Shaped charges?

[EnterpriseSovereign]

It was stated in the section on photon torpedoes that they have a minimum range because the energy goes in all directions and may affect the launching ship and have no shaped-charge effect. However there's no mention of that problem being solved in Nemesis, since it appears that all of the energy is directed at the target vessel or its shields with torpedo strikes and in addition torpedoes were fired at point-blank range by the Scimitar at the Valdore, removing the minimum range thing since the Scimitar takes no damage when this takes place. (and only when the Valdore's shields failed did we see matter being ejected from the surface of the hull)

[Ghost Rider]

And this is SW vs ST how again?

[Darth Tanner]

How do you know the Scimitar received no damage, their shields were at 60% after destroying both Romulan ships and leaving the Ent with only enough power for one phaser blast, the stupidly high level of quality and power of the Scimitar's shields and other technology (being able to have them up while cloaked for instance) would likely render explosions of the small payload of Star Trek default configuration war heads useless.

Also the Scimitar was using disruptors only wasnt it? Its difficult to tell as I assume they would be using Romulan ones which are green aswell.

[Darth Servo]

I believe the issue was the torps are a threat to an UNSHIELDED ship.

[RedImperator]

Torpedoes could be an issue for unshielded ships because an matter-antimatter reaction releases hard gamma rays. That could irradiate the crew without necessarily destroying the ship.

[The Silence and I]

The funny thing about that is AFAIK no one ever seems to care about what should be very deadly doses of gamma rays.

Yesterday's Enterprise: all the damage the Ent C took was by torpedoes, the hull was badly damaged, and the crew was not cooked alive by rads.

Generations: Multiple torpedo hits, unshielded, and not a single mention of radiation poisoning (forget poisoning, the crew should have been dead with the posssible exception of Data, and the dolphins if their tanks are big enough/they get lucky).

Q Who: Data considers it likely the Enterprise could destroy itself with its own torpedoes at the propsed detonation range, but after firing no one seems to care about the radiation that should have just flooded the ship.


What really bugs me about this is whenever the crew encounters something the authors know is radioactive, or decide will be radioactive, the hull offers next to no protection, so it seems unlikely it offers excellent protection against weapons grade radiation bursts, but crappy defense against everything else.

[Bounty]

Yesterday's Enterprise: all the damage the Ent C took was by torpedoes, the hull was badly damaged, and the crew was not cooked alive by rads.

Something had to have killed over half the crew.

[Uraniun235]

Q Who: Data considers it likely the Enterprise could destroy itself with its own torpedoes at the propsed detonation range, but after firing no one seems to care about the radiation that should have just flooded the ship.

BZZT. Wrong.

- Volley of torpedos fired.
- Borg fire again. Ship loses shields. Borg fire again. Ship drops out of warp.
- Riker orders Worf to arm another spread of torpedos.
- Data warns that this could be fatal.
- Riker (maybe Picard?) is about to order Worf to fire, when Q pops up and says "I'll be leaving now."
- Picard begs Q for help.

The torpedoes were not fired after the shields went down.

Generations: Multiple torpedo hits, unshielded, and not a single mention of radiation poisoning (forget poisoning, the crew should have been dead with the posssible exception of Data, and the dolphins if their tanks are big enough/they get lucky).

Those explosions seemed pretty weak, and after the first volley of two torpedo hits, the Klingons seemed to just use disruptors.

[The Silence and I]

BZZT. Wrong.

- Volley of torpedos fired.
- Borg fire again. Ship loses shields. Borg fire again. Ship drops out of warp.
- Riker orders Worf to arm another spread of torpedos.
- Data warns that this could be fatal.
- Riker (maybe Picard?) is about to order Worf to fire, when Q pops up and says "I'll be leaving now."
- Picard begs Q for help.

The torpedoes were not fired after the shields went down.

Well alright then, but I really had thought this scenario happened at some point in one episode or another, only they did fire. *Puzzled*

Those explosions seemed pretty weak, and after the first volley of two torpedo hits, the Klingons seemed to just use disruptors.

Weak, maybe. As visuals go a gamma burst would be mostly invisible to us--just the flash boiling of the casing would be seen. But they may have used more than two, Geordi comments the warp core went because of the last torpedo hit. Regardless of their power though, those two hits should have flooded a fair bit of the engineering section with gamma rays. This is not mentioned, and I find it odd.

Something had to have killed over half the crew.

Those deaths do not require radiation to account for, and I am still puzzled by A) a complete lack of mention B) the only injuries on the bridge being burns or damage from a physical impactor. They beam over without saying so much as 'stay away from the hot areas' and so on.

I mean, a few hundred kT to a couple MT of energy, carried mostly by gamma rays, is not going to be kind to a fleshy crew, and I can't really imagine the highly exposed bridge is going to be radiation free.

[Batman]

IIRC in 'New Ground' they dispersed that Soliton Wave thingy with photorps and had to evacuate the facing hull area due to radiation concernes, no mention of the shields being down.
In that episode where Picard and Wussley crash with shuttle (shortly before Wussley goes to the Academy), the E-D has to tow a highly radioactive freighter through an asteroid belt for disposal and are in mortal danger from it. No mention of shields being down and IIRC they explicitely mention the shields only being limited protection (and of course nobody takes the slightest bit of damge thanks to them finishing 7 or so seconds before reaching 'terminal radiation damage'. Isn't digital radioactivity fun? ), yet they happily take repeated torpedo hits on those shields without much but the occasional console explosion happening...

[Darth Wong]

Do you people understand that high-frequency electromagnetic radiation will heat up armour and air to an enormous degree? The way you're describing it, the radiation is some kind of magic ray stuff that passes through the hull and the air harmlessly, doing damage only to the crew.

High-energy gamma releases aren't like low-level gamma releases. Low-level gamma releases are "invisible" because they are too weak to significantly heat up objects and atmosphere. Not so with high-energy releases; they create nuclear fireballs.

[The Silence and I]

Just doing some rough hack and slash calcs, if I start with 1 kT of gamma radiation, released in all directions, 200 m from a ship bridge (e.g. an impact on the ventral side of the saucer hull, beneath the bridge) and assume that after adding up the hull and decks I get a 99% radiation absorption rate every square meter of the bridge will be 'filled' with some 80 kJ of radiation.

100 kT (more into the accepted range of yields) and you need 99.99% absorption to keep intensity down to 80 kJ per sq meter. I don't know what kind of absorption rate can be expected--especially after the air ionizes--but 99.99% is pretty damn high sounding, and the separation is something like two football fields--a large percentage of any Federation ship will be inside a zone that large. Supposedly the Enterprise C took many hits like this one, but the bridge crew fatalities were from consols and falling objects, not gamma rays. This is assuming all hits were to the ventral side of the ship, offering additional 'armor' to the bridge.

Of course, all that above is apparently wasted, because I just found a screen cap: Trogdor had some fun with this one!

It is quite obvious I think, that there was very little hull between the torpedoes and the bridge crew, yet at least two survived and the Enterprise D personel waltzed on in like it was an agreeable place and not hotter than hell.

[The Silence and I]

IIRC in 'New Ground' they dispersed that Soliton Wave thingy with photorps and had to evacuate the facing hull area due to radiation concernes, no mention of the shields being down.

Very close. They were concerned with "ion radiation" which I guess could mean ionizing radiation, and it was a problem because there were a few gaps in the aft shields (I just looked this up, Star Trek Minutiae has some excellent TNG and DS9 episode scripts in case you didn't know). This confuses me more than before however, because direct hull impacts in other episodes don't seem to cause this "ion radiation"

[The Dark]

100 kT (more into the accepted range of yields) and you need 99.99% absorption to keep intensity down to 80 kJ per sq meter.

To get 100 kT of gamma rays into the target would require:

*pulls out envelope*
100*2 (spherical blast) = 200kT
200*(3) (~1/3 of energy from M/AM explosion in form of gamma rays) = 600kT

a 600kT torpedo, assuming perfect 100% reaction rate. It'd be 6mT if only 10% efficient. Given that torpedoes are equal to or less than 64 megatons, we would be looking at nearly 1mT of gamma radiation with a 10% efficient M/AM reaction in the torpedo, assuming a surface hit.

Note that these (except the 50% energy into target) are relatively lowball numbers. A 10% reaction rate is low, and the 1/3 is simply gamma rays - lethal radiation sorts are at least 4/9, and almost certainly over 50%. Given the low density of the hull, re-radiation may be a problem as well.

Going along with the main page, if we accept the DS9 TM's 74% level (for sake of something that's at least in-universe, albeit not canon), there would be 7.4 megatons worth of gamma radiation striking the ship on a surface detonation, and at least another 2.47 megatons worth of other deadly radiation.

[Batman]

*sighs*
Except photorps are nowhere near 64MT, and hull density is up for grabs.
The fact remains that radiation hazards from PTs, given equal shield and hull resilience, should either be a threat or not. Yet while there seems to be a radiation hazard from close proximity detonations from their own torpedoes, nobody ever seems to worry about it when being hit by other people's PTs in combat.

[Uraniun235]

Well alright then, but I really had thought this scenario happened at some point in one episode or another, only they did fire. *Puzzled*

You may be thinking of The Nth Degree, in which Super-Broccoli amped up the shields so that they could take what might well have otherwise been a fatally-near torpedo detonation.

[The Dark]

*sighs*
Except photorps are nowhere near 64MT,

Upper limit for torpedoes is 64.3 megatons. I used that as an example, since it's a number off Mike's page. If you want to reduce it, change the numbers. The math's not hard: assuming 100% reaction, divide by six. If it's a lower efficiency reaction, multiply the size of the torpedo by the percentage, and divide by six.

and hull density is up for grabs.

How thick do you think windows can be made without causing visible visual distortion? And just what are they made out of that allows a ship to land on a planet without sinking into the ground, despite having relatively small contact areas compared to the volume of the ship? They can't be all that dense.

The fact remains that radiation hazards from PTs, given equal shield and hull resilience, should either be a threat or not. Yet while there seems to be a radiation hazard from close proximity detonations from their own torpedoes, nobody ever seems to worry about it when being hit by other people's PTs in combat.

Yep. Makes no sense at all, particularly since the damage-inducing hits are presumably at even closer range than ones own shots. Shields could theoretically mitigate the radiation threat, but a torpedo that overwhelms the shields should sleet radiation into the vessel.

[Batman]

Upper limit for torpedoes is the worst they do on-screen and that's nowhere near 64MT, leaving alone that's from a source that has been declared non-canon quite a while ago.
The thickness of the windows doesn't say beans about the density of the material, leave alone the metallic parts which make up the majority of even a Galaxy's hull, and the contact area of the saucer section in 'Generations' was quite considerable (that being the only occasion we ever saw even part of the E-D land).

[Chris OFarrell]

For the record, torpedoes later in TNG and generaly through DS9 and Voyager behaved like shaped charges more then omnidirectional explosives. We also know that they were able to configure a torpedoes explosive geometry to a very specific configeration in that episode with the Exocomps.

I mean compare the massive explosions the torpedoes generated against the Borg Cube in Q-Who and the dull flares in BOBW when salvos of the things were simply absorbed into the Borg cubes defenses. It makes sense that Starfleet upgraded their torpedoes in the face of the Borg threat to deliver maximum firepower on target.

We also have the Quantum torpedoes in FC against the Sphere and against the JH fighter in Seige of AR-whateverthenumberis which look to direct their energy in narrow cones straight through their target.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

How do you know the Scimitar received no damage, their shields were at 60% after destroying both Romulan ships and leaving the Ent with only enough power for one phaser blast, the stupidly high level of quality and power of the Scimitar's shields and other technology (being able to have them up while cloaked for instance) would likely render explosions of the small payload of Star Trek default configuration war heads useless.

Also the Scimitar was using disruptors only wasnt it? Its difficult to tell as I assume they would be using Romulan ones which are green as well.

Forgive the delay, my comp's being a pain. Anyway, the Scimitar's shields were at 70% after being hit by multiple Quantum torpedoes, and straight after firing at the Valdore the bridge of the scimitar did not spark or show damage otherwise. Both disruptors and torpedoes were used, the disruptors were blue/white, the torps green. When the Scimitar chases the Ent-E, both types are clearly visible.