ST Starkiller's power finally calculated?

Found this video which was uploaded yesterday.
Seems quite powerful?
Anyone found any more accurate estimations?
Thanks.

 

1.21 jigga watts.

 

Its midichlorian count is off the charts. Even higher than Master Yoda's.

 

At 5:00 / 15:14 this video person says "Atmospheric Expansion 2.08*10^32 Joules"
Earth's gravitational binding energy is 2.5 10^32 Joules. This video presenter does not cite gravitational binding energy, which is the relevant quantity, and does not explain what he means by the term "atmospheric expansion". Additionally, I had to sit through what, 4 minutes of the video presenter thinking he's funny, when he is not, to arrive at anything worth analyzing. Beware people who try to be funny while trying to appear smart. Only a few can do that. If you need a number, take 2.5*10^32 Joules * 5 planets = 12.5*10^32 Joules to duplicate the movie event.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_binding_energy

And do not be bullied by the 99% on this forum that heave sighs at using your critical thinking skills against this franchise. This franchise would not be where it is if it did not leverage the simulation of vast technological events that shook world history and required acts of daring and engineering prowess that required real numbers with real science. Do not be bullied.

 

Something tells me his math is a little off.

 

I can't view the video at the moment, so I'll go based off of the text above.

In the Wiki article you quoted, it mentions Earth's GBE as being comparable to our Sun's total weekly output of energy. I would be interested to know what time period it supposedly took Starkiller to charge up for the Hosnian Prime shot. We could then back-calculate the efficiency of the energy absorption/gathering compared to the normal amount of solar energy released during that time period. (That assumes Starkiller's sun is similar to our sun, just like we assume the planets destroyed to be comparable to earth.)

Of course the answer will probably be that the energy greatly exceeds the amount possible through simple collection of the star's output energy since a significant chunk of the star's mass apparently was used to fire the weapon, as seen during the 2nd charging...

 

I'm only pretty sure on the following. I have not run it through Excel or exhausted myself at double and triple checking. It should give a general idea of orders of magnitude involved.

GBE_Earth = 2.24 * 10^32 J
L_sun = 3.85 * 10^26 W, which is Joules per second.
L_sun * 60 * 60 * 24 * 7 = 2.32 * 10^32 Joules per week.
So, GBE of one earth mass planet requires 1 week solar output.
5 earth mass planets would require 5 weeks solar output.
So if the planet of Starkiller Base was in deep space shadow for a hypothetical 5 weeks, it's not surprising that the surface would look so much like Iceland, which is right south of the Arctic Circle. It almost appears as if someone thought about this.
Of course it doesn't make sense to assume that it is only photon energy that feeds Starkiller, because the movie says it takes ~15 minutes to charge enough to destroy earth-size D'Qar. So the question is how to gain 1 GBE_Earth in 15 minutes from the sun-like star.
How many units of 15 minutes are there in one week? 15 * 4 * 24 * 7 = 10080 or ~10^4

ASSUMPTION: The movie shows the destructive power goes at superluminal speeds without being in hyperspace. I'll conjecture that even if destructive power can be sent as matter, it would require energy to get that matter to accelerate up to near lightspeed before whatever new phenomenon kicked in. If it used energy, that acceleration to lightspeed is for free. It is even more retarded from a science in fantasy perspective to have ordinary stellar plasma going faster than light, for whatever stupid reason, than it is to have energy generated from stellar plasma going faster than light. It is less costly in terms of total energy expenditure, and total suspension of disbelief, if the payload used only energy.

Another key concern from the movie is that the total luminosity of the star goes down as it's charging. I postulated on some other Starkiller thread that a black hole was a component of the siphoning process.
Two boundary conditions are then provided: 1 L_sun at time 0 minutes, and 0 L_sun at time 15 minutes.
Two more come from the total energy: 0 GBE_Earth at time 0 minutes, and 1 GBE_Earth at time 15 minutes.

Just as a sanity check, if one models the decrease in luminosity as linear, you are losing some constant number of watts per minute.

So if the movie says it takes 15 minutes, divide L_sun by 15
First convert L_Sun from J/s to J/min
3.85 * 10^26 J/s * 60s/m = 2.31 * 10^28 J/min
Now find a linear increment that is 1/15 that amount
2.31 * 10^28 J/min / 15 increments = 1.54 * 10^27 J/min per increment
Now integrate this increment unit from minute 0 to minute 15
1.54 * 10^27 J/min * [0 min, 15 min ] x dx =
1.54 * 10^27 J/min * x^2/2 * [0 min, 15 min ] =
1.54 * 10^27 J * 15^2/2 =
1.73 * 10^29 J total energy absorbed from 15 minutes of constantly decreasing L_sun

Sanity check on Sanity check: [ { 2 * ( 1.73 * 10^29 ) } * 4 * 24 * 7 ] = 2.32 * 10^32 or one week of L_sun or ~1 GBE_Earth. So, that checks out.
So if Starkiller has sucked in 1.73 * 10^29 J from luminosity but needs 2.32 * 10^32 J total,
The needed difference is 2.31827 * 10^32 J.
I stated in the ASSUMPTION that this energy is generated from stellar plasma matter. How? Not even worried about it.
E = mc^2
2.31827 * 10^32 J = m c^2
2.31827 * 10^32 J / c^2 = m = 2.6 * 10^15 kg
So Starkiller needs to suck in 2.6 * 10^15 kg of stellar plasma (and convert it to pure energy) in 15 minutes.

By way of due diligence, the stellar Mass-Luminosity equation gives a method to calculate reduced luminosity as a result of reduced mass.
The amount of mass required is so small in comparison to the sun-like star's total mass that the required amount disappears in the subtraction,
2 * 10^30 kg - 2.6 * 10^15 kg. You can see a difference of 15 orders of magnitude.
That means there is no need to calculate Mass-Luminosity change. Not even for charging for Hosnian system.
I could proceed through the exercise of linearizing and the integrating the total plasma mass necessary just to simulate the effect of the black hole.
The black hole's power grows from 0 to 1, and it is consistent that its ingestion of plasma / photosphere matter would be proportional in time to its ingestion of stellar photon output. The calculation would be similar to the one above.

tdlr: Over the course of 15 minutes required to charge up for D'Qar, Starkiller sucks/steals 1.73 * 10^29 Joules of visible photon energy from the star and space surrounding the star, and also sucks/steals 2.6 * 10^15 kg of plasma from the star's photosphere.

 

Starkiller also uses dark matter as a source of energy, not just its sun.

 

For those of you who are unconfortable with the metric system and find it more intutitive to express the number in familiar units like farthings per cubic bushel, the number is: a ****load

Mod edit: Language

 

According to the book that some poster transcribed, it was Dark Energy. I did a calculation on that, too, in some other thread. The who cares take home is that it would require as much Dark Energy as can be located inside our Oort Cloud (almost 1.5 light years from the sun) in order to destroy one earth-mass D'Qar.

One of the authors tasked with writing book adaptations for the upcoming movies Could make some headway into tying The Force to Dark Matter. If The Force is what binds the galaxy together (like Newtonian gravity), then Dark Matter is what gives the galaxy its flat rotation curve.

 

uh huh.....hmmm....okay...yeah.....

Now tell me more about the specific science of not instantly dying horribly from depressurization the second they stepped out of the Millennium Falcon on some random atmosphere-less asteroid?

 

Just assume that I cannot. Simpler.

 

No. Please do.

 

Thanks for stepping up and knocking out that calculation. I was hoping you would

While unlikely (considering the Millenium Falcon flew through an enormous open hole on each end), my disbelief was always suspended by assuming that the Space Slug had a nice, human-friendly atmosphere inside its body

 

The real reason why it could never blow up planets...

- Designed by engineers...ok
- Built by droids..ok
- Aimed by storm troopers....

 

Hah, okay I'm fine with that, I think my post might have sounded more agressive than it was. I was kinda expecting someone to point out exactly what you just did, and I was gonna point out that it's mouth was wide open lol.

I didn't mean to be a jerk, but this just struck me as one of those topics applying real world science to a fantasy setting, when there are a whole plethora of things that are scientifically incorrect throughout the saga. Even Starkiller base. Even if your willing to suspend your disbelief about them being able to safely store that much energy (which TC has graciously calculated for us) within the planet somehow, there's still the little issue that everyone standing that close to the 'barrel' when it fires should have been vaporized instantly like if they were standing that close to a star. Not to mention totally obliterizing the atmosphere in a massive fireball. Now serving Fried First Order Army.

 

Oh yes, sorry, it was dark energy. Is dark energy even a thing? I mean Foster has a long tradition dealing in the Trek verse so you'd think it would at least be a thing, even if its application is in a more traditional Star Warsy fashion here.

 

Yes. Responsible for the acceleration of the expansion of the universe. However it is not a local phenomenon, like dark matter (which halos galaxies).

 

Oh the energy left over from the "big bang" right? I get that mixed up with the missing mass or dark matter.

What is the difference?

 

No that's the cosmic microwave background, dark energy is really weird: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy

It's basically Einstein's fudge factor that he could never explain.

 

That's a lot of missing energy!

 

Yup, stuff that we can see, are made of, and interact with is about 5% of the universe.

 

Sorry, I can't really stand to watch that thing. The narration is obviously provided by a text-to-speech program and it's too distracting. It's as if the person making it was too shy to use their own voice.

 

Dark Energy is a property of space time itself. Hold up your finger and thumb and you are holding a cubic centimeter of dark energy. It is present locally, globally, uniformly, here, there. What the 2011 Nobel Prize winners including Brian Schmidt discovered was that the universe was expanding at an accelerating rate. What makes that happen, baring new fundamental insights, is what is imagined, using a science-fiction-y name, to be a form of energy that pushes space apart, or pulls space apart, or whichever analogy is most convenient to internalize that the most distant galaxies we see, more than half way across the universe, flee from us faster than nearer galaxies. So, "it" is not only present locally, it is present at great distance. All the great distances you can imagine. The structure of the universe is soap bubbles that luminous baryonic matter and dark matter live in. The soap bubbles are called Cosmic Voids and I recommend get your mind blown by reading up on Bootes Void. The action we perceive to be the acceleration of the expansion of the universe is most easily imagined as these bubble voids just getting bigger and bigger and the galaxies that make up the soap film getting farther and farther away (average distance).

Dark Matter is also another science-fiction-y name for an as yet unsolved mystery, which is why do galaxies rotate in a manner that is much faster than Keplerian. If you have the opportunity to notice how the moon changes positions in the sky every night, you are seeing with your eye Keplerian motion. Mercury whips around the sun, Earth cruises around the sun, Jupiter moseys around the sun, Pluto creeps around the sun. It is isolated Newtonian bodies interacting locally by discrete gravitational force. The solar system is Keplerian. The Battle of Yavin hinged on the idea of orbiting around an obstructing planet - that's Keplerian. Dark Matter is how astronomers explain that the galaxy as a whole is NOT behaving in a Keplerian fashion. Every galaxy that can be seen reproduces the same unintuitive effect: there is not an unambiguous Keplerian gradient of orbital speed for any given distance from the galactic center. It is, if mapped out, a roughly flat line, which means that if it were not for some unknown additional mass, the stars at the outside should go flinging off. So, there must be additional unseen matter, now called Dark Matter. In order to cause so much exterior mass that Keplerian orbits become a flat rotation curve , this unseen Dark Matter has to extend many, many lengths of the galaxy. The Milky Way's Dark Matter halo (to memory, could be wrong) extends 15 diameters out. It can be thought of as invisible smoke, but, a loooot of it.

Computer models that attempt to reproduce the universe as we see it generally or usually end up showing the dark matter streams into the soap bubble structure before baryonic matter, and so, one can imagine that dark matter is kind of the supporting structural "spine" upon which baryonic matter, which includes luminous matter like stars and non-luminous like planets, accretes.

Leveraging some Star Wars, The Force binds the galaxy together, which is as good as necessary an analogy of normal gravity, and may as well include Dark Matter being acted upon by normal gravity, to get the rotation curves we see, which otherwise would not be possible. So, the galaxy seen at the end of ESB cannot be a thing that exists without Dark Matter. Conversely, if The Force is what binds the galaxy together (internally), Dark Energy is what drives galaxies apart from each other. So some writer may have some intriguing fun with that. This book here that mentions Dark Energy is channeling the idea that the most inexorable force that we can know of, one that can ultimately tear an atom apart given enough billions of years, is being played with by these children in Nazi uniforms.