Mith wrote:It was in one-off-the-cuff remark by Sisko and another for something they planted on a asteroid supply base. And it was trilithium, which is a funky thing to begin with.
Sisko was indeed under a great deal of stress at the time he belts out the "ten isotons" line in "The Ship". The "A Time to Stand" dialog is made under less duress, and what the explosives were said to do was confirmed by the actual events (visuals) of the episode. It is still possible that Sisko was right about the ten isotons, but he may have been refering to the total over time yeild, not the explosives going off right that second. Since the Dominion did not directly target the captured attack ship, we have no way of knowing how much damage exactly would be done beyond the destruction of a ship that had been tough enough to survive slamming into solid rock at high speed, and still remained operational to some degree.
Mith wrote:Kim wasn't likely serious about the whole planet destroying thing. And even if he was, it was probably technobabble. What we're looking at is probably the yield of the weapon that causes some sort of subspace reaction. Ie, we know that the damage to subspace can cause stars to go nova, so using similar means to make one collapse is also possible.
The problem with that scene was that Tuvok had corrected Kim on the exact yeild of the charge, yet made no attempt to correct Kim quip about the yeild being enough to destroy a small planet, which is what we would expect, if Kim were wrong. Given that 90 isotons was enough to wipe everything out in a roughly spherical area 1,600 km in diameter (actually they needed to be 900 km away, which makes the diameter 1,800 km) , it is possible that 54 isotons would be enough to destroy a very small planetary body, or cause severe damage to it. For comparison, the Moon is approximately 3,476 km in diameter and Pluto is an estimated 2,360 km.
-Mike
