How do you know it was vaporized? When something gets hit by a phaser, it simply disappears, but it doesn't explode like it would if it vaporized; in fact there's generally no trace of it left at all. So to say it was "vaporized" is incorrect; we don't know what happens to it. All of ST technology uses some space-bending effect, so that might be what's involved to make sub-atomic particles lose cohesion with each other, causing matter to simply fall apart into neutrinos, tachyons etc; in fact, that sounds a lot like what happens to it, and would explain where it goes.Kor_Dahar_Master wrote:You missed my point.Mr. Oragahn wrote:Firing 10~18 GT/s at the surface of a planet you're trying to save, cracking the crust, and then trying to continue dumping particles by the means of a beam weapons through the material you just turned to ions... why do I find that silly again? :)
Obviously NDF is your friend: it can trigger a chain reaction in matter which can amplify the effect of a beam weapon, even when the beam is gone. Measuring this... via DET... is a big no no.
What i am saying is that in that episode the Enterprise phaser vaporised the same amount of material it would have taken 10-18GT per second of DET to achieve.
Gigaton-level phasers?
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Re: Gigaton-level phasers?
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Re: Gigaton-level phasers?
No NDF. I already gave you the quote about disruptors from "A Taste of Armageddon". Of course some materials are tougher than others. If I take a laser and shine it on a piece of paper and burn a hole through it, but then shine it on a brass plaque but can't burn or even melt it, maybe heat it up a bit, does that mean that lasers are magical NDF weapons? No, it means that it takes more power to effect a material with different physical properties on it. Here is "Too Short a Season" at 4:30 with the phasers being used to cut through a bulkhead with no "NDF" just a torch-like DET effect."Forsaken", at 20 seconds.
Phasers at maximum do indeed NDF stuff away, but thermal side effects are also present.
They quickly eat away the surface coating but can't get through the toranium inlay.
Later on they get those bipolar torches but it takes time to do anything worth it.
I noticed that alloys handle NDF effects much better than basic elements.
Still, as far as "Lower Decks" goes, see a very short burst effect on the hull of the shuttle here.
Next is "Hide and Q" at 0:41. One shot and BOOM!
Then going back a ways there is TOS' "Man Trap" at 4:30 onwards.
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Re: Gigaton-level phasers?
No, not always as was the case in TNG's "Aquiel" where the use of a phaser on a creature in the form of a crewman by the titular character left cellular remains on a deckplate.KirkSkywalker wrote:How do you know it was vaporized? When something gets hit by a phaser, it simply disappears, but it doesn't explode like it would if it vaporized; in fact there's generally no trace of it left at all. So to say it was "vaporized" is incorrect; we don't know what happens to it. All of ST technology uses some space-bending effect, so that might be what's involved to make sub-atomic particles lose cohesion with each other, causing matter to simply fall apart into neutrinos, tachyons etc; in fact, that sounds a lot like what happens to it, and would explain where it goes.
Also, again I have to remind you guys of the disruptor (which phasers can and do operate on as per TOS' "Obsession) from "A Taste of Armageddon":
SCOTT: Yes, Mister DePaul?
DEPAUL: Sensor readings just shot off the scale.
SCOTT: Well, now. They're taking pot shots at us. Holding, Mister DePaul?
DEPAUL: Screens firm, sir. Extremely powerful sonic vibrations. Decibels eighteen to the twelfth power. If those screens weren't up, we'd be totally disrupted by now.
MCCOY: Well, I guess that answers our questions, Mister Scott. They're not very friendly, are they?
SCOTT: Aye, but what about our Captain and the landing party down there somewhere?
MCCOY: We get them out.
SCOTT: If they're alive, and if we can find them. That's a big planet.
MCCOY: Not too big for the Enterprise to handle if it has to.
SCOTT: We can't fire full phasers with our screens up, and We can't lower our screens with their disruptors on us. Of course I could treat them to a few dozen photon torpedoes.
So the energy directed shakes the hell out of everything, which falls in line with Mirror Archer's disintegration statement from "In a Mirror, Darkly". So no Nuclear Disruption Force (NDF), which is something totally different.
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Re: Gigaton-level phasers?
YES always, in the context of the original cited question, and my related response: i.e. we were discussing the case of when it does, which the OP claimed “vaporized” a shaft of rock 3000km deep; however such things are clearly not vaporized, just “vanished” somehow in a way that produces no detectable radiation or residue, and leaves no detectable trace (other than in "The Omega Glory," when Spock was temporarily stunned when standing next to an object that Cap. Tracey "vanished" with his phaser). In contrast, vaporization leaves quite obvious raiation and residue-- ala an explosion.Mike DiCenso wrote:No, not alwaysKirkSkywalker wrote:How do you know it was vaporized? When something gets hit by a phaser, it simply disappears, but it doesn't explode like it would if it vaporized; in fact there's generally no trace of it left at all. So to say it was "vaporized" is incorrect; we don't know what happens to it. All of ST technology uses some space-bending effect, so that might be what's involved to make sub-atomic particles lose cohesion with each other, causing matter to simply fall apart into neutrinos, tachyons etc; in fact, that sounds a lot like what happens to it, and would explain where it goes.
I also wouldn’t say it’s” NDF,” but more accurately SNDF—i.e. sub-nuclear disruption force, since the particles are clearly not free protons and electrons, but something much smaller-- otherwise you’d have a dangerous 75-kg mass of particle-shower emanating from any zapped person or equal-sized object, which would want to join to the nearest opposite charge. However instead we simply see it “disappear” like it was beamed somewhere else, and we don’t know how much energy this takes; for all we know it could be just like popping a balloon, since subatomic particles are mostly just empty space—i.e. perhaps it takes very little energy at all, just a certain frequency etc, which would be like pricking a balloon (via SNDF) instead of punching it (ala DET, disruption, etc).
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Re: Gigaton-level phasers?
No, I am answering in the context of what you guys are talking about. The mechanism is critical here since it may require a great deal of energy given even phaser rifle in TNG's "The Mind's Eye" on a seemingly rountine test firning was stated as outputting 1.05 megawatts. Comparable weapons, like the Breen CRM-114 rifle, which was of comparable size, could output 4.6 gigajoules to cut through force fields. The TOS AToA dialog is very important to all of this since not only do we get a rating of insane decibels levels for the planetary disruptors, but we also get the mechanism for it, which is compared to a sonic vibration. Furthermore, we know the following about phaser settings from TOS' "Obsession":
KIRK: Take your men. Make a swing around our perimeter. Scan for dikironium in the atmosphere.Set your phasers on disrupter-B. If you see any gaseous cloud, fire immediately. You're on Red Alert. Make a sweep.
Ah ha. Phasers are capable of disrupting in multiple ways. Therefore, NDF, that is nuclear or sub-nuclear disruption it not the mechanisim involved here.
So what do we have? Hand phasers disintegrate targets via some kind of sonic disruption, and they require at least megawatts for output. There are sometimes thermal effects and someone times not, but as we see in "The Omega Glory", it is not an isolated effect as seen here when Spock is seriously injured as the computer next to him is hit at 8:57.
-Mike
KIRK: Take your men. Make a swing around our perimeter. Scan for dikironium in the atmosphere.Set your phasers on disrupter-B. If you see any gaseous cloud, fire immediately. You're on Red Alert. Make a sweep.
Ah ha. Phasers are capable of disrupting in multiple ways. Therefore, NDF, that is nuclear or sub-nuclear disruption it not the mechanisim involved here.
So what do we have? Hand phasers disintegrate targets via some kind of sonic disruption, and they require at least megawatts for output. There are sometimes thermal effects and someone times not, but as we see in "The Omega Glory", it is not an isolated effect as seen here when Spock is seriously injured as the computer next to him is hit at 8:57.
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Re: Gigaton-level phasers?
How do you know Spock didn't simply get some stray rays from Capt. Tracy's phaser-blast? Spock was only stunned, after all, he didn't suffer any burns or radiation-sickness etc., like he would if he was actually hit by a NDF disruption, as would everyone else in the room.
So it makes more sense it was phaser-rays, which only stun a person at low levels.
So it makes more sense it was phaser-rays, which only stun a person at low levels.
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Re: Gigaton-level phasers?
Apparently you didn't watch the episode as Spock was injured by the side affects of being in the close proximity of the vaporized computer:
MCCOY: He'll live, but I'll have to get him to better facilities than this.
Then later just before the duel with Tracy:
KIRK: Spock?
SPOCK: I'm weak, Captain, but not in difficulty.
MCCOY: He must have attention soon.
SPOCK: My need for attention is vital, Doctor, but our need for departure is even more immediate
So this was no mere "stun" effect, but something much more serious since if it were McCoy would not be constantly concerned and would have been content to let the effects wear off as we have seen many times with the various times stunn has actually been used on people. Also given Vulcans' natural toughness over humans, this would have been far more serious for Kirk or McCoy had they been the ones hit.
-Mike
MCCOY: He'll live, but I'll have to get him to better facilities than this.
Then later just before the duel with Tracy:
KIRK: Spock?
SPOCK: I'm weak, Captain, but not in difficulty.
MCCOY: He must have attention soon.
SPOCK: My need for attention is vital, Doctor, but our need for departure is even more immediate
So this was no mere "stun" effect, but something much more serious since if it were McCoy would not be constantly concerned and would have been content to let the effects wear off as we have seen many times with the various times stunn has actually been used on people. Also given Vulcans' natural toughness over humans, this would have been far more serious for Kirk or McCoy had they been the ones hit.
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Re: Gigaton-level phasers?
Phasers can also kill without leaving a trace, and McCoy had no idea how much damage it did. In any event, an NDF disintegation of 10kg of metal would have killed Spock and everyone else, and made quite a mess besides; however that computer simply disappeared without a trace, other than its temporary effect on Spock.
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Re: Gigaton-level phasers?
No, the effects were not temporary as the dialog I presented in my previous posts clearly stated, and Spock was in dire need of advanced medical care with the implication that if he did not receive proper care, he would die.
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Re: Gigaton-level phasers?
Nothing like an NDF would have caused, i.e. 10kg of atomic nuclei and free electrons turning the building into an ion-engine. Whatever hit Spock, and whatever caused it, it definitely wasn't an NDF.Mike DiCenso wrote:No, the effects were not temporary as the dialog I presented in my previous posts clearly stated, and Spock was in dire need of advanced medical care with the implication that if he did not receive proper care, he would die.
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Re: Gigaton-level phasers?
Well that's the other issue here, is that NDF is not "effects free", either, no matter how much energy is required since there would have been as you say an massive ionic plasma filling the room when either Galloway or the computer got hit. One possibility is that phase modulated weapons, like the phase cannons of the 2150's, or the later phasers of the 2250's onward may at the same time phase transition a target, allowing the awful after effects like super-heated steam or ionized plasmas and so to be removed for the most part.
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Re: Gigaton-level phasers?
But phase-transitioning is a stretch, and it wouldn't have hurt Spock by his simply standing next to a targeted object (unless as stated, he caught some of the phaser-blast). This leaves SNDF, which is the only way that the matter can be converted to harmless particles-- i.e. if they're so small and neutral that they simply pass through everything fairly harmlessly (with "fairly" being a relative term in Spock's case).Mike DiCenso wrote:Well that's the other issue here, is that NDF is not "effects free", either, no matter how much energy is required since there would have been as you say an massive ionic plasma filling the room when either Galloway or the computer got hit. One possibility is that phase modulated weapons, like the phase cannons of the 2150's, or the later phasers of the 2250's onward may at the same time phase transition a target, allowing the awful after effects like super-heated steam or ionized plasmas and so to be removed for the most part.
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Re: Gigaton-level phasers?
Hey? You see an entire patch of the coating of that door suddenly disappear.Mike DiCenso wrote:No NDF."Forsaken", at 20 seconds.
Phasers at maximum do indeed NDF stuff away, but thermal side effects are also present.
They quickly eat away the surface coating but can't get through the toranium inlay.
Later on they get those bipolar torches but it takes time to do anything worth it.
I noticed that alloys handle NDF effects much better than basic elements.
Still, as far as "Lower Decks" goes, see a very short burst effect on the hull of the shuttle here.
If it's the acronym NDF that bothers you, then let me say technobabbled away with low signs of heat nonentheless.
Just because you have one type of weapon that disrupts a target with sound waves in space, while shouting... sorry, shooting enough energy as to destroy a million star systems from the ground, through the atmosphere, at a ship located in close orbit... doesn't mean it applies to all systems. And it doesn't mean that there wouldn't be any NDF either.I already gave you the quote about disruptors from "A Taste of Armageddon".
Gloablly, I don't put any stock into that quote because the number is just beyond silly.
It's like shooting your own foot here, Mike. You precisely give me a proof that what took place in "The Forsaken" was NDF.Of course some materials are tougher than others. If I take a laser and shine it on a piece of paper and burn a hole through it, but then shine it on a brass plaque but can't burn or even melt it, maybe heat it up a bit, does that mean that lasers are magical NDF weapons? No, it means that it takes more power to effect a material with different physical properties on it. Here is "Too Short a Season" at 4:30 with the phasers being used to cut through a bulkhead with no "NDF" just a torch-like DET effect.
Besides, what does this sequence prove? They set the phasers on some unknown setting, and for the sake of coherency, I'd have to say that they wanted to make a clean hole.
Yes, however anyone who's going to argue that it's pure DET doesn't really have any idea of what kind of pyroclastic effects are expected when trying to truly boil off that amount of rock in such a short burst.Next is "Hide and Q" at 0:41. One shot and BOOM!
It's not the first time we see phaser/disruptors firing at a target and suddenly making it pop either.
Of course again if it were pure DET both Spock and Kirk, especially Kirk, would be bleeding to death after that.Then going back a ways there is TOS' "Man Trap" at 4:30 onwards.
-Mike
May, or may not.Mike DiCenso wrote:No, I am answering in the context of what you guys are talking about. The mechanism is critical here since it may require a great deal of energy given even phaser rifle in TNG's "The Mind's Eye" on a seemingly rountine test firning was stated as outputting 1.05 megawatts.
No, it could cut through a field of such energy. We don't know if it defeats it because it just happens to match it on an intensity ground. It's also a Breen weapon, and if I recall correctly, the Breen are the same people who had already managed to build shield-cheating weapons.Comparable weapons, like the Breen CRM-114 rifle, which was of comparable size, could output 4.6 gigajoules to cut through force fields.
It's also a bulky weapon, obviously meant to engage large moving vessels and punch through considerable amounts of reactive armour, a thickness way greater than what you find on UFP shuttles for example.
It doesn't really matter how, as long as it's clear that it's exotic. A sound wave, if it's powerful enough, wouldn't disrupt you. It would cause a shockwave through the material and if powerful enough, would heat it up.The TOS AToA dialog is very important to all of this since not only do we get a rating of insane decibels levels for the planetary disruptors, but we also get the mechanism for it, which is compared to a sonic vibration. Furthermore, we know the following about phaser settings from TOS' "Obsession":
KIRK: Take your men. Make a swing around our perimeter. Scan for dikironium in the atmosphere.Set your phasers on disrupter-B. If you see any gaseous cloud, fire immediately. You're on Red Alert. Make a sweep.
Ah ha. Phasers are capable of disrupting in multiple ways. Therefore, NDF, that is nuclear or sub-nuclear disruption it not the mechanisim involved here.
Besides, you assume "B" is a way as other than NDF, while it could be a level, a magnitude in the effect, or a mix between DET and NDF.
You assume that the ground to orbit defense sonic weapon works on the same principles as a phaser. It's quite a leap, for which there is no evidence.So what do we have? Hand phasers disintegrate targets via some kind of sonic disruption, and they require at least megawatts for output.
And Kirk is not when "stone" is pulverized less that one meter from him.There are sometimes thermal effects and someone times not, but as we see in "The Omega Glory", it is not an isolated effect as seen here when Spock is seriously injured as the computer next to him is hit at 8:57.
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Re: Gigaton-level phasers?
And about an equal amount in both cases, indicating that either the material of the computer (i.e. various metals) was more dangerous when disintegrated, or Spock was simply standing closer (which indeed he was-- about 6 inches from the computer)-- and so either caught more of the reflected phaser-rays, or more of the "fallout."Mr. Oragahn wrote:And Kirk is not when "stone" is pulverized less that one meter from him.Mike DiCenso wrote:There are sometimes thermal effects and someone times not, but as we see in "The Omega Glory", it is not an isolated effect as seen here when Spock is seriously injured as the computer next to him is hit at 8:57.
-Mike
But let's look at what it definitely wasn't:
1. It wasn't NDF fallout, which would destroy everything in the room and probably more.
2. It wasn't disrupted, vaporized or otherwise pulverized into atoms, protons, electrons, vapors or otherwise particulate material, which would do the same, sending it flying in all directions at extremely high speeds and levels of ionization.
This leaves only the material either being "phased" out of normal existence, or SNDF'ed into bits so small that it's relatively harmless.Since phase-shifting was only generally introduced in TNG, then this leaves SNDF.
When tens or hundreds of pounds of matter disappear (like in "The Omega Glory" when Enisgn Redshirt or the computer are "zapped" by Capt. Tracey's phaser), you have to account for it; you can't just say "a wizard 'disappeared' it."
Phasers have adjustable settings which do various things, so we can't assume that 2 settings simply do the same thing at different rates. Phaser-stun seems to be like a taser, i.e. ionization of electrons; while disruption seems to accelerate molecules, i.e. generating heat; and higher levels seem to affect even smaller particles, affecting sub-nuclear particles; so there's frequency as well as amplitude (energy-output), with higher frequencies affecting smaller particles.
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Re: Gigaton-level phasers?
A power clip would provide enough energy in order to kill 550 men while leaving their bodies more or less whole.Mr. Oragahn wrote:
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.
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.[/quote]
As G2K indicates, Tracey was seen using vaporization settings against the Enterprise crew.
An order of magnitude is a quite reasonable "waste" level, but not strictly exclusive. The more rapidly, and the longer range, at which Tracey kills off the Yang, the more he will miss. Individual Yang could surely be killed by a hundred kilojoules of phaser energy almost every time (that would be several times the energy of a rifle bullet, albeit in a perhaps less efficient form, or a tenth-second burst at the "test" intensity level of 1.05 MW from "The Mind's Eye"), but I think your assumed accuracy of 10-100% is perhaps high. See here, here, and here. Tracey and others surely fired with widebeam modes, continuous beam modes, and sprayed shots at long range with wild abandon to catch the Yang before they could advance into range. 100 "shots" per death at 100 kJ per "shot" would give 10 MJ spent per death (still not as much as a vaporization shot) and "thousands" of deaths gives tens of gigajoules.
You simply don't have time to pick targets when you're outnumbered a thousand to one and the enemy can advance from out of sight to stabbing range in a few minutes of running. Does the Yang incident mean very much regarding phaser power packs? No. The Yang incident is flexible. We don't know how many thousands were killed, how many thousands were wounded, how many thousands of shots missed, or even what energy was used in the phaser kill settings. Probably not more than a megajoule, but we could push the incident to fit with anything from a couple hundred megajoules' capacity to a couple hundred gigajoules' capacity easily. From one hundred megajoules to a terajoule if we really push it, +/- 2 full orders of magnitude. it's much more flexible than "Galileo Seven" (which is pretty sharply constrained to +/- 0.5 orders of magnitude), and as a result, between the two incidents, "Galileo Seven" is far more authoritative - as well as being far more direct, since the Yang incident relies on the conclusion that phaser effect is of the same order of magnitude as a thermal weapon with comparable destructive results.
Given the fact that the NCC-1701 Enterprise had an overall density of about 5 g/cc in spite of being mostly empty space, and that tritanium / duranium bulkheads seem to be the norm in TNG+, we do have ample reason to conclude that the Enterprise is a much tougher bird than a wet-navy ship of an older era.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.
Those saucer sections are about 150m in diameter. One quadrant of one deck is, using a 3m height, then, about 13,000 cubic meters. That's right - the area that Kirk ordered evacuated "only" was about the size of a wet-navy cruiser, and if we assumed a uniform distribution of mass (questionable) it would account for 56,000 tons of material, more than the Bismarck. A five hundred pound bomb is about 2 gigajoules. Would a single 500 pound bomb landing amidships have wiped out the crew of the Bismarck (cutting through a similar weight of metal)? Of a modern nuclear cruiser (filling a similar volume with lethal overpressures)?
I'm not an expert on such things and I don't know, but in the open, a 500 pound bomb landing on a flat surface in the open fills about a 17,000 m^3 hemisphere with lethal blast effects. Shrapnel assuredly won't go through tritanium bulkheads, and I suspect they'd do quite a bit to damp the blast effects propagating to other compartments, as well, if they are sealed. Numbers do shoot through the roof using super Trek materials, but just using regular old steel bulkheads is, I think, good enough to illustrate the need for gigajoules of energy in a phaser.
Fair enough - but we have to understand the means of destruction fairly well, and you're missing a few things about phasers.Secondly, there's Riker never said that a single shot was supposed to flatten a building.
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.Frame of Mind wrote: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.
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.
First, wide-beam phasers spread vertically as well as horizontally. It's not going to be an efficient "cutting" charge - nor do phasers have the sharp kinetic effects of explosives. It doesn't transfer momentum, and at high levels, it causes matter to disintegrate without explosive effect. All thermal effects and no shock effects. Second, there isn't really an indication that his cell is in a small building. It's an institutional setting of some kind. He's in a cell. Not a flimsy one, either. And that brings us to the second point. All of these methods of bringing down a building - bombings and demolitions - rely on hitting low on the building to cause gravitational collapse.
It's true you only need a hundred megajoules or so to bring down a building - but to bring one down using a widebeam phaser is not necessarily as efficient as using a chemical explosive.
Not necessarily. You also run into problems when destructively testing high-yield weapons - what, exactly, are they being fired at?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.
You would rather that the culprit for the mysterious glow be the pumping station - a technology as old as the Romans - rather than the phaser? You think that the pumping station has the ability to shoot giant destructive red glows that flash water into steam?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:
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.Jedi Master Spock wrote: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.
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 mysstterious phenomenon which displays no properties which are known and useful for gauging.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.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 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.
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.
I think it's clearly a phaser effect - an unusual one, perhaps, with energy being channeled in unusual ways due to the local Treknobabble radiations that were so important in the episode, but all due to the phaser nonetheless.
Aqueducts are, as I've mentioned, Roman technology. Filter stations are slightly more modern, but there's still no remotely plausible reason for either pumps or filters to fire destructive glows that propagate like that. Phasers, however, are seen to have mysterious glowing effects that continue to act on matter after the initial beam has been cut off. Usually they don't look like that, but again, that's most easily explained by saying that the local treknobabble radiation made it look different.
Spock had to fire the boosters while still in the atmosphere. Atmospheric drag is not negligible when you're dealing with supersonic velocities. Something shaped like the Galileo and exiting the atmosphere with the speed it exits the atmosphere is going to experience drag forces comparable to a re-entering Apollo module. Here, a quick calculation for you. Suppose we have wonderful energy fields that just scoop atmosphere out of the way without itself absorbing any heat. That atmosphere will get heated, of course, by a lot. Say that the Galileo has a 3m^2 profile and lifts off at an angle theta from the ground, which is approximately flat, relative to the depth of the atmosphere - here, let's say about 45 degrees. Then the Galileo displaces a column of about 45,000 kilograms of atmosphere. Suppose the average speed is 10 kps; by the rule of thumb above (see wikilink), that's heating 45 tons of atmosphere by 10 kilokelvins - 4.5x10^11 gram-kelvins. Note that room temperature atmosphere has heat capacity on the order of 1 joule per gram kelvin. You might guess that means 450 gigajoules would be wasted on heating atmosphere.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:
At this altitude? Oh sure, thin atmospheric drag exists, but how can it not be almost negligible at this point?Jedi Master Spock wrote: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.Mr. Oragahn wrote:I don't really get how they screwed up so much shortening their orbit with such a boost.
Thus, turning on boosters early means less delta v.
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.
You'd actually be a bit low; at very high temperatures, you tend to start breaking up diatomic molecules with five degrees of freedom each and reducing them to monoatomic forms with three degrees of freedom each, but twice as many particles; but it's a very gross-scale figure anyway, so the difference doesn't matter that much. Suffice it to say that since we're not dealing with a close to vertical launch angle, we're talking about hundreds of gigajoules, possibly as much as a terajoule, going to drag. So you wait. You delay firing boosters until you clear 90% or so of the mass in the atmosphere, and then fire them, meaning that you waste less than a hundred gigajoules on drag.
Energy lost to drag is by all means a significant factor, and a small variation - such as firing the main boosters at sea level instead of waiting until you're above most of the atmosphere - could easily gain or lose you tens of gigajoules, and that can make all the difference in the world. Launching into space is a tricky business.
I'm not talking about fusion fuel. I'm talking about chemical propellants being charged out of available water from the phasers - while, mind you, still on the ground. If the shuttle had a working fusion engine capable of working from atmospheric water, charging the phaser packs would mean nothing. On top of that, Trek fusion plants usually run on deuterium. They're not super-advanced burn-anything machines. If the shuttle has a fusion reactor, it's out of deuterium, and can't burn random material.I didn't have this in mind, but now that you mention it, let's look at it. The ship could have ramming scoops.Such as, say, distilling water out of the planetary atmosphere and electrolysing it into hydrogen and oxygen?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.
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.
So re-run that. We have hours to "produce" fuel using phaser power packs. You objected that the phasers themselves didn't contain chemical fuel and there seemed to be some kind of chemical fuel in use; I pointed out that perhaps their energy was used to produce chemical fuel, e.g., via electrolysis. Perhaps there is even a reverse mechanism whereby spent helium stores, intended for use as propellant, can be broken back up into deuterium using phaser energy. I don't know. You don't know. But what we do know is that the energy from the phasers was used to create fuel from nothing, and that had better not be a free lunch.
Actually, now that you mention it, with hydrogen, being exposed to an external environment will mean you will shortly have no hydrogen at all as it reaches normal temperatures and vaporizes into the universe's lightest gas, dispersing with alarming speed.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.The episode is clear: The fuel was gone, and the phaser energy was used to create that.
"Earth-like" to within what margin?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.
You can't actually say - not that this isn't one of the particulars that we would expect to see liberties taken with respect to special effects.
First, I have addressed the problem of fuel mass already. Phasers, as you noted several posts ago, do not actually contain fuel. They therefore, as I noted previously, must have been used to produce usable fuel from some other substance (which you then misunderstood in a manner untenable with the episode's contents). This would therefore not represent several kilograms of fuel. Second, if the energy essentially comes from a reactionless drive as you are concluding, we still have atmospheric drag - which will not be trivial, marking in all probability over ten gigajoules - and we still must come up with the energy to accelerate the Galileo to a near-orbital speed, which is to say we return precisely to the 180 GJ figure here, plus accounting for atmospheric drag. That's where I started out, in fact. Someone insisted on examining the matter further to cover the case of chemical thrust, and so I have. If chemical thrust is used, we're talking about having a couple hundred GJ per phaser; if it's not particularly important, then we're talking about having a few dozen GJ per phaser; and in all cases, the phasers themselves must supply gigajoules of energy.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.
This is specific as I'm willing to get with the whole body of the evidence. There is absolutely nothing which requires, or even indicates in a reliable fashion, sub-gigajoule phaser packs, and numerous sources which require higher energy capacity.
Here is what is meant. The rock in "Deja Q" is numerous times deeper in a gravity well than DS9; it is very deep in a planetary gravity well, practically skimming the atmosphere, while DS9 is in a high orbit around Bajor. The rock in "Deja Q" is at least hundreds of times the size of the E-D, and almost certainly substantially more. As discussed here, it is troublingly large.
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.
There's more logic in considering that fusion power would be mastered to a higher degree than antimatter power generation.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.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!
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.
I don't understand what you mean here.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'll spell out the math for you. Suppose that antimatter is 150 times as powerful as fusion, for the same size of vessel. Suppose DS9 has fusion generators comparable, relative to its size, to the antimatter generators of a GCS. Then DS9 has a little over 2% of the full warp power of the E-D. But DS9 is almost certainly less than 2% of the mass of the Bre'el moon, and for DS9 to encase itself in a warp field was more difficult than the E-D to encase the Bre'el moon in a warp field, even though the Bre'el moon was also deeper in a gravity field, which should also make it harder.
In other words, that DS9 would be able to use mass lightening even though it is fusion powered fits very well with everything I have said, even though DS9 was not built with the intent to use such a field - for, relative to DS9's ability to generate power, it seems less able to apply a mass-lightening field.
That is orbit of a planet. To reach escape velocity requires almost four times as much energy as achieving a low orbit (63 MJ/kg), and to exit the system from a 1 AU solar orbit requires fifteen times as much as that (890 MJ/kg). That is to say, for every second you require to achieve low orbit using Treknobabble devices that ignore all friction and only worry about GPE, you require a full minute to build up enough power to leave the system, even if you have no kinetic energy to worry about.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).
The low references are such as "The Outcast," in which a shuttle's reserve power is implied to be 56.4 megajoules - about enough to launch a baseball-sized probe from Earth's surface into an elliptical orbit around the sun. The "craptastic" shuttle earlier, you have yourself calculated above needs more than a gigawatt just to limp into orbit.
Why? We have no reason to conclude they can or cannot. Therefore, presumption that it must be a fusion core is improper. The fact that it is possible that the probe had an antimatter core is sufficient. More on this later. The specific MLT ratio is at its core unimportant, by the way; what is important, instead, is the fact that mass is lightened to a very small fraction of the original total.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.
Energy differences. If I am not greatly mistaken, I simply took the GBE difference between a 500 km stable circular orbit and a 55,000 km stable circular orbit. The mass of the moon, however, is subject to some revision, I think, and the orbit should actually be an elliptical one.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?
The mass lightening effect was such that the moon itself had effectively no mass, and was conducted basically at the perigee of its orbit - the most dramatic point, giving us (nicely) an exact altitude. The GBE of the moon Klyo relative to Bre'el IV is, at T+500 km, almost exactly what it is at the surface; it's a full -59 MJ/kg. Gravity propagates at the speed of light - so this GBE effectively vanishes the moment the warp field makes the mass "disappear." That gives you 2.4 yottajoules of GBE that the warp field has to supply. Things actually get more complicated in a hurry when we take into account the fact that there's a Bre'el primary star somewhere only a few light minutes away - certainly close enough that the warp field would be affected - which increases the GBE "loss" by an order of magnitude. The more surrounding matter you account for, the more the GBE loss increases.
That calculation doesn't take into effect KE, which is a significant oversight, all things considered; the episode actually says the inertial mass will also change, which means the KE will be reduced, and it would make some sense if the application of the warp field traded both of those between each other. (Certainly it is the "minimal" technique, in that we are trying simply to find the basic energy requirement for this type of feat, on which we can then add considerations of realism that dictate inefficiencies.)
If it was a very erratic orbit that they were trying to fix and the moon is passing by very quickly; on reflection, it probably is something like this orbit, the period is about right, in which case it would have -59 MJ/kg GBE and +50 MJ/kg KE, meaning the warp field only needs to supply +9 MJ per kilogram of mass that it de facto eliminates - that's +9 EJ per million tons.
Non-coincidentally, the application of a 100% efficient static warp field is going to require the same amount of energy you need to leave behind everything within a lightspeed-radius envelope of inhibiting masses. You are making binding energy disappear, and the deeper you are in the gravity well, the more dramatic that change is.
I don't see that's clearly what it's a percentage of. It could be a percentage of full reaction as in a never-achievable 100% of fuel reacting in one pass, just as easily and just as logically. No reason to choose one interpretation over the other - and the stark variation in power requirements between different incidents such as putting up warp fields and maintaining a static orbit strongly implies that your interpretation should get the axe. High warp speeds aren't within an order of magnitude of each other, and never have been; the power requirement for an idling starship should be very low.
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.
We also know, specifically from Voyager, that the pressure and temperature of the warp core vary substantially in operation. Pressure, for example, varies by a factor of 20!. Not 10 - a full 20!
I don't buy your base assumption at all.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.
Well, I've told it to you before. Conservation of energy. It's a very good reason.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.
And if it were, it would be way too much energy for the ship to generate.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 technique I'm using is "minimal" - that is to say, any higher measurement requires that your warp drive pulls free energy out of subspace.
Except I see no reason to assume phaser power cells or anything of comparable power density are used to power the probe; the probe could easily carry more than a hundred power packs, which are themselves even smaller than the phasers; the probe could easily carry micro-fusion generators, such as Data uses for power, rather than the batteries you are thinking of; the TOS phaser packs will not even be necessarily as good as the ones used in a TNG+ probe even were it powered by such (being optimized for different conditions and being a century out of date); and finally, your estimate of phaser power pack capacity are fundamentally flawed as they are based on attempting to dismiss in toto "Galileo Seven" in favor of a much looser technique of estimation from "The Omega Glory."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:
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).Me wrote: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.
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:
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.Me wrote:
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, 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.
Quite simply, the probe's power generation capabilities are totally unknown. We can only put the loosest estimates on where it might be.
That formula was never actually followed by the show, so it's not exactly canonical.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.
What? I'm aware of no such thing. I recall, in fact, that in "Best of Both Worlds," something to the contrary is claimed.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?
What, precisely, else is supposed to be the antimatter in that container? And what, then, would the blue mass be? Occam's Razor is at play here.
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.
- What is the clear evidence that the blue mass is antimatter? none. It's all speculative.
We can't know any of these things, but they are all perfectly reasonable things to assume.[*] 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.
[*] 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.
We could also assume that the Federation commonly stores anti-deuterium in an ultra-dense form; but that would not be particularly productive, either. The simplest interpretation is best. They had a little antimatter; this antimatter was then able to give them a couple seconds of Warp 1. What's the simple explanation? The antimatter was consumed. Completely, as antimatter generally is. "Antimatter waste" from incomplete reaction only shows up in Voyager, and then only in three episodes, two of which involve the same wasteful civilization. The kind of warp core the Federation uses does have byproducts; the dilithium crystals become trilithium resin over time. But there's a very small amount created ("Starship Mine"); so all the antimatter reacts in a Federation-style warp core, with very little energy going into solid waste (trilithium resin). Some might go into thermal waste, but we have good reasons for thinking that's pretty small, like the ships not being glowing thermal beacons.
Compared to what? To the amount already stored on the ship? Not at all. To the amount stored in a photon torpedo? Not at all. That very same cadet had been given a field commission as an officer of Starfleet a year previously ("Where None Have Gone Before"). Earlier that season, he was placed in command of a science team ("Pen Pals"). At the beginning of the next season, he would be permitted to engage in an experiment that turned out to actually endanger the ship, far more than detonating the equivalent of a low-yield photon torpedo - runaway nanites in "Evolution."[*] 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.[/list]
Absurd or not, it was made perfectly clear in TNG that the captain and crew of the Enterprise trusted Wesley Crusher as much as a competent adult in the crew. You have to live with that fact.
7.5 PW is neither the highest nor lowest figure for a Constellation to break the warp barrier. It is simply the best figure - the one which involves the simplest and most plausible assumptions.By all means, the 7.5 PJ figure is certainly not a low end, but a high end.
They are - if you have a ship with a terawatt warp core, with almost no systems capable of taking anywhere near warp power, and shuttles with gigawatt power generators.
Power and transporters
This one also needs to be covered, quickly if possible.
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?There are several evacuations carried out. Pick one. Any one. Start here.I'm missing the reference here. Do you have more data about this event?
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.
In "The Outcast," we are given an explicit energy total for a transport. It's absurdly low and GPE would make a mockery of it.
Something does follow.
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.
A photon torpedo is entirely modular. Thus, if guidance can be minimal, shielding minimal, and drives minimal, warhead can be maximized. We see our quantifiable highest yields only against stationary targets. "Skin of Evil" requires a gigaton when examined closely - it may have its oddities, but it has made its spot upon the planet too quick and too large to be anything less.
We know that photonic torpedoes, even, are variable-yield weapons, and even in combat, they are not always fired at "full" yields, even in the first battle they are used!
We know, too, that shields can absorb an immense amount of raw energy - it depends on how that yield is applied. In "Best of Both Worlds," the Borg Cube does not blink at a deflector dish beam; yet phasers and photon torpedoes have harmed them. "Changeling" gives an alien probe sending massive bolts with ninety times the yield of a photon torpedo - and yet, unlike a decent spread of photon torpedoes, a single strike doesn't break the Enterprise's shields. Similarly, in "Balance of Terror," the Romulan plasma torpedo has immense power - multiple gigatons - but the Enterprise survives it somehow.
By my estimations, a large ship, such as the E-D, puts out more through its phaser array than through torpedo tubes over time. For a small ship, this is not guaranteed, and it is not too far in the short run. However, phasers cannot turn in mid-flight; it is very difficult to hit someone a light-second away with a light-speed beam. Phasers, too, while capable of delivering more power eventually, do not deal as much at once; a photon torpedo's detonation happens in a fraction of a second. Microseconds. Nanoseconds matter on the timescale of a nuclear bomb and, too, on an antimatter bomb.
It is also closer than you realize; if the E-D puts out 1 GT/s through phasers at full power, and launches 100 MT photon torpedoes, a phaser hit that holds contact for a tenth second delivers the same yield as a photon torpedo - only over a million times as long a stretch, and in a single narrow spot. A photon torpedo is like a shotgun blast; a phaser is like a firehose. The latter unquestionably puts more kinetic energy downrange, but the former has a disconcerting habit of punching through people and perforating organs.
And I think it's not a very productive subdiscussion, so I'll bury it at this point, and see if we can't recover the original point.Yes, they do. I never denied this.
This subdiscussion mainly begun as a reaction to the last part of your post:
Very simply, that UFP hand weapons wouldn't be able to do it."The Arsenal Of Freedom" transscript.JMS wrote: 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.
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?
Other interpretations, such as these:
Really are just exploring the contradictions that crop up.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.
I'll address that last point, though. Potential power increases with volume. Armor thickness increases merely linearly. The result is that the math fits perfectly with a hand phaser that can't more than scratch a thin tritanium plate, and ship-grade phasers that rip through them with impunity. The figures I've outlined are quite internally consistent - require a gigajoule to put a cubic centimeter hole in a tritanium plate with a hand phaser, then it would take a petajoule to demolish a cubic meter of tritanium. Exawatt phasers are then capable of ripping holes across several decks - just as they actually do when fired at unshielded vessels.
What you're claiming "makes no sense" actually fits perfectly together. Accept phaser firepower as I've outlined, both for ships and hand weapons, accept tritanium resistance to phasers as I've outlined, and the hull damage seen in "Generations" seems perfectly ordinary.
That would make some sense - in that Yar has been known to be close-mouthed - but it seems a stretch regardless. We're now assuming that there's some very unusual mechanism in play, and we certainly already have plenty of them floating around in Star Trek.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.
What takes the cake is that in "Obsession," Spock cuts himself a piece of tritanium just fine - it breaks off when he fires on it with the appropriate setting of his phaser. It does not, however, melt, and the phaser has a slightly unusual effect - well, it's fired for almost two seconds, and they made the beam splash. Here. But there's no sign of the tritanium melting; he's just managed to phase it hard enough to chip a chunk off. Actually melting it probably does require more power than a hand phaser. They pick it up with tongs afterwards, which suggests that it might just be too hot to handle.
We also know that starship hulls, in large part tritanium alloy, melt at extraordinarily high temperatures.
Possible, but why assume that?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.
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.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.
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).[/quote]
The torpedoes are, in fact, the same size every time we've seen them, and look almost exactly the same from the CCS to GCS to ICS. They're a little more different on the NX.
A correction for you: Sniping would be a torpedo role. Torpedoes are going to be accurate at longer ranges than phasers. We have, interestingly enough, seen a design that purportedly is stuffed full of torpedo launchers according to the tech manuals - the Akira class. We haven't seen oversized weapons of any kind on UFP ships. Large phaser arrays would be for ships intended to last a long time in the midst of combat and in particular at close ranges, where the off-axis, all-angle, multi-beam tracking capabilities are important and where backblast from a poorly aimed torpedo presents a potential hazard.
It's very simple. They fire the phaser beam. Some energy goes immediately into vaporizing ice; other energy goes into generating a slow-moving wave of glowiness. (Sound familiar? "Ensigns of Command.") The beam is cut off, but the phaser energy is still bound up in the glowing effect, which then continues to vaporize water. (Sound familiar? "Ensigns of Command.")
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.
It obviously was what he had in mind. Phasers don't do violent blasting. They can melt, but when you crank them up high enough to vaporize, you get non-violent disintegration as a result, usually. Why? We don't know. For the E-D to blast its way out through the molten rock is likeliest to mean disintegration of that tube of rock.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.