Gigaton-level phasers?

[Picard]

Here:

http://www.st-v-sw.net/Obsidian/Strek/S ... hasers.htm

[Mike DiCenso]

Here....what? How does linking to this article help with regards to the topic on hand?
-Mike

[Picard]

"You will notice that the conclusions say that total, the phaser blast was 4.2 gigatons. Of course, since the event took several seconds of screen time, it concludes that the phaser was equivalent to 1,173 petawatts. In other words, a full power phaser beam puts out about 11,730 petawatts, or 11,730 petajoules per second. If you go to the shields page, you will see that Imperial shields can only absorb about a hundred megatons or so, which is 420,000 TJ, which is 420 petajoules. In other words, based on the above, it would take about .04 seconds of phaser fire to bring down an ISDs shields."

That is how.

[Mike DiCenso]

Some issues here that need to be addressed:

- Where and does this article obtain the 100 megaton number for ISD shields?

- Also what is the exact timing of the comet melting in "Masks"?

- What is the size of the comet nucleus before the melting started?

- The article links to a FurryConflict site that no longer is available, and so there is no
way to know exactly what that group's conclusions were on the subject.

Simply put, the old, and obviously incomplete Strek-vs-Swars.net article only shows some images and gives a conclusion without any real analysis. Now in this old thread here at SFJN I estimated the melting from the episode itself at approximately 11 seconds, which means the energy from the phaser is spread out over that timeframe for a yeild of no greater than 222 MT a second delivered to the comet. This thread also contains a copy of Graham Kennedy's calcs for "Masks" as well, too, which estimates a somewhat lower 2.635 GT total delivered to the comet nucleus over 10 seconds.
-Mike

[Jedi Master Spock]

Some issues here that need to be addressed:

- Where and does this article obtain the 100 megaton number for ISD shields?

- Also what is the exact timing of the comet melting in "Masks"?

- What is the size of the comet nucleus before the melting started?

- The article links to a FurryConflict site that no longer is available, and so there is no
way to know exactly what that group's conclusions were on the subject.

Simply put, the old, and obviously incomplete Strek-vs-Swars.net article only shows some images and gives a conclusion without any real analysis. Now in this old thread here at SFJN I estimated the melting from the episode itself at approximately 11 seconds, which means the energy from the phaser is spread out over that timeframe for a yeild of no greater than 222 MT a second delivered to the comet. This thread also contains a copy of Graham Kennedy's calcs for "Masks" as well, too, which estimates a somewhat lower 2.635 GT total delivered to the comet nucleus over 10 seconds.
-Mike

If I use a fairly ungenerous scaling of 2 km, the onscreen time of 11 seconds, the stated power level of 10%, 3 MJ/kg of energy applied to disintegrate the object, and a typical cometary density of 600 kg/m^3, I wind up with a final figure of 1.6 GT/sec for full-strength figures assuming "low energy" vaporization, and we can go an order of magnitude higher for superheating if we assume that's going on.

Basically, completely disintegrating cubic km of matter means gigatons, and "Masks" is definitely in that ballpark.

[Mike DiCenso]

I assume that you mean melting as opposed to vaporization by that, and using melt numbers instread of vaporization only makes sense since that is precisely what they said they were going to do.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

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.
*snip transcript section*

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.

They already were in orbit at that point. Spock likely put thrusters out at max, burning all the "fuel" they had. The shuttle was actually moving both upwards and forward, until it was in space and from there it's quite impossible to tell where it was pointed at. Logically if the shuttle could max out such a boost that it slammed the crew into their seats, they could have pushed themselves away from the planet for a very long elliptic orbit. I don't really get how they screwed up so much shortening their orbit with such a boost. Makes no sense to me. From the moment you can achieve an orbit, no matter how precarious it was, such a boost would have surely put them out of misery for a much longer time.

Now, that story about fuel is really odd. Since when did phasers have fuel?
There can only be fuel if they had some of it in a tank, and needed energy to energize said fuel. So it means there's a minimum power that's required to energize fuel, since after that I'm sure the system would be built in a smart enough way as to use part of the energy produced with the fuel to maintain the energizing of the rest of the fuel poured into the reactor.

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.

There are so many problems with that.
First of all, the planet didn't show any lighter gravity. Secondly, if you want to handwave some issues in the calc with technobabble in order to make the low energy expenditure still sufficient to reach the equivalent of a LEO, then said technobabble is simply violating laws.
Or mass is lightened.

Next. I tend to think that repulors are much more efficient than newtonian thrusters, which would likely be hugely inefficient power hogs and require ships to hold quite a good amount of fuel to achieve any particular thrust: The figure you got, which is probably just about the baseline energy needed for near 100% efficient engines, would surely need to be multiplied in order to account for conservation of momentum and fuel inefficiencies.

If you don't use technobabble, your figure is by all accounts waaay too low even for a low orbit. It's impossible to agree with that.
You know it means the total energy they got from phasers would already need to stand somewhere in the high gigajoule range, probably in the terajoule range to be fine.
And that's probably a figure anyone would be very uncomfortable to deal with if it were to be related to hand phasers, especially since they had like eight of them or something only.

Besides, Scotty said that draining a phaser would take several hours. Make that between two and four, you have between 7,200 and 14,400 seconds to wait for a phaser to be drained. Perhaps it was a limitation of the system and the delicate procedure - earlier on Scotty said that it was risky and talked about the hardware which could not cope with pressure - but in the end, even if you manage to convince people that a single type-2 phaser would hold a reserve of hundreds of gigajoules, more or less one order of magnitude, you would have no proof that such a weapon could deplete its entire energy stock in a few shots.
If the rate of power transfer was close to the maximum power output of such a hand phaser, then the true power of a phaser would be about more than 3 or 4 OoMs inferior to the energy "stored" in such a little weapon. Which means you'd be in low megajoule and high kilojoule region. Which would admirably fit with newer numbers.

You may prove, from another episode, that on a high setting such a phaser can indeed be depleted that fast, but I'm sure you'd also find like a good dozen of episodes where such raw firepower would have been badly needed and was never put to use.
That's the problem of not knowing much of Trek.

1. A NDF. Can'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.)

It's hard to imagine that the energy cell of a Romulan phaser rifle rated at 1.05 MW would be dwarfed by a much earlier hand phaser, by three orders of magnitude, so much as to be able to fire gigawatts. And that's the power, we're not even told if the weapon could handle that much power over a full second.
Or like a Cardassian disruptor rifle with an output of 4.7 MJ, which would obviously refer to the maximum setting per shot. Then again it's more powerful than a phaser pistol, and yet we've seen hand phasers disintegrate people. The real energy requirements to do that, to vaporize flesh, bones, water, plus the leather and metal the targets would carry, would already be above 100 MJ, and quite likely well above that.

And it would get interesting if we knew how many shots those two types of weapons can deliver, as we have a good idea of their maximum output. Unless we have to believe that even on max setting, they could fire thousands or tens of thousands of shots, the maximum stock of such weapons - which as rifles are more powerful than hand phasers - would be less than the figure you obtained from Galileo Seven.

In the end the figure from TOS would be at odds with the rest.
All in all, I don't see any evidence of a maximum firepower in the gigajoule range. At the very best a stock of so much energy, and that's pretty much all.

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.

Assessing the pipes as literally heated to incandescently hot is not only necessary, it's simply impossible, if you watch the video.
It's unarguably obvious that it has nothing to do with the pipe being heated up, but more with a surge which generated two fields of energy or something, around the pipe, and traveled both ways, blowing up whatever relay they found on their way. The surge itself was clearly an after effect of a build up which only resulted from the former damaged dealt to a small section of the station by Data's phaser.

And that's not all, because he aimed at the base of the stepped water cascade, destroying a small piece of whatever hardware it's supposed to be: a display of firepower which would rate in the kilojoule range. This was what triggered the initial red glow which went up all the small cascade, into the top of the small building, and that's where the reaction spread.
The method he'd use and what he meant by turning the pumping station to a pile of debris, is all left to his sole discretion... and the mysterious mechanisms of this station.
Considering how very weird and sensitive this whole installation is, it's even less easy and reliable to estimate what would be required to damage the station more seriously.

...
The only way out of these power generation figures is assuming that UFP ships very freely violate conservation of energy every time the warp core is turned on.

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.

The system which allowed to lower the mass of a moon by nearly six orders of magnitude is also the one that allows the impossible FTL travel.
In reality, both FTL travel and mass lightening are equally impossible for now, and both would probably and theoretically require working around the tenets of spacetime physics we hold in respect atm. Most interestingly, both are tied to the same system. So it's actually very simple to claim that extra sublight speeds could be obtained by applying a warp bubble to the E-D without pressing the gas pedal up to warp 1 and spending jiggawatts to the power of howdy!
And since the ship alone could lighten such a wide moon, it's obviously easy to lighten its own mass and move around.

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.

Which the ship wouldn't need to produce, and in this case, didn't the E-D move away from a star?

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.

It doesn't need to violate laws that much, if at all. It principally needs a way to modify values we consider to be near constants without breaking a balance. It needs to be more efficient at lightening a ship than a thruster is at spending (well, wasting) fuel to push one via thrusters.
But it requires that you have a reactor to power the mass lightening system. Nothing says it's going to cost huge amounts of energy.

For example the difference of energy that's needed in theory to reach escape velocity, and then the amount of fuel that really needs to be burned and energy which needs to be produced is staggering.
Here alone, repulsors would allow a massive saving on power.

Then add the other very principle of mass lightening, on paper, that is to obtain greater speed precisely by lowering mass of an object while conserving the same energy of said object.
You maintain the energy of the object, but the energy you spend to lower the mass is far less than the energy you spend by keeping the mass while trying to push it further.

Besides, we have evidence of mass lightening used to move large structures, and that while powered by fusion:

KIRA
(beat, to O'Brien)
What would it take to move this
station to the mouth of the wormhole?

O'BRIEN
This isn't a starship, Major.

We've got six working thrusters to power us and that's it.
A hundred-sixty million kilometer trip would take two months.

KIRA
It's got to be there tomorrow.

O'BRIEN
(reacts)
That's not possible, sir...

KIRA
That wormhole might just reshape the
future of this entire quadrant. The
Bajorans have to stake a claim to
it...

KIRA
(beat, character
movement)
And I have to admit that claim will
be a lot stronger if there's a
Federation presence to back it up.


DAX
(calm, to O'Brien)
Couldn't you modify the subspace
field output of the deflector
generators... just enough to create
a low-level field around the
station...

A beat. O'Brien begins to get her logic...

O'BRIEN
So we could lower the inertial mass...

DAX
(nods)
If you can make the station lighter,
those six thrusters would be all the
power we'd need.

O'BRIEN
(a beat, it might
just work)
This whole station could break apart
like an egg if it doesn't work...

DAX
Even if it does work, we're going to
need help from Starfleet once we get
there...

Bajoran supernumeraries in the background... with much
urgency... lights dip and thrum... a definite strain to the
reactor sounds...

O'BRIEN
Dammit! Computer... analyze subspace
field integrity...

COMPUTER VOICE
Power frequency imbalance is
preventing field closure...

O'BRIEN
Add reactor three to the power grid...

to see the warp field struggle to zap into place but reaches
only about ninety percent of the station...

As before.

COMPUTER VOICE
Partial field established.

Instability at twelve percent.

O'BRIEN
(reacts)
Partial field.
(a beat, dammit)
Is the station's inertial mass low
enough to break orbit?

COMPUTER VOICE
Procedure is not recommended.

O'BRIEN
Dammit, I didn't ask for an opinion...
just tell me whether or not we can
get enough thrust with only a partial
field established...

COMPUTER VOICE
Affirmative.

O'BRIEN
All right. Initiate transit mode,
three-axis stabilization. Engage
thrusters.

Close on the thrusters firing... the huge structure rumbles...

as the station breaks orbit, gaining velocity...

O'Brien moving along his console... checking readings... a
klaxon rings...

COMPUTER VOICE
Warning. Field integrity declining.
Instability at twenty-one percent.

O'BRIEN
(on the move, to supernumeraries)
We've got to close that gap in the
field... or we're going to tear
ourselves into a million pieces.

COMPUTER VOICE
Warning - Subspace field collapse in

sixty seconds...

The vibrations continue... O'Brien moves to his console,
searching for an answer... looking at the Cardassian
symbols... after a beat... yells to the room--

O'BRIEN
Does anyone here know if the inertial
dampers can feed the deflectors?

The Bajoran supernumeraries look at him with blank stares...
O'Brien's on his own... he sighs, turns back to the
console... ?

O'BRIEN
(to himself)
A good time to find out.

Starts working panels furiously...

O'BRIEN
Computer, transfer energy from the
inertial dampers to reinforce the
subspace field...

COMPUTER VOICE
Procedure is not recommended.

O'BRIEN
Dammit... transfer the energy!

COMPUTER VOICE
Unable to comply. Level One safety
protocols have cancelled request.

O'BRIEN
(reacts)
Cancelled it...

COMPUTER VOICE
Warning. Subspace field collapse in
thirty seconds.

O'BRIEN
(yelling to
supernumeraries)
I'm gonna transfer it manually...
(to one)
On my mark, redirect the flow to the
deflectors...
(to another)
Keep the power balanced...

COMPUTER VOICE
Field collapse in fifteen seconds...

O'BRIEN
Now!

O'Brien and supernumeraries look like a trio of pianists
playing three baby grands... hitting panels, flipping
busbars... the lights dim again... the whine changes...
O'Brien looks up, did it work...

as the field zaps completely into place surrounding the
station...

The vibration stops and the whine disappears...

COMPUTER VOICE
Field energy now within flight
tolerances.

Although the only relation to warp is established in the comments which I'm not sure to be genuine, the system is just doing the same thing as in Deja Q: reducing mass and thus allowing movement powered by the same sources of energy available to the Deep Space Nine station.
Globally it enabled them to move the station from point A to point B in a much shorter time. A trip of two months was reduced to something likely as short as one or two days (there were running the clock with Cardassians, and those thought the UFP would send reinforcements, and the E-D was said to be able to get there in two days).
Their average velocity would happen to have gone from 30.44 km/s to a speed (assuming two days trip) 925.9 km/s. More than 30 times faster, for a structure which was never built like a ship that's meant to fly around most of its time.
And if I'm correct, the station is powered by a huge fusion reactor, so ML can be achieved with even that kind of inferior power source, perhaps with limited effects.
Again, let's imagine what a ship designed to exploit this truth and powered by a warp core could achieve!

Needless to say that I always found the numbers associated to warp speed rather odd.

In "The Emissary", 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.

Not necessarily. Similarly to a significant gravity field, say that of a small planet, a distortion that is powerful enough wouldn't make a difference between a 30 meters long craft and a 643 meters long one. Both ships would, for example, experience near the exact same 0.5g pull.
What would change would be the size of the field to protect the ship.

But even if we go with mass, the probe and the Klingon would easily weigh more than 100 kg. Picking RSA's mass estimations for the GCS in tonnes, it would be between 6.5 e7 and 25.2 e7 times greater than the probe's. Which, in terms of orders of magnitude and multiplying factor, even falls beneath the factor I got when working with the sphere's volume - 1.392 e8 - and thus it would lead us to an even lower power requirement for the GCS' warp speeds.

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.

I looked at your evidence for 7.5 PW, which is a guesstimate of the amount of energy Wes' blob of AM could deliver.

Your number is based on several assumptions:

• First, the idea that the blue stuff is antimatter.
• Secondly, that the crystals left could channel all of that energy.
• Thirdly;
  • that the antimatter could be made to entirely react inside this ball, and that by the way with good enough efficiency.
  • or that the antimatter could be sucked out fast enough and pumped into the Hathaway's warp core fast enough, despite that there are only very little thin devices planted into the blue element, which would seem to greatly limit the flux of matter which can channeled out of the sphere.

The 7.5 is absolutely the best case scenario that makes it a high end in all possible ways.

Not to say that no matter the safety of AM containment technology accessible to the UFP, which allows highly qualified personnel to manipulate antimatter within the elaborated and still highly regulated confines of a spaceship, I don't see a student and his pet project being even allowed to tap anything close to megatons of energy just to see if his paper's little plasma gizmo theories work.
It would be absolutely and completely irresponsible to the put the entire survival of a crew and a ship at the mercy of a student's curiosity and... unfortunate accident.

I could picture he got allowed to fiddle with high gigajoules worth of antimatter tops, that if the bulkheads of the E-D are as good as the hull.
Kilotons would really be pushing it.

I also assume that by now, you consider that 7.5 PW is the energy needed to jump to or out of warp, correct?

Also, why do you work from the idea that warp 9 = 1000 times warp 1? Would it be based on respective warp speeds?

I note that you used 250 kg for the probe plus the chick inside instead of 100 kg (not a problem, just making it clear I noticed it).
I don't see how using mass would change anything to my number in any significant way considering what I have evidenced above though.

Now, there may be a need to spend more energy to push the ship that fast, or slow it down, but the power requirements needed to maintain warp speed can't be that low, in comparison to the acceleration to warp or decelerations.
It's not important either, since the same jump vs. cruise consumption principle would apply to both the probe and the E-D, meaning that the rating I got for the probe's maximum power output would would still scale up to the max power output of the Galaxy-class... since the value I obtained for the probe was the maximum power output anyway.

Besides, we have Resistance. I'd point out that it's an episode that really makes it hard to know what really powers shields, since dropping them helps the antimatter reaction. I thought they were largely powered by the fusion chamber (sa you told me once in another thread), but obviously they have a real effect on the warp core. It could mean that the difference between the power production via M/AM and fusion isn't so vast.
It would also allow us to argue that fusion powered warp travel is possible.
There's no sign that a craft couldn't produce a high energy plasma with a fusion reaction. I don't even see evidence that the Phoenix has a M/AM reactor besides using what they called a warp core back then and channeling plasma. Did they even have M/AM reactors back then, instead of just plain fusion?

Now logically, with the difference in energy densities between an annihilation and the best fusion which can be achieved, around 2 OoMs, it's quite logical that if injectors lock up at 9%, a fusion reactor would never prove powerful enough for a warp drive, for reactors of similar sizes. Now, perhaps bigger fusion reactors would allow to reach a sufficient power production level to get to those 9% for a ship or a space station.
To get a reactor ten times bigger, you need to multiply each dimension only by 2.154. That's certainly not excessive at all.
In absolute theory and completely isolated systems, and keeping with the difference of two OoMs, the best fusion reactor would need to process roughly a hundred times more matter than the M/AM core.
So if for some reason, assuming size is relative to the power production, the fusion core needed to be 100 times bigger, you would only need to multiply its three dimensions by 4.642.

Eventually we can leave this aside because we have this 9% figure which is much more interesting...

Indeed, it is worth noticing that if the M/AM reaction drops below 9%, the plasma injectors will lock up, meaning that whatever is the lowest cruise mode for the USS Voyager at warp, it can't work below that level of reaction, and would logically run a safe level that's about 10% or 12% (they already were alarmed when it reached 12%).
Which means that whatever is your power figure for slow cruise warp speed (warp sustainment), it can only drop as far as 10% of the best reaction they can achieve, or eventually 100%.

Now there are differences between ship classes, and the Voyager is more of a courrier (with weapons and all that) and more recent, so it's ought to be more efficient at managing power consumption for its trips at various speeds, including peak speed. It means there's a severe doubt that the GCS could allow its reaction efficiency to drop that low.
It also has two warp cores apparently, and perhaps one is used as a backup when the other fails, or something, as we've seen the secondary one being ejected as it was building up energy.
I have no evidence that both are used at the same time though, so I'll keep working from the idea that there was only one in use at the time the character made the comments.

If we can't gauge the energy stock of the probe from its volumes in phaser rifles, we have to look for the cases of the smallest annihilation cores we know of.

What kind of max output a shuttle that's warp capable has been known to achieve? Like, compared to weapons and shields, outside of technobabble and other physics raping systems (like mass lightening, antigravity, etc.)?

We've seen Jem'hadar bugs make craters in ice asteroids which would require several gigajoules of energy to make.
If you look at the Cytherian probe in "The Nth Degree", it was able to overpower the shields of a small shuttle (number five), and later when it attacked the E-D, the field it emitted started at 3.2 terawatts. Most obviously, the probe would have never behaved in a way as to generate more energy against the shuttle than against the E-D, if only for the fact that the E-D is considerably bigger than a shuttle. It's also a field, so it's possible that the shuttle was only exposed to a fraction of this very field.
From those two examples alone you could see where a meagre probe that's below 2 cubic meters and its even considerably smaller extra bits on its shell would logically produce much less than those other ships.
All in all, the power production of an UFP shuttle, regardless of its type, would be found in the gigawatt range. This is the most likely conclusion.

The probe in "The Emissary" had been gutted of its original systems in order to accommodate the trip of one humanoid, and bits and bobs were strapped to the casing, outside. It's painfully clear that in such conditions, the power source of the modified probe could not operate in the best conditions.
Now we don't know the kind of power core it used. It could be antimatter based and thus allow for a smaller core volume, or be using a larger and unusual fusion core, or perhaps the equivalent of pre-charged power cells, in which case the comparison to phasers would be very apt.
But still, pretending that it was powered by a small M/AM core - I emphasize the fact that I really want to see evidence the UFP has that tech - its volume would be a small fraction of the volume of any M/AM core found on a shuttle equipped with such power production technology.

Now some measurements.

Riker pegged the class 8 probe at just over two meters.
Suzie Plakson, who played among other roles, the hybrid emissary K'Ehleyr, is 187 cm tall, and as we can see in the episode, her head was only four or five fingers away from the inner rim, and her feet almost touched the opposite side of the capsule. Of course the extra cranium height of a Klingon explains all.
I'll work with a 2 meters long probe. As we can see on this picture, even the longest blocky piece on the topside of the probe couldn't be more than one meter long.
When O'brien and Riker lift the upper half, we can see that the thickness of the longest "strappon assembly" - which appears to be the biggest piece of all - is inferior to the width of O'brien's wrist by a couple centimeters.
This would easily make it only 4 centimeters thick. The width seems to be equal to the width of O'brien wrist, so let's say 6 centimeters.

Globally, if it were a rectangular prism (which is not since it's trapezoidal), it would have a volume of 4 x 6 x 100 = 2400 cm³ (0.0024 m³).

Now, let's pick the Delta Flyer II for example, which we know had a warp core. RSA's volumetric charts gives the ship a volume of 337 m³.
Going with the width measured at AES, 12.2 m, and by using a ruler against the screen, after pausing at the moment we see the ejected warp core (DVD caps would be way better but Trekcore has none for that very short moment), I get roughly 9.7 cm for the DF's width and 0.5 cm for the warp core diameter. It makes the cylinder have a diameter of 0.629 meters.
Then based on this picture, ignoring the bits that stick out from the squared ends on both sides of the core (and thus treating it like a flush cylinder with no beveled ends), I get a width of 0.9 cm and a height of 2.7 cm. Thus the warp core is roughly 1.887 meters tall.

The cylinder's volume is 0.58636 m³.

Now the volume for the longest black piece strapped onto the probe's shell was 0.0024 m³.

The difference is a factor of 244.3166, with access to much more storage room for antimatter than anything which could be found on the probe: the piece of external equipment I measured appears to be completely isolated from the other black structures.
Now when you consider how much space is needed for torpedoes while the M/AM reaction of a torpedo requires less subtlety than a reactor does, and that torps are rated in the megaton range, I don't see the black pieces on the outside of the probe - probably installed there as room was made inside to allow a tall humanoid to fit - holding such vast quantities of antimatter.

It goes without saying that we have absolutely no evidence whatsoever that there's a warpcore located inside one of those black things at all.



Notice that all of this work could be quickly negated if the theory of warp sustainment were true: the idea that a torpedo for example can remain at warp while spending a fraction of the energy that the ship used to propel its own mass and about everything transported, or its volume.
But then it would also mean that the probe couldn't generate the energy on its own.
That said, with the lock up figure we have, we'd still know that only about ten times more power would have been needed to throw it at warp 9.

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.

Masks, that's because they're supposed to turn the ice to vapour, literally (well they say melt in the episode). Of course until they press the NDF boost effect, they wouldn't go very fast. You can watch the amount of ice the beam gouges under a few seconds, it's rather clear that at this rate it would take much longer than two dozen seconds to get the ice off.
If we want to rationalize the ice surrounding the station seen shrinking inwards, we'd have to argue that there's an almost invisible NDF efffect going on on its own that "eats" matter, much more effectively than simply heating ice. Of course that would just not be what Geordi said they would do.

Now I can't think of an example that would prove that NDFed matter is not affected by gravity or doesn't still manifest under the form of gravitational disturbances.
So if the matter was "phased" and somehow still remained floating in the gravity of the target, then pealing off a layer after another would then just turn the moon into a phased cloud that would just be as massive. That said, the interaction with normal matter would be undocumented for us.

ie, people don't bump into the "shadow" mass of someone who's been NDFed by a disruptor for example.

But I don't recall evidence of any "phasing" occurring either. Best left out thus far.

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.

We've seen that mass isn't such a problem at all, so obviously this argument isn't good enough.

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.

I'm missing the reference here. Do you have more data about this event?

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.

I didn't know that there were that many cases of terawatt being identified as the peak outputs.
Does your main page contain all references and explanations about the contradictions?

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.

Actually very minor problems. We're talking about blasting a lid of rock that's perhaps a kilometer wide and we're not even sure it's deeper than it's wide, and they don't need to blast it violently. They can go for slow melting or meticulous fragmentation, or even use the disruptive nuclear force, perhaps even with the dish as they did in Cost of Living, albeit at a toned down value.
In Cost of Living they did it very quickly.
---
Sidenote: it's very interesting that their main dish appears to be so powerful and above phaser and torpedo abilities (in the episode their weapons were not capable of destroying the asteroid's core). The non use of this very easily calibrated devastating device is most puzzling. We can only infer that it would be near to totally pointless against shields and advanced hull alloys, but it seems to be more of a plot hole than anything.
---
To return to Pegasus, it would be quite absurd to blast the rock lid in one shot. It's well within their abilities and their shields would have no problem to cope with it.
So they can calmly proceed with even precise NDF/kiloton DET fragmenting. They can even take their sweet slow time and melt that thing, and eventually use their navigational deflectors to push any projected matter aside.
Whatever the reason of their refusal to use weapons at first (asteroid instability?), there's no need for exawatt power, not even petawatt power to get a hole through that.

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].

Would you bet your hat that those megajoule/watt phaser rifles have never shown a capacity to NDF people or other objects away? And would you argue that the rifles would actually be more powerful than the phaser pistols?
It doesn't seem reasonable at all.

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.

Yet it's just as valid as dialogue, isn't it?

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.

Everything we see is actually very limited. There is no certain way to ascertain which type of weapon was used up until we actually see them solely using the disruptors and assume they had nothing left.
We see more rocking going on and one more sure hit.

More holes are present next to the two former ones.

More, and notably, larger.

Actually I'll reconsider some of the things I've said about the holes.
It's harder to say which ones were made first. The first two holes clearly were not located on the same decks. We can see where the second torp is headed at, in relation to the first impact hole.

Those two first holes would certainly not be what looks like two overlapping holes. If I had DVD caps it would be easier to point at them, but what looks like two overlapping holes can just be the result of one single stretched hole, and it would correspond to the first torpedo hit. Then the second hole "behind", which we may not totally see as the hull's curve forbids it, would be the second shot.

The lower, third hole could be the third torpedo hit.

Besides, each disruptor salvo is made of two bolts. They just need to not exactly impact on the same point to create what looks like a larger hole when seen at a given angle.

There is simply no evidence I see that shows the bolt weapons being more powerful. The destruction on the base of the nape is limited. The hit on the nacelle is even lighter, and that's without any single evidence that the a nacelle would be more armoured than any other part of the ship.

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.

We see Data only report damage once, despite the ship being hit numerous times before. It's therefore best treated as a summary of what they have suffered thus far. The damage was from deck 31 to 35.
As we can see in the sequence when the nacelle is hit, the damage on the upper starboard side of the central section is concentrated around those levels, with the first two shots which have left the two holes a bit closer to the aft. The one that's closer to the foreground was caused off screen, which could only happen before Troi moved the ship out of orbit and stirred it so the starboard side was not in the Klingon cruiser's LOS. There is no other impact to be seen anywhere around the dish area. And when the nacelle is hit, the flash that highlights the ventral portside area of the main section shows no sign of damage. We see the black segment which can be seen here as well. Yet we know that the disruptors precisely hit this region of the hull.
It fits with what we saw, based on this diagram (non canon perhaps, but useful to locate decks nonetheless).
All in all, it's pretty clear that the damage caused by disruptors is minimal in comparison.
Hell, I didn't even notice, but the last impact we see is a hit very close, perhaps on the edge of the inside the impulse thruster, and the damage is not exactly excessive. And if you think there's less armour around that piece, then it means the disruptor bolt that hit was even less powerful than what we'd think.

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).

The hit on the lower portside of the main section happens when the crew is exposing the ship's left flank to the Klingon vessel.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPR4pNQGNYk#t=0m30s
It's not a perpendicular impact trajectory, but it's certainly far more perpendicular than flat.
I don't really see how angle would make a difference for torpedoes unless they were shaped, which then would mean that they're even more powerful than what we saw, and may also provide ammo to the idea that they created elongated holes instead of neatly round ones.
The last shot we saw was a direct hit almost at 90° right next or into the impulse engine.
As seen, both energy bolt attacks were less destructive, including one that is hard to spot (I haven't found the point of impact in the region where it's expected to be, and we know the shields were not capable of stopping bolts).

[Jedi Master Spock]

They already were in orbit at that point.

No, they weren't. When Spock turned on the boosters, they were on the ground getting held up.

Logically if the shuttle could max out such a boost that it slammed the crew into their seats, they could have pushed themselves away from the planet for a very long elliptic orbit.

Not necessarily. It all depends on how long they were able to maintain thrust.

I don't really get how they screwed up so much shortening their orbit with such a boost.

I can. Simple story: High speed exiting the lower atmosphere means more friction. More friction means more energy wasted in producing heat instead of kinetic energy.

Thus, turning on boosters early means less delta v.

Now, that story about fuel is really odd. Since when did phasers have fuel?

Since this episode, apparently.

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.

There can only be fuel if they had some of it in a tank, and needed energy to energize said fuel. So it means there's a minimum power that's required to energize fuel, since after that I'm sure the system would be built in a smart enough way as to use part of the energy produced with the fuel to maintain the energizing of the rest of the fuel poured into the reactor.

Such as, say, distilling water out of the planetary atmosphere and electrolysing it into hydrogen and oxygen?

The episode is clear: The fuel was gone, and the phaser energy was used to create that.

There are so many problems with that.

They're all problems that make phasers higher energy.

First of all, the planet didn't show any lighter gravity.

Actually, this is suggested by the giant rocks getting thrown around. It's not necessary at all, of course.

Secondly, if you want to handwave some issues in the calc with technobabble in order to make the low energy expenditure still sufficient to reach the equivalent of a LEO, then said technobabble is simply violating laws.
Or mass is lightened.

As I said, the primary method of dealing with an increase in phaser energy is to assume that it means that phasers can shoot quite a bit more high-powered shots than I originally suggested.

Which is not such a major problem, because we almost never see phasers run out, there's no guarantee that overloading phasers release near 100% of their stored power, and, in fact, we aren't too sure about the total energy yield of an overloaded phaser, short of "lots."

Next. I tend to think that repulors are much more efficient than newtonian thrusters, which would likely be hugely inefficient power hogs and require ships to hold quite a good amount of fuel to achieve any particular thrust: The figure you got, which is probably just about the baseline energy needed for 100% efficient engines, would surely need to be multiplied in order to account for conservation of momentum and fuel inefficiencies.

If you don't use technobabble, your figure is by all accounts waaay too low even for a low orbit. It's impossible to agree with that.

When in doubt, check figures. The Space Shuttle is about 16% of this theoretical efficiency. This would then translate to about 140 gigajoules per phaser.

I don't doubt that the shuttle is using both drive systems. It's still having to deal with atmospheric resistance even in the most efficient case, and there's really nothing that says that the total energy capacity of a phaser can't be on the order of 10 tons of TNT.

Since a single shot on maximum settings is supposed to be able to flatten a building, it's not even terribly surprising.

but in the end, even if you manage to convince people that a single type-2 phaser would hold a reserve of hundreds of gigajoules, more or less one order of magnitude, you would have no proof that such a weapon could deplete its entire energy stock in a few shots.

Which is why I said that substantially increases the number of high-powered shots expected. We have no reason to conclude that hand phasers are capable of firing anything more than a couple gigajoules at a time.

It's hard to imagine that the energy cell of a Romulan phaser rifle rated at 1.05 MW would be dwarfed by a much earlier hand phaser, by three orders of magnitude, so much as to be able to fire gigawatts. And that's the power, we're not even told if the weapon could handle that much power over a full second.

That's being drained on a test setting, in a very non-violent fashion. That doesn't indicate anything at all about peak draws.

Or like a Cardassian disruptor rifle with an output of 4.7 MJ, which would obviously refer to the maximum setting per shot.

Do you know what the full quote there says?

KIRA: This is a standard issue, Cardassian phase-disruptor rifle. It has a four point seven megajoule power capacity, three millisecond recharge, two beam settings.

4.7 MJ/3 ms = 1.57 gigawatts.

Then again it's more powerful than a phaser pistol, and yet we've seen hand phasers disintegrate people.

And how long do we see a phaser charged up before making such a shot? Hm, perhaps several tenths of a second? How long does the beam last? Perhaps several frames?

Yes, it's a little problematic that it says "four point seven megajoule power capacity" and then describes a Federation weapon as "a little less powerful," but Kira could very easily be choosing to refer to the maximum sustained output when she's talking about power, rather than the maximum stored shot energy. What appears as a continuous shot on camera could easily be several hundred small bolts per second as suggested by the quote.

The real energy requirements to do that, to vaporize flesh, bones, water, plus the leather and metal the targets would carry, would already be above 100 MJ, and quite likely well above that.

We're talking on the order of MJ/kg, which represents on the order of hundreds of MJ, which represents on the order of tenths of a second of output of a phase disruptor rifle.

Assessing the pipes as literally heated to incandescently hot is not only necessary, it's simply impossible,

The whole incident is "simply impossible" - pipes don't glow like that for any known physical reason.

Which do you prefer? A pipe that is heated and cools in an odd length of time, or a mysterious glow that can only be related to the phaser itself?

Either way it means gigajoules of energy came from that phaser strike.

The surge itself was clearly an after effect of a build up which only resulted from the former damaged dealt to a small section of the station by Data's phaser.

I disagree. There's no indication at all that the glow is caused by the pumping station itself. Instead, it is the visible evidence of the propagation of quite a lot of energy. Quite a lot of thermal energy, to judge by the fact that the pipe bursts along the way.

The system which allowed to lower the mass of a moon by nearly six orders of magnitude is also the one that allows the impossible FTL travel.

And is the same system which, if allowed to circumvent mass lightening, can then be used to draw power directly from subspace.

We don't need to assume violation of COE. It's an enormous can of worms.

Which the ship wouldn't need to produce

So why bother with antimatter?

It doesn't need to violate laws that much, if at all.

Yes, it does.

Besides, we have evidence of mass lightening used to move large structures, and that while powered by fusion:

KIRA
(beat, to O'Brien)
What would it take to move this
station to the mouth of the wormhole?

O'BRIEN
This isn't a starship, Major.

We've got six working thrusters to power us and that's it.
A hundred-sixty million kilometer trip would take two months.

KIRA
It's got to be there tomorrow.

O'BRIEN
(reacts)
That's not possible, sir...

KIRA
That wormhole might just reshape the
future of this entire quadrant. The
Bajorans have to stake a claim to
it...

KIRA
(beat, character
movement)
And I have to admit that claim will
be a lot stronger if there's a
Federation presence to back it up.


DAX
(calm, to O'Brien)
Couldn't you modify the subspace
field output of the deflector
generators... just enough to create
a low-level field around the
station...

A beat. O'Brien begins to get her logic...

O'BRIEN
So we could lower the inertial mass...

DAX
(nods)
If you can make the station lighter,
those six thrusters would be all the
power we'd need.

O'BRIEN
(a beat, it might
just work)
This whole station could break apart
like an egg if it doesn't work...

DAX
Even if it does work, we're going to
need help from Starfleet once we get
there...

Bajoran supernumeraries in the background... with much
urgency... lights dip and thrum... a definite strain to the
reactor sounds...

O'BRIEN
Dammit! Computer... analyze subspace
field integrity...

COMPUTER VOICE
Power frequency imbalance is
preventing field closure...

O'BRIEN
Add reactor three to the power grid...

to see the warp field struggle to zap into place but reaches
only about ninety percent of the station...

As before.

COMPUTER VOICE
Partial field established.

Instability at twelve percent.

O'BRIEN
(reacts)
Partial field.
(a beat, dammit)
Is the station's inertial mass low
enough to break orbit?

COMPUTER VOICE
Procedure is not recommended.

O'BRIEN
Dammit, I didn't ask for an opinion...
just tell me whether or not we can
get enough thrust with only a partial
field established...

COMPUTER VOICE
Affirmative.

O'BRIEN
All right. Initiate transit mode,
three-axis stabilization. Engage
thrusters.

Close on the thrusters firing... the huge structure rumbles...

as the station breaks orbit, gaining velocity...

O'Brien moving along his console... checking readings... a
klaxon rings...

COMPUTER VOICE
Warning. Field integrity declining.
Instability at twenty-one percent.

O'BRIEN
(on the move, to supernumeraries)
We've got to close that gap in the
field... or we're going to tear
ourselves into a million pieces.

COMPUTER VOICE
Warning - Subspace field collapse in

sixty seconds...

The vibrations continue... O'Brien moves to his console,
searching for an answer... looking at the Cardassian
symbols... after a beat... yells to the room--

O'BRIEN
Does anyone here know if the inertial
dampers can feed the deflectors?

The Bajoran supernumeraries look at him with blank stares...
O'Brien's on his own... he sighs, turns back to the
console... ?

O'BRIEN
(to himself)
A good time to find out.

Starts working panels furiously...

O'BRIEN
Computer, transfer energy from the
inertial dampers to reinforce the
subspace field...

COMPUTER VOICE
Procedure is not recommended.

O'BRIEN
Dammit... transfer the energy!

COMPUTER VOICE
Unable to comply. Level One safety
protocols have cancelled request.

O'BRIEN
(reacts)
Cancelled it...

COMPUTER VOICE
Warning. Subspace field collapse in
thirty seconds.

O'BRIEN
(yelling to
supernumeraries)
I'm gonna transfer it manually...
(to one)
On my mark, redirect the flow to the
deflectors...
(to another)
Keep the power balanced...

COMPUTER VOICE
Field collapse in fifteen seconds...

O'BRIEN
Now!

O'Brien and supernumeraries look like a trio of pianists
playing three baby grands... hitting panels, flipping
busbars... the lights dim again... the whine changes...
O'Brien looks up, did it work...

as the field zaps completely into place surrounding the
station...

The vibration stops and the whine disappears...

COMPUTER VOICE
Field energy now within flight
tolerances.

Although the only relation to warp is established in the comments which I'm not sure to be genuine, the system is just doing the same thing as in Deja Q: reducing mass and thus allowing movement powered by the same sources of energy available to the Deep Space Nine station.
Globally it enabled them to move the station from point A to point B in a much shorter time. A trip of two months was reduced to something likely as short as one or two days (there were running the clock with Cardassians, and those thought the UFP would send reinforcements, and the E-D was said to be able to get there in two days).
Their average velocity would happen to have gone from 30.44 km/s to a speed (assuming two days trip) 925.9 km/s. More than 30 times faster, for a structure which was never built like a ship that's meant to fly around most of its time.
And if I'm correct, the station is powered by a huge fusion reactor, so ML can be achieved with even that kind of inferior power source, perhaps with limited effects.
Again, let's imagine what a ship designed to exploit this truth and powered by a warp core could achieve!

This is not, in fact, a contradiction. The moving of DS9 fits precisely into the paradigm I have described. This field was not applied as easily or quickly as the much larger field of "Deja Q." It is strongly implied that DS9's fusion reactors are both extensive and powerful by its ability to resist fire; fusion reactors are expected to be 2-3 orders of magnitude less potent than similar antimatter reactors.

Do you know how many times larger the rock of "Deja Q" was than DS9, and how much deeper it was in a gravity well? Neither factor is trivial, and together, they easily explain how DS9 was able to apply a warp field.

Not necessarily.

Yes, necessarily. If you want to work with conservation of energy, it's mass that is the limiting factor. End of story.

But even if we go with mass, the probe and the Klingon would easily weigh more than 100 kg.

My figures assumed 250 kg.

I looked at your evidence for 7.5 PW, which is a guesstimate of the amount of energy Wes' blob of AM could deliver.

Your number is based on several assumptions:

First, the idea that the blue stuff is antimatter.

Which seems to be precisely what it's supposed to be.

Secondly, that the crystals left could channel all of that energy.

Which is substantially less than the full design load, so that also makes sense.

that the antimatter could be made to entirely react inside this ball, and that by the way with good enough efficiency.
or that the antimatter could be sucked out fast enough and pumped into the Hathaway's warp core fast enough, despite that there are only very little thin devices planted into the blue element, which would seem to greatly limit the flux of matter which can channeled out of the sphere. The 7.5 is absolutely the best case scenario that makes it a high end in all possible ways.

These are all engineering problems.

And we know they're engineering problems that were solved, because the antimatter was consumed, and moreover without blowing the interior of the ship up.

It would be absolutely and completely irresponsible to the put the entire survival of a crew and a ship at the mercy of a student's curiosity and... unfortunate accident.

Given that the E-D survives getting directly hit by photon torpedoes, has internal forcefields, and tritanium bulkheads that have no problem with hand phaser fire, I think that qualifies as hyperbole.

I also assume that by now, you consider that 7.5 PW is the energy needed to jump to or out of warp, correct?

In that particular situation it is approximately the right figure.

Also, why do you work from the idea that warp 9 = 1000 times warp 1? Would it be based on respective warp speeds?

It's a guess, pure and simple... but a reasonable guess given the low end of cited warp speeds.

Now, there may be a need to spend more energy to push the ship that fast, or slow it down, but the power requirements needed to maintain warp speed can't be that low, in comparison to the acceleration to warp or decelerations.

Why not?

Besides, we have Resistance. I'd point out that it's an episode that really makes it hard to know what really powers shields, since dropping them helps the antimatter reaction. I thought they were largely powered by the fusion chamber (sa you told me once in another thread), but obviously they have a real effect on the warp core.

That would be a difference between the E-D and Voyager; the E-D used a large array of secondary fusion generators to power shields normally. Voyager may tap things straight off the warp core to save space.

It could mean that the difference between the power production via M/AM and fusion isn't so vast.
It would also allow us to argue that fusion powered warp travel is possible.

ST:FC and "Balance of Terror" have already done so.

To get a reactor ten times bigger, you need to multiply each dimension only by 2.154. That's certainly not excessive at all.
In absolute theory and completely isolated systems, and keeping with the difference of two OoMs, the best fusion reactor would need to process roughly a hundred times more matter than the M/AM core.
So if for some reason, assuming size is relative to the power production, the fusion core needed to be 100 times bigger, you would only need to multiply its three dimensions by 4.642.

Actually, you don't need the actual reactor to be 100x as large; you just need it to process 100x the fuel.

Indeed, it is worth noticing that if the M/AM reaction drops below 9%, the plasma injectors will lock up, meaning that whatever is the lowest cruise mode for the USS Voyager at warp, it can't work below that level of reaction, and would logically run a safe level that's about 10% or 12% (they already were alarmed when it reached 12%).
Which means that whatever is your power figure for slow cruise warp speed (warp sustainment), it can only drop as far as 10% of the best reaction they can achieve, or eventually 100%.

Does it mean 9% of possible reactant? Or does the 9% reaction rate refer to the percentage of matter/antimatter that reacts on its magic pass through the dilithium crystal?

Voyager is also the series that's given us throughput estimates based on pressure and temperature. The range of pressures varies. The question is "nine percent of what?" and the answer is totally unknown.

If we can't gauge the energy stock of the probe from its volumes in phaser rifles, we have to look for the cases of the smallest annihilation cores we know of.

What kind of max output a shuttle that's warp capable has been known to achieve? Like, compared to weapons and shields, outside of technobabble and other physics raping systems (like mass lightening, antigravity, etc.)?

You mean aside from the systems that require the most energy?

All in all, the power production of an UFP shuttle, regardless of its type, would be found in the gigawatt range. This is the most likely conclusion.

It's an absurd conclusion given their ability to make and leave orbit in a hurry.

Now when you consider how much space is needed for torpedoes while the M/AM reaction of a torpedo requires less subtlety than a reactor does, and that torps are rated in the megaton range,

Well, up to gigaton for bombardment purposes.

I don't see the black pieces on the outside of the probe - probably installed there as room was made inside to allow a tall humanoid to fit - holding such vast quantities of antimatter.

I told you exactly what kind of quantity is required. It's quite reasonable, and not vast at all.

Now, let's do the right math. If the DF is 337m^3 and its warp core is 0.6 m^3, the warp core took up 0.2% of the total volume, which in turn is vanishingly small. Since we're talking about reacting a lower volume of fuel (the DF is overengined), we can easily fit this inside the shell itself, totally invisibly.

Notice that all of this work could be quickly negated if the theory of warp sustainment were true: the idea that a torpedo for example can remain at warp while spending a fraction of the energy that the ship used to propel its own mass and about everything transported, or its volume.
But then it would also mean that the probe couldn't generate the energy on its own.
That said, with the lock up figure we have, we'd still know that only about ten times more power would have been needed to throw it at warp 9.

The probe was fired from a starbase. There is nothing, of course, to tell us that there wasn't some detachable booster used, a warp sled of some kind.

Masks, that's because they're supposed to turn the ice to vapour, literally (well they say melt in the episode). Of course until they press the NDF boost effect, they wouldn't go very fast. You can watch the amount of ice the beam gouges under a few seconds, it's rather clear that at this rate it would take much longer than two dozen seconds to get the ice off.

And? The melting continues after the beam shuts off, or accelerates, or both. Not at all unreasonable.

So if the matter was "phased" and somehow still remained floating in the gravity of the target, then pealing off a layer after another would then just turn the moon into a phased cloud that would just be as massive. That said, the interaction with normal matter would be undocumented for us.

The matter needs quite little velocity imparted to it for that to not be a problem.

We've seen that mass isn't such a problem at all

No, we haven't. You're claiming that mass isn't an issue, with no evidence for it.

I'm missing the reference here. Do you have more data about this event?

There are several evacuations carried out. Pick one. Any one. Start here.

Let's say you beam one away party up, 1000 kg total mass, from the full transporter range of 40,000 km. Guess what? You needed 60 gigajoules to account for their displacement in the gravity field. Over three seconds, 20 gigawatts. Oh, and then you also needed to account for delta-v, too. So now transporting up an away team takes on the order of full percents of maximum warp power.

I didn't know that there were that many cases of terawatt being identified as the peak outputs.

"The Dauphin" and "The Masterpiece Society." Then there's a similarly absurd case of megajoules for a shuttle in "The Outcast," which would be barely enough to push one down a runway, let alone travel through space.

Does your main page contain all references and explanations about the contradictions?

Why, yes, I think it does.

Actually very minor problems. We're talking about blasting a lid of rock that's perhaps a kilometer wide and we're not even sure it's deeper than it's wide, and they don't need to blast it violently.

They're talking about blasting it violently and the dangers thereof.

Sidenote: it's very interesting that their main dish appears to be so powerful and above phaser and torpedo abilities (in the episode their weapons were not capable of destroying the asteroid's core). The non use of this very easily calibrated devastating device is most puzzling. We can only infer that it would be near to totally pointless against shields and advanced hull alloys, but it seems to be more of a plot hole than anything.

Actually, it's noted very explicitly in "Best of Both Worlds." It's quite consistent in this regard, in fact. The only times we see phaser power comparable to full warp power is in "The Sound of Her Voice," and the Defiant is not a typical ship.

The non-use is quite explicable. Mess up the deflector dish and you aren't going to be able to travel anywhere by warp. Sure, it's also a large beam, probably poorly collimated and therefore with limited range, and doesn't have the sophisticated abilities to penetrate shields that torpedoes and beam weapons both have (see Generations). It's a very simple brute-force weapon that, if anticipated, is easily shielded against by an opponent that otherwise might be damaged by more sophisticated weapons (see Best of Both Worlds).

So they can calmly proceed with even precise NDF/kiloton DET fragmenting.

As the unstable asteroid collapses on them?

Would you bet your hat that those megajoule/watt phaser rifles have never shown a capacity to NDF people or other objects away? And would you argue that the rifles would actually be more powerful than the phaser pistols?

What are you trying to actually argue here?

Yet it's just as valid as dialogue, isn't it?

No, not really. Beam width constancy is a huge implicit assumption. Dialogue is generally explicit.

As seen, both energy bolt attacks were less destructive, including one that is hard to spot (I haven't found the point of impact in the region where it's expected to be, and we know the shields were not capable of stopping bolts).

I think you're really just convincing yourself.

All our evidence as to what caused what damage is circumstantial. I see it as indicating clearly that the bolts did more damage. You've managed to convince yourself that it must be the torpedoes - perhaps the bolts hit the exact same spot, perhaps the damage report was a cumulative discussion, et cetera. Neither one of us can be certain of either case, and we can talk each other blue in the face with no result.

I will say this: What's clear in the battle is that the enemy D12 only opens with torpedo fire, and switches immediately to energy weapons - and lesser or greater, those energy weapons, used by a much smaller ship, do quite a bit of damage.

It's also perfectly clear to me that the same types of torpedoes are being used on both large and small ships - but that larger ships should have more powerful phasers. The question is not, in my opinion, if phasers are the stronger weapons; the question is for what ships is a phaser blast stronger than a torpedo.

[Jedi Master Spock]

I assume that you mean melting as opposed to vaporization by that, and using melt numbers instread of vaporization only makes sense since that is precisely what they said they were going to do.
-Mike

No, I do mean vaporization. If you just melted the comet to liquid water, that would be an unstable state. When everything settled down a minute or two later, you'd have a smaller ball of solid ice surrounded by a halo of gases and maybe some icy bits.

If what you want to end up with is most of the comet mysteriously vanished and nowhere in sight, with a small cloud of some visible vapor/ice surrounding it, you need to vaporize the bulk of the comet. That's what we're seeing happen in that episode. Liquids and the cold vacuum of space do not coexist very well.

It's not uncommon to have "melt" substituted for "sublimate" when it comes to ice and snow when the latter term would be technically appropriate. This is one of those circumstances. Apply the necessary energy, and you get a phase transition directly from solid to gas.

[Mike DiCenso]

Yes, which is why I was asking f you were defining "vaporization" in the precise sense of the word versus a more colloqial one that could mean sublimation as a result of melting the comet in the near vacuum of space, and as you well know, the melt energy required to remove that much ice versus outright boiling it away or vaporizing it changes the outcome of the equation. Melting in this situation makes more sense since the goal was to remove the ice, but not damage what was encased inside it.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

Surely, one of two of the notes picked regarding the capacity of phasers doesn't look the same way with the episode at hand.
What precisely sounded like a high end cap from Memory Alpha turns out to be a low end cap in the episode (checked on YT): the beam is clearly being tested, so there's no reason to push it at max, although we don't know for sure, and we see the beam fired for something like a minute, so we know for sure that the rifle has at the very least a stock of several dozens, perhaps low hundred megajoules.

For the other case, the Cardassian rifle, I missed the recharge time. I will check the episode and its dialogue later on. I see it's also possible to understand that the power capacity rated in joules would mean stock energy, as the total energy which can be produced.
From there, the other example above wouldn't fit.
It's not exactly an invalid claim since as a whole, the energy levels in ST are often low, even when there would be great advantages at using the greater firepower levels.
But the stable beam from the UFP rifle (well, it was not exactly an UFP rifle either, but the paramters and the power output were deemed normal regarding typical UFP rifles) and its low megawatt would surely destroy more than enough obstacles (rock, crates, walls) which are used by people as cover.

EDIT: I checked out the script of "Return to Grace", and it may prove that the entire context matters here as well.

KIRA: This is a standard issue, Cardassian phase-disruptor rifle. It has a four point seven megajoule power capacity, three millisecond recharge two beam settings.
ZIYAL: How do you know so much about Cardassian weapons?
KIRA: We captured a lot of them during the occupation. It's a good weapon, solid, simple. You can drag it through the mud and it'll still fire. Now this. (Federation phaser rifle.) This is an entirely different animal. Federation standard issue. It's a little less powerful, but it's got a more options. Sixteen beam settings. Fully autonomous recharge, multiple target acquisition, gyro stabilised, the works. It's a little more complicated, so it's not as good a field weapon.

It seems that the "fixed" power capacity of the Cardassian phase-disruptor rifle is opposed to the autonomous recharge ability of the UFP weapon.
The meaning it seems to convey is that while the UFP weapon can recharge itself normally with its own power source, the Cardassian rifle can't, implying that it needs something to recharge it.
I figure it can be plugged to some portable fusion generator or something, from which you can recharge several rifles at once.
Once plugged in, the power conduits allow for a full recharge within 3 milliseconds.
Therefore, we can keep the megajoule figure as an indication of the maximum firepower of the weapon on the field, instead of the figure being its maximum available energy (it's a simpler weapon that seems to be limited in its scope compared to the versatile and more complicated UFP weapon), and dismiss the idea that it is capable of producing gigawatts of power.
It therefore fits with the description of the UFP standard rifle and the demonstration from "The Mind's Eye".
With a max firepower of 4.7 MJ, it has more power than the UFP rifle, which would be rated at less than 4.7 MJ per second. Kira says the UFP weapon is less powerful, and the test Geordie and Data conducted fits within those parameters. Its maximum output could rate at 4.6~4.5 MW for example, just to give an idea.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Here, I'm bumping this with a post which has actually grown to some impressive size, now that I look at it in the preview.
Itch Hiudje.
It took some time to write this reply, so I'm not expecting any detailed reply within the next month, if it's going to address my post in its entirety, just to be sure all due attention has been paid to my points, and no reply or counter argument was rushed. There's no hurry. I'd actually prefer not to see a lenghty come within the next week, at least. Any detailed reply will be long, and it will take time to post, at the expense of whatever is left of one's spare time.
Now, I also took the liberty of rearranging the order of the paragraphs of our posts in order to identify some main topics. I'll begin this with the study of TOS type-II phasers from the epside "The Omega Glory", then take a look at other cases of phaser use, and then move on to the Galileo 7 case.
There will be other topics to be tackled, and I'll finish on comments and arguments about CS (capital ship) weapons as a whole.
It's possible that if the section on phasers grows too big, it may need to be split from this thread which originally largely focused on CS weaponry yields.





TOS type-II phasers and power clips

Since it would be pointless to repeat RSA's own work, I'll merely point to his conclusions:

[quote="ST-v-SW.net; "The Omega Glory""]
Tactically speaking, the Phaser Two is extremely effective. In "The Omega Glory"[TOS2], Captain Ronald Tracey becomes stranded on a planet in a pre-industrial state, abandoning the Prime Directive in favor of a fountain of youth he believes he has discovered. Installing himself as ruler of the Kohm tribe he has made contact with, Tracey uses his phaser to defend the village against the enemy Yang savages.

Upon the Enterprise's arrival, the crew learns of this. Spock finds Tracey's reserve power packs amongst "several hundred Yang bodies" from an attack a week prior. When Kirk prepares to confiscate Tracey's phaser, Tracey takes the Enterprise landing party prisoner, vaporizing Galloway in the process, and puts McCoy to work to find the (non-existent) immortality serum. (Note that since there were several hundred Yang bodies from the attack a week prior, it is logical to assume that Tracy had used the lowest kill setting, as opposed to the constant vaporizations he used against the Enteprise party.)

He tries to convince Kirk to join him, to help him defend against the thousands of Yangs massing for another attack. Kirk refuses, he and Spock escape, the two find McCoy, and the party survivors prepare to contact the ship. Then Tracey enters, looking haggard . . . the final Yang attack is in progress.

• Tracey: "They sacrificed hundreds just to draw us out into the open. And then, they came, and they came. We killed thousands, and still they came!" (emphasis his)

He goes on to say that they drained their phasers, and that his phaser was nearly drained. It is worth noting that there were, after Galloway's death, only four phasers on the planet. The Yangs almost certainly used only the most basic tactics . . . they were probably out in the open and dressed in various animal bits when fired upon by Tracey. However, given that the Yangs carried spears, we must assume that the range at which Tracey killed them was sufficient to keep the statistical likelihood of his being hit reasonably low. Even the prehistoric bow and arrow (or its precursor, the even more prehistoric atlatl) could be employed reliably out to about 40 meters, suggesting that a significant percentage of Tracey's kills were at about that range.

Even assuming a mere 2,200 were killed (low "hundreds" plus low "thousands"), that is still 550 deaths per phaser in just the last attack. Captain Tracey's reserve belt packs had been found by Spock, and the Enterprise crew was not carrying any (none were seen taken when the party was taken prisoner, though communicators and phasers were). We can thus gather that, per power pack, up to 550 kills can occur. One would presume that a similar number of stunnings would be possible.
[/quote]
A power clip would provide enough energy in order to kill 550 men while leaving their bodies more or less whole.
The high end, corresponding to 9999 kills, would be 4.545 times higher, and therefore about 2500 kills per weapon clip.

Depending on how you look at it, there's clearly little need to use more than 1 MJ per shot, especially when energies hundred times lower would still make a large mess of each single one of these low tech Yang people. You may push the figure one notch up to include attempts at scaring them, or waste through wide beam settings, and you'll get 250 MJ of energy capacity.
Eventually the highest energy capacity per clip would end being about 2.5 GJ and that's damn generous.





Other cases of power and yields of hand phasers and rifles

There's a couple of cases to look at here, and some claims to address, and perhaps some beliefs to correct.
For one, we know that the overloading hand phaser would have taken out the entire deck where Kirk's quarters were located. Although he ordered personnel to be removed from his quadrant (only).
How much do you think is needed?
A couple gigajoules would totally wreck a deck and much more all around the source of explosion. We're looking at something which could approach a mini-nuclear blast, will all the high overpressure to expect from such an event.
But then claim super materials, and numbers shoot through the roof, like for example by suggesting that sections could be isolated by strong bulkheads just as good as the stuff of hulls.
And then, say hi to the high kilotons, perhaps even megatons since you could have to go through several bulkheads.

Secondly, there's Riker never said that a single shot was supposed to flatten a building.

RIKER: No. If this is a real phaser, then I was on the Enterprise. But I fired it on myself, so I should be dead. None of this is real. I'm setting this to level sixteen, wide field. That should destroy half of this building. Unless, of course, this isn't a real phaser.

Level sixteen, wide field: half the building can be destroyed. No time given for the shot's duration. Actually, no number of shots is given either. Despite Riker's thread, we notice that he doesn't use a wide beam setting to shoot at the "audience". What we saw also was a shot that didn't last long.
Plus the objective of the mission was to find people who had been last located in a small building. That's about the only information that's given about the size of any building, and all we know is that Riker was told he was in a mental institute.
With a tight DET beam, we can imagine what this would require. Phasers have displayed some blast capacities, but the lesser the blast, the more energy will be needed.

Let's look at examples of destruction by explosives.

First, to look at high ends, let's assume for a moment that these explosives were of the high energy density hexogen material known as RDX.
We can find information about RDX here and here.
The first link reports that "the velocity of detonation of RDX at a density of 1.76 grams/cm³ is 8,750 meters per second."
Assuming the density isn't fiddled with, then the kinetic energy turns out to be 6.7375 e4 J (67.375 kilojoules for 1.76 grams), which translates as 38.281 MJ per kilo. However this is not applicable since the explosive will obviously lose mass to deliver energy.
So that's why we use the second link, which provides calculated and experimental values for "RDX-wax 94/6". The calculated value is 5.06 MJ/kg. The experimental figure is 5.28 MJ/kg, which is the one I'll use to extract indicative figures from the examples below.

Let's start with how ten kilos of explosive caused enough damage to the Park Hotel the day of the Passover Massacre, enough to call it destroyed.
Many people will look at a building and call it destroyed even if it's still up, and long as it's more like ruined, even if only partially.
We get a high end of 52.8 MJ.
On a higher literal end side of things, you have the attack on the King David Hotel, achieved with 50 kilos of explosive according to this source.
This time, it's 264 MJ.
We have another example in the bombing of the Katu nightclub. With two devices located outside of the targeted building. This page talks about 0.5~1 kg of TNT and about 100~150 kg of a "low velocity explosive, possibly ammonium nitrate mix."
Going with TNT, we'd get between 418.4 MJ and 627.6 MJ.
For an external and non-focused explosion (low efficiency in the delivery of energy), you can observe the extent of the damage here:

http://www.kenexner.com/images/bali/DSCF0136.JPG
http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/terr ... den/7.html
http://www.life.com/image/1751334
http://www.life.com/image/1751329

You have more examples of two to three digit kg bombs destroying buildings at the following website:
Copy the link: http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cac ... ews]=35707

And perhaps one of the most relevant cases, which actually happens to be closer to what we're dealing with, is the destruction of the old Union Carbide Building 82.
WCHS's news spoke of fifty pounds (22.68 kg) of plastic explosive wrapped in copper casing set up to demolish the building.
Would it be RDX, you'd have a total of 120 MJ to spread.
Probably the best page of all about this operation. The explosion comprised two stages. Apparently a portion of the explosives were placed at several points, in what looks like lines forming a grid pattern that would slice through the structure at key points. The rest of the charges were mostly placed at the base, and detonated to trigger the collapse. The building, which wasn't small, was completely pulverized.
10 charges even failed to detonate.

It is interesting because we get to see how a focused application of energy turns out to be much more efficient to take down a building, with a fraction of the energy of the bombing examples presented before.
A phaser with NDF properties on a wide beam setting (which, btw, happen to be rather flat, thus "slicy") would easily hit several walls at once. It would NDF-cut through them and through the structures supporting it.
The first stage was needed to weaken the structure without blowing it up, so the second stage, with the rest of the explosive in the basement and some other bits at mid height, would produce a clean and absolute destruction.

Another example that shows how "small" quantities of explosive are more than enough when properly used, the Holley Hotel in Charlestion was brought down in early 90s with 75 pounds (34.02 kg) of explosive, for about 180 MJ.
A record demolition is presented here, in an article from 1999. It's about the demolition of the large Bow Valley Hospital in Calgary, an extremely large complex.
For such a daunting task, 1746.33 kg of explosive were used, seemingly divided into 7000 odd charges (about 0.25 grams per charge on the average).
Had RDX been used, the total yield would have been about 9220.62 MJ.

Obviously, those 9.22 GJ would not be necessary to damage half of a small building, and only a fraction of explosive energy used in the Union Carbide Building 82's demolition would be necessary to complete what Riker claimed his weapon could achieve.

In light of all of this, from the focused destruction, possibly the added benefit of NDF properties, the wide beam setting, the small size of the building, the fact that only half of it would be destroyed, and the total lack of duration, there is simply zero basis for arguing about gigawatts here.

Also the context is quite important here. Riker's statement was not formulated under quiet conditions. He was so desperate that he had just shot himself a couple seconds earlier, and kept going through revelation after revelation. He kept shooting at everything, and even took the risk of shooting at the fake E-D's crew without exactly knowing what the consequences would be.
It is quite a considerable request to ask people to take his statement, under such conditions, at face value. He was trying to bluff and intimidate his psy/jailor as well, which doesn't make the statement more reliable, but actually less.

Finally, do we even need to be literal with his statement? Not really.
A collapse of several walls and a large section of the building set on fire would be far more than enough to consider this area destroyed.

As for the two references I picked earlier on, my post here shows that it is perfectly possible for these weapons to have a maximum setting on the low megawatt range.
I'd point that it's actually possible that Geordi put the setting on a high mode, since they were looking for a glitch, and the greater the output, the more obvious the glitch would be.

Finally, the mysterious glow on pipes in episode "Ensigns of Command".
I'd point again to my post here, which absolutely shows that it is not heating.
You asked me:

Which do you prefer? A pipe that is heated and cools in an odd length of time, or a mysterious glow that can only be related to the phaser itself?
Either way it means gigajoules of energy came from that phaser strike.

Neither. The first solution is clearly incorrect, and the other "solution" isn't better, as nothing requires the phaser to be the direct or sole source of the phenomenon, or even responsible at all beyond blowing something up.
My point is clear: it's a result from an energetic build up of the station itself. The glow itself simply can't be rated at all. It is a mysterious phenomenon which displays no properties which are known and useful for gauging.

The surge itself was clearly an after effect of a build up which only resulted from the former damaged dealt to a small section of the station by Data's phaser.

I disagree. There's no indication at all that the glow is caused by the pumping station itself. Instead, it is the visible evidence of the propagation of quite a lot of energy. Quite a lot of thermal energy, to judge by the fact that the pipe bursts along the way.

There is no reason why the magic glow would conveniently run along the pipes like that. How can it be? What is it? Nothing, it's a plot device in action.
Although I would be very interested in reading your explanation about how it is what you claim it to be, I must say that quantifying it just as rather useless. Thermal energy doesn't propagate like that.
See, there is precisely nothing normal about the glow. It is transparent and looms above the steps of the quiet water cascade, even well after the initial explosion caused by the phaser shot is long gone.
Not to ask why would a translucent crimson glow just happen to follow up the steps like that?
Absolutely everything sensible rejects the idea that it is a form of thermal propagation. It is the most simple explanation to say that exceptional hardware was responsible of this oddity.





Galileo 7 and fuel from the TOS hand phasers

I notify the correction about when Spock used the boosters.
Now, I think it would have been preferable to switch them off the moment they had left ground, since the creatures were not a problem anymore, especially since the thrusters point backwards and that the shuttle showed no obvious use of vectored thrusting.
It really doesn't make sense here, especially when you consider that they used both repulsors and boosters continually to get off. At least they could have orientated the ship upwards. The ship's trajectory was simply totally unfit for orbit solely using thrusters. Repulsors would be the major providers of an increase in altitude: they obviously had to nullify gravity first, and then add extra acceleration.
Yet fuel was mainly used for thrusters, but it's clear that it also provided power to the repulsors.
Once in orbit, they had 45 minutes of orbit left before falling back into the atmosphere.
Somehow, they had very little fuel left, but they probably were still using whatever they had left to push themselves a little further before being pulled down again, but not by much. Spock ignited the fuel, yet Scotty says they have fuel after that. As we see, the fuel was still being jettisoned and ignited.
Logically, the explanation would be that shuttle's inertial dampeners were "surprised" (reduced power consumption on them explains it), which would explain the acceleration the crew felt, and how things calmed down despite the ship still spitting flaming fuel (inertia dampeners adjusted).
And so we see that they kept pushing for far nearly two minutes or more from there.
But there's still this problem:

I don't really get how they screwed up so much shortening their orbit with such a boost.

I can. Simple story: High speed exiting the lower atmosphere means more friction. More friction means more energy wasted in producing heat instead of kinetic energy.
Thus, turning on boosters early means less delta v.

At this altitude? Oh sure, thin atmospheric drag exists, but how can it not be almost negligible at this point?
It shoved off almost 40 minutes of orbit.
It doesn't make sense.
Now, I made observations based on visuals. But if we were to take them at face value, but if we are to do so, then this is a problem. Clearly, they're more than well into a medium orbit. Now let's be real here. There's just no way the ship can flare up this way at such a distance.
This represents a bigger problem of the reliability of any special effect, and like much of the material of this epoch, puts its "scientific" background into doubt.
I don't know if the newer version has this bit corrected.

There can only be fuel if they had some of it in a tank, and needed energy to energize said fuel. So it means there's a minimum power that's required to energize fuel, since after that I'm sure the system would be built in a smart enough way as to use part of the energy produced with the fuel to maintain the energizing of the rest of the fuel poured into the reactor.

Such as, say, distilling water out of the planetary atmosphere and electrolysing it into hydrogen and oxygen?

I didn't have this in mind, but now that you mention it, let's look at it. The ship could have ramming scoops.
We're not looking for dihydrogen combustion anyway, so the issues regarding electrolysis wouldn't apply. We're not even looking for pseudo "cold fusion". We want typical high energy and high temperature fusion, starting with a very, very small quantity, enough so that the pressure and heat can be provided by the phasers' fuel, and then step by step, each increase of energy providing more energy to sustain the operation. Considering that fusion reactors work well, with a high net gain, it's clear that in Star Trek, it's easy to maintain a fusion reaction. If the shuttle has no warp core, it's even a sure thing that it's optimized to handle fusion.
The other requirements are the existence of ramming scoops, which means this process wouldn't work until the ship actually moves at a substantial speed, which also means that phasers were absolutely necessary.
We're also needing enough concentration of water vapor.
On Earth, there's an average of 1% of water vapor in air, for an air density of more than 1 kg/m³ at sea level, at 20°C.
So you have 12 grams of water per cubic meter, with 11.11% of it being hydrogen atoms. Well, under the form of dihydrogen.
That's 1.332 grams of hydrogen per cubic meter.
Perhaps I can still get something here.
It takes 435.9 kJ per mol of H2 to get 2 H. That's about 217.95 kJ/gram.
With the pp chain (not going into the details of which branch is picked after we get helium), we know that it's worth 6.3 e11 J/g at best. So technically, the creation of hydrogen is not going to matter much in the end.
According to this calculator, the density at 30K feet and 50F is about 3.2 times lower than at sea level.
30K ft, that's 9144 meters.
Now I wander across extrapolation fields here, but let's say that the ramming scoops can gather like a tenth of a cubic meter of air while pushing through one meter of atmosphere.
Thus we get 0.1332 grams/m³ at sea level, and thrice less at 9.144 km above the ground (0.4 grams).
Going with the low end density, over 9144 meters, the shuttle would have caught 0.0444 grams x 9144 meters, or 406 grams.
With a 100% effective proton-proton reaction, you can obtain as far as 2.5578 e14 Joules.
We see that the ramming scoops could collect even a hundredth or thousandth of a cubic meter of matter and still obtain more than enough energy.
The advantage is that the energy which can be obtained this way is so vast that we don't really have to worry much about the power figures we could obtain here: they'd be high, but why that would be silly for phasers, it would make plain sense as hydrogen fuel that's readily available and virtually limitless.

The episode is clear: The fuel was gone, and the phaser energy was used to create that.

Gone for practical purposes, but unless there was a force field or a mechanical system purging the second auxiliary tank by force, simply having a leaking pipe couldn't exactly completely empty the tank. Depending on the numbers of liters per such tank, you could easily have several grams of hydrogen left, for example. It's always something good to have.

First of all, the planet didn't show any lighter gravity.

Actually, this is suggested by the giant rocks getting thrown around. It's not necessary at all, of course.

And busted by the obvious Earth-like gravity demonstrated by everything else that took place on the surface. I'm not going to put much stock into Styrofoam "rocks".
It's not like a Mars-like gravity would make the real energetic requirement low enough anyway.

Next. I tend to think that repulsors are much more efficient than newtonian thrusters, which would likely be hugely inefficient power hogs and require ships to hold quite a good amount of fuel to achieve any particular thrust: The figure you got, which is probably just about the baseline energy needed for 100% efficient engines, would surely need to be multiplied in order to account for conservation of momentum and fuel inefficiencies.

If you don't use technobabble, your figure is by all accounts waaay too low even for a low orbit. It's impossible to agree with that.

When in doubt, check figures. The Space Shuttle is about 16% of this theoretical efficiency. This would then translate to about 140 gigajoules per phaser.
I don't doubt that the shuttle is using both drive systems. It's still having to deal with atmospheric resistance even in the most efficient case, and there's really nothing that says that the total energy capacity of a phaser can't be on the order of 10 tons of TNT.

16% efficiency while the spacecraft had its own weight worth of fuel to take her up, more than 100 tonnes for thrust only.
The Galileo shuttle could only run on the fuel mass of a couple of phaser clips. It puts its mass ratio at almost one!
There's not much to obtain here. For practical purposes, it's logical to assume that hand phasers, notably to be used with one hand only, would weigh as much as your typical current handgun. Phasers are mostly plastics and bits of metal anyway, so we can look at good equivalents in modern handguns.
For example, the full weight of a loaded magazine for the Glock 34 is 280 g, including 78 g for the empty clip. The ammo alone of eight clips would be about 1.6 kg. So there's really no issue here if I go with the fuel of all the clips weighing a total of 5 kilos.
When you have only a couple of phasers' power clips as your source of mass, it goes without saying that to gain momentum, it is necessary to compensate the lack of mass with considerably more energy at the adequate high velocities.

Let me take an example. Say you want to achieve 10 m/s². Your shuttle weighs 10 tons (less than a modern armoured APC, but twice the figure used at DITL - thanks to Mike for the link btw).
Over one second, you want to get 10 m/s. With a ship that weighs 10,000 kg, you get a momentum of 100,000 kg.m/s.

To achieve this momentum with only five kilos of fuel, you need to expel gases at 20,000 m/s. Assuming you don't lose any mass in the process (which is certainly not true because part of the energy comes from the fuel's converted mass and some new found particles are just not exploitable), you're looking at 2 GJ of energy over one single second. For one g, just to nullify the planet's natural pull if it were anywhere like Earth (and again, even it were twice as weak, you'd still have to provide 0.5 more just to obtain a net 1 g for take off).
This is basically the most absolute and still totally implausible low end figure. They weren't climbing very fast either.
The problems are also many: we only did that for one second, we still used all the fuel, we didn't take into account friction.
We know that even when high up in the atmosphere, they still needed one more minute to achieve orbit, and still had plenty more fuel for the max boost Spock achieved by jettisoning the fuel which he ignited as well. So clearly they consumed fuel over several minutes, and had a very low fuel consumption. We can establish some kind of average consumption here. Say they needed two minutes to get into orbit.
The real need would most likely be more than that, especially since they had planned to maintain orbit for 45 minutes before decaying, and they weren't flying away from the planet much once there, since they only had a handful minutes after expanding all the fuel before reentering atmosphere and beginning to burn up.
With five kilos of fuel consumed over two minutes of flight, that's an average of 16.67 grams/s.
To displace the Galileo 7 shuttle at 10 m/s at the end of that second, those 16.67 grams need to be expelled at 5,998,800 m/s.
At such speed, each pack of 16.67 grams would carry a kinetic energy of 300 GJ, and that's again a 100% efficiency and no fuel-mass loss best case scenario.
Besides, at nearly 1g of constant acceleration, we're never going to reach 6.9 km/s before more than 11.6 minutes of travel. The real fuel consumption would actually need to be quite lower.
Finally, as a comparison, in order to lift 200 tonnes (NASA space shuttle and its fuel) at 10 m/s², while expelling only 20 grams of matter, said matter would have to ejected at speed of 1 e8 m/s, with a KE of 1e14 J.
As we can see, there's enough reasons to be convinced that numbers would just be too high. The kind of silly high, here.

Add to that the figure from "The Omega Glory" and we have no other solution but to somehow assume that the shuttle was amassing noticeable quantities of matter for further motion while flying, providing an endless supply of energy as long as enough water could be scooped.
That's the best we can make out of this situation.

And that was for the theory, since no matter the model, it's absolutely clear that the shuttle never spat those levels of power while in the atmosphere of the planet.
Hence why despite the dialogue, everything looks like reaction-less drive provided most of the motion, as I suggested earlier on. That is certainly not going to make the episode any more coherent.





Sublight propulsion and MLT

The original point was gauging the power production of the E-D from one of its journeys out of a star system on sublight drives.
We have definite proof that the E-D could lower the mass of a large object by applying a warp field around it, with a factor of several millions or near. We know that DS9, a space station not designed for travel at all, and powered by a fusion generator, could be reconfigured to achieve mass lightening and then be able to move to a specific destination in a short time.

Although the only relation to warp is established in the comments which I'm not sure to be genuine, the system is just doing the same thing as in Deja Q: reducing mass and thus allowing movement powered by the same sources of energy available to the Deep Space Nine station.
Globally it enabled them to move the station from point A to point B in a much shorter time. A trip of two months was reduced to something likely as short as one or two days (there were running the clock with Cardassians, and those thought the UFP would send reinforcements, and the E-D was said to be able to get there in two days).
Their average velocity would happen to have gone from 30.44 km/s to a speed (assuming two days trip) 925.9 km/s. More than 30 times faster, for a structure which was never built like a ship that's meant to fly around most of its time.
And if I'm correct, the station is powered by a huge fusion reactor, so ML can be achieved with even that kind of inferior power source, perhaps with limited effects.
Again, let's imagine what a ship designed to exploit this truth and powered by a warp core could achieve!

This is not, in fact, a contradiction. The moving of DS9 fits precisely into the paradigm I have described. This field was not applied as easily or quickly as the much larger field of "Deja Q." It is strongly implied that DS9's fusion reactors are both extensive and powerful by its ability to resist fire; fusion reactors are expected to be 2-3 orders of magnitude less potent than similar antimatter reactors.

There's more logic in considering that fusion power would be mastered to a higher degree than antimatter power generation.
The difference between the theoretical bests of both reactions (pp fusion vs. antimatter) is a factor of 1.428 e2.
Besides, I didn't claim a contradiction. Quite on the contrary, the very fact that DS9 wasn't built as a spaceship, and yet could be quickly modified to achieve mass lightening is quite the proof here that a ship designed with this in mind from get go is not a ludicrous idea, but actually most expected.

Do you know how many times larger the rock of "Deja Q" was than DS9, and how much deeper it was in a gravity well? Neither factor is trivial, and together, they easily explain how DS9 was able to apply a warp field.

I don't understand what you mean here.

All in all, the power production of an UFP shuttle, regardless of its type, would be found in the gigawatt range. This is the most likely conclusion.

It's an absurd conclusion given their ability to make and leave orbit in a hurry.

Please define hurry. :)
The craptastic shuttle (from the example from earlier on) shows that with its 16% efficiency, it generated an average of 39.2157 GW over 510 seconds. Disregarding greater friction, if you want to achieve the orbit ten times faster (51 seconds), you would push the power to 3.92157 TW (quick figure here, ten times faster, with v², 100 times more energy).
Air friction could be negated by the fact that the UFP shuttles are most likely far more efficient in propulsion.
And that goes without saying that the space shuttle plus the whole rocket assembly weighed a grand total of more than 200 metric tonnes when it began to fly upwards, instead of 5 or 10 metric tonnes for a small UFP shuttle.
The UFP shuttle would be between 40 to 80 times less massive, and if the efficiency is five times better (80%), you get a power figure around tens to hundreds of gigawatts.
You may get terawatts if you think shuttles are ten times heavier and have a propulsion that's just as disastrous as that of our current shuttles.
Add to that the still good possibility of mass lightening even on shuttles, and I don't see why we need to look beyond the gigawatt range here. The DS9 MLT ratio is already of 30. The Deja Q ratios could be considerably higher.

Now, while I give you the point about the antimatter density, there's one crucial element that's lacking here, and it's the evidence that the probe had an antimatter core, and that the UFP has ever been able to build one so small.
Without such evidence, we then can only consider the presence of a fusion core, perhaps of the grade of phasers.

I didn't know that there were that many cases of terawatt being identified as the peak outputs.

"The Dauphin" and "The Masterpiece Society." Then there's a similarly absurd case of megajoules for a shuttle in "The Outcast," which would be barely enough to push one down a runway, let alone travel through space.

Funnily enough, the insane rest to effective mass ratios from Deja Q easily allows for a multi-megawatt power figure to be enough.

Deja Q

That one really puzzles me. I checked your "TNG>power tech" and "sublight travel>TNG" pages and I'd like to read more about the details of your calculations. What is the stable orbit altitude you used? They finally put it at a distance of 55,000 km, which is more than a very generous high orbit if the planet were anywhere near-Earth. The moon's perigee when it represented a problem was 500 km and about to suffer from atmospheric drag on the next pass.
Does it mean they had planned to move it to a distance of 54,000 km, or was it just the distance they left the moon at once they had activated MLT? Couldn't have their initial figure been much more conservative?





Warp speeds, power production and consumption

You asked me if the percentage figures from "Resistance", notably the 9%, were supposed to be understood as a percentage of possible reactant, or as percentage of matter/antimatter that reacts on its magic pass through the dilithium crystal.
You want to know 9% of what, and while you think it's totally unknown, I think it's pretty straight forward when we take a look at the script:

KIM: Commander, any word on that tellerium?
CHAKOTAY: Not yet. How bad is it?
KIM: The anti-matter reaction rate is down to twelve percent. If it drops below nine the plasma injectors will lock up and we'll never be able to re-initialize the nacelles.
CHAKOTAY: Options?
KIM: If we're going to reduce our power demands even further, we're going to have to drop the shields.
CHAKOTAY: I don't want to leave the ship defenseless this close to a hostile planet.
KIM: All other systems are already offline. Life support is at minimal. You asked for options? That's our last one.
CHAKOTAY: All right, power down the shields.
KIM: That helped, but it's only a matter of time. There's nothing more we can do without the tellerium.
NEELIX [OC]: Neelix to Voyager.
CHAKOTAY: Yes, Neelix.
NEELIX [OC]: The rest of the away team is gone, Commander. They've been taken by the Mokra. What do you want me to do?
CHAKOTAY: Did you get the tellerium?
NEELIX [OC]: Yes, I have it.
CHAKOTAY: Then we need you here. Prepare to beam directly to engineering.
KIM: Re-routing emergency power to transporter room two and energizing.
CHAKOTAY: Chakotay to away team. Captain, can you hear me?
KIM: Unlock the control conduit.
CHAKOTAY: Tuvok, Torres, please respond.
KIM: Keep an eye on the flow rate.
CREWMAN: Yes sir. Rate's holding steady.
KIM: Reaction rate has stabilized at thirteen percent. Up to fifteen, eighteen.
NEELIX: It worked then. We're all right.
KIM: Maybe, once the rate is up to normal we'll try getting the warp drive back on line. Then we'll see if there was any damage.
CHAKOTAY: Begin rerouting power back to all key systems. What happened down there?
NEELIX: I don't know exactly. I went in the shop and completed the trade, then I heard weapons fire on the street. By the time I got out there the Captain and the others were gone.
CHAKOTAY: Are you sure it was the Mokra?
NEELIX: I spoke to witnesses on the street. They said it was quite a fight.
CHAKOTAY: Any idea how the Mokra knew you were down there?
NEELIX: Someone must have told them we were coming. The Mokra have informants everywhere.
CHAKOTAY: Could your contact be one of them?
NEELIX: I don't think I would have made it back here with the tellerium if he had been. Besides, he's involved with the Alsaurian resistance movement. He would never help the Mokra.
CHAKOTAY: They've probably got the resistance movement under surveillance.
KIM: Commander, I think we're ready to give the engines a try. I'm opening the plasma injectors. Warp engines are back online! All systems normal.
CHAKOTAY: Good work, Mister Kim. Mister Neelix, you're with me.

It's percentages of the M/AM reaction rate, most logically percentages of the maximum reaction rate available when you push the warp core to maximum.
Kim pointed out that on the lists of things to deactivate, shields were coming soon. They had already put offline all other systems, and life support was minimal.
The tellerium is just as necessary as the dilithium crystals. The tellerium apparently helps in stabilizing the M/AM reaction.
A small quantity is needed, but without it, it's impossible to maintain reactions. Less and less tellerium means a lowering power production capacity.
What we see is that below 9%, the nacelles were also out, and as I said earlier, it's clear that 12% was already worrying.
That's why 10% appears to be a fair figure, and an easy one to use at that.
Shield consumption must not have been great (likely recharging it at a low rate), but it was taxing the warp core nonetheless.
Due to the Intrepid-class becoming active 20 years after the Galaxy-class and receiving many state of the art and recent innovations, it's also a safe reference in terms of efficiency in warpcores and power management.
Therefore the 10% figure is much reliable, and it's quite a break-me-back scrap-the-bottom low end.
The reason for that is that they were managing to bring the reaction rate up to normal levels, at which point they could actually bring the warp drive back on line, and that came from Kim a few seconds after he stated the rate climbing, last said to be at 18%, while it went from 13% to 18% as fast as it took Kim to report it, and unless he was anticipating, the real rate was probably at 20%.
The warp drive is quite the power hog here, and clearly it wouldn't lift a finger until the warp core's M/AM reaction rate would reach "normal levels", which we know are actually above 20%.
So we see that just to get the warp drive to work, only that, you need it to be at more than 20%.
Simply put, for an Intrepid-class, the cruiser consumption, if this ever were to be proved to even exist to begin with, could only be 5 times smaller than the maximum consumption, assuming the power needed for the jump to warp is 100% of the warpcore's M/AM reaction capacity.

Now, I'm yet to see a clear and indisputable reason why volume can't be a factor and why only mass can, when we're dealing with warp bubbles cast around objects.
We just have no idea how they achieve that. The anchor on which all warp is based could be relative to the mass of the galaxy, even its core, for all we know. The difference of mass between even a moon and a ship would be akin to a spit in the ocean.
The relevance could easily be on the size of the warping (transformation) applied to realspace, like an aperture, where the forces applied to the ship are not relative to its mass, but to the size of the bubble. It's quite an open field and I don't see any reason to ditch the bubble size as the prime factor.
Not to say that either mass or size, both provided similar multipliers, and I even pointed out in an earlier post that the multiplier obtained by using the mass was smaller:

But even if we go with mass, the probe and the Klingon would easily weigh more than 100 kg. Picking RSA's mass estimations for the GCS in tonnes, it would be between 6.5 e7 and 25.2 e7 times greater than the probe's. Which, in terms of orders of magnitude and multiplying factor, even falls beneath the factor I got when working with the sphere's volume - 1.392 e8 - and thus it would lead us to an even lower power requirement for the GCS' warp speeds.

If we compare the 250 kg for the mass of the probe against the high end mass for the GCS which was 25.198 e6 tonnes, we get a rough factor of 1e8 (compared to the 2.52 e8 from above).
Then, here are the respective power production levels between the probe (left) and the GCS (right):

probe power -> Galaxy-class warpcore
--------------------------------------
1 megawatt -> 100 terawatts
10 megawatts -> 1 petawatt
100 megawatts -> 10 petawatts
1 gigawatt -> 100 petawatts
10 gigawatts -> 1 exawatt

Then you can add the x5 multiplier (cruise to peak) to the GCS power production if you wish.

As far as I'm concerned, my original calculation was:

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 seconds in 6.1 hours, you get a constant power of 45.537 megawatts.

Now, if we use the high energy capacity of 2.5 GJ per phaser clip, and assume that there was about the equivalent of 100 of such power clips crammed somewhere inside one of those black things (while remembering that part of the black element must also contain the power core), we get 250 GJ.
Now, assuming that the probe consumed all its fuel reserve over 21,960 seconds, the maximum power consumption is 11.384 MW.
It would be lower if fuel was left (which is more than likely).
We therefore get 1.1384 PW for the power consumption of the GCS at warp 9.
Now accepting the idea that this would be the cruise power consumption, the real power consumption for the acting of jumping to warp would be 5.6922 PW.

Also, why do you work from the idea that warp 9 = 1000 times warp 1? Would it be based on respective warp speeds?

It's a guess, pure and simple... but a reasonable guess given the low end of cited warp speeds.

Eventually, according to the formula presented here, warp 9 = 1516.3811 warp 1.
Warp 1 as the chart in use by the time of TNG, which is not a problem since the warp speeds in question are about TNG+ ships and other crafts.

It could mean that the difference between the power production via M/AM and fusion isn't so vast.
It would also allow us to argue that fusion powered warp travel is possible.

ST:FC and "Balance of Terror" have already done so.

And since the time I asked that question, I've widened my meager knowledge of Trek. So I'd add "Arsenal of Freedom" to that list, since the saucer section of the E-D was capable of returning to a distant starbase while only running on the fusion core(s).

If we can't gauge the energy stock of the probe from its volumes in phaser rifles, we have to look for the cases of the smallest annihilation cores we know of.

What kind of max output a shuttle that's warp capable has been known to achieve? Like, compared to weapons and shields, outside of technobabble and other physics raping systems (like mass lightening, antigravity, etc.)?

You mean aside from the systems that require the most energy?

I thought we had a quote (recently found by Mike?) that clearly said that UFP ships could dump their entire power production right through the phaser banks?





Wes' gift and its attached power figure

I would prefer avoiding repeating my points as written halfway down this post, but not all of your replies convince me.

1. What is the clear evidence that the blue mass is antimatter? none. It's all speculative.
2. What is evidence that the dilithium crystals could transfer the energy at a high output? You want me to assume they were good enough, despite the ship not having a drop of antimatter left. Should we assume that the dilithium crystals were pristine? As you said, the crystals would be meant to deal with much more power, but I believe you may want to read that bit first:
   LAFORGE: The hard part's going to be calibrating the thermal curve necessary to start a controlled reaction.
   RIKER: Assuming you can, can you regulate the reaction?
   WESLEY: There's just enough crystal to do it. We plan to channel the reaction through the chips.
   Meaning that they already were limited by the crystals they had at hand, and if they couldn't make the situation perfect on all fronts, then they couldn't exploit the AM lump to its best potential. Riker said "regulate the reaction", but we don't know how good said reaction would be.
3. The doubts I raised about the idea that "the antimatter could be made to entirely react inside this ball, and that by the way with good enough efficiency... or that the antimatter could be sucked out fast enough and pumped into the Hathaway's warp core fast enough, despite that there are only very little thin devices planted into the blue element, which would seem to greatly limit the flux of matter which can channeled out of the sphere" are still valid. That's why I said that the "7.5 is absolutely the best case scenario that makes it a high end in all possible ways." Which you more or less handwaved by saying that "these are all engineering problems" and that all the antimatter had been consumed.
   Yes, of course they are. How does that help? We have cases of antimatter wastes. We can't tell if such "waste" didn't pile up in the ball or wherever the reaction took place to the point of suffocating any possible reaction before using all the antimatter. Considering that we were talking about power production, we don't even have the proof that they produced all the energy from that amount of antimatter in one second or less, if there is any build up of energy (a charge) before making a warp jump. And finally, we have no proof that they actually consumed all the antimatter. I checked the script for "Peak Performance", and found no such clue.
4. Plus the point I made about the absurdity of allowing a cadet to manipulate such a vast amount of antimatter, held in a glorified fishbowl, relative to a project necessary to his final grade in plasma physics, duraglass or not, still holds. Antimatter is very, very dangerous material, no matter what. You don't pass it over without a second guess so a Cadet may get an A+ at school.

By all means, the 7.5 PJ figure is certainly not a low end, but a high end.






Power and transporters

This one also needs to be covered, quickly if possible.

I'm missing the reference here. Do you have more data about this event?

There are several evacuations carried out. Pick one. Any one. Start here.

Let's say you beam one away party up, 1000 kg total mass, from the full transporter range of 40,000 km. Guess what? You needed 60 gigajoules to account for their displacement in the gravity field. Over three seconds, 20 gigawatts. Oh, and then you also needed to account for delta-v, too. So now transporting up an away team takes on the order of full percents of maximum warp power.

Where is the problem exactly? Those figures aren't high, even if you take into account the delta-v to match the starship's orbital speed. Is it even impossible that they would charge up some capacitors?







GT level torps in bombardment purposes

What is the evidence of the gigaton level yields for photon torpedoes used in planetary assaults?
And why specify bombardment purposes, while you argue that the ships can produce many ewawatts and have exawatt level phasers, which would obviously always require exawatt level shields, which in returns means that torpedoes would need to be of the gigaton level even in your most mundane space battle against ships as big as GCSes.
Something does not follow.





D12's weapons against UFP-made hull

As seen, both energy bolt attacks were less destructive, including one that is hard to spot (I haven't found the point of impact in the region where it's expected to be, and we know the shields were not capable of stopping bolts).

I think you're really just convincing yourself.

All our evidence as to what caused what damage is circumstantial. I see it as indicating clearly that the bolts did more damage. You've managed to convince yourself that it must be the torpedoes - perhaps the bolts hit the exact same spot, perhaps the damage report was a cumulative discussion, et cetera. Neither one of us can be certain of either case, and we can talk each other blue in the face with no result.

I think my observations are fairly objective.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPR4pNQGNYk#t=0m20s
The first torpedo is seen leaving a hole that covers almost three decks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPR4pNQGNYk#t=1m54s
We see three impacts. We know two were caused by torps, and we know that by the time the D12 started using disruptors, that side of the ship was out of the D12's sight.
We know two torps hit, and we have room to argue that a third one was launched before the D12 used disruptors.
These are the largest obvious holes we can see.

Then we have the impacts by disruptors.
They clearly deal damage, but as I've shown, the hit on the underbelly's portside didn't seem to have managed to deal any substantial damage, the hit on the portside nacelle is hard to gauge and doesn't show any glowing hull like torps do (that despite being disruptor shots), we primarily see a large dark area and some bits of hull flying away.

Later we have disruptor bolts miss twice and then hit the "nape" where the main sublight thruster is, and much later on, when the saucer detaches from the rest of the superstructure, we get to see impacts.
This is very interesting. We can be sure that those marks are caused by the disruptors. What we see, though, is that the holes are elongated and thin. We see that there are large scorch marks around them, which is logical considering the fact that they leave large plumes of burning plasma as they impact, something the torps didn't do. The torpedo holes are very clean in comparison, there are little to no scorch marks at all.
What this shot of the back of the junction section between the neck and the saucer shows is holes which are smaller, and we can suggest that the elongated aspect is either due to bolts hitting at an angle (although that requires very extremely open angles) or that they're the result of two impacts separated by a few meters only.
From the highest resolution of the video, I can see none of the wide multi-deck wide holes, but only what appears like dents, like if made by large claws.

All I wish we had were HD screencaps from the DVDs. These ones hardly help at all, safe for only this nice one.
We still don't know how many bolts actually landed in that area either.

I will say this: What's clear in the battle is that the enemy D12 only opens with torpedo fire, and switches immediately to energy weapons - and lesser or greater, those energy weapons, used by a much smaller ship, do quite a bit of damage.

Yes, they do. I never denied this.
This subdiscussion mainly begun as a reaction to the last part of your post:

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.

"The Arsenal Of Freedom" transscript.
Yar scans the piece of tritanium.


TASHA
Tritanium. It's been melted.
RIKER
What could do that?
TASHA
Whatever it was, it's beyond our technology.


I'm sorry, but what is that supposed to mean?
Does that mean that they don't have the technology to melt tritanium? So starships grow on trees now?
Or what? No one could melt tritanium with weapons or any device of type X, despite the fact that thus far, there is no reason to set a limit on the maximum scale of such devices, since they just had no idea yet about what was going on here? They know nothing about that place at all. They don't know what they'll find there, safe that it's a planet where weapons and other gadgets are sold. Could be anything, could be of any size. There is nothing to claim that needs to be "reasonable": they haven't explored that area of the jungle yet, as Yar makes her statement even before Data finds a gun.

And when they find a weapon (after Yar's weird comment) we see that it's quite a huge piece of technology that would really find its place on a bulky power armour, or large shuttle.
The most amusing aspect of this is that the tritanium has been melted, yet the vegetation around the plank (?) is absolutely fine. Finally, that place is inhabited by dwarf sized hovering machines, very mobile, equipped with weapons, capable of cloaking and projecting extremely convincing holograms, can take a full exposure to a phaser beam for two to three seconds (and later two beams on kill mode for more than one second, and keep "improving" by coming back with deflector shields), and can shoot impenetrable force fields which return no information to sensors and still remain active despite the robot being destroyed. And then you can count the beaming in and out of the drones.
The ACS (Anti Capital Ship) weapons were a severe threat to the E-D shields, and the firing vehicle was impossible to track.

Your phaser firepower estimation largely relies on this element, but from my point of view, it just makes no sense.
I know the episode wanted to build tension, but that's not helping much.
It's even more absurd because if we take your maximum energy and power capacity figures for type II hand phasers (as for example the figure you give in the part I quoted), it's absolutely clear that they'd have far more than available energy to achieve that if it's supposed, to be achieved with weapons.

At best, all I can think of is that Yar didn't spill the whole beans, and her tricorder was telling her that it's been melted in a way that no UFP technology is capable of.
In other words, it's the method, not the fact that it was melted, that was odd.

Considering the feats of those weapons (607 and else), it's possible that they are capable of making matter flow via technobabble and make it look like it's been melting.

It's also perfectly clear to me that the same types of torpedoes are being used on both large and small ships - but that larger ships should have more powerful phasers. The question is not, in my opinion, if phasers are the stronger weapons; the question is for what ships is a phaser blast stronger than a torpedo.

Well I don't know what is the evidence that the same torpedoes are used on all types of ships of a given faction. And it's possible that if they don't bother making bigger torps for bigger ships, that they'd also use the same phaser/disruptor banks/nodes for larger ships, albeit in greater quantities.
We're yet to see large UFP sniping ships which would devote a large amount of their volume to the sole mounting of an oversized phaser array (something even better than 3 nacelles "future" Enterprise).





Other random cases relative to power production

Masks
It would be quite long to go through it again. The problem is simple. The comet wouldn't melt if that much energy was fired at it. It would shatter, explode, and threaten the embedded structure inside. Geordie & co. wanted to melt the ice, and it seems that's because they wanted to be careful and avoid blowing it up violently.
There you can see the size of the comet, relative to the station, measured thanks to the top of the station that's revealed as the phasers "melt" some of the ice.



The process, however, starts slowly, and we know it's for a good reason. I don't see why they'd suddenly accelerate the process.
Besides, I don't even see why they'd bother melting all of the comet when they just need to disloge the station from the ice of the mantle. The core was even supposed to contain some heavier elements.
They set it at 10%, and the beam would automatically terminate as the comet's core would be reached. In other words they wouldn't even try to melt the entire thing, and most likely not even an entire half.
Although there's an issue, like how the ice shrinks inwards and disappears on its own, the real point is that I don't see them vaporizing that much ice so fast without breaking it into little pieces. The sudden expansion of matter due to the sudden increase of temperature would logically lead the comet to break into pieces. Amusingly, it would probably shatter the comet and shorten the procedure a great deal, but taking the risk of damaging the structure inside nonetheless.
I only see two solutions. The first, they try to melt it slowly, at the rate seen for the few seconds we see the beam hit the comet. Or they increase firepower suddenly, but break the ice doing so, which makes melting the comet unnecessary, and the station survives it, because in the meantime they scanned it and got a clear idea of its toughness.

Pegasus
We've seen the size of the breach the E-D flew through. The amount of rock melted by the Romulan warbird would obviously be of the kind to fill that fracture, to make a cap of a given thickness.
Blasting that cap is certainly not going to require massive amounts of energy. Yes, blasting it would be dangerous to the ship's safety since it was inside that asteroid, but it's certainly not going to take massive amounts of energy. First, because it's still very hot, and secondly because it could be a kilometer wide and just as deep or less. They found the Pegasus 2 km beneath the surface of the asteroid, and the seal was in front of them, but we don't know if it filled the entrance up to the surface. At best, if we take the whole length they went through phased, we can claim a cap of 3 km tops. It's much like a cylinder.
The fact is that they didn't even talk about a blast at all. They just wanted to cut through it, and for some reason the readings they had were showing that their situation was very bad. Probably worsened after the Romulans had fired at the entrance. You won't find evidence of exawatt phasers here because they're not necessary in this escape operation. It might be if you intended to vaporize the entire cap in one shot, which is obviously not what Worf had in mind.

[Mith]

Although I agree on not having gigaton level phasers--I do have to question that quote, since it does go against everything we know about Trek. Ie, we've seen ships throw out their entire warp cores. I'm not sure how they plan on keeping the injectors running if there's no warpcore.

[Kor_Dahar_Master]

Although I agree on not having gigaton level phasers--I do have to question that quote, since it does go against everything we know about Trek. Ie, we've seen ships throw out their entire warp cores. I'm not sure how they plan on keeping the injectors running if there's no warpcore.

Im not sure anybody is saying they are gigaton DET weapons but we do have instances where they disintigrate large quanities of materials that would require gigatons of firepower were they a DET weapon. However as they likely are not due to the effects we still need to quantify them in a measurable way and as such comments like "a effect that would require 20 gigatons per second of DET fire" is the best available option.

[Mike DiCenso]

Several major problems here with this.


- The phasers in "Mask" were stated as being set to widespread, and that is what we see as the phasers first fire in the normal narrow beam, then within a couple seconds widen out many times this and were continuing to widen even when the scene cut. I know Oragahn doesn't like this fact as it goes against his whole thesis, but it was stated and shown, and would allow for even heating of the comet's outer layers as well as reduce fragmentation from rapid thermal expansion.

- Captain Tracy's killing of the Yangs is also somewhat flawed as we see thoughout the episode that the guy loved running around firing his phaser on full disintegration mode. He uses this several times on-screen when he vapes Lt. Galloway, the redshirt of the week, then a computer Spock was trying to rig to send a message for help to the Enterprise (Spock suffers life-threatening injuries since he was next to it clearly indicating whatever it is phasers do on this setting is not completely without dangerous effect to those nearby), and then when chasing Kirk through the streets of the village, Tracy fires and misses Kirk, hitting a rain barrel, and making it vape away.

Prior to the final Yang attack, and before Kirk and company arrived on the scene, he had killed hundreds of Yang raiders, which did leave bodies, or some remains behind that Spock and Galloway while out scouting the area could find along with abandoned phaser power packs. Tracy may still have tried to scare them off with a massive show of force at that time, leaving bodies as a warning, but when push came to shove, he opened up with everything he had. Another thing to keep in mind is that the Kohm henchmen probably only had minimal training with the phasers they had stolen from the Enterprise landing party, so we cannot expect them to use the phasers properly as a trained Starfleet captain or other personel would.


- One the "The Pegasus", the E-D and Pegasus were far more than 2 km below the surface of the asteroid as once the cloak engages and the E-D stars moving, it takes several seconds for them to reach the still glowing plug and then a second or two passing inside the rock that Worf reports that they have passed through 2 kilometers of the asteroid and are within a kilometer of the surface. Thus three km total. You can see the entire scene here from 1:00 onward. The total depth into the asteroid teh two ships were at is probably closer to 4 km given the time it took the E-D to reach the rock.
-Mike