Star Wars & Reactors

[Abacus]

Something which came up in a recent nerdy discussion I was having with some people brought up a thought. Is there in fact a limit on returns for reactor sizes? Or do larger capital ships simply have multiple reactors?

[Patroklos]

The death star would seem to argue against limits. Multiple reactors would seem to be a redundancy thing, or perhaps there are different flavors of power.

[fractalsponge1]

If anything, what we've got suggests that the effectiveness limit goes down as you get smaller, not the other way around.

[Rhadamantus]

Yeah, Star Wars seems to have the same thing as Schlock Mercenary, where reactor efficiency is upward sloping.

[Kojiro]

Reactors can't be all that from what we see in TLJ. The Raddus for example, looking at the ICS, does not have a reactor but uses liquid fuel. We're also told that Resurgent class star destroyers have two reactors- one dedicated to the additional engines it carries.

Presumably there's some reason the Resurgents got a second reactor instead of simply increasing the size- two reactors means as certain amount of space has to get used up on doubled up materials and tech. Likewise the Raddus dedicates significant space to fuel which presumably has some benefit over a reactor.

[Patroklos]

Reactors can't be all that from what we see in TLJ. The Raddus for example, looking at the ICS, does not have a reactor but uses liquid fuel. We're also told that Resurgent class star destroyers have two reactors- one dedicated to the additional engines it carries.

Presumably there's some reason the Resurgents got a second reactor instead of simply increasing the size- two reactors means as certain amount of space has to get used up on doubled up materials and tech. Likewise the Raddus dedicates significant space to fuel which presumably has some benefit over a reactor.

Yet another reason to hate TLJ. There is no reason that the Raddus has fuel of that sort other than the director being inexplicably married to that stupid ticking clock chase scene and being willing to bend any interfering planks of the in world setting to force that abomination of a plot device.

One of two things happened. Someone in writing pointed out reactors don't work that way, and instead realizing that fact is indicative of how stupid the movie plot was and changing it the director just deleted the offending reactors. More likely, the talent-less hacks running the show never even realized there was an issue, and someone who actually understands SW was forced to shoehorn technobable into the ICS to try and woefully under justify what was seen on screen.

[Galvatron]

I don't see why they didn't just say that the Raddus took damage to its reactor and would inevitably fail after a certain amount of time (or something like that). It would be similar to how the Falcon's hyperdrive was constantly broken in TESB.

[Patroklos]

That's an infinitely better way to do it. You thought of that in five seconds. By yourself. For free.

These guys had years, professional writers by the dozen, and millions of dollars and couldn't replicate you feat. That's the level of incompetence we are dealing with.

[Crazedwraith]

People would still complain reactors don't work that way or something. They're probably just resigned to people bitching whatever they do.

eta: swapped nerds for people, as I'm falling into a behaviour I would dislike in others.

[Esquire]

They're the ones who decided to make a science fiction movie; obviously there's going to be a subset of viewers interested in the science of it all. Also, everything in this by Asimov - there are degrees of wrongness, and 'for literally no reason, this ship works differently from every other ship depicted anywhere in our popular science fiction universe' is more wrong than 'that's not how modern reactors work.'

[Crazedwraith]

They don't exactly have to work differently aside from being magically hideously under-stocked on fuel.

[Galvatron]

People would still complain reactors don't work that way or something.

Work what way? In TESB, Threepio said "the hyperdrive motivator has been damaged" as the reason they can't make the jump to hyperspace. How hard would it have been to make up something similarly nerdproof for the Raddus?

[Crazedwraith]

People would still complain reactors don't work that way or something.

Work what way? In TESB, Threepio said "the hyperdrive motivator has been damaged" as the reason they can't make the jump to hyperspace. How hard would it have been to make up something similarly nerdproof for the Raddus?

Sure if the idea is just 'main reactors broke. Auxiliary power will last 17 hours' or something. Sounds find to me.

The idea that you could damage a reactor and then have a precise time to catastrophic failure is a sci-fi stable but also one that's complained about a lot. (e.g. real nuclear Reactors don't go boom if you damage them and even if they did you wouldn't be able to know when to the second. )