Mr. Oragahn wrote:Once they're far in space. It seems antigravity is best suited for VTOL, like some force that's really good against the direction of gravity, but at some point is pointless and then shifting to thrusters is necessary/better. It's hard then, for me, to picture exactly how we can assess that the ship took gigajoules from the hand phaser.
Besides, the dialogue posted by Mike seems to suggest something closer to these people charging up some system in order to kick start some engine.
Returning to the episode directly might clarify things. I did my analysis mainly from a very fast read of transcripts before. The episode may be viewed in entirety
here.
This is where we first have the mention of the problem:
SCOTT: Very bad, Mister Spock.
SPOCK: In what way?
SCOTT: We've lost a great deal of fuel. We have no chance at all to reach escape velocity. And if we ever hope to make orbit, we'll have to lighten our load by at least five hundred pounds.
SPOCK: The weight of three grown men.
SCOTT: Aye, you could put it that way.
MCCOY: Or the equivalent weight in equipment.
SPOCK: Doctor McCoy, with very few exceptions we use virtually every piece of equipment aboard this craft in attaining orbit. There's very little excess weight, except among the passengers.
BOMA: You mean three of us must stay behind.
SPOCK: Unless the situation changes radically, yes.
Note that the shuttle is unable to reach escape velocity, but is able to reach
orbit.
One crewman dies, and then the crew finds some equipment they can get rid of:
SPOCK: Perhaps if you were to channel the second auxiliary tank through the primary intake valve.
SCOTT: It's too delicate. It may not be able to take the pressure as it is.
MCCOY: (coming in from rear compartment) This should save us at least fifty pounds, Mister Spock.
SPOCK: Excellent, Doctor.
MEARS: We should be able to scrape up another hundred pounds.
SPOCK: Which would still leave us at least one hundred and fifty pounds overweight.
Then we get the
bad news:
SCOTT: Pressure's dropping. We're losing everything.
SPOCK: What happened?
SCOTT: One of the lines gave. The strain of coming through the atmosphere and the added load when we tried to bypass. Yes, that's done it. We have no fuel.
SPOCK: That would seem to solve the problem of who to leave behind. Consider the alternatives, Mister Scott.
SCOTT: We have no fuel! What alternatives?
All the fuel is gone, according to Scotty.
SCOTT: I can adjust the main reactor to function with a substitute fuel supply.
SPOCK: That's all very well, but we don't have a substitute supply.
SCOTT: Aye, we do. Our phasers. I can adapt them and use their energy. It'll take time, but it's possible.
MCCOY: Trouble is, they happen to be our only defence.
SPOCK: They would also seem to be our only hope.
SCOTT: Aye.
SPOCK: (after brief thought) Yeoman, your phaser.
MEARS: But what if the creatures attack again?
SPOCK: They won't attack for at least several hours. By then, with luck, we'll be gone.
SCOTT: If I can get a full load, we should be able to achieve orbit with all hands. Not that we can maintain it long.
SPOCK: We don't have to maintain it very long, Mister Scott. In less than twenty four hours, the Enterprise will be forced to abandon its search in order to make a rendezvous. If we can't maintain orbit after that time, it won't make any difference. If we burn up in a decaying orbit or die here on the planet's surface, we shall surely die. Doctor, your phaser. Go to work, Mister Scott.
I'm afraid this actually is going to wind up being quite a bit of energy, since we're having to lift an entire
Galileo class shuttle with fuel drained from the phasers. One redshirt wanders off; they need
all the phasers to lift off:
MCCOY: I don't know. He'll risk his neck locating Gaetano and if he finds him, he's just as liable to order him to stay behind. You tell me.
BOMA: Do you really think the ship will ever leave?
MCCOY: Well, it won't unless we get these phasers back.
Once actually lifting off, they encounter some further difficulties:
SCOTT: What are you doing?
SPOCK: Our boosters.
SCOTT: We'll never be able to hold orbit.
SPOCK: Would you rather stay here?
SCOTT: No, Mister Spock.
Spock turns on the boosters early. The shuttle may have started attempting to lift off on repulsor power, but the boosters [thrusters] were required to actually lift off. From the interior, the shuttle is vibrating roughly; from the exterior, we see that the shuttle is moving
forward, not upwards, and we have a line of glowing rectangles on the shuttle aft. So
yes, the shuttle is using thrusters. As a result of having to use boosters just to lift off, the craft is only able to make a single orbit, with forty five minutes until it starts to decay.
Overall, in other words, the phaser power packs had enough energy that could be turned into fuel that, with conventional thrust, was able to put an 8m shuttlecraft into orbit. Not 150 pounds; the entire craft is being accelerated to a low orbit. Say the shuttle is ten tons total mass (that would give overall density on the order of 0.2 g/cc, IIRC); then the kinetic energy it would have at about 6 kps (which is pretty much insufficient to achieve a stable LEO) would be 180 gigajoules. This is slightly unrealistically
low because of the amount of work that has to be done overcoming atmospheric drag, but let's say that's treknobabbled away or that it's actually a rather small planet.
I'm afraid that while my original estimate doesn't reflect what actually happened in the episode, my original conclusions about hand phasers are robust against increases of hand phaser energy capacity by 1.5-2 orders of magnitude. I am forced to revise my estimates of how many high-powered shots a hand phaser is able to make.
What I'm requiring here is that phaser disintegration requires
about as much energy as traditional vaporization. If it requires
more energy, our phaser energy estimates are going increase as well. What
you need is for phaser disintegration to require
less energy than vaporization, and that's simply not going to line up with TOS phaser power packs having tens of gigajoules of energy.
1. A NDF. Cna't be gauged.
3. A NDF wide beam setting would exactly be capable of that I think. You're literally slicing off the building's base, with the advantage that NDF spreads much better than an explosion, in a cleaner way, with what looks like a minimal initial input. What was the size of the building exactly? Could a phaser blast match the power of a TNT explosion?
Here's an example:
That's circular logic. I re-present to you this segment of the argument:
Hand phasers have gigajoule-range power storage. (Corrected: Tens of gigajoules)
They are nevertheless only capable of gigajoule-range destruction through firing. (Converting disintegration to vaporization as necessary.)
Conclusion: Phaser disintegration requires similar energy to chemical vaporization. (Caveat: Possibly more, but we don't want to go there because of what happens on the ship level.)
2. EoC, which I addressed in detail on this website
here. It seems you didn't have access to anything better than a few blurry screencaps, because the episode really tells a very different story (I believe there already were problems with your interpretations of the screencaps btw).
I agree that assessing the pipes as literally heated to incandescently hot is not necessary. It has been discussed several times on these forums, yes. I can't recall where.
However, we are producing thousands of cubic meters of steam bursting a very long metal pipe, and this makes for a high energy estimate; no matter how we slice EoC, it's an event representing on the order of gigajoules of apparent destruction. We can get several gigajoules out of pipe heating if we interpret the glow as heating; we will also get several gigajoules out of several thousand cubic kilometers of high-pressure steam. We will
not go below 1 gigajoule of released thermal energy; we would have to work very hard to go over 10 gigajoules of released thermal energy. This is, in other words, substantially less energy than one TOS era phaser could supply in "Galileo Seven," and we do
not expect that Data was able to fire a large number of shots with this type of destructive effect. He had to modify the phaser in order to make this shot.
Isn't what always happen? With ships "crushing" the universe in so far as to reach c and then move beyond relative c?
No, it isn't. Since FTL travel is basically impossible, we're going to have to bend everything in a pretzel to get there, so we don't worry about "real" energy requirements for that.
It's pretty much required. Otherwise, if we used something like E=mc² to speculate about how much energy would be required to sufficiently lighten a ship, the logic would already be borked and lead to stupidly high numbers in order to make a difference. And it of course gets totally ridiculous when applying this to the big asteroid since its mass was reduced by so many orders of magnitude.
Clearly the explanation is technobabblish beyond hope, since even E=mc² feels extremely raw and solves nothing.
Mass lightening
in the real universe could be used to draw a lot of energy very quickly out of a gravity field. Look up a bunch of old perpetual motion machine patents. If you had a mass lightening field that let you violate conservation of energy in a static situation (as required by your hypothesis) you'd be able to make almost all of them work.
Logically speaking, if Treknology can do that, you wouldn't need deuterium or antideuterium supplies at all. If we're to make
any sort of sense, we're going to have to start with conservation of energy, and assuming it's only violated when absolutely necessary. Otherwise, we wind up in "Obsession" super-antimatter territory.
Needless to say that I always found the numbers associated to warp speed rather odd.
In The Emiszsary, we had a modified space class-eight probe able to fit a tall Klingon-human hybrid female. The probe was just above two meters long. The thing had been flying at warp 9 and the distance covered by the probe was nothing short, since from the initial probe's course, they actually rerouted it so 6.1 hours.
Making things simple, the probe would have a volume above one cubic meter, but let's stick to 1 m³.
Looking at RSA's volumetrics page, a GCS has a length of 643 meters. I won't take a greater value to measure the warp bubble's volume because the GCS's height and width are inferior to the length.
Which means using an ellipsoid formula would return a volume value inferior to that of a sphere that's 643 meters wide. Nonetheless, I go for the sphere.
To summarize, that makes a high end by using a volume for the prove that's inferior to what it would be, and a volume for the E-D's warp bubble that's greater than what it should be.
And it will be an even greater high end for two other reasons: assuming that the probe has not been drifting for a longer amount of time, plus a generous figure for the stored energy the prove could tap.
That is also assuming that what defines the power requirements is the bubble size and not its frontal cross section. Then, the volume we get for a sphere that's 643 meters wide is 1.392 e8 m³.
I think this is a flawed assumption. The power requirements should be driven by
mass, not volume.
The probe was fairly empty inside, no more than a shell with cushioned inner walls. The bits and bobs on the outside surely were what assured more of the guidance and power systems, plus a bit of the life support... and with no evidence that the thing was fitting with anything as good as an antimatter core.
The probe couldn't even claim producing the power output of a small shuttle.
On the pieces strapped to the shell on the outside, the longest of them wouldn't measure more than a couple dozen cubic centimeters. That would be the equivalent of picking perhaps ten phaser rifles and adding their volumes in order to get one monolithic volume.
It appears rather fair to assume that one of the larger pieces would be related to the power production, if not several of them.
I wouldn't see any reason to assume that the energy reserve of the probe would exceed a maximum stock of say, 1000 GJ of stored energy there (which is frankly ludicrously high considering the equivalent in phaser rifles volume).
With 21,960 in 6.1 hours, you get a constant power of 45.537 megawatts.
Multiply this by 1.392 e8 and you get a power requirement of 63.4 e8 MW, or in a correct nomenclature, 6.34 e15 W.
I'm yet to find a way to scale this down to the 2 seconds at warp 1 jump executed by Riker with his old UFP ship in that battle simulation, but I wouldn't be surprised that it would fit with the volume of that blue wax thing Wes used (assuming the blue thing is the AM, not a containment of some kind).
Needless to say that out figures differ a lot, unless I missed something.
Here is your second problem:
Power requirement to
reach warp speed, especially within system, is wholly different from power required to
maintain warp speed, especially outside of a system.
I
don't anticipate that warp travel requires
constantly these high power levels. I'm assuming instead that warp travel requires essentially the bare minimum of energy required to change the gravitational potential energy of an object. That's a lot of power in-system; in other areas, however, it may be very
little power, and once you've
applied the warp field of appropriate strength, changing your effective mass to something quite near zero, maintaining it should require quite a bit less energy once you're out into open space. I don't think the E-D has the fuel necessary to maintain
peak power output for more than a couple hours. On the other hand, it's possible for them to get up to close to warp nine and coast there for several hundred years in the intergalactic void.
But let me give you the "corrected" figure based on mass and not volume: 7.5 PW/2 million tons gives 3.75 megawatts/kg for "warp 1" power. x1000 for warp 9 power, x250 kg, x6.1 hours x3600 seconds/hours = 20.6 petajoules. We can easily hide that much antimatter in little modules inside the hull of the probe.
I
don't see this as a problem. So what if we don't
see the power supplies? Antimatter containment can be pretty compact.
Redistribute? Where? How?
In a "phased" form, still affected by gravity and to a degree non-phased matter (see episodes involving crew "out of phase"), which then de-phases slowly, atom by atom. By slowly we could mean a scale of seconds. No explosion, but the net result is the introduction of "X" vapor. As, for example, suggested by what we see in "Masks," where we have a very visible vapor cloud.
Wasn't the terawatt figure attributed to what was channeled to the main dish at some point?
Doesn't matter. With terawatt peak power production, the original million-ton Enterprise would have required
ten days to get from orbital space dock around Earth to out of the system. Suddenly, just transporting the away team up from maximum transporter range requires a significant fraction of full warp power. That maximum evacuation transporter speed used to evacuate colonists from hanging in high orbit? It's actually using pretty near to maximum warp power.
It's true that we have several references to peak power in the terawatt range. However, in each of those epsiodes, we
already see implicit contradictions of that figure, and power generation that low simply will not work.
Considering that it was meticulously done and that it was only melted, there's a clear limit to the power which can be claimed for this incident.
Not quite.
First, the Romulans melt an unknown amount of rock. We're not sure of the type or the precise quantity. There's more than an order of magnitude of play in the figures already.
Second, we know that the E-D can
blast that hole wide open again, but this would cause bad things to happen. (Massive energy discharge, enclosed space, et cetera et cetera.) There are several orders of magnitude of play in this figure depending on the type of blasting involved.
But nothing proves that the weapons deliver the energy, instead of the energy coming from whatever odd phenomenon the weapons work by.
Except that we have a pretty good idea how much energy those weapons are supplied with. This is
precisely the point of the argument you're attempting to address. We have very strong circumstantial evidence that puts the energy
consumed by these weapons on the same level as the energy
delivered.
Not only is it a reasonable null hypothesis to assume in the first place, we actually have evidence falling in line with it. We have
no evidence against it; almost all the arguments offered invoking NDF have amounted to a hollow argument by ignorance.
It's been repeated quite a bit, and there
is a bit in the TNGTM that backs it up - but the TNGTM is not the least bit canon [or consistent with the show, for that matter].
Yes, but this time it were visuals which didn't show anything impressive at all. The magnitude of the effect you'd expect from a weapon that splits such a moon would be phenomenal.
It goes without saying that by measuring the width of the beams, the moon appears to be extremely small.
I'd like to discuss this case further if you wish to, but I think the remastered TOS would be a better source.
IMO, scaling from beam width is a ridiculous choice.
First of all, there are numerous impacts which occur but which we don't see as the film shows what goes on on the E-D's bridge at that moment.
There could be a number of extra torps which were fired.
Dubious. Everything we see aligns with the idea that they
opened up with torpedoes and then followed up with disruptors/phasers.
More holes are present next to the two former ones.
More, and notably,
larger.
We
see the second time the BoP fires. It's bolts, not torpedoes. Then we cut straight to the bridge, which rocks
once, and then we have the damage report indicating
that hit dealt damage across five decks. We couldn't have a clearer-cut case if we tried; those larger holes next to the initial torpedo hits are the only ones that look large enough to span five decks, and we know precisely that the second volley opened up a breach that ran for five whole decks.
I'll suggest this to you: Rather than being less destructive, other bolt impacts hit at a steeper angle, penetrating more deeply instead of skidding across a long span of hull as the second attack did. They may also have impacted a better-armored section (such as on the nacelle).