Vance wrote:
Explosions in TCW don't produce shockwaves which extend from the fireball. wThat time a thermal detonator creates a fireball tens of meters across with enough force to put a crab droid air-born for ten seconds or w/e didn't have significant shockwaves, and neither did the rocket launcher which fragments the cliff side, or any of the explosions / fireballs created by "lasers" (or the bombs iirc, or the tac superweapons).
I said 'If they were explosions in the sense of HE' as in a detonation as opposed to a deflagration. 'Explosion' is not a singular term, it can encompass many different effects, and many explosions may not produce dangerous blast effects without additional conditions (EG highly contained, as in gunpowder or BLEVEs - Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosions.) It would be pretty difficult to justify (intelligently) why they don't use explosions in that context against the enemy (unless we were to believe they have NO explosives whatsoever that exist in Star Wars, which is stupid, especially how often we've seen craters blasted in walls and shit) and even if you do come up with an explanation it still means such SW weapons are ridiculoulsly inefficient for the effects they give (which is better at killing, a flamethrower or bullet? Remember the bullet, even in a burst, generates far less energy than the flamethrower.)
And shockwaves, I repeat, are only part of the story. The thermal effects are actually more significant. Raising a cubic meter of air to the temp of around 700-800K (well past boiling point and temps at which which heated metal can start to glow) will require around 400-500 kilojoules per cubic meter or kilogram (At typical dry air densities its around the same thing) A 100 MJ blaster bolt for example has enough energy to heat 200-250 cubic meters of air - equivalent to roughly a 5x5x5 meter area. At the very least that is going to be noticable, if not dangerous. And even if a single bolt did not have much of a serious effect in such circumstances, how do you think dozens or hundreds of bolts (or entire battles with thousands) at any given time might impact the enviroment given that?
Thermal detontaors are not exactly applicable because they supposeldy use weird self-containment shit to contain the effects briefly, although that has limits (energy does not just *disappear* after all) and too high an energy input could still have adverse effects on the enviroment because energy does not vanish. I'm getting this feeling that you're just saying shit at random to me and not really paying attention to the substance of what I am getting at.
Probably not in this case, vehicle lasers creating 6 - 10 meter wide fireballs is actually quite common in tcw, and in some the examples hidden mines under the ground simply isn't likely. The Geonosian arena for example, or the village with the overlooking murderlaser.
Since I've not watched enough of the Clone Wars in depth to recognize any of this shit I have no context with which to go by, but in my experience people treat any 'brightly glowing bloblike thing' described in text or shown onscreen as a 'fireball' without really understanding what a fireball actually IS.
The bolts usually fully immerse in the target within 1-2 frames, so their inputting their energy over 10,000 times (iirc) slower than high explosive or nukes. So bombs of equal energy would be orders of magnitude greater in power, for what its worth. Blasters are about as "low explosive" as you can get.
This is not as helpful as it doesn't tell us much about the nature of the bolt/target interaction. If the bolt is composed of particles that decay inside the target into EM radiation for example, the bolt could 'pass' inside thet arget in a tenth of a second, yet still release its energy in a far shorter period of time (which would be implied by events like the destruction of Alderaan for example, or various cratering incidents in inorganic medium like the hangar bay wall in ANH.)
And again even if there is no blast effect there is still a non-trivial thermal effect (actually made worse probably by the fact that you need more energy to achieve similar effects or lethality, the 'flamethrower vs bullet' analogy again.)
I scaled it against a starfighter which was almost adjacent (possibly a little closer to us) to the fireball.
The actual size of the fireball is less of an issue to me than the shape is. A fireball as classically defined is an omnidirectional expansion of really hot gas/plasma - see
here. Something liek a gasoline explosion is something else entirely, and not neccesarily a 'fireball' as we know it, but actually calcing it is probably much more compilcated (because when you combust shit its not just hot air, chemical reactions are not always 100% efficient.) I don't think you can just go 'okay I scaled how wide the glowy shit is, then I figure its a fireball and get my number'.
The example in Caves of Ice said "instantly", so at most a second.
And where do you get such a precise definition of 'instantly?' Why hsould we assume Cain has a chronometer in his skull that he neccesarily remembers this all at once? Context matters, and even if it 'instantly' turned to steam (and he somehow knew that it literally did affect the entire volume) it still doesn't consider issues like 'volume effected' and the penetration of the melta. There's a vast difference between 'heating a few cubic cm of matter' and 'heating a few cubic meters of matter' in an instant. Heck there's huge differences even if its just surface area.
And yet again I notice you fixate on one detail and ignore others, which is starting to annoy me.
A flamethrower probably helps spread the energy about a bit. >30 GJ is a lower limit for the state change so establishing mechanism and all that only really determines how much the number goes up by. Considering it done this "instantly" its most likely 30 gigawatts.
Not if it its the traditional 'microwave' style melta. Massless radiation at that energy level would generate tremendous momentum, on the order of 100 kg*m/s. Thats about equal to any assault rifle on full auto, and keeping any device like that on target, much less staying upright, is going to be dififcult if not impossible. And that assumes the melta blast fires only for a single second.
The 'pyrum petrol' melta examples would not neccearily have that problem, but generate their own difficulties WRT Caves of Ice (penetration issues, explosive effects, thermal dangers to passerbys, etc.) Its actually a bit of a pain in the ass calc wise to reconcile by 'complete vaporization' because of that.
Recoil dissipation, same could be said for plasma guns when they start vaping small groups of people lol.
Recoil cannot magically disappear. It must be conserved. Unless you're trying to argue Jurgen's melta is mounted on some sort of hydraulic counter-force frame I doubt there is much you could do to mitigate the effects - its not like you can put a muzzle brake on it.
More evidence for lightsaber variable yields. The figures are vaguely consistent with the proposed blaster outputs too.
If we assume the doors are iron. I've never been quite completely convinced that wholly meshes up with the visuals, temp and thermal property wise. This does not mitigate any of hte problems I have described above. The lightsaber scene can also be excused on the basis of 'Jedi magic' to certain extents which yuo cannot handwave for every other effect.
Lighstabers are also not blasters. A lightsaber produces its effect from sustained application of energy (a second or more) and does not cause explosive effects (EG slicing someone with a lightsaber does not make them blow apart. They don't even consistently sever limbs for that matter or cause any consistently obvious burn injuries.) whereas a blaster delivers its energy in a fraction of a second, can cause explosive effects, and generally causes little prolonged heating and are known to cause at least some degree of flash burn injury.
If superconducting metal is needed for the effects to take place then I guess it must be superconducting (it does kinda instantly all turn blue-white). The thing would require >15 megajoules to melt going by some melt figures, or 60 by others.
Or it has a different mechanism than simply dumping ungodly huge quantities of energy into it. Its hardly the first time such an argument has been put forth or could be rationalized, and its not completely without merit, and in this case requires far less mental gymnastics to make work with the scene.
Well it says it was superheated so it might largely have been heated to or close to boiling point with a smaller amount being actually vaped. I've got rid of all the stuff about 36kg being a lower limit lol. I think the author just underestimated how throwing several dozen liters is like hurling a dwarf.
If you're giong to invoke 'author doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about' then there's no point in even analyzing the scene, because its useless as evidence. You don't get to throw the scene out and keep the numbers - its all or nothing. And if the bulk of the water was simply boiled we're talking a fraction of the energy involved - like 10 MJ or so probably. That still requires explaining how the water was uniformly heated in such a short period of time without significantly explosive effects, however (heating a small volume of the water in a fraction of a second would be, technically, an explosion.) which again points to multiple shots/sustained fire, unless blaster bolts magically widebeam on impact or something.
There's lots and lots of examples of phasers in the megajoules and the highest is 20MJ for some phase pistols with no mention of significant inefficiency. The effects are consistent with the whole ~gj/m^3 thing.
Based on?
There's also the heavily implied to be multi-gigajoule Breen rifle. It can vape a droid which is likely well armoured against 20MJ phase pistols, or destroy shuttles which have withstood 0.9 GJ beams and survived in other episodes, penetrate 15Cm of advanced armour which agains is probably good against the megajoules and overwhelm shields of up to 4.6 gigajoules. The weapon creates a multi-cubic meter fireball type explosion with no shockwave.
The fact you continually persist in viewing fireballs in terms of energy does not reassure me, nor does your ability to assess such scenes accurately. You tend to be far too blithe in dismissing the problems simply in order to hang onto your huge numbers. Energy is not a scoring mechanism, nor does having MOAR ENERGY neccesairly make it a better weapon. If I have a lazer that only requires 10 kj to kill the target, as opposed to 1 MJ, but it achieves the same lethality, the latter weapon is arguably superior (if everything else is held equal) because it consumes less energy to achieve the effect. That means larger ammo supply, its easier to cool (higher rate of fire - if no other things are an issue I could generate up to 100 10 kj killshots as opposed to the single 1 MJ killshot.)
We have some weapons which are explicitly stated to yield megajoules or gigajoules in Star Trek and Star Wars (counting ICS) and in both cases the weapons of sated yields usually equate to somewhere on the order of 1 gigajoule per cubic meter of collateral. Then we have weapons achieving state changes without significant explosions in both SW and 40K (and the breen rifle) which require energy again consistent with 1gj/m^3. I did call the page "a trend of science fiction", and it is empirically consistent using canon stated yields or quantified yields across the franchises.
So it isn't dishonest, its observation.
No, its not. You're outright ignoring legitimate issues with the weaponry. This isn't new - people have been pointing out problems in hand weapons analysis like this for ages (Mike's own website has debunked HUEG YIELD phasers on the enviromental effects AND recoil both, for example.) You can't just handwave away numbers by saying ITS CANON because you want to treat weapon energy yields as some sort of scoring metric.
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