Stargate BC-304 VS Enterprise-E and Star Destroyer

[WhiteLion]

Let's clarify a point, I'm not saying that 304 is invincible, I absolutely think it isn't, but I can't deny what I saw on the screen, it would be hypocritical, and it would be to the same extent if I accepted calculations without precise numbers derived from the canon.
I just want to be objective, why do you blame me? I have no idea how much power it has absorbed, I only know that a star cannot expect little power, and I don't think it's plausible that the firepower of a ship equates the energy of a stellar phenomenon in power. That's all, I don't think dedalus is invincible in the most absolute way, there are so many ships that would tear it to pieces, but denying what we saw on the screen is not objective.

[PREDATOR490]

A) You want to claim that what we see on screen is 100% undeniable and ignore any outliers.
B) The visual effects make it abundantly clear that the energy was being DEFLECTED by Daedalus and that a portion of it was hitting the ship.
C) A portion of that energy is then causing damage to the Daedalus THROUGH the shields in the form of heat build up
D) If you want to throw dialogue into the mix, the Daedalus was not expected to survive that event even WITH the ZPM especially for a duration that can only be quantified as HOURS.
E) What we do see is that within minutes the ship is already suffering hull damage and beginning to vent atmosphere

Provide a number of how much energy the star witnessed produced in that CME, then go to provide how much energy was deflected vs. what was actually absorbed. Then go on to provide how much of that ended up bleeding through the shield to cause heat build up that damaged the ship.

[NecronLord]

Forgive me but you did a completely hypothetical and speculative reasoning, based on numbers completely devoid of precise information concerning the specific case in question. The stars are different, how can you also say that it was absorbing 0.1%? We have no way of knowing how much coronal mass has been expelled. You based your reasoning only on hypothetical deductions. If we want to make a serious reasoning the hypotheses are only misleading.

That's right, I did.

As I said, it could be 99%, but you need to prove that, otherwise you are simply begging the question, and saying that because it's a high energy interaction the ship absorbed that energy. That's not necessarily the case at all.

[WhiteLion]

@PREDATOR: I can't say how much the daedalus can withstand, I can only say what I see on the screen, that is, that for the duration of the video the Daedalus resists a crash I have never seen any ship do, and that the heat product was affecting the hull of the ship. I do not say anything more, I never said that it could remain whole hours, even if in the video they do not deny it, but since there is no concrete proof I do not affirm it nor support it.

The point that I argue is that the bc-304 shields, if enhanced by a zpm, can be enormously higher than the shields of the enterprise (which have a limit of 47.3 GW, source Wikipedia) and of the star destroyer, because the shields of the Super Star Destroyer Executor have collapsed under the fire of the rebel army, which is much weaker than the damage suffered by the shield of the Daedalus, and the shields of a Star Destroyer are not at all comparable to those of a Super Star Destroyer (source: Star Wars movie).

For this reason I argue that probably the Daedalus would come out victorious against both, the enterprise has shown to have gigaton firepower but weak shields, the star destroyer does not demonstrate neither gigaton firepower nor adequate shields.

Another parameter that could play in favor of the enterprise is the range of weapons, much higher than the Daedalus.

@NecronLord:
I understand you, but if you read well what I wrote I only claimed that the ship supported the coronal mass eruption of the star, I didn't say it could do it indefinitely because on the screen it didn't, we only know that it can sustain that damage for the time we saw it do it on the screen.

[NecronLord]

Indeed it did. But it did not endure the whole thermal output of same.

It endured some portion, which you cannot estimate.

It could be as I say 0.1% which isn't that out of the ordinary as this is clearly a deflection incident. It could be even less. That would be consistent with megaton to gigaton weapons being dangerous in the setting, ZPM powered rayguns not immediately vapourising asteroids, and single ZPMs not being enough to fly cities.

[WhiteLion]

I agree, we cannot estimate the power of the weapons because we lack precise data from facts that happened on the screen.
For the shield we can only say that it has sustained a cosmic event that no other ship has ever made on the screen, and it did so only for the time spent on the screen. There is no doubt that some of the heat began to damage the ship (albeit very slowly), but still we are far beyond the firepower of the enterprise, the Star Destroyer having no gigaton weapons is a very small threat to the bc shield 304 compared to the enterprise.

[NecronLord]

Again, the above isn't a proof it is gigatons it could be literally anything. The scene proves nothing of value.

Let's look at other stats for ZPMs we can work out from the series.

And as mentioned there are other events that show merely single figure megaton/second power output for ZPMs, such as being unable to lift Atlantis. Are you going to address those limits?

[Tribble]

@Tribble:
no, I believe that if an event appears in a canonical episode then it is real in the series.
In your example both things are true, the enterprise was able to reach that speed in that specific situation, the voyager instead in its situation was not able to go faster. It does not mean that the enterprise is able to always arrive at that speed, but only that if there are the same conditions it is able to do so.

Which is meaningless because we have no idea what those conditions are. There wasn't any evidence of transwarp / other new tech being used, a wormhole / space anomaly being found, a higher power seizing control of the E-A and flinging it towards its destination etc. The E-A does this one feat this one time with no explanation and its never repeated at any other point afterwards unless one of the above was in play. Feats like that must be treated as outliers and be disregarded because we have no real way of interpreting them.

[PREDATOR490]

@PREDATOR: I can't say how much the daedalus can withstand, I can only say what I see on the screen, that is, that for the duration of the video the Daedalus resists a crash I have never seen any ship do, and that the heat product was affecting the hull of the ship. I do not say anything more, I never said that it could remain whole hours, even if in the video they do not deny it, but since there is no concrete proof I do not affirm it nor support it.

The on-screen dialogue makes it abundantly clear the Daedalus was not going to survive much longer. That puts it in the range for minutes to an hour.

The point that I argue is that the bc-304 shields, if enhanced by a zpm, can be enormously higher than the shields of the enterprise (which have a limit of 47.3 GW, source Wikipedia) and of the star destroyer, because the shields of the Super Star Destroyer Executor have collapsed under the fire of the rebel army, which is much weaker than the damage suffered by the shield of the Daedalus, and the shields of a Star Destroyer are not at all comparable to those of a Super Star Destroyer (source: Star Wars movie).

You straight up stated you have no idea how much the Daedalus can withstand then go to make a claim that she suffered more damage than the entire Rebel Fleet can put out at Endor.

You have made a claim that a BC304 can withstand the firepower of the entire rebel fleet at Endor. It is now on you to show working and justify that claim.

A) Show working for how much energy the Rebel Fleet at Endor could produce
B) Show working for how much energy the CME hit the Daedalus for
C) Show working for how much energy a Star Destroyer's shields can withstand
D) Show working for how much energy a Star Destroyer's weapons can produce


If A is smaller than B. You will have proved this claim.
If B is smaller than A. You will know that an Executor's shields are stronger than a BC304.
If D is greater than B. You will know that a BC304 cannot withstand the firepower of a Star Destroyer.

For this reason I argue that probably the Daedalus would come out victorious against both, the enterprise has shown to have gigaton firepower but weak shields, the star destroyer does not demonstrate neither gigaton firepower nor adequate shields.

Your 'argument' is bullshit piled up on more bullshit.
You have not shown any working for how you are making these bold statements. You have admitted repeatedly you have no numbers but continue to double down on making claims about the limits of Star Wars and Star Trek ships.
Your ENITRE 'argument' revolves around a single incident in SGA involving a CME... you refuse to accept reasoned responses that this event cannot be quantified because of the nature and limited data provided about the mechanics of the event.
You also refuse to accept the concept of an outlier or consistency with the rest of the franchise.

The only number given in that entire episode for the CME was Atlantis was going to get hit with a radiation blast of 50,000 REM.
Atlantis could not withstand this with a ZPM extended shield.
That is all you have to work with, but I look forward to seeing your working on how much energy the CME in SGA produced.

[Solauren]

Also, prove that the BC-304 can beam a warhead into a Star Destroyer. They're armor just might be thick enough to block, even without shields.

[NecronLord]

There's no real need to demonstrate that, we have seen asgard transporters operate in the vicinity of black holes and through "Several hundred metres beneath the surface of the planet." in Revalations. They're not Trek transporters and far fewer things have stopped asgard transport beams. They regularly beam through Chyenne mountain and I don't think even the solid neutronium structure in Unnatural Selection was shown to block them.

I think if you want to say that a star destroyer hull would block or interfere with an asgard transporter beam the burden of proof would lie on the Star Wars side there.

Only active defences have ever stopped an asgard transport beam, such as electronic countermeasures from wraith ships or starship shields.

[WhiteLion]

@ PREDATOR490
http://www.ansa.it/canale_scienza_tecni ... 5d1bc.html

I apologize for the link in Italian, I am on a lunch break and do not have much time to look for an English source, but they are still available everywhere. I provide the translation of the quotation:

"A coronal mass ejection can contain billions of tons of material that can be accelerated by several million kilometers per hour, generating a spectacular explosion that from the surface of the Sun throws a wind of particles towards the outside."

Consider billions of tons of material at millions of degrees of temperature shot at many million km / h on a ship's shields, the rebel fleet does not reach this level of energy. A shield that bears this bears well beyond the fire of the weapons of a Star Destroyer. Do you realize that you're combining the fire of some spaceship with a cosmic stellar phenomenon?

For the firepower of the star destroyers I base myself on what I see in the canon series, honestly I have never seen damage caused by the weapons of the Star Destroyers that made one think of a gigaton power, in a few episodes maybe a few megatons. A Gigatoni explosion devastates a vast area of ​​a continent, as seen in the discovery and weather video when using the mark9. I've never seen similar damage in the turbolasers of a star destroyer.

[NecronLord]

Hi, Lion.

This is a bit of a teaching moment.

Imagine a glass of water at 100 degrees.

A fool dips his hand in, for one second, then removes his hand.

Heat has been transferred into his hand.

Does that mean that the water is now at 0 degrees?

[Tribble]

Hi, Lion.

This is a bit of a teaching moment.

Imagine a glass of water at 100 degrees.

A fool dips his hand in, for one second, then removes his hand.

Heat has been transferred into his hand.

Does that mean that the water is now at 0 degrees?

Is it possible that the BC-304 was doing something similar to the metaphasic shields in Star Trek? If so, I doubt that shields which were specifically calibrated to maximize their effectiveness against a coronal mass ejection would be nearly as effective against something different like turbo laser fire.

Plus, couldn’t phaser fire / turbo laser fire be more concentrated than a coronal mass ejection and thus cause more damage even if the total energy output was lower?

[Starglider]

"A coronal mass ejection can contain billions of tons of material that can be accelerated by several million kilometers per hour, generating a spectacular explosion that from the surface of the Sun throws a wind of particles towards the outside." Consider billions of tons of material at millions of degrees of temperature shot at many million km / h on a ship's shields...

You appear to lack the basic physics knowledge to be able to use statements like this in a calculation. It should be obvious that the first questions are, 'how much of (the sun's) sky is the material spread over' and 'how even is the distribution', which determines how much of the mass can actually intersect a planet at ~1 AU. The answers are approximately 'from 400 to 10000 square degrees' and 'moderately variable' which means that an earth-like planet is going to get hit by at most 0.2% of the material, usually far less. The other blatantly obvious fact is that a million degree plasma is not going to stay that way in open space: like any hot gas it wants to cool down and expand. For a CME that happens relatively slowly due to the enormous volume, but it takes several days to reach 1AU which is enough to cap the temperature at ~1MK and the velocity at ~1000 km/s (the later due to solar wind interaction: essentially drag from trying to push the pre-existing plasma out of the way). In this case Daedalus is relatively close to the star but presumably not blocking any more of the plasma than necessary to shield the planet. This gives a sensible upper bound of 500MT of material with 1x10^24 J of kinectic energy which is equivalent to ~240 million gigatons. However the shields do not have to absorb this energy as they are deflecting the ions, not breaking it to a stop. Assuming a deflection cone angle of 30 degrees, the lateral velocity will be 25% of incoming which means a KE imparted or transferred of ~15 million gigatons (over about 90 seconds : equating to about 700 million TW). The temperature of the material is irrelevant to the work done by the shields, although obviously relevant to the damage done by any leaking material. 700 million TW is impossibly high by Trek standards, and about 100 times higher than the typical estimates for output of an ISD's turbolasers. Of course this is an upper limit (most CMEs are much wider spread) and 90 seconds of it depleted the ZPM and damaged the ship.

I would note that none of this matches the visual effects: the shields don't appear to extend much past the ship and there is no way a ship of that size can shield a planet no matter how close it gets to the star, because real CMEs are nowhere near that concentrated (and if you could concentrate billions of tonnes of plasma into a beam that small, it would be an impossibly bright opaque blob). We have to assume that the shields were actually expanded over many square kilometres and the VFX were merely illustrative.

[Starglider]

Assuming a deflection cone angle of 30 degrees... I would note that none of this matches the visual effects... we have to assume that the shields were actually expanded over many square kilometres and the VFX were merely illustrative.

To be clear, I was being generous here and taking the 30 degree deflection cone from the SFX shot while acknowledging that there is no way the SFX can be realistic. The actual minimum cone required to shield a planet is equal to the angle subtended by the planet from the point where the deflection occurs, which is less than a degree (halved for the deflection angle if the plasma is split equally in each direction). If we assume that the shields were actually acting over the minimum area required to fully shield the planet (hundreds of square kilometres) and deflecting the plasma by the minimum amount (half a degree), and also assuming the most concentrated and powerful plausible CME for a sun-like star, the upper bound on KE imparted or tranferred is 3.8 x 10^19 J = 9.1 gigatons, and the power requirement is 420,000 TW. This is much more compatible with the other feats we've seen for the BC-304. Given that the depiction in the VFX is literally impossible, I'd go with this explanation.

[WhiteLion]

@NecronLord: there are precise times for heat transfer based on the quantity of heat, this gives us an idea of ​​the enormous amount of heat absorbed by the shield and the hull.

@Tribble: anything can be, but we are talking about a huge energy, mass and speed gap, simply by concentrating the blow I don't think it is credible even to equate the damages, we are talking about an energy thousands and thousands of times higher. But being a scifi series depends on what the canon decides, real physics does not count as the opinion of the authors.

@starglider:
great post, really complete and reasoned. Can I ask you what mass and speed numbers did you use in your calculations?

Assuming the power of the eruption is 240 million gigatons I would say that the shield has sustained something that no starship can equate in terms of firepower.

The same thing if we assume an angle of 30 degrees, even the resulting 15 million gigaton power is equally unattainable by the weapon systems of the ships we are considering.
However, we consider that the 30 degree angle is our hypothesis, it could be greater or less. The fact remains that the power absorbed even at an angle of 30 degrees is huge and out of range for the weapons of the other spaceships.

PS: you said that the power of the turbolasers of the Star Destroyer is 100 times less than 15 million gigatons, which I know of in the Legends calculations are credited to 30 terajoules, or about 7 gigaton (although I personally consider the calculations of stardestroyer.net very speculative, because they have too many hypothetical variables, such as the composition of materials and the mass of asteroids, which are only the result of fan hypotheses). While instead in the canon (which is official subject) there are only objective visual evidence of destructive capacity, ranging from kilotons to megatons. On the basis of what can be seen of the current canon material, no explosion or damage leads to a gigaton power (neither by extension nor by the damage caused), as instead happens in those observed in Star Trek and Stargate.

[NecronLord]

the upper bound on KE imparted or tranferred is 3.8 x 10^19 J = 9.1 gigatons, and the power requirement is 420,000 TW.

I think it's important, particularly for the likes of Lion here, who is likely only going to see the big number, and not take a real look at the TW figure to render your power figures as megatons-per-second. For the benefit of Lion, 420,000 TW is 100 megatons per second, or with ST Technical Manual figures, equivalent to sustaining a barrage of a few photon torpedos every second, it's also while twelve times larger than my original estimate for ZPMs several years ago more in line with the multi-mile Atlantis seen in later seasons (as doubling the diameter increases the volume and thus mass by a factor of eight) as my scaling of the city was based on its rendering in the pilot which backstage info tells us was later regarded as too small and the CGI model scaled up by a factor of two to three.

Within the bounds of throwing out the visFX as junk (which honestly isn't a bad thing in this case) and relying on the dialogue only to construct a hypothetical event I do think that's actually as good an estimate as we're getting.

@NecronLord: there are precise times for heat transfer based on the quantity of heat, this gives us an idea of ​​the enormous amount of heat absorbed by the shield and the hull.

Again, not really. Does the water drop to freezing point immediately? Heat transfer (which isn't what Starglider's number uses, mind you) is a complete unknown here, but you keep coming back to it.

[Starglider]

great post, really complete and reasoned.

I appreciate the sentiment but it really isn't: this is the bare minimum, high school physics reasoning that should be expected in a versus analysis. For example, shielding a planet with a (relatively) small occlusion close to the star probably wouldn't work regardless of the deflection angle or the survivability of the occluding body, because the ions comprising a CME are a thermal plasma not ballistic particles. As such you would get an effect similar to shooting a bullet through water: a brief region of near-vacuum immediately behind the penetrator, closing up quickly as the fluid pressure forces material back into the gap. I don't have the fluid mechanics knowledge necessary to calculate the length of the low-pressure region, but in this case I'm pretty sure it's many orders of magnitude smaller than the distance from (say) Mercury orbit to Earth. As such there isn't much we can say here other than 'that thing we saw in Atlantis was clearly nothing like an a real CME, it must have been a narrow beam of non-thermal ions created by some freak sci-fi phenomenon specific to that star, and as such none of the physical parameters of a real CME are applicable' (and thus we can't reasonably extrapolate Daedalus capability from it).

The point here is not so much the specific figures, it's that it's pointless to throw around raw numbers without putting them in a proper context e.g. at least a back-of-napkin physical model of what's actually happening in the scene. This is where the educational and intellectual value of these kind of debates comes from, not googling for the biggest numbers you can find for any given franchise. As such I strongly recommend you do the working yourself if you're trying to present a defensible argument.

PS: you said that the power of the turbolasers of the Star Destroyer is 100 times less than 15 million gigatons, which I know of in the Legends calculations are credited to 30 terajoules, or about 7 gigaton (although I personally consider the calculations of stardestroyer.net very speculative, because they have too many hypothetical variables, such as the composition of materials and the mass of asteroids, which are only the result of fan hypotheses).

The original SW movies are not 'legends', they are still primary canon, the relevant scenes are reasonably consistent and the assumptions used by Darth Wong's calculations are conservative, i.e. they generally give reasonable lower bounds.

[WhiteLion]

Darth Wong does not know the mass, size and composition of the asteroids affected by the Star Destroyer turbolasers.
His reasoning is based on his entirely hypothetical personal hypotheses, taking as a basis of reasoning an asteroid with characteristics of his speculation does not prove anything concrete.

For the coronal mass eruption, if we continue like this we won't get anywhere because we will embark on pure speculation calculations ending in the same error as StarDestroyer.net.
Let's simplify the discussion:
Do you think the weapons of the enterprise and the Star Destroyer are comparable in power to a coronal mass eruption?
Could the entarprise and Star Destroyer shields sustain a coronal mass eruption?
If you think you canon canon examples.

The reasoning in this way is simple and less dispersive, otherwise we go off topic.

[NecronLord]

Darth Wong does not know the mass, size and composition of the asteroids affected by the Star Destroyer turbolasers.
His reasoning is based on his entirely hypothetical personal hypotheses, taking as a basis of reasoning an asteroid with characteristics of his speculation does not prove anything concrete.

For the coronal mass eruption, if we continue like this we won't get anywhere because we will embark on pure speculation calculations ending in the same error as StarDestroyer.net.

You might be surprised to find that shitting on Stardestroyer.net isn't generally well thought of on Stardestroyer.net, by all means present your rebuttals for the main site's film-based calcs.

Let's simplify the discussion:
Do you think the weapons of the enterprise and the Star Destroyer are comparable in power to a coronal mass eruption?

THe estimate you just praised when it was in Terawatts describes the event as broadly within reach of the Enterprise yes.

Realistically I don't think the eruption is actually survivable as depicted. The visual effects look nothing like what's described in the episode or what a Crononal Mass Ejection is.


Stargate Coronal Mass Ejection.


Real one.

If I were being truly cynical I would suggest that while intelligent, McKay has repeatedly described his understanding of written Lantean ancient as rudimentary, it's shown even within this episode, that he's not the best guy for the Ancient language.

McKAY: Just ... hang on, hang on. If I, um ... (He thinks for a moment, then types again. The voice plays again, but this time it's clearer and is obviously a language.)

WEIR: Hey, wait a minute. Play that back again.

(Rodney plays the voice again. Elizabeth smiles.)

WEIR: This is Ancient. At least, I can make out a few of the words now.

McKAY (smiling smugly at John): Ha!

WEIR: "Incursus" -- something was attacked, or overtaken.

McKAY: Meaning Atlantis.

WEIR: No, I don't think so. "Adaris"?

SHEPPARD: What's "adaris"?

WEIR: I don't know.

It's entirely possible that between them, McKay, who doesn't have a strong grasp of the Lantean language, and Weir, who is intelligent but without a strong technical background, misidentified this prominence as something known to them. It's also extremely unlikely that the humans of Earth do not understand most Lantean technical terms anyway, recall Carter's blank uncomprehension when Thor attempted to explain how replicators operate with 'Keron Pathways' or when quantum physics was described as a fallacy replaced by Equilibrium physics (whatever that is) in Tollan science. Indeed the SGC regularly uses the term quantumn physics even though this exchange obviously shows some of hte principles of it are considered falsified by more advanced civilizations.

It's entirely possible that it's an entirely unknown phenomenon to us that McKay simply called a Mass Ejection in grasping for something in English to call what the Lanteans perhaps called an Stellar Lance Eruption or something of that nature.

[WhiteLion]

I have only highlighted one fact. The author of stradestroyer.net gave for exact calculations in which a factor is completely hypothetical, having no official criteria but only observational on which to base. Mass, composition and size of the asteroid cannot be deduced from simple observation, even the dimension, to deduce it from the pixels is very approximate and depends on the view and the angle, which are both inaccurate in a video. I have no interest in slandering anyone, but this is speculation given for objective truth. I am also a Star Trek fan, but being on a forum does not mean endorsing an inaccurate and hypothesis-based thesis.

For the power of weapons I believe that even 40k weapons cannot equate in power a coronal mass eruption, we are talking about millions of megatons of stellar material launched at millions of km / h. The torpedoes of the enterprise have shown in the video you posted that they are capable of devastating vast areas of continents, but how can you tell that they have the same power as a stellar phenomenon? From the calculations mentioned above we talk about tens of thousands of gigatons. I ask without criticism or irony, I am seriously interested. I don't have much imagination, I always tend to rely on facts.

It could be that it is not a CME, but from what we see in the episode there do not seem to be moments that suggest a misunderstanding, indeed. Furthermore the definition of CME according to wikipedia is an expulsion of material from the solar corona, observed with a coronograph in white light (an expulsion of material from the solar corona, observed with a coronograph in white light), and on the screen we see exactly this material high speed and incandescent coming from the crown of a star.

In the episode there are no official references to support the fact that it is another phenomenon, we can hypothesize that it is a similar event based on the fact that McKay sometimes made a mistake in the translations and on the fact that visually it appears different, but objectively it is a hypothesis, sincerely, I do not feel like equating what is affirmed and seen in a canon episode with a personal hypothesis.

[NecronLord]

Yeah, no. What Mike's website very clearly uses are estimates based on known characteristics, these estimates are clearly labelled as such and the working shown in full. Again a few posts ago you thought 420,000 Terawatts was a good figure, until it was translated to 100 Mt/sec for you to understand.

And yes, there is no reference to it being something other than a larger CME than a real one, except the visuals. If you see a film have a character, who is from let's say 1910, call an assault rifle a machine gun, and it's shown he has no experience of them, but is looking for a name, that doesn't mean you would think that the AK-74 shown is a machine gun? If a character was describing a Ford Transit and called it a huge truck, you wouldn't then think that was a Peterbilt 386 because it was described as a huge truck.

Visuals matter, and the thing shown is not a Coronal Mass Ejection, those are invariably thousands of miles wide.

It's rich of you to accuse Mike of giving 'completely hypothetical' numbers when you keep making numbers up yourself. If not, show your working for the five hundred or so meters wide (remember it's narrower than the Daedalus) "Coronal Mass Ejection."

[Tribble]

Dialogue is generally lower on the hierarchy than visual effects when it comes to trying to measure something for the simple reason that dialogue tells us what the characters think is going on while the visuals show us what’s actually going on. Where the visual effect contradicts what the characters are saying, the visual effect takes precedence for observational purposes.

As an example, Vaporization is a big one in Star Trek - whatever the phasers are doing when they hit someone, they are clearly not “vaporizing” in the traditional scientific sense as that would more or less cause a steam explosion which cooks everyone in the room.

Having rewatched that scene I don’t think you could call whatever was going on a CME when the visuals are clearly different from what a CME looks like. If it is a CME it’s a very small one.

[WhiteLion]

It is not the power itself, even if they were 2 kilotons or 2 petatons, if the reasoning is based on asteroids of which size, composition and mass are not known canonically, the reasoning will be inconclusive. This is my point. I'm not slandering anyone, I'm just saying that classifying this reasoning as a fandom hypothesis is right, but classifying it as reliable in the canon is incorrect, it's disinformation.

it could easily be as you say. Aesthetically it appears slightly different, but in the episode it is clearly mentioned as CME. Neither in subsequent episodes nor in official statements is this denied. It does not seem a bad idea to stick to official sources, but the visual doubt remains, on this I agree with you. But objectively if in the episode it is said clearly and without doubt that it is a CME it could simply mean that the director has decided to represent a CME in a more cinematic and less realistic way, after all it is scifi not a documentary, it is made for entertainment.