Lucky wrote:I don't recall TNG: The Pegasus and VOY: Rise ruling out higher yields? The Pegasus seemed to be in the turn that space rock into vapor or smaller range, and Rise was in the they only used just enough boom range.
Actually, "The Pegasus" is all over the place in what yields you can get from torpedoes. Warsies will naturally take the lowest ones they can get under the their "mistaken" assumption that the asteroid was only 5 km wide and "mostly hollow". However as several threads here and elsewhere have shown, the asteroid is at least 9 x 6.5 km, and the mostly hollow myth is easily debunked with simple geometry and volumetrics calculations since the tunnel fissure that the E-D was in made up far less than 1 percent of the total volume and even several such tunnels would not make much of a difference. The lowest numbers then become high kiloton range to low single digit megatons per torpedo under the assumption that the asteroid only gets fragmented. On the upper end of the scale, you get an insane 100 gigatons or more per torp.
The "Rise" asteroid is another one they love to manipulate by again by underscaling the size and pulling the situation far out of it's original plot context. The shattering done to the asteroid was not normal. They expected near-total vaporization based on the understanding that the asteroid was a natural one made of nickel-iron. It turns out later as a critical part of the plot that the asteroid was an artifical construct designed to resist being vaporized so that at least parts of it could crash onto planets that it's builders desired, drive off the current inhabitants, and allow them to stake their claim to the planet in the aftermath.
Given the probable "Rise" asteroid size scalings, the statements and most important the critical plot point of the episode, you wind up with several tens of megatons as the minimum yield for the single photon torpedo, and upwards of low single digit gigatons.
Lucky wrote:Is there anything to actually put an upper limit on the boom a photon torpedo can cause as far as what is shown on screen?
No, not really, other than possibly DS9's "The Die is Cast", and VOY's "The Omega Directive".
-Mike