Brian Young's Slave1 vs asteroids video

[Nowhereman10]

Greetings everyone! I was going through Mr. Young's archives on YouTube and found this gem here. I felt compelled to respond to this one as I felt his (Young's) method is extremely self-serving given that he assumes one gigajoule per meter cubed. I can't honestly see how this guy gets half a kiloton to 5 kilotons no matter how I slice it. Anyway, here's my reply:

This does not follow logically. Neither Obi-Wans Delta-7 Aethersprite-class light interceptor starfighter nor Slave-1 ever come close enough to get any really reliable scaling. Slave-1 is too far away behind the asteroid and the Aethersprite is somewhere in front of the asteroid in question (Given the 3.92m width for the starfighter, the asteroid is around 16 meters on the long axis) as shown in your own video here at 1:47 to 2:13. Slave-1 is a fair distance away, too, given that when you look just about 10 frames past when the Aethersprite levels out into a side profile almost you can see Slave-1 in the background and a quick measurement of the two craft shows Slave-1 is only 9 meters long at most in comparison to the 8 meter starfigher, and given that Slave-1 is supposed to be 21 meters tall (long), that kind of nixes it's utility as a benchmark for the asteroid at all. Also this is not the only time we ever see Slave-1 hit another modest-sized asteroid (7.84 m on the long axis), and even less damage is done. Now I know you're all into believing that all the little explosions are tiny asteroids being vaporized, hence the one gigajoule a cubic meter, but I hate to break this to you... There are NO tiny asteroids being vaporized, and this asteroid was clearly only fragmented (BTW, a 16 m asteroid requires only about 4.1 tons of energy if it is a sphere of igneous rock according to the SDN calculator). Those are flak bursts. It's a common visual trope in Star Wars since everything is so heavily styled after World War II footage. Some blasters do it, turbolasers on Star Destroyers do it So your method is self-serving since you want the ICS to be validated. There's maybe 17.15 GJ expended, and that's perhaps on the very upper end of things because the calculator assumes a perfect sphere and that asteorid is anything but one. So that's not half a kiloton, much less 5 kilotons. Hell its not even in the frackin' ballbark!

So, in conclusion, I have to say that your methodology is extremely flawed and does not take all the variables into account here

I know I may have a flawed counter analysis, but this can't be nearly as bad as his. Mike DiCenso and Mr. Oragahn have been talking about Mr. Young being unable to let go of the ICS and his Turbolaser Commentary work, and I think this is hard proof of it.

[2046]

Um, wow. Just astonishing.

Okay, so that little rock that got blown up is way closer to the camera than either the Jedi fighter or Slave I. I see no evidence . . . and he hasn't presented any there, to be sure . . . that it is further from the camera than it appears.

Have they put TPM in 3D yet so people can see the spatial relationships that I seem to see so easily?

The only way to scale it is to try to use the blaster bolts themselves, which are absurdly small. Judging against the Jedi fighter when it is hit, they are literally less than a foot wide. While I can't see the comparison between bolt and rock in Brian's scene very well due to resolution and the difficulty doing frame-by-frame in Youtube, I'd wager that the rock is maybe two meters, four meters at the high end, and it was merely fragmented.

He'd have better luck discussing the second fragmented rock . . . that one looks to be perhaps a bit larger, but again not much, and certainly not 10-15m.

Just wow.

[Nowhereman10]

In fairness to Mr. Young, I went and looked at the scene on DVD, and the Aethersprite does indeed pass in front of the asteroid's lower edge. But you can't tell where the asteroid is in between the two ships. What is interesting and Mr. Young either missed it or ignored it (because it doesn't support his case), is that Slave-1 and the starfighter can clearly be seen subtending the same width just after the asteroid is fragmented and the two ships finish their respective turns.

So Mr. Young's use of Slave-1 for scaling the asteroid in the video is just bad. I don't know if one of you guys want to see if you can work out how far the two are apart, but I'd hazard a guess at 100 meters or so between 'em.

[2046]

In fairness to Mr. Young, I went and looked at the scene on DVD, and the Aethersprite does indeed pass in front of the asteroid's lower edge.

We must be talking about different asteroids. I'm talking about the one that gets destroyed that he was so on about. The Jedi fighter doesn't go anywhere near that one.

The one the Jedi fighter seems to go in front of the lower edge of is a big and distant one. There are some flak bursts that occur between it and the camera, but the asteroid itself is not damaged by them . . . it was much too far in the background.

[Mr. Oragahn]

There are two asteroids hit. There's a way to guess where energy bolts fired by Slave-I are, roughly.
We know bolts are of the same length and fly at the same speed. We also more or less realize that for most of the pursuit, Fett is shooting a speck late and seems to land his bolts in on the trail of the Aethersprite Delta-7, like if it were shooting at the ghost image of the starfighter.
With a bit of carefulness, one can measure the first asteroid relatively safely by using the width of one of Slave-I's bolts.
The second asteroid is measured by picking the wingspan of the starfighter as it circles the rock and banks to the right, seemingly avoid an impact. Or one can also use a bolt's width since they clearly graze the rock in question. One even impacts it anyway.

However, Young's method is absolutely wrong. You cannot measure the first asteroid by using the Jedi starfighter's length, since Obi-Wan has already banked sharply to the left around the big asteroid while the first asteroid to measure has barely entered the camera.
By picking the starfighter as a yardstick for the first asteroid, he ends having a quantity of meters per pixel superior to what he should obtain.
The second problem is that we don't even see the starfighter at a full sideview. It's skewed because still pointing several degrees towards the camera and not more or less strictly towards the right border of the screen.
Meaning that the entire length of the ship is compressed into an even narrower length of pixels on the screen... which increases even more the meter density per pixel! Two for two, that's bad.
Slave-I, on the other hand, seems to pass closer to the fragmented asteroid but it's not clear enough and the asteroid is already in many pieces by that moment.
Plus BY repeats the same mistake. If he's, for example, going to use the pixel distance between the two ends of Slave-I's flappy "wings", then fine, but then he has to find two points on the asteroid positionned in the exact same way, to keep up with the perspective. Trouble is, that's just not what he does, because it would mean that one of the points he'd have to pick on the asteroid, the one corresponding to the tip of Slave-I's left wing, and as one of the two ends of his measurement segment, would be on the hidden side of the asteroid: swap the asteroid with Jango's ship and you'd realize where the two points defining the segment would be located: certainly not at the extreme left and right edges of the asteroid we see.
As such, the other point on the asteroid he'd need to find (the one corresponding to the tip of the starboard wing) would be on the side of the asteroid facing the camera, but it would not be located on the far left edge of the object we see on screen.

I noticed that last year, Rama at Spacebattles tried a scaling of the first asteroid.
But following that he used the kiloton fragmentation formula.
Yield in kilotons = (d/100)^3
For a rock that small, it seemed odd to me. Not to say that the blast effects are nowhere nuclear to begin with.
Others may have used Wong's asteroid nuclear blaster calculator and perhaps divided by two, but the problem remains the same, regarding gas expansion.
I also cannot help wondering how they could find gigajoules of energy and yet have rocky bits drift soooooo slowly.

I think it's explained by something I had spotted back in 2007 but didn't link to that particular part of the chase, as I was too focused on the seismic mines.
Simply put, it turned out that those asteroids, which Saxton tried hard to pass as solid lumps of metal, actually were very loose and dusty packs of particles and rocky lobes.
Both the cuts made by the seismic mines on small asteroids and the huge impacts between two massive lumps of rock produced massive amounts of small fragments and clouds of particles.

Shouldn't explosive bolts in the hundreds of megajoules or low gigajoule have largely pulverized the asteroids measured to gauge the firepower of the Slave-I?
Such frail asteroids also explains why they could be fragmented and yet produce groups of fragments that would expand so slowly.



For the note, here's our local relevant thread from late 2007 I started.
I think I might rerun the scalings with better choices of pictures because the second measurement also suffers a bit of the skewed fighter syndrom since it's not a full-front wingspan I used (meaning I put more meters per pixel and ended with a slightly bigger asteroid than I should have).

[2046]

There are two asteroids hit.

Only one in the video linked to, though.

[Mr. Oragahn]

There are two asteroids hit.

Only one in the video linked to, though.

Yes, oddly enough he analyzes the one that's the hardest to gauge.
Well, I'm not really surprised either.

[Mike DiCenso]

Ah, good ol' Brian. Up to the nonsense as usual, I see. I consulted my DVD copy before replying here after seeing which asteroid is identified as the one hit. Looks like Robert has it pinned down correctly and the Delta-7 never even comes close to it at all. Obi-Wan's figher is somewhere behind this asteroid, as it just curves tightly around the larger asteroid.

So here's my stab at some photometrics work here. For this I will use Robert's image that is supplied here in the thread since the asteroid's outline is clearly marked out and it is very nearly onscreen at this point before being hit. Furthermore, I will be analyzing the relative distances between the Delta-7 and Slave-I.

If we take the measurements literally as the two objects are lined up perfectly. That is the the Delta-7's path took it right under the asteroid in question, then the following:

Asteroid

Image Width: .95"

Image Height: 1.15"


Obi-Wan's Delta-7 Aethersprite

Image Width: .30"/ Official Width: 3.92 meters

Image Length: .45"/ Official Length: 8 meters

So that established we then do the following:

Length of Delta-7 divided into the width of the asteroid = .95 divided by.45 = 2.1 to 1 ratio. This means 2.1 x 8 meters (the length of the Delta-7) = 16.8 meters for the asteroid width. The starfighter length divided into the asteroid height is thus:

1.15 divided by .45 = 2.55 to 1.

2.55 x 8 = 20.4 meters.

So Nowhereman's numbers aren't too far off here as we have an approximately 17 by 20 meter asteroid. For the sake of fairness and to get the highest energy for the asteroid's destruction via shattering, I'll assume the asteroid is a 20 meter sphere made of elemental iron. An important caveat; the Delta-7 has not fully straightened out and so its length is only about 3 quarters what it would be, but for the sake of fairness I am going for the largest numbers possible and thus the highest energy possible. And with that in mind....

Plugging the numbers into the SDN calculator I get:

37 tons of cratering energy and fragmented as igneous I get 8 tons. Or 158 gigajoules and 33.5 gigajoules respectively.

That's it, that's the best I could do. Since two blaster bolts go through the asteroid, that energy is divided approximately in half. So 79 or 16.75 GJ respectively for each shot.

A kiloton is one thousand tons of TNT. So 158 tons is only one sixth of that, which is not even close to half a kiloton (500 tons of TNT).

So much for that, and that is after I bent over backwards.

As for Slave-I, which is visible in the lower left corner of the screencap, I measure a height of .60". That means that Slave-I is only 1.3 times taller than Obi-Wan's 8 meter starfighter is long. So Nowhereman is right in that the two ships are separated by a fair distance. And remember that the Delta-7 is in a three-quarter profile view in comparison to Slave-1, so when the Delta-7 goes to full profile side view, that ratio will likely even out.

But how far is the separation between the two craft?

The image provided is 6" wide approximately and we now know the length and height of the respective ships, so with those we can try to work out roughly how far from the camera each of them are and then from that how far each is from the other.

And here's the problem, this movie was shot in digital and I cannot find any real information on the film size, or anything else. So I need some help here! Can anyone provide this information accurately?
-Mike

[2046]

"In the case of Episode II, we have a movie shot entirely on an early digital camera with a native resolution of 1440 x 1080p24 compressed progressive-scan video."

http://st-v-sw.net/STSWbasics-tv.html

But I still don't see why you guys are trying to scale the blown-up asteroid against the fighter. There's no reason to believe they are sufficiently close to each other, beyond the extremely short-range shooting of Slave I.

That is to say, if I put a pebble in front of the camera at sufficiently close distance, then (ignoring focus issues) it'll look like a mountain if scaled against a larger background object.

[Mr. Oragahn]

As far as the first asteroid is concerned, the starfighter is just too far behind to be used.
Besides, we never get a "full side" of the fighter either. It's always some half arsed angle in some direction.
It's pretty obvious that if you took a picture of a bus at a 3/4 angle, the bus on the picture wouldn't take as much room (width) as if you had taken a near full-profile shot of the vehicle (by standing perpendicular to the left or right side of the bus).
If you really want to go that way and use skewed views of objects, you'll have to do some trigonometry, perhaps take a jab at Euler angles even.
I still believe it's much easier to find proper points of reference where perspective isn't a problem.

[Mike DiCenso]

"In the case of Episode II, we have a movie shot entirely on an early digital camera with a native resolution of 1440 x 1080p24 compressed progressive-scan video."

http://st-v-sw.net/STSWbasics-tv.html

But I still don't see why you guys are trying to scale the blown-up asteroid against the fighter. There's no reason to believe they are sufficiently close to each other, beyond the extremely short-range shooting of Slave I.

That is to say, if I put a pebble in front of the camera at sufficiently close distance, then (ignoring focus issues) it'll look like a mountain if scaled against a larger background object.

The whole point is to demonstrate just how flawed Brian's methodology really is. You can't get half a KT, much less 5 KT out of it, even using the Delta-7 starfighter, and Slave-I is too damn far away to say that it is applicable to to this.
-Mike

[Lucky]

Greetings everyone! I was going through Mr. Young's archives on YouTube and found this gem here. I felt compelled to respond to this one as I felt his (Young's) method is extremely self-serving given that he assumes one gigajoule per meter cubed. I can't honestly see how this guy gets half a kiloton to 5 kilotons no matter how I slice it. Anyway, here's my reply:

This does not follow logically. Neither Obi-Wans Delta-7 Aethersprite-class light interceptor starfighter nor Slave-1 ever come close enough to get any really reliable scaling. Slave-1 is too far away behind the asteroid and the Aethersprite is somewhere in front of the asteroid in question (Given the 3.92m width for the starfighter, the asteroid is around 16 meters on the long axis) as shown in your own video here at 1:47 to 2:13. Slave-1 is a fair distance away, too, given that when you look just about 10 frames past when the Aethersprite levels out into a side profile almost you can see Slave-1 in the background and a quick measurement of the two craft shows Slave-1 is only 9 meters long at most in comparison to the 8 meter starfigher, and given that Slave-1 is supposed to be 21 meters tall (long), that kind of nixes it's utility as a benchmark for the asteroid at all. Also this is not the only time we ever see Slave-1 hit another modest-sized asteroid (7.84 m on the long axis), and even less damage is done. Now I know you're all into believing that all the little explosions are tiny asteroids being vaporized, hence the one gigajoule a cubic meter, but I hate to break this to you... There are NO tiny asteroids being vaporized, and this asteroid was clearly only fragmented (BTW, a 16 m asteroid requires only about 4.1 tons of energy if it is a sphere of igneous rock according to the SDN calculator). Those are flak bursts. It's a common visual trope in Star Wars since everything is so heavily styled after World War II footage. Some blasters do it, turbolasers on Star Destroyers do it So your method is self-serving since you want the ICS to be validated. There's maybe 17.15 GJ expended, and that's perhaps on the very upper end of things because the calculator assumes a perfect sphere and that asteorid is anything but one. So that's not half a kiloton, much less 5 kilotons. Hell its not even in the frackin' ballbark!

So, in conclusion, I have to say that your methodology is extremely flawed and does not take all the variables into account here

I know I may have a flawed counter analysis, but this can't be nearly as bad as his. Mike DiCenso and Mr. Oragahn have been talking about Mr. Young being unable to let go of the ICS and his Turbolaser Commentary work, and I think this is hard proof of it.

Is Brian claiming that weapons in Star Wars scale linearly?