Praeothmin wrote:So my question remains unanswered... :)
For all who care about this sub theory, it's possible that destroying the valve, that is, overloading it, causes a small sudden chain reaction and makes the rest of the whole shield system go poop, even if in theory the buffer could have absorbed more energy before saturation.
Because if I get it correctly, the circuit is as such:
Absorber >> buffer >> neutrino convertor >> radiator.
>> being power conduits.
Once the radiator (the exit valve) or the convertor are out, the buffer will keep filling up, reaching saturation point, overloading and exploding.
But to make sense from the wattage numbers, the idea is that overloading the radiator or the convertor themselves causes an explosion that damages the rest of the system.
After all, saturating a possibly efficient but fragile system, especially around the neutrino convertor or the radiator, with many petawatts of power, is not a mere feature (even if here, petawatts is way below Saxton's claims, but we'll get on that later on).
That would be why destroying the part of the system that has a poor draining rate would be a weakness to the whole system in question.
However, before you react, I have to say that this is absurd, for two reasons.
First, why would the radiator ever overload if there was an energy buffer? All the energy the radiator couldn't dissipate per second would be kept in the buffer, until all energy is flushed out, or reaches saturation threshold.
Secondly, it's a kind of bizarrre system that they have power conduits able to absord megatons of energy, say gigatons, and yet can't transfer the exact same amount on the other end.
So basically, as people have said, if it was about draining rates versus buffers, that would make little sense, since you'd need to claim absolutely ridiculously low draining rates to make sense of the snubfighters event.
As said earlier, if shields in the ICS are just described in systems dissipating watts, if the explanation is only limited to that, it's another attempt at wanking things up, because it establishes a binary situation, where either you match the wattage level, or you don't. And then you can find yourself shooting for the end of times as long as you don't reach near 99% of the dissipation rate (incldues a bit of variance, no system's perfect after all).
As previously established, this does not mesh with the films at all, where shields are drained by packets. Each hit is a loss of X units of shielding, and shields barely recharge in the heat of a battle, unless you start to divert enough power towards them.
And as such, never could have fighters ever hoped getting rid of an ISD's shields, no matter the concentrated fire and wattage. It could be possible if we were talking about radiation rates around very low gigatons per second, and thus much lower for a 1/100 of a second, and thus within the range of explosives releasing most of their high kiloton/megaton level energy within a 1/100 of a second.
But the rates are simply many orders of magnitude too high.
As a consequence, it either kindly forces the ICS believers to wank up torpedoe yields, or claim that their explosives release most of their energy within a millionth or a billionth of a second.
In either way, lower elements have to follow in the path of wank to match the initial high figures.
A final possibility could be that there are series of radiating channels, and each hit destroys one of those channels. So in the end, the shields loose efficiency because they're progressively damaged, and as such, you can't simply reroute power. You actually have to repair the shields. Period.
Which, again, doesn't fit with TPM's events, where the Naboo yatch got her shields rejuiced as R2 manually rerouted power to them.
That said, on the ICS point, there were, AFAIK, no numbers ever given regarding the shields of that yatch. Mostly because Saxton wasn't involved in that book.
If he had, how could they have claimed their usual wank, when droids were directly hit and hardly exploded in any nuclear fashion?
You see them claim megaton level shielding for fighters since AOTC, IIRC.
With all that flak and droids exploding mere feet away from R2, this would mean that this astrodroid had super uber armour, able to withstand either kilotons, megatons or gigatons of power, depending on the asinine claim of the day.
Same for the naked hull of the ship, while the shields were down.
That yatch took what? a very few direct hits and most of the damage due to a small dozen of nearby explosions? That's just a few times more than the shields of N-1s, shot down by the same cannons towards the end of the film.
They would be definitely stuck. So of course, between TPM and AOTC, fighters and royal Naboo ships got upgraded as a whole, from shields going down after, at best, a few low gigajoules shots, to shields able to withstand many petajoules.
The "Absorber >> buffer >> neutrino convertor >> radiator" system is not a bad idea as long as you talk about armour being hit, and not some absurd vampiric cloud presented as a shield theory.
However, no matter the system we're talking about, energy shield or armour, the other main problem lies in the wattage figures which are associated.
Now, as for the figures themselves and the recent ICS compilation, it seems that it's nothing more than a pure marketing package with a very few bonuses, with all the already existing info rehashed into this new all-in-one book.
Looking at SDN's thread regarding the new compilation, since several people have read them...
They left the TIE's solar panels.
There's lots of info that is reinterpretated from older sources, which may even predate WEG's stuff.
There's still those bizarre 60 & 60 TLS and ion cannon numbers, with no refinement on their caliber.
