Okay, so my response to both of you is going to be in one post.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:
My position is that torpedoes in "knife fight range" situations are set to ~10 gigatons. That fits in well with the 2 gigaton/second phaser firepower we see in episodes like Masks. Under such assumptions, shield flares would only occur if hundreds of megatons were deposited upon the shields in short order. In short, the benchmark for "what causes a shield flare" has been moved up.
2 GT/s is a level of firepower that seems beyond ridiculous, even for that setting.
If that's the episode wherein the E-D was melting ice around some base, I don't know what we can say of visuals. The script doesn't give such positive evidence, and those visuals actually show something that is miles away from what you'd get by shooting gigatons into ice.
Then either it was a VFX error, or phasers operate via some exotic mechanism.
If you want to argue that the ten second "disappearing" of 4 cubic kilometers of ice was via some exotic mechanism (as opposed to thermal vaporization), you will drive the requisite energy up by many orders of magnitude. We have particle accelerators well into the TeV, and have never observed "magic disappearing." Ergo, we may conclude that each nadion is in excess of a TeV. If each nadion can "disappear" a single atom or molecule, we have on the order of a petajoule being expended to disappear every gram of organic-equivalent matter, or an exajoule per kilogram, or a zettajoule per ton. The asteroid in Masks would have required 4e27 J to disappear. As this was delivered in 10 seconds by phasers at 10% power, phasers at 100% power would require a power of 4e27 watts. In other words, at maximum power, the Galaxy class's phasers accept 400% of the warp core output calculated from The Masterpiece Society feat, which in turn was accomplished by pushing the warp core to 400% of its maximum rated output. The reader may draw their own conclusions regarding the viability of such a hypothesis.
"But it's a chain reaction" you say. If that were the case, than any sufficiently dense chunk of matter should be completely disappeared by any phaser blast capable of disappearing matter of that type. If that were the case, then the asteroid in Pegasus (for example) could have been dealt with in entirety by Worf's sidearm, and the Doomsday Machine (which was made of uber-dense neutronium) would have been even more vulnerable. Again, the reader may draw their own conclusions regarding the viability of such a hypothesis.
As for me, hypothesis non fingo. Analogy with thermal effects is just about the only thing we have to go on, and
the only thing with quasi-reasonable implications.
That's a common point of contention but anyone who looks at Star Trek will see an universe where small bits of plot-stuff can do vast things outside of the purely physical abilities of normal, logical stuff. McGuffins and all that. Then of course there could be high levels of energy involved in each little phaser act, but how do we know for sure that this literally far fetched and very fictional mechanism that seems to dump matter into a plotbin largely gets most of its energy from the weapon, when you have cases of chain reactions lying around? Heck, even a normal day to day chain reaction such as combustion proves that you don't have to claim a match held all a stack of wood's worth of total energy to turn most of it to ashes. We simply cannot know for sure what goes on when those made up weapons could simply exploit a kind of chain reaction that goes on its own, cascading through several phases, only needing a science-bending nudge at the beginning.
See the above for my opinion on the viability of "chain reaction" hypotheses.
What is the evidence that waving matter away, even the total mass of a man, wouldn't actually take hundreds of gigajoules of "untappable" energy? Surely, one could easily expect that the process to sort of erase matter away in that fashion could easily requires mountains of energy in comparison to the levels needed to even flash boil someone off.
Which is why I assume - contrary to all visual "evidence" - that phasers "only" require thermal-equivalent energy input, and "only" deliver thermal-equivalent energy output.
TNG era phasers are capable of "disappearing" about 400,000,000 tons/second at 10% power. That's about 4,000,000,000 tons per second at 100% power, assuming that "disappearing" scales linearly.
Quite an interesting figure there. Where does it come from?
"Masks."
As a reminder, "Masks" involved the complete vaporization of a ~2 km wide comet in ~10 seconds with the phasers at 10% power. A 2 km comet would be ~4,000,000,000 cubic meters, which (at the density of ice) would be ~4,000,000,000 tons. So we know for a fact that a Galaxy class starship's phasers are capable of vaporizing ~400,000,000 tons of material every second at 10% power.
Over here they guestimate that Los Angeles weighs 12,000,000,000 tons. So the phasers of the Enterprise-D could indeed "disappear" Los Angeles in three seconds or so.
How much area would that cover if it were to be applied to, say, the topsoil of a planet plus some trees?
Are you trying to ask me how much time it would take for a starship to disappear the entire surface of a planet to a depth of several centimeters? Assuming density of ~1g/cubic centimeter (water-esque), assuming that everything needs to be disappeared to a depth of 10 cm, and assuming that all 13,866,000 square kilometers of arable land on earth need to be disappeared, about six minutes. If you want a depth closer to 1 m, think an hour. YMMV based on considerations of orbital mechanics, planetary defenses, amount of arable land, reliance on terrestrial agriculture vs sea food, etc.
And of course there's no reason to think that TOS phasers were as advanced or effective as TNG phasers.
TOS phaser power would be in the vicinity of 7 petawatts...
Surely, TOS was quite advanced in comparison to the late ENT era, but by how much? Back in ENT, their fancy phase banks had freshly reached the low terawatt level and the NX-01 was not exactly that outclassed by the local sector's competition. Yet they were exploiting a king of power tech was that roughly the same as what the UFP has been using for centuries; antimatter annihilation.
We've seen the Connie own ENT-ships easily but there weren't that many of them at a single time and a simple advantage of about ten times in most important domains such as power generation, shields and phasers would easily lead to such a superiority. Yet that would certainly
not push TOS-level ship power plant tech to petawatt levels.
If it helps for you, think in terms of tons of matter "disappeared" per second as opposed to thermal equivalent.
When I say that the phase cannons on the NX-01 were 5 TW, I'm saying that they can "disappear" ~2000 tons of matter per second. (which probably fits in well with your interpretation of the "Mt. McKinley" quote, I have spent some time going through the archives of this forum and know your position on the subject)
When I say that TOS phasers were 7 PW, I'm saying that they can "disappear" ~3,000,000 tons of matter per second.
When I say that TNG phasers are 10 EW, I'm saying that they can "disappear" ~4,000,000,000 tons of matter per second.
Disappearing Los Angeles during the TOS era would have taken close to an hour. Multiply that by every particularly populous city on the planet, and we're talking about an operation that would take several days.
Unless it triggers a chain reaction.
In chemistry, the rate at which a reaction occurs is proportional to the concentration of reactants in a solution. In other words, the denser the reactants are, the faster the reaction goes. From what I understand, that goes double for nuclear reactions: as soon as critical mass is reached, everything goes boom. If we extend this understanding of how chain reactions work to phasers, then we would have to conclude that anything made out of a sufficiently dense material would react almost in entirety upon coming into contact with a phaser beam. This is manifestly not the case. If anything, phaser efficacy
decreases with the density of material. This is far more consistent with a fixed "rate of disappearance" of target mass at each power setting, which in turn would imply a close correlation between the physical effect a phaser has and the power at which it is set. It leaves open the possibility that the power requirements are less than would be required to produce an equivalent thermal effect (though this is unlikely given the dissimilarity of the process to those achieved in particle accelerator), but it certainly closes the door on any "chain reaction" theories.
Unless you apply that energy in a more raw fashion and cause massive fires. Or a bit of both.
Causing fires over a significant portion of earth's surface with "raw power" would require many gigatons.
A ship that could flash-level a hundred of the biggest cities on a planet or more with torpedoes, plus ignite fires on a large surface due to wide angle shooting mode, and perhaps even disrupt matter in a way that would literally poison or interrupt any kind of potential exploitation or life cycle of most of the targeted world's exposed surface, would probably leave any planet in a poor, sorry state, easily into ruined territorry.
The goal of General Order 24 is to drive intelligent life on the planet to extinction. To exterminate, to annihilate, to wipe out.
And then there's all the small towns scattered across the planet that you have to destroy as well. And there's the agricultural base that needs to be destroyed in order to really ensure that this civilization ends.
What worked against the extremist interpretations of BDZ also works here. I.E., a large rain of kiloton level weapons would indeed ruin much of our Earth.
Melting the earth's crust to a depth of 1 cm over the course of a day (hardly an extremist interpretation of BDZ) would require the input of 50 megatons per second of energy. Significantly less than what can be calculated for Trek, but still something that would require no less than 51 "kiloton level" weapons fired every second - far in excess of any rate of fire we see an ISD pull off.
And any Trek ship would possess more than that kind of firepower. You want to end civilization? You don't even need to aim for all the arable land. Pollution,
Do phasers and photon torpedoes produce significant amounts of pollution? Phasers appear to simply make stuff disappear, and an antimatter device wouldn't produce much besides gamma rays. At any rate, the amount of pollution required to drive humanity extinct would be fairly substantial. Even assuming that they can produce pollution comparable in toxicity to sarin gas, which is lethal at a concentration of 35 mg/cubic meter, and even assuming they can constrain the clouds of death to one kilometer above the ground, to cover 1% of the planet with fatal concentrations would require 1.75e11 kg of the stuff - 17.5 million tons, larger than the Enterprise itself. With more benign toxins (the kinds that could be produced via uncontrolled reactions on the planet's surface), the amount of toxin released would have to be far greater. To produce similar effects with, say, hydrogen cyanide (which I doubt would be produced in significant quantities by indiscriminate burning of whatever happens to be exposed) would require some two orders of magnitude more toxin. And then, of course, it's unlikely that the areas covered by clouds of toxin and the areas of high population density would coincide particularly well (not to mention the fact that if these toxins are burning they will end up moving up into the atmosphere 1-3 kilometers, where they won't do much to poison anybody), no matter how careful you were, which means that you'll have to burn even more stuff and produce even more toxin.
ash,
The explosion of Mount Toba c. 75,000 BC sent some two trillion tons of ash into the atmosphere. Humanity in Africa and India went through a bottleneck, but did not go extinct. This was at a time when the human population was on the order of a million. To drive a larger population to extinction, we would presumably require a proportionately greater amount of ash - and thus a proportionately greater amount of energy.
radiation,
Phaser disruption does produce radiation, but for shipboard weapons, likely only to a radius of several tens of kilometers (if that), and only for a period of seconds at most. This is in stark contrast to the dust cloud of death produced by an atomic bomb, which can persist for weeks or months. There would also be no radioactive fallout from an antimatter explosive.
lack of light
See "ash." The amount of work it would take to get sufficient smoke, ash, etc. into the atmosphere to block enough light to drive an intelligent species to extinction would be about the same as the amount of work it would take to cause a mass extinction simpliciter.
Oh, and quoting wikipedia's nuclear winter article:
In a paper by the United States Department of Homeland Security finalized in 2010, fire experts stated that due to the nature of modern city design and construction, with the U.S. serving as an example, a firestorm is unlikely after a nuclear detonation in a modern city.[167] This is not to say that fires won't occur over a large area after a detonation, but that the fires would not coalesce and form the all important stratosphere punching firestorm plume that the nuclear winter papers require as a prerequisite assumption in their climate computer models. The nuclear bombing of Nagasaki for example, did not produce a firestorm.[168] This was similarly noted as early as 1986-88, when the assumed quantity of fuel "mass loading"(the amount of fuel per square meter) in cities underpinning the winter models was found to be too high and intentionally creates heat fluxes that lofts smoke into the lower stratosphere, yet assessments "more characteristic of conditions" to be found in real-world modern cities, had found that the fuel loading, and hence the heat flux the results from burning, would rarely loft smoke much higher than 4 km.[169]
Emphasis added. Note the density of references.
So it's plausible to assume that the clouds of smoke and ash produced by widespread burning of the planet's surface wouldn't reach the stratosphere and cause nuclear winter unless the amount of energy input was absolutely obscene.
will do most of the work.
Which will be on the order of a zettajoule.
Hitting the main water source in glaciers will do to.
To raise the sea level of an earth-like planet by one milimeter would require the addition of 360 cubic kilometers of water to the oceans. That's about 360 billion tons, or 360 trillion kilograms. To raise sea level by a meter would require you to melt 360 quadrillion kilograms of ice. Given that the specific heat of fusion of ice is ~333,550 J/kg, that means that for every meter you want to raise the oceans by, you need to expend 120 zettajoules, or 29 teratons. If phasers are "magic disappearit guns," that's going to have to be coming exclusively from the torpedoes.
Cutting huge ice chunks off and tractoring them into the tropics is 1) going to give cities by the coasts plenty of time to evacuate (defeating the purpose of messing around with raising the sea level in the first place), and 2) sloughing off huge chunks (360 thousand cubic kilometers per meter of sea level!) of coastline and/or ice is going to take gigatons anyways.
And, again, let's nor forget wildfires. Good exploitable planets with rich life come with plant life too. They quite go hand in hand. Yet massive wildfires, once started, are one of the hardest things to put down. The best part of it is that on our planet, they start with very little inputs.
Only in sufficiently dry conditions. If you lit all the dry forest regions on earth simultaneously, the environmental impact would be terrible, but the impact on global industry and the human race in its entirety would be far less significant. Certainly not an extinction-level event.
Now imagine what could be done if you had at your disposal the genocidal weapons of a ship sitting in orbit. You wouldn't actually waste time hitting deserts. You'd ruin the forests and the rivers. You might shoot at some underweater fault lines too and create as many tsunamis as you could too, and perhaps try to release into the seas hydrocarbons or other natural yet poisonous elements.
Just consider the ecological disasters that happened during the last century and the ever so minimal levels of input needed to trigger them.
All I can see is that the earth is orders of magnitude worse-off and there are more of us humans than ever.
A parameter that cannot be accounted for. Obviously no ship would be able to destroy a world alone if it would first have to defeat bases and local navies of similar power level.
Besides, I don't think that missing one single base is going to nullify the concept of ruining an entire world.
Think of Stargate SG-1's version of the Cheyenne Mountain Complex. It's only marginally higher-tech than our version, but it's a full kilometer under the mountain, and as long as it survives, the apocalypse can be canceled.
A base of a similar tech level only a few kilometers deeper still might not be completely safe from phaser assault, but it would certainly be difficult to detect, and (as before) would be capable of responding in kind to an orbital assault.
As a matter of fact, plausible mid-future range technology (ie, the kind that could be expected of a pre-warp, pre-force-field civilization) can produce some pretty impressive stuff. A civilization capable of waging an interplanetary war with weapons of mass destruction would be expected to have substantial ability to launch surface-to-orbit warheads (be it by rocket, Project Orion, Verne gun, mass-driver, laser launch, or combination thereof) in a fairly short period of time, significant military assets deep underground, and ludicrously powerful surface-to-orbit energy weapons. Interestingly, the last is without a doubt present on Eminar seven.
The amount of effort it would take to dislodge these hardened military targets would arguably be sufficient to get a significant portion of the way to "mass extinction level" even without a single counter-value strike.
And where are we with the hyperbole and bluffing anyway?
Given that the number of times these throwaway lines crop up, and how consistent they are, probably nowhere. Even with allowances for hyperbole and bluffing, it is obvious that the makers of the show wanted us to believe that Constitution class starships are capable of driving intelligent life on a pre-warp industrialized planet to extinction in short order.
We have at least five of these things (one in "The Menagarie/The Cage," one in "A Taste of Armageddon," one in "Bread and Circuses," and at least two in "Whom Gods Destroy"). Even if in each case there was a 50% chance of hyperbole, bluffing, etc., there would only be a 3% chance that
all of them were. Each individual case needs to have an 87% chance to be hyperbole/bluff/misinterpretation on average in order for there to be only a 50% chance that Connies are the ultimate exterminators.
It's not like there's been any solid, technical description of what really goes on with G.O. 24.
But there have been plenty of descriptions of effects: "blasting half a continent," "the entire inhabited surface of your planet will be destroyed," "your ship can lay waste to the entire surface of the world," "destroy the entire Antos race," "powerful enough to wipe out a planet," etc.
What is being described is clearly the extinction of sapient life on a planet.
The only way to reduce the amount of time to carry out General Order 24 to a tactically potent level is to assume that the torpedoes are doing most of the heavy lifting - and since there are only about a hundred of them, each of them must have a yield well into the gigatons.
Why? We do know that a widespread dispersal of thermal damage or phaser disruption would be far more effective than delivering excessive firepower on single points.
Causing exposed hair and clothing (which are generally slightly oily and rather drier than most natural materials) to burst into flame requires an intensity of 125 J/square centimeter. That's 1.25 MJ per square meter, or 1.25 TJ per square kilometer. Since forest fires usually require special conditions of heat and dryness (and if you came in the wrong time of year, you could hardly be able to count on forest fires to do the heavy lifting for you), we'll assume that that has to be applied to half of the arable land on the planet. 8.5e18 J would be required to set all of the arable land on earth on fire. To do it in one day would require a time-averaged brute-force phaser firepower of 100 TW. Given that phaser banks in TOS appear to work based off of capacitors, it is likely that the phasers would require extensive cooldown periods to recharge after expending their energy. Instantaneous firepower would be something on the order of 1 PW. Given the less than fully militarized nature of Starfleet vessels, it is unlikely that the powerplant of a Constitution would run at less than 10 PW. These are all fairly conservative figures compared to high-end showings, but based on what you've been saying, I doubt that you're comfortable with them.
And of course, while setting all the arable land on earth on fire would probably result in massive famine unlike any seen in history, only the poorest nations would be completely wiped out. While the governments of richer countries would surely collapse, the most resourceful inhabitants (read:survivalist kooks) would survive on stocks of processed and/or canned food. Those with rowboats who live near large bodies of water would be able to live off the bounty of the sea - at least if there was any bounty left in their seas after however many centuries of "progress." The ashes of their civilization would fertilize the next year's crops, and forever that planet would curse the name of the "Fit'rashen" even as they remembered the heights from which they had fallen. Giving a civilization a grudge and a reminder of what science can give them in one fell swoop is hardly conducive to the Federation's continued existence.
Extinction takes a lot of effort for humans. We are resourceful, we make our own niche (at the cost of everything else on the planet), and we breed fairly rapidly.
My pick is quite simple: they were worried for the asylum's people because the one single shield generator pushed that far, to levels never seen anywhere else, couldn't handle the war-level firepower. Plus a lot of logic and safety measures flew right through the window the moment it was clear that the people down there were led by a really mad guy. In fact, either he knew what were the risks of casting the shield yet did it, or he didn't know. On one side it's pure madness, on the other it's pure ignorance, which tells us that no counter argument to "my" pick could be based on an assessment of the logic of the mad guy's plan or sanity, if he had any left.
It also has absolutely no evidential basis in any episode of Trek.
Emphasis added.
1) Even on ships, shields are not produced by a single projector, but by a grid of deflectors covering the hull. That's what the grid on the hull of every post-TMP ship is supposed to be: the shield generators. Even if their designation as such by the designers of the ships isn't enough for you, we often have different portions of the shield (aft, fore, port, starboard, etc.) taking damage separately, which - while admittedly not conclusive - certainly indicates that different generators are devoted to protecting different sections of the ship. On your theory, a mere ship requires multiple distinct elements covering each section of its hull, but an entire planet can be covered by a single shield generator.
2) In episodes like "Year of Hell" "Dagger of the Mind," the absence of planetary shields elicits surprise.
3) The idea that the shield generator, and not the ship's weapons, would be the cause of the asylum's destruction implicitly contradicts McCoy's sentiment of "How can we be powerful enough to wipe out a planet and still be so helpless?"
4) At the end of the day, the italicized "perhaps" is the cornerstone of this entire theory. Perhaps this shield generator is different from all the others in that it is centralized and dangerously explosive - but there is no real reason to think that this is the case. From my perspective, the whole "explosive shield generator on Elba II" concept is a contrived theory designed specifically to avoid the implication that, in the Trekverse, capital ships can cause mass extinctions as quickly as they can empty their torpedo bays.
1. So Elba II would have a network of shield generators covering an entire planet, for one single asylum? That is certainly very, very hard to believe. Perhaps we'd need to dig the script again to get a proper idea of how unpopulated the planet is, but as far as I can remember, it didn't make me think there were any other settlement aside from the domed asylum, even during normal times.
Given how strong the Asylum dome is supposed to be in the first place, that line of argumentation would cut against
any form of shielding for the asylum.
If you find it hard to suspend disbelief for an advanced shield system on a mere nuthouse, the asylum dome appears to be somewhat overdesigned for a loony bin, and it may have originally been a military base on a border that, by the time of the episode, was no longer contested.
2. What kind of surprise? Or more precisely, what is it that's to understand by "planetary shield"? Are the surprised people always expecting a full planetary coverage? Because if they were just expecting *some* kind of protection, be it an array of weapons, counter measures (jamming or anti-missile ordnance) or even a local theater shield, we'd be a far cry from the planetary sphere case.
First and foremost, the only difference between a theater shield and a planetary shield is how many theater shields you have.
Second, have we ever seen a single generator on a starship scale produce 360 degree coverage, or have we always seen shields to port, starboard, fore, aft, top, and bottom? If the latter, why would we expect
any shield to be capable of making a full "bubble"?
Finally, in the TOS episode, we see Kirk expect a theater shield to protect the following:
12-60 of the expected shield generators would be required to cover an entire planet, depending on the size of the Memory Alpha planetoid.
3. Not at all. The case of an exploding shield generator pushed to untolerable levels would clearly make them powerless too. That wouldn't leave them without the power to ruin a planet, yet they'd have no way to preserve the life of the people they'd be trying to save. In fact, the overall idea of that line would clearly be that genocidal firepower could not solve their problem here. Or in other words, they could be as powerful as they'd like, brute force wouldn't be the solution.
I did say implicitly. But you have a point. I cede point 3.
4. It's in fact quite divorced from the topic of mass extinction, which can be achieved with much less than what I think you're arguing for.
See the above Re: poisoning, ash, etc.
Then again, I'm also sure that all we have about those claims of massive destructions are nothing more than characters either making threats, musing through one line or trying to impress someone. We've seen more solid evidence.
It is a cumulative case. As mentioned above, even if each individual line has an evidential value of only 50%, their cumulative evidential value is 97%.
But to get back to the point, the argument solely aims at showing that Elba II doesn't provide a reliable case of planetary shielding. In fact, thinking of it, a single deposit of gigaton-level firepower in one spot wouldn't exactly cause that mass extinction level at all. It would certainly destroy a lot of stuff, but there's a limit to that. Why do I say that? Because it would require the Enterprise to have something more like near teraton level, or even post-teraton level weapons aboard since apparently, poking a hole through the shield would kill all life.
No, blasting through the shield would kill all life. While McCoy was worried about the margin of safety, the answer to his question was "yes," indicating that poking a hole through the shield wouldn't necessarily have had catastrophic consequences.
I see no reason to think that the total torpedo compliment of the Enterprise would add up to less than 600 gigatons, so blasting through the shield could easily involve the deposition of a teraton or more on the shield.
It's even worse if you consider that killing all life, in the case of Elba II, meant poking the shield on the other side of the domed asylum's location, which itself would require a direct application of energy from a starship to be cracked, not an indirect one,
That is never even implied. All they say is that an away team couldn't crack it and that the starship could.
The implication is just totally silly.
It's also canon, so we have to deal with it.
You seem to be going out of your way to manufacture disbelief. When watching any form of fictional entertainment, that is the exact opposite of what should be done.
Emphasis added.
You cannot deny that a one ton bomb today is significantly more powerful than a one ton bomb from the forties. In addition to better guidance, etc. we have indeed improved the yield.
A primitive weapon of any given size is going to have a dramatically inferior yield to an advanced weapon of the same size.
I'm afraid the emphasis wasn't needed here. It's meant as "not always". One might prefer a stick of dynamite thrown by hand; another might prefer a rifle that can shoot an explosive armour piercing bullet that can find its way home, dodging multiple obstacles over a range of four hundred yards for example (I infused a bit of high tech in the mix for good measure). One has more boom, but the other is quite more efficient up to a large variety of targets and will do the job, more often btw.
Or like having a gigaton nuke that can barely be mounted on a low tech rocket that uses combustion of hydrocarbons for propulsion, and a megaton super advanced torpedo with guidance systems and shields, and a interstellar range. Yield aside, the superiority of the second weapon is undisputable in most cases.
Who said anything about getting a torpedo yield from Booby Trap? At most, I was trying to invite a comparison to the Federation's
specialized surface attack weapons, not their anti-capital ship weapons. We're talking about the sorts of things they could bring to bear in a planetary bombardment if they had a loadout specialized for such a bombardment - as appears to be the case for the Federation's peers in The Die is Cast.
Data says that the devastation was done with primitive weapons. Therefore, the advanced weapons of the Federation could do the same thing more quickly and effectively. Possibly even in only an hour with only twenty ships.
I have better arguments in my arsenal if I want to make an argument for multi-gigaton torpedoes.
Is the interstellar range thing actually applicable to Trek torpedoes, or are you just spicing things up to make the comparison clearer?
Odd, yes, but arguably necessary to explain the Enterprise's moving neutron stars around.
Yes, I hear you, but since it's massively stupid (not you, the concept it implies), even from a purely design perspective only, I'd happily ditch the neutron shard outlier for the sake of consistency and logic any time.
Canon: 4. the body of rules, principles, or standards accepted as axiomatic and universally binding in a field of study or art
Is all canon created equal, or are we allowed to prune it in order to make it better comport with our aesthetic sensibilities?
Has the Defiant ever displayed the ability to set its pulse phasers to widebeam? I'm not aware of it ever having done so, but if I'm wrong, feel free to correct me.
I haven't watched enough of ST to tell. It's a matter of aperture size at the end of the hose I guess. That you fire a beam or drops shouldn't make much of a diffrence in your garden hose's versatility. :)
What we're talking about is a dedicated warship, rather unlike what we see with the Galaxy. If the Galaxy class phaser array is a garden hose, the Defiant's pulse phasers are water jet cutters, and the latter most definitely do not have a wide-beam setting.
But I'll humor you for a moment. The Defiant is much smaller than the Enterprise D, but it is also much more combat oriented, so we'll assume that it is capable of putting out the same phaser firepower as a Galaxy class starship's phaser array - roundabout ten exawatts or the equivalent thereof. We will assume the Great Link is about the size of the Baltic Sea, and that it needs to heat the entire thing from 17 degrees Celsius to about 65 degrees Celsius - making the Founders considerably more tolerant of high temperatures than their "solid" counterparts, but not capable of handling literally boiling temperatures. Conveniently, it also cuts the energy from the 1.0e22 J required to heat the Baltic Sea from 4 degrees C to boiling in half.
So 5e21 J / 1e19 W = 500 s.
I don't know about you, but I seriously doubt that the Defiant could last for a full eight minutes and twenty seconds against seven battlebugs without even trying to return fire for a second. And, of course, there's every reason to think that the pulse phasers on the Defiant are not more powerful than a Galaxy class starship's phaser array, but less.
We still don't know much about the Great Link overall volume, do we?
The script for "Broken Link" calls it a "sea of changelings," and what is actually represented onscreen appears to be a sea. I see no reason to assume that we are dealing with anything smaller than, say, Lake Superior.
Also, when a Founder loses a bit of its mass, what happens?
That piece of mass reverts to a gelatinous form. Other than that, not much.
And more, since they're a Great Link, what happens if you hurt them at once when they're all linked?
Is there any kind of trauma that would psychically kill the "patient" without even having to blast the equivalent of his brains out?
Given the robusticity of a fluid-phase life form as depicted in DS9, I doubt it. It isn't like there are differentiated organs in distinct areas, each of which is required to keep the whole functioning. Everything does everything.
Also, what kind of hand phaser firepower does it take to kill a walking Founder for example?
Quite a bit more than it takes to kill a human, and even then there's the question of how much taking on the form of something could make them vulnerable to the things that something is vulnerable to.
Other points:
Now, is this an average energy intensity, or is it a minimum? Let us suppose it were an average. Then there would be regions where the intensity would be so great as to flash-boil a region of the Great Link (these regions would be directly below the Quantum torpedoes) surrounded by regions that had "just enough" to sterilize them, surrounded by regions that were only sterilized to a handful of centimeters. Sure, this situation would leave us with huge shockwaves propagating through the Great Link, but given that solid homogeneous tissues are resistant to blast effects, it is likely that significant numbers of Founders would survive. This hardly counts as "wiping out every Founder on the planet."
They're not in solid form but a fluid one as far as I've seen. In fact, Odo in a weak state needs a box to rest into. That's most likely their easiest and most comfortable form.
In actuality, something like the liver is likely also going to be liquid, or near enough, for all intents and purposes. If anything, liquid founder is likely to be even
more homogenous, and thus even more resistant to damage.
It would be smarter to actually have the torpedoes plunge into the GL's volume. The destruction would be far more intense.
For a limited radius, perhaps, but given that we have only a handful of torpedoes (a hundred at the most), a wide area of effect is required. For something inside of the Great Link, at a first approximation, there are going to be two cones of wasted energy, one going up into the atmosphere, and one going down into the ground, with only a thin ring of effectively applied energy. By raising the device above the surface, you manage to get an entire cone to hit it, which is a fairly substantial improvement. It's the same line of logic behind using airbursts with ordinary nuclear weapons. I also suspect that setting the bomb off under the surface also causes more of the energy to be in the form of probably useless shock, which should be avoided if at all possible.
I have attempted to find equations modeling the amount of energy deposited by a shockwave from an explosion running through a water-like medium, but so far I haven't found anything I'm skilled enough to use.
Now, that's certainly not going to make the calculation either, and it's also going to involve a considerable consideration regarding the phenomenon known as coupling.
I suppose that this entire exercise hinges on exactly how the detonation of a quantum torpedo couples to the Great Link.
You assume that something like the equivalent of boiling water is necessary, but what happens with the massive and sudden exposure to radiations?
We aren't sure that the mechanism of a quantum torpedo involves radiation in the sense you seem to be thinking. The most likely products would be gamma rays, which would be quickly absorbed by the atmosphere, resulting in the production of the fireball and shockwave so characteristic of high-yield weapons.
More to the point, gamma rays decrease in intensity by a factor of ten with every .6-1.0 m of water that they have to go through. Beta particles (released by nukes and antimatter explosives, the latter of which may or may not be involved in the detonation of a quantum torpedo) are far less penetrative. Water also shields well against neutrons, which are only produced by fission and certain fusion reactions - unlikely to be a part of a quantum torpedo detonation. Alpha particles are also only produced in nuclear reactions, but are so wimpy and incapable of penetration that they can barely get through human skin. I feel fairly confident saying that even if torpedoes are well into the teratons, the radiation component will only effect the uppermost ten meters of the great link - if even that much.
As a general rule with true nuclear weapons, thermal effects out-range blast effects, and blast effects out-range radiation.
It would also look precisely like that if it were a hundred kilometers deep.
But also if it were only less than a meter deep, that's the point. Looking at the aspect of it to affirm a certain impressive depth is not right.
Since it's consistent with 10 cm and 100 km, why not go somewhere in the middle, like 100 m? Since that also happens to be a typical depth for a sea or a lake on earth, I see no reason to artificially deflate the size of the Great Link by quibbling about what the visuals are "consistent with." The first question should always be "What are the makers trying to show us?" and in this case, the answer appears to be "a mass of changelings that is significant on a geographical scale."
So it's clearly exotic, which is antithetic to raw energy and simple matters of brute force.
"exotic"=/="less energy intensive."
If the explosions occurred underground, and the phasers were triggering fault-lines, then we wouldn't expect to see any ejecta, we wouldn't expect to see any fireballs, and we wouldn't expect to see any magma showing through the crust. In fact, we would need an explanation for seeing anything from orbit in the first place.
But if nothing would be seen from space, then the level of damage wouldn't be enough at all.
A magnitude 12+ earthquake wouldn't be enough at all?
And since we did see stuff, but since said stuff is nonsensical from a modern physics POV, we're back at fancy weapons, Genesis-like (and even the Genesis wave wasn't that fast, but it's a starting point).
1. What we actually see fired at the planet are seemingly standard-issue torpedoes and disruptors.
2. In "For the Uniform," waves from quantum torpedoes move even more rapidly through the atmosphere of a planet. Would you argue that, instead of a failure on the part of the special effects technicians to accurately depict shock waves, the trilithium-dispersing torpedoes are actually somehow Genesis devices?
3. The fireball "gasoline explosions" we see in most Hollywood space battles are also totally nonsensical from a modern physics point of view. What we should see are bright, brief flashes with small amounts of glowing spallation knocked off of the target. No turbulent fireballs. Are we to assume that there are no DET ship-to-ship weapons in mainstream SF, or are we to cut the special effects technicians some slack with liberally applied willing suspension of disbelief?
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sonofccn wrote:
1. I feel your putting the cart a little ahead of the horse in regards to Exawatt phasers. While I would agree Masks does lends credence and support to Gigaton yield phasers it certainly not without its issues. First and foremost you are arguing that the forward phasers of the Enterprise-D take a substantial fraction of the "TrueQ" quote, one of the higher explicit power figures for Trek that I'm aware of. Even accepting that they weren't pushing the engines, at a redline of 400% phasers would still be eating up a big chunk of total power.
The "True Q" quote was delivered at a time when the ship wasn't doing anything particularly impressive (other than keep everybody from drifting around in zero gravity, of course). If inertial dampeners, structural integrity fields, shields, and weapons were online, we could reasonably expect far greater energy output - to say nothing of dramatically modifying the structure of space-time to produce a propulsive force!
Moreover, the most obvious thing to follow the infamous "per" at the end of Data's line would be "second." Given that this is reflected in the script, we have two options: 1) literalism, in which case the 12.75 Exawatts is not the
first derivative of energy with respect to time, but rather the
second; that is to say, the reactor's output is increasing or decreasing by 12.75 Exawatts per second. 2) Authorial intent, in which case we simply drop the "per second" as being superfluous - the script writer simply confused their joules with their watts, and we, as charitable viewers, will mentally correct that error on their behalf.
My methodology constrains me to the latter approach.
2. At the risk of impoliteness, you assumptions on General Order 24 have a Saxtonian feel to them. Not only have you, essentially, declared every single blade of grass strategically important but you have also brought up hypothetical counter-measures which you assume a starship must be able to overcome.
This is not likely to be a persuasive argument to any but those already convinced.
a) Given that the one example of the Enterprise threatening General Order 24 was against a planet capable of waging interplanetary warfare, it is reasonable to assume that some sort of defenses are in place. No planetary shields or warp-capable combat spacecraft, obviously, but underground bunkers, ludicrously powerful energy weapons (like those seen in the episode), and some means of rapidly launching WMD's would all be par for the course.
b) Given that the goal of General Order 24 in the only other example we have - that of Garth delivering it against the Antosians - appears to have been the extermination of a sapient species, destruction of most/all manmade structures and all agricultural capacity would appear to be a minimum requirement.
c) While the comparison to Saxton may or may not be apt (I think it is), I feel that I have at least two major advantages: 1) I "color inside the lines" of the canon, and 2) I do it to both franchises. While my interpretation of lines like "Wipe out the entire Antos race" and "lay waste to the entire surface of the world" may be annoyingly literalistic, my interpretation of "vaporize a small town" has suffered from the same criticism, and I think that most of the forumgoers here would balk at my conclusions about the Empire's industrial capacity. In short, if I am an inflationist, I am an even-handed inflationist. I also like to think that 3) I'm more civil and polite, but I'm biased on that front. ;)
3. From Mirror Mirror {TOS-02) as taken from
here We learn the technologically identical Terran Empire:
Mirror Mirror wrote:SPOCK: At norm, Mister Kyle. Controls at neutral.
KYLE: Yes, sir.
SPOCK: Status of mission, Captain?
KIRK: No change.
SPOCK: Standard procedure, Captain? (Kirk nods) Mister Sulu, you will programme phaser barrage on Halkan cities.
Photon torpedoes might not ever be used for "soft" targets like cities.
[/quote]
a) Given that the Halkans are pacifists, we likely cannot expect the sorts of defenses that we can expect from a place like Eminar 7. This relaxes the timeframe substantially.
b) Also from the script:
SPOCK: But we cannot expect their co-operation. They have refused the Empire. Command procedure dictates that we provide the customary example.
This may not be a full "General Order 24" situation, but rather a mere "show them that we're capable of General Order 24" kind of deal.
c) More from the script:
KIRK: We will level your planet and take what we want. That is destruction. You will die as a race.
This is spoken by Kirk when everything he knows about the ISS Enterprise is what he learned from the capabilities of the USS Enterprise, further driving home the point that a Constitution class starship is capable of driving a sapient race to extinction. This raises our data set from five lines to six, with a corresponding increase in the probability that my "inflationist" interpretation is the correct one.
Moff Tarquin wrote:On the contrary, the number of torpedoes carried by the Enterprise do not number more than 100. If it had hundreds of thousands of these munitions, perhaps it would be plausible to place them in the kilotons. However, if we assume that (say) 1% of the planet needs to be covered in 5 psi overpressure, then each photon torpedo needs to cover 50,000 square kilometers. Using Carey Sublette's Nuclear Weapons FAQ:
{Snip}
We can calculate that each torpedo has a yield of 5.6 gigatons. If we raise the required overpressure to 20 psi, the yield is in excess of 90 gigatons.
I have played around on a site called "NukeMap," and hitting earth with a series of 100 6 gigaton nuclear weapons at populous cities such that there is minimal overlap leaves enough work for the (we presume relatively less powerful) phasers to do. In addition to leaving heaps of rubble where the hundred largest cities on earth once stood, firestorms would cover central Europe, the East Coast of the United States, and substantial portions of China and Southern Asia. However, most of Eastern Europe and substantial portions of the central United States, large portions of Africa, and much of South America would be fairly intact and require phaser work
Ultimately I would question the need for generating 5 psi over even 1% of the world. If Little Boy was dropped on New York today, the city would be effectively destroyed as a metropolis center regardless if there were still building standing upright. There would be fires, chaos, looting. The survivors would need food, medical supplies, etc. It would likely be quite taxing for the United States to shift people to noncontaminated areas, provide all the needed resources and what have you. And if every major city in the US had got bombed well, no help would be coming. For all practical, if not geographical, purposes the United States would cease to be.
Little Boy only destroyed an area of 12 square kilometers. That's impressive, but only about 1% of the Big Apple. And if all you could afford to hit (given targets on all the other continents) was New York City, Washington DC, Boston, Miami, Chicago, and Los Angeles, only destroying 12 square kilometers of each of them, what you'd have is something far from the destruction of the American infrastructure, to say nothing of the extinction of the American people. If you want to one-shot-kill a
city, you need a yield well into the megatons. If you want to ten-shot-kill a
nation, you need yields well into the hundreds of megatons. If you want to hundred-shot-kill a
sapient species, you need yields well into the gigatons.
Moff Tarquin wrote:The asylum is the only habitation that we are made aware of in the episode, but there could easily be other domed colonies elsewhere on the planet.
If there had been anyone inside the protective shield, the Enterprise likely would have contacted them before trying the risky shield penetration gambit. The lack of such occurrence would strongly suggest the asylum was the solitary settlement on the planet.
Perhaps, but that brings us headlong into the second fork of my dilemma.
Moff Tarquin wrote:Given that we haven't seen overloaded shield generators explode in Star Trek, we have to choose option C: that the firepower of the Enterprise is so great that blasting through the shields on one side of the planet would cause lethal effects on the other side of the planet, propagated atmospherically or seismically, not by coring through the planet.
Option C is no different from option A. You are still arguing that phasers have the accidental margin to devastate the far side of the planet. Essentially bleed through damage. And the facility is fairly tough. Per the
episode:
Whom Gods destroy wrote:GARTH: Well done. Well, Captain, you continue to resist. How stupid of you. Put him in that chair right here. I've arranged a small entertainment. I wouldn't want him to miss any of it. Well, Captain, even you must admit that I'm a genius. What you see here is my latest invention. This is an explosive, the most powerful one in history. If I were to drop this flask, the resulting explosion would vaporise this planet. Now do you see why it is ridiculous to resist me? Well, perhaps you require the demonstration I've arranged. Watch closely.
(Shutters open to show the planet surface on a screen.)
GARTH: Now, it is true that she is deadly as a poisonous serpent, but she is also a beautiful woman, and you have held her in your arms, Captain. I've ordered my men to drive her out of the protective dome. And, of course, she would choke to death on the outside in minutes.
(On the screen, Marta is struggling against two figures in environment suits.)
GARTH: But I've arranged a more merciful end for her because after all, Captain, she is my consort. One tiny crystal implanted in her necklace, a portion of this explosive no bigger than a grain of sand. I propose to detonate it from here.
(Marta is left alone, choking.)
GARTH: Poor girl. Poor, dear, suffering child. I will help her now.
(Boom!)
[Bridge]
SULU: There's been an explosion on Elba Two!
SCOTT: Point nine five!
MCCOY: It must've wiped out everything.
SCOTT: Immediate probe. Is the force field in place, Mister Sulu?
SULU: Yes, sir. Solidly.
UHURA: (at Spock's station) Life continues to exist on the planet.
A "Point nine five" explosion, something Bones thinks is enough to wipe out everyone down on the planet, doesn't even scratch the asylum.
One has to wonder what a photon torpedo would be capable of if a mere grain of explodium can do that...
So I have hard time believing seismic activity or even ripping the atmosphere off ala Obsession would instantly kill everyone without hope of rescue as is implied in the episode.
There's a fairly significant possibility that the Chicxulub impact was the cause of the lava flows known as the Deccan Flats. Big impacts shake planets,
something on the other side of the planet from a 120 teraton impact can experience a magnitude 9 earthquake.
So, since I'm arguing for a total Connie loadout between a thirtieth and a thousandth of that, assuming that the size of the earthquake scales linearly with the amount of energy hitting the ground on the opposite side of the planet, we could reasonably expect a magnitude 7 or 8 earthquake in the area of the dome if the starship "blasted through" the shields. Give or take a couple of decimal points. Whatever way you slice it, delivering a teraton or more in short order is going to cause seismic disturbances on the other side of the planet. Substantial seismic disturbances.
And this would only be an accidental fraction of the phasers full power,
No, the answer to McCoy's question was "yes, there is a margin of safety." I'm not saying that the phasers alone on "precision cut mode" could break the dome, I'm saying that a magnitude 7-8 earthquake caused by "blasting through" the shields could break the dome.
And while we have, to my knowledge, never seen a shield generator explode we do know that 1.) Federation tech can explode under the right circumstances ala the frequent exploding consoles
Which have a lethal radius in the single digit meters on a bad day.
2.) We have seen reactors explode for various reasons, suddenly amping up to try and strengthen/maintain the farthest, weakest point might tax it such that it may go critical.
It may, or it may not, there's nothing in the episode to make us think that there is. And of course, when the Enterprise pushes itself in episodes like The Paradise Syndrome, the result isn't an explosion, but a whole bunch of burnt out circuits. There's no reason to think that the asylum's power source would be any more volatile.
Moff Tarquin wrote:Bad example. Until recently, the tomahawk missile could be mounted with a variable yield W80 thermonuclear warhead. The maximum yield? 150 kilotons, some ten times the yield of Little Boy.
"More advanced" means "smarter and smaller, but - if need be - capable of far superior power."
The fact the Tomahawk cruise missile is capable of supporting a nuclear warhead, as could almost every delivery platform in the US armed forces I believe, does not alter or discredit my argument that a Tomahawk is a vast technological improvement over Little Boy. Indeed, the nuclear warhead is likely the least advanced part of whole affair, likely being quite recognizable to the right people in the late 40's and early 50's while its electronics would represent a quantum leap forward.
The very fact that
almost every delivery platform in the US armed forces is capable of delivering a nuclear warhead sort of plays into what I'm trying to say here. A German V2 is a mere firecracker when compared to a Minuteman missile, but the latter is incomparably more advanced. As a general rule, an advanced weapon will have a greater yield than a primitive weapon playing the same role. The difference in yield is nowhere near as great as the difference in range and accuracy, but the yield difference is almost always there. When it isn't, it's usually because the advanced weapon involves the creation of a new niche.
Now, it is true that the creation of the new niche (such as that of the guided cruise missile) can often render an old niche (such as that of the massive plane-dropped bomb) more or less obsolete, and that on occasion the weapons filling the old niche have a higher yield than the weapons filling the new niche. This is certainly the case with the Tomahawk and the Tsar bomb. However, there are some caveats, mostly having to do with yield
for unit weight.
As for being more advanced always being capable of "far superior power", I would find that a dubious argument. The Tsar Bomb was detonated in the 60's and was a relatively straight forward and simple gravity bomb type.
America, using its advanced technology, could easily have built a bomb with the same yield and half the weight. The only reason they didn't is because the new niche of accurate ICBM's opened up, rendering plane-dropped bombs obsolete.
With the Booby Trap quote, we are dealing with something quite different. On the one hand, we have the primitive technology, which appears to have ripped the crust of a planet (or even totally destroyed it!) almost by accident ("neither side intended for Orelius nine to be the decisive conflict"), and on the other hand, we have the Federation (and its peers, the Romulans and Cardassians), that looks down its nose at such weapons.
When we think about the implications
for planetary bombardment specifically, TDiC seems quite a bit less like an outlier. If primitive technology can do it on accident, advanced technology can do it on purpose, and faster.
Moff Tarquin wrote:I wouldn't be so sure of that. The Sphere Builders helped the Xindi build that one, and IIRC they were time travelers.
Perhaps, but the superweapon was largely built with local resources. So while no doubt guided and aided by the Sphere Builders, the Xindi weapon is a 22nd century built device.
And future time travelers could probably teach us how to put technology we have together to build a weapons-grade laser with a specific power of 20 kW/kg, but such a thing would be far beyond our current capacity. We're lucky to get 200 W/kg.
Moff Tarquin wrote:Possible, but in the absence of a good reason to assume chain-reaction (other than "it couldn't have done all that by itself, could it?") I tend to assume DET.
The fact we know planets can explode on their own, or be triggered to do so ala Think Tank, compels us to consider the possibility. There is simply no reason to assume the planet was busted up purely and totally by conventional arms as per your argued theory.
Think Tank was a trap set, and the vast majority of planets in Trek
aren't made of explodium. While there is precedent for exploding planets, there just isn't any positive reason (other than sheer incredulity) to think that that's what happened to Orelius nine.
Moff Tarquin wrote:Except for the Intrepid, apparently.
Well I did say in and of itself. And it is the correct summation. Having nukes does not instantly and by its own existence grant you nuclear-firepower proof battleships.
Except that, if nukes = planet busters, nuke-proof battleships = the Intrepid.
Now, if you said "having nuke-proof battleships doesn't imply that you have nukes," you
might have an argument. Just not much of one.
Moff Tarquin wrote:My argument would be that the warpcore almost never runs at "one hundred percent," and that its "normal" output may indeed be far less than "one percent."
But even if you don't accept that, you have to weigh an off-the-cuff statement against an actual achievement of the ship. If something has to give, it's the off-the-cuff statement.
1. One may of course rationalize almost any statement. I myself find it unlikely Laforge was referring to an infinitesimal fraction of the warp core output.
Do we even have any evidence of prefixes larger than "tera-" existing in the 2300's?
2. We don't know if the Enterprise brute forced moved the stellar fragment or if they somehow cheated physics. Your analysis hinges on a brute force power model and the only explicit power figure given in the episode falls vastly short of your calculation. I do not mean to be the disagreeable "that guy" but at the very least that is some cause for concern that there may be something more going on than we might, initially, believe.
We have particle accelerators in the TeV range, and we have yet to see excitations of "subspace fields," mass-lightening effects, or gravitational manipulation. Every mole of TeV particles is 95 Petajoules. Unless you want to say that the laws of physics in the Trek-verse are radically different from the laws of physics here, cheating physics is going to cost you through the nose in energy requirements
on top of so-called brute force. Unless you want to declare Trek immune to all attempts at calculation, a "brute force" estimate will
always be a
minimum estimate. "Cheating physics" will raise energy requirements by many orders of magnitude.
Moff Tarquin wrote:I, for one, find it odd that he's referring to the "power of the plasma" in the first place, but for some reason, that's what he's doing.
The plasma should contain the usably harnessed energies which can now be transferred through the rest of the ship. Its a little odd he's referring to that instead of the matter/anti-matter reaction itself but I don't see any grievous technical error or inherent wrongness.
There's no inherent wrongness, but there's also the distinct possibility that the oddness is attributable to some technical aspect of warp plasma physics we have no knowledge of. Maybe measuring output per unit plasma is more convenient for certain applications than the overall power output of the reactor. Admittedly, other than the observation that the Enterprise is dragging around freaking neutron stars, and other than the 12.75 exawatt figure given by Data, evidence for the hypothesis is rather sparse.
Moff Tarquin wrote:Then why measure it in units of gigawatts?
Well a range would imply a bracketed area, in this case gigawatts. Conversely while unorthodox stating it in such a manner it is perfectly accurate to describe 12.75 Exawatts as 12.75 billion gigawatts . The total power being referred to wouldn't be changed. And Data can keep it all perfectly straight where we'd likely get confused and slipped numbers around.
Do we even have any evidence of prefixes larger than "tera-" existing in the 2300's? If not, then the "terawatt range" quote would only provide a lower bracket - precisely what I'm arguing for.
Moff Tarquin wrote:If they wanted us to think it's only as deep as a kiddie pool, they wouldn't have made it stretch from horizon to horizon.
Every description I've found of the Great Link compares it to a sea or an ocean. While it's consistent with what we see to say that it's ankle-deep, it's not consistent with the spirit of what we see - and given my narratological methodology, the spirit of what we see can be as important as, or more important than, the details of what we see. If the details can be reconciled, than we can keep them. But authorial intent as revealed in the plot and the dialogue reigns supreme.
I can't speak for the writer's intent. I can only observe that seeing as the founders were previously quite content to be something the size of a pond makes me leery of assuming their now comparable to the Baltic sea Colorful uses of the word "sea" and/or "Ocean" not with standing. Further the restraints of the episode itself, Garak likely only going to get a salvo or two before being overwhelmed, would suggest a very concentrated, easily exercised Great Link.
A single petaton nuke detonated not far over the surface of (say) Lake Ontario would likely vaporize it completely regardless of such considerations. Petaton yields are only justified if the Great Link is the size of one of Earth's larger oceans.
If Garak takes the time to program the targeting computer(s) before opening fire, he will be able to take full advantage of the Defiant's targeting capabilities.
I would be the first to admit that the Great Link almost certainly covers considerably less than 200,000,000 square kilometers, or considerably less than two fifths of the planet's surface - certainly there's no reason to assume that it completely covers an entire hemisphere of the planet. I would also be the first to admit that the Great Link is considerably less than 5 kilometers deep on average - no ocean on earth is so deep. However, I would also be the first to insist that the Great Link have a surface area well in excess of 300 square kilometers and an average depth well in excess of 30 meters, again based on an analysis of the seas and large lakes of Terra. Something between 1000-100,000 cubic kilometers seems reasonable for a "sea-like" Great Link, like the one depicted in "Broken Link." The
script for "Broken Link" literally calls it a "sea of changelings," and the
script for "What You Leave Behind" calls it an "ocean of shape-shifters" twice. Incidentally, the
script for "The Search" calls it a "large gelatinous lake," so the Great Link appears to have grown substantially in the authors' minds over the course of the series. This isn't necessarily a retcon, as we know for a fact that changelings can change their mass at will by at least an order of magnitude. IIRC, Odo turned into a suitcase once, and Sisko had no trouble at all carrying it.
Ultimately, my issues are any "Broken Link" calculations hinges upon assumptions made upon a substance we have little understand of and whose dimensions are either vague or utterly unknown. This is not a strong or particularly solid foundation to
rest one's hat on or build as the centerpiece for a firepower paradigm.
All indications are that the dimensions are "big" and the properties of the substance include "durable."
So much for not being "rated to withstand even a fraction of such energies," eh?
Well this is the same ship and crew who think a thousand kilograms of anti-matter is a big bomb. Consistency never was Voyager's strong suit. ;)
Of course, when an ounce of (activated) antimatter is worth multiple petatons, the inconsistencies can be played against one another to produce a consistent whole.
Moff Tarquin wrote:For whatever it's worth, I don't think that most Trek ships could handle a multiple-teraton torpedo detonate within several kilometers of them. Gigatons applied over a period of seconds via phasers (or an exploding planetoid)? Sure. Teratons applied over a period of microseconds? Nope. This is how I explain the knife-fight ranges we often see in fleet battles: by closing in to within several kilometers of your adversary, you make it impossible for them to one-hit-kill you without one-hit-killing themselves as collateral damage
For whatever its worth, while not without its merits, from what we've observed of fleet battles no one is particularly shy about using torpedoes at "knife-fight" ranges. Also under a paradigm of shields notably < torpedoes you would expect the torpedo boat concept would have resurfaced especially if you’re a backwater race like the Cardassians who couldn't hope to win a phaser fight with a Galaxy class.
Since torpedoes are variable yield, using them at low yield at close range is a viable tactic if you want to drive up your firepower in short bursts. As for torpedo boats, 1) against warp-capable opponents, it would be difficult to maintain ranges that allow you to make use of your advantage in torpedo capabilities, and 2) while normal ships might not have magazines nearly as large, they do have more than enough to one-shot-kill you from any range at which you can one-shot-kill them. At the end of the day, the combination of these two factors could easily mean that the sole advantage of a torpedoboat would be combat endurance - something that wouldn't be of much use unless you can handle phasers long enough for it to matter.