Nuclear Weapons More Powerful Than Photonic Torpedeos????!!

Is it possible that they are amped up nuclear torpedoes? They seemed to have made a huge racket in The Original Series episode "Balance of Terror" when the Romulans unleashed them. I thought that Photonic Torpedoes were made of anti-matter.... much more powerful than that. Not to mention what the U.S.S. Enterprise had under James T. Kirk.

 

Photonic torpedoes never came across as very powerful, remember the ones used on the automated repair station? Equal to ten of twenty pounds of modern explosives at best.

 

What the Romulan War featured was "by our standards primitive atomic weapons". No nuclear weapons were mentioned in the TOS episode, either in reference to the old war or the 2260s confrontation. And the big red cloud of death the Romulans used was not called atomic any more than it was called nuclear.

1) We don't know what "atomic weapons" are. Today, we have none. Tomorrow, just about any weapon might be named "atomic", and probably the name would befall upon a type different from the one that carried the name back in the fifties. Probably some devious chemical weapon or nanogoo bomb or whatever.

2) The wording does suggest that these mysterious atomics remain in use in TOS, only in a less primitive form. Are photon torpedoes atomic weapons? Or are phasers?

Timo Saloniemi

 

I was thinking that it would be like a nuclear warhead that we have today. However, something involving anti-matter might seem more powerful, but apparently not in the Star Trek universe.

The Romulan Centurion called the weapons he used against the U.S.S. Enterprise "old style nuclear warheads." They were probably left over from their conflict with United Earth before they became the founding member of the United Federation of Planets.

In the Star Trek: Enterprise: Romulan War novels Hoshi Sato refers to them by the same name... odd....

 

Nukes can be dial a yield, so can the fictional torpedoes. They may be a range limitation on torps. Yield go up only as distance from the firing ship increases. Too far--and too much anti matter is used for propulsion--and yield goes back down.


There may be other ways to pack a lot of energy

Nitrogen-60?
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=40412.0

Then too there is this:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/02/confirmation-of-ultra-high-energy.html

chemonuclear

 

Just a two-meter long slug of metal (no antimatter or whatever warhead) fired at warp or even impulse can probably do a lot of damage.

 

As would a nuclear-tipped spatial torpedo with a W-60 warhead or 22nd century equivalent. As would, come to think of it, even a MODERN DAY anti-satellite missile at its maximum velocity.

Hell, a fucking sidewinder missile would have packed a bigger punch than NX-01's spatial torpedoes and probably would have been slightly more reliable on top of it.

 

You wouldn't even need an armed warhead. Any solid object of decent mass moving at warp or near warp would do.

 

If the shields/deflectors of a ship moving at warp can casually brush aside a piece of debris in the ships path, how would a "piece of debris" fired at warp speed be expected to do any level of damage to a ship?

Assuming the shield were up.

 

Naturally, it depends on the mass of the object and the strength of the shields/polarized hull plating. But the force delivered by the impact of a sizeable solid object fired at warp is nothing to sneeze at, since Reed described just a grain of space dust can rip a fist-sized hole through an unprotected ship. Repeated hits can from non-warhead tipped missiles can bring down shields too, since it still would be a case of shields dissipating or absorbing energy. Repeated photorp hits may just bring them down faster if they provide a one-two punch of kinetic and electromagnetic energy.

 

My question is more about the scientific empirical logic of a matter/anti-matter vs. a nuclear torpedo being used as the weapon of choice during the Earth-Romulan War after the show of Star Trek: Enterprise.

I believe that that was him talking about a Photonic Torpedo. Are Photon Torpedoes from the 23rd Century even stronger than the nuclear torpedoes from the Romulan Wars?

 

For all we know, photon torpedo is merely shorthand for "photonic torpedo."

No one here really knows, but one could speculate. In TOS' "Balance of Terror" however, the detonation of "an old-style nuclear warhead" was able to inflict considerable damage to the Enterprise from 100 meters away.

 

I don't know what you're trying to say by "scientific empirical logic" but assuming you're asking "Would it make sense?" The in-universe reason is "basically yes." Nuclear weapons tend to be fairly effective even against 23rd century vessels; less advanced defenses of a century earlier would have been even more vulnerable to them.

in terms of relative damage caused and comparative explosive yield, though, none of the weapons on NX-01 even come close to the destructive power of a modern-day nuclear device. Certain episodes like Stormfront managed to draw direct comparisons in terms of the energies involved and suggest that typical yields for directed energy weapons are roughly comparable to very large projectile weapons (NX-01's phase cannons probably pack the punch of a 16-inch naval gun). Spatial torpedoes are noticeably less powerful than phase cannons, while photon torpedoes are noticably more powerful. For the kind of massive jump in weapons yield that would be implied by a nuclear-class weapon, phase cannons would cease to be meaningful as weapons and would be relegated only to close-range or purely defensive fire against small targets that torpedoes couldn't hit.

 

"warp" torpedoes fired between two locations would probably be scrap metal long before exiting warp, unless you had an onboard auxiliary system... however, you could use a probe (class 9?) to traverse intra-warp. I doubt that a class nine probe fitted with a warhead (if correct one with warp capability) would have the same predictability of gravitational shift on a moving starship as it would against a station. And on a station, you may have planetary systems grav adjusts and the probe itself would be apprehended on sensors like "a sore thumb". or "captain obvious".

additionally: Fat boy and little man were nuclear "in-fission" by gravitational detonation... at least I think? The idea is to get the particles to reach a great instability to imploded on their own self freeing up energy, right?

 

The advantage of a warhead is that if there is a "near miss" (say from evasive action) the warhead can still detonate and damage the target.

The chunk of metal moving at warp speed would pass harmlessly by.

 

Which many photon torpedoes actually did in Trek. Quite a few of them missed and just sailed on by their intended targets.

 

I am not sure if these links help, but as much as I am interested in science (out of Math, English and Science on the ACT test in my senior year of high school, my best was Science,) I am not a professional physics science. If anyone can search or help me understand how a nuclear explosion differs from an anti-matter/matter collision (which I believe is what makes up the Photon Torpedeos in the 23rd and 24th century of Star Trek), please let me know, especially if you have a background.

http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/73914/would-a-matter-antimatter-explosion-cause-fallout

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunexotic.php

 

During the attacks in Balance of Terror, my impression is that the damage was being caused by proximity blasts, not direct hits, except for the last attack.

In Elaan of Troyius, there are two detonations near the Klingon ship (upper port side and beneath), and then a direct hit amidships. Three torpedoes apparently didn't detonate, too far away or perhaps owing to some kind of ECM.

 

Those were proximity phasers, not torpedoes. In fact, no torpedoes were exchanged in that engagement except for an old-style missile dropped in the Enterprise's path that was blown up by phasers.

More likely it was just a case they missed.

 

Didn't say there were, my point on proximity blasts stands. If it were just somekind of kinetic kill projectile it could have skimmed pass the Romulan's hull with a millimeter separation and caused zero damage. How you would get a "energy bolt" to proximity detonate is unclear, but apparently that is what was happening.