The Die is Cast, ICS, and a retrospective on vs. debates.
Posted: Thu May 02, 2013 4:55 am
Today, I found this at SDN:
- The Duchess of Zeon wrote:BIG DISCLAIMER:
My objective here is to just provide information to versus fanfiction authors so they can base stories on these calcs to make them both "plausible" and interesting, rather than one-sided stomper adventures, because I've seen the amount of fun fanfiction of Star Trek vs. Star Wars totally disappear since ICS was published, and I regret that rather severely as it was, to me, the truly entertaining part of the versus debates.
I was heavily involved in Star Wars vs. Star Trek versus debates for a long time, and was responsible for some maximal size scalings for the Imperial fleet. A lot has changed in Star Wars since then. I pretty much tuned out after ROTS and didn't revisit things until perhaps the past two months. The versus debates were functionally ended by the insertion of the 200 gigaton turbolaser estimate into the Acclamator stats in the Incredible Cross Sections.
One problem with them however is that they were a decidedly high-end estimate of Star Wars firepower. Extremely high end--excessively high end, one could argue. Looking back, this troubles me somewhat, because for a long time we did argue, as debaters are wont to do (and there was nothing wrong with it), for low-end estimates of Star Trek firepower.
It would be only fair to observe that if we are to accept 200 gigaton yields for medium turbolasers that we necessarily also accept the maximum possible energy output for Star Trek. And this is very much higher than what is commonly admitted. We have examples from both TOS and The Die is Cast in DS9, and they both suggest a rather substantial capability on the part of Star Trek.
The 200 gigaton level for a quad turbolaser bolt is simply a statement. It is, quite arguably, on exactly the same level as the idea that 20 Romulan and Cardassian ships could "destroy" the crust in an hour, and the mantle in 5 hours, of a habitable planet. Therefore, we will hold them to be equally valid and see what comes of it. The rationale is straightforward: 200 gigaton turbolaser bolts are substantially in excess of what is seen on the screen. So is the stated capacity of Star Trek energy weapons from TDIC.
Star Wars pictoral analysis shows firepower much more powerful than Star Trek pictoral analysis based firepower. This isn't in dispute, and I haven't become a Trekkie. What I am trying to do is inject some life back into the vs. debates and a more sensible comparison of the two universes. What attracted me to the "warsie" side of things was first of all that Star Wars depicts an immensely old, immensely sophisticated civilization on a galaxy-spanning scale. Star Trek is about a young civilization.
But I do not really think that Star Trek displays a level of firepower, or general technology, much worse than in the days of Xim the Despot in Star Wars history. There is still some real grounds for comparison.
One of the most important things to do at this point is to have a geology lesson. The mantle is not liquid. The temperature of rocks in the mantle is already much greater than the melting point of the rocks in the mantle. It is held a solid due to lithostatic pressure, not due to its energy content. Or, to put it simply, you can make the mantle liquid simply by eliminating the lithostatic pressure on it. You do not need to heat it up.
This puts the claim of being able to destroy the mantle in 5 hours, which otherwise sounds extremely powerful, into context: The crust is 5 - 120km thick, and the lower part of the lithosphere is 50 - 120km thick and composed of rigid rock. It would be quite possible for a civilization like those shown in Star Trek to create deep shelters inside the upper lithosphere; this provides the necessity of the Romulan-Cardassian fleet to continue firing to "destroy the mantle" quite amply: The objective is to destroy enough rock to remove the lithostatic pressure so that the planet experiences liquifaction.
More generally, "destroying" the lithosphere (the crust+solid mantle) essentially destroys the tectonic plates. This is a relatively more sensible proposition and in shattering them one expects a massive volcanic overturn layer. This would be analogous to an artificially induced "mantle overturn" like has occurred naturally in the past on Venus.
Total heat flow at the surface of the Earth from convention is around 4.0E+13 W. Of this only something like 8.0E+11W is actually released by volcanism. This is about 2% of the total; but that's not all the energy involved because the other 98% doesn't exclusively radiate out through the crust. The amount of energy that is being stored per second in Venus, a very similar planet, for a major mantle overturn event, is probably about equivalent to the energy involved in both volcanism and driving plate tectonics on Earth.
"Energy of plate tectonics calculation and project" by NH Swedan suggests the energy of the 'tectonic engine' of the planet is 1.29E+19 J/yr or 4.0E+11W. Collectively this means that the energy Venus is not successfully rejecting by the lack of a tectonic regime, leading to mantle overturn events, is about 1.2E+12W. With a mantle overturn event every 300 million years, Venus would have stored 1.0E+28 J of energy for such an event to occur. This is approximately 5,900 times the energy required to melt the surface of a planet to a depth of 1 metre based on Dr. Curtis Saxton's calculations.
If rough surface destruction takes 1 hour, and the destruction of the mantle a further 5 hours, a total energy input for 20 ships over 6 hours would yield an average firepower (we assume higher for a D'Deridex and lower for a Keldon) of 2.3E+22 W. If a mantle overturn event is every 500 million years, this goes to 3.8E+22W.
Comparing to the 200 gigaton turbolaser rating.
We may take it that a quad turbolaser with a 200 gigaton yield per shot is comparable to the beam trench notch cannon on an ISD-I. These medium bolts were about 3 - 4 times smaller than the largest turbolaser bolts observed by Dr. Saxton in scaling for the size of turbolaser bolts from a Star Destroyer. Maximum rate of fire observed from a turbolaser on a Star Destroyer has been one round per 2 seconds. Therefore an average figure is about 300 - 400 gigatons/second per heavy gun mount. With the secondary guns producing something like a trivial 11% of the total energy consumption of the guns, the rest going to the 64 primary heavy turbolaser cannon, 21,000 gigatons per second is a lower bound and 28,000 gigatons per second is an upper bound. At the lower bound this is 8.8E+22W, and at the upper bound this is 1.2E+23W, though this assumes the medium guns fire at the same rate as heavy ones; they may fire up to four times faster, which would drive the upper bound to more like 1.6E+23W.
The end result of this is that if we're using maximal calculations for both the Galactic Empire and Star Trek, we actually get extremely similar power figures for both Star Wars and Star Trek. However, this is based only on firepower. If we use the acceleration of the Star Destroyers scene in the Battle of Endor, we get noticeably higher figures for the Star Destroyer's total energy output: Around 1E+25 W based on Dr. Saxton's calculations for typical density of a warship and the 3,000g acceleration observed.
However, my calculations for Star Trek firepower have been relatively conservative with the set of assumptions made and rounding potentials; they may have also intended to complete the entire attack in only 5 hours, not six. Collectively this means a true "maximum upper limit" for the energy output, including both shields and weapons and drives, ancillary systems, etc, of an average Alpha/Beta Quadrant ship is probably more around 1.5E+23W, in the same way that for a Star Destroyer this figure is based on firepower alone around 2.5E+23W for shields and weapons alike, and closer to 1E+25W for observed acceleration. We can assume however that the acceleration in question was truly a "full emergency thrust" situation to trap the Rebel fleet quickly; it was probably conducted without energy shields and weapons up to maximize speed, as anything else would imply that weapons are a trivial component of power generated on an ISD, which is irrational. If the ~1.0E+25W for a Star Destroyer's total power output based on acceleration is accurate, then it would almost certainly require firepower to be at the higher end, around 1.6E+23W, with shielding probably double that if we assume that the designers rationally wished to provide equal particle and energy shielding. This still means that something like 75 - 80% of an ISD's energy output is actually going to engines and ancillary systems, though certainly that isn't unreasonable with the enormous power outputs of real life warships also being essentially almost entirely directed to engines in percentile terms.
Based on this, an actual comparison of maximal firepower levels between Star Wars and Star Trek could actually allow for the ISD to only have ~65 - 70 times the energy production of an averaged Keldon/D'Deridex and has about 5.3 times the volume as the averaged K/DD. This would suggest that the energy density per-tonne of a Star Destroyer is actually only about 12 times greater than that of a Star Trek vessel. In terms of firepower density, the Star Trek ships would actually be slightly ahead -- 1.26 times the firepower density of a Star Destroyer. But this isn't likely for the simple reason that the K/DD's were firing warheads; the Star Wars firepower is based entirely off of energy weapons, and we know from EU sources that Star Destroyers have missile and mine launchers with the Assault Proton Torpedoes the former can fire being twelve times more powerful than a normal Proton torpedo, and viable anti-ship weapons in their own right. We also know from canon that Star Destroyers can fire flak rounds, and that the guns seen in ROTS expelling expended cartridges were multirole mass drivers for giving an acceleration advantage to torpedoes/missiles and firing flak bombs and direct impactor projectiles. The energy required for these mass drivers, which Star Destroyers must have based on the official publications (since they are explicitly described as the only weapon that produces flak bursts, and we see Star Destroyers generating flak bursts), further drive up Star Destroyer weapons energy output, and the damage the warheads from the missile/torpedo launchers and the mass drivers of course provides additional energy output to balance the relative firepower-to-tonne capabilities of the Star Wars and Star Trek ships.
The final conclusion of this kind of analysis is that if we go entirely based on upper limits for both Star Trek and Star Wars, we actually have a pretty fair fight -- the Federation fleet in "Favour the Bold" of 600 ships might well have been worth 8 - 10 ISD-IIs.