Damn this is funny...

[Praeothmin]

ISDs are agile now...

:)

[Mr. Oragahn]

Oh, that's quite laughable.

I raise you with Rama and Vymple/Leo1 rebooting the Slave-I/asteroid calcs and denying the odd behaviour of some asteroids in TESB.

http://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/ ... 17/page-12

It's baffling how much pseudo-science Rama will appeal to in order to avoid the fact that if a blast had occurred on the surface, in order to crack an asteroid open as it happened in the film, the explosion on the surface would have been easily noticed, never mind if it originated from the side we couldn't see? Is it too much for them to think that in the frames following the asteroid breaking apart, and some fire coming through on the cracks that the camera could see, we still see no goddamn debris, particles and fire coming from behind the asteroid? Do these people, especially Rama who loves to sound like a physicist that he isn't, can't understand that with less resistance, an impact on the surface, even before cracking the mass of asteroid as much as to make its pieces fly in different directions, will generate a rather violent and much obvious explosion on the surface, and that there is simply no way in the universe that we couldn't see anything in any of the frames during which we see said asteroid breaking apart??

The entire premise being the same paradigm of laser bolts being rather mundane photon beams or eventually, at best, particle systems with no blast capacity whatsoever aside from blasting matter by heat up as it impacts with a large volume of matter.
The same useful paradigm that required they denied flak bursts for more than a decade now!

And is it this same Leo laughing at the idea of bolts being capable of piercing stuff, who brought evidence forth, a couple years ago I believe, of bolts fired by pistols used by a main clone character in TCWS (movie premiere + season 1), going through the armour of super battle droids precisely like if they had pierced it?

Oh, the "SotG Saga guide seems to suggest that simply using ion thrusters in the lower parts of the atmosphere (which it notes as generating thousands of gravities of force) has a negative impact on the ship as well," according to Rama.
Thousands of gees. You know, about 19,600 m/s².
HAHALOLOLROFL.

We know from the ANH novelization that there's an express antigrav range concerning large planetary masses, so it appears to be more efficient to use the repulsors in close orbit. However since repulsors don't produce any work (they're only countering the effects of gravity - not generating thrust) any actual hard inter-planetary work has to be done by the sublight engines; such as the 500-1000G work performed by the X-Wings orbiting Yavin.

It goes without saying that without gravity, a centrifugal force would already push objects on a tangential course into space. But I'm digressing. Why is he ignoring all the facts of ships rising solely using repulsorlift, with engines mostly on idle, perhaps providing power of said repulsors, and some forward action instead of an upward work you know?
You know, like say the Acclamators leaving Coruscant, the Millennium Falcon leaving Mos Eisley, the rebel squadrons leaving Yavin IV's jungle, Vader's shuttle leaving Endor base's landing platform, Padmé's various ships leaving Naboo and Tatooine, Dooku's sailor ship leaving Geonosis, etc.
Did he see rockets pointed downwards? I didn't.

And boy, SWST is doing a fantastic job at trolling Mith on every possible point discussed since ASVS was given birth.

[mojo]

this is not exactly on topic, i admit, but after reading at least 30 eu books, and watching the ot a billion times, i'm still slightly less than clear on sw ship engines. as best as i can understand, there are three types?
1. repulsors = used to land and take off from planets, and work by pushing against objects of large mass? are repulsors actually gravity based?
2. sublight engines = i would guess normal type engines, like expelling something in the opposite direction the ship wants to go?
3. hyperdrive = god knows?

[Mr. Oragahn]

Huh, Rama assumes nickel iron because that's what the ICS or whatever book Saxton had a hand in said.

http://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/ ... st-7930259

Well, Rama PM'd it to me because I couldn't find the original thread. And the damn search function is off. There's not much to it really, he scales the bolt, scales the portion of one asteroid destroyed, and IIRC he assumes nickel iron, though I haven't checked the volume estimate. I'll ask him.

It's a complete reboot of the debate from 2007 that got me banned by CPLFacehugger and Thanatos. :)
They're literally ignoring the asteroids of Geonosis being pulverized and showing that they're mainly loosely held packs of dirt (when the seismic charges slice them up or when very large debris smash into others).

Saxton had those asteroids made of nickel iron just to increase the yields of the weapons.

[Mr. Oragahn]

this is not exactly on topic, i admit, but after reading at least 30 eu books, and watching the ot a billion times, i'm still slightly less than clear on sw ship engines. as best as i can understand, there are three types?
1. repulsors = used to land and take off from planets, and work by pushing against objects of large mass? are repulsors actually gravity based?
2. sublight engines = i would guess normal type engines, like expelling something in the opposite direction the ship wants to go?
3. hyperdrive = god knows?

1. I'd say they could be reactionless drives of some sort. Some would say that they nullify gravity, and consume nothing as long as they're not used for movement. But there's no link established between the idea that nullifying gravity, somehow, would also allow motion.

2. The vast majority of them are fusion engines, some are noted to still be fission engines in EU sources. They're purely reaction drives, expelling crap out to produce motion. There are sort of "magnetic" rudders which are used to deviate the thrust. They "vectorize" it with force fields. So you get V-thrust.
It's also required that they can literally redirect the thrust in such a way that it would produce a backwards push, in order to slow down, but it wouldn't be as efficient as simply having thrusters pointing forward. Basically a thruster is an open reactor with a nozzle, but force fields could be used to produce a form of capsule, to enclose all the energized ions, so much that the fusion explosion would push both on the forward and inner section of the reactor, and the rear section of the forcefield, to nullify all forces and produce no thrust, and then having holes in the force field arranged in a ring-like gap that would curve back forward, allowing the cloud of exhaust to be finally expelled more or less at a forward angle in some cone-like fashion (avoiding redirecting gases onto the ship btw). If you want an image, it would be like having the ion exhaust forming some kind of barely open umbrella, the top of said umbrella pointing backwards.
That or the exhaust would be funneled into two diametrically opposed holes through the force field, in a V shape exhaust (the two top tips of the V pointing forwards, and again avoiding the ship).
All in all, all forces counted and summed, this would produce a final backwards force.
There would be a big waste, so it would not be as efficient as one big force produced by thrusters simply pointing forwards.

3. They push a ship into hyperspace, noted numerous times as being another dimension.

[Mr. Oragahn]

I've been hoping back and forth between the latest pages of the thread I linked to (it's already been linked to in another SFJ thread I believe, but can't remember where).

There's that interesting post from Jared I wish to share with you.

...everything you ever wanted to know about blasters.

Blasters rely on two components, a gas chamber and a power cell. The chamber is filled with an energy-rich gas; when the blaster is fired a set amount of this gas is forced through a conversion enabler, where energy from the power cell excites the gas. The gas, now volatile, then passes through an actuating module, where it is converted to a particle beam, focused through a prismatic crystal or some other device, and emerges from the barrels emitter as a bolt of glowing energy. This basic technology has been adapted to many forms, from small sidearms, pistols, and rifles to artillery cannons and the giant turbolasers aboard warships.

Other weapons are often lumped in with blasters despite having fairly different effects. Disruptors pack a huge amount of gas into each shot, doing far more damage to their targets. Most blasters have a stun setting, which feeds power through a secondary emitter, bypassing the gas chamber to shape an electromagnetic burst that disrupts targets' nervous systems, often leaving them unconscious. (Stun settings must be adjusted for a target's size and physiology: A stun bolt that would drop an Ewok will just annoy a Wookie.) And ionization blasters are primarily for overloading droid circuitry.

Though soldiers trapped in a shootout would swear otherwise, blaster bolts themselves carry no heat. But their displacement of matter produces kinetic energy that causes heat. The atmosphere is superheated by the bolt's passage; materials struck by a bolt deform and fuse; and liquids inside physical bodies instantly change state into steam, expanding and doing terrible damage to surrounding tissue. In addition, the conversion enabler heats up as gas is energized by the power pack, and a small amount of ozone is emitted as a trace product of the bolt emerging from the emitter nozzle.

It goes on to explain they began as heavy artillery, eventually the tech was miniaturized to the degree we see it today. Of note
,

The ancestors of handheld blasters were beam tubes, which gradually displaced heat beams and plasma cannons (both of which used lasers to heat plasma) because they were safer to carry and wield and required less maintenance.

Here’s more from Paul re blasters: “Blaster technology is one of those things that really reveals Star Wars’s pulp-fiction credentials. Everyone knows what a blaster is — a gun that fires zippy glowing energy bullets. There’s also a well-established Expanded Universe vocabulary of “blaster gas” and “galven coils” to describe the bits of the guns. But serious attempts to describe a blaster in realistic terms are, as Jason Fry would say, pretzelly — not least because writers have, over the years, been working with at least two completely different concepts.
“The first of these ideas originated in some of the earliest RPG material from West End Games, whose authors were evidently thinking of a chemical laser — a real-world device in which a laser beam is fired through a gas chamber that acts as a focusing lens. This has the advantage of being a bit of real science, but comes with the big drawback that chemical lasers don’t shoot glowing bullets like the weapons in the movies, and also means all the destructive firepower of the blaster has to come from the power pack, which has to be generating truly massive amounts of energy.
“Pretty soon a new description of blaster technology emerged, in which the laser (if mentioned at all) simply acted as a trigger, a little like the gunpowder that fires a bullet, charging up a slug of “blaster gas,” which gets packaged into a glowing bullet by the electromagnetic rifling in the barrel. Haden Blackman went all out with this interpretation. It describes what we see in the movies a lot better than the “chemical laser” version, and hints that the “blaster gas” (the stuff Lando mines on Bespin) has some weird unspecified properties that contribute significantly to the firepower of the weapon.
“You can probably guess which of the two is my preferred interpretation of the tech, but I hope that the end result in Warfare is ambiguous enough to be read either way.”

http://jasonfry.tumblr.com/post/2090710 ... notes-pt-2


I really don't actually see how someone who prefers the chemical laser version could actually read that from the book's passage, but whatever. Interesting that the "energy-rich" gas actually contributes to the firepower. It's like vespine, or gaseous naquadah, I suppose. Somebody's gotta find a way to ignite Bespin, now. :)

I've seen, and used to generally assume, the fanon theory that the bolt is plasma in a magnetic bubble, I think the "Science of Star Wars" TV special also went with that. But I think that show show said "plasma" for just about everything.

Funny that the bolts don't carry any heat. They're mostly behaving like solid objects, causing friction as they pass through atmosphere. It seems most of the light emitted by those bolts is due to that friction.

The end notes really emphasize the exploding bullet nature of a bolt. Which is just perfect for explaining flak behaviour, and just one step away from armor piercing behaviour noticed a few rare times.

Thankfully some intelligent people realized that we needed to move away from Saxton's complicated and ridiculous nonsense that didn't fit anything and only existed on the premise of a VFX glitch in the OT (no kidding, the asteroid exploding one frame before being hit).

[Lucky]

I've been hoping back and forth between the latest pages of the thread I linked to (it's already been linked to in another SFJ thread I believe, but can't remember where).

There's that interesting post from Jared I wish to share with you.

...everything you ever wanted to know about blasters.

Blasters rely on two components, a gas chamber and a power cell. The chamber is filled with an energy-rich gas; when the blaster is fired a set amount of this gas is forced through a conversion enabler, where energy from the power cell excites the gas. The gas, now volatile, then passes through an actuating module, where it is converted to a particle beam, focused through a prismatic crystal or some other device, and emerges from the barrels emitter as a bolt of glowing energy. This basic technology has been adapted to many forms, from small sidearms, pistols, and rifles to artillery cannons and the giant turbolasers aboard warships.

Other weapons are often lumped in with blasters despite having fairly different effects. Disruptors pack a huge amount of gas into each shot, doing far more damage to their targets. Most blasters have a stun setting, which feeds power through a secondary emitter, bypassing the gas chamber to shape an electromagnetic burst that disrupts targets' nervous systems, often leaving them unconscious. (Stun settings must be adjusted for a target's size and physiology: A stun bolt that would drop an Ewok will just annoy a Wookie.) And ionization blasters are primarily for overloading droid circuitry.

Though soldiers trapped in a shootout would swear otherwise, blaster bolts themselves carry no heat. But their displacement of matter produces kinetic energy that causes heat. The atmosphere is superheated by the bolt's passage; materials struck by a bolt deform and fuse; and liquids inside physical bodies instantly change state into steam, expanding and doing terrible damage to surrounding tissue. In addition, the conversion enabler heats up as gas is energized by the power pack, and a small amount of ozone is emitted as a trace product of the bolt emerging from the emitter nozzle.

It goes on to explain they began as heavy artillery, eventually the tech was miniaturized to the degree we see it today. Of note
,

The ancestors of handheld blasters were beam tubes, which gradually displaced heat beams and plasma cannons (both of which used lasers to heat plasma) because they were safer to carry and wield and required less maintenance.

Here’s more from Paul re blasters: “Blaster technology is one of those things that really reveals Star Wars’s pulp-fiction credentials. Everyone knows what a blaster is — a gun that fires zippy glowing energy bullets. There’s also a well-established Expanded Universe vocabulary of “blaster gas” and “galven coils” to describe the bits of the guns. But serious attempts to describe a blaster in realistic terms are, as Jason Fry would say, pretzelly — not least because writers have, over the years, been working with at least two completely different concepts.
“The first of these ideas originated in some of the earliest RPG material from West End Games, whose authors were evidently thinking of a chemical laser — a real-world device in which a laser beam is fired through a gas chamber that acts as a focusing lens. This has the advantage of being a bit of real science, but comes with the big drawback that chemical lasers don’t shoot glowing bullets like the weapons in the movies, and also means all the destructive firepower of the blaster has to come from the power pack, which has to be generating truly massive amounts of energy.
“Pretty soon a new description of blaster technology emerged, in which the laser (if mentioned at all) simply acted as a trigger, a little like the gunpowder that fires a bullet, charging up a slug of “blaster gas,” which gets packaged into a glowing bullet by the electromagnetic rifling in the barrel. Haden Blackman went all out with this interpretation. It describes what we see in the movies a lot better than the “chemical laser” version, and hints that the “blaster gas” (the stuff Lando mines on Bespin) has some weird unspecified properties that contribute significantly to the firepower of the weapon.
“You can probably guess which of the two is my preferred interpretation of the tech, but I hope that the end result in Warfare is ambiguous enough to be read either way.”

http://jasonfry.tumblr.com/post/2090710 ... notes-pt-2


I really don't actually see how someone who prefers the chemical laser version could actually read that from the book's passage, but whatever. Interesting that the "energy-rich" gas actually contributes to the firepower. It's like vespine, or gaseous naquadah, I suppose. Somebody's gotta find a way to ignite Bespin, now. :)

I've seen, and used to generally assume, the fanon theory that the bolt is plasma in a magnetic bubble, I think the "Science of Star Wars" TV special also went with that. But I think that show show said "plasma" for just about everything.

Funny that the bolts don't carry any heat. They're mostly behaving like solid objects, causing friction as they pass through atmosphere. It seems most of the light emitted by those bolts is due to that friction.

The end notes really emphasize the exploding bullet nature of a bolt. Which is just perfect for explaining flak behaviour, and just one step away from armor piercing behaviour noticed a few rare times.

Thankfully some intelligent people realized that we needed to move away from Saxton's complicated and ridiculous nonsense that didn't fit anything and only existed on the premise of a VFX glitch in the OT (no kidding, the asteroid exploding one frame before being hit).

You would like The New Essential Guide to Weapons and Technology then.

One thing that is rather assuming is that the CGI series contradicts that somewhat with the Episode Supply Lines. The heavy blasters at least were running out of power, but there is no mention of a need for blaster gas.

[Mr. Oragahn]

As long as they don't specify what produces the power, it's fine.
At least in Rookies (TCWS Season 1, ep 5), they used liquid tibanna fuel to blow up the base. It's said to be highly explosive. Obviously, we're not far from the idea of tibanna being used as fuel for weapons.

[Lucky]

As long as they don't specify what produces the power, it's fine.
At least in Rookies (TCWS Season 1, ep 5), they used liquid tibanna fuel to blow up the base. It's said to be highly explosive. Obviously, we're not far from the idea of tibanna being used as fuel for weapons.

Well, here is the quote and context:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwIxPLwW ... re=related. What do you think?

[Mr. Oragahn]

What should I be looking for precisely?

[Lucky]

What should I be looking for precisely?

About 0:18 they talk about the supplies they need.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwIxPLwW ... re=related
"Master Jedi, we are runing out of food and water, and our heavy weapons systems are out of power"
If they shot special gas from their side arms and small arms I would think they would have needed that as well.

On a side note, where is it implied Bespin mined gas for blasters?

[Mr. Oragahn]

Outside of the EU, I don't know. TCWS is yet to establish the origins of tibanna gas afaik (but since I stopped at season 1 and couldn't give a shit about a crappy show with lazorz...).

[Khas]

What should I be looking for precisely?

About 0:18 they talk about the supplies they need.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwIxPLwW ... re=related
"Master Jedi, we are runing out of food and water, and our heavy weapons systems are out of power"
If they shot special gas from their side arms and small arms I would think they would have needed that as well.

On a side note, where is it implied Bespin mined gas for blasters?

It was mentioned in TESB that Bespin mined Tibanna gas, and the technical manuals and some novels say that Tibanna gas is used in blasters, and as we've seen in TCW, Tibanna is highly volatile.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Good then, the chain is made clearer.

[Lucky]

What should I be looking for precisely?

About 0:18 they talk about the supplies they need.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwIxPLwW ... re=related
"Master Jedi, we are runing out of food and water, and our heavy weapons systems are out of power"
If they shot special gas from their side arms and small arms I would think they would have needed that as well.

On a side note, where is it implied Bespin mined gas for blasters?

It was mentioned in TESB that Bespin mined Tibanna gas, and the technical manuals and some novels say that Tibanna gas is used in blasters, and as we've seen in TCW, Tibanna is highly volatile.

I find it extremely stupid for the most common weapon in the Star Wars galaxy to need an extremely rare space-propane in order to work. The stuff is seemingly only found in the rare cloud in a few gas giants.

I find it much more believable that the GFFA has advanced energy storage technologies, and that blasters use a derivative of shields technologies.