Borg Cube vs 1 gigaton nuke

[Roondar]

What's more important in attacking the Borg is not how much energy you're putting downrange, but whether or not the weapon is something they're currently defending against. If they're expecting naquadah enhanced nukes, naquadah enhanced nukes aren't going to do a thing.

Weapons the Borg manage well against are funky weapons which deal great amounts of damage via physics raping mechanisms. For example, the phasers, which for the first time they were used against a Cube, ate large volumes. When the bizarre effect of a weapon is understood, all that remains is the sheer energy of the attack in its bluntest form.

Such as say... M/AM explosions? They manage to do very well against those, all things considered.

I wasn't of those who argued that one GT nuke would do it, but the Tau'ri have ships capable of beaming their entire armoury at once if needed.

Besides, First Contact's finishing blow against the Cube shouldn't be taken that literally. You can say the ship took several torps in one single weak spot and we didn't see much of the structure blowing up, but we didn't see anything that would be synonymous with the atmosphere filled interior of a ship exposed to hundreds of megatons either, and we didn't see the debris being ejected anywhere as fast as expected. There obviously are pros and cons.

The problem here being, naturally, that even the lowest calcs of PT's put them at yields which would create much bigger effects on the hull/inside of pretty much any Starship they've ever been used against. The easy (and IMHO correct) way out would not be to lower the yields but to acknowledge that which we allready know - ST ships hulls (along with their hull-strengthing techno-babble) are just a whole lot stronger than you'd think. They tend to absorb much more energy than ordinary materials would.

In any other Sci-Fi show this is taken for granted (like say, SW, SG, Halo, etc). I see zero defensible reason why ST would be any different.

Heck, nine times out of ten the reasoning is actually reversed: see <random SW/SG/Halo/Etc> ship take a <ludicrous yield> blast. Observe how almost nothing happens, proving how über our hulls are. yay!

[Jedi Master Spock]

Gigaton phasers? That's silly.

Personally, I´m inclined to agree. I´m thinking Phasers are going to be somewhat weaker than torpedoes - say 50-75% of them or so. This fits with my -admitedly not very scientific- 'gut feeling' about how the two match up onscreen.

Then again, gigaton phasers are not needed at all for the reasoning behind the Borg surviving 1 GT nukes ;)

Well, I might actually agree with you on 50-75%. It depends how we measure - are we measuring from a typical phaser "hit," or a sustained second of phaser fire, or what? VS debate estimates are rarely precise to within 50% in any event.

It may seem counterintuitive at first for phasers to deliver more yield over time, but photon torpedoes have things other than brute yield going for them - such as nano-second scale intensity and being long-range guided projectiles. A phaser may be able to deliver a gigaton over the course of an entire second, but a photon torpedo will deliver it in less than a microsecond of impact. IMO, GCS phasers on full power have a "high-end" estimate of 1-10 GT/sec. The Sovereign, Ambassador, and Nebula classes are the only ones that should be able to even come close to matching that. The typical Federation ship in those fleets is closer to a tenth the size of a GCS, and is older with less advanced phaser arrays; it's only in the case of a handful of ships that we can suggest > GT/sec phasers.

The same generous end for photon torpedoes is 100-1000 MT. A typical "hit" is often only a small fraction of a second, so even the GCS is delivering similar yields per "hit" with phasers as with photon torpedoes. Lean high on the torpedoes and low on the phasers and that rapidly shifts just within the margin of error.

Fact of the matter is, though, that most of the excessive firepower incidents rely on the use of beam weapons, and the ability to continuously fire phasers for an entire battle is what makes them primary weapons. "Inheritance"'s Okudagram being the most egregious example of phaser power. Dialogue-based estimates still lead to around a half kilometer of matter going poof per second on low power settings. Phasers deliver an impressive amount of power.

This is confirmed in "The Sound of Her Voice" when pulling phaser power gives a 50% boost in speed for the Defiant. Warp power requires a lot of juice - even something the size of the Defiant should have a multi-exawatt warp core based on comparison with the GCS, and the Defiant does have disproportionately powerful phasers.

We have, in other words, suggestive data about how much raw juice it requires to run phasers. "Galileo Seven" and "Conscience of the King" both put raw power pack capacity of TOS hand phasers into the gigajoules. Almost all the data is suggesting that phasers are well within an order of magnitude of the vaporization energy of their effects - quite possibly dead on.

Weapons the Borg manage well against are funky weapons which deal great amounts of damage via physics raping mechanisms. For example, the phasers, which for the first time they were used against a Cube, ate large volumes. When the bizarre effect of a weapon is understood, all that remains is the sheer energy of the attack in its bluntest form.

If that was true, how come quantum torpedoes, transphasic torpedoes, and the like do so well? How come phasers are still being used with effect against the Borg?

The cumulative yield of torpedoes dumped on the cube's weak spot in ST:FC is far less than the raw amount of energy dumped in the deflector beam. Raw energy is not nearly as important as delivering that energy in a difficult-to-stop form in the right place at the right time; the deflector beam array weapon delivered more raw power than any other weapons system installed on a ST ship could hope to (maximum warp power >>> maximum phaser power).

All indications are that for most ships, warp power exceeds phaser power by a factor of 10-100, in fact. If the warp power available to ships is roughly proportionate to volume, the power of the BOBW deflector beam quite likely exceeds the phaser power of the entire ST:FC fleet.

And yet, that fleet was using phasers, not massed deflector array beams. Why? Perhaps because phasers are flexible technobabble weapons that are incredibly difficult to shield against. The Borg cannot shield against all possible phaser frequencies all the time.

[Mike DiCenso]

I'm surpised that no one mentions TNG's "A Matter of Time", which has the E-D not only burning off the thick layer of volcanic dust in the Pentharan atmosphere using it's second largest phaser array, but also taking the the resulting plasma and redirecting it out into space using it's nav deflector and shields.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

Weapons the Borg manage well against are funky weapons which deal great amounts of damage via physics raping mechanisms. For example, the phasers, which for the first time they were used against a Cube, ate large volumes. When the bizarre effect of a weapon is understood, all that remains is the sheer energy of the attack in its bluntest form.

Such as say... M/AM explosions? They manage to do very well against those, all things considered.

Yes, M/AM weapons do that just fine. No matter how Borg shields work, the point is that they can take the explosions of such devices, although it's possible that the Borg's defenses make torpedoes explode slightly prematurely. Although AM will react with matter, it may not be as efficient as it would be if the warhead detonated under perfect mix conditions.

I wasn't of those who argued that one GT nuke would do it, but the Tau'ri have ships capable of beaming their entire armoury at once if needed.

Besides, First Contact's finishing blow against the Cube shouldn't be taken that literally. You can say the ship took several torps in one single weak spot and we didn't see much of the structure blowing up, but we didn't see anything that would be synonymous with the atmosphere filled interior of a ship exposed to hundreds of megatons either, and we didn't see the debris being ejected anywhere as fast as expected. There obviously are pros and cons.

The problem here being, naturally, that even the lowest calcs of PT's put them at yields which would create much bigger effects on the hull/inside of pretty much any Starship they've ever been used against. The easy (and IMHO correct) way out would not be to lower the yields but to acknowledge that which we allready know - ST ships hulls (along with their hull-strengthing techno-babble) are just a whole lot stronger than you'd think. They tend to absorb much more energy than ordinary materials would.

In any other Sci-Fi show this is taken for granted (like say, SW, SG, Halo, etc). I see zero defensible reason why ST would be any different.
Heck, nine times out of ten the reasoning is actually reversed: see <random SW/SG/Halo/Etc> ship take a <ludicrous yield> blast. Observe how almost nothing happens, proving how über our hulls are. yay!

The effects would not necessarily be that impressive. I believe that regardless of the fireball special effect, what is usually left of a hull after a torpedo hit it is a reliable indicator of the weapon's power.
I agree that the hulls are tough, but it would require pushing this reasoning rather far to start arguing that the guts of a Cube that can be smashed by one of those S8472 aliens can take megatons to the face and slightly flinch. One explanation I didn't think of for FC's issue regarding the Borg Cube's demise is that it's possible the shields were reshaped to fill the hole. If they're adaptable, they should be adaptable in shape. Therefore the tame explosion effects could be explained by the shield largely swallowing the energy, but unfortunately some of the bleed off still managed to reach that one soft spot, and trigger a chain reaction which would lead to the destruction of the entire Cube in an impressive display of pyrotechnics.

Well, I might actually agree with you on 50-75%. It depends how we measure - are we measuring from a typical phaser "hit," or a sustained second of phaser fire, or what? VS debate estimates are rarely precise to within 50% in any event.

It may seem counterintuitive at first for phasers to deliver more yield over time, but photon torpedoes have things other than brute yield going for them - such as nano-second scale intensity and being long-range guided projectiles. A phaser may be able to deliver a gigaton over the course of an entire second, but a photon torpedo will deliver it in less than a microsecond of impact. IMO, GCS phasers on full power have a "high-end" estimate of 1-10 GT/sec. The Sovereign, Ambassador, and Nebula classes are the only ones that should be able to even come close to matching that. The typical Federation ship in those fleets is closer to a tenth the size of a GCS, and is older with less advanced phaser arrays; it's only in the case of a handful of ships that we can suggest > GT/sec phasers.

The same generous end for photon torpedoes is 100-1000 MT. A typical "hit" is often only a small fraction of a second, so even the GCS is delivering similar yields per "hit" with phasers as with photon torpedoes. Lean high on the torpedoes and low on the phasers and that rapidly shifts just within the margin of error.

Fact of the matter is, though, that most of the excessive firepower incidents rely on the use of beam weapons, and the ability to continuously fire phasers for an entire battle is what makes them primary weapons. "Inheritance"'s Okudagram being the most egregious example of phaser power. Dialogue-based estimates still lead to around a half kilometer of matter going poof per second on low power settings. Phasers deliver an impressive amount of power.

Poof being the word. If it's anywhere like Inheritance, Legacy and Masks (1, 2), we're dealing with beams which can "dissolve" or "drill" --in rather magical ways-- massive amounts of matter without the associated effects due to a sudden and important increase of temperature of the material in question, be it ice or rock.
That, and the disintegration effect that's well known for such weapons. We've seen what it does to ships (a few examples: against a Cube for the UFP's first contact with the Borg, A Klingon's weapons that go through the E-D's shield, and other incidences in DS9) -- ships which can even continue to eat their own hulls once they've been largely blasted and their weapon banks logically destroyed in the process, for whatever technobabble effect that may release...

Gigaton yields for phasers, that's really something new for me, especially here; we're on a pro-ST side, but I don't even recall this being argued in favour of a high end.
Also I have a problem with the idea of a range that actually spans a full order of magnitude. 100 to 1000 MT, that's quite a stretch of arms here.

This is confirmed in "The Sound of Her Voice" when pulling phaser power gives a 50% boost in speed for the Defiant. Warp power requires a lot of juice - even something the size of the Defiant should have a multi-exawatt warp core based on comparison with the GCS, and the Defiant does have disproportionately powerful phasers.

Multi-exawatt if we go with Data's figure. The Dauphin gives, depending on the script you pick, gigawatts to terawatts of power production for the entire ship, and if anyone is interested in "explaining" this figure, anyone can also apply this same methodology to "explain" Data's billions of gigawatts (per something?).

Besides how fast was the Defiant flying at warp?
You may say "max speed" or "top cruisse speed", which is not the same, but still pretty high anyway.
So what's the power consumption?
I think we also happen to have an old thread about that one. It would be interesting to put our hands on it.
We had a probe fitted to support one humanoid life that would fly at warp 9.

We have, in other words, suggestive data about how much raw juice it requires to run phasers. "Galileo Seven" and "Conscience of the King" both put raw power pack capacity of TOS hand phasers into the gigajoules. Almost all the data is suggesting that phasers are well within an order of magnitude of the vaporization energy of their effects - quite possibly dead on.

You have to mitigate those high ends with the infamous packing crate cover syndrome.
Conscience of the King: a "mass-critical" concentrated NDF effect that spreads over a volume would explain a large portion of the devastation, seeing how one shot can cascade over the entire body of a humanoid and dissolve it, and more when a prolongated hosing can eat away a wall rock. Also, a 1 kg explosive detonating inside a taxi cab will wreck its interior. I beg to see the size of the deck in question.
Galileo Seven: what are the observations, precisely?

I remember your Ensigns of Command calculation, but there are many issues with it.
I have not seen the episode, but I'd still like to know how so much of the pipe's length can glow red with no variation of luminosity, which is already very odd. That, and how can it be that on both edges of the heated up section of the pipe, the colour actually reaches a dim orange instead of red?

Besides, the picture you use is very small, but I noticed a couple of things when going at Trekcore.
http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbna ... 48&page=10
http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbna ... 48&page=11

Did Data shift his aim from this spot to the pipe?
On this picture, the pipeline is clearly passing behind the small building with the flights of stairs.
How can it be that Data hits the pipe at a point that seems to be somewhere at the top of the stairs, when his weapon is hitting near the lowest steps?
Besides, on the larger version of the picture you used, we can also notice that the top of the stairs, and only that section, is also glowing red. How odd.

And if I already were having issues to explain how the explosion occurred on the pipeline, we'd also have to look at other issues.
In Trekcore's following picture, the pipeline has totally cooled down below luminosity level. Assuming that screencap is taken perhaps one or give seconds after the former one, that's a rather fantastic natural cooling rate.

Last but not least, we can also see even more interesting bits on this last cap. First, there are two secondary explosions that occur, the one of the left side of the screen being even greater in magnitude from the one that apparently directly resulted from Data's shot. We can know that by using the size of the pipe as a yardstick.
The other explosion, further up the pipe, occurs where there's some kind of torch light, halfway between the two curved sections, somewhere above a point in the middle of the valley.
And finally, we can see another of those segments glowing red. Compare picture 210 and 211, it's close to the mountain, before the left turn. I'm sure Data's phaser didn't reach that far.

The whole damned thing is rather puzzling.

Weapons the Borg manage well against are funky weapons which deal great amounts of damage via physics raping mechanisms. For example, the phasers, which for the first time they were used against a Cube, ate large volumes. When the bizarre effect of a weapon is understood, all that remains is the sheer energy of the attack in its bluntest form.

If that was true, how come quantum torpedoes, transphasic torpedoes, and the like do so well?

Perhaps because their own associated technobabble creates microporosity in Borg shields, and thus increases the amount of damage delivered to the structure of the ship like in ye old days. This would explain, perhaps, a low increase of raw firepower, but a greater gain in efficiency at ignoring certain types of shields.

How come phasers are still being used with effect against the Borg?

Suggestion: Because they still deliver lots of energy on an extremely focused point, and if the Borg's defensive shield fails, then there's a chance of dealing the Cube some damage to the extent the first Cube met by the E-D suffered of, with large swathes of hull erased from realspace.
Torps being rawish, they have their advantage, but they're different and not exactly known for being as bizarre as phasers. It's my opinion that phasers are very good against matter and not too advanced hulls.
Advanced civilizations in Trek like the UFP, Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians and co have come to build hulls which can resist NDF effects rather well (although we did see hulls dissolve after being hit by Klingon disruptors, in the movie when the bolts passed through the shields).
Torps may come with such effects to a small degree as well, but that's not exactly what they seem to be known for. They don't discriminate enough.

The cumulative yield of torpedoes dumped on the cube's weak spot in ST:FC is far less than the raw amount of energy dumped in the deflector beam.

Although I don't know the yield of the beam in question, the fact that they hit a weak spot, after a prolonged assault on the Cube, explains why the Borg ship went down against such weapons in the end.

Raw energy is not nearly as important as delivering that energy in a difficult-to-stop form in the right place at the right time; the deflector beam array weapon delivered more raw power than any other weapons system installed on a ST ship could hope to (maximum warp power >>> maximum phaser power).

All indications are that for most ships, warp power exceeds phaser power by a factor of 10-100, in fact. If the warp power available to ships is roughly proportionate to volume, the power of the BOBW deflector beam quite likely exceeds the phaser power of the entire ST:FC fleet.

What's the basis for that claim? I can't find the BOBW super beam calc on your analysis pages.

And yet, that fleet was using phasers, not massed deflector array beams. Why? Perhaps because phasers are flexible technobabble weapons that are incredibly difficult to shield against. The Borg cannot shield against all possible phaser frequencies all the time.

That's an equally good explanation, and doesn't require claiming extreme firepower for phasers. The fact that it can actually eat Borg hull at east when the ship's not prepared would also help a lot.

EDIT: changed the links for the pictures. Now they work.

[Mr. Oragahn]

I'm surpised that no one mentions TNG's "A Matter of Time", which has the E-D not only burning off the thick layer of volcanic dust in the Pentharan atmosphere using it's second largest phaser array, but also taking the the resulting plasma and redirecting it out into space using it's nav deflector and shields.
-Mike

What's that?

[Mike DiCenso]

In that episode, numerous volcanic eruptions had filled the upper atmosphere of the earth-like planet Penthara IV. So much so that sunight was nearly blocked out all over the planet, and within a day snow was falling on what was originally temperate or tropical areas as seen here. For a perspective, the amount of dust that the great eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 threw some 21 cubic km of volcanic material into the air (much of it falling back immediately with hours and days), and while it caused in the year following the eruption for average global temperatures to fall by as much as 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 °F), it did not cause severe snowfall over the entire globe, nor totally to block out nearly all sunlight, except very locally. Now imagine that multiplied by several orders of magnitude, and you have any idea of how much dust needed to be ionized by the E-D phasers into plasma, and furthermore the dust was all removed within 11 seconds of the ship firing phasers, drawn up into space by the ship's navigational deflector, held by the shields, and then redirected off into space.

For further perspective, a ball of volcanic material a little over 1.725 km in radius would be about the volume of that much volcanic material. The vaporization energies would be on the order of 20.6 gigatons. Likely more given how difuse the material was. Now it can be argued that most of the energy was the result of a chain-reaction effect, which is what would have happened, if the ship's phasers had been off in power output variance by as much 60 gigawatts (burning off the Pentharan atmosphere in the process), but either way that's still an impressive amount of energy in so short a period of time, in particular since the amount of dust was likely far, far greater than that put out by Krakatoa on Earth.
-Mike

[Roondar]

Weapons the Borg manage well against are funky weapons which deal great amounts of damage via physics raping mechanisms. For example, the phasers, which for the first time they were used against a Cube, ate large volumes. When the bizarre effect of a weapon is understood, all that remains is the sheer energy of the attack in its bluntest form.

Such as say... M/AM explosions? They manage to do very well against those, all things considered.

Yes, M/AM weapons do that just fine. No matter how Borg shields work, the point is that they can take the explosions of such devices, although it's possible that the Borg's defenses make torpedoes explode slightly prematurely. Although AM will react with matter, it may not be as efficient as it would be if the warhead detonated under perfect mix conditions.

I'll admit to being rather sceptical towards that claim. Where is your evidence the shields work that way instead of taking the blast directly?

To me it seems as if Borg shields are just a whole lot stronger than UFP shields. And considering their general high tech edge and huge size advantage over the UFP ships it's only logical, no?

I wasn't of those who argued that one GT nuke would do it, but the Tau'ri have ships capable of beaming their entire armoury at once if needed.

Besides, First Contact's finishing blow against the Cube shouldn't be taken that literally. You can say the ship took several torps in one single weak spot and we didn't see much of the structure blowing up, but we didn't see anything that would be synonymous with the atmosphere filled interior of a ship exposed to hundreds of megatons either, and we didn't see the debris being ejected anywhere as fast as expected. There obviously are pros and cons.

The problem here being, naturally, that even the lowest calcs of PT's put them at yields which would create much bigger effects on the hull/inside of pretty much any Starship they've ever been used against. The easy (and IMHO correct) way out would not be to lower the yields but to acknowledge that which we allready know - ST ships hulls (along with their hull-strengthing techno-babble) are just a whole lot stronger than you'd think. They tend to absorb much more energy than ordinary materials would.

In any other Sci-Fi show this is taken for granted (like say, SW, SG, Halo, etc). I see zero defensible reason why ST would be any different.
Heck, nine times out of ten the reasoning is actually reversed: see <random SW/SG/Halo/Etc> ship take a <ludicrous yield> blast. Observe how almost nothing happens, proving how über our hulls are. yay!

The effects would not necessarily be that impressive. I believe that regardless of the fireball special effect, what is usually left of a hull after a torpedo hit it is a reliable indicator of the weapon's power.
I agree that the hulls are tough, but it would require pushing this reasoning rather far to start arguing that the guts of a Cube that can be smashed by one of those S8472 aliens can take megatons to the face and slightly flinch. One explanation I didn't think of for FC's issue regarding the Borg Cube's demise is that it's possible the shields were reshaped to fill the hole. If they're adaptable, they should be adaptable in shape. Therefore the tame explosion effects could be explained by the shield largely swallowing the energy, but unfortunately some of the bleed off still managed to reach that one soft spot, and trigger a chain reaction which would lead to the destruction of the entire Cube in an impressive display of pyrotechnics.

On the other hand, your reasoning would require something just as bad: UFP torpedoes below 1 MT.

And UFP torpedoes are most definitely not limited to sub MT yield.

Not only would such yields make zero sense when compared to what they seek to do with them (or accomplish, or threathen to do with them, depending on the situation), it also stretches credibility to the breaking point (and beyond) to suggest that 24th century space combat uses yields that would make the average real world nuke seem like a massively overpowered doomsday weapon.

Especially since we know that unshielded UFP ships of the 23rd century type can take nukes unshielded and live to tell the tale. (per the TOS episodes involving their accidental timetravel back to Earth and their fights with Romulan starships).

[Mr. Oragahn]

In that episode, numerous volcanic eruptions had filled the upper atmosphere of the earth-like planet Penthara IV. So much so that sunight was nearly blocked out all over the planet, and within a day snow was falling on what was originally temperate or tropical areas as seen here. For a perspective, the amount of dust that the great eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 threw some 21 cubic km of volcanic material into the air (much of it falling back immediately with hours and days), and while it caused in the year following the eruption for average global temperatures to fall by as much as 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 °F), it did not cause severe snowfall over the entire globe, nor totally to block out nearly all sunlight, except very locally. Now imagine that multiplied by several orders of magnitude, and you have any idea of how much dust needed to be ionized by the E-D phasers into plasma, and furthermore the dust was all removed within 11 seconds of the ship firing phasers, drawn up into space by the ship's navigational deflector, held by the shields, and then redirected off into space.

For further perspective, a ball of volcanic material a little over 1.725 km in radius would be about the volume of that much volcanic material. The vaporization energies would be on the order of 20.6 gigatons. Likely more given how difuse the material was. Now it can be argued that most of the energy was the result of a chain-reaction effect, which is what would have happened, if the ship's phasers had been off in power output variance by as much 60 gigawatts (burning off the Pentharan atmosphere in the process), but either way that's still an impressive amount of energy in so short a period of time, in particular since the amount of dust was likely far, far greater than that put out by Krakatoa on Earth.
-Mike

I've been collecting information on that episode, and I can tell you that the chain reaction did occur, but within acceptable parameters.
The visuals alone show it. The whole event is the absolute proof that the phasers are an extremely exotic weapon, depending on the needs of the plot. It's literally a fix-it-all beam here.
Is this episode useful?

Yes, M/AM weapons do that just fine. No matter how Borg shields work, the point is that they can take the explosions of such devices, although it's possible that the Borg's defenses make torpedoes explode slightly prematurely. Although AM will react with matter, it may not be as efficient as it would be if the warhead detonated under perfect mix conditions.

I'll admit to being rather sceptical towards that claim. Where is your evidence the shields work that way instead of taking the blast directly?

I don't know enough of Trek to guarantee any solid fundation behind this idea, but it's interesting to consider. Obviously, even if fans would tend to jump at the concept that makes their universe more powerful in the rawest way, a tactician or an industrialist would be more interested in a system that actually makes the enemy's weapon less efficient while not expanding more energy with the defenses.

To me it seems as if Borg shields are just a whole lot stronger than UFP shields. And considering their general high tech edge and huge size advantage over the UFP ships it's only logical, no?

Perhaps, yes, but the Borg are also advanced in terms of technology of tricks, not just raw power, so you can never be totally certain.
Anyway, it is not important.

The effects would not necessarily be that impressive. I believe that regardless of the fireball special effect, what is usually left of a hull after a torpedo hit it is a reliable indicator of the weapon's power.
I agree that the hulls are tough, but it would require pushing this reasoning rather far to start arguing that the guts of a Cube that can be smashed by one of those S8472 aliens can take megatons to the face and slightly flinch. One explanation I didn't think of for FC's issue regarding the Borg Cube's demise is that it's possible the shields were reshaped to fill the hole. If they're adaptable, they should be adaptable in shape. Therefore the tame explosion effects could be explained by the shield largely swallowing the energy, but unfortunately some of the bleed off still managed to reach that one soft spot, and trigger a chain reaction which would lead to the destruction of the entire Cube in an impressive display of pyrotechnics.

On the other hand, your reasoning would require something just as bad: UFP torpedoes below 1 MT.
And UFP torpedoes are most definitely not limited to sub MT yield.

Not only would such yields make zero sense when compared to what they seek to do with them (or accomplish, or threathen to do with them, depending on the situation), it also stretches credibility to the breaking point (and beyond) to suggest that 24th century space combat uses yields that would make the average real world nuke seem like a massively overpowered doomsday weapon.

Especially since we know that unshielded UFP ships of the 23rd century type can take nukes unshielded and live to tell the tale. (per the TOS episodes involving their accidental timetravel back to Earth and their fights with Romulan starships).

Why would they need to be below 1 MT? I'm considering that the explosions weren't so violent because the shields were reshaped as to fit inside the hole, perhaps even protecting certain sections independantly, but their efficiency was reduced. Again, I have hard times accepting the idea that the materials used inside the Cube can naturally withstand multi-megaton so well without the help of technology and force fields, when alien creatures have been breaching walls with just the strength of their organic limbs.
The idea of sections being sealed off by force fields isn't ridiculous either. If drones, notably those operating inside Borg ships, can have shields, it comes to reason that the so cavernous and porous Borg ships would rely on force fields to a large degree. Some would be used to contain atmosphere, but their power could be cranked up to withstand attacks.

[Mike DiCenso]

I've been collecting information on that episode, and I can tell you that the chain reaction did occur, but within acceptable parameters.
The visuals alone show it. The whole event is the absolute proof that the phasers are an extremely exotic weapon, depending on the needs of the plot. It's literally a fix-it-all beam here.

Is this episode useful?

I seriously doubt you've gathered any real information or you'd have stumbled across Data's briefing to Picard on the procedure that was being planned using the phasers, deflectors and shields to remove the dust:

PICARD: The good news.

DATA: The motion of the dust has created a great deal of electrostatic energy in the upper atmosphere. With a modified phaser blast, we could create a shock front that would encircle the planet and ionise the particles.

PICARD: That would be like striking a spark in a gas-filled room.

DATA: With one exception, sir. The particles would be converted into a high energy plasma which our shields could absorb and then re-direct harmlessly into space.

PICARD: Turn the Enterprise into a lightning rod?

DATA: Precisely, sir.
PICARD: And the bad news?

DATA: If our phaser discharge is off by as little as point zero six terawatts, it would cause a cascading exothermal inversion.

PICARD: Meaning?

DATA: We would completely burn off the planet's atmosphere.


So the inital goal is to create a shockfront, not necessarily a chain-reaction, though that admittedly may still be the case. The exothermal inversion won't occur according to Data unless the phaser discharge is off by as little as 0.06 TW. This also indicates that the 60 GW variance is a small portion of the overall of the phaser's output and Picard later confirms this by telling Rasmussen that the "margins of error are extremely critical".

So whatever else, the second largest phasers are capable of at least 60 gigawatts, probably a lot more than that since the variance is described as being a critically small minority of the output, and it would not be the maximum output capable by the ship's phasers since the second largest array is used instead of the somewhat larger dorsal saucer array. So if the variance represented as much as a third of the total output, then the second largest array is at least capable of 180 GW. On the other hand it can be ramped up even higher if it is only a tenth to as much to 600 GW. But it is quite probably it could be many times even that.

So whatever else, the wavefront was not specifically a chain-reaction, but definitively the adverse exothermal inversion was, and that was thankfully avoided. Either way phasers have an output in the mimimum hundreds of GW to low TW range.

Futher the data is useful in that the total wavefront as it encircled the planet would have required that the entirety of the dust be turned into plasma, which was then sucked up by the deflector and the shields, which means the shields can handle gigaton range energies.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

I've been collecting information on that episode, and I can tell you that the chain reaction did occur, but within acceptable parameters.
The visuals alone show it. The whole event is the absolute proof that the phasers are an extremely exotic weapon, depending on the needs of the plot. It's literally a fix-it-all beam here.

Is this episode useful?

I seriously doubt you've gathered any real information or you'd have stumbled across Data's briefing to Picard on the procedure that was being planned using the phasers, deflectors and shields to remove the dust:

I did. I read the script, but didn't find anything useful other than other typical Trek technobabble solution that fixes everthing with a bit of red this and a pinch of blue that and let's just forget we did that in the next episode.
The variance point was nothing new, we went over that three years ago, and it doesn't support gigaton phasers.

PICARD: The good news.

DATA: The motion of the dust has created a great deal of electrostatic energy in the upper atmosphere. With a modified phaser blast, we could create a shock front that would encircle the planet and ionise the particles.

PICARD: That would be like striking a spark in a gas-filled room.

DATA: With one exception, sir. The particles would be converted into a high energy plasma which our shields could absorb and then re-direct harmlessly into space.

PICARD: Turn the Enterprise into a lightning rod?

DATA: Precisely, sir.
PICARD: And the bad news?

DATA: If our phaser discharge is off by as little as point zero six terawatts, it would cause a cascading exothermal inversion.

PICARD: Meaning?

DATA: We would completely burn off the planet's atmosphere.


So the inital goal is to create a shockfront, not necessarily a chain-reaction, though that admittedly may still be the case. The exothermal inversion won't occur according to Data unless the phaser discharge is off by as little as 0.06 TW. This also indicates that the 60 GW variance is a small portion of the overall of the phaser's output and Picard later confirms this by telling Rasmussen that the "margins of error are extremely critical".

So whatever else, the second largest phasers are capable of at least 60 gigawatts, probably a lot more than that since the variance is described as being a critically small minority of the output, and it would not be the maximum output capable by the ship's phasers since the second largest array is used instead of the somewhat larger dorsal saucer array. So if the variance represented as much as a third of the total output, then the second largest array is at least capable of 180 GW. On the other hand it can be ramped up even higher if it is only a tenth to as much to 600 GW. But it is quite probably it could be many times even that.

So whatever else, the wavefront was not specifically a chain-reaction, but definitively the adverse exothermal inversion was, and that was thankfully avoided. Either way phasers have an output in the mimimum hundreds of GW to low TW range.

Futher the data is useful in that the total wavefront as it encircled the planet would have required that the entirety of the dust be turned into plasma, which was then sucked up by the deflector and the shields, which means the shields can handle gigaton range energies.
-Mike

The fact that the effect spread on its own beyond the initial shot, and did so in a self-controlled intelligent-design way, and even bumped back after the effect reached the other side of the planet, is by definition a chain reaction, just not one that ended badly.

The gases and dust released by the planet lead to an increase of energy or whatever. Data, Geordi or someone else noticed something along those lines.

The idea that a single phaser shot has the potential to put an entire atmosphere on fire is ridiculous, so much that it doesn't fit with anything, and devastating any planet would therefore only require merely shooting some gigawatt/terawatt phasers at a planet. Even TDiC didn't achieve that, and it's just as good as the nonsense of Obsession.

The continuity is going thusly: a batch of episodes that seem more or less normal, and sometimes an odd one where a single ship can kill an entire planet just by sneezing at it.
If anything, I'll chalk it up to the planet's bizarro materials in the mantle.
The reason no one mentioned that episode may be that it simply doesn't make much sense.

[Jedi Master Spock]

The fact that the effect spread on its own beyond the initial shot, and did so in a self-controlled intelligent-design way, and even bumped back after the effect reached the other side of the planet, is by definition a chain reaction, just not one that ended badly.

Actually, a Klingon battlecruiser does something quite similar in "The Chase."

WORF: Some kind of plasma reaction is consuming the lower atmosphere.
PICARD: Can we stop it?
WORF: No, sir. The reaction is global.
DATA: All life on the planet is being destroyed, sir.

It's certainly not something we see often, but every time the question has come up, the ability of a single starship to kill off a planetary population in short order has come up positive, from TOS on forwards. The mechanism is rarely made clear. I'm not sure it's actually ridiculous to suggest that this is a standard capability; it's very rare that extinguishing life on a planet is considered useful or desirable in Star Trek.

The idea that a single phaser shot has the potential to put an entire atmosphere on fire is ridiculous, so much that it doesn't fit with anything, and devastating any planet would therefore only require merely shooting some gigawatt/terawatt phasers at a planet. Even TDiC didn't achieve that, and it's just as good as the nonsense of Obsession.

Actually, TDIC is substantially more energetic by dialogue (and quite energetic by visuals as well). I'd say that the phasers in use here are substantially more energetic than gigawatts/terawatts in any event - rather, petawatt/exawatt range phasers. A 0.06 TW variance should be trivially easy precision (1 part in 17) to reach with a single terawatt phaser.

Now, we can't quantify the power needed to set off the atmosphere's chain reaction, but we can quantify the power needed to suck this stuff into orbit and then permanently away from the planet. Escaping from an Earthlike planet is 63 MJ/kg. You thus want 63 petajoules (15 megatons) [plus whatever margin for inefficiencies] per million tons of dust vacuumed up and sent out into the solar system beyond if the planet is about the same size and mass of Earth.

The "Year Without a Summer" was caused by a combination of solar lows and a series of volcanic eruptions, the largest (and most dramatic) of which emitted somewhere between 10 and 120 million tons of sulfur into the atmosphere. Dust/ash adds significantly to the total. Toba was supposed to have put 800 cubic kilometers of ash into the sky.

One billion tons of material might or might not be sufficient for a mass extinction event depending on the fragility of the ecosystem, but I suspect it's an appropriate unit to use for mass extinction events and huge climate shocks. 63 exajoules per billion tons, divided by 25 seconds of vacuuming, is about 2.5 exawatts per billion tons of debris. Not by the phasers, by the deflector array. We've seen the deflector array can channel full warp power, which is generally suggested to be more than a couple exawatts ("True Q," "Deja Q," Descent," "Half a Life," "Relics," "Where None Have Gone Before").

It's a nice example, though - not of firepower, but of power generation. There's no warp field coming into play here, which is the tricky part in all six of the above examples. It's almost useless for talking about phasers, except for ruling out the very worst Saxtonite underestimates, but it's at least moderately useful for power generation.

[Mike DiCenso]

It's a nice example, though - not of firepower, but of power generation. There's no warp field coming into play here, which is the tricky part in all six of the above examples. It's almost useless for talking about phasers, except for ruling out the very worst Saxtonite underestimates, but it's at least moderately useful for power generation.

Here I have to disagree with you, it can in a round about way be used to determine firepower strength since the shields had to handle literally gigatons of energy flowing up and around them in the form of the highly ionized plasma. And I think you know as well as I that we're talking here about several tens of gigatons that the shields had to absorb and then redirect out into space over several seconds time.
-Mike

[Roondar]

For clarity I edited out some of the quotes. I hope that is ok.

I'll admit to being rather sceptical towards that claim. Where is your evidence the shields work that way instead of taking the blast directly?

I don't know enough of Trek to guarantee any solid fundation behind this idea, but it's interesting to consider. Obviously, even if fans would tend to jump at the concept that makes their universe more powerful in the rawest way, a tactician or an industrialist would be more interested in a system that actually makes the enemy's weapon less efficient while not expanding more energy with the defenses.

Personally, I agree that ST in general show this attitude all over, but it doesn't really fly when we consider what happens to Starships (Borg inclusive) when their shields fail. Unless this part of shielding is seperate from the rest somehow, but that would make things really complicated for little reason.

Then again, if you ask me, effective yield is far more important than the raw energy anyway. If you have a magic beam that uses 1 joule to erase 1kg of matter it's the result that counts, not the use of energy.

Why would they need to be below 1 MT? I'm considering that the explosions weren't so violent because the shields were reshaped as to fit inside the hole, perhaps even protecting certain sections independantly, but their efficiency was reduced. Again, I have hard times accepting the idea that the materials used inside the Cube can naturally withstand multi-megaton so well without the help of technology and force fields, when alien creatures have been breaching walls with just the strength of their organic limbs.
The idea of sections being sealed off by force fields isn't ridiculous either. If drones, notably those operating inside Borg ships, can have shields, it comes to reason that the so cavernous and porous Borg ships would rely on force fields to a large degree. Some would be used to contain atmosphere, but their power could be cranked up to withstand attacks.

Well, material strength in the ST universe is obviously a great deal above what we have today. The NX-Enterprise took a quarter-kiloton contact explosive to it's hull (when all defenses where offline - and that ship has no Structural Integrity Grid) and the resulting hole was quite, quite anemic compared to what we'd expect from 250.000 KG of TNT vs real world materials. And that was against a 300 years older ship in a line that is far less advanced than what the Borg have.

Then again, I suppose stuff like the Borg equivalent of Structural Integrity fields could provide a lot of the answer.
(Don't forget: the movie suggests -but does not outright state-, per Data's damage report on the cube, that the Borg have lost shields prior to the part of the battle we see)

As to the walls being beaten by Organic limbs, there's two reasons this is problematic as a comparisom.
The first is that we have no idea if the wall is made from the same stuff as the outer hull.

The second being that we have no idea wether Species 8472, being from 'fluidic space' - a bizzaro dimension outside of realspace, are really that strong. Or that they just have special 'sci-fi magic' built in that makes them appear to be a whole lot stronger than they really are (i.e. they don't actually brute force the wall but use an aspect of their weird extra-dimensional state to breach it).
(on a sidenote, where does this happen exactly - my memory of species 8472 has one of them stuck over on Voyager without being nearly so strong)

[Roondar]

It's a nice example, though - not of firepower, but of power generation. There's no warp field coming into play here, which is the tricky part in all six of the above examples. It's almost useless for talking about phasers, except for ruling out the very worst Saxtonite underestimates, but it's at least moderately useful for power generation.

Here I have to disagree with you, it can in a round about way be used to determine firepower strength since the shields had to handle literally gigatons of energy flowing up and around them in the form of the highly ionized plasma. And I think you know as well as I that we're talking here about several tens of gigatons that the shields had to absorb and then redirect out into space over several seconds time.
-Mike

Well, phasers do have the tendency to make matter 'vanish' without a trace (no gasses etc as a result), so I don't think you can really count on the plasma containing all the matter (or even a significant percentage) you've calculated.

[Mike DiCenso]

Um, no. Reread the dialog and go look up the visuals on Trekcore. The phasers don't do anything like disintigration here, just as we've seen in other episodes where phasers act as pure DET weapons. If the phasers could have done what you suggest in this situation, then all the ship had to do was go around with them set on widebeam and gradually remove the dust that way. Instead they used the phasers to initiate a shockwave that encircled the planet and turned the dust into ionized plasma, then since the deflector beam acted as lightning rod to draw it up to the E-D, where the shields absorbed it, held it while the ship pirouetted about, and then dispersed the plasma out into space.
-Mike