Torpedoe focus
Yes, the ship can be endangered only by a very close range (only few km tops) blasts by multiple torpedoes.
But it neither proves nor disproves any focusing ability.
From the very fact that it can be endangered in such a way while destroying or damaging a target with phasers won't ever represent the same level of danger, from teh very fact that there's a backslash from the radiation, we
do know that there's no focus at all, if the firing ship can be damaged by a return of energy going backwards. That strictly means an uncontrolled omnidirectionnal blast.
And if it could be controlled, it would have been done, and mentionned, and would have never represented a danger.
Now, maybe they can focus like
a percentage of the total output. Bu this would both affect calculations, and the ratio of radiation would have to be presented and supported.
We know from episodes TNG's "Half a Life" that torpedoes can certainly be made to do weird things (as in restart a star).
Nothing to do with focus at all.
But if the raw energy output of the torpedoes is so great, and if they cannot direct 100% of the energy to the target, then the "leakage" or wasted energy could still be what endangers the ship firing them.
As for it being a "plus", I wouldn't necessarily say that, since you cannot ever have more than half the explosion's energy hit the target. What a torpedo with an uncontrolled blast lets you do is hit a large number of targets with a big proximity blast, and still ensure (if the yeild is big enough) that there will still be a decent amount of damage done regardless.
I didn't say it was a plus in that way, only that it would mean that in certain conditions, estimated yields would have to be doubled. For example, if a technician reports a damage of X joules after a torpedoe impact on shields, and if the torpedoe is not focused, then the real yield of the torpedoe was close to X*2.
That's my only point here. We can default to saying that for the most part, torpedoes act as an ordinary high-energy explosion, though there are some occasions where their energies can be controlled, however there is still enough inefficencies to allow for a fair amount of the energy to be wasted.
What are such "controlled energy" (as controlled blast) cases?
Stargate shields, the non relevance of wattage and power of weapons
Of course is relevant. If you pump in enough energy over a specfic time frame, then the shields will collapse and the ship (or city) will be destroyed/severely damage. That suggests wattage can be a factor.
No. That is stating the obvious, but this is not the kind of wattage that is relevant against a specific type of shield. See below.
If you have a starship and I have one, and both ships have a shield rating for say... 4,200 TJ. We fight to see who's ship will win. Your weapon delivers 4.2 TJ a second (4.2 TW obviously) as bolts (refire ever .5 seconds), while my ship's weapon delivers 4.2 TJ every 10th of a second, and is a continous beam that can dwell on a target with near 100% accuracy. Who's going to win? Mine will, of course.
Why? Because I can deliver that energy faster as a function of time, and I have no break in my delivery of the energy over your weapon.
But that's not my point. My point is that stargate shields don't care if you pump 1 MT in ten seconds, or 1 MT in only one second. In the end, it looses 1 MT of shields, and with no difference at all in the effects on the shield. Shields in Stargate don't appear to recharge that much during a battle.
There are, however, shields in other universes where delivering energy faster is of relevance.
For example, what some pro SW-EU people say about how shields deal with energy, where it becomes a matter of saturation.
The Die is Cast: O' Mama!
I beg to disagree.
He's talking about fire... like there's anything on that rock to burn. Where? Last time I've seen an episode about the founders' world, there was only one little tinny winny island sticking out, barren of any vegetation. As for the rest of the surface, I don't know, but if that world was covered at 99.99999% by founder juice, nothing worth of a firecamp could grow underneath.
So it's the wall of ignorance shield again, is it? It isn't just about setting fires, it's about massive fireballs and shockwaves, and what that means for the yeilds. So that is still conservative.
Come on. What you gave me from Graham's calcs (we'll come on that point later btw) clearly showed that the spreading fire accounted a lot for the total damage.
See the second underlined part:
Again taking the planet to be roughly Earth-sized, the damage would cover 170 million square kilometres. To further reduce the yield of our torpedoes I'm going to assume that 90% of this was done by the beam weapons, with only 17 million square kilometres affected by torpedoes. And to cut the numbers down even more I'm going to assume that the damage inflicted was of the most feeble kind. According to the High Energy Weapons Archive quoted above, for any given weapon yield the most widespread effect is thermal - meaning any nuclear bomb will start fires at far greater distances than it will knock down buildings. So for my low end estimate I am going to say that the 17 million square kilometre area was only affected to the extent of having fires started on it.
The fleet launches only ten torpedoes to cause this damage, so each one accounts for 1.7 million square kilometres. This means that each torpedo has lit fires over an area of about 735 kilometres radius. Using the above equations we can get an idea of the yield required to do this damage :
r_thermal = Y0.41
735 = Y0.41
7352.44 = Y
Y = 9,793,653.38
This is in multiples of 2.5 kilotons, so the overall yield would be :
Yield = 9,793,653.38 x 2,500
= 24,484,133,461.48 tons
= 24,484.13 Megatons
Giving each torpedo a yield of 'only' 24 thousand megatons.
As for not setting fires...
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... 77&pos=214
A courtyard where Odo and a the female changling are standing, not the bush next to them (they are actually in a sizeable garden area). The fact that the changelings occupy some portion of their planet as a liquid does not mean they occupy all of it.
A place where "people" lived. I have plants and trees in and around my house. However,
I put them there. Show me the natural little island and let's see if there's any vegetation that has grown on its own there.
He also goes to assume that a certain type of weapon, torpedoes in that case, which for all intents and purposes would have been set to maximum yield in that case, only represented like 10% of the total damage that occured from all weapons being fired in the opening volley, pretty much against the very statement you took (from an episode) about the ratio between phasers and torps.
His assumptions are nothing more than attempts to lower the figure beyond ridicule up to the point where it doesn't fit facts and logic, but somehow would make the event acceptable.
He's doing nothing of the sort. He's simply showing that in the most conservative of calculations just how powerful the event was. On one extreme end you can say that 30% of the planet's crust was destroyed by vaporization (though that doesn't quite fit the visuals), and you get insanely high petatons for ST weapon yeilds. On the other, you get low gigatons. That's the extreme he's showing. He's not in any way trying to make the torpedo yeilds "more acceptable".
See the first underlined part above.
Wall of ignorance?
The only way to accept this is to assume that by "crust", they meant "surface", which is the (flawed and unsound) premise of his calcs. Of course, saying surface would have been much clearer and technically correct, if that was really what happened.
He is doing no such thing. That is your own misunderstanding of what Graham is doing with the calculations, either intentionally or otherwise.
He's talking about a large part of the damage being wild spread fires. Over an area. You can't make it more surface related than that.
His calcs are not about vaporization of large bits of the crust (in order to reach the mantle later on).
I suppose that if destroying the crust is liting fires on the surface, then destroying the mantle is setting fire on its surface... oh wait, how are they going to even reach the mantle as a whole with weapons that only lit fire on the surface?...
So basically, we're again with calcs that are correct but do not fit the elements from the show. They're unacceptable.
You have to be totally honest and play with hands on the table. What info are you ready to neglect from that episode? How far are you ready to go before it fits with former events?
Now you are just being dishonest here. Or maybe you missed this from the article:
So much for the upper case, what about the lower end? Looking at the actual attack itself, it was reported that thirty percent of the crust was destroyed in the opening volley. This time we are after the lowest weapon yields possible, so we will minimise the damage by assuming that 'destroyed' does not mean 'vaporised' as before, and that in fact the attack did not even shatter the crust into pieces. Rather, let's see what numbers we arrive at if we just look at an attack which simply damaged one third of the surface of the planet.
So please. I made no statements about 20 or so gigatons being the upper case, nor is Graham ignoring information from the episode. I know you know about his website, and you've read the articles there. But here's a link to the whole article for you to look at again:
http://www.ditl.org/hedarticle.php?24
I fully stated previously that his goal was to create the lowest possible yeild from the TDiC bombardment.
As a matter of fact, no, I have not read the articles. There are many of them, plenty, I haven't read them all yet. A very few only, I can't really remember which ones or what they said precisely.
So let's put a term to those accusations you're making since a couple of posts.
I asked you to provide calcs about TDIC, and you did this:
http://www.starfleetjedi.net/forum/view ... =3951#3951
Then there are the torpedo impacts seen in TDiC, which show lower limits in the tens of gigaton range.... well above the phaser yeild for "Masks".
Are there at least detailed calcs to see how people reached that multi GT figure?
Graham worked it out using the Nuclear Weapon's website FAQ formula for calculating yeilds:
Again taking the planet to be roughly Earth-sized, the damage would cover 170 million square kilometres. To further reduce the yield of our torpedoes I'm going to assume that 90% of this was done by the beam weapons, with only 17 million square kilometres affected by torpedoes. And to cut the numbers down even more I'm going to assume that the damage inflicted was of the most feeble kind. According to the High Energy Weapons Archive quoted above, for any given weapon yield the most widespread effect is thermal - meaning any nuclear bomb will start fires at far greater distances than it will knock down buildings. So for my low end estimate I am going to say that the 17 million square kilometre area was only affected to the extent of having fires started on it.
The fleet launches only ten torpedoes to cause this damage, so each one accounts for 1.7 million square kilometres. This means that each torpedo has lit fires over an area of about 735 kilometres radius. Using the above equations we can get an idea of the yield required to do this damage :
r_thermal = Y0.41
735 = Y0.41
7352.44 = Y
Y = 9,793,653.38
This is in multiples of 2.5 kilotons, so the overall yield would be :
Yield = 9,793,653.38 x 2,500
= 24,484,133,461.48 tons
= 24,484.13 Megatons
Giving each torpedo a yield of 'only' 24 thousand megatons.
Nothing else. No link. Just that. So a bit less vitriol and more diplomacy would be nice.
You must show unequivacably that the information is incorrect beyond your complaints of "it cannot be so!". We know little about the Founder's homeworld beyond what we see. It probably is geologically "dead", which fits in well with the changelings probably wanting a nice, stable world which they can sit in their natural liquid state as a community forming into a living lake, or ocean.
Because they couldn't do that on Earth?
It would also be necessary to demonstrate that a geologically dead planet would manage to provide the warm climate found on the Founders' world.
So? I only gave some real-world examples.
Throwing names can be done by anybody. Doesn't mean you've defended your point though.
The examples you gave, I demonstrated that they would still not fit with the computer estimate.
Check
Luna's geology estimations.
Again, no way this type of world could match the computer estimation.
I do not understand why you go to such bizarre lengths to try twist this around. Yes, Mars and the Moon are smaller than the Earth.
Here goes gravity.
But it is also theorized that at some point the Earth's own internal heat will die enough to where it will no longer have a signficant magnetic field. The Founder's world could be something like that. Old and cooling off.
And how does it explain the discrepancy? How thick do you believe the crust will become when Earth, for example, will cool down?
Look at the ratio for Mars, again.
Will the mantle be harder to destroy? Sure.
The mantle will always be harder (as longer) to destroy with the volumes we've got, and take much more time than the 6:1 ratio from the computer estimation suggests. Try two digits to one for a start.
But that does not mean that the crust will be suddenly easier by extension. In fact, a much thicker crust will be far harder to destroy as well, which is what is taken into account.
Again, I never claimed that it would be easier. I'm curious as to where you've found this.
Really, you are becoming a bit dishonest here. It was simply a real-life example. I in no way suggested it was an identical situation. For the Moon the crust thickness represents over 4% of the total diameter, and up to 8% of the radius. It is an example that some planetary bodies can have thicker crusts. It is one possibility.
Ah because I have the bad luck shooting down your hope at using an "example" that would magically explain the situation, and so I'm dishonest, again?
What about stopping with your accusations and actually defending your stand with sound theories and solid data, hm?
This is already answered since Graham was doing his level best in that particular set of calculations to make the torpedoes used in the TDiC bombardment as weak as he possibly could. The higher end calcs vaporize the crust, and a mid-range estimate would certainly be enough to send parts of the crust and mantle to escape velocity.
Sure, the high ends talk about god knows how many teratons, the middle ones still talk about so many gigatons, both being yields completely unseen before, and I may even venture to say after, and the low ends get so low, to supposedly be acceptable in regards of the rest of Trek (because that's the exact reason those low ends exist) that they would completely fail at achieving what the computer gave, even less what the report mentionned.
So basically, it's either yields that are non supported by the rest of Trek, and equivalent to the worse ICS wank you can find for Wars, or it's yields that seem to fit in the usual ballpark, but completely dismiss almost the totality of data from this episode and even more.
How a planetoid will still be dense enough to generate the observed gravity and maintain an atmosphere while being small enough so that the crust would be extremely thick, to the point where there may not even be any core as we know it, but just some kind of mantle?
We're simply entering the real realm of the pink unicorn, with an exotic planet of unknown composition and unknown dimensions. We could claim absolutely anything, up to the existence of extremely volatile materials.
At this point, it'd be just as good to claim that this planet is an aggregate of fairy dust.
Oh, I see. So if 1 hour for crust destruction is measly reduced to something like one or two minutes (a couple of seconds to destroy 30% of the crust, remember), we're left with, what? 12 minutes max to destroy the mantle, if not 6 minutes...
Sure.
Absolutely. Although it has been suggested that the fleet might have needed time to recharge and reload weapons between each volley, so two minutes would be for a continously sustained volley and no need to cease fire, check the results of the bombardment to that point and recharge or reload.
Let's take Mars as an example.
Radius: 3,389.95 e3 m
Crust thickness: 5 e3 m
Volume of the crust: V = 7.1145 e12 m³
Let's say that is the volume of an asteroid.
That would give us a diameter of 459,155.46 m, and a vaporization of 3.720 e8 gigatons (for hard granite, less energy hungry than the nickel-iron).
In clearer terms, 372 PT.
To minimize this, say that after the first volley, the fleet has to reload, return to their respective bases, recharge their power banks, and return to this planet.
So we'll concentrate on the 30% of the crust destroyed with a full coordinated assault with 20 ships giving all they have.
That 111.6 petatons. Divided by 20 ships, that's 5.58 petatons of firepower each.
Remember that I consider that all their ordinance and most of their power cores would be dramatically depleted at this point. Of course, numbers would be even greater if I assumed that the fleet had enough firepower to complete the whole task without returning home for refueling and rearming.
Which of course would not fit dialogue since they were supposed to destroy the crust in at least one hour, thus making it impossible for resupply moves.
But still, 5.58 petatons, maybe, at best, one order of magnitude below since the crust is carpet bombed. Delivered in, what? Between one and two minutes (and the very maximum).
And even this high end would sound reasonnable and acceptable? It's not like I considered the crust of a planet like Earth.
There's also another possibility we've overlooked. In proper parlance, there is no "The Mantle" as such. There is an upper and an inner mantle. The estimate given might not only have been extremely conservative to ensure they could do the job before any Dominion forces could be expected to arrive and stop them, but it may only assume that the crust was being stripped and then one layer (the upper one) of the mantle was being removed.
That would fit with everything.
Because you say so? Sorry, it would not, and mantle is a finely accepted term that combines both layers. They say the mantle, then it's both layers.
You still have yet to show that TDiC should not be considered at all. So what about SG's "Redemption"? Having seen the two-parter in question, I don't recall any specifics given about the size of the SG explosion, only that it would continue to build up until it destroyed the Earth. So how did you get a 1-2 gigaton explosion from anyway? Visuals of the Stargate exploding at the end?
It's from dialogue, between Carter and Hammond.
That said, the final explosion in the sky is reported to happen something like 3 million km away, and still lookes like many times the size of the Moon seen at night.
However, I've been theorizing for many years that hyperspace has the ability to amplify explosions, as hyperspace is filled with energy.
This was nothing more than a theory, which I also applied to the destruction of the O'Neill and the three Beliskners as well, in Small Victories I think.
In that episode, the O'neill is sent into hyperspace, lures three Biliskners enhanced by replicators in the same conundrum, and then detonates, destroying all four ships.
This happened after many seconds in hyperspace, which means an insane distance. Yet, the explosion was so powerful that it managed, when returning to normal space, to illuminate the shields of Thor's Biliskner and even push the ship sideway by several tens of meters!
That hyperspace energy theory had no much basis back then, up until the episode in Stargate Atlantis where Zelenka stated that Wraith hyperdrives were somehow strained because of "hyperspace radiations". Possibly a form of radiation that is not harmful per se to most biological beings (otherwhise Sheppard would have been dead in his F-302, and this would be a major concern to most ships in Stargate since they fly shields down), but that would cause massive chain reactions if triggered by explosions in hyperspace.
Well, the final point is that anyway, the explosion seen at the end if incredibly powerful, many many orders of magnitude more than even a gatebuster detonation (that could be the only thing to destroy a connected stargate, and only when placed properly), but in the episode they talk about an explosion of 1 or 2 gigatons at most, that would destroy all life on Earth.
Which is simply impossible, especially with a single underground blast.
Until we have information that says the character are wrong, then we cannot dismiss what they are saying. To do so is a serious fallacy of arguement. Yes, the FX people and the writers get things wrong. That is true. But if we dismiss everthing, or nearly everything because of that then we wind up with nothing. If we cannot take dialog, then we take visuals. Visuals for TDiC suggest nothing less than tens of gigatons of firepower according to highly conservative calcs.
I'm not saying to dismiss everything. Don't exagerate. Only what cannot be made sound, reasonnable and reliable.
Masks, funky ice fusion
I do. Also bear in mind as your own graphic below shows, the archive is not just a solid block, but a series of small blocks with lots of hollow space between them. I don't even want to try and touch that for volume, but to say that the archive does not take up that much of the total volume.
It's still quite bulky and made of thick blocks. It could reduced to the volume of a pear made of legos. Even on
this schematic, it still eats a significant volume of the comet.
My point is that regarding the way energy was imparted, the way the ice melted is completely nonsensical.
But it still is being melted, regarless of what you want to call it. The size of the comet is actually far more substantial than anyone first guessed at.
In a way that makes no sense. So until you explain the funky physics at play, the calcs are unreliable.
But that's not what is happening. Or at least I'am not sure what you think is happening as the material is shrinking away from both the archive and the phaser beam as seen better in the second of the three Trekcore.com images:
http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... 168&pos=69
The phaser is about 5-6 times wide here, but you can also see the target point better as well. The ice at this point is melting away from the phaser beam which is not impacting the archive structure, but is still clearly hitting the outer layers of the comet nucleous and working down from there to expose the top of the archive in the next image. The image after that shows the beam has doubled in side and the ice retreating away from it on either side, and down.
This phase is not the one that interests me. Look at the fusion phase when the station is seen from the main viewscreen on the E-D.
This is the phase that makes no sense.
Still, also notice, when the E-D starts to melt ice, how lumps of ice already remain on the apex of the main tower.
Efficient beam, huh. :/
Simple, if I understand you correctly. The heat left over in the outer layers of the remaing ice radiated out, sublimating away that ice.
There's an enormous problem with that.
The E-D didn't circle the asteroid to attack the surface by every angle. It sat there, with the station directly in the LOS of its beam. By the position of the station, it was creating a large dead angle in its shadow, where most of the ice would have formed a sort of cone. Above all, contrary to what the images have shown, the last bits of ice to melt would have not been the ones close to the station, but the ones located far away from it, especially within that dead angle cone.
We see by the position of the E-D, and later on from the view on the bridge's screen, that the station was standing in the way of the beam.
Simple geometry reveals that means a large portion of the ice won't be directly hit by the beam.
Beisdes, it shows that the station will stop a lot of the beam. Thus heat up more than anything else, and as so, completely stripping the sequence of any sense, since the station still has ice on it while the rest of the comet is mysteriously gone.
It's even weirder since the beam was supposed to stop once reaching the core. Not only a large part of the beam would seem to be intercepted, but as a consequence, the final lump of ice to melt due to energy radiation, post beam, would never be located on the station, and would actually look like an hemisphere progressively loosing mass and looking like a flattened lens.
Of course, we should have seen a large part of the ice break off the station.
None of which ever happened.
Or enough ice was removed that in conjunction with the local star (there is a signficant light source and there was a 'tail' of ionized material trailing the comet nucleous beforehand) and the residual heat from the phasers, sublimated the outer layers toward the station.
By looking at the way ice "shrinks" (again, acknowledge that phenomenom will be a necessary phase for you for the interest of the discussion), we see that it's very fast, even after the phasers have stopped firing.
If the sun is responsible of that, you should take that into account for your calcs.
But we see from earlier sequences that the comet does not drastically melt like that, that fast.
Oh yes, I also make out the size of the comet now at 3.1 km wide, assuming a 6 meter phaser beam in the first screencap, and that the curvature follows pretty closely to your sphere image all around. That brings the melt energies up to 2 gigatons. Even if we were to go with your unfounded 2 minute melt time, the phaser is still on 10% power putting out about 16.7 MT a second. At full power, that would be 167 MT a second (10 x 16.7 = 167).
1. You used the asteroid calculator for that. Which by definition will provide numbers which surpass what is necessary to melt ice with a sweeping beam. Try to use the volume and directly calc the amount of energy to melt x m³ of ice. This will be closer to the real amount of energy.
2 gigatons becomes an upper limit that is incorrect because it's based on a repartition of energy that does not match the known facts. It's not a single blast that must have enough energy left, inverse square law in action, to even manage to melt ice at a given radius.
It's a continuous widened beam that progressively melts ice over a more or less large zone.
The larger the beam, the less relevant will be the use of a calculation based on a single omnidirectionnal blast.
2. My timing is not unfounded. It doesn't require a super computer to notice how much ice is actually melted. It's a very small fraction of the overall quantity.
So going by your logic, during the first 5.5 seconds of screentime, the E-D manages to melt a small amount of ice, and in the next 5 seconds or so, quickly melts the rest of the comet, which an amount of is literally shielded by the station itself because mere LOS concerns.
The 10-11 seconds timeframe is unfounded. As I suspected, two camera cuts in the sequence misled observers.
3. You didn't remove the station's volume, which despite your claims, is far from being made of that much spaced blocks. On the contrary, it's made of fused monoliths.
Which will, again, alter the calculations and reduce them.
That's just guessing on your part as we don't see the entire firing sequence, nor if the phaser beam continued to widen out (the loss of ice material isn't uniform, it gets faster and larger as the beam widens). The scene itself also plays out fairly continously, and there is no real indication of a 1.8 minute skip in time.
It only gets faster past a certain point since enough energy has built up. However, widening the beam will hardly make it more powerful.
The scaling of the initial beam to the rest of the section shows it to be no less than 750 meters wide (making for a 3.073 km wide comet as a whole). Far more than a "few hundred meters".
Impossible. With a 6 m wide beam, the part of the station we see is simply to small to be considered even 750 m wide. See, I took a beam 6 m wide at the point of impact, and used the last frame to see the maximum of the exposed station. Even picking the two most distant points on the station, it only gives me a distance of 309 m, and that's an oblique line (37.2°) from end to end.
Plus, didn't they say that the signal precisely came from the core of the comet?
I think you're reaching for straws here. There is no skip in time, and it is easily explained away with the phasers widening around the comet as the operation proceeded.
As I said, widening the beam would not make it more powerful. So, first, you'd be asked to prove that it actually widened to that extent, and secondly, prove that it became that powerful.
Again, you are reaching desperately for straws here. There is nothing confusing here. The phasers fire, widening over a short time, and perhaps keep widening. The comet appears to be some 3 km wide, and it is nearly completely melted in less than 11 seconds time.
There's nothing funky or confusing, except to those who don't like the implications of a multi-gigaton firepower phaser for Federation starships, and as a consequence, even higher yeild photon torpedoes.
We'll see when you'll have, at least, watched the correct sequence.
Who watches the Watchers and the 60 GW variance
"As much as" has the same signification than "as little as", safe that "as little as" shows that this variance is a little one.
"As big as", obviously, is a big variance. What that kind of variance would be is up to anyone, but suggesting that it could be vastly more, like 3 orders of magnitude more is already extremely big for me.
Point being, you can't know what the maximum variance can be, and a system that has surges within the megaton range is kinda unreliable in my book.
Except that we have important clues:
* Data chooses to use terawatts, and not simply describe the varience within say, the gigawatt range. If the total output were limited to the gigawatt range as you seem to be suggesting, then he would describe it likely as "must not be off by as much as sixty gigawatts".
* Other evidence, such as photon torpedo yeilds and such indicate at least kiloton to megaton range firepower for weapons.
Talking about variances by using terawatts demonstrates that variances only evolve within the kiloton range at best.
No one is stating that the variance is reaching the megaton range. It is however a 60 gigawatt range in an unknown larger amount. The point being that phasers output falls at least within that varience amount, and no less at what is apparently a full power discharge. It is a very narrow margin in a much greater overall amount.
Your vastly more powerful is literally meaningless regarding the power of shields in Stargate. A vulgar change in kilotons won't make a big difference, that's the point.
Pegasus and Riker's wet dreams
They could. But Riker feels that the asteroid needs to be completely destroyed to ensure that the Pegasus and it's illegal cloak be destroyed. It's the context of the thing that you keep trying to hand-wave away here.
No. You're desperatedly trying to put those words into my mouth.
I'm merely telling you that your interpretation of "destruction of asteroid" is largely inflated, and above all would be achieved through the bombardment of less efficiency, that is, hit the surface instead of firing most missiles on courses to enter the asteroid by most holes.
Point being, when a house is destroyed, it's not necessarily completely leveled, even less completely turned to 1 cm wide debris, even less completely vaporized.
Maybe later the crew could figure a more efficent way to destroy the Pegasus without resorting to the extremes. But that's not what Riker at that time is suggesting. Even if they send the torpedoes all down the volcanic fissures to create an effect as though they planted inside the asteroid, we still can get gigaton firepower for each torpedo by just playing around with the scalings, and the assumptions. Each torpedo is vaporizing a portion of the asteroid; and the asteroid is at least 12 km wide. Quite simple.
How? A single blast to reach fragmentation energy for 10 wide debris only reaches 1.7 gigatons.
Wouldn't the asteroid be destroyed if turned to such a mass of debris?
That's, again, talking about a single blast, which is not the most effective mean, and thus requires large excess of energy in the core.
Did you even consider the much lower cratering values? Because firing torps hitting the surface of the asteroid will cause exactly that, craters. And sorry, but I think that if your ship sits where there's soon going to be a crater, it's ought to be considered fully destroyed with everything it has inside.
It makes torps confortably sit in the multi megaton range, two or three digits. With 5 of them at full yield, you vastly surpass the power of a phaser.
Remember, a fraction of a second for nukes and any similar explosive, compared to a full second for a phaser's beam.
It will? The asteroid debris will be likely blown outward by the explosions.
Not all of them. There will be bounces, crashes, and parts directly touched by the torpedoes' radiations.
Riker doesn't know at that time that the asteroid will collapse as you describe. That is information Data later mentions when Worf suggests using the phasers to tunnel out of the asteroid to free the E-D.
I didn't use that information for my estimation.
Let's use Wong's calculator, again. For a 12 km wide asteroid, the equivalent craterization would be of a yield of 8.2 gigatons, for a single blast able to create a crater of the size of the asteroid.
Not to say that all those calcs are nice and all, but using 12 km as the diameter is vastly unfair. This is the lenght, not the width. And the asteroid is largely porous.
Good way to pump up the yields!
Pegasus + TDIC = T3h tr00f?
As you have been corrected (hopefully) on your mistaken view of Graham's calculations, maybe we can move on from here. There is nothing "unfathomable" about "The Pegasus" calculations. Low gigaton range firepower for torpedoes is perfectly acceptable, unless you happen to not like them because it puts ST firepower on the same footing as SG's.
-Mike
I stand my position. TDIC is a shame you can't rationalize. Pegasus is often over inflated and used by looking at the wrong numbers, and Masks is, again, inflated and involves a strange phenomenom.
