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

[Mr. Oragahn]

Watchdog, that must have taken you quite some time!
Thank you for the quotes.

Lots of interesting bits, EU wise.

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.

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.

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:

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.

"Higher-dimensional universe."

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.

Funny to see that all rebels and Solo didn't seem to bother with opaque transparisteel windows.
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.

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.

Damn. That's big.

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.

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."

Effects relative to many teratons of energy. Maybe a few petatons, but that's stretching it.

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.

1 hour 13 minutes to recharge the weapon, for 1/3 of the final power when the battle station will be fully operational.

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.

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.

I like the last sentence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And now, moving on to Alderaan.

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.

What are the units of that timer?
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.

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.

So the top tributary beam is in Theta sector, apparently.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hey, nice to see that not all Imperials knew that Alderaan had plenty of defense weapons.
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.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Before this new book and the ICSs, was the SL just a big ass laser in the EU?

One guide argued so. I think it's an old guide though. So first, it's clearly retconned now. Secondly, back then, certain things about SW weren't as detailed and documented as they're now.

Well, it doesn't prevent some people to still make extravagant claims and sprout lies, but at least, we have access to the info to show them wrong.

Back then, and during the WEG era, some errors creeped in.

[2046]

I've had very little time to think on the topic or play online with it lately, so this is just a quicky.

That said, it dawned on me the other day while driving that the chain reaction concept as seemingly espoused by the novel seems contrary to a planetary shield, which is probably why they probably side-stepped the issue.

For one thing, the superlaser/hyperspace-particle-beam-thingy/whatever in the book clearly reacts with planetary matter . . . ergo, much as some have suggested NDF ought not have an effect against shields, the chain reaction would likely be ineffective against shields. Raw beam energy . . . kinetic or electromagnetic or what-have-you . . . would be the opposing force for any shield.

Further, there's the issue of hyperspace. If I remember correctly, Wong's suggestion was that if the hyperspace domain were such a source of energy as the book suggests for the chain reaction, then vessels entering said domain would have to be uber-shielded anyway. But if Alderaan's planetary shield was akin to that used by starships, then would it not be equally impervious to the effects of that domain?

Either way, it would seem that you can't declare an über-ized Alderaanian shield overwhelmed by an über-ized chain reaction superlaser. At best you could claim a shield knocked out by the superlaser's electromagnetic/whatever leftovers.

Further, it would seem that either the energy of the hyperspace domain is not so deleterious to ships as he would suggest, or that starship shields are not the primary protective measure against hyperspace while in transit there.

In other words, I don't see how his counterargument holds. But do correct me if this line of thought is ill-considered.

[Mr. Oragahn]

More comments on the extract posted by watchdog:

Tarkin stared at the incomplete spheroid, floating serenely in the void, eerily backlit by the solar glow reflected from Despayre. It wasn't even a complete skeleton yet.

Then at what distance did the proto DS fire at Desapayre from? Would the station already have deflecting shields?

When done, however, the battle station would be 160 kilometers in diameter.

This is supposed to be the last retcon, right? How does that fit with measurements made on the films directly, and with other EU sources which say 120 km?

There would be twenty-four zones, twelve in each hemisphere. Every zone, called a sprawl, would have its own food replicators, hangar bays, hydroponics, detention blocks, medical centers, armories, command centers, and every other facility needed to provide service for any mission deemed necessary. In an emergency, auxiliary command centers located in each sprawl provided full weapons and maneuverability control, for a redundancy depth of twice a dozen.

Redudancy is well planned. This is to be expected to exist on SW ships as well.
Notably for the Executor and that ISD that lost its whole bridge tower in TESB.

When fully operational, the battle station would be the most powerful force in the galaxy, by far...
Aside from the fearsome, world-destroying "superlaser" itself — which was based upon the Hammertong Project and used a power source secretly taken by the 501st Stormtrooper Legion on Mygeeto during the Clone Wars —

The power source is a hypermatter reactor. We understand thusly, that the Republic/Empire had not such power sources before. The book even says that the hypermatter reactors were first test onboard ships with some ISDs Mk I, and the first experiments proved lethal to an entire crew, at least.
It took them like two decades to get it right for the Death Star, and that was because they had the plans from the CIS.

the station would mount a complement of craft, both space and ground, equal to a large planetside base: four capital ships, a hundred TIE/In starfighters, plus assault shuttles, blastboats, drop ships, support craft, and land vehicles, all ultimately totaling in the tens of thousands.

Not that much ships, considering the size of the station. But the numerous point defense guns were supposed to deal with that.

It would have an operational crew numbering more than a quarter million, including nearly sixty thousand gunners alone.

All depending on the number of gunners per piece of artillery, it goes from 60,000 to less than that. In ANH, it seems that certain cannons were manned by two or three gunners, right?

Anyway, 60,000 cannons is the maximum. Unless gunners can control several cannons at the same time. Which didn't seem the case at all. For the reference, the OT:ICS showed that each turret on an ISD needed its own mini crew.

The vessel could easily transport more than half a million fully outfitted troops, and the support staff—pilots, crew, and other workers—would be half that number. The logistics of it all were staggering. Oh, it would be a fearsome monster indeed. But a monster tamed and under Tarkin's control; a monster sheathed in quadanium steel plating, invulnerable and impervious.

Quadanium? Something new?

Well, almost invulnerable. Lemelisk had disappointed him in that instance. The greatest challenge in designing the battle station, he had said, was not creating a beam cannon big enough to destroy a planet, nor was it building a moon-sized station that would be driven by a Class Three hyperdrive. The greatest challenge was powering both of them. There must be trade-offs, he had said. In order to mount a weapon of mundicidal means, shielding capabilities would have to be downgraded to a rudimentary level.

Guys at SDN already jumped on this to wank the stuff up. Like, woah! rudimentary shields that stop planet debris.

As I said earlier on, we have evidence that debris slow down. It's weird, but it's seen on screen. Even more. The book talks about billions of debris (small to mountain sized). Put this at a distance of 6 planetary diameters, and there's not much left to hit the Death Star.

Considering that fighters can go through the force field, if debris were deflected, they had to possess a velocity under what they think they had.

Yes, the ANH novelization says it's a tough shield. But the film shows that starfighters can get through it.

Ergo, it's not a defense shield like the ones we find on starships, or even droids.

Power, Bevel had said, was not infinite, even on a station this size, fueled by the largest hypermatter reactor ever built.

Nothing new. Just cutting it to separate this extract from the following bit, cause it's interesting and needs to be clearly cut.

However, given the surface-to-vacuum defenses, the number of fighters, turbolaser batteries, charged-particle blasters, magnetic railguns, proton torpedo banks, ion cannons, and a host of other protective devices, no naval ship of any size would be even a remote threat. A fleet of Imperial-class Star Destroyers—even a fleet of Super-class Star Destroyers, should such a thing ever exist — would offer no real danger to the battle station once it was fully operational. Given all that, a shield system that was less than perfect at times wasn't such a high price to pay for the ability to vaporize a planet.

The surface to vacuum defenses (huh? what's that, a range of 10 centimeters?) were enough to deal with a fleet of ISD or SSDs.
This puts at new twist on Dodonna's words, for any self respected EU fan.

The Death Star had such firepower, aside from the superlaser, that it would be able to deal with any fleet of any ISD or SSD anyone could think of.

We know that SDN people always took the most convenient interpretation of Dodonna's words, and never agreed that Dodonna, when talking to the pilots, could have been including the surface defenses, or even solely talked about them.

But here, we see that it was the case. If you use the EU, you'll be forced to accept the fact that Dodonna was talking about the surface weapons.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Liar liar pants on fire!

Venting are we?

The quote states that "no naval ship of any size would be even a remote threat" meaning that no INDIVIDUAL ship would be a threat. After that line there is full stop and then it states that "A fleet of Imperial-class Star Destroyers—even a fleet of Super-class Star Destroyers" would offer no threat. NOT "any fleet" or "entire Imperial starfleet" but "a" fleet.

A fleet is just as vague as "any fleet". They even go to say that even a fleet of superships that don't even exist would still represent no danger to the fully operational station.
You clearly see that the author(s) tried to cover as much ground as possible, up to the point where they use references to ships which aren't even thought to exist.

So yes, your friends at SDN will need to reconsider their famous interpretation of Dodonna's words. While a generous interpretation of the book will mean that a fleet of ISDs will be much less than half the starfleet, a reasonable interpretation, meant to fit with Dodonna's words, will precisely mean that such an hypothetical fleet of ISDs would be roughly as large as half the starfleet, if not more (there aren't only ISDs, though they were the toughest ships the Empire had for quite some time).

I shouldn't even comment on the retarded "surface to vacuum means 10cm range". I guess that means that surface to air missiles have a range of 10cm too.

Dude, it was just a joke. "Surface to vacuum weapons", used to describe ranged weapons, when the weapons themselves are already in vacuum, is just not the most appropriate and sounds funny. Of course, there's no yardstone which could be used.

Seriously, chill out.

You heard it guys. If you use EU you must use Mr. Oragahns false interpretation of Death Star novel!
But hey what have we here? It's the Behind the Magic CD that states:

"You heard it guys."
You just can't debate on your own.

No other weapon produced during the Galactic Civil War proved as devastating as the awesome Imperial superlaser. The superlaser was created by several turbolaser pulses, produced by amplifications crystals around the cannon's circular well. These pulses were fused over the central focus lens, resulting in a devastating energy beam with more firepower than half the Imperial starfleet.

Well whoop-de-fucking-do. It seems that EU explicitly states that it's the superlaser itself that is more powerful than half of starfleet not the surface defense weapons.
Keep up the "reasoned discussion of Star Wars and/or Star Trek" guys!

The DS book gives the tributary beams effects which have nothing to do with turbolasers.

Besides, as I demonstrated (well, just putting into words what a film already established as fact a decade ago), notably by using the DS book as evidence, the energy the beam actually directly deposits into the planet is nowhere e32 joules, and appears to be, at best, it's in the petaton range.

Again:



The e32 joules (at least) are released much later on, when the beam is already gone since more than a full second.

You know, it is nothing more than DET + funky chain reaction.
It is just plain hypocrisy to see you argue that Trek's planet busting weapons are mere chain reaction weapons with little to no DET capacity, just because planets blow up well after the beams finished hitting their target, while what we get in ANH is exactly the same thing, safe that it happens faster.

The Death Star's beam deals damage in less than half a second, instead of dozens of seconds.
The delay between the surface destroying event, and the overkill explosion, is a bit more than one second long, instead of several seconds long.

It just happens faster, but in essence, they are similar phenomenoms.

Oh crap, what did I dare to say here!

So yes, scale these petatons down, notably with a reactor core that's bigger in a 160 km wide battlestation than in a 120 km wide battlestation.

Yes, do it, just for the kicks. ;)





[quote"Darth Cerveau"]Liar. Our interpretations have ALWAYS included the possibility that the surface defenses was included in that quote. What was under debate was the idiotic trektard idea that said statement did NOT include the superlaser. Include the surface weapons or don't include them in Dodona's quote, the SW position isn't hurt either way. Hell, including them only means the Imperial starfleet is that much more powerful. Nice false dilema though Mr Oragahn, trying to force people to choose between "just the superlaser" and "just the surface defenses" even though "all of the above" is a perfectly viable third option.[/quote]

Then excuse me.
I've seen enough SDN residents on SB.com argue that Dodonna only considered the superlaser in his speech.
Considering the lack of moderation you people show on a constant basis, it is not surprising that we can think you always reach for the most sensationalistic interpretations, which you still often do, anyway.

Btw, as I have shown, your position needs an update. The beam is clearly shown, with help of the book, that the superlaser is nowhere close to e32 joules.
Well, that was already clearly outlined since the Special Edition, but it's not too late.

It's like arguing with Roberto Gonzalez. They look for loopholes rather than straight interpretations. For them, the entire Death Star concept is something they try to poke loopholes in, rather than taking the obvious straightforward interpretation that it's really big, really powerful, and blows up planets. No normal person thinks like that.

Flash news: No one denied that it's really big, really powerful, and blows up planets.

But I appreciate the irony.

[watchdog]

A few other bits that caught my eye (as much as skimming the text can catch an eye);

The Steel Talon was the ninth ship upon which he'd served; on the last four of them his duty had been that of a gunnery chief. An Imperial-class Star Destroyer, the Talon was the backbone of the fleet. Tenn hoped to be transferred, one day, to one of the four new Super-class Star Destroyers that were currently being built. Those were monsters indeed, eight or ten times the size of the Imperial-class ships, which were themselves over a kilometer and a half in length. The SSDs looked like nothing so much as pie-shaped wedges sliced out of an asteroid and covered with armament. Perhaps if he called in the right favors at the right time, he might wrangle an assignment on the next one scheduled to roll ponderously out of the Kuat Drive Yards. He still had a few good years left in him, and who better to run the big battery on one of those monster ships than him? He had his request in, and maybe, if Hoberd got his promotion, he'd put in a good word for Tenn before he left. As long as Hoberd was running the battery, though, that wasn't likely to happen. He didn't want to lose the best CPO in the sector, so he said.
Well, thought Tenn, it's nice to be appreciated. Still, he knew, deep down, that he wouldn't be satisfied until he could say he'd run the biggest and the best.
Shift change was coming, and officers and crew filled the halls on their way to their duty stations. Even though it would only be a drill, Tenn was looking forward to hearing the generators whine as the capacitors loaded, followed by the heavy vibrations and scorched-air smell as the ion cannons and lasers spoke, spewing hard energy across empty space to destroy the practice targets. To be able to reach out a hundred klicks or more and smash a ship to atomic dust was real power. And nobody was better at it than he was.

Found this kinda funny, as something similar has happened to me;

"Not happy with this assignment, son?"
That earned Uli's new commander an incredulous look. "Not happy? I did my first tour in a Rimsoo unit on a swamp world where your lungs could fill with spores in five minutes if you weren't wearing a filter mask. I patched up maybe a thousand clones, and I was supposed to be rotated back to my homeworld and discharged a civilian at the end of it. That was . . . five? six? hitches ago. I lost track."
Hotise nodded. "Imslow," he said.
"That's right." IMSLO stood for "Imperial Military Stop Loss Order." Too many skilled people who'd been drafted had had enough of the military after the Clone Wars, and when their compulsory service ended, wanted nothing more than to go home. With the action against the Rebels heating up, the Empire couldn't allow that. Doctors, in particular, were in short supply; hence, IMSLO. A retroactive order mandating that, no matter when you'd been conscripted, once you were in, you were in for as long as they wanted you—or until you got killed. Either way, it was kiss your planned life good-bye.
Imperial Military Stop Loss Order. An alternative translation, scrawled no doubt on a 'fresher wall somewhere by a clever graffitist, had caught on over the last few years: "I'm Milking Scragged; Life's Over." The memory brought a faint, grim smile to Uli's lips.

He had, of late, become aware of the sound of his breathing, the rhythmic and even pulses of the suit's respirator. The mechanical device that helped keep him alive was most efficient, and he usually tuned it out. Now and again, however, usually during quiet or contemplative moments, it would intrude, reminding him that it was the will of his Master that he had become what he had become. In many ways, so much less than he had been before.
And in other ways, so much more . . .
The creation and construction of the suit had been perforce hasty, since the maimed and burned thing that had been Anakin Skywalker was dying, and would not have survived for long even in a bacta tank. There had been no time to tailor all the life-support systems specifically to his needs. Many of the suit's features were adapted from earlier technology, such as had been designed for the cyborg droid General Grievous over two decades before. It was hardly state-of-the-art. It could, Vader knew, be rebuilt now and made infinitely better, more comfortable, and more powerful. There was only one problem with doing so: to be completely excised, even temporarily, from the suit would kill him. Not even the safety of the hyperbaric chamber—indeed, not even his command of the dark side—could ensure his protection during such a procedure.

GRAND MOFF'S SUITE, LQ FLAGSHIP HAVELON

"Sir, there has been . . . an incident."
Seated behind his desk next to the panorama of his viewport, which occupied most of the wall to his right, Tarkin stared at the captain. "An incident?"
"Yes, sir. An explosion in the oxygen supply tanker arriving from the planet. It was just off the northeastern quadrisphere's Main Dock when it happened."
"How much damage?"
"Uncertain, sir. There is still a lot of debris flying about. The tanker was destroyed. Fortunately, most of the crew were only droids. A few navy beings and officers—"
"Don't address trivial matters, Captain. How much damage to the station?"
"So far, what we know for sure is that the dock portal and bay took the brunt of the explosion. Our security teams can only guess at—"
"Then do so."............."Look to the forward viewport, sir," the pilot said.
Tarkin, who had been poring over a schematic hologram of the station that showed where the damage was, turned and stared through the port at the real thing.
It was indeed a mess. It appeared as if a giant hand had smashed the dock, then petulantly ripped sections of it loose and flung those into space. Debris of all sizes and shapes whirled and tumbled aimlessly, not having had time yet to settle into any sort of orbit.
Tarkin's expression was pinched tight in anger, but his voice was level as he said, "Bring her around and let's have a closer look."
"Sir." A pause. "There's a lot of debris, sir."
"I can see that. I suggest you avoid running into it."
The pilot swallowed dryly. "Yes, sir."
As the pilot began to swing the small cruiser into a wide turn, Tarkin's aide approached.
"Yes, Colonel?"
"The forensic investigation team has a preliminary report, sir."
"Really? This soon?"
"You did indicate a desire for alacrity, sir."
"Indeed." Tarkin offered the colonel a small, tight smile. "Hold off on the flyby," he instructed the pilot. "I'll take the report here."
"Sir." The pilot was visibly relieved at this.
A moment later, the holoprojector lit over the command console at which Tarkin stood, displaying a one-third-sized image of a security force major standing at attention.
"Sir," the major said, giving a military bow.
Tarkin made an impatient gesture. "What do we have, Major?"
The major reached off-image to touch a control, and a second holoimage blossomed next to him. It was that of an Imperial gas tanker. As Tarkin watched, the images grew larger and translucent as the point of view zoomed closer. A flashing red dot appeared toward the rear of the ship, and the POV zoomed in closer still to reveal the interior of the vessel.
"From the dispersal pattern of the ship's interior and hull, which we backtracked by computer reconstruction, the source of the explosion was here—" The officer pointed into the hologram, only his hand and pointing finger becoming visible in the blown-up image before Tarkin's eyes. "—in the aft cargo hold. The precise location was plus or minus a meter of the pressure valve complex on the starboard tank array."
"Go on."
"Given the size of the tanks and the pressure—the oxygen is liquefied, of course—and the estimated explosive potential and expansion, we have calculated that a leak and subsequent accidental ignition of expanding gas in an enclosed compartment is highly unlikely to have produced the level of damage recorded."
Tarkin nodded, almost to himself. "Sabotage, then," he said. "A bomb."
"We believe so, sir." The image zoomed back out to encompass the major again. "We have not yet recovered parts of the device itself, but we will."
Tarkin gritted his teeth, feeling his jaw muscles bunch. He made an effort to relax, giving the major another of his tight smiles. "Congratulate your team on their efforts thus far, Major. I am pleased with your efficiency."
"Thank you, sir." The man smiled.
"But don't pat yourselves on the backs too much just yet. I want to know what kind of bomb it was, who made it, who planted it— everything."
The major stiffened again. "Yes, sir. We will report as soon as we have new information."
"You're already late with it," Tarkin said. "Dismissed."

"As it happens, my leafy friend, yes. I have it on dependable authority that the EngSat Complex and Dybersyne Engineering Systems have begun production on the largest focusing magnet ever built—the gauss equivalent of a small iron moon's field, so they say."
"Well, that's, uh . . . interesting," Ratua said. "Probably the most exciting thing this year at the Interstellar Conference of Dull and Boring Science Twits."
"My apologies for any inadvertent rudeness, my young sprout, but you know naught about which you jest." Balahteez glanced up at the ceiling but was clearly intending that his gaze pierce the roof and extend into space.
"Yon construction, upon which so many of our fellows have been conscripted to menial labor, along with thousands and thousands of slaves, droids, and private contractors, not to mention army, navy, and Imperial engineers, is the destination for this colossal apparatus."
"Yeah—so?"
"Well, let me enlighten you. Beams of coherent particles, such as electrons, positrons, and the like, as well as amplified photon emissions, are often focused with large magnetic rings. Let us postulate that one could, in this fashion, generate a weaponized beam with enough force to blow a large asteroid apart with a single blast."
"Is there such a thing?"
"In theory, yes, though it requires a power source so large as to be impractical to perambulate, even on a Star Destroyer. But," Balahteez continued, raising one phalange in emphasis, "aboard something the size of, say, a moon, one could easily install and house such a mechanism."
"You're saying the battle station they're building up there is going to be that large?"
"Oh, my, yes. Easily. But this is not the point. The magnetic ring being built by Dybersyne is much, much larger than would be needed to focus such a beam, even a beam of such astonishing power."
Ratua frowned. "You've lost me."
The smuggler smiled. "Let us say, for the sake of argument, that the battle station under construction is large enough to hold, oh, six or eight such weapons, as well as a hypermatter reactor that could power a small planet. And that it is possible to focus all of this energy into a single beam—by the largest and most powerful magnetic ring ever made." He looked expectantly at Ratua.
"Milking mopak," Ratua said softly.
"Indeed, indeed. I see you comprehend at last. Not so dull and boring after all, eh?"
Ratua shook his head. That was for sure. If the Empire could make something like that work, there wouldn't be any place a Rebel force could hide—the superweapon could, with a single blast, destroy whole continents. Maybe even whole planets. Just knowing such a thing existed, it seemed, would be enough to keep the peace. You certainly wouldn't want to see it coming into your system with malign intent . . .

LOWER LEVEL TROOP BARRACKS, SECTOR N-ONE, DEATH STAR

The N-One sector, a huge area equal to one twenty-fourth of a hemisphere, had been partly pressurized and heated, so at least Teela didn't have to wear a vac suit to work anymore. Thank the stars for that; she was sick to death of ending each day fatigued by the effort of manipulating the stiff joints and servos, the limited vision, and the inability to scratch—to name only a few problems. She'd worn vac suits before on jobs, and those experiences hadn't been pleasant, but this was by far the worst, because the Empire, no doubt in a cost-saving effort, had mandated the use of outmoded constant-volume suits instead of the newer, elastic one-piece designs.
The suits had been necessary for a time, however. On a project this size there was no way to complete the entire hull, pressurize it all, and then start building the interior—the amount of air necessary would be tremendous. Once the vessel was functional, then the multitude of converters installed in every sector could easily handle the task, but until those were online, air would have to be sucked from a planetary atmosphere and hauled up out of the gravity well by cargo ship—either that, or build a huge conversion plant in space and truck water to that, which would be even harder. A tanker full of water was more unwieldy than one full of air bottles, and without proper heat it just turned into blocks of ice when you unloaded it, which in turn resulted in problems with increased volume. The sheer magnitude of the project wouldn't allow a full exterior hull construction first.
Thus it had been reasoned early on that, while the hull was being laid, individual sectors would be built and sealed. This allowed plenty of storage space, at least at first, for supplies, as well as habitats for workers to stay close to the task. Hundreds of thousands of laborers needed someplace convenient to live—shuttling them back and forth for any distance after every shift was neither cost- nor time-effective.
The hull-plate extruders were only a few hundred kilometers away, hung at a fixed orbital point where the gravitational forces of the prison planet and the raw-material asteroids being towed to the gigantic masticators all balanced. The process was simple enough. An asteroid sufficiently high in nickel-iron content was hauled from the outlying belt to the masticators and fed into a maw; the whirling durasteel teeth chewed the asteroid to tiny bits and mixed them with alloy ores mined and brought up from Despayre, including quadanium. The resulting gravel had water added and was put under high pressure to form a slurry, then fed into pipelines that led to the smelters. These were essentially huge melting pots that refined the mix, burning off impurities. The resulting scarified ore was conveyed to extruders that pressed out the hull plate, rather like food paste from a squeezed tube. There was still a lot of slag left over, but this was just gathered together, pointed at the local star, and given a hard push. Months later, these slag-rafts would fall into the sun and be burned up.
Teela had been on projects before that used deep-space masticators and extruders, of course, such as skyhooks and wheelworlds. She'd never seen as large or as many as there were here, however. The amount of plate being produced was beyond any amount ever used in one place before.
Sector N-One was shaped like a large crescent slice of juicemelon, cut in half midway. It was thirty-one kilometers wide at the base, which would be the equator when the station was finished, narrowing almost to a point only a few dozen meters wide at the other end, and just over ninety-four klicks long. Most of the sectors would be identical in this hemisphere, save for a select few and including, of course, those through which the superlaser would be constructed.
It was hard to visualize the scope of the whole orb. Big didn't begin to do it justice. The habitable crust alone was two kilometers thick, and included in it the surface city sprawls, armory, hangar bays, command center, technical areas, and living quarters. Below that would be the hyperdrive, reactor core, and secondary power sources—none of which, fortunately, concerned her.

Uli watched the procession pass. "Walked right past us, didn't they?"
"The word is that Lord Vader is not fond of medics," C-4ME-0 said. "Apparently he has had some unpleasant experiences in that area."
Uli nodded. He could see why. The only reason he could imagine that someone would be stuffed into a lung-suit with a respirator breathing for him would be because his own breathing passages had been terribly damaged and, for some reason, new lobes and trachea could not be cloned and implanted. That would be a strange malady in this day and age, but not impossible. Some kind of autoimmune problem, perhaps.
There were those rare people, one in a billion, who would reject their own matched genetic tissue implants—even skin grafts. Had to be something like that, Uli mused—nobody would voluntarily walk around looking like Vader otherwise.

Tarkin was pleased. As much as he distrusted Vader and his motives, the coming of the man in black had visibly improved functions wherever one looked. Nobody wanted to face the Sith Lord's wrath, and the best way to avoid that was to do one's job with the utmost efficiency. Vader was a catalyst; he caused reactions that went well beyond his personal sphere of influence, great as that was. The fear he inspired in others was far more than merely the sum of his various and sinister parts. Even Tarkin, a Grand Moff, had sensed it occasionally, like a whiff of ozone presaging an ion storm. It was odd, Tarkin reflected. His rational mind knew that Vader was only a maimed remnant of a man, sealed for the rest of his life in biosupport armor. A figure more to be pitied than anything else. But in person, the last thing he inspired was pity. Vader had power, and he knew how to use it, no matter if he was overseeing the scouring of a continent from the bridge of his Star Destroyer or striking a man dead from across the room.

a little more on the hyperspace phenomena;

The viewports were opaqued, there being nothing to see but a kind of impressionistic fuzzy strangeness. Memah had tried looking out into the higher-dimensional realm early in the voyage, and had quickly realized that the resulting headache and nausea were not to her liking. Rodo, who had undertaken more than a few FTL voyages, had warned her, but she'd had to check it out for herself. Memah Roothes had never been one to take another's word for something when she could investigate herself; a trait, she reminded herself wryly, that had led to more than one headache over the years.

CENTRAL COMMAND DECK, OVERBRIDGE, DEATH STAR

Tarkin found himself wishing once again that Daala were here. It surprised him how much he missed her company. She had military responsibilities at the Maw Installation, of course, but the truth was that the nature of that area of space, in which a congeries of black holes orbited one another in an elegant, complicated dance, made casual passersby unlikely in the extreme. And if that weren't enough, the four Star Destroyers on duty there were more than capable of discouraging any errant ships, Rebel or otherwise.
And now that the station was being constructed here in the Horuz system, the importance of the work at the Maw was somewhat less than it had been. It was true that Qwi Xux's other projects—the Sun Crusher, the World Devastators, and other potent superweapons—were still in development there, as well as the installation being full of valuable scientists and technicians, but if Daala were to leave for a week or two, there would be no problem whatsoever with her captains maintaining security in her absence.
Of course, Daala had officially been given express orders to maintain her post until relieved, since there had to be a ranking admiral in charge. But there were orders and then there were orders, and since both sets came from Tarkin, he could alter them as he deemed necessary. As the galaxy's only Grand Moff, he had extensive leeway in how he ran his portion of the navy. Nobody could question him, save the Emperor— and as long as he got the job done, the Emperor wouldn't care what he did to accomplish it.
Tarkin stared out the viewport at the partly assembled battle station, and thought about it.

"Engineers." Tenn put a considerable amount of sarcasm in the word.
"Yeah, I hear that. But they're pulling out all the stops on this baby." He rubbed his hand on the control console. "Any problem they had, they threw enough money at it to bury it to the rails. We'll have the power, no worries there."
"And if somebody didn't forget to dog a bolt tight, maybe it won't blow us all to the other side of the Rim."
"Hey, I'm telling you, word is the worst piece of gear on it is still triple redundant."
"I had a nephew who was a deck monkey on the Battle Lance," Tenn said.
Doan's smile faded. "Yeah. I knew a couple of guys shipped on her. It was a freak accident."
"Maybe. A backfire could overload the HM reactor and turn this station into radioactive dust, too."
Doan shook his head. "Never happen. They got the Emperor himself looking over their shoulders on this one. They won't frip it up."
Tenn shrugged. There was little point in worrying about equipment failure. If the thing worked, it would prove the Death Star to be, as Tarkin had put it in one of his many inspirational addresses to the station's population, "The ultimate power in the galaxy." If it didn't work—well, the hypermatter reactor was capable of generating an energy burst equivalent to the total weekly output of several main-sequence stars; if anything went wonky, it wasn't likely he'd be around long enough to notice. Nor would anyone else.
"Yeah, well," he replied, "if they can build it so it holds together, I'll shoot it."
"Let me show you how it works. You and your team will be practicing on the simulator until the real thing here's online."
As Doan explained the intricacies of the sequencing relays, Tenn found it somewhat difficult to concentrate on what the other man was saying. He wasn't sure why. After all, he'd dreamed of this moment for months: the day he'd finally stand in the control chamber of the super-laser and be officially given command of it. Even though construction wasn't finished yet, you couldn't tell it from in here. He listened to the susurration of the klystron tubes and thermistor couplers, smelled the astringent scent of insulation lube, felt the breath of conditioned air adjusted to a constant twenty degrees, and wondered why he was not content.
There was only one reason that seemed remotely feasible.
The Battle Lance.
His nephew, Hora Graneet, had been a navy spacer on the Imperial-class Star Destroyer Mark II class vessel, which had been selected for a shakedown cruise testing one of the improved prototype hypermatter reactors. Tenn didn't know the specifics of what had happened, and didn't have anything close to the math needed to understand it anyway. He knew that hypermatter existed only in hyperspace, that it was composed of tachyonic particles, and that charged tachyons, when constrained by the lower dimensions of realspace, produced near-limitless energy. How this "null-point energy" had become unstable he didn't know. He only knew it had been powerful enough to turn an ISD-II and its crew of thirty-seven thousand people into floating wisps of ionized gas in a microsecond.

EXERCISE SUITE, EXECUTIVE LEVEL, DEATH STAR

Motti prided himself on keeping fit. Stripped to a speed-strap and drenched in his own sweat, he was working out in the executive officers' heavy-gravity room, which he'd set at a three-g pull. Just standing in such a field was an effort. Every movement required three times the energy it normally did. Even jumping was risky—land at a bad angle and you could break an ankle. Trip and fall and the impact could fatally crack your skull.
Motti picked up a trio of denseplast workout balls, each the size of his fist. Anywhere else on the station they would weigh about a kilo each; in the HG room they were three apiece. Juggling them caused his muscles to quickly burn. His shoulders, arms, hands, back—all were protesting the effort as he tossed and caught the balls. He could manage the three most basic patterns: the cascade, which was the easiest; the reverse-cascade, a bit harder; and the shower, in which the balls all circled in the same direction. If he dropped one it was usually during the shower pattern, and the first thing he had learned when juggling in the HG room was to move his feet out of the way quickly if he dropped a ball. Three kilos moving three times faster than normal could easily break bones or crush toes.
Today, despite the burning in his muscles, he was a machine, moving perfectly, and the balls stayed aloft, moving in sync without any flaw. He was aware that a couple of other senior officers were watching him from one corner of the room, and he smiled to himself. Being fit was important. If you were physically stronger than the men around you, it made them look upon you with the most basic level of respect: Cross me, and I can break you in half. He was not, nor would he ever be, some fat and out-of-shape formchair officer who'd wheeze and run out of breath if he had to climb a flight of steps.

Some meat;

SUPERLASER SIMULATOR, THETA SECTOR, DEATH STAR

CPO Tenn Graneet had been assured that the mock-up of the battery control room for the superlaser was an exact replica of the as-yet-unfinished one, down to the last rivet. Every function that was to be found in the soon-to-be-working ultimate weapon was replicated in the simulator. The gunnery team would spend long hours training at the mock-up's consoles, programming the complicated firing procedure into their brains, so that when the actual control room became operational, switching to the real thing would be as easy as falling off a bantha.
Which was a good thing, because the superlaser battery wasn't a simple installation. It was, in fact, far more complex than any gun control in any ship in the Imperial Navy that Tenn had ever encountered. There were banks of lighted switches color-coded for each of the eight tributary sub-beams; monitors double-stacked around the wall that showed every function of the hypermatter reactor and generator; sensor readings from the heart of the reactor to the field amplifiers, the inducer, the beam shaft . . . taken all together, it made a heavy destroyer's biggest gun look like a child's toy. Each component had to be precisely tuned and focused. If the primary beam focusing magnet was off a nanometer, the tributary beams would not coalesce, and there was a good chance of imbalance explosions in the beam shaft if the tributaries weren't pulsed in at exactly the proper time and in the proper sequence. The techs and engineers tended to wave that possibility off as too small to worry about. One chance in a hundred million, they said. Tenn wasn't swallowing that. When it came to something this potentially deadly, no odds were long enough. It was true that there were automatic fail-safes, but Tenn— and any chief worth his salt—trusted them just about as far as he could stroll in hard vac. Some of those engineers lived in skyhooks so far up past the clouds that they'd forgotten what the ground looked like. If a gun's designer wasn't willing to stand next to it when it was being tested well, Tenn saw no reason to be there, either.
Triggering a monster like this wasn't like pressing the firing stud on a blaster. At optimum it would take fifteen or twenty seconds from the given command to fire until the main beam was ready to be unleashed, and they hadn't gotten close to that yet. Half the time during firing simulations they couldn't balance the phase harmonics enough to shoot the primary beam at all. And even if the magnetic ring was precisely stabilized, all it would take was one of the tributaries warbling so much as a microhertz out of phase, and the others would desynchronize as well. The result would be a feedback explosion along the beam shaft and back to the main reactor that would turn the battle station into an incandescent plasma cloud in less than a single heartbeat, and the Empire thanks your family very much for your sacrifice.
That wasn't going to happen on his watch, Tenn vowed. By the time the actual battery was operational, Tenn expected his crew to be running the program smooth as lube on polished densecris plate. But they weren't there yet. Not even within a parsec of close.
Fortunately, they had plenty of time to practice. The crew, half of whom Tenn had swiped from his old unit with help from his new commander, were sharp enough, but it took twelve people working the battery to properly light the big gun and make it go bang, and every one of them had to nail his or her part dead-on. There was no margin for error. So far, in the first dozen run-throughs, they had been able to fire the primary beam five times within a minute of the order. Once they'd taken two minutes, and four times they hadn't been able to focus the tributaries properly at all, resulting in complete failures to fire. One time the computer had registered a late minor beam-warble that would have resulted in an automatic shutdown of the primary power feed to avoid damage, which meant it would have taken an hour to get back up for ignition sequencing. And wouldn't that be a delightful job, recalibrating everything with the land batteries of a Rebel base spewing hard energy at you?
In addition to the real problems, there had been a simulated major run malfunction with multiple beam-warbles and disharmonic phasing. The computer, in theory, could have shut that one down in time, but Tenn thought that report was optimistic. In a real situation, with a fully powered weapon, that one would more than likely have turned a whole lot of beings, equipment, and everything else into sizzling ions racing toward the edges of the galaxy.
"All right, boys, let's see if we can get it right this time. I want everything by the numbers and clean. Throw the wrong switch, you are on kitchen patrol for a week. Too slow on the phase-balance, better get some nose plugs, because you will be scrubbing the trash compactors until they sparkle. Drop a reading on the inducers, and you'll find yourself shoveling out the animal pens until you smell like the south end of a northbound reek. Are we clear?"
"Yes, Chief!" came the chorus of replies.
"Say again, I didn't hear you!"
"Yes, Chief!"
He smiled under the blast helmet, then grimaced as a rivulet of sweat ran into one eye. The milking headgear would be less than useless if the gun backfired, but it would make a dandy torture device for interrogating real spies. True, it was navy policy that gunners wear them, but who-ever'd designed these black buckets hadn't had to leave one on for a whole shift. They just made the job harder by restricting peripheral vision and essentially guaranteeing that you spent most of your shift clonking your head on pipes, struts, bulkheads, and the like. They were also hot and stuffy. Tenn was pretty sure some boot-head had designed them for looks and not function. When nobody was around, he let the men take the helmets off and breathe a bit, but given the nature of this sim battery, some by-the-book officer was always dropping by to gawk.
"We have an order to commence primary ignition," he said. "Commence . . . now"
He tapped the timer control and watched the seconds flick past as the chorus of reports began:
"Hypermatter reactor level one hundred percent. Feeds on tributaries one through eight are clean . . . "
"Primary power amplifier is online . . . "
"Firing field amplifier is green . . . "
"We are go on induction hyperphase generator feed . . . "
"Tributary beam shaft fields in alignment . . . "
"Targeting field generator is lit . . . "
"Primary beam focusing magnet at full gauss . . . "
Tenn watched the timer. So far, so good. But then:
"We have a hold on tributary five. Repeat, we have orange on T-five! Disharmonic in the subrouter."
"Fix it, mister!" Tenn said. He looked back at the timer. Twenty-four seconds . . . "Get it straight right milking now
The sweating T-5 tech tapped buttons, moved sliders, pivoted shift levers. "Reharmonizing . . . the warble is flattening out—in five, four, three, two . . . T-five is clean, we are go on T-five!"
Tenn scanned his board. The last orange light blinked off, and they were green straight across. He thumbed the safety button on the shifter above his head and pulled it down.
"Successful primary ignition achieved," the computer said.
There was a cheer from the crew, and Tenn smiled. "Thirty-eight seconds. That's a new record, even with the glitch, but we can do better." He took off his helmet. "Restart it. If we break thirty seconds before swing or third shift does, I'm buying the beer."
They cheered, and fell to work with a will. Once again, he smiled. Nothing seemed to motivate a crew like the lure of free beer.

GRAND MOFFTARKIN'S QUARTERS, EXECUTIVE LEVEL, DEATH STAR

Daala stepped from the shower, a waft of hot water vapor following her out. Tarkin smiled as she dried herself with a fluffy black towel made of virgin cotton from the Suliana fields and slipped into a matching robe. She stood under the air jets and dried her short hair, then came into the bedchamber and sat on the foot of the bed.
"Feel better?" Tarkin asked.
"Much. So much nicer to have hot water than the sonics."
"Yes. Rank has its privileges. You have news for me?"
"I do. You won't like it."
He sat up and looked at her.
She went to the desk, opened a drawer, and removed an info disk. She dialed his computer terminal to life.
"You have my access codes?" Now he slid out of the bed, the silk of his sleepwear causing static electricity as it moved across the sheets. His gown crackled and clung to his body, but he ignored it as he walked to where she stood.
She smiled at him. "Of course."
"Did I give them to you?"
"You don't remember? Well, if you didn't, I know you meant to."
Tarkin wasn't sure if he should be angered or aroused by this evidence of Daala's boldness. Before he could decide, a hologram blinked on. It showed rows of sealed cargo containers, the white everplast boxes stacked three-deep, with corridors between them to allow access. They looked like standard two-point-five-meter units, but it was hard to say just by looking.
"Security cam," she said. "Aft cargo hold on the Undauntable."
"A security cam that was not destroyed in the explosion?"
"Oh, it was blown up with the rest of the ship. But it was rigged to feed a signal to a receiver. I obtained the recording."
"How?"
"A moment. Watch."
There was a date/time stamp in the lower right-hand corner of the image, the seconds flashing by . . .
A figure moved into view. Tarkin frowned. It was still hard to judge size without some kind of scale.
As if reading his thoughts, Daala moved her hand over a sensor, and a grid overlaid the image. The figure was slightly less than two meters tall. That still didn't tell him much. With the cloak and hood concealing it, it could have been any of a hundred species.
The mysterious being walked along the row of containers. It reached one in the middle of the cam's field and tapped the keypad on the door with one gloved finger.
"Why didn't we have bioscanners going as well?" Tarkin asked, annoyed. "We'd have data on species, sex, age—"
"Shh," she said. "We were lucky to have gotten this much. Now watch."
The door rolled up and the figure entered the container.
Thirty seconds passed. The figure emerged, closed the door behind him—or her—and moved out of cam view.
Daala waved the recording off. She looked at him, waiting.
Tarkin was nobody's fool. "The explosive device was in the cargo container and ready to go. All the agent had to do was trigger it."
"Yes. He didn't bring anything with him, so it had to be in place already."
"And?"
She turned to the console's controls. Another image appeared, this one a routing manifest.
"The rigged container's ID number is not visible in the recording, but the number of the one eight down is, so it was a simple matter to figure out the one we want."
True, Tarkin thought. Loading droids were not known for creativity. They stacked cargo containers by the numbers.
"You can see that this container came from the cargo vessel Omega Gaila, itself from the ammunition stores at the Regional Naval Supply Area near Gall. The container carried high explosives, so that's what a scan would show—if anybody bothered to do one."
She waited again.
Tarkin thought about it. "The RNSA at Gall is a high-security facility. Extremely tight. Nobody on or off the base without top clearance, even the cargo handlers."
"Yes."
He frowned. Shook his head. "Not possible."
"Yet somebody got into a container and rigged it with a bomb powerful enough to blast a Star Destroyer apart. And they weren't shooting in the dark, hoping to hit something, because it took somebody on the other end to arm the device."
"So they knew where it was bound," he finished for her. "No way to have agents at every possible destination. Once it got to our storage facility, it could have gone to any of several ships."
"Or to this station," she said. "It was the luck of the draw that Undauntable needed ammo before we did."
"So it's being run by somebody higher than a cargo handler. At the very least, there had to be somebody from Routing involved, and enough of a conspiracy to be able to place or contact an agent already here. We are talking about a Rebel spy in the Imperial Navy with more than a little reach."
"Just so."
"We can probably determine who loaded the container, and who routed it."
"Which is good, but also doesn't stop something similar from happening again if the next shipment comes from a different source."
"Correct. We need to find whoever is running the agents here," he said.
"I concur."
He looked at her. "How do you plan to do this?"
"I'm assuming that the agent did not choose suicide. We have the day and time the device was activated. He or she would have had to arrive before that time, and depart before the explosion. Undauntable's operational logs were backed up on the station's computer, the last entry coming just before the ship's destruction. It might take some time, but we can access those and narrow down the possibilities."
"Good," Tarkin said. "Do so immediately."
She smiled and adjusted the lapels of her robe. "Immediately?"
He did not return her smile. "Yes. There are times for dalliance, and times for action. I want a report by zero five hundred hours."
Daala nodded and began to dress, quickly.

This is enough for now, I'll deal with part 2: shakedown later. Hopefully there is enough here to be of service.

[watchdog]

Liar liar pants on fire!

Venting are we?

The quote states that "no naval ship of any size would be even a remote threat" meaning that no INDIVIDUAL ship would be a threat. After that line there is full stop and then it states that "A fleet of Imperial-class Star Destroyers—even a fleet of Super-class Star Destroyers" would offer no threat. NOT "any fleet" or "entire Imperial starfleet" but "a" fleet.

A fleet is just as vague as "any fleet". They even go to say that even a fleet of superships that don't even exist would still represent no danger to the fully operational station.
You clearly see that the author(s) tried to cover as much ground as possible, up to the point where they use references to ships which aren't even thought to exist.

Darn, and I think I compleatly ignored the part in the book that states that an imperial fleet would be helpless. Oh well.

[Mr. Oragahn]

More comments, again. And, again, thanks for the quotes. But be steady. Posting entire chunks of a book may soon turn out to be... well, you know.
But it also provides clearer context.

The Steel Talon was the ninth ship upon which he'd served; on the last four of them his duty had been that of a gunnery chief. An Imperial-class Star Destroyer, the Talon was the backbone of the fleet.

Mightest ships at that time.

Tenn hoped to be transferred, one day, to one of the four new Super-class Star Destroyers that were currently being built. Those were monsters indeed, eight or ten times the size of the Imperial-class ships, which were themselves over a kilometer and a half in length. The SSDs looked like nothing so much as pie-shaped wedges sliced out of an asteroid and covered with armament.

Includes the Executor-like, the mistaken 8 km long but still EU canon sort of mini Executors, and other ships, possibly like Jerec's Vengeance (was it called like that? that one was really ace in fact).
Well, Jerec was cool. A good video game vilain. Not much relief, but clearly some charisma.

Shift change was coming, and officers and crew filled the halls on their way to their duty stations. Even though it would only be a drill, Tenn was looking forward to hearing the generators whine as the capacitors loaded, followed by the heavy vibrations and scorched-air smell as the ion cannons and lasers spoke, spewing hard energy across empty space to destroy the practice targets. To be able to reach out a hundred klicks or more and smash a ship to atomic dust was real power. And nobody was better at it than he was.

Weapons charge (capacitor loading). No direct feed for these ones.
Ion cannons and laser targets. Basically the same layman terms we have since, well, since the films are out. :)

Minimum range: 100 klicks. 100 km. In phase with the range given in ROTS' novelization. That said, this was against very large targets. Such heavy weapons have critically smaller ranges against smaller targets.
Just check out Robert's page for that. Yes, some of you readers have that guy, but he used high canon to get the ranges. Film and novelizations.

There was only one problem with doing so: to be completely excised, even temporarily, from the suit would kill him. Not even the safety of the hyperbaric chamber—indeed, not even his command of the dark side—could ensure his protection during such a procedure.

Explains how Vader got down so quick in ROTJ. Severely (?) damage the suit, and the big daddy's owned.
No wonder why he had to put extra plating on his shoulders.

Tarkin, who had been poring over a schematic hologram of the station that showed where the damage was, turned and stared through the port at the real thing.
It was indeed a mess. It appeared as if a giant hand had smashed the dock, then petulantly ripped sections of it loose and flung those into space. Debris of all sizes and shapes whirled and tumbled aimlessly, not having had time yet to settle into any sort of orbit.

Reminds me of the effects of that rhomanol fission bomb planed in a shuttle, which ripped off several decks of a New Republic large warship.

Still, we've seen the size of docks on the Death Star. Not that huge.

Tarkin's expression was pinched tight in anger, but his voice was level as he said, "Bring her around and let's have a closer look."
"Sir." A pause. "There's a lot of debris, sir."
"I can see that. I suggest you avoid running into it."
The pilot swallowed dryly. "Yes, sir."

They don't want the debris to hit the warship.

It's a small cruiser.

Ratua shook his head. That was for sure. If the Empire could make something like that work, there wouldn't be any place a Rebel force could hide—the superweapon could, with a single blast, destroy whole continents. Maybe even whole planets. Just knowing such a thing existed, it seemed, would be enough to keep the peace. You certainly wouldn't want to see it coming into your system with malign intent . . .

That Ratua guy can't think of any weapon that could destroy a continent in one shot.
He says continents, but he also says planets as well, though we know that the weapon is not able to destroy several planets at the same time.

If you're going to argue that he said continents, with an s, then it would mean that considering he said planets with an s as well, that he could think, at least, about a weapon that could destroy A planet.

Which is impossible. There's not even a single weapon that could destroy A planet at that time.

It's just a way to enumerate things it simply can't destroy, no matter the number of iterations, from one to infinite.

The N-One sector, a huge area equal to one twenty-fourth of a hemisphere, had been partly pressurized and heated, so at least Teela didn't have to wear a vac suit to work anymore. Thank the stars for that; she was sick to death of ending each day fatigued by the effort of manipulating the stiff joints and servos, the limited vision, and the inability to scratch—to name only a few problems. She'd worn vac suits before on jobs, and those experiences hadn't been pleasant, but this was by far the worst, because the Empire, no doubt in a cost-saving effort, had mandated the use of outmoded constant-volume suits instead of the newer, elastic one-piece designs.

Limited vision?
Where's that super advanced visor that casts a 3d holographics rendition of the environment in front of you?

An asteroid sufficiently high in nickel-iron content was hauled from the outlying belt to the masticators and fed into a maw; the whirling durasteel teeth chewed the asteroid to tiny bits and mixed them with alloy ores mined and brought up from Despayre, including quadanium. The resulting gravel had water added and was put under high pressure to form a slurry, then fed into pipelines that led to the smelters. These were essentially huge melting pots that refined the mix, burning off impurities. The resulting scarified ore was conveyed to extruders that pressed out the hull plate, rather like food paste from a squeezed tube. There was still a lot of slag left over, but this was just gathered together, pointed at the local star, and given a hard push. Months later, these slag-rafts would fall into the sun and be burned up.

Slag! Slag!

The smelters have enough firepower to slag asteroids!!! :)

Teela had been on projects before that used deep-space masticators and extruders, of course, such as skyhooks and wheelworlds. She'd never seen as large or as many as there were here, however. The amount of plate being produced was beyond any amount ever used in one place before.

Wheelwords.
Nice. Though not as wide, apparently, as ringworlds or even a Halo.

Vader had power, and he knew how to use it, no matter if he was overseeing the scouring of a continent from the bridge of his Star Destroyer or striking a man dead from across the room.

A continent?... Not a planet?

The viewports were opaqued, there being nothing to see but a kind of impressionistic fuzzy strangeness. Memah had tried looking out into the higher-dimensional realm early in the voyage, and had quickly realized that the resulting headache and nausea were not to her liking. Rodo, who had undertaken more than a few FTL voyages, had warned her, but she'd had to check it out for herself. Memah Roothes had never been one to take another's word for something when she could investigate herself; a trait, she reminded herself wryly, that had led to more than one headache over the years.

If I had to find an analogy, I'd say that's like being in a train that goes fast. Fast is above c. The scenery, outside, is real space. Hyperspace is a dimension so close to real space that there are interactions between the two. Starlight and gravitational fields among them.

The train's foggy window is the frontier between realspace (countryside) and the train (hyperspace).

Initially, people thought that simply standing up on a train would kill you. Seems that the reasoning applied to the dangers of hyperspace runs on the same lack of rationalization, just boosted.

And now that the station was being constructed here in the Horuz system, the importance of the work at the Maw was somewhat less than it had been. It was true that Qwi Xux's other projects — the Sun Crusher, the World Devastators, and other potent superweapons — were still in development there, as well as the installation being full of valuable scientists and technicians, but if Daala were to leave for a week or two, there would be no problem whatsoever with her captains maintaining security in her absence.

So by the time the station has been moved to Huluz system, the other superweapons are already being studied and prototyped.

I never got the EU timeline checked, so it helps.

We learn at the end of the paragraph that the battle station is still only "partly assembled".

Doan's smile faded. "Yeah. I knew a couple of guys shipped on her. It was a freak accident."
"Maybe. A backfire could overload the HM reactor and turn this station into radioactive dust, too." Doan shook his head. "Never happen. They got the Emperor himself looking over their shoulders on this one. They won't frip it up."
Tenn shrugged. There was little point in worrying about equipment failure. If the thing worked, it would prove the Death Star to be, as Tarkin had put it in one of his many inspirational addresses to the station's population, "The ultimate power in the galaxy." If it didn't work—well, the hypermatter reactor was capable of generating an energy burst equivalent to the total weekly output of several main-sequence stars; if anything went wonky, it wasn't likely he'd be around long enough to notice. Nor would anyone else.
"Yeah, well," he replied, "if they can build it so it holds together, I'll shoot it."

Adressed earlier on.

I'll just notice that the hypermatter reactor, when powering the up the weapons, doesn't seem to give a burst of energy. It's a very meticulous and progressive operation, taking at least 15-20 seconds to get the beam ready for fire.

Remember:

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.

1 hour 13 minutes to recharge the weapon, for 1/3 of the final power when the battle station will be fully operational.

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.

A burst, huh?

We see that what actually provided so much energy, as far as the Talon is concerned, was the result of an overload the reactor couldn't handle.
Just think about you need to vapourize an ISD, and then think about the firepower figures and other energy consumptions we heard in the last years. Multiple multi-teraton shots per second. Etc.

His nephew, Hora Graneet, had been a navy spacer on the Imperial-class Star Destroyer Mark II class vessel, which had been selected for a shakedown cruise testing one of the improved prototype hypermatter reactors. Tenn didn't know the specifics of what had happened, and didn't have anything close to the math needed to understand it anyway. He knew that hypermatter existed only in hyperspace, that it was composed of tachyonic particles, and that charged tachyons, when constrained by the lower dimensions of realspace, produced near-limitless energy. How this "null-point energy" had become unstable he didn't know. He only knew it had been powerful enough to turn an ISD-II and its crew of thirty-seven thousand people into floating wisps of ionized gas in a microsecond.

They were trying improved hypermatter reactors, and had an ISD II used for such an experiment.

EXERCISE SUITE, EXECUTIVE LEVEL, DEATH STAR

[...]

Thrice the normal gravity for a human body. Neat, but it looks like around ROTJ, imp troops didn't give a damn about those training rooms in increased g.

SUPERLASER SIMULATOR, THETA SECTOR, DEATH STAR

[...]

Not a single time they speak about a turbolaser, and all the descriptions point to much more complicated systems.

Triggering a monster like this wasn't like pressing the firing stud on a blaster. At optimum it would take fifteen or twenty seconds from the given command to fire until the main beam was ready to be unleashed, and they hadn't gotten close to that yet. Half the time during firing simulations they couldn't balance the phase harmonics enough to shoot the primary beam at all. And even if the magnetic ring was precisely stabilized, all it would take was one of the tributaries warbling so much as a microhertz out of phase, and the others would desynchronize as well. The result would be a feedback explosion along the beam shaft and back to the main reactor that would turn the battle station into an incandescent plasma cloud in less than a single heartbeat, and the Empire thanks your family very much for your sacrifice.
That wasn't going to happen on his watch, Tenn vowed. By the time the actual battery was operational, Tenn expected his crew to be running the program smooth as lube on polished densecris plate. But they weren't there yet. Not even within a parsec of close.

So if you disturb the weapons to such a small degree, either you stop the weapon, or make it blow up.

He smiled under the blast helmet, then grimaced as a rivulet of sweat ran into one eye. The milking headgear would be less than useless if the gun backfired, but it would make a dandy torture device for interrogating real spies. True, it was navy policy that gunners wear them, but who-ever'd designed these black buckets hadn't had to leave one on for a whole shift. They just made the job harder by restricting peripheral vision and essentially guaranteeing that you spent most of your shift clonking your head on pipes, struts, bulkheads, and the like. They were also hot and stuffy. Tenn was pretty sure some boot-head had designed them for looks and not function. When nobody was around, he let the men take the helmets off and breathe a bit, but given the nature of this sim battery, some by-the-book officer was always dropping by to gawk.

:) Lucas and his helmets.

Tenn scanned his board. The last orange light blinked off, and they were green straight across. He thumbed the safety button on the shifter above his head and pulled it down.
"Successful primary ignition achieved," the computer said.
There was a cheer from the crew, and Tenn smiled. "Thirty-eight seconds. That's a new record, even with the glitch, but we can do better." He took off his helmet. "Restart it. If we break thirty seconds before swing or third shift does, I'm buying the beer."
They cheered, and fell to work with a will. Once again, he smiled. Nothing seemed to motivate a crew like the lure of free beer.

Bunch of nerdy guys not knowing what they were about to do.

[Mr. Oragahn]

This is Mr. Oragahn claiming that up until the moment Alderaan's rings appear the observed energy is mid to low petatons "at best".
Of course anyone who has the films can easily do this:



The planet obviously expands in all directions in the 4 frame time interval shown here.
On those screencaps each pixel is roughly 125km and the planet expanded for at least several pixels. That would mean some 250km in a matter of four frames or 1500km/s. That is 6.6*10^36J. And the beam is STILL FIRING.
Really what makes one think he can be such a lying cunt and get away with it?

Maybe first because I'm not such a lying cunt?

Petatons of energy is at least thousands of teratons, more than enough to send hot crust matter into space. Petatons can mean anything from 2 PT to 999 PT.

The hemisphere facing the DS takes most of the damage. Debris from that zone are sent into space. The rest of the atmosphere is put on fire. Which makes it that the halo around the planet becomes thicker, brighter and bigger. How do you translate that as the whole planet expands, I don't know.

Especially since we know that a significant mass of the planet is sucked into hyperspace through an unquantifiable mechanism, which means that all those nifty calcs about energy needed to overcome gravity binding are in need of some severe lowering as well.

Check this page, under part B. The Surface Behavior.

See how the other side of Alderaan is, as a whole, not that much affected by the explosion. We see that only the blue haze expands, gets whiter and opaque, which is quite normal, as heat is transfered throughout the whole atmosphere.

That hypermatter is tachyonic was a possibility everyone was aware for years. I can't believe those idiots actually think that novel's statement about tachyons is some great discovery which somehow completely destroys our point.

I'm not going to deny the tachyonic nature of hypermatter, as it's defined in the book.
What I'm saying is that there's no proof that your tachyons are found only in realspace, at superluminal velocities, and not in another dimension... when the same book precisely describes hyperspace as a higher-dimensional universe.
This is not counting the many sources that refer to hyperspace as another dimension, and the rather lack of consistency on what hyperspace really is.

Hmm so because hypermatter is tachyonic that means that Acclamators use fusion reactors? I don't quite see the connection here but hey that's Trekkie logic for you.

Hey?
No. I say they used fusion cores, first because of the TPM quote about fusion that powers everything, secondly because the hypermatter reactors were still tested during the ISD I and ISDs II, and they had to send legion 501st to grab the power source for their Death Star.

It's quite clear that if anything, the CIS were likely leading in power technologies - after all, they came with the Death Star, and yet these better power cores didn't give them such an advantage against fusion powered ships.

[2046]

"Engineers." Tenn put a considerable amount of sarcasm in the word.
"Yeah, I hear that. But they're pulling out all the stops on this baby." He rubbed his hand on the control console. "Any problem they had, they threw enough money at it to bury it to the rails. We'll have the power, no worries there."
"And if somebody didn't forget to dog a bolt tight, maybe it won't blow us all to the other side of the Rim."
"Hey, I'm telling you, word is the worst piece of gear on it is still triple redundant."
"I had a nephew who was a deck monkey on the Battle Lance," Tenn said.
Doan's smile faded. "Yeah. I knew a couple of guys shipped on her. It was a freak accident."
"Maybe. A backfire could overload the HM reactor and turn this station into radioactive dust, too."
Doan shook his head. "Never happen. They got the Emperor himself looking over their shoulders on this one. They won't frip it up."
Tenn shrugged. There was little point in worrying about equipment failure. If the thing worked, it would prove the Death Star to be, as Tarkin had put it in one of his many inspirational addresses to the station's population, "The ultimate power in the galaxy." If it didn't work—well, the hypermatter reactor was capable of generating an energy burst equivalent to the total weekly output of several main-sequence stars; if anything went wonky, it wasn't likely he'd be around long enough to notice. Nor would anyone else.

Each component had to be precisely tuned and focused. If the primary beam focusing magnet was off a nanometer, the tributary beams would not coalesce, and there was a good chance of imbalance explosions in the beam shaft if the tributaries weren't pulsed in at exactly the proper time and in the proper sequence. The techs and engineers tended to wave that possibility off as too small to worry about. One chance in a hundred million, they said. Tenn wasn't swallowing that. When it came to something this potentially deadly, no odds were long enough. It was true that there were automatic fail-safes, but Tenn— and any chief worth his salt—trusted them just about as far as he could stroll in hard vac. Some of those engineers lived in skyhooks so far up past the clouds that they'd forgotten what the ground looked like. If a gun's designer wasn't willing to stand next to it when it was being tested well, Tenn saw no reason to be there, either.
Triggering a monster like this wasn't like pressing the firing stud on a blaster. At optimum it would take fifteen or twenty seconds from the given command to fire until the main beam was ready to be unleashed, and they hadn't gotten close to that yet. Half the time during firing simulations they couldn't balance the phase harmonics enough to shoot the primary beam at all. And even if the magnetic ring was precisely stabilized, all it would take was one of the tributaries warbling so much as a microhertz out of phase, and the others would desynchronize as well. The result would be a feedback explosion along the beam shaft and back to the main reactor that would turn the battle station into an incandescent plasma cloud in less than a single heartbeat, and the Empire thanks your family very much for your sacrifice.

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.

[Roondar]

*reads thread*

*smiles*

(appologies, I just had to do this - I know everyone here allready realised this is what the result of the book is)

Ahh, I see.. The DS uses some wonky chain reaction to blow up planets. Well, there goes the DET theory.

Please note that per 'Starwars-side' arguments we've had to endure for years this means that:

a) the 'real' yield cannot be calculated. Full stop. (After all, Phasers alledgedly use chain reactions and their 'real' yield can't be calculated because the effective yield of a CR weapon is not the real power input). We do know -from being told this ad. nauseum- that CR weapons are never as powerful as DET ones though.

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).

--

And lo and behold: no mention of neutronium in the DS hull either. In fact, it sounds like the hull is made of a refined form of whatever you find in the average nickel/iron asteroid with a bit of extra's from the prison planet.

Fits in nicely with a pilot of a cruiser being concerned with some debris left over after an explosion. Whoops, there goes the uber-hull argument!

--

Also note that the EU is fully part of canon in their mind so what this book says goes for them: Deathstar Superlaser = CR wonkyness, not DET. Even better, I've heard them reason many a time that the most recent source always overrules older sources. Including therefore the ICS firepower and hullstrength bits.

I'm amused now.

[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.

[Mr. Oragahn]

You're talking about a person who actually buys Darkstar's "band of brightness-anti-genesis effect" bull.

Besides the obvious ad hominem attack, have you actually read the passage in question?

The book apparently thinks something similar to this phenomenom - the band - does happen. However, not up to the point where the band produces the explosion, as Robert thinks; but it clearly describes a wall of fire that expands, leaving some kind of blackness inside.

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.

If the orange corresponds to fire, then there is no reason that the middle of the fireball would suddenly grow some huge black spot, unless something weird was already growing down there, while the orange disc continues to expand.
Maybe I'm reading too much into that, but it's clearly not the way fireballs work.
Ah, of course, I already adressed this.
Good job ignoring it.

That said, the main destruction process still delivers lots of energy on the facing hemisphere, drills a hole and starts an exotic reaction down there.

It's just that the whole weapon has several stages, several effects, and is certainly not a mere turbolaser.

No, itts because the ROTS novelization makes a statement about dragons in the center of stars and cousins of those dragons in starship reactors means Acclamators run on nuclear fusion.

It's more about how it says that fusion reactors power everything, from podracers to spaceships, back in TPM era.

That said, as far as I'm concerned, I could still stick with the higher canon, and only consider vague hypermatter references that would be present in the latest prequel novelizations. :)

But of course! "Kids talking about dragons living in stars" is iron clad evidence. No way around it: ALL SW ships use fusion.
But when a novel states in no unclear terms that DS reactor output is equivalent to "total weekly output of several main sequence stars" then we shouldn't in any way take it at face value. Oh no now we must concoct all kinds of goofy explanations to escape the clearly stated energy output.

Your "face value" is flawed. As simple as that. The book precisely says that it takes quite some time to power the whole weapon system.

This flies in the face of the comment, in the same book, that says that the multi star power is released in a burst - in a context where things are precisely said to go wrong.

Cherry picking, ignoring context and other elements won't win you a cookie.

The sheer fact that you actually pick the bits that please you from what I or other people say is just weakening your position. If you to debate correctly, you'll have to consider everything, and stop pulling strawmen.

[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.

[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