Star Trek Low end

[Lucky]

What are the events in Star Trek that are commonly troted out as low showings, but are not?

What are the low showings in Star Trek?

[Mike DiCenso]

Traditionally it tends to be based around a few episodes from TNG and DS9, but most in particular stuff from the TNG and DS9 TMs. The rest are extreme low-ball interpretations of what are actually high power events, like "The Pegasus" or "Rise".
-Mike

[Kor_Dahar_Master]

Pegasus calcs are typically trotted out.

Also Starship Down', 'Parallels' or 'Patterns of Force' are a favorite whine of a poster called "the atom" on SB.com but i have not see them he just makes posts like this:

http://forums.spacebattles.com/showpost ... stcount=81

[Mike DiCenso]

The question is this; how do any of these examples count as Star Trek low end?

There is little to no firepower shown in PoF, the only example being when the Enterprise effortlessly shoots down a nuclear missile shot at it.

"Starship Down" has a crippled Defiant fighting deep in the gravity well and super-dense atmosphere of a gas giant. Hardly low end there.

And what in "Parallels" is a low end event? There is very little starship combat in it. In fact we see one universe's E-D utterly vaporize the E-D of another.

My first impression is this person is just throwing out episode names without actually knowing anything about what happens in them. But that's all too typical for when these people argue against Trek in these debates.
-Mike

[Lucky]

The question is this; how do any of these examples count as Star Trek low end?

There is little to no firepower shown in PoF, the only example being when the Enterprise effortlessly shoots down a nuclear missile shot at it.

"Starship Down" has a crippled Defiant fighting deep in the gravity well and super-dense atmosphere of a gas giant. Hardly low end there.

And what in "Parallels" is a low end event? There is very little starship combat in it. In fact we see one universe's E-D utterly vaporize the E-D of another.

My first impression is this person is just throwing out episode names without actually knowing anything about what happens in them. But that's all too typical for when these people argue against Trek in these debates.
-Mike

"Star Ship Down" has the seemingly slow torpedo that breaches the Defiant's hull in a very odd fashion since atmosphere is not escaping.

[Picard]

Torpedo seemed to be made specifically to dig itself into hull. Might have used shields or some kind of "drill". Or, most likely, melted its way throught the hull.

[Lucky]

Survivors
400 gigawatts bring down the shields of the Enterprise-D
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_XbWq49vUM

What happened
A being that may have been able to make 2+2=Fish was causing everything, and at least some of the bridge crew realized what they were dealing with early on in the episode.


The description of the weapon makes it questionable as to what was being shot at the Enterprise-D since the beam was a jacketed antiparticle beam. It is never explained as to what the jacketing is.

The effects of the weapon are described as disassembling the shields, a description never used before or after, and likewise the visual effects for the weapon are unique. It implies an anti-shield property.

The beam particle ifthere ever was one was able to cause thermal damage to the Enterprise-D's hull. This means the hull's temperature was raised above 12,000 degrees Celsius in seconds at most, and Federation hulls are normally not even in the low thousands of degrees.

edit
The Douwd is shown to be a powerful telepath. This means we can not trust the emotional reactions of the characters.

Conclusion
It is best to just judge this event as unquantifiable.

We know that in "A Taste Of Armageddon" the Enterprise is hit with 18^12 decibels.

In "Fair Haven" Voyager was able to take Ninety million terajoules plus what ever other stresses the wave front was putting on Voyager.

We also have the Doom's Day Machine which used an antimatter beam to carve up planets.

Finally we have the NX-01's 500 megajoule phase cannons which were considered light guns for their time.

The only claim that one might be able to make is that antishield weapons need not bring down shields through brute force, but you don't need this episode to make the argument that it matters more how you hit the shields then how hard.

[Kor_Dahar_Master]

"Star Ship Down" has the seemingly slow torpedo that breaches the Defiant's hull in a very odd fashion since atmosphere is not escaping.

Structural integrity and emergency forcefields ect would deal with explosive decompression and dealing with the breach and it is not unusual for a weapon to pierce Armour then explode.

[Mike DiCenso]

"Star Ship Down" has the seemingly slow torpedo that breaches the Defiant's hull in a very odd fashion since atmosphere is not escaping.

Sigh. I thought this nonsense had been debunked years ago. Take a look at this image of the missile and the bulkhead area around it:



Now look at the glowing drill-like head, the melted, carbon-scored bulkhead material, and it's fairly obvious this thing was designed to drill inside an enemy vessel, then explode from within.
-Mike

[User1663]

Pegasus calcs are typically trotted out.

Also Starship Down', 'Parallels' or 'Patterns of Force' are a favorite whine of a poster called "the atom" on SB.com but i have not see them he just makes posts like this:

http://forums.spacebattles.com/showpost ... stcount=81

Ah so this is where you hide out when you get banned from Spacebattles is it? Interesting. In any case, no I'm not talking about the Jem Hadar warhead that embeds itself in the hull. I'm talking about near the end when Miles has his engineering crew fit a quantum torpedo warhead inside an atmospheric probe, and then uses it to blow up a fully functional Jem Hadar ship in a single sub-kiloton explosion (hell I'd be amazed if the yield was more then half a ton).

This isn't where I place ST firepower on average mind you. Just using it to point at how idiotic it is to cherry pick high showings to suit your purposes when so many other contradictions already exist.

[Mike DiCenso]

You're proof of that is.... what? While the point about Star Trek lower limits is a vaild one, you still have to back up your claims, especially on this board.
-Mike

[User1663]

I'd gladly show the scene if I knew how to take images from video. But here's the link to the episode for reference anyways: http://www.allstepisodes.com/megvid.php?n=3407.

[Lucky]

I'd gladly show the scene if I knew how to take images from video. But here's the link to the episode for reference anyways: http://www.allstepisodes.com/megvid.php?n=3407.

Try going to Trekcore. They have lots of screen caps for every Star Trek episode even if they aren't always what you need.

[Lucky]

"Star Ship Down" has the seemingly slow torpedo that breaches the Defiant's hull in a very odd fashion since atmosphere is not escaping.

Sigh. I thought this nonsense had been debunked years ago. Take a look at this image of the missile and the bulkhead area around it:



Now look at the glowing drill-like head, the melted, carbon-scored bulkhead material, and it's fairly obvious this thing was designed to drill inside an enemy vessel, then explode from within.
-Mike

Drilling into the target seems like a common ability for torpedos in Star Trek.

[Mike DiCenso]

I'd gladly show the scene if I knew how to take images from video. But here's the link to the episode for reference anyways: http://www.allstepisodes.com/megvid.php?n=3407.

I was going to suggest Trekcore

I don't see what you're talking about. At the end of the episode, the Defiant fires off a beam weapon at the last attack ship:



Or did you mean this:





Given that a JH attack ship is over 100 meters long and 90 meters wide, we can scale the explosion to at least 500-600 meters. On top of that, this is occuring in the dense atmosphere and heavy gravity of a large gas giant planet, so I'd say that's considerably more than a ton of TNT's worth of explosives going off. In fact, using the SDN nuclear weapons effects calculator, that fireball would potentially represent a 1 megaton explosion in a terrestrial planet's atmosphere.
-Mike