Set piece battle: StarFleet VS CIS

[Mr. Oragahn]

The big question for me would be if the federation ships are allowed to use their warp drives as long as they stay in the star system?

If so technically they could always withdrawal from any fight, conduct repairs, and return, allowing them to choose the engagement every time.

Of course the SW ships have no reason to just sit there and even stay in said system.
With FTL sensors, the moment they'll notice that the enemy ships can move so fast in-system, they'll know what they're facing.

Plus the battle's parameters are tight enough that I don't see necessarily ships in either camps deciding to leave on a hurry.

[Mr. Oragahn]

The Invisible Hand is resilient, but against SW weapons. Her survival in orbit of Coruscant for quite some time, I suppose, means something there.

Not just the IH, in the ROTS novelization General Grievous makes mention that Chancellor Palpatine should have been out system "hours ago" implying the Confederate naval force had been stuck/trapped by the Republic Navy for that duration and presumbly had been exchanging blows.

That is impressive, although one has to understand that it have largely been about how much firepower could be brought against one ship's defensive force field against that same ship's power production channeled to these systems.
Simply put, the battle was so cramped that it turned out complicated to be able to focus enough firepower on a single ship to take it down. I suppose that many ships therefore found enough time to recharge shields and feed them with power.
The fact that in TPM, after a few tweaks by R2, all power could be routed towards the shields of Amidala's ship tells a lot: shields can be recharged fast enough so that feeding them in real time can make a difference.
Now, just stretch that system to a warship and you can see how battles could last for long times. Surely, shield projectors would probably be pushed to their max and start to show signs of integrity failure, and once burnt, there would be no point trying to feed them with more power.
There's also the very likely idea that warships can precharge their weapons, meaning that they can enter a battle with guns on full, and then later on reduced to have to make a choice in how they divide their current power production.
From the Death Star to the Slave-I, we know that guns have to be charged.

The IH isn't bigger than Venators and firepower figures for Venators could range for about tens to hundreds of kilotons to perhaps a couple on megatons on full volley spread

How is a "full volley spread" being defined? All their guns firing? Because looking at this image it appears to have four of the big gun emplacements on either side of its "conning towers" which , if 2046 doesn't mind me linking to his work, running with the lower range offered to vaporize a small town would put it well over a couple of megatons by themselves let alone any other, smaller guns the Venator might posses.

The way it's written doesn't strictly imply that each bolt has that potential, although it's possible.
So the low megaton figure would work as a high end, while on the other end of the spectrum, the lower limit is hard to fix.
If we go for a maxed out charged shot per HTL in the region of 1~2 megatons, it's actually going to give the IH a similar firepower, seriously enough to threaten any Trek ship : the IH has several large guns.
And if we consider that we don't have to bother with the concept of a charged shot, then we're dealing with as many megatons per gun, fired at a rate like one shot per second, sometimes faster than that.

It is actually very interesting. In Trek, we notice in general that battles are very short lived. The opening volley will generally quickly deal massive damage to the target, up to the point where it becomes a question of who shoots first in an even duel.
Shields soon fall and hardly get recharged fast enough to endure any longer exchange. I bet that if you were to find examples of shields being brought back into action, you'd find that the enemy vessel somehow lost a portion of her firepower, and/or that even with *some* degree of shielding back, the battle's duration wouldn't be bumped from mere minutes to hours.

Now, on the other hand, ROTJ's battle already suggested quite some high durability when two fleets would clash: even the outmatched and outnumbered Rebel fleet didn't get plastered all across Endor in a handful minutes.
In ROTS's novel, it is clearly said that the battle lasted for hours.

If you give the IH like 1.5 megatons x 5 HTLs for example, and have all guns fire every 5 seconds, the IH can deliver 45 megatons of focused thermal energy per minute? Nothing to scoff at, especially since the 50 unfocused megatons photon torps or so tend to bring down shields dramatically of even the mightest TNG ships after 3 to 5 hits.
Figures would be in the same ballpark, perhaps a bit lower, for any ship of the same tonnage. And somehow, no matter how you'd average this out, they could go on for hours like that, until somehow the mistake of taking a greater break, or having more than one ship focusing firepower on a single target, would tip the balance against said target.
Which reminds me of the Rebel fleet concentrating fire on the Executor.
Although I'm not saying the rain of fire would be constent and not at max yield, there's still some important element not to be missed here: SW ships might be able to tank much more firepower on the long run than any Trek ship.

Still, ships like the Galaxy-class appear to be quite above the mark nevertheless, if only for the fact that SW forces seldom use advanced explosives.

A clever use of the Enterprise and the CIS stands no chance at all.

with an official max range, near effective, of 100 km, which is still way above the usual approach or even engagement range used by Trek ships.

An oddly hard liner claim but, to be succient, Federation vessels have been observed hitting vastly smaller targets at a hundred times the aformentioned "offical max range". If you wish I will happily dig up the examples from "The Wounded" and such but I feel this is well trodded ground.

In terms of probabilities, these outliers only matter in wars. But within the confines of a single battle, I reject such few occurences as simply not likely to ever happen.

More to the point, while I feel justified in assuming the Federation won't exploit their range advantage, Confederate/Republic accuracy observed for single digit kilometers is so absymal and their agility/mobility so limited thier only hope would be to close and try and drown the Federation in a deluge of fire.

In the movies? It is hard to assess but I don't recall any particular glaring case of a ship dramatically missing her large target over a few km only.

As a sidenote, I don't understand why there haven't been warships solely designed as carriers of big guns. When you consider the size of Echo Base's ion cannon, or the EU references of ground-to-orbit TLs (which have their own cores), having ranges in the hundreds of km (the ion cannon covered several thousand km) you really are left to wonder why you just see a model which is about one big gun mounted on a reactor.
The Munificent class, by all means, should really be that. Their huge front guns should really prove lethal on the battlefield and offer a massive advantage in firepower and range, not giving a shit about carrier role.

In the EU, the Death Star's conventional weapons are said to be able to repel a large fleet. Considering the size of the space station, I couldn't picture enemy ships coming close to a few km from the surface of that ship before engaging... if only for the risk of any stupid collision with the battlestation.

The GCS's terawatt core would most likely allow phasers to be charged to hundreds of TW

I'm curious by what measure did you use to arrive at a terrawatt range, X-XXX I presume, for a Galaxy class reactor?

I believe two or three quotes support that notion. One from Geordi directly speaking of the GCS core's output.
Multi-TW cores nearing the petawatt range are more than acceptable. The increase of ship size isn't enough to me to warrant such a massive increase of power production.
Even if pre-TOS era ships were exploiting power production at a level of only 10% of what a TNG core could output, I don't see how this translates into super petawatt cores.

An Intrepid class, a generally smaller and less impressive mid sized ship, boasts five Petawatts in a solitary conduit:

SEVEN: It is. The optical assembly is properly aligned. I'm ready to access the main power supply.
KIM: After you. Wait! What are you doing? There are five million gigawatts running through there!

Not that I'm claiming all of that can be channeled to phasers of course but a GCS should be able to generate far more than Terrawatts.

Considering that 7o9 could put her arm into that conduit, I'm not sure how to take it at face value.
Plus Kim only mentions a watt figure, which is certainly NOT enough to assert that it's a constant flux. If pulses, and therefore frequency, matter here, then the real figure could easily be maaany orders of magnitude lower when we'd want to know the real constant and maximum energy flux.

For example we can already build petawatt lasers, yet I'm pretty sure they don't come close anywhere to the yield of Ivy Mike.

Large amounts of inert natural matter suffer greatly from the application of phaser weapons, because of the NDF effect

Well as far as I know NDF is non-canon and, hat tip to Lucky, the nearest I recall the show ever coming to it was in "Cost of living living" {TNG-05}:

DATA: Sir, the core is composed of nitrium and chrondite. It is unlikely another photon torpedo will be of any effect.
PICARD: Mister Worf, prepare a tractor beam.
WORF: Aye, sir.
DATA: Thirty seconds to impact.
WORF: Captain, I am unable to get a positive lock with the tractor beam. There is magnetic field interference emanating from the core materials.
PICARD: Activate a deflector dish. If we project a particle beam, we may be able to produce a disruptive nuclear effect within the core.
WORF: Aye, sir.
DATA: Impact in seventeen seconds.
WORF: Particle beam activated. The target has been destroyed, Captain.

Thanks but I already knew that one and even if the NDF name per se is fan made, it exists only to explain the effects which are hardly thermal. Heck, even when they can be thermal, in the sense of explosively thermal, the targets often get hit for a prolongated duration, with no ill effects, before it explodes.
This applies to both hand phasers and ship phasers (from hand phasers used against the bodysnatchers' leader to a variety of rock and ice asteroids in TNG and DS9).

As a sidenote, no one is going to explain how they could get a sensor lock on the same asterois their weapons couldn't lock on. Because if they can use the dish to lock on the asteroid, there's no need to attempt to cobble up a weapon from the dish instead of, you know, using the data collected from the dish in order to obtain a lock for the weapons.
It is also interesting that an asteroid that is plain to see cannot be locked on because of magnetic disturbances. No visible-light optical lock I guess.

Notice btw, that "disruptive nuclear effect" needn't to imply any fancy effect. It's the nuclear effect that's going to be disruptive on the asteroid's structure. Understandable, eh? It's not the same as a nuclear disruptive effect, or whatever the acronym stands for which implies an exotic means to dissassemble a nucleus by breaking the atomic bonds without using a low tech brute force method (anything about delivering energy in a splattering way, basically).
However, in practice, it quite was as as it was observed for phasers in numerous occasions, the beam had to hit the asteroid for some time before it blew up all of sudden!

And it required the deflector dish rather than the phaser. As well we have examples as such from "That Which Survives" {TOS-03}:

KIRK: There are no good ways, Sulu.
(Kirk phasers the ground, but it only cuts a shallow trench in the soil.)
SULU: That's the same red rock.
KIRK: My phaser didn't cut through it.
MCCOY: Whatever it is, it has a mighty high melting point.
KIRK: Eight thousand degrees centigrade. It looks like igneous rock, but infinitely denser.

Suggesting phasers' destructive ability are at least partially thermal in nature rather than a magic disintergrator.

Sometimes there's very little typical thermal side effect at all.
However, perhaps the capacity of a material to absorb kinetic energy at the atomic scale is going to matter against the NDF effect. Makes sense, actually.
But that stone is hardly normal either.

However, in the case of SW, the MCPS device managed to pass shields somehow because it precisely wasn't focused like a beam.

I'm not sure I follow. The page-image you linked too merely stated the Metal-Crystal phase shifter bypassed shields rather than explaining why it did so.

Brain fart. Forget it.

[sonofccn]

The big question for me would be if the federation ships are allowed to use their warp drives as long as they stay in the star system?

If so technically they could always withdrawal from any fight, conduct repairs, and return, allowing them to choose the engagement every time.

Well I would ask couldn't the Confederates do similar? Using microjumps to reposition themselves across the star system.

That is impressive, although one has to understand that it have largely been about how much firepower could be brought against one ship's defensive force field against that same ship's power production channeled to these systems.Simply put, the battle was so cramped that it turned out complicated to be able to focus enough firepower on a single ship to take it down.

Certainly there is no indication of "concetrate fire" as we have in ROTJ. Through its debatable how much that is required for normal combat. Venators and Munificent frigates shouldn't be that far apart, T-canon suggests 1 Venator is worth somewhat less than two Munificents, for instance.

The fact that in TPM, after a few tweaks by R2, all power could be routed towards the shields of Amidala's ship tells a lot: shields can be recharged fast enough so that feeding them in real time can make a difference.
Now, just stretch that system to a warship and you can see how battles could last for long times. Surely, shield projectors would probably be pushed to their max and start to show signs of integrity failure, and once burnt, there would be no point trying to feed them with more power.

Perhaps through there may be danger taking an example from a small, and therefor perhaps less overall power intensive to shield, unarmed royal yacht and expanding it to mammoth warships. Equally telling would be that the Executor's commander chose to intensify the forward fire rather than merely recharge/regenerate the shields.

The way it's written doesn't strictly imply that each bolt has that potential, although it's possible.
So the low megaton figure would work as a high end, while on the other end of the spectrum, the lower limit is hard to fix.

Well we could easily speculate that, as the quote comes at the tail end of an hours long battle, that the town vaporizing turbolaser bolts are undercharged and "full power" ones could be vastly greater. But without evidence to indicate either extreme I feel we should make neither assumption and take the quote at face value.

It is actually very interesting. In Trek, we notice in general that battles are very short lived. The opening volley will generally quickly deal massive damage to the target, up to the point where it becomes a question of who shoots first in an even duel.
Shields soon fall and hardly get recharged fast enough to endure any longer exchange. I bet that if you were to find examples of shields being brought back into action, you'd find that the enemy vessel somehow lost a portion of her firepower, and/or that even with *some* degree of shielding back, the battle's duration wouldn't be bumped from mere minutes to hours.

Now, on the other hand, ROTJ's battle already suggested quite some high durability when two fleets would clash: even the outmatched and outnumbered Rebel fleet didn't get plastered all across Endor in a handful minutes.
In ROTS's novel, it is clearly said that the battle lasted for hours.

If you give the IH like 1.5 megatons x 5 HTLs for example, and have all guns fire every 5 seconds, the IH can deliver 45 megatons of focused thermal energy per minute? Nothing to scoff at, especially since the 50 unfocused megatons photon torps or so tend to bring down shields dramatically of even the mightest TNG ships after 3 to 5 hits.
Figures would be in the same ballpark, perhaps a bit lower, for any ship of the same tonnage. And somehow, no matter how you'd average this out, they could go on for hours like that, until somehow the mistake of taking a greater break, or having more than one ship focusing firepower on a single target, would tip the balance against said target.
Which reminds me of the Rebel fleet concentrating fire on the Executor.
Although I'm not saying the rain of fire would be constent and not at max yield, there's still some important element not to be missed here: SW ships might be able to tank much more firepower on the long run than any Trek ship.

Basically brute force and endurance pitted against finess and ,relative,agility. Obviously the exact particulars I think may still be open for debate but as an general idea that's how I see the fight going.

In terms of probabilities, these outliers only matter in wars. But within the confines of a single battle, I reject such few occurences as simply not likely to ever happen.

The term "outliers" implies descrepency which I feel has not been properly justified. We rarely have, when range is mentioned, have explicit short range examples. Far less than examples greater than 100 KM. To quote myself:

KIM: We've got a starship on our tail. Nebula class.
PARIS: I'll try to lose them, Harry, but they're a lot faster than we are.
MAN [OC]: Attention runabout Yellowstone. Power down your engines or we will open fire.
KIM: They're going to try to do everything they can to stop us. They think we're trying to steal this prototype.
PARIS: They're closing to five thousand kilometres.
(Bang!)
KIM: Shields down to seventy percent. Fifty percent.
(Bang! Sparks.)

Five thousand kilometers.

PARIS: Thirty thousand kilometres and closing.
JANEWAY: Target their power core.

Thirty thousand and their targeting power core.

JANEWAY: All right, that's enough. Tuvok, give them a phaser sweep with the forward array. Don't destroy any of them, just let them know we're not going to sit here like ducks.
TUVOK: Aye Captain.
JANEWAY: What was that?
KIM: The interferometric pulses they're emitting. They've reflected the energy of the phasers right back to us.
CHAKOTAY: Anything we fire is going to affect us instead of them. What about a photon torpedo?
TUVOK: Since our shield strength is non-existent, I would not recommend it.
PARIS: They're only seven thousand kilometres away and still coming.

Greater than seven thousand kilometers for a phaser strike.

DATA
The warship is three hundred
thousand kilometers from the
Phoenix. It is opening fire.
The Phoenix has taken a direct
hit.

An old standby

RIKER
(a beat, then)
You'll get only one shot.

KARGAN
We will only need one. Arm all
phasers and torpedoes. Prepare
to fire them simultaneously.

RIKER
Then I recommend you do not fire
until you are within forty
thousand kilometers.

KLAG
Why?

RIKER
It will reduce their response
time.

Closing to forty thousand kilometers before firing with the excuse of lowering response time.

O'BRIEN: Commander, long range scanners have picked up two Jem'Hadar warships directly ahead. They're heading this way at warp five.
SISKO: How close will they pass us?
O'BRIEN: One hundred thousand kilometres.
KIRA: That's well within range of their weapons, Commander

One hundred thousand kilometers is will within Dominon's firing range and they were never displayed as having super long range compared to the Federation.

SPOCK: Unknown, Captain. Nothing within sensor range. (a third bolt approaching) Something now, Captain. Very small. Bearing one two three degrees, mark one eight. Range ninety thousand kilometres.
KIRK: That's our target, Mister Sulu. Prepare photon torpedo.
(The third bolt hits)
SCOTT: Shields still holding, sir, but the drain on the engines is reaching the critical point. Ach, we lost warp manoeuvreing power. Switching to impulse.
SULU: Photon torpedoes armed, sir.
KIRK: Has the target changed location, Mister Spock?
SPOCK: No, sir. Holding steady.
KIRK: Ready photon torpedo number two, Mister Sulu.
SULU: Ready, sir.
KIRK: Fire.
SULU: Torpedo away. (a pause, then a flash) Direct hit.

Ninety thousand kilometers and a direct hit against something comparable in size to R2-D2.

CHEKOV: Phasers locked on target. Range closing. Seventy five thousand kilometres.
KIRK: Fire.
(There's a satisfying flare on the viewscreen.)
CHEKOV: Got him!

seventy-five thousand with phasers.

SULU: They've stopped dead, sir. Range ninety thousand kilometres and holding.
UHURA: Mister Spock? I'm receiving a visual signal.
SPOCK: Transfer to main viewer.
UHURA: Aye, sir.
(A strange, garish orange figure with triangular eyes (possibly) appears against a blue and pink tie-die background.)
LOSKENE [on viewscreen]: I am Commander Loskene. You are trespassing in a territorial annex of the Tholian Assembly. You must leave this area immediately.
SPOCK: Spock, in command of the Federation star ship Enterprise. Commander, according to the Federation, this area is free space.
LOSKENE [on viewscreen]: We claim this territory and are prepared to use force, if necessary, to protect our property.
SPOCK: We are not interested in your display of force. The Enterprise is responding to a distress signal from one of our ships and is currently engaged in rescue operations. Do you wish to assist us?
LOSKENE [on viewscreen]: I find no evidence of a disabled ship. My instruments indicate ours are the only two vessels in this area.
SPOCK: The other ship is interspatially trapped. It should reappear in one hour and fifty three minutes. We request you stand by until then.
LOSKENE [on viewscreen]: Very well, Enterprise. In the interest of interstellar amity, we will wait precisely one hour and fifty three minutes. But be correct. We do not tolerate deceit.
.
.

.
MCCOY [OC]: Now you've got to get this ship out of here.
SULU: Mister Spock, we're being fired upon.
(The ship shakes to the impact of the blasts of energy.)
SPOCK: The renowned Tholian punctuality.

Again ninety thousand range.

So there we have nine clear examples from TOS-Voyager.

In the movies? It is hard to assess but I don't recall any particular glaring case of a ship dramatically missing her large target over a few km only.

Well we should start with the Tantive IV, which at 140 meters in lenght isn't that small compared to the Federation, for a legitimate round up. Through if you have a particularly good example I'm willing to look at it.

As a sidenote, I don't understand why there haven't been warships solely designed as carriers of big guns. When you consider the size of Echo Base's ion cannon, or the EU references of ground-to-orbit TLs (which have their own cores), having ranges in the hundreds of km (the ion cannon covered several thousand km) you really are left to wonder why you just see a model which is about one big gun mounted on a reactor.
The Munificent class, by all means, should really be that. Their huge front guns should really prove lethal on the battlefield and offer a massive advantage in firepower and range, not giving a shit about carrier role.

Likely because big ships which don't devote notable fractions to hanger space for defensive fighters and power to the shields would be hidiously vulnerable to strikecraft. Not to mention glass cannons when the irate Venator returned fire.

Further I am unsure we have any evidence ground turbolasers have longer maxium range than their star borne brethern, merely that they engage targets moving in prediticable arcs within a planet's gravity well.

I believe two or three quotes support that notion. One from Geordi directly speaking of the GCS core's output.

That should be the Master piece society{TNG-05}:

LAFORGE: We have a matter-antimatter warp reaction system, the most powerful in the Starfleet. Normally, it kicks plasma up into the terawatt range. Why?

There is also the Dauphin quote but that's muddled when they then beam a person down to the planet. Conversely we have this from True Q{TNG-06}:

DATA: Imagination is not necessary. The scale is readily quantifiable. We are presently generating twelve point seven five billion gigawatts per
(an alarm goes off)

And then this from Good Shepherd {VOY-06}:

[Astrometrics lab]

KIM [OC]: The Captain wants to get a cleaner look at that cluster coming up off starboard.
SEVEN: Acknowledged. Take these specifications to Lieutenant Torres.
CELES: Right away.

[Turbolift]

CELES: Deck eleven.

[Engineering]

TORRES: What's our Borg Queen want now? We need to route at least another five terawatts to the sensor array.

Impling the sensory array is recieving at least five terawatts already let alone what the rest of the ship is consuming.

The increase of ship size isn't enough to me to warrant such a massive increase of power production.
Even if pre-TOS era ships were exploiting power production at a level of only 10% of what a TNG core could output, I don't see how this translates into super petawatt cores.

I'm not sure what this is in refrence too. The Intrepid class is a 24th century era starship and my examples shows 5 Petawatts coursing through a conduit. There is nothing to translate or extropolate other than it fails to match with your stated paradigm.

Plus Kim only mentions a watt figure, which is certainly NOT enough to assert that it's a constant flux. If pulses, and therefore frequency, matter here, then the real figure could easily be maaany orders of magnitude lower when we'd want to know the real constant and maximum energy flux.

There is nothing to indicate the conduit is experiancing a power flux or is "active" only for fractions of a second nor is there is reason to assume so. At best you might say it is disparate to the greater bulk of evidence, through that remains to be seen, but it is as straightforward as the Geordie quote.

Thanks but I already knew that one and even if the NDF name per se is fan made, it exists only to explain the effects which are hardly thermal. Heck, even when they can be thermal, in the sense of explosively thermal, the targets often get hit for a prolongated duration, with no ill effects, before it explodes.
This applies to both hand phasers and ship phasers (from hand phasers used against the bodysnatchers' leader to a variety of rock and ice asteroids in TNG and DS9).

The issue is we have quotes placing thermal energy, heating, as an integral component. That armor A with a higher specific melting point would resist better than armor B with a lower one. We can also surmize, based on lack of extravagent thermal effects, something inherent to the phaser is limiting or containing the excess.

But NDF neither fits or explains either point. If its breaking down atomic bonds or whatever the melting point of a material should be irrevelent and the process should both take and release energy which should be observable in the local enviroment.

As a sidenote, no one is going to explain how they could get a sensor lock on the same asterois their weapons couldn't lock on. Because if they can use the dish to lock on the asteroid, there's no need to attempt to cobble up a weapon from the dish instead of, you know, using the data collected from the dish in order to obtain a lock for the weapons.
It is also interesting that an asteroid that is plain to see cannot be locked on because of magnetic disturbances. No visible-light optical lock I guess.

Uh...they did get a weapon's lock. They fired a torpedo and hit the asteriod hence the "unlikely another photon torpedo will be of any effect" line by Data. It was only the tractor beam which couldn't get a "lock", likely unable to secure sufficent "grip" on the core.

Notice btw, that "disruptive nuclear effect" needn't to imply any fancy effect. It's the nuclear effect that's going to be disruptive on the asteroid's structure.

Does it mandate "fancy effect"? No. It is however the closest the canon has ever gotten to my knowledge and it is pretty telling when they run into something which they can't brute force they turn to reconfiguring the deflector dish for a technobabble "magic" solution not their phasers.

It's not the same as a nuclear disruptive effect, or whatever the acronym stands for which implies an exotic means to dissassemble a nucleus by breaking the atomic bonds without using a low tech brute force method (anything about delivering energy in a splattering way, basically).

Except canonically phasers do have the needed power to do it brute force like and can be transmitting "splattering energy" without unduly disturbing their enviroment such as observed in the Mind's eye {TNG-04}:

(Data and Geordi are doing test firings of the phaser rifle)
DATA: Energy flow is within normal parameters, from the pre-fire chamber to the emission aperture.
LAFORGE: Rapid nadion pulse, right on target. Beam control assembly, safety interlock, both checked out. Beam width intensity controls also responding correctly.
DATA: Energy cell usage remains constant at one point oh five megajoules per second. Curious. The efficiency reading on the discharge crystal is well above Starfleet specifications.

1.05 megajoules is roughly comparable to the explosive energy of a Sherman tank HE shell IIRC yet both Geordie and Data are standing inches from the active weapon without any protective equipment.

Sometimes there's very little typical thermal side effect at all.

Perhaps and I freely admit something funky is handwaving it away but I feel the evidence points it being there in the first place rather than cheating physics completely.

However, perhaps the capacity of a material to absorb kinetic energy at the atomic scale is going to matter against the NDF effect. Makes sense, actually.

Well as you are using "NDF" merely as a placeholder for exotic disintergration it can be whatever you feel fits the evidence best. To me however it does not seem intuitive to talk of melting points and tempatures for an atomic bond disintergrator.

But that stone is hardly normal either.

True. It has a melting point of eight thousand degrees centigrade or higher and is "infinitely" denser than igneous rock.

[Lucky]

This is what the only known Nuclear Disruptive Effect beam looked like.

http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... ing010.jpg

http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... ing011.jpg

http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... ing012.jpg

http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... ing013.jpg

http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... ing014.jpg

http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... ing016.jpg

http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... ing017.jpg

Weather or not you believe that Phasers are NDE weapons, NDE does not account for the lack of violent secondary effects.