WMD Page Update

[wilfulton]

Now I'm not much for Star Trek anymore, so this is what I recall from sometimes unreliable memory about what I saw as a kid ~15 years ago. I do recall on one TNG episode, a Borg cube used a "laser" to excise a portion of the Enterprise's hull for whatever reason. I don't really remember any details, just that little bit there. Maybe someone else who's watched TNG more recently might be able to answer that.

But it doesn't do much for "lasers can't penetrate trek shields" arguments.

[Isolder74]

Now I'm not much for Star Trek anymore, so this is what I recall from sometimes unreliable memory about what I saw as a kid ~15 years ago. I do recall on one TNG episode, a Borg cube used a "laser" to excise a portion of the Enterprise's hull for whatever reason. I don't really remember any details, just that little bit there. Maybe someone else who's watched TNG more recently might be able to answer that.

But it doesn't do much for "lasers can't penetrate trek shields" arguments.

Except its that Laser can't penetrate the Navigation Deflector. They say that a trek ship doesn't have to have its shields up to stop a laser.

[Hawkwings]

OK, I'm tired, but here goes.

In ST scenes, we can see the surface of the ship.

So the shields/nav deflectors don't block out light either incoming or outgoing.

So a laser using a beam along the visible wavelength would be able to "touch" the hull right? I mean, it's just light, nothing special about it, besides the fact that it's focused...

So a very powerful laser could potentially burn the hull? Or maybe aim it at a window? It may crack the window, causing a breach, or if the window is perfectly transparent (like the shields and nav deflector apparently are) then it'll "burn" the interior of the ship?

Now proceed with the disassembling of my argument

[Kazuaki Shimazaki]

They are just mocking the Trekkies's Outrageous Okona = Immunity position. No person could hold that position in SDN and survive for long.

[Lord Poe]

Good stuff. Poor Napolean, though. That wasn't fair, using him to represent. Trekkies can't dance as well as he can

And they don't have his awesome Bo-staff skillz!

hey Wayne, your single point defense turbolaser blast link on that page seems to be broken.(+http://www.mrpoesmorgue.com/wmd/wmd.html)

Thanks. It was going to simply refer you back to the top of the page. An early idea I abandoned, but forgot that link.

Err, how do you know it is Falcon sized?

I don't. It should read "nearly". We can't see the entire asteroid, but as it spins, we can get an approximate view of its size compared to the tiny Jedi fighter, akin to the Falcon-TIE fighter sequence in ANH. Its being obscured too much by the foreground asteroid to get a definite size.

And hey, what ever happened to your page on range, where you dealt with the Falcon shooting down Vader's wingman in the trench?

Seperate page, right now:

http://filmgate.h4h.com/louis/falconrange.html

It's a great page. Highly informative. If we find weird typos, do you want us to tell you? Not that it matters.

Sure thing! Brian has already pointed out I misspelled "Acclamator"

[Kuroneko]

Well, I'm not really up on SWvST debates, so I only briefly skimmed this page, but one thing jumped out at me.... If the ST plasma conduits contain actual plasma, there is absolutely no reason to suppose that they would be immune to ion cannons in the first place, because plasmas are highly responsive to electromagnetism. The usage of electrical cirtcuits in Trek ships is simply icing on the cake, as that counter-argument falls regardless.

[Ender]

Flipping through your pages Wayne, I see "publish or perish" kiscks my ass yet again.

You covered most everything on your Obi wan vs Jango page, except for one poit: calcualtin the yield of the blaster shot. Now while the novel implies Kenobi jumped, the novel also states he is on his feet at the time, which disagrees with the movie. So by figuring how far he was thrown, you can figure how much force was applied to him. Divide that by the surface area of him on his side, you have the overpressure wave. Using a couple of formulas available online, you can figure the energy released into the air from the shot to get a minimum yield of the blast.

[Illuminatus Primus]

It just bugs me when the sort of fuel you can pump through a hose and has even spilled has a higher energy density per-gram than anti-matter, the most energy-dense (in terms of PE) substance known

Who said hypermatter had higher energy density per gram than M/AM? All hypermatter needs is greater MASS density than standard matter.

Ender did that calc.

[Kane Starkiller]

Just found an error in your page:

Remember that a bomb's energy delivery is decreased exponentially with distance. Slave-1 is not in frame, so a direct scaling is impossible, but if we assume that the wave is traveling at least 300 meters per second (smashes through the 100 meter asteroid in fractions of a second), the asteroid would be at least 2.4 kilometers from the bomb. If we assume only 2 kilometers distance, and at least a kiloton of energy for a 100 meter asteroid, we're looking at gigatons of energy at the point of detonation. This bomb releases energy in 2 dimensions rather than 3, so it scales by the inverse square law I believe, rather than cubes. The AOTC:ICS indicates that the bomb releases about 11.9 gigatons of energy. 11,900,000 kilotons divided by 4,000,000 (2,000 meters squared) is about 2.975 kilotons. So, at 2km distance, just about the right amount of energy is delivered to fragment that asteroid. Unless my calculations are off, neither are the AOTC:ICS figures. It's not stacking the deck, it's not choosing sides. It just works out.

I don't know if that first sentence is a typo but the energy of an explosion does not decrease exponentialy. The energy of an omnidirectional exploson decreases quadraticaly because the surface of a sphere is 4r^2pi. However the blast of a seismic charge had a planar or more likely cylindrical effect. Since the heigth of a cylinder remained the same and only its diameter increased then the explosion will decrease linearly with distance.
The surface of the shockwave will be 2*r*pi*h where h is the heigth of the cylinder. It would take 1kt of energy to fragment 100m asteroid. The shockwave would interact with 100*h surface of the asteroid. So the shockwave would have to impart 1/100h [kt/m2] or 0.01/h [kt/m2] on the asteroid to fragment it. If the distance of the asteroid is 2.4km from the center of the explosion than the yield of the seismic charge would be
E=0.01/h *2*2400*pi*h=0.01*2*2400*pi=150kilotons.