Reconsidering firepower for the neu-Canon

[The Duchess of Zeon]

No they do not, that's where the 2 gigaton turbolaser bolts come from.

[Adam Reynolds]

As for the question of neu-canon vs any other name. Why not simply use the official names: canon and legends.

Do you feel this is a subject that needs to be debated?

Not when referring to the films. Obviously it would make sense that Rebels would use numerous smaller ships.

It was my knee jerk reaction to the abysmal accuracy in the Clone Wars series and the idea that that might be influencing the technical discussion. There are too many issues in that series to consider it visually canon in the same sense as the films. I rather wish that it were legends as well, but we're stuck with it. I just hope the new movies don't make any serious references to it.

I think they were also influenced by the EU references to Imperial naval bombardments vaporizing the oceans or melting the crust of a planet. A bombardment on the order of one kiloton per square kilometer is enough to destroy pretty much all civilization on an inhabited world (unless everybody's living in well protected underground bunkers). But it takes vastly more firepower than that to boil off the seas or melt planetary crust to a depth of several kilometers.

Delivering such a bombardment in a timely fashion (a few hours) takes a LOT of firepower. Which is where you get teraton/second power outputs from, because you need to dump thousands or even millions of teratons of energy into a planet to destroy it that thoroughly.

In terms of high end numbers with the new canon, Dodonna's briefing in ANH indicates numbers somewhat consistent with the ICS. While it is hard to judge absolute numbers from such a statement, it certainly gives a numbers in excess of 10^26* watts for a single average Imperial warship(presumably a Star Destroyer), even assuming millions of them. The problem with statements like this is that they are too open to interpretation to be as useful as visual analysis obviously. There is also the unknown question of whether or not the rest of the Imperial fleet contained any additional smaller superlasers of their own. Unless the new novel Tarkin sheds any light on this.

For earlier legends numbers, even based on scaling up the Acclamator(listed at 10^23 watts) class 100 times, we would only see a number of 10^25 watts. For what it's worth Wookiepedia lists the STar Destroyer's reactor at 10^24 watts, based on it being 1/100th of the reactor size of the Executor which was listed at being 10^26 in the Inside the Worlds books

While this doesn't directly affect firepower figures, one issue with the use of a Base Delta Zero bombardment, or more generally an orbital bombardment, in the era of the OT is the existence and proliferation of planetary shields. The Rebels in both ANH and ROTJ considered the Death Star an existential threat to the existence of the Alliance. My theory as to why is that planetary shielding had evolved to the point at which that during and immediately after the Clone Wars, as Imperial power was becoming more pervasive, virtually every significant world that could afford one built one. Even Alderaan, which was described by Leia as peaceful bothered to have one. Even the minor outpost of Hoth had a theater shield. This could have been partially what Tarkin meant when he referred to Dantooine as being too remote, that it lacked a planetary shield and thus would be an issufcient test. It would likely be the case that worlds semi-openly supporting the Rebels, like Mon Calamari, would be virtually immune from all but the most serious attack thanks to their planetary shields.

So did the ISD delivering Vader to the DS2 in RotJ. What the new canon (and no, sorry, I'm not calling it 'neu-canon'. You want to use the german term for new, use it right. It's 'neue/r' Canon) doesn't tell us (at least per the movies, I don't recall what 'Rebels' had to say on this) is how many TIEs an ISDs carries. Of course the new canon also-barring TCW-hasn't any evidence of fighters being a threat to capital ships on their own.

Not to mention that the scores of Imperial fighters at Endor had to come from somewhere. While it could be argued that many came from the Death Star, the fact that the Alliance fleet were somewhat surprised to see them in numbers like those gives an indication that they must have come from the Imperial fleet.

As for fighters threatening capital ships, while Endor doesn't actually show them being a threat in the direct sense, the dialog does arguably imply this. Lando gives the fighters an order to "draw their fire away from the cruisers" which implies that they are at least something of a threat in sufficient numbers. Though he could have been assuming that they would be attacking along with the Star Destroyers. Naboo gives the opposite example, in which Qui-Gon clearly expected the Naboo fighter force to loose against the Trade Federation's battleship. His exact words could go either way in a more general sense, given that he stated "the weapons on your fighters" implying that Naboo's fighters were too light to be a serious threat to the heavily shielded and massive Trade Federation freighter, not that no fighters ever would be. The Battle of Coruscant is inconclusive in that we never see enough of the battle to make a judgement in either direction on this issue, but we never see fighters doing major damage on their own.

No they do not, that's where the 2 gigaton turbolaser bolts come from.

At this point do we really know that? The fact that capital ships require heavy weapons to shoot each other doesn't mean that fighters necessarily do. Given that shields appear to have properties similar to armor in that they are active unless they fail and appear to have a damage threshhold, below which nothing much matters, they aren't neccisarily the Star Trek style of having uniform shielding in all directions and thus much weaker attacks could potentially attack weaker points on the vessel. Fighters which can ferret out weak points could potentially do much greater damage than their firepower figures imply.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I'm not sure how your comment remotely addresses the turbolaser firepower calculations or bolt scaling from the Turbolaser Commentaries, Saxton, and Wong. These things are totally unrelated to starfighters.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Medium turbolasers have an output with their long bolts of around 465,00 TW, but we've seen long turbolaser bolts which come from the main batteries rather than trench and forward dorsal batteries (from ROTJ), which are much longer. I had recalled that various scaling had been taken to take this ship-length turbolaser bolt (circa 1,600 meters long) and scale its firepower up from the observed ESB outputs (which max out at a conservative of 465,000 TW -- as less conservative analyses of minor point-defence cannon can go as high as 240,000 TW).

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Looking back through the old data, for an ISD-II the largest cannon would be at an output of 2,800,000 TW, which is the same as 670 MT/s. An ISD-I's main guns (also the main guns of an Executor) would be approximately four times that, or around 2.7 GT/s. However, this is for a bolt duration of 1/15th second. But the assumption of one round per two seconds was itself conservative--excessively so, in my opinion. Movie footage could in fact easily justify 2 rounds per second. In this case the rate of fire and duration of fire means that the largest turbolasers are only firing rounds of about 180 megatons each, but the power output per battery is 360 MT/s. This gives a relatively modest weapons output for an ISD-I/II of around 6 - 8 GT/s.

I would argue that this is still sufficient for a Base Delta Zero operation when we only have the vague idea that a BDZ is meant to destroy a habitable planet rather than melt its surface as it was in the more explicit old EU sources, and therefore that we cannot reliably conclude weapons output for a Star Destroyer much greater than 6 - 8 GT/s based on the existing canon evidence. Conversely, all of the assumptions here remain extremely conservative; even the rate of fire could still be higher based on some of the movie evidence, and I haven't yet considered anything from The Clone Wars. So this is the minimum under the new canon regime using reasonable sets of assumptions.

[Adam Reynolds]

I'm not sure how your comment remotely addresses the turbolaser firepower calculations or bolt scaling from the Turbolaser Commentaries, Saxton, and Wong. These things are totally unrelated to starfighters.

Sorry I quoted your point instead of Simon's, I was thinking it was a comment about the first half of his post.

[Simon_Jester]

Addressing specifically the "firepower greater than half the Starfleet" quote by Dodonna...

1) There are two interpretations of this. One is that he was saying that the Death Star's total ability to deliver destructive energy is greater than half, but not all, of the entire Imperial fleet.

2) The other is that for purposes of planning a conventional attack, Dodonna is ignoring the output of the superlaser because he does not think it can be used in a fleet action. The Death Star II was clearly capable of doing that, but we don't know if the Death Star I was. In that case, Dodonna would presumably be referring to the conventional fighter and turbolaser capability of the Death Star, and saying this was greater than half the Starfleet's.

I favor the second interpretation.

Among other things, remember when Han hears Obi-Wan suggest that the Imperial starfleet has destroyed Alderaan, he replies: "The entire star fleet couldn't destroy the whole planet. It'd take a thousand ships with more fire power than I've—"

Now, he's cut off there, but from context the verb is clearly going to be something like "seen," "heard of," or "imagined."

Now, Han's background as an Imperial naval cadet is gone with the old EU so far as I know, but it still seems reasonable to assume that he has at least a crude, order-of-magnitude familiarity with the size of the Imperial fleet and the capability of Imperial weapons. After all, he spends vast amounts of time evading those very same ships, and shows signs of being familiar with the details of their doctrine, performance, and capability.

So while we cannot take this quote from Han as a precise statement, we can say that it is inconceivable to Han that "the entire star fleet" could actually "destroy the whole planet." He can imagine a fleet that could, at least to the point of specifying that it would take "a thousand ships" and they'd have to be very powerful. But he cannot believe that the starfleet which actually exists could have done so.

If blowing up the planet were something the starfleet could do, I wouldn't expect Han to be so vehemently surprised. He might be shocked, he might be uncertain, but he would have no reason to reject Obi-Wan's suggestion out of hand.

So we have here a contradiction: Dodonna says the Death Star has firepower greater than half (but implicitly not ALL) the starfleet, while Han says the Death Star has done something the entire starfleet could not have done.

I feel this is most neatly resolved by saying that Dodonna is talking purely of the Death Star's conventional weapons batteries, which might be used to repel a rebel attack in space, and not counting the superlaser, which is a purely strategic weapon.

[Eternal_Freedom]

So we have here a contradiction: Dodonna says the Death Star has firepower greater than half (but implicitly not ALL) the starfleet, while Han says the Death Star has done something the entire starfleet could not have done.

I'm not sure that's a contradiction. Since the Death Star obliterated the planet rather than "merely" destroying it's entire surface, it would require a fuckload more energy (10^38J IIRC). So, taking Dodonna's comment as referring to the DS's surface guns not the superlaser, it's entirely consistent to say the DS outguns half the Starfleet while leaving the entire Starfleet unable to shatter the planet.

Additionally, given your reasonable assumptions of Han's knowledge of the Starfleet, it may be that when he says "it's impossible" he could be thinking "it's impossible they did it so fast no-one called for help/noticed/whatever." Even in the old canon, BDZ's weren't instant events, they took time, and with galaxy-wide real-time communications, someone should have been able to call for help, spread word, or even say goodbye to family/friends or whatever.

[Patroklos]

You know, people say things like "they could be halfway across the country" or "half the company know this rumor by now" as a colloquial expression, not anything remotely technical in nature or backed up by anything. I realize we are grasping for anything to measure off of, but the circumstances of when and why these people are saying it (ie an Imperial officer expressing exasperation with "they could be on the other side of the galaxy") should be taken into account. An ex-girlfriend/boyfriend is probably not the most evil human being alive despite many having said that. An employee/boss is probably not the most incompetent human being on Earth despite the strongly held opinion that that is the case. I can't think of any circumstance where "all the tea in China" is an accurate assessment of any metric despite it being claimed often.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The quotes merely suggest that the baseline is extremely conservative. But that's the whole point--to reestablish the conservative baseline now that we no longer have the ICS or any of the EU quotes.

[bilateralrope]

So we have here a contradiction: Dodonna says the Death Star has firepower greater than half (but implicitly not ALL) the starfleet, while Han says the Death Star has done something the entire starfleet could not have done.

Only if we assume that Han knows what he's talking about. Even after his nonsensical statement about the Kessel Run.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

So we have here a contradiction: Dodonna says the Death Star has firepower greater than half (but implicitly not ALL) the starfleet, while Han says the Death Star has done something the entire starfleet could not have done.

Only if we assume that Han knows what he's talking about. Even after his nonsensical statement about the Kessel Run.

That's been pretty adequately explained as referring to the fact he's such a good navigator he can cut a lot of corners around the Kessel black hole cluster, an explanation that I still like, if in more generic terms, for the canon. But that only needs an explanation because it's totally nonsensical otherwise. Hyperbole can explain his other comments.

[bilateralrope]

An explanation that was thrown out with the rest of the EU.

[Batman]

And good riddance. That they even bothered to come up with an 'explanation' for what was obviously nothing more than Han boasting to impress the stupid farmboy with his mad space skills says a lot about the general quality of the EU.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Indeed. I strongly recall reading somewhere or other that in the original script there's a not saying "Han is boasting to try and impress the ignorant farm boy" or somesuch.

[Borgholio]

Indeed. I strongly recall reading somewhere or other that in the original script there's a not saying "Han is boasting to try and impress the ignorant farm boy" or somesuch.

Just look at Obi Wan's face. That's a "Bullshit" expression. He knew...even if Luke may have been fooled.

[Simon_Jester]

So we have here a contradiction: Dodonna says the Death Star has firepower greater than half (but implicitly not ALL) the starfleet, while Han says the Death Star has done something the entire starfleet could not have done.

I'm not sure that's a contradiction. Since the Death Star obliterated the planet rather than "merely" destroying it's entire surface, it would require a fuckload more energy (10^38J IIRC). So, taking Dodonna's comment as referring to the DS's surface guns not the superlaser, it's entirely consistent to say the DS outguns half the Starfleet while leaving the entire Starfleet unable to shatter the planet.

Uh, yes, that's exactly the resolution I myself was suggesting to this 'paradox.'

Additionally, given your reasonable assumptions of Han's knowledge of the Starfleet, it may be that when he says "it's impossible" he could be thinking "it's impossible they did it so fast no-one called for help/noticed/whatever." Even in the old canon, BDZ's weren't instant events, they took time, and with galaxy-wide real-time communications, someone should have been able to call for help, spread word, or even say goodbye to family/friends or whatever.

Perhaps, but note that Han dwells on the amount of firepower and the number of ships it would take to blow apart a planet, not on how fast it happened. This suggests that the real obstacle to annihilating planets is that, while it's at least conceivable that it could be done... it would require a force of ships and troops greater than Han believes the Empire possesses.

And while Han is certainly a braggart, and prone to overconfidence, he's not actually a fool, and he has been a successful smuggler for some time. He clearly knows the performance of Imperial warships, well enough to differentiate between different classes of Imperial ships. If Han thinks it 'impossible' for the Starfleet to blow apart a planet, I see no reason to argue with him.

Which, again, is neatly explained by the suggestion we've now both made, that the Death Star superlaser is indeed a unique thing, a weapon far more powerful than anything else which exists, and one cannot realistically calculate the performance of lesser weapons just by scaling down from it. By analogy, just because we can build a half ton (nuclear) bomb that explodes with the force of 500,000 tons or so of TNT doesn't mean we can build a one-gram bomb that explodes with the force of one ton of TNT.

So it is impossible to Han (who's never heard of superlasers) that any number of existing starships could volatilize a planet and smash it to pieces. Sure, conceivably someone could build that many ships, even if it might take a planet's mass in ships to destroy a planet that way. But no one's ever done that, as far as Han knows, so he dismisses the possibility.

And, as we've both suggested, Dodonna's reference to the Death Star firepower simply involves its conventional weapons, not its superlaser.

You know, people say things like "they could be halfway across the country" or "half the company know this rumor by now" as a colloquial expression, not anything remotely technical in nature or backed up by anything. I realize we are grasping for anything to measure off of, but the circumstances of when and why these people are saying it (ie an Imperial officer expressing exasperation with "they could be on the other side of the galaxy") should be taken into account. An ex-girlfriend/boyfriend is probably not the most evil human being alive despite many having said that. An employee/boss is probably not the most incompetent human being on Earth despite the strongly held opinion that that is the case. I can't think of any circumstance where "all the tea in China" is an accurate assessment of any metric despite it being claimed often.

I agree with you on this. On the other hand, here context is that of a detailed military briefing being given by a dignified officer making a desperate plan for a death-or-glory attempt to destroy a massive battlestation that's coming to kill everyone. This is not the time for willful exaggerations.

[Adam Reynolds]

Indeed. I strongly recall reading somewhere or other that in the original script there's a not saying "Han is boasting to try and impress the ignorant farm boy" or somesuch.

It was in the novelization. And now that the EU is no longer canon, it is the only thing that need be true.

And while Han is certainly a braggart, and prone to overconfidence, he's not actually a fool, and he has been a successful smuggler for some time. He clearly knows the performance of Imperial warships, well enough to differentiate between different classes of Imperial ships. If Han thinks it 'impossible' for the Starfleet to blow apart a planet, I see no reason to argue with him.

Impossible doesn't only mean physically impossible. The US military believed that it would be impossible for Japan to to what it did in December 1941, invading the Philippines, Thailand , the Dutch East Indies, and Malaya simultaneously. Just for good measure smaller operations captured Guam, Wake, the Gilberts, the Bismarcks, and New Guinea at the same time. Given the demands of the war in China, all of this was done by only ten divisions, often with virtually no reserves or logistical support. It was considered impossible in the sense that it was incredibly risky, not that it was physically impossible. This was partially what made it successful in the short term. While everyone expected something, given their limited resources, no one expected Japan to hit everything at once. It was also the case that much of the rest of the world recognized the foolishness of what the Japanese were doing, that they never had a chance of holding on to what they captured.

It could be the case that both Han and Dodonna are right, that the Imperial starfleet couldn't destroy the planet in those terms at it would require them to muster a sufficiently large fleet that it would destroy the balance of power of the entire galaxy. Alderaan was destroyed with such massive overkill that the pieces were small asteroids, hardly something the starfleet would have ever done, even if were able to muster the firepower to crack its shields.

And, as we've both suggested, Dodonna's reference to the Death Star firepower simply involves its conventional weapons, not its superlaser.

While I would agree that the statement is ambiguous enough that actual firepower numbers are largely impossible to quantify, I see no reason to not take it at face value. Why would he never refer to the most unique attribute of the Death Star when describing it? What's to say that DSI can't target capital ships? While it would likely have the issue that its recharge time was much longer than DSII, there seems to be no reason that it would be incapable of targeting them, at least with the new canon. The surprise of the Rebels at Endor wasn't that the Death Star could shoot capital ships, it was that it was operational. Any comments about the DSII being designed specifically with this purpose in mind are no longer canon. As for the turbolasers, they were theoretically* just as irrelevant to the Rebel pilots given that they were designed to shoot larger vessels, something he mentions later in the briefing.

Which, again, is neatly explained by the suggestion we've now both made, that the Death Star superlaser is indeed a unique thing, a weapon far more powerful than anything else which exists, and one cannot realistically calculate the performance of lesser weapons just by scaling down from it. By analogy, just because we can build a half ton (nuclear) bomb that explodes with the force of 500,000 tons or so of TNT doesn't mean we can build a one-gram bomb that explodes with the force of one ton of TNT.

With an atomic bomb, we know that there is a minimum yield due to the fact that it requires a certain amount of energy to activate. Given that we see Death Star style weapons used by the GAR on Geonosis, there is nothing to suggest that the technology doesn't scale down to the level of heavy turbolasers. As to why other warships doesn't use fixed beams in the style of the Death Star, it likely has something to do with sustained rate of fire. Gunships seem to burn through their ammunition extremely fast, so much so that Obi-Wan and Anakin's had none left over when chasing Dooku. In their case they would be expected to by cycled quickly enough it would never matter, star destroyers don't have that option.

* Porkins would disagree but then he made the idiotic choice of flying in a straight line.

[Patroklos]

And while Han is certainly a braggart, and prone to overconfidence, he's not actually a fool, and he has been a successful smuggler for some time. He clearly knows the performance of Imperial warships, well enough to differentiate between different classes of Imperial ships. If Han thinks it 'impossible' for the Starfleet to blow apart a planet, I see no reason to argue with him.

This is not a reasonable assumption. I am sure Columbian drug smugglers in the Gulf of Mexico might have some familiarity with coast guard cutters but even then I doubt it amounts to "what's the caliber and rate of fire of their deck gun" but rather "is this thing big enough to catch me and deadly enough I need to care?" They would know absolutely nothing about a DDG, CG or CVN. Similarly smugglers flying stashes via planes over the border are not experts in the potential load out of at B-52.

Even in the old cannon where Han had actual Imperial experience it would be a decade plus old by now and even then he was very junior. Most of my junior officers would be stumped if I asked them a random weapons question unless they just walked out of their qualifying boards or they work with it on a daily basis.

I agree with you on this. On the other hand, here context is that of a detailed military briefing being given by a dignified officer making a desperate plan for a death-or-glory attempt to destroy a massive battlestation that's coming to kill everyone. This is not the time for willful exaggerations.

So detailed it took single digit in minutes worth of screen time? That briefing was as surface scratching as you could get, and for the purposes of who he was talking to all he was saying is "This thing is BAAAAD. Like, REALLLLY BAD. Shoot here. GOOD LUCK!" The pilots didn't need or care about some grand strategic breakdown of galactic techno-military scaling.

Could be he was correct. Of all the statements made concerning fire power this is certainly the one that should be considered to have the most potential for being a no shit fact.

[Simon_Jester]

And while Han is certainly a braggart, and prone to overconfidence, he's not actually a fool, and he has been a successful smuggler for some time. He clearly knows the performance of Imperial warships, well enough to differentiate between different classes of Imperial ships. If Han thinks it 'impossible' for the Starfleet to blow apart a planet, I see no reason to argue with him.

Impossible doesn't only mean physically impossible. The US military believed that it would be impossible for Japan to to what it did in December 1941...

That was because they underestimated the Japanese military's courage, determination, coordination, and ability to overcome large numbers of isolated colonial outposts quickly using a highly trained force. Not so much because they underestimated Japan's raw firepower.

Here, for Han to be fundamentally wrong about whether the Imperial starfleet can blow apart a planet, he would have to be wrong about their firepower, probably wrong by orders of magnitude. An error on par with thinking a single automatic rifle could destroy a city, or that a nuclear bomb could fail to destroy a single building. While it is possible that he would make such a gross error, it really doesn't seem very likely.

If he were that ignorant of technical matters and the performance of starships, it would be very hard for him to function as a smuggler and outlaw- just as the one thing Age of Sail pirates have to know how to do is sail.

It could be the case that both Han and Dodonna are right, that the Imperial starfleet couldn't destroy the planet in those terms at it would require them to muster a sufficiently large fleet that it would destroy the balance of power of the entire galaxy. Alderaan was destroyed with such massive overkill that the pieces were small asteroids, hardly something the starfleet would have ever done, even if were able to muster the firepower to crack its shields.

It seems hard to believe that the Empire is 'balanced' by military threats so great that it cannot amass a majority of its own strength in one place for a single operation. If there were outside threats of that magnitude, one would expect them to be referenced somewhere in the movies, if only because the rebels would seek them out as allies... instead, the Empire is portrayed as the only significant military power in the galaxy.

While I would agree that the statement is ambiguous enough that actual firepower numbers are largely impossible to quantify, I see no reason to not take it at face value. Why would he never refer to the most unique attribute of the Death Star when describing it?

Because it is irrelevant to the purpose of planning an attack on it, or he believes it to be so?

What's to say that DSI can't target capital ships? While it would likely have the issue that its recharge time was much longer than DSII, there seems to be no reason that it would be incapable of targeting them, at least with the new canon. The surprise of the Rebels at Endor wasn't that the Death Star could shoot capital ships, it was that it was operational. Any comments about the DSII being designed specifically with this purpose in mind are no longer canon. As for the turbolasers, they were theoretically* just as irrelevant to the Rebel pilots given that they were designed to shoot larger vessels, something he mentions later in the briefing.

If the rate of fire is an issue, then the Death Star would be able to shoot a capital ship... once. Then wait an hour or three. Anyone mad enough to attack the Death Star would surely bring more than one ship. For purposes of fighting a serious naval battle, it would not be a very helpful weapon. Or at least there's no on-screen evidence of it.

Also, the turbolasers were something the Rebel fighters could dodge, but that larger Rebel ships could not have dodged- thus making it unsafe to use anything other than fighters. Which is exactly the point in Dodonna's briefing.

Note that while I can see this explanation being wrong, it is at least credible. And the alternative is to assume that the Starfleet's combined main battery firepower is sufficient to dismantle planets on a reasonable timescale. Which means the Empire either has billions of ships, or has ships with teraton/second firepower... neither of which is really supported by the movie evidence. Without the old EU's Base Delta Zero evidence, there isn't much support for that at all, as far as I can remember.

With an atomic bomb, we know that there is a minimum yield due to the fact that it requires a certain amount of energy to activate. Given that we see Death Star style weapons used by the GAR on Geonosis, there is nothing to suggest that the technology doesn't scale down to the level of heavy turbolasers. As to why other warships doesn't use fixed beams in the style of the Death Star, it likely has something to do with sustained rate of fire. Gunships seem to burn through their ammunition extremely fast, so much so that Obi-Wan and Anakin's had none left over when chasing Dooku. In their case they would be expected to by cycled quickly enough it would never matter, star destroyers don't have that option.

It's not obvious that the beam weapons on Republic gunships are the same type as the Death Star superlaser, even if they superficially appear to be of similar nature.

It's also not obvious that there's linear scalability. The composite beam weapons on the gunship are on the rough order of one meter across. Whereas the Death Star superlaser is at most on the order of one hundred thousand meters across. Thus, the Death Star's main weapon would presumably have a total volume on the rough order of 10^15 times greater... one quadrillion times.

Yet the Death Star's main beam has a power output of something like 10^38 watts given what it did to Alderaan. A weapon one-quadrillionth that big (and, presumably, powerful). That would be on the order of 10^24 watts, a figure in the hundreds of gigatons or single digit teratons per second, in its own right.

LAAT gunship beams are clearly not that powerful. I sincerely doubt we could find supporting evidence for them being much more destructive than gigawatt/second, possibly megawatt/second.

In which case even if LAAT beams are a smaller-scale version of the Death Star's main weapon, then clearly, increasing the size of the firing platform by a quadrillion times allows for something like a quadrillion quadrillion times greater firepower.

So we cannot reasonably assume that Imperial warships have firepower per ton equal to that of the Death Star either.

And while Han is certainly a braggart, and prone to overconfidence, he's not actually a fool, and he has been a successful smuggler for some time. He clearly knows the performance of Imperial warships, well enough to differentiate between different classes of Imperial ships. If Han thinks it 'impossible' for the Starfleet to blow apart a planet, I see no reason to argue with him.

This is not a reasonable assumption. I am sure Columbian drug smugglers in the Gulf of Mexico might have some familiarity with coast guard cutters but even then I doubt it amounts to "what's the caliber and rate of fire of their deck gun" but rather "is this thing big enough to catch me and deadly enough I need to care?" They would know absolutely nothing about a DDG, CG or CVN. Similarly smugglers flying stashes via planes over the border are not experts in the potential load out of at B-52.

I'm not saying Han would know the details, but he'd probably have at least a rough clue what they can and cannot do. It's like, even a mildly knowledgeable person today might not know exactly what a B-52 is capable of, but they know that loaded with conventional bombs it can't flatten a whole state, but could probably flatten whole blocks of buildings. Or that a gun can kill a man but can't kill a tank, and would be gross overkill on a cockroach.

So if he thinks it's "impossible" that the Starfleet could just vaporize a planet and reduce it to a highly dispersed debris field, to me that really does suggest that it's impossible. Or at least couldn't be done easily by a small fraction of the starfleet's total strength. And given what the Death Star is capable of, if "half the starfleet" could put out the same main battery firepower as the Death Star superlaser, it would take only a small fraction of that "half the starfleet" force to reduce a planet to a debris field.

It just wouldn't be as rapidly expanding a debris field.

I agree with you on this. On the other hand, here context is that of a detailed military briefing being given by a dignified officer making a desperate plan for a death-or-glory attempt to destroy a massive battlestation that's coming to kill everyone. This is not the time for willful exaggerations.

So detailed it took single digit in minutes worth of screen time? That briefing was as surface scratching as you could get, and for the purposes of who he was talking to all he was saying is "This thing is BAAAAD. Like, REALLLLY BAD. Shoot here. GOOD LUCK!" The pilots didn't need or care about some grand strategic breakdown of galactic techno-military scaling.

Could be he was correct. Of all the statements made concerning fire power this is certainly the one that should be considered to have the most potential for being a no shit fact.

Right. I would assume Dodonna was neither grossly exaggerating nor grossly understating the Death Star's firepower. But given that literally no other weapon in the Star Wars universe exhibits anything like the raw per-ton firepower of the Death Star, and that everyone is baffled as to how the Empire can blow up whole planets until they find out exactly what the Death Star is...

It seems unlikely that the pre-Death Star Starfleet actually had the ability to totally obliterate planets and just chose not to use it for some reason.

[seanrobertson]

Are the films' novelizations still "canon"?

The ROTS novel describes how a turbolaser hit would vaporize a "small town" IIRC.

What many folks do not understand is that a beam weapon, particularly a "bolt"-like discharge, requires a LOT more energy to incur damage on a level comparable to a nuke or antimatter bomb.

Michael touched on this in his "AOTC" analysis, way back when. So many people compare centrally-buried bombs to turbolasers and ilk weaponry in a linear fashion, but that is so simplistic as to approach "hurf durf" ville.

More to come.

[Simon_Jester]

Ghetto edit to my previous post:

Actually, if we can benchmark the Death Star superlaser (which has X power output) and LAAT beams (which have roughly one quadrillionth of a quadrillionth of X power output) as being essentially similar weapons that represent Star Wars technology...

...That's actually fairly close to saying that the power output of a weapon scales roughly with the square of the volume it occupies. In which case a superlaser mount on the scale of, say, 35 meters on a side (about right for capital ship beam weapons) would be roughly forty thousand times larger than the LAAT beam weapons, and roughly 1.6 billion times more powerful... which is broadly compatible with gigaton-range power outputs.

All this is very vague and approximate, but it might actually let us roughly plot a realistic-ish curve of weapon firepower.

[Batman]

@Sean:I don't think 'incur' was exactly the term you intended to use there, as that would refer to damage to the turbolaser bolt. (Or I completely misunderstand the term which is of course also distinctly possible). Did you perhaps mean 'inflict'?

And I really don't like the 'small town' thing. What's small by SW standards, what are the buildings made of (for a ridiculously extreme example, adamantium vs balsa wood), was that a literal statement or not, what kind of turbolaser at what kind of power level were they talking about etc.

[Adam Reynolds]

That was because they underestimated the Japanese military's courage, determination, coordination, and ability to overcome large numbers of isolated colonial outposts quickly using a highly trained force. Not so much because they underestimated Japan's raw firepower.

Here, for Han to be fundamentally wrong about whether the Imperial starfleet can blow apart a planet, he would have to be wrong about their firepower, probably wrong by orders of magnitude. An error on par with thinking a single automatic rifle could destroy a city, or that a nuclear bomb could fail to destroy a single building. While it is possible that he would make such a gross error, it really doesn't seem very likely.

If he were that ignorant of technical matters and the performance of starships, it would be very hard for him to function as a smuggler and outlaw- just as the one thing Age of Sail pirates have to know how to do is sail.

Han's exact quote is: "The entire starfleet couldn't destroy the whole planet. It'd take a thousand ships with more firepower than I've..."
If we take Han's statement at face value then the entire Imperial starfleet is less than 1000 ships, regardless of anythign else. We are left with one of two possibilities. Either he is correct and the entire Imperial fleet is less than a thousand ships, or he is wrong and it is not impossible. Another option is that he was not referring to an Imperial starfleet in absolute terms, that he was referring to a smaller body such as sector fleets. This idea fits with the reference to "your starfleet" by the Imperial officers around the Death Star table.

Han never actually says its impossible, just that he didn't see the Imperial fleet as being able to do it. If we go by the theory that planetary shielding is what prevents planetary destruction, then it would make sense that he would have considered it impossible in such a short time period.

I should also point out that Obi-Wan, while he also had a warning from the Force, was hardly surprised that it had happened. I would expect a veteran of the Clone Wars would have a better understanding of the firepower that can be unleashed in Star Wars space combat than a smuggler who had likely only dealt with Imperial warships involved in policing.

It seems hard to believe that the Empire is 'balanced' by military threats so great that it cannot amass a majority of its own strength in one place for a single operation. If there were outside threats of that magnitude, one would expect them to be referenced somewhere in the movies, if only because the rebels would seek them out as allies... instead, the Empire is portrayed as the only significant military power in the galaxy.

The Empire being unwilling to deploy its entire fleet to one location hardly requires an equal threat. The Empire is fighting an insurgency. In counter-insurgency warfare, one of the key ideas is efficiency. The more resources used against a specific target, the less effective the occupying force will be. The US in Iraq also had massive military superiority, it didn't stop them from not having enough troops if things ever truly went badly.

If the rate of fire is an issue, then the Death Star would be able to shoot a capital ship... once. Then wait an hour or three. Anyone mad enough to attack the Death Star would surely bring more than one ship. For purposes of fighting a serious naval battle, it would not be a very helpful weapon. Or at least there's no on-screen evidence of it.

If the ship it shot were something like the Executor, that would actually be quite useful. In any case, it would obviously require such a low power output to destroy a capital ship as opposed to a planet that there would be no need to recharge the superlaser first. If we use an estimate for an Imperial warship of 10^26 watts for its reactor, the Death Star's reactor at 10^33 watts(based on a recharge time of a day) would actually be able to fire nearly continuously as long as it had fuel as there would be no need to waste time recharging for a full power shot. Despite also being more powerful, this is clearly what the Second Death Star did at Endor.

Note that while I can see this explanation being wrong, it is at least credible. And the alternative is to assume that the Starfleet's combined main battery firepower is sufficient to dismantle planets on a reasonable timescale. Which means the Empire either has billions of ships, or has ships with teraton/second firepower... neither of which is really supported by the movie evidence. Without the old EU's Base Delta Zero evidence, there isn't much support for that at all, as far as I can remember.

But there is nothing that outright contradicts it either. That would be like seeing the first atomic bomb and declaring it impossible to equal with conventional firepower if one had never seen the firebombing efforts against Japan which actually did more damage than the two atomic bombs, though taking hundreds of planes instead of one. The fact that planetary destruction is a taboo among the various factions in most conflicts in Star Wars doesn't make it impossible.

It's not obvious that the beam weapons on Republic gunships are the same type as the Death Star superlaser, even if they superficially appear to be of similar nature.

They appear to operate on exactly the same principle, using the same style of converging beams. Why would they be anything else but the same technology? By this logic we should assume that stormtrooper blasters and AT-AT blasters are fundamentally different.

It's also not obvious that there's linear scalability. The composite beam weapons on the gunship are on the rough order of one meter across. Whereas the Death Star superlaser is at most on the order of one hundred thousand meters across. Thus, the Death Star's main weapon would presumably have a total volume on the rough order of 10^15 times greater... one quadrillion times.

Yet the Death Star's main beam has a power output of something like 10^38 watts given what it did to Alderaan. A weapon one-quadrillionth that big (and, presumably, powerful). That would be on the order of 10^24 watts, a figure in the hundreds of gigatons or single digit teratons per second, in its own right.

LAAT gunship beams are clearly not that powerful. I sincerely doubt we could find supporting evidence for them being much more destructive than gigawatt/second, possibly megawatt/second.

In which case even if LAAT beams are a smaller-scale version of the Death Star's main weapon, then clearly, increasing the size of the firing platform by a quadrillion times allows for something like a quadrillion quadrillion times greater firepower.

So we cannot reasonably assume that Imperial warships have firepower per ton equal to that of the Death Star either.

As to the question of beam size and scaling, there are clearly two scales in planetary combat versus space combat. As no one is interested in killing their own troops or masses of enemy civilians, weapons used in planetary warfare are proportionally much weaker than those used in space. The one possible exception we see is the Republic's artillery on Geonosis, which was presumably designed with the role of mobile coastal gun in mind. Even they presumably drained their energy reserve shooting down a single TF battleship core. Another limiting factor on planetary weapons and vehicles might be the fact that they seem to only use stored power rather than having their own internal power generations. Though this would logically also limit starfighters which don't seem to have such limits, being designed to potentially go up against opposing capital ships.

There is nothing to suggest that capital ships don't scale linearly with reactor size.

I'm not saying Han would know the details, but he'd probably have at least a rough clue what they can and cannot do. It's like, even a mildly knowledgeable person today might not know exactly what a B-52 is capable of, but they know that loaded with conventional bombs it can't flatten a whole state, but could probably flatten whole blocks of buildings. Or that a gun can kill a man but can't kill a tank, and would be gross overkill on a cockroach.

If someone knew that a single B-52 could level a city block and that generally they were used alone or in limited numbers, and then saw that all of Boston was leveled, their initial reaction might very well be that it seemed impossible.

So if he thinks it's "impossible" that the Starfleet could just vaporize a planet and reduce it to a highly dispersed debris field, to me that really does suggest that it's impossible. Or at least couldn't be done easily by a small fraction of the starfleet's total strength. And given what the Death Star is capable of, if "half the starfleet" could put out the same main battery firepower as the Death Star superlaser, it would take only a small fraction of that "half the starfleet" force to reduce a planet to a debris field.

It just wouldn't be as rapidly expanding a debris field.

Not if Alderaan was shielded. If the role of the Death Star was gross overkill for the purpose of cracking planetary shielding, then it would have a purpose even if the conventional Imperial fleet were easily capable of doing that level of damage to an unprotected world. Alderaan's shield lasted for 1/10th of a second against the Death Star. With that level of energy output, it would be quite difficult for the Imperial fleet to overcome Alderaan without a protracted bombardment.

Right. I would assume Dodonna was neither grossly exaggerating nor grossly understating the Death Star's firepower. But given that literally no other weapon in the Star Wars universe exhibits anything like the raw per-ton firepower of the Death Star, and that everyone is baffled as to how the Empire can blow up whole planets until they find out exactly what the Death Star is...

When would we see a canon example of Death Star level per ton firepower? The only cases of capital ships cutting loose are against each other, who clearly have shields roughly equivalent to their guns.

It seems unlikely that the pre-Death Star Starfleet actually had the ability to totally obliterate planets and just chose not to use it for some reason.

Why? The United States has the ability to destroy most nations on Earth and hasn't since World War two. The fact that we have never seen anything that indicates that they have in the limited canon we see from the films, doesn't mean that they hadn't previously done so. It was likely that there was planetary destruction in the Clone Wars in any case. And if planetary shields had proliferated after the Clone Wars it would answer this question as well, it was difficult enough to penetrate planetary shields that it generally wasn't worth the trouble. The Death Star changed this.

Are the films' novelizations still "canon"?

Both the Clone Wars and the ROTS novelization can't possible be canon as the novelization is full of references to things from the original Clone Wars continuity like Labyrinth of Evil. The novelization explicitly is contradicted by the series in that the novelization claimed that Obi-Wan and Grievous had never fought and that Obi-Wan and Anakin never had any experience with fighting Magnaguards, both of which happened repeatedly in the series.

[Borgholio]

If we take Han's statement at face value then the entire Imperial starfleet is less than 1000 ships, regardless of anythign else. We are left with one of two possibilities. Either he is correct and the entire Imperial fleet is less than a thousand ships, or he is wrong and it is not impossible

Ok here's my take on the matter. To destroy a planet, we know we need a certain amount of energy applied to the planet within a short enough time for it to explode, as opposed to simply melt. The Death Star does this in one shot of course, since that's what it's designed to do. But with the standard Imperial starfleet, the largest ships are the Executors (and we only ever see one on film so we have no idea how many more there are). To impart enough energy into a planet to destroy it with starships, you'd need to have a lot of ships targeting the same spot on the planet and all pummeling it down to the core with every weapon they have with enough force to break it apart entirely. So you would need a thousand ships the size of the Executor with way more power than they are capable of projecting. Han's statement may be off-hand, but it makes sense. Even if you take tens of thousands of normal Stardestroyers, they would be unable to concentrate their fire enough to blast the entire planet apart due to the "relatively" low output of each ship and the sheer number of ships needed.

To invoke the EU, there was a new class of Super Stardestroyer called the Eclipse. It was armed with a mini-superlaser capable of shattering a continent or a small moon, but not an entire world. Even something as massive as that, you'd need dozens of them to destroy an Earth-sized world. So you'd need dozens of a kind of ship that simply didn't exist in the OT, or a thousand of the kind of ship that we only ever see one of, armed with a scale of weaponry that we never see.