Upon browsing through, I clicked on a link that led me to one of your arguments from spacebattles. I'll start here.
Even a satellite armed with a nuke would be a threat to a planet. As you put it, it's a problem of scale.
Being a threat to a planet while you are a ship with WMDs onboard is pretty much vague and enough of threat to any world.
Yes, warships have plenty of weapons, plenty of missiles and energy cannons.
What you don't understand, Mr. O, is that a star destroyer is not just a "threat" to the world in the sense that a satellite with a nuke is. The latter can royally fuck up a nation's day and kill hundreds of thousands of people. A star destroyer can leave "
no witnesses. no survivors". Here are some things that will not accomplish this to the slightest degree:
The 100 teraton K-T extinction event
Yellowstone erupting
A massive solar flare by the sun
The Cold War world's nuclear arsenal multiplied by ten
The Enterprise's entire photon torpedo complement
Most of the above would royally fuck up the human race and most animal life. But many of us would survive, and most sea creatures would as well with the possible exception of the last one.
You're right. The relevance is scale, and you have it severely underestimated.
But what is just bollocks is those high gigaton/teraton claims made out of the blue, openly disregarding former established EU facts.
SW: Slave ship
the laser cannons being mounted into the open skeletal frames required bracing and recoil-dissipation casings that would have withstood explosions measured in the giga-tonnage range. Anything less, and a single shot fired in battle would rip a destroyer or battle cruiser in two, a victim of its own lethal strength
The Adventures of Lando Calrissian
Her weaponry and defenses ran the gamut from continent-destroying hell projectors to small teams of unarmed combat experts.
To name two.
The hundreds of gigatons and above are the fruit of severe misconceptions, and solely based on selective and overliteral interpretations of some descriptions of BDZ, while other descriptions of the same process clearly put a different song about the abilities of a spaceship. It's precisely how we got to those huge firepower numbers, solely based on three parameters:
Do you think that Karen Traviss sat down and considered the mathematical and scientific implications of her stats before she wrote them down? Did George Lucas calculate the energy of the Death Star and decide to add in halo ring special effects to tone it down? Did the creators of TCW sit down and think long and hard about Ahsoka Tano and the realism and evolutionary implications of her race?
Saxton is different among these in that he actually attempts to scientifically derive his figures. But that does not make Saxtonian ICS's calculations like those of Mike Wong.
They are stated canon fact. Saxton could have come home, rolled the dice and made up random figures, which is little different than what 99% of EU writers do, and they'd still be canon fact.
- One ISD being enough.
"Cloaked Star Destroyer!" Han snapped back, twisting the helm yoke viciously, the whole plan suddenly coming clear. "That battle back there over Bothawui- all those ships beating each other into rubble- with a Star Destroyer waiting hidden here, ready to finish them all off and maybe burn Bothawui in the bargain. No survivors, no witnesses, only a battle everyone in the New Republic would blame everyone else for." VOTF p.617
- One hour only to achieve required effect.
That is an assumption. Honestly, the actual timeframe is less than a day, but more than an hour. Hardly changes the figures sufficiently.
- Melt the entire surface to a depth of one meter.
It's
more than that. Melting the surface to one meter's depth would not leave "no survivors, no witnesses" if a single person had the sense to hide in an underground bunker when ships with WMDs were exchanging fire above.
There is enough of evidence on internet, for anyone who actually cares to look for it -- which I think is the point of anyone of actually posting here -- to see how the paintaing we got from Curtis Saxton is a nothing more than a vulgar plastic bag full of semen.
Butthurt now? Do you seriously think that Saxton made the ICS's just so that he could rig a debate which he almost never mentioned or took part in?
Even lately, I posted evidence from Vector Prime which shows how knowledgable people (Han Solo, with all his experience then) knows that even a current generation ISD couldn't blast enough of a 20 wide rocky small moon, known as Dobido, within a timeframe which can range from 1 hour (high end) to 7 hours of bombardments (likely, as it's the time left for the moon to hit the planet), or even more, as Han learned about the 7 hours after making his statement I think. Though I'm not certain about the last part, but the 7 hours is pretty solid.
Citations.
And there's, of course, those two terajoules (kilotons) of firepower mentionned, applying to New republic frigates, Golan stations and even ISDs. Ships totally combat ready and fully functional. Not lame crippled dustbins with reactor outputs scrapping the bottom of the barrel for no reason.
In the recent posts I made on this site, I did post links to other sources, and not only SFJN.
Citations.
Even the bit mentionned by Leo1 is vague and we can't be sure it's not hyperbole, because it precisely has all the ingredients for being so (people making impressive one liner short comments about the glorious powers of their weapons more than often drop into the exageration department), and as I said, looks like some mere copy/pasting of what the latest two ICSes say.
What idiot Supreme Commander such as Niathal would glorify weapons they see on a daily basis while discussing important battle strategies that dictate the fate of a galaxy? Feel free to explain to me what she
really means by "planet's surface to molten slag". Does she just mean that they can bomb a few population centers and destroy a few fisheries? Is this a "figurative" definition of "molten slag"? How do you possibly equate the two, figuratively or literally? It would be equivalent to stating that a house with a giant hole in its roof was "vaporized".
Yes, don't be shy, we know that anytime someone will speak about the firepower in SW, the ICS will be there, because they clearly took the central stage with their extravagant claims.
They're not claims any more than Jaina Solo's existence is a claim. They're canon statements.
What I have observed is that as a whole, the old guard of people who opposed the erroneous data of the ICS don't wander here anymore, and the others don't seek to really verify the coherency, solidity and true source of those super claims, and quite happy with the actual status, or ignorance (term, which I stress is not used in a derogatory way).
I am not very unsettled by your disillusionment, Mr. O, and that's genuine. More than likely those "old guards" simply moved on with their lives.
Everything was fine when people agreed that Star Wars' high end was in the low gigaton, and that only was based on Mike Wong's own estimation.
the laser cannons being mounted into the open skeletal frames required bracing and recoil-dissipation casings that would have withstood explosions measured in the giga-tonnage range. Anything less, and a single shot fired in battle would rip a destroyer or battle cruiser in two, a victim of its own lethal strength
Of course, as I was getting tired of hearing people claim that bigger numbers existed back then, I wanted to know more about those rumours. Truth being that the higher claims which existed back then, were just one claim in fact, made from a person making up numbers completely arbitrarily, and obtained absurd estimations.
So taking "molten slag" literally (read: the legit definition of the term) is suddenly "absurd" now? How so? I would argue that both interpretations contain some degree of validity. Except that exactly what is the "figurative" meaning of molten slag? An evenly cratered surface? Does not resemble molten slag in any way, shape or form. Destroyed cities? Does not resemble the entire surface being turned to molten slag in any way, shape or form.
People don't seem to realize the vast discrepancy between SW real flavour and SW with crunchy Saxton bits. The data he put in the last two ICSes (which in themselves are very great and entertaining book for the art they contain) is seen being at least three orders of magnitude above the truth. While, for example, he'd claim that fighters exchanged firepower in the terajoule range (kiloton), we saw in the movie that mere hundreds of megajoules, in indirect hits, were enough to threaten a top notch shielded fighter.
You mean like the double digit megajoule shot from Slave 1 that made no more than a tiny dent in Obi Wan's unshielded starfighter?
So my take on this is that knowing that two contradictory sets of figures exist, those in the low-high megaton/low gigaton range, and those in the high gigaton/low-mid teraton range, you'll just have to declare which sets you base your arguments on.
How could you
possibly say that low megatons could affect the entire planet in a matter of hours? How do you circumnavigate a planet and fire at its entire surface, either to turn it to "smoking debris" or your figurative definition of "molten slag", and leaving "no survivors, no witnesses" using low megaton weaponry. Do you have any idea how genuinely impossible it is? That even every supervolcano and in the world going off at once would be insufficient for the
decimation of a world- all life, all vessels, all systems.
We know from here:
"Imperial Star Destroyers have so thoroughly blasted Dankayo that I fear for my safety, even in this deep-planet survival shelter."- Scavenger Hunt p20
That even a tiny, relatively insignificant Rebel base contains a "deep planetary shelter"; or at least its equally insignificant (and airless, according to you) planet does. How could Base Delta Zeros be remotely expected to leave "no survivors, no witnesses" in a very important world such as Bothawui when a single military bunker would easily survive?
"The hospital ship Mercy, an antiquated Dreadnaught, two assault frigates, a squadron of Corellian gunships, and assorted support vessels orbited a recently devastated world. Cities of colored glass, now reduced to rubble, merged with plains of heat-fused earth. This was just one of the many planets laid to waste during the last few years."- Rebel Agent, p65.
If the cities weren't literally glassed, why would they look like colored glass? If the plains weren't melted or significantly heated, why would they be described as "heat-fused earth"?
