How are these calcs? (Stargate)

[The Reaper]

A debater on Factpile put these calcs up (Cananatra) and I was wondering how accurate they were.

Looking to the feats of a ZPM power asgard shield we get the episode echoes.
stargate.wikia.com/wiki/Echoes
Firstly to quote McKay
“McKay: It’s a coronal mass ejection on a scale that dwarfs anything our sun has ever emitted.”
Well dwarfs doesn’t help us much. But it means we can take the best our sun has thrown out and know the SG shields can take at least that much.
“Coronal mass ejections reach velocities between 20km/s to 3200km/s with an average speed of 489km/s, based on SOHO/LASCO measurements between 1996 and 2003. The average mass is 1.6×1012kg. The values are only lower limits, because coronagraph measurements provide only two-dimensional data analysis.”
So taking averages 489km/s ( or 483×10^3 m/s) and 1.6×10^12kg.
So lets get the kinetic energy E = 1/2mv^2 (Sorry they look so bad)
so E = (0.5)(1.6×10^12)(483×10^3)^2
E = 9.01428696×10^28 joules
As factpile seems to like this in tons of TNT for some reason….
2.177364×10^19 Tons
or
21.8 exatons
Now remember, that’s just the kinetic energy. The amount of thermal energy would be massive, and to get the number would require dipping into thermal dynamics, and for this I’m not bothered with that type of maths.
So ZPM powered Sg shields can take at least 21.8 exatons.
Factoring in dwarfed would mean that the energy they were hit by is much greater then the above calculation (which is itself an average)[And only the kinetic energy].
Now to look at celestial sizes, for a rough definition of dwarf on that scale.
A diameter of 838 km is the threshold between being a rock and a dwarf planet.
Earth diameter 12756 km.
Now this math is arbitrary as McKay just said it dwarfed, but in celestial mechanics the ratios will be assumed the same.
12756/838 = 15.22195704
Please note that I chose the earth for the ratio arbitrarily, as a low end figure. I could have chosen Jupiter.
Now taking that the dwarfed kinetic energy was 21.8 exatons, and the ratio between dwarf and a mid sized planet is 15.22.
The kinetic force output of that much larger star coronal mass ejection can be:
21.8×15.22 = 331.796 exatons of kinetic energy. Once again remember this calculation is not taking into account thermal or other radiation energy.
The ship survived that without the shield collapsing for a considerable time.
Now I’m unsure of 40k ship weapon output calcs, but can they surpass that?
To take shaun182′s information on the go’uld mother ship vs covenant cruiser thread.
we have a mother ship with:
“A) Fighter/Carrier complement: 12 wings of death gliders, 3 wings of alkesh bombers
B) Propulsion technology FTL: 32,000 times the speed of light
C) Sublight acceleration: unknown
D) Standard engagement range: close range within a few kilometres of one another
E) Weaponry effective range: unknown however can hit precise targets from high orbit
F) Firepower: 200 megaton from 60 staff cannons, as well as unknown amount of point defence weapons.
G) Shielding: 260 gigatons
H) Durability: on average, can survive a few 200 megaton shots without shields
I) Sensors: can detect multiple energy signatures, track ftl objects
J) Power generation: naquadah reactor produces unknown amount of energy.”
For this all weapons systems will be done in damage per second. meaning I take the energy output the recycle time to find the average energy output across a battle.
Ok so asgard shields powered by a ZPM came to at least 331.796 exatons. Far more if I’d calculated the radiation and heat.
Go’uld Ha’tak, is looking at 200megatons and 60 weapons. For a total of 12gigatons. factoring a recycle rate of 5 seconds. We come out with 2.4 Gigatons per second.
We also know the go’uld Ha’tak has shields taking 260 gigatons.
Having go’uld shield strength, allows us to find the power of ori weapons. Works out at, as stated above. 26 terratons for an ori beam. With a recycle rate of 3 seconds we get 8.67 terratons per second.
We also know it takes 10 of the smaller defence weapons to collapse a ha’taks shield. giving an output per shot of 26 gigatons. The ten were fired from the rear quarter of the vessel over slightly more then a second. Assuming an even spread around the vessel, full power output from those weapons is 1.04 terratons per second.
Overall giving an ori mother ship a total firepower of 9.7 terratons per second. (about 4,000 times stronger then a ha’tak, no wonder they done so bad in the series).
Next we can use the ori beam strength to calculate naquada powered asgard shields. Taking 3 ori beams to drop naquada powered asgard shields gives us a resilience of 78 terratons. (So ZPM’s make them about 4billion times more powerful)
Next, to find out the power of go’uld mines which they flew into once. We see it took 7 mines to take down the asgard shields. Putting the mines at 11.14 terratons per mine.
Next we can use the asgard naquada powered shields to calculate wraith weapon strength. Wraith took them down with 19 hive ship shots. So 4.11 terratons per shot. At full output a hive ship shoots 14 times per second, though not with all that impressive accuracy. Giving a hive ship 54.47 terratons of firepower per second.(More then ori interestingly)
Now we have to find out how long a hive can survive under known weapons fire. Using the episode “The Queen” we can see it lasts 84 seconds before Sheppard shows up to use drones on it. though it would undoubtedly would have lasted longer we can use that as a weakest case, so as to be able to continue our calculations. Hive ships have as seen above fire rates of 54.47 terratons per second. Meaning the hive sustained 4,575.48 Terratons (4.58 petatons) of damage before Sheppard showed up. Though a low estimate as it doesn’t include the drone strikes, its good enough to continue from.
Next, wraith ships take at best 3 asgard beams to take down. 4,575.48/ 3 = 1,525.16 terratons (1.52 petatons) per beam. Each earth cruiser has four such beam emitters with recycle time of about 2 seconds. Giving earth cruisers an output on beam weapons, of 3.05 petatons per second.
We also know it takes 5 asgaurd beams to take out an ori mother ship. So ori motherships can take 7.63 petatons of damage.
We also saw an aurora class ship take 6 asgard beam to the hull before being destroyed, putting its hull armour at 9.15 petatons. We have no way to get its shields, as far as I can tell. However ancient zpm powered shields are comparable to asgard zpm powered shields. So its likely in the same range.
Next we’ll look at the Atlantis city shield. It was under almost constant bombardment by a series of wraith fleets for ‘many’ years. As one fleet was destroyed it would be replaced by the wraith (due to their ZPM powered cloning facilities and growing ships) and thus atlantis was using its drones faster then it could manufacture them. Now the ‘many years’ isn’t very precise. Many used like that, as you are all aware, is an indefinite, but reasonably large (otherwise couple, few, several ect are used), so to be fair I’ll take it just above the other quantities and use 8. That’s above couple, few, several but below dozen and score so more or less mid range. Now the largest wraith fleet, indeed the only one that seems to have more then 2-3 are the siege fleets. From clips these tend to number 9 or so hive ships and an unknown number of cruisers. So for this calculation I’ll take 9, and ignore cruisers completely both because they are never specified and because we have no numbers for them. Now as shown above a hive ship has a weapon output of 54.47 terratons per second. Times 9 is 490.23 terratons per second. Now assuming it takes the wraith some considerable time (may have had instant reinforce from a nearby base but I wont claim that) to replace each destroyed fleet, say at least as much time off bombardment as on, that gives 4 years of continual bombardment. Now to get seconds in 4 years, 86,400 seconds in a day x 1460(numbers of days in 4 years) = 126,144,000 seconds. At 493.23 terratons per second = 6.2217×10^22 tons OR 62.22 Zetatons over the course of the first siege of atlantis. From this we can also see that ancient shields are some 60 times more efficient then asgard shields given equal power sources. Now that bombardment still allowed enough shield strength to remain to hold back an ocean for 10,000 years.
Using this also then allows us to get the weapon output of a ZPM power hive ship. As has been noted, wraith organic technology scales with power, limited only by the amount of power available, allowing for faster FTL, faster regen, denser hulls and bigger ships. When atlantis engaged the hive fleet, it was powered by three ZPM’s in ‘Enemy at the gates’, two supplied in a fit of pique by the wraith Todd. Now as those ZPM’s had been used prior to atlantis getting them, to an unspecified amount, i feel its only fair to assume they’re at 50% power(with ZPM power levels its likely much higher). It has also been shown several times throughout the series, that Atlantis’s shields only drop once the power source(ZPM) is depleted, apparently ZPM’s can transfer virtually all their energy instantly to whatever system they’re hooked up to. So taking the power supply at only 50%, and that the ZPM powered hive dropped the atlantis shields in 2 minutes gives us an output of some 518.5 exatons per second from the ZPM powered hive. However it must also be taken into account that Atlantis’s shields were also being drained by brushing the upper atmosphere, so taking 25% off the wraith weapon strength seems a decent approximation (if anyone wants to calculate how much energy was actually drained they’re welcome to do so). Giving the ZPM powered super hive a weapons output of 388.875 exatons per second. Which coincidently fits in with the hive ship slapping around the three earth cruisers sent to intercept it between the galaxies.

[NecronLord]

Poorly formatted for one. Spaces between paragraphs make things so much easier on the eye.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Also, I doubt some of the facts. For one, the super-hive did not take out Atlantis' shield - it damaged it but the city was still able to survive re-entry.

If you want an example of Wraith ship toughness, look at "The Pegasus Project," where a Hive makes a close orbit of a black hole without the benefit of shields to protect them.

[Stark]

What would shields be protecting them from? Gravity? Hawking radiation?

[Eternal_Freedom]

I was thinking more of the hyperaccelerated matter spiraling into the event horizon. And the extremely powerful gamma rays that matters gives off.

You know, those big jets we can see from ten billion light years away sometimes?

[Stark]

'Hyperaccelerated'? Did you just make that up? Matter enters a black hole under the normal influence of gravity in a planar fashion, so unless they parked themselves in the accretion disk, why woudl that be relevant?

Regardless, I'm sure you can show pictures of the episode featuring hyperaccelerated matter striking the shields.

[Eternal_Freedom]

If they orbited the black hole, they would have passed through the disc at least once.

And I'm sure you can stop being a smarmy bastard, and this is off-topic anyway.

[Stark]

It's not 'off topic' to say your suggestion has problems. To use 'being near a thing' as an example of shieldign or whatever you have to quantify what they're exposed to, and not just say 'hyperaccelerated = big number'.

Are you sure you know about all orbital configurations?

[Eternal_Freedom]

It is off-topic, the thread is about some other guy's calcs. I mentioned the pegasus project as an aside.

AS for the orbital configurations, I'm still reading that textbook. But if the accretion disc is a circular plane, and the orbit forms either a circle or a parabola around the centre of that plane, then surely as a matter of geometry it must pass through that plane?

[Stark]

So an aside is okay, but pointing out your aside is not useful isn't? Gotcha.

And I'm no astrogator, but I think there are orbital paths that don't circumscribe the centre of gravity; it's not like the ship would have been in a non-powered orbit anyway.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

CMEs are not unidirectional. They expand outwards from the surface of the star along the lines of magnetic force, as I understand it, and the ship is going to get hit by a hell of a lot less than the full force of the blast.

That calculation might be right in principle if they're doing something drastic such as enveloping the star in a force field to shield the solar system from it, I wouldn't raise an eyebrow at that kind of a performance from a TARDIS or a GSV, but if it's just a matter of individual survival then you need to divide the cross-sectional area of the flare as it passes the target ship by the cross sectional area of the ship to get the fraction of the energy of the flare that hits the ship and is taken on the shields; I wouldn't be at all surprised if you lost six orders of magnitude, more, in that.

In addition to the five, closing in on six, orders of magnitude the calculation is actually already wrong by.

V-squared comes out at 2.39E11, M is 1.6E12, so you're actually looking at 1.9E23 J, forty-five teratons.

Again, cross section- depending on where the ship was, how much of the blast it ate; I mean it's a yield figure, and probably quite a respectable one if it was in that close, but Sol's a million kilometres in diameter (not an accurate figure) and CME's don't emanate from a point source; from patches on the surface of the sun yes, of large area. Even flying on the surface of the star there's no way to get the ship to eat the entire energy of the burst.

[Eternal_Freedom]

In the episode Cameron states they will sling-shot around the black hole. Also, we see them fly toward the plane of the disc, and when we see them curve around it, we see a distinct streak behind the ship. That might just be SFX but I think that is showing them passing through the disc. unfortunately I have no ability to post images, but if you watch the episode from 39:30 to 39:35 you can see it.

[Stark]

If it has scaling information to work out how far away it is (and establish density and velocity) it could well be meaningful.

[Batman]

Um-if we see them curve around it that sort of means they never did enter the disc.

[Eternal_Freedom]

My apologies if I made that unclear, we see it curve around the black hole. I believe that streak shows them entering the accretion disc.

[Batman]

'I believe' isn't exactly reliable evidence, but let's for the moment assume they did. That would have exposed them to-what, exactly? How much gamma radiation hit that ship? How much 'hyperaccelerated' matter did at what relative speed?The total output of the black hole (which you haven't quantified, it's not like black holes are all the same size) or the accretion disc (ditto) are irrelevant, the only part that matters is how much of it actually hits the ship?

[lordofchange13]

I was thinking more of the hyperaccelerated matter spiraling into the event horizon. And the extremely powerful gamma rays that matters gives off.

isn't that what Hawking radiation is, low wave length thermal radiation? Don't really understand the deference from thermal radiation and EM radiation.

[Batman]

Um-no? Hawking radiation is the indeed IR frequency stuff the black hole itself emits. I presume E_F is talking about gamma radiation from the accretion disc that surrounds it.

[lordofchange13]

Um-no? Hawking radiation is the indeed IR frequency stuff the black hole itself emits. I presume E_F is talking about gamma radiation from the accretion disc that surrounds it.

Sorry,excuse me. I miss understood, though the hawking radiation would still be a factor for the ships shield ability's.

[Batman]

Um-no? Hawking radiation is the indeed IR frequency stuff the black hole itself emits. I presume E_F is talking about gamma radiation from the accretion disc that surrounds it.

Sorry,excuse me. I miss understood, though the hawking radiation would still be a factor for the ships shield ability's.

It may still be (or not, as we have absolutely no numbers to go on), I was merely pointing out that E_F was at this time not commenting on the radiation from the black hole itself.

[Ahriman238]

Okay, we can clear this up fairly easily.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuAkvJxA ... re=related[/youtube]

Streaking of the accretion disk from around where the ship disappeared @ roughly 0:30.

For ZPM power I usually use these calcs from a guy called Nairda on the web. They're not perfect, but others tend to make even more assumptions.

I'm using a ZPM total power capacity of 50.16 Yotta Joules. How I got this is a very long explanation. But the short version is: I took the average energy on a lightning strike. I counted the lightning strikes that struck Atlantis when the big wave was coming (The Eye, S01e11.) I multiplied that number by the average energy per lightining, and then divide this by the time we saw the shields up. That gave me the energy required to keep the shields up, I then multiplied that by the years the three ZPM kept the shields up under water, and divided that by three (the amount of zpms used) and that gave me the power of a ZPM.

From this I calculated many things, from the power of Wraith weapons (number of bolts hitting atlantis per seconds, and McKay saying that the half powerd ZPM would last two weeks tops, etc) to the energy required to dial Destiny. I calculated the energy to dial from Earth to Pegasus (which is too long to explain here) at around 5.5 exa watts per second or .00000011 percent of a ZPM per second.
So if I make a linear growth in energy requirements, we have that if we consume 5.5 exa watts to travel 3,000,000 light years to Pegasus, then to travel 37,000,000,000 we need 67.83 Zeta Watts to dial Destiny or .135 percent of a ZPM per second. That means that the ZPM will only last for a little more than 12 minutes.

EDIT: link posted. because embed only works half the time for me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuAkvJxA ... re=related

[Juubi Karakuchi]

I can contribute with regard to the Goa'uld mothership.

The generally accepted figure for a standard Ha'tak's main gun is 200 megatons (840 Petawatts). Ha'taks are described as carrying 12 heavy guns, while the rest are light anti-fighter guns. My main source for Ha'tak shields and firepower is the episode 'Company of Thieves' as it shows an upgraded and standard Ha'tak (both of the Lucian Alliance) in combat, the former destroying the latter. No formal quantification has been given for the capabilities of an upgraded Ha'tak, the only clue being that Osiris' Ha'tak was able to take on Thor's warship, whereas previously it would have taken four or five standard Ha'taks (according to the RPG books). If this is taken literally, that means that a standard Ha'tak is 5x the power of a standard Ha'tak, giving us a firepower figure of 1 gigaton per shot.

Returing to 'Company of Thieves,' Netan's ship is seen firing on Tenat's ship for 14 seconds, at an average rate of 1 shot per second (I also counted 14 hits), after which it takes two direct hits in rapid succession, causing it to blow up. However, assuming this is in real time (as opposed to events taking place at the same time being covered consecutively), then there was a period of 16 seconds from Netan's "biggest fool" speech to the Odyssey escaping (the point at which Netan's ship is first seen firing), in which he might or might not have been firing. If we take the 14 second figure as a conservative estimate, that means that a standard Hat'ak can withstand 14x 1 gt hits over 14 seconds before the shields fail (the shields glow when hit, indicating loss of energy as visible light). This means one of two things; firstly that the shield has a set value of 14 gt (meaning it cannot be replenished), secondly that more energy was applied to the shield than could be replenished. If we go with the latter, then the limit on a standard Ha'tak's shield replenishment must be less than 1 gt equivalency, or else the two ships would have been stalemated.

'The Serpent's Lair' offers a further clue, specifically when Klorel managed to raise his Ha'tak's shield (with his bridge crew getting very nervous) and stop the missile. The 'Goa'uld buster's destructive power is given as 1 gigaton, meaning that the shield was struck with about 500 mt (it being an explosion, around 1/2 the energy is hurled out away from the shield). The shield had been up for approximately one second, yet was able to resist the equivalent energy of 500 mt, giving a replenishment figure of 2100 petawatts (500 mt equivalent) per second. Thus, every 1 gt hit scored on Tenat's Ha'tak has an actual effectiveness of 50%, half of the shield's expended energy being replenished per second. If 14 hits do 500 mt each, then the maximum capacity is 7 gt equivalency (29,400 petawatts) for a standard Ha'tak and 35 gt equivalency (147 exawatts) for an upgraded Ha'tak.

I don't know how that compares to the blue star corona figures, as there was a lot of disagreement over those.

[Connor MacLeod]

The CME clearly didn't push the ship backwards when it impacted. That puts some pretty hefty constraints how much of the CME it could have absorbed. IF that weren't enough, we see that the CME gets deflected to either side of the ship, so it wasn't absorbing all the energy to begin with - if it had the CME would have slowed to a stop rather than being diverted. That calc is such an incredibly generous upper limit its basically unusuable in any serious sense.

[The Reaper]

CMEs are not unidirectional. They expand outwards from the surface of the star along the lines of magnetic force, as I understand it, and the ship is going to get hit by a hell of a lot less than the full force of the blast.

That calculation might be right in principle if they're doing something drastic such as enveloping the star in a force field to shield the solar system from it, I wouldn't raise an eyebrow at that kind of a performance from a TARDIS or a GSV, but if it's just a matter of individual survival then you need to divide the cross-sectional area of the flare as it passes the target ship by the cross sectional area of the ship to get the fraction of the energy of the flare that hits the ship and is taken on the shields; I wouldn't be at all surprised if you lost six orders of magnitude, more, in that.

In addition to the five, closing in on six, orders of magnitude the calculation is actually already wrong by.

V-squared comes out at 2.39E11, M is 1.6E12, so you're actually looking at 1.9E23 J, forty-five teratons.

Again, cross section- depending on where the ship was, how much of the blast it ate; I mean it's a yield figure, and probably quite a respectable one if it was in that close, but Sol's a million kilometres in diameter (not an accurate figure) and CME's don't emanate from a point source; from patches on the surface of the sun yes, of large area. Even flying on the surface of the star there's no way to get the ship to eat the entire energy of the burst.

Since I can't get him to come here his reply was this.

Sci-fi. Note the fi, standing for fiction. The authors can make a solar flare however thin they feel like. Just because a normal solar flare does not act like that does not mean this one did not act like that. Mckay stated it would start small, for whatever reason, and then expand to engulf the planet which is why the ship intercepted it close to the star while it was still small. To take that logic you used further would be to say that in fact Sg ships can not use hyperspace, because it does not exist or that Destiny’s real space FTL is impossible due to the knowledge of current relativity. This is science fiction, word of god said the solar flare was concentrated enough to be taken on the shields, therefore that solar flare was concentrated enough to be taken on the shields. There is simply no two ways about that.

The CME clearly didn't push the ship backwards when it impacted. That puts some pretty hefty constraints how much of the CME it could have absorbed. IF that weren't enough, we see that the CME gets deflected to either side of the ship, so it wasn't absorbing all the energy to begin with - if it had the CME would have slowed to a stop rather than being diverted. That calc is such an incredibly generous upper limit its basically unusuable in any serious sense.

And to this he said.

yes, I saw that, and due to the law that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, in order for the ship to maintain its possition and not be swept along with the solar flare it would have to be producing power equal to the KE of the solar flare to resist being moved. He obviously did not think that arguement through.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Words almost fail me...although as a description of this postmodernist cheesehead, "subliterate moron" does come to mind. That is a concession- resorting to special pleading and word of god, which serves to prove that the authors didn't know what they were talking about either.

The idea that it's all right to have "science" in science fiction that is just technobabble asspulling that tries to shit on reality (which fortunately does not care), this is what ruined Trek and means we deserve everything the SyFy channel can do to us. Do we really have to resort to magic painted blue to tell good stories? Is "Meh" an answer now?

Yes, we can- have to- postulate changes in the laws of physics for most science fiction. Nine times out of ten, when it's all played through and the meaning of it is understood, what the change does does is tell us why reality doesn't actually work that way. Yes, Destiny's drive is impossible. Suppose for the sake of argument that it wasn't, then what else is possible?

There can be such a thing as good fictional science- scientists turned writers tend to be a lot better at this- a small change thoroughly explored, on and through the human element. Star Wars left so much unexplained that we can all have a go figuing out what and why, squirrelling about the background- Trek tried to explain too much and contradicted itself cripplingly in the process.

Suspension of disbelief is a quality that each of us has in varying proportion, and some part of the writer's job is to measure it out, decide how much stress to put on it, challenge it- and every step loses some of the audience, keeps the rest- until the next act of egregious bullshit. If you want to be God of your own universe where the laws are what you say they are, you'd better have a damned good tale to tell to get many people to buy into it;

and if your laws are different, if your up is my RA+8.34, what price buy in? Revealing that the cosmos is powered by bullshittium is an insult to the audience, in addition to bad literary craftsmanship. Fail as sci, fail as fi. If it's not a CME, don't call it one.