Master of Ossus wrote:There is a small degree of support for Robert's claim that the torpedoes used by the Enterprise are enormously powerful. In "Q Who," the Enterprise is pursued by a Borg cube, but is incapable of firing torpedoes at it at one point because the ship would be destroyed by the blast, although the cube was some distance away. In "Nth Degree," the same was true, although the alien probe that was being targetted was much closer to the Enterprise. However, both of these examples rely on the exclusive availability of high-yield weapons, as opposed to a mixed yield of high-, medium-, and low-yield torpedoes.
Yeah.
It's entirely possible, too, that the crew is simply really
overcautious when it comes to taking damage to the ship.
(That doesn't really fly when we see shields raised against
Roga Danar's ship, or against some foes like Pakleds,
but generally speaking there is a great deal of fear where
anything antimatter is concerned; e.g., "Friendship One.")
I hesitate to dismiss both instances as sheer incompetence...
if it was only "Q Who?" or "The Nth Degree," that'd be one thing.
Two instances of such a concern--with others in the wings,
I'm pretty sure--make it hard to blow off.
Still, if, say, a 200 kiloton explosion is a threat to the
shields (and therefore, much more to the ship's hull itself),
proximity detonations at 2 kilometers out would require a warhead
almost 500 times more powerful, or about 100 megatons, to
pack the same wallop (assuming similar frontal area, which
is too simplistic but convenient).
With M/AM warheads, that's quite a difference...1 gram
of matter reacting with one gram of AM yields 21.5 kilotons.
To jump from warheads of 10g (20 total) to 4,650g seems
excessive. When we hear isotons used, it's a big deal
to go from around 20 ("Living Witness") to 83 ("The Omega
Directive"), and the highest unit we ever hear for
a photorp, perhaps not even a single photorp, is the infamous
200 isotons from "Scorpion II."
It must be the case that proximity detonations are only
a real threat when the shields are heavily depleted or almost
gone (just as with our two examples). In that case, I think we
could say that a warhead in the single-digit kilotons could do
severe hull damage (in line with that old TOS episode w/ the
jet fighter?). That'd closely match the kinds of phaser gougings
we see in TWOK.
Severe hull damage doesn't readily translate to
"total destruction" as stated in the dialogue, so we could
say maybe a 50 kiloton bomb or thereabouts might do
catastrophic damage? That is, after all, more than enough
energy to vaporize a huge volume of a ship's hull, trigger a
core breach, etc. If it'll level a large city, I think it should
be pretty nasty to a starship anyway!
That would bring these high-yield weapons down to
no more than 25 megatons, almost on the dot. I simply
don't see how one could argue that an unshielded starship
could survive much more than the equivalent of a 50 kiloton
nuke at PBR.
I don't have a problem with a pretty big variance in yields,
though I still don't like a jump from 200 kilotons to 25 megatons.
Even if the standard torpedo was 500 kilotons, that's a fifty-fold
increase--the likes of which would indicate standard torpedoes
at, say, 20 isotons going all the way up to 1,000!
Lots of fudge room there. To suggest the standard yield
torpedo is significantly more powerful than 500 kT makes
a lot of visuals very hard to explain, but to find the high
yield stuff significantly lower than at least a few megatons
means the whole starship would blow up if exposed to
a few kilotons, unshielded (which doesn't mesh very well
with "Images in the Sand," though it could still be rationalized).
I hope the irony of this isnt lost upon you.
