Mike DiCenso wrote:
Well, if you only look at that as the single point of evidence, you might be right with that. However, taken in the larger body of evidence available to us, it seems that it is indeed what that ship had to do in order to get that kind of firepower in that situation. Otherwise the captain could have just ordered the light cruiser after the rocket troopers' defeat to a far higher altitude or as pointed out earlier in this thread, to a high orbit and then fired down on the shaft. You can possibly chalk it up to an incompetent and overeager captain, but that then gets into a slippery slope of just declaring Imperial officers in general as being stupid and incompetent, which I'm not willing to fall back on just yet.
I'm not sure why she'd go to the trouble of getting further away from the target once they're already practically on top of the hole. Blaming too much on convenient incompetence is a bad habit, but it seems to fit here. The Imperial captain started out bored and wanting to get a false alarm over with, to seeing an opportunity for promotion, to having Hera point blank say the captain was showing her inexperience. This example could fly either way with regard to maximum range.
Yes, Tarkin's order to Thrawn are about the only possible save that could be made for Imperial firepower in this instance.... if we didn't already have many other examples of firepower to look at that says that the Imperials couldn't do much better than they were. See, we have to take into account the variables that sets the Thrawn bombardment apart from the others:
* Range. The bombardment is the longest range known range yet shown as far as I can tell. In the hundreds of kilometers easily based on how much of the screen that the planet subtends as the view and likely is further in range than what General Grievious' fleet pulled off in TCW (approximately 200 km).
* The demonstrated firepower is at most a couple orders of magnitude less than other examples, the exception being the TESB asteroid "vaporization" firepower, which really is in the single-digit to low double-digit terajoule range. Assuming of course that those asteroids weren't really prone to being naturally explody.
* Despite Thrawn's marching order from Tarkin, why then use the heavy guns for the bombardment, if medium and light TLs would have sufficed?
Regarding the range, yes, this is by far the longest range engagement seen so far. I don't like to rely on the ESB asteroids either, what with such similar "explosions" from comparatively slow collisions in the same field. The only thing the scene really does is not prove that they can't vaporize such asteroids.
As for why they would use the heavy guns to produce such weak firepower, well, honestly I think the folks behind the scenes finally got the big guns rigged and/or got final approval for their use on the show and were chomping at the bit to play with their new toys. Basically turning the ISDs into Mk.2 Venators that use the jumbo cannons for everything.
That likely being the same reason they suddenly lost all their small guns and used those same brutes to fire on snub fighters after the OT made such extensive use of smaller emplacements. Yeah, that's a sad, out of universe explanation, I know.
Another point I mentioned earlier though, is that the only really good shots we saw of the TL impacts were those tracking in on Kanan on his bike, and they did not appear random. Personally, I wouldn't discount the possibility of those not being spill over from the primary bombardment on the shield, but a smaller emplacement tracking a target of opportunity. If those bolts were the product of the heavy batteries, it would imply one of the heavy emplacements had abandoned its assigned target and was instead trying to pick off a guy on a bike. The bombardment scene has its oddities from any perspective.
And of course, there is still the very explicit point that prisoners were a priority, whether this was the best they could muster or not, this bombardment (really the only one so far), already has its nerfing write off built in, no mental gymnastics required to reconcile a contradiction with higher firepower. Whether a higher example will come along or not is the question.
The idea that those big guns have superior range certainly makes sense though. Still, while I don't see this massive energy loss at range providing an all encompassing explanation for everything we see, I can think of nothing that would specifically discount it either. And in addition to the "fading of the galvening" and that fighter that "rang" from a near miss 2046 pointed out, the ESB asteroid scene had an asteroid "ignite" from a near miss from a TL bolt too, so the idea of significant leakage might work.
Darth Spock wrote:Well, one of the first things I encountered in the versus community was a general tendency not to include weapon interactions with star ships, such as was seen in ROTS. The idea being, I gather, that shields and *magic* advanced armor would muck it up. Using similar comparisons in 'Trek yields similar results, it's the narrative spirit that mainly boosts the weapons into WMD territory. Enter the narrative from RotS.
2046's calcs are plenty high enough, over a petajoule in fact. Of course, depending on how one wants to interpret the passage, I could even get it below 100 GJ, assuming the weapons are powerful enough only to theoretically vaporize just the water content of a very small population of a few hundred people. But taking the most straightforward interpretation of the line pretty much requires no less than a dozen kilotons, or many tens of terajoules.
Yes, that has generally been the case, because we don't often have information what the materials or other super science that exists in these universes' technology bags can field that would significantly alter the numbers one way or another. But that being said, what do see being done to ships is largely consistent with the recently range of visuals of attacks on known things like unshielded rock, etc, as well as other information about the use of steel or steel alloy metals in SW ships. So taken piecemeal, yes, you'd be absolutely right, but taken all together, well, it's not looking so good for Star Wars right now.
To try and salvage something for Star Wars, I'd hypothesize that at point-blank range, those big guns might be able to manage terajoule-range firepower, but at the ranges used during the orbital bombardment, they lose enough energy in transit that they wind up at megajoule-range at impact.
-Mike
All in all, your hypothesis manages to fit all the factors without direct contradiction, and is completely in keeping with observed effects. On a side note, I think versus analysis does have a tendency to jade its participants with notions of WMDs or bust. A space ship able to throw out a steady stream of GJ-TJ fire, even if it deteriorates to MJ after several hundred or a few thousand km is well beyond modern tech and at home in scifi.
I have mentioned before that I suspect lower powered weapons may intentionally be used en masse, with the idea that the quantity and specific nature of weapon delivery might be more useful than simply upping the yield on the ordinance. If indeed this is the "best they can do" however, then the tactics employed in Star Wars raises some real questions. If some well placed MJ-GJ shots is really all it takes to severely damage a vessel despite it's defenses, then nuclear warhead missile drones should be dominating space combat, much the way missile destroyers have replaced heavy cannons in modern warfare. The usual limitations to such weapons are already nullified by SW canon, point defenses repeatedly allow fighters to close, and fusion technology is mature and commonplace, there's nothing stopping the use of multimegaton "cruise missiles" or even fighter/bombers launching multiple bombs in the 100's of KT against capitol ships, despite their depiction in the traditional Hollywood manner so far. Realistically, those would generate quick kills against vessels straining to throw (and absorb) low kilotons at each other at the absolute best. Then again, the Rebels episodes "Homecoming" and "Iron Squadron" have come very close to doing just that, though again under somewhat unusual circumstances, and with lowball Hollywood effects.
Again, technical limitations don't suffice to explain such an absence, that kind of firepower was available 60 years ago in the real world. There have been hints of odd political limitations, but that doesn't adequately explain such restraint in deep space, especially from the unscrupulous Empire, or the desperate and often equally aggressive rebels, such as Saw Gerrera. As I alluded to earlier, allowances for "Hollywood firepower" are required in pretty much all franchises, including 'Trek, in order to balance everything from the Borg bombardment in ST:FC to the TDiC bombardment, and all in between. In short, while suspension of disbelief and canon may trump common sense, the ultimate nature of SW weapons is still floating in a somewhat vague territory. I'd say ICS gigatons can be neatly discarded with high canon evidence now, but a certain level of firepower is required for certain feats, such as implied in the RotS novel. Personally, I'll feel better accepting a conclusion one way or the other once the line has been drawn a little more clearly as to what exactly turbo lasers can or can't do. (And preferably not provided through vague text or some bottom rung Disney "canon" source like a comic or a game's flavor text.)
Sorry about getting so long winded, but the thought processes behind my rationale run a circuitous route, which is partly why I have difficulty looking at the bombardment in the Rebels season 3 finale and calling it a day.