Uraniun235 wrote:LOL, I don't believe I've ever heard the phrase "generously insane" before.
I've coined it recently - its a tribute to my past debates with SB Fivers.
For example, we have Dark Lord/Elizar from Spacebattles who claims that the Shadow Planetkiller really could generate up to a trillion megatons worth of destructive power rather than a hundred million. He bases this logic on the semantic nitpick that "thousands" clearly means anything from 2,000 to 999,999 - or in other words, greater than two thousand but under a million. His "proof" is usually the fact that in a prior episode of b5 (the one involving the berserker probe - a Knife in the Dark, IIRC) the yield of the nuke was stated as "500,000 megatons".
So basically, because they can state a specific figure (500,000) in megatons rather than saying "500 gigatons), we must assume "thousands of megatons" means anything up to a million.
So I've used this figure to just prove how badly the Shadows are fucked against someone like say, the Empire - the Culture, the 4th Empire, etc.
1e12 Megatons (1,000,000 missiles x 1,000,000 megatons) is the total yield deliverd to the planet. The stated timeframe for total destruction is stated as 10-12 hours. Therefore, we can assume that any other Shadow vessel (IE shadow cruiser) smaller than said PK cannot deliver this m uch to the planet in that timeframe.
Assuming the 10 hour timeframe gives us a "insanely generous" upper limit of just under 28,000,000 Megatons, or 28 Teratons. Such a yield *might* penetrate the shields of an Acclamator or a Trade Federation core ship, but any decent SW warship woudl bitchslap said vessel handily.
OF course "insanely generous" is also relative - In the "teraton" example, I am blatantly ignoring a whole slew of limiting factors that put the value orders of magnitude lower, as well as other factors (like the 500 megaton nukes).
In the case of ISA firepower, the "insanely generous" calcs are baserd on B5-wars supported notions that its POSSIBLE for a Shadow cruiser (or at least larger kinds than the one destroyed in ITF) to survive multiple nukes (or for a same sized one to, although its still possible to overload defensers and destroy one in the right conditions- one assumes the conditions were met in ItF) - in such a case "insanely generous" would be assuming the cruisers absorbed anywhere from 16%-50% of the nuke, and may have survived several (probably 4-5, but no more than 10 or so) - again the figures fluctuate depending on how "insanely generous" I wanted to be and how fanatical a person I might be engaging with.
In more reasonable/practical debate the "insanely generous" calcs would probably assume only a couple nukes (2, maybe 3 at the most) probably for a bigger Shadow vessel, and no more than 15-16% of the total energy (About 1/6th the blast).
