Twilight: The Xindi Death Star!

[TheDarkling]

There was no conventional war and it seemed to have its own FTL propulsion (the smaller version did for a fact).

Really? And this was how many years after the Xindi surprise attack at the beginning of Season 3? You surprise me!

About a year or so.

On the matter of the smaller version of the weapon, that was a completed machine. The weapon I saw in those screencaps earlier in the thread looked sort-of incomplete to me, as if they had yanked it out of the shipyard as soon as it was complete enough to perform its' primary mission.

It looks like a scaled up version of the test weapon, I saw nothing to indicate it was unfinished.

Also speculating that they didn't have time to finish the FTL engines seems a bit suspect, I imagine the weapons system was far more of a bottleneck in construction than the engines and creating both in tandem should easily be possible.

I suspected that, like the TCS Behemoth in 'WCIII', many of its' secondary systems (as well as some non-mission-critical primary systems) might not yet have been fitted yet.

Yeah and we saw how well that worked out, sending in an incomplete superweapon is just asking for it to be destroyed.

[Embracer Of Darkness]

I can't believe people are still arguing about how the Xindi weapon was a rip-off of the Death Star.

Anyway, I actually really enjoyed this episode. I thought it was well written and extremely well played-out, especially some of the scenes toward the end. If they keep this up, I might actually become a regular viewer.

[Drooling Iguana]

Might the Xindi weapon have been a DET beam used in combination with a force field to keep the fragments of Earth togeather so that they could be more easily heated? Would the visual effect we saw be consistant with this type of mechanism?

[Admiral_K]

DI, That would be really stretching it... Next thing you know you will be seeing "bands of brightness" =P.


IT obviously had some pretty powerful DET capabilities, but it seemed to drill into the earths crust and perhaps through to the core. Perhaps it intereacted with the Earth's core in some technobabular fashion that caused it to "explosively uncouple" the rest of the planet.

[The Silence and I]

Whoa... I have not seen a triple post in a while

[Darth Wong]

Might the Xindi weapon have been a DET beam used in combination with a force field to keep the fragments of Earth togeather so that they could be more easily heated? Would the visual effect we saw be consistant with this type of mechanism?

What you fail to understand is that the energy required to vapourize the entire Earth is orders of magnitude below the energy required to make it expand rapidly. I am not exaggerating when I say that the entire Earth should have vapourized in less than a second if the beam carried anywhere near enough energy to make it expand like that, so this idea (apart from requiring giant forcefields which dwarf anything else ever accomplished in Trek) doesn't solve the problem at all.

Face it; the only solution is a goofy Scorpion-style chain reaction. An object which has been given thousands of times more energy than is necessary to vapourize it will not mysteriously hold together and appear mostly solid until well after the beam stops firing.

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

What you fail to understand is that the energy required to vapourize the entire Earth is orders of magnitude below the energy required to make it expand rapidly. I am not exaggerating when I say that the entire Earth should have vapourized in less than a second if the beam carried anywhere near enough energy to make it expand like that, so this idea (apart from requiring giant forcefields which dwarf anything else ever accomplished in Trek) doesn't solve the problem at all.

Face it; the only solution is a goofy Scorpion-style chain reaction. An object which has been given thousands of times more energy than is necessary to vapourize it will not mysteriously hold together and appear mostly solid until well after the beam stops firing.

BAH!!! Why the hell do Trek weapons ALWAYS rely on a Funky-Chain-Reaction-of-the-Week as their damage mechanism?!!? It's unreliable and it phucks up all attempts at proper analysis. Can You Say "Brain Bug"?

I prefer good old DET as a Damage Mechanism. Generate X amount of energy, fire it at Target Y, and be able to count on it doing Z amount of damage.

EDIT: *Kills a few Typodemons*

EDIT2: *Kills some more Typodemons*

[Shadow]

BAH!!! Why the hell do Trek weapons ALWAYS rely on a Funky-Chain-Reaction-of-the-Week as their damage mechanism?!!? It's unreliable and it phucks up all attempts at proper analysis. Can You Say "Brain Bug"?

I prefer good old DET as a Damage Mechanism. Generate X amount of energy, fire it at Target Y, and be able to count on it doing Z amount of damage.

EDIT: *Kills a few Typodemons*

EDIT2: *Kills some more Typodemons*

Why do you assume that it was intended to be a chain reaction? Did you consider the possibility that they liked the visual effect, and didn't care about the technical aspects of it? Enterprise is a show made to make money (not as successful as the producers would have hoped, admittedly). I'm tired of people complaining about these "chain reactions". Some people forget the "fiction" part of science-fiction. Not everything can be explained. For example, you may say this was a chain reaction, but can you say how it worked? Of course not. This is the only place I've seen that tries to analyze every aspect of a show so heavily.

[Darth Wong]

Why do you assume that it was intended to be a chain reaction?

Oh great, another "let's imagine the creator's intent while ignoring what he decided to put on the screen" idiot.

Did you consider the possibility that they liked the visual effect, and didn't care about the technical aspects of it?

Did you consider that if you gave me a dollar for every time they mentioned cool reactions in Star Trek, I'd be a rich man? Give me one fucking piece of evidence that they did not intend it to be a chain reaction. The visuals are a solid piece of evidence in favour, and you have not provided a shred of evidence against, have you?

Enterprise is a show made to make money (not as successful as the producers would have hoped, admittedly).

Wow, did you figure that out all by yourself?

I'm tired of people complaining about these "chain reactions". Some people forget the "fiction" part of science-fiction.

More stupidity on your part. The fact that it is fictional does not change the fact that they decided to create a fictional chain-reaction.

Not everything can be explained. For example, you may say this was a chain reaction, but can you say how it worked? Of course not.

And how does that change the fact that it's obviously a chain reaction? Oh yeah, it doesn't change it at all. What we do know is that when you flick a lighter under a lot of kindling and the fire continues after the lighter is shut off, you don't attribute all of the energy of the fire to the fucking lighter.

This is the only place I've seen that tries to analyze every aspect of a show so heavily.

That's because most places allow idiocy like yours to pass without comment, because they are run by fanboys with shit for brains.

[Ender]

Might the Xindi weapon have been a DET beam used in combination with a force field to keep the fragments of Earth togeather so that they could be more easily heated? Would the visual effect we saw be consistant with this type of mechanism?

No because it exploded after the ship was gone

[Oberleutnant]

Now after finally seeing the episode (Sir Sirius and Faram - thank you!), I've got to admit that ENT seems to be finally on the right course. This was one of the best episodes during the show's three year voyage. Jolene Blalock played her part excellently. I don't care about technological aspects, but the drama worked, despite the use of reset button at the end. It's certainly no The Inner Light, but not a stinker either.

[The Yosemite Bear]

let's face it, B&B have no idea what they are doing, and they aren't using ILM anymore..... Then again, watching cable I have discovered how easy it is to creat a CGI based Sci-fi show....

One of my favorite bits of cheese involves a very gothic looking starliner (haunted), being run by bounty hunters who are always broke. <It's like ghost ship meets bebop...>

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

<SNIP>

<SNIP Imperial Smackdown>

WTF!?! I post an observation about Trek and 24 hours later Darth Wong's blasting caps in someone's ass for their stupidity (granted the nerf herder deserved it ). If I woulda known that my post would have been the razored spike a wannabe Village Idiot tries to suicide himself on, I wouldna posted. Nice Work, Darth Wong. *tosses Wong an Imperial Kilocredit coin*

Always Tip the Host

[The Yosemite Bear]

gee Einy that should be "Sorry about the mess"

oh by the way, do you know how to clean up a frying ban at a time like this?

[Shadow]

Mr. Wong totally missed the point of my post. Notice that I never said that I believe it was not a chain reaction. I said the creators of the effect may not have intended the effect to be a chain reaction. This is quite a difference. My post was made to dispute Snowman's belief that the creators of this show were attempting to make it difficult for a "proper analysis" to be made, not to argue over the Xindi weapon.

[apocolypse]

Mr. Wong totally missed the point of my post. Notice that I never said that I believe it was not a chain reaction. I said the creators of the effect may not have intended the effect to be a chain reaction. This is quite a difference. My post was made to dispute Snowman's belief that the creators of this show were attempting to make it difficult for a "proper analysis" to be made, not to argue over the Xindi weapon.

No, that's not what Einy was saying. He said it was that the visuals make it difficult to calc, not that the creators were intentionally making it difficult.

And they may have not intended to make it a chain-reaction, but that's irrelevant because that's what they've given us.

[Darth Wong]

Mr. Wong totally missed the point of my post.

That's an interesting way of conceding that your post had no cogent point whatsoever.

[Shadow]

No, that's not what Einy was saying. He said it was that the visuals make it difficult to calc, not that the creators were intentionally making it difficult.

And they may have not intended to make it a chain-reaction, but that's irrelevant because that's what they've given us.

He was saying that it was intended to be that way because he called it a "brain bug". I'll post the definition of this given on this site. I believe this was the origin of the term.

"Brain bugs" is my personal term for ideas which are implanted in the collective consciousness of sci-fi fans.

This implies that the writers have somehow got the idea that all the weapons on Star Trek must be chain reactions. If they intended a chain reaction, they would have included it in the dialogue. A casual viewer would not notice the effect, so this would have to be done.

It doesn't matter that this "makes it difficult to calc". The show was not intended to be easy to evaluate, which I tried to explain in my post. This is why I said it was intended to make money (not to be analyzed for some sort of debate). Some people don't seem to understand this.

[Darth Wong]

This implies that the writers have somehow got the idea that all the weapons on Star Trek must be chain reactions. If they intended a chain reaction, they would have included it in the dialogue. A casual viewer would not notice the effect, so this would have to be done.

As I said, you are claiming that they did not intend this to be a chain reaction; they just decided to make it look like one. See the previous rebuttal which you tried to evade with this "missed the point" bullshit of yours.

It doesn't matter that this "makes it difficult to calc". The show was not intended to be easy to evaluate, which I tried to explain in my post. This is why I said it was intended to make money (not to be analyzed for some sort of debate). Some people don't seem to understand this.

It doesn't matter what it was intended for (particularly since you have not presented a shred of evidence that they "intended" it to be anything other than a chain reaction), because we're discussing what it is, and you have no direct rebuttal even though you obviously dislike the conclusion so you attempt this roundabout cowardly bullshit.

It doesn't matter whether it's a brainbug or not; it is what they consistently do. This is like saying that Klingons aren't really screaming idiots because the writers are just being stupid. Yes, they're just being stupid, and yes, it's a brainbug, but that doesn't change the fact that the Klingons are screaming idiots.

[Shadow]

Yeah, you are right that I dislike the conculusion. I just think that the poster should not have been mad at the writers because they intended it to be this way. I don't think it was intentional. I was trying to say that the show doesn't cater specifically to them.

[Patrick Ogaard]

My interpretation of the Xindi planetbusting incident:

The oversized energy beam projector fires on the planet, disintegrating water and crust material in its wake. The standard phaser effect of part of the energy following fault lines or fissures in rock -- as well as luckless Klingon crewmen -- leads to propagation of the effect beyond the immediate vicinity of the beam path, and the beam has enough power that the scattered energy is still enough to cause considerable damage around the fault lines/fissures.

In short order, seas of magma are exposed and add to the generalized devastation, not that anyone would really notice.

The beam keeps going, boring into the silicate-rich (and thus NDF-vulnerable) mantle and leaving a path of disintegrated mantle in its wake. Once the beam bores down to the metallic core, however, its progress just about stops dead and much of the beam scatters into the surrounding mantle, pumping those spiffy NDF energies into huge volumes of silicates. The beam is then switched off, but the NDF chain reaction continues for some time, until a sufficiently large portion of the mantle is gone.

The inner core feels the relief of pressure as big chunks of the mantle disappear and the planet's gravity is slightly reduced by the massive disintegration effects. The solid but superheated inner core expands outward, turning into liquid nickel and iron and bursting the planet apart.

It's still goofy, but it kind of sort of almost works without invoking additional, heretofore unknown technobabble. (Of course, the pressure on the inner core might not be sufficient to blow up the planet if abruptly released, but that's for someone else to figure out.)

[Admiral_K]

At any rate, it is clearly NOT a DET destruction of the planet as the Death Star Super Laser is.

[Drooling Iguana]

Perhaps the visibile beam that we saw was only intended to drill below the surface so that a device could be beamed down to finish the job in whatever technobably way you could imagine (a mass lightening field around the planet?) It would explain why the beam cut off halfway through.

[Patrick Degan]

Perhaps the visibile beam that we saw was only intended to drill below the surface so that a device could be beamed down to finish the job in whatever technobably way you could imagine (a mass lightening field around the planet?) It would explain why the beam cut off halfway through.

What is the point of introducing two additional mechanisms into the picture to try to explain a process which still relies on an induced chain-reaction? And how would a planetary mass-lightening field aid in this process? Consider the course of your logic: the use of a beam to drill into the deeper layers of the target, followed by the introduction of the induced chain-reaction device, followed by the mass lightening field to push away Earth's fragmented mass from the centre.

The whole technical point of the chain-reaction is to take advantage of a process which somehow utilises the material of the target to fuel the reaction because the beam or bomb itself hasn't the requisite energy to do the job directly. But then, a mass-lightening field is employed to push the fragmented planet apart? The amount of energy any such forcefield would require must balance out against the GPE of the mass to be lightened —which means that it would be far simpler to employ a beam powerful enough to blast the planet apart through sheer brute force. Which negates the need for a chain-reaction weapon in the first place.

[Patrick Degan]

The beam keeps going, boring into the silicate-rich (and thus NDF-vulnerable) mantle and leaving a path of disintegrated mantle in its wake. Once the beam bores down to the metallic core, however, its progress just about stops dead and much of the beam scatters into the surrounding mantle, pumping those spiffy NDF energies into huge volumes of silicates. The beam is then switched off, but the NDF chain reaction continues for some time, until a sufficiently large portion of the mantle is gone.

The inner core feels the relief of pressure as big chunks of the mantle disappear and the planet's gravity is slightly reduced by the massive disintegration effects. The solid but superheated inner core expands outward, turning into liquid nickel and iron and bursting the planet apart.

Problems:

1. A planet has within its structure countless fissures which would scatter any NDF effect. The mantle will not experience any sort of uniform disintegration.

2. The Earth's core is nickel/iron; not especially dense on the atomic scale. The reaction would not "stop dead". Furthermore, any such planet-busting weapon dependent upon a chain-reaction would be energised sufficently to induce the reaction in the liquid metallic core.

3. I hate to have to remind you of this, but gravity simply won't disappear. A planet is not a pressure boiler waiting to blow apart. The planetary mass will still tend to coalesce around a central point from mutual gravitational attraction unless acted upon by an extraordinary outside force.