Is the house of cards tumbling ?

Dagons Child · Post by **Dagons Child** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 11:42 pm

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?t=102827

First the canon legalese starts to topple away from the delusions of sd.net, now the blessed Saxton and ICS are being questioned by other SW authors (again., and again)

GStone · Post by **GStone** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 3:27 am

The best line came in the first post:

"Star Wars now has Warp Drive..."

And, unless they're pulling a TARDIS thing where it's bigger on the inside than the outside, it still won't explain the 40,000 ton number.

Nonamer · Post by **Nonamer** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 7:34 am

It was falling apart for years. It basically fell down to what the mods at SDN and SB.com enforced, and their underlings were willing to push. I don't think even a tiny minority still believes in that crap.

GStone · Post by **GStone** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 1:28 pm

They are the tiny minority. :-P

Edit: I decided to go to the page linked to at wookiepedia and I saw something that's I'm sure will be a classic for many. I give you the VT-16 wisdom:

"Have you people even read the book? It says "40k tons of hypermatter fuel". Hypermatter is not the same as matter. VT-16 16:43, 26 June 2006 (UTC)"

I know what he wants to say, but it comes out stupid anyway. It's stupid because of the quote from the ep 3 ICS: "Main reactor annihilates up to 40,000 tons of fuel per second at maximum power". Not power generation, but how much is annihilated. And it doesn't say "hypermatter fuel", it just says "fuel". The prefix hyper shows up a couple times, but I just checked again and hypermatter shows up nowhere for the Venator entry, though he may just be combining entries from different books, but his quoting is off, in any case. Hypermatter appears nowhere in the entry for the ship. The TARDIS idea of the fuel storage tanks are larger on the inside than outside is a better explanation. They're already part of the way there with saying it makes "a limited warping of the space-time continuum" Warp space-time, so it's larger on the inside and make it lighter at the same time and you got your 40,000 tons per second. This level of sophistication of warping space might explain the EU's hyperspace speeds.

But, if this was true, we should have seen interdiction against the Falcon as it left Tatooine by one of the ISDs. If you can do that with fuel, you can do it so you can cram more weapons into a ship than what you would normally think is possible. You wouldn't need a specific ship for interdiction or jamming. Every ship would be capable of it.

Nonamer · Post by **Nonamer** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 8:31 pm

Ok, a very tiny minority. :p Probably of the millions of SW fans out there, maybe a few thousand at best believe in the wank version of SW.

Also I don't go to SDN. As you can see, when it is related to SW, there is no intelligence or logic there. Might as well go to a Fundamentalism forum since you'll find similar belief systems.

Mr. Oragahn · Post by **Mr. Oragahn** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 9:18 pm

Dagons Child wrote:http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?t=102827

First the canon legalese starts to topple away from the delusions of sd.net, now the blessed Saxton and ICS are being questioned by other SW authors (again., and again)

Yeah, but they're not doing a good job at it either.

I mean, it's possibly brave to say that some of the ICS stuff is way out, but it should be done by providing better explanations, don't you think?

That is, there's not enough fuel for the necessary acceleration, or it does not provide enough energy. Well, for the figures they actually coinsider valid.
At that point, you have to enter the realm of exotic stuff, and that's quite what Saxton did with the saxtonium. Or hypermatter.

But he clearly abused the system and took a shot at actually enforcing higher figures than what was necessary, since he introduced an exotic *matter* with funky mass properties regarding energy production for 1 gram of said matter utterly and perfectly annihilated.

Socar · Post by **Socar** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 9:51 pm

Issues with the ICS aside, Vympel's sentiments pretty much mirror my own on the matter.

Mr. Oragahn · Post by **Mr. Oragahn** » Sun Jan 07, 2007 12:51 am

Socar wrote:Issues with the ICS aside, Vympel's sentiments pretty much mirror my own on the matter.

A but they're a bit too selective when it comes to the info they like and the one they don't.
Besides, quite often, when they have a problem with a given EU claim, even if it can be legitimate, it's when the information nerfs things, rarely the inverse.

Now, that said, I've myself always took info from the RPG rulebooks with a grain of salt, and that since the old WEG times.

GStone · Post by **GStone** » Sun Jan 07, 2007 3:00 am

One of the RPG books says the shields are electric dampening fields, which while would explain the flash we see as the asteroid gets destroyed when it comes up from underneath the SD, is an odd thing to base shields on. It's like it's supposed to be a fission making field, which would be a better basis for weapon technology than just straight plasma.

Edit: Here's the latest. A few "nuggets":

Ender-"As for why fuel sources must be dense, consider the mass we are talking about here - the reactants themselves are almost 1/6th the total mass of the ship, and the ejecta mass 5 times the mass of the reactants and structure combined. And these must fit into fuel silos that snuggly fit into the ships hull. While not neutronium levels, the fuel is still in excess of the density of the core of jupiter or a brown dwarf."

Of course. It's gotta be that fucking dense.

Surlethe-"I had always assumed they were accelerating the tachyons with electromagnetic fields of some sort, like we use in particle accelerators."

No comment necessary. And, to his credit, Wong is sounding like one of the more sane-er people in that thread...mostly.

Post by **Jedi Master Spock** » Sun Jan 07, 2007 10:46 pm

There are a few lines in that thread which strike me as unusual or ironic, but there's not much point in repeating them here simply because I think they're humorous in context.

The basic thing is that - as I pointed out - Saxton et al seem to be falling into official disfavor. Wong sounds more than a little bitter, and I'm not hearing the sort of faith in continuity that you used to hear.

I think this may herald a change in that segment of the fanbase.

GStone · Post by **GStone** » Fri Jan 12, 2007 1:45 am

I need help with someone else's logic for their train of thought.

Okay, I currently have a bit of a headache, so I didn't read all of Connor's post, but I skimmed it and saw something. A speed before transition from normal space to hyper that's used by a vessel is said to be .9c for calculations and then, it's said that this figure is conservative.

Someone explain this. When you are traveling less than a couple hundred kph, how is it a conservative figure to accelerate from that to .9c? Shouldn't that be called a generous figure? Conservative makes me think of far less than .1c because we see they fly off and they don't disappear in the next frame. The next few frames show blurred stretching.

Is there something about math lingo I'm not up to speed on?

Post by **Jedi Master Spock** » Fri Jan 12, 2007 2:22 am

No, it's not conservative.

Without a great deal more detail on exactly how the transition from normal speeds to hyperspeeds works, it is inappropriate to assert 0.9c pre-transition speeds without significant supporting evidence.

It is particularly inappropriate to assume repeated transitions to and from 0.9c in real space without some sort of wonky (e.g., "subspace," "mass lightening," "continuum distortion," "warp field") effect on stored fuel. The energy of an object is related to its rest mass times gamma.

Gamma being, of course, 1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2).

A little quick math shows you that for 0.9c, gamma is ~2.3, meaning that if you have a ship that accelerates to 0.9c in real space with no funky effects on internal fuel, it has consumed no less than 56% of its original mass in fuel.

If it does this, dumps all the excess energy somehow, and does it again, the problem exponentiates, and you're left with less than 20% of your original rest mass.

The long and the short of it is that assuming regularly repeated acceleration to 0.9c on internal fuel under normal physics is quite extraordinary, so unless you have a compelling reason to make an assumption on that order, it's not a warranted assumption.

Let alone a "conservative" assumption. I suspect the term is being used as a rhetorical device. False "minimum" and "maximum" values are very commonly seen in the VS debate, so there's plenty of precedent for that. He has probably talked himself into using the term by noting that 0.9 c is rather less than lightspeed itself.

GStone · Post by **GStone** » Sat Jan 13, 2007 12:15 am

Eh, I think he might be thinking conservative in relation to Saxtonian tachyonic matter expenditures near c or something (forget about the nature itself and how fucked up it is for logic), since much of that bunch are using the ideas he was talking about before he did the ep 2 ICS. Thanks.

Dagons Child · Post by **Dagons Child** » Sat Jan 20, 2007 11:51 pm

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... 7&start=75

take a read of the latest additions to this thread especially the quotation of Mr Sarli's "take" on saxton.

they do not like this at all, its like reading some of the arguments that went on after saxton got to canonise his fanfic in the ICS.

i think we are seeing more and more that the violently antagonistic section of the fandom that comprises most of those behind the "bigger is better at any cost" being marginalised more and more.

GStone · Post by **GStone** » Sun Jan 21, 2007 2:02 am

How the hell are they still bitching about this? Accept he did something else and move on. C level trumps RPG game mechanics anyway and Saxton's work has been attacked for years.

Starfleet Jedi

Is the house of cards tumbling ?

Is the house of cards tumbling ?

Re: Is the house of cards tumbling ?