Ender wrote:The Silence and I wrote:Galaxy's have nice thermal properties too:
Before
After
Notice the lack of thermal scorring, on the leading edge of the reentry no less! Just a bit of dirt.
Also note the visable blue tint on the edge of the flames, which is consistent with what we saw in Nemesis for their shields.
So that says nothing about their thermal conductivity.
EDIT: After reading Ender's posts during my writing of this, I felt this needed clarification:
1)
Except the shields are not hull conforming Ender. You are proposing that the saucer section has the more advanced hull conforming shields, but the battle hull, and the combined vessel, does not?
2) That blue tint, which is fainter than any shield glow, could easily have everything to do with the temperature of the atmosphere.
3) Those shields would have been extremely handy when the battle hull blew sky high. You do remember why they crashed, right? The shockwave disabled their engines, they fell into the atmosphere, and Data only achieved thruster control a few hundred meters above the surface. I highly doubt the shields were operational, to say nothing of points 1 and 2.
Now, like a good scientist, rationalize this with the fact that we have seen examples (EG cause and effect) where it was calculated on SB to be weaker then steel.
I'll wait.
Weaker than steel?
1) The nacelle assembly is widely recognized to be the weakest area of any starship, and is not representative of the Saucer's hull integrity.
2) Generations had a significantly larger budget than Cause and Effect, I find I trust that to be a better source of information; however, this is hard to defend, so see point three:
3) The Bozeman is ~240m long, and travelled somewhat more than its length in one second. It also masses some 2.4 e8 kg. Therefore it had some 5.8e10 kg*m/s to its name. Now, the impact was glancing, but some change in speed occured, simply because there was an impact. How much change in speed? Well it takes about one second for the Bozeman to cover the last 100 m of the Ent-D's nacelle, so perhaps as much as a 100 m/s difference.
What was the impact area? Hard to say, the leading edge of the Bozeman's nacelle struck, that edge is about 10 meters wide, though the corner of it actually struck. But the two nacelles slid over each other for about one hundred meters. At most that's 1000 m^2.
So, 2.4e10 kg*m/s over 1000m^2 over an impact time of again, one second. So a pressure of some 2.4e7 N/m^2. Or 244 tons of force per m^2. With a hull some 30-40 cm thick, and that is merely an average.
But, these numbers are shakey at best, useless at somewhat worse than best and go downhill from there. SO,
A) the numbers I crunched are likely wrong,
B) the nacelle blew up from the inside, i.e. the warp coil blew up; the hull was apparently fine (except of course the clear part where the plasma burst through).
C) If my numbers are close, then the nacelle pylon, despite being very thin, didn't even twist under the stress of
2,400,000 tons of force, for an entire second.
D) What ever the total force, it was the sudden impact that did the damage, not hull failure, evidenced by lack of hull debris, and lack of apparent damage when later viewed, after attitude failure, and just before core breach.
E) The Bozeman, with more stable design, was not destroyed, however it also suffered no hull damage in the shot. This is more icing on the cake, as a much older starship's hull stood up just fine. It is silly to propse a more advanced starship would have a weaker hull.
In Conclusion, it was a design flaw that destroyed the Enterprise D; no hull failure was observed, and the supporting pylon apparently can support the entire weight of the battle section, plus some. I fail to see how this is some kind of bitchslap.