Episode 7 ICS: technologically relevant quotations

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Re: Episode 7 ICS: technologically relevant quotations

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Feb 08, 2016 1:22 am

Khas wrote:Though, the fact that slagging planets wasn't even possible until the First Order came along is a massive blow to the Pro-Wars side.
^ dat.

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Re: Episode 7 ICS: technologically relevant quotations

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Feb 08, 2016 1:28 am

Jedi Master Spock wrote:"Slag" basically means "lay waste." Like this. Note that the efficiency is related to the blast size, so kiloton range blasts are much more efficient when it comes to laying waste than megaton range blasts.
It is so true. The less blast, the more "clean" heating. A rain of kiloton shots would do better than fewer megaton shots at slagging a surface in some more uniform fashion.
Then add the Kirby effect and you may even trigger Ring of Doom effect, 200% more crispy and onion flavour.
Of course, just because the special Star Destroyer can do it doesn't mean that other Star Destroyers can't.
It really boils down to the way it's described. But for the moment it sort of implies it's a property of the Finalizer's heavy guns. There's no general tone reference that alludes to this being something shared between all Star Destroyers, new and old.
Note also that the "kyber crystal" ultimately originates with the very first EU work, spelled "kaiburr" in Splinter of the Mind's Eye.
And that, for some bizarre reason, is kinda cool. :)

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Re: Episode 7 ICS: technologically relevant quotations

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Feb 08, 2016 1:44 am

Moff Tarquin wrote:
Not completely surprised that hypermatter is still around - it's too nice of a bit of random technobabble to ditch -
I found the implication that it was contained in a fusion system to be quite intriguing. Small fusion furnaces are obviously a part of the Star Wars universe, so it's possible that a fusion system is required to catalyze the hypermatter annihilation. It's sort of like antimatter catalyzed fusion, only in reverse - fusion catalyzed annihilation.
Thermonuclear nukes are fusion boosted fission atomics; the fusion enhances the second phase of the fission. Technically, it remains a more efficient fission device, wherein the fusion simply allows the process to reach a higher energetic production. I.E., reducing the waste.
Saxton's very specific model being something of the past, any mention of hypermatter used alongside fusion cores can be seen in a similar way: hypermatter catalyzed fusion.
From pg. 27, regarding the "standard" First Order TIE fighter:
STAR POWER
A TIE's wings are solar-collecting arrays that gather light energy and channel it through high-efficiency coils into a reactor, where it triggers emissions from a high-pressure radioactive fuel. While visually similar to earlier TIE/Ins, these latest models boast improved solar cells and higher-capacity converters, the products of Imperial research conducted for the TIE Advanced program.
Geez. So they did really go with the old solar panel concept, the one that absorbs light.
What a wasted opportunity. :(
...
Is it?...
In the illustration on the same page, at the center of the solar panel - where the pylon is attached to the wing - there is an object labeled a "Solar power phase one converter." On the previous page, this structure was surrounded by at least two rings of "phase two converter coils." Anyways, there are "Solar collector power lines" running from the phase one converter down the pylon and to the "SJFS P-s6 twin ion engine system." This "twin ion engine system" appears to make up the core of a toroid-esque shape (with a trapezoidal cross-section) that is mounted on the back of the TIE. The outer rim is circular, but inner rim has the shape of a hexagon. Inside and "below" the hexagonal inner rim is a thing associated with the following label: "SJFS I-a4b solar ionization reactor has no moving parts to reduce maintenance."

From pg. 30:
Special Forces TIEs are two-person fighters that carry a hyperdrive and deflector shields, as well as banks of high-yield deuterium cells that provide additional power to the engines, weapons, or shields and can be recharged from the TIE's solar panels.
The "deuterium cells" bit makes me think "fusion," but the fact that they can be "recharged from the solar panels" throws a wrench in the works of that interpretation.
WAIT!
No way solar cells can recharge... deuterium cells??? What the heck! You cannot replenish a fuel tank with photons. It's aburd. And even if for some odd reason, the hydrogen was used to store energy instead of being used as fuel (but how would it remain deuterium then?), it would take centuries for the measly intensity of star rays to recharge anything, unless all Star Wars movies are to be taken literally.
However, now, if that means... that the solar panels... no... can't be.
...
It would mean the panels can actually scoop those natural hydrogen isotopes to store them in containers...
Ok, not exactly my H+ sniffing tech I had argued in favour of in other thread (H+ being a typical product of stars... so solar... see?), but it ain't that bad. It would mean, at least, that these panels have a double function. They can collect photons as much as they can collect hydrogen. Win-Win.
Hurray ....ish?

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Re: Episode 7 ICS: technologically relevant quotations

Post by Moff Tarquin » Tue Feb 09, 2016 1:56 am

Mr. Oragahn wrote:
Moff Tarquin wrote:
So we have hypermatter-annihilation cores as a component of fusion systems.
Stressing on the component aspect of it is interesting. It makes the system sound like enhanced fusion. That is, perhaps reaching close to the ideal energy production levels.
It certainly doesn't tell anything about hypermatter (remember btw that Saxton hijacked that term from the early first ICS).
We don't even know how those particles annihilate, they're all exotic at the moment BUT that they're being related to hyperspace reminds me of two things:
1. As always, I have a ton of notes scattered across a billion txt files which will never get printed on screens other than mine.
2. An old Star Destroyer cross section diagram did show the power core being directly linked to the hyperdrive. I may even have a scanned picture of that I had prepared for the hypothetical posting of the aforementioned text. It had the benefit of bridging several EU sources with the entire hypermatter concept, if one was willing to forget Saxton's obsession for anything big and dense (...).
Feel free to post that stuff if you ever find it!
What it means is that the fusion could very well be enhanced with hyperspace. That's not a silly concept considering how hypermatter was officially described as being used in the first Death Star's core and how it progressively became clear to debaters and even writers that a superlaser would provide far more destruction than what a simple beam would. In other words, it triggered a level of destruction beyond the output of the core by several orders of magnitude.
I personally think that their endorsement of the "keeping the same mass/energy profile past lightspeed" thing implies (though not necessarily entails) that hypermatter is somehow tachyonic.

One wonders how they can come back in out of hyperspace, annihilate some of the tachyons (thus altering its mass-energy profile), and then jump back into hyperspace.
The whole backstory about the Talon(?) star destroyer used to experiment a hypermatter core and blowing up would have very well been such an attempt at stabilizing, at a smaller scale, this process.
Then, in order to make it safe and reliable, the whole hypermatter-related phase had to be seriously toned down, unless all large spaceships would be as sensitive as vials of nitroglycerine.
Recall that I am new to the debate and do not know what the Talon star destroyer is.


Incidentally, there are many indications throughout the book that the First Order has been doing a lot of cutting-edge research that makes it much more formidable than the Galactic Empire ever was, but there will be time for that in a moment.
Perhaps it is more pragmatic? The Empire's "thing" was the super battle station. The amount of efforts, power and money that went into that must have dried the economy of the galaxy at large. So the Empire couldn't really do much than do paint jobs when rolling out the latest lines of Star Destroyers.
I would argue that the industrial capacity of the Galactic Empire was rather more robust than that. Anything shy of three million Acclamator-equivalent or stronger vessels seems low to me, but in case you haven't noticed, I wank everything when I see an advantage on either side.

In any case, if the Death Star and other warships are the same density, and the Death Star II was halfway finished in four years, then if 10% of those resources were diverted to building ships in an emergency situation (such as contact with a technologically superior foe), the Galactic Empire could build 2 super star destroyers, 350 star destroyers, and 3000 Acclamator-equivalents every day. With a population in the hundreds of trillions, a draft would allow them to crew all these ships. Assuming a population of a hundred trillion, and assuming that only 0.1% of the population can be drafted, and assuming that every 8e3 cubic meters of ship needs one crewman (giving the Acclamator a crew of a thousand), this could be kept up for thirty years before the Empire would run out of people to man its fleet. By that time, the fleet would have grown to a size of 20,000 SSD's, 4,000,000 ISD's, and 30,000,000 AES's. Darth Sidious is no idiot, if he needed to, he would divert resources away from his death-ticle.

I honestly think that "Federation vs Galactic Empire" would be roughly analogous to "Captain Tracey vs The Yang": "we killed them by the hundreds, but they kept coming... we killed them by the thousands, but they just kept coming!"

But then again, I'm fairly convinced of 100 megaton max firepower for heavy turbolasers, and six gigatons bare minimum for TOS era torpedoes, and my narratological methodology means that I assume a priori that Star Wars vs Star Trek has to make for an interesting story, so the evidence might not be the main reason I take such a view point.
One shudders to think what a full spread of photon torpedoes would do. But I digress.
But proton torpedoes are ought to carry far more effective power than beam weapons.
We're talking about nuclear weapons here. They deliver their energies in such a short time frame than the deflector shield would be massively stressed. However, these weapons come in very limited numbers, can be intercepted, sent haywire with jamming and nothing says how many are needed nor the kind of damage they'd do to the hull after that.
These aren't nukes. They release "a cloud of high-velocity proton particles" upon detonation.

VFX analysis places their maximum yield on the order of a kiloton - about 10,000 of them would release the same power as a heavy turbolaser bolt.

We also know from the Battle of Endor that a capital ship can take turbolaser fire for at least half an hour, but that fighters can nonetheless pose a legitimate threat - and this book implies that the fighters pose such a threat in large part because they each carry eight proton torpedoes - weapons with warheads that could be compared unfavorably in size to a photon grenade.

So half an hour's worth of megaton+ turbolasers have little effect, but eight of these pitiful explosive devices in quick succession can "punch through shields" and damage the vessel beneath.

The only explanation I can think of is that SW ray shielding works by scattering incoming beams - but the energy from an omnidirectional explosive device is already mostly scattered, so there's only so much they can do. Particle shielding exists, but can be overloaded easily.

In any case, if eight of the fist-size proton weapons are sufficient to "punch through shields" on a capital ship, a coffin-sized photon torpedo will do much, much worse.
So the remnants of the Empire ran away and started building secret labs. Why is this important? Because - when combined with the facts from Lucas' immovable canon - it means that the hypermatter-annihilation reactors small enough to fit in a ship and the kyber-crystal enhanced turbolasers capable of slagging planets (we'll come to those momentarily) are innovations.
In the script of the CW episodes featuring the Kirby weapon, wasn't it Yoda who said something along the lines of this being something entirely new?
Actually, IIRC, he said that superweapons of the past almost always used them.
This emphasizes the offensive role of starfighters (as opposed to onboard weaponry) in the Star Wars universe. The bit about the redundant command center (the cut-away has a Emergency Bridge labeled some 700-800 meters closer to the bow than the Command Bridge) has an interesting implication: Imperial-era star destroyers didn't have redundant command and control systems.
One could argue that the Imperial Star Destroyer also was the result of some financial deals with the private sector. In the solid models used for the movies, you can spot docking bays in the side notches, somewhere in the trench. But clearly, the real deployment was reduced to a miserable gap in the belly. Yet, these ships weren't showing any sign of the apparently saved space being devoted to something else, like more heavy weapons, although there were quite a number of medium turbolaser batteries dotting the trenches all way down.
In fact, I'd say the Star Destroyers were progressively turned into space stations. Big lumbering ships, with a bit more heavy turbolasers (barely), largely suggesting an orbital surveyor role more than anything else.
Of course, there was this extra amount of thrusters, which would give a clue as to how the saved space was used: no longer would the fighters and bombers be chasing the enemy crafts; now this duty would fall onto the Star Destroyers' shoulders.
So it's odd. Those models were a strange blend of space stations and dragsters that were very hard to overrun (as per Solo's line).
Then the remnant Imperial forces decided to say screw that, especially looking at how much they lost against swarms of Rebel fighters, and returned to the true and tried method of relying on carriers instead of would be battleships.
I take a slightly different view of the ISD. You'll notice that the big guns are on top and the main bays are on the bottom. This thing rolls into a system, drops its troop compliment onto the planet as an occupying force, and remains in orbit with its guns pointed up in the direction any relief force would have to come from. The fighters can be used as a defensive screen, but can also be used to raid ground targets.

The main difference on the Finalizer is that, in addition to the main hanger on the bottom, it also appears to have a flight deck that points "out" and to the sides - actually emphasizing a "fighters as a first line of defense" sort of strategy, which seems (to me, at any rate) to make the Finalizer more space-combat oriented relative to an ISD. Nowhere near as space-combat oriented as a Star Trek vessel, but more so than an ISD.
Which is fine and all, but are they using hyperspace-capable crafts or still using those planetary-system ranged TIE models?
As we see beneath, they actually couldn't decide, although they did give some TIE models those darn hyperdrives after all.
Still. Decades of using the quite impressive Imperial design has produced fans who only swear by the battleship model. So we're only back to the more hybrid balance but nowhere close to a ship that is almost only carrier in soul, flanked by real destroyers.
The snarky part of me and the part of me that thinks that the Empire has a ridiculous advantage in Industrial capacity both want to respond as follows: "If these are their destroyers, what do their dreadnoughts look like?"

The answer: the Executor. You'll notice that in every major fleet operation in the OT (as opposed to the border patrol and corvette chasing we saw in ANH), there was an SSD present. But this is rapidly going off topic. Oops.

So First Order turbolasers are more powerful and have a higher fire rate than Imperial turbolasers. Why? Because they have kyber focusing crystals. Clearly, these crystals are more than mere focusing elements - if they were, they would have no effect on firepower and recharge rate. It seems reasonable to think that these kyber crystals act like the kyber crystal in the Clone Wars story reels: energy amplifiers. 1 Mt goes in, 100 Mt or more goes out. This explains how capital ships suddenly have the ability to slag planets - something the immovable canon of Lucas never even hinted at.
If only the ITL had proven to be able to spit 1 MT of energy! :)
Actually, if we take Darkstar's method of estimation here:
A 1969 Ford Mustang Mach One weighs in at around 3571 lbs., or about 1620kg. Assuming 90 percent of that weight was in the form of iron just for calculation's sake (or 1450kg), and assuming that it takes about 7.6MJ/kg to vaporize iron, then the Mach One would need 11,020 megajoules to be vaporized. That's about the same as the eleven tonnes of water from the house example, but it has to strike a much smaller area. The Mach One is 4.76 meters long, 1.82m wide, and 1.27m tall. Assuming the energy is to be deposited on four square meters, then, then the required intensity would be 2,755 MJ/m², which is just freaking nuts. That's almost 12 times the intensity required to vaporize a person at three kilometers, and 600 times the intensity required to make exposed flesh flash into steam. It would require a strike of about 75 megatons.
And apply it to a SW small town of 750 m radius, we get a figure of 5 megatons for a heavy turbolaser. We could probably double that, assuming half goes to blast and half goes to heat proper (like in a nuclear explosion), so ~10 megatons is more than defensible canonically.
FOTLs are different because they most likely pack a figment of superlaser property to some degree.
Now, I wouldn't take the slag reference literally too soon, we'll wait to see if we're finally going to see something like a starship in SW turn very naughty against a rock or a planet.
If we assume 1 m deep in an hour, we have ~125 gigatons/sec. If we assume 1 cm deep in a day, we have ~50 megatons/sec. This from a ship at least double the size of an ISD and (presumably) some eight times the volume.

Compare this to the ~5 teratons/sec we get from assuming the Defiant can sterilize the Great Link before being destroyed by battlebugs.

I'm fairly confident that, even if BDZ becomes canon, the Defiant would still wipe its ass with just about any single ship in the Star Wars universe.

First Order research has endowed ordinary TIEs with shields - implying that Imperial-era TIEs lacked them.
Which then confirms that the Millennium Falcon's quad turrets shot flak.[/quote]
Indeed.
The wings are indeed solar panels, but the energy they collect is used to "trigger emissions from a high-pressure radioactive fuel." The First Order views fighter pilots as military assets - in contrast to the Galactic Empire, which saw them as expendable.
OK, so the solar panels sort of kickstart the fission or fusion reaction.
One would have thought that once the engines are on, they don't need to collect anything else since a minuscule fraction of the cores' output would cover any further need. After all, if what is collected by solar panels can launch the reaction... then any fission or fusion power plant would have no problem to guarantee its own process. It's not like these ships wouldn't store energy in capacitors or have extra fuel cells either.
But I have to ask: is the paragraph describing the role of the panels really specific about what they collect?
They are unambiguously solar panels, I'm afraid.

If this is really the point of all that, one simply has to consider that one side uses antimatter for fuel and exchanges fire that either carries antimatter warheads or rock-disintegrating beams, whilst the other side simply doesn't.
Regardless of the details, there would already be a disadvantage right there, one that the SW side could only compensate for by having very large power plants capable of matching in energetic output what Trek ships (or any other fictional ship of similar tech) would produce.
Rock and ship, but yeah.

I guess my point is that if eight clouds of "high velocity proton particles" can bring down particle shields, then photon torpedoes (which are at least a hundred times the linear size of the part of the proton torpedo that actually gets launched, judging from the pictures) would tear through any Star Wars capital ship like tissue paper.
The biggest bane to the Trek side of the debate is the sudden canonicity of BDZ-style planet slagging.
I'm actually more than eager to see those minisuperlasers in action. Perhaps they require to trigger a special mode?
And shooting at a planet isn't like shooting at an enemy ship.
True, true.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:

Thermonuclear nukes are fusion boosted fission atomics; the fusion enhances the second phase of the fission. Technically, it remains a more efficient fission device, wherein the fusion simply allows the process to reach a higher energetic production. I.E., reducing the waste.
Saxton's very specific model being something of the past, any mention of hypermatter used alongside fusion cores can be seen in a similar way: hypermatter catalyzed fusion.
The point of, say, antimatter catalyzed fusion would be to make it easier to generate the temperatures necessary to initiate fusion, allowing fusion reactors to fit in smaller vessels. Given Luke's little fusion furnace in the TESB novelization, it's obvious that the Empire doesn't have any problem with small-scale fusion.

My guess was that hypermatter annihilation requires high temperatures to achieve, and the only way such temperatures could be achieved by any structure smaller than a moon is in a fusion reactor.

Then again, the idea of "hypermatter boosting" of a fusion reactor to improve efficiency is also a good one.

And just like with a thermonuclear bomb, there could be a combination of both factors involved.

Geez. So they did really go with the old solar panel concept, the one that absorbs light.
What a wasted opportunity. :(
...
Is it?...
Maybe in your view. From my perspective, solar panels - even if only capable of providing a relatively small amount of power - at the very least are able to simplify the design considerably: instead of having one system to ignite the reaction, and a second system to keep it going, you just have one system igniting and maintaining the reaction.
In the illustration on the same page, at the center of the solar panel - where the pylon is attached to the wing - there is an object labeled a "Solar power phase one converter." On the previous page, this structure was surrounded by at least two rings of "phase two converter coils." Anyways, there are "Solar collector power lines" running from the phase one converter down the pylon and to the "SJFS P-s6 twin ion engine system." This "twin ion engine system" appears to make up the core of a toroid-esque shape (with a trapezoidal cross-section) that is mounted on the back of the TIE. The outer rim is circular, but inner rim has the shape of a hexagon. Inside and "below" the hexagonal inner rim is a thing associated with the following label: "SJFS I-a4b solar ionization reactor has no moving parts to reduce maintenance."



The "deuterium cells" bit makes me think "fusion," but the fact that they can be "recharged from the solar panels" throws a wrench in the works of that interpretation.
WAIT!
No way solar cells can recharge... deuterium cells??? What the heck! You cannot replenish a fuel tank with photons. It's aburd. And even if for some odd reason, the hydrogen was used to store energy instead of being used as fuel (but how would it remain deuterium then?), it would take centuries for the measly intensity of star rays to recharge anything, unless all Star Wars movies are to be taken literally.
However, now, if that means... that the solar panels... no... can't be.
...
It would mean the panels can actually scoop those natural hydrogen isotopes to store them in containers...
Ok, not exactly my H+ sniffing tech I had argued in favour of in other thread (H+ being a typical product of stars... so solar... see?), but it ain't that bad. It would mean, at least, that these panels have a double function. They can collect photons as much as they can collect hydrogen. Win-Win.
Hurray ....ish?
[/quote]
Well, it takes a lot of finagling to get to that position, and it's fairly obviously not what the author intended. But if that's what it takes for you to be able to take the existence of the panels seriously, be my guest!

As for me, I'll handle the TIE's ability to get more out of solar power than it should be able to more or less the same way that I handle the Kirk bomb in Obsession: it's canon, I can deal with it.

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Re: Episode 7 ICS: technologically relevant quotations

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sat Feb 20, 2016 12:35 am

Moff Tarquin wrote:Feel free to post that stuff if you ever find it!
Like many things I have put on a backseat, this may have to wait until more urging matters get settled. But I won't forget.
I personally think that their endorsement of the "keeping the same mass/energy profile past lightspeed" thing implies (though not necessarily entails) that hypermatter is somehow tachyonic.

One wonders how they can come back in out of hyperspace, annihilate some of the tachyons (thus altering its mass-energy profile), and then jump back into hyperspace.
Essentially, it may simply mean that people in hyperspace remain what they are out of it too.
Recall that I am new to the debate and do not know what the Talon star destroyer is.
This was a reference in the Death Star EU novel. I'm not so sure of the ISD's name though, but it was something to that effect nevertheless.
I would argue that the industrial capacity of the Galactic Empire was rather more robust than that. Anything shy of three million Acclamator-equivalent or stronger vessels seems low to me, but in case you haven't noticed, I wank everything when I see an advantage on either side.

In any case, if the Death Star and other warships are the same density, and the Death Star II was halfway finished in four years, then if 10% of those resources were diverted to building ships in an emergency situation (such as contact with a technologically superior foe), the Galactic Empire could build 2 super star destroyers, 350 star destroyers, and 3000 Acclamator-equivalents every day. With a population in the hundreds of trillions, a draft would allow them to crew all these ships. Assuming a population of a hundred trillion, and assuming that only 0.1% of the population can be drafted, and assuming that every 8e3 cubic meters of ship needs one crewman (giving the Acclamator a crew of a thousand), this could be kept up for thirty years before the Empire would run out of people to man its fleet. By that time, the fleet would have grown to a size of 20,000 SSD's, 4,000,000 ISD's, and 30,000,000 AES's. Darth Sidious is no idiot, if he needed to, he would divert resources away from his death-ticle.

I honestly think that "Federation vs Galactic Empire" would be roughly analogous to "Captain Tracey vs The Yang": "we killed them by the hundreds, but they kept coming... we killed them by the thousands, but they just kept coming!"

But then again, I'm fairly convinced of 100 megaton max firepower for heavy turbolasers, and six gigatons bare minimum for TOS era torpedoes, and my narratological methodology means that I assume a priori that Star Wars vs Star Trek has to make for an interesting story, so the evidence might not be the main reason I take such a view point.
And if I may say, your newcoming status to this overall topic also shows what may be a typical mistake. Is there a point musing about how many ships the Empire could have gotten out of the mass of a Death Star if it had chosen differently? The point really is that the Empire did everything to get those stations built and although such resources, with a proper plan, could have been used to build a large amount of ships, it didn't happen.
Even by the old EU, it was absolutely clear that the Death Star was considerably understaffed. I'm not knowledgeable about new official figures to the present day and I may say that such information may not exist anymore, due to the canonical reboot.
We know that a Republic brought under a stricter rule, that of Palpatine, couldn't normally produce anything close to a fraction of the ships a shard of even the first Death Star would have afforded.
Therefore, we may open ourselves to massive speculation as to how Palpatine's empire managed to find the resources for the battle stations. Squeezing worlds until they'd crack is possible, but that would have likely pushed more worlds into the Rebellion's arms, yet even up to ANH, a seditious organization such as the Rebellion didn't display any of the assets it later had.
For all intents and purposes, the Empire's been a rather quiet evil that most of the galaxy accepted. No one could even deny its prestige and the peaceful times it brought (regardless of why the war actually occured). Even the Senate itself remained officially in effect for decades up until ANH because it worked better that way.
These aren't nukes. They release "a cloud of high-velocity proton particles" upon detonation.

VFX analysis places their maximum yield on the order of a kiloton - about 10,000 of them would release the same power as a heavy turbolaser bolt.

We also know from the Battle of Endor that a capital ship can take turbolaser fire for at least half an hour, but that fighters can nonetheless pose a legitimate threat - and this book implies that the fighters pose such a threat in large part because they each carry eight proton torpedoes - weapons with warheads that could be compared unfavorably in size to a photon grenade.

So half an hour's worth of megaton+ turbolasers have little effect, but eight of these pitiful explosive devices in quick succession can "punch through shields" and damage the vessel beneath.

The only explanation I can think of is that SW ray shielding works by scattering incoming beams - but the energy from an omnidirectional explosive device is already mostly scattered, so there's only so much they can do. Particle shielding exists, but can be overloaded easily.

In any case, if eight of the fist-size proton weapons are sufficient to "punch through shields" on a capital ship, a coffin-sized photon torpedo will do much, much worse.
Or that you may have massively overestimated turbolasers and that proton torpedoes might be nuclear in some other fashion. After all, ions, plasma, protons and all those terms can, with little work, lead us to the natural idea of stellar fusion.
In other words, they may be some kind of miniature tokamaks purposedly built to blow up by overload.

I take a slightly different view of the ISD. You'll notice that the big guns are on top and the main bays are on the bottom. This thing rolls into a system, drops its troop compliment onto the planet as an occupying force, and remains in orbit with its guns pointed up in the direction any relief force would have to come from. The fighters can be used as a defensive screen, but can also be used to raid ground targets.
Guns pointing upwards is hardly an angle of comfort for those weapons. They're far more at ease for broadside exchanges at large horizontal angles and shooting at the surface of world in that way.
The small bay underneath might have been a decision to avoid the much exposed design of the Venators too.
The main difference on the Finalizer is that, in addition to the main hanger on the bottom, it also appears to have a flight deck that points "out" and to the sides - actually emphasizing a "fighters as a first line of defense" sort of strategy, which seems (to me, at any rate) to make the Finalizer more space-combat oriented relative to an ISD. Nowhere near as space-combat oriented as a Star Trek vessel, but more so than an ISD.
I'd agree, the ISD is more like a siege ship. And, in other occasions, it can still deploy a small contingent of fighters and count on its massive thrusters to chase any prey. Such an advantage in forward mobility allows an ISD to enter a system at great speed.
It's also very much possible that because of what the Empire had achieved, the ISDs were meant for patrol operations and planetary enforcement than straight out brawls in space in the way things were done during the Clone Wars.
The snarky part of me and the part of me that thinks that the Empire has a ridiculous advantage in Industrial capacity both want to respond as follows: "If these are their destroyers, what do their dreadnoughts look like?"
The answer: the Executor. You'll notice that in every major fleet operation in the OT (as opposed to the border patrol and corvette chasing we saw in ANH), there was an SSD present. But this is rapidly going off topic. Oops.
Yes, it is. Besides, let's not make conclusion on the basis of such a ridiculously small sample.
Actually, if we take Darkstar's method of estimation here:
A 1969 Ford Mustang Mach One weighs in at around 3571 lbs., or about 1620kg. Assuming 90 percent of that weight was in the form of iron just for calculation's sake (or 1450kg), and assuming that it takes about 7.6MJ/kg to vaporize iron, then the Mach One would need 11,020 megajoules to be vaporized. That's about the same as the eleven tonnes of water from the house example, but it has to strike a much smaller area. The Mach One is 4.76 meters long, 1.82m wide, and 1.27m tall. Assuming the energy is to be deposited on four square meters, then, then the required intensity would be 2,755 MJ/m², which is just freaking nuts. That's almost 12 times the intensity required to vaporize a person at three kilometers, and 600 times the intensity required to make exposed flesh flash into steam. It would require a strike of about 75 megatons.
And apply it to a SW small town of 750 m radius, we get a figure of 5 megatons for a heavy turbolaser. We could probably double that, assuming half goes to blast and half goes to heat proper (like in a nuclear explosion), so ~10 megatons is more than defensible canonically.
Yes, but it takes one to run with the upper end interpretation of the word vaporize.
If we assume 1 m deep in an hour, we have ~125 gigatons/sec. If we assume 1 cm deep in a day, we have ~50 megatons/sec. This from a ship at least double the size of an ISD and (presumably) some eight times the volume.
We'll have to wait to see if there's enough support for a literal take on the slag term.
Note : in this purely Star Wars oriented thread, I'll not comment on comparison of firepower between this universe and another one such as ST.
Maybe in your view. From my perspective, solar panels - even if only capable of providing a relatively small amount of power - at the very least are able to simplify the design considerably: instead of having one system to ignite the reaction, and a second system to keep it going, you just have one system igniting and maintaining the reaction.
I'm afraid one cannot avoid the problem that a solar panel is the poorest choice of power source next to magnets and rats in wheels, especially for such a civilization.
They have portable fusion furnaces and dinky power cells that can push large podracers close or beyond Mach1 at ground level.
And the panels are just impractical unless one can really find them some superior utility.
That's why I went looking for scooping purposes, alongside jamming and telemetry relaying for deep space scanning.
Well, it takes a lot of finagling to get to that position, and it's fairly obviously not what the author intended.
Perhaps but what he wrote makes even less sense. What a pity, we either get competent engineers and physicists who could write good stuff but use their position of authority to push an inflationist agenda, or we get authors who pick their info here and there and seem to have little understanding of the basic science they borrow terms from. There is just no middle ground!

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Re: Episode 7 ICS: technologically relevant quotations

Post by Moff Tarquin » Thu Feb 25, 2016 12:25 am

Mr. Oragahn wrote:
I personally think that their endorsement of the "keeping the same mass/energy profile past lightspeed" thing implies (though not necessarily entails) that hypermatter is somehow tachyonic.

One wonders how they can come back in out of hyperspace, annihilate some of the tachyons (thus altering its mass-energy profile), and then jump back into hyperspace.
Essentially, it may simply mean that people in hyperspace remain what they are out of it too.
My issue is that the whole "mass-energy profile" theory was that, since the mass of the SD was "a+bi" while travelling at sublight, it could also be "b+ai" while travelling at FTL, and that the ability to do jump between the two was basically a result of the fact that the ratio "a:b" stayed the same throughout. But that would seem to imply that, if some mass "ci" of tachyon fuel is consumed during operations, the ratio "a:b" turns to "a:(b-c)," in which case the ability to jump is compromised.

Recall that I am new to the debate and do not know what the Talon star destroyer is.
This was a reference in the Death Star EU novel. I'm not so sure of the ISD's name though, but it was something to that effect nevertheless.
So it was from the Legends?
Or that you may have massively overestimated turbolasers
By your standards, I "massively overestimate" everything. Which is actually rather encouraging, seeing as what I'm aiming for could be accurately described as "omni-inflationism."
and that proton torpedoes might be nuclear in some other fashion. After all, ions, plasma, protons and all those terms can, with little work, lead us to the natural idea of stellar fusion.
In other words, they may be some kind of miniature tokamaks purposedly built to blow up by overload.
In that case, the result wouldn't be a cloud of protons per se, but rather a cloud of alpha-particles - if it releases a cloud of any positively charged nucleons, at any rate. Your typical D-T fusion reaction is going to release 80% of its energy in neutrons and 20% of its energy in alpha particles. D-D fusion is kinda funky because it can either make "T + proton" or "He3 + neutron," and the tritium is going to get burned unless you actively try and get it the heck out of dodge. Proton fusion is really fun! It turns six protons into one alpha particle, two protons, two positrons, two neutrinos, and two gamma rays. No idea how much energy goes into each of those, but I doubt that most of it is concentrated into the protons.

The description "a cloud of high-velocity proton particles" implies that the protons are the primary mechanism of damage, which in turn implies that the plurality of the energy released is in the form of protons (in other words, of all the reaction products, the protons are the ones with the most energy, either because they are produced in greater numbers, or because each proton is more energetic than individual particles of other kinds released by the reaction). I can't think of any physical process that fits that description.

I take a slightly different view of the ISD. You'll notice that the big guns are on top and the main bays are on the bottom. This thing rolls into a system, drops its troop compliment onto the planet as an occupying force, and remains in orbit with its guns pointed up in the direction any relief force would have to come from. The fighters can be used as a defensive screen, but can also be used to raid ground targets.
Guns pointing upwards is hardly an angle of comfort for those weapons. They're far more at ease for broadside exchanges at large horizontal angles and shooting at the surface of world in that way.
Fair enough. It certainly is odd that there are no big guns on the ventral surface, though.
The small bay underneath might have been a decision to avoid the much exposed design of the Venators too.
That would make sense. But have we actually compared the surface area of the hanger bay openings relative to the size of the ship?
The main difference on the Finalizer is that, in addition to the main hanger on the bottom, it also appears to have a flight deck that points "out" and to the sides - actually emphasizing a "fighters as a first line of defense" sort of strategy, which seems (to me, at any rate) to make the Finalizer more space-combat oriented relative to an ISD. Nowhere near as space-combat oriented as a Star Trek vessel, but more so than an ISD.
I'd agree, the ISD is more like a siege ship. And, in other occasions, it can still deploy a small contingent of fighters and count on its massive thrusters to chase any prey. Such an advantage in forward mobility allows an ISD to enter a system at great speed.
It's also very much possible that because of what the Empire had achieved, the ISDs were meant for patrol operations and planetary enforcement than straight out brawls in space in the way things were done during the Clone Wars.
What sort of capital ships do we see the Rebellion field in Rebels?
The snarky part of me and the part of me that thinks that the Empire has a ridiculous advantage in Industrial capacity both want to respond as follows: "If these are their destroyers, what do their dreadnoughts look like?"
The answer: the Executor. You'll notice that in every major fleet operation in the OT (as opposed to the border patrol and corvette chasing we saw in ANH), there was an SSD present. But this is rapidly going off topic. Oops.
Yes, it is. Besides, let's not make conclusion on the basis of such a ridiculously small sample.
Agreed on both counts.
Actually, if we take Darkstar's method of estimation here:
A 1969 Ford Mustang Mach One weighs in at around 3571 lbs., or about 1620kg. Assuming 90 percent of that weight was in the form of iron just for calculation's sake (or 1450kg), and assuming that it takes about 7.6MJ/kg to vaporize iron, then the Mach One would need 11,020 megajoules to be vaporized. That's about the same as the eleven tonnes of water from the house example, but it has to strike a much smaller area. The Mach One is 4.76 meters long, 1.82m wide, and 1.27m tall. Assuming the energy is to be deposited on four square meters, then, then the required intensity would be 2,755 MJ/m², which is just freaking nuts. That's almost 12 times the intensity required to vaporize a person at three kilometers, and 600 times the intensity required to make exposed flesh flash into steam. It would require a strike of about 75 megatons.
And apply it to a SW small town of 750 m radius, we get a figure of 5 megatons for a heavy turbolaser. We could probably double that, assuming half goes to blast and half goes to heat proper (like in a nuclear explosion), so ~10 megatons is more than defensible canonically.
Yes, but it takes one to run with the upper end interpretation of the word vaporize.
I do it with Star Trek, so it would be intellectually dishonest of me not to do so with Star Wars. As a matter of fact, it might even count as intellectually dishonest of me not to go with the even higher figure that could be derived from Bastrop.
If we assume 1 m deep in an hour, we have ~125 gigatons/sec. If we assume 1 cm deep in a day, we have ~50 megatons/sec. This from a ship at least double the size of an ISD and (presumably) some eight times the volume.
We'll have to wait to see if there's enough support for a literal take on the slag term.
Fair enough.
Maybe in your view. From my perspective, solar panels - even if only capable of providing a relatively small amount of power - at the very least are able to simplify the design considerably: instead of having one system to ignite the reaction, and a second system to keep it going, you just have one system igniting and maintaining the reaction.
I'm afraid one cannot avoid the problem that a solar panel is the poorest choice of power source next to magnets and rats in wheels, especially for such a civilization.
Given the lack of oxygen in space, and the amount of mass it would take to provide life support for the rat, solar power could be an order of magnitude better for its weight than "rats in wheels," if not more.
They have portable fusion furnaces and dinky power cells that can push large podracers close or beyond Mach1 at ground level.
And the panels are just impractical unless one can really find them some superior utility.
That's why I went looking for scooping purposes, alongside jamming and telemetry relaying for deep space scanning.
These are all good points, but none of the other functions are canonically supported. The solar panel function is.
Well, it takes a lot of finagling to get to that position, and it's fairly obviously not what the author intended.
Perhaps but what he wrote makes even less sense.
Do we as readers get to adjudicate whether or not a canonical source should be taken seriously based on what we find sensible?

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Re: Episode 7 ICS: technologically relevant quotations

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Feb 29, 2016 6:39 pm

Moff Tarquin wrote: My issue is that the whole "mass-energy profile" theory was that, since the mass of the SD was "a+bi" while travelling at sublight, it could also be "b+ai" while travelling at FTL, and that the ability to do jump between the two was basically a result of the fact that the ratio "a:b" stayed the same throughout. But that would seem to imply that, if some mass "ci" of tachyon fuel is consumed during operations, the ratio "a:b" turns to "a:(b-c)," in which case the ability to jump is compromised.
Oh, so with a + bi = ai + b, you get a = ai + b - bi, a = i(a + b) + b, or a = ai + b(1 - i)... what??? :|
Maybe it means the dry tonnage stays the same, or that the overall mass, regardless of the status of the ship in or out of hyperspace, is exactly the same.

So it was from the Legends?
Legends now, yes.
By your standards, I "massively overestimate" everything. Which is actually rather encouraging, seeing as what I'm aiming for could be accurately described as "omni-inflationism."
I forget that. I suppose that from your universe, I'm some kind of practical tool for fool proofing your numbers to whatever audience exists over there? :)
In that case, the result wouldn't be a cloud of protons per se, but rather a cloud of alpha-particles - if it releases a cloud of any positively charged nucleons, at any rate. Your typical D-T fusion reaction is going to release 80% of its energy in neutrons and 20% of its energy in alpha particles. D-D fusion is kinda funky because it can either make "T + proton" or "He3 + neutron," and the tritium is going to get burned unless you actively try and get it the heck out of dodge. Proton fusion is really fun! It turns six protons into one alpha particle, two protons, two positrons, two neutrinos, and two gamma rays. No idea how much energy goes into each of those, but I doubt that most of it is concentrated into the protons.

The description "a cloud of high-velocity proton particles" implies that the protons are the primary mechanism of damage, which in turn implies that the plurality of the energy released is in the form of protons (in other words, of all the reaction products, the protons are the ones with the most energy, either because they are produced in greater numbers, or because each proton is more energetic than individual particles of other kinds released by the reaction). I can't think of any physical process that fits that description.
Let's say that the confined plasma contains a large proportion of protons, and it's also a yet unknown reaction because of FICTIONAL FUEL! (tibanna?) and that's it. The bomb works by breaching the containment field all at once.
Imagine it might even be a turbolaser bolt on steroids: because it can brew its own reaction inside the solid shell of a torpedo, it doesn't need to be bottled pre-firing into a coherent state that should endure for several seconds of travel through space or atmosphere without the luxury on relying on a physical shell and reactor.
But the proton torpedo does, and would be a super concentrated bolt, one that maintains the reaction "fresh". Really some kind of bottled mini-star.

That would be like some fusion weapons in Warhammer 40000.

Pushing this even further, we may infer that starships use a super stable variant of that system.

Or it's just a bomb that simply does release a majority of its content as protons by whatever made up reaction we'll have to accept.

Fair enough. It certainly is odd that there are no big guns on the ventral surface, though.
The lack of guns on those ships and their placement always struck me as stupid. They're really a bonus, constraining those ships to certain activities where broadsides make sense.
CIS Munificient-class frigates, with their massive gun pointing forward, were a nice variation. But then again those were therefore limited in a snipe at long range purpose, forced to look at the target.
The small bay underneath might have been a decision to avoid the much exposed design of the Venators too.
That would make sense. But have we actually compared the surface area of the hanger bay openings relative to the size of the ship?
It always looked gaping on Venators to me. Plus the moving parts might have been a liability if hit.
The top hatch is simply that big. Venators also had the huge notches and the traditional ventral bay.
ISDs went for a simpler, rawish design with less holes and more armour. They clearly lost a degree of carrier functionality there, but in exchange gained survivability imho.
What sort of capital ships do we see the Rebellion field in Rebels?
Haven't watched Rebels. Can't stand the kiddy style and character design. Nor the droid that keeps saying f***.
Given the lack of oxygen in space, and the amount of mass it would take to provide life support for the rat, solar power could be an order of magnitude better for its weight than "rats in wheels," if not more.
So you are a Thermian!
These are all good points, but none of the other functions are canonically supported. The solar panel function is.
It isn't exactly that well supported. It just says solar panels and recharge some fuel cells... there's still room, there's still hope.
Perhaps but what he wrote makes even less sense.
Do we as readers get to adjudicate whether or not a canonical source should be taken seriously based on what we find sensible?
Doctor Who, in the first episode of its renewal season, has something like a huge portion of the USA power grid's energy flowing through a silly cable tied to a computer, which a Dalek used to syphon said energy entirely. Or something to that effect. I assure you, it's just that silly.
I'm of those who will attempt anything to have the other parties agree to dismiss this stupidity and avoid references to impossible things.

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Re: Episode 7 ICS: technologically relevant quotations

Post by Darth Spock » Fri Mar 11, 2016 4:56 am

ICS wrote:PACKING A PUNCH

The original X-wing's designers envisioned a fighter with the speed and power to attack Imperial Star Destroyers, and delivered on that promise. Just like its predecessor, the T-70 has powerful wingtip cannons that can fire in single, dual, or quad mode, and it can punch through deflector shields with its eight proton torpedoes.
Moff Tarquin wrote:The spent casings are retained in the X-wing. Presumably, it is this little streak that will release a "cloud of high velocity proton particles." Eight of these little streaks will "punch through deflector shields," and endow the X-wing with the "power to attack Imperial Star Destroyers."
Just a quick thought on that. Thus far, I've been inclined to treat any kind of weapon with the word "proton" in it as a sort of in-universe shorthand for "shield penetrating weapon." So far the only specifically named proton weapons were the "new proton cannon" that "penetrated" the Acclamator's shields in CW "Innocents of Ryloth." And of course the proton torpedoes that were needed to overcome the ray shields and enter the exhaust port of the DS1 in ANH. What is special about proton warheads, or exactly how other warheads would interact with non-particle shields is just speculation.


Moff Tarquin wrote: What sort of capital ships do we see the Rebellion field in Rebels?
Thus far, past some clunky freighters, I think the only military capital ships they've shown were a handful of Correllian corvettes, and an old Clone War era ship that the Republic mostly only used as a transport. There may be more, but while I do watch the show, I am lagging behind, barely having seen any of season 2 yet.

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