Yavin battle + Stargate: Death Star & ISDs vs. Atlantis

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Mr. Oragahn
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Yavin battle + Stargate: Death Star & ISDs vs. Atlantis

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sat Jan 13, 2007 12:40 am

Here we go. I've tried variants of this debate on various places, but I always see it as a good thing.

We're back in A New Hope.

The Death Star is on its way to Yavin IV, and will arrive in ten hours.

But things have changed quite a bit in the Yavin system.

Yavin IV has been handwaved away by Ascended beings, and replaced by Lantia. Instead of a solid and old rock temple, serving as a base for the rebels, there's now Atlantis, quietly floating amid a vast ocean.

The city is powered by three ZPMs, fully armed and all known systems working correctly.
All hangars are full of the maximum gateships possible. All gateships are standard models, fully armed and operational as well.
The city is thriving with life. There are many lantian scientists, soldiers and pilots.

They set up a defense grid of 24 satellites all averagely spread around the planet at a stable orbit, with six more gathered near the geosynchronous orbital point above Atlantis. So that's a total of 30.

They have four Aurora-class warships patroling the planet's close vicinity. We're going to assume that the multiple turreted cannons on the Aurora-class warships are working on the same principles as the lab's cannon on Doranda (episode Trinity, where McKay accidently destroys near an entire star system).

However, Tarkin woke up and felt dizzy this morning. So looking at his sad face in the mirror, he shaved himself, brushed his teeth and decided to send a preemptive strike at the planet.

That's why 10 ISDs mk-I are popping out of hyperspace, 1 AU from Lantia.
They come with 42 TIE fighters, 12 TIE interceptors and 12 TIE bombers each. A full wing each, which each star destroyer sill deploy, keeping 12 TIE fighters for close patrol, the rest being sent at the planet.

The Lantians do not possess the Death Star's plans.

The Death Star carries over 1000 wings and will release 900 of them against the planet, and keep the hundred left for defense.
Vader is still on the battle station, ready to jump in his special TIE advanced fighter.

Tarkin's plan is to use the Death Star's beam if all other methods fail. He will keep the battle station at six planetary diameters of Lantia in any case.
Since Tarkin couldn't stand Leia's witty remarks, he's decided she'd look better flattened between two trash compactor walls. There are no other rebels on the imperial station.

To sum up, here are the three imperial assault waves:

1. 10 star destroyers. 1 wing each.
2. Death Star arrives ten hours later. 900 wings sent against Atlantis.
3. Death Star fires the superlaser.

Can Atlantis repel the first wave, and then destroy the Death Star?
Last edited by Mr. Oragahn on Sat Jan 13, 2007 12:58 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Post by Nonamer » Sat Jan 13, 2007 2:04 am

First of all, I don't like SG versus, because frankly consistency in that series is an afterthought. I suspect that a DS blast should easily take them out, though I'm sure some of the calcs for Atlantis's shields scale high enough to survive.

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Post by AnonymousRedShirtEnsign » Sat Jan 13, 2007 10:17 am

I'd say Atlantis defeats the ISDs and the DS's fighters, then gets blown up by the DS.

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Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sat Jan 13, 2007 12:55 pm

It really boils down to the figures you go by.

Let's focus on ZPMs for a moment.

There are various figures available left and right, and somehow misinformed people think those things barely carry enough energy to lift a small city of the size of Atlantis.
Well, while we don't understand why this is the case, or more precisely, why a 3km wide Atlantis needs three ZPMs to move around while a 11 km long and bulky hiveship can take off, without the Wraith apparently possessing anything close to a power source worth of a ZPM.

My point being that it's more a problem of security protocols than power, and that the humans in Atlantis simply can't reprogram the computer.
Then some people think Progeny, and watch at the asuran cityship being destroyed as McKay set their three ZPMs to overload. Yet, it had only enough energy to vaporize the city, but in never endangered the planet, despite the ship being possibly one planetary radius or diameter away from the planet. But that is being lazy, and an absurd claim. This would mean very little energy, like a couple of tens of gigatons for strict overkill vaporization of a city said to be remarkably fragile (though this was for Atlantis, not the asuran ship, but they're extremely close and the Asurans borrow their tech from their creators).

It's therefore an absurd claim to say that those 3 much prized ZPMs would only hold that much energy. One single ZPM's overload in Critical Mass would destroy a planet in its entirety, and that was for a partially depleted ZPM.

It has thus been obvious that ZPM overload means a final explosion that can be dialed up or down. So in the end, the Critical Mass event is not even necessary a high end, especially since dialog suggested that simply dialing the stargate would draw that amount of power and make the ZPM overload. That is, a total planetary destruction level of power. Just for a transgalactic dial. We're not even talking about the requirements to keep the wormhole stable for several seconds, though I did come up with an idea explaining why dialing a gate for such long distances does not require that amount of power.
However, if I was wrong, it would strongly suggest that a single full ZPM contains far far more than that amount of energy, considering the number of times it's been drained for previous intergalactic dials.
But there's other evidence to look at.

For other figures, the highest one was about half of a ZPM apparently holding enough energy to destroy our solar system. Think supernova, starting off-axis, thus initially more powerful than a sun centered one, and doubled for a full ZPM. Again, the same bunch of people started saying that this level of destruction would only happen because the ZPM in question, brought by Camulus, was booby trapped with certain chemicals.

However, this is completely absurd, because that's saying that miniature particles held enough energy to compose most of the yield that would lead to a big supernova.
The real deal is that the ZPM was sabotaged so that by the first split second it would be used, the foreign elements would damage core parts of the device and make the whole damn thing pour all its energy into realspace.
Lee even ran a test, from scraped microscopic fragments he took off the ZPM's casing, invisible to the naked eye. They blew a fist sized hole in a small metal plate.
Point being, even if the whole ZPM volume's was made of this material, this could not even hope to match an absurdly small fraction of the total destructive yield. So needless to say that with only a small amount of the ZPM's structure being actually altered, the effect of those elements would never lead to anything close to what people have tried nerfing the ZPM at.

There are thus far two planetary destruction claims, from Camulus and Lee in Zero Hour (Lee said "destroyed the whole planet"), and one from McKay in Critical Mass ("destroy the planet in its entirety").
Carter corrected Lee's calcs in Zero Hour and mentionned the destruction of the entire solar system. With a ZPM at 50%.

Last but not least, we've seen that lantian tech has power conduits which can, at least, transfer 2% of a ZPM per second at full power, and that had to be calibrated on the limitations of the device Zelenka's team built, so again, there's no way to know if it's the final limitation.
The fact that the Lantians could build a ZPM which, even when exploding, could actually extract nearly all of its energy in a flash infinitely minuscule portion of a second, would clearly suggest that we're barely scratching the surface here.

I actually have a way to tie all this together, but I have to cut the rough edges first.

In the end, it would mean that Atlantis power conduits can transfer the equivalent of 2%/s of the total of two big supernovas, or 1%/s of a supernova.
That's the high end, which for all intents and purposes, is acceptable.


As for the power of the Death Star, the lowest end I can think of is that the real power of the Death Star is limited to the first explosion of Alderaan, the one that wasted the whole surface and blew a large portion of the crust around the point of impact away, and that the rest was the result or whatever planetary reactor blowing up, some kind of Naboo-like power plant scaled up, or else.

In the end, it means that Atlantis could happily sit there and shrug off the Death Star's superlaser.

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Post by AnonymousRedShirtEnsign » Sun Jan 14, 2007 1:16 am

Assuming Super-Laser-Effect rather than DET, DS can still take out Atlantis if it shoots the planet rather than the city since mass conversion works better on a planet than it does on a shield.

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Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sun Jan 14, 2007 2:22 am

AnonymousRedShirtEnsign wrote:Assuming Super-Laser-Effect rather than DET, DS can still take out Atlantis if it shoots the planet rather than the city since mass conversion works better on a planet than it does on a shield.
If you discard the DET superlaser because you think it would fail, I don't get how you think the exotic-chain-reaction superlaser will do any better, especially since in the end, it's still a matter of the planet blowing up, which means that there is a quantifiable level of energy, regardless of where it comes, and that Atlantis will actually have to survive the destruction of the planet, not a direct DET hit, which means even less energy to cope with.

The cityship will probably be hurtled into space, if the Lantians didn't already lift the city up.

And then, of course, if the superlaser really is an abstract problem of mass conversion, then it will probably have even reduced results against a shield which, by nature, seems particleless until further evidence is provided.

Really opposing all various ends, you can start with Atlantis, the warships and the satellites getting owned by the ISDs and their wings, to Atlantis happily taking direct superlaser hits before taking the Death Star down with a swarm of ZPM powered drones.

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Post by AnonymousRedShirtEnsign » Sun Jan 14, 2007 5:00 am

I wasn't disregarding a DET superlaser. I don't think Atlantis can stand up to planet-killer energy blast, so I was trying to come up with an alternative way for the Death Star to win.

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Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sun Jan 14, 2007 2:59 pm

But according to a given set of evidence which, as far as I'm concerned, seems very high but remains unchallenged, Atlantis could easily withstand several direct blasts.

Yes, I know, it sounds like wank, but frankly, just look at the facts.

If we oppose the Death Star's high end and Atlantis' high end, there's just no way the Empire's battle station will ever represent a danger to the planet.

Eventually, Atlantis could stretch its shield over more than the forward planet's arc.
Stretching the shield is a function that does exist (Echoes), but which is limited as the shield was apparently not built for that purpose, and it weakens it.
It can't turn into a total planetary shield, but would cover enough of the planet to protect it.

With 3 power sources, each holding twice the energy level of a big supernova, there's plenty power there to spare.

That is, I repeat, a high end. Not necessarily the. *

A low end I go by would make have half a ZPM already able to destroy 100% of a planet.

I'm interested in knowing if there are other figures or interpretations.

* How a solar system can be totally destroyed? At which level you consider that the farthest piece of ice or frozen rock in the system is destroyed?
A supernova might just torch its surface.
But I guess that as soon as the sun is out of the equation, and all inhabitable planets dead, we can safely assume that the system is quite destroyed, but that's a low end.

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