The Death Star's power output confirmed!

[Mr. Oragahn]

No, and Kane Starkiller already tried that. It would be quicker to rewrite the very fabric of the English language than spin doctor the clear formulation of simple fractions into some obscure logarithmic scale.
You can read that part of the debate, but imho it's a bit of a waste of time, as KS kept pushing that for several pages, all for nothing.
It's as straight forward as "I'm going to use this system's power at a third of what its maximum capacity".

I'll have a look at it. Sorry, what thread did you say that was in again?

Starts with the last two posts of this page.
Good luck.

Besides, several of the quotes I provided about superlasers show that full thirds of the weapon, either from the Death Star or close to what the DS' SL can achieve, don't blast full thirds of a planet: they tend do be described burning continents.
It doesn't even matter, because during the whole Despayre incident, they kept firing the weapon with the same level of charge, and despite that, the effects kept getting bigger way beyond the point of multiplying 1/3 by 3 (or 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3).
What was clearly logarithmic (sort of) were the effects, not the power.

Don't several of those quotes refer to superlaser platforms vastly smaller than the DS, though? Much of the stuff from the DESB for example was talking about the Eclipse ISD if I remember it right.

Indeed, and that's quite silly. That was Dark Empire era of wank, forgetting that if the Empire had been obligated to build a battle station that wide, it was for some reason.

Nonetheless, they still measure their firepower in relation to the Death Star' superlaser.

But if it's written in "Death Star" the way you say it was, then yes obviously that doesn't work remotely like any non-magical energy transfer.

Indeed it's completely fraked up. Now that's the point I've and some others have been trying to get through Bobby's skull, but that's some tough alloy we're dealing with.

The links to the quotes are at the top of this post.

[StarWarsStarTrek]

Yeah, whatever.
It's not like the speed and position of the asteroid field hasn't been adressed within the last two weeks, when you were posting.
To make it simple, it would be hard for an asteroid field to remain there. Besides, if the asteroids had kept the speed at which the visible part of the planet blew out, MF would have been hit by c fractional bits.

Since when was the asteroid field anywhere near the planet when the Falcon arrived, and how do you know how long after Alderaan was destroyed the Falcon arrived? Oh, you don't.

You assume that e38 J is correct.
It is not, as evidenced numerous times.

Then use the e32 joule figure. It hardly changes the point that according to your undefined theory, Star Wars can create perpetual motion machines.

Ha?
No, I'm merely saying that strange phenomena took place, and that the energy, most of it actually, didn't come from the superlaser, although the superlaser still rates, in terms of raw energy, very high.

Until you define this "strange phenomena", your point is null.

Re read the quote JMS provided in that thread.
Obviously, you have not even clicked on the links.
You are wrong and wasting my time.

What thread? Where? JMS has provided plenty of links; you need to be more specific.

No, the charging is quite specific. They said 1/3, and all three shots were fired at that yield. All following recharge times were roughly similar.
I presented the theory, in the "Death Star" thread, that the superlaser saturates a target, so much that past a given thresholds, some out of DET effects begin to manifest, and past another threshold, the increase is almost exponential and the energy reaches levels enough to scatter a planet.
I also posit that if the saturation effect is brought to its maximum at once, the effects are even greater, and you get the hyperspace reflux ring.
It's as good as any other theory, but I'm yet to find one that is better.

Exponential effects with energy? How? Explain how the energy magically increases over a threshold.

You're attempting to refute the visuals of the film, which shows a planet being blown to bits. The laws of thermodynamics imply a lower limit of e32 joules. Your response is an undefined, unsupported, physics violating law that is mysteriously never mentioned in any tech books or novels.

The Star Wars database for the superlaser says that it unleashes unthinkable amounts of raw power. You could stretch the quote to make it that it unleashes unthinkable amounts of raw power to instigate the chain reaction and that this raw power is really only a few gigatons, but then why is the chain reaction never mentioned? If a chain reaction did exist, then it would be far more important to mention than the raw power, which is the first thing mentioned in the page.

Or the original ICS mentioning that the hypermatter reactor has enough power output to destroy the planet, meaning that the reactor itself has the required power, not the planet's matter being manipulated to provide energy.

Oh shit, are you now arguing over my expression?

No, I'm arguing over your desperation at nitpicking events to support your physics violating, undefined theory of the superlaser somehow simulating an e32 - e38 joule event. How? You don't explain; maybe a wizard did it.

I couldn't care less about quantum torps.
This thread has nothing to do with Star Trek, so keep your off topic red herrings to yourself.

This board has everything to do with Star Trek. The thread topic is not an ends unto itself; it's a means to an end of the overarching SW vs ST debate.

In a similar fashion:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi5mj6-C ... re=related

7:15. Bam! The Nemesis explodes and has the same halo effect that the superlaser does. That surely must mean that warp cores are really just a technobabble illusion, right? Surely this disproves that ST ships use antimatter!

I clearly proved that you are trolling this very thread, by ignoring evidence from it, numerous times, and that since page 1, and against several warnings.
I'm talking of evidence which was already present in other older threads and which were already referenced when you started to present your claims.
You can complain all you want, that's not going to move me. It's a bit late to play the victim here.

No, what you do is to bombard me with random posts you want me to respond to in response to a post that has absolutely nothing to do with what you're saying.

If you want me to respond to them, post them in the thread I made for the sole purpose of you guys asking me questions, or accept the debate. Instead, you inexplicably send me these random posts of yours that you want me to respond to, because obviously my personal life is of no consequence compared to starfleet jedi.

I'd rather see the quote than attempt understanding your sentence. Thank you.

Page 216:

The collapsed residue of the battle station would continue to consume itself for several days, forming for that brief span of time the most impressive tombstone in this corner of the cosmos.

Also, from the ANH script:

A huge beam of light emanates from within a cone-shaped area and converges into a single laser beam out toward Alderaan. The small green planet of Alderaan is blown into space dust.

What the fuck?
Is that all you can do? Dodge with some red herrings when I blast your arguments apart?
Again, I don't care about Trek. It has no place in this thread, get that shit out of it.
Mike already told you to stop derailing topics that way.
Don't you get it, genius?

Don't you get it? You're assuming that the engineers overkilled the Cruiser for no reason. Fine then; maybe they overkilled by two orders of magnitude. That's still e22 joules! What point are you trying to make here?

Large. As far as I'm concerned, I rate the DET part of the superlaser at teratons/low petatons.

And where did you pull that number from? Your ass?

So you're claiming that the superlaser blew Alderaan into "space dust", accelerating its matter at at least escape velocity and imparting e32 joules of energy into the planet, using only e21 joules? That the superlaser is a perpetual motion machine that can create energy out of nothing?

It's his number and... in light of Star Wars, it's not measly at all.
Oh sure, that's what? a medium TL for an ICSer? I understand the shock.

Given that the modern world nuclear arsenal comes strikingly close to such a number, and that Star Wars has wildly proliferated fusion power and weapons? 23 gigatons is not stellar level, it is hardly worth everybody in universe gawking and frightened by its awesome power.

"Oh Rebels, you're gonna be so scared! There's this uber superlaser, and it can impart 23 gigatons, more powerful than...uh, a few thousand nukes, in a galaxy with gabillions of fusion reactors available to the public!"

"Oh! We are so scared! Not only at the ability to violate physics by somehow imparting e32 joules on an object using only e22 joules, but at the awe inspiring power of 0.000001% of the power of a sun!"

We put links, we repeated it. You have an obligation to read it or shut up, if you intend to repeat your baseless claims like a broken record.

I did respond to your claims. It's not my fault that every time I respond to your claims, you bring up more in the middle of a debate.

See, the constructive part is like the whole chunk of my post that contained links to very relevant posts, but you demonstrated times and times again that you don't even read what other people wrote.
So don't even dare talk about me not being constructive.
And for that other trolling round, I'll report you.

Where in your post are there any links? Oh, no, there are none. Your arguments falls with this quote:

The Death Star's prime weapon unleashed unthinkable levels of raw energy capable of tearing apart entire worlds. That energy began deep inside the gargantuan station, and was eventually channeled into an array of eight tributary laser cannons

1. Raw power is mentioned, but a chain reaction involved with this, which would be crucially important information, is not.

2. "capable of tearing apart entire worlds" is a relative clause describing raw power; there's nothing else it could describe gramatically. It is not referring to the planet's matter itself being used as a reactant.

3. The quote, managed by Lucasarts, says that the energy comes from several huge laser cannons. Laser cannons are not chain reaction weapons.



And this one:

the Death Star is built around a hypermatter reactor which can generate enough power to destroy an entire planet.

You know as well as me that claiming that the quote really means:

"the hypermatter reactor can generate enough power to instigate a chain reaction that would destroy a planet"

Which is technically possible, but you know very well that the author did not intend this, the wording matches the DET description better than it does some chain reaction that is mysteriously not mentioned or alluded to.

Yeah, whatever, enjoy the rest of your time here before you go running at SDN.

I don't have an account on SDN. Would you like to post more nonessential butt-hurt insults?

You see, you spend half of your time related to me claiming that I am a troll, in which case you have no idea what a troll really is. You're just throwing around such a word to describe anybody who does not conform to your position, which is that the Death Star really uses a conservation of energy violating superlaser that can transfer more energy to a target than it produces, a chain reaction that is mysteriously never mentioned by any source in all of Star Wars continuity.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Yeah, whatever.
It's not like the speed and position of the asteroid field hasn't been adressed within the last two weeks, when you were posting.
To make it simple, it would be hard for an asteroid field to remain there. Besides, if the asteroids had kept the speed at which the visible part of the planet blew out, MF would have been hit by c fractional bits.

Since when was the asteroid field anywhere near the planet when the Falcon arrived,...

Everyone expected the planet to be there, meaning that they were headed for Alderaan, and we've seen that ships generally come in and out of hyperspace some view planetary radii away from said planet anyway.
Instead, they got served with rocks.

... and how do you know how long after Alderaan was destroyed the Falcon arrived? Oh, you don't.

Doesn't really matter much, since the astrocomputer predicts the planets' orbits. Be it under one big ball or detached fragments, the mass will still be affected by the local star's gravity field.
The odd thing is that there actually was a field.
It may be partially explained by the explosion not being so clean and instead being very chaotic, to the point that some kinetic energy got nullified by other explosions, but that would require an irregular spread of several explosions all over the planet's crust or mantle, which would once again hurt the DET view, since it's all supposed to be one big explosion.

You assume that e38 J is correct.
It is not, as evidenced numerous times.

Then use the e32 joule figure. It hardly changes the point that according to your undefined theory, Star Wars can create perpetual motion machines.

Drop the fancy term you learned. You think you have proved anything? Nope.
Besides, you also assume that e32 J is correct.
I'm not going to engage into circular reasoning to use e32/38 J to prove that e32/38 J is correct. That's silly.

Ha?
No, I'm merely saying that strange phenomena took place, and that the energy, most of it actually, didn't come from the superlaser, although the superlaser still rates, in terms of raw energy, very high.

Until you define this "strange phenomena", your point is null.

No. I defined it more than enough. Now it's up to you to actually read the thread, or the "Death Star novel" one. Take your pick.

Re read the quote JMS provided in that thread.
Obviously, you have not even clicked on the links.
You are wrong and wasting my time.

What thread? Where? JMS has provided plenty of links; you need to be more specific.

No, because I provided the links again in a very recent post, in that very recent thread of yours, which you all ignored.
I even said that JMS posted the quotes in this thread.

So stop buying time and concede. Your foolish act is totally transparent.

No, the charging is quite specific. They said 1/3, and all three shots were fired at that yield. All following recharge times were roughly similar.
I presented the theory, in the "Death Star" thread, that the superlaser saturates a target, so much that past a given thresholds, some out of DET effects begin to manifest, and past another threshold, the increase is almost exponential and the energy reaches levels enough to scatter a planet.
I also posit that if the saturation effect is brought to its maximum at once, the effects are even greater, and you get the hyperspace reflux ring.
It's as good as any other theory, but I'm yet to find one that is better.

Exponential effects with energy? How?

Technomagic. Moving on.

Explain how the energy magically increases over a threshold.

I don't have to explain the details.
It's TV physics, that's all, and all we're left with since normal physics are KIA.

You're attempting to refute the visuals of the film, which shows a planet being blown to bits.

No, I'm not attempting to do so. I take into account ALL the visuals.
It's quite funny how the staunchest wongies always loved to pull that accusation, when it was demonstrated time and time again that they are the ones who ignored large swathes of the evidence.
And now, you're doing the same as they do.
You're not even original.

The laws of thermodynamics imply a lower limit of e32 joules.

If the entire planet explodes at once and keeps expanding.
Obviously, you have not watched the same movie, the one with delayed explosions, rings of something, a polar cap that actually collapses (see RSA's website, again) and an asteroid field that remains in place.

Plus the evidence that hyperspace is involved and that the mass of the planet was partially pushed into hyperspace.

Your response is an undefined, unsupported, physics violating law that is mysteriously never mentioned in any tech books or novels.

Bollocks.
All empty accusations.
You have proved nothing, and you constantly fail at basic comprehension of visual and literal evidence.

The Star Wars database for the superlaser says...

Blah blah blah.
That's part has already been covered.
Mike even warned you for that. Twice.
And I provided the links.

You're digging your own grave, and only making JMS' decision easier.

Or the original ICS mentioning that the hypermatter reactor has enough power output to destroy the planet, meaning that the reactor itself has the required power, not the planet's matter being manipulated to provide energy.

The ICS is not the sole EU source involved here.
Other quotes disagree, and I won't annoy you over the way the ICS drawing reimagines the destruction of Alderaan.
Apparently the artist think that the superlaser is some kind of giant gravy sauce gun:

Oh shit, are you now arguing over my expression?

No, I'm arguing over your desperation at nitpicking events to support your physics violating, undefined theory of the superlaser somehow simulating an e32 - e38 joule event. How? You don't explain; maybe a wizard did it.

OK, so you are indeed nitpicking over my expression, and then backpedaling with some bullshit.

I couldn't care less about quantum torps.
This thread has nothing to do with Star Trek, so keep your off topic red herrings to yourself.

This board has everything to do with Star Trek. The thread topic is not an ends unto itself; it's a means to an end of the overarching SW vs ST debate.

No, it's a SW thread, and I don't care about ST.
So there. Nice attempt though.

In a similar fashion:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi5mj6-C ... re=related

7:15. Bam! The Nemesis explodes and has the same halo effect that the superlaser does. That surely must mean that warp cores are really just a technobabble illusion, right? Surely this disproves that ST ships use antimatter!

You wasted your time.

I clearly proved that you are trolling this very thread, by ignoring evidence from it, numerous times, and that since page 1, and against several warnings.
I'm talking of evidence which was already present in other older threads and which were already referenced when you started to present your claims.
You can complain all you want, that's not going to move me. It's a bit late to play the victim here.

No, what you do is to bombard me with random posts you want me to respond to in response to a post that has absolutely nothing to do with what you're saying.

If you want me to respond to them, post them in the thread I made for the sole purpose of you guys asking me questions, or accept the debate. Instead, you inexplicably send me these random posts of yours that you want me to respond to, because obviously my personal life is of no consequence compared to starfleet jedi.

I clearly proved that you are trolling this very thread, by ignoring evidence from it, numerous times, and that since page 1, and against several warnings.
I'm talking of evidence which was already present in other older threads and which were already referenced when you started to present your claims.
You can complain all you want, that's not going to move me. It's a bit late to play the victim here.

I'd rather see the quote than attempt understanding your sentence. Thank you.

Page 216:

The collapsed residue of the battle station would continue to consume itself for several days, forming for that brief span of time the most impressive tombstone in this corner of the cosmos.

So that your earth shattering quote? A piece of text that essentially says this is now a graveyard with debris that keep burning for days?
I also like how it says that it has collapsed.

Funny how everything already was in the novelization from day one. :D

Also, from the ANH script:

A huge beam of light emanates from within a cone-shaped area and converges into a single laser beam out toward Alderaan. The small green planet of Alderaan is blown into space dust.

Very vague, and I didn't notice that Alderaan was green.

You're such a bad debater.

What the fuck?
Is that all you can do? Dodge with some red herrings when I blast your arguments apart?
Again, I don't care about Trek. It has no place in this thread, get that shit out of it.
Mike already told you to stop derailing topics that way.
Don't you get it, genius?

Don't you get it? You're assuming that the engineers overkilled the Cruiser for no reason.

Ha. I thought you were going to explain why I don't get the necessity of your stupid Treky red herring.

Fine then; maybe they overkilled by two orders of magnitude. That's still e22 joules! What point are you trying to make here?

Good. They fired e22 J, just for the sake of it, because they wanted to have fun. Why not? Is there any law that states that they couldn't try to supervape the ship and anything that was within a multi km radius out?

Are you a Joule nazi or something?

Large. As far as I'm concerned, I rate the DET part of the superlaser at teratons/low petatons.

And where did you pull that number from? Your ass?[/quote]

There are some reasonable parameters to consider which lead to such figures, based on the description of Despayre's demise.
What I look at is the first shot, because the planet has not been bombarded yet, so it's in a pristine state.

The relevant piece from the description of the first shot against the planet:

"Seismographic sensors showed that massive groundquakes had begun, rumbling down into the bowels of the planet. Giant waves in the ocean, generated by the shifting of tectonic plates, rushed for the shores of the big continent. Volcanoes spewed lava. Clouds of steam and volcanic ash began to rapidly obscure the surface from view - but not fast enough."

• giant waves : not descriptive enough, we can still go with an earthquake of magnitude 9 on the Richter scale to make impressive waves. Eventually, we could push that to 10, which would be 15 gigatons... although those are released over a long period of time, so they're much less efficient at making ripples, therefore they would tend to lead to a high end when trying to extrapolate a yield from tsunamis. Despayre has a gravity of .75g, where g, I assume, are gravities just like on Earth. That would make Despayre smaller than Earth. Perhaps there were megatsunamis, but there is no description of massive areas of land being swallowed by waters. As we can see on this map of the latest Japanese tsunami, there's no need to have many of them to cover large swathes of one of the vastest oceans of our planet. A hundred of them would seem rather good enough, and at 9 on the Richter scale, we have a total energetic release of 480 megatons. So we get 48 gigatons.
• tectonic plate shifting : too vague to exploit, but we may take a look at the effects of the meteoretic impact which produced the Chicxulub crater. Some other website I read some time ago said that the Chicxulub impact did send tremors all over Earth, and is now officially rated at 96~100 teratons, 12.55 on the Richter scale. There are impact specifics, although they don't provide much about the earthquakes. If anything, it's pretty much the high end of all. We could NOT be looking at teratons anyway and spread several of those events across the planet, because we'd largely overshoot the desired effects. The planet would be largely remodeled.
• most likely already existing volcanoes...
  
  
  • spewing lava : again, hard to tell. However, in light of what I just said above, large amounts of teratons spread all over the planet would have resulted in more than mere volcanoes brought back to life: we'd be looking at the innards of the planet turned inside out, with the crust cracked in many places and with lava spilling through those massive shears, while entire chains of mountains would disappear and others would be created. Note that this is more in line with what happens after the second shot, proving that the second shot, albeit delivering the same charge, actually resulted in effects many orders of magnitude greater than those of the first blast. Then, of course, the final third shot literally blew the planet apart, which points to an even greater discrepancy in the magnitude of the effects.
  • spewing clouds of steam and ash : we can go on the extreme side of things, by comparing with La Garita eruption, rated at 240 gigatons in total. The wikipedia page says that it spewed enough material to fill Lake Michigan. If all of Earth was covered by replicates of that lake, based on its surface area (58,000 km²) and that of Earth (510,072,000 km²), there would be about 8794 of them.
    That's about 2,110,560 GT, or ~2.1 petatons.
    However, that's clearly more than the effects described in the snippet. Let's note that the spreading of particles was "not fast enough".
    We can look at the 1980 eruption of Mt Saint Helens.
    The ash cloud covered 60,000 km² of land.
    So you'd need about 8501 St Helens eruptions to cover the whole of Earth. On the 24 megatons of the whole event, 7 were released by blast, which is what propelled the whole matter up.
    So we're looking at a total of 59,507 megatons of energy here, or 59.5 gigatons.
    This would still provide more than enough spare energy to produce earthquakes well above the 8th degree on the Richter scale. Hundreds of gigatons in total would actually fore all those effects, including serious 9th degree earthquakes.

We also notice that the energy is rather well distributed. There is absolutely no description whatsover of the equivalent of an impact or massive exhaust jet. It's like the superweapon, as it touched the planet, spread all over its surface. Which is funnily similar to RSA's theory in some ways. At least faaaar more similar to his than to any Wongie explanation about a massive ray that slams into a planet and digs a big hole there.

It would seem that I actually overestimated the possible true DET yield of the superlaser by many orders of magnitude, with the real level hovering around mid to high gigatons, perhaps low teratons.

Aside from the more detailed figures, all of this was already presented in the "Death Star" novel thread.

Let me report this picture from the other Death Star thread, which more or less explains what I think happens:

So you're claiming that the superlaser blew Alderaan into "space dust",...

If I'm correct, that's not my claim but a quotation from one of the sources.

accelerating its matter at at least escape velocity...

Some of it... while other pieces collapsed... and in the end, the field fixed itself so much that despite the observed kinetic energy, it acted like it had never reached anywhere close to escape velocity. This is easily observed.

... and imparting e32 joules of energy into the planet,...

I'm not claiming that the superlaser imparted e32 J.

using only e21 joules?

Probably much less now. It imparted some energy which allowed some odd phenomenon to kick in and release even more energy, juts like you use a match to put on fire some stuff covered in gasoline. Combustion, after all, is also a chain reaction. :)

That the superlaser is a perpetual motion machine that can create energy out of nothing?

You know, it's not because you've discovered the meaning of perpetual motion machine on Internet yesterday that you now have to repeat it several times a post.
Something happened, some energy came from elsewhere than the superlaser, and I love ponies.

It's his number and... in light of Star Wars, it's not measly at all.
Oh sure, that's what? a medium TL for an ICSer? I understand the shock.

Given that the modern world nuclear arsenal comes strikingly close to such a number, and that Star Wars has wildly proliferated fusion power and weapons? 23 gigatons is not stellar level, it is hardly worth everybody in universe gawking and frightened by its awesome power.

"Oh Rebels, you're gonna be so scared! There's this uber superlaser, and it can impart 23 gigatons, more powerful than...uh, a few thousand nukes, in a galaxy with gabillions of fusion reactors available to the public!"

Which don't even produce petawatts apparently, unless they begin to get stupidly large.
It's also an universe where higher canon struggles to bring yields superior to the megaton range, and with the EU having several references that clearly cap the firepower of capital ships in the terawatt range.

So yes, a two digits gigaton blast would take a thousand ships with more fire power than I've...

We put links, we repeated it. You have an obligation to read it or shut up, if you intend to repeat your baseless claims like a broken record.

I did respond to your claims.

You did type something in reply to some parts of my posts. I can't really say that it was anything worthwhile.
You certainly and repeatedly proved that you don't even read the quotes from the book Death Star and larger list of superlaser quotes I have provided.

It's not my fault that every time I respond to your claims, you bring up more in the middle of a debate.

Actually, my position is rather so simple and has so little changed that I don't need to add more during the middle of a debate.
If anything, if you were not so obtuse and trolling, this would already be over.

See, the constructive part is like the whole chunk of my post that contained links to very relevant posts, but you demonstrated times and times again that you don't even read what other people wrote.
So don't even dare talk about me not being constructive.
And for that other trolling round, I'll report you.

Where in your post are there any links? Oh, no, there are none.

Quoted for the humour.

Your arguments falls with this quote:

The Death Star's prime weapon unleashed unthinkable levels of raw energy capable of tearing apart entire worlds. That energy began deep inside the gargantuan station, and was eventually channeled into an array of eight tributary laser cannons

1. Raw power is mentioned, but a chain reaction involved with this, which would be crucially important information, is not.

But it doesn't exclude a chain reaction either, and that's enough for me considering that other sources and even the movies require a complex explanation.

2. "capable of tearing apart entire worlds" is a relative clause describing raw power; there's nothing else it could describe gramatically. It is not referring to the planet's matter itself being used as a reactant.

You'd be right if you wouldn't forget the necessary fudging, and I think other people here quoted the entirety of that database section, which notably pointed out that the core was fusion based, n'est-ce pas?

3. The quote, managed by Lucasarts, says that the energy comes from several huge laser cannons. Laser cannons are not chain reaction weapons.

But laser cannons are supposed to behave remotely close to DET weapons. However, the superlaser did not.
You fail again.
Notice that it gets tiring pointing out your incapacity to properly analyze a rather simple scene and pieces of some other books.
You are obviously NOT interested into a proper debate.

And this one:

the Death Star is built around a hypermatter reactor which can generate enough power to destroy an entire planet.

You know as well as me that claiming that the quote really means:

"the hypermatter reactor can generate enough power to instigate a chain reaction that would destroy a planet"

Which is technically possible, but you know very well that the author did not intend this, the wording matches the DET description better than it does some chain reaction that is mysteriously not mentioned or alluded to.

But then, again, in light of other quotes, descriptions and things that happened in the movie, this requires to be understood differently than the way you do. Otherwise, it's cherry picking.
Notice that the official website database is one of the weakest sources of all. It has a long record of being both wrong on several points, and being often edited.

Yeah, whatever, enjoy the rest of your time here before you go running at SDN.

I don't have an account on SDN. Would you like to post more nonessential butt-hurt insults?

Read the sentence, again. Is there any insult in it?

You see, you spend half of your time related to me claiming that I am a troll, in which case you have no idea what a troll really is. You're just throwing around such a word to describe anybody who does not conform to your position, which is that the Death Star really uses a conservation of energy violating superlaser that can transfer more energy to a target than it produces, a chain reaction that is mysteriously never mentioned by any source in all of Star Wars continuity.

Troll.

(That was a short btw.)

[Praeothmin]

a chain reaction that is mysteriously never mentioned by any source in all of Star Wars continuity

Except, y'know, IN THE FREAKING DEATH STAR NOVEL, WHICH WOULD NICELY EXPLAIN THE MULTIPLE EXPLOSIONS IN THE FREAKING MOVIES WHEN THE DS FIRES AT ALDERAAN...

[StarWarsStarTrek]

Everyone expected the planet to be there, meaning that they were headed for Alderaan, and we've seen that ships generally come in and out of hyperspace some view planetary radii away from said planet anyway.
Instead, they got served with rocks.

You can see planets from quite some while away just using your eyes, not to mind the fact that Han was probably also relying on his instruments to see if Alderaan was there.

Doesn't really matter much, since the astrocomputer predicts the planets' orbits. Be it under one big ball or detached fragments, the mass will still be affected by the local star's gravity field.
The odd thing is that there actually was a field.
It may be partially explained by the explosion not being so clean and instead being very chaotic, to the point that some kinetic energy got nullified by other explosions, but that would require an irregular spread of several explosions all over the planet's crust or mantle, which would once again hurt the DET view, since it's all supposed to be one big explosion.

What's this supposed to mean? The asteroids we see whipping past the Falcon are a miniscule portion of the planet's mass, meaning that you're judging the entire explosion, which we clearly see has debris, because of 0.0000001% of the planet's mass. What's more, if the DET theory is right, then there is no contradiction; any debris that was cleanly accelerated would be long gone, and that which is left may not have had as much energy imparted to it.

Why? Because the superlaser is not 100% efficient. That's why most of the debris is gone by the time the Falcon arrived, because most was accelerated to 1/3 C.

Drop the fancy term you learned. You think you have proved anything? Nope.

Obviously you do not bother to explain how your undefined theory conforms with the laws of thermodynamics.

Besides, you also assume that e32 J is correct.
I'm not going to engage into circular reasoning to use e32/38 J to prove that e32/38 J is correct. That's silly.

Oh course it's correct; otherwise, the planet would have simply collapsed onto itself from its gravity well. Are you even thinking this through?

No. I defined it more than enough. Now it's up to you to actually read the thread, or the "Death Star novel" one. Take your pick.

So go ahead and restate your definition, because depending on what sources you use, it shifts from "the Death Star's hypermatter reactor shunted them into hyperspace!" to "the superlaser converted the planet's mass into energy!"

No, because I provided the links again in a very recent post, in that very recent thread of yours, which you all ignored.
I even said that JMS posted the quotes in this thread.

So stop buying time and concede. Your foolish act is totally transparent.

You know, my buying time technique would be the most ineffective I could use, because you could easily crush it just by sending the link.

Technomagic. Moving on.

So you expect me to throw out the DET method that actually exists in favor of your theory, of which the only explanation is "technomagic"?

I don't have to explain the details.
It's TV physics, that's all, and all we're left with since normal physics are KIA.

So if you want to throw out real physics, why are you pro Trek members still trying to calculate yields like we are using real life physics and real life measurements?

The burden of proof rests on your theory, because our "theory" is really just the laws of thermodynamics combined with the formula for kinetic energy and the laws of gravitation, all of which are about as close to proven as you can get.

No, I'm not attempting to do so. I take into account ALL the visuals.
It's quite funny how the staunchest wongies always loved to pull that accusation, when it was demonstrated time and time again that they are the ones who ignored large swathes of the evidence.
And now, you're doing the same as they do.
You're not even original.

One of the visuals shows that the post explosion planet is FULL OF DEBRIS that is SCATTERING OUTWARDS. How do you explain this? That it gained 1/3 C velocity, or at least escape velocity, without having that energy imparted to it?

If the entire planet explodes at once and keeps expanding.

Which, in a vacuum, it will. Gosh, do I need to spell this out for you?

Obviously, you have not watched the same movie, the one with delayed explosions, rings of something, a polar cap that actually collapses (see RSA's website, again) and an asteroid field that remains in place.

None of which your theory explains.

The best explanation can be attributed to the hypermatter reactor and its exotic tachyon technobabble. The Death Star explosions had similar effects. However, you jump to the conclusion that the nature of the superlaser being wonky somehow means that it uses less energy to generate X, when the more physics conforming answer is that the exotic technique allows for it to produce MORE energy to generate X, without magically reducing the threshold for X.

In fact, the Death Star novel explains that the hypermatter reactor allows for MORE ENERGY that REAL SPACE MASS-ENERGY CONVERSION allows. This means:

1. The hypermatter reactor uses its wonkyness to produce MORE energy, NOT to rape physics reduce the threshold needed to do stuff

2. Hypermatter reactor exceed what is possible in real space mass-energy conversion; in other words, hypermatter exceeds antimatter in energy potential.

Plus the evidence that hyperspace is involved and that the mass of the planet was partially pushed into hyperspace.

Which you interpret as reducing the threshold needed to do the effect instead of increasing the energy to meet the threshold.

It's like no child left behind; their stupid solution is not to make students smarter to meet standards, but to lower the standards!

Bollocks.
All empty accusations.
You have proved nothing, and you constantly fail at basic comprehension of visual and literal evidence.

Nothing? I don't need to provide anything, because I have hundreds of years of physics behind the DET 'theory'. The burden of proof is on you to explain why your undefined theory works better than the laws of physics.

Blah blah blah.
That's part has already been covered.
Mike even warned you for that. Twice.
And I provided the links.

You're digging your own grave, and only making JMS' decision easier.

Mike warned me because you outright lied by saying that the quote did not exist, and he didn't bother to read my side of the story until I appealed to him.

Would you like to actually respond to the post, and PROVE your claim that it "could" be that "raw power" really means "raw power, but also in complement with chain reactions that are never mentioned, even though it would be far more crucial than the raw power that is mentioned in the first sentence"?

The ICS is not the sole EU source involved here.
Other quotes disagree, and I won't annoy you over the way the ICS drawing reimagines the destruction of Alderaan.
Apparently the artist think that the superlaser is some kind of giant gravy sauce gun:

But of course, you feel that your EU source is more valid than an equal canon status EU source because...a wizard did it.

OK, so you are indeed nitpicking over my expression, and then backpedaling with some bullshit.

No.

1. The visuals show the planet's mass being scattered.
2. The visuals show the mass being scattered at extreme speeds, as does physics
3. The ANH script and SW database describe Alderaan being blown to "space dust" and "rubble" respectively.
4. The fact that Alderaan isn't there when the Falcon arrives means that this is true.
5. Physics tell us that accelerating an object requires energy, and we can easily calculate this.
6. Math tells us that this equals out to a lower limit of e32 joules.

So please, explain how the planet's mass was accelerated by e32 joules (REQUIRED to scatter the planet LIKE WE SEE IT HAPPEN:



Without e32 joules being imparted by the superlaser.

No, it's a SW thread, and I don't care about ST.
So there. Nice attempt though.

You don't care about ST?

You wasted your time.

Is this supposed to be a rebuttal?

By your same logic, ST ships don't use antimatter, they use the same technobabble you claim the Death Star superlaser does.

I'd rather see the quote than attempt understanding your sentence. Thank you.

What quote?

So that your earth shattering quote? A piece of text that essentially says this is now a graveyard with debris that keep burning for days?

No, it's a grave that's the most impressive in this corner of the cosmos. Clearly you did not read the quote in detail.

To make it clear, cosmic tombstones would include things like black holes.

I also like how it says that it has collapsed.

Funny how everything already was in the novelization from day one. :D

Yeah, if you take the word literally, it probably means that the hypermatter reactor 'collapsed' much of the station into a sort of black hole, which also rationalizes both the part about it being a tombstone and the lack of an Endor holocaust in the Battle of Endor.

Very vague, and I didn't notice that Alderaan was green.

You're such a bad debater.

It's a freaking typo, nitpicker. And it's not vague at all. The planet was blown to "space dust". You can debate what size "space dust" is, but it is obviously matter, and therefore proof that the planet's matter was indeed scattered.

Ha. I thought you were going to explain why I don't get the necessity of your stupid Treky red herring.

Good. They fired e22 J, just for the sake of it, because they wanted to have fun. Why not? Is there any law that states that they couldn't try to supervape the ship and anything that was within a multi km radius out?

Are you a Joule nazi or something?

[/quote]

Prove that they overkilled. Prove it! Oh, no, you're just claiming that they overkilled "for fun" (why engineers would risk overkill just for fun, even though since it's in space you can't witness the fun like in mythbusters, so it's pointless, you do not explain) to try and rationalize it with your undefined theory.

There are some reasonable parameters to consider which lead to such figures, based on the description of Despayre's demise.
What I look at is the first shot, because the planet has not been bombarded yet, so it's in a pristine state.

The relevant piece from the description of the first shot against the planet:

"Seismographic sensors showed that massive groundquakes had begun, rumbling down into the bowels of the planet. Giant waves in the ocean, generated by the shifting of tectonic plates, rushed for the shores of the big continent. Volcanoes spewed lava. Clouds of steam and volcanic ash began to rapidly obscure the surface from view - but not fast enough."

• giant waves : not descriptive enough, we can still go with an earthquake of magnitude 9 on the Richter scale to make impressive waves. Eventually, we could push that to 10, which would be 15 gigatons... although those are released over a long period of time, so they're much less efficient at making ripples, therefore they would tend to lead to a high end when trying to extrapolate a yield from tsunamis. Despayre has a gravity of .75g, where g, I assume, are gravities just like on Earth. That would make Despayre smaller than Earth. Perhaps there were megatsunamis, but there is no description of massive areas of land being swallowed by waters. As we can see on this map of the latest Japanese tsunami, there's no need to have many of them to cover large swathes of one of the vastest oceans of our planet. A hundred of them would seem rather good enough, and at 9 on the Richter scale, we have a total energetic release of 480 megatons. So we get 48 gigatons.
• tectonic plate shifting : too vague to exploit, but we may take a look at the effects of the meteoretic impact which produced the Chicxulub crater. Some other website I read some time ago said that the Chicxulub impact did send tremors all over Earth, and is now officially rated at 96~100 teratons, 12.55 on the Richter scale. There are impact specifics, although they don't provide much about the earthquakes. If anything, it's pretty much the high end of all. We could NOT be looking at teratons anyway and spread several of those events across the planet, because we'd largely overshoot the desired effects. The planet would be largely remodeled.
• most likely already existing volcanoes...
  
  
  • spewing lava : again, hard to tell. However, in light of what I just said above, large amounts of teratons spread all over the planet would have resulted in more than mere volcanoes brought back to life: we'd be looking at the innards of the planet turned inside out, with the crust cracked in many places and with lava spilling through those massive shears, while entire chains of mountains would disappear and others would be created. Note that this is more in line with what happens after the second shot, proving that the second shot, albeit delivering the same charge, actually resulted in effects many orders of magnitude greater than those of the first blast. Then, of course, the final third shot literally blew the planet apart, which points to an even greater discrepancy in the magnitude of the effects.
  • spewing clouds of steam and ash : we can go on the extreme side of things, by comparing with La Garita eruption, rated at 240 gigatons in total. The wikipedia page says that it spewed enough material to fill Lake Michigan. If all of Earth was covered by replicates of that lake, based on its surface area (58,000 km²) and that of Earth (510,072,000 km²), there would be about 8794 of them.
    That's about 2,110,560 GT, or ~2.1 petatons.
    However, that's clearly more than the effects described in the snippet. Let's note that the spreading of particles was "not fast enough".
    We can look at the 1980 eruption of Mt Saint Helens.
    The ash cloud covered 60,000 km² of land.
    So you'd need about 8501 St Helens eruptions to cover the whole of Earth. On the 24 megatons of the whole event, 7 were released by blast, which is what propelled the whole matter up.
    So we're looking at a total of 59,507 megatons of energy here, or 59.5 gigatons.
    This would still provide more than enough spare energy to produce earthquakes well above the 8th degree on the Richter scale. Hundreds of gigatons in total would actually fore all those effects, including serious 9th degree earthquakes.

We also notice that the energy is rather well distributed. There is absolutely no description whatsover of the equivalent of an impact or massive exhaust jet. It's like the superweapon, as it touched the planet, spread all over its surface. Which is funnily similar to RSA's theory in some ways. At least faaaar more similar to his than to any Wongie explanation about a massive ray that slams into a planet and digs a big hole there.

It would seem that I actually overestimated the possible true DET yield of the superlaser by many orders of magnitude, with the real level hovering around mid to high gigatons, perhaps low teratons.

Aside from the more detailed figures, all of this was already presented in the "Death Star" novel thread.

Let me report this picture from the other Death Star thread, which more or less explains what I think happens:

So let me get this straight:

You claim that the superlaser is NOT det, and that 99.99999999999999%, with no exaggeration, comes from the chain reaction. Then, you assume that at 33% power, suddenly there is no chain reaction, and it's all DET?

What's more, if you think that the suplerlaser was high teratons, explain why the 100% superlaser accelerated the planet by e32 joules*.


*Before you roll your eyes:

1. Do you agree that the planet's mass was scattered at escape velocity? I'm not asking if it was from DET; just whether it happened.

a) If yes: move on
b) If no: explain why we SEE the mass being scattered far faster than escape velocity AND explain why said mass is 99.99999% not there when the Falcon arrives.

PS: If you think that the mass was somehow converted into energy, explain why we see debris when it's destroyed, why there are asteroid chunks and. why the script and database say that it was blown into pieces

And if you claim that the mass-energy conversion doesn't have to be 100% perfect, that doesn't solve the fact that ALL of the mass was scene right after the superlaser acted; otherwise, you'd see most of it 'disappear'.

2. Explain how your chain reaction allows for e32 joules to be 'simulated' WITHOUT the superlaser imparting that energy. Where does the energy come from?

If I'm correct, that's not my claim but a quotation from one of the sources.

Some of it... while other pieces collapsed... and in the end, the field fixed itself so much that despite the observed kinetic energy, it acted like it had never reached anywhere close to escape velocity. This is easily observed.

Some? The asteroids moving past the Falcon were quite comfortably at escape velocity; just because 0.000000001% of the planet's mass, actually more than the asteroids imply, was only accelerated at a little above escape velocity doesn't mean that it wasn't. Nor does it support your claim that only "some" was accelerated when:

1. Most of the matter is gone when the Falcon arrives
2. We see the MAJORITY of the debris flying outward without slowing down after the explosion.

I'm not claiming that the superlaser imparted e32 J.

But if most or even some of the mass was indeed accelerated to escape velocity, that kinetic energy had to have come from somewhere, and the only energy being imparted to it that's significant is the superlaser.

Probably much less now. It imparted some energy which allowed some odd phenomenon to kick in and release even more energy, juts like you use a match to put on fire some stuff covered in gasoline. Combustion, after all, is also a chain reaction. :)

Combustion is not an odd phenomena that defies physics. This is not a nitpick; it's the fact that you cannot explain this odd phenomena at all, not even to Treknobabble levels.

You know, it's not because you've discovered the meaning of perpetual motion machine on Internet yesterday that you now have to repeat it several times a post.

Here is an example of you making an outright factual incorrect statement that I just discovered the meaning of perpetual motion machine. I cannot prove it to you, but I know that this is not true, and therefore that you are wrong.

Something happened, some energy came from elsewhere than the superlaser, and I love ponies.

Energy came from where? Subspace? Quantum? Was e32 joules just lying around somewhere?

Which don't even produce petawatts apparently, unless they begin to get stupidly large.
It's also an universe where higher canon struggles to bring yields superior to the megaton range, and with the EU having several references that clearly cap the firepower of capital ships in the terawatt range.

So yes, a two digits gigaton blast would take a thousand ships with more fire power than I've...

On the contrary, the dialogue would do like this:

Mon Montha: We have news of a powerful superlaser. I could go into the magic chain reaction it uses to destroy a planet, usually requiring millions of times the output of the sun, while only using eleven orders of magnitude less energy, a chain reaction that is perhaps the most effective input-output of all time, but I won't. Instead, I'll not mention it or hint at it at all...well, except for now, and any hypothetical technical guides will fail to mention such a revolutionary, awe inspiring chain reaction that makes fusion look like manual labor in comparison.

Rebel: Why?

Mon Montha: Because I have something far more important. The DET portion of the beam contains 23 gigatons of energy! That's more firepower than half the starfleet! I am terrified of the raw power of that...if I were to write a tech book, the very first thing I would mention would be that such power is "unthinkable amounts of raw power". It's so powerful that the most efficient chain reaction even conceived is not even worth mentioning!

Rebel: But couldn't a type 0 civilization that's discovered nuclear fusion, something that we use galaxy-wide, a few decades ago construct a nuclear weapons arsenal rivaling-

Mon Montha: Come on!

You did type something in reply to some parts of my posts. I can't really say that it was anything worthwhile.
You certainly and repeatedly proved that you don't even read the quotes from the book Death Star and larger list of superlaser quotes I have provided.

I have the Death Star novel. Something tells me that you don't. Instead, you nitpick stuff you like from it while ignoring:

1. That the hypermatter reactor was stated to be able to produce bursts exceeding the weekly output of several main sequence stars*

2. That hypermatter was stated to exceed real space mass-energy conversion.

3. That the book confirms that said hypermatter, more powerful than antimatter, is used on star destroyers.

4. This is a little off topic, but the book specifies somewhere along 3500 G's of acceleration for a random shuttle.

*And no, a layperson, which the person whose PoV it was was, would not refer to a red dwarf as a main sequence star; he'd be referring to stars he's most familiar with.

Actually, my position is rather so simple and has so little changed that I don't need to add more during the middle of a debate.
If anything, if you were not so obtuse and trolling, this would already be over.

See, "obtuse" and "trolling" contradict each other. Usually, a troll knows that he or she is wrong but keeps on trolling. Do you even get your definitions right?

Quoted for the humour.


But it doesn't exclude a chain reaction either, and that's enough for me considering that other sources and even the movies require a complex explanation.

It doesn't exclude a chain reaction, but you can hardly argue that the term "unthinkable amounts of raw power" looks like a description of a chain reaction more than DET. Surely you can claim that the author mentions 23 gigatons as "unthinkable amounts of raw power" even though our modern nuclear arsenal reasonably approaches that, but doesn't bother to mention a chain reaction that boosts effects by 12 orders of magnitude, but the quote fits DET better.

You'd be right if you wouldn't forget the necessary fudging, and I think other people here quoted the entirety of that database section, which notably pointed out that the core was fusion based, n'est-ce pas?

You are wrong:

he weapon's heart drew power directly from the station's raging hypermatter core, converting and amplifying the colossal powers into focussed energy.

Hey, it says that it draws power directly from the hypermatter reactor. Oh, you say, but it doesn't say that it does not also draw power from the planet's mass! Nah, it would just mention the power from the hypermatter reactor, even though literally 99.9999999999999% comes from somewhere else if the chain reaction is to be believed.

But laser cannons are supposed to behave remotely close to DET weapons. However, the superlaser did not.
You fail again.
Notice that it gets tiring pointing out your incapacity to properly analyze a rather simple scene and pieces of some other books.
You are obviously NOT interested into a proper debate.

I fail again? Your stupid circular reasoning of dismissing a quote supporting my side by using the disputed conclusion of your side is stupid.

But then, again, in light of other quotes, descriptions and things that happened in the movie, this requires to be understood differently than the way you do. Otherwise, it's cherry picking.
Notice that the official website database is one of the weakest sources of all. It has a long record of being both wrong on several points, and being often edited.

Other quotes? I just provided 3 quotes blatantly supporting DET, and your response is...oh, other quote contradict it!

Read the sentence, again. Is there any insult in it?

Yes, there is. But if you did not mean anything, I apologize.

Troll.

(That was a short btw.)

Ah, so you're beyond the point of backing up your accusations.

Persecutor: murderer.
Defense lawyer: prove it. You-
Persecutor: murderer. You did not bother to attend the man's funeral, so you're obviously hiding something.
Defense lawyer: my client did not even know the man or that he had died.
Persecutor: murderer.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Everyone expected the planet to be there, meaning that they were headed for Alderaan, and we've seen that ships generally come in and out of hyperspace some view planetary radii away from said planet anyway.
Instead, they got served with rocks.

You can see planets from quite some while away just using your eyes, not to mind the fact that Han was probably also relying on his instruments to see if Alderaan was there.

Yeah, sure. Just let's see you prove that. Meanwhile, I have the vast majority of jumps in/out of hyperspace proving me right.
*yawn*

Doesn't really matter much, since the astrocomputer predicts the planets' orbits. Be it under one big ball or detached fragments, the mass will still be affected by the local star's gravity field.
The odd thing is that there actually was a field.
It may be partially explained by the explosion not being so clean and instead being very chaotic, to the point that some kinetic energy got nullified by other explosions, but that would require an irregular spread of several explosions all over the planet's crust or mantle, which would once again hurt the DET view, since it's all supposed to be one big explosion.

What's this supposed to mean?

If there had been one explosion with more than enough energy to propel all mass beyond escape velocity, there wouldn't be any field left with all concentrated there. DUH

The asteroids we see whipping past the Falcon are a miniscule portion of the planet's mass, meaning that you're judging the entire explosion, which we clearly see has debris, because of 0.0000001% of the planet's mass. What's more, if the DET theory is right, then there is no contradiction; any debris that was cleanly accelerated would be long gone, and that which is left may not have had as much energy imparted to it.

Why? Because the superlaser is not 100% efficient. That's why most of the debris is gone by the time the Falcon arrived, because most was accelerated to 1/3 C.

If it's not that efficient, you'll have to stop using Saxton's figures. For the remind, he actually goes go with e38 J, and e32 J is the whole planet still reaching escape velocity, which in this paragraph above, you just droppped.

Welcome to my world!

Drop the fancy term you learned. You think you have proved anything? Nope.

Obviously you do not bother to explain how your undefined theory conforms with the laws of thermodynamics.

Who said it doesn't obey laws of thermodynamics?
Hyperspace seems to fit in real space, despite being rather weird. Well, I appeal to this weirdness. It exists in SW, so that's fine.

Besides, you also assume that e32 J is correct.
I'm not going to engage into circular reasoning to use e32/38 J to prove that e32/38 J is correct. That's silly.

Oh course it's correct; otherwise, the planet would have simply collapsed onto itself from its gravity well. Are you even thinking this through?

Can you be consistent from one paragraph to another in the same post?
Mm....

No. I defined it more than enough. Now it's up to you to actually read the thread, or the "Death Star novel" one. Take your pick.

So go ahead and restate your definition, because depending on what sources you use, it shifts from "the Death Star's hypermatter reactor shunted them into hyperspace!" to "the superlaser converted the planet's mass into energy!"

Again?
I didn't say the planet's mass was converted, although it could be very well be part of the effect if we go with the novelization.
I'm not exactly that much inclined to give an undisputable theory as much as I actually care to point out that it's certainly not DET.
Providing an auxiliary theory is just a bonus to fill a void.

No, because I provided the links again in a very recent post, in that very recent thread of yours, which you all ignored.
I even said that JMS posted the quotes in this thread.

So stop buying time and concede. Your foolish act is totally transparent.

You know, my buying time technique would be the most ineffective I could use, because you could easily crush it just by sending the link.

Pro tip: let's buy us both time and stop typing that shit and click on the link. I'm pretty sure that by now, you don't even remember why you need to click on the link.
Geez.

Technomagic. Moving on.

So you expect me to throw out the DET method that actually exists in favor of your theory, of which the only explanation is "technomagic"?

Technobabble works as well, but I wanted to be original.

I don't have to explain the details.
It's TV physics, that's all, and all we're left with since normal physics are KIA.

So if you want to throw out real physics, why are you pro Trek members still trying to calculate yields like we are using real life physics and real life measurements?

I always said there's a Direct Energy Transfer (DET) part to it, so yep!

No, I'm not attempting to do so. I take into account ALL the visuals.
It's quite funny how the staunchest wongies always loved to pull that accusation, when it was demonstrated time and time again that they are the ones who ignored large swathes of the evidence.
And now, you're doing the same as they do.
You're not even original.

One of the visuals shows that the post explosion planet is FULL OF DEBRIS that is SCATTERING OUTWARDS. How do you explain this? That it gained 1/3 C velocity, or at least escape velocity, without having that energy imparted to it?

Nice dodge. I spoke of the explosion, not its post effect.
But notice that you're also wrong on the post effects. In that last post of yours, you can't even know if you want to stick with Saxton's numbers or admit that the explosion wasn't capable of actually pushing debris that fast.
Pwah.

If the entire planet explodes at once and keeps expanding.

Which, in a vacuum, it will. Gosh, do I need to spell this out for you?

You are absolutely right and we can all expect an empty spac -oh wait, what's that asteroid field that lingers there?
This shit is starting to loose sense. :D
Too cool!

Obviously, you have not watched the same movie, the one with delayed explosions, rings of something, a polar cap that actually collapses (see RSA's website, again) and an asteroid field that remains in place.

None of which your theory explains.

Magic did it. I don't care, as long as it's absolutely clear that DET eats its potatoes and roots as well, dirt included.
Which it does.
Yay!

The best explanation can be attributed to the hypermatter reactor and its exotic tachyon technobabble.

Oh look, big hypocrite, you're using "technobabble" as well now!

The Death Star explosions had similar effects. However, you jump to the conclusion that the nature of the superlaser being wonky somehow means that it uses less energy to generate X, when the more physics conforming answer is that the exotic technique allows for it to produce MORE energy to generate X, without magically reducing the threshold for X.

The more physics conforming answer is rather very limited: it would be one big explosion, and bye bye.
Fortunately, people with eyes and half a brain can actually that there's something fishy with that one.

In fact, the Death Star novel explains that the hypermatter reactor allows for MORE ENERGY that REAL SPACE MASS-ENERGY CONVERSION allows. This means:
1. The hypermatter reactor uses its wonkyness to produce MORE energy, NOT to rape physics reduce the threshold needed to do stuff
2. Hypermatter reactor exceed what is possible in real space mass-energy conversion; in other words, hypermatter exceeds antimatter in energy potential.

If it can provide more energy than mass-energy conversion, it is violating laws of physics. You can't pull energy out of nowhere, and especially not out of matter beyond its mass, unless you pull it out of somewhere else.
And, fortunately enough, when the beam hits the planet, the first explosion is nowhere close to e32 J, and the second one leaves plenty of effects that just don't fit with a DET phenomenon. Actually, the mere fact that a second explosion occured fucks up the whole DET theory.

Do you understand that?

Can you just say yes or no? Can you?

Plus the evidence that hyperspace is involved and that the mass of the planet was partially pushed into hyperspace.

Which you interpret as reducing the threshold needed to do the effect instead of increasing the energy to meet the threshold.

No. X energy is needed to meet the odd physics' threshold. This threshold has nothing to do with gravitational binding energy. The GBE will be dealt with the extra energy that comes from somewhere, likely hyperspace, once the odd physics' threshold is passed.

The ICS is not the sole EU source involved here.
Other quotes disagree, and I won't annoy you over the way the ICS drawing reimagines the destruction of Alderaan.
Apparently the artist think that the superlaser is some kind of giant gravy sauce gun:

But of course, you feel that your EU source is more valid than an equal canon status EU source because...a wizard did it.

No, because more sources agree against what you think is correct. Oops!

Good. They fired e22 J, just for the sake of it, because they wanted to have fun. Why not? Is there any law that states that they couldn't try to supervape the ship and anything that was within a multi km radius out?
Are you a Joule nazi or something?

Prove that they overkilled. Prove it!

No. Don't need to. We don't know how much energy the put into that.
Perhaps they wanted to make a demonstration to Tarkin.

Oh, no, you're just claiming that they overkilled "for fun" (why engineers would risk overkill just for fun, even though since it's in space you can't witness the fun like in mythbusters, so it's pointless, you do not explain) to try and rationalize it with your undefined theory.

And what's that? Overkilled? Where was it stated that it threatened the station?
Somehow, you think that because the yield I'm attributing to this event is greater than the figure I go with, suddenly this makes the same event a danger with my figure.
Let's get clear. They fired it, and it worked. Period.

I hope you won't mind that I trimmed down your post, btw. It was full of useless drivel. I already repeated myself several times in that post you're (hopefully) reading.

There are some reasonable parameters to consider which lead to such figures, based on the description of Despayre's demise.
What I look at is the first shot, because the planet has not been bombarded yet, so it's in a pristine state.

The relevant piece from the description of the first shot against the planet:

"Seismographic sensors showed that massive groundquakes had begun, rumbling down into the bowels of the planet. Giant waves in the ocean, generated by the shifting of tectonic plates, rushed for the shores of the big continent. Volcanoes spewed lava. Clouds of steam and volcanic ash began to rapidly obscure the surface from view - but not fast enough."

• giant waves : not descriptive enough, we can still go with an earthquake of magnitude 9 on the Richter scale to make impressive waves. Eventually, we could push that to 10, which would be 15 gigatons... although those are released over a long period of time, so they're much less efficient at making ripples, therefore they would tend to lead to a high end when trying to extrapolate a yield from tsunamis. Despayre has a gravity of .75g, where g, I assume, are gravities just like on Earth. That would make Despayre smaller than Earth. Perhaps there were megatsunamis, but there is no description of massive areas of land being swallowed by waters. As we can see on this map of the latest Japanese tsunami, there's no need to have many of them to cover large swathes of one of the vastest oceans of our planet. A hundred of them would seem rather good enough, and at 9 on the Richter scale, we have a total energetic release of 480 megatons. So we get 48 gigatons.
• tectonic plate shifting : too vague to exploit, but we may take a look at the effects of the meteoretic impact which produced the Chicxulub crater. Some other website I read some time ago said that the Chicxulub impact did send tremors all over Earth, and is now officially rated at 96~100 teratons, 12.55 on the Richter scale. There are impact specifics, although they don't provide much about the earthquakes. If anything, it's pretty much the high end of all. We could NOT be looking at teratons anyway and spread several of those events across the planet, because we'd largely overshoot the desired effects. The planet would be largely remodeled.
• most likely already existing volcanoes...
  
  
  • spewing lava : again, hard to tell. However, in light of what I just said above, large amounts of teratons spread all over the planet would have resulted in more than mere volcanoes brought back to life: we'd be looking at the innards of the planet turned inside out, with the crust cracked in many places and with lava spilling through those massive shears, while entire chains of mountains would disappear and others would be created. Note that this is more in line with what happens after the second shot, proving that the second shot, albeit delivering the same charge, actually resulted in effects many orders of magnitude greater than those of the first blast. Then, of course, the final third shot literally blew the planet apart, which points to an even greater discrepancy in the magnitude of the effects.
  • spewing clouds of steam and ash : we can go on the extreme side of things, by comparing with La Garita eruption, rated at 240 gigatons in total. The wikipedia page says that it spewed enough material to fill Lake Michigan. If all of Earth was covered by replicates of that lake, based on its surface area (58,000 km²) and that of Earth (510,072,000 km²), there would be about 8794 of them.
    That's about 2,110,560 GT, or ~2.1 petatons.
    However, that's clearly more than the effects described in the snippet. Let's note that the spreading of particles was "not fast enough".
    We can look at the 1980 eruption of Mt Saint Helens.
    The ash cloud covered 60,000 km² of land.
    So you'd need about 8501 St Helens eruptions to cover the whole of Earth. On the 24 megatons of the whole event, 7 were released by blast, which is what propelled the whole matter up.
    So we're looking at a total of 59,507 megatons of energy here, or 59.5 gigatons.
    This would still provide more than enough spare energy to produce earthquakes well above the 8th degree on the Richter scale. Hundreds of gigatons in total would actually fore all those effects, including serious 9th degree earthquakes.

We also notice that the energy is rather well distributed. There is absolutely no description whatsover of the equivalent of an impact or massive exhaust jet. It's like the superweapon, as it touched the planet, spread all over its surface. Which is funnily similar to RSA's theory in some ways. At least faaaar more similar to his than to any Wongie explanation about a massive ray that slams into a planet and digs a big hole there.

It would seem that I actually overestimated the possible true DET yield of the superlaser by many orders of magnitude, with the real level hovering around mid to high gigatons, perhaps low teratons.

Aside from the more detailed figures, all of this was already presented in the "Death Star" novel thread.

Let me report this picture from the other Death Star thread, which more or less explains what I think happens:

So let me get this straight:

You claim that the superlaser is NOT det,

Bzzt!
You're wrong.
There is some DET involved. Difference.

and that 99.99999999999999%, with no exaggeration, comes from the chain reaction.

Yes.

Then, you assume that at 33% power, suddenly there is no chain reaction, and it's all DET?

No. There's a chain reaction, but obviously it's not all of sudden because the planet got "charged" with the weird effect at a slower rate.

What's more, if you think that the suplerlaser was high teratons, explain why the 100% superlaser accelerated the planet by e32 joules*.

It didn't not accelerate the planet by e32 joules. Not only because part of the planet was gone into hyperspace, but also because the superlaser initiated a chain reaction of some kind which provided most of the energy.

Think of a superlaser effect, or attribute you put into a target. Or like a zat gun, if you have watched Stargate. That's the analogy I already used before.
One shot stuns, a second shot kills, and the third one is a sort of NDF function.
But if you wait long enough, the effects dissipate and you'll have to shoot the same person again to re-stun this person.
However, if a boosted zat were fired at a person, it's more than likely that said person would be NDF'ed away, and perhaps in some more violent fashion; a bit like it happened to Martouf, the brainwashed Tok'ra, who was forced to suicide himself with a weapon which both generated an explosion which was lethal over a given radius, and which also completely disintegrated Martouf beyond what a real vaporization would have done: there was no blood and very little smoke and steam in fact for the complete disappearance of the man and his clothes.

1. Do you agree that the planet's mass was scattered at escape velocity? I'm not asking if it was from DET; just whether it happened.

a) If yes: move on
b) If no: explain why we SEE the mass being scattered far faster than escape velocity AND explain why said mass is 99.99999% not there when the Falcon arrives.

c) As it should be clear since I'm keep repeating myself, and you keep asking the same question: a portion of the planet got mass scattered. The rest was sucked into hyperspace and on RSA's page there's also evidence that some of the mass was collapsing at the upper pole. And in the end, a significant amount of the mass remained around where the planet once was, although spread over a couple Alderaan radii.

2. Explain how your chain reaction allows for e32 joules to be 'simulated' WITHOUT the superlaser imparting that energy. Where does the energy come from?

It's not e32 J, for the reasons once again given above, and the energy came from somewhere else. If it had come from the superlaser, the explosion would have been much more straightforward and simple. And there would bave probably been no mumbo jumbo about hyperspace.

If I'm correct, that's not my claim but a quotation from one of the sources.

Some of it... while other pieces collapsed... and in the end, the field fixed itself so much that despite the observed kinetic energy, it acted like it had never reached anywhere close to escape velocity. This is easily observed.

Some? The asteroids moving past the Falcon were quite comfortably at escape velocity;

Your ignorance is vast.
Escape velocity for a planet like Alderaan would probably be similar to Earth.
Guess what?
We wouldn't have seen the asteroids, and a single minor impact would have blasted the ship apart.
A 1 ton debris at Earth's EV would have a KE of 6.272 e10 J, which is well above anything seen in SW in terms of thermal energy, but since it's an impact, we have to look at the momentum, and my god, it's just that horrible: 1.12 e4 tonnes.m/s.
Lol?

... just because 0.000000001% of the planet's mass, actually more than the asteroids imply, was only accelerated at a little above escape velocity doesn't mean that it wasn't.

Of course, if it were.

Nor does it support your claim that only "some" was accelerated when:

1. Most of the matter is gone when the Falcon arrives

Hyperflush.

2. We see the MAJORITY of the debris flying outward without slowing down after the explosion.

Actually, we already see the cloud of debris decelerating.

Combustion is not an odd phenomena that defies physics. This is not a nitpick; it's the fact that you cannot explain this odd phenomena at all, not even to Treknobabble levels.

You're part of that group think that believes I need to publish some thesis about the ground breaking physics of some fictional universe for of wizards and space ships.
Huh.

Did you notice that as far I'm concerned, the purpose of this thread, that is, pointing out the true power generation of the DS, has already been completed several pages ago?
So actually, instead of losing more time trying to explain to that tincan you have in lieu of a head why I don't need to come with an explanation that would smack Einstein in the head, I'll merely look for anything you can actually provide that may prove you right.

Aside from the material you based your arguments upon, which I've debunked, that is.

You know, it's not because you've discovered the meaning of perpetual motion machine on Internet yesterday that you now have to repeat it several times a post.

Here is an example of you making an outright factual incorrect statement that I just discovered the meaning of perpetual motion machine. I cannot prove it to you, but I know that this is not true, and therefore that you are wrong.

Oh, sorry. Wrong GMT.

Something happened, some energy came from elsewhere than the superlaser, and I love ponies.

Energy came from where? Subspace? Quantum? Was e32 joules just lying around somewhere?

4th dimension... I think.

Aw, damn. I said I would stop talking about my formidable theory.

Which don't even produce petawatts apparently, unless they begin to get stupidly large.
It's also an universe where higher canon struggles to bring yields superior to the megaton range, and with the EU having several references that clearly cap the firepower of capital ships in the terawatt range.

So yes, a two digits gigaton blast would take a thousand ships with more fire power than I've...

On the contrary, the dialogue would do like this:

Mon Montha: We have news of a powerful superlaser. I could go into the magic chain reaction it uses to destroy a planet, usually requiring millions of times the output of the sun, while only using eleven orders of magnitude less energy, a chain reaction that is perhaps the most effective input-output of all time, but I won't. Instead, I'll not mention it or hint at it at all...well, except for now, and any hypothetical technical guides will fail to mention such a revolutionary, awe inspiring chain reaction that makes fusion look like manual labor in comparison.

Rebel: Why?

Mon Montha: Because I have something far more important. The DET portion of the beam contains 23 gigatons of energy! That's more firepower than half the starfleet! I am terrified of the raw power of that...if I were to write a tech book, the very first thing I would mention would be that such power is "unthinkable amounts of raw power". It's so powerful that the most efficient chain reaction even conceived is not even worth mentioning!

Rebel: But couldn't a type 0 civilization that's discovered nuclear fusion, something that we use galaxy-wide, a few decades ago construct a nuclear weapons arsenal rivaling-

Mon Montha: Come on!

I suggest you send that silly dialogue to Lucas for approval.

Troll.

(That was a short btw.)

Ah, so you're beyond the point of backing up your accusations.

Persecutor: murderer.
Defense lawyer: prove it. You-
Persecutor: murderer. You did not bother to attend the man's funeral, so you're obviously hiding something.
Defense lawyer: my client did not even know the man or that he had died.
Persecutor: murderer.

Troll.
Mmm... wait!

I think there is nothing worthwhile to add. This circus can only end by starving your inner troll.

[StarWarsStarTrek]

Your main argument, or one of them, seems to be that because not all of the planet's mass was accelerated to such speeds, the calcs can be thrown out. This is a stupid false dilemma. The asteroid field was under 0.0000001 percent of the planet's mass, so go ahead and reduce the energy req by that percentile if you feel so inclined. The rest of the planet was not there, so guess what that means?

You also ignore my dialogue parody when it's more than that. It's making the point that your uber chain reaction is never talked about by any character or technical book, but both mention the amazing DET power. But if 99.9999999% of the energy comes from a chain reaction so powerful it amplifies the effect by 12 orders of magnitude, why is every so awed by the 0.0000000001% DET part but does not bother mentioning that the empire figured out a way to get free energy by violating thermodynamics?

Unthinkable amounts of raw power is the first thing mentioned in the database, but the author does not bother to mention the chain reaction that if it existed would be far more interesting and revolutionary, accounting for 99.99999999% of the effects. Raw power does not fit well with chain reaction; in theory you could claim that it means lots of power of DET combined with chain reaction, but that fits more awkwardly than a DET theory.

Or the ICS statement of the hypermatter reactor having enough power to destroy a planet. This strongly supports DET and goes against the notion that 99.999999999 percent of the energy comes from elsewhere, as the ICS quote mentions that the hypermatter reactor has the power. Once again you could argue that it means enough power for a chain reaction for a planet buster, but that's stretching the quote. DET fits with the quotes without having to contrive a 99.9999999 percent source that is never mentioned.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Your main argument, or one of them, seems to be that because not all of the planet's mass was accelerated to such speeds, the calcs can be thrown out. This is a stupid false dilemma. The asteroid field was under 0.0000001 percent of the planet's mass, so go ahead and reduce the energy req by that percentile if you feel so inclined. The rest of the planet was not there, so guess what that means?

You also ignore my dialogue parody when it's more than that. It's making the point that your uber chain reaction is never talked about by any character or technical book, but both mention the amazing DET power. But if 99.9999999% of the energy comes from a chain reaction so powerful it amplifies the effect by 12 orders of magnitude, why is every so awed by the 0.0000000001% DET part but does not bother mentioning that the empire figured out a way to get free energy by violating thermodynamics?

Unthinkable amounts of raw power is the first thing mentioned in the database, but the author does not bother to mention the chain reaction that if it existed would be far more interesting and revolutionary, accounting for 99.99999999% of the effects. Raw power does not fit well with chain reaction; in theory you could claim that it means lots of power of DET combined with chain reaction, but that fits more awkwardly than a DET theory.

Or the ICS statement of the hypermatter reactor having enough power to destroy a planet. This strongly supports DET and goes against the notion that 99.999999999 percent of the energy comes from elsewhere, as the ICS quote mentions that the hypermatter reactor has the power. Once again you could argue that it means enough power for a chain reaction for a planet buster, but that's stretching the quote. DET fits with the quotes without having to contrive a 99.9999999 percent source that is never mentioned.

Hey guys, am I hallucinating or is rebooting the entire discussion once more?
I don't need to pay attention to your parody when facts work better, and thus far you were powerless to debunk my figures based on the first Despayre shot. That's all I wanted to know, and I knew you couldn't, because you never paid attention at those facts despite being presented the information countless times.
See, you're even continuously clinging to the database quote despite the fact that it's already been addressed.

And I'll do it once more, by copying the entire database article, just so we're sure you don't weasel your way out of it:



Like I knew, someone other than me, most likely Mike Dicenso, had already pointed out the fusion part. And that ages ago.
I just highlighted how the article contradicts itself about the size, and clearly shows that a hypermatter reactor is one that is based on a fusion reaction using stellar fuel.
The article is also wrong, in that the superlaser was fired at full power only once, against Alderaan.

See? I can't be bothered with trolling deniers such as you.

As for the ICS, it may say a reactor has enough power to do one thing, but many other sources say something else. So we have to understand the ICS statement as the reactor has the capacity to produce something that ends with the planet being destroyed, where power is capacity and not wattage.

Allow me a comparison. It's a bit like the S8472 main bioship's reactor has the power, somehow, to blow planet up. Or same with the Xindi superweapon. Its reactor clearly has the capacity to generate a something to blow up a planet, even if the reactor does it via some weird system. It has the power to destroy a planet like Stalin had the power to crush Berlin or Hitler to crush Paris. If you don't go down that route then you're trying to force a contradiction with sources that outnumber the ICS.

[StarWarsStarTrek]

Hey guys, am I hallucinating or is rebooting the entire discussion once more?

No, I am pointing out the flaws in your argument that you conveniently ignore.

I don't need to pay attention to your parody when facts work better,

Once again, you don't get it.

You're claiming that there are two components to the superlaser: the DET and the chain reaction.

You claim that the DET accounts for about 0.000000000001% of the effects, and that the chain reaction takes over for the rest of the 99.999999999999%.

Yet for whatever reason, every time a technical guide or a character marvels at the superlaser, never once do they mention the 99.999999999999% part, instead they marvel at the 0.000000000001% part.

and thus far you were powerless to debunk my figures based on the first Despayre shot. That's all I wanted to know, and I knew you couldn't, because you never paid attention at those facts despite being presented the information countless times.

I have provided rationalizations for that. Either way, you have one quote that may support your side, I have provided 7:

1. Death Star - hypermatter reactor exceeds M/AM conversion*
2. Death Star - hypermatter reactor has power output of multiple main sequence stars*
3. Star Wars Database - unimaginable amounts of raw power
4. Star Wars ICS - enough power output from hypermatter reactor to destroy a planet
5. Star Wars Database - Alderaan was reduced to rubble
6. Star Wars ANH script - Alderaan is blown into space dust
7. Star Wars ANH - we clearly see debris flying away from the explosion at 1/3 C.

But you desperately think that your one example overrides my seven.

*It says that it exceeds realspace mass-energy conversion, so there's no outright physics violation.

*And a layperson is not going to mean red dwarfs by the phrase main sequence stars

See, you're even continuously clinging to the database quote despite the fact that it's already been addressed.

"Addressed" as in "it may be that it's just referring to the 0.000000000001% DET part"

And I'll do it once more, by copying the entire database article, just so we're sure you don't weasel your way out of it:



Like I knew, someone other than me, most likely Mike Dicenso, had already pointed out the fusion part. And that ages ago.
I just highlighted how the article contradicts itself about the size, and clearly shows that a hypermatter reactor is one that is based on a fusion reaction using stellar fuel.
The article is also wrong, in that the superlaser was fired at full power only once, against Alderaan.

The AotC ICS explains this away in that fusion is needed to confine hypermatter reactors in real space.

See? I can't be bothered with trolling deniers such as you.

Ah, you're using your fancy troll word again. Guess what? Dismissing one of my sources as that it "may be because..." is handwavium.

As for the ICS, it may say a reactor has enough power to do one thing, but many other sources say something else.

You mean one incident that you have brought up?

So we have to understand the ICS statement as the reactor has the capacity to produce something that ends with the planet being destroyed, where power is capacity and not wattage.

Allow me a comparison. It's a bit like the S8472 main bioship's reactor has the power, somehow, to blow planet up. Or same with the Xindi superweapon. Its reactor clearly has the capacity to generate a something to blow up a planet, even if the reactor does it via some weird system. It has the power to destroy a planet like Stalin had the power to crush Berlin or Hitler to crush Paris.

If this is not handwavium attempting, I don't know what is.

the Death Star is built around a hypermatter reactor which can generate enough power to destroy an entire planet

See that? If it said "had the power to destroy a planet", you may have a point, but it quite blatantly states that the hypermatter reactor has enough power to destroy a planet, not that the hypermatter reactor provides 0.000000000001% of the power while the rest comes from a wizard.

[ If you don't go down that route then you're trying to force a contradiction with sources that outnumber the ICS.

Outnumber? Ha! You've provided a single example for your side. I have several, and the G canon films:



Clearly, you will try and prove that the debris we see in this image being scattered isn't real debris, and that it later just collapsed into itself or into a steady orbit. Clearly you will point to an asteroid field of 0.000000000001% of the planet's mass still being somewhat there as evidence that most/all of the planet was not scattered at at least escape velocity. Clearly you will fail.

[Kor_Dahar_Master]

Clearly, you will try and prove that the debris we see in this image being scattered isn't real debris, and that it later just collapsed into itself or into a steady orbit. Clearly you will point to an asteroid field of 0.000000000001% of the planet's mass still being somewhat there as evidence that most/all of the planet was not scattered at at least escape velocity. Clearly you will fail.

It is pretty clear from that image that most of the planet is not being scattered likely due to it being shunted into hyperspace, the tiny amount of debris we see is likely some of what is left being ejected.

Then use the e32 joule figure.

e32 joules is 8.8e16 megatons i believe and yet the size of the explosion is far less than what we should see.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Yet for whatever reason, every time a technical guide or a character marvels at the superlaser, never once do they mention the 99.999999999999% part, instead they marvel at the 0.000000000001% part.

Many guides never paid much attention to what happened on screen. Yet all of them were going with the fusion core idea.

The bestest fusion mechanism could release 6.3 e14 J/kg.
So to get to 2.4 e32 J, you need 3.75 e17 kg (3.75 e14 tonnes) of fuel. That's hundred of trillions tonnes of fuel.
Of course, to meet the real objectives set by Saxton, you actually need a million times more fuel.
3.75 e23 kg.
Almost a sixteenth of Earth's entire mass (5.9736 e24 kg) in stellar fuel.


I'll also point out why I don't have to explain in details my "theory". I'll merely quote what RSA already wrote some time ago on his own website, which is still relevant today:

2. Causal vs. Mechanistic

Though this is an example of a different method of analysis, I refer to it primarily because its use represents DET theorists attempting to change the rules in the middle of the game, a maneuver first made by Mike Wong during our debate.

For example, Star Whichever fans do not demand that the other side explain the particulars of how their particular FTL drive functions in order to accept that it propels the ship faster than light. Han pulls some levers, or Picard points and says "Engage", and off they go, ending up in whole other star systems over the space of a commercial break. Oh sure, we get some neat vocabulary about subspace fields and whatnot on Trek, or alluvial dampers on Star Wars, but not a one of us can describe precisely how a subspace field results in forward velocity, or how an alluvial damper can participate in causing the ship to jump to lightspeed.

In short, we accept the effect of FTL travel, and ascribe the cause to the proper device, whether that device's operation is understood or not. There's no handwaving, 'magick', or 'Scottydidit' involved.

Nevertheless, Wong's primary attack on the Superlaser Effect theory is that it is based on that very same inductive causal approach. Since I do not make wild guesses about a nuts-and-bolts description of the mechanism of the chain reaction, he declares the concept invalid, not even a theory ("a theory must have a defined mechanism" (so much for Sir Isaac, or even Darwin!)), non-predictive, and so on, deriding it as "undefined" and "mysterious". This is both wrong-headed and inconsistent on his part, and no amount of bluster and insults can cover up that simple fact.

Let us take, for example, the basic template for Wong's own causality-based inductive analysis of the superlaser.

1. Watch ANH and see the Death Star's green beam 'o' doom strike Alderaan, which then explodes.
2. Conclude that the beam's strike was the cause, and the explosion the effect.

Green beam make planet go boom, and voila . . . observations complete.

Moving on.

and thus far you were powerless to debunk my figures based on the first Despayre shot. That's all I wanted to know, and I knew you couldn't, because you never paid attention at those facts despite being presented the information countless times.

I have provided rationalizations for that. Either way, you have one quote that may support your side, I have provided 7:

1. Death Star - hypermatter reactor exceeds M/AM conversion*
2. Death Star - hypermatter reactor has power output of multiple main sequence stars*
3. Star Wars Database - unimaginable amounts of raw power
4. Star Wars ICS - enough power output from hypermatter reactor to destroy a planet
5. Star Wars Database - Alderaan was reduced to rubble
6. Star Wars ANH script - Alderaan is blown into space dust
7. Star Wars ANH - we clearly see debris flying away from the explosion at 1/3 C.

But you desperately think that your one example overrides my seven.

*It says that it exceeds realspace mass-energy conversion, so there's no outright physics violation.

*And a layperson is not going to mean red dwarfs by the phrase main sequence stars

You have hardly provided any rationalization at all. Instead, you focus on bits from a few sources and limit yourself to that, denying everything else.

1. Yes, it gets its energy from somewhere else. It doesn't say that it does get it all inside the reactor, unless I missed something. It couldn't, since the descriptions it provides go against that.
2. Already covered by JMS and I provided the link to his post several times. I also pointed out the same thing. The layperson knows nothing about what a main sequence star is. The layperson doesn't even use the term star to begin with. They often say "a sun".
3. Already addressed. I even did it again, in detail, in my former post (to which you replied with a very erroneous dodge, as we'll see).
4. Addressed as well.
5. Never denied that Alderaan was reduced to rubble/pebbles/rock bits. But that's the same database from which you cherry pick your evidence.
6. So? Who denied that? And ANH's novelization says the second Death Star, ready to shoot (at full) exploded and released "the energy of a small artificial sun", which is just too detailed to pass as mere equivocation. Even if for some reason, the capacitors didn't release their energy, we know that upon firing, the main reactor is online and works at full.
   We will certainly notice that when it exploded, the spaceships in space didn't blow up.
   Yet, at best, just like for Alderaan, the Death Star has a range of 6 planetary diameters.
   Assuming Yavin IV was like Alderaan or Earth (radius: 6371 km), we get a maximum distance of 76,452 km.
   Applied to a sphere, that's a maximum surface area of 7.345 e16 m².
   Okay, let's work with 2.4 e32 J, and say that the core generally works for 12 hours (43,200 seconds) to store that much energy.
   That is still 5.556 e27 W.
   Now let's divide that by our sphere's surface area, and we get an intensity of 75.65 e9 J/m² at the known superlaser's maximum range.
   In other words, we already are at the limit of an intensity level which we know has taken down X-wing sized fighters in movies.
   Of course, it only gets worse if we start to take into account the release of energy from the capacitors, and if we work with Saxton's upper limit, which was 3.4 e38 J. Or with the fact that the ships were nowhere close to Yavin IV when the Death Star exploded, as a matter of fact.
   Heck, the very explosion of the Death Star was far from being impressive at all. Certainly nowhere close to anything like the power of a star like Sol, which is still "capped" at 3.839 e26 W.
   An attempt at solving this issue would be to argue that most of the Death Star's ionized mass got sucked into hyperspace as well. The rings would tend to prove that something like that may have happened.
7. Saxton gets 6% of c, not 33%. And, again, I already dealt with that part as well. It's funny how you don't even care what people say. You'll just repeat the same points like some broken record.

You know what? What you are doing is not citing 7 diffrent sources. You've splitted "Death Star" into two. You only provided 6 different sources.
It would be very funny if I started splitting the sources the same way you did. For example, I could pick the database and already come with several facts that you completely defined.

- Just one core, and it's said a "hypermatter reactor".
- This reactor is described as being "fusion based" (so hypermatter = fusion, and that's also in agreement with another source we rarely cite, here, from the ICS thread you didn't really read).
- Uses "stellar fuel".
- Fuel is carried in "bottles lining [the core's] periphery" (meaning most likely that only a moderate fraction of the Death Star volume is dedicated to fuel storage).
- The tributary beams coalesce "into one single blast with the intensity of a stellar core", for which you'd need to aim at hypergiant stars (millions of solar luminosities) to hope reach the 2.4 e32 J mark. Needless to say, you will never get above that, and yet we know it's extremely necessary for DETists.
In other words, go suck your sore thumb.

Oh see, at least 4 safe, perhaps 5.
Want me to look at other sources? Like, all the quotes I provided which you repeatedly fail to consider?
No, so stop that nonsense. Your evidence is outnumbered. Period.

See, you're even continuously clinging to the database quote despite the fact that it's already been addressed.

"Addressed" as in "it may be that it's just referring to the 0.000000000001% DET part"

Yes, addressed, since that's exactly what the database leads us to. Fusion based reactor, not magic based reactor, and stellar fuel. You know, the bits you ignore. So I don't care if that hurts your preconceptions.
It's not like you completely failed to debunk my conclusions based on the first Despayrean shot, yes? ;)

And I'll do it once more, by copying the entire database article, just so we're sure you don't weasel your way out of it:



Like I knew, someone other than me, most likely Mike Dicenso, had already pointed out the fusion part. And that ages ago.
I just highlighted how the article contradicts itself about the size, and clearly shows that a hypermatter reactor is one that is based on a fusion reaction using stellar fuel.
The article is also wrong, in that the superlaser was fired at full power only once, against Alderaan.

The AotC ICS explains this away in that fusion is needed to confine hypermatter reactors in real space.

You think I'm new to this?
See above. What the ICS and the database describe are two different cats.

As for the ICS, it may say a reactor has enough power to do one thing, but many other sources say something else.

You mean one incident that you have brought up?

No, I mean the many sources that say it's fusion based, including the very database you cherry pick your evidence from. I can't tell why it has still not switched in your brain. You're just not honest enough to admit you're stuck. The database is against you in fact, and you know it.

So we have to understand the ICS statement as the reactor has the capacity to produce something that ends with the planet being destroyed, where power is capacity and not wattage.

Allow me a comparison. It's a bit like the S8472 main bioship's reactor has the power, somehow, to blow planet up. Or same with the Xindi superweapon. Its reactor clearly has the capacity to generate a something to blow up a planet, even if the reactor does it via some weird system. It has the power to destroy a planet like Stalin had the power to crush Berlin or Hitler to crush Paris.

If this is not handwavium attempting, I don't know what is.

the Death Star is built around a hypermatter reactor which can generate enough power to destroy an entire planet

See that? If it said "had the power to destroy a planet", you may have a point, but it quite blatantly states that the hypermatter reactor has enough power to destroy a planet, not that the hypermatter reactor provides 0.000000000001% of the power while the rest comes from a wizard.

It's certainly not elegant, granted. It's not like the ICS is absolutely perfect.
See the way it depicts the destruction of Alderaan, despite the fact that it was the easiest bit not to mess up.
Eventually, I can do without one and just point out that it's outnumbered.
But we tend to make all sources stick togethere as much as possible.
Something you should try one day.

[ If you don't go down that route then you're trying to force a contradiction with sources that outnumber the ICS.

Outnumber? Ha! You've provided a single example for your side.

You would be correct if you had not proved that you constantly ignored how I pointed out the database disagreed with you, as well as ignored all the quotations I already provided about superlasers and the Death Star's reactor design.

I have several, and the G canon films:



Clearly, you will try and prove that the debris we see in this image being scattered isn't real debris,...

No, because I never made such a claim and won't need to make it now. But nice strawman.

... and that it later just collapsed into itself or into a steady orbit.

Which is what happened.
We'll also see how you use just one shrunk screen capture instead of the whole sequence.
The one that shows the explosion actually slowing down.
Or the delayed secondary explosion, which no DETist has been able to ever explain.
How can it get more dishonest than that, I don't know.
But it's not surprising coming from you.

Clearly you will point to an asteroid field of 0.000000000001% of the planet's mass still being somewhat there as evidence that most/all of the planet was not scattered at at least escape velocity. Clearly you will fail.

Clearly, the electrochemical signal between your eyes and your brain gets lost en route.

[Mr. Oragahn]

I must point out that I should update this graphic to account for the fact that there is a considerable difference of effects between the first shot and the second one, a difference in magnitude that is beyond the mere addition of another third of the maximum power: after the second shot, the planet is quite literally returned to something close to a sort of primordial state.
So the "Exotic effects" region will have to be enhanced downwards, to cover the second shot as well, and I will add a new threshold, which will indicate something along the lines of "greater planetary destabilization threshold" or something along those lines.

[StarWarsStarTrek]

Many guides never paid much attention to what happened on screen. Yet all of them were going with the fusion core idea.

All? What about the ICS?

The bestest fusion mechanism could release 6.3 e14 J/kg.
So to get to 2.4 e32 J, you need 3.75 e17 kg (3.75 e14 tonnes) of fuel. That's hundred of trillions tonnes of fuel.
Of course, to meet the real objectives set by Saxton, you actually need a million times more fuel.
3.75 e23 kg.
Almost a sixteenth of Earth's entire mass (5.9736 e24 kg) in stellar fuel.

You're assuming the use of nuclear fusion. As I recall, merely the term 'fusion' is used; a term that technically applies to M/AM conversion. As far as we know, hypermatter may very well require fusion.

However, when we are encountered with a contradiction, the best bet is to rationalize them. Some sources imply hypermatter, others imply fusion; the AOTC ICS gives us the rationalization that fusion is used in conjunction with hypermatter. Case closed.

I'll also point out why I don't have to explain in details my "theory". I'll merely quote what RSA already wrote some time ago on his own website, which is still relevant today:

2. Causal vs. Mechanistic

Though this is an example of a different method of analysis, I refer to it primarily because its use represents DET theorists attempting to change the rules in the middle of the game, a maneuver first made by Mike Wong during our debate.

For example, Star Whichever fans do not demand that the other side explain the particulars of how their particular FTL drive functions in order to accept that it propels the ship faster than light. Han pulls some levers, or Picard points and says "Engage", and off they go, ending up in whole other star systems over the space of a commercial break. Oh sure, we get some neat vocabulary about subspace fields and whatnot on Trek, or alluvial dampers on Star Wars, but not a one of us can describe precisely how a subspace field results in forward velocity, or how an alluvial damper can participate in causing the ship to jump to lightspeed.

In short, we accept the effect of FTL travel, and ascribe the cause to the proper device, whether that device's operation is understood or not. There's no handwaving, 'magick', or 'Scottydidit' involved.

Nevertheless, Wong's primary attack on the Superlaser Effect theory is that it is based on that very same inductive causal approach. Since I do not make wild guesses about a nuts-and-bolts description of the mechanism of the chain reaction, he declares the concept invalid, not even a theory ("a theory must have a defined mechanism" (so much for Sir Isaac, or even Darwin!)), non-predictive, and so on, deriding it as "undefined" and "mysterious". This is both wrong-headed and inconsistent on his part, and no amount of bluster and insults can cover up that simple fact.

Let us take, for example, the basic template for Wong's own causality-based inductive analysis of the superlaser.

1. Watch ANH and see the Death Star's green beam 'o' doom strike Alderaan, which then explodes.
2. Conclude that the beam's strike was the cause, and the explosion the effect.

Green beam make planet go boom, and voila . . . observations complete.

Moving on.

Darkstar is not understanding the fact that the burden of proof lies on him. Wong's theory is really just what the laws of physics dictate; direct energy transfer. This is the default assumption of a giant beam hitting a planet and the planet exploding. What's so hard to understand about this? The superlaser theory has nothing going for it that makes it better than the default DET theory.

You have hardly provided any rationalization at all. Instead, you focus on bits from a few sources and limit yourself to that, denying everything else.

Wrong. The only sources you use are one part from the Death Star novel (even though that very novel confirms blatantly that the Death Star uses hypermatter) and some sections from the database that point to fusion as the power source.

1. Yes, it gets its energy from somewhere else. It doesn't say that it does get it all inside the reactor, unless I missed something. It couldn't, since the descriptions it provides go against that.

Occam's razor and common sense. If 99.9999999999% of the energy comes from somewhere else, why would the book only mention the 0.0000000001% source and not ever hint at the one supplying the majority of the energy?

[*] Already covered by JMS and I provided the link to his post several times. I also pointed out the same thing. The layperson knows nothing about what a main sequence star is. The layperson doesn't even use the term star to begin with. They often say "a sun".

On the contrary, the layperson with at least high school science is going have heard of main sequence stars, in which case they will assume a G class star.

And lol @ laypeople not using the term star.

[*] Already addressed. I even did it again, in detail, in my former post (to which you replied with a very erroneous dodge, as we'll see).

What? Saying that the database implies the use of fusion? Then take fusion and the raw power statement. One supports me, another supports you.

[*] Addressed as well.

You admitted that the statement fits with DET better than it fits with chain reaction. Therefore, it's a quote in my favor.

[*] Never denied that Alderaan was reduced to rubble/pebbles/rock bits. But that's the same database from which you cherry pick your evidence.

The amount of energy needed to do that is 5.9 * 10^31 joules.

[*] So? Who denied that? And ANH's novelization says the second Death Star, ready to shoot (at full) exploded and released "the energy of a small artificial sun", which is just too detailed to pass as mere equivocation. Even if for some reason, the capacitors didn't release their energy, we know that upon firing, the main reactor is online and works at full.
We will certainly notice that when it exploded, the spaceships in space didn't blow up.
Yet, at best, just like for Alderaan, the Death Star has a range of 6 planetary diameters.
Assuming Yavin IV was like Alderaan or Earth (radius: 6371 km), we get a maximum distance of 76,452 km.
Applied to a sphere, that's a maximum surface area of 7.345 e16 m².
Okay, let's work with 2.4 e32 J,

Why? The visual footage clearly shows that the planet's mass was scattered at more than escape velocity.

and say that the core generally works for 12 hours (43,200 seconds) to store that much energy.
That is still 5.556 e27 W.

Which scales down to about 5e22 joules for an ISD. What was your point?

Now let's divide that by our sphere's surface area, and we get an intensity of 75.65 e9 J/m² at the known superlaser's maximum range.
In other words, we already are at the limit of an intensity level which we know has taken down X-wing sized fighters in movies.
Of course, it only gets worse if we start to take into account the release of energy from the capacitors, and if we work with Saxton's upper limit, which was 3.4 e38 J. Or with the fact that the ships were nowhere close to Yavin IV when the Death Star exploded, as a matter of fact.
Heck, the very explosion of the Death Star was far from being impressive at all. Certainly nowhere close to anything like the power of a star like Sol, which is still "capped" at 3.839 e26 W.
An attempt at solving this issue would be to argue that most of the Death Star's ionized mass got sucked into hyperspace as well. The rings would tend to prove that something like that may have happened.

Maybe I am not reading this well enough, but I have no idea what you're trying to say here.

[*] Saxton gets 6% of c, not 33%. And, again, I already dealt with that part as well. It's funny how you don't even care what people say. You'll just repeat the same points like some broken record.[/list]

You know what? What you are doing is not citing 7 diffrent sources. You've splitted "Death Star" into two. You only provided 6 different sources.

Seven different quotes. You haven't provided anywhere near that number supporting your stance.

It would be very funny if I started splitting the sources the same way you did. For example, I could pick the database and already come with several facts that you completely defined.

Go ahead. See if you can come up with 7 relevant quotes.

- Just one core, and it's said a "hypermatter reactor".

...and?

- This reactor is described as being "fusion based" (so hypermatter = fusion, and that's also in agreement with another source we rarely cite, here, from the ICS thread you didn't really read).

No, that's not true. The book Star Wars: Death Star explicitly states that hypermatter reactors exceed M/AM conversion in energy potential.

And even if hypermatter = fusion, it does not mean nuclear fusion.

- Uses "stellar fuel".

And? A large chemical explosion was more powerful than the photon torpedo payload of the Enterprise.

- Fuel is carried in "bottles lining [the core's] periphery" (meaning most likely that only a moderate fraction of the Death Star volume is dedicated to fuel storage).

And?

- The tributary beams coalesce "into one single blast with the intensity of a stellar core", for which you'd need to aim at hypergiant stars (millions of solar luminosities) to hope reach the 2.4 e32 J mark. Needless to say, you will never get above that, and yet we know it's extremely necessary for DETists.
In other words, go suck your sore thumb.

In other words, you're claiming that the clear, onscreen footage showing the planet visibly being scattered at extreme velocities is just an illusion.

In other words, you think that e32 joules is not impressive, and that it somehow helps your argument.

Oh see, at least 4 safe, perhaps 5.
Want me to look at other sources? Like, all the quotes I provided which you repeatedly fail to consider?
No, so stop that nonsense. Your evidence is outnumbered. Period.

Why don't you actually send your quotes, instead of threatening to do so?

Yes, addressed, since that's exactly what the database leads us to. Fusion based reactor, not magic based reactor, and stellar fuel. You know, the bits you ignore. So I don't care if that hurts your preconceptions.
It's not like you completely failed to debunk my conclusions based on the first Despayrean shot, yes? ;)

Once again, you have no idea what the word fusion means. Once again, you fail to actually rationalize or explain the ICS quote, instead of just waving it away by citing another equal canon status quote.

You think I'm new to this?
See above. What the ICS and the database describe are two different cats.

Listen Mr. O; when two equal canon status sources collide, you rationalize both sources together. Your idea is to just wave away mine because you feel like it. The AOTC ICS provides a rationalization for this.

No, I mean the many sources that say it's fusion based, including the very database you cherry pick your evidence from.

The database is the only source you've provided so far; meanwhile, four seperate sources imply or state the use of hypermatter.

I can't tell why it has still not switched in your brain. You're just not honest enough to admit you're stuck. The database is against you in fact, and you know it.

And even if you were right on that, what makes you claim that your source takes precedence over mine? Because it helps you that way?

It's certainly not elegant, granted. It's not like the ICS is absolutely perfect.

Stupid strawman attempt. Whether or not it's perfect, it just oh so happens to blatantly support DET FAR more smoothly than it does fit with chain reaction.

See the way it depicts the destruction of Alderaan, despite the fact that it was the easiest bit not to mess up.

It was an artistic drawing. Is this the best poisoning the well fallacy you can attempt?

Eventually, I can do without one and just point out that it's outnumbered.

By what? The films clearly show at least an e32 joule event, part of the database supports it, SW: DS supports it, where is this imaginary army of sources that you claim? Why don't you clearly list out all of the sources that overrule a blatant statement?

But we tend to make all sources stick togethere as much as possible.
Something you should try one day.

So then why are you outright dismissing the ICS just because you don't like it? Why are you outright dismissing the very explicit statements in SW: DS describing the hypermatter reactor as something very different than fusion and as having more energy potential than M/AM conversion?

If you want to practice what you preach, go ahead and rationalize the pro high Wars statements with your own.

You would be correct if you had not proved that you constantly ignored how I pointed out the database disagreed with you, as well as ignored all the quotations I already provided about superlasers and the Death Star's reactor design.

Oh, that portion of the database is among the only sources that supports you, and even then it's in a sketchy angle; the term fusion can apply to more than just nuclear fusion.

EGVV: ""heavy metals, liquid reactants, or virtually any substance" is what fusion reactors in SW use.

No, because I never made such a claim and won't need to make it now. But nice strawman.

Then explain how your superlaser theory conforms with conservation of energy if it scatters said debris at what can be timed with a stopwatch to be beyond escape velocity, yet according to you uses less energy than that.

Which is what happened.

WHAT? Prove this. Now. Prove that ALL or MOST of the planet's mass was seen recollapsing into a bundle of rubble.

We'll also see how you use just one shrunk screen capture instead of the whole sequence.
The one that shows the explosion actually slowing down.

No it doesn't. And if it did, using a stopwatch you could time the debris velocity to be at hypersonic to relativistic speeds. There is no denying this; it's on screen, irrefutable evidence.

Or the delayed secondary explosion, which no DETist has been able to ever explain.
How can it get more dishonest than that, I don't know.

And the superlaser theory cannot explain this either. Stop applying double standards.

But it's not surprising coming from you.

Why is it that mods always seem to conveniently never notice when you sneak in insults into your statement?

And don't claim that they're right; that's irrelevant.

Clearly, the electrochemical signal between your eyes and your brain gets lost en route.

Ah, you think that you're so clever, eh? Talking smack on the internet?

Why don't you rationalize and explain how a planet's mass is accelerated at escape velocity or more without said energy being imparted at it. Explain where such stellar amounts of energy came from. Explain why NOBODY EVER MENTIONS THIS in ANY tech novel, nor does any character EVER mention this, but has no problem with MARVELING at the reactor, which is apparently only 0.00000000001% of the power.

Explain why the DS novel explicitly states that hypermatter EXCEEDS MASS-ENERGY CONVERSION IN REAL SPACE.

[Kor_Dahar_Master]

Why don't you rationalize and explain how a planet's mass is accelerated at escape velocity or more without said energy being imparted at it.

No need as most of the mass is shifted to hyperspace prior to the explosion.

[Mike DiCenso]

And? A large chemical explosion was more powerful than the photon torpedo payload of the Enterprise.

Source? You keep repeating these things like a mantra, yet provide no citation of an episode, and very seldom do you provide dialog. When you do provide dialog you leave out the episode citation!

At any rate, it doesn't really matter since technobabble chemicals in Star Trek, like the ultritium explosives used in "A Time to Stand" have demonstrated some insanely powerful yeilds:

O'BRIEN: Ninety isotons of enriched ultritium should take out the entire storage facility and everything else within eight hundred kilometres.

SISKO: Which means we have to be nine hundred kilometres away before the bomb goes off.

This amount of explosives on it's own would be impressive if not for the fact that it nearly vaporized a multi-km asteroid and the facility on it as well:


The before (note the little JH battlebug for some sense of scale)...


...And after

So given what we know, this would be a yeild at least in the hundreds of gigatons range.
-Mike