Top ten VS myths

[Mr. Oragahn]

(You can't overcome everything with more power. No matter how powerful the laser it will never escape the black hole)

True, unfortunately, this quote is (correctly) used in regards to the "Lasers can't even penetrate our navigational deflectors", and said Navigational Deflectors have nothing to do with black holes...

The point is that there are things that no matter how powerful the weapon you can not brute force your way in or out as the case may be.

In order to do it's job a navigational deflector has to be able to move all subatomic and large particles out of the way of the ship while it is traveling at FTL speeds through real space. The ship would be destroyed if photons, electrons, protons, ect could get through.

The Navigational deflector can be used to make singularities.
Scorpion
KIM: It looks like the Borg have accessed deflector control. They're trying to realign the emitters.
CHAKOTAY: Shut them out.
KIM: They've bypassed security protocols.
TORRES: We're emitting a resonant gravitation beam. It's creating another singularity.
CHAKOTAY: Reverse course.
PARIS: We're fighting intense gravimetric distortion. I can't break free!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singularity

Let's notice that by default the ship is always visible, meaning that a certain threshold of light is allowed, just like all ships in all SF in general.
There's also the problem that photons still have properties akin to matter, and can be given a non zero mass. You can't arbitrarily increase their number and expect the same result since at some point they'll clearly pile up in front of your shields and act like a layer of matter.
For example, if you take a look at Wong's calculation page about the Millennium Falcon, the one wherein he got megatons of light which rocked the ship, you can see that it's possible to take down a shield, but only with massive amounts of photons.

For example, since blaster shots and all their variations carry a bunch of photons mixed to some fancy material force field, any variation of that on the scale of a superlaser would be far more than necessary to ruin a ship like the GCS.
Not to say that since in SW weapons are not pure light, the question doesn't require to be asked.
Besides, I consider that it's possible that Picard's remark may have been relative to the size of the ship in question, considering that the E-D had an advantage against pure laser weapons, but wasn't completely immune either. It would have just been so lopsided that they had little to fear.

[Praeothmin]

The Navigational deflector can be used to make singularities.

Not through power, through Technobabble:

We're emitting a resonant gravitation beam. It's creating another singularity.

[Jedi Master Spock]

Urm... antimatter is "only" 156 times more powerful than fusion - in real world at least, and we don't have much indication that it is different in Trek in any way; and as far as I know, we generally use RL physics whenever possible.

Well, there is actually a factor of efficiency. A less than 100% efficient reaction (and real-world fusion reactions are typically very much less than 100% efficient) will have a different ratio.

Given the apparent near-total absence of waste heat or radioactive waste products from fusion devices in ST/SW, this isn't necessarily that important in ST or SW, but should be kept in mind in general.

[Picard]

I know; but I was generalizing. Difference between ST and SW could be more than that or less; but as you pointed out, they do seem to achieve pretty good efficiency.

[Lucky]

Let's notice that by default the ship is always visible, meaning that a certain threshold of light is allowed, just like all ships in all SF in general.

Are they visible, or is that just for view convenience?

By this reasoning every visual sci-fi that has shields if full of drooling morons for not exploiting the obvious weakness. At best you can argue that the shields only let so much light through when the crew doesn't care.

There's also the problem that photons still have properties akin to matter, and can be given a non zero mass. You can't arbitrarily increase their number and expect the same result since at some point they'll clearly pile up in front of your shields and act like a layer of matter.
For example, if you take a look at Wong's calculation page about the Millennium Falcon, the one wherein he got megatons of light which rocked the ship, you can see that it's possible to take down a shield, but only with massive amounts of photons.

For example, since blaster shots and all their variations carry a bunch of photons mixed to some fancy material force field, any variation of that on the scale of a superlaser would be far more than necessary to ruin a ship like the GCS.
Not to say that since in SW weapons are not pure light, the question doesn't require to be asked.
Besides, I consider that it's possible that Picard's remark may have been relative to the size of the ship in question, considering that the E-D had an advantage against pure laser weapons, but wasn't completely immune either. It would have just been so lopsided that they had little to fear.

We know the ships sit in a bubble of warped space/time just by having their engines turned on.

We know that the Navigational deflector moves all the photons, electrons, protons micrometeorites, and everything else smaller then moons

Star Trek Ships fly at 70% the speed of light through atmosphere without trouble, and ships have gone to warp in Earth's atmosphere without trouble, and in both cases nothing of note happens. to the planets.
http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/thum ... 24&page=11
http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/thum ... 24&page=12
http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/thum ... ?album=425

There is plenty of evidence things like momentum are not transfered to the ship/shield generators in star Trek as with many Sci-Fi shielding systems.

Not through power, through Technobabble:

We're emitting a resonant gravitation beam. It's creating another singularity.

I see moving the goal posts on your part. You claimed navigational deflectors had nothing to do with black hole. I not only proved they use gravity to do what they do, but also that they are powerful enough to create black holes.

What technobabble? They used the navigational deflector to increase the number of gravitons in an area until the gravitational pull reached or exceeded the Schwarzschild radius , and a wormhole of the needed size was formed.
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/Graviton.html
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/questi ... number=535

If there was technobabble, it was involved in making sure the created singularity lead to the right place.

The creation of the singularity in Scorpion is a good way to find a lower limit for Voyager's reactor output.

[KSW]

Urm... antimatter is "only" 156 times more powerful than fusion - in real world at least, and we don't have much indication that it is different in Trek in any way; and as far as I know, we generally use RL physics whenever possible.

Unless you think an ounce of normal antimatter is enough to rip away half an earth-sized planet's atmosphere ("Obsession")

Meanwhile 1.2 ounces of normal antimatter will "only" produce a 1MT explosion when combined with an equal amount of matter. So clearly it is quite different.

[StarWarsStarTrek]

(no need to spend the rest of the thread arguing this, BTW)

That the RotS novelization quote was referring to HTLs.

" The skies of Coruscant blaze with war.

The artificial daylight spread by the capital's orbital mirrors is sliced by intersecting flames of ion drives and punctuated by starburst explosions; contrails of debris raining into the atmosphere become tangled ribbons of cloud. The nightside sky is an infinite lattice of shining hairlines that interlock planetoids and track erratic spirals of glowing gnats. Beings watching from rooftops of Coruscant's endless cityscape can find it beautiful.

From the inside, it's different. The gnats are drive-glows of starfighters. The shining hairlines are light-scatter from turbolaser bolts powerful enough to vaporize a small town. The planetoids are capital ships."

Since when do HTL's track starfighters? They don't.

[Mr. Oragahn]

(no need to spend the rest of the thread arguing this, BTW)

That the RotS novelization quote was referring to HTLs.

" The skies of Coruscant blaze with war.

The artificial daylight spread by the capital's orbital mirrors is sliced by intersecting flames of ion drives and punctuated by starburst explosions; contrails of debris raining into the atmosphere become tangled ribbons of cloud. The nightside sky is an infinite lattice of shining hairlines that interlock planetoids and track erratic spirals of glowing gnats. Beings watching from rooftops of Coruscant's endless cityscape can find it beautiful.

From the inside, it's different. The gnats are drive-glows of starfighters. The shining hairlines are light-scatter from turbolaser bolts powerful enough to vaporize a small town. The planetoids are capital ships."

Since when do HTL's track starfighters? They don't.

Since when do anti-fighter TL bolts prove to be long and luminous enough to be seen from the surface?

Oh yes, they don't.
Movie 1, novelization 0.

[KSW]

The creation of the singularity in Scorpion is a good way to find a lower limit for Voyager's reactor output.

Well if you can focus gravitons tightly enough via gravity-lens, then you can technically create a singularity regardless of power, since it results when gravitons achieve a density where escape-velocity = C. At that point, basically, anything it hits becomes relatively non-existent, except a similar subspace field strong enough to counter it.
So it's not just about power, but also the gravity-lens efficiency.
The difference between this and a quantum-torpedo, is that the torpedo can create a larger singularity for its size, since it can expend all its fuel at once, with no required safety-limits unlike a ship's reactor.

[StarWarsStarTrek]

Since when do anti-fighter TL bolts prove to be long and luminous enough to be seen from the surface?

Oh yes, they don't.
Movie 1, novelization 0.

I love how you counter my contradiction with another contradiction instead of refuting mine.


Since when can starfighters be visible as gnats from the surface? Oh yes, they don't. Fortunately, the battle was being viewed from the rooftops. The rooftops of Coruscants are very high. However high these rooftops are, if starfighters are still visible as gnats then the light scatter from light turbolasers surely can be as well.

Well, you say, how do you know? I don't just from that part of the quote, nobody does. Fortunately, we do know quite for certain that HTL's do not track starfighters, far more certainly than whether or not you could see turbolasers from rooftops of unknown height. End deal.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Since when do anti-fighter TL bolts prove to be long and luminous enough to be seen from the surface?

Oh yes, they don't.
Movie 1, novelization 0.

I love how you counter my contradiction with another contradiction instead of refuting mine.

I actually use higher canon to discredit lower canon material. That's why my position is superior to yours. However, the whole text is so at odds with the film that it could very well be that the best option is to ignore all that doesn't fit.
I couldn't care less about what the novelization says on the very topic of the aspect of bolts since it's completely contradicted. What isn't contradicted from that book, I prefer to keep if possible. Like the destruction of a small town bit.

Since when can starfighters be visible as gnats from the surface? Oh yes, they don't. Fortunately, the battle was being viewed from the rooftops. The rooftops of Coruscants are very high.

They're only a couple kilometers high. It's like standing at the top of some mountain. Not enough to see small fighters, unless they reflect sunlight like satellites do at times.
There's also the problem of air rarefaction up there, so people can't be that high either.

The battle was taking place some hundreds of km above the surface.

However high these rooftops are, if starfighters are still visible as gnats then the light scatter from light turbolasers surely can be as well.

Even if they were, there weren't any long shiny hairlines in the movies aside from beams fired by SPHA-Ts from inside Venator bays.

Besides, anti-fighter weapons have never shown the range necessary to shoot towns from orbit. And thinking that they'd pack megatons of firepower even when the heavy weapons don't show any of that is purely ludicrous.

I mean, is it too much to ask for you to think a moment about the idea of having point defense point-blank range weapons, meant to shoot down targets the size of cars, to have the firepower of hundred times Hiroshima?
Do you see anything like that in the movies or TCWS that even fits with that paradigm??

[Lucky]

The creation of the singularity in Scorpion is a good way to find a lower limit for Voyager's reactor output.

Well if you can focus gravitons tightly enough via gravity-lens, then you can technically create a singularity regardless of power, since it results when gravitons achieve a density where escape-velocity = C. At that point, basically, anything it hits becomes relatively non-existent, except a similar subspace field strong enough to counter it.
So it's not just about power, but also the gravity-lens efficiency.
The difference between this and a quantum-torpedo, is that the torpedo can create a larger singularity for its size, since it can expend all its fuel at once, with no required safety-limits unlike a ship's reactor.

In Scorpion the singularity was used to create a wormhole large enough for Voyager to travel through. I'm sure there is some formula that can tell us how much energy is needed to do that.

[Lucky]

Since when do anti-fighter TL bolts prove to be long and luminous enough to be seen from the surface?

Oh yes, they don't.
Movie 1, novelization 0.

I love how you counter my contradiction with another contradiction instead of refuting mine.


Since when can starfighters be visible as gnats from the surface? Oh yes, they don't. Fortunately, the battle was being viewed from the rooftops. The rooftops of Coruscants are very high. However high these rooftops are, if starfighters are still visible as gnats then the light scatter from light turbolasers surely can be as well.

Well, you say, how do you know? I don't just from that part of the quote, nobody does. Fortunately, we do know quite for certain that HTL's do not track starfighters, far more certainly than whether or not you could see turbolasers from rooftops of unknown height. End deal.

I'm pretty sure we see the so called heavy turbo lasers shooting at fighters in SW:TCW.

[Picard]

The Navigational deflector can be used to make singularities.

Not through power, through Technobabble:

We're emitting a resonant gravitation beam. It's creating another singularity.

I'm sorry, but how do you expect them to create black hole?

Black hole is gravitational distortion. Thus, packing area of space with gravitons would make perfect sense to create a stable or semi-stable black hole.

However, we know they can warp timespace in a similar way to black hole - refer to warp drive. How is that achieved, however...

[Praeothmin]

The Navigational deflector can be used to make singularities.

Not through power, through Technobabble:

We're emitting a resonant gravitation beam. It's creating another singularity.

I'm sorry, but how do you expect them to create black hole?

Black hole is gravitational distortion. Thus, packing area of space with gravitons would make perfect sense to create a stable or semi-stable black hole.

However, we know they can warp timespace in a similar way to black hole - refer to warp drive. How is that achieved, however...

Ok, let's say they have the energy to create micro black holes...
But singularities as big, if not bigger than the ship?
Through pure power?
Nope, I don't believe it...