LMAO@SpaceBattles!

[Mr. Oragahn]

Currently laughing my ass off at this new UnCluttered guy and his desperate acrobatics to ignore canon. If SBC was looking for some new trolls, they'd have at least one in him.
Instead of trying to find an explanation as to why the Wraith couldn't use thicker and denser hulls for their ships, he goes at length to butcher a rather simple statement made by McKay.
Despite the fact that we've seen MANY systems in Stargate being boosted by a ZPM, and that's not just FTL but weapons, shields and even sublight engines, which is of importance here since an Aurora-class warship, the Tria, did reach 0.99999... c on STL with a ZPM, he's trying to spin doctor some simple statements into something truly absurd.
Never mind if the explanation could be simple : the ZPM allows to be build bigger and denser hulls, perhaps because there's some unexplained factor related to power which means that the Wraith cannot wait forever for a ship to grow and the only way to make a better hull is to provide more power now before the hull hardens, but also because, by following what Rodney said, they couldn't maneuver and maintain the structural integrity without snapping. Now, the ZPM also allows that, which perhaps means that the part of the Wraith systems that builds the hull could build super alloys but needed a specific power to do that, that is, to reach a threshold, and now thanks to the ZPM, this is possible. Those alloys considerably increase the structural integrity. However that would probably not be enough, and in order to fit with McKay's statements, we may need to assume some reinforcing structural integrity field at play, all of which also allowing a greater engine structure which can tolerate higher pressures and temperatures, and eventually some better force fields there as well.
Add better sensors and better weapons as well.
And voila.

If the hull was merely larger, McKay would have just pointed it out, instead of saying that it was denser and larger, especially since by the time he said that, the ship was largely completed anyway. They didn't observe the ship in its infancy.
He's arguing for something stupid, like the hull is first grown super dense, then it's expanded from its current mass into a larger hull, so the density actually drops back to the usual density.
That's just so convoluted at this point! Not only that, but the analogies he uses to defend his position, like the crab hull, is not even relevant, unless he could prove that a crab grows a new and denser shell, and then "inflates" it without adding more mass.
Of course, anyone logical would say that the crab is just growing more "hull". Not that it's getting denser.
It's just so dumb. We've seen drones puncture hiveships left to right, even if fired in small numbers. That is, going through ships which are either 11 km long or at least around 5 km long.
Atlantis fired drones and they weren't even denting the damn thing, and McKay said it would be impenetrable.

Does Uncluttered Ears understand?
Impenetrable means which cannot be penetrated. It's not just more armor; it's better armor.

MCKAY
I'm detecting massive energy output.

SHEPPARD
What's happening?

MCKAY
It's growing.

SHEPPARD
What the hell are you talking about?

MCKAY
That's what they're doing with the surplus energy—using it to grow a larger, and if I'm reading this correctly, significantly denser outer hull. It makes sense. Normal hives have a limit of growth. I mean, any bigger or heavier and they become impossible to maneuver, let alone get into hyperspace. I mean, you make a simple left turn, and you're torn apart by your own inertia. But with a ZPM…

SHEPPARD
I get the picture. What does that mean for us?

MCKAY
When they're done, my guess is that hull will be all but impenetrable.

The amount of gymnastics is ludicrous.

Now, this imbecility aside, we can also observe that a ZPM is indeed offering insane amounts of power. Simply put, on the same vein as the episode "The Seed", we not only have again a confirmation that Wraith ships grow out of energy and can tap ZPMs, but that said ZPMs can provide phenomenal amounts of power.
We're talking about adding substantial mass to a ship that is 11 km long.
That is not merely providing extra tonnes, but increasing by a considerable margin the mass of a ship that is bound to be worth several billion tonnes.
RSA had found that the Executor, while being 17.6 km long, might weight as much as 6.32 to 12.65 bn tonnes.
Contrary to a normal hiveship, the ZPM powered hiveship, or super hiveship, has armour covering sections which were usually not to much covered. Besides, the vast gap inside is now completely filled. A hiveship is also thicker than the Executor.
We can assume, at least, that the super hiveship would have a mass about two thirds of the Executor's.
That would be at least 2.21 bn tonnes.
In order to represent a significant difference between a hiveship and this new beast, the extra mass of the later, which is also stated to be denser and making it impenetrable, must be a large portion of its total mass.
Let's just round that to 1 bn metric tonnes.
That's 89.876 e27 J.
21.481 exatons.

Now, for how long as this amount of energy been used?
To answer that, we need to know since when the ZPM powered hiveship project began:

WOOLSEY: All right, then tell me this: why now? You've had those ZeePMs for over a year.

TODD: The organic nature of the Hive creates certain incompatibilities with Ancient technology. I put my best scientists to work on this project and recently one of them succeeded.

WOOLSEY: Only he didn't wanna turn it over to you. He decided to keep it for himself. And now you want us to help you kick him to the kerb.

TODD: What you really need to know is that this Hive is a work in progress. It has yet to reach its full potential – which means if you attack it now, you may be able to destroy it, but if you hesitate it will be too late ... and this Hive will be unstoppable.

We can, eventually, take an extremely long period. Say a year.
Ok, that's roughly 2,847,983 e15 W, nearly three million petawatts, low end.
That might get multiplied by 6 or 12 if the energy consumption was spread over one or two months.
This is not a surprising value. It works with the Tria's deceleration, it works with the need to tank a mass extinction blast, and it even works with depletion rates for ZPMs as obtained from other cases.
Finally, it clearly demonstrates that a ZPM does have that much energy to tap. More than enough to completely blast a planet apart on sheer DET.

[Mr. Oragahn]

And many of them are nonsense.
The one that's very good to study is "Rise", which can already give several times the TM yield.

But not so nonsensical as you might think. "The Pegaus", even if you remove the funky magnetic fields and gravitational issues out of the equation, still leaves you with 114 gigatons per torpedo, if you assume a regular rock-based asteroid of 6.5 x 9 km on the upper end of things. All things taken together, we can make a pretty stong case, if we really want to for an average torpedo being 100-500 megatons, and single digit gigatons on average.
-Mike

Pegasus, if you remove everything that makes the asteroid bizarre, leaves us with a ship which needs most of its torps to destroy a porous rock that's about 8 km long.
Obviously, 114 GT per torpedo would make Riker's statement vastly wrong, as one torpedo would do the job. 114 GT is a horrible amount of energy. Heck, you may throw two more torps here and there to clean the debris field around, just in case, and that's all.

A single gigaton on the average is way excessive. Riker merely said destroy, and unless you vaporize it in one shot, which needs a yield and a number of torps obviously not in line with his own statement, you'll face one problem: debris.
Yes, because since Riker that most of their torps would be needed to destroy the asteroid, they won't be able to prevent the stuff from breaking up.
And as such, I don't see why we need to go for ~1 GT per torp when they'll have to fire plenty of torps, and that in such conditions, even very moderate megaton yields will easily get rid of all the bits and turn them to vapour.
You certainly don't need 1 GT per torp when we know that they can't destroy a 8 km long asteroid bound to fragment anyway, after firing more than a hundred torps, for the simple fact that 1 GT torps, or even torps in the hundreds of megatons, would completely get rid of the asteroid in a few salvos.


Even more interesting is that if we treat the rock as rather normal, aside from the weird gravito-magnetic field, the mere fact that well more than a hundred torps are needed to destroy a 8 km long porous rock when back in ENT, the NX-01 could already leave a 3 km crater in an asteroid, reveals that yields may have not so dramatically changed.
The increase of firepower just needs to be sufficient so a ship from the next century can easily solo a flotilla of warships from the former century. This requires greater defenses (like increased shielding and eventually better capacitors), better armour alloys, and higher yields. This is easily working when the NX-01 would have phasers near the TW range with torps in the mid-high TJ range, and incrase by a factor of ten for each century, eventually.

But Star Trek put that to shame iirc, with the demonstration of a shuttle being lightly damaged by phaser rifles used to scorch it so as to make it look like it did go through a severe battle, when we know that these rifles can be working in the MJ range on max.
The difference is rather large.

I think that one DS9 episode gives 1.57 GW output for phaser rifles.

I doubt that.

Actually we don't know what the upper limits for a phaser rifle are exactly, and in the instance that Mr. Oragahn cites, the phaser had been continuously used on the shuttle's hull for a number minutes just to make one modest-sized scorch mark.
-Mike

To make it look like it was attacked, and make that believable.

While Trek materials are unusually strong, that would be an indicator that the hand phaser really wasn't putting out all that much energy at the time. Granted, you probably wouldn't want to use a maximum energy beam on anything you're close to, but it's one of the incidents that suggests phasers are generally not that high energy, at least on normal settings.

Why not? Reed was fiddling with MJ settings of hand phasers in order to work against the Borg, by firing inside a room, at a panel of material a couple meters away.
Even worse, in TNG, Geordi was testing the MJ setting of a phaser rifle right in the middle of engineering room, by firing at a small piece of material placed like one or two meters away from the weapon, and he and the person he worked with . Call that mad or extremely confident, but they obviously see no problem doing it.

The case for them being different isn't that strong. In "Ensigns of Command," we see steam puffs bursting out of pipe nearly a kilometer away from impact from a 24th century hand phaser (several tens of gigajoules, realistically speaking, since that means thousands of cubic meters of steam are under pressure enough to do damage);

I took care of debunking that incident as a valid source of information more than a year ago in the gigaton-level phaser thread.

In order to make the TM look anywhere near as inaccurate as the ICS, we would need more than single digit gigatons. As I pointed out, one of the closest quantifiable events from the movie to the ICS are the asteroids the Slave I blasts. It's believable that those guns put out as much as a gigajoule per bolt (pushing the assumptions in the generous direction to support as high a yield as is plausible); the ICS is more on the order of a kiloton per bolt (3.5 orders of magnitude off; shift the parameters and that easily becomes 4-5 orders of magnitude).

I noticed, by going through Connor's numbers for warhammer, that the heavier the weapon, the greater the discrepancy between real yields and what he claimed. It became very obvious that he was merely reflecting the Wong school of thought.
It is not a surprise that both SW and 40K numbers share the same pattern.

Infantry weapons will see their yields increase by three or four orders, capital ship weapons typically increased by 6 to 9 orders of magnitude; even 12 sometimes, since we could find evidence of petatons of firepower for weapons even directly described as being in the terawatt range.

Unsurprisingly, the last two prequel-ICSes and other official publications for which Saxton was a consultant share the same traits.

"Rise" is really a very good case to study. There are some complications involved with scaling the asteroid next to a glowing photon torpedo, but it's a simple case of knowing exactly what should happen to a nickel-iron asteroid hit with a photon torpedo - mostly vaporized, with no fragments larger than a centimeter - and how energetic the resulting explosion from a non-nickel-iron (but still largely inert) asteroid is (energetic enough that it clearly could have vaporized the asteroid - if only it hadn't fractured too quickly, leaving large intact chunks).

I don't think there are any other cases on the big or little screen that control as many of the unknowns in Star Trek or Star Wars as "Rise" - "Pegasus" has worse scaling problems and involves an asteroid of unusual composition and density. So "Rise" provides a very good measure of photon torpedo yield, just like "Galileo Seven" provides a very good measure of the total energy stored in a hand phaser.

Well, there's the asteroid that is blasted in TMP, but since they're flying at warp and that there's an array of odd visual effects going on, I'm not sure what to make out of it.

In "Cost of Living", the denser core of an asteroid made of nitrium chondrite survived the blast produced by two torpedoes fired successively and which "shattered" most of the asteroid's mass.
For some reason, Data considered that it was unlikely that another torpedo would be of any effect.
Go figure. Nitrium and chondrite are real elements. Most likely the core in question was formerly molten and dense, and represented too much of a mass to seriously dent with another torpedo.
That one is rather weird, to say the least!

[Jedi Master Spock]

And many of them are nonsense.
The one that's very good to study is "Rise", which can already give several times the TM yield.

But not so nonsensical as you might think. "The Pegaus", even if you remove the funky magnetic fields and gravitational issues out of the equation, still leaves you with 114 gigatons per torpedo, if you assume a regular rock-based asteroid of 6.5 x 9 km on the upper end of things. All things taken together, we can make a pretty stong case, if we really want to for an average torpedo being 100-500 megatons, and single digit gigatons on average.
-Mike

Pegasus, if you remove everything that makes the asteroid bizarre, leaves us with a ship which needs most of its torps to destroy a porous rock that's about 8 km long.
Obviously, 114 GT per torpedo would make Riker's statement vastly wrong, as one torpedo would do the job. 114 GT is a horrible amount of energy. Heck, you may throw two more torps here and there to clean the debris field around, just in case, and that's all.

A single gigaton on the average is way excessive. Riker merely said destroy, and unless you vaporize it in one shot, which needs a yield and a number of torps obviously not in line with his own statement, you'll face one problem: debris.
Yes, because since Riker that most of their torps would be needed to destroy the asteroid, they won't be able to prevent the stuff from breaking up.
And as such, I don't see why we need to go for ~1 GT per torp when they'll have to fire plenty of torps, and that in such conditions, even very moderate megaton yields will easily get rid of all the bits and turn them to vapour.
You certainly don't need 1 GT per torp when we know that they can't destroy a 8 km long asteroid bound to fragment anyway, after firing more than a hundred torps, for the simple fact that 1 GT torps, or even torps in the hundreds of megatons, would completely get rid of the asteroid in a few salvos.


Even more interesting is that if we treat the rock as rather normal, aside from the weird gravito-magnetic field, the mere fact that well more than a hundred torps are needed to destroy a 8 km long porous rock when back in ENT, the NX-01 could already leave a 3 km crater in an asteroid, reveals that yields may have not so dramatically changed.
The increase of firepower just needs to be sufficient so a ship from the next century can easily solo a flotilla of warships from the former century. This requires greater defenses (like increased shielding and eventually better capacitors), better armour alloys, and higher yields. This is easily working when the NX-01 would have phasers near the TW range with torps in the mid-high TJ range, and incrase by a factor of ten for each century, eventually.

A 3 km crater is not the "mid-high TJ" range, but starting to look like "low PJ" range, FYI.

The "Pegasus" asteroid has both scaling issues (we've seen several different scalings of it) and composition issues (gravitational fields, which requires a very massive asteroid, which by any of the scalings results in obscene densities; strong natural magnetic fields, which by any of the scalings results in assuming that the asteroid was the subject of odd mischief by Q or was largely comprised of rare earth metals).

It's troublesome. The result is that "Pegasus" fits nearly equally badly with anything - from sub-megaton photon torpedoes to multi-gigaton photon torpedoes.

I doubt that.

It's the Cardassian phase disruptor rifle. 4.7 megajoule capacity with a 3 millisecond recharge time. The reasonable interpretation of these two points of data is that it's the discharge crystal being referred to - i.e., in continuous firing a peak sustained ~ one and a half gigawatt output. "Return to Grace" is the episode.

The exact line is:
KIRA: This is a standard issue, Cardassian phase-disruptor rifle. It has a four point seven megajoule power capacity, three millisecond recharge two beam settings.

Why not? Reed was fiddling with MJ settings of hand phasers in order to work against the Borg, by firing inside a room, at a panel of material a couple meters away.
Even worse, in TNG, Geordi was testing the MJ setting of a phaser rifle right in the middle of engineering room, by firing at a small piece of material placed like one or two meters away from the weapon, and he and the person he worked with . Call that mad or extremely confident, but they obviously see no problem doing it.

Fair enough.

The case for them being different isn't that strong. In "Ensigns of Command," we see steam puffs bursting out of pipe nearly a kilometer away from impact from a 24th century hand phaser (several tens of gigajoules, realistically speaking, since that means thousands of cubic meters of steam are under pressure enough to do damage);

I took care of debunking that incident as a valid source of information more than a year ago in the gigaton-level phaser thread.

As far as I'm concerned, you failed to. Please note my last post in that thread, which I don't see a reply to. I'll quote the relevant portion:

You would rather that the culprit for the mysterious glow be the pumping station - a technology as old as the Romans - rather than the phaser? You think that the pumping station has the ability to shoot giant destructive red glows that flash water into steam?

I think it's clearly a phaser effect - an unusual one, perhaps, with energy being channeled in unusual ways due to the local Treknobabble radiations that were so important in the episode, but all due to the phaser nonetheless.

Aqueducts are, as I've mentioned, Roman technology. Filter stations are slightly more modern, but there's still no remotely plausible reason for either pumps or filters to fire destructive glows that propagate like that. Phasers, however, are seen to have mysterious glowing effects that continue to act on matter after the initial beam has been cut off. Usually they don't look like that, but again, that's most easily explained by saying that the local treknobabble radiation made it look different.

I noticed, by going through Connor's numbers for warhammer, that the heavier the weapon, the greater the discrepancy between real yields and what he claimed. It became very obvious that he was merely reflecting the Wong school of thought.
It is not a surprise that both SW and 40K numbers share the same pattern.

Infantry weapons will see their yields increase by three or four orders, capital ship weapons typically increased by 6 to 9 orders of magnitude; even 12 sometimes, since we could find evidence of petatons of firepower for weapons even directly described as being in the terawatt range.

Unsurprisingly, the last two prequel-ICSes and other official publications for which Saxton was a consultant share the same traits.

Several possible reasons for that come to mind - one of which is that vague hyperbolic statements have more flexibility at large orders of magnitude, and another of which is that the reductio ad absurdum is more obvious at lower scales - but I'm not sure which is correct.

In the case of WH40K, it might also have much to do with the two explicit yield figures that Connor was aware of; 19 "megathules" for lasguns and six hundred gigatons for torpedoes. Both are fairly old sources of dubious accuracy, IIRC, but they've been bandied about the VS debate constantly for years.

[Mr. Oragahn]

A 3 km crater is not the "mid-high TJ" range, but starting to look like "low PJ" range, FYI.

The asteroid calculator from SDN shows that a 1.5 km deep crater into an asteroid of hard granite needs about 4.9 megatons.
But the mitigating factors are rather enormous. The equation he used is solely based on experiments made against ground soil and in a gravitational system. I've been unable to get a copy of the book he used though.
An asteroid in space is a different object. First of all, it doesn't generate considerable gravity at all. Secondly, and that's quite the important part of it, it's now considered that most large asteroids are packed dirt and large nodes of material, loosely held together. In theory, it would be obviously more brittle than even a large lump of cosmic ice. It goes without saying that this hardly makes for a solid element. It also means that cracking, pushing and knocking such pebbles out of their "socket" is not going to be as hard as if one were to make a hole in hard granite or ice.
Besides, the capacity of torpedoes to penetrate materials that are on the range of ground compositions or even weaker compounds exists. Burrowing is extremely important. We know it can happen, and that also considerably increases the transmission of energy to the surrounding ground, i.e. the coupling. For low to medium kiloton yields, depths around 50 meters matter and are optimal, yet I doubt that Wong's equation models such conditions. Most likely, they correspond to barely, half or not buried charges at all, which is not leading to different results and doesn't produce the largest possible craters for a given yield. For further depths, charges happen to be too low to produce anything worthwhile.
Finally, add the fact that the torpedo will be heavy and come at a significant speed. Pick the highest demonstrated speed and you have the parameter that corresponds to the conditions of highest damage possible. There's no reason to use inferior parameter values when the 3 km crater figure strictly corresponds to the highest capacity of the torpedo. As such, it needs to correlate with the highest parameters. So we know that both momentum and the torpedo's own mass would easily and considerably increase the capacity to gouge a crater, if only to help in the former department, that is, burrowing inside the asteroid. We've seen this demonstrated with low megaton yield nukes which left huge craters on Earth because of their impressive casing, and they were not burrowed. But this time we're in space, with no ground to push against : a crater on Earth, regardless of gravity, cannot push matter downwards forever, while in space, it can and would most likely fracture the asteroid, unless this one is particularly huge. Of course, to make a 3 km crater into an asteroid, this one cannot be of a size inferior to 3 km, but there's no need to go fetch the biggest asteroid possible.
It also goes without saying that the depth of a crater is not the same as its width.

However, it is correct that we could go looking for a low petajoule blast on the average. The problem being the large discrepancy between phase cannons and such torpedoes. It's hard to believe that Klingon BoPs of the ENT period had shields that could tank several megatons on the average. Yet ARcher's crew couldn't do anything without firing several torpedoes up the BoP's pipe in a section where shielding was minimal, clearly demonstrating that the torps' yields were insufficient to go through the shields at normal levels.
However, if the torpedoes were capable of megatons, the Klingons would have completely steamrolled the whole quadrant effortlessly.
It is especially true since deadly space battles completed with phase cannons and phasers don't get solved in one or two shots, but not many either (certainly not a hundred!), which solidly demonstrates that high GJ/low TJ weapons do fit the bill and slinging megaton level weaponry would simply not fit the era at all.

But that's quite a problem of ENT which is complicated to solve.
It goes without saying that megaton level fusion weapons could already be achieved, but we'd have to claim that for some reason, they'd be too large, not maneuverable enough, too slow and unprotected. They'd be easily shot down, and would endanger the firing ship if intercepted too soon or fired at a very close target.
One would say that fusion technology would have obviously been considerably enhanced by then, and that is true, so we shouldn't expect to see bombs as huge as they were during the Cold War.
Ivy Mike was 73.8 tons heavy and had a max yield of 12 MT. It also was quite big.
Now reduce the size, add maneuvering systems and sensors. We can guess that the yield would be considerably lowered. In fact, the device would have probably not worked very well.
But it also was a primitive design. However, we have no information on how efficient a Terran fusion explosive was.

The only rationalization I could think of being that the low megaton yields of a photonic torpedo could be achieved, but only in special conditions, and strictly outside of combat conditions.
But how is that supposed to make sense?
What's the point of giving a max yield, for example, if it means the torpedo may not even be fired at all?
All I can suggest is that it may be capable of such a yield, but only if a lot if not all of the systems inside the torpedo are removed beyond what is strictly necessary for the bang, with the direct result being that the projectile is now a dumb cannonball without any maneuverability and protection.

The "Pegasus" asteroid has both scaling issues (we've seen several different scalings of it)...

Mmm, I found that vivftp's scalings are extremely accurate. I've never seen any good evidence to reject them.

... and composition issues (gravitational fields, which requires a very massive asteroid, which by any of the scalings results in obscene densities; strong natural magnetic fields, which by any of the scalings results in assuming that the asteroid was the subject of odd mischief by Q or was largely comprised of rare earth metals).
It's troublesome. The result is that "Pegasus" fits nearly equally badly with anything - from sub-megaton photon torpedoes to multi-gigaton photon torpedoes.

Indeed. That makes the asteroid a complete piece of... whatever. At best, one could argue that it's caused by the phasing tech and only affects space crafts for some reason?
One would wonder why, with such a massive field, that asteroid didn't shine like a beacon in a pitch black night though...

I doubt that.

It's the Cardassian phase disruptor rifle. 4.7 megajoule capacity with a 3 millisecond recharge time. The reasonable interpretation of these two points of data is that it's the discharge crystal being referred to - i.e., in continuous firing a peak sustained ~ one and a half gigawatt output. "Return to Grace" is the episode.

The exact line is:
KIRA: This is a standard issue, Cardassian phase-disruptor rifle. It has a four point seven megajoule power capacity, three millisecond recharge two beam settings.

The other reasonable interpretation, which shines when one picks the whole dialogue, when Kira was comparing both weapons, is that it's the recharge time once plugged into a portable reactor pack.
This because Kira cites "fully autonomous recharge" as a trait of the Federation phaser rifle, which obviously means that the Cardassian didn't have it. Which means the Cardassian rifle relied on an external recharge system, most likely a rack tied to a power core. More details here.

The megajoule setting would work particularly well in contrast to the 1.05 MW Romulan disruptor rifle. In "The Mind's Eye", even a 1.05 MW for a UFP phaser rifle is well above Starfleet specifications.

The case for them being different isn't that strong. In "Ensigns of Command," we see steam puffs bursting out of pipe nearly a kilometer away from impact from a 24th century hand phaser (several tens of gigajoules, realistically speaking, since that means thousands of cubic meters of steam are under pressure enough to do damage);

I took care of debunking that incident as a valid source of information more than a year ago in the gigaton-level phaser thread.

As far as I'm concerned, you failed to. Please note my last post in that thread, which I don't see a reply to. I'll quote the relevant portion:

You would rather that the culprit for the mysterious glow be the pumping station - a technology as old as the Romans - rather than the phaser? You think that the pumping station has the ability to shoot giant destructive red glows that flash water into steam?

I think it's clearly a phaser effect - an unusual one, perhaps, with energy being channeled in unusual ways due to the local Treknobabble radiations that were so important in the episode, but all due to the phaser nonetheless.

Aqueducts are, as I've mentioned, Roman technology. Filter stations are slightly more modern, but there's still no remotely plausible reason for either pumps or filters to fire destructive glows that propagate like that. Phasers, however, are seen to have mysterious glowing effects that continue to act on matter after the initial beam has been cut off. Usually they don't look like that, but again, that's most easily explained by saying that the local treknobabble radiation made it look different.

Dang. I reopened the text file and it's a mess and horribly long. I've got a reply in pieces. I'll try to see how I can finish it, but I have to streamline it a bit.
In the meantime, we know we strongly disagree on that point.

Several possible reasons for that come to mind - one of which is that vague hyperbolic statements have more flexibility at large orders of magnitude, and another of which is that the reductio ad absurdum is more obvious at lower scales - but I'm not sure which is correct.

In the case of WH40K, it might also have much to do with the two explicit yield figures that Connor was aware of; 19 "megathules" for lasguns and six hundred gigatons for torpedoes. Both are fairly old sources of dubious accuracy, IIRC, but they've been bandied about the VS debate constantly for years.

Actually, I noticed that for the vast majority of his observations, anytime he was citing other calcs and sources, the one to surface the most was his Caves of Ice estimates. It's literally central to his paradigm.
I've rarely seen him refer to the old Space Hulk quotations. Not to say that there's strong reasons to disregard the figure.
Connor has devoted an entire extra thread to a strong update on the CoI calcs. A lengthy work ultimately pointless since it totally hinges on a conflation of two lines and literalism applied to hyperbole.
It's not a surprise that any criticism of those calculations was met with harsh opposition. I've experienced it at SBC when I cited my own calcs. They were rejected on the basis of "just because", he Connor factor and the idea that he worked a lot, so he's obviously right.
Well, being obtuse enough to keep walking in the wrong direction is the wanderer's problem. I couldn't care less.

[sonofccn]

It's hard to believe that Klingon BoPs of the ENT period had shields that could tank several megatons on the average. Yet ARcher's crew couldn't do anything without firing several torpedoes up the BoP's pipe in a section where shielding was minimal, clearly demonstrating that the torps' yields were insufficient to go through the shields at normal levels.

Your memory is incorrect. Here should contain everything needed for the incident(s) in question along with my own crude observations. Suffice it to say 1 to 2 photonic torpedoes set to fifty percent creamed a BOP. It was only by diverting everything and weakening his aft section to almost nothing that he could withstand Archer's firing.

That said I do find it unlikely that Starfleet's photonic torpedoes are in the megaton range, if I had to ballpark it I'd would guess they could only dish out in the high tens of kilotons or low hundreds.

However, if the torpedoes were capable of megatons, the Klingons would have completely steamrolled the whole quadrant effortlessly.

I don't see why this need be. One shouldn't overlook phase cannons and their ilk are typically depicted as fairly focused beams versus the more chaotic explosions of torpedoes as well that the BOP is more along the lines of a destroyer in the Klingon navy. The few times the Enterprise struck against a D-5/D-7 at best only proved the NX class could tank a beating rather than overpowering the Klingon warships.

[Jedi Master Spock]

However, it is correct that we could go looking for a low petajoule blast on the average. The problem being the large discrepancy between phase cannons and such torpedoes. It's hard to believe that Klingon BoPs of the ENT period had shields that could tank several megatons on the average. Yet ARcher's crew couldn't do anything without firing several torpedoes up the BoP's pipe in a section where shielding was minimal, clearly demonstrating that the torps' yields were insufficient to go through the shields at normal levels.
However, if the torpedoes were capable of megatons, the Klingons would have completely steamrolled the whole quadrant effortlessly.
It is especially true since deadly space battles completed with phase cannons and phasers don't get solved in one or two shots, but not many either (certainly not a hundred!), which solidly demonstrates that high GJ/low TJ weapons do fit the bill and slinging megaton level weaponry would simply not fit the era at all.


But that's quite a problem of ENT which is complicated to solve.
It goes without saying that megaton level fusion weapons could already be achieved, but we'd have to claim that for some reason, they'd be too large, not maneuverable enough, too slow and unprotected. They'd be easily shot down, and would endanger the firing ship if intercepted too soon or fired at a very close target.
One would say that fusion technology would have obviously been considerably enhanced by then, and that is true, so we shouldn't expect to see bombs as huge as they were during the Cold War.
Ivy Mike was 73.8 tons heavy and had a max yield of 12 MT. It also was quite big.
Now reduce the size, add maneuvering systems and sensors. We can guess that the yield would be considerably lowered. In fact, the device would have probably not worked very well.
But it also was a primitive design. However, we have no information on how efficient a Terran fusion explosive was.

The only rationalization I could think of being that the low megaton yields of a photonic torpedo could be achieved, but only in special conditions, and strictly outside of combat conditions.
But how is that supposed to make sense?
What's the point of giving a max yield, for example, if it means the torpedo may not even be fired at all?
All I can suggest is that it may be capable of such a yield, but only if a lot if not all of the systems inside the torpedo are removed beyond what is strictly necessary for the bang, with the direct result being that the projectile is now a dumb cannonball without any maneuverability and protection.

Really?

Think carefully about this for a minute. Yes, the NX-01's phase cannons are designed for 500 gigajoules each ("Silent Enemy"), and the spatial torpedo warheads are quite similar to a terajoule device ("Minefield"). However, it's quite early on that Reed overloads the cannons for ten times their rated capacity (again, "Silent Enemy") and further, can be used to blow up something "the size of Mount McKinley." (A test is seen in "Fight or Flight.")

This is the first season of Enterprise. The NX-01 is considered virtually unarmed at this point. The top speed that they've set their brand new "warp five engine" to, at the point that the phase cannons are tested out and rated, is warp 4.5 - while the Klingons casually use warp factor 6 without a second thought. As of the first season, the NX has a rough time dealing with anyone. ENT is an interesting series in that the ship is upgraded incredibly during the course of the show.

So, first, we have to consider that the phase cannons of season 1 are not necessarily the same as the phase cannons of season 2 - or even later in season 1 - and are certainly not the upgraded weapons after the NX's big post-S2 overhaul in which the photon torpedoes were installed.

Second, we have to consider the age-old problem related to phase weapons: Which is more important, effect, or actual energy yield? Phase cannons cause destructive effects on inanimate rock ("destroy Mount McKinley" is actually a greater effect level than "put a 3 kilometer crater in an asteroid"), and may have much better penetration than torpedoes at the same yield level.

Third, as you say, the maximum possible yield of a photon torpedo, for ship-to-ground bombardment, doesn't mean the same thing as the actual tactical yield of a photon torpedo, for ship-to-ship combat. This is an issue with 24th century photon torpedoes as well. However, we have to consider the first two issues as well. Once we do, a low-megaton yield is not nearly so difficult conceptually.

There are, after all, just two things that indicate a low-end yield for phase cannons - the quoted 500 gigajoule figure in "Silent Enemy," and the quoted 80 gigajoule figure in "Congenitor" - contrasted with the dramatic visuals of "Fight or Flight"'s firing test and its subsequent description in "Silent Enemy," both of which are much closer to putting a 3 kilometer crater in an asteroid.


So let's talk Klingons. The Klingons are the 800 pound gorilla on the block at this point, and the NX is being pushed around by the metaphorical equivalent of the chimpanzees. There isn't another power in the area that can challenge the Klingons for dominance; you either prudently avoid them or deal with them on their terms.

Phase cannons could, as of a full season of ship shakedown and tinkering later, maybe penetrate their armor. (ENT: "Judgement") If the Klingon ship sat still. Note that we're not talking about their shields; just their armor. They do have shields. Every time the NX manages to pull off damaging a Klingon ship, it's treated like a miracle. (Even odd or small Klingon ships, such as Goroth's ship, which carries most un-Klingonly escape pods and doesn't have the normal shape of Klingon warships.)

Now, humans do manage to damage Klingon ships several times, but the writers do try very hard to establish a serious level of Klingon technological superiority during the ENT period. It's not at all strange to me that the NX would have to upgrade by a couple of orders of magnitude to start threatening the Klingons with "brute force" type weapons.

The other reasonable interpretation, which shines when one picks the whole dialogue, when Kira was comparing both weapons, is that it's the recharge time once plugged into a portable reactor pack.
This because Kira cites "fully autonomous recharge" as a trait of the Federation phaser rifle, which obviously means that the Cardassian didn't have it. Which means the Cardassian rifle relied on an external recharge system, most likely a rack tied to a power core. More details here.

Three milliseconds? That would mean that as soon as you plugged the rifle into the rack, it finished charging.

When we're talking about a three millisecond recharge time, it really only makes sense in terms of a tactical context, rather than a storage rack. E.g., that's how long until you can fire the weapon again once you've fired away. "Autonomous recharge" vs "three millisecond recharge" sounds like the difference between "automatic" and "semi-automatic." E.g., perhaps the Cardassian rifle fires bursts of 4.7 megajoules, and then recharges in a separate action, while the Federation rifle continuously cycles power into its discharge crystal the moment it is used.

What we can take from that is that somewhere in that phase disruptor rifle, there is a connection intended to transfer 4.7 megajoules in three millisecond. This is a non-trivial amount of power and a significant design requirement. Which is more likely? That this gigawatt-range connection is part of the firing mechanism, or that this gigawatt-range connection is the one that goes to the recharge rack when the weapon is stored?

The megajoule setting would work particularly well in contrast to the 1.05 MW Romulan disruptor rifle. In "The Mind's Eye", even a 1.05 MW for a UFP phaser rifle is well above Starfleet specifications.

It doesn't. Because with a 4.7 megajoule total capacity in a weapon that's slightly beefier than a Federation phaser rifle, you'd drain it in less than five seconds flat. Geordi and Data are draining the weapon for quite some time longer than that. The 4.7 megajoule power capacity could be any one of a wide variety of things, but "total energy capacity of this weapon" doesn't fit.

[sonofccn]

Yes, the NX-01's phase cannons are designed for 500 gigajoules each ("Silent Enemy"), and the spatial torpedo warheads are quite similar to a terajoule device ("Minefield"). However, it's quite early on that Reed overloads the cannons for ten times their rated capacity (again, "Silent Enemy") and further, can be used to blow up something "the size of Mount McKinley." (A test is seen in "Fight or Flight.")

Begging your pardon sir but as far as I know there was no test fire of phase canons in Fight or Flight. Destroying "Mount Mckinley" appears to come from Silent Enemy.

REED: Even if these cannons had been installed at Jupiter Station, they wouldn't be any more effective than they are now.
ARCHER: What about yesterday? I saw you blow something up the size of Mount McKinley.
REED: Yes sir, but that was due to an overload.

They do test their torpedoes of course in Fight or Flight and if I misunderstood what you were saying I deeply apologize. In any event please forgive this intrusion.

[Jedi Master Spock]

Somehow, I thought it was more complicated than that, but yes, the images I'm thinking of do come from "Silent Enemy." I stand corrected.

It's best that we treat the actual line as a little hyperbolic; however, even so, the visuals of the test do line up nicely with high-yield effect, even if the stated energy level is only in the TJ range. If we take it perfectly literally, the "size of Mount McKinley" is 5500m from base to peak, which would make phase cannons significantly more powerful than photonic torpedoes... when fired at inert targets, anyway.

[Mr. Oragahn]

However, it is correct that we could go looking for a low petajoule blast on the average. The problem being the large discrepancy between phase cannons and such torpedoes. It's hard to believe that Klingon BoPs of the ENT period had shields that could tank several megatons on the average. Yet ARcher's crew couldn't do anything without firing several torpedoes up the BoP's pipe in a section where shielding was minimal, clearly demonstrating that the torps' yields were insufficient to go through the shields at normal levels.
However, if the torpedoes were capable of megatons, the Klingons would have completely steamrolled the whole quadrant effortlessly.
It is especially true since deadly space battles completed with phase cannons and phasers don't get solved in one or two shots, but not many either (certainly not a hundred!), which solidly demonstrates that high GJ/low TJ weapons do fit the bill and slinging megaton level weaponry would simply not fit the era at all.


But that's quite a problem of ENT which is complicated to solve.
It goes without saying that megaton level fusion weapons could already be achieved, but we'd have to claim that for some reason, they'd be too large, not maneuverable enough, too slow and unprotected. They'd be easily shot down, and would endanger the firing ship if intercepted too soon or fired at a very close target.
One would say that fusion technology would have obviously been considerably enhanced by then, and that is true, so we shouldn't expect to see bombs as huge as they were during the Cold War.
Ivy Mike was 73.8 tons heavy and had a max yield of 12 MT. It also was quite big.
Now reduce the size, add maneuvering systems and sensors. We can guess that the yield would be considerably lowered. In fact, the device would have probably not worked very well.
But it also was a primitive design. However, we have no information on how efficient a Terran fusion explosive was.

The only rationalization I could think of being that the low megaton yields of a photonic torpedo could be achieved, but only in special conditions, and strictly outside of combat conditions.
But how is that supposed to make sense?
What's the point of giving a max yield, for example, if it means the torpedo may not even be fired at all?
All I can suggest is that it may be capable of such a yield, but only if a lot if not all of the systems inside the torpedo are removed beyond what is strictly necessary for the bang, with the direct result being that the projectile is now a dumb cannonball without any maneuverability and protection.

Really?

Think carefully about this for a minute. Yes, the NX-01's phase cannons are designed for 500 gigajoules each ("Silent Enemy"), and the spatial torpedo warheads are quite similar to a terajoule device ("Minefield"). However, it's quite early on that Reed overloads the cannons for ten times their rated capacity (again, "Silent Enemy") and further, can be used to blow up something "the size of Mount McKinley." (A test is seen in "Fight or Flight.")

This is the first season of Enterprise. The NX-01 is considered virtually unarmed at this point. The top speed that they've set their brand new "warp five engine" to, at the point that the phase cannons are tested out and rated, is warp 4.5 - while the Klingons casually use warp factor 6 without a second thought. As of the first season, the NX has a rough time dealing with anyone. ENT is an interesting series in that the ship is upgraded incredibly during the course of the show.

Well, do we have any evidence that weapons are so considerably upgraded, so much as to make megaton explosives more or less even to the phase cannons?
They added more, for sure, but then?

So, first, we have to consider that the phase cannons of season 1 are not necessarily the same as the phase cannons of season 2 - or even later in season 1 - and are certainly not the upgraded weapons after the NX's big post-S2 overhaul in which the photon torpedoes were installed.

OK, but that's a if thus far.

Second, we have to consider the age-old problem related to phase weapons: Which is more important, effect, or actual energy yield? Phase cannons cause destructive effects on inanimate rock ("destroy Mount McKinley" is actually a greater effect level than "put a 3 kilometer crater in an asteroid"), and may have much better penetration than torpedoes at the same yield level.

The tip of it was actually destroyed.
And that's just acceptable if we disregard the fact that the beams were extremely wide. If the rocky protrusion really was of the size of McKinley, the beam's width would be greater than the NX-01's wingspan at the point of impact.
In the end, what is clear is that the blast was certainly not even enough to blast the whole "mountain" (contrary to what Archer says, so he was not going for accuracy here).
Besides, wasn't Archer the guy who said you could blast a planetoid with a yield which was known to be fail completely short of even blowing up a small moon ?

So let's talk Klingons. The Klingons are the 800 pound gorilla on the block at this point, and the NX is being pushed around by the metaphorical equivalent of the chimpanzees. There isn't another power in the area that can challenge the Klingons for dominance; you either prudently avoid them or deal with them on their terms.

Phase cannons could, as of a full season of ship shakedown and tinkering later, maybe penetrate their armor. (ENT: "Judgement") If the Klingon ship sat still. Note that we're not talking about their shields; just their armor. They do have shields. Every time the NX manages to pull off damaging a Klingon ship, it's treated like a miracle. (Even odd or small Klingon ships, such as Goroth's ship, which carries most un-Klingonly escape pods and doesn't have the normal shape of Klingon warships.)

Now, humans do manage to damage Klingon ships several times, but the writers do try very hard to establish a serious level of Klingon technological superiority during the ENT period. It's not at all strange to me that the NX would have to upgrade by a couple of orders of magnitude to start threatening the Klingons with "brute force" type weapons.

Of course they would need to. But that's not solving the problem, contrary to an hypothetical opposition between manageable tactical yields, and some "strategical" WMD yields with lots of prep (and possibly lots of modifications to standard torpedoes) and targets havning nothing to do with ships.
But there's just zero evidence that the ships carry super duper torpedoes for special use, and that's certainly true for the NX-01.
So if they wanted to achieve anything "strategical", they'd have to fiddle with their current torpedoes.

The other reasonable interpretation, which shines when one picks the whole dialogue, when Kira was comparing both weapons, is that it's the recharge time once plugged into a portable reactor pack.
This because Kira cites "fully autonomous recharge" as a trait of the Federation phaser rifle, which obviously means that the Cardassian didn't have it. Which means the Cardassian rifle relied on an external recharge system, most likely a rack tied to a power core. More details here.

Three milliseconds? That would mean that as soon as you plugged the rifle into the rack, it finished charging.

Yep. I see no problem with that. Eventually, if the rifle was a solid design and properly built, we could imagine that by merely having a specific edge of the weapon touch the charging-rack, the rifle would be back into operation in a heart beat.

When we're talking about a three millisecond recharge time, it really only makes sense in terms of a tactical context, rather than a storage rack.

A portable power source is tactically sound. Heck, it doesn't even have to produce gigawatts of energy. It only says how long it would take to transfer the enrgy. It is, in fact, easily understood as nothing more than an indication of flux capacity as a rate of x joules per y unit of time, not real power production per se.
Even if it would only take 1 nanosecond to rechrge the weapon's megajoule stock, it doesn't say that whatever does the recharge can produce terawatts or more. It just says how fast it can transfer the energy.
There's no other way round since the rifle doesn't have an autonomous recharge capacity. Autnomous meaning of its own, that doesn't rely on some external to the design of the weapon.
Or perhaps it's a power clip, meaning that it only takes 3 ms to trasnfer all the clip's power to the rile's internal. I'm not disputing a transfer capacity in the GW range after all.

E.g., that's how long until you can fire the weapon again once you've fired away. "Autonomous recharge" vs "three millisecond recharge" sounds like the difference between "automatic" and "semi-automatic." E.g., perhaps the Cardassian rifle fires bursts of 4.7 megajoules, and then recharges in a separate action, while the Federation rifle continuously cycles power into its discharge crystal the moment it is used.

Autonomous isn't exactly similar to the term automatic.

What we can take from that is that somewhere in that phase disruptor rifle, there is a connection intended to transfer 4.7 megajoules in three millisecond. This is a non-trivial amount of power and a significant design requirement.

Besides, going with the option that it's a fancy way to say auto/semi-auto, what an auto system is that it prepares a round automatically on a continous rate until the weapon gripes or the clip goes black. A semi-auto needs you to release the trigger for this mechanism to work. It doesn't mean the round is produced, it only details how the round is brought to the firing chamber, from the clip.
In light of this, a 3 ms recharge on a semi-auto only means that it takes 3 ms to transfer 4.7 MJ to the firing capacitor from the clip. It's an information about flux, not about the power production of the clip. The energy that is transfered from the clip to the firing system doesn't automatically translate as weaponized energy. It certainly doesn't mean that you can also keep recharging that much continuously without destroying the weapon. There's some resistance to consider there.
Transferinf 4.7 MJ internally still means that only 4.7 MJ have been transfered.
Nowhere it is said that this can be repeated over the course of a second so as to obtain firing yields considerably greater.
Where is the proof that the system could handle a complete transfer of 1566 GJ per second ?
We just have the wattage transfer, from a power source to the firing system (likely a "capacitor", as per SF tropes).

Which is more likely? That this gigawatt-range connection is part of the firing mechanism, or that this gigawatt-range connection is the one that goes to the recharge rack when the weapon is stored?

No matter the one you pick, it simply does not translate as firepower.

The megajoule setting would work particularly well in contrast to the 1.05 MW Romulan disruptor rifle. In "The Mind's Eye", even a 1.05 MW for a UFP phaser rifle is well above Starfleet specifications.

It doesn't. Because with a 4.7 megajoule total capacity in a weapon that's slightly beefier than a Federation phaser rifle, you'd drain it in less than five seconds flat.


In the case of the external recharge system, I think I may need to reword my thoughts (too lazy to see if I typed them correctly in fact). After all, I had already considered, in the gigaton-level phaser thread, that hand phasers from a century earlier would already tap power packs containing much more energy. It wouldn't make sense to claim that rifles don't carry as much if not more energy!

Eventually, that that means is that the Cardassian rifle can fire burst up to 4.7 MJ, and takes 3 ms to recharge its entire internal stock from a charging rack, however high it is.

I can imagine one Cardassian solder slamming the buttstock into a socket, perhaps press a button, hear a quicly increasing humming sound over less than a second, and have your gun ready with another fresh stock of hundreds of MJ to tap or perhaps a bit more.

Geordi and Data are draining the weapon for quite some time longer than that. The 4.7 megajoule power capacity could be any one of a wide variety of things, but "total energy capacity of this weapon" doesn't fit.

We don't have to understand power capacity, notably following a rating in joules, as the stock of a clip, but what a shot is capable of.
Just like the power of a weapon in the wide meaning of it.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Looks like SS4 couldn't handle the Tyranids somehow failing at taking the super city of Blame!, so had to come up with some retarded excuse as to lock a thread that didn't do any differently than your random vs thread at SBC. Class.

Observe a Haloite, Nattuo having a seizure and falling into stringent denial mode in a thread where the highest forces of Stargate are put under the supervision of competent leaders.
Frothing at the mouth, he's fallen down to claiming that facts just didn't happen and abusing logic as to completely reject the principle of competence as observed from the audience's point of view.

It's really that bad. I mean, aside from spamming a whole galaxy with ZPM busting FTL capable missiles built under a time dilation field, or even destroy a whole universe with fracturing the fabric of time and space with Arcturus (although that's extreme and could be debated), we still have Asgards turning stars to blackholes or Asuran and Replicator industrial might which can be used, along time dilation, to literally eat a whole galaxy in a very short time:
Get to a system, lock it in time dilation with the device used by the Asgards, and have all resources used to build more of the stuff, more time dilation devices, more weapons, more Replicators and Asurans, more ships, more numbers, all that in very little time. Make kits and ready-made crafts, and prepare to send them all by flying outside of the field (we know that the one deployed at Halla was permeable).
Use Asgard FTL to cross 2000 LY within a few seconds to send all those deployment packs which will lock more systems in TD, rinse and repeat.
Beyond the preparation needed to implement such a plan, once it would be going on, it could take a few seconds outside of the TD to completely eat a star system.
Remember, we are allowed to use the industrial reproduction rates of Replicators to their acceptable and expected heights.

[User1652]

Just wondering. Is Mr. Oragahn Soulgazer from Spacebattles? Just wondering because I heard that Mr. Oragahn goes to spacebattles sometimes and wonder if he was Soulgazer.

[Kor_Dahar_Master]

After the usual suspects got through preaching and damning anybody who dared blame inconsistencies on CGI ect ect like the "MT McKinley" comment and visual material in "ENT:Silent enemy" and giving it a bit of a hammering.


http://forums.spacebattles.com/showthre ... 327&page=3

So i pointed out a few inconvenient facts...:).

EDIT, i have reported the guy called Sir_Tanly for his failure to do what is required and generally being a troll....lets see how the mods deal with him.

[Praeothmin]

lets see how the mods deal with him.

Well, since you're the one reporting him, I think it's more like:
"Let's see how the mods DON'T deal with him."


:)

[Kor_Dahar_Master]

lets see how the mods deal with him.

Well, since you're the one reporting him, I think it's more like:
"Let's see how the mods DON'T deal with him."


:)

http://forums.spacebattles.com/showpost ... tcount=130

A minor wrist slap but a step in the right direction at least, although looking at Sir_Tanly's next couple of posts he is ignoring it and switching tactics that involve "not knowing my claims" and demanding i "post a thesis" lol a fantastic claim made in the same post he also says he has rebutted these unknown claims several times check it out....:).

http://forums.spacebattles.com/showpost ... tcount=133

LOL first post claims he has rebutted my claims and argument several times, and the last two he asks what they are...

[Kor_Dahar_Master]

I guess locking the thread is preferable to forcing someone arguing with me to fulfill the burden of proof then huh...


http://forums.spacebattles.com/showpost ... tcount=137

FYI i hit the report button only twice during the entire thread and included links and a full explanation in them to make it easy for him to do his job.....


Obviously i knew it would be a waste of time to do so (at least over there) but doing it the right way and showing the mods response to it on here makes a good addition to the other material we have in this thread already.