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Calc: ISS Charon Bombards Planet

Updated: Jun 29, 2023


ISS Charon bombardment


Star Trek is pretty consistently below Star Wars in terms of firepower. However, in Star Trek: Discovery (also known as DIS, or STD), an alternate-universe Federation ship bombards a planet with photon torpedoes, obliterating a huge area and appearing to blow right through the crust into the mantle.


To get a very accurate figure is beyond my knowledge level, but I think I can get some very rough numbers. First, we need to find out how big each crater is. To get a guesstimate, I got on Google Earth and aligned the planet to get something of the same angle, and then overlaid them in Canva. It looks like each crater is (with a very large margin of error) about 20-100 kilometers across. Wow. NUKEMAP tells me that a 100-megaton nuke (bigger than any ever detonated, and enough to break windows 50 kilometers away) would make a crater under four kilometers across. However, a 100-megaton bomb would make a fireball about sixteen kilometers across, implying that our 100-km craters should be produced by 400-km fireballs, which we don't see.


If each crater is 20 kilometers across and *looks at screencap* deep enough to expose the molten mantle *looks up depth of mantle*

...this makes no sense. The mantle is 30 kilometers down on land.


Okay, so maybe the lava we see is produced by the torpedoes themselves. To melt that much rock (if the craters are 5 km deep, that's ten trillion cubic meters of rock per crater) would require:

1000000000000 m³ x density of granite x energy to melt granite = ~7e15 megajoules (that's 1700 gigatons).


The energy released by each torpedo, according to these calculations, is a thousand times the energy that could be released by turning the average man into pure energy, roughly equivalent to the total energy held by all the petroleum reserves in the world in 2003, and about half of the total energy from the sun that hits the earth every 24 hours. (It's also enough energy to pick up a mass equivalent to the moon by nine millimeters.)


And remember, this is just the energy required to melt the rock. The torpedoes onscreen melt it, crack the crust around it, and hurl it miles into the atmosphere.

Crater from crayons exploding comic

But are prime-universe Federation ships such as the Enterprise capable of the same thing? All onscreen evidence suggests not—the only thing remotely resembling this was the oft-misinterpreted Deep Space 9 orbital bombardment, and that still wasn't even close to as destructive. And when the USS Discovery performed an orbital bombardment, a total of six torpedoes fired into the same ~100 square miles did not appear to blast away chunks of crust, instead only resulting in a bright glow. By the time of Picard, weapons have developed enough to get at least something of the power shown in the mirror universe, as shown by the orbital bombardment of Mars (one estimate put that in the range of 35000 gigatons). Prime-universe photorps are a few megatons at best.

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