A Borg Cube in Babylon 5

[seanrobertson]

10-12 megatons is a FIRM upper-limit for a Shadow cruiser's endurance. Exposure to such energies resulted in a cruiser's complete and utter destruction.

Does that in turn give an idea on the firepower for the Vorlon ship that destroyed the Shadow cruiser in Interludes and Examinations? It looked like the beam was active for about six seconds, although whether the Shadow vessel was effectively destroyed before it was shattered by the Vorlon ship ramming through it is another question entirely.

Yeah, I think it does, Uraniun. The beam struck the Shadow ship for a shade under 6 seconds (5.5, according to Brian) -- at least, that we could see. The damned scene changed twice on us, but I figure what we saw was in real-time.

And I can't honestly tell if the Shadow ship was destroyed before it was rammed It seemed like it was pretty much combat ineffective at that time, regardless.

Since Shadow cruisers are devastated by 10 megatons, an upper-limit for the Vorlon weapon would be 1.8 MT/sec., or about 7500 TW.

[Kane Starkiller]

The 7 TJ figure is a real puzzle for a couple of reasons.
1 -- I can't be certain of the Borg ship's altitude, but given the curvature of the star in the background, it would certainly appear to be no more than a million km from the star's surface.
At that range, the Borg ship's profile area would absorb 16 TW ... yet, for some reason, exposure to less than half of that is fatal?

That is not logical

But the ambient radiation of 16TW won't disappear when the flare hits. So the shields would be dealing with standard 16TW plus 7TJ from the flare. The Borg ship pursued Enterprise and then stopped presumably at the upper limit of radiation it can take. Then when the energy of the flare was added the ship was destroyed.

2 -- In the same episode, Cpt. Crusher's second-in-command implied that a similar flare would destroy the Enterprise.

We know the E-D's frontal shield area is as much as 100,000 m^2, meaning the flare would impart 250 gigajoules.

Whoops.

At the risk of understating things, these things are a wee bit odd, nay? The Enterprise didn't have any trouble coping with a couple of terawatts for hours on end in "Relics." And if we're to believe the dialogue in "I, Borg," the Enterprise didn't have any real problems entering a star's chromosphere, where the power intensity wouldn't be all that dissimilar to the photosphere's. Thus, ~6 TW also posed no immediate danger.

It's entirely possible Crusher's first officer was simply wrong, but if he weren't, how would the Enterprise be destroyed by 24 times less energy -- with metaphasic shields online, no less -- than it could withstand without metaphasic shields?

Again the energy of the flare would come in addition to the normal EM radiation a ship would absorb. Thus there is no contradiction, 250GJ added to already existing 6TW would be the straw that broke the camels back.

Unfortunately, it is a big deal: the ships pursuing Kurn would've absorbed FAR more energy approaching the star than the flare could ever have imparted to them. We know the Klingon ships came rather close to the star's photosphere without blowing up. Conservatively, let's assume they were at an altitude of 50,000 km before Kurn pulled his little trick. (Someone could nitpick this until, as we say in my area, "the cows come home"; nonetheless, be it 100,000 km or half a fuckin' million, my point still stands.)

That would mean the cruisers could handle terawatt-level exposure -- that is, twenty times more energy -- yet, inexplicably, are instantly destroyed by <50 GJ.

Moreover, as we discussed in our previous exchanges, we know a Galaxy-class starship's phasers can direct more than 60 GW to a target. We've seen a GCS fight BoPs which were outwardly identical to the "Redemption" cruisers. One or two strong phaser blasts didn't destroy such ships, yet ... somehow, some way, 50 GJ can?

"Shadows and Symbols" is no different. Jem'Hadar fighters are about 100m wide and 23m tall. The flare itself was much larger than those previously discussed; O'Brien said it would "incinerate everything within 100 million kilometers."

Even if the flare had a much greater energy per cubic meter than previous incidents, does it seem likely Jem'Hadar attack ships would be far more resilient than 300m long Birds-of-Prey, a Galaxy-class starship or that Borg juggernaut? Of course not. Thus, those little ships in their 2300 m^2 profile from the rear were also blown away by energies inconsequential in comparison to what they absorbed by simply approaching and hanging around that star.

The same explanation applies: the energy received from ambient EM radiation is increased by the energy from the flare it's not replaced by it.
IIRC in both Redemption and Shadows and Symbols stress to the shields and hull were reported as the BoPs approached the stellar surface. Add a flare and the ship blows up. There is no real contradiction.
Again even assuming that the flares switch the shields off the fact is that the hull itself can absorb several hits from their primary weapons thus their main weapons are still limited to 10TW level firepower and since they can take down the shields in turn the shields themselves are limited to such numbers.

*The NX-01 had at least two phase cannons rated at 500 GJ apiece. I don't recall most phase cannon beams lasting more than a second or two, so we might guess their combined output would be .5 to 1 TW. The ship also had torpedoes that could "put a three kilometer crater in an asteroid."

Thus, Starfleet's very first ship greatly outclasses one nearly 30 times more massive and over 200 years more advanced.

Do we take character statements above observed events? Even so, as I said, energy of the flares adds to the ambient EM radiation which is constantly pounding the shields unlike phasers. They said the torpedoes can make a three kilometer krater in an asteroid but they never actually demonstrated it. Obviously we know that Federation could, at the very least, go to the museum and put a W88 warhead onto its missiles. Does that somehow change the upper limit on their shields independently established? You seem to be claiming that whatever firepower a starship demonstrates on an occasion the said ship must be able to withstand that firepower. Needles to say that kind of reasoning would cause us to make very interesting conclusions about the resilience of the Ohio class submarine.
Not to mention that if we assume that the dissipation rate of a Galaxy class is 5TW it will be threatened by stellar radiation yet NX class will never be able to drop its shields with its 500GW weapons.

*After all, as you've said many times now, if conventional Trek weapons fail to destroy ships which we know can be destroyed by solar flares, we must conclude those weapons are much less energetic than the flares.

I think that's a false dilemma; a relatively more intense weapon might simply blow through parts of an unshielded target. Still, I'll run with what you're saying.

Ergo, according to your reasoning, 50 gigajoules is far more energetic than a full spread of photon torpedoes, which only does moderate shield damage to similar cruisers.

Regardless, for generosity's sake, we'll assume <50GJ is equal to ten photon torpedoes. Each torpedo, then, has an effective yield equivalent to barely over a ton of TNT. The entire torpedo complement would be equal to roughly 299 tons of TNT.

Well clearly if a readily quantifiable event destroys a ship outright but weapons fail to do so then the weapons are less powerful than the said event. The fact that the civilization that build the ship in question has the technical know how to build multimegaton weapons doesn't change that fact. We have seen many photon torpedo impacts against bare hull during the First Contact Borg battle, TWOK, ST3 etc. and they certainly didn't appear to be even in the kiloton yield range.

*Since it'd take some 30-125 megatons to shatter the asteroid in "Pegasus," this means Riker overestimated his weapons' effectiveness by some 100,000 to over 400,000 times.
I guess that dickhead Admiral Pressman's an even bigger idiot than I originally thought, too, since he raised hell about destroying an asteroid with weapons half a million times too weak to do the job.

If we assume that Riker meant shatter when saying destroy which we don't know. I already covered this: if our assumption on what Riker meant leads us to contradiction with directly observed events then our assumptions are wrong.

Well, if these torpedo figures place a firm upper-limit on the size of the asteroid seen therein, we can conclude that, if that asteroid was largely composed of granite, it could've been up to, but no more than, about 39m wide. Since the "core" left over was roughly a fourth or fifth the original body's size, it must've been no more than 10m wide.

I guess the deflector discharge became more focused mid-stream after all, eh? And yet again, we learn moron Data -- and the equally unreliable sensors, for that matter -- are prone to exaggerating a thing's diameter by 200 times and, perhaps worse, mistakes a 1200 ton body for a 1.2E9 ton one.

No big deal. I'm sure any space-faring civilization can afford to routinely miscalculate simple things like mass by a factor of a million.

How do we even begin to explain such incompetence? This stretches suspension-of-disbelief tighter than if I tried to pull my ex-girlfriend's panties up about my chest. I could easily accept Riker, Data, LaForge et al. occasionally miscalculating things by perhaps an order of magnitude, but not this shit.

From VOY episode "Hunters":
KIM: It's a tiny one, probably about a centimetre in diameter, but it's putting out almost four terawatts of energy.
and later
JANEWAY: I've learned a few interesting things about that relay station. It's generating as much energy every minute as a typical star puts out in a year.
A typical star like our sun will produce 10^34J of energy meaning Janeway thinks station's power is 2*10^32W. But before Kim quantified it at 4TW.
Then there are incidents like breaking the mathematically defined radius like "event horizon" with warp particles etc.
Starfleet personnel can indeed make mistakes of many orders of magnitude and I most definitely wouldn't want to make a case against directly observed events based on assumptions about some of their less than clear statements.

There is a way to try and make some sense of all this -- that is, if you accept Michael's very sound idea that certain things have a disproportionately great effect, or altogether bypass, shields. (I noticed you didn't respond to some of the examples I quoted to that end, like the undoubtedly VERY low-powered nucleonic beam that penetrated the Enterprise's shields in "The Inner Light.") His hypothesis accounts for all of the discrepancies I noted above.

Further, thanks to "Symbiosis," we also know that very powerful magnetic fields can "disrupt electrical systems," so the most logical way to reconcile the data we have is this: Trek shields don't cope with plasma well and, in close proximity to something with a magnetic field as powerful as a star's, energies which usually pose no threat, even to an exposed hull, can be lethal for much the same reason that, IMO at least, Black Star was destroyed -- that is, due to the ship's own power systems running amuck.

That would handily explain why a 60-plus gigawatt phaser has a negligible effect on a K'Vort-like cruiser, yet a much lower-energy event like the flare that could destroy the same ship easily.

And so on and so on.

I already addressed this: even if we assume that flares simply deactivate shields the fact remains the ships were destroyed. We know that primary weapons of Jem'Hadar ships and BoPs can't destroy a Galaxy class in a short amount of time thus their weapons are limited to 10TW level. Since those same weapons can drop the shields of a Galaxy given enough time its shields cannot have more then on the order of 10TW dissipation rate and few hundred TJ of capacity.
We know that even when several starfleet vessels concentrate their fire on an unshielded Borg ship and start digging a hole in it the damage is not instantaneously catastrophic to a Borg ship and the ship withstood the fire much longer then the one in "Descent" endured the combination of ambient radiation and flare impact. Again this limits the firepower of even several starfleet ships to much less than 1000TJ.
Furthermore we know that even without flares being near the surface of a star puts a great stress on starship shields and is considered dangerous therefore their dissipation rate can't be significantly higher then 10TW.

Well, to start, for all practical purposes, I do look the other way where Black Star's destruction is concerned.

Second, it's not a good analogy in this case. There was an obvious delay between the nukes going off and the Black Star's destruction. Not so with those Klingon ships. The latter seems, per your interpretation, a clear case of energy overwhelming the Klingons' shields and hulls; the former ... *scratches chin* That's totally different.

If I remember "Legend of the Rangers" correctly (God knows I've tried to forget it), when Young Race B5 ships fully charge their weapons, that poses an inherent danger to the ship itself. Drala'Fi's guns were fully charged and, unfortunately for the Minbari and their exposed gun ports, it seems the two bombs' radiation did something to compromise the ship's weapons and power systems.
In a sense, then, she was hoisted by her own petard, as our resident master Sith Lord sometimes says.

But the fact remains that the nukes did cause damage to the Black Star. Even if the actual destruction was the result of some internal malfunction caused by the damage the fact remains that the Black Star couldn't have taken much more no matter the circumstances.
The same goes for Star Trek ships. They repeatedly get destroyed by energies found near solar surfaces.

We see blue bodies of water on the surface, and we know the planet's inhabited. It's highly likely it is Earth-like, with similar size and gravity.

As those folks from NASA noted, NEO risks are assessed according to size. There are several categories of risk: asteroids only large enough to cause local damage -- that is, an impact with an area effect some 600 km in radius*; asteroids big enough to cause regional damage, or an area effect up to 5,000 km in radius*; and, finally, asteroids which are large enough to cause global damage, which requires on the order of one million megatons and a 1-2 km wide asteroid.

*I think that's correct. If anyone knows otherwise, please say so.

Doing global-scale damage in this manner is quite cut and dry, Kane. A 50m wide asteroid could never approach such effects. A 100m wide asteroid could never have such effects. Conservatively speaking, it takes a kilometer-wide asteroid to affect an entire Earth-like planet.

Simply put, then, it doesn't matter what anyone meant by "damage." To have a global effect, the "core" of that asteroid must be no less than a kilometer wide -- two kilometers, according to revised NASA estimates.

The only other explanation is that the thing was impossibly dense and massive to cause such devastation. Interestingly, that'd explain why photorps were unlikely to have any further effect.

NASAs numbers come from NASAs definition of global damage. What is Datas definition of "planet wide" damage? We can assume but at the end of the day it's an assumption and not directly observed event.
We have three pieces of evidence: directly observed starship destruction by combination of ambient radiation and flares, directly observed failure on the part of photon torpedoes to destroy unshielded targets even after several hits and the multimegaton yield based on an assumption and not direct observation. One of these three things has to go. The obvious intruder is the one based on assumption however reasonable the assumption might be.

No, you're not sure about the size because you refuse to acknowledge what global damage must mean To affect an entire globe requires that the impact energy must be on the order of a million megatons. That, in turn, places a lower-limit on the core's size and, ergo, the intact asteroid's size.

My current rig doesn't have all of the best programs for it, but I'll try to scale that asteroid shortly, FWIW.

I have no problem with discussing different possibilities on how big the asteroid could be. I have a problem with using those assumptions as a counter to directly observed events.
For example you assume that when Data said "planet wide" damage, he meant the same thing NASA today means when it says "global damage". What is your evidence for this? And if, following your assumptions, we reach a conclusion contradictory to directly observed evidence then the assumption is wrong right?

Yes: it's south of 4000 TJ a'la "Descent Pt. II," right?

Much lower yep.

And X-ray lasers, nuclear weapons, rockets of various sorts and many other things. Assuming shields were up to handling a Shadow weapon's energies, we don't know if special shield modifications would be required to stop said weapon. Since Shadow beams don't involve any kind of bizarre NDF effect, as we might note with phasers and disruptors, one would imagine that the Borg's shields would address them for what they seem to be: a kind of particle beam which behaves like a very powerful laser.

*snip*

But you say that diffuse particles whether high energy plasma or low temperature nebulae tend to deactivate shields so why would they be able to stop concentrated very high particle stream?

That'd be appealing to ignorance. While it's possible, we saw no such fighters in the vicinity. We saw a capship.

While I grasp what you're getting at about being more or less generous with Trek and/or B5, this isn't the best example to demonstrate your case:

It's not so big of a stretch. Shadow fleet was all over the place and from that distance it would be very difficult to make out black shadow fighters. As you say it is possible.

Nonsense. There are four pictures on that page. If you'd kindly direct your attention to the second image, you'll see the debris more than "kind of looks like" parts from a warship; it's an obvious match.

Next, look at third image. See the legs/spines? Shadow fighters do not have such features. When a scout's viewed from its top or bottom, the set of spines on either side of the ship look somewhat like what we see in the image.

But look at the scout from its sides. Its outermost spines are much too thin and curvy. We're clearly looking at legs blown off of a cruiser.

I don't see how that movie proves anything. There is a fragment that practically looks like a square and that might be the central body of a Shadow ship and then the rest of the ship is drawn around the fragment but ultimately doesn't even overlap with the fragment perfectly.
Nothing that disproves my point that a fighter could've been mangled in such a way to appear as central body of a capital ship for a few moments.

Someone was. That debris can't from be a fighter. It can't be from a scout. It's unmistakably a cruiser's body and some of its legs.

As I said it proves nothing. The drawing doesn't even match up perfectly with the fragment. It might be but it might not. We can only make out one Shadow capital ship and after the nuke explodes the fragments come from the location of the ship thus it is very likely that the capital ship was destroyed. That is the real evidence (although not proof). Drawing legs around random fragments is not. It's not really different than folding dollar bills and coming up with burning WTC towers.

Right, right, and we didn't see the beam "flicker," either.

You do know that, even if there were flickers, our eyes could very well be too "slow" to catch them, right? We view 24 frames/sec. as seamless and continuous when we're watching a movie.

Yes that's why I used 1/24 of a second as the time in which the beam needs to burn through the entire length of the ship without the camera noticing the flicker. It could be even faster but 1/24s is the lower limit. Obviously the beam does actually require a finite time to punch through the length of a cruiser otherwise its power would be infinite and if we had a faster camera (maybe 30fps) we could catch the flicker.
It's not possible to somehow melt through several hundred meters of ship in a fraction of a second. You need to vaporize the material so violently that it moves out of the way fast enough to dig through the hull. Even if we use 10kt/s beam you still won't get melting when that much power hits the target and the material will still be vaporized at the impact point.

And incidentally, I've been talking about the closest Narn ship in that sequence. It's much easier to see what's going on there. The one in the background did appear to be pierced from stern to bow in a split-second but, beyond that, it's very hard to determine what happened to that ship: from the clip I'm watching, the whole ship seemed to explode shortly after the Shadow beam went through it. I can't tell if the beam cleaved the ship in two.

You can see the uncropped sequence here. Before you get all pissed I'm just linking to the page as the source of images not endorsing all of the arguments on the page.
The ship does explode before the beam is completely finished cutting the ship in two but by that time the beam is almost through the bottom.

Huh?

A Vorlon battleship is nowhere near that long. I don't care what some tech book or whatever says; Cole said the planet-killers were each 3 or 4 miles across, and we see plenty of battleships grouped closely to a planet-killer at various times. They're always utterly dwarfed.

Perhaps there are somewhat larger battleships, just as there were apparently different-sized "Spiders." Organic ships might grow (and/or shrink, as we observe with our own elders) over time. But undeniable visual evidence is at the tip-top of Babtech's Vorlon Warships page.

Besides, while I realize your firepower/resilience figures are purely hypothetical, we have seen a Shadow cruiser blow a hole through part a Vorlon battleship before. (See how we can see the Shadow's purple beam at the bottom of the screen?)

It would take several such hits to do catastrophic damage. Likewise, we saw cruisers on both sides exchange fire at Coriana VI and, again, I don't recall either side's heavy guns blowing the other away like that *snaps fingers* The only ships with such firepower belonged to some of the "lost" First Ones, like the Walkers at Sigma-957.

So, yes, since I'm quite sure we're dealing with highly comparable vessels here, my point stands: their weaponry yields a lot less than 10 megatons/sec.

The battleship is most definitely around 1.4km long:

Here you see Sheridan and Ivanova standing next to the Vorlon cruiser/transport putting it at 100m length roughly.

You can see that Vorlon cruiser/transport, itself about 100m long, is about as long as the gray stripe on the battleship.
On this image of the official model we can see that the ship at 880px is 13.6 times longer than the 65px stripe. Therefore the ship is at least 1360m long.

Another scene from Interludes and Examinations showing the comparison with the orange colored cruiser/transport of the type that destroyed the Shadow ship at the beginning of the battle:

The battleship utterly dwarfs the cruiser.
Looking at this image:

Planetkiller is on the order of 40km-50km long. Cole was wrong or maybe he meant 34 miles instead of 3 or 4 or maybe we was (unlikely) referring to some other unseen ship.

The battleship was indeed damaged by the Shadow beam but it was not exactly catastrophic. Taking the battleships size into account it could easily have endurance 10 times that of an average Shadow ship.

Sure, after many hours.

Frankly, Kane, so what?

Say I've got a 10m thick iron plate and a laser set-up in my backyard. My laser's a bit shitty; it's only capable of a few settings, but I got a good deal on it, so ... .

My friend brings over a 10m thick iron plate (I guess he has a giant dumptruck. How he drove such a thing into my backyard presents altogether different problems, but we won't get into that).

My laser has a circular cross-section 1 meter in diameter. Thus, to vaporize a 1 meter wide hole through a 10 meter thick plate would require the following:

On my laser's lowest setting, 1 GW, it would take 466 seconds to do the job.

On its medium setting, 10 GW, ~47 seconds.

On its high setting, 50 GW, it'd take just over 9 seconds.

On the medium-high setting, 100 GW, 4.6 seconds.

And on the very highest setting, 400 GW, just over 1 second.

On second thought, I guess my laser's anything but shitty. *shrugs*

Theoretically those numbers are correct. In reality as it is being pumped with energy the iron will begin to shed the excess heat. For example at the temperature of 1810K (a degree below its melting point) iron will be radiating 0.6MW/m2 (p=a*T^4 where "a" is Stephan-Boltzman constant and T is temperature in kelvin) which means that the net energy will be 999.4MW for a 1GW laser. This is of course next to inconsequential but what if you have a 0.6MW laser? Using theoretical numbers the hole should be punched in 7.71 days. In reality the hole will never be punched since iron will reradiate as much heat as it receives when the temperature reaches 1810K.
So, lets assume you fire a 0.6MW laser and keep it on for 100 days. Would it be correct to simply multiply the power rating with the elapsed time to come up with a number of 5000GJ and then say that a 400GW laser would need at least 12 seconds to punch a hole? No.
The same thing applies to simply multiplying 3TW number with 3 hours to come up with a number and then claim it means that shields could withstand 1000TW power for 30 seconds.

Shields aren't iron plates, obviously, but the principle isn't wildly different: If we know that a few terawatts are indeed enough to very, very slowly drain shields (by one "percent" -- whatever that really means -- every 469.5 seconds), just why are you assuming they can't cope with something significantly more powerful if only for brief periods of time?

I mean, come on: a couple of terawatts drain shields by ~two thousandths per second. Thousandths, Kane.

It seems patently absurd to suggest something ten times more powerful would even pose a short-term threat. When you get into the hundreds and thousands range, I can clearly see how things would change.

But, yet again, I digress ... .

You've condemned me for assuming Riker doesn't know the likely effects of his ship's weapons, to say nothing of "Cost of Living."

What of your assumptions, then? While I honestly do think your interpretation of shield function is intelligent, it's not the only one. There's never been any conclusive evidence in any Trek iteration about what, exactly, it means when someone says, "Our shields are down to 50 percent." Does that mean full-strength shields, capable of fielding Y energy/power, can only handle Y/2 at 50%? Does that mean the shields are 50% less efficient than at maximum capacity?

Why should I take your own assumptions about real unknowns, like how shields work, prima facie?

Star Trek shields behave like armor plates but ones which disappear into nothing if the energy is not maintained and which get "damaged". As I demonstrated above shields will have plenty of time to shed the excess energy during the three hours and you cannot use the energy calculated by simply multiplying power with long time period as the energy capacity.
Again you could use a 0.1MW 1m wide laser beam and hit the iron until the cows come home you won't punch through it because the metal will keep shedding the excess heat. Therefore resilience will not scale linearly with increase in power as the heat shedding rises proportionally with fourth power of temperature.
This is proven by "Descent" where Enterprise even with metaphasic shields can endure only 15 minutes in the chromosphere. Compared with "Relics" this is only a slight increase in ambient radiation yet causes drastic decrease in endurance similarly how slight increase of power from 0.6MW to 0.7MW would change the hole drilling time from never to some finite time.

Again, you seem to be making a hefty assumption about just how these shields work. Assuming you're correct, how do you think these megatons of energy would be released? That is, in what manner? Omnidirectionally, from every point on the shield's surface?

We might also be speaking somewhat at cross-purposes with our terminology here. It's easy for me to do in these long posts, especially when it takes awhile to formulate a response.

As the shields fail the energy would be released in an uncontrolled fashion and would definitely blow up the ship. That doesn't happen, nothing actually happens when shields fail therefore their capacity isn't much greater then the power of their major weapons.

[Coalition]

The battleship is most definitely around 1.4km long:
http://img532.imageshack.us/img532/9084 ... rpreya.jpg
Here you see Sheridan and Ivanova standing next to the Vorlon cruiser/transport putting it at 100m length roughly.
http://www.b5tech.com/oldb5tech/science ... shadow.jpg
You can see that Vorlon cruiser/transport, itself about 100m long, is about as long as the gray stripe on the battleship.

Um, those look like two different ships there. The transport's 'wings' only cover the rear section, and the forward section is attached via 'connections, and at the front of the forward section are the tendrils. In the second picture, the 'wings' are overlapping with the tendrils.

[Kane Starkiller]

No it's the same type of the ship. I'm talking about the one with the green line going through it. You can clearly see in its shadow (also with green line through it) that the main body with wings is separated from the "head" with tendrils.

[Coalition]

No it's the same type of the ship. I'm talking about the one with the green line going through it. You can clearly see in its shadow (also with green line through it) that the main body with wings is separated from the "head" with tendrils.

Ah, my mistake. Sorry.

[seanrobertson]

But the ambient radiation of 16TW won't disappear when the flare hits. So the shields would be dealing with standard 16TW plus 7TJ from the flare. The Borg ship pursued Enterprise and then stopped presumably at the upper limit of radiation it can take. Then when the energy of the flare was added the ship was destroyed.

Quite right: it's 16 TW plus some fraction of 7 terajoules.

It's important to keep in mind that the 7 TJ flare is an upper-limit which, like Michael's 50 GJ figure from "Redemption Pt. II," assumes the flare's gas transferred 100% of its energy to the ship. As he notes, that's impossible; otherwise, we would've seen a "supercooled chunk of metallic hydrogen sitting under [the Klingon ships]."

I honestly do not know what percentage of 7 terajoules affected the Borg ship. Half that value? A quarter? 10 percent?

I guess I could ask Michael As it stands, however, we know the flare could NOT impart that much energy to the Borg ship.

On the other hand, 16 TW is not a strict upper-limit. In fact, given the image I posted, it is more likely the Type 3 ship was at half the stated altitude, meaning it absorbed 64 TW for at least 5 minutes 24 seconds.

So, you'd have me conclude several minutes' exposure 64 TW poses no immediate danger to the ship whatsoever -- but add just a few more terajoules to the mix, and BAM!: the ship's shields instantly fail and the whole ship's blown away?

Again the energy of the flare would come in addition to the normal EM radiation a ship would absorb. Thus there is no contradiction, 250GJ added to already existing 6TW would be the straw that broke the camels back.

That's slap goofy. They can handle 6 TW for minutes, but ratcheting it up to 6.25 TJ instantly blows them away?

The same explanation applies: the energy received from ambient EM radiation is increased by the energy from the flare it's not replaced by it.

Sure. But as I said, the flare energies are still utterly inconsequential opposite what the ships were capable of handling for minutes and, in some cases, hours on end.

Speaking thereof, let's take a closer look at the opening events of "Redemption Pt. II," shall we?

According to the best scaling figures available, the Klingon Birds-of-Prey seen in "Defector," "Yesterday's Enterprise" and "Rascals" are 350m long and, thus, some 530m wide with their wings in the so-called "flight configuration." You can read about these measurements here.

Consequently, according to some rather simple figures I computed from those numbers, I determined that this large BoP has no less than a 43,000 square meter area when viewed from the top or bottom.

However, it is entirely possible that Kurn's ship is of another, somewhat smaller class.

You can see from this image that the Vorn is wider than the Bortas.




Vor'cha-class cruisers' dimensions have never been explicitly nailed down in "canon," but measurements based on its studio model confirm the ship is 1.4 times longer than it is wide.

Thus, according to David Stipes' figures, the cruiser is 325m wide; based on Sternbach's, 338m; 342m according to the DS9 TM; and, finally, 363m according to Hutzel and Nemecek's DS9 scale chart.

I decided that, since Sternbach designed the Vor'cha and he was the only one of those guys involved in TNG circa "Reunion" (:?: I could be wrong about that), his dimensions are probably the most accurate for our purposes.

Thus, based on the measurements I took above, theHegh'ta may be like the "Reunion" and "The Mind's Eye" ships; i.e., the 265m long and 400m wide variety of cruiser.

His ship presented its ventral side to the star.


From that angle, >38,300 m^2 face the star.



(Please note that the BoP drawing's proportions were measured from high-res photos of the filming miniature. Before one of my associates at Starship Modeler released a 1/1000 scale KBoP, I was about to build my own and had taken painstaking measurements to that end.)

Given that Kurn was close enough to the photosphere to absorb ~60 MW/m^2, his bare hull withstood more than 2.3 terawatts for about four seconds.

The Duras-loyal ships following him were identically-sized. When they were destroyed, their bows were pointing toward the star.

We know those BoPs have the typical bubble shields.



Therefore, according to the diagram I cooked up, their frontal area appears to be ~56,400 m^2.


This means that, for perhaps 10 seconds or so before they were destroyed, they were absorbing energy at a rate of more than 3.4 TW.

Michael calculated that the flare which destroyed those ships imparted something less than 2.5 MW/m^2 so, with our refined estimate of the Birds' frontal area, we learn the flare's total energy is much less than 140 GJ.

Conclusion: an unshielded BoP can endure 2 terawatts for at least a few seconds, but shielded Birds-of-Prey fielding 3.4 TW are instantly destroyed by 3.54 TW

What the hell? A meager [fraction of] a four percent energy increase is catastrophic?

If I'm wrong and the ships in "Redemption" were of the even-larger variety documented at Suricata's blog, the Duras-loyal ships' frontal areas are 99,837 m^2, which means they absorbed 6 TW and were destroyed by that plus a [far less than] 250 GJ flare.

So, yet again, the ships handle 6 TW just fine, but 6 plus some fraction of .25 TJ means instant death?

That's utterly stupid in light of how Kurn's ship withstood several terawatts without shields. At most, the flare might've overwhelmed his pursuer's shields; the energy left over is simply not enough to destroy them!

IIRC in both Redemption and Shadows and Symbols stress to the shields and hull were reported as the BoPs approached the stellar surface. Add a flare and the ship blows up. There is no real contradiction.

You're a little confused. Watch "Redemption Pt. II" again.

At 1:46, Worf reported that their aft shields were gone.

2:19: Worf reported that the Hegh'ta was entering the star's corona.

2:41: The ship is rocked by another attack. Only after Worf reports that the shields were failing altogether does he say the temperature was exceeding the ship's designed limit. The ship takes another hit.

There's nothing that indicates the star's radiation threatened their shields. And since we're talking about the ships pursuing Kurn, whether or not his ship had trouble is a red herring. He was unshielded for over 20 seconds. Of course the hull's going to heat up!

2:57-3:01: The Hegh'ta is above the star's photosphere, still unshielded and absorbing over 2 TW.

Then, his still-shielded pursuers come along, absorbing EM at a rate of 3.4 TW. Kurn yells "DaH!," the Hegh'ta goes to warp and kicks up a little flare that imparts far less than 140 GJ to each enemy ship.

According to your explanation, going from 3.4 to 3.54 TJ is enough to blow away their shields and their hulls -- in spite of the fact that Kurn's unshielded ship withstood at least 2 TW for several seconds.

As Bender would say, "Does not compute!"

Again even assuming that the flares switch the shields off the fact is that the hull itself can absorb several hits from their primary weapons thus their main weapons are still limited to 10TW level firepower and since they can take down the shields in turn the shields themselves are limited to such numbers.

From the examples listed above, your own reasoning requires that a few dozen to hundred gigajoules atop 3 TW is lethal for rather powerful Klingon warships, so I don't know where you're getting the 10 TW-level firepower. Based on your notion that solar flares + ambient EM = more energy than starship's shields and hull can take, that means these "main weapons" must be commensurately smaller.

As I said before, however, I think it's that's a blatant false dilemma for two reasons. But examples speak louder than almost anything else, so consider this:



That little Miranda-class has a volume just under 220,000 cubic meters. She's about 150m wide and less than 70m tall. With a traditional TNG-style bubble shield, her frontal area might be 9,305 m^2. 10,000 square meters is a likely maximum.

Let's assume the Klingon cruisers chasing Kurn in "Redemption" are replaced by a Miranda. Let's further assume the Starfleet ship chases Kurn to the star and is destroyed by the same tactic.

(Slight aside: I do not think that's unreasonable. It's seriously doubtful a Miranda compares very favorably to the large BoP classes. It's silly that Kurn would, in turn, run from such a ship but, for our purposes, let's overlook that for a minute. It's irrelevant to the point I'm about to make anyway.)

That would mean Ms. Miranda fielded almost 560 GW on approach, then was hit and destroyed by a <23 GJ flare.

Add the two up, and we learn the Miranda will be blown away instantly by 583 GJ.

But wait a minute ... As Michael notes on his Phasers page, "Phasers appear to destroy less than 5 cubic metres of starship armor per second of continuous impact, so they seem to be tactically equivalent to 1-10 TW lasers."

That appears to be in line with the vapor flash we see in this picture, which certainly appears to have terawatt-level effects even if we assume duranium and such don't have significantly different properties than iron.


How does a ship that's instantly blown away by hundreds of GJ stand up to terawatt-ranged beam weapons and, since photorps have always been considered heavier weapons, at least low kiloton-ranged torpedoes?

(Yes, the torpedo which blew up part of the Reliant's "roll bar" could have been sub-kiloton -- but then, Kirk wasn't trying to destroy the ship outright, was he?)

Do we take character statements above observed events?

Negative, but then, I:

*subscribe to Michael's hypothesis about shields' vulnerability to plasma
*know that magnetic fields can fuck with a starship's electrical systems even 1 AU out, so when you're surrounded by a very powerful magnetic field like those found around solar flares, I posit the effects should be catastrophic.

I also don't see why we should create a false dichotomy between what's said and what we see. The best evidence is that which we observe, but it's important to reconcile the two when we can. Per what I've proposed, we can have Riker's high-kiloton to low-megaton torpedoes in "Pegasus" AND easily explain why solar flares are so dangerous for Trek ships, shields AND hulls alike.

Even so, as I said, energy of the flares adds to the ambient EM radiation which is constantly pounding the shields unlike phasers. They said the torpedoes can make a three kilometer krater in an asteroid but they never actually demonstrated it. Obviously we know that Federation could, at the very least, go to the museum and put a W88 warhead onto its missiles. Does that somehow change the upper limit on their shields independently established?

I don't recall any such demonstration of photonic torpedo yield, unfortunately. All I remember's that Malcolm said the things were armed with antimatter warheads which were highly configurable, where low settings would knock the comm array off a shuttle and the highest setting was capable of cratering a sizable asteroid. There was no talk about special warheads for asteroid-popping.

You seem to be claiming that whatever firepower a starship demonstrates on an occasion the said ship must be able to withstand that firepower. Needles to say that kind of reasoning would cause us to make very interesting conclusions about the resilience of the Ohio class submarine.

When did those get shields?

My claim is this: when a C.O. shouts, "Photon torpedoes, maximum yield, full spread!", yes, I fully expect that those torpedoes are the best they can muster. You know, being maximum yield and all. ("Beyond maximum" is nonfuckingsensical unless the torpedo is specially modified, like the device Harry Kim and Tuvok worked on in "The Omega Directive." And there is NO indication such modifications were even considered in episodes like "Pegasus.")

Thus, when a fairly comparable enemy target is hit with such a barrage and their shields withstand it, that does speak to the shields' strength -- provided, of course, that we know those devices' maximum yields.

Not to mention that if we assume that the dissipation rate of a Galaxy class is 5TW it will be threatened by stellar radiation yet NX class will never be able to drop its shields with its 500GW weapons.

What about the illusory Husnock's 400 GW weapon, then? It did a good job knocking the shields down. The NX's weapons are more powerful. They should have the same effect.

Well clearly if a readily quantifiable event destroys a ship outright but weapons fail to do so then the weapons are less powerful than the said event. The fact that the civilization that build the ship in question has the technical know how to build multimegaton weapons doesn't change that fact. We have seen many photon torpedo impacts against bare hull during the First Contact Borg battle, TWOK, ST3 etc. and they certainly didn't appear to be even in the kiloton yield range.

How do you know those photon torpedoes impacted an unshielded hull? Because we saw plumes of flame?

Another false dilemma. We see that kind of thing happen all the time in Star Trek. Did you see "Call To Arms"? The Dominion fleet's initial volley made flames and shit sprout from the station, but as Damar said shortly thereafter, the "station's shields are holding."

I've addressed TWOK. As for Trek III, well, so what? Kruge's ship had decloaked; he surely had time to get shields up.

As for the BoP's response shot, you do recall that Kruge said the Enterprise outgunned them 10:1, yes? Besides, apart from Chang's modified BoP, there's no indication that scout-sized BoPs can fire standard photon torpedoes. In fact, if you'd examined the filming miniature as I have, you'd realize the Bird's so-called "torpedo launcher" is a strange-assed looking thing -- certainly lacking a port big enough to fire typical Starfleet-sized casings.

(Aside: I would have posted a picture of just this; unfortunately, the best I can do at the moment is to take a picture of my Tsukuda Models KBoP kit. Its designers, like the good folks at Fine Molds did for SW kits, closely studied the actual filming mini; with a few minor exceptions, the Tsukuda kit is extremely accurate.

In any case, the "torpedo launcher" on the Tsukuda model is just as I described. Chang's boat excepted, the 360'-long BoPs can NOT fire torpedoes anywhere near as big as those used by the E-A, E-D, et al.)

If we assume that Riker meant shatter when saying destroy which we don't know. I already covered this: if our assumption on what Riker meant leads us to contradiction with directly observed events then our assumptions are wrong.

Of course he meant shatter How else could you destroy the asteroid, Kane? The whole point was to get at something a quarter the size of a man inside a mountain-sized body. Just busting up parts of it wouldn't accomplish the mission.

From VOY episode "Hunters":
KIM: It's a tiny one, probably about a centimetre in diameter, but it's putting out almost four terawatts of energy.
and later
JANEWAY: I've learned a few interesting things about that relay station. It's generating as much energy every minute as a typical star puts out in a year.
A typical star like our sun will produce 10^34J of energy meaning Janeway thinks station's power is 2*10^32W. But before Kim quantified it at 4TW.

I hear you, but that needn't be a contradiction. Kim's initial readings could've been based on little more than the intensity of the "gravimetric eddies" that rocked the Voyager about; i.e., "putting out 4 TW" as in releasing that in the form of the gravity disturbances. Besides, Janeway's statement came much later, presumably after they'd had a chance to study the thing at length.

Do I need to point out that initial sensor readings of an alien technology are a just bit different than knowing the yield of your own torpedoes and/or measuring something's diameter?

Then there are incidents like breaking the mathematically defined radius like "event horizon" with warp particles etc.
Starfleet personnel can indeed make mistakes of many orders of magnitude and I most definitely wouldn't want to make a case against directly observed events based on assumptions about some of their less than clear statements.

As you can see, that's not exactly what I have in mind. But for some reason, you ignored my explanation, which I first proposed here:

There is a way to try and make some sense of all this -- that is, if you accept Michael's very sound idea that certain things have a disproportionately great effect, or altogether bypass, shields. (I noticed you didn't respond to some of the examples I quoted to that end, like the undoubtedly VERY low-powered nucleonic beam that penetrated the Enterprise's shields in "The Inner Light.") His hypothesis accounts for all of the discrepancies I noted above.

Further, thanks to "Symbiosis," we also know that very powerful magnetic fields can "disrupt electrical systems," so the most logical way to reconcile the data we have is this: Trek shields don't cope with plasma well and, in close proximity to something with a magnetic field as powerful as those surrounding a solar flare, energies which usually pose no threat, even to an exposed hull, can be lethal for much the same reason that, IMO at least, Black Star was destroyed -- that is, due to the ship's own power systems running amuck.

That would handily explain why a 60-plus gigawatt phaser has a negligible effect on a K'Vort-like cruiser, yet a much lower-energy event like the flare that could destroy the same ship easily.


(Yeah, I know. The flare's energy plus the ambient EM have to be totalled. Regardless, the phaser blast is far more intense and, as such, should still do very visible damage to a cruiser-class BoP's hull. My idea accounts for this. Yours does not.)

I already addressed this: even if we assume that flares simply deactivate shields the fact remains the ships were destroyed.

Did you read what I wrote?

Trek shields don't cope with plasma well and, in close proximity to something with a magnetic field as powerful as a star's, energies which usually pose no threat, even to an exposed hull, can be lethal for much the same reason that, IMO at least, Black Star was destroyed -- that is, due to the ship's own power systems running amuck.

Are you saying a powerful magnetic field cannot have such a profound effect on a starship?

See, I'm trying to reconcile both observed events AND spoken dialogue as much as possible. And while I anticipate that you'll claim I'm making an assumption, "Symbiosis" was abundantly clear: Even with fully-powered shields, large magnetic fields shorted out bridge control panels, disrupted sensors, transporters, communications and the tractor beam -- all while the Enterprise orbited the fourth planet in the system, very far away from the most intense solar flare activity.

Thus, it is safe to say that, when your ship closely orbits a star and is nailed with a flare, the effects on the ship's systems should be far more dramatic. If a bridge console shorted out and was about to overload at an A.U. out, imagine the effects on a starship's power distribution network and reactor at point-blank range.

And by this "even if" stuff, I notice that you still refuse to concede anything about exotic particles and some gasses having strange effects on shields. Was the nucleonic beam that zapped Picard in "The Inner Light" powerful enough to overwhelm the shields? It got through them with no trouble, yet the thing didn't vaporize Picard, did it? And why don't shields function in a nebula, again? I don't think I heard any explanation for that one either.

We know that primary weapons of Jem'Hadar ships and BoPs can't destroy a Galaxy class in a short amount of time thus their weapons are limited to 10TW level. Since those same weapons can drop the shields of a Galaxy given enough time its shields cannot have more then on the order of 10TW dissipation rate and few hundred TJ of capacity.

When have we ever seen scout-sized BoPs or Jem'Hadar attack ships threaten a GCS without bypassing the latter's shields altogether? Lursa and B'Etor were unwilling to go up against the E-D until she was effectively unshielded. The Jem'Hadar's weapons ignored the Odyssey's shields.

Those fuckers are TINY next to a GCS. Neither ship probably masses more than about 10,000 tons. The Galaxy-class ships were something like 4-5 million tons. Of course the little ships will be far less powerful. They're great in groups and, IMO at least, probably overpowered for their size -- but still ... we're looking at a tonnage differential of a good 450 times. That's NOT to suggest a GCS is remotely close to 450 times more powerful; however, as we all know, size does matter

We know that even when several starfleet vessels concentrate their fire on an unshielded Borg ship and start digging a hole in it the damage is not instantaneously catastrophic to a Borg ship and the ship withstood the fire much longer then the one in "Descent" endured the combination of ambient radiation and flare impact. Again this limits the firepower of even several starfleet ships to much less than 1000TJ.

No, no, not just <1000 terajoules. Recall my refined estimate from "Descent." Based on a conservative 1 million km altitude, the Type 3 Borg ship fielded 16 TW for several minutes, minimum; then, a <7 TJ flare, plus the background EM, destroyed the ship.

At the more likely altitude of 500,000 km, the Borg ship absorbed 64 TW for minutes before that, plus the <7 TJ flare, before it was destroyed.

According to your reasoning, then, a small fleet of Federation ships would be unable to dish out 20-70 TJ, maximum. Since that Borg ship easily whipped the E-D's ass in combat, it'd certainly stand to reason that several more ships, if not ten or more, would be needed to overwhelm its defenses.

That is inconsistent with what we observe in other episodes. We know starship weapons have a much more profound impact than a few terawatts of solar EM, which only drains shields at a rate of two thousands of a percent per second ("Relics"). Phasers and photon torpedoes typically deplete starship shielding by 5-20%/hit, depending on the ship of course. If a half-second phaser blast or photon torpedo hit drains shields by 10%, that means each of those weapons inflicted many thousands of times more damage than a few terawatts.

Phasers may have exotic effects against shields, but photon torpedoes don't involve any tricks; they overwhelm a target with sheer energy.

So, tell me: why didn't this photorp, which is well over 1,000 times more effective against shields than a few terawatts, pour over 1,000 TJ into those shields? That's in-line with what Riker expected of photorp performance in "Pegasus," and it's certainly consistent with a civilization that uses antimatter warheads instead of chemical weapons or nuclear devices, both of which would be cheaper to manufacture and much safer to load and maintain.

I know what you'll say. I'm trying to flout three assumption-based things over those stupid fucking solar flares

The thing is, I'm not.

I echoed Michael's observations about shield weaknesses, and I took things a step further with clear-cut information from "Symbiosis."

Michael's hypothesis explains why the shields fail so quickly in a solar flare. My hypothesis explains why the starship itself, bathed in one of the most intense magnetic fields imaginable, could be destroyed by far less energy than conventional Trek weapons provide.

In other words, I've offered a rationalization that accounts for most of the firepower and shield figures we have. It permits high kiloton-ranged photorps. It permits low-megaton shielding capacity. It explains why Archer's Enterprise would never truly threaten modern Trek capships. It explains why the shields failed against the illusory Husnock's attack. It explains why shields don't work in a nebula. It accounts for the potential lethality of solar flares.

Does your idea explain all of those things?

Furthermore we know that even without flares being near the surface of a star puts a great stress on starship shields and is considered dangerous therefore their dissipation rate can't be significantly higher then 10TW.

Do you remember the premise behind the metaphasic shield, Kane?

But the fact remains that the nukes did cause damage to the Black Star. Even if the actual destruction was the result of some internal malfunction caused by the damage the fact remains that the Black Star couldn't have taken much more no matter the circumstances.
The same goes for Star Trek ships. They repeatedly get destroyed by energies found near solar surfaces.

If Black Star is a mile long as some suggest, she is almost 3 kilometers tall by my estimate.

The second bomb was approximately three ship lengths behind her when it exploded, or ~3 miles.

Based on a highly generous estimation of the cruiser's rear profile -- 1.34E6m^2 -- that means she absorbed no more than 40 terajoules from the blast.


Interestingly enough, Babtech estimates for an Omega-class ship's firepower are around that level, with a lower-limit of ~40 TW. The real figure is probably on that order of magnitude, but I wouldn't even rule out 100-200 TW.

Minbari Warcruisers have never really be known for heavy armor; superior firepower, stealth technology, outstanding fighters and sheer numbers are where they most excel. And even if they do have special armor, we still know Earth Force weapons can damage them ... otherwise, Dukhat wouldn't have been killed and all that.

But could an Omega blow the biggest Warcruisers away with a single hit? How about several?

No. That simply wouldn't happen. But the numbers do not lie, do they?

... unless you're willing to be a little flexible and try to reconcile the greater body of evidence, that is, even if it means explaining Black Star's destruction just as I explain starships being killed by solar flares.

NASAs numbers come from NASAs definition of global damage. What is Datas definition of "planet wide" damage?

Why would it be any different, Kane? Global and planet-wide mean the same damned thing.

This is turning into a WOI if I ever saw one. I definitely didn't expect this from you.

I'll say this one more time: to affect an entire globe, the impact energy from an asteroid or similar object must approach 1 million megatons. Therefore, a 100m asteroid cannot affect anything on a global scale, unless you assume some kind of insane velocity at impact.

Even a 500m wide asteroid cannot affect anything across an entire planet -- that is, unless you were so desperate as to argue "damage" might mean something like a global stock market crash

No: it requires either a typical asteroid be as massive as a 2 km-wide asteroid.

We can assume but at the end of the day it's an assumption and not directly observed event.

So? Something we see is the best evidence, of course, but you seem to act as if any statement that's not backed up with a completely iron-clad, unambiguous piece of corroborative visual evidence is essentially worthless. Our "job" as such is to do the best we can of fitting all the data we have under the same umbrella -- hence things like Michael's hypothesis that shields are weak against plasma.

I have no problem with discussing different possibilities on how big the asteroid could be. I have a problem with using those assumptions as a counter to directly observed events.

Well, even though I've not had any luck scaling the thing yet, I can tell you they were standard photorps to the best of our knowledge. No one said anything about modifying the things. It is also safe to assume that, since two torpedoes were fired at the intact rock, they were set to maximum yield.

Thus, since maximum yield torpedoes don't knock shields down ... well, you get the rest. Since "beyond maximum" is meaningless, I fully expect that a starship's defenses can take the equivalent of their own "best shot," so to say.

For example you assume that when Data said "planet wide" damage, he meant the same thing NASA today means when it says "global damage". What is your evidence for this? And if, following your assumptions, we reach a conclusion contradictory to directly observed evidence then the assumption is wrong right?

This is ridiculous. Now I need to provide evidence that planet-wide and global mean the same damned thing?

If an assumption about an asteroid's size can't be reasonably reconciled with things we've observed, then yes, absolutely: the assumption is simply wrong.

The problem we have here is three-fold as I see it:

*you don't really accept Michael's shield weakness hypothesis. You sorta pay it mind inasmuch as you say, "Oh, well, even if that's true," but that's a euphemism for "I don't want to cede this point." His Trek shields page goes a long way toward proving his case. His debate with Mike Griffiths (see the main site and look in the "Hate Mail" section) demonstrated this rather conclusively as well.

*you insist that these lethal solar flares must be far more energetic than not-so-lethal photon torpedoes and phasers, which is not necessarily the case at all. I have offered an explanation why solar flares are so dangerous to even the most powerful starships. Among many other things, that explanation means Riker can be right about his own weapons' performance. Your explanation requires we call a whole bunch of people liars, fools or both. While it's certainly nothing new to Trek and characters have made many, many stupid mistakes, have we ever known them to miscalculate their weapons' effectiveness by over half a million times?

That's a "negative."

*as I noted earlier, you seem to think any dialogue that's not completely corroborated by an observed event is essentially worthless. While I concur that what we see is much higher in an evidentiary hierarchy, dismissing characters as mouth-breathing idiots who spout total nonsense only takes us so far. They're doing something right to cruise the stars at hundreds to a few thousand c, to use antimatter as a power source, etc.

As such, when a character suggests a course of action -- as Riker did in "Pegasus" -- and everyone around him seems to agree their weapons are capable of such effects, it's pretty fuckin' likely the guy's right.

I realize your inevitable comeback to that: the USS Cole, submarines, Earth Force building multi-megaton nukes with relative ease and all that. But Riker didn't say anything about modifying ordinary torpedo warheads. In fact, since he said it would take MOST of their photon torpedoes, that implicitly rules out any kind of modified "super-torp" nonsense.

But you say that diffuse particles whether high energy plasma or low temperature nebulae tend to deactivate shields so why would they be able to stop concentrated very high particle stream?

For the same reason they stop other particle beams -- namely, phasers and disruptors. I will say that I think a Shadow cruiser's firepower might make fairly short work of GCS-level shielding, however. I figure its energy is realistically the equivalent of a full spread of photon torpedoes -- well above 1,500 TW, but probably not as high as 20,000 TW.

But then, we were talking about one Shadow ship opposite a Borg cube, which has far more resilient shields than any GCSs.

It's not so big of a stretch. Shadow fleet was all over the place and from that distance it would be very difficult to make out black shadow fighters. As you say it is possible.

"Possible" in the sense that we can't rule out the possibility that fighters were buzzing around there. As you said earlier, at that range, we couldn't see the things. And since we did NOT see them, the possibility remains an intellectual curiosity -- nothing more.

I don't see how that movie proves anything. There is a fragment that practically looks like a square and that might be the central body of a Shadow ship and then the rest of the ship is drawn around the fragment but ultimately doesn't even overlap with the fragment perfectly.
Nothing that disproves my point that a fighter could've been mangled in such a way to appear as central body of a capital ship for a few moments.

In other words, "You don't know that it wasn't a fighter!"

You're continuing to appeal to ignorance. We saw a Shadow warship near the explosion. Debris moved away from the blast in a manner we would expect from a destroyed Shadow warship.

Further, if the fragments closely match a Shadow warship's features, the parsimonious explanation is that a Shadow warship was blown to bits -- not that fighters, which we couldn't even see, are so badly mangled by the explosion* that they suddenly grow in size and look like clearly identifiable parts of a "battlecrab."

*That very idea is absurd, btw. The White Star could blow those little things away effortlessly. The bomb's energy would've easily vaporized any fighters nearby. I will, however, note that, as Brian points out on Babtech, it's a great testament to a Shadow cruiser's constitution that it was not vaporized by the blast. Their so-called organic armor is as impressive as anything Brian or I can think of.

Yes that's why I used 1/24 of a second as the time in which the beam needs to burn through the entire length of the ship without the camera noticing the flicker. It could be even faster but 1/24s is the lower limit. Obviously the beam does actually require a finite time to punch through the length of a cruiser otherwise its power would be infinite and if we had a faster camera (maybe 30fps) we could catch the flicker.
It's not possible to somehow melt through several hundred meters of ship in a fraction of a second. You need to vaporize the material so violently that it moves out of the way fast enough to dig through the hull. Even if we use 10kt/s beam you still won't get melting when that much power hits the target and the material will still be vaporized at the impact point.

No argument here. I figure a Shadow cruiser's main weapon might be up to 20,000 TW.

You can see the uncropped sequence here. Before you get all pissed I'm just linking to the page as the source of images not endorsing all of the arguments on the page.
The ship does explode before the beam is completely finished cutting the ship in two but by that time the beam is almost through the bottom.

That's fair enough.

But why would I be mad that you linked to Brandon's page?

The battleship is most definitely around 1.4km long:
*snip*

I said it's possible some battleships are larger than others, did I not?

By the way, you should have rechecked Brandon's conclusions. It looks like the battleship is closer to the camera than the transport. The Vorlon fighters are closer to the camera still; you'd do better to scale the battleship relative to the fighters' size.

I think Brandon either made a mistake in using the transport as a benchmark, or he simply used it because it'd yield bigger numbers.

Tim Earls said Vorlon fighters are 21m long. Some of his other figures are pretty weird, like the near-500m long White Star.

Regardless, I don't have any measurements to the contrary, so I'll go with his number.

According to my scaling, that battleship is less than 787m long.





The fighters were slightly closer to the camera, so that is an upper-limit. But I think it is probably quite close to that particular ship's length.

780m is large, but it is a LONG way from 1,400.

*snip*
Planetkiller is on the order of 40km-50km long. Cole was wrong or maybe he meant 34 miles instead of 3 or 4 or maybe we was (unlikely) referring to some other unseen ship.

Marcus Cole is familiar with a lot of starships. He did say that he was having trouble with his instruments, but he's seen a 5 mile-long B5 opposite many of those ships. There's no way he meant "34 miles." His estimate could be off, but it's highly doubtful he'd underestimate the thing's size by an order of magnitude. (For what it's worth, Brian told me the filming script indicated the VPK was 15 km. wide.)

The battleship was indeed damaged by the Shadow beam but it was not exactly catastrophic. Taking the battleships size into account it could easily have endurance 10 times that of an average Shadow ship.

Not exactly catastrophic?

Again, damn, son Are you even reading what I write?

This shit is getting frustrating, dude. I CLEARLY said it'd take SEVERAL such hits to do catastrophic damage, did I not?

*looks up the page* Yep. That's what I said alright.

Theoretically those numbers are correct. In reality as it is being pumped with energy the iron will begin to shed the excess heat. For example at the temperature of 1810K (a degree below its melting point) iron will be radiating 0.6MW/m2 (p=a*T^4 where "a" is Stephan-Boltzman constant and T is temperature in kelvin) which means that the net energy will be 999.4MW for a 1GW laser. This is of course next to inconsequential but what if you have a 0.6MW laser? Using theoretical numbers the hole should be punched in 7.71 days. In reality the hole will never be punched since iron will reradiate as much heat as it receives when the temperature reaches 1810K.
So, lets assume you fire a 0.6MW laser and keep it on for 100 days. Would it be correct to simply multiply the power rating with the elapsed time to come up with a number of 5000GJ and then say that a 400GW laser would need at least 12 seconds to punch a hole? No.
The same thing applies to simply multiplying 3TW number with 3 hours to come up with a number and then claim it means that shields could withstand 1000TW power for 30 seconds.

While I appreciate your accuracy, you're missing my point. Those numbers were purely illustrative; I wasn't striving for such a degree of realism. The whole idea is to draw your attention to the fact that a few terawatts only drained the shields by THOUSANDTHS of a percent yet, according to your reasoning, jumping from something like 6.4 TW to 6.54 instantly knocks out shields and blows a ship up in another case.

Star Trek shields behave like armor plates but ones which disappear into nothing if the energy is not maintained and which get "damaged". As I demonstrated above shields will have plenty of time to shed the excess energy during the three hours and you cannot use the energy calculated by simply multiplying power with long time period as the energy capacity.

Why not? You were talking about my theoretical iron plate. Shields are somewhat like that, but it's too loose of an analogy to predict what the deflector can or can't take.

Again you could use a 0.1MW 1m wide laser beam and hit the iron until the cows come home you won't punch through it because the metal will keep shedding the excess heat. Therefore resilience will not scale linearly with increase in power as the heat shedding rises proportionally with fourth power of temperature.
This is proven by "Descent" where Enterprise even with metaphasic shields can endure only 15 minutes in the chromosphere. Compared with "Relics" this is only a slight increase in ambient radiation yet causes drastic decrease in endurance similarly how slight increase of power from 0.6MW to 0.7MW would change the hole drilling time from never to some finite time.

... And you don't think that difference is owed the fact that the Enterprise had to use metaphasic shields to survive?

Michael talked about this on his Trek shields page.

As the shields fail the energy would be released in an uncontrolled fashion and would definitely blow up the ship. That doesn't happen, nothing actually happens when shields fail therefore their capacity isn't much greater then the power of their major weapons.

I don't have much of a problem with that.

[Kane Starkiller]

Since many of the points are repeating in several paragraphs I'll fuse some into a single one when I'm quoting you or omit redundant ones. Let me know if you think I missed anything.

Quite right: it's 16 TW plus some fraction of 7 terajoules.

It's important to keep in mind that the 7 TJ flare is an upper-limit which, like Michael's 50 GJ figure from "Redemption Pt. II," assumes the flare's gas transferred 100% of its energy to the ship. As he notes, that's impossible; otherwise, we would've seen a "supercooled chunk of metallic hydrogen sitting under [the Klingon ships]."

I honestly do not know what percentage of 7 terajoules affected the Borg ship. Half that value? A quarter? 10 percent?

I guess I could ask Michael As it stands, however, we know the flare could NOT impart that much energy to the Borg ship.

On the other hand, 16 TW is not a strict upper-limit. In fact, given the image I posted, it is more likely the Type 3 ship was at half the stated altitude, meaning it absorbed 64 TW for at least 5 minutes 24 seconds.

So, you'd have me conclude several minutes' exposure 64 TW poses no immediate danger to the ship whatsoever -- but add just a few more terajoules to the mix, and BAM!: the ship's shields instantly fail and the whole ship's blown away?

I'd have you conclude? We saw it. The ship blew up. End of story. I'm not sure what your point is. That the shields are perhaps unusually sensitive to the flare? I already accepted that possibility and as I have shown weapon exchanges without shields still limit the weapon yield and the shield. I also showed how slight increases in power output can significantly decrease durability with the block of iron example but looking below you completely ignored that explanation.

That's slap goofy. They can handle 6 TW for minutes, but ratcheting it up to 6.25 TJ instantly blows them away?

How many times do I need to explain this? If their dissipation capacity is 6.1TW then they'll be able to withstand 6TW indefinitely but add a few hundred GJ in a second and their shields depending on their capacity can be overwhelmed. The added energy heats up or ruptures an antimatter containment cell, for example, and the ship blows up. There is nothing inexplicable about this.

Sure. But as I said, the flare energies are still utterly inconsequential opposite what the ships were capable of handling for minutes and, in some cases, hours on end.

Speaking thereof, let's take a closer look at the opening events of "Redemption Pt. II," shall we?

According to the best scaling figures available, the Klingon Birds-of-Prey seen in "Defector," "Yesterday's Enterprise" and "Rascals" are 350m long and, thus, some 530m wide with their wings in the so-called "flight configuration." You can read about these measurements here.

Consequently, according to some rather simple figures I computed from those numbers, I determined that this large BoP has no less than a 43,000 square meter area when viewed from the top or bottom.

However, it is entirely possible that Kurn's ship is of another, somewhat smaller class.

You can see from this image that the Vorn is wider than the Bortas.

*SNIP SCALING*

This means that, for perhaps 10 seconds or so before they were destroyed, they were absorbing energy at a rate of more than 3.4 TW.

Michael calculated that the flare which destroyed those ships imparted something less than 2.5 MW/m^2 so, with our refined estimate of the Birds' frontal area, we learn the flare's total energy is much less than 140 GJ.

Conclusion: an unshielded BoP can endure 2 terawatts for at least a few seconds, but shielded Birds-of-Prey fielding 3.4 TW are instantly destroyed by 3.54 TW

What the hell? A meager [fraction of] a four percent energy increase is catastrophic?

If I'm wrong and the ships in "Redemption" were of the even-larger variety documented at Suricata's blog, the Duras-loyal ships' frontal areas are 99,837 m^2, which means they absorbed 6 TW and were destroyed by that plus a [far less than] 250 GJ flare.

So, yet again, the ships handle 6 TW just fine, but 6 plus some fraction of .25 TJ means instant death?

That's utterly stupid in light of how Kurn's ship withstood several terawatts without shields. At most, the flare might've overwhelmed his pursuer's shields; the energy left over is simply not enough to destroy them!

A meager fraction of a four percent energy increase is catastrophic? Yes apparently so. I've seen it. You've seen it. What is the problem?
Again if your point is that the shields are unusually susceptible to flares I have already acknowledged and dealt with that possibility: the fact that ships can't instantly blow up unshielded targets limits their weapon yield and ultimately shield capacity as no more than several times their hull strength.

You're a little confused. Watch "Redemption Pt. II" again.

At 1:46, Worf reported that their aft shields were gone.

2:19: Worf reported that the Hegh'ta was entering the star's corona.

2:41: The ship is rocked by another attack. Only after Worf reports that the shields were failing altogether does he say the temperature was exceeding the ship's designed limit. The ship takes another hit.

There's nothing that indicates the star's radiation threatened their shields. And since we're talking about the ships pursuing Kurn, whether or not his ship had trouble is a red herring. He was unshielded for over 20 seconds. Of course the hull's going to heat up!

2:57-3:01: The Hegh'ta is above the star's photosphere, still unshielded and absorbing over 2 TW.

Then, his still-shielded pursuers come along, absorbing EM at a rate of 3.4 TW. Kurn yells "DaH!," the Hegh'ta goes to warp and kicks up a little flare that imparts far less than 140 GJ to each enemy ship.

According to your explanation, going from 3.4 to 3.54 TJ is enough to blow away their shields and their hulls -- in spite of the fact that Kurn's unshielded ship withstood at least 2 TW for several seconds.

As Bender would say, "Does not compute!"

1:40 KURN:transfer auxilliary power to shields
1:47 WORF: the shields are gone
2:15-2:17 external shot of BoP, you can clearly see the shield impact effects thus the shields are back up
2:24 WORF: shields failing, outer hull temperature exceeding design limit
2:45 external shot of the sun, still several diameters away
Again it is clear as day that coming close to a star puts severe stress on a ship flares or no flares. Obviously BoP was under attack and damaged and not up to specs but this is simply one of several incidents that shows that approaching a star is not childs play which limits their shield and hull resistance.

From the examples listed above, your own reasoning requires that a few dozen to hundred gigajoules atop 3 TW is lethal for rather powerful Klingon warships, so I don't know where you're getting the 10 TW-level firepower. Based on your notion that solar flares + ambient EM = more energy than starship's shields and hull can take, that means these "main weapons" must be commensurately smaller.

As I said before, however, I think it's that's a blatant false dilemma for two reasons. But examples speak louder than almost anything else, so consider this:

That little Miranda-class has a volume just under 220,000 cubic meters. She's about 150m wide and less than 70m tall. With a traditional TNG-style bubble shield, her frontal area might be 9,305 m^2. 10,000 square meters is a likely maximum.

Let's assume the Klingon cruisers chasing Kurn in "Redemption" are replaced by a Miranda. Let's further assume the Starfleet ship chases Kurn to the star and is destroyed by the same tactic.

(Slight aside: I do not think that's unreasonable. It's seriously doubtful a Miranda compares very favorably to the large BoP classes. It's silly that Kurn would, in turn, run from such a ship but, for our purposes, let's overlook that for a minute. It's irrelevant to the point I'm about to make anyway.)

That would mean Ms. Miranda fielded almost 560 GW on approach, then was hit and destroyed by a <23 GJ flare.

Add the two up, and we learn the Miranda will be blown away instantly by 583 GJ.

But wait a minute ... As Michael notes on his Phasers page, "Phasers appear to destroy less than 5 cubic metres of starship armor per second of continuous impact, so they seem to be tactically equivalent to 1-10 TW lasers."

That appears to be in line with the vapor flash we see in this picture, which certainly appears to have terawatt-level effects even if we assume duranium and such don't have significantly different properties than iron.


How does a ship that's instantly blown away by hundreds of GJ stand up to terawatt-ranged beam weapons and, since photorps have always been considered heavier weapons, at least low kiloton-ranged torpedoes?

(Yes, the torpedo which blew up part of the Reliant's "roll bar" could have been sub-kiloton -- but then, Kirk wasn't trying to destroy the ship outright, was he?)

No one is saying that the resulting explosion was only the work of the energy received from the sun. Star Trek ships have large amounts of antimatter on board and generally tend to blow up when you look at them crosswise. The point is that less than 10TW level of energy is enough to overwhelm their defenses and start causing damage, the explosion itself might be the result of internal antimatter containment collapsing.
In other words I'm not saying that such energies must always and immediately lead to instant destruction of the ship depending on the exact situation. However it does mean that an order or two orders of magnitude greater power and energy (like the weapons of the Shadow ship) will without any doubt cause catastrophic damage within a second.
Secondly 1-10TW estimate on the main page comes from technical manual that states it takes 2.4TJ to vaporize a cubic meter of tritanium or 40 times more than iron. Since this is a non-canon source these numbers are irrelevant. Micheal Wong, I suspect, is only using them to demonstrate that even with those numbers the weapons can't be much higher than 1-10TW. If we use iron as a baseline the numbers fall accordingly. Assuming 20m long, 2m wide and 4m deep gash and 90% air that's 16m3 requiring 1TJ to be vaporized. Over roughly 3 seconds that is on the order of 330GW.
Now, before you say that this contradicts "Survivors" because it means that Miranda should be able to drop the shields of a Galaxy class with a single shot please understand that none of the numbers we calculate when working with stellar radiation or material properties are good for more than rough order of magnitude estimates.
Thus if we calculate shields to be 500GW and weapons 800GW we can't tell with any certainty that the weapons will really be able to punch through. However if we calculate weapons to be 1,500TW and the shields no more than 10TW than we can be certain the weapon will easily punch through.

Negative, but then, I:

*subscribe to Michael's hypothesis about shields' vulnerability to plasma
*know that magnetic fields can fuck with a starship's electrical systems even 1 AU out, so when you're surrounded by a very powerful magnetic field like those found around solar flares, I posit the effects should be catastrophic.

I also don't see why we should create a false dichotomy between what's said and what we see. The best evidence is that which we observe, but it's important to reconcile the two when we can. Per what I've proposed, we can have Riker's high-kiloton to low-megaton torpedoes in "Pegasus" AND easily explain why solar flares are so dangerous for Trek ships, shields AND hulls alike.

I already shown several times, and will expand upon below, that even if we assume the flares outright switch off the shields their weapons and consequently shields are still limited by those incidents.
I am not creating a dichotomy between what is said and what we see since it was never actually said that asteroid will be shattered. This is assumption made by you. You can argue it is reasonable but at the end of the day it remains an assumption: assumption on what Riker meant, the composition of the asteoroid etc.
By the way you seem very certain that Riker would know what is the energy required to shatter an asteroid. I'm honestly curious do you think the commanding officer of an Ohio class submarine knows the energy required to crater a small island, say 1000m wide and 10m average elevation so that it is completely flooded? I actually don't know so I'm really asking if you know whether such matters are a part of its training and whether this is something he is expected to know.

When did those get shields?

My claim is this: when a C.O. shouts, "Photon torpedoes, maximum yield, full spread!", yes, I fully expect that those torpedoes are the best they can muster. You know, being maximum yield and all. ("Beyond maximum" is nonfuckingsensical unless the torpedo is specially modified, like the device Harry Kim and Tuvok worked on in "The Omega Directive." And there is NO indication such modifications were even considered in episodes like "Pegasus.")

Thus, when a fairly comparable enemy target is hit with such a barrage and their shields withstand it, that does speak to the shields' strength -- provided, of course, that we know those devices' maximum yields.

So what if they have not specifically mentioned those modifications? I'm not even claiming that they were merely that it is a known possibility. For all we know there is a drastic reduction in kinematic performance when you increase the yield. It is unimportant in any case.
The issue is logic: shield capacity and weapon yield are two separate matters and can be estimated separately if independent incidents exist. Stellar incidents allow us to determine the upper limit on shields independently of their weapons.

What about the illusory Husnock's 400 GW weapon, then? It did a good job knocking the shields down. The NX's weapons are more powerful. They should have the same effect.

No one said that certain weapons won't be more effective than others even if they are slightly less powerful. That is not the same as claiming shields are switched off by few hundred GJ but will conveniently be back at 100% effectiveness when 1,500TW Shadow weapon shows up. It's one thing to say that Small Diameter Bomb will have greater penetration even if it has several times lower yield than older unsophisticated bombs and other thing to say armor is susceptible to tickling by bird feathers but when hit by a shaped charge it'll be back to 100% effectiveness.

How do you know those photon torpedoes impacted an unshielded hull? Because we saw plumes of flame?

Another false dilemma. We see that kind of thing happen all the time in Star Trek. Did you see "Call To Arms"? The Dominion fleet's initial volley made flames and shit sprout from the station, but as Damar said shortly thereafter, the "station's shields are holding."

I've addressed TWOK. As for Trek III, well, so what? Kruge's ship had decloaked; he surely had time to get shields up.

As for the BoP's response shot, you do recall that Kruge said the Enterprise outgunned them 10:1, yes? Besides, apart from Chang's modified BoP, there's no indication that scout-sized BoPs can fire standard photon torpedoes. In fact, if you'd examined the filming miniature as I have, you'd realize the Bird's so-called "torpedo launcher" is a strange-assed looking thing -- certainly lacking a port big enough to fire typical Starfleet-sized casings.

(Aside: I would have posted a picture of just this; unfortunately, the best I can do at the moment is to take a picture of my Tsukuda Models KBoP kit. Its designers, like the good folks at Fine Molds did for SW kits, closely studied the actual filming mini; with a few minor exceptions, the Tsukuda kit is extremely accurate.

In any case, the "torpedo launcher" on the Tsukuda model is just as I described. Chang's boat excepted, the 360'-long BoPs can NOT fire torpedoes anywhere near as big as those used by the E-A, E-D, et al.)

I explained this many times.
In First Contact the fleet actually starts digging a hole thus shields are gone. Photon torpedoes, quantum torpedoes and phasers are flying into the hole and the ship is relatively undamaged the hole is maybe 100m wide and 100m deep. Again Descent clearly shows that the combined firepower of the phasers and photon torpedoes can't be greater than the combination of EM radiation and flares. Certainly not tens of times greater which would be the case with megaton level torpedoes.
In TWOK ships exchange weapon fire while unshielded inside a nebula and photon torpedoes failed to destroy ships with a single shot something a megaton or even 100kt weapon would be able to do without question based on solar flare incidents.
In ST3 I guess it's possible that Kruge got the shields up although he specifically ordered energy to weapons.
However there are more incidents.
In "Way of the warrior" Defiant lowers it shields while being fired upon by a Vor'Cha to rescue the Detapa council. Worf fires a tractor beam at the Vor'Cha which reduces its weapon effectiveness by 50% and Defiant manages to withstand its fire for 2 minutes as it transports the council.
Then there is "Jem'Hadar" battle.
It is clear that their weapons aren't more powerful than 10TW.

Of course he meant shatter How else could you destroy the asteroid, Kane? The whole point was to get at something a quarter the size of a man inside a mountain-sized body. Just busting up parts of it wouldn't accomplish the mission.

By digging to the cave in which the ship was and concentrating the power on the ship?
No need to blow up every last molecule of the asteroid.

I hear you, but that needn't be a contradiction. Kim's initial readings could've been based on little more than the intensity of the "gravimetric eddies" that rocked the Voyager about; i.e., "putting out 4 TW" as in releasing that in the form of the gravity disturbances. Besides, Janeway's statement came much later, presumably after they'd had a chance to study the thing at length.

Do I need to point out that initial sensor readings of an alien technology are a just bit different than knowing the yield of your own torpedoes and/or measuring something's diameter?

So they picked up 4TW before they picked up 10^32W? Not that it would make sense either way. Somehow a cm wide black hole puts out the energy equal to 100,000 suns. It's nonsense.

As you can see, that's not exactly what I have in mind. But for some reason, you ignored my explanation, which I first proposed here:

There is a way to try and make some sense of all this -- that is, if you accept Michael's very sound idea that certain things have a disproportionately great effect, or altogether bypass, shields. (I noticed you didn't respond to some of the examples I quoted to that end, like the undoubtedly VERY low-powered nucleonic beam that penetrated the Enterprise's shields in "The Inner Light.") His hypothesis accounts for all of the discrepancies I noted above.

Further, thanks to "Symbiosis," we also know that very powerful magnetic fields can "disrupt electrical systems," so the most logical way to reconcile the data we have is this: Trek shields don't cope with plasma well and, in close proximity to something with a magnetic field as powerful as those surrounding a solar flare, energies which usually pose no threat, even to an exposed hull, can be lethal for much the same reason that, IMO at least, Black Star was destroyed -- that is, due to the ship's own power systems running amuck.

That would handily explain why a 60-plus gigawatt phaser has a negligible effect on a K'Vort-like cruiser, yet a much lower-energy event like the flare that could destroy the same ship easily.


(Yeah, I know. The flare's energy plus the ambient EM have to be totalled. Regardless, the phaser blast is far more intense and, as such, should still do very visible damage to a cruiser-class BoP's hull. My idea accounts for this. Yours does not.)



Did you read what I wrote?

Trek shields don't cope with plasma well and, in close proximity to something with a magnetic field as powerful as a star's, energies which usually pose no threat, even to an exposed hull, can be lethal for much the same reason that, IMO at least, Black Star was destroyed -- that is, due to the ship's own power systems running amuck.

Are you saying a powerful magnetic field cannot have such a profound effect on a starship?

See, I'm trying to reconcile both observed events AND spoken dialogue as much as possible. And while I anticipate that you'll claim I'm making an assumption, "Symbiosis" was abundantly clear: Even with fully-powered shields, large magnetic fields shorted out bridge control panels, disrupted sensors, transporters, communications and the tractor beam -- all while the Enterprise orbited the fourth planet in the system, very far away from the most intense solar flare activity.

Thus, it is safe to say that, when your ship closely orbits a star and is nailed with a flare, the effects on the ship's systems should be far more dramatic. If a bridge console shorted out and was about to overload at an A.U. out, imagine the effects on a starship's power distribution network and reactor at point-blank range.

And by this "even if" stuff, I notice that you still refuse to concede anything about exotic particles and some gasses having strange effects on shields. Was the nucleonic beam that zapped Picard in "The Inner Light" powerful enough to overwhelm the shields? It got through them with no trouble, yet the thing didn't vaporize Picard, did it? And why don't shields function in a nebula, again? I don't think I heard any explanation for that one either.

I already demonstrated several times that even assuming their shields are unusually susceptible to flares it still doesn't change the upper limit on their weapons and shields.
If shields are affected by high temperature gas, low temperature gas, magnetic fields, particle beams, "nucleonic beam" (which actually means either proton or neutron beam) etc. what guarantee is there they will be of any use against Shadow or any B5 weapons? It's anyones guess whether they'll be effective at all and since so many natural phenomena renders them useless the chances are they won't be.
So in the end it's likely that shields won't be useful against Shadow weapons and even if they are they'll still be quickly overwhelmed by sheer power.
Second are you claiming that if the calculated figures for shield resistance or hull resistance don't perfectly match up with phaser figures (500GJ of NX class is larger than 250GJ energy BoP would receive; 60GW+ is more powerful than total flare energy) this somehow means that ships would be able to withstand 1,500,000GW Shadow beam?
All those numbers are within a rough order of magnitude: high GW/GJ and low TW/TJ. They don't match up perfectly since the events don't allow precise calculations.
However the precision (order of magnitude) is more than enough to be certain that at least a thousand times more powerful weapon will be able to obliterate those ships in less than a second.

When have we ever seen scout-sized BoPs or Jem'Hadar attack ships threaten a GCS without bypassing the latter's shields altogether? Lursa and B'Etor were unwilling to go up against the E-D until she was effectively unshielded. The Jem'Hadar's weapons ignored the Odyssey's shields.

Those fuckers are TINY next to a GCS. Neither ship probably masses more than about 10,000 tons. The Galaxy-class ships were something like 4-5 million tons. Of course the little ships will be far less powerful. They're great in groups and, IMO at least, probably overpowered for their size -- but still ... we're looking at a tonnage differential of a good 450 times. That's NOT to suggest a GCS is remotely close to 450 times more powerful; however, as we all know, size does matter

They are limited to less than 10TW, 150 times less than the Shadow beam. Does it take 150 Jem'Hadar ships to threaten a single shielded Galaxy? There are other examples like Vor'Cha with 50% weapon effectiveness being unable to destroy Defiant in 2 minutes. The very fact that Defiant's ablative armor is a big deal further points that shields are not order of magnitude more effective than the armor itself.

No, no, not just <1000 terajoules. Recall my refined estimate from "Descent." Based on a conservative 1 million km altitude, the Type 3 Borg ship fielded 16 TW for several minutes, minimum; then, a <7 TJ flare, plus the background EM, destroyed the ship.

At the more likely altitude of 500,000 km, the Borg ship absorbed 64 TW for minutes before that, plus the <7 TJ flare, before it was destroyed.

According to your reasoning, then, a small fleet of Federation ships would be unable to dish out 20-70 TJ, maximum. Since that Borg ship easily whipped the E-D's ass in combat, it'd certainly stand to reason that several more ships, if not ten or more, would be needed to overwhelm its defenses.

That is inconsistent with what we observe in other episodes. We know starship weapons have a much more profound impact than a few terawatts of solar EM, which only drains shields at a rate of two thousands of a percent per second ("Relics"). Phasers and photon torpedoes typically deplete starship shielding by 5-20%/hit, depending on the ship of course. If a half-second phaser blast or photon torpedo hit drains shields by 10%, that means each of those weapons inflicted many thousands of times more damage than a few terawatts.

Phasers may have exotic effects against shields, but photon torpedoes don't involve any tricks; they overwhelm a target with sheer energy.

So, tell me: why didn't this photorp, which is well over 1,000 times more effective against shields than a few terawatts, pour over 1,000 TJ into those shields? That's in-line with what Riker expected of photorp performance in "Pegasus," and it's certainly consistent with a civilization that uses antimatter warheads instead of chemical weapons or nuclear devices, both of which would be cheaper to manufacture and much safer to load and maintain.

I know what you'll say. I'm trying to flout three assumption-based things over those stupid fucking solar flares

The thing is, I'm not.

I echoed Michael's observations about shield weaknesses, and I took things a step further with clear-cut information from "Symbiosis."

Michael's hypothesis explains why the shields fail so quickly in a solar flare. My hypothesis explains why the starship itself, bathed in one of the most intense magnetic fields imaginable, could be destroyed by far less energy than conventional Trek weapons provide.

In other words, I've offered a rationalization that accounts for most of the firepower and shield figures we have. It permits high kiloton-ranged photorps. It permits low-megaton shielding capacity. It explains why Archer's Enterprise would never truly threaten modern Trek capships. It explains why the shields failed against the illusory Husnock's attack. It explains why shields don't work in a nebula. It accounts for the potential lethality of solar flares.

Does your idea explain all of those things?

You keep repeating that few TW only drain the shields at "a rate of two thousands of a percent per second" when I have demonstrated several times how reradiation rate of the shields means that it is incorrect to simply multiply power rating and time interval and call that "shield capacity". Did you read my 0.6MW laser example?
ISS sits in orbit for years. At 1,400W/m2 in a year it will absorb 220GJ of energy. If a 20GW laser hits it and blows it up instantly then that is a contradiction according to your logic.
I have also pointed out that the fact a civilization is capable of building a warhead of certain size that doesn't mean their ships can withstand comparable firepower.
Also you say that assuming shields are susceptible to flares clears the way for high yield photon torpedoes when that is simply not the case: I already demonstrated their weapons aren't capable of quickly destroying unshielded targets and that EM radiation itself is dangerous to their ships therefore there is absolutely no room for multimegaton shield capacity.
Your claim of contradiction, as I pointed out above in my post, is dependent on assumption that calculated flare and ambient radiation is precise within 100GJ/GW and thus, if smaller, it contradicts the phaser figures. Those numbers however are only a rough order of magnitude which all agree (along with phaser yields) that their shield and weapons are in high GW/GJ or low TW/TJ range. No more precision is required to conclude a 1,500TW weapon will blow them up effortlessly.

Do you remember the premise behind the metaphasic shield, Kane?

Other than they'll be able to provide greater survivability near the star what else? The point is 10TW is the upper limit on their shields. 1,500TW compressed in a 10m wide beam will rip through them.

If Black Star is a mile long as some suggest, she is almost 3 kilometers tall by my estimate.

The second bomb was approximately three ship lengths behind her when it exploded, or ~3 miles.

Based on a highly generous estimation of the cruiser's rear profile -- 1.34E6m^2 -- that means she absorbed no more than 40 terajoules from the blast.


Interestingly enough, Babtech estimates for an Omega-class ship's firepower are around that level, with a lower-limit of ~40 TW. The real figure is probably on that order of magnitude, but I wouldn't even rule out 100-200 TW.

Minbari Warcruisers have never really be known for heavy armor; superior firepower, stealth technology, outstanding fighters and sheer numbers are where they most excel. And even if they do have special armor, we still know Earth Force weapons can damage them ... otherwise, Dukhat wouldn't have been killed and all that.

But could an Omega blow the biggest Warcruisers away with a single hit? How about several?

No. That simply wouldn't happen. But the numbers do not lie, do they?

... unless you're willing to be a little flexible and try to reconcile the greater body of evidence, that is, even if it means explaining Black Star's destruction just as I explain starships being killed by solar flares.

Of course there is room for flexibility. But not a thousand times. We can quibble over wheter it takes 500GJ or 400GW or 10TW or 3TW to overwhelm the shields of a Galaxy class and that 500GJ phasers of an NX doesn't match up with 400GW Husnock beam but that's inconsequential when it comes to 1,500,000GW Shadow beam. It's three orders of magnitude difference.

Why would it be any different, Kane? Global and planet-wide mean the same damned thing.

This is turning into a WOI if I ever saw one. I definitely didn't expect this from you.

I'll say this one more time: to affect an entire globe, the impact energy from an asteroid or similar object must approach 1 million megatons. Therefore, a 100m asteroid cannot affect anything on a global scale, unless you assume some kind of insane velocity at impact.

Even a 500m wide asteroid cannot affect anything across an entire planet -- that is, unless you were so desperate as to argue "damage" might mean something like a global stock market crash

No: it requires either a typical asteroid be as massive as a 2 km-wide asteroid.

I don't know. Why did they change the definition of an event horizon so that it's no longer a mathematically defined radius but some energy barrier that can be broken through?
It's not up to me to explain why would it be different. It's up to you to prove that it is not different since that is the critical assumption upon which you build the contradiction with directly observed events.

So? Something we see is the best evidence, of course, but you seem to act as if any statement that's not backed up with a completely iron-clad, unambiguous piece of corroborative visual evidence is essentially worthless. Our "job" as such is to do the best we can of fitting all the data we have under the same umbrella -- hence things like Michael's hypothesis that shields are weak against plasma.

But you're not doing the best job since you are intentionally making assumptions that will inflate photon torpedo yields beyond what we know their ships can take. And for the hundred time: even if their shields are unusually weak against plasma their weapons and thus shields are still limited by said events.
Is the "Cost of Living" drastically changed if the asteroid would only actually destroy a city? Is the situation any less urgent? You act as if disregarding Datas statement of "planet wide damage" is actually dismissing some great piece of data which causes huge problems when this is simply not the case.

For the same reason they stop other particle beams -- namely, phasers and disruptors. I will say that I think a Shadow cruiser's firepower might make fairly short work of GCS-level shielding, however. I figure its energy is realistically the equivalent of a full spread of photon torpedoes -- well above 1,500 TW, but probably not as high as 20,000 TW.

But then, we were talking about one Shadow ship opposite a Borg cube, which has far more resilient shields than any GCSs.

So they stop some particle beams and completely fail against others. Again why should we assume they'll work against Shadows? The fact they fail against mundane stuff diffuse gasses and proton/neutron beams suggests they are specifically optimized against whatever phasers and disruptors are composed off and thus are unlikely to be effective against completely unknown Shadow beams.
Borg Cube is more resilient than a Galaxy but not much more. Large Borg ships are destroyed by less than 100TW and even assuming that it had no shields we know that shields provide the same order of magnitude of protection so we are still in hundreds of TW range. Shadow beam will rip through it easily.
And that is giving every assumption to Borg: that their shields are unusually susceptible to simple gasses but will be at 100% against Shadow beams, using upper limit for how much energy their absorbed from the star and using the lower limit for Shadow beam.

"Possible" in the sense that we can't rule out the possibility that fighters were buzzing around there. As you said earlier, at that range, we couldn't see the things. And since we did NOT see them, the possibility remains an intellectual curiosity -- nothing more.

But if one is using the scene as an absolute upper limit then it's really up to him to come up with clear proof one way or another isn't it? Otherwise he must acknowledge the fact that the scene doesn't unequivocally provide an upper limit for Shadow ship resilience.

In other words, "You don't know that it wasn't a fighter!"

You're continuing to appeal to ignorance. We saw a Shadow warship near the explosion. Debris moved away from the blast in a manner we would expect from a destroyed Shadow warship.

Further, if the fragments closely match a Shadow warship's features, the parsimonious explanation is that a Shadow warship was blown to bits -- not that fighters, which we couldn't even see, are so badly mangled by the explosion* that they suddenly grow in size and look like clearly identifiable parts of a "battlecrab."

*That very idea is absurd, btw. The White Star could blow those little things away effortlessly. The bomb's energy would've easily vaporized any fighters nearby. I will, however, note that, as Brian points out on Babtech, it's a great testament to a Shadow cruiser's constitution that it was not vaporized by the blast. Their so-called organic armor is as impressive as anything Brian or I can think of.

But this entire line of reasoning started with your claim that Shadow beam can't be more than 10MT/s because that is the proven upper limit on their resilience. I showed that it is not proven since there is a possibility that those were the debris of other ships. It is one thing to say that one thing is the most likely explanation and another to say it's proven.
How do you know the bomb would vaporize those fighters? What would be the energy they would absorb? How does that energy match up with vaporization requirement for iron?
Now, again, I'm not claiming Shadow ships can withstand 10MT the number I'm using is roughly 50kt/s obtained from the fact that it could withstand Sharlin's beam for several seconds.

I said it's possible some battleships are larger than others, did I not?

By the way, you should have rechecked Brandon's conclusions. It looks like the battleship is closer to the camera than the transport. The Vorlon fighters are closer to the camera still; you'd do better to scale the battleship relative to the fighters' size.

I think Brandon either made a mistake in using the transport as a benchmark, or he simply used it because it'd yield bigger numbers.

Tim Earls said Vorlon fighters are 21m long. Some of his other figures are pretty weird, like the near-500m long White Star.

Regardless, I don't have any measurements to the contrary, so I'll go with his number.

According to my scaling, that battleship is less than 787m long.

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1014/460 ... 7cd4_o.jpg
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4009/460 ... e9a0_o.jpg



The fighters were slightly closer to the camera, so that is an upper-limit. But I think it is probably quite close to that particular ship's length.

780m is large, but it is a LONG way from 1,400.

How can the transport possibly be farther away from the camera? It's above the left arm of the battleship. The one with the green line going through it, you can see its shadow to the right also with a green line through it. It is as long as the dark gray stripe plus one light gray. That puts the battleship at about 1.4km long without question.
Secondly your measurement is NOT an upper limit since the fighters are closer to the camera as well. That is therefore a lower limit for the size of the battleship.
There is also no indications that Vorlon battleships come in different sizes.

Marcus Cole is familiar with a lot of starships. He did say that he was having trouble with his instruments, but he's seen a 5 mile-long B5 opposite many of those ships. There's no way he meant "34 miles." His estimate could be off, but it's highly doubtful he'd underestimate the thing's size by an order of magnitude. (For what it's worth, Brian told me the filming script indicated the VPK was 15 km. wide.)

Whatever the explanation the planetkiller can easily be scaled from battleship in front of it which is less wide than the planetkillers blue band. Thus the planetkiller's central body is no less than 40km wide putting the entire ship at 50km wide and long.

Not exactly catastrophic?

Again, damn, son Are you even reading what I write?

This shit is getting frustrating, dude. I CLEARLY said it'd take SEVERAL such hits to do catastrophic damage, did I not?

*looks up the page* Yep. That's what I said alright.

I'm afraid you lost me. This entire argument started when you said that Shadow beam can't be 35MT/s because then it would instantly obliterate Vorlon battleship. I then pointed out that since Vorlon ship could have up to 10 times greater volume than a Shadow ship it could be resistant enough not to be immediately gutted by the Shadow beam. In other words it would take several shots. Which is what you are claiming. So where is the problem?

While I appreciate your accuracy, you're missing my point. Those numbers were purely illustrative; I wasn't striving for such a degree of realism. The whole idea is to draw your attention to the fact that a few terawatts only drained the shields by THOUSANDTHS of a percent yet, according to your reasoning, jumping from something like 6.4 TW to 6.54 instantly knocks out shields and blows a ship up in another case.

But that realism is critical. The idea that you can simply take power rating and multiply it by a long time interval and call that "shield capacity" is completely devoid of reality. You could shoot a 0.6MW beam for years and not melt the metal. That doesn't mean it's "capacity" is hundreds of TJ. And that is the core of the point: your "THOUSANDTHS of a percent" figure is completely meaningless since it ignores the fact that the shields would have hours to reradiate the given energy. 3TW time 3 hours IS NOT THE SHIELD CAPACITY.
I already provided this thought experiment but here it goes again: suppose that the reradiation rate of a shield is 10TW and it's capacity is 1TJ. 10.1TW will take 10 seconds to overwhelm the shields while 10.3TW will take 3 seconds. 1.98% increase in power causes 300% increase in effectiveness.

Why not? You were talking about my theoretical iron plate. Shields are somewhat like that, but it's too loose of an analogy to predict what the deflector can or can't take.

See above and previous post. You don't factor in the fact the shields will have the time to shed the excess energy.

[Kojiro]

No it's the same type of the ship. I'm talking about the one with the green line going through it. You can clearly see in its shadow (also with green line through it) that the main body with wings is separated from the "head" with tendrils.

Just a quick note- the Vorlon Transport (the ship in the hangar) looks virtually identical to the Vorlon Destroyer when it's petals are folded in. Are you certain this is not a destroyer- the same kind of ship that rammed the shadow vessel (according the B5 Wars they can come in 4 different colours)? Typically when we see a transport flying about it has its petals open (barring docking), where this one does not. A destroyer would hardly be out of place.

Not saying it *is* a destroyer, just that the two are very similar.

[Themightytom]

No it's the same type of the ship. I'm talking about the one with the green line going through it. You can clearly see in its shadow (also with green line through it) that the main body with wings is separated from the "head" with tendrils.

Just a quick note- the Vorlon Transport (the ship in the hangar) looks virtually identical to the Vorlon Destroyer when it's petals are folded in. Are you certain this is not a destroyer- the same kind of ship that rammed the shadow vessel (according the B5 Wars they can come in 4 different colours)? Typically when we see a transport flying about it has its petals open (barring docking), where this one does not. A destroyer would hardly be out of place.

Not saying it *is* a destroyer, just that the two are very similar.

Maybe they use a juvenile destroyer as a transport?

[Kane Starkiller]

I'm afraid I'm only familiar with the show. I don't remember seeing any evidence of the existence of a "destroyer" other than "Ulkesh type transport"-basically normal transport colored orange.

[NecronLord]

As an aside, thanks for the upper limit on Vorlon battleship size, Sean. Always good to have some new information on the Vorlons. I'll have to catch up on this thread properly when time permits.

No it's the same type of the ship. I'm talking about the one with the green line going through it. You can clearly see in its shadow (also with green line through it) that the main body with wings is separated from the "head" with tendrils.

Just a quick note- the Vorlon Transport (the ship in the hangar) looks virtually identical to the Vorlon Destroyer when it's petals are folded in. Are you certain this is not a destroyer- the same kind of ship that rammed the shadow vessel (according the B5 Wars they can come in 4 different colours)? Typically when we see a transport flying about it has its petals open (barring docking), where this one does not. A destroyer would hardly be out of place.

Not saying it *is* a destroyer, just that the two are very similar.

The petals are foldable. I don't get why anyone would think they were meant to be a different ship type. The Vorlons pretty obviously use that design for transport, and various other tasks, as shown particularly in Thirdspace (where for some reason, the insides of the petals are dark). B5wars was very keen to make up derivative ships, like several sizes of battlecrab, for the obvious reason of selling models. I'd be a bit iffy on their destroyer/transport distinction.

[seanrobertson]

NecronLord,

I'm always happy to be of some use to this site

However, Kane is right: I was wrong when I said upper-limit. My mind was elsewhere when I said that (see ARSE).

Since the fighters are closer to the camera than the battleship, the battleship's length is actually a lower-limit, though I think the actual value's close.

As embarrassing as that was -- and I was going to mention this in my reply to Kane, which will take time given my other commitments/problems -- I'm even more embarrassed to admit this ...

See the image with the VBB, the fighters and the transport?

When I said "transport," I was talking about the ship at the far right of the image ... a damned fighter.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!

As I said at the outset, I freely admit I'm rusty at all this; it's been years, after all. I don't remember how to calculate P = U/c as I used to, for example. And it has been almost four years since I've watched a full B5 episode. But in my zeal to be "right," I fucked up.

In any case, if we go with Tim Earls' figure on a Vorlon fighter's size, my scaling is correct; the battleship is no less than 787m long but, given how close the fighters were, it's probably not much longer than 800m.

Contrarily, if we go by independent scaling of the transport/destroyer/what-have-you, that ship is indeed more like 1.3 km long. (Since the transport-type is ~3 times longer than the fighters, that'd mean they are, in turn, probably over 30m long themselves.)

I would tend to favor measurements based on what WE can verify; as such, even though it doesn't necessarily help my position in the thread, I'd lean toward the 1.3 km long figure for the battleship. After all, as I said myself, Tim Earls has been known to come up with some weird figures -- albeit the fact that his numbers typically exaggerated ships' sizes.

Even though it's a relatively inconsequential point in the greater context of my argument with Kane, I'll confer with Brian and take a closer look at the transport's length.

[Kojiro]

The petals are foldable. I don't get why anyone would think they were meant to be a different ship type. The Vorlons pretty obviously use that design for transport, and various other tasks, as shown particularly in Thirdspace (where for some reason, the insides of the petals are dark). B5wars was very keen to make up derivative ships, like several sizes of battlecrab, for the obvious reason of selling models. I'd be a bit iffy on their destroyer/transport distinction.

The ship that rammed the shadow cruiser is of this same configuration (though admittedly red in colouration) and it's clearly larger than a transport (easily seen when it smashes through the crab). It also had the firepower to mess up the shadow ship. Wihle B5 Wars was eager to sell models (such as the vorlon light cruiser which we never see) I think you'll find the vorlon destroyer idea is based off this ship. It's either a different class (or at the very least size) of ship or it's a transport that wasted the battle crab.

Not trying to be difficult or anything, just wanted to point out that such vessels exist in the canon and should be considered.

[seanrobertson]

Kane,

I apologize yet again for taking so long to reply. I have enjoyed our exchanges and the great challenge you have offered. Even though I find holes in your conclusions, I think you are formidable. I know you will have a [probably devastating!] response to this but, given my circumstances, this might be my last post in the thread -- at least, for awhile. I can't say for sure, but it might behoove me to stay away from the Internet for awhile; as of late, it's bought me an expensive lot of worries and trouble.

I have a quote-for-quote response saved in a document but, as you know, many of the points overlap. Rather than repeat myself several times, I'll save us both the bother and try to get at the meat of this. As you graciously offered, please point out if I've overlooked something.

Also, if I am harsh at times, I'm sorry. I don't intend to be.

Lengthy preambles aside ...

We have several different (albeit related) arguments going at once, but the main point of contention seems to concern the strength of Trek defenses. We need to settle that before we can tackle the rest IMO. I see our positions thusly:

Your argument: We see several Trek ships destroyed by solar flares. Even if the plasma bypasses shields altogether, that energy was still instantly lethal to the ships' bare hulls. Given that conventional Trek weapons are not that destructive [Let me intrude here. They're not always that destructive, but there are plenty of times that we've seen single hits destroy starships], it follows that said weapons must have much less energy than the flares imparted to the ships.

Pros:

1. Your hypothesis is grounded in observed phenomena. We see these things happen; thus, we know it is true that flares can be deadly to starships.

2. Your explanation has fewer terms than mine does.

3. Your take on my "iron slab" -- notably, that a small power variance can mean the difference between penetrating something and never even really scratching it -- is a fair enough rationalization why one or perhaps even two of the six ships were destroyed by flares (see "con" no. 3).

Cons: several in my eyes.

1. You make no effort to reconcile those flare figures with much, if any, dialogue about firepower, defensive strength, etc.

While dialogue is lesser evidence, it is still a form of evidence and any good explanation would try to account for it -- not dismiss it out-of-hand or repeatedly blow off statements as vaguerisms.

2. Subsequently, you've many times charged that some of the dialogue is vague and any figures derived therefrom are based on assumptions.

While that is true to an extent, you overlook the fact that my interpretation of this "vague" dialogue is quite consistent with many other things we are told throughout Trek's various iterations.

A few examples:

*Kirk's Enterprise supposedly had enough firepower to destroy an industrialized planet's major cities per General Order 24. This would be almost impossible if their weapons were limited to the terajoule range, but a low megaton-range torpedo complement (e.g., 200 fifty kiloton warheads), coupled with phasers' exaggerated effects against light elements, could make a successful bombardment more than viable.

*Riker expects to destroy a large asteroid, which would require his torpedoes yield at least hundreds of kilotons.

*When the Enterprise lost shields in "Q Who?", Data cautioned against using photon torpedoes, noting that a kilometer (or several)

distant explosion could destroy their ship. Even if Data was being overly cautious, in order to impart any meaningful amount of energy -- a few terajoules, at least -- to the hull from such range requires photorps yield in the hundreds of kT.

*Riker voices a similar concern in "The Nth Degree," wherein the ship has lost shields and cannot use torpedoes because a kilometer or more distant proximity detonation could destroy the ship. As I said, given that we've seen unshielded ships endure terawatt-range bombardment, damaging the Enterprise would seem to require that she'd be struck with at least several terajoules from the blast. Here again, the proximity of that blast requires that a photon torpedo yield into the hundreds of kT.

*Per "Deja Q," warp nine power requires something presumably close to, but ultimately less than, 30,000 TW.

*In "Best of Both Worlds," the deflector dish is used as a weapon, meant to channel the warp core's output. If it directed something close to warp nine power against the cube, ~30,000 TW, it would have an energy potentially greater than seventy 100 kT torpedoes or fourteen 500 kT torpedoes -- to say nothing of the fact that such a beam would have a far greater intensity. Either figure, and anything in between, comfortably fit LaForge's expectation that the beam would be more powerful than "anything their phasers or photon torpedoes could ever provide." (Note that I said power. The Enterprise can only launch so many torpedoes at once and, hence, "provide" only so much energy at one time.)

*"Broken Link": While Garak's claim, "We have enough firepower on this ship to turn that planet into a smoking cinder!" is clearly hyperbole, it would seem the Defiant does have the firepower to, in an unknown amount of time, sterilize the planet. Again, that would be impossible if her weapons were as limited as you suggest.

*"The Die Is Cast": Irrespective of "Colonel Lovok's" nonsensical estimates, it's safe to say that fleet could rather swiftly exterminate complex life, if not down to bacteria, on the Founder homeworld. In spite of the fact I think that fleet was using specialized torpedos -- the weird "ripple" effects we see couldn't be caused by any normal energy release, no matter how great -- they were also firing their disruptors, which would be pointless if they didn't contribute to the destruction.

*Apocalypse Rising": Damar said, "Personally, I think we'd be better off launching an orbital assault on Gowron's Command Center. A full spread of photon torpedoes would take care of him, the Klingon High Command and everyone else within a few hundred kilometers."

O'Brien retorted, "Shelling Ty'Gokor won't get the job done. You'd be lucky to launch one torpedo before they shot you down. And even a dozen wouldn't penetrate the shielding around the command center."

Interestingly ...

A 500 kT blast, or five 100 kT torpedoes going off simultaneously in the same area, would destroy all buildings in ~100 square kilometers.

A megaton blast would destroy buildings within 160 square km and leave everyone within 430 square kilometers suffering third-degree burns.

You might argue that Damar meant that a spread of torpedoes would kill everyone within a few hundred kilometers' radius, but the resulting figures are ridiculously high -- well into the gigaton range. The only Star Trek weapon with such a yield is that Cardassian missile with a metric ton AM charge.

Contrarily, someone might say Damar was as much a drunken fool as a Glinn as he later was a Gul and, later yet, a Legate.

At any rate, all of these figures can be reconciled as a consistent data set. Your hypothesis requires that we IGNORE this consistency, and more, simply because you assume the flares' energy is what makes them so deadly to unshielded hulls.

3. When I showed that the flares' energies were paltry opposite the background radiation, you concluded that the flares were that "little bit extra" that the ships could not handle. In other words, your hypothesis requires that it is a mere coincidence that the flares were the "straw that broke the camel's back" on six separate occasions.

That is outrageous, to put it kindly. If that were the case once, fine; but the likelihood of six different ships succumbing to the same fate for the very same reason is ridiculously low.

3. My earlier calculations were much too generous toward your position. You pointed out that the ambient radiation didn't disappear when the flares hit the ships, which is true.

However, it was foolish of me to let you add up a second's worth of ambient EM absorption and add that to the flare's energy

Why? Because all of the six ships that are destroyed by those flares blew up in far less than one second! In the case of the Klingon cruisers, shield loss and destruction took place in a single frame of video. Given the rate at which their shields absorbed background EM -- over 3.3 TW -- this means that, in the instant they are destroyed, the ships only had to cope with 220 GJ, plus the flare's upper-limit energy of 140 GJ.

However, you cannot simply add those figures up, either. As I noted, the shields handled 3.3 TJ over the course of a second without trouble. Therefore, the shields should have blocked the ambient radiation in that instant, leaving only the flare's energy to destroy the hull.

(Note: do I even have to say how generous that is as well? It could very well be that the shields soaked up a good portion of the flare's energy as well, leaving even less still to actually affect the hull.)

As I showed, Kurn's unshielded ship absorbed 2.2 TW or, on a single frame of video basis, MORE energy than the flare could EVER impart to his pursuers (<140 GJ for Lorgh's ships vs. over 145 for Kurn).

While I agree with you that these figures are really only good for order of magnitude estimates, that doesn't change my point in the least.

Whether it's 3.3 TW or the 1-10 TW range makes no difference; time and again, we see that the flares' energy is not only paltry versus what a fully shielded ship can take, those energies are also LESS THAN WHAT AN IDENTICAL SHIP CAN ENDURE WITHOUT SHIELDS!

Therefore, your interpretation that flares are so deadly to unshielded ships because of sheer energy seems flawed. Even if they do match some things we see, a few of which you noted, the resulting photorp and phaser figures you'd have us accept are far too small to account for the things I listed above. And the "straw breaking the camel's back" idea might've worked once or twice, but to suggest it coincidentally worked out that way for SIX different ships is downright fucking incredible.


My argument:

Flares are deadly to starships because of shields' weakness to plasma, coupled with extremely intense magnetic fields fucking over a ship's power systems.

I spelled all of this out in my previous reply, but you didn't seem to understand my argument. For instance, you didn't mention anything when I pointed out all of those quotes in "Symbiosis," which made it rather plain that mundane magnetic fields some A.U. away caused trouble.

You did not address the potential likelihood that tens of thousands of gauss would have catastrophic effects on a ship's power systems, especially when unshielded.

Cons:

1. It's less parsimonious than your explanation.
2. It assumes ramping up the magnetic fields by orders of magnitude would have commensurately greater effects against a starship's power

systems.
3. While my approach could easily look like I'm "working backwards" -- that is, starting from a conclusion and going from there -- that's not so. Once I realized that the solar flare figures made little, and I would argue no, sense, I realized a different interpretation of the facts was in order.

Pros:

1. I couple what we see with what we're told. My idea does not require that we play dumb about Riker's statement in "Pegasus" or quibble over something as self-evident as the supposed difference between "global" and "world-wide," among many other things. We do not have to glibly ignore lots of information that consistently indicates photon torpedoes typically yield into the hundreds of kilotons circa TNG onward. To that end, and unlike your idea, mine does not require that we obtusely pretend that, when an XO shouts, "Fire torpedoes, maximum yield, full spread!" and those torpedoes fail to defeat a comparable enemy's shields, that "maximum yield" means anything less than hundred kT warheads.

Simply put, I think I account for that which you do not. Additional terms or no, parsimony is only good if it fits all the facts at hand.

2. As a corrolary to #1, my explanation also permits us to quantify shield strength. As I noted early in the thread, if a K'Vort-class cruiser can withstand 5 high-yield torpedoes and only suffer moderate shield damage, that means its shield can cope with hundreds of kilotons at a rate of thousands of terawatts. (Assume torpedoes are 100 kT. 5 explode on the cruiser's shields, but only a quarter or so of that 500 kT actually strikes the target. Therefore, the cruiser's shields are good for 125 kT -- over 500 TJ -- in the span of a split-second.)

A GCS is superior, but not by much; 3 K'Vorts overpowered the Enterprise-D. Thus, it would seem her defenses are limited to the hundreds of kilotons range as well.

But then, the thread's not really about Klingons or Galaxies, is it?

A Borg cube is a match for small fleets, so I don't think it's unreasonable to expect its defenses are an order of magnitude greater; i.e., somewhere in the low megaton range. This would be consistent with the cube's ability to cope with the deflector blast in "BoBW" and the manner in which it shrugged off photon torpedo detonations that might have damaged, if not actually destroyed, a kilometers-distant Enterprise. It would explain why a cube can easily whip the Enterprise but eventually succumb to dozens of ships.

As it stands, then, I think my initial conclusions were correct. A large Minbari fleet could take the cube down. A Shadow warship would seem a rough match for a cube, and I strongly suspect the typical small Shadow attack force would dispatch the Borg ship.

The cube would have a firepower at least on par with a GCS's, which is greater than any Young Race weapons I can think of. YR weapons can kill Shadow ships given a sustained attack, and it would appear that split-second exposure to three Narn cruisers' beam weapons is enough to render a Shadow cruiser combat ineffective. Remember the ship which had its next to longest spike severed in "The Long, Twilight Struggle"? That left the ship adrift. Therefore, it is not necessary to blast the ship with megatons of energy to "win" a fight with it.

I have never shirked away from the chance a Shadow weapon would bypass a cube's defenses altogether. We don't know if that'd be the case or not, so we have to consider both possibilities. Furthermore, while a Shadow's beam is at least as energetic as a spread of photon torpedoes, it is more intense; then again, so was the Enterprise's deflector weapon, which easily could have directed similar or somewhat greater energy levels -- to no effect, I might add. (Yes, Locutus knew about the weapon, so the Borg were ready for it.

Regardless, the cube's shields had to be strong enough to handle the energy, adaptation or no. All they did was adjust their shields such that they were no longer vulnerable to certain frequencies.)

If this thread were about a war between the Borg and Shadows, I've little doubt who would win: the Shadows. The Collective has advantages, including potentially far greater speeds and per-unit superiority, however slight. It would seem they have a large fleet as well.

But the Borg are slow to react. The Shadows aren't when it's time to rock and roll. The death cloud would be devastating to Borg-controlled planets and the unicomplex(es), and the Shadows have assembled a much larger fleet -- supposedly many thousands of ships -- than we've ever known the Borg to mobilize for any single engagement. (Arturis said "hundreds" of cubes invaded his home system. Even if that's true, several thousand > however many hundred.)

A few miscellaneous notes:

*I strongly disagree with your idea that a typical Trek ship's shields only offer a few times greater protection than the hull itself. While that might hold true of Defiant's ablative armor, that's not apples to apples, Kane.

Indeed, according to figures to which you gave tacit approval, shields coped with TW-range bombardment, but the hull succumbed to an order of magnitude less energy.

*You claim otherwise, but I never saw you demonstrate that being in close proximity to a star threatened a shielded starship. You alluded to "Redemption Pt. II," which I'll tackle momentarily, and "Shadows and Symbols" to boot; however, you never showed me the money. No quotes. No vidcaps. Nothing.

*Actually, let me back up: what I just said isn't entirely true. You did cite "Redemption Pt. II."

Unfortunately, you also misquoted Worf in the process:

1:40 KURN:transfer auxilliary power to shields
1:47 WORF: the shields are gone
2:15-2:17 external shot of BoP, you can clearly see the shield impact effects thus the shields are back up
2:24 WORF: shields failing, outer hull temperature exceeding design limit
2:45 external shot of the sun, still several diameters away
Again it is clear as day that coming close to a star puts severe stress on a ship flares or no flares. Obviously BoP was under attack and damaged and not up to specs but this is simply one of several incidents that shows that approaching a star is not childs play which limits their shield and hull resistance.

At 1:47, Worf actually said, "Aft shields are gone."

By the time we see the exterior shot, with Kurn's shields taking several hits, Worf could easily have transferred forward shield power toward the rear.

And as I said before, only after the shields fail are we told that the hull temperature became a problem, which also suggests that shields offer a much greater degree of protection than you've asserted.

So, honestly, man, how did you ever show that approaching a star is that big of a deal? You didn't quote jack from "Shadows ... ." I poured over its script and couldn't find anything to support that claim. And you're overlooking the ease with which the Enterprise entered a Sol-like star's* chromosphere in "I Borg." Picard never freaked out and ordered warp power to shields or any such thing; on approach, he calmly said, "More power to forward shields."

*The star in "I Borg" was enough like our own that it had a habitable planet. (The small part of the planet we saw was covered in snow, but it was not so cold that the pajama brigade started shivering. Shit, they couldn't even see their own breath.)

About Reliant's phaser cannon:

Secondly 1-10TW estimate on the main page comes from technical manual that states it takes 2.4TJ to vaporize a cubic meter of tritanium or 40 times more than iron. Since this is a non-canon source these numbers are irrelevant. Micheal Wong, I suspect, is only using them to demonstrate that even with those numbers the weapons can't be much higher than 1-10TW. If we use iron as a baseline the numbers fall accordingly. Assuming 20m long, 2m wide and 4m deep gash and 90% air that's 16m3 requiring 1TJ to be vaporized. Over roughly 3 seconds that is on the order of 330GW.

That's not so bad, seeing as how those beams are vaporizing materials that might be an order of magnitude better than what we have today.

I also imagine that a big ship like a GCS would have much more powerful phasers than old and little Reliant.

On that note, "Galaxy's Child" indicates a GCS can comfortably dial its phasers down to 3%. Given that Data and LaForge were concerned about a variance as small as 60 GW in "A Matter of Time," it'd appear that phasers output at least 2 TW -- which, of course, doesn't consider the possibility that they are more effective against shields and, to a far greater degree, very light elements/combinations thereof (things like water, silicates, etc.).

Concerning the reason I put a Miranda-class ship into the chase/flare scene in "Redemption Pt. II":

Now, before you say that this contradicts "Survivors" because it means that Miranda should be able to drop the shields of a Galaxy class with a single shot please understand that none of the numbers we calculate when working with stellar radiation or material properties are good for more than rough order of magnitude estimates.

Maybe I didn't explain it well enough or got side-tracked with all of that talk of inconsistency, but I intended the Miranda example was to illustrate how just ONE of her weapons can dish out at least an order of magnitude greater energy than a solar flare would likely impart to her. (Admittedly, I initially said two, citing Michael's figures. Sure enough, those numbers were based on the TM stuff. While I wish that were still admissible for simplicity's sake, I do think the 64 megaton torpedoes and like were entirely too high.)

By the way you seem very certain that Riker would know what is the energy required to shatter an asteroid. I'm honestly curious do you think the commanding officer of an Ohio class submarine knows the energy required to crater a small island, say 1000m wide and 10m average elevation so that it is completely flooded? I actually don't know so I'm really asking if you know whether such matters are a part of its training and whether this is something he is expected to know.

You'd really need to ask somebody like Lonestar about it, or Ender perhaps. I'm quite sure he was/is was in the USN also. I've not seen either post in quite awhile

That said, I would expect that the C.O. would have a pretty good, if general, idea had he crater-flooded small islands before. You know, like Riker, who's watched the Enterprise blow up several asteroids, ranging from small to I would argue rather large, on several occasions prior to the events in "Pegasus."

I explained this many times.
In First Contact the fleet actually starts digging a hole thus shields are gone. Photon torpedoes, quantum torpedoes and phasers are flying into the hole and the ship is relatively undamaged the hole is maybe 100m wide and 100m deep.

But dude, that's not what you said earlier. Maybe you misspoke or something, but what you wrote clearly describes torpedoes exploding on the cube's surface: "We have seen many photon torpedo impacts against [the] bare hull during the First Contact Borg battle."

Yes, certainly, the cube's shields were down around the area of that "hole" which, incidentally, I'd note seemed to be quite a bit deeper than 100m (for the little that's worth). Any mouth-breather might understand why a bunch of big bombs going off inside the cube would be lethal; but then, that's not what we were talking about.

(Another aside: I'm told that the novelization, while non-canon, notes that, when Picard hears the Borg, he learns that the area in which he orders the fleet to fire has lost its shields. Since cubes are decentralized, that's a fair explanation why he picked that target. It certainly doesn't contradict Data's statement that the coordinates indicated did "not appear to be a vital system.")

Again Descent clearly shows that the combined firepower of the phasers and photon torpedoes can't be greater than the combination of EM radiation and flares. Certainly not tens of times greater which would be the case with megaton level torpedoes.

When the bulk of the prominence hit the Borg ship in "Descent," it went up like a Roman candle in about a quarter-second. Per my figures, the flare's energy was less than 7 TJ. In a quarter-second, that ship could've only absorbed 16 TJ from background radiation (again, assuming a rather conservative 500,000 km altitude. More on that later if I get the chance).

Just as it was with the Klingon ships, the Type 3 bruiser had NO trouble with 16 TJ on a quarter-second basis for ... what was it? Over 5 minutes?

Right: over five minutes.

Therefore, the background EM is a non-issue; the shields would handle that just as they had for minutes on-end. All that was left was the flare's energy, resulting in that uncannily coincidencal "last straw," pushing the ship from shielded to a cloud of hot gas in an instant.

Odd that the shields offered over 10 times more protection than that ship's bare hull did, eh? Just like in "Redemption Pt. II," where shielded ships were going seemingly going along just fine, but an unshielded one immediately got hot as hell.


On the Defiant's resilience against a Klingon attack cruiser:

In ST3 I guess it's possible that Kruge got the shields up although he specifically ordered energy to weapons.

True. I would have to think it'd be crazy to not raise shields, but then, Kruge was rather crazy, wasn't he?

However there are more incidents.
In "Way of the warrior" Defiant lowers it shields while being fired upon by a Vor'Cha to rescue the Detapa council. Worf fires a tractor beam at the Vor'Cha which reduces its weapon effectiveness by 50% and Defiant manages to withstand its fire for 2 minutes as it transports the council.

I hear ya, but in another episode, Vor'cha-class Bortas destroyed a significantly larger ship with a single disruptor bolt. Attack cruisers easily blew some Cardassian capships in "Sacrifice of Angels" and "What You Leave Behind" to hell, and Galors utterly dwarf Defiant.

Naturally, we have to keep in mind that starships aren't lumps of rock. One lucky hit or well-aimed shot could have an effect greater than multiple less precise attacks.

Be that as it may, I wonder ... maybe the Klingons weren't quite ready to destroy the Defiant and, as such, limited their fire to disable her. That fits with their later effort to negotiate with Sisko before actually attacking DS9, which they initially regarded as a soft target.

Concerning our on-going melee about "Pegasus":

By digging to the cave in which the ship was and concentrating the power on the ship?
No need to blow up every last molecule of the asteroid.

This verges on a straw man. I said shatter the asteroid, which is the minimum requirement for destroying the asteroid. But shattering the thing such that no fragments exceed 10m in diameter is hardly blowing up every last molecule.

Read or listen to the dialogue. When Riker proposed destroying the thing, they didn't know where the ship was inside the asteroid; concentrating fire would be impossible.


About your example of the Voyager's crew's stupidity:

So they picked up 4TW before they picked up 10^32W? Not that it would make sense either way. Somehow a cm wide black hole puts out the energy equal to 100,000 suns. It's nonsense.

You're right. It's really stupid. If we cease suspending disbelief for a moment, you and I both know those writers don't know a terawatt from a bucket full of cat shit.

In another VGR episode, Harry Kim jerked Seven away from a panel she'd just opened, exclaiming, "There are 5 million gigawatts running through there!" Problematic as that is on several levels, the most incongruous thing was Seven's reply: "The exoskeleton on this limb can withstand it." Fucking pitiful.

I would, however, reiterate: sensor readings of an alien technology or some freakishly bizarre stellar phenomenon are very different than knowing the yield of your own torpedoes and/or measuring something's diameter.


In response to this:

All those numbers are within a rough order of magnitude: high GW/GJ and low TW/TJ. They don't match up perfectly since the events don't allow precise calculations.
However the precision (order of magnitude) is more than enough to be certain that at least a thousand times more powerful weapon will be able to obliterate those ships in less than a second.

I fully agree that our calculations are inherently rough, but wait a sec.: are you seriously suggesting that a 200-year-old ship, whose "low-yield particle beams" were scoffed at by the Klingons of the time, and a small variance in a more modern phaser support your position?

That's what we were discussing. The NX-01's weapons and a small phaser calibration.

Qui-Gonn held you in such high esteem. Surely you can do better!

So, too, could you do improve on the following point -- that is, by simply being truthful:

You keep repeating that few TW only drain the shields at "a rate of two thousands of a percent per second" when I have demonstrated several times how reradiation rate of the shields means that it is incorrect to simply multiply power rating and time interval and call that "shield capacity". Did you read my 0.6MW laser example?
ISS sits in orbit for years. At 1,400W/m2 in a year it will absorb 220GJ of energy. If a 20GW laser hits it and blows it up instantly then that is a contradiction according to your logic.

I must protest that this is complete bullshit. I have NEVER said you can "multiply [a] power rating and time interval and call that 'shield capacity'." That's the very definition of strawmandering. THIS is what I wrote, Kane:

"So, tell me: why didn't this photorp, which is well over 1,000 times more effective against shields than a few terawatts, pour over 1,000 TJ into those shields? That's in-line with what Riker expected of photorp performance in "Pegasus," and it's certainly consistent with a civilization that uses antimatter warheads instead of chemical weapons or nuclear devices, both of which would be cheaper to manufacture and much safer to load and maintain."

No siree. If I wanted to multiply power by a time interval, I would masturbate to "Relics" and say that even a crippled ship could withstand 100,000 TJ all at once. That's complete horseshit, sure enough; however, if I were inclined to argue such a silly position, THAT -- not a few hundred or even 1,000 terajoules -- is more in line what I'd say. Well into the tens of megatons. That's a big difference.


On your "beyond maximum" torpedoes:

I have also pointed out that the fact a civilization is capable of building a warhead of certain size that doesn't mean their ships can withstand comparable firepower.

And I countered that we hear, "Fire torpedoes. Maximum yield, full spread!" and yet, these high-yield torpedoes do not necessarily defeat enemy shields, nevermind destroying them.

I'm not talking Borg ships, Shinzon's wanked-out ride or something a "superbeing" cooked up, either. I'm talking ships that are on a rough par with the Enterprise.

Ergo, if those torpedoes yield what we can repeatedly infer they should, shields are measurably depleted by, but can handle, hundreds of kilotons of energy at a rate of several thousand terawatts.

Your explanation requires that we pretend the characters are doing a bunch of stuff offscreen to create something way beyond standard specifications. Sorry, but we don't see that, and no one says anything to give us reason to suspect that happens every time an asteroid or city is targeted. The only reason you think it's so is because of those solar flares, and I have demonstrated why the conclusions based on as much are dubious at best.

Also you say that assuming shields are susceptible to flares clears the way for high yield photon torpedoes when that is simply not the case: I already demonstrated their weapons aren't capable of quickly destroying unshielded targets and that EM radiation itself is dangerous to their ships therefore there is absolutely no room for multimegaton shield capacity.

Again, pardon me for saying so, but really: this is bullshit times two, three and four. You have never demonstrated that EM is dangerous to anything except an unshielded cruiser which was under enemy fire. You ignore plenty of times when we DO see unarmored starships blown away by a single blast. And you totally ignored my explanation to reconcile most of the data we have.

Your claim of contradiction, as I pointed out above in my post, is dependent on assumption that calculated flare and ambient radiation is precise within 100GJ/GW and thus, if smaller, it contradicts the phaser figures. Those numbers however are only a rough order of magnitude which all agree (along with phaser yields) that their shield and weapons are in high GW/GJ or low TW/TJ range. No more precision is required to conclude a 1,500TW weapon will blow them up effortlessly.

Suppressed evidence. Does that ring any bells?

The phaser/flare comparison is only one among MANY, and you know it.

About a Shadow cruiser being blown straight to hell:

But if one is using the scene as an absolute upper limit then it's really up to him to come up with clear proof one way or another isn't it?

Otherwise he must acknowledge the fact that the scene doesn't unequivocally provide an upper limit for Shadow ship resilience.

...

But this entire line of reasoning started with your claim that Shadow beam can't be more than 10MT/s because that is the proven upper limit on their resilience. I showed that it is not proven since there is a possibility that those were the debris of other ships. It is one thing to say that one thing is the most likely explanation and another to say it's proven.
How do you know the bomb would vaporize those fighters? What would be the energy they would absorb? How does that energy match up with vaporization requirement for iron?
Now, again, I'm not claiming Shadow ships can withstand 10MT the number I'm using is roughly 50kt/s obtained from the fact that it could withstand Sharlin's beam for several seconds.

In all candor, I think you're selling your position a bit short here. I actually do think it'd take close to a megaton or so to utterly destroy a Shadow cruiser, although it would seem to take far less to take one out of a fight, as I noted before.

And while I appreciate that you agree about the 10 MT upper-limit, I do not understand why you continue to try and sow seeds of doubt over its destruction.

I mean, how did you show the debris seen is anything but the warship's? I don't see any diagrams. I don't see any comparisons with fighters or scouts. You mentioned that fighters could have been in that scene, only we couldn't see them. It's laughable to think we'd see debris from those things, which would be smaller still!

Are conclusions based on this scene as absolutely certain as God riding a bolt of lightning down to us and declaring, "Thou shalt now and forever know that the scene in question depicts a Shadow cruiser's destruction"? No.

It doesn't have to be. It is the best explanation of what happened. The debris seen closely matches parts of a cruiser. The path in which the debris moved is what we'd expect from the cruiser closest to the blast.

If you have a problem with that, I respectfully challenge you to present evidence to the contrary.

Finally:

But that realism is critical. The idea that you can simply take power rating and multiply it by a long time interval and call that "shield capacity" is completely devoid of reality. You could shoot a 0.6MW beam for years and not melt the metal. That doesn't mean it's "capacity" is hundreds of TJ. And that is the core of the point: your "THOUSANDTHS of a percent" figure is completely meaningless since it ignores the fact that the shields would have hours to reradiate the given energy. 3TW time 3 hours IS NOT THE SHIELD CAPACITY.

Quote me when I said that it was. I've reviewed the thread, and closest I ever came to saying any such thing was when I said the following:

Based on Michael's findings, shields' long-term endurance and something close to their burst-capacity needn't be orders of magnitude apart.

Orders of magnitude, as in 2-3, though probably not more.

And:


Shields aren't iron plates, obviously, but the principle isn't wildly different: If we know that a few terawatts are indeed enough to very, very slowly drain shields (by one "percent" -- whatever that really means -- every 469.5 seconds), just why are you assuming they can't cope with something significantly more powerful if only for brief periods of time?

I mean, come on: a couple of terawatts drain shields by ~two thousandths per second. Thousandths, Kane.

It seems patently absurd to suggest something ten times more powerful would even pose a short-term threat. When you get into the hundreds and thousands range, I can clearly see how things would change.

Hundreds and thousands, at which point things change. Not ten thousand or over one hundred thousand.

Sounds pretty consistent with the figures I submitted in this post.

What do you think, Kane? And what do some of the rest of you think? It seems as if anytime I engage someone in these lengthy debates, everybody else steps back and want no part of it Far be it for me to appeal to popularity, but it'd be nice to hear from someone who's truly paid attention to all this and has an objective take on it.

In the meantime, brinuti se vidjeti, Kane. And I thank you from the heart for providing me with this great debate, which has distracted me from my troubles.

[Batman]

SOME of us stay out of them because at least every once in a while, we realize we don't really know what we're talking about
And I'm not really happy with basing ANY calculations on the swiss army deflector dish beam from BoBW because not only have we no clue how much energy actually went INTO it, we don't know how much energy it put OUT, and given the technobabble nature of a lot of Star Trek technology, we don't really know HOW it was supposed to work or even what it was supposed to do in the first place. We don't even have any EFFECTS to determine its yield from because it achieved absolutely nothing (other than glowing prettily and burning out the deflector dish).
And on a mostly completely irrelevant tangent, 30,000TW for Warp 9 is surprisingly low. Unless Warp cores are inefficient as hell, that's less than 30 tons of reactant for a whole day at Warp 9. A mere 11,000 tons would provide a Galaxy with a year's worth of fuel for that speed.

[seanrobertson]

Those are fine thoughts, Batman.

Please keep in mind that, considered in isolation, none of those examples mean a heck of a lot. The main reason I brought up the deflector dish weapon was to illustrate that such an output could be easily enough reconciled with a much greater body of consistent data.

[Batman]

Those are fine thoughts, Batman.
Please keep in mind that, considered in isolation, none of those examples mean a heck of a lot. The main reason I brought up the deflector dish weapon was to illustrate that such an output could be easily enough reconciled with a much greater body of consistent data.

I have no intention of getting involved in the rest of the discussion, that's WAY over my head.
I was commenting on the deflector beam of doom because REGARDLESS of how much power they had theoretically available to funnel into it, it's IMHO just too ill-defined to be useful for the reasons I stated.
I commented on the Warp 9 power issue because, as I said, it seemed surprisingly low, nothing more.
And I think it says something about how jaded one can become about SciFi when one can call 30,000 TW 'surprisingly low' and be perfectly serious

[seanrobertson]

Those are fine thoughts, Batman.
Please keep in mind that, considered in isolation, none of those examples mean a heck of a lot. The main reason I brought up the deflector dish weapon was to illustrate that such an output could be easily enough reconciled with a much greater body of consistent data.

I have no intention of getting involved in the rest of the discussion, that's WAY over my head.

But, but ... you're Batman!

I was commenting on the deflector beam of doom because REGARDLESS of how much power they had theoretically available to funnel into it, it's IMHO just too ill-defined to be useful for the reasons I stated.
I commented on the Warp 9 power issue because, as I said, it seemed surprisingly low, nothing more.
And I think it says something about how jaded one can become about SciFi when one can call 30,000 TW 'surprisingly low' and be perfectly serious

I understand.

There is a lot of guesswork involved there. To actually prove a cube's defenses are capable of withstanding a rather focused, multi-megaton/sec. beam is impossible.

[Batman]

But, but ... you're Batman!

I know I'm supposed to be qualified high expert on pretty much everything, but I'm reasonably certain Star Trek in general and TNG in special have never been officially STATED to be among the topics I am the world's most knowledgeable person on

I understand.
There is a lot of guesswork involved there. To actually prove a cube's defenses are capable of withstanding a rather focused, multi-megaton/sec. beam is impossible.

Actually, it's pathetically easy-with the right evidence. Which we, unfortunately, don't have.

[Lord Insanity]

I wrote this back on page 4.

"Q Who" part 4 of 5 on Youtube.

Watch the first minute and a half. Seriously is anyone in the B5 universe going to stop shooting and hold a damn conference after being attacked and then blowing several craters in the offending ship? Unless B5 weapons are way under ST levels a single Borg cube is going to die real quick.

Now if I followed the thread right you have subsequently agreed that B5 weapons (Narn/EA beamers and up) are at least within the same order of magnitude as ST weapons. Is there any evidence to suggest the Borg would not try to perform a first contact situation in the same manner in which they did in the above episode? The Borg didn't even raise their shields, if not for Picard's restraint the Enterprise could have easily destroyed the cube. Would anyone in B5 show that kind of restraint after being boarded and having their ship sliced into? So chances are really good that versus any single B5 ship with Narn/EA beamers or better, a single Borg Cube dies really fast.

Edit: minor grammatical mistake

[seanrobertson]

I wrote this back on page 4.

"Q Who" part 4 of 5 on Youtube.

Watch the first minute and a half. Seriously is anyone in the B5 universe going to stop shooting and hold a damn conference after being attacked and then blowing several craters in the offending ship? Unless B5 weapons are way under ST levels a single Borg cube is going to die real quick.

Now if I followed the thread right you have subsequently agreed that B5 weapons (Narn/EA beamers and up) are at least within the same order of magnitude as ST weapons.

Hmm ... not necessarily. I think I was on record saying a GCS should have a greater firepower than most, perhaps all, YR ships, including the Excalibur's main weapon.

Now, shattering a 250m wide sphere-shaped asteroid with a beam weapon is actually more impressive, and would require more energy, than doing the same task with a centrally-buried bomb. Even though Brian bent over backwards to be generous in considering the asteroid's size (e.g., I really don't think White Stars are 250m long), if it was that wide, it could've taken well over 8 kilotons/sec. to destroy the thing.

When Michael broke down Slave One's weapons in his "AOTC" review, he noted that shattering rocks with blasters might've required significantly more energy:

According to the SW2ICS, the midship guns have a per-shot yield of 2 kilotons, which would be enough to pulverize a well-consolidated 100-150 metre wide asteroid, assuming that the force-coupling efficiency of an energy bolt is equal to the force-coupling efficiency of a centrally buried chemical explosive. Of course, this is not the case, nor is it even close, so the 100-150 metre figure should be treated as an extremely generous estimate. An energy beam primarily heats the target, and the only form of force coupling is secondary, through gas expansion caused by rapid vapourization. Realistically, a 2 kiloton energy beam of perhaps 0.01 second duration would probably be limited to fragmenting an asteroid of only a few dozen metres in size rather than 100-150 (with a lot of heating, melting, and vapourization), which is closer to what we see in the film.

As such, the Excalibur's weapon might be into the hundreds of terajoules range, especially if we overlook the fact that the asteroid it shattered was not reduced to <10m fragments.

But that still doesn't bode so well for B5 ships opposite Starfleet's best -- IMO, at least.

Is there any evidence to suggest the Borg would not try to perform a first contact situation in the same manner in which they did in the above episode? The Borg didn't even raise their shields, if not for Picard's restraint the Enterprise could have easily destroyed the cube. Would anyone in B5 show that kind of restraint after being boarded and having their ship sliced into? So chances are really good that versus any single B5 ship with Narn/EA beamers or better, a single Borg Cube dies really fast.

Edit: minor grammatical mistake

Dumb as the Borg are, I rather doubt they would've sat there while their ship faced total destruction; nonetheless, that's an unknown and, for our purposes, not all that important.

What you propose is possible, but so far as I know, B5 weapons don't involve exotic chain-reactions or the like, a'la phasers; they do things the old-fashioned way, via what's come to be known in some SD.net circles as DET or direct energy transfer.

Well, we see how well raw energy release devices work against the cube in "Q Who?" Several spectacular, km-wide fireballs engulf the cube ... and as Worf laments, they didn't even damage the thing. Tricking one's way past their defenses with a frequency change is one thing; overwhelming their shields with raw power is another.

So, yeah, it's vaguely possible a cube would run aground the very first B5 warship it encountered. Just the same, I doubt it. In spite of a cube's relatively low density, it's still a massive ship. Dealing fatal damage to it before being destroyed in turn ... honestly, I just don't see that in the cards for single YR ships.

[Lord Insanity]

Now if I followed the thread right you have subsequently agreed that B5 weapons (Narn/EA beamers and up) are at least within the same order of magnitude as ST weapons.

Hmm ... not necessarily. I think I was on record saying a GCS should have a greater firepower than most, perhaps all, YR ships, including the Excalibur's main weapon.

Now, shattering a 250m wide sphere-shaped asteroid with a beam weapon is actually more impressive, and would require more energy, than doing the same task with a centrally-buried bomb. Even though Brian bent over backwards to be generous in considering the asteroid's size (e.g., I really don't think White Stars are 250m long), if it was that wide, it could've taken well over 8 kilotons/sec. to destroy the thing.

As I wrote back on page 5.

According to the Tech page Phasers are roughly equivalent to 1 kiloton per second versus armor. (7 megatons versus shields but the Borg weren't using those.) According to the BabTech page on EA ships an Omega-class destroyer's main 'lasers' are roughly equivalent to 9 kilotons per second.

At the lowest level, are the weaker younger races, these would includes races like Narn, Brakiri, Gaim etc. A Borg cube would most likely defeat these races forces fairly easily.

If I remember correctly it was not so subtly implied that the Narn sold beam weapons to the EA during the Earth-Mimbari war. As the Narn beams are mounted on their ships similarly to EA beams and they are both red that certainly fits with the canon anyway. The BabTech page on the Narn has the absolute upper limit of their beams as delivering 60 megatons over 7 seconds.

Given the above I doubt even the Narn would have trouble stomping a single Borg cube. Any larger factions are just as safe for the simple fact that none of them are going to stop shooting like the Enterprise did in Q Who.

Dumb as the Borg are, I rather doubt they would've sat there while their ship faced total destruction; nonetheless, that's an unknown and, for our purposes, not all that important.

Actually it sort of is important. See Below.

What you propose is possible, but so far as I know, B5 weapons don't involve exotic chain-reactions or the like, a'la phasers; they do things the old-fashioned way, via what's come to be known in some SD.net circles as DET or direct energy transfer.

Well, we see how well raw energy release devices work against the cube in "Q Who?" Several spectacular, km-wide fireballs engulf the cube ... and as Worf laments, they didn't even damage the thing. Tricking one's way past their defenses with a frequency change is one thing; overwhelming their shields with raw power is another.

Well that is just it, at that point the Borg had their shields up. Earlier with the shields down the Enterprise was blowing large craters into the cube with phasers. The exotic chain-reactions of phasers make them less effective against metal and/or armor. The Borg sat there for at least several minutes with according to the dialog 30% of their ship destroyed. It is quite reasonable to assume the only reason the cube didn't die outright then and there is because Picard stopped shooting and held a conference.

So, yeah, it's vaguely possible a cube would run aground the very first B5 warship it encountered. Just the same, I doubt it. In spite of a cube's relatively low density, it's still a massive ship. Dealing fatal damage to it before being destroyed in turn ... honestly, I just don't see that in the cards for single YR ships.

As the above numbers I quoted indicate, against an unshielded target, B5 weapons are at least on par with phasers if not superior. Unless the Borg engage differently then what we see in Q Who, they die. Now if they encountered a smaller ship below EA/Narn beamer level power, assimilated tech, and subsequently used their shields (which really is their greatest advantage in this situation) then it is a whole different ballgame. Really the only reason the Borg would lose is because their tactics suck and play into the strengths of B5 tech.