SDN: To Ender and Lantean drones

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Mr. Oragahn
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SDN: To Ender and Lantean drones

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Fri Feb 13, 2009 10:55 pm

As usual, it didn't take much for a typical SDN versus debater to jump at any glimpse of mistake or any form of excuse to flush a diarrhea of insults and stupidity.

I'm going to address this nonsense.
First, a while back, following the airing of Stargate Atlantis 4th season's Adrift and Lifeline episodes, the two first ones, l33telboi started a thread to post observations here.
Among the many points addressed in his thread, we came to look at the sequence of asteroid pulverization (which l33t started a smaller thread for at SBC.

Recently, a guy nicknamed RJLCyberPunk (or PunkMeister in other places, notably at SDN, and also registered at Gateworld if I'm correct) started what looked like an innocent thread at SBC about the drones. I know he also runs a low traffic vs website which I registered at some while ago, before realizing what it was about.

It wasn't clear that his thread (at SBC) was going to serve as a source of information and ammo for his own arguments in a thread at SDN, If Ancients (SG) tech is found in the SW galaxy...., which he started a few days earlier at the end of January 09.

Time went on, I posted my own opinions and the results of some observation I and l33t made, including firepower figures for the drones.

Logically, RJLC started parroting these opinions, calcs and other pieces of info for his debate, and this is where around page 6 of the SDN thread, Ender intervened with the all natural bile you can expect from these folks.
This is where the comedy really writes itself as well. Therefore, I'll quote Ender's sneerful post and just deal with each of his points, which he seems rather proud of for some reason.



Ender -- Post subject: Re: If Ancients (SG) tech is found in the SW galaxy.... Post Posted: 2009-02-12 10:43pm wrote: I didn't waste my time reading the whole of this thread. But I will address the absolutely atrocious analysis work done here.
Yes. Most of what he actually typed his nothing more than the result of his totally assumed ignorance of the topic at hand and where material comes from. The surprise!
For Reference, all this is work done by one Mr.Oraghan at SB. PM glossed over that fact except for a throw away line and is basicially trying to create the impression that it is his. We do not have an explicit rule against plagiarism, but as someone who does a lot of analysis, I think stuff like this is a good example of why we should.
Actually, as shown at the beginning of this post, I posted my calculations and observations at SFJN first, and only a very few excerpts at SBC.
Also, the pictures you'll see below are actually PunkMaister's as far as I can tell, since I never made them, nor l33telboi as far as I can verify (both here and at SBC).
Of course, there is a wide gulf between what I've done and what this guy does. Mr.Oraghan is one of the many sockpuppets of some twit from that RSA cesspit.
Classic. That's sheer ignorance. Anyone here would know this couldn't be further away from the truth. Just a recurring buzzword in their mouths anyway.
He believes, among other things, that power is irrelevant to the effects of a process, that conservation of energy is not in fact true,...
A rather cheap shot reference at about a post I made on the way repulsors work, according to an unfounded ICS claim about how the floatation created by repulsorlifts was totally powerless, debunked by Vympel himself while citing a piece of the AOTC novel, regarding the time Obi-Wan pulls some cables off from the killer droid's entrails, and both start to plummet.
I pointed out that the topic of anti-gravity was just too complex, that planets don't consume power to maintain gravity as far as we know, that the energy involved wasn't necessarily produced by the ship itself, and that again in the context of trying to make sense of the explanation that hyperdrives were built in the vicinity of black holes and were the result of another technobabble gibberish about space time knots what have you.
... and can't do basic math. This will come into play here shortly.
Actually, you'll see that the calculations were right, and the error is indeed an error, but a rather obvious one that I freely admit, not a stupid belief which sounds as bad as claiming Earth is flat.
PunkMaister wrote: That is the episode but if you think it validates your claim of the asteroids being about the size of a jumper think again, and it is that video that provides the evidence to the contrary and here it is:

Image

First is a comparison between the overall size of the main tower and the jumpers here:
Image
We can see clearly how big and large the circumference of the building is in relation to the ship's overall size...
Failure to correct for perspective when measuring the Puddle Jumper. Which makes the rest Error Carried Forward, but lets run through it anyways since it ends up being irrelevant.
PunkMaister wrote: Second we have an asteroid about to impact said tower here:

Image

And here it is you see to validate your claim it has to be that either the puddle jumpers somehow grew in size or the tower in question shrank which we know it cannot be. The asteroid envelopes the whole width of the building as is about to hit!
Again, failure to correct for perspective. We do not know the relative positions of the asteroid, tower, and camera. The more conservative approach (and as we shall see, the correct one) would be to assume that it is close to the ship that has been heading towards it at high acceleration the entire time, but that would drive down the size of the asteroid and thus the power of the event. And SB analysis is all about getting the value you want, not about figuring out a consistent and accurate value.
Although I'm in agreement about the atrocious scaling job done there, we can appreciate the public sharing of his hatred towards Spacebattles.
Many would also pick the irony of his final statement.
PunkMaister wrote: And finally we have another size reference as the puddle jumper maneuvers up and away from the tower after it destroys the offending asteroid:

Image

So while the asteroids were probably not kilometers wide they were certainly in orders to 8 and even 20 times bigger than the jumpers in question that one was easily 20 times the size of the jumper...
If you want to lie, yes, one could certainly draw that conclusion. However if you seek to determine accurate values, you will notice that if you assume that the puddle jumper does not magically change size, it is more consistent for a much smaller asteroid being closer to the puddlejumper in image 2. It is an incredibly simple exercise to subtend the angle in a manner similar to how one covers the moon with your thumb, even without numbers. Given that we have the puddlejumper for reference we can do this relative to it. Eyeballing it, the PJ covers about 3x as much of the screen as the asteroid. For that asteroid to be 20x the diameter of the PJ, there would need to be a separation of multiple kilometers between them. If that were the case, then there would be no need for the evasive action we see in image 3.

So we have intentional misrepresentation of the scene in question to inflate the numbers. Which is of course the point, PunkMaister and the others at SB are looking for high values, not an accurate assessment. This turns out to be a trend.
PM, at this point, was largely backpedalling from his previous claim that the drones were pulverizing kilometer wide asteroids.
We can again wiggle at the "trend" stab. Let's just remember it's SDN, haven of parsimony, fair observations and objectively reasonable low lower ends when it comes to Star Wars and Star Trek, and probably the last serious versus board where there's a complete consensus in support of Saxton's official writings in SW.

A trend, says who?

PunkMaister wrote: I need to correct the overall scales I posted earlier as is actually 2,3 or more times larger than the jumpers and not 20. This darn connection just keeps breaking off darn it! Anyhow here are some calcs about the whole deal by Mr.Oraghan.
Me wrote: A 10 meters wide asteroid has a mass of 1220 tons for a vlume of 524 m³.

That is 2,328.2442748091603053435114503817 kg/m³.

Rounded to 2,328.24 kg/m³.
In typical SB fashion they work back from pretty much any starting point they want to get whatever figures they want. Apparently that makes more sense to them than doing research. This is a good example of that, but another one that I won't be surprised if PM trots out was the time they took a magazine line about zero point energy having enough energy in the volume of a coffee cup to boil the oceans and worked from that, leading to a long argument about what was the valid size for a coffee cup.
A sweeping slanderous generalization of a whole community because of statements made by a few at SBC regarding ZPE, how surprising.
Anyway, we have effectively an arbitrary density for a given asteroid rather than making assumptions about it. For carbonaceous types graphite would have been a better base assumption.

Also, apparently he has no idea what "rounding" is, needing to go to 28 decimal places. I suspect this is an attempt to make the work look really precise and adopt an artificial air of validity. Of course, looking accurate and being accurate are totally different things.
Obviously, someone over there has a different meaning for the word rounding.
As for the calculation? Ender debunks nothing. His rebuttal his a mix of maybes and assumptions, as you can see below.
That is, the density figure was nothing more than a check. We could see that as Wong's calculator drastically rounded numbers to a very few decimals, the final figure wasn't totally identical.
But the difference was minor.
Me wrote:Let's say that certain debris were 1 m wide.

An asteroid, assumed as a sphere, being 1 meter wide, has a volume of 1 m³.
Yes ladies and gentlemen, that is correct. Here Mr Oraghan apparently thinks a sphere and a cube are one and the same. A sphere with a diameter of 1 meter will have a volume of ~0.52 meters^3, while a cube 1 meter on a side will have a volume of 1 m^3.

The alternative is that Mr Oraghan is a lying sack of shit who is trying to artificially inflate his numbers. It's like a choose your own adventure.
Yes, in Ender's world, I'm either as dumb as toothpick, or a "lying sack of shit" with an agenda to inflate numbers.
Completely impossible to compose in his head the idea that it could merely be a ... mistake?

WOW! A ... mistake?? What's that?
Yes, a mistake, no more no less.
Which means the following bit, from the original post:
Let's say that certain debris were 1 m wide.

An asteroid, assumed as a sphere, being 1 meter wide, has a volume of 1 m³.

The debris move at 19.5 meters over .25 seconds, or 78 m/s.

The kinetic energy is:

E = 1/2 x m x v²
E = .5 x 2,328.24 x 6084
E = 7,082,506.08 joules (for an asteroid of 2,328.24 kg)

So we get a ratio of:
E = 3,042 joules / kg
... is quite wrong. But I don't feel the need to explain that it was just a mistake, as I suppose I was thinking in cubic meters and for some reason my brain fused and went with a cube instead of a sphere. I don't think I need to tell that I know the difference between a sphere and a cube.

I don't even know why I typed this, as it's totally irrelevant to the following and final calc in my original post. That's probably just me typing stuff as I was thinking without really checking back to see what I typed there. Yes, that happens, and yes, it's unfortunate.

However, is this proving anything about the calculation? No.
As far as I'm concerned, the secondary calc for the whole mass, which is just as basic as it can get, is absolutely correct, and his exalted excellence Ender could have easily known this by using the same speed (78 m/s) with the same mass (18,496 tons) I used.
Me wrote: The debris move at 19.5 meters over .25 seconds, or 78 m/s.
We know the scaling is off, so this is highly suspect.
This figure has absolutely nothing to do with PunkMaister's scaling.
Me wrote:The kinetic energy is:

E = 1/2 x m x v²
E = .5 x 2,328.24 x 6084
E = 7,082,506.08 joules (for an asteroid of 2,328.24 kg)

So we get a ratio of:
E = 3,042 joules / kg

If applied to the whole asteroid's mass, and remembering that a noticable portion of the asteroid was beyond that range two frames earlier, I tried to get the total energy for an asteroid which was 24.75 meters wide:
All of this is highly suspect given the above flaws. By the way, note that there is zero attempt to justify an asteroid diameter of 24.75 meters.
It's actually amply justified, both at SFJN and SBC, two websites he does know. However, for someone who thinks he knows where the info comes from, who I am and who my idol is, he seems to make a lot of uneducated guesses after all.
Me wrote:Mass of a 24.75 m wide granite asteroid: 18,496,000 kg

Total E = 56,264,832,000 joules.

Squid's E = 28,132,416,000 J.

I don't know if it's quite a good way to obtain the energy...
Granite is formed from volcanic activity, when molten rock is subjected to extreme pressure. Something tells me there is very little in the way of molten rock of intense pressure in an asteroid field.
It depends where the asteroids come from. If they were part of a much larger mass (planet or moon), yes, you'd have found that pressure at a given time.
But wait, that's not the funniest part!
Further granite has a density of ~2750 kg/m^3 which doesn't match his little derivation above.
Have at him boys.
Indeed, it does not match it. My figure is based on a lower density. A figure which I picked from no else place but Wong's own asteroid calculator:
M. Wong, about granite wrote: Density is roughly 2330 kg/m³. If any readers have access to more accurate thermophysical property data on granite, I would appreciate the input.
I could pick the greater density, but I'm sure I'd be accused of craving for the highest figures.
And finally, as we can see, the whole basis to refuse the calc is nothing more than a biased, ignorant and hasty opinion. Good job.

As for the carbonaceous type asteroid, graphite inside, the average value would be around 1750 kg/m³.

Again, picking the average 24.75 meters diameter for the asteroid, we have a volume of 7.9382 e3 m³, a mass of 13,891,850 kg, an overall KE of 42.259 e9 joules, for an expansion speed of 78 m/s.

Therefore 21.1295 GJ per squid (two were used).

This is the pure kinetic energy, it does not account for the heated up material, for the extreme dust-like pulverization of the rock, nor the energy required to drill into the asteroid.

Besides, as pointed out, a surface explosion on the backside of the asteroid --necessary to explain why the tower's glassy surface just behind was not visibly damaged by any shard-- would lead to a figure four times the result, according to a note l33telboi found.
Which would bring the drone's yield to 84.518 GJ, and obviously quite more when you'd consider all the parameters, meaning that we're quite likely around the 100 GJ value if not much more, and that even for weak asteroids.

That goes without counting the possibly higher feats involving drones burrowing through Wraith ships' armour.

Finally, regarding PunkMaister's plagiarism, shame on him as well.

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