The Die is Cast

[The Nomad]

The "dialogue vs visuals" debate can be settled by simply looking at this thread. It's a fine example of how people can wrangle over the meaning of a word like "destroy", which in turn demonstrates that dialogue is subjective.

In other words, visuals are objective (no one can argue that the visuals showed no significant crust damage whatsoever) while dialogue is subjective (different individual interpretations can lead to many orders of magnitude different levels of destruction).

In short, TDiC is not objective evidence for high ST weapon power. At best, it is a subjective suggestion that ST may be capable of destroying lots of rock (not heavy metal armour), depending on your interpretation, and it would have to be rationalized with 4.2GW phaser banks and the entire armament of the E-D being necessary to destroy a 5km wide asteroid (see "Pegasus"), while Jango Fett could do that with a single seismic charge.

Puh-lease. Haven't you carefully watched all TNG to debunk it ? Then you should remember some episodes when the distances quoted by characters are way higher than those seen onscreen. What does it mean ? That :
1°) the screen vs dialog thing in ST is not as trivial as you imply
2°) considering budgetary limits, and drama effects ( vessels shooting vessels distants of hundreds of km wouldn't be very "kewl" isn't it ? ) it is likely to assume that nearly all space scenes in ST are not what they would be "in real life"
3°) screen evidence is reliable only to consider such things like " the Defiant took x hits therefore... " or "they were x vessels therefore, considering relative strength of all ships, y has an advantage"...
4°) ship battles in ST could occur at speed and distances way more important than those seen in "kewl" eps like SoA.
5°) not considering dialog evidence is foolish. Even if it's contradictory.

Rk :*the vessels fired both beams and torpedoes, meaning that torps might exploit one kind of NDE/ZPF effect.
*the TM isn't canon. It merely helps.

It would be interesting to guess what kind of effect phasers would have on SW shield tech. Complete dissipation without special effect ? Or Dune effect ( which is personnal shield + hand laser = multi-megaton blast. Guess why poison darts and bullets are still popular in 10191... ), which, reported to a proper scale, would make it especially dissuasive for both sides.

[Robert Walper]

If I may simply include a quote from a website regarding the TDiC event:

In this episode a fleet of twenty Romulan and Cardassian vessels have been constructed by the intelligence agencies of those powers. These ships pass through the Bajoran wormhole and proceed under cloak to the Omarian nebula in order to attack the home planet of the Founders. During the run up to the attack the following dialogue takes place between Enabren Tain, Elim Garak, and the Romulan Colonel Lovok :
Tain : "Our plan is to wait until we've entered orbit of the Founder's planet, then decloak and begin massive bombardment."
Lovok : "Computer analysis indicates that the planet's crust will be destroyed within one hour and the mantle within five."

On arrival at the planet the fleet launches a bombardment lasting some few seconds. We see the impacts of the weapons on the surface, resulting in shock waves which travel over a significant section of the planet's surface. The following dialogue accompanies the attack :
Tain : "So much for the Dominion. Open fire!"
Woman : "The first barrage is complete."
Tain : "Effect?"
Woman : "Thirty percent of the planetary crust destroyed in opening volley. No change in life form readings."
Tain : "What? That's impossible. Some of them had to be killed!"
Woman : "Our sensor readings have been confirmed by three other warbirds. There's no change in the number of life signs on the surface!"
Garak : "They're using an automated transponder to send back false sensor readings. The planet's deserted!"

It soon transpires that Colonel Lovok is a changeling infiltrator placed within the Romulan intelligence service in order to encourage this attack so that the fleet could be led into an ambush; moments after the above dialogue a force of 150 Jem'Hadar ships emerged from the nebula and attacked.

It has been claimed by some that the damage projections made by Lovok were a lie and that the damage done to the planet was an illusion generated by the Founders. However, these claims make little sense. There seems to be no reason for Lovok to tell such a lie - it doesn't gain the Founders anything to have Tain and Garak think that the attack will be ten or a hundred times faster than it really would or could be. And even a basic knowledge of military technology on the part of Tain or Garak would have been enough to allow them to see through such a lie, putting the Founder's whole plot at risk. Simulating planetary scale damage would also be a difficult and pointless business. Immense fireball explosions and atmospheric shock waves are clearly visible on the surface of the planet; simulating these would involve holographic projections covering hundreds of millions of square kilometres! And what would it accomplish? The fleet was already in the Founder's trap at this point, the Jem'Hadar were moments away from launching their attack, so making Tain and co. think that their attack was succeeding is pointless.

So it seems beyond reasonable doubt that both the damage projection and the attack were genuine. Given this, we can work up a few figures concerning the yield of the weapons used.

We can only make guesses about the relative sizes of the crust and mantle, the materials within them and the damage expected to be inflicted upon them. As usual for Star Trek the Founder's planet has a Human-habitable surface and identical gravity to Earth's, and so is likely to be approximately the same size and density as Earth.

On Earth, the crust has a surface area of about 510 million square kilometres. Its thickness ranges from about 5 kilometres under the ocean to about 70 kilometres in the continents; since there is about three times as much ocean as continent, the average thickness would be about 21 kilometres. So we're looking at over ten billion cubic kilometres of rock massing about 2.9x1022 kg. The Earth's mantle is about one hundred times the volume of the crust and is somewhat denser; it is 3,000 kilometres thick, with a volume of over nine hundred billion cubic kilometres and a mass in excess of 4.25x1024 kg.
----
Again taking the planet to be roughly Earth-sized, the damage would cover 170 million square kilometres. To further reduce the yield of our torpedoes I'm going to assume that 90% of this was done by the beam weapons, with only 17 million square kilometres affected by torpedoes. And to cut the numbers down even more I'm going to assume that the damage inflicted was of the most feeble kind. According to the High Energy Weapons Archive quoted above, for any given weapon yield the most widespread effect is thermal - meaning any nuclear bomb will start fires at far greater distances than it will knock down buildings. So for my low end estimate I am going to say that the 17 million square kilometre area was only affected to the extent of having fires started on it.

The fleet launches only ten torpedoes to cause this damage, so each one accounts for 1.7 million square kilometres. This means that each torpedo has lit fires over an area of about 735 kilometres radius. Using the above equations we can get an idea of the yield required to do this damage :
r_thermal = Y0.41
735 = Y0.41
7352.44 = Y
Y = 9,793,653.38


This is in multiples of 2.5 kilotons, so the overall yield would be :
Yield = 9,793,653.38 x 2,500
= 24,484,133,461.48 tons
= 24,484.13 Megatons


Giving each torpedo a yield of 'only' 24 thousand megatons.

It is worth reiterating that this represents virtually the lowest possible yield of the weapons used in the attack; the attack was described as "destroying" thirty percent of the planet's crust, but to generate this figure we are assuming that the torpedoes only contributed 10% of this, and that rather than "destroy" the crust all the torpedo attack did was light fires over the affected area! Yet even with this exceptionally weak interpretation of what was seen, the yield of each weapon is well into the tens of thousands of megatons.

So we can reasonably expect that the weapons used in "The Die Is Cast" have yields somewhere between about 25 thousand and 20 billion Megatons. The "real" figure will depend on where you pitch your assumptions between the two extremes I have used here; for example if you took ten torpedoes as doing one half of the damage in the actual attack, via blast rather than thermal effects, then each weapon would have a yield of about 14 million Megatons. Even then there are some factors I have neglected in this analysis - for example all of these figures assume that the entire energy of every weapon is expended in a useful (i.e. destructive) manner, whereas in fact some of it would be radiated away into space. This alone would increase the yields here significantly.

[SPOOFE]

the screen vs dialog thing in ST is not as trivial as you imply

Hmm... if you would be so kind, my good sir, please point out where anyone described the "screen vs dialog thing" (as you call it) trivial?

considering budgetary limits, and drama effects ( vessels shooting vessels distants of hundreds of km wouldn't be very "kewl" isn't it ? ) it is likely to assume that nearly all space scenes in ST are not what they would be "in real life"

Do you really want to stick with that logic?

Do you, really?

All right.

Then, using that logic, we conclude that, considering scientific knowledge and education limits, and drama effects (vessels easily penetrating a shield with no danger to the people underneath wouldn't be very "kewl", would it?) it is likely to assume that, in the much-vaunted TOS, a lot of the original Enterprise's capabilities and power levels are not what they would be "in real life".

Say adios to the Cult of the Connie.

screen evidence is reliable only to consider such things like " the Defiant took x hits therefore... " or "they were x vessels therefore, considering relative strength of all ships, y has an advantage"...

Not really. Unless you wish to claim that Star Trek has different laws of reality than we do in... well... reality, we can know and predict what we SHOULD see given Effect X (even if the idiot writers or FX guys don't know). When we see lack of Effect X, we can then rule out Cause X.

ship battles in ST could occur at speed and distances way more important than those seen in "kewl" eps like SoA.

All right. Then, objectively, tell us what those speeds and distances should be, using the visuals.

not considering dialog evidence is foolish. Even if it's contradictory.

The best course of action is to try to take as much evidence as possible into account. The dialogue, in this case, is contradictory to the aforementioned example of Pegasus in terms of that episode's dialogue. So we conclude that the dialogue in one of those examples is just plain wrong. Given that, in the case of TDiC, preferring visuals over dialogue would only require us to ignore one (already contradictory) piece of dialogue (while preferring dialogue would have us ignore numerous other examples of both dialogue AND visuals), the most reasonable choice is to go with the visuals in the case of TDiC.

That choice, of course, results in the smallest amount of evidence being disregarded.

[SPOOFE]

If I may simply include a quote from a website regarding the TDiC event:

It is bad form in a debate to mention a cite without telling people where it was cited from.

[Robert Walper]

It is bad form in a debate to mention a cite without telling people where it was cited from.

The quote is from Graham Kennedy of the "Daystrom Institue Techical Library". I thought it might be best not to mention his name, since I feel there are many who would quickly disregard his input because of Mike Wong's dislike for him.

To be perfectly honest, I find some of his reasoning questionable myself from direct experience, however I felt this particular quote has some good info and brings up some good points.

[Lord of the Farce]

It has been claimed by some that the damage projections made by Lovok were a lie and that the damage done to the planet was an illusion generated by the Founders. However, these claims make little sense. There seems to be no reason for Lovok to tell such a lie - it doesn't gain the Founders anything to have Tain and Garak think that the attack will be ten or a hundred times faster than it really would or could be. And even a basic knowledge of military technology on the part of Tain or Garak would have been enough to allow them to see through such a lie, putting the Founder's whole plot at risk.

Ehhh... If such a lie would be easily recognised, than wouldn't those guys get a little suspicious when in only a few seconds they "destroyed" 30% of the crust (when 100% was suppose take closer to 1 hour )? The only reasonable explaination that I see is that they had been actually shooting down a lot longer, and that the inbetween time was cut out between cuts. And if you ask why would the Dominion wait that long before attacking, simple: they wanted the Romulans and Cardassians to waste some of their weapons before jumping in (note that fact that the ambush wasn't sprung until the fools realised that they were duped).

And what's with this immense fireball explosions?
I watched the episode and the scene in question frame-by-frame (all because of the talk about the episode), and nowhere do I see anything that is some kind of "immense fireball explosion". Hell, most of the time we barely even see 1/3 of the planet surface facing the Rom/Card fleet, and the area where they were firing at was barely 2/3 of that.

[SPOOFE]

I felt this particular quote has some good info and brings up some good points.

Except he completely disregards the visuals, which obviously do NOT show anything NEAR 30% of the crust destroyed. His interpretation... oh, hell, he doesn't even PROVIDE an interpretation. He just ignores it, and hopes nobody notices. His theory requires the complete ignoring of canon visual evidence, while the counter-theory - that the canon false sensor readings also provided false damage readouts - requires us to ignore neither dialogue nor visuals. Thusly, the only flaw we are left with is the lack of surprise on the part of the commanding officer, which can easily be explained away by him not not expressing his shock or surprise openly... the mark of a well-drilled man in terms of keeping on his "poker face".

The theory that incorporates the most evidence is the superior theory.

[Darth Wong]

Puh-lease. Haven't you carefully watched all TNG to debunk it ? Then you should remember some episodes when the distances quoted by characters are way higher than those seen onscreen.

Oh look, everybody! Another newbie with the same tired old arguments! Yippee! By the way, it is also canon dialogue that Voyager had to enter the atmosphere of an Earth-like planet in order to fire on another ship (a renegade Federation ship) as it descended into that same atmosphere, and that it had to break off the pursuit for safety reasons (meaning that it could not just sit outside the atmosphere and accurately target a ship from ~50km away). How do you like them apples? There are ways to rationalize the TNG range dialogue with observation, but I see you would rather look for excuses to completely ignore entire categories of evidence.

What does it mean ? That :
the screen vs dialog thing in ST is not as trivial as you imply

I hardly call it "trivial". In fact, I consider it a serious issue, and one which tends to reveal a great deal about the mindset of those discussing it. Simply put, there is the objective approach, and the subjective approach. You obviously prefer the subjective approach.

considering budgetary limits, and drama effects ( vessels shooting vessels distants of hundreds of km wouldn't be very "kewl" isn't it ? ) it is likely to assume that nearly all space scenes in ST are not what they would be "in real life"

Wrong. ST is "real life" for the purpose of suspending disbelief. If you are going to arbitrarily rewrite ST to what you think it should realistically be, then you are not talking about ST; you are talking about your own bastardized version of it.

screen evidence is reliable only to consider such things like " the Defiant took x hits therefore... " or "they were x vessels therefore, considering relative strength of all ships, y has an advantage"...

Why? The show is canon, is it not? The show is a audio/video medium, is it not? The show is produced and written as such (as opposed to a novel which is later adapted to film), is it not?

ship battles in ST could occur at speed and distances way more important than those seen in "kewl" eps like SoA.

It could if the producers decided to do it that way, but it doesn't. Too bad for you, newbie.

not considering dialog evidence is foolish. Even if it's contradictory.

Who said anything about not considering dialogue evidence? I consider it, and I conclude that based on a history of astounding ignorance and butchery of SI units, that most dialogue contradictions can be chalked up to character incompetence and/or changes in the language over the next three centuries (I remind you that this is a government which is known to have arbitrarily "recalibrated" their warp factor scale over a timeframe of 80 years). Moreover, I point out that just as in real life, dialogue is subjective rather than objective, hence it is inherently unreliable. This is the way we treat it in real-life, newbie.

In reality, it is you who is ignoring a form of evidence (visual, objective evidence) by denigrating it, declaring nearly all of it irrelevant, and pretending it doesn't exist. In other words, just as I said, you wish to discard the objective in favour of the subjective (better for you, since you can interpret it to mean whatever you find convenient at the time).

It would be interesting to guess what kind of effect phasers would have on SW shield tech. Complete dissipation without special effect ? Or Dune effect ( which is personnal shield + hand laser = multi-megaton blast. Guess why poison darts and bullets are still popular in 10191... ), which, reported to a proper scale, would make it especially dissuasive for both sides.

The incredibly stupid plot device of Dune is completely irrelevant here. It has no basis in any sort of reality, and we do not need to incorporate it into two other sci-fi universes where it is not necessary.

In other words, it's a red herring. Drop it.

[Darth Wong]

The quote is from Graham Kennedy of the "Daystrom Institue Techical Library". I thought it might be best not to mention his name, since I feel there are many who would quickly disregard his input because of Mike Wong's dislike for him.

It's the fact that I absolutely massacred his arguments on my Hate Mail page, not my "dislike". You are trying to produce a perception of unreasoning bias rather than logical rebuttal, as the reason for GK's pariah status among intelligent sci-fi fans (even most Trekkies quickly distance themselves from his illogic).

To be perfectly honest, I find some of his reasoning questionable myself from direct experience, however I felt this particular quote has some good info and brings up some good points.

Like what? His completely unfounded assumption that dialogue can only be interpreted one way? His 25,000 megaton figure for photorps, even though this is grossly, hopelessly incompatible with "Pegasus", ST6, and every other photorp incident? His decision to completely ignore the only objective evidence available, ie- the visuals? His implicit claim that canon dialogue cannot contain mistakes but canon visuals can?

No, GK does not make any good points. He merely demonstrates his awe-inspiring ability to selectively see only that which pleases him.

[Howedar]

intellectual...osmosis...imploding...brain...

[Master of Ossus]

Puh-lease. Haven't you carefully watched all TNG to debunk it ? Then you should remember some episodes when the distances quoted by characters are way higher than those seen onscreen. What does it mean ? That :
1°) the screen vs dialog thing in ST is not as trivial as you imply

Why? It could mean one of several things, including that a kilometer no longer represents a kilometer. They might have redone the SI scale. It could also mean that the characters are consistently mistaken. BTW, are we to assume that the Klingons were completely incompetent to allow the Jem'Hadar fighters to ram them? If what you are saying is true, we must assume that the Klingons realized the Jem'Hadar were ramming them long before the actual impact (they should have known that there would be no other reason for the Jem'Hadar to close the range between the two groups of ships), AND that the Klingons CHOSE not to engage them with their weapons, which can fire (according to you) across hundreds of thousands of kilometers of space and reliably strike targets at such ranges. Are you saying that every single time we have seen a BoP in a prolonged, uncloaked battle with another ship, its commander has been totally incompetent to repeatedly over-shoot his target, flying past the ship he is firing on and necessitating the BoP's long turn (often under fire)? If what you are saying is true, the BoP should engage its target at a huge distance, so flying past it would never be a problem (since you claim that the number of hits they can take is one of the only "trustworthy" parts of visual effects). Can RoF also be trusted in the visuals?

2°) considering budgetary limits, and drama effects ( vessels shooting vessels distants of hundreds of km wouldn't be very "kewl" isn't it ? ) it is likely to assume that nearly all space scenes in ST are not what they would be "in real life"

So, are we to believe that every space scene we have ever seen in ST is essentially a giant FX gaffe, even when their ranges are not contradicted by dialogue? You are essentially trying to disprove more evidence (the many times we have seen starships fighting in ST) with less evidence (the few times we have characters talking about ranges inconsistent with the ranges seen on the visuals). BTW, what are we to do when Data says something about light being made out of ions? Are we to believe that, somehow, light is now made of ions in ST? Or are we to believe that Data was mistaken?

3°) screen evidence is reliable only to consider such things like " the Defiant took x hits therefore... " or "they were x vessels therefore, considering relative strength of all ships, y has an advantage"...

Oh, I get it, so you are taking part of a visual effect and saying that we can use that, while simultaneously disregarding the rest of the visual effect because ST ships must be more powerful, in your mind. That is a very clear indication of bias and/or incompetence.

4°) ship battles in ST could occur at speed and distances way more important than those seen in "kewl" eps like SoA.

How can a speed or a distance be more important? Oh, this is a Freudian slip. He is saying that distances are more important at times than at others because, if there is an example of a ST vessel once firing at long range on any target it will automatically prove that EVERY other incident of firing weapons in ST is completely wrong. That is how a range can be "more important." If it is good, it will override any preponderance of evidence that it is not true.

5°) not considering dialog evidence is foolish. Even if it's contradictory.

WTF?

1. Mike and all of the other sane debaters here are not ignoring dialogue (the correct spelling). In fact, we TOLD you how we are taking it into consideration: the word "destroy" clearly does not indicate "vaporized."
2. Should we believe, then, that light is made up of ions?
3. Dialogue is always at least partially subjective. Many times, it is obviously biased. Other times, it is completely contradictory (as you said). In these instances, we take the dialogue, examine what is said, and then rationalize it against what we know. Sometimes (as in the case of Data's mysterious "ion light") the only explanation is that a character is mistaken or lying. In other cases, what is said in the dialogue can be rationalized away more easily, and without attacking the credibility of a character. This is not ignoring dialogue, it is examining all of the evidence (including dialogue) and then drawing conclusions on what we know. We are not ignoring the dialogue, we are interpreting it. You insist on ignoring many aspects of the visual effects. YOU are ignoring evidence, not us.

Rk :*the vessels fired both beams and torpedoes, meaning that torps might exploit one kind of NDE/ZPF effect.
*the TM isn't canon. It merely helps.

Who said the TM was canon? It doesn't even really help. It is completely un-canon. It's not even official, like many SW sources. Do you have any reason for assuming that Matter/Anti-Matter reactions work differently on some kinds of matter than others, or are you just being an idiot?

It would be interesting to guess what kind of effect phasers would have on SW shield tech. Complete dissipation without special effect ? Or Dune effect ( which is personnal shield + hand laser = multi-megaton blast. Guess why poison darts and bullets are still popular in 10191... ), which, reported to a proper scale, would make it especially dissuasive for both sides.

Okay, now you want to make conjectures based on a ludicrous incident in Dune, except that you want to use Dune to demonstrate that something is possible in both SW and ST? That is so much crap I don't even want to talk about that. Why do we care why people in a completely different universe still uses bullets and darts? Are you aware that this is an idiotic attempt to change the focus of this thread?

Everyone, notice how he now tries to change the subject after making a long post with nothing but stupid points. His goal is obviously to pass those parts of his post under our radar (kind of like how most parts of the visual effects in ST go under his radar). His shameless attempt to change the subject into an even more idiotic debate will not be acknowledged by me, except to say that the idea that a phaser will react catastrophically with a SW shield is so stupid it's not even funny.[/i]

[starfury]

Puh-lease. Haven't you carefully watched all TNG to debunk it ? Then you should remember some episodes when the distances quoted by characters are way higher than those seen onscreen. What does it mean ? That :
1°) the screen vs dialog thing in ST is not as trivial as you imply
2°) considering budgetary limits, and drama effects ( vessels shooting vessels distants of hundreds of km wouldn't be very "kewl" isn't it ? ) it is likely to assume that nearly all space scenes in ST are not what they would be "in real life"
3°) screen evidence is reliable only to consider such things like " the Defiant took x hits therefore... " or "they were x vessels therefore, considering relative strength of all ships, y has an advantage"...
4°) ship battles in ST could occur at speed and distances way more important than those seen in "kewl" eps like SoA.
5°) not considering dialog evidence is foolish. Even if it's contradictory.

So, the same can be said of every other sci-fi serias by your logic after all in "endgame" we heard dialogue that a warlock/GOD beams can level half the eastern seaboard despite obvious evidence that b5 weapons are not so powerful, or giving the Vorlon planetkiller DS-like ability to shatter planets based on dialogue by lyta, of it destorying shadow planets and bases.

we can also say based on dialogue alone for SW that a Photon torp is equal to one ton of TNT as one Ioston = one ton of TNT.

so please don't bore us with your dialogue> visual arguments.

[Robert Walper]

It's the fact that I absolutely massacred his arguments on my Hate Mail page, not my "dislike". You are trying to produce a perception of unreasoning bias rather than logical rebuttal, as the reason for GK's pariah status among intelligent sci-fi fans (even most Trekkies quickly distance themselves from his illogic).

It was not my intention to present a perception of unreasoning bias. Merely from what I've read, you've claimed to have exchanged "harsh words" in the past, and I got the impression you didn't like him very much, therefore in an attempt to simply be diplomatic, I thought it best not to mention his name. Apparently I was wrong, I apologize.

To be perfectly honest, I find some of his reasoning questionable myself from direct experience, however I felt this particular quote has some good info and brings up some good points.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Like what? His completely unfounded assumption that dialogue can only be interpreted one way? His 25,000 megaton figure for photorps, even though this is grossly, hopelessly incompatible with "Pegasus", ST6, and every other photorp incident? His decision to completely ignore the only objective evidence available, ie- the visuals? His implicit claim that canon dialogue cannot contain mistakes but canon visuals can?

No, GK does not make any good points. He merely demonstrates his awe-inspiring ability to selectively see only that which pleases him.

If I may ask, Mr. Wong, have you or are you planning to make any calculations regarding how much firepower was required by the fleet in "TDiC" to do what damage, or perhaps simply effects, we did physically see? If I may point out, Graham Kennedy did say in his calculation I quoted that he was assuming the most feeble of damage, which was simply starting fires in the affected area. Perhaps his calculations are incorrect due to his usage of the 30% figure, but what about simply starting fires in the area we actually saw affected? How much firepower would be required? I'm in no position to either confirm or question his actual calculations.

[Howedar]

The thing is, we saw essentially no area affected. You really don't want us to base our calcs on TDiC.