It's my intent to calculate how much energy a Zero Point Module outputs (not the explosions involved) from the following information.
- The city of Atlantis is less dense than water. It even floats when all naquadah generators are deactivated.
- The city is incapable of flight with one, and probably with two, Zero Point Modules. This is shown in SGAS2E17, where McKay asserts that the city would still
be incapable of flight with two functioning Zero Point Modules.
"We might even be able to light up the engines, and get the city to fly"
"Really?"
"No, but we still need it [a second ZPM]"
Atlantis Scaling
Image 1
This image shows the outside of the main tower. Highlighted is the balcony outside the control areas of Atlantis. The flat part of that is somewhat larger than the stargate. This can be seen in the interior set plans of the gateroom area presented on the gallery of scifi.com. This makes the red line approximately five meters across. The blue line appears to be equal to the red line.
Image 2
Here we see the tower from above. That section of it is 39.9 pixels (Sqr. Root of 1597pixels² [34²*21²]) across. The tower itself is, at its widest point, around 200 pixels across. This is 5 times 5 meters, or 25 meters across.
Now, the ratio of the width of the central tower to its height is 1:10.6 (15:160 pixels on an image I used as a basis) and the ratio of the width of the tower's wide point to the base of the city is approximately 1:36.3 (15:545) Therefore, the approximate height of Atlantis, aerials excluded, from sea level is 265 meters. The approximate diameter of the base is 908.3 meters. This is of course, quite small for a city, but one can only assume that the Ancient civilization's population was relatively low - such an emphasis on high quality, low volume seems to have doomed them to fail in their war against the Wraith, after all.
Now, SGAS2E13 shows a side-on schematic of the city, with a strange, giant spike structure emerging from its underside - possibly an anchor, as this does not appear to be visible in the opening minutes of Rising, when the city was on land.We'll ignore this though, as we can handily fit it into the space between the snowflake-piers.
Volume and Mass
1.7171e+8 m³
Density of Seawater Saay... 1030 Kg/m³ We'll assume that Atlantia's (hey, have to call it something) seawater is the same as Earth's. It's certainly unlikely to be much different, water is presumably the main constituent.
1.7171e+8*1030= 176,861,300,000 Kg. However, be aware that this is likely an order of magnitude or so beyond the actual volume of the city, as you can tell to look at it that it's not a cylinder. However, we want to make a generous upper limit...
Additionally, in the opening scene of Rising, when the main engines of the city engage, with a rather large flash, the velocity seems to change in one second from around 265 meters (one city-height) per second, to something around a kilometer five kilometers per second (four city-heights {no spike here, remember, so 265 meters}} This is a velocity change of approx 800 m/s/s. 56,595,616,000,000,000 Watts or 13.53 Mt per second. We know that 2 Zero Point Modules are incapable of achieving this energy output, however, this may be close to the output of two zero point modules, so I would conclude that the upper limit of sustained energy output of a ZPM is somwhat below, but close to 6.75 Mt/s. Going by the 8 Mt/s calc for the shields of Atlantis previously, I would say that the Atlantis shield is capable of drawing the energy of multiple ZPMs simultaneously. So, comments? Debunkings?
