Comments on "Vaporizing a Small Town" page

[Mr. Oragahn]

http://www.st-v-sw.net/STSWvapetown.html



Shining hairlines

That said, the rocket booster of Sputnik 1 was visible as a magnitude 1 object compared to the polished half-meter of Sputnik itself, which was only mag 6. That's on par with the brightness of Saturn. It was a 28m by 3m cylinder that reached a height that isn't available in my research, but in any case it is said to have reached orbit and hung out there for a couple of months, suggesting that it maybe hit 100km or some similar LEO figure. For a painted-white, high-albedo, 28x3 vehicle to show as mag 1 still suggests that the turbolaser bolts, only about as bright as the reflected sunlight on the dingy ship hulls in the RotS battle when seen from afar, would've had to be quite large to be noticed.

Initially, I would have said that the beam fired from the hangar of one of the Venators was a better contender to that label. It's, in fact, particularily long, as being a constant beam, and somehow more "shiny" in certain ways.
Above all, it's actually extremely large and completely glaring white for two frames, before being focused into the less luminous beam.

That said, there are two problems with that anyway.

First, it's more an exception than anything else. As goes the idea that it's a SPHA-T beam of some sort, it has more to do with a trick of a particularily inspired commander, finding an oportunity to use one of the machines inside the hangar and use it against another starship, rather than a standard weapon which would fit the rather general description from the book.
Such a rarity can't fit with a description that talks about the vast bulk of fire exchanged between ships. That said, it's bad, because visuals hardly fit with the book's description. Since there's nothing on screen to be considered shining hairlines which would, above all, remain visible from the surface.
It would have us to think that the starships aren't firing their heavier turbolasers anymore. Which we know is untrue. We see Venators firing their main guns, like we see capital CIS ships firing their large caliber guns as well.

A theory would be that all those ships don't have much juice left, and aren't firing their cannons at maximum capacity.
It's not a far fetched idea at all.

If we consider EU sources for a moment, and use it only to fuel theories, we're told that SPHA-T means a SPHA type walker mounted with a heavy turbolaser, previously supercharged from the power core of the carrier it was parked in, as those walkers as unable to power their own weapon.

So in theory, it would seem that it's fairly easy to have cannons charged up, and remain like that for a long time. Thus it's likely that starships can also charge their cannons beforehand.
Going back to my previous point, it would mean that with those energy capacitors depleted, capital ships would now be powering their weapons directly from their respective cores' outputs.
It's quite interesting that the most luminous beam, and above all, the one that fits the best the book's description (written by an author who acknowledged trying to mesh as much EU as possible with the films' lore), as long and shiny hairline, is fired by a weapon that EU sources describe as working from previously charged capacitors.

The idea would be that those hairlines correspond to a moment of the Coruscant battle that is further away in the past, when the starships had their weapons' capacitors still sufficiently charged.
But that would be a double edged sword, meaning that firepower suddenly and immensely decreases when the capacitors are out, and that would also mean that the power cores don't provide large amounts of energy.
However, all that being nice, I don't think the description suggests that what it refers to happened hours ago.

Secondly (yes, the first point was quite long but I had to get it out), even if those SPHA-Ts were the true sources of those hairlines, the fact that the T corresponds to turbolaser, which for all intents and purposes, are just as big, if not bigger than the heavy turbolasers present on the Republic's heavier warships, means that the SPHA-T would be firing with guns which are the best and most powerful ones the Republic can bring to the table, and thus completely dismiss any idea that those SPHA-Ts were using medium or light turbolasers.

So, in conclusion, we're reaching the inevitable conclusion that we're orbiting around a description, depicting ongoing events, that does not match the visuals.

Therefore, there's no logic here claiming that the hairlines must be about the heavy bolts only, as there are simply no luminous and sufficiently elongated bolts to be labeled as shining hairlines visible from the surface at all.

Basically, that means we would be talking about any level turbolaser here, not necessarily the biggest ones.

Of course, a conservative stance is to assume that the heavier turbolasers were the one refered to, especially since they're the most likely to produce the most luminous bolts.





Mos Eisley's size

The derelict ship:

http://www.st-v-sw.net/images/Wars/Spec ... tower2.jpg

Your augmented overview montage:

http://www.st-v-sw.net/images/Wars/Spec ... a-mark.jpg

My own montage (an edit from your cap):



First and foremost, I'd say that any analysis based on shadows is condemned to be wrong, as shadow orientation is inconsistent in those scenes. It's not even consistent within a single pan.
In the Gallofree/docking bay 94 scene, they even manage to have two different blocks have shadows pointing in opposite directions.
I know there are twin suns in that stellar system, but please.

That said, there's one thing for sure. On the first of your images, the tip of the ship is pointing to the right of the screen, and we see that there's a long street in the background, with more tall buildings.

On the second picture, the large view of Mos Eisley, the structure that you circled has its tip, if it's a tip, pointing to the left.
We can also see that the structure is not far from the very edge of the city.
Considering the orientation of the structure you circled, there should actually be many buildings south of that structure (assuming south is behind us and north is in the background, at the horizon, on that wide view shot).
This serves to demonstrate that they're clearly not the same structure at all.

Besides, the structure you circled appears to be significantly bigger than the derelict craft, especially when you compare the size of people against it, and then the size of people against the tall square tower seen not far from docking bay 94.

The fact that the structure you circled sits on the edge of the city comes in opposition with the fact that Obi-Wan and Luke passed in front of that structure a while after entering the city.

They got inside the city with no sign of that crashed ship. We can see the square and round towers in the background, on the right side (again, don't pay atention to shadows):



They glide across a large plaza with a big and rusted Gallofree medium cargo ship parked in the background, same as the kind used by the rebels:



They continue straight on into one of the main streets:



Going further towards the two towers, they pass not far from docking bay 94 (located nearby, somewhere on the right, offscreen):



Then they go down a small street. We can appreciate the size of the buildings, especially those far behind, already caught in a blue haze:



Cross another place:



Then we see them driving down another narrow street, only to be forced to stop by an imperial patrol.

And only then, they pass in front of the derelict ship:



So obviously, we definitely agree, and confirm that the desolate piece of wreckage can't be located on the rim of the city, and is not that tall. According to the shadow of that piece of junk, its tip should be as high as the top of the screen, that is, significantly smaller than those 4-5 stories high buildings seen here and there, for eg. the Naboo-like structure in the shot of the derelict, in the far background, or those two towers in what could be Tatooine's central plaza.

This disputes the idea that the worn out ship is as tall as the higher buildings of Mos Eisley.

However, the silhouette you circled on the distant view of Mos Eisley clearly is one of the tallest structures of the city, so if you were to use it, you may rather look at a building easy twice as tall.

Besides, there's another element to consider.
When you look at the size of the central docking bays, and even the size of docking bay 94 (not to be confounded with these ones since they're smaller), when you notice how there's hardly even a medium concentration of them in that zone of the city (we only see those two small ones in fact - plus the 94 that's not far - despite the panning shot), like three docks per city block, in the most active part of the town, when you know that there must logically be around a hundred bays (from 1 to 94, plus eventually a few more, and not counting possible subtrees, as bay 52-A), that they're ought to be roughly as large, then you wonder how all of them can be cramped into a city that's supposedly 1 or 2 km wide, when we don't even get the chance to see more despite the numerous shots.

The smallest ships, able to provide all a pilot needs for long trips, are of the size of rebel fighters, like X-wings, which are roughly 12.5 meters long.
It's likely that many docking bays are for the small cargos (the medium ones, like the Gallofree, seem to directly land in open places) and personnal yatchs, considering the local activities.

Jedi starfighters are slightly smaller, but they don't come with their own hyperdrive, and the hyperdrive collar sitting in orbit is particularily big. Plus they're not the types of ships ought to be seen in such regions full of criminals and otehr smugglers.

Even when you look at the structures all around Mos Eisley, you realize that nearly all the buildings have either domes, or additional structures on their roofs, if not vast arrays of antennas. So they are not docking bays.





Vaporization definition

On this point, I won't claim that a layman type interpretation is out of question. It's logical to assume the author went for a rather comprehensible and commonly (mis)used term, contrary to a scientifically grounded definition, and I agree that the layman term is more than acceptable here, especially since the whole description is hardly metaphor free.

However, there's a point I disagree with on your "Thermal problem" article.

Contrary to the vast bulk of the structures present in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped, most of those present in Mos Eisley are likely more massive and sturdier. They're less likely to be blown away by the shockwave fainting down to 3.5 psi.
The picture of the rased Hiroshima proves that the buildings built with beams of metal and forms of concrete were still up, while the rest of the surrounding landscape was flattened.

I'll also point to your Appendix A. It's rather clear that in agreement with the novelisation, numerous buildings of Mos Eisley use a lot that local adobe, old stone and double layers of durasteel. Even more, the light coloured surfaces of all the buildings could cause a phenomenom similar to the "white house" survival (at 3.5 psi that is, the colour would become irrelevant at 20 psi).

On this, more energy would be required to level such a city.

Now, we don't got the chance to see any quotes you'd have used for Appendix C, talking about durasteel in less than impressive terms. Those would be interesting to read.
If the author refered to the EU's durasteel, it seems to be quite an impressive material. Vader's artificial hand is made of such a material, yet I've heard of that story about how the glove survived the destruction of the Death Star, and even a trip through a sort of blackhole or whatever. I'm not sure.

On the other hand, all I could find with key words "durasteel definition", were those rather lame facts:

Bloodlines (Karen Traviss), Legacy of The Force:

"It's eighty kilos per square centimeter."
"What is?" asked Han, distracted.
"The yield stress of durasteel. You look like you're testing it."

What's the acceleration? Generally, the only number that's often omitted from a calc, despite being "present", is 1. So that's 1 m/s². Or, otherwise, big smelly BS.

Darksaber (Kevin J Anderson):

Daala turned and ripped one of the electric-blue glowtorches from the floor behind her. "Enough!" she shouted. She raised the durasteel staff high and smashed it down upon the tabletop. The glowcrystal exploded into shards with crackling blue sparks, and transparent fragments flew in all directions. She hammered the rod down again and again, denting the table, bending the staff, and fragmenting the end.

So they make their houses and ships out of this?
Well, two favorite writer profiles for bounty hunters.

However, many EU sources talk about various forms of durasteel. Military grade, marks, for armour.
Remember the acceleration figures presented on another page of ST-v-SW.net. How could they be possible, if real durasteel was so craptastic?

Star Wars Encyclopedia, page 84:

"Durasteel: Used to build everything from from space vehiciles to dwellings, this ultralight metal can withstand radical temperature extremes and severe mechanical stress."

There seems to be various flavours of durasteel.

What about a description of durasteel from the novelisations? At least we could dismiss those absurd figures.

They're EU sources. We'd have to see what the higher sources say about that material.

[2046]

With apologies, I didn't really pay any attention to the EU-specific stuff you mention and work from, since it basically puts me in snooze mode. But I will say that it's rather iffy to use it even as the basis of a theory, since it can be quite the slippery slope.

In any case, I'm not sure how to respond to some of your post, 'cause at times it seems you're disagreeing, but I can't tell what it is you're disagreeing with. At other times it seems like you're disagreeing over stuff we agree on. So if my response seems muddled or confused, my apologies in advance.

Initially, I would have said that the beam fired from the hangar of one of the Venators was a better contender to that label. It's, in fact, particularily long, as being a constant beam, and somehow more "shiny" in certain ways.

I thought that would've worked better, too, but of course he directly identifies the shining hairlines with turbolaser bolts.

Just so everything's available, let's re-quote the text:

" The skies of Coruscant blaze with war.

The artificial daylight spread by the capital's orbital mirrors is sliced by intersecting flames of ion drives and punctuated by starburst explosions; contrails of debris raining into the atmosphere become tangled ribbons of cloud. The nightside sky is an infinite lattice of shining hairlines that interlock planetoids and track erratic spirals of glowing gnats. Beings watching from rooftops of Coruscant's endless cityscape can find it beautiful.

From the inside, it's different. The gnats are drive-glows of starfighters. The shining hairlines are light-scatter from turbolaser bolts powerful enough to vaporize a small town. The planetoids are capital ships."

A theory would be that all those ships don't have much juice left, and aren't firing their cannons at maximum capacity.
It's not a far fetched idea at all.

Well, we don't really have any evidence for that sort of thing. I'm not really fond of such theories, to be honest, simply because battles would then become exercises in not shooting. After all, if you imagine that ships end up firing with only tiny percentages of their original energy as battles drag on, then you want to be the fresh new ship that comes in like a juggernaut, incapable of being damaged by the puny shots of the battle's old-timers.

To put it in a real-world context, battleships with limited ammo obviously try not to waste shots. But, the 'low batteries' idea, translated into the context of ammunition, would be like ending up with smaller and smaller ammo as the battle wears on.

So, in conclusion, we're reaching the inevitable conclusion that we're orbiting around a description, depicting ongoing events, that does not match the visuals.

His use of the term "shining hairlines" might be somewhat florid, in keeping with the rest of the paragraph, but tied as it is to the known turbolaser shots I don't really see any contradiction or significant contrariness with the visuals.

First and foremost, I'd say that any analysis based on shadows is condemned to be wrong, as shadow orientation is inconsistent in those scenes. It's not even consistent within a single pan.

I concur, which is why I don't base my analysis on shadows. Even in a particular scene, such as the one of the derelict, there is inconsistency . . . just check the foreground walking people against the CGI elements. The difference averages around 20 degrees.

The worst example comes in the shot just after the Rebel-style cruiser and the pull-back to the wide view of the two towers (square and round-top), where the landspeeder moves along a narrow street. There are a pair of stormtroopers on the left and a pair on the right. These are the same troopers, reversed digitally, and the shadows and light angles on the armor aren't even adjusted.

And of course there's the bar exterior, which is first seen with two guys walking into the shaded door, then our people walk in to the brightly sunlit door.

No chance of doing sun angle continuity timings with the Tatooine scenes, lemme tell ya.

On the second picture, the large view of Mos Eisley, the structure that you circled [...] This serves to demonstrate that they're clearly not the same structure at all.

While I appreciate the additional confirmations, I don't really see why you spent all the time on it. As I noted, the appearance of that structure is mere coincidence, and nothing more. We can add additional reasons to that beyond the one I used, but any of them alone would be sufficient.

But if I can work your info into a future update (since I'm certainly not above taking a page off on tangents ;) ), I'll be sure to give you credit.

Besides, the structure you circled appears to be significantly bigger than the derelict craft, especially when you compare the size of people against it, and then the size of people against the tall square tower seen not far from docking bay 94.

Well, it's taller than its surroundings. I don't have the text file I was using for the purpose anymore, but IIRC I ballparked the height of the derelict at something like 20-25 meters.

The square-shaped building (that looks rather similar to one of the DS turbolaser towers) is only about 30-35 meters tall, judging by nearby folks and a margin of error.

Since there's taller stuff on the right (which would be northeast in your pic) from the thing I circled, and other tall stuff even just above in the pic, then you can see one of the reasons for my initial excitement. But as I noted myself, it was just a coincidence.

Going further towards the two towers, they pass not far from docking bay 94 (located nearby, somewhere on the right, offscreen):

How do we know it's to the right? Just wondering, I've never really tried to figure that out.

According to the shadow of that piece of junk, its tip should be as high as the top of the screen

Well, using the shadows of stuff at the same distance (since foreground shadows would've meant the ship was not as tall as the pieces we could see), I came out with an average shadow angle of 100.4 degrees in a marked pic I was using at the time. The line for that angle takes it above the screen edge, though it does come within about two meters of the right-most highest visible portion at that point. Since the shape of the vessel is an unknown above the screen, I gave it wiggle room either way.

This disputes the idea that the worn out ship is as tall as the higher buildings of Mos Eisley.

It's not quite as tall, but then I never asserted or suggested otherwise. The thing I circled and then dismissed as a coincidence is also not as tall as other structures in the wide shot.

Besides, there's another element to consider.
When you look at the size of the central docking bays, and even the size of docking bay 94 (not to be confounded with these ones since they're smaller), when you notice how there's hardly even a medium concentration of them in that zone of the city (we only see those two small ones in fact - plus the 94 that's not far - despite the panning shot), like three docks per city block, in the most active part of the town, when you know that there must logically be around a hundred bays (from 1 to 94, plus eventually a few more, and not counting possible subtrees, as bay 52-A), that they're ought to be roughly as large, then you wonder how all of them can be cramped into a city that's supposedly 1 or 2 km wide, when we don't even get the chance to see more despite the numerous shots.

I'm just going by the building heights, which are generally known. There are, after all, no skyscrapers there that we ever see, and since the place is called a town we ought not expect any.

Whether the docking bays are numbered sequentially, and their average size, is not known. Most are said to be mere gouges in the dirt, for what it's worth, and hence we need not expect to see buildings for most.

Also interesting is to compare your pic of the two towers with the two towers visible in the HD version of the Mos Eisley wide shot:



If you look just above what I circled on the page, you'll see two tall buildings nearby, which look very much like the square tower and the round-top tower.

In any case, I don't see any reason to assume a Mos Eisley significantly larger than what's already been concluded. It's a small place.

Vaporization definition

On this point, I won't claim that a layman type interpretation is out of question. It's logical to assume the author went for a rather comprehensible and commonly (mis)used term, contrary to a scientifically grounded definition, and I agree that the layman term is more than acceptable here, especially since the whole description is hardly metaphor free.

However, there's a point I disagree with on your "Thermal problem" article.

Contrary to the vast bulk of the structures present in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped, most of those present in Mos Eisley are likely more massive and sturdier. They're less likely to be blown away by the shockwave fainting down to 3.5 psi.

I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with here, since I explicitly went into Mos Eisley's construction in Section III-D.

And as you can see, my final conclusion for bolt yield is 75 times higher than what I noted as being required for a 20psi overpressure across the whole town. So I don't see where 3.5 psi is of relevance regarding my page at all.

[Mr. Oragahn]

With apologies, I didn't really pay any attention to the EU-specific stuff you mention and work from, since it basically puts me in snooze mode. But I will say that it's rather iffy to use it even as the basis of a theory, since it can be quite the slippery slope.

It's just that I was looking for more info on how strong durasteel could be. Ultimately, I wouldn't pay much attention to the EU either on that point.
Like I used to do in the past, I mainly use the EU's facts as only possibilities and ideas for furhter theories within the higher canon. That is, if I consider that there's a better explanation than an EU fact, which at thisp onit is nothing more than a suggestion, then I dismiss it.

I thought that would've worked better, too, but of course he directly identifies the shining hairlines with turbolaser bolts.

Well, that thing that fired that long beam could be a turbolaser bolt. It should, in fact, considering the level of damaging it did.
What rules it out is that it's an exception, something like 1:10000000...

" The skies of Coruscant blaze with war.

The artificial daylight spread by the capital's orbital mirrors is sliced by intersecting flames of ion drives and punctuated by starburst explosions; contrails of debris raining into the atmosphere become tangled ribbons of cloud. The nightside sky is an infinite lattice of shining hairlines that interlock planetoids and track erratic spirals of glowing gnats. Beings watching from rooftops of Coruscant's endless cityscape can find it beautiful.

From the inside, it's different. The gnats are drive-glows of starfighters. The shining hairlines are light-scatter from turbolaser bolts powerful enough to vaporize a small town. The planetoids are capital ships."

I'm wondering at what time the sequence described in the book is supposed to happen.
Is it expanded material, predating the battle sequence in the film, or is it supposed to correspond to the film, exactly?
I don't have the book, so I can't check the initial descriptions, nor the intro.

Well, we don't really have any evidence for that sort of thing. I'm not really fond of such theories, to be honest, simply because battles would then become exercises in not shooting. After all, if you imagine that ships end up firing with only tiny percentages of their original energy as battles drag on, then you want to be the fresh new ship that comes in like a juggernaut, incapable of being damaged by the puny shots of the battle's old-timers.

To put it in a real-world context, battleships with limited ammo obviously try not to waste shots. But, the 'low batteries' idea, translated into the context of ammunition, would be like ending up with smaller and smaller ammo as the battle wears on.

But exercises in not shooting is precisely what seems to happen so many times. Han Solo not even taking pot shot at a TIE. Vader's TIE squadron taking time to fire. The absolute low concentration of fire even during the final stages of the battle of Endor, from both sides of the fence.

There's Boba Fett firing the Slave-I's nose cannons while it has just started the engines, and the energy banks are already depleted.

It appears rather logical that weapons would have their own capacitors, charged up to the chin. That would be a plus, instead of relying on the direct power core's output.

His use of the term "shining hairlines" might be somewhat florid, in keeping with the rest of the paragraph, but tied as it is to the known turbolaser shots I don't really see any contradiction or significant contrariness with the visuals.

The contradiction lies in the fact that his imaged descriptions seem to be what we'd see from the point of view of people standing up on the rooftops of Coruscant's buildings.
Yet, even us, in space, can't even really spot the rather short and faint most powerful bolts.

Simply put, if you look at the film, there's just one single shiny hairline to be seen, and it comes from a hangar. All the rest does not fit at all.
That's why if the text from the book concerned a moment of the battle preceding the film's sequence, we could then claim that the bolts, back then, were more powerful.

It wouldn't hurt your estimations in the slightest, and would explain why most if not all shots, as seen in the film, are pathetic, and not even worth several hundreds of tons of TNT.

I concur, which is why I don't base my analysis on shadows. Even in a particular scene, such as the one of the derelict, there is inconsistency . . . just check the foreground walking people against the CGI elements. The difference averages around 20 degrees.

The worst example comes in the shot just after the Rebel-style cruiser and the pull-back to the wide view of the two towers (square and round-top), where the landspeeder moves along a narrow street. There are a pair of stormtroopers on the left and a pair on the right. These are the same troopers, reversed digitally, and the shadows and light angles on the armor aren't even adjusted.

That one is the worst. The shadows on the buildings are literally inverted. The twin suns start at south, and end at north by the time Luke reaches the twin docking pits.

While I appreciate the additional confirmations, I don't really see why you spent all the time on it. As I noted, the appearance of that structure is mere coincidence, and nothing more. We can add additional reasons to that beyond the one I used, but any of them alone would be sufficient.

But if I can work your info into a future update (since I'm certainly not above taking a page off on tangents ;) ), I'll be sure to give you credit.

It's more a question of showing that the derelict ship is not one of the highest buildings, by far, and couldn't be used as a yardstick to mesure Mos Eisley's size, if we were to consider the wide shot accurate (which is a whole other matter).

I understand that you estimated the leaning tower on the grand angle shot being 25 m high or so, based on the derelict's height.

"However, we can at least say with some confidence that the leaning tower in the distant view and the leaning tower in the in-town view are comparable in size."

This is where I disagree on.

Though I don't think the difference will be enormous, I believe it removes one or two earned kilometers off the chart.

How do we know it's to the right? Just wondering, I've never really tried to figure that out.

We see the "turbolaser" tower and the one with a rounded dome. Judging by the angle, it's not far from the two twin pits.

Well, using the shadows of stuff at the same distance (since foreground shadows would've meant the ship was not as tall as the pieces we could see), I came out with an average shadow angle of 100.4 degrees in a marked pic I was using at the time. The line for that angle takes it above the screen edge, though it does come within about two meters of the right-most highest visible portion at that point. Since the shape of the vessel is an unknown above the screen, I gave it wiggle room either way.

There's indeed a glitch in shadows, but averaged, we can agree that what we see of the beached ship is all there is to see.

Whether the docking bays are numbered sequentially, and their average size, is not known.

That's just the way every single carpark slot is numbered, whether it's in supermarkets, at the office or in your flat's building. Same for for planes in airports and boats at marinas.
I just don't see why we should make it more complicated when in all people's minds, parking slot 42 means the 42th slot, especially since we're in working from a layman perspective (cf. the definition of vaporization).

There's just no way even a 2 km wide city could accomodate so many bays, especially since their concentration is very low.

Most are said to be mere gouges in the dirt, for what it's worth, and hence we need not expect to see buildings for most.

Do you have a quote on the gouge thing? Even if they vulgar holes dug with a giant spade, we simply didn't see many ships parked around. In fact, besides the medium gallofree cargo parked on some large plaza, there has been no other ship really sitting anywhere else, unless in the far distant background.

The film shows various ships hovering all over the city, taking off from zones which are among city blocks. Be those stardocks dedicated buildings, or mere dirt holes, they still take room.

Also interesting is to compare your pic of the two towers with the two towers visible in the HD version of the Mos Eisley wide shot:



If you look just above what I circled on the page, you'll see two tall buildings nearby, which look very much like the square tower and the round-top tower.

There's just something wrong with that wide shot. I don't find it very consistent with the intramuros shots.









In this shot above, we can see the two towers. By looking at their orientation and disposition, we see that Luke and co entered south east of them (using my previous arbitrary map at the top of my first post).
He obviously got a bit lost, since when they approach those two towers later on, after passing in front of the medium cargo, they come from full south, in a rather straight vector.

What we can see is that slightly to the left of those two towers, there's another one, more distant, since more diluted through the haze. Due to perspective, this tower is ought to be as tall as the TL tower.
We don't clearly see any tower like that one on the wide shot.





We can see a building in the far background, on the left of the picture. Due to the way the tower seems to vanish behind a curtain of haze, and once again due to perspective, we know that it's a tall structure.





(Click on the picture to see the HD version).

The derelict is barely taller than the dome building just sitting behind. Yet, we can see at the end of the street, in the background, a taller Theed-like building.
Or we can see the roof of a square tower (with an array of antennas, behind the vapour trail) that even reaches higher, on the picture, while also being closer to the camera.

I don't use ROTJ because the sequence is mirrored (yes, they still do that nowadays, even if it brings nothing in terms of budget).

In any case, I don't see any reason to assume a Mos Eisley significantly larger than what's already been concluded. It's a small place.

Yes, it's small.
However, my own village is already more than 10 km² large. That's already more than 3 km wide.
Where I live, a country not reputed for large cities full of skyscrappers, even a one kilometer wide agglomeration wouldn't even be enough to posit as a village.
I've measured Mos Eisley, by using the leaning bit at the south, and assuming it being 25 m high. By trying to take the most I could from Mos Eisley, that is, even taking small structures located far away from the bulk of the town, I barely reach a 1 km width, which is what you got, and that's extra generous.

It would mean that a gallofree transport, if it's 90 m long, takes roughly one tenth of the city's width. Needless to say that such a relatively big ship, sitting in the middle of wide and empty plaza, and being literally 3 to 5 times in lenght what the tallest towers can be in height, should be more than easy to spot on the wide angle, especially knowing that it's south of the two towers.

Unsurprisingly, there's nothing as such to be seen on the HD shot, even zoomed in.

We could still claim that it landed just before Luke arrived. But then there would be the large vacant zone to be seen.

Plus when we look at how far the buildings go on the left of the ship, we see that the two sort of towers on the wide angle are just too close to the south edge of the city. There's not enough room, on the wide shot, between those two towers and the city's edge, to cramp the plaza and all the structures between this plaza and the towers, and I'm not even talking about the buildings located beyond the plaza, on the other side, south to the plaza.

Really, there's no way Mos Eisley could be 1 to 2 km wide, and I couldn't honestly settle on a 1 km wide agglomeration when it's barely worth the village label where I live.

With a VFX department which can't even get shadows right in added CGI shots, I don't expect a new grand angle shot of Mos Eisley to be the most reliable piece of evidence ever.
It goes as far when you zoom on the HD version of the wide shot, there are weird leaning structures all over Mos Eisley.

I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with here, since I explicitly went into Mos Eisley's construction in Section III-D.

And as you can see, my final conclusion for bolt yield is 75 times higher than what I noted as being required for a 20psi overpressure across the whole town. So I don't see where 3.5 psi is of relevance regarding my page at all.

Sorry, that's a left over. I wrote this soon after you posted it, and recovered it while fiddling with old files. I tried to update the thing a little bit as well, ut obviously, I've done an incomplete job. I've read the whole article (deep down to durasteel related appendix part, which had me search a bit more on that), but I forgot to remove that piece.
Don't bother with that part.

[2046]

I'm wondering at what time the sequence described in the book is supposed to happen.
Is it expanded material, predating the battle sequence in the film, or is it supposed to correspond to the film, exactly?

I don't see where it refers to any specific time. I took it as a rather general, overall sort of description, sort of like talking about the Iraq invasion with a florid description of sand and explosions.

Well, we don't really have any evidence for that sort of thing. I'm not really fond of such theories, to be honest, simply because battles would then become exercises in not shooting. After all, if you imagine that ships end up firing with only tiny percentages of their original energy as battles drag on, then you want to be the fresh new ship that comes in like a juggernaut, incapable of being damaged by the puny shots of the battle's old-timers.

To put it in a real-world context, battleships with limited ammo obviously try not to waste shots. But, the 'low batteries' idea, translated into the context of ammunition, would be like ending up with smaller and smaller ammo as the battle wears on.

But exercises in not shooting is precisely what seems to happen so many times. Han Solo not even taking pot shot at a TIE. Vader's TIE squadron taking time to fire. The absolute low concentration of fire even during the final stages of the battle of Endor, from both sides of the fence.

Well said, though the first two are a range issue and an accuracy issue, respectively.

As for the latter, that was probably canonically more a matter of overloading (i.e. shooting too much) than trying to not shoot enough.

RoTS p.91: "But -- the forward towers are already overloading, sir [...] They'll be at critical failure in less than a minute --"

There's Boba Fett firing the Slave-I's nose cannons while it has just started the engines, and the energy banks are already depleted.

It appears rather logical that weapons would have their own capacitors, charged up to the chin. That would be a plus, instead of relying on the direct power core's output.

To a point, yes.

His use of the term "shining hairlines" might be somewhat florid, in keeping with the rest of the paragraph, but tied as it is to the known turbolaser shots I don't really see any contradiction or significant contrariness with the visuals.

The contradiction lies in the fact that his imaged descriptions seem to be what we'd see from the point of view of people standing up on the rooftops of Coruscant's buildings.
Yet, even us, in space, can't even really spot the rather short and faint most powerful bolts.

We can spot them, and they can spot them, just as we could spot the 3 meter-wide Sputnik upper stage . . . I was simply making the point that they're pretty dim overall.

After all, it's not like he tried to suggest that they could see the weapons fire from fighters.

There is no contradiction here.

Simply put, if you look at the film, there's just one single shiny hairline to be seen, and it comes from a hangar. All the rest does not fit at all.

The hairlines are specifically identified as turbolaser bolts. It's right there in the text. As far as the quote is concerned, the blue beam thingy doesn't exist.

I don't know how to make it any more plain than that.

It's more a question of showing that the derelict ship is not one of the highest buildings, by far, and couldn't be used as a yardstick to mesure Mos Eisley's size, if we were to consider the wide shot accurate (which is a whole other matter).

I understand that you estimated the leaning tower on the grand angle shot being 25 m high or so, based on the derelict's height.

"However, we can at least say with some confidence that the leaning tower in the distant view and the leaning tower in the in-town view are comparable in size."

This is where I disagree on.

But why? The tallest buildings you point to (the two towers) top out at 30-35 meters in size, with the round-top somewhat shorter. The derelict is estimated at circa 25m.

In the wide shot of the town, the feature I initially took to be a leaning building (but which may actually be a street, given the appearance in HD) is not as tall as the two features which interestingly resemble the two towers. I'm getting 14 pixels versus 18 and 17, for instance.

So again, I do not see why you are disagreeing on something where we agree.

We see the "turbolaser" tower and the one with a rounded dome. Judging by the angle, it's not far from the two twin pits.

Interesting.

Whether the docking bays are numbered sequentially, and their average size, is not known.

That's just the way every single carpark slot is numbered, whether it's in supermarkets, at the office or in your flat's building.

So room 404, for instance, is one of 404 rooms in a hotel or apartment building? I always thought it was room 4 of floor 4.

We're simply going to have to disagree on this point, because whereas you're taking the assumption of sequential numbering starting at 1 and trying to use that to override visuals, I think it is more proper to take the visuals at face value. If that contradicts your hypothesis, based solely on the existence of only one known number, that all numbers below that must exist, then, well, I just don't see a problem in need of resolution.

More later.

[Mr. Oragahn]

I don't see where it refers to any specific time. I took it as a rather general, overall sort of description, sort of like talking about the Iraq invasion with a florid description of sand and explosions.

Timeless description then. Ok. So there is definitely a contradiction here. The consequences... don't matter much there, as I'm not even sure there would be any.

Well said, though the first two are a range issue and an accuracy issue, respectively.

Yeah, well nevermind what the text can say there, it just makes zero sense. The cannons themselves can reach beyond that, and we have enough evidence that laser cannons can shot straight enough.

That TIE was like a couple of meters ahead of the Millenium Falcon.
Yes, dialogue and all that, but the fact is that it was well within firing range.
Han could have fired without the help of computers.

Simply put, if it's not a problem of powering up the cannons, then it's indeed a problem of accuracy, but because the Falcon's systems at this point sucked like hell, either because there was a malfunction, some damage, or the arrays were put out of order for a reason or another.
That wouldn't be a surprise, with that piece of junk were the power core, the main engines and the hyperdrive, to cite a few, seem to fail like on a daily routine.

As for the latter, that was probably canonically more a matter of overloading (i.e. shooting too much) than trying to not shoot enough.

RoTS p.91: "But -- the forward towers are already overloading, sir [...] They'll be at critical failure in less than a minute --"

From ROTS? Not ROTJ? That's pretty funny, because ROTS's battle is particularily intense as a matter of fact.

We can spot them, and they can spot them, just as we could spot the 3 meter-wide Sputnik upper stage . . . I was simply making the point that they're pretty dim overall.

Err... let's resume. We can spot them? We barely see them even if we, as the came, are literally floating right in the middle of the battlezone.
From such distances, most bolts are fairly dark in comparison to what would be necessary, and they're extremely short.
As for Sputnik, I have ard times believing that the probe didn't radiate much more than light than those bolts did in the film.

So I just don't see how people present on the rooftops could claim being able to see the bolts, while they're kilometers away from the battle, and there's like a pollution and atmospheric haze playing against them, possible daylight and smoke from debris and wercked parts falling down, while us, having the best seat to witness them, can't see any as a matter of fact.
Cause I'm sorry, but none of the bolt seen on screen, besides the hangar beam, matches the "shiny hairline" description.

The point is simple, as I see it.

It is conservative to consider that by turbolasers, the author means the heavy ones.

But it is not reasonable to argue that he's talking about the heavier ones due to the luminosity of bolts, while it doesn't correspond to the reality of the film. That is, we can't use the "shiny hairlines" as evidence that he's talking about the heavier turbolasers.

Basically, the only argument, which is a honourable one, to argue that he's talking about the heavier TLs, is because we would be looking for a conservative figure here. Thus a low end.
There is no other reason to support the idea that TL = HTL.

But why? The tallest buildings you point to (the two towers) top out at 30-35 meters in size, with the round-top somewhat shorter. The derelict is estimated at circa 25m.

In the wide shot of the town, the feature I initially took to be a leaning building (but which may actually be a street, given the appearance in HD) is not as tall as the two features which interestingly resemble the two towers. I'm getting 14 pixels versus 18 and 17, for instance.

So again, I do not see why you are disagreeing on something where we agree.

My point is that you say leaning tower = 25 m high. I say it's higher.

And after that, I actually argue that the whole wide shot angle is completely bogus, so it's impossible to get a reliable size of Mos Eisley from it.

Various in town clues also help to get an idea of how bigger Mos Eisley is, and the definition of a small town helps as well.

So room 404, for instance, is one of 404 rooms in a hotel or apartment building? I always thought it was room 4 of floor 4.

We're simply going to have to disagree on this point, because whereas you're taking the assumption of sequential numbering starting at 1 and trying to use that to override visuals, I think it is more proper to take the visuals at face value. If that contradicts your hypothesis, based solely on the existence of only one known number, that all numbers below that must exist, then, well, I just don't see a problem in need of resolution.

More later.

Docking bay 94 is at ground level. So obviously a level analogy wouldn't really fit. But in your three digits analogy, the first one could refer to either a class of docking bay, or a city block, or a street.

But with two digits only, if all digits are used evenly in the city, the lower number of docks would be one pit for each first number up to 8, plus at least 4 docks for for the number 9.
12 docks.
Otherwise, the biggest number would be 9x9, or 81 docks. However, if that system was correct, I'd expect three digits, the first one for the class (level in your flat analogy) and the two last ones for the dock number, from 01 to 99.

I mean, 9 docks top per style of dock, or section of the city, with a place as busy as Mos Eisley, seems fairly small.

But we can put this point aside if you don't feel like arguing about it.

All in all, we can focus on the major asset you used to determine Mos Eisley's city, the wide shot, and my position is clear: you can't use it.

[2046]

Most are said to be mere gouges in the dirt, for what it's worth, and hence we need not expect to see buildings for most.

Do you have a quote on the gouge thing?

Script:

INTERIOR: MOS EISLEY SPACEPORT -- DOCKING BAY 94

Chewbacca leads the group into a giant dirt pit that is Docking
Bay 94. Resting in the middle of the huge hole is a large,
round, beat-up, pieced-together hunk of junk that could only
loosely be called a starship.

Novelization:

"Docking bay ninety-four, Luke noted, was no different in appearance from a host of other grandiosely named docking bays scattered throughout Mos Eisley. It consisted mostly of an entrance rampway and an enormous pit gouged from the rocky soil. This served as clearance radii for the effects of the simple antigrav drive which boosted all spacecraft clear of the gravitational field of the planet.
The mathematics of spacedrive were simple enough even to Luke. Antigrav could operate only when there was a sufficient gravity well to push against-like that of a planet-whereas supralight travel could only take place when a ship was clear of that same gravity. Hence the necessity for the dual-drive system on any extrasystem craft.
The pit which formed docking bay ninety-four was as shabbily cut and run-down as the majority of Mos Eisley. Its sloping sides were crumbling in places instead of being smoothly fashioned as they were on more populous worlds. Luke felt it formed the perfect setting for the spacecraft Chewbacca was leading them toward."

There's just something wrong with that wide shot.

Even if you're correct, it can hardly be discarded.

I've measured Mos Eisley, by using the leaning bit at the south, and assuming it being 25 m high. By trying to take the most I could from Mos Eisley, that is, even taking small structures located far away from the bulk of the town, I barely reach a 1 km width, which is what you got, and that's extra generous.

I should re-do it with the new, higher-quality shot, but I doubt there will be a grand change of scale.

Even assuming that the two towers in the wide shot are not the same as the two towers in what we'll call the CGI crane shot (which includes the transport), but are instead unseen towers of 70 meters height, double anything we've noted thus far, then Mos Eisley still comes out to 2km and change, from the farthest-left building in the wide shot I gave to the farthest-right.

Let's ponder that in relation to my page:

1. I noted that a blast overpressure of 20psi could be achieved across the whole town, estimated at 1.5km, with a 20 kiloton bomb. That still leaves a substantial overpressure a few hundred meters beyond.

Vaporization of humans could be achieved with 400 kilotons at 1.5km. Even doubling that to 800 kilotons (.8 megatons) to account for another few hundred meters doesn't do much, because:

2. My final conclusion was 1.5 megatons.

So, even if your vague and ill-considered quasi-objections are all correct despite the various internal and external contradictions, you've still accomplished nothing of consequence.

It would mean that a gallofree transport, if it's 90 m long, takes roughly one tenth of the city's width. Needless to say that such a relatively big ship, sitting in the middle of wide and empty plaza, and being literally 3 to 5 times in lenght what the tallest towers can be in height, should be more than easy to spot on the wide angle, especially knowing that it's south of the two towers.

Ideally it would be easy to spot, but it is not necessary for it to be so. Its orientation is not certain, for instance . . . if parked aligned with our field of view, it would look like little more than a tallish building.

Further . . . although your application of compass directions onto the image is actually probably spot-on (Anchorhead being south of Mos Eisley per the novelization), the presumption that they entered from the south is a little, well, presumptuous. In the novelization, for instance, Luke attempts to claim to the stormtrooper that they are from Bestine, to the west. They were aware that the Empire was looking for them. It seems unlikely to me that they'd have come in directly.

Of course, adding to the confusion, the author explicitly notes that they departed from the Jawa barbecue toward the southeast, which ought to have been away from Mos Eisley altogether. On the other hand, that supports the notion that they were taking a somewhat evasive course.

We could still claim that it landed just before Luke arrived. But then there would be the large vacant zone to be seen.

We have a large selection of those.

Plus when we look at how far the buildings go on the left of the ship, we see that the two sort of towers on the wide angle are just too close to the south edge of the city.

What do these two things have to do with one another? You talk of buildings to the left of the ship (and hence, in your view, to the west), yet say the towers are too close to the south edge of the city.

With a VFX department which can't even get shadows right in added CGI shots, I don't expect a new grand angle shot of Mos Eisley to be the most reliable piece of evidence ever.

That's absurd. The problem comes with trying to match CGI and disparate live-action elements, some obtained in haste over 20 years before . . . they could've done a much better job, yes, but that doesn't apply to the wide angle shot. In the wide angle CGI shot, they had control of all the variables. That's also why the crane shot looks better than some of the street-level views.

It goes as far when you zoom on the HD version of the wide shot, there are weird leaning structures all over Mos Eisley.

Like I said, the structure I initially though to be the leaning derelict need not be. Any assemblage of domed structures and shadows, seen at sufficient distance and at sufficiently low pixel/meter resolution, can appear as one leaning object.

[2046]

I don't see where it refers to any specific time. I took it as a rather general, overall sort of description, sort of like talking about the Iraq invasion with a florid description of sand and explosions.

Timeless description then. Ok. So there is definitely a contradiction here.

Your statement is absurd. If it is a "timeless" general description of the whole battle, then there can be no contradiction with specific moments as you initially claimed. You cannot have it both ways.

Well said, though the first two are a range issue and an accuracy issue, respectively.

Yeah, well nevermind what the text can say there, it just makes zero sense.

I'm not interested in what you refuse to believe. My website is based on analysis of canon facts, not wild guesses and personal incredulity. If you cannot challenge it on that basis, then any challenge you attempt to make is irrelevant.

As for Sputnik, I have ard times believing that the probe didn't radiate much more than light than those bolts did in the film.

Sputnik was reflective (and the drive section refractive). Neither was luminescent.

The satellite itself was a polished sphere about half a meter in size, meaning that sunlight reflecting off of it would be coming from an even smaller area. The satellite still managed to be a mag-6 object, which is impressive in and of itself but would scarcely be visible to most people, especially in urban areas.

Assuming perfect reflectivity, then, we have a very bright but very small object in LEO reaching mag-6.

What we need for a turbolaser bolt is for it to reach about mag-3 or better. Small fighter-scale weapons were not noted as being visible, so we can rule out anything of about that size. Drive-glows of starfighters were visible as 'gnats', though, so we can consider those a rough lower limit. Those are generally on the order of a meter wide, and bright.

So for very visible bolts that appear as obvious lines, bright ones of a meter wide seem like the best option.

Only the largest-scale bolts are a meter wide.

So I just don't see how people present on the rooftops could claim being able to see the bolts, while they're kilometers away from the battle, and there's like a pollution and atmospheric haze playing against them, possible daylight and smoke from debris and wercked parts falling down, while us, having the best seat to witness them, can't see any as a matter of fact.

Your reasoning above is almost 180 degrees off from what it ought to be.

1. Many of Coruscant's rooftops are kilometers above the ground. As seen in the opening of AotC, they are above fog level. This puts them above some of the light pollution haze, perhaps most depending on conditions.

2. The ships are illuminated by sunlight, but surface watchers need not be. Much of the fight occurred just on the night side of the terminator.

3. Smoke and debris from the battle would be worse within it, which is where we're seeing things. On the ground below it would be an odd thing until later, when the atmosphere (as is also canonically noted) has a haze from all the fires and so on. But during the battle itself, this would not be a significant problem.

4. Most of the time, we are looking for weapons fire against the atmospheric glow toward the side or down toward the lit surface, not against the blackness of space. Rooftop-watchers would not have this problem.

Cause I'm sorry, but none of the bolt seen on screen, besides the hangar beam, matches the "shiny hairline" description.

The point is simple, as I see it.

You have a particular interpretation of what a shiny hairline must be, but this interpretation is contrary to what they are directly identified as being. So your interpretation is irrelevant and, in the context of the canon, dead wrong.

Get over it.

My point is that you say leaning tower = 25 m high. I say it's higher.

Based on what? And why are you even complaining? I thought you wanted the derelict shorter.

But we can put this point aside if you don't feel like arguing about it.

There's nothing to argue about. You are rejecting the validity of the wide shot of the town based (in this instance) on your belief that a numbered docking bay requires the existence of docking bays of all lower digits. We do not know if that is so, but we know what the town looks like, so your point is moot.

All in all, we can focus on the major asset you used to determine Mos Eisley's city, the wide shot, and my position is clear: you can't use it.

And all of your vague and vaguely-stated reasons why you reject it appear to be based on unfounded assumptions and often-baseless personal disbelief of known facts.

1. You reject the wide shot because:
a. It makes Mos Eisley smaller than your village, and you don't like that idea. That of course is silly, because definitions of village and town and whatnot are all over the map.
b. You reject the identification of objects visible in the in-town scenes based on your own assumptions of where stuff ought to be. This requires that you assume the existence of unseen skyscrapers, along with other assumptions.
c. You think the existence of DB94 requires DB1-DB93 of similar or greater size and construction, which is unnecessary.

2. You reject the RotS novelization line because:
a. You interpret "shining hairlines" as a continuous beam between two objects. This is silly, since we are specifically told those represent turbolaser bolt exchanges between vessels.
b. You reject the visibility of turbolaser bolts from the ground, based on fundamental flaws in how you think of the visibility of objects in space.
c. You have a unique theory of Star Wars combat tactics, one which requires rejecting canonically-identified range limitations and other factors.

I'm probably missing some stuff, but I think I've got the major points.

The simple truth is, you are attempting to create contradictions in order to invalidate the wide shot and novelization line because, for whatever misguided reason, you seek to reject my firepower assessment.

But as noted, my firepower assessment contains an extraordinary amount of wiggle room in SW's favor, ending up some 75 times higher than what you initially thought to complain about. So even if we grant your attempts to quibble with the semantics of florid descriptions and so on, we still end up with a conclusion higher than what could be drawn with your preferences intact.

And the fun part is, the RotS line is the single highest statement or display of Star Wars capital ship firepower anywhere in the canon, standing as quite the outlier (but which I count in generosity), meaning you're fighting to invalidate as contradictory the single item that gives SW its greatest yields.

And yet you press on, for reasons (and often with reasons) which are entirely elusive to me.

My apologies that my pages have raised such ire in you, but I can't apologize for dismissing your challenge unless it improves tremendously.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Script:

INTERIOR: MOS EISLEY SPACEPORT -- DOCKING BAY 94

Chewbacca leads the group into a giant dirt pit that is Docking
Bay 94. Resting in the middle of the huge hole is a large,
round, beat-up, pieced-together hunk of junk that could only
loosely be called a starship.

Novelization:

"Docking bay ninety-four, Luke noted, was no different in appearance from a host of other grandiosely named docking bays scattered throughout Mos Eisley. It consisted mostly of an entrance rampway and an enormous pit gouged from the rocky soil. This served as clearance radii for the effects of the simple antigrav drive which boosted all spacecraft clear of the gravitational field of the planet.
The mathematics of spacedrive were simple enough even to Luke. Antigrav could operate only when there was a sufficient gravity well to push against-like that of a planet-whereas supralight travel could only take place when a ship was clear of that same gravity. Hence the necessity for the dual-drive system on any extrasystem craft.
The pit which formed docking bay ninety-four was as shabbily cut and run-down as the majority of Mos Eisley. Its sloping sides were crumbling in places instead of being smoothly fashioned as they were on more populous worlds. Luke felt it formed the perfect setting for the spacecraft Chewbacca was leading them toward."

Ok, so that gouge pit thing is completely invalidated by the film. In the film, it's a real man made structure, a building with lost all of hardware running over the ground and in the walls.
So there docking bays not gouge pits.

Even if you're correct, it can hardly be discarded.

The wide shot and the in-town shots disagree largely.
With the wide shot, eventually Mos Eisley is 1 to 2 km smaller than my own village.
In the in-town shots, it doesn't look so.
My gripe with that is that you make a measurement on that wide shot, by using a formerly assumed height obtained from an in town shot, when we can easily see that they don't mesh well together.

I should re-do it with the new, higher-quality shot, but I doubt there will be a grand change of scale.

Even assuming that the two towers in the wide shot are not the same as the two towers in what we'll call the CGI crane shot (which includes the transport), but are instead unseen towers of 70 meters height, double anything we've noted thus far, then Mos Eisley still comes out to 2km and change, from the farthest-left building in the wide shot I gave to the farthest-right.

It can't work. Nowhere do we ever get the impression that there's a 70-75 m high tower in Mos Eisley, and even if that was the case, it would mean that all the domes we see on the wide shot, would be roughly 50 meters high, which it is hardly the case with the in-town shots.

So it's very simple. First, it has to be acknowledged that the wide shot differs largely from the in town shots, and there's no consistency there, and secondly, it has to be recognized that the in-rown shots point to a larger town.

Let's ponder that in relation to my page:

1. I noted that a blast overpressure of 20psi could be achieved across the whole town, estimated at 1.5km, with a 20 kiloton bomb. That still leaves a substantial overpressure a few hundred meters beyond.

Vaporization of humans could be achieved with 400 kilotons at 1.5km. Even doubling that to 800 kilotons (.8 megatons) to account for another few hundred meters doesn't do much, because:

2. My final conclusion was 1.5 megatons.

So, even if your vague and ill-considered quasi-objections are all correct despite the various internal and external contradictions, you've still accomplished nothing of consequence.

What matters to me is the size of Mos Eisley. That it increases the yield or not, or makes is Bastrop sized, is not really an issue for me.
It's really about the city's size.

Ideally it would be easy to spot, but it is not necessary for it to be so. Its orientation is not certain, for instance . . . if parked aligned with our field of view, it would look like little more than a tallish building.

No. The thing is a solid 90 m long structure, sitting on a large place, which most of it is largely empty. We can actually see how far from the droid in the foreground the ship is sitting.
No building could mask the ship. No eye trick, no perspective issue, especially from where we're seeing Mos Eisley on the wide shot, could mask the ship and the large plaza.
There's enough space to make two to three of such transports sit side by side.

Here's where it should be, or where we could see the larger plaza:



The faint horizontal white line starts from the base of what would be the TL tower, and goes to the right. It helps to understand the orientation of the two towers regading our point of view.

We can see that the orientation is roughly identical to the one in this shot:



We can see that the street which they went through is perpendicular to the virtual line drawn between the two towers, and is roughly straight south of them.

So basically, according to my (assumed) cardinal points, we know the plaza can only be south of those towers, and easy to spot.
We're talking about a plaza which is large enough to enable the landing of a 90 m long spaceship, that is, a plaza roughly 100 m long, and seemingly just as much wide; or four times the size of the building you used for your measurements.

With this shot, strictly followed by this second cap, we see that the plaza is like ten small buildings south of the towers.

The plaza, nor the ship, are there to be seen.

Further . . . although your application of compass directions onto the image is actually probably spot-on (Anchorhead being south of Mos Eisley per the novelization)

Lucky shot. :)

... the presumption that they entered from the south is a little, well, presumptuous. In the novelization, for instance, Luke attempts to claim to the stormtrooper that they are from Bestine, to the west. They were aware that the Empire was looking for them. It seems unlikely to me that they'd have come in directly.

In the film, they've been checked by the patrol after a while wandering in Mos Eisley. At that point, Luke could have claimed he came from anywhere.
Things would have been very different if the patrol stopped them at one of the entrances of Mos Eisley, which is clearly not the case.

Plus this shot clearly shows that they entered east/south east of the towers (if we assume that the TL tower is on the west side of the town, the dome shaped tower on the east side), as we can see them.

Of course, adding to the confusion, the author explicitly notes that they departed from the Jawa barbecue toward the southeast, which ought to have been away from Mos Eisley altogether. On the other hand, that supports the notion that they were taking a somewhat evasive course.

They first returned to the Owen's farm, which shouldn't be too far from Anchorhead, said to be at the south of Mos Eisley. It would mean the Jawa sandcrawler was a few kilomters away from Mos Eisley, towards the west. From that vehicle, going southeast would actually bring Luke and Obi-Wan back to Anchorhead, or not too far, at the south of Mos Eisley. And thus, when they head for Mos Eisley, they approach from the south.

The Bestine part is probably BS not too draw too much attention about anyone coming from the south, since I suppose that the Imperials would actually expect the escapees to come from that direction.
So basically, they just went down, to go up after that.

Here's how I see it:



Note that the placement of the Owen's farm regarding Anchorhead is an assumption. I don't know if Anchorhead is beyond the farm, to the south, or not.

Plus when we look at how far the buildings go on the left of the ship, we see that the two sort of towers on the wide angle are just too close to the south edge of the city.

What do these two things have to do with one another? You talk of buildings to the left of the ship (and hence, in your view, to the west), yet say the towers are too close to the south edge of the city.

When we see the ship, whatever's on the left of the ship would actually be south of the ship. In the wide shot, we clearly see that there's not even enough structures at the south of the two towers.

With a VFX department which can't even get shadows right in added CGI shots, I don't expect a new grand angle shot of Mos Eisley to be the most reliable piece of evidence ever.

That's absurd. The problem comes with trying to match CGI and disparate live-action elements, some obtained in haste over 20 years before . . . they could've done a much better job, yes, but that doesn't apply to the wide angle shot. In the wide angle CGI shot, they had control of all the variables. That's also why the crane shot looks better than some of the street-level views.

I don't think it's so absurd.
The details on the wide shot were added by the SE. That is, the same version which features the new shots from Mos Eisley. So basically, we have more than enough reason to estimate that the visuals are faulty when done for the same release.
We have proof that the two towers aren't the only big buildings in Mos Eisley, from the in-rown shots, yet we only see them predominantly reigning over the city on the wide shot.

Your statement is absurd. If it is a "timeless" general description of the whole battle, then there can be no contradiction with specific moments as you initially claimed. You cannot have it both ways.

If there's no contradiction, it then means that at some point in the battle, the starships were indeed exchanging bolts which looked like shiny hairlines that could be easily seen from the ground.

As for Sputnik, I have ard times believing that the probe didn't radiate much more than light than those bolts did in the film.

Sputnik was reflective (and the drive section refractive). Neither was luminescent.

The satellite itself was a polished sphere about half a meter in size, meaning that sunlight reflecting off of it would be coming from an even smaller area. The satellite still managed to be a mag-6 object, which is impressive in and of itself but would scarcely be visible to most people, especially in urban areas.

Assuming perfect reflectivity, then, we have a very bright but very small object in LEO reaching mag-6.

What we need for a turbolaser bolt is for it to reach about mag-3 or better. Small fighter-scale weapons were not noted as being visible, so we can rule out anything of about that size. Drive-glows of starfighters were visible as 'gnats', though, so we can consider those a rough lower limit. Those are generally on the order of a meter wide, and bright.

So for very visible bolts that appear as obvious lines, bright ones of a meter wide seem like the best option.

Only the largest-scale bolts are a meter wide.

"The situation is similar over Coruscant. The opening scene as the fighters 'fall' over the side of a Venator shows us that a battle is afoot, and most of the ships that are visible have only flashes around them . . . the distant bolts aren't visible at all against the planet. Where weapons fire occurs against the blackness of space the situation is similar. Observe these two battles in progress . . ."

"The first features a Republic cruiser on the right (her nose visible) fighting a Separatist vessel. The blue bolts of the Republic ship have almost a whitish inner glow at close range, but this feature is invisible further away. Similarly, the returning red bolts of the Separatist ship are scarcely visible at all. In the second image, a similar battle features flashes on the hulls of the two vessels, but no bolts are seen between them whatsoever."

" Even in modern-day Earth urban environments, with what one would expect to be a small amount of light pollution compared to that of Coruscant, you won't see anything fainter than a 3 or so in our goofy magnitude system. It's not a leap to imagine that from the cityscape of Coruscant (even on the rooftops above most of the lights and, in some cases, the low-level cloud cover) the situation would be far worse, especially when looking for the dim hairlines of a turbolaser bolt. Thus, it's clear that any bolts visible from the surface must've been the biggest and most powerful."

I think there is a misunderstanding.

You admit yourself that the heavier bolts are barely visible from space, even if the camera is floating in the middle of that mish mash of two fleets.

So how could people, on the ground, be capable to see those turbolaser bolts, when we consider the pollution, the atmosphere, light scattering, clouds, smoke from fallin debris and an even greater distance?
Even more, how could they see them as "shiny hairlines", when we do not during the film?

That is my point. The author says:

" The skies of Coruscant blaze with war.

The artificial daylight spread by the capital's orbital mirrors is sliced by intersecting flames of ion drives and punctuated by starburst explosions; contrails of debris raining into the atmosphere become tangled ribbons of cloud. The nightside sky is an infinite lattice of shining hairlines that interlock planetoids and track erratic spirals of glowing gnats. Beings watching from rooftops of Coruscant's endless cityscape can find it beautiful.

From the inside, it's different. The gnats are drive-glows of starfighters. The shining hairlines are light-scatter from turbolaser bolts powerful enough to vaporize a small town. The planetoids are capital ships."

We're probably in case where the author had to invent a few things before the scene was actually completed, and ended, as often, with a description that doesn't match the final scene.

Plus I'd like to see those EU's famous orbital mirrors as well.

Your reasoning above is almost 180 degrees off from what it ought to be.

1. Many of Coruscant's rooftops are kilometers above the ground. As seen in the opening of AotC, they are above fog level. This puts them above some of the light pollution haze, perhaps most depending on conditions.

2. The ships are illuminated by sunlight, but surface watchers need not be. Much of the fight occurred just on the night side of the terminator.

3. Smoke and debris from the battle would be worse within it, which is where we're seeing things. On the ground below it would be an odd thing until later, when the atmosphere (as is also canonically noted) has a haze from all the fires and so on. But during the battle itself, this would not be a significant problem.

4. Most of the time, we are looking for weapons fire against the atmospheric glow toward the side or down toward the lit surface, not against the blackness of space. Rooftop-watchers would not have this problem.

1. They'd be, at best, 10 km above the ground. There's like many more tens of kilometers between them and the fleets.
We barely see the heavy turbolaser bolts of ships flying a few kilometers away from the camera, and we're in vacuum.

2. Mkay, I don't think there's any disagreement there.

3. Most of the smoke would quickly dissipate in space, and trails wouldn't last long. In atmosphere, that would be, on the contrary, much worse, adding a veil of diluted smokes mixed to the already present clouds and pollution. It can only be worse from the surface, not the reverse.
Plus in the film we clearly see the ships without any problem, despite the few faint clouds of smoke, which perfectly supports my point.

4. No. When the two fighters plunge over the Venator's edge, we see may warships below. Even beneath them is a particularily dark region of Coruscant.
There's no "shiny hairline" to be seen at all.
When we see the vulture droids taking off to intercept Anakin and Obi-Wan, once again there's no shny hairlines to be seen, despite the fact that the camera is looking at the depth of space.
Same when, seconds earlier, they fly close to massive warships. We get that one, which fires cannons supposedly able to vaporize an ice moon in one blow (ICS nonsense). Agai, it stacks upon the blackness of space. We can see that the bolt are fairly short, and particularily dim.

So that's simple.
Either there is a contradiction, and thusn the only reason to assume that the author is talking about the heaviest turbolasers is the result of the utmost conservative stance, or there's no contradiction, but then it refers to a point of the battle when the ships were indeed exchanging such shiny hairlines, but this precedes the film's opening battle sequence.

You have a particular interpretation of what a shiny hairline must be, but this interpretation is contrary to what they are directly identified as being. So your interpretation is irrelevant and, in the context of the canon, dead wrong.

Get over it.

Come on, let's get real for a moment. We even have scenes where ships, located a very few kilometers away from the camera, are surrounded by explosions but where no bolts, shiny or not, are to be seen.

By which miracle would people, living in the breathable layer of an atmopshere, be able to see shiny hairlines which aren't even visible at a few kilometers of distance, huh?

There's nothing to argue about. You are rejecting the validity of the wide shot of the town based (in this instance) on your belief that a numbered docking bay requires the existence of docking bays of all lower digits. We do not know if that is so, but we know what the town looks like, so your point is moot.

And what it looks like from the outside differs greatly from what it looks like from the inside.
You seem to insist downsizing Mos Eisley to a subvillage "urban" entity.

And all of your vague and vaguely-stated reasons why you reject it appear to be based on unfounded assumptions and often-baseless personal disbelief of known facts.

1. You reject the wide shot because:
a. It makes Mos Eisley smaller than your village, and you don't like that idea. That of course is silly, because definitions of village and town and whatnot are all over the map.
b. You reject the identification of objects visible in the in-town scenes based on your own assumptions of where stuff ought to be. This requires that you assume the existence of unseen skyscrapers, along with other assumptions.
c. You think the existence of DB94 requires DB1-DB93 of similar or greater size and construction, which is unnecessary.

2. You reject the RotS novelization line because:
a. You interpret "shining hairlines" as a continuous beam between two objects. This is silly, since we are specifically told those represent turbolaser bolt exchanges between vessels.
b. You reject the visibility of turbolaser bolts from the ground, based on fundamental flaws in how you think of the visibility of objects in space.
c. You have a unique theory of Star Wars combat tactics, one which requires rejecting canonically-identified range limitations and other factors.

• 1a. From Merriam-Webster online:
  The only definition relevant to size/population is the second one:
  A : a compactly settled area as distinguished from surrounding rural territory.
  B : a compactly settled area usually larger than a village but smaller than a city.
  C : a large densely populated urban area : CITY.
  D : an English village having a periodic fair or market.
  
  A doesn't help much, as this could be all and anything, from a pack of four skyscrappers to a city of the size of Washington.
  B says that is has to be bigger than a village.
  C shows that it's large and densely populated area. Which fits but doesn't give much info about a town besides that it's large.
  D is irrelevant. England does not exist in Star Wars, and Star Wars's produced by an american company.
• 1b. What I reject is that idea that the wide shot is accurate in relation to the intramuros shots. I've outlined the many discrepancies, and I hope that my efforts above made it clearer.
• 1c. But it would follow logic, especially since DB 94, despite having its first number being 9, is actually located at ground level. But as I said, I can put this point aside.
• 2a. I interpret shiny hairline as an elongated bolt that is shiny. Bolts are particularily hardly elongated in ROTS, and far from being shiny at all. A simple dheck out of definitions would make this rather clear from the get go.
  Mind you, I do not reject the whole line.
• 2b. What flaws, again? If you can't even properly see the bolts when you're in space, from various up and down angles, there's not going to be any magic about how people on the ground will be able to see them. I reject the absurd idea that people, even located on Coruscant's highest skyscrappers, are supposed to be able to identify turbolaser bolts, and see them as shiny hairlines, when we, as the audience, using the camera from a much more favourable position, can barely, if not simply can't even see the bolts from massive ships fighting a very few kilometers away. You got to tell me how this is supposed to happen, really.
• c. Excuse me? I proposed the possibility, and didn't hammer it as a fact, that ships would enter battles with their cannons already charged, since tied to their own capacitors, beside direct input from the power core. I provided a couple of instances which clearly show that weapon have to be charged, and I clearly reject the absurd idea that the Millenium Falcon's firing range is like a few meters ahead of it, when flying in a straight line behind its target, and posit that it's either due to malfunction, bad calibration of the turrets, or (and I forgot about it) the radiations and dust from Alderaan technically narrowing the firing range, but that alone doesn't really fly.

The simple truth is, you are attempting to create contradictions in order to invalidate the wide shot and novelization line because, for whatever misguided reason, you seek to reject my firepower assessment.

But as noted, my firepower assessment contains an extraordinary amount of wiggle room in SW's favor, ending up some 75 times higher than what you initially thought to complain about. So even if we grant your attempts to quibble with the semantics of florid descriptions and so on, we still end up with a conclusion higher than what could be drawn with your preferences intact.

And the fun part is, the RotS line is the single highest statement or display of Star Wars capital ship firepower anywhere in the canon, standing as quite the outlier (but which I count in generosity), meaning you're fighting to invalidate as contradictory the single item that gives SW its greatest yields.

And yet you press on, for reasons (and often with reasons) which are entirely elusive to me.

My apologies that my pages have raised such ire in you, but I can't apologize for dismissing your challenge unless it improves tremendously.

The firepower is not really the problem. My problem lies in the idea that the author's talkign about the heaviest turbolasers, because only the heaviest turbolasers' bolts can look like shiny hairlines for people parked on the buildings' rooftops of Coruscant, which is not the case.

Ultimately, it shouldn't change much to yoru calcs. It would just mean that:

1. Mos Eisley is bigger than what you think.
2a. The turboalsers the author mentions are not necessarily the heavier ones; Based on the observation that the book is supposed to describe what's on screen, but fails on certain key elements.
2b. Or the warships charge their cannons before entering a battle; no direct total contradiction, but the book's description then refers to a moment of the battle that largely preceeds the film's opening sequence, which funnily would give credit to the idea from the people of the other side of the debate, that the cannon's capacitors were largely depleted past that point. That, however, wouldn't invalidate the line, and would still meant that when the bolt were looking like shiny hairlines, that is, more powerful than they were during the film, they could only vaporize a small town, since this is what the author says. So in fact, you would rather wish to agree with my 2b than with 2a.

[Kane Starkiller]

I know I haven't posted here long but I felt I had to weigh in on the "Vaporizing a small town" page as I think that there are a few important facts people seem to be missing.

First of all I see that there is a link to Nuclear weapon FAQ in the Darkstar's article yet Darkstar uses simple geometric scaling which disregards atmospheric effects rather than using ready available empirical nuclear effect formulas.
In our case thermal radiation formula:
r=Y^0.41*r_const where r_const is 1.
This formula will give us the yield of the bomb (expressed in multiples of 2.5 kilotons) for any given radius.
For 0.75km (Darkstar's stated radius of Mos Eisley) the yield is 1.24kt.
However this formula is derived based on the intensity of 8cal/cm2 or 334,720J/m2. In order to vaporize a human being we need 2.31*10^8J/m2 or 690 times greater intensity. Since intensity, at a given distance from the explosion, is proportional to the yield then the bomb also needs to be 690 times more powerful or 0.855 megatons.

To vaporize a Ford Mustang, to use Darkstar's example, we would need 8230 times more energy than to cause 3rd degree burns as assumed in Nuclear FAQ empirical formula.
Thus we multiply 1.24 kt with 8230 to reach the yield of 10.2 megatons.


To cause 3rd degree burns in humans 1km and 3km from the blast point we would need 2.5kt and 36.44kt respectively.
Multiplying with 690 we find that it takes 1.72Mt and 25Mt to vaporize them at stated distances.
Finally to actually vaporize a Ford Mustang at 3000 meters we require a yield of no less than 300 megatons.

To further back my figures I also did some testing on Arizona asteroid impact effect calculator which although it deals with asteroids can produce a pretty good approximation of what would happen since we are talking about depositing large amount of energy into the ground.
I entered asteroid diameter of 1m and density of 50,000kg/m3. I needed to enter high density since otherwise the asteroid breaks up in the atmosphere in the simulation. I also entered the values of 90 degrees for angle of impact and sedimentary rock for type of target.
To achieve 2.31*10^8J/m2 intensity at 1km distance I needed to bump the speed to 7730km/s which results in energy of 187Mt before atmospheric entry or 115.8Mt upon impact. To vaporize a Ford Mustang at 3km I needed to raise the velocity to 80,000km/s resulting in impact energy of 12.37 gigatons.

The numbers from asteroid calculator are much higher since obviously nuclear bomb desposits it's energy in all directions while asteroid impacts directly into the ground. A turbolaser bolt also deposits it's energy by impact which makes it far more similar to high-speed asteroid impact than the explosion of a nuclear bomb.


There is still an important point left though. Not only did Darkstar disregard the atmospheric effects but he disregards obstacles between the blast point and target.
Suppose that there is another human standing between the bomb and target human. That doubles the required yield and intensity of the bomb right there. What if the Ford Mustang is in a parking lot and there are 20 other cars between it and the bomb? 20 times increase. If the parking lot is 3km from the blast point? 6Gt-250Gt! What if the parking lot is behind a Wal-Mart? What if the Wal-Mart is behind a tree line?
These are not exactly trivial or unlikely changes to the calculations. Even in Mos Eisley the thermal radiation would need to vaporize every single building, land speeder, droid and organic lifeform standing in it's path before it reached the hypothetical human standing at 750 meters from the blast center. Orders of magnitude increase easily.
And we still didn't get into the albedo effects and reflection of the radiation.

I know there is some bad blood between me and the board but I still decided to post since this seems to me as an important enough point.


EDIT:calculation check

[Praeothmin]

Kane Starkiller wrote:

I know there is some bad blood between me and the board but I still decided to post since this seems to me as an important enough point.

I was under the impression it was mostly extreme disgreement on most SW vs ST discussions, but of course I can only comment on what I perceive from the sidelines... :)

[Mr. Oragahn]

Kane: all depends what you mean by vaporized. The lowest interpretation is that the city is roughly entirely leveled, but certain structures may remain up. However, they're not able to perform the functions they're built for.

Now, if you want vaporization of everything, and above all be sure to get around the LOS issues, it's pretty sure that you have to encompass the whole target in your hotty fireball.

[Kane Starkiller]

Kane: all depends what you mean by vaporized. The lowest interpretation is that the city is roughly entirely leveled, but certain structures may remain up. However, they're not able to perform the functions they're built for.

Vaporized means to be turned into vapor. I don't see how "leveled" as in not vaporized can be a low interpretation. If we wanted to go high we could assume that vaporized town also includes subterranean structures like basements which would really bump up the figure.
Darkstar links to several pages where the term vaporized is used to describe, incorrectly, what happened to Hiroshima. But we can hardly use the fact that a term is sometimes misused as some kind of evidence that it will always be misused. If the narrator of the book (which is not a mere character but has the similar role as camera in the films) states the town can be vaporized then we take that at face value unless it is contradicted by other events.


Just to add another point about Coruscant inhabitants observing the battle.
The relevant quote:

Beings watching from rooftops of Coruscant's endless cityscape can find it beautiful.

Darkstar claims that normal turbolasers would be invisible from that altitude. However what beings are watching from the rooftops? Is their eyesight better than that of human standard? Are they using electronic binoculars or similar vision aid? The excerpt doesn't say only that they are "watching".
But since they did climb up to the rooftops to watch the battle it is not exactly unreasonable to assume they brought some sort of vision aid.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Kane: all depends what you mean by vaporized. The lowest interpretation is that the city is roughly entirely leveled, but certain structures may remain up. However, they're not able to perform the functions they're built for.

Vaporized means to be turned into vapor. I don't see how "leveled" as in not vaporized can be a low interpretation. If we wanted to go high we could assume that vaporized town also includes subterranean structures like basements which would really bump up the figure.
Darkstar links to several pages where the term vaporized is used to describe, incorrectly, what happened to Hiroshima. But we can hardly use the fact that a term is sometimes misused as some kind of evidence that it will always be misused. If the narrator of the book (which is not a mere character but has the similar role as camera in the films) states the town can be vaporized then we take that at face value unless it is contradicted by other events.

I can't agree, for the simple reason that there's large evidence that a very common way of (mis)using the term vaporize just measn dropping a nuclear like firepower on a town and erase it from the map, without literally vaporizing stuff.
It's like when you find a terran made expression in an EU book. You know that it's a wording that comes from Earth, and would have unlikely originated one any of Star Wars's worlds, or more precisely that it's an expression that rings a bell to us, inhabitants of Earth and its respective nations. It is made for us, by us, and thus must be understood from our context, even if it's applied, by necessary narrative rules, to fictions about worlds which are far far away.

Thusly, a quick glance at google will simply show that the expression "vaporize a town" has the same mechanism behind it as "crush an army".

Besides, if we were to take the words literally, then I'd like to know what we're supposed to understand by "shining hairlines that interlock planetoids" - which I'd like to use to point out, again, that this strongly describes a situation were beams fired from a ship hit their targets before the beam has finished its course, clearly pointing to kilometer long bolts, which never ever happened in the whole battle safe once, as far as we can see, and clearly never was a case representing a majority, which finely highlights how the description of the book do not match the visuals from the film.

Now, arguably, that piece I took is from the part of the paragraph that heavily relies on imagery terms, metaphors, to depict what happens.

The part about the vaporization is in the second section of the extract, the one where the author defines, with more concise but concrete descriptions nonetheless, what each metaphor was about.

However, it still remains that there's no indication that the author is being particularily engaged in laying down a scientific paper, within one line, about the exact effects of turbolaser on urban areas, within the biosphere or any common world.
There's large room for hyperbole here.

This vast possibility means that a conservative stance is to treat this as hyperbole.

Just to add another point about Coruscant inhabitants observing the battle.
The relevant quote:

Beings watching from rooftops of Coruscant's endless cityscape can find it beautiful.

Darkstar claims that normal turbolasers would be invisible from that altitude. However what beings are watching from the rooftops? Is their eyesight better than that of human standard? Are they using electronic binoculars or similar vision aid? The excerpt doesn't say only that they are "watching".
But since they did climb up to the rooftops to watch the battle it is not exactly unreasonable to assume they brought some sort of vision aid.

It's unnecessary to add unprovable elements. Let's keep things simple.
The fact remains that googles or not, whatever the book describes does not even match what we can see, through the camera, while beign right in the middle of the battle.

There simply are inconsistencies between novelisations and films, this always happens. For example, since when did the (higher) canon show, or moderately suggested, that the heaviest weapons on capital ships had range counted in the light minutes (or was it light seconds?) ?
As far as I'm concerned, all evidence would point to the exact contrary, that is spitting range being favoured, with, at best, orbital bombardments being possible, and that's not even sure, when you look at how long it took for the Trade Federation ships to open fire against the Naboo yatch in TPM, or how close to the Trade Federation cores the SPHA-T were dropped.

Honestly, at some point, it's apples and oranges, and pointless to argue to the contrary.

[Kane Starkiller]

I can't agree, for the simple reason that there's large evidence that a very common way of (mis)using the term vaporize just measn dropping a nuclear like firepower on a town and erase it from the map, without literally vaporizing stuff.
It's like when you find a terran made expression in an EU book. You know that it's a wording that comes from Earth, and would have unlikely originated one any of Star Wars's worlds, or more precisely that it's an expression that rings a bell to us, inhabitants of Earth and its respective nations. It is made for us, by us, and thus must be understood from our context, even if it's applied, by necessary narrative rules, to fictions about worlds which are far far away.
Thusly, a quick glance at google will simply show that the expression "vaporize a town" has the same mechanism behind it as "crush an army".

We cannot determine the meaning of words by "googling" them. Vaporize has a specific meaning and it is to turn something into vapor. It doesn't matter how many ignorant people misuse it on how many web pages.
If you claim that author misused it and actually meant blowing down a town then show evidence. Otherwise you are breaking Occam's Razor.

Besides, if we were to take the words literally, then I'd like to know what we're supposed to understand by "shining hairlines that interlock planetoids" - which I'd like to use to point out, again, that this strongly describes a situation were beams fired from a ship hit their targets before the beam has finished its course, clearly pointing to kilometer long bolts, which never ever happened in the whole battle safe once, as far as we can see, and clearly never was a case representing a majority, which finely highlights how the description of the book do not match the visuals from the film.

Now, arguably, that piece I took is from the part of the paragraph that heavily relies on imagery terms, metaphors, to depict what happens.

The part about the vaporization is in the second section of the extract, the one where the author defines, with more concise but concrete descriptions nonetheless, what each metaphor was about.
However, it still remains that there's no indication that the author is being particularily engaged in laying down a scientific paper, within one line, about the exact effects of turbolaser on urban areas, within the biosphere or any common world.
There's large room for hyperbole here.

Again the fact that author uses hyperbole on some places doesn't change the meaning of vaporized. An author of a scientific texbook might use poetic descriptions in certain parts of book does that invalidate or cast doubts on scientific terms he uses?
Secondly if you read the passage it is clear the author begins with poetic description and then elaborates with scientific description of the events:

The gnats are drive-glows of starfighters. The shining hairlines are light-scatter from turbolaser bolts powerful enough to vaporize a small town. The planetoids are capital ships.

There is a clear line between poetic and scientific.

It's unnecessary to add unprovable elements. Let's keep things simple.
The fact remains that googles or not, whatever the book describes does not even match what we can see, through the camera, while beign right in the middle of the battle.

But you said it yourself that the first passage is hyperbole: "interlocked planetoids" etc. So why do you now expect these poetic descriptions of the first passage to accurately describe reality?
It is neccessary to add new elements since human observers couldn't see it with their own eyes therefore they had vision aid or they were some other species that has more acute eyesight.
The alternative is to declare the book contradiction which is breaking SoD.

There simply are inconsistencies between novelisations and films, this always happens. For example, since when did the (higher) canon show, or moderately suggested, that the heaviest weapons on capital ships had range counted in the light minutes (or was it light seconds?) ?

That is not inconsistency. If one source makes a certain statement but other makes no statements regarding the issue then there is no inconsistency.

As far as I'm concerned, all evidence would point to the exact contrary, that is spitting range being favoured, with, at best, orbital bombardments being possible, and that's not even sure, when you look at how long it took for the Trade Federation ships to open fire against the Naboo yatch in TPM, or how close to the Trade Federation cores the SPHA-T were dropped.

Hitting a Venator or Trade Federation battleship will obviously be easier than to hit a Naboo yacht. While close range does appear to be the norm there are also incidents of Ion canon scoring two clean hits at an ISD at 10,000km range.
Finally if that one statement of light-second or whatever it was does turn out to be incorrect how does this make the entire novel contradictory?
Containing an error is not the same as completely erroneous.

[Mr. Oragahn]

I can't agree, for the simple reason that there's large evidence that a very common way of (mis)using the term vaporize just measn dropping a nuclear like firepower on a town and erase it from the map, without literally vaporizing stuff.
It's like when you find a terran made expression in an EU book. You know that it's a wording that comes from Earth, and would have unlikely originated one any of Star Wars's worlds, or more precisely that it's an expression that rings a bell to us, inhabitants of Earth and its respective nations. It is made for us, by us, and thus must be understood from our context, even if it's applied, by necessary narrative rules, to fictions about worlds which are far far away.
Thusly, a quick glance at google will simply show that the expression "vaporize a town" has the same mechanism behind it as "crush an army".

We cannot determine the meaning of words by "googling" them. Vaporize has a specific meaning and it is to turn something into vapor. It doesn't matter how many ignorant people misuse it on how many web pages.
If you claim that author misused it and actually meant blowing down a town then show evidence. Otherwise you are breaking Occam's Razor.

I don't believe we can use Occam's Razor here, simply because there's too much ambiguity as to how we can interpret it, either in a hard scientific way, or in a common way.

Besides, if we were to take the words literally, then I'd like to know what we're supposed to understand by "shining hairlines that interlock planetoids" - which I'd like to use to point out, again, that this strongly describes a situation were beams fired from a ship hit their targets before the beam has finished its course, clearly pointing to kilometer long bolts, which never ever happened in the whole battle safe once, as far as we can see, and clearly never was a case representing a majority, which finely highlights how the description of the book do not match the visuals from the film.

Now, arguably, that piece I took is from the part of the paragraph that heavily relies on imagery terms, metaphors, to depict what happens.

The part about the vaporization is in the second section of the extract, the one where the author defines, with more concise but concrete descriptions nonetheless, what each metaphor was about.
However, it still remains that there's no indication that the author is being particularily engaged in laying down a scientific paper, within one line, about the exact effects of turbolaser on urban areas, within the biosphere or any common world.
There's large room for hyperbole here.

Again the fact that author uses hyperbole on some places doesn't change the meaning of vaporized.

I don't challenge the literal meaning of the term. I challenge the idea that it's to be taken literally. It could just as much as it couldn't, and thus measn that being conservative puts his in a situation where we have to look at it from a moderate point of view.

An author of a scientific texbook might use poetic descriptions in certain parts of book does that invalidate or cast doubts on scientific terms he uses?

The novelisation is not a scientific textbook.

Secondly if you read the passage it is clear the author begins with poetic description and then elaborates with scientific description of the events:

The gnats are drive-glows of starfighters. The shining hairlines are light-scatter from turbolaser bolts powerful enough to vaporize a small town. The planetoids are capital ships.

There is a clear line between poetic and scientific.

I recon there's a difference, but you'll notice that he clearly does not make any explicitely detailed descriptions of the effects of turbolasers. He limits himself to the use of one word, while EU guides and all that, are rather talkative about what this or that does, when a detailed and scientific explanation is required.

Basically, even if between the two lines, a layer of imagery is shed, it doesn't undermine the possibility that the author was using layman terms.

It's unnecessary to add unprovable elements. Let's keep things simple.
The fact remains that googles or not, whatever the book describes does not even match what we can see, through the camera, while beign right in the middle of the battle.

But you said it yourself that the first passage is hyperbole: "interlocked planetoids" etc. So why do you now expect these poetic descriptions of the first passage to accurately describe reality?
It is neccessary to add new elements since human observers couldn't see it with their own eyes therefore they had vision aid or they were some other species that has more acute eyesight.
The alternative is to declare the book contradiction which is breaking SoD.

The hyperbole in interlocking ships, is precisely how it locks ships. Just to exagerate how the beams seem to tie ships together, and seen from far way, that would probably look like a web of energy beams.
But his description has more to do with some anime or Babylon 5 than Star Wars, unless I missed the part about how the whole battle opposed flying SPHA-Ts against mini Death Stars.

But nevermind, let's get it to a very simple point; If we consider that he's using hyperbole, then you have to admit that he could largely be exagerating the effects of TL, and use the term vaporize like some would use the term slag, or crush, even if there's nothing of the short, or so little.

If he's not using hyperbole, thus it means that we're dealing with a strict metaphor, and so, a shiny hairline is a very luminous elongated bolt, that's so long and so constant that it seems to tie two ships one to the other.
Which is not what happens in the film, safe only once, and that's a trick, not the standard.
It would also mean that the term vaporize is meant to be used literally, but would be part of an overall description that is partially erroneous.

So basically, to avoid the inconsistency, the point would be to claim that the book describes a moment that largely precedes the film, at a point when the ships were indeed exchaning very luminous and very elongated beams of energy, much more similar to the shots seen in the background, during the duck hunt of Endor, where, at least, the bolts are very elongated, and though not particularily glaringly luminous, can still be seen from a large distance, which is not the case for the battle of Coruscant.

There simply are inconsistencies between novelisations and films, this always happens. For example, since when did the (higher) canon show, or moderately suggested, that the heaviest weapons on capital ships had range counted in the light minutes (or was it light seconds?) ?

That is not inconsistency. If one source makes a certain statement but other makes no statements regarding the issue then there is no inconsistency.

Please. The "absence of proof is not proof of absence" defense only goes so far as there's not an overwhelming amount of data pointing to the fact if such ranges existed, we would have seen them in action, at least during on film over six.

Eventually, he's talking about the absolute range, that is, before the bolt dissipates or whatever, but not about the firing range: the distance at which you can still properly aim at a target and hope to score a moderately good hit rate.

A range in lightminutes would mean, at least 36 million kilometers (roughly 1/4 of 1 AU).

Excuse me, but we have to call a cat a cat, and this is smelly BS. Makes me giggle.

As far as I'm concerned, all evidence would point to the exact contrary, that is spitting range being favoured, with, at best, orbital bombardments being possible, and that's not even sure, when you look at how long it took for the Trade Federation ships to open fire against the Naboo yatch in TPM, or how close to the Trade Federation cores the SPHA-T were dropped.

Hitting a Venator or Trade Federation battleship will obviously be easier than to hit a Naboo yacht. While close range does appear to be the norm there are also incidents of Ion canon scoring two clean hits at an ISD at 10,000km range.

Orbital range reversed. Paint me unimpressed.

Finally if that one statement of light-second or whatever it was does turn out to be incorrect how does this make the entire novel contradictory?
Containing an error is not the same as completely erroneous.

I was just pointing out that inconsistencies happen, not trying to hammer so flawed generalization.