Star Wars : the real firepower question

[Mr. Oragahn]

It's complicated. The EU provides evidence of firepower in the low megaton region on a best day, with most likely a large range of kilotonish firepower.

But if we stick to the movies and TCW on the other hand, they are not so generous. There, the low kiloton range seems to be the rule, and difficultly spotted at that.
The much vaunted asteroid blasting in TESB is seriously disputed for two pages worth of very good reasons.
We're left with the Trade Federation Droid Control Ship blowing up from within with not so impressive explosions, but the central sphere section blowing up in a more impressive way, although we know fuel can blow up.
We have TCW and its CIS ground cannons shooting down Acclamators, or AT-TEs and Jedi Fighters taking care of Munificents with their usual cannons.
In the movie, we have SPHA-T beams that puncture a coreship and once they get through the armour, there's nothing truly awe-inspiring going on. Easily low terawatt for the beams at Geonosis, and in ROTS, a CIS ships that's penetrated by one of those blue beams hardly goes up in some super nuclear fashion once the beam hits the inner sections.
The Invisible Hand is almost a joke, her hull incapable of coping with reentry and the ship being bisected by internal explosions in, at best, the low gigajoule rante if you assume racks upon racks of low megajoule weapon rounds exploded more or less at once.

It seems most of the power in the core goes to the massive thrusters and maneuvering.
The weapon systems, however, are literally dwarfed by such constructs and leave little reason to think they'd benefit a lot from the reactor's output.

In fact, the Munificent-class frigates' twin main cannons are one of the rarest cases of big guns being mounted on ships to seemingly exploit a large fraction of the core's output, making these smaller and perhaps fragile ships good in a sniping role, but sucking at a battleship one.
SPHA-Ts pack lots of firepower, though, and without the EU's idea that they're precharged aboard Venators, we'd consider that these war engines house cores which can provide gigawatts of power, which is impressive, since once upsized, would definitely provide power output generous figures to the large starships. But then again, they all have small cannons that hardly seem to exploit that power.

This is very puzzling. In such a context, nuclear ordnance would be a sure winner, even at levels of Fat Man.

[Mr. Oragahn]

So guys, no one's got an opinion on this. Sure it sounds like an old topic, yet there'll be a shift in the canon and we can safely work from what was considered upper cannon.
It is some kind of topic everybody would rather brush under the mat? :)
I am honestly having a real problem to reconcile anything we saw with the idea of starships exchanging firepower in the megaton range.
Anything I see points to low terajoules and that's all.
Even if space battles used to last a while, with ships starting with some shielding in the megaton range (which does not seem to be the case), it does not change that one single nuke would be enough to get rid of a battleship in no time and that would even spare the attacker from tapping its own power core to feed a weapon system since the nuclear ordnance is autonomous.

[Lucky]

So guys, no one's got an opinion on this. Sure it sounds like an old topic, yet there'll be a shift in the canon and we can safely work from what was considered upper cannon.
It is some kind of topic everybody would rather brush under the mat? :)
I am honestly having a real problem to reconcile anything we saw with the idea of starships exchanging firepower in the megaton range.
Anything I see points to low terajoules and that's all.
Even if space battles used to last a while, with ships starting with some shielding in the megaton range (which does not seem to be the case), it does not change that one single nuke would be enough to get rid of a battleship in no time and that would even spare the attacker from tapping its own power core to feed a weapon system since the nuclear ordnance is autonomous.

HAN: The entire starfleet couldn't destroy the whole planet. It'd take a thousand ships with more fire power than I've...

Here Han says that a thousand Imperial ships couldn't blow up an Earth like planet even working together. This sets a hard ish upper limit.

He also seems to imply that the Empire would have a very hard time getting a thousand ships in one place even for a short amount of time.

VEERS: My lord, the fleet has moves out of light-speed. Com-Scan has detected an energy field protecting an area around the sixth planet of the Hoth system. The field is strong enough to deflect any bombardment.

A shield that only seems to cover maybe 30 kilometers is too much for a fleet to blast through.

[359]

I have to say I agree with this, I don't want to, but I do. The firepower that one can derive from the now numerous events in the movies and The Clone Wars are by-far-and-large not terribly impressive. Especially now that the novelizations appear to be out, at least how I see the new canon, as they were the sole source of evidence for megaton range yields.

With instances of fighter, tank, and turret blaster fire clearly penetrating the hulls of starships and with multiple strikes of such shots against mundane objects it becomes harder and harder to justify atomic scale weaponry for these vessels.

In fact all I can come up with is the vaporization of asteroids in TESB. And even then, as Mr. Oragahn stated, such calculations can be disputed. I however, prefer to continue to assume mundane materials. In fact, short of the 'ten seconds to orbit == huge weapons' argument the greatest argument for firepower comes from said asteroid calcs. Even then, assuming the asteroids are solid iron only yields 45 kt for the medium turbolasers being fired.

For me the largest reason I am weary of dropping my firepower figures down is a general rule I try to follow for such sci-fi civilizations: their tech level should be at least greater than or equal to that of our own. Which I suppose still allows volleys of multi-kiloton yield shots, but again aside from that one instance evidence is starting to push my "stupidly low" line, and that makes me uncomfortable.

So guys, no one's got an opinion on this. Sure it sounds like an old topic, yet there'll be a shift in the canon and we can safely work from what was considered upper cannon.
It is some kind of topic everybody would rather brush under the mat? :)

I agree it needs new discussion. There has been such an influx of new evidence in recent years, plus now this shift in canon completely changes the way we can now look at this universe.

It's new! It's fun! Jump in now while prices last! :)

[Mr. Oragahn]

I have to say I agree with this, I don't want to, but I do. The firepower that one can derive from the now numerous events in the movies and The Clone Wars are by-far-and-large not terribly impressive. Especially now that the novelizations appear to be out, at least how I see the new canon, as they were the sole source of evidence for megaton range yields.

With instances of fighter, tank, and turret blaster fire clearly penetrating the hulls of starships and with multiple strikes of such shots against mundane objects it becomes harder and harder to justify atomic scale weaponry for these vessels.

In fact all I can come up with is the vaporization of asteroids in TESB. And even then, as Mr. Oragahn stated, such calculations can be disputed. I however, prefer to continue to assume mundane materials. In fact, short of the 'ten seconds to orbit == huge weapons' argument the greatest argument for firepower comes from said asteroid calcs. Even then, assuming the asteroids are solid iron only yields 45 kt for the medium turbolasers being fired.

For me the largest reason I am weary of dropping my firepower figures down is a general rule I try to follow for such sci-fi civilizations: their tech level should be at least greater than or equal to that of our own. Which I suppose still allows volleys of multi-kiloton yield shots, but again aside from that one instance evidence is starting to push my "stupidly low" line, and that makes me uncomfortable.

Same here.
But perhaps we've never really considered SW for what it truly was?
Perhaps we dramatically overestimated the power production and the energy requirements of a vast array of technologies.
If we take a look at blasters, we see that on a best day, they tend to display energy densities per bolt that might be pegged at something like dozens of times, perhaps a couple hundred times the firepower of your average .45 caliber bullet.
If we apply a similar ratio to the power plants, perhaps their fission plants, had they been the same size of our 1 GW ones, would produce many times that? Like, hundreds of GW. Then, with fusion, let say that it allowed them to obtain the same amount of power, but at a considerably smaller size.

We always assume that such civilizations have harnessed the much vaunted miniature sun in a bottle. AKA hot fusion.
But perhaps they're not exactly there yet?

If matter-antimatter collisions resulted only in photon emission, the entire rest mass of the particles would be converted to kinetic energy. The energy per unit mass (9×10^16 J/kg) is about 10 orders of magnitude greater than chemical energies, and about 3 orders of magnitude greater than the nuclear potential energy that can be liberated, today, using nuclear fission (about 200 MeV per fission reaction or 8×10^13 J/kg), and about 2 orders of magnitude greater than the best possible results expected from fusion (about 6.3×10^14 J/kg for the proton-proton chain). The reaction of 1 kg of antimatter with 1 kg of matter would produce 1.8×10^17 J (180 petajoules) of energy (by the mass-energy equivalence formula, E = mc²), or the rough equivalent of 43 megatons of TNT – slightly less than the yield of the 27,000 kg Tsar Bomb, the largest thermonuclear weapon ever detonated.

At best, the most perfect use of fusion technology wouldn't even allow a power plant to be ten times smaller than a fission plant reacting with the same mass of fuel, at the same speed.

Now, I'm not saying that our current fission plants approach anything like a fission-based star-like power plants that can start and maintain a constant super-critical reaction within some impressive force field, nope.
But maybe the SW tech for fusion hasn't really peaked yet?

Perhaps the Death Star's uniqueness precisely was that its huge reactor core allowed it to harness a magnitude of reaction which wasn't possible with smaller cores? Perhaps that some involvement of hyperspace also increases the power, but is so unstable that it can only be used to fire at targets and pretty much nothing else if running at near full power?

Then, perhaps part of the construction of the Death Star and the entirety of the construction of the DS2 was done through the use of replicating machines, some kind of formerly banned technology?
Admitedly, with current 3D printers, we're not really far from seeing a day when machines could multiply themselves very fast.
Some (mad) Japanese architects even throught about using spider robots to build a large floating pyramid on water.

To get back to firepower, I objected that if the ships had defenses tailored for such lower amounts of firepower, then their shields would be utterly raped by their equivalent of nuclear ordnance.
But then, the exact same issue would still exist at higher yields. A fusion nuclear device exploiting the best technology in Warsverse would most likely completely top the firepower of an entire barrage of heavy TLs.

It might turn out that such powerful weapons could simply be forbidden by protocols of war, respected by all sides and even the CIS during the Clone Wars.
We do know they had super weapons, but never got used. Case in point, that multimegaton funky nuke in one of the late episodes of TCWS.

As such, knowing that no defense, no armour, no shield could even cope with such weapons, the defense systems are uniquely built to allow ships to survive conventional firepower. This also allows ships not to have to add extra armour or heavier shield generators, which dramatically alleviates the entire game of logistics and energy economy.

It could be like in Dune, where the use of atomics is clearly forbidden.

So guys, no one's got an opinion on this. Sure it sounds like an old topic, yet there'll be a shift in the canon and we can safely work from what was considered upper cannon.
It is some kind of topic everybody would rather brush under the mat? :)

I agree it needs new discussion. There has been such an influx of new evidence in recent years, plus now this shift in canon completely changes the way we can now look at this universe.

It's new! It's fun! Jump in now while prices last! :)

Dang. You quoted me typing cannon. :|
Curse you!

[359]

I suppose that would need to be the case, it's just such a shift from what one might have thought in the past. Although the theme does fit better within the bounds of Star Wars: the might being derived not from technological achievement, but from complexity of scale and long-standing might of the ages of infrastructure supporting an ancient space-faring civilization. One that continues to chug away in the same pattern for eons on end...

We do know they had super weapons, but never got used. Case in point, that multimegaton funky nuke in one of the late episodes of TCWS.

Those were odd, in that their stated yield was that of one-hundred megatons. However three were seen to detonate in the Umbara arc in season four, TCW: "Plan of Dissent" I think. Needless to say there were nowhere near 100 megatons (animation or not); at least not 100 megatons of TNT.

[Mr. Oragahn]

MEGATOONS!!

[Mr. Oragahn]

Gotta wonder if the CGICWMOVIENOVELIZATION is worth reading to fins some interesting details.
On the other hand, whatever one may find, I wouldn't see any reason to dismiss what is plain to see from the movies alone.

For now, I'll stick to beam set at very low kilotonish firepower (without the blasts that come with nuclear ordnance).

Meaning I may have a couple threads to update...

[Mith]

You guys are still holding out for mid to high TJs? I've been going for high GJs to low TJs.

[Mike DiCenso]

Those were odd, in that their stated yield was that of one-hundred megatons. However three were seen to detonate in the Umbara arc in season four, TCW: "Plan of Dissent" I think. Needless to say there were nowhere near 100 megatons (animation or not); at least not 100 megatons of TNT.

Given the reactions of the other clones in that episode, we can assume that either the one clone was over exaggerating the yield, or the ones detonated were on a lower yield setting. But one way or the other, it does bracket such firepower for Star Wars.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

You guys are still holding out for mid to high TJs? I've been going for high GJs to low TJs.

Mmm no no, low KT is the absolute max I'm willing to give.
At some point we had a real world one kilton explosion on some test bed which produced a 60 m wide fireball I think. It's a point of reference. It seems that bolts fired by CIS cannons on the ground, against "Acclamators", beams fired by SPHA-Ts against coreships and torps fired by N-1s against the Trade Fed DCS in Ep I (weapons which can be dialed up and down, obviously, when we compare the conveyed ideas of external vs internal damage) really cap the firepower at roughly less-than-nuclear very low KT tops.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Could it be that Lucas' conception of war in space was heavily influenced by J. Kennedy's speech about nuclear weapons?