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now granted i have not seen nemesis yet, but there was quite a bit of talk about a romulan ship mounted uber-weapon that could destroy a planet. you know, the one with the seven minute lag time. seems to me that B&B are dropping a gauntlet....designing a ship with a weapon like that, albeit slow to charge they have mounted a single shot planet buster weapon and a ship half the size of a VSD. WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THAT?

How does this superweapon work? Is it raw energy or technobabble chain reaction?

i dunno. i'm going to see the movie tonight. i would imagine quite a bit of raw energy is involved being that the rommie ship needs to charge for a full seven minutes. any guess on my part would be pure speculation

If it's raw energy then it will be just plain stupid, since a single shot planet buster is far beyond the current tech level of the Alpha/Beta Quadrant powers.

Isn't it some technobabble radiation weapon?

Jim Raynor wrote:If it's raw energy then it will be just plain stupid, since a single shot planet buster is far beyond the current tech level of the Alpha/Beta Quadrant powers.

must be a combonation. if the ship needs to run its reactor for seven full minutes then thats a hell of a lot of power. i know the rommie's use an artificial quantum singularity for a power source. i assume this one is at least somewhat more powerful than the one on the standard D'erderix class warbird. but i have no numbers. in any event, it is a single shot planet buster. maybe Brannon and Bragga secretly lurk sd.net and are trying to compensate! lol

I thought it was a radiation weapon that kills all life on a planet.

Spanky The Dolphin wrote:I thought it was a radiation weapon that kills all life on a planet.

that would make a hell of a lot more sense

It wouldn't matter if the Romulan ship shattered the planet into fragments like Alderaan, it would considered overruled by the majority of all other evidence in Trek by rabid Warsies...but if it fired the same weapon at the Enterprise E and it survived...LOL...

Col. Crackpot wrote:

Spanky The Dolphin wrote:I thought it was a radiation weapon that kills all life on a planet.

that would make a hell of a lot more sense

You don't understand. If kills all "life" on a planet meaning everyone becomes boring idiots like most ST characters already. So, almost everyone in Starfleet is immune to the weapon's effects.

Robert Walper wrote:It wouldn't matter if the Romulan ship shattered the planet into fragments like Alderaan, it would considered overruled by the majority of all other evidence in Trek by rabid Warsies...but if it fired the same weapon at the Enterprise E and it survived...LOL...

it couldn't be simply 'overruled'. it is in a movie which is the highest level of cannon. you and i and the rest of us are not part of the process, we just watch or read and argue about what it all means.

Col. Crackpot wrote: if the ship needs to run its reactor for seven full minutes then thats a hell of a lot of power.

The long charge time doesn't necessarily mean lots of energy (ie Core output * time).

The long period may be for warming up the negative plasma inverters or decoupling the isolinear matrix. I also wouldn't rule out the harmonic singularity modulators, they need some fine adjustments, especially if the energy beam is a cascading subspace pulse ............. you get what I mean

paladin wrote:

Col. Crackpot wrote:

Spanky The Dolphin wrote:I thought it was a radiation weapon that kills all life on a planet.

that would make a hell of a lot more sense

You don't understand. If kills all "life" on a planet meaning everyone becomes boring idiots like most ST characters already. So, almost everyone in Starfleet is immune to the weapon's effects.

true, they all are a bunch of dull dimwits. although i did like that one planet in TNG where everyone ran around with nothing but white strips of fabric covering up their goodies.

Spanky The Dolphin wrote:I thought it was a radiation weapon that kills all life on a planet.

I heard that's what it is. It makes almost no sense, either way. It's kind of like firing a great number of neutron bombs at a planet, all at once, but more effective in that it actually appears to disintegrate flesh.

Its probably a large scale version of that beam starfleet uses to clean its ships (from episode where Picard is alone on the enterprise taking on terrorists Die hard style) although it may not be called the same thats what I expect it to act like.

TheDarkling wrote:Its probably a large scale version of that beam starfleet uses to clean its ships (from episode where Picard is alone on the enterprise taking on terrorists Die hard style) although it may not be called the same thats what I expect it to act like.

See, that would be referring to things that have been brought up in the past. In other word, continuity. Therefore, since this is ST, it is basically not going to be that beam.

Perhaps it shines a janeway porno on the planet and well, we all know where it goes from there. Seriously though, such a weapon would have to be uber tech in order to pack that much energy on such a small platform. The reactor alone would outsize the romulan vessel.

TheDarkling wrote:Its probably a large scale version of that beam starfleet uses to clean its ships (from episode where Picard is alone on the enterprise taking on terrorists Die hard style) although it may not be called the same thats what I expect it to act like.

You mean like the baryon sweep?

Spanky: That would be it, although like I said (for the reasons neoolong mentions) it won't be called that but I think its will more or less be the same thing - beam that destroys any life.

As an aside.

Blowing up a planet isn't unheard of rememebr the Promellians did it in their last ever battle and their technlogy is considered primitive ("look their control panels don't even have several terrawatts going to them") so therefore brute force planet destruction is possible but its probably more effective to do it through other means (TDiC, Plasma reaction weapon, General order 24 etc).

How do you derive power output from something that turns people into stone?

TheDarkling wrote:Its probably a large scale version of that beam starfleet uses to clean its ships (from episode where Picard is alone on the enterprise taking on terrorists Die hard style) although it may not be called the same thats what I expect it to act like.

Having seen the movie, that can't be what it is. Star Fleet appears to have done no research into this type of radiation due to its obvious biogenic qualities. This technology is available only to the Romulans, and possibly is limited only to the Remans.

Vympel wrote:How do you derive power output from something that turns people into stone?

You can't. Crusher said that only a few grams of the stuff could kill all life on a planet, but it is clear from the end of the movie that the weapon was not nearly so dangerous as it had been made out to be. The fact that the Scimitar, within one second of being fully charged, could be destroyed without harming anyone on the nearby Enterprise with its radiation, is stupid if we assume that the same weapon was about to kill a planet's worth of life forms.

Vympel wrote:How do you derive power output from something that turns people into stone?

You can't, it's like the line from Iron Man that goes "He was turned to steel, in the great magnetic field", it's a complete impossibility. It almost sounds like a bad rip-off of the carbonite freeze in Star Wars, the turning people to stone part that is.