The Genesis Device

[kostmayer]

Wasn't the Enterprise D in danger of accidentally burning off the atmosphere of a planet in "A Matter of Time"? What would be involved in an enemy ship burning off a planets atmosphere using conventional beam weapons?

How much energy would be needed to boil the ocean?

[Sionnach Glic]

Any idea how they acomlpished this? I find it difficult to believe you could do that just with the standard loadout of a Klingon warship.

[Captain Seafort]

I'm not sure if it was standard, but they used some kind of weapon to destroy the biosphere with a "plasma reaction".

[Sionnach Glic]

Did they explain how the biosphere was destroyed? Was it burned off, polluted, etc?

[Captain Seafort]

*shrugs*

WORF
(off instruments)
Some kind of plasma reaction is
consuming the lower atmosphere.

PICARD
Can we stop it?

WORF
No, Sir. The reaction is
global...

Data looks up from his console.

DATA
All life on the planet is being
destroyed.

And later:

PICARD
He destroyed the planet's
biosphere after taking the sample.

Pretty emphatic the the biosphere was destroyed, but very little in the way of specific details. I got the impression that it was some kind of biological weapon.

[Sionnach Glic]

Some sort of chain-reaction weapon I think.

[Mark]

I always assumed it was some kind of toxic effect from the plasma.

[Teaos]

The maqui had a weapon that made a planet uninhabitable for Cardassians, but that was a bio weapon.

[Graham Kennedy]

The plasma reaction one, we saw a creeping brown stain moving over the planet at extremely high speed; covered most of a hemisphere in less than a minute.

We do know that ships can cause planetary scale effects of various kinds without a great deal of trouble. The E-nil "decontaminated" an entire planet's atmosphere in Let That Be Your Last Battlefield. Voyager somehow cleansed the radiation from a whole planets atmosphere in Friendship One. The E-D ionised much of an atmosphere and then drew it up off the planet and sent it into space in A Matter of Time. It's not at all inconceivable that a ship could do something to a planet that would destroy all life on it, in my opinion.

In terms of brute firepower it's clear that a TOS ship can unleash something at least on the magnitude of World War III, if not an order of magnitude or two more. While The Die is Cast says 20 ships can destroy a third of a planetary crust in a minute or so... so one could do a whole crust in about an hour.

[Sionnach Glic]

Hm, interesting.

[Graham Kennedy]

You get a quick look at it 22 seconds into this

[Teaos]

A point people often raise is that they say TOS weapons seem to be more powerful than TNG ones. Destoryed planet crusts ect. I exaplin the difference as that TOS weapons were really good at making wide scale moderate damage while TNG ones had just as much if not more power but managed to confine that fire power to a smaller area making it more damaging to a small area.

[Mikey]

Makes sense.

[Graham Kennedy]

I think in TNG they often restrict themselves in how much firepower they use. The US is developing a lot of smaller warheads these days to limit collateral damage, so maybe it's like that.

But The Die Is Cast does indicate that they have more firepower than TOS when they need it.

[Mark]

Not to mention by restricting and confining they're fire, they make the individual shot likely more powerful. (Ship to ship)