Power is the rate at which energy is discharged or work performed. So how can they be the same if one takes hell of a lot longer?
Human input in Trek spaceship battles
- Thread starter Anton Dolinsnky
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Power is the rate at which energy is discharged or work performed. So how can they be the same if one takes hell of a lot longer?
Why do WE?
Neither do WE.
In which case, such weapons are often deployed. Or at the very least, deployed in a mass-destructive mode of operation. Mass destruction has more to do with intent than the weapons being deployed; after all, Dresden and Hamburg were hit by conventional carpet bombing and yet suffered far heavier damage than Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
I can only add that it's not inconceivable that more powerful weapons do exist on starships (why limit them to only one or two types of systems?), and situations can and do arise where more firepower is needed for a single device. Probably not COMBAT situations, more like demolition cases or some type of strategic standoff weapons. Since phasers/photorps/disruptors are rarely used in WMD-style attacks, it makes more sense to envision a completely different type of weapon for these situations. Voyager's "tricobalt devices" come to mind, where "tricobalt" might be some futuristic super material like dilithium, with the property that it can be made into a REALLY powerful tamper for a fission-fusion device. If all else fails, a weaponized version of the Genesis Device probably exists, as a torpedo that deconstructs its target at the subatomic level and doesn't bother reorganizing it into anything.
Glad you asked!
Power is described in terms of joules per second, i.e. watts. A 60 watt light bulb therefore uses 60 joules every second. This works well for a continuous discharge situation, but not for something that has to operate in bursts or pulses, or in short spurts of activity. It therefore isn't particularly useful to measure weapon output in watts, except occasionally with lasers, when trying to assess the power class of a particular weapon.
I'll add a new example for you: from "Mind's Eye" we know a starfleet phaser rifle is in the megawatt power class (about 1.05 megajoules per second, in fact). As this is comparable to much larger laser weapons currently used by the U.S. military, we have an easy point of comparison: based on their effects, it's clear that phaser rifles are far more efficient (around 80% compared to 30%) in putting that energy into a target, which means a phaser rifle discharge can put something like 800kJ into a particular target in a one-second period. Compare this to a .50-caliber browning machinegun firing at 600spm; at this rate of fire, the BMG fires ten bullets every second, each bullet having about 20kJ kinetic energy. This means the BMJ will put around 200kJ into a target for a one second burst.
This means a Starfleet phaser rifle is about four times as powreful--in terms of yield delivered to target--than a modern heavy machinegun. Probably, it would be more comparable to, say, a grenade launcher or an Oerlikon gun. This seems perfectly consistent with the way phaser rifles were used in the Trekiverse.
As for starship phasers: the matter is trickier because battleship guns have a much lower rate of fire (even compared to contemporary weapons, which are speed demons by comparison). If you scale this up to starship combat, you find a reference in "Who Watches the Watchers" that a 4.2 GW power generator is "enough to power a small phaser bank," which could mean a discharge of 420MW for up to ten seconds before having to recharge, or 200 MW for twenty seconds, etc. While a single short discharge would indeed be comparable to an Iowa-class cannon shell, the phaser banks would be able to outgun even the Iowa by being able to fire these discharges more often, with a longer range, and with better accuracy.
In the void of space there would be absolutely no reason not to deploy as much firepower as possible against an enemy ship you're trying to destroy. On Earth we have to worry about fallout and collateral damage - not so in a starship duel. There would be no reason not to dial up those torpedoes to their maximum possible city-busting antimatter yield and have the ships phasers set to "mass destruction".
As for tricobalt devices - in a later episode of Voyager we hear that their yield was measured in teracochranes. A cochrane is a unit of warp/subspace field measurement, so it would be logical to infer that tricobalt devices are in fact subspace weapons, designed to impart destruction by the immense forces generated by continuum disruption.
Other than possible treaty violations, plus the need to deliver damage to the target in a form "that counts" more than simply pisses the enemy off. Irradiating the enemy ship with x-rays might be a good way to kill them all, but in the mean time they can still slice you to ribbons a dozen times over before they succumb to radiation sickness.
Then why don't they?
More importantly, with regard to ENT: Why didn't they? If a TNG-era photon torpedo has a yield of a couple hundred megatons, this is already competitive with strategic nuclear weapons we already have. This means NX-01 could have easily matched the firepower of its 24th century counterparts just by mounting an old W88 warhead on a spatial torpedo. Why, instead, go, into battle with these puny spatial torpedoes with "plasma warheads" that look like they're primed with gunpowder?
Which makes more sense as a futuristic WMD, especially if the effects of conventional nuclear/radiative weapons have largely been nullified by basic technology.
Put that another way: a species called "Pyranians" evolved on a frozen planet with extremely high levels of atmospheric oxygen, with temperatures so low that ice is as hard as granite and most of their buildings are made out of it. In their middle industrial age, some Pyrian scientists invented napalm, which in this oxygen-rich environment can burn hot enough to literally melt entire cities with only a small ignition. Napalm devices, to the pyrians, are weapons of mass destruction. Then suddenly the Pyranians encounter humans, who build their ships and tanks out of metal and not ice, and therefore aren't as afraid of napalm since there's little chance of their being killed/melted just from the heat of the flames. This leaves the Pyranians to fall back on more conventional weapons that can still punch through ceramic armor and fireproof garments.
It doesn't really matter how powerful a nuclear warhead is if it doesn't deliver that power in a form that will damage the target. 90 megatons worth of energy just isn't all that much if half of it strikes the target as neutrinos and the other half bounces off its navigational shields as otherwise harmless x-rays.
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Well, thanks for the physics lesson, but I still think you're simplifying things a bit. You're focusing too much on raw power and not capability. Again, I don't see BB guns digging a hole 1 mile deep in mere seconds. In practice, your comparison just doesn't stand
I'm sure smashing a sledgehammer against someones chest has similar power to a bullet, but does that mean cavemen were more advanced than 21st century humans?
As an aside, DS9 TM has SF rifles capable of holding charge of 3.4 x 10^8 MJ. It doesn't say how long it takes to discharge it, but it can't be too long, which is quite a power difference from Mind's Eye. I don't remember the episode so I can't comment
Of course not. A Battleship gun would do the same job in a couple of WEEKS, and even then probably wouldn't be the most efficient tool for the job (even the Enterprise only does this with "drilling phasers" which may or may not be a specialized phaser setting).
The point is, phasers will do essentially the same job as a battlehip gun (in terms of raw destructive power) only they will do it a hell of a lot faster. It's about the difference between a muzzle loader and a gatling gun.
No, a sledgehammer would have signifigantly less kinetic energy than a bullet (whose output is can be measured in kilojoules).
As to your second highly absurd comment, nobody said anything about star trek weapons being less advanced than ours. Often enough, "More powerful" and "more advanced" are two completely different things. Just because the time-traveling assassin across from you is armed with an 15th century crossbow--whose bolts have slightly more kinetic energy than the .22 caliber rifle you're carrying--doesn't mean 15th century weapons are more advanced than yours; this becomes clear after both of you take your first shot and it comes time to reload.
The DS9TM isn't particularly valuable in this regard since alot of its estimates are pretty far off. The reference from Mind's eye is at least canon, as it gives you a specific power output in fairly concrete terms.
You are using rather peculiar definition of "powerful" here. If weapon A deals same amount of destruction in mere seconds that weapon B needs weeks to cause, most people would say that weapon A is a hell of a lot more powerful.
You are using rather peculiar definition of "powerful" here. If weapon A deals same amount of destruction in mere seconds that weapon B needs weeks to cause, most people would say that weapon A is a hell of a lot more powerful.
Not necessarily. A repeating rifle isn't that much more powerful than a breach loader, it just has a much higher rate of fire. It delivers the same power per discharge though, and therefore doesn't qualify as "more powerful," especially in situations where only a single discharge is required or desired.
OTOH, a 76mm otobreda gun is generally considered less powerful than the 127mm mk45 mount used on U.S. warships, despite the fact that its firing rate is nearly four times as fast, and its sustained firing rate is even higher; the otobreda could probably deliver the same amount of damage in less time than the Mk-45, but is not considered "more powerful" as such because time is still a factor.
I think you're conflating "powerful" with "effective." A musket is a more effective weapon than a battle axe for reasons that have nothing to do with power.
I still disagree about multi-megaton warheads doing nothing but irradiating a target. That much radiation set off against the hull or indeed anywhere within a kilometer or so will cause tremendous thermal shock all throughout the ship - probably more than enough to rip the hull apart.
That depends entirely on what the ship is made of. A hull material that doesn't absorb x-rays would be impervious to impulsive shock damage, since all those high energy photons would be reflected back into space without being converted into lower-energy infrared rays. Or worse, a material that absorbs x-rays and quickly re-radiates them as microwaves or something without experiencing a great deal of ionization. The hull would get hot, but it wouldn't vaporize or even explode the way ordinary steel would.
Of course, a high-carbon compound like parafin or graphite would absorb almost all of that radiation and then ablate away without any significant impulsive shock... seems to me, multi-megaton x-ray blasts would only be effective against a relatively primitive target... perhaps a "primitive" space vehicle of a type that allows no quarter, no surrender, not even visual ship-to-ship communications.
For the moment let's concede the point... do we know for sure that photon torpedoes actually produce huge bursts of gamma rays? Or is the matter/antimatter reaction used to produce something more useful?
After all, it's not like starships are propelled through space by antimatter-catalyzed rocket engines stuffed into the warp nacelles, even though these engines could be insanely powerful compared to ordinary fusion drives in the impulse engines. Is there canonical information that suggests photon torpedoes operate in any way similar to ordinary nuclear devices? Or could it be that photon torpedoes are designed to impart tremendous accelerations on their targets as a type of boosted kinetic energy weapon using matter-antimatter reactions as a power source (which, again, would be a type of weaponized warp drive).
Here's another question for you: how could the Borg use their tractor beams as a weapon? Crushing/compressing targets with brute force, or possibly using the tractor beam to attract and repel a starship, three hundred times a second, at more than a hundred gravities? All kinds of possibilities abound, but the one thing we can be almost certain of is that Borg tractor beams don't use gamma rays.
Indeed, but in that case it would only be useful against gamma ray weapons. It doesn't seem useful even in the 23rd century, considering even the Romulans--who still had nuclear devices aboard their ship--didn't usually use them in combat.
We don't know that the Romulans didn't have some kind of ablative armor, really. It never came up. I see no reasons why ablative armor wouldn't be effective against other kinds of high-energy weaponry as well.
As for torpedoes being explosive M/AM warheads as opposed to warp-driven kinetic slugs - they EXPLODE, dude. They're spoken of as "detonating" and having "explosive yields". They do all kinds of things that kinetic energy weapons simply can't.
As for torpedoes being explosive M/AM warheads as opposed to warp-driven kinetic slugs - they EXPLODE, dude. They're spoken of as "detonating" and having "explosive yields". They do all kinds of things that kinetic energy weapons simply can't.
So do slugs when they hit things at high enough velocity. In fact the Standard SM-3's EKV produces a pretty impressive explosion when it strikes an orbiting target at 6km/s.
OTOH, I again mention it wouldn't be a "Warp driven slug" as much as a "weaponized warp drive." Imagine a shuttlecraft sidling up to the side of a starship and then blowing into warp drive such that a three-meter section of that starship was suddenly caught up in that warp field and slammed forward into the adjacent bulkheads at a thousand kilometers an hour. Even if the torpedo isn't moving that fast, it could strike the ship with tremendous pure force... force that, unlike a gamma ray burst, would be extremely difficult to counteract except with a similar type of force field; force that, most importantly, could cause significant blast damage even in the vacuum of space.
Which leads me to the point that matter and antimatter do not technically "explode" on contact.
But photon torpedoes also do things that antimatter weapons can't (and that only kinetic energy weapons can). Most importantly is the ability to cause SMALL explosions that can cause a controlled amount of damage. Theoretically you can react just enough matter/antimatter that the gamma ray burst will vaporize part of the torpedo casing at just a fast enough rate to cause a comparatively small fireball; the problem is, most of the energy is still released as gamma rays, and in this case a concentration of radiation not sufficient to cause physical damage, but more than enough to sterilize anyone and anything in the blast radius.
If photon torpedoes are supposed to be controllable/clean weapons, they would need the ability to physically slam into the target and knock off a sufficiently large or small piece of it. This points to damage through kinetic energy, in this case a type of kinetic forcefield powered by matter/antimatter reaction. That's a tall order for a starship's deflectors to have to repel.
I'll concede that torpedoes could be used as kinetic energy weapons if needed, but we've seen several examples of them exploding in space without impacting a target - that's something no kinetic slug could possibly do. The weaponized warp drive is an interesting theory, but we've seen and heard no evidence of this. In fact I'd say that such a weapon would be classified as a subspace weapon, and thus outlawed by treaty. Probably Starfleet has them anyway - like tricobalt devices - but I'd wager they'd do their best to keep them secret and deployed aboard starships only on a limited level.
I take it you've never heard of "flak?"
Am I misremembering, or were you one of the almost-dozen posters who insisted that phaser beams must be subspace weapons if they're able to operate at warp?
Anyway, there's nothing implicit in "subspace weapons" that bans any weapon that uses subspace fields to deliver energy, only that a weapon that rips massive and unpredictable holes in subspace is illegal as per some plot device in Insurrection. And whether photon torpedoes would deliver their blast effect through mini warp distortion or other type of kinetic forcefield is debatable; if nothing else, it might explain the sparkle effect if photorps are wrapped in a highly energetic version of the always-stingy brig shield.
Regarding tractor beams being used offensively, the Star Wars universe seems to suggest using them to limit the target's mobility. Hold them in place so if you want to you can smack them with weapons and they can't escape. More often of course they're used for capturing rather than damaging, as in Trek. But I think you could also use them as crushing beams, as you've suggested.
Why assume the torpedoes can't do both? Either use the M/AM to drive the warp field, or do a AM dump into the matter chamber for a "conventional" detonation? The equivalent of switching modes between anti-ship and shore bombardment, only you don't need multiple types of ammunition, and you can even select the mode on a sliding scale.
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