Resisting the superlaser.

[Omeganian]

A question - what ships, structures, and other things in SF are likely to survive a direct hit from the Death Star's superlaser? Non corporeal aside.

[Simon_Jester]

Stars should survive in recognizable form, but the energy release might well be large enough to trigger extremely impressive stellar activity: wouldn't be surprised to see firing the DS-I superlaser into a star trigger a nova-like event, for instance.

But that's not what you meant. Off the top of my head, though, I have a hard time coming up with other examples. What it really boils down to is "what settings throw around drastically higher energy levels than Star Wars?" And the answer to that is best left to others.

[mappster]

The Beast Planet, perhaps?



(Its from the rather magnificent Shadow Raiders/War Planets).

Its most significant feats are resting comfortably in a star for an indefinite period, having a planet explode in its maw, and having an artifically-accelerated fire-world crash straight into it at sublight speeds. None of these noticably damaged or even slowed its course. Do any of these compare to the energy that comes from the DS superlaser?

If anyone wants to analyse the scenes, Veoh.com has them to watch (episodes Ragnarok Pt 2; This is the way the world ends; and Timebomb).

[Zaune]

Unicron? At the very least, it wouldn't be guaranteed to score a first-shot kill given his/its sheer mass, unless they scored a lucky hit on some vital area.

And on a related note, potentially useful as an active defence mechanism against it are the various artificial wormhole-based "hyperspace gates" that some settings use for FTL travel.

[Crossroads Inc.]

This thread is goign to get very silly very fast I feel...

The DS Energy calcs are friggen 'Ginormous'. A planet covered in plaentary shields was not enough to push back a single shot. I don't know if even Culture ships can shurg of the direct energy from a shot from the DS. I mean the DS would get owned by such ships, but resisting the blast?

The Beast Planet may come close, but it is also a cartoon. Don't get me wrong I loved the show, but the Beast Planet resisting the things that hit it made my brain hurt.

[Imperial528]

A dyson sphere might, but only by the virtue that the beam would go right through it rather than spreading. That is, of course, assuming that the DS superlaser will just go right through instead of spreading and making a massive hole in the thing.

In Homeworld (Both 1&2), there are some Progenitor ships that might stand a chance, but just by value of their sheer size (the wrecks of these things can been seen as huge objects from the vast distances (read: distance from here to the moon at max) the individual pieces spread over after the ships were somehow destroyed over time) However, this is just speculation, so unless they make a HW3 that somehow features these giants, I don't think there's any way to quantify this.

Other than the above, I can't think of anything with an even remote chance of resisting a hit, let alone surviving.

[DaveJB]

There might be an example from the Star Wars canon itself - the Sun Crusher, which survived a blast from the Death Star Prototype with relatively minor damage. The problem is, the Essential Guide gives two inconsistent energy estimates - one that states that the DSP has a third of the DS1's superlaser power (meaning about 3E37J), and another that says the largest celestial body it can destroy is one the size of Earth's moon (which would be around 1E29J, and is backed up somewhat by the DSP's destruction of Kessel's moon).

If the 3E37J estimate is correct, then the Sun Crusher probably could survive a blast from the DS1 (albeit with severe damage, and it probably wouldn't survive a second blast). If the 1E29J figure is the correct one however, there's no way in hell the Sun Crusher would survive the massively more powerful blast from the full-fledged DS1.

[Simon_Jester]

Hmm. Speaking for myself, I would rate weapon systems that can reliably evade the Death Star's fire and score a kill on it without any "small thermal exhaust port" tricks as belonging in this thread too. At which point there are more options. A Culture ship might or might not be tough enough to shrug off planet-dispersing energy levels, but if it can confidently dodge the shot and lay down an equivalent barrage in its own right, killing the Death Star, it might as well be that tough.

[Dahak]

A Xeelee Nightfighter might do. One is seen to survive a flare of a magnetar at blank range without any physical damage.

[Sriad]

Larry Niven's Ringworld would survive intact, albeit with another "Fist of God" type cataclysm.

A number of ships (including Culture; 4D weapon deployment and countermeasures are fundamentally important ship to ship tactics) could successfully defend themselves with wormholes, but that doesn't exactly count as a "Direct hit".

Xeelee ships would survive structurally, but there's a decent chance they'd go brain-dead. I don't remember the particulars of that neutron star-quake they used to knock out a Nightfighter in Exultant, but they're extremely high energy events and the materials used in some Xeelee construction is explicitly indestructible, made by hacking physics.

Unicron?

Depends how big you figure he is. Transformers is notoriously bad at scaling and he's probably the worst case. He could range from roughly the size of Saturn (eating full planets, as is depicted in some comics) to a couple dozen miles tall, scaling from spaceships and individual Transformers.

If you go with the high end he'd likely survive anything except a headshot; at the low end his atoms wouldn't even stick to each other.

[Zaune]

Hmm. Speaking for myself, I would rate weapon systems that can reliably evade the Death Star's fire and score a kill on it without any "small thermal exhaust port" tricks as belonging in this thread too. At which point there are more options. A Culture ship might or might not be tough enough to shrug off planet-dispersing energy levels, but if it can confidently dodge the shot and lay down an equivalent barrage in its own right, killing the Death Star, it might as well be that tough.

In that case, I'll throw in some Homeworld examples. (Hey, now there's a crossover idea...) The Sajuuk's main gun or the Siege Cannon from Cataclysm can knock out a destroyer in a single shot, though achieving this with the latter requires a lot of precision and plenty of luck, so a direct hit on the superlaser aperture from either of those is almost certainly a mission-kill at minimum. They also have the ability to make extremely precise hyperspace jumps, enough that they could probably use it to get into and out of range without taking too many hits.

Depends how big you figure he is. Transformers is notoriously bad at scaling and he's probably the worst case. He could range from roughly the size of Saturn (eating full planets, as is depicted in some comics) to a couple dozen miles tall, scaling from spaceships and individual Transformers.

If you go with the high end he'd likely survive anything except a headshot; at the low end his atoms wouldn't even stick to each other.

I was thinking of his debut appearance (I think) in Transformers: The Movie. And does he actually keep his brain there, then? I always wondered about that.

[Sriad]

Depends how big you figure he is. Transformers is notoriously bad at scaling and he's probably the worst case. He could range from roughly the size of Saturn (eating full planets, as is depicted in some comics) to a couple dozen miles tall, scaling from spaceships and individual Transformers.

If you go with the high end he'd likely survive anything except a headshot; at the low end his atoms wouldn't even stick to each other.

I was thinking of his debut appearance (I think) in Transformers: The Movie. And does he actually keep his brain there, then? I always wondered about that.

Since we saw in Ultimate Doom that Cybertron is in the same order of magnitude as the Earth's moon, size-wise, Movie Unicron is limited to a diameter somewhere in the mid single digit thousands of km. Lithone and Cybertron's moons are fairly small.

(with a margin of error of several thousand percent, like I mentioned before. )

His brain (or maybe ghost -- there are a surprising number of ghosts in Transformers) survives his body's destruction; in several episodes of season three (and a plot arc in Transformers UK) he plots to get new eyes, attach himself to various objects to convert into new bodies, etc.

[Zaune]

Not having been a particular fan of the franchise even when I was in the target demographic, I yield to your greater knowledge on this subject.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Hmm. Speaking for myself, I would rate weapon systems that can reliably evade the Death Star's fire and score a kill on it without any "small thermal exhaust port" tricks as belonging in this thread too. At which point there are more options. A Culture ship might or might not be tough enough to shrug off planet-dispersing energy levels, but if it can confidently dodge the shot and lay down an equivalent barrage in its own right, killing the Death Star, it might as well be that tough.

I suppose the Shellworlds from Matter could probably survive a DS superlaser, albeit with damage. Not really enough information available to calculate but we know that they require a large amount of antimatter annihilated near to the core in order to destroy them, so they should be considerably more resistive to external threats. The fact that the Iln could not destroy them easily despite almost certainly possessing firepower comparable to the Culture also tells something about their durability.

[Lord of the Abyss]

A Known Space vessel protected by a stasis field, or a Marooned In Real Time ship protected by a bobble should survive easily. Not even a superlaser can harm something in a field where time is stopped.

There's a ship in a short story set in Sabrehagen's Berserker universe that can probably survive. It was protected by a field that was the result of a failed attempt to develop an FTL drive. According to the equations it diverts anything entering it "at right angles to the speed of light"; no one knows what that means, but they do know that nothing that goes in is ever seen again. The only exception being FTL projectiles, but the superlaser isn't either.

[B5B7]

One should not automatically assume incorporeal beings would survive. These usually have some capability to interact with real universe, so possibly a massive disruption in the physical universe could also affect them.

A ship with a puppeteer General Hull might be able to resist - definitely if it has its stasis field on.
The Excession from the Cultureverse would be immune.

[Parallax]

It'd be debatable whether or not a fully functioning TARDIS might survive a direct hit.

[Chaotic Neutral]

I suppose the Shellworlds from Matter could probably survive a DS superlaser, albeit with damage. Not really enough information available to calculate but we know that they require a large amount of antimatter annihilated near to the core in order to destroy them, so they should be considerably more resistive to external threats. The fact that the Iln could not destroy them easily despite almost certainly possessing firepower comparable to the Culture also tells something about their durability.

For the record, the DS laser has more power in the beam than an entire moon sized mass of antimatter blowing up at once.

[adam_grif]

Anything that can phase in and out of existence or whose shields work in non-conventional (for SF anyway) ways should be able to "survive a blast", albeit by "cheating". Abyss already mentioned a few such things with stasis fields et al. I'm not sure if it exists, but if a techbase can warp spacetime they should in theory be able to build "shields" that deflect what would otherwise be direct hits away from them by changing local spacetime geometry.

[Chaotic Neutral]

Anything that can phase in and out of existence or whose shields work in non-conventional (for SF anyway) ways should be able to "survive a blast", albeit by "cheating". Abyss already mentioned a few such things with stasis fields et al. I'm not sure if it exists, but if a techbase can warp spacetime they should in theory be able to build "shields" that deflect what would otherwise be direct hits away from them by changing local spacetime geometry.

Does "avoiding" the blast count as survival?

[Zaune]

Does "avoiding" the blast count as survival?

I would assume so, unless we're going to eliminate any ship that can move faster than the Death Star can reasonably traverse the superlaser.

[Xon]

Xeelee ships would survive structurally, but there's a decent chance they'd go brain-dead. I don't remember the particulars of that neutron star-quake they used to knock out a Nightfighter in Exultant, but they're extremely high energy events and the materials used in some Xeelee construction is explicitly indestructible, made by hacking physics.

The neutron star-quake disabled the Xeelee Nightfighter because the intense magnetic field caused space-time to start crystallizing. The space-time flaw "wings" which provide the sub-lightspeed drive gave out under those conditions, and the humans it was chasing physically captured it before the Nightfighter could regenerate from the event.

Said Nightfighter also lasts 3-5 million years after that when another human expedition digs it up from the previous humans stored it.

[CSJM]

If we allow the downright ridiculous, Gurren Lagann iterations at least from Super-Galaxy size should be able to survive. The Super-Galaxy Dai-Gurren might be able to shrug it off as well.

[Simon_Jester]

One should not automatically assume incorporeal beings would survive. These usually have some capability to interact with real universe, so possibly a massive disruption in the physical universe could also affect them.

A ship with a puppeteer General Hull might be able to resist - definitely if it has its stasis field on.
The Excession from the Cultureverse would be immune.

Nah. EM radiation through the hull would be a killer- the green light from the beam alone would probably bake the contents of the hull. Frankly, a GP hull can't be immune to high-energy radiation any more than it is to antimatter, because it's still made out of atoms even if the interatomic bonds are impossibly good.

Stasis fields, OK, could stand off the beam. I wouldn't bet anything I cared to lose on a General Products hull doing the same.

[Sarevok]

IIRC the GP hull is one giant atom. It is not indestructible per se.