Firmus Piett wrote:Screw the cartoons, orbital bombardment IS KNOWN in the films. It was implied to be a viable option at Hoth, were it not for that blasted shield, remember? I bet orbital bombardment would have been considered at Endor too, were it not for the fact that Endor was similarly shielded (Han had to gain permission to land, which involved lowering planet-side shields).
That is actually one of the handful of times we hear of the possibility (outside of the now iffy EU that is), and note that that was with one of the largest of warships, the Super Star Destroyer, and at least five attending ISDs. The Endor shield, at least based on the novelization implications, is to protect the second Death Star from ship-based attack. The holographic diagram in the briefing even shows the shield being projected up from Endor in a bulb shape around the DS2, and in the novelization the DS2 is bombarded by the Rebel fleet. And if the firepower of SW capital ships was so awesome, then given the limited coverage of the shield and that General Veers' forces were able to land and walk under it, then a major attack right near by would seen a massive shockwave through the air and ground and destroy the Rebel base or severely damage it.
Firmus Piett wrote:Why would they disrupt the clouds? This is SW where certain blaster bolts can fly uninterrupted through water as easily as air, and ships can fly at hyperspnic-speeds through planetary atmosphere without disturbance ;). And your talking about starfighters to be fair? Not building sized turbolasers or starship carried missiles.
You've described a phenomena seen in most sci-fi shows, and the implications are that these weapons do not work as real world weapons would of that alleged magnitude of firepower. Even still, when said weapons hit something, they seldom cause effects anywhere near what is claimed of them, and more often than not in the Versus Debates, Warsies hold to a double standard by claiming high levels of firepower while using those very same phenomena in Star Trek and other sci-fi to claim weak firepower, even when the weapons hit something (after coring through the air and not disturbing it much), and yet sometims cause effects on a target many orders of magnitude greater than similar sized Star Wars weapons.
Firmus Piett wrote:My own conservative "firepower" only calculations (no DS scaling, acceleration scaling, ect) puts firepower in the tons - kilotons for smaller guns (depending on whether they are "lasers" or "ballistics") to megatons for the biggest guns. This might be handy when razing cities or executing a Base Delta Zero, but really it's overkill in context to this discussion. Considering the numbers of guns carried by warships, and the fact that many of these guns are larger than some of the largest vehicles ever to grace the battlefield on the ground, it should be the case that starships could wipe the floor with armies and fortifications.
By what? The asteroid in TESB which have many variables involved that have seldom been answered by SW debaters, like the colliding asteroids that burn blue. And those are hardly the most conservative calcs you can come up with in any instance for Star Wars ship-mounted weapons. For example, by using the width of the turbolaser bolts instead of the questionable length, and then comparing them to the asteroids, you wind up with very much smaller rocks than the 20-40 meters of Brian Young and Mike Wong (which were based on bad assumptions, like the non-existent asteroids of the
Falcon-Avenger chase scene).
You instead wind up with asteroids of less than 5 meters, and it is still generous to assume vaporization in those instances, and that all the energy was from the TL, not this strange explosive phenomena of the Hoth asteroids.
Firmus Piett wrote:Perhaps the reason planetary bombardment is so rare in TCW is due to fear of reciprocation, to avoid the war devolving into both sides using their fleets to wipe out enemy armies and cities through orbital bombardment. Resorting to using warships (which may be capable of performing Base Delta Zero) to deal with planetary armies or populations might be akin to unleashing our own nuclear arsenals here on modern Earth, making both sides hesitant to do so with any real regularity or harshness. Brian Young once proposed the rarity of orbital bombardment may be a range limitation, however this seems unlikely to me since spaceships are able to hover at any height above a planets surface and because of the potential for bombardment in ESB.
Fear of retaliation or Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), is a valid point. But later on in TESB, part of RoTS and TCW, is there no reason to hold back like that, especially Hoth which is a desolate world and politically wouldn't be a liability to the Empire to go full out on and hit the Rebels indirectly by disrupting the planetary crust.
I don't believe range is an issue, either given we have seen SW ships open fire from greater than 60 km in TPM, and in TCW over 200 km.
-Mike