An Idiot on Startrek.com

[Meest]

A few movies here, some in high atmosphere mind you, but look at the intensity and persistance.

http://www.osti.gov/historicalfilms/filmlist.html

[Darth Lucifer]

A few movies here, some in high atmosphere mind you, but look at the intensity and persistance.

Crap...too bad they're in real media. I'd like to find a way to save these bad boys...

I'm going to just sit back and watch the rest of this debate...I'm still trying to process what some of what these guys are talking about.

On another note, it looks like DMJII hasn't been around. Did he get banned again? I was going to do another "Best of Dr. Evil" mega-post. I think I'll do it anyway...

[Meest]

Link to the ones you want, they are easily converted.

[Darth Lucifer]

Link to the ones you want, they are easily converted.

I'm looking for some software to do just that. I also hate real media because of spyware. People who make spyware should me tried for crimes against humanity.

[Darth Wong]

*cracks knuckles*

Originally, that was more a SFX budget issue... but, if you care to take everything literally, ... making stuff go poof completely is a very tricky thing to do, no? And clearly it works on things other than water. And... what's the energy yield requirement, hm?

If he doesn't know, then what makes him think it must be high?

Phasers aren't known for malfunctioning. They are known for being able to slice straight through shields when tuned correctly, however. Which brings me to the next point: If a phaser can penetrate shielding - or bring shields down just as well as 100+ MT photorps - and does additional damage all out of proportion to its energy yield to what it hits... how, pray tell, does this particularly make phasers not highly useful?

100MT photorps? If photorps were 100MT, then from "Relics", just one should take out a GCS.

Of all the visual instances of phaser and turbolaser use - or clear top-canon dialogue references - phasers have had the greater visible destructive effect. You don't see TLs/blasters taking out multi-mile comets on 10% power, blasting holes through rock, heating unknown materials to thousands of degrees, turning people into thin air... or drilling deep holes in earth... etc etc. You see them... blowing up small asteroids. Shooting down fighters. Doing very little damage to snow. Shooting small holes in walls. Putting scorch marks on walls. Shooting ships up. Etc.

Destroying an entire planet. Knocking down shields of ships which shrug off "thermonuclear fireworks" directly outside the bridge windows and seismic charges that can wipe out multi-mile pieces of rock, not ice.

Darth, Darth, Darth... you've been talking about the Pegasus for a long time, and you still keep getting things wrong. At the time that Riker made his estimate, they'd just figured out which asteroid it was in... by detecting the signature of the Peg's warp core. Quite ready, quite active, as far as he knows... although no telling how much juice is left in it or what the exact status of the shields, nav deflectors, SIF, or hull are.

Fuckball actually thinks that Riker's figure for destroying the asteroid was mostly based on the difficulty of destroying a wrecked ship that has lain dormant for a decade? Even a fully functional Federation warship doesn't take a hundred photorps to destroy, so he still has to explain why they need most of their 275 photorp payload, doesn't he?

...but still demonstrates that making an Enterprise-sized hole in an asteroid is well within their ability. Try to stick to a coherent argument - I can set forth a reason for the shields to not be fully operational inside the asteroid. You can't argue that phasers can do squat against, say, rock while referencing the short order removal of many million cubic meters of it in a hurry.

Yes, the most powerful ship in the fleet can make an Enterprise-sized hole in an asteroid. Given that Slave-1 could have shredded that entire asteroid with just one charge, is this supposed to impress anyone?

Unfortunate. In TESB... we see a major shift in the way the Falcon is portrayed. In ANH, the Falcon is clearly a freighter - a small one, but much more massive and less maneuverable than TIE fighters. In TESB's asteroid chase scene, we see a maneuverable Falcon that's small enough to dodge through gaps that would be too narrow for a TIE, provided it's put on edge. A 40m wide Falcon would be ... oh, about 10 meters tall, IIRC... and this is supposed to be shorter in height than a TIE is wide (~6m).

Clearly a 40m Falcon is too wide for this scene. And I wouldn't call myself anonymous, either. It helps to think about, y'know, how big something has to be for things to work out.

Obviously, this moron is assuming that the width of the pass was exactly the width of one TIE fighter. No doubt if a modern fighter plane ever hit a rock wall trying a stunt like that, he would assume that it passed through a crevice exactly as wide as its wingspan too.

It's true that it doesn't look anything like a megaton explosion would. I added a putative 5 megaton explosion to TDIC, using the highest possible brightness level, just for you... realistically, it would probably look quite a bit dimmer from that distance, particularly as I scaled the substantially larger "mushroom" cloud (not really traditionally mushroom shaped at that yield anymore) rather than a naked fireball. Sorry, but a 1 MT device was just too small to be convenient.

Actually, since the fireball is brighter than the Sun and stays that way for several seconds, it would be quite readily visible from orbit.

You wouldn't see it sitting there on the dark side of the planet if it weren't glowing white hot, actually.

Since we can see forest fires from orbit, this is an absurd statement. Forest fires are nowhere near as hot as hypersonic shockwaves would be. In fact, hypersonic shockwaves characterize a nuclear explosion; the nuclear fireball looks like the Sun until the expanding shock front is no longer moving fast enough to create surface temperatures similar to the Sun.

Most of the energy was allegedly released in a subspace pulse... and seems to have involved the disintegration of most of the moon. The damage to QonoS's atmosphere supposedly left the planet with 50 years of habitability remaining... which takes a fair amount of energy. In order to create that large area of effect required a crapload of energy... only a tiny fraction of which actually ended up hitting QonoS.

Actually, energy is work, and this wave did not do much work.

That you claim Trek is famous for. Torpedos that cause chain reactions do a great deal more, from the two examples we've seen. These are, IIRC, plasma torpedos. Brute force bombardment. Next?

Stating conclusion as a premise. Classic circular logic.

No. They are simply excuses to try and ignore the canon based on a failure to comprehend what could possibly be going on. "WTF," you say, "I can't make any sense of this thing! It doesn't look like I think it should! Throw it out!"

Who said anything about throwing it out? We're just interpreting it intelligently, rather than approaching it as an infant would.

Given your inability to realize how visible a megaton explosion would be from orbit, I'm not going to take your word on this. Now: Why should dialogue or VFX fail to be canon evidence? You just want to throw out whatever you can't fit in your model.

Given the fact that this supposedly gigaton-yield explosion does not make the requisite fireball that literally glows like the Sun, I can only imagine that he's inventing his nuclear claims out of thin air.

These effects are easily visible from space... and impacts are purely and directly kinetic. This isn't a kinetic bombardment.

Now that's just plain wrong. Trying to characterize asteroid impacts as purely kinetic phenomena is idiotic, because air friction creates a glowing columnar plasma wake as the asteroid moves through the atmosphere, and the impact creates an effect very similar to a nuclear fireball, as the KE is converted into heat.

The Founder's world is poorly distinguishable, has a holographic projection sitting on top of it, and is rather on the cold and dead side.. What you see... is about the most you would see. I could try painting out one of those rings using a thousand individual megaton bombs with what would look roughly the same from orbit... it probably wouldn't look as impressive, just a stationary ring that's visible from space for perhaps a couple of seconds.

Since a gigaton-yield fireball will last for nearly two minutes according to the scaling laws from "Effects of Nuclear Weapons", he is obviously full of shit. Even a 1-megaton bomb's fireball lasts for nearly 5 seconds, so this "perhaps a couple of seconds" idiot statement only applies to a sub-megaton device.

Stripping off a fair amount of atmosphere isn't exactly "token." It's claimed to be a subspace effect... which would affect starships and other sorts of things with warp cores, subspace comms, etc much more than an inert planet.

How did "damage to the planet's ozone layer" become "stripping of a fair amount of atmosphere"? Nice dodge

Planar plasma torpedo airburst (intended to burn alive/melt/toast anything on the surface), holographic deception. Next?

Plasma behaviour in atmosphere is well-known, and doesn't behave like that. Next?

Incidentally... megaton level nuclear events don't even have to leave craters.

True, if they are airbursts. However, they do have to create a fireball which lasts for more than 4 seconds, and gigaton-yield fireballs last for nearly two minutes. So unless these things went off above the atmosphere, this is not an explanation.

Shattering asteroids in a km-plane isn't the same as destroying completely a 5 km asteroid via brute high-intensity photon attack...

Yes it is, because if the torps were as powerful as advertised, then the first blast would shatter the asteroid, much as the seismic charge did. Those asteroids hit by the seismic charge weren't cut cleanly in half; there was sufficient force applied to shatter them into fragments. And once the asteroid was shattered, then it would be ridiculous to run around hunting down all of the pieces of rock when they have these fancy scanners that can detect advanced materials and target them specifically. Under no circumstances were they ever going to destroy every little bit of that asteroid.

or insuring the complete destruction of a man-portable device inside a running starship hidden somewhere inside that same asteroid. (For that matter... for all Riker knows, the phase cloak is actually running.)

That is the dumbest retort I've heard in a long time. If the phase cloak was running, they would unable to detect the ship's presence in the asteroid. What kind of a fucktard makes these arguments? In combat, does it take 100 torpedoes to destroy a starship? No. So why does he suddenly think it would take most of a ship's 275 torpedo payload to destroy a derelict? Oh yeah, because he's full of shit.

For one thing, the most recent model developed (used on the Scimitar) is considered "perfect" by a vessel quite capable of detecting gravitons. Can I be sure? No. Do I know that direct mass detection of a moving object is a pain in the tail? Yes. SW cloaks at least don't involve ships that move around much.

Trek ships have been capable of detecting gravitons since at least the beginning of TNG, yet gravity could be used to detect Warbird singularity reactors a decade later, in DS9. How does this fit into his pseudo-logic?

<snip random verbiage>

Consider, then, the battle of ROTJ in this light. In theory, if most of the Rebel fighters were assembled into a single lot and all dumped their protorps, they might down the Executor's shields, provided the large number of TIEs present and the anti-fighter fire that would concentrate on such a large formation didn't shoot down any of them beforehand.

And given that a fighter can be loaded up with a weapon that would have shredded the whole Pegasus asteroid in one burst, what does this say?

So, in other words, the Klingon battlecruiser was warp strafing, and the Enterprise's own warp strafe was made without any calling of distances.

When a ship takes several seconds to cover a few tens of thousands of kilometres, it is not "warp-strafing". Obviously, numbers are not this clown's specialty. Tell me, if a real-life fighter approaches a ground target at supersonic speed, slows down to accurately launch ordnance, and then accelerates away at supersonic speed, would he conclude that it supersonically strafed the ground target?

As I mentioned... not "never." And it's not particularly devastating against an equally capable opponent... which is usually the case in Trek. Either that, or the battle is so severely mismatched that one may as well not bother.

DS9. Totally immobile station. What's his excuse?

well then, lets SEE those numbers.

"Two." (When Knight Hammer is introduced: "Only the Executor was this big -- and that one ship practically bankrupted the Empire."
"Two." (When Lusanyka is introduced.)

(It's something of a theme, actually.)

All in all, a bit over a dozen such "super" star destroyers of varying types are introduced in the EU, and they seem rather rarer than fleets of a hundred or more Star Destroyers.

This guy takes that quote about the Executor nearly bankrupting the Empire seriously even though we know that the Empire built two Death Stars, either of which make the Executor look like a toy?

You misread me. Part of some continuity doesn't exactly mean the same thing as "canon."

When Paramount says canon, they mean authoritative, real, part of permanent continuity, and that production staff are obliged to respect as precedent. This is not what LL means.

Production staff are obliged to respect canon Star Trek material as precedent? This guy hasn't watched much Star Trek lately, has he? There are whole websites out there detailing the Trek writers' contempt for continuity; no one is obliging them to respect much of anything.

A MT explosion in the place of the SOE explosion would not even be visible at typical television resolution.

Wrong. It would be brighter than the Sun for 5 seconds. A gigaton explosion would be brighter than the Sun for roughly 100 seconds. Even if the size of the fireball is small from orbit, it would still be incredibly bright.

The actual fireball from a 100 MT explosion would likely not be visible either. What we see require a pretty high yield to reproduce even vaguely by detonating something on the surface.

A 100 MT detonation would produce a fireball that glows brighter than the Sun for roughly 35 seconds.

Any shockwave propagating through a breathable atmosphere would be white hot, not dulllish yellow. I ask again, don't you have any idea what megaton yield explosions look like?

I do... as I mentioned earlier, you don't appear to.

The radiant energy from a shockwave is based entirely on its temperature... which declines over time. As with any "black body" emission, it will pass through stages of being dimmer and dimmer, including what you might like to think of as "dull yellow."

And this is precisely why a larger explosion glows like the Sun for a longer time; something this imbecile obviously doesn't understand despite his pathetic attempts to seem knowledgeable.

Portions of a shockwave exiting the atmosphere - which is what we see, presumably, in SOE, which shows ejection outside the atmosphere - must inevitably disperse in a hurry and can't trade speed for more heat traveling through a vacuum. Thus... a fast cooling shockwave that turns transparent in a hurry. Now that you've pointed out the bit about actual shockwave temperature, that works quite well, thank you muchly.

his interpretation requires that the atmosphere behind the shock front has instantly coole down, so it doesn't glow any more once the shock front exits the atmosphere! Does he think that the inside of a nuclear fireball is cool?

Now... do I have to draw a picture of what a MT explosion would look like, assuming perfectly clear conditions, next to the SOE explosion, or have you started to figure out what a MT yield really looks like on a planet?

It would look like a small dot glowing brighter than the Sun for around 5 seconds. Never mind a gigaton blast, which would glow brighter than the Sun for nearly two minutes. His entire theory is based on the cretinous assumption that the air behind a hypersonic shockwave instantly cools down!

[Meest]

Here's a few examples, I know the conditions aren't exactly the same, but gives decent visual.. Don't see how they can tout such knowledge then not even know the intensity of nuclear blasts.

27kT airdrop burst 1.4MT high altand finally low alt bombing run 120kT

Here's the only description that I could find of a multi-megaton blast effect:

"Are you still there?" was the first radio transmission received at Johnston Island hours after the TEAK thermonuclear test on August 1, 1958. The 3.8 megaton, 77-kilometer-high blast triggered an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) which stopped radio communications throughout that large area of the Pacific. The EMP was so severe that military and civilian aircraft had to be grounded in Hawaii. The TEAK fireball could be seen as far away as Oahu Island, approximately 525 nautical miles from Johnston Island. Eyewitnesses said the colorful display rivaled the "Southern Lights," also referred to as the Aurora Australis.

And of a ground level blast:

This cratering explosion, with a yield of 104 kilotons, displaced 12 million tons of earth and formed a 1,280-foot-diameter by 320-foot-deep crater in the desert floor, releasing seismic energy equivalent to 4.75 on the Richter Scale.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

Damn it, for some reason I can't seem to register there.

[NecronLord]

Actually, since the fireball is brighter than the Sun and stays that way for several seconds, it would be quite readily visible from orbit.

I'm doubting that the absoloute magnitude of a nuclear fireball is the same as the sun's, but the apparent magnitude from the horizon is greater. It would require complex calculations that are well beyond my understanding of astronomy to compare the apparent mag of a star from 1AU with that of a 5 Mt device at several thousand clicks.

[Hardy]

Actually, since the fireball is brighter than the Sun and stays that way for several seconds, it would be quite readily visible from orbit.

I'm doubting that the absoloute magnitude of a nuclear fireball is the same as the sun's, but the apparent magnitude from the horizon is greater. It would require complex calculations that are well beyond my understanding of astronomy to compare the apparent mag of a star from 1AU with that of a 5 Mt device at several thousand clicks.

You mean a simple approximation with the Inverse Square Law can'y suit you?

[Glimmervoid]

I just lost what little respect I had left for DMJay.

He posted this list hear.
"Lets Rank Military powers ok
1) USA - me
2) England
3) China
4) S. Korea
...
"
Now you may think what is wrong with it but if you look at number 2 you will see it says England. There is no English army this guy is a complete idiot he is putting up a list of armies that don’t exist. It’s called the British army or the United kingdoms armed force.

[Jon]

I think we knew he was a complete idiot long before he posted that little example. I tried my hand in there for all of 2 posts, gave up, what a tool he is.

[Rightous Fist Of Heaven]

Its rather obvious that DMJay's flaunted military experience is bullshit. He doesnt even have a clue of the Abrams's specifications, and his appalling knowledge of military history makes up another fine point. He is just one sad wanker who really really would like to try and fire a gun in the military but either he cant drag his teenager ass there or he is too much of a fat ass to fare in the Military.

[Darth Wong]

Actually, since the fireball is brighter than the Sun and stays that way for several seconds, it would be quite readily visible from orbit.

I'm doubting that the absoloute magnitude of a nuclear fireball is the same as the sun's, but the apparent magnitude from the horizon is greater. It would require complex calculations that are well beyond my understanding of astronomy to compare the apparent mag of a star from 1AU with that of a 5 Mt device at several thousand clicks.

Actually, all you need to do is show that its surface temperature is at least 6000K.

[Darth Lucifer]

I see shit stain (DMJII/DMJay) is back...I gave him some bait, but quite frankly, I'm bored with the troll now.

I'm surprised the thread has hung on for this long...

[Darth Servo]

I'm tired of dealing with this fuckwad.

Yes there is you ignorant fool. Regardless of HOW the energy gets there, the atmosphere can only dissapate it at a certain rate. There is NOTHING technobabble related about an atmosphere.

Actually, the rate at which the atmosphere dissipates it (now that you care to bring that up) - and the form it takes - depends on the geometric configuration of the distribution of energy. A small quantity of atmosphere superheated dissipates more thermal energy through radiation than a large quantity moderately heated with the same excess quantity. Some types of radiation will go clear through most types of atmosphere - although many solid objects will absorb them. Etc etc.

there is only too quickly for a specific type and distribution of direct energy input. Given a particular mix of photon frequencies, one can have direct radiation "instantly" (i.e., lightspeed) cook a particular radius to a fireball with the same total energy.

If I have a torpedo that ejects plasma radially along a plane at 0.99c, it's going to look on the funny side to somebody expecting a nuke.

And where did you dig up THIS steaming pile of pseudoscience?

Common sense. Well, common sense for anybody who knows some basic optics. Transmission percentages are quite variable by frequency.

And, if you do set off a planar c-frac plasma charge, it's going to look completely different from a nuke. You can trust me, or you can go into your backyard and take out a small quantity of explosive in various forms. Get a claymore mine, a shaped charge, an unshaped charge, and lots of small chunks... compare. Try not to blow your hand off.

Really? WHEN have you seen a 100+MT explosion on a small planet to know what it would look like?

The same times that you have... and, btw, the SOE planet isn't considered "small." It's considered "Earthlike."

In order to obscure such an even the atmosphere would need to be almost like that of Venus. And since a bunch of humans could walk around on the surface without any breathing problems, your assumption is clearly BS.

Opacity is very closely related to composition. Mess with the qualitative composition, and even a breathably dense atmosphere can quite capably obscure it.

In the case of TDIC, there isn't enough atmosphere to maintain the sort of fireball one would extrapolate from nuclear yields.

BS. You're making that up out of thin air.

But of course it's made of thin air. Air, past the first couple miles of atmosphere, has a tendancy to dramatically thin out. If I have a device of the yield that vaporizing the mantle in 5 hours suggests, there's not going to be enough atmosphere around to float around in a graceful fireball. It's going to be rather lacking in that regard - much of it will end up dispersed into the vacuum of space in a short order. After all, we're talking a per-device yield sufficient to blow away a fair fraction of the atmosphere in the first few seconds of bombardment.

Besides, even IF there was a thin atmosphere, it can NOT shed the energy in seconds!

And yet you assume exactly this happens in the TESB asteroid field sequence. Pity.

Yet the view of the planet returns to normal immediately after the ring passes. Your entire "theory" blatently ignores conservation of energy.

"Returns to normal"? You can't even tell if it returns to "normal" at that resolution. You can't see the atmosphere, you can't make out any features on the surface, etc etc. Your suggestion that you know it returned perfectly back to normal is absurd and based on a lack of information rather than a presence of it.

And just WHAT kind of energy spreads out in a ring pattern and leaves the middle uniluminated?

Actually, if you examined the pictures in question - which you apparently have not - you'd notice that the interior of the rings is illuminated in clumps.

If you were familiar with nuclear devices, you'd also be familiar with how both shockwave and fireball glow for a brief period of time... and a nuke doesn't work by spitting out relativistic ejecta.

Sorry, but with the Energy level you're trying to claim for TDiC, we most certainly would. You're trying to claim GIGATON level bombargment.

Actually, if you really want to press the point, I'm claiming that a 100+ MT photon torpedo is entirely reasonable.

We have, of course, clear dialogue references placing the effective firepower in the petaton per second range for the fleet, if you want to get picky... and as you have no higher-canon contradiction to that, you should (per your policies) accept it as fact.

Never said they would be. I have continually maintaned that what ever weapons were used in TDiC set off some kind of chain reaction in the atmosphere. And there has NEVER been any canon statement on how Romulan or Cardassian beam weapons work.

Again, you display your complete ignorance. We've actually gotten into some detail in the past on Romulan beam weapons.

Except for the fact that NEITHER incident proves ubetr powerful torpedos. IF Trek torps were that powerful, they would blow up a GCS with one shot.

Not necessarily. It's quite well established that different types of energy have different impacts on shields... the less "tricky" the weapon, the harder it has to work.

Relics establishes 30 Megatons as an upper limit for the E-D's shields.

Does not, actually... as you'd know if you had watched the episode rather than read about it on SDN. As you may or may not be aware, in this episode we saw a solar flare, projected to increase in magnitude, threatening to literally engulf the ship. Bathe a ship in ten million Kelvin plasma for three hours and the upper limit of the shielding established for that particular event is clearly well over 30 MT. The upper limit for strong solar flares in general suggests the rough analogy of having Tsar Bomba detonated just off the port bow every few seconds... which is to say a great deal of total energy, even not considering this star's flares are supposed to be exceptionally strong.

Checks TDiC script. Nope. No yield specs. You're making things up out of thin air again. It only says how long to destroy the crust and mantle. It doesn't say HOW its done.

Destroying crust and mantle give us a clear range for the effective yield of the materials used.

It doesn't describe TDIC. What it describes are real events... which in turn pale in comparison to TDIC's events and canon dialogue. And I tell you once again, the rings aren't brown... white. Perhaps a shade yellow of white.

I see you're color blind as well as dishonest.

I see you still haven't looked at the pretty pictures. Do so. Zoom in. You'll find that the rings are "grey" - i.e., dim white - and have no tinge of brown to them.

What it does tell you is that a surface detonation (as is SOE) would not be visible from orbit at, for example, 1 megaton, or really (at that pixel size) 5 megatons. Regardless of how long it glowed for.

Notice how TJhairball just cintinues to nit-pick at the small yeild yet refuses to admit that HIS theory doesn't explain the event either.

Note how darth continues to fail to explain the situation while completely failing to quantify an alternate situation and claiming that my sharp correction to his claims (that a megaton device would glow brighter for longer) qualifies as a mistake. Let's face it... I'm nitpicking at small yield, because small yield doesn't work. My proposal? That photon torpedos have a not-small yield equal to many-small yield devices. His proposal? Nothing.

In real nuclear yeild explosions, duration of the glow increases with the energy yield. The bigger the yield, the longer the glow.

And we're not dealing with a nuke, bud. Something you can't seem to wrap your brain around.

And the atmosphere [in Skin of Evil] WAS clear. When the away team was down on the surface there wasn't a SINGLE cloud in the sky.

Actually, the atmosphere looked like one solid haze. Next?

Complete lethality was expected with good reason...

Because they were set up by the founders? Thats "good reason" in your mind?

Are you suggesting that Romulans would have no idea what a plasma torpedo will do in planetary bombardment? The "dupe" was simple - it had to be - the entirety of the setup was in getting them to send the fleet to bombard a planet that was, in actuality, uninhabited.

AND be brighter than the sun, UNlike those dull rings.

Brighter than the sun only if you're close enough. At that range, you wouldn't even notice it, most likely. As I've mentioned countless times before... a nuke is only "brighter than the sun" in immediate terms. From any appreciable distance, the inverse square law gives us a much brighter Sun.

Nonsense. The general illumination of the planet was not changed by those enormous "shockwaves".

They don't have to turn night into day in a past-line-of-sight effect, fella. You may notice that the bright areas are fairly diffuse, which would suggest either a very broad glowing region or the immediate area being quite well illuminated by a glowing shockwave.

Also take note that there is no canon dislogue stating what those rings were.

No, just that they wiped out 30% of the surface, and that the rings appeared immediately after the planet was hit by weapons fired at it by a hostile fleet. Darth, at this point you're just trying to obfusticate the issue with volume.

In the case of TDiC, there is no need to assume Romulan torps are chain reaction weapons since plenty of beam weapons from both the Cardassian ships and Warbirds.

...which aren't being used extensively here and still imply extremely high effective firepower figures.

As for photon torps, remember, they WERE destroying a shuttle. Who knows what kind of equipment it had on board.

Ah, yes, the shuttle of SOE. You know, the non-warp capable orbit hoppers that are about three times as long as a photorp themselves, and are mostly full of a large crew compartment? The earlier editions of which had been known to run out of power, and could be run off of hand phaser packs?

The shuttle producing an enormous multi-hundred megaton to gigaton explosion would fit my scenario nicely.

And don't forget... a surface strike on a shuttle leaves room for blenty of energy not involved in creating an optimal atmospheric effect.

Tell me. Why would this subspace shockwave effect the ozone and NOT the Oxygen on Quonos? They are BOTH made of the same atoms. Oxygen is O2, ozone is O3.

First... the portion of the explosion affecting the ozone is not necessarily the portion involved in creating a "subspace shockwave" that affects the Excelsior. It's likely to be an EM portion of the release, which in turn will affect O2 and O3 differently depending on what frequencies it is comprised of.

At the most effective, it would turn all of it into free oxygen (O1) which would recombine into mostly O2.

You have no objective evidence of ANY vaporization. It looks to ME like HALF of the asteroid is still there IN ONE PIECE.

That "one piece" of noticably less than half the asteroid breaks into fragments. The half that disappeared into a puff of white was vaporized. Next?

We've seen that the word "vaporization" on Trek is often a figure of speech. In ST VI: TUC, Valeres 'vaporizes' a metal pot yet the event didn't touch what ever was being cooked IN the pot . It was still pearly white. Furthermore, NO ONE is reacting to the metal vapor that SHOULD be filling the air in the room.

Pot there => pot not there. Substituting the alternate meaning of "completely wiped from the face of existence" doesn't help your case any.

It shows that the torp couldn't POSSIBLY be 100 MT if a pickaxe can tear it apart. Shattering a 400 meter asteroid (even IF we accept Scooter's half-@$$3D scalling) works out to 10-15 kilotons.

Shattering it into 10 meter chunks using TNT, assuming roughly terrestrial composition. But vaporizing it - or even half - requires much more energy, as does dicing it into pieces no larger than a marble using, say, a single radial gamma ray burst. I would note that if he'd borrowed Wong's technique from the TESB asteroid field, he would've gone up close to the GT range.

No, thats just ONE way to dispute it.

It's the only way that holds any water.

How the hell were they able to CARRY AROUND a chunk of rock that had recently been exposed to 100 MT of energy?

The vagaries of large uneven explosions are quite interesting. I would assume that either that particular chunk did not take the brunt of the explosion (those chunks were vaporized, as per the picture you referenced) and was merely indirectly shattered. It may have also been cooled.

Since you've reatly exagerated photon torps, this is just nonsense.

Actually, no. You're claiming that photorps are too weak to affect an ISD's shields, by yield. In order to claim so by the standard of available evidence of protorp effectiveness vs ISD shields, which by your policy you are obliged to accept, you must assert the claim that the yield of a photon torpedo is less than five times the yield of a proton torpedo. In order to even assert the possibility that this is the case, you have to at least claim that a photorp has less than a 4 MT yield.

Try making a 300km bloom visible from orbit with a 4 MT device that directly struck a shuttle sitting on the ground.

When was this?

The Breach, IIRC. I try not to think about Enterprise too much, but if you insist on going by the corporate 'canon policies,' you're stuck with it.

In the ROTJ novelization, it quite explicitly states that Mon Cal cruisers absorbed "thermonuclear fireworks" early in the battle without the shields failing.

Thermonuclear fireworks == a few scattered proton torpedos. You need very many at once in order to actually bring any shielding section down. SW shields appear to work on catastrophic overload failure rather than cumulative-energy failure according to most non-game references; the cumulative-energy references have them be somewhat regenerative, particularly in the case of MCCs.

Once again, an EXACT QUOTE would really help you here.

If you want an exact quote on SW shield frequencies right now, I can recycle one from the Obsidian Order section of Darkstar's page...

The hull's not armored, and there don't seem to be ray shields, at least not at those frequencies.

(Implying ray shields have particular frequencies they operate at.) If you want the K-wing ones, you'll have to wait for a bit.

And visible transparency of shields has NOTHING to do with being frequency coherent. You've just been watching too much Trek again. Glass has no frequency. The shields let ANY frequency of light through. If that feature was TRULY frequency dependent, it would only let ONE wavelength through.

Glass has a frequency, actually... but more importantly, glass is transparent to particular frequencies of light and absorbs other wavelengths. It's opaque to most UV wavelengths, for example. "Visible light" is only an arbitrary frequency range of EM radiation. You let all visible light through, you have a frequency gap, end of story.

So? Its still ludicrous to claim that a military battleship weapons are anywhere near those of a private fighter.

A ~5m chunk of asteroid being partially fragmented is not the work of a 2 kiloton event.

The asteroid does NOT explode. It turns white hot and then disappears. Your lies will avail you nothing. Those "chunks" were NOT "flying around". They clearly disapate and it occurs FAR too quickly for them to be glowing solid debris.

Examine the per frame referents. Clear orange glowing specks, which then fade out of view.

Oh please. Until that episode they thought the Pegasus had EXPLODED. They thought it was completely DESTROYED!

Which showed, when they came across contradictory evidence, how little they knew of the fate of the Pegasus.

It clearly was NOT a large number of nuclear devices. We see a handful of BEAMS striking the planet and the rings spread out from there, faster that the speed of sound, thus another nail in the coffin of the direct energy release theory.

Beams and torpedos. So you would like to suggest that the torpedos contributed only an irrelevant portion of bombardment energy and were not, in fact, the source of the rings... which may be seen to be not centered on the beams in question?

Becasue the information was explicitly fed to the Roms and Cardies by the Dominion.

Ahem. Again... you want to assume that the Romulans and Cardassians will be easily fooled into thinking their weapons are millions of times more powerful than they actually are. The primary method of deception here is not in what a Romulan ship can do - the Romulans know this pretty well - but in the viability of the strategic move at this point in time.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

A few movies here, some in high atmosphere mind you, but look at the intensity and persistance.

Crap...too bad they're in real media. I'd like to find a way to save these bad boys...

Actually, they're also available in MPEG format. Frankly I don't know how you could have missed that.

[Darth Lucifer]

The RealPlayer software is required to browse the following streaming multimedia (.ram files).
RealPlayer and RealVideo® are registered trademarks or trademarks of RealNetworks, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.

When I saw that at the top, I hit back on my browser. It was a reflex action. I hate RM and the spyware it's infested with.

I double checked one of the links and saw the column marked MPEG. Thanks!

[Joe Momma]

Why do people assume that protocol droids such as C-3PO only serve the same function as Universal Translators? From what we've seen, protocol droids seem to function in much the same way as their name would suggest. They not only know the language but the culture as well, which is much more complicated and useful for diplomatic relations and negotiations between different parties than language alone is. That's especially important given the sheer number of species a person in the SW universe could meet on any given occasion.

It took Data over "eight or nine minutes" to put at least a few dozen and at most a couple hundred chips back in place. We could see his arms moving and it was NOT faster than a human's arm could have been. Data only got the job done faster than a human because he could tell which chip went where just by looking at them, something no human could do.

It says a lot about the Fed's goofy design principles that the isolinear chips had no visual representation to indicate where they might be placed. Considering these guys but data screens on dumbbells, you think they'd have some way to label the contents of a given isolinear chip. Perhaps even a very small okudagram that would act as the equivalent of a label on a CD. What the hell, if you're going to use complicated technical solutions to everything anyway...

-- Joe Momma

[Glimmervoid]

Well the startrek side just said they won( i dont know how they say that jem adar can be made as fast as droids so logic is not a main issue with them) and i cant be bothed arguming any more. Just thought i should tell peopel.

[Darth Servo]

They've been saying they won since the debate started. I haven't been over there in a few days so they probably view that as my surrender.

[Joe Momma]

Well the startrek side just said they won( i dont know how they say that jem adar can be made as fast as droids so logic is not a main issue with them) and i cant be bothed arguming any more. Just thought i should tell peopel.

Even worse, at least one of the assclowns was arguing that the Jem'Hadar were "professional as hell" and the Founders can infiltrate and destroy anything. And yet another tool has stepped up with the whole "Q can wipe out the Empire so ST wins" bit.

My hat's off to anyone with the fortitude to bother arguing with these schmucks.

-- Joe Momma

[Trekdestroyer]

AOL users aren't allowed there so I can't go join the fun. I hate being left out of somthing like this. LIKE I am so pissed

[Glimmervoid]

AOL users aren't allowed there so I can't go join the fun. I hate being left out of somthing like this. LIKE I am so pissed

Whats your email i will send you a gmail invite so you can register.

[Trekdestroyer]

AOL users aren't allowed there so I can't go join the fun. I hate being left out of somthing like this. LIKE I am so pissed

Whats your email i will send you a gmail invite so you can register.

Trekdestroyer@aol.com
Thanks a lot!

[HemlockGrey]

You know, there comes a time when you just need to throw up your hands, post a final rebuttal, and conclude it with YOU STUPID FUCK in ten-foot high letters.