He's a chew toy.
While I agree, this thing about the 'fundamental differences' doesn't smell right, I wanted to comment on a few points.
The Empire also uses thrusters to propel its ships in space. Imperial repulsorlift technology only works in a significant gravity well, so when they get away from a planet, they use the same Newtonian principles as Federation ships to accelerate.
Has anyone ever actually crunched numbers on the amount of fuel required to actually accelerate the Death Star or an ISD? I'm just really curious, because someone mentioned in another thread the sort of acceleration they had, and I was wondering if the amount of fuel expended in accelerating a ship at those rates? For some reason I had thought that the millenium falcon used some other kind of technology, that big 'rocket' on the back never looked like a conventional sort of newtonian system. And I must read more on repulsorlifts, that was an interesting fact.
You can argue until you turn blue in the face about how the Death Star blew Alderaan into bits, but the minimum amount of energy required to accomplish that task is easy enough to calculate.
Well, I don't want to start this argument here, I'm sure I'll come across the thread eventually, but, I just wanted to point out that this isn't always the case. Example: You have a nuclear bomb (yay!). Now yes, to get the big fireworks you need to impart some energy into it, but not the same amount of energy as it will actually release. By the same token, it CAN be possible to destroy a planet without resorting to ridiculous amounts of energy. Before someone kills me, I am NOT arguing for this 'fissionable core of Alderaan' theory, I currently believe that the Death Star DID impart a ridiculous amount of energy into the planet. But I'm just saying, things don't always have to be quite so simple.
That just tells us thier main reactor is really more of a battery then is it actually generating energy. So what?
Their main reactor is not a battery. It is a mechanism that converts fuel (matter and antimatter) into energy.
I think he was making an analogy, sort of, in that antimatter shouldn't really be considered a 'power source' in the traditional sense, since it takes just as much energy to make it as you get out of it? Ergo, it acts as a compact way of storing a large amount of energy, and in that sense, is acting as a 'battery'. I don't think he meant it literally, just in the overall function.
They DO have the ability to convert matter directly into energy.
If they could do that, they would not need to carry large quantities of dangerous antimatter fuel in storage tanks on the ship. The show absolutely contradicts your claim.
Don't the transporters, replicators and probably a few other gadgets do this? I've heard some confusion over whether it really turns things into energy or just disassembles and reassembles, but I'm sure there are examples of matter to energy conversions. BUT, that being said, this has ALWAYS been shown as a process which requires energy to accomplish, and I don't think that SuperScaleConstruct actually meant that they turn the matter into energy as a power source (well, I suppose both fusion and M/AM reactions do SORT of count as turning matter into energy, so we might have misunderstood him entirely.)
Why isn't every weapon in the US or Russian nuclear arsenal a 50-megaton bomb?
While I'll admit, I'd USUALLY prefer a couple smaller bombs to one larger bomb, I think you jump to the conclusion on why we have smaller bombs too quickly. First, it IS more efficient, in that you can spread the devestation more efficiently over a larger area (or a couple seperate areas). But if I give you a small, ridiculously strong target, you're going to want to hit it with one friggin' big bomb. Right tool for the right job. The reason WE don't have bombs of a ridiculously large nuclear bombs is that they progressed to a certain size before we finally put a stop (sort of) to nuclear weapon development (the largest nuke ever detonated was 50 megaton, theoretically capable of being 100 megaton, that was back in the 60s. I have little doubt that without the regulation, we WOULD have kept building bigger nukes.) So big bombs certainly have their uses. But as to why photon torpedos don't have the strength of a warp core breach, I think the more likely answer is, you don't want to be anywhere near a warp core breach when it goes off, so you couldn't really have combat at Star Trek typical distances, since we already know at close-ish ranges, photon torpedoes can actually damage the ship doing the shooting if you're not careful.
Everything we've seen in Star Trek indicates that if you "only do half of the procedure" then you just disintegrate the object on your source pad without reorganizing any matter at the destination to fit the object's pattern. You do not get a bunch of energy from the process.
Agreed! I cannot think of a single instance of dematerializing some chunk of matter to extract energy from it.
It's how their warp field works, as per "Deja Q".
Can anyone point me to a reference that says warp drive works via mass lightening?! I'm still looking. I remember the episode, but that just shows the warp field CAN be used for mass lightening, not that this is how we normally zip around space. But I don't have specific memories or the actual episode, do they actually say that that's how they normally work? And does anyone have any other references? It's more out of curiosity. Star Trek does have gravity manipulation, and the gravity manipulation done in Star Trek DOES require power (I think things tend to fall out of the sky when they lose power. I'm sure we must have some examples.)
And if SW ships don't use thrust engines of any sort, then kindly explain what those glowing things on the back of the stardestroyer are:
Again, I was kind of curious to read/do math on the fuel a thrust engine would need in order to move around a ship in the SW world. I had kind of thought there must be something more to those engines than simple thrust principles. I mean, how do they decelerate the way they do? I admit, my knowledge of Star Wars propulsion is rubbish, I'd like to fix that, so anyone with some interesting reading they could point me to, that would be awesome.
