Uber-powered antimatter?

[Treknobabble]

The first thing I would like to point out is that the following is about as canonical as anything Star Trek related can be. It's from the original series, honest-to-Gene-Roddenberry canon, the equivalent of anything from A New Hope in the Star Wars universe.

What we're dealing with here is the yield we get from antimatter in TOS episode "Obsession." Kirk is ordering the construction of an antimatter bomb capable of destroying a gaseous-phase monster. Spock, that paragon of cold, hard reason, says that "about an ounce should be sufficient," but warns that the blast will "rip away half the planet's atmosphere."

In case anybody worries that Spock may have allowed himself to indulge in hyperbole, later in the episode, when Enterprise is at "maximum orbit," the bomb goes off and the shockwave travels through empty space and shakes the ship. The only way that's possible is if the shockwave took part of the atmosphere with it for hundreds of kilometers to the Enterprise. So, from all appearances, the bomb worked as advertised.

Now, an ounce of antimatter in the real world will release around 1.2 megatons of energy when it comes into contact with regular matter. Nothing to be trifled with, but nowhere near "blow of the atmosphere" proportions.

According to the Atomic Rockets site, it would take 77,000,000,000 megatons (77 petatons) to blow the atmosphere off of planet earth.

Which means that one ounce of Star Trek high-canon antimatter releases about 38,500,000,000 megatons when it undergoes annihilation.

In other words, Star Trek antimatter releases billions of times more energy than the real thing.

Obviously, this is physically impossible. But that's okay, given that the entire show is built around the premise of a spaceship traveling around the galaxy at faster than light speeds, which is physically impossible. The spaceship is inhabitable but has no visible heat radiators, which is also physically impossible. And it appears to be capable of extended acceleration, but doesn't have any propellant tanks, which is physically impossible as well. (see other sections of the Atomic Rockets site for details)

In a show that's doing three physically impossible things before the first commercial break, ten orders of magnitude can be filed under "minor inaccuracies."

So we're stuck with (yet another) canonical-but-impossible thing that Federation starships rely upon to function. We're going to have to roll with it, just like we roll with more common bits of treknobabble like "warp drives," "plasma conduits," and "subspace."

So let's ask ourselves a couple of questions:
1) What does this mean for photon torpedo yield? According to the TNG Technical Manual, each torpedo has 1.5 kg of antimatter, giving a theoretical yield of 64 megatons (minus neutrinos from charged pion decay, but Trek has plentiful handwavium supplies to deal with that issue...). But that's using real antimatter. If the photon torpedoes are loaded with Star Trek (TM) antimatter, that's going to be an underestimate by nine or ten orders of magnitude.
2) What does that mean for warp core power outputs? We all know that they use antimatter to generate energy, but when an ounce of antimatter releases energies measured in petatons, the energy generation capacities of the average Federation starship must be mind boggling.

[Enigma]

Means a whole lot of nothing. Nowhere in any series has that level of antimatter yield has been shown.

[Captain Seafort]

Means a whole lot of nothing. Nowhere in any series has that level of antimatter yield has been shown.

Yes it has - the very episode used to calculate said yield, supported by the presence of a gigantic crater on the planet in the remastered version.

[DaveJB]

Future instances in the franchise - the Enterprise blowing up an asteroid in TMP, the mooted destruction of the giant asteroid in TNG: The Pegasus, and Kim's statements of what a photon torpedo should do to a normal asteroid in VOY: Rise - are all more consistent with the multi-megaton yield that photons are actually supposed to have, making the incident in Obsession an outlier. It seems more likely that the planet in that episode had some exotic elements in its crust and/or atmosphere, and the antimatter explosion set off some sort of chain reaction that resulted in the gigantic explosion that was inferred in the original version of the episode, and actually seen in the remastered one.

[Lord Revan]

yeah when a single episode gives wildly inconsistent data (excuse the pun) we dismiss that data, most example of Photon torp damage fall to the high kT or low MT range so while there's example that show really high yields like this one or pathetically low yields but we dissmiss those as outliers as they are inconsistent with the bulk of the evidence.

[Borgholio]

Here's a question...can an antimatter bomb be boosted? For instance there is a practical limit to how big you can make an atomic bomb, but if you add a bit of deuterium to the mix then it increases the power by an order of magnitude. I wonder if they might have something in the 23rd century that can do the same thing to an antimatter warhead...

[Eternal_Freedom]

Here's a question...can an antimatter bomb be boosted? For instance there is a practical limit to how big you can make an atomic bomb, but if you add a bit of deuterium to the mix then it increases the power by an order of magnitude. I wonder if they might have something in the 23rd century that can do the same thing to an antimatter warhead...

It's Tritium you're thinking of (I think so anyway). As for boosting antimatter weapons you can...add more antimatter. It's particles and antiparticles annihilating, not a fission or fusion reaction. Add more fuel, make it annihilate more efficiently (get as much used as possible before the rest of the reaction scatters the remaining fuel) but that's about it.

[Treknobabble]

Future instances in the franchise - the Enterprise blowing up an asteroid in TMP, the mooted destruction of the giant asteroid in TNG: The Pegasus, and Kim's statements of what a photon torpedo should do to a normal asteroid in VOY: Rise - are all more consistent with the multi-megaton yield that photons are actually supposed to have, making the incident in Obsession an outlier. It seems more likely that the planet in that episode had some exotic elements in its crust and/or atmosphere, and the antimatter explosion set off some sort of chain reaction that resulted in the gigantic explosion that was inferred in the original version of the episode, and actually seen in the remastered one.

You gave the most thoughtful, thorough, and detailed contrary position, so I'll answer you as best I can and hope that it addresses the concerns of everybody else.

1) I chose an instance from the original series because of a point that somebody brought up on the Star Wars canonicity thread:

This is off-topic, but I suggest that we from now on should get harder with the Star Trek canon and follow Gene Roddenberry's order that "It isn't Star Trek until I say it's Star Trek". With Roddenberry's own words in mind, then Star Trek V The Final Frontier to Star Trek Nemesis, TNG, VOY, DS9 and Enterprise can be ignored.

I personally take a less extreme view, but I think that Mange has a point. A "middle position" would be to take Star Trek: TOS as "Honest-To-Gene High Canon," the later Star Trek series and movies as "C+" or "G- Canon," and everything else as "C canon." In other words, stuff from the original series should be taking precedence over stuff from TNG, VOY, DS9, etc., and even that takes precedence over stuff from the technical manuals, etc.

2) This is hardly the only incident that implies that Star Trek principalities have access to weapons with yields well beyond the megaton range. DS9 "The Die is Cast" 's infamous planetary bombardment scene springs to mind.

Quoting Graham Kennedy:

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.

...

Looking at the actual attack itself, it was reported that thirty percent of the crust was destroyed in the opening volley. This time we are after the lowest weapon yields possible, so we will minimise the damage by assuming that 'destroyed' does not mean 'vaporised' as before, and that in fact the attack did not even shatter the crust into pieces. Rather, let's see what numbers we arrive at if we just look at an attack which simply damaged one third of the surface of the planet.

Again taking the planet to be roughly Earth-sized, the damage would cover 170 million square kilometres. To further reduce the yield of our torpedoes I'm going to assume that 90% of this was done by the beam weapons, with only 17 million square kilometres affected by torpedoes. And to cut the numbers down even more I'm going to assume that the damage inflicted was of the most feeble kind. According to the High Energy Weapons Archive quoted above, for any given weapon yield the most widespread effect is thermal - meaning any nuclear bomb will start fires at far greater distances than it will knock down buildings. So for my low end estimate I am going to say that the 17 million square kilometre area was only affected to the extent of having fires started on it.

The fleet launches only ten torpedoes to cause this damage, so each one accounts for 1.7 million square kilometres. This means that each torpedo has lit fires over an area of about 735 kilometres radius. Using the above equations we can get an idea of the yield required to do this damage :

r_thermal = Y0.41
735 = Y0.41
7352.44 = Y
Y = 9,793,653.38
This is in multiples of 2.5 kilotons, so the overall yield would be :

Yield = 9,793,653.38 x 2,500
= 24,484,133,461.48 tons
= 24,484.13 Megatons
Giving each torpedo a yield of 'only' 24 thousand megatons.

It is worth reiterating that this represents virtually the lowest possible yield of the weapons used in the attack; the attack was described as 'destroying' thirty percent of the planet's crust, but to generate this figure we are assuming that the torpedoes only contributed 10% of this, and that rather than 'destroy' the crust all the torpedo attack did was light fires over the affected area! Yet even with this exceptionally weak interpretation of what was seen, the yield of each weapon is well into the tens of thousands of megatons.

So we can reasonably expect that the weapons used in 'The Die Is Cast' have yields somewhere between about 25 thousand and 20 billion Megatons. The 'real' figure will depend on where you pitch your assumptions between the two extremes I have used here; for example if you took ten torpedoes as doing one half of the damage in the actual attack, via blast rather than thermal effects, then each weapon would have a yield of about 14 million Megatons. Even then there are some factors I have neglected in this analysis - for example all of these figures assume that the entire energy of every weapon is expended in a useful (i.e. destructive) manner, whereas in fact some of it would be radiated away into space. This alone would increase the yields here significantly.

So we know that principalities with Federation-level technology have access to weapons with yields measured in at least gigatons. This is easy to explain on the hypothesis that their weapons are armed with warheads made of Star Trek: The Original Series (TM) brand antimatter, not so easy to explain on the hypothesis that their weapons are armed with the real kind of antimatter.

Alternatively, we could assume that there are torpedoes specifically intended for use in planetary bombardment, and while normal ship-to-ship torpedoes are limited to megaton range, these "heavy torpedoes" have yields in the giga- or teratons. Very useful for demolishing a planet's surface... or taking down the shields of an turbocharged mile-long wedge of death.

3) We know that torpedoes can have variable yields, and in many cases, it would be desirable to limit the yield of a photon torpedo to several megatons. Even under normal ship-to-ship combat conditions (which probably don't involve the use of charges that could rip the atmosphere off of a planet), the torpedo's blast causing damage to the ship that fired it is a rather substantial concern. Using torpedoes with petaton yields would substantially exacerbate the risk of damage to the firing ship. This likely explains the use of "low" yield torpedoes in ST:TMP. Concern about collateral damage should also be taken into account when examining VOY: "Rise." Using an "Obsession" yield charge to save an inhabited planet is a bit like using an ICBM to deal with insurgents in a crowded city - counterproductive.

4) In TNG: "Pegasus," we have a Federation starship lodged in an asteroid 10 kilometers long and 5 kilometers wide. They can't tell where the 100-200 meter long ship is, and their goal is to destroy it and its experimental/illegal technology beyond the point of salvagability. Leaving behind a cloaking device that could fit handily in your microwave counts as "mission failure." They also want to do this without destroying themselves, and as mentioned before, even "low" yield photon torpedoes can be dangerous in that regard. Most importantly, they want to do this without the Romulans getting too pissed off about Starfleet showing up in their system and blowing up their asteroids. Ionizing radiation or no ionizing radiation, hiding a multi-petaton blast is quite simply impossible! The notion of pulling off a "black op" goes out the window the moment you reach for an ounce of Star Trek: The Original Series (TM) brand antimatter. Issues of scale, thoroughness, "backscatter," and enemy detection are all in play. The first two issues push up the required amount of firepower to pull the mission off, driving up our estimate of individual torpedo yield. The second two issues would cause the major players to prefer using lower-yield weapons if at all possible, driving down the amount of antimatter they'd want to put in each warhead to the minimum value consistent with achieving the necessary degree of destruction.

5) Using the "there must have been something other than the antimatter" gambit is undesirable for several reasons.
a. There's no evidence for it. There's nothing in the dialogue that even suggests that it's a possibility (and, if anything, the hyperbole Kirk uses when discussing the stuff - "a pound could blow up the whole system" - seems to indicate that it's the antimatter they're worried about, not a chain reaction on the planet). There's nothing in the dialogue that even suggests that it's not a possibility. It is completely impossible to verify or falsify. The probability of it being the case is inscrutable. It doesn't even rise to the level of the "fairies exist" hypothesis in our universe, which is at least mentioned by those of us who exist in it. I'm tempted to say that the "there must have been some other factor" argument is not even "not even wrong."
b. It cuts both ways. Sure, we can arbitrarily hypothesize that there's something in the crust/air that let a chain reaction get going in "Obsession." But we can just as easily arbitrarily hypothesize that there's something in the crust of the "Pegasus" asteroid that decreased the efficacy of an antimatter charge. Using this method, anything one wants to change about the power of a weapons system can be changed.
c. It cuts all ways. What if a Trekkie arbitrarily hypothesized that Alderan had something special in its crust that let the Death Star blow it up? Or that the asteroids in TESB and AOTC were doped up with high explosives? There's nothing in the dialogue of the relevant episodes that even begins to address those bare postulates, nothing solid for an interlocutor to use to contradict that particular hypothesis - even if there is nevertheless plenty to use to indicate that planets in general are in danger from the Death Star, not just Alderan.

In any case, thank you for your time. I hope that I haven't bored you with my long-windedness.

[Treknobabble]

Here's a question...can an antimatter bomb be boosted? For instance there is a practical limit to how big you can make an atomic bomb, but if you add a bit of deuterium to the mix then it increases the power by an order of magnitude. I wonder if they might have something in the 23rd century that can do the same thing to an antimatter warhead...

Possibly. In TOS episode "The Doomsday Machine," they found a way to deactivate the blasted stuff - yet another indication that Star Trek: The Original Series (TM) brand antimatter is very different from the real thing.

Anyways, the deactivation mechanism also caused "subspace interference," and was achieved by a "general energy dampening field." Perhaps the antimatter is ordinarily exposed to an "energy intensifying field"? It's no more nonsensical than the notion of "subspace" existing in the first place...

[Eternal_Freedom]

The problem with Graham Kennedy's derivation from The Die is Cast is that we simply don't see that kind of destruction. We don't see one-third of the planet's surface being blasted away. We see shots penetrating a cloud layer, and we see roughly circular shockwaves spreading through those clouds, consistent with megaton-range weaponry.

It's long been the position on this board that visuals trump dialogue. The script says 30% of the crust is destroyed, the visuals do not match. Hell, five lines later they unambiguously state that the Dominion are tricking them with false sensor returns.

So, no, TDIC is not an example of uber-powerful torpedoes. Ignoring the comment about visuals/dialogue/false data etc, consider this. IF the Tal'Shiar and Obsidian Order had such vastly more powerful weapons, then the Borg would not be a threat to them at all, nor would the Federation, or the Klingons; Enabran Tain would be able to rule over Cardassia unopposed.

And on the more general point, if the Federation, a hundred years earlier, had such insanely powerful antimatter weapons...why were the Borg ever a threat? Or the Klingons in ST6?

[Captain Seafort]

The problem with Graham Kennedy's derivation from The Die is Cast is that we simply don't see that kind of destruction. We don't see one-third of the planet's surface being blasted away. We see shots penetrating a cloud layer, and we see roughly circular shockwaves spreading through those clouds, consistent with megaton-range weaponry.

Mt-range DET weaponry, which as you say rules out PT-range PTs, but I wouldn't say the visuals entirely rule out the damage claimed, given that phasers and disruptors "vaporise" objects without the violent effects on the environment that would result if DET weapons were used to truly vaporise said object. A more significant objection is the fact that if phasers were capable of inflicting this sort of damage the Pegasus asteroid could have been dealt with in a fraction of a second, without mass torpedo volleys being necessary.

However, an ounce of antimatter did make a bloody big hole, and there was no indication by anyone that this was due to anything specific to the planet - it was chosen because that was the scene of the Farragut's battle, not for any explosion-amplifying properties. On top of this, TOS has a consistent record of travel times that would have had Voyager home in a few months, not decades, so it might be necessary to consider it a third alternate universe from a technical standpoint.

[Eternal_Freedom]

If 30% of the crust had been destroyed in the first volley, we'd be expecting to see global firestorms, vast areas of lava erupting from the now-exposed mantle. We just don't see enough.

Not to mention the fact that even the Founder/Romulan didn't expect so much damage so quickly. He said "the crust will be destroyed in one hour." Which should be hundreds or thousansd of volleys, not the 3-5 we might think given the stated "damage" from one volley.

[Treknobabble]

The problem with Graham Kennedy's derivation from The Die is Cast is that we simply don't see that kind of destruction. We don't see one-third of the planet's surface being blasted away. We see shots penetrating a cloud layer, and we see roughly circular shockwaves spreading through those clouds, consistent with megaton-range weaponry.

How do we know the shockwaves are spreading through those clouds as opposed to some other medium? How do we know that the torpedoes were not detonating some time after penetrating under the crust, as opposed to bursting in the air? And what on earth would propel those shockwaves at such absurd speeds for such great distances? They're easily 1000 kilometers wide, and reach full size in less than a second. The speed of sound is 340 m/s, so the shockwaves were traveling thousands of times the speed of sound for hundreds of kilometers.

Let's operate under the assumption that the shockwaves are traveling through a layer of clouds.

According to Mike Wong's nuclear effects calculator, it takes a 100,000 megaton weapon to produce "widespread destruction" over an area with a radius of ~300 km. Assuming that "visible shockwave in the cloud layer" entails "widespread destruction on the ground," that's the yield for the fleet's weaponry. Incidentally, this is also significantly larger than the yield calculated by Mr. Kennedy.

It's long been the position on this board that visuals trump dialogue. The script says 30% of the crust is destroyed, the visuals do not match.

That's odd. The dialogue can tell you a lot more what the writers and directors were attempting to portray than the visuals can, seeing as the visuals are limited by the episode's special effects budget and the knowledge base of the special effects team, and seeing as the special effects team may be assumed to be tailoring their work to fit the script as opposed to the other way around, it looks like this board has things backwards.

Would we expect these people to even know what a megaton explosion even looks like? How do we know that they weren't trying to depict a bunch of ripples going through the crust? How do we know what's cloud and what's something else?

There are a million ambiguities in the visual effects of any given scene, at least for our purposes. Outright statements by characters, on the other hand, lack such ambiguity.

Hell, five lines later they unambiguously state that the Dominion are tricking them with false sensor returns.

What clued them off wasn't the level of destruction they saw, but the fact that anybody survived it. That's why I included the initial portion of Kennedy's quote.

Ignoring the comment about visuals/dialogue/false data etc, consider this. IF the Tal'Shiar and Obsidian Order had such vastly more powerful weapons, then the Borg would not be a threat to them at all, nor would the Federation, or the Klingons; Enabran Tain would be able to rule over Cardassia unopposed.

And on the more general point, if the Federation, a hundred years earlier, had such insanely powerful antimatter weapons...why were the Borg ever a threat? Or the Klingons in ST6?

Who's to say that the Borg, the Federation, and the Klingons don't all have such weapons?

In short, we have the following points:
1) Visuals are ambiguous in a way that dialogue is not (particularly when dealing with numbers), so with all due respect, the "position on this board" is questionable at best.
2) While there were false sensor readings, the apparent damage done to the crust did not appear to make anybody suspicious, and it is therefore likely that 30% of the crust being destroyed in a single volley is well within the bounds of expected performance.
3) When everybody is using high-yield weapons, the fact that one party has high yield weapons does not guarantee them supremacy over other the parties.

[Treknobabble]

If 30% of the crust had been destroyed in the first volley, we'd be expecting to see global firestorms, vast areas of lava erupting from the now-exposed mantle. We just don't see enough.

So you expect us to trust your eyes over the Romulan sensors?

Not to mention the fact that even the Founder/Romulan didn't expect so much damage so quickly. He said "the crust will be destroyed in one hour." Which should be hundreds or thousansd of volleys, not the 3-5 we might think given the stated "damage" from one volley.

You were seriously expecting internal consistency from an episode of Star Trek?

[Treknobabble]

Anyways, it takes about 7,000 petatons to demolish (read: melt) the entire crust. One hour = 3600 seconds. So the combined fleet is capable of putting out around 2 Petatons every second. There's about 20 ships, so each individual ship is putting out 100 teratons every second. That's 100,000,000 megatons for one volley from one ship.

The Federation is capable of competing with Romulans. Ergo, there's every reason to think that, say, a Sovereign-class warship would be capable of putting out 100,000,000 megatons with every volley if it were loaded up with planet-busters.

Every time you move the goalposts, things get worse for you.

First I come up with Mr. Kennedy's figure of 24,000 megatons. You don't like that because it's based on the dialogue. So we look at the shockwaves in the problematically ambiguous special effects, and end up calculating a yield of 100,000 megatons per torpedo. Finally, you insist that we use a different piece of dialogue, which leaves us with a value of 100,000,000 megatons per volley from warships capable of existing in the DS9 universe.

If you keep this up, we'll end up with an ounce of Star Trek: The Original Series (TM) brand antimatter in every weapon used in DS9: "The Die is Cast."

[Eternal_Freedom]

You're whole argument is based on ST having internal consistency, that because they used such uber-weapons once, they must always be using them. And you say I'm wrong for expecting internal consistency within the same episode? What the hell?

Normally I wouldn't trust my eyes over Romulan sensors...but in this case, it's obvious to anyone with a lick of knowledge that if 30% of the crust had been destroyed in seconds, we should see considerably more damage on the planet. We should see firestorms, we should see vast areas of exposed lava, we should see trillions upon trillions of tons of material being ejected up out of the atmosphere (if the crust is vaporised then that vapor has to go somewhere).

Your attempt to use Mike's nuclear weapons effects calculator fails, since "widespread destruction" on the ground is much harder than "dispersing a cloud layer." Assuming that the former is the same as the latter is absurd.

As for "if everyone has such uberweapons it wouldn't be noticeable." That, frankly, is bullshit. If they had such insanely powerful "antimatter", they would be using that for fuel and their ships would be much more powerful. In order to even survive proximity detonations their shields would have to be equally as powerful as the weapons (since we frequently see starships and space stations taking several torpedo hits in quick succession without the shields failing), which is inconsistent with the other, natural phenomena we've seen affect shields (the E-D hiding in a star's corona in Descent, for instance). In other words, by not ignoring this one anomalous example in Obsession, you're demanding we ignore a load of other inconsistencies that arise as a result.

The visuals do not match the dialogue, and since the visuals are things we can actually measure and calculate from (as opposed to dialogue being subjective, open to interpretation, downright lies etc), we cannot take the given damage at face value.

[Treknobabble]

You're whole argument is based on ST having internal consistency, that because they used such uber-weapons once, they must always be using them. And you say I'm wrong for expecting internal consistency within the same episode? What the hell?

1) I don't think that they always use such weapons, my argument is merely that they are capable of using such weapons.
2) That was supposed to be more of a jab at Star Trek than at you, but I can see how it can be taken that way. My apologies.

Normally I wouldn't trust my eyes over Romulan sensors...but in this case, it's obvious to anyone with a lick of knowledge that if 30% of the crust had been destroyed in seconds, we should see considerably more damage on the planet.

Well, it's pretty obvious to me that the creators of Star Trek don't have a lick of knowledge. So I vote we go with what they unambiguously say they were depicting, rather than with what they ambiguously appear to have depicted.

We should see firestorms, we should see vast areas of exposed lava, we should see trillions upon trillions of tons of material being ejected up out of the atmosphere (if the crust is vaporised then that vapor has to go somewhere).

The crust needn't be vaporized to be destroyed. I used Mr. Kennedy's 24 gigaton figure for a reason.

Who's to say that the crust wasn't melted or shattered by shockwaves moving through it?

Your attempt to use Mike's nuclear weapons effects calculator fails, since "widespread destruction" on the ground is much harder than "dispersing a cloud layer." Assuming that the former is the same as the latter is absurd.

To me, it looked like there was the production of expanding rings of a whitish-grey substance. This wasn't ripples in the clouds, this was a visible shock front like this one.

As for "if everyone has such uberweapons it wouldn't be noticeable." That, frankly, is bullshit. If they had such insanely powerful "antimatter", they would be using that for fuel and their ships would be much more powerful. In order to even survive proximity detonations their shields would have to be equally as powerful as the weapons (since we frequently see starships and space stations taking several torpedo hits in quick succession without the shields failing), which is inconsistent with the other, natural phenomena we've seen affect shields (the E-D hiding in a star's corona in Descent, for instance). In other words, by not ignoring this one anomalous example in Obsession, you're demanding we ignore a load of other inconsistencies that arise as a result.

First and foremost, I have already given reasons why weapons with very high yields would not be used in ordinary ship to ship combat, which in turn provides us the reason why ship shields are not made to deal with the ludicrous amounts of energy produced by even miniscule charges of Star Trek: The Original Series (TM) brand antimatter.

Secondly, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the Enterprise reaches Jupiter's orbit in 1.8 hours. Assuming constant acceleration and the minimum possible distance (628,000,000 km), that's an acceleration of 29,911.6 m/s/s, which is easily comparable to the 1,000 - 5,000 g accelerations claimed for Star Wars sublight craft. Every kilogram of ship had 1.878 x 10^16 J of work performed on it, and dividing that by the amount of time it took gives the Enterprise a specific power of 2.899 x 10^12 W/kg. Three terawatts for every kilogram of ship is nothing to sneeze at.

The visuals do not match the dialogue,

Do we blame this on the screen writers or the special effects technicians?

and since the visuals are things we can actually measure and calculate from (as opposed to dialogue being subjective, open to interpretation, downright lies etc), we cannot take the given damage at face value.

On the contrary, visuals are far more open to interpretation than dialogue. With dialogue, we are given numbers. With special effects, we need to derive the numbers, and that means that we need to bring assumptions to bear. Which leaves us arguing about assumptions when we have an explicit statement that cuts through the tangled arguments and gives us a definitive answer.

[Eternal_Freedom]

You're whole argument is based on ST having internal consistency, that because they used such uber-weapons once, they must always be using them. And you say I'm wrong for expecting internal consistency within the same episode? What the hell?

1) I don't think that they always use such weapons, my argument is merely that they are capable of using such weapons.
2) That was supposed to be more of a jab at Star Trek than at you, but I can see how it can be taken that way. My apologies.

But since in your argument these "weapons" use antimatter in some uber-form, and these weapons can apparently be built with what si readily available aboard a starship, and can be fired from standard torpedo tubes...then they have no reason not to use such uber-antimatter in a great deal more situations than "that one time we need to blow up some cloud creature" or "that one time we tried a first strike at the Founders and failed miserably."

Normally I wouldn't trust my eyes over Romulan sensors...but in this case, it's obvious to anyone with a lick of knowledge that if 30% of the crust had been destroyed in seconds, we should see considerably more damage on the planet.

Well, it's pretty obvious to me that the creators of Star Trek don't have a lick of knowledge. So I vote we go with what they unambiguously say they were depicting, rather than with what they ambiguously appear to have depicted.

Nope, sorry, not gonna work, since the Star Trek writers have unambiguously said that, for instance, you can build an engine that travels at infinite speed (VOY: Threshold), you can find a "crack" in an event horizon (VOY: Parallax) (a mathematical, rather than physical boundary), that depending on the episode it's either trivial to travel at warp speed within a star system (any episode where the E-D warps out of orbit), or absurdly dangerous (TMP, DS9 By Inferno's Light), or that you can't beam through shields yet do it anyway (TNG: Relics). And that's just off the top of my head. IF the writers don't have a lock of knowledge, as you freely admit, why take what's in the script at face value when it doesn't match what we see happening?

We should see firestorms, we should see vast areas of exposed lava, we should see trillions upon trillions of tons of material being ejected up out of the atmosphere (if the crust is vaporised then that vapor has to go somewhere).

The crust needn't be vaporized to be destroyed. I used Mr. Kennedy's 24 gigaton figure for a reason.

Who's to say that the crust wasn't melted or shattered by shockwaves moving through it?

Then the deformed material has to go somewhere. If it was melted, we'd still be seeing a sea of molten lava. If it shattered, we'd see some sign of that as well.

Your attempt to use Mike's nuclear weapons effects calculator fails, since "widespread destruction" on the ground is much harder than "dispersing a cloud layer." Assuming that the former is the same as the latter is absurd.

To me, it looked like there was the production of expanding rings of a whitish-grey substance. This wasn't ripples in the clouds, this was a visible shock front like this one.

Hmm, ok, having gone back and looked at the episode again, I'll concede that it's more like a shock front. However, I also noticed that the beam weapons they fire have the same apparent effect as the torpedoes do...meaning the beam weapons have the same hypothetical insane firepower level as these supposed ubertorpedoes...which raises even more questions and inconsistencies.

As for "if everyone has such uberweapons it wouldn't be noticeable." That, frankly, is bullshit. If they had such insanely powerful "antimatter", they would be using that for fuel and their ships would be much more powerful. In order to even survive proximity detonations their shields would have to be equally as powerful as the weapons (since we frequently see starships and space stations taking several torpedo hits in quick succession without the shields failing), which is inconsistent with the other, natural phenomena we've seen affect shields (the E-D hiding in a star's corona in Descent, for instance). In other words, by not ignoring this one anomalous example in Obsession, you're demanding we ignore a load of other inconsistencies that arise as a result.

First and foremost, I have already given reasons why weapons with very high yields would not be used in ordinary ship to ship combat, which in turn provides us the reason why ship shields are not made to deal with the ludicrous amounts of energy produced by even miniscule charges of Star Trek: The Original Series (TM) brand antimatter.

That still raises issues. Why, for instance, when the Federation is massively outnumbered in the early Dominion War don't they bust out these monster torps as anti-fleet weapons? If the enemy is only expecting "normal" torpedoes it would be devastatingly effective. Why aren't they used against the Borg when regular torpedoes prove ineffective? And so on.

Secondly, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the Enterprise reaches Jupiter's orbit in 1.8 hours. Assuming constant acceleration and the minimum possible distance (628,000,000 km), that's an acceleration of 29,911.6 m/s/s, which is easily comparable to the 1,000 - 5,000 g accelerations claimed for Star Wars sublight craft. Every kilogram of ship had 1.878 x 10^16 J of work performed on it, and dividing that by the amount of time it took gives the Enterprise a specific power of 2.899 x 10^12 W/kg. Three terawatts for every kilogram of ship is nothing to sneeze at.

And I never said it was, or that ST ships can't accelerate rapidly (although this is one of the higher-end examples I know of). However, we know that ST ships use "mass lightening" fields or effects to reduce the ships effective mass, so the power calcs on that are questionable at best.

and since the visuals are things we can actually measure and calculate from (as opposed to dialogue being subjective, open to interpretation, downright lies etc), we cannot take the given damage at face value.

On the contrary, visuals are far more open to interpretation than dialogue. With dialogue, we are given numbers. With special effects, we need to derive the numbers, and that means that we need to bring assumptions to bear. Which leaves us arguing about assumptions when we have an explicit statement that cuts through the tangled arguments and gives us a definitive answer.

And yet the explicit statements on-screen are so often incredibly wrong. How can we trust dialogue for hard numbers when they make mistakes like I listed above? Or, for some more, the E-D generating 12.75 billion GW while sitting still, which means either a) the crew should be cooked from the waste heat or b) the ship is so insanely ineffecient and wasteful even a total moron wouldn't build it. Or having Data say an amphibian is a fish.

[Treknobabble]

1) I don't think that they always use such weapons, my argument is merely that they are capable of using such weapons.
2) That was supposed to be more of a jab at Star Trek than at you, but I can see how it can be taken that way. My apologies.

But since in your argument these "weapons" use antimatter in some uber-form, and these weapons can apparently be built with what si readily available aboard a starship, and can be fired from standard torpedo tubes...then they have no reason not to use such uber-antimatter in a great deal more situations than "that one time we need to blow up some cloud creature" or "that one time we tried a first strike at the Founders and failed miserably."

Sometimes you want a hand grenade, and sometimes you want an ICBM. But under normal tactical and strategic circumstances, you'll prefer the hand grenade in order to avoid collateral damage, injury to the launcher (especially at relatively short ranges), and political repercussions.

As a matter of fact, I can't think of any situation other than "we want to destroy the surface of a planet," "we want to destroy something that's already vapor," or "we want to destroy something that isn't a planet but is nonetheless as durable as one" where you would want to use more than a few milligrams of Star Trek: The Original Series (TM) brand antimatter.

Well, it's pretty obvious to me that the creators of Star Trek don't have a lick of knowledge. So I vote we go with what they unambiguously say they were depicting, rather than with what they ambiguously appear to have depicted.

Nope, sorry, not gonna work, since the Star Trek writers have unambiguously said that, for instance, you can build an engine that travels at infinite speed (VOY: Threshold), you can find a "crack" in an event horizon (VOY: Parallax) (a mathematical, rather than physical boundary), that depending on the episode it's either trivial to travel at warp speed within a star system (any episode where the E-D warps out of orbit), or absurdly dangerous (TMP, DS9 By Inferno's Light), or that you can't beam through shields yet do it anyway (TNG: Relics). And that's just off the top of my head.

All very interesting stuff. All of it probably impossible. All of it arbitrary. And all of it canonical, as far as I can tell.

IF the writers don't have a lock of knowledge, as you freely admit, why take what's in the script at face value when it doesn't match what we see happenin

Um, because what we see happening is some idiot special effects technician's attempt to depict what the screenwriters put in the script in the first place?

The script is usually what the special effects people use to figure out what they're going to make. You don't have animators making stuff that "looks cool" and then have the screenwriters try and come up with episodes around that. At least, not unless the makers of Star Trek are even more incompetent than we already know that they are.

The crust needn't be vaporized to be destroyed. I used Mr. Kennedy's 24 gigaton figure for a reason.

Who's to say that the crust wasn't melted or shattered by shockwaves moving through it?

Then the deformed material has to go somewhere.

Back where it was, perhaps?

If it was melted, we'd still be seeing a sea of molten lava.

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.

If it shattered, we'd see some sign of that as well.

From hundreds of kilometers up? Beyond the shockwaves we already saw running through the crust/ocean surface/atmosphere?

To me, it looked like there was the production of expanding rings of a whitish-grey substance. This wasn't ripples in the clouds, this was a visible shock front like this one.

Hmm, ok, having gone back and looked at the episode again, I'll concede that it's more like a shock front. However, I also noticed that the beam weapons they fire have the same apparent effect as the torpedoes do...meaning the beam weapons have the same hypothetical insane firepower level as these supposed ubertorpedoes...which raises even more questions and inconsistencies.

I really don't have anything to say in response to the uberbeam problem, other than "there's already a long list of questions and inconsistencies."

Well, "waaah, stop making me look at pictures when we're discussing visual media," is pretty tempting as well, but I want you to take the dialogue seriously so I'll do my best to grapple with the visuals.

Unfortunately, my best happens to be "concede the point with some semblance of dignity."

First and foremost, I have already given reasons why weapons with very high yields would not be used in ordinary ship to ship combat, which in turn provides us the reason why ship shields are not made to deal with the ludicrous amounts of energy produced by even miniscule charges of Star Trek: The Original Series (TM) brand antimatter.

That still raises issues. Why, for instance, when the Federation is massively outnumbered in the early Dominion War don't they bust out these monster torps as anti-fleet weapons?

So the Dominion doesn't start doing the exact same thing.

If the enemy is only expecting "normal" torpedoes it would be devastatingly effective.

Sure, the first time. Every time after that, the only determining factor in a fleet engagement is "which side lands the first blow," because you can be damn sure that the dominion is capable of doing the exact same thing.

Why aren't they used against the Borg when regular torpedoes prove ineffective?

To avoid giving the Borg good/bad ideas. You don't want an already tough to deal with enemy assimilating the idea of using weapons meant for planetary bombardment in regular old ship-to-ship combat.

Secondly, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the Enterprise reaches Jupiter's orbit in 1.8 hours. Assuming constant acceleration and the minimum possible distance (628,000,000 km), that's an acceleration of 29,911.6 m/s/s, which is easily comparable to the 1,000 - 5,000 g accelerations claimed for Star Wars sublight craft. Every kilogram of ship had 1.878 x 10^16 J of work performed on it, and dividing that by the amount of time it took gives the Enterprise a specific power of 2.899 x 10^12 W/kg. Three terawatts for every kilogram of ship is nothing to sneeze at.

And I never said it was, or that ST ships can't accelerate rapidly (although this is one of the higher-end examples I know of). However, we know that ST ships use "mass lightening" fields or effects to reduce the ships effective mass, so the power calcs on that are questionable at best.

Fair enough, but seeing as the 5000 g accelerations the X-wings undergo don't result in the splattering of their pilots, it seems that Star Wars has "inertial dampeners" of some kind as well. And, from the perspective of physics, an "inertial dampener" just is a "mass lightener."

On the contrary, visuals are far more open to interpretation than dialogue. With dialogue, we are given numbers. With special effects, we need to derive the numbers, and that means that we need to bring assumptions to bear. Which leaves us arguing about assumptions when we have an explicit statement that cuts through the tangled arguments and gives us a definitive answer.

And yet the explicit statements on-screen are so often incredibly wrong. How can we trust dialogue for hard numbers when they make mistakes like I listed above? Or, for some more, the E-D generating 12.75 billion GW while sitting still, which means either a) the crew should be cooked from the waste heat or b) the ship is so insanely ineffecient and wasteful even a total moron wouldn't build it. Or having Data say an amphibian is a fish.[/quote]
1) when it comes to power output, even a single GW would be capable of roasting a ship that size with that amount of surface area. As a matter of fact, any space ship capable of doing interesting things that lacks blatantly obvious radiators would be thus roasted.
2) In the OP, I made a point of noting that the "physically impossible" is par for the course in Trek. Is it bullshit? Yeah, pretty obviously so. The problem is that being bullshit doesn't disqualify it for being canon. This applies to everything from "Obsession" to "Warp 10" to "beaming with shields" to "12.75 billion GW" to "Hi, our spaceship is pressurized all over!"
3) Amphibians may not be fish, but it's pretty hard to define a fish clade that doesn't include everything with a backbone using methods that modern taxonomists like. Same goes for reptiles and things that have four legs. That's no excuse for Data having a complete positronic brain fart, though.
4) Finally, (and most importantly) however questionable the dialogue may be, the special effects were based on it. That means that the the special effects, far from giving us something solid to hold onto, are just yet another layer of unreliability.

[DaveJB]

1) I chose an instance from the original series because of a point that somebody brought up on the Star Wars canonicity thread:

This is off-topic, but I suggest that we from now on should get harder with the Star Trek canon and follow Gene Roddenberry's order that "It isn't Star Trek until I say it's Star Trek". With Roddenberry's own words in mind, then Star Trek V The Final Frontier to Star Trek Nemesis, TNG, VOY, DS9 and Enterprise can be ignored.

I personally take a less extreme view, but I think that Mange has a point. A "middle position" would be to take Star Trek: TOS as "Honest-To-Gene High Canon," the later Star Trek series and movies as "C+" or "G- Canon," and everything else as "C canon." In other words, stuff from the original series should be taking precedence over stuff from TNG, VOY, DS9, etc., and even that takes precedence over stuff from the technical manuals, etc.

Firstly, that's not what the official canon policy of Star Trek is. The policy is that anything that appears on-screen is canon. Even Star Trek V or VOY: "Threshold."

Secondly, going by what Roddenberry says doesn't help your argument, it actually buries it. This is what Paula Block, Paramount's then-head of Star Trek licensing, had to say about the matter in late 2005:

Another thing that makes canon a little confusing. Gene R. himself had a habit of decanonizing things. He didn't like the way the animated series turned out, so he proclaimed that it was NOT CANON. He also didn't like a lot of the movies. So he didn't much consider them canon either. And—okay, I'm really going to scare you with this one-after he got TNG going, he .. well .. he sort of decided that some of the Original Series wasn't canon either. I had a discussion with him once, where I cited a couple things that were very clearly canon in the Original Series, and he told me that he didn't think that way anymore, and that he now thought of TNG as canon wherever there was conflict between the two. He admitted it was revisionist thinking, but so be it.

So, by Roddenberry's own statements, the incident in "Obsession" is the one that should be discarded, as it's out of step with what we see in the TNG-era shows (and TMP).

Eternal_Freedom has addressed most of your other arguments, but...

5) Using the "there must have been something other than the antimatter" gambit is undesirable for several reasons.
a. There's no evidence for it. There's nothing in the dialogue that even suggests that it's a possibility (and, if anything, the hyperbole Kirk uses when discussing the stuff - "a pound could blow up the whole system" - seems to indicate that it's the antimatter they're worried about, not a chain reaction on the planet). There's nothing in the dialogue that even suggests that it's not a possibility. It is completely impossible to verify or falsify. The probability of it being the case is inscrutable. It doesn't even rise to the level of the "fairies exist" hypothesis in our universe, which is at least mentioned by those of us who exist in it. I'm tempted to say that the "there must have been some other factor" argument is not even "not even wrong."

It's undesirable, yes, but it's the only explanation that makes any real sense. For perspective, 1 ounce of antimatter is roughly 1/80th the amount of antimatter contained within a TNG-era photon torpedo. If Star Trek antimatter was really that powerful, then never mind that huge multi-hour bombardment that was mooted in TDIC, a single torpedo should have been sufficient to wipe out all life on the Founder homeworld.

b. It cuts both ways. Sure, we can arbitrarily hypothesize that there's something in the crust/air that let a chain reaction get going in "Obsession." But we can just as easily arbitrarily hypothesize that there's something in the crust of the "Pegasus" asteroid that decreased the efficacy of an antimatter charge. Using this method, anything one wants to change about the power of a weapons system can be changed.
c. It cuts all ways. What if a Trekkie arbitrarily hypothesized that Alderan had something special in its crust that let the Death Star blow it up? Or that the asteroids in TESB and AOTC were doped up with high explosives? There's nothing in the dialogue of the relevant episodes that even begins to address those bare postulates, nothing solid for an interlocutor to use to contradict that particular hypothesis - even if there is nevertheless plenty to use to indicate that planets in general are in danger from the Death Star, not just Alderan.

The difference in these cases is that the existence of some explosion reducing/magnifying mechanism isn't necessary for what we actually see. The incident in "The Pegasus" is consistent with other TNG-era asteroid destruction events, and with Alderaan's destruction, the onus would fall on someone to prove that the conventional "shoot 1E38J at the planet" mechanism is unworkable, and that their proposed theory makes more sense.

[WATCH-MAN]

The problem with Graham Kennedy's derivation from The Die is Cast is that we simply don't see that kind of destruction. We don't see one-third of the planet's surface being blasted away. We see shots penetrating a cloud layer, and we see roughly circular shockwaves spreading through those clouds

[...]

If 30% of the crust had been destroyed in the first volley, we'd be expecting to see global firestorms, vast areas of lava erupting from the now-exposed mantle. We just don't see enough.

[...]

but in this case, it's obvious to anyone with a lick of knowledge that if 30% of the crust had been destroyed in seconds, we should see considerably more damage on the planet. We should see firestorms, we should see vast areas of exposed lava, we should see trillions upon trillions of tons of material being ejected up out of the atmosphere (if the crust is vaporised then that vapor has to go somewhere).

[...]

If it was melted, we'd still be seeing a sea of molten lava. If it shattered, we'd see some sign of that as well.

Your argument doesn't seem to be conclusive to me.

As you said yourself: »We see shots penetrating a cloud layer, and we see roughly circular shockwaves spreading through those clouds.«

What we do not see is what happens beneath the cloud layer.

And we do know next to nothing about this cloud layer. We do not know its density, its composition, its thickness or its altitude.

We only know how it looks and that it seems to cover the whole planet and that even the »circular shockwaves spreading through those clouds« couldn't disperse the cloud layer. From this we can at least conclude that this cloud layer is not similar to the naturally occurring clouds from Earth.

According to the report, thirty percent of the planetary crust was destroyed.

It wasn't said that the crust was »blasted away« or vaporized or melted. It was only said that it was destroyed.

But it is already destroyed if it is shattered.

But why are we supposed to expect to be able to see the shattered crust through the cloud layer if we couldn't see the intact crust before the attack and when even the »circular shockwaves spreading through those clouds« couldn't disperse them.

[WATCH-MAN]

I have a few question:

How many aircrafts in the US armed forces are routinely armed with the most powerful weapons (nuclear weapons) the US have?

Even in war time, how many aircrafts in the US armed forces are routinely armed with the most powerful weapons (nuclear weapons) the US have? While flying their attacks in Iraq or Afghanistan, how many aircrafts in the US armed forces were armed with the most powerful weapons (nuclear weapons) the US has? Since the development of nuclear weapons, the US was involved in many wars and warlike operations. How often did they deploy their most powerful weapons (nuclear weapons)?



Why are we supposed to expect that a Starfleet ship is armed with the most powerful weapons the UFP have or is able to build?

The combined Romulan/Cardassian fleet was build for only one purpose: To attack and destroy the Founders planet. Insofar it suggests itself that they are armed with weapons to enable them to do this - maybe weapons that are not routinely distributed to all ships

(According to Chakotey, Federation Starships normally do not even carry tricobalt devices. It was unusual that the USS Voyager had two of such devices.)

Maybe the weapons used at the attack on the founders planet were specially built for this long prepared mission.

Maybe the Federation has the technology and knowledge to build similar powerful weapons - but has decided to not build them as they do not want to start an armament race.

Maybe there are treaties - as the Treaty of Algeron, the second Khitomer Accords or the Jankata Accords - which are outlawing such weapons - as metagenic weapons or subspace weapons are outlawed by such treaties.

[WATCH-MAN]

• • • • deleted

[DaveJB]

I'm pretty sure that in order for the Founder planet's atmosphere to have such a dense cloud cover that it obscured any high-energy detonations on the surface, it would have to be so thick that it would be a Venusian-type "pressure cooker" atmosphere. Which, judging by the fact that Kira was able to walk around and breath unprotected in "The Search," I think we can safely say isn't the case.

As for the general TDIC argument, here are a few pertinent quotes from a debate that Mike had about this very subject many years ago:

In short, the problem with high-energy atmospheric detonations is that the air can only hold a certain amount of energy before it becomes plasma, and the laws of thermodynamics only allow it to expand and shed this energy to its surroundings at a limited rate due to blackbody radiation and hydrodynamics, so you invariably get a brilliant fireball with any sufficiently large release of energy in an atmosphere, and the more energy you have, the longer the fireball lasts.

Hence, we have obvious proof that these blasts are not the monster explosions you think they are (as if this isn't obvious from just looking at their dull brown glory). The fireballs which should result from, say, gigaton-level energy releases should last for many minutes, and it is simply NOT POSSIBLE for shockwaves to move at hundreds of kilometres per second without glowing far brighter than the Sun.

When the K-T mass-extinction "dino-killer" asteroid struck the Earth some 65 milion years ago, it produced a plasma jet of ionized matter which was hurled into space. This plasma jet glowed so brightly that it would blind anyone who looked at it, and when it came back down, it began to condense into liquid droplets and eventually superheated solid particles which showered down and started wildfires all over the entire planet. Yet this blast was totally inadequate to destroy 30% of the planet's crust, and you have the audacity to claim that the feeble-looking dull brown clouds in [the] pictures are far more powerful than the dino-killer was!

If you could actually destroy 30% of an Earthlike planet's crust [...] with a single volley of torpedoes (let's say it was 300 torps), then a single torp should be able to destroy 20 million km³ of crust. Yet we discover in "Rise" that it is only expected to fragment a nickel-iron asteroid which is perhaps 100 metres across at most (not even 0.01 km³)

[Eternal_Freedom]

But since in your argument these "weapons" use antimatter in some uber-form, and these weapons can apparently be built with what si readily available aboard a starship, and can be fired from standard torpedo tubes...then they have no reason not to use such uber-antimatter in a great deal more situations than "that one time we need to blow up some cloud creature" or "that one time we tried a first strike at the Founders and failed miserably."

Sometimes you want a hand grenade, and sometimes you want an ICBM. But under normal tactical and strategic circumstances, you'll prefer the hand grenade in order to avoid collateral damage, injury to the launcher (especially at relatively short ranges), and political repercussions.

As a matter of fact, I can't think of any situation other than "we want to destroy the surface of a planet," "we want to destroy something that's already vapor," or "we want to destroy something that isn't a planet but is nonetheless as durable as one" where you would want to use more than a few milligrams of Star Trek: The Original Series (TM) brand antimatter.

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.


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.

Nope, sorry, not gonna work, since the Star Trek writers have unambiguously said that, for instance, you can build an engine that travels at infinite speed (VOY: Threshold), you can find a "crack" in an event horizon (VOY: Parallax) (a mathematical, rather than physical boundary), that depending on the episode it's either trivial to travel at warp speed within a star system (any episode where the E-D warps out of orbit), or absurdly dangerous (TMP, DS9 By Inferno's Light), or that you can't beam through shields yet do it anyway (TNG: Relics). And that's just off the top of my head.

All very interesting stuff. All of it probably impossible. All of it arbitrary. And all of it canonical, as far as I can tell.

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.

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.

IF the writers don't have a lick of knowledge, as you freely admit, why take what's in the script at face value when it doesn't match what we see happenin

Um, because what we see happening is some idiot special effects technician's attempt to depict what the screenwriters put in the script in the first place?

The script is usually what the special effects people use to figure out what they're going to make. You don't have animators making stuff that "looks cool" and then have the screenwriters try and come up with episodes around that. At least, not unless the makers of Star Trek are even more incompetent than we already know that they are.

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.

The crust needn't be vaporized to be destroyed. I used Mr. Kennedy's 24 gigaton figure for a reason.

Who's to say that the crust wasn't melted or shattered by shockwaves moving through it?

Then the deformed material has to go somewhere.

Back where it was, perhaps?

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. Incidentally, if it were only shattered, not melted or vaporised, that would take less energy than melting or vaporising would. What assumptions did Mr Kennedy make for his calculations? Did he assume "destroyed" to mean "shattered, melted, vaporised?" Because that will severely effect the numbers.

If it was melted, we'd still be seeing a sea of molten lava.

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.

If it shattered, we'd see some sign of that as well.

From hundreds of kilometers up? Beyond the shockwaves we already saw running through the crust/ocean surface/atmosphere?

Um, yeah, we're talking about dumping petatons worth of energy into the planet's surface. It's going to have a noticeable effect.

I really don't have anything to say in response to the uberbeam problem, other than "there's already a long list of questions and inconsistencies."

That isn't an answer, sunshine. That long list of questions and inconsistencies is something that you, in claiming these uberweapons, have to answer or concede.

Well, "waaah, stop making me look at pictures when we're discussing visual media," is pretty tempting as well, but I want you to take the dialogue seriously so I'll do my best to grapple with the visuals.

Unfortunately, my best happens to be "concede the point with some semblance of dignity."

What are you conceding exactly?

First and foremost, I have already given reasons why weapons with very high yields would not be used in ordinary ship to ship combat, which in turn provides us the reason why ship shields are not made to deal with the ludicrous amounts of energy produced by even miniscule charges of Star Trek: The Original Series (TM) brand antimatter.

Except those reasons don't apply in the exceptional circumstances we see in the series. Like the batte to re-take DS9, which was a "do or die" for the Federation. Or the Breen attack on Earth. Or the final attack on Cardassia, where deploying such weapons would have won them the final battle decisively.

That still raises issues. Why, for instance, when the Federation is massively outnumbered in the early Dominion War don't they bust out these monster torps as anti-fleet weapons?

So the Dominion doesn't start doing the exact same thing.

Again, the Federation were already losing the war. They had nothing to gain by holding back on using such weapons.

If the enemy is only expecting "normal" torpedoes it would be devastatingly effective.

Sure, the first time. Every time after that, the only determining factor in a fleet engagement is "which side lands the first blow," because you can be damn sure that the dominion is capable of doing the exact same thing.

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.

Why aren't they used against the Borg when regular torpedoes prove ineffective?

To avoid giving the Borg good/bad ideas. You don't want an already tough to deal with enemy assimilating the idea of using weapons meant for planetary bombardment in regular old ship-to-ship combat.

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.

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.

And I never said it was, or that ST ships can't accelerate rapidly (although this is one of the higher-end examples I know of). However, we know that ST ships use "mass lightening" fields or effects to reduce the ships effective mass, so the power calcs on that are questionable at best.

Fair enough, but seeing as the 5000 g accelerations the X-wings undergo don't result in the splattering of their pilots, it seems that Star Wars has "inertial dampeners" of some kind as well. And, from the perspective of physics, an "inertial dampener" just is a "mass lightener."

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.

And yet the explicit statements on-screen are so often incredibly wrong. How can we trust dialogue for hard numbers when they make mistakes like I listed above? Or, for some more, the E-D generating 12.75 billion GW while sitting still, which means either a) the crew should be cooked from the waste heat or b) the ship is so insanely ineffecient and wasteful even a total moron wouldn't build it. Or having Data say an amphibian is a fish.

1) when it comes to power output, even a single GW would be capable of roasting a ship that size with that amount of surface area. As a matter of fact, any space ship capable of doing interesting things that lacks blatantly obvious radiators would be thus roasted.
2) In the OP, I made a point of noting that the "physically impossible" is par for the course in Trek. Is it bullshit? Yeah, pretty obviously so. The problem is that being bullshit doesn't disqualify it for being canon. This applies to everything from "Obsession" to "Warp 10" to "beaming with shields" to "12.75 billion GW" to "Hi, our spaceship is pressurized all over!"
3) Amphibians may not be fish, but it's pretty hard to define a fish clade that doesn't include everything with a backbone using methods that modern taxonomists like. Same goes for reptiles and things that have four legs. That's no excuse for Data having a complete positronic brain fart, though.
4) Finally, (and most importantly) however questionable the dialogue may be, the special effects were based on it. That means that the the special effects, far from giving us something solid to hold onto, are just yet another layer of unreliability.

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.

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.

3. I'm not going to comment on, since it was simply another example of the ST dialogue being utter bollocks.

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.

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.