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Patroklos wrote:I'd image some sort of planetary shield could be used for this. I vaguely remember the Imperial Sourcebook talking about some sort of satellite network that blocks all light to a planet as sort of a soft BDZ. I don't have the source readily available right now.

Darth Tanner wrote: If the surface of a planet was artificially made molten through bombardment how long would it take for that to naturally cool down regardless of artificial measures taken to cool it? The heat would be radiating away rapidly into the core/atmosphere/vacuum would it not?

Eternal_Freedom wrote:

Darth Tanner wrote: If the surface of a planet was artificially made molten through bombardment how long would it take for that to naturally cool down regardless of artificial measures taken to cool it? The heat would be radiating away rapidly into the core/atmosphere/vacuum would it not?

Well the heat won't be being transferred to the core, since that will almost certainly still be hotter than the molten surface. As for the atmosphere, I would be amazed if there is much left of it after a full BDZ, and even then it's going to be so hot that it can't absorb much heat from the molten crust either. So basically you're left with heat being radiated out into space. Which could take a very long time indeed.

Eternal_Freedom wrote:That's certainly something you could do, but frankly it'd be easier to find an arid world like Mars and terraform that than try and fix a full-BDZ corpse of a planet.

Patroklos wrote:When it comes to the planet cooling you need to remember that you are not just dealing with the energy dumped into the crust but also all the energy welling up from the mantle and core. We are talking geologic age to repair such damage.

RogueIce wrote:

Patroklos wrote:I'd image some sort of planetary shield could be used for this. I vaguely remember the Imperial Sourcebook talking about some sort of satellite network that blocks all light to a planet as sort of a soft BDZ. I don't have the source readily available right now.

That was from The Courtship of Princess Leia and I think intended to be a terror weapon or whatever.

Oh and since they can, would it be at all effective to just dump a whole planet's worth of ocean on it?

They can do this? I know transport costs in the SW galaxy are ridiculously cheap, but even filling an ISD to the brim wouldn't be much more than a decent sized lakes worth of H2O.... who'd have the TIME for that many sorties?

Borgholio wrote:There was something in the EU about how to punish a rebellious world, the Empire used massive freighters to simply spacelift out all the surface water of a world and left it bone dry.

from the main site wrote:More evidence of the massive scale of Imperial transport fleets can be seen in the fate of Gholondreine-b. On pg. 167[of the novel Slave Ship], it states:

"The oceans of Gholondreine-b had been sucked down to the last molecule of saline liquid, then transported by a fleet of massive Imperial freighters to an orbital catalysis plant near Coruscant. Economy hadn't been the motivating factor- it was more expensive to ship that amount of water than to synthesize it- but punishment had been."

Note the ramifications: a single transport fleet carried the entire planetary oceans of Gholondreine-b away. If Gholondreine-b was similar to Earth, then the mass of its oceans would have been roughly 1.4E21 kilograms. Even if the transport fleet was composed of a million ships, each vessel would have had to carry 1.4 trillion tons of water! The density of water is roughly 1 metric ton/m³, so each ship would have needed at least 1.4 trillion cubic metres of cargo space. If the transports were cylindrical in shape, they had to be 5 km in diameter and at least 71 km long to have that much internal space! Even if each ship took 1000 round trips, the operation would have required a million-ship fleet of vessels measuring 1km in diameter and 1.8km long. This incident shows again how the Imperial transport fleet is superior to anything the Federation could possibly field.

Borgholio wrote:

Patroklos wrote:When it comes to the planet cooling you need to remember that you are not just dealing with the energy dumped into the crust but also all the energy welling up from the mantle and core. We are talking geologic age to repair such damage.

Only if it's molten straight through. As I always understood it, BDZ melts the top several meters of the planet's surface but that's it. It won't take *that* long to cool if most of the crust is actually still intact.

Patroklos wrote:There is the actual melting but also the impact of the turbo lasers on top of fault lines, volcanoes, etc. shoot a terra ton weapon at Yellowstone and tell me there won't be follow on consequences.

Solauren wrote:Since a BDZ also boils of the atmosphere and oceans on a planet, it literally leaves a ball of magma floating in space.

However, assuming it's gravity and magnetic field hasn't been wrecked, it would still be doable.

I'd say
#1 - Orbital Nightcloak over the planet for an extended period to cool it
#2 - Soft land a few very large comets to reintroduce water, and at the same time soak up excess heat

That should cool a planet down enough to be Terraformed.

That does leave, however, the problem of possible sever fault line damage and the like. There is also the possibility that the upper crust was melted enough that the world no longer has fault lines, and is a smooth sphere.

Assuming groundquakes and volcanos are not a problem, you'd have to reintroduce an atmosphere, and possibly dig out new oceans and lakes and the like. That implies hundreds of millions of labor droids and machines to do this.

Then you have the issue of building a planetary level ecosystem, and making it stable.

FaxModem1 wrote:Remind me, in KOTOR II, wasn't the terraforming of Telos almost bankrupting the Republic at the time, as Czerka was lobbying heavily for a more profitable method of terraforming and also exploiting the resources of the planet, while the Ithorians wanted a more green policy of just making the planet as beautiful and natural as possible? Or was it just because their economy and government were nearly ruined due to Sith war/Jedi Civil war?

Batman wrote:What severe damage? Those planets were decimated by bioweapons.