Legacy & Inheritance: phaser drills

[Mike DiCenso]

I would have thought it pretty self-explanatory, Kane:

JULIANA
I'm going to monitor the density
of the rock layers and adjust the
strength of the particle beam as
we go. That should minimize the
seismic stress we generate while
we're drilling.


Please re-read the other episode quotes; this is a precise drilling, and they had to adjust the beam to deal with the rock density issue, which explains the slowing down of the drilling in the last few seconds and km. Also acknowledged is that deriving firepower figures is difficult because of the aforementioned contexts of the drilling operation. At best we can get are rough averages.

However, if you want to make a big deal over the relatively minor issues of the phaser drilling in "Inheritiance", then I certainly hope you will be willing to deal with the very odd-ball issues that crop up by the ton with the Death Star destruction of Alderaan in ANH, as well as the DS2 "material disappearences" of the Rebel cruisers in RoTJ.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

I would have thought it pretty self-explanatory, Kane:

JULIANA
I'm going to monitor the density
of the rock layers and adjust the
strength of the particle beam as
we go. That should minimize the
seismic stress we generate while
we're drilling.


Please re-read the other episode quotes; this is a precise drilling, and they had to adjust the beam to deal with the rock density issue, which explains the slowing down of the drilling in the last few seconds and km. Also acknowledged is that deriving firepower figures is difficult because of the aforementioned contexts of the drilling operation. At best we can get are rough averages.

However, if you want to make a big deal over the relatively minor issues of the phaser drilling in "Inheritiance", then I certainly hope you will be willing to deal with the very odd-ball issues that crop up by the ton with the Death Star destruction of Alderaan in ANH, as well as the DS2 "material disappearences" of the Rebel cruisers in RoTJ.
-Mike

But like I said elsewhere, trying to derive direct firepower figures from phaser effects on inert materials is sketchy at best.
Besides, I find that megaton rate a bit high in the light of power capabilities.
The thing is that with phasers, you can obtain more meat for what you pay, but it seems to require lots of work and special settings, and it doesn't work well. For example, a simple magnesite ore vein can dramatically slower the process. Besides, it creates a backdraft that threatens the security of the very spaceship.
This is fine for poking holes, but not so for battles.

Anyway, has anyone a picture of data looking up the hole when down in the cavern?

[Kane Starkiller]

I would have thought it pretty self-explanatory, Kane:

JULIANA
I'm going to monitor the density
of the rock layers and adjust the
strength of the particle beam as
we go. That should minimize the
seismic stress we generate while
we're drilling.


Please re-read the other episode quotes; this is a precise drilling, and they had to adjust the beam to deal with the rock density issue, which explains the slowing down of the drilling in the last few seconds and km. Also acknowledged is that deriving firepower figures is difficult because of the aforementioned contexts of the drilling operation. At best we can get are rough averages.

How does this explain anything? If you ramp up the firepower to anything close to Mt/s or even kt/s AT ANY POINT while inside a few meters wide hole you'll vaporize the rock, superheat it until it becomes plasma and become completely opaque to the beam. The superheated material will start to expand and move upwards all the while absorbing the incoming beam and likely deform the hole itself. Again there is no way you can drill a narrow hole with such power levels.

However, if you want to make a big deal over the relatively minor issues of the phaser drilling in "Inheritiance", then I certainly hope you will be willing to deal with the very odd-ball issues that crop up by the ton with the Death Star destruction of Alderaan in ANH, as well as the DS2 "material disappearences" of the Rebel cruisers in RoTJ.

Unlike this example Alderaan actually BLOWS UP at 5% speed of light. The very fact that a few meters wide hole managed to stay intact PROVES there was never anything like megatons or kilotons of energy contained within it.


As for the hole in question:

The opening appears 30 times less wide than the bottom of the hole so assuming constant diameter it is 30 times more distant from the camera.
Assuming the distance between camera and the bottom of the hole is 5 meters the surface is 150 meters from the camera.


Or how about the sequence from TNG 4 "Legacy":


Is this supposed to be kilotons or megatons per second? Where is the superheated vaporized sand violently expanding from the point of impact? Is there any vaporized material? Melted at least? Just some white smoke. No shockwaves no fireballs.

There is a mountain of evidence that phasers obviously don't work by pure firepower, that their effectiveness is greatly dependent on the target material and that certain materials can even somehow threaten the ship as shown in "Inheritance" and mentioned by Mr. Oragahn several times.

[Jedi Master Spock]

My apologies, but I happen to have already analyzed this episode and the conclusions are available in brief here.

How does this explain anything? If you ramp up the firepower to anything close to Mt/s or even kt/s AT ANY POINT while inside a few meters wide hole you'll vaporize the rock, superheat it until it becomes plasma and become completely opaque to the beam. The superheated material will start to expand and move upwards all the while absorbing the incoming beam and likely deform the hole itself. Again there is no way you can drill a narrow hole with such power levels.

Except with decidedly abnormal behavior - e.g., as typical of phasers. In fact, the explosion of superheated gas that we expect to see is the most conspicuously absent feature of the SFX - meaning that the absence of superheated plasma and deformation means nothing in this context.

The only measurable item (and that not at all precisely) is the destructive effect - which we may deem, with good reason, to be equivalent to vaporization.

assuming constant diameter

That assumption is not justified in the least bit, unfortunately, nor is the conclusion that the hole is only 150 meters deep. The latter, in fact, is directly contradicted in the script, which speaks of kilometers and the mantle, and contradicted by implication by the Okudagram.

The shot of Data looking upwards gives us no information whatsoever about the depth of the hole; the Okudagram and the dialogue both do.

Taken together, there is a quite consistent story they offer, at least in some versions of the account:

The E-D drills through the crust in several seconds. This is at least 8 km deep.

After drilling through the crust, the E-D boosts power. The solidified mantle turns out to be easy to cut through, and in no time the technicians are dialing back the power so they don't overshoot the target. They spend the last five seconds (2 km) on a precise cut that doesn't damage the chamber beneath.

Depth is, according to the Okudagram and the detailed discussion beforehand - i.e., the plotline of the episode - about 2800 km. A literalist examination of the scripted lines of the firing sequence alone, without considering the context of the episode, still gives a minimum of 10 km.

Which, I will note, using your scaling figures above (5m to the hole) gives us a top end of the hole that is 70+ times the diameter of the base... or to put it another way, trying to make the hole as small as possible while taking the Data shot as accurate and the dialogue not literally contradicted gives us over a hundred million cubic meters of rock, rather than the ~350 you seem interested in passing it off as. For reference of scale, that means the E-D, over the short drilling sequence seen in the episode, making its own volume in rock disappear every second.

Vaporizing that volume of rock per second happens to come up on (as I mentioned in the page above) the hundreds-of-petawatts range. This is, of course, three orders of magnitude less than the minimum power required to go to warp right next to a Sun-like star, which is why I cite that figure rather than try to develop anything serious from the 2800 km tunnel and the shot of Data looking up at it.

If I pretend the average diameter constant at, say, ~3 meters, I can get back to the hundreds-of-petawatts range considering the actual length of the tunnel - but I have to disregard that shot if I'm to keep it reasonable.

"Inheritance," frankly, is the most ridiculously powerful example of phaser drilling on the books when you consider the full context of the episode and insist on trying to scale the far end of the hole from that shot.

There is a mountain of evidence that phasers obviously don't work by pure firepower, that their effectiveness is greatly dependent on the target material and that certain materials can even somehow threaten the ship as shown in "Inheritance" and mentioned by Mr. Oragahn several times.

Curious interactions with materials, yes. As far as the effect of the phasers, they seem quite similarly destructive against a wide variety of materials - rock, metal, humans, et cetera - and what indications we have suggest that phasers consume an amount of power that would thermally vaporize the targets they make mysteriously disappear, both for hand phasers and for ship's phasers.

[Kane Starkiller]

Except with decidedly abnormal behavior - e.g., as typical of phasers. In fact, the explosion of superheated gas that we expect to see is the most conspicuously absent feature of the SFX - meaning that the absence of superheated plasma and deformation means nothing in this context.

It doesn't matter what phasers are. If they carry a certain amount of energy that energy must be manifested when it hits target. There is no manifestation thus they don't carry the claimed energy content.

That assumption is not justified in the least bit, unfortunately, nor is the conclusion that the hole is only 150 meters deep. The latter, in fact, is directly contradicted in the script, which speaks of kilometers and the mantle, and contradicted by implication by the Okudagram.


The shot of Data looking upwards gives us no information whatsoever about the depth of the hole; the Okudagram and the dialogue both do.

So you are saying the hole does not have a constant diameter? Are you thinking something conical in shape? If the hole is really 2800km deep then it's top is 560000 times more distant from camera than the bottom (the camera is about 5m from the bottom of the hole). For it to appear only 30 times smaller than the bottom it must be 18666 times wider than the bottom of the hole. Assuming bottom is 2m in diameter the top should be 37km wide.
That's a total volume of million cubic kilometers. There is going to be some serious aerial shockwaves when air rushes in to fill up the new hole. I thought they were trying to help those people.

The E-D drills through the crust in several seconds. This is at least 8 km deep.

After drilling through the crust, the E-D boosts power. The solidified mantle turns out to be easy to cut through, and in no time the technicians are dialing back the power so they don't overshoot the target. They spend the last five seconds (2 km) on a precise cut that doesn't damage the chamber beneath.

Depth is, according to the Okudagram and the detailed discussion beforehand - i.e., the plotline of the episode - about 2800 km. A literalist examination of the scripted lines of the firing sequence alone, without considering the context of the episode, still gives a minimum of 10 km.

Which is ridiculous. How can the hole possibly be 2800km deep and not collapse?

Which, I will note, using your scaling figures above (5m to the hole) gives us a top end of the hole that is 70+ times the diameter of the base... or to put it another way, trying to make the hole as small as possible while taking the Data shot as accurate and the dialogue not literally contradicted gives us over a hundred million cubic meters of rock, rather than the ~350 you seem interested in passing it off as. For reference of scale, that means the E-D, over the short drilling sequence seen in the episode, making its own volume in rock disappear every second.

So basically you are dancing between 2800km and 10km. You are trying to make 10km depth seem almost reasonable but of course how does that help the ridiculous 2800km depth?
By the way the script is wrong. There is no mention of mantle in the filmed episode.

Vaporizing that volume of rock per second happens to come up on (as I mentioned in the page above) the hundreds-of-petawatts range. This is, of course, three orders of magnitude less than the minimum power required to go to warp right next to a Sun-like star, which is why I cite that figure rather than try to develop anything serious from the 2800 km tunnel and the shot of Data looking up at it.

This is my main point of disagreement. You using this example to derive firepower when that is clearly wrong. How exactly do those hundreds of petawatts which is 24Mt/s drill a hole? You do realize that if you pump that much energy into the ground you'll end up with a huge fireball (plasma) which will just end up absorbing the incoming beam? It doesn't matter what phasers are if they contain that much energy. The very fact that they managed to drill a hole proves that there is no such energy involved.

"Inheritance," frankly, is the most ridiculously powerful example of phaser drilling on the books when you consider the full context of the episode and insist on trying to scale the far end of the hole from that shot.

It doesn't matter. The deeper you go the more your firepower has to increase and the more impossible it becomes to drill any kind of hole with it.

Curious interactions with materials, yes. As far as the effect of the phasers, they seem quite similarly destructive against a wide variety of materials - rock, metal, humans, et cetera - and what indications we have suggest that phasers consume an amount of power that would thermally vaporize the targets they make mysteriously disappear, both for hand phasers and for ship's phasers.

They don't make packing crates mysteriously disappear. They didn't make that rock Jem'Hadar hid behind in "Rocks and shoals" mysteriously disappear. Like I said they work against some materials and against other they don't. Against some they even produce some kind of feedback that threatens the ship.



Where are those megatons? Again it doesn't matter what phasers are. Either they carry the power or they don't. There are no high energy events so they don't. Simple as that.

[Jedi Master Spock]

It doesn't matter what phasers are. If they carry a certain amount of energy that energy must be manifested when it hits target. There is no manifestation thus they don't carry the claimed energy content.

This is my main point of disagreement. You using this example to derive firepower when that is clearly wrong. How exactly do those hundreds of petawatts which is 24Mt/s drill a hole? You do realize that if you pump that much energy into the ground you'll end up with a huge fireball (plasma) which will just end up absorbing the incoming beam? It doesn't matter what phasers are if they contain that much energy. The very fact that they managed to drill a hole proves that there is no such energy involved.

It doesn't matter. The deeper you go the more your firepower has to increase and the more impossible it becomes to drill any kind of hole with it.

Where are those megatons? Again it doesn't matter what phasers are. Either they carry the power or they don't. There are no high energy events so they don't. Simple as that.

The dissociation of bonds is a manifestation of energy. Now, where exactly the matter disappeared to is an open question, but that little bits of matter were completely dissociated with one another - easily to the degree that occurs in vaporization - is not. That requires energy, plain and simple; every bond has a negative energy, and getting rid of them requires a very significant energy input.

The paucity of thermal effects doesn't change that.

So you are saying the hole does not have a constant diameter? Are you thinking something conical in shape? If the hole is really 2800km deep then it's top is 560000 times more distant from camera than the bottom (the camera is about 5m from the bottom of the hole). For it to appear only 30 times smaller than the bottom it must be 18666 times wider than the bottom of the hole. Assuming bottom is 2m in diameter the top should be 37km wide.

Not a problem. More stable that way. Etc etc.

That's a total volume of million cubic kilometers. There is going to be some serious aerial shockwaves when air rushes in to fill up the new hole. I thought they were trying to help those people.

A million cubic km through a 342 sq km hole in 19 seconds would be154 m/s at the surface of the hole. Quite an inrush, but no shockwave - remember, you have to push air in order to make it move any faster than its normal thermal velocities. Now try running the figures again, remembering that the air rushes in only at its thermal velocities, and remembering that velocity will be slowing as the air cools both in and out of the hole.

Now run them a third time, remembering that the giant whoosh is going to be taking place over the course of hours, and think about how large an area in Alaska, Wyoming, Siberia, or any other sparsely populated area you could evacuate in five minutes with a handful of transporters. Oh, and remember that no suction effects have been seen when phasers disappear objects, and you're relying on the rock completely disappearing without leaving any sort of vapors behind.

If you still think that's a complication worth investigating after all that, you're welcome to present your case for it.

Which is ridiculous. How can the hole possibly be 2800km deep and not collapse?

Among other things, by being conical, vertical, and through a largely uniform solid. (Actually, just being vertical and through an essentially uniform solid is enough.)

So basically you are dancing between 2800km and 10km. You are trying to make 10km depth seem almost reasonable but of course how does that help the ridiculous 2800km depth?
By the way the script is wrong. There is no mention of mantle in the filmed episode.

There is, however, the Okudagram, and discussion of deep lying pockets of still-molten rock.

So you're saying you can't buy either 10 km or 2800 km? It's pretty clear 2800 km is what actually happens. It's also clear that, if you take either the Okudagram or the shot of Data looking up the tunnel with a grain of salt - without ignoring the whole rest of the episode, at least - you wind up with the same order of magnitude, the hundreds-petawatts bracket.

It's up there with TDIC as far as firepower outliers if you insist on taking the piece as a documentary, I'm afraid.

They don't make packing crates mysteriously disappear.

They have been known to go straight through them as if they weren't even there.

They've disappeared metals. They've disappeared crystalline substances. They've disappeared organic compounds and water. That's as much diversity of material as we can expect to see.

[Kane Starkiller]

The dissociation of bonds is a manifestation of energy. Now, where exactly the matter disappeared to is an open question, but that little bits of matter were completely dissociated with one another - easily to the degree that occurs in vaporization - is not. That requires energy, plain and simple; every bond has a negative energy, and getting rid of them requires a very significant energy input.

The paucity of thermal effects doesn't change that.

How much energy is required to "dissapear" matter the way phasers do is a question though. Obviously trying to derive firepower by calculating vaporization energy is intellectually dishonest don't you think? Secondly justify your assumption that breaking the chemical bonds via phaser effect will be a net negative energy since it could be net positive. Burning for example in which chemical bonds of material are broken in favor of bonding with oxygen and the energy is RELEASED. That's why a cigarette bud can cause huge forest fires after all.

Not a problem. More stable that way. Etc etc.

Etc etc? Please elaborate. Anyway it will not be nearly enough stable to survive. With a depth of 2800km 37km (only at the top) is completely inadequate.

Among other things, by being conical, vertical, and through a largely uniform solid. (Actually, just being vertical and through an essentially uniform solid is enough.)

Ah well that's it. Somebody better tell those oil companies they don't have to reinforce their little holes with metal tubes and concrete to prevent collapse because even 2800km holes will apparently survive.

There is, however, the Okudagram, and discussion of deep lying pockets of still-molten rock.

Okudagram with mountains hundreds of km tall and caves 1000km thick. Right.
I mean sure litographic pressure assuming constant mantle density of 3000kg/m3 will be about 40Gpa. Sure this is something like 100 times greater than ultimate tensile strength of steel but since we are talking about a cone with a slope of 89.62 degrees (0 degrees being horizontal and 90 degrees being vertical meaning cone is actually a cylinder) there will be no problem right?
Honestly must you always support even the most mind numbingly ridiculous theory to further your agenda? I remember when you claimed how it's easier to construct things inside a gravitational field than in free fall because "it holds things in place" never mind the cancellation of stresses.

So you're saying you can't buy either 10 km or 2800 km? It's pretty clear 2800 km is what actually happens. It's also clear that, if you take either the Okudagram or the shot of Data looking up the tunnel with a grain of salt - without ignoring the whole rest of the episode, at least - you wind up with the same order of magnitude, the hundreds-petawatts bracket.

Utter nonsense. There are caves 2800km beneath the surface now? With nice and cosy temperatures? They say the core is cooling down but it didn't cool down yet. And again you claim hundred petawatts without explaining how you can drill with that kind of firepower.

It's up there with TDIC as far as firepower outliers if you insist on taking the piece as a documentary, I'm afraid.

What brownish circles that are less bright than the distant star to the left of the planet? What is that supposed to be? And precisely because I take it as documentary I say there is no evidence of any kind of super firepower various wild theories about what those brownish things might be notwithstanding.

They have been known to go straight through them as if they weren't even there.

No one said all packing crates are of the same material. How does this change the fact they are material dependant?

They've disappeared metals. They've disappeared crystalline substances. They've disappeared organic compounds and water. That's as much diversity of material as we can expect to see.

And you ignored the plain old rock in "Rocks and shoals". How is that for material diversity we expect to see? As I said repeatedly they work on some, useless on others.
Besides all you need to do is wrap your ship in magnezite and you're good to go. :)


By the way I absolutely love it how you claim that drilling through the surface MUST mean hundreds of petawatts of power even though there are no manifestation of that power and it works through material disappearance but when it comes to Death Star then every pixel of every frame is examined and if one shows that there might be something fishy with the explosion then, oh no, we can't possibly determine the firepower of Death Star even though there are no thermodynamic indications for that conclusion.

Furthermore you YOURSELF claimed that phasers effects are similar to those of superlaser in this thread. So how come drilling a narrow hole is hundred petawatts but blowing up an entire planet is not 10^38J?
Can you say consistency?

[Mr. Oragahn]

There's a couple of puzzling points, really.

1. The claim that a 2,800 km deep hole, with a slope of 80° (90° being vertical) would allow it to avoid collapsing on itself.
Sure, the rock's supposed to be solid, but there are problems. They mentionned unstable layers. There also are various materials to go through, and this means veins and this, with different tensile attributes, and a differential will mean a lot, since the softer materials will be pushed out. There's also the temperature near the pocket, and the fact that the phaser beams do deliver some kind of energy (they apparently raised the pocket's temp by 300 degrees or something, and had to wait for it to cool down). That does not really sound like an unified medium to go through.

2. We do not know what happens to the matter that is hit by the beam.
For all his flaws, Wong actually put an interesting list of possibilities (and more about the NDF theory here). This is old stuff, but we see that nothing has really moved since, and I don't see how one could pretend being able to calc energy consumption from those weird mechanisms.
The only explanations that could fit are so exotic that I don't see why we have to accept the idea that breaking bonds is necessary.
Here's the choices of interest:

- Transition out of the continuum.
- Disappearing into the Zero-point Domain.
- Complete conversion into neutrinos.

We know that phaser effects are exothermic, to significant or unsignificant extents, depending on the settings and the situation.

So I really don't see how we are supposed to get a reliable estimation of power consumption when we have absolutely no idea of what is at play.

3. Please let's leave TDIC out of this. There's a thread for that at this very moment, so if any of you has a thought about it, you know where to post. The TDIC thread is to adress this episode as a whole.

4. Please, let's also leave the superlaser out of this. I'd love talking about it, and have Kane's views on it, but please, keep this thread superlaser-free.

[Jedi Master Spock]

How much energy is required to "dissapear" matter the way phasers do is a question though. Obviously trying to derive firepower by calculating vaporization energy is intellectually dishonest don't you think? Secondly justify your assumption that breaking the chemical bonds via phaser effect will be a net negative energy since it could be net positive. Burning for example in which chemical bonds of material are broken in favor of bonding with oxygen and the energy is RELEASED. That's why a cigarette bud can cause huge forest fires after all.

If new lower energy bonds are formed, heat - not mysterious phaser NDF-rays - is released. This reaction is very well studied.

So if what you're doing with the phaser effect involves breaking down the chemical bonds at some point, then the phaser needs to supply the full enthalpy of formation for whatever it disintegrates.

Vaporization energies aren't "intellectually dishonest." They're (a) the closest match for the descriptions used in Star Trek, whether verbal or visual, and (b) noncoincidentally in the right ballpark for any method of dissociating matter into its component atoms, which happens to be an incidental step in nearly every offered explanation for phasers' effects.

The figures also, as I mentioned, happen to dovetail neatly with the power requirements of starships as well as the biggest bang you can get out of an overloading hand phaser compared to its maximum effects; most of the cases in which starships use phasers against large inanimate objects suggest that maximum phaser power is 1-3 orders of magnitude less than maximum warp power.

Okudagram with mountains hundreds of km tall and caves 1000km thick.

Not necessarily mountains and caves, but yes, that Okudagram.

Etc etc? Please elaborate. Anyway it will not be nearly enough stable to survive. With a depth of 2800km 37km (only at the top) is completely inadequate.

I mean sure litographic pressure assuming constant mantle density of 3000kg/m3 will be about 40Gpa. Sure this is something like 100 times greater than ultimate tensile strength of steel but since we are talking about a cone with a slope of 89.62 degrees (0 degrees being horizontal and 90 degrees being vertical meaning cone is actually a cylinder) there will be no problem right?

Honestly must you always support even the most mind numbingly ridiculous theory to further your agenda?

Exactly how many times have I called the 2800 km hole ridiculous?

It is what the canon dictates if you want to hold to it religiously as a documentary. I don't, hence why I'm talking about "hundreds of petawatts," i.e., the figure expected from drilling on the order of 10^4 rather than 10^6 meters, and what seems reasonable from "Masks" and the other drilling incidents.

Well, if I must be "mind numbingly ridiculous," and since you appear to be manufacturing new phrases ("litographic pressure" is a unique turn of phrase), I'll ask you to explain exactly what you think is going to spontaneously happen to a 2800 km deep hole in the course of a couple hours and why...

... and why I should be concerned about it, when :

• If you are going to hold the entire episode to the same standards of accuracy you apply selectively to Data looking up the tunnel, what you should be asking yourself is what contrived explanation you can come up with to neatly explain a ridiculuous piece of fiction. I recommend using the deflector dish if you want to sound like a scriptwriter, but my personal favorite is the tractor beam.
• I don't happen to personally consider the result of holding Star Trek to those standards of accuracy compatible with the combination of physics and common sense.

Get the picture now?

Utter nonsense. There are caves 2800km beneath the surface now? With nice and cosy temperatures? They say the core is cooling down but it didn't cool down yet.

If something "is cooling down," then quite clearly, it has cooled.

And again you claim hundred petawatts without explaining how you can drill with that kind of firepower.

I and you and Mr. Oragahn have all said how you can drill with that kind of firepower...

... the magic of phasers.

What brownish circles that are less bright than the distant star to the left of the planet? What is that supposed to be? And precisely because I take it as documentary I say there is no evidence of any kind of super firepower various wild theories about what those brownish things might be notwithstanding.

Any discussion of "destroying the mantle," or otherwise affecting regions of matter of normal planetary densities on the order of 10^6 m in size, qualifies as a clear outlier for high firepower in Star Trek. Surely you agree?

No one said all packing crates are of the same material. How does this change the fact they are material dependant?

And you ignored the plain old rock in "Rocks and shoals". How is that for material diversity we expect to see? As I said repeatedly they work on some, useless on others.
Besides all you need to do is wrap your ship in magnezite and you're good to go. :)

The effect is - more to the point - setting dependent. On low settings, "plain old rock" deflects a phaser bolt; on high settings, "plain old rock" gets disintegrated.

By the way I absolutely love it how you claim that drilling through the surface MUST mean hundreds of petawatts of power even though there are no manifestation of that power and it works through material disappearance but when it comes to Death Star then every pixel of every frame is examined and if one shows that there might be something fishy with the explosion then, oh no, we can't possibly determine the firepower of Death Star even though there are no thermodynamic indications for that conclusion.

Furthermore you YOURSELF claimed that phasers effects are similar to those of superlaser in this thread. So how come drilling a narrow hole is hundred petawatts but blowing up an entire planet is not 10^38J?
Can you say consistency?

"Consistency" would be talking about saying the Death Star put out around 10^32 joules, actually, equivalent to the annihilation of somewhere on the order of 10^12 metric tons of matter, but touche. Other than slipping six orders of magnitude, you have a good point there, especially when you consider that I have publicly estimated the Death Star's energy on hand to be on the order of no more than 10^28 joules realistically.

I'll think about it. Thank you for pointing that out.

[Mr. Oragahn]

If new lower energy bonds are formed, heat - not mysterious phaser NDF-rays - is released. This reaction is very well studied.

So if what you're doing with the phaser effect involves breaking down the chemical bonds at some point, then the phaser needs to supply the full enthalpy of formation for whatever it disintegrates.

Vaporization energies aren't "intellectually dishonest." They're (a) the closest match for the descriptions used in Star Trek, whether verbal or visual, and (b) noncoincidentally in the right ballpark for any method of dissociating matter into its component atoms, which happens to be an incidental step in nearly every offered explanation for phasers' effects.

The figures also, as I mentioned, happen to dovetail neatly with the power requirements of starships as well as the biggest bang you can get out of an overloading hand phaser compared to its maximum effects; most of the cases in which starships use phasers against large inanimate objects suggest that maximum phaser power is 1-3 orders of magnitude less than maximum warp power.

How do we know that the phasers break the bonds?

More, how can you still use vaporization figures, when the remaining matter isn't showing high traces of heat existence, and that the super driller used in Inheritance "only" heated the pocket by 300 degrees?

Okudagram with mountains hundreds of km tall and caves 1000km thick.

Not necessarily mountains and caves, but yes, that Okudagram.

Not necessarily mountains and caves? What are these things supposed to be? Especially the mountains?
Kane has a point here. If the scales are just so inacurate, why should we consider the 2800 km lenght acceptable?

If the mountains on the Okudagram are hundreds of km high, say 100 km high, and the caves thousands of km high, there's a problem here.
That's a selective interpretation of evidence, similar to that of the DSII-Endor hologram case in Star Wars.

You use Earth for that figure, right? The highest point on Earth is located at 8,900 meters above sea level, for the most generous estimation of Mt Everest.
Coupled to the Okudagram size of a pocket, and the real size of a pocket, that would mean that the real hole's depth is between 1 and 3 orders of magnitude lower than that 2,800 km figure.

Yes, it should be measured as being between 280 km and 2.8 km deep, of course 2.8 km being the moderate end, and much easier to correlate to the shot of Data looking up through the hole, than a theory about a supercone that's 2800 km deep.

Utter nonsense. There are caves 2800km beneath the surface now? With nice and cosy temperatures? They say the core is cooling down but it didn't cool down yet.

If something "is cooling down," then quite clearly, it has cooled.

I think Juliana was sweating. She was a robot though, but who knows? Maybe her sim-epiderm was more elobarated than Data's.

And again you claim hundred petawatts without explaining how you can drill with that kind of firepower.

I and you and Mr. Oragahn have all said how you can drill with that kind of firepower...

... the magic of phasers.

Unless you actually explain that magic, I'd like to know how you can affirm that anything close to the transfers of energies, as they happen in vapourization, is at play here.

[Mike DiCenso]

Kane Starkiller wrote:

How does this explain anything? If you ramp up the firepower to anything close to Mt/s or even kt/s AT ANY POINT while inside a few meters wide hole you'll vaporize the rock, superheat it until it becomes plasma and become completely opaque to the beam. The superheated material will start to expand and move upwards all the while absorbing the incoming beam and likely deform the hole itself. Again there is no way you can drill a narrow hole with such power levels.

But yet we have a hole apparently thousands of km deep, drilled with great precision and all in a 20 second time period. You can't claim they didn't do it... because they did it! The exact how of it is something we don't know, and it's hard to tell what the sides of the drilled out tunnels have. Is the side of the Inheritence tunnel glassified?

However, if you want to make a big deal over the relatively minor issues of the phaser drilling in "Inheritiance", then I certainly hope you will be willing to deal with the very odd-ball issues that crop up by the ton with the Death Star destruction of Alderaan in ANH, as well as the DS2 "material disappearences" of the Rebel cruisers in RoTJ.

Unlike this example Alderaan actually BLOWS UP at 5% speed of light. The very fact that a few meters wide hole managed to stay intact PROVES there was never anything like megatons or kilotons of energy contained within it.

It blows up after some very funky stuff happens, and then we see more unsual effects after the explosion that suggests CR, not DET. So just remember, Kane, that you cannot have your cake and eat it, too. If you acknowledge one example's flaws, then you must acknowledge the other.

As for the hole in question:

The opening appears 30 times less wide than the bottom of the hole so assuming constant diameter it is 30 times more distant from the camera.
Assuming the distance between camera and the bottom of the hole is 5 meters the surface is 150 meters from the camera.

How wide is the hole above Data's head? How far is the hole opening on the cavern ceilingfrom Data? What is the light at the presumed other end of the tunnel? The magma pocket caverns Data and Julia are in seem to have their own weird light source, suggesting that perhaps there is something else creating that light, other than mere sunlight.

Or how about the sequence from TNG 4 "Legacy":


Is this supposed to be kilotons or megatons per second? Where is the superheated vaporized sand violently expanding from the point of impact? Is there any vaporized material? Melted at least? Just some white smoke. No shockwaves no fireballs.

That's not the entire sequence, and the goal was simply to drill a tunnel. The drilling goes down a mile (1,600 meters) in approximately 13 seconds. The Legacy and Inheritance examples are very different once you get past the common goal of creating a tunnel.

There is a mountain of evidence that phasers obviously don't work by pure firepower, that their effectiveness is greatly dependent on the target material and that certain materials can even somehow threaten the ship as shown in "Inheritance" and mentioned by Mr. Oragahn several times.

Of course they don't on all settings. We knew that already. But we don't know how much energy it takes to do the "disruptor B" settings, or the disintegration setting mentioned as being the highest setting of a TOS-era Type-II phaser pistol, and dispite your protestations to the contrary, we do have a "mountain of evidence that phaser can also act as "pure firepower" weapons:

http://www.starfleetjedi.net/forum/view ... 01&start=0


So on some settings you can use a phaser to "disappear" a target, and others you can heat, melt, and vaporize.
-Mike

[Jedi Master Spock]

How do we know that the phasers break the bonds?

We don't.

However, we can make the reasonable guess that they do from the fact that phasers break things apart piece by tiny piece. And then there's the way that the term "vaporize" crops up.

More, how can you still use vaporization figures, when the remaining matter isn't showing high traces of heat existence, and that the super driller used in Inheritance "only" heated the pocket by 300 degrees?

Actually, heating a rock by 300 degrees is around 2% of a traditional thermal vaporization figure - which seems not a bad figure for waste heat.

Not necessarily mountains and caves? What are these things supposed to be? Especially the mountains?

Diagrams of uneven layering within the planet, perhaps? Or the patterns of geothermal cooling/heating? Something a little more relevant to the problem at hand like those would be good options.

That's a selective interpretation of evidence, similar to that of the DSII-Endor hologram case in Star Wars.

Unfortunately, it's not particularly selective - the Okudagram is the only way we can try to scale the thing directly. I wish it was selective, but the Okudagram is the clearest piece of evidence out of the lot, as foggy as it is. Which is sad, really, but...

You use Earth for that figure, right? The highest point on Earth is located at 8,900 meters above sea level, for the most generous estimation of Mt Everest.
Coupled to the Okudagram size of a pocket, and the real size of a pocket, that would mean that the real hole's depth is between 1 and 3 orders of magnitude lower than that 2,800 km figure.

Which is more along the lines of what I'd like to see. However, it's not just the Okudagram, but the episode itself suggesting the vast scale. They're supposed to be helping save the planet from cooling off.

Which is completely ridiculous, IMO.

Yes, it should be measured as being between 280 km and 2.8 km deep, of course 2.8 km being the moderate end, and much easier to correlate to the shot of Data looking up through the hole, than a theory about a supercone that's 2800 km deep.

Well, if we want to project a constant rate of drilling, we can peg the hole at around 10 km, give or take.

I think Juliana was sweating. She was a robot though, but who knows? Maybe her sim-epiderm was more elobarated than Data's.

Sweating is much better than melting or burning, which is what we would expect on an Earthlike planet at any significant depth.

[Who is like God arbour]

[quote="in the script from "Inheritance" it is"]

• PICARD, GEORDI, and DATA look on as Atrean Scientist PRAN TAINER stands before an OKUDAGRAM depicting a cross-section of the Atrean planet. Also present is Pran's human wife, JULIANA TAINER, a fiftyish woman dressed in Atrean fashion. The Atreans are a humanoid species, only slightly different from us.
  
  • • • JULIANA:
      Captain, our situation has worsened since my husband and I first contacted you. The molten core of our planet is not just cooling -- it's begun to solidify.
  • • • PRAN:
      Our gravitational field has been affected -- seismic activity has increased by a factor of three.
  • • • JULIANA:
      If the cooling continues at this rate -- Atrea will become uninhabitable within thirteen months.
  Everyone takes in this grim news.
  
  • • • GEORDI:
      We could minimize seismic activity by creating isobaric fissures and releasing some of the tectonic stress -- but that would just be a temporary fix.
  • • • DATA:
      The only permanent solution would be to re-liquefy the core.
  Geordi stands and moves to the Okudagram.
  
  • • • GEORDI:
      These pockets in the magma layer -- how close are they to the molten region of the core?
  • • • JULIANA:
      A few kilometers, why?
  Geordi turns to Data.
  
  • • • GEORDI:
      You think that's close enough to try ferro-plasmic infusion?
  Data considers, then acknowledges the possibility.
  Juliana and Pran share a look -- they're not sure what this means.
  Data moves toward the monitor, gesturing.
  
  • • • DATA:
      The procedure would involve using our ship's phasers to drill down through the planet's surface and into the pockets -- where we would set up a series of plasma infusion units.
  • • • GEORDI:
      We'd trigger the units by firing a modulated energy burst down through the shafts.
  Juliana addresses Data.
  
  • • • JULIANA:
      I see... injecting sufficient plasma directly into the core should trigger a chain reaction... and that will reliquify the magma...
  • • • DATA:
      It should be possible to stabilize the core temperature at ninety-three percent of normal.
  • • • PRAN:
      If it works, the core would remain molten for centuries.
  Picard lets Pran and Juliana consider for a beat.
  
  • • • PICARD:
      If you give your permission, we'll begin immediately.
  • • • PRAN:
      Very well. But before we proceed, I'd like to update our geological surveys.

[/quote]

We know now, that the pockets in the magma layer are few kilometers close to the molten region of the core.

Assuming an earthlike planet, they have to drill through the crust and most of the mantle to reach the pockets few kilometers from the core.

• • 

That are 2890 km according to Wikipedia - minus the few kilometers the pockets are away from the core.

I see no reason to doubt that they have to drill through nearly 3'000 kilometers.

• • (A further question would be, where the molten region of the core is? It could be that they even have to drill through parts of the already solidified core to reach the molten region of the core.)

[Mr. Oragahn]

How do we know that the phasers break the bonds?

We don't.

However, we can make the reasonable guess that they do from the fact that phasers break things apart piece by tiny piece. And then there's the way that the term "vaporize" crops up.

1. What things they break apart, exactly?
2. The repeated misuse of a term doesn't make it correct. Every language has words everybody wrongly uses.
3. There's the simple fact that if the process ahd anything to with vaporization, which it does not, the atmosphere down there, in the pockets, would be highly toxic.

More, how can you still use vaporization figures, when the remaining matter isn't showing high traces of heat existence, and that the super driller used in Inheritance "only" heated the pocket by 300 degrees?

Actually, heating a rock by 300 degrees is around 2% of a traditional thermal vaporization figure - which seems not a bad figure for waste heat.

2% of several hundreds of megatons... still lies in the megaton range.
We hardly even see kiloton level associated DET effects.

Not necessarily mountains and caves? What are these things supposed to be? Especially the mountains?

Diagrams of uneven layering within the planet, perhaps? Or the patterns of geothermal cooling/heating? Something a little more relevant to the problem at hand like those would be good options.

Nope. They clearly of the same colour of the crust, and clearly extensions of crust matter, forming peaks.

That's a selective interpretation of evidence, similar to that of the DSII-Endor hologram case in Star Wars.

Unfortunately, it's not particularly selective - the Okudagram is the only way we can try to scale the thing directly. I wish it was selective, but the Okudagram is the clearest piece of evidence out of the lot, as foggy as it is. Which is sad, really, but...

Well, I wouldn't rely on the okudagram for precise sizes. That said, Wilga quoted the part about the layer close to the core. That alone is good enough.
Which brings me to another problem...

They're supposed to be helping save the planet from cooling off.

... by injecting plasma from single torpedo sized pods, into magma pockets close to the core? They're clearly implying that a vast part of the crust has cooled down below fusion point, and that phenomenom extended very deeply, close to the core...
Somehow... I find the energy requirements very low.

Besides, we can easily assume a Venus sized planet as well. Assuming an Earth sized planet would be looking at a limit that's higher than the lower one.

[Jedi Master Spock]

1. What things they break apart, exactly?

Humans... rocks...

... if it takes longer than a frame, we see it happen slowly and in what looks like a piecemeal fashion.

2. The repeated misuse of a term doesn't make it correct. Every language has words everybody wrongly uses.

So? Gives us somewhere to start.

3. There's the simple fact that if the process ahd anything to with vaporization, which it does not, the atmosphere down there, in the pockets, would be highly toxic.

This is actually a problem with the episode regardless of what we assume.

2% of several hundreds of megatons... still lies in the megaton range.
We hardly even see kiloton level associated DET effects.

We clearly just did.

Nope. They clearly of the same colour of the crust, and clearly extensions of crust matter, forming peaks.

Who says that's the crust, and not the cooled upper mantle layer, with the outside circle representing the crust? (Remember, by scale, the crust should be a pretty simple line here.) Anyway, I agree, let's leave the Okudagram for now.

... by injecting plasma from single torpedo sized pods, into magma pockets close to the core? They're clearly implying that a vast part of the crust has cooled down below fusion point, and that phenomenom extended very deeply, close to the core...
Somehow... I find the energy requirements very low.

Besides, we can easily assume a Venus sized planet as well. Assuming an Earth sized planet would be looking at a limit that's higher than the lower one.

It could be a little larger or smaller, although not by too much if we want to be strict documentarians again.