StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Doomriser wrote:ROFL, I figure that a one-mile diameter asteroid would take nearly 200 GT to vapourize, though if you really want to know, Darth Wong's site has an asteroid destruction calculator...

Robert Treder wrote: Oh, the CIA World Factbook 2001 also says that Kazakhstan is "slightly less than four times the size of Texas", and Kazakhstan is 2,717,300 sq km (including water area; w/o water is 2,669,800 sq km).

Turkey is "slightly larger than Texas" at 780,580 sq km (again, including water area; w/o water is 770,760 sq km).

South Africa is "slightly less than twice the size of Texas" at 1,219,912 sq km (w/o water 1,219,912 sq km).

Botswana is "slightly smaller than Texas" at 600,370 sq km (w/o water is 585,370 sq km).

Well, the CIA website seems to like using Texas as a yardstick, so there are a lot more, but I don't feel like finding them. I just looked up the ones I thought were about Texas-sized or would use a Texas yardstick.
Looks like Texas is about 650,000-something sq km.

Darth Wong wrote:OK, so let's say Texas is 650,000 km^2, disregarding the volumetric effect of the Bush family ego. If we assume that the asteroid in Armageddon has a projected area the size of Texas, this would imply that it is a spherical asteroid roughly 900km wide.

This is a huge asteroid; more of a moon. For an asteroid of such large size, physical fragmentation energy is insignificant compared to gravitational binding energy. If we assume it is made of hard granite, its mass would be 9E17 tons and its GBE would be 1.7E7 gigatons. Yup, that's right: 17 million gigatons.

So, a 200 gigaton blast would have very little effect on an asteroid the size of Texas.

Graeme Dice wrote:Or in other words, those were some awfully big nukes they planted in that asteroid to push either half around the planet.

Darth Wong wrote:So, a 200 gigaton blast would have very little effect on an asteroid the size of Texas.

Darth Jehovah wrote:Could a BDZ handle such a beast?

Darth Wong wrote:

Darth Jehovah wrote:Could a BDZ handle such a beast?

Depends on just how powerful a BDZ really is. Conservative estimates based on mission requirements of zero survivors and zero witnesses (even in a technologically advanced society) are around the quarter-million gigaton mark (156 salvoes from 8 200-gigaton emplacements), but you need 17 million gigatons to overcome the asteroid's gravity, so I would say no.

Darth Wong wrote:

Graeme Dice wrote:Or in other words, those were some awfully big nukes they planted in that asteroid to push either half around the planet.

And magical too, since there's no reason the asteroid should have cleanly split in half instead of fragmenting in all directions. And I suspect that scaling of the asteroid fragment movements on the NASA display screen from the DVD might reveal that the figure is even larger, since their rate of separation was probably very large, once scaled against the size of the Earth.

The clean planar split is rather bizarre, isn't it? Perhaps Bruce Willis borrowed some seismic charges from Jango Fett, and then supercharged them by squeezing really hard on the detonation trigger.

Darth Wong wrote:

Graeme Dice wrote:Or in other words, those were some awfully big nukes they planted in that asteroid to push either half around the planet.

And magical too, since there's no reason the asteroid should have cleanly split in half instead of fragmenting in all directions. And I suspect that scaling of the asteroid fragment movements on the NASA display screen from the DVD might reveal that the figure is even larger, since their rate of separation was probably very large, once scaled against the size of the Earth.

The clean planar split is rather bizarre, isn't it? Perhaps Bruce Willis borrowed some seismic charges from Jango Fett, and then supercharged them by squeezing really hard on the detonation trigger.

Darth Wong wrote:

Darth Jehovah wrote:Could a BDZ handle such a beast?

Depends on just how powerful a BDZ really is. Conservative estimates based on mission requirements of zero survivors and zero witnesses (even in a technologically advanced society) are around the quarter-million gigaton mark (156 salvoes from 8 200-gigaton emplacements), but you need 17 million gigatons to overcome the asteroid's gravity, so I would say no.