cue Troy McClure voice I'm Sean Robertson. You might remember me from such films as "Associates of Brian Young's at Babtech: Attack of the Killer Tomatoes XVI" or "That Crazy Dukat Guy from Starship Modeler."
I know Jason, Mr. 2500th, will be familiar with me as Dukat
But enough of that silliness. I'm curious:
What's the deal with firepower figures in ENT?
In "Silent Enemy," Reed tells us a single phase cannon as a "maximum power output of 500 gigajoules." Bernd, Ryan, Timo, and about a million others of us know that should be gigawatts.
But that's okay for the moment. We could assume the weapon batteries are thusly charged up then, over a period of several seconds, use up that energy, corresponding to a power of a couple hundred GW apiece. This is bolstered by a factor of ten in the same episode, so an emergency-level dicharge is on the order of a few terawatts.
I can believe that. Based on some very rough scaling of the asteroids shattered in "Singularity," I figured firepower 400-2,000 GW was appropriate.
But then, in "Cogenitor," Reed decides to show one of the aliens his...err, gun He confuses power and energy units again, but this time, he says their maximum is 80 GJ.
?!
Other than terrible internal consistency, is there any way to explain this? To go from potentially thousands of gigawatts to dozens is a rather dramatic drop; furthermore, given the increasingly hostile aliens the NX-01 has encountered, it'd seem like dumbing the guns down would be a HUGE mistake.
My thought is that it's maybe a smaller gun, but dialogue doesn't support that, nor do I believe have we seen a smaller weapon. It wasn't quite as "tall" as Reed, but I have no idea how large phase cannons actually are. Are there any decent shots of the 500 GJ weapons relative to something of a known size?
Oh well *shrugs*. I'd hoped ENT would try to steer clear of TNG-DS9-VGResque technobabble with phaser effects, wherein a little energy does a lot of damage. But it would seem phase cannons are rapidly becoming very phaser-like, doing things for which [their most recently stated output] is insufficient.
Posted by TheWoozle (Member # 929) on :
I thought that the wattage was the energy going into it, while joules is the energy that the target receives. Isn't one joule the energy to heat one gram of water one degree? or is that a BTU?. What I wonder is... how do they get hundreds of watts of power in a little battery?
How does that compair to the 747-mounted real world lasers? correct me if I'm wacked-out, but arn't they using 1-megawatt lasers for missile defense? I would think that a gigawatt weapon would be pretty impressive.
... and SURE, IGNORE ME, heh. HI, welcome to the madness.
Posted by Ryan McReynolds (Member # 28) on :
Third-grade science refresher:
Joules are units of energy. Watts are units of power. Power is energy per unit time... they are not synonyms.
Power is how wide open you have the faucet. Energy is the amount of water that came out.
Posted by Phoenix (Member # 966) on :
In that case, I'd want to measure weapon "power" as joules. When I fire my phase pistol, I don't want to know how much energy per second it's putting out - I want to know how much energy my victim will receive. Therefore "joules per shot" seems like an excellent way to measure it.
Posted by Cartmaniac (Member # 256) on :
Shots vary in duration and intensity... unit time doesn't.
Posted by Ryan McReynolds (Member # 28) on :
quote:Originally posted by Phoenix: In that case, I'd want to measure weapon "power" as joules. When I fire my phase pistol, I don't want to know how much energy per second it's putting out - I want to know how much energy my victim will receive. Therefore "joules per shot" seems like an excellent way to measure it.
Hey, groovy, there's nothing wrong with that. Just call it "energy" instead of "power."
Posted by Guardian 2000 (Member # 743) on :
Given Malcolm's fixation on security procedures (at least compared to most everyone else on the ship), I don't see that we can accept he'd go telling some random alien about the ship's firepower. At least, not its real firepower.
Posted by Timo (Member # 245) on :
I like the "smaller gun" route, and using this to excuse all the instances when phase cannon fire erupts from places where there are no "Silent Enemy" style phase cannon. Like, well, the bow guns in "Bounty".
I'm all for the idea that the ship has several "calibers" of weapons, and that the lighter guns would be the ones used to blow up silly little ECM drones, as in "Bounty". There haven't been too many references to "primary" and "secondary" phasers in the other shows, but we did hear this once, for the Stargazer in TNG "The Battle". And that ship had an emitter arrangement similar to NX-01, sort of: easily discernible paired emitters close to saucer centerpoint, and easily missed single ones close to saucer rim.
But these light guns should IMHO have been mentioned in "Silent Enemy", along with the three bigger guns...
Timo Saloniemi
Posted by TheWoozle (Member # 929) on :
Back when they first installed the phase-cannon on the ENTERPRISE, they had the parts for two more just like it.
Posted by Treknophyle (Member # 509) on :
Offhand, I'd go with the 'Deck 29 Scenario...".
Let's face it, the days of careful staff tech/science continuity checks are behind us.
![[Smile]](smile.gif)