NoogDeNoog wrote:Or...maybe just maybe the docking bays are meant to take that level of exhaust.
And prove that the engines are supposed to destroy the docking bay. Just making a claim that they have that level of power is just a bold and empty claim.
So engines can turn everything into lava pools but don't do any harm to an old docking bay? BTW, what is with the attitude? Are you like this to everyone or is it just me? The claim of how powerful the engines are was not mine.
Yes, they are like this to everyone, or at least everyone they can get away with doing it to whenever they feel like it. Consider the definition of "mockery of stupid people" as applied by human beings and it shouldn't come as a surprise.
Seriously, here's the basic parameters:
Star Wars spacecraft are capable of accelerations on the order of 1000g. This requires a
high power to weight ratio- trivially, if the ship is going from a standing start, in one second each ton of spacecraft gains .5mv^2 = .125m(at^2)^2 = 1.25*10^10 J, an amount of energy equivalent to that released by a few tons of high explosive.
Per ton of ship, in one second.
Assuming Star Wars spacecraft use a normal reaction drive (which is the shakiest part of the argument, in my opinion), the exhaust from that drive must be extremely energetic- roughly as destructive as the blast wave of a major chemical explosion, since it's carrying a comparable amount of energy
even for a small ship. After all, even something as small as an X-Wing weighs several tons. The Millenium Falcon is larger. That kind of exhaust plume really ought to be enough to level any building not specially braced to withstand it- something built up with the equivalent of many meters of reinforced concrete.
Of course, under normal conditions, a ship could certainly throttle back its engines to something around a few g. At those thrust levels, you're talking about much less energy release into the exhaust, more like the blast of heat from a jet engine- which is dangerous to unprotected humans, but not enough to destroy well designed buildings...
for a small ship.
Things get much worse when you contemplate large ships, which need correspondingly beefier engines. At that point, the exhaust plume at maximum thrust will look like a sort of directional nuclear fireball, because you
need the equivalent of a nuclear fireball in order to accelerate such gigantic objects at even a few g. In fact, that's the only way we've come up with so far to do it using known technology: build the spaceship on top of a giant metal plate and touch off nuclear bombs under the plate.
So it's unlikely that a
large ship could land at all on its reaction drive, because it would do so much damage to the ground directly underneath it by firing the equivalent of a megaton-range flamethrower into it that it wouldn't have a stable landing field afterwards. There'd be lava all over the place, stuff like that. Smaller ships could conceivably do it
if they had a well reinforced, heat resistant landing pad to work with.
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Again, according to the ANH novelization repulsorlift is effective out to orbital distances and then some.