"Star Wars: Death Star" and the destruction of Ald

[Mike DiCenso]

Roondar wrote:

b) Turbolasers, being downscaled Superlasers, are in fact a CR weapon.

Note that these are merely their own arguments used against them (I happen to not agree - the DS is scarily powerful and TL's are in no way, shape or fashion simply downscaled DS Superlasers. But hey, the Star Wars VS Debaters disagree with me on that one. They're the ones saying TL's and DS Superlasers are pretty much the same thing but different sizes).

You know, I half-jokingly once noted that TL could be a phaser or disruptor-like weapon. It certainly would go a long way towards explaining the slightly odd "vaporization" behavior of the asteroids in TESB, if the TL were some sort of CR-based weapon. So even if the TLs and SLs are not exactly the same weapon, they may both work on a CR principle.
-Mike

[Jedi Master Spock]

In other words, I was right on the money earlier. The "main-sequence stars" quote is not regarding the nominal output of the reactor, but only in reference to catastrophic superlaser self-destruction.

For my next trick, I shall now predict that the opposition will utterly fail to recognize this, and will continue claiming that this novel refers to the normal power output of the Death Star reactor as being equivalent to weeks of stellar activity in hours.

I see a small problem with that.

An uncontrolled reactor explosion is precisely what destroyed the Death Star; I've computed that, based on the effects described in the novelization, as~e28-29 J at the most generous, not ~e32-e33 joules as the "main sequence stars" quote suggests. Most of this reactor energy needs to end up imploding back into hyperspace.

Quick flux calculation: e32-33 J at a range of 200,000 km (assuming Yavin to be Jovian) is tens to hundreds of kilotons per square meter. There's no indication of a planetary shield around Yavin or any substantial damage to the planet - indicating, as I pointed out earlier, something ~4 orders of magnitude lower in total energy, even accounting for the fact that not all the energy left the Death Star at once.

The superlaser was mostly charged, too, if we're to trust the time indicators; the Death Star was only minutes away from firing on Yavin, not the ~4 hours the Death Star novel suggests it would take to charge up.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Heh, that is exactly what I was begining to think, too, Roondar. Effectively the Superlaser is closer in idea to what JMS had proposed in a thread here several months ago; that phasers and the DS superlasers make matter disappear. Of course, as you and Oragahn point out, the difference is that the SL pushes things into hyperspace instead of subspace (One could possibly make a case that hyperspace and subspace are closely related, as well).

In fact, thinking on it, the secondary effects described in the book where several main sequence stars' worth of energy can be generated in an uncontrolled manner when things go terribly wrong is also suprisingly similar to another phaser example of things going wrong in TNG's "A Matter of Time" where we learn that the main ventral phaser array of the E-D had to be kept in check to a small fraction of a varience in the total power output or it would start a chain-reaction that would burn off the entire atmosphere of the Earth-like planet Penthara IV.

In other words; things go bad with DS SL, and you get a really big out of control energy burst of several main-sequence stars. Things go out of bounds with a large starship's phaser array, and you wind up with a planet's atmosphere burned off.
-Mike

Isn't this one of those cases where we got a energy estimation that is leaps and bounds above regular Trek estimations, or what?
If it's a normal thing to happen, it would show that it requires little to burn the surface of a world. I mean, you have a good WMD here. Is there a reason why such a predictable, and thus easy to produce system, would not be seen more often, if not at all?

In fact, could we adress this in another thread?

[Mr. Oragahn]

Well, the superlaser is definitely capable of some hefty amount of DET, still.
It still pretty much almost completely put a whole planet on fire within a second, and blasted matter out into space.

But the vast bulk of matter remained there. In fact, it collapsed and felt into hyperspace via some funky reaction that obviously builds up.

That's why peopel call that a chain reaction. A CR that leads to a bigger bang for the bucks, but something pretty much exceptional.

I suppose that once they'll realize that they can't strawman a whole book, they'll engage into ad hominem campaigns and focus their efforts on anti-Reaves and anti-Perry videos.

Of course it is. But when the 'Star Trek side' shows Phasers have DET components they get -more or less- laughed out of the forum. Which is why I put it in those terms. Kind of a 'you reap what you sow' thing.

Personally I never understood the problem - CR type weapons are a much more advanced concept than just throwing more energy at a problem (in my opinion naturally). It's not like the DS becomes a pushover this way or less scary in any way.

I just thought of something funny though... In effect the DS is doing almost exactly* what Phasers are supposedly doing if you believe the tech manuals (which is a separate issue): it's weapon pushes things out of the space-time continuum ;)

*) of course, the DS pushes things into hyperspace whereas Phasers allegedly push things into subspace.

Simpler mechanisms, less exotic, are more polyvalent and as a general rule, work against most things.

Technobabble weapons are complex, not easy to understand, a sort of travesty of science and sometimes very dependant on the nature of the target.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Nowhere does it say that reactor will release this energy ONLY if something goes wrong. In fact it is clear that the part about the output is a digression to inform about the reactors output so that conclusions can be readily drawn about what would happen IF that kind of energy output was released uncontrollably.
Jesus they can't even get the semantic whoring right.

Let's get through it step by step.

"... the hypermatter reactor was capable of generating an energy burst equivalent to the total weekly output of several main-sequencee stars."

I understand that sentence as the generator has a power equivalent to the total weekly output of several main-sequencee stars.
It's what I get because there's a combination of two elements.
A quantified energy (several stars weekly output), associated to "burst".
A burst is something pretty much sudden. It's fast. That's why all that energy turns out be produced as a burst, ergo in such a tight timeframe that we can speak of joules per one second, which turns out to be a figure of power.

Do you agree with this interpretation or not?

Btw, I'll check a thing or two about the description of the explosion of the Death Stars in the novelizations.

[Jedi Master Spock]

I checked the Wookieepedia article and it cites the Death Star novel as saying that 4% power to the superlaser would be sufficient to blow up a Lucrehulk battleship (i.e., TF battleship.) Can this line be confirmed?

Just batting a few figures around, leaving aside the complication of the Death Stars' deaths:

I don't agree with the idea that the reactor can unleash that energy in a burst in a controlled usable fashion, although the limiting factor may be the power conduits rather than the reactor itself. Several main sequence stars for a week (if we take that to be 1-4 Sols) is generally in the 2.5-10e32 watt range.

Accordingly, then, charging for an hour and thirteen minutes would be 1-4e36 joules, and therefore blow up Despayre quite capably.

However, a one third power shot failing to blow up Despayre - the whole sequence taking three shots - suggests strongly that each individual shot had no more than 1e32 J in and of itself, which caps controlled power at that point in the Death Star's construction to no more than ~2e28 W. I'm not particularly fond of evaluating bounds rather than providing simple estimates, but that will do for a ballpark.

Interestingly, the descriptions so far seem to suggest the energy from a hypermatter reactor comes from hyperspace, and nowhere in the quotes listed so far do we see any discussion of fuel. Is there anything from this novel talking about that? I'm curious to see how coherent of an explanation it provides.

[Roondar]

Well, the superlaser is definitely capable of some hefty amount of DET, still.
It still pretty much almost completely put a whole planet on fire within a second, and blasted matter out into space.

But the vast bulk of matter remained there. In fact, it collapsed and felt into hyperspace via some funky reaction that obviously builds up.

That's why peopel call that a chain reaction. A CR that leads to a bigger bang for the bucks, but something pretty much exceptional.

I suppose that once they'll realize that they can't strawman a whole book, they'll engage into ad hominem campaigns and focus their efforts on anti-Reaves and anti-Perry videos.

Of course it is. But when the 'Star Trek side' shows Phasers have DET components they get -more or less- laughed out of the forum. Which is why I put it in those terms. Kind of a 'you reap what you sow' thing.

Personally I never understood the problem - CR type weapons are a much more advanced concept than just throwing more energy at a problem (in my opinion naturally). It's not like the DS becomes a pushover this way or less scary in any way.

I just thought of something funny though... In effect the DS is doing almost exactly* what Phasers are supposedly doing if you believe the tech manuals (which is a separate issue): it's weapon pushes things out of the space-time continuum ;)

*) of course, the DS pushes things into hyperspace whereas Phasers allegedly push things into subspace.

Simpler mechanisms, less exotic, are more polyvalent and as a general rule, work against most things.

Technobabble weapons are complex, not easy to understand, a sort of travesty of science and sometimes very dependant on the nature of the target.

The downside of those 'simpler mechanisms' is, however, that the requirements for the rest of the system become vastly more complex, not easy to understand and a definite travesty of science.

Case in point: weapons which yields as high as some people on both sides of this debate suggest would require quite impossibly high amounts of matter/anti matter to achieve. And that is not counting the difficulty in getting the power converted from a gamma ray burst to something more useful like a plasma-based energy weapon.

Another hitch is that it might not even be physically possible to achieve particles with the energy levels that DET weapons of such yields would require. It is not as if anyone has ever tried that now is it. And blindly assuming it'll just work is, if our recent advances in science have taught me anything, insane.

In reality the only thing these 'simpler mechanisms' have in their favor is that they tend to produce more easilly estimated results. Any suggestion they are 'better science' is nonsense. Starwars Hypermatter? Get real. Thats no more valid than handwavium in 'real science'. Startrek Antimatter explosions with yields thousands of times higher than they should be? Get real, that is equally handwavium.

Both sides have wonky bits in their approaches.

As to CR, yes it is wonky and filled with handwavium. Yes it is not scientific. But at least it doesn't really pretend to be either, which cannot be said for the oh-so-realistic DET firepower suggestions of either side (Startrek TOS antimatter was always a hoot, as are suggestions of teraton TL's no more than say a meter or two-three wide and 200 meters long or so) or the oh-so-realistic shield/armour capabilities claimed by either side. Neutronium pellets/Graviton based space distortions indeed.

I guess I'm saying that science can only get you so far in these debates. If we'd be really strict about it, 90% of the capabilities of either side would be labeled as 'pseudoscience' at the very best and 'pure fantasy' if we'd be honest about it.

[Mr. Oragahn]

They are pseudo science, but one would favour the weapon that involves the less exotic effects in its result.

A turbolaser is a mysterious weapon. Saxton's description is not making anything clearer at all, and makes no sense (reducing speed to gain range - never proved in films).

But the results, when they hit a target, are rather basic. They're akin to bombs, really. But high technobabble bombs.

That's different from a shit load of weapons in SF that spin worlds, run along the curvature of a planet in a disk like pattern, create something in the middle and make the planet go boom, creates rifts, dimensional windows, NDF, etc.

But as shown, it is clear that the superlaser is not a mere turbolaser, and that, they don't like.

It's also clear, from the quotes we got, and as outlined by JMS, that hypermatter is never said to be stored in any way, unless I missed a bit.
It seems to be a case where from the moment you get your hypermatter, you use it right now, and deal with the energy, or you're fubar.

[Roondar]

They are pseudo science, but one would favour the weapon that involves the less exotic effects in its result.

A turbolaser is a mysterious weapon. Saxton's description is not making anything clearer at all, and makes no sense (reducing speed to gain range - never proved in films).

But the results, when they hit a target, are rather basic. They're akin to bombs, really. But high technobabble bombs.

That's different from a shit load of weapons in SF that spin worlds, run along the curvature of a planet in a disk like pattern, create something in the middle and make the planet go boom, creates rifts, dimensional windows, NDF, etc.

But as shown, it is clear that the superlaser is not a mere turbolaser, and that, they don't like.

It's also clear, from the quotes we got, and as outlined by JMS, that hypermatter is never said to be stored in any way, unless I missed a bit.
It seems to be a case where from the moment you get your hypermatter, you use it right now, and deal with the energy, or you're fubar.

Quite true, the effects of say, a Photon Torpedo are far easier to explain than the effects of a Phaser blast.

But on the other hand, a non-DET weapon can do one thing that a DET weapon cannot, which is why they are so popular in SF: get effective yields far greater than the energy put in suggests are possible.

[Mr. Oragahn]

I checked the Wookieepedia article and it cites the Death Star novel as saying that 4% power to the superlaser would be sufficient to blow up a Lucrehulk battleship (i.e., TF battleship.) Can this line be confirmed?

Huh, that would be a whole can of worms.
A guy at SDN said the DS1 was used to fire a low powered shot at a lucrehulk captured by the rebels.

Apparently, that's some heavy retcon, because the DS1 was never able to shoot down such small targets. There may even be a note in the ANH novelization to that effect.

Just batting a few figures around, leaving aside the complication of the Death Stars' deaths:

I don't agree with the idea that the reactor can unleash that energy in a burst in a controlled usable fashion, although the limiting factor may be the power conduits rather than the reactor itself.

In other words, harnessing such power under a controlled reaction.
But it's also an open door for no limits fallacies.

One could easily say that to blow up planets, they just need to build a HM reactor and overload it. Guess what? They have not done anything like that in the decades after the battle of Yavin IV. Maybe not even in a century, while it's the most obvious idea one could think of.

It's clear that there's another limiting factor. We may consider that it's related to the reactor volume, but the DS2's one is 500-600 m wide, top.

Maybe the DS2 used a network of cores, but then we'd be venturing into the land of unsupported claims.

Several main sequence stars for a week (if we take that to be 1-4 Sols) is generally in the 2.5-10e32 watt range.

As I have looked earlier on, main sequence is a huge band, and it can be million times more powerful than Sol, or 1000 times less powerful.

Accordingly, then, charging for an hour and thirteen minutes would be 1-4e36 joules, and therefore blow up Despayre quite capably.

Yes, that's what I said. I'm not sure if you disagree or not, but from the simple moment one says that the beam is at 1/3 of what it the weapon will be in the end, and only scorches continents and cracks volcanoes, you know that multiplying this by three doesn't add up.

There's no where near e32 joules there. That's why I assumed that the hyperspace rift was due to a cumulative effect, which would increase as long as you'd fire the superlaser into the same target, within a respectable timeframe, up to the point where you'd reach a threshold and then trigger the hyperspace window.

Notice how the third beam fired at Despayre is many many orders of magnitude superior to the first two ones, and yet it still was fired at 1/3 of the Death Star's superlaser capacity.

However, a one third power shot failing to blow up Despayre - the whole sequence taking three shots - suggests strongly that each individual shot had no more than 1e32 J in and of itself, which caps controlled power at that point in the Death Star's construction to no more than ~2e28 W. I'm not particularly fond of evaluating bounds rather than providing simple estimates, but that will do for a ballpark.

But again, going by the description of Despayre's destruction, a third of the total hardly nears e32 joules.

And compare this with the destruction of the Death Star, as described in ANH's novelization:

"Space filled temporarily with trillions of microscopic metal fragments, propelled past the retreating ships by the liberated energy of a small artificial sun."

Considering that the suns are not different than ours, even if were absurdly generous, that small star would just as strong as Sol, at best.
And that's no where near what you'd expect if the Death Star had been gathering weeks of stellar energy outputs inside its reactor before exploding.

As a matter of fact, it does not fit with the novelization, no matter how you spin it, unless you start to pretend that the ANH extract meant when a small star explodes... and then it shoots back the other way, because we'd be looking at the power of a nova.

Which is, tadada... e38 joules. :) (Although with an artificial small sun, it could, say would, be considerably less.)

And yet...



That's no where 1/3 of that energy. Not even 5 orders of magnitude below that level of energy.

Finally, as I was getting at with Kane, but apparently he either ignores my question or hasn't read it yet, here's the part about the burst:

Some burst definition.

All point to the fact that it's all about a sudden act, or event. I'm going to repeat a bit of what I said earlier on:

That is a weapon that requires at the very least 1 hour 13 minutes to recharge the weapon, for 1/3 of the final power when the battle station will be fully operational.

The total power would be 3 hours and 39 minutes for a fully powered shot.

13,140 seconds to gather enough energy for a full fat shot. That's a power e5 times lower than the magnitude of the energy itself.

Considering that the words expressely say "generating an energy burst".

Ergo, this only happens under uncontrolled conditions.

[Mr. Oragahn]

They are pseudo science, but one would favour the weapon that involves the less exotic effects in its result.

A turbolaser is a mysterious weapon. Saxton's description is not making anything clearer at all, and makes no sense (reducing speed to gain range - never proved in films).

But the results, when they hit a target, are rather basic. They're akin to bombs, really. But high technobabble bombs.

That's different from a shit load of weapons in SF that spin worlds, run along the curvature of a planet in a disk like pattern, create something in the middle and make the planet go boom, creates rifts, dimensional windows, NDF, etc.

But as shown, it is clear that the superlaser is not a mere turbolaser, and that, they don't like.

It's also clear, from the quotes we got, and as outlined by JMS, that hypermatter is never said to be stored in any way, unless I missed a bit.
It seems to be a case where from the moment you get your hypermatter, you use it right now, and deal with the energy, or you're fubar.

Quite true, the effects of say, a Photon Torpedo are far easier to explain than the effects of a Phaser blast.

But on the other hand, a non-DET weapon can do one thing that a DET weapon cannot, which is why they are so popular in SF: get effective yields far greater than the energy put in suggests are possible.

Yes, in general, we see that what you gain in energy requirements (lower ones), you loose in versatility, since many planetkillers or planetbusters would fail against targets protected with, huh, equally pseudo science defenses, notably shields of various nature.

That's why it's interesting, because in the EU, there was a source that said something along the line that a full shot, or a third of the superlaser, if it a world protected by a planetary shield, would only burn continents.
Well, the sheer power of the weapon is still impressive, and you still destroy a planet, but we can see that apparently, it would loose the overkill effect.

But take that with a weapon that needs to work from matter and convert, or at least do something with it. Put a particleless shield, and your weapon is nearly pointless, safe if it can deal some hefty DET.

[Mike DiCenso]

Heh, that is exactly what I was begining to think, too, Roondar. Effectively the Superlaser is closer in idea to what JMS had proposed in a thread here several months ago; that phasers and the DS superlasers make matter disappear. Of course, as you and Oragahn point out, the difference is that the SL pushes things into hyperspace instead of subspace (One could possibly make a case that hyperspace and subspace are closely related, as well).

In fact, thinking on it, the secondary effects described in the book where several main sequence stars' worth of energy can be generated in an uncontrolled manner when things go terribly wrong is also suprisingly similar to another phaser example of things going wrong in TNG's "A Matter of Time" where we learn that the main ventral phaser array of the E-D had to be kept in check to a small fraction of a varience in the total power output or it would start a chain-reaction that would burn off the entire atmosphere of the Earth-like planet Penthara IV.

In other words; things go bad with DS SL, and you get a really big out of control energy burst of several main-sequence stars. Things go out of bounds with a large starship's phaser array, and you wind up with a planet's atmosphere burned off.
-Mike

Mr. Oragahn wrote:

Isn't this one of those cases where we got a energy estimation that is leaps and bounds above regular Trek estimations, or what?
If it's a normal thing to happen, it would show that it requires little to burn the surface of a world. I mean, you have a good WMD here. Is there a reason why such a predictable, and thus easy to produce system, would not be seen more often, if not at all?

It could be, if you used it in that manner. However, the episode produces a power variance quote that is nearly 60 times greater than the TNG Technical Manual's 1.02 gigawatt number, and thus it gives phaser power for the second largest of the E-D's arrays that is far above what that non-canon source that Warsies love to trot out over and over again.

As for using it as a weapon; such a thing would have to be used under circumstances where the planet is largely undefended.

In fact, could we adress this in another thread?

If you like. :-)
-Mike

[2046]

In other words, I was right on the money earlier. The "main-sequence stars" quote is not regarding the nominal output of the reactor, but only in reference to catastrophic superlaser self-destruction.

For my next trick, I shall now predict that the opposition will utterly fail to recognize this, and will continue claiming that this novel refers to the normal power output of the Death Star reactor as being equivalent to weeks of stellar activity in hours.

I see a small problem with that.

An uncontrolled reactor explosion is precisely what destroyed the Death Star; I've computed that, based on the effects described in the novelization, as~e28-29 J at the most generous, not ~e32-e33 joules as the "main sequence stars" quote suggests.

See the reply in the computation thread.

Also, the fact from the novel that it would be "capable of" such output in a catastrophic failure scenario does not necessarily require that such must be the value in the event of the failure modes we've witnessed.

Quick flux calculation: e32-33 J at a range of 200,000 km (assuming Yavin to be Jovian) is tens to hundreds of kilotons per square meter.

This would seem to support the notion that the DS1 destruction was less energetic than 1E32, then.

The superlaser was mostly charged, too, if we're to trust the time indicators; the Death Star was only minutes away from firing on Yavin, not the ~4 hours the Death Star novel suggests it would take to charge up.

I didn't know we knew when the charging process began, but in any event a mostly-charged superlaser . . . per the films, novelizations, and the particular EU novel under discussion . . . is irrelevant by itself. The chain reaction must be deployed on the station itself to achieve the big kaboom.

Interestingly, though, this approach could allow for an interesting upper-limit calculation on the mass of the Death Star, provided we assumed that the chain reaction scaled perfectly. After all, if we have an upper limit on the energy striking Yavin (i.e. less than 1E32), and if we made an educated guess at the energy of the Alderaan blast (i.e. 1E30-something), we could compare the energies and thus the requisite masses. We'd at least be in the ballpark, albeit an extremely vague one.

[Mr. Oragahn]

In other words, I was right on the money earlier. The "main-sequence stars" quote is not regarding the nominal output of the reactor, but only in reference to catastrophic superlaser self-destruction.

For my next trick, I shall now predict that the opposition will utterly fail to recognize this, and will continue claiming that this novel refers to the normal power output of the Death Star reactor as being equivalent to weeks of stellar activity in hours.

I see a small problem with that.

An uncontrolled reactor explosion is precisely what destroyed the Death Star; I've computed that, based on the effects described in the novelization, as~e28-29 J at the most generous, not ~e32-e33 joules as the "main sequence stars" quote suggests. Most of this reactor energy needs to end up imploding back into hyperspace.

Quick flux calculation: e32-33 J at a range of 200,000 km (assuming Yavin to be Jovian) is tens to hundreds of kilotons per square meter. There's no indication of a planetary shield around Yavin or any substantial damage to the planet - indicating, as I pointed out earlier, something ~4 orders of magnitude lower in total energy, even accounting for the fact that not all the energy left the Death Star at once.

The superlaser was mostly charged, too, if we're to trust the time indicators; the Death Star was only minutes away from firing on Yavin, not the ~4 hours the Death Star novel suggests it would take to charge up.

There may not be a contradiction. They could have been charging up the beam all the way they were en route to Yavin, and were just a few minutes away from completing the precharge.
Or maybe it was just ready and they were simply going around the planet and voila.

It would work that way: the Death Star actually precharges the beam for quite some time, and the whole firing procedure takes only a few minutes.
It would fit with the references about how long it took the super weapon to recharge after firing.

Besides, the new well documented exotic reaction with matter that occurs explains why they couldn't fire through even the upper levels of the gas giant. It could have very well depleted the beam to a significant extent and damaged Yavin instead, possibly even endangering the Death Star considering its proximity to the gas giant, and the planet's likely mass.






A few more words to Kane now.

As usual, you leave aside the points you don't seem confident enough to defend. It's a pity, because they all turn out to be concessions in return.
You're welcome to adress the issue of the opposite surface of Alderaan that only gets remotely damaged anytime you feel warm inside.

Now, before adressing your other griefs, let me quote a previous post of mine;

Let's get through it step by step.

"... the hypermatter reactor was capable of generating an energy burst equivalent to the total weekly output of several main-sequencee stars."

I understand that sentence as the generator has a power equivalent to the total weekly output of several main-sequencee stars.
It's what I get because there's a combination of two elements.
A quantified energy (several stars weekly output), associated to "burst".
A burst is something pretty much sudden. It's fast. That's why all that energy turns out be produced as a burst, ergo in such a tight timeframe that we can speak of joules per one second, which turns out to be a figure of power.

Do you agree with this interpretation or not?

Are you kidding me?
Are you fucking kidding me?!?!?

No, KS, I'm not kidding you.
I'm simply tried to obtain a semblance of reasoned debate with you.

Even though the quote says energy he will interpret it as power because burst is "pretty much sudden...it's fast". So he goes on to pretend that sudden means one second so it's actually watts so it's actually power.

Even if it's more than one second, your energy generated in a burst fashion can't be an event that last one hour.
By the sheer value and meaning of the definition of the word burst, this simply describes an event that happens fast.

A three hours precharge is nowhere fast.

Yes, you seem to interpret the quote differently than how it should be read. It says "generate", not "release".

Stacking joules and joules over several hours, for one final shot... that's releasing the energy in a burst.
Generating that same amount of energy in a burst... that's a matter of power, the generation of energy during an extremely tight timeframe.

You have complained a lot. Waved a lot. Been quite vocal and gloated much, but you have not provided your own detailed understanding of that very sentence.

Now, I know how one could interpret the sentence the way you do, but I want to see you precisely write it down, in a formulatic and detailed fashion, to dismiss any ambiguity.

Just what kind of a fucking idiot do you need to be to think that if energy is released very fast you can just substitute it with power? Doesn't he realize that energy is energy no matter how fast it is exchanged?

Strawman. I assumed that if burst represented a timeframe of one second, it could very well be substituted with a power figure.

If it takes two seconds, the energy figure will be divided by two, and refered to in watts. If it takes half a second, the energy figure will be multiplied by two, and refered in watts.

I don't see what's hard to understand here.

Does he even realize that his interpretation doesn't make any sense since it would then equate power to energy?
Simply amazing: it's all there black on white and says energy but the fanatic just chooses to interpret it as power.

[Kenny Banya]This is gold Jerry, GOLD![/Kenny Banya]

It makes sense to consider that the energy figure can be considered a power figure if that energy is released extremely fast.
Again, I refer to the meaning of burst.

If you think that an event described as happening as a burst, would actually last one to three hours, there's a problem with you, not me.

Unless you have an interpretation of that sentence, but you prefer to parade like a twit instead of actually being constructive and provide this very interpretation of yours, in a detailed way.

All point to the fact that it's all about a sudden act, or event. I'm going to repeat a bit of what I said earlier on:

That is a weapon that requires at the very least 1 hour 13 minutes to recharge the weapon, for 1/3 of the final power when the battle station will be fully operational.

The total power would be 3 hours and 39 minutes for a fully powered shot.

13,140 seconds to gather enough energy for a full fat shot. That's a power e5 times lower than the magnitude of the energy itself.

Considering that the words expressely say "generating an energy burst".

Ergo, this only happens under uncontrolled conditions.

Can you believe this idiot? After pretending that energy burst is actually power output he can now go on to claim that since the reactor needs an hour to recharge for less than planet destroying shot then that means that the "total weekly output of several main sequence stars" only applies to "uncontrolled conditions".

Disagreement aside, it's pure logic.

If the noticeable energy delivered by a beam, which has been charged for at least more than one hour, if not much more, hardly matches the weekly output of several main sequence stars, then the figure provided there can only refer to another context.
A context which is largely hinted at, considering the reference to events going awry and out of control.

]If the Death STar's hypermatter reactor could only produce the stated level of power when it was unstable or "uncontrolled" conditions, then it wouldn't be a capability.

Because you say so?
You think it would be the first time, in SF, where a character refers to a given power core, that would generate an explosion of magnitude x, if it was to explode/overload/get ruined/etc.?

All of these cases are precisely descriptions of capabilities, but under specific conditions which have nothing to do with controlled conditions.

It wouldn't be without a precedent that a character in SF would say that an overloading reactor could generate an explosion of a given yield.

Since when do we rate power outputs in terms of "uncontrolled reactions" anyhow?

When the context is about an uncontrolled reaction.

In any case, the whole context indicates that the bit about malfunctioning applied to the firing process as a whole, not just the reactor independent of the rest (the power output is relevant to indicate just how much energy is involved, a nd how quickly someone would be decimated if something went wrong.) - they specifcally mention the superlaser backfiring, in fact. (I'll try to post quotes later.)

Which means nothing else but that the superlaser backfiring would precisely create the hyperspace rift inside the battle station.

He's either never read the book or he's decided to be dishonest about Despayre too. They were testing the weapon on Despayre to see how powerful it would be - there were still uncertanties about how powerful it might be or how effective it could be. The first shot took no power, and was 1/3 the power. It was basically a planet "sterilizing" level event (atmosphere probably around 5000 degrees, implied.. that would take alot of energy. to accomplish, since that would also be an indirect effect..) Planet, however, was still intact.

Or maybe you didn't bother reading what I said, before making accusations and building your neat bag of strawmen?
You can try to prove that I denied this. Go on. Or maybe you can shut up and actually talk about what you know, not what you don't.

The second shot, an hour and fiteen minutes later, cracked apart the crust and basically reduced the entire planet to a molten state, given what was described. This takes more energy than above, but the planet is still, basically intact.

No, it does not take more energy than before. The beam was still 1/3 of total power, and the entire planet was clearly not reduced to molten state.
Lava covered the surface, but the surface was largely solid enough to crack, for mountains to collapse or rise, and for many volcanos to erupt and be created. You don't get that when the very crust is melted. Above all, the cloud layer still remained there, blocking the view. Not much atmosphere blown into space.

An hour and nineteen minutes later, they fire the third and final time.. and the planet blows apart as its mass is finally scattered. Its also scattered so quickly that debris impacts on the Death STar's shield very shortly after firing. And this is all at 1/3 power. Also no funky hyperspace stuff.

Still 1/3, same recharge time than for the first two shots. Care to explain how for beams which are all equal, the last one is many many magnitudes higher than the first two?

I offered a solution (cumulative hyperspace related effect). Provide one.

Taking the three different results (ones increasing in firepower, up to mass scattering.)

First two shots are of a roughly very similar magnitude.

... with similar timeframes, as well as all the "need to test" stuff

There is zero "need to test" stuff. The only reference I got for the word test is that Tenn wondered for a brief moment if they were testing his loyalty. Nothing else.

...its rather obvious that they were fine tuning the beam after each shot

There is zero evidence of that.

- they weren't sure how much power could be managed, so it would make sense they conservatively go with lower power shots before working up to something more powerful.

Indeed, they fired beams at 1/3 of the maximum power. That's for your dialed down yield. Thank you.







Basically, here are several key points we can make out of this new book:

• The book precisely says that all the energy of the beam is delivered when the first ring is generated. We know what level of DET that would correspond to. This is nowhere e32 joules.
• A vast part of the superlaser's most destructive ability is largely dependant of an exotic reaction with hyperspace, where a significant amount of Alderaan's mass is shifted (boosted in the book), likely to trigger the complex mass conversion reaction described in the ANH novelization. Meaning that former energy estimations based on full planetary mass scattering have to be dramatically reconsidered and lowered, because lots of the planet's mass doesn't enter the equation anymore.
• The superlaser is not a turbolaser. It may have similarities, but it has just as much similarities as it has differences. Therefore, you can't scale down the superlaser to guess the firepower of turbolasers mounted on capital ships.
• The superlaser is a cumulative effect weapon, which induces an exotic chain reaction over a certain threshold, which in turn provides most of the destruction seen in the film, due to a complex mechanism.
• The power source for the Death Star was stolen by 501st legion, and at their beginning, only a few Imperial Star Destroyers were granted hypermatter reactors. One of these experiments even resulted in a dramatic failure. Meaning that hypermatter reactors applied to capital ships was not that common, and certainly not such a well rounded technology.
  Ergo, the vast bulk of other imperial ships at that time did not have such reactors, and this also means that Venators and Acclamator did not have hypermatter reactors.
  It also means that the CIS had an advantage here, and despite the difference of power technologies, the Republic wasn't horribly lagging behind in the war.
• The Death Star's defenses, superlaser specifically non included, can repel an assault from any fleet of star destroyers or super star destroyers. Which, in light of this EU product, shows that the rather over generous interpretation of Dodonna's words held by some is wrong. Dodonna precisely refered to the battle station's defenses, which is only logical considering the lenght of the briefing and what would matter the most to the rebels.

Feel free to adress these conclusions.

[SailorSaturn13]

But take that with a weapon that needs to work from matter and convert, or at least do something with it. Put a particleless shield, and your weapon is nearly pointless, safe if it can deal some hefty DET.

This ignores the VERY REAL possibility that this exotic shot would pierce(i.e. fly into without interacting with) the shields, like the Thalaron Beam.