scvn2812

All that shows is that Hand had damage to key structural members from her fight with Gualara and Vengeance didn't take enough damage to be structurally compromised. Enterprise was at risk of not just crashing but burning up. Although I suspect the risk might have been to the crew rather than the ship as a whole unless she had taken such a severe beating that it was just crossed fingers and duct tape holding her together.

Another thought: if armor rated for say 1 terraton gets hit by 1 terraton and a kiloton, might that be a bad experience for the crew and anyone nearby the ship?

Read the above a bit more carefully dude

Its pointed out that there are stray hits in capital ship on capital ship combat in atmosphere that hit the ground instead of the ship which we must assume was intended to be hazardous to the other ship's health. Hazardous to the other ship's health requiring nuclear force at minimum.

I took yonder laser weapon calculator and plugged in a kiloton of wattage and used tungsten as the material because I didn't feel like trying to decide what value to use for rock. However, it does make a good stand in for a low end starship armor. Actual starship materials and energy weapon yields would be significantly stronger / more potent as evidenced by Hoth.

My above calc was to show that a beam weapon hitting the ground with even a kiloton equivalent in wattage will result in shockwaves to some extent or another. By the calculators' determination, enough to cause significant destruction within the confines of a single compartment, however large that is expected to be. An effect similar to this was not seen or so I'm getting from reading this second hand (I don't know precisely which video is being referred to where this instance of a turbolaser aimed at a ship hits the ground.)

With regards to starships, the assertion is not that turbolasers are Kilotons in wattage nor that ship armor can accurately be described by tungsten. I'm exploring an idea that if enough death ray energy hits something with enough energy that it causes an explosion, an explosion of several dozen meters in diameter as we sometimes see inflicted on ships in these videos would likely cause a shock wave proportionate to the size of the explosion itself. The potency of the explosion being based on just how much more vigorous the beam was than the armor was resilient. If there's enough overkill to cause an explosion that looks like a bomb going off then a shock wave is a reasonable assumption if the atmosphere is thick enough. Its only the energy above and beyond the ability of the materials to handle causing the shockwaves so it wouldn't be continental in scale in any case.

The Venators vs Munis fight may be too high of an altitude but I've also seen Acclamators downed by flak explosions with no shock waves either. I'm going to go out on a limb and say we probably have a lot of explosions in film toon canon that probably ought to have shockwaves.

If that is the case, I beg the question, then what? Do we add this to the list of known weapon feats or call it an error? If the latter, might that have consequences for other universes with goofy effects like phasers are treated?

Notable is that this movie offers the first instance of a ship weapon, albeit a heavy shuttle sized one, hitting ground. The result makes me suspect even more that if there is any starship grade combat in atmosphere in Star Wars ep 7, it is not likely to be all that more impressive than what the Clone Wars has offered.

Vengeance did a swan dive comparable to the Enterprise-D and took all the heat and kinetic effects that would imply yet flying over a volcano about to erupt is bad juju for shuttles and even the Big-E herself. Granted, this was likely just the tip of a super volcano if it really could wipe out the tribal civilization on the planet and most life. So all in all, not a very helpful movie for trying to figure out what the new old girl can handle.

Space ICBMs are a thing now though. First time I can recall an autonomous weapon with interstellar range being considered in any franchise aside from Dreadnaught.

Playing with numbers using this calculator with the assumption of 1 kiloton yield, a 5 meter lens, wavelength of 2.9 e -7 (the default value) and a beam duration of .3 seconds, we'd get a 1.6 kilometer pin hole in the ground with a radius of 35 centimeters or so if the ground were made of tungsten and the beam fired at a distance of 1,000 km. Said calculator also informs me that impulse shock, which it defines as the rate of vaporization exceeding the speed of sound causing shockwaves in any material nearby. How far those shockwaves would extend is beyond the calculator's scope.

So if there's enough inefficiency in the disposal of heat to cause melting of something with a melt point of gigatons, a rounding error's worth of excess energy above the capacity of the armor ought to cause some local turbulence in the atmosphere in ship to ship combat. For that matter, don't even WWII caliber naval guns cause shockwaves? I seem to recall an aerial picture of an Iowa broadside where the water is moved by the violence of the firing of the guns, I would imagine the explosion on the receiving end would likewise cause some shockwaves as well. The explosions in that video of the Separatist and Republic ships fighting in atmosphere certainly seem WW2 in scale yet I don't recall shockwaves. Is there a way these ships can have chunks of hull flying off of them without producing some sort of atmospheric shockwave? A terraton missing and hitting a planet ought to be a bit more violent.

If there is a reasnable expectation that even the scale of blasts that we do see should have a shockwave then we seem to have two conclusions, both opening doors to rabbit holes that make claiming anything we do is scientifically justiable rather tricky, the first being that everything we see in at least Clone Wars is a recreation with flawed effects akin to Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor (except I don't think Michael Bay would ever soft peddle the scale of explosions ) which still leaves us with the question of whether that's a 1 ton explosion the animators failed to put a shockwave around or a 1 ton explosion that is just the tip of an ice berg of pain the size of a small sun that was safely absorbed by the shields / armor and not permitted to escape into the environment. The 1 ton being what our eyes tell us, the 1 ton + significantly more that we can't see because it was absorbed being what the Death Star, General Dodonna, causal asteroid destruction etc. tell us.

The second being that its some sort of reverse voodoo physics phaser where military targets are harmed far more savagely than soft targets - either way without a shockwave, at which point everything up to and including the Death Star's hypermatter reactor burning condensed orphan tears is not fully able to be ruled out.

As analyists looking at a children's cartoon based on a movie franchise with live actors, are we obligated to mind trick ourselves into forgetting that's its a children's cartoon if we hit a brick wall with our ability to contrive excuses for why the cartoon doesn't match even our most conservative estimates of what is happening in the movies such as the Hoth asteroids being blown to smithereens? I don't mean that to make a mockery of what we do here but I do think its a fair question.

I have the same reservations about both flawless damage control even as damage is being taken and the notion of a gentleman's agreement not to leave planets with their populations and climates devastated by adding stellar amounts of heat into the planet. Especially in the case of the latter where we can't get every country to agree to stop using landmines, cluster bombs, chemical weapons, phosphorus weapons etc on just one planet. Its hard to imagine such a consensus arising in a civilization of numerous species.

On the other hand, they can and do throw some pretty fantastic energy around with zero apparent consequences to the environment. The Millennium Falcon can take off without knocking over Stormtroopers a stone's throw away or kicking up any debris at all.

The Death Star technicians work next to beams containing a chunk of the energy needed to destroy a planet without any obvious protection.

Yet their ability to manipulate energy isn't so perfect that you don't have things happen like the ISDs that explodes at Endor rather than being bludgeoned into scrap. An explosion where the visible portion is large enough to consume a mile long warship ought not to be pleasant to have happen over your house no matter how conservative the assumptions.

I suppose it's possible that in either case, they take the chance that their safeguards might fail or someone might cheat and dial the power up to apocalypse. Although I would imagine going to full combat power might take time if the reactor and associated systems are running at their low end, everything would have to be brought to full strength in tandem, you'd have to walk the reactor up to max, since every magnitude increase in output would require all the safeties to be ramped up to handle it. So it might be difficult to cheat as the other guy would probably notice and start ramping up their power too, neutralizing any advantage from racing to see who can cause the apocalypse first.

I've remarked a few times that as far as on screen canon goes, aside from one side trying to build a Death Star, it's a pretty civil civil war. Aside from the Death Star, the hundred megaton missiles defending that one planet are the most powerful weapons we have direct confirmation of existing rather than extrapolating their existence and enough of those would handily do the job of slaughtering millions and devastating planetary economies and environments. Yet we have no canon planetary holocausts except Alderaan and almost Yavin and that was after 20 years of military dictatorship rather than a 3 year civil war after generations of peace on the galactic scale.

Terraton turbolasers or not, if they want to murder planets they can but don't.

Quick question: are there bombardments from the main guns on a soft target like a planet's surface in a situation where we should expect them to be taking advantage of how much energy they can throw around? I know there's a few instances of shields and armor tanking shots that would level a city according to Brian's and Wong's models without more fireworks than what we would expect from a WW2 fight. That I assume is due to implausibly efficient and resilient armor and shields that prevent more than a token amount of energy escaping.

Ground bombardment without a need to reduce collateral damage would be messy to explain.

I rather like the model from Hull No. 721 where Star Destroyers and Mon Cal ships use random thrusts to throw off accuracy and turbolasers are used at long ranges to create patterns of fire that ships have to try to navigate through, sort of like how kinetics are treated in harder scifi. Targets are hosed down with light gun fire to try and get lucky to hit when a hole in the shields opens to let fire out. Shields aren't perfect and well timed fire can let shots through even if the shield hasn't failed. Heat management is also a limiting factor on how much of a pounding ships can take.

I couldn't check the math or even whether you're accurately portraying the universe but I can definitely say if an explanation works or not in terms of making sense to the uninitiated.

Alright since the OP didn't generate as much dialog as I was hoping, I'll widen the premise.

What is your preferred vision of how various universes duke it out? Not necessarily what you think is suggested by the most bits of canon but if you were put in charge, how would you portray combat in various universes?

For example, I fins myself torn between the minimally destructive (relatively speaking, it's still pretty destructive just not go for the jugular decisive like B5), high precision combat implied by the TOS movies and the implied combat of TOS with long range, warp speed combat with potent nuclear caliber torpedoes for very long range proximity bombardment when accuracy is low. Aka the model Starfleet Museum uses in its fiction.

I remember there being a projectile of some kind. I'll have to excavate my closet and figure out where my comics are.

It's a missile, all missiles look phallic. George Carlin does a great rant about it. I don't remember the original art in Dark Empire looking that bad. I might have to find my trade paperback and see how it looked originally and see how much creative license was taken here. I suspect a lot.

Other than the idea of an entire Federation existing on the opposite side of the Klingon and Romulan Empires, that's one of my favorite Trek guides. As time has gone on, I think the colonial / age of Sail model where each nation has its core which are all nearby as in age of sail Europe and then they have far flung colonies beyond their cores which are intermingled and logistically difficult to defend from one another.

I raise an eyebrow at the only ship in the quadrant line as well given that Federation space is almost half in the Beta quadrant, one would figure given the majority of TOS is about the race to make allies and secure resources before the Klingons, half or more of the fleet would be in Beta Quadrant. Even if we go by the 12 like her quote, that's 6 ships. If we go by USN carrier battlegroup deployments, that would at least then be 2 on station, 2 in transit and 2 in dock. This also does not factor in that at this point, additional vesssels that are nearly as capable in a fight as a Connie are around such as the Mirandas.

Another possibility is that the orientation of the quadrants was changed by a few degrees sometime later as new terminology came into vogue and discoveries about galactic geography came to light. Originally you may have been almost in Klingon space before you crossed into the Beta quadrant. They

I don't care for that method myself. Being a fan of torch drive settings, I actually don't have a problem with settings with disproportionate engine power to electrical power available for weapons. My favorite novels of late involve terrawatt torch drives and gigawatt tops lasers. Although they do have nukes which means that they technically do have access to comparable energies for destruction as they do propulsion, it's just not directly relatable to energy weapons.

I think it's more reasonable to measure firepower and propulsion separately and break down firepower by weapon type. My preferred method for presuming the power of Star Destroyers for example is working downwards from the Death Star.

I sense a greater interest in complaining about the inconsistencies of one specific franchise in this thread than discussion of the topic in the OP.

Anyway, in an attempt to steer the thread back, I'm rather taken with Starfleet Museum's Starfleet Battles / TOS vision of warp speed combat and multi light second ranges.

Anti grav would explain the lack of interaction with the surroundings at very low speeds but I'm thinking to avoid sonic booms would require a more exotic propulsion method or some way of manipulating the air along the ship's path. Even the Acclamators in Attack of the Clones are moving up at space shuttle speeds without making much of a fuss. I look at it as a problem that would have needed solving once a civilization decided it was desirable to have ships as long as a kilometer plus land and take off in any sort of reasonable time you don't want them killing entire states with the airflow of their passing. How they do it, beats me.

Anyway, so to return to the OP. I tend to lean towards the head canon that visuals are the equivalent of animations in a History Channel special and not necessarily perfectly scaled, showing everything going on. Simplified abstractions. Its not a very good model for debating though so it sort of requires keeping personal preference and "real" canon separate.

In the latter case, one is still left with trying to figure out why the optimum use of technology in the setting from the outsider point of view isn't actually the best use after all.

I look at the surface to orbit issue as exotic propulsion technology as the Falcon doesn't even bother anyone when it takes off, let alone leave the sonic boom in its wake you'd expect from something accelerating rapidly. I'd buy the time compression idea if not for Obi Wan having a conversation in real time as he exits the atmosphere in Attack of the Clones and then speeds past a moon until both planet and moon rapidly shrink in the distance.

I know all of the out of universe reasons why ships go at one another age of sail style, I'm more interested in how people regard "real" combat and how or if they consider visuals representative of combat.

With a few exceptions like nBSG and B5, this seems to be something that pops up all over scifi.

SG-1: Deathgliders can hit nearly the speed of light, Ha'taks have same day travel of AU distances without using hyperspace

Star Wars: 30 seconds from surface to orbit, lunar orbit in minutes, the Death Star appears to have been perhaps at lunar orbit when it fired on Alderaan

Star Trek: same day in system travel at impulse speeds demonstrated a few times (ST1 was discussed previously), warp speed combat maneuvers in TOS and USS Phoenix took out a Cardassian ship from 300,000 km at one point

oBSG: top speeds for the Galactica of just over a light speed, twice the speed of light for Vipers

Andromeda: dialog indicating ship speeds generally measured in PSL (percentage speed of light) and ships attacking at ranges as far out as 2 light minutes

Yet the visuals for each of these shows routinely show fights with closing speeds of hundreds of meters to single digit KPS, weapons used at ranges of just a few ship lengths. Without exception these shows routinely have fights taking place between ships in the same frame at distances that Jack Sparrow and Horatio Nelson might think are just a bit close.

So what is your personal preference for dealing with these issues?

Except that in that case, it would have been given the definition "asteroid" or "moon". And would be icy. Using the good ol' Eyeball Mk. I, Memory Alpha looks rocky. And the minimum diameter for a rocky body to be spherical is 600 km.

Terms like that tend to be used in a rather squishy way by science fiction writers. They also tend to be hotly debated among scientific circles as well. Right now the definition of planet iirc is above a certain mass and has cleared its orbit of significant debris.

What would one call an object in the 400 to 600 km neighborhood that does not orbit anything besides the primary and does not share its orbit with anything else of significance? Presumably a planet of some sort, it may technically be a dwarf planet but the adjective might be dropped just as short hand if its the only colonized object in the system or is the dominant colonized object at least in terms of importance or population.

Scaling this seems like a very iffy proposition given the UFP has artificial gravity technology (which means object size is no barrier to habitation as long as it's within artificial structures) and there are no scaling cues to tell us how close the big E is to the camera other than she's close enough to the camera that she's not casting a shadow on the colony.

That said I have no objection to the UFP having the ability to erect such structures on a planet or in space. Earth space dock has tens of thousands of times the volume of the Enterprise. Scale seems to be no limiting factor on their ability to build immobile structures.

The first episode of Stargate SG-1 establishes that the movie and the show are part of the same continuity. There are some issues like Ra being a more spiritual / energy being possessing a human rather than a snake like creature (I've always mentally retconned that as Ra having secretly been a quasi-ascended being like Anubis and movie Anubis was series Anubis who had figured out Ra's secret and used it to survive having his head ringed up to Ra's ship) and Ra's personal guard being human instead of Jaffa, but the events of the movie happened even if the details might have quietly been retconned.

I don't think anyone has ever really come up with an explanation for this that I've seen. SG-1 is known for its conundrums when it comes to orbital bombardment.

So here we have half a dozen Goa'uld motherships that can apparently withstand stellar energies for some time, a feat which the most conservative calculations put at permitting them to withstand small nuclear weapons and they go up from that.

Said motherships then rain fire down upon Anubis' mothership, a significantly larger vessel, which is hovering above the city. Not all of the fire is accurate, not all of the fire is absorbed the shields and hull. Some shots miss, some over penetrate. Now as we all know, the direct effects from an energy weapon impact are likely to be significantly less than a bomb of the same joules due to how the energy is delivered. On the other hand, you still have superheated columns of debris that will be expanding outwards to cook their surroundings to some extent and I'm having a hard time reconciling the firepower that would apparently be needed to bring down a Goa'uld ship with the end result.

A couple of thoughts. One is that the bolts did not just overpenetrate the ship, they also penetrated so deeply into the crust that their effects would not be immediately felt. There may be later climate / geological impacts from opening very deep, if very narrow fissures in the crust in the city. The city may later need to be evacuated due to new volcanic activity.

Another is that the runaway naquadria reaction later described to be threatening the entire continent if not planet was part of why there was so little collateral damage: the energy from the Goa'uld weapons was somehow largely conducted into the naquadria.

That is dead on what I was thinking but just didn't manage to articulate in that way. I absolutely concur that private civilian space travel is probably not outlawed within the Federation but sanity dictates that it is probably even more strictly regulated than air travel is today. If an improperly flown plane, even a little biplane, is a tragedy waiting to happen, a mishandled shuttle at sufficient velocity may be apocalyptic. Its never been discussed what would happen to a planet if it were struck by a warp driven ship but I doubt it would be pleasant.

Emphasis on the word "constant." A Galaxy-class has to red line its engines to keep pace with a Borg Cube and even then its iffy. When you combine that with no ship we've ever seen being able to take more than a few minutes of fighting with a peer, let alone a superior opponent (Ref: Wrath of Khan, Undiscovered Country, Nemesis) before having to break off and make repairs or exploding and more often than not, losing shields in less than a minute, this is not the stuff of an hours long continuous fight.

This, and other "hours long" battles, likely represents a "battle" with several separate engagements spread out across the duration of the battle punctuated by ships breaking off to repair, reform and plan the next attack. In the case of the battle with the Borg, given the limitations of warp drive when trying to run down a Cube and the lack of any reason for the Borg to stick around if the prize is Earth and they've been met with a force that could potentially overcome them, the Cube was likely attacked multiple times by multiple fleets, starting with the fleet in the Typhon sector, tearing through it or leaving it in its dust, possibly encountering other fleets along the way and then running into another fleet at Sol. We don't know where the Typhon Sector is, but it could be further away than the the Romulan border, allowing the E-E to arrive in Sol in time to save the day.

So I see it more of a battle in the sense of the battles in the Pacific in World War 2 where a series of attacks and retreats by carrier launched aircraft over the course of hours, even days, are counted as a single battle. In other words, the most likely explanation given what we know about the capabilities of the Borg and Federation is a series of attacks, either by pursuing or intercepting ships, over the course of hours or days with the finish line and final, decisive engagement being at Earth.

The pacing or the materials being buffed by exotic fields and the like? Either way, agreed. There's only so much time you can spend having bits blown off your ship before you have to try to break off and make repairs. Same goes for Coruscant in all likelihood, it only took five or six minutes of screen time for an ISD to bite it so there were probably discrete engagements and withdrawals for that fight too.

The Borg may use some sort of smart material that they can tweak the properties of on the fly but they also have all manner of fields as well. The hull is not likely their main line of defense. Also In the Best of Both Worlds, Borg ships were shown to be faster than a Galaxy class red lining it's engines, the First Contact battle was probably a series of fights like BOBW with various task forces intercepting the cube along its flight path or catching up when it drops out of warp for any reason rather than hours upon hours of constant fighting and bombardment. Trek ships can't take more than a few seconds from a peer in most fights without taking crippling damage, the longest ship to ship battles take a few minutes.