Mike DiCenso wrote:Usually in the past, certain pro-Wars people tried to either hyper-inflate firepower or ship numbers by making comparisions with involving the Death Star superlaser. They would make the claim that SW ships had tremendous firepower by dividing the oft-quoted 25,000 ISD number into the (assumed) DET superlaser of 1e36 J, or they would conversely assume that there were literally billions of captial ships in the Galactic Empire, again going on the basis that the SL was a DET weapon.
Yep. Those elements have been revised since then. Even the EU has incorporated weird physical phenomenoms relative to the Death Stars to create stories (Dart Vader's gauntlet sent through a watzizit anomaly resulting from the DSII's explosion).
People have identified out the visual evidence and outlined extracts from the novelisation that do offer a whole new different perspective on the mechanisms of the Death Star. Too bad an old EU source didn't think beyond "scaled up Turbolaser" (which is still used by some warsies nowadays), nevermind superior evidence which lets us know that it's nothing of the sort.
At best, if you really want to insist that the Death Star destroys planets through a majority of DET principles, and that there was a planetary shield around Endor then, the secondary explosion is enough to allow room to suggest that the second explosion was fuled by Alderaanian power plants.
See, it goes both ways. If they claim the existence of the convenient powerful hypermatter that can shatter a planet, and yet be contained inside the core of a Death Star, they also have to acknowledge its use to power up the shield on Alderaan. For a comparative purpose, look at the huge explosion from the destruction of the shield emitter on Endor, only due to a bunch of explosives; think about the size of the battle station it was protecting, and then think about what would happen with a power plant powering a shield encompassing a
whole planet, which now would have to cope with the power of a planet-destroying beam.
As for the numbers derived from Dodonna's quote, a recent thread at Spacebattles (Connie vs ISD) helped us to refresh a couple of memories.
Or you can look at those threads, from SB:
Dodonna quote, january 2002. It predates the publishing of AOTC: ICS by a few months, and this might explain the
relative sanity of the comments made back then. It also has a nice reference about previous superlaser platforms from ANH's novelisation.
The stances of certain members also surprise me.
Episoce II ICS, april 2002. A big speculation thread about the new ICS written by Curtis Saxton.
Funny to notice that among those who appeared to be identified as Trekkies, a couple of them got banned. Yet I can spot names in that thread who behaved like trolls in the past, but guess what?
They're still present. We can also see how the most virulent warsies were kinda nice with E1701 back then. He was a mod, no?
Ah, I've found something. Someone's tried to calc the Nar Shamdaayaadaaaaa (there's not enough vowels in the world I'm afraid) BDZ:
Itsa me!
The stats for the Acclamator were those:
Acclamator class military transport ship:
Lenght: 752 meters.
Power output: 2e23 watts.
Shield strenght: 7e22 watts.
Weaponry:
-12 quad TLs - 200 gt per shot.
-24 laser cannons - 6 megatons per shot.
And, of course, the Slave-I had 190 MT concussion missiles, and 12 GT mines. And beam weapons generating gigatons of recoil. :|
Two interesting replies from CoF:
1,
2 (this one contains a quote from the TFN interview).
Still scanning the thread, another quote. I'm derailing a bit, but I take it as an occasion to place bits of info from EU sources as well, to see what comes from where:
"The resulting energy beam had more firepower than half the Imperial starfleet and could instantly reduce a world to asteroid fragments. Each amplification crystal required a seperate gunnery station, where a crew of fourteen soldiers had to precisely adjust and modulate the turbolaser pulses to allow the focus lens to create a stable energy beam. Four reserve amplification crystals could be brought on line."
(ref: The Essential Guide to Weapons and Technology)
Coupled more quotes fom 2005 where even E1701 was
pointing out the
flawed reasonings behind all those extrapolations (again - but I can't find the other thread from 2005 where he abundantly talked on Dodonna's quote), we can definitely see that basically, it's just nonsense.
And considering that some die-hard warsies still don't get the point of the complete uselessness of a briefing that would totally exclude what's more relevant to the rebel pilots, the defense turbolasers, we understand how absurd certain conclusions come to be.
But that's nothing new.
What really bothered me was all those stories about super uber calcs that seem to be dated as "pre-Saxton". There's more to say on that below.
It's probably thinking like this that has brought the Versus debate to the point that it is, and I suspect is what helped to influence Saxton into the belief that an ISD can melt the crust of an Earth-like planet in less than a day.
That way or the other. Maybe he's responsible, somehow, of the degradation and credibility of the arguments thrown by the same bunch of people.
For that, I'll look at 2046's post, because the info he reports is rather telling.
There's a thing to notice though.
Many cite the construction of the second Death Star as a record. And it is. It's a secret project, and it's achieved within, what? two to three years approximatively.
This figure is often cited to bolster the super industrial state of Star Wars. Well, looking at Coruscant, for example, is enough to acknowledge this.
That said, let's look at it from another perspective. Isn't it funny that at the same time as the Empire focuses its ressources on another bigger Death Star project, for a much more tightened timeframe, for a very near schedule, the rebel also spectacularily grow in power and size?
It's easy to suggest that all what is secret about this project is that the Emperor simply diverted many bucks towards that project without telling what he was doing, not even to the Moffs.
With the senate long dismantled, and the public kept in ignorance, it's no wonder how this project can be considered secret.
That said, a well spread belief is that
if the Empire can build battle stations of that size,
then they can do the same for fleets of ships
at the same time. And thus we see those calcs where people divide the mass or volume of the Death Star (and we see with ease why a 900 km wide Death Star is much more interesting to them than a 160 km wide Death Star), and go forth to find the equivalent in capital ships, without actually thinking that if the Empire actually built a Death Star, it may not have been able to build as many ships at the same time, and spend bucks on other parts of the military in other sectors, to enforce imperial rule, which then seems responsible, to an extent, to the rise of the rebellion as a real and powerful menace to the Emperor.
As said earlier on, it's worth the observation as to how the rebellion seems only able to spare one blockade runner for the most important mission ever, and how they're stuck in a temple without any form of visible defense, and how later on, they literally grow bases with theater shields, ion cannons, have many atmospheric fighters, cargos, starfighters and bombers (with two new models such as the B-Wing and the A-Wing) and a fleet of capital ships which, at the Battle of Endor, can actually stand a chance against the Empire's elite forces in a head to head battle.
The earliest reference I can find to the use of the word "gigatons" on ASVS is in 1999 by Michael January (a guy whose webpages I've archived):
link to long and ugly URL
The term does appear earlier at ASVS, based on the "gigatons of recoil" line about turbolasers from one of the EU novels (
Slave Ship).
Yeah, gigatons of recoil. We wonder if there's been a Special-Special Super Edition of the trilogy that only a few select people, this EU author counted, actually know to exist.
Last time I checked, the starfighters, no matter the era, never struck me fighting with anything superior to gigajoule level weaponry, neither were they destroyed by anything superior to subkiloton weaponry.
Of course, that was from 1998, a year before another EU novel (X-Wing: Isard's Revenge) suggested that "terajoules of coherent light" spread amongst fifty cannons were fired from two ~700m long New Republic warships in a fight to the death against a battlestation. The same book stated that an ISD poured terajoules of energy into enemy shields in broadsides, suggesting that terajoules was the consisent level.
Even by the time of my arrival at ASVS, the "gigatons of recoil" line was the one you were told by the pro-Wars bloc, not "terajoules of coherent light".
Nevermind if terajoules figures are much faithful to what happens on screen.
Even nowadays, the ICS Church doesn't dare to pretend that fighters or bombers, especially designed for war, can ditch that amount of firepower with their laser cannons.
Yet, they used it back then. The amount of blatant lying with a straight face, and mocking of the opposition's intelligence and patience, helps to explain the absurd situation that exists now.
It is comedy, really, that the figure they hid behind, back then, is even absurdly over what they dare to claim nowadays for ships of the tonnage of a Slave I.
In any case, January used the old Brian Young Turbolaser Commentaries as basis for his statement about gigatons. Reviewing Young's work via the earliest available page on archive.org, we find that Young reaches as high as 1.6 megatons (7000 terajoules) for a "medium" turbolaser bolt.
However, he includes reference to Saxton's faulty Base Delta Zero claims, thereby noting the possibility of an average per-shot firepower for light-to-heavy guns (of which they estimated either 60 or 200) of almost 600 megatons.
So January asserts that an ISD broadside would constitute some 14,000 megatons of energy, or 14 gigatons. He also asserts that a heavy ISD gun could yield up to 17 gigatons, though he doesn't address the oddity of that figure compared to his earlier broadside estimation.
For January, light turbolasers were no less than 3 megatons, with 138 megatons for a light gun also being a "CONSERVATIVELY" derived figure.
Meaning, overall, that the myth of uber-firepower for Star Wars vessels largely began with Saxton, and his 1997 claims of uber-fied BDZ firepower. After all, Brian Young didn't come close to such figures.
(And no, I don't think it purely coincidental that 1997 was also the era of Saxton's involvement in Trek/Wars debates. But that's outside the scope of this thread.)
Indeed, while we can be led to think that the the gigaton figures were actually predating any influence or work from Saxton, those crazy numbers are actually the direct result of Saxton's unreasonable claims and load of misinformation.
But maybe there truly are "calcs", somewhere. ;)