A lightning strike carries approx 5-billion joules...

A lightning strike carries approx 5-billion joules, how many strike(s) would it be to be the equivalent of a starship's phaser(Star Trek 1701-D) 50k terawatts.

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about tree fiddy

Watt is a measure of power
Joule is a measure of energy

You need to specify a time span for a phaser shot.

200kA
100kV

Same time firing in the show when the fire just once

Think of it this way:
1 Watt = 1 Joule/sec

It'd be like asking if a Tesla Model 3 has a range of 270 miles, how fast is it compared to a BMW 3-series?

One is just distance. The other is distance over time.

50,000 terawatts is ~50 quadrillion joule/sec

dat power when Picard said "Continual fire all phasers."

If we go off of this line of thinking then all we would need is the length of time of an average lightning strike.

hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/lightning2.html

Although that line of thinking is more complicated than at first glance.

windpower engineering and development says that lightning bolts carry from 5 kA to 200 kA and voltages vary from 40 kV to 120 kV. So if we take some averages, say, 100 kA and 100 kV, tthen

P = 100×10^3 A x 100 x 10^3 V

= 10,000 x 10^6 W

= 1 x 10^10 W

a terawatt is 1 x 10^12 W, so using my shitty averages an enterprise d 50k terawatt phaser is about equivalent to 5 million lightning strikes

which lines up reasonably okayish with this

Yeah, I took the 93 ms average 3-stroke lightning time length and worked it out. I got 930,000 strikes (with significant figures this is really just 1 million) at 5 billion Joules in one second to match the D's phasers for one second.

An in this case of huge variables and the magnitude of what we're talking about, the difference between 1 million and 5 million strikes is actually pretty good.

Starship phaser ain't no joke

They seem pretty useless most of the time in the actual shows.
That calculated power would be more than enough to wipe a city off the face of the map.

Yeah. Sci-Fi writers sometimes don't do their math very well.

Comic writers never, ever do any science or math or research on anything.

that's because shields exist in star trek
if something is hit with no shields it's instantly blown up

But it seems kind of nonsense that said shields can survive continuous barrages of such an immense amount of energy.

The same reactor that generates the phaser generates the shields

But which requires more energy?

my ass getting tentacle fucked all night on the holodeck

What a low-test activity, as expected on Sup Forums

Safeties would prevent this.