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Just how many TeraWatts WOULD it require to destroy an entire planet, much like the Death Star in Star Wars or the Xindi superweapon in Star Trek Enterprise?

Well first it's an amount of energy so it's TeraJoules, not TeraWatts. Don't feel bad, Trek manages to mess those two up almost every single time they use them.

With that out of the way, it depends on a lot of factors. Essentially, what you're doing is giving every kilogram of the planet enough kinetic energy to achieve escape velocity. For Earth, escape velocity is about 11,000 m/s, so using the formula for kinetic energy you get a figure of about 60 Million Joules per kilogram.

Since the Earth masses about 6x10^24 kilos, then 60,000,000 x 6x10^24 = 360,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Joules - 360,000,000,000,000,000,000 TeraJoules.

But that's the minimum. You also have to supply enough energy to shatter the planet to pieces. Most weapons will also heat it up a bunch along the way. Stuff like that.

And of course if your planet is bigger/more massive than Earth, the figures rise in proportion.

But really, destroying a planet is utterly pointless in most SF scenarios. Why bother? Ten thousand times less energy will still destroy everything on it, and the population is just as dead either way.

It is also a specialized weapon too.

GrahamKennedy wrote:Well first it's an amount of energy so it's TeraJoules, not TeraWatts. Don't feel bad, Trek manages to mess those two up almost every single time they use them.

With that out of the way, it depends on a lot of factors. Essentially, what you're doing is giving every kilogram of the planet enough kinetic energy to achieve escape velocity. For Earth, escape velocity is about 11,000 m/s, so using the formula for kinetic energy you get a figure of about 60 Million Joules per kilogram.

Since the Earth masses about 6x10^24 kilos, then 60,000,000 x 6x10^24 = 360,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Joules - 360,000,000,000,000,000,000 TeraJoules.

But that's the minimum. You also have to supply enough energy to shatter the planet to pieces. Most weapons will also heat it up a bunch along the way. Stuff like that.

And of course if your planet is bigger/more massive than Earth, the figures rise in proportion.

But really, destroying a planet is utterly pointless in most SF scenarios. Why bother? Ten thousand times less energy will still destroy everything on it, and the population is just as dead either way.

Awww thanks. I DO need to get me tech stuff straight -_-

Then what about the 8472 bioweapon, which has a beam firepower of 7,500,000 TeraWatts and still destroyed a Borg world? :/

Meste17 wrote: Then what about the 8472 bioweapon, which has a beam firepower of 7,500,000 TeraWatts and still destroyed a Borg world? :/

You mean the one that needs 9 small ships to fire at a planet to destroy, but an individual ship was not powerful enough to destroy Voyager (it only clipped the shields), while similar ships took 3 shots to destroy Borg Cubes.

So either a Borg Cube is 1/27 the shielding of a planet, or the writers had no sense of scale.

Personally, I'd have gone with the ships bombarding Borg planets from orbit, then 'vomiting' slime onto the planet. Voyager crew watches as the slime slowly eats away the Borg biological components, then slowly dissolves the mechanical components as well (a faster form of the cells that infected Harry). The ships in orbit would provide additional power for this, and eventually the slime would start building more Bioships. Each Borg planet captured is a fairly habitable environment, and the 8472 would be using it to grow new ships.

Each planet is not just a loss to the Borg, but also a shipyard for 8472. Have Kes get a mental impression that 8472 sees all other life forms as 'food', to be purified (i.e. converted into more 8472 and their ships). With the ability for a single ship to start converting a planet, any 8472 ship that exists is a potntial genocide for the Milky way (and neighboring galaxies).

I made the assumption that the weapon works on some unspecified principle of funky science. Say it converts a great big chunk of the planet's core into energy by initiating some sort of subspace chain reaction.

The reason being that an actual energy-in-to-destroy a planet weapon is a bit of an absurd thing to have around, especially on a small ship. The planetbuster was only a couple of times bigger than a normal 8472 ship, and acted in concert with about eight of those. So really, the weapon would only be about ten or twelve times the size of a normal 8472 weapon. So if the planetbuster can fire 10^32 Joules in one shot, then a normal ship should be able to fire 10^30 - 10^31 in one shot. Even if you went a million times less and claimed 10^26, for a standard 8472 ship, it's still massively, stupidly more powerful than anything else around - literally trillions of times more powerful.

It all gets a bit silly to have weapons that powerful around. It would be like armies on Earth trying to fight wars where assault rifles fired bullets that could blow up a city and grenades that could level a continent.

Coalition wrote:

Meste17 wrote: Then what about the 8472 bioweapon, which has a beam firepower of 7,500,000 TeraWatts and still destroyed a Borg world? :/

You mean the one that needs 9 small ships to fire at a planet to destroy, but an individual ship was not powerful enough to destroy Voyager (it only clipped the shields), while similar ships took 3 shots to destroy Borg Cubes.

So either a Borg Cube is 1/27 the shielding of a planet, or the writers had no sense of scale.

Personally, I'd have gone with the ships bombarding Borg planets from orbit, then 'vomiting' slime onto the planet. Voyager crew watches as the slime slowly eats away the Borg biological components, then slowly dissolves the mechanical components as well (a faster form of the cells that infected Harry). The ships in orbit would provide additional power for this, and eventually the slime would start building more Bioships. Each Borg planet captured is a fairly habitable environment, and the 8472 would be using it to grow new ships.

Each planet is not just a loss to the Borg, but also a shipyard for 8472. Have Kes get a mental impression that 8472 sees all other life forms as 'food', to be purified (i.e. converted into more 8472 and their ships). With the ability for a single ship to start converting a planet, any 8472 ship that exists is a potntial genocide for the Milky way (and neighboring galaxies).

Sounds like a great idea though a little grotesque for Trek.

McAvoy wrote:

Coalition wrote: Personally, I'd have gone with the ships bombarding Borg planets from orbit, then 'vomiting' slime onto the planet. Voyager crew watches as the slime slowly eats away the Borg biological components, then slowly dissolves the mechanical components as well (a faster form of the cells that infected Harry). The ships in orbit would provide additional power for this, and eventually the slime would start building more Bioships. Each Borg planet captured is a fairly habitable environment, and the 8472 would be using it to grow new ships.

Each planet is not just a loss to the Borg, but also a shipyard for 8472. Have Kes get a mental impression that 8472 sees all other life forms as 'food', to be purified (i.e. converted into more 8472 and their ships). With the ability for a single ship to start converting a planet, any 8472 ship that exists is a potntial genocide for the Milky way (and neighboring galaxies).

Sounds like a great idea though a little grotesque for Trek.

That is the whole idea. Think The Blob, but with space capability and energy weapons.

The slime lands on the planet, starts converting the local organics into a 'hive' that then start to launch more 8472 ships. The ship itself then goes to a nearby chondrite asteroid, and eats it to create more biomatter. While processing the biomatter internally, it returns to the planet, and uses its beam weapon to power the hive, allowing it to create ships at a faster rate.

Coalition wrote:So either a Borg Cube is 1/27 the shielding of a planet, or the writers had no sense of scale.

Or, as Graham suggests, funky science. There's plenty of precedent, mainly in the fact that phaser "vaporisation" does not result in everyone else in the room being killed by a big cloud of superheated steam.

Captain Seafort wrote:

Coalition wrote:So either a Borg Cube is 1/27 the shielding of a planet, or the writers had no sense of scale.

Or, as Graham suggests, funky science. There's plenty of precedent, mainly in the fact that phaser "vaporisation" does not result in everyone else in the room being killed by a big cloud of superheated steam.

There's canon that phasers have a "disintegrate" setting anyway.

I though canon said the matter was phased out of reality.

Teaos wrote:I though canon said the matter was phased out of reality.

No. There's actually very little canon on it, but the TMs state that there is some funky phasing effect going on.

Here's a line from the TM's description of Phaser setting 8 :"cascading disruption forces cause humanoid organisms to vaporise, as 50% of the affected matter transitions out of the continuum."

So that sounds like the disrupter effect is actually what makes that transition out of the continuum happen. The effect causes the atoms or molecules of the target to be disrupted and disassociate, whilst simultaneously phasing them out of normal space - presumably this is the phasing effect that makes things invisible/intangible sometimes.

But the only canon I know about it is Kirk's lines in Obsession :

Kirk : "Take your men. Take a swing around our perimeter. Scan for dichronium in the atmosphere. Set your phasers on disrupter beam. If you see any gaseous cloud, fire immediately."

And later :

Kirk : "I want four men armed with phaser two set for disrupter effect. Join me in the transporter room in five minutes. You'll accompany me to the planet's surface."

You can read a lot about what's been said about phasers in different sources in my article on them.