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  1. In Memory of LAJ_FETT: Please share your remembrances and condolences HERE

Lit Fleet Junkie Flagship- The technical discussions of the GFFA (Capital Ships thread Mk. II)

Discussion in 'Literature' started by AdmiralWesJanson, Sep 12, 2005.

  1. Tzizvvt78

    Tzizvvt78 Jedi Grand Master star 5

    Registered:
    Jun 12, 2009
    Highlighted.
    That is as irrelevant to the argument as saying the high-yield of an Acclamator's gun is also the standard setting, as straw-man minimalists use constantly.

    BDZ is well-fleshed out in Legends. Its purpose is to destroy all resources an enemy could think of using, which means ultimately, on a city planet they would have to destroy everything above and below ground, as there are cityscape underworlds like we see on Coruscant. Not to mention mines on any developed world, which can stretch kilometers below ground.

    By that standard a dozen Executors wouldn't be considered mass-produced. No one's arguing there's as many of them as there are Star Destroyers, yet this seems to be the minimalist assumption.

    In real life I guess this means nuclear-tipped ICBMs would be considered superweapons, given they supercede any and all other explosives.
     
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  2. Iron_lord

    Iron_lord Chosen One star 10

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    Sep 2, 2012
    According to the Imperial Handbook - that's exactly right. "Superweapon" is a relative term, defined by the technology of the era.
     
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  3. Tzizvvt78

    Tzizvvt78 Jedi Grand Master star 5

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    Jun 12, 2009
    That's my point, it's an arbitrary definition. Why something gets labled "superweapon" should imply it's either rare or somehow not part of military doctrine doesn't make sense. Again, the first film had a planet being blown up, not just seared from pole to pole, but blown into small chunks, right down to the molten core. When did people go from that to believing it's impossible to destroy a planet's top-layer without using a "superweapon"? Legends had a Star Destroyer bombardment event that "atomized a planet's top-soil". There's an illustration of three Supers, several Star Destroyers and even several escort frigates bombaring a planet so hard you see mushroom clouds blanketing the surface from orbit. Does that mean even escort frigates are "superweapons"? I'm sure whoever got hit by one on the surface would have thought so.

    Therefore using the term "superweapon" as a benchmark for "unbelievable" acts in SW and to shut down debate is ridiculous.
     
  4. Abadacus

    Abadacus Jedi Grand Master star 4

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    May 4, 2014
    You're putting words in my mouth there. A superweapon is orders of magnitude more powerful than a "regular" weapon, hence "super". That's it. I wouldn't call any individual system on an Executor a "superweapon", but as it's a ship an order of magnitude larger than a regular Star Destroyer, we call it a "Super Star Destroyer". That's it.

    The definitions of "atomize" are "convert (a substance) into very fine particles or droplets" and "reduce (something) to atoms or other small distinct units".
    Here's a huge plume of atomized soil from a sub-kiloton bunker buster. Finally, given that topsoil is usually two to eight inches deep, I find it hard to believe "atomized the topsoil" actually means "melted the crust" (30 to 50 km thick).
    To completely carpet-blast the planet's surface, "atomizing the topsoil" and more besides, is exactly what I proposed in my previous post.

    There are several planetary bombardment images I can think of, I think the first one here might be the one you're thinking of, it's certainly the most impressive.
    [​IMG][​IMG]
    First, without knowing the planet's sizes, we can't say anything very accurate about the sizes of these mushroom clouds, but since we're here to speculate, let's assume that they're both fairly earth-sized.
    In both we see mushroom clouds, extensive fires and smoke. But I don't see anything that looks remotely like multiple 200+ gigaton shots hitting each second. In fact in the first image we can see that most of the turbolaser implacements don't produce visible mushroom clouds at all (though we can put that down to small detail, turbulent atmo or other factors), while the smaller clouds look megaton range at most - presumably the other explosions in this range are concealed by the extensive dust clouds. The biggest clouds are interesting, as there are only two or three of them, indicating a rare weapon with a low rate of fire. Those clouds look big enough to be maybe single-digit gigaton, especially given the clear pressure wave around each; maybe this is a massive bombardment turbolaser on SSDs we've never seen before, or just a modification to this battlegroup.
    In the first image, with 200 gt as the figure for a CW-era heavy turbolaser, and the combined firepower of at least 6 SDs, 2SSDs and 3NBs, the atmosphere should be ignited, among other things. Again, I think many just don't grasp the extreme amounts of energy involved.

    What? That's not what I've been saying at all, and I'm not trying to "shut down debate", I'm just presenting my own headcanon rationalizations for what I believe to be logical approximate levels of firepower in the Star Wars galaxy.
    Feel free to disagree, but I'm feeling like this is beginning to derail a bit. I'm certainly anything but a minimalist - the energy of a turbolaser bolt is small beans compared to the realistic size of the galaxy and Imperial war machine. Calling me a "straw man minimalist" both makes no sense and helps turn the thread from a discussion into an argument.
    Saxton has his numbers, and they were canon, but that shouldn't stop us geeks from having fun discussions about whether we agree with his results, and what we, personally, might say instead.
     
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  5. Tzizvvt78

    Tzizvvt78 Jedi Grand Master star 5

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    Jun 12, 2009
    Well, it's mostly other posters, not you. I wasn't even addressing you on that post.

    Oh, the second pic is fanart, only the first is official. Though not canon any more. You can see a giant shockwave cloud underneath the middle SSD in the first pic. Not knowing the extent of the planet itself makes your argument against 200 gigaton, arbitrary. I could post this image of an Assertor doing BDZ with another large impact crater + shockwave cloud ring, but it'd be just as arbitrary for/against 200 gigaton.

    You're also skipping past some things there. Atomizing the top-soil isn't the same as cracking the crust. But for BDZ to be fulfilled on a planet with mines, they have to get taken out to prevent use by an enemy. That's what BDZ is/was for. So there's two actions needed if a world has great agricultural value + mining areas.
     
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  6. Alpha-Red

    Alpha-Red Chosen One star 7

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    Apr 25, 2004
    Okay, so I don't know anything about the yield/output/gigaton debate...but isn't it possible for ships to adjust the power of their weapons and that this might be the reason for explosions of various sizes? I mean, in the NJO we certainly had ships from starfighters going up to capital ships adjusting their weapons' output as a means of combating the Yuuzhan Vong's defenses.
     
  7. Abadacus

    Abadacus Jedi Grand Master star 4

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    May 4, 2014
    Very true, there are actually two numbers we need here: "routine firepower" and "maximum firepower". In most cases, however, we have little or no frame of reference for where to put examples on the scale, so we have to make educated assumptions about individual examples and where they land on the scale. We also need to make a distinction between "apparent blast" and "true firepower". "True" will be larger for blaster weapons, but the difference becomes negligible when we get to the biggest scales.
    One few clear-cut contrasts we have is with the AT-AT on Hoth. They adjust their chin cannons between two settings that we see: A lower power, but more rapid-cycling setting to target infantry, small defensive turrets, and airspeeders, with apparent blasts in the range of low kgs TNT to low tons. Then a higher-power (explicitly 'maximum firepower') shot that destroys a hardened building; we don't get a great view, but it's in high tons to low kilotons at least, but not much more than a megaton or so in apparent blast.
    Rushing off to do holiday things. I'll write a more lucid post when I have more time.
     
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  8. Tzizvvt78

    Tzizvvt78 Jedi Grand Master star 5

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    Jun 12, 2009
    Saxton only specified what the maximum output of each gun was. He also added the variable yield on the Venator profile in ROTS:ICS. Which, again, is implied by the old movies. There's variable yields for deflector shields, according to dialogue, as well as variable yields for cannons (AT-AT in ESB as mentioned above).

    What's interesting is that right before shooting, General Veers specifies that the target is 17,28 km away (at least I think one of the books said it was in kilometers). We also see the explosion covering much of the viewport right after hitting. Does that add up to the estimate?
     
  9. anotherdemon

    anotherdemon Jedi Knight star 2

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    Apr 29, 2013
    Got around to watching the extended cut of Spark of the Rebellion:

    the Inquisitor is shown with 5 star destroyers; whether entirely his or not, it's a pretty big show of force

     
  10. anotherdemon

    anotherdemon Jedi Knight star 2

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    Apr 29, 2013
    RE: energy,

    Whilst energy can be the same, how it's applied determines what it looks like.

    A typical thunderstorm puts out low kilotons worth of energy, though it's nowhere as destructive to buildings in a confined area as say a town, using a bomb of the same energy.

    20 kiloton laser bolt won't ever look like a 20 kiloton bomb

    The former will be impressive, of course. The laser will heat up and vaporize an area the size of the emitter, punching into the ground as it does such and continuing to melt/vaporize material next to the stuff being melted/vaporized as the laser punches into the ground, but the effect will look closer to an underground bomb + a heap of light/flash as soon as the bolt/beam hits. The hardest hit area is right at the impact point.

    A bomb will go in all directions -- the energy released won't be as powerful across its entire impact area, but it'll hit a lot more in its path.

    In space, bombs are even less effective against armored targets unless you get a contact detonation, and even then it'll only hit the target with 50% of its effective energy. A laser will be close to 100% (other than degradation of the beam as it travels).

    RE: what Star Wars lasers are,

    I don't see much difference between the LAAT and SPHA laser beams and the typical blaster/turbolaser bolts we see, other than duration of the energy transmitted. They're effectively the same thing as far as I can tell, other than looks and duration of the beam/bolt.
     
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  11. Iron_lord

    Iron_lord Chosen One star 10

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    Sep 2, 2012
    Timescale and energy level matter though. Once you get into the really high energies, it doesn't matter whether it's a bomb, a kinetic weapon, a particle beam weapon, or a laser weapon - a vast amount of energy released in a tiny space, in a tiny amount of time, is going to look pretty similar- producing a crater, a light flash, etc.

    At least, if all take place in atmosphere.

    And when a laser is described as being "2 kilotons yield" then it makes sense that this means that it is roughly equivalent in destructive capacity to a 2 kiloton bomb.
     
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  12. Abadacus

    Abadacus Jedi Grand Master star 4

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    May 4, 2014
    Power is a function of energy over time. A thunderstorm can last hours, spread out over a few miles, a bomb goes off in a fraction of a second over a few inches of explosive material. An individual lightning bolt is quite high power, and if they all hit in the same place at the same time you'd have something that looks very much like the equivalent bomb. A blaster bolt takes a fraction of a second to impact a roughly square inch area, putting it more in the bomb range.

    1. Blasters, again, behave nothing like lasers.
    2. This is another assumption based on power levels. If a laser delivers its energy slowly enough, there is indeed time for vaporized and melted material to move out of the way at low velocities. This higher-temperature material carries away energy.
    If a laser deposits energy so rapidly that there is no time for that material to move... energy builds up... energy, temperature, and pressure all vary proportionately... kaboom.
    It would take a slow and deliberate burn to "drill" into the ground with a laser, a few "tons" dumped in a fraction of a second will just cause an explosion at the target.
     
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  13. blackmyron

    blackmyron Chosen One star 7

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    Oct 29, 2005
    For those of you interested in power discussions, I highly recommend reading Randall Munroe's What If book - I mean, the guy made calculations on how much power that Yoda outputs. (Also, that the destruction of Alderaan was technically a seismic event of 15 on the Richter scale).
     
  14. King of Alsakan

    King of Alsakan Jedi Grand Master star 4

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    Nov 25, 2007
    Was it good? That's up next for me after I am done with the Science of Interstellar book. I just skimmed it so far and saw the Death Star and Yoda stuff.
     
  15. blackmyron

    blackmyron Chosen One star 7

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    Oct 29, 2005
    It is excellent. He takes absurd questions, acknowledges the absurdity, and then treats them as a real physics question - often, he comes up with even more absurd questions along the way.
    Plus, the cover has a T-rex being lowered into a sarlacc. (If you take off the jacket cover, you can see what happens next).
     
  16. Tzizvvt78

    Tzizvvt78 Jedi Grand Master star 5

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    Jun 12, 2009
    But that's where the Legends ICS books said that the visible bolt was just a part of a greater beam. Which also took care of FX fails where the "invisible" portion hits something before the bolt (Luke's hand on the sailbarge in ROTJ, Yoda's command post in ROTS etc.). The majority of the energy is directed at a target, it's a directed energy weapon.

    In the ROTS:ICS, a Juggernaut tank's main cannon can deliver the heat of a nuclear bomb into one small spot. The description makes it sound like this was a reference to the AT-AT attack in ESB, hitting the generator 17 km away and creating that fireball. With enough pressure on the surrounding air, there's going to be a shockwave, but not the kind of effect you propose, since the majority of energy going into the reaction is affecting the target.

    Just look at the effect of concentrating laser bolts in the Kyber crystal in the Utapau arc of TCW. Battle droids take the brunt of the resulting beam, to the point of evaporating. It's a similar effect to the clones evaporating when hit by the Umbaran heavy cannon. The energy is directed mostly into the target, leaving the surroundings relatively intact.
     
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  17. anotherdemon

    anotherdemon Jedi Knight star 2

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    Apr 29, 2013
    A bolt of lightning is about equal to 1 ton of TNT. It looks nothing like 1 ton of TNT in magnitude. 20 kilotons of a thunder storm over a city will never damage the town like 20 kilotons of TNT would. That's the point.

    Instantaneous laser blasts will displace material due to the shockwaves of vaporized matter. An instantaneous blast will drill into the ground, and how far depends on how powerful it is. It won't drill as far as a KE impactor, but it'll go deeper than a bomb.

    RE, SW lasers,

    Why don't they behave like lasers? The bolt? Not moving at C? You do know that the bolt isn't affected by gravity? So it's impossible for them to be some form of projectile (encapsulated plasma or something). The only different weapon we see is the Ion Cannon (plasma cannon in other words), but that's shot out of orbit at high velocity. Saxton's tracing effect is one way to interpret the visible bolt, and it's possible for lasers to only have a visible bolt that's slower than C (though it's due to a rapid succession of lasers shot in a short amount of time).
     
  18. Iron_lord

    Iron_lord Chosen One star 10

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    Sep 2, 2012
    A lightning bolt's energy isn't released all at the impact point though - but spread out over the length of the bolt. Much of that energy is spent in heating the air around it up to enormous temperatures - causing the thunderclap.
     
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  19. Tzizvvt78

    Tzizvvt78 Jedi Grand Master star 5

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    Jun 12, 2009
    A SW laser bolt doesn't cause a thunderclap, though. Which means most of the energy gets released into a target.
     
  20. Iron_lord

    Iron_lord Chosen One star 10

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    Sep 2, 2012
    They do cause a loud noise, and a flash, when they hit the target though.

    Leia blasting through the grate on the DS1 springs to mind.

    They might be more efficient than explosive weapons, at doing things like "melting targets" - but if most of the energy is directed downward rather than sideward - then that vastly increases the timeframe required to blanket a planet.

    McEwok's figure:

    to complete the bombardment of an Earth-sized world in a 24-hour period would require a continuous rate of fire affecting nearly six thousand square kilometers every second.

    Now if we're going with only 1 hour (Humbarine for example) - then we're looking at about 140,000 square km per second. Conclusion - we need some way of vastly increasing the Area of Effect.

    Possible solution - "airburst" shots a bit like the flak bursts we see in ANH (but on a vaster scale) - and restrict the drilling shots to a very small percentage of the planet's area - the aforesaid mines, cities, etc.

    Just heating up the atmosphere at ground level, a little bit - will result in life-forms dying of heat.
     
  21. Tzizvvt78

    Tzizvvt78 Jedi Grand Master star 5

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    Jun 12, 2009
    Where does he get that figure from and from what basis? How is he calculating the area of effect and of the concentration of shots on the surface?
     
  22. seeker_two

    seeker_two Jedi Grand Master star 4

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    Jan 3, 2003
    Another thing to consider.....steam. When a bolt penetrates the ground and vaporizes matter, the vapor has to go somewhere. The vapor could expand rapidly and cause a lot of secondary damage.

    Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk
     
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  23. Abadacus

    Abadacus Jedi Grand Master star 4

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    May 4, 2014
    I'm trying to find the time to write a more thorough post - there are a lot of misconceptions around to be addressed - but for now this is the important one. This is a common Hollywood effect, but the physics simply don't work.
    seeker_two is hitting the nail on the head, but it's not limited to vaporized water. If we assume a Super battle droid is composed of around 1 cubic meter of metal, what happens when that metal is vaporized instantly?
    Copper, as an extreme low-end, expands by a factor of about 67,000 during vaporization. Suddenly we have 67,000 cubic meters of metal vapor - but there hasn't been time for the atoms to move and take up that volume, so it's enormously pressurized. That means a truly massive explosion. A dense alloy with a high specific heat like durasteel will both take a great deal more energy to vaporize, and create an equivalently more powerful explosion. The high surface area and high thermal conductivity of the metal vapor will also dump heat into the air as it expands, further increasing the pressure wave and raining condensed droplets of molten metal over a huge area. No intact surroundings.
    Funny how we don't see these effects onscreen.

    Star Trek attempts to rationalize their constant use of this effect by deciding that phasers somehow convert the mass of the target into neutrinos. That's alright, but it strikes me as an overly convoluted concept forced upon the setting by a scientifically lazy effect, and I don't think we need to go that direction with blasters when their original depiction was so simple and intuitive.
    Which brings us to the "lightspeed damage followed by tracer" theory of blasters. I think there are two motives behind this; to win geek debates by making blasters 'better', and to explain a continuity error where a scorched area is painted on a wall and seen before the bolt hits. This is a common and minor error, and can also be found in countless movies featuring modern or historical weapons.
    Ultimately, this is a convoluted and scientifically dubious rationalization that attempts to explain a small minority of cases while ignoring that the vast majority of cases (where the damage is dealt at impact) clearly contradict it.
     
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  24. Iron_lord

    Iron_lord Chosen One star 10

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    Sep 2, 2012
    accidental double post.
     
  25. Iron_lord

    Iron_lord Chosen One star 10

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    Sep 2, 2012
    Basic maths - the Earth has a surface area of over 510 million square km:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth

    there are 86400 seconds in 24 hours - therefore, to affect every bit of an Earth sized planet in 24 hours, over 5902 square km need to be affected, every second.

    Which fits with his "nearly 6000 km per second" estimate.
     
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  26. FTeik

    FTeik Jedi Grand Master star 5

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    Nov 7, 2000
    So now turbolasers can detonate on their own, before hitting solid ground? And how - with all the energy released clouding sensors - would the attackers know, when to use drilling shots and when those "airbursts"? The much simpler solution is, that an attacking ISD/Providence has enough reactor- and consequently firepower to conduct such an operation.

    Regarding vaporisation (or the lack of it): could a possible solution be, that the blast penetrating the target/armour is so concentrated and pierces through so quickly, that only a small area is effected? Think of a superfast-moving hot poker. At least for the majority of blaster-setting we see (according to the ANH-novel - which contrasts the movie there - Luke "opened" Leia's cell-door with his blaster set on full power and shooting the entire door off).