How threatening are KE weapons to Star Wars ships?

[EricChase88]

I've looked at this page, and it appears that Star Destroyers can withstand megatons of KE pretty much every second. http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tec ... ield2.html

However, I also looked at this page, and it appears that KE of 150 kilotons of TNT is enough to do some damage to the bridge of a Star Destroyer.
http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tec ... mples.html

Wouldn't this mean that a Reaper's cannon is a credible threat against Star Destroyers? Consider the following (taken from ME codex http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Codex/ ... d_Vehicles):
- Conventional dreadnoughts start artillery duels and exchange fire at tens of thousands of kilometers, and Reaper cannons are mentioned to have longer effective range than this, though I don't know how this compares to engagement ranges in Star Wars.
- A Reaper's cannon are kinetic energy weapons. It uses magneto-hydrodynamics to shoot a stream of dense, molten alloy of uranium, tungsten, and iron with the energy yield of 454 kilotons of TNT. http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Codex/The_Reapers These weapons also have considerable fire rate, as demonstrated in gameplay. There have even been reports of Reaper weapons with yields in the megatons of TNT. http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Codex/ ... s_Alliance

With this in mind, would this be a credible threat to Star Destroyers? In addition, in the Halo universe, KE weapons have even greater yields, with energy in the gigaton range. http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Magnetic_Accelerator_Cannon Would this be even more threatening to Star Destroyers?

[NecronLord]

I've looked at this page, and it appears that Star Destroyers can withstand megatons of KE pretty much every second. http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tec ... ield2.html

However, I also looked at this page, and it appears that KE of 150 kilotons of TNT is enough to do some damage to the bridge of a Star Destroyer.
http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tec ... mples.html

Two suggestions to reconcile these:

Option 1 (Armour):

Naturally the ventral side of the destroyer is much more heavily armored than the bridge tower's forward facing, you only need to look at the windows to see that.

Option 2 (Shields):

Brian Young has been doing some really interesting research into shields lately over on his SciFights.net that demonstrates pretty conclusively that ships (or other objects travelling below a certain speed) can fly under each other's shields, and the shields interact more strongly with high velocity objects than low (such as the famous shields in Dune, or Warhammer 40,000, or some in Stargate) this can explain the bridge tower example; it's possible the one that hit the ventral side of the destroyer had a higher velocity and thus triggered the shield, while the one that hit the bridge tower wasn't going fast enough.

Naturally if this is so, the kind of weapons you're talking about would activate the Star Destroyer's shields and do no harm, while say, ramming the Star Destroyer at .5 km/sec is a much more serious proposition.

[StarSword]

Kinetic weapons are at least threatening enough that mass drivers aren't entirely unheard-of as surface-to-orbit weapons: ref. the hypervelocity gun from Before the Storm and Empire at War. I don't have any clue on specifics though: in the first case the gun is being used in a live-fire military exercise rather than actual battle, and in the second case game mechanics aren't canon.

[Eternal_Freedom]

The Hypervelocity gun is a good example. They had to bring in a specially modified SD with extra shield systems to sit int he line of fire, and even then the shields were buckling when the fighter strike took out the gun.

[Skywalker_T-65]

According to the Wook, Mass Driver's are at least somewhat useful. Game mechanics come into play again (since they are most notably used by Zann), but they at least try to justify it. Namely because most starship shields are made of two different systems.

Ray Shields which are used to deflect radiation and blaster/turbolaser bolts.

and

Particle shields (the page is one line long, so no point linking) which are used to deflect physical things like missiles or large space rocks. Assuming I'm remembering things correctly, the reason that MD's are so effective are because Ray shields tend to get the lion's share of power (since turbolasers are the bigger threat), and provide no defense against the projectiles. Thus, Mass Driver shells go through them, and hit the (comparatively) weaker Particle Shield.

That's just what I assume though, since bypassing the Ray Shields like the Wook page says shouldn't do much unless the particle ones are weaker.

[Andras]

I dont have a real basis for it, but I've always felt that energy shields are 3 OoM more effective then particle shields, because it's much easier to absorb or deflect energy then mass. So a 150KT KE event would be about the same as a 150MT energy attack.

[Vendetta]

The answer is always going to be "it depends how big they are".

In ESB the star destroyers shot down asteroids on collision courses, so it was obviously better for them to spend energy on weapons fire than to let the shields absorb the hits and spend energy keeping them recharged.

[Cykeisme]

Particle shields (the page is one line long, so no point linking) which are used to deflect physical things like missiles or large space rocks. Assuming I'm remembering things correctly, the reason that MD's are so effective are because Ray shields tend to get the lion's share of power (since turbolasers are the bigger threat), and provide no defense against the projectiles. Thus, Mass Driver shells go through them, and hit the (comparatively) weaker Particle Shield.

It makes sense to allocate more defense toward ray shielding, since most of the weapons used in Star Wars are energy weapons.
If this were the case, it does suggest that using a combination of energy weapons and physical projectiles might add complications that make it more difficult for a given ship to protect itself.


Since physical projectiles can be intercepted, or have their mass scattered/dispersed, there's other ways to stop them as well; even the point defense guns on SW capships can have fairly significant yields.
Combined with particle shielding (even dialled down) that should be adequate defense against KE weapons of similar yields to the turbolasers they deal with.

On a random tangent, it's sort of like how folks actually think Jedi and other Force users would be more susceptible to physical solid projectiles than blaster bolts, because the lightsaber might melt or just cut the projectiles apart, while they continue onward to wound the Force user.
They forget that a Jedi needs a lightsaber to defend himself because blaster bolts can't be TK'd, but bullets can, like Obi-Wan using TK to deflect Durge's hail of flechettes/bullets in the hand-animated Clone Wars series.
In the same manner, even if shielding is more effective against energy weapons, ships can use their point defense weapons to mess up physical projectiles before they arrive. Point defense weapons can't do anything against incoming energy weapon fire, which is why ray shielding needs to be up to snuff.

[Jedi Commisar]

The answer is always going to be "it depends how big they are".

In ESB the star destroyers shot down asteroids on collision courses, so it was obviously better for them to spend energy on weapons fire than to let the shields absorb the hits and spend energy keeping them recharged.

And how fast the pojectile is traverling as well "procul satis volatus" and all that

[Sea Skimmer]

They forget that a Jedi needs a lightsaber to defend himself because blaster bolts can't be TK'd, but bullets can, like Obi-Wan using TK to deflect Durge's hail of flechettes/bullets in the hand-animated Clone Wars series.

That idea breaks apart, because blasts and turbolasers bolt ect... have recoil, which means they have significant projectile mass. In fact it must be a damn lot of mass since the velocity is fairly low in most instances, slower then some grenade launchers. So no obvious reason exists why one mass possessing projectile should be any different then another, and the blaster bolts provide much more reaction time to work with then a 1000m/s rifle bullet would.

[Vespane X]

E-11's deliver enough momentum to send stormtroopers vertical through the air, and pistols do the same to B-1's. If they do that through KE with such low velocity, the bolts would weigh infeasible amounts. Alternative explanations have included the resulting vapour forcing them through the air.