Some black holes are. I don't think it says anywhere in the series microscopic such are, though. It's not just a matter of what it's called, it has to have the power to do damage as well. I'm not saying the Culture probably couldn't build such a weapon, or reverse Xeelee tech if nothing else - the Coalition could, after all - but they're not entering the game with an instawin. No, but it does operate on a smaller scale. The Imperium spans the entire galaxy. The Culture has a few trillion citizens and isn't anything big on a galactic scale. They are utterly insignificant to a power like the Daleks. I thought effectors were supposed to be EM radiation? Doesn't that argue against extreme ranges? That guy appears to be making several assumptions that aren't necessarily true. For one, he's taking the 50m number from "Warriors of Ultramar" (the Nova cannon that fired at 5,000kps) and applying .9 c numbers to that. To me that looks a little ... well, like he's deliberately aiming for a high number. And in that novel it was the breech that was 50 meters, not the shell. Since the 770,000 ton shell would mass almost eight times as much as a frigate/destroyer vessel, I'm more than a little skeptic about it. Especially since crewmen still load it by the force of their arms.
That would seem to contradict the Rogue Trader fluff at least in part, then. Can you provide quotes to support this? I thought the AdMech troopers were cyborgs, not genuine robots? Certainly. As I said I prefer to use the Spacefleet/Rogue Trader numbers for "average" speeds, though given the nature of the warp it can be both slower and faster - and sometimes MUCH faster - at times. Are they necessarily comparable to the missiles though? Weapons can vary quite a lot even under the same designator in 40k - lances can be lasers or "plasma" weapons, depending, for example, and then there are the highly variant speeds for the Nova cannon, to name just a few things. Not to mention Nova cannons that are not KE weapons at all in some books (There's everything from plasma weapons to other, odder stuff). Taking the quotes literally I don't see why that's necessary; the blast wave alone from a few megaton or high kiloton blasts should do the vast majority of demolition for most cities. The BFG rulebook does mention cities turned into "radioactive glass" but in that entry (as in the battleships that "lay waste to continents") there's no timeframe specified.
The per-area intensity shouldn't be "far" greater as far as I can gather, but greater still. As for the star, wasn't it supposed to be a super-giant or something? Reducing inertial mass to negative wouldn't allow it to go FTL. It would just turn negative. To say, if you pushed something it would go the other way than where you intended to push it. Yes, but why then would it render the planet "uninhabitable"? I'd rather just say the quote doesn't work, Cain was talking out of his ass, and move along. Unsure, but he's in the infantry so it's not necessarily extensive. It was a long time ago since I saw it; did we actually see that detonation and the AM that caused it? It's easier to assume the dialogue is off than to assume new abilities (that are never seen again afterwards), I'd think. In the 40k text we don't have that option. Then it seems that does make sense for a ret-con. After all, there aren't any Squats or Jokaero around anymore ... In 40k they don't really have the scientific method. They use "Standard Template Constructs" to build stuff - essentially old blueprints they follow to the letter without understanding the mechanics underlying them. "Science" in 40k is archaeology - digging up new STCs from the Dark Age of Technology (when they did have "real" science and innovation).
I don't get the obsession with the Argo dune buggy, and comparing it to main battle tanks and the like. It is obviously NOT a combat vehicle. It's a recon jeep/dune buggy designed for use in environments where normal transportation methods (i.e. transporters) are unavailable. Seriously, it's comparable to the M151 MUTT jeep, or the ITV LSV (Internally Transported Vehicle Light Strike Vehicle) prototype being designed to be carried inside the V-22 Osprey (replacing the M151 in that role). In fact, it is quite comparable to the ITV prototype, serving almost the exact same role, only unlike the ITV which is designed as a purely military reconnaissance and light strike vehicle, the Argo dune buggy is designed for non-combat reconnaissance and light transport, probably as its primary role, with some limited defensive capabilities tacked on as an afterthought. In a regular combat environment, I highly doubt we'd see the Argo dune buggy at all. We know Trek has tanks, assault skimmers (probably a primarily atmospheric, low-flying fast attack craft), and 'hoppers' (some kind of armed/armored troop carrier, probably comparable in role to the UH-60 Blackhawk). We know that dedicated infantry wear light body armor that appears resistant to phaser and disruptor weapons. We have seen Trek crewmembers jury-rig a personal shield generator from little more than a combadge, a paperclip, and a piece of chewing gum on multiple occasions (apparently MacGuyver is an instructor at the Academy), and presumably Starfleet would be able to engineer a combat-functional device in a proper development facility. Most of their actual combat ground vehicles are probably shielded as well as armored (we've seen small, portable forcefield generators often enough, and even tiny shuttlepods that wouldn't be any bigger than a proper attack craft or battle tank have shields). Another important thing to note is that ground combat in Trek is rare for a reason, and not just because we focus on starship crews. Just one single frigate in orbit can end a battle decisively one way or the other if there are not planetary defenses to keep it occupied. A single frigate could devastate a planet in relatively short order. In most cases, a starship in orbit is going to be more decisive in battle than a million boots on the ground. With torpedoes that can go up to half a gigaton and phasers that can 'vaporize' entire continents with only a handful of shots, or rain down lethally precise fire with minimal collateral damage, armies are only needed as an occupying force, to take particularly delicate targets intact, or when there are no starships available to rain down fire from on high.
Um...something strange was going on. Their ship had been hijacked by aliens. They were trying to take the Enterprise to another galaxy. I believe they also enhanced the warp drive. It's also possible that navigational problems aren't as big when you're outside the galaxy. The problem being the great barrier. 222 terwawatts is indeed a great deal of firepower, but it only translates to roughly 53.2 kilotons. You forgot to add in how long the ship stayed there. Endurance is something we should note, simply for the sake of comparison. That's a total of 799.2 petajoules or 191.2 megatons. Unfortunately it tells us nothing about their maximum shield capacity. Manually? What do you mean by that? The ones that only the Space Marines use? No they don't. It's this thing we call ethics. It's the same reason why they removed all the lethal force fields from DS9 and replaced them with nonlethal ones. The non-canon one? Surel someone as well learned as you wouldn't have made such an obvious mistake...right? We have no idea how fast the ship was going, my point being that the visuals clash with everything we know--like the Enterprise E taking nuclear explosions to the bare hull. That doesn't make it a 610 gigaton weapon. And this has what to with this thread? Oh right, your frail ego. Let me guess, Conner? Yeah, he does that. He takes every high instance of 40k he can--he even leaves some rather embaressing quotes out from the same source. He even reinterprets canon information from time to time. Like when an old quote says "millions" he takes it as "ten million" and bases his fleet number calculations off of that while ignoring more modern numbers of 'one million worlds'. He has some legs to stand on in some of his calculations, but he's always aiming high. No, just a star. It doesn't specifiy, but if we're going to assume a star, G Type would probably be best, though we could of course include other stars if we know the output of their solar flares. Yes...I know that. It's the sci-fi magic explination. Fine with me. I think that would be our problem here. Physically see it? No, we never see it. We do see the ship shake violently and in the new editions we see a massive continent size crater. The only problems being the visual effects are still inaccurate. Yes. Exactly. A pity they're so stagnant.
I didn't remember them tampering with the warp drive. But if that was so, then that explains the outlier I guess. It's a lower limit, assuming my numbers are accurate. Of course it makes a few assumptions, but it's still in the same general range, so I don't see it as hugely problematic. Firepower in the low megatons/second could probably still break the shields. This is a little higher than "destroy a city" might imply, but not unreasonably so. No need to imply things. It's fairly recently it was reclassified; I didn't know about it until just a while ago either. Um, assuming that bit is still canon, I'd think it does, if each warhead was five gigatons each. What's your reasoning for thinking otherwise. The poster's name was "Connor MacLeod" like the "Highlander" guy, with a matching avatar. So yeah, I guess that's him. You two know each other from before? If a source said "millions" without qualification I'd say it means two million as a lower limit; I'm generally conservative on that kind of stuff. Although going by context it can also imply higher numbers. But for the worlds of the Imperium, 1 million is the canon number (assuming that's what you meant.) I'll check the BFG rulebook then and see why I thought it was unusual. This might take a day or two. Well, it doesn't make sense assuming vaguely realistic physics. To go FTL you pretty much need to "cheat" somehow (whether by warp drive, wormholes, or whatever). Haven't seen the remastered editions of any TOS. Would a screencap help, or is it basically just inconsistent so it plainly doesn't work? That pushes down the "average" range I'd think, given we have few hard numbers otherwise apart from the "city destroying" quotes. Except for the Nova cannon, but it's not exactly an "ordinary" weapon. I might have done them a little injustice. From time to time it do seems they can build new things. A little, at least. But it's not consistent, and exampes like the Munitorum Manual mostly speak for themselves. And the STC stuff is also something that's been around from the very first, so one can't exactly ignore it.
No need for outrage; he did add a qualifier, so he didn't claim that was how it "should" necessarily be interpreted. Just that it could be. (Which technically I suppose you could, but it's not "conservative" and more like geared towards getting the numbers as high as possible)
The most absurd qualifier I've ever heard in my life. We destroyed Hiroshima without vaproizing every square inch of it.
Hmm, wait I'm incorrect, that was another episode. No, that's probably just an outlier then--or a really, really fast subspace path. Maybe the one that's on the way to the edge of the galaxy... Granted, but I suppose it's also still a transport ship. Supposedly a warship would carry stronger shields than that. Ricrery has this thing about throwing a fit when someone gets a term wrong or mistakes something in another sci-fi/setting that they're not intimantely familiar with--as if doing so is some sort of cardinal sin. It's a MIRV weapon, using it as a base comparison for firepower is somewhat dishonest when you say 600 gigatons, when it requires so many warheads to reach that amount. I don't personally know him, but I know of him. He has a whole series of 40k calcs that are aimed at getting the higher numbers. I do believe a chap on another site has dedicated a thread or two at pointing out many of the errors presented by Conner. That said, I don't really have much against the guy. Yes, it is. But Conner, someone who is very obviously familiar with 40k canon, ignores this when he makes his calculations. He also entirely ignores the source of the fleet numbers presented in other sources (suggesting tens of thousands of ships and hundreds of thousands of transports for the navy). It's entirely dishonest. You're probably thinking back to the solar flare bit; the author flurbed on the numbers. The solar flare he suggests (rather figuratively) are waaay too large, but he probably meant something like square km rather than just km itself. Correct. It's inconistent with what it should look like I believe, but my knowledge of explosions is limited here; it's just a very clean explosion: http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Tycho_IV Bottom pic. Yes, but that's not unusual. Plenty of sci-fi has outliers. Trek included. If I were being as dishonest as Ricrery is with 40k calcs, I'd be pointing to Booby Trap, The Die is Cast, Broken Link, A Taste of Armageddon, The Immunity Syndrome, Obsession, and so forth. Well, I suspect the people on Mars know what they're doing. I suspect it's just a lack of innovation on their part. Afterall, they take to tecnology and science as priests, not scientists. It's only natural that their advancement is slow. Sadly, they are far more crude than the UFP in probably 70% of their technology. Transporters have horrible ranges. Ie, in the 22nd century, Earth transporters had a range of 10,000 km. In the 24th century, it's four times that. It's also on something that ranges from small craft as shuttles, to starships, and even used by homesick cadets beaming from Starfleet Academy to their homes. Here, it's mostly limited to the Space Marines and usually very limited in what they can transport (ie, nothing larger than twice the size of a man), where as later TNG transporters can beam entire fighters into their cargo bays or hundreds of people in less than half a minute. On the other hand, their industry makes up for it. Their ships are absurdly much larger, a few km for some of their ships. I mean, the largest UFP ship is about the size of an Imperial frigate. The numer of weapons also makes a difference; the IoM has far heavier armed ships, even more so than the Klingons and the Romulans. Unfortunately...they're just pretty poorly designed...with large glass-like windows. Then again, the UFP likes putting their bridges where the enemy can fire at them...
A quick note on transporters as weapons: There is a very good reason why we don't see them being used to rip apart ships and just 'beam them away' as suggested. Transporters are NOT an energy-free device. They require energy, considerable amounts of energy, to transport materials back-and-forth. They also require rather fine sensor readings to transport effectively, and blocking transporter beams is relatively easy (we see transport inhibitors in ST:Insurrection, in the form of mobile stands which are very similar to the transport enhancer stands we've seen in a few other Trek episodes). Blocking unwanted transport, especially into critical areas of a ship, should therefore be relatively easy. Without being able to precisely scan the area to know precisely what you're trying to dematerialize, trasporters become a crude beam weapon, not really much different from a phaser or disruptor. The problem then becomes one of effectiveness and efficiency. In all likelihood, without fine resolution to allow proper transport, transporters probably make crude, short-range weapons that are poor on effectiveness and high on power-consumption. They would be poor weapons for ship-to-ship combat. Against ground troops, even if there aren't transport inhibitors in use, transporters still require a lot of energy, so wiping out the enemy ground army with phasers and photon torpedoes may well be vastly more energy efficient than using transporters.
He was talking about against personal. Ie, why don't they basically beam them into space or scramble their bodies. The reasoning is due to ethics. Unlike 40k, the people in Star Trek don't go about scrambling people. Maybe a few Orion Crime Lords do...but that's it.
Something about phaser I know that it's SW vs ST,but I consider Mike Wong to be very reliable. http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tech/Beam/Beam1.html
Well, it pushes the range up a little, but it's still reconcilable. Don't know anything about your earlier history around here,so I can't really comment on that. I'm effectively a newcomer and don't know the people here, so for the nonce I'm assuming good faith from my fellow debaters. True, though the missile is still a 610 gigaton weapon. Huh. Is that so. I'll look at some of his other stuff at that board (seems it was quite a bit) and see if I concur (I want to keep an open mind, after all), but if that's true, I'm pretty sure that would disqualify him as a reliable source. Who's this guy debunking him, and where's he doing it, BTW? If that is true, then yes that's deliberately dishonest. the 1 million worlds number is pretty much the single most consistent quantifiably variable there is in the 40k fluff. Right. I checked, and here's the quote: Taken at face value that implies a huge sun. Of course then one could argue it wouldn't be a "solar" scale anymore. But generally I'm inclined towards taking stated numbers at face value; it's more objective, if nothing else. That does look decidedly odd. For starters, my biggest objection would be that there appears to have been no penetration of the planet's crust - which such a powerful explosion should have caused, if it was straight nuclear disintegration and powerful enough to destroy large percentages of its atmosphere. 40k is more problematic than most though, given how little continuity control they have. Not to say I don't agree in principle. The job is figuring out the range supported the most consistently throughout. 40k bridges do have window shields (as in physical armor - several meters thick IIRC) that they can deploy, at least in "Execution Hour" and its sequel. They take a couple of minutes or so to deploy fully.
And, right, I promised I'd be back with more quotes! Here's one I noticed from "Acceptable Losses", published originally in "Inferno!" Magazine (IIRC?) and the nin the anthology "Into The Maelstrom". It's the latter edition I'm quoting here: The Divine Justice is a cruiser (class not given AFAIK). Assuming a heavy cruiser like the Macharius from "Execution Hour", the "city destroying" range (kiloton/megaton) is confirmed, broadly speaking. Since we aren't given a timeframe for the city destruction, it's also possible we're dealing with a weaker light cruiser, which would need longer to perform such an operation. This short story also has useful quantifiable stuff on fighter/bomber scale spacecraft, but I'll skip that over for now since the discussion is mostly on capital ships. So we'll switch to "Shadow Point": The Drachenfels is also a cruiser, similar to (if IIRC not the same class as) the Macharius. Assuming the minimum energy required for total vaporization and that the rock has thermophysical properties similar to silicon, I get firepower somewhat over half a kiloton with a quick calc for 200 tons. This is almost certainly too high though, given that it's explicitly stated all of it is not vaporized, but some/a lot of it is just fragmentation. If so it can be much lower. SP also has a very interesting destruction of an asteroid using torpedoes that should be worthwhile to calc, but I don't have the time right now, so I'll be back (hopefully) for that one later ... Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Technically, we don't what they meant by city leveling. It can mean outright vaporization to just toppling over all the buildings. W40k numbers are all over the place, petatons for CoI, teratons for the BFG pg 8 on Weapons Batteries, and the ending of Fire Warrior.
While that's true, it's better to be conservative with the numbers IMHO. "Destroy" is sufficiently vague to allow for other interpretations, but a conservative interpretation at least gives a solid lower limit that can't be nitpicked to death (like say, the unspecified continent destroying in the BFG rulebook). Weapons batteries aren't detailed on p 8 in the rulebook (my edition at least). Nor do I see anything in the bit on them to imply they are teraton weapons. Or were you thinking of the battleships that "lay waste to continents"?
Doesn't the 40k imperial navy have a missile that can burrow into a plant's core and completely blow it apart? Even just considering the gravitational gradient that you would need to overcome, there's no way to do the calcs on that without ending up with a ridiculously huge yield. Surely up in the millions or billions of gigatons at least.
Well, even in the mid-22nd Century, before the Federation was even founded, the Xindi (who would later become a notable Federation member) were capable of building a ship-sized superweapon that could destroy a planet. Sure, they had some help with that, but combined with TDiC the implications are that it is not that far beyond the capabilities of typical Trek weaponry, and unless I'm mistaken, that whole part of the timeline supposedly wasn't erased after the reset of the temporal cold war in Season 4, so the Federation should have much of the information necessary to build such a device.
