Haz the biggatons?

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Mr. Oragahn
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Haz the biggatons?

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sun Oct 12, 2014 11:00 am

What do you think of each claim presented there:

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img805/ ... 724431.png

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Re: Haz the biggatons?

Post by Darth Spock » Tue Oct 14, 2014 1:27 am

Works for me. Oh, and I think the technical term for what that last one haz is "wigglytons." Yes, I believe that is the official scientific term for it. Not to be confused with the yellow squirrel's "giggletons."

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Re: Haz the biggatons?

Post by Praeothmin » Sun Oct 19, 2014 1:38 am

Made me laugh... :)

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Re: Haz the biggatons?

Post by Lucky » Mon Oct 20, 2014 6:07 am

StarCraft
Having played the first game, I have to say that this seems to be an EU thing only unless something changed in StarCraft II

MASS EFFECT
They could be a "bigatons" setting if they chose to be. I seem to recall hearing something about treaties limiting how powerful starships can be, and how many of those ships a group can have.
Generally they are well above Babylon 5 on average.

In have no idea what series this is.

In have no idea what series this is.

Xeelee
Never looked into it

Star Wars
Agree

Warhammer 40,000
There is a rather large disconnect between standard weapons, and the rare "bigaton" extremes weapons unless one takes things like plasma guns having outputs comparable to stars as literal.

Star Trek
The only setting I know of where the drama is often because the crews are trying not to accidently wipe out all life on the planet while trying to save the planet with their standard gear. It's really the only setting I can think of that uses its super-tech to limit collateral damage as much as possible.

Halo
How did anyone ever honestly claim "bigatons for it? Don't they make body armor out of the same stuff they use for starship armor?

Stargate
True, the writers do forget the setting's capabilities at time

Poke E Mon
Most poke E Mon aren't all that powerful, but one high end Poke E Mon can easily kill every thing on a planet if it wants to and it only goes up from there. The most powerful Pok E Mon I know of is credited with creating at least one universe and everything in it.

Andromeda
I'm not sure what is surprising about the "bigatons" here?

NBSG
Roughly 50 megatons for high end weapons?

Babylon5
500 megaton weapons are considered super weapons, and standard anti-warship guns are about 200 megawatt as i recall.

Doctor Who
There is generally a huge disconnect between the super weapons and standard weapons of the setting

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Re: Haz the biggatons?

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Oct 20, 2014 8:53 pm

Lucky wrote:StarCraft
Having played the first game, I have to say that this seems to be an EU thing only unless something changed in StarCraft II
It's an universe that's highly inconsistent. The Protoss pull some fancy superweapons, even sometimes biggatons from normal weapons apparently, all in some mangas. But get kicked by Terrans or Zergs. Then the Terrans have literally sewn a planet with a cracked core glowing out in the open. Yet they hardly have the industrial power for that.
MASS EFFECT
They could be a "bigatons" setting if they chose to be. I seem to recall hearing something about treaties limiting how powerful starships can be, and how many of those ships a group can have.
Generally they are well above Babylon 5 on average.
Above B5, it's hard to say, the ships' weapons didn't sound that impressive, aside from the speeds of some of them.
At some point it benefited from a bit of background fluff about a planet being scared by some stray shot or something, you could see the scar from far away in space and it was said, I think, that a big ancient ship did tank a large amount of that energy.
For the rest...
Xeelee
Never looked into it
Apparently it's topping the Culture, which features multi kilometer long super sentient robo-spaceships that use some mundane weapons that can cut superstructures such as ringworlds in a very short amount of time.
Star Wars
Agree
That was basically a mockery of the inflationists' claims. Truth said, they hardly even had the EU to back them up, but it was only revealed once debaters, including us, started digging into the sources they relied on, and more.
Now that this insanity seems to have settled, we're back to a fictional state wherein the Death Star only is biggaton worthy, and quite a lot. It therefore really deserves its super weapon status.
Warhammer 40,000
There is a rather large disconnect between standard weapons, and the rare "bigaton" extremes weapons unless one takes things like plasma guns having outputs comparable to stars as literal.
Most people limit themselves to quoting what some vocal hammies say. Most inflationist figures were assembled at SDN by Connor MacLeod. Figures could go up or down from gigatons to kilotons. There's no real consistency and CML's threads at SDN have surely caused more confusion: any author looking for information will likely end reading CML's nonsense and take it at face value. The paradigm is however very simple: the exceptionally powerful and often times exotic superweapons starships can carry would simply be irrelevant if the claimed biggaton figures for conventional weapons were true.
Star Trek
The only setting I know of where the drama is often because the crews are trying not to accidently wipe out all life on the planet while trying to save the planet with their standard gear. It's really the only setting I can think of that uses its super-tech to limit collateral damage as much as possible.
They have good stuff but what makes it stand apart is the bells and whistles that come with them, making the weapons very efficient and versatile.
But doomsday weapons and payloads, altough accessible, aren't part of the conventional arrays of weaponry. Nothing to scoff at though. Trek ships have many cases of blasting various sizes of asteroids with torpedoes or beam weapons. If sometimes this is clearly done with magitech, there are other times when it looks like sheer brute force was responsible.
Halo
How did anyone ever honestly claim "bigatons for it? Don't they make body armor out of the same stuff they use for starship armor?
Mostly because of the very first merchandise book written for this universe, The Fall of Reach. After that, it only had been a story of constant retcons. That said, the super ancient civilizations fleshed out in the latest books really use powerful tech (although Halo 4 would seem, again, to tend to mitigate that). It's just that the humans and Covenant don't have that kind of firepower.
Stargate
True, the writers do forget the setting's capabilities at time
The question is how many times really. Generally, many claims about limited firepower and disconnect with higher figures stem from complete disregard of context.
There are some errors, but not up to the point mdae by overgeneralizing and usually lazy anti-SG arguments make it out to be. The universe has been remarkable consistent in portraying naqahdah as a handwavium mineral of awesome power and Stargate probably is the only show that also remained fairly accurate and generous in its mention of specific yields. I think you'd be hard pressed to find that many figures of kilotons to megatons for devices or bomb that are easily transported and gigatons for anything that can be carried by an aircraft.
The latest show has been renown for featuring a spaceship that would both fight the gravity of giant stars and enter the photosphere of yellow and blue stars for recharging.
That, while said ship essentially is the fruit of a pet science project and is barely holding in one piece. But it also has a plethora of ships posing a threat to the earlier one while not being shown having a firepower that would correspond to the levels required to take down such shields. In truth, SG-1 and SGA seem to have been more consistent than SGU in that domain.
Poke E Mon
Most poke E Mon aren't all that powerful, but one high end Poke E Mon can easily kill every thing on a planet if it wants to and it only goes up from there. The most powerful Pok E Mon I know of is credited with creating at least one universe and everything in it.
So you say that the super stuff is actually limited to a few pokemons that actually represent the equivalent of superbeings/superweapons in many other fictions?
Andromeda
I'm not sure what is surprising about the "bigatons" here?
Perhaps because the show tells a story that's different from the real canon, that is uniquely written and comprises stats which indeed point at big yields, although I'm not sure if they're that really big. There's some heavy use of weaponized antimatter though.
NBSG
Roughly 50 megatons for high end weapons?
Perhaps a bit more depending on some sources, but yeah.
Although the claim is absurd because I haven't seen people try to pretend nBSG had super yields. That's entirely made up. What we know for sure is that the mightiest Battlestars can tank the nukes fired from Basestars and these ships can shoot anything from kilotons to megatons from the same weapon racks.
The Eye of Jupiter gives a multi-megaton yileds to Galactica's nukes.
What really make nBSG a surprisingly potent adversary is the hax use of FTL jumps, especially as used by the Cylons, who could basically macross-spam a target with a variety of missiles, subammo from nukes, and that the Raiders could carry kiloton nukes and jump. That and the fact that the Raptors could be jampacked with racks of multi-MT nukes, and these ships, 40 years after the war, were capable of accurate FTL jumps.
I think the biggest claims could henceforth come the show's finale which precisely had a Raptor accidentally fire its entire count of 16 missiles at the Cylon Colony, some kind of 100 km wide super structure, and push it off course.
But nBSG remains one of the shows with the lowest tech demonstrated onscreen.
Babylon5
500 megaton weapons are considered super weapons, and standard anti-warship guns are about 200 megawatt as i recall.
LOL, that's a bit unfair. Non-Shadow beam weapons were still shown vaporizing large volumes of metal and the figures I remember easily gave the Young Species' ships firepower in the mid to high terawatt range.

With the recent variations of Star Wars, oppositions between both universe would actually prove entertaining, assuming appropriate scenarii.
Doctor Who
There is generally a huge disconnect between the super weapons and standard weapons of the setting
Yes, and the science is just horribad, absolutely fubar. But the conveyed idea is that it's still impressive. High tech impressive, quite more than Star Trek.

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Re: Haz the biggatons?

Post by Lucky » Thu Oct 23, 2014 7:54 pm

Mr. Oragahn wrote: It's an universe that's highly inconsistent. The Protoss pull some fancy superweapons, even sometimes biggatons from normal weapons apparently, all in some mangas. But get kicked by Terrans or Zergs. Then the Terrans have literally sewn a planet with a cracked core glowing out in the open. Yet they hardly have the industrial power for that.
So the claims for StarCraft are akin to claiming the Death Stars mean the Empire can build their volume in Stardestroyers if it wants to?

Mr. Oragahn wrote: Above B5, it's hard to say, the ships' weapons didn't sound that impressive, aside from the speeds of some of them.
At some point it benefited from a bit of background fluff about a planet being scared by some stray shot or something, you could see the scar from far away in space and it was said, I think, that a big ancient ship did tank a large amount of that energy.
For the rest...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reIUf3552_Q
The Mass Effect Codex entries are the highest "canon" for the setting as I understand it, but to me that sort of thing only makes sense.

The scar was created by an ancient anti-Reaper weapon, it didn't seem to help.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: That was basically a mockery of the inflationists' claims. Truth said, they hardly even had the EU to back them up, but it was only revealed once debaters, including us, started digging into the sources they relied on, and more.

Now that this insanity seems to have settled, we're back to a fictional state wherein the Death Star only is biggaton worthy, and quite a lot. It therefore really deserves its super weapon status.
I've never been able to understand how you can derive a weapon's output by the ships acceleration given the engine exhaust would always be more dangerous then the weapons.

Mr. Oragahn wrote: Most people limit themselves to quoting what some vocal hammies say. Most inflationist figures were assembled at SDN by Connor MacLeod. Figures could go up or down from gigatons to kilotons. There's no real consistency and CML's threads at SDN have surely caused more confusion: any author looking for information will likely end reading CML's nonsense and take it at face value. The paradigm is however very simple: the exceptionally powerful and often times exotic superweapons starships can carry would simply be irrelevant if the claimed biggaton figures for conventional weapons were true.
And something similar is being done at Spacebattles.com.

Really, if your conclusions makes the super-weapons pointless then you've made a mistake somewhere, or the author has.

Mr. Oragahn wrote: They have good stuff but what makes it stand apart is the bells and whistles that come with them, making the weapons very efficient and versatile.

But doomsday weapons and payloads, altough accessible, aren't part of the conventional arrays of weaponry. Nothing to scoff at though. Trek ships have many cases of blasting various sizes of asteroids with torpedoes or beam weapons. If sometimes this is clearly done with magitech, there are other times when it looks like sheer brute force was responsible.
I wasn't talking about the super-weapons in Star Trek. It's a common plot element that the hero ship can casually turn a planet into a "cinder" is minutes at most, and that a few standard torpedos can blow up stars.

As for the doomsday weapons, at least one is standard issue on all Federation ships, the gravimetric torpedo.

Mr. Oragahn wrote: Mostly because of the very first merchandise book written for this universe, The Fall of Reach. After that, it only had been a story of constant retcons. That said, the super ancient civilizations fleshed out in the latest books really use powerful tech (although Halo 4 would seem, again, to tend to mitigate that). It's just that the humans and Covenant don't have that kind of firepower.
This is why I hate EU material. Fans, and I use the term sarcastically here, latch on to anything no matter how much it conflicts with the source.

Mr. Oragahn wrote: The question is how many times really. Generally, many claims about limited firepower and disconnect with higher figures stem from complete disregard of context.
There are some errors, but not up to the point mdae by overgeneralizing and usually lazy anti-SG arguments make it out to be. The universe has been remarkable consistent in portraying naqahdah as a handwavium mineral of awesome power and Stargate probably is the only show that also remained fairly accurate and generous in its mention of specific yields. I think you'd be hard pressed to find that many figures of kilotons to megatons for devices or bomb that are easily transported and gigatons for anything that can be carried by an aircraft.

The latest show has been renown for featuring a spaceship that would both fight the gravity of giant stars and enter the photosphere of yellow and blue stars for recharging.

That, while said ship essentially is the fruit of a pet science project and is barely holding in one piece. But it also has a plethora of ships posing a threat to the earlier one while not being shown having a firepower that would correspond to the levels required to take down such shields. In truth, SG-1 and SGA seem to have been more consistent than SGU in that domain.
Context is always relevant, but this seems to often be forgotten for one reason or another.

Having never seen a single episode of SGU, is it possible the Destiny's hull is made from something that is not good at handling certain types of stress, but very good at dealing with others?
Mr. Oragahn wrote: So you say that the super stuff is actually limited to a few pokemons that actually represent the equivalent of superbeings/superweapons in many other fictions?
Legendary Pok E Mon are the highest end Pok E Mon.
http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/ ... ry_pokemon

Arceus is basically the being/god who created the Pok E Mon multiverse.
http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Arceus_(Pokémon)

Keep in mind that no Poke E Mon should be taken lightly, and the games have some rather absurd sounding fluff for them, but the games are the original source material. All Poke E Mon can easily kill a human if they want to, and the ghost types and psychic types can casually do things to you that are worse then death.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Perhaps because the show tells a story that's different from the real canon, that is uniquely written and comprises stats which indeed point at big yields, although I'm not sure if they're that really big. There's some heavy use of weaponized antimatter though.
Last I checked Andromeda simply stated the visuals were basically an abstract representation of what was really going on like any sane person would conclude from watching any visual Sci-Fi like Star Trek and StarGate, and were blunt about it like Mass Effect .

Mr. Oragahn wrote: LOL, that's a bit unfair. Non-Shadow beam weapons were still shown vaporizing large volumes of metal and the figures I remember easily gave the Young Species' ships firepower in the mid to high terawatt range.

With the recent variations of Star Wars, oppositions between both universe would actually prove entertaining, assuming appropriate scenarii.
Babylon 5's anti-fighter guns and Starfury are shown to easily chew through warship armor, and it can easily be rationalized as everyone using ablative armor given they count.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Yes, and the science is just horribad, absolutely fubar. But the conveyed idea is that it's still impressive. High tech impressive, quite more than Star Trek.
Dr.Who is hardly a serous setting no matter how much horror might appear in it.

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Re: Haz the biggatons?

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sun Nov 02, 2014 1:20 am

Lucky wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote: It's an universe that's highly inconsistent. The Protoss pull some fancy superweapons, even sometimes biggatons from normal weapons apparently, all in some mangas. But get kicked by Terrans or Zergs. Then the Terrans have literally sewn a planet with a cracked core glowing out in the open. Yet they hardly have the industrial power for that.
So the claims for StarCraft are akin to claiming the Death Stars mean the Empire can build their volume in Stardestroyers if it wants to?
Certain absolutely ridiculous industrial feats in SC indeed imply that the Terrans could build a stupidly huge fleet or army, whatever.
That and the scaling problems plaguing this fiction, I really stay clear of all that nonsense.
The setting is just good enough on an overall scope, but for no reason I'd ever encourage anyone to delve into the depths of this nonsense.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Above B5, it's hard to say, the ships' weapons didn't sound that impressive, aside from the speeds of some of them.
At some point it benefited from a bit of background fluff about a planet being scared by some stray shot or something, you could see the scar from far away in space and it was said, I think, that a big ancient ship did tank a large amount of that energy.
For the rest...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reIUf3552_Q
The Mass Effect Codex entries are the highest "canon" for the setting as I understand it, but to me that sort of thing only makes sense.

The scar was created by an ancient anti-Reaper weapon, it didn't seem to help.
And the Reapers were finally being taken down by weapons which never had to be come close to leave multi-continent wide slits at the surface of planets.
The codices are good enough, make a decent universe with some strong points and many limitations. It didn't strike me as over the top.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: That was basically a mockery of the inflationists' claims. Truth said, they hardly even had the EU to back them up, but it was only revealed once debaters, including us, started digging into the sources they relied on, and more.

Now that this insanity seems to have settled, we're back to a fictional state wherein the Death Star only is biggaton worthy, and quite a lot. It therefore really deserves its super weapon status.
I've never been able to understand how you can derive a weapon's output by the ships acceleration given the engine exhaust would always be more dangerous then the weapons.
This is why in the AOTC:ICS or the next one, Saxton had a line about how the warships could direct all their power plant's power right into the weapons.
Mind you, the Death Star was totally unique in that all diagrams in the EU pointed at a device which had its power core directly fed into the main weapon array. It essentially was an engine of destruction wherein the exhaust was tightly focused. So it was rather dishonest to pick that rather exceptional design and derivate wild assumptions about the firepower of conventional warships.
One thing I liked in the EU of very late, in the latest iteration of the CCG, was an unique model of star destroyer built with a superlaser array in its center, the entire forward wedge section split into two mandibles, not unlike that of the Millennium Falcon, with the superlaser sitting deep down within the recesses. The dish was located right in front of the SD's dome, that is, the power plant.
Sort of the same with Palpatine's Eclipse. The superlaser didn't have a dish, but the entire beam was focused throught the length of the ship I suppose, and most likely was like an open shaft straight from the ship's power core.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Most people limit themselves to quoting what some vocal hammies say. Most inflationist figures were assembled at SDN by Connor MacLeod. Figures could go up or down from gigatons to kilotons. There's no real consistency and CML's threads at SDN have surely caused more confusion: any author looking for information will likely end reading CML's nonsense and take it at face value. The paradigm is however very simple: the exceptionally powerful and often times exotic superweapons starships can carry would simply be irrelevant if the claimed biggaton figures for conventional weapons were true.
And something similar is being done at Spacebattles.com.

Really, if your conclusions makes the super-weapons pointless then you've made a mistake somewhere, or the author has.
That's what you'd think, it seems most basic sense, but it literally crashes against zealous fanboyism. No sound argument could be accepted. It's like if you attacked them directly instead of their "beloved" fictional universe, which they actually had a poisonous relation with.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: They have good stuff but what makes it stand apart is the bells and whistles that come with them, making the weapons very efficient and versatile.

But doomsday weapons and payloads, altough accessible, aren't part of the conventional arrays of weaponry. Nothing to scoff at though. Trek ships have many cases of blasting various sizes of asteroids with torpedoes or beam weapons. If sometimes this is clearly done with magitech, there are other times when it looks like sheer brute force was responsible.
I wasn't talking about the super-weapons in Star Trek. It's a common plot element that the hero ship can casually turn a planet into a "cinder" is minutes at most, and that a few standard torpedos can blow up stars.
Me neither. I point acknowledge legit feats of demonstrative high firepower. Admitedly, this hasn't been verified much in the nuTrek movies; aside from plot nonsense and really overthe top super special devices, I don't think we have that much evidence of great firepower (although the skirmish on Qronos shows Klingon blasters leaving rather big holes in the walls, sometimes). The only thing going for these movies is that they're a follow up on the ENT show, for which there were very clear figures, and the event related to the Narada completely altered the UFP's vision of ship design forever.
As for the doomsday weapons, at least one is standard issue on all Federation ships, the gravimetric torpedo.
Having a stash of super weapons used for very exceptional measures is not surprising, nor absurd, as long as it makes sense with the rest.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Mostly because of the very first merchandise book written for this universe, The Fall of Reach. After that, it only had been a story of constant retcons. That said, the super ancient civilizations fleshed out in the latest books really use powerful tech (although Halo 4 would seem, again, to tend to mitigate that). It's just that the humans and Covenant don't have that kind of firepower.
This is why I hate EU material. Fans, and I use the term sarcastically here, latch on to anything no matter how much it conflicts with the source.
Halo was so new that TFOR didn't seem to conflict much, although the gigaton/teraton figures for the railguns really did clash and look totally ridiculous in light of the tech the humans had.
But it was official material so you literally had to suck it up. Fortunately that nonsense is over and the super duper stuff has been moved to the upper tier, with Precursors and friends.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: The question is how many times really. Generally, many claims about limited firepower and disconnect with higher figures stem from complete disregard of context.
There are some errors, but not up to the point mdae by overgeneralizing and usually lazy anti-SG arguments make it out to be. The universe has been remarkable consistent in portraying naqahdah as a handwavium mineral of awesome power and Stargate probably is the only show that also remained fairly accurate and generous in its mention of specific yields. I think you'd be hard pressed to find that many figures of kilotons to megatons for devices or bomb that are easily transported and gigatons for anything that can be carried by an aircraft.

The latest show has been renown for featuring a spaceship that would both fight the gravity of giant stars and enter the photosphere of yellow and blue stars for recharging.

That, while said ship essentially is the fruit of a pet science project and is barely holding in one piece. But it also has a plethora of ships posing a threat to the earlier one while not being shown having a firepower that would correspond to the levels required to take down such shields. In truth, SG-1 and SGA seem to have been more consistent than SGU in that domain.
Context is always relevant, but this seems to often be forgotten for one reason or another.

Having never seen a single episode of SGU, is it possible the Destiny's hull is made from something that is not good at handling certain types of stress, but very good at dealing with others?
Aside from violent impacts and the fact that it was a ship so was expected to withstand certain movements and accelerations, I don't think we've seen anything very special about the hull.
The somehow bothersome but rather real fact is that Stargate does actually provide enough pieces of evidence which once collected, show that it's a universe within which shields can do very well against more or less normal, high levels space hazards and other phenomena, but suffer some terrible weaknesses against certain weapons which clearly rely on a significant amount of magitech to drain shields faster than through sheer raw energy. When you have a ton of evidence that relatively new manmade and extremely portable naqahdah generators can produce gigawatts with no noticeable heat loss (!!), you can only muse at what happens at the scale of advanced power cores of gigantic proportions mounted of large starships.

So perhaps the drone machines harassing Destiny are another case of some advanced weapon capable of draining ancient shields admirably fast with little effort. Mind you, we know absolutely nothing about the origin of those automatized ships. But you know, in the show at some point the crew uses Destiny's main weapon at something like 60% and they're worried they'd be killing the rest of the crew on the ground. They do that to... blast open the reinforced entrance door of some subterranean library/base.
With that kind of firepower, you'd have expected the entire city and its suburbs wiped out in no time flat. Trying to rationalize this 60% thing is a waste of time imho.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: So you say that the super stuff is actually limited to a few pokemons that actually represent the equivalent of superbeings/superweapons in many other fictions?
Legendary Pok E Mon are the highest end Pok E Mon.
http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/ ... ry_pokemon

Arceus is basically the being/god who created the Pok E Mon multiverse.
http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Arceus_(Pokémon)

Keep in mind that no Poke E Mon should be taken lightly, and the games have some rather absurd sounding fluff for them, but the games are the original source material. All Poke E Mon can easily kill a human if they want to, and the ghost types and psychic types can casually do things to you that are worse then death.
Well, they can like any other human can kill a human if they insist on using their strength at their fullest.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Perhaps because the show tells a story that's different from the real canon, that is uniquely written and comprises stats which indeed point at big yields, although I'm not sure if they're that really big. There's some heavy use of weaponized antimatter though.
Last I checked Andromeda simply stated the visuals were basically an abstract representation of what was really going on like any sane person would conclude from watching any visual Sci-Fi like Star Trek and StarGate, and were blunt about it like Mass Effect .
Sidenote: some time ago, I found a quote from one of the main staff members of the nBSG show saying that they also took such liberties to make battles nicer to watch. I think that's particularly true for the latest seasons, where they really got used to depict ships exchanging shots at very close range.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: LOL, that's a bit unfair. Non-Shadow beam weapons were still shown vaporizing large volumes of metal and the figures I remember easily gave the Young Species' ships firepower in the mid to high terawatt range.

With the recent variations of Star Wars, oppositions between both universe would actually prove entertaining, assuming appropriate scenarii.
Babylon 5's anti-fighter guns and Starfury are shown to easily chew through warship armor, and it can easily be rationalized as everyone using ablative armor given they count.
Yes, good against beams to some degree. But then we have the nukes fiasco against the Minbari. Thing is, Shadow weapons simply were overkill.

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Re: Haz the biggatons?

Post by Lucky » Thu Nov 20, 2014 9:40 am

Mr. Oragahn wrote: Certain absolutely ridiculous industrial feats in SC indeed imply that the Terrans could build a stupidly huge fleet or army, whatever.

That and the scaling problems plaguing this fiction, I really stay clear of all that nonsense.

The setting is just good enough on an overall scope, but for no reason I'd ever encourage anyone to delve into the depths of this nonsense.
I'm pretty sure there is a mission in the first game where you need to steal something like 10 to 20 ships, and this is considered a large number of ships.

Mr. Oragahn wrote: And the Reapers were finally being taken down by weapons which never had to be come close to leave multi-continent wide slits at the surface of planets.

The codices are good enough, make a decent universe with some strong points and many limitations. It didn't strike me as over the top.
I was under the impression that the Reapers were defeated by a Deus Ex Machina in that the Reapers were defeated by hacking them?

Mr. Oragahn wrote: This is why in the AOTC:ICS or the next one, Saxton had a line about how the warships could direct all their power plant's power right into the weapons.
And amusingly the same books show that the maximum output for those guns is governed by how large the capacitor bank is. I do love how tech books can be so self contradictory.

Mr. Oragahn wrote: Mind you, the Death Star was totally unique in that all diagrams in the EU pointed at a device which had its power core directly fed into the main weapon array. It essentially was an engine of destruction wherein the exhaust was tightly focused. So it was rather dishonest to pick that rather exceptional design and derivate wild assumptions about the firepower of conventional warships.
The Death Stars are more akin to the A-10 Thunderbolt II then anything else. They are both big guns that a vehicle was built around.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: One thing I liked in the EU of very late, in the latest iteration of the CCG, was an unique model of star destroyer built with a superlaser array in its center, the entire forward wedge section split into two mandibles, not unlike that of the Millennium Falcon, with the superlaser sitting deep down within the recesses. The dish was located right in front of the SD's dome, that is, the power plant.
Sort of the same with Palpatine's Eclipse. The superlaser didn't have a dish, but the entire beam was focused throught the length of the ship I suppose, and most likely was like an open shaft straight from the ship's power core.
Do you mean the Conqueror? That does make a lot more sense then a Death Star to me



I'd much rather have theion cannon the Rebels had at Hoth mounted in a Stardestroyer.

Mr. Oragahn wrote: That's what you'd think, it seems most basic sense, but it literally crashes against zealous fanboyism. No sound argument could be accepted. It's like if you attacked them directly instead of their "beloved" fictional universe, which they actually had a poisonous relation with.
It isn't unusual to get emotionally invested in your own work, but there is a problem if it is someone else's work, or you take constructive criticism of your work as personal attacks.

It isn't unique to Warhammer 40,000 though I'd be wary of calling what would usually be called an inflationist a fan of a setting. Strangely if you even try to broach the idea that Star Trek uses anything larger the double digit megatons you tend to get accused of wankery, and using outliers no matter how many examples you bring forth.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Me neither. I point acknowledge legit feats of demonstrative high firepower. Admitedly, this hasn't been verified much in the nuTrek movies; aside from plot nonsense and really overthe top super special devices, I don't think we have that much evidence of great firepower (although the skirmish on Qronos shows Klingon blasters leaving rather big holes in the walls, sometimes). The only thing going for these movies is that they're a follow up on the ENT show, for which there were very clear figures, and the event related to the Narada completely altered the UFP's vision of ship design forever.
I'm not aware of much of quantifiable things in the new Star Trek time line? You have a cold fusion bomb stopping a volcanic eruption, and then you have the end of Into Darkness where heavily damaged ships survive more or less uncontrolled reentry and high g stops.


Mr. Oragahn wrote: Having a stash of super weapons used for very exceptional measures is not surprising, nor absurd, as long as it makes sense with the rest.
But it's annoy when this sort of thing is ignored because they aren't used willy nilly.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Halo was so new that TFOR didn't seem to conflict much, although the gigaton/teraton figures for the railguns really did clash and look totally ridiculous in light of the tech the humans had.

But it was official material so you literally had to suck it up. Fortunately that nonsense is over and the super duper stuff has been moved to the upper tier, with Precursors and friends.
The UNSC in Halo has some rather scizo tech just taking the first game into account.

They have a caseless submachine gun, but every other small arm and side arm is using cased ammunition.

They have a man portable "LASER", and yet never seem to mount something similar on their vehicles. They use EM slug throwers everywhere, but no LASER for no reason.

^_^ This is a silly reason why game mechanics are considered non-canon, or Halo is really inconsistent. ^_^
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Aside from violent impacts and the fact that it was a ship so was expected to withstand certain movements and accelerations, I don't think we've seen anything very special about the hull.

The somehow bothersome but rather real fact is that Stargate does actually provide enough pieces of evidence which once collected, show that it's a universe within which shields can do very well against more or less normal, high levels space hazards and other phenomena, but suffer some terrible weaknesses against certain weapons which clearly rely on a significant amount of magitech to drain shields faster than through sheer raw energy. When you have a ton of evidence that relatively new manmade and extremely portable naqahdah generators can produce gigawatts with no noticeable heat loss (!!), you can only muse at what happens at the scale of advanced power cores of gigantic proportions mounted of large starships.

So perhaps the drone machines harassing Destiny are another case of some advanced weapon capable of draining ancient shields admirably fast with little effort. Mind you, we know absolutely nothing about the origin of those automatized ships. But you know, in the show at some point the crew uses Destiny's main weapon at something like 60% and they're worried they'd be killing the rest of the crew on the ground. They do that to... blast open the reinforced entrance door of some subterranean library/base.

With that kind of firepower, you'd have expected the entire city and its suburbs wiped out in no time flat. Trying to rationalize this 60% thing is a waste of time imho.
I've seen most of Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis, and the major weakness of the setting is the small size of the space fleets.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Well, they can like any other human can kill a human if they insist on using their strength at their fullest.
No, that is understating the threat the common Pok E Mon poses to a real world human.
http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pidgey_(Pokémon)
http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/ ... _(Pokémon)
http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Vulpix_(Pokémon)
http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/ ... _(Pokémon)
http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/ ... _(Pokémon)
The common pigeon can literally blow you away, the common dog and fox breath deadly fire, the common guinea pig/hedgehog shoots armor piercing poison spines, and these are the weak ones. We are talking about a world that might not notice a Tyranid invasion.

Humans in Pok E Mon are superhuman by real world standards do to coevolution with the other Pok E Mon, and are arguably descendants of Mew.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Yes, good against beams to some degree. But then we have the nukes fiasco against the Minbari. Thing is, Shadow weapons simply were overkill.
From an in-universe perspective "In The Beginning" never happened. It is a peace of in-universe realistic fiction told to some children to give them hope.

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