Darth Wong wrote:Ignore the "1/3" estimate and go with the statement that it can vapourize a continent. Vapourizing a continent is a miniscule energy event compared to destroying the entire planet, but if it honestly had 1/3 of the energy of the Death Star or even 1/3 of GBE, it would be able to easily vapourize an entire planet, and that would be a major plot point which would have been mentioned.
As I recall the eclipses' little "superlaser" idea was not from the original DE per se, it was largely an add-on from the WEG stuff (Again I have to check, it might have been in the background notes.
In any case, doesn't the whole "plot point" defend on how dangerous the weapon is to targets? I mean a fraction of or at GBE is alot of energy (even with recharge), but it may not be able to blow up all planets (I'm not sure it could pierce Alderaan's shield, even though they made up some nonsensical technobabble in the DESB to give it shield-piercing abilities. Involved some neutrino stupidity I think.)
Darth Wong wrote:Ignore the "1/3" estimate and go with the statement that it can vapourize a continent. Vapourizing a continent is a miniscule energy event compared to destroying the entire planet, but if it honestly had 1/3 of the energy of the Death Star or even 1/3 of GBE, it would be able to easily vapourize an entire planet, and that would be a major plot point which would have been mentioned.
As I recall the eclipses' little "superlaser" idea was not from the original DE per se, it was largely an add-on from the WEG stuff (Again I have to check, it might have been in the background notes.
In any case, doesn't the whole "plot point" defend on how dangerous the weapon is to targets? I mean a fraction of or at GBE is alot of energy (even with recharge), but it may not be able to blow up all planets (I'm not sure it could pierce Alderaan's shield, even though they made up some nonsensical technobabble in the DESB to give it shield-piercing abilities. Involved some neutrino stupidity I think.)
I think of the superlaser as a way to obliterate a capital ship very quickly, as it lacks the impressiveness of the DS superlaser, and can't be used for anything else except what i mentioned above. The eclipse could batter down shields with the rest of it's guns, since it probably can pound at shields faster than they recharge. As for the neutrino explanation, that is one of the more offensive uses of technobabble. Neutrinos are non-interactive. that is why it would penetrate shields. If they have a way to make neutrinos interact with normal matter, they would set up shields to stop them.
It seems to be proposed to be 2/3rds of the power of one of the contributory superlaser beams, but we don't know which one, as numerous beams combine--presumably one of the weaker ones. I'll note that in addition to being able to "sear continents in a flash" it can crack the crust of a planet, which suggests it being able to penetrate through at least 40km of rock.
Indeed, it seems likely that the impact of the beam itself--and its heating effects on the atmosphere--are sufficient to sear a continent, while even more power is left over, enough to penetrate deep into the mantle and cause crack the crust, presumably not only by the initial penetration but by superheating large amounts of material in the mantle in the area of the hit, which would cause massive geologic disturbances.
The beam can probably destroy the planetary biosphere, but people in highly secured positions in the crust on the far side of the planet or otherwise shielded and provided with a self-contained atmosphere would probably survive. Defensive and protective technology in Star Wars are not exactly weak either, after all.
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But that still doesn't work. 2/3 of 1/8th of the power of the DS blast would be much more power than it woudl take to merely crack a planets crust and sear a conienent, even Asia sized, extra-crispy. Furthermore, could one even fit a big enough reactor for such a blast inside the ship's hull? I have no idea how hypermatter reactors scale up and down though.
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Vehrec wrote:But that still doesn't work. 2/3 of 1/8th of the power of the DS blast would be much more power than it woudl take to merely crack a planets crust and sear a conienent, even Asia sized, extra-crispy. Furthermore, could one even fit a big enough reactor for such a blast inside the ship's hull? I have no idea how hypermatter reactors scale up and down though.
The answer is that it must be one of the smaller internal tributory beams that is being referred to.
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I wouldn't be surprised at all if the Death Star main beam's tributary cascade went through at least a dozen iterations, resulting in at least an eightfold energy increase per cascade. Cascading was used on the LAAT laser balls, so we know it can be used at scales much smaller than the DS superlaser; this would build up to the big 1/8 power beams, instead of simply pumping out eight 1.3e37 J beams straight from the reactor. So if you're looking to reconcile the 2/3 statement instead of dismissing it entirely, you probably can simply arbitrarily choose an energy level between 1e28 J and 1e38 J.
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I thought that the two thirds quote was referring to the minimum amount of power needed to destroy a standard habitable planet (I imagine that the power settings on the Death Star were adjustable)
Given the amount of power that the destruction of Alderaan demonstrated, I presume that even one of the tributary beams would have far excess energy necessary for a planetary destruction event (though that's purely speculation, since we don't know how a superlaser works)
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Pelranius wrote:I thought that the two thirds quote was referring to the minimum amount of power needed to destroy a standard habitable planet (I imagine that the power settings on the Death Star were adjustable)
Given the amount of power that the destruction of Alderaan demonstrated, I presume that even one of the tributary beams would have far excess energy necessary for a planetary destruction event (though that's purely speculation, since we don't know how a superlaser works)
Again, it depends on which tributary beam you refer to. There were several stages of combination in the buildup to the main Death Star Beam.
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Pelranius wrote:Given the amount of power that the destruction of Alderaan demonstrated, I presume that even one of the tributary beams would have far excess energy necessary for a planetary destruction event (though that's purely speculation, since we don't know how a superlaser works)
Like I said, there are probably at least a dozen steps of combining tributaries that ramp up power eightfold or more each iteration. In fact, the thousands of initial tributary beams may even be three times Eclipse-strength; that would make the comparison a little less arbitrary than randomly choosing a cascade.
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