Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Battles (Spoilers)

[Srelex]

I also think that there is an official game--in Japan at least.

[Ford Prefect]

Well we know it has a maximum range after which the beam somehow peters out. And keep in mind its power output is only in excess of 740TW according to the show (that being the output of the Vulture Claw, which is said to be comparable).

Dude, 740TW is shitloads. Maybe you've just been debating with Star Wars for too long, But a beam weapon in excess of a 180 kilotons is ridiculous.

[Vympel]

It's really not. We can do over 100 times that with nuclear warheads. For a doomsday weapon that can wipe out fleets, its a bit weak tea, and it makes you wonder just what fusion missiles they're throwing around in battle (remember in My Conquest how we see an Imperial gunship drop a missile on an Alliance ship, there's a big blinding flash and the entire thing is destroyed)

I'd expect kiloton-scale yields for the ship's beam weapons, not Iserlohn's massive main gun. That should really be in the megaton range.

Of course, it is 740TW not 740TJ, so it might be interesting to see how long the ships last in the 'flash' of the beam before they're destroyed to judge their durability.

[takemeout_totheblack]

I'd say the ships are pretty darn tough, both shields and hulls. During one of the many battles, they fight for extended periods of time no less than 1000-2000 clicks above a particularly violent star, Amlitzer I think it was. Anyway, ships that large with that much surface area should be soaking up hundreds of kilotons of solar energy easy, not to mention they 'ride' a mini solar flare up and through enemy formations!
Maybe the Thor Hammer and Vulture's Claw have a sort of trick to them, some thing that bypasses their shields, which have been shown to be unable to block massive or at least solid objects. Perhaps their shields are unable to block the X-Ray spectrum, thus making a massively scaled up X-Ray laser a potent weapon even at relatively low outputs?

[Vympel]

Yeah, Amlitzer needs to be looked at closer, I keep forgetting about it.

Updated Seventh Battle of Iserlohn a bit, I had forgotten that Yang was promoted to Vice Admiral (only stated in Episode 10, that's why I forgot).

If anyone can assist with names, please do. Of the three Imperial chiefs, only Muckenburger's name is known (the chiefs may have been credited, but whoever did the fansub just put two ??? ??? in both the character and actor fields). Further I don't remember Seeckt's aide (the only other competent person on the Imperial side in that battle, apart from Oberstein) ever being named. He could've stopped the entire plan if he had just shot Seeckt - personally I found it unbelievable that they would still obey his orders when a hostage.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

I seem to recall the ships taking between half a second and somewhat over a second to be destroyed by Thor's Hammer, so that puts it around 3*1014 and 1015J. That is within an order of magnitude of a quick calculation I performed of how much energy it would take to destroy those thousand ships*, at least just the energy that goes into the ships themselves. While it looks as if the energy isn't uniformly distributed away from the beam (Iserlohn never shows any effects from firing), this also would assume that within the target fleet no energy is wasted radiating into space or into ships too far away to be destroyed. That doesn't seem to be the case, as Seeckt's ship is shaken by the first shot but sustains no real damage. Thus if we want to use the 740TW figure, one fix is to say the power figure is not the beam itself, but whatever powers the beam, which can store up energy and fire more powerful shots.

*Assume the average ship is destroyed by having one side of it heated up until glowing white, causing secondary explosions to destroy the ship, which is consistent with the depictions I glanced through. I'm unsure of how large the average ship is but I recall the Brunhild was slightly over a kilometer in length and it's a big battleship, so let's say the average ship is 300m long and 50m tall, and that the ship is heated to a depth of 10cm. This gives 12*109kg of iron over 1000 ships, which takes about 300TJ total to heat to a white glow.

[takemeout_totheblack]

I think some models made for this series put the length of the Brunhild at 1.1 k long while the average cruiser, the ship class that constitutes the bulk of each fleet, is 600-800 meters long. Also, extrapolating from damage we've seen (chunks torn away etc) the armor edge is clearly visible on 600-800 meter long ships from a distance, implying thickness greater than 10cm, 30-40cm is probably closer to accurate. Also, probably not iron.

My own theory:
Although it's called an 'X-Ray Laser' the Thor Hammer and Vultures Claw are visible in a vacuum, implying a beam weapon similar to ship based weaponry. Perhaps this is similar to Star Wars in that something referred to as a laser is in fact called such due to the laser's part in the weapon's mechanism. Zephyr Particles seem to be capable of producing considerably more energy than is what put into them, making them a logical candidate for the 'oomph' part of the weapon. This would also explain why ships powered by what appears to be fusion explode in such a spectacular manner!

[Commander 598]

Based on this:



I would guess that LoGH "lasers" might not be lasers.

[Ford Prefect]

It's really not.

It really is. Saying 'oh we can do more with bombs' is totally irrelevant, a beam weapon with a triple digit kiloton output per second is ridiculous. It's not a millisecond pulse, it's a multi-second sustained beam.

[Bakustra]

It's really not.

It really is. Saying 'oh we can do more with bombs' is totally irrelevant, a beam weapon with a triple digit kiloton output per second is ridiculous. It's not a millisecond pulse, it's a multi-second sustained beam.

How long does Thor's Hammer fire for? If it's multi-second, that's likely to give it an overall energy output of a megaton. In the case of nuclear warheads, how close do they detonate, usually? Because good ol' inverse-square law allows their effective input into the ship to drop off severely, along with geometric problems. In other words, there isn't necessarily a huge discrepancy here.

[Simon_Jester]

Ford, I may be missing something here. Could you explain in a bit more depth why, in what strikes me as a soft-SF* setting, beam weapons with sustained firepower in the high kiloton/second range are ridiculous?

*Soft but not squishy; there would appear to be a fair degree of internal consistency in the physics and so on, but there are definitely aspects of the setting's technology that don't correspond to anything we know of or can reasonably project existing in the future.

[Vympel]

Made some corrections - I just found out Lobos' first name (its Lazzll) whilst doing the write up for the Battle of Amlitzer (I'm not sure what else to call the mighty ass-rape of Episode 15, since it was fought all over the place - I'm thinking of another title) and also that he was a High Admiral, not a Fleet Admiral.

[Ford Prefect]

How long does Thor's Hammer fire for?

I checked out the scene where Yang uses it on the Iserlohn defence fleet, and the beam fires for about nine or ten seconds.

Ford, I may be missing something here.

You may be missing how 740TW is not a small number.

[Vympel]

I checked out the scene where Yang uses it on the Iserlohn defence fleet, and the beam fires for about nine or ten seconds.

It's more accurate to look at how long the beam washes over the ships in its path. I counted about 6 seconds, but the ships start to disintegrate well before the end.

[Bakustra]

How long does Thor's Hammer fire for?

I checked out the scene where Yang uses it on the Iserlohn defence fleet, and the beam fires for about nine or ten seconds.

That'd be a 2-megaton total for the beam's energy content. Now, a second question: is there any evidence for their nuclear weapons being megaton-range? Because if they use pure fusion weapons, they don't have the lower limit that a modern thermonuclear weapon does. Alternately, they could be pure fission weapons and relatively small as well.

[Simon_Jester]

Ah, are you guys calculating the energy expended on the ships, or on the beam as a whole? It seems to me that the sensible measure of the Thor's Hammer beam is going to be something like "kilotons per square meter per second." A LOT of energy is being wasted between the ships, though it's possible that we're seeing some kind of phased-array system where a large number of beams are directed against the ships, with the radiance filling the space around them being much less energetic per unit area- sidescatter, if you will.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

Ah, are you guys calculating the energy expended on the ships, or on the beam as a whole? It seems to me that the sensible measure of the Thor's Hammer beam is going to be something like "kilotons per square meter per second." A LOT of energy is being wasted between the ships, though it's possible that we're seeing some kind of phased-array system where a large number of beams are directed against the ships, with the radiance filling the space around them being much less energetic per unit area- sidescatter, if you will.

I was calculating just the energy on the ships, myself. I have no idea how far apart from the center of the beam the outermost destroyed ships are and so can't calculate it as a radiating beam, and it doesn't appear to be a uniformly volumetric effect, so I went with the only sort of calculation I could think of. While I'm not sure how useful it is (though your idea makes sound at least possible now), I was rather surprised how well it worked with the given figure so I shared it.

One aspect that might help figure it out is to compare the effects against a target that takes the entire beam. Thor's Hammer causes significantly, but not incomparably, more damage to a fortress than, say, a single bombardment volley from a fleet. But it also does significantly more damage to a fleet than that single volley would, too. I don't have any sort of calculation to back it up, but it would seem that Thor's Hammer doesn't waste the vast majority of its energy into space. Maybe much of it, but not 99+%, or else fortress weapons should be so powerful that the fleet attack against Iserlohn should have been irrelevant either way.

[Simon_Jester]

What does a bombardment volley look like? Same visual, or massed targeted fire from individual beams?

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

What does a bombardment volley look like? Same visual, or massed targeted fire from individual beams?

When an entire fleet targets a single point it just looks the same as when they target a distributed fleet: like a large number of individual beams*. But Thor's Hammer doesn't really look like the typical ship-based beam weapons anyway. They have the beams shoot straight from the emitters while Thor's Hammer has glowing spiral lines converge onto an empty spot from which the visible beam shoots out, all accompanied by electrical-looking discharges.

*Actually, I may be misremembering this entirely, but at one point in the show I think a fleet may combine its shots into one larger beam. Can anyone confirm this?

[KlavoHunter]

What are you using to rip these stills from the video, anyways? I want to do a bit of that myself...

[Ford Prefect]

I'm fairly certain that the ship mounted weapons are supposed to be neutron-based particle beams, while Vulture Claw (and by extension Thor Hammer) are explicitly X-ray lasers. We can say 'well, they don't really act much like X-ray lasers', but I'm willing to accept dramatic effect.

[Vympel]

What are you using to rip these stills from the video, anyways? I want to do a bit of that myself...

Media Player Classic. So long as you change the renderer to make sure image saving is enabled (it clearly indicates which ones are capable of it) you're golden. Just hit Alt+I. It may take the previous frame you saw as opposed to the one the screen's actually paused on, so you need to check that, if it's critical you get one single frame.

I used to use VLC, but I've gone sour on it - it's frame by frame button is unreliable (it stops working after a while) and with many files the image turns to pixellated soupy shit for no discernible reason at the drop of a hat.

Before that, I used to use PowerDVD's function, which was good, but its frame by frame/ capture thing never worked right either. I'd have to push next frame twice to advance the damn image.

[Uraniun235]

I'm fairly certain that the ship mounted weapons are supposed to be neutron-based particle beams, while Vulture Claw (and by extension Thor Hammer) are explicitly X-ray lasers. We can say 'well, they don't really act much like X-ray lasers', but I'm willing to accept dramatic effect.

I'd wonder how much of the [TECH] is lifted straight out of the original novels as well.

*Actually, I may be misremembering this entirely, but at one point in the show I think a fleet may combine its shots into one larger beam. Can anyone confirm this?

I can.
Spoiler

In the episode where they destroy Geiersburg Fortress, Yang orders his entire fleet to focus fire on one of the conventional thrusters mounted on Geiersburg; the beams converge into one. This also happens in a later episode, when Yang is fighting... shit, I can't remember the guy's name, we'll call him Admiral Stalin... and when Admiral Stalin clusters his ships in a tight formation to effect a breakthrough, Yang counters by concentrating fleet fire along the axis of the enemy formation.

I think we also see smaller examples of focused fire (like maybe several ships in one) in the battle preceding Geiersburg's destruction, where Kempf tries for a corridor breakthrough (which struck me as incredibly foolhardy).

[Simon_Jester]

Well, given that each of these ships has dozens of beam emitters and that the fleets can contain hundreds or thousands of them, if they're all concentrated on a point target they would look like a single massive beam tens or hundreds of times the diameter of any single beam in the barrage.

That much stands to reason.

[Uraniun235]

I've always thought this was an interesting sequence: the Patroklos' guns burning their way into an Imperial battleship's nose. I don't think the Overture To A New War remake-movie's version of Wallenstein's demise was quite as spectacular.