And you are entitled to your opinion. But there's no canon on the subject either way.
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.
This is nothing more or less than argument from incredulity. You say it's an insane amount of energy to carry around and they could never need that much. However, we have no idea how much energy warp drive requires, nor shields, phasers, grav plating, etc. You can't argue that they wouldn't need that much when we've no idea what their energy requirements are.
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. 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.
And it's almost always true that when people say "it will never be that much!" about the future, they turn out to be wrong. How would a 19th century person react to the notion that one bomb could be as powerful as ten million tons of explosives? How would a 1940s person react to the idea that one computer could be ten billion times as powerful as his? The pace of advance on these things is only increasing, and TOS has two centuries more of advancement to come.
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.
No, no 19th century person would have believed anything could be so powerful (except maybe God), but then again, they had no idea of nuclear material. In the real world yeah, we have no clue what we might discover next, but we are talking about a fictional world that has provided us with an energy source, and has shown it's general power. We have a basis to go on, our 19th century guy not only does not, but he wouldn't even have the motivation to consider the hypothetical, which we do and are doing.
And incidentally, if we go strictly by canon then there is something very weird about the antimatter used in TOS, and it is in fact vastly more powerful than you discuss above. That one ounce produced a detonation far and away greater than a megaton or so.
...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.
But there are several issues with this. Torpedoes are of variable yield, and we are rarely told what yield is being used (and it's usually in weird units or an arbitrary setting number when we are).
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.
Star Trek ships are composed of materials unknown to the present day - tritanium, duranium, etc - and we have a limited idea how tough and durable these are - though what we do know indicates that they are pretty damned tough, given for example that the Enterprise withstood a nuclear bomb going off right next to it in Balance of Terror.
Further complicating this is references to structural integrity fields. We know from The Chase and Gambit that these can protect a hull almost as well as full shields do. We can only speculate about how they would affect estimates of the effect of a weapon on a target.
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.
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. 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.
Then we have the idea that an exploding ship explodes its antimatter. I would say, given the canonical references and depictions of what a starship's antimatter going up can do, that this is rarely if ever a feature of a starship explosion. I have no problem believing that an exploding ship dumps as much antimatter as possible in the last fraction of a second,
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. We've seen what it takes to dump AM, we've seen a few core dumps and it is nothing near fast enough to compete with a ship in mid-explosion. Even assuming that ships have this feature, that it can somehow recgonize when it is in the middle of total destruction and that it's components are even still working enough to jet the AM faster than any AM dump we've ever seen, and ignoring that we've never seen any indication of this hypothetical dump, why would it be a feature to begin with?
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.
if for no other reason than that believing such allows us to accept all of the facts.
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.
Let us assume, for the moment, that the ship does carry 50,000 tons of antimatter and an equal amount of matter. Even assume that it's normal everyday antimatter rather than whatever weird stuff TOS seems to use. Explosive yield of that is around 2 billion megatons. From an orbit say 500 miles up, that means the planet would receive some six hundred megatons per square mile. Even if 99.9% of that was absorbed by the atmosphere - and I can't believe it would be - it would still be absolutely devastating. I know that's a very quick and dirty guestimate, but I think it's a reasonable conclusion - and while we could argue the numbers the other way easily, I also think it's perfectly possible that I am greatly underestimating it if anything.
I'll have to bow to Tyyr's reply on this one, I sure can't add anything or do any better.
