In "The Dauphin" Riker claims that the Enterprise can't generate (one, two... unknown) a terawatt of power when they are contacted by the planet to which they were transporting Salia. But in "New Ground", Data says "We are presently generating 12.75 billion gigawatts per... (he was interrupted before he could finish his sentence, but he was likely going to say "second")... well, one billion gigawatts equals one MILLION terawatts!
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Posted by Identity Crisis (Member # 67) on :
"12.75 billion gigawatts per second" would be nonsense. Watts are a measure of power. Power is the energy generated or used per second. You do not generate watts per second. You generate joules per second. 1 watt = 1 Joule per second. The missing word would have to have been something else.
Data should also have said '12.75 exawatts' rather than '12.75 billion gigawatts'. I think we just assume that this was translated for 20th century audiences who weren't as familiar with some of the more obscure SI prefixes.
The consensus is that Riker is an idiot and that nothing he says or does should ever be taken seriously.
Oh, okay. He was talking about the amount of power that the Enterprise can put out from her communications systems. Not the total power output of the ship.
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Posted by Aethelwer (Member # 36) on :
Of course, Geordi once said that the warp core generates power in the "terawatt range."
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Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :
They just want you to think: Geez', that's a lot! and get away with it..
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Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
Well, like ID said, he was probably talking about a specific system, not overall. The ship can generate 12.75 EW, but that doesn't mean they have an entire TW to spare. All that power is being used to run the ship, and really large amounts can't be rerouted w/o affecting the ship's systems...
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Posted by Aethelwer (Member # 36) on :
OTOH, we've never seen any indication that the Enterprise uses anything near EW-range power...
Of course, it makes no sense to say "we generating XXX Watts per second" since a Watt is already a unit of energy per second, but that made me wonder why Data would use such a line... I mean, what else could he have said? "We are presently...blabla...per warp nacelle"?
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