repairing BDZ damage

[cmdrjones]

Are there any canon sources on the terraforming capabilities of the Empire in various eras? I am not sure if this has come up in the past, but through some cursory searches we have a few examples of SW weaponry being used on planets, some of these being habitable you'd assume are valuable to any galactic government. It stands to reason that a galaxy spanning civilization would have SOME means of cleaning up their messes and repairing a biosphere after a planet has been hit by a bombardment...

that being said, I am sure there are also bombardments of an intensity LESS than BDZ, what would be the recovery time after a partial bombardment of a planet?

[Lord Revan]

SWTOR has some talk about repairing orbital borbardment on lesser scale then full BDZ as does KOTOR2, IIRC it was said in legendaries that it would be more practical to Terraform a new planet then to try "repair" a planet that has been a a victim of BDZ.

[Lord Pounder]

IIRC the whole purpose of Base Delta Zero was to make a planet beyond use. The crust of a planet is literally melted, there is nothing left to terraform.

[bilateralrope]

How long would it take a planet to naturally cool from a melted crust to habitable temperatures ?

[Borgholio]

Well the first step in repairing a BDZ would be to get the planet to cool off. If the crust is molten again, this will take time. The best bet would be to use large orbital sunshields or mirrors to block all incoming sunlight to the world. Hopefully chill it enough so that the oceans that were boiled off will condense again as rain and help to solidify the crust. After that is done, they could re-introduce plants, animals, and build new cities. That should be easy enough for them, but the big unknown is how long it'll take to artificially chill a molten world.

[Patroklos]

I'd image some sort of planetary shield could be used for this. I vaguely remember the Imperial Sourcebook talking about some sort of satellite network that blocks all light to a planet as sort of a soft BDZ. I don't have the source readily available right now.

[RogueIce]

I'd image some sort of planetary shield could be used for this. I vaguely remember the Imperial Sourcebook talking about some sort of satellite network that blocks all light to a planet as sort of a soft BDZ. I don't have the source readily available right now.

That was from The Courtship of Princess Leia and I think intended to be a terror weapon or whatever.

Oh and since they can, would it be at all effective to just dump a whole planet's worth of ocean on it?

[Darth Tanner]

KOTOR2 shows Telos IV having been bombarded into barren wastelands and the Republics reclamation efforts turning it back into green and pleasant land by a vast almost planet covering layer of terraforming platform.

Telos IV was not to the extreme BDZ some sources give, the surface was not molten (or maybe had just been cooled already) and some military facilities buried deep enough survived the bombardment but it can’t be much extra work to turn a barren ball of blasted rock into a green fertile would than an even more blasted barren ball of rock hit by a heavy Warsie BDZ?

If the surface of a planet was artificially made molten through bombardment how long would it take for that to naturally cool down regardless of artificial measures taken to cool it? The heat would be radiating away rapidly into the core/atmosphere/vacuum would it not?

[Eternal_Freedom]

If the surface of a planet was artificially made molten through bombardment how long would it take for that to naturally cool down regardless of artificial measures taken to cool it? The heat would be radiating away rapidly into the core/atmosphere/vacuum would it not?

Well the heat won't be being transferred to the core, since that will almost certainly still be hotter than the molten surface. As for the atmosphere, I would be amazed if there is much left of it after a full BDZ, and even then it's going to be so hot that it can't absorb much heat from the molten crust either. So basically you're left with heat being radiated out into space. Which could take a very long time indeed.

[Borgholio]

If the surface of a planet was artificially made molten through bombardment how long would it take for that to naturally cool down regardless of artificial measures taken to cool it? The heat would be radiating away rapidly into the core/atmosphere/vacuum would it not?

Well the heat won't be being transferred to the core, since that will almost certainly still be hotter than the molten surface. As for the atmosphere, I would be amazed if there is much left of it after a full BDZ, and even then it's going to be so hot that it can't absorb much heat from the molten crust either. So basically you're left with heat being radiated out into space. Which could take a very long time indeed.

If the BDZ blows off the atmosphere then you could possibly bombard the planet with comets. It'll be like throwing ice cubes into a bowl of hot soup. The comets would melt and help cool the surface. The resulting water vapor and gasses contained within the comet could help rebuild the atmosphere.

[Eternal_Freedom]

That's certainly something you could do, but frankly it'd be easier to find an arid world like Mars and terraform that than try and fix a full-BDZ corpse of a planet.

[Borgholio]

That's certainly something you could do, but frankly it'd be easier to find an arid world like Mars and terraform that than try and fix a full-BDZ corpse of a planet.

Yeah that's what they say in the books too...easier to terraform another world than repair a BDZ.

[Patroklos]

When it comes to the planet cooling you need to remember that you are not just dealing with the energy dumped into the crust but also all the energy welling up from the mantle and core. We are talking geologic age to repair such damage.

[Borgholio]

When it comes to the planet cooling you need to remember that you are not just dealing with the energy dumped into the crust but also all the energy welling up from the mantle and core. We are talking geologic age to repair such damage.

Only if it's molten straight through. As I always understood it, BDZ melts the top several meters of the planet's surface but that's it. It won't take *that* long to cool if most of the crust is actually still intact.

[cmdrjones]

I'd image some sort of planetary shield could be used for this. I vaguely remember the Imperial Sourcebook talking about some sort of satellite network that blocks all light to a planet as sort of a soft BDZ. I don't have the source readily available right now.

That was from The Courtship of Princess Leia and I think intended to be a terror weapon or whatever.

Oh and since they can, would it be at all effective to just dump a whole planet's worth of ocean on it?

They can do this? I know transport costs in the SW galaxy are ridiculously cheap, but even filling an ISD to the brim wouldn't be much more than a decent sized lakes worth of H2O.... who'd have the TIME for that many sorties?

[Borgholio]

They can do this? I know transport costs in the SW galaxy are ridiculously cheap, but even filling an ISD to the brim wouldn't be much more than a decent sized lakes worth of H2O.... who'd have the TIME for that many sorties?

There was something in the EU about how to punish a rebellious world, the Empire used massive freighters to simply spacelift out all the surface water of a world and left it bone dry.

[Adam Reynolds]

There was something in the EU about how to punish a rebellious world, the Empire used massive freighters to simply spacelift out all the surface water of a world and left it bone dry.

There was.

More evidence of the massive scale of Imperial transport fleets can be seen in the fate of Gholondreine-b. On pg. 167[of the novel Slave Ship], it states:

"The oceans of Gholondreine-b had been sucked down to the last molecule of saline liquid, then transported by a fleet of massive Imperial freighters to an orbital catalysis plant near Coruscant. Economy hadn't been the motivating factor- it was more expensive to ship that amount of water than to synthesize it- but punishment had been."

Note the ramifications: a single transport fleet carried the entire planetary oceans of Gholondreine-b away. If Gholondreine-b was similar to Earth, then the mass of its oceans would have been roughly 1.4E21 kilograms. Even if the transport fleet was composed of a million ships, each vessel would have had to carry 1.4 trillion tons of water! The density of water is roughly 1 metric ton/m³, so each ship would have needed at least 1.4 trillion cubic metres of cargo space. If the transports were cylindrical in shape, they had to be 5 km in diameter and at least 71 km long to have that much internal space! Even if each ship took 1000 round trips, the operation would have required a million-ship fleet of vessels measuring 1km in diameter and 1.8km long. This incident shows again how the Imperial transport fleet is superior to anything the Federation could possibly field.

Though I wonder if the oceans really would be as large as those on Earth. A sustainable population would be possible with much smaller oceans.

[Patroklos]

When it comes to the planet cooling you need to remember that you are not just dealing with the energy dumped into the crust but also all the energy welling up from the mantle and core. We are talking geologic age to repair such damage.

Only if it's molten straight through. As I always understood it, BDZ melts the top several meters of the planet's surface but that's it. It won't take *that* long to cool if most of the crust is actually still intact.

There is the actual melting but also the impact of the turbo lasers on top of fault lines, volcanoes, etc. shoot a terra ton weapon at Yellowstone and tell me there won't be follow on consequences. A bombardment over an entire planet is going to make it geographically unstable useless they dial down the damage and just pepper the surface with low level energy. I never got that impression though, I figured it was just regular naval weaponry.

[Solauren]

Since a BDZ also boils of the atmosphere and oceans on a planet, it literally leaves a ball of magma floating in space.

However, assuming it's gravity and magnetic field hasn't been wrecked, it would still be doable.

I'd say
#1 - Orbital Nightcloak over the planet for an extended period to cool it
#2 - Soft land a few very large comets to reintroduce water, and at the same time soak up excess heat

That should cool a planet down enough to be Terraformed.

That does leave, however, the problem of possible sever fault line damage and the like. There is also the possibility that the upper crust was melted enough that the world no longer has fault lines, and is a smooth sphere.

Assuming groundquakes and volcanos are not a problem, you'd have to reintroduce an atmosphere, and possibly dig out new oceans and lakes and the like. That implies hundreds of millions of labor droids and machines to do this.

Then you have the issue of building a planetary level ecosystem, and making it stable.

[Simon_Jester]

There is the actual melting but also the impact of the turbo lasers on top of fault lines, volcanoes, etc. shoot a terra ton weapon at Yellowstone and tell me there won't be follow on consequences.

Given the natural effects of a teraton weapon landing anywhere, the resulting explosion of the Yellowstone caldera is going to be an anticlimax.

After all, no disastrous geological event, including things like the Chicxulub impact that killed the dinosaurs, or the repeated explosions of supervolcanoes in our planet's past, released anything like the sheer volume of energy it'd take to melt the surface and boil the oceans. This is an important point- a Base Delta Zero bombardment is so much worse than a 'normal' planet-ruining disaster like a dinosaur-killing asteroid that you would barely even notice the effect of such an asteroid or volcanic explosion going off in the middle of it.

The point about the bombardment leaving the planet far more tectonically unstable is, in my opinion, more significant. Even after it cools, there will be a lot of surplus heat energy in the lower crust and the mantle.

[cmdrjones]

Since a BDZ also boils of the atmosphere and oceans on a planet, it literally leaves a ball of magma floating in space.

However, assuming it's gravity and magnetic field hasn't been wrecked, it would still be doable.

I'd say
#1 - Orbital Nightcloak over the planet for an extended period to cool it
#2 - Soft land a few very large comets to reintroduce water, and at the same time soak up excess heat

That should cool a planet down enough to be Terraformed.

That does leave, however, the problem of possible sever fault line damage and the like. There is also the possibility that the upper crust was melted enough that the world no longer has fault lines, and is a smooth sphere.

Assuming groundquakes and volcanos are not a problem, you'd have to reintroduce an atmosphere, and possibly dig out new oceans and lakes and the like. That implies hundreds of millions of labor droids and machines to do this.

Then you have the issue of building a planetary level ecosystem, and making it stable.

I see, what about a planet that has been subject to severe damage but not totally destroyed, such as:
Tirolus, Comac Four and Halax?

http://babylon5.wikia.com/wiki/Jha%27dur

[Batman]

What severe damage? Those planets were decimated by bioweapons.

[FaxModem1]

Remind me, in KOTOR II, wasn't the terraforming of Telos almost bankrupting the Republic at the time, as Czerka was lobbying heavily for a more profitable method of terraforming and also exploiting the resources of the planet, while the Ithorians wanted a more green policy of just making the planet as beautiful and natural as possible? Or was it just because their economy and government were nearly ruined due to Sith war/Jedi Civil war?

[Adam Reynolds]

Remind me, in KOTOR II, wasn't the terraforming of Telos almost bankrupting the Republic at the time, as Czerka was lobbying heavily for a more profitable method of terraforming and also exploiting the resources of the planet, while the Ithorians wanted a more green policy of just making the planet as beautiful and natural as possible? Or was it just because their economy and government were nearly ruined due to Sith war/Jedi Civil war?

I'm pretty sure it was the two wars that did the trick. First it was the Mandalorian wars, then the Jedi Civil War. This was followed by a period of instability that culminated with the destruction of the Jedi Order.

[cmdrjones]

What severe damage? Those planets were decimated by bioweapons.

It's a different subject, environmental damage rather than pummeling the planet with turbolasers