Estimating the Size of The Bre'el Moon

[2046]

You know, I just noted something very interesting about this whole episode.

When they are considering blowing up the moon, the following exchange takes place:


Riker: 'Could we blow it into pieces?'
Data: 'The total mass of the moon would remain the same, commander'


On the face of it, this is a very reasonable thing to say: when you blow stuff up, you don't remove matter.

However, I do believe we've just 'un-canonized' the NDF effect - phasers are always said to make stuff 'disappear' in some wonky fashion but Data's statement makes it rather clear that Starfleet weapons don't do that.

It's not a contradiction. We've seen many occasions where phasers act more like dynamite than a magic eraser. Consider the difference between the "Rapture" or "Chain of Command" shots versus the "Hide and Q" or Insurrection shots. In the first group, there is extremely "clean" "vaporization" . . . the aforementioned magic eraser effect. In the latter two, it's more like dynamite.

In my view, this has suggested a fine degree of control over weapon effects, within limits. If something's too big you just have to go for it in dynamite mode, but it is possible to magic-eraser something cleanly.

It seems likely based on what we've seen that ship's phasers don't (or perhaps can't) really have only the magic eraser effect at the highest power settings. I think we've always seen them in dynamite mode, except perhaps for very low-power occasions.

But in any case, I think Riker was talking torpedoes, wasn't he?

[Mike DiCenso]

No, not in this particular case. You're probably thinking of the much later "The Pegasus" [TNG, Season 7] example where Riker specifically recommends using "most of" the photon torpedoes to destroy a large asteroid and the aforementioned ship of the episode title contained within it.

Now this will probably come up, but anyone remember the NJO thread from a while back?

We now have a better point of comparison between the E-D and a star destroyer's relative firepower with the 20km asteroidal moon Dobido of planet Sernpidal, which massed out at 10e15 kg, versus the current estimated Bre'el IV's moon's mass of 10e16 kg, and similar, though likely somewhat larger linear dimensions. In apparently either case, both ships have hours before impact, but neither will be able to reduce their respective moons down to fragments small enough to prevent a large-scale global catastrophe.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

You know, I just noted something very interesting about this whole episode.

When they are considering blowing up the moon, the following exchange takes place:


Riker: 'Could we blow it into pieces?'
Data: 'The total mass of the moon would remain the same, commander'


On the face of it, this is a very reasonable thing to say: when you blow stuff up, you don't remove matter.

However, I do believe we've just 'un-canonized' the NDF effect - phasers are always said to make stuff 'disappear' in some wonky fashion but Data's statement makes it rather clear that Starfleet weapons don't do that.

Secondly, since we now know the moons most likely mass, we can finalize the E-D's maximum tractorbeam output.

To make an object weighing 1 * 10^16 KG move by 92 m/sec requires 4,23 * 10^19 J, or in the ten seconds they took, 4,2 * 10^18 watt - aka ~1 GT/sec.

Next up, determining maximum atainable impulse speeds assuming 4,2*10^18 watts as top-end output. But that's for another thread ;)

Isn't that final figure close to that output Data mentionned during a run test?
Or maybe it was Kim for the Voyager?

That said, it does indeed put a critical blow to the idea that there's a great gain by using phasers against inert matter, and by the sound of it, it points to most of the moon being broke into still very significant solid bits. No relevant vapourization, which is odd. I mean, the yields needed to break such a moon would have to vapourize some matter, ang the gas would be kicked on other trajectories which would not be a menace anymore.
But it would be explainable with lower yields for the torps, maybe?

[Mike DiCenso]

You know, I just noted something very interesting about this whole episode.

When they are considering blowing up the moon, the following exchange takes place:


Riker: 'Could we blow it into pieces?'
Data: 'The total mass of the moon would remain the same, commander'


On the face of it, this is a very reasonable thing to say: when you blow stuff up, you don't remove matter.

However, I do believe we've just 'un-canonized' the NDF effect - phasers are always said to make stuff 'disappear' in some wonky fashion but Data's statement makes it rather clear that Starfleet weapons don't do that.

Secondly, since we now know the moons most likely mass, we can finalize the E-D's maximum tractorbeam output.

To make an object weighing 1 * 10^16 KG move by 92 m/sec requires 4,23 * 10^19 J, or in the ten seconds they took, 4,2 * 10^18 watt - aka ~1 GT/sec.

Next up, determining maximum atainable impulse speeds assuming 4,2*10^18 watts as top-end output. But that's for another thread ;)

Isn't that final figure close to that output Data mentionned during a run test?
Or maybe it was Kim for the Voyager?

I believe you're refering to Data's 12.75 billion gigawatt (12.75 million terawatts) quote from "True Q", but that is at least several orders of magnitude less than 4.2*10e18 watts.

The same is true of Kim's power statement from "Revulsion", where there is at least thousands of terawatts flowing through a power conduit.

That said, it does indeed put a critical blow to the idea that there's a great gain by using phasers against inert matter, and by the sound of it, it points to most of the moon being broke into still very significant solid bits. No relevant vapourization, which is odd. I mean, the yields needed to break such a moon would have to vapourize some matter, ang the gas would be kicked on other trajectories which would not be a menace anymore.
But it would be explainable with lower yields for the torps, maybe?

Except that any lower yeilds runs completely counter to what was expected of a torpedo in VOY's "Rise" in being able to vaporize most of a hundreds of meters wide asteroid, and what the E-D demonstrated in "Cost of Living" in destroying much of a larger asteroid (though they had to use a technobabble means to destroy the technobabble material of it's much smaller core).
-Mike

[Roondar]

You know, I just noted something very interesting about this whole episode.

When they are considering blowing up the moon, the following exchange takes place:


Riker: 'Could we blow it into pieces?'
Data: 'The total mass of the moon would remain the same, commander'


On the face of it, this is a very reasonable thing to say: when you blow stuff up, you don't remove matter.

However, I do believe we've just 'un-canonized' the NDF effect - phasers are always said to make stuff 'disappear' in some wonky fashion but Data's statement makes it rather clear that Starfleet weapons don't do that.

Secondly, since we now know the moons most likely mass, we can finalize the E-D's maximum tractorbeam output.

To make an object weighing 1 * 10^16 KG move by 92 m/sec requires 4,23 * 10^19 J, or in the ten seconds they took, 4,2 * 10^18 watt - aka ~1 GT/sec.

Next up, determining maximum atainable impulse speeds assuming 4,2*10^18 watts as top-end output. But that's for another thread ;)

Isn't that final figure close to that output Data mentionned during a run test?
Or maybe it was Kim for the Voyager?

That said, it does indeed put a critical blow to the idea that there's a great gain by using phasers against inert matter, and by the sound of it, it points to most of the moon being broke into still very significant solid bits. No relevant vapourization, which is odd. I mean, the yields needed to break such a moon would have to vapourize some matter, ang the gas would be kicked on other trajectories which would not be a menace anymore.
But it would be explainable with lower yields for the torps, maybe?

Vaporizing something does not change the mass of the object in question at all, it merely distributes it over a (much) wider area.

So Data is correct in that the mass would not change. He's also correct to state that many seperate fragments are going to wreak more havoc than one big one - this is the exact reason there are MIRV weapons. A single MIRV containing 10 seperate 1 MT bombs will do far more damage than one single 10 MT bomb*.

If he meant it that way the whole exchange will still make sense without requiring anything odd about phasers/torpedoes. After all, it really doesn't matter all that much if they vaporized even three quarters of that moon in the process, the destruction inflicted on the world below would still be devastating. Especially if you have thousands of seperate 'nuke-equivalents' falling on your world.

--

*) using the SD.net calculator I get the following for 10MT: thermal radiation 30 KM, fireball radius 1.8KM.

For 1 MT we get: thermal radiation: 11.7 KM, fireball radius: 700M.

So, ten seperate 1MT bombs will net you an area 'destroyed' with a 7KM radius. Everybody in an area with a radius of 117 KM will be seriously injured, possibly dead. This is far more effective than the larger bomb, even though the yield per bomb is much lower.

The equivalent nuke to get the same effects as the 10 seperate 1MT ones would be about 300 MT. This just goes to show: effective yields are far more important than actual yields.

To apply this to our scenario:
If Data meant 2000 fragments, each doing about 1MT worth of damage we're looking at a total radius of 23400 KM for the thermal effects, and a total radius of 1400 KM of fireball.

Now, the total energy released this way is of course much lower than dropping the moon down on the planet (merely 2 GT instead of many teratons) but the actual destructive effect will be harsher on the people, especially on the short term.

[Mike DiCenso]

Okay, that scenario I might be able to accept, if for no other reason than it fits better with the expected effects on a nickel-iron asteroid from "Rise", the large asteroid destructions seen in "Cost of Living", and "Booby Trap", among others.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

Vaporizing something does not change the mass of the object in question at all, it merely distributes it over a (much) wider area.

Well, that's the writers not thinking it completely, unfortunately.
Vapourizing the asteroid permits vapourized matter to expand on a trajectory which would make it miss the planet, and for the rest, spread it across a large area of said planet.
The momentum of gazillons particles would be utterly negligible, and said particles would burn in atmosphere.

The problem today is that we have not enough firepower to utterly vape asteroids, we don't have proper delivery methods, and as a result, we can't deal with the break up scenario.

Star Trek shouldn't have such a problem, especially with those phasers which "eat" matter for less joules than what's needed to vapourize them.

I think this whole thing is an error, a contradiction of other incidents. Or for some reason, the phasers were down, couldn't be used, or there wasn't enough AM to convert into energy for the phaser banks to dent the asteroid, which is dubious.

[Roondar]

Vaporizing something does not change the mass of the object in question at all, it merely distributes it over a (much) wider area.

Well, that's the writers not thinking it completely, unfortunately.
Vapourizing the asteroid permits vapourized matter to expand on a trajectory which would make it miss the planet, and for the rest, spread it across a large area of said planet.
The momentum of gazillons particles would be utterly negligible, and said particles would burn in atmosphere.

The problem today is that we have not enough firepower to utterly vape asteroids, we don't have proper delivery methods, and as a result, we can't deal with the break up scenario.

Star Trek shouldn't have such a problem, especially with those phasers which "eat" matter for less joules than what's needed to vapourize them.

I think this whole thing is an error, a contradiction of other incidents. Or for some reason, the phasers were down, couldn't be used, or there wasn't enough AM to convert into energy for the phaser banks to dent the asteroid, which is dubious.

I'm not sure of that.

Vaping the asteroid would require quite a bit of energy. It's said to be 'ferro-crystaline'. I'll assume that to mean 'iron' for this calc (since that will lower the energy requirements compared to say, a rock asteroid given the same weight). Iron need 450 J per KG to rise one degree. Assuming the asteroid needs to be heated by 2000 degrees to vaporize (which is too low, but still) that means the E-D would need to supply an effective yield equivalent* of 450*2000*10^16KG = 9^21 J or roughly 2 teratons.

*) As in, not the energy they actually supply, but the energy it 'appears' to take.

The E-D's phasers have never shown destructive qualities that would amount to a sustained 20 MT/sec over 29 hours. Their combat endurance is nowhere near 29 hours so that figure is ridiculous to begin with.

If we assume them to be able to fire non-stop for an hour before they run out of reserves (which is again, much too long but still a more reasonable conclusion) they'd need a sustained phaser-output with an equivalent yield of half a GT a sec. Which is much, much higher than anything we've seen them do versus objects that are roughly pure metal.

The point here is that they probably do have the ability (unlike us today) to carve the asteroid into big chunks. And probably also the ability to carve it into many small chunks. But like Data stated this still leaves you with a huge mess.

(On a sidenote, even if they could 'phaser' away the asteroid, that would probably take too long - a phaserbeam is approximately 23 meters in diameter - per the Lysian probe thread. Even if we assume the beam to be as long as the Asteroid's diameter all the time and takes only one second to phaser trough they'd still only carve away a mere pittance of the asteroid per second.

At 20 KM in diameter the effective surface area they'd need to carve away would be 3,14 * 10^8 m2. The phaser only has a surface area of 415 m^2. It would take them 209 hours to get rid of the asteroid that way since they can't 'hurry' and let the phaser do more than vanish stuff because that would likely cause chunks to break of and hit the surface)

[Mike DiCenso]

Where do you get the idea that the E-D or any other starship cannot endure 29 hours in combat? We know from DS9's "The Die is Cast", that a Romulan/Cardassian bombardment to strip the Founder's homeworld down to the core would require 6 hours, and that was from vessels that presumeably are not significantly more capable that way than their Federation counterparts. That is teratons or petatons equivalent firepower sustained over 6 hours. If they can do that to a planet, then destroying a 20-25 km moon over several hours should be easy to do.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

The problem is that you don't need to NDF the entire asteroid with the phasers. Just do as much as you can with the phasers, it will greatly reduce the amount of matter.

Then place yourself at a very good distance of the remnants of the asteroid, and spam it by volleys of many torps.

[Mike DiCenso]

It might make more sense, if Data was concerned about the thermal effects of the intial volley sending thousands of chunks of debris on tangent trajectories down onto Bre'el IV before they could be targeted and destroyed.
-Mike

[Roondar]

Where do you get the idea that the E-D or any other starship cannot endure 29 hours in combat? We know from DS9's "The Die is Cast", that a Romulan/Cardassian bombardment to strip the Founder's homeworld down to the core would require 6 hours, and that was from vessels that presumeably are not significantly more capable that way than their Federation counterparts. That is teratons or petatons equivalent firepower sustained over 6 hours. If they can do that to a planet, then destroying a 20-25 km moon over several hours should be easy to do.
-Mike

Well, there are three reasons:

1) The E-D has 275 torpedoes. They'd be done firing all of those in under two-three minutes. Phasers are, on avarage, not as powerful as photon torpedoes and usually used for precision strikes rather than brute force (which is what the torpedoes are used for). They also have a tendency to show phasers being less and less effective as combat drags on (look at many voyager episodes for that, the ship usually starts really strong when facing those darned Kazon and ends up doing less and less per shot as the battle drags on - we're still talking minutes of combat here btw, not hours)

2) There have been ample examples of combat situations in ST and none of them lasted anywhere near 29 hours of continuous fighting per ship. Even the longest of them usually only last minutes. Allmost all of those short engagements end with a clear winner or loser at the end of that time.

3) The TDiC ships knew they where going to be doing a long-term planetary bombardment. It's logical to assume they prepared their weapons loadout for that specific reason.

And they obviously did do exactly that, we see how rapidly the TDiC fleet deploys it's torpedoes. If they keep up that rate of torpedo spam they'd either be out of torpedoes in minutes or they carry many thousands of them (if a single ship fires one torpedo every two to four seconds - which looks about right) they'd need 5400 to 10800 of them per ship just to keep up.

After all, the E-D carrying only 275 torpedoes makes sense for most normal situations (heck, at 64 MT each it'd be a most-frightening 17,6 GT of firepower - overkill for all but the most extreme of situations) but there is no real reason they are limited to that amount - their cargobays could store thousands and thousands of them.

It's just that they rarely need such firepower in the first place and on the off chance that they do after all need more than that they could always prepare for the mission beforehand and fetch the thousands of torps they need. Which they probably didn't have the time for in this scenario ;)

[Roondar]

The problem is that you don't need to NDF the entire asteroid with the phasers. Just do as much as you can with the phasers, it will greatly reduce the amount of matter.

Then place yourself at a very good distance of the remnants of the asteroid, and spam it by volleys of many torps.

You really don't want to do that, torpedo blasts usually show smallish chunks flying of at great speeds. Even if you reduce the mass by 75% you'd still have plenty of opportunity for my lethal-2000-one-MT-fragments-scenario. It does not take much to get a 1MT impact on the planet from a piece of debris.

And there would be lots and lots of debris using this method.

No, the whole problem is that asteroid is so frikking close to the planet. Had it been further out they probably would have opted for destruction instead, they do have that ability after all (per Pegasus - which is an asteroid in the same general size category). It's just that the risk of bombarding the planet with asteroid pieces as a result is pretty darned high and such a bombardment would be nearly as devastating (on the short term) as dropping the moon down instead.

[Mike DiCenso]

Where do you get the idea that the E-D or any other starship cannot endure 29 hours in combat? We know from DS9's "The Die is Cast", that a Romulan/Cardassian bombardment to strip the Founder's homeworld down to the core would require 6 hours, and that was from vessels that presumeably are not significantly more capable that way than their Federation counterparts. That is teratons or petatons equivalent firepower sustained over 6 hours. If they can do that to a planet, then destroying a 20-25 km moon over several hours should be easy to do.
-Mike

Well, there are three reasons:
They also have a tendency to show phasers being less and less effective as combat drags on (look at many voyager episodes for that, the ship usually starts really strong when facing those darned Kazon and ends up doing less and less per shot as the battle drags on - we're still talking minutes of combat here btw, not hours)

I'am not sure that's always the case, and the "Deja Q" example is not one of combat, but what should be the systematic destruction of a small moon. Unlike combat, they will not have to worry about diverting power to shields, nor will they have to worry as much about damage to weapons systems since there is no return fire from an enemy.

2) There have been ample examples of combat situations in ST and none of them lasted anywhere near 29 hours of continuous fighting per ship. Even the longest of them usually only last minutes. Allmost all of those short engagements end with a clear winner or loser at the end of that time.

Not so, in "Sacrifice of Angels", the Defiant and many other Federation starships fought for 5 straight hours during the initial half of the fighting during Operation Return. The Defiant leaves the fleet behind to contend with the Dominion fleet while it goes on to try and prevent the wormhole mines from being brought down. It takes three more hours for the Defiant to get there. So that means we had many ships fighting for more than 8 hours, and with no expectation at that point that the fighting would cease any time soon.

3) The TDiC ships knew they where going to be doing a long-term planetary bombardment. It's logical to assume they prepared their weapons loadout for that specific reason.

And they obviously did do exactly that, we see how rapidly the TDiC fleet deploys it's torpedoes. If they keep up that rate of torpedo spam they'd either be out of torpedoes in minutes or they carry many thousands of them (if a single ship fires one torpedo every two to four seconds - which looks about right) they'd need 5400 to 10800 of them per ship just to keep up.

Possibly, but the fleet was also making rather extensive use of phasers and disruptors as well, so that has to be factor in as to how much of the work was expected to be high-yeild torpedoes versus high-power beam weapons.

After all, the E-D carrying only 275 torpedoes makes sense for most normal situations (heck, at 64 MT each it'd be a most-frightening 17,6 GT of firepower - overkill for all but the most extreme of situations) but there is no real reason they are limited to that amount - their cargobays could store thousands and thousands of them.

Point of correction here; the E-D carries 250 torpedoes, as per "Conundrum" [TNG, season 5]. The E-D's torpedoes also likely have much higher yeilds than a mere 65 megatons as demonstrated by the VOY "Rise" (22-155 megatons) vaporization expectation, and TNG's "Skin of Evil" (500 megatons).
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

You really don't want to do that, torpedo blasts usually show smallish chunks flying of at great speeds. Even if you reduce the mass by 75% you'd still have plenty of opportunity for my lethal-2000-one-MT-fragments-scenario. It does not take much to get a 1MT impact on the planet from a piece of debris.

And there would be lots and lots of debris using this method.

No, the whole problem is that asteroid is so frikking close to the planet. Had it been further out they probably would have opted for destruction instead, they do have that ability after all (per Pegasus - which is an asteroid in the same general size category). It's just that the risk of bombarding the planet with asteroid pieces as a result is pretty darned high and such a bombardment would be nearly as devastating (on the short term) as dropping the moon down instead.

I beg to differ. A correct pattern of proxy detonation surrounding the asteroid, by flanking it, and constantly bombarding it from the sides would take care of any escapees. They'd be vapourized and forced to detonate with the ejecta moving towards the initial mass.
Other torpedoes detonating between the asteroid and the ship/planet would destroy any consequent incomer.

Considering the distance inquired, it shouldn't be hard for the E-D to track those debris.

Besides, the mere fact that they didn't consider NDFing the asteroid to reduce its mass and move it with more ease is problematic.