Starfleet Jedi

In "A Taste of Armageddon" there is a disruptor that has it's out put given in Decibels. It has been a while since i saw the ep, and was wondering if they say it is a sonic weapon?

I recently looked up Decibel on Wikipedia after the Mythbusters talked about sound, and noticed it could be used to measure pressure and other things like electricity. Is it possible they did not mean sound?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel

Well it can't be a sonic weapon for obvious reasons, so yeah, why not?

Someone brought that up on SDN (IIRC) not long ago.

DEPAUL: Screens firm, sir. Extremely powerful sonic vibrations. Decibels eighteen to the twelfth power. If those screens weren't up, we'd be totally disrupted by now.

Not much wiggling room methinks.

Mr. Oragahn wrote:DEPAUL: Screens firm, sir. Extremely powerful sonic vibrations. Decibels eighteen to the twelfth power. If those screens weren't up, we'd be totally disrupted by now.

Not much wiggling room methinks.

Well, if they were in the upper atmosphere, then sounds could still hit them... :)

They were hit by a 800 gigawatts focused beam of Florence Foster Jenkins.

Shields or not, Picard would die.

That supposes that the disruptor beams don't hit the target, then shake it to pieces by transmitting a sonic wave through it's structure, or substance. Either way, as JMS once pointed out, that many decibels is an insane amount of energy.
-Mike