Regarding EU:NJO

[SailorSaturn13]

From time to time there are claims on SDN that only "old" EU had weak figures for SW(X-Wing), while all new supports ICS. Therefore., I did and analyzed the book NJO:Vector Prime, which started in 1998.

For first time I won't include exact citations, which will follow slowly later, just impottant facts

[SailorSaturn13]

Chapter 4.
Falcon is described as being more powerful than fighters:

"But while Falcon was surprisimgly agile for a ship that looked like an old garbage scow than a starfighter, she was also much, much more powerful"

From that we learn:
1. Weapons predominate shields in SW, if Tie fighters can overpower the shields of "much more powerful" ship so swiftly;
2. If Falcon cannot vapourise a Tie (in ANH), neither can fighters.

[SailorSaturn13]

Chapter ten;

The trip from Reecee had taken a week, and while that was no problem in the comfort of Millenium falcon or Jedi Sabre, such a journey could tax an X-Wing pilot to her limits.

The trip Reecee-Dubrillion takes a week, not hours. Reecee is closer to Dubrillion than coruscant, this is third of SW galaxy at most.

Also, we see that a pilot CAN be in X-Wing from that long.

From the chart in the book we see that this trip is roughly equal to Sullust-Endor trip, so a week figure there is justified as well.

[SailorSaturn13]

Tie advanced x1, favoured by the elite oft he old Empire, including Darth Vader

Obviously, X-Wings weren't favoured modell. So their shielding must be lousy.

Courtesy of Elim GArak:

for many years the militaries of both the Empire and the New Republic had been trying to perfect off-ship shielding, with greater power sources lending deflector shields to small starfighters, thus freeing the drives of the starfighters to the tasks of maneuvering, accelerating, and firing. Thus far, little progress had been made with the technique, and Luke understood that if Lando could perfect it out here, the value to the enterprising man would be many times greater than all the treasure he could leech off of all the asteroids of Lando's Folly."

Energy transfer tech, like used in "Tears of the prophets" or "Memorial", unavaiable to times of Empire.

[SailorSaturn13]

Chapter 11

primitive two-stage rockets from Rommamol

Ourlevel of tech. Now , what it does....

large red bruises that were the thermonuclear blast clouds

Battle cruiser came into sight , dwarfing the Rhommamoolian capsule, despite the fact it was much farther away

SMALL capsule...

"Boom", Nom Anor said...
The nuclear fission explosives packed into the shuttle detonated, vaporizing the entire section of docking bays, blowing out out a huge section of the lower floor of the great battle cruiser, issuing a shock wave and a rain of white-glowing metal shards that folded many of the nearest buzzing starfighters in on themselves and lifted the tail of the battle cruiser, uprighting it ninety degrees before any stabilizing jets could halt the roll

So we learn:
Contrary to ICS, SW hulls cannot shrug off thermonuclear blasts, not even fission blasts. The damage brought by relatively small fission explosives was catastrophic, putting cruiser out of comission. So, without shields, SW ships would be BLASTED by photon torpedoes. Given that in ROTS novellization, cruisers couldn't penetrate "Invisible Hand's" hull instantly, they must have TLs in KT-low MT range at best.
Also SW hulls are metallic. So neutromium IS some metal called so.

[SailorSaturn13]

"Sernpidal" Da'Gara replied. "Third planet in Julevian system, and the most heavily populate dplanet of the entire sector"

WE'll later see how populated Sernpidal is. If this is planet with biggest population...

[l33telboi]

A few more things:

A Stardestroyer said to be the only thing strong enough to be able to shatter a small moon (heck, we even get exact figures for mass and size), and even then the larger pieces would be able to seriously damage the planet below.

There's a direct quote on how many Stardestroyers it would take to destroy a planet made mostly from ice.

The heavy guns from a Stardestroyer is unable to penetrate the ice crust of a planet. Hinted that the people beneath that crust couldn't even feel it.

In any case, i didn't pay too much attention to these things when i read it, but i thought that you might want to check up on these things, since you're quantifying NJO.

[Mike DiCenso]

Chapter ten;

The trip from Reecee had taken a week, and while that was no problem in the comfort of Millenium falcon or Jedi Sabre, such a journey could tax an X-Wing pilot to her limits.

The trip Reecee-Dubrillion takes a week, not hours. Reecee is closer to Dubrillion than coruscant, this is third of SW galaxy at most.

Also, we see that a pilot CAN be in X-Wing from that long.

From the chart in the book we see that this trip is roughly equal to Sullust-Endor trip, so a week figure there is justified as well.

Well now, this is an interesting quote, if it is indeed accurate.... It would lend support to the idea that the starfighter pilots could have spent at least a few days in transit from Sullust to Endor, but not likely more than week, and a week was considered "taxing" here, so probably a few days less than that. This all suggests very strongly that X-wings, at the very least, have the necessary "facillities" on-board for relatively long duration flights.

By the way, SS13, could you please provide some page number citations for these quotes?
-Mike

[Jedi Master Spock]

A Stardestroyer said to be the only thing strong enough to be able to shatter a small moon (heck, we even get exact figures for mass and size), and even then the larger pieces would be able to seriously damage the planet below.

We do? Exact size and mass? Do tell, please.

[l33telboi]

We do? Exact size and mass? Do tell, please.

Bah, i was hoping no one would ask, that way i wouldn't have to go digging through the novel again. Oh well.

And what a moon! It seemed huge, as if it was a second planet the size of Sernpidal. Han spent a moment remembering the information he had garnered about the place when schooling Anakin on their flight and descent plan. Sernpidal did have a moon—two of them, in fact. One was substantial, nearly a fifth the size of Sernpidal, but the other was much smaller, perhaps only twenty kilometers or so in diameter.

“Which moon is that?” Anakin asked curiously, and he turned to Han and the old man, his expression fraught with fear. “That’s Dobido, isn’t it?”
“Dobido’s the tiny one,” Han replied.
“Indeed it is Dobido,” the old man said.

Han then wasted no time, didn’t even bother to call in to the ground controllers for permission. He put theFalcon up, straight up, a lightning run to orbit, and put in a course to chase the rushing moon.
“There it is,” he said to his son as they came over the horizon, moving to close pursuit. “Ten trillion tons of danger.”
“Torpedoes?” Anakin asked.
Han looked at him incredulously. “That’d be like shooting a bantha with a tickle stick,” he replied. “It’d take a Star Destroyer to blast that moon, and even if it did, the falling pieces would devastate Sernpidal.”

[Mike DiCenso]

Just off the cuff estimates; the moon is rather low-mass. Only about .41.88 metric tons per meter cubed, if I did my numbers correctly. So whatever this thing is made of, it's not solid nickle-iron composition, nor is it harder, denser rock. This doesn't make Star Destroyers look very impressive.
-Mike

[Jedi Master Spock]

You've got your figure inverted, Mike. You divided volume by mass rather than vice versa.

20 km diameter = 10 km radius = 4/3*pi*1,000 km^3 = 4.2e12 m^3.

10 trillion tons = 10e12 T.

I.e., 10/4.2 T/m^3, or 2.4 T/m^3 (g/cc). This is a reasonably normal density for a 20 km moon. Blowing it apart into pieces is generally 0.1-10 gigatons, depending on how solid it is - rubble pile or one big solid rock.

The fact that there would be pieces left after the best the Star Destroyer could do strictly prohibits the use of more than mid-zettajoule (low teraton) cumulative bombardment, incidentally. We can probably also guess a reasonable approach velocity for the moon and put a momentum ceiling on the weaponry as well.

This is unusually solid information for a novel. I guess Salvatore did his homework.

A reputation for attention for detail with his editors could well help to explain why he was asked to pen the AOTC novelization after his highly controversial decision to kill off Chewbacca.

For the record, though, Vector Prime (1999) does still predate the AOTC ICS (2002), though by a fairly short amount of time. 8 years later, it could be described as "old" EU now, I suppose.

[Mike DiCenso]

Thanks for the correction, JMS. Still, 2.4 T/m^3 doesn't lead us to anything really impressive for a sustained firepower average for SDs. As for the publication date, it's only about 3 years off from AoTC ICS, and even less time than that when you consider when Saxton was writing the ICS book versus Vector Prime's publication date. That VP couldn't have been considered is rather interesting, especially when we have a very clear set of statements on Dobido’s size and mass, and fairly clear statement on the effects of an SD bombardment. There will still be sizable enough debris leftover to cause significant wide-spread devastation on Sernpidal.

I wonder if VP helped in playing a part in Sari's re-estimating SD firepower.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

And again, you're looking at a surface bombardment, so more to do with cratering than a single detonation from the core. Cratering energies are even less impressive.

[l33telboi]

What i find the strangest in that incident is that the moon doesn't seem to burn up in the atmosphere. I mean it's said to circling the planet, slowing coming down and picking up speed as it does.

Why wouldn't a relatively small moon like that shatter and burn up once it hits the atmosphere? And if there was something there to actually beat it into smaller pieces, how come those pieces wouldn't burn up even more easily?