaxy, was completely obliterated by the energy release on the order of megaton.

None of that makes any sense in context of the episode, where it is clearly stated that the star had entered a period of instability and increased radiation output, and we see at least initially very high speed velocity CMEs. Furthermore, you assume that the shields are 23% of what is available when the ship is at full power, rather than also taking into account that the shields are at 23% percent of what the auxiliary power itself can provide. Not to mention, you still keep clinging to this notion that the shields in Trek work only to keep out a few TWs and collapse if exposed to energy above that, rather than what we see where prolonged exposure (bombardment) seems to drain or cause damage, as though they were rather instead giant batteries that more energy you expose them to, the faster they drain out or take damage. But of course for you to go down that route would be admitting on your part to potentially hundreds of thousands to millions of terajoules for ST shields.

Nor for that matter do you seem to pay attention where it was stated that the temperature output of the star in "Descent" raised the ship's hull temperature by 12,000 C. That is not a normal star and the ship's shields were holding dispite not being metaphasic shields and most importantly being pounded on by the Borg ship (at least 36% damage). They only implemented the metaphasic shield program after all of that, and even then when they were already very close to the star. Once the program was initiated, it started to destablize after several minutes (up to 5 minutes of dialog on the planets surface and a few tens of seconds.) , and would take up to 4 more minutes to lose integrity. So a mere five minutes is incorrect. Over 9 minutes total. Also, dispite the dialog stating they were entering the star's corona, the visuals shown them appearing to enter into the chromosphere or photosphere.

The other problem with claiming weakness for the Borg ship is that like the SG example, the solar flare reaches the Borg ship in a state that is highly concentrated and is only somewhat wider than the ship itself indicating something unsual. The many of the same issues there apply here.

As I already stated the issue is what particular warhead is a particular torpedo using.
We know that even late 24th century BoPs can be destroyed by the combination of TW level radiation from a star and energy carried by photosphere matter from "Redemption". Clearly they cannot withstand megatons of energy being delivered in a fraction of a second. Thus, either that particular warhead had much lower energy or Reed overestimated the capabilities of the warheads.

I don't know where you get that. The BoP Kurn and Worf were in was heavily damaged from fighting and was under constant bombardment by the pursuing Duras BoPs. Yet it managed to survive practically skimming the photosphere for at least a couple minutes. The two pursuing BoPs look like they could be either crashing into the material kicked up by Kurn's BoP, or they could be crashing into the surface of the photosphere itself. Although non-canon, the shooting script agrees with the latter interpretation.

And we're not even getting into more interesting territory such as VOY's "Parallax" where flying around a black hole's event horizon is a piece of cake.

In DS9's "Shadows and Symbols", Martok and Worf's BoP withstands a fairly long exposure while skimming just above the photosphere of the target star.

Also Reed as the weapons officer of Earth's best starship shouldn't be going around over-estimating it's capabilities. If you want to fall back on the tired old nonsense of a character's whose dialog you don't like because it ramps up ST power levels, then you'll have to do better than that. We have nothing really to disprove that and photonic torpedoes have to be at least in the hundreds of kiloton to low megaton range since each phase cannon on an NX class starship can dish out up to 5 TW (10 TW for the combined forward main battery). That photonic torpedoes provide at least several orders of magnitude above that shouldn't come as any big shock. The idea of torpedoes only being a few TWs runs completely contrary to ENT's "Sleeping Dogs" where torpedoes detonated hundreds of meters away from a Klingon Raptor push it up several hundred meters against the gravity and dense atmosphere of a gas giant.

When ship's shields are overwhelmed by a certain amount of power that is an upper limit on it's defensive capability and not a lower limit. While there are incidents in which photon torpedoes could have larger yield this is easily explained by larger warhead which we know they can install in "Omega" for example.

There is no evidence that in episodes like "Cost of Living" or "Rise" that exotic warheads like that from "The Omega Directive" are in use, and yet these torpedoes can utterly vaporize or pulverize asteroids hundreds of meters wide. Why not use them against starships as well at that yield setting?

In the episode "Treachary, faith and the great river" we have a scene where Jem'Hadar fighter fires at a 100m comet, it's beam is blocked and it ends up putting a 30m wide gash in it. At that time they were trying to destroy a Runabout and we know that they are not capable of destroying it with a single shot thus their weapons were likely at maximum or close to it. It would take around 50 tons of TNT to crater a 100m comet but since this was not a centrally buried explosive but a beam the actual requirement would be on the order of 500t or more. In any case it again puts a rough upper limit on the firepower of a ship that is a major threat to Alpha Quadrant powers.

Are you even watching these episodes, Kane? Look at these pages from TrekCore..

http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbna ... 60&page=14
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbna ... 60&page=15
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbna ... 60&page=16
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbna ... 60&page=17

... And tell me again that those things are only 100 meters wide, or that they are only getting a little 30 meter wide crater punched in them. All of them are getting utterly blown apart with some clearly gaseous vaporized material to boot. Even if we accepted that, which is silly, it runs contrary to the megaton level firepower effect of a weak Cardassian freighter's phaser beam on an asteroid some 400,000 km away and a planetary defense disruptor on an asteroid some 200,000-500,000 km distant as seen in DS9's "Return to Grace".

And remember, as pointed out earlier, it is clearly and canoncially stated in B5 that the 200 MW guns on the Babylon 5 station itself are a threat to most B5 ships anyway.

Other notable examples would be Reliant firing at Enterprise which didn't have shields. Even the second time it fired and destroyed it's port photon launcher the phaser penetration was extremely limited, no more than 5 meters deep or the starboard photon would also be incapacitated, 2m wide gash. Compare this to 750m (some sources indicate even over 1km) long Narn vessels cut in half effortlessly. Jem'Hadar ships from the episode "Jem'Hadar" also failed to cause significant damage to effectively shieldless Odyssey. These incidents also indicate that level of protection provided by the Star Trek ship shields is not orders of magnitude greater than that provided by it's armor.

So, let's see here. In a battle at very close range, between two shieldless and heavily damaged starships, they're going to be lobbing full-yield torps at the Reliant (Suicide given the warnings in TNG's "Q Who?" and "The Nth Degree" about firing torps at close range)? Or that both ships, crippled by earlier fighting will be at full strength with phasers? Or even that the materials used in the ST ships along SIF force fields is the same as a Narn vessel's hull?

Shadow beam is at least 80kt/s (vaporizing 750m long, on average 15m thick Narn cruiser at 10m width). Assuming 5% is actual metal and all else air that is 44 million kg of iron which requires 80kt to be vaporized. Since the beam cut through the Narn ships consistently without any impediment, flickering or visible decrease in strength on the other side the actual output is at least several times larger likely an order of magnitude.
That is on the order of 1000TW focused in a beam 10m wide and will definitely cause massive damage to a Galaxy class.

So you're also making another leap of faith here in assuming that the materials and such of a Trek ship are the same thing as that of a Narn vessel? Or that crippled starships of over 80 years prior are the same thing as a fresh and fully shielded GCS? Even a crippled E-D took 5-25 TW just sitting around unshielded, and it's heavily damaged on secondary power source shields were capable of providing protection for hours against potentially millions of TJ.

10-60MT is 50,000TJ-300,000TJ or the level of energy which threatens Galaxy even when absorbed over a time period of 3 hours and 10 times the rough upper limit for the energy that obliterated the Borg ship. Shadow ship absorbed it in fraction of a second bringing the power level at maybe even million TW.

Except that your upper limit for the Borg ship isn't even an upper limit. We have a non-standard Borg vessel getting hit by a wonky-looking artifically induced CME that stays very focused tens of thousands of km from the source star. When we have seen Borg cube ships easily handle much more than that, the gigatons of energy output by the E-D's deflector dish in BoBW. While the Shadow ship wasn't totally destroyed, true, though dispite what you say, it was nearly instantly disabled by the blast when it suffered damage. The same thing would be true and moreso for a GCS faced with point-blank detonation of 4-5 full yield setting photon torpedoes.
-Mike

[Kane Starkiller]

None of that makes any sense in context of the episode, where it is clearly stated that the star had entered a period of instability and increased radiation output, and we see at least initially very high speed velocity CMEs. Furthermore, you assume that the shields are 23% of what is available when the ship is at full power, rather than also taking into account that the shields are at 23% percent of what the auxiliary power itself can provide.

Period of instability doesn't automatically mean orders of magnitude greater power output and the color of the star proves that the surface temperature was on the order of 5000K. If normal power output of the star is, say, 40MW/m2 and the shield can take 45MW/m2 they are OK. However if the period of instability causes the star to emit 47MW/m2 they are in trouble.
I don't assume that shields are at 23%, they say so. I see no reason to assume that this is actually 23% of the 23% which is actually only 15% of the 5% of the full number or whatever.

Not to mention, you still keep clinging to this notion that the shields in Trek work only to keep out a few TWs and collapse if exposed to energy above that, rather than what we see where prolonged exposure (bombardment) seems to drain or cause damage, as though they were rather instead giant batteries that more energy you expose them to, the faster they drain out or take damage. But of course for you to go down that route would be admitting on your part to potentially hundreds of thousands to millions of terajoules for ST shields.

You are basically claiming that ST shield performance is independent from the intensity or the firepower and that they can take X amount of joules whether that energy comes from a source 100m wide or 1cm wide and whether it comes from a source with 0.01X W power or 10X W power level. Since no material or field behaves in such a manner what evidence do you have Star Trek shields will?

Nor for that matter do you seem to pay attention where it was stated that the temperature output of the star in "Descent" raised the ship's hull temperature by 12,000 C. That is not a normal star and the ship's shields were holding dispite not being metaphasic shields and most importantly being pounded on by the Borg ship (at least 36% damage). They only implemented the metaphasic shield program after all of that, and even then when they were already very close to the star. Once the program was initiated, it started to destablize after several minutes (up to 5 minutes of dialog on the planets surface and a few tens of seconds.) , and would take up to 4 more minutes to lose integrity. So a mere five minutes is incorrect. Over 9 minutes total. Also, dispite the dialog stating they were entering the star's corona, the visuals shown them appearing to enter into the chromosphere or photosphere.

At 12,000C Enterprises hull would be glowing blue and would vaporize itself. Temperature is actually atom vibrations around their equlibrium positions. At 12,000C the vibrations would be such that all chemical bonds would be broken no matter what is the material. Secondly at 12,000C the ship would be emitting 1GW/m2 compared to 40MW/m2 at the surface of the yellow star. How exactly can it be heated to the temperatures where it is shedding heat at a rate 25 times greater than it is receiving?
The statement doesn't make any sense on multiple levels.
For "Descent" I did use the numbers as if the Enterprise was at the surface of the star and 9/5 is 1.8 so the numbers won't change drastically.

The other problem with claiming weakness for the Borg ship is that like the SG example, the solar flare reaches the Borg ship in a state that is highly concentrated and is only somewhat wider than the ship itself indicating something unsual. The many of the same issues there apply here.

And just like super concentration claims for SG example it doesn't make sense. I already calculated the limits on density for the Atlantis example. Same thing applies here.

I don't know where you get that. The BoP Kurn and Worf were in was heavily damaged from fighting and was under constant bombardment by the pursuing Duras BoPs. Yet it managed to survive practically skimming the photosphere for at least a couple minutes. The two pursuing BoPs look like they could be either crashing into the material kicked up by Kurn's BoP, or they could be crashing into the surface of the photosphere itself. Although non-canon, the shooting script agrees with the latter interpretation.

That's what I was talking about. The jet of surface plasma was kicked up and both ships were immediately obliterated. This puts an upper limit on their durability which agrees with Descent and Relics example and at the same time an upper limit on BoP weaponry since Kurn's ship couldn't immediately destroy the pursuing ships.

And we're not even getting into more interesting territory such as VOY's "Parallax" where flying around a black hole's event horizon is a piece of cake.

That wasn't a black hole no matter what they said.

In DS9's "Shadows and Symbols", Martok and Worf's BoP withstands a fairly long exposure while skimming just above the photosphere of the target star.

This agrees with all other examples. No one said the ships are destroyed instantly however stellar radiation intensity is dangerous and likely fatal. This puts the upper limit roughly at 10TW. Maybe it's 7.9TW or 22.1TW but that's the general order of magnitude.

Also Reed as the weapons officer of Earth's best starship shouldn't be going around over-estimating it's capabilities. If you want to fall back on the tired old nonsense of a character's whose dialog you don't like because it ramps up ST power levels, then you'll have to do better than that. We have nothing really to disprove that and photonic torpedoes have to be at least in the hundreds of kiloton to low megaton range since each phase cannon on an NX class starship can dish out up to 5 TW (10 TW for the combined forward main battery). That photonic torpedoes provide at least several orders of magnitude above that shouldn't come as any big shock. The idea of torpedoes only being a few TWs runs completely contrary to ENT's "Sleeping Dogs" where torpedoes detonated hundreds of meters away from a Klingon Raptor push it up several hundred meters against the gravity and dense atmosphere of a gas giant.

But we do have something to disprove his statements: all the incidents I listed. Furthermore I have no problem believing that an interstellar civilization can build multimegaton weapons, it would be ridiculous to claim otherwise. That doesn't mean ships can actually withstand shots from those particular warheads. I already went through this with Mr. Oragahn.

There is no evidence that in episodes like "Cost of Living" or "Rise" that exotic warheads like that from "The Omega Directive" are in use, and yet these torpedoes can utterly vaporize or pulverize asteroids hundreds of meters wide. Why not use them against starships as well at that yield setting?

But there is evidence albeit indirect: the upper limit set by stellar radiation incidents.
Also there is no indication that there was something exotic about the warhead in Voyager other than uprated yield which could've been obtained by putting more warhead.
As for why they don't use them it is possible that weight of a standard torpedo puts is just above the intercept capability of defense weapons. The additional reason could be political: fear of escalation.
Also shattering a 200m asteroid (the remainder in Cost of Living scaled using the deflector beam) would take about 100kt-1MT if it was a Nickel-Iron asteroid. Yet they had to use the deflector beam.

Are you even watching these episodes, Kane? Look at these pages from TrekCore..

http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbna ... 60&page=14
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbna ... 60&page=15
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbna ... 60&page=16
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbna ... 60&page=17

... And tell me again that those things are only 100 meters wide, or that they are only getting a little 30 meter wide crater punched in them. All of them are getting utterly blown apart with some clearly gaseous vaporized material to boot. Even if we accepted that, which is silly, it runs contrary to the megaton level firepower effect of a weak Cardassian freighter's phaser beam on an asteroid some 400,000 km away and a planetary defense disruptor on an asteroid some 200,000-500,000 km distant as seen in DS9's "Return to Grace".

And remember, as pointed out earlier, it is clearly and canoncially stated in B5 that the 200 MW guns on the Babylon 5 station itself are a threat to most B5 ships anyway.

What comets do you think were more than 100m wide? The only one that looked that way was the one the Runabout was hiding and the Jem'Hadar ship was behind it so we can't be sure what is the actual diameter.
There also is no evidence of megaton level energy being released by the Cardassian freighter. Even to vaporize a 50m wide Nickel-Iron asteroid takes less then a megaton and the asteroid was clearly not vaporized but shattered which could be accomplished by 125 tons if we are dealing with igneous rock.
Also I agree that Federation ships are generally superior to those of the younger races although their warships like Sharlin and Omega do possess TW level firepower and thus would be a threat to Starfleet ships in theory at least.

So, let's see here. In a battle at very close range, between two shieldless and heavily damaged starships, they're going to be lobbing full-yield torps at the Reliant (Suicide given the warnings in TNG's "Q Who?" and "The Nth Degree" about firing torps at close range)? Or that both ships, crippled by earlier fighting will be at full strength with phasers? Or even that the materials used in the ST ships along SIF force fields is the same as a Narn vessel's hull?

I never mentioned photon torpedoes. However the fact remains that even the initial strike by the Reliant left only a surface gash. Regarding the materials and structural integrity fields we are again back at the stellar incidents which destroy ships with all of that plus shields. Needless to say unshielded ships are going to be even less resistant. Secondly I see no reason to assume Federation has access to materials many times more heat resistant than the Narn and there are limits to how heat resistant any material can be anyway.

So you're also making another leap of faith here in assuming that the materials and such of a Trek ship are the same thing as that of a Narn vessel? Or that crippled starships of over 80 years prior are the same thing as a fresh and fully shielded GCS? Even a crippled E-D took 5-25 TW just sitting around unshielded, and it's heavily damaged on secondary power source shields were capable of providing protection for hours against potentially millions of TJ.

I could just as easily claim that Narn hull materials are stronger. Enterprise was not crippled when initially fired upon and crippled or not has no bearing on the strength of the hull materials and the limitations in firepower imposed upon the Reliant.
Furthermore there is no evidence that hull materials were improved significantly over the next 80 years. Taking 5-25W over the entire surface is not the same as taking it in the form of concentrated beam and I already demonstrated it's not millions of TJ but 100,000 TJ and you have shown no evidence for your interpretation of the statement "shields at 23%" to actually mean 23% of some fraction of the shield strength.

Except that your upper limit for the Borg ship isn't even an upper limit. We have a non-standard Borg vessel getting hit by a wonky-looking artifically induced CME that stays very focused tens of thousands of km from the source star. When we have seen Borg cube ships easily handle much more than that, the gigatons of energy output by the E-D's deflector dish in BoBW. While the Shadow ship wasn't totally destroyed, true, though dispite what you say, it was nearly instantly disabled by the blast when it suffered damage. The same thing would be true and moreso for a GCS faced with point-blank detonation of 4-5 full yield setting photon torpedoes.

I already went through the motions of what it means that the plasma stream remained focused with Mr. Oragahn in great detail in this thread. Long story short it means that it's pressure and thus energy content is severely limited and cannot possibly be carrying more than megaton level energy and likely far less than that.
The fact that it wasn't a standard Borg ship doesn't change the fact that it was far superior to the Galaxy which further constrains Starfleet and by extension Klingon, Romulan and Cardassian ships.
What is your evidence that Galaxy class deflector beam can impart gigaton level energy (per second I presume you are claiming) when it took it several seconds to shatter a 200m asteroid in Cost of living?
If the Shadow ship gets hit by 10MT-60MT photon torpedo (assuming they can fit that yield inside the casing and will be maneuverable enough to avoid being shot down) then obviously it will be destroyed.

[Mike DiCenso]

You are basically claiming that ST shield performance is independent from the intensity or the firepower and that they can take X amount of joules whether that energy comes from a source 100m wide or 1cm wide and whether it comes from a source with 0.01X W power or 10X W power level. Since no material or field behaves in such a manner what evidence do you have Star Trek shields will?

Here you go again. You are saying that an ST ship shields are somewhere between 5-100 TW, and you do not seem to acknowledge that when a ship gets hit by something, be it a one meter square beam or a million square meter charged particle field, the ship's shield doesn't sit there happily until someone hits it with a 110 TW beam or whatever, it takes damage over time. That's why they call out some fraction like "shields down 70 percent!" or whatever. Whatever the shield mechanism is, it seems dependent on damaging the generators, or plummeling down some kind of charge capacity. What you describe is rarely seen and usually takes an enourmous amount of power overwhelming power. What we seen in "Relics" seems to be that the ship reaches a threshhold where the shields starts to erode away in a given time, not merely get punched through, at least where the EM radiation from a star is concerned. Also, we can't assume a normal G-type star given the "Relic" star's behavior of violent expulsion of matter and radiation unlike anything we know of possible with our own Sun. Either the star was larger and more energetic than conventional wisdom says it is, or it was artifically induced into acting that way by some unknown agency. Nonetheless, we have nothing else to go by, and must accept this because this is what happened in the episode.

At 12,000C Enterprises hull would be glowing blue and would vaporize itself. Temperature is actually atom vibrations around their equlibrium positions. At 12,000C the vibrations would be such that all chemical bonds would be broken no matter what is the material. Secondly at 12,000C the ship would be emitting 1GW/m2 compared to 40MW/m2 at the surface of the yellow star. How exactly can it be heated to the temperatures where it is shedding heat at a rate 25 times greater than it is receiving?
The statement doesn't make any sense on multiple levels.
For "Descent" I did use the numbers as if the Enterprise was at the surface of the star and 9/5 is 1.8 so the numbers won't change drastically.

It would glow blue? Pray tell, when did you become such an expert on a fictional group of materials that lets you know their physical properties so well? Or how the SIF fields of the ship contribute to aiding in keeping the hull protected? Also, we are dealing with a star that does not follow the norms. It was stated to be emitting temperatures that high. Either we must discard expert characters that no one questioned, or we must accept the visuals or come to some synthesis. But you cannot merely pick and choose as you like. We have a ship that is stated on one hand to be safe in the star's corona, but visually looks to like it is inside the chromosphere or photosphere. We have a character saying the ship is being heated to 12k C as though it were a blue supergiant, but the star appears yellow-white.

If you want to have high ST shield conventional shield and hull strength, you got with one, if you want it weak, you go the other way.

The other problem with claiming weakness for the Borg ship is that like the SG example, the solar flare reaches the Borg ship in a state that is highly concentrated and is only somewhat wider than the ship itself indicating something unsual. The many of the same issues there apply here.

And just like super concentration claims for SG example it doesn't make sense. I already calculated the limits on density for the Atlantis example. Same thing applies here.

Which were refuted by Mr. Oragahn on logical grounds. You want so desperately for the SG and ST examples to be conventional flares, even though they don't look or act like them. Which is why he ultimately disregards the SG example since it flies so totally out of wack that it is rendered unusuable.

I don't know where you get that. The BoP Kurn and Worf were in was heavily damaged from fighting and was under constant bombardment by the pursuing Duras BoPs. Yet it managed to survive practically skimming the photosphere for at least a couple minutes. The two pursuing BoPs look like they could be either crashing into the material kicked up by Kurn's BoP, or they could be crashing into the surface of the photosphere itself. Although non-canon, the shooting script agrees with the latter interpretation.

That's what I was talking about. The jet of surface plasma was kicked up and both ships were immediately obliterated. This puts an upper limit on their durability which agrees with Descent and Relics example and at the same time an upper limit on BoP weaponry since Kurn's ship couldn't immediately destroy the pursuing ships

.

I don't know, it looks as though at least one of the BoP slams into the star itself. And then there is the matter of how fast the BoPs were going since both Kurn's and the Duras BoPs reach the photosphere from the edges of the solar corona hundreds of thousands to millions of km out in less than 30 seconds. At 33,333 km per second, that's a pretty good chunk of c given that the solar corona can extend several solar radii out from the photosphere.

And we're not even getting into more interesting territory such as VOY's "Parallax" where flying around a black hole's event horizon is a piece of cake.

That wasn't a black hole no matter what they said.

Nonethless, it was said and done. Now I'am not saying it's usable, just that it was something that canonically happened that is an example of how one can cherry pick to wank up ST levels.

In DS9's "Shadows and Symbols", Martok and Worf's BoP withstands a fairly long exposure while skimming just above the photosphere of the target star.

This agrees with all other examples. No one said the ships are destroyed instantly however stellar radiation intensity is dangerous and likely fatal. This puts the upper limit roughly at 10TW. Maybe it's 7.9TW or 22.1TW but that's the general order of magnitude.

Not only did the BoP withstand the star's radiation at the surface, but it is another example of what I was refering to earlier with Trek shields; here as in most other examples, the shields get eroded down over a length of time. If the ships had a capacity of say, 15 TW for a mean average, and the star can only put out just below that for the total shield surface area, then why would the shields slowly erode away, regardless, unless they operate somewhat differently than you claim it does? Is it because maybe they can pump a certain amount of power to the shield generators, and the shields then are taken down at faster or slower rates depending on the weapon or natural radiation power and concentrations?

But we do have something to disprove his statements: all the incidents I listed. Furthermore I have no problem believing that an interstellar civilization can build multimegaton weapons, it would be ridiculous to claim otherwise. That doesn't mean ships can actually withstand shots from those particular warheads. I already went through this with Mr. Oragahn.

No, it doesn't. However that does not not mean that they cannot do so, either. Numerous examples otherwise show this. A single or two torpedoes will not necessarily destroy the ship, but we know that a full spread of them will cripple and risks total destruction, even with shields. That's canon fact. Not once, but twice stated. We have seen a photonic torpedo at 50% yield slam into a 22nd century BoP's shields, and later the same one by double-fronting it's shields effortlessly withstands that. Even assuming a few tens of kilotons per torpedo, that's rather impressive for a small ship of that era to endure.

But there is evidence albeit indirect: the upper limit set by stellar radiation incidents.
Also there is no indication that there was something exotic about the warhead in Voyager other than uprated yield which could've been obtained by putting more warhead.
As for why they don't use them it is possible that weight of a standard torpedo puts is just above the intercept capability of defense weapons. The additional reason could be political: fear of escalation.
Also shattering a 200m asteroid (the remainder in Cost of Living scaled using the deflector beam) would take about 100kt-1MT if it was a Nickel-Iron asteroid. Yet they had to use the deflector beam.

You did not watch the episode, Kane. They used two torpedoes to vape most of a hundreds of meters wide asteroid (probably as much as a kilometer scaling the torpedoes that turn to tiny dots and then disappear against the asteroid's bulk as they head to the thing), then used the deflector to shatter the technobabble core. See, there's that little thing called context we have to take into account as well as the fact that highly resistant, technobabble materials plagues ST like mites on a dog is just a fact of life. Conversely, to turn that around on you, it was calculated here in SFJN threads that it takes a gigaton of energy for the E-D to push the 20 km Bre'el moon to impart a 92 meter/sec delta vee to it. It takes 3.8 gigatons of explosive power to vaporize the stardrive hull of a GCS assuming that it is only made of iron.

What comets do you think were more than 100m wide? The only one that looked that way was the one the Runabout was hiding and the Jem'Hadar ship was behind it so we can't be sure what is the actual diameter.
There also is no evidence of megaton level energy being released by the Cardassian freighter. Even to vaporize a 50m wide Nickel-Iron asteroid takes less then a megaton and the asteroid was clearly not vaporized but shattered which could be accomplished by 125 tons if we are dealing with igneous rock.
Also I agree that Federation ships are generally superior to those of the younger races although their warships like Sharlin and Omega do possess TW level firepower and thus would be a threat to Starfleet ships in theory at least.

Why several of ones they were shooting at as well as the one the runabout was hidden in. There was a reason they booked out of there since the JH attack ships did possess the power to destroy it. Also the RtG freighter phasers were certainly far more powerful than a mere few hundred GW or even single digit TW given that most of the asteroids were vaporized and from hundreds of thousands of km away. The fact that an unshielded BoP's hull armor could handle hundreds of kilotons to +- 1 megaton is more impressive.

I never mentioned photon torpedoes. However the fact remains that even the initial strike by the Reliant left only a surface gash. Regarding the materials and structural integrity fields we are again back at the stellar incidents which destroy ships with all of that plus shields. Needless to say unshielded ships are going to be even less resistant. Secondly I see no reason to assume Federation has access to materials many times more heat resistant than the Narn and there are limits to how heat resistant any material can be anyway.

Yet, in ST the Federation and other powers as well as nature itself has such materials. Tritanium, and nitrium that don't act at all like we think they should. On top of that, they can refinforce their kooky hulls with special force fields, such as the structural integrity fields, and the the defense grid that the Enteprise powers up at yellow alert in ST2.
How does that effect the equation? Do the Narn's have that? We know the Minbari have something like that as well as the Centauri, and most definitely so do the Vorlon and Shadows ships.

Can the Shadows and Vorlons potentially harm the Federation run-of-mill starships? Sure. I agree with that, but once the ante is upped, the Borg, Voth, and other older ST powers can handle them well enough.

I could just as easily claim that Narn hull materials are stronger. Enterprise was not crippled when initially fired upon and crippled or not has no bearing on the strength of the hull materials and the limitations in firepower imposed upon the Reliant.
Furthermore there is no evidence that hull materials were improved significantly over the next 80 years. Taking 5-25W over the entire surface is not the same as taking it in the form of concentrated beam and I already demonstrated it's not millions of TJ but 100,000 TJ and you have shown no evidence for your interpretation of the statement "shields at 23%" to actually mean 23% of some fraction of the shield strength.

The U.S.S. Galaxy herself took two hits from the Cardassian orbital defense weapons that utterly trashed Excelsior and Miranda class ships. The E-1701 in ST2 during the first battle only survived because Khan wanted Kirk alive so that he could gloat over having beaten him. As as pointed out earlier, the E-1701 was not entirely defenseless going in. The Reliant in turn was strafed by a heavily crippled starship with it's mains and auxilary power knocked out.

I already went through the motions of what it means that the plasma stream remained focused with Mr. Oragahn in great detail in this thread. Long story short it means that it's pressure and thus energy content is severely limited and cannot possibly be carrying more than megaton level energy and likely far less than that.
The fact that it wasn't a standard Borg ship doesn't change the fact that it was far superior to the Galaxy which further constrains Starfleet and by extension Klingon, Romulan and Cardassian ships.
What is your evidence that Galaxy class deflector beam can impart gigaton level energy (per second I presume you are claiming) when it took it several seconds to shatter a 200m asteroid in Cost of living?
If the Shadow ship gets hit by 10MT-60MT photon torpedo (assuming they can fit that yield inside the casing and will be maneuverable enough to avoid being shot down) then obviously it will be destroyed.

Yes, and all of his counter-points still stands, too. We have a non-standard event from a non-standard star in behavior, appearance and output. How else can the E-D be exposed to 12,000 C temperatures?

See my earlier answer, and to add to it we have the 12.75 billion GW quote from "True Q", as well as the 5 million GW (for an Intrepid class starship's power conduit) quote from "Revulsion".

As for the yield, we have seen numerous times where fitting even an exotic warhead into a torpedo casing is possible as observed in "The Omega Directive", and if nothing else they can remove some of the guidence software and remotely guide the torpedo to it's target as per DS9's "Valiant". One major tactical advantage going for the Shadow battlecrab is that they do have a form of cloaking device, though how effective it is compared to it's Trek counterpart is unknown.
-Mike

[Kane Starkiller]

Here you go again. You are saying that an ST ship shields are somewhere between 5-100 TW, and you do not seem to acknowledge that when a ship gets hit by something, be it a one meter square beam or a million square meter charged particle field, the ship's shield doesn't sit there happily until someone hits it with a 110 TW beam or whatever, it takes damage over time. That's why they call out some fraction like "shields down 70 percent!" or whatever. Whatever the shield mechanism is, it seems dependent on damaging the generators, or plummeling down some kind of charge capacity. What you describe is rarely seen and usually takes an enourmous amount of power overwhelming power. What we seen in "Relics" seems to be that the ship reaches a threshhold where the shields starts to erode away in a given time, not merely get punched through, at least where the EM radiation from a star is concerned.

I'm saying that just like any other material or field shield have a certain reradiation capacity. If that capacity is not exceeded shields will contiunue to function indefinitely. For example if you park a Galaxy near Earth it would receive 1MT over the course of the year. However it wouldn't damage the shields since the impact radiation would not exceed the reradiation capacity. In this case the reradiation capacity is slightly below the impact radiation(for example radiation is 5TW and the reratiation capacity is 4.95TW). This causes the shields to take damage over time and ultimately collapse. The point is that 100,000TJ number is meaningless since shields would not be required to handle it at any point in time, it is simply the total radiation absorbed across a large time interval.

Also, we can't assume a normal G-type star given the "Relic" star's behavior of violent expulsion of matter and radiation unlike anything we know of possible with our own Sun. Either the star was larger and more energetic than conventional wisdom says it is, or it was artifically induced into acting that way by some unknown agency. Nonetheless, we have nothing else to go by, and must accept this because this is what happened in the episode.

There is no need to assume the star was roughly equal to sun. We see it's color and the fact that Dyson sphere has oceans and vegetation proves that it can't be more powerful than the sun. The statement that the star has entered a period of heightened emissions in no way means that it's power output increased by an order of magnitude.

It would glow blue? Pray tell, when did you become such an expert on an fictional group of material materials that lets you know their physical properties so well? Or how the SIF fields of the ship contribute to aiding in keeping the hull protected? Also, we are dealing with a star that does not follow the norms. It was stated to be emitting temperatures that high. Either we must discard expert characters that no one questioned, or we must accept the visuals or come to some synthesis. But you cannot merely pick and choose as you like. We have a ship that is stated on one hand to be safe in the star's corona, but visually looks to like it is inside the chromosphere or photosphere. We have a character saying the ship is being heated to 12k C as though it were a blue supergiant, but the star appears yellow-white.

If you want to have high ST shield conventional shield and hull strength, you got with one, if you want it weak, you go the other way.

The exact composition of Enterprise's hull is irrelevant. When atoms are given energy they vibrate and the electrons move to higher energy level. As they drop down to their original energy level they emit photons. It's frequency will depend on the energy of the electron and at 12,000C they will be blue.
The star was yellow and the planet orbiting it supported life thus limiting it's output. The fact that characters were experts doesn't mean they couldn't mispronounce the temperature and no one bothered to check because they saw it on screen themselves.

Which were refuted by Mr. Oragahn on logical grounds. You want so desperately for the SG and ST examples to be conventional flares, even though they don't look or act like them. Which is why he ultimately disregards the SG example since it flies so totally out of wack that it is rendered unusuable.

They were not refuted since Mr. Oragahn never pointed to any errors in my calculations or challenged the validity of gas laws these formulas comes from. Simply questioning my motives or subjective declarations that events are "out of whack" doesn't disprove the observed events.

I don't know, it looks as though at least one of the BoP slams into the star itself. And then there is the matter of how fast the BoPs were going since both Kurn's and the Duras BoPs reach the photosphere from the edges of the solar corona hundreds of thousands to millions of km out in less than 30 seconds. At 33,333 km per second, that's a pretty good chunk of c given that the solar corona can extend several solar radii out from the photosphere.

No both BoPs collide with the plasma jet. I don't see what the speed has to do with their shield performance besides were there any scene cuts in those 30 seconds?

Nonethless, it was said and done. Now I'am not saying it's usable, just that it was something that canonically happened that is an example of how one can cherry pick to wank up ST levels.

This has nothing to do with cherry picking the evidence. No one is saying that the characters didn't state they are in a black hole merely that they were incorrect or that the definition of black hole has changed to include other weird phenomenons.

Not only did the BoP withstand the star's radiation at the surface, but it is another example of what I was refering to earlier with Trek shields; here as in most other examples, the shields get eroded down over a length of time. If the ships had a capacity of say, 15 TW for a mean average, and the star can only put out just below that for the total shield surface area, then why would the shields slowly erode away, regardless, unless they operate somewhat differently than you claim it does? Is it because maybe they can pump a certain amount of power to the shield generators, and the shields then are taken down at faster or slower rates depending on the weapon or natural radiation?

What the events demonstrate is that stellar radiation near the surface is just above the reradiation capacity of the starships as I have shown. Thus the shields will not be instantly brought to 0% but gradually over time.

No, it doesn't. However that does not not mean that they cannot do so, either. Numerous examples otherwise show this. A single or two torpedoes will not necessarily destroy the ship, but we know that a full spread of them will cripple and risks total destruction, even with shields. That's canon fact. Not once, but twice stated. We have seen a photonic torpedo at 50% yield slam into a 22nd century BoP's shields, and later the same one by double-fronting it's shields effortlessly withstands that. Even assuming a few tens of kilotons per torpedo, that's rather impressive for a small ship of that era to endure.

I never argued that ships can't withstand several photon torpedo hits but we don't know what is the exact yield of those particular torpedoes. We have not seen that the torpedo was 50% of the full yield which presumably could create a 3km crater but we hear a character state it. It doesn't agree with independent events which can be directly verified.

You did not watch the episode, Kane. They used two torpedoes to vape most of a hundreds of meters wide asteroid (probably as much as a kilometer scaling the torpedoes that turn to tiny dots and then disappear against the asteroid's bulk as they head to the thing), then used the deflector to shatter the technobabble core. See, there's that little thing called context we have to take into account too, and the fact that highly resistant, technobabble materials plagues ST like mites on a dog is just a fact of life. Conversely, to turn that around on you, it was calculated here that it takes a gigaton of energy for the E-D to push the 20 km Bre'el moon to impart a 92 meter/sec delta vee to it. It takes 3.8 gigatons of explosive power to vaporize the stardrive hull of a GCS assuming that it is only made of iron.

There is no evidence the asteroid was vaporized and furthermore since the nitrium parasites survived it most likely wasn't. The core fragment was most definitely only shattered and was stated that a single photon torpedo couldn't replicate those effects. Enterprise was never able to move Bre'el moon which means that incident is an upper limit on it's energy generation over several hours.
Assuming that the entire stardrive was really vaporized that points to what kind of energy the stored antimatter can release. It doesn't mean their reactor can produce that kind of energy in a matter of minutes or hours and control it. Assuming a Galaxy can go a year without refueling it's average power generation would be 500GW.

Why several of ones they were shooting at as well as the one the runabout was hidden in. There was a reason they booked out of there since the JH attack ships did possess the power to destroy it. Also the RtG freighter phasers were certainly far more powerful than a mere few hundred GW or even single digit TW given that most of the asteroids were vaporized and from hundreds of thousands of km away. The fact that an unshielded BoP's hull armor could handle hundreds of kilotons to +- 1 megaton is more impressive.

I don't see how any conclusive scaling can be made on these asteroids. The first ones to be destroyed were gone before the Jem'Hadar fighters even come into view. The one in which Runabout was hiding was in front of Jem'Hadar fighters so we can only get the upper limit. It was no more than 500m wide and was destroyed in two shots bringing the upper limit to about 5kt. There is no contradiction with the upper limit that I already established before.
In what incident did the unshielded BoP survive megatons of energy?

Yet, in ST the Federation and other powers as well as nature itself has such materials. Tritanium, and nitrium that don't act at all like we think they should. On top of that, they can refinforce their kooky hulls with special force fields, such as the structural integrity fields, and the the defense grid that the Enteprise powers up at yellow alert in ST2.
How does that effect the equation? Do the Narn's have that? We know the Minbari have something like that as well as the Centauri, and most definitely so do the Vorlon and Shadows ships.

I'm sure that they came up with some materials, alloys and armor that are superior to common iron which I always use to calculate energies involved. That doesn't mean they are somehow orders of magnitude better in every respect. Narn hull could very well be inferior to Starfleet hulls but not as to account for the fact Shadows can slice them in 1 second across their length while ST weapons like in ST2 and "Jem'Hadar" can't cause more than surface gashes in several minutes of battle. The evidence itself is not definite or conclusive, I agree, but taken together with other examples I have shown it points to the fact that ST beam weapons are vastly less powerful than that of the Shadows.

Can the Shadows and Vorlons potentially harm the Federation run-of-mill starships? Sure. I agree with that, but once the ante is upped, the Borg, Voth, and other older ST powers can handle them well enough.

Since 5TW at 40MW/2 is around the upper range of Galaxy shield capacity while Shadow beam is at roughly 1000TW at 10TW/m2 it will slice through it shields easily. Since shields offer more protection than the hull the ship itself will be sliced through.
Voth are an unknown, their technology seems impressive but we don't know how many of them are there. Borg ships are not that impressive when one looks at their size. They lack the sufficient firepower to destroy even Miranda class starships in a short amount of time and they can be heavily damaged by several shots from Species 8472 weapon when even Intrepid class can withstand more than one shot.
If the Federation fleets used a more coordinated assault when dealing with Borg cubes instead of firing randomly across it's hull their ships would be dispatched much more quickly. I don't see that their ships will end up being superior to Shadow ships. Then of course their planet killers with thousands of missiles carrying thousands of megatons would easily obliterate entire fleets of Borg ships.

The U.S.S. Galaxy herself took two hits from the Cardassian orbital defense weapons that utterly trashed Excelsior and Miranda class ships. The E-1701 in ST2 during the first battle only survived because Khan wanted Kirk so that he could gloat over having beaten him. As as pointed out earlier, the E-1701 was not entirely defenseless going in. The Reliant in turn was strafed by a heavily crippled starship with it's mains and auxilary power knocked out.

Sure he wanted to gloat after he disabled the Enterprise. That doesn't mean he went into the fight with it's phasers at 10%. Excelsior and Miranda class are much smaller than a Galaxy so what blows out a chunk of Galaxy will completely obliterate smaller ships. That doesn't mean the hull is much tougher.

Yes, and all of his counter-points still stands, too. We have a non-standard event from a non-standard star in behavior, appearance and output. How else can the E-D be exposed to 12,000 C temperatures?

You simply declaring the star "non standard" doesn't make it so and furthermore it doesn't mean anything. The radiation of the stars in question is limited by their color and the presence of livable planets. I already dealt with 12,000C number and the answer is it's hull cannot possibly be at 12,000C.

See my earlier answer, and to add to it we have the 12.75 billion GW quote from "True Q", as well as the 5 million GW (for an Intrepid class starship's power conduit) quote from "Revulsion".

Statements which fly in the face of observed events and furthermore are not further tested or corroborated in the episodes themselves nor is the episode in any way dependent on the stated numbers. Simple lapsus lingua settles that problem.

As for the yield, we have seen numerous times where fitting even an exotic warhead into a torpedo casing is possible as observed in "The Omega Directive", and if nothing else they can remove some of the guidence software and remotely guide the torpedo to it's target as per DS9's "Valiant". One major tactical advantage going for the Shadow battlecrab is that they do have a form of cloaking device, though how effective it is compared to it's Trek counterpart is unknown.

Whether Shadow ships have a cloaking device is unclear. The cloak effects is the Ship moving in and out of hyperspace as they don't use jump points like other races. When they are in hyperspace they can detect objects in real space however since Star Trek races have no knowledge of hyperspace they have no chance of detecting incoming Shadow ships which means that the element of surprise will always be with Shadow ships and they are shown to use hit and run tactics very effectively. I suspect Borg would be the greatest victim of such attacks.

[Mr. Oragahn]

They are your result. Prove that we would see anything at such densities.

What do you mean? It's all right there in the episode: we see that it's not transparent and we see that it's not expanding. When we apply gas laws on the fact that it's not expanding we arrive at certain densities. It's all direct observation and laws of physics at work here. There is nothing "mine" about the results.

Why didn't you work from the fact that the stream is visible? And I mean thick like as the intense fiery trail of a mega-flamethrower.
You have worked with pressure, without even trying to know if your numbers, pressures and densities worked with the fact that it was visible at all.

Perhaps, or not. It's up to tell me why I should accept your calcs and assume that they would somehow fit with the idea that we would see the stream.

See above. Here you even admit that it's "perhaps and perhaps not" in other words you have no idea yet you challenge the results that were derived by directly applying the physical laws at directly observed events?

You applied half the physical laws. At best, your work is incomplete.

You're having an issue about double standards here, and l33telboi pointed it out a long time ago: how can it be that a stream that starts from a sun spot that is visible from that distance, can be naturally compressed into such a narrow stream, at which point the respective pressures of the corona and the stream would match?

When did I say the jet was the result of compression? This was your contention and is impossible. All we see is that a jet erupts after the collapse.

And we see how big it is at that distance. It would be, at the very least, bigger than the moon.
How do your assumptions even work there? Plasma fans out, it doesn't contract. It would appear that you tried to apply half-science to something is neither the complete visual evidence, nor the complete dialogue evidence.

What is important to know is
This diagram shows what normally passes through the atmosphere and where it stops.
Needless to say that to be radiation poisoned while sitting in Atlantis, you're going to need to be exposed to a fuckton of hard X-rays and gamma-rays, and only atmospheric absorption figures for such wavelengths can tell us what figures we need to look for. Why I think it's going to be huge is for the simple fact that even the punchiest wavelenghts like hard X-rays barely pass through meters of the atmosphere.
If you cannot explain that, your calculation was pretty much pointless.

This diagram is given for standard solar radiation where the percentage of x-rays and gamma rays is small.
Look here.
The intensity of the visible light at say 500nm emitted by the Sun, for example, is 850W/m2 at the top of the atmosphere. The intensity of light at 250nm is 25W/m2. In other words even ultraviolet radiation of that wavelength only accounts for less than 2% of the total radiation emitted by sun.
X-ray radiation which is 0.1nm-10nm is not even on the chart and intensity drops to zero at 220nm or so. Thus the standard intensity of the x-ray radiation that arrives at the top of the atmosphere is on the order of milliwats per square meter or so.
This is the intensity that corresponds to the chart you have provided.
A 100m wide TW level radiation will have an intensity of 30W/m2 if it spread out to Earth's hemisphere which means it would be far more penetrative.

That's not the problem. Air absorbs X-rays, even high energy hard ones.
X-ray absorption and transmission through air:

http://panoptesv.com/SciFi/HardX.html <- Hard X-rays at 1 e-11 are largely attenuated within less than 100 meters of air, and completely absorbed within the over couple hundred meters that follow.
Note the tip of the absorption curve (green) also points downwards on the far left. This one will obviously implies high figures for hard X-rays (the more penetrative ones) to get anywhere close to the surface of the planet.

http://www.3dx-ray.com/pdfs/3dx_begin_gd_uk_f_0107.pdf <- At 15 km, a human subject would absorb 10 µSv/H, and only 0.03 µSv/H at sea level. Therefore the difference over 15 Km is a factor of 333.33--. Which means that by picking the figure I obtained earlier on (but this time divided by two for only one side of the planet is hit), we move to 1.888 e21 J.
Which over 23 hours still means a power of 22,801.93 e12 W.
But we know that the photon blast, which is different from the other particle blast of protons travelling at 4,000 km/s, could have only lasted as long as the ship remained in position, which is a couple of minutes only. Ten of them, tops. That's 600 seconds, or a power of 3,146,666.67 e12 W.
The source in question also puts the lethal does at 3000 instead of 1000.

http://www.lot-oriel.com/site/site_down ... deen01.pdf <- For your X-ray photons to pass through air relatively unstopped, and that still over short distances, you respectively need the following energies: 7 KeV to cross 1 cm, 40~45 KeV to cross 100 cm (all at sea level). By extrapolation (nothing proved here), by multiplying the energy by 5.7~6.4, you increase the distance by 100. If the pattern repeated itself, for photons at 258 KeV, they'd cross 100 meters before being stopped.
120 KeV is at the "upper" (in fact lower) end of hard X-rays.
This is speculative, but we can look at the stronger gamma-rays, notably those noticed from certain lightnings, or eventually the left over from nukes which have light casings, and thus would absorb little of the emitted X-rays.

One of the possible ways to get your X-rays down to the surface is actually to get rid of the air to the point it's light enough to stop acting as an obstacle, or that eventually plasma may be a greater enabler, but I didn't check plasma properties regarding X-rays transmission, although if temperatures get high enough, gamma-rays and X-rays will radiate from such plasma. But then to make a column of plasma all the way down to the surface, we're speaking of putting the whole volume of exposed on fire, literally. And then, that's to be made over all the exposed area. Which would obviously fit with an mass extinction level event.

Then we can look at gamma rays, with energies thousand times greater. But both gamma and X rays are totally absorbed by atoms, producing ions. So although the energies per particle differ, their behaviour is roughly similar, which I suppose logically means that for a given amount of radiation, if you go with gamma rays, then you need less of them. Which is what will happen considering that we're fixed at 50,000 rems. So we'll get less gamma-rays, and therefore the problem will remain the same, and actually possibly even worse, since the less gamma-photons, the more atoms of oxygen and other gases there are to interact with in comparison, which as crazy as it sounds would mean our fixed quantity of MeV photons would not even be numerous enough to punch through the entire atmosphere (unless gamma rays, because of their higher energies, somehow "dodge" collisions on a higher rate, but I didn't find evidence of this yet).

These jets narrowed to 3km, what is their density? How do they override the density constraints on the particular jet from the episode?

That, I don't know atm. Perhaps there's an indication somewhere. I merely pointed it out for how surprising it was. I never thought a flare --or a compopent of a flare perhaps-- could be that narrow.
Flares partially are the result of special conditions in magnetic fields. That said, it was more for scientific curiosity, since I don't think it would be useful.

Finally regarding the visuals, as I already told l33telboi I formerly claimed that jet moves at no more than 100km/s relative to the ship but have realized that the angle of the camera makes the speed difficult to gauge. Since I was ultimately interested in upper limit I decided to go with 4000km/s.

That's an unconvincing evasion. The ship is hit at a 3/4 angle, so the angle alone cannot explain how we see such a low stream. The stated speed is so huge that we're talking about a distance of probably 50,000 Deadalus-lengths covered per second. It's abundantly clear that we couldn't even discern any detail on the stream if it was moving that fast.

You are no more correct than me in trying to explain by science that what we saw could be explained naturally. We'll see if you manage to show that your calculation can result into a visible stream.
If not, then I guess you'll have to say we ignore visuals.

You still haven't shown a single error in my calculations nor have you managed to challenge the gas laws I utilized. You simply repeating that my calculations are incorrect doesn't make it so.
It's actually a nice trick in how you change "not transparent" into "visible" to make it sound like it's not proving a negative you're asking me to do just now and several times in this thread. In any case it's irrelevant and dealt with above.

Visible... it's not like the post you quoted, and the former ones, didn't contain other adjectives. Thick, opaque, opaque like seen in the episode, etc.Your calculations can be as correct as you want them to be, what remains to be shown is if they can result in such a visible and thick stream.

By the way, McKay actually spoke of a proton stream.

Do you need a multi-kilometer wide asteroid to hit Earth to know that it would destroy life?
What he said about the stream and so on, and that after having time to verify the Lantean database, was based on the idea that he was right.
So in his mind, there could have been a stream that would kill life on the planet. And yes, in his mind, and based on the time he had to verify all that and the archives, he was convincing that this life threatening stream could be stopped by the ship before it fanned out.
And, finally, based on this, he considered that the ZPM would be necessary.

So it doesn't matter if he was right in the end, because all he assumed to happen, which actually did happen like he predicted, is what you need to use for your calcs. You cannot ditch whatever pleases you, like the fact that it would kill life on the planet for hundreds of years, because it has nothing to do with what was even theorized to happen. And McKay was convinced that the ship could withstand that onslaught. If you're trying to demonstrate that what was planned to happen in the show was scientifically impossible, then good job, because that's what I said from the beginning, and proves your calc useless.

But you still haven't demonstrated that what he thought will happen actually happened.

He didn't indicate that things were going differently than planned.
Besides, it's pointless to go with what happened, when we can rely on what he thought would work anyway. With what he thought would happen, he considered the plan doable by squishing the ZPM's power into the shield's matrix.

Did the flare actually last as he predicted? He didn't even know. What was his assumption of the duration of the flare upon which he based his prediction about mass extinction? We don't know. And McKay was lucky in his prediction that Daedalus would survive: the ship started falling apart, what would an hour more do to the ship?

The greater duration wouldn't necessary mean a greater total energy, but could simply mean a lower power with the total energy not changing.

My calculations do not prove that jet was scientifically impossible. It's the other way around. My calculations derive the scientifically possible upper limit on the jet's density.

But density is only an aspect of it.

It is your insistence on higher density that takes it into the realm of impossibility. Do not use your mistakes to discredit my argument.

You keep getting my point wrongly. I do not insist on higher densities, but ask proof that your result would actually look like what they looked on screen, or, at least, prove that the stream you calculated would be as thick as the one we "saw".

Oh, with the slight difference that ST ships have shields which can withstand contact detonation from such weapons. I'm actually baffled that I need to point that out. These are weapons with at least very high terajoules, to many petajoules, and powers several orders of magnitude above such numbers.

But you can't tell what is the yield of a particular photon torpedo by looking at it any more than you can tell whether a Tomahawk is nuclear tipped or conventional by looking at it fly.
If we see a Burke get hit by a missile that could be nuclear or conventional tipped, and survive, we conclude it was a conventional one not that there is a contradiction with USS Cole bombing.
Analogously when we see a Star Trek ship, which we know can be damaged or destroyed by TW level power, take a hit from a photon torpedo and survive we conclude that the particular torpedo had a less powerful warhead not that the previously observed event is contradicted.

Unless of course we have data that helps calculate the yields of warheads, or other events which help us gauge the power that goes into the shields.
We have enough of the first that prove the yields I talked about. So obviously there is a contradiction.

[Mr. Oragahn]

When ship's shields are overwhelmed by a certain amount of power that is an upper limit on it's defensive capability and not a lower limit. While there are incidents in which photon torpedoes could have larger yield this is easily explained by larger warhead which we know they can install in "Omega" for example.
In the episode "Treachary, faith and the great river" we have a scene where Jem'Hadar fighter fires at a 100m comet, it's beam is blocked and it ends up putting a 30m wide gash in it. At that time they were trying to destroy a Runabout and we know that they are not capable of destroying it with a single shot thus their weapons were likely at maximum or close to it. It would take around 50 tons of TNT to crater a 100m comet but since this was not a centrally buried explosive but a beam the actual requirement would be on the order of 500t or more. In any case it again puts a rough upper limit on the firepower of a ship that is a major threat to Alpha Quadrant powers.
Other notable examples would be Reliant firing at Enterprise which didn't have shields. Even the second time it fired and destroyed it's port photon launcher the phaser penetration was extremely limited, no more than 5 meters deep or the starboard photon would also be incapacitated, 2m wide gash. Compare this to 750m (some sources indicate even over 1km) long Narn vessels cut in half effortlessly. Jem'Hadar ships from the episode "Jem'Hadar" also failed to cause significant damage to effectively shieldless Odyssey. These incidents also indicate that level of protection provided by the Star Trek ship shields is not orders of magnitude greater than that provided by it's armor.

Shadow beam is at least 80kt/s (vaporizing 750m long, on average 15m thick Narn cruiser at 10m width). Assuming 5% is actual metal and all else air that is 44 million kg of iron which requires 80kt to be vaporized. Since the beam cut through the Narn ships consistently without any impediment, flickering or visible decrease in strength on the other side the actual output is at least several times larger likely an order of magnitude.
That is on the order of 1000TW focused in a beam 10m wide and will definitely cause massive damage to a Galaxy class.
10-60MT is 50,000TJ-300,000TJ or the level of energy which threatens Galaxy even when absorbed over a time period of 3 hours and 10 times the rough upper limit for the energy that obliterated the Borg ship. Shadow ship absorbed it in fraction of a second bringing the power level at maybe even million TW.

Some of the beams were struggling to slice through the Narn cruisers, while some others clearly cut them in half in little time. Either way, there's clearly an indication that some of the Battlecrabs were not capable of outputting as much power as their comrades. Precharge, maybe?

None of that makes any sense in context of the episode, where it is clearly stated that the star had entered a period of instability and increased radiation output, and we see at least initially very high speed velocity CMEs. Furthermore, you assume that the shields are 23% of what is available when the ship is at full power, rather than also taking into account that the shields are at 23% percent of what the auxiliary power itself can provide.

RAGER
Captain! I'm reading intense
graviton emissions on the surface
of --

The ship is suddenly ROCKED HARD and people are flung
about. The LIGHTS DIM and several consoles go OUT.
The ship goes to RED ALERT.

DATA
(off console)
Some type of tractor beam has
locked onto us.

RIKER
Helm, get us out of here!

RAGER
We've lost main power... auxiliary
power down to twenty percent.

...

As before. The Bridge is SHAKING and the lights are
DIM. The main viewer shows the atmosphere rushing
past, with a glowing SUN directly ahead.

...

RAGER
Auxiliary power failing.

DATA
(working)
The resonance frequency of the
tractor beams is incompatible with
our power systems. Warp and
impulse engine relays have been
overloaded. I am attempting to
compensate.

...

PICARD
Full sensor sweep, Mister Data.
Where are we?

DATA
We are approximately ninety
million kilometers from the star's
photosphere.
(beat)
I am reading a great deal of
surface instability. It may
be--

Suddenly Rager breaks in.

RAGER
(urgent)
Sir. The inertial motion from
the tractor beams is still carrying
us forward. The impulse engines
are off-line and I can't stop
our momentum. We're falling
directly into the star.

...

DATA
We will enter the sun's
photosphere in three minutes.

PICARD
Maneuvering thrusters?

RIKER
I've got thirty percent power...
it won't be enough to stop us.

PICARD
No. But it may be enough to turn
us into orbit and hold our
distance from the photosphere.

Riker sits down at the Engineering console and bends to
work.

PICARD
(to Riker)
Port thrusters ahead full,
starboard back full.

Riker works the console.

DATA
(off console)
Our flight path is changing...
right ten point seven degrees...
insufficient to clear the
photosphere.

RIKER
(to com)
Lieutenant Bartel, divert all
power from auxiliary relay systems
to the maneuvering thrusters.

...

DATA
Our angular deflection is
increasing. Now at fifteen
degrees... eighteen... turn
now twenty point one degrees.

...

The giant image of the star gradually shifts to the
left as the ship manages to turn away.

...

RAGER
We're in orbit, Captain. Our
altitude is one hundred fifty
thousand kilometers.

RIKER
(to Picard)
I'll see about getting main power
back on-line.

PICARD
Very well.

...

DATA
The sphere appears to be
abandoned.

Data works the console and a schematic diagram of the
sphere and star appears on the monitor. Several
sections of the star have been highlighted.

DATA
Our sensors show that the star
is extremely unstable. It is
experiencing severe bursts of
radiation and matter expulsions.

PICARD
That would explain why they
abandoned it.
(beat)
But if there's no one still
living here, how were we brought
inside?

DATA
I believe we triggered a series
of automatic piloting beams which
were designed to guide ships into
the sphere.

...

WORF
(urgent)
Sir. Sensors show a large
magnetic disturbance on the
star's surface.

Data works his console.

DATA
It is a solar flare, Captain.
Magnitude: twelve. Class: B.

PICARD
(to Worf)
Shields?

WORF
Shields are up... but only at
twenty-three percent.

DATA
The star has entered a period of
increased activity. Our sensors
indicate that solar flares will
continue to grow. In three hours,
our shields will no longer be
be sufficient to protect us.

...

EXT. SPACE - IN THE SPHERE (OPTICAL)

The ship is still in orbit around the star. A HUGE
SOLAR FLARE billows up behind the ship... part of the
flaming plasma brushes against the shields of the
Enterprise.

INT. MAIN BRIDGE

Picard, Data, Worf, and Rager at their stations. The
ship ROCKS.

WORF
Shields still holding... but down
another fifteen percent.

RIKER'S COM VOICE
Riker to Captain.

PICARD
Go ahead Number One.

RIKER'S COM VOICE
We've restored helm control...
and you have partial impulse
power.

PICARD
Good. Stand-by.
(to Worf)
Can we use the phasers to open
a hole in the sphere?

WORF
No, sir. The exterior shell is
composed of carbon-neutronium.
Our weapons would be ineffective.

PICARD
Mister Data, we need to find a
way out of here. Begin scanning
for another hatch or portal that
might still be open.

DATA
The interior surface area is over
ten to the sixteenth square
kilometers. It will take seven
hours to completely scan the
surface.

The whole question is hos shields work and if the auxiliary power has anything to do with the percentage.
Generally, once the shields take a severe hit, they don't recover in the following minutes.
Does the percentage indicate a given amount of energy left to cope with any further attack, or is it relative to the structural integrity of the shielding system, and so at 0% it's definitely burned out (all emitters fried for example)?
When shields are back at near 100%, are we told they are recharged, or are we told they're repaired?

Nor for that matter do you seem to pay attention where it was stated that the temperature output of the star in "Descent" raised the ship's hull temperature by 12,000 C. That is not a normal star and the ship's shields were holding dispite not being metaphasic shields and most importantly being pounded on by the Borg ship (at least 36% damage). They only implemented the metaphasic shield program after all of that, and even then when they were already very close to the star. Once the program was initiated, it started to destablize after several minutes (up to 5 minutes of dialog on the planets surface and a few tens of seconds.) , and would take up to 4 more minutes to lose integrity. So a mere five minutes is incorrect. Over 9 minutes total. Also, dispite the dialog stating they were entering the star's corona, the visuals shown them appearing to enter into the chromosphere or photosphere.

The other problem with claiming weakness for the Borg ship is that like the SG example, the solar flare reaches the Borg ship in a state that is highly concentrated and is only somewhat wider than the ship itself indicating something unsual. The many of the same issues there apply here.

I'd suggest an exceptional magnetic field or something else like antimatter. These are the most recurrent ideas that surface when scientist talk about coronas, to explain what heats them up.
So something would heat up the hull without necessarily managing to heat up enough of the tenuous coronal gases. It could even be some field that happens to be much more interactive with metals than gases.

I don't know where you get that. The BoP Kurn and Worf were in was heavily damaged from fighting and was under constant bombardment by the pursuing Duras BoPs. Yet it managed to survive practically skimming the photosphere for at least a couple minutes. The two pursuing BoPs look like they could be either crashing into the material kicked up by Kurn's BoP, or they could be crashing into the surface of the photosphere itself. Although non-canon, the shooting script agrees with the latter interpretation.

It looked like the warp drive pulled some stuff from the photosphere and literally intercepted the path of the Duras' BoPs, blowing them up.

And we're not even getting into more interesting territory such as VOY's "Parallax" where flying around a black hole's event horizon is a piece of cake.

It would depend on how hot the accretion disc is, and how much energy the black hole radiates as well. There are limits to this.

That photonic torpedoes provide at least several orders of magnitude above that shouldn't come as any big shock. The idea of torpedoes only being a few TWs runs completely contrary to ENT's "Sleeping Dogs" where torpedoes detonated hundreds of meters away from a Klingon Raptor push it up several hundred meters against the gravity and dense atmosphere of a gas giant.

That's supposedly a ship with a crew of 12 though, and that close to a gas giant, there would still be some traces of atmosphere.

Are you even watching these episodes, Kane? Look at these pages from TrekCore..

http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbna ... 60&page=14
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbna ... 60&page=15
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbna ... 60&page=16
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbna ... 60&page=17

... And tell me again that those things are only 100 meters wide, or that they are only getting a little 30 meter wide crater punched in them. All of them are getting utterly blown apart with some clearly gaseous vaporized material to boot. Even if we accepted that, which is silly, it runs contrary to the megaton level firepower effect of a weak Cardassian freighter's phaser beam on an asteroid some 400,000 km away and a planetary defense disruptor on an asteroid some 200,000-500,000 km distant as seen in DS9's "Return to Grace".

http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... gr_279.jpg
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... gr_280.jpg
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... gr_281.jpg
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... gr_282.jpg
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... gr_283.jpg
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... gr_284.jpg
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... gr_285.jpg
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... gr_286.jpg
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... gr_287.jpg

They're not vaporizing any considerable volume of ice but blowing whole chunks up.
A Jem'Hadar fighter is +90 meters long. Going by the width of the beam, the first asteroids they blow up are of the same size as a Jem'hadar fighter, perhaps a bit wider, but they're not perfectly spherical either, so settling for 100 meters is right.

Then come the bits they blow up from larger asteroids.

http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... gr_290.jpg
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... gr_291.jpg
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... gr_292.jpg

This one is hard to gauge since we don't see the width of the beam when it strikes the asteroid. It would probably make the two chunks some 100-150 meters wide each, with a percentage of the pulverized icy mass that's heated up to the point in turns into bright and silverish white gases. The debris are still fairly large.

http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... gr_295.jpg
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... gr_296.jpg
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... gr_297.jpg

This one is even harder to tell. But considering that runabout skimmed it and pulled up to avoid the asteroid, we can consider that it's relatively close enough to the asteroid on the vertical plan. Since the Danube-class is 20 meters long, and its width seems to be 75% its length, I'd go with a value of 15 meters.
The fracture seems to be 17 meters wide at its widest point, and some 45-50 meters long. Depth would be around 30 meters or more.

http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... gr_298.jpg
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... gr_299.jpg

Another fracture of ice partially turned white. It seems to be about two Bugs long, but only one Bug wide.

If we had to look at those partial vaporizations in space, we'd probably get some couple of very high gigawatts here, if not terawatts.

[Kane Starkiller]

Why didn't you work from the fact that the stream is visible? And I mean thick like as the intense fiery trail of a mega-flamethrower.
You have worked with pressure, without even trying to know if your numbers, pressures and densities worked with the fact that it was visible at all.

The pressure numbers cannot not work because it's physically impossible for the jet stream to be denser than I calculated. I chose the pressure limitation since it is dictated by a clear cut laws and formulas and even before that it seemed apparent to me that pressure will be limited. Again: I derived the limitation on pressure from gas laws. Show that they are impossible or incorrect or you have no point. If you know something I don't, namely how the visibility of the flame puts a lower limit on the density and the laws of physics behind it there then show it. There is no reason to beat around the bush like that.

You applied half the physical laws. At best, your work is incomplete.

My intent was to calculate the upper limit on pressure. To do that gas laws was all that was necessary. Again if you know something I don't and my calculations are wrong then say it.

And we see how big it is at that distance. It would be, at the very least, bigger than the moon. How do your assumptions even work there? Plasma fans out, it doesn't contract. It would appear that you tried to apply half-science to something is neither the complete visual evidence, nor the complete dialogue evidence.

We see a large flare collapse, there is a disturbance across a large chunk of the stellar surface and then we see a jet come into view. The frame in which we first see the jet is the frame in which it has risen close enough to the camera that it can be seen not the moment it raised from the surface since at that time it was too small to be visible.

That's not the problem. Air absorbs X-rays, even high energy hard ones.
X-ray absorption and transmission through air:

http://panoptesv.com/SciFi/HardX.html <- Hard X-rays at 1 e-11 are largely attenuated within less than 100 meters of air, and completely absorbed within the over couple hundred meters that follow.
Note the tip of the absorption curve (green) also points downwards on the far left. This one will obviously implies high figures for hard X-rays (the more penetrative ones) to get anywhere close to the surface of the planet.

http://www.3dx-ray.com/pdfs/3dx_begin_gd_uk_f_0107.pdf <- At 15 km, a human subject would absorb 10 µSv/H, and only 0.03 µSv/H at sea level. Therefore the difference over 15 Km is a factor of 333.33--. Which means that by picking the figure I obtained earlier on (but this time divided by two for only one side of the planet is hit), we move to 1.888 e21 J.
Which over 23 hours still means a power of 22,801.93 e12 W.
But we know that the photon blast, which is different from the other particle blast of protons travelling at 4,000 km/s, could have only lasted as long as the ship remained in position, which is a couple of minutes only. Ten of them, tops. That's 600 seconds, or a power of 3,146,666.67 e12 W.
The source in question also puts the lethal does at 3000 instead of 1000.

http://www.lot-oriel.com/site/site_down ... deen01.pdf <- For your X-ray photons to pass through air relatively unstopped, and that still over short distances, you respectively need the following energies: 7 KeV to cross 1 cm, 40~45 KeV to cross 100 cm (all at sea level). By extrapolation (nothing proved here), by multiplying the energy by 5.7~6.4, you increase the distance by 100. If the pattern repeated itself, for photons at 258 KeV, they'd cross 100 meters before being stopped.
120 KeV is at the "upper" (in fact lower) end of hard X-rays.
This is speculative, but we can look at the stronger gamma-rays, notably those noticed from certain lightnings, or eventually the left over from nukes which have light casings, and thus would absorb little of the emitted X-rays.

One of the possible ways to get your X-rays down to the surface is actually to get rid of the air to the point it's light enough to stop acting as an obstacle, or that eventually plasma may be a greater enabler, but I didn't check plasma properties regarding X-rays transmission, although if temperatures get high enough, gamma-rays and X-rays will radiate from such plasma. But then to make a column of plasma all the way down to the surface, we're speaking of putting the whole volume of exposed on fire, literally. And then, that's to be made over all the exposed area. Which would obviously fit with an mass extinction level event.

Then we can look at gamma rays, with energies thousand times greater. But both gamma and X rays are totally absorbed by atoms, producing ions. So although the energies per particle differ, their behaviour is roughly similar, which I suppose logically means that for a given amount of radiation, if you go with gamma rays, then you need less of them. Which is what will happen considering that we're fixed at 50,000 rems. So we'll get less gamma-rays, and therefore the problem will remain the same, and actually possibly even worse, since the less gamma-photons, the more atoms of oxygen and other gases there are to interact with in comparison, which as crazy as it sounds would mean our fixed quantity of MeV photons would not even be numerous enough to punch through the entire atmosphere (unless gamma rays, because of their higher energies, somehow "dodge" collisions on a higher rate, but I didn't find evidence of this yet).

None of this is news and none of this changes anything. A human would receive 0.03µSv/H at sea level from standard solar radiation which, as I already explained, only emitts mW/m2 of radiation in X-rays. I already calculated that a 100m wide TW level radiation composed mostly of ultraviolet rays, gamma rays and x-rays (hitting Daedalus) would translate into 30MW/m2 across the Earth. Using your 333 factor atenuation that is 90kW/m2 which then translates into 320Sv/H. More than enough to kill a human.

That's an unconvincing evasion. The ship is hit at a 3/4 angle, so the angle alone cannot explain how we see such a low stream. The stated speed is so huge that we're talking about a distance of probably 50,000 Deadalus-lengths covered per second. It's abundantly clear that we couldn't even discern any detail on the stream if it was moving that fast.

Then the energy level is much lower. How does this change the upper limit or my conclusion that Shadow beam could penetrate it's shields?

Visible... it's not like the post you quoted, and the former ones, didn't contain other adjectives. Thick, opaque, opaque like seen in the episode, etc.Your
calculations can be as correct as you want them to be, what remains to be shown is if they can result in such a visible and thick stream. By the way, McKay actually spoke of a proton stream.

You can't question my calculations on the upper limit on density by your hunch feeling that it won't be visible nor can you demand from me to follow up on your hunch with calculations. Either provide your own calculations or concede the point.
Secondly the upper layers of phototsphere are mostly composed of hydrogen atoms and at such temperatures they will be ionised (plasma) and hydrogen ion is a proton.

He didn't indicate that things were going differently than planned.
Besides, it's pointless to go with what happened, when we can rely on what he thought would work anyway. With what he thought would happen, he considered the plan doable by squishing the ZPM's power into the shield's matrix.

He said he didn't know how long the flare would last. In the end did it last long enough to measure up to his predictions? There is no evidence. He actually considered it a bad plan IIRC and it was done out of desperation. As I already pointed out Daedalus came very close to destruction.

The greater duration wouldn't necessary mean a greater total energy, but could simply mean a lower power with the total energy not changing.

What could modify the power rate? It is dictated by radiation which is dependent on the temperature and the kinetic energy of the plasma.

But density is only an aspect of it.

It was the aspect I was interested in and which derives the upper limit on it's energy content. If you are interested in further aspect you are free to explore them. Let me know if you find something interesting.

You keep getting my point wrongly. I do not insist on higher densities, but ask proof that your result would actually look like what they looked on
screen, or, at least, prove that the stream you calculated would be as thick as the one we "saw".

The proof is the observation of the episode. We see the way it looked. If you have a hunch something is amiss then follow it up wit research and calculations. You can't attack my calculations with your hunches.

Unless of course we have data that helps calculate the yields of warheads, or other events which help us gauge the power that goes into the shields.
We have enough of the first that prove the yields I talked about. So obviously there is a
contradiction.

What other events are there that let us directly gauge the resilience of the shields? What data do you have to calculate the yield of those particular warheads we see impacting the ships?

Some of the beams were struggling to slice through the Narn cruisers, while some others clearly cut them in half in little time. Either way, there's clearly an indication that some of the Battlecrabs were not capable of outputting as much power as their comrades. Precharge, maybe?

When did the beams struggle? Every time they engaged the Narns the beams sliced cleanly through them.

The whole question is hos shields work and if the auxiliary power has anything to do with the percentage.
Generally, once the shields take a severe hit, they don't recover in the following minutes.
Does the percentage indicate a given amount of energy left to cope with any further attack, or is it relative to the structural integrity of the shielding system, and so at 0% it's definitely burned out (all emitters fried for example)?
When shields are back at near 100%, are we told they are recharged, or are we told they're repaired?

I have no doubt that if the main power is offline shields won't be at full strength. None of this has any bearing on Worf's simple declaration that shields are at 23% which Mike DiCenso claims is actually 23% of some lower strength for which there is zero evidence. All that the captain needs to know is what is status of the ship not an entire history of the event.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Why didn't you work from the fact that the stream is visible? And I mean thick like as the intense fiery trail of a mega-flamethrower.
You have worked with pressure, without even trying to know if your numbers, pressures and densities worked with the fact that it was visible at all.

The pressure numbers cannot not work because it's physically impossible for the jet stream to be denser than I calculated. I chose the pressure limitation since it is dictated by a clear cut laws and formulas and even before that it seemed apparent to me that pressure will be limited. Again: I derived the limitation on pressure from gas laws. Show that they are impossible or incorrect or you have no point. If you know something I don't, namely how the visibility of the flame puts a lower limit on the density and the laws of physics behind it there then show it. There is no reason to beat around the bush like that.
...
My intent was to calculate the upper limit on pressure. To do that gas laws was all that was necessary. Again if you know something I don't and my calculations are wrong then say it.

So, you're trying to tell me that you're making a calculation that would both fit visuals and science? But you can't tell me if the densities you worked from, with the temperatures you used, would make the matter show up like it did in the episode.
Here's how the thing looked on screen:

http://www.stargatecaps.com/sga/s3/312/ ... s0810.html
http://www.stargatecaps.com/sga/s3/312/ ... s0811.html
http://www.stargatecaps.com/sga/s3/312/ ... s0830.html
http://www.stargatecaps.com/sga/s3/312/ ... s0833.html

It's obviously pure nonsense. Is your calculation trying to work with this or not? I'm genuinely lost about your position.

That's not the problem. Air absorbs X-rays, even high energy hard ones.
X-ray absorption and transmission through air:

http://panoptesv.com/SciFi/HardX.html <- Hard X-rays at 1 e-11 are largely attenuated within less than 100 meters of air, and completely absorbed within the over couple hundred meters that follow.
Note the tip of the absorption curve (green) also points downwards on the far left. This one will obviously implies high figures for hard X-rays (the more penetrative ones) to get anywhere close to the surface of the planet.

http://www.3dx-ray.com/pdfs/3dx_begin_gd_uk_f_0107.pdf <- At 15 km, a human subject would absorb 10 µSv/H, and only 0.03 µSv/H at sea level. Therefore the difference over 15 Km is a factor of 333.33--. Which means that by picking the figure I obtained earlier on (but this time divided by two for only one side of the planet is hit), we move to 1.888 e21 J.
Which over 23 hours still means a power of 22,801.93 e12 W.
But we know that the photon blast, which is different from the other particle blast of protons travelling at 4,000 km/s, could have only lasted as long as the ship remained in position, which is a couple of minutes only. Ten of them, tops. That's 600 seconds, or a power of 3,146,666.67 e12 W.
The source in question also puts the lethal does at 3000 instead of 1000.

http://www.lot-oriel.com/site/site_down ... deen01.pdf <- For your X-ray photons to pass through air relatively unstopped, and that still over short distances, you respectively need the following energies: 7 KeV to cross 1 cm, 40~45 KeV to cross 100 cm (all at sea level). By extrapolation (nothing proved here), by multiplying the energy by 5.7~6.4, you increase the distance by 100. If the pattern repeated itself, for photons at 258 KeV, they'd cross 100 meters before being stopped.
120 KeV is at the "upper" (in fact lower) end of hard X-rays.
This is speculative, but we can look at the stronger gamma-rays, notably those noticed from certain lightnings, or eventually the left over from nukes which have light casings, and thus would absorb little of the emitted X-rays.

One of the possible ways to get your X-rays down to the surface is actually to get rid of the air to the point it's light enough to stop acting as an obstacle, or that eventually plasma may be a greater enabler, but I didn't check plasma properties regarding X-rays transmission, although if temperatures get high enough, gamma-rays and X-rays will radiate from such plasma. But then to make a column of plasma all the way down to the surface, we're speaking of putting the whole volume of exposed on fire, literally. And then, that's to be made over all the exposed area. Which would obviously fit with an mass extinction level event.

Then we can look at gamma rays, with energies thousand times greater. But both gamma and X rays are totally absorbed by atoms, producing ions. So although the energies per particle differ, their behaviour is roughly similar, which I suppose logically means that for a given amount of radiation, if you go with gamma rays, then you need less of them. Which is what will happen considering that we're fixed at 50,000 rems. So we'll get less gamma-rays, and therefore the problem will remain the same, and actually possibly even worse, since the less gamma-photons, the more atoms of oxygen and other gases there are to interact with in comparison, which as crazy as it sounds would mean our fixed quantity of MeV photons would not even be numerous enough to punch through the entire atmosphere (unless gamma rays, because of their higher energies, somehow "dodge" collisions on a higher rate, but I didn't find evidence of this yet).

None of this is news and none of this changes anything. A human would receive 0.03µSv/H at sea level from standard solar radiation which, as I already explained, only emitts mW/m2 of radiation in X-rays.

On the average, you're at 10^-6 of sunlight.

I already calculated that a 100m wide TW level radiation composed mostly of ultraviolet rays, gamma rays and x-rays (hitting Daedalus) would translate into 30MW/m2 across the Earth. Using your 333 factor atenuation that is 90kW/m2 which then translates into 320Sv/H. More than enough to kill a human.

Hang on. You mention the width, but what does it have to do with anything here?

1. It's important, therefore we must multiply the intensity (in terawatts) by the cross section of the 100 meters wide beam, which would have an area of 3.1416 e4 m², thus obviously putting even the smallest terawatt value into the petawatt range for the shields, and exawatt range for high terawatt values (e14 TW).
2. It has nothing to do with the width, so we can solely concentrate on the terawatt figure.

So let's pick the highest value in the terawatt range for the intercepted pack of photons alone:
9.99 e14 W.
Now, we get the intensity high in the atmosphere, divided by half of Earth's surface area:
2.55 e14 m².

Your intensity is:
I = 3.9176 W/m²

This is spread over the whole planet, without counting the absorption factor which will obviously reach higher than 333, since we only compared the decrease from the ground to an altitude of 15 km, which represents a fraction of the atmosphere, even the thick one (supersonic crafts only allow themselves to reach supersonic speeds above 30 km in general because that's where the atmosphere starts to be thin enough).
So the factor would be at least 500, not 333, and with all the atmosphere remaining, I wouldn't be surprised to reach up to a factor of 550~600.
Still, with a factor of 500, the intensity at sea level will be less than:

7.8352 e-3 W/m²!

That's the range of soft X-rays that hit the top of the atmosphere.
Even if you multiplied it by the human surface area I got earlier on (1.8 m²), you'd get 1.410336 e-2 W for an entire human.
With a 80 kg heavy individual, you get 1.76292 e-4 W/kg, or 1.76292 e-4 Sv/s.
Over 23 hours, that's 14.6 Sv.
Compared to the 500 Sv that equal 50,000 rem. 34.25 times less.
Which means, after we adjust the real value, a shield holding against 34,215.75 terawatts. That's in the petawatt range.
And that's over 23 hours non stop.

Then, again, McKay considered that it would work even if the all the energy was delivered over a couple of minutes.
Which, as I said, what you deemed to be a firm upper end is nothing more than a firm abyssal lowest possible end.

Note that I should pick a value for the sphere greater than Earth's radius, since the energy hits the atmosphere many dozens of kilometers above the surface. But what would make a greater SA, and not help your figures since the intensity would be lower.

That's an unconvincing evasion. The ship is hit at a 3/4 angle, so the angle alone cannot explain how we see such a low stream. The stated speed is so huge that we're talking about a distance of probably 50,000 Deadalus-lengths covered per second. It's abundantly clear that we couldn't even discern any detail on the stream if it was moving that fast.

Then the energy level is much lower.

And yet the stream reached the camera a very few seconds after the splotch collapsed, and the camera was quite at a good distance from the photosphere.

How does this change the upper limit or my conclusion that Shadow beam could penetrate it's shields?

This question has been addressed above, and your conclusion proved wrong.

Visible... it's not like the post you quoted, and the former ones, didn't contain other adjectives. Thick, opaque, opaque like seen in the episode, etc.Your
calculations can be as correct as you want them to be, what remains to be shown is if they can result in such a visible and thick stream. By the way, McKay actually spoke of a proton stream.

You can't question my calculations on the upper limit on density by your hunch feeling that it won't be visible nor can you demand from me to follow up on your hunch with calculations. Either provide your own calculations or concede the point.

It's a hunch as much as you use the pressures as the basis of your calculation, say it works with visuals, but didn't check if it would result in what we saw.
For example, assuming that hydrogen atoms are all ionized and that each electron counted in a flare corresponds to an hydrogen ion that is also carried away through the stream, then the book (with the Google system) I pointed at earlier on gives densities of 44~7 e18 electrons/m³.

That's already five~six orders of magnitude above your concentration, which was 10^13 particles/m³.
Which from your 3.2 GW, would at least turn out to be 224 TW to 1.408 PW.

If this wasn't enough, I have to question the densities your worked out.
This website and this one give numbers of proton densities for solar winds that can reach two dozens of protons/cm³ (millions per cubic meter) in solar winds. Since these values logically correspond to readings from satellites around Earth, and perhaps derived values from observation centers on the ground, I find it rather weird that the highest observations made in the vicinity of Earth for solar winds can dwarf your results, when we know that particle clouds and bursts will expand through space, and would represent but a fraction of the original densities.

Secondly the upper layers of phototsphere are mostly composed of hydrogen atoms and at such temperatures they will be ionised (plasma) and hydrogen ion is a proton.

I reckon that the wording made it sound like a critic, but it wasn't. I just figured out that it was worth mentioning that he expected real world particles, not some exotic stuff.

He didn't indicate that things were going differently than planned.
Besides, it's pointless to go with what happened, when we can rely on what he thought would work anyway. With what he thought would happen, he considered the plan doable by squishing the ZPM's power into the shield's matrix.

He said he didn't know how long the flare would last. In the end did it last long enough to measure up to his predictions? There is no evidence. He actually considered it a bad plan IIRC and it was done out of desperation. As I already pointed out Daedalus came very close to destruction.

But it did work, and knowing the guy, when he thinks something has no chances, he actually bitches and moans about it and how everybody's fucked.

The greater duration wouldn't necessary mean a greater total energy, but could simply mean a lower power with the total energy not changing.

What could modify the power rate? It is dictated by radiation which is dependent on the temperature and the kinetic energy of the plasma.

You consider that a weaker eruption, even if lasting longer, would be impossible?

Unless of course we have data that helps calculate the yields of warheads, or other events which help us gauge the power that goes into the shields.
We have enough of the first that prove the yields I talked about. So obviously there is a
contradiction.

What other events are there that let us directly gauge the resilience of the shields? What data do you have to calculate the yield of those particular warheads we see impacting the ships?

Are you joking?
Maybe you want to take a tour and read a couple of threads on this website, there's been a consequent number of threads where asteroid busting by torps or beams have been observed.
You're free to bump them if you think there's a new view to propose.

Some of the beams were struggling to slice through the Narn cruisers, while some others clearly cut them in half in little time. Either way, there's clearly an indication that some of the Battlecrabs were not capable of outputting as much power as their comrades. Precharge, maybe?

When did the beams struggle? Every time they engaged the Narns the beams sliced cleanly through them.

At 1:44 of the battle, the cruiser in the background is not cut as swiftly as the one in the foreground, and that's despite the beam literally punching through the cruiser's stern, and therefore digging through the soft meat, and having zero reason to encounter any greater resistance than if the beam was sweeping over the armoured hull. Oh sure, the cruiser gets downed, and still fast, but considering how all the other cruisers pose no resistance whatsoever and get down even faster, the delay here is quite noticeable.

So it means that the weapon is not necessarily working at its lowest level in most cases, since we have one where the beam is temporarily halted while the target has nothing special to bring up to explain this.

The whole question is hos shields work and if the auxiliary power has anything to do with the percentage.
Generally, once the shields take a severe hit, they don't recover in the following minutes.
Does the percentage indicate a given amount of energy left to cope with any further attack, or is it relative to the structural integrity of the shielding system, and so at 0% it's definitely burned out (all emitters fried for example)?
When shields are back at near 100%, are we told they are recharged, or are we told they're repaired?

I have no doubt that if the main power is offline shields won't be at full strength. None of this has any bearing on Worf's simple declaration that shields are at 23% which Mike DiCenso claims is actually 23% of some lower strength for which there is zero evidence. All that the captain needs to know is what is status of the ship not an entire history of the event.

I'd agree, but if 23% corresponds to how well shields will work at transferring energy, and not how much energy they actually have left, therefore it's clear that if shields can only work at 23% of their maximum capacity, they'll only transfer a fraction of the power they're given. And if that power is even inferior to what it can usually rely on, it's even lower.
Hell, I don't know, it could be so bad that even at 23%, the flux the shields would be capable of managing would be greater than what the current power source could provide, although for such a case, I believe the computer would automatically adjust to the lowest common denominator.

But the question still remains. Is 23% a fraction of an energy stock, or an indication of how much of the whole incoming flux the shields will be able to handle?

[Kane Starkiller]

So, you're trying to tell me that you're making a calculation that would both fit visuals and science? But you can't tell me if the densities you worked from, with the temperatures you used, would make the matter show up like it did in the episode.
Here's how the thing looked on screen:

http://www.stargatecaps.com/sga/s3/312/ ... s0810.html
http://www.stargatecaps.com/sga/s3/312/ ... s0811.html
http://www.stargatecaps.com/sga/s3/312/ ... s0830.html
http://www.stargatecaps.com/sga/s3/312/ ... s0833.html

It's obviously pure nonsense. Is your calculation trying to work with this or not? I'm genuinely lost about your position.

I was interested in finding relevant limitations on the flare in question. In this case the relevant limitation is it's power limited by density which is limited by pressure. That is all. "Pure nonsense" means nothing. It's a subjective opinion.

On the average, you're at 10^-6 of sunlight.

Yes this is the usual percentage of X-rays sun emits.

Hang on. You mention the width, but what does it have to do with anything here?

1. It's important, therefore we must multiply the intensity (in terawatts) by the cross section of the 100 meters wide beam, which would have an area of 3.1416 e4 m², thus obviously putting even the smallest terawatt value into the petawatt range for the shields, and exawatt range for high terawatt values (e14 TW).
2. It has nothing to do with the width, so we can solely concentrate on the terawatt figure.

So let's pick the highest value in the terawatt range for the intercepted pack of photons alone:
9.99 e14 W.
Now, we get the intensity high in the atmosphere, divided by half of Earth's surface area:
2.55 e14 m².

Your intensity is:
I = 3.9176 W/m²

This is spread over the whole planet, without counting the absorption factor which will obviously reach higher than 333, since we only compared the decrease from the ground to an altitude of 15 km, which represents a fraction of the atmosphere, even the thick one (supersonic crafts only allow themselves to reach supersonic speeds above 30 km in general because that's where the atmosphere starts to be thin enough).
So the factor would be at least 500, not 333, and with all the atmosphere remaining, I wouldn't be surprised to reach up to a factor of 550~600.
Still, with a factor of 500, the intensity at sea level will be less than:

7.8352 e-3 W/m²!

That's the range of soft X-rays that hit the top of the atmosphere.
Even if you multiplied it by the human surface area I got earlier on (1.8 m²), you'd get 1.410336 e-2 W for an entire human.
With a 80 kg heavy individual, you get 1.76292 e-4 W/kg, or 1.76292 e-4 Sv/s.
Over 23 hours, that's 14.6 Sv.
Compared to the 500 Sv that equal 50,000 rem. 34.25 times less.
Which means, after we adjust the real value, a shield holding against 34,215.75 terawatts. That's in the petawatt range.
And that's over 23 hours non stop.

Then, again, McKay considered that it would work even if the all the energy was delivered over a couple of minutes.
Which, as I said, what you deemed to be a firm upper end is nothing more than a firm abyssal lowest possible end.

Note that I should pick a value for the sphere greater than Earth's radius, since the energy hits the atmosphere many dozens of kilometers above the surface. But what would make a greater SA, and not help your figures since the intensity would be lower.

Yes I was off in that calculation but since my own figures were extreme overkill even this result is still around what is enough to kill a human since you only need 20-100Sv to do it. Secondly X-rays were an example of a high energy EM radiation. There are other like ultraviolet rays which penetrate much deeper. Again, it's not necessary for firepower figure to be much higher even assuming Daedalus ended up receiving planet sterilizing amount of radiation which is not conclusive.

And yet the stream reached the camera a very few seconds after the splotch collapsed, and the camera was quite at a good distance from the photosphere.

We can't know for sure when the stream erupted. Maybe the eruption started before the collapse.

This question has been addressed above, and your conclusion proved wrong.

Only because you concentrate solely on the least penetrative of all the high energy EM radiation when they were only one example of the entire spectrum starting from ultraviolet and beyond. Furthermore displayed firepower like in "First Strike" beam which threatens Atlantis (though only after days of exposure) and which is perhaps a few tons of TNT/s provides an additional piece of evidence 1000TW Shadow beam would punch through the shields.

It's a hunch as much as you use the pressures as the basis of your calculation, say it works with visuals, but didn't check if it would result in what we saw.
For example, assuming that hydrogen atoms are all ionized and that each electron counted in a flare corresponds to an hydrogen ion that is also carried away through the stream, then the book (with the Google system) I pointed at earlier on gives densities of 44~7 e18 electrons/m³.

That's already five~six orders of magnitude above your concentration, which was 10^13 particles/m³.
Which from your 3.2 GW, would at least turn out to be 224 TW to 1.408 PW.

If this wasn't enough, I have to question the densities your worked out.
This website and this one give numbers of proton densities for solar winds that can reach two dozens of protons/cm³ (millions per cubic meter) in solar winds. Since these values logically correspond to readings from satellites around Earth, and perhaps derived values from observation centers on the ground, I find it rather weird that the highest observations made in the vicinity of Earth for solar winds can dwarf your results, when we know that particle clouds and bursts will expand through space, and would represent but a fraction of the original densities.

But I didn't make any claims based on my hunch but only after I performed calculations. Google book densities have nothing to do with densities I calculated based on the focus of the beam. Again: show what was wrong with my usage of gas laws instead of these vague indirect attacks.
What is the temperature of those solar winds? Pressure depends on density and temperature. If a gas is at, for example, at 0K it's pressure will be zero in zero g. The plasma jet in question was still at several thousand K judging from it's yellow color.

But it did work, and knowing the guy, when he thinks something has no chances, he actually bitches and moans about it and how everybody's fucked.

Yes it happened to work. But not because of his precise calculations or predictions, he had no clue whether the flare would last for several more seconds or hours. If the beam continued for hours the ship would've been destroyed.

You consider that a weaker eruption, even if lasting longer, would be impossible?

I'm saying that rate of energy release based on total energy is dictated by well known physical laws and would be far easier to predict than the total energy content which would depend on the actual flare in question. So if Rodney couldn't predict how long it would last that means that he didn't know what the total energy will be.

Are you joking?
Maybe you want to take a tour and read a couple of threads on this website, there's been a consequent number of threads where asteroid busting by torps or beams have been observed.
You're free to bump them if you think there's a new view to propose.

Torps can have variable warheads and I don't remember beams ever displaying more than TW level of power.

At 1:44 of the battle, the cruiser in the background is not cut as swiftly as the one in the foreground, and that's despite the beam literally punching through the cruiser's stern, and therefore digging through the soft meat, and having zero reason to encounter any greater resistance than if the beam was sweeping over the armoured hull. Oh sure, the cruiser gets downed, and still fast, but considering how all the other cruisers pose no resistance whatsoever and get down even faster, the delay here is quite noticeable.

So it means that the weapon is not necessarily working at its lowest level in most cases, since we have one where the beam is temporarily halted while the target has nothing special to bring up to explain this.

Actually the cruiser in the background gets cut in half far more quickly than the one in foreground it's just an illusion because the closer beam has a greater angular velocity. The one in the background gets cut in half in about 24 frames or 1 second.

I'd agree, but if 23% corresponds to how well shields will work at transferring energy, and not how much energy they actually have left, therefore it's clear that if shields can only work at 23% of their maximum capacity, they'll only transfer a fraction of the power they're given. And if that power is even inferior to what it can usually rely on, it's even lower.
Hell, I don't know, it could be so bad that even at 23%, the flux the shields would be capable of managing would be greater than what the current power source could provide, although for such a case, I believe the computer would automatically adjust to the lowest common denominator.

But the question still remains. Is 23% a fraction of an energy stock, or an indication of how much of the whole incoming flux the shields will be able to handle?

I already taken this into the account in one of my previous posts: "Thus full shields should be able to withstand between 5TW during 6 hours or 20TW during 3 hours."

[Mr. Oragahn]

So, you're trying to tell me that you're making a calculation that would both fit visuals and science? But you can't tell me if the densities you worked from, with the temperatures you used, would make the matter show up like it did in the episode.
Here's how the thing looked on screen:

http://www.stargatecaps.com/sga/s3/312/ ... s0810.html
http://www.stargatecaps.com/sga/s3/312/ ... s0811.html
http://www.stargatecaps.com/sga/s3/312/ ... s0830.html
http://www.stargatecaps.com/sga/s3/312/ ... s0833.html

It's obviously pure nonsense. Is your calculation trying to work with this or not? I'm genuinely lost about your position.

I was interested in finding relevant limitations on the flare in question. In this case the relevant limitation is it's power limited by density which is limited by pressure. That is all. "Pure nonsense" means nothing. It's a subjective opinion.

Gas pressure alone is not all. There are magnetic fields to take into consideration.
So that's about two things you dismiss: magnetic field and the obvious nonsensical thickness of the stream.
Would you rather simply work from dialogue?

Hang on. You mention the width, but what does it have to do with anything here?

1. It's important, therefore we must multiply the intensity (in terawatts) by the cross section of the 100 meters wide beam, which would have an area of 3.1416 e4 m², thus obviously putting even the smallest terawatt value into the petawatt range for the shields, and exawatt range for high terawatt values (e14 TW).
2. It has nothing to do with the width, so we can solely concentrate on the terawatt figure.

So let's pick the highest value in the terawatt range for the intercepted pack of photons alone:
9.99 e14 W.
Now, we get the intensity high in the atmosphere, divided by half of Earth's surface area:
2.55 e14 m².

Your intensity is:
I = 3.9176 W/m²

This is spread over the whole planet, without counting the absorption factor which will obviously reach higher than 333, since we only compared the decrease from the ground to an altitude of 15 km, which represents a fraction of the atmosphere, even the thick one (supersonic crafts only allow themselves to reach supersonic speeds above 30 km in general because that's where the atmosphere starts to be thin enough).
So the factor would be at least 500, not 333, and with all the atmosphere remaining, I wouldn't be surprised to reach up to a factor of 550~600.
Still, with a factor of 500, the intensity at sea level will be less than:

7.8352 e-3 W/m²!

That's the range of soft X-rays that hit the top of the atmosphere.
Even if you multiplied it by the human surface area I got earlier on (1.8 m²), you'd get 1.410336 e-2 W for an entire human.
With a 80 kg heavy individual, you get 1.76292 e-4 W/kg, or 1.76292 e-4 Sv/s.
Over 23 hours, that's 14.6 Sv.
Compared to the 500 Sv that equal 50,000 rem. 34.25 times less.
Which means, after we adjust the real value, a shield holding against 34,215.75 terawatts. That's in the petawatt range.
And that's over 23 hours non stop.

Then, again, McKay considered that it would work even if the all the energy was delivered over a couple of minutes.
Which, as I said, what you deemed to be a firm upper end is nothing more than a firm abyssal lowest possible end.

Note that I should pick a value for the sphere greater than Earth's radius, since the energy hits the atmosphere many dozens of kilometers above the surface. But what would make a greater SA, and not help your figures since the intensity would be lower.

Yes I was off in that calculation but since my own figures were extreme overkill even this result is still around what is enough to kill a human since you only need 20-100Sv to do it.

The episode establishes 500 Sv. Not 100 Sv. Nor 20 Sv.
Your figure was totally off, yes, by six orders of magnitude.

And I didn't even bother trying to find out how much energy would be necessary to reach people the closer to the poles one would be, as I treated the intensity in an "omnizenith" way, like if sunlight was coming at 90° ontop of every single square meter of the exposed side of the planet, which would only make the figures considerably bigger (the reason we have hot deserts at the equator and ice caps at the poles). I clearly didn't bother with solar angles, which would only greatly increase numbers. Here it's said that for UVB irradience "there is an approximate 50-fold increase as the solar altitude increases from 10 to 90°."
A value confirmed by the observed differences notified here, p. 163, irradiance charts based on ZSA, with values varying by several OoMs.

Secondly X-rays were an example of a high energy EM radiation. There are other like ultraviolet rays which penetrate much deeper.

And how does that help? Not only flares and CMEs are noticeable for the copious amounts of x-rays they release (high temp plasma), so there's less reasons to go with UV.
That, and UV are between x-rays and visible light, and around 9~10% of visible light reaches the surface, based on the sunlight duration during perfect sunshine conditions.
Of course that being outside of cloudy days!

Let's remember the numbers.

Assuming our human had his skin completely unwrapped, you have 1.8 m² of skin to hit with energy. That's already a conservative premise, since there are zones of the human body which wouldn't get as much energy as some others.
I got 22,222 J/m². With half of Lantea being like Earth, we need at the very least 5.667 e18 J. That's assuming each square meter at sea level gets the maximum output with zero absorption, and by assuming that there's a star shining right above each square meter hit by the burst.

So, let's see what we get if we deal with visible light.
Since less than 10% make it to sea level, we'd got with at the very least 5.667 e19 J.
Over 23 hours, that's 684.42 e12 W for our stream.

Now, since we're moving down the wavelength, into the UV, we can look at how much UV is being absorbed by the atmosphere.
Subtypes, UVA, UVB, UVC.
Sources, natural:
"The Sun emits ultraviolet radiation in the UVA, UVB, and UVC bands. The Earth's ozone layer blocks 98.7% of this UV radiation from penetrating through the atmosphere. 98.7% of the ultraviolet radiation that reaches the Earth's surface is UVA. (Some of the UVB and UVC radiation is responsible for the generation of the ozone layer.)"
That's roughly in line with what this source says.

Then we take a lookt at the UV index, which lets get an idea of how much energy is absorbed by subtype. On the ranges that are truly damaging to the skin, UVC and UVB, only the second reaches the ground surface, and in very small quantities, but they remain relevant nonetheless.

For the kicks, there is an UV index weather forecast calculator here, for US regions:
"Each point on the index scale is equivalent to 25 milliwatts/square meter of UV radiation at the earth's surface for UV wavelengths between 290 and 400 nanometers."
ZIP codes here.

This source says that "at an altitude of around 2,000 metres the amount of UV radiation can be up to 30% higher than at sea level."

Page 7 of this document:
"The UV irradiance increases with altitude because the amount of absorbers in the overlaying atmosphere decreases with altitude. Measurements show that the UV irradiance increases by 6-8% per 1000 m increase in altitude."
Some other sources say 7%, one even goes to say 14% per kilometer.
Reports +9%/km.

As EUV, pages 10 and 13 of this document would indicate that you shouldn't even count on it, and would be quicker to put the atmosphere on fire. We can also look at the extreme left of the curve, where wavelengths reach below 50 nm. It also has formulas to calculate absorptions.
Index of all files about planetary atmospheres. Insane amount of data!
This source reports various UVAE figures, from 2 to 25% /km from other sources, to their own narrowed down to 8-13%/km for UVB.
And if this is of interest to anyone, observations about underwater irradience.

I'd probably go back to this book, page 163:
"...large ozone absorption at 305 nm," which is up there on the UVB scale.

If we take a look at the ozone layer, we get an even better idea

For example, a constant increase by 9% over 40km (1.09^40) would correspond to a final difference of 31.41.
We're above the reduction for visible light, and this brings our former 23-hours long rate to 2,149.76 e12 W.

That's if we go with the ionizing radiation wavelengths that would suffer less from absorption. A lower end, in other words.

Again, it's not necessary for firepower figure to be much higher even assuming Daedalus ended up receiving planet sterilizing amount of radiation which is not conclusive.

As long as it fits with 50,000 rems.

And yet the stream reached the camera a very few seconds after the splotch collapsed, and the camera was quite at a good distance from the photosphere.

We can't know for sure when the stream erupted. Maybe the eruption started before the collapse.

Methinks the planet-sized bright explosion should be a good clue of the moment the ejection occured.

This question has been addressed above, and your conclusion proved wrong.

Only because you concentrate solely on the least penetrative of all the high energy EM radiation when they were only one example of the entire spectrum starting from ultraviolet and beyond.

Measurements in rems for ionizing radiation would only look beyond "hard" UVs in the spectrum if the photons were powerful enough to kick electrons, which takes a shit lot of more energy up those scales. Think, for example, about ionizing air with visible light.

Furthermore displayed firepower like in "First Strike" beam which threatens Atlantis (though only after days of exposure) and which is perhaps a few tons of TNT/s provides an additional piece of evidence 1000TW Shadow beam would punch through the shields.

Well, on that you're totally wrong, since we have evidence that ZPM have enormous amounts of energy in stock.
That said, other examples are irrelevant. Let's focus on our single Echoes case.

It's a hunch as much as you use the pressures as the basis of your calculation, say it works with visuals, but didn't check if it would result in what we saw.
For example, assuming that hydrogen atoms are all ionized and that each electron counted in a flare corresponds to an hydrogen ion that is also carried away through the stream, then the book (with the Google system) I pointed at earlier on gives densities of 44~7 e18 electrons/m³.

That's already five~six orders of magnitude above your concentration, which was 10^13 particles/m³.
Which from your 3.2 GW, would at least turn out to be 224 TW to 1.408 PW.

If this wasn't enough, I have to question the densities your worked out.
This website and this one give numbers of proton densities for solar winds that can reach two dozens of protons/cm³ (millions per cubic meter) in solar winds. Since these values logically correspond to readings from satellites around Earth, and perhaps derived values from observation centers on the ground, I find it rather weird that the highest observations made in the vicinity of Earth for solar winds can dwarf your results, when we know that particle clouds and bursts will expand through space, and would represent but a fraction of the original densities.

But I didn't make any claims based on my hunch but only after I performed calculations. Google book densities have nothing to do with densities I calculated based on the focus of the beam. Again: show what was wrong with my usage of gas laws instead of these vague indirect attacks.

I think it should be obvious.
The first part relates hydrogen ions with electron densities. If they're proportional and if there's nearly as many H+ as there are electrons in those blasts, then your figures would be completely off by many orders of magnitude.

The second example would be even more telling. Your result correspond to the densities measured in the vicinity of Earth.
The measures come from the Space Weather Prediction Center.
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/index.html
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ace/ace_rtsw_data.html

Peaks would be measured in tens of protons per cc, or tens of millions of protons per cubic meter. You got a figure such as 10^13 particles/m³.
Even if peaks corresponded to flares and other CMEs, what we get would only be a fraction of the orignal density, as the bursts would expand across space until they cross Earth's path.
Unless I'm missing something, this means your result corresponds to a proton density near Earth, and the particle density of a typical flare or CME would be many orders of magnitude above that, within the corona of Sol.

What is the temperature of those solar winds? Pressure depends on density and temperature.

Why does it matter? The burst wouldn't contract because its bulk mass would cool down. I really don't see where you're going with that.

If a gas is at, for example, at 0K it's pressure will be zero in zero g. The plasma jet in question was still at several thousand K judging from it's yellow color.

Yellow outside, literally white in the center, as seen when it impacts the shield.

But it did work, and knowing the guy, when he thinks something has no chances, he actually bitches and moans about it and how everybody's fucked.

Yes it happened to work. But not because of his precise calculations or predictions, he had no clue whether the flare would last for several more seconds or hours. If the beam continued for hours the ship would've been destroyed.

If he didn't think the shield would hold on for more than some minutes, and since he considered that people would get irradiated up to 500 SV, then it means the total energy has not changed, and you have only reduced the duration, and therefore increased power. This doesn't really help you, I'm afraid.

You consider that a weaker eruption, even if lasting longer, would be impossible?

I'm saying that rate of energy release based on total energy is dictated by well known physical laws and would be far easier to predict than the total energy content which would depend on the actual flare in question. So if Rodney couldn't predict how long it would last that means that he didn't know what the total energy will be.

They studied samples. That's how they knew of the precedent MEE.

Are you joking?
Maybe you want to take a tour and read a couple of threads on this website, there's been a consequent number of threads where asteroid busting by torps or beams have been observed.
You're free to bump them if you think there's a new view to propose.

Torps can have variable warheads and I don't remember beams ever displaying more than TW level of power.

There are enough calcs putting torps in the multi-megaton range.

At 1:44 of the battle, the cruiser in the background is not cut as swiftly as the one in the foreground, and that's despite the beam literally punching through the cruiser's stern, and therefore digging through the soft meat, and having zero reason to encounter any greater resistance than if the beam was sweeping over the armoured hull. Oh sure, the cruiser gets downed, and still fast, but considering how all the other cruisers pose no resistance whatsoever and get down even faster, the delay here is quite noticeable.

So it means that the weapon is not necessarily working at its lowest level in most cases, since we have one where the beam is temporarily halted while the target has nothing special to bring up to explain this.

Actually the cruiser in the background gets cut in half far more quickly than the one in foreground it's just an illusion because the closer beam has a greater angular velocity. The one in the background gets cut in half in about 24 frames or 1 second.

There is no illusion, and your evaluations of durations are rather erroneous, to say the least.
We see the beam first hits the bow of the cruiser, then keeps going down and meets with the stern. The beam was obviously coming at a ~10° angle above the cruiser's plate, from behind. Oddly, it completely fails to penetrate the ship and cause greater damage until it does hit the stern, as evidenced by the lack of explosion until the beam gets there. Logically we'd suggest that the armour resisted, which would fit with what comes next.
Once the beam locks on the engines, it lingers there, energy being poured into the same spot, the beam pushing through but nothing special happens despite the fact that the beam would be going thru the soft guts. Suddenly the cruiser pops!

That's quite different from the other beam that shows no problem to bisect the cruiser in the foreground, and that despite the fact that wherever it hits, it comes into contact with armour.

It's clear and indisputable evidence that the beam hitting the cruiser in the background was less powerful.

I'd agree, but if 23% corresponds to how well shields will work at transferring energy, and not how much energy they actually have left, therefore it's clear that if shields can only work at 23% of their maximum capacity, they'll only transfer a fraction of the power they're given. And if that power is even inferior to what it can usually rely on, it's even lower.
Hell, I don't know, it could be so bad that even at 23%, the flux the shields would be capable of managing would be greater than what the current power source could provide, although for such a case, I believe the computer would automatically adjust to the lowest common denominator.

But the question still remains. Is 23% a fraction of an energy stock, or an indication of how much of the whole incoming flux the shields will be able to handle?

I already taken this into the account in one of my previous posts: "Thus full shields should be able to withstand between 5TW during 6 hours or 20TW during 3 hours."

But shields working at 23% of whatever juice they get from the ship is different if the shields receive energy from the fusion plant instead of the warpcore.

[Mike DiCenso]

But shields working at 23% of whatever juice they get from the ship is different if the shields receive energy from the fusion plant instead of the warpcore.

That has been my point. We don't know that powering off the full warp core or impulse engines does not produce far greater shield capacity. With auxilary power knocked out (it was stated to be failing), they may have been running on batteries for all we know. So is that 23% of shield capacity on batteries, 23% of restored auxilary power, or what? The 5-22 terawatts figure can only be a fairly conservative number under that scenario. Even then, we know that the flares were expected to increase significantly over time in output. Kane's estimate doesn't really account well for that, it's a big unknown by how much. So for example, if we start off under the assumption that 23% shields can handle 5 TW, and the flares would increase that by say at least a factor of 1.5 over the next 3 hours, you then get a little over 32 TWs capacity. But again, we have no idea. What if the CMEs were expected to increase it by up to a full order of magnitude? Say 50 TW, which means that full shields would handle 217 TW. If we assume that 23% is of batteries and apply all the same assumptions, you can wildly drive up the shield's total capacity well beyond that.

Of course this also follows off of Kane's idea of shield capacity, rather than mine, which would mean that if take the total energy absorbed by the shields over that time period and assume that shields act like batteries, rather than have a set, limited capacity that you are either just under or over to damage them or knock them out, you wind up with up to several gigatons of potential total capacity.
-Mike

[Kane Starkiller]

Gas pressure alone is not all. There are magnetic fields to take into consideration.
So that's about two things you dismiss: magnetic field and the obvious nonsensical thickness of the stream.
Would you rather simply work from dialogue?

Magnetic field is not a straight line but a loop and can't explain jet's coherence. I didn't dismiss it. What does it mean that thickness is "obviously nonsensical"? There is no reason not to work with both dialogue and visuals. This is not a radio drama.

The episode establishes 500 Sv. Not 100 Sv. Nor 20 Sv.
Your figure was totally off, yes, by six orders of magnitude.

And I didn't even bother trying to find out how much energy would be necessary to reach people the closer to the poles one would be, as I treated the intensity in an "omnizenith" way, like if sunlight was coming at 90° ontop of every single square meter of the exposed side of the planet, which would only make the figures considerably bigger (the reason we have hot deserts at the equator and ice caps at the poles). I clearly didn't bother with solar angles, which would only greatly increase numbers. Here it's said that for UVB irradience "there is an approximate 50-fold increase as the solar altitude increases from 10 to 90°."
A value confirmed by the observed differences notified here, p. 163, irradiance charts based on ZSA, with values varying by several OoMs.

The episode doesn't establish 500Sv. The episode shows McKay predicting that it could be 50,000rems. Since he didn't know how long it will last he couldn't be sure about the final irradiance. And you still haven't shown why it would be necessary for the radiation to possess more than TW total power.

And how does that help? Not only flares and CMEs are noticeable for the copious amounts of x-rays they release (high temp plasma), so there's less reasons to go with UV.
That, and UV are between x-rays and visible light, and around 9~10% of visible light reaches the surface, based on the sunlight duration during perfect sunshine conditions.
Of course that being outside of cloudy days!

Let's remember the numbers.

Assuming our human had his skin completely unwrapped, you have 1.8 m² of skin to hit with energy. That's already a conservative premise, since there are zones of the human body which wouldn't get as much energy as some others.
I got 22,222 J/m². With half of Lantea being like Earth, we need at the very least 5.667 e18 J. That's assuming each square meter at sea level gets the maximum output with zero absorption, and by assuming that there's a star shining right above each square meter hit by the burst.

So, let's see what we get if we deal with visible light.
Since less than 10% make it to sea level, we'd got with at the very least 5.667 e19 J.
Over 23 hours, that's 684.42 e12 W for our stream.

Now, since we're moving down the wavelength, into the UV, we can look at how much UV is being absorbed by the atmosphere.
Subtypes, UVA, UVB, UVC.
Sources, natural:
"The Sun emits ultraviolet radiation in the UVA, UVB, and UVC bands. The Earth's ozone layer blocks 98.7% of this UV radiation from penetrating through the atmosphere. 98.7% of the ultraviolet radiation that reaches the Earth's surface is UVA. (Some of the UVB and UVC radiation is responsible for the generation of the ozone layer.)"
That's roughly in line with what this source says.

Then we take a lookt at the UV index, which lets get an idea of how much energy is absorbed by subtype. On the ranges that are truly damaging to the skin, UVC and UVB, only the second reaches the ground surface, and in very small quantities, but they remain relevant nonetheless.

For the kicks, there is an UV index weather forecast calculator here, for US regions:
"Each point on the index scale is equivalent to 25 milliwatts/square meter of UV radiation at the earth's surface for UV wavelengths between 290 and 400 nanometers."
ZIP codes here.

This source says that "at an altitude of around 2,000 metres the amount of UV radiation can be up to 30% higher than at sea level."

Page 7 of this document:
"The UV irradiance increases with altitude because the amount of absorbers in the overlaying atmosphere decreases with altitude. Measurements show that the UV irradiance increases by 6-8% per 1000 m increase in altitude."
Some other sources say 7%, one even goes to say 14% per kilometer.
Reports +9%/km.

As EUV, pages 10 and 13 of this document would indicate that you shouldn't even count on it, and would be quicker to put the atmosphere on fire. We can also look at the extreme left of the curve, where wavelengths reach below 50 nm. It also has formulas to calculate absorptions.
Index of all files about planetary atmospheres. Insane amount of data!
This source reports various UVAE figures, from 2 to 25% /km from other sources, to their own narrowed down to 8-13%/km for UVB.
And if this is of interest to anyone, observations about underwater irradience.

I'd probably go back to this book, page 163:
"...large ozone absorption at 305 nm," which is up there on the UVB scale.

If we take a look at the ozone layer, we get an even better idea

For example, a constant increase by 9% over 40km (1.09^40) would correspond to a final difference of 31.41.
We're above the reduction for visible light, and this brings our former 23-hours long rate to 2,149.76 e12 W.

That's if we go with the ionizing radiation wavelengths that would suffer less from absorption. A lower end, in other words.

The absorption rates for UV radiation are obviously given independently from total spectrum absorption so there is no justification for you first multiplying the power by 10 before even entering into UV discussion. Not to mention that you assume the Ozone layers, which are responsible for most of the absorption, are similar for both planets. You give a number of 6% increase for UV radiation but then go with 9% and call that a lower limit even though 6% increase only gives a factor of 10 and not 31.
And all of this is again based on an assumption that the final duration of the radiation (which was completely unknown to McKay) ended up being lethal for the life on the planet.

As long as it fits with 50,000 rems.

There is no evidence for 50,000 rems. McKay predicted it but the final energy release was unknown.

Methinks the planet-sized bright explosion should be a good clue of the moment the ejection occured.

Again what is your evidence that the jet only erupted after the collapse.

Well, on that you're totally wrong, since we have evidence that ZPM have enormous amounts of energy in stock.
That said, other examples are irrelevant. Let's focus on our single Echoes case.

We did focus on the example and all you presented is insistence that we shouldn't use the upper limit of the jet energy content because is "weird" and that we should use sterilization of the planet as a lower limit even when there is no evidence the actual radiation burst was sufficient in energy.
Other examples are not irrelevant since they provide additional independent upper limits. And they are not in thousands of TW let alone megatons/s.

I think it should be obvious.
The first part relates hydrogen ions with electron densities. If they're proportional and if there's nearly as many H+ as there are electrons in those blasts, then your figures would be completely off by many orders of magnitude.

The second example would be even more telling. Your result correspond to the densities measured in the vicinity of Earth.
The measures come from the Space Weather Prediction Center.
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/index.html
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ace/ace_rtsw_data.html

Peaks would be measured in tens of protons per cc, or tens of millions of protons per cubic meter. You got a figure such as 10^13 particles/m³.
Even if peaks corresponded to flares and other CMEs, what we get would only be a fraction of the orignal density, as the bursts would expand across space until they cross Earth's path.
Unless I'm missing something, this means your result corresponds to a proton density near Earth, and the particle density of a typical flare or CME would be many orders of magnitude above that, within the corona of Sol.

But this is not a typical flare or a CME is it? This is the whole point of disagreement: your insistence on using power, energy and densities of large CMEs when nothing like that happened in the episode. I really don't see how you expect to contradict the calculations I performed with completely unrelated data.
Secondly tens of millions is 10^7. How is this similar to my number of 10^13 particles? Stars are composed mostly of hydrogen so proton density is the particle density.

Why does it matter? The burst wouldn't contract because its bulk mass would cool down. I really don't see where you're going with that.

Because once it cooled down it wouldn't expand as rapidly. And larger CMEs could likely be more dense than the tiny jet from our episode.

Yellow outside, literally white in the center, as seen when it impacts the shield.

Yes therefore it had high temperature (I assumed 10,000K) thus it must have low density otherwise it would expand.

If he didn't think the shield would hold on for more than some minutes, and since he considered that people would get irradiated up to 500 SV, then it means the total energy has not changed, and you have only reduced the duration, and therefore increased power. This doesn't really help you, I'm afraid.

Again: power is dependent on kinetic energy the particles got when the flare collapsed and the EM radiation is dependent on the internal energy the particles got when the flares collapsed. If this total energy is known to Rodney, how can the duration be unknown? Rate of EM radiation and velocity are directly governed by the total energy and temperature. Since he didn't know the duration he couldn't know what is the original energy.

They studied samples. That's how they knew of the precedent MEE.

In other words they knew what happened and what might happen again but had no conclusive proof.

There are enough calcs putting torps in the multi-megaton range.

I already dealt with this with varying warheads.

There is no illusion, and your evaluations of durations are rather erroneous, to say the least.
We see the beam first hits the bow of the cruiser, then keeps going down and meets with the stern. The beam was obviously coming at a ~10° angle above the cruiser's plate, from behind. Oddly, it completely fails to penetrate the ship and cause greater damage until it does hit the stern, as evidenced by the lack of explosion until the beam gets there. Logically we'd suggest that the armour resisted, which would fit with what comes next.
Once the beam locks on the engines, it lingers there, energy being poured into the same spot, the beam pushing through but nothing special happens despite the fact that the beam would be going thru the soft guts. Suddenly the cruiser pops!

That's quite different from the other beam that shows no problem to bisect the cruiser in the foreground, and that despite the fact that wherever it hits, it comes into contact with armour.

It's clear and indisputable evidence that the beam hitting the cruiser in the background was less powerful.

It's not erroneous. I have the episode on my computer. I counted frame by frame and it takes 24 frames for the beam to appear at the underside of the ship. At the very first frame of the contact there is a bright flash at the bow of the ship and we see the vaporized material expanding from the bow and then the beam appears into the cameras view from above as it slices downwards. I advise you to watch the actual episode in greater quality than that on the youtube.

But shields working at 23% of whatever juice they get from the ship is different if the shields receive energy from the fusion plant instead of the warpcore.

Says who? Worf reported the shields are at 23%. Are we supposed to assume that in every episode a certain percentage is different than in previous one based on the exact damage the ship has received? This doesn't make any sense, all the information that the captain needs is what is the state of the shield compared to it's nominal value not some weird number requiring him to perform multiplications in his head.