Sure, but that's all it will be - a guess.Lighthawk wrote:No, but isn't that why people have these discussions, just because there is in fact no offical onfo (assuming we go only by what has been stated in the shows and ignore other offically licensed sources) Just because there is no canon for it, doesn't mean there is not any way to use what info has been provided to make educated guesses.
True, but whilst phasers do have heat effects, they also have all sorts of weird abilities. How much energy does it take to produce nadions? To produce a disrupter effect? Or "transition out of the continuum"? We simply don't know and can barely even guess.I disagree, while we can't know exactly what energy needs they require, we can make some general guesses based on results. Phaser impacts on various materials we could figure out by how much relative heat and or damage is done. A phaser beam that just burns a hole in a guy's chest probably wasn't sucking up energy equal to a nuclear blast for example.
The few examples we have for energy useage point to numbers higher than you would probably like. Like the Voyager episode that had five million gigawatts running through one power conduit, even whilst the ship was at impulse, not using weapons, shields, etc. Or the TNG episode where the E-D was sitting there doing nothing, but had "seven five billion gigawatts per-" something being generated in the warp core.Based on the mass of ships, we can make guesses at impulse engine energy uses by the rate of accelaration. Admittitly, I don't have the mathematic skills (or likely the pateince) to figure these ballpark numbers out, but even without doing the math I think I can reasonably say certain degrees of energy are just way too much or way too little.
As for how much energy... well, it's not an easy math problem actually but think of even a simplified version that ignored relativity. Kinetic energy is 1/2 m v^2. Energy yield from antimatter is m c^2. So to accelerate 1 kg to lightspeed, ignoring relativity, you need to annhilate a mass of half a kilogram. Meaning that accelerating an 800,000 ton ship to c would take 400,000 tons of matter and antimatter.
Now there's a bunch of things wrong with that, not least that the ship doesn't even use M/AM for impulse speeds. But if you want to speculate about how much energy it takes to travel at warp 9, all you can do is guess.
That's certainly true.I do agree with the point that people trying to guess the future never do get it quite right, but they overguess just as much as the underguess I'd argue. Look back to the 40s, 50s, and 60s. Think about how many scifi works of those times showed that by the year 2000, we'd have flying cars, personal robots, laser pistols, ect.
You might be surprised how much energy it takes to go planet busting. But let's not forget Trek ships can indeed resurface a planet pretty effectively in short order....well in that case, I think that stands as an arguement for my case about how much of the stuff you would every actually want on hand. If my figure of 2 billion is actually smaller than it should be, well damn. We've already got enough to burst a planet like a glass bead being hit by a sledgehammer, going up even more? I know we don't know exactly how much energy various things need, but I really just can't imagine, based on what I have seen in trek, that they would be anything approaching what we're talking about here.
Only by making guesses as to what density it is stored at.Point, this is one of those things where we have to speculate. We know the size of a torpedo though, and thus can make some guesses as to just how much AM one could cram into it. Even if we go overboard and say that half the torpedo is the warhead, you're talking about maybe a few hundred pounds of the stuff.
Yes indeed. And let's not forget that a single barrage from 20 ships destroyed one third of an entire planetary crust in The Die is Cast.Hmmm...I am torn on this. On the one hand, yeah, we don't know how strong the stuff is, and we don't know how much a SIF adds. On the other, we've seen a torpedo put a multi-mile hole in a planet. The energy that represents is just staggering to consider from any standpoint.
Hmmm... are you arguing that a nuclear bomb puts out as much energy as a star?I would like to point out this though, we know that a nuclear explosion produces heat as great or greater than that produced by a yellow star within our own sun's range. As a torpedo hit has been shown to have a similar effect, I think we can safely say that the energy release is thus within the same general area.
True.We've also seen that starships getting too close to a star can be damaged or destroyed by their heat, so we know that whatever they are made of, it does not have an absurdly high temperture tolerance. Being hit by a torpedo is basically thus like being at the epicenter of a nuclear explosion. However strong the material is, if it starts melting, I don't think even a SIF is going to save things.
The single most annoying feature of trying to generate numbers for ANY of this is the sheer inconsistency of the weapons, etc. One day a torpedo can be fired at "God" and not kill Kirk 50 feet away. The next, they are blowing the hell out of a planet. One day a photon can vapourise a whole ship, the next it barely puts a hole in the hull.
What answers you come up with will depend entirely on which examples you take as the norm, and which you dismiss (and why).
Which is fine, but you have to explain why Scotty thought that a M/Am detonation would be easily enough to destroy a 100 km long V'Ger in TMP. The detonation of the E-D in Generations would probably have done little more than scorch the inside of the hangar bay they were in!I'm sorry, but I can't for the sake of common sense agree with this. You're saying that ships have some feature that lets them realize they are blowing up, and that they can then just dump they're AM? I can't buy that at all, I'm sorry.
Actually, whilst we have seen CORE dumps, we have never, ever seen antimatter dumped.We've seen what it takes to dump AM, we've seen a few core dumps
Well I don't believe we've ever seen a Klingon ship self destruct. And no, they wouldn't necessarily want to have uber blasts all the time; in battle you're just as likely to be around friendly ships as enemies, after all, if not more so.If the resulting blast would be as you've been arguing, massive and far ranging regardless of vacuum, wouldn't that be what you'd want as the downed ship? A possible way to take your enemy down with you? The federation we might be able to make some case against this, but the klingons? Romulans? They would love to have their ship's death throes take down the enemy that killed them.
Yes, exactly so. The best explanation is the one that fits all the facts. If you wish to posit that the explosions we see in Generations and the like represent the entire antimatter stock detonating, then please explain Scotty's reference in TMP. Please explain why Kirk compared the Enterprise blowing up to an exploding star in The Naked Time. Etc.I'm sorry, but I find this to be flawed reasoning. You're saying that in order to accept what we've seen, in this case the explosion sizes of detonating ships, we should believe in a system that we have never heard reference to, and which works in a manner far superior to a simular system that we have actually seen in use. We should accept this hypothetical system as being more likely to exist than that the reason ships don't go boom over several hundred km is because being in a vacuum denies the blast it's power.