I haven't been following all of your voluminous exchange here all that closely, but I think Oragahn's argument is that hypermatter annihilation is actually the same thing as fusion. Which is backed up primarily by a novel ("Rogue Planet") claiming the Death Star could use ice for fuel.StarWarsStarTrek wrote:1. You use silly false dilemmas. When you find some sources saying hypermatter and others saying fusion, you assume that the contradiction cannot be rationalized and that one must be right. You say this despite the canon rationalization found in the AotC ICS that fusion reactors are used to confine hypermatter reactors to normal space.
2. You assume that your sources showing fusion reaction is more valid than those showing hypermatter reaction, even though both sides are equal level canon. Your support of this is that your sources outnumber mine; even though you have yet to meet my request of you listing out in order your sources, as I have done for mine. Prove that your sources outnumber mine.
(If I got it wrong then apologies to Mr. O. Sorry also if my post repeats stuff you've gone over before -- it's not easy to follow long threads like this fully attentively... ;) )
Now I'm not sure about that bit (Haven't got the book so I can only check the snippage at SWTC, which is presumably(?) where Mr. O got his quote), but I do know there are multiple independent sources explicitly stating the Death Star using hypermatter (eg the OT:ICS, OT Inside The Worlds, OT Visual Dictionary, the Death Star novel ... ) while others say it uses fusion (eg Technical Journal and IIRC various RPG books). Meanwhile none that I've personally read says it uses both or that they're the one and same. "Rogue Planet" would be the exception, but what it says doesn't seem to mesh with the stuff about hypermatter being tachyonic. So I'm somewhat uncomfortable with that conclusion.
What we do seem to have established is that the power generation of the Death Star is in any case large. Possibly even beyond what fusion can manage, depending. The main sequence star quotes have been already shown (and naturally people drew their different conclusions). But there's also another similar quote from the OT:ITW that hasn't been brought up around here AFAIK:
Some quick calcs using the low end of 200 stars ("hundreds") and stuff pulled from Vickypedia:In order to deliver a spectacular, planet-destroying burst, the station's hypermatter reactor would have to have been able to generate power equivalent to hundreds of supergiant stars.
Going by this definition a supergiant star would generally emit tens to hundreds of thousands of times the sun's output, depending on type and mass. Possibly even more if you take it to include hypergiants. Using a somewhat mid range supergiant like Rigel (luminosity ca 70,000 times Sol) for the baseline for an example calc we get a figure in the 10^33 watts range, assuming I didn't butcher the maths. So if we acknowledge the quote the DS power generation should probably be within an OOM or two of this example estimate.Supergiants are among the most massive stars. They occupy the top region of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. In the Yerkes spectral classification, supergiants are class Ia (most luminous supergiants) or Ib (less luminous supergiants). They typically have bolometric absolute magnitudes between -5 and -12. The most luminous supergiants are often classified as hypergiants of class 0.
Supergiants can have masses from 10 to 70 solar masses and brightness from 30,000 up to hundreds of thousands times the solar luminosity. They vary greatly in radius, usually from 30 to 500, or even in excess of 1,000 solar radii. The Stefan-Boltzmann law dictates that the relatively cool surfaces of red supergiants radiate much less energy per unit area than those of blue supergiants; thus, for a given luminosity red supergiants are larger than their blue counterparts.
(Not surprisingly of course Saxton was tech advisor on this book lol XD )
Yet it ought to stand unless it's incompatible with what's said elsewhere. Contradictions of this? Most arguably "Death Star" and that crazy test firing sequence, which I'll really have to read up on. (Though it might fit with the main sequence star bit depending on interpretation.) Any others?
Here I think you might be on to something. There's actually a quote to that effect by Qwi Xux, one of the Death Star design engineers in the novel "Jedi Search" where she compares the DS to the Sun Crusher.*Note that the galaxy gun is a chain reaction, and IS EXPLICITLY STATED SO. No character ever disguises this fact with thinly veiled statements like they supposedly do with the superlaser. They state it up front and clearly that it is a chain reaction. Ditto with the sun crusher being a chain reaction, and a device that was planned to destroy the universe or something crazy like that. The characters and tech manuals clearly state when something is a funky chain reaction that it is one; yet according to you, they mysteriously don't say anything when it comes to the superlaser.
Emphasis added by yours truly.Jedi Search wrote:"This craft is highly maneuverable, and small enough not to be noticed on a systemwide scan, but they still might encounter some resistance. Remember, the Death Star was the size of a small moon. This accomplishes through finesse what the Death Star brought about through brute force.''
With a cold fear inside Han did not want to know the answer to his next question. How could she compare this small ship to the Death Star? But he couldn't stop himself from asking, "And what is it? What does it do?''
Qwi looked at the image with awe, pride, and fear. "Well, we haven't actually tested it yet, but the first full-scale model is basically completed. We call this concept the Sun Crusher, tiny but immensely powerful. One small, impervious craft launches a modulated resonance projectile into a star, which triggers a chain reaction in the core, igniting a supernova even in low-mass stars. Straightforward and simple.''
It's certainly circumstantial evidence at least.