It was "four hundred gigawatts of particle energy!" It knocked the shields down with one hit, though there was no damage (probably thanksAustralopithicus wrote:In the TNG episode 'The survivors', when Kevin Uxbridge created the first Husnock warship illusion, it strikes with 40 MW of particle energy. Worf claims there to be 'no damage', and Riker states that 'If that's the best they can do, this will only last 5 minutes'. All round, the crew is genuinely unimpressed with this display of firepower.
Therefore, the particle ship weapons of TNG must be much stronger than the 5.1 MW that the TNG manual states. If the Enterprise can only dish out 5.1 MW of particle energy, then they shouldn't be so unimpressed with the Husnocks' 40 MW of particle energy. Therefore, I would go for an estimate of at least 204 MW of energy (5.1 x 40) and the high end of the estimate rests with whether the 2nd illusion kicked out 400 GW or 400 MW of particle energy, because I frankly can't remember. If 400 MW, there's something seriously wrong with TNG shields, if 400 GW (As the DITL professes, but I don't think that's actually what Worf said - my defective memory... ) then the shields or the hull are much more powerful than we thought.
Thoughts, comments, information anyone?
to the "intervention" of the Douwd).
And no, 5.1 MW for an individual phaser emitter isn't canon; the TMs
themselves aren't canon, so you might as well throw that no. out.
You might also note that the TNG TM mentions that there are 200
collimating emitters in the GCS's dorsal saucer array, meaning a firepower
of roughly 1 gigawatt (1,000 megawatts).
Such is also irrelevant for two reasons: one, "A Matter of Time"; two,
observed phaser effects.
"A Matter of Time" establishes that a mere variance of 60 GW in a
phaser beam could burn off a planet's atmosphere. That's obviously beyond the 1.02 GW possible with 200 collimating saucer dorsal
emitters...
On to two: 6 million gigawatts, let alone 60 GW (which a daisy cutter easily surpasses) would make *zero* difference in whether or not an atmosphere was to be burned off; therefore, phasers are material-dependent weapons. This is corroborated by numerous other episodes and examples therein. Phasers appear to be pretty awesome at totally destroying very light elements, and next to worthless, perhaps limited to somewhere near their initial output, against the very heaviest elements like neutronium (ref: "Think Tank," "The Doomsday Machine").
IMO, the most powerful phasers are usually the equivalent of about 50 TW against typical Star Trek armor, roughly 10-40,000 TW against most shields, and several teratons/sec. (tens of billions of TW) against very light
elements like those you'd find in a planet's crust. This goes even higher
when dealing with the atmosphere of a planet, obviously, for the aforementioned reasons.
But in all relevant contexts, they'll do maybe a light turbolaser or two
worth of damage to a Star Wars shield. That's certainly better than
5 million watts, but it's far from what's needed.