List of expanded universe sources incompatible with ICS

[Praeothmin]

Appeal to ignorance. I do not have to work at lucasarts to point out that a TCW example must not contradict G canon.

No, but it is your place to provide evidence of why TCW does contradict G-Canon...
I say RotS (most notably around the 2:20 to 2:45 time, dark clouds hinting at atmospheric combat, no KT explosions) shows the same power levels as TCW...
And look, I provided links showing what I'm talking about...
This is called evidence...

[StarWarsStarTrek]

You are mangling context. I was not discussing any TCW scene specifically in this post, I was pointing out that any evidence must meet the lower end limits established by G canon, or they are invalid. That lower limit being vaporizing several meter long asteroids and a small town.

[Picard]

These are both LOWER and UPPER end limits for weapons used (medium and heavy turbolasers, respectively), beacouse we have no other info from canon.

[StarWarsStarTrek]

These are both LOWER and UPPER end limits for weapons used (medium and heavy turbolasers, respectively), beacouse we have no other info from canon.

No, the 1.5 megaton calculation is the lower limit. An upper limit would be assuming the benefit of the doubt to high end Star Wars, by assuming a large small town size and literal vaporization.

You are assuming figurative vaporization, which is reasonable (although how you calculate scientifically something that is figurative is still not explained), but you therefore cannot claim that your calculation is an upper limit.

You are assuming a small town US sized, despite Star Wars being several OOMs of greater scope than us. You can make 4th wall breaking rebuttals, but you have not shown any other examples of SW authors ever breaking the 4th wall.

You are assuming that the turbolaser bolts are heavy ones, even though from the rooftops of Coruscant the starfighters were stated to be visible, and the same novel heavily implies that the heavy turbolasers were offline. Light turbolasers would still be visible if starfighters were.


An upper limit calculation:

Using some EU here, but LOTF Legacy says, with some slight paragraphing:

"Mandalore only has 4 million people. There are many towns that have more people than us."

Nothing in the movies contradicts this: Mos Eisley is not as much of a town as it is a meeting spot for, as Obi Wan says, scum and villainy, and Tatooine has not the resources to build towns of any decent size, nor the reason to do so given that in a desert you do not want to have towns too large, especially since Tatooine's inhabitants are mostly farmers.

If some towns have >4 million people, then surely small towns may have 1 million; remember, this is an upper limit.

Toronto's square area is 630 km^2; cut in half to 1 million and you have 315 km^2, or a radius of about 9 km.

So since we are calculating an upper limit, we are assuming literal vaporization, which would basically only happen within the fireball itself.

This would turn out to 2 gigatons...for light turbolasers. Eh, that seems to high; perhaps you could assume medium turbolasers.


Obviously, this is an upper limit, but one of which is founded on reasonable facts.

[Picard]

Possible, althought it requires us to ignore logic and rest of canonical evidence. But you got the point.

[Jedi Master Spock]

Rarely is this shown.

No, it's quite common. Look at the list.

They fall under:

A random comic book showing hilariously sub kiloton turbolasers, only to show a pan shot from outer space showing the shots visible from orbit.

Actually, pan shots showing the shots visible from orbit don't always happen - nor do those pan shots typically kick the yield of the weapons up to ICS range.

At best, the visual effects of these comic books are wildly inconsistent; but unfortunately, while the visual effects depicting the explosions themselves are not necessarily accurate "in detail" (i.e., Anakin isn't cartoony), they are showing things such as frequently contradict the ICS, such as humans surviving quite close to the site of impact of a turbolaser bolt in a bombardment.

Some idiot author making a sub kiloton showing of a turbolaser, but in the same book or the next one describes ISD's or other ships as performing feats that quite blatantly require enormous amounts of energy to perform.

Actually, this isn't terribly common. The case you've highlighted in "Slave Ship," as vague as it may be, is the exception, rather than the rule. In general, there are very few feats that ISDs perform that are easily quantified with any precision - not even the bombardment of Caamas.

In any case, total reactor output corresponding directly to total weapons output is a hubris of the ICS. I doubt that sustained weapon output is within an order of magnitude of peak reactor output.

With heavy, capital ship busting photon torpedos, yes, they can be a threat. But TPM and ROTJ show that without these, starfighters are helpless against capital ships.

There's actually nothing that differentiates those protons from ones fired at ground targets or other snubfighters; in fact, in some of the X-Wing cases, we have fighters loaded up for an attack on heavy targets which have to then deal with TIE fighters.

TPM and ROTJ don't actually show that starfighters are helpless against capital ships. ROTJ in particular has a very odd sequence of events. In particular, the Rebel fleet is desperately engaged already, when Lando says this:

LANDO
Only the fighters are attacking. I wonder
what those Star Destroyers are waiting for.


Plain TIEs have been engaging the Rebel capital ships; and only, onscreen, with laser bolts. Of course, once the Rebels drive right into the Imperial capital ships, Rebel fighters which do a remarkable amount of damage to Imperial targets. According to the ICS, these sorts of ships are literally a millionth the potency of a capital ship.

Compare ARC-170 shield strength numbers to Acclamator shield strength numbers. The impact of a snubfighter attacking a capital ship should, according to the ICS, be absolutely nothing. A single glancing blow from a capital ship's turbolaser would deal hundreds of thousands of times the damage of a fighter's strafing run.

It's actually not unusual for the sources depicting snubfighters attacking capital ships to have them use lasers against the capital ships; while weakening the shields first with proton torpedoes is a favored tactic, it's far from the only method of attack. In fact, proton torpedoes are almost only used for initial shield-bursting salvos in the EU sources, and in ROTJ, laser bolts are the primary attack used by fighters on capital ships.

In order for a TCW showing to be admissible as evidence and support a low end yield for turbolasers:

1. They must be in a situation where a high yield weapon is an intelligent thing to do

Which is typically the case.

2. The yield depicted must meet the minimal requirement for the asteroid vaping scene and the "vaporize a small town" quote; triple digit kilotons.

Actually, the minimal requirement for those is quite a bit less than triple digit kilotons. Given that the "vaporize a small town" quote can refer to a heavy turbolaser and what we might see used is a light or medium turbolaser, and given that the "vaporize a small town" quote doesn't require higher than single digit kilotons for a heavy turbolaser, the minimum energy requirements for a turbolaser bolt incident to be consistent with those cases is in the gigajoule bracket.

3. They must have the means to use medium/heavy turbolasers

No, actually, that's not necessary. Light TL yields are also quite relevant - and quite able to contradict the ICS. The ICS claims that light anti-fighter turbolasers are firing off multi-megaton bolts.

So far, few of TCW examples match these, especially not 2. Any sub kiloton turbolasers are either dialed down or otherwise directly contradicted by G canon evidence.

G level evidence directly contradicts very little about low yields. I'm afraid you're greatly mistaken on the flexibility of the G level evidence.

No it's not. The Naboo starfighter fleet did jack all against the trade federation battleship, essentially a converted merchant ship, until Anakin got lucky/help from the Force.

Not surprising, given that the Naboo snubfighters were poorly armed, outnumbered by the Trade Federation fighter screen, and trying to take down ships substantially larger than ISDs.

In order to contradict the ICS, however, we would simply need a single case in which a single N-1 fighter caused a single scratch on a TF battleship's hull in a conventional attack. Such as what Mr. Oragahn is talking about in these two posts.

That's the problem with the ICS figures in relating capital ships and fighters. The ICS figures assume that a capital ship has per unit volume comparable or even superior power output, shield absorption, and firepower, with long range and good accuracy. If that's the case, fighters are pretty much worthless in fleet combat.

Instead, fighters are critical in fleet combat. Book after book blames Imperial losses on the way that Rebels had good fighters with independent hyperspace capabilities, good weapons, good shielding, and good pilots.

Ackbar states that if their shields are disabled, their starfighters might be able to damage the ISD's. A Rebel pilot is incredulous about two X wings facing off against a star destroyer.

Two isn't enough. But twelve? Twenty? Chances start looking up. The idea that Rebel capital ships will be able to soften up Imperial capital ships so that Rebel fighters can disable them out only makes sense if the orders of magnitude aren't ridiculously far apart. It makes sense if a MCC has 10 or 100 times the firepower of an X-Wing, but is unable to apply it as precisely; but it doesn't make sense if an MCC has several million times the firepower of an X-Wing.

What's particularly interesting is the way that the B-Wing is described in the early EU literature (e.g., the Essential Guide books): As a super-heavy fighter with firepower equivalent to smaller capital ships. Originally, the climactic battle in ROTJ was to include a scene where a squadron of B-Wings went in and soloed an ISD - the sort of incident that would line up perfectly with the X-Wing novels.

[Mr. Oragahn]

He works for WankFilm.

Besides, Dark Force Rising also contradicts hull strengths - seeing as how lightsaber can cut throught hull of Dreadnought calss heavy cruiser - and maybe few other things. I'll try to download it from somewhere.

Lightsabres do some really silly stuff, they cut through anything. Heck, it took longer for one to cut through the armoured internal door of a Lucrehulk-class battle ship than through the outer hull of a Trade Federation sort of coreship.

boy I really don't want to have to make this post again as I'm failry sure it will get ignored..by every one like it did the last three times but *takes breath* here goes

The ICS is non canon for one reason that completely trumps all others. The Films do not support that level of fire power speed or anything at all

This is very wrong. Most of the material of the ICSes is not conflicting with the movies. Ony some details, which happen to be outrageously erroneous and put there by design, to fit fanboys' dreams.

The rest is totally acceptable, although it makes it hard to know how far it is reliable. Globally, the most reliable ones are the OT and TPM ICSes. Same goes for the "Inside the Worlds of" books which Saxton didn't infect.

You are mangling context. I was not discussing any TCW scene specifically in this post, I was pointing out that any evidence must meet the lower end limits established by G canon, or they are invalid. That lower limit being vaporizing several meter long asteroids and a small town.

Ahem. The lower ends is TESB asteroids made of inflammable splodium and "vaporizing" meaning "leveling".
That's what we call low ends.

Sidenote : Mos Espa is quite larger than Mos Eisley. It's already several kilometers in width according to a map, and you don't see the entirety of it, and there's much more in length that can be seen.

[Praeothmin]

Ahem. The lower ends is TESB asteroids made of inflammable splodium and "vaporizing" meaning "leveling".
That's what we call low ends.

It's been mentioned many times, and he always ignored it, so I'm sure he'll do so again...

[Mr. Oragahn]

TPM and ROTJ don't actually show that starfighters are helpless against capital ships. ROTJ in particular has a very odd sequence of events. In particular, the Rebel fleet is desperately engaged already, when Lando says this:

LANDO
Only the fighters are attacking. I wonder
what those Star Destroyers are waiting for.

Well, it's just a simple statement there. It doesn't mean the fighters threatened the capital ships, unless some of those fighters and perhaps bombers fired some missiles at the capital ships.

Plain TIEs have been engaging the Rebel capital ships; and only, onscreen, with laser bolts.

I don't see anything like that. Actually, many misses by TIE fighters hit capital ships, including bolts flying towards the large gap of one of the cruisers, and nothing happened.
All capital ships appear totally unmolested until later in the battle when both sides' cruisers engage at close range and then fighters start standing a chance.
I'd also have to check out when the "thermonuclear" explosions occur in the novelization, but it would be interesting if they had happened before both fleets merged.
Also, same novelization clearly states that fighters could engage the supercruiser the moment the fleet would concentrate its fire on it.
Frankly, as I said years ago, I wish Lucas had shown more fire being exchanged by both sides.

Of course, once the Rebels drive right into the Imperial capital ships, Rebel fighters which do a remarkable amount of damage to Imperial targets.

Not that much actually. At best, you see globes being destroyed, and we see very little of what truly caused the destruction of the first one as X-wings get downed, and the Executor's globe is supposed to be attacked once are weakened by Rebel cruisers.

Besides, we see plenty of ships crashing into capital ships of both sides and they come out totally unscathed.

In order to contradict the ICS, however, we would simply need a single case in which a single N-1 fighter caused a single scratch on a TF battleship's hull in a conventional attack. Such as what Mr. Oragahn is talking about in these two posts.

I've long corrected that stance. I think I even did it at the end of the topic you cited, or in one wherein I debated with Kane Starkiller.

We see three N-1s fire three torps towards the top hemisphere of the core. Later on, we see that the core is totally pristine, so these torps did nothing.
Later on, during the strafing run that leads a few N-1s towards the dish, two torps are fired. The one that strikes the dish does make a large explosion, but clearly the explosion would have not been powerful to take out the entire dish. So at best it could have only dented part of it.
But we see later on that the dish is still there: the shadowy structure actually moves. It were just a large scorch mark, it would be immobile and plastered all over the port side of the bridge neck.
The image is not very good so we can't really tell, but a DVD screencap, I'm sure, will easily clear any doubts.
There are other moments when we can still spot the dish.
Right after Anakin gets access to the ship's controls and before he does a hard turn on the left, we can see the N-1 pass in front of the screen, with the ship's core section in the background, and we can distinguish tip of the dish behind.
Then he flies towards the aft of the battleship from its port side, goes around the towers on the back of the engine section and returns towards the core section, and flies to the starboard side of the tower. A droid vulture fighter crashes into the tower. Again, we can see the tip of the dish, and it is totally undamaged.
Finally, just before we see the core explode, we can again see the dish.

Plus none of the droid fighters' missing fire caused any damage to the battleship.

Instead, fighters are critical in fleet combat. Book after book blames Imperial losses on the way that Rebels had good fighters with independent hyperspace capabilities, good weapons, good shielding, and good pilots.

The EU largely has them engage capital ships with opening volleys of torpedoes, and sometimes in the X-Wing series, more damage needs to be brought upon those ships otherwise shields start to recover.

Two isn't enough. But twelve? Twenty? Chances start looking up. The idea that Rebel capital ships will be able to soften up Imperial capital ships so that Rebel fighters can disable them out only makes sense if the orders of magnitude aren't ridiculously far apart. It makes sense if a MCC has 10 or 100 times the firepower of an X-Wing, but is unable to apply it as precisely; but it doesn't make sense if an MCC has several million times the firepower of an X-Wing.

Unless cruisers make holes in the targets' shields.
However, why wouldn't the cruisers simply continue to fire at the same weakness?
The only rationalization I can think of is some complicated idea that involves certain advantages against ray shields and particle shields.
While the cruisers had no mean to significantly weaken the ray shields, the fighters had missiles which could go through particle shields, but the overall shielding system formerly required some softening, which is what the cruisers would provide.
Either the particle shields, by some relation to the ray shields, would become weaker, or more porous, or the attack on the ray shielding forced the Imperials to significantly cut down the flux on particle shielding, allowing A-wings to fire torps and get the bridge's shields down.

What's particularly interesting is the way that the B-Wing is described in the early EU literature (e.g., the Essential Guide books): As a super-heavy fighter with firepower equivalent to smaller capital ships. Originally, the climactic battle in ROTJ was to include a scene where a squadron of B-Wings went in and soloed an ISD - the sort of incident that would line up perfectly with the X-Wing novels.

Damn, I so wish we had actually seen B-wings torp spam ISDs.
B-wings can be such a danger because literature clearly depicts them as armed up to the chin. They're slow and craptastic for dogfighting, but they have such an array of weapons that they can concentrate fire on a single point and bring shields down.
If they can hit some sensitive spot, bingo !

X-wing's complex proton torpedoes might have yields of near 1 KT, but a dumber missile not needing any shield and advanced drive system could make much more room for the warhead. The MG7-As are very compact (smaller than a man's foot, from the OT:ICS) and the size of the warhead inside must be minimal. Not let's think about missiles of the size of sidewinders. See for example Shadow Bombs, essentially proton warheads filled with baradium in lieu of the drive systems and sensor suites.
Two of such bombs could split a 315 meters long Yuuzhan Vong ship in half.

Two B-wings could theoretically easily bring about the equivalent of two or three Fat Boys onto a small surface area, and much more if they'd use heavier thermonuclears.

[Admiral Breetai]

This is very wrong. Most of the material of the ICSes is not conflicting with the movies. Ony some details, which happen to be outrageously erroneous and put there by design, to fit fanboys' dreams.

did you not see where i specified fire power and speed and all that?

The rest is totally acceptable, although it makes it hard to know how far it is reliable. Globally, the most reliable ones are the OT and TPM ICSes. Same goes for the "Inside the Worlds of" books which Saxton didn't infect.

seems like no matter if its comic books or science fiction movie franchises Data books almost always fudge something up huh?

secondary canon source..with errors? I'm not nor ever considering it valid evidence

[Jedi Master Spock]

TPM and ROTJ don't actually show that starfighters are helpless against capital ships. ROTJ in particular has a very odd sequence of events. In particular, the Rebel fleet is desperately engaged already, when Lando says this:

LANDO
Only the fighters are attacking. I wonder
what those Star Destroyers are waiting for.

Well, it's just a simple statement there. It doesn't mean the fighters threatened the capital ships, unless some of those fighters and perhaps bombers fired some missiles at the capital ships.

Plain TIEs have been engaging the Rebel capital ships; and only, onscreen, with laser bolts.

I don't see anything like that. Actually, many misses by TIE fighters hit capital ships, including bolts flying towards the large gap of one of the cruisers, and nothing happened.
All capital ships appear totally unmolested until later in the battle when both sides' cruisers engage at close range and then fighters start standing a chance.
I'd also have to check out when the "thermonuclear" explosions occur in the novelization, but it would be interesting if they had happened before both fleets merged.
Also, same novelization clearly states that fighters could engage the supercruiser the moment the fleet would concentrate its fire on it.
Frankly, as I said years ago, I wish Lucas had shown more fire being exchanged by both sides.

Ah, but this was said earlier:

There is much excitement on the bridge as the attack begins.

The Millennium Falcon and several squads of Rebel fighters head
into an armada of TIE fighters. The sky explodes as a fierce
dogfight ensues in and around the giant Rebel cruisers.

REBEL PILOT
There's too many of them!

LANDO
Accelerate to attack speed! Draw their fire
away from the cruisers.

In the novel, the "thermonuclear fireworks" line comes before Lando notes that the Star Destroyers haven't attacked yet, along with this:

Within a matter of minutes, the battlefield was a diffuse red glow, spotted with puffs of smoke, blazing fireballs, whirling spark showers, spinning debris, rumbling implosions, shafts of light, tumbling machinery, space-frozen corpses, wells of blackness, electron storms. It was a grim and dazzling spectacle. And it was only beginning.

Also, before the Star Destroyers actually engage - by which we mean, the Rebel fleet charges into their midst - this:

It was a scene of pandemonium. Silent, crystalline explosions surrounded by green, violent, or magenta auras. Wildly vicious dogfights. Gracefully floating crags of melted steel; icicle sprays that might have been blood.

A "crag" refers to an upthrust cliff or small mountain, and would not be a very apt choice of words to describe a destroyed fighter.

Of course, once the Rebels drive right into the Imperial capital ships, Rebel fighters which do a remarkable amount of damage to Imperial targets.

Not that much actually. At best, you see globes being destroyed, and we see very little of what truly caused the destruction of the first one as X-wings get downed, and the Executor's globe is supposed to be attacked once are weakened by Rebel cruisers.

Besides, we see plenty of ships crashing into capital ships of both sides and they come out totally unscathed.

There are several cases where fighters are attacking capital ships, and at least pieces of those ships are exploding.

In order to contradict the ICS, however, we would simply need a single case in which a single N-1 fighter caused a single scratch on a TF battleship's hull in a conventional attack. Such as what Mr. Oragahn is talking about in these two posts.

I've long corrected that stance. I think I even did it at the end of the topic you cited, or in one wherein I debated with Kane Starkiller.

We see three N-1s fire three torps towards the top hemisphere of the core. Later on, we see that the core is totally pristine, so these torps did nothing.
Later on, during the strafing run that leads a few N-1s towards the dish, two torps are fired. The one that strikes the dish does make a large explosion, but clearly the explosion would have not been powerful to take out the entire dish. So at best it could have only dented part of it.
But we see later on that the dish is still there: the shadowy structure actually moves. It were just a large scorch mark, it would be immobile and plastered all over the port side of the bridge neck.
The image is not very good so we can't really tell, but a DVD screencap, I'm sure, will easily clear any doubts.
There are other moments when we can still spot the dish.
Right after Anakin gets access to the ship's controls and before he does a hard turn on the left, we can see the N-1 pass in front of the screen, with the ship's core section in the background, and we can distinguish tip of the dish behind.
Then he flies towards the aft of the battleship from its port side, goes around the towers on the back of the engine section and returns towards the core section, and flies to the starboard side of the tower. A droid vulture fighter crashes into the tower. Again, we can see the tip of the dish, and it is totally undamaged.
Finally, just before we see the core explode, we can again see the dish.

Plus none of the droid fighters' missing fire caused any damage to the battleship.

Well, you'll have to forgive me for not having managed to track down the finale to the saga of the dish. I went looking for it, but I couldn't find much.

However, leaving a scorch mark is sufficient.

Instead, fighters are critical in fleet combat. Book after book blames Imperial losses on the way that Rebels had good fighters with independent hyperspace capabilities, good weapons, good shielding, and good pilots.

The EU largely has them engage capital ships with opening volleys of torpedoes, and sometimes in the X-Wing series, more damage needs to be brought upon those ships otherwise shields start to recover.

Two isn't enough. But twelve? Twenty? Chances start looking up. The idea that Rebel capital ships will be able to soften up Imperial capital ships so that Rebel fighters can disable them out only makes sense if the orders of magnitude aren't ridiculously far apart. It makes sense if a MCC has 10 or 100 times the firepower of an X-Wing, but is unable to apply it as precisely; but it doesn't make sense if an MCC has several million times the firepower of an X-Wing.

Unless cruisers make holes in the targets' shields.
However, why wouldn't the cruisers simply continue to fire at the same weakness?
The only rationalization I can think of is some complicated idea that involves certain advantages against ray shields and particle shields.
While the cruisers had no mean to significantly weaken the ray shields, the fighters had missiles which could go through particle shields, but the overall shielding system formerly required some softening, which is what the cruisers would provide.
Either the particle shields, by some relation to the ray shields, would become weaker, or more porous, or the attack on the ray shielding forced the Imperials to significantly cut down the flux on particle shielding, allowing A-wings to fire torps and get the bridge's shields down.

Except, again, we don't actually see much torpedo-firing by fighters in this sort of action. They're firing laser bolts. One possibility is that fighters are able to take advantage of small temporary holes in the shields; another possibility is that the shields have depth, or layering, and the fighters are flying beneath the main ray-shielding. However, every one of these cases leaves a substantial flaw in the defenses of Star Wars capital ships.

The simplest explanation - and this also fits neatly with game mechanics in the computer and role-playing games, so EU authors writing novels that tie in to RPGs or computer games will have this in mind as they write - is that there's just not that huge of a firepower difference.

What's particularly interesting is the way that the B-Wing is described in the early EU literature (e.g., the Essential Guide books): As a super-heavy fighter with firepower equivalent to smaller capital ships. Originally, the climactic battle in ROTJ was to include a scene where a squadron of B-Wings went in and soloed an ISD - the sort of incident that would line up perfectly with the X-Wing novels.

Damn, I so wish we had actually seen B-wings torp spam ISDs.
B-wings can be such a danger because literature clearly depicts them as armed up to the chin. They're slow and craptastic for dogfighting, but they have such an array of weapons that they can concentrate fire on a single point and bring shields down.
If they can hit some sensitive spot, bingo !

X-wing's complex proton torpedoes might have yields of near 1 KT, but a dumber missile not needing any shield and advanced drive system could make much more room for the warhead. The MG7-As are very compact (smaller than a man's foot, from the OT:ICS) and the size of the warhead inside must be minimal. Not let's think about missiles of the size of sidewinders. See for example Shadow Bombs, essentially proton warheads filled with baradium in lieu of the drive systems and sensor suites.
Two of such bombs could split a 315 meters long Yuuzhan Vong ship in half.

Two B-wings could theoretically easily bring about the equivalent of two or three Fat Boys onto a small surface area, and much more if they'd use heavier thermonuclears.

Maybe, if George is in a good mood, he'll have the CG boys spice up the ROTJ battle in the next re-release, and the B-Wings will get their air time.

[StarWarsStarTrek]

No, it's quite common. Look at the list.

And I could compile an even larger list of figures supporting the ICS, and they'll all fall conveniently within a few orders of magnitude. Unlike yours, they'll also be internally consistent.

Actually, pan shots showing the shots visible from orbit don't always happen - nor do those pan shots typically kick the yield of the weapons up to ICS range.

The fact that the pan shots and the close up shots are erroneously different is proof that either the source is unreliable or there is something fishy going on. Either way, you cannot cherry pick portions of a comic that happen to support your argument, even though the very next panel supports a far higher yield estimate.

At best, the visual effects of these comic books are wildly inconsistent; but unfortunately, while the visual effects depicting the explosions themselves are not necessarily accurate "in detail" (i.e., Anakin isn't cartoony), they are showing things such as frequently contradict the ICS, such as humans surviving quite close to the site of impact of a turbolaser bolt in a bombardment.

And they also show shots that are visible from orbit. Like the Taris bombardment from KOTOR, where the shots get progressively stronger as the camera zooms out, until they are multi megaton from orbit.

Actually, this isn't terribly common. The case you've highlighted in "Slave Ship," as vague as it may be, is the exception, rather than the rule. In general, there are very few feats that ISDs perform that are easily quantified with any precision - not even the bombardment of Caamas.

For example, Troy Denning's Star by Star has a bomb small enough to pass as a personal communications device making a 1 km fireball, has fighters doing strafes at near C speeds, then has long range turbolasers having low kiloton yields, and then turbolasers vaporizing 10 km orbital mirrors.

Whoever wrote the X wing series goes from mentioning kilojoules of energy from laser cannons to proton torpedos turning islands with mountain ranges into slag.

In any case, total reactor output corresponding directly to total weapons output is a hubris of the ICS. I doubt that sustained weapon output is within an order of magnitude of peak reactor output.

Then what is the rest of the energy being used for? To cook dinner?

There's actually nothing that differentiates those protons from ones fired at ground targets or other snubfighters; in fact, in some of the X-Wing cases, we have fighters loaded up for an attack on heavy targets which have to then deal with TIE fighters.

Then explain why the proton torpedos on the Naboo starfighters, which were just as large as those used by X wings, were unable to do jack against a converted transport ship. Surely even if Naboo has no army, their proton torpedos would not be several orders of magnitude behind torpeodos that can damage capital ships! The explanation is that proton torpedos have variable yields, just like modern missiles have variable yields.

TPM and ROTJ don't actually show that starfighters are helpless against capital ships. ROTJ in particular has a very odd sequence of events. In particular, the Rebel fleet is desperately engaged already, when Lando says this:

LANDO
Only the fighters are attacking. I wonder
what those Star Destroyers are waiting for.


Plain TIEs have been engaging the Rebel capital ships; and only, onscreen, with laser bolts. Of course, once the Rebels drive right into the Imperial capital ships, Rebel fighters which do a remarkable amount of damage to Imperial targets. According to the ICS, these sorts of ships are literally a millionth the potency of a capital ship.

Compare ARC-170 shield strength numbers to Acclamator shield strength numbers. The impact of a snubfighter attacking a capital ship should, according to the ICS, be absolutely nothing. A single glancing blow from a capital ship's turbolaser would deal hundreds of thousands of times the damage of a fighter's strafing run.

It's actually not unusual for the sources depicting snubfighters attacking capital ships to have them use lasers against the capital ships; while weakening the shields first with proton torpedoes is a favored tactic, it's far from the only method of attack. In fact, proton torpedoes are almost only used for initial shield-bursting salvos in the EU sources, and in ROTJ, laser bolts are the primary attack used by fighters on capital ships.

And yet none of the capital ships were as much as scratched during the battle. Ackbar mentions in the novelization that if they can drop the ISDs' shields, their fighters might stand a chance. The fighters were doing jack all against shielded ISDs.

Which is typically the case.
Actually, the minimal requirement for those is quite a bit less than triple digit kilotons. Given that the "vaporize a small town" quote can refer to a heavy turbolaser and what we might see used is a light or medium turbolaser, and given that the "vaporize a small town" quote doesn't require higher than single digit kilotons for a heavy turbolaser, the minimum energy requirements for a turbolaser bolt incident to be consistent with those cases is in the gigajoule bracket.

Vaporize a small town requires at least high triple digit kilotons as a lower limit.

No, actually, that's not necessary. Light TL yields are also quite relevant - and quite able to contradict the ICS. The ICS claims that light anti-fighter turbolasers are firing off multi-megaton bolts.

They can fire megaton shots, but logically I doubt that light turbolasers would contain such massive overkill against small starfighters that can take no more than a kiloton, at best.

G level evidence directly contradicts very little about low yields. I'm afraid you're greatly mistaken on the flexibility of the G level evidence.

Do you see the irony in this? No? Ok. Well, most of the low end showings in TCW are simply too low to be admissible, because they don't fit vaporizing a small town or vaporizing 40 meter asteroids. They have to be higher than those lower limits in order to be admissible as evidence, but they rarely ever are.

Not surprising, given that the Naboo snubfighters were poorly armed, outnumbered by the Trade Federation fighter screen, and trying to take down ships substantially larger than ISDs.

Which is further proof that laser cannons do jack all against shielded capital ships, unless if you're going to claim that Naboo proton torpedos are magically weaker than mounted laser cannons just because they're peaceful.

In order to contradict the ICS, however, we would simply need a single case in which a single N-1 fighter caused a single scratch on a TF battleship's hull in a conventional attack. Such as what Mr. Oragahn is talking about in these two posts.

And exactly how are scorchmarks contradicting the ICS? The ICS shows that fusion weapons barely scorch capital ship hulls, and voila; starfighters, which carry fusion weapons, barely scorch their hulls. Is this supposed to be a contradiction?

That's the problem with the ICS figures in relating capital ships and fighters. The ICS figures assume that a capital ship has per unit volume comparable or even superior power output, shield absorption, and firepower, with long range and good accuracy. If that's the case, fighters are pretty much worthless in fleet combat.

Nobody said that they're worthless. They just typically don't take down capital ships.

Instead, fighters are critical in fleet combat. Book after book blames Imperial losses on the way that Rebels had good fighters with independent hyperspace capabilities, good weapons, good shielding, and good pilots.

Of course, but Rebel fleets did not routinely try and slam heads against imperial star destroyers.

Two isn't enough. But twelve? Twenty? Chances start looking up. The idea that Rebel capital ships will be able to soften up Imperial capital ships so that Rebel fighters can disable them out only makes sense if the orders of magnitude aren't ridiculously far apart. It makes sense if a MCC has 10 or 100 times the firepower of an X-Wing, but is unable to apply it as precisely; but it doesn't make sense if an MCC has several million times the firepower of an X-Wing.

Nobody said that cruisers have several million times the power of sufficiently armed starfighters, of whom can carry weapons in the gigaton range based on ICS calcs. Therefore, your claims that this contradicts the ICS are invalid, because the ICS calcs still adequately explain it. The only starfighter we see specifically quantified in the AOTC ICS is Slave 1, and there is no reason for it go be equipped with capital ship busting torpedos. Therefore, if we assume the ICS to be true, we can deduce high gigaton level capital ship busting torpedos. Nothing here is contradicted or inadequately explained by the ICS.

What's particularly interesting is the way that the B-Wing is described in the early EU literature (e.g., the Essential Guide books): As a super-heavy fighter with firepower equivalent to smaller capital ships. Originally, the climactic battle in ROTJ was to include a scene where a squadron of B-Wings went in and soloed an ISD - the sort of incident that would line up perfectly with the X-Wing novels.

But obviously the B wing seen was cut, so your point is null. And if we actually saw it happen, then the explanation would be that the B wings had gigaton level torpedos, and the ICS would remain internally consistent. Your alleged contradictions are explained by the ICS.

Meanwhile, darkstar's, for example, calculations don't mesh at all. He claims that the huge streaks of light are heavy turbolasers, and that each are 1.5 megatons. But then he claims that the the power generation of an ISD is only around 500 terawatts, which doesn't make sense at all if it can generate megaton level shots to the point of filling the sky with them. See how it doesn't match up, at all?

And his acceleration figures for the Falcon and ISD's matches out the ISD's being millions of times more powerful than the Falcon, which is exactly what you accuse me of.

Yes, he claims that the Falcon can only apply a few megajoules of thrust, yet then admits that Slave 1's laser cannons can produce many megajoules per shot, and that there is a possibility of them being in the gigajoule range!

[Praeothmin]

And I could compile an even larger list of figures supporting the ICS,

And why don't you, for once?
But not just "oh, Darksaber supports it", but rather "oh, Darksaber supports it because...".
That would be nice for a change, you actually providing evidence...

[Jedi Master Spock]

And I could compile an even larger list of figures supporting the ICS, and they'll all fall conveniently within a few orders of magnitude. Unlike yours, they'll also be internally consistent.

You haven't; and I'm pretty sure you can't. The sources that actually indicate ICS figures are required are basically non-existent. The sources that are even remotely compatible with the ICS are few and far between - for example, Slave Ship's famous "gigatonnage" line. And I wouldn't even say that the ICS books in and of themselves are internally consistent.

The fact that the pan shots and the close up shots are erroneously different

In the event that there is a pan shot that shows something, which is in fact typically not the case.

is proof that either the source is unreliable or there is something fishy going on. Either way, you cannot cherry pick portions of a comic that happen to support your argument, even though the very next panel supports a far higher yield estimate.

I'm not cherry-picking. That's for documentarians, who pretend not to know when dramatic license is being exercised, and take a snippet in isolation while trying to ignore plot and authorial intent.

Say that we do have two scenes, a pan shot showing enormous mushroom clouds engulfing a planet, and then a close intimate shot showing the planet's surface with the heroes running around in panic as things blow up and burn. Which is the more important piece of information? The latter. It's more detailed, more intimate, and by the fact that the heroes actually survived being out in the open as those turbolaser bolts landed, we can dismiss the pan shot as visual hyperbole. We already knew that the illustration only had limited accuracy - real explosions don't look like comic book drawings of explosions - and there's nothing that ties that shot in with other information.

And they also show shots that are visible from orbit. Like the Taris bombardment from KOTOR, where the shots get progressively stronger as the camera zooms out, until they are multi megaton from orbit.

Multi-megaton, unfortunately, remains inconsistent with the ICS.

For example, Troy Denning's Star by Star has a bomb small enough to pass as a personal communications device making a 1 km fireball, has fighters doing strafes at near C speeds, then has long range turbolasers having low kiloton yields, and then turbolasers vaporizing 10 km orbital mirrors.

Which is still orders of magnitude below the ICS figures.

Actually, the only really inconsistent part is making fighter strafes at near-c speeds. Turbolasers being able to eventually deliver megatons, individual long-range bolts falling in the low kiloton range, those are quite consistent with the gold standard of the 1-10 terajoule proton torpedo. The claim of a 1 km fireball will, I believe, need to be backed up; an actual 1 km fireball leads to a much larger blast than 1 km, while a 1 km diameter area of dramatic effect in an illustration would point towards something less powerful than Little Boy, which at 13 kt totally destroyed everything in a circle 1.6 km in radius (i.e., 3 km in diameter).

I wouldn't be surprised to find that the actual quote is rather more innocuous than you're making it out to be.

Whoever wrote the X wing series goes from mentioning kilojoules of energy from laser cannons to proton torpedos turning islands with mountain ranges into slag.

The X-Wing series have a certain measure of inconsistency; however, the incident you mention is one Mr. Oragahn describes in detail here.

It turns out that the "mountain ranges" touted by Saxtonites was, in fact, describing a single volcanic crater:

Salm reached out and touched the holographic world. The island he selected grew up in place of the world of which it was part. As the image expanded, the computer added buildings, mountains, ion-cannon batteries, and other details of military importance. Two steep mountain chains - the edges of an extinct Volcano's crater - enclosed the base like parentheses.

This is a volcanic isle, not necessarily a large one. The "mountain chains" are something more like this than the Himalayas. Unfortunately for the Saxtonite interpretation, it turns out that the method of intended destruction was not, in fact, proton torpedo bombardment, but getting the geothermal generator to blow sky-high:

The island, you see, is part of an old Volcano. The generators are geothermal and old and not up to the strain of raising the shield and powering the ion cannons."

"And if they choose to go turtle instead of trying to shoot?"

"The bomber pilot traced a circle around what would have originally been the edge of the crater. To the south the wall had broken down almost completely
and much of the base had been built on the flat stretch of land that linked the volcano and the bay. On the north side of the crater the wall had begun to erode,but it was just a small divot compared to the gap in the south.

"The shield has to cover everything from the beach to the tops of the mountains. On the North side it should be possible to blast through the mountain and open up enough of a gap to let our bombers in. Once we're under the shield, the generators go and its over.

Grand Isle would be no match for two squadrons of Y-wings. In addition to two laser cannons, the Y-wings sported twin ion cannons and two proton torpedo launchers. Each ship carried eight torpedoes, which meant either of the squadrons packed enough firepower to turn the lush, verdant landscape of Grand Isle into a black, smoking mass of liquid rock.

If roughly two hundred torpedoes can flatten a small volcanic isle, that would be quite a bit more impressive than seen elsewhere in the X-Wing series. Unfortunately, the details don't actually support the idea that Grand Isle is the size of Australia, which is about what's necessary to support ICS figures; and the details anchor this hyperbolic statement down to a much more basic level.

A shield, powered by a geothermal tap, is enough to withstand serious attack. Think about that for a minute. It's about as bad as the TIE fighters' solar-electric engines.

Then what is the rest of the energy being used for? To cook dinner?

Drive systems. Especially hyperdrive systems. The energy requirements of space travel itself are enormous.

Vaporize a small town requires at least high triple digit kilotons as a lower limit.

No. Hiroshima was quite a bit larger than a typical small town - about 350,000 people lived there.

An example of a typical narrative description of the destruction of Hiroshima: NARRATOR: A half-century has passed since Hiroshima was vaporized in an atomic fireball. People genuinely do talk this way; and the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 15 kilotons. A single terajoule of yield is sufficient to obliterate a small densely built town of X,000 inhabitants. Thus, a genuine "lower limit" on that loose narrative description is less than a single kiloton. Not triple digit kilotons.

Vaporizing a small town really could refer to anything in the terajoule or petajoule range. We have roughly six orders of magnitude of wiggle room if we're being particularly generous. This is, of course, not quite enough to make the ICS seem reasonable. ICS-yield bolts don't vaporize small towns; they instead

They can fire megaton shots, but logically I doubt that light turbolasers would contain such massive overkill against small starfighters that can take no more than a kiloton, at best.

That's putting the cart before the horse - and also not quite getting what the ICS is saying. The ICS says that light anti-fighter weapons rate at 6 megatons per shot. The ICS also says that ARC-170 shields can dissipate close to a megaton of energy per second.

You're not quite getting the link here. An ISD is 2 million times the size of a Rebel fighter. Logically speaking, if a kiloton torpedo can one-shot an X-Wing or Y-Wing, 2 gigatons (2 million times as much) should be able to one-shot an ISD - if they have the same power/size ratio. Unfortunately, this is one hundredth of the yield the ICS prescribes for invisibly small weapons on a "troop transport" that is itself barely 15% of the size of an ISD. Saxton is aware of this ratio problem, and so he said that anti-fighter weapons fired multi-megaton bolts, and fighter shields dissipated on the close order of a megaton of energy per second.

Do you see the irony in this? No? Ok. Well, most of the low end showings in TCW are simply too low to be admissible, because they don't fit vaporizing a small town or vaporizing 40 meter asteroids. They have to be higher than those lower limits in order to be admissible as evidence, but they rarely ever are.

I'm afraid that vaporizing a 40 meter asteroid is a bit of an overconfident overstatement. You see, what we actually see - literally - in the film is inconsistent with the thermal yield necessary to totally vaporize a 40 meter asteroid. The debris is too slow; the explosion takes much too long; et cetera. The VFX, in other words, are a crude approximation, as unrealistic as a cartoon.

What we can say is that an ISD can blow up an asteroid more or less the size of the Millennium Falcon. Maybe it's mostly vaporized. Maybe it's partially vaporized, and the parts that aren't flew away as fast-moving debris. The true lower limit of what's seen in the Hoth asteroid belt is much lower than Brian Young claimed it to be, for this reason. As I said, the G level evidence is actually very flexible.

As far as I'm concerned, this flexibility is not wide enough to admit the ICS figures. Even if we assume the asteroids were largely vaporized, we still have medium sized bolts longer than the Falcon barely edging into the megaton range by very generous computations - bolts much larger and brighter than the ones actually striking the Falcon. And the ICS thinks that medium turbolasers should be firing tens of gigatons per bolt.

And exactly how are scorchmarks contradicting the ICS? The ICS shows that fusion weapons barely scorch capital ship hulls, and voila; starfighters, which carry fusion weapons, barely scorch their hulls. Is this supposed to be a contradiction?

Because of how severely the ICS thinks that capital ships should outpower fighters. The ICS figures are written with the assumption that the firepower/size and shield/size ratios of large capital ships are identical to fighters - meaning that a fighter shouldn't be able to as much as scratch the hull.

Nobody said that they're worthless. They just typically don't take down capital ships.

Except when they do. And hence the list.

Of course, but Rebel fleets did not routinely try and slam heads against imperial star destroyers.

Rebel fighters routinely slam heads against smaller capital ships all over the EU. Star Destroyers only rarely.

Nobody said that cruisers have several million times the power of sufficiently armed starfighters, of whom can carry weapons in the gigaton range based on ICS calcs. Therefore, your claims that this contradicts the ICS are invalid, because the ICS calcs still adequately explain it. The only starfighter we see specifically quantified in the AOTC ICS is Slave 1, and there is no reason for it go be equipped with capital ship busting torpedos. Therefore, if we assume the ICS to be true, we can deduce high gigaton level capital ship busting torpedos. Nothing here is contradicted or inadequately explained by the ICS.

And if we actually saw it happen, then the explanation would be that the B wings had gigaton level torpedos, and the ICS would remain internally consistent. Your alleged contradictions are explained by the ICS.

The Slave I is not a fighter. It is substantially larger than a fighter - between one and two orders of magnitude larger, in fact. Its conventional torpedoes, very much larger than proton torpedoes, are rated at 190 megatons by the ICS - meaning that you would have to launch a thousand of them to add up to the yield of a single blast from a "medium" turbolaser mount on an Acclamator. And Fett is supposed to be armed to the teeth. The ICS does claim his seismic charge is 12 gigatons. It's a large unguided and unpropelled bomb, both much larger and much more advanced than a regular proton torpedo - and it would take seventeen of them to match the ICS yield of a single quad-barreled turbolaser on an Acclamator firing once. Both of these figures are well in excess of the energy actually displayed onscreen in AOTC, of course.

Elsewhere in the EU, two dozen proton torpedoes is sufficient to knock down the shields of a Victory Star Destroyer, a ship larger and substantially more powerful than an Acclamator. Given that a Victory should be able to absorb a lengthy pounding from an Acclamator - say, one or more broadsides from the 12x quad medium turbolasers the ICS gives it, which is to say 2.4 teratons per broadside - you need proton torpedoes with not mere gigaton yields, but hundreds of gigatons. Either that, or there's something really special about hitting Star Wars capital ships with torpedoes, which would make the relative rarity of torpedoes really silly; it would make it particularly silly that the "outdated" Victory-class Star Destroyer relies more heavily on missiles. Instead of being the staple of fleet combat, however, capital ship torpedoes are rare.

But obviously the B wing seen was cut, so your point is null.

No, my point is that the Essential Guide series actually claims that the B-Wing has firepower equivalent to small capital ships. Which is one of the numerous implicit contradictions to the ICS model, in which capital ships are stratospherically superior to fighters.

Meanwhile, darkstar's, for example, calculations don't mesh at all. He claims that the huge streaks of light are heavy turbolasers, and that each are 1.5 megatons. But then he claims that the the power generation of an ISD is only around 500 terawatts, which doesn't make sense at all if it can generate megaton level shots to the point of filling the sky with them. See how it doesn't match up, at all?

Actually, if the average power generation of an ISD is 500 terawatts, then an ISD could fire a megaton shot about every ten seconds. Which is actually more frequently than we see the very largest bolts. But I don't agree with him, even though I feel that's a perfectly reasonable figure for the sustained average firepower output of an ISD based on documentarian evidence from the films. I think the peak power generation of an ISD is up in the single digit exawatt range. The reason? Space travel is energy-expensive. And this, I think, would be worth going into a new thread on if you want to talk about peak power generation and sustained firepower output.

[StarWarsStarTrek]

You haven't; and I'm pretty sure you can't. The sources that actually indicate ICS figures are required are basically non-existent. The sources that are even remotely compatible with the ICS are few and far between - for example, Slave Ship's famous "gigatonnage" line. And I wouldn't even say that the ICS books in and of themselves are internally consistent.

If I get time, I can bump a long old thread I made about this and update my sources. There are indeed plenty of sources that imply power generation figures of e23 to e26 joules per second.

In the event that there is a pan shot that shows something, which is in fact typically not the case.


I'm not cherry-picking. That's for documentarians, who pretend not to know when dramatic license is being exercised, and take a snippet in isolation while trying to ignore plot and authorial intent.

Say that we do have two scenes, a pan shot showing enormous mushroom clouds engulfing a planet, and then a close intimate shot showing the planet's surface with the heroes running around in panic as things blow up and burn. Which is the more important piece of information? The latter. It's more detailed, more intimate, and by the fact that the heroes actually survived being out in the open as those turbolaser bolts landed, we can dismiss the pan shot as visual hyperbole. We already knew that the illustration only had limited accuracy - real explosions don't look like comic book drawings of explosions - and there's nothing that ties that shot in with other information.

Or you could rationalize the pan shots as the larger turbolasers, while the in panel shots are displayed as lighter turbolasers or even just small laser cannons. That's preferable to assuming that comic authors are too stupid to scale shots.

And while the close up shots are more important to the story, the pan shots are there for the purpose of describing the bombardment and the scale of it itself.

Multi-megaton, unfortunately, remains inconsistent with the ICS.

Actually, the small laser cannons we see on the cruiser look like the point defense laser cannons described in the ICS and in TPM.

Which is still orders of magnitude below the ICS figures.

A one kilometer fireball would correlate to about 9 megatons, and this is a handheld suicide bomb strapped to someone's chest. It scales up just fine.

Actually, the only really inconsistent part is making fighter strafes at near-c speeds. Turbolasers being able to eventually deliver megatons, individual long-range bolts falling in the low kiloton range, those are quite consistent with the gold standard of the 1-10 terajoule proton torpedo. The claim of a 1 km fireball will, I believe, need to be backed up; an actual 1 km fireball leads to a much larger blast than 1 km, while a 1 km diameter area of dramatic effect in an illustration would point towards something less powerful than Little Boy, which at 13 kt totally destroyed everything in a circle 1.6 km in radius (i.e., 3 km in diameter).

I wouldn't be surprised to find that the actual quote is rather more innocuous than you're making it out to be.

I do not have the quote, which is in Star by Star, with me, but it mentions that a sphere of light or whatever extended; and this is explicitly stated and seen from orbit, one kilometer, which is obviously referring to to the fireball.

The X-Wing series have a certain measure of inconsistency; however, the incident you mention is one Mr. Oragahn describes in detail here.

It turns out that the "mountain ranges" touted by Saxtonites was, in fact, describing a single volcanic crater:

Salm reached out and touched the holographic world. The island he selected grew up in place of the world of which it was part. As the image expanded, the computer added buildings, mountains, ion-cannon batteries, and other details of military importance. Two steep mountain chains - the edges of an extinct Volcano's crater - enclosed the base like parentheses.

This is a volcanic isle, not necessarily a large one. The "mountain chains" are something more like this than the Himalayas. Unfortunately for the Saxtonite interpretation, it turns out that the method of intended destruction was not, in fact, proton torpedo bombardment, but getting the geothermal generator to blow sky-high:

The island, you see, is part of an old Volcano. The generators are geothermal and old and not up to the strain of raising the shield and powering the ion cannons."

"And if they choose to go turtle instead of trying to shoot?"

"The bomber pilot traced a circle around what would have originally been the edge of the crater. To the south the wall had broken down almost completely
and much of the base had been built on the flat stretch of land that linked the volcano and the bay. On the north side of the crater the wall had begun to erode,but it was just a small divot compared to the gap in the south.

"The shield has to cover everything from the beach to the tops of the mountains. On the North side it should be possible to blast through the mountain and open up enough of a gap to let our bombers in. Once we're under the shield, the generators go and its over.

Grand Isle would be no match for two squadrons of Y-wings. In addition to two laser cannons, the Y-wings sported twin ion cannons and two proton torpedo launchers. Each ship carried eight torpedoes, which meant either of the squadrons packed enough firepower to turn the lush, verdant landscape of Grand Isle into a black, smoking mass of liquid rock.

If roughly two hundred torpedoes can flatten a small volcanic isle, that would be quite a bit more impressive than seen elsewhere in the X-Wing series. Unfortunately, the details don't actually support the idea that Grand Isle is the size of Australia, which is about what's necessary to support ICS figures; and the details anchor this hyperbolic statement down to a much more basic level.

A shield, powered by a geothermal tap, is enough to withstand serious attack. Think about that for a minute. It's about as bad as the TIE fighters' solar-electric engines.

Volcanic isles can be large. The Aleutian Islands, although a combination of many smaller islands, is over 17,000 km^2 in area.

Drive systems. Especially hyperdrive systems. The energy requirements of space travel itself are enormous.

Oh, but we know from the novelizations that power can be diverted from those systems to the weapons systems; which makes sense, as hyperdrive is selective in use, as it propulsion.

No. Hiroshima was quite a bit larger than a typical small town - about 350,000 people lived there.

An example of a typical narrative description of the destruction of Hiroshima: NARRATOR: A half-century has passed since Hiroshima was vaporized in an atomic fireball. People genuinely do talk this way; and the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 15 kilotons. A single terajoule of yield is sufficient to obliterate a small densely built town of X,000 inhabitants. Thus, a genuine "lower limit" on that loose narrative description is less than a single kiloton. Not triple digit kilotons.

Vaporizing a small town really could refer to anything in the terajoule or petajoule range. We have roughly six orders of magnitude of wiggle room if we're being particularly generous. This is, of course, not quite enough to make the ICS seem reasonable. ICS-yield bolts don't vaporize small towns; they instead

Hiroshima was not vaporized, and does not fit the definition of vaporization, not even a decent figurative one. We still see buildings standing and survivors.

That's putting the cart before the horse - and also not quite getting what the ICS is saying. The ICS says that light anti-fighter weapons rate at 6 megatons per shot. The ICS also says that ARC-170 shields can dissipate close to a megaton of energy per second.

Which is variable, but reasonable. We know that these shots can essentially one shot fighters, fighters of which a small, unshielded one was slightly harmed by a multi gigajoule direct hit.

You're not quite getting the link here. An ISD is 2 million times the size of a Rebel fighter. Logically speaking, if a kiloton torpedo can one-shot an X-Wing or Y-Wing, 2 gigatons (2 million times as much) should be able to one-shot an ISD - if they have the same power/size ratio. Unfortunately, this is one hundredth of the yield the ICS prescribes for invisibly small weapons on a "troop transport" that is itself barely 15% of the size of an ISD. Saxton is aware of this ratio problem, and so he said that anti-fighter weapons fired multi-megaton bolts, and fighter shields dissipated on the close order of a megaton of energy per second.

One thing in the ICS that I am skeptical of is that starfighters use hypermatter; I have the impression that those are only present on larger ships. However, the claim does make sense...did you just say a megaton per second? Where in the ICS does it say this? Because Slave 1's laser cannons were listed as two kilotons per shot. That doesn't mesh.

I'm afraid that vaporizing a 40 meter asteroid is a bit of an overconfident overstatement. You see, what we actually see - literally - in the film is inconsistent with the thermal yield necessary to totally vaporize a 40 meter asteroid. The debris is too slow; the explosion takes much too long; et cetera. The VFX, in other words, are a crude approximation, as unrealistic as a cartoon.

What we can say is that an ISD can blow up an asteroid more or less the size of the Millennium Falcon. Maybe it's mostly vaporized. Maybe it's partially vaporized, and the parts that aren't flew away as fast-moving debris. The true lower limit of what's seen in the Hoth asteroid belt is much lower than Brian Young claimed it to be, for this reason. As I said, the G level evidence is actually very flexible.

As far as I'm concerned, this flexibility is not wide enough to admit the ICS figures. Even if we assume the asteroids were largely vaporized, we still have medium sized bolts longer than the Falcon barely edging into the megaton range by very generous computations - bolts much larger and brighter than the ones actually striking the Falcon. And the ICS thinks that medium turbolasers should be firing tens of gigatons per bolt.

We do not see any debris left over, so, going by your assertion of authorial intent, it's obvious that there is not intention for there to be super small fragments we conveniently don't see.

Saxton does provide evidence that the debris was vaporized. I am no science expert, and I doubt that you are, either; I think it's safe to say that Saxton's scientific statements are difficult to challenge unless if you too have a science PhD.

Because of how severely the ICS thinks that capital ships should outpower fighters. The ICS figures are written with the assumption that the firepower/size and shield/size ratios of large capital ships are identical to fighters - meaning that a fighter shouldn't be able to as much as scratch the hull.

That hardly makes sense. Fighters are only seen scratching the hull when the shields are down, and the ICS says that fusion rockets can barely scratch the hulls of capital ships. If we see fighters destroying capital ships through their shields, then you may have a point, but we don't.

Except when they do. And hence the list.

We know from the films that they don't, or usually don't. Where do we ever see starfighters taking out capital ships?

Rebel fighters routinely slam heads against smaller capital ships all over the EU. Star Destroyers only rarely.

Right; we almost never see, even in the X wing novels, X wings taking down a star destroyer without some sort of handicap bonus, such as the star destroyer being damaged or inoperational.

The Slave I is not a fighter. It is substantially larger than a fighter - between one and two orders of magnitude larger, in fact. Its conventional torpedoes, very much larger than proton torpedoes, are rated at 190 megatons by the ICS - meaning that you would have to launch a thousand of them to add up to the yield of a single blast from a "medium" turbolaser mount on an Acclamator. And Fett is supposed to be armed to the teeth. The ICS does claim his seismic charge is 12 gigatons. It's a large unguided and unpropelled bomb, both much larger and much more advanced than a regular proton torpedo - and it would take seventeen of them to match the ICS yield of a single quad-barreled turbolaser on an Acclamator firing once. Both of these figures are well in excess of the energy actually displayed onscreen in AOTC, of course.

There is no reason for the Slave 1 to have an anti capital ship arsenal. Plenty of evidence points towards trying to take on a capital ship with a starfighter is suicide, and Jango Fett had no intention of fighting a capital ship with a squadron.

Elsewhere in the EU, two dozen proton torpedoes is sufficient to knock down the shields of a Victory Star Destroyer, a ship larger and substantially more powerful than an Acclamator. Given that a Victory should be able to absorb a lengthy pounding from an Acclamator - say, one or more broadsides from the 12x quad medium turbolasers the ICS gives it, which is to say 2.4 teratons per broadside - you need proton torpedoes with not mere gigaton yields, but hundreds of gigatons. Either that, or there's something really special about hitting Star Wars capital ships with torpedoes, which would make the relative rarity of torpedoes really silly; it would make it particularly silly that the "outdated" Victory-class Star Destroyer relies more heavily on missiles. Instead of being the staple of fleet combat, however, capital ship torpedoes are rare.

Really? Then explain why the tie fighters or X wing didn't launch the 24 proton torpedos that can allegedly take down a capital ship's shields. The Naboo starfighters probably had plenty more proton torpedos than that, and they were fighting a converted transport ship.

And although I do not remember the source, I could have sworn reading somewhere that proton torpedos disrupt shields via some sort of EMP. Gah, I can't find it.

No, my point is that the Essential Guide series actually claims that the B-Wing has firepower equivalent to small capital ships. Which is one of the numerous implicit contradictions to the ICS model, in which capital ships are stratospherically superior to fighters.

That's ridiculous. How is this:



Going to have firepower on par with this:



You accuse the ICS of misrepresenting capital ship/fighter ratios, yet this source claims that a B wing has firepower on par with a ship hundreds of times its size, with the same tech base?

Actually, if the average power generation of an ISD is 500 terawatts, then an ISD could fire a megaton shot about every ten seconds. Which is actually more frequently than we see the very largest bolts. But I don't agree with him, even though I feel that's a perfectly reasonable figure for the sustained average firepower output of an ISD based on documentarian evidence from the films. I think the peak power generation of an ISD is up in the single digit exawatt range. The reason? Space travel is energy-expensive. And this, I think, would be worth going into a new thread on if you want to talk about peak power generation and sustained firepower output.

We can see in ROTJ that turbolasers, even heavy turbolasers, have a rate of firepower of around one shot every two seconds.

We can also see in the same quote that darkstar uses that a decent portion of the sky was filled with said turbolasers. If these were only fired once every ten seconds, the sky would not be full of them, unless if the ships obediently all fired at the same time, in which case the spectators from the rooftops of Coruscant would have seen a short onslaught of turbolasers every ten seconds.

My point is that low end Star Wars calcs are very inconsistent and do not mesh. Darkstar says that the Falcon's power output is in the middle megawatts; which means that, if an X wing has similar power generation, even though it's far smaller, it would have taken the Rebel fleet weeks to reach the Death Star in the battle of Yavin. And there are claims that this figure is disproven by a contradictory imperial viewscreen, but no evidence for this has been put forward.

We see the Slave 1 firing 13 or more gigajoule level shots at a RoF of about 700 rounds per minute, meaning that the Slave 1 was outputting as much as a few hundred gigajoules every second, and this is not accounting for its targeting systems, propulsion and shielding.