Slave Ship and ICS

[Lucky]

We don't *see* it in ROTS, the scene has been removed. The novelization still has this passage I think, and the illustrated novel has it as well iirc.

Jedi Knight has shown that fuel was liquid. West End Games's RPG supplement "Black Ice" shows that fuel is liquid and it not superdense either.

RSA and JMS have posted a lot about that fuel, and there are criteria which really make it one of a kind, and although there's no superb theory to explain it all, something that gets close to the concept of a high efficiency and energetic form of diesel, which could be fused as well, isn't too absurd.
It's scoffed at because of the word diesel, or say hydrocarbons, but it's quite good once one honestly looks at it. It's also that there's been nothing better suggested thus far, aside from Saxton hamfised's tachyonic hypermatter.

There is also the whole Zillo beast story line that happens because the Republic wants the fuel that is in the ground on that planet.

[StarWarsStarTrek]

Gee, one rebuttal at a time.

As for the diesel fuel claim, it's contradicted by the films. Anakin and Obi Wan are dry by the next scene cut, and Shaak Ti does not die.

[Mike DiCenso]

Masterpiece society:

Haven't you noticed the fact that not only was the fragment not being accelerated by any speed, the stated energy source was a bunch of plasma in the terawatt range? Or that the Enterprise was changing the fragment's trajectory, not it's speed?

Need I mention when a combustible fuel source was considered to be viable for fueling a deflector shield?

Or when a large chemical explosion was more powerful than a proton torpedo?

Good lord. The normal power generation was stated to be terawatt range. It does not preclude higher power generation, and it is at extreme odds with half a dozen other explicit power generation examples already mentioned in this thread. Changing trajectory also means imparting kinetic energy to the mass of the fragment, thus even a 1 meter a second velocity vector change will still require enormous amounts of energy to accomplish. At best you can say that the episode is highly self-contradictory.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

Masterpiece society:

Haven't you noticed the fact that not only was the fragment not being accelerated by any speed, the stated energy source was a bunch of plasma in the terawatt range? Or that the Enterprise was changing the fragment's trajectory, not it's speed?

Need I mention when a combustible fuel source was considered to be viable for fueling a deflector shield?

Or when a large chemical explosion was more powerful than a proton torpedo?

Good lord. The normal power generation was stated to be terawatt range. It does not preclude higher power generation, and it is at extreme odds with half a dozen other explicit power generation examples already mentioned in this thread.
-Mike

We have a matter-antimatter warp reaction system, the most powerful in the Starfleet. Normally, it kicks plasma up into the terawatt range. Why?

It hardly sounds like a low ball figure. It's like saying a 1 GW nuclear power plant can normally kick some electricity up in the megawatt range., or when comparing the horsepower of two vehicles, declaring the horsepower of a sports car by providing a figure ten or a hundred times lower than what it truly is.
Or like Star Wars' scroll starting with the statement that the Death Star can destroy a small moon, when it can split planets into tiny little bits at once.
No, in general, when people make such statements, they tend to go for the best said system can do.

As for the other example, Data's figure from "True Q" is largely fudgeable, and there's only Kim's statement regarding the power going down some conduits 7o9 was going to put her arms into that's worth it. Not to say anything about the idea of removing a panel and putting one's arm into a conduit and thinking it's fine is puzzling: if there is power, then there is, it's not one day there's power so I can shove an arm in there, and the other day there's no power. Plus it is absolutely clear that it can only be a statement about some overall power production: If there were petawatts flowing through those small conduits, then the density of power per cubic meter of conduit would be monumental, and no arm, Borg or not, could withstand that.
The rest is about calculations made by fans. Hardly decisive.

You still have "The Dauphin" which takes some serious fudging to avoid lowering the entire E-D's power production capacity to low TW or GW.

We still have the fusion based self destruct of the E-nil worth of some several dozen megatons, and generally fusion power capacity isn't too far from antimatter cores ; the one in DS9 for example did a fantastic job and that's from the Cardassians, who do their things in a rawer fashion, not to say that their tech is inferior in some way to that of the UFP.

In the "Nth Degree", the ship is clearly threatened by a terawatt field, and oddly enough, Data is quite mute about pointing out how much more powerful the field would be in order to fit with usual petawatt claims. You think an increase of a thousand would be worth reporting. Even more for a million. Huh.

The Cardassian ATR-4107, with the capacity to destroy a small moon and used by B'Eelanna to "destroy" a Cardassian planet, and had a warhead of 1000 kg of AM, for a theoretical maximum yield of 42.96 gigatons. Since it's the warhead, the power plant would have its own fuel supply and it would be inferior (or it would tap the warhead's AM stock but then it would barely dent it). If it were anywhere relevant to the yield, it would have been considered alongside the warhead and cited. The thing flew for more than two years by the time Voyager caught it.
That ship laughed at anything thrown at it, and would actually be able to threaten the USS Voyager very seriously, despite having flown for that long with no resupply.
That's more than 3.156 e7 seconds of travel. Even if the ship's consumption rate was of only 1 TW during its trip searching for a target (warping here and there, using sensors to find a planet, eventually repelling some enemies), it would have consumed a total of 3.156 e19 J, or 7.543 GT, or no less than 17.56 % of the warhead's theoretical energy.
We immediately see that if we use higher power consumption figures, the warhead's potential energetic stock itself would not suffice to power the ship that long.
Yet it's been claimed that petawatts are easily consumed to push a large ship to warp at not so impressive speeds.
Obviously that's not the case.

I will spare you the E-D being rocked by low megajoule blasts from the Lysian destroyer.

So see, aside from very indirect fan calculations, there's quite some meat behind the idea that the high profile UFP ships would be capable of producing high TW/very low PW power levels at best.
I'd say that shields are charged up some several times those numbers, in joules. And I'd add that phasers are much more efficient against shields, even if less powerful, than torpedoes (huge neutrino waste, not perfect M/AM reaction rate, non narrow directed blasts, and photons documented as being particularly well dealt with by UFP shields - see lasers).
They're also very efficient against normal matter in general, but not against alloyed hulls which prove to react "normally", like if hit by mere DET beams, against phaser/disruptor blasts.

[Mike DiCenso]

It hardly sounds like a low ball figure. It's like saying a 1 GW nuclear power plant can normally kick some electricity up in the megawatt range., or when comparing the horsepower of two vehicles, declaring the horsepower of a sports car by providing a figure ten or a hundred times lower than what it truly is.
Or like Star Wars' scroll starting with the statement that the Death Star can destroy a small moon, when it can split planets into tiny little bits at once.
No, in general, when people make such statements, they tend to go for the best said system can do.

Not necessarily. There is a safe normal operational level, and then there are what are called "red line" levels of operation. You don't normally drive your car at 180-200 kph because that would wear out the engine and tires well ahead of when it is supposed to. Jet engines operate in a similar manner as do rocket engines, like the Space Shuttle Main Engines. They normally operate at a certain percentage of their overall power plant output capability, but they keep extra power in reserve just in case. In the episode we are discussing, I can easily see the E-D red lining it's warp and impulse engines well into the petawatt range and perhaps a little bit above. The indications are in the episode at the end that they were pushing the total ship's power output right to the limits.

As for the other example, Data's figure from "True Q" is largely fudge able, and there's only Kim's statement regarding the power going down some conduits 7o9 was going to put her arms into that's worth it. Not to say anything about the idea of removing a panel and putting one's arm into a conduit and thinking it's fine is puzzling: if there is power, then there is, it's not one day there's power so I can shove an arm in there, and the other day there's no power. Plus it is absolutely clear that it can only be a statement about some overall power production: If there were petawatts flowing through those small conduits, then the density of power per cubic meter of conduit would be monumental, and no arm, Borg or not, could withstand that.
The rest is about calculations made by fans. Hardly decisive.

Yes, you tried to fudge it by claiming he means something similar to kilowatt hours when we know from the script that the intent of the writer is that he means no such thing. Furthermore, your interpretation of the "Revulsion" statements are bereft of facts. Neither Kim, nor Seven discuss the power flowing through the conduit in terms of overall power production. That conduit had 5 million gigawatts flowing through it. Period. It was doing this while the ship was not at warp, nor in a state of combat readiness. Kim was clearly not joking around when Seven tried to reach inside it, and Kim of all people should know how much power was flowing through the conduit since he was in charge of the project to divert some of that power to the new and improved astrometrics lab.

You still have "The Dauphin" which takes some serious fudging to avoid lowering the entire E-D's power production capacity to low TW or GW.

The "Daupin" example is a clear outlier. It cannot be reconciled with any previous or following power quote. Since the context of the discussion was about communications, the only logical way to view it is that the E-D's entire communication system cannot generate that much power.

We still have the fusion based self destruct of the E-nil worth of some several dozen megatons, and generally fusion power capacity isn't too far from antimatter cores ; the one in DS9 for example did a fantastic job and that's from the Cardassians, who do their things in a rawer fashion, not to say that their tech is inferior in some way to that of the UFP.

Which means what? The Constellation's rigged self destruct was for at least 196 megatons, assuming at least two impulse engines going off. Remember that Kirk explicitly asked Spock if a 97 MT explosion would result, if a starship impulse engine, not engines were overloaded. Spock corrects him by saying it would be 97.835 MT, but does not correct him on the engine number required. That's 823,200 TJ of energy, or 823 petajoules as you well know. If the warp engines are an order of magnitude more powerful, then we're well into the exawatt range.

As for Deep Space Nine, we saw the station fire photon torpedoes at various ships of all sizes. Those require antimatter to work. It is quite possible that the station does make use of matter-antimatter power systems, not merely fusion. With the exception of "Civil Defense" and the DS9 TM, there is little reference made to the station's power generation.

In the "Nth Degree", the ship is clearly threatened by a terawatt field, and oddly enough, Data is quite mute about pointing out how much more powerful the field would be in order to fit with usual petawatt claims. You think an increase of a thousand would be worth reporting. Even more for a million. Huh.

That's another distortion. The E-D was not initially threatened by the 3.2 terawatt energy, and they only moved away as precaution. Here's the dialog:



WORF: Probe now closing at fifteen point three metres per second. Collision course.

DATA: Captain, sensors are reading no particulate emissions or subspace field distortions.

PICARD: Then how is it able to move?

DATA: Method of propulsion is unknown, sir.


RIKER: Ensign, take us away from it. One quarter impulse.

ANAYA: (the lady at helm) Aye, sir.

WORF: The probe is matching our speed and course.

DATA: Captain, an energy field is forming. Intensity is three point two terawatts and increasingaround the device.

WORF: Sir, the shuttlecraft shields did not provide sufficient protection for its computer Our computer may also be vulnerable. I recommend withdrawal to a safe distance.

So you can see that they tried moving away because it came at them on a collision course, then it puts up the field, which is clearly stated to be increasing in output, not staying stagnant. We have no idea how fast or high the power field reached. They keep trying to move away as a precaution. Only much later does the power field grow to a point were it threatens the shields. But we have no idea what that power output is.

The Cardassian ATR-4107, with the capacity to destroy a small moon and used by B'Eelanna to "destroy" a Cardassian planet, and had a warhead of 1000 kg of AM, for a theoretical maximum yield of 42.96 gigatons. Since it's the warhead, the power plant would have its own fuel supply and it would be inferior (or it would tap the warhead's AM stock but then it would barely dent it). If it were anywhere relevant to the yield, it would have been considered alongside the warhead and cited. The thing flew for more than two years by the time Voyager caught it.
That ship laughed at anything thrown at it, and would actually be able to threaten the USS Voyager very seriously, despite having flown for that long with no resupply.
That's more than 3.156 e7 seconds of travel. Even if the ship's consumption rate was of only 1 TW during its trip searching for a target (warping here and there, using sensors to find a planet, eventually repelling some enemies), it would have consumed a total of 3.156 e19 J, or 7.543 GT, or no less than 17.56 % of the warhead's theoretical energy.
We immediately see that if we use higher power consumption figures, the warhead's potential energetic stock itself would not suffice to power the ship that long.
Yet it's been claimed that petawatts are easily consumed to push a large ship to warp at not so impressive speeds.
Obviously that's not the case.

Except that you conveniently forget Dreadnought's purpose, Oragahn. It was essentially an automated suicide starship. It had weapons, shields, warp drive and more. Given it's purpose as designed to go and attack the Maquis, it was expected to plow through potentially heavy threat forces. This means fighting other starships, which means generating lots of power for shields and weapons, which means a warhead makes perfect sense since it is an untappable reserve so that if the ship is out of fuel, it can still make a big bang at it's target. We've discussed all this before.

I will spare you the E-D being rocked by low megajoule blasts from the Lysian destroyer.

Oh don't be silly since the weapons did nothing to harm either the E-D's shields, nor cause any internal damage whatsoever. I can't believe you'd stoop down to such a silly Michael Wong-like snipe.

So see, aside from very indirect fan calculations, there's quite some meat behind the idea that the high profile UFP ships would be capable of producing high TW/very low PW power levels at best.
I'd say that shields are charged up some several times those numbers, in joules. And I'd add that phasers are much more efficient against shields, even if less powerful, than torpedoes (huge neutrino waste, not perfect M/AM reaction rate, non narrow directed blasts, and photons documented as being particularly well dealt with by UFP shields - see lasers).
They're also very efficient against normal matter in general, but not against alloyed hulls which prove to react "normally", like if hit by mere DET beams, against phaser/disruptor blasts.

Actually, you are wrong there. In addition, you ignored the 9 million terawatt reference in VOY's "Riddles" as well as the 90 million terajoule number from "Fair Haven". All point to exawatt range power as routine for Trek ships, and Federation ships in particular. As for weapons efficency, we have seen that the phasers in the TNG-era are less effective than photon torpedoes, and later supplanted by quantum torpedoes. Phasers in the TOS-era seem to be prefered in combat, and in ST:ENT, there is a back and forth tech race between missile weapons versus beam weapons.

The alloyed hull fallacy is also silly since it was debunked a long time ago as well you know. We have seen phasers do enourmous amounts of damage to hulls, but it tells us nothing about phaser power given how advanced the alloys are, and the fact that there are often shields and structural integrity fields, among other confounding variables.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

It hardly sounds like a low ball figure. It's like saying a 1 GW nuclear power plant can normally kick some electricity up in the megawatt range., or when comparing the horsepower of two vehicles, declaring the horsepower of a sports car by providing a figure ten or a hundred times lower than what it truly is.
Or like Star Wars' scroll starting with the statement that the Death Star can destroy a small moon, when it can split planets into tiny little bits at once.
No, in general, when people make such statements, they tend to go for the best said system can do.

Not necessarily. There is a safe normal operational level, and then there are what are called "red line" levels of operation. You don't normally drive your car at 180-200 kph because that would wear out the engine and tires well ahead of when it is supposed to. Jet engines operate in a similar manner as do rocket engines, like the Space Shuttle Main Engines. They normally operate at a certain percentage of their overall power plant output capability, but they keep extra power in reserve just in case. In the episode we are discussing, I can easily see the E-D red lining it's warp and impulse engines well into the petawatt range and perhaps a little bit above. The indications are in the episode at the end that they were pushing the total ship's power output right to the limits.

Most cars' dashboards have speed counters for which the last quarter will never be reached because the vehicle simply can't mechanically do so.
Even sports cars, although without pushing their engines, can get close to their max speeds without hurting their pieces, and people often speak about their speed by referring to their max speed, not some kind of silly cruising speed that's like 10% of what it really has in its guts. Besides, it doesn't matter, because the formulation Geordi used precisely corresponds to a declaration of prestigious feature, because that's just the way you'd go about any system's most impressive capacity. It's notably quite silly to consider that Geordi would almost drool over his pants about the core's capacity to go up in the terawatt range if the ship could do x10, x100 or x1000 times that. Geordi would simply have no reason to settle for the terawatt range at all.
So those safety limits you speak of can't really be very high either. As such, I considered a capacity to eventually push the core up the low petawatt range, assuming the core's non-stressful peak would be of several hundred TW. Anything else is really spin doctoring.
Red lining into the petawatt range and perhaps a little bit above is frankly not acceptable in episode.
It's quite peculiar, indeed, that the safe working level of a power plant would be one or more OoMs below peak capacity. yet what you speak of almost puts the difference as three or four full orders of magnitude.
Please, find me one single example of a power plant capable of that.

As for the other example, Data's figure from "True Q" is largely fudge able, and there's only Kim's statement regarding the power going down some conduits 7o9 was going to put her arms into that's worth it. Not to say anything about the idea of removing a panel and putting one's arm into a conduit and thinking it's fine is puzzling: if there is power, then there is, it's not one day there's power so I can shove an arm in there, and the other day there's no power. Plus it is absolutely clear that it can only be a statement about some overall power production: If there were petawatts flowing through those small conduits, then the density of power per cubic meter of conduit would be monumental, and no arm, Borg or not, could withstand that.
The rest is about calculations made by fans. Hardly decisive.

Yes, you tried to fudge it by claiming he means something similar to kilowatt hours when we know from the script that the intent of the writer is that he means no such thing.

Because my objections are totally valid. It's better than going with a script that goes by X watt per second.
Watts per anything greater, like hour or day, is perfectly admissible. It's widely useed today, and there's little reason why it would go out of fashion.
There's also the other possiblity that it's X watts per a given tank of AM, or amount or volume of AM. That, again, is a valid way to rate a power plant's production, as it produces X watt per fuel stock, knowing that said fuel stock does certainly not get consumed in one miserable second.
The fact is, the dialogue is incomplete and so unusable.

Furthermore, your interpretation of the "Revulsion" statements are bereft of facts. Neither Kim, nor Seven discuss the power flowing through the conduit in terms of overall power production. That conduit had 5 million gigawatts flowing through it. Period. It was doing this while the ship was not at warp, nor in a state of combat readiness.

And so what? A ship that has petawatts flowing through its power grid while doing nothing spectacular is a silly design. Are told if the power is puled or not? If that's one conduit, aren't a little baffled at the fact that one can open it and say that any accidental excess of energy, by saying touching some stupidly badly isolated wires or their equivalent, would merely produce a slight energy arc... worth a thousand Hiroshimas?
Don't you find this totally silly?
At best a single Borg's arm, if we take the best figures out there, could tank some megawatts. I don't know how large your power conduit is, but that doesn't jive well with a flux rated in real petawatts.
That's why it's best treated as relative petawatts.

You still have "The Dauphin" which takes some serious fudging to avoid lowering the entire E-D's power production capacity to low TW or GW.

The "Daupin" example is a clear outlier. It cannot be reconciled with any previous or following power quote. Since the context of the discussion was about communications, the only logical way to view it is that the E-D's entire communication system cannot generate that much power.

Yes, that fudging. Fortunately for you, I do accept it as a good rationalization, because I also do not agree with such a ship's overall max power capacity stuck at the gigawatt power level.
Still, that leaves the whole sensor system relying on gigawatts. Meaning that any system which would be sheated in some field of some sort rating higher would be hard to read through for the E-D's sensors.

We still have the fusion based self destruct of the E-nil worth of some several dozen megatons, and generally fusion power capacity isn't too far from antimatter cores ; the one in DS9 for example did a fantastic job and that's from the Cardassians, who do their things in a rawer fashion, not to say that their tech is inferior in some way to that of the UFP.

Which means what? The Constellation's rigged self destruct was for at least 196 megatons, assuming at least two impulse engines going off. Remember that Kirk explicitly asked Spock if a 97 MT explosion would result, if a starship impulse engine, not engines were overloaded. Spock corrects him by saying it would be 97.835 MT, but does not correct him on the engine number required. That's 823,200 TJ of energy, or 823 petajoules as you well know. If the warp engines are an order of magnitude more powerful, then we're well into the exawatt range.

I don't think some weird form of critical mass overloading is the same as actual power production.
You can in theory burn up most of the nuclear fuel in fusion from the moment you can actually trigger the explosion with the appropriate compression and heat rates, which will obviously be easily achieved otherwise they could not blow their stock up. So they're essentially using their nuclear fuel to make a big bomb.
But measuring the yield of a bomb running on 1 kg of deuterium is not like measuring the power production of a nuclear plant, even if it happened to use a stock of 1 kg of deuterium.

As for Deep Space Nine, we saw the station fire photon torpedoes at various ships of all sizes. Those require antimatter to work. It is quite possible that the station does make use of matter-antimatter power systems, not merely fusion. With the exception of "Civil Defense" and the DS9 TM, there is little reference made to the station's power generation.

There is, and all the dialogue references I found only speak of fusion core(s). That is all we have. Nothing precludes stocking AM warheads, but again, a warhead is not necessarily a power plant, even if Trek, a warhead can apparently be charged from a ship's AM stock (although I'm afraid that's a bit of fan fiction thus far).

O'BRIEN: Computer, is the diagnostic on the fusion power plant finished yet?
COMPUTER: Affirmative. The fusion power plant is operating within normal parameters.
O'BRIEN: What are you talking about? It's thirteen percent below normal.
COMPUTER: Cardassian specifications accept operating efficiency within twenty percent.
O'BRIEN: Well, I don't. Anara.
(A Bajoran woman comes over)
ANARA: Yes, sir.
O'BRIEN: How much do you know about the carbon reaction chambers?
ANARA: I've learned a little about laser-induced fusion. Not much more than the basics.
O'BRIEN: It's a bloody inefficient system, and I'd trade it in for a Federation model tomorrow if I could. But it's all we've got. Do me a favour. Keep an eye on the exhaust plasma temperature. Computer, increase deuterium flow by five percent to reaction chamber two.
COMPUTER: Procedure is not recommended.
O'BRIEN: Look, I've had enough of your opinions, damn it. Just do it.
COMPUTER: Procedure is not recommended. Consult Cardassian operational guidelines, paragraph two five four A, now on screen.
O'BRIEN: I don't want to read your tech manual. Fine, we'll do it ourselves. Re-initialising reactor two. Directing plasma stream to conduits one four three, one four four.
ANARA: Chief O'Brien. The power flow from reactor two has just been shut down.
O'BRIEN: What? Computer, analyse reactor two failure.
COMPUTER: Reactor two was shut down after sensors detected a potential overload of the carbon reaction chambers.

O'BRIEN: Sorry I couldn't get here sooner. Another fusion reactor went down. How's it going?

DUKAT: It's very simple. When the countdown is completed, the computer will order the main fusion reactor to disengage the reaction stabilisers, causing it to overload, destroying the station.
DAX: What about the reactor? Is there any way to shut it down?
DUKAT: It may be possible to manually disengage the laser fusion initiator, but in order to do that we have to be in the reactor room.
DAX: Not necessarily. We can disengage the initiator from one of the control junctions on level thirty four.
BASHIR: But now that the computer's wiped out the access codes, not even a Cardassian can get out of this room.
KIRA: Well then, maybe we should concentrate on trying to eliminate the forcefield protecting the door.
DAX: We don't have time to eliminate every forcefield between here and level thirty four. What we need to do is find a way to deactivate all the forcefields on the station at the same time.

KIRA [OC]: The laser fusion initiator at one of the control junctions on level thirty four.

COMPUTER: Warning. Main fusion reactors will overload in seven minutes.
QUARK: Tell me something I don't already know.
KIRA [OC]: Kira to Odo.
ODO: Go ahead, Major.
KIRA [OC]: We're beginning evacuation procedures. The forcefields have been deactivated and all the doors on the station should be operable.
ODO: All except one. It seems the forcefield around my office are still in operation.
KIRA [OC]: I'll send a work team down immediately.
COMPUTER: Warning, main fusion reactors will overload in six minutes.
QUARK: Are you telling me we're the only ones still locked in?
ODO: This forcefield must be on a separate system from the others.
QUARK: But why go to so much trouble to keep people out of the Security office?
ODO: It's not to keep people out, it's to keep me in. I suppose during the occupation the Cardassians considered their security chief a security risk.
QUARK: And I know why.
ODO: Oh, do you?
QUARK: It's because they knew you were an honourable man. The kind of person who would do the right thing regardless of the circumstances. And now your integrity is going to get us both killed. I hope you're happy.

[Corridor]

COMPUTER: Warning. Main fusion reactors will overload in five minutes.
SISKO: Chief, did you ever finish those upgrades on the deflector shields?
O'BRIEN: Yeah, why?
SISKO: We may not have time to disengage the fusion initiator. What if we directed the explosion into the shields?
O'BRIEN: That's not a bad idea. The shields are the only thing on the station that can absorb that much energy.
(debris blocks their path)
O'BRIEN: That power surge we felt must've blown out one of the plasma conduits. The corridor's completely blocked for the next fifty metres.
JAKE: Can't we get around it?
SISKO: We don't have time.
O'BRIEN: There might be a way. There's a maintenance conduit adjacent to this corridor. If it's not blocked, we might be able to get around the debris and get to the reactor control junction. Give me a hand.
(They clear rubbish from the access panel.)
O'BRIEN: I can feel heat through the door.
(So he opens it.)
SISKO: What's wrong?
O'BRIEN: See for yourself.
(There's a green plasma fire in the conduit walls.)
COMPUTER: Warning. Main fusion reactors will overload in three minutes.
SISKO: I want you to wait here.
JAKE: But
SISKO: I mean it this time.
(O'Brien and Sisko tear their sleeves to make mittens for their hands.)
SISKO: I'll go first. Follow five metres behind me. If one of us runs into trouble in here
O'BRIEN: I know, I know. The other one keeps on going.

[Conduit]

(Flashes and bangs are all around them. One knocks O'Brien down.)
SISKO: O'Brien!
(O'Brien is out cold. Sisko goes on. O'Brien wakes briefly then passes out again.)

[Reactor control junction]

COMPUTER: Warning. Main fusion reactors will overload in ninety seconds.
(Sisko starts moving isolinear rods around.)
SISKO: Sisko to O'Brien.

[Conduit]

SISKO [OC]: Chief, can you hear me?

[Corridor]

SISKO [OC]: Chief, answer me.
(Jake goes into the conduit.)

[Reactor control junction]

(Sisko is reversing rods and pressing buttons.)
COMPUTER: Warning. Main fusion reactors will overload in sixty seconds.

[Conduit]

(Jake drags the groaning O'Brien back towards the corridor.)

[Reactor control junction]

COMPUTER: Warning. Main fusion reactors will overload in thirty seconds.
(Sisko works fast.)

[Corridor]

(Jake pulls O'Brien out of the conduit.)
O'BRIEN: Jake, I thought your father told you to stay out of there.
JAKE: If you don't tell him, I won't.

[Reactor control junction]

(Sisko is still pressing buttons.)
COMPUTER: Warning. Main fusion reactor overload.
(Whumph! Energy discharges from the station and the shields are lit up.)
O'BRIEN [OC]: O'Brien to Sisko.
SISKO: Chief, you're all right?

That should settle it for now.

In the "Nth Degree", the ship is clearly threatened by a terawatt field, and oddly enough, Data is quite mute about pointing out how much more powerful the field would be in order to fit with usual petawatt claims. You think an increase of a thousand would be worth reporting. Even more for a million. Huh.

That's another distortion. The E-D was not initially threatened by the 3.2 terawatt energy, and they only moved away as precaution. Here's the dialog:



WORF: Probe now closing at fifteen point three metres per second. Collision course.

DATA: Captain, sensors are reading no particulate emissions or subspace field distortions.

PICARD: Then how is it able to move?

DATA: Method of propulsion is unknown, sir.


RIKER: Ensign, take us away from it. One quarter impulse.

ANAYA: (the lady at helm) Aye, sir.

WORF: The probe is matching our speed and course.

DATA: Captain, an energy field is forming. Intensity is three point two terawatts and increasingaround the device.

WORF: Sir, the shuttlecraft shields did not provide sufficient protection for its computer Our computer may also be vulnerable. I recommend withdrawal to a safe distance.

So you can see that they tried moving away because it came at them on a collision course, then it puts up the field, which is clearly stated to be increasing in output, not staying stagnant. We have no idea how fast or high the power field reached. They keep trying to move away as a precaution. Only much later does the power field grow to a point were it threatens the shields. But we have no idea what that power output is.

Two easy ways to debunk that:
1. If the ship had petawatt capacity in its shields, a field in the terawatt range would be absurdly insignificant. It could try to hurt the E-D all day, the crew would just order some popcorn from the replicator and enjoy the boring display as much as possible.
2. As said, not only is this a clear threat, but Data didn't mention any considerably greater power for the field. You'd think that a considerably increase in the power of the field would be a bit (read: a fuckton) relevant.

The Cardassian ATR-4107, with the capacity to destroy a small moon and used by B'Eelanna to "destroy" a Cardassian planet, and had a warhead of 1000 kg of AM, for a theoretical maximum yield of 42.96 gigatons. Since it's the warhead, the power plant would have its own fuel supply and it would be inferior (or it would tap the warhead's AM stock but then it would barely dent it). If it were anywhere relevant to the yield, it would have been considered alongside the warhead and cited. The thing flew for more than two years by the time Voyager caught it.
That ship laughed at anything thrown at it, and would actually be able to threaten the USS Voyager very seriously, despite having flown for that long with no resupply.
That's more than 3.156 e7 seconds of travel. Even if the ship's consumption rate was of only 1 TW during its trip searching for a target (warping here and there, using sensors to find a planet, eventually repelling some enemies), it would have consumed a total of 3.156 e19 J, or 7.543 GT, or no less than 17.56 % of the warhead's theoretical energy.
We immediately see that if we use higher power consumption figures, the warhead's potential energetic stock itself would not suffice to power the ship that long.
Yet it's been claimed that petawatts are easily consumed to push a large ship to warp at not so impressive speeds.
Obviously that's not the case.

Except that you conveniently forget Dreadnought's purpose, Oragahn. It was essentially an automated suicide starship. It had weapons, shields, warp drive and more. Given it's purpose as designed to go and attack the Maquis, it was expected to plow through potentially heavy threat forces. This means fighting other starships, which means generating lots of power for shields and weapons, which means a warhead makes perfect sense since it is an untappable reserve so that if the ship is out of fuel, it can still make a big bang at it's target. We've discussed all this before.

And if anything, I don't remember conceding anything.
What exactly in anything of what you wrote hurts my position exactly?

I will spare you the E-D being rocked by low megajoule blasts from the Lysian destroyer.

Oh don't be silly since the weapons did nothing to harm either the E-D's shields, nor cause any internal damage whatsoever. I can't believe you'd stoop down to such a silly Michael Wong-like snipe.

I just use it to point out that the science in Star Trek is quite amusing at times.
And Wong is also right about how Data can also get his units or physics facts messed up.
I merely use it to show that a low end can easily counter a high end.

So see, aside from very indirect fan calculations, there's quite some meat behind the idea that the high profile UFP ships would be capable of producing high TW/very low PW power levels at best.
I'd say that shields are charged up some several times those numbers, in joules. And I'd add that phasers are much more efficient against shields, even if less powerful, than torpedoes (huge neutrino waste, not perfect M/AM reaction rate, non narrow directed blasts, and photons documented as being particularly well dealt with by UFP shields - see lasers).
They're also very efficient against normal matter in general, but not against alloyed hulls which prove to react "normally", like if hit by mere DET beams, against phaser/disruptor blasts.

Actually, you are wrong there. In addition, you ignored the 9 million terawatt reference in VOY's "Riddles"

Used to cloak a Ba'neth space station?
Do we know if it was smaller than, say, any of those mushroom UFP space stations that completely dwarf starships?

... as well as the 90 million terajoule number from "Fair Haven".

Associated to what?
Isn't is the overall energy content of some field or large storm?

As for weapons efficency, we have seen that the phasers in the TNG-era are less effective than photon torpedoes, and later supplanted by quantum torpedoes. Phasers in the TOS-era seem to be prefered in combat, and in ST:ENT, there is a back and forth tech race between missile weapons versus beam weapons.

All battles I remember from TNG and DS9 are a mix of both. What's the evidence that phasers are inferior?

The alloyed hull fallacy is also silly since it was debunked a long time ago as well you know.

What I know is that there's hardly anything silly about it, when a ship like the E-D can't disintegrate a full warship without shields, while it can do some wonderful things to soil and rocky crusts.
I've never seen a better explanation as to why a ship's phaser can't magic-eat another entire ship's hull away in one shot, while a scaled down hand phaser can easily make disappear enormous amounts of rock in comparison to the size of the hand phaser itself.
The best solution thus far is that hulls are built to sustain the NDF effects of phasers, while rock, for example... is just rock.

We have seen phasers do enourmous amounts of damage to hulls, but it tells us nothing about phaser power given how advanced the alloys are, and the fact that there are often shields and structural integrity fields, among other confounding variables.
-Mike

Phasers and disruptors... in ST2, we do see phasers against hulls. You don't see entire sections disappearing. In the movie with the Klingon sisters, the weapon fire was going straight through the E-D's shields, yet the hull wasn't being NDF'd away in whole swathes as the disruptor bolts hit.
Focused beams will simply be superior against torps unless torps have high initial yields to compensate for all the negative factors I listed.

[StarWarsStarTrek]

Masterpiece society:

Haven't you noticed the fact that not only was the fragment not being accelerated by any speed, the stated energy source was a bunch of plasma in the terawatt range? Or that the Enterprise was changing the fragment's trajectory, not it's speed?

Need I mention when a combustible fuel source was considered to be viable for fueling a deflector shield?

Or when a large chemical explosion was more powerful than a proton torpedo?

Good lord. The normal power generation was stated to be terawatt range. It does not preclude higher power generation, and it is at extreme odds with half a dozen other explicit power generation examples already mentioned in this thread. Changing trajectory also means imparting kinetic energy to the mass of the fragment, thus even a 1 meter a second velocity vector change will still require enormous amounts of energy to accomplish. At best you can say that the episode is highly self-contradictory.
-Mike

Quantify this enormous amount of energy. You're also pulling a strawman on the point that I'm trying to make; that is, that the claim of e23 joules is contradicted in the episode itself, and the strange method of moving the moon is indicative of a technobabble method of moving it.

[Mike DiCenso]

Masterpiece society:

Haven't you noticed the fact that not only was the fragment not being accelerated by any speed, the stated energy source was a bunch of plasma in the terawatt range? Or that the Enterprise was changing the fragment's trajectory, not it's speed?

Need I mention when a combustible fuel source was considered to be viable for fueling a deflector shield?

Or when a large chemical explosion was more powerful than a proton torpedo?

Good lord. The normal power generation was stated to be terawatt range. It does not preclude higher power generation, and it is at extreme odds with half a dozen other explicit power generation examples already mentioned in this thread. Changing trajectory also means imparting kinetic energy to the mass of the fragment, thus even a 1 meter a second velocity vector change will still require enormous amounts of energy to accomplish. At best you can say that the episode is highly self-contradictory.
-Mike

Quantify this enormous amount of energy. You're also pulling a strawman on the point that I'm trying to make; that is, that the claim of e23 joules is contradicted in the episode itself, and the strange method of moving the moon is indicative of a technobabble method of moving it.

This is not a strawman. Even with the technobabble, the tractor beams in Star Trek work on a pushing or pulling principle. Also, you're confusing, perhaps deliberately, the power requirement of the E-D to push the stellar core fragment with that of the E-1701 to push the nearly Earth's Moon-sized asteroid. Just go back and look at my earlier calculations. 1e28 joules is the energy required. You, on the other hand, have yet to produce any calculations whatsoever, much less provide real evidence. Someone else had to provide the Slave Ship passage for you (JMS), and other people have done all the other work in this thread.

The ball, SWST, as they say, is on your side of the court.
-Mike

[StarWarsStarTrek]

If tractor beams operate on push and pull, then why wasn't the velocity of the fragment changing?

Furthermore, here are relevant snippets from script:

DATA: The fragment has a density of one hundred billion kilograms per cubic centimeter. As a result, when it passes Moab Four, it will cause tectonic shifts well beyond eight-point-seven on the Richter Scale.

...

HANNAH: I've worked up a few schematics based on gravimetric potentials and deflector energy allocation...

...

HANNAH: Your ship... what kind of energy output is it capable of generating?

GEORDI: We have a matter/antimatter warp reaction system, the most powerful in Starfleet... normally kicks plasma up into the terawatt range... what are you thinking about?

...

HANNAH: When we first spotted the fragment approaching, I came up with the idea, but we can't generate the kind of energy we would need ... You can.



You can claim that the talk of plasma is not a significant part of the warp core power, but that would beg the question as to why it was even mentioned in such a dire situation.

Therefore, the most reasonable explanation is that tractor beams operate on technobabble. That's how you reconcile the implicit bragging of terrawatt range plasma with an e28 joule event.





Moreso, if the feat really did require e28 joules of energy, then that would mean that the Enterprise could boil a planet's ocean with a single blast.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHTtOMWRysg

Uh huh.

[Trinoya]

SWST why on earth did you once against post a video of a confirmed warheadless quantum torpedo that STILL sent shockwaves across a planet as evidence of low yields...


IT HAS NO YIELD. IT HAS NO WARHEAD. There is no antimatter in those two torpedoes. NONE. They were SPECIFICALLY REDESIGNED TO CAUSE NO DAMAGE.

This has been explained to you numerous times, please stop ignoring and acknowledge that you can not use that scene to determine yield of a normal quantum torpedo or any other weapon in star trek. It would be the same as if someone said,

"This turbrolaser was designed to only fire tracer rounds. It did no damage at all to the planet, therefore all turbolasers do no damage!"

Please show progress and retract any claims associated with using that video.

[StarWarsStarTrek]

Please show me where you provided such evidence.

[Trinoya]

The first time "I" mentioned it to you was in this thread.

http://starfleetjedi.net/forum/viewtopi ... m&start=75

ONE: This is proof of ranges measured in tens of thousands of kilometers.

TWO: Those quantum torpedoes had their warheads removed and were replaced with a chemical warhead to infect the entire planet with a harmful substance.

THREE: There is no visible range in the second part of the video, it shows the entire battle from the view screen save for the act of firing.

You did not address it at all at the time and moved on, while posting false evidence, including movies from other sci-fi franchises as well as fan art all the while in that thread. I presumed, wrongly it seems, that you took the time to look up that it was actually designed to disperse a chemical warhead. The video that you post does not show the chemicals spreading across the atmosphere mere seconds later.

Essentially I gave you the benefit of the doubt since it seemed you were quite ignorant of star trek, and hadn't watched enough of it to be informed.

What specifically occurs in the episode for the uniform is those torpedoes are modified not to bomb a planet but instead to spread a poison through the entire planet. They were not trying to blow anything up, they were making it uninhabitable. It would be like tying a chemical warhead to a nuclear bomb and trying to calculate a nuclear yield. It's just not applicable. Furthermore you know, they aren't blowing shit up on the ground, and merely dispersing in atmosphere.

This action, in [DS9] For the Uniform, ultimately made that world uninhabitable to human life for 50 years. The dispersion of the chemicals themselves, in the episode, was all that achieved this effect. Furthermore, any old federation ship with a torpedo is capable of this, since it uses Trilithium Resin, a byproduct of the warp cores (this is also the same stuff that makes stars explode with FTL shockwaves in star trek).

[Mike DiCenso]

If You can claim that the talk of plasma is not a significant part of the warp core power, but that would beg the question as to why it was even mentioned in such a dire situation.

Therefore, the most reasonable explanation is that tractor beams operate on technobabble. That's how you reconcile the implicit bragging of terrawatt range plasma with an e28 joule event.

In the future, please place quotes or color tags around your dialog as it makes it easier to sort out quickly from. Furthermore, please do not confuse someone else's arguements with mine. I never talked about the plasma being seperate from the warp core.

Technobabble certainly can explain it, but it does not completely explain what is going on and whatever is going on, it still requires a great deal of energy as per the dialog you cited:

HANNAH: When we first spotted the fragment approaching, I came up with the idea, but we can't generate the kind of energy we would need ... You can.

We have seen that in Trek, large, stationary fusion power plants can generate large amounts of power, which is the crux of one of Mr. Oragahn's arguments above. However if the colony cannot generate the power needed, then that means the warp core on the E-D has to be pretty damn powerful. In fact, later on in the episode they talk about maintaining the tractor beam and pushing the ship's engines and tractor beam emitters right to their very operational limits, even diverting life support power to get every last bit they can throw into the tractor beam and keep it going to push the fragment. There's also this:




DATA: Increasing impulse power to tractor emitters. EPS power levels rising.

They even shunted impulse power as well as warp power in there.

HANNAH: The emitter circuits won't hold for long.

LAFORGE: We won't need them for long.

HANNAH: Four hundred percent over standard.

LAFORGE: Okay. Now we're getting there.

HANNAH: The fragment's moved point four degrees off its previous heading. Point six five. It's working.

Again, lots of power and everything being pushed to their limits.

Moreso, if the feat really did require e28 joules of energy, then that would mean that the Enterprise could boil a planet's ocean with a single blast.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHTtOMWRysg

Uh huh.

This is irrelevant, and this is great example of epic failure on your part since the torpedoes used here not only are not being used to for anything other than a high-altitude air-burst to disperse trilithium resin to poison the planet's atmosphere, but it still makes explosions well over 200 kilometers in diameter. As has been gone over already, that means each torpedo is at minimum 10 to 20 times larger than the largest real life nuclear weapon ever detonated.

So, you care to try again?
-Mike

[Mike DiCenso]

Most cars' dashboards have speed counters for which the last quarter will never be reached because the vehicle simply can't mechanically do so.
Even sports cars, although without pushing their engines, can get close to their max speeds without hurting their pieces, and people often speak about their speed by referring to their max speed, not some kind of silly cruising speed that's like 10% of what it really has in its guts. Besides, it doesn't matter, because the formulation Geordi used precisely corresponds to a declaration of prestigious feature, because that's just the way you'd go about any system's most impressive capacity. It's notably quite silly to consider that Geordi would almost drool over his pants about the core's capacity to go up in the terawatt range if the ship could do x10, x100 or x1000 times that. Geordi would simply have no reason to settle for the terawatt range at all.
So those safety limits you speak of can't really be very high either. As such, I considered a capacity to eventually push the core up the low petawatt range, assuming the core's non-stressful peak would be of several hundred TW. Anything else is really spin doctoring.
Red lining into the petawatt range and perhaps a little bit above is frankly not acceptable in episode.
It's quite peculiar, indeed, that the safe working level of a power plant would be one or more OoMs below peak capacity. yet what you speak of almost puts the difference as three or four full orders of magnitude.
Please, find me one single example of a power plant capable of that.

Actually, you're overexaggerating Geordi reactions in telling Hannah about the E-D's normal power generation. He wasn't drooling or overly excited, he rather matter of factly states with that annoying for you qualifier of "normally" in there that the ship kicks plasma up into the terawatt range. That can span anywhere from 1-999.9 TW. It's such a wide latitude that you can pick whatever the hell you want. I'm just trying to make sense of it in context to the many more examples that have orders of magnitude greater power generation stated for the ship or other ships.

Also see my responses to SWST on many of these issues. The red line of the engines and the tractor beam circuits are a big part of what gets done at the end of the episode. They push the circuits at least 400 percent above normal safe operational limits. They were even shunting in impulse power as well as diverting power from every system, including life support.

So yeah, I can see them red-lining the engines to produce petawatts quite easily.

As for a real-life example of this, look at a steam engine. On one local display locomotive, the plates in the cab rate the normal operational pressure for the boiler at 190 psi, and safe maximum operational pressure 220 psi. That's at least 14%. However, the boiler is so overdesigned that it can easily handle 300% beyond that for hydrostatic testing. So why didn't they routinely operate the locomotive at that pressure? Because of economics as well as safety. To normally operate it that way would quickly wear out the boiler in months, rather than years, and would be horredously expensive.

But, suppose that you had to operate that boiler at near those limits because it might necessitate major inspections and repairs later, but you use the power generated by the locomotive to do something that saves a small village from being destroyed. Furthermore, what if that is a government, instead of private corporation that runs the locomotive? Again, context is everything. Normally they can do X, but this is a very abnormal situation, which requires Y.

See, there's all kinds of scenarios we can go over where they push the engines so hard that it gets huge amounts of power, and while it's not normal, they can still do it.

Because my objections are totally valid. It's better than going with a script that goes by X watt per second.
Watts per anything greater, like hour or day, is perfectly admissible. It's widely useed today, and there's little reason why it would go out of fashion.
There's also the other possiblity that it's X watts per a given tank of AM, or amount or volume of AM. That, again, is a valid way to rate a power plant's production, as it produces X watt per fuel stock, knowing that said fuel stock does certainly not get consumed in one miserable second.
The fact is, the dialogue is incomplete and so unusable.

But, again, as you well know, we have the calculations that I've done that place power generation for the warp core during a breech in the low exawatt range. If I did the math wrong for that, I'd like to hear someone say something. But even if I was off by 10 times, that's still 167 petawatts. That assumes the stardrive is made of ordinary elemental iron, which we know it is not, and that there are no magical SIF or other confounding variables involved. Furthermore, the assumption was also based around the exact amount of energy required to vaporize the stardrive section, which we know is really low-ball since the on E-D's sister ships, the Yamato and Odyssey were not only vaporized outright, but there was still more than enough energy released to cause significant melting and vaporization of the hulls of the much larger saucer sections, as well as impart enough KE for those section to go flying off at hundreds of meters a second.

So what we have:

1.) Writer's intent that 12.75 billion gigajoules per second.

2.) Fan calculations that low-ball the stardrive vape energies in the low single-digit exawatt range.

And so what? A ship that has petawatts flowing through its power grid while doing nothing spectacular is a silly design. Are told if the power is puled or not? If that's one conduit, aren't a little baffled at the fact that one can open it and say that any accidental excess of energy, by saying touching some stupidly badly isolated wires or their equivalent, would merely produce a slight energy arc... worth a thousand Hiroshimas?

Don't you find this totally silly?

No, I don't. Because we are dealing with a very advanced and powerful technological level here. We don't know how much, for example, keeping SIF and IDF going costs power-wise. We do know from "Good Shepherd" [VOY, Season 6], that Voyager routinely uses at least 5-10 TW for the long range sensors alone. But we don't know what artifical gravity costs, nor do we know what maintaining the navigational deflector does, and that is a big ticket power item, or the warp engines on stand-by mode. Lots and lots and lots of good reasons for it.

At best a single Borg's arm, if we take the best figures out there, could tank some megawatts. I don't know how large your power conduit is, but that doesn't jive well with a flux rated in real petawatts.
That's why it's best treated as relative petawatts.

No, Sevem was not going to grab an exposed electrical wiring conduit, she was going to reach into a plasma stream, which can be controlled with a magnetic field, and she says:

The exoskeleton on this limb can withstand it.

This coming from someone less than a couple months of having been downgraded from being a Borg drone. But whether or not her exoskeleton really could have withstood it in that downgraded condition is questionable, it still remains that Harry Kim stated that 5,000 TW was flowing through the conduit, and he knew that system, and Seven who was being anal about the optical alignment being off by a tiny amount did not attempt to correct him.

Yes, that fudging. Fortunately for you, I do accept it as a good rationalization, because I also do not agree with such a ship's overall max power capacity stuck at the gigawatt power level.
Still, that leaves the whole sensor system relying on gigawatts. Meaning that any system which would be sheated in some field of some sort rating higher would be hard to read through for the E-D's sensors.

So, communications now equals sensor system? How do you get that? The sensors on Voyager were at least 5-10 TW. But "The Dauphin" is self-contradictory anway. They still beamed people down through the massive interference that required a terawatt, which means that sensors on the ship also had to be able to read what was going on down planetside to ensure safe transport, ect.

I don't think some weird form of critical mass overloading is the same as actual power production.
You can in theory burn up most of the nuclear fuel in fusion from the moment you can actually trigger the explosion with the appropriate compression and heat rates, which will obviously be easily achieved otherwise they could not blow their stock up. So they're essentially using their nuclear fuel to make a big bomb.
But measuring the yield of a bomb running on 1 kg of deuterium is not like measuring the power production of a nuclear plant, even if it happened to use a stock of 1 kg of deuterium.

We don't know what Scotty did to jury-rig the explosion in the first place. A power feedback loop, for instance, would require that the ship on impulse generates a ginourmous amount of power instantly that the Constellation would go BOOM! once it reached the target destination. But even if we assume that the overload was 100 times the power the ship could safely generate, it would still leave us with over 8 petawatts to play with on impulse power alone. Hell, even a x 1,000 reduction would still leave us with at least .8 PW.

There is, and all the dialogue references I found only speak of fusion core(s). That is all we have. Nothing precludes stocking AM warheads, but again, a warhead is not necessarily a power plant, even if Trek, a warhead can apparently be charged from a ship's AM stock (although I'm afraid that's a bit of fan fiction thus far).

(examples snipped)

Okay, so we have some more examples. But I wasn't saying that the torpedoes are powerplants for the station, only that they show that there have to be stockpiles available of antimatter for the torpedo warheads to make use of, and when we see the big fleet battles, the photon torpedoes are the big bruisers for instant ship killing. The station's phasers work best on the much smaller, less powerful ships, like Hideki's, Jem'Hadar attack ships, and Klingon BoPs.

If Deep Space Nine were solely relying on phasers for ship killng, I'd completely agree with you on the matter, but that's not what we see going on. Also don't forget that the Neg'Var was able to blow out one of the main shield generators on the station with the big disruptor cannon in "Way of the Warrior". Theoretically it could have destroyed the station, if the intent was not to capture the station, but destroy it.

In the "Nth Degree", the ship is clearly threatened by a terawatt field, and oddly enough, Data is quite mute about pointing out how much more powerful the field would be in order to fit with usual petawatt claims. You think an increase of a thousand would be worth reporting. Even more for a million. Huh.

He does report the field is increasing throughout the crisis, but he never quantifies it, thus you have to consider the real possibility that the field was increasing rapidly upwards at an expontential rate.

Two easy ways to debunk that:
1. If the ship had petawatt capacity in its shields, a field in the terawatt range would be absurdly insignificant. It could try to hurt the E-D all day, the crew would just order some popcorn from the replicator and enjoy the boring display as much as possible.

2. As said, not only is this a clear threat, but Data didn't mention any considerably greater power for the field. You'd think that a considerably increase in the power of the field would be a bit (read: a fuckton) relevant.

Again, these can only be used, if one ignores outright what happened in the episode. The thing moved towards the E-D on a collison course. The E-D then tries to get away from the probe, but the thing chases after them and then starts the power field.
But more importantly, and what you are desperately trying to avoid, is that the field was increasing in intensity and output. There is no getting around that. So you are now left with trying to wave away that the only possibility is that the field is not increasing by very much at all, even though the E-D herself was not taking damage or anything from the intial 3.2 TW field. This says a lot. It says that the field has to be increasing enourmously to be a threat at all, and we see the probe field glow grow quite signficantly during the whole time:


About just after the probe started powering up at 3.2 terawatts.


Right before the torpedoes wack it.

So the glow intensifies at by several factors. Thus the minimum numbers are far higher than you claim as it at least doubled, and who knows how much it actually reached. So a terawatt or two isn't a real threat. It needs potentially into the tens of TW to be a minimum threat to the ship. We also have the calcs done for the various star surfing episodes, which confirm that hours of 12-250 TW are not a threat to the ship, thus again invaildating your premise here that the ship is threatened by mere single-digit numbers.

And if anything, I don't remember conceding anything.
What exactly in anything of what you wrote hurts my position exactly?

Quite a bit, actually. Again, go back to the stardrive calculations. At the end of it all, the Torres causes a warp core breech on Dreadnaught with her phaser. Again, a big boom results that vaporizes the ship.

I just use it to point out that the science in Star Trek is quite amusing at times.
And Wong is also right about how Data can also get his units or physics facts messed up.
I merely use it to show that a low end can easily counter a high end.

But it doesn't disprove anything about the high-power generation. No damage to shields or hull. The rocking is silly, I'll grant that, but you have to do better than citing "Conundrum".

They're also very efficient against normal matter in general, but not against alloyed hulls which prove to react "normally", like if hit by mere DET beams, against phaser/disruptor blasts.

Again, this hoary old fallacy about phasers was dealt with long ago. Phasers and disruptors have been shown doing horendous damage to hulls, like this example here:

Used to cloak a Ba'neth space station?
Do we know if it was smaller than, say, any of those mushroom UFP space stations that completely dwarf starships?

It dwarfed the very small Ba'neth starships, each of which was the size of a JH attack ship, or even smaller compared to how they looked early on in comparison to Voyager:



The station itself cannot be anywhere near Spacedock, much less SB 74 sized when we see it next to the small Ba'neth starships as seen in the video here at 3:06. According to Kim, that 9 million TW was just for the cloaking field alone. Yet Voyager braves a confrontation with the station and the other ships there.

Associated to what?
Isn't is the overall energy content of some field or large storm?

It's hard to tell, the implication is that the gradient locally around the ship was increasing by that much. However, VOY's "One Small Step" indicates that a 1 km wide eliptical-shaped subspace graviton phenomena of 30 million terajoules is something the ship can easily deal, even while being parked just a few hundred meters away for many hours, if they cut power and changed the shield polarity so as not to attract the damn thing.

All battles I remember from TNG and DS9 are a mix of both. What's the evidence that phasers are inferior?

Go look back at "The Nth Degree" again, the photon torpedoes were the only things that could destroy the probe. The phasers were used at maximum power and then some, but did not scratch the paint on the thing, but just for full-yield torpedoes were more than enough, and they would have crippled the E-D at that close range through the shields, if not for Barclay's modifications to boost the shield's power by 300 percent.

What I know is that there's hardly anything silly about it, when a ship like the E-D can't disintegrate a full warship without shields, while it can do some wonderful things to soil and rocky crusts.
I've never seen a better explanation as to why a ship's phaser can't magic-eat another entire ship's hull away in one shot, while a scaled down hand phaser can easily make disappear enormous amounts of rock in comparison to the size of the hand phaser itself.
The best solution thus far is that hulls are built to sustain the NDF effects of phasers, while rock, for example... is just rock.

Look, I hate having to repeat this stuff. Yeah, phasers do some weird stuff, but we've also know that materials highly resistant to phasers and torpedoes have some insanely high melting and vapor points. Take the Kalandon outpost's red rock material in "That Which Survives". That was at least 8,000 degrees C according to McCoy and Kirk's dialog. The E-D's hull in "Descent, Part 2" withstood 12,000 C without signfiicantly glowing, thus one can argue that structral integrity fields, plus the high natural melting point of materials like nitrium, duranium, and especially tritainium make it difficult to outright vape away a whole starship. And it's lucky for you the jury is still out on TAS' current canoncity as the E-1701 does just exactly that to an gigantic alien starship in "Beyond the Farthest Star" [TAS, Season 1].

Phasers and disruptors... in ST2, we do see phasers against hulls. You don't see entire sections disappearing. In the movie with the Klingon sisters, the weapon fire was going straight through the E-D's shields, yet the hull wasn't being NDF'd away in whole swathes as the disruptor bolts hit.
Focused beams will simply be superior against torps unless torps have high initial yields to compensate for all the negative factors I listed.

That's exactly it. See above for torp yeilds versus phasers in "The Nth Degree". Or better still, since most of it was covered here on SFJN, save us both the time and bandwith and look up the relevant threads and re-read them.
-Mike

[Mike DiCenso]

Oh, just to be contrary, I'm going to drop in another VOY example. The infamous tanking of a planetoid explosion scene from "Think Tank".

Since the planetoid is spherical, not oblate, we can make a reasonable assumption that it is somewhere at least between 400 to 2,000 km. The dialog from the episode has them discussing using phasers to drill at least 60 kilometers into the upper mantle to get at some dilithium deposits. Picking a nice average size between the two extremes, let's say it's about 1,200 km wide.

Using Wong's calculator to get a ballpark idea of the energies involved, this would mean overcoming a gravitational binding energy of at least 1e7 gigatons, assuming the thing was made up solely of ice.

Based on how far the planetoid subtends the field of view, the distance is around 1,000 km. Working out the energy means that there would be around 13,316,816.7 TW per km. Voyager's shields are elliptical, and we'll say they are no more than 133 x 70 meters for a total surface area of 29,248.23 m^2. So dividing 13e6 TW into 1 million square meters gives us 13 TW per meter squared! Multiply that by the frontal shield surface area and you then get 380,224 TW or just about 91 megatons.

This did not take down Voyager's shields, either:

JANEWAY: Maybe not. Reroute every spare gigawatt to the shields. Prepare to fire phasers.

TUVOK: Our target?

JANEWAY: The gas cloud.

SEVEN: Do you believe the impact will throw us clear?

JANEWAY:If our shields hold

So this only provides a lower limit to what a medium sized Federation vessel's shields are capable of tanking.
-Mike