Concerning the superlaser effects, there clearly is enough material to warrant a theory about the weapon's beam reacting with its target's matter. Perhaps it could be weird antimatter of some kind, I don't know, but we couldn't limit ourselves to that.
RSA already explored this avenue on his neat Death Star/Superlaser page, and his expanding band has something very interesting, as it seems to be supported by "Death Star":
Death Star, Chapter 55 wrote:
The image of the planet Despayre seemed to shiver as a thin beam of emerald green-nearly the
same color as Ratua's eyes, she thought-from off the edge of the 'proj lanced into the center of
the single huge continent.
They both watched disbelievingly as an orange spot blossomed on the image of the planet. It
seemed no bigger than Memah's thumbnail at first, but it grew rapidly, spreading in an
expanding circle. The center of the orange turned black.
"Kark," Ratua said. He sounded stunned.
"What? What is it?"
"They-they're firing at the planet. With the superlaser."
The orange and black spread in irregular waves now, continuing outward from the center. The
blue of the ocean didn't even slow it down.
"The atmosphere's on fire," Ratua said. Calmly, as if he were discussing the weather. Going to
be a warm day today, temperature around five thousand degrees . . .
If the beam was either just a bunch of super charged particles, or a vast pile of antimatter, the reaction at the point of impact would be extremely violent, and the hottest point would ALWAYS remain where the beam hit.
However, the book describes an orange spot that blossoms and grows rapidly. That would easily be the hologram rendering the atmosphere lighting up, although I have hard times believing that the effect could spread on its own. If anything, you could expect the exposed side of the planet to get its atmosphere heated up by radiant energy from the point of impact, but this would be quite immediate. The only thing which could spread so slowly would be ejecta caught in the gravity well.
What is strange, however, is that the center of the orange large spot turned black. Usually fireballs don't tend to get hotter on the outside while their center cools down.
And it doesn't stop there, since after that the orange and black then spread in irregular waves, outward from the center. How odd.
Let's be clear. If for any reason, the black would correspond to the region in the ejecta + atmosphere on fire that cools down, there would be even less energy on the rim of this phenomenon, and it would certainly not have enough energy to spread any further.
What the hologram description tells us is a picture of a spot of orange that spreads outward from the point of impact, soon turning into a
RING of orange.
In other words, pretty much RSA's magic band's cousin, albeit of lesser magnitude I'd say.
So clearly it just can't be matter reacting at the point of impact like if you dumped a huge mass of antimatter. There's something even weirder going on. That said, it doesn't preclude the necessity of explaining the discrepancies between effects and the weapon's varying power levels.
I recently revived the very strong possibility,
here and
here, that the superlasers react with the target's mass.
It's quite necessary, in fact, since when you consider ALL of the EU's data about superlasers and how they react with planets and shields, it becomes clear that something doesn't add up between the effects against shields and effects against planets: shields which are briefly defeated by torpedo spheres - weapon platforms which would be reaching to be pegged at anything beyond teratons- still managed to
greatly diminish the effects of superlasers to the point that an unshielded planet will blow up Alderaan style, and a shielded planet will "only" gets its surface put on fire.
I provided firepower figures for Torpedo Spheres from Black Ice; see the two posts I linked to.
"We" already established that the increase of effects on targets is not linear despite and not proportional to the linear increase of power output of the weapon itself (various fraction of maximum firepower do
NOT produce effects that match the same fraction of e38 J).
So I considered that as the beam is both DET and technobabble (the DET part in the teraton/petaton range), a planetary shield stops the vast majority of the technobabble effect, but still is defeated by a beam with a width several kilometers wide that dumps raw energy on a given spot of a planetary shield.
An EU source says that neutrinos are involved in the process, and greatly suggests that both the superlaser beam contains the neutrinos, and that it helps defeating the shield.
Now, IF neutrinos make shield penetration easier, as it seems to be implied, then it's even more obvious that a superlaser would have less reasons not to be able to deliver energy to the planet.
So in return, it's even more necessary to explain why the simple fact of going through a planetary shield is so capable of nerfing a superlaser.
Considering that a shield has little mass at all, it's obvious that a mass-reactive weapon would be at pain to do anything worthwhile -and in this case would need to count on the DET part of the weapon to achieve anything.
