The Effects of an SD crashing into an earth like planet

[Vanas]

IIRC, a star destroyer in a background engagement of the Battle of Endor appears to explode in the manner that Chitoryu is alluding to.

I was going to mention this myself, but if the fuel is horribly dense and horribly reactive, wouldn't the destroyer have exploded far more impressively than the relatively gentle explosion we see?

[Noble Ire]

IIRC, a star destroyer in a background engagement of the Battle of Endor appears to explode in the manner that Chitoryu is alluding to.

I was going to mention this myself, but if the fuel is horribly dense and horribly reactive, wouldn't the destroyer have exploded far more impressively than the relatively gentle explosion we see?

Perhaps, and perhaps not. As has been noted, very little is known about SW reactors or the fuels they use. There may be some sort of internal failsafe that mitgated the scale of a ship-wide detontion, or perhaps the fuel doesn't react as violently in an uncntrolled environment, for whatever reason. Still, I think its likely that it was some kind of reactor explosion. What else could have made the destroyer explode from the inside out in little more than a second?

Maybe Callista went back in time, sunk aboard and set off a TIE bomber's payload in its hangar. That knocked an SSD out of commission, after all.

[Lazarus]

Concerning exploding reactors, and the apparent presumption that no reactors explode, I'd point towards what would theoretically happen if you suddenly shut down the magnetic containment field of an analagous antimatter reactor. This hypothetical reactor has a similar quantity of fuel inside it as would be in an ISD hypermatter reactor, and the same amount of stored reserves nearby. The antimatter would immediately contact with the matter of the reactor shell itself and explode, annihilating the reactor. Depending on how much fuel is in the reactor (as per Surlethe's stated calculations, thats 1e9 kg per second) this would cause a huge explosion, and with stored reserves and amount of matter present, the potential energy release would be huge.

Now, I'm not saying that this therefore means hypermatter must produce a similar effect - far from it. We don't know enough about hypermatter to suggest it behaves in a similar fashion to antimatter. However, the point I am making here is that the idea that a hypermatter reactor 'cannot explode' is ridiculous. As far as I can see the only logic this is based on is 'nuclear reactors don't explode, therefore hypermatter reactors don't explode'. What proof is there to say hypermatter wouldn't react violently with normal matter? Indeed, as has been said, there is evidence to suggest it might.

[Lord Revan]

I would think that all of this brings up an interesting question...

Could you Safely "Land" an ISD? Even if there was zero chance of it ever getting airborn again, could you land it in such a way as it be intact and unharmed?

I dunno, while a Venator-class SDs and IIRC Victory-class SDs where designed to land on planets (VnSDs even have landing gear) ISDs weren't, so I think really depends on a) what do you consider a landing and b) what it landed in/on, though I dout it would be totally unharmed.

[Ariphaos]

Concerning exploding reactors, and the apparent presumption that no reactors explode, I'd point towards what would theoretically happen if you suddenly shut down the magnetic containment field of an analagous antimatter reactor. This hypothetical reactor has a similar quantity of fuel inside it as would be in an ISD hypermatter reactor, and the same amount of stored reserves nearby. The antimatter would immediately contact with the matter of the reactor shell itself and explode, annihilating the reactor. Depending on how much fuel is in the reactor (as per Surlethe's stated calculations, thats 1e9 kg per second) this would cause a huge explosion, and with stored reserves and amount of matter present, the potential energy release would be huge.

This only applies if you are actually storing it as antimatter, rather than have some magically efficient process that does a conversion.

Regardless, none of the ISD explosions seen on screen even began to approach the high megaton / low gigaton range that the impact would generate.

[Ritterin Sophia]

Whilst not yet out and not exactly an orbital crash, we saw from the Force Unleshed previews that a Star Destroyer can fall from a rather significant height and neither the metal it landed on nor the ship's armor distorted to any significant degree.

[Ender]

Chit, you know reactors don't explode like a nuclear weapon, right?

Would the reactors, if they exploded, send out the fuel as debris, or would it be eaten up before that happened?

Also, what IS the composition of the ISD reactor fuel anyway?

Numbnuts, prove that any sort of engine just explodes.

Fucking A, you are working on some illogical presumption that engines are ticking time bombs waiting for the slightest jostle.

"slightest jostle" no, but the fuel tanks would be extremely volatile. Even if it is just metallic hydrogen, it would have to be stored at densities that would make the heart of a gas giant make look like the vacuum of space. In fact a perplexing issue is how the fuel doesn't initiate fusion from compression (my theory is they use time dilation devices to slow it so that it won't).

Dropping from orbit, the 1 billion ton ISD (estimate) would hit the ground with 6.73*10^19 joules of KE. That should be enough to rupture the fuel tanks, which will then decompress with a style all their own. The reactor should scram rather then release it's energy - Dalaa was going to have people on board to initiate the reactor exploding in one of her terrorist schemes.

[Ender]

IIRC, a star destroyer in a background engagement of the Battle of Endor appears to explode in the manner that Chitoryu is alluding to.

I was going to mention this myself, but if the fuel is horribly dense and horribly reactive, wouldn't the destroyer have exploded far more impressively than the relatively gentle explosion we see?

Yes. It's reactor power is ~1/30th that of Sol's output. The question of where the energy in the reactor and shield sinks goes is an open one - I can only guess that they have really fast transfer systems and great heatsinks, so the energy is used to warm a material in the event of an emergency. THe material just isn't hot enough to glow due to a high specific heat, so we can't see it from a distance. Ad hoc as all hell, but it is a possible solution.

[Sriad]

IIRC, a star destroyer in a background engagement of the Battle of Endor appears to explode in the manner that Chitoryu is alluding to.

I was going to mention this myself, but if the fuel is horribly dense and horribly reactive, wouldn't the destroyer have exploded far more impressively than the relatively gentle explosion we see?

Yes. It's reactor power is ~1/30th that of Sol's output. The question of where the energy in the reactor and shield sinks goes is an open one - I can only guess that they have really fast transfer systems and great heatsinks, so the energy is used to warm a material in the event of an emergency. THe material just isn't hot enough to glow due to a high specific heat, so we can't see it from a distance. Ad hoc as all hell, but it is a possible solution.

IIRC most waste heat in Star Wars is radiated as neutrinos.

Anyway, the crash result is fairly straightforward, if loosely defined:

If we have no reactor breach or the hypermatter disperses in a non-reactive fasion, we're just dealing with m*g*h for a poorly defined mass and height: 100-30,000 km could conceivably be a "close orbit", but if it's much farther than, say, 200km it's hard to imagine how it would be "dragged down" without resorting to tidal forces and gravity wave radiation over millions of years. The SD's mass, as others have said, is around 1e13kg, give or take quite a lot of fuel.

Gives us 1.96e19 joules, or about 4.5 gigatons. Giving the SD double it's weight in fuel only linearly amplifies the potential energy to ~15 gigatons.

My physics is nowhere near the level I need to calculate the energy required to compress 2e13kg of anything into the space given a star destroyer's fuel, but I imagine total containment failure would have some pretty ferocious ELE level consequences. OTOH we don't see those on screen in the movies when star destroyers are destroyed, for which I imagine we can credit superior engineering.

[Surlethe]

I'm pretty sure that to know the amount of work you have to do to compress the fuel, you have to know the initial state of the fuel before you actually compress it.

That said, the density of the fuel will be on the order of 5e5 kg/m^3 (if the silos are 10% of the ship's volume). If it started with the density of water, 1e3 kg/m^3, and if we treat it like an ideal gas subjected to isothermal compression, W = nRTln(Vi/Vf). Vi/Vf = pf/pi (for density p) = 500, so W = nRTln(500). Assuming the fuel is stored at, oh, 30 K, and fuel with the molar mass of iron, W = (1.8e14 mol)(8.314 J/mol*K)(30 K)ln(500) = 2.8e17 J. This is about 70 megatons of energy.

Take this analysis with a truckload of salt, because I have no idea how "realistic" my assumptions are.

[Darth Wong]

You know, everyone's assuming that the fuel is matter/antimatter and therefore highly volatile because that's the Star Trek model. However, there is no reason why this has to be the case.

Let's suppose hypermatter is matter which has been accelerated to a tachyonic state (or some other exotic state), and circulates in a cloud around the ship which is not visible. Let's also suppose that the energy requirement to do this is enormous. Could it not be said that the fuel now has an extremely high potential energy, and that (mathematically, at least) you can release energy simply by lowering that fuel to base state? No matter/antimatter reactions required, and if the ship blows up, the fuel simply spins off harmlessly into space.

Sci-fi authors need to be more creative in their power generation ideas. Really, all you need for virtually unlimited fuel energy density is an imaginary state which involves enormous potential energy. That's nowhere near as absurd as many existing sci-fi technologies and conventions.

[bz249]

You know, everyone's assuming that the fuel is matter/antimatter and therefore highly volatile because that's the Star Trek model. However, there is no reason why this has to be the case.

Let's suppose hypermatter is matter which has been accelerated to a tachyonic state (or some other exotic state), and circulates in a cloud around the ship which is not visible. Let's also suppose that the energy requirement to do this is enormous. Could it not be said that the fuel now has an extremely high potential energy, and that (mathematically, at least) you can release energy simply by lowering that fuel to base state? No matter/antimatter reactions required, and if the ship blows up, the fuel simply spins off harmlessly into space.

Sci-fi authors need to be more creative in their power generation ideas. Really, all you need for virtually unlimited fuel energy density is an imaginary state which involves enormous potential energy. That's nowhere near as absurd as many existing sci-fi technologies and conventions.

Well we saw at least two incident in SW where hypermatter reactors of a 'ship' blew up in a rather violent mode, namely the two Death Stars. However if hypermatter had been as reactive as antimatter we would have seen an explosion equivalent of a supernova because the huge power output of the DS required enormous quantity of fuel. So it might be the excess energy/heat of the reactor which created the fireworks.
Oh, is there any official explanation for that thing?

[Ender]

You know, everyone's assuming that the fuel is matter/antimatter and therefore highly volatile because that's the Star Trek model. However, there is no reason why this has to be the case.

Let's suppose hypermatter is matter which has been accelerated to a tachyonic state (or some other exotic state), and circulates in a cloud around the ship which is not visible. Let's also suppose that the energy requirement to do this is enormous. Could it not be said that the fuel now has an extremely high potential energy, and that (mathematically, at least) you can release energy simply by lowering that fuel to base state? No matter/antimatter reactions required, and if the ship blows up, the fuel simply spins off harmlessly into space.

Wouldn't that also create some nasty gyroscopic and dialtion effects on the ship? We are talking about a lot of mass moving very fast - would t he fact it is FTL change that at all?

Sci-fi authors need to be more creative in their power generation ideas. Really, all you need for virtually unlimited fuel energy density is an imaginary state which involves enormous potential energy. That's nowhere near as absurd as many existing sci-fi technologies and conventions.

That's about the only scifi tech John Ringo managed to get right.

[phongn]

Wouldn't that also create some nasty gyroscopic and dialtion effects on the ship? We are talking about a lot of mass moving very fast - would t he fact it is FTL change that at all?

Doesn't ROTS:ICS pretty much explain that's how hypermatter is stored? Now, it might be spinning in contained fuel tanks (or a ring, in the case of fighter hyperdrive frames)

[Howedar]

You know, everyone's assuming that the fuel is matter/antimatter and therefore highly volatile because that's the Star Trek model. However, there is no reason why this has to be the case.

Let's suppose hypermatter is matter which has been accelerated to a tachyonic state (or some other exotic state), and circulates in a cloud around the ship which is not visible. Let's also suppose that the energy requirement to do this is enormous. Could it not be said that the fuel now has an extremely high potential energy, and that (mathematically, at least) you can release energy simply by lowering that fuel to base state? No matter/antimatter reactions required, and if the ship blows up, the fuel simply spins off harmlessly into space.

Sci-fi authors need to be more creative in their power generation ideas. Really, all you need for virtually unlimited fuel energy density is an imaginary state which involves enormous potential energy. That's nowhere near as absurd as many existing sci-fi technologies and conventions.

That's a good point, I was reading through this thread and starting to wonder if the pdV work wasn't more than you'd ever get even by energy equivalence.

[Darth Wong]

That's a good point, I was reading through this thread and starting to wonder if the pdV work wasn't more than you'd ever get even by energy equivalence.

It's pretty easy to show that this is the case for highly relativistic particles, where almost all of the mass is actually the mass-equivalent of their kinetic energy. To be honest, I would hesitate before trying to do any of the math for superluminal particles, where you're talking about complex numbers and some pretty esoteric physics. That's not what I specialized in.

[Big Orange]

No shit sherlock, but thank you for the pointless tangent. So are you going to answer the question at hand?

Not as pointless as you usual explosive histrionics, Ghost Rider, but what is wrong in pointing out that a mile long structure made out of dense, exotic alloys pulverising itself into a planet’s surface would do a horrifying amount of ecological and atmospheric damage that would kill more people than the direct impact of the Imperial warship?

And to answer Bluewolf’s questions:

A. If many miles away, the cities population would get seriously injured or killed by the giant blanket of toxic fog thrown up by the ISD's impact and obliteration.

B. The city’s whole population gets instantly killed by the adjunct impact of a mile long and dense metallic object.

C. Gigantic crater and ecological devastation for miles around, with the entire planet affected by a low level nuclear winter.

D. A big tidal wave, although the seriousness of the tidal wave depends on how far out at the sea the ISD splashed down and the population density of the nearest coastline (best scenario).

E. Like the pre-D scenarios, but made worse by the dense mountain range connecting with the incoming “mountain” of the Imperial Star Destroyer.

Numbnuts, prove that any sort of engine just explodes.

Fucking A, you are working on some illogical presumption that engines are ticking time bombs waiting for the slightest jostle.

As for the reactor fuel. Hypermatter...helps none because no one fucking knows what SW hypermatter is other then a highly dense fuel that has some unusual properties.

You berate me when I pointing out that a crashing ISD would not blow up like a bomb but instead cause indirect ecological damage, then you berate chitoryu12 for stating that the ISD’s reactor would blow up catastrophically (there is no real evidence). Please be more consistent.

And I have a theory of Hypermatter being fairly solid but partially liquid form of fuel that is not combustible under most circumstances but through a generator process in a starship's power module, where it gets converted into raw power for the sub-light boosters and hyperdrive.

[Surlethe]

And I have a theory of Hypermatter being fairly solid but partially liquid form of fuel that is not combustible under most circumstances but through a generator process in a starship's power module, where it gets converted into raw power for the sub-light boosters and hyperdrive.

What the hell kind of theory is that? What sort of mechanism do you propose to generate predictions that we can test against observations?

[Ritterin Sophia]

And I have a theory of Hypermatter being fairly solid but partially liquid form of fuel that is not combustible under most circumstances but through a generator process in a starship's power module, where it gets converted into raw power for the sub-light boosters and hyperdrive.

Do you mean like a plastic, hard under pressure and soft without it?

[Bounty]

In Rogue Squadron II, a crashed and beached ISD is shown. The scene it'self doesn't make much sense - the surrounding area, including trees, is completely intact - but plot-wise (and that's still considered canon, correct?) it does establish that an ISD's reactor , fuel stores and ammunition can survive a crash without detonating. Radiation leakage had to be minimal too, since Rebel troops were able to operate near the crash site with no protection.

[Big Orange]

What the hell kind of theory is that? What sort of mechanism do you propose to generate predictions that we can test against observations?

I thinking along the lines of the internal combustion engine, but executed with vastly greater technology and with vastly greater energy output.

Do you mean like a plastic, hard under pressure and soft without it?

Yes but halfway through the process of being converted into pure energy, Hypermatter could be similar to Aerogel...

[Ghost Rider]

*snip long winded shit*

Glad to know it takes two posts, and your verbose ass to answer what most do in one. So if I started eliminating half of your worthless shit, we'll actually properly see your non spam count.

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind the next time you enter one of these diatribes.

You berate me when I pointing out that a crashing ISD would not blow up like a bomb but instead cause indirect ecological damage, then you berate chitoryu12 for stating that the ISD’s reactor would blow up catastrophically (there is no real evidence). Please be more consistent.

And I have a theory of Hypermatter being fairly solid but partially liquid form of fuel that is not combustible under most circumstances but through a generator process in a starship's power module, where it gets converted into raw power for the sub-light boosters and hyperdrive.

Glad you can't read, and in fact you prove again you are doing the exact same thing with this post.

Course, you'll actually prove the evidence behind your theory, right?

Oh wait, we'll have to wait for another useless post of yabbering to even glean anything useful.

[Ghost Rider]

What the hell kind of theory is that? What sort of mechanism do you propose to generate predictions that we can test against observations?

I thinking along the lines of the internal combustion engine, but executed with vastly greater technology and with vastly greater energy output.

That still does not ANSWER the question.

Demonstrate your evidence to support your theory. Not spew a longer line about something you haven't shown any evidence for.

Do you mean like a plastic, hard under pressure and soft without it?

Yes but halfway through the process of being converted into pure energy, Hypermatter could be similar to Aerogel...[/quote]

Wow, pure energy..

Take Physics 101 to realize how fucking retarded it is to say this.

And again...show your evidence.

[Surlethe]

What the hell kind of theory is that? What sort of mechanism do you propose to generate predictions that we can test against observations?

I thinking along the lines of the internal combustion engine, but executed with vastly greater technology and with vastly greater energy output.

Did you even read my question? I'll repeat it: what sort of mechanism do you propose? In other words (since you're apparently too dense to realize what a mechanism is), how do you think this fuel stores and releases energy, and what predictions can you make from this method of storing and releasing energy?

[Big Orange]

Did you even read my question? I'll repeat it: what sort of mechanism do you propose? In other words (since you're apparently too dense to realize what a mechanism is), how do you think this fuel stores and releases energy, and what predictions can you make from this method of storing and releasing energy?

Sorry, the best I can come up with about Hypermatter for now is this Wookiepedia article:

Hypermatter

Hypermatter was an exotic form of matter used in the hypermatter annihilators of the Death Stars and starships. Its unusual properties allowed vessels to produce the phenomenal amounts of energy necessary for their operation.

Hypermatter was tachyonic matter. It was annhiliated as it accelerated to infinite speed within the reactor.

Despite its high efficiency, it still required massive amounts of fuel to power the great starships of the spacelanes. For example, the Venator-class Star Destroyer's main reactor annihilated the equivalent of 40,000 tons of matter each second at peak power. Even small starfighters required significant fuel supplies—the Utapaun P-38 starfighter consumed 6.2 kilograms of hypermatter each second at full power. Hypermatter was also found in the hyperdrive rings used by some Clone Wars era starfighters.

During the late years of the Galactic Republic, research into utilizing hypermatter for alternative needs was ramped up considerably. A grant from Republic Sienar Systems was given to the Republic Ministry of Science allowing them to continue research into hypermatter for planetary power, deep space mining, and other civilian uses.

Link> http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Hypermatter

And this interesting clip off an article here:

The answer to both of these problems was solved with the invention of the hypermatter reactor.

The hypermatter reactor is the heart of the Death Star. The Death Star's hypermatter core is based largely on early Sienar Systems hypermatter implosion core that was the power source of the Confederacy of Independent Systems' Great Weapon (the early inspiration for the Death Star -- more on this later). Little is actually known about the details of the highly classified reactor design, but we do know that it is a massive fusion reactor fed by stellar fuel bottles that line the periphery of the main reactor chamber.

Link> http://science.howstuffworks.com/death-star6.htm

So Hypermatter is a form a fuel that is combusted to make energy, if this rather vague technical info is anything to go by...