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More specificly how much energy would they bleed off traveling from space to the planets surface? And would it significantly reduce their power?

hmm. i don't think that turbolaser bombardment is signicantly "bled off" if it is, it heats the air

If firing from space to planet, keep in mind that any energy that "bleeds off" is dumped into the air. Superheated air is just a fancy word for a nuclear explosion, which is very devastating in and of its own right. This especially true if the beam dumps a significant amount of energy in the planet's upper atmosphere, which is mostly transparent to heat.

I think this is kind of a double edged sword. Atmospheric interference might degrade beam effects against hard targets, such as underground bunkers, at the expense of devastating the soft targets above.

Turbolaser or blaster "projectiles" don't - the energy content is inside the projectile, so its not realyl radiating outwards.

The massless beams look to be fairly transparent to the atmosphere, so they probably don't bleed much energy to the enviroment.

A particle beam like the ion cannon, however, probably would interact extensively (its a beam of charged particles, after all!) - which means that in some cases (IE the hoth ion cannon) you probably have to use some sort of force-field to evacuate a "channel" through the atmosphere to allow the beam to fire.

Couldn't an ion cannon create lightning around it as it bleeds it's electronic charge?

If ion cannons work the way we think, then yes there should be significant electrical activity at the cannon site or around the "projectile" while it travels. Also the ion cannon at hoth didn't seem to have significant bleed off into the atmosphere so that seems to suggest that there's some form of containment for the "shot".

Well minimum bleed off by each would be roughly 1KW/S. This would just account for the very bright light. At a power dissipation exceeding 1 GW/sec the atmosphere around the shot should cause some wild thermal distortions/ or plasmafication of atmospheric gasses. Given the power of the shots, even the GW/Sec maximum dissapation seems a bit minimal for power leakage. This is assuming that the shot is moving at a reasonable rate that is nowhere near C.

And the energy bleed has a million fold error possible, so I am not really narrowing it down much.

Norade wrote:Couldn't an ion cannon create lightning around it as it bleeds it's electronic charge?

Yes, it should.