The 1.5 megaton myth

[StarWarsStarTrek]

Fucking ay.
See below.


Artillery, missiles, interception fire, the point is the same. If it's visible, the effect would be the same.
All we're told is that they fill the sky.
Using Google can quicly put to rest your claim:
http://www.google.com/search?q=artillery+filling+sky

I tried your link, and went to google images. Nowhere do I see pictures of artillery shells hitting the sky. Artillery doesn't work that way. The shells go way too fast.

Let me arrange your sentence here:
"If the shields were down (...) then a single HTL could have destroyed a capital ship had they still been up."

Am I supposed to understand anything here?
:/

1. The shields were down (the shells were hitting bare hull)
2. A single HTL bolt would have taken down an unshielded ship ("without our deflector shield we'll be sitting ducks!")
3. Yet that does not happen, nor do we see any HTL bolts. Instead we see occasional LTL bolts and typically what are stated in the EU to be flak cannons.
4. Therefore, HTL's were down.

Official literature. ICS, per chance? Because any asstard who wrote that never opened a book about what flak is about.
Clue: it certainly has nothing to do with fixed gunpoints lobbing shells at subsonic speeds from the broadsides.
Even the shells themselves didn't reveal any sign of behaviour that would potentially make them relevant as a form of flak.
The reality is both for a Venator and the Invisible Hand, those cannons just make fuck sense at all. The best I can think of is some kind of uss in boarding operations, to deal local damage to enemy gun pieces to avoid your own ship getting damaged, as well as transportation boats or connection tubes, if there's anything like that. Which I have not seen evidence of, as far as the later is concerned.

Who says that the main purpose of those guns was what they were used for, rather than as a desperate improvisation?

The small towns and cities are featured in TCWS. I know this was already pointed out by others before me.

And when do the characters in TCW ever see small towns in a developed SW planet, rather than small, sparsely populated planets that TCW tends to focus on?

And there you just shot yourself in the foot. Ottawa, a capital city, in a nation of 34 M people, is already quite small (although it's actually very close to Gatineau, which explains the lack of expansion in a certain direction, and the lack of overall exclusive influence in the region).
As for Naboo, you either get 600 M or more than 4 billions, which is all I need anyway. It largely surpasses Canada, and in one case comes close to Earth.
Plus we already worked with your definition of towns from that series of books, which still don't allow for large areas. And it said towns had pops of hundreds of thousands iirc, not small towns.

I just showed you that being a capital city does not equate to being large, and then you italicize capital city as if it matters? What point are you trying to make here?

The lower limit if close to the nuke that blasted Hiroshima. Below two dozen kilotons.

Hiroshima was not vaporized.

He didn't go with a hyper literal application. He wanted to obtain an already absurd high end within the confines of his interpretation of "vaporize".
We know that if you go down the route where even houses and random buildings are all turned to hot particles, you'll have to aim for an event that actually puts a city sized crater into the ground of the planet.
One could say that if the TLs could do that, the author would have said so instead of fixing himself to a description that would easily sound less impressive.

"HIS" interpretation is made up and arbitrary. How he comes up with it he does not explain.

Figuratively, it was. We provided plenty of evidence of that. It's all over the Internet for crissake. Don't you ever read people's posts?

Ohhhhh...some random dudes on the internet claimed it was vaporized, so that must be what the author too meant, or what it would mean in SW! But when Chakoway says that something "should have been vaporized", obviously he's being literal!

Oh, and the vast majority of descriptions of Hiroshima do not state that it was vaporized. Most acknowledge that many people were vaporized, and that the structures at the epicenter of the detonation were too. The only ones that claim that Hiroshima was vaporized are typically random posters on random, non scientific message boards.

Did you know that the nuclear calculator will never provide a figure for the hyper literalism you're going for?
Tss tss.
Now, let's look at how you proceeded.
RSA said a circle that's 4.9 km. It means 4.9 km wide. You used the diameter as if it were the radius.
Radius is 2.45 km.
You need about 24 megatons (instead of 400) to get a fireball that's roughly 2.45 km wide on ground contact (because that's what it is, a ground contact explosion).
The near total fatalities over the same radius is 700 KT, instead of your 5 MT.

Heck, even the craterization figure from his asteroid busting calculator returns only 21.3 megatons for a 4900 meters wide hard-granite rock. That, of course, would technically take care of the entirety of the city.

My bad on the diameter vs radius issue. 23 megatons is still far more than 1.5 megatons.

Of course, if we wanted to be honest and look at the true vaporization figures, knowing that they're for a single bomb placed inside a closed environment, instead of an open and flat surface, we would already get 452.1 gigatons.

Which just so happens to be within an OOM of 200 gigatons.

Don't you think that with such a yield, the author wouldn't have described the potency of the weapons as something more capable than just vaporizing a small town, huh?

Don't you think that with the chain reaction being quintillions of times more powerful than the DET component, tech guides and characters would mention IT instead of ignoring it and only mentioning the DET component? Oh how annoying hypocrisy is!

Neither will an asteroid that doesn't exist to begin with. I'd rather go with technobabble flak weapon than invent rocks out of thin air like SDN has been claiming for more than a decade. But feel free to mindlessly copy Wong's hosted page again.

[/quote]

And you don't think that the asteroids existed because...eh.

[Mr. Oragahn]

I tried your link, and went to google images. Nowhere do I see pictures of artillery shells hitting the sky. Artillery doesn't work that way. The shells go way too fast.

I didn't look for pictures but for citations from people.
If I wanted to point to pictures, I'd have given the links to pictures.
Actually, I'd have given the links to videos for firing by night; just so you could see the tracers rounds and other demonstrative tracer shells. That would still not make the non visible shells less sky-filling anyway. Just saying, before you leap at your keyboard with another of your abysmal "debunkings".

Let me arrange your sentence here:
"If the shields were down (...) then a single HTL could have destroyed a capital ship had they still been up."

Am I supposed to understand anything here?
:/

1. The shields were down (the shells were hitting bare hull)
2. A single HTL bolt would have taken down an unshielded ship ("without our deflector shield we'll be sitting ducks!")
3. Yet that does not happen, nor do we see any HTL bolts. Instead we see occasional LTL bolts and typically what are stated in the EU to be flak cannons.
4. Therefore, HTL's were down.

You must be blind because we do see the HTLs of the Venator firing. But I could understand the Venator not firing at full power while being so close, if indeed the Venator didn't have shields anymore.
That said, if those ships didn't have shields, it would really beg the question why no warship in the vicinity got that on their scopes and fire a heavy bolt at them.
Plus the shells are solid projectiles, and we saw proton torpedoes and concussion missiles sheathed in visible force fields, and yet the later are said to be capable of going through shields.
Plus there are two types of shields, and there's no evidence that both ray and particle shields were down or up at the same time.
It's totally possible that most power was put on ray shields, with particle shields down. Perhaps it also prevented weapons from being fired at full. Then, those solid shells made a difference because neither ships would raise particles shields high enough.

Now, the reason why you are wrong is that you claim all shields were down. However, we've seen that it takes very little to damage those warships. A wall a couple thumbs thick didn't prevent a slowly moving shell fired by the Invisible Hand to wreck havoc in one of the Venator's firing chambers. There's no doubt that multiplying that thickness up to several meters would still not provide enough resistance against firepower in the megaton range, and certainly nothing above.

Meaning that those ships didn't fire such highly powered bolts.

Meaning that other ships did, since the novelization says that such high powered bolts were fired.

I'd also like to point that we've seen sort of shiny "hairlines" in TESB, when the ISD was firing at the Millennium Falcon when it was just before it, but the green lines were very faint.

In reality, it's hard to tie the novelization's description with what we saw in the movie. But then, if we consider that the novelization's description doesn't fit with the movie, here goes one of those very few descriptions of firepower.

Sidenote (not intended to serve as part of this debate): It's quite obvious, anyway, that the firepower of warships won't scale up dramatically if we had to look at hull strength only. Between the E-web gun that can lethally threaten the Millennium Falcon on Hoth, and the Delta-7's hull that got damaged by megajoule-level shots, you wouldn't expect more than some terajoules of firepower tops to largely pierce the metres-thick hulls of Star Destroyers, at their thickest point.
Only shields would allow a greater protection.

Official literature. ICS, per chance? Because any asstard who wrote that never opened a book about what flak is.
Clue: it certainly has nothing to do with fixed gunpoints lobbing shells at subsonic speeds from the broadsides.
Even the shells themselves didn't reveal any sign of behaviour that would potentially make them relevant as a form of flak.
The reality is both for a Venator and the Invisible Hand, those cannons just make fuck sense at all. The best I can think of is some kind of uss in boarding operations, to deal local damage to enemy gun pieces to avoid your own ship getting damaged, as well as transportation boats or connection tubes, if there's anything like that. Which I have not seen evidence of, as far as the later is concerned.

Who says that the main purpose of those guns was what they were used for, rather than as a desperate improvisation?

That's not my point. Improvisation or not, they clearly are the worst gun design if meant for flak. If you want to see flak guns, then look at the towers on the surface of the Death Star, or the attack run against the Malevolence by Anakin's Y-wing squadron. That's flak. And it even explodes.
The OT novelizations have an abundance of flak references related to fire coming from either turbolasers or weapons as small as the chin cannons on AT-ATs. And it makes sense.

Expecting a flak role from turrets with such a narrow arc of angle and little to no capacity to swivel is patently absurd.

The small towns and cities are featured in TCWS. I know this was already pointed out by others before me.

And when do the characters in TCW ever see small towns in a developed SW planet, rather than small, sparsely populated planets that TCW tends to focus on?

Rhodia? The planet of the Twi'leks?
Or even Kashyyyk as a matter of fact, right from ROTS. Perhaps PauCity then, another capital from the movies as well? Or, heck, what about Kamino?
Funny thing how all these worlds are capital worlds.

And there you just shot yourself in the foot. Ottawa, a capital city, in a nation of 34 M people, is already quite small (although it's actually very close to Gatineau, which explains the lack of expansion in a certain direction, and the lack of overall exclusive influence in the region).
As for Naboo, you either get 600 M or more than 4 billions, which is all I need anyway. It largely surpasses Canada, and in one case comes close to Earth.
Plus we already worked with your definition of towns from that series of books, which still don't allow for large areas. And it said towns had pops of hundreds of thousands iirc, not small towns.

I just showed you that being a capital city does not equate to being large, and then you italicize capital city as if it matters? What point are you trying to make here?

I just told you that you picked an example of a capital city, not even a town or a small town.
I also proved that Naboo had far more people on its surface than Canada, and actually several other countries grouped, but you also ignored that.
Perhaps we should look at what it means to be a small town in Canada, eh? ;)

The lower limit if close to the nuke that blasted Hiroshima. Below two dozen kilotons.

Hiroshima was not vaporized.

One of the two uses of the word vaporized says it was. How long will you keep repeating that fucking lie like if evidence against your obtuse position had not been provided a million times before?

He didn't go with a hyper literal application. He wanted to obtain an already absurd high end within the confines of his interpretation of "vaporize".
We know that if you go down the route where even houses and random buildings are all turned to hot particles, you'll have to aim for an event that actually puts a city sized crater into the ground of the planet.
One could say that if the TLs could do that, the author would have said so instead of fixing himself to a description that would easily sound less impressive.

"HIS" interpretation is made up and arbitrary. How he comes up with it he does not explain.

Ah yes, his interpretation of "vaporize" is made up. Riiight.
We already talked about that. Do you want me to post another definition out of a dictionary, so you'll just shut up?
Let's do that.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vaporize

2: to cause to become dissipated
3: to destroy by or as if by converting into vapor <a tank vaporized by a shell>

Knowing that a shell never turns a tank to gas. They simply don't have enough energy to do so.

Dissipated?
To dissipate:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dissipated (pick the verb)

transitive verb
1b : to cause to spread thin or scatter and gradually vanish
intransitive verb
1: to break up and scatter or vanish

*sigh*

Figuratively, it was. We provided plenty of evidence of that. It's all over the Internet for crissake. Don't you ever read people's posts?

Ohhhhh...some random dudes on the internet claimed it was vaporized, so that must be what the author too meant, or what it would mean in SW! But when Chakoway says that something "should have been vaporized", obviously he's being literal!

Journalists. Dictionaries. Nothing will satisfy SWST.

Oh, and the vast majority of descriptions of Hiroshima do not state that it was vaporized.

Laypeople say destroyed, leveled, blown or vaporized. Vaporized sounds cool.

Just for you.

Did you know that the nuclear calculator will never provide a figure for the hyper literalism you're going for?
Tss tss.
Now, let's look at how you proceeded.
RSA said a circle that's 4.9 km. It means 4.9 km wide. You used the diameter as if it were the radius.
Radius is 2.45 km.
You need about 24 megatons (instead of 400) to get a fireball that's roughly 2.45 km wide on ground contact (because that's what it is, a ground contact explosion).
The near total fatalities over the same radius is 700 KT, instead of your 5 MT.

Heck, even the craterization figure from his asteroid busting calculator returns only 21.3 megatons for a 4900 meters wide hard-granite rock. That, of course, would technically take care of the entirety of the city.

My bad on the diameter vs radius issue. 23 megatons is still far more than 1.5 megatons.

It's a hyper high end. It literally leaves a deep crater in place of the city, with a depth equal to the radius, but ignores gravity, so the yield would actually be even greater: the city on the surface would be long gone even before the earth could be gouged out of the crust.

Of course, if we wanted to be honest and look at the true vaporization figures, knowing that they're for a single bomb placed inside a closed environment, instead of an open and flat surface, we would already get 452.1 gigatons.

Which just so happens to be within an OOM of 200 gigatons.

In the most common usage of the terminology, what you say is incorrect, and I doubt that you're not going with powers of 10 here.

Don't you think that with such a yield, the author wouldn't have described the potency of the weapons as something more capable than just vaporizing a small town, huh?

Don't you think that with the chain reaction being quintillions of times more powerful than the DET component, tech guides and characters would mention IT instead of ignoring it and only mentioning the DET component? Oh how annoying hypocrisy is!

Well nice dodge. I notice that you failed to reply to my question, which was expected. The obvious answer was of course, the author would have pointed out that one bolt could actually wipe out an entire large nation and probably leave a crater the size of Washington.

Now, the difference between one analysis (the ROTs quote) and the other (the Death Star's power output) is that the ROTS bit isn't in contradiction with other sources regarding the way energy is imparted to the target.
We pretty much all agree that the turbolaser in this case is DET. It is also analyzed on its own merits.

Then, when a source is analyzed separately, we go into the next phase, that is, looking at the complete set of descriptions.
In the case of turbolasers, the EU is very generous, and agrees with the lower end.
But this second step isn't relevant to this debate.
This debate is about the interpretation made of one single piece of text, and should be limited to that.

Neither will an asteroid that doesn't exist to begin with. I'd rather go with technobabble flak weapon than invent rocks out of thin air like SDN has been claiming for more than a decade. But feel free to mindlessly copy Wong's hosted page again.

And you don't think that the asteroids existed because...eh.

What? You claimed asteroids existed before being vaporized (just a mere parroting of one of SDN's oldest claim). Stop projecting those asinine ideas.

[2046]

But when Chakoway says that something "should have been vaporized", obviously he's being literal!

I scarcely have time to read here these days, much less post, but your dishonest accusation patterns crossed the line above.

Chakotay said an asteroid almost 400 meters long should've been vaporized, and the next line reads that any (escaping) fragments shouldn't have been more than a centimeter in diameter.

Though you try to hide it well, it is apparent that you're smart enough to realize that a solid nickel-iron asteroid hundreds of meters in size isn't going to come apart in such an orderly fashion. The asteroid volume is 13,508,063 m^3. That's 13,508,063,000,000 cubic centimeters.

Unless you wish to argue that a photon torpedo is a giant space blender that could evenly cut the asteroid into 13.5 trillion pieces, then the scientific definition of vaporization is an absolute necessity. The bloody thing's 400 meters long for crying out loud . . . any simple non-vaporizing detonation would've looked just like the one we saw, with big chunks going everywhere. Even a really badass detonation could've allowed meter-wide debris, but no, we hear about only centimeter-sized escapees.

It's patently ridiculous to claim anything less than scientific vaporization as the goal.

But, then, you knew that, and chose to ignore it to attempt to slander. But all you did was make yourself look more ignorant to anyone paying attention . . . if anyone still does pay attention to you, that is.

[Mike DiCenso]

Thanks again to the magic of YouTube, we can view the scene with the Falcon being chased by the Avenger. At 12:12 through 13:24, you can clearly see that the TL bolts are not hitting any asteroids whatsoever, especially and most importantly when most of that scene occurs after they have left the field and there's noting left to hit!

So the big 64,000 dollar question is this: where are these asteroids before they get vaporized?
-Mike

[Kor_Dahar_Master]

Thanks again to the magic of YouTube, we can view the scene with the Falcon being chased by the Avenger. At 12:12 through 13:24, you can clearly see that the TL bolts are not hitting any asteroids whatsoever, especially and most importantly when most of that scene occurs after they have left the field and there's noting left to hit!

So the big 64,000 dollar question is this: where are these asteroids before they get vaporized?
-Mike

When they take off from naboo the bolts from the trade federation ships also do the flak thing.

[Mike DiCenso]

Yes, I previously linked to turbolaser flack bursts occurring in ANH as well. But this is the one example of flack bursts being mistaken, or rather deliberately played up as being vaporized asteroids when there are no asteroids being hit at all in the TESB Falcon versus Avenger chase scene. It's really frustrating that this lie has persisted as long as it has.
-Mike

[Kor_Dahar_Master]

Yes, I previously linked to turbolaser flack bursts occurring in ANH as well. But this is the one example of flack bursts being mistaken, or rather deliberately played up as being vaporized asteroids when there are no asteroids being hit at all in the TESB Falcon versus Avenger chase scene. It's really frustrating that this lie has persisted as long as it has.
-Mike

I have seen people make the same claim or demand proof of flak and having several scenes with it in always leaves them stumped and normally resorting to abuse.

[Mike DiCenso]

And these people claim to watch Star Wars or even be fans of it? Look, you can't help but notice the flack bursts. It's part of the whole World War II montage feel and look of the movies, and now the TCW CGI series. We see cloudy black explosions in mid-air in several scenes of the TCW, mimicking a similar effect at the beginning of RoTS. So highest canon and upper tier canon are in lockstep agreement with one another. Open and close shut case.
-Mike

[StarWarsStarTrek]

I didn't look for pictures but for citations from people.
If I wanted to point to pictures, I'd have given the links to pictures.
Actually, I'd have given the links to videos for firing by night; just so you could see the tracers rounds and other demonstrative tracer shells. That would still not make the non visible shells less sky-filling anyway. Just saying, before you leap at your keyboard with another of your abysmal "debunkings".

And I don't see how the "citations" of random posters on the internet helps your argument at all.

You must be blind because we do see the HTLs of the Venator firing.

I would be interested in seeing where.

But I could understand the Venator not firing at full power while being so close, if indeed the Venator didn't have shields anymore.

Correct.

That said, if those ships didn't have shields, it would really beg the question why no warship in the vicinity got that on their scopes and fire a heavy bolt at them.

Because they were busy fighting ships of their own?

Plus the shells are solid projectiles, and we saw proton torpedoes and concussion missiles sheathed in visible force fields, and yet the later are said to be capable of going through shields.
Plus there are two types of shields, and there's no evidence that both ray and particle shields were down or up at the same time.
It's totally possible that most power was put on ray shields, with particle shields down. Perhaps it also prevented weapons from being fired at full. Then, those solid shells made a difference because neither ships would raise particles shields high enough.

That's idiotic; if they diverted all or most power from particle to ray shields, logically they would have diverted some back to particle shielding after both sides started using projectile weaponry.

Now, the reason why you are wrong is that you claim all shields were down. However, we've seen that it takes very little to damage those warships. A wall a couple thumbs thick didn't prevent a slowly moving shell fired by the Invisible Hand to wreck havoc in one of the Venator's firing chambers. There's no doubt that multiplying that thickness up to several meters would still not provide enough resistance against firepower in the megaton range, and certainly nothing above.

Red herring. Your argument goes "you claim the shields were down however we saw that the armor was weak." You're attempting to prove that the shields were still up, not that the armor was weak.

Meaning that those ships didn't fire such highly powered bolts.

Which is exactly what I'm saying. Is this supposed to be a rebuttal or an agreement?

Meaning that other ships did, since the novelization says that such high powered bolts were fired.

No, the novel says that turbolaser bolts were fired. I am saying that they were light turbolaser bolts. You're using circular reasoning; the novel describing high powered bolts is something that you are trying to prove, it's not a premise.

I'd also like to point that we've seen sort of shiny "hairlines" in TESB, when the ISD was firing at the Millennium Falcon when it was just before it, but the green lines were very faint.

Really? Show me a link or image.

In reality, it's hard to tie the novelization's description with what we saw in the movie. But then, if we consider that the novelization's description doesn't fit with the movie, here goes one of those very few descriptions of firepower.

Surely you are not going to dismiss the quote that you pro Trek debaters have been using for years as your firepower calculations, are you?

Sidenote (not intended to serve as part of this debate): It's quite obvious, anyway, that the firepower of warships won't scale up dramatically if we had to look at hull strength only. Between the E-web gun that can lethally threaten the Millennium Falcon on Hoth, and the Delta-7's hull that got damaged by megajoule-level shots, you wouldn't expect more than some terajoules of firepower tops to largely pierce the metres-thick hulls of Star Destroyers, at their thickest point.
Only shields would allow a greater protection.

And a 50 caliber machine gun could conceivably pierce an armored jeep and point blank range, so surely that means that it could damage an aircraft carrier, right? Did you realize that starfighter hulls have titanium alloys, not the neutronium alloys of capital ships?

That's not my point. Improvisation or not, they clearly are the worst gun design if meant for flak. If you want to see flak guns, then look at the towers on the surface of the Death Star, or the attack run against the Malevolence by Anakin's Y-wing squadron. That's flak. And it even explodes.
The OT novelizations have an abundance of flak references related to fire coming from either turbolasers or weapons as small as the chin cannons on AT-ATs. And it makes sense.

Expecting a flak role from turrets with such a narrow arc of angle and little to no capacity to swivel is patently absurd.

Poisoning the well fallacy and red herring. We're not discussing the use and effectiveness of the flak cannons.

Rhodia? The planet of the Twi'leks?

Wookieepedia is not completely accurate, but it says:

Ryloth, also known as Twi'lek, and Twi'lek Prime,[5] was the harsh, rocky homeworld of the Twi'leks, an Outer Rim Territories world located on the Corellian Run and forming one endpoint of the Death Wind Corridor.

Hardly sounds like a developed planet to me.

Or even Kashyyyk as a matter of fact, right from ROTS.

Nowhere is it stated that Kashyyk was highly populated or developed either. And no, being very important does not make it either of the above, unless if you think that Saudi Arabia is a developed nation.

Perhaps PauCity then, another capital from the movies as well? Or, heck, what about Kamino?
Funny thing how all these worlds are capital worlds.

"All these worlds are capital worlds"; what?

I just told you that you picked an example of a capital city, not even a town or a small town.

No, you brought up the Naboo example, not me. Don't put words in my mouth.

I also proved that Naboo had far more people on its surface than Canada, and actually several other countries grouped, but you also ignored that.

The population of a nation has little connection to its capital city size.

Perhaps we should look at what it means to be a small town in Canada, eh? ;)

It's not relevant, so what's your point? The average developed planet in SW would have dozens of billions of people on it, based on the 100 quadrillion population figure (reinforced by the RotS novel).

One of the two uses of the word vaporized says it was. How long will you keep repeating that fucking lie like if evidence against your obtuse position had not been provided a million times before?

Prove that Hiroshima was vaporized figuratively. Quantify "figurative vaporization", and explain the line between "destroyed" and "figuratively vaporized". If you cannot do these, then you cannot hope to calculate an upper limit or even a median calculation with a figurative term.

Ah yes, his interpretation of "vaporize" is made up. Riiight.
We already talked about that. Do you want me to post another definition out of a dictionary, so you'll just shut up?
Let's do that.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vaporize

2: to cause to become dissipated
3: to destroy by or as if by converting into vapor <a tank vaporized by a shell>

Knowing that a shell never turns a tank to gas. They simply don't have enough energy to do so.

Dissipated?
To dissipate:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dissipated (pick the verb)

transitive verb
1b : to cause to spread thin or scatter and gradually vanish
intransitive verb
1: to break up and scatter or vanish

*sigh*

Exactly why should I listen to the dictionary definition from a private company? Is this dictionary website authoritative on the English language?

Quantify "to cause to spread thin." How thin? How fast?

Journalists. Dictionaries. Nothing will satisfy SWST.


Laypeople say destroyed, leveled, blown or vaporized. Vaporized sounds cool.


Just for you.

Look at it this way:

There are two possible definitions of vaporization, the literal and the figurative. You have no evidence that it HAD to have been figurative other than because you think that the authors was using that definition, ie definition 3 in your link and not definition 2. Give me a solid reason other than "oh, most people use it in layman terms...because...because the internet says so!"

The literal version happens to fit within an OOM of Saxtonite calculations, which are canon in the AotC and RotS ICS's.

The figurative version fits with no other cross referenced sources in canon; darkstar's power generation figures are hilariously incompatible with 1.5 megaton HTL's.


Unlike what you may wish, since the ICS's are canon, we need to try and rationalize them with G canon. Since interpretation 1 (literal) fits better with the ICS's than interpretation 2 (figurative) which fits with nothing, not even the power generation or speed figures of darkstar, the same person that made the 1.5 megaton calcs, we take interpretation 1 because it is more consistent with other canon sources.

Interpretation 1 and 2 are equally valid from a language and canon status standpoint, but interpretation 1 of literal vaporization fits with C canon sources better, so it wins.

It's a hyper high end. It literally leaves a deep crater in place of the city, with a depth equal to the radius, but ignores gravity, so the yield would actually be even greater: the city on the surface would be long gone even before the earth could be gouged out of the crust.

Choosing a literal interpretation of vaporize is hardly high end at all. Vaporize is a quite well known and applicable literal term with a specific scientific meaning. Your unscientific analyzing of vaporizing meaning a totally arbitrary amount of destruction is silly. If the author meant vaporize figuartively, then you have no business calculating anything other than a lower limit from the word unless if you can establish a clear cut difference between "vaporize figuratively" and "destroy" or "scorch" or "screw up".

In the most common usage of the terminology, what you say is incorrect, and I doubt that you're not going with powers of 10 here.

You fail to understand that the best theory is the one that fits with the facts the best. A literal interpretation of the quote fits with the ICS sources, while a figurative interpretation does not and holds no canon precedence over the equally valid literal interpretation. Jeez, this is getting annoying.

Well nice dodge. I notice that you failed to reply to my question, which was expected. The obvious answer was of course, the author would have pointed out that one bolt could actually wipe out an entire large nation and probably leave a crater the size of Washington.

Why?

Now, the difference between one analysis (the ROTs quote) and the other (the Death Star's power output) is that the ROTS bit isn't in contradiction with other sources regarding the way energy is imparted to the target.

Except that your figurative interpretation is in contradiction with the ICS, and the literal interpretation is not. We go with the interpretation that best fits with the facts.

We pretty much all agree that the turbolaser in this case is DET. It is also analyzed on its own merits.

My point is that if you are going to argue authorial intent, you would have to explain why no author or in universe character even points out for a brief moment that the DS's superlaser was a chain reaction weapon, despite the fact that they very clearly pointed such chain reactions out in every other instance in which there was one, such as the sun crusher and the galaxy gun. But no, but your logic, everybody gets amnesia in regards to the function of the superlaser!

Then, when a source is analyzed separately, we go into the next phase, that is, looking at the complete set of descriptions.
In the case of turbolasers, the EU is very generous, and agrees with the lower end.
But this second step isn't relevant to this debate.
This debate is about the interpretation made of one single piece of text, and should be limited to that.

The EU does not agree with the lower end. Show me a single EU source that agrees with 1.5 megaton HTL's; you won't find any.

What? You claimed asteroids existed before being vaporized (just a mere parroting of one of SDN's oldest claim). Stop projecting those asinine ideas.

Because we visibly see turbolasers causing blue glows. Logically they were asteroids, because they were just hitting asteroids moments earlier. Is this really that hard to understand?

[Mr. Oragahn]

I didn't look for pictures but for citations from people.
If I wanted to point to pictures, I'd have given the links to pictures.
Actually, I'd have given the links to videos for firing by night; just so you could see the tracers rounds and other demonstrative tracer shells. That would still not make the non visible shells less sky-filling anyway. Just saying, before you leap at your keyboard with another of your abysmal "debunkings".

And I don't see how the "citations" of random posters on the internet helps your argument at all.

Random posters being various journalists who wrote articles everyone would understand save perhaps you? Plus a video?
Yeah, sorry if I do go with that.
I don't even know why I have to prove anything beyond that point. It's used that way over the world, it's also defined that way in dictionaries.
The only reason why we can't accept the meaning that annoys you, is because... it annoys you.
I wasn't trying to show which one was better than the other. We've all been arguing against you to tell you that the "leveled" interpretation was valid. That defining a low end, then. You reject this possibility, making the low end anything based on physics defined vaporization.
You're simply wrong. That's all.
So thank you but I consider this case closed.

You must be blind because we do see the HTLs of the Venator firing.

I would be interested in seeing where.

Damn, is it hard for you to look at the heavy turrets and spot the rather obvious blue bolts originating from them?
Seriously.

Plus the shells are solid projectiles, and we saw proton torpedoes and concussion missiles sheathed in visible force fields, and yet the later are said to be capable of going through shields.
Plus there are two types of shields, and there's no evidence that both ray and particle shields were down or up at the same time.
It's totally possible that most power was put on ray shields, with particle shields down. Perhaps it also prevented weapons from being fired at full. Then, those solid shells made a difference because neither ships would raise particles shields high enough.

That's idiotic; if they diverted all or most power from particle to ray shields, logically they would have diverted some back to particle shielding after both sides started using projectile weaponry.

What's more idiotic is claiming that the Venator had lost her shields when she entered that short ranged spiting contest with no glaring sign of severe damage. You know, like you would expect from a ship having lost her megaton shields (or more) and being hit by an extra bolt (because we doubt that the enemy stops firing in the middle of a battle, with precog and all that, knowing when shields would fail).

Now, the reason why you are wrong is that you claim all shields were down. However, we've seen that it takes very little to damage those warships. A wall a couple thumbs thick didn't prevent a slowly moving shell fired by the Invisible Hand to wreck havoc in one of the Venator's firing chambers. There's no doubt that multiplying that thickness up to several meters would still not provide enough resistance against firepower in the megaton range, and certainly nothing above.

Red herring. Your argument goes "you claim the shields were down however we saw that the armor was weak." You're attempting to prove that the shields were still up, not that the armor was weak.

Meaning that those ships didn't fire such highly powered bolts.

Which is exactly what I'm saying. Is this supposed to be a rebuttal or an agreement?

Meaning that other ships did, since the novelization says that such high powered bolts were fired.

No, the novel says that turbolaser bolts were fired. I am saying that they were light turbolaser bolts. You're using circular reasoning; the novel describing high powered bolts is something that you are trying to prove, it's not a premise.

That's why you shouldn't cut and quote every little bit before having read the whole.
There's obviously a problem between ships which can throw megatons at each other, yet a few centimeters of armour getting pierced by shitty level of firepower.
In a way, yes, that would be an agreement that both ships couldn't fire anything spectacular.
But that also means that to conform to the book, then there has to be other ships which were exchanging that much firepower.

Fact remains that the low end will make that firepower (which could be kilotons) be fired from HTLs. The highest end will have the greatest figure available, attached to the smallest turbolasers.

I'd also like to point that we've seen sort of shiny "hairlines" in TESB, when the ISD was firing at the Millennium Falcon when it was just before it, but the green lines were very faint.

Really? Show me a link or image.

Since you quote Wong's website so much, you must surely have read at least once the Turbolaser Commentaries pages he has hosted. There are pictures from TESB there.

In reality, it's hard to tie the novelization's description with what we saw in the movie. But then, if we consider that the novelization's description doesn't fit with the movie, here goes one of those very few descriptions of firepower.

Surely you are not going to dismiss the quote that you pro Trek debaters have been using for years as your firepower calculations, are you?

1. I'm not pro-Trek. I'm anti-wank. Especially anti SW wank in this case.
2. If it has to be dismissed, so be it. I won't feel sorry. Would you?

Sidenote (not intended to serve as part of this debate): It's quite obvious, anyway, that the firepower of warships won't scale up dramatically if we had to look at hull strength only. Between the E-web gun that can lethally threaten the Millennium Falcon on Hoth, and the Delta-7's hull that got damaged by megajoule-level shots, you wouldn't expect more than some terajoules of firepower tops to largely pierce the metres-thick hulls of Star Destroyers, at their thickest point.
Only shields would allow a greater protection.

And a 50 caliber machine gun could conceivably pierce an armored jeep and point blank range, so surely that means that it could damage an aircraft carrier, right? Did you realize that starfighter hulls have titanium alloys, not the neutronium alloys of capital ships?

Ah, the neutronium hull.
The same hull that was seen burning and being peeled away as the Invisible Hand fell through the atmosphere of Coruscant, with literally entire sections of the armour and the ship burning and detaching themselves under the heat and friction? Exposed parts of the superstructure, previously undamaged, yet incapable of coping with the heat of a rather tame reentry.

Remember this post?
Well obviously not, it's just better to flush it all so you can repeat the same nonsense later on.

That's not my point. Improvisation or not, they clearly are the worst gun design if meant for flak. If you want to see flak guns, then look at the towers on the surface of the Death Star, or the attack run against the Malevolence by Anakin's Y-wing squadron. That's flak. And it even explodes.
The OT novelizations have an abundance of flak references related to fire coming from either turbolasers or weapons as small as the chin cannons on AT-ATs. And it makes sense.

Expecting a flak role from turrets with such a narrow arc of angle and little to no capacity to swivel is patently absurd.

Poisoning the well fallacy and red herring. We're not discussing the use and effectiveness of the flak cannons.

Mmm, I feel like the reason they'd be used would be relevant, but let's put that aside now that I've shown they are the worst design ever for flak cannons.

Rhodia? The planet of the Twi'leks?

Wookieepedia is not completely accurate, but it says:

Ryloth, also known as Twi'lek, and Twi'lek Prime,[5] was the harsh, rocky homeworld of the Twi'leks, an Outer Rim Territories world located on the Corellian Run and forming one endpoint of the Death Wind Corridor.

Hardly sounds like a developed planet to me.

And yet is the planet of one of the aliens we see the most in Star Wars. They even had a seat of their own in the Senate, and were clearly brought to evidence during the movie.

Or even Kashyyyk as a matter of fact, right from ROTS.

Nowhere is it stated that Kashyyk was highly populated or developed either. And no, being very important does not make it either of the above, unless if you think that Saudi Arabia is a developed nation.

Let's make that easier, shall we?
Show me a small town in Star Wars.
Something different than the "town" reference you brought earlier on from some novel and which was dealt with.

I just told you that you picked an example of a capital city, not even a town or a small town.

No, you brought up the Naboo example, not me. Don't put words in my mouth.

I'm talking about your Canadian example. It agreed with me.

I also proved that Naboo had far more people on its surface than Canada, and actually several other countries grouped, but you also ignored that.

The population of a nation has little connection to its capital city size.

Sure. It's an example that's again in my favour.
I'm just going to wait to see what a small town is supposed to look like in your book.

Perhaps we should look at what it means to be a small town in Canada, eh? ;)

It's not relevant, so what's your point?

Ah, now it's not important.

The average developed planet in SW would have dozens of billions of people on it, based on the 100 quadrillion population figure (reinforced by the RotS novel).

It would require millions of worlds hosting billions of people.
Even if it were true (and I'm waiting to see evidence of that from higher canon), where does it prove that a small town would be huge in Star Wars?

Ah yes, his interpretation of "vaporize" is made up. Riiight.
We already talked about that. Do you want me to post another definition out of a dictionary, so you'll just shut up?
Let's do that.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vaporize

2: to cause to become dissipated
3: to destroy by or as if by converting into vapor <a tank vaporized by a shell>

Knowing that a shell never turns a tank to gas. They simply don't have enough energy to do so.

Dissipated?
To dissipate:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dissipated (pick the verb)

transitive verb
1b : to cause to spread thin or scatter and gradually vanish
intransitive verb
1: to break up and scatter or vanish

*sigh*

Exactly why should I listen to the dictionary definition from a private company? Is this dictionary website authoritative on the English language?

Well, go find a superior definition then.
Until you do, I'll still be right and you wrong.

Quantify "to cause to spread thin." How thin? How fast?

"To spread thin or scatter and gradually vanish."
Or the other line, that says "to break up and scatter or vanish."

If I posted all of them, it's for a good reason.

Look at it this way:

There are two possible definitions of vaporization, the literal and the figurative. You have no evidence that it HAD to have been figurative other than because you think that the authors was using that definition, ie definition 3 in your link and not definition 2. Give me a solid reason other than "oh, most people use it in layman terms...because...because the internet says so!"

I never claimed we HAD to go for the figurative. I merely attacked the idea that it was not valid.
Its validity defines the true low end.

The literal version happens to fit within an OOM of Saxtonite calculations, which are canon in the AotC and RotS ICS's.

Are you shitting me?
Venators, according to Saxton, could already output more than 800 teratons per second and divert all of that to guns.
We're way above the highest end.
Besides, as I said, even said highest end would have warranted a completely different description. You don't say that a turbolaser can vaporize a small town when you fire multi gigatons at a planet.

The figurative version fits with no other cross referenced sources in canon;

lol yes, it does.

darkstar's power generation figures are hilariously incompatible with 1.5 megaton HTL's.

Huh, did you read his page? He DOES come with a low megaton figure for HTLs.
Jesus.

Unlike what you may wish, since the ICS's are canon, we need to try and rationalize them with G canon. Since interpretation 1 (literal) fits better with the ICS's than interpretation 2 (figurative) which fits with nothing, not even the power generation or speed figures of darkstar, the same person that made the 1.5 megaton calcs, we take interpretation 1 because it is more consistent with other canon sources.

Interpretation 1 and 2 are equally valid from a language and canon status standpoint, but interpretation 1 of literal vaporization fits with C canon sources better, so it wins.

Who gives a shit about other EU? I told you that we're analyzing this text on its own merits.

It's a hyper high end. It literally leaves a deep crater in place of the city, with a depth equal to the radius, but ignores gravity, so the yield would actually be even greater: the city on the surface would be long gone even before the earth could be gouged out of the crust.

Choosing a literal interpretation of vaporize is hardly high end at all. Vaporize is a quite well known and applicable literal term with a specific scientific meaning. Your unscientific analyzing of vaporizing meaning a totally arbitrary amount of destruction is silly. If the author meant vaporize figuartively, then you have no business calculating anything other than a lower limit from the word unless if you can establish a clear cut difference between "vaporize figuratively" and "destroy" or "scorch" or "screw up".

You don't understand. The hyper high end is based on the literal scientific interpretation of vaporization. Aka, turn to goddamn vapor, especially a hot one in this case.
Heck, the figure ends with much more mass than the small town's being vaporized.
Oh, just to be lazy, I went for a totally silly figure there, and plugged 10 km for the asteroid calculator at SDN.
Nickel-iron, central detonation, vaporization yield: 7.49 e3 gigatons.

Surely, the author wouldn't think that speaking of vaporizing a small town would be an understatement.
Oh, but why, you don't understand that reality either.

In the most common usage of the terminology, what you say is incorrect, and I doubt that you're not going with powers of 10 here.

You fail to understand that the best theory is the one that fits with the facts the best. A literal interpretation of the quote fits with the ICS sources, while a figurative interpretation does not and holds no canon precedence over the equally valid literal interpretation. Jeez, this is getting annoying.

Damn, the farce. :)
I'm correcting you on your use of OoMs and you go on with some irrelevant shit.
I should be paid for that.

Well nice dodge. I notice that you failed to reply to my question, which was expected. The obvious answer was of course, the author would have pointed out that one bolt could actually wipe out an entire large nation and probably leave a crater the size of Washington.

Why?

Science, you dolt.

Or thermodynamics!, to parrot you. :D

Now, the difference between one analysis (the ROTs quote) and the other (the Death Star's power output) is that the ROTS bit isn't in contradiction with other sources regarding the way energy is imparted to the target.

Except that your figurative interpretation is in contradiction with the ICS, and the literal interpretation is not. We go with the interpretation that best fits with the facts.

No, we don't.
And the ICS are the outlier in the vast swarm of EU facts, if a comparison is needed.
I get the feeling that you don't even understand what the ICS figures are really about here.

We pretty much all agree that the turbolaser in this case is DET. It is also analyzed on its own merits.

My point is that if you are going to argue authorial intent, you would have to explain why no author or in universe character even points out for a brief moment that the DS's superlaser was a chain reaction weapon, despite the fact that they very clearly pointed such chain reactions out in every other instance in which there was one, such as the sun crusher and the galaxy gun. But no, but your logic, everybody gets amnesia in regards to the function of the superlaser!

Case by case. Moving on.

Then, when a source is analyzed separately, we go into the next phase, that is, looking at the complete set of descriptions.
In the case of turbolasers, the EU is very generous, and agrees with the lower end.
But this second step isn't relevant to this debate.
This debate is about the interpretation made of one single piece of text, and should be limited to that.

The EU does not agree with the lower end. Show me a single EU source that agrees with 1.5 megaton HTL's; you won't find any.

This board is literally choke full of such evidence.
Use the search function, you damn troll.

What? You claimed asteroids existed before being vaporized (just a mere parroting of one of SDN's oldest claim). Stop projecting those asinine ideas.

Because we visibly see turbolasers causing blue glows. Logically they were asteroids, because they were just hitting asteroids moments earlier. Is this really that hard to understand?

Wonderful "logic" you've got here!
You will now present evidence that asteroids existed in place of those flashes, just before those flashes appeared and stop dodging this request.
I'll be waiting, but it is unlikely that I'll still be posting on this website around 2050 though, so hasten your pace!

[Mith]

He's got a point. Half the time it seems like Super Star Destroyers are having difficult times creating firestorms--something that would be instant with 10kt detonations. Perhaps we should move the bar down some?

[Praeothmin]

Mr. Oragahn, calling someone a "Dolt" is an insult, as well you should know, and against the rules...

Watch it, please...

Oh, and SWST, the ICS is C canon, waaaaaayyyyyy lower than the movies, TCW and themovie novelizations, so if higher canon, such as TCW, contradicts it regularly, than the ICS can be considered as pure BS, which it is...

And EU, as per Darksaber and many others discussed previously here, do indeed support low as shit Firepower figures for SW...

[StarWarsStarTrek]

Random posters being various journalists who wrote articles everyone would understand save perhaps you? Plus a video?

Show me an article written by a journalist that describes artillery fire as filling the sky. And if you post a link to a random blogger and declare it to be from a journalist, I will laugh hardly.

Yeah, sorry if I do go with that.
I don't even know why I have to prove anything beyond that point. It's used that way over the world, it's also defined that way in dictionaries.
The only reason why we can't accept the meaning that annoys you, is because... it annoys you.
I wasn't trying to show which one was better than the other. We've all been arguing against you to tell you that the "leveled" interpretation was valid. That defining a low end, then. You reject this possibility, making the low end anything based on physics defined vaporization.
You're simply wrong. That's all.
So thank you but I consider this case closed.

The nightside sky is an infinite lattice of shining hairlines that interlock planetoids and track erratic spirals of glowing gnats.

This is a lattice:



Notice how the entire nightside sky is mentioned, meaning that as much as half of the sky was covered with turbolasers.

Damn, is it hard for you to look at the heavy turrets and spot the rather obvious blue bolts originating from them?
Seriously.

Prove that they were heavy turrets. Since when were turbolasers blue?

What's more idiotic is claiming that the Venator had lost her shields when she entered that short ranged spiting contest with no glaring sign of severe damage. You know, like you would expect from a ship having lost her megaton shields (or more) and being hit by an extra bolt (because we doubt that the enemy stops firing in the middle of a battle, with precog and all that, knowing when shields would fail).

The Republic was clearly winning the Battle of Coruscant, so when the Venator lost shields it could have easily retreated back into Republic lines, while the Invisible hand was doing just that.

That's why you shouldn't cut and quote every little bit before having read the whole.
There's obviously a problem between ships which can throw megatons at each other, yet a few centimeters of armour getting pierced by shitty level of firepower.
In a way, yes, that would be an agreement that both ships couldn't fire anything spectacular.
But that also means that to conform to the book, then there has to be other ships which were exchanging that much firepower.

Fact remains that the low end will make that firepower (which could be kilotons) be fired from HTLs. The highest end will have the greatest figure available, attached to the smallest turbolasers.

The point that you seem to trying to make, which you aren't really articulating, is that they could not have been LTL's or else if both ships could consistently take LTL's like they did in the megaton range, they would not be harmed by flak cannons.

Problem is that flak cannons and turbolasers use different mechanisms for damaging targets.

Since you quote Wong's website so much, you must surely have read at least once the Turbolaser Commentaries pages he has hosted. There are pictures from TESB there.

The only bolt seen that was faint was one coming from the nose of the ISD, one that probably wasn't even a turbolaser. The rest were pretty bright.

1. I'm not pro-Trek. I'm anti-wank. Especially anti SW wank in this case.
2. If it has to be dismissed, so be it. I won't feel sorry. Would you?

1. As a question for you, what are your calcs for SW weaponry and ST weaponry??
2. So then why are you still arguing in support of a quote that you think should be dismissed?

Ah, the neutronium hull.
The same hull that was seen burning and being peeled away as the Invisible Hand fell through the atmosphere of Coruscant, with literally entire sections of the armour and the ship burning and detaching themselves under the heat and friction? Exposed parts of the superstructure, previously undamaged, yet incapable of coping with the heat of a rather tame reentry.

Remember this post?
Well obviously not, it's just better to flush it all so you can repeat the same nonsense later on.

Obviously you missed the entire point. That is, that your attempt to equate the durability of single manned starfighters with that of a capital ship is silly and stupid.

Mmm, I feel like the reason they'd be used would be relevant, but let's put that aside now that I've shown they are the worst design ever for flak cannons.

In the formations that were seen in the Battle of Coruscant, starfighters would have to fly along the sides of many enemy capital ships, where flak cannons mounted on those sides could be useful.

And yet is the planet of one of the aliens we see the most in Star Wars. They even had a seat of their own in the Senate, and were clearly brought to evidence during the movie.

And I see plenty of black people in the USA, so that must mean that Africa is a highly developed continent, right? I see plenty of Arabic people here too, so surely Saudi Arabia is a highly developed country, right?

Let's make that easier, shall we?
Show me a small town in Star Wars.
Something different than the "town" reference you brought earlier on from some novel and which was dealt with.

Town population sizes are hinted at in LOTF: Revelation, but other than Mos Eisley we do not visibly see any small towns in SW. Mos Eisley is not an accurate representation of an average small town in SW.

I'm talking about your Canadian example. It agreed with me.

The entire point I brought up in the Canadian example was that capital cities are not necessarily large. You rebutted this by saying...that capital cities can be small? Do you eve understand what I'm trying to say here?

Sure. It's an example that's again in my favour.
I'm just going to wait to see what a small town is supposed to look like in your book.

In SW? Probably similar to that of a small city by our standards.

Ah, now it's not important.

Not a Canadian small town in this context, no. You obviously seem to think that you've got me on something, but you can't seem to explain what. My point was that capital cities are not always large, and I cited Otowa as an example. Your rebuttal is...to say that Otowa is small?

It would require millions of worlds hosting billions of people.
Even if it were true (and I'm waiting to see evidence of that from higher canon), where does it prove that a small town would be huge in Star Wars?

The 100 quadrillion quote is not contradicted by any higher canon; indeed, the RotS novel mentions "quadrillions" of people. If we divide this by the one million planet figure in the ANH novel (even though most of these would be concentrated in the more populated planets), that's an average of 50 billion people.

Well, go find a superior definition then.
Until you do, I'll still be right and you wrong.

Define "superior". Superior in that it fits your definition better? Tell me, what makes you think that "to spread thin and vanish" is somehow quantifiable? Do you wish to calculate the energy needed to fragment something so small it'll be microscopic? That'll probably take even more energy than simply vaporizing it literally, and...gasp, vaporizing literally just happens to "spread thin and vanish" something!

"To spread thin or scatter and gradually vanish."
Or the other line, that says "to break up and scatter or vanish."

If I posted all of them, it's for a good reason.

The only reasonable way for something to vanish like that is for it to be vaporized. Once again, you support my theory.

I never claimed we HAD to go for the figurative. I merely attacked the idea that it was not valid.
Its validity defines the true low end.

Did I question that it could have been figurative? What I do question is how you scientifically quantify a figurative term. Explain what the calc's would be to:

Figuratively vaporize Bastrop
Scorch Bastrop
Devastate Bastrop
Screw up Bastrop
Scatter Bastrop
Figuratively disintegrate Bastrop

Oh, no, you can't, can you?

Are you shitting me?
Venators, according to Saxton, could already output more than 800 teratons per second and divert all of that to guns.
We're way above the highest end.
Besides, as I said, even said highest end would have warranted a completely different description. You don't say that a turbolaser can vaporize a small town when you fire multi gigatons at a planet.

No, Venators could in theory divert almost all of its 800 teratons/second into its various heavy turbolaser turrets. How this relates to what I'm saying you have not explained.

lol yes, it does.

This, Mr. O, is not what I'd call a rebuttal supported by facts.

Huh, did you read his page? He DOES come with a low megaton figure for HTLs.
Jesus.

And he comes up with kilotons/second reactors, while at the same time claiming that ISD's can do 2 HTL's/second. See if you can tell the problem with this.

Who gives a shit about other EU? I told you that we're analyzing this text on its own merits.

And both interpretations of the text (figurative and literal) have equal merit on its own, so therefore we need to go with the one that fits with the rest of canon better.

What's more, you have no problem with analyzing ICS quotes based on comparisons with the rest of canon, or quotes related to the DS based on comparisons with outside sources. Stop applying silly double standards, Mr. O.

You don't understand. The hyper high end is based on the literal scientific interpretation of vaporization.

How is it hyper high end? If Riker said in an episode "this phaser has enough power to vaporize a 20th century car", I'd bet you 10 imaginary bucks that every Trekkie here would be trying to figure out how much energy it takes to literally vaporize a car, because vaporize is a literal, clearly defined term that it used very often.

Aka, turn to goddamn vapor, especially a hot one in this case.

Yes, that's what vaporize means.

Heck, the figure ends with much more mass than the small town's being vaporized.

What the fuck are you talking about? Are you claiming that vaporizing something increases its mass?

Oh, just to be lazy, I went for a totally silly figure there, and plugged 10 km for the asteroid calculator at SDN.
Nickel-iron, central detonation, vaporization yield: 7.49 e3 gigatons.

Can somebody tell me why you think that vaporizing a town equates to vaporizing a nickel iron asteroid of the same diameter as the town?

Surely, the author wouldn't think that speaking of vaporizing a small town would be an understatement.
Oh, but why, you don't understand that reality either.

Your selective use of authorial's intent is annoying. Don't you think that the author would fine it extremely deceptive and misleading to say that the DET portion of the superlaser beam is soooooo powerful and that the DS is a "brute force" weapon while the alleged chain reaction component is quintillions of times more powerful and is never mentioned?

Damn, the farce. :)
I'm correcting you on your use of OoMs and you go on with some irrelevant shit.
I should be paid for that.

You actually claim that the figurative use of vaporize is more commonly used than the literal term?

That surely explains why the first definition listed in the source you used is literal.

That surely explains why in a quick google search, all of the uses of vaporize are literal except for darkstar's page (which is inexplicitly in the first page result of "vaporize") and a few irrelevant ones (song lyrics, brand names) and none are figurative.

In fact, I searched up hiroshima vaporized:

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&sugexp=bve ... 16&bih=413

The only sources to mention Hiroshima itself as vaporized is some random poster (and another poster pointed out that Hiroshima wasn't vaporized) and a random blogger. The majority of the sources describe Hiroshima specifically as human bodies being vaporized and material at the epicenter of the explosion being vaporized, an explicit contrast from the actual city being vaporized.

Science, you dolt.

Or thermodynamics!, to parrot you. :D

Clearly you miss the direction of my why, which was at why the author would use your description instead of the equally scientifically valid vaporization statement.

No, we don't.
And the ICS are the outlier in the vast swarm of EU facts, if a comparison is needed.
I get the feeling that you don't even understand what the ICS figures are really about here.

No, you don't understand it. Your figurative statement does not fit well with the ICS, my literal statement does. Therefore, the literal statement fits better with the facts.

Case by case. Moving on.

Ah, Mr. O attempts to dodge the question! If you want to do a case by case application of authorial's intent, explain and justify why the Death Star case gets a pass while the small town case does not.

This board is literally choke full of such evidence.
Use the search function, you damn troll.

I am under no obligation to support your own claims for you. Either show me some evidence or concede the point.

Wonderful "logic" you've got here!
You will now present evidence that asteroids existed in place of those flashes, just before those flashes appeared and stop dodging this request.
I'll be waiting, but it is unlikely that I'll still be posting on this website around 2050 though, so hasten your pace!

This is like asking for proof that there was oxygen when you see a fireball. There had to have been some matter there that was hit or else we would see not glow.

And here:



You clearly see that this is that of an asteroid being vaporized.

[Mith]

Show me an article written by a journalist that describes artillery fire as filling the sky. And if you post a link to a random blogger and declare it to be from a journalist, I will laugh hardly.

UK paper blog: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/20 ... udi-arabia

For the Libyan rebels it must seem as if the US or western cavalry is riding to the rescue. Celebratory gunfire and fireworks filled the skies over Benghazi after the UN security council voted in favour of a no-fly zone and air strikes to stop Gaddafi's forces.

LA Weekly: http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2011 ... es_ufo.php

Anti-aircraft artillery filled the skies and those who had bomb shelters went below. But what triggered the wave of fear known as the Battle of Los Angeles?

You were saying? Both articles come from viable new media sources, one from the US and one from the UK. Unless you want to claim that the US military can literally fill the sky with anti-aircraft artillery, then you'd best shut up now.

This is basic language skills here. This is shit that anyone out of high school could tell you.

The nightside sky is an infinite lattice of shining hairlines that interlock planetoids and track erratic spirals of glowing gnats.

This is a lattice:



Notice how the entire nightside sky is mentioned, meaning that as much as half of the sky was covered with turbolasers.

Again, the author is not being literal. He is artistically describing something to help you form the image. What he is saying is that there were so many bolts from so many ships over the sky that it looked to almost be a pattern in areas. Given that these were large amounts of ships firing wildly at each other, this isn't unsurprising.

Prove that they were heavy turrets. Since when were turbolasers blue?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmYwX7r9 ... re=related

Time Index(s): 1:27, 1:32, 1:45, 1:50

Enjoy. Also, feel free to take note of the lack of multi-gigaton explosions within the atmosphere of that planet.

Obviously you missed the entire point. That is, that your attempt to equate the durability of single manned starfighters with that of a capital ship is silly and stupid.

They're not all that far apart. As you saw in the link of C canon, those fighters were dealing significant damage to the frigates with just their lasers, let alone their torpedoes.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Well, since Mith ninja'ed me and handed your sorry butt on some points, I'll just deal with those I think still need an extra touch of brutality.
Doesn't mean that this post will be short either, unfortunately.

Damn, is it hard for you to look at the heavy turrets and spot the rather obvious blue bolts originating from them?
Seriously.

Prove that they were heavy turrets. Since when were turbolasers blue?

O_O

Seriously.
Why the fuck am I losing my time with you again?
You know, it just happens that all EU references for the Venator's biggest turrets we saw fire (during the exchange between a Venator and the IH) identify them as HTLs.
Not too hard, they're indeed the biggest ones.
In the ICSes, they're ought to fire more than 800 teratons per broadside.

And the movies have shown that blue bolts can come from HTLs.
Did you even watch ROTS once or something?

What's more idiotic is claiming that the Venator had lost her shields when she entered that short ranged spiting contest with no glaring sign of severe damage. You know, like you would expect from a ship having lost her megaton shields (or more) and being hit by an extra bolt (because we doubt that the enemy stops firing in the middle of a battle, with precog and all that, knowing when shields would fail).

The Republic was clearly winning the Battle of Coruscant, so when the Venator lost shields it could have easily retreated back into Republic lines, while the Invisible hand was doing just that.

Yeah, I forgot that they could instabeam elsewhere.
Thank you for another of those major failures of yours you've used us to.

That's why you shouldn't cut and quote every little bit before having read the whole.
There's obviously a problem between ships which can throw megatons at each other, yet a few centimeters of armour getting pierced by shitty level of firepower.
In a way, yes, that would be an agreement that both ships couldn't fire anything spectacular.
But that also means that to conform to the book, then there has to be other ships which were exchanging that much firepower.

Fact remains that the low end will make that firepower (which could be kilotons) be fired from HTLs. The highest end will have the greatest figure available, attached to the smallest turbolasers.

The point that you seem to trying to make, which you aren't really articulating, is that they could not have been LTL's or else if both ships could consistently take LTL's like they did in the megaton range, they would not be harmed by flak cannons.

Problem is that flak cannons and turbolasers use different mechanisms for damaging targets.

The OT novelizations are full of references about flak. Flak fired from typical turbolasers. And, oh wait, didn't someone like Mike recently tell you that TCWS are also full of such occurrences?
Damn you. A pity we don't have some infamous Hall here, you'd surely have a spot with your name.

Since you quote Wong's website so much, you must surely have read at least once the Turbolaser Commentaries pages he has hosted. There are pictures from TESB there.

The only bolt seen that was faint was one coming from the nose of the ISD, one that probably wasn't even a turbolaser. The rest were pretty bright.

Oh yes, I forgot the time in the movie when the pictures paused and some text appeared over the screen, saying "btw, those green lines aren't turbolasers".
-_-
I think from there on, I'll just cite that post, just to ridicule you. It will buy me time and just show the kind of bloke you are.

1. I'm not pro-Trek. I'm anti-wank. Especially anti SW wank in this case.
2. If it has to be dismissed, so be it. I won't feel sorry. Would you?

1. As a question for you, what are your calcs for SW weaponry and ST weaponry??
2. So then why are you still arguing in support of a quote that you think should be dismissed?

1. Not the topic x 2.
2. I'm not. I'm merely offering an interpretation of it, just in case we have to actually keep it.

Ah, the neutronium hull.
The same hull that was seen burning and being peeled away as the Invisible Hand fell through the atmosphere of Coruscant, with literally entire sections of the armour and the ship burning and detaching themselves under the heat and friction? Exposed parts of the superstructure, previously undamaged, yet incapable of coping with the heat of a rather tame reentry.

Remember this post?
Well obviously not, it's just better to flush it all so you can repeat the same nonsense later on.

Obviously you missed the entire point. That is, that your attempt to equate the durability of single manned starfighters with that of a capital ship is silly and stupid.

I'm pretty sure that your identification of what is stupid is rather wrong here, suzie. :)
I just demonstrated that the neutronium claim is bullshit. Doing that by actually pointing at WILGA's post, which you had already ignored back then. That's quite an habit you have there btw.
Entire sections that get ripped apart and burn during a reentry, and a rather tame one in fact, won't hold long against very low nuclear firepower. Actually, they may even collapse under sub-KT firepower rather easily.
Indeed, delivering the equivalent of half a kiloton onto a 1 meter disc should really do messy things to that kind of superstructures.

Mmm, I feel like the reason they'd be used would be relevant, but let's put that aside now that I've shown they are the worst design ever for flak cannons.

In the formations that were seen in the Battle of Coruscant, starfighters would have to fly along the sides of many enemy capital ships, where flak cannons mounted on those sides could be useful.

Not, for the fact that those cannons are fixed.
And may I point out that building weapons of defense to fit a predetermined pattern of naval deployment which, according to the ROTJ novelization, is supposed to be quite rare, is another trademark of retardation.

And yet is the planet of one of the aliens we see the most in Star Wars. They even had a seat of their own in the Senate, and were clearly brought to evidence during the movie.

And I see plenty of black people in the USA, so that must mean that Africa is a highly developed continent, right? I see plenty of Arabic people here too, so surely Saudi Arabia is a highly developed country, right?

They have some of the most populated cities. Development is irrelevant.
Yet a small town in Africa is still very small.
Thank you for losing there as well.

Let's make that easier, shall we?
Show me a small town in Star Wars.
Something different than the "town" reference you brought earlier on from some novel and which was dealt with.

Town population sizes are hinted at in LOTF: Revelation

I already told you not to serve me that LOTF reference again. Can't you read?

but other than Mos Eisley we do not visibly see any small towns in SW. Mos Eisley is not an accurate representation of an average small town in SW.

Oh, yeah, you know that how again?
In America and in the UK, which are the two main countries wherein English forms are used, small towns are well identified. There's some variance, but not enough to allow for some silly definition like the one you used based on an ecumenopolis.
That's absurd.

I'm talking about your Canadian example. It agreed with me.

The entire point I brought up in the Canadian example was that capital cities are not necessarily large. You rebutted this by saying...that capital cities can be small? Do you eve understand what I'm trying to say here?

No, that's certainly not what I did. I merely used your "evidence" against you.
You should have not brought the Canadian example first. Now you don't know how to get out of this pitfall. Too bad for you.

It would require millions of worlds hosting billions of people.
Even if it were true (and I'm waiting to see evidence of that from higher canon), where does it prove that a small town would be huge in Star Wars?

The 100 quadrillion quote is not contradicted by any higher canon; indeed, the RotS novel mentions "quadrillions" of people. If we divide this by the one million planet figure in the ANH novel (even though most of these would be concentrated in the more populated planets), that's an average of 50 billion people.

And where does it prove that a small town would be huge in Star Wars?

Well, go find a superior definition then.
Until you do, I'll still be right and you wrong.

Define "superior". Superior in that it fits your definition better? Tell me, what makes you think that "to spread thin and vanish" is somehow quantifiable? Do you wish to calculate the energy needed to fragment something so small it'll be microscopic? That'll probably take even more energy than simply vaporizing it literally, and...gasp, vaporizing literally just happens to "spread thin and vanish" something!

Oh shit. Now you want me to define "superior".
When will this nonsense ever stop?

"To spread thin or scatter and gradually vanish."
Or the other line, that says "to break up and scatter or vanish."

If I posted all of them, it's for a good reason.

The only reasonable way for something to vanish like that is for it to be vaporized. Once again, you support my theory.

"to break up and scatter"
Like when you... destroy... something. Or pulverize.

*sigh*

I never claimed we HAD to go for the figurative. I merely attacked the idea that it was not valid.
Its validity defines the true low end.

Did I question that it could have been figurative?

Yes, because there's honestly no other way for it to be figurative. Besides, you have not even provided a figurative alternative either. All you have given, and insisted on, is the literal way.

What I do question is how you scientifically quantify a figurative term.

Level, as flatten, you know.
The nuclear calculator provides a range for that kind of effects, due to massive overpressure.
Oops, sorry, I used scientific terms.

Explain what the calc's would be to:

Figuratively vaporize Bastrop

Already done with the SDN calc.

Scorch Bastrop
Devastate Bastrop
Screw up Bastrop
Scatter Bastrop
Figuratively disintegrate Bastrop

Oh, no, you can't, can you?

Why should I even bother?
Scatter, eventually? Do you think it would make a difference? I don't think so.

Are you shitting me?
Venators, according to Saxton, could already output more than 800 teratons per second and divert all of that to guns.
We're way above the highest end.
Besides, as I said, even said highest end would have warranted a completely different description. You don't say that a turbolaser can vaporize a small town when you fire multi gigatons at a planet.

No, Venators could in theory divert almost all of its 800 teratons/second into its various heavy turbolaser turrets.

What. I. Said.

How this relates to what I'm saying you have not explained.

See former posts to see what went on.

Huh, did you read his page? He DOES come with a low megaton figure for HTLs.
Jesus.

And he comes up with kilotons/second reactors, while at the same time claiming that ISD's can do 2 HTL's/second. See if you can tell the problem with this.

Oh, damn! He comes with different figures? The crime! We'll remember this as a day in infamy!

You don't understand. The hyper high end is based on the literal scientific interpretation of vaporization.

How is it hyper high end?

The hyper high end can only be based on the literal scientific interpretation of vaporization.

Heck, the figure ends with much more mass than the small town's being vaporized.

What the fuck are you talking about? Are you claiming that vaporizing something increases its mass?

I'm saying... that more mass than the small town's gets vaporized. There's the town's mass, and then there's more mass, like the ground's.

Oh, just to be lazy, I went for a totally silly figure there, and plugged 10 km for the asteroid calculator at SDN.
Nickel-iron, central detonation, vaporization yield: 7.49 e3 gigatons.

Can somebody tell me why you think that vaporizing a town equates to vaporizing a nickel iron asteroid of the same diameter as the town?

Because to turn the entirety of the city into plasma, you'll that much energy over such a range. I spare you the difference between a contained explosion and a surfacic one, plus the fact that you have to input excess energy just to be sure to actually vaporize all of it, and not just make a big fireball.

Surely, the author wouldn't think that speaking of vaporizing a small town would be an understatement.
Oh, but why, you don't understand that reality either.

Your selective use of authorial's intent is annoying.

You are annoying, in being incapable of understanding that I'm not going to accept a perfectly valid argument being countered by a red herring based on what another author wrote in another book.
What you say is just dumb. No one in his sane mind would say that a TL can vaporize a small town when it dumps so much energy on the surface of a world at once. That's foolish.

Damn, the farce. :)
I'm correcting you on your use of OoMs and you go on with some irrelevant shit.
I should be paid for that.

You actually claim that the figurative use of vaporize is more commonly used than the literal term?

That surely explains why the first definition listed in the source you used is literal.

That surely explains why in a quick google search, all of the uses of vaporize are literal except for darkstar's page (which is inexplicitly in the first page result of "vaporize") and a few irrelevant ones (song lyrics, brand names) and none are figurative.

In fact, I searched up hiroshima vaporized:

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&sugexp=bve ... 16&bih=413

The only sources to mention Hiroshima itself as vaporized is some random poster (and another poster pointed out that Hiroshima wasn't vaporized) and a random blogger. The majority of the sources describe Hiroshima specifically as human bodies being vaporized and material at the epicenter of the explosion being vaporized, an explicit contrast from the actual city being vaporized.

WTF.
You were wrong with your use of the terminology "order of magnitude". I corrected that bit. It's funny how you dodge this by returning to another part of the debate (interpretation of the term vaporized).
The error, in this post, was:

Of course, if we wanted to be honest and look at the true vaporization figures, knowing that they're for a single bomb placed inside a closed environment, instead of an open and flat surface, we would already get 452.1 gigatons.

Which just so happens to be within an OOM of 200 gigatons.

As we can see, it has nothing to do with how one understands the word vaporized.

Yes, I need to go that low into your turd just to show how desperate you are.

Science, you dolt.

Or thermodynamics!, to parrot you. :D

Clearly you miss the direction of my why, which was at why the author would use your description instead of the equally scientifically valid vaporization statement.

Why couldn't he? Both interpretations are good ones, so there.
But since you refuse that people can use the term vaporize to mean reduced to rubble, pebbles and dust, it's no wonder why you keep asking those asinine questions.
It does make for a tiring "debate".

Frankly, this board was used to debaters of far greater caliber than yours.

No, we don't.
And the ICS are the outlier in the vast swarm of EU facts, if a comparison is needed.
I get the feeling that you don't even understand what the ICS figures are really about here.

No, you don't understand it. Your figurative statement does not fit well with the ICS, my literal statement does. Therefore, the literal statement fits better with the facts.

The lower end interpretation fits with plenty of sources cited there, far outnumbered the ICS, if that's what matters to you.
Of course, you would know that, if you were a nut honest and had attempted to prove why the ICS figures are closer to Star Wars than the vast bulk of EU quotes, movie novelizations and TCWS.

This board is literally choke full of such evidence.
Use the search function, you damn troll.

I am under no obligation to support your own claims for you. Either show me some evidence or concede the point.

I'm under no obligation to repeat entire swathes of former debates and posts full of evidence for your own delusional pleasure.
Your refusal to read those posts is just proof that you're not interested in a real debate.
I'm clearly getting the vibe that you're a miserable person who just registered to troll this board. This level of dishonesty you demonstrate, post after post, is precisely flabbergasting.

Wonderful "logic" you've got here!
You will now present evidence that asteroids existed in place of those flashes, just before those flashes appeared and stop dodging this request.
I'll be waiting, but it is unlikely that I'll still be posting on this website around 2050 though, so hasten your pace!

This is like asking for proof that there was oxygen when you see a fireball.

o_O
...
Asteroids are not invisible, genius.

Damn, and I thought I had seen all!

There had to have been some matter there that was hit or else we would see not glow.

How do you know that?
Why matter wouldn't be part of the bolt?
How would you explain the flak bursts in TCWS then?
Asteroids, again?
lol

And here:



You clearly see that this is that of an asteroid being vaporized.

Can't see the picture. But I can know that by reading the html link that it's going to be zero evidence at all.
I asked you, rather kindly, to provide evidence of asteroids, not to repeat the same retarded nonsense that comes from SDN.
I note your failure to comply.

Now, seeing how this was completely futile -I'm used to debate with people belonging to the homo sapiens sapiens branch after all- I'll just ignore anything you could say in that thread before starting to lose neurons due to how dumb your position is.
Bye.