Base Delta Zero

[Mr. Oragahn]

Well, that answers that. In that case, I would nominate this to go on the list of EU material that contradicts the ICS.
-Mike

Yes, that one would probably be a good piece of evidence.

[Mike DiCenso]

Then put the darrn thing over there!
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

Then put the darrn thing over there!
-Mike

Sure thing. After you. :)

[Mike DiCenso]

Oh, no, no, no. I insist.
-Mike

[Sunburst]

Ok, sorry to simplify things but here's the simple answer.

The BDZ does not exist. The first time I ever read about it was on stardestroyer.net. The idea surprised me. This idea which is based on a personal interpretation of tech books which I have and read profusely years ago lead me to believe that the people that thought up the bdz idea are people with a very skewed perspective of reality, an inability to understand the English language (or they have a poorly translated copy of the tech manuals), and they probably watched too much DBZ. Also, these are people that haven't actually watched a Star Wars movie in years, have a nostalgic view of the trilogy and the believe that the Imperial Star Destroyer is the greatest space ship ever.

Do you know what happens when someone has a nostalgic view of the trilogy and actually watches it and even listens to tapes of it in the car? You get the Timothy Zahn trilogy.

I've said my peace, thanks for reading.

[Mike DiCenso]

Actually, from an Expanded Universe perspective, the Base Delta Zero (BDZ) does exists. Here on this forum, not only in this thread, but many others, the evidence has been documented over and over again as to it being a legitimate term. What has been the issue is how energetic the operation is. How many ships are required, and how long that it takes to carry it out. What has also been documented is evidence in that certain people who had an influence on Dr. Saxton fed him distorted versions of the BDZ and other aspects of SW technology in order to wank it above Trek. The controversy then becomes how much did Saxton allow himself to be lead by the nose, or if he was simply in on the whole thing all the time. Those are the real questions. But as far as the EU is concerned, it is a "real" Imperial order the way General Order 24 or the Prime Directive are for Trek. Now as for George Lucas and "Real" Star Wars, that's also another another arguement all together.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

What has also been documented is evidence in that certain people who had an influence on Dr. Saxton fed him distorted versions of the BDZ and other aspects of SW technology in order to wank it above Trek. The controversy then becomes how much did Saxton allow himself to be lead by the nose, or if he was simply in on the whole thing all the time. Those are the real questions.

You're being way too kind and misled.

Everything from his methodology to the sources he picked himself show an immense lack of doubt and questioning.
Anyone honest about a proper appreciation of what's going on would question the context of provided data and ponder how it is that such a large ensemble of fiction sources (the EU was already quite large right before 2000) only present aspects of Star Wars that seem to portray a vision of SW that was so at odds.
Look at the picture he chose for the Victory-class ship (a modified version besides) bombarding a "planet". It was very easy to demonstrate that this is not a planet.
That's the same dude going as far as to argue that the fireworks of ROTJ over Endor were X-wings actually vaporizing the falling debris of the space station, while people were rejoicing down there, dancing and drinking.
It's the same man who would have easily known that there were references of much lower firepower (terajoules from "Isard's Revenge"), but like others, they were quickly dismissed.

You do not go writing an entire website of exhaustive articles and then feign ignorance of sources as a defense. It just doesn't mesh.

I had the special edition VHS tapes and a player with a frame by frame play mode, and I could already see the BS about the vaporization of asteroids from TESB, all the made up incidences.
All it took was to simply play the goddamn movie.

If Saxton has been fooled by anything, it's his own fanboyism, and that is all. At anytime he could have questioned the figures, the claims, before even being approached for the last two ICSes. He never did.

[Sunburst]

I have to agree with Mr. Orangahn about Saxton. He's web page is very loosely based on Star Wars, and although he spent alot of time on crunching number and making a web site it seems like he went on his own tangent away from what I've always thought Star Wars was: a fun story in it's own universe about good vs evil and a heroes journey. His technical data doesn't fit with the actually moves and even his naming conventions come from a personal place as apposed to the films we enjoyed.

I've read more EU than I care to admit and I know Star Wars backwards and forwards, or at least the Star Wars that existed before the prequals came out. I've done the Wars vs Trek thing since the early '90's. The BDZ idea is relatively recent idea in the EU, it doesn't exist in the movies and even in the first 20 years of books it didn't exist. (a planetary bombardment being a different idea entirely, which is mentioned in a few places like the books The Heir to the Empire, Darksaber and the Rebellion game) I like the idea of a Star Destroyer being able to destroy targets from space, it's basically the roll of the old Battleships. But if you watch the movies you'll notice that not one ship ever fires a shot at a planet (DS excluded), even in the Attack of the Clones when the transports are hovering overhead and could do serious damage to the enemy lines, it doesn't happen. (these being the same transports with extremely high firepower numbers that are also scalable or so says the ICS). The idea just doesn't fit of melting (or evaporating) off a planet's crust, just like Saxton's work in general doesn't fit with the story of Star Wars.

Saxton's work and the bdz idea are sort of like the idea of adding wheels and a rocket engine to a cheetah so it can go faster. The cheetah becomes something different and entirely new; it gets faster ("better"), but it's not really a cheetah anymore. And Star Wars with crazy huge fire power numbers isn't what Star Wars is about and is just doesn't fit with the Mythology. The more I read about firepower figures and technical data the easier it is to forget about what makes Star Wars what it is. And Star Wars is definitely not TIE fighters obliterating the Yavin base from outer space...which is what Saxton and the BDZ will eventually lead too.

[Mike DiCenso]

West End Game's RPG supplement "Scavenger Hunt", which first introduced the BDZ, was published in 1989, approximately 12 years after ANH, and about three years before the "Heir to the Empire" Trilogy was published in 1991. As with much of the gaming material produced by WEG, the EU was strongly influenced by the background information found in it, and it continues to have an influence today over 20 years later. The issue is not that BDZ existed, as I said before, it is that it was turned by Saxton, Wong, Young, Poe and others into something that was a specific form of planetary bombardment requiring multiple ships to devastate the entire inhabited surface of a world withing a day as a last resort into a single ISD melting the surface of the planet at least several meters in at most an hour.

In the movies and TCW, we have seen no such operation at any scale, though the idea of a planetary bombardment is a possibility as indicated by General Veer's dialog with Darth Vader in TESB. As you say, this sort thing is not in keeping with the mythic nature of the Star Wars stories, and it runs completely counter to George Lucas ideas, and why a Death Star would be even needed at all in the first place. We have all seen that there are many instances in the movies and the TCW where even a limited planetary bombardment would have been extremely useful, and yet are not carried out. The Clonetroopers' rescue operation on Geonosis is just such an example, and it shows us that planetary shields are limited in use or are nonexistant as nothing stops the Republic ships from landing, not even ion or turbolaser cannons, and oddly enough, Genosisian sensors don't even detrect the attack until it is far too late!

So the BDZ as the Saxtonites and Warsies would have it be portrayed, does not even exist in Lucas vision of Star Wars. Even if a planetary bombardment occurs in the TCW, it will in all likelihood not be very energetic at all.

As for Saxton himself, there is no real doubt that he was aware he was getting cherrypicked quotes or even outright distortions from his buddies. The ussue I was bringing up was to what extent he was initally aware of this, or as I indicated, if he was in on it from the very begining. He certainly seemed to have no problem with regards to the Geoffrey T. Mandel's ISD blueprints from the 1970's that were clearly unauthorized (unlicensed) fan material, but he chose to make use of it anyway, and even derived the Imperator class name for the SD from it. So either he has to be incredibly dense, or he is just Star Wars' equivalent of James Dixon; everything is canon, even bad fan fic.
The only diffence is that Saxton chose to cherrypick or interpret what was there in a manner that made Sw tech far more powerful than it really is.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

To the point that a pissed off teenager can borrow his father's cargo ship armed with heavy laser cannons and utterly vaporize in one shot the equivalent of half of Washington.

[Mike DiCenso]

Which begs the question of why Boba Fett in TCW just use those alleged kilotons of firepower to kill Mace Windu to get revenge instead of the overly elaborate plan that he used?
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

Which begs the question of why Boba Fett in TCW just use those alleged kilotons of firepower to kill Mace Windu to get revenge instead of the overly elaborate plan that he used?
-Mike

Mmm... they needed a proof they were dead. That said, I'm not sure how they expected to get that proof by booby trapping the helmet to begin with...

[Mike DiCenso]

Ah but wait, aren't SW sensors so super-terrific that they can scan inside the wreck of the Endurance and know if those alleged uber kilotons of firepower from Slave-I did the job or not?
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

Text edited to cope with my error about the location of Atrakenite refugees. I got confused about page 13 of the book describing Atraken as a "satellite" planet type. Actually, the whole page is a complete mess of nomenclature. Page 13, which features the "planet log" page for Atraken, seems to actually describe... its moon... despite having the name Atraken typed into the "planet name" cell... instead of Trilos, which is a planetoid.
Damn WEG.
And if confusion wasn't total, same page 13 also comes with a "world summary" that describes... Atraken. The real one, this time.

So obviously, most of the material relative to Trilos can be cut out of the post. *sigh*
It doesn't change the parts relative to the description of Atraken though.

Oh and Darth Hoth, thanks for pointing out the error. We all do wish this to be as most accurate as possible, don't we? :)

---

In this thread at SDN (which has evolved into a rather interesting way in its second half - assuming you can cope with usual claims of 200 GT), Darth Hoth made the following claim and I wanted to check it out:

Did they demonstrate its use? That's all I want to see right now, just a point where those capabilities are actually used. Not even Mike's BDZ calcs (which, unsurprisingly, are very flawed, but let's run with them) come close to 200 gigaton shots - his highest calc is 100 gigaton for an entire broadside. He put individual shots at like 2 gigatons from the big guns.

Directly demonstrated use? No, not to my knowledge. There are novels that speak of "continent-destroying weapons" and the like (sufficiently vague to be mostly unhelpful), but no full petaton bombardments to be seen. The best we have is descriptions of the kind quoted by Saxton and Darth Wong on their respective pages (blowing the atmosphere off Dankayo). There are also various other EU sources (mostly WEG books) not quoted by them talking about planetary bombardments doing hideous environmental damage (the planet Atraken, for example, had much of its seas, though not all of them, boiled away by bombardment during the Clone Wars, as revealed in Planets of the Galaxy, Volume Two). Going by these, one can derive numbers somewhere in the gigatons per second/teratons total range, I believe, although I have not done any detailed independent work on it, just some very rough calculations.

Atraken?
That's a "new" one which I never heard of.
Boiling oceans away fits with the general ultra high firepower figures worth of multiple teratons, and you'd expect the surface of the planet to be a residue of molten rock.
As usual, let's see for ourselves what the text says.

System Summary

The yellow star Kattellyn has only two planets in its systems - sadly, both are dead. Kronas is a ball of searing rock that orbits much too close to the sun to ever sustain even the tiniest shred of life. Atraken is a bombed-out husk, a poisoned legacy of the Clone Wars.

Atraken has three moons, Trilos, Doulos, and Mrykos. Only Trilos is capable of sustaining life of any kind, and it is here that an Atrakenite minig colony was set up several years before the Clone Wars erupted. Atrakenite refugees made their way here and have bolstered the population to its current level.

The Kattellyn system is on a well-travelled trade route, but the disaster of Atraken is common knowledge to most spacefarers.

By far, most of the destruction is related to large scale poisoning. Many died, but there has been refugees. We'll learn more about the refugees later on.

System Datafile

Kattellyn system, star: Kattellyn, yellow sun. Two planets, Kronas and Atraken. Atrakenite mining colony on Trilos, primary Atrakenite moon.
ALERT: RESTRICTED SYSTEM! The population of the planet Atraken was decimated during the Clone Wars. There is no one left on the planet to trade or interact with. Possible hazards include biochemical weaponry residue, unexploded ammunition, and other sustained environmental hazards. This system is dead and off-limits to all personnel.

The remaining of unexploded ammunition is identified as a clear risk, so here's our first clue that the destruction of the planet is not that overkill melt-the-crust operation.

Starport Touchdown

This is a limited starport, formerly used as the main starport in the pre-Clone War days. Now, it lies mostly unused. Most of the spacecraft used to evacuate Atrakenite survivors have been disassembled, and only two craft remain.

So people successfully fled the destruction on multiple ships towards one of the planet's moon, Trilos (since it's the only inhabitable moon).
There's now (NR era) a population of 100,000 people on Trilos.

Planet Log

Planet Name: Atraken / Planet Type: Satellite
Type: Satellite
Atmosphere: Type III (Breath Mask Required)
Hydrosphere: Arid
Gravity: Light
Terrain: Caves, mountains, craters
Points of Interest: Ee colony, Old Mine, Starport Touchdown

Read Trilos instead of Atraken.

The Ee are 6 cm long very smart and telepathic worms with, frankly, very high end powers. Even if they're short ranged (a few tens of centimeters) and often limited to objects of one or two kilos tops, you can relate their powers to the top scale powers of the Force, even the most obscure from the EU, like teleportation, anti-gravity, raising or lowering temperature, creating light globes, mind reading, power drain, telekinesis, etc. but without any description linking them to the Force at all. They're found on Trilos.

Atraken is further described as a "desolate wasteland".

World Summary

The planet Atraken is the primary world of this system. Atraken is a wasteland, ravaged by the Clone Wars to the point of irreparable ecological disaster. The planet has been totally written off the world logs as a place for visitors to travel and trade.
However, what the overwhelming majority of the galaxy is unaware of is that a small segment of the Atraken population escaped the conflict and fled by ship to Trilos, one of the three moons of Atraken.
[...]
The Atrakenies have, in the last few years, begun making salvage runs back to their home world.

What could there be to even try to recover from a ravaged and poisonous world which would have seen its oceans truly boiled off and crust melted?
If anything, what caused the destruction of oceans, if it had been the result of firepower, was largely focused on some oceans only.
Other than that, we're not even said what really caused the loss of some oceans. No indication that it's the result of a bombardment.

The World of Atraken

The once-beautiful planet of Atraken now stands as a monument to mindless destruction. Opposing forces in the Clone Wars made it their battlefield, destroying each other, the planet's environment, and over 90 percent of the native population.
Nowadays, Atraken's oceans, those that have not been boiled away, are huge bodies of poisonous water. Most plant life has been blasted away, and all animal life is gone. The very air is poisonous, carrying either the remains of chemical weapons or virulent strains left over from germ warfare. The only lifeform that remains are large, burrowing insects called "diehards" that have adapted to eating the poisons of Atraken.
All that stands now are the shattered remains of Atraken's cities and a carpet of debris, the last bits of evidence that a thriving civilization once existed there.

That's the crux of the evidence.
We have the reference about boiled oceans, but we already spot the discrepancies.
First, not all oceans were boiled away. There are remaining oceans, now endless pools of poison.
Above all, large insects survived merely because of their burrowing abilities.
Finally, cities are still there, albeit turned to "shattered remains" and "debris".

Citing Atraken as the evidence of a BDZ-level firepower would be most tenuous at best.

Exploring Atraken

The only legitimate reason for exploring Atraken is for purposes of salvage. In order to survive for any length of time on that blasted planet, full protection space suits will be needed. Even these, however, are not enough - the howling winds of Atraken, laced with corrosive chemicals, will slowly cause a suit to lost its structural integrity, eating away at the non-metal parts.

There is more information on page 19, including more of the same babble about salvage. We have a salvage table which indicates that you can find spare parts for droids, or even spaceships. Or broken landspeeders.
We learn of the Cydwens, sort of birds more or less "imported" and, although very few (like a dozen on the planet), manage to survive very well, notably by hunting the diehards.
And then, there's info about environmental perils, presented in another table.
It goes from "massive durst storms" to "ground collapses". From time to time, explorers can find "fairly intact buildings". Add other "electrical storms" that prevent communications and sensor operation, plus some high radiation areas.

And that's it.
Here's enough evidence that Atraken was not subjected to an overkill ICS-like bombardment.
The only mystery is why some oceans boiled away, while the solid surface obviously didn't receive any kind of punishment which would be necessary to boil oceans away.
Whatever caused the loss of some oceans is entirely open to speculation.

[StarWarsStarTrek]

BTW, yes, I know that this has been gone over again and again. However, I feel as if the Base Delta Zero is a very significant argument in favor of Star Wars, and that counterarguments tend to be very half-hearted, to say the least.


Ah, the famous Base Delta Zero. One of the most commonly cited arguments by us pro Wars people. Base Delta Zero involves turning the upper crust of a planet into molten slag, and is the source for Saxton's 200 gigaton figure that he came up with for the AOTC ICS. But what sources support this? A lot, in fact.

Caamas BDZ
Dankayo BDZ
Emberlene BDZ
Meridian BDZ
Bothawui intended BDZ

LOTF Revelations:
"I've often fought the urge to reduce a planet to molten slag myself, Niathal said, unmoved. "Probably for totally different reasons to you, Colonel. But I agree with Gil-holding what we seize is going to be a drain on resources, unless Fondor shows some pragmatism and rolls over. Let's give them an extra reason for doing that, beyond annihilation."
Star Wars Technical Journal
Attack of the Clones: Incredible Cross-Sections
Revenge of the Sith: Incredible Cross-Sections
The Imperial Sourcebook
The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia


All of these examples feature several similar aspects:

1. The surface of the planet is devastated. Not just like one would expect in a nuclear war, but melted, turned to slag, atomized, etc. This implies a firepower several OOM's beyond our entire nuclear arsenal.

2. There are little to no survivors, despite the mass spread possession of space capable craft. Even in a nuclear war, one would expect survivors of some sort, but in most BDZ's there are no survivors at all. This implies that BDZ's are rather fast; done in a few hours, and this, combined with 1, require a firepower per TL in the gigaton range.

3. There is typically no life surviving after the attack, not even oceanic creatures. Even the 100 teraton extinction event was not enough to completely wipe out the ecosystem; a base delta zero is.

4. The planet often times remains uninhabitable even decades after, even with futuristic terraforming technology.




Common counter arguments:

"There are lower end BDZ's!" - actually, most supposedly lower end BDZ's are not really low end, but some are. However, the high end BDZ's outnumber the lower end ones, and are harder to handwave/rationalize away. A lower end BDZ could simply be due to a lack of desire or will to destroy everybody, or planetary/theater shields slowing down the damage. A high end BDZ...how do handwave those away? They outnumber the lower end feats, and there are too many to be handwaved away as an outlier or extremity.

"Calculations of them are overstated!" - actually, most calculations made are very low end. For example, Mike Wong's calculation was assuming that the BDZ only extended 1 meter into the ground, even though underground bunkers could easily be lower than that, and BDZ's are described as atomizing the upper crust of a planet. The one hour time frame is not only canon, it is also supported by the fact that there are often times no survivors, despite the common availability of space and hyperdrive capable craft in Star Wars.

"General Order 24!" - General Order 24 wipes out all life on a planet. It does not atomize the top soil or boil a planet's oceans. It also uses up probably most or all of the torpedo payload of a large Star Trek starship, whereas a BDZ can be performed by recharging turbolasers.




By the way, some do not consider the EU to be canon. If you do not, then this thread does not apply to you; this is for those who believe the EU to be canon, official, or to be part of the continuity in one way or another.