How powerful could a hard sci-fi civilization be?

[bilateralrope]

*How much mass are these thrusters going to expend every time the gun is aimed?

None. You can't "Aim" a weapon like that because any attempt to move it causes shear forces to tear it apart. Super-railguns firing death asteroids at relativistic velocities are no more possible within the laws of physics than are solid dyson spheres.

And if you build it pointing exactly at what you need to fire it at then shear forces still tear it apart because it's so large that the gravity of your star and solar system act unevenly on it along its length and distort it (meaning it explodes when fired) or simply cause it to snap because the material limits of any actual material have been exceeded.

Extreme high end "Hard" SF is wizards.

Thanks. That pretty much makes all my problems with RKV attacks mere nitpicks in comparison.

A massive problem with suggesting Death Rocks as an internal means of MAD is that is isn't mutual at all.

Death Rocks aren't going to kill everyone in the target system, just the people on celestial bodies. Smaller moving objects, like ships or space stations, should be unharmed. If the RKV launcher also survives, then it just needs someone to tell it to fire after the Death Rocks hit to make destruction mutual.

Well, as mutual as they can be when most of your civilization has been moved into space craft too small and mobile to be hit by death rocks, which should be pretty easy if you have the industry to make the launcher.

[Stark]

I think you mean literally anything not a planet: anything that could conceivably move non predictably in tens of thousands of years. Space colonies, asteroid towns, generation ships etc are all basically immune simply by firing a thruster every century.

All you can do is genocide cavemen: the ultimate expression of hard scifi 'intelligence'.

[bilateralrope]

I think you mean literally anything not a planet: anything that could conceivably move non predictably in tens of thousands of years. Space colonies, asteroid towns, generation ships etc are all basically immune simply by firing a thruster every century.

I'd say they have to fire it every year or so, since it's only the closer star systems that have a reasonable chance of even hitting planets. I'd expect them to be firing thrusters more often for other reasons.

All you can do is genocide cavemen: the ultimate expression of hard scifi 'intelligence'.

Only if they can solve all the other problems with DOOM ROCK ATTACKs that have been mentioned.

[KhorneFlakes]

Stark's quote about genociding cavemen pretty much sums up the so-called "hard sci-fi" fattynerds. They're all just a bunch of incredibly paranoid (and genocidal) dickholes.

Seriously, this is why I hate Orion's Arm. The fattynerds don't want anything interesting or fun. They just want to kill cavemen and fail to wipe out other space faring civilizations, and then the aforementioned space faring dudes come over and laugh their asses off at the genocidal fuckwads.

[Darth Tedious]

Exactly.
Threatening to launch an attack that might hit in 20,000 years isn't going to impress anyone who can Base Delta Zero your planet today.

[Stark]

From the first page the discussion is about a society of superminds in a distributed society throughout a system, which indeed be difficult to BDZ. It just doesn't matter, because attacking the million worlds of SW (for instance) will take maybe forty thousand years... only after you launch your eleven trillion RKVs the SW guys will trivially obliterate your quadrillion space habitats using methods with no counter.

So like Connor says, you can have a 'powerful' (ie, not 2001-level tech or whatever) hard scifi society, but pitching them against literal magic is ridiculous and meaningless. The only real advantage such 'hard scifi' stuff has is scale, because science fiction in general certainly doesn't do that very well.

[Darth Tedious]

Wait a minute...

If all the HSF dudes are living in snazzy orbital habitats and hollowed-out asteroids and stuff that's hard to BDZ,

How are they going to use Death Rocks to get MAD with each other?

This idea doesn't even work when it's an internal conflict, let alone against space wizards

[easydoesit1]

You'd need around e24 watts to overload its heat dissipation rate. Theoretically it's possible, I guess. But against a fleet, you're screwed.

I couldn't resist but the funny thing is that it is relatively easily for the aforementioned type 2 civilization to punch through star destroyer shields. The key is the word rate. The star destroyer can dissipate energy at the rate of 1*10^24 joules/second. So what if you use a femotsecond (1*10^-15 s) pulsed laser? Then you would need in excess of 1 gigajoule/femtosecond to defeat star destroyer shields. So operating at 1 kilohertz and 20% efficiency you would need greater than 10 terajoules/second to overwhelm star destroyer shields. To be safe I'd go with 50 terajoule capacitors feeding a 5 gigajoule/femtosecond 1000 hertz laser as my star destroyer killer. Or to lower energy requirements you could go to a 100 hertz laser. You would still be delivering 4 terrajoules/second into the hull of the star destroyer. Now if this is an x-ray laser then you are carving up the star destroyer like it's made of paper. Which brings up the question of why would an advanced race actually waste energy on shields?

By the way, if a type 2 civilization converted the mass of IO into Minbari warcruiser sized ships carrying these lasers then they would be able to build 2 trillion of them. Sounds like a dead star destroyer fleet to me.

[Ariphaos]

RKVs are for retards.

The best weapon that an STL civilization has is sunshine and happiness. Pretty much the only meaningful weapon.

[bilateralrope]

You'd need around e24 watts to overload its heat dissipation rate. Theoretically it's possible, I guess. But against a fleet, you're screwed.

I couldn't resist but the funny thing is that it is relatively easily for the aforementioned type 2 civilization to punch through star destroyer shields. The key is the word rate. The star destroyer can dissipate energy at the rate of 1*10^24 joules/second. So what if you use a femotsecond (1*10^-15 s) pulsed laser? Then you would need in excess of 1 gigajoule/femtosecond to defeat star destroyer shields. So operating at 1 kilohertz and 20% efficiency you would need greater than 10 terajoules/second to overwhelm star destroyer shields. To be safe I'd go with 50 terajoule capacitors feeding a 5 gigajoule/femtosecond 1000 hertz laser as my star destroyer killer. Or to lower energy requirements you could go to a 100 hertz laser. You would still be delivering 4 terrajoules/second into the hull of the star destroyer. Now if this is an x-ray laser then you are carving up the star destroyer like it's made of paper. Which brings up the question of why would an advanced race actually waste energy on shields?

By the way, if a type 2 civilization converted the mass of IO into Minbari warcruiser sized ships carrying these lasers then they would be able to build 2 trillion of them. Sounds like a dead star destroyer fleet to me.

How big would that laser be ?

Could it be aimed fast enough to hit the Star Destroyer ?

Would the laser be able to dissipate waste heat fast enough that it doesn't melt itself ?

Even if all those are true, it's still going to be useless against hit and run attacks.

[Stark]

Who even cares when firing RKVs at real science fiction is starting an uninterceptable WMD fight against guys with way better uninterceptable WMDs than you.

The page one approach of a dispersed civilization using vast arrays of lasers and PBs to kill real scifi ships with scale is much more compelling, because it also gives plenty of targets. Too bad for them that after they launch their paranoid tantrum their star will explode and destroy their entire civilization.

Don't fuck with the big dog, kids.

[bilateralrope]

RKVs are for retards.

The best weapon that an STL civilization has is sunshine and happiness. Pretty much the only meaningful weapon.

I don't understand how that link is arguing RKV's are a bad idea.

[avatarxprime]

Man, I finally got around to reading this entire thread and it seriously felt like a return of the Orion's Arm VS we had a while back. If anyone is still on the "hard" sci-fi force using RKV against the Empire, well they'll do you one better:Galaxy Gun. If you feel you want to go von Neumann instead, fine, Star Wars will still one-up you with a World Devastator.

As to actually using RKVs, as has been pointed out, you're not creating a gun and firing one. In this instance, gravity is your friend. The HSF could use the supermassive blackhole at the center of their galaxy to fire off planets (and even stars) at low percentages of lightspeed (<5%, but potentially as high as 10%). If we're taking a "sufficiently advanced" computer, then it should be able to come up with the trajectories needed. However, moving the mass into place will be a project that will take ages, more than long enough for the FTL civilization to do something about it, and you certainly won't be rapid firing these projectiles.

[Connor MacLeod]

I couldn't resist but the funny thing is that it is relatively easily for the aforementioned type 2 civilization to punch through star destroyer shields. The key is the word rate. The star destroyer can dissipate energy at the rate of 1*10^24 joules/second. So what if you use a femotsecond (1*10^-15 s) pulsed laser? Then you would need in excess of 1 gigajoule/femtosecond to defeat star destroyer shields. So operating at 1 kilohertz and 20% efficiency you would need greater than 10 terajoules/second to overwhelm star destroyer shields. To be safe I'd go with 50 terajoule capacitors feeding a 5 gigajoule/femtosecond 1000 hertz laser as my star destroyer killer. Or to lower energy requirements you could go to a 100 hertz laser. You would still be delivering 4 terrajoules/second into the hull of the star destroyer. Now if this is an x-ray laser then you are carving up the star destroyer like it's made of paper. Which brings up the question of why would an advanced race actually waste energy on shields?

By the way, if a type 2 civilization converted the mass of IO into Minbari warcruiser sized ships carrying these lasers then they would be able to build 2 trillion of them. Sounds like a dead star destroyer fleet to me.

This little approach works as long as oyu focus exclusively on the 'dissipation rate' thingamajig from the ICS and either completely ignore the existence of the shield heat sinks as well as the radiators. Or assume the aforementioned heat sinks have such an inconsequential impact on shields that they might as well not exist. But if they are able to hold a decent fraciton of a second's worth of the dissipation rate (say, 1/10th, but I suppose even 1/100th would work in this case) your argument vanishes into a puff of smoke.

It never ceases to amaze me how often this argument pops up from time to time (I think my favorite pertained to nukes being able to overload shielding because of the time in which they delivered their energy. Clearly only WATTAGE matters and shields are not complex machinery that might have multiple important aspects to their proper functioning.)

Edit: I'll also note that the idea of 'HARD CIV' vs 'SOFT CIV' fighting a Deadliest Warrior style matchup to prove who is the most MANLY is probably doomed from the get go no matter how you try to argue it. If it comes down to a 'all-out to the death' war of total attrition, SW is just going to use its hyperdrive advantage to beat the non-FTL civilization offensively or defensively (Even if they fort up their system with a shit-ton of doom lazers or whatever, there
s still that galaxy-gun like hyperspace missile/bomb swarm idea I proposed earlier. All it would come down to is the perfromance issues they settled on and the amount of time and resources they're willing to waste to simpyl WIN.)

What I'd find more likely is that the Hard Sci Fi civ doesn't seek to prove its undefeatable, but rather that the price of victory would be unbearably high, thereby making any sort of military offensive by the Empire unattractive (Because for all its advantages the GE is still corrupt, inefficient, and rather lazy. It's not like its had any external threats to motivate it to be militarily effective, after all..) Once they manage to take the military issue out of the equation, they pursue alternative means (diplomacy, trade, maybe try to take them down internally via insurrection or such) to achieve their goals (again if 'winning' is the goal, at least.)

[Connor MacLeod]

If you are honestly going to ignore material science enough to get your coilgun and dyson spheres to power it you might as well go for the holly grail of hard to reach Hard science fiction technology and grab an Alcubierre drive. But of course you would never think of actual science that allows FTL in your hard-on sci-fi, despite it's 'validity'. Man the hard sci-fi crowd is hilarious in how they define what is HARD SCI-FI!

That's actually a good point. I keep forgetting about stuff like that (or Wormholes. wormhole travel seems to be more 'acceptable' a form of FTL than other shit in sci fi) and given all the 'hard sci fi' tactics being deployed, this doesn't seem any more or less implausible.

I keep mentally batting around this idea where some sort of 'slow' FTL (maybe single or double digit c) would exist alongside ships that travel STL. Maybe the FTL has limitations or issues that could still make STL ships practical (and depending on who you ask, ships that can achieve space travel at fractions of light speed are as magical as FTL drives. ) sorta like the drive systems in the Hyperion Cantos novels.

[easydoesit1]

How big would that laser be ?

Depends on the tech base used to build it but I think a type 2 civilization should not have a problem fitting one on a 40 million metric ton robotic space ship. Femtosecond and attosecond lasers which we are just starting to develop will have been perfected long ago perfected by the time you get to type 2 civilization status. Shields don't help in this match-up.

Could it be aimed fast enough to hit the Star Destroyer ?

Only the turret would have to be aimed at the star destroyer. Most of the laser would be stationary with respect to the ship. So yes it could be aimed fast enough to hit the star destroyer.

Would the laser be able to dissipate waste heat fast enough that it doesn't melt itself ?

Yes, though the total heat dissipation depends on heat sinks and radiators. However, as long as the ship/orbital weapon platform was big enough (and 40 million metric tons is pretty big) this wouldn't be a problem.

Even if all those are true, it's still going to be useless against hit and run attacks.

You wouldn't just have one. I referenced building 2 trillion ships each massing 40 million metric tons and armed with these weapons. If you had 100,000 distinct orbital colonies and/or planets to defend in your system then you could surround each of them with 20 million of these. If all 25,000 star destroyers jumped in at once to attack one of the colonies then each one would be on the receiving end of 800 of these ships shooting at it. You wouldn't get through many of these hit and run attacks before running out of star destroyers. By the way I am talking about 2 trillion ships in one star system being a trivial thing.

This little approach works as long as oyu focus exclusively on the 'dissipation rate' thingamajig from the ICS and either completely ignore the existence of the shield heat sinks as well as the radiators. Or assume the aforementioned heat sinks have such an inconsequential impact on shields that they might as well not exist. But if they are able to hold a decent fraciton of a second's worth of the dissipation rate (say, 1/10th, but I suppose even 1/100th would work in this case) your argument vanishes into a puff of smoke.

It never ceases to amaze me how often this argument pops up from time to time (I think my favorite pertained to nukes being able to overload shielding because of the time in which they delivered their energy. Clearly only WATTAGE matters and shields are not complex machinery that might have multiple important aspects to their proper functioning.)

From http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Deflector_shield
"The shield itself behaved in a manner similar to that of a thermally conductive material—energy applied was quickly diffused and re-radiated back into the environment, but the shield itself could also absorb some of the energy. The absorbed energy was shunted into heat sinks, and re-radiated at a lesser rate by the shield and neutrino radiators. "

Okay so the energy that the shield absorbs in shunted into the heat sinks and re-radiated by the shield and the neutrino radiators. This does nothing to stop my solution to punching through the shields. The shields will only be able to absorb 20% of the energy I'm shooting at it in any one pulse. Plus it will radiate that energy away during the time between pulses. The 1*10^24 watt figure is the maximum rate that the shield can dissipate energy. Otherwise, the shield dissipation rate wouldn't be 1*10^24 watts, it would be something else. Hence, it may as well not be there. Wattage does matter and even though shields are complex, physically impossible, imaginary machinery; if you want to have the semblance of reality then you won't dismiss scientifically plausible ways to defeat a technology thought up by a non-scientist that wrote a work of fiction. Now I'm sure you know that neutrino radiators cannot be taken seriously if we were to get real technical as it is a technology that can never be created. It is pure technobabble. As long as we are on the subject, I'm sure you know that the ICS power figures would turn a star destroyer into an expanding sphere of ionized gas if it ever turned on it's own reactor unless the laws of thermodynamics don't apply to star destroyers. As a matter of fact, the star destroyer's guns should vaporize from waste heat whenever it fires. I could keep going but pretty much star destroyer's can't even exist in this universe. But how long does it take for the heat sinks and the neutrino radiators to kick in anyway? Light travels 3*10^-7m in one femtosecond which is the duration of the pulse. How will the heat sinks and neutrino radiators even know to kick in, in that short a period of time? Oh, and the shield will still only be able to dissipate energy at the rate of 1 gigajoule/femtosecond per it's specs in the ICS. But the really bad thing is that the above explanation for how heat sinks and radiators work for the shield is bad. They should deal with getting rid of the waste heat created by the shield emitter, which if the ICS is to be believed, is more than enough even if it is 1/1000 of the power of the shield to reduce the star destroyer into an expanding cloud of plasma. You see heat sinks and radiators will not be coming to the defence of your shield.

[easydoesit1]

What is the strongest science fiction faction a socially, politically, intellectual and morally enlightened civilization, that has passed all significant threats of extinction, defeat?

The only time limit on its development is the natural age of the universe. The only limits on its technological advancement are our current understanding of laws of physics and inherent engineering limitations; this means no FTL. Could this civilization conceivably match down the UFP in a total war? Or even the Galactic Empire?

[inspired by this thread:

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=114575 ]

The strongest a STL civilization could become is a star lifting civilization that spans an entire galactic supercluster. Just say no to fighting it. Don't even bother to have the thought. A star lifting civilization will make Star Wars' Star Forge look like a child's toy by comparison. It is a civilization that alters the evolution of stars and builds elements on demand to suit it's fancy. The sheer scale of it's industrial might would put virtually every scifi faction you ever heard of to shame. It would take 200,000 years to overrun the Star Wars galaxy but it could easily field a fleet at the beginning that would outnumber every ship that the Empire could build in that time span by a million to one without using even .00001% of it's industrial capacity. It could send fleets numbering in the trillions to every single system in the Empire simultaneously though it would take up to 200,000 years for all of the fleets to arrive at their target systems. The remnants for the first set of attacks would von neumann the system and send out even more ships so over the course of 200,000 years the total number of ships would increase and the scale would just go to stupidity and absolute ridiculousness. Just say 200 billion star systems times 2 trillion ships in each system with half being launched at the Empire. And that is just the trivial resources in one galaxy. The numbers could actually be a lot worse even with half of a galaxy. You are talking about a civilization that could build stars by lifting solar material from giant stars. For pure ownage they could build ships with artificial red dwarfs as their power source. Yeah, Dyson battleships because they are gangster like that. It would be massive, large, and to say planet killing at the least. Yeah, it would be a real star destroyer. There is almost no limit to the ridiculousness of an advanced civilization that follows the laws of physics as we know them.

[Ariphaos]

RKVs are for retards.

The best weapon that an STL civilization has is sunshine and happiness. Pretty much the only meaningful weapon.

I don't understand how that link is arguing RKV's are a bad idea.

Step 1) Be close enough that the gravitational pull of e.g. Kuiper belt objects being enough to pull your target sufficiently off course.
Step 2) Devote the resources necessary to build a multi-light-year long coilgun.
Step 3) Somehow, hide this, despite being close enough to satisfy the first condition.
Step 4) Somehow, fire this monstrosity without having it be detected, and without screwing up and destroying your entire coil array.

Sunshine and happiness, on the other hand, is not a single projectile. Meaning you have a target path rather than a target point. It's a continuous beam. It moves exactly at the speed of light, not at some fraction of it. You are directly using your raw power output as a weapon - not pumping it through some Rube Goldberg device at a loss.

[bilateralrope]

You wouldn't just have one. I referenced building 2 trillion ships each massing 40 million metric tons and armed with these weapons. If you had 100,000 distinct orbital colonies and/or planets to defend in your system then you could surround each of them with 20 million of these. If all 25,000 star destroyers jumped in at once to attack one of the colonies then each one would be on the receiving end of 800 of these ships shooting at it. You wouldn't get through many of these hit and run attacks before running out of star destroyers. By the way I am talking about 2 trillion ships in one star system being a trivial thing.

By hit and run attacks I mean the Star Destroyer hyperdrives in, fires off a salvo, then gets out before the light from its arrival has arrived at anything the hard civ controls. Meaning that it doesn't matter how powerful the hard civs weapons are, as the Star Destroyer is gone before the hard civ even knows it's there.

[bilateralrope]

Sunshine and happiness, on the other hand, is not a single projectile. Meaning you have a target path rather than a target point. It's a continuous beam. It moves exactly at the speed of light, not at some fraction of it. You are directly using your raw power output as a weapon - not pumping it through some Rube Goldberg device at a loss.

How wide would this continuous beam be when it enters the target system ?
How much energy per square meter are we talking about ?

[Stark]

You wouldn't just have one. I referenced building 2 trillion ships each massing 40 million metric tons and armed with these weapons. If you had 100,000 distinct orbital colonies and/or planets to defend in your system then you could surround each of them with 20 million of these. If all 25,000 star destroyers jumped in at once to attack one of the colonies then each one would be on the receiving end of 800 of these ships shooting at it. You wouldn't get through many of these hit and run attacks before running out of star destroyers. By the way I am talking about 2 trillion ships in one star system being a trivial thing.

By hit and run attacks I mean the Star Destroyer hyperdrives in, fires off a salvo, then gets out before the light from its arrival has arrived at anything the hard civ controls. Meaning that it doesn't matter how powerful the hard civs weapons are, as the Star Destroyer is gone before the hard civ even knows it's there.

Or you could just blow up the sun and say 'nobody likes a loser'. 'Soft scifi' includes so much stuff at 'hard scifi' has literally no counter to its not even funny. Scale is the only chance they have, but without FTL or the power to counterattack their scale is useless against stellar bombs, reality bombs, gods, time travel, probability dampners, nuclear dampners, any of that crazy 'soft' shit.

[bilateralrope]

You wouldn't just have one. I referenced building 2 trillion ships each massing 40 million metric tons and armed with these weapons. If you had 100,000 distinct orbital colonies and/or planets to defend in your system then you could surround each of them with 20 million of these. If all 25,000 star destroyers jumped in at once to attack one of the colonies then each one would be on the receiving end of 800 of these ships shooting at it. You wouldn't get through many of these hit and run attacks before running out of star destroyers. By the way I am talking about 2 trillion ships in one star system being a trivial thing.

By hit and run attacks I mean the Star Destroyer hyperdrives in, fires off a salvo, then gets out before the light from its arrival has arrived at anything the hard civ controls. Meaning that it doesn't matter how powerful the hard civs weapons are, as the Star Destroyer is gone before the hard civ even knows it's there.

Or you could just blow up the sun and say 'nobody likes a loser'. 'Soft scifi' includes so much stuff at 'hard scifi' has literally no counter to its not even funny. Scale is the only chance they have, but without FTL or the power to counterattack their scale is useless against stellar bombs, reality bombs, gods, time travel, probability dampners, nuclear dampners, any of that crazy 'soft' shit.

Some soft settings don't have the power to blow up stars and I prefer my arguments to apply to as many soft civilizations as possible, even if I am talking about a specific setting.

[Stark]

I appreciate that, but I think the joke is that given xyz soft setting (like B5, for instance) if you gave them 5,000 years while RKVs are in flight, they'd have ascended to god hood by the time your projectiles hit. The huge timescales are so big compared to the life cycle of a soft civilisation that how they are 'now' isn't fixed. SW civilisation is what, 25,000 years old? That's not very long in 'wait for one trillion RKVs to hit' terms.

I think that people pitting them directly against each other when it takes some large part of the recorded history of one side to land a single blow ignores what happens to soft civilisations at the high end.

But yeah beating them up with 'current' stuff is still fun. It's arguable at a proper hard civilisation should be able to stabilise their sun or create a new one anyways.

[Imperial528]

The strongest a STL civilization could become is a star lifting civilization that spans an entire galactic supercluster. Just say no to fighting it. Don't even bother to have the thought. A star lifting civilization will make Star Wars' Star Forge look like a child's toy by comparison. It is a civilization that alters the evolution of stars and builds elements on demand to suit it's fancy.

Star Wars has something similar to that capability actually, except instead of settling for altering existing stars, they decided to move them through hyperspace instead. Unfortunately the device was destroyed, though it was still intact at the time of the GE, and a smaller one existed in the Maw.

There is almost no limit to the ridiculousness of an advanced civilization that follows the laws of physics as we know them.

Physics? Maybe. Material science? No, not the way you describe. The things you speak of building would be impressive, sure, but they would be oh so very fragile. Though don't even try to make a Dyson shell, it won't go well for you. Someone would just need to disrupt its station keeping thrusters on one side and apply force to the other and watch it collide with the star at its core. That is, if it doesn't crumple from the damage or its own existence.

The ships you have described, and the energy levels their weapons would operate at, are impossible with known materials. So please do tell what, exactly, you would build them out of.

[Connor MacLeod]

From http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Deflector_shield
"The shield itself behaved in a manner similar to that of a thermally conductive material—energy applied was quickly diffused and re-radiated back into the environment, but the shield itself could also absorb some of the energy. The absorbed energy was shunted into heat sinks, and re-radiated at a lesser rate by the shield and neutrino radiators. "

First off, can we get some independent verification of this other than the Wiki? I know its not in the ICS, and its not in any sources I've seen or known of. So unless it cropped up in the Essential Guide to Warfare or something, I'm not sure about the 'shield behaving like thermally conductive material' or that it diffuses or reradiates back, for that matter.

Okay so the energy that the shield absorbs in shunted into the heat sinks and re-radiated by the shield and the neutrino radiators. This does nothing to stop my solution to punching through the shields. The shields will only be able to absorb 20% of the energy I'm shooting at it in any one pulse.

And how pray tell did you arrive at a 20% figure? And 20% of what (eg terms of yield, weapon, etc.)

Plus it will radiate that energy away during the time between pulses. The 1*10^24 watt figure is the maximum rate that the shield can dissipate energy. Otherwise, the shield dissipation rate wouldn't be 1*10^24 watts, it would be something else. Hence, it may as well not be there. Wattage does matter and even though shields are complex, physically impossible, imaginary machinery; if you want to have the semblance of reality then you won't dismiss scientifically plausible ways to defeat a technology thought up by a non-scientist that wrote a work of fiction. Now I'm sure you know that neutrino radiators cannot be taken seriously if we were to get real technical as it is a technology that can never be created. It is pure technobabble. As long as we are on the subject, I'm sure you know that the ICS power figures would turn a star destroyer into an expanding sphere of ionized gas if it ever turned on it's own reactor unless the laws of thermodynamics don't apply to star destroyers. As a matter of fact, the star destroyer's guns should vaporize from waste heat whenever it fires. I could keep going but pretty much star destroyer's can't even exist in this universe.

All I'm seeing is alot of pointless or redundant verbiage padding out this statement, aside from your obsession over wattage alone. I mean its not as if anything else will *possibly* be a factor to shields other than power!

But how long does it take for the heat sinks and the neutrino radiators to kick in anyway?

We have no idea. Are you talking about 'activate to full power from complete deactivation' or what?

Light travels 3*10^-7m in one femtosecond which is the duration of the pulse. How will the heat sinks and neutrino radiators even know to kick in, in that short a period of time?

]

Wait, you just asked about this particular property of the shields, and then automatically assumed it COULDN'T simply because of 'arbitrary numbers?' I'm just guessing you took the speed of light and divided it by a femtosecond and then arbitrarily decided that was all that mattered. Nothing about other parameters (number of pulses, energy per pulse, and so on) because.. well.. BECAUSE.

I'll also note that while we don't know what you asked, we DO know from the ICS and various other sources that they employ quite a few massless beam weapons (at least one variant of laser/turbolaser weapon, for example) and they have particle beams as well (which are for the most part not going to be vastly slower.) So I'd wager we need to know alot more than 'how fast the beam moves' or how fast your hypothetical uberlaser is pulsing.

Oh, and the shield will still only be able to dissipate energy at the rate of 1 gigajoule/femtosecond per it's specs in the ICS.

Which shield are we talking about? THere's several shield ratings in the ICS, and moreover its hilarious how you seem to assume that 'only dissipation matters' - if you somehow dump the energy in quickly enough the shields will somehow be completely ignored. Which actually completely ignores my point about heat sinks. What if the dissipation rate, for example, was not 'when the energy hits the shield', but rather 'what the radiators dissipate each second?' That would change things around quite a bit. What's more, one of the more commonly discussed interpretations (at least the way Mike used to put it) is a sink analogy. The 'dissipation rate' in the ICS is the drain, the heat sinks are the sink, etc. We know the size of the drain, but we dont know the sink itself, or how fast things get poured into it, etc.

I will further note that if such tactics were viable you wouldn't have to use shit like Torpedo spheres to take down shields, since they do pretty much what you describe to bypass shields as well.

But the really bad thing is that the above explanation for how heat sinks and radiators work for the shield is bad. They should deal with getting rid of the waste heat created by the shield emitter, which if the ICS is to be believed, is more than enough even if it is 1/1000 of the power of the shield to reduce the star destroyer into an expanding cloud of plasma. You see heat sinks and radiators will not be coming to the defence of your shield.

I can't tell if this is backpedaling, complaining, or just hard sci fi elitism.

It probably doesn't matter though. I could be wrong/concede all of the above and Star Wars STILL wouldn't lose to the hypothetical 'SUPAR HARD SCI FI DOOMPIRE' because.. well they simply don't have to fight the way you seem to think they do. What makes you think they even need to get into range of all these DOOMLASERS to be effective, for one thing? The ROTS ICS mentions Venator TLs having a 10 light minute range, for example, and in one of the NJO novels (Rebel Stand) a starship is capable of bombarding targets from outside the Coruscant system.

What's even more hilarious is that they don't even need to use beam weapons, given that hyperdrive gives them a fantastic delivery platform for any sort of weapon system they might want to attack with, and they could stand off at potentially any distance and deliver it. Someone mentioned the Galaxy gun as one obvious example of this, but frankly sticking a hyperdrive on anything that can carry a ton of 'boom' would work. They dont' even need stupendously huge warheads, just alot of them (or alot of delivery platforms, whatever works.) As I said before, it really comes down to will, resources, and time.

I can't wait to find out what this hyper-super-dooper HARDSCIFI superciv is going to do to stop the Empire from hyperspace bombing them from light years out.