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I've got a question about the Interdictor picket-ships that the Empire has, that prevent ships from going to hyperspace. They project powerful gravity fields in an area, right?
But I've got a question. What stops the Interdictor from using this as a weapon? If they can project powerful gravities in a large area, could they not project these powerful gravities on a planet, say, 10 gravities in strength and crush every human being on the planet?
Jus' wondering. All of you fine folks who know StarWars much better than me have my permission to cane and flame me if this is a stupid theory.

This is actually quite possible, but an interdictor's cones of gravity SEEM to be too small to effectively use on a planet. Their gravity appears to be very great, however, as they can be used to propel an Interdictor significantly faster than the engines can (ref. Solo Command). I think the primary reason that they are not generally used to cause destruction on a planet is that Interdictor numbers appear to be more limited than ISD numbers by quite some margin, and an ISD can just as easily be sent to BDZ a planet, or to attack buildings and specific locations on that planet. The interdictor would, therefor, be unnecessary and less precise than an ISD, but it might be an interesting tactic to use if there was some strange reason why an Interdictor was caught by itself when it needed to seriously damage a city or a landmass.

Even dedicated "gravshock" devices are considered to be less efficient than using normal thermal means of destroying area. I'll suspect the same to be true with a non-dedicated device.

Gil Hamilton wrote:What stops the Interdictor from using this as a weapon?

This is actually an arguement rabid Trekkies are fond of. It's the "take some peice of technology and try to get it to do something just to show that it could work as a weapon, no matter how ineffective" arguement. For example, some Trekkies argue that you can set a phaser to explode. Therefore, phasers can double as grenades. Or there's the argue that once an ISD's shields are down, and it's so battle damaged that ECM is off line, a Federation vessel could beam a bomb into the ISD's reactor. See the point?

USAF Ace wrote:This is actually an arguement rabid Trekkies are fond of. It's the "take some peice of technology and try to get it to do something just to show that it could work as a weapon, no matter how ineffective" arguement. For example, some Trekkies argue that you can set a phaser to explode. Therefore, phasers can double as grenades. Or there's the argue that once an ISD's shields are down, and it's so battle damaged that ECM is off line, a Federation vessel could beam a bomb into the ISD's reactor. See the point?

I'm no rabid Trekkie, and I see your point, but I dont' see why the interdictor's gravity generators couldn't be used as a weapon. What I was putting out there was asking why specifically it would be an ineffective weapon, since I assume that many of the members here are much more knowledgeable about the Interdictor. It's just an idea, I'm not pushing it like it's mathematic truth, so don't label me a rabid Trekkie just yet, eh?

It's a lot easier and simpler to just shoot a planet. But what if the planet is shielded? The shield would stop turbolasers but not gravity, so can't interdictors be used to crush shielded targets?

Hmm, using this on a whole planet seems somewhat ulikely, but you could use it on regions of a planet, or on spaceships. It's a somewhat ineffeicient weapon, it'll need lots of energy, and time to power up. Surely would be good as a terror weapon.

Two
1. With The Grav Generators going they have to either cut back on shielding or Weapons making it a nice pretty target
2. To cover roughly a 100KM Area the best(*Read strongest) an Interducter can generate is roughly .2G to .4G, Thats enough to grap a ship out of space
To Create 10G they probably could but the *AoE would be quite small(Maybe 2KM at Best? Imagin how long THAT would take to pacfiy a planet)
And I say .2G because Fighters seem not to be affected by Interducters otherwise unwary fighters should *Spiral towards the center of the Mass show correct?

This is all pure speculation, PURE sepeculation on my part but it does explan why it can't be used as weapon and how it can be used to *Boost off other vessles like a Giant Repulserlift

But a 100km across volume of effect is relatively tiny in terms of space combat and it would be exceptionally unlikely that a starship would be caught by it compared to the sheer volume of space and given the accelerations starships in StarWars seem capable off, they could get out of it rather easily, so it wouldn't be effective from keeping them in realspace. I have trouble picturing them being effective in the first place given the scale of space warfare without being able to effect areas of space many thousands of kilometers across.

An Interdictor's area of effect must definitely cover more than 100km of space. In the Zahn trilogy, wasn't it stated that an Interdictor can generate a mass shadow equivalent in size to a good-sized star?

In any case, I have a hypothesis that the gravity field that an Interdictor is very large, but not very strong... that, contrary to natural gravity, there's no "central point" to the mass shadow, and as such, a gravity field of .2 G's near the gravity well generators would also be .2 G's near the very outer edge of the field. I'm basing this primarily on the fact that the outer boundary of an interdiction field is clearly defined, and the fact that interdiction fields are conical in shape rather than spherical. Opinions or insights on this hypothesis?

To be honset there is just so little we know about them...

SPOOFE wrote:An Interdictor's area of effect must definitely cover more than 100km of space. In the Zahn trilogy, wasn't it stated that an Interdictor can generate a mass shadow equivalent in size to a good-sized star?

In any case, I have a hypothesis that the gravity field that an Interdictor is very large, but not very strong... that, contrary to natural gravity, there's no "central point" to the mass shadow, and as such, a gravity field of .2 G's near the gravity well generators would also be .2 G's near the very outer edge of the field. I'm basing this primarily on the fact that the outer boundary of an interdiction field is clearly defined, and the fact that interdiction fields are conical in shape rather than spherical. Opinions or insights on this hypothesis?

I agree with that.

Anyway, I think that the gravity field generated is strong enough to keep a ship out of hyperspace, but too weak to use as a weapon, unless there's some sort of way to focus the field.

Actually, even .2g's could be used as a terror weapon, assuming the civilization wasn't too advanced. Can you imagine .2g's off to the side in our world? It would fuck up everything.

Interdictors create gravity wells, but all you need are enough g's to register on the target ship's sensors. Once the Gravity well is detected, the hyperdrive automatically shuts down, so the said ship doesn't smash into it.

SPOOFE wrote:An Interdictor's area of effect must definitely cover more than 100km of space. In the Zahn trilogy, wasn't it stated that an Interdictor can generate a mass shadow equivalent in size to a good-sized star?

In any case, I have a hypothesis that the gravity field that an Interdictor is very large, but not very strong... that, contrary to natural gravity, there's no "central point" to the mass shadow, and as such, a gravity field of .2 G's near the gravity well generators would also be .2 G's near the very outer edge of the field. I'm basing this primarily on the fact that the outer boundary of an interdiction field is clearly defined, and the fact that interdiction fields are conical in shape rather than spherical. Opinions or insights on this hypothesis?

Interesting, but I'm having trouble with a conical gravity field. I always assumed that when the Interdictor generated a gravity well, at whatever point it chose to generate the point, it would then radiate outward like a normal gravity well. I don't quite follow how a cone shaped gravity well would work. Is it conical with the field pulling the ship toward the Interdictor or something more esoteric?
If it's the former you could do even more fun stuff, like dispersing atmospheres off planets. Even if you could only generate a half gravity of acceleration in the opposite direction of the planets surface, that would lower the surface gravity of the area you are effecting (assuming the gravity of the planet is 1G, which a remarkable amount of planets and asteroids in StarWars seems to have ) would have a surface gravity of a half G. Over a large area as a Interdictor should logically be capable of effecting, it may be sufficent to allow the lighter gases escape (correct me if I'm wrong). Not only that, but it will create one monster of a low air pressure area. That would royally screw up the weather over the entire planet in nasty ways, like making one huge windstorm. Do it just for an hour or so to get the ball rolling.
Best of all, it will work straight through planetary shielding. Planetary shields don't block gravity, or else they'd fly free of their primary the moment they turned them on, not to mention every satillite and ship in orbit around it would suddently find themselves not orbiting the planet anymore. Incidently, I am very tired of the selectively blocking shield excuse. On Spacebattles I've got someone claiming that planetary cloaks block gravity, but selectively don't block their primary's gravity. It's made me very irritable, so as a niceness to me, please don't suggest it.