I'm pretty sure it was Azron_Stoma who pointed out that it wasn't a thousand worlds.
But I agree, most of the 'member worlds' would not be much use to evacuate to. Think of some of the places we're talking about- Mustafar, Geonosis, Taaris, hell- even Tatooine would probably be hard pressed to suddenly accomodate a million immigrants.
I was actually under the impression that (decent) planetary shields would protect the whole planet, and not just a specific area. Though, I think it the Genesis device would work just fine no matter where on the planet it was detonated. I'd still go with the theory that the Genesis Device would work on a whole planet even if what only detonated in the upper atmosphere.

And reaching the surface would be not much harder, since it is not blatantly obvious that it is some sort of superweapon. It is a piece of tech unknown to the SW galaxy, so without a detailed investigation (which could be done either on a space station or on the ground) it is not even remotely suspicious. And even after a detailed investigation what can an average customs officer conclude: it is a piece of alien shit (it rather rare, that the brightest minds of a planet go to customs and border security bureau). He might quarantine the stuff, but if it the papers are okay, why to do so?

Saying "technobabble" does not mean "zero energy". I know the effective result is interpreted that way, but it really doesn't. What technobabble addresses is HOW energy interacts with a target or enviroment. Phaser's imparting momentum is a good example - even though its technobabble mechanism is theorized to turn a target to neutrinos, there is still clearly energy involved in the process.

It's rather obvious thats ome further mechanism was involved than just the antimatter, but it must face limitations of some kind in how it can be applied or deployed else they would be using it more often (Doosmday machine is an obvious example.)

I don't know the episode in question, but I will go ahead and show a few calculations that may or may not support the anti-matter argument. If you want to double check my figures, feel free, I'll be posting my references as I go.

To start, the average mass of Earth's atmosphere is approximately 5.1480x1018 kg [1]
The escape velocity of planet Earth is 11.186 km/s [2]
Using the formula for force, F=mass*velocity^2, the required force is F=(5.1480x1018 kg)*(11.186 km/s)2=644.152*1024 Joules
Because the matter/antimatter reaction turns the mass into pure energy, Einsteins equation E=m*c2, and the velocity of c (the speed of light) is 299792.458 km/s. Using this equation, we can obtain the required mass of both reactants together.
m=E/c2=(644.152*1024 Joules)/(299792.458 km/s)2=7.16716*109 kg
Because the matter/antimatter reaction requires both reactants to be equal in mass, each reactant requires a mass of 3.58358*109 kg.
Because starships in the Federation use deuterium, and the most efficient method of storing deuterium is in liquid form, the density of liquid deuterium is 162.4 kg/m3 [3]
Using our data so far, we can calculate the volume required of each reactant as V=mass/density=(3.58358*109 kg)/(162.4 kg/m3)=22.0664*106 m3
Because cylinders typically are used to store liquids, we'll use a cylinder with a height equal to its radius for the formula V=pi*r3
r=[pi*(22.0664*106 m3)]1/3=410.797 meters

Just for reference, the Enterprise D had a length of 642.5 meters and a width of 467 meters. So if you want to drop two cylinders, each the size of the Enterprise D, onto a planet just to blow away the atmosphere, you can certainly do that.

The Doomsday machine example falls flat because antimatter was specifically said to be "deactivated" in its vicinity. They used what seemed very much like the same weapon against the giant amoeba in "The Immunity Syndrome", planting their ounce of antimatter near the nucleus, backing off a few thousand kilometres to near to the outer edge, and detonating. Again, lots of banging around suggesting that it certainly produced the required energy somehow.



The device in question was this:



The blue ball, not the antgrav that's carrying it.

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Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe - Albert Einstein

I took the image and decided to apply some good old fashioned science to it.



Given that the average human male's hand is 189 millimeters in length [1], and that the man's hand standing behind the device is 70 pixels, that gives us a rough length for the ball itself, at 198 pixels, to be 0.535 meters in diameter.
With this, we can obtain the volume for the device as being 0.6414 m3 in volume.
Assuming my calculations in the last post are valid, the amount of energy needed to blow away the atmosphere is 644.152*1024 Joules of energy.
That means that in order to blow away the atmosphere, WHATEVER is in that container must have the power of 1*1027 Newtons/meter2, or a whopping 145.655*1021 pounds per square inch.
To put that into comparison, the pressure at the center of the sun is ONLY 3.3*1012 pounds per square inch [2].

EDIT: Spotted a conversion error in the pressure of the sun. Corrected.

We're talking 14 million tons of antimatter here, at a density of 22 million tons per cubic meter. I don't care if the antigrav unit nixed gravity, you are SO not moving something like that by hand.
However that device did what it did, it was not a pure DET event.

But...why? If we can accept that the Death Star "might" have drawn energy directly from hyperspace to produce its DET effect, why should this be any different? Shouldn't the determination be based on the observable method and effects of the explosion?

Although I'm honestly not recollecting this event in any episode of TOS at all, so sorry if this doesn't applyl.

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There is no surer aphrodisiac to a man than a woman who is interested in him.

Because it was never repeated throughout all of Star Trek, when the Death Star was a bigass battle station showing firepower consistent with the rest of the universe if you allow for some leeway in scaling (usually to the detriment of the regular ships' firepower) while this device would have been the manportable equivalent of 240 billion 64MT photon torpedoes?

Don't forget that when I made my calculations, I assumed the Federation was using liquid anti-deuterium. Liquids cannot be compressed any further, and the temperature that deuterium condenses at is 18o K. That's Kelvin, which is absolute temperature. At 0o K, all molecular motion stops completely. To get it that cold takes a fuckton of power even for small amounts, and you have to do that for something the equivalent size of a battleship. I imagine that's enough anti-matter to fuel Starfleet for years! And you're talking about compressing something that is already at it's most compressed and fitting it inside a bowling ball. I'm sorry, but that's impossible.

I know you're making the argument that the Death Star obtains energy from Hypermatter. That's entirely different, and here's why. Hypermatter exists in such a way that it exists in both real space and hyperspace. Antimatter is a phenomena that we observe here today, because we can produce minuscule amounts of antimatter using particle accelerators. While I'm sure the process has become pretty easy by the time of the 23rd century, you're still dealing with a phenomena that we can test here in the real world, and we know what will happen. Until scientists release data saying that antimatter releases several orders of magnitude greater energy than it currently does, it will remain bound by the the equation E=m*c2.

Actully, I doubt planetary shields would work.

The Sun Crusher(Ugh KJA) managed to kill at least one major Imperial world by using it's technobabble missiles to detonate the star. With Starwars FTL sensors, they should have had over 8 minutes warning before the radiation hit, and upto ~20-30 minutes before the physical matter hit the planet to get the shields up.

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"Okay, I'll have the truth with a side order of clarity." ~ Dr. Daniel Jackson.
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias." ~ Stephen Colbert
"One Drive, One Partition, the One True Path" ~ ars technica forums - warrens - on hhd partitioning schemes.

Do we have reason to believe that Carida had a planetary shield in working order? From what I recall of Champions of the Force, no mention was made of one, and neither can I remember any in the supplemental WEG sourcebook. (Though it was a good long while ago I read either of them, so I may be wrong.)

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"But there's no story past Episode VI, there's just no story. It's a certain story about Anakin Skywalker and once Anakin Skywalker dies, that's kind of the end of the story. There is no story about Luke Skywalker, I mean apart from the books."

-George "Evil" Lucas

Considering the Industrial capacity displayed by the DS2, I doubt making 23 million Acclamators would be much of a problem, I can't remember the exact numbers, but how many ISD's on average per minute equivilents were the calcs for the rate of construction?



I don't see how a 0.17% increase in population (Assuming earth level populations on average) would be THAT big of an issue, also in Republic/Imperial controlled worlds don't they have replicators and things of that nature?



I'm pretty sure I've already established that the ships are large enough that they don't have to be packed in like sardines, partly for this very reason in fact.



Again with the Industrial capacity we all know the Empire has, this shouldn't be an issue.



How exactly are the feddies supposed to suddenly hit anywhere in the SW galaxy at ease now? Simultaneously no less?

No, if I recall Kyp flew the suncrusher to Caridia during the nova to try and rescue his brother and was able to fly down into the planet indicating there was no active shield. However it could simply be they didn't activate it as it would interfere with an evacuation or that the suncrusher, being magical, could fly through the shield without damage.

Also I think he destroyed a major shipyard world and a military base long with Caridia so either these similarly vital targets didn’t have shields or they couldn’t stand up to their star exploding.

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Get busy living or get busy dying... unless there’s cake.

The Sun Crusher was magically invulnerable, there was no mention of it being shield piercing that I recall. To my knowledge there's zero evidence for Carida having a planetary shield, leave alone an Alderaan/Coruscant level one.

Were the shields down on the ISD that it rammed it's way through?
With the level of handwave-invulnerability that quantum-crystalline armour provides, it's possible that it could punch through shields anyway...

I vaguely recall that they may have been down, but it probably wouldn't have mattered either way, since we're likely talking a large amount of force/momentum.)

It didn't have any magic shield piercing properties however, because it didn't need any (either on its munitions or on itself.) The Sun crusher was designed to get inside planetary systems and blow up stars - nothing about that requires it to be able to penetrate shielding.

First off, that argument is based purely on interpretation of the evidence, even though it contradicts several other instances (like the Doomsday machine using its own magical antiproton weapons.) Moreover, the "deactivation" bit, aside from sounding silly, happened only after some unknown type of weapon hit penetrated the Constellation's defenses and apparently inflicted damage. So "deactivation" is left quite open to interpretation other than some magically silly "shuts off antimatter" argument. (If it could stop antimatter from reacting, why does it not stop fusion?)

Even if it didn't, there's still nothing stopping them from using it at a range, because that mythical "antimatter deactivation" effect isn't very long ranged (the Enterprise's warp drive stayed active throughout the engagement as I recall, and it didn't have to stay many millions of km out of range to do it.) Considering that a mere "ounce' is supposedly capable of fantastically destructive, mass-extinction level energies, (which ought to pale to the hypothetical yields of photon torpedoes, no less) it is patently silly to assume they would be incapable of using it as a weapon at a distance, even if that just means using fuckoff huge amounts.



Actually there are some quite not-insignificant problems with the fuel storage issue on the Death Star that required a hefty amount of handwaving that is not much different than here. Moving it would not be impossible either - simply requires assuming the device used mass lightening. The "Super-antimatter" has any number of problems with certain interpretations, but transportation is not one of them.

Don't confuse potential with actual capacity. Yes, they can potentailly build that many ships if they want to, but in reality it would be alot more complicated than that, as at least part of that is going to also go into infrastructure and logistics to support the warships (supply ships, supply bases, etc.) you can't just assume the capacity to support a DS's mass in warship automatically exists, or that it would even be adapted already to handle that volume. Nevermind other issues (crewing, etc.)

Sufficed to say, if they have the ability to haul away the planet's oceans with just a fleet, they probably can contrive some manner to transports large numbers of people (although I suspect it would be hibernation/stasis/cryogenically frozen or whatnot.)

That was actually part of my point. Despite the fact that the device was undeniably manportable somehow (be it mass-lightening, the thing working on technobabble and thus not massing all that much to begin with, Trelane made it so, take your pick), there's something about it that prevented it from being used anywhere else, despite the fact that if the effects are DET (however they are achieved), this 'super-antimatter' would increase their offensive firepower by a not inconsiderable number of orders of magnitude.

It's going to be messy no matter how you try to rationalize it. E=MC^2 pretty much rules out "supar antimatter" unless you assume some additional STargate like "reaction amplification" effect is going on (which means its basically just acting as a trigger for a much more powerful energy release.) if you take "ounce" literally at least as mass. You could argue "ounce" as a unit of volume and it is some super-insane high density material, but the context made it seem like it was a tiny amount of antimatter relative to the ship overall (and as noted, it would be a fuckoff huge quantity in any case - I'd hate to think how that screws up mass ratios for the Enterprise.) That's workable but very very awkward.

Of course, you could assume "hyperbole" as far as removing the atmosphere goes, but that only works so far, because the explosion HAS to be threatening to the enterprise (nevermind the oddity about shockwaves, having it reach out into orbit is going to put constraints on it all its own, unless we assume that was an exaggeration as well... which again is possible, but highly awkward.)

Brute force answers to this also run into the "why they didn't do this elsewhere" issue - its not IMPOSSIBLE to make it work, at least with sufficient explanation, but that path is going to be very complicated to make sense of at the least, nevermind reconciling it with latter trek.

And there is of course what I described, which is really just a variation on the "reaction aimplifier" I mentioned above with a stipulation to explain why it seems to be of limited use in conventional warfare. Making shit up like that is never a good policy, but it may be neccessary - but if someone has a better alternative than what I suggested, I'm open to suggestions

This might sound like a stupid idea, but perhaps the force of the explosion largely came from the 'creature' itself? We really don't know its exotic properties, but we know that it's a) not natural and b) was warp-capable, and not just piss weak warp one but high-warp velocities. It's not explained how it could achieve such velocities and give the Enterprise a run for its money from its appearance alone. For all we know it's some kind of strange, weird alien ship, or some kind of hybrid entity, but something has to power it.

That's possible. You could also argue it was a weird atmosphere. You're still going to be ignoring the letter of Spock's statement (but not, perhaps the spirit) but it can work.

One possibility occured to me is that we just treat Antimatter as being like neutronium or black holes, it is different than what it means to us IRL. It's not exactly the first time ST has done weird shit with antimatter in TOS or other series, although I'm not sure if that neccesarily makes things better or worse.

I got to looking at fusion processes on Wikipedia, because my professor had made mention of a muon-catalyst fusion reactor. The biggest limitation in muon-catalyst fusion is that muons are difficult to produce, but that is a limitation I'm sure can be overlooked. In essence, the muon is an electron, but with a mass of 207 times that of an electron. This means that it has a much higher gravitational force on the nearby electrons. If enough of them are used, a mass of atoms would become super dense, and the theory is that they would be so dense, you could achieve fusion at room temperature.

Like all particles, there is an anti-muon (or positive muon), which means that because you've increased the mass of the elementary particles going into the reaction, you've made the energy of converting it to pure energy much higher. In theory, if you have 4 muons (2 muons, one in each hydrogen of deuterium, 2 antimuons) replacing the electrons, we can do the following. Because the mass of a single muon is 200 times that of an electron, we can say that M, the mass of a muon, is equal to 200e, with e being the mass of an electron. M=200e. So, since we have four electrons, replacing them with muons gives us E=4Mc^2, or E=800ec^2. That means the mass alone of replacing the electrons with muons creates a hell of a lot of power.

But don't forget, this extra mass increases the gravitational pull on each molecule, pulling them closer together. This will increase the density of both the matter and anti-matter, making it much more potent. This is the only way that I can think of to create 'super anti-matter', and even then, it's a ton of work to produce and refine. But the potential would be amazing.

No, absolutely not. The Federation would never destroy a populated planet. It is contrary to everything that is Star Trek. It would be like a Jedi murdering a child. The Romulans or the Klingons on the other hand could do it easily.