Cloaks and Torpedos

[Crazy Eddie]

Voyager really had a few "pseudo-consequential" events... but none that have any long-term impact on the Star Trek world.

Brutally crippling the Borg in the Voyager series finale doesn't count as having a long-term impact?

Voyager crippled the Borg every other week. By the time we got to Endgame they were just glorified Romulans with a collective weakness.

And, it could be argued that any new Star Trek series set in the prime universe in the future, when the Federation has the technology to return to the Delta Quadrant, may find a multitude of races that have embraced the Federations ideals and started a Delta Quadrant Federation (and may find a few races who hate the Federation due to Voyager's influence, as well).

Or they may find a class-action lawsuit against the entire Federation. Maybe Captain Janeway ends up inside the Pandorica?

Far as that goes a 2 ton missile slamming into a planet at .25c and no anti-matter would knock a planet into an ice age, but that's another discussion

Please continue.

It's called a relativistic kill vehicle. According to my calculations, a 2 ton craft going at full impulse (.25c) that slams directly into a planet would be an explosion on the magnitude of about 1,423 megatons. In comparison, the last Yellowstone super volcano eruption was about 600 megatons and the most powerful nuke "Tzar Bomba" could have produced 100 megatons but that much power scared the Soviets, so the hobbled it to about 50 megatons. No, if you want to knock a planet back into the stone age, you don't need thousands of isotons of antimatter. you just need a good cloaking device. and full impulse.

Did you ever stop to think that the same vehicle traveling at, say, warp four would be an even more effective weapon (I've lately started to wonder if photon torpedoes do not sometimes work this way).

 

[tighr]

Did you ever stop to think that the same vehicle traveling at, say, warp four would be an even more effective weapon (I've lately started to wonder if photon torpedoes do not sometimes work this way).

We don't know enough about warp mechanics, but its possible that anything traveling at warp would just fly right through the planet.

Its actually an interesting question, now that I think about it.

 

[Transk53]

Did you ever stop to think that the same vehicle traveling at, say, warp four would be an even more effective weapon (I've lately started to wonder if photon torpedoes do not sometimes work this way).

We don't know enough about warp mechanics, but its possible that anything traveling at warp would just fly right through the planet.

Its actually an interesting question, now that I think about it.

Agree. I would doubt thought that a Torpedo would slam through due to its own mass. I would say that the shell would be relatively weak and not penetrate a crust, not wholey at least.

I am supprised though that a Strike Torpedo (Just realised my spelling error lol) was not concieved. I bet the Cardassians would have one. Then again, that would be down to the airy fairy fluffy bunny effect. In Babylon 5, the use of Mass Drivers was realistically the only means to take out a target quickly, well maybe not quickly, Narn was bombarded for around 48 hours. The point being that only the Vree and Minbari had Anti-Matter and maybe the Yolo.

If Earthforce had a Matter/Anti-Matter Reactor or Fusion Plant/Core or whatever, An Omega would sliced and diced anything that moved, sat or was just in the way. Without melting the barrels of course. I think that for me was what JMS wanted when he devised B5. Yeah Earth had the same scenario with first contact, but he wrote it that Earth had a lucky escape and that it was a fractious universe, but with good and evil in all races.

In ST it seems that even the Cardassians have Benevolence when they are supossed to be aggressive, Klingons as well. Personally I do not think it would have been shocking or a risk for one of those two to deploy weapons of mass distruction. I harbour the opinion that Gul Dukat would have quit the subtle tatics with Bajor, and just leveled the home world and kept the outer colonys for slave labour. The death camps were only an after thougt in DS9 and not explored. Perhaps that is why I do not favour one series over the other, one for each mood. Both universes are great, but two extremes IMHO

It's called a relativistic kill vehicle. According to my calculations, a 2 ton craft going at full impulse (.25c) that slams directly into a planet would be an explosion on the magnitude of about 1,423 megatons. In comparison, the last Yellowstone super volcano eruption was about 600 megatons and the most powerful nuke "Tzar Bomba" could have produced 100 megatons but that much power scared the Soviets, so the hobbled it to about 50 megatons. No, if you want to knock a planet back into the stone age, you don't need thousands of isotons of antimatter. you just need a good cloaking device. and full impulse.

Gonna be googling that.

 

[Sandoval]

We don't know enough about warp mechanics, but its possible that anything travelling at warp would just fly right through the planet.

It won't. Starships at warp can't fly through planets. That's silly.

 

[Timo]

Or impressive, depending on whom you ask.

So far, we have been given no explicit reason to think starships couldn't fly through solid rock. They certainly have enough thrust, and enough strength.

For some reason, though, strength was thought to be an issue in breaking out of the rock in "The Pegasus". Drilling a hole or just plain ramming through was deemed too risky, because

Data: "The asteroid's internal structure is highly unstable. Any attempt to cut through the rock could cause the entire chasm to collapse."

Apparently, the issue was that the collapse would trap the starship, perhaps no creating much damage per se, but making maneuvering difficult or impossible. Possibly impulse engines aren't simply rockets with enough thrust to give the ship a thousand gees, even though that's what they do? Possibly impulse engines are highly dependent on magical subspace manipulation that just plain can't be done if the ship is surrounded by too much rock?

But that's all speculation. Dialogue or visuals give us no explanation as to why starships couldn't fly through planets.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[UncleRice]

Did you ever stop to think that the same vehicle traveling at, say, warp four would be an even more effective weapon (I've lately started to wonder if photon torpedoes do not sometimes work this way).

Actually I have. Warp mechanics have been the discussion of other threads I have been watching. Consensus suggests the gravitational pull of the planet make warp fields difficult to impossible to maintain. Further, the FTL element of warp drive is actually a technicality as the ship isn't actually going FTL inside the warp bubble. This obfuscates the situation to the point that it would be best to say you can't warp into a planet.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Did you ever stop to think that the same vehicle traveling at, say, warp four would be an even more effective weapon (I've lately started to wonder if photon torpedoes do not sometimes work this way).

Actually I have. Warp mechanics have been the discussion of other threads I have been watching. Consensus suggests the gravitational pull of the planet make warp fields difficult to impossible to maintain. Further, the FTL element of warp drive is actually a technicality as the ship isn't actually going FTL inside the warp bubble. This obfuscates the situation to the point that it would be best to say you can't warp into a planet.

Exactly correct.

In-universe, we know that any object inside of the "warp field" (however you define that... I define it as a bubble, but not everyone does) is carried along at the speed that field is moving.

Essentially, it's non-Newtonian in nature. You've created your own little "pocket universe" which is slipping through the real universe at some superluminal velocity. Within your "pocket universe" you have no effective velocity at all. (That's in-Trek... we have no idea how some form of "real warp drive" might actually work, although the stuff shows above currently being hypothesized fits fairly well with my "faster-than-light, subspace-assisted impulse" concept, actually!)

So, what happens if you "warp into a planet?" Well, at some point, atmosphere starts to enter the bubble, and so either you get a massive, instantaneous compression effect within your bubble, or you get hyper-velocity mass flow through the bubble. And at the speed you'd be talking about, this would for all practical purposes be like running into an immovable object, even with "only" the atmosphere being considered." Hitting water, or solid rock for that matter, would be worse, but not significantly worse... the end effect would be the same in either case... your ship would be totally crushed.

Now, if you think of "warp drive" as some form of "hyperspace drive" (ala Star Wars, or apparently ala "JJ Abrams Trek"), then you're not even in the same universe at all. Instead of creating a "field" you carry through spacetime with you, you're in another realm entirely. (Hence why the JJ-Prise "came out of hyperspace" into the middle of a debris field which they had not been aware of... something that would never happen in Star Trek as we've all known it for decades, would it?).

So, perhaps with the "JJ-warp" system, you could fly right through a planet. But with the TOS-through-ENT-and-everything-in-between" warp system, no, you can't.

 

[Transk53]

I first thought that the concept of a ship warping through a planet would be too redicules. However, what about some some matter conversion field interlinked into the sub space field. Could not see something go through a planetry core, but what about a gas giant. Perhaps the field could manipulate matter around the hull, but without the matter collapsing on top of the ship or damaging the planet itself.

So far, we have been given no explicit reason to think starships couldn't fly through solid rock. They certainly have enough thrust, and enough strength.

I would think that most ships attempting that would be crushed by Gravity before reaching a solid core.

 

[tighr]

For some reason, though, strength was thought to be an issue in breaking out of the rock in "The Pegasus". Drilling a hole or just plain ramming through was deemed too risky, because

Data: "The asteroid's internal structure is highly unstable. Any attempt to cut through the rock could cause the entire chasm to collapse."

Apparently, the issue was that the collapse would trap the starship, perhaps no creating much damage per se, but making maneuvering difficult or impossible.

True, but in The Pegasus, they are starting out inside the asteroid. They would be unable to go to warp while inside the asteroid because they don't have enough available space to ramp up to warp 1, which would cause them to impact the asteroid at sublight speeds.

Again, this is my limited understanding of warp theory, but I think you need to have a runway. In all visual depictions of engaging warp drive, the ship is seen to travel at sublight until it breaks the warp barrier.

Consensus suggests the gravitational pull of the planet make warp fields difficult to impossible to maintain. This obfuscates the situation to the point that it would be best to say you can't warp into a planet.

So what would happen if you tried to warp into a planet? Would you just bounce off?

I'm not in the same threads as you about warp theory, so my only guess would be that you wouldn't so much warp through the planet, as much as space would bend and you would end up warping around the planet. Visually, it would appear the same as warping through the planet, though. But, I could be way off base.

 

[Transk53]

I know sod all about warp theory. I don't have the math abillity. Ok so say all of the above content is plausible on a scientific level.

However, one element that comes in natural thought, Hardware. Ok for a simple example.

The Enterprise E turns up at a planet for a little experiment. There is no worries here though, the experiment is being monitored and tracked by the Enterprise G. The Enterprise E is entirely un-manned and is being Computer guided. The experiment is to see if the Main Computer can handle all of the calculations to maintain a Subspace Bubble to be able to fly through a planet at Warp, remarked the Captian. "I wonder if it will work?"

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Did you ever stop to think that the same vehicle traveling at, say, warp four would be an even more effective weapon (I've lately started to wonder if photon torpedoes do not sometimes work this way).

Actually I have. Warp mechanics have been the discussion of other threads I have been watching. Consensus suggests the gravitational pull of the planet make warp fields difficult to impossible to maintain.

This "consensus" didn't take "The Voyage Home" and STXI into account, did it?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

So, what happens if you "warp into a planet?" Well, at some point, atmosphere starts to enter the bubble, and so either you get a massive, instantaneous compression effect within your bubble, or you get hyper-velocity mass flow through the bubble. And at the speed you'd be talking about, this would for all practical purposes be like running into an immovable object, even with "only" the atmosphere being considered." Hitting water, or solid rock for that matter, would be worse, but not significantly worse... the end effect would be the same in either case... your ship would be totally crushed.

Except for two things in this case:
1) The navigational deflectors are specifically designed to PREVENT this sort of thing from happening and
2) At the speeds you're going, the "crush" event may require a handful of microseconds to complete. At FTL velocities, that's the amount of time it takes for a ship to travel from the upper atmosphere to several hundred kilometers below the crust, during which time the warp field is still active and still smashing through the atmosphere at a few hundred times the speed of light.

The warp field imparts motion on anything that passes through it, which neccesarily means that for these few microseconds there's a mass of air and eventually solid rock being accelerated forward at about a hundred times the speed of light. Even if this crushes your ship in the process, it also crushes a column of material at such insanely high velocities that you might as well have struck the planet with thousand tons of antimatter.

 

[blssdwlf]

Did you ever stop to think that the same vehicle traveling at, say, warp four would be an even more effective weapon (I've lately started to wonder if photon torpedoes do not sometimes work this way).

Actually I have. Warp mechanics have been the discussion of other threads I have been watching. Consensus suggests the gravitational pull of the planet make warp fields difficult to impossible to maintain. Further, the FTL element of warp drive is actually a technicality as the ship isn't actually going FTL inside the warp bubble. This obfuscates the situation to the point that it would be best to say you can't warp into a planet.

The "in universe" references to warp mechanics depends a little on the series.

For TOS and TOS Movie ships, going to warp next to a planet is not a problem at all. The difference is that they just aren't going as fast as they could be until they get farther away. The implication here is that a warp speed ship attempting to fly into a planet (or star) would be naturally slowed down as it got closer and closer to the target and at some point they are no longer FTL. Then again, TOS and TOS Movie ships had no problem hitting 0.5c with their impulse engines so a relativistic kill vehicle wouldn't be out of the question.

In TNG and later, we've seen ships go to warp literally right on top of a star ("Redemption pt2"). AFAIK, TNG and later versions of warp drive do travel at a more uniform FTL speed. Subspace phenomena can negatively affect or disrupt warp fields. This occurs in "Omega Directive" (damaged subspace), "Scorpion" (subspace turbulence), "The Q and the Grey" (subspace shockwaves from supernovas). A "graviton wake" disrupts warp drive in "The Loss". Flying a starship into a planet might be a toss up between something the planet might have that naturally disrupts warp fields or a giant explosion from a warp field ripping into the planet and ship.

Oh and speaking of photon torpedoes... in "Pen Pals" and "Half a Life" we see them being used to burrow into a planet and fly into a stellar core.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Except for two things in this case:
1) The navigational deflectors are specifically designed to PREVENT this sort of thing from happening and

Not really. IF they had no limitations on available power, and were always 100% effective, that would be true. But we know about the power draw requirements for the "navigational deflector" so we know that there are limits on just how much it can do.

I see this system as a "pressor beam" that changes the vector of small masses in the path of the ship so that they're no longer in the path of the ship under normal starflight. Think of it as a broom, in front of the ship, as an analogy.

A broom can work when you're looking at moving a few grains of sand. But ram it into a sand dune and it's useless.

That's a pretty clear analogy to what we're looking at here. It would serve no purpose whatsoever, in this situation, and would become overloaded a mere fraction of a percent of the way through the atmosphere.

2) At the speeds you're going, the "crush" event may require a handful of microseconds to complete. At FTL velocities, that's the amount of time it takes for a ship to travel from the upper atmosphere to several hundred kilometers below the crust, during which time the warp field is still active and still smashing through the atmosphere at a few hundred times the speed of light.

I wonder where you got the idea that there's a TIME factor here, as though "time" is the driving variable. It would not be.

Rather, the driving variable would be "impinged-upon mass." Either way you look at it.. "hypervelocity flow through the warp bubble" or "hypercompression due to mass accumulating in the warp bubble" it has nothing whatsoever to do with time, and has everything to do with the mass you're forcing into that bubble (through flying into it). The time it would take to intercept a given amount of mass will be a RESULT, not a driving variable. Do you see my point?

The mass density of atmosphere is much less than that of water or rock, of course, so the time in atmosphere might be more than it would be in water or rock, to be sure, but since both would occur in less time than it takes for a single neuron to fire, it hardly seems like it would make a meaningful difference.

The only real issue is "how close to the ground would the ship be when it's destroyed?" It could never really penetrate (intact) below the surface, but it might make it close to the surface.

The warp field imparts motion on anything that passes through it, which neccesarily means that for these few microseconds there's a mass of air and eventually solid rock being accelerated forward at about a hundred times the speed of light. Even if this crushes your ship in the process, it also crushes a column of material at such insanely high velocities that you might as well have struck the planet with thousand tons of antimatter.

Well, I'm not convinced that the scale of the explosion is necessarily remotely what you suggest, though MUCH of what you say is entirely reasonable.

Yes, the ship itself would be destroyed in an infinitesimally short period of time upon entering an atmosphere (ST IV notwithstanding), and might even still be intact until reaching the surface in some circumstances. But in any case, it WOULD be destroyed. The question is... what then?

The mass which made up the ship would continue to travel, albeit in a different state. Let's call it "debris" even though that's probably a misguiding term... most likely, this "debris" would be made up of dissociated elementary particles which would not be identifiable as any form of solid matter whatsoever at this point. It would still be mass, which is really my point.

Your argument assumes that the energy level of this debris mass carries energy according to conventional newtonian rules. But it seems unlikely to me that such newtonian rules would apply... otherwise, the ship could never accelerate to warp FTL speed in the first place! No, "warp drive" must be non-newtonian. In which case, your assumption of the energy impact of this is unreasonable.

Now, we know that ships which "drop out of warp" do seem to have some residual sublight velocity when they do so. This is not necessarily reasonable, from any scientific standpoint I can see, but it's something we know from on-screen evidence, so we have to accept it for the purpose of this conversation, don't we?

I get the impression that whatever the velocity of the ship in real-space was before entering warp is the same velocity it has upon exiting warp. And we know that conventional sublight velocity in the Trek work is limited to less than 0.75C, and generally less than 0.5C. (Feel free to refine those values as you wish, I'm just tossing out ballpark numbers).

Well, once the ship is destroyed, the "warp field" will collapse imminently, but will continue to exist for some short period of time after the ship is reduced to elementary particles within that field.

The likely result is that the warp field will behave as a "penetrator" while carrying along whatever mass it has collected (a small portion of which would be the original mass of the ship). But the more mass it picks up, the faster the field collapses as well.

Once the collected mass drops back into real space/time, THEN the energy of that mass would be delivered to the "target," in conventional newtonian terms.

It would still be a massive impact, make no mistake, but I think you're dramatically overestimating the degree of devastation to be seen.

According to your calculation, ramming a planet with a galaxy class would blow the entire planet apart, leaving only a nebula filled with gravel and vaporized stone. More likely, ramming a planet with a galaxy class would create a massive crater and leave a scorched region about the size of Oklahoma. (And might result in a "nuclear winter" condition, on an earthlike planet.)

It would still be a big deal. Just not as big of a deal as you seem to think it would be.

 

[blssdwlf]

Except for two things in this case:
1) The navigational deflectors are specifically designed to PREVENT this sort of thing from happening and

Not really. IF they had no limitations on available power, and were always 100% effective, that would be true. But we know about the power draw requirements for the "navigational deflector" so we know that there are limits on just how much it can do.

I see this system as a "pressor beam" that changes the vector of small masses in the path of the ship so that they're no longer in the path of the ship under normal starflight. Think of it as a broom, in front of the ship, as an analogy.

A broom can work when you're looking at moving a few grains of sand. But ram it into a sand dune and it's useless.

That's a pretty clear analogy to what we're looking at here. It would serve no purpose whatsoever, in this situation, and would become overloaded a mere fraction of a percent of the way through the atmosphere.

How does this account for warping through an ion storm ("Court Martial"), or the Earth's atmosphere (ST:IV) or the Mutara Nebula (ST:II) ? It would seem that the ship is adequately protected even warping through large volumes of dense gas that screws with shielding.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

How does this account for warping through an ion storm ("Court Martial")...

Who said that the ship was at warp? I don't recall any dialog saying so. Also, did any line talk about the particle density of that ion storm? How do you know it's not as diffuse as interstellar hydrogen, just in ionized form?

I get the impression from "Court Martial" that the Enterprise had diverted to investigate this storm, and had deployed this specialized "manned towed array" (the "ion pod") to study this phenomenon and could not have its shields up while the pod was deployed.

Presumably, they COULDN'T energize the defensive systems (screens and shields) while this towed "ion pod" was outside of the ship's defensive perimeter. Likely, it needed to be deployed in that fashion because to make proper observations of an ion storm require you to be in an essentially unpowered observation platform at a distance from the ship's strong energy fields.

I, personally, see the "ion pod" as being a big glass bottle, essentially, with limited (purely mechanical) life support systems, and simple, low-energy sensing devices. It couldn't have an on-board computer, because that would interfere with observations as well (high-frequency computer noise) and thus required an actual human operator. It would be towed behind on an actual CABLE. Energize the shields, with the cable going through the shield barrier region, and you'll either slice the cable or you'll short the shield generators.

So, I see no issue there whatsoever.

... or the Earth's atmosphere (ST:IV)...

Well, I did say "ST IV notwithstanding." That's a problem in general. But I guess you could argue that the ship was merely in the stratosphere at that point, and perhaps was only at WF1 (which is "merely" the speed of light) at that point, or moving at WF6 (which, at the time, was still generally accepted to be c * 6^3, or 216c) so while dangerous (as was clearly inferred), the danger was not the same as if you were warping down into full 1ATM pressure. I thought that this was silly, though, and generally, I treat much of ST IV as in need of a bit of "retcon revision." Your mileage may vary.

... or the Mutara Nebula (ST:II)?

Well, if the Mutara Nebula is like REAL nebulae... this would be a non-issue. Two reasons... first, a nebula is NOT "dense gas" (no matter how it may have appeared on-screen). It's far, far thinner than any planetary atmosphere. And second... there was only a brief moment of warp drive while inside the nebula, and that was happening as the nebula was in the midst of ceasing to exist at all. So... a thin (and rapidly disappearing) veil of gas is NOT like a full-density atmosphere.

There is "atmosphere" in deep space. It's just a very, very, very thin atmosphere. A nebula is not all that much denser.

Going to warp in a planetary atmosphere is inevitably going to be much, much worse than going to warp in ANY spacial phenomenon.

Going to warp in Jupiter's atmosphere would be worse than going to warp in Earth's atmosphere, for that matter. It's not a binary thing... it's a sliding scale, remember. There is no such thing in reality as "pure vacuum."

It would seem that the ship is adequately protected even warping through large volumes of dense gas that screws with shielding.

"Dense" is a relative term. Give me a "moles per cubic meter" value and we can discuss it. Otherwise, there's no science to be discussed. And we're only talking about scriptwriter preferences.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I wonder where you got the idea that there's a TIME factor here, as though "time" is the driving variable. It would not be.

Rather, the driving variable would be "impinged-upon mass." Either way you look at it.. "hypervelocity flow through the warp bubble" or "hypercompression due to mass accumulating in the warp bubble" it has nothing whatsoever to do with time, and has everything to do with the mass you're forcing into that bubble (through flying into it). The time it would take to intercept a given amount of mass will be a RESULT, not a driving variable. Do you see my point?

No.

The amount of additional mass that would cause the ship to implode/crush under pressure is a constant (let's call it X). The amount of time it takes for the warp field to accumulate that much mass at FTL speeds is a variable and is a function of velocity (let's call it Y). The faster you're going, the more quickly you accumulate that mass. HOWEVER, the warp field will not collapse and the ship will not implode within in a nonzero time interval and a certain amount of time will pass between the moment we reach Y and the crushing event (let's call that time interval 'Z').

A certain amount of mass will be displaced at superluminal speeds in Z seconds. Even if Z is a fraction of a microsecond, we're talking potentially several hundred tons of air and several thousand tons of solid rock being slammed against each other at several times the speed of light.

The mass density of atmosphere is much less than that of water or rock, of course, so the time in atmosphere might be more than it would be in water or rock, to be sure, but since both would occur in less time than it takes for a single neuron to fire, it hardly seems like it would make a meaningful difference.

A neuron fires in about five milliseconds. A starship traveling at warp one will travel a distance of three hundred kilometers in one millisecond. If your starship is targeted at the Earth, that means it will plow through the upper atmosphere and hit the surface in about three-fourths of a millisecond.

A column of air two hundred meters wide and two hundred kilometers long would have a volume of about 6.2 billion cubic meters. Compressing all of that gas into a single volume in three quarters of a millisecond. This is the equivalent of detonating a thermonuclear warhead two hundred kilometers long.

The only real issue is "how close to the ground would the ship be when it's destroyed?" It could never really penetrate (intact) below the surface, but it might make it close to the surface.

Even if it doesn't HIT the surface, the interface event with the atmosphere is going to create a cataclysmic shockwave that will flatten everything for hundreds of kilometers. This, of course, is BEFORE the antimatter in the containment pods detonates aboard your suddenly atomized starship.

If it does hit the ground, then you've got several thousand tons of rock being propelled into the rock layers beneath them at a few thousand kilometers per second. The effect would be identical to the planet being hit by a very large asteroid, or a very small one traveling at enormous velocities.

Yes, the ship itself would be destroyed in an infinitesimally short period of time upon entering an atmosphere (ST IV notwithstanding), and might even still be intact until reaching the surface in some circumstances. But in any case, it WOULD be destroyed. The question is... what then?

Then the expanding shockwave it produced on its passing radiates out and causes devastation on a massive scale. An instant later, fifty tons of antimatter that used to be safely contained in magnetic bottles is suddenly released into the environment and you've got a second more massive shockwave immediately behind the first.

Your argument assumes that the energy level of this debris mass carries energy according to conventional newtonian rules.

No, I'm not talking about the debris at all. I'm talking about the warp field itself and the energy contained therein. Under TNG physics a warp field is a non-inertial reference frame where the newtonian rest state is actually a forward-moving state with respect to all outside observers. But because it takes a certain amount of energy to PRODUCE that frame, that energy cannot dissipate instantly (and canonically, it doesn't; starships shot out of warp can take several seconds to return to sublight even when their engines are completely shut down). Even if the starship is crushed in planc second, the WARP FIELD will persist considerably longer than that.

Now, we know that ships which "drop out of warp" do seem to have some residual sublight velocity when they do so. This is not necessarily reasonable, from any scientific standpoint I can see, but it's something we know from on-screen evidence, so we have to accept it for the purpose of this conversation, don't we?

I'm only talking about warp physics as depicted in TNG/ENT, basically. TOS/TMP are considerably different, enough that warp drive may not actually produce a uniform speed but a constant acceleration. Either way, it is explicitly stated in TMP that a starship traveling at warp will continue at warp for a considerable amount of time (22.5 seconds in this case) before it slows to sublight speed. TNG warp engines may use an entirely different mechanism for producing FTL velocities, but we know that at least ONE of them will have a bit of residual momentum to it.

The likely result is that the warp field will behave as a "penetrator" while carrying along whatever mass it has collected (a small portion of which would be the original mass of the ship). But the more mass it picks up, the faster the field collapses as well.

But you're not taking into account the interaction between the penetrator and its environment. A warp field moving through an atmosphere at 10 times the speed of light is going to BLOW THE FUCK OUT OF THAT ATMOSPHERE for the tiny amount of time it takes to collapse. The energy of the debris inside the warp field is almost irrelevant (except for the ship's antimatter, of course) because the displacement wave created BY the warp field is going to raise holy hell.

And that interaction, by the way, is established canonically. Data uses the displacement of the Stargazer's warp field against interstellar gas to track it for a firing solution in "The Battle."

According to your calculation, ramming a planet with a galaxy class would blow the entire planet apart

No, just flatten/incinerate one of its continents and probably trigger a nuclear winter. IOW, an alien shuttlecraft traveling at about warp three would have been enough to wipe out the dinosaurs.

When did I ever claim it would atomize the entire planet, though?

 

[Cary L. Brown]

A thousand tons of antimatter, per your previous post, might have the effect you mention... but that's a lot more mass than the ship would actually carry. However, if a ship DID carry that much antimatter, and if that were to react with a thousand tons of matter, it would be more than enough to reduce an Earth-sized planet to gravel and vapor. That's what I was responding to.

When I was talking about "time not being the main factor," what I mean is that it's the result, not the the input. Field velocity and intercepted mass are the inputs. The time to destruction is the result of the equation where these to values are the inputs. The faster you're moving, and the greater the density of material you impinge on, the shorter the time to the ship's destruction.

Your calcs on time versus neuron-firing agree with my point... yet it almost reads as if you're arguing with me on that point. I'm going to treat your comments as agreement, however, and just an effort to expand on my point, unless you tell me otherwise.

I have no argument with your shockwave point... I just treated the overall effect as a single "end state" rather than discussing individual sub-stages. I think you'd be talking about an area of devastation of about the size of Oklahoma... with secondary effects felt worldwide. You seem to be saying the same thing, so again, I'm a bit confused that it SEEMS like you're arguing against me?

You think that this would "flatten/incinerate" an entire continent... I think that this is a bit of an overestimation, but I also think you're dramatically overestimating the amount of antimatter carried at any time by a starship. Of course, this is a philosophical point... I believe that starships can, and MUST, perpetually generate antimatter "on the fly" and cannot just carry a "years-long supply" aboard. You may not agree with me on that point (though I seem to recall you saying something to a similar point, didn't you?)

I doubt that there is fifty tons of antimatter on the Enterprise (1701 or even 1701-D) at any time... much less a thousand tons.

 

[Timo]

On ion storms and warp:

Lt Hanson: "Approaching ion storm, Sir."
Kirk: "Warp factor one, Mister Hanson."

On the limitations of navigational deflectors:

If they are good for pushing aside dust at warp 9, that already should give them enough oomph to push aside neutron stars at warp 1 - the difference in speed and related Newtonian energy is that extreme.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Transk53]

You reckon a hand bag could fly through a planet on the rise of a dawn. Intriguing stuff. Surley though a Warp Core would cause a catastrophic event if a ship kissed the ground. I don't pretend to understand a lot of the above, but a Warp Core exploding must surely render any planet unstable at minimum.