Brian Young's new website is up!

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Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Post by StarWarsStarTrek » Thu Apr 19, 2012 11:32 am

Mike DiCenso wrote:What I find funny is that Brian claims things are inescapable, yet we routinely here on this site and on others find all kinds of way around it.
...which is precisely the problem here. You assume that all of these calculations need to be rationalized into something lower than what they imply. Hence, you add in imaginary mass lightening that does not exist in Star Wars canon. There is no contradiction with assuming that SW propulsion follows Newtonian physics; in fact, they just happen to fit within an OOM of the ICS's and a DET Death Star. Analyzing certain pieces of evidence with the mindset of trying to deflate the numbers as much as humanly possible is a horribly biased methodology.

For Trek, however, their ships are explicitly stated to have mass-lightening, so here I can actually use it.

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Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Post by Praeothmin » Thu Apr 19, 2012 12:21 pm

StarWarsStarTrek wrote: For Trek, however, their ships are explicitly stated to have mass-lightening, so here I can actually use it.
At Warp...
We have no mention, at all, of mass lightening at Impulse, so their acceleration and power calculations for Impulse stand... :)

Plus, Rabid Warsies will always assume all that power can be transferred to weapons, even when movie scenes contradict those ICS figures...

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Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Post by sonofccn » Thu Apr 19, 2012 12:53 pm

SWST wrote:I do not recall the EU ever mentioning mass lightening technology.
Starships of the Galaxy 2007 wrote:"Starships also have ion drives capable of incredible acceleration (thousands of times the force of gravity) due to a combination of exceptional thrust and manipulation of the starship's mass relative to its exhaust. In addition, repulsorlift drives are preferred for delicate maneuvering during takeoff and landing. In fact, the mass manipulation that makes ion drives so efficient in deep space is markedly less efficient in atmosphere, so almost all starships use both drives in conjunction during atmospheric flight, particularly when near the surface of a planet."
So mass manipulation is C-canon.

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Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Post by Tyralak » Thu Apr 19, 2012 3:43 pm

I think some of you guys are too hard on brian. He's a good friend of mine and he's hardly a rabid warsie. I don't always agree with his ideas but he's very intellectually honest. He's nothing like such blockheads as Wong, Poe or Dice. He caught a lot of crap from the SDN crowd because of his views on warp strafing and TDiC. His antimatter video is really insightful and if you pay close attention, it also completely harmonizes the so-called discrepancies the warsies trot out regarding TDiC.

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Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Post by Praeothmin » Thu Apr 19, 2012 4:40 pm

Tyralak wrote:I think some of you guys are too hard on brian. He's a good friend of mine and he's hardly a rabid warsie. I don't always agree with his ideas but he's very intellectually honest. He's nothing like such blockheads as Wong, Poe or Dice. He caught a lot of crap from the SDN crowd because of his views on warp strafing and TDiC. His antimatter video is really insightful and if you pay close attention, it also completely harmonizes the so-called discrepancies the warsies trot out regarding TDiC.
I don't think he's voluntarily dishonest, but he does make glaring mistakes that true careful analyses would have picked up...
For example (which I've posted in this thread), his speed examples ignore DS9 entirely, or even some of Voyager's high speeds, of the fact that better star charts increase speeds...
The arrow in RotJ does not hit the black bodyglove, his own video shows it going through the armor of the ScoutTrooper...

He doesn, however, clearly mention the TOS ENT as being the most beautiful ship in Sci-Fi, and makes many valid points in both franchises, like the acceleration examples, some of which are undisputed...

Essentially, I like his efforts, but think he brushed over some examples to quickly, or not thoroughly enough...

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Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Post by StarWarsStarTrek » Thu Apr 19, 2012 7:15 pm

sonofccn wrote:
SWST wrote:I do not recall the EU ever mentioning mass lightening technology.
Starships of the Galaxy 2007 wrote:"Starships also have ion drives capable of incredible acceleration (thousands of times the force of gravity) due to a combination of exceptional thrust and manipulation of the starship's mass relative to its exhaust. In addition, repulsorlift drives are preferred for delicate maneuvering during takeoff and landing. In fact, the mass manipulation that makes ion drives so efficient in deep space is markedly less efficient in atmosphere, so almost all starships use both drives in conjunction during atmospheric flight, particularly when near the surface of a planet."
So mass manipulation is C-canon.
Huh.

Interesting find. But mind you, the Geonosis incident involved Dooku's ship accelerating in atmosphere.

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Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Post by Mike DiCenso » Thu Apr 19, 2012 9:12 pm

That in and of itself is not that impressive because, like with the Rebel starfighters in ANH, Dooku's ship is seen leaving the planet at a rather low rate of acceleration, then a jump cut. So somewhere between then and the later orbital view, we can easily presume that as with our current-day rockets it translated to vertical and went directly out of the Geonosian atmosphere.
-Mike

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Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Post by Mike DiCenso » Thu Apr 19, 2012 9:24 pm

StarWarsStarTrek wrote:
Mike DiCenso wrote:What I find funny is that Brian claims things are inescapable, yet we routinely here on this site and on others find all kinds of way around it.
...which is precisely the problem here. You assume that all of these calculations need to be rationalized into something lower than what they imply. Hence, you add in imaginary mass lightening that does not exist in Star Wars canon. There is no contradiction with assuming that SW propulsion follows Newtonian physics; in fact, they just happen to fit within an OOM of the ICS's and a DET Death Star. Analyzing certain pieces of evidence with the mindset of trying to deflate the numbers as much as humanly possible is a horribly biased methodology.

For Trek, however, their ships are explicitly stated to have mass-lightening, so here I can actually use it.

If that's what you think, then you truly missed the supreme irony of Brian's ICS statements. First and foremost people should be trying to do everything they can to disprove a theory. Otherwise you can just toss out the scientific method and adopt what amounts to dogmatic religion. The fact is that you can start with any number of assumptions, but if your assumptions are wrong, then it doesn't matter how well you do the math, it's still wrong. And this is one your biggest problems here and why you get into so much trouble with everyone else ; you don't know how to get past the idea that the math is added up properly, but the assumptions and data they are based on are false, misleading, or just flat out wrong.

Junk in equals junk out as the old saying goes.

Also on the warp issue; as has been already pointed out, mass-lightening appears to be a warp only phenomena, though it is possible they do apply it to the impulse drive in some cases.
-Mike

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Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Post by StarWarsStarTrek » Thu Apr 19, 2012 9:40 pm

Mike DiCenso wrote:
If that's what you think, then you truly missed the supreme irony of Brian's ICS statements. First and foremost people should be trying to do everything they can to disprove a theory.
This is true. But "disprove" has higher standards than making a physics violating concept up and saying that this 'could' explain the events as well...even if the new explanation presents hundreds of plot holes.
The fact is that you can start with any number of assumptions, but if your assumptions are wrong, then it doesn't matter how well you do the math, it's still wrong. And this is one your biggest problems here and why you get into so much trouble with everyone else ; you don't know how to get past the idea that the math is added up properly, but the assumptions and data they are based on are false, misleading, or just flat out wrong.
Brian Young and Saxton only assume that Star Wars follows newtonian physics, and here you are complaining about their methods being unscientific, while your initial reaction is to bring up a physics-violating alternative explanation?

[the above is in the context of before the quote was presented]
Mike DiCenso wrote:That in and of itself is not that impressive because, like with the Rebel starfighters in ANH, Dooku's ship is seen leaving the planet at a rather low rate of acceleration, then a jump cut. So somewhere between then and the later orbital view, we can easily presume that as with our current-day rockets it translated to vertical and went directly out of the Geonosian atmosphere.
-Mike
So there is a magical barrier between "we can only accelerate at 4 G's, we are WW2 fighters..." and "ZOMG NOW WE ARE 20,000 G'S ACCELERATION!" now?

Because the quotation provided does not make any sense whatsoever. What happens if you accelerate to relativistic speeds, and then turn off this mass-lightening? Does your ship now have massive kinetic energy, despite having been accelerated with far less? Does it magically slow down in space?

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Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Post by Mike DiCenso » Thu Apr 19, 2012 9:56 pm

Tyralak wrote:I think some of you guys are too hard on brian. He's a good friend of mine and he's hardly a rabid warsie. I don't always agree with his ideas but he's very intellectually honest. He's nothing like such blockheads as Wong, Poe or Dice. He caught a lot of crap from the SDN crowd because of his views on warp strafing and TDiC. His antimatter video is really insightful and if you pay close attention, it also completely harmonizes the so-called discrepancies the warsies trot out regarding TDiC.
No, Brian isn't as blatantly "bad" as those others, but he still makes some huge falsehoods in order to push through his ideas. You mentioned the Antimatter Case Study, there he shows the Mokra Order's attack on Voyager with the phased ion cannons. He claims that one "rocks their world", which is kind of true, but then Voyager was being targeted by 85 of things, and was being constantly shot at by them until the way team was rescued. See it's a matter of editing and conveying what's happening in proper context that's important here.

There's also another flaw; the Constellation, which had been in a futile battle with the planetkiller before the Enterprise arrived, had her shields completely knocked down, and had huge chunks blasted out of her saucer section and warp nacelles. Enterprise later loses shields and is hit several times by the planetkiller's antiproton beams. By his reckoning, both starships should've been utterly destroyed in one or two shots at most. Now you might say that the planetkiller reduced beam power, but that seems like a waste of time since it's sole purpose was not to get into prolonged battles with starships, but instead to plow through and get to the enemy's planets, cut them up, then eat them and then go on to the next targets. It's much easier, and more efficent to knock out the shields in one shot, then in one or two shots completely kill the enemy ship. Heck, that's what V'Ger did in ST:TMP; it one-shotted the shields, then did a one-shot kill on the defenseless vessel. Very neat, tidy and clean. When it needed to, it ramped up the power considerably. There is no reason that the planetkiller in "The Doomsday Machine" couldn't have done the same thing.
-Mike

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Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Post by General Donner » Fri Apr 20, 2012 7:00 am

StarWarsStarTrek wrote:I do not recall the EU ever mentioning mass lightening technology. The closest we have are inertial dampeners, and it is an incredible leap in logic to assume that they actually lower an objects mass, rather than its interia.
Inertial mass is the same thing as mass, to the best of my knowledge. It's conceptually distinct from gravitational mass, but it's still mass. More importantly, it's the kind of mass that's most likely to matter for super-high accelerations.
And if they really could magically lower an object's mass by several orders of magnitude (the amount needed to make the two universes even remotely comparable in reactor power), why could they not install them on AT-ATs and have them jump around like mechas?
Why would they ever build something like an AT-AT at all, in the first place? You have to work pretty hard to come up with a design that makes BattleTech mecha look reasonable by comparison, but the AT-AT certainly does. I think we've already pretty conclusively established that most of the movie military designs aren't built with efficiency in mind.

(The EU does include some more sensible designs, and Saxton does a fair job of rationalizing some of the crazier Lucasfilm stuff, but with George in charge and concerned about making merchandise, it's a foregone conclusion the end result won't be very satisfying to us nerds who stop and think about stuff.)

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Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Post by General Donner » Fri Apr 20, 2012 7:20 am

Mike DiCenso wrote:This is a big problem for Star Trek as well as Star Wars. Mass lightening tech is quite probable. What I find funny is that Brian claims things are inescapable, yet we routinely here on this site and on others find all kinds of way around it. The fact is, neither he nor Saxton or anyone else didn't truly try to disprove anything. They made up their minds and went with the numbers they wanted.
Well, to be honest, the mass-lightening references in the fluff are somewhat obscure. (It's only two or three stories and an RPG book in all, to my knowledge.) I don't think I can fault people for not knowing about those in the pre-wiki ages when Saxton did most of his calculations. And in the absence of explicit evidence for physics-breaking technologies, it does make a certain amount of sense to assume their non-existence.

Of course, since Saxton did most certainly learn about at least one such reference at some point (what with it being quoted on his site and all), it becomes a little odd that he wouldn't have considered the wider implications of it when he derived his figures for power generation.
Furthermore, if you can apply that thinking to Star Wars, why not apply it to Star Trek or any other SF franchise? I mean we do know the mass of the TOS Enterprise and Voyager (nearly 1 million long tons and 700,000 metric tons respectively)and we have seen them perform feats of acceleration far in excess of their Star Wars counterparts.
Well, we do know mass-lightening effects are present where Trek warp drives are concerned. And just looking at Memory Alpha, impulse drives also seem to include some exotic elements (subspace fields) that might be "cheating" against Newtonian physics.
The Enterprise in ST:TMP's run from Earth to Jupiter requires at least a 34,000 m/s², or 3,460 gs acceleration, which if we plug the numbers in:
No offense, but I believe you might have made a mistake there. From the numbers posted, it seems you're using the acceleration as the final velocity in your calculation. If you calculate acceleration times mass, you get a measure of force, not kinetic energy.
About 5,800 petajoules. And this from a mid-size Federation starship on impulse power only. If we use the E-D, which we can reasonably extrapolate is 6-24 times more massive than Voyager or the Constitution-class Enterprise, the power output gets really scary since the E-D has managed to get from Saturn to Earth in 19 minutes on impulse power only.
-Mike
If it did that, then it was most certainly "cheating" by going faster than light. The minimum distance from Saturn to Earth is on the order of eight astronomical units or so -- over a light-hour. I don't think we can calculate anything from that, using real-life physics.

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Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Post by General Donner » Fri Apr 20, 2012 7:37 am

StarWarsStarTrek wrote:Because the quotation provided does not make any sense whatsoever. What happens if you accelerate to relativistic speeds, and then turn off this mass-lightening? Does your ship now have massive kinetic energy, despite having been accelerated with far less? Does it magically slow down in space?
Some kinds of mass-lightening tech in sci-fi does appear to go against conservation of energy just like that. At least if you listen to their versus-debating fans ...

For SW, we have one example readily available to check, courtesy of Dr. Saxton:
Tales of the Bounty Hunters wrote:When Boba Fett again refused to answer, IG-88 increased his speed to tolerance levels, narrowing the gap between his ship and the Slave I. He rode tight in the bowshock from Fett's ship. But suddenly, in a remarkable move, Boba Fett activated his inertial damping system, slamming his descent to a halt in the atmosphere of Tattooine. The stress and power required for such a maneuver utterly trashed his hyperdrives. IG-88 zoomed past him, unable to squelch his velocity sufficiently. He brought the IG-2000 to a halt in less than two seconds- directly in the targeting cross of Fett's ship.
On the same page, M. Wong comments:
Describes another function of inertial dampers- they can apparently be used to lower the inertia of an entire vessel, to permit rapid velocity changes.
So with inertial damping on overload, a ship rams to a quick halt in much less than two seconds. Presumably this is due to atmospheric friction. The momentum the ship already has doesn't appear to translate into huge velocity as the inertial mass is lowered by the orders of magnitude this would require, so it would appear conservation of momentum is indeed ignored. Whether it works the same way in reverse in the other direction (ie, heavier objects retain their lightened velocity once it's shut off) is uncertain, but I'd personally consider it improbable.

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Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Post by Mike DiCenso » Fri Apr 20, 2012 8:31 am

General Donner wrote: If it did that, then it was most certainly "cheating" by going faster than light. The minimum distance from Saturn to Earth is on the order of eight astronomical units or so -- over a light-hour. I don't think we can calculate anything from that, using real-life physics.
Not unless the ship was experiencing severe time dilation effects. By using this calculator here, I'd say they were doing around .97 c.
Now I'm not saying that there's no mass-lightening or other tricks in play, but it does illustrate that Brian is using a double standard here. If you get 1e22 w reactor power for ISDs and SSDs from just assuming a straight up acceleration and raw power, you have to do the same for Star Trek or any other franchise's ships until you know otherwise.
-Mike
Last edited by Mike DiCenso on Wed May 09, 2012 8:27 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Brian Young's new website is up!

Post by General Donner » Fri Apr 20, 2012 8:53 am

Mike DiCenso wrote:Not unless the ship was experiencing severe time dilation effects. By using this calculator here, I'd say they were doing around .97 c.
Right, good point, if the time measured was subjective aboard the ship. Of course, that assumes you held that velocity for the entire trip; if you had to spend significant amounts of time speeding up and slowing down then the upper end goes up a little further still.

That does lend itself to fairly extreme accelerations. Which was the episode in question, and what was the context of the number?

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