Borg Cube vs 1 gigaton nuke

[Roondar]

Um, no. Reread the dialog and go look up the visuals on Trekcore. The phasers don't do anything like disintigration here, just as we've seen in other episodes where phasers act as pure DET weapons. If the phasers could have done what you suggest in this situation, then all the ship had to do was go around with them set on widebeam and gradually remove the dust that way. Instead they used the phasers to initiate a shockwave that encircled the planet and turned the dust into ionized plasma, then since the deflector beam acted as lightning rod to draw it up to the E-D, where the shields absorbed it, held it while the ship pirouetted about, and then dispersed the plasma out into space.
-Mike

I have seen that episode, several times by now even. I'm aware of the impressive visuals.

And I still feel it's quite possible that the technobabble shockwave had a partial -though how much I'm not sure- desintegration effect. It's how phasers show to operate. They definitely have a DET element and they just as definitely have a non-DET element to them. Just because these elements combine and sometimes show more DET-like results and sometimes show more non-DET like results changes very little about that.

Besides, pure DET can't explain this reaction at all. If it did act like pure DET parts of the that planet would have been in deep trouble even with the E-D there to funnel the resulting trouble away after it started (well, the people there anyway).

[Mike DiCenso]

Again, even if we went with your assertion, it only makes the procedure undertaken all that much more unnecessary as all the E-D crew would have to do is to start scrubbing the atmosphere for hours or days with the phasers on a wide beam setting. End of problem, no one gets hurt. Further, there is little to no indication that the phasers poofed anything, at least in any signficant amount. The wave front turned the dust into heated ionized plasma, and nothing is stated about disintegrating it away, even in part. Show me in either the dialog or the visuals where this happens.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

The fact that the effect spread on its own beyond the initial shot, and did so in a self-controlled intelligent-design way, and even bumped back after the effect reached the other side of the planet, is by definition a chain reaction, just not one that ended badly.

Actually, a Klingon battlecruiser does something quite similar in "The Chase."

WORF: Some kind of plasma reaction is consuming the lower atmosphere.
PICARD: Can we stop it?
WORF: No, sir. The reaction is global.
DATA: All life on the planet is being destroyed, sir.

We know for sure a Klingon ship started that?
We know nothing odd was involved there? We know that the Vor'cha used disruptors or any other conventional weapon to do so?

It's certainly not something we see often, but every time the question has come up, the ability of a single starship to kill off a planetary population in short order has come up positive, from TOS on forwards. The mechanism is rarely made clear. I'm not sure it's actually ridiculous to suggest that this is a standard capability; it's very rare that extinguishing life on a planet is considered useful or desirable in Star Trek.

It would be rather easy for the Dominion to burn Cardassia, or for Jemmies to burn large areas since, after all, they did manage to come close to Earth cities.

The idea that a single phaser shot has the potential to put an entire atmosphere on fire is ridiculous, so much that it doesn't fit with anything, and devastating any planet would therefore only require merely shooting some gigawatt/terawatt phasers at a planet. Even TDiC didn't achieve that, and it's just as good as the nonsense of Obsession.

Actually, TDIC is substantially more energetic by dialogue (and quite energetic by visuals as well).

How? Visuals are below the energies required to ionize a thick layer of atmosphere, then move it to some point around a planet, and then suck it up into space, plus other parameters I'm probably not thinking about. And that's the controlled variant.
Dialogue wise, it never said how many weapons would be fire. I don't think dialogue even gives a number for the ships in both Tal'shiar and OO fleets.
It's still way behind an armed scientific ship being said to be capable of casually putting an entire planet's atmosphere on fire by oopsie.

I'd say that the phasers in use here are substantially more energetic than gigawatts/terawatts in any event - rather, petawatt/exawatt range phasers. A 0.06 TW variance should be trivially easy precision (1 part in 17) to reach with a single terawatt phaser.

Why? A high terawatt phaser (three digits, say) would already be four orders of magnitude above the critical variance here.
That's like bitching about the missing dozens of gigajoules in the yield figure of a thermonuclear weapon that would be ten times the power of Hiroshima's leveler.

Now, we can't quantify the power needed to set off the atmosphere's chain reaction, but we can quantify the power needed to suck this stuff into orbit and then permanently away from the planet. Escaping from an Earthlike planet is 63 MJ/kg. You thus want 63 petajoules (15 megatons) [plus whatever margin for inefficiencies] per million tons of dust vacuumed up and sent out into the solar system beyond if the planet is about the same size and mass of Earth.

See, I have a problem here. We perfectly acknowledge that the chain reaction that lead to the controlled ionization of the atmosphere is complete BS because there's no other way to call it, channeling energies that it pulled out of nowhere by act of the Great Unicorn, but we must assume that the rest of the plasma's properties are still logical? That mass is still the same, that whatever triggered and fueled the chain reaction doesn't even alleviate the E-D's work in moving this stuff away?

How could the E-D even Megamaid all the plasma that covered the planet in such a clean manner?? You know, force the bizarre plasma to work its way back to the point of contact between the plasma layer and the deflector dish's beams?

The "Year Without a Summer" was caused by a combination of solar lows and a series of volcanic eruptions, the largest (and most dramatic) of which emitted somewhere between 10 and 120 million tons of sulfur into the atmosphere. Dust/ash adds significantly to the total. Toba was supposed to have put 800 cubic kilometers of ash into the sky.

One billion tons of material might or might not be sufficient for a mass extinction event depending on the fragility of the ecosystem, but I suspect it's an appropriate unit to use for mass extinction events and huge climate shocks. 63 exajoules per billion tons, divided by 25 seconds of vacuuming, is about 2.5 exawatts per billion tons of debris. Not by the phasers, by the deflector array. We've seen the deflector array can channel full warp power, which is generally suggested to be more than a couple exawatts ("True Q," "Deja Q," Descent," "Half a Life," "Relics," "Where None Have Gone Before").

It's a nice example, though - not of firepower, but of power generation. There's no warp field coming into play here, which is the tricky part in all six of the above examples. It's almost useless for talking about phasers, except for ruling out the very worst Saxtonite underestimates, but it's at least moderately useful for power generation.

"True Q," "Deja Q," Descent," "Half a Life," "Relics," "Where None Have Gone Before"
Are those references available on your main pages or are they to be found somewhere else?

[Mr. Oragahn]

Well, material strength in the ST universe is obviously a great deal above what we have today. The NX-Enterprise took a quarter-kiloton contact explosive to it's hull (when all defenses where offline - and that ship has no Structural Integrity Grid) and the resulting hole was quite, quite anemic compared to what we'd expect from 250.000 KG of TNT vs real world materials. And that was against a 300 years older ship in a line that is far less advanced than what the Borg have.

I though the hatch used to protect from that 0.25 KT mine was polarized, which if I'm correct, the debut in the shielding department?

Then again, I suppose stuff like the Borg equivalent of Structural Integrity fields could provide a lot of the answer.
(Don't forget: the movie suggests -but does not outright state-, per Data's damage report on the cube, that the Borg have lost shields prior to the part of the battle we see)

But the torps were hitting inside the ship at that point. Perhaps the Borg focused internal force fields (shields and SIF) onto that section, but it was not enough.

As to the walls being beaten by Organic limbs, there's two reasons this is problematic as a comparisom.
The first is that we have no idea if the wall is made from the same stuff as the outer hull.

By the damage caused by the fire onto that very spot, compared to what the torps and beams did to any other outer section of the hull, I'd be tempted to think that the inside is not as good.

The second being that we have no idea wether Species 8472, being from 'fluidic space' - a bizzaro dimension outside of realspace, are really that strong. Or that they just have special 'sci-fi magic' built in that makes them appear to be a whole lot stronger than they really are (i.e. they don't actually brute force the wall but use an aspect of their weird extra-dimensional state to breach it).

Wow, that's a rather huge stretch.
Sorry, don't buy it at all.

(on a sidenote, where does this happen exactly - my memory of species 8472 has one of them stuck over on Voyager without being nearly so strong)

When Kim and co go on a Cube and Kim is hit by one of these aliens, beamed back into Voy and has that 8472 snort growing through his nose or something.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Again, even if we went with your assertion, it only makes the procedure undertaken all that much more unnecessary as all the E-D crew would have to do is to start scrubbing the atmosphere for hours or days with the phasers on a wide beam setting. End of problem, no one gets hurt. Further, there is little to no indication that the phasers poofed anything, at least in any signficant amount. The wave front turned the dust into heated ionized plasma, and nothing is stated about disintegrating it away, even in part. Show me in either the dialog or the visuals where this happens.
-Mike

Roondar's idea works. Why didn't the E-D shoot more of that NDF weapon then? Perhaps because more NDF into that dust would start to bleed off into the rest of the atmosphere and perhaps even beyond.
More wouldn't be better, and the 0.06 TW variance may support this idea. A variation upwards would screw the planet.
Plot wise, they're already lucky that they could be allowed to have their solve-it-all effect not "infect" all other elements of the biosphere. Perhaps the phasers were tuned to exactly work with the dust, but working on the right parameters was extremely tight and unforgiving.

[sonofccn]

Hey, thought I pop in :-) Hope this helps clear up the chase a little.

We know for sure a Klingon ship started that?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ3x0RKGMMY
@3 minute mark. The crew show no signs of the planet's demise being impossible, merely surprise that someone would "torch" it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-K89-nx ... re=related @ start shows a solitary klingon vessel, Vor'cha class I believe. @ 1:40 mark Klingong admits he caused it, neither Picard nor the Cardassion state disbelief that it could be done or anything to suggest additional help lying in wait.

[Cocytus]

How? Visuals are below the energies required to ionize a thick layer of atmosphere, then move it to some point around a planet, and then suck it up into space, plus other parameters I'm probably not thinking about. And that's the controlled variant.
Dialogue wise, it never said how many weapons would be fire. I don't think dialogue even gives a number for the ships in both Tal'shiar and OO fleets.
It's still way behind an armed scientific ship being said to be capable of casually putting an entire planet's atmosphere on fire by oopsie.

Sorry for just jumping in here, but the TDiC dialogue actually does give us a number for the fleet. The admiral, who for some strange reason is wearing a gold uniform, states that Enabren Tain is "commanding a fleet of twenty ships manned by combat veterans."

We can also get an estimate of how many weapons are fired from the visuals.

[Jedi Master Spock]

We know for sure a Klingon ship started that?
We know nothing odd was involved there? We know that the Vor'cha used disruptors or any other conventional weapon to do so?

We're pretty sure. We don't know if the Klingons used disruptors, phasers, photon torpedoes, or some other weapon.

It would be rather easy for the Dominion to burn Cardassia, or for Jemmies to burn large areas since, after all, they did manage to come close to Earth cities.

Earth presumably had defences up and active. Cardassia, though... well, given the number of Dominion ships in orbit, the Dominion should have been able to extinguish Cardassia.

It is a good counterexample. The only thing I can raise to dispute it is that the Dominion doesn't use the same types of technologies common to the Federation, unlike Klingons and Romulans.

How? Visuals are below the energies required to ionize a thick layer of atmosphere, then move it to some point around a planet, and then suck it up into space, plus other parameters I'm probably not thinking about. And that's the controlled variant.

How? The visuals show shockwaves moving just about as fast, and it's not an upper atmospheric phenomenon.

Sucking the dust into space is actually not terribly great in magnitude compared to doing that to the entire atmosphere.

Dialogue wise, it never said how many weapons would be fire. I don't think dialogue even gives a number for the ships in both Tal'shiar and OO fleets.
It's still way behind an armed scientific ship being said to be capable of casually putting an entire planet's atmosphere on fire by oopsie.

We do have a number of ships, and we do have a timeframe. The purported level of destruction is so far beyond atmospheric stripping to make it ridiculous - and in this episode, we're not dealing with atmospheric stripping so much as atmospheric combustion - a chemical reaction changing the nature of the atmosphere making it impossible to live.

Why? A high terawatt phaser (three digits, say) would already be four orders of magnitude above the critical variance here.
That's like bitching about the missing dozens of gigajoules in the yield figure of a thermonuclear weapon that would be ten times the power of Hiroshima's leveler.

Why? Because petawatts/exawatts are the normal phaser range.

We can rule out gigawatts outright because a sub-terawatt phaser wouldn't need to be especially precise. We can't rule out terawatts based on precision arguments. The question of how precisely the E-D should be able to regulate its phaser power is an interesting one, but one we have next to no data on. Is 99% good? 99.99%? We simply don't have any good way of resolving that level of precision.

See, I have a problem here. We perfectly acknowledge that the chain reaction that lead to the controlled ionization of the atmosphere is complete BS because there's no other way to call it, channeling energies that it pulled out of nowhere by act of the Great Unicorn, but we must assume that the rest of the plasma's properties are still logical? That mass is still the same, that whatever triggered and fueled the chain reaction doesn't even alleviate the E-D's work in moving this stuff away?

In a word? Yes.

We're told exactly what the reaction does - it causes the debris to ionize into a plasma, basically magically. However, ionizing something doesn't change its mass.

How could the E-D even Megamaid all the plasma that covered the planet in such a clean manner?? You know, force the bizarre plasma to work its way back to the point of contact between the plasma layer and the deflector dish's beams?

The deflector dish does weird EM stuff manipulating matter to push it out of the path of the Enterprise. Plasma is easily manipulated by EM fields - much more so than the non-ionized part of the atmosphere. So if you focus the deflector dish and turn it on "reverse," then the idea that it will disproportionately suck up the ionized material is not that strange. Basically, it's an extra-powerful magnetic tractor beam in this episode.

"True Q," "Deja Q," Descent," "Half a Life," "Relics," "Where None Have Gone Before"
Are those references available on your main pages or are they to be found somewhere else?

Largely, I believe. "True Q" is the dialogue 12.75 exawatt reference. "Deja Q" is the moon-lightening incident. "Half a Life," "Descent," and "Relics" are the three sun-diving/escaping in a hurry episodes. "Where None Have Gone Before" is the most questionable, as it relates instead to the E-D moving technically under its own power, but with alien modifications.

Almost all of these are based primarily change in gravitational binding energies, just like this one; however, they also involve warp fields. If you think warp fields violate conservation of energy, you're left with nothing except for "True Q."

However, this incident, while full of technological oddity, does not involve warp fields.

[Mike DiCenso]

Earth presumably had defences up and active. Cardassia, though... well, given the number of Dominion ships in orbit, the Dominion should have been able to extinguish Cardassia.

It is a good counterexample. The only thing I can raise to dispute it is that the Dominion doesn't use the same types of technologies common to the Federation, unlike Klingons and Romulans.

Not really since there are mitigating factors here, such as the fact that the female Founder was still down on the surface of the planet, and the Allied fleet was surrounding the Dominion fleet and Cardassia. Any attempt to turn their attention to the task of bombarding the planet would have invited an attack on the fleet by the Allied force.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

@Cocytus: thanks for the update.

How? Visuals are below the energies required to ionize a thick layer of atmosphere, then move it to some point around a planet, and then suck it up into space, plus other parameters I'm probably not thinking about. And that's the controlled variant.

How? The visuals show shockwaves moving just about as fast, and it's not an upper atmospheric phenomenon.

It's only a shockwave, which means a punctual non definitive displacement of gaseous or liquid matter over a limited radius. That's ought to fall behind the act of either:

1. Turning an entire atmosphere into plasma.
2. Turning a given volume of particles that's spread over the whole planet into plasma, then suck all of this into one spot, and then haul it up.

B is a combo of two systems, so less relevant here, while A is the sole effect of a miscalibrated weapon, which is more of interest.
TDiC's overall destruction was going to be huge, but the damage per weapon is terribly inferior to what a mundane phaser bank can do because of a difference of 60 GW.
Didn't Sisko threaten to pollute and entire planet with a single plague bomb that would kill life? Why bother, when a single phaser shot can put the entire atmosphere on fire?
Why bother with something as silly as red matter to kill all people on a planet instead of firing a Romulan phaser once at a planet and let it its entire surface glow like a fiery star?
There's probably a gazillion cases where such planet killing capacity would have been used simply by virtue of being actually easy to achieve.

Hell, it's the UFP here. If it was so easy to turn a mere phaser on a ship into such a destructive weapon --and that's what the episode seems to argue-- I'm sure the UFP would have outlawed such weapons to more conventional ones like lower tech beam weapons and a bigger emphasis on torpedoes.

Dialogue wise, it never said how many weapons would be fire. I don't think dialogue even gives a number for the ships in both Tal'shiar and OO fleets.
It's still way behind an armed scientific ship being said to be capable of casually putting an entire planet's atmosphere on fire by oopsie.

We do have a number of ships, and we do have a timeframe. The purported level of destruction is so far beyond atmospheric stripping to make it ridiculous - and in this episode, we're not dealing with atmospheric stripping so much as atmospheric combustion - a chemical reaction changing the nature of the atmosphere making it impossible to live.

The point is that what the Tal'Shiar and OO can achieve, per weapon, through a concerted plan of mass destruction, is peanuts to what a science ship with weapons strapped as a second thought can achieve by a mere oopsie.
It's also hard to believe that neither the Tal'Shiar nor the OO would be capable of such prowess, and didn't turn the entire atmosphere of the Founders' home into plasma. That would have surely been a good introduction to the genocide: mass sterilization.

I mean, Roondar's idea was actually good, but it hardly makes it less of an extreme outlier.

I may add, though, that if the E-D could lighten the mass of a moon in Deja Q by playing with its warp field, to a significant extent, while remaining in place close to the moon, it's obvious that they can cheat physics on some way that allows to gain more velocity, locally. Locally because it seems the mass lightening effect doesn't preclude the tidal forces from being important on the planet. Which means that they could also lighten the mass of the ionized dust, or even the ship's own mass.

Why? A high terawatt phaser (three digits, say) would already be four orders of magnitude above the critical variance here.
That's like bitching about the missing dozens of gigajoules in the yield figure of a thermonuclear weapon that would be ten times the power of Hiroshima's leveler.

Why? Because petawatts/exawatts are the normal phaser range.
We can rule out gigawatts outright because a sub-terawatt phaser wouldn't need to be especially precise. We can't rule out terawatts based on precision arguments. The question of how precisely the E-D should be able to regulate its phaser power is an interesting one, but one we have next to no data on. Is 99% good? 99.99%? We simply don't have any good way of resolving that level of precision.

I didn't say it would be gigawatts, but I don't see any need to argue for petawatts either, lest exawatts.

See, I have a problem here. We perfectly acknowledge that the chain reaction that lead to the controlled ionization of the atmosphere is complete BS because there's no other way to call it, channeling energies that it pulled out of nowhere by act of the Great Unicorn, but we must assume that the rest of the plasma's properties are still logical? That mass is still the same, that whatever triggered and fueled the chain reaction doesn't even alleviate the E-D's work in moving this stuff away?

In a word? Yes.

We're told exactly what the reaction does - it causes the debris to ionize into a plasma, basically magically. However, ionizing something doesn't change its mass.

In normal physics, that is right. But normal phsyics don't allow energy to be pulled out of nowhere, especially in such a controlled way.
Generally energy is obtained when a loss of mass in a given volume is noticed. It is rather convenient to consider that the phaser found cheap energy somewhere without paying its price... in dust.

How could the E-D even Megamaid all the plasma that covered the planet in such a clean manner?? You know, force the bizarre plasma to work its way back to the point of contact between the plasma layer and the deflector dish's beams?

The deflector dish does weird EM stuff manipulating matter to push it out of the path of the Enterprise. Plasma is easily manipulated by EM fields - much more so than the non-ionized part of the atmosphere. So if you focus the deflector dish and turn it on "reverse," then the idea that it will disproportionately suck up the ionized material is not that strange. Basically, it's an extra-powerful magnetic tractor beam in this episode.

Sure, it will suck the matter that's around its cone of action, but how exactly would it apply this force field so far that it would reach on the other side of the planet?

"True Q," "Deja Q," Descent," "Half a Life," "Relics," "Where None Have Gone Before"
Are those references available on your main pages or are they to be found somewhere else?

Largely, I believe. "True Q" is the dialogue 12.75 exawatt reference. "Deja Q" is the moon-lightening incident. "Half a Life," "Descent," and "Relics" are the three sun-diving/escaping in a hurry episodes. "Where None Have Gone Before" is the most questionable, as it relates instead to the E-D moving technically under its own power, but with alien modifications.

Almost all of these are based primarily change in gravitational binding energies, just like this one; however, they also involve warp fields. If you think warp fields violate conservation of energy, you're left with nothing except for "True Q."

However, this incident, while full of technological oddity, does not involve warp fields.

If we work from this hypothesis, then we also have to notice that we do have that terawatt figure from Dauphin, that tops what the entire ship could produce, we have Kim's unknown mi/billions in some Voyager episode (above terawatts that one is), plus another one from Geordi in Masterpiece Society that once again says that the ship's power prod is in the terawatt range.
You said on your page that terawatts wouldn't allow for fast travel within a system and pointed out other limitations, which rather interestingly can all be circumvented precisely by mass lightening allowed with a local warp field at sublight speeds.
That without saying that I'm not sure a ship such as a Galaxy-class would mass 25 million metric tonnes.

As for the other cases, let's still see what they're about, even if I don't really see their relevance for most of them.
Half a Life deals with torpedoes' shields principally, with torpedoes penetrating at a given depth the outer layer of a sick red sun.
Relics could easily point to terawatts and it's only saved by a certain unknown parameter and perhaps some oddities in the local star's properties.
Descent is another case that's dealt with by the use of warp field.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Earth presumably had defences up and active. Cardassia, though... well, given the number of Dominion ships in orbit, the Dominion should have been able to extinguish Cardassia.

It is a good counterexample. The only thing I can raise to dispute it is that the Dominion doesn't use the same types of technologies common to the Federation, unlike Klingons and Romulans.

Not really since there are mitigating factors here, such as the fact that the female Founder was still down on the surface of the planet, and the Allied fleet was surrounding the Dominion fleet and Cardassia. Any attempt to turn their attention to the task of bombarding the planet would have invited an attack on the fleet by the Allied force.
-Mike

Yet they attacked the planet, and the point I'm going at is that it would take so little seconds, with one single ship, to induce an absolute atmosphere ionizing chain reaction.
There is simply no excuse for any side not to be able to achieve this.

[Mike DiCenso]

I'm not sure where you're going with this. The Founder was down on Cardassia. Why would they kill her by doing a TDiC-style bombardment, or set up an AMoT chain-reaction with the atmosphere? Also Cardassia was their only remaining base of operations, and the Founder had hoped for the Allied fleet to simply blockade the planet, thus buying them time to rebuild. Totally destroying Cardassia goes completely against those goals.
-Mike

[User1356]

I'm not sure where you're going with this. The Founder was down on Cardassia. Why would they kill her by doing a TDiC-style bombardment, or set up an AMoT chain-reaction with the atmosphere? Also Cardassia was their only remaining base of operations, and the Founder had hoped for the Allied fleet to simply blockade the planet, thus buying them time to rebuild. Totally destroying Cardassia goes completely against those goals.
-Mike

Transporters.....She just told them to kill ALL the Cardassians

[Mike DiCenso]

Transporters.....She just told them to kill ALL the Cardassians

Why should they direct their spacebourne resources to that task when the ground troops are capable of it on their own? A quote here from WYLB:

WEYOUN: [on monitor]: We know these disgraceful acts of sabotage were carried out by a mere handful of extremists. But these radicals must come to realise that their disobedience will not be tolerated. That you, the Cardassian people, will suffer the consequences of their cowardly actions. Which is why I must inform you a few moments ago, Dominion troops reduced Lakarian City to ashes. There were no survivors. Two million men, women and children gone in a matter of moments. For each act of sabotage committed against the Dominion, another Cardassian city will be destroyed. I implore you not to let that happen. Let us return to the spirit of friendship and cooperation between our peoples, so that together, we can defeat our common enemies, the Federation, the Klingons, the Romulans and all the others that stand against us. Thank you.

This indicates that troops possess the means to utterly destroy a city of 2 million in "moments". No need to waste starship assets which are tied up at this point trying to prevent the Allied fleet from reaching Cardassia. Later on:

[b]WEYOUN:[/b] We have a security breach.

FOUNDER: The guards will deal with it. Is there a problem?

WEYOUN: The guards. There're only a handful left in the building. I sent the rest to help eradicate the Cardassians.
(Weapons fire outside.)

WEYOUN: You two, get out there and see that no one gets through that door. You, stay here. In case they fail.


On the Founder leaving, she refuses to leave, and moments later the Kira, Garak and the resistance break into the control room:

WEYOUN: Founder, perhaps we should consider finding a safer location.
FOUNDER: And just where would that be?

(The door is blown open. One Jem'Hadar is killed by a Cardassian before the other him. Kira shoots the last Jem'Hadar in the room.)

WEYOUN: Well, Colonel Kira. What a pleasant surprise.

KIRA: The pleasure's all mine.

EKOOR: The Federation fleet has surrounded the planet.

KIRA: I want you to contact the Jem'Hadar and the Breen, and you order their ships to stand down.

GARAK: And order their troops on Cardassia to do the same.

FOUNDER: I will do no such thing.

WEYOUN: Tell me, where's my old friend Damar?

GARAK: Damar's dead.

WEYOUN: What a pity.

GARAK:He died trying to free Cardassia.

WEYOUN: What's left of it.

(Garak shoots Weyoun.)
FOUNDER: I wish you hadn't done that. That was Weyoun's last clone.

GARAK: I was hoping you'd say that.

KIRA: This war's over. You lost.

FOUNDER: Have I? I think you'll find that neither the Jem'Hadar or the Breen will agree with that assessment. They will fight to the last man.

KIRA: And what will that accomplish?

FOUNDER: Isn't it obvious? You may win this war, Commander, but I promise you, when it is over, you will have lost so many ships, so many lives, that your victory will taste as bitter as defeat.

Not long after this, Odo beams down and links with the Founder, ending the conflict, and the Dominion fleet is tied up facing off with the Allied fleet, the Founder was unable to give them any orders until after Odo links with her.
-Mike

[Roondar]

Again, even if we went with your assertion, it only makes the procedure undertaken all that much more unnecessary as all the E-D crew would have to do is to start scrubbing the atmosphere for hours or days with the phasers on a wide beam setting. End of problem, no one gets hurt. Further, there is little to no indication that the phasers poofed anything, at least in any signficant amount. The wave front turned the dust into heated ionized plasma, and nothing is stated about disintegrating it away, even in part. Show me in either the dialog or the visuals where this happens.
-Mike

The proof is in how this whole plasmafication happened. That's definetly not DET. We had similar discussions about the Deathstar beam - the effect of a DET based weapon hitting a single point will not do what happened to Alderaan, nor will a DET based beam do what happened here.

You are aware of the rediculous energies involved quite well, so you must be aware of what would happen if you strike a point of the athmosphere with that level of energy.

As a hint: you won't get a nice planet encompassing plasma field that can be harmlessly sucked off by the E-D shields. Instead, you'd get an earth-shattering KABOOM at the point of impact and destroy a nice big area of the ground below where you just hit.

Even if you miraculously managed to avoid that pitfall (which would qualify as magic allready), you'd still end up with a massive problem: you've just turned a sizable portion of the contents of the atmosphere into highly charged plasma. Now, if this was real highly charged plasma instead of magic goo (which it seems to be) there would be serious repercussions throughout the planet's atmosphere (and possibly on the ground as well) nearly instantly. You won't have a few seconds to funnel it all up into your shields - the damage would be done instantly. With a DET like beam it's unthinkable you'd manage to turn the dust into plasma but leave alone the rest. It's not an energy issue, it's a you-can't-control-where-the-energy-goes problem.

As a real world analogy: you can't use a high-yield atomic bomb to merely target the silicates but not affect the metals in a city either.

Now, I'm not saying Phasers are not impressive but that incident is not a good indicator for the energy that is used by the process. There's too many problems.

My explanation neatly avoids all these problems - less of the athmosphere is turned into plasma, the reaction is NDF so it can be silly and still work, it reduces the potential effect on the planet, it explains why they can target the dust but leave the rest alone and as a bonus it doesn't actually weaken Phasers. Having a gun that can do all that is both incredibly usefull and very powerful. But it's still not DET ;)