New page I banged together

[Xon]

I'm trying to figure out how it is a "contentious statement of fact" that reading replies where the context in which the reply is framed has been removed or reduced can be difficult. Especially when it isn't even about the content itself.

[Xon]

If we're forced to make a bunch of unwarranted assumptions, that defeats the purpose of a calculation in the first place!

Maybe shields do need to output a terawatt to defend against a terawatt laser striking them. That makes sense a kind of intuitive sense; however, as I've said many times now, if someone is trying to dismiss OBSERVED EVIDENCE willy-nilly, he had better not do so on the basis of a complete unknown.

The issue with this is a) RL General Relativity is significantly incomplete in Stargate and what happens in A Matter of Time has Carter suggesting a major revision to complete rewrite b) we are explicitly told Quantum Mechanics is wrong by the Tollans in Shades of Grey when they then go on to demonstrate an FTL laser. Maybe you are going on newton's 3rd law, but the existance of inertia dampeners capable of reducing the effective mass of objects when they interact with gravity and other objects goes a long way to dispute that one. After all, the F-302 is utterly incapable of reaching orbit without them, but with them can get to Antarctica in Lost city part 2 when they are normally based in Nevada inside of 10 minutes.

Stargate has tons of magic tech which flys in the face of any calcs we can do, and Stargate is highly consistant in re-using thier magic physics all over the place. I'll accept conventional objects are governed by rules we know, but the utterly wacky shit? You need to demonstrate they are infact following RL physics rather than whatever magic Stargate writers are introducing.

Honestly I thought the calcs for the Asuran beam was a high-end calc. It is just I haven't seen enough evidence to convince me that you can deduce the energy requirements for operating Atlantis's shield from what it is repelling.

[Chaotic Neutral]

How much energy does a tank expend when it gets shot by an AK-47?

[Jeremy]

How much energy does a tank expend when it gets shot by an AK-47?

In previous decades, none. All of the energy involved is conservation of kinetic and then account for conservation of momentum.
Now a tank could have a microphone/computer system to determine where the bullet came from or even some kind of explosive reactive armor.

[Chaotic Neutral]

Exactly, so why should a shield need to expend power to stop a bullet? Perhaps it only needs a constant power supply.

[adam_grif]

Because the shield was up for like 3000 years on a single ZPM underwater, and it was expected to hold out for 3 days against bombardment from a fleet of ships.

[Jeremy]

Exactly, so why should a shield need to expend power to stop a bullet? Perhaps it only needs a constant power supply.

The energy needed to change the velocity of the bullet to zero, divided by the time it takes to complete the change is the amount of power expended to stop the bullet. If the supply of the circuit can't provide that amount the bullet is not stopped.

Stargate shields seem to be depletable, so they either have a capacitor to provide the energy or they have a limited supply of shield-stuff (???).

[Brian Young]

Wrong. Stargate tech has demonstrated the ability to absorb power at a distance and collect power from subspace. Childhood's End shows that the Ancients had the technology to extend a rather short ranged(only a few dozen kilometres) energy dampening field from a device.

Energy dampening and energy absorption are different things. But the primary problem with the idea is that Destiny physically entered the photosphere. If Destiny could somehow extend an invisible "net" that absorbs energy, transmitting it through space also unseen, into the batteries or whatever it has, then it could do so from a distance.
In general terms, it is not what we see in the episode. It is not implied in the episode. Therefore this is an extraordinary claim, requiring extraordinary evidence. There is none to be had. Therefore, I say it is bunk.
Furthermore, if you saw a recent episode where they skim the edge of another star, the solar collectors appeared to operate like ramscoops. If that is the case, Destiny likely runs on nuclear fusion.
Even if we were to accept your energy absorption field idea, which has no evidence to support it, we'd still be looking at an area of "a few dozen kilometers." Okay, let's assume 100 kilometers in diameter, just to wank off. That would raise the absorption to about 471000 terawatts, or about 113 megatons per second. If Destiny did this for 5 minutes, it would absorb 34 gigatons. That powers it for a long time, months or maybe years, in combat, FTL, etc.
So, even wanking off to this ridiculous idea, it comes nowhere near anything you guys claim in this thread. Nothing close to those "teraton" bombs. Nothing close to destroying planets or star systems. If anything, given this is a ridiculous idea and a ridiculously inflated size, it *supports my figures*.
To put this in perspective, do you know how powerful the Replicator beam would have to be to deliver that much energy in 29 hours? 2700 terawatts or 650 kilotons per second. And that is using your ridiculous assumption and further multiplying it out to 100 kilometers!
How powerful would the Wraith fleet have to be to deliver that much energy to Atlantis' shields in "days?" Let's assume 2 days to make them as powerful as possible, so we can wank off some more. 200 kilotons per second.
Note the Ancients decided to power Destiny by solar power rather than a bunch of ZPMs. ZPMs are safe. They are small and light, making them perfect to power his huge ship with tons of storage space. But even wanking off to this unsupported idea, these numbers simply don't equal what we see in our other favorite SciFi shows.
To further put it in perspective, how long would Destiny have to stay in the star, using your net-that-never-happened, to power one shot from an Acclamator troop transport in Star Wars? 1770 seconds, or almost 30 minutes. To power one shot.
As I said before, the fact that Destiny uses solar power places Ancient technology below that seen in many other shows. It is inescapable.
Combine this with the fact that a single ZPM cannot power Atlantis' engines sufficiently to launch it into orbit, and you can see there is no way to elevate the figures to the level you guys want. Yes, Atlantis is designed to run on 3 of them. BECAUSE ONE CAN'T EVEN LAUNCH IT INTO ORBIT! It is a power problem, not a design flaw. How do we know this? Because they tapped the power from an underwater drilling station, which had no ZPMs, to assist the launch. They could then do it. That tells us the ZPM just didn't have the juice.

*The Stargate is capable of radiating ~10^13 watts when off. This is derived from Teal'c being stuck in the Stargate, and a significant chunk of his energy-mass being lost over a few days of the gate being off. The cooling system in the SGC isn't what I could sanely suggest being capable fo dissipating 10 trillion watts and the energy has to go somewhere so Subspace which the Stargate extensively uses anyway

Please provide a quote. I recently saw that episode, and I think you are full of shit.

[Xon]

Energy dampening and energy absorption are different things.

And that is why I quoted two seperate magic pixy dust technologies.

But the primary problem with the idea is that Destiny physically entered the photosphere. If Destiny could somehow extend an invisible "net" that absorbs energy, transmitting it through space also unseen, into the batteries or whatever it has, then it could do so from a distance.

Exactly how the hell are we going to determine the size of the fields? They are invisble! We don't even know the relation between the distance from the field and how much power is absorbed.

In general terms, it is not what we see in the episode. It is not implied in the episode.

And the retards playing passenger on Destiny thought that the ship was going to kill itself and them. Despite them being able to measure power usage and having an some-what crude understanding of Stargate power generation. SGU is not going to be a good source of the characters explaining much.

Furthermore, if you saw a recent episode where they skim the edge of another star, the solar collectors appeared to operate like ramscoops.

It will be sometime later before I can get to my SGU episodes, but from memory they just glowed as star plamsa swirled around them. Which they did the first time it occured.

Please provide a quote. I recently saw that episode, and I think you are full of shit.

48 hours. Gateworld doesn't have a transcript of the episode however. Here is a transcript.
From the summary;

Teal'c turns to go through the Stargate -- but does not emerge through Earth's gate on the other side before the wormhole disengages.
....
The Stargate has massive amounts of memory -- like a computer buffer. The gate temporarily stores the energy patterns in crystals before it reconverts them back into matter. It does this to make sure it has all the information from the incoming person or object before it reassembles them.

Teal'c is stuck in the Stargate. This mass-energy has gone somewhere. Teal'c's physical body is encoded into the stargate itself, whiel the energy can be supplied from elsewhere.

What isn't stated in the summary is the reason they where given 48 hours, was this time limit was based on the decay of the stargate's energy store.

McKAY
But you can't just ignore the laws of thermodynamics. Entropy dictates that the crystals won't retain their energy patterns permanently. I've measured it. It's what's called quantitative evidence.
CARTER
I think the energy itself is unimportant past its initial imprint on the crystals.
McKAY
And this fantasy is based on?
CARTER
I suspect the gate is storing its ones and zeros on a subatomic level within the structure of the crystals. So even though the energy is dissipating, the most recent pattern still exists.
McKAY
You suspect?
CARTER
We're dealing with a level of quantum physics here that is way beyond us.
McKAY
More than a third of the energy pattern the gate required, to reintegrate Teal'c, has almost gone.

At this stage they have 32 hours left from the 48 hour limit. So the stargate is managing to dispurse ~23kg(1/3 of 70kg) of mass-energy in about 16 hours. Which is about 10^13 watts. And it sure as fuck isn't going into the base.

[Vympel]

The energy needed to change the velocity of the bullet to zero, divided by the time it takes to complete the change is the amount of power expended to stop the bullet. If the supply of the circuit can't provide that amount the bullet is not stopped.

Please read:-

http://www.theforce.net/swtc/power.html#shields

A shield need not be anything more complicated than a wall. There is no reason, in the example of a bullet, that a shield need "lose strength" when struck by a bullet, or for it to expend energy additional to that merely required to keep it up when struck.

This brainbug that when a shield is hit it must necessarily do additonal work (particularly, work commensurate to what is hitting it) to stop what is hitting it has no rational basis. A better understanding of shield mechanics is the question of heat dissipation (i.e. overload its capacity to dump heat, causing the shields to fail over time as heat builds up in the system) and conservation of momentum.

[adam_grif]

The energy needed to change the velocity of the bullet to zero, divided by the time it takes to complete the change is the amount of power expended to stop the bullet. If the supply of the circuit can't provide that amount the bullet is not stopped.

Please read:-

http://www.theforce.net/swtc/power.html#shields

A shield need not be anything more complicated than a wall. There is no reason, in the example of a bullet, that a shield need "lose strength" when struck by a bullet, or for it to expend energy additional to that merely required to keep it up when struck.

This brainbug that when a shield is hit it must necessarily do additonal work (particularly, work commensurate to what is hitting it) to stop what is hitting it has no rational basis. A better understanding of shield mechanics is the question of heat dissipation (i.e. overload its capacity to dump heat, causing the shields to fail over time as heat builds up in the system) and conservation of momentum.

It's only a "brainbug" if someone is claiming that shields can never work any other way, however in this case he is right because maintaining gateverse shields for huge amounts of time has occurred several times in the run, the 3333.33... year shielding of Atlantis on one ZPM being the most extreme example. Off the top of my head I can't think of any evidence in the series that would support the shields acting as armor.

[Xon]

And Stargate's exploits inertia manipulation so heavily it's often hard to see how momentum is conservation.

Logically with a fine grain enough inertia dampener, you can create an electro-inertia engine. Push a ton of electrons throught a wire, and set your interia dampeners to extract momentum from the vibrating electrons in that wire and spread that momentum over the craft. Changing direction would be a matter of pumping current through various wires depending on it's orientation through the inertia dampener field. I really don't want to think about how much power that would require. It would also allow you to 'fake' a supercondutive line having resistance.

Depending on how the inertia dampener interacts with physical matter, it might be posible to "tune" exactly what it extracts momentum from. If so you would have a functional energy dampening field which looks like black magic.

[avatarxprime]

Wrong. Stargate tech has demonstrated the ability to absorb power at a distance and collect power from subspace. Childhood's End shows that the Ancients had the technology to extend a rather short ranged(only a few dozen kilometres) energy dampening field from a device.

Energy dampening and energy absorption are different things. But the primary problem with the idea is that Destiny physically entered the photosphere. If Destiny could somehow extend an invisible "net" that absorbs energy, transmitting it through space also unseen, into the batteries or whatever it has, then it could do so from a distance.
In general terms, it is not what we see in the episode. It is not implied in the episode. Therefore this is an extraordinary claim, requiring extraordinary evidence. There is none to be had. Therefore, I say it is bunk.

The Destiny shield is plain different from pretty much every other shield we have seen in Stargate ever IIRC (if I'm wrong please provide an example). The Destiny shield hugs the ship, all others (except the Kull Warriors) form a visible bubble around their target, while Destiny's tends to be completely transparent with a slight orange/yellow shimmer effect. Even shields that are tight around their target (i.e. the Atlantis gate shield or Kull Warrior energy dampening shields) create either the standard visible shield bubble or experience a bloom or some kind of visible effect when exposed to enemy fire. Note that when Destiny is being attacked in Trial and Error we never even see a shield bloom or any other effect (we don't see one in other episodes either, but I don't feel like listing them out). Continuing on to the idea of a shield absorbing energy, the other time we have seen a shield being used to generate an energy absorbing effect (Beachhead) it follows with the visible effects set for all previous known shields since as far as we know the shield was doing the absorbing. Why then is it not logical to assume that any such energy absorbing field generated by Destiny would then follow suit with Destiny's observed shield properties and not be visible?

Note the Ancients decided to power Destiny by solar power rather than a bunch of ZPMs. ZPMs are safe. They are small and light, making them perfect to power his huge ship with tons of storage space.

Who says they had even developed ZPMs by then? I would like to point out that Destiny uses older Ancient tech (FTL sans-Hyperspace, the control chair drills into your head, etc...) than anything we've seen in the rest of the series.

[seanrobertson]

I'm trying to figure out how it is a "contentious statement of fact" that reading replies where the context in which the reply is framed has been removed or reduced can be difficult. Especially when it isn't even about the content itself.

Let's not suppress evidence. You said Brian seemed "hellbent" on removing contextual cues. Apart from the gross exaggeration, that sure reads like you're accusing him of dishonest debating tactics. I think that begs more than a one-liner "because I say so" in evidentiary terms.

If that's not what you meant, nevermind. All else I'll say is that I'd no trouble following what the man said, whether he quoted someone or posted from the hip.

[seanrobertson]

Xon,

First, let me apologize for poking fun at your other handle yesterday. I had a bad cough and the things I took to temper it yesterday left me a little ... loopy.

Second, I'd like to thank you for the thoughtful reply.

The issue with this is a) RL General Relativity is significantly incomplete in Stargate and what happens in A Matter of Time has Carter suggesting a major revision to complete rewrite b) we are explicitly told Quantum Mechanics is wrong by the Tollans in Shades of Grey when they then go on to demonstrate an FTL laser. Maybe you are going on newton's 3rd law, but the existance of inertia dampeners capable of reducing the effective mass of objects when they interact with gravity and other objects goes a long way to dispute that one. After all, the F-302 is utterly incapable of reaching orbit without them, but with them can get to Antarctica in Lost city part 2 when they are normally based in Nevada inside of 10 minutes.

Maybe I'm not familiar enough with Atlantis to even comment on this, but I didn't think the Lantean Cityship itself used any kind of mass-lightening technology? It certainly didn't seem to utilize as much in achieving escape velocity.

Stargate has tons of magic tech which flys in the face of any calcs we can do, and Stargate is highly consistant in re-using thier magic physics all over the place. I'll accept conventional objects are governed by rules we know, but the utterly wacky shit? You need to demonstrate they are infact following RL physics rather than whatever magic Stargate writers are introducing.

But you know the default method is to first approach things in relation to actual physics. If something specific indicates that the Cityship's shield operates by something truly far out, then we can shift gears.

Honestly I thought the calcs for the Asuran beam was a high-end calc. It is just I haven't seen enough evidence to convince me that you can deduce the energy requirements for operating Atlantis's shield from what it is repelling.

I don't know about the shield's energy requirements as such; as best as I can remember, that only became an issue when someone suggested a connection between the shield and a ZPM's output. Or maybe capacity. I don't recall.

In any case, where either of the latter are concerned, there seem to be more straightforward means of determining limit figures. Like how one ZPM can't put Atlantis into orbit.

[Xon]

First, let me apologize for poking fun at your other handle yesterday. I had a bad cough and the things I took to temper it yesterday left me a little ... loopy.

My last week of work(and in most of december) has been nothing but excel-fu, fighting with accounting & subscription data and talking with 3rd parties to import it, I'm supposed to be a damn programmer. I really should have thought out my original statements in a lot more detail.

Maybe I'm not familiar enough with Atlantis to even comment on this, but I didn't think the Lantean Cityship itself used any kind of mass-lightening technology? It certainly didn't seem to utilize as much in achieving escape velocity.

NecronLord's scaling indicates some truely wacky power figures to lift something like Atlantis, and frankly we don't see the water under it remotely behaving as if it was having anything like that energy being dumped into the enviroment. SGA 5x20 is actually a better scene at seeing Atlantis take off. We actually get to see the "thrusters" glow a light blue with utterly no drive flare that we should see from a reaction drive. They look like freaking lights painted onto the model.

To furthur complicate the issue, Atlantis had to be powering both the STL drives and the Hyperdrive during takeoff. Which in every case we have seen tends to have a lengthy spinup time, all we know about hyperdrive's energy requires is it starts at "significant".

To thrown another complication, Brain Storm indicates that "heat management" is fundmentally magic in Stargate. Ignore the inter-universe bridge, but looks at what that "heat sink" does.

But you know the default method is to first approach things in relation to actual physics. If something specific indicates that the Cityship's shield operates by something truly far out, then we can shift gears.

I don't know about the shield's energy requirements as such; as best as I can remember, that only became an issue when someone suggested a connection between the shield and a ZPM's output. Or maybe capacity. I don't recall.[/

Shields are volumetric energy fields which do some really wacky stuff. From sending a lightly lobbed stone hurdling back to crack sharply against a wall +10 metres behind SG-1(Window of Opportunity), crushing a planet into a singularity!(Ori shield in Beachhead), conditional shields which permitting large solid objects to pass through them but not air(BC-304's hanger bays shields), conditional shields which stop arbitary solids & fluids but not air(Ancient Personal shield). And the shield Carter had which "sent away" the existing entire room's contents when she was managed to get her contents of that room pulled across to another universe(Road not taken). Or shields which couldn't stop an object "out-of-phase" from bypassing them can be altered todo so despite not providing a significant advantage against convensional weapons(Tollans vs Anubis).

To make matters worse, since shields have been shown to interacts with different types of objects differently we can deduce certain events will impact a shield more than others. That's the foundation of shield draining events. And if it's weaponisable by humans, it should have been already in Stargate since the Ancients had multi-millions of years to poke away at it. And the Stargate franchise has been remarkably good at hinting at some utterly crazy physics violation and turning it into a mainstay later with no furthur explanation beyond the proverbial 15 second recap.

In any case, where either of the latter are concerned, there seem to be more straightforward means of determining limit figures. Like how one ZPM can't put Atlantis into orbit.

Atlantis is also the capital ship of a race who love packing it with Plot Devices. It was actually a plotpoint that when they arrived on Atlantis that it started powering enough stuff up that just plane wasn't needed that the shield started to fail. It's another running point that the SG-teams on Atlantis have only physically explored a very small part of the city and they keep being suprised by the utterly randomshit built into the city.

Atlantis would have been a political capital, and nothing even gets done with maximium efficiency in one of those. It's not a warship where we can say is it needs todo 'x' and meet 'y' performance profile. It's where thier high council of thier entire civilization lived. Instead we canonically have entire labs stuffed full of plot devices hidden away, and the Ancients never had to worry about a lack of power which has come to bit SGA teams in the ass.

[Xon]

After thinking about the "freeze lightning" from Brain storm, it's actually perfectly rational and in-line with how past Stargate technology was presented before.

Fundementally an inertia dampener transfers momentum from one site and spreads that momentum over another site. Providered it can transfer momentum regardless of the orientation with respect to the inertia dampening field, you now have an heatpump. This heatpump will not be limited by conventional thermodynamic equilibrium of that object and it's enviroment, but by the properties of the inertia dampening field and how much momentum it can extract.

Lets suggest how this inertia dampening field is being generated is going screwy or whatever is containing the field to the extarction site is playing up. And you are having random spikes where the field rapidly expands like lightning seeking ground. Everything touched by the expanding field would have a significant amount of heat just magicly sucked out of it, the air itself could be potentially freezing inside the field.

You could even explain telekinesis in a similar way, somehow generating a inertia manipulation field which is adding momentum to the target object.

[Vympel]

It's only a "brainbug" if someone is claiming that shields can never work any other way, however in this case he is right because maintaining gateverse shields for huge amounts of time has occurred several times in the run, the 3333.33... year shielding of Atlantis on one ZPM being the most extreme example. Off the top of my head I can't think of any evidence in the series that would support the shields acting as armor.

I don't understand your point - how does maintaining gateverse shields for huge amounts of time prove that they act in that brainbuggy "I have a 50TW shield and I've been hit by a 25TW laser so now my shield is down by 50%" fashion? All it says to me is that the power systems have enough fuel to maintain the shield for that amount of time, no?

Anyway, all I'm really saying is that there is no reason to ever assume that a shield needs to do the same amount of work as the weapon it is being struck with in order to protect a ship from it - I've seen a lot of Stargate, I don't recall them ever saying that either. Referring to armor is just an analogy.