2046 wrote:
I'd be willing to roll with the idea of a single-frame implosion on ship-sized material disappearances.
Indeed, the smaller the mass, the less inertia we'd expect in that collapse process.
After all it is a very solid rule of physics.
In fact, what we see of a planet collapsing already represents
hundreds of kilometers being crushed per
fraction of a second.
It goes without saying that a similar albeit dramatically downscaled effect, applied to targets such as starships or space stations, would be barely noticed, unless, I suppose, the superlaser would be purposely set at a significantly lower power output. What I mean by lower is at a level that goes
well below the overkill "instaflash" hit and destruction fate that we saw starships suffer from.
Besides, it is quite a well verified idea when we think about it: only one target has been exposed for a somewhat longer duration, i.e. Alderaan, and that's also the only mass we've seen subjected to a "slow" collapse.
Considerably smaller targets (rebel capital ships) or objects subjected to superlaser overload (Death Star, about to fire at Yavin IV) all went up near immediately and so did the mass.
Somehow, a planet such as Alderaan seems to represent the proverbial ceiling, the sort of biggest target the Death Star's superlaser could assuredly destroy in its entirety with its system's power banks totally maxed out.
In the EU book, the 3 km wide Rebel cruiser and its hundreds of fighters sent against the battle station were again totally destroyed in a flash with a level of power that was quite close to the amounts fired at Despayre. Read: totally overkill for the nature of the target in question.
Next, with Despayre, we even saw that if the weapon wouldn't
saturate a massive target such as a planet in one shot, the exotic effects wouldn't even kick in, or perhaps would do so in such unnoticeable magnitudes that even the second shot at Despayre was barely capable of causing more destruction than the first, although some effects seemed to be slightly more severe, aside from the mere fact of shooting another round of neutrino-intertwinned-mountain-upheaving-energy-level into the planet. It's only the third shot, at the same power as the first two other shots, that seemed to unlock the chest and free the genius to the superblast, perhaps because the planet (or its shadow mass in hyperspace, whatever) was near sufficiently saturated (destabilized?) with the first two shots as to need just another push to literally pop.
Still, even that third shot, since not as powerful in terms of shock/inertia and perhaps hyperspace-strain as one full power single shot, didn't seem to manage to produce the reflux ripple, like if the superlaser somewhat couldn't pass the equivalent of the wall of sound.
Now, adding to those facts the superlaser's tendency to react with the whole of a target's mass, perhaps it comes as no surprise that the crew of the Death Star could simply not shoot through Yavin, not even take the risk of grazing the planet, but instead needed a clear shot at Yavin IV.