I lack both the math skills and the raw data to calculate this, but when looking at another thread it struck me as something interesting to know....
Are SW weapons, especially turbolasers, subject to economies, or diseconomies, of scale? Or are they roughly smooth throughout?
It would seem to me that if we could somehow isolate, say, the firepower and mass of several given weapons, on different scales, we could get an idea of whether the weapons scale well, poorly, or smoothly... which would lend us greater abilities to predict, though in an admittedly imperfect manner, the yield of weapons whose throughput is not formally addressed.
I dont know enough to even know where to start, but I thought it an interesting idea and figured id throw it out here for the experts to chew on.
Analyzing a fictional universe is alot like science. Though you cant run experiments, you can take known facts, derive theories, and test their predictive power.
Economies and Diseconomies of Scale
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RedImperator
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Wouldn't this belong in Pure Star Wars?
Anyway, some of the early work that was done trying to pin down ISD firepower scaled down the Death Star superlaser (which had a lower limit fixed at some gigantic number I can't be bothered to look up right now) to the size of the heavy dorsal guns on the ISD II, and compared that number to what the TESB asteroid vaporization scene demonstrated for the point-defense guns on the same ship. I believe it worked out that the power curve was pretty linear, possibly becoming more efficient as the size of the guns increased. The math heads on this board could answer this better than I could.
Anyway, some of the early work that was done trying to pin down ISD firepower scaled down the Death Star superlaser (which had a lower limit fixed at some gigantic number I can't be bothered to look up right now) to the size of the heavy dorsal guns on the ISD II, and compared that number to what the TESB asteroid vaporization scene demonstrated for the point-defense guns on the same ship. I believe it worked out that the power curve was pretty linear, possibly becoming more efficient as the size of the guns increased. The math heads on this board could answer this better than I could.
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Yep. Moved.RedImperator wrote:Wouldn't this belong in Pure Star Wars?
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