Playing Devil Advocate

[Ritterin Sophia]

Coruscant (the most important and secure world in the galaxy)

Minor nitpick. But I would argue that Coruscant, whilst heavily defended, isn't the most heavily defended. Anaxes is a Core World planet that is officially referred to as a 'Fortress Planet", and in addition to serving as nominal HQ of the Republic space forces and largest war college in the Republic also boasts it's own shipyards and what is referred to as an abnormally sizable fleet of it's own. It would make sense to assume a Core planet referred to as a 'Fortress Planet' would have static defenses at least comparable to Coruscant (Three tier shielding, with a planetary shield, district-level theater shields, and buildings with built-in deflector shields of their own) and given Coruscant didn't really have a fleet to protect it (or at least one that they knew about until later in the movie), Anaxes would've been slightly more secure.

[the atom]

On the topic, could somebody get me a passage of this infamous 'Base Delta Zero' incident (including the aftermath)? It seems to be the thing that everybody says is full proof of the validity of ICS based calcs, though I've never read the full passage, and I've wanted to analyze it for myself.

[SCRawl]

On the topic, could somebody get me a passage of this infamous 'Base Delta Zero' incident (including the aftermath)? It seems to be the thing that everybody says is full proof of the validity of ICS based calcs, though I've never read the full passage, and I've wanted to analyze it for myself.

Thirty seconds of Google-fu led me to this page. All the numbers are there, though they are not spoon-fed to the reader. If you want that, perhaps someone will oblige you, but I wouldn't count on it.

[the atom]

Yes I would certainly prefer the actual passage as opposed to somebody else's analysis.

[Darth Tedious]

I'm pretty sure if you search it on Wookieepedia you'll find a list of sources/appearences.

[Luke Skywalker]

Mike doesn't gives only the absolute minimum amount of primary evidence, so that page doesn't answer his question.

There's the dankayo example:

... to rendezvous at Dankayo and reduce the tiny base to molten slag. Even before the last of its atmosphere drifted away,
before the dense clouds of atomized topsoil could begin to settle, Imperial transports Elusive and Timely, as well as a
complement of TIE fighters, moved in to perform "mop-up" operations and a through search of Dankayo's now evenly-cratered surface.

The 3 ISD's blow off the atmosphere of Dankayo and atomize its topsoil.

[the atom]

Along what timeframe? An hour? 3 hours? A day? Also, which guns of an ISD are involved in such a bombardment

The Wookieepedia says nothing on the time frame. All I'm trying to do is figure out the yield of each gun involved.

[Connor MacLeod]

For smaller numbers, sure. The energy might get spread fast enough that it doesn't build up to cause damage, or it might be spent on relatively useless stuff like phase changes instead of acceleration, sound, light, etc. etc. etc.

But, when you get into such huge numbers like terajoules, with them already being in a small space and time, it's just such ridiculous overkill that you can put huge energy into all the other factors and still have a lot left over for the blast effect.

So I have a hard time seeing how huge energy small blast would work, especially in an atmosphere. (In open space, the energy might not be visible - things like x-rays on a nuke, for example, may be invisible on screen. In atmosphere though, they'd quickly be absorbed by the air, heating it up to cause a fireball.)

If we were talking about anything like a realistic energy weapon (RL laser, particle beam, etc.) I would agree. But I think its safe to say
Blasters (or phasers, or something like a Lensman Delameter) are only loosely like RL weapons. Blasters, for example, have no consensus on their nature. They range from weird massless beams composed of magic particles that decay into photons, to phyiscal projectiles or small warheads, to your typical plasma weapons. They can behave like heat rays or explosives or even have weird effects interchangably (like blasters failing to inflict severe third degree burns or blow out large holes in people.)

That tends to make predicting the results hard - I mean how exactly does a blaster, phaser, etc deposit energy into the target? How well does it penetrate (particle beams penetrate well, and as I recall that affects how they deposit their energy into the target compared to projectiles or lasers. Laser frequency certainly impacts penetration aspects as well.) In what manner does it release that energy, and how does it interact with the target? Lightsabers if we go by TPM can melt a roughly fist-sized hole through a blast door in about a second, but they clearly don't radiate even a fraction of that energy to the enviroment or even underwater.

A good example is Mike's 'convert into neutrinos' theory for phasers. Under that mechanism a phaser could actually generate produce huge amounts of power, but with little to no effect on the enviroment or even on the target, becuase the neutrinos wouldn't interact much or at all. A variation of that could explain the various burns and such they cause - maybe different settings cause different degrees of interaction, which may result in cases of severe burning or thermal effects we sometimes see (or even heating rocks, or blasting down those boulders to cover that entrance in one ep of TNG I vaguely recall.)

Which leads to the question: What do we know about blaster bolt that allows us to determine what a hypothetical Terajoule (or even gigajoule - GJ outputs are not exactly trivial as far as enviromental effects either.) output would look like?

Also: One of the interesting things I've noted with Luke Campbell's own research into lasers is that he makes it quite clear that parameters like this matter. I know when on SFConsim he posted his "laser small arms" pictures and stats, he mentioned that his 5-10 kj "pulsed laser train" weapons created ~2 cm holes (that overpenetrates like mad, at that), whereas it might take 40 kj or so to drill a 1 cm hole through a body. Roughly the same effects, but vastly different in terms of energy usage. Mike came to similar conclusions IIRC on his "destruction" page WRT simulating explosives, which is what the Campbell-style "blasters" technically are doing.

[Luke Skywalker]

Along what timeframe? An hour? 3 hours? A day?

Most sources seem to confirm that Base Delta Zero's are done within a few hours, hence the "no survivors" goal and the "matter of hours" claim by the Technical Journal.

Also, which guns of an ISD are involved in such a bombardment

Presumably the heavy guns.

The Wookieepedia says nothing on the time frame. All I'm trying to do is figure out the yield of each gun involved.

Given about 10^26 joules needed to blow the atmosphere off a planet, and even if the operation took a full day, that would be an output of tens of teratons per second for each ISD, assuming 100% efficiency. That's a lot.

[the atom]

Given about 10^26 joules needed to blow the atmosphere off a planet, and even if the operation took a full day, that would be an output of tens of teratons per second for each ISD, assuming 100% efficiency. That's a lot.

According to Mike's calculations that figure is closer to 2E24 J if I read the article right. Converting that to explosive power gives me something like 478.011472276 TT overall. Divvying that up between the three ships gives me 159.337 TT total from each ship. Dividing that up further into their output per second gives me a less impressive figure of 14GT per second.

However I cannot claim to be very good at math and I used some conversion programs along with a bit of division to come to that number, so if anybody wishes to correct me feel free.

[Batman]

Given about 10^26 joules needed to blow the atmosphere off a planet, and even if the operation took a full day, that would be an output of tens of teratons per second for each ISD, assuming 100% efficiency. That's a lot.

According to Mike's calculations that figure is closer to 2E24 J if I read the article right. Converting that to explosive power gives me something like 478.011472276 TT overall. Divvying that up between the three ships gives me 159.337 TT total from each ship. Dividing that up further into their output per second gives me a less impressive figure of 14GT per second.
However I cannot claim to be very good at math and I used some conversion programs along with a bit of division to come to that number, so if anybody wishes to correct me feel free.

Your math seems OK, though I'd ease up on the digits to the right of the decimal point Besides, even for 1E26J that amounts to no more than 92GT per second per ship so I'm not sure where he gets tens of TT per second per ship from.

[Luke Skywalker]

Given about 10^26 joules needed to blow the atmosphere off a planet, and even if the operation took a full day, that would be an output of tens of teratons per second for each ISD, assuming 100% efficiency. That's a lot.

According to Mike's calculations that figure is closer to 2E24 J if I read the article right. Converting that to explosive power gives me something like 478.011472276 TT overall. Divvying that up between the three ships gives me 159.337 TT total from each ship. Dividing that up further into their output per second gives me a less impressive figure of 14GT per second.
However I cannot claim to be very good at math and I used some conversion programs along with a bit of division to come to that number, so if anybody wishes to correct me feel free.

Your math seems OK, though I'd ease up on the digits to the right of the decimal point Besides, even for 1E26J that amounts to no more than 92GT per second per ship so I'm not sure where he gets tens of TT per second per ship from.

I was using a different calculation than him, in case if you didn't notice. He was referring to Wong's calcs, I was referring to Dankayo calcs.

[Batman]

Yes, and you did that wrong anyway. 1E26J at 10TT (absolute minimum for '10s' of TT) per ship per second gives the operation a duration of a whopping 13 minutes. I thought we were talking hours here?
However, I seem to have slipped up somewhere myself-for 1E26J, 3 ships and 1 hour I get slightly over 2TT.

[the atom]

As far as my understanding goes the operation lasted three hours.

[Connor MacLeod]

Yes, and you did that wrong anyway. 1E26J at 10TT (absolute minimum for '10s' of TT) per ship per second gives the operation a duration of a whopping 13 minutes. I thought we were talking hours here?
However, I seem to have slipped up somewhere myself-for 1E26J, 3 ships and 1 hour I get slightly over 2TT.

It won't matter. 3e26 joules (closer to 4e26 joules really) is a dramatically underestimated lower limit for any sort of beam weapon. A nuke at least can use airbursts to 'efficiently' heat the air, but a beam weapon will pass through it and strike the ground. Which means you will only be heating the air indirectly (either by simulating nuclear detonations on the ground, which means you'll have to be vaporizing parts of the ground to do so, or heating it so that energy radiates up and heats the air anyhow.) And this assumes no other matter (like water vapor) pollutes the air, since that will only add to the calc (ejecting vaporized oceans + atmosphere would up the calc to e29 joules, for example, and that still doesn't include inefficiencies.)

The problem is, this is not a precise, unambiguous calc, and it is therefore easily contested. No timeframe, no obvious indications of the nature of the planet, etc. What little we do know suggests it was a fairly major base - it held records and data for Rebel operations in 3 sectors, suggesting it may have been a sector level base or better (less than the main rebel headquarters, like Yavin and Hoth, but still significant.) Bases of that nature, as far as we know, are all on open-air, habitable planets and moons (again Hoth and Yavin) rather than airless asteroids, but "likely" is not "certain", and so it remains contested.

Base Delta Zero, by comparison, is actually far EASIER to argue, even without a timeframe, because we can infer timeframe from maximum operation times in the ICS if nothing else, and even if the capability can be performed to lesser degrees, the fact it encompasses a wide vareity of planet types (from a small colony to Coruscant-like worlds) means that BDZ has to encompass the greater feats as well as the lesser, as well as address the means of bombardment available to a given vessel or fleet of vessels (EG projectiles, beams, missiles, viral weaponry, whatever.)

[Rama]

As far as my understanding goes the operation lasted three hours.

Based on what evidence? After all, you've demonstrated none of your calculations, have not taken into account any of the parameters of the operation in lieu of evidence to the claim, assumed it was a BDZ where no such order is mentioned anywhere, failed to elucidate upon the basic planetary variables that you used to calculate the energy required to cause total global destruction across Dankayo on the scale depicted (diameter, gravity, water content etc.), have yet to specify any time frame sans a number you pulled from your ass and worst of all? You harp on about how a BDZ is intended to destroy everything without limits or holds barred, yet even a fraction of the energy required to evenly crater the surface of a planet (or a minor percentage - less than 0.001% - of the figure you proposed) would be more than sufficient to atomize the Rebel base.

The Rebel base that they intended to pick apart for information after causing a mass extinction event across the rest of the globe, which means that they probably never intended to slag the entire surface, just render life an obsolete concept.

Internal consistency in your own method much?

[the atom]

As far as my understanding goes the operation lasted three hours.

Based on what evidence? After all, you've demonstrated none of your calculations, have not taken into account any of the parameters of the operation in lieu of evidence to the claim, assumed it was a BDZ where no such order is mentioned anywhere, failed to elucidate upon the basic planetary variables that you used to calculate the energy required to cause total global destruction across Dankayo on the scale depicted (diameter, gravity, water content etc.), have yet to specify any time frame sans a number you pulled from your ass and worst of all? You harp on about how a BDZ is intended to destroy everything without limits or holds barred, yet even a fraction of the energy required to evenly crater the surface of a planet (or a minor percentage - less than 0.001% - of the figure you proposed) would be more than sufficient to atomize the Rebel base.

The Rebel base that they intended to pick apart for information after causing a mass extinction event across the rest of the globe, which means that they probably never intended to slag the entire surface, just render life an obsolete concept.

Internal consistency in your own method much?

I was told that the operation took somewhere close to that time. If you know better then let's hear it. I used Dankayo because apparently everybody else seems to describe it as one. For my conversions I basically used Mike Wong's calcs and did a bit of converting and dividing. If you have specific issues with my math then I'm all ears. If it's the original energy calcs then I'm afraid you'll have to take it up with him.

[Rama]

I was told that the operation took somewhere close to that time. If you know better then let's hear it.

We're never told the time frame full stop (and neither were you), making any claims to an otherwise unreliable canon reference immediately questionable in lieu of a typically Weasel-like tact when responding in such a fashion to someone who is demanding evidence. In debating "that's what I was told by a friend. What friend? He's some guy I know and can't reference" isn't a typically accepted response, and is usually seen as a rather maligned attempt to make up whatever shit you want and not have to support, defend or even treat it with considerable objectivity when challenged to do so. There's a reason that "Weasel words" are a legitimate clause for dismissing citations in essays and associated research papers after all.

Although thanks for transparently shifting the burden of proof, I hate it when users try to obtusely foist their own claims onto others.

I used Dankayo because apparently everybody else seems to describe it as one.

A BDZ is an explicit order, one that follows a set of circumstances, not application. Which is why, for example, there are mobile troop divisions equipped to handle the execution of a BDZ order on a local scale, presumably with heavy weapons and under the express order to fuck shit up to the best of their abilities.

Of course not every orbital bombardment is a BDZ, and thus of course not every BDZ involves the use of orbital or starship weapons (big bombs such as the Clone Wars era Planet Killer or Barradium Fission warhead seem to suffice).

For my conversions I basically used Mike Wong's calcs and did a bit of converting and dividing. If you have specific issues with my math then I'm all ears. If it's the original energy calcs then I'm afraid you'll have to take it up with him.

For me to have any problem with your mathematical analysis, you would have to present one in the first place. You haven't, instead you've just presented a figure without once taking into account or comprehending the exact same parameters he took into account when scaling the required level of destruction to achieve a desired goal on a precisely sterile testbed. Of course in lieu of his established parameters he even states that he merely uses a his original figure as a baseline, and that his considered energy proponent would actually (because planets are not sterile laboratories) be far higher, citing figures as high as 5 PT, 23 PT and even as high as 239 PT for time averaged operations intended to achieve direct objectives.

So again we have the following problems:

- Dankayo wasn't explicitly a BDZ, just a heavy bombardment as far as we can tell.
- Their objective wasn't to destroy the base given that they sent Troopers to the surface to pick through the intel from the base (ST armor is vacuum sealed BTW), and even if Dankayo was the size of our moon, evenly cratering the surface would more than do the job of pulverizing the base itself back to component atoms.
- We have no idea how long the bombardment lasted, the surface gravity of Dankayo, the diameter etc.

[the atom]

We're never told the time frame full stop (and neither were you), making any claims to an otherwise unreliable canon reference immediately questionable in lieu of a typically Weasel-like tact when responding in such a fashion to someone who is demanding evidence. In debating "that's what I was told by a friend. What friend? He's some guy I know and can't reference" isn't a typically accepted response, and is usually seen as a rather maligned attempt to make up whatever shit you want and not have to support, defend or even treat it with considerable objectivity when challenged to do so. There's a reason that "Weasel words" are a legitimate clause for dismissing citations in essays and associated research papers after all.

Ah I see where I goofed now. I thought I had read it from General Schatten on SB, but on further inspection it seems I garbled his claim of " in under an hour three ISDs have evenly cratered the surface of an entire planet and hit it hard enough to vaporize the ocean and blast it's atmosphere off." Dissmiss my figures then.

A BDZ is an explicit order, one that follows a set of circumstances, not application. Which is why, for example, there are mobile troop divisions equipped to handle the execution of a BDZ order on a local scale, presumably with heavy weapons and under the express order to fuck shit up to the best of their abilities.

Of course not every orbital bombardment is a BDZ, and thus of course not every BDZ involves the use of orbital or starship weapons (big bombs such as the Clone Wars era Planet Killer or Barradium Fission warhead seem to suffice).

Ah well that clears things up immensely. I had been lead to believe a BDZ was another word for exterminautus.

For me to have any problem with your mathematical analysis, you would have to present one in the first place. You haven't, instead you've just presented a figure without once taking into account or comprehending the exact same parameters he took into account when scaling the required level of destruction to achieve a desired goal on a precisely sterile testbed. Of course in lieu of his established parameters he even states that he merely uses a his original figure as a baseline, and that his considered energy proponent would actually (because planets are not sterile laboratories) be far higher, citing figures as high as 5 PT, 23 PT and even as high as 239 PT for time averaged operations intended to achieve direct objectives.

True. I just converted what I saw into explosive energy and divided that up among the ships and into a certain time-frame. However seeing as I was wrong about the length of time the operation took and that Dankayo was not, in fact, a BDZ, my conversions don't work.

So again we have the following problems:

- Dankayo wasn't explicitly a BDZ, just a heavy bombardment as far as we can tell.
- Their objective wasn't to destroy the base given that they sent Troopers to the surface to pick through the intel from the base (ST armor is vacuum sealed BTW), and even if Dankayo was the size of our moon, evenly cratering the surface would more than do the job of pulverizing the base itself back to component atoms.
- We have no idea how long the bombardment lasted, the surface gravity of Dankayo, the diameter etc.

Do we ever actually get to see a crust-melting planet scale BDZ? Out of all his citations Dankayo was the only complete incident mentioned so I just went with that. Everything else seemed based on off-hand quotes and assumptions really, which bothered me quite a bit.

[Rama]

Do we ever actually get to see a crust-melting planet scale BDZ? Out of all his citations Dankayo was the only complete incident mentioned so I just went with that. Everything else seemed based on off-hand quotes and assumptions really, which bothered me quite a bit.

A BDZ doesn't require literal crust melting since the most egregious of all Imperial interpretations was the elimination of all life, which can be accomplished with the reduction of the atmosphere and atomization of the soil and water content (4E27) versus the sheer energy required to vitrify the contents of the crust (5E28). It may seem a trivial comparison, but a BDZ already goes as far as to render the planet unusable to almost all complex life for decades (before terraforming can take place) and requires an extensive devotion of resources anyway (hypermatter isn't free), whereas further vitrification seems to be an act of callousness used only when absolutely necessary to send a message that the planet is to never be used again - even after wiping away the surface population.

General Grievous carried out one such attack on the world of Humbarine, in which his fleet slagged the world down to the crust in an hour long bombardment - which makes sense in lieu of his despicable character. The Republic only bombarded entrenched armies in order to dislodge them (out of practicality), and the Imperials often tried to cover up their planetary attacks as Pirate or mercenary retaliations (Palpatine wanted to retain a positive public image), but Grievous was a monster who wanted to literally burn off worlds for the sake of doing so.

[Connor MacLeod]

The problem there is it actually says tiny base!

'tiny' relative to what?

What I think Danakyo is is an asteroid like base, similar to the thing we see at the end of Revenge of the Sith, though surely a lot bigger than that specifically. Maybe something the size of Charon; 1000km across or less.

Except that if they did that, they'd call it an asteroid or a moon or something else. I don't remember all the detials of Scavenger hunt, but I do remember them calling it a planet.

The base has a tiny surface presence and a much larger underground complex, hidden from plain view. It has an artificial environment - gravity, atmosphere, etc. The asteroid itself doesn't have an atmosphere.

Yes, that's possible, but we really can't be sure either way. What we know argues that it probably isn't a small asteroid base, but that doesn't neccesarily rule out other things (planet's may not have atmospheres for whatever reason, for example.) and therein lies the problem.

[Connor MacLeod]

As far as the whole crust melting thing goes - once you get beyond a certain point (blowing off atmospheres, boiling/vaporizing oceans, etc) it is probably a given that at least the uppermost layers of the crust/surface will start melting ot some degree. It might only be marginal "glassing" from brief bursts of radiation, or it may be from other factors - inefficiency alone is likely to guarnatee a fair bit of energy gets dumped into the crust itself in some form or another, even if it doesn't melt.

This of course depends entirely on the kinds of weapons you employ as well. BDZ via seismic charges, for example, are unlikely to do much if any melting.

[Luke Skywalker]

Sorry to bump, but I've been on vacation for a while, and because I have such a life, I read a decent amount of Star Wars novels. Here are more contradictions of the high end SW calcs that I myself believe in.

"The Salvation rocked as its powerful lasers unleashed their deadly energies onto the planet below. ... The turbolaser missed, but someone else didn't. The ground-based lasers exploded into a million pieces, destroyed by unknown fire.

...The turbolasers fired again. Targets on the ground burst into brilliant balls of fire."

Later

The Solidarity shone like a miniature star in the reflected light of Athega system's blazing primary. ... There the Solidarity and its small flotilla of attendant vessels were simultaneously hidden from any passing gaze and shielded from the blazing, hull-stripping light of the deadly sun.

Later

Even from orbit, Starkiller could see evidence of recent military activity, particularly a deep black scorch mark near one of the planet's famous hanging cities. Some kind of heavy munitions had been in play, although probably not nuclear."

-Star Wars the Force Unleashed 2


How could megaton-gigaton level weaponry possibly miss?

A star millions of kilometers away and easily peal away the shields of a SW freighter, which is rather unimpressive no matter how blazing hot the star is.
Apparently, nuclear weapons are "heavy munitions" in Star Wars




"This was for the benefit of two full companies of stormtrooper heavy infantry who were holding a pair of re-doubts to either side of a blast door that looked like it could withstand a good-sized fusion bomb.


Later...

"Have you seen the armor on this place? It'll take you hours to pound through! [Speaking to Lando on a Mon Cal starship]

The Lancer, the Paleo, and the Unsung opened up with synchronized fire, blasting broadsides in precise sequence to maintain a near-constant rain of supercharged plasma on the ion-turbo cannons and the gravity gun."

-Star Wars Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor


It would take hours for the "considerable firepower" of Remember Alderaan to pound through a blast door that could take a decent sized fusion bomb.

The rest of the text and plenty other isn't exactly explicitly contradicting of high firepower, but you'd imagine that the turbolasers opening fire and the giant fireballs that would probably turn the ground below them to slag and create massive earthquakes were actually described as such instead of as "plasma storm".

Ironically, Shadows of Mindor also contains high end implications (such as X wings moving at near relativistic speeds).

[Havok]

... to rendezvous at Dankayo and reduce the tiny base to molten slag. Even before the last of its atmosphere drifted away,
before the dense clouds of atomized topsoil could begin to settle, Imperial transports Elusive and Timely, as well as a
complement of TIE fighters, moved in to perform "mop-up" operations and a through search of Dankayo's now evenly-cratered surface.

Uh... so the TIEs have to perform mop up duty on craters? Yeah, that passage indicates that it isn't quite as powerful and all encompassing as people claim.

[Havok]

And quite frankly I declare BDZ's non canon as they violate the most sacred rule of Star Wars canon, which is contradicting the movies.

If Star Destroyers can fly around willy nilly vaporizing planetary mantles, then who gives a fuck about a Death Star?

Oh yeah, I know planetary shields blah blah blah. That's great but as we know you can hyperspace jump right into orbit (ROTS) or sneak up (TESB) (AOTC) on a planet with huge fucking Star Destroyers, and that makes them seem pretty fucking useless.