Target practice (2008-07-22)

[Wyrm]

Alright. My response, now that I can actually see SDN again.

---Message Begins---
Finding your message hard to respond to, being so disorganized, I did some rearranging of the little sections. Sorry for the delay.

(The DS as a WMD)

Another exampble of blockheadedness. your arguing about some thing when you agree with me. Coundn't you understand I was saying we had been overly dependent on nuclear forces? It makes you sound like an idiot when you do that.

Oh, god! What a way to move the goalposts, buddy! It doesn't fucking matter whether or not we are "overly reliant on nukes" or not, as that is beyond the scope of this discussion. The scope, by the way, is whether or not the Death Stars imply Star Destroyers puny or ineffective.

Your argument that being able to ruin a planet for habitation is all that is necessary. My arugment is that the situation you describe glosses over a lot of very relevant detail. I pointed out that, because of planetary shields (your objections to them notwithstanding), a fleet may spend months pounding at a target world before it is able to wipe it out; planets are in a position of resisting, bargaining, and conditional surrender. The Death Star negates all of these options for shielded planets, as the battle station's main weapon can crack any known planetary shield.

I find it hilariously ironic that you accuse me of leaping to conclusions when, in fact, this is exactly what you have done on multiple occasions in this very discussion. You look at the gap between the Death Star and the Star Destroyer and immediately conclude that Star Destroyers are ineffective, without taking into account _all_ of the relevant information. Base Delta Zero operations exist had have been executed no less than four times in Galactic history. As planetoid impactor simulations demonstrate, a large impact in one part of the Earth would extinguish life over the entire Earth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TdRgpGbbaY

(A 500 km wide impactor traveling at 20 km/s having a density of a stony asteroid, perhaps 2.75 g/cc works out to 3.5997415822e28 J, or 3 billion times less energy than the Death Star blast.) Multiple nasty effects of a large amount of energy being dumped onto a planet should be clear: a partial shield is useless against a committed spacefaring navy with the ability to execute a BDZ. However, Wedge's Gamble clearly indicate that a seige can take months.

Never read the book. If by capital you mean the Empire/Republic capital, you would want to take it with minimal damage.

No. You want the capital to surrender as quickly as possible. That means demonstrating that you can cause some damage. A seige is only useful when you cannot do this, and instead try to outlast the beseiged's ability to endure the situation.

If you did have inpenitrable planetary shields the strategic logic of you position would be valied. However the situation before ANH was not as you discribe it. Their was strategic mobility. In the Clone Wars many importent planets chaged hands in a short period of time.

Your logic is flawed. The point of a seige is to starve the beseiged out, as it were. That the planets eventually capitulate and surrender, and thus, change hands, just means that the seiges worked. You can have impenitrable shields (which I do _not_ claim, only strong, planet-covering shields) and still run out of food, water, resources, energy, condoms, ect. And the fact that the planets 'change hands' rather than drop completely off the map strategically indicates that they are still of use — that a BDZ has not occured.

Planetary shields also explains the torpedo spheres, featured in Black Ice and mentioned in Children of the Jedi.

The existence of planetary shields glues all this evidence together. The convergence of evidence points to their existence.

Objection your honor. The witness is drawing conclussions not supported by facts in evidence.

Ah, you're one of those idiots who think that science operates in any way like a legal proceeding. It doesn't; that objection didn't work for holocaust deniers, either.

That last statement needs explanation: In _Why People Believe Weird Things_, Michael Shermer explains that no one fact proves the holocaust. Instead, there is a convergence of evidence pointing towards the holocaust. Holocaust deniers, people who deny that the Nazis were carrying through a systematic plan to destroy the Jewish people, object to the individual facts concerning the holocaust, explaining them away with alternate hypotheses. Yet there are many hypotheses, each one explaining only a few facts. The Holocaust is the only theory that explains ALL of the evidence.

Similarly, only the planetary shield hypothesis explains the existence of the BDZ, torpedo spheres, long seige operations (Wedge's Gamble), the Death Stars, and the ANH novelization quote (below), to name a few.

ANH novelization p.129-130: "The defense systems on Alderaan, despite the Senator's protestations to the contrary, were as strong as any in the Empire. I should think that our demonstration was as impressive as it was thorough."

Who is making this statment, to who?

I believe it was Tarkin to Vader.

Planetary defense systems does not nessasarlly mean planetary shields. Defenses could mean local shields on the scale of TESB, covering cities, and major bases. Planetary defense batteries, again like Hoth.Fighter Squdrons, orbital platforms, electronic jamming, both offensive and defensive, mine fields. A local defense fleet. It could be almost any thing.

Here we see you spawn an ancillary hypothesis to try to explain the first part of the quote, but ignores the second part. That hypothesis has currency _only_ if you remove this quote from its surrounding context. I know this comes as a surprise to a no-context bastard like you, but context is important — so important that removing it is a form of dishonesty.

So let's put the quote back into context: The Death Star had just blown up a planet. Tarkin talks about the demonstration being "as impressive as it was thorough," so there was indeed SOMETHING about Alderaan's defenses that would make the demonstration be poingniant to anyone in the Empire. Something that, were these defenses absent, would have subtracted much from the impact of the demonstration.

Would a home fleet, orbital platforms, mine fields, defense batteries, or the like have made a difference? No, unless they are so thick that they blanket the entire planet and physically block the superlaser, which we don't see, or attack the station to try to destroy the DS before it fired, but we know that not a shot was fired: Tarkin didn't call Leia's bluff that Alderaan had "no weapons," and therefore was a legitimate millitary target.
How about shields covering cities? No, in this case, shielding a couple of individual cities wouldn't really have made a difference: the planet's gone, dude.

Electronic countermeasures? Not only would electronic countermeasures be completely ineffective in attenuating the superlaser beam, the planet is right there, large as life. It's as big as a barn. How could you _not_ miss it? It's nothing to write home about in terms of making the demonstration more effective than if the electronic countermeasures were absent.
The planetary shield hypothesis, however, explains all parts of this quote. It implies the Death Star can crack any planetary shield in the Empire, and makes all shielded planets effectively naked to the Empire, thus making the demonstration "impressive as it was thorough."

The FX frames were remastered, but the effect shown conforms to no physical phenomenon currently known. There's still a spreading of energy around Alderaan for a brief moment, coupled with a haze effect that is too high to be an atmosphere for a planet inhabited by anything approaching human.

You statement is not scientific, or objective, it's leaping to a conclusion. You have no way of knowing what such an event would look like, thank god.

I think I have a lot firmer grasp on the physics than you do.

May be the ionishere was supercharged by the beam. Most likely the FX guys just thought the planet would glow before it blow up.

So once more you spawn _another_ hypothesis to explain the glow. Thing is, there are three frames (1/8th second) where the glow spread, yet the clouds underneath were undisturbed. The DS beam has been clocked going approximately c, so the beam should have traveled 37,000 km (three times the diameter of the planet itself) during this time, so the explosion should've already long started and should already be kicking up debris. But the planet is still intact, even the clouds aren't cooked away.

So the beam has hit something, something that stops it for about one eighth of a second.

This is, of course, completely consistent with a planetary shield, but NOT with a supercharged ionosphere.

For instance, in the ROTJ, the mere fact that the Rebels had to steal a shuttle and Imperial codes to lower the shields and land in order for their gambit to work is clear evidence that there was a planetary shield around Endor. Furthermore, in the novelization, it's stated explicitly:

Not necessarily. the shield may just cover the area near the shield generator.

_Yet another_ ancillary hypothesis. Again, you have no uniting theory tying many disperate facts together, only a plethora of custom-made hypotheses. Occam's razor slices these off, too.

Pretty silly that the Empire had no one manning, or defending the landing field, when a rebel strike team landed.

Which should lead you to think that the Rebels wouldn't use the landing pads in the first place, since the Rebels would assume that the landing pads _would_ be manned and defended.

ROTJ novelization p.071: At the center of the briefing room was a large, circular light-table, projected above which a holographic image of the unfinished Imperial Death Star hovered beside the Moon of Endor, whose scintillating protective deflector shield encompassed them both.

That's what you call a Retcon, it's contradicted by what's shown on screen. What's on screen is canon, because it's a movie. If it was a movie based on a book the book would be canon.

The fact that the Endor planetary-covering shield was not part of the _Rebel diagram_ is canon, but diagrams are always distortions of reality. The shield around Endor was obviously omitted for clarity in the film. The page from the ROTJ novelization strongly suggests that Endor did have that shield.

Furthermore, the mere _existence_ of Torpedo Spheres (look it up on Wookiepedia) points to planetary shields. The damn things were purpose-built to take them out.

More stuff written after the retroactive introduction of planetary shields.

Just because something is retconned, does not mean it's not canon. I don't like the fact that Han didn't shoot first in the revised ANH, but that doesn't mean I can declare it not canon.

Honest investigation sometimes force on you conclusions you don't like. Sorry, but that's life.

(DS physics)
Onto your 'Death Star powered by nuclear fusion argument'. To recap, remember that the 1e38 J figure comes from the observation that Alderaan's debris were being spread around at approximately 4%c. Creating 1e38 J of energy requires the conversion of 1.1126500561e21 kg of matter into energy. Hydrogen fusion converts about 0.7% of the fuel mass into energy, so 1.590e23 kg of hydrogen fuel is required. Liquid hydrogen is 67.758 kg/m^3 at 1 atm and 20 K, which is 2.3458e21 cubic meters, which may be packed into a sphere 16,485.4 km in diameter. Therefore, each planet busting shot of the Death Star requires a mass of hydrogen at least 103 times the size of the Death Star itself (160 km in diameter). Supplying this hydrogen over the course of 24 hours via a supply chain would require the arrival of a 372 km sphere of liquid hydrogen every second.

The supposition that the Death Star runs on nuclear fusion requires either (a) the Death Star being at least 103 times its actual size, or (b) require the arrival of a supply sphere two and a third the size of the Death Star itself _every second_. Both requirements would have obvious effect on the film, and we see neither. Therefore, the supposition that the Death Star is powered by nuclear fusion is wrong, wrong, wrong!

Fruthermore, if we suppose the power source is some total conversion scheme like matter/antimatter, substitute 100% matter to energy conversion in the above calculation, and use iridium (22.42 g/cc), the iridium sphere needed would be 456 km in diameter, or 2.84 times the Death Star's size. A supply train requires an iridium sphere one fifteenth the diameter of the Death Star to arrive every second, which should still be rather obvious.

Lacking both the required size and the required supply train, we are forced to the conclusion that the Death Star is powered by a source of energy that has a higher free energy density than any ST power. We label this energy source "hypermatter."

Are you caiming the same phyical laws in our universe don't aply in the SW universe? In that case you could suggest any thing, such as you don't need as much energy to blow up a planet. Lucas did't care how much power it took. He just assumed it would take some thing really big to do it, like a huge fusion powered DS. By your new lower out put figure fusion might work because you came down 11 powers. Nice concession. Thank you.

So, just because we have to throw out one rule in a very specialized black box (the hypermatter reactor), we can dispose of them all? Sorry, but the correspondance principle comes to the rescue: we don't assume the laws are broken unless it's clear they are. There's _nothing_ impossible about destroying a planet in the normal laws of physics, so we assume the default laws apply when a planet is destroyed. A hypermatter reactor allows the wierd physics to be confined completely to a black box. 1e38 joules.

Interesting calculation. I suggested in an earlier post that the DS might have huge capacitors, and didn't nessacerly need to surge all the power needed for the shot in one instant.

You lose. Hard. The 2.5462963e27 watt figure DOES assume capacitors of some kind. If the DS had to produce that power over the few seconds the shot was fired, that would require power generation on the order of 1e38 watts. That's basic physics, cupcake.

Bullshit. The Death Star survived being in close proximity to a 1e38 J explosion without damage (Alderaan), no further than 300,000 km. That's at least 2000 teratons per square kilometer. If it's not shielded, it has very sturdy armor, which WOULD make an X-wing more powerful than any Federation ship. And the Empire _does_ know how to shield a ship 160 km in diameter, your protests notwithstanding. They can shield entire planets. A mere 7 gigatons is not going to do squat.

Wrong on several counts. First you your self stated the explosion wouldn't = the full energy release.

Lie. I've always stated that the Alderaan blast is a 1e38 J event and was all delivered in one punch. You are confusing this with the _minimum power_ of the Death Star to build up in a day the energy to take out Alderaan in one blast.

Second most of the energy would have been absorbed by the mass of the planet.

Lie. The 1e38 J is calculated from the kinetic energy of the planet's debris.

Third the DS was more like 900,000 km away.

Lie. The time it took to travel from the DS to Alderaan is timed at 1 second. That limits the distance to one light second... 300,000 km.

Alderaan was much smaller in the sky then the Earth is from the Moon, so it must have been at least twice as far, as the moon is from the Earth.

Even if you're right, and the angular sizes measure as you say, all that proves is that the CAMERA was that far away, not the DS. The _timing_ of the events shows you wrong.

Finally the DS has no shields, as clearly shown in ANH,

Even if the DS has no shields, then it would imply VERY TOUGH ARMOR, which would be just as much a hinderance to your Federation bukakke fest.

and the fact the second one needed a ground based shield.

The one that wasn't complete yet, right? Maybe the shield generators hadn't arrived yet.

The fact it has none is more evidence contradicting planetary shields.

No. Quite the opposite, in fact. Even if the shielded elements had to be spherically shaped, that's still a shielded area 900 km in diameter that your opponent's weapons can't get through. The Earth has 510,072,000 km^2 of area. The shield around the DS shields about 63,000 km^2 under it. That means 8000 shields are sufficient to cover an entire planet.

If the 900 km shield balls can be spread flat, then you get sections that have an area of 2.544e6 km^2, and only two hundred someodd generators would be required.

Given that the surface of the DS is designed to be smacked in the face with at least 1.7 billion teratons, this is a little hard to swallow.

This silly statement was just dealt with. By this logic one DS could shoot another and it would survive.

A DS's shot is a lot more than 1.7 billion teratons, moron. WAY more.

Or that it would survive an impact with a dinokiller asteroid. Silly

It would only be silly if Galactic Empire citizens were to treat dinokiller asteroids as portends of doom rather than annoyances. In fact, I would consider it silly for a warship from an interesting spacefaring civilization, in a universe where one hit did not mean instant death, to NOT shrug off dinokiller asteroids with ease.

(On the detonation of the DS2)

I asked you to figure a megaton yield idiot. To say an explosion in space continues forever is literally true, but tells us nothing about the range it would cause damage at. Use that great brain to come up with some thing that helps advance the debate.

Even stated like that, the question is unanswerable. State a minimum energy intensity and I can find an answer. Hell, the math's so simple that even you could do it. Simply solve this equation for r: 4πr^2 = E/I, where I is the minimum intensity in Joules per square meter, and E is the energy liberated in the explosion. Please note that E is not necessarily 1e38 J. The energy of a hypermatter reactor going up is not necessarily the energy of its fuel.

So you are saying the SW universe is based on sillyness? So you would rather accept the violation of the mass-energy equation with all that implies to the nature of the universe, then accept that the power requirements is a plot anomaly?

"Plot anomaly" is not an allowed answer. In fact, it's not an answer at all. It's saying, "It is a Mystery, for the Lucas works in mysterious ways."

Or that you use you own idea that the power can be stored over a days time, and so might be generated by fusion.

Being able to store energy for days at a time does _not_ mean it can be generated by fusion.

(A diversion to answer the "Kzinti lesson" issue)

Are you saying a light TL puts out a blast = to 200 GT of energy? You are F ing nuts. One shot from a light Turbo laser would wipe out the whole UK?

_Any_ interesting spacefaring race should be able to easily cause planetary destruction. Google "Kzinti lesson".

The Kzinti are part of the ST Universe. They were added in the 1970s animated series, which is canon, and considered the 4th year, of the 5 year mission. The ST Earth beat back the Kzinti, in the well named "Earth Kzinti Wars".

What the hell, you idiot? I asked you to look up "Kzinti Lesson," not give me a lecture on how the Earthlings waxed the Kzinti Empire. That happened in Larry Niven's original 'Known Space' version, too, so I was _not_ saying the Kzinti could kick the Federation's bottom. I asked you to look up "Kzinti Lesson" because it's directly related to "interesting drives."
Since even using Google seems beyond you, I'll give you the "Kzinti lesson": "a reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive." It's closely related to Jon's Law: "Any interesting space drive is a weapon of mass destruction. It only matters how long you want to wait for maximum damage." It goes on to say: "Interesting is equal to 'whatever keeps the readers from getting bored'".

By Jon's Law, _any spacefaring civilization with interesting space drives_ should be able to *easily* wipe out the whole UK! The reason why it's called the "Kzinti Lesson" is because it's the Kzinti who learned the lesson.

(Back to the Death star)

The surroundings of a proton torpedo detonation would be armor plating with an unknown specific heat function, an unknown melting point and heat of fusion, and an unknown vaporization point and heat of vaporization, _and on top of that_ an unknown albedo in the gamma rays. In other words, we don't know how much heat it takes to vaporize a cubic meter of Death Star armor, or even how much energy it will absorb. (The Death Star might be SHINY in the gamma ray spectrum!)

Fighter guns have no trouble blasting though it.

How much energy per shot do you think these guns have? Remember that these fighters have demonstrated obscene delta-V for very small fuel fraction (therefore an obscene specific impulse), AND demonstrate obscene thrust. That implies obscene-squared power output... a VERY interesting space drive. A powerful weapon is as easy as mounting this same space drive to shoot forward: anything in the exhaust plume will have a very bad day.

A big rock has no trouble smashing it.

When has a Death Star been hit by a big rock? Unless it was debris from Alderaan, which the Death Star weathered without any apparent damage.

It seems the plasma in the reactor core needs a magnetic field to contain it.

Why is the glowy stuff surrounding the reactor plasma?

If they could build a solid casing they would, for safety reasons, so reactor plasma can melt it.

That's _not_ the reason you build magnetic bottles to contain plasma, private! That is, if we assume that the glowy stuff is plasma!

We saw how little damage the armor actually took, so this must be _tough

Took from what? Fighters had no trouble shooting it up. Get over it, it's main defense is it's size.

Again, from little fighters with _demonstratably_ obscene-squared power levels to juice them. Remember Jon's law; if their weapons were much less powerful than their space drives, they'd use their own space drives as weapons. Even if the Death Star was made out of iron, it's still a powerful little fighter.

An X-wing would have no trouble blasting a Galaxy class starship to pieces. Get over it.

In the reference to hypermatter they stated that 40,000 ton of hypermatter produced 3.6x10*24 watts of power. They sited a P38 fighter using up to 6.2kg a second at full power. Dividing that you get about 6x10*20 watts. Are you saying you think a SW fighter if it landed on earth today could power the whole US power grid for years?

Actually, I would be very surprised if that *wasn't* the case! Interesting spaceflight requires serious power (if you don't cheat). Any ship from Larry Niven's Known Space series could crank out enough power to keep the US purring.

(general ship discussion)

Bullshit. By the laws of physics, a non-direct hit can _never_ do as much damage as a direct hit can cause.

The laws of hydrodynamics say you can. Explosions send greater shockwaves though water then they do though air.

Only if hydrodynamics overrides the conservation of energy, which —last time I checked— it doesn't. Even shockwaves follow the inverse square law.

skies from SDN explains: An explosion underwater transmits the explosive energy as a shockwave more efficiently than in air, but it doesn't add to the explosive energy (conservation of energy). A direct hit will still be more damaging because the energy will be transmitted directly to the target, rather than through a secondary medium.

There are two ways in which a near miss can cause more critical damage. One is the the shockwave spreads energy over a larger area of the target, and so has more chance to damage a weakened area. The second is by spreading force across the entire hull, thereby causing the ship to snap. This is an actual tactic, where the torpedo is set to go off under the ship's keel) that takes advantage of the fact that ships' hulls are not designed to resist an upward force.

As there are not shockwaves in space, and ships will be designed to resist damage in all directions, this tactic is useless.

(And you're trying to lecture _me_ about over-unity power plants? At least I know over-unity isn't possible in the real world, unlike you're MOAR POWERFUL underwater exposions!)

The analogy is obviously imperfect, idiot. There's no "below water" in space. All other things being equal, a hit to the underside of a spacegoing warship is just as deadly as a hit to the topside. This is why I limited the discussion to bombs and missles, as they're the closest analogues to what you'll find on a space fighter.

Again a smart guy being an idiot. read what I said jerk, I was talking about ships in the water. I guess you just zoned out when you wrote that.

I _know_ you were talking about ships in the water. That's *why* what you say above doesn't apply to SW ships —the _real_ subject at hand— which don't float in water, of course.

So you've identified one instance where a battleship can be superior to a carrier. Concession accepted.

Some times you say things that have nothing to do with what were talking about, or counter an argument I never made. What was the concession your babbling about? I never made any evaluation about battleships vs carriers. They each have advantages, and vulnerabilities, and they have very different functions. So what the hell are you talking about?

You really think I don't save your messages?

True there is no horizon in space. However fighters in SW by virtue of their superior acceleration deceleration, operational speed, and maneuverability can move in and out of ship firing range. A carrier could operate just like they do on earth. Have their fighters attack targets while keeping the ship out of the range of direct fire weapons. Battleships on the other hand can lay down more tons of explosives on a given target in a short period of time, then the air wing of a carrier.

You've just made a consession that a battleship has advantages over a carrier, that a battleship can hurl more units of destruction at a target than a carrier.
You're either lying, or you have a memory so short that it's measured in microseconds. Neither possibility says much for you.

In other words, fire, *boom*, rinse and repeat. Compared to fighter-vs-fighter battles, they're boring. In WWII dogfights, you have one man against another, maneuvering about to try to outsmart each other. Capitol ships just impersonally pound away at each other until one sinks, and have far less dramatic color. Fighter-vs-capitol ship battles are similarly boring. Unless a fighter gets shot down, or scores a hit on a vulnerable spot, it's trite.

That's because you imaging it like a video game. In a movie you would show men in action, being killed and wounded, dealing with damage, and fighting back. Modern effects would be great for the externals. Men I know who fought in the Korean War told me about 16" rounds sounding like freight cars going over head. At night they could see the shells glowing, in the air. Gun ships turn night into day, allot more spectacular then the light specks from SDs. I guess you slept though the battle scenes in "Tora, Tora, Tora", or "In Harms Way". How about sailing ship actions, like "Master & commander", "Damm the Defiant", or the "Hornblower" series.

So Lucas _didn't_ pull his playbook from WWII naval tactics, or studied the great battleship dramas, as evidenced by his boring naval battles... which of course, is what this little side argument was about: just because we don't see spectacular cap-vs.-cap naval battles, doesn't mean it wasn't going on, and they didn't shoulder most of the burden of taking each other down. Concession accepted.

And how does this answer my point that Lucas only borrowed the dogfighting from WWII?

The fighter vs ship action is out of WWII.

Given that it was only in WWII that fighter vs. ship action became practical, this should not really be surprising. Taking out targets of opportunity is an obvious tactic.

Calling Stupid Troopers Storm Troopers, giving them, along with Vader German style helmets, before GIs got their Fritz helmets. Anti fighter weapons mounted on "flak towers".

.... I'm afraid I don't follow you here.

Ah, another idiot who doesn't understand what "bracketting fire" is.

So they miss on purpose? What an idiot. Bracketing fire, or straddling in naval terms is were you shoot over, then under, so you have them zeroed in to get a hit on the third shot. You do that because of the inherent inaccuracy of guns, your not trying to miss, your just correcting your fire. With missiles and beam weapons you don't bracket, you go for one shot one hit. You are conceding my point that turbo lasers are as inaccurate as the WWII naval guns their modeled on. If they have to bracket it means their slaving of the beam emitter and their targeting system is off, or the targeting system sucks.

If it were true that the turbolasers were so piss-poor at targetting, why was that SD able to place a devistating shot on the Tantive's main reactor and shut it down without destroying the rest of the ship? And why, a generation previous, were the turbolasers of the Trade Federation craft able to unerringly pick off a bunch of astromech droids on the Queen's transport but not hit the ship's surface not a meter underneath? Unless the term "bracketing fire" was a slight abuse of the language and had another purpose.

See, braketing fire can _also_ be used to control your opponent's movements. If the opponent veers to the left or right, up or down, it takes more damage than if it remained on a predictable course — so they remain on that course. If you can fire over the ship, you can also control its speed. In other words, braketing fire can be used to control your enemy and make him do what _you_ want him to do.

Which is, of course, the essence of victory.

Also note that bracketing fire is only useful for ranging when the fire is ballistic... where the shell has to be lobbed up and subsequently comes back down on the target. Turbolasers are not 'ballistic' by any definition of the word; were it weren't for a juking target, targeting is as easy as point-and-shoot.

You can see that in ANH, the SD was subsequently able to place a shot right smack on the Tantive's main reactor, rendering it a sitting duck ripe for capture. It could then verify that the Death Star's plans were sent somewhere else, which they would NOT be able to do if the Tantive were destroyed. The Trade Federation wanted to capture Queen Amadalla alive, so it knocked out the shields and bracketed her ship so it could not escape, picking off astromechs to keep the shield from being repaired and thus able to risk escape.

You mean the turbolasers that were designed around a "large scale assault"? That is, _capitol ships_? That they hit any fighters at all, which they were not designed to target, is a miracle.

They don't seem much better against bigger slower targets ether, bracketing fire.

See above.

Except you don't know that. It could easily have been Lucas showing the tipping point of the battle in a dramatic way. After grinding against each other long and hard, the Rebels gained the upper hand in the battle by taking the Executor, the Imperial flagship, out of commission. After concentrating fire on the Executor, the Executor's shields weakened to the point where one-man fighters could penetrate their shields. This was the culmination of everyone's will and effort, and enabled the small contribution of nameless A-wing pilot to tip the balance in the Rebels' favor. The cooperation of the Ewoks' manpower and the Rebels' training enabled them to gain access to the shield bunker and blow it up, enabling the MF and Red Leader to fly into the Death Star and blow it up, the goal of everyone involved.

You might be right, but your conclusion is trying to fit a premise. We have no idea what damage the Cruisers did to the SSD, we only know what the fighters did.

Why do you assume that the cruisers _didn't_ do damage in proportion to their size? Because that conclusion would make sense?

See? Where you see "the difference of the one" wankery, I see "the triumph of the team." Yet it's the same film. What Lucas wanted to show doesn't matter. What he did show does.

Yes we only see what the fighters did. You are surmising what the Cruisers did.

Yes, because that conclusion actually makes sense.

You first said that because the only damage being caused was by fighters, capitol ships are useless. This was based on the moronic assumption, if you don't see it, it didn't happen. When I called you on that... IT'S THE INCREDIBLE MOVING GOALPOSTS! That's dishonest fuckwittery, fella.

Your inferring what I didn't imply. I never said the Cruisers did no damage to the SSD, I said we don't know what they did, because we never saw any of their hits. I said we saw fighters deliver the fatal blows. I said if Lucas wanted us to think the Cruisers did most of the damage he would have shown it, and he didn't. You are the one trying to prove some thing not shown on screen, the burden of proof is on you not me.

Ah, another moron who doesn't understand what "burden of proof" actually means.

To suppose that cruisers, with their ability to deal more damage per shot, and mounting more of these weapons, than any fighter of similar tech, and were at point blank range (meaning that firing would require hardly any targeting at all beyond point-and-shoot), did the majority of the damage is not extraordinary and needs hardly any justification at all. My burden of proof is not heavy in the slightest, and in any other context would be the null hypothesis, the same way the statement, "I saw cars on the street," would not require very much justification either.

You, on the other hand, have to show not only that the fatal damage the fighters did was fatal in any way beyond discombobulating the crew so badly that they crashed into the Death Star, but also that it was the fighters that took out the bridge shields all by their lonesome, and that the globe of uncertain function was indeed the shield generator globe... especially given that shield generators don't seem to _need_ globes to be generated.

Whoops! Response too long! Continued...

[Wyrm]

Here's the second part of the message...

Sigh. Can we stop the wankery now? Photon torpedoes have never shown to execute the 9000 g turns that proton torpedoes are able to demonstrate, which seems to be necessary to trigger the precise hit that sets of the chain reaction that destroys the Death Star.

Why do they have to pull 9,000 g turns? They would blow it to peaces straight on. The Proton Torpedoes didn't need to either. The fighters in ANH are only going down the trench at about 1km a second, about mach 3. The missiles don't need to do loops. Mach 4 missiles pull less then 30 Gs doing full loops. It would have made more sense to show the missiles doing pop ups into the exhaust port. At any rate ships and missiles can't turn like that in space any way, so to talk about g forces is pointless. In ROTJ they just needed to destroy the plasma containment field

Do these modern missles turn in a loop radius measured on the order of meters while going 1 km/s? The proton torpedoes were seen able to make a 90° turn in the space of the two-meter DS1 thermal exhaust port traveling at 1 km/s. I know this requires heavy math: a = v^2/r... which now that I calculate it out, pops out a result of 50,000 g.

Precisely. Your entire previous argument on this matter was 'fighters score the killing shots, therefore, capitol ships == teh weakness'. It's right up there in your (quoted) section: You say, "The only specific damage on the SSD is from fighters."

Your concession is gratefully accepted.

You have miss understood my argument, and are setting up strawmen. You do that allot. I never said capital ships were weak.

Yet, we have you insinuating that cruisers couldn't take down the Imperial SD without the fighters in the ROTJ space battle, even though cruisers have more weapons, more powerful weapons, and were shooting at point blank range. This is your argument. Just because the way I say the argument makes it sound silly is not my fault; the argument _is_ silly.

They fill a roll in a combined arms task force. My point is that capital ships are vulnerable to attack from light forces. Their own defenses are inadequate, and they need fighter support. Just like real capital ships have to be screened by escort ships, and aircraft.

Yes, they venture forward, protected by a screen of fighters and escorts, so that any 50 mm shell fired from an opposing force would bounce harmlessly off the fighters. Wait.

Look, Rob, I don't believe anyone has ever said that fighters can't make a nuscience of themselves for capitol ships. But all the damage we've seen fighters cause the Executor are to obvious "soft spots": the globes atop the bridge tower, and the windowed bridge proper.

Your memory is faulty. Only the SD hold back. Do you think the TIE Interceptors just flew by the Rebel Cruisers at point blank range with out shooting? Just exposing them selves to enemy fire to scare the enemy?

Listen, kid. Putting aside the fact that obeying your superiors is drilled into the core of every millitary head, if your Emperor could Force choke you over a comlink, you wouldn't dare disobey him, either.

Blockhead, why did they give the order? If they can't hurt the Rebel Cruisers why order the attack? How many times and ways do I have to ask the question? What was the reason for the attack? Are you saying they ordered a futile charge? Was it a mistake? Were they incompetent? The only logical conclusion is that they thought they could damage the Rebels.

There were Rebel _fighters_ that the Imperial fighters could attack, and can hurt. And besides, the Emperor special orders obviously only applied to the capitol ships.

What's your alternative theory? You don't want to accept the logical answer because it invalidates your position.

_My_ logical answer does _not_ invalidate my proposition. Who are the Imperial fighters going after? Other fighers and the Falcon, which is a small tramp freighter that is vulnerable to fighter fire. They leave the capitol ships mostly alone. Anyone with a pair of eyes can see that.

The operative word here is "seem". You have no solid count of how many fighters there were. You also realize that there could've been plenty of fighters mixed in with the capitol ships, which would be nearly invisible at that scale.

Why would they do that? They weren't expecting an Imperial Fleet, with waves of fighters waiting for them. Only the fighters, lead by the MF could do the task at hand. The plan was to go right in get the job done, and get out quick.

Or the plan may go pear shaped unexpectedly. Says Wedge, "Stay sharp. We could run out of space real fast." Says Lando, "Lock onto the strongest power source. It should be the power generator." They were making up the route as they went along; they didn't have a map to the station mains. A few TIE fighters couldn't negotiate the tight turns in the station, perhaps going too fast to catch up with Rebels. The TIE figthers themselves are a worry... look at all those waves in the "The Emperor cometh" scene.
We only saw the team that reached the power generator. Perhaps there are a lot of teams that were making attempts at the same time.

What would be the reason for holding back most of their fighters? They only needed to be separated from the fighters for a few minutes, for the plan to work. This was a maximum effort, they put in every thing they had to make sure it would work.

And they did; it's unreasonable to assume they wouldn't. However, fighters are small things in comparison to the monsters. And when the trap was sprung, don't you think the rebels would've scrambled all fighters anyway? What kind of fleet would have the number of fighters be of the same order as the number of capitol ships?

Under strength, but you can't assume that there were as few as 50 fighters. Do you really think that the survival ratio between TIEs and Rebel snubs could improve by over two orders of magnitude in just four years? If there were really 1,800 TIE fighters vs 50 rebels, it would've been a slaughter.

My God can't you read. I said the Empire clearly did not have 1,800 fighters. It seemed they had only a hundred, or so. The figure of 60 fighters, and 12 bombers per SD is in books and games. We never saw that many in action. At Hoth I don't think we saw any. As far as we know the first DS had only 13 fighters.

I'm sorry, I thought you had some _intelligence_ to your name. Having only a hundred or so fighters when the full strength of the force is 1,800 wouldn't just be under-strength, it would be the very definition of DECIMATED!

I notice you didn't answer this either. Do you want to answer why a capitol ship would bother with fighters when there are bigger fish to fry?

To save them selves. The fighters have clearly been shown to be a threat to capital ships.

You have yet to show that, under normal circumstances, a fighter is a realistic threat to a capitol ship. It's always in combination with capitol ship support.

don't know that the bridge was taken off, moron. All we know is that damage was severe enough to disrupt communications. We don't get a clear view of the bridge after the hit, but we also don't see any bridge debris. Secondly, that's not a "house-sized" asteroid. That was 70 fucking meters of rocky kickass. The damn thing is clocked at 5e14 J, or half a megaton, as a lower limit. The EU has this ship surviving the impact as a whole, even after enduring several days of murderous impacts.

As the image fads you see the bridge crew, and captain. The Captains screams, covers his face, and falls over.

Lie. The captain throws up his hand and vanishes. No scream. No falling to the floor. And even if your citation was correct, at best that would show that the bridge chamber had merely decompressed... because, you know, THE COM EQUIPMENT AND BRIDGE CAMERAS WOULD STILL BE FUNCTIONING!

Can the Enterprise survive even one such impact?

Yes and it has many times. The ship has flown into asteroid fields many times.

Even the most violent of the ST asteroid fields are positively tame and sparse compared to the TESB field.

In "Mudd's Women" the Enterprise projects it shields over a small ship in an asteroid field. The range is about 2 minutes away at full impulse. so it's about 1 light minute, 18,000,000 KM.

Prove full impulse is 1/2 c. This will be especially difficult, seeing how there would be significant and obvious distortion in the visual field, including a fisheye effect due to the abberation of light, significant Dopplar shift (from 1/2 to 2x observed wavelength), and 15% length contraction.

The effort burns out 3 of their 4 dylititium crystals, and at the last moment the ship suffers a direct hit from one at least as big as the TESB rock, and is destroyed.

Prove the asteroid was as big as the TESB rock. Also, seeing as the ship was destroyed, stronger shields do not follow.

Voyager flies though the rings of a gas giant in the credits.

Lie. The Voyager flies _above_ the rings, by a margin of about 1/5 the Voyager's length. Furthermore, seeing that a 70 m asteroid would be ~1/5 that of the Voyager's 344 m length, there isn't even TESB-sized boulder IN that ring! (It's the CAMERA that goes through the rings, and that's not necessarily real in-universe!)

In "Hell Year" Voyager is badly damaged in a large meteor storm, when their shields are down. When they get the shields up they ride it out with little trouble. In "Balance of Terror an unshielded Enterprise survives a nuclear explosion 100 meters off their bow.

Yield? Calculated absorbed energy amount?

In "The Changeling". Nomad hit's the ship with a bolt = to 9 PT. (They say 90 in the episode, but that was a script mistake.) Assuming the Torpedoes of TOS were half the power of MK VI of TNG on we get 288 megatons.

I will not give you this assumption. Prove the yeild of a MK IV photon torpedo.

In ST TMP V-Ger hits the Refitted Enterprise with a plasma sphere that converted Klingon D 7Ms into electrical impulses for storage in it's imaging chamber, a kind on memory bank.

In other words, a wierd event of unknown energy. No figures.

Later V-Ger sends out 12 more spheres each hundreds of times more powerful, to do the same thing to the whole Earth. This means the Refit Enterprise withstood a force that might have been 1/5,000 of a force that would have converted the whole Earth into energy.

From a wierd physical event of unknown energy — a 'magical disappearing act' of the second kind. 1/5000 of an unknown energy is an unknown energy.

8 ships from species 8472 combined their power to break up a planet.

An effect that is clearly a funky chain reaction, as the time it took for the planet to break up was on the order of seconds. Brute force against a planet not take that long. No figures.

One of them hit's Voyager a glancing blow, which sends the ship tumbling in space, but they survive, and are able to warp away.

Took a hit from a weapon of completely unknown power. No figures.

USS Excelsior survived the shock wave from the destruction of Praxis. What ever it was they joked about it compared with a meteor shower. Sulu "That was no meteor shower".

An unquantifiable subspace event. No figures. You'll note that Qu'onos was NOT rendered an uninhabitable wasteland. Or smashed to bits.

The TOS Enterprise along with the Constellation, survived mutable hits from the "Doomsday Machine", Pure anti proton beams, that were used to carve up planets.

Over an unknown time period. No figures.

Trek ships take a lot more guff, then SW ships.

You have shown nothing of the sort.

(shields)

Shields work _nothing_ like the stealth of Star Trek, and only one aspect of real stealth - that is, absorbing the energy of an emitted active signal, which works by detecting the return signal.

What are you talking about. Stealth is not a major element in ST. Real stealth absorbs and scatters radio waves. Some does bounce back, so stealth aircraft are detectable, but at much shorter ranges, or only at certain angles. When ever Fed ships installed cloaking devices they plugged them into the deflector system. Romulan Cloaks were described has "The selective bending of light". Not absorbing light, if it absorbed light a cloaked ship would be a black spot, but it's not, it's a distortion field. Obviously sensor beams are effected the same way, or you would still be able to track them. If cloaks work as part of a shield system they have to work in a similar way. Phasing cloaks are a whole other mater. Both work by scattering or bending energy, that explains the effect of beams spreading out, and lighting up a shield. External effects were limited in TOS, but we saw many planet based shields hit with phaser fire, and we saw the light up effect, and the beams breaking up and some of it bouncing off.

Blah, Blah, Blah. I know how modern stealth works, moron. There's also the fact that the radio waves absorbed and deflected are many orders of magnitude less energetic than a death ray would be. That makes a big difference.

Also, even cloaked ships are affected by weapons fire from ST ships. Remember Undiscovered Country?

In "Tomorrow Is Yesterday", and "Assignment Earth", the Enterprise used it's shields to defeat 1960s early warning radar. Shields have been used many time to block sensor probes, so they can perform some cloaking functions already. Cloaking gives shields the ability to deflect a wider range of energies.

Of course, radar waves are much, much weaker than turbolasers.

Some energy is absorbed, some deflected around the shield radiating back into space. They call them deflector shields for a reason, deflecting energy, and matter.

Rate of energy dispersion is limited, you know, again by thermodynamics (second law, this time). Until you disperse that energy, you have to store it somewhere. If you can't? Bye bye, shield system.

Unlike SW shields that can with stand "Any bombardment".

In context, any bombardment that would leave survivors. Darth Vader would brief his Death Squadron about what would be acceptible force and unacceptible force.

Since hypermatter is used on ships, and not on planets, ground based systems use a lesser power system, like fusion.

Stated without any proof whatsoever.

However ground based shields are stronger then ship based shields.

Of course. The power plants on a planet don't have to supply power to any propulsion systems on a planet.

In TESB 6 SD, each more powerful then the ground based generator, can't beat down the shield.

Correction: they can't beat down the shield without overkill.

What happened to the Second law of thermodynamics? May be this is another physical law that doesn't apply in the SWs Universe?

Don't strawman. There are limits on heat diffusion, but depending on your technology, this can be large, and the amount of punishment your shields can absorb can be similarly large. The Enterprise found a mere 400 GJ a problem for their shields.

Vorlon, and Shadow ships have energy absorbing skins.

The physics of Vorlon and Shadow ships do not interest me.

To absorb, or not to absorb. That is the question.

To be relevant, or to not be relevant. That is the question.

ST shields are not called absorbers, they talk about them dispersing energy.

As the "turbolaser" lesson shows, names can be deceptive.

To laze, or not to laze. That is the question.

To be relevant, or to not be relevant. That is the question.

What a joke. What is that based on? did we ever see any thing like that from a SD?

Vaping 40m diameter asteroids in ESB. The task requires energy on the order of 200 GT. I may be misremembering the exact figure, but the required energy is definitely orders of magnitude more than the 400 GJ that the Enterprise-D had trouble with in The Survivors (400 GW * less than 1 s = no more than 400 GJ).

The figure is absurd.

Argument from incrudelity is a fallacy.

In a Voyager episode "Rise" a Photon Torpedo is considered sufficient to vaporize an asteroid more then 200 meters wide and 390 meters long.

Oh, God! This argument again. The "Rise" asteroid was _not_ vaporized. The Voyager crew didn't even EXPECT it to be vaporized, as Tuvok refers to _fragments_ no more than 1 cm in diameter. Even assuming it was a metallic asteroid, that puts the "Rise" torpedo yield at 300 kilotons, and seeing how fragile the material of the asteroid turns out to be, it's probably closer to 15 kT. Try again.

400 GJ won't melt a cube of iron 6 meters on a side. Absolutely pathetic.

These figures sound nuts, considering the electro processing I have seen in aluminum plants. The way you talk they would need terawatts of power.

Watts are not joules, moron; power is not energy. Furthermore, iron is not aluminum, and going into solution is not melting. Your experience in electrodeposition plants is completely irrelevant to melting iron. Furthermore, the figure is absolutely correct, no matter how "nuts" the figure "sounds" to you, which is a red flag that you didn't even try to calculate the answer, even though the calculation requires nothing more than high-school science and Wikipedia.

I'll even give you all the required constants from Wikipedia to get you started:

Density of iron = 7.874 g/cm^3
Standard atomic weight (grams per mol) of iron = 55.845 g/mol
Heat of fusion (melting) for iron = 13.81 kJ/mol

Prove to me that you _any_ kind of scientific competence and calculate the correct answer. Please show your work.

(Han's Blaster)

Mostly water.

What, you didn't know that? They spray water underneath the shuttle when they launch. That's what absorbs the heat and keeps the underlying concrete from damage. The big billowing white cloud that sprays out the sides underneath the launchpad is steam. You really didn't think that was all engine exhaust, did you?

Yes smart guy I know about the water. The Shuttle is putting out 4.5 million pounds of trust. The old Saturn V put out 7.5 million. The structure has to with stand that. If it was just a matter of heat ceramics could handle the job.

Are you arguing that the big chunks Han took out of the wall above the stormtroopers was _ceramic_?! That's hillarious.

We don't use ceramics for _any_ load-bearing structure, let alone launchpads. Concrete is so easy to make and work with that the ancient Romans were using it everywhere. The stuff Han blasted is going to be some species of concrete.

I thought what so impressed you was handling the blast effect, not the heat since that would be more relevant in dealing with Han's blaster.

You did know that Han's blaster took big chunks out of what was clearly concrete-like material. And again, sudden large heat input will create explosions.

did you see Han shooting the bounty hunter, in a ANH?

He was wearing armor of unknown composition, and therefore unknown heat capacity, melting point and heat of fusion, vaporization point and heat of vaporization.

More delusions, he was wearing a shirt, and open vest.

And under the shirt there is...?

And blasters have a setting knob. They can be tuned for the occasion.

We know the blasters of Stupid Troopers can be set to stun.

So you agree blasters can be set. Concession accepted.

If the concrete walls are even _remotely_ like modern concrete, Han's blaster *still* delivers two-ton bags of kick and ass.

The blast didn't even pass through his body.

You can't have the two blaster bolts of the same power not go through a squishy body AND be able to take chunks out of concrete above a launchpad. That either requires awesome body armor on Mr. Greedo, or a blaster with settable power levels. Choose one.

(Nuuukes Iiiin Spaaaace)

Any thing in that zone is vaporized.

Stop pretending to know anything about how an atomic bomb works, kid. The zone where the detonation reaches millions of degrees C is in the small uranium/plutonium core, and vaporizes it. The rest of the energy escapes as gamma rays. That's what vaporizes the outer bomb casing, and it's immediate surroundings.

Since we have never set off nukes in space all are experience, and terms are based on atmospheric effects.

Actually, we _have_ set off a few nukes at high altitudes, as high as 540 km. The behavior they show is quite different from the mushroom cloud you're 'familiar' with. Also, if terms apply in an atmosphere, why would they apply in space.

We know that most of the energy would be in the form of heat.

Which is initially inside the fissioning core, which is at 10 million K. The heat needs to then be transported out of the core before it will vaporize squat. This core is a blackbody radiating 5.6704e20 watts per square meter, the maximum irradiance occuring at 289 picometers — near the beginning of the gamma ray spectrum. In contrast, the material with the highest thermal conductivity is synthetic diamond, 2500 W/m*K. Add to this the fact that X-rays and gamma-rays have high penetrability, radiative transport is going to dominate the exchange of heat early on in the bomb's detonation, until hydrodynamic compression heating takes over.

When you mock some one for using the only terms we have you sound like an asshole. What terms would you use?

"Radiative transport" for the direct heating by radiation; "compression heating" for the heating the air in front of the shockwave after the first few microseconds of the detonation. In space, there would be no compression heating of a surrounding atmosphere. The debris sphere would expand quickly and thin out promptly. I showed that after a twentieth of a second, the 1 ton bomb reaches a density of 200 µg/m^3. Compare that to air, 1.2 kg/m^3. After a second, it's less than 50 ng/m^3. You would get no visible fireball.

You would have to make them up jerk.

"Radiative transport" is not a made-up term, nor a made-up concept.

Do you think that zone is 5' across?

Ah, pretending to have knowledge by appealing to rules of thumb that don't apply in this case, a fallacy of accident. The reason bursts in an atmosphere have a large vaporization zone is because there are tons of superheated air in direct contact with you in this zone, frying you by extended contact. But the reason the rules of thumb you're using work is because they are calculated for a known environment. Where the large fireball does not form, but in fact, disappates rapidly (such as in a vaccuum), the heating is much less.

Yes, that is 10 kilometers every second - in one twentieth of a second, about one frame of film, the main body of the vapor cloud would be about the size of a Star Destroyer! Assuming we started from a 1 metric ton warhead (as we've seen, the Death Star itself makes up very little of the cloud), that's a cloud that is 200 µg per cubic meter in density. Yes, MICROGRAMS per cubic meter. Not very dense.

It took a lot longer for the DS to blow up in ROTJ, and that one was bigger.

Um. What are you talking about? I was explaining why we should not see a fireball from a nuke in space. And a bigger station would imply a _longer_ time to explode, not shorter.

You don't know how much the armor would be heated. Heat transfer would be dominated by radiation, which is an unknown value since we do not know the albedo of the armor in the gamma ray spectrum. Flying through a sun's core is a different feat altogether.

And what about the crew dying from the gamma rays. no shield remember

First off, you have _not_ proved no shields, over a millitary object which if shields are availible, _should have them_.

Secondly, if the albedo of the armor in the gamma rays is very good, it will be reflected back out into space, and not harm the crew.

Thirdly, we did see some effects inside the Death Star as a result of the proton torpedoes, an unknown distance from them. Which are filled with air, and therefore may form a fireball inside, complete with shockwave.

(Stormtroopers)

You mean the same blasters that would get more and more powerful to penetrate better and better protection? How do you know the troopers were killed? Armor does its job if it prevents a fatal wound.

We never see them moving around wounded. They never call for medics, they just drop dead.

You mean they just drop. They may be unconscious. Unconscious people are unable to call for medics, too.

And you mean the sling shots that wrapped around the soft-socked necks of the stormtroopers, where there would be a weak point due to its design?

Face it their chumps, defeated by teddy bears. They would have a tough time conquering Munchkinland. Hobbits are tougher then the Teddy Bears, and much smarter. They better keep out of the Shire.

Now you're just posturing. Unless you can present proof that Ewoks cannot outwrestle a hobbit or munchkin.

All it seems to do is make them impersonal, and limit their field of vision.

Stormtrooper HUDs are canon.

May be but they just don't use them well.

How do you know that? All the Stupid Trooper moments you can cite are in situaions where they would be ordered not to interfere. They had no trouble capturing the Tantive, no trouble routing Hoth, and were winning Endor until the Rebels and the Ewoks got heavy fire support.

No wonder they're out of practice!

There just off camera. Millions of ground troops on each side died in the Dominion War.

Nevertheless, we don't see big ground battles in ST. We do see them in SW.

wrong, phasers still can do what they always did, there just used at lower setting in most stories.

I have NEVER, EVER seen a phaser blow up a PENCIL. You know... something that actually takes ENERGY! It's all "magical disappearing act." Want me to be impressed by the MDA? Quantify it, and prove it.

(AT-ST and Bradleys)

Logs that big? Yes, they would.

Very wrong. They can crash through brick walls. and have a house fall down on them and keep going.

Neither a house nor a brick wall is a redwood-sized log, moron.

A car can ram them and it won't take it out, they need to be loaded with explosive to do that.

A car is not a redwood-sized log either, moron.

A Bradley weighs about 30 tons. A 4 m diameter x 40 m length Redwood log easily weighs 250 tons. Who do _you_ think would win an argument?

The rolling logs would have no effect on tracked vehicles, you can't trip them. You might damage a wheel on a Striker, but they have 8.

AT-STs aren't tracked.

You zoned out again, I was talking about a Bradley.

That was my point, you goddamned moron. You're comparing a tracked aspect of a tracked vehicle with a non-tracked vehicle. The comparison between the AT-ST and the Bradley is obviously inappropriate.

A Bradley carries 6 riflemen, who would dismount in this type of terrain.

An AT-ST is legged.

They still need infantry support.

And you know this because...?

Armor needs infantry support.

The AT-ST is a scout.

So is a Bradley. The M3 version is a Cavalry vehicle.

A cavalry vehicle is not a scout.

Blah blah blah. AT-ST's are not equivalent to bradleys, moron. They're scouts, whose main defense is their speed and active balance. You see an AT-ST weather several meter-wide boulders being lobbed at them, because they could ride the punch, as it were, and soften the blow. Riding the punch would enable them to get away with less armor and be lighter and quicker. It would also leave them more vulnerable to pancaking.

Bradley's are scouts to moron. Armored Cavalrey uses M3 Bradleys.

A cavalry vehicle is not a scout. Where the hell did you get this idea?

A recon unit of an armored unit is offen made up of Bradleys. AT-ST like Walkers are stupid machines, You can see them from miles away in any kind of open country, and their high profile makes them easy targets.

And you know this because...?

Silly lab boy, what do you think the Hud shows? Does he use radar, inferred, a type of sonar? Or does he just share data with other units, a tactical display?

How should I know? But why do you assume that Luke, a literal fresh-off-the-farm farmboy would even know how to turn the HUD _on_, let alone scroll thorugh its features?

(Retcons)

When was the novelization written? Was it after the fan looking frame by frame introduced the idea into the SW mythos? In more then 30 years of talking to SW fans, yes even at conventions, no one ever mentionioned planetary shields. It's never mentioned in TV programs about SW Tech. It's never been mentioned in any panel I was on discussing the science in science fiction.

It doesn't even matter when planetary shields entered the SW mythos. They're there now, officially sanctioned and implied in all Lucasfilm materials.

In every discussion I ever had on this topic, the SW fans all ways conceded the superiority of Trek tech, attacking it by calling it magic. They based their position the Empire would win on it's militaristic mind set, numbers, and the fact their ships are so much bigger.

Did you get the cirriculum vitae of all those SW fans you've talked to? What, they didn't have them? Too bad for you, then, because their scientific credibility is exactly jack over squat.

(misc science)

Wow Tom I'm so impressed, you learned about the hydrogen matallic core of Jupiter. Only the smartest people on earth know about that.

Idiot! I learned _how much pressure_ is needed to turn hydrogen metallic, about ~25 GPa. I'd never been clear on that before. "The hydrogen metallic core of Jupiter" is NOT a precise set of conditions hydrogen turns metallic.

I consider the ability to think through the implications of _any_ observation to be very worthwhile. Being able to understand why a Death Star is impossible in our universe and what has to change to make it possible is good, fun mental exercise. It's like cross-country biking for your brain!

What your doing is more like sophistry, a form of intellectual dishonesty.

Please demonstrate why what I said was sophistry.

When I didn't fall into the trap and called you a liar, you point out the truth that you were hoping I'd forget and then accuse me of calling you names. Only you _are_ a liar. You lied by trying to misdirect me; by trying to pretend that lasers had anything to do with turbolasers.

You talk like a paranoid delusional. If I wanted to be dishonest, I wouldn't have mentioned SW laser don't act like laser, thus conceding the point, that they may not be lasers. It's a sign I was trying to be objective. Your reacting like a nut who's delusions are being attacked. You lash out at the one attacking the delusion. "Your only trying to trick me".

Sorry. "You're _STUPID_ or lying, but dishonest in any case." Is that better?

Here's your exact words to Mike Wong (emphesis mine):

Weapons in SW are stated to be _lasers_, (Ion cannon aside) though they don't look or act that way, a lot of the time. _Laser energy_ just burns it's target, no blast effects. Poor weapons for bombardments from space. _Lasers_ can be countered in several ways. Refraction is a simple low tech way in use today. wide band adjustable shields would find it easy to jam their wavelength frequency. ST ships do this in most combat stories, lasers are in a low wavelength, by the nature of what a laser is. For them it's a low tech weapon, easly countered.

Though you give a passing nod that "turbolasers are not lasers" fact, you then go on discussing the shortcomings of lasers and how they may be countered by ST powers. Excuse me, but if SW powers don't use lasers, how is this discussion of any relevance to the matter at hand, whether or not SW can spank ST like a little brat.

So, if you're not lying, you're still being dishonest by using a red herring fallacy, a fallacy of relevance. Fallacies of relevance have only one purpose, to distract. My accusation still stands.

"I know you want to kill me, I'll kill you first".

I know you have the emotional age of a two-year-old, and I am confident you have neither the resources nor the balls to carry through with an internet-rage-fueled murder. That you seem to think that I would even be thinking of preemptive murder... sort of betrays a certain paranoia in yourself, doncha think?

Tom were not talking about science, were contrasting works of fiction.

Is this debate as a whole not about ST vs SW? And how does this objection dismiss the fact that science does indeed have a gold standard?

Go back to school, kid. Temperature isn't heat.

At my age it's nice to called a kid.

It saddens me to hear that you are not a kid. If you were, you'd have an excuse for your nonexistent grasp on science, mathematics, and logic, as well as a chance to correct them.

It's sure not a targeting system, because their shooting sucks.

They only demonstrate this sucky targeting in situations where they'd been ordered not to kill, but make it look good.

You like to use magic catch all phrases with out really under standing what it really means. Talk about nukes in space.

You mean _you_ don't understand what they really mean, so when I use the terms, you assume that I must be bluffing.

Reality check, fool! I have demonstrated far more knowledge about the details of a nuclear explosion alone than you have ever demonstrated on _any_ subject. I know enough detail such that I can extrapolate to the vaccuum environment. I even know that the US has detonated nuclear weapons on the very edge of space, so that the ideas that I presented have even been tested! On the other hand, you can only continue to use the stupid rules of thumb you've picked up from god-knows-where, which are clearly designed for use in an atmosphere (shockwave blast radius, anyone?), and apply them in space, which is a MASSIVE fallacy of accident.

You have performed _not one_ calculation. You can respond to my high figures only with incrudelity, as if your limited, uneducated experience is any guide at all to what would happen in reality. You have made _basic errors_ in science, like equating power with energy, calling magic disappearing acts 'vaporization', and even showing defects in thinking, such as the fallacy of accident.

I have watched both for 30 years, 40 for Trek, and have formed a good appraisal of both.

Unlike you, I know what the fuck I'm doing.

I'm going to snip your wanking because it's too long and this has gone long enough already.

--- CUT HERE ---

Sorry for the humongus character count. I'll try for more brevity next time.

[Deathstalker]

Just a late night observation:

ROTJ novelization p.071: At the center of the briefing room was a large, circular light-table, projected above which a holographic image of the unfinished Imperial Death Star hovered beside the Moon of Endor, whose scintillating protective deflector shield encompassed them both.
That's what you call a Retcon, it's contradicted by what's shown on screen. What's on screen is canon, because it's a movie. If it was a movie based on a book the book would be canon.


The fact that the Endor planetary-covering shield was not part of the _Rebel diagram_ is canon, but diagrams are always distortions of reality. The shield around Endor was obviously omitted for clarity in the film. The page from the ROTJ novelization strongly suggests that Endor did have that shield.

Endor did have a shield. When the rebel team was heading for the moon, they had to transmit a clearance code to get the shield lowered. They were heading the forest moon with "parts and technical crew" not heading to the DS. If there is no shield covering Endor, why the need to lower it? It's in the film. He could argue that it is only a local or theater shield, but that makes it vulnerable. A full planetary shield makes the moon and it's generator invulnerable.[/quote]

[Chris Parr]

I have NEVER, EVER seen a phaser blow up a PENCIL. You know... something that actually takes ENERGY! It's all "magical disappearing act." Want me to be impressed by the MDA? Quantify it, and prove it.

Well, there was that TNG episode, "The Ensigns of Command" where Data uses a phaser to blast an aquaduct. No "magical disappearing act", but an actual, honest to god explosion.

Anyway, here's the link to the clip on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFzzoXEum3A[/i]

[Vympel]

I have NEVER, EVER seen a phaser blow up a PENCIL. You know... something that actually takes ENERGY! It's all "magical disappearing act." Want me to be impressed by the MDA? Quantify it, and prove it.

Well, there was that TNG episode, "The Ensigns of Command" where Data uses a phaser to blast an aquaduct. No "magical disappearing act", but an actual, honest to god explosion.

Anyway, here's the link to the clip on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFzzoXEum3A[/i]

You mean where the phaser glow runs up water (doing nothing to the water) and just causes an explosion at each pipe juncture? Come on.

[Wyrm]

Hey, I just noticed this in my inbox. It's not a reply to my last message because it's dated before my reply was sent, but it means that our friend is a Darktard. I fired off a reply:

After addition research on the "Death Star Anomaly" I made some interesting findings.

I see you found Darkstar's site. This is not "new data". It's old data.

1. The DSs power source. In the canon Novelisation of ANH we are told the DS destruction was caused by "The liberated energy of a small artificial sun." That is a description of fusion power. It matches perfectly with what we see in the reactor seen in RTOJ. It's fusion plan and simple, stated by an original canon source. Not a rewrite years later from fans or noncanon source engaged in one upsmenship.

Bullshit. You have not proved that the glowy stuff is plasma. Furthermore, fusion does not define "sun"-ness, or being a star. About ten percent of all stars in the milky way are white dwarfs. These stars shine by their own residual heat, not fusion. Neutron stars shine by the slowing of their rotation. What defines a star is its luminosity, not its power source.

2. Power requirements of the Death Star. The calculation 1E*38J isbased on a brute force calculation of the energy needed to do the job. The Novel states that the "Super Laser", converts matter into energy. It is some kind of conversion weapon.

Lie.

Source: ANH novelization p.178: Theoretically, no weapon could penetrate the exceptionally dense stone of the ancient temple, but Luke had seen the shattered remains of Alderaan and knew that for those in the incredible battle station the entire moon would present simply another abstract problem in mass-energy conversion.

There is no mention of the superlaser in that paragraph. Furthermore, if it's the superlaser that does the mass-energy conversion directly on the planet, it should be self-starting and automatic. There would be no calculation involved. The "abstract problem in mass-energy conversion" is a calculation of the fuel needed to generate a superlaser bolt of sufficent power.

like an antimatter beam? For this to blow up Alderaan, it only needs to convert 1/5,000 of the mass of the planet. This gives you an energy requirement in the area of 1.1E*21J power, according to the "ST-v-SW.Net site.

False, and a lie. Again, a superlaser able to ignite the matter in a planet so easily should be self-starting and self-propagating. A gain of 5000 times over the course of a quarter second means a gain of 6.25e14 over the course of a second. It would take only 22 seconds for the planet to be destroyed by the energy equivalent of one kilogram of mass coupled with the superlaser effect. This is planetary destruction dirt cheap, my friend.

That power requirment is with in the scope of a huge fusion reactor 17 km across, for the DS1. This is the same method of attack used by the "Dooms Day Machine", which then sucked in planetary debris to feed it's mass converter drive.

Lie. The Doomsday Machine deconstructed planets for fuel. Different process.

3. In conclusion to the DS anomaly, the whole thing was explained at the time of ANH. All the subsequent BS about Hypermatter is an effort to fix a nonexistent problem. Perhaps it was trying to solve another problem? The SW vs. ST debate. The SW people needed to redefine their power source to surpass ST Matter/Antimatter, and scale up every thing from there. They needed to create facts to support a desired out come. Sounds like a creationist, not a scientific method.

Lie. The destruction of Alderaan has been studied by astrophysicist Curtis Saxton. There is nothing in that explosion that requires anything beyond mass-energy transfer, save for the fire-rings, which may be easily explained by the presence of a planetary shield (which we know exist, your protestations not withstanding). Robert Scott Anderson has his own "theory" of some sort of chain reaction, a "theory" with no mechanism, no predictions, and no supporting evidence... and therefore, not a theory.

Evaluating Star Destroyers, for a general fleet engagement.

1. Now having established the power source for Imperial forces we come down quite a few orders of magnitude from a Ventnor SD putting out 3.6x10*24 watts per second. DS1s reactor is a cylinderabout 17km by 9km. If the reactor of the classic Imperial SD is about 1/4cubic km we get a rough estimate of about 22,000 time less power assuming = power density. If the DS1 had an out put of say 1.2E*21J we get some thing like 6E*15J. That is still an awesome figure unless your a megalomaniac.

The output of a generator is measured in WATTS, you scientific ignoramus. That is Joules of energy produced _per second_.

Since this entire line of argument is based on a faulty premise (that you successfully have shown that the DS superlaser shotput of Alderaan required less than 1e38 J) it can be safely dismissed.

2. How Turbo Lasers are used in battle. In the novelisation of ANH we are told each turbo laser is powered by it's own turbine generator. They make a huge amount of noise, and generate smoke. This smoke effect is shown in one of the Clone Wars movies. That seems to indicate a chemical combustion source to make smoke, that or the circuits burn every time you use them, not very good. That indicates they don't drew power from the main reactor, and so are limited to the out put of the Turbo Generator. Were did all the Gigatons go?

You're thinking of a _gas_ turbine generator. Steam turbine generators generate no smoke in and of themselves; the pollution and smoke of such a plant is dependant totally on the method you use to boil the water. A nuclear reactor generates no smoke, after all.

What we see in Clone Wars are the turbolasers firing off shells (you can see the casings!). What that indicates is that a turbolaser bolt has a physical component to them, probably tibanna gas (as stated in official sources). Of course, it is a gas with unknown properties, but any complex gas will probably produce a fine condensate residue when heated to high temperatures. This easily explains the "smoke."

And again, names are deceptive. I once envisioned a "fusion turbine engine", which magnetohydrodynamically converted the hot plasma of a fusion chamber directly into rotary motion, in analogy to how a steam turbine

3. The novel further states each turbo laser is targeted by it's own crew. This means there is no central fire control, which I find amazing. They are using the same system used by naval ships 100 years ago, each turret is aimed by it's own gun captain. Even by WWI the worlds leading navies, lead by the British were developing central fire control systems, with primitive aiming computers, to bring the guns into line. Still this explains a lot about the kindly put "Uneven gunnery performance", seen in all the movies. Individual gun captains would have to be assigned targets by the ships weapons officer, or left to their own discretion. "Batteries 1-16 engage the nearest enemy cruiser.""Batteries 17-28 stand by to engage approaching fighters on the starboard side." "All port batteries standby to engage the lead enemy capital ship on the turn, as they come to bare. After 6 rounds, all even batteriesprepare to engage fighters, all odd batteries continue firing at will on the lead ship. Forward batteries are authorized to engage targets of opportunity." As you can see this is a clumsy way of fighting a ship, that's why we don't do it that way any more.

The existence of an independent fire crew does not preclude central fire control. Indeed, it's desireable to have an individual fire crew in any case. If command pathways to central fire control are lost, there's always giving individual orders to fall back on.

Evaluating Starships in a general fleet engagement.

1. all fire control is centrally controlled, with only manual back up. Power is feed to beam weapons directly from main power systems. The actual attack is directed by computer control, TOS "Arena". Targeting is performed by ships sensors, not individual weapon stations. Targeting data links are shared between ships, like the USN naval tactical data system,NTDS, going back to the 60s, and today's AEGIS. Targeting is very refined, ably to target critical areas. Target weapons, engines, and so on. The Tactical officer sets the parameters of what the computer will do, like AEGIS. The computer is programmed witha number of preset attack and evasion maneuvers, Picard in "Yesterdays Enterprise" "Attack pattern Seara".

Said as if SD cannot do this; the existence of individual fire teams does not preclude central fire control. Furthermore, dispite all this fancy tech, ST ships never seem to engage each other past spitting distance.

SDs never evade, they lack the maneuverability.

You mean, _relative_ lack of maneuverablity between similar foes. Perhaps SD ships can't outmaneuver each other due to complete pairity, so they have to outfight each other.

This gives a great deal of flexibility, and speed to the captain in planning and executing complex tactical maneuvers.

Which we've never seen. "Maneuver Riker 2" was the Enterprise-D moving out of the way of the Borg tractor beam. That's so simple it hardly qualifies as a maneuver.

It makes it much easier for an admiral to hold his fleet together as a unit, and avoid the tendency of a battle to break down into individual ship actions. Admiral Ack-Bar's order to concentrate all fire on the SSD was about the simplest and easiest and best order he could have given.

You see none of his other orders, but we cannot conclude they weren't given.

Every one could under stand what he was supposed to do.

This is a given in ANY order.

Beyond that things get more complex and start to break down. The Japanese lost the battle off Samar during the "Battle of Lytle Gulf" because ADM Kurita lost control of his fleet. Shit happens.

2. The conclusion is obvious. Federation Star Fleet has a huge CCC and tactic advantage in a fleet engagement over the Imperial Star Fleet.

Again, individual fire control teams do not preclude a CCC in Imperial ships. Furthermore, if ST ships have superior maneuverability, the certainly don't show it.

Evaluations of Durasteel vs. Tritainium.

1. In the novelisation of ROTS Durasteel is shown to melt in lava. That is less then the melting point of the Nickel Steel used in the blades of turbo fan jet engines. It may be very hard, and able to resist blast and kinetic damage very well, but not heat. Like today we can make aluminum as hard as steel, but takes a lot less heat.

Ordinary steel melts in hot lava. Obviously, different grades of steel have different thermal properties. This alloy of durasteel obviously had a lot of something else in it. Perhaps iron to make it cheaper.

If you knew anything about materials science, you'd know this.

2. Tritanium is stated to be 21 times harder then Diamonds. It cannot be melted by 24th century science. It can only be shaped by molecular weaving, when it is made. A hand phaser on force 16 can only chip it "Obsession".

Hardness and melting point are largely irrelevant to material strength. If you knew anything about materials science, you'd know this. Being unmeltable to their own science, having to be prepared using a special molecular-level process, would make it _very_ expensive to work and rarely used.

Now for some observations of my own.

Fundamental observation: SW powers are able to build fully mobile battlestations of 900 km in diameter. No ST power has built an equivalent. This speaks directly to the superiority of SW material design. You can't build big movable things unless you have very strong materials. Size matters.

Fundamental observation: Said fully moble battlestations are able to survive being smacked in the face by over 2000 teratons per square kilometer, or 2 gigatons per square meter. This is a lower limit — and and almost much bigger due to the "lumpiness" of the debris cloud. If the DS has no shields, then for Luke's X-Wing to produce that much smoke, it must pump more than 2 GT into the Death Star with each shot to produce the vapor clouds we see. So you either have to admit tough armor, or tough shields. Choose your poison. (And it gets worse. To even produce that much metal vapor, assuming a Death Star of iron, Luke's quad guns must spit 60 GJ per shot. But this shouldn't be surprising: to lift a 20 ton spacecraft into orbit takes thousands of GJ. I told you interesting drives implies weapons of mass destruction!)

[Peptuck]

I like how he says that Starfleet has superior CCC abilities compared to Star Wars fleets without providing any examples of said superior CCC capabilities in the first place.

[Batman]

Since when is TAS canon, anyway?

[Patrick Degan]

Hey, I just noticed this in my inbox. It's not a reply to my last message because it's dated before my reply was sent, but it means that our friend is a Darktard. I fired off a reply:

After addition research on the "Death Star Anomaly" I made some interesting findings.

I see you found Darkstar's site. This is not "new data". It's old data.

1. The DSs power source. In the canon Novelisation of ANH we are told the DS destruction was caused by "The liberated energy of a small artificial sun." That is a description of fusion power. It matches perfectly with what we see in the reactor seen in RTOJ. It's fusion plan and simple, stated by an original canon source. Not a rewrite years later from fans or noncanon source engaged in one upsmenship.

Bullshit. You have not proved that the glowy stuff is plasma. Furthermore, fusion does not define "sun"-ness, or being a star. About ten percent of all stars in the milky way are white dwarfs. These stars shine by their own residual heat, not fusion. Neutron stars shine by the slowing of their rotation. What defines a star is its luminosity, not its power source.

2. Power requirements of the Death Star. The calculation 1E*38J isbased on a brute force calculation of the energy needed to do the job. The Novel states that the "Super Laser", converts matter into energy. It is some kind of conversion weapon.

Lie.

Source: ANH novelization p.178: Theoretically, no weapon could penetrate the exceptionally dense stone of the ancient temple, but Luke had seen the shattered remains of Alderaan and knew that for those in the incredible battle station the entire moon would present simply another abstract problem in mass-energy conversion.

There is no mention of the superlaser in that paragraph. Furthermore, if it's the superlaser that does the mass-energy conversion directly on the planet, it should be self-starting and automatic. There would be no calculation involved. The "abstract problem in mass-energy conversion" is a calculation of the fuel needed to generate a superlaser bolt of sufficent power.

like an antimatter beam? For this to blow up Alderaan, it only needs to convert 1/5,000 of the mass of the planet. This gives you an energy requirement in the area of 1.1E*21J power, according to the "ST-v-SW.Net site.

False, and a lie. Again, a superlaser able to ignite the matter in a planet so easily should be self-starting and self-propagating. A gain of 5000 times over the course of a quarter second means a gain of 6.25e14 over the course of a second. It would take only 22 seconds for the planet to be destroyed by the energy equivalent of one kilogram of mass coupled with the superlaser effect. This is planetary destruction dirt cheap, my friend.

That power requirment is with in the scope of a huge fusion reactor 17 km across, for the DS1. This is the same method of attack used by the "Dooms Day Machine", which then sucked in planetary debris to feed it's mass converter drive.

Lie. The Doomsday Machine deconstructed planets for fuel. Different process.

3. In conclusion to the DS anomaly, the whole thing was explained at the time of ANH. All the subsequent BS about Hypermatter is an effort to fix a nonexistent problem. Perhaps it was trying to solve another problem? The SW vs. ST debate. The SW people needed to redefine their power source to surpass ST Matter/Antimatter, and scale up every thing from there. They needed to create facts to support a desired out come. Sounds like a creationist, not a scientific method.

Lie. The destruction of Alderaan has been studied by astrophysicist Curtis Saxton. There is nothing in that explosion that requires anything beyond mass-energy transfer, save for the fire-rings, which may be easily explained by the presence of a planetary shield (which we know exist, your protestations not withstanding). Robert Scott Anderson has his own "theory" of some sort of chain reaction, a "theory" with no mechanism, no predictions, and no supporting evidence... and therefore, not a theory.

I called it, didn't I? I knew this guy would prove to be a Darkstar acolyte, and that the Solarmonite Theory of Alderaan's destruction would eventually start rearing its ugly head in this exchange.

[Darth Wong]

Ordinary steel melts in hot lava.

Actually, lava doesn't melt plain iron, which has a melting point of 1810K whereas lava typically hovers at 1500K or less. Therefore, even if durasteel were actually bog-standard iron, it should not melt in lava unless the lava is much, much hotter than lava that we see on Earth.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

Is there any way to estimate the viscosity of the lava in that scene? IIRC, as a general rule of thumb, the less viscous the lava material is, the hotter it is generally found at.

[Wyrm]

Ordinary steel melts in hot lava.

Actually, lava doesn't melt plain iron, which has a melting point of 1810K whereas lava typically hovers at 1500K or less. Therefore, even if durasteel were actually bog-standard iron, it should not melt in lava unless the lava is much, much hotter than lava that we see on Earth.

Hmmm... possibilities:

Given that lava glows by blackbody radiation, but readily forms black crusts, the Mufastar lava has done similiarly, only more so. The top of it is cooler than the stuff than melted the durasteel...

The durasteel is cut with some really cheap, low-temperature metal, like lead.

The lava is really, really noxious, and eroded the durasteel partially by chemical action. (NASTY!)

Or something different. Suggestions?

[Aratech]

Well, they were mining the lava for something. Is there anything in real life that would make that worthwhile? Or can we assume its something native to the GFFA?

[Connor MacLeod]

The shields around the facility obviously failed, and the lava eruptions managed to get up onto that walkway thingy. When that happened, I figured that what we observe is attirbutable to some sort of mechanical failure failure - perhaps the lava DID weaken the structure somewhat, especially if that facility was using tensor fields (the fact that a rather narrow and flimsy-looking walkway was supporting a large mass on the end of its arm doubtless can be mentioned.)

At no time, I might add, ,did we actually *see* any durasteel on Mustafar melting, and there was also a grgeat deal MORE of the facility exposed that didn't heat up or melt noticably either - including the bit actually floating on the lava. That structure itself endured bare contact with the lava even as it went over that lava waterfall, and didn't even seem to exhibit any noticable heating that I could tell.

and of course one could simply point to part of the Invisible hand (Damaged in combat, ,no less) surviving atmospheric reentry highly intact - a feat that can only be achieved by the Space Shuttle under certain circumstances and with special materials. And the IH is, like most Separatist Vessels, not a true warship or not nearly as durably designed as a Venator.

and we know TIE fighters can enter/escape atmosphere without difficutlies ( as do other ships, but that might be argued to be due to shielding.) We see TIEs doing it in TESB (out of a gas giant, no less, whose gravity is stronger than a standard planet's.)

Edit: And stormies can wlak around out on the surface of the planet without being discomfited. I Daresay that says something about their materials science.

[Connor MacLeod]

Ordinary steel melts in hot lava.

Actually, lava doesn't melt plain iron, which has a melting point of 1810K whereas lava typically hovers at 1500K or less. Therefore, even if durasteel were actually bog-standard iron, it should not melt in lava unless the lava is much, much hotter than lava that we see on Earth.

Doesn't rock (at least going by the usual assumptions we take "rock" to mean in sci fi analysis) take more energy to melt per kg than iron? Or were you also accounting for differencecs in density in your statement (ie given equal volumes)?

[Surlethe]

The shields around the facility obviously failed, and the lava eruptions managed to get up onto that walkway thingy. When that happened, I figured that what we observe is attirbutable to some sort of mechanical failure failure - perhaps the lava DID weaken the structure somewhat, especially if that facility was using tensor fields (the fact that a rather narrow and flimsy-looking walkway was supporting a large mass on the end of its arm doubtless can be mentioned.)

That's an interesting take: positing that what happened to the long arms extending over the lava was similar to what happened in the WTC. That is, heated up, the metal will probably lose most of its ability to bear a load, and break. It makes sense to me, but I'm sure Mike can shed more light on it.

Doesn't rock (at least going by the usual assumptions we take "rock" to mean in sci fi analysis) take more energy to melt per kg than iron? Or were you also accounting for differencecs in density in your statement (ie given equal volumes)?

It may have a higher latent heat of fusion, but that doesn't matter to the melting points. Example: water has a specific latent heat of fusion of 334 J/g, while ammonia has one of 339 J/g, but ammonia melts at -75 C, while water melts at 0 C. So if you put liquid ammonia at less than 0 C on ice, even though the energy that was required to melt the ammonia is greater than the energy that is required to melt the ice, the ice will not melt.

[Wyrm]

More from Moron Bob, and my reply:

Hi Tomas. First off you had me shaking my head, and laughing about you saying I issued a death threat against you. If you read my post I was making uplines for a paranoid. It was a witticism, and since it went over your head it shows your witless. It also confirmsmy humor was well directed, you are paranoid.

You have a reading comprehention problem:

At 7:23 PM -0400 8/9/08, Thomas R Jefferys wrote:

"I know you want to kill me, I'll kill you first".

I know you have the emotional age of a two-year-old, and I am confident you have neither the resources nor the balls to carry through with an internet-rage-fueled murder. That you seem to think that I would even be thinking of preemptive murder... sort of betrays a certain paranoia in yourself, doncha think?

Only an idiot would construe this as any sort of death threat. I was clearly mocking the very idea I would be threatened by you.

Second delusional. When did I say SDs are useless? I never have, just the opposite, I keep saying there more useful then the DS. The DS is a WMD of limited use, and SDs are general purpose forces of great flexibility, and are more cost effective. My contention is there are no planetary shields, which by you own logic obviates the logic of building the DS. So when you keep saying I think SDs are weak or useless your showing your delusional.

Another lie. Or a communication problem.

Finally trying to use some logic. Yes you have a point. The guns on fighters can hurt ships but only from very close range. SW was modeled on WWII. In WWII air craft could cripple, or sink ships with bombs, and rockets. To do that they had to get very close, and risk being shot down. Ships could engage each other at much greater range. Point blank fire from fighters score mostly hits. The longer range fire from capitol ships miss allot. Energy weapons lose power over distance. A turbo laser blast at long range, may not be much more powerful then blasts from fighter guns at point blank range. Lucas wanted fighters to shoot up ships that's why we saw it on screen. We have to guess what capital ships can do to each other. I was hoping to see that, but in 6 movies we never saw 2 big ships shoot it out.

We never see all this capitol ship fire hitting the ship. The fire your crediting is implied. We see a SD in the back ground blowing up under fire. We see no details. The only specific damage on the SSD is from fighters.

Here, you're still trying to get away from the point that cruisers could mount the same type of weapon that fighters do and simply spam each other to death. You point out that the only specific damage caused to the SSD is the fighters. You argue that the turbolaser fire of the cruisers are weakened by distance, and "may not be much more powerful then[sic] blasts from fighter guns at point blank range", as if you know what the fuck you're talking about, and that their shots would miss alot, as if the sheer number of bolts flying about wouldn't make hitting something nearly certain. (That's why I said "spam each other to death within moments".)

your example of500km asteroids as weapons shows you have idea what your talking about. No shield could keep out some thing like that.

The film I showed you was of a 500 km striking the _modern-day Earth_, obviously unshielded. It was indended to show that the energy of the impact would be conducted around the _entire_ Earth from one smack hit just south of Japan, in the ocean, away from any major city and therefore in an unshielded area. It was intended to show that a partially shielding of a planet would be useless against a BDZ: the energy would simply be conducted around your planet and wipe you out anyway. However, a _full_ shield built by a sufficiently advanced society could save a planet from such an impact.

Not that I'd expect you to understand.

It seems most of the none sense you guys spew out is from the EU. Lucas him self said the EU is not his Universe. He said it's some type of parallel universe. Nothing in the EU has any effect on SWs continuity, It's not canon. You on the other hand ignore canon, the Novelizations, they are canon.

Another lie. Here's the quote, taken from Darkstar's own site:

STARLOG: "The Star Wars Universe is so large and diverse. Do you ever find yourself confused by the subsidiary material that's in the novels, comics, and other offshoots?

LUCAS: "I don't read that stuff. I haven't read any of the novels. I don't know anything about that world. That's a different world than my world. But I do try to keep it consistent. The way I do it now is they have a Star Wars Encyclopedia. So if I come up with a name or something else, I look it up and see if it has already been used. When I said [other people] could make their own Star Wars stories, we decided that, like Star Trek, we would have two universes: My universe and then this other one. They try to make their universe as consistent with mine as possible, but obviously they get enthusiastic and want to go off in other directions."

This is the quote Darkstar claims invalidates the EU. But if Lucas wanted to invalidate the EU in one stroke, in one to-be-quoted statement, why not just say, "The EU isn't Star Wars" and be done with it? Why all the talk of two universes if there was only One True Star Wars? Why talk about other authors participating in Star Wars, his universe? Why even the EXISTENCE of the C canon; why not shoehorn everything else into N canon and be done with it?

George Lucas knows that, even though he himself isn't beholden to the EU, the EU does shape the perception of his universe with his vision of it. Anything short of dumping the EU completely would allow this influence. Hell, even Gene Rodenberry disavowing large parts of the ST licenced material didn't prevent it. Yet he set up this entire branch of his company, LucasFilm Licencing, Ltd., in order to manage EU issues. Why spend the money if he could just say, "It doesn't count. Get over it"?

Here's another quote, this time from Cinescape:

"There are two worlds here," explained Lucas. "There's my world, which is the movies, and there's this other world that has been created, which I say is the parallel universe—the licensing world of the books, games and comic books. They don't intrude on my world, which is a select period of time, [but] they do intrude in between the movies. I don't get too involved in the parallel universe.

Again, talking about "parallel universes", yet the "parallel universe" of the EU intrudes in on his own between the movies. Does the SW universe experience wacky dimensional intrusions, with only six periods of respute?

Of course not. George is talking to ordinary people, not metaphysics woo-woos. One of the definitions of "universe" is "The sphere or realm in which something exists or takes place." His domain is in the movies. What he says happens in the movies, goes, but between the movies there are gaps, where Lucas himself has nothing to say, the EU can have a say.

Again, I have a convergence of evidence:

The existence of multiple levels of canon between G and N canon, which has NO explanation if the EU doesn't count. The fact that Lucas never disavowed the EU in a simple, unambiguous statement, which has NO explanation if the EU doesn't count, as the EU would shape his fans' perception of same. The fact that Lucas says that the EU 'universe' intrudes between the movies, his domain, which has NO explanation if the EU doesn't count. The fact that the LucasFilm canon policy is set up in an elegant way to allow George Lucas to allow him to override facts in the EU without even caring what those facts are, which has NO explanation if the facts in the EU don't count in the first place. The fact that, in the _very quote_ Darkstar cites as proof of the EU not counting, that other authors were being allowed to write Star Wars stories, which has NO explanation if the EU doesn't count.

The theory I (and other SDNettizens) subscribe to is, "The EU is canon, but has a special structure to allow George Lucas to just make movies without much added fuss," and it explains all the above facts. On the other hand, DarkStar's "The EU doesn't count," theory explains none. The evidence supports my theory, not DarkStar's.

Of course, you will now brush all of this off in favor of DarkStar's pet "theory".

You also ignore common sense and logic. For one you claimed the asteroid that took out the SD bridge in TESB had the energy of .5 megatons, so you concede thatmuch force can defeat a SDs shields, and cause critical or even fatal damage.

Except that we didn't see the required bridge debris that would be expected from such a collsion, and later EU material states that the SD survived. Furthermore, it wasn't the shields that withstood the impact, but the bridge structure itself. The captain was using a hyperwave transmission (they were using holograms), and the EU says that shields block hyperwave transmissions — therefore, the shields were _down_.

Besides, don't we _know_ what happens when we take out the bridge: the SD goes out of control!

Then you clamed that the turbo laser blasted the 40 meter asteroid with a 200 gigaton blast. So the SD set off a 200 gigaton blast 100 meters in front of it's bridge, and over it's hull, and suffered no damage? So 500 kilotons can cripple a SD but a blast 400,000 times bigger does no damage? Now from there if a SDs turbo laser put out 200 gigaton blasts then one hit would take out another SD. In fact it would take out a SSD. In fact it would take out any ship in the SW universe, including the DS .

Apples to oranges, kid. The SD that was hit with a .5 megatons was unshielded at the time, and the only _definite_ damage done was that its communications were disrupted. With a shield up, it will obviously be tougher.

Since you like to dismiss phasers as silly weapons that make things disappear, lets take a look at Turbo lasers. So their lasers? No their particle beams? No their projectile weapons? No their all 3 combined? At least the projectile component explains how the beam can burst, causing a "flak" effect.

Using cargo cult debate tactics do not work on me, cupcake. Phasers cause matter to change to an _unknown_ physical state when it makes things disappear. We don't know the final state, so we can't calculate the energy change between the initial and final states, and thus, the energy the phaser has to supply.

Unlike phasers, turbolasers _do_ make things blow up, vaporize (_properly_ vaporize, not that magical disappearing act phasers do — there's fucking vapor left over!), melt and all the things a directed energy weapon _should_ do. We can actually _measure_ the energy output of a turbolaser by appealing to the conservation of energy: changing from a _known_ initial state to another _known_ final state requires the input of a certain amount of energy, which came from the turbolaser bolt.

Their powered by a chemical turbine, but you claimed they put out gigatons of force. Those must be some chemicals.

Lie. The "turbo" in "turbolaser" does not imply turbine of any kind in the same way the "laser" in "turbolaser" does not imply lasers of any kind, much less a chemical turbine. As to the function of Tibanna gas in the turbolaser, we don't know.

You claimed they miss on purpose to force the enemy to fly in a straight line. Very amusing.

Yes, I'm sure the very basic concept of controling the enemy's movements is beyond you, armchair general. It's essentially the same purpose as suppressive fire, except that instead of keeping the enemy under cover so they can't shoot at you (hence, suppressive), we instead control its movements so that we can set up the precise disabling shot that will take the fight out of it without destroying it. Because in some cases, _destroying_ your target does not fit your mission.

We don't expect suppressive fire to hit anything, because that's not its purpose. Similarly, we don't expect the slightly misnamed bracketing fire to hit anything either, because that's not its purpose.

Not that I expect you to understand this.

You clamed independently manned, powered, and targeted weapons are better then; main reactor powered, automated, and centrally controlled systems.

Lie. I said that a fire station which has a fire control team does not _preclude_ central control. I have my original message on my HD, you know.

And your wrong, the independent fire control is not a back up, it's their standard mode.

Prove it. And don't bring in the Death Star's defense systems. If the damn thing was designed around a large-scale assault, then it shouldn't be surprising the automatic systems are boggled by a few snub fighters. I wouldn't be surprised if the automatic systems simply ignore them as insignificant.

Just ignorant. The USN in WWII had the most effective anti aircraft system in the world, the MK 37, because it was centrally controlled. At the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands the USS South Dakota shot down 26 Japanese aircraft. She could never have done that with out central fire control. Do you think we should convert our AEGIS ships to manual control of individual manned launchers?

No. I said it's good to have a backup.

You clamed the phase "Artificial Sun" does not suggest fusion, because white dwarfs, and neutron stars have no fusion going on in them. There not suns, all suns are stars, but not all stars are suns. A sun by definition has fusion going on inside it, yellow suns, white suns, red suns, orange suns, even blue suns, and combinations there of. Live with it, the novel described fusion. What we saw in the second DS reactor showed fusion, The drive systems on SDs showed fusion.

Heh, I wonder when this argument would turn up.

"Sun" is a common term, not an astrophysical one. The term you're looking for is 'main sequence star'. We knew that the Sun was a star long before we knew it was powered by nuclear fusion. If it turned out (as many in the 19th century had theorized) that the sun was powered by the Kelvin-Helmholtz process, it would not have changed the definition of "sun".

But even if we take your assumption to its logical conclusion, it means that these plants confine their plasma by way of gravity, the way main sequence stars do. But to do that, you need at least 0.12 solar masses bearing down on it. Therefore, the ships of the Empire are on the order of 10,000 km just to accomindate their stellar cores.

Or do you conceed that the quote can only be taken seriously by widening the definition of "sun"?

Massive hydrogen mining suggests fusion. What do you think Londo was mining on a gas giant? methane?

Cloud City was a _Tibanna_ gas mine. And before you say this is an EU thing, Han says this in the film.

Furthermore, any galactic civilization will be mining hydrogen, because together with oxygen, you get the most vital compound you will need in space: water. Mining methane will allow you to produce plastics and other synthetics.

With hypermatter you don't need to mine methane, because the hypermatter BS would produce unlimited amounts as a byproduct.

Why do you assume hypermatter will produce methane? Hypermatter itself obviously isn't nucleonic matter.

You still haven't answered the question about fighters vs capital ships. If fighters can't onlyhurt capital shipson their own, why did the Imperial fighters attack theRebelCruisers on their own?

They don't fight the Rebel cruisers. They fight the Rebel _fighters_. I thought I already went over this.

The only answer you give is "They were ordered to".

Lie. I _also_ later said that the fighters were fighting fighters and the MF.

And disobeying orders from your superior is bad, mkay? Especially when he can force-choke you over a holocom. Obeying this superior's orders will result in a longer life, no matter how much the enemy pounds at you.

That mindlessly misses the point. You suggest they engaged the Cruisers to attackfighters that were escorting them. First off there were no fighters with the cruisers, they were in a separate group getting ready to enterthe DS.

Yes, and when the DS turned out to be shielded after all, things went pear-shaped and everyone pulled up... which means that everyone would be in a mixed up hairball.

Second we saw them shooting at the cruisers. So once again why would a commander order his fighters to attack if they have no chance to hurt the enemy?

They didn't shoot the curisers for the sake of shooting the cruisers; they hit the cruisers as they were shooting at fast-juking fighters. Did you even see the film?

You clamed ST ships have short firing ranges. I guess you never watched the show.

<br> The problem is, I _have_: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBDbVPimLB0

Ranges have been stated out to 100,000 kms for phasers, and much greater for photon torpedoes.

<br> Stated figures and demonstrated figures are different.<br>

Most combat is at 40,000 km or less though.

More like 4 km or less.<br>

SW combat takes place at not much more then 1,000 km.

<br> Still better than ST.<br>

At Endor SDs at the edge of visual range are out side effective range. As close as it was, the DS never used it's turbo lasers to support their fleet at Endor.

No. It used the superlaser, which was one hit, one kill.

Was it out of range?

No, it was using the superlaser for maximum "We are going to fuck you over so bad the assholes of your families will be hurting for seventeen generations" effect.

With ST ships able to maneuver at half C,

<br> Prove it.

a sudden change of vector couldopen or close the range by 100,000s of kms in seconds. In "Yesterdays Enterprise", the Enterprise D takes such a beating because they have to cover the Enterprise C, so they couldn't maneuver, they had to just stand and take it. Watch the show and you'll know your wrong.

It took over a minute for the Enterprise C to get through the rift and set things right. Yet the rift was obviously no more than ten km away at the time. Since you obviously fail math, 10 km/60 sec is much, much, MUCH less than 1/2 c.

When you say that it'sa given that any order is understood, you showing blinding ignorance. countless battles have been lost because orders were misunderstood, or were too complex to carry out.

Lie. I said that it _should_ be understood, not that it will be understood. But then, you don't have any reading skills, so I can see how you made that mistake, you no-context bastard.

You may know about some physics, but you seem to know little about history, combat, planning, tactics, strategy, leadership, or psychology.

I'm no expert in those matters, but in this regard you are not my superior. Or my equivalent.

In short you can't evaluate themerits and demerits of the two sides because you have no frame of reference. When I say fire control methods are like comparing ships from the Russo Japanese war, with an AEGIS combat system it means nothing to you.

Do you not know what "does not preclude" means? It means that having an individual fire team does not mean there could not have been a direct central fire control. You. are. lying.

SW fanatics dismiss transporters as a device they don't have in SW,

Actually, SW _does_ have a matter transmitter (that's the generalized transporter): http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Magwit%2 ... fying_hoop

The transporter in SW is a _parlor trick_. Furthermore, the transporter in ST is a fragile process that fails if you look at it cross-eyed. The ST canon says shields block transporters, and SW has shields in spades. It's no tactical panecia.

but SW can build a light saber, as if transporters don't represent a quantum leap in science.A light Saber is just a plasma torch, it's not that impressive as a technology.

A plasma torch extending from a compact hilt many times shorter than itself, with the ability to cut through most materials in SW (who can build very impressive spacecraft: again, size matters), all without cooking an untrained user (Luke), is _extremely_ impressive.

If you put it together SW military capability is grossly inferior to ST.

To even do the things we see them capable of, the SW ships have to have phenomenal power output. WWII maneuvers were only possible in WWII because we do things in AIR, which makes things much, much easier; you have reaction mass all around you to move in great masses without expending much energy. In space, you cannot fly like an airplane unless you had _very strong_ and _very efficient_ engines. This is testiment to their power generation technologies, and if you have that much power to throw about, you can do a lot of damage.

ST, not so much.

Of course, you don't know what the fuck I'm talking about and will probably ignore this. I won't be shocked.

Only in terms of industrial base does the Empire have a clear advantage.

That's the understatement of the year! Their industrial base _alone_ would insure victory by sheer attrition.

Strategic speed may be faster,

The Empire has ships able to take them halfway across the galaxy in a day(s); compare that to Voyager's seventy YEARS at *maximum warp*.

fleet numbers are not higher then Dominion war levels. Building big things is not an advantage in it's self. In terms of fire control, shielding, automation levels, Range, fire power, tactical speed, CCC, sensors,ST has it hands down.

Range: Millennum falcon... halfway across the galaxy in a single hyperspace jump, taking about a day — Voyager would take 70 years, and it's not clear it could do it on a single tank.

Shielding, and firepower: The Enterprise would need most of its ~200 torpedo loadout to destroy an asteroid — Slave 1 shatters asteroids the same size with ease, using a single seismic charge.

The other issues, I answer with this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBDbVPimLB0

I rest my case.

Search you feelings Thomas, you know it is true. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!.

Sheesh, and you say _I'm_ the one who doesn't understand psychology? Your rhetorical tricks don't work on me, cupcake.

[Peptuck]

Building big things is not an advantage in it's self.

Amusing how he says that ST is superior in automation when they have a remarkably limited number of sapient machines and Star Wars is filled with so many self-aware droids that one entire side of the a galactic civil war used them as their primary infantry.

[Batman]

So the DS2 didn't use it's turbolasers at Endor because the rebels were out of range. It's totally not like the Emperor already ordered the ISDs not to interfere so he could demoralize the rebels with the operational superlaser.
And that already presumes the DS2 had any operational turbolasers period, leave alone ones it could bring to bear.
I'll just not bring up lighthour ranges in the EU necause Wyrm knows about them anyway and Moron Bob would just ignore them. Just as he ignores that Ackbar calling on the rebel fleet to 'concentrate all fire on that Super Star Destroyer' and one or more ISDs actially being destroyed by capship fire onscreen sort of says that yes, they were in TL range all right.

[Aratech]

Nitpick, the Ent typically carries about 275 torps on full loadout, making the Pegasus incident that much more underwhelming.

And dear God! Claims of death threats! Verily, this man has studied well and hard the playbook of Darkstar.

[Chris Parr]

So the DS2 didn't use it's turbolasers at Endor because the rebels were out of range. It's totally not like the Emperor already ordered the ISDs not to interfere so he could demoralize the rebels with the operational superlaser.
And that already presumes the DS2 had any operational turbolasers period, leave alone ones it could bring to bear.
I'll just not bring up lighthour ranges in the EU necause Wyrm knows about them anyway and Moron Bob would just ignore them. Just as he ignores that Ackbar calling on the rebel fleet to 'concentrate all fire on that Super Star Destroyer' and one or more ISDs actially being destroyed by capship fire onscreen sort of says that yes, they were in TL range all right.

Not to mention that the shield generator was located on the Moon of Endor and the Imperials wouldn't want to risk hitting it and, you know, exposing the Death Star to the Rebels hitting the main reactor with proton torpedoes and concussion missiles and blowing it up.

[Batman]

Why in Valen's name would firing on the rebels risk hitting the shield generator on Endor? If memory serves the rebels WEREN'T in-between Endor and the DS/Imperial fleet, presumably on account of the shield being in the way if nothing else.

[Chris Parr]

Oh, yeah, I forgot about that.

[Peptuck]

And that already presumes the DS2 had any operational turbolasers period, leave alone ones it could bring to bear.

They did have some guns active on the surface, visible from when Lando and Wedge are making their attack run, but still doesn't mean the Rebel fleet was in range to get blasted by the turbolasers, or if Palpatine even wanted them to be obliterated by "mere" surface weapons instead of the turbolaser.

[Swindle1984]

Has this moron actually resorted to claiming death threats were made? That's the ultimate "I just lost, hard" admission.

I wonder if Darkstar ever meets these people in person. It's probably the only way he could ever get a blowjob.