darthy wrote:
Is there reason to believe they would fire something more powerful at these pebbles than at the falcon though? This is one argument I've already had.
They were trying to capture the Falcon, not blow it up. That's one reason.
I don't feel like digging through tech manuals, old posts, and marking where the bolts come from on the star destroyer again if it can be avoided.
You'll have to if you want to make your argument stick.
The point is that the methods used to establish how big the asteroids are in sw estimates has flaws by their own admission. They assume that where a falcon is at a certain point in another scene can be used to estimate the asteroid sizes in that scene. They admit this when doing the calculations that they don't know how far away the camera is to the asteroids so that it would be impossible to determine how big the asteroids are. Other estimates like the one I showed you conclude they're 3 meters or less in size, not 20 or 30 meters.
And my point is that your own scaling is flawed. As I said, there's a variety of scaling you can use that comes up with a variety of figures. None of them can reasonably go below the terajoule range (and in connection, terawatt power levels). That's perfectly sufficient for several purposes - and it has particular relevance to this sort of rubbish:-
the calculations done on the animated series outrank what's stated in books since the animated series is T-canon.
No they do not. They are a sylized caricature of "reality" and the notion that they could ever contradict explicit figures is nonsensical. In any event, I have yet to see anyone actually perform 'calculations' based on the cartoon. When they do, I will be happy to mock them profusely. As I said in my earlier post (which you seemed to have missed):- The explosions in TCW look the same in space as they do in atmosphere- which is impossible. They are not valid evidence, fly in the face of the G-canon lower limits, and are wildly inconsistent even with themselves - e.g. like in the premiere of Season 3 where Asajj Ventress' fighter kicks up comparatively enormous explosions on warship hulls but the very same weapons in the same battle causes only minor inconvenience to the hull of Obi-Wan's starfighter.
Referring back to my comment above re asteroids:- you should realize that even if your asteroid scaling was correct, which is a lower limit for the invisible weapons on an ISD, the lower limit for same is
far in excess of anything one would derive from caricature TCW visuals. Holding them up as an accurate representation of anything is no less absurd than trying to 'calculate' the old animated Clone Wars cartoon, or pretending that the version of Anakin Skywalker in TCW is more 'accurate' than that seen in a comic, purely because one is 'T-canon'.
In an interview with Empire Magazine (June 2008), Lucas refers to the film as: “a stylized cartoon...it is not photo-real because the characters look like they have been painted”.
Even when the clones requested air support while they were pinned down, the star destroyers told them they couldn't spare it. Not something I'd expect to hear from a ship with that type of weaponry onboard.
This has already been debunked in detail by others. I find it amazing that you think "we're in a planet wide invasion, we can't spare you any air support" means "we don't have the firepower to support you".