Reliability Issues With The Star Trek Technical Manuals

[Mith]

A common interpetation is 4.7 megajoules per three milliseconds which should be in the gigajoule range for a full second discharge.

And they would be wrong.

Three milliseconds is the recharge rate of the phaser rifle, not its discharge rate. Those are two very different and very important things. Most likely the phaser rifle has a quarter second discharge and a three milisecond recharge.

We also have an example or two where hand phasers'/phaser rifles' effects that would likely tickle the gigajoule range, such as when Worf takes out the deflector dish in the movie First Contact, through obvious that depends on if your interpret that the energy comes from the phaser or some form of reaction on target.

It was specifically stated that the dish was charged with anti-protons and that blowing it up while it was on the ship was a bad idea.

[sonofccn]

And they would be wrong.

Three milliseconds is the recharge rate of the phaser rifle, not its discharge rate

That interpetation requires Kira, explaining to a novice who's unfamiliar with either weapon, is being needlessly complex for a feature tangential to its use in the field, saying it recharges instantly would have been a lot easier, not to mention phasers are typically powered off of power packs as seen in Omega Glory.

Most likely the phaser rifle has a quarter second discharge and a three milisecond recharge.

Assuming a 4.7 megajoule capacity that means a phaser rifle is built to the tolerance of a gigawatt. If we take the 4.7 as a per quarter second figure, assuming the phaser has the power for a full one second discharge, it should be roughly six gigawatts. Simply speaking your interpetation implies walking up and attaching the recharge socket to your target would be vastly more effective , transfering far greater energy in a thousandth of a second, than the actual offensively tailored options.

It was specifically stated that the dish was charged with anti-protons and that blowing it up while it was on the ship was a bad idea.

Specificly:

WORF: We should bring reinforcements.
PICARD: There's no time. It looks as if they're building the beacon right on top of the particle emitter. Once all the transponder rods are in place the beacon will be activated.
HAWK: Well if we set our phasers to full power...
PICARD: No! There's a risk that we hit the dish. It's charged with anti-protons. We could destroy half the ship. We have to find another way

I'd argue this is far from destroying "half the ship" implying one way or another it wasn't as dangerous removed as it was attached. The fact it seems to depower when Picard shoots the connecting cable suggests, to me, it had become inert when Worf shot it.

Compare this image where the "bars" or "spines" appear to be glowing with this image where the "spines" or not aglow.

[Lucky]

The Federation is only 8,000 LY wide. While it would take them years to cross it at lower warp velocities, the TM suggests that there are areas of space where FTL is faster. Hence why you can reach the center of the galaxy in one episode and visit the edge of it in another and yet still have a starship that takes decades to find its way back.

You mean this?

The actual values are dependent upon interstellar conditions, e.g. gas density, electric and magnetic fields within the different regions of the Milky Way galaxy, and fluctuations in the subspace domain. Starships routinely travel at multiples of c, but they suffer from energy penalties resulting from quantum drag forces and motive power oscillation inefficiencies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Warptable.gif

It would appear to be saying that warp 9 will at best be 1000 times faster then the speed of light, but will often be slower.

And they would be wrong.

Three milliseconds is the recharge rate of the phaser rifle, not its discharge rate. Those are two very different and very important things. Most likely the phaser rifle has a quarter second discharge and a three milisecond recharge.

Kira's statement makes the most sense if she is talking about the pre-fire chamber that both the tech manual(P. 134) and show(TNG: The Mind's Eye) talk about, and we also have similar statements about phase pistol output.

[Lucky]

I'd argue the "script writers" equally have no "sense of scale":

LAFORGE: I can see it now and I'm telling you that you don't have time to wait. Not even forty seconds.
ARRIDOR [OC]: Ferengi pod out.
LAFORGE: Damn it, Arridor, we're seventy thousand light years away from our ships. Come on, now. Follow us in. We'll lead you.
(no reply)
LAFORGE: Idiots. It's getting worse. I'm taking us in, Data. With or without them.
DATA: Thrusters at half power. Three quarters.
LAFORGE: Entering outer event horizon.

[Ferengi pod]

ARRIDOR: They panic quickly under pressure. There, precisely as scheduled. Right where I expected it to be.
(Then the end of the wormhole whizzes away from them)
.
.
.
WORF: Captain, DaiMon Goss is demanding to know where his men are.
PICARD: Advise him to set his coordinates for the Delta Quadrant. He may run into them in eighty years or so

Now there are far faster examples from TNG and I am not saying it should be used as the end all be all of warp velocities but it is a clear cut case of needing far more than a "few months to a few years" and as a season three episode should predate the tech manual.

The TNG Tech Manual states warp 9 is c*1000 times faster then the speed of light, or to put it a different way, it would take about 8 years to cross the United Federation of Planets at warp 9.

The writers however have always shown it to be faster to travel in mapped space, and have always shown that starships need to be wary of dangers like literal waves, and in some cases starships have to avoid large areas of space.

We also have an example or two where hand phasers'/phaser rifles' effects that would likely tickle the gigajoule range, such as when Worf takes out the deflector dish in the movie First Contact, through obvious that depends on if your interpret that the energy comes from the phaser or some form of reaction on target.

McCoy says phasers melt what they hit in "That Which Survives", and Riker honestly vaporizes material in "Vengeance Factor". I fail to see any reason to assume a free lunch.

[Lucky]

In DS9: "Battle Lines" a shot specified as being around one gigajoule downed the shields of a denube-class runabout.

The fact that the sensors weren't working properly do to a bleep load of factors makes any reading they got through the "white noise" a low end

it was long established in TOS and TNG that some weapons are better at bringing down shields then others. Lasers, X-ray lasers, Neutral particle beams, and merculite rockets are stated to be of little to no threat to a starship with shields up. Then you have Nomad's beam weapon which was stated to have a yield equal to about 90 TOS era photon torpedos, but no one has ever claimed a conni could take 90 photon torpedos. It's not a matter of how hard you hit a Trek style shield, but how you hit it.

Than there is DS9: "The Die is Cast", which needs no explanation.

Actually you do need to explain how the Die is Cast is an outlier? Whom Gods Destroy, and Booby trap clearly states that everyone can do things like mass scatter a planet with a fleet of starships.

And then another common one is VOY: "Rise" where a lone photon torpedo yields >=30 megatons.

Please explain? I'm not sure what you are trying to say. I'm not aware of "Rise" being inconsistent with anything dealing with torpedo yields. Torpedos are dial a yield.

By definition outliers are inconsistencies.

In my experience, when dealing with a large number of data points you will always end up with some data points that don't fit into the relatively narrow range set by most of the data. What matters is if the vast majority of data falls into a relatively narrow range.

The idea of having other factors affect warp speed is made because of the inconsistencies as a way to explain them. I am not aware of anywhere in the series where that idea is hinted at, so by itself the series is inconsistent.

Off the top of my head:

It is bluntly stated that ships at warp are effected by gravitational phenomenon in "Scorpion" to the point that even the Borg are believed to avoid certain areas. Traveling through the "Northwest passage" was likened to going through rapids as I recall.

In "Star Trek VI" you have a wave of "subspace energy" created when Praxis blew up, smash into a Federation ship, and the crew responds exactly as a crew on water would.

"Force of Nature" you have ships traveling through a narrow area of space do to stuff making travel anywhere else in the area impractical.

As I had said, some are less prone to detonation. And in any case, destroying the battery will cause a release of it's started potential energy in some way or another. Also that is a different situation than completely destroying all of the battery (no debris) as phasers do when they detonate. Then there is nothing to contain its stored energy and it must be released in some manner.

But we don't know what method of storage used in Phasers in the TNG era. If the storage device can only release about one or two gigawatts at any one time it would limit an uncontrolled release.

Yes, they do appear to have limited collateral damage for some reason or another, and one could argue that the same thing occurs when they detonate.

It seems to me that the limited collateral damage is intentional.

[2046]

If you show someone a gun before a battle, are you going to wow them with how many fractions of a second it takes for the next round to enter the chamber after the last fires or is extracted, or are you going to note that it shoots X rounds per minute?

[359]

The fact that the sensors weren't working properly do to a bleep load of factors makes any reading they got through the "white noise" a low end

First, the dampening field was localized to the planet's surface.

O'Brien: "Exactly. See, they're putting out a mutual induction field that would block out ninety nine percent of all transmissions to and from the surface."

Second, Kira was concerned about that level of energy buildup calling it significant.

Kira: "Reading a significant energy build-up in the satellite. Six hundred megawatts, nine hundred, it's firing."

it was long established in TOS and TNG that some weapons are better at bringing down shields then others. Lasers, X-ray lasers, Neutral particle beams, and merculite rockets are stated to be of little to no threat to a starship with shields up. Then you have Nomad's beam weapon which was stated to have a yield equal to about 90 TOS era photon torpedos, but no one has ever claimed a conni could take 90 photon torpedos. It's not a matter of how hard you hit a Trek style shield, but how you hit it.

One could also argue that is not evidence of variable effectiveness just strong, weak, and inconsistent weapons.

Actually you do need to explain how the Die is Cast is an outlier? Whom Gods Destroy, and Booby trap clearly states that everyone can do things like mass scatter a planet with a fleet of starships.

I don't think I need to state that it would take more than a couple of gigajoules to mass scatter a planet. This was to provide contrast with the other examples, such as DS9: "Battle Lines".

And then another common one is VOY: "Rise" where a lone photon torpedo yields >=30 megatons.

Please explain? I'm not sure what you are trying to say. I'm not aware of "Rise" being inconsistent with anything dealing with torpedo yields. Torpedos are dial a yield.

It would not make sense to reduce yield by that much when you are trying to totally obliterate an asteroid which will hit a civilized world. And it was later stated that they would have trouble destroying others due to the slight increase in resiliency.

In my experience, when dealing with a large number of data points you will always end up with some data points that don't fit into the relatively narrow range set by most of the data. What matters is if the vast majority of data falls into a relatively narrow range.

That is true, but those data points which lie outside the range are still there, they are just inconsistent.

Off the top of my head:

It is bluntly stated that ships at warp are effected by gravitational phenomenon in "Scorpion" to the point that even the Borg are believed to avoid certain areas. Traveling through the "Northwest passage" was likened to going through rapids as I recall.

In "Star Trek VI" you have a wave of "subspace energy" created when Praxis blew up, smash into a Federation ship, and the crew responds exactly as a crew on water would.

"Force of Nature" you have ships traveling through a narrow area of space do to stuff making travel anywhere else in the area impractical.

Sure, there are things that will get in your way when traveling. You will try to go slower through or arround them. But that does not indicate that one war factor is variable, just that you might choose a lower factor or a longer rout because of the location.

Additionally those are very localized events. They are all described as being rare, and not found all throughout space. The one from "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" is an artificial explosion which temporarily effected subspace, the means by which a starship travels at warp.

But we don't know what method of storage used in Phasers in the TNG era. If the storage device can only release about one or two gigawatts at any one time it would limit an uncontrolled release.

If the storage device is suddenly no longer there (say... in the event of an explosion) the energy must go somewhere.

::pure speculation::
If a phaser overloads the pre-fire chamber with the same "vanishing act" by which it effects targets, and vanishes the primary power cell, the explosion would be consistent at only an handful of megajoules. Except for the many times in TOS when a phaser explosion is much more threatening. Although those are an older design of phasers.
::pure speculation::

If you show someone a gun before a battle, are you going to wow them with how many fractions of a second it takes for the next round to enter the chamber after the last fires or is extracted, or are you going to note that it shoots X rounds per minute?

Essentially Kira was giving the rounds per minute and and the impact energy, but in a more complicated manor. This could be because they are normally treated as beam weapons and not automatic pulse weapons, and it is science fiction.

[Lucky]

First, the dampening field was localized to the planet's surface.

O'Brien: "Exactly. See, they're putting out a mutual induction field that would block out ninety nine percent of all transmissions to and from the surface."

Second, Kira was concerned about that level of energy buildup calling it significant.

Kira: "Reading a significant energy build-up in the satellite. Six hundred megawatts, nine hundred, it's firing."

1)

BASHIR: Commander, sensors indicate lifeforms localised in twelve square kilometres on the moon's surface. They may be humanoid, sir 


SISKO: Humanoid? Can you verify that? 


BASHIR: I can't resolve the biopatterns. There's too much interference. 


SISKO: Take us in a little closer. 


KIRA: We're being scanned by one of the satellites. I don't like this. It's heading toward us. 


SISKO: Shields up! 


KIRA: Reading a significant energy build-up in the satellite. Six hundred megawatts, nine hundred, it's firing. 

(BANG) 

KIRA: Shields are down. Forward thrusters are gone. We're losing power. 


There is a lot of what could be called white noise interfering with the sensor readings. We can not know the true output of the weapon.

2) Without knowing what the weapon was, the yield is useless. Some weapons completely ignore shields, others are completely useless against shields, and most of the weapons in Star Trek are somewhere in between.

One could also argue that is not evidence of variable effectiveness just strong, weak, and inconsistent weapons.

Then you would have to ignore the evidence:

1) The phased polaron beam weapon used by the Dominion and Breen Energy disruptor alone show that the shields used by the Alpha Quadrent powers reacts differently to different things.

3)

WORF: Still, your weapons were limited and their ship superior. 


KORRIS: Yes. All we had was an ancient battery of Merculite rockets. Our only chance was to trick them into lowering their shields. 


KONMEL: We reduced power and lured them in. 


KORRIS: They suspected nothing. 


KONMEL: Then, when they lowered their shields to beam over a boarding party, we opened fire.

PICARD: Mister Data, what's their offensive potential? 


DATA: Talarian warships are limited to neutral particle weapons, high energy X-ray lasers and merculite rockets. No match for the Enterprise, Captain. 


PICARD: The last thing I want is to be forced into destroying one of their ships.

PICARD: Lasers can't even penetrate our navigation shields. Don't they know that? 


RIKER; Regulations so call for a Yellow Alert. 


PICARD: A very old regulation. Well, make it so, Number One. And reduce speed. Drop main shields as well. 


RIKER: May I ask why, sir? 


PICARD: In case we decide to surrender to them, Number One.

Neutral Particle Beams, L.A.S.E.R. weapons, and Merculite Rockects are talked of as useless against shields regardless of yield, and is completely plausible in known physics. The ship being immune to photons and things commonly found in solar wind is actually something that is required for a Star Trek Starship not to be destroyed when it goes to warp.

The fact that there is no limit as to how powerful a LASER can be paints a picture of a setting(Star Trek) that has a defense that makes LASER ineffective.

I don't think I need to state that it would take more than a couple of gigajoules to mass scatter a planet. This was to provide contrast with the other examples, such as DS9: "Battle Lines".

1)

KIRA: The Rubicon it is. You know, the rate we go through runabouts, it's a good thing the Earth has so many rivers.

Even in-universe Runabouts are not known for being all that difficult to damage and destroy, but even so the weapons and shields were upgraded at least once after Battle Lines.

2) Battle Lines is an unquantifiable event. We do not know the weapons actual yield do to the sensors having problems with background noise. Without knowing the nature of the weapon we can not make any honest analysis.

3) Even if we take Kira's statement it was more likely a terajoule blast given the rate it was charging.

4)

DUKAT: Is that a ramscoop control or a deflector grid panel? Just curious. It really doesn't matter. Cardassian pursuit vessels are years ahead of this

Why would a large outdated shuttle's shields be the standard by which you judge the capabilities of larger ships? They did seem to get up graded after the event.

It would not make sense to reduce yield by that much when you are trying to totally obliterate an asteroid which will hit a civilized world. And it was later stated that they would have trouble destroying others due to the slight increase in resiliency.

1) Why would a damaged starship in need of a Federation dry-dock and possibly a new warp core and that is chronically low on fuel try to use as little fuel as possible to destroy something? They used enough boom according to their sensors. Heck, we've seen starships fire torpedos that seemingly had no warheads.

2) Why would anyone have a hard time destroying something designed to be hard to safely destroy? The fake asteroids were designed to break in a certain manner if someone tried to destroy them, and seemed to have guidance systems.

Now the question you are not asking: Why didn't then just use phasers?

That is true, but those data points which lie outside the range are still there, they are just inconsistent.

That doesn't stop real world scientists from basically ignoring the outliers for the more consistent data and quantifiable data.

Sure, there are things that will get in your way when traveling. You will try to go slower through or arround them. But that does not indicate that one war factor is variable, just that you might choose a lower factor or a longer rout because of the location.

Additionally those are very localized events. They are all described as being rare, and not found all throughout space. The one from "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" is an artificial explosion which temporarily effected subspace, the means by which a starship travels at warp.

And yet we have the crew of Deep Space Nine running into the dangerous anomalies quite often like the guys who are going into uncharted space. The Star Trek Milky Way is the galactic equivalent of a death world.

If the storage device is suddenly no longer there (say... in the event of an explosion) the energy must go somewhere.

If I blow up an alkaline battery how much of the energy stored in the battery is released? If I blow up a Quartz battery how much of the stored energy will be released? If I blow up a Dilithium battery how much energy will be released? Many power sources are basically inert.

::pure speculation::
If a phaser overloads the pre-fire chamber with the same "vanishing act" by which it effects targets, and vanishes the primary power cell, the explosion would be consistent at only an handful of megajoules. Except for the many times in TOS when a phaser explosion is much more threatening. Although those are an older design of phasers.
::pure speculation::

That would make sense, and mirror reality to a degree.

[sonofccn]

The TNG Tech Manual states warp 9 is c*1000 times faster then the speed of light, or to put it a different way, it would take about 8 years to cross the United Federation of Planets at warp 9.

Which, at a 1000c, would be slightly faster than the example of "the price". Not too inconsistent with each other all things considered.

The writers however have always shown it to be faster to travel in mapped space

Explicit examples I believe did not occure until well into Voyager, years after the Tech manual in question was written, and beside the speed issues inherent to that particular series itself we also have DS9 and the relative ease in which they traversed the Gamma quadrent.

But concerning ourselves with TNG we can find sufficent incongruant examples to suggest the writers, being writers first and foremost rather than scientists, were more interested in spinning good yarns than litteral, scientific consistency. Such as:

LAFORGE: Well, sir, according to these calculations, we've not only left our own galaxy, but passed through two others, ending up on the far side of Triangulum. The galaxy known as M Thirty Three.
PICARD: That's not possible. Data, what distance have we travelled?
DATA: Two million seven hundred thousand light years.
PICARD: I can't accept that.
DATA: You must, sir. Our comparisons show it to be completely accurate.
LAFORGE: And I calculate that at maximum warp, sir it would take over three hundred years to get home.

Which roughly, depending on how much Geordi is rounding, works out to an average of 9000c in an area which is most certainly not mapped.

Of course most of that would have been in the galactic void between stars, perhaps they could simply set the cruise control to warp 9 and use their highest speed to the fullest. Except we also have "Where silence has lease" {TNG-02}:

RIKER: Engage.
(We see the Enterprise whizz off, but nothing changes on the viewscreen)
RIKER: Your engines have engaged, haven't they, Ensign?
WESLEY: Aye, sir.

[Engineering]

PICARD [OC]: Lieutenant La Forge, I'd like you to monitor our velocity closely. LAFORGE: Is everything all right up there, Captain?
PICARD [OC]: Are the engines operating normally?
LAFORGE: Yes, sir. Everything looks fine down here.
PICARD [OC]: We're increasing to warp two.
LAFORGE: Aye, sir.

[Bridge]

PICARD: We should be seeing stars by now. Data, how far have we come?
DATA: Inertial guidance shows one point four parsecs travelled, Captain.
PICARD: Ensign?
WESLEY: Confirmed, sir. Exactly what my readings say.

Assuming the entire exchange took a full minute and we rounded down to a solitary, "neat" parsec or 3.26 lightyears the Enterprise, at warp 2, was averaging 1713456c in an equally empty void with no one batting an eyelash. Which, even if we assume the Enterprise in "Where no one has gone before" went straight through the center of M-33 at a hobbled 1000c average still should have gotten them home in a third of the time estimated.

Then we have this:

Bridge]

WESLEY: The Jovis has a maximum speed of warp three. He's had twenty three hours so we can define a perimeter of point one oh two light years as his possible distance.
RIKER: Fajo doesn't know that we're onto him, so he probably isn't taxing his engines at top speed.
WESLEY: He could have made it to the Nel Bato system, or maybe even the Giles Belt.
PICARD: He's a trader. He doesn't attract customers by being hard to find.
RIKER: We could put out a coded level two query to all Federation outposts within the perimeter.
PICARD: Make it so.

Which, rounding up to a full 24/day for the sake of ease, makes warp three, in Federation territory, roughly 37c or so. Which implies Fajo would take over two centuries to travel across the Federation.

Lastly we have this:

HANSON: We expected much more lead time. Your encounter with the Borg was over seven thousand light years away.
PICARD: If this is the Borg, it would indicate they have a source of power far superior to our own.

Said encounter occuring during season 2 roughly a year previously. Of note is Picard's assumption of a greater power source, rather than better starcharts, for a Borg cube averaging a speed of 7000c.

[359]

There is a lot of what could be called white noise interfering with the sensor readings. We can not know the true output of the weapon.

Bashir is scanning the surface and then starts talking about interference. O'Brain scans the surface and mentions interference on the surface.

Despite this interference they were able to identify lifeforms on the surface and localize their position and make a guess that they may be humanoid, they just couldn't lock onto individual lifeforms with sufficient resolution. That is plenty of resolution to pick up hundreds of megawatts in a satellite hundreds of times closer with fair reliability.

Additionally, Kira responded as if the numbers she was reading off were a threat to the runabout. She even went as far as to call it a significant energy buildup.

I'm not arguing that this is normal, I'm just saying this can not be discounted as evidence.

Without knowing what the weapon was, the yield is useless. Some weapons completely ignore shields, others are completely useless against shields, and most of the weapons in Star Trek are somewhere in between.

The effect of weapons on a starship which are not directly stated to have odd effects are generally directly proportional to the power/energy of the weapon and inversely proportional to the remaining shield intensity.

Even if we take Kira's statement it was more likely a terajoule blast given the rate it was charging.

The weapon charged for less than ten seconds at increasing power levels less than one gigawatt, it could be no more than ten gigajoules.

Even in-universe Runabouts are not known for being all that difficult to damage and destroy, but even so the weapons and shields were upgraded at least once after Battle Lines.

True, but they have been seen to withstand weapons fire in DS9: "The Maquis part II", DS9: "The Die is Cast", and many others where they take several hits from large weapons before they loose shields.

Then you would have to ignore the evidence:

1) The phased polaron beam weapon used by the Dominion and Breen Energy disruptor alone show that the shields used by the Alpha Quadrent powers reacts differently to different things.

I have ignored nothing, thank you. The Dominion's polaron beams were specifically stated to be unusual and able to bypass shields. There is no precedent to assume that random weapons can bypass shields without a specific statement that they can. Especially since we are always told when weapons go through the shields, for story purposes.

Neutral Particle Beams, L.A.S.E.R. weapons, and Merculite Rockects are talked of as useless against shields regardless of yield, and is completely plausible in known physics. The ship being immune to photons and things commonly found in solar wind is actually something that is required for a Star Trek Starship not to be destroyed when it goes to warp.

The fact that there is no limit as to how powerful a LASER can be paints a picture of a setting(Star Trek) that has a defense that makes LASER ineffective.

Since no one in Star Trek except the weak races use lasers, they almost invariably switch to something better as they get the power, this is an illogical assumption, especially because stellar radiation can be a threat with sufficient intensity and duration as can other EM based radiations.

To me, the evidence portrays things as follows:
Lasers: Weak Weapons
Mercutile Rockets: Weak Weapons
Nomad Beam/torpedo part: Inconsistent Weapons

This is ignoring nothing, I simply prefer to not assume random other factors simply to explain these one-off instances and just label them as 'inconsistent' or whatever, and be done with it.

Why would a damaged starship in need of a Federation dry-dock and possibly a new warp core and that is chronically low on fuel try to use as little fuel as possible to destroy something? They used enough boom according to their sensors. Heck, we've seen starships fire torpedos that seemingly had no warheads.

Sklar: "Captain. We appreciate your efforts but I think it's time we considered an evacuation. According to my analysis there are at least twelve more asteroids heading in our direction. How can we hope to destroy them all even with your help?"

Everyone has decided that it can't be done at this point, it is made clear that they can't just ramp up their yield a thousand, or even ten, times to get the job done.

Why would anyone have a hard time destroying something designed to be hard to safely destroy?

Sit back and think about it.


Say... you are trying to destroy a block of styrofoam you found lying around. You decide to burn it with fire. So you put it over some wood, pour some gasoline on it, and light it ablaze. After the smoke clears you see, to your amazement, that it is still there. You examine the block further only to discover that it is a block of Toughstuff!™ which requires 2000°C to even melt. Now is it at all surprising that your attempt did not work?

Now the question you are not asking: Why didn't then just use phasers?

They may have when Tuvok was clearing up the debris, we don't know. Why didn't they warp out further and nudge them off course? Why didn't they use multiple torpedoes or phaser strikes? why didn't... Answer: The plot demanded they not be successful, and lo and behold: they weren't. :)

That doesn't stop real world scientists from basically ignoring the outliers for the more consistent data and quantifiable data.

This is very true, but they still exist. They wouldn't be used in a final analysis, but they do not cease to exist, especially in our situation where by nature of the medium many things are inconsistent. So if someone wants to use them to correlate with another piece of evidence they can.

If I blow up an alkaline battery how much of the energy stored in the battery is released? If I blow up a Quartz battery how much of the stored energy will be released? If I blow up a Dilithium battery how much energy will be released? Many power sources are basically inert.

If you blow up an alkaline battery its stored energy is released in some form or another, any way it is released it is so small next to the 'blowing up' energy we would never notice it. However since we know phaser cells blow up and power the explosion, the explosion should be proportional to the stored energy.

[Lucky]

Which, at a 1000c, would be slightly faster than the example of "the price". Not too inconsistent with each other all things considered.

You do realize that you are quoting this out of context? It was intended to be presented with the bit directly below it.

Most ships can't reach warp 9. Warp 9 is considered extremely fast in TNG, and it is implied in Enterprise that warp 5 to 7 is the norm for fast ships.

Explicit examples I believe did not occure until well into Voyager, years after the Tech manual in question was written, and beside the speed issues inherent to that particular series itself we also have DS9 and the relative ease in which they traversed the Gamma quadrent.

There is nothing bluntly stated in TNG that says good maps are relevant for fast travel times, but "Home Soil" has the Enterprise-D mapping the Pleiades Cluster. Given we can map the Pleiades Cluster without leaving the planet there must be more to mapping endeavors then simply marking the locations of stellar objects. You then have odd places like the narrow passage in "Force of Nature", and the dark cluster in "Hero Worship", and on top of all that you have diplomatic limitations.

"Encounter At Farpoint" takes place at the edge of explored(by Starfleet) space, and the Enterprise-D traveled there straight out of the constructs drydocks

Between "Home Soil" and "Encounter At Farpoint" there are 15 episodes.

At the beginning of "Home Soil" the Enterprise-D is mapping the Pleiades Cluster which is 390 to 460 light years from Earth.

Between "Home Soil" and "Conspiracy" 6 episodes. In "Conspiracy" the Enterprise-D returns to the Sol system.

The Warp Scale given in the TNG tech manual doesn't make sense from the context of the events in the show.

[Lucky]

Bashir is scanning the surface and then starts talking about interference. O'Brain scans the surface and mentions interference on the surface.

And if the sensors were working right he should have been able to detect the nanites. It shows how bleeped-up the sensors are.

O'BRIEN: Not even a transponder signal. If they went down, we should at least get something from their transponder. The warp eddy has traces of meson particle emissions. That makes it a Starfleet power reactor.

KIRA: Reading a significant energy build-up in the satellite. Six hundred megawatts, nine hundred, it's firing.

http://www.startrek.com/watch_episode/pOupNQLwWcOI

9:46-Notices a power build up
9:48-States it is 600 megawatts
9:50-States 900 megawatts
9:51-firing

600*4=2400

900*1=900

2400+900=3300 megawatts = 3.3 gigawatts

Without knowing the charge at 9:46 we can not determine the output, but a 4.2 gigawatt fusion reactor can be used to power a small phaser bank so I guess a runabout getting shot down isn't that odd. They are just warp capable shuttles when you get down to it.

Why is Kira reading watts? it doesn't matter how quickly the weapon charges.

Despite this interference they were able to identify lifeforms on the surface and localize their position and make a guess that they may be humanoid, they just couldn't lock onto individual lifeforms with sufficient resolution. That is plenty of resolution to pick up hundreds of megawatts in a satellite hundreds of times closer with fair reliability.

They should have been able to spot the nanites, and possibly had the entire design.

Additionally, Kira responded as if the numbers she was reading off were a threat to the runabout. She even went as far as to call it a significant energy buildup.

A small phaser bank can be run off of a 4.2 gigawatt reactor, but we still have no idea as to what sort of weapon was used, and that matters because we have several examples of weapons that ignore shields.

I'm not arguing that this is normal, I'm just saying this can not be discounted as evidence.

Actually, now that I've thought about it, a low gigawatt weapon are repeated talked about, and one of them was favored do to its anti-shield capabilities in "Business As Usual".

Still, this is like comparing PT boat to a battleship.

The effect of weapons on a starship which are not directly stated to have odd effects are generally directly proportional to the power/energy of the weapon and inversely proportional to the remaining shield intensity.

Phasers and Disruptors are standard weapons, but have strange attributes that no one ever really talks about directly, and that does not change the fact they have odd attributes.

The Runabout magically lost power to all systems pretty much at once without blowing up, and then the Runabout magically falls out of orbit, but the only visible damage was from the crash landing. You don't think there was something odd going on with what happened in "Battle Lines"?

The weapon charged for less than ten seconds at increasing power levels less than one gigawatt, it could be no more than ten gigajoules.

I was confusing prefixes.

True, but they have been seen to withstand weapons fire in DS9: "The Maquis part II", DS9: "The Die is Cast", and many others where they take several hits from large weapons before they loose shields.

"Battle Lines"
Season: 01
Episode: 13

"The Maquis Part 2"
Season: 02
Episode: 21

KEOGH: Mister O'Brien, can you equip the two remaining runabouts with extra banks of photon torpedoes? 

O'BRIEN: I already started retrofitting their weapons systems. They should be ready in a few hours.

"The Die Is Cast"
Season: 03
Episode: 21

ARAK'TARAL: No other crew. Standard Danube-class runabout. Some modification to the phaser array and shield generators.

"The Ship" (The Federation capture a Bug Fighter with a phased Polaron beam)
Season: 05
Episode: 01

Treachery, Faith and the Great River (Runabout shields are shown to stop phased polaron beams used by the bug fighters)
Season: 07
Episode: 06

The Federation began up-guning, up-armoring and otherwise up-grading the runabouts as early as season 01 of Deep Space Nine. Unlike many groups in Sci-Fi settings the "United Federation Of Planets" is not technologically static. They are always up-grading everything.

I have ignored nothing, thank you. The Dominion's polaron beams were specifically stated to be unusual and able to bypass shields. There is no precedent to assume that random weapons can bypass shields without a specific statement that they can. Especially since we are always told when weapons go through the shields, for story purposes.

I'm seeing a known weakness in the shields.

OFFICER: I'm getting casualty reports from decks four, five, eight and seventeen. We also have a plasma leak in our port nacelle. 


KEOGH: Deploy damage control teams. 


OFFICER: Aye, sir. 


KEOGH: Keogh to runabouts. 


KIRA [OC]: Go ahead. 


KEOGH: They're using some kind of phased polaron beam to penetrate our shields.

[Runabout Mekong]

DAX: Have you tried altering your harmonics to compensate?

[Odyssey Bridge]

KEOGH: We've run through the full spectrum, but none of the frequencies were effective. Divert shield power to weapons. We'll give O'Brien five more minutes

JANEWAY: Shields to maximum! Stand by all weapons! 


TUVOK: They're in visual range. 


CHAKOTAY: My God. Captain. 


KIM: I'm picking up a polaron beam. We're being scanned. 


JANEWAY: Think good thoughts. 


TUVOK: The last Cube has rejoined the others. 


JANEWAY: Did we sustain any damage? 


KIM: No. Shields held. Warp engines are coming back on-line. All primary systems are stable.

They don't seem surprised that the Polarons can get through.

Since no one in Star Trek except the weak races use lasers, they almost invariably switch to something better as they get the power, this is an illogical assumption, especially because stellar radiation can be a threat with sufficient intensity and duration as can other EM based radiations.

To me, the evidence portrays things as follows:
Lasers: Weak Weapons
Mercutile Rockets: Weak Weapons
Nomad Beam/torpedo part: Inconsistent Weapons

This is ignoring nothing, I simply prefer to not assume random other factors simply to explain these one-off instances and just label them as 'inconsistent' or whatever, and be done with it.

The quotes clear say the weapons are useless regardless of yield, which matches up with known physics. For what you claim to be true we must assume the characters meant something completely different from what they said. If yield was the relevant matter then the characters would have said something to that effect. Instead the characters state the type of weapon if useless.

You're engaging in a No Limits Fallacy by basically saying that if a laser is powerful enough it can overcome the pull of gravity.. You might as well be saying you can get light to go faster by adding energy.

The shields used by Star Fleet are gravitational distortions
http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/albu ... en0613.jpg
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Cochrane_(unit)

Star Fleet shields are not magical Sub-Space systems.
"Force of Nature" RIKER: The vessel appears to be intact. They have shields, but it looks like their subspace systems are out.
There is no limit to the energy you can put into a LASER.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFgESxCA3-c

Photons VS Gravity, Gravity always wins.
http://physicsforme.wordpress.com/2011/ ... -cloaking/

You're entire counter point is that you say something is so, and because of that, we should ignore the evidence.

Sklar: "Captain. We appreciate your efforts but I think it's time we considered an evacuation. According to my analysis there are at least twelve more asteroids heading in our direction. How can we hope to destroy them all even with your help?"

Everyone has decided that it can't be done at this point, it is made clear that they can't just ramp up their yield a thousand, or even ten, times to get the job done.

1) Look at the entire scene:

JANEWAY: Fire! 


TUVOK: The asteroid is fragmenting, but most of the debris is still on a collision course with the planet. 


JANEWAY: Target the fragments. Destroy them. 


CHAKOTAY: That asteroid should have been vaporised. What happened? 


KIM: Not sure. Sensors showed a simple nickel-iron composition. We shouldn't be seeing fragments more than a centimetre in diameter. 


SKLAR: Ambassador, I'm afraid I was right. This isn't going to work. The same thing happened to us yesterday. We tried to vaporize two incoming asteroids but they fragmented and struck the surface. 


TUVOK: I've destroyed most of the debris, Captain, however targeting scanners were unable to track two of the fragments. They have already entered the upper atmosphere. The debris impacted on the largest continent, approximately 500 kilometres from the southern tip. 


NEZU AMBASSADOR: The central desert. Fortunately that region isn't heavily populated. 


TUVOK: Substantial cratering, atmospheric shockwaves, and large concentrations of dust and other stratospheric contaminants. 


SKLAR: How long until the next asteroid hits? 


TUVOK: Approximately six hours. 


NEZU AMBASSADOR: Can you give us an idea of it's trajectory? 


TUVOK: Same continent, but this time on the eastern coastal region. 


NEZU AMBASSADOR: Our largest colonies are there. Over five thousand citizens. 


SKLAR: Captain. We appreciate your efforts but I think it's time we considered an evacuation. According to my analysis there are at least twelve more asteroids heading in our direction. How can we hope to destroy them all even with your help? 


KIM: Incoming hail from the surface. It's coming from one of the heavily damaged areas. 


JANEWAY: On screen. 


VATM [on viewscreen]: Ambassador, I've been analysing the debris and I've discovered disturbing evidence that the asteroids are not what they seem. They are composed of artificial materials. I must meet with you immediately. 


KIM: I've lost the transmission. 


CHAKOTAY: Location? 


KIM: I can't find him. Too much interference. 


NEZU AMBASSADOR: That was Doctor Vatm, our most prominent astrophysicist. He mentioned the composition of the asteroids. Could he have found something important? 


SKLAR: At this point Ambassador, I don't know what that discovery could be. 


JANEWAY: Mister Paris, can we send a shuttle down through that turbulence? 


PARIS: It would be a rough ride, but I think it's possible. 


SKLAR: Our chances of finding Doctor Vatm are slim. We should evacuate the colonies. 


NEZU AMBASSADOR: We haven't time to evacuate all those people. I won't give up, not now. Captain, I'm asking for your help again., but I won't ask you to risk your crew. 


JANEWAY: In for a penny, in for a pound. 


NEZU AMBASSADOR: Excuse me? 


JANEWAY: It's a human expression, Ambassador, and it means we're not leaving you now. Tuvok, assemble rescue teams. We'll send down three shuttles to find Doctor Vatm. 


TUVOK: Aye Captain. Mister Paris. 


CHAKOTAY: Bridge to Engineering. B'Elanna, I want you to beam aboard a sample of the debris from that last asteroid. Let's find out why it wasn't vaporised. 


JANEWAY: I'm going to study the data we've collected so far. I'll be in my Ready Room.

2) Voyager's crew is not about to give up, nor do they give any sign they believe the task is impossible. They simple state what should have happened.

3) Tuvok has no trouble blasting the fragments

4) Skiar is working for the guys building the fake asteroids
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Sklar

5) The entire scene seems to show Voyager running an experiment on behalf of the Nezu.

Sit back and think about it.


Say... you are trying to destroy a block of styrofoam you found lying around. You decide to burn it with fire. So you put it over some wood, pour some gasoline on it, and light it ablaze. After the smoke clears you see, to your amazement, that it is still there. You examine the block further only to discover that it is a block of Toughstuff!™ which requires 2000°C to even melt. Now is it at all surprising that your attempt did not work?

It was a rhetorical question. The fact of the matter is the asteroid was made to look like it was made of iron and nickel while being made of more brittle materials, and this means you need a larger yield or to attack it in a completely different manner.

They may have when Tuvok was clearing up the debris, we don't know. Why didn't they warp out further and nudge them off course? Why didn't they use multiple torpedoes or phaser strikes? why didn't... Answer: The plot demanded they not be successful, and lo and behold: they weren't. :)

More likely Voyager's crew were running an experiment on behalf of the people living on the planet, hence why they tried the exact same thing that had failed twice before.

This is very true, but they still exist. They wouldn't be used in a final analysis, but they do not cease to exist, especially in our situation where by nature of the medium many things are inconsistent. So if someone wants to use them to correlate with another piece of evidence they can.

While true, one can not disregard the majority of the data for one example that is likely unquantifiable do to a lack of vital information..

Take star in "TNG: Decent Part 1 and 2" for example. This is usually trotted out as a low end, but the star is abnormal, as it matches a star with the in-universe designation of having a "superdense corona"*., and for that matter we still don't understand the corona of Sol very well, or the inner workings of a star

*Therm used in TNG: Suspicions

If you blow up an alkaline battery its stored energy is released in some form or another, any way it is released it is so small next to the 'blowing up' energy we would never notice it. However since we know phaser cells blow up and power the explosion, the explosion should be proportional to the stored energy.

For all we know phasers are powered by fish, yes there are fish powered weapons in Star Trek.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Power_cell
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Biorifle

[359]

And if the sensors were working right he should have been able to detect the nanites. It shows how bleeped-up the sensors are.

Oh I don't disagree that there was interference, it was clearly stated that there was. But it was only stated to affect the surface, and was not enough to be likely to cause a significant distortion in energy readings of a nearby satellite in space.

A small phaser bank can be run off of a 4.2 gigawatt reactor, but we still have no idea as to what sort of weapon was used, and that matters because we have several examples of weapons that ignore shields.

But most weapons don't, so we can not assume so with this one.

The Federation began up-guning, up-armoring and otherwise up-grading the runabouts as early as season 01 of Deep Space Nine. Unlike many groups in Sci-Fi settings the "United Federation Of Planets" is not technologically static. They are always up-grading everything.

I suppose it is possible. It just seems unlikely to me that they would go from ridiculously weak (to the point where the hull should offer many times more protection than the shields) to inordinately tough in only a year.

You're engaging in a No Limits Fallacy by basically saying that if a laser is powerful enough it can overcome the pull of gravity.. You might as well be saying you can get light to go faster by adding energy.

The No Limits Fallacy in this case would state that because a weapon can not hurt this shields does not imply that a similar weapon of sufficient intensity can not penetrate said shield. So in this case, you are arguing a no limits fallacy.

A gravitational field is far different than a shield. Shields draw energy from a source, in this case a starship. In a field, such as a gravitational field, objects have a potential energy. At the event horizon of a black hole there is simply no speed which is sufficient to provide the energy necessary to lift an object beyond a certain distance in the field.

1) Look at the entire scene:

2) Voyager's crew is not about to give up, nor do they give any sign they believe the task is impossible. They simple state what should have happened.

3) Tuvok has no trouble blasting the fragments

4) Skiar is working for the guys building the fake asteroids
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Sklar

5) The entire scene seems to show Voyager running an experiment on behalf of the Nezu.

1) I did, when we went over this the first time
2)I do not claim they are giving up as a whole, just that they are not going: 'Oh well, lets just try not dialing down the torpedoes so much'
3)The fragments are significantly smaller than the original chunk.
4)True, but that doesn't make his statement any less valid.
5)Assuming they did dial down the yield to match, but there is no evidence of that unless one assumes that in the first place.

It was a rhetorical question. The fact of the matter is the asteroid was made to look like it was made of iron and nickel while being made of more brittle materials, and this means you need a larger yield or to attack it in a completely different manner.

Sorry, I misinterpreted your intent with the statement.
It is correct that you would need a greater yield, but there is nothing indicating that they have greater yields at their disposal, in fact the general theme indicates otherwise.

For all we know phasers are powered by fish, yes there are fish powered weapons in Star Trek.

They could be powered by fish, although it is almost certainly not. But we do know that they do explode as we have seen it on many occasions.

[sonofccn]

You do realize that you are quoting this out of context? It was intended to be presented with the bit directly below it.

You advocated a certain argument beneath that line yes. An argument I addressed but which is not explicitly involved in the base facts of which I was making comparison.

Most ships can't reach warp 9. Warp 9 is considered extremely fast in TNG, and it is implied in Enterprise that warp 5 to 7 is the norm for fast ships.

Okay? None of this suggests or implies the Writers had a coherent warp paradigm they coherently followed. Which is the bone of contention, you claiming they had a better sense of scale/ possesing a consistent warp paradigm.

There is nothing bluntly stated in TNG that says good maps are relevant for fast travel times, but "Home Soil" has the Enterprise-D mapping the Pleiades Cluster. Given we can map the Pleiades Cluster without leaving the planet there must be more to mapping endeavors then simply marking the locations of stellar objects. You then have odd places like the narrow passage in "Force of Nature", and the dark cluster in "Hero Worship", and on top of all that you have diplomatic limitations.

Conversly I did provide an explicit TNG refrence linking greater warp speed with power generation which likely should be given more weight in determining what the Writers intended in that particuar era.

The Warp Scale given in the TNG tech manual doesn't make sense from the context of the events in the show.

Which is not the argument. The argument is if the show Writers had a better sense of scale, that they had a consistent Warp scale they employed rather than simply being concerned with trying to write a good episode.

[Lucky]

Oh I don't disagree that there was interference, it was clearly stated that there was. But it was only stated to affect the surface, and was not enough to be likely to cause a significant distortion in energy readings of a nearby satellite in space.

Battle Lines
O'BRIEN: Exactly. See, they're putting out a mutual induction field that would block out ninety nine percent of all transmissions to and from the surface.

To me this sounds like Starfleet sensors are both stupidly powerful, and stupidly sensitive. At best only 1% of the signal was reaching the Runabout, and it was still able to determine the general shape of the life forms. The closer to the satellites the more powerful the damping fields should be.

But most weapons don't, so we can not assume so with this one.

To assume that a weapon(the one on the satellite) works through raw power would be dishonest. Who ever built the satellites had a good understanding of energy damping technologies, and a standard(by Star Trek standards) energy beam weapon being fired in a damping field would be rather inefficient.

I suppose it is possible. It just seems unlikely to me that they would go from ridiculously weak (to the point where the hull should offer many times more protection than the shields) to inordinately tough in only a year.

Starfleet has a rather notable record of upgrading things to an absurd degree. Deep Space: 9 was a barely working hunk of junk that was upgraded to the point where it could take on fleets of warships, and the U.S.S. Lakota was up-graded to a point where it could fight Starfleet's top of the line warship evenly. Some relatively minor improvements to the Runabouts is hardly impressive. It isn't like they expected runabouts to fight Bugfighters and win at any time during the series. They just improved the shields on the runabouts to a point where they could take a few hits from starships, and bolted on a few external torpedo launchers.

The No Limits Fallacy in this case would state that because a weapon can not hurt this shields does not imply that a similar weapon of sufficient intensity can not penetrate said shield. So in this case, you are arguing a no limits fallacy.
.
A gravitational field is far different than a shield. Shields draw energy from a source, in this case a starship. In a field, such as a gravitational field, objects have a potential energy. At the event horizon of a black hole there is simply no speed which is sufficient to provide the energy necessary to lift an object beyond a certain distance in the field.

A weapon that never hits its target can never damage it, and Starfleet shields are gravitational distortions that bend the attack away from the ship. The shields don't absorb anything, but redirect the attack hence the glow.
http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/albu ... en0613.jpg

The Borg cubes are also surrounded by gravitational distortion fields as part of their warp drive.

It's like fighting a Ghastly/Hounter/Gengar in Pok-E-Mon Red/Blue/Yellow.

2)I do not claim they are giving up as a whole, just that they are not going: 'Oh well, lets just try not dialing down the torpedoes so much'

They did the logical and reasonable thing. What they tried should have worked, but failed, and so they tried to find out why before the next asteroids arrived. What if the asteroids were actually weapons designed to shatter if you try to blow them up?

3)The fragments are significantly smaller than the original chunk.

The fragments being smaller doesn't really matter. There was plenty of time to get in front of the asteroids, and whittle them down to nothing with phasers, or enlarge the beam width and turn up the power.

4)True, but that doesn't make his statement any less valid.

Skiar doth protest too much. He knew the asteroids could be stopped, and why the single course of action seen was not working as it should have.

5)Assuming they did dial down the yield to match, but there is no evidence of that unless one assumes that in the first place.

Voyager's crew bluntly stated they dialed their torpedo to just barely enough fire power to do the job given the data they had, and we are then told that the Nezu had done exactly the same thing twice with the same results. Why try something that had fail twice before unless you are trying to gather more data?

It is correct that you would need a greater yield, but there is nothing indicating that they have greater yields at their disposal, in fact the general theme indicates otherwise.

I don't see any sign that Voyager's crew couldn't up the yield, or use different tactics if it was required(more power isn't always the best answer).

They could be powered by fish, although it is almost certainly not. But we do know that they do explode as we have seen it on many occasions.

We also know that the cosmetic design of phasers changed over time, and it is very possible that the internal design changed. There seems to be a huge difference between a phaser exploding in TOS and a phaser exploding in TNG.