Target practice (2008-07-22)

[Batman]

@Batman, there is a P 38 fighter its in RotS:ICS

I stand corrected, then. And I'm surprised that nobody noticed I confused 'Where no Man has gone Before' (where E-nil DOES encounter something called the Galactic Barrier under her own power) with 'That which Survives'.
Not that I see how that matters since the UPPER or LOWER edge of the galaxy is considerably LESS distant than 20,000 ly.

[Batman]

When was the last time you saw a hard-core Trektard who wasn't also a rabid fundie? Funny that (wrong as he is) he tries to play on the side of "creationist thinking = bad".

I'm a Trekkie and I'm as atheistic as DW himself. But I'm willing to try and dismantle this guy's case.

He didn't say 'Trekkie'. He said 'hard-core trektard'. That's not exactly the same thing you know.

The fact that all SD's lost in action (I'm conceding this point because it's been about four years since I've seen the later SW movies)

Maybe you should've read the rest of the thread then. NONE of them were.

As so many have pointed out, fusion doesn't mean nuclear fusion. If it were nuclear fusion, the Death Star would be impossible even if a large amount of it were pure plutonium. Fusion could mean the fusion of matter and antimatter or the fusion of material into a black hole.

And never actually mentioned in any canon material that I can recall, and CERTAINLY not the movies.

An ISD is indeed larger than most ST vessels, except Borg cubes or Dominion heavy battleships, the latter of which is about five kilometres long, IIRC about the same size as an SSD

Hello? Executor was 19 FUCKING KILOMETRES long. Even the asinine WEG material credited SSDs with 8 km length.

[CaptainChewbacca]

The Death Star is a weapon of terror. It is made to cow your enemy into submission. It is overkill. It is extremely energy-inefficient when the destruction of a planetary population could be achieved at a far lesser cost via BDZ. An Imperial Star Destroyer is a weapon of war. It's made to kill your enemy. They're made for entirely different purposes.

Can Star Destroyers get through a planetary shield? Seems to me that THAT would be one of the main plusses of a Death Star.

[Ender]

The Death Star is a weapon of terror. It is made to cow your enemy into submission. It is overkill. It is extremely energy-inefficient when the destruction of a planetary population could be achieved at a far lesser cost via BDZ. An Imperial Star Destroyer is a weapon of war. It's made to kill your enemy. They're made for entirely different purposes.

Can Star Destroyers get through a planetary shield? Seems to me that THAT would be one of the main plusses of a Death Star.

A squadron of star destroyers and a star dreadnaught can't get through a theater shield, mush less a planetary one.

[Venator]

The Death Star is a weapon of terror. It is made to cow your enemy into submission. It is overkill. It is extremely energy-inefficient when the destruction of a planetary population could be achieved at a far lesser cost via BDZ. An Imperial Star Destroyer is a weapon of war. It's made to kill your enemy. They're made for entirely different purposes.

Can Star Destroyers get through a planetary shield? Seems to me that THAT would be one of the main plusses of a Death Star.

It's been said to death that the Death Star has a practical use; apparently high-end planetary shields can take fleet-level bombardments for months.

In the absence of a Death Star, Imperial fleets tend to rely on "Torpedo Spheres" to crack planetary shields with high-yield missiles, if I remember rightly.

[TC Pilot]

Indeed. Torpedo spheres painstakingly analyze the planetary shield and essentially unloaded a multitude of missiles on weak points. The alternative is to pound away at the shields for however long it takes for the shield to come down.

This can be incredibly long, too. In the Clone Wars cartoon, in particular, the Clone army was "right on schedule" with a several-months long bombardment of a theater shield, and Coruscant's shields held up for days against sustained bombardment by the Imperial Coalition's blockade fleet before the New Republic simply decided to drop the shield so they could flee. Admiral Ackbar, in Wedge's Gamble was resigned to a months-long siege of the capital, as well.

[Swindle1984]

The Death Star also serves the practical purpose of a mobile garrison, if the ability for Star Destroyers to dock inside its hangars is canon. Mobile siege weapon AND a massive concentration of military force with repair and refueling facilities would prove very valuable, especially once you factor in the terror weapon aspect.

[PeZook]

The purpose of the Death Star is irrelevant. They built it, it flies under its own power, it has an FTL drive and can destroy planets. It's a feat of engineering that Trek powers simply cannot duplicate or counter in any way at all.

[Rihannsu Science Officer]

He didn't say 'Trekkie'. He said 'hard-core trektard'. That's not exactly the same thing you know.

Hello? Executor was 19 FUCKING KILOMETRES long. Even the asinine WEG material credited SSDs with 8 km length.

I must have remembered five miles (8 km) as five kilometres. Not that it matters, given the sheer NUMBER of ISD's vs. the number of Dominion battleships.

Last time I was here I was called a Trektard, had some ideas on defending the Federation and allies. Probably not too remembered, but I did identify as a "Trektard" (quotes emphasised, meaning "Trektard in the eyes of a large percentage of SDN.")

[Peptuck]

The purpose of the Death Star is irrelevant. They built it, it flies under its own power, it has an FTL drive and can destroy planets. It's a feat of engineering that Trek powers simply cannot duplicate or counter in any way at all.

Not to mention utterly and completely outpowering the industrial capacity of the Federation. Having the ability to build what is essentially a 900km-diameter planet, on-site, with petty cash, in six months, using the resources of a single shipping company, and entirely in secret, should go to show just what kind of a power is being dealt with here.

The Empire could literally slap together the entire combined Federation fleet a hundred times over without straining their resources, or even entering a serious wartime footing.

[Darth Hoth]

The purpose of the Death Star is irrelevant. They built it, it flies under its own power, it has an FTL drive and can destroy planets. It's a feat of engineering that Trek powers simply cannot duplicate or counter in any way at all.

That does not, however, appear to be what the Trektard is talking about. Instead, he is using his own kind of logic to "prove" that if an ISD can perform a Base Delta Zero, then the Empire would not need the Death Star, and since they built one, that is not the case. Against the obvious counter-argument of planetary shields, he is throwing up Walls of Ignorance, which the rational debaters are attempting to break through.

On an unrelated note, does anyone have the slightest inkling as to what he is talking about with regards to hydrogen mining? Is that from any canon source, a Darkstar rant, what? Even Wookieepedia, the bastion of hyperinclusionism, makes not the tiniest mention of it. Is it purely made up? Or is it possible that he himself is stupid enough to simply assume Cloud City a hydrogen mining base?

[Darth Hoth]

The Empire could literally slap together the entire combined Federation fleet a hundred times over without straining their resources, or even entering a serious wartime footing.

You are giving the Federation vastly too much credit. The "thinly populated" Chommell Sector of the waning days of the Galactic Republic alone outnumbered the Federation by an order of magnitude or more. They, the tiniest fraction of what was to become the Empire, one of thousands of sectors and a smallish one at that, could do what you posit without exceeding the peacetime Federation in military expenditure relative to GDP, even if one for the sake of the argument were to assume weapons parity.

[Ryushikaze]

The purpose of the Death Star is irrelevant. They built it, it flies under its own power, it has an FTL drive and can destroy planets. It's a feat of engineering that Trek powers simply cannot duplicate or counter in any way at all.

That does not, however, appear to be what the Trektard is talking about. Instead, he is using his own kind of logic to "prove" that if an ISD can perform a Base Delta Zero, then the Empire would not need the Death Star, and since they built one, that is not the case. Against the obvious counter-argument of planetary shields, he is throwing up Walls of Ignorance, which the rational debaters are attempting to break through.

On an unrelated note, does anyone have the slightest inkling as to what he is talking about with regards to hydrogen mining? Is that from any canon source, a Darkstar rant, what? Even Wookieepedia, the bastion of hyperinclusionism, makes not the tiniest mention of it. Is it purely made up? Or is it possible that he himself is stupid enough to simply assume Cloud City a hydrogen mining base?

That is, I believe, what he is implying. Certainly, it's the only off hand mention of 'gas mining' I can think off that isn't from some forsaken sourcebook somewhere. And this guy's grasp of the OT is so tenuous I wouldn't be surprised if he totally forgot that they specified Cloud City was responsible for Tibanna, not Hydrogen.

[Wyrm]

Alright. I've officially joined the dogpile.

To: Bob <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Tech levels

Hi. I'm from SDN, the site administrated by Mike Wong, the fellow you kindly sent your hillarious letter to start this whole shebang.

Your grasp of logic, science and technology, not to mention millitary strategy is laughable at best. Your attack starts with the statement, "If SDs were as powerful as you say, you would never have had to build the Death Star." This statement assumes that the Death Star shares the same purpose as a Star Destroyer, when they clearly do not.

The second statement we focus on is "All of the SDs we saw lost in action where taken out by fighters. That shows they have weak shields, and weak anti- fighter defences. If you assume an X wing has more fire power then the Enterprise D, your just being silly."

Leaving aside the others' arguments that the capitol ships in SW were actually taken out by other capitol ships while the snub fighters actually do very little damage (or are freakishly lucky to score a critical hit), you realize that if an X-wing can mount a weapon that could easily penetrate a capitol ship's shields, that a capitol ship could mount them by the bajillion? The fighters would never get the chance to blow up any capitol ships: the other cap-ships simply spam each other to death within moments.

This doesn't happen. Therefore, by your own premises, you're wrong.

Okay, onto the stupid assumption that the SW universe has only fusion power. You cite as evidence SW ships "moving like bricks", to which I answer that they only do so in comparison to other SW ships that are supposed to be more nimble, and "Power is fusion, that's it," in other words, your say-so. But the onscreen evidence of ANH clearly demonstrates that the energy of the Death Star's beam is at least 1e38 J per shot, by the fact that Alderaan's debris was scattered as fast as 4%c, which translates into 1.590e23 kg of hydrogen (fusion) fuel. Liquid hydrogen is 67.758 kg/m^3 at one atmosphere (~101 kP) and 20 K, so this is a sphere 16,485.4 km wide. This is about 103 times the diameter of the DS1 it is supposed to be contained in, for a single shot. Matter/antimatter would require a sphere of hydrogen 3,153.5 km in diameter, 19.7 times the diameter of the DS1. A sphere of uranium the same mass would be 480 km in diameter (19.1 g/cc), or 3 times the DS1's. Yet in cross sections of the DS1, we find no fuel tanks; the fuel, if it exists, must be integral with the reactor body, such that the reactor occupies at most 10% of the DS1's diameter. And the DS1 had enough fuel for several of these shots.

"Hypermatter reactors" are unspecified in its mechanism, but it adheres to the above determinations of power density. They are what power the larger SW ships. And they need it.

"Weapons in SW are stated to be lasers, (Ion cannon aside) though they don't look or act that way, a lot of the time." This is to give up the argument before you even begin; if it doesn't look like a duck, fly like a duck, or quack like a duck, it ain't a duck, no matter how many times you call it one. If it doesn't act like a laser, it ain't a laser, no matter how many times it's called a "turbolaser."

"Laser energy just burns it's target, no blast effects. ... Lasers can be countered in several ways. Refraction is a simple low tech way in use today. wide band adjustable shields would find it easy to jam their wavelength frequency." The Trektard 'typed weapons' is one of the dumbest arguments in Trektardism, because at high power levels, heating effects produce blast effects, and blast effects produce heading effects.

Do you want an example of a heating effect producing a blast effect? An atomic bomb. The primitive product of uranium/plutonium fission is an intense burst of gamma-rays (with a smattering of other frequencies). If it were impossible for electromagnetic radiation to become mechanical action, a nuke would consist of a burning flash of intensely bright light, over in an instant. Indeed, in space, this is exactly what a nuke looks like. The shock wave and mushroom-cloud shaped fireball that is the 'signature' of a nuke is caused by the air being heated up a great amount in a small amount of time. An intense enough laser will also produce shockwaves. High explosives produce shockwaves in the same way. This also connects to why you're full of crap when you deny that proton torpedoes are nukes of some kind.

Indeed, that ST have such effect segregated along weapons types is proof that they are weak. Phasers and disrupters make things dissolve throughs some funky NDP effect. But we know one thing about NDP effects: they are weak. Pay attention the next time someone disintegrates by a phaser blast — the "shockwave" doesn't even singe the carpet! An effect that doesn't even do what a cigarette can do is not 'powerful' except in the minds of the stupid.

"In terms of speed, fire power and shielding there is just no contest." That's right. There is no contest. It just doesn't go the way you think. SW ships demonstrate firepower far in excess of ST ships, but they need to grind away at other SW ships in order to weaken shields enough for fighters to make potshots through weak points in them. (The space battle took at least as long as the battle with the Ewoks on the ground, and that was quite prolonged.)

This thing has grown long enough. This is a lot for you to chew over, along with my other SDN friends. Chio.

I especially like my 'typed weapons = weak weapons' argument.

[Wyrm]

Hi. I'm from SDN, the site administrated by Mike Wong, the fellow you kindly sent your hillarious letter to start this whole shebang.

Yes I have gotten a good laugh.

Your grasp of logic, science and technology, not to mention millitary strategy is laughable at best. Your attack starts with the statement, "If SDs were as powerful as you say, you would never have had to build the Death Star." This statement assumes that the Death Star shares the same purpose as a Star Destroyer, when they clearly do not.

The point you keep missing no mater how many time I repeat it is that killing the population of a planet is all you need to do.

There's more to war than just destroying the enemy. Demoralization is also part of it. The Death Star, as has been pointed out, is a _terror weapon_. Even Tarkin admits that. "Fear will keep them in line. Fear of this battle station." If the Death Star can make a planet surrender without firing a shot, then it has done its job. But such a terror weapon needs street cred, hence Alderaan: Tarkin passed up an opportunity to wipe out a rebel base (he didn't know that Leia lied until later) in favor for an effective demonstration of the Death Star's capabilities on a Core World.

A BDZ renders the planet uninhabitable, but only _after_ the world's protective shield (if any) has been eliminated, and with the powerful shields, that can take a while, and with help and sympezisers less than a day away by hyperspace, this is a powerful bargaining chip. Alderaan's shields were "as powerful as any in the Empire," yet it only held a fraction of a second against the sueprlaser. As small as the SW galaxy is to its citizenry, it isn't THAT small.

If the point is terror scattering the mass is the planet is just gratuitous.

Or maybe the planetary shields of a typical target (rich) world is just that hard to crack. Remember, a typical seige operation using a fleet of SW ships on a wealthy world like Alderaan can take months.

Lucus never bothered to think about the energy needed, he just wanted a dramatic effect, for a story.

It doesn't matter if Lucas bothered to think about ramifications of a planet being shattered by a weapon, or if it was just for dramamtic effect in a story. The Death Star can blow up a planet.

If you think the Emperor was a good strategist your showing that the basic concepts of strategy are over your head.

And, as a matter of fact, I don't think the Emperor is a good strategist. If he had been, he would've won the battle of Endor.

And the Death Star can blow up a planet.

Since you under stand nothing about conserving forces, you think you have to be strong every were. That's why you think there are 10,000 SDs.

Funny, I never claimed any such thing.

Napoleon once asked a staff officer to draw up a plan to defend the boarders of France. He spread the army out evenly across the frontier. Napoleon chewed him out, by saying "Are you trying to stop smugglers". May be you think the emperor was a better strategist then Napoleon? The Emperors strategy in the original trilagy, was bound to end in defeat, because he was setting more and more of the people in the Galaxy against him. His strategy in the prequel movies was good, because he was rallying people and worlds too his cause. They thought they were serving a good purpose. You can rule a huge empire with little force if most of it's people are willing to be ruled. Kublai Khan said "You can conquer the world from horse back, but you can not rule it from there". Brute force will only get you so far, especial when people have the physical means of resistance. The Emperor had no monopoly on force.

Whether the Emperor was right or wrong to have the Death Star built is another debate. You have not addressed the basic point: your argument that the need for a Death Star proves the Star Destroyers are impotent relies on the basic assumption that the two have the same purpose, when they clearly do not.

The second statement we focus on is "All of the SDs we saw lost in action where taken out by fighters. That shows they have weak shields, and weak anti- fighter defenses. If you assume an X wing has more fire power then the Enterprise D, your just being silly."

Leaving aside the others' arguments that the capitol ships in SW were actually taken out by other capitol ships while the snub fighters actually do very little damage (or are freakishly lucky to score a critical hit), you realize that if an X-wing can mount a weapon that could easily penetrate a capitol ship's shields, that a capitol ship could mount them by the bajillion? The fighters would never get the chance to blow up any capitol ships: the other cap-ships simply spam each other to death within moments.

Finally trying to use some logic. Yes you have a point. The guns on fighters can hurt ships but only from very close range. SW was modeled on WWII. In WWII air craft could cripple, or sink ships with bombs, and rockets. To do that they had to get very close, and risk being shot down.

The main reason for this, of course, was that WWII missles and bombs were unguided. A bomb that misses doesn't do nearly as much damage as a bomb that squares a direct hit. Also, WWII fighters had to score direct hits on vulnerable parts of the ship to sink them. That requires getting closer.

In addition, planes have and advantage the surface guns of battleships do not: they can strike beyond the horizion. There is no horizion in space.

As far as I know, the only thing Lucas credits WWII for is films of dogfights creating models for his own snub-fighter dogfights, and never claimed to pull the entire WWII naval tactics manual. Capitol-ship combat is actually pretty boring to watch.

Ships could engage each other at much greater range. Point blank fire from fighters score mostly hits. The longer range fire from capitol ships miss allot.

Please state your proof that the capitol ships' fire misses a lot. And for that matter, define what you mean by misses a lot.

Energy weapons lose power over distance.

Yes, they do. But your milage may vary. A tightly focused beam will remain effective over a longer distance than a not-so-tightly focused beam.

A turbo laser blast at long range, may not be much more powerful then blasts from fighter guns at point blank range.

Depends on how much the beam spreads over that distance, and how much umph you can pack into the turbolaser shot to begin with.

Lucas wanted fighters to shoot up ships that's why we saw it on screen.

Again, what Lucas _wanted_ to show is irrelevant. What Lucas _actually_ showed was a pair of fighters firing on a domed structure of uncertain function, which blew up, and another fighter crashing into the Executor's main bridge. The fighter did not take out the entire Executor. If an auxilliary bridge could've taken control in time, she would've been saved. But shit happens, and it crashed into the DS2. So the fighter didn't take out the Executor... the DS2 did.

We have to guess what capital ships can do to each other. I was hoping to see that, but in 6 movies we never saw 2 big ships shoot it out.

Actually, one blew up _completely_ in the scene where Ackbar ordered concentration of fire on the Executor. Since we never seen a fighter do nearly this much damage to the Executor, we can safely credit this kill to the capitol ships.

And, no, don't say that the desctruction of the Death Stars by fighters proves otherwise. Both tasks required specific circumstances that wouldn't be availible to ST ships. The DS1 was taken out through a specific chink in its armor that could only be taken advantage of by a Force user; the second required fighters flying into the damn thing to shoot directly at the reactor, a route unavailible in a completed battlestation.

We never see all this capitol ship fire hitting the ship. The fire your crediting is implied. We see a SD in the back ground blowing up under fire. We see no details. The only specific damage on the SSD is from fighters.

If that were true, why doesn't the Rebellion ditch capitol ships completely and just use their uber-fighters?

This doesn't happen. Therefore, by your own premises, you're wrong.

Okay, onto the stupid assumption that the SW universe has only fusion power. You cite as evidence SW ships "moving like bricks", to which I answer that they only do so in comparison to other SW ships that are supposed to be more nimble, and "Power is fusion, that's it," in other words, your say-so. But the onscreen evidence of ANH clearly demonstrates that the energy of the Death Star's beam is at least 1e38 J per shot, by the fact that Alderaan's debris was scattered as fast as 4%c, which translates into 1.590e23 kg of hydrogen (fusion) fuel. Liquid hydrogen is 67.758 kg/m^3 at one atmosphere (~101 kP) and 20 K, so this is a sphere 16,485.4 km wide. This is about 103 times the diameter of the DS1 it is supposed to be contained in, for a single shot. Matter/antimatter would require a sphere of hydrogen 3,153.5 km in diameter, 19.7 times the diameter of the DS1. A sphere of uranium the same mass would be 480 km in diameter (19.1 g/cc), or 3 times the DS1's. Yet in cross sections of the DS1, we find no fuel tanks; the fuel, if it exists, must be integral with the reactor body, such that the reactor occupies at most 10% of the DS1's diameter. And the DS1 had enough fuel for several of these shots.

I'm glad you take this so seriously.

There's no need to be jealous just because I can do this for fun, but you have to struggle just to get the physics right.

To make this work you have to create a power source (Hypermatter) that gets more then 100% energy from matter.

Wrong. The calculations above are for energy generation availible to ST powers, nuclear fusion and matter/antimatter, and here I was assuming these efficiencies were 100% just to show that even under the BEST theoretical circumstances, the amount of fuel needed to perform a task the Death Star can do requires too much fuel if such power sources were all that were availible to SW powers.

The Death Star can blow up a planet. That task requires too much fuel if SW powers were limited to those availible to ST powers. Therefore, whatever powers Death Stars is more powerful still than any nuclear fusion or matter/antimatter reactor, and therefore, SW powers have access to such a reactor. Its existence is _demanded_ by the Death Star.

That makes this a waste of time trying to make sense of it.

Of course. All hobbies are a waste of time. If they weren't, they wouldn't be hobbies, just jobs that you happen to enjoy.

You are going even beyond hypermatter, and suggesting they get power with out expending fuel, that's just stupid.

Lies. Hypermatter is super-exotic shit. To do the task required of it (powering a space station of no more than 160 km in diameter to blow up worlds multiple times), it must have a free energy density that exceeds its inertial and gravitational mass. This is absurd by any currently-known physics, and therefore impossible by that physics.

Yet the Death Star exists in SW, in its observed configuration. The Death Star can blow up planets. Therefore, the physics of SW is not our physics, and it allows such things to exist.

The whole thing is just silly. Just accept it makes no sense, and accept it with suspension of disbelief, like so many other events in Sci/Fi. Vorlon planet killers, species 8472 taking out planets, the Lexx, and so on. I just saw Dr Who tonight, and the Dalikes moved planets though time and space. Would you waste you time trying to calculate the power need to do that. Would you try to explain the power source? It's nonsense.

Of course it's nonsense. But its fun to speculate. Don't be jealous because I have the intellectual chops to find speculation more fun than chore, even when solving ordinary differential equations in thermodynamics. I even learned under what conditions hydrogen turns metallic.

Why, the way you whine makes it sound like you _don't_ find this fun.

"Hypermatter reactors" are unspecified in its mechanism, but it adheres to the above determinations of power density. They are what power the larger SW ships. And they need it.

Again the whole concept is none sense.

Again, I'm not denying that. And again, it's fun to observe SW and understand _why_ blowing up a planet with a 160 km diameter spaceball requires an impossible power source, and to speculate what has to change with the universe to make it _not_ impossible.

"Weapons in SW are stated to be lasers, (Ion cannon aside) though they don't look or act that way, a lot of the time." This is to give up the argument before you even begin; if it doesn't look like a duck, fly like a duck, or quack like a duck, it ain't a duck, no matter how many times you call it one. If it doesn't act like a laser, it ain't a laser, no matter how many times it's called a "turbolaser."

That was my point, they don't seem like laser. So your agreeing with me.

Do you think I can't see through this transparent lie? Your entire spew was based on 'turbolasers = lasers, therefore, can be countered by tuning a trek shield.'

"Laser energy just burns it's target, no blast effects. ... Lasers can be countered in several ways. Refraction is a simple low tech way in use today. wide band adjustable shields would find it easy to jam their wavelength frequency." The Trektard 'typed weapons' is one of the dumbest arguments in Trektardism, because at high power levels, heating effects produce blast effects, and blast effects produce heading effects.

Wartardard weapons make so much more sense. The concept of countering EM bands does makes sense theoretically.

Except for this small little matter called the first law of thermodyamics, also known as the conservation of energy. The energy you absorb from the EM bands you block has to go *somewhere.* If you cannot store 200 GT of energy in your shielding system, you cannot defend against a laser weapon the same power as the light turbolasers on a Star Destroyer. Either the remaining energy slips past your shields, or your shielding system blows up in your face with the force of 200 GT.

Heating melts, or even vaporizes things. Some things will explode if super heated, like concrete, but they don't make things explode persay.

Go back to school, kid. Physically, an explosion is caused by a localized sharp overpressure. Anything that causes a localized sharp overpressure will cause an explosion.

Concrete explodes when superheated because of the ideal gas law and the rupture of the concrete: residual moisture inside the concrete vaporizes due to the heat, then builds to high temperature while being confined to a fixed volume in the concrete, which implies building to a high pressure. When the pressure in these bubbles exceed the strength of the concrete, it ruptures, and the disbalanced overpressure pushes the fragments of the concrete to high speed.

Similarly, explosives explode because of the superheating of the products of the exothermic reaction of the explosive detonating. The ideal gas law comes in again, and the superheated gas is at such an overpressure that it ruptures its container and drives pieces in all directions.

Of course, an explosive should explode, yet all explosives explode by way of heating. Rapid heating, but heating nonetheless.

Do you want an example of a heating effect producing a blast effect? An atomic bomb. The primitive product of uranium/plutonium fission is an intense burst of gamma-rays (with a smattering of other frequencies). If it were impossible for electromagnetic radiation to become mechanical action, a nuke would consist of a burning flash of intensely bright light, over in an instant. Indeed, in space, this is exactly what a nuke looks like. The shock wave and mushroom-cloud shaped fireball that is the 'signature' of a nuke is caused by the air being heated up a great amount in a small amount of time. An intense enough laser will also produce shockwaves. High explosives produce shockwaves in the same way. This also connects to why you're full of crap when you deny that proton torpedoes are nukes of some kind.

Wow I didn't know that.

That's right, bub.

All explosions in space convert most of their energy into heat.

Most energy eventually ends up as heat, due to the second law of thermodynamics, so this shouldn't be at all surprising.

On one of the Apollo missions hand grenades were set off on the moon. They sent a tiny seismic shock though the lunar surface. Some shock does effect matter, if the blast is in direct contact with it. You are full of crap if you think the tiny blast the proton torpedoes made was on a nuke level. Did you see a Pica Flash? Was there a fire ball?

Why would there be a fireball? The fireball of a nuke is caused by the nuke heating up a section of the atmosphere. This is impossible in space, due to the conspicuous lack of said atmosphere. This was all in the quoted paragraph above.

Did part of the DS vaporize?

You mean the DS which is covered with SF-grade armor plate, which may be tougher than any material we can currently make?

Did the fighter flying though it's own blast get fried by radiation?

You mean the fighters which are shielded, the same shields that were ordered to be set to "double front" when they were traveling through the DS's own defenses?

None of the above happened.

None of the above _should_ have happened anyway, even with proton torpedoes being powerful nukes.

What we saw was about the effect of an F16 at tree top level dropping 2, 2,000lbs bombs, and just barely avoiding damage from it own bombs.

A man standing at treetop hieght above the detonation of two 2,000 lb bombs would be very, very _dead_. Not everything has the same toughness, you know.

Indeed, that ST have such effect segregated along weapons types is proof that they are weak. Phasers and disrupters make things dissolve throughs some funky NDP effect. But we know one thing about NDP effects: they are weak. Pay attention the next time someone disintegrates by a phaser blast - the "shockwave" doesn't even singe the carpet! An effect that doesn't even do what a cigarette can do is not 'powerful' except in the minds of the stupid.

That comment is so stupid as to laughable. Low disintegration settings are shown to have very discreet effects, that's true. To say that makes a phaser a weak weapon is mindless. On the highest setting hand phasers can disintegrate hundreds of cubic feet of stone.

Using NDP, an effect that, when it ran out of juice, didn't produce enough heat to kill crewmen at short ranges. It didn't even burn their hands when they touched it minutes after completing the tunnel. Remember the first law of thermodynamics: energy has to come from and go *somewhere.*

Is their a hand weapon in SW that can do that?

Yes. Han Solo's _hand blaster_ takes out torso-sized chunks of building material that can withstand the backwash of SW ships taking off. We can actually guage the amount of energy that takes. Of course, such a weapon would produce a lot of rock vapor which will kill you, so it is arguable that a phaser would be more useful than Han Solo's blaster if you happen to be trapped in a cave. But this isn't an argument about which weapon makes the better swiss army knife, isn't it?

In terms of practical use in an infantry fire fight, blasters don't seem much more effective then current weapons. Combatants stand out in the open and shoot it out.

SW combatants use modern concepts like cover, covering fire, and suppressive fire, while ST combatants just randomly shoot stuff. SW combatants also cause a fair amount of collateral damage not only to the natural scenery (from which we can directly guage the yield), but also from their weaker structures (like taking large chunks out of the Tantive VI's bulkheads during the boarding battle in ANH). When was the last time you saw a phaser or disruptor blow anything up? Not disintegrate, _blow it up!_

If current troops did that, they would be gunned down by bursts of automatic weapons fire. Many Trek writers from TNG on say they dumbed down phasers because they were too powerful to show them having a shoot out.

Cause they wanted to save on the squibs, not because of any need to tone down of the badassness of the phaser. On the contrary, you want your weapons to be as badass as possible.

When the plot called for it phasers could do what their supposed to do. I could understand using low setting aboard ship, because you don't want to blow up your own ship, or any ship your aboard.

Singing the carpet is _not_ blowing the ship up.

In "Omega Glory" Capt Tracy killed hundreds of warriors armed with bows and lances.

Well, Tracy had better luck than Custer.

With 4 phasers he and his men killed thousands. Could 4 storm troopers do that?

Easily. If they were not surprised, in an easily defendable position, and the natives act like charging retards. Of course, all troops in ST act like charging retards.

A company sized unit of STs with armor support, and a recon unit attached, were beaten by an army of may be 1,000 Teddy Bears, armed with slings, and spears. What a bunch of losers.

Sigh. This crap again.

Calling the Ewoks 'teddy bears' does not make them pushovers any more than calling turbolasers 'lasers' makes them amplifiers for light by way of stimulated radiation. They are clever little bastards with great strength, able to shove around Artoo easily, whereas Luke had trouble on Degobah.

The Ewoks also had the advantage of surprise, terrain, millitary engineering, air support, and guerilla tactics. Their tactics were not stand-up slugfests between Ewok forces and Imperial troopers; they popped out of nowhere, killed or severely injured a few troopers, and then faded back into the forests.

And finally, dispite all those advantages, the Ewoks were _losing_ until a couple of them commandeered that AT-ST along with Chewie. Didn't you hear the dramatic, sad music that was playing before then, when an Ewok got fried, and was mourned over by his friend?

"In terms of speed, fire power and shielding there is just no contest." That's right. There is no contest. It just doesn't go the way you think. SW ships demonstrate firepower far in excess of ST ships, but they need to grind away at other SW ships in order to weaken shields enough for fighters to make potshots through weak points in them. (The space battle took at least as long as the battle with the Ewoks on the ground, and that was quite prolonged.)

If fighters can't take out ships on their own why did the Empire attack the Rebel Fleet at Endor with out capitol ship support?

They _did_ have capitol ship support, you goddamn moron! What the hell did you think "grinding away at each other" meant? Physically scraping past each other?

Please think of some thing better then, "They were ordered to".

The _Imperials_ were ordered not to fire, unless the Rebels tried to get away. The Rebels were under no such orders! Furthermore, the Imperials started firing at them when the Rebels attacked them point blank.

If SW ships have good fire control why do the shoot down so few fighters?

How many fighters do you think were shot down in that battle?

And furthermore, why bother with fighters when there's a capitol ship vomiting huge blasts of energy at you?

If SW shields are so strong, why do rocks the size of houses smash up their ships?

Evidence of house sized rocks smashing up their ships?

This thing has grown long enough. This is a lot for you to chew over, along with my other SDN friends. Chio.

That"s not much to chew over. You gave me less then cotton candy, mostly air. [/quote]

Ferrus Cranium strikes again.

[Chris Parr]

If SW shields are so strong, why do rocks the size of houses smash up their ships?

Evidence of house sized rocks smashing up their ships?

The only time I can remember Star Wars ships being smashed by house sized rocks was when those TIE fighters chased the Millenium Falcon into that asteroid field in Empire Strikes Back, and collided with those asteroids and exploded on impact. I don't think they were shielded though.

[Darth Wong]

Maybe he's referring to the ~70m wide asteroid which crashed into a Star Destroyer bridge tower in TESB. The volume of a 70m wide sphere is roughly 180,000 cubic metres, so if it was made out of nickel-iron, its mass would be around 1.6 million metric tons. Even if it was made out of something crappy with a low density like 3000 kg/m^3, its mass would still be more than a half-million tons. This makes me wonder how big the houses are where he lives, since I've never heard of a private residence with volume equivalent to a 70m rock.

This is leaving aside all of the arguments about whether that ship's shields were even up, and disputes over the level of damage. If something that big and massive hit a Federation ship, nobody would question its ability to do serious damage.

[Peptuck]

This is leaving aside all of the arguments about whether that ship's shields were even up, and disputes over the level of damage. If something that big and massive hit a Federation ship, nobody would question its ability to do serious damage.

For shit's sake, a slow moving Federation ship grazed the Enterprise's starboard nacelle in "Cause and Effect" (IIRC; it was the episode in TNG where the Enterprise was caught in a time loop) and that destroyed the entire ship. It wasn't a collission, the two ships barely scraped one another and it sent the Enterprise into a wild, uncontrolled spin that ended with the entire ship exploding.

Moron Bob here has zero room to argue about collision damage to Star Destroyers when the best ship in the Federation can't survive a mild skid mark.

[Connor MacLeod]

Don't forget this quote;

All Star Destroyers, including the Executor, were diverted into the swirling asteroid storm. Turbolaser gunners blasted the largest rocks; those they missed impacted against the bow shields like multi-megaton compression bombs.

a Multi-megaton asteroid impact is going to be alot bigger (and have more momentum) than the 70m asteroid that struck the bridge. And momentum WON'T care whether shields are up or down (as Mike's shield page has explained numerous times.)

In fact, the only "upper limit" I could think of for asteroid impacts would be from the Sketchbook/scriptbook for TESB (I've seen a few copies), or the old TESB comic, which showed large ships impacting with multi-km asteroids (at an unknown speed) - and judging from the impacts they died from internal detonations of some kind (Which suggests the shield generators probably got torn off their mountings at some point and hit something inside the ship that went kablooie), as I recall the bows of the ships were largely intact.

That doesn't even factor in that we didn't see debris (or couldn't tell the extent of damage to the bridge tower) - the pulverization/vaporization of the asteroid pretty much prevented that (aside from the fact we coudl tell it was at least partly intact, perhaps buckled in or deformed.)

[Darth Ruinus]

Its existence is _demanded_ by the Death Star.

I like this line alot.

[Patrick Degan]

Regarding the asteroid/shield issue, this from Curt Saxton's website:

During a search for the Millennium Falcon in a particularly dense and unstable asteroid belt, one of Lord Vader's star destroyer escorts suffered serious collisional damage. A fast-moving asteroid of approximately 70m diameter slipped into contact with the destroyer before the gunnery crews had a chance to blast it. The object exceeded the capacity of the deflector shields around the command tower, which were already undermined by continual pummelling and whatever effects had earlier been suffered at the hands of the Hoth rebel ion cannon operators. Both the asteroid and the tower were obliterated. The remainder of the ship flew onwards. [Michael Wong originally investigated the kinetics of this event. I independently repeated this work, but with a more refined estimate of the asteroid's velocity.] Judging by the observed size and velocity of the asteroid, and assuming a typical ferrous asteroidal composition, the kinetic energy involved in the collision was in excess of

E > 5 x 10E14 J.

This can be considered an upper limit to the effectiveness of the deflector shields of the star destroyer (for instantaneous impact absorption) which was already seriously battered by asteroids and possibly an earlier collision with two other destroyers. The shields of a destroyer in peak condition would be more powerful. The book Anakin Skywalker: The Story of Darth Vader explicitly states that all the Imperial vessels withstood "multi-megaton" impacts on their shields, a megaton being equal to 4.19 x 10E15J.

The maximum capacity of a warship's shields should be designed to be similar to or greater than the total firepower of a comparable opponent vessel. If shields were much weaker than weapons then their use would be pointless; if they were very much stronger then weaponry would be superfluous.

A similar collision between another destroyer and a smaller asteroid left the ship unscathed. The asteroid struck near on the portside of the primary docking bay. Upon impacting with the shields it crumbled within a fraction of a second, indicating a lower-limit estimate on the shields' capacity to absorb sudden blows. The asteroid was approximately 10m in diameter and had a kinetic energy of at least

2 x 10E12 J.

Later, when the Millennium Falcon swooped across the surface of the star destroyer Avenger, some of the big ship's guns missed their target and accidentally struck other parts of the destroyer's dorsal hull. The blasts were harmlessly dissipated by the energy shields. Assuming that these weapons were at the same power as the guns used to casually vaporise asteroids [refer to weaponry section] the instantaneous capacity of the dorsal energy shields is not less than a figure on the order of 32TJ or 260TJ.

We have an example of one stardestroyer suffering the loss of it's bridge tower after an unknown number of multiple impacts in a heavy asteroid field during a search operation of at least several hours, but the ship continues to fly onward, in formation on the Executor's flank.

[Lonestar]

For shit's sake, a slow moving Federation ship grazed the Enterprise's starboard nacelle in "Cause and Effect" (IIRC; it was the episode in TNG where the Enterprise was caught in a time loop) and that destroyed the entire ship. It wasn't a collission, the two ships barely scraped one another and it sent the Enterprise into a wild, uncontrolled spin that ended with the entire ship exploding.

Moron Bob here has zero room to argue about collision damage to Star Destroyers when the best ship in the Federation can't survive a mild skid mark.

I might add that modern naval vessels can take a lot of damage and still operate under their own power.




That was after a collision with an aircraft carrier and fire that melted the aluminum superstructure...but the Belknap was still able to make it to port under it's own power.

Clearly, Starfleet damage control is damn near worthless if collision with a nacelle causes a ship's reactor to blow.

Out of curiosity, has anyone done the math for what the mass of the 1701-D would be if decompressing the shuttle bay would move it out of the way like that?

[Darth Wong]

Interesting factoid: if we assume a residential building with 10 foot high storeys (~3m), then a 70m wide round object works out to a monster home with approximately 60000 square metres of floor space. That's more than six hundred and fifty thousand square feet, for you Americans. That's a pretty big house! I wonder if Moron Boy thinks that 650,000 square foot homes are typical.

[Swindle1984]

The Empire could literally slap together the entire combined Federation fleet a hundred times over without straining their resources, or even entering a serious wartime footing.

You are giving the Federation vastly too much credit. The "thinly populated" Chommell Sector of the waning days of the Galactic Republic alone outnumbered the Federation by an order of magnitude or more. They, the tiniest fraction of what was to become the Empire, one of thousands of sectors and a smallish one at that, could do what you posit without exceeding the peacetime Federation in military expenditure relative to GDP, even if one for the sake of the argument were to assume weapons parity.

Didn't Mike or someone else calculate that it would take 1,000 Galaxy-class starships (assuming the figures in the technical guide are correct, which observation shows they aren't) over an hour of continual bombardment to take down the shields of a Star Destroyer, assuming the Star Destroyer didn't return fire and just sat motionless the entire time?

Maybe I'm remembering wrong.

But between that and the fact that a Star Destroyer can basically one-shot any Federation ship ever built, I'm willing to bet that the only reason you couldn't conquer/exterminate the entire Federation with a single Star Destroyer would be fuel concerns.

[Peptuck]

The whole thing is just silly. Just accept it makes no sense, and accept it with suspension of disbelief, like so many other events in Sci/Fi. Vorlon planet killers, species 8472 taking out planets, the Lexx, and so on. I just saw Dr Who tonight, and the Dalikes moved planets though time and space. Would you waste you time trying to calculate the power need to do that. Would you try to explain the power source? It's nonsense.

I like how he tries to state SW ships use fusion, but when he gets served up a faceful of actual math explaining why it would be impossible, his only response "why are you trying to calc it? IT MAKES NO SENSE!!11!"