Death Star and the Eclipse SSD

[Bilbo]

Once the Eclipse was design was completed did its existance pretty much preclude the need for the Death Star?

Its single laser can bring down a planetary shield. It cannot blow a planet up but it can sear the life off of a planets continent. Being smaller I imagine you could build dozens if not hundreds of them in place of a single Death Star. I dont have any numbers to back this up but I am guessing that several Eclipse class working together could destroy a Death Star. Sure the superlaser would take some out but if say 20 of them attacked at once (which would mass less than a single DS) they could not all be destroyed fast enough for the Death Star to survive.

As far as I can tell the only real advantage a Death Star has it that it is a single weapon which means only one crew and command staff. Having dozens (or hundreds) of Eclipse class means there are potentially hundreds of planet destroying weapons any one of which could go rogue.

[Darth Wong]

A completed DS2 would have been largely invulnerable even to fleets of heavily armed warships. An Eclipse-class ship could still be threatened by conventional attack.

[18-Till-I-Die]

Personally i never saw why they'd use the raw materials of billions of ISDs instead of building...billions of ISDs.

Cracking a planetary shield is largely irrelevent if you just have enough firepower dispersed across the fleet. Like smaller superweapons of various types, or fuck just affix the DS style engines to a stray moon or planet and fling it at the enemy at a goodly portion of light-speed, i seriously doubt any shield can withstand a Pluto-sized mass hitting it at about .10 c, do you? And even IF you had to hit it more than once (extraordinarily unlikely) you have...what, trillions, quadrillions of such planetoids sitting around doing nothing. The galaxy is fucking overflowing with ammunition.

And in the mean time, what the Hell is your enemy going to do? Send a few thousand ships at you? If you got two thousand 3,000,000 ship fleets hanging around (i'm using that number cause i recall it being said the DS II was equal to six-billion ISDs) then why on Earth would you need to even send ONE WHOLE FLEET. A fraction of that number could do the job. Again, assuming that you have to do anything more than put an engine and a hyperdrive on a small planet or a moon and let it fly...and they CAN make planets-sized hyperdrives, they have so called "worldships", "battle planetoids" and the Death Stars themselves so it's well within their technology.

Anyway the whole thing seemed like a waste to me. At the end of the day it struck me as an asinine "terror weapon" like the Nazis came up with, and just as useless or impractical in actual combat, e.g the 'Dora' supergun.

[Darth Wong]

The crew requirements of the Death Star are paltry compared to the crew requirements of millions or billions of ISDs. That may factor into the viability of the scheme. It may be that their industrial capability is almost unthinkably vast but their manpower limits are much stricter.

[18-Till-I-Die]

Well...yeah maybe, but then again, i mean their capital has something like quadrillions of people on it. Plus they have AI, plus they have cloning, AND we know they have some kind of rapid fabrication technology (nanotech assemblers, something like the StarGate replicators?) cause they built the DS: Part Deux in a few months IN SECRET.

Really yeah it's possible, but when you're talking about something as immeasureably vast as the Star Wars civilization, resources and manpower become almost irrelevent. They're not some magical post-scarcity society but it kind of falls apart when you realize that they could construct artificial planets and moons with seeming ease. Didn't the Emperor give his favored minions worldships?

Is it possible, certainly, but it seems more likely that the Emperor was just obsessed with his "ultimate weapon". Plus in the long run they probably didn't need literally billions of ISDs considering each one is basically a mobile star with guns (making their name...hilariously ironic). Also i would imagine it's a control thing on the Emperor's part as well. His plans tend to collapse because he's so fucking anal about everything, like how the World Devastators ALMOST destroyed the New Republic but, oh! No, no, turns out he kept a special secret kill command just in case...of something. The guy tends to shoot himself in the foot by way of sheer arrogance, so i could easily see him not wanting to have anyone else enjoy the power of commanding the Death Star but him. Like his private imperial fortress or something.

I just have a problem seeing resources or manpower being a problem here when we consider how gob-smacking vast the Galactic Empire is.

[Galvatron]

This is another reason I can't stand Dark Empire. It diminished the awesomeness of the Death Star by making it too easy for the Empire to replicate its key abilities on a relatively small warship. And even that didn't occur until after Tom Veitch had already introduced those stupid World Devastators and told us they were "far more lethal than the Death Star."

[18-Till-I-Die]

But it's logical they COULD and indeed should have done so, Galvatron.

I mean they had superlaser tech decades before the Death Star, it was just a bigger version of the ones we see in the PT, with a bigger reactor. It's actually entirely logical they would have smaller, less powerful but more tactically functional versions. Just like we had the Tsar Bomb, but we also have smaller nukes.

More so...the WDs are entirely logical as well. They have rapid construction and resource gathering technology, and they have access to gravity controling devices. Really it's all entirely logical in-universe. There is no technological, or dare i say "realistic", reason that even a smaller, cheaper mobile superlaser like the Darksaber should be impossible or somehow "difficult" to build.

And frankly, both the Eclipse and the WDs are more tactically realistic than the Death Star, thus making them more functional in a long term campaign. In a real war, these are most likely what the Empire would use if it had to face an enemy of equal power, say Galactic Civilization (lensmen) or the Culture. Immediate, battlefield-level tactical superweapons are actually entirely logical and quite realistic, putting aisde their strategic brethren for a moment.

[Galvatron]

What is "superlaser tech?" That sounds like EU gibberish. Are you talking about those composite-beam cannons on the LAATs in AOTC? Is there something about the superlaser that makes it different than a turbolaser? Is there some reason why a sufficiently scaled-up turbolaser wouldn't achieve the same result as a scaled-up superlaser?

[Darth Wong]

I mean they had superlaser tech decades before the Death Star, it was just a bigger version of the ones we see in the PT, with a bigger reactor.

And they had "bomb" tech centuries before the A-bomb was detonated over Hiroshima. I guess that means the A-bomb was no big deal, right?

[Teleros]

In a real war, these are most likely what the Empire would use if it had to face an enemy of equal power, say Galactic Civilization (lensmen) or the Culture. Immediate, battlefield-level tactical superweapons are actually entirely logical and quite realistic, putting aisde their strategic brethren for a moment.

I just had this wonderful image of the original Death Star taking 24hrs (including recharge time) to destroy each of the billions of Civilisation worlds during a full-scale war .

It diminished the awesomeness of the Death Star by making it too easy for the Empire to replicate its key abilities on a relatively small warship.

Yes, but as 18 says, that doesn't stop it being a rational in-universe idea. And in many ways, World Devastators can be more dangerous than a Death Star, although they are of course easier to destroy and take longer to take a planet apart.

Its single laser can bring down a planetary shield.

Define "planetary shield" - is it one as powerful as Alderaan's, or some rubbish 3rd-rate thing you might expect to get over Tatooine?

As far as I can tell the only real advantage a Death Star has it that it is a single weapon which means only one crew and command staff. Having dozens (or hundreds) of Eclipse class means there are potentially hundreds of planet destroying weapons any one of which could go rogue.

As I see it, the Death Star is easier for Palpatine to control, and will be cheaper in terms of time, manpower and possibly even overall cost (it's radically different to churning out ISD #4411237 at KDY, but a much smaller crew etc will drive down the cost). Plus of course it fits in better with the Tarkin Doctrine of using terror to control the galaxy.

And they had "bomb" tech centuries before the A-bomb was detonated over Hiroshima. I guess that means the A-bomb was no big deal, right?

A-bombs however aren't merely scaled-up chemical explosive bombs, which is what the superlaser on the Death Star appears to be. Yes scaling up like this is nothing to sniff at (look at how much trouble the US is having scaling up from laser pointers to laser weapons), but it's a poor comparison.

[18-Till-I-Die]

I used superlaser as a catch-all, but yea the composite beams in the PT.

As for what the difference is, well i have no idea, but clearly one exists now doesn't it since we know the two technologies are different in that one uses several beams combined while the other uses only a single short "bolt" or pulse. Obviously the Turbolasers can fire faster than the superlasers, but both are clearly the same technology or branch of technology as normal laser cannons--i.e, some kind of plasma weapon (according to the Escential Guide to weapons, it uses some kind ionized gas propelled by magnetic fields).

My best guess is that superlasers, or composite beams if you must use an uncessesarily long term, are more powerful. They use more than one plasma stream at a time, focused somehow via forcefields it appears, and thus the overall output is i qould presume increased. Also it's a continuous beam weapon as opposed to a bolt. Based on this, and using pure speculation here, i would then assume that Turbolasers are more effective at hitting fast moving targets (spray the area with shots) while a superlaser is more effective at precise strikes and greater overall output in terms of firepower. A blaster analogue exists here in that you have blasters and "disruptors", which are basically identical in theory but the disruptors have more powerful batter packs and use more "blaster gas" (whatever that is) per shot, so they're more powerful but can't fire as quickly. I would guess, again pure speculation, the same is true for Turbolasers and superlasers.

And they had "bomb" tech centuries before the A-bomb was detonated over Hiroshima. I guess that means the A-bomb was no big deal, right?

That's not what i mean. Galvatron said that he doesn't understand why the existence of tactical superweapons exist, since they have the Death Star. So my point was that the technology existed long before than, ergo it's perfectly reasonable to build both--the Death Star is a strategic weapon (the hydrogen bomb if you will) while the Eclipse is a tactical superweapon (a suitcase nuke). Of course the Death Star is more powerful but as i understand it Galvatron was trying to say that the latter made the former "less impressive"...

It diminished the awesomeness of the Death Star by making it too easy for the Empire to replicate its key abilities on a relatively small warship.

And i was saying that that's not true, any more than a bomb making the A-bomb unimpressive. The Death Star is however based on technology they used much earlier, the fact that they did does not make it somehow less impressive or effective, it means they scaled it up accordingly...to a strategic weapon. But battlefield level weapons and tactical superweapons of a similar design would still logically exist within this range. Just like we had tactical AND strategic nukes during the Cold War, one for immediate battlefield use and one, God help us, to wipe out whole cities. I may have been unclear in this but i think that's the best way to put it.

[Illuminatus Primus]

Once the Eclipse was design was completed did its existance pretty much preclude the need for the Death Star?

How do you figure that? HIMS Eclipse is thousands of times less massive than the first Death Star. And the Alderaan deflector shield held off the blast for fractions of a second. There's no evidence to suggest Eclipse can produce an equally effective blast, considering that if you plot the performance of known reactors, the ISD scales up correctly to the Death Star I; the Eclipse would have to be an extreme outlier which is never apparently duplicated. The explanation offered by the DESB, that of a "coupled tachyon charge" is scientifically incoherent and incorrect. Not to mention its a no-limits fallacy to assume because HIMS Eclipse can defeat a planetary deflector shield it can defeat any existing or theoretical planetary deflector shield of arbitrary strength. Consider the shield protecting Coruscant in the weeks following its fall to the Neo-Republican forces, it was significantly weaker than the Hoth or Alderaanian shield, as an Executor-class vessel was capable of defeating it with salvos from beneath to permit its escape. It is much more reasonable to suggest the Eclipse minimalist superlaser is capable of defeating some deflector shields, but that some of the strongest, such as Alderaan's, are above its capacity to defeat alone.

Consider this discussion, please.

Its single laser can bring down a planetary shield. It cannot blow a planet up but it can sear the life off of a planets continent.

Direct evidence the performance of the Eclipse superlaser is immensely lower than that of the first Death Star; the first Death Star provided many millions of times more energy than was needed to actually destroy Alderaan and disperse its mass despite being temporarily held off by the Alderaanian shield. Contrariwise, this item of evidence directly indicates the performance of the superlaser as being far below even the bare minimum planetary mass scattering threshold, to say nothing of the immense overkill of the Alderaan shot.

Being smaller I imagine you could build dozens if not hundreds of them in place of a single Death Star. I dont have any numbers to back this up but I am guessing that several Eclipse class working together could destroy a Death Star. Sure the superlaser would take some out but if say 20 of them attacked at once (which would mass less than a single DS) they could not all be destroyed fast enough for the Death Star to survive.

Consider that the Death Star routinely has to direct immense energies approaching the order of firing of its main weapon, such as maximum acceleration and hyperjumps. Furthermore even a .001% waste heat loss from the Death Star would require heat dissipation mechanisms with much much higher lower limit than the maximum firepower of even scores of Eclipse-class warships, based on your own citation of the "continent searing" threshold.

As far as I can tell the only real advantage a Death Star has it that it is a single weapon which means only one crew and command staff. Having dozens (or hundreds) of Eclipse class means there are potentially hundreds of planet destroying weapons any one of which could go rogue.

The advantage of the Death Stars is that they are much more unassailable (as Mike points out, the equivalent weight in lesser craft is more easily destroyed; something which might kill 10-20% of the equivalent fleet ship-by-ship might be unable to even overtax the shields of the Death Star, rendering it much more survivable pound for pound), and they have a much higher theoretical firepower. Firepower which evidently may be necessary in light of the fact that member worlds can afford such stupendously strong defenses as Alderaan. The Death Star II might have been a reaction to the fact that with the introduction and subsequent destruction of the first Death Star, defense improved even more, and it was necessary to be able to defeat all conceivably possible practical defenses.

[Illuminatus Primus]

This is another reason I can't stand Dark Empire. It diminished the awesomeness of the Death Star by making it too easy for the Empire to replicate its key abilities on a relatively small warship. And even that didn't occur until after Tom Veitch had already introduced those stupid World Devastators and told us they were "far more lethal than the Death Star."

First of all, the magic no-limits tachyon-pulse-technobabble bullshit superlaser on Eclipse was a creation of the author of the Dark Empire Sourcebook, not Tom Vietch in Dark Empire, as it can be found no where in Dark Empire or its notes. Second, the World Devastators were self-evidently less lethal than the Death Star.

[Galvatron]

The Death Star II might have been a reaction to the fact that with the introduction and subsequent destruction of the first Death Star, defense improved even more, and it was necessary to be able to defeat all conceivably possible practical defenses.

The size difference always bugged me since there never appeared to be a practical reason for it, so I like this idea.

[Illuminatus Primus]

The Death Star II might have been a reaction to the fact that with the introduction and subsequent destruction of the first Death Star, defense improved even more, and it was necessary to be able to defeat all conceivably possible practical defenses.

The size difference always bugged me since there never appeared to be a practical reason for it, so I like this idea.

There's also the matter that the Death Star I probably doesn't have the highest endurance. Cannot probably maneuver battle very much without taxing its endurance too much, and can probably hype around and kill only a planet only a couple times without refueling or restocking (the Death Star's logistical support is another black box scale comprehension nightmare for primitive Earth-bound humans). The Death Star II can supposedly also fire several times a day rather than only once (the Death Star I's limited capacitor storage and maximum sustainable reactor output), so it could conceivably do a lot more wrecking before being limited by its logistical train.

[Galvatron]

Hell, maybe Tarkin cut corners on the first DS and the DS2 actually represents what they would had made if they hadn't been forced to do it all with the limited resources they were able to allocate to the project while the Imperial Senate was still holding the purse strings.

[Stark]

There's also the limiations of a starship platform for such a weapon - fuel and radiators.

I think it's relevant that the death stars were designed for terror and to a massive scale. Tarkin probably could have done fine with a super starship or bombardment fleet; he wanted a Death Star instead.

[Darksider]

A completed DS2 would have been largely invulnerable even to fleets of heavily armed warships. An Eclipse-class ship could still be threatened by conventional attack.

This is something i've always wondered about. How would one go about destroying a Death Star if there weren't any convenient weaknesses? How many New Republic ships would it take if the remnant had gotten one online? Thousands, millions, more?

[The Original Nex]

A completed DS2 would have been largely invulnerable even to fleets of heavily armed warships. An Eclipse-class ship could still be threatened by conventional attack.

This is something i've always wondered about. How would one go about destroying a Death Star if there weren't any convenient weaknesses? How many New Republic ships would it take if the remnant had gotten one online? Thousands, millions, more?

The actual numbers would be enormous. Practically speaking, a fully functional and completed Death Star II would be the end game.

[Bilbo]

There's also the limiations of a starship platform for such a weapon - fuel and radiators.

I think it's relevant that the death stars were designed for terror and to a massive scale. Tarkin probably could have done fine with a super starship or bombardment fleet; he wanted a Death Star instead.

For all we know Tarkin saw a Death Star under his command as his way to take over the Empire.

[Darth Wong]

And they had "bomb" tech centuries before the A-bomb was detonated over Hiroshima. I guess that means the A-bomb was no big deal, right?

A-bombs however aren't merely scaled-up chemical explosive bombs, which is what the superlaser on the Death Star appears to be. Yes scaling up like this is nothing to sniff at (look at how much trouble the US is having scaling up from laser pointers to laser weapons), but it's a poor comparison.

Wrong. If you're just looking at the blast, it appears to have the same damage mechanism, ie- a tremendous release of heat and pressure. The only difference would appear to be one of sheer quantity. You wouldn't know that they're generated by different mechanisms. With superlasers, you're just looking at the output phenomenon: the combining-beam effect.

[Illuminatus Primus]

There's also the limiations of a starship platform for such a weapon - fuel and radiators.

I think it's relevant that the death stars were designed for terror and to a massive scale. Tarkin probably could have done fine with a super starship or bombardment fleet; he wanted a Death Star instead.

I severely doubt that someone who is essentially a government servant, Palpatine's czar for the Outer Rim, suffering under Senatorial (sympathetic to the Rebellion) scrutiny and supervision, would just be able to demand a Death Star because he feels like it. Furthermore, do you think the fact the Alderaanian shield holding off the 1e38 J beam for several tenths of seconds (an eternity for a c-propagating beam) implies that a much lesser quantity of energy along different vectors from poorly coordinated sources (a simple bombardment fleet) would be equally effective?

A completed DS2 would have been largely invulnerable even to fleets of heavily armed warships. An Eclipse-class ship could still be threatened by conventional attack.

This is something i've always wondered about. How would one go about destroying a Death Star if there weren't any convenient weaknesses? How many New Republic ships would it take if the remnant had gotten one online? Thousands, millions, more?

The actual numbers would be enormous. Practically speaking, a fully functional and completed Death Star II would be the end game.

Why does everyone think a Death Star would be able nuke planets for years on end without resupply? There are at least twelve million major population centers, fifty-one million inhabited worlds, and billions of worlds with some level of at least industrial development. All by itself, its just a terrorist weapon. It has to refuel and rearm, and Saxton implies (and states extratextually) that they are limited by fuel inertia with E = mc^2 or at least relatively close to it, which means they will only be able to destroy a couple planets before needing refueling. Its logistical train will be vulnerable to conventional fleets and warfighting. A Death Star without fuel is just a really big immobile artificial habitat.

[Darth Wong]

And they had "bomb" tech centuries before the A-bomb was detonated over Hiroshima. I guess that means the A-bomb was no big deal, right?

That's not what i mean. Galvatron said that he doesn't understand why the existence of tactical superweapons exist, since they have the Death Star. So my point was that the technology existed long before than

No it didn't. Not when the whole point of the Death Star, its greatest engineering and construction and logistical difficulty, and hence its most important technology, is its sheer scale.

[Stark]

I severely doubt that someone who is essentially a government servant, Palpatine's czar for the Outer Rim, suffering under Senatorial (sympathetic to the Rebellion) scrutiny and supervision, would just be able to demand a Death Star because he feels like it. Furthermore, do you think the fact the Alderaanian shield holding off the 1e38 J beam for several tenths of seconds (an eternity for a c-propagating beam) implies that a much lesser quantity of energy along different vectors from poorly coordinated sources (a simple bombardment fleet) would be equally effective?

Isn't this the guy whose magnum opus was either directed by or ghostwritten by Palpatine? The Tarkin Doctrine is more than just the Death Star, it was a philosophy towards government and even if the DS wasn't 'practical' in a volumetric sense it's valuable as a symbol through sheer scale.

If you're going to define 'bombardment fleet' as 'single' or 'what it says in some stupid book' when we're talking about more 'efficient' uses of the DS's volume (ie huge wodges of starships far in excess of the Imperial Sourcebook's 'bombardment fleets'), go ahead. Defeating the rebellion and putting a strangehold on the galaxy could probably have been achieved with billions of ISDs, but that didn't meet the political goals. Likewise a starship-scale superlaser could have 'killed' Alderaan in a few shots (if we accept the EU silliness, anyway, which personally I don't) but again, doesn't have the shock value.

Can someone explain to me how 'an eternity for a c-propagating beam' is relevant when we know the time and the wattage? We can estimate the order of energy the shield recieved before the planet was destroyed, it's just a really big number.

The whole Eclipse thing has been discussed before, and you either accept the EU thing where it is 1/3 (or something) of the DS weapon or you scale from the reactor sizes/fuel/etc and figure it's probably much less, which makes the DS far more 'logical' than people in this thread seem to think (political justification aside).

[18-Till-I-Die]

And they had "bomb" tech centuries before the A-bomb was detonated over Hiroshima. I guess that means the A-bomb was no big deal, right?

That's not what i mean. Galvatron said that he doesn't understand why the existence of tactical superweapons exist, since they have the Death Star. So my point was that the technology existed long before than

No it didn't. Not when the whole point of the Death Star, its greatest engineering and construction and logistical difficulty, and hence its most important technology, is its sheer scale.

I don't think we're disagreeing here. That's my entire point, actually. Galvatron's argument is that the existence of smaller superweapons makes the Death Star "less impressive", which frankly is a style over substance argument, becuase the technology to build the Death Star existed decades (more likely millennia, due to tech stagnation in Star Wars) before. The fact they made it bigger was what made the Death Star so powerful but that doesn't make it the be-all end-all of superlaser technology...the Eclipse and Sovereign for example, have superlasers that are adequately powerful for their purpose, which is to kill a planet. Even if it takes like twenty of them to equal a Death Star the fact that you can build THOUSANDS for the price of one Death Star just makes them more economical, not less practical. As far as i can see what you're saying is that the Death Star was unique because it's size was astronomically larger than any superlaser that had been built before, and i don't deny this. My point was that smaller, more tactically practical superweapons (like Eclipses, Sovereigns, Darksaber, Wold Devastators) are a logical outgrowth of the idea.