Vendetta wrote: ↑2021-09-23 09:45am
Here's the thing though "How manly does our made up stuff look compared to other made up stuff" is not actually relevant. It does not help you tell good stories in the slightest. Versus debates are an idle pastime for the internet or the pub, not the point of writing fiction!
Nobody's numbers actually matter.
Actually, numbers do matter.
You at least need to do "back of the envelope" numbers to "sanity check" things.
Mike's old SWvsST page did it nicely:
LINK on Death Star
LINK on Alderaanian Destruction
LINK on SW Acceleration
There's a lot, but I'll boil it down for you -- Mike basically pointed out that:
1.) If Alderaan's mass had been accelerated to merely escape velocity (11.2 km/sec); Mike pointed out that it would have taken 10+ minutes for the debris cloud from it's destruction to spread. Instead, analyzing frame by frame shows that Alderaan's debris was ejected at around 18,000 km/sec; or around 4% of the Speed of Light.
2.) The Death Star's acceleration capacity was about 670 km/sec2. while moving around the Gas Giant Yavin to get into firing position on the Yavin IV moon.
This one isn't from Mike, but from me using a physics calculator (
LINK)
4.) If we assume that Star Wars craft can reach escape velocity from Earth-like planets (11.2 km/sec); in about ten seconds from a zero start (0 km/sec), we end up with an atmospheric acceleration of 1.12~ km/sec2.
With all this math done, you don't have to explictly state "Reactor output rate now steady at one to the thirty third power, Sir." -- that's boring and lazy.
What you can do from a story telling point of view with all those "back of envelope" numbers are things like this.
1.) You can figure out how late someone could leave Alderaan and not die from the debris ring.
The official SW site has a video showing that about 1.5 minutes elapsed from Leia arriving on the Death Star's oversector bridge and Tarkin ordering the superlaser to be fired.
If we assume that Leia was rousted from her cell and marched to the Oversector Bridge in advance of the DS1 dropping from hyperspace to minimize the amount of time separatists could escape from Alderaan; we can assume further that the total elapsed time from the DS1 dropping from hyperspace and the big gun firing was about two minutes.
Furthermore, using a displacement calculator:(
LINK)...
with:
Starting Velocity of 11.2 km/sec (11,200 m/sec2) - Orbital Velocity.
Acceleration of 1,400 km/sec2 (1,400,000 m/sec2) - About 2 times faster than the Death Star - I think this is a reasonable estimate for large transports.
Time = 6 seconds
We get a distance travelled of 25,260+ km -- that's enough to get us out of the 15,000 km/sec "danger zone" for the debris ring's initial acceleration
Add in about ten seconds for leaving the atmosphere and reaching orbital velocity from a zero start on the ground.
So; from all this -- the minimum safe time for a last minute escape from Alderaan is about 16 to 17 seconds before the Death Star fires. Anything less than that, you stand a chance to be destroyed by the debris ring impacting you.
Thus, the only people who made it off Alderaan were:
1.) Criminal elements (smugglers) or ultrarich people who already had escape plans well in advance and were ready to go at the drop of a hat.
2.) Transports scheduled for takeoff in less than a minute when the Death Star showed up. It takes about 20 minutes to board an Airbus A380. This is not likely to change significantly for large transport spacecraft in the SW universe.
This has further dreadful implications.
Remember how in ANH, it didn't take the Imperials long to find the Millennium Falcon with a "short range fighter"?
Why were the TIEs out?
Not to defend the Death Star (remember, it was invulnerable to the starfleet); but to round up ships and craft like the Millennium Falcon which were moving in and out of the Alderaanian system as part of the routine space traffic scheduled that day.
Where did all that space traffic go when Alderaan was destroyed?
Was there a "Sanitization Operation" planned to ensure that the Empire's story of what happened in Alderaan was the only story that got out?
Was there a "second Alderaanian holocaust" when Luke destroyed the Death Star, and by extension the millions of Alderaanian refugees rounded up by Imperial forces and imprisoned on the Death Star until "stories could be gotten straight"?
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Another point for "numbers do matter" / story matters is this:
Mike pointed out that with a conservative 1 day recharge figure for the Superlaser on DS1, you got a required power production rate of 1.2E33 watts for the Death Star's reactors. By contrast, the Sun's total output is 3.8E26 watts.
The Death Star is about 3.1 million times more powerful than the Sun; and the sun consumes about 5E16 kilograms of hydrogen per day.
If we handwave things away and say that hypermatter is efficient enough to make the consumption rate of the Sun and Death Star the same -- then you need to feed 5E16 kg of handwavium into the Death Star every time you fire the big gun.
Where is that handwavium produced? You could make a spy thriller story over tracking handwavium production to see if large amounts are being diverted from existing production facilities or if the Empire is building new production facilities as part of the Rebellion's efforts to make sure they're not caught flat-footed by the existence of a new Death Star type weapon again.