V-GER vs. the Death Star

[ANGELUS]

Why would the time be so short? When V-ger digitized the Klingon ships and the Fed Space station, it tood several seconds and thats just a few hundred meters. How much longer would this effect take to cover the surface of the earth?

Good point. Let's say it takes 10 seconds to "digitize" a GCS. That would be a rate of around 650,000 cubic metres per second (assuming a GCS volume is 6.5E6 m^3). Now, let's extrapolate that to digitizing the Earth's 510 million square km surface area to a depth of 10 metres (thus ignoring surface structures taller than 10 metres or anything buried deeper than 10 metres). At that rate, it would take roughly ... two hundred and fifty years.

So, even if it fires off a hundred of these things and each one is a thousand times more powerful than the one which struck the Klingon ship, we're still looking at a timeframe of more than 20 hours.

I think this thing would have a helluva time dealing with an ISD, never mind the Death Star.

There's just one problem Mike. The satelite itself was launched over three hundred years before the events seen in TMP. It had already "digitized" whole planets, stars, and galaxies in this timespan in its quest for gathering information. Perhaps it used some other method? If so, wouldn't it make sense that it use this method on something the size of the Death Star?

Actually the "Machine civilization" that Vger found could have given it all the data about those galaxies inside of it, after all digital information can be duplicated. Maeby the civilization had explored and made detailed maps of those galaxies (only explored, not necessarly digitized) and then gave the information to Vger because it would need it for its trip back to Earth. The fact that Vger was able to digitize matter and energy means that the civilization was able too, but it doesn't mean that they used to do it, after all Vger wasn't one of them so it would behave differently, it just ran into them and they gave it technology and knowledge, but it followed its original programation "gather information and return to the creator", it simply had now power and tech to do it. They didn't give it new programation, just enough power and info to follow it.

[Durandal]

I don't think that solution works; if we use it, then Indiana Jones never shot the Arab swordsman in Raiders of the Lost Ark (that wasn't in the script; it was Harrison Ford's idea and the director went along with it).

I'd call it an impulse, rather than an idea. Ford apparently had to piss really badly, so instead of fighting the swordsman, like he was supposed to, he pulled out his pistol and just shot him, and the swordsman obediently fell over.

[Grand Admiral Thrawn]

I don't think that solution works; if we use it, then Indiana Jones never shot the Arab swordsman in Raiders of the Lost Ark (that wasn't in the script; it was Harrison Ford's idea and the director went along with it).

I'd call it an impulse, rather than an idea. Ford apparently had to piss really badly, so instead of fighting the swordsman, like he was supposed to, he pulled out his pistol and just shot him, and the swordsman obediently fell over.

Really? I heard he was really sick, so he just shot him.

[Grand Admiral Thrawn]

Roddenbury wrote the novel. How is it non-canon?

The fact that the canon policy of Roddenbury and Paramount is books are non-canon. Furthermore, the ability to stop the sun exceeds IIRC the needed energy to destroy Earth, not simply sterilize it.

Also, I would like to mention the fact that there are a large number of Disparities between TOS and the rest of the series. I don't know if they carried over to the movies or not, but mostly it has to do with speed and weapons. E1701 on SB.com put this forward, and had good backing for it. I'll check it out and see if I can find it, but disregard me until I do.

Most of those disparities are false.

[Darth Servo]

I don't think that solution works; if we use it, then Indiana Jones never shot the Arab swordsman in Raiders of the Lost Ark (that wasn't in the script; it was Harrison Ford's idea and the director went along with it).

I'd call it an impulse, rather than an idea. Ford apparently had to piss really badly, so instead of fighting the swordsman, like he was supposed to, he pulled out his pistol and just shot him, and the swordsman obediently fell over.

Really? I heard he was really sick, so he just shot him.

I've heard several different versions of the story. The most common one was that they had tried shooting the scene several times. He was originally supposed to use his whip against the swordsman, but something always went wrong. Finally, Harrison just got tired of doing it over and over angain and decided to shoot the guy, the guy went along with it and everyone loved it, so it was a keeper.

And now its one of the classic scenes of all time.

[Singular Quartet]

Roddenbury wrote the novel. How is it non-canon?

The fact that the canon policy of Roddenbury and Paramount is books are non-canon. Furthermore, the ability to stop the sun exceeds IIRC the needed energy to destroy Earth, not simply sterilize it.

Also, I would like to mention the fact that there are a large number of Disparities between TOS and the rest of the series. I don't know if they carried over to the movies or not, but mostly it has to do with speed and weapons. E1701 on SB.com put this forward, and had good backing for it. I'll check it out and see if I can find it, but disregard me until I do.

Most of those disparities are false.

You mean like an ounce of Ent-nil's power supply ripping the atmosphere off of a planet, where as the Yamato, IIRC, another Galaxy class, lost Antimatter containment, and somewhat damaged the E-D, which was the standard 10km away? Nope. No disparities there...

[Darth Wong]

Most of those disparities are false.

You mean like an ounce of Ent-nil's power supply ripping the atmosphere off of a planet, where as the Yamato, IIRC, another Galaxy class, lost Antimatter containment, and somewhat damaged the E-D, which was the standard 10km away? Nope. No disparities there...

Not at all, since this event you speak of never happened. It was merely Spock pontificating about the possibility. Not only is it a non-event, but it is based entirely on the assumption of perfect inerrancy from someone who thinks you can use sonic weapons in space.

[Singular Quartet]

Most of those disparities are false.

You mean like an ounce of Ent-nil's power supply ripping the atmosphere off of a planet, where as the Yamato, IIRC, another Galaxy class, lost Antimatter containment, and somewhat damaged the E-D, which was the standard 10km away? Nope. No disparities there...

Not at all, since this event you speak of never happened. It was merely Spock pontificating about the possibility. Not only is it a non-event, but it is based entirely on the assumption of perfect inerrancy from someone who thinks you can use sonic weapons in space.

Never saw that episode, so I'm not gonna fight over it. As to discrepencies in firepower, speed, and other things, here's E1701's take on it, from here

Sigh... I'm gonna have to sit down and list the episodes, one by one, pointing out every example... again... aren't I?

"The Cage" - Lee Kelso states that the Enterprise could bring to bear enough firepower to "blast half a continent". Even assuming a continent the size of Australia, and taking a minimalist approach to the defination of "blast", that's a lot of firepower, generated by the Enterprise's laser weapons, which are later stated to be vastly inferior to phasers.

"Where No Man Has Gone Before" - Enterprise travels to edge of the galaxy for the first time - from Earth, the nearest possible edge, heading straight up, is something close to 2,500 LY. This episode is also notable for Spock ordering the helmsman to engage "time-warp drives, take us into hyperspace!"

"The Naked Time" - A risky cold-start of the ship's impulse engines flings the ship into reverse at "a speed greater than is possible in normal space", and back in time 71 hours. Earlier, Scotty states that if their intermix formula is wrong, they'll "go up in the biggest blast since the last star around these parts went supernova."

"Balance of Terror" - Already remarked on, a plasma weapon vaporizes an asteroid that is at least 2 miles across, in the single shot. Sorry Phalanx, the outpost's shields do fail after the second hit. The third vapes the asteroid, and leaves only a smattering of brittle remneants of the hardest substance known to their science. Bare minimum, 180 GT. Enterprise survives the first hit, which chases them at greater than warp 8, and is able to manuever. A second hit brings down their shields, and a nuke at point-blank range causes damage to the phaser control room. Total casualties at the end of the battle: Romulan ship and all hands, phaser specialist Robert Tomlinson.

"Arena" - A recording from Cestus III states that the Gorn approached at sublight along standard Federation approach lanes, before knocking out the planet's phaser batteries in their first salvo.

"The Alternative Factor" - the entrance of the Lazarus from an antimatter universe generates a violent space-time ripple which Starfleet Command states unequivacably was "felt in all quadrants of the galaxy, and beyond."

"Tomorrow is Yesterday" - an accidental slingshot around a black hole throws the Enterprise back to 1967. While cruising through the upper atmosphere in excess of Mach 1, Spock notes with little concern that if Christopher fires his payload of nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles at the unshielded Enterprise, they "could cause some damage." The Enterprise then locks the jet in a tractor beam, but even after dropping to lowest power, the tractor causes the plane to fragment.

"A Taste of Armageddon" - The computers on the surface list the Enterprise as having been destroyed by a tricobalt warhead, and the landing party killed when the enemy "materialized fusion bombs over the city." When held hostage, Kirk declares that he'll show Anan 7 what devestation really is, and orders Scotty to carry out General Order 24 in two hours. When Anan asks what he's done, Kirk states that if he isn't released by that deadline, the Enterprise will level the surface of the planet and kill everyone on the planet. The Eminians, panicking, attack the Enterprise with a sonic disrupter Scotty rates at 10^18 decibles, or 11 trillion times louder than a 767 on take-off. Far from being a bluff, Scotty moves out of range of the disruptors, and prepares to carry out the order when Kirk reports back in, having destroyed the planetary computers.

"Errand of Mercy" - When trying to convince the Organians to fight against the Klingons, he tells that that they will become slaves of the Empire. The head counciler retorts that if they resist, the Klingons might simply destroy the planet, and be spared the trouble. When the Organians finally decide to intervene, as the Klingon and Federation fleets gather in the system, the counciler states that they cannot permit a war between the Klingons and the Federation, because the conflict in their system would almost certainly result in the destruction of their planet, and would cost far too many lives overall.

"Friday's Child" - When the Capellans turn on him, the Klingon agent declares that with the Enterprise off chasing a phony distress call, that his ship could "burn this planet to a cinder." Kirk, Spock, and McCoy take him deadly seriously.

"The Doomsday Machine" - A planet eater is going around chopping planets into rubble with a pure antiproton force beam, and devouring the rubble as fuel. Commodore Matt Decker (father of TMP's Willard Decker) in command of the USS Constellation, attacks the device, which is made of pure neutronium. When his ship is crippled making the direct approach, after exhausting phaser banks and emptying the torpedo magazines, he beams his crew down to the class-M planet in the system, fully expecting the thing to eat his ship. Instead, it ignores the ship, and eats the planet. When Enterprise arrives, under Decker's control, it makes several more direct attacks, and is hit repeatedly with the same weapon used to chop up the planets. Two of those hits occurr after the shields fail, and there is no visible hull damage (as there is on Constellation). When Decker's shuttle explodes inside the maw, there is a slight power drop. So they toss in the entire Constellation, with the fusion impulse reactors rigged to blow. When the planetkiller eats the Constellation, and the reactors cook off at "97.3 megatons", it is stopped dead in space, but is otherwise undamaged.

"The Changling" - Nomad "sterilizes" the entire Malurian star system, in very short order. The population of 4 billion is exterminated. When it attacks the Enterprise, each of the three shots it fires are stated to rate as equivalent to 90 photon torpedoes, and the 1.5 meter probe easily withstands a single torpedo strike. The third shot (equivalent to a total of 270 photon torpedoes) brings the Enterprise's shields down.

"Mirror, Mirror" - In the mirror universe, Kirk is ordered to exterminate the entire Halkan population. The first part involves utterly destroying their cities the moment they come over the horizon, followed by the extermination of the entire rest of the populace, so that the Empire can mine the dilithium there itself.

"The Deadly Years" - the Enterprise strays into the Romulan neutral zone, and is attacked by the same class of Bird of Prey as in "Balance of Terror" - it withstands multiple strikes from the plasma weapon, then is transmitted an order to surrender. Kirk broadcasts a clear message to Starfleet, stating that he will self-destruct the ship using a newly installed Corbomite Device, which will instantly destroy *everything* within 200,000 kilometers, and warns that starships should avoid the entire area for at least several weeks after the blast.

"Bread and Circuses" - once again, captured by the locals, Kirk invokes General Order 24, which scares the shit out of Captain Merrick, who was a classmate of Kirk's at the Academy. Instead, Scotty manages to cause a planet-wide power failure as a distraction to rescue Kirk.

"Journey to Babel" - the Enterprise is sabotaged by an Orion pirate posing as an Andorian aide. Trapped at sublight, the Enterprise is attacked by an Orion pirate ship that remains at warp 8. When the opportunity arises, despite remaining at sublight, Enterprise fires on the Orion, crippling it in the first volley. It then self-destructs to prevent capture.

"Obsession" - Kirk finally lures the cloud-creature back to its home planet, Tycho IV. To lure it, they bait it to the surface with human blood, then set a charge of one-ounce of TOS uber-antimatter... the resulting explosion tears the atmosphere of the planet off.

"The Immunity Syndrome" - investigating the destruction of the USS Intrepid, and wiped out billions of people in Gamma 7A, they discover an 11,000 mile-long space-ameoba, which consumes energy, both mechanical and biological. Spock discovers that the plasma within the cell is largely gelatinous, with a liquid core near the center and nucleus. The Enterprise persues Spock's shuttle into the heart of the creature, and plants a bomb. The resulting explosion virtually atomizes the cell.

"A Piece of the Action" - Enterprise uses ship phasers on stun to knock out an entire block's worth of fighting mobsters in one fell swoop. Fun side note, Oxmyx tells Kirk to meet up with his boys at "the yellow fire plug at the end of the street." It takes Scotty less than 5 seconds to pinpoint the exact location...

"By Any Other Name" - The Enterprise's second trip through the galactic barrier, on a beeline for Andromeda.

"Patterns of Force" - when tracked by an incoming thermonuke at warp (both at warp speeds, moving towards each other), Enterprise calmly blows it away with a phaser shot.

"The Ultimate Computer" - during the final wargames exercise, M-5 goes bezerk. It suddenly jumps to warp 4, and strafes the fleet which is at sublight, with full phasers. The opposing ships, who's shields have been jacked down to 10% normal, take damage. Enterprise then pulls a tight 180, and corckscrews through the fleet formation at warp 7. Starship Excalibur takes repeated hits, and is declared dead - the entire crew is dead, but the ship itself is perfectly intact. Commodore Wesely pulls the rest of the ships back, and prepares to go in at full power, and destroy the rogue Enterprise, and they also jump to warp to engage.

"The Omega Glory" - on the ground, using a single phaser pistol and a handful of power packs, kills *thousands* of charging barbarian hordes easily. To save the town from the oncoming horde, he asks Kirk for four phaser pistols and three extra power packs each. "They sacrificed hundreds of warriors, just to lure us out into the open," he says, "then they came, and they came, and they came. We cut down thousands of them, and still they came." It's worth noting that the barbarians in this case did possess archers and basic smoothbore muskets...

"Elaan of Troyus" - The Enterprise is sabotaged by one of the Dohlman's guards, who is in the pay of the Klingons. They are stuck at sublight, trying to fend off a Klingon ship which remains at warp. On emergency power only, they manage to maintain the shields for several passes of the Klingon battlecruiser. Then they find out the Dohlman's necklace is made of raw dilithium, and giving them to Scotty, five minutes later, they pull up partial main power, jump to warp, and cripple the Klingon ship with their opening barrage.

"Is There in Truth No Beauty?" - Third time through the galactic barrier - they apparently got so far from the Milky Way before Larry Marvick was stopped, that they required extremely precise navigation to return.

"For the World is Hollow, And I Have Touched the Sky" - The Enterprise is diverted to destroy an asteroid on a collision course with Daran V. The Asteroid ship Yonada, which they continue to believe they can easily destroy if need-be, is large enough that from the interior, it resembles a planetary surface. Producing the title, at one point, a man staggers in, and says, "Even though it was forbidden, I climbed the western mountains. They have lied to us! For the world is hollow, and I have touched the sky!"

"Day of the Dove" - Fourth trip through the galactic barrier...

"That Which Survives" - The Enterprise is hurled some 990.7 light-years from the planet where the landing party is stranded. The trip damaged the Enterprise's engines, and Spock notes that at their maximum sustainable warp, Warp 8.4, it will take 11 hours to return to the planet.

"Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" - Under the control of Bele, the Enterprise travels to Cheron, 90,000 light-years distant, in under two days.

"Whom Gods Destroy" - the planet is shielded, and Kirk and Spock are trapped within the penal colony. Scotty states that the Enterprise can batter down the shields, but that the backwash would destroy everything on the surface, even if the firing point is on the opposite side of the planet, where the shield is weakest. In the meantime, Garth shows off a chemical explosive - a piece smaller than a grain of sand vaporizes an Orion slave girl, and generates a sizable earthquake. Garth states that if he drops the 20 oz bottle of the stuff, that it would vaporize the entire planet.


cool guy covered TMP. I tried to get a screen capture from the DVD version of the asteroid scene in the wormhole, however, the torpedo dwindles from view several second before it impacts and shatters the asteroid. The stated mass of the asteroid is in useless units... unless someone can figure out what the hell "Mass, .2" means...

And Cool Guy's commentary from here

Well, if we use ST:TMP (which is probably the movie that depicts the Constitution class refit as a stronger ship than the other movies), I still think the ISD will win. But, here are some nice numbers you can get from the movie:

Accelerations between 8,500 - 10,000 km/s/s.
- Takes between 3 and 3.5 seconds to accelerate from warp .7 - warp .8 while at impulse (based upon the time between Sulu's reports). For those who don't know, they stated impulse speeds in warp fractions in this movie (when leaving earth, Kirk ordered the impulse engines to come online and then to go warp .5).

Getting hit by Vger's weapon.
- McCoy states that the weapon Vger fired (5 times) at earth is the same one that hit them. Spock adds that it is hundreds of times more powerful and that it will devistate the entire surface of the planet (and that they are moving into equidistant positions). The Ileia probe then adds that they are going to remove the carbon based lifeform infestation from earth because the creator has not answered (this is when each weapon split up into three smaller ones for a total of 15).

Lets see, 5 weapons, each being 999 times more powerful than the one that hit the enterprise. A 4E23J Bomb (asteroid) hit earth 65 million years ago and the biosystem survived (I know, the asteroid only hit in one place... but the people/animals didn't have military bunkers, or anything of that sort either). Anyways:

4E23J / 5 = 8E22 per weapon

SO, if using the "asteroid bomb" number is not overshooting the amount of energy it would take to wipe out all human life (at the least, the probe did say "carbon based" units which would include all life...) in the form of 5 weapons that later split into a total of 15 smaller weapons, then:

Lowest end: 8E22 / 999 = 8.008008E19J per weapon that hit the enterprise (or a good 19 GTs).

Highest end: 8E22/200 = 4E20J per weapon that hit the enterprise (or a good 95 GTs).

Both figures are lower than what a HTL can dish out. A couple 200GT HTLs should be able to take out the Enterprise according to those numbers (which aren't actually accurate until I can find out how much energy it would take to eliminate all human life in an advanced society through 5 and/or 15 weapons... but the numbers are still fun to play with ). Of course, that is assuming the ISD can hit the enterprise

[Darth Wong]

It's easy to find "contradictions" when you make no attempt whatsoever to rationalize seeming inconsistencies and every attempt to exaggerate them.

[kojikun]

TedC, dont be an idiot. If it has pictures of over 300,000,000,000 stellar objects, countless planets, moons, etc, do you honestly think a quick peek into the looking glass will show anything more then a small fraction of what VGER recorded? The chances of that small fraction being the klingon ships is ridiculously small.

[Lord Poe]

"The Cage" - Lee Kelso states that the Enterprise could bring to bear enough firepower to "blast half a continent". Even assuming a continent the size of Australia, and taking a minimalist approach to the defination of "blast", that's a lot of firepower, generated by the Enterprise's laser weapons, which are later stated to be vastly inferior to phasers.

Did he say in one shot? Nope. The ship coupld stay up there for weeks doing this, foe all we know.

"Where No Man Has Gone Before" - Enterprise travels to edge of the galaxy for the first time - from Earth, the nearest possible edge, heading straight up, is something close to 2,500 LY. This episode is also notable for Spock ordering the helmsman to engage "time-warp drives, take us into hyperspace!"

I've watched this episode for years now. Not ONCE is it ever stated or shown that they departed from Earth at the beginning of that episode.

"The Naked Time" - A risky cold-start of the ship's impulse engines flings the ship into reverse at "a speed greater than is possible in normal space", and back in time 71 hours. Earlier, Scotty states that if their intermix formula is wrong, they'll "go up in the biggest blast since the last star around these parts went supernova."

And? Obviously, E7101 is trying to float a turd that attempts to compare the Enterprise exploding to a supernova. Not true. A firecracker going off could still be "the biggest blast since the last star around these parts went supernova".

"Balance of Terror" - Already remarked on, a plasma weapon vaporizes an asteroid that is at least 2 miles across, in the single shot. Sorry Phalanx, the outpost's shields do fail after the second hit. The third vapes the asteroid, and leaves only a smattering of brittle remneants of the hardest substance known to their science. Bare minimum, 180 GT. Enterprise survives the first hit, which chases them at greater than warp 8, and is able to manuever. A second hit brings down their shields, and a nuke at point-blank range causes damage to the phaser control room. Total casualties at the end of the battle: Romulan ship and all hands, phaser specialist Robert Tomlinson.

First of all, the Enterprise survives the first hit by first outrunning the blast until it was all but dissipated, and it STILL knocked the crew off their feet. It does NOT maneuver. The nuke causes some of the crew to suffer radiation effects along with damaging the ship. Also, after the first engagement with the Romulans the phaser transfer coil burns out. Note that the Enterprise suffered NO hits, and Scotty said nothing about the systems being overtaxed.

Also, it took the Enterprise THREE WEEKS to chase and battle the Romulans. In the beginning of the episode, it was stated that it would take three weeks before the Enterprise heard from Starfleet command. At the end of the episode, Yeoman Rand informs Kirk that Starfleet has responded.

"Arena" - A recording from Cestus III states that the Gorn approached at sublight along standard Federation approach lanes, before knocking out the planet's phaser batteries in their first salvo.

And this means.....?

"The Alternative Factor" - the entrance of the Lazarus from an antimatter universe generates a violent space-time ripple which Starfleet Command states unequivacably was "felt in all quadrants of the galaxy, and beyond."

Which is obviously bullshit, as the Enterprise is still exploring the galaxy along with 11 ofther sister ships, and Starfleet Command has no influence outside the galaxy.

"Tomorrow is Yesterday" - an accidental slingshot around a black hole throws the Enterprise back to 1967. While cruising through the upper atmosphere in excess of Mach 1, Spock notes with little concern that if Christopher fires his payload of nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles at the unshielded Enterprise, they "could cause some damage." The Enterprise then locks the jet in a tractor beam, but even after dropping to lowest power, the tractor causes the plane to fragment.

Uh huh. So the Enterprise can damage a 300 year old aircraft? I'm quaking in my boots...

"A Taste of Armageddon" - The computers on the surface list the Enterprise as having been destroyed by a tricobalt warhead, and the landing party killed when the enemy "materialized fusion bombs over the city." When held hostage, Kirk declares that he'll show Anan 7 what devestation really is, and orders Scotty to carry out General Order 24 in two hours. When Anan asks what he's done, Kirk states that if he isn't released by that deadline, the Enterprise will level the surface of the planet and kill everyone on the planet. The Eminians, panicking, attack the Enterprise with a sonic disrupter Scotty rates at 10^18 decibles, or 11 trillion times louder than a 767 on take-off. Far from being a bluff, Scotty moves out of range of the disruptors, and prepares to carry out the order when Kirk reports back in, having destroyed the planetary computers.

Gothmog Lord of Balrogs Location: Angband, Beleriand, Middle-Earth Dec 12th 2001 at 8:38pm (spacebattles.com):

And the weapon was fired from within a Earth normal atmosphere.... AND what people who use this (or argue against it) fail to note is that it was posted as a joke. People should know better than to take things out of context, particularly without checking with the person who did it... right Chris? In other words, you are attempting to invalidate something that I never claimed was valid in the first place (the sheer ludicrousness of the number should have been the give-away, there... ).

"Errand of Mercy" - When trying to convince the Organians to fight against the Klingons, he tells that that they will become slaves of the Empire. The head counciler retorts that if they resist, the Klingons might simply destroy the planet, and be spared the trouble. When the Organians finally decide to intervene, as the Klingon and Federation fleets gather in the system, the counciler states that they cannot permit a war between the Klingons and the Federation, because the conflict in their system would almost certainly result in the destruction of their planet, and would cost far too many lives overall.

So we go from the assumption in "The Cage" that one ship can destroy a planet, to the combined fleets of Earth and the Kingon Empire needed to destroy one?

"Friday's Child" - When the Capellans turn on him, the Klingon agent declares that with the Enterprise off chasing a phony distress call, that his ship could "burn this planet to a cinder." Kirk, Spock, and McCoy take him deadly seriously.

Again, no time indication.

"The Doomsday Machine" - A planet eater is going around chopping planets into rubble with a pure antiproton force beam, and devouring the rubble as fuel. Commodore Matt Decker (father of TMP's Willard Decker) in command of the USS Constellation, attacks the device, which is made of pure neutronium. When his ship is crippled making the direct approach, after exhausting phaser banks and emptying the torpedo magazines, he beams his crew down to the class-M planet in the system, fully expecting the thing to eat his ship. Instead, it ignores the ship, and eats the planet. When Enterprise arrives, under Decker's control, it makes several more direct attacks, and is hit repeatedly with the same weapon used to chop up the planets. Two of those hits occurr after the shields fail, and there is no visible hull damage (as there is on Constellation). When Decker's shuttle explodes inside the maw, there is a slight power drop. So they toss in the entire Constellation, with the fusion impulse reactors rigged to blow. When the planetkiller eats the Constellation, and the reactors cook off at "97.3 megatons", it is stopped dead in space, but is otherwise undamaged.

"..but is otherwise undamaged" LOL!!! Anyway, where's the proof that those beams were of the same intensity as those used to carve up planets? That's like saying the DS2 used the superlaser at full power to destroy the Mon Cal ships in ROTJ. It didn't, or we would have seen a beam a hell of a lot wider, and pass through those ships without stopping.

"The Changling" - Nomad "sterilizes" the entire Malurian star system, in very short order. The population of 4 billion is exterminated. When it attacks the Enterprise, each of the three shots it fires are stated to rate as equivalent to 90 photon torpedoes, and the 1.5 meter probe easily withstands a single torpedo strike. The third shot (equivalent to a total of 270 photon torpedoes) brings the Enterprise's shields down.

This is according to Spock, who has been wrong before:

http://h4h.com/louis/spock.html

"Mirror, Mirror" - In the mirror universe, Kirk is ordered to exterminate the entire Halkan population. The first part involves utterly destroying their cities the moment they come over the horizon, followed by the extermination of the entire rest of the populace, so that the Empire can mine the dilithium there itself.

And Kirk says he will "lay waste" to the planet, THEN "take what they want". So obviously, the damage can't be catastrophic.

"The Deadly Years" - the Enterprise strays into the Romulan neutral zone, and is attacked by the same class of Bird of Prey as in "Balance of Terror" - it withstands multiple strikes from the plasma weapon, then is transmitted an order to surrender. Kirk broadcasts a clear message to Starfleet, stating that he will self-destruct the ship using a newly installed Corbomite Device, which will instantly destroy *everything* within 200,000 kilometers, and warns that starships should avoid the entire area for at least several weeks after the blast.

First of all, those Romulan ships are NOT the prototype ship seen in "Balance of Terror". Secondly, those plasma weapons are NOT the same as shown in "Balance of Terror", since these dissipate almost immediately after being fired, AND look like nothing more than Klingon torpedoes when they hit the Enterprise.

"Bread and Circuses" - once again, captured by the locals, Kirk invokes General Order 24, which scares the shit out of Captain Merrick, who was a classmate of Kirk's at the Academy. Instead, Scotty manages to cause a planet-wide power failure as a distraction to rescue Kirk.

Again, no time frame given. And was the power failure "planet-wide"? A car hitting a transformer here where I live can knock out power for several city blocks now.

"Journey to Babel" - the Enterprise is sabotaged by an Orion pirate posing as an Andorian aide. Trapped at sublight, the Enterprise is attacked by an Orion pirate ship that remains at warp 8. When the opportunity arises, despite remaining at sublight, Enterprise fires on the Orion, crippling it in the first volley. It then self-destructs to prevent capture.

Bullshit, the aide NEVER sabotaged the ship, and it is NEVER stated that the Enterprise was trapped at sublight speeds.

"Obsession" - Kirk finally lures the cloud-creature back to its home planet, Tycho IV. To lure it, they bait it to the surface with human blood, then set a charge of one-ounce of TOS uber-antimatter... the resulting explosion tears the atmosphere of the planet off.

http://h4h.com/louis/spock.html

"The Immunity Syndrome" - investigating the destruction of the USS Intrepid, and wiped out billions of people in Gamma 7A, they discover an 11,000 mile-long space-ameoba, which consumes energy, both mechanical and biological. Spock discovers that the plasma within the cell is largely gelatinous, with a liquid core near the center and nucleus. The Enterprise persues Spock's shuttle into the heart of the creature, and plants a bomb. The resulting explosion virtually atomizes the cell.

So they explode a bomb in the middle of an amoeba that was on the verge of seperating anyway, and this is somehow amazing?

"A Piece of the Action" - Enterprise uses ship phasers on stun to knock out an entire block's worth of fighting mobsters in one fell swoop. Fun side note, Oxmyx tells Kirk to meet up with his boys at "the yellow fire plug at the end of the street." It takes Scotty less than 5 seconds to pinpoint the exact location...

Bullshit, once again. It is Kirk that calls in the exact location for this blast, on his communicator.

"By Any Other Name" - The Enterprise's second trip through the galactic barrier, on a beeline for Andromeda.

Thanks to an upgrade provided by technologically superior aliens FROM the Andromeda galaxy.

"Patterns of Force" - when tracked by an incoming thermonuke at warp (both at warp speeds, moving towards each other), Enterprise calmly blows it away with a phaser shot.

OOOh, amazing....

"The Ultimate Computer" - during the final wargames exercise, M-5 goes bezerk. It suddenly jumps to warp 4, and strafes the fleet which is at sublight, with full phasers. The opposing ships, who's shields have been jacked down to 10% normal, take damage. Enterprise then pulls a tight 180, and corckscrews through the fleet formation at warp 7. Starship Excalibur takes repeated hits, and is declared dead - the entire crew is dead, but the ship itself is perfectly intact. Commodore Wesely pulls the rest of the ships back, and prepares to go in at full power, and destroy the rogue Enterprise, and they also jump to warp to engage.

Where is it stated that the fleet is at sublight? The scene clearly shows they are at warp. And why is it so amazing that one ship had dead crew but no visible damage? In "Balance of Terror", we saw no damage but the crew was suffering from radiation damage from simple NUKES.

"The Omega Glory" - on the ground, using a single phaser pistol and a handful of power packs, kills *thousands* of charging barbarian hordes easily. To save the town from the oncoming horde, he asks Kirk for four phaser pistols and three extra power packs each. "They sacrificed hundreds of warriors, just to lure us out into the open," he says, "then they came, and they came, and they came. We cut down thousands of them, and still they came." It's worth noting that the barbarians in this case did possess archers and basic smoothbore muskets...

And this proves what exactly? This has nothing to do with any starships, and doesn't address the fact that Tracy was accompanied by Coms during this raid, and wasn't alone.

"Elaan of Troyus" - The Enterprise is sabotaged by one of the Dohlman's guards, who is in the pay of the Klingons. They are stuck at sublight, trying to fend off a Klingon ship which remains at warp. On emergency power only, they manage to maintain the shields for several passes of the Klingon battlecruiser. Then they find out the Dohlman's necklace is made of raw dilithium, and giving them to Scotty, five minutes later, they pull up partial main power, jump to warp, and cripple the Klingon ship with their opening barrage.

Ooohhh... THAT's never happened before....

"Is There in Truth No Beauty?" - Third time through the galactic barrier - they apparently got so far from the Milky Way before Larry Marvick was stopped, that they required extremely precise navigation to return.

More Red Herrings. An insane man flew them into the Barrier, and only a Medusan (in the body of Spock) was able to get them out again. Note the normal crew COULDN'T do this.

"For the World is Hollow, And I Have Touched the Sky" - The Enterprise is diverted to destroy an asteroid on a collision course with Daran V. The Asteroid ship Yonada, which they continue to believe they can easily destroy if need-be, is large enough that from the interior, it resembles a planetary surface. Producing the title, at one point, a man staggers in, and says, "Even though it was forbidden, I climbed the western mountains. They have lied to us! For the world is hollow, and I have touched the sky!"

Yet when faced with an ACTUAL asteroid in "The Paradise Syndrome" Spock cripples the Enterprise in an attempt to destroy it....

"Day of the Dove" - Fourth trip through the galactic barrier...

Again due to alien influence...

"That Which Survives" - The Enterprise is hurled some 990.7 light-years from the planet where the landing party is stranded. The trip damaged the Enterprise's engines, and Spock notes that at their maximum sustainable warp, Warp 8.4, it will take 11 hours to return to the planet.

And again, Spock is probably wrong in his numbers, since a defense program named Losira sabotages the engines, which sends the ship hurtling through space at high warp, and out of control. Spock estimates that the crew has only "14.87 minutes" left before the ship explodes. Scotty works madly trying to remedy the problem by working on the magnetic containment field holding the antimatter. As Scott begins repairs, Spock tells him he has "8 minutes, 41 seconds" left. Soon the countdown to the imminent destruction of the Enterprise comes and goes-- and nothing happens. If Spock is so precise with his calculations, why was Scott able to work for at least ten seconds after Spock said the ship would explode?

"Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" - Under the control of Bele, the Enterprise travels to Cheron, 90,000 light-years distant, in under two days.

Yup, AGAIN, under alien control...

"Whom Gods Destroy" - the planet is shielded, and Kirk and Spock are trapped within the penal colony. Scotty states that the Enterprise can batter down the shields, but that the backwash would destroy everything on the surface, even if the firing point is on the opposite side of the planet, where the shield is weakest. In the meantime, Garth shows off a chemical explosive - a piece smaller than a grain of sand vaporizes an Orion slave girl, and generates a sizable earthquake. Garth states that if he drops the 20 oz bottle of the stuff, that it would vaporize the entire planet.

And Garth is of course, INSANE. He just escaped imprisonment, so when did he have time to set up a research lab and develop such an expolsive at a PRISON colony?

[Vympel]

Bwhahahahah 180GT Romulan plasma torpedoes- yes .....

The lame ass arguments just keep on getting resurrected.

Anyone feel like bringing up TDiC and Skin of Evil again? Really, hasn't the quota for us not hearing these non-arguments passed or something?

[Darth Wong]

Did he say in one shot? Nope. The ship coupld stay up there for weeks doing this, foe all we know.

You should also note that the event in question never took place and could be hyperbole.

And? Obviously, E7101 is trying to float a turd that attempts to compare the Enterprise exploding to a supernova. Not true. A firecracker going off could still be "the biggest blast since the last star around these parts went supernova".

And again, it's a lot of hot air. When we finally saw the Enterprise explode in ST3, it was no supernova. The E-Nil, after all, could not muster a 97.835 megaton blast from its entire armament, otherwise it could have killed the Doomsday machine without sacrificing an entire ship to do so.

"Balance of Terror" - Already remarked on, a plasma weapon vaporizes an asteroid that is at least 2 miles across, in the single shot.

He's full of shit. It pulverizes the asteroid; it does NOT vapourize it. Fragmentation figures are ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE smaller than vapourization figures. And how does he explain Spock bringing back pieces of the fucking asteroid base if it was vapourized?

Also, it took the Enterprise THREE WEEKS to chase and battle the Romulans. In the beginning of the episode, it was stated that it would take three weeks before the Enterprise heard from Starfleet command. At the end of the episode, Yeoman Rand informs Kirk that Starfleet has responded.

I thought it was three hours.

"The Alternative Factor" - the entrance of the Lazarus from an antimatter universe generates a violent space-time ripple which Starfleet Command states unequivacably was "felt in all quadrants of the galaxy, and beyond."

Which is obviously bullshit, as the Enterprise is still exploring the galaxy along with 11 ofther sister ships, and Starfleet Command has no influence outside the galaxy.

Not to mention the fact that no actual damage was done, so any attempt to generate an energy figure from this is a waste of time.

"Errand of Mercy" - When trying to convince the Organians to fight against the Klingons, he tells that that they will become slaves of the Empire. The head counciler retorts that if they resist, the Klingons might simply destroy the planet, and be spared the trouble. When the Organians finally decide to intervene, as the Klingon and Federation fleets gather in the system, the counciler states that they cannot permit a war between the Klingons and the Federation, because the conflict in their system would almost certainly result in the destruction of their planet, and would cost far too many lives overall.

So we go from the assumption in "The Cage" that one ship can destroy a planet, to the combined fleets of Earth and the Kingon Empire needed to destroy one?

It's still just hyperbole. At no point is his idiotic notion that this mens anything more than flattening the surface. It doesn't even necessarily mean 100% casualties. Hiroshima was "destroyed" without 100% casualties.

"Friday's Child" - When the Capellans turn on him, the Klingon agent declares that with the Enterprise off chasing a phony distress call, that his ship could "burn this planet to a cinder." Kirk, Spock, and McCoy take him deadly seriously.

Again, no time indication.

Holy fuck, are all Trekkie arguments based on this kind of "he said something which sounded really bad-ass, and everyone around him took it real serious like, so, umm, I've got hard evidence"? I'm getting tired of looking at this shit; all of his points are simply laughable so far, and I'm not seeing any evidence of improvement. Wayne, you must have more endurance for bullshit than me. Signing off.

[Lord Poe]

I'm getting tired of looking at this shit; all of his points are simply laughable so far, and I'm not seeing any evidence of improvement. Wayne, you must have more endurance for bullshit than me. Signing off.

Really? YOU"RE the one that debated Darkstar, remember?

[Singular Quartet]

<troll>Well you didn't disprove that TOS fights at warp, so it must be different (and more powerful) than the rest!</troll>

As to that, I'll pick some of hte points that are more easily defendable, mostly because I don't watch TOS enough. And I really should have read through this, first...

"Arena" - A recording from Cestus III states that the Gorn approached at sublight along standard Federation approach lanes, before knocking out the planet's phaser batteries in their first salvo.

And this means.....?

That Federation planets have plantary phaser arrays.

"Errand of Mercy" - When trying to convince the Organians to fight against the Klingons, he tells that that they will become slaves of the Empire. The head counciler retorts that if they resist, the Klingons might simply destroy the planet, and be spared the trouble. When the Organians finally decide to intervene, as the Klingon and Federation fleets gather in the system, the counciler states that they cannot permit a war between the Klingons and the Federation, because the conflict in their system would almost certainly result in the destruction of their planet, and would cost far too many lives overall.

So we go from the assumption in "The Cage" that one ship can destroy a planet, to the combined fleets of Earth and the Kingon Empire needed to destroy one?

Isn't collateral damage wonderful?
Yes, but on to the point: What this could be taken as, is that the Organians were worried about random misses impacting on their world.

"Bread and Circuses" - once again, captured by the locals, Kirk invokes General Order 24, which scares the shit out of Captain Merrick, who was a classmate of Kirk's at the Academy. Instead, Scotty manages to cause a planet-wide power failure as a distraction to rescue Kirk.

Again, no time frame given. And was the power failure "planet-wide"? A car hitting a transformer here where I live can knock out power for several city blocks now.

To true. *recalls power going on and off four seperate times in a single day* Anyways, one would think that a spiecies would be smart enough to have multiple power generation stations? I swear, brainless aliens back in the day...

"The Ultimate Computer" - during the final wargames exercise, M-5 goes bezerk. It suddenly jumps to warp 4, and strafes the fleet which is at sublight, with full phasers. The opposing ships, who's shields have been jacked down to 10% normal, take damage. Enterprise then pulls a tight 180, and corckscrews through the fleet formation at warp 7. Starship Excalibur takes repeated hits, and is declared dead - the entire crew is dead, but the ship itself is perfectly intact. Commodore Wesely pulls the rest of the ships back, and prepares to go in at full power, and destroy the rogue Enterprise, and they also jump to warp to engage.

Where is it stated that the fleet is at sublight? The scene clearly shows they are at warp.

It isn't. Its clearly stated that they fight at FTL, not STL.

And why is it so amazing that one ship had dead crew but no visible damage? In "Balance of Terror", we saw no damage but the crew was suffering from radiation damage from simple NUKES.

Random thought: Maybe they use the shields as heavy radiation shielding, where the normal armor can't actual protect against it? Maybe the Ent-nil has a mircowave/radiation weapon that kills the crew, but leaves the ship (Which would be useful, but I don't see the Federation using it.)

"The Omega Glory" - on the ground, using a single phaser pistol and a handful of power packs, kills *thousands* of charging barbarian hordes easily. To save the town from the oncoming horde, he asks Kirk for four phaser pistols and three extra power packs each. "They sacrificed hundreds of warriors, just to lure us out into the open," he says, "then they came, and they came, and they came. We cut down thousands of them, and still they came." It's worth noting that the barbarians in this case did possess archers and basic smoothbore muskets...

And this proves what exactly? This has nothing to do with any starships, and doesn't address the fact that Tracy was accompanied by Coms during this raid, and wasn't alone.

Probably that phasers have a large firing capacity when set to kill.

"Elaan of Troyus" - The Enterprise is sabotaged by one of the Dohlman's guards, who is in the pay of the Klingons. They are stuck at sublight, trying to fend off a Klingon ship which remains at warp. On emergency power only, they manage to maintain the shields for several passes of the Klingon battlecruiser. Then they find out the Dohlman's necklace is made of raw dilithium, and giving them to Scotty, five minutes later, they pull up partial main power, jump to warp, and cripple the Klingon ship with their opening barrage.

Ooohhh... THAT's never happened before....

Yes! Random plot device, probably enver mentioned through the episode up until then!

"Is There in Truth No Beauty?" - Third time through the galactic barrier - they apparently got so far from the Milky Way before Larry Marvick was stopped, that they required extremely precise navigation to return.

More Red Herrings. An insane man flew them into the Barrier, and only a Medusan (in the body of Spock) was able to get them out again. Note the normal crew COULDN'T do this.

I have no solid ideas about this, but it seems like there's some sort of treknobabble field kicking aroudn the milky way in TOS.

"That Which Survives" - The Enterprise is hurled some 990.7 light-years from the planet where the landing party is stranded. The trip damaged the Enterprise's engines, and Spock notes that at their maximum sustainable warp, Warp 8.4, it will take 11 hours to return to the planet.

And again, Spock is probably wrong in his numbers, since a defense program named Losira sabotages the engines, which sends the ship hurtling through space at high warp, and out of control. Spock estimates that the crew has only "14.87 minutes" left before the ship explodes. Scotty works madly trying to remedy the problem by working on the magnetic containment field holding the antimatter. As Scott begins repairs, Spock tells him he has "8 minutes, 41 seconds" left. Soon the countdown to the imminent destruction of the Enterprise comes and goes-- and nothing happens. If Spock is so precise with his calculations, why was Scott able to work for at least ten seconds after Spock said the ship would explode?

They were still working on their "Statistical Doom" equations, and they weren't perfected yet?

"Whom Gods Destroy" - the planet is shielded, and Kirk and Spock are trapped within the penal colony. Scotty states that the Enterprise can batter down the shields, but that the backwash would destroy everything on the surface, even if the firing point is on the opposite side of the planet, where the shield is weakest. In the meantime, Garth shows off a chemical explosive - a piece smaller than a grain of sand vaporizes an Orion slave girl, and generates a sizable earthquake. Garth states that if he drops the 20 oz bottle of the stuff, that it would vaporize the entire planet.

And Garth is of course, INSANE. He just escaped imprisonment, so when did he have time to set up a research lab and develop such an expolsive at a PRISON colony?

Never mind the fact that there's a planetary shield...

[Grand Admiral Thrawn]

Sigh... I'm gonna have to sit down and list the episodes, one by one, pointing out every example... again... aren't I?

"The Cage" - Lee Kelso states that the Enterprise could bring to bear enough firepower to "blast half a continent". Even assuming a continent the size of Australia, and taking a minimalist approach to the defination of "blast", that's a lot of firepower, generated by the Enterprise's laser weapons, which are later stated to be vastly inferior to phasers.

1. DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND HYPERBOLE? When you threaten someone, it's great to excagerate!
2. What does "blast half a continent mean"?
3. No time period given. Given enough time, an M-4 could "blast half a continent."
4. Inferior doesn't always mean less powerful.

"Where No Man Has Gone Before" - Enterprise travels to edge of the galaxy for the first time - from Earth, the nearest possible edge, heading straight up, is something close to 2,500 LY. This episode is also notable for Spock ordering the helmsman to engage "time-warp drives, take us into hyperspace!"

When did they sat they started for Earth?

"The Naked Time" - A risky cold-start of the ship's impulse engines flings the ship into reverse at "a speed greater than is possible in normal space", and back in time 71 hours. Earlier, Scotty states that if their intermix formula is wrong, they'll "go up in the biggest blast since the last star around these parts went supernova."

And, if there were no explosions since the last supernova, anything could be described as that!

"Balance of Terror" - Already remarked on, a plasma weapon vaporizes an asteroid that is at least 2 miles across, in the single shot. Sorry Phalanx, the outpost's shields do fail after the second hit. The third vapes the asteroid, and leaves only a smattering of brittle remneants of the hardest substance known to their science. Bare minimum, 180 GT.

I guess Spock was holding vapourized pieces of the station?

Enterprise survives the first hit, which chases them at greater than warp 8, and is able to manuever.

In a straight line. And it was disapating.

A second hit brings down their shields, and a nuke at point-blank range causes damage to the phaser control room. Total casualties at the end of the battle: Romulan ship and all hands, phaser specialist Robert Tomlinson.

There was a second hit? And the nuke caused radiation to outer decks. Cassualties=Several dozen irradiated.

"Arena" - A recording from Cestus III states that the Gorn approached at sublight along standard Federation approach lanes, before knocking out the planet's phaser batteries in their first salvo.

Wow. Impressive.

"The Alternative Factor" - the entrance of the Lazarus from an antimatter universe generates a violent space-time ripple which Starfleet Command states unequivacably was "felt in all quadrants of the galaxy, and beyond."

That would imply SF knows whats happening in all parts of the galaxy. This is false, or else the E-Nil wouldn't be finding new planets every day.

"Tomorrow is Yesterday" - an accidental slingshot around a black hole throws the Enterprise back to 1967. While cruising through the upper atmosphere in excess of Mach 1, Spock notes with little concern that if Christopher fires his payload of nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles at the unshielded Enterprise, they "could cause some damage." The Enterprise then locks the jet in a tractor beam, but even after dropping to lowest power, the tractor causes the plane to fragment.

1. Is Mach 1 supposed to be impressive?
2. Ooh wow. They managed to do what a Sidewinder can.

"A Taste of Armageddon" - The computers on the surface list the Enterprise as having been destroyed by a tricobalt warhead, and the landing party killed when the enemy "materialized fusion bombs over the city." When held hostage, Kirk declares that he'll show Anan 7 what devestation really is, and orders Scotty to carry out General Order 24 in two hours. When Anan asks what he's done, Kirk states that if he isn't released by that deadline, the Enterprise will level the surface of the planet and kill everyone on the planet.

No timeframe.

The Eminians, panicking, attack the Enterprise with a sonic disrupter Scotty rates at 10^18 decibles, or 11 trillion times louder than a 767 on take-off. Far from being a bluff, Scotty moves out of range of the disruptors, and prepares to carry out the order when Kirk reports back in, having destroyed the planetary computers.

ROFL! Sonic weapons in space!

"Errand of Mercy" - When trying to convince the Organians to fight against the Klingons, he tells that that they will become slaves of the Empire. The head counciler retorts that if they resist, the Klingons might simply destroy the planet, and be spared the trouble. When the Organians finally decide to intervene, as the Klingon and Federation fleets gather in the system, the counciler states that they cannot permit a war between the Klingons and the Federation, because the conflict in their system would almost certainly result in the destruction of their planet, and would cost far too many lives overall.

People often said a nuclear war between the USSR and the US would result in Earth's destruction.

"Friday's Child" - When the Capellans turn on him, the Klingon agent declares that with the Enterprise off chasing a phony distress call, that his ship could "burn this planet to a cinder." Kirk, Spock, and McCoy take him deadly seriously.

No timeframe. A lot of firebombing B-17s could do the same.

"The Doomsday Machine" - A planet eater is going around chopping planets into rubble with a pure antiproton force beam, and devouring the rubble as fuel. Commodore Matt Decker (father of TMP's Willard Decker) in command of the USS Constellation, attacks the device, which is made of pure neutronium. When his ship is crippled making the direct approach, after exhausting phaser banks and emptying the torpedo magazines, he beams his crew down to the class-M planet in the system, fully expecting the thing to eat his ship. Instead, it ignores the ship, and eats the planet. When Enterprise arrives, under Decker's control, it makes several more direct attacks, and is hit repeatedly with the same weapon used to chop up the planets. Two of those hits occurr after the shields fail, and there is no visible hull damage (as there is on Constellation). When Decker's shuttle explodes inside the maw, there is a slight power drop. So they toss in the entire Constellation, with the fusion impulse reactors rigged to blow. When the planetkiller eats the Constellation, and the reactors cook off at "97.3 megatons", it is stopped dead in space, but is otherwise undamaged.

1. Since AM is only dangerous to matter, the SIF could protect it.
2. The E-Nil's weapons are obviously <97.3 megatons, since they didn't simply shoot in the ship.
3. You assume this fuel short ship would waste planet blasters on a 300m long ship.

"The Changling" - Nomad "sterilizes" the entire Malurian star system, in very short order. The population of 4 billion is exterminated. When it attacks the Enterprise, each of the three shots it fires are stated to rate as equivalent to 90 photon torpedoes, and the 1.5 meter probe easily withstands a single torpedo strike. The third shot (equivalent to a total of 270 photon torpedoes) brings the Enterprise's shields down.

And this proves what? E-Nil's torpedoes are shitty since it would take 270 to take their shields down?

"Mirror, Mirror" - In the mirror universe, Kirk is ordered to exterminate the entire Halkan population. The first part involves utterly destroying their cities the moment they come over the horizon, followed by the extermination of the entire rest of the populace, so that the Empire can mine the dilithium there itself.

No timeframe. And obviously the planet must remain in good condition if they wish to mine it.

"The Deadly Years" - the Enterprise strays into the Romulan neutral zone, and is attacked by the same class of Bird of Prey as in "Balance of Terror" - it withstands multiple strikes from the plasma weapon, then is transmitted an order to surrender. Kirk broadcasts a clear message to Starfleet, stating that he will self-destruct the ship using a newly installed Corbomite Device, which will instantly destroy *everything* within 200,000 kilometers, and warns that starships should avoid the entire area for at least several weeks after the blast.

1. If these were the same weapons, why could the E-Nil now magically take multiple hits?
2. The Corbomite weapon is a BLUFF!
3. Kirk is an idiot. the Moon is farther from the Earth then 200 000km. A pitifully small distance. Since SF can't go into the neutral zone and it would only effect intrasystem, SF wouldn't care.
4. Romulan weapons are shorter ranged then 200 000 km or they could have backed off and fired.

"Bread and Circuses" - once again, captured by the locals, Kirk invokes General Order 24, which scares the shit out of Captain Merrick, who was a classmate of Kirk's at the Academy. Instead, Scotty manages to cause a planet-wide power failure as a distraction to rescue Kirk.

Primative pre-spaceflight locals. The E-Nil could spend years shooting.

"Journey to Babel" - the Enterprise is sabotaged by an Orion pirate posing as an Andorian aide. Trapped at sublight, the Enterprise is attacked by an Orion pirate ship that remains at warp 8. When the opportunity arises, despite remaining at sublight, Enterprise fires on the Orion, crippling it in the first volley. It then self-destructs to prevent capture.

The Andorian aide never sabotaged anything, other then Kirk with a knife. All TOS warp combat is STL (see buttom.

"Obsession" - Kirk finally lures the cloud-creature back to its home planet, Tycho IV. To lure it, they bait it to the surface with human blood, then set a charge of one-ounce of TOS uber-antimatter... the resulting explosion tears the atmosphere of the planet off.

Spock said it would.

"The Immunity Syndrome" - investigating the destruction of the USS Intrepid, and wiped out billions of people in Gamma 7A, they discover an 11,000 mile-long space-ameoba, which consumes energy, both mechanical and biological. Spock discovers that the plasma within the cell is largely gelatinous, with a liquid core near the center and nucleus. The Enterprise persues Spock's shuttle into the heart of the creature, and plants a bomb. The resulting explosion virtually atomizes the cell.

Obviously since it had to be placed in a specific location, it wasn't pure firepower.

"A Piece of the Action" - Enterprise uses ship phasers on stun to knock out an entire block's worth of fighting mobsters in one fell swoop. Fun side note, Oxmyx tells Kirk to meet up with his boys at "the yellow fire plug at the end of the street." It takes Scotty less than 5 seconds to pinpoint the exact location...

...A few blocks away from Kirk's transmission, where they should be scanning!

"By Any Other Name" - The Enterprise's second trip through the galactic barrier, on a beeline for Andromeda.

Aliens involved.

"Patterns of Force" - when tracked by an incoming thermonuke at warp (both at warp speeds, moving towards each other), Enterprise calmly blows it away with a phaser shot.

Amazing. They shot at a straight line missle.

"The Ultimate Computer" - during the final wargames exercise, M-5 goes bezerk. It suddenly jumps to warp 4, and strafes the fleet which is at sublight, with full phasers. The opposing ships, who's shields have been jacked down to 10% normal, take damage. Enterprise then pulls a tight 180, and corckscrews through the fleet formation at warp 7. Starship Excalibur takes repeated hits, and is declared dead - the entire crew is dead, but the ship itself is perfectly intact. Commodore Wesely pulls the rest of the ships back, and prepares to go in at full power, and destroy the rogue Enterprise, and they also jump to warp to engage.

All TOS warp combat is STL (see bottum.)

"The Omega Glory" - on the ground, using a single phaser pistol and a handful of power packs, kills *thousands* of charging barbarian hordes easily. To save the town from the oncoming horde, he asks Kirk for four phaser pistols and three extra power packs each. "They sacrificed hundreds of warriors, just to lure us out into the open," he says, "then they came, and they came, and they came. We cut down thousands of them, and still they came." It's worth noting that the barbarians in this case did possess archers and basic smoothbore muskets...

???

"Elaan of Troyus" - The Enterprise is sabotaged by one of the Dohlman's guards, who is in the pay of the Klingons. They are stuck at sublight, trying to fend off a Klingon ship which remains at warp. On emergency power only, they manage to maintain the shields for several passes of the Klingon battlecruiser. Then they find out the Dohlman's necklace is made of raw dilithium, and giving them to Scotty, five minutes later, they pull up partial main power, jump to warp, and cripple the Klingon ship with their opening barrage.

READ FOR ALL TOS WARP COMBAT!

The speeds Sulu read out were firmly STL.

"Is There in Truth No Beauty?" - Third time through the galactic barrier - they apparently got so far from the Milky Way before Larry Marvick was stopped, that they required extremely precise navigation to return.

Did he not overtax the engines. And why do you need precise navigation to turn around?

"For the World is Hollow, And I Have Touched the Sky" - The Enterprise is diverted to destroy an asteroid on a collision course with Daran V. The Asteroid ship Yonada, which they continue to believe they can easily destroy if need-be, is large enough that from the interior, it resembles a planetary surface. Producing the title, at one point, a man staggers in, and says, "Even though it was forbidden, I climbed the western mountains. They have lied to us! For the world is hollow, and I have touched the sky!"

A hollow asteroid which plenty of time to blast it.

"Day of the Dove" - Fourth trip through the galactic barrier...

...Second alien...

"That Which Survives" - The Enterprise is hurled some 990.7 light-years from the planet where the landing party is stranded. The trip damaged the Enterprise's engines, and Spock notes that at their maximum sustainable warp, Warp 8.4, it will take 11 hours to return to the planet.

Spock already screwed up before...

"Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" - Under the control of Bele, the Enterprise travels to Cheron, 90,000 light-years distant, in under two days.

Alein control!

"Whom Gods Destroy" - the planet is shielded, and Kirk and Spock are trapped within the penal colony. Scotty states that the Enterprise can batter down the shields, but that the backwash would destroy everything on the surface, even if the firing point is on the opposite side of the planet, where the shield is weakest.

Everything on the surface being one penal coloney right beside the shield generator!

In the meantime, Garth shows off a chemical explosive - a piece smaller than a grain of sand vaporizes an Orion slave girl, and generates a sizable earthquake. Garth states that if he drops the 20 oz bottle of the stuff, that it would vaporize the entire planet.

Let's assume Garth used 1/1 000 000 of an oz to kill the Orion girl and it produced 1 gigaton (SUPER GENEROUS)

So the bottle is 20 000 000 times stronger. 20 million gigatons.

BZZ! That super generous estimate is only 8e25 J. Garth is mad.

cool guy covered TMP. I tried to get a screen capture from the DVD version of the asteroid scene in the wormhole, however, the torpedo dwindles from view several second before it impacts and shatters the asteroid. The stated mass of the asteroid is in useless units... unless someone can figure out what the hell "Mass, .2" means...

Useless indeed at least.

[Uraniun235]

Just to nitpick...

1. If these were the same weapons, why could the E-Nil now magically take multiple hits?

It's quite possible the Enterprise had recieved an upgrade since "Balance of Terror".

[Isolder74]

I don't think that solution works; if we use it, then Indiana Jones never shot the Arab swordsman in Raiders of the Lost Ark (that wasn't in the script; it was Harrison Ford's idea and the director went along with it).

I'd call it an impulse, rather than an idea. Ford apparently had to piss really badly, so instead of fighting the swordsman, like he was supposed to, he pulled out his pistol and just shot him, and the swordsman obediently fell over.

Actually Harrison had a bad case of the Flue and felt terrible. They could not spare any days sgooting so they just has Indy shoot the swordsman.

[Gandalf]

I'm getting tired of looking at this shit; all of his points are simply laughable so far, and I'm not seeing any evidence of improvement. Wayne, you must have more endurance for bullshit than me. Signing off.

Really? YOU"RE the one that debated Darkstar, remember?

One can only take so much bullshit in a lifetime.

[seanrobertson]

Alright, spawning from the SPK thread comes this.

V-GER has that one-hit zapping thing (remember, when it launched the planetary torpedoes Spock said they were possibly thousands of times stronger than the originals, meaning V-GER has a whole lot more power than once thought).

Who wins? The planet-buster or the digitizer?

Death Star, hands down. V'Ger might have the capability to render something along the lines of a Base Delta Zero if it wants to. (Actually, we don't know how energetic its attack on Earth would have been...probably sufficient to kill everything in a matter of hours, but would it digitize the people out of existence or blow them up?)

I think a Shadow Planet Killer might be able to kill V'Ger, depending on how powerful the latter's "energy field" is AND if that field can be used as a dedicated shield.

A Death Star is simply overkill.

[seanrobertson]

Actually Harrison had a bad case of the Flue and felt terrible. They could not spare any days sgooting so they just has Indy shoot the swordsman.

Maybe he had bad flu AND had to piss LOL.

I hear Harrison won't be fighting Nazis in the next film. Too bad...that "pull your heart out" guy in pt. II was pretty nasty, but Nazis make good bad guys.

[seanrobertson]

Did he say in one shot? Nope. The ship coupld stay up there for weeks doing this, foe all we know.

Right. It's totally subjective...the only indication that TOS era ships had any kind of decent firepower, to my knowledge anyway, was that the Romulan plasma weapon was able to shatter a big asteroid.

"Where No Man Has Gone Before" - Enterprise travels to edge of the galaxy for the first time - from Earth, the nearest possible edge, heading straight up, is something close to 2,500 LY. This episode is also notable for Spock ordering the helmsman to engage "time-warp drives, take us into hyperspace!"

I've watched this episode for years now. Not ONCE is it ever stated or shown that they departed from Earth at the beginning of that episode.

Agreed.

And? Obviously, E7101 is trying to float a turd that attempts to compare the Enterprise exploding to a supernova. Not true. A firecracker going off could still be "the biggest blast since the last star around these parts went supernova".

ROTF...I think that's *exactly* what I told E on Spacebattles about a year ago!!!!!

"Arena" - A recording from Cestus III states that the Gorn approached at sublight along standard Federation approach lanes, before knocking out the planet's phaser batteries in their first salvo.

And this means.....?

That the E's crew was so stupid as to simply ignore the Gorn ship because it approached "along standard Federation space lanes"

I suppose it is meant to denote targetting capabilities, but that's nothing unique in Trek. We're constantly hearing Picard, Janeway, and Sisko to target engines, sensors, shields, weapons--you name it.

Which is obviously bullshit, as the Enterprise is still exploring the galaxy along with 11 ofther sister ships, and Starfleet Command has no influence outside the galaxy.

Right. It's just goofy hyperbole.

Uh huh. So the Enterprise can damage a 300 year old aircraft? I'm quaking in my boots...

In fairness, that the unshielded hull could withstand tiny nuclear weapons isn't all bad, but it's nothing unique either.

"Friday's Child" - When the Capellans turn on him, the Klingon agent declares that with the Enterprise off chasing a phony distress call, that his ship could "burn this planet to a cinder." Kirk, Spock, and McCoy take him deadly seriously.

Again, no time indication.
[/quote]

Yeah, and how is it any different than:

"We have enough firepower on this ship to turn that planet into a smoking cinder! Surely you, Worf, wouldn't object to a little genocide if it saved the entire Alpha Quadrant?!"--Garak

"I am a warrior, NOT a murderer!"--Worf ("Broken Link," DS9).

More hyperbole, anyway. Klingons are known to make bold threats; e.g., "I will personally cut out your tongue, yIntagh!" (little Toral to Gowron).

"..but is otherwise undamaged" LOL!!! Anyway, where's the proof that those beams were of the same intensity as those used to carve up planets? That's like saying the DS2 used the superlaser at full power to destroy the Mon Cal ships in ROTJ. It didn't, or we would have seen a beam a hell of a lot wider, and pass through those ships without stopping.

Fully agreed. The PK could well have been recharging or have fired some kind of defense weapon, too (whether or not it's of the same *type* as that used against planets doesn't necessarily prove anything).

This is according to Spock, who has been wrong before:

http://h4h.com/louis/spock.html

Yes, though I forgive him for letting Sulu sneak off the bridge in that Psi 2000 episode

Maybe Spock meant the shots were the equivalent of X detonations at some proximity? I know that's lame, but 90 photorps to take down shields (or more) makes even less sense.

And Kirk says he will "lay waste" to the planet, THEN "take what they want". So obviously, the damage can't be catastrophic.

No, they'll be wearing environment suits that let them wade through miles-deep lakes of molten rock LOL.

First of all, those Romulan ships are NOT the prototype ship seen in "Balance of Terror". Secondly, those plasma weapons are NOT the same as shown in "Balance of Terror", since these dissipate almost immediately after being fired, AND look like nothing more than Klingon torpedoes when they hit the Enterprise.

In fairness, Starfleet probably did manage to boost their ships' shields to handle the Romulan plasma weapons, but they do sound like watered-down versions of what we saw in "BOT."

Bullshit, the aide NEVER sabotaged the ship, and it is NEVER stated that the Enterprise was trapped at sublight speeds.

Trapped? I dunno...not in those words, but they didn't have warp power when the Klingons attacked (am I thinking about the same thing? I'm distracted--sorry, Wayne); they had to take that chick's dilithium necklace to get warp speeds running again.

Oops, no, I'm thinking of "Elaan of Troyius." My bad.

http://h4h.com/louis/spock.html

WRT "tearing off the planet's atmosphere," I'm more inclined to think that was simply Spock affecting a human expression/exaggerating. He did occassionally make dry remarks about how hanging with Bones made him a shittier Vulcan (or the like).

Where is it stated that the fleet is at sublight?

I don't think that's ever stated in "The Ultimate Computer." They must be thinking about the Woden drone-freighter.

And this proves what exactly? This has nothing to do with any starships, and doesn't address the fact that Tracy was accompanied by Coms during this raid, and wasn't alone.

That one puzzles me, too, at least insofar as I don't see how it proves that a phaser is ultra-powerful. How much electrical energy does it take to kill a human being in a typical body-shot, like if a guy took a hot wire and stuck it onto his gut or chest?

And again, Spock is probably wrong in his numbers, since a defense program named Losira sabotages the engines, which sends the ship hurtling through space at high warp, and out of control. Spock estimates that the crew has only "14.87 minutes" left before the ship explodes. Scotty works madly trying to remedy the problem by working on the magnetic containment field holding the antimatter. As Scott begins repairs, Spock tells him he has "8 minutes, 41 seconds" left. Soon the countdown to the imminent destruction of the Enterprise comes and goes-- and nothing happens. If Spock is so precise with his calculations, why was Scott able to work for at least ten seconds after Spock said the ship would explode?

I have another quirk to add to this. You remember that episode in which the trio visits that planet with the "Atavaracon" (????), the time-travel machine, maintained by a librarian named Atoz?

While in one of that planet's ice ages, Spock tells some hottie that he comes from a planet "millions of light years from here."

MILLIONS?! So they travelled to some other galaxy before running into Atoz and the Atavacaracharton thing?!

And Garth is of course, INSANE. He just escaped imprisonment, so when did he have time to set up a research lab and develop such an expolsive at a PRISON colony?

No kidding. The guy was a total lunatic. I've read a few people say, "But Kirk and Spock took him seriously!" in an effort to prove the veracity of Garth's claim.

My guess is, they looked worried because they were afraid Garth was going to drop the bottle and maybe blow up the room

[seanrobertson]

[I guess Spock was holding vapourized pieces of the station?

ROTF. Yeah...the vapor very rapidly cooled to reform a solid piece of metal for Spock to find

There was a second hit? And the nuke caused radiation to outer decks. Cassualties=Several dozen irradiated.

I don't remember two hits in "BoT," at all. That might be made up.

"Arena" - A recording from Cestus III states that the Gorn approached at sublight along standard Federation approach lanes, before knocking out the planet's phaser batteries in their first salvo.

Wow. Impressive.
[/quote]

LOL! I just realized I saw "phasers" and immediately assumed that the Gorn ship had disabled the E-NIL'S phaser banks I wasn't thinking of the planet at all. For anyone that wonders, that's why I said the E-nil's crew was stupid...I just misread it. (Yeah, I know...you're all real worried about that .)

That makes the Gorn ship's capabilities even LESS impressive, since hitting a stationary target on a bloomin' planet should be very easy. It also makes the Cestus people stupid...a ship follows a Federation route, so they shouldn't take notice until their phaser batteries are blown up?

That would imply SF knows whats happening in all parts of the galaxy. This is false, or else the E-Nil wouldn't be finding new planets every day.

Bingo. That's a slam dunk.

1. Is Mach 1 supposed to be impressive?
2. Ooh wow. They managed to do what a Sidewinder can.

I think the main claim is that a "damaged, unshielded E-nil can go through a black hole for breakfast and eat a jet fighter's nuke warhead-tipped missile "payload" for lunch. Interesting how those nukes which, as I understand, are teeny-tiny ones, barely a couple of kilotons, would damage the E-nil yet those planet-killer shots in "The Dooms. Mach." didn't do much better?

Hmm...

I know: the nukes that fighter carried must've been TERATON range!

1. Since AM is only dangerous to matter, the SIF could protect it.
2. The E-Nil's weapons are obviously <97.3 megatons, since they didn't simply shoot in the ship.
3. You assume this fuel short ship would waste planet blasters on a 300m long ship.

Yeah, no kidding.

I will say this in minor defense of the E's weapons: evidently the PK "deactivated antimatter" (no shit), so that would render photorps useless. Why they couldn't use phasers, though, I think is still subject to what you're suggesting; i.e., the phaser has far less effect than 90-plus megatons.

And this proves what? E-Nil's torpedoes are shitty since it would take 270 to take their shields down?

Hehehe...yeah. Probably three times their own inventory just to drop their own shields...?

READ FOR ALL TOS WARP COMBAT!

The speeds Sulu read out were firmly STL.

I recall some instances of FTL combat, even in "Elaan" (the Klingon ship slowed down and sped up numerous times). Sulu was calling out speeds when the Klingon ship had dropped out of warp IIRC.

Then again, what does that matter, even if they can "warp strafe" something? Photon torpedoes detonated in a warp ship's flight path can damage it; e.g., Kazon proximity torps in front of VGR at warp in "Basics." Surely other weapons (turbo coughcough lasers coughcough) could do the same thing.

Spock already screwed up before...

True, that.

I'm a little reticent to just blow off anything Spock says on the basis that he's made mistakes in the past...I'm not saying you are doing this, Thrawn (or anyone really), but it seems as if we're all leaning in that direction.

By the same logic, someone could say, "Well, Sean guessed wrong about the winning lottery numbers. He is therefore unreliable when he tells us the sky is clear today" and be way off.

What *is* pertinent, I think, is any instance in which Spock has made mistakes about light years or other astronomical units in the past. He has definitely done so, like his "millions of ly" comment in that time-travel/Mr. ATOZ episode.

Oh, and a quick word on all these fantastic warp speeds...

I oftentimes hear people laud TOS as if its tech is superior to TNG and onward, and these kinds of goofy warp speeds (the thing Bele pulled for example) are used to substantiate those claims.

I wonder, then, how fast did the E-D travel when it reached that "heaven" type place in "Where No One..."? How about when Barclay got real smart and took the E-D to the Cytherians in "The Nth Degree"? Or how about when Q snaps his fingers and throws the E-D about 5,000 ly? The E-D *still* "travelled" that distance, after all

All are whacked examples of warp speeds. How could anyone miss that?

Let's assume Garth used 1/1 000 000 of an oz to kill the Orion girl and it produced 1 gigaton (SUPER GENEROUS)

Especially since she just vanished...no vapor or any other nasty effects

So the bottle is 20 000 000 times stronger. 20 million gigatons.

BZZ! That super generous estimate is only 8e25 J. Garth is mad.

Maybe he had a bigger bottle stuck up his ass. His head was certainly somewhere in there...

cool guy covered TMP. I tried to get a screen capture from the DVD version of the asteroid scene in the wormhole, however, the torpedo dwindles from view several second before it impacts and shatters the asteroid. The stated mass of the asteroid is in useless units... unless someone can figure out what the hell "Mass, .2" means...

Point two means .2 trillion metric tonnes, LOL.

Nah, I dunno. It's very, very hard to get anything from that scene--I fully know what you mean there.

I have an idea, though. We could do a lower-limit based on the last visible position of the photorp, and scale the asteroid from that. That should be easy, even if it's pretty inaccurate (IIRC, the torpedo disappears rather fast). If I could make screengrabs I would try it myself.

One might also be able to play with the torpedo's scale, rate of acceleration judged from its passing under the E-nil's saucer (and distance travelled from launch to impact), and some range vs. naked eye stuff, but that's all well beyond me. It's also probably not feasible in this instance, or I'm just tired and dreaming all that up *shrugs*.

[Grand Admiral Thrawn]

The jet the E-Nil destroyed must have been a F-101 or F-106. Both carried the Genie nuclear air-to-air rocket. According to Global Security the Genie has a 1.5 kt wahead. This would have caused damage on the E-Nil


Slave 1's guns were rated 8e12J, or 1.9 kilotons BTW.

[Patrick Degan]

"The Cage" - Lee Kelso states that the Enterprise could bring to bear enough firepower to "blast half a continent". Even assuming a continent the size of Australia, and taking a minimalist approach to the defination of "blast", that's a lot of firepower, generated by the Enterprise's laser weapons, which are later stated to be vastly inferior to phasers.

Let's see... First, the officer in question was Jose Tyler, not Lee Kelso. Second, Tyler's statement has no quantifiable figures and is about on the same level of hyperbole as talk of the United States being able to "flatten" Russia with its nuclear arsenal of the time.

"Where No Man Has Gone Before" - Enterprise travels to edge of the galaxy for the first time - from Earth, the nearest possible edge, heading straight up, is something close to 2,500 LY. This episode is also notable for Spock ordering the helmsman to engage "time-warp drives, take us into hyperspace!"

As has been pointed out by several posters, nowhere is it stated in the entire episode just where the Enterprise is departing the galaxy from. Also, the reference to "time warp" was abandoned by the time WNMHGB was produced, and it is Kirk who gives the order to leave the galaxy at warp one.

"Balance of Terror" - Already remarked on, a plasma weapon vaporizes an asteroid that is at least 2 miles across, in the single shot. Sorry Phalanx, the outpost's shields do fail after the second hit. The third vapes the asteroid, and leaves only a smattering of brittle remneants of the hardest substance known to their science. Bare minimum, 180 GT. Enterprise survives the first hit, which chases them at greater than warp 8, and is able to manuever. A second hit brings down their shields, and a nuke at point-blank range causes damage to the phaser control room. Total casualties at the end of the battle: Romulan ship and all hands, phaser specialist Robert Tomlinson.

"Vapourisation" means to turn something into vapour. It doesn't leave debris behind. Secondly, no velocity figure is given for the Enterprise in her retreat from the plasma-implosion weapon. Thirdly, the nuke blast cannot be definitively demonstrated to have contributed to the leak of phaser coolant; it could have been cumulative damage or a defective conduit.

"Tomorrow is Yesterday" - an accidental slingshot around a black hole throws the Enterprise back to 1967. While cruising through the upper atmosphere in excess of Mach 1, Spock notes with little concern that if Christopher fires his payload of nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles at the unshielded Enterprise, they "could cause some damage." The Enterprise then locks the jet in a tractor beam, but even after dropping to lowest power, the tractor causes the plane to fragment.

The exact dialogue: "It is an interceptor, armed with missiles, possibly with nuclear warheads. If he hits us with one, it may damage us. Perhaps beyond our ability to repair under current circumstances."

Spock is uncertain as to what weaponry Capt. Christopher's F104 is carrying. Secondly, Spock showing "little concern" is more indicative of his non-emotional nature rather than his assesment of the "poor" capability of the fighter's armament against the structure of the ship.

Also, from the observed movement of the Enterprise in Earth's atmosphere, the ship is hardly "traveling Mach 1".

"A Taste of Armageddon" - The computers on the surface list the Enterprise as having been destroyed by a tricobalt warhead, and the landing party killed when the enemy "materialized fusion bombs over the city." When held hostage, Kirk declares that he'll show Anan 7 what devestation really is, and orders Scotty to carry out General Order 24 in two hours. When Anan asks what he's done, Kirk states that if he isn't released by that deadline, the Enterprise will level the surface of the planet and kill everyone on the planet. The Eminians, panicking, attack the Enterprise with a sonic disrupter Scotty rates at 10^18 decibles, or 11 trillion times louder than a 767 on take-off. Far from being a bluff, Scotty moves out of range of the disruptors, and prepares to carry out the order when Kirk reports back in, having destroyed the planetary computers.

Again, no quantifiable figures are given for the power of the ship's weaponry or time of application against the target planet and thus a determination of the nature of the devestation which could be wreaked is not possible. Suffice to say, however, the Enterprise's weaponry is shown to be no more powerful than 100MT worth of firepower given what we see in "The Doomsday Machine".

"Errand of Mercy" - When trying to convince the Organians to fight against the Klingons, he tells that that they will become slaves of the Empire. The head counciler retorts that if they resist, the Klingons might simply destroy the planet, and be spared the trouble.

Ayelborne says no such thing in the episode.

When the Organians finally decide to intervene, as the Klingon and Federation fleets gather in the system, the counciler states that they cannot permit a war between the Klingons and the Federation, because the conflict in their system would almost certainly result in the destruction of their planet, and would cost far too many lives overall.

Wrong. Ayelborne is speaking in general terms as to how many lives will be lost in the threatened interstellar war between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. And again, he says nothing about Organia being destroyed.

"Friday's Child" - When the Capellans turn on him, the Klingon agent declares that with the Enterprise off chasing a phony distress call, that his ship could "burn this planet to a cinder." Kirk, Spock, and McCoy take him deadly seriously.

Kras says no such thing in the episode.

"The Doomsday Machine" - A planet eater is going around chopping planets into rubble with a pure antiproton force beam, and devouring the rubble as fuel. Commodore Matt Decker (father of TMP's Willard Decker) in command of the USS Constellation, attacks the device, which is made of pure neutronium. When his ship is crippled making the direct approach, after exhausting phaser banks and emptying the torpedo magazines, he beams his crew down to the class-M planet in the system, fully expecting the thing to eat his ship. Instead, it ignores the ship, and eats the planet. When Enterprise arrives, under Decker's control, it makes several more direct attacks, and is hit repeatedly with the same weapon used to chop up the planets. Two of those hits occurr after the shields fail, and there is no visible hull damage (as there is on Constellation). When Decker's shuttle explodes inside the maw, there is a slight power drop. So they toss in the entire Constellation, with the fusion impulse reactors rigged to blow. When the planetkiller eats the Constellation, and the reactors cook off at "97.3 megatons", it is stopped dead in space, but is otherwise undamaged.

The planet killer is visibly affected by the explosion triggered by the Constellation's detonation and its mechanisms are clearly destroyed. Furthermore, we once again have no exact figures as to how long the planet killer must apply its weaponry against a planetary target; how many shots, how many usages of the tractors to pull in planetary debris. Commodore Decker himself states that the machine was "slicing chunks" out of a planet, not blasting it apart in one or two blows.

"The Changling" - Nomad "sterilizes" the entire Malurian star system, in very short order. The population of 4 billion is exterminated. When it attacks the Enterprise, each of the three shots it fires are stated to rate as equivalent to 90 photon torpedoes, and the 1.5 meter probe easily withstands a single torpedo strike. The third shot (equivalent to a total of 270 photon torpedoes) brings the Enterprise's shields down.

No, all three shots combined added up to the equivalent of 270 photorps. And once again, we have no quantifiable figures as to how many strikes Nomad applied to the Malurian homeworld(s).

"Mirror, Mirror" - In the mirror universe, Kirk is ordered to exterminate the entire Halkan population. The first part involves utterly destroying their cities the moment they come over the horizon, followed by the extermination of the entire rest of the populace, so that the Empire can mine the dilithium there itself.

Sigh... E-1701 just pulls things right out of his ass, doesn't he? The episode only demonstrates that the ships has to be in line of sight with its target to devestate cities on the surface. Kirk's orders from Imperial Command are to annihilate the Halkans, but there is no timeframe as to how long this will take to accomplish. And for all we know, the Halkan population could be only in the millions.

"The Deadly Years" - the Enterprise strays into the Romulan neutral zone, and is attacked by the same class of Bird of Prey as in "Balance of Terror" - it withstands multiple strikes from the plasma weapon, then is transmitted an order to surrender. Kirk broadcasts a clear message to Starfleet, stating that he will self-destruct the ship using a newly installed Corbomite Device, which will instantly destroy *everything* within 200,000 kilometers, and warns that starships should avoid the entire area for at least several weeks after the blast.

It is equally likely that either the Enterprise's shields were upgraded in the year since "Balance Of Terror" or the Romulans installed a lower-powered version of the plasma weapon aboard their warships given how seriously the full strength variant of the weapon drained power and limited range and left a ship vulnerable. Second, as has been pointed out, the "Corbomite device" was a bluff —there is no such weapon.

"Bread and Circuses" - once again, captured by the locals, Kirk invokes General Order 24, which scares the shit out of Captain Merrick, who was a classmate of Kirk's at the Academy. Instead, Scotty manages to cause a planet-wide power failure as a distraction to rescue Kirk.

Kirk did not invoke General Order 24; the Proconsul mentioned the possibility of starship weaponry "laying waste to the entire surface of the world" before dismissing said possibility because of the Federation's non-interference directive. Also, the power-failure was not planetwide; nothing in the episode indicates its scope.

"Journey to Babel" - the Enterprise is sabotaged by an Orion pirate posing as an Andorian aide. Trapped at sublight, the Enterprise is attacked by an Orion pirate ship that remains at warp 8. When the opportunity arises, despite remaining at sublight, Enterprise fires on the Orion, crippling it in the first volley. It then self-destructs to prevent capture.

The Orion spy did not sabotage the Enterprise and the attacking ship's approach was visibly sublight for each of its actual strafing runs.

"Obsession" - Kirk finally lures the cloud-creature back to its home planet, Tycho IV. To lure it, they bait it to the surface with human blood, then set a charge of one-ounce of TOS uber-antimatter... the resulting explosion tears the atmosphere of the planet off.

At most, Spock indicated that the blast would rip away half the planet's atmosphere. The ship encounters shockwaves from the disrupted atmosphere (at 11,000 kilometres?!?!). We do not observe the planet's condition afterward, and so statements about the actual destruction wrought have dubious validity.

"The Immunity Syndrome" - investigating the destruction of the USS Intrepid, and wiped out billions of people in Gamma 7A, they discover an 11,000 mile-long space-ameoba, which consumes energy, both mechanical and biological. Spock discovers that the plasma within the cell is largely gelatinous, with a liquid core near the center and nucleus. The Enterprise persues Spock's shuttle into the heart of the creature, and plants a bomb. The resulting explosion virtually atomizes the cell.

We do not see this in the episode. For all we know, it's mass was merely disrupted and blasted apart. E-1701 really needs to stop being so careless about canon events or making up things which aren't actually observed.

"By Any Other Name" - The Enterprise's second trip through the galactic barrier, on a beeline for Andromeda.

Thanks to alien modification to the ship's warp drive.

"Patterns of Force" - when tracked by an incoming thermonuke at warp (both at warp speeds, moving towards each other), Enterprise calmly blows it away with a phaser shot.

Neither the Enterprise nor the Ekosian missile are stated to be moving at FTL velocities in the episode.

"The Ultimate Computer" - during the final wargames exercise, M-5 goes bezerk. It suddenly jumps to warp 4, and strafes the fleet which is at sublight, with full phasers. The opposing ships, who's shields have been jacked down to 10% normal, take damage. Enterprise then pulls a tight 180, and corckscrews through the fleet formation at warp 7. Starship Excalibur takes repeated hits, and is declared dead - the entire crew is dead, but the ship itself is perfectly intact. Commodore Wesely pulls the rest of the ships back, and prepares to go in at full power, and destroy the rogue Enterprise, and they also jump to warp to engage.

Pity that the ships are never visibly observed moving at FTL velocities as they close range with one another, and that the count-down of ranges between the Enterprise and the Lexington battlegroup clearly contraindicate FTL manoeuvering.

"Elaan of Troyus" - The Enterprise is sabotaged by one of the Dohlman's guards, who is in the pay of the Klingons. They are stuck at sublight, trying to fend off a Klingon ship which remains at warp. On emergency power only, they manage to maintain the shields for several passes of the Klingon battlecruiser. Then they find out the Dohlman's necklace is made of raw dilithium, and giving them to Scotty, five minutes later, they pull up partial main power, jump to warp, and cripple the Klingon ship with their opening barrage.

As has been stated several times, Sulu's countdown of ranges clearly indicates sublight manoeuvering as the ships close range with one another.

"Day of the Dove" - Fourth trip through the galactic barrier...

The Enterprise does not reach the barrier in this episode.

"Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" - Under the control of Bele, the Enterprise travels to Cheron, 90,000 light-years distant, in under two days.

No distance figure for Cheron is given, and no location plot for either the Enterprise or planet Ariannus is provided anywhere in the episode, so this claim is utter horseshit.

"Whom Gods Destroy" - ...In the meantime, Garth shows off a chemical explosive - a piece smaller than a grain of sand vaporizes an Orion slave girl, and generates a sizable earthquake. Garth states that if he drops the 20 oz bottle of the stuff, that it would vaporize the entire planet.

Garth is also barking mad, so I'd tend to doubt his scientific competence at this point.



In short, I'd say that E-1701 is hardly the best source of information to rely upon, given that he doesn't even seem to know what actually happened in half the episodes of TOS.