And you thought SW fanboys were bad...

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Mith
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And you thought SW fanboys were bad...

Post by Mith » Sun Nov 01, 2009 2:10 pm

Me and Mr. O here have been debating (http://forums.spacebattles.com/showthre ... 93&page=16)with another SB member about the subject of a room apparently being able to withstand a direct hit from a nuclear weapon. The quote, goes something like this:
She should feel safe here. Reach was one of the UNSC’s largest industrial bases, ringed with high-orbit gun batteries, space docks, and a fleet of heavily-armed capital ships. On the planet’s surface were Marine and Navy Special Warfare training grounds, OCS schools, and between her underground facilities and the surface were three hundred meters of hardened steel and concrete. The room where she now stood could withstand a direct hit from an 80-megaton nuke.

So why did she feel so vulnerable?
This is the conclusion that
higbvuyb:
"The room where she now stood could withstand a direct hit from an 80-megaton nuke."

'The room where she now stood'. This obviously refers to, well, the room in which she is standing, not the whole facility.

Not that an 80 megaton EPW is enough to destroy something buried under two kilometres of granite, of course. Meaning that the statement becomes even more nonsensical when interpreted as you would.
Later, to show how amazingly stupid it is to assume that the author is being literal about an undefined room taking a nuclear blast, rather than the 300 meters of hardened concreate and steel, I posted this:
Now, your statement is like me saying 'I'm wearing heavy plate armor of the finest steel, with chain mail covering the gaping holes, and leather to keep the chains from irritating my skin and to cushion any blows. As I stood, I could take a sword strike across the chest.
Compare:
She should feel safe here. Reach was one of the UNSC’s largest industrial bases, ringed with high-orbit gun batteries, space docks, and a fleet of heavily-armed capital ships. On the planet’s surface were Marine and Navy Special Warfare training grounds, OCS schools, and between her underground facilities and the surface were three hundred meters of hardened steel and concrete. The room where she now stood could withstand a direct hit from an 80-megaton nuke.
Now, as you can see here, I am indicating a very similar method of description that the author did in his quote. In both our quotes, we refer to a common knowledge sort of protection. For the Halo novel, it’s 300 meters of steel and concrete, something that someone would find similar to a modern military nuke bunker. For my quote, it’s the plate, chain, and leather used in medieval times. But the most important similarity is the last two:

‘The room where she now stood could withstand a direct hit from an 80-megaton nuke.’

And mine:

‘As I stood, I could take a sword strike across the chest.’

Alone, each sentence would be assumed to be literally by the average reader. And such readers would be confused; why is the sword strike or the nuke strike ineffective? Rooms aren’t immune to nuclear weapons and humans sure as hell can’t laugh off sword blows to the chest. However, when we take it in context with the rest of the paragraph, we get the reasons as for why these things are possible. For the novel, the room is located under 300 meters of concrete and steel, something commonly used in bunkers and it’s stated that her facility was within the bunker. For my quote, the human is wearing plate armor, which would easily deflect any blow to the chest. In other words the accumulated knowledge from the other the rest of the paragraph clues in the reader that the last sentence of each is not to be taken literally.

And before someone goes on to claim how assuming that the author isn’t being literal can be used as a means to misquote them, allow me to point out that terms such as pulverize and vaporize are also used very commonly in sci-fi and fantasy. And in many cases, the terms are not literal, but to show a great deal of damage was done.

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Re: And you thought SW fanboys were bad...

Post by The Dude » Sun Nov 01, 2009 2:57 pm

Your whole confusing analogy aside, only a fool would consider the room itself to be safe from an 80 megaton blast, rather then the whole facility. You don't walk into to many bunkers with "this area rated for 10Mt", "this are rated for 80Mt" signs in different rooms.

That said, Halo fanboy's can be pretty bad. I hear Fivers are worse but I've never run across one.

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Re: And you thought SW fanboys were bad...

Post by Mike DiCenso » Sun Nov 01, 2009 5:03 pm

The Fivers largely seemed to drop out of the Versus debates a long, long time ago when it became pretty apparent that their tech wasn't up to snuff compared to most of what was out there. When it was revealed that a Minbari Sharlin could be easily destroyed by the proximity detonation of a 2 megaton nuke, it ment that almost any other group could utilize pretty standard nukes in wiping the floor with them (as per dialog from "Points of Departure"). Shadow battlecrab ships can be destroyed by 500 megatons, though even in that case the ship destroyed took only a relatively small fraction of that bomb's total energy release. If that wasn't damning enough, the Babylon 5 space station itself had weapons rated at only 200 megawatts, which were still considered fairly effective weapons against all the other young races' vessels.
-Mike

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Re: And you thought SW fanboys were bad...

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Nov 02, 2009 2:58 am

And a distant 10 mt nuke clearly destroyed a Shadow Scout ship. Scout is a misnomer though, as they're 300 meters long, though some claim they're only 150 meters long.
Still, the ship was quite far from the nuke. It was saturated by kilotons and that's all.

There's a sequence of Battlecrabs attacking a Narn planet with a base on it, it's even cited on one of the two main techy B5 websites, but the scales are completely off (just like the scales in many SF sequences or even in WH40K Firewarrior cutscene).

Other than that, you also have Galen giving Sheridan a taste of what's to come as a mysterious fleet attacks a planet from orbit, and you see very large yellow beams striking the surface, but there's nothing like nuclear effects going on.

Then you have the Excalibur concentrating its super weapon to pulverize a small asteroid.

You have some higher numbers, with the Narn nukes, or the yield of each Shadow Planet Killer missile.

That said, it may seem weaker than many other universes, but it's probably the closer to reality you can count, as far as energies and materials are concerned.

Aside from that Zohak guy who only posts to drop excruciatingly long blocks of text and quotes without explaining why he posts them at all --and lots of people actually ignore his "contributions" since very little people ever quote anything from the data he provides-- there's almost no one left. At least no one we can identify as a strong fanboy.

The hard ones seem to have solely isolated themselves in one of those pure B5 community forums, and even there, you have a mix of wank and reasonable claims.

As for Halo, I got to see a new face of that Hig dude. I didn't expect him to reach so low when hurt in his beliefs.
There are some fans pushing big numbers at every opportunity, like Nattuo, but despite this, I found discussing with him much more enjoyable than with Hig.
With Nattuo, generally, when he's wrong, he either admits or simply drops the point. Or still considers himself right, but drops the point nonetheless, perhaps to bring it later on. With Hig, however, even when he is wrong, it turns out that you are the one who's always wrong... and stupid, apparently. At some point in the discussion, it became so absurd that he did the equivalent of suddenly swapping personalities, and literally attacked some of his own points after trying to pass them as mine, and contradicted himself several times without realizing it. The last post of mine is pretty much a whole demonstration of this, and how he actually openly recognizes opting for the most illogical interpretation when addressing some other bunker cases, admitting that yes, having a heavy door that blocks an airblast changes the meaning of "direct hit" from "hit on the surface" to "bomb that explodes in the tunnel behind the door", or "in some adjacent room".
Of course the whole thread is actually his baby, somehow, and features calcs that have been attacked by buugipopuu.
Hig even managed to be worse than Monster104, who generally picks any good occasion for some good Halo wank.

And if things were not silly enough, that new Encyclopedia that came out is all over the place, with claims of teratons but presenting materials or gear that simply don't fit with that reality. You have space weapons with near c ranges, and high tech rifles that barely touch anything at 100 meters. Some official rep at Bungie said that there already was a patch en route, for this Encyclopedia.

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Re: And you thought SW fanboys were bad...

Post by The Dude » Mon Nov 02, 2009 12:07 pm

Mr. Oragahn wrote:And a distant 10 mt nuke clearly destroyed a Shadow Scout ship. Scout is a misnomer though, as they're 300 meters long, though some claim they're only 150 meters long.
*shrug* Don't get to hung up on the ships name and size. If it's designed for recon, it doesn't much matter whether it is 150m or 300m long. The size isn't going to change it's role, in fact a 300m long recon craft would probably be more effective then a 150m long one.

I realize my post isn't all that clear but hopefully you get my point.

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Re: And you thought SW fanboys were bad...

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Nov 02, 2009 2:05 pm

The Dude wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote:And a distant 10 mt nuke clearly destroyed a Shadow Scout ship. Scout is a misnomer though, as they're 300 meters long, though some claim they're only 150 meters long.
*shrug* Don't get to hung up on the ships name and size. If it's designed for recon, it doesn't much matter whether it is 150m or 300m long. The size isn't going to change it's role, in fact a 300m long recon craft would probably be more effective then a 150m long one.

I realize my post isn't all that clear but hopefully you get my point.
More effective at dying. The nuke would still be 10 MT. :)

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Re: And you thought SW fanboys were bad...

Post by Mike DiCenso » Mon Nov 02, 2009 4:24 pm

The 300 meter "scout" would certainly intercept more of the bomb's energy that a 150 meter one would. Of course if in the role of a scout craft the Shadow vessel is optimized for recon duties, not combat and may be more lightly armed and armored (shielded) than a fully combat-equipped craft would be.
-Mike

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Re: And you thought SW fanboys were bad...

Post by Praeothmin » Mon Nov 02, 2009 5:22 pm

The Dude wrote:Your whole confusing analogy aside, only a fool would consider the room itself to be safe from an 80 megaton blast, rather then the whole facility. You don't walk into to many bunkers with "this area rated for 10Mt", "this are rated for 80Mt" signs in different rooms.

That said, Halo fanboy's can be pretty bad. I hear Fivers are worse but I've never run across one.
Exactly.
The author was quite clearly indicating the entire facility, at that depth, was able to resist an 80 Megaton warhead explosion, not just a single room...

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Re: And you thought SW fanboys were bad...

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Nov 02, 2009 5:26 pm

Mike DiCenso wrote:The 300 meter "scout" would certainly intercept more of the bomb's energy that a 150 meter one would. Of course if in the role of a scout craft the Shadow vessel is optimized for recon duties, not combat and may be more lightly armed and armored (shielded) than a fully combat-equipped craft would be.
-Mike
Possibly, but they were used for battle as well, and used the same kind of defenses as Battlecrabs. Armour doesn't seem to be what Shadows rely on for defense. It's more than likely that the dissipation skin of a Battlecrab is much more effective, but then again we saw two Narn Cruisers focusing their beams (two per cruiser, so a total of 4 max, but perhaps only two, I don't remember correctly) on the same spot on a Battlecrab spike and severing it almost immediately.

B5tech (which has a forum where Fivers "regrouped") gives a length of 356 meters for the Scout, but it may be disputed.

Some of the proprieties of the SPK are discussed there, although it's good to remember that the Drakh quite sucked at exploiting the SPK's true abilities.

The description of its abilities is quite odd and largely depends on who's using the SPK, but it's clear that it can kill all life on the surface of a planet, and even blow one up by technobabble.

When used by the Drakh, the missiles weren't causing much damage, although somehow they still managed to kill a world. Yet the SPK is capable of unleashing "thousands of megatons times thousands of missiles", and those missiles seem huge.
Each one of these impressive warheads would have to be worth many gigatons to match the effects.

There's the SPK's capacity of drain power sources, which itself should probably manage to kill anything and turn a planet into a frozen wasteland, but I don't think we ever saw that, aside from used against ships.

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Re: And you thought SW fanboys were bad...

Post by Mike DiCenso » Mon Nov 02, 2009 9:02 pm

The so-called "battlecrab" design is clearly different from the scout configuration, not merely size. Armor thickness, shields, whatever defense is is that Shadow vessels have it clearly is not equal any more than you can claim the same for say, an X-wing versus an ISD, nor a runabout versus a GCS. So that I do grant there are likely different capabilities per vessel. What is the power output of a Narn cruiser, and how does just managing to clip a single section of spine off mean anything?
-Mike
Last edited by Mike DiCenso on Tue Nov 03, 2009 4:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: And you thought SW fanboys were bad...

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Nov 02, 2009 10:26 pm

Mike DiCenso wrote:The so-called "battlecrab" design is clearly different from the scout configuration, not merely size. Armor thickness, shields, whatever defense is is that Shadow vessels have clearly is not equal any more than you can claim the same for say, an X-wing versus an ISD, nor a runabout versus a GCS.
Perhaps it's true for the shields, and that would remain to be proved, but I'm not aware of any evidence that there is a difference in armour thickness.
So that I do grant there are likely different capabilities per vessel. What is the power output of a Narn cruiser, and how does just managing to clip a single section of spine off mean anything?
-Mike
Well, the spine, without evidence of anything else, it would be of the same constitution as pretty much anything else from the ship, as far as it can be observed. Hell, it's B5, with very little work on the CGI models, so I really wonder how someone can find evidence that there's something special about the surface.
There wasn't even a psyguy to lower the ship's controls and defensive systems.

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Re: And you thought SW fanboys were bad...

Post by Mike DiCenso » Tue Nov 03, 2009 5:22 pm

Mr. Oragahn wrote:Perhaps it's true for the shields, and that would remain to be proved, but I'm not aware of any evidence that there is a difference in armour thickness.
If a scout can be destroyed more readily than can a battlecrab (10 mt versus an upper limit of 500 mt), then it follows that there is some difference in shields/armor between the two obvious classes of Shadow vessels.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Well, the spine, without evidence of anything else, it would be of the same constitution as pretty much anything else from the ship, as far as it can be observed. Hell, it's B5, with very little work on the CGI models, so I really wonder how someone can find evidence that there's something special about the surface.
There wasn't even a psyguy to lower the ship's controls and defensive systems.
It's assumed by some that the Shadow vessels use a weapon adapation similar to the Vorlon ships. They may also have real force field type shields as well as varying thicknesses of armor. The spine damage tells us little to nothing since we have no information on how much energy is put out by a cruiser's main much less how energy a concentrated attack by 4 of them would mean towards what is needed in cliping a small thin tip of a battlecrab's spine, which may or may not be hollow structure and probably is of a thickness far less than the main body of the craft.
-Mike

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Re: And you thought SW fanboys were bad...

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Tue Nov 03, 2009 7:14 pm

Mike DiCenso wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Perhaps it's true for the shields, and that would remain to be proved, but I'm not aware of any evidence that there is a difference in armour thickness.
If a scout can be destroyed more readily than can a battlecrab (10 mt versus an upper limit of 500 mt), then it follows that there is some difference in shields/armor between the two obvious classes of Shadow vessels.
They used shields to spread damage, so it's logical that the larger they are, the more they can cope with.
It doesn't mean BC has thicker armour than a Scout though. I wouldn't assume unless strong evidence supports this idea.

What's the evidence of the 500 MT?
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Well, the spine, without evidence of anything else, it would be of the same constitution as pretty much anything else from the ship, as far as it can be observed. Hell, it's B5, with very little work on the CGI models, so I really wonder how someone can find evidence that there's something special about the surface.
There wasn't even a psyguy to lower the ship's controls and defensive systems.
It's assumed by some that the Shadow vessels use a weapon adapation similar to the Vorlon ships. They may also have real force field type shields as well as varying thicknesses of armor. The spine damage tells us little to nothing since we have no information on how much energy is put out by a cruiser's main much less how energy a concentrated attack by 4 of them would mean towards what is needed in cliping a small thin tip of a battlecrab's spine, which may or may not be hollow structure and probably is of a thickness far less than the main body of the craft.
-Mike
Losing the spine disabled the ship as much as it had to be tugged by another BC. So since losing a single arm is so crucial to the ship, it's more than logical that they'd be protected by the same shield strength. Otherwise it's silly to have an entire ship with a heavily armoured core, be crippled because it loses a small arm.

As for the firepower, it cannot be so astonishing, considering that such ships were attacking human fleets and didn't curbstomp them so badly, and they're hardly given petawatt weapons of any relevance.

Now, we better start a B5 thread if you want to. We've gone too far on the offtopicness.

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Re: And you thought SW fanboys were bad...

Post by Mike DiCenso » Wed Nov 04, 2009 8:35 am

Mr. Oragahn wrote: They used shields to spread damage, so it's logical that the larger they are, the more they can cope with.
It doesn't mean BC has thicker armour than a Scout though. I wouldn't assume unless strong evidence supports this idea.

What's the evidence of the 500 MT?
It is only logical inference on shields and armor given the clearly different roles of the craft and real-life precedent. As for the 500 MT, you of all people should recall G'Kar's statements from "Into the Fire" as well as Ivanova's from "The Hour of the Wolf" place the yield at somewhere around 500-600 MT. The one blast we see allows for up to at least 10% or so of the blast to be absorbed by the the Shadow vessel, or around 250,000 TJ (60 MT). At least 11-12 MT was absorbed, assuming somewhat less was absorbed. The battlecrab was also not completely destroyed, it was blown to large pieces, not utterly vaporized, nor reduced to tiny, barely recognizable fragments.


Mr. Oragahn wrote:Losing the spine disabled the ship as much as it had to be tugged by another BC. So since losing a single arm is so crucial to the ship, it's more than logical that they'd be protected by the same shield strength. Otherwise it's silly to have an entire ship with a heavily armoured core, be crippled because it loses a small arm.
Or it was not possible to protect that structure in such a way as you can with the main body of the craft.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:As for the firepower, it cannot be so astonishing, considering that such ships were attacking human fleets and didn't curbstomp them so badly, and they're hardly given petawatt weapons of any relevance.

Now, we better start a B5 thread if you want to. We've gone too far on the offtopicness.
Again, establish an upper and lower limit for the firepower since we could be talking anything from hundreds of gigawatts to at least single terawatts per beam and remember that unlike a bomb blast, a beam is concentrating a great deal of energy into a much smaller area (which the shields and armor hopefully are able to deflect and dissipate).

Anyway, what's needed to be said has been said, either start a thread or let it rest here. B5 tech simply isn't up to the level of other sci-fi franchises.
-Mike

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Re: And you thought SW fanboys were bad...

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Wed Nov 04, 2009 1:58 pm

I posted a reply here.

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