Thank you for the quotes.
Lots of interesting bits, EU wise.
Some would argue that this shows that hyperspace is nothing more than just realspace, but experienced when going above c. Starlight and nebulae are distorded.Darth Vader stood on the bridge of his warship, staring out through the forward viewport at the kaleidoscopic chaos of hyperspace. The effect, even moving at the relatively stately speed of a Star Destroyer, was akin to tumbling down an endless tunnel of amorphous, whirling patterns of light—starlight and nebulae smeared into impressionistic blotches by the ship's superluminal speed.
That said, hyperspace always had a connection with realspace. Notably when it comes to gravity.
You'll notice that the theory that "hyperspace = super c realpsace" fails to consider that if it was true, there would be no reason for spaceships to have to quit the gravity well of a world to go into hyperspace.
But the real knock comes there:
"Higher-dimensional universe."He knew that even experienced spacers and navy personnel often hesitated to look out at it. Standard operating procedure was to keep the thick slabs of transparisteel opaqued while traveling through the higher-dimensional universe.
Funny to see that all rebels and Solo didn't seem to bother with opaque transparisteel windows.There was something profoundly wrong about hyperspace, composed as it was of more than the three spatial and one temporal dimensions that most sentient species were used to. Looking too long into hyperspace promised madness, so the stories went. He had never heard of anyone actually succumbing to "hyper-rapture," as it was called. Nevertheless, the legends persisted.
Vader enjoyed staring into it.
We saw hyperspace both from inside and outside of their ships, and it wasn't different.
Maybe something do with class 3 hyperdrives only?
I'll let EU fans deal with that.
Damn. That's big.A flash of pale green glimmered briefly from the holo.
The room shook, vibrating enough to rattle the chairs. She felt her viscera become momentarily buoyant, and realized that the ship's gravity field had flickered.
"What is that?" Memah stood, fighting sudden, inexplicable panic. After all, what could possibly pose a danger to—
Ratua held up a hand to quiet her. Those green eyes watched the 'proj. "Wait a second," he said. "Something's wrong."
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 . . .
She felt a horrifying urge to laugh. It didn't seem real—it couldn't be real. Ratua must've tuned in to some future-fic holo by mistake. It wasn't a real planet she was watching burn. No. Things like that just didn't happen.
Memah stared at the image. She could not look away.
The description is simple: it describes a wall of fire that progressively grows in power, leaving the center blackened, or something considerably different, considered worth enough to be painted black on the screen, while the fire wall continues to move over the surface of the world in an expanding motion.
Think ID4's cityship beam boosted, or that anime... what was it again, I've seen on Youtube a few months ago, probably from a link posted here, and it culminated in an expanding donut of fire.
Maybe Crest of the Star. Episode 2, end. Mike Dicenso for the info. I think it's a presentation.
Compare this to End of Humanity. The woman, in this documentary, says, with an enjoyed voice, that... err.. korewa kagashimotu huge asteroid kuwaremate, itoi big shit shinjoto wema, sumete yuka kodasai your ass vaporized kawai!! ^-^
It shows that the hotness would remain at the point of impact, and not warrant any blackness.
Of course, that's an asteroid hit, with kinetics at that level, the effect would be just a bit different than with an energy beam, since that said beam would still craterize the surface and send matter up there anyway.
Anyway, in the end, the book's description has far more to do with an expanding wall of fire.
Effects relative to many teratons of energy. Maybe a few petatons, but that's stretching it.SUPERLASER FIRE CONTROL, THETA SECTOR, DEATH STAR
Tenn looked at the images from the targeting cam. He still had his hand on the firing lever. He released it and stared, watching as the very air on the prison world caught fire in a runaway planetary holocaust. Seismographic sensors showed that massive groundquakes had begun, rumbling down into the bowels of the planet. Giant waves in the ocean, generated by the shifting of tectonic plates, rushed for the shores of the big continent. Volcanoes spewed lava. Clouds of steam and volcanic ash began to rapidly obscure the surface from view—but not fast enough.
He had just killed everything on the planet Despayre. If all life wasn't dead already, it would be soon.
The CO moved to look over his shoulder. He didn't congratulate Tenn on the shot; he just stood there.
"Stang," Tenn said.
The CO nodded. "Yeah."
1 hour 13 minutes to recharge the weapon, for 1/3 of the final power when the battle station will be fully operational.COMMAND CENTER, OVERBRIDGE, DEATH STAR
Motti said, "Engineering says the capacitors will be recharged in an hour and thirteen minutes."
Tarkin watched the projection as the effects of the beam manifested on the planet. By the time the second pulse was ready for discharge, there wouldn't be anything alive on the world below them to care. The chain reaction was massive. And at only one-third of the power that would be available when it was fully operational.
Amazing.
That 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.
This also fits with the description of what the superlaser mounted on the Eclipse would do, or so. Although, again, I repeat that we need to find the exact quotes about this, because it seems that there's even one that talks about 1/7 of a Death Star superlaser power.
I like the last sentence.SUPERLASER FIRE CONTROL, THETA SECTOR, DEATH STAR
An hour and fifteen minutes after the first beam, Tenn fired the second one.
The planet Despayre, already scorched lifeless and beset with cataclysmic groundquakes and volcanism, began to shake like some tormented creature in its death throes. Massive cracks, thousands of kilometers long and tens of klicks wide, striated the world. Mountains collapsed in one hemisphere as they jutted up and rose in another. It was impossible to see all this directly, of course, because of the cloud cover that had blanketed the surface, but the IR and VSI scopes showed everything all too clearly. The molten core of the globe, already venting through innumerable new volcanoes, oozed to the surface and produced oceans of lava that spread across the land. This was how the planet had been born, and this was how it was dying.
Big mommy ouch. That said, with associated effects of matter slowing down, the speed wouldn't be as high as one could expect from a normal explosion, even if the yield is huge.An hour and nineteen minutes later, when Tenn fired the third beam that blew the charred and burned-out cinder apart, shattering it into billions of pieces, it seemed almost pointless. Everybody and everything on it had already been roasted, scalded, or drowned. The system's gravity twisted as the planetary well ceased to exist. Shield sensors quietly recorded the thousands of fragments, from the size of pebbles to that of mountains, deflected from the station.
There is something weird though.
The beam is still 1/3 of the power of the expected power, yet, this time it blows up the planet.
The yield factor doesn't add up. You jump from something that's betwen e21 to e24 joules, to something like e32 joules at least.
It seems that firing the superlaser multiple times progressively grew the chain reaction inside. I suppose that the effect fades out after weeks/months/years/centuries, but if you keep charging up the effect, at one point you reach the threshold and trigger the hyperspace related chain reaction.
The fully powered beam directly reaches that threshold anyway.
It also seems that violently reaching the threshold is what causes the ripple. Meaning that the ripple is both an effect of reaching a certain threshold, but also a question of how fast you reach.
I say this because despite being Alderaanized, Despayre's final overkill destruction didn't create hyperspace ripples.
Think of the zat gun in Stargate SG-1. One shot stuns. The second one kills. The third one VFXes you out. But we've seen people been hit more than three times in their life. It's just that it didn't happen all at once.
The effects vanish over time.
It's also possible that some adjustements were made on the weapon later on.
What's that queen? Sounds she's related to Naboo. Of course, you know that in galaxy so wide, that queen could be from anywhere, or just a figment of some imagination. But you know how the EU has the habit of having everything come from Tatooine, Yavin or Bespin.Sweet Queen Quinella. A whole planet, destroyed. Just like that. No matter how tough you thought you were, that was hard to stomach.
Especially when you were the one who had pulled the lever.
And now, moving on to Alderaan.
What are the units of that timer?SUPERLASER FIRE CONTROL, DEATH STAR
Tenn heard the order crackle over the speaker. He couldn't believe it, but there it was:
"Commence primary ignition."
He hesitated a second. Could it be some bizarre kind of test? To see if he had what it took?
No, that was foolish. He had already killed the prison planet, hadn't he? They couldn't have any doubts about his loyalty, both to the Empire and to Governor Tarkin.
But in a way that made it worse — because it meant the order was real. He was about to destroy yet another world — and it wasn't a virulent jungle planet swarming with criminals this time.
This time it was a world all too similar to his own homeworld.
He was aware of his CO watching him. He reached up, grabbed the lever. All systems were green.
His crew once again performed their functions flawlessly, adjusting switches, checking readouts, balancing harmonics. All too soon, everything was in readiness. All systems were go.
Tenn felt sweat dripping down his neck, under that blasted helmet. He looked at the timer: 00:58:57.
h / m / s? m / s / ms?
Else? - why would they be Earth units?
Just when this did this happen? It seems like they destroyed Despayre a few minutes ago.
So the top tributary beam is in Theta sector, apparently.He pulled the lever.
It would take a second or so for the tributary beams to coalesce. He wanted to look away from the monitor, but he couldn't.
The superlaser beam lanced from the focusing point above the dish.
That timer again. 13 seconds or less than one second. It is said that it would take a second or so for the beams to coalesce.The image of Alderaan on the screen was struck by the green ray.
It took no more than an instant. Tenn knew that the beam's total destructive power was much bigger than matter-energy conversions limited to realspace. At full charge, the hyper-matter reactor provided a superluminal "boost" that caused much of the planet's mass to be shifted immediately into hyperspace. As a result, Alderaan exploded into a fiery ball of eye-smiting light almost instantaneously, and a planar ring of energy reflux—the "shadow" of a hyperspatial ripple—spread rapidly outward.
The timer read: 00:59:10.
Alderaan, population: billions. Earth like, more or less - we didn't see much of Alderaan. There could have been densely populated cities, or at least well spread over the surface, with plenty of forests and lakes around.So little time. So much damage. It was incredible.
If, somehow, the Rebel Alliance were to win this war — not that Tenn Graneet could see how that would be possible, given what he had just witnessed, what he had just done — then surely this act would condemn his ashes to the deepest pit they could find after he was executed.
It was his job, and if he hadn't performed it, someone else would have, but his belly roiled with the enormity of what pulling that lever had caused.
Billions of lives snuffed out. Just like that.
Hey, nice to see that not all Imperials knew that Alderaan had plenty of defense weapons.There was no sense of triumph in it, none. He had not destroyed a Rebel base or a military target. Instead, a planet full of unarmed civilians had been . . . extinguished.
And he had done it.
It made him feel sick.
Though this a bit vague. It's true that the civilians themselves, much like on Earth, are not armed. Well, when everything ok (ah, yes, I don't think everything's ok when a vast portion of a country's population still thinks it needs to own lethal weapons, no matter how healthy the country is).
Ah, besides. No shield.