'sploding 'steroids : gasoline rocks :D

[Mike DiCenso]

At any rate, regardless of what Vympel/Leo1, Point 45 or whomever. The fact is that TCW has been discussed on SDN. For example, there is a thread on scaling the Malevolence. Dispite PT being "crap", it still was discussed and used in Versus debates (mainly backed up by Saxonton written ICS), so that is no excuse for them ignoring the TCW.

Ignore TCW because it's "a kiddie show"? Why? Then there goes most of TPM with the emphasis on Anakin "Yippie!" Skywalker, and Jar-Jar Binks. Frankly speaking, my bet is the real reason they ignore it is precisely because TCW is failing to show uber gigatons of firepower. Hell, TCW does not even give them a fraction of the Jedi wankfest that the first animated CW cartoons did as a consolation prize.
-Mike

[Trinoya]

When you think about it, the entirety of the TCW series has almost entirely hurt the arguments of the ICS debaters. It doesn't help that this is a level of cannon higher than the ICS and certainly has hurt many other claims, ranging from planetary shields to accuracy claims.

[Praeothmin]

Well, in an argument about weapons accuracy over at ASVS, InvaderSkooj admitted that SW weapons were less accurate, but that since they saturated the target area with Fire, they still got the job done...
Some Pro-Wars debaters are honest enough in many aspects, you just have to find them... :)

[Mike DiCenso]

Well, yes. Pro-Wars people like ILikeDeathNote, Cpl Kendall (aka The Dude), Enigma, and Airlocke, among others are honest Versus debaters.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

I don't think Point45 has any influence at all.
He could be a very clever sockpuppet but I don't buy that. He just has too much style in his own crappiness. He only gets bonuses because he's a warsie and despite the stupidity of his arguments, with most mods being warsies, he gets some free passes despite polluting entire threads and pissing off many members, all groups concerned.
For example, Kyosanim is a trektard of the worst kind, the Trek equivalent of IQ45, but he does get enormous leeway as well. I think they enjoy trolls no matter what, it's part of the picture and brings life to the forums.

Notice that for some very bizarre cosmic reason that transcends logic, 45 and Kyo have never argued against each other, even when both posted in the same thread multiple times.

Are you sure that they (Kyosanim and Point45) are not one in the same same? After all, it's not that hard for someone with a bit of talent and imagination to make a sock puppet account and change "style", even to grammar or spell badly, if need be to throw people off.

Well, they really did seem to pop up in the versus forum at the same time, and leave at the same time. There's definitely been a Kyosanim and Point45 moment when both were very active, and it was at the same time. Still, Kyosanim joined the 25 Apr 2005 -at that present time, he only has 579, which is not a lot. Point45 registered on 14 Nov 2008, with 465 messages thus far.
Kyosanim really had something against me, but he sort of phased out when it became clear I wouldn't pay much attention to the ramblings of his simple mind.
There indeed are weird things about both these accounts, but we'll never know. Best thing to do is just ignore them, even if it's against board rules. They have been pure wastes of time.

Oh no! You'll now be seen as a disciple of Darkstar since those observations are very similar to ones he made many years ago for as yet still unfinished article on turbolaser firepower. Oh wait, for some reason they already think that, dispite you being pro-SG franchise, not Star Trek. ;-)
-Mike

It's quite interesting, when you join both the firepower figures on his pages, and my observations of the asteroids' behaviour and rather explosive nature, that we reach something that does strongly look like the level of firepower exchanged by the ships in TCWS. The explosive nature of asteroids would cap all this because what we'd consider to be fragmenting, melting or vaporizing energy imparted by the KE of impacts or turbolasers could largely be caused by whatever frozen gouts of highly explosive ore inside.

[Lucky]

Yeah well, there it is, one of those ridiculous SFJN claims, again.

This time, this is resulting from an ongoing discussion at SBC on turbolasers that devolved into a meticulous analysis of a peculiar EU claim in regards to the TESB asteroid scenes.

As such, I just found it more and more irrepressible to post my latest brain fart here.

Basically, the point is rather simple. The Hoth asteroid field is surprisingly dense for a field that's so far from Hoth itself (the novelization is quite explicit on that, Hoth is so far that it's not distinguishable from the background's stars). It's nothing like our main belt.

Still, that's not what I'm going to argue over here, although I also had to point that.

What the matter is... is that I haven't seen one person insistingly ask why those asteroids exploded and burned in space so easily.

Quoting a piece of the exchange between me and Leo1/Vympel:

Of course those asteroids had a tendency to spontaneously turn themselves into balls of fire the moment they'd hit another small rock or something else; a thing I think the EU should have been smart to point, perhaps those asteroids being full of volatile stuff or something, which would put a new spin onto the vaporized asteroid craze btw.

Except they're explicitly not full of 'volatile stuff', so lets move on from yet another attempt by you to muddy the waters, introduce uncertainty, confuse the issue, and generally try and get as far away as possible from straightforward interpetation of obviously clear evidence.

A 10 m wide iron asteroids masses 4121 tonnes if it's considered a sphere. It takes 1.3 KT (5.439 e12 J] to melt it and 7.5 KT to vaporize it.
At 4121 tonnes, it needs to impact at a relative speed of 1,624.7 m/s in order to release a purely theoretical and ideal energy of 1.3 KT, and that's just to melt it.
Which as far as flashing asteroids are concerned, is waaaay above anything observed. I won't even insist on the debris that keeps burning after an impact between two small asteroids, or that miserable small asteroid that ponderously drifts into the crater of a much bigger asteroid (although that one isn't that big), and slams into the curved wall, which generates a luminous red flash (but it's partially obscured).

Is it silly to talk asteroids containing some kind of volatile ore? Perhaps. At least it would be extremely unusual.
Now does it fit with what is seen on screen? Hell yes, far more than claiming they're mere lumps of iron or rock and nothing else.

Of course, exploding asteroids... that's amusing. We now might reconsider that famous TESB scene where an ISD supposedly vaporizes several small asteroids.

Then, some pictures.

• 1. A very small piece of rock slowly lands inside the crater of a much bigger asteroid (roughly 4 times the Millennium Falcon's width I'd say), and produces a red flash.
  
  
• 2. A TIE hits an asteroid that's slightly bigger than itself. While the pilot was ejected and his suit burning as well, it's understandable since it's a material that could burn. But iron?
  
  
• 3. A small piece of rock is intercepted by the TIE. The left "solar" panel is hit at the base. The small piece of rock definitely disappears in a blob of blue energy.
  
  
• 4. An impact between two asteroids of different size. The relative velocity of the smaller one that hits the bigger one is simply too low to even reach fusion of materials. Yet both asteroids blow up in some impressive way.
  
  
• 5. A collision between same sized small rocks. The explosion is magistral, once again, and results into what could be called a fireball, the piece of rock leaving a fiery blue trail. The Millennium Falcon flies above it.
  
  
• 6. Another fiery asteroid passes by, seen through the starboard windows of the Millennium Falcon's cockpit.
  
  

Notice that the flashes of light are confirmed in the novelization.

So then, we can look at asteroids both being shot down and impacting against an ISD's hull.

• 

(The video has been shrunk by the image host btw.)

We can also appreciate how some asteroids seem to come to stop dead in their tracks, before being shot down. I suppose that they were stupefied, shocked perhaps. Say... petrified?

I still don't know if this is supposed to be serious, but it seriously pees all over those vaporized asteroid claims gleefully.

A lot of those asteroids look like they might be made of thermite, and thermite does have a high iron content.

[Praeothmin]

How could asteroids be naturally made of thermite?

[Lucky]

How could asteroids be naturally made of thermite?

I watch a lot of Myth Busters, and the Hindenburg special was what inspired the theory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg ... stigations

Just take something like iron-oxide mixed with something like aluminum, and throw in a some flammable gases(possibly frozen). You end up with "rocks" that will be able to do what we see in the movie. Just keep in mind that each rock will have a different mix.

No matter how you cut it the Hoth asteroid field is strange.

[Mr. Oragahn]

We all knew these explosions were too violent for mere kinetic energy.
Now you say that thermite was inside those asteroids, and that pulverized them to dust?
Oh boy. I knew it!
It was a controlled demolition.
I'm betting my hat that those damned rebel terrorists, forced to hide in caves in some frozen desert, planned to pull down the entire asteroid field upon thousands of innocent and proud citizens of the empire the moment they'd step into it.
The fundies even flew one of those asteroids into a destroyer's tower, which resulted into the collapse of the twin globes. We can clearly see it on some video. We also have a holo-record of an unidentified captain before the crash.
I heard they also did something similar, later on, when they downed the magnificent Executor. It seems they did it by crashing a bird into her bridge tower. The sensors of some nearby craft accidentally recorded a noisy audio feed, in which we could hear the rebel pilot shout something like "waaah Ackbar"...
TIEs were scrambled too late.

These cowards don't even respect our way of life. I hate them.

[Lucky]

We all knew these explosions were too violent for mere kinetic energy.
Now you say that thermite was inside those asteroids, and that pulverized them to dust?
Oh boy. I knew it!
It was a controlled demolition.
I'm betting my hat that those damned rebel terrorists, forced to hide in caves in some frozen desert, planned to pull down the entire asteroid field upon thousands of innocent and proud citizens of the empire the moment they'd step into it.
The fundies even flew one of those asteroids into a destroyer's tower, which resulted into the collapse of the twin globes. We can clearly see it on some video. We also have a holo-record of an unidentified captain before the crash.
I heard they also did something similar, later on, when they downed the magnificent Executor. It seems they did it by crashing a bird into her bridge tower. The sensors of some nearby craft accidentally recorded a noisy audio feed, in which we could hear the rebel pilot shout something like "waaah Ackbar"...
TIEs were scrambled too late.

These cowards don't even respect our way of leaving. I hate them.

So you don't like my theory that some of the Hoth asteroids had a mix of metals that when properly energized tend to explode and or burn?

How about the Hoth asteroids are something similar to Clathrate hydrates?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_hydrate

[Mr. Oragahn]

We all knew these explosions were too violent for mere kinetic energy.
Now you say that thermite was inside those asteroids, and that pulverized them to dust?
Oh boy. I knew it!
It was a controlled demolition.
I'm betting my hat that those damned rebel terrorists, forced to hide in caves in some frozen desert, planned to pull down the entire asteroid field upon thousands of innocent and proud citizens of the empire the moment they'd step into it.
The fundies even flew one of those asteroids into a destroyer's tower, which resulted into the collapse of the twin globes. We can clearly see it on some video. We also have a holo-record of an unidentified captain before the crash.
I heard they also did something similar, later on, when they downed the magnificent Executor. It seems they did it by crashing a bird into her bridge tower. The sensors of some nearby craft accidentally recorded a noisy audio feed, in which we could hear the rebel pilot shout something like "waaah Ackbar"...
TIEs were scrambled too late.

These cowards don't even respect our way of leaving. I hate them.

So you don't like my theory that some of the Hoth asteroids had a mix of metals that when properly energized tend to explode and or burn?

How about the Hoth asteroids are something similar to Clathrate hydrates?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_hydrate

It was a joke. On the contrary, I think it's an interesting idea you have there. It's laudable that you even went to the point of trying to find some scientific plausibility in that.

[Lucky]

We all knew these explosions were too violent for mere kinetic energy.
Now you say that thermite was inside those asteroids, and that pulverized them to dust?
Oh boy. I knew it!
It was a controlled demolition.
I'm betting my hat that those damned rebel terrorists, forced to hide in caves in some frozen desert, planned to pull down the entire asteroid field upon thousands of innocent and proud citizens of the empire the moment they'd step into it.
The fundies even flew one of those asteroids into a destroyer's tower, which resulted into the collapse of the twin globes. We can clearly see it on some video. We also have a holo-record of an unidentified captain before the crash.
I heard they also did something similar, later on, when they downed the magnificent Executor. It seems they did it by crashing a bird into her bridge tower. The sensors of some nearby craft accidentally recorded a noisy audio feed, in which we could hear the rebel pilot shout something like "waaah Ackbar"...
TIEs were scrambled too late.

These cowards don't even respect our way of leaving. I hate them.

So you don't like my theory that some of the Hoth asteroids had a mix of metals that when properly energized tend to explode and or burn?

How about the Hoth asteroids are something similar to Clathrate hydrates?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_hydrate

It was a joke. On the contrary, I think it's an interesting idea you have there. It's laudable that you even went to the point of trying to find some scientific plausibility in that.

It's hard to tell when someone makes a post like that.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Kuddos to Jared for the find.

http://youtu.be/ccD_1m529eA
20:18
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Peragus_II

Peragus II was a planet in the Peragus system of the Outer Rim Territories' Xappyh sector. A major source of low-grade engine fuel, Peragus II was originally a terrestrial world, but it was nearly destroyed hundreds of years before 3959 BBY by the early attempts of miners to siphon off fuel from the planet. A mining accident caused an explosion beneath the crust, blowing a massive hole in the planet and forming an asteroid field around the world. By 3951 BBY, mercenaries and tradesmen constructed the Peragus Mining Facility in the Peragus asteroid field, but both the asteroid field and the station were destroyed when a stray blast during a firefight between the light freighter Ebon Hawk and the Hammerhead-class cruiser Harbinger ignited the fuel in the asteroid field. After the destruction of the asteroid field, no further mining projects were attempted in the ruins of Peragus II.

And we can see, it took an unlucky shot at a particularly sensitive asteroid, since we have the scene to realize that despite the number of asteroids being hit, nothing like a chain reaction ever was noticed and some asteroids easily withstood the firepower without being noticeably damaged.
There just was that damned black sheep in the herd...