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I was watching an episode of ST:TNG earlier, and it occurred to me that they would have a much easier time if they could, for example, detonate photon torpedoes in a ten-kilometer grid over the surface of the planet until the aliens surrendered Lieutenant Yar. Obviously the Prime Directive forbids them from doing that, but it begs the question: Would Enterprise alone be capable of systematically glassing a planet, Halo-style (although maybe with torpedoes, not beams), until no life remained, in a reasonable amount of time? In Halo, glassing takes a huge fleet. I'm not trying to suggest that Enterprise is somehow equal to something like a CCS-class cruiser, because it's obviously not—it's about a tenth the size. But in Star Trek individual ships are shown as being able to do way more than a single ship can in most other universes. So, does this happen? Could it happen without the Prime Directive? I don't know enough about Star Trek to know.

Maybe I don't know how many torpedoes the enterprise has though so it would probably be cheaper to simply target key settlements instead of glassing the whole planet.

Sadly my Star Trek knowledge base is no where near that of Halo or Star Wars. However, with some quick study from Memory Alpha and Google, type one torpedoes are just over a Tsar Bomb, and while type twos are more powerful have a smaller blast size and will require more torpedoes and time. If they could maintain a near-constant fire rate (not too hard to do as long as you have plenty of redshirts to load the torpedores) along with an inexhaustible supply of type ones, they could sure glass a planet in what I can guess would be an hour or two, the fastest covenant glassing taking hours at the least. So yeah, plausible.

And Shadow, the Enterprise-D maxed out at 250 torpedoes.

Admiral Vinyl wrote:along with an inexhaustible supply of type ones,
And Shadow, the Enterprise-D maxed out at 250 torpedoes.

That's a pretty key part of that, though. That would mean the answer was no, because they don't carry enough torpedoes. If they've only got 250, they'd need to have a blast radius of something like 2500 kilometers to cover a planet the size of Earth. That means it's a question of whether the phaser batteries put out enough power to do emulate Covenant glassing beams for any amount of time. IIRC an ISD's turbolasers put out something like the energy of a medium-sized nuke with every blast, so that's not impossible.

Adrien Victus wrote:

Admiral Vinyl wrote:along with an inexhaustible supply of type ones,
And Shadow, the Enterprise-D maxed out at 250 torpedoes.

That's a pretty key part of that, though. That would mean the answer was no, because they don't carry enough torpedoes. If they've only got 250, they'd need to have a blast radius of something like 2500 kilometers to cover a planet the size of Earth. That means it's a question of whether the phaser batteries put out enough power to do emulate Covenant glassing beams for any amount of time. IIRC an ISD's turbolasers put out something like the energy of a medium-sized nuke with every blast, so that's not impossible.

So unless they have a redshirt powered cargo ship of torpedoes nearby, And I doubt the phasers arrays are strong enough they only ever fire for like three seconds and seem to hardly do damage to anything with remote armor on it. But that's just shitty special effects, the technical details I don't know.

While it is theoretically possible, in order to actually do it, your best best would lie in like strapping some torpedo magazines or like weld a cargo hold in to have enough ammunition. A small fleet (of Galaxy-classes) or a couple with support from freighters could do the job.

Let's just go hijack the dynson sphere laser.

AFAIK a photon torpedo at maximum yield is comparable to a TZAR-bomb in terms of yield.
However, Enterprise-E carries quantum torpedoes which are to photon torpedoes what a thermonuke is to a nuke, and while their total yield is unknown, they draw their power from a quantum chain reaction that may be able to devastate an entire continent.
Also the ammount of area that needs to be glassed does not contain seas, further making the task easier.
Not to mention that if we move to secondary canon we get the 25th Century Oddyssey-class Enterprise-F which is significantly larger and would definetely be able to torch a planet.
Secondary canon also contains the novels where Section 31 repeatedly mentiones and conducts torchings of planets with Starfleet vessels to eradicate all evidence of their actions, proving that it is possible to do so.

I've determined a while ago that to glass a planet the size of earth you'd need something like 819 exajoules. (Or something like that, I'll do that math again later.)

According to wolfram|alpha tsar bomba is 58 megatons of tnt. and type one's are slightly more powerful than the tsar bomba, so we'll say it's 65 megatons per warhead. That's 0.272 exajoules per warhead, and there are 250 of. That's 68 exajoules. not enough. You still need 751 exajoules of energy. I'll search more for the power of the Phasers later. but yeah the torpedos cannot glass a planet on their own.

Enterprise-D, no. Not enough ammunition to completely glass a planet, although ones with very small landmasses, perhaps.

Enterprise-E, possibly. Given the quantum torpedoes and photon torpedoes, they could hit everything big with quantum torps, then clean up with photons. If you're THAT pressed for ammo, phasers could maybe finish up.

Remember, the Ent-D was a science vessel first, so it actually was pretty weakly armed (for a ship that size). The Ent-E was actually classed as a battlecruiser, and as such packed one hell of a punch in comparison. Just my two credits.

I can't find any stats for ammunition capacity of the Ent-E, but it had nine photon torpedo tubes to the Ent-D's two, so presumably it carried a similarly multiplied number of torpedoes. It also had the quantum torpedoes and more phasers.

@solar maybe not litterally glass but definetely bomb to death, which the Ent-E is easily capable of, due to quantum torpedoes and hella photon torpedoes as well as phaser spam