Are the ICS books accurate?

[Mike DiCenso]

I bold high-lighted the statement of contention here. But the sentence is being asked in the form of a question, Socar.

Here is the whole thing:

"It is possible that we undercalculated this for the ICS, or some of the larger ones may have been hit twice. Things happen so fast, it's hard to tell even frame by frame. But the scaling here is more reliable than most of the ones in TESB, they all either fragmented or vaporized (most of them), and this is fighter-scale weaponry. These things make it a better comparison to Trek."

It seems to me that it's just Brian Young just giving some alternative explanations. I don't really see him asking anything.

That last sentence in quotes there is another curiosity, too, that I'd like a good explanation for.

Well, since Wayne Poe already stated that he was asking the group as a whole to look at updates that he was going to put on his website (presumably the Trek vs Wars part of his website, obviously), I'm not really sure what kind of explanation you're looking for. Perhaps they were just trying to find good examples of Wars' asteroid destroying capability compared to Trek's for Wayne's page.

Right, but that his site is devoted to Star Trek versus Star Wars, still makes Curtis Saxton's involvement rather interesting. The Return to Grace exchange has Saxton appearing to respond to Young on the issue of the TESB asteroids, but then, almost as an afterthought, he appears to respond to Sean with the following:

"
Brian,

> The bolt hits one side, and superheats it. This superheated material
> superheats the next part, which superheats the next part, until all of
> the mass is superheated. This happens faster than the expansion stress
> can shatter the asteroid.

Mostly right, but needs clarification of the mechanism of heat transfer.

A small mass in the path of the beam receives the initial heat deposit.
This mass expands (due to its overpressure) at a rate that exceeds the
sound speed within the solid. Thus solid matter is swept up by this blast
wave (the correct physics term) without feeling any precursor disturbance.
(The blastwave outruns any vibration or conductive warming.) Kinetic
energy of the expansion is thermalised directly within the upswept
material; it is instantly vaporised at the blastwave if the energy is
great enough.

NB. the mechanism of heat transfer within the asteroid is blastwave
expansion, not passive heat conduction. The expanding gas simply sweeps
up the material in its path, dissociating it at the atomic level upon
contact. In the SW case, there's no chance for solid fragments to
survive.

If you input somewhat less than the vaporisation energy of the whole
asteroid, then the blastwave will grow to the radius where the shock
temperature is diminished below the vaporisation temperature of the rock.
Propagating outwards from that stage: a disruptive shockwave or vibration
in the solid. Fragmentation is likely throughout the surrounding,
surviving solid matter.

If the energy from the weapon is injected too slowly then passive heat
conduction and vibration may be efficient enough to spread the heat
throughout the asteroid without a violent blastwave.

Curtis.

sean:

Lord Poe's correct, though: the asteroid Groumall destroyed with the planetary disruptor is very close to the first asteroid's size--maybe just a hair larger.

I measured the disruptor bolt's size relative to the BoP's keel, right before impact (see McC's "Battle038." Outstanding vidcaps btw, McC!).

As we established, the Bird's engineering hull is about 25m wide. The bolt is easily a fifth that--almost 6m wide by my measurements.

Compare that to McC's "Asteroid09," a frame or two before the bolt actually connects. In that image, I find the asteroid is 61 pixels by 73 to the bolt's 15. Thus, the second asteroid's ~24m high and 28m wide vs. the first's 10-20m diameter."

Now is this Saxton, or is this someone else slipping in a comment, but pasted it right behind Saxton's comment without attribution? I'am open to a reasonable explanation, but I'd like proof. But otherwise it does look like Saxton is involved with a behind-the-scenes versus exchange for the purpose of wanking up SW over ST. In particular, if this is indeed Saxton's commentary, he is specifically doing so about the "Return to Grace" asteroid destruction. That he made these comments, apparently knowing that it would be used on a known versus debate site, only raises questions concerning his [Saxton's] neutrality, which is a part of the issue. Also we still have the "It is possible that we undercalculated this for the ICS", be a question or statement. "We calculated", not "Curtis calculated" for ICS. Interesting.
-Mike

[Socar]

On that note, who is the "McC" that Curtis Saxton(?) is referring to?

[Mike DiCenso]

I'am not entirely certain, but it does appear that what RSA was able to save for viewing is not the entirety of the exchange, and we don't know the full listing of the particpants. Probably never will know who they are, for that matter.
-Mike

[Nonamer]

Like I said previously, a VFX error can be considered if an event doesn't make sense. Given the larger body of evidence of a smaller DSII, between 160-270km, than the bigger ones as well as consistency with previous movies, the smaller DS is much more reasonable. And it is the MF alone, but just about every combat scene in SW that suggests a much lower acceleration speed, including the opening battle scene of ROTS, the slow escape of all the other SW ships in the ending battle scene of AOTC, etc.

In addition to Endor and Geonosis incidents here is an excerpt from TPM novelization:

The Nubian shot through the hangar doors, ripping past battle droids and laser fire, lifting away from the city of Theed into the blue, sunlit sky. The planet of Naboo was left behind in secondy, the ship rising into the darkness of space, arcing toward a suddenly visible cluster of Trade Federation battleships blocking it's way.

The planet was left behind in seconds. If we assume it to mean just leaving the atmosphere that's say 10 km in 10 seconds or 1km/s2.
Whooops. But hey I'm sure you'll explain how this is also an error.

I hope this is sarcasm because you only need 20 G's of acceleration to reach 10 km in 10 seconds (1/2 * a * t^2 = D is the formula).

Prove that there isn't a unicorn in my closet first. This old tactic is getting increasingly ridiculous and unteniable.

You've got it backwards. You are the one makign the claim, the burden of proof is on you.

Who's claiming the magical bomb exists? You're the one proclaim the more outrageous claims and you need to present evidence instead of pretending the ICS is always right.

It flat out stated the size of the DS II. If it said 2000km you would just all over it as it's just as credible as anything else. Note that the problem here is not the validity of this particular source, but the decisions of Saxton to choose bigger over smaller.

So? One of the early scripts for SW had the Star Destroyers as one man fighters. And for the record I always use 160km DS2 because I don't have the will to fight over every detail with fanatic Trekkies but that doesn't mean Dr. Saxton is lying when he uses 900km figure.

Yes he is, because he basically "forgot" equally valid numbers outside of his DS page.

It's been said many times that Dankayo may not be Earth sized, nor does the final destruction suggest something that would blow off an Earth-like atmosphere. And the second is as open to interpretation as you wish. You could say it means slagging merely the civilized parts, or slagging everything down to the upper mantle. It is not very clear and not useful either.

It specifically stated blowing off atmosphere so really now you are again throwing out evidence you don't like.

We don't know what the atmosphere consists of. This tells us little.

Not the same thing. Saxton literally scaled the concept art. That's a pretty bad way to find the size of an object.

It's better. Since special effects crew and the director rarely think in terms of numbers but in visual terms of something being huge or small. Which means that the actual scetch will be a lot closer to home than some number.

So concept art is actually better than the actuall FX used in the movies? What color is the sky on the planet you live on?

And what exactly does this jamming do to one's acceleration ability or one's ability to aim at "up"?

I love how you ignored the part about craft surrounding you in the heat of battle. Here is a quote from ANH novelization where Dodonna is briefing his men:

"Also, their field generators will probably create a lot of distortion, especially in and around the trench. I figure that maneuverability in that sector will be less than point three." This produced more murmurs and a few groans from the assembly.

See that? Distortions that affect manuverability. And jamming affects your ability to determine the distance to the nearest object so how will you know how long can you accelerate?

This isn' the DS I. This is Genosis, which was a Separatist stronghold and was attacked by the Republic. Dooku's escape receieved little more than blaster fire and there were few ships in the area.

To bad you are posting at SFJ.net and you should follow the rules and guidelines of this site.

If you are interested in discussing the SW universe then you should follow the rules of it's creators. Otherwise you are arbitrary picking and choosing what to use.

Not the problem on SFJN which goes by its own rules. Feel free to leave if you don't like it.

You should quit it with the Naboo ship bomb. It doesn't help your case. And the ship that was hit by the SPHA-T later crashed back down to the planet. If it was massive enough to absorb the 10^23 some joules of energy, it would flatten the whole region when it crashed.

And you should really start producing some evidence. And the core ship did flatten the region. Didn't you notice the shockwave?

Wasn't nearly big enough. In Saxton's own words, the SPHA-T can give a "million-ton object with an acceleration of
40000G" which is enough to accelerate that object to 392 km/s in one second. For the ship to be big enough that we wouldn't have seen any movement, we would need about a conservative 10,000 times more mass than that (that's still 4Gs of acceleration per beam and there were 11 beams, enough to reach the upper atmosphere faster than your nubian fighter). Going with E = mgh (mass times gravity * height), and assuming a 3000m height when it fell and 9.8 m/s^2 gravity, we get 10^13 kg * 9.8 m/s^2 * 3000m = 2.94 × 10^17 joules, which is about 70 MT. And that's conservative.

Hypermatter violates E=MC^2 whereas mass-energy conversion does not.

How does hypermatter violate that formula? And how can you convert planetary mass to energy without supplying a comparable amount of energy?

Hypermatter gives more energy per mass than M*C^2, which is a violation of physics. Mass-energy conversion does not.

While there is no known mechanism to easily turn matter to energy, we do know that black holes do it just by crushing the matter through gravity and high energy photons can spontaneously turn into matter. I'm not suggesting that what the DS did was anything like those two examples but that it is totally within real world physics that there exists another mechanism that can do mass energy conversion.

No it isn't within the real world for Death Star to convert large amount of planetary mass to energy without supplying a comparable amount of energy itself.

And your logic for this is? We know stellar objects like black holes can do so and there's nothing in the laws of physics that explicitly prevents it.

[Jedi Master Spock]

You should quit it with the Naboo ship bomb. It doesn't help your case. And the ship that was hit by the SPHA-T later crashed back down to the planet. If it was massive enough to absorb the 10^23 some joules of energy, it would flatten the whole region when it crashed.

And you should really start producing some evidence. And the core ship did flatten the region. Didn't you notice the shockwave?

Wasn't nearly big enough. In Saxton's own words, the SPHA-T can give a "million-ton object with an acceleration of
40000G" which is enough to accelerate that object to 392 km/s in one second. For the ship to be big enough that we wouldn't have seen any movement, we would need about a conservative 10,000 times more mass than that (that's still 4Gs of acceleration per beam and there were 11 beams, enough to reach the upper atmosphere faster than your nubian fighter). Going with E = mgh (mass times gravity * height), and assuming a 3000m height when it fell and 9.8 m/s^2 gravity, we get 10^13 kg * 9.8 m/s^2 * 3000m = 2.94 × 10^17 joules, which is about 70 MT. And that's conservative.

Thanks, guys! I was just updating my AOTC weapons page a couple days ago, so it's fresh in my mind that I came up with 7-70 MT based on recoil of the SPHA-Ts.

The above gives me another method to more or less confirm that estimate, although I'm going to have to run some figures myself and look carefully at the core ship's fall before I put that up on the page.

[Kane Starkiller]

I hope this is sarcasm because you only need 20 G's of acceleration to reach 10 km in 10 seconds (1/2 * a * t^2 = D is the formula).

That was a typo. I meant to write 100km heigth since 10km is hardly leaving the planet behind. Mount Everst is 8km tall.

Who's claiming the magical bomb exists? You're the one proclaim the more outrageous claims and you need to present evidence instead of pretending the ICS is always right.

No I don't. ICS is official and official means correct until disproven by movies.

We don't know what the atmosphere consists of. This tells us little.

But we can make a reasonable assumption and in addition we have the quote that says that topsoil was atomized in other words vaporized.

So concept art is actually better than the actuall FX used in the movies? What color is the sky on the planet you live on?

Except of course movie FX also shows Death Star to be 900km in certain scenes. Whooops.

This isn' the DS I. This is Genosis, which was a Separatist stronghold and was attacked by the Republic. Dooku's escape receieved little more than blaster fire and there were few ships in the area.

Thanks for proving my point. There was no jamming on Geonosis hence Dooku was able to accelerate at thousands of g.

Not the problem on SFJN which goes by its own rules. Feel free to leave if you don't like it.

If you are discussing the validity of ICS then we must examine it as official material as it was intended. You want to pretend that ICS is fan material so everything it states must be seen in the movies. That is not true.

Wasn't nearly big enough. In Saxton's own words, the SPHA-T can give a "million-ton object with an acceleration of
40000G" which is enough to accelerate that object to 392 km/s in one second. For the ship to be big enough that we wouldn't have seen any movement, we would need about a conservative 10,000 times more mass than that (that's still 4Gs of acceleration per beam and there were 11 beams, enough to reach the upper atmosphere faster than your nubian fighter). Going with E = mgh (mass times gravity * height), and assuming a 3000m height when it fell and 9.8 m/s^2 gravity, we get 10^13 kg * 9.8 m/s^2 * 3000m = 2.94 × 10^17 joules, which is about 70 MT. And that's conservative.

And? What's the problem? You do realize that physical collision is not a nuclear explosion and thus will not have the same effects as one? Most of these 70Mt will be spent on deforming the structure of the core ship.

Hypermatter gives more energy per mass than M*C^2, which is a violation of physics. Mass-energy conversion does not.

Provide quotes of ICS where the nature and energy yield of hypermatter is discussed so I can se what exactly are the statements.

And your logic for this is? We know stellar objects like black holes can do so and there's nothing in the laws of physics that explicitly prevents it.

Then explain how. Explain how can Death Star initiate a reaction in a planet that will produce 10^38J. Provide calculations that show a black hole with a planetary mass can produce 10^38W.

[Socar]

Except of course movie FX also shows Death Star to be 900km in certain scenes. Whooops.

I apologize if you've already covered this (I went back and skimmed the discussion but couldn't find anything on it), but which specific scenes from the movie showed a 900 km Death Star?

[Nonamer]

I hope this is sarcasm because you only need 20 G's of acceleration to reach 10 km in 10 seconds (1/2 * a * t^2 = D is the formula).

That was a typo. I meant to write 100km heigth since 10km is hardly leaving the planet behind. Mount Everst is 8km tall.

That's still only 200Gs. Perhaps much more problematic is the definition of "rising into the darkness of space" since anything over 10 miles will be out of the troposphere and the sky will become black, but the atmosphere doesn't actually stop until the end of the exosphere which is more like 1000km. Equally problematic is the definition of seconds since that could be anything from 2 seconds to 59 seconds. For instance, if instead of 100 km in 10 seconds you use 100 km in 30 seconds you will get back to the ~20G range of acceleration. You can also support just about any acceleration you wish too; if you say 1000km in 2 seconds that will get you something like 50000 Gs. All told, with such a huge range of values the info basically lacks falsifiability and is irrelevant to scientific discussion.

Who's claiming the magical bomb exists? You're the one proclaim the more outrageous claims and you need to present evidence instead of pretending the ICS is always right.

No I don't. ICS is official and official means correct until disproven by movies.

I hope JMS bans you for this comment as you have been told many times that this rhetoric is not allowed in this thread.

We don't know what the atmosphere consists of. This tells us little.

But we can make a reasonable assumption and in addition we have the quote that says that topsoil was atomized in other words vaporized.

Top soil can be an inch thick too, nor were we told that all topsoil had been vaporized nor told whether the whole planet was covered in topsoil.

So concept art is actually better than the actuall FX used in the movies? What color is the sky on the planet you live on?

Except of course movie FX also shows Death Star to be 900km in certain scenes. Whooops.

Like Socar said, show us this FX proof. Considering I've already shown that they've screwed up the FX of the DSII this is hard to believe.

This isn' the DS I. This is Genosis, which was a Separatist stronghold and was attacked by the Republic. Dooku's escape receieved little more than blaster fire and there were few ships in the area.

Thanks for proving my point. There was no jamming on Geonosis hence Dooku was able to accelerate at thousands of g.

Did you have a minor stroke or something? The whole time it was about how the lack of any such reasons for him to acclerate at less than full speed is evidence against thousands of Gs of acceleration. To recap, we never saw these thousands of Gs of acceleration. We simply went from one scene where Dooku was in the lower atmosphere and the next where he was hundreds of miles into space.

Not the problem on SFJN which goes by its own rules. Feel free to leave if you don't like it.

If you are discussing the validity of ICS then we must examine it as official material as it was intended. You want to pretend that ICS is fan material so everything it states must be seen in the movies. That is not true.

That's a strawman. We definitely consider the material of the ICS, but we also consider whether it is well written or plausible with the rest of SW canon. If not, then we must reject large aspects of it. That's the policy of this particular thread and more or less the policy of the board. If you don't like it, then you might as well leave since there is no point for any further discussion.

Wasn't nearly big enough. In Saxton's own words, the SPHA-T can give a "million-ton object with an acceleration of
40000G" which is enough to accelerate that object to 392 km/s in one second. For the ship to be big enough that we wouldn't have seen any movement, we would need about a conservative 10,000 times more mass than that (that's still 4Gs of acceleration per beam and there were 11 beams, enough to reach the upper atmosphere faster than your nubian fighter). Going with E = mgh (mass times gravity * height), and assuming a 3000m height when it fell and 9.8 m/s^2 gravity, we get 10^13 kg * 9.8 m/s^2 * 3000m = 2.94 × 10^17 joules, which is about 70 MT. And that's conservative.

And? What's the problem? You do realize that physical collision is not a nuclear explosion and thus will not have the same effects as one? Most of these 70Mt will be spent on deforming the structure of the core ship.

LOL. That's definitely one of the weakest excuses I've ever heard. On par with the "tracer" theory of turbolasers. Explain exactly where this multi-megaton energy absorbing capacity comes from, since structural material has no energy storing capacity? Any deformation of a ships structure must follow the conservation of energy, and if it can't store that energy it must be expelled into the environment.

Hypermatter gives more energy per mass than M*C^2, which is a violation of physics. Mass-energy conversion does not.

Provide quotes of ICS where the nature and energy yield of hypermatter is discussed so I can se what exactly are the statements.

The DS is not part of the ICS. The hypermatter and mass-energy conversion debate is a related but completely different discussion.

And your logic for this is? We know stellar objects like black holes can do so and there's nothing in the laws of physics that explicitly prevents it.

Then explain how. Explain how can Death Star initiate a reaction in a planet that will produce 10^38J. Provide calculations that show a black hole with a planetary mass can produce 10^38W.

http://www.habitablezone.com/space/messages/437394.html

The power output levels of a Kardashev Type III civiliation are briefly achieved by a 2 milligram black hole, constructed by firing 10E+24 protons, or equivalent mass, into a spherical volume of space 2.95E-30 meters in radius, simultaneously. The resulting event horizon would convert 100 percent of the matter stream into a 10E+37-Watt pulse of radiation lasting 6.6E-25 seconds.

Doesn't look like much of a problem. Black holes have the peculiar property of having a having a higher power output the smaller they are.

[Kane Starkiller]

I didn't plan to respond to your incoherent ramblings anymore but there are two things I just had to point out:

LOL. That's definitely one of the weakest excuses I've ever heard. On par with the "tracer" theory of turbolasers. Explain exactly where this multi-megaton energy absorbing capacity comes from, since structural material has no energy storing capacity. Any deformation of a ships structure must follow the conservation of energy, and if it can't store that energy it must be expelled into the environment.

You relly don't know shit about physics do you? The 70Mt kinetic energy will be used to deform the structure of the ship. It will be used up to break up the chemical bonds in the metal. Do you get it now finally?

Doesn't look like much of a problem. Black holes have the peculiar property of having a having a higher power output the smaller they are.

Learn some math for Christ's sake and learn how to read. That 10^37W black hole will last for 10^-25s which means it will produce only a TJ of energy.
You see the smaller the black hole gets the shorter it's lifespan.

[Nonamer]

I didn't plan to respond to your incoherent ramblings anymore but there are two things I just had to point out:

Does that mean you're giving up?

LOL. That's definitely one of the weakest excuses I've ever heard. On par with the "tracer" theory of turbolasers. Explain exactly where this multi-megaton energy absorbing capacity comes from, since structural material has no energy storing capacity. Any deformation of a ships structure must follow the conservation of energy, and if it can't store that energy it must be expelled into the environment.

You relly don't know shit about physics do you? The 70Mt kinetic energy will be used to deform the structure of the ship. It will be used up to break up the chemical bonds in the metal. Do you get it now finally?

The same could be said for any asteroid impact. However we still see a explosion. So unless there is a method for kinetic energy to chemical energy conversion that doesn't rely on thermal energy, this is rather strong BS.

Doesn't look like much of a problem. Black holes have the peculiar property of having a having a higher power output the smaller they are.

Learn some math for Christ's sake and learn how to read. That 10^37W black hole will last for 10^-25s which means it will produce only a TJ of energy.
You see the smaller the black hole gets the shorter it's lifespan.

Then get 10^26 of them. Or find a way to make them out of the planet itself. Infinitely more plausible than hypermatter or whatever. Anyways, it shows the physical plausibility of the mass-energy conversion method regardless of whether you use the micro-black hole method.

[Jedi Master Spock]

And if you create somewhat larger black holes, they last a bit longer and - when fired at high speeds - get to consume a certain quantity of planetary mass before finally evaporating.

However, as I briefly alluded to earlier, accurately modeling that scenario is a pain in the tail - especially considering that, in addition to the core of material "crushed" into the event horizon and converted completely into energy, a certain additional volume of material experiences is violently crushed enough to undergo nuclear fusion.

I haven't tried crunching the numbers yet, but I can estimate off-hand that coming up with accurate figures for the final yield an entire spread of small high-speed black holes fired through a rocky planet (atmosphere, crust, mantle, core, etc) is going to require very messy numeric integration taken over a few billion iterations, and even just working out the basics of a simplified model by hand is going to be a bit messy.

I'm not even particularly fond of the idea of the Death Star firing micro-black holes - that's a remarkably powerful technology that has other applications. However, it is a fine display of one of the wide varieties of methods for converting matter into energy.

No I don't. ICS is official and official means correct until disproven by movies.

If you are discussing the validity of ICS then we must examine it as official material as it was intended. You want to pretend that ICS is fan material so everything it states must be seen in the movies. That is not true.

Once again, Kane Starkiller, the question at hand is not validity or official status, but accuracy when compared with other sources, which is a rather different issue.

You should recognize by now that the argument you offer above is going to get you nowhere on this issue.

incoherent ramblings

And I've mentioned the bit about staying polite before.

This is your final warning before I proceed to taking some variety of action.

Did you have a minor stroke or something?

Nonamer, you may consider yourself to be given official warning as well. I'm deathly serious about maintaining good manners here - it's part of the whole experiment in launching these boards.

(You have more slack left at the moment than Kane. See enforcement policy for details.)

[Nonamer]

Did you have a minor stroke or something?

Nonamer, you may consider yourself to be given official warning as well. I'm deathly serious about maintaining good manners here - it's part of the whole experiment in launching these boards.

(You have more slack left at the moment than Kane. See enforcement policy for details.)

Sorry. :(

[Mr. Oragahn]

Sorry playing the necromancer, and double sorry if it was already said, but isn't it possible that Dankayo actually was a small planetoid, and that the atmosphere talked about was the atmosphere of the base?

[Lord Edam]

Sorry playing the necromancer, and double sorry if it was already said, but isn't it possible that Dankayo actually was a small planetoid, and that the atmosphere talked about was the atmosphere of the base?

I believe the standard response to that is "Dankayo is a planet not an airless moon". ie, because it's called "a planet", and has "a small rebel adminsitrative base" on it, it must by definition be a habitable planet.

the fact that boiling off the entire atmosphere & top soil of a habitable planet would be severe overkill for capturing a small administrative base is conveniently ignored in favour of Big Numbers.

[AnonymousRedShirtEnsign]

So is the fact a mop up detail was dispatched to finish the Rebels which would be completely unnecessary if ISDs had GT level weapons.