Treknobabble wrote:Eternal_Freedom wrote:
Many situations int he Dominion War are decidedly not "normal tactical circumstances." The Federation is fighting a war that they were losing. They knew that massive Dominion reinforcements were arriving imminently unless they stopped them. They would have had literally nothing to lose by using one of these uber-weapons to take out the Dominion/Cardassian fleet that intercepted them prior to reaching DS9. Even if the Dominion responded in kind, well, the Federation was already facing destruction (including the elimination of Earth). Nothing to lose, everything to gain, and yet no superweapon is used. It takes a literal divine intervention to save their asses.
I disagree on the "nothing to lose" bit. Using this sort of weapon places the firing ship in nearly as much danger as the target ship. This is the "backscatter" issue.
Moreover, once the Federation starts doing it, the Dominion can see it as "fair play" to use planetary bombardment weapons as ship-to-ship weapons. And then the Federation is right back where it started, except that it's losing ships even faster.
Since you are so fond of "unambiguous statements" made in dialogue, look at what Admiral Ross had to say: "Of those ships come through the wormhole,
we're finished." Unambiguously, definitively, the Federation knew
it would lose if they did not stop those reinforcements. There is literally no reason not to use them. Even if the Dominon responds in kind they would have obliterated a major Dominion force and bought time to shore up their defences and build more ships and weapons.
By your logic, if a nation is losing a war against another nation with superior numbers of airplanes, they should reprogram their air-to-surface missiles and start using them as air-to-air missiles. Such a move would be understandable if the other nation were fielding, say, Trieskelion-esque flying aircraft carriers. But it doesn't make nearly as much sense when dealing with plain old airplanes.
By your logic, we should also have expected nuclear weapons development to have peaked with the Tsar Bomb, or continued in that direction. Instead, we saw a reduction of nuclear weapon yields and an increase in precision.
This is an absurd analogy, but I'll run with it. If th losing nation's air to ground weapons were nukes that could be used to destroy many enemy aircraft with one proximity blast,
and it would be destroyed if it did not stop those planes, then yes, I would fully expect it to take such an action.
As for the Tsar Bomba bit. Yes, we never went past that (or even came close to that ield in operational weapons) but that's because we didn't need to. If we suddenly faced an existential threat that required a 100-megaton nuke to stop,
we would build one, becuase the alternative is being destroyed. Did you even watch the Dominon War episodes? Everyone involved knew that the Federation would be shattered, divided and oppressed for
generations if the Dominion were triumphant. That constitutes an existential threat and it would be perfectly reasonable to break out every stashed superweapon they had. Hell, Section 31 resorted to biological warfare in order to eliminate the enemy, because it was that grave a threat.
There are a million possible trade-offs that would make it a bad idea to use heavy weapons of this sort in anything but the most dire of circumstances - merely being outnumbered is insufficient. The use of inordinate force is always a bad idea.
Again, these were the most dire of circumstances...go and watch the gods-damned episode.
For that matter, given that these supposed superweapons use only some TOS-Brand Antimatter, not some specialised, highly classified technology, why don't the Breen use them when attackign Earth? Their intent was to cause as much damage as possible. The aftermath shows San Francisco and STarfleet Headquarters heavily damaged but still recogniseable. If the Breen had used this uber-antimatter ther wouldn't even be a North America left.
Well, this brings up how much uber-antimatter can actually fit in a torpedo. The TNG manual suggests 1.5 kg, but that's not a canonical figure. It could actually be closer to 1.5 mg, bringing the maximum yield of a photon torpedo down from the petaton level to the gigaton level - which is consistent with what we see in TDIC.
There's also the question of how effectively the Breen managed to implement their attack. Sure, they wanted to do as much damage as they could, but did Star Fleet let them? According to Memory Alpha, the Breen met with stiff resistance and had most of their attack fleet destroyed. It seems entirely reasonable to think that the damage they were capable of doing far exceeded the damage that they actually managed to do.
We see the aftermath, San Francisco clearly took a hit from a nuke-equivalent weapon, probably megaton-range given the damage (depending on where it detonated), or it took a massive bombardment of conventional-explosive-equivalent weaponry. If the Breen had access to this uber-antimatter, even
one hit should have caused FAR more damage than what we see. Even using a mg of your supposed uber-antimatter and a 1.5 gigaton yield, we should not still see recogniseable buildings and bridges.
And on the TM, it's canonical unless directly contradicted by the relevant series - TNG or DS9. Since neither show states how much antimatter is included (whether normal or super-duper-magic antimatter) we have no reason to discount it, especially since the figure is roughly consistent with almost every other torpedo firepower example we have.
Probably impossible? All of those are definitively impossible (or contradictory, int he case of the in-system warp or the beaming through shields). And I know what you'll say, "oh but ST clearly has different physics since they have FTL etc." Yeah they do. But travelling at infinite speed (or having a "crack" in an event horizon) is beyond physically impossible, it's mathematically impossible as well.
I never claimed that it was anything but total BS. I merely claimed it was canon.
In case my name didn't tip you off, I don't think very highly of ST when it comes to scientific/mathematical/logical accuracy. There are inaccuracies and contradictions, but they are canonical inaccuracies and contradictions, so we either attempt to harmonize or we shrug and move on. Which do you prefer?
I would prefer you employ some reason in your arguments. For the TDiC incident, we have two possibilities, either the dialogue is accurate and 30% of the crust is destroyed/melted/whatever, in which case the Romulan/Cardassian spy organisations have access to weapons
far more powerful than displayed by the respective militaries
and aren't used in any other situation no matter how useful they would have been or, more reasonably, we accept that their sensors etc are being fooled and the damage inflicted is substantially less than what is claimed.
Hence, we cannot take dialogue at face value. The accepted convention, when trying derive values from SF, is that we treat is as a "documentary" of sorts of something that happened, hence the visuals are the things that actually happen whilst dialogue is made by humans (and other creatures) which are inherently fallible, is subject to interpretation, hyperbole etc.
I suppose that therein lies our fundamental disagreement. While Mr. Kennedy offered reasons to think that, in this case, the figures reported in the dialogue can be considered accurate, there is a deeper reason to take the dialogue at face value: these aren't documentaries of an alternate universe, they are attempts at telling a story. I don't see how treating a story as a "fictional documentary" (whatever that could even
mean), how treating it as something that it neither is nor was intended to be, can give us "the truth" about what it depicts (whatever
that could even mean).
I dunno where you're getting "fictional documentary" as a term from, that isn't what I said. For the purposes of deriving numbers, we treat the visuals as, well, a visual record of an event. Exactly the same way you might watch video footage of, say, the Battle of Jutland (if such footage existed, to my knowledge it does not) and then attempt to calculate the power of the magazine explosions that totalled the British battlecruisers.
See above. We don't treat it as a TV show for the purpose of deriving numbers, but as a visual record of what actually happened.
So you're saying that treating a story as something other than a story helps us find out what the story is about?!
Since the entire purpose of these debates is to determine which fictional universe would win in a contest neither universe's creator imagined, then no, treating the series/films etc as records of events that can be measured and quantified doesn't tell us anything about "what the story is about."
Because we aren't trying to delve into what the stories are about. We're trying to quantify numbers so we can see who "wins." Tell me, does the yield of a photon torpedo, or a turbolaser, in any way affect what ST or SW is "about?" Does it have impact on the themes of exploration, human development, good vs evil and so on? Of course it fucking doesn't.
But that's a very ncie red herring you have there.
Smartass. You try taking a cubic metre of, say, polystyrene or wood or any solid, break it into pieces, and then try and fit it back into a cubic metre volume again. It doesn't work. We should see some evidence.
Sure, it won't fit in the same volume. But from space, you won't be able to tell much of a difference between a solid block with a volume of a cubic meter and a pile of fragments with a volume of two cubic meters.
Actually, with modern satellite imagery, we
could tell the difference between those two. But in this case, if 30% of the crust has just doubled in volume and fragmented, we'd notice that. Not least because we would see material from the mantle suddenly bursting to the surface, as the solid shell of rock is no longer holding it in place. It'd be like a supervolcano covering 30% of the planet's surface.
The 24 giagaton figure came from the assumption that "30% of the crust was destroyed" meant "30% of the planet's surface was set on fire, and the 10 torpedoes we saw fired only did 10% of the damage."
Using Lovok's damage predictions, and assuming that "destroying the crust and mantle in six hours" means "vaproizing the crust and mantle by discharging 250 torpedoes from every ship," Mr. Kennedy calculates a figure of 20 petatons per torpedo.
You can go to his site to check his math. I think we can both agree that the former figure is probably closer to the truth than the latter figure.
Now for a rehash of some calculations I've presented.
Using what we see, and assuming that the lightly colored rings are visible shock fronts, we can be fairly certain that "widespread destruction" occurred over a radius of at least 300 km. Which gives us a value of 100 gigatons per torpedo/beam.
Using Lovok's damage predictions, and assuming that "destroying the crust in one hour" means "melting the crust in one hour, we can calculate a "middle ground" figure. It takes 7,000 petatons to melt the entire crust, and one hour is 3600 seconds, so the combined fleet has a firepower of about 2 petatons per second. There are ~20 ships in the fleet, so we get a figure of 0.1 petatons per ship per second, aka 100 teratons per ship per second. Assuming 50% of that comes from beam weapons, we get a figure of 50 teratons per ship per second from torpedoes. We'll assume that these ships have abnormally large complements of torpedoes (aka, not limited to 250 like most Federation vessels), and thus can afford to fire torpedoes at a rate of ten per second. This gives us a value of 5 teratons per torpedo.
So, using conservative calculations based on the dialogue and the images, we get figures of 24 gigatons per torpedo. Using "mid range" calculations based on the images alone, we get a figure of 100 gigatons per torpedo. And using high-end calculations based on Lovok's lines alone, we get a figure of 5 teratons per torpedo. Conclusion: ST ships have access to multiple-gigaton weaponry.
What is your source for the 7,000 petatons to melt the crust in an hour figure?
And again, even if we accept this conclusion (and I, as yet, do not. But I do appreciate you using actual numbers) why aren't such weapons used elsewhere? This is what it keeps coming back to. The firepower apparently displayed here is so wildly inconsistent with what we see
everywhere else (outside one one TOS example) that it boggles the mind that this is the one and only use anyone in the Alpha Quadrant could find for them.
Perhaps you should write the producers and see if you can't get some kind of explanation? It would be quite entertaining to see them try and dodge the issue.
That being said, there's no reason to think that we'd be able to see the glow from kilometers in orbit during the daytime. Maybe there were clouds. Maybe the strike made clouds that fogged up our view of the ground. Maybe these are underwater strikes. Maybe a million things, but whatever the maybes may be we are explicitly and unambiguously told that 30% of the planet's crust was destroyed.
Unless the atmosphere is absurdly freaky (which it
can't be, since we see Kira walking around with no pressure suit/breathing gear) we would be able to notice if 30% of the crust were suddenly melted. That much energy has to go somewhere. Since it says 30% of the crust, not just the surface, then you're talking millions of cubic km of rock suddenly becoming molten. It should surge upwards or outwards. It does not, ergo the "unambiguously stated number" is wrong.
Torpedoes, at any rate, are more than capable of penetrating deep through solid rock. The crust could be destroyed from the bottom up, and "ripples" of magma showing through a now shattered crust would be an entirely reasonable thing to expect to see - and would also be very much consistent with what we did, in fact, see. The end product would be an ocean of magma with "icebergs" of solid rock floating on top. Crust destroyed? Yes. Consistency with visuals? Yes, just like any of the dozen other conditions I've listed.[/quote]
No, not consistent with visuals, since we
don't see an ocean of magma formed. We don't see anything like "ripples" of magma. In fact, we only ever see the effects of the bombardment on the viewscreen, which is fed by sensor data,
and it's clearly stated the sensors are being fooled.
By this point, it should be obvious that the visuals are *extremely* open to interpretation. We could have ripples through the clouds, visible shock fronts scouring the surface clean, underwater explosions causing expanding rings of steam, or even ripples traveling through an ocean of magma with shattered "rockbergs" floating on top. Given the plethora of different things would could actually be seeing, why not use the dialogue as a guide to figure out what's actually being shown?
Because none of those suggestions actually match the 30% figure? Seriously, look it up, those shockwaves, or whatever they are, don't cover anywhere near 30% of the surface. 10-15% at most at a rough estimate.
Um, yeah, we're talking about dumping petatons worth of energy into the planet's surface. It's going to have a noticeable effect.
Realistically, we're talking weapons with high-gigaton or low-teraton yields here. 100 gigatons per strike could easily produce the effect we saw if any of the suggestions I've made thus far hold true.
That's a big if.
What are you conceding exactly?
I'm conceding that TDIC indicates that beam weapons, as well as torpedoes, can be dialed up to have multi-gigaton yields if we take the dialogue seriously. Nothing more.
Now, if the ships really run on TOS-brand antimatter, presumably they have high enough power outputs to put that much energy into the beams. And the considerations of why low-yield weapons would be preferable to high-yield weapons under most ship-to-ship combat conditions also apply to beam weapons.
Except having the beam weapons be that powerful raises
even more inconsistencies and problems. Namely, if the beam weapons can be made just as powerful as a torpedo, why bother with torpedoes and their limited ammunition at all? It also means that they would have a lot more power for their shields (they would have to, in order to survive this uberbeams) which means that the incident where the shields are exposed to easily quantifiable energies (the E-D in a star's corona for instance) would also be wrong, IF they had beams equal in power to these supertorpedoes, then they must b able to generate that much power for the beam weapons, which means they have that much power available for the shields (since they order "divert power from weapons to shields" or vice versa countless times), which means they should survive for MUCH longer in the corona then they actually can.
It also means they must either use this super-antimatter as fuel or carry a lot more conventional antimatter. Either way, when we see ships suffer containment breaches, we should see much larger explosions than we do (the various Galaxy class ships exploding for example, or the USS Saratoga at Wolf 359).
I'm working through Sun Tzu's The Art of War, and if anything is obvious, it's that the use of excessive force is always a very last resort. Getting your enemy to surrender without completely demolishing their infrastructure and economy is the ideal situation. Getting them to surrender without even fighting? Best of all.
Geuss what, the battle sen in "Sacrifice of Angels"
is their fucking last resort. Admiral Ross clearly and unambiguously states that if those reinforcements arrive "we're finished." That sounds like a last resort to me. If that isn't a last resort, what is? The Jem'Hadar marching over the Golden Gate bridge?
At that point in the war, the Federation was settling for "will it let us survive a bit longer?" They weren't going for an "Ideal, win-the-war-in-one-go" battle. It was to
stop them getting curbstomped.
With that in mind, let's look at some general principles.
Using this online calculator:
http://www.5596.org/cgi-bin/nuke.php
We can determine that a 5 teraton charge can cause impulsive shock damage to hull material with a 50 kJ/mol heat of fusion and a 950 kJ/mol heat of vaporization (substantially better performance than tungsten) at distances of over 1000 km, and a 40 petaton "Kirk bomb" can do so at distances of over 100,000 km. Gigaton charges would be less dangerous, but would still be nothing to be trifled with.
So, generally speaking, you don't want to use a teraton charge when dealing with anything within 1000 km, because that places your ship at risk. You also don't want to use a teraton charge when dealing with anything within 1000 km of any of the following: friendly units, enemy structures that would be valuable if taken intact, planets that you intend to colonize or control, etc. Moreover, if you use a teraton charge in a certain situation, your enemies might think, "say, why don't we start doing the same thing?" and then you're screwed as soon as the shoe ends up on the other foot. And even if you're okay with that, you probably
won't be okay with being charged with war crimes, which is a legitimate possibility depending on the specifics of the situation. In short, if there is an option aside from using a teraton charge, you want to use that option.
The minimum-range thing is moot given that torpedoes are supposed to have ranged well in excess of 1000 km ( the fact that we hardly ever see such ranges notwithstanding). So you'd treat them as stand-off weapons, like a nuclear-tipped cruise missile fired from hundreds of kilometers away.
As for friendly units, valuable structures etc, again, treat it as a stand-off weapon so there won't be any friendlies in range.
So, in the situations you mention, we can determine the following.
If you want to take a station, you don't want to set off teraton or petaton explosive charges anywhere near it.
Except their mission wasn't "retake the station" it was "stop the Dominion from removing the minefield and allowing their reinforcements to arrive." If that means destroying the station, so be it. At any rate, the defending fleet obligingly rode out to meet the Federation in deep space, well away from Bajor or DS9 and were in a nice tight formation, an
ideal target for your teraton-level or petaton-level "Kirk bombs." And yet, it never even
occurs to
anyone involved.
The Breen attack appears to have been dramatically less effective than it could have been, yes. But if their goal wasn't complete annihilation but rather demoralization, they did things exactly right.
Quoting directly from Captain Sisko "Starfleet managed to destroy most of the attacking ships, but by then most of the damage had been done." Given that we don't even see the grass lawn scorched away, they clearly didn't even use photon torpedoes or equivalent weapons. Frankly I would have expected the obliteration of San Francisco to be even more demoralising than, well, a bad air raid. The point is, the Breen, logically, should have had access to similar supertorpedoes (or super-beams) and thus, if such weapons existed, should have done waaay more damage than usual.
For that matter, they have a shot at obliterating Starfleet Command completely. Why didn't they take it?
In the final battle of Cardassia, most ship-to-ship combat was at very close range, making teraton-yield weapons as dangerous to the firing ship as they were to the target. As for the planet itself, the large numbers of friendly forces would make the use of teraton weapons in an orbital bombardment counterproductive.
As with the battle in "Sacrifice of Angels" the Dominion/Cardassian fleet comes out to meet them in deep space and is then forced back to Cardassia's orbit. So, once again, a perfect target for a supertorpedo. But it isn't used.
Again, the Federation were already losing the war. They had nothing to gain by holding back on using such weapons.
Save, of course, suddenly starting to lose the war even faster than before.
They have two choices: use this weapon which might help us survive long enough to win, but might cause a retaliation or don't use this weapon, in which case, we lose anyway. In the case of the battle in Sacrifice of Angels, they knew that the Dominion reinforcements would make them lose much more quickly anyway. Everyone involved expected that that massive fleet arriving would lead to a crushing Federation defeat in a matter of days or weeks at most.
They're already facing defeat. Whether it takes a few days or a few weeks doesn't matter. But Starfleet categorically refused to consider surrender and was ready to fight to the bitter end. Sisko even says "Even if I knew we would lose for certain and nine hundred billion people will die, I could not order my people to surrender and accept Dominion occupation." Losing the war
faster, or more bloodily, is clearly irrelevant to them.
Hmm...the Dominion military strategy is "we massively outnumber them and can rapidly replace losses, the Federation can't." These weapons would be ideal for the Dominion to use since it allows them to even more massively outnumber their opponents. Hell, they should be using them on kamikaze missions to take out starbases and shipyards. We don't see them do this.
If the Dominion were the Empire, they probably would have. But it looks like the Dominion thought like Sun Tzu and figured that doing less physical damage and relying on psychological warfare would be far more beneficial for them in the long run. Just like any real-world military would.
And you don't think that single ships annihilating whole fleets or bases on their own wouldn't have massive psychological value? At any rate, the Dominion clearly aren't concerned with avoiding physical damage, since his first planned act after the Federation surrender was
wiping out Earth's population to avoid a rebellion that
might spring up later.
As with the Dominion examples I listed above, the Federation has little to gain from holding back such powerful weapons against such threats. The Borg might start using such weapons as well. So what? If the Borg came in force the Federation would be fucked anyway. Again, they have no reason not to use such weapons.
Except, of course, to avoid being even more screwed than they already are.
And yet, they
are willing to go to extreme lengths to fight the Borg. Like planning to use a sentient individual as a carrier for a biological weapon to annihilate them all, and when Picard calls them out and says "hey, we shouldn't do that, it's against our principles" they outright order him to do it if he gets the chance. Or being willing to travel back in time to stop them. They go to those lengths, but they won't use a bigass torpedo?
For that matter, why didn't the Borg try using such uberweapons against Species 8472? We saw in Scorpion Part 1 that regular Borg weapons can damage the bioships, so logically a supertorpedo should at least do more damage. But again, no such weapon is deployed or mentioned.
Is it really so hard to see that mutually assured destruction could be just as effective a deterrent in the twenty-fourth century as it was in the twentieth? When it comes down to it, it's a damn good thing that nobody uses a tactical nuke to do what could just as easily be done with a hand grenade.
Um, S8472 are already winning against Borg, to the point of blowing up whole planets. Clearly any mythical ubertorpedo isn't an effective deterrent
otherwise there wouldn't be a fucking war would there. And once again, rather than using some mega-bomb, it's straight back to the bio-weapons (which ST writers seem disturbingly keen on).
Your analogy fails once again, since in this case the grenade-equivalent (regular photorps, beam weapons etc) clearly
can't do the job except in huge numbers.
Um, no. An inertial dampener is meant to reduce the acceleration felt by the crew to tolerable levels, presumably through some application of artificial gravity. It does not affect the mass of the ship. "Mass lightening" is a distinct technology apparently using subspace fields of some form to lower the effective mass that the engines have to move, which is a different thing entirely.
There are two ways that the effective mass of a starship can be decreased: one, production of exotic matter that has negative mass; two, production of a gravitational effect that allows some portion of the ship's acceleration to feel like free fall.
From this, we can conclude that lowering the effective mass of the starship
just is producing some kind of gravitational effect, and this entails that inertial dampening and mass lightening, at the very least, share the same mechanism.
Except that the mass-lightening stated (in the DS9 opening episode) to involve subspace fields, which involves neither of those two options. Thus, the mass-lightening effect is independent of artificial gravity.
1. That really doesn't answer or explain anything, it just handwaves it. Either a) the ship does not generate that much power while idling or b) it is dumping a huge amount of waste energy somewhere (subspace most likely). Option B is absurd, because no-one would build a ship that wastes so much power.
Or maybe it just takes that much energy to produce a subspace field sufficient to maintain artificial gravity throughout the ship. Generating gravitational effects is extremely energy intensive, no matter how much help you're getting from subspace.
Show me a source for how energy-intensive it is to create artificial gravity. Especially when the artificial gravity stays working with no warp core and no main power (TNG Disaster, Wrath of Khan, Search for Spock, Voyage Home etc). Clearly it can't be
that energy intensive if the emergency batteries can keep it going, along with life support, communications and in some cases, a few phaser shots.
2. Waving "wah, it's canon" doesn't help, since the visuals are also canon. One is inconsistent with the other. You chose to favour the dialogue, I (and this site) favour the visuals as something we can actually measure and derive numbers from.
The visuals are canon,
but so is the dialogue. Since the visuals were, presumably,
based on the dialogue, and since we can
never be 100% what we're looking at (your eyes can fool you very easily, google "optical illusions"), but we
can be 100% sure of what was said, it seems that dialogue should trump visuals.
I'm well aware of optical illusions, you condescending twit. At any rate, the SFX would be based on storyboards, plot outlines, early drafts (since the effects have to be done before the live-action scenes, you can make changes after the effect are done). We can be sure of what is said by the characters on-screen, but that does not automatically translate 100% into what actually happened, since the characters do not have the same knowledge as the writer or the audience.
3. I'm not going to comment on, since it was simply another example of the ST dialogue being utter bollocks.
No, STAR TREK ITSELF is utter bollocks. Dialogue, visuals, all of it. The same goes for Star Wars. There is no subspace, there is no hyperspace, there is no such thing as a "phaser" or a "turbolaser," Alderan and Vulcan are complete fiction, etc. We deal with it, or we spend our time debating something else.
The absurdity of the setting does not excuse the absurdity of dialogue or events within it, since
for the purposes of the debate we assume them to be real, self-consistent universes with technology that works the same way in the same situations. Hence, a
massive inconsistency like this is a problem that must be addressed
without creating further inconsistencies, which your theory singularly fails to do.
4. Again, this goes with a different approach. But again, since the visual effects are also canon, and one disagrees with the other, we have no choice but to chose dialogue or effects to base our estimates on. This site uses effects, because it's what we "see" happening in-universe.
We can never be sure of what we're seeing. What we see is open to interpretation. What is said is far less ambiguous.
You can argue that the special effects people did a bad job depicting 30% of the planet's crust being destroyed, but you can't argue that they depicted something entirely different for the simple reason that we are told that that's precisely what they depicted. Did they do a crappy job of depicting it? Yes. Did they depict something else? No.
A bit more musing (and re-watching the episode in question) revealed something interesting. As I mentioned above, we only ever see the bombardment effects on the viewscreen, which is an image created by sensor data that we
know is being manipulated and fooled. The statement that "30% of the crust is destroyed" is based on yet more sensor data, which is again being manipulated and fooled. We can chalk up the inconsistency to an
in-universe effects failure, which would be amusing.
You also seem to have quietly ignored my comments about the dialogue being flawed since the very same scene implies their sensors are being fooled. The stated effects not only a) don't match the visual damage but b) don't match their own, unambiguously stated predictions. Ergo, what they state as happening is not what is actually occurring.
I've already dealt with these points, but I'll reiterate what Mr. Kennedy had to say:
It has been claimed by some that the damage projections made by Lovok were a lie and that the damage done to the planet was an illusion generated by the Founders. However, these claims make little sense. There seems to be no reason for Lovok to tell such a lie - it doesn't gain the Founders anything to have Tain and Garak think that the attack will be ten or a hundred times faster than it really would or could be. And even a basic knowledge of military technology on the part of Tain or Garak would have been enough to allow them to see through such a lie, putting the Founder's whole plot at risk. Simulating planetary scale damage would also be a difficult and pointless business. Immense fireball explosions and atmospheric shock waves are clearly visible on the surface of the planet; simulating these would involve holographic projections covering hundreds of millions of square kilometres! And what would it accomplish? The fleet was already in the Founder's trap at this point, the Jem'Hadar were moments away from launching their attack, so making Tain and co. think that their attack was succeeding is pointless.
You never dealt with these points, so I'll wait for your answer to Mr. Kennedy before I add anything of my own.
Make your own damned arguments. Anyway, it does gain them something to tell such lies, it makes Tain much more likely to go along with his plan if he thinks he can pull it off quickly and decisively. Making him think the attack is succeeding means he isn't going to pay attention to what else is going on around them. Indeed, if they think it's going really well and they only need a few more salvos, the Romulans/Cardassians will be incline to stay and fire them and risk the Jem'Hadar attack rather than going "oh bollocks, leg it."