Gigaton-level phasers?

[User1401]

Ok, so I'm browsing Starfleetjedi.net for a bit, looking at the weapons section- and I notice a claim that 24-23rd century starship phasers are in the gigaton range. This claim goes completely unreferenced, as most of the website appears to be. If someone could defend that claim, I would most appreciate it.

[Mike DiCenso]

I cannot speak for Jedi MasterSpock's (JMS) webside, if that is what you're refering to, that information is based on a number of different effects phasers have been seen to do in various episdes, which are cited on those pages ( you may have missed those as the coordinate system is a bit odd as far as navigation is concerned).

If you also spend some time searching the forum here, you will find JMS gets into detailed discussions and debates concerning the apparent yield of phasers in some episodes, such as TNG's "Masks", where the E-D melts away a comet nucleus in approximately 11 seconds, among others.
-Mike

[Who is like God arbour]

The latest thread concerning phaser fire power is "B5Tech: Thoughts on Treknology - Effect of Phaser...". There you can find an example for what phasers can do.

[Mr. Oragahn]

For having gone through a couple of those observations, and after having written on some them and watched the evidence, I can say for sure that Mask is certainly not the most solid and reliable case you want to cite if you plan to argue for the existence of exawatt phasers. There could be other cases of interest, right, but Masks is not one of them.
Use the search function of this board, or the Google search engine and restrain the search to this board, to obtain more information about such observations.

[Kor_Dahar_Master]

Im not sure if i got this right but if the E-D phasers drilled a 50m wide hole roughly 3000km deep the beam would have the equivalent value in DET terms of:-

Granite = 190 gigatons or 10 gigatons per second as the beam took roughly 19 seconds to reach the depth

Nickel-Iron = 340 gigatons or 18 gigatons per second for the 19 seconds.

Now i had to referance and use several calculations im not too sure about to get the above answers so if i managed to ferk them up please say so and point out where i went wrong.

Also as i said the figures above are (i hope) roughly correct as far as a comparison to how much power a DET weapon would require to vaporise that much matter and as such a indicator to the level of fire power the phasers had.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Firing 10~18 GT/s at the surface of a planet you're trying to save, cracking the crust, and then trying to continue dumping particles by the means of a beam weapons through the material you just turned to ions... why do I find that silly again? :)

Obviously NDF is your friend: it can trigger a chain reaction in matter which can amplify the effect of a beam weapon, even when the beam is gone. Measuring this... via DET... is a big no no.

[Kor_Dahar_Master]

Firing 10~18 GT/s at the surface of a planet you're trying to save, cracking the crust, and then trying to continue dumping particles by the means of a beam weapons through the material you just turned to ions... why do I find that silly again? :)

Obviously NDF is your friend: it can trigger a chain reaction in matter which can amplify the effect of a beam weapon, even when the beam is gone. Measuring this... via DET... is a big no no.

You missed my point.

What i am saying is that in that episode the Enterprise phaser vaporised the same amount of material it would have taken 10-18GT per second of DET to achieve. I am well aware that phasers do not rely on a pure DET effect but we are limited to measuring effects in terms we can understand so they had a "equivalent effect" that would require 10-18gt of DET per second.

I thought i made that clear but il revise my post if you feel it was not.

[Who is like God arbour]

[...] if the E-D phasers drilled a 50m wide hole [...]

Why are you assuming, that the hole is only 50 m wide?

If it were only 50 m wide and 3.000 km deep, you wouldn't see light, looking through the shaft, as we have. (50 m = 1/60.000 of 3.000 km)



Therefore, if we assume that the shaft was indeed 3.000 km deep, it has to be wider than only 50 m.

And the depth of the shaft is the only thing we can get from that episode because we know that they drilled to pockets in the magma layer, which were only a few kilometers away from the molten region of the core. At Earth, the core begins ca. 3.000 km under the surface of Earth.

The visuals and informations of these episode are making only sense (if at all), if you assume, that the ceiling of the pocket is a few kilometers above Data and the end of the shaft accordingly wide and that, in addition to that, the shaft gets wider the higher it gets.

The later assumption finds support by the fact, that they have said, that they wanted to adjust the particle beam while drilling to minimize the seismic stress. By reducing the strength of the particle beam, the diameter of the drilled shaft could be reduced too.

That they have reduced the strentgh of the particle beam is supported by the fact, that they needed five seconds for the last five kilometers although they needed for the whole 3.000 kilometers only 19 seconds.

[Kor_Dahar_Master]

[...] if the E-D phasers drilled a 50m wide hole [...]

Why are you assuming, that the hole is only 50 m wide?

Cos when i put 100m wide figures (or larger) in the things i used to calculate the figures they gave were too large for some of the calculators i used...:D.

I did not actually say it was a 50m wide hole i just showed the "equivalent effect" figures from IF it was 50m wide....and they were well into the gigatons, obviously a wider hole would require more.

[Mr. Oragahn]

I thought i made that clear but il revise my post if you feel it was not.

I should probably revise mine since I did understand you were not advocating for DET. I merely wanted to point out how silly it would be if it were looked at from a DET perspective.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Therefore, if we assume that the shaft was indeed 3.000 km deep, it has to be wider than only 50 m.

And the depth of the shaft is the only thing we can get from that episode because we know that they drilled to pockets in the magma layer, which were only a few kilometers away from the molten region of the core. At Earth, the core begins ca. 3.000 km under the surface of Earth.

The visuals and informations of these episode are making only sense (if at all), if you assume, that the ceiling of the pocket is a few kilometers above Data and the end of the shaft accordingly wide and that, in addition to that, the shaft gets wider the higher it gets.

The later assumption finds support by the fact, that they have said, that they wanted to adjust the particle beam while drilling to minimize the seismic stress. By reducing the strength of the particle beam, the diameter of the drilled shaft could be reduced too.

That they have reduced the strentgh of the particle beam is supported by the fact, that they needed five seconds for the last five kilometers although they needed for the whole 3.000 kilometers only 19 seconds.

I don't remember the cave being that big.

[Who is like God arbour]

I don't remember the cave being that big.

Are you remembering the cave being small?

Fact is that we have only seen a few parts of the cave and that there was - as far as I know - no scene from which we could have measured the hight of the cave in the part, where the shaft ends [O]. We have only seen the walls of the cave and only in the moment, from which the image from above is, the ceiling. Insofar the cave could be a few kilometers high.

[Mr. Oragahn]

I don't remember the cave being that big.

Are you remembering the cave being small?

Fact is that we have only seen a few parts of the cave and that there was - as far as I know - no scene from which we could have measured the hight of the cave in the part, where the shaft ends [O]. We have only seen the walls of the cave and only in the moment, from which the image from above is, the ceiling. Insofar the cave could be a few kilometers high.

But when you want to believe that the ceiling is very large and that high, you don't expect the bottom of the cave, where they are, to be that small and cramped. Besides, they'd need to have placed huge WWII DCA spotlights lighting up the ceiling for us to see it so fine.

[Jedi Master Spock]

As I see it, the question of determining the phaser power of a GCS is tricky for several reasons. Phasers are unusual weapons that have been known to do fairly unusual things, which complicates the question of yield. You'll hear talk about nadion effects and the like - so before we do any meaningful analysis, we have to first address the common myth that phaser yield and phaser effect are completely separate.

On high settings, a hand phaser typically disintegrates a human. From "The Galileo Seven", we know that seven TOS era hand phasers have enough juice to lift an extra 150 pounds clear off a planet to escape it before it blows up. That's 600 megajoules right there - if you have 100% energy efficiency in liftoff, which is simply not going to happen. Realistically, since shuttles use thrusters, this points to multi-gigajoule energy capacities. The fact that overloading phasers are a major hazard, the sustained long-term discharge of 1.05 megajoules per second in "The Mind's Eye," even the fact that Data uses micro-fusion cells are all quite compatible with this.

So then we want to look at phaser effect. TOS era hand phasers, on high settings, tend to make people completely disappear. The energy required to vaporize someone is around 100 megajoules. Truly spectacular hand phaser shots in TNG have gigajoule-range energy effects, but TNG phasers should have much better batteries, too. From this and similar evidence, we can conclude that the power used by a phaser and its apparent effect (including "phaser" vaporizations) should be very close to each other in terms of energy.

That established, we can now look at the actual yield of a GCS phaser bank. We have several ways of getting at this problem - four, in fact. To my eye, the highest figures also come out of the strongest methods.

Power Generation

From a conservation of energy standpoint, the fact that a GCS can exit a system very quickly (as in "Relics") from a cold start indicates that a GCS has a very high rate of peak power generation. Even warp-speed displacement within a gravity field (as in "Descent") requires hundreds, possibly thousands, of exawatts.

In terms of quotations, "Deja Q" gives us our only realistic specific power output for a GCS - 12.75 exawatts when the warp core isn't being pushed. There are occasional references to terawatt-range power outputs, but since a terawatt isn't enough energy to get something the size of a GCS out of Earth orbit very quickly, we pretty much have to throw those out. There are also a few references to petawatt/exawatt range figures in Voyager (such as the quotation being disputed here), but "Deja Q" is the important one for our purposes. To make a long story short, we have to conclude that GCS can pull hundreds of gigatons of energy per second through the warp core.

If we assume that 1-10% of maximum power can be routed to phasers - which seems reasonable - we conclude phasers should put out multiple gigatons per second.

Phaser effects on inert bodies

More directly, we have several events in which phasers are used to drill rock, such as "Inheritance" and "Legacy." (See here for the most recent discussion we had on the topic here on SFJ).

Here is the (brief) discussion of the TNG phaser drilling incidents on the main website. These incidents involve disintegrating a lot of rock. The quick summary is that a gigaton of phaser energy a second is about enough to disintegrate one seventh of one cubic kilometer of rock per second - a rate of material disappearance that fits pretty reasonably for all four rock-related incidents in TNG, from the E-D's presumed ability to blast its way out of the asteroid in "The Pegasus" on up to the sustained drilling into the mantle of "Inheritance."

There's also a comet in "Masks." Here, we really aren't talking about as much energy, but the E-D is firing its phasers at an explicitly stated 10% rate. As Mike DiCenso indicated above, "Masks" involved only a short duration phaser sweep, and the comet should be several cubic kilometers. The estimate on the main website is a bit higher, since it assumes the comet was vaporized and then superheated, but this also suggests around gigaton per second firepower. Here's the thing with "Masks," though: While vaporizing the comet is a lower-energy event than the phaser drilling cases, it is unique in explicitly indicating the task was accomplished with 10% phaser power.

We also have one incident in TOS - "The Paradise Syndrome" - in which CCS phasers are used to blast something made of rock. There are a number of problems with the incident, such as the fact that the rock in question is supposed to be half the size of Earth's moon, but isn't remotely near spherical, but the stated goal of fracturing an extinction-event asteroid, and the literal documentarian reading of what "actually" happened (melting a 70 km patch on a strangely non-symmetric large asteroid), point to high energy levels. Since GCS phasers should be stronger than CCS phasers, this actually points towards stronger than GT/sec phasers on a GCS, but it's in there.

These are fairly flexible incidents on the whole. If you're willing to wave a hand over "Inheritance" and say that it's not drilling nearly as deeply as the Okudagram suggests, and minimize "The Paradise Syndrome" by shrinking the asteroid to something that we wouldn't be surprised to be non-spherical, you can justify anything from hundreds of megatons per second to tens of gigatons per second.

Comparison with photon torpedoes/General firepower

There's a major problem with trying to compare phasers with photon torpedoes: There's no actual agreement on which should produce a greater fraction of total firepower.

We do know that total firepower of a CCS is enough to completely obliterate a planetary civilization, but we don't actually know how phasers and photon torpedoes compare. We know that they tend to think of photon torpedoes for blasting asteroids, for example ("Rise" and "Pegasus" both demonstrate that thinking), and we know that for the NX-01, phase cannons were weaker than photonic torpedoes.

However, that doesn't tell us that phasers are weaker or stronger than photon torpedoes on the whole. Photon torpedoes almost certainly deliver a faster pulse of energy, and a different kind of energy; phasers do the whole "magic disintegration" number, while photon torpedoes blow things up conventionally.

Since photon torpedoes themselves should have a maximum yield falling around 100 MT - 1 GT, and can also be fired at substantially lower yields, with a GCS easily being able to fire an average of a torpedo a second, we could suggest that phasers are 10 MT/s-10 GT/s - somewhere within an order of magnitude of the raw power of the torpedoes.

General Order 24 strongly suggests going no lower even if you're minded to be minimalist, since even the updated CCS doesn't carry all that many photon torpedoes (only enough to obliterate a hundred cities or so), meaning that the destruction of an advanced planetary civilization can be carried out largely with CCS phasers in a fairly short timeframe.

I'm of the opinion phasers are the main weapon of most Federation ships, with torpedoes being used for special effect. This explains why something the size of a GCS only carries a couple hundred of them, to me, and why we don't see the use of torpedo-boat style warships; however, others carry the opposite opinion, and there's not really anything in the canon to make sure of either.

Hull damage

One of the most curious cases of calculation is trying to compute phaser yield from actual hull damage. We know that GCS hulls are mainly tritanium, and in "Star Trek: Generations," we get a unique close look at the damage done by a phaser strike when shields aren't helping - each bolt that land puts a gaping hole across several decks, as seen in screencaps (see here for screenies) and indicated in dialogue. It's worth noting that with the shields useless, the phasers actually did a lot more damage than the photon torpedoes - photon torpedoes might be more useful for knocking down shields, but they did very little to the GCS hull.

Now we have to know how thick the tritanium cladding on the outer hull is. Let's say about 30 cm, for the moment. Each blast is stripping away several hundred square meters of tritanium hull and then damaging the fringes, so call it 100 cubic meters of tritanium phaser-"vaporized" per blast - it's peeling/blasting away a little more than that, but that seems to be about how much is actually disintegrated (the photon torpedoes do a little less hull damage, we might note).

That leaves us with one more piece of information: How tough is tritanium? This is the real unknown. This is what we do know, from "Obsession" and "Arsenal of Freedom." Tritanium is 21.4 times as hard as diamond. Tritanium can be heated to 12,000 degrees Celsius without showing any sign of melting. Even thin tritanium plates and bulkheads are basically invulnerable to UFP hand phasers, which regularly emit blasts strong enough to disintegrate humans in a beam about a square centimeter.

Now, we would expect about 50 gigajoules of phaser energy to disintegrate a cubic meter of iron. If tritanium is only ten times as hard to disintegrate as iron, as we might guess from the temperatures we've seen tritanium heated to, then we're looking at a pretty low end of about ten kilotons per blast.

On the high end, however, we've heard Yar standing there with a hand phaser looking at a partially melted plate of tritanium and say that UFP weapons can't do that. That phaser that she's packing can put 100 megajoules of disintegration energy in a beam a centimeter wide, and yet can't even melt - let alone disintegrate - a tritanium plate a few centimeters thick? If 100 MJ/cm^2 were sufficient to punch a hole through several centimeters of tritanium, disintegrating several hundred square meters of tritanium cladding several tens of centimeters thick would require close to a gigaton. And that's an outdated D12, not a GCS.

Really, though, since we don't know much about tritanium, we can't rule out much on hull damage, but the way that phasers destroy things (efficient disintegration with minimal collateral damage) and the incredible durability of tritanium against hand phasers lines up neatly with the gigaton figures.

[User1401]

Alright, thank you for explaining. It would be nice if the justification for such claims was included on your main website.