StarWarsStarTrek wrote:Semantics are not really relevant in this debate. I understand the difference between joules and watts. As for power generation, assuming that the recharge time involves actually powering the superlaser and not cooling it, then yes, I concede that the actual power output is about e28 watts. The ability of the Death Star to even deliver that much energy without vaporizing itself is quite impressive into itself, right?
Impressive? Yes. The Death Star is
very impressive. Delivering e27-e28 watts would mean a similar power-to-volume ratio as a GCS. The Death Star is something I expect has a more powerful reactor than any UFP starship. It's an enormous battle station, and just building it is a pretty impressive feat of engineering.
In alignment with the ICS? No.
And this is the
highly generous interpretation of the quote. It's not realistic in context. We've seen Death Stars destroyed; they don't unleash e30+ joules on their surroundings. We've seen
in the same novel the Death Star firing; it doesn't unleash e30+ joules on a 1/3 power shot.
The superlaser would have to have extremely high heat capacity and/or extremely advanced cooling systems in order to not get vaporized, and the Death Star would have have to be able to withstand an enormous amount of recoil. That being said, such a power output supports the AOTC and ROTS ICS figures for star destroyers quite well, because if you scale them linearly it works out to be "realistic". The Death Star's reactor is 16 kms; a star destroyer's is 140 meters, both in diameters. A e24+ watt reactor therefore makes complete sense.
A little math for you: A 16 km reactor is over a million times the size of a 140 m reactor.
Both superweapons of which are nearly impossible to calculate due to being chain reaction weapons. Based off of standard power output the Death Star exceeds the power output of the Federation, and likely the entire Alpha Quadrant.
The Death Star is
also a chain reaction weapon. So is the Xindi superweapon. So is Dr. Device in
Ender's Game. So is pretty much every planet-busting and star-destroying weapon in popular science fiction.
Where did you get that information for median main-sequence stars? You're suggesting that a median main sequence star is about 100 times less powerful than our sun, even though out sun isn't particularly large.
Our sun
is particularly large. Most main sequence stars are type M red dwarfs, which typically have a luminosity less than 1% of the Sun's. The median main sequence star looks about like
this.
(As a convenient illustration of this fact, there are 11 main-sequence (and one non-main sequence) stars within 10 light years of us. Ross 154 is the 6th brightest.)
(BTW, our email debate; yes, that's me; is it still going on?)
Sure, I'll reply within the next couple of days. I've been busy and I forgot about it. If you like, you could just move it to a thread here.
The power percentiles seemed to have been completely messed up in Star Wars Death Star. A 1/3 power shot should still have destroyed the planet. Another shot was able to be fired about an hour, despite the fact that a full powered shot took about 24 hours to recharge. If you want to take the power percentage as linear though, note that a 4% power shot destroyed a Rebel Alliance cruiser. The fact that they put the power at 4% and not 3% implies that 4% power is needed as a somewhat upper end to destroy a Rebel cruiser...even with the lower end calculations of e30 joules, 4% of that is e28-e29 joules.
That's why we know that it's a chain reaction weapon that doesn't actually deliver that much raw energy. Since a 1/3 power shot has effects several orders of magnitude
below mass-scattering energy, it's not delivering mass-scattering energy in the first place.
This is actually not a new problem; it's one that is underlined throughout the EU whenever less powerful superlasers show up, whether on the
Darksaber or the
Eclipse. Read a little
here about the
Eclipse. The destructive effects of the
Eclipse's lower-powered superlaser line up just fine with the partially-powered shots seen in the
Death Star novel; they're only really problematic for the Saxtonite model.
How so? The quotes that supposedly prove a chain reaction are often misinterpreted. The quotes mention that the hypermatter reactor exceed mass-energy conversion. Trekkies take the quotes to mean that the reactors do not produce as much energy as assumed, and that they use a chain reaction to do it with less energy. However, in reality, it's reversed; the hypermatter reactors use sort of a chain reaction to get more energy!
The problem with that is where the matter comes from. Ultimately, Saxton's notion of hypermatter is to have almost all the matter being annihilated outside of our universe.
Which, when you get down to it, is much messier than assuming it's at least mostly within our universe.
Out of context? The quote about the weekly output of several main sequence stars vs the Death Star is quite direct and blatant. What is the power output of the Death Star in your model?
Direct? The quote refers to an uncontrolled reaction, and depending on what contexts you put it in, can refer to anything within a range of
three orders of magnitude even taken most simply as referring to a "typical" main sequence star. If we substitute the
minimum luminosity for a main sequence star for, say, the
median luminosity, we can drop things even further into a more realistic range. We have very little idea what benchmark the character in question is referring to.
The line may well have a similar in-universe status to the real-life worries of some scientists that the Trinity test would set the atmosphere on fire - a theoretical calculation that some people were taking seriously, but turned out to be seriously flawed.
Uh, what? Are you actually implying that a misfire is more powerful than an actual regular blast? Where is your evidence?
In theory it could actually be so.
However, I'm going to point out that while a misfire
could be more powerful, we actually have higher-level evidence (destruction of the DS1 and DS2) that points to a much lower energy event. We don't have to
speculate about what it would look like if the Death Star's reactor went up in an uncontrolled release; we
know this straight from the very first
Star Wars movie. Both battle stations were fully charged and well into their firing sequence, preparing to destroy a planetary target, when they were destroyed in ANH and ROTJ.
The
Endor Holocaust calculations point towards an explosive kinetic energy of around e24-e25 joules (e26-e27 joules if we use Saxtonite-style mass figures) for the DS2. The DS1's destruction is about as bright as a second sun on Yavin - but only very briefly, which points to a similarly
small amount of energy being released.
Taken in context with the actual events of the movies
or within the context of superlasers within the EU, the test-firings of the
Death Star in the novel of the same name are actually not the least bit strange, and it seems pretty safe to throw out the higher-end interpretations of the quote in question in favor of the lower-end interpretations.
