Returning to the BDZ thread, here's a claim I'd like to debunk. Unsurprisingly, it's made by Leo1/Vympel.
Jared was asking him a couple questions regarding Saxton. It happens that it's a topic I know relatively well, and I also know Leo1's positions on this subject. We've seen that his position hasn't changed much since 2008. Although
some observations, interpretations and conclusions changed since then, I have an answer to the following question Jared asked
here:
Jared wrote:
Did Saxton use the one-ship/one-hour thing as the basis for his ICS numbers, or did he not? The ICS didn't state it, but did he assume it in order to work backwards to determine firepower numbers?
The answer is simple, as
I told Leo1 after arguing about Saxton and the BDZ interpretations:
Me wrote:Leo1/Vympel wrote:Me wrote:
Probably the strongest claim of massive damage. However, duration is not mentionned.
Doesn't
need to be. Your delusion that the figures in the ICS are dependent on a minimum duration for orbital bombardment is just that.
Yes, indeed,
just that (Star Wars Technical Commentaries).
"..., the combined power of the turbolasers of a star destroyer firing throughout a circumplanetary orbit of what must be at least a few minutes' duration cannot be done without a total energy injection of E(melt) > 1.7 x 10^24 J."
This minute based bombardment figure actually strictly fits with his ICS numbers. Oh, the shock!
Oh but noooo, they're clearly not related.
Leo, wake up.
"It cannot be too time-consuming (more than an hour or a few hours), otherwise the operation would be tactically impotent. Enemy forces would have sufficient time to evacuate assets on the side of the planet which faces away from the assaulting destroyer."
"A flotilla of star destroyers could render a planet's surface uninhabitable within less than an hour..."
Combined to
this (StarDestroyer.Net).
"Given the great speed at which reinforcements can arrive and the fact that historical BDZ operations have never been interrupted in progress, it seems likely that if necessary, a Star Destroyer should be capable of accomplishing a Base Delta Zero in a period of an hour or less."
"Given a 1 hour timeframe, ..."
In popular objections:
"A more reasonable timeframe is one or two hours,..."
ICS, written by Curtis Saxton (SWTC), giving ample credits to Mike Wong (SDN).
Most amusing is how Wong's firepower numbers, which were based on that one flawed hour timeframe, are literally dwarfed by the ICS figures, by many orders of magnitude.
It would be obvious to anyone that the timeframe also makes a large difference in the ending firepower estimation. Even your two gurus got it. Why can't you?
Of course the figure that Saxton gave was for a few minutes of bombardment.
The faster you make it, the less efficient it is. Turn a few minutes into a full hour, you may be looking for a duraction ten times longer, and then a firepower ten times lower.
1.7 e24 J is a "combined firepower" figure. So under a few minutes, say 6, that's 360 seconds, or 4.722 e21 W. About
1.1286 teratons per second.
Please keep that in mind. I'll continue to refer to the Saxtonian BDZ, and they'll be about those lasting a few minutes, as per his first estimations.
What I find funny is that somehow in
Leo's defense, is the idea that Saxton provided a "low end", since what would be truly necessary would be "a hundred or a thousand times greater":
Leo1 wrote:Jared wrote:
But is it described being done to an entire planet? By one ship? In one hour?
Can you please listen to what I say? As I've said more than once in this thread:-
It doesn't need to be one ship in one hour. That was never the basis for the numbers of the ICS. Ever. That's why both ICS2 and ICS3 references to crust melting refer to it being done by fleets. If you actually read Dr. Saxton's website on the issue, you'd see that the lower limit he calculates using the "one ship one hour" assumption is in reality hundreds to thousands times lower than what would realistically be required due to all the inefficiencies involved.
I really don't know how more simple I can make this.
Somehow, this supposedly makes the ICS figures better, since a ship doing the one meter deep crust melting in minutes would requires "a hundred or a thousand times" more energy. Therefore, the last two ICSes, while pointing out that the crust melting was achieved with
fleets, were being "conservative".
I say it's absolute bollocks.
But let's check something first.
AotC:ICS, Page 22 wrote:
Armies entrenched deep underground may be subject to a last-resort "Base Delta Zero" fleet bombardment. Such operations reduce the upper crust of a planet to molten slag - a spectacle unseen in the Republic until the Clone Wars.
It's in fact true that taken alone, the AotC:ICS blurb could be understood as a fleet of Acclamators executing a BDZ, the BDZ consisting of firing at enemy fortifications and deeply entrenched targets with high yield torpedoes and turbolasers. We could understand the molten slag bit as they concentrated their firepower on those targets to the point of turning the surface to molten slag, which would
not mean the surface of the entire planet, but merely the surface where the targets are located.
It's really the RotS:ICS which insisted on the hour-long crust melting, by a fleet. Or did it?
RotS:ICS, page 15 wrote:
The [Invisible Hand] was also used to supervise naval attacks on 26 strategic Loyalist Worlds. These included the hour-long orbital bombardment that depopulated and melted the crust of the former city-planet of Humbarine, an ancient founding world of the Republic.
So according to Leo1, it points to a fleet used to do so.
Hang on. Is it said that the fleet is used to complete the bombardment, or to support the bombarding craft(s) through escort and interception roles?
Munificents
See, the same last ICS presents the Banking Clan's Munificent-class frigate as a ship which can annihilate up to 2,300 tonnes per second, using its twin main reactors. Such a ship comes with a massive weapon encased in its prox: two massive
laser cannons stacked one above another, said to be slow to maneuver but deadly to larger warships. They're sticking out from a "prow turbolaser elevation mount". So now it's a turbolaser?
I also don't really see what there is to maneuver about them, since at best they can only swing up and down within a tight angle.
Sidenote: I find Leo's insistance on "laser cannon" amusing if it's supposed to point to low power weapons, since the RotS:ICS shows the Invisible Hand sporting "dual laser cannons" which are quite big and also points at point defense ion cannons with yields of 4.8 megaton a shot.
Yes, in the EU, the turbolaser is more powerful than a laser, but with the RotS:ICS, a laser cannon is still going to fit in the gigaton region. Warships equipped with laser cannons are well capable of completing a BDZ or even engage larger warships in numbers. I believe that most of the small warships which were to complete the BDZ of Nar Shaddaa had very few turbolasers at all.
While the ICS is not short of contradicting other EU sources, it contradicts itself once more in the text frame on the right, as it says that this weapon (always the same big duo of cannons) is in fact two huge turbolaser cannons, not laser cannons.
The best part is that these two turbolaser cannons can blast-melt a 1000 km wide ice moon.
http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Sci ... roids.html: 6.62 e7 gigatons (66.2 petatons, or 277 e24 J), if it were a nuke detonated within the ice moon. The real firepower would obviously be greater, perhaps four times is we take Wong's word on a surface hit.
It's abundantly clear that a Munificent can charge up her weapons by annihilating at max 2300 tonnes of fuel per second (max power: 44,896 gigatons/sec, or 2.0671 e23 W).
Over 44 teratons per second.
No one said that main weapon had to wait to be charged in order to be fired. We know weapons in Star Wars can be dialed down, right? :)
And of course, we've seen heavy weapons in TCWS fired at high rates.
So, now, if you need between a hundred to a thousand times more energy to complete the one meter deep crust melting operation, then you will need about e2~e3 x 1.7 e24 J in total.
So let's see the Munificent's theoretical minimum time record, if it takes a thousand times more energy, and assume that it fires its main cannon each second with the power it recieves from its twin reactors:
8224 seconds. Or 2.284 hours.
Ten times less if we're only looking at *only* a factor of 100 for the energy requirement.
Assuming the factors are true (Saxton does not provide
any evidence for this), it's only in the highest case that it is true that more than one hour is required by a Munificent to achieve that ridiculous definition of a BDZ.
The Munificent doesn't have obvious broadside heavy weapons, so it's going to put itself on orbit first, and then rotate 90° and try to control its course that way.
However, we must not miss the most important factor here: the main prow guns can be charged.
277 yottajoules being the low end since it corresponds to an internal explosion, multipled by four we get 1108 e24 J.
Which means that in fact that a single Munificient is largely capable of covering a high end BDZ in a single shot, and free to its crew to make a "clean" high end BDZ by circling the planet and delivering more shots on the other side a few minutes later (remember, 2800 g).
Invisible Hand
The RotS:ICS sets the modified Providence-class carrier/destroyer's maximum fuel consumption as 12,000 tonnes per second.
That's a power of 234,240 gigatons/second, or 1.0785 e24 W.
In other words, over 230 times the firepower/sec needed to complete the task described by Curtis Saxton within a few minutes, which I assumed to be 6.
As seen
here, the quad turbolasers could output up to 1 TT per shot (by taking the scales as they were published back then). The IH has at least 4 pieces of that type on her portside around the hangar bay, but is given 14 of them in total, and 34 dual laser cannons, which aren't considerably smaller than the turbolasers.
I'd pick a third of each.
That's about 4.6 TT for the quadcannons, and 11.3 x 0.1 T (I assume those dual cannons are ten times less powerful), or 1.1 TT.
We get 5.7 TT in total, or 2.385 e22 W.
More than enough to complete within 72 seconds.
The high end BDZ would require a hundred to a thousand IHs to complete the same task under a few minutes (6), and likely ten to a hundred times IHs to complete the task within an hour.
Lucrehulks and Acclamators
As we can see from
the Battle of Rendili, both modified Lucrehulk-class core ships and Acclamators could battle in space. The core ships were given heavy weapons in lieu of the mere point defense cannons they were supposed to have (although we've never seen these light weapons in the movies).
An Acclamator and its twelve 200 GT quad turbolaser turrets is given a power production of e23 W, about as much as a Munificent's power production. A core ship had 3 e24 W, and 48 assault laser cannons and 3 turbolasers.
Those ships would easily cover a low end Saxtonian BDZ on their own, but large fleets would be needed to meet the requirements for a high end BDZ.
Venators
A Venator-class Star Destroyer, which can deposit all of its power into its heavy turbolasers, burns up to 40,000 tonnes of fuel per second: 780,800 gigatons/sec, or 3.595 e24 W - almost 8 times the energy necessary to put 8
Chicxulub craters into the crust of a planet per second!
If it can channel 780 TT through its weapons at once, it's abundantly clear that putting a hundredth of that energy per second through the same weapons will never overheat them as fast, if ever: assuming it can't fire its weapons at 780 TT per broadside again within the next few seconds.
Now let's put it simply. With its sole power production over one single second, the Venator
already meets more than twice the energy requirements for the entire low end BDZ.
Simply put, it can cover two low end BDZ within a few minutes, and its entire power output over one second is even enough to cover one full high end BDZ, with its energy requirements being a hundred to a thousand times superior, and that
within a few minutes.
Finally, in a way similar to that of the Munificents, a Venator can obviously come in orbit of a system with its weapons' capacitors already precharged with several dozens of teratons or more for a devastating opening volley by targeting various points of globe, before continuing. ;)
Conclusion
If the Invisible Hand isn't capable of that kind of firepower (and thus is absolutely in need of an escort while relying on powerful shields), then to meet the Republic's firepower, the CIS has to have warships capable of balacing a Venator's firepower out, and it's obviously covered by the Munificents.
The difference of power production between a Munificent and a Venator means that a Venator is worth more than 17 Munificents. But since Munificient can come with their main weapon ready for a massive shot, we see that both types of ships will have no problem to cover even a high end Saxtonian BDZ
within a few minutes, by using the ICS numbers.
And, of course, an ISD sporting an even larger power core, I don't think we need to stretch this to agree that a BDZ would also be covered within a very few minutes, perhaps less than one, by a single ISD.
Oh, and the Malevolence... do we even
need to get there?
In the end, we see that Leo's claims are just so debunked it's not even funny, and I'd suggest him to read his beloved Bible with more attention.
