StarWarsStarTrek wrote:
3. So your argument is that, in a three decade long debate, restatement of arguments is a bannable offense. Go ahead and report everyone in spacebattles.com and starfleetjedi then, including yourself.
But no, to you, it only counts when these arguments are "bad" and have "already been debunked". Of course, the fact that making making "bad" arguments, no matter how truly crappy they may be, a bannable offense is an extremely subjective and risky move that not even SDN mods do escapes you, or that "already been debunked" refers to radically different things from various persons' perspectives.
They
are already debunked.
Proof is that nothing, absolutely nothing of what you ever argued for here is either new or challenging towards claims made here before you arrived. You simply completely ignore what we did. You completely ignored basic statements, simple facts, crystal clear conclusions and solid logic, in favour of your denials and repetitive broken claims.
What are we to do, if not ban you in light of such dishonesty, really? The only reason you're here is because JMS has yet to come to his senses about you really are.
4. "it's obvious that the raw materials can't be destroyed"? Sure they can. You can blow up an oil deposit or a mine. It just takes far more energy than your silly mini delta zero would have.
A planet
is raw materials. Its mantle and core are full of precious raw materials.
You plan to destroy them as well?
Do you even think before posting?
Your BDZ will destroy all (most) arable land, but won't do much to harm fisheries to the slightest, or underground mines, or oil deposits, or aquatic creatures, or the vast majority of forests and many wildlife, most or all of which count as "assets of production".
- Fisheries: artificial constructs to grow fish. Not to be confounded with natural fisheries, which would obviously require destroying most oceans to do so. Man made fisheries, even if underwater, can easily be targeted. Go look up for "fisheries" in a dictionary, and you'll see that no one needs to go for the meaning that supports absolutely ludicrous firepower levels.
- Underground mines: they're just tunnels, you cretin. You merely need to collapse them. If it's the ore inside that annoys you, you have to snap the planet away with MAGIC!
- Oil deposits, same stuff. You destroy all industrial assets. Otherwise, you need to destroy the whole planet.
- Aquatic creatures will die if you achieve proper nuclear winter and fire at seismic hot spots. A biopshere is a fragile thing, in case you didn't notice.
- Forests and their wildlives aren't assets of production. Production only happens with a form of industry, even if primitive. As forests are the easiest part of the BDZ, destroyed with peripheral effects due to the bombardment.
Above all things, absolutely all these arguments are
NOTHING NEW.
5.
Megaton impacts will certainly prove very easily dangerous, even several kilometers down the surface. Tremors, at first. Massive. And, of course, real direct blast and heat if one insists on digging you out.
My apologies, you were referring to megaton weapons instead, a strange distinction since you don't seem to think that HTL's are even megaton yielded.
And yet you quote me showing that I believe weapons can deliver megatons. It's not like a rain of concentrated high kilotons wouldn't work, you know, if you really have to reach some underground base.
Next time, try to read properly.
Either way, if megaton weapons can make tremors powerful enough to deform a space age shelter through kilometers of solid granite, once again, explain why nuclear bunkers were expected to survive modern nuclear missiles despite inferior materials sciences and being only a hundred or so meters (if even that) in many cases below the ground.
Long story short, you're wrong. Kiloton or megaton weapons will not do anything through shockwaves to a deep planetary shelter, nor will one hundred of them. For them to actually be a threat, they would have to be firing for hours just to penetrate to a single shelter, assuming that they magically know where it is.
Except that I'm not exactly pushing the idea that megaton blasts will dramatically deform the structures. That is why I'm saying one must continue firing downwards.
The structures may be hard, but just like for helmets, they don't stop momentum. They won't stop tremors (unless built with systems to absorb shocks, but there's no evidence of that), and it's the machines inside which will suffer most. See Hoth and how the base was being dramatically shaken. Past some point, the inside was almost completely ruined.
Even, if for some reason, you were to argue that kilotons of energy had hit the mountain, it would be proof that, yes, bases can be endangered by such blasts on the surface.
"Multikiloton weapons directed at the ground, fired repeatedly, will sooner or later reach an underground target" - if you somehow magically knew where said shelters are and fire your heaviest weapons at it repeatedly, you may eventually blast through to a single shelter in a matter of hours. What if there are ten of these dispersed across a planet, and the enemy did not conveniently put these on the holonet? Then what? You have to effectively melt the planet's crust indiscriminately.
Or go for what is less expensive than some stupid action such as the one you describe: park a small garrison if you think there may be some underground shelter, and shoot down any resupply ship and jam all transmissions.
Only a total douche would ever think of melting the whole surface of a planet, down to several kilometers, just in order to dislodge some Rebels hidden in one or several bunkers he doesn't even know to exist for sure, instead of merely parking a minor force and just blockading the planet by starving the rats out.
Really, the amount of stupidity you guys argue for in order to get your neat numbers, it's staggering.
6.
A high yield stress means more stress has been applied to materials to remove defects. The point being increasing the yield strenght.
Stress is easily measured as a pressure, and mass per surface area is a unit of pressure which was once used here.
Which is precisely why it's ridiculous. Leia was speaking in the context of Han Solo's weight against the chair. You can come up with whatever excuses you want to, which are not only silly and insufficient, but aren't what was running through Traviss's head when she wrote the damn thing.
But anyway, we can discuss this in another thread.
Yes we can.
7a. You do absolutely nothing to prove that any of these effects will completely destroy all life to the slightest degree.
And I told you that "all life" had to be rationalized because in Star Wars it can reach such levels that you never know you've killed all life until you snap the planet out of existence with MAGIC! or hyperspace shunting (Death Star).
So we have to go for what is enough to spoil a planet for most species and civilizations, and looking at what we see in Star Wars, it's clear that a nuclear waste land stuck in a nuclear winter, with a toxic and thick atmosphere and a poisoned biosphere is just good enough.
You simply summarize the effects that a nuclear winter will have. Read any credible book on a hypothetical nuclear war. None of them project a complete eradication of human life.
I wonder what books you've read, because the scenario I had has shown that you obtained massive casualties with minor application of firepower spread in an intelligent manner, with something like a hundred 15 KT shots at most (I said 10 KT in my previous post but it actually was 15 KT:
clicky (although that's not the PDF I have, which is more detailed)).
Humans largely depend on food types which are obtained from crops. Crops are very fragile resources, and bees play a central role there. Air currents do wonders to transport particles, notably nuclear particles, across entire oceans. They can do it with sand, which is heavier in general.
It doesn't take a genius to know that spreading the whole nuclear firepower of the planet over it surface would totally kill us. Around the 90s, the total nuclear firepower's yield was estimated at 20 gigatons. The scientific projection only used like 20,000 times less energy than that.
With the total yield, you can fire 2 million 15 KT bombs. That's of course totally overkill.
Obviously, Imperials strategists would already have geological biological analysis tools in order to know, after scanning a planet, where to shoot to maximize destruction. Computers would immediately provide them a list of coordinates to aim at, which they could even do automatically.
And we do not have underwater cities or deep planetary shelters.
Cities, in general, aren't big secrets, so they shall be easy targets, no matter where they are.
Additionally, you cannot expect long term radiation effects to kill off the survivors (which it will fail to do) because of Wars medical science, the possibility of help arriving and the fact that they can just leave (and the several days they have to live would be enough to tell the story, contradicting "no witnesses"). The 100 teraton K-T extinction event did not eradicate life, a nuclear winter will not either.
SW's medical science isn't a miracle. Its bacta comes in very limited supply. It would certainly not be enough to take care of a
planetary population, assuming you could have access to it in any reasonable amount of time, or assuming you knew of what happened to begin with.
Who in the world would even try to help these people with Imperial ships around, ready to smoke an entire planet?
Get real, a proper medical evacuation of such proportions could only happen through massive heaps of collaboration, not with twitchy space born genociders flying around.
Remember, my lowly friend, that in a textbook definition of a BDZ, in the ideal scenario, a fleet of a hundred ships is required, even if an ISD can achieve the mission on its own.
This certainly reduces the chances of escapes as much as it renders any potential rescue harder as well.
The 100 TT event was a very focused delivery of energy. For all intents and purposes, it was a massive waste of it, if someone had used to destroy life.
And as I said, going down the absolutist route like you do, when it comes to the eradication of life, is considerably ludicrous.
It just can't work in Star Wars.
You completely failed to address what I wrote about various life forms, notably the Force. It's clear that you just can't win this.
c. So now your counter to the various "molten slag" quotes goes from claiming without basis a figurative connotation of the phrase to denying that said phrases are even accurate? Unfortunately for you, these statements are from various authors, around half predating Saxtonian ICS's, and many are told from omniscient 3rd person narrators. You cannot merely dismiss them because they irritate you, or because you feel that a single event sort-of doesn't fit perfectly with the equal canon sources.
Nice attempt at rebooting.
I largely demonstrated why molten slag needs to be rationalized. It's not without basis. My entire post before has precisely been about clarifying the whole contradiction from Scavenger Hunt between the objective of reducing a base to molten slag (and not the whole planet), and the real effects.
Nie to see you deny that as well.
All this thread is about demonstrating that after all. We have clear descriptions that contradict the literalistic way, like the age old Star Wars Technical Journal from 95 with its planetary surface turned into smoking debris in a matter of hours, or Hutt Gambit (which has been posted way too many times and which you cannot dismiss, no matter how hard you try to claim Fel to be ignorant of a BDZ is when Han knows what its effects are, in the same book!).
I'm irritated because you openly ignore quotes you don't like, and there's not a single mod around even caring to force you to deal with them and pay respect to previous work.
If at least you could even read and understand what's
here.
In conclusion, you still seem to be under the impression that "all natural resources" means "all arable land...but not really other natural resources, because they obviously can't really be eliminated".
Wrong.
This is a factual inaccuracy that you continue to sprout, despite mountains of analysis and math on the subject suggesting quite the opposite. Many (most) people would doubtlessly die, but millions would still live.
That all life on a planet can be eradicated in a matter of hours by a dispersed bombardment akin to the Cold War nuclear arsenal.
Wrong. I never said the eradication of life was immediate. The BDZ operation takes hours, not the total effects.
You see an inaccuracy because it's your reading comprehension that is at fault.
You don't understand the prerequisites of a base delta zero. By canonical statements, all life, natural resources and assets of production must be dead and gone within several hours (not slowly die away months later), and the planet's surface must be reduced to molten slag.
And by very canonical statements, what is left of such a bombardment is smoking rubble, blackened corpses and burning buildings.
No man made lava (safe in Saxton's wet tale he sort of managed to cram in some ICS or Inside the World book). Not that it matters much, since his entire model rests on the idea of firepower scaling down in such a way that the Millennium Falcon's shields shall tank megatons, when we know they can't (they can't protect from TIE firepower indefinitely as seen in ANH, and when the hull is hit, the whole ship isn't disintegrated, yet in the TESB novelization, a mere E-web tripod gun can seriously damage her hull!).
See? I rationalize. You don't.
Of course, the latter according to you is figurative, yet the modern Cold War arsenal would not be described as turning the planet to molten slag, nor would the K-T extinction event.
For one reason: because it's an idiom that's specific in its use and meaning, to Star Wars.
Comparitavely the results of yours would be:
50% or so immediate fatalities,
Depends on the urban population. Large cities require less firepower spreading, and produce the highest casualties. The rest of the firepower can be applied, through lesser yields, to the country side.
... an unknown amount die later depending on medical facilities available, millions (out of billions) still live to tell the tale. [Reality: 100% fatalities within hours.]
The nuclear winter scenarios actually involved massive wastes of energy over urban centers, and they never involved scenarios of furious bombardment on specific targets such as volcanoes and other seismic fault lines, the former being perfect to cheaply maximize the release of particles in the atmosphere.
Aside from a few craters essentially invisible from orbit, the planet's surface looks the same as it did before from a spaceship, and Admiral Niathal would not say that the planet was "turned to molten slag" in the most extreme of propoganda. [Reality: planet looks jacked up from orbit, dense clouds of fog block out the sun (Camaas incident, CCG picture)]
He couldn't see a thing because an unilateral bombardment on a planet would result in the body covered with a brown/greyish blanket, with nuclear-like fireballs occasionally piercing through.
So that Mon Cal could have certainly not seen a thing.
Where did you get that citation from, and could you please provide the entire line?
Much wildlife is wiped out, but many species survive and many forests are still standing. [Reality: vegetation is boiled off the planet]
Forests are burned. Raging fires take care of
any forest, as they produce magnitudes of heats which can eat through your average lush jungle.
It goes without saying that numerous nuclear explosions will certainly have some effects on the winds, which are going to nurrish and propagate the fires.
After all, you cannot dump thousands of megatons of firepower into a biosphere and expect walk-in-the-park climatic conditions.
Aquatic wildlife and fisheries are virtually unaffected. [Reality: all fisheries are destroyed]
Water is poisoned, (industrial) fisheries (also simply called fisheries) are immediately destroyed, nuclear winter finishes off a great deal of the life which needed light to survive, resulting in the death of natural predators.
Mineral deposits and oil deposits are virtually unaffected. [Reality: all assets of production are destroyed]
If they need to be targeted, they would.
Mineral deposits are not worth shooting at unless there's some major exploitation going on.
An entire planet, mantle and core included, are mineral deposits after all.
So there's clearly a limit to how far one can push the idea that such ensembles need to be destroyed.
Cities are reduced to rubble. [Reality: cities are "reduced to a sea of manmade lava", which is far too explicit to seriously argue for a figurative connotation, but if one insists, reduced to rubble by kilotons does not resemble a sea of manmade lava to any person with respectable vision]
Cities are definitely reduced to rubble. Confirmed.
Heck, Dankayo wasn't exactly turned into rubble much, yet it was object to reduction to molten slag.
But we both know you don't give a shit about that fact.
Such open ignorance would warrant a ban, but I can't be arsed to waste time chasing you. Mods don't do their job, and when they do, JMS slaps them in the face for doing their job. I couldn't care less about this board now, now that its true lunatic substance has been revealed.
I'm merely replying to you because I don't want to have anyone get the impression that I never addressed your points. Now I'll just have to redirect to these posts. :)
In other words, the difference between this:
Where in that picture does it imply that the topsoil has be atomized, and in what universe would this be classified as "dense clouds" or "being to settle" in more time than it takes for two imperial transports to mobilize and deploy troops? It would
completely settle within minutes at the most, and "being to settle" from a figurative standpoint within seconds.
The picture shows a dust cloud.
You don't know what a dust cloud is?
I really can't fathom the way your fucking brain works. Do you realize how much wrong there is in that simple question of yours I underlined?
I'm telling you what we
should see; that is, clouds.
And what the "atmosphere" would look like after being teraton'd to death: a giant ball of fire.
Point (which flew above your head): you can't see shit in the second scenario (yours).
If the part about the clouds settling is not to be taken literally, and just means the ships descended onto the planet and landed quickly, then fine, there's no need to butcher that extract any longer as you do.
If it's to be taken literally, I've told you that SW ships are seen to land and take off very rapidly, so even moderate clouds of dust lifted up by moderate explosions would still be settling before small deployment ships would land (such as those 50 meters long transports).
So in both cases you're wrong.
The "maybe" is very clear and makes the whole difference
On the contrary, it's entirely irrelevant. Han Solo would not make such an assertion if Wars firepower were so hopelessly weak that it would take them years to accomplish said task.
Pardon? What? Irrelevant?...
It's Han's thoughts. The words are not meaningless. Otherwise the whole book is.
What a disgusting way to try to deny facts: selection of words, ditching those which you don't like.
Try removing the "maybe" from the text, and then put it back into it, and your basic English skills, assuming they're up to date, should tell you how that single word makes a shit load of difference.
