I challenge darkstar to a debate

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Lucky
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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by Lucky » Sun Aug 07, 2011 8:38 am

General Donner wrote:IIRC Saxton (and the Wongians) imagined some kind of thermally superconductive outer armor layer that'd hold up to megaton-level bursts even without the shields. Dunno whether that idea came first from the ICS, or the newsgroups/SDN.

That doesn't work so good with Ep3, obviously. But if you're dogged enough, I'm sure you can still get rationalizations together. Say, maybe the hull itself under those circumstances contains intrinsic forcefields that aren't connected to the shields, but still enhance durability and thermal conductivity? (Those "tensorial fields" Saxton mentions repeatedly in his ICS duology might fit the bill.) From Ep3:ICS, those were explicitly turned off when Invisible Hand crashed.

I'm not advocating that. I liked the ICS very much in my "Warsie wanker" phase and in a way I still do, but nowadays I'll fully acknowledge it's not really in tune with most of the other EU. But other people can and do invoke "active" armor systems to explain away discrepancies, and not just in SW. They're kind of like the variable yield claims for weapons that way -- you can magic away almost any contradiction by pointing to stuff like that.
The secondary effects of say 200 gigaton weapons would have made the Hoth shield worthless since the base would have been destroyed by earthquakes.

I think Star Wars tends to use ablative armor.

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Mr. Oragahn
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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sun Aug 07, 2011 10:42 pm

I suppose that the ship that also got nailed by the blue beam coming from the ventral bay of a Venator also had lost her "tensorial" field or whatever, since her hull surely didn't put up much of a resistance against a weapon which, once it struck the inside of the ship (and didn't even punch on the other side), didn't exactly turn the guts into a local nova, despite all the softer structure and air inside.

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by General Donner » Mon Aug 08, 2011 8:51 am

Isn't that exactly what a Saxtonite diehard would tell you? ;)

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by Mike DiCenso » Mon Aug 08, 2011 8:55 am

Would Saxtonites bring up those magical neutrino-soaking shields to explain away the absence of the big kabooms?
-Mike

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Aug 08, 2011 10:28 am

General Donner wrote:Isn't that exactly what a Saxtonite diehard would tell you? ;)
They could try, but it would make no sense as we're dealing with a ship that's literally torn apart. Pretending that their super duper soaking systems are still working, absorb all the nifty jiglatons only to leave the equivalent of hundreds of gigaoules worth of blast, that's a stretch.

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by 2046 » Sat Aug 13, 2011 12:02 pm

StarWarsStarTrek wrote:In order to prove me wrong, you'd have to prove that the Rebel tactical display was off in its positioning by several orders of magnitude,
Which was done. By comparison to exterior visuals and the Imperial display, the Rebel display, being used exclusively for observation by the Rebel's non-tactical folks, is a far outlier.

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by Mike DiCenso » Sat Aug 13, 2011 4:32 pm

Mr. Oragahn wrote:
General Donner wrote:Isn't that exactly what a Saxtonite diehard would tell you? ;)
They could try, but it would make no sense as we're dealing with a ship that's literally torn apart. Pretending that their super duper soaking systems are still working, absorb all the nifty jiglatons only to leave the equivalent of hundreds of gigaoules worth of blast, that's a stretch.
Quite often in AoTC as well as TCW, we get situations were there are no obvious active energy shields of any kind to provide even that kind of an excuse.
-Mike

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Praeothmin
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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by Praeothmin » Mon Aug 15, 2011 2:40 pm

Not to mention the burning hull of the Invisible Hand in RotS upon atmospheric re-entry...
Did the atmosphere suddenly impart GTs of friction upon the hull?
How can a KT or MT resisting hull burn upon re-entry?

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by Picard » Mon Aug 15, 2011 3:32 pm

You can always argue that they have some kind of dampening + SIF. But while TESB shows kiloton-range MTL, RotS shows megajoule-range turbolasers in use on capital shis (granted, these seem to be incapable of penetrating shields - they have to hit portion of ship without shields (like turbolaser port, where is only field which prevents atmosphere from running away) to be effective). But then again, kiloton-or-less energy beams were shown to be able to destroy TF destroyers (unless you argue that shields were down (?)). It's a mess.

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by Mike DiCenso » Mon Aug 15, 2011 5:27 pm

That assumes that megaton range MTLs on the much larger ISDs are really actually doing what Warsies have claimed over the years. The whole exploding and burning asteroids bit kind of puts more than a bit of a dampener on that. As for the the rest, we might be generous in assuming that the gun ports have some sort of shielding up that may be absorbing at least some portion of the TL energies. However, if you look at the exterior scenes again, you'll see fireball impacts on the hull of the various ships where there are no obvious gun ports. Furthernore, TCW's "Downfall of a a Droid" shows clearly what megajoule to gigajoule-range walker blaster bolts striking the unshielded aft ends of Munificents look like, and it looks an awful lot like what we see in RoTS.
-Mike

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by Picard » Tue Aug 16, 2011 11:48 am

Urmm... medium turbolasers only go in double-digit kilotons. Heavy turbolasers are in single-digit megaton range, accoriding to RotS novelization, and medium TL are around 15.6 kilotons - indeed, if we compare volume of bolts (granted, my calculations are extremely rough - done in 15 seconds flat - but should give you idea) then, assuming 15.6 kt medium turbolasers, heavy turbolaser bolts should be around 1.28 Mt in yield. As for Clone-war era, it is completely different ships, tactics, equipment - I could imagine that they did not even have shields - but that throws HTL yields right out of the window, except for size comparation I mentioned.

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Tue Aug 16, 2011 1:42 pm

Mike DiCenso wrote:That assumes that megaton range MTLs on the much larger ISDs are really actually doing what Warsies have claimed over the years. The whole exploding and burning asteroids bit kind of puts more than a bit of a dampener on that. As for the the rest, we might be generous in assuming that the gun ports have some sort of shielding up that may be absorbing at least some portion of the TL energies. However, if you look at the exterior scenes again, you'll see fireball impacts on the hull of the various ships where there are no obvious gun ports. Furthernore, TCW's "Downfall of a a Droid" shows clearly what megajoule to gigajoule-range walker blaster bolts striking the unshielded aft ends of Munificents look like, and it looks an awful lot like what we see in RoTS.
-Mike
In general, hulls don't seem to be the prime mean of defense. Shields are. A Jedi starfighter with shields up can soak some considerable damage from shots that broke apart rocks about a few meters large, and those ships are rather very cramped.
It's a matter of scaling this up. Tanking like several dozens of megajoules with a power generator that's probably not even one cubic meter big would allow a 10^3 meters wide generator to power shields capable of withstanding a thousand times more energy.
It goes without saying that there could be miniaturization issues, meaning that past a certain volumes, certain better technologies exist.
Take the Millenium Falcon. It was said the bazooka-looking weapon carried by the snowtroopers would destroy its hull. Now we know that the MF's hull could withstand the shots from the blasters, which probably are a notch about modern firearms in terms of power, like an order of magnitude superior, to account for the holing and melting of round sections of the stormtrooper armour, which is supposed to be relevant against thermal damage. The bazooka weapon and its independent power source would have a firepower considerably higher, in order to make a real difference between a hull which can safely laugh at the blasters shots, but which would suddenly be ruined by the larger gun. That clearly means a severe increase of firepower.
So we can make that large gun (E-Web in the EU) be worth 10 times a blaster shot. That should give us a capacity of low three digits kilojoules.
The power source contained inside the transportable power pack would be providing that energy. It's about a bit larger than one of those large cardboard boxes we use to move stuff from one house to another, which one bloke can carry on his own. Looking at the size of the trooper's hand and using clues such as the dome ontop of the power pack, plus the fact that it's obviously as wide as it's high, and has a length a bit less than twice its height, we can go with a size of 50 x50 x100 cm, for a volume of .25 m³.
Assuming that shields are linked to power capacitors which are precharged (that would be the idea), a power pack about four times bigger would fit with the Jedi starfighter's feats since it would allow her shields to be charged up to several megajoules worth of protection in little time.
Globally, scaling up all weapons from those feats would lead to medium terawatt power production for small capital ships, which seems to fit with all SW lore. It would fit with the firepower, notably references in the EU, and allow for charging up shields to possibly a couple hundreds of kilotons for those same warships, up to several megatons worth of shielding for ISDs.
That seems quite a safe set of figure, counting, as I said, the possibility of better power tech past certain thresholds.

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by Admiral Breetai » Tue Aug 16, 2011 7:55 pm

really is GT plus level fire power so crazy for trek? based off the consistent high end showings I mean

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by Praeothmin » Tue Aug 16, 2011 8:33 pm

Yes, since there are also consistent low end showings as well...

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by Mike DiCenso » Tue Aug 16, 2011 9:12 pm

Yeah, but the so-called low showings aren't as low as some people claim, plus do a number of low showings cancel out an equal number of high-end ones?
-Mike

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