UNSC Infinity Shields can take supernova energy? Really they are zettaton power?

[WhiteLion]

Hi guys, I was arguing with scifi fans about Halo's UNSC Infinity shields, I don't know much about the series for which I read what I found around.
I have been told that his shields are zaton 11 grade, because they have been able to contain the radiation of a supernova.
The video is this:
https://vimeo.com/416553710

I expressed my doubts because of the fact that the shields did not activate, logically if they had received damage they would light up as they usually do, for example as in this video:
https://vimeo.com/416563708

but in the scene of the star explosion they did not light up.
Do you think it is presumable that the star's radiation has not reached infinity?

[Eternal_Freedom]

Firstly, simple geometry tells you that the shields, if they were affected, wouldn't tank the supernova's entire energy output since that's dispersed evenly in all directions.

Second, the ship sees a flash of light and then jumps away before being hit by an expanding wave of solar material that's been ejected. So the shields may well have absorbed/deflected the electromagnetic radiation but that's not the sum total of a supernova's energy output.

Finally, the ultimate evidence that the Infinity's shields can't withstand a supernova explosion comes at the very end, with the report "emergency jump complete Captain." If their shields could take the hit why were they making an emergency jump in the first place? Follow that with the rest of that report "Injuries re..." presumably "injuries reported on xyz deck," meaning the ship did take some kind of damage.

So no. They are not zetaton-strength. Not even close.

[WhiteLion]

I too have come to your conclusion, I agree with the points you raised.

1) If the shields had received energy they would have lit up.
2) If even the radiation had arrived at the ship and the shields would have lit, the shield would not have absorbed e44 energy, because it is the total sum of the energy emitted by the star in all directions, and not the energy of the vectors that strike the ship.
3) If he could have sustained the energy he would not have made an emergency escape.

In the conversations I am having, it is argued that the ship must necessarily have received radiation because it travels at the speed of light.
But from what I see Halo is not always consistent with real physics:

1) For example, when railgins fire they project a ray of light, being purely kinetic weapons, they should not do so.
2) The matter expelled by the star should travel at 30000 km / s, instead we see it on the screen with the naked eye, if it traveled at 30000 km / s we should not see it moving on the screen so slow, the movement would be instantaneous.

Is my reasoning correct or am I doing something wrong?

[Eternal_Freedom]

Your points 1, 2 and 3 seem fine - the shields lighting up part does fit with observed Halo shield effects even if it's (frankly) unnecessary for this argument.

Your point about the speed of the material ejected from the star is not quite right. 30,000 km/s (0.1 c) is actually at the high end of supernova ejecta speeds.. It would indeed be moving far faster on screen, but the main point is that the Infinity must have been damn close to that star for the material to reach it so soon after the initial burst of light - having watched the video again (and assuming it's all continuous and there isn't a scene break anywhere) it takes 7 seconds for the ejecta to reach the Infinity after the flash (flash is at 0:04, Infinity fully enters the slipspace portal (pursued by some of the ejecta) at 0:11).

So assuming the ejecta is moving at 30,000 km/s, that means the slipspace portal was 210,000 km from the star's surface - which is pretty damn close to a star you clearly know is about to go boom, just over half the Earth-Moon distance). Though, granted, there's about 10% extra on that shortest distance since it would have taken the EM radiation about a second to travel as well, so call it ~240,000 km closest distance as a ballpark.

Hmm, just checked wikipedia, turns out that the 0.1 c ejecta speed may be several times higher than what it actually is - closest I could find in skimming the article suggests only "several percent," so call it 0.03 c, which means our seven-second delay between flash and arrival of ejecta put Infinity at just 63,000 km from the star's surface, which is even more insane.

Frankly, I wouldn't want to approach a star that can go supernova anywhere near that close even if I was driving the Infinity. Though something funky is clearly going on - that star was waaay too yellow to be a near-supernova massive star, which are typically red supergiants and dozens of times larger than our Sun - Betelgeuse for instance is only about ten times our Sun's mass but almost a thousand times the radius, though Betelgeuse is a fair ways off from going supernova at the moment.

I'd be sitting pretty at least a couple light-hours away to be safe, not less than one light-second.

[WhiteLion]

Your points 1, 2 and 3 seem fine - the shields lighting up part does fit with observed Halo shield effects even if it's (frankly) unnecessary for this argument.

Your point about the speed of the material ejected from the star is not quite right. 30,000 km/s (0.1 c) is actually at the high end of supernova ejecta speeds.. It would indeed be moving far faster on screen, but the main point is that the Infinity must have been damn close to that star for the material to reach it so soon after the initial burst of light - having watched the video again (and assuming it's all continuous and there isn't a scene break anywhere) it takes 7 seconds for the ejecta to reach the Infinity after the flash (flash is at 0:04, Infinity fully enters the slipspace portal (pursued by some of the ejecta) at 0:11).

So assuming the ejecta is moving at 30,000 km/s, that means the slipspace portal was 210,000 km from the star's surface - which is pretty damn close to a star you clearly know is about to go boom, just over half the Earth-Moon distance). Though, granted, there's about 10% extra on that shortest distance since it would have taken the EM radiation about a second to travel as well, so call it ~240,000 km closest distance as a ballpark.

Hmm, just checked wikipedia, turns out that the 0.1 c ejecta speed may be several times higher than what it actually is - closest I could find in skimming the article suggests only "several percent," so call it 0.03 c, which means our seven-second delay between flash and arrival of ejecta put Infinity at just 63,000 km from the star's surface, which is even more insane.

Frankly, I wouldn't want to approach a star that can go supernova anywhere near that close even if I was driving the Infinity. Though something funky is clearly going on - that star was waaay too yellow to be a near-supernova massive star, which are typically red supergiants and dozens of times larger than our Sun - Betelgeuse for instance is only about ten times our Sun's mass but almost a thousand times the radius, though Betelgeuse is a fair ways off from going supernova at the moment.

I'd be sitting pretty at least a couple light-hours away to be safe, not less than one light-second.

sorry but my english is not very good when it comes to scientific aspects, not being a native English speaker.

From what I understand of your post (correct me if I'm wrong please), saying that in reality the ejected matter of the star travels less than 30000 km / s you mean that the scene is realistic and for this reason we see with the naked eye the wave of matter ejected from the star? If so I can't tell you, I read on wikipedia that the speed is 30000 km / s, for this reason I believed that the fixed scene is unrealistic, since if the material ejected from the star traveled at 30000 km / s we wouldn't have been able to see it with the naked eye.

Please correct me if I get it wrong

sorry but my english is not very good when it comes to scientific aspects, not being a native English speaker.

From what I understand of your post (correct me if I'm wrong please), saying that in reality the ejected matter of the star travels less than 30000 km / s you mean that the scene is realistic and for this reason we see with the naked eye the wave of matter ejected from the star? If so I can't tell you, I read on wikipedia that the speed is 30000 km / s, for this reason I believed that the fixed scene is unrealistic, since if the material ejected from the star traveled at 30000 km / s we wouldn't have been able to see it with the naked eye.

Please correct me if I get it wrong

For the other points of my speech, do you think the star's radiation has reached infinity? In my opinion, not because the shields did not light up as they always do when they receive an energetic or kinetic blow. That's why I think we can't talk about shrouded shields

[Eternal_Freedom]

The electromagnetic radiation (visible light, x-rays, gamma rays and so on) will definitely have reached the Infinity because we see the flash from the supernova.

30,000 km/s for supernova ejecta (the physical matter thrown out, the stuff we see almost catch the Infinity) is a number I recall reading, but that's 10% of lightspeed and possibly at the high end of known speeds rather than the low end.

It's not that the scene is unrealistic because of the speeds (although it is, that material would have been moving waaaay faster than we see) but rather that the ship would have to be extremely close (in astronomical terms) to the star when it went kaboom - and the star itself should have looked a lot bigger at that distance, and a lot redder. Without knowing the context of the event, that was not a typical supernova explosion - the star was too small and the wrong colour.

But mainly it's that no sane starship Captain would take such a valuable ship as the Infinity that bloody close to a star in it's death throes.

[WhiteLion]

The electromagnetic radiation (visible light, x-rays, gamma rays and so on) will definitely have reached the Infinity because we see the flash from the supernova.

30,000 km/s for supernova ejecta (the physical matter thrown out, the stuff we see almost catch the Infinity) is a number I recall reading, but that's 10% of lightspeed and possibly at the high end of known speeds rather than the low end.

It's not that the scene is unrealistic because of the speeds (although it is, that material would have been moving waaaay faster than we see) but rather that the ship would have to be extremely close (in astronomical terms) to the star when it went kaboom - and the star itself should have looked a lot bigger at that distance, and a lot redder. Without knowing the context of the event, that was not a typical supernova explosion - the star was too small and the wrong colour.

But mainly it's that no sane starship Captain would take such a valuable ship as the Infinity that bloody close to a star in it's death throes.

Ok thanks, so even if the scene is not realistic for all the reasons we have listed, you say that surely the radiation will have reached Infinity, in this way the guys who told me that infinity has shield zettaton are right.

The calculation they proposed to me starts from the power of a supernova of e44, and by the law of the inverse square, and based on the surface in meters2 of the ship, at the end of the calculation it is obtained that the shields have held a power of e30, i.e. .



The point I raise, however, is that the shields did not activate because we did not see them light up (correct me if I'm wrong by watching the video) as we see clearly happening in the video I posted about the collision with the cruiser.

In your opinion it is possible that given the numerous scientific inconsistencies of the author that we see during the video, the radiation (proving to be yet another scientific inconsistency) did not reach infinity, and for this reason the shields did not activate and therefore did not are they illuminated?

[Eternal_Freedom]

The gamma rays and x rays (the high energy stuff you are concerned about) move at the same speed as light does. Fromt he camera's perspective, we have Infinity in the foreground and the star in the background when it explodes. Since we see the visible light flash, the x-rays and gamma rays will have also reached the camera at the same time.

Why the shields didn't light up under the impact I don't know - most likely whoever did the graphics for that scene didn't know or care. The electromagnetic radiation must have reached the ship, because we saw the visible light flash. That radiation will have or should have impacted the shields.

The argument that you start with 10e44 Joules of energy and then divide by the surface area of the ship to get 10e30 J shield strength is....utterly laughable.

10e44 Joules is the total energy released in a typical supernova, over a period of time that can be weeks, and a good chunk of it gets released as stuff like neutrinos, which don't interact well with matter (and thus won't transfer any energy). Using the surface area of the ship is useless because a) the shields aren't exactly matching the hull, they're a bubble and b) only the rear aspect of the shields takes the hit. Plus you'd also need to know how far the ship was from the star, which runs into the other problems I mentioned about the star being completely wrong.

As an alternative explanation, we can argue that the shields don't light up because the shields aren't raised at all - it's entirely possible that the ship's AI devoted every bit of power to charging the slipspace drive for the "emergency jump" the ship performed, and trusted to the (heavy) armour to keep out the visible light, x rays and gamma rays.

If that is the case, then the scene is completely useless for working out the shield strength, since they aren't raised, except to say that they definitely can't withstand a supernova explosion because they ran like hell away from it

[WhiteLion]

T

ok thank you, the values ​​e44 and e30 are not mine, they were provided by others in the speech, personally I do not believe in the shield zettaton for the reasons I wrote.

The discussion is this:

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads ... 11/page-23

Precisely the calculation that has been provided on this discussion is as follows:

CIT. "If we want to go by true high end Halo calculations the Infinity makes a mockery of the concept of a teraton.

Recall Epoloch, the type II supernova that Infinity outran? Assuming Epoloch is a typical yellow star similar in size to Sol the ship would have been roughly 3.4 million kilometers away * when the light from the supernova impacted her shields. At 3.4 million kilometers the inverse square of a 3e44 joule event would be 1.97E24 joules per square meter, or 471 TT. The rear profile of the Infinity has a surface area of ​​869.652 m ^ 2, placing her total shield absorption rate 1.7E30 joules (assuming no irregular portions of the hull continued to absorb the luminous portion of the supernova), or 409 exatons. In reality, most of the hull barring the fore is being illuminated by the event, so the shield surface area is approximately 24 million kilometers - so the total rate of energy absorption is 4.84E31 joules (11 ZT).

What's even more impressive is that the Infinity, despite having a downstar velocity of 5,000 km / s due to the inertia generated by Requiem, managed to accelerate to roughly 10% of the speed of light with a deuterium fusion engine - which means that it has to be able to manage accelerations of roughly 5000 km / s ^ 2 simply to avoid joining Requiem four seconds later - any lower, and it would fall into the photosphere. Just going by the estimation of using a super efficient deuterium-deuterium fusion as the reactant, looking over the theoretical exhaust velocities of such engines we can get figures in the 10,000 km / s range. Pretty much all of them can manage more than that exhaust velocity, but for now let's go with that.

Given an acceleration of 5,000,000 m / s ^ 2 and a mass of 970 million tons, the thrust has to be 4.85E18 Newtons.

If we use the estimated thrust of 4.85E18 Newtons and estimated exhaust velocity of 10,000,000 m / s, the propellant mass flow would be extremely high, so to calculate the power:

Fp (j) = (F * Ve) / 2

4.85E18 * 10000000/2

2.425E25 watts continuous output with a 510 kilogee acceleration.

Besides having in excess multi-petaton engines and shields in double digit petaton range, she's also fairly potent in terms of offensive options. Assuming a ferrous-tungsten composition each shell based on the Warfleet cutaway masses just over a million tons each, capable of being accelerated to 0.5c, so a directed alpha strike would involve a direct impact of dozens of petatons. Then there's the sheer volume of missiles. Recall how Keyes, despite having a pair of 1.17 TT MAC rounds loaded was not confident that he could take our a Destroyer? The Infinity took out a Destroyer with a mere 100 Howler missiles, indicating that they're rated for in excess of 23 GT a piece (which is not so crazy, as I will soon elaborate) - and the Infinity has ten thousand of these warheads they can launch in salvos.

And nukes? Recall, their short range tactical nukes with a mere 14.2 kg of DTPF filler can do the following to an Earth sized planet (which is not grossly inconsistent, given what we observe in Nightfall - with a fireball engulfing a third of a structure several thousand kilometers long).



Scaling up the planet, the fireball would be in the 300-600 TT range. However recall that this is a tactical nuclear weapon used by small single man fighters. Anti-shipping missiles used by Capital ships have 2.1 tons of reactant and thus have 147 times the fuel, allowing for detonations in the 44-88 PT range.

So I would say she has an incredibly decent shot, given that she has double digit zettaton shields, tens of thousands of Gatebuster equivalent missiles, multi-hundred teraton tactical nukes, likely 30+ anti-shipping nukes rated in the 40-80 petaton range and hundreds of kilogees accelerations with weapons ranges being effective to ten thousand kilometers for peer vessels (peer vessels being mile long ships that can dodge 0.5 c rounds in just over half a second and 0.1 c missiles in less than a tenth of a second).

And before I close, might I remind those reeling at the above that these are all canon numbers.

* Epoloch, prior to collapsing, takes up the following on-screen dimensions.

OD / X = Y / Z
OD / 1391400 km = 592px / 235px
OD / 1391400 = 2.5
OD = 1391400 * 2.5
OD = 3,478,500 km "






.............. this is the complete calculation that has been posted on the forum, and that seems to me not very credible because the shields have not risen and because you cannot be sure of the distance .

[Eternal_Freedom]

That argument is fundamentally flawed, right from the start. They call it a Type-II supernova, and then say "assume the star is a typical yellow star similar in size to Sol." Stars like our sun simply cannot undergo a Type-II supernova, they're too small by (at minimum) a factor of eight.

Even if some other effect is going on to cause something like a Type-II supernova explosion in a Sol-type star, it would not release 10e44 Joules of energy - that's equivalent to 0.1% of the mass of the star being converted to energy - and while 0.1% of mass lost and released as energy is reasonable for fusion reactions, this would need all of the star's mass to undergo fusion.

And even if we accept that due to whatever reasons the Sun-type star does undergo a Type-II supernova and does release that much energy, the Infinity would be a lot closer than the 3.4 million km quoted. While that would make the Joules-per-square-metre figure higher, it would drastically lower his engine thrust calculations further down.

And none of that changes the fact that the ship was running away, meaning the ship's crew and AI knew damn well this wasn't something they could survive being hit by.

And there's also the last point I made, about the shields not lighting up because they weren't active at all, with their power diverted to charging the slipspace drive for that "emergency jump."

[Rogue 9]

What is the context of the scene? Was the star destroyed by some sort of weapon, or was it supposed to be a natural supernova and the artists just screwed up?

[Eternal_Freedom]

IIRC the star is the core of a Dyson shell that forms the Shield World Requiem, and I think they did something like fire a sabotaged slipspace drive into it. Or something. Definitely not a natural explosion.

[WhiteLion]

they collided the Requiem in the star generating the supernova