Mike, I'm not a scientist nor an engineer, but half of your problems could be solved by some self study of your own on basic structural and scientific principles.
Mike DiCenso wrote:
Here you go again. You are going out of your way to misrepresent another person's point of view. Yes, speculating is all we can do. But to declare, flat out that the only possibility is that a SW ship is doing nothing but magically brute forcing it's way into space ala Newtonian mechanics (defying the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy)
Wait, since when do Newtonian mechanics defy CoE now?
And what you do not seem to understand is that, if we go only by primary canon, “brute force”
is the only possible way for
anything to work! Could you imagine going up to a scientist and telling him “how do you know that the chemical reaction you just made produced an equal mass of products? You just assume that the reaction brute-forced its way using Conservation of Mass!”?
Your argument is still the ridiculous “well, you are assuming that observable facts are true…Einstein’s theory of relativity
could be false!” that ignorant debaters just love to toss around. Your argument is this:
It is an assumption, not a fact, that Star Wars should be analyzed using Scientific data.
Which proves my entire point here.
Additionally,
all calculations are derived here from scientific principles that ultimately stem from CoE. When you try to calc the energy needed for a phaser to vaporize a human, your math is based on the "assumption" that the breaking of molecular bonds requires energy to be transferred; CoE.
is sheer dishonesty, especially when other people bring up the inconvenient possibility, backed by evidence from a highly placed source (the ANH novelization), that such things exists (repulsorlift, antigravity), you then try to use flowery language to dismiss it. We know such things exist and we know it's an integral part of the drive systems that SW ships use.
Repulsorlifts still require energy. Read
Shadows of Mindor. If I recall, I have already explained this; and antigravity, as Young explains perfectly, only accounts for one G, and even that energy isn't free, because the gravitational potential energy that the craft would otherwise have had has to go somewhere. Same thing with repulsorlifts. No free energy here.
It does not. Because you and those who wrote the Episodes II and III ICS cherry picked the evidence and ignored anything else.
Brian Young presents several examples of high acceleration feats from both trilogies. This isn’t an outlier, and it certainly is not “cherry picking”.
Mind you, Brian Young himself does not care for the EU. So, based on solely on the movies and perhaps the movie-novels, you have various instances of indisputable high-acceleration feats, and, as a premise, you presume that the SW universe can be explained scientifically; ergo, you get the numbers he gets.
Which gets us back to Brian's Case Study, in which he dishonestly oversimplified the process, which we know to be false since the outed emails from Wayne Poe's secret little cabal group show us that they did this all with the goal of "making things look better in comparison to Trek".
Who is “misrepresenting” one’s position now? This ridiculous libel is a conspiracy theory minded, fucking
crazy delusion. As though Saxton would risk his reputation and career to win an online debate. Do you really think that we value this silly diversion from real life as much as you do?
1. At no point has Saxton
ever commented on Star Wars’s technical capabilities in relation to Star Trek. At no point has he ever implied that he is a fan of Star Trek, or knows anything about it. To claim otherwise is to suggest that Saxton has been
deliberately hiding his role in the debate for what…15 years? Ever since the early years of the internet! Did he and Wong have it all planned out ahead of time? Did Saxton spend god-knows how much time writing a detailed website for the sole purpose of winning an online fantasy debate? Why is he hiding this from you? And why would he thank Mike Wong and other Warsies at the end of the ICSII, if he were
secretly conspiring with them?
2. If Saxton wanted to win the debate with the ICS’s, he could have done so, with
ridiculous ease. Simply add in snippets rationalizing every possible contradiction to his sources. Trust me; he certainly did not write the book with any such intention.
3. Have you ever considered the possibility that Saxton consulted Wong and other Warsies because many of them have relevant university degrees, and Mr. Anderson does not? Have you ever considered why all of the scientists and engineers favor the Warsie side, and that, to my knowledge,
not a single scientist, engineer or anyone with a relevant degree has
ever been confirmed to support Trek?
4. Have you ever wondered why, for example, Atomic Rockets, a completely unrelated, but scientifically centered site, cites stardestroyer.net as a source, yet nobody ever goes to this website for scientific information?
Really, this mentality of yours that there is an Evil Warsie Conspiracy to win a nerd debate is completely self delusional. Are you attempting to boost your own ego here?
Wait, wait a minute. Do you think that writing excessively long and often meaningless dissertations are a qualification for acceptability from a scientific standpoint? Really?
Saxton’s work is only “meaningless” because half of it is completely beyond all of us to calculate or replicate.
But your entire argument here is that we cannot "assume" that conventional physics apply to X incident in Star Wars. On this premise,
every calculation you have EVER made is completely bunk, because it is based on modern scientific thought, and all of it collapses like a house of cards if you throw out CoE at a moments notice.
JMS and Anderson have both written here on this board as well as on their own websites very detailed essays on the nature of science fiction technologies. By that rationale, JMS and RSA have both equalled or surpassed Saxton and Wong many times over. But that's not how things work. The evidence has to be brought to bear. In the case of Saxton and Wong, and in the case we are focused on here, Brian Young, the evidence was clearly cherry picked or misrepresented to achieve the highest possible power outputs for SW ships, and in some cases, they did so with the ulterior motive of achiving superiority over Trek.
No, Darkstar’s scientific knowledge is not a fraction of that of Saxton’s or Wong’s, but he still feels entitled to call them out of using "bad science". Could you imagine how many head would roll if we hired a team of scientists to cross check your own theories on Star War technology and yields?
“I don’t assume that Newtonian physics apply to Star Wars.”
Again, here we go again with the misrepresentation of your opposition. A classic bad Warsie tactic, if ever there was one. Too bad there's not another mod, this would grounds for another warning.
No, it would not. Calling me a faggot would, but in a board inhabited by neo-cons, could I be surprised that homophobia is tolerated here?
It's been pointed out to you that only one TL bolt ever observed did that.
Nope. The blaster bolt that hits Luke Skywalker’s artificial hand in RotJ does as well.
If that was a Trek phaser doing that, Warsies would declare it to be a statistical outlier and dismiss it.
Really? Feel free to show me a single instance in which Mike Wong
EVER breaks suspension of disbelief in analyzing primary or even secondary canon. The only time I have ever observed him doing this was in the case of magically changing ship sizes.
Saxton has
never done this with primary canon, not even for the sound in space!
The more you suspend SoD, the more you shift away from a Scientific analysis of canon to a literary analysis of canon, and
that’s my entire point.
The Death Star issue has been stomped to death and you keep ignoring the huge Spacedock and Starbase 74 space stations, among many others that are bigger in volume than even the largest SSDs. Each one of the SB 74 stations are big enough for 11,000 or more Galaxy or Sovereign class starships. And there are at least 4 such stations. But this has been all brought up to you before, and you have hand waved it all away. Never even addressed how such a thing factors into the resource and industrial capability of the Federation.
No, I did not. I simply pointed out to you that none of this even adds up to a fraction of the engineering feat that the Death Star is, because none of these space stations needed to go FTL, because none of them needed to be able to handle the inconceivable levels of stress needed for this moon sized battle station to accelerate at even one km/s^2 without immediately collapsing upon itself.
You don’t seem to understand that a single larger object, with a few exceptions, is exponentially more difficult to construct than several smaller ones, because the stresses and logistics involve increase tenfold for every tiny mass and volume increase. Do you think that countering the construction of the Empire State building with the fact that numerous cathedrals were constructed in the 16th century puts the 16th century Spanish on parity with the 20th century United States in industrial and engineering capabilities?
Your
immobile space stations don’t need to worry much about size at all. A battle station capable of circumnavigating a gas giant does. Remember that strength increases by area; gravity and stresses will be proportional to volume.
To go back to my Empire state building example, the structure has to withstand the force of gravity by more than a smaller structure; this scales cubically. Yet its increased loading strength only increases by a power of two. And the Death Star must be able to accelerate
far faster than the force of gravity.
So:
1. All of the Federation’s observed space stations, built up over decades or even centuries, combined with its entire Starfleet, don’t add up to a single Death Star in mass; never mind the imperial fleet, or the various space stations the Empire possesses that make your own look like Hoovervilles.
2. The difficulty needed to build a larger structure is exponentially larger than the difficulty needed to build a smaller one.
3. The Death Star must be able to handle the stresses of rapid acceleration; your space stations don’t.
Proof? Where's your numbers? You've tossed out a random number in the past, but how does that compare in context to a small, primitive starship from the 23rd century on impulse power only?
Wait, you’re asking me for proof that my own numbers are
higher than yours now? Yes, I understand that impulse power could be e17 watts; I also know that:
1. Impulse engines can warp. They are obviously not conventional drives.
2. Impulse power has, on multiple occasions, been diverted to help boost main power, which implies that there is no four orders of magnitude in difference between the two for your calculation to compare with my own.
Why not? Proof? Where is the evidence? Repulsorlift is used inside gravity wells, and even antigravity is used near it as per the Death Star's approach to Alderaan in the ANH novelization when the battlestation got within "anti-gravity range".
And in order to not make gravitational potential energy magically disappear, anti-gravity must require energy, as would repulsorlifts. They are not free energy. If Dooku used repulsorlifts, that the ship did not have to make the potential energy of the craft go somewhere.
But if you go that route, why don't we calculate the energy required for the heavily damaged Galileo shuttlecraft in TOS' "The Galileo Seven" to achive orbit on a secondary power source in just a matter of seconds.
I haven’t seen the footage. If you possess
several examples of this consistently occurring in Trek, as I have myself, then sure.
That is a very skewed and faulty conclusion at best. You have to show how these known, canon technologies can be dismissed (they can't), and you have to show why they violate CoM&E.
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Because if you decrease mass, you decrease energy. Conservation of mass states that any lost mass must be converted into energy. Repulsorlifts and anti-grav exist in Wars, but they must require energy. So no, this isn’t a “skewed and faulty conclusion at best” to anyone who understands basic physics.