What if the Empire invaded modern day Earth?

[Junghalli]

I know there's probably a litany of books and shit to back all this stuff up, so I'm not actually contesting it debate-wise, but does anyone else find the mental image of a TIE fighter strafing the ground with it's little pew-pew guns and raising a series of giant nuke-level explosions pretty god damned hilarious?

Yes, I also find the image pretty goddamn surreal to be honest. I mean I'm not saying that the numbers are wrong or anything (insofar as scientific analysis of totally made up shit that breaks science can be meaningfully called right or wrong) but ... stuff like kiloton level starfighter lasers looks to me like what happens when you try to scientifically analyze something made up by scriptwriters and FX people who neither knew nor cared about the scientific implications of what they were putting on the screen, and so whatever you come up with is probably going to be more an artifact of unrelated plotting decisions and FX limitations and whatever somebody thought would look cool than anything else. I could be wrong though, for all I know George Lucas personally worked out the math and carefully instructed the FX people on how they were to show the right size and type of explosions, and it doesn't matter to the debate either way.

[Mobius IO]

Yes, I also find the image pretty goddamn surreal to be honest. I mean I'm not saying that the numbers are wrong or anything (insofar as scientific analysis of totally made up shit that breaks science can be meaningfully called right or wrong) but ... stuff like kiloton level starfighter lasers looks to me like what happens when you try to scientifically analyze something made up by scriptwriters and FX people who neither knew nor cared about the scientific implications of what they were putting on the screen, and so whatever you come up with is probably going to be more an artifact of unrelated plotting decisions and FX limitations and whatever somebody thought would look cool than anything else. I could be wrong though, for all I know George Lucas personally worked out the math and carefully instructed the FX people on how they were to show the right size and type of explosions, and it doesn't matter to the debate either way.

No this is exactly right.

[Shroom Man 777]

Now I wonder why they even bother sending clonetroopers to fight in the open terrain in Geneosis when a few high-powered turbolaser bolts, or some of those LAAT missiles or something, could've just vaporized that horde of battle droids.

[Aaron]

I know there's probably a litany of books and shit to back all this stuff up, so I'm not actually contesting it debate-wise, but does anyone else find the mental image of a TIE fighter strafing the ground with it's little pew-pew guns and raising a series of giant nuke-level explosions pretty god damned hilarious?

Wait wait wait, I'm sure there's answers to this that I just don't know, but... like... how did R2-D2 get shot in the head by a kiloton-level TIE laser at almost point-blank range during the trench run and come out only somewhat severely damaged? Were there shields that invisibly and undetectably strip 99.99% of the energy from a shot without actually stopping it? Weren't the X-wing shields all set to 100% forward to help protect from fixed turbolasers?

And where were the giant clouds of steam and shit rising from the snowfields of Hoth as AT-ATs fired their guns all over the place? Maybe they had the guns dialed down so they wouldn't render the ground unwalkable, but then the dude explicitly ordered "maximum firepower" when shooting the generator and it still wasn't terribly impressive.

Inquiring minds want to know, because every dumbass weapon bigger than a tripod gun being nuke-level certainly appears to require some interesting non-movie shit to come up with.

Yeah I do but its one of those things that you either accept or get bogged down for days arguing about. *shrug*

[Srelex]

Now I wonder why they even bother sending clonetroopers to fight in the open terrain in Geneosis when a few high-powered turbolaser bolts, or some of those LAAT missiles or something, could've just vaporized that horde of battle droids.

There was a bigass debate on that here: http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1078

[DudeGuyMan]

Well, looking at the date, that thread appears to belong to a Trek partisan desperately flogging TDIC because the EP2:ICS had just come out and the Trek/Wars debate was basically ending. Still, I can sort of feel where he was coming from, minus giving a crap about Star Trek.

I mean it's almost like there's two versions of Star Wars. The one everyone and their family saw at the theater, and the internet debate version where it's a good thing little Anakin silently dialed his fighter guns down to 0.01% power before shooting those enemy droids in the Naboo hangar or else the whole Theed palace would have went up like Hiroshima.

And look I'm not dumb. I know that within a context where "Dude you are putting way more thought into this than the writers ever did!" isn't a valid argument there's asteroid calcs and freeze-frames and shit to back all of this stuff up. And I know that Trek did the exact same thing back in the day (and probably still does, on forums where anyone gives a fuck) with photon torpedoes that are "multi-megaton" but still go off like 500 pound WW2 bombs and shit.

I just wish I could jump into one of these random Star Wars debates and have it look like Star Wars. Not, you know, Internet Star Wars where a quick squirt from the lasers on a space fighter is like hundreds of tactical nukes all going off, or whatever. Because I've seen a lot of Star Wars, but I am really not up to date on Internet Star Wars anymore.

Pointless lamentation over.

[Star Wars 888]

So nothing.

??? Tie fighters cannot move at mach 10 in an atmosphere. In the atmosphere they move at around mach 1.

Again nothing, and you have really no idea what 1 KT of energy does to most modern items, do you? This is what it fires per shot.

100 ships.

Do you have a source putting the tie fighters' laser cannons at 1 KT?

And how will they build 100 ships capable of holding AT-ATs? Since when would space age engineers have knowledge on how to build sea ships when Star Wars rarely if ever uses them? How will they get resources to build ships that can carry AT-ATs and that can go a few miles before getting blown to bits by aircraft carrier fleets?

Because when I can turn your city into slag, and you cannot assemble forces before I do...your choices are

Surrender and I spare you or Defy me I burn your city into cinders.

Oh I forgot, humanity is so fucking dumb they are lockstep with the idea of dying for the cause.

This has nothing to do with my question. And read the OP. CIS is off.

I keep forgetting modern forces having speeds that can reach mine in less then the minutes it takes mine to cover planetary distances. Again show proof that my TIEs are slower or demonstrate the F22 can do the speeds shown of Yavin to the Death Star. I want to see this.

Tie fighters have an atmospheric speed of about 1000 kmh. F22s are over twice that fast.

Adults call this making alliances. Thanas made a good point, something you should've read and comprehended. Humans aren't lockstep suicidal nuts, and unless this is a summer blockbuster? Many many South American nations aren't going to be thrilled to be turned into wastelands.

Read the OP. Humanity is united in this scenario, and quite frankly any world power could solo.

Thanks for conceeding.

Answer my question. Eventually the AT-ATs, AT-STs and tie fighters would run out of fuel, and 500,000 stormtroopers would be left to combat the world's militaries and 6 billion civilians.

Not my problem you cannot read the first post.

Sorry, I forgot about my own OP.

Wait, are you conceeding again, or just blithering?

AT-ATs have limited range; they run out of fuel. According to the Star Wars: The New Essential Guide to Vehicles and Starships their operational range is in the hundreds of miles, as are AT-STs.

Once they run out of fuels and supplies, having KT or MT weapons won't mean shit. AT-ATs and AT-STs don't run on fossil fuels or anything else that they'd find on Earth.

You do grasp the point of demonstrating the proof of this, correct?

Tens of thousands of non nuclear ICBMS raining down on the invasion force would wipe out the entire force minus the AT-ATs and tie fighters. 2 tie fighters couldn't hit the Millennium Falcon from a few feet away while moving at sub sonic speeds, so don't come bullshitting about how their uber targeting systems would stop tens of thousands of ICBMS moving at several thousand miles per hour.

The invasion force is screwed due to limited logistical capabilities and limited anti air capabilities.

[Junghalli]

Since the debate has pretty much settled on the TIEs being the wildcard factor, it has to be asked: is there any possible way of estimating how long can they go around shooting up stuff with their nuclear-level pew pew lasers?

I mean unless they have some magical thermodynamics violating bullshit power source (which I wouldn't put past SW by any means) they're going to need refueling eventually. Does the nebulously defined "enough supplies to last them from North and South America" include enough fuel for the TIEs to go around destroying civilization with their nuclear level pew pew lasers? If not, do we have any relevant figures we can use?

I suppose we could use the ANH one. 400,000 km in 5 minutes comes out to ~1400 km/s. If we assume they accelerated for half the trip and decellerated for the other half this would be half their final velocity, which would be ~2800 km/s. It's been a long time since I watched the movie, refresh my memory, was there any indication of how long it took for them to get back to that moon after the Death Star blew up? Because if not I'm just going to round up to 3000 km/s - 200 km/s is way overkill for what you'd need to get around a gas giant moon system (they could get back in a little over an hour at 100 km/s).

Assuming that TIEs then can put the same amount of energy into their guns as into their engines a single tank would be enough for 11,250 1 kt shots using their total potential kinetic energy change and assuming they have a mass of 10 tons.

Then again if they could actually do that you'd think that in the trench of the Death Star they'd have been spraying each other with machine gun-like bursts of fire instead of what I seem to remember them doing which was more somewhat carefully picking their shots and squeezing them off one at a time. Then again, it could be that's because of overheating issues or the need to charge a capacitor between shots.

Another factor is the whole "Tibanna Gas" thing which seems to imply their guns might actually be using some kind of ammunition rather than just pure energy. And given the description of the stuff I've read I'll bet dollar to donuts it's a made-up magic material that won't exist anywhere in our universe, so whatever they're carrying with them will be all they've got, forever. Even if we're generous and assume it's an exotic term for something in real science according to the main site it's usually mined from nebulae and the outer layers of stars, and the OP says nothing about the kind of specialized extraction equipment they'd probably need to mine the whatever it is from the sun.

I mean it's almost like there's two versions of Star Wars. The one everyone and their family saw at the theater, and the internet debate version where it's a good thing little Anakin silently dialed his fighter guns down to 0.01% power before shooting those enemy droids in the Naboo hangar or else the whole Theed palace would have went up like Hiroshima.

Yeah, that's pretty much the way I've always felt about it be honest.

[Batman]

Wait wait wait, I'm sure there's answers to this that I just don't know, but... like... how did R2-D2 get shot in the head by a kiloton-level TIE laser at almost point-blank range during the trench run and come out only somewhat severely damaged? Were there shields that invisibly and undetectably strip 99.99% of the energy from a shot without actually stopping it?

Yes?

Weren't the X-wing shields all set to 100% forward to help protect from fixed turbolasers?

No? They were set do 'double front' (whatever that means) to pass through the DS' 'magnetic field' (whatever THAT may be). You're thinking X-Wing games.
Besides, by the time Gold Leader started his attack run they were explicitely told to 'stabilze your rear deflectors' so even IF it meant deflectors set to 100% forward that would've been over by the time R2 was hit.

[Junghalli]

Wait wait wait, I'm sure there's answers to this that I just don't know, but... like... how did R2-D2 get shot in the head by a kiloton-level TIE laser at almost point-blank range during the trench run and come out only somewhat severely damaged? Were there shields that invisibly and undetectably strip 99.99% of the energy from a shot without actually stopping it?

Yes?

Actually it probably would have been more like 99.9999999% of the energy (which would be enough to degrade it to something like a rifle shot I think - no serious I didn't just write a bunch of nines, I actually thought about that number ) or something like that just FYI. I calculate 99.99% of 1 kt is still him being shot in the face with enough energy to melt more than half a ton of iron.

It certainly was lucky for him that when the shield failed it failed just enough to let something like .0000001% of the shot's energy through. Man, imagine if instead it only stopped .0001% of the energy or something, he'd have been shot in the face with the equivalent of a tank gun or something.

[Batman]

So nothing.

??? Tie fighters cannot move at mach 10 in an atmosphere. In the atmosphere they move at around mach 1.

Because-you say so. You have been provided with a canon source that says they can, AND with a canon source that says the not all that much more aerodynamic ARC-170 can move at MACH 40. You have to show the movies CONTRADICTING this. And not only do I doubt you have done any analysis of TIE fighter in-atmosphere speeds worthy of the name, even IF they never move faster than Mach1 THAT IS NOT A CONTRADICTION OVERRIDING LOWER CANON.

Again nothing, and you have really no idea what 1 KT of energy does to most modern items, do you? This is what it fires per shot.
100 ships.

Do you have a source putting the tie fighters' laser cannons at 1 KT?[/quote]
Thank you for having neither read the main site NOR this thread where the relevant portions OF the main site were quoted. (The first one is a rules violation, BTW).

And how will they build 100 ships capable of holding AT-ATs? Since when would space age engineers have knowledge on how to build sea ships when Star Wars rarely if ever uses them?

Are you really this abysmally stupid? They can casually build things that ar so far outside our enginerring capabilities they might as well be magic but they don't know how to build something mankind figured out 10,000 years ago? Blatant lie or ignorance to boot because there's PLENTY of naval vessels in the Star Wars universe.

How will they get resources to build ships that can carry AT-ATs and that can go a few miles before getting blown to bits by aircraft carrier fleets?

The same way we do build those ships? Assuming they HAVE to to begin with, given that we have plenty of those ships as it is and there's little we can do to stop them from capturing them intact (especially as most of those ships are civilian so I SERIOUSLY doubt anybody has the means nor the will to blow them up rather than have the Imperials use them).

I keep forgetting modern forces having speeds that can reach mine in less then the minutes it takes mine to cover planetary distances. Again show proof that my TIEs are slower or demonstrate the F22 can do the speeds shown of Yavin to the Death Star. I want to see this.

Tie fighters have an atmospheric speed of about 1000 kmh. F22s are over twice that fast.

TIE Fighters have an atmospheric speed of Mach 9 low end until and unless you show movie evidence to the contrary.

Read the OP. Humanity is united in this scenario, and quite frankly any world power could solo.

Against a force that can quite franky ignore their air power in the air because its fighters are effectively invulnerable, its infantry is to infantry weapons, and its heavy armour is invulnerable to anything nonnuclear.Err-no.

Answer my question. Eventually the AT-ATs, AT-STs and tie fighters would run out of fuel, and 500,000 stormtroopers would be left to combat the world's militaries and 6 billion civilians.

Assuming mankind is willing to absorb the casualties that'll happen in the meantime.
You do grasp the point of demonstrating the proof of this, correct?[/quote]

Tens of thousands of non nuclear ICBMS raining down on the invasion force would wipe out the entire force minus the AT-ATs and tie fighters.

A pity we don't have ANY non-nuclear ICBMs. AT ALL.

2 tie fighters couldn't hit the Millennium Falcon from a few feet away while moving at sub sonic speeds,

You will now provide evidence for this.

so don't come bullshitting about how their uber targeting systems would stop tens of thousands of ICBMS moving at several thousand miles per hour.

Yes they would, if we actually HAD that many ICBMs to begin with or ANY of them had conventional warheads to begin with. Oh, and let me introduce you to the concept of RELATIVE speed. I don't care how slow the Falcon was RELATIVE to the TIE fighters. If all involved parties are moving at nine billion c, the fact that the APPARENT speed differential is subsonic (which isn't a constant BTW) doesn't change that they're moving at 9 billion c (and no Wars speeds are nowhere that fast).

The invasion force is screwed due to limited logistical capabilities and limited anti air capabilities.

What limited antiair capabilities? They have 100 effectively invulnerable (in the air) fighters as long as their supplies last. Their problem is logistics because they don't have the numbers OR the supplies to conquer Earth.
If world domination is really required their best bet is the rest of the planet surrendering after they see what happened to the Americas.

[Batman]

It certainly was lucky for him that when the shield failed it failed just enough to let something like .0000001% of the shot's energy through. Man, imagine if instead it only stopped .0001% of the energy or something, he'd have been shot in the face with the equivalent of a tank gun or something.

Given that ONLY that small a fraction of the energy hit R2 I'd argue the shield most definitely did its job

[Ritterin Sophia]

??? Tie fighters cannot move at mach 10 in an atmosphere. In the atmosphere they move at around mach 1.

Dude I've said it twice now. The Jedi Interceptor from whence the TIE is based scoots around at 15,000km/h without shields. With a shield the substantially less aerodynamic ARC-170 Starfighter pulls 44,000km/h. By all measures the TIE is 4/5 as fast as the Jedi Interceptor and those stats of some 1,250km/h atmospheric speed come from the RPGs which also list the speed of the Jedi Interceptor at 1,500km/h.

According to Lucasfilms' canon policy on Star Wars, they need to be reconciled. The best reconciliation I've found is that the lower atmospheric speed (which is always 1/10th of it's maximum atmospheriic speed for some reason) is the one from which a starfighter can effectively maneuver in a dogfight. Much like you would never see a contemporary fighter dogfight at maximum thrust.

[DudeGuyMan]

God it's like when you get into it with a believer and they hit you with their whole litany of crazy rationalizations that explain why a world that totally has a god in it just happens to function as if it does not.

No, no, the Falcon and the TIE fighters having a hard time hitting one another despite moving at the speed of a fucking moped relative to one another doesn't mean their targeting stinks by real world standards. Someone said something about jamming during the trench run, so there was also jamming here and it was so super powerful that it crippled everyone's abilities by 99.9999% but nobody said anything about it. Or something.

Sure it looks like they're operating those guns on the Falcon via human reflexes, which would make them completely useless given the sorts of speeds it's claimed these ships fight at, but let's not even fucking pretend there isn't something somewhere about totally awesome targeting systems that just function in such a way as to not appear to exist.

And all the ship guns are actually capable of unleashing massive torrents of city-destroying firepower, like a machine gun full of nuclear artillery shells, even the tiny fighter guns. Sure they consistently appear to have a much smaller effect, but everyone is always turning them down, or there are shields that coincidentally happen to invisibly reduce them to that same smaller level, or whatever, every single time we see them hit something.

But oooh, in my versus scenario none of that would apply and suddenly the federation/kilrathi/brazilians/whatever would be getting owned by mach 40 TIE fighters leaving continent-scarring trails of destruction behind them anytime they fired a momentary burst from their pewpew guns. Yeah that's the real Star Wars. You just never got to see it in those Star Wars movies because of a totally coincidental continuous stream of odd circumstances and exceptions.

Jesusholyshitchrist.

[Darth Hoth]

Are we doing Arguments From Personal Incredulity, now?

Seriously, do people here think they are contributing anything new? (Apart from Destructionator, who at least presents arguments why he finds the established calculations dubious.) "Waaah! WWII footage! Stormtroopers got beaten by teddy bears! We don't see any mushroom clouds in teh movies so that means Acclamators can't have gigatons! Mike Wong and Saxton were biased and smoking too much crack!"

There is nothing original about this. All of this, and more, has been presented here before by various Trekkies. Nothing new under the sun.

[Darth Hoth]

Look at the photographs on that page, you can see smoke. The caption makes the outrageous assumption that it is vaporized metal - something the main site does a lot - and then follows up by calculating the energy needed to vaporize X mass of steel and claims that is the small arms output! (Note the flaws here: assume the gas is vaporized wall. Assume the wall is steel. Assume the mass vaporized. Calculate and apply that right to the gun. Let's ignore that not a single step in that makes the slightest lick of sense, being inconsistent with everything else we see, and of course, that there's not a single shred of actual evidence for any of it. And, naturally, let's ignore alternate theories. If we applied that level of rigor to 18th century artwork, we'd conclude gigajoule muskets because of all the black powder it kicks up.

How could a musket vapourise anything? Solid slugs do not behave that way. On the contrary, the known data on their operation (using a very inefficient chemical propellant for the bullet) requires the residue smoke. But for blasters, supposedly firing some kind of weirdo "energy plasma" (the EU explanation that probably fits best with the film evidence, although there are several others, and none is exactly perfect), we have no reason to make any such assumptions.

Further, I do not see anything on that page to indicate that Mike Wong based any firepower figures on that scene, or the assumption that the vapour was one hundred per cent metal. The caption says it, yes, but it is not mentioned otherwise. (He did talk about disruptors vapourising blocks of metal, though, which is supposedly described in the EGtW&T.)

Now, personally I would not call such an assumption conservative by any means, nor arguably reasonable (given that the electronics they shot up would likely hold a lot of plastics and stuff that would contribute to the smoke if burned or vapourised, for just one thing), but it is not used to suggest any figures.

Note this same reasoning is used to do starfighter firepower too, so the main site's numbers there are completely worthless as well.)

Why is it unreasonable to assume that the smoke/vapour cloud resulting from strafing of Death Star surface structures is vapourised metal? I can see your point in the earlier example, but here?

The beauty of tibanna gas is that it explains all this quite well without stupid assumptions. When the blaster fires, it releases this gas into the room when it hits the target. That's what we see coming off the walls and filling the room. It is why we see the bolts and why they travel at the speed they do. It is why there isn't any kind of waste heat problem on the guns (the gas carries it away). It, being a physical projectile, explains why we see recoil on the guns.

Most of these do not require such an explanation, if one takes other data into account. The Death Star superlaser alone proves that SW energy technology is absurdly efficient, reducing the waste heat problem to the point of eliminating it for small arms in the estimated firepower range. The smoke is explainable from vapourisation or combustion without requiring heinous power estimates. It also does not really explain the highly variable speed of the blaster bolts (or the visible part of the bolt, if there is an "invisible" portion of it as there supposedly is with heavier weapons) . . . although direct observation of recoil and propagation speed in the films does, in my humble opinion, at least, invalidate the idea that blasters are EM weapons and their beams propagate at c, as some people have claimed in the past.

[Shroom Man 777]

It certainly was lucky for him that when the shield failed it failed just enough to let something like .0000001% of the shot's energy through. Man, imagine if instead it only stopped .0001% of the energy or something, he'd have been shot in the face with the equivalent of a tank gun or something.

Given that ONLY that small a fraction of the energy hit R2 I'd argue the shield most definitely did its job

Maybe R2-D2 can also withstand multi-kiloton shots?

[Samuel]

It certainly was lucky for him that when the shield failed it failed just enough to let something like .0000001% of the shot's energy through. Man, imagine if instead it only stopped .0001% of the energy or something, he'd have been shot in the face with the equivalent of a tank gun or something.

Given that ONLY that small a fraction of the energy hit R2 I'd argue the shield most definitely did its job

Maybe R2-D2 can also withstand multi-kiloton shots?

In episode 1 you have the droids being destroyed, but not blasted apart by starship lasers. While they needed to avoid hiting the queen's ship, there is no reason not to use the strongest shots they can.

Perhaps the little thing has wings (obscured by the glow) and it glides like an airplane! Or maybe it is just a movie and we all need to fucking relax.
BTW, I said previously that Mike shows more rigor than the asteroid destruction pages. I take that back, he uses the same thing here: http://stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tech/Beam/Asteroid.html including the high school science errors in significant figures. If you want a real laugh, take a look at this: http://stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tech/Beam/Calc1.html where he assumes momentum transfer from massless particles and calls it power. At least he points out his assumption here, and states if it doesn't apply then the number is worthless.

How could a musket vapourise anything?

It can't; that conclusion is completely absurd. But that's the logic used on the weapons page.

From http://stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tech/Beam/Beam2.html

From Luke Skywalker's strafing run in the Battle of Yavin, a single hit upon the unshielded surface of the Death Star could be seen to cause a large flash of superheated material, enough to engulf an entire X-Wing fighter and cause thermal damage to its hull despite its shields. [...] At least 60GJ is required to vaporize a single cubic metre of ordinary iron, so this provides a lower limit for starfighter laser cannon energy.

There's a flash of something, therefore a cubic meter of iron was vaporized. This is the thing he's talking about:



Those sparks, in Mike's mind, indicate a cubic meter of iron vaporized. Bullshit, I've seen bigger light displays from an improperly wired light switch. (ok, not literally, but if you scale for size, it is fairly similar) Further note that there's no evidence of holes in the armor - he fires several shots, but we can't see and residual effects on the surface. How can you vaporize a cubic meter of something, but have it not be missing a cubic meter of anything?


The handgun page doesn't give a specific number. It just states that it has "much more knock down power" than modern guns. I can almost agree with that. The only question it leaves is why shooting unarmored soldiers didn't result in a big mess of filth as the impact point exploded with steam. Which is a big fucking question. (Warsies generally say "they turned the power level down lol" So you expect me to believe that Luke and Han turned the power down on every hit, and turned it back up on every miss? What the fuck.)

But still, the wording is fairly reasonable (especially if you use my method: it is a PG movie, so they can't show exploding people anyway). However, the caption puts the absurd thought in your mind that even little Star Wars guns vaporize metal, so when you see him make that same claim a couple pages later, you just accept it. Marketers do that kind of thing all the time: put good thoughts in your brain, then follow it up with their product. Now, when you see their product in the store making good claims, you subconsciously associate it with being familiar and good, so you're more inclined to believe the box and buy it.

Smoke from blasters -> vaporized metals. Shit kicked up from starfighters -> more vaporized metal. Never mind the fact that it isn't proven in either case.

Solid slugs do not behave that way. On the contrary, the known data on their operation (using a very inefficient chemical propellant for the bullet) requires the residue smoke.

This assumes you know the method of operation. For Star Wars, we don't. It is "pew pew aaaaarrrrgh". Could be energy, could be projectiles. There might be black power kicking that out. There might be dry ice cooling the gun. We don't know. Jumping to the conclusion that it is vaporizing iron could be true, but it could be a hundred other things too.

BTW, even if it is impacts vaporizing things, there's no reason to assume it is iron. Why would an internal wall be made out of thick iron? It could be a sheet metal covering, or it could be painted drywall. Virtually the entire main site is built out of assumptions on top of assumptions. That's not science. Science is built on a foundation of direct observation.

Why is it unreasonable to assume that the smoke/vapour cloud resulting from strafing of Death Star surface structures is vapourised metal? I can see your point in the earlier example, but here?

Take a look at the screenshot. There might some metal gas in there, but it could be a lot of other things too (including heated solid metal fragments). Calling it vaporized metal is assumption #1. Calling it one cubic meter is assumption #2. Neither have a solid basis in observation, so pulling a number out of it leaves a very big margin of error. And calling it a "lower limit" is, frankly, laughable.

Most of these do not require such an explanation, if one takes other data into account.

Yes, there's other explanations too. What I like about the gas (+projectile) is that it wraps up a lot of things in one neat package, but it isn't the only answer to them.

It also does not really explain the highly variable speed of the blaster bolts (or the visible part of the bolt, if there is an "invisible" portion of it as there supposedly is with heavier weapons)

Those are all special effects goofs. If you must explain them though, a physical projectile goes a long way: it could be affected by the weather (wind and air pressure slowing it down). Or the launching mechanism could be unreliable.

The invisible component though has to be considered nothing but an effects mistake. Concocting some huge explanation for something that you can only see zoomed in, frame by frame, in what, one or two examples? It's ridiculous.

The only problem with a physical projectile is explaining why it doesn't curve down when fired on a planet. Perhaps the little thing has wings (obscured by the glow) and it glides like an airplane! Or maybe it is just a movie and we all need to fucking relax.

Never!

[Ritterin Sophia]

In episode 1 you have the droids being destroyed, but not blasted apart by starship lasers. While they needed to avoid hiting the queen's ship, there is no reason not to use the strongest shots they can.

Yes there is, and you just stated it. The quad turbolasers on the TradeFed ships are anti-capship weapons, if they dialed those up to full blast a stray hit would atomize the entire ship.
[quote="DudeGuyMan"-snip-[/quote]

Congratulations on your whine, now take it to Lucasfilms and tell them. We are not the one in control of the canon policy.

[Bakustra]

Note that the question of R2-D2 surviving is an interesting one, but we still have large-scale explosions to explain. One suggestion: fighters carry a limited number of shots, which may be dependent on capacitors or tibanna gas reserves, depending on what theory you go with. These shots can be poured into a relative few high-power shots to destroy turrets or other shipside targets, or a larger number of anti-fighter shots for dogfighting, thus explaining the discrepancy.

Alternatively, we can assume that the Death Star has subcutaneous volatile substances (assuredly the TIEs are volatile), but that requires explanation as well. An added bonus of this theory is that it explains why the official numbers for fighter proton torpedoes (from the Technical Journal) are very similar (indeed, literally one kiloton): with torpedoes at hand, fighters can reserve their shots for other fighters. Note that we do not see Luke or anybody else

In episode 1 you have the droids being destroyed, but not blasted apart by starship lasers. While they needed to avoid hiting the queen's ship, there is no reason not to use the strongest shots they can.

We see them hit by shots and essentially vanish- we cannot say whether momentum carried them off, or heat exploded them. I am not sure that the scene is necessarily strong one way or the other.

The handgun page doesn't give a specific number. It just states that it has "much more knock down power" than modern guns. I can almost agree with that. The only question it leaves is why shooting unarmored soldiers didn't result in a big mess of filth as the impact point exploded with steam. Which is a big fucking question. (Warsies generally say "they turned the power level down lol" So you expect me to believe that Luke and Han turned the power down on every hit, and turned it back up on every miss? What the fuck.)

We don't see Han shoot anybody besides Greedo with his handgun in ANH, which is when we see the flashiest damage from blasters at Docking Bay 94. And the disparity there can legitimately be attributed to altered settings. I don't find it a huge assumption to assume that stormtrooper guns are less powerful (for ammo conservation) than an outlaw's sidearm, nor that the "vapor" is not entirely vapor (if it is, then SW humans must require regular lung treatments after battles; a clear advantage of stormtrooper armor!). If anything, what we see on the DS and Bespin is likely smoke. We don't even see sparks from much other than the shot-out camera.

God it's like when you get into it with a believer and they hit you with their whole litany of crazy rationalizations that explain why a world that totally has a god in it just happens to function as if it does not.

No, no, the Falcon and the TIE fighters having a hard time hitting one another despite moving at the speed of a fucking moped relative to one another doesn't mean their targeting stinks by real world standards. Someone said something about jamming during the trench run, so there was also jamming here and it was so super powerful that it crippled everyone's abilities by 99.9999% but nobody said anything about it. Or something.

Sure it looks like they're operating those guns on the Falcon via human reflexes, which would make them completely useless given the sorts of speeds it's claimed these ships fight at, but let's not even fucking pretend there isn't something somewhere about totally awesome targeting systems that just function in such a way as to not appear to exist.

And all the ship guns are actually capable of unleashing massive torrents of city-destroying firepower, like a machine gun full of nuclear artillery shells, even the tiny fighter guns. Sure they consistently appear to have a much smaller effect, but everyone is always turning them down, or there are shields that coincidentally happen to invisibly reduce them to that same smaller level, or whatever, every single time we see them hit something.

But oooh, in my versus scenario none of that would apply and suddenly the federation/kilrathi/brazilians/whatever would be getting owned by mach 40 TIE fighters leaving continent-scarring trails of destruction behind them anytime they fired a momentary burst from their pewpew guns. Yeah that's the real Star Wars. You just never got to see it in those Star Wars movies because of a totally coincidental continuous stream of odd circumstances and exceptions.

Jesusholyshitchrist.

Right, so you don't like it. Fair enough. But on the same token, half of that is either misinterpretations or official in nature, and thus akin to punching smoke. Of course, the same tokens apply to virtually all sci-fi powers. Few can, in fact, hit something moving at less than a meter per second relative to them, many boast of immense destructive firepower which never lives up to the promise, and the majority use human reflexes on at least some level (Funny that you should bring up Wing Commander here). And their fans trumpet them all the same.

There are a great many SW fans here, but there are fans of this type everywhere and of all things. Blaming the malefic "Warsies" as something unique is setting yourself for a great disappointment down the road if you continue to interact with sci-fi and fantasy fans on the Internet.

[Bakustra]

We don't see Han shoot anybody besides Greedo with his handgun in ANH, which is when we see the flashiest damage from blasters at Docking Bay 94. And the disparity there can legitimately be attributed to altered settings.

Yeah, that works.

SW humans must require regular lung treatments after battles; a clear advantage of stormtrooper armor!).

Man, could you imagine someone inhaling iron gas? Even ignoring the horrible burns this would do, then having little iron powder in the lungs... oh that sounds painful.

Smoke from secondary fires is quite believable. Blaster shots do tend to combust things they hit (officer's shirts included!).

"Hey, Joe, what's that rattle in your chest?" "Oh, just took off my helmet too quickly after the firefight and inhaled. The doc says I've got six weeks to live- there was uranium in the air."

The only question with the smoke is where the sprinklers are, but on the other hand, they probably get so much smoke that they use infrared detectors to look for open fires instead. Imagine accidentally shooting the wall after taking care of that annoying little mouse droid and then drenching the hall. The Empire probably mandates executions for that.

[Stark]

Interiors are probably designed to mitigate this somehow; either materials that are non-toxic, combinations that intereact under heat to become more benign, in-wall thermal isolation, etc. We see in Bespin that the walls are layered, which may help.

[Samuel]

Crap, I screwed up the previous quote. I didn't mean to quote the whole block

In episode 1 you have the droids being destroyed, but not blasted apart by starship lasers. While they needed to avoid hiting the queen's ship, there is no reason not to use the strongest shots they can.

We see them hit by shots and essentially vanish- we cannot say whether momentum carried them off, or heat exploded them. I am not sure that the scene is necessarily strong one way or the other.

They make screaming sounds as they are hit. The screaming goes on even after the have been knocked off. (see 1:25)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfhK5UED ... re=related

[JointStrikeFighter]

Crap, I screwed up the previous quote. I didn't mean to quote the whole block

In episode 1 you have the droids being destroyed, but not blasted apart by starship lasers. While they needed to avoid hiting the queen's ship, there is no reason not to use the strongest shots they can.

We see them hit by shots and essentially vanish- we cannot say whether momentum carried them off, or heat exploded them. I am not sure that the scene is necessarily strong one way or the other.

They make screaming sounds as they are hit. The screaming goes on even after the have been knocked off. (see 1:25)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfhK5UED ... re=related

There is no sound in space! That was probably the ships battle management systems creating artificial screams for increased aural feedback to the crew.

[Star Wars 888]

Because-you say so. You have been provided with a canon source that says they can, AND with a canon source that says the not all that much more aerodynamic ARC-170 can move at MACH 40. You have to show the movies CONTRADICTING this. And not only do I doubt you have done any analysis of TIE fighter in-atmosphere speeds worthy of the name, even IF they never move faster than Mach1 THAT IS NOT A CONTRADICTION OVERRIDING LOWER CANON.

[\quote]

pay attention. I side in the atmosphere according to that guide to vehicles in starships.

Do you have a source putting the tie fighters' laser cannons at 1 KT?
Thank you for having neither read the main site NOR this thread where the relevant portions OF the main site were quoted. (The first one is a rules violation, BTW).

iirc Mike talked about other laser cannons but not tie fighters. Either way tie fighters had limited fuel and were made to be dependan on star destroyers. Once they run out of fuel having kt weapons won't mean shit.

Are you really this abysmally stupid? They can casually build things that ar so far outside our enginerring capabilities they might as well be magic but they don't know how to build
something mankind figured out 10,000 years ago? Blatant lie or ignorance to boot because there's PLENTY of naval vessels in the Star Wars universe.

. They can with Star Wars era ship yards, skilled engineers, a labor force and tech such as durasteel and hypermatter. They get none of that here.

The same way we do build those ships? Assuming they HAVE to to begin with, given that we have plenty of those ships as it is and there's little we can do to stop tthem intact (especially as most of those ships are civilian so I SERIOUSLY doubt anybody has the means nor the will to blow them up rather than have the Imperials use them).

civilian ships cannot carry at ats and would get blown to bits by military ships. Trying to make ships that can hold at ats and stand up to aircraft carriers would require an Industrial base that the invaders lack.

When the at ats and such run out of fuel they are screwed cause they don't run on anything on Earth. Having kt weapons won't change that.

Sorry, more will come on a later post, iPod touches can be hard to type on.
I keep forgetting modern forces having speeds that can reach mine in less then the minutes it takes mine to cover planetary distances. Again show proof that my TIEs are slower or demonstrate the F22 can do the speeds shown of Yavin to the Death Star. I want to see this.
[/quote]
Tie fighters have an atmospheric speed of about 1000 kmh. F22s are over twice that fast.[/quote]
TIE Fighters have an atmospheric speed of Mach 9 low end until and unless you show movie evidence to the contrary.

Read the OP. Humanity is united in this scenario, and quite frankly any world power could solo.

Against a force that can quite franky ignore their air power in the air because its fighters are effectively invulnerable, its infantry is to infantry weapons, and its heavy armour is invulnerable to anything nonnuclear.Err-no.

Answer my question. Eventually the AT-ATs, AT-STs and tie fighters would run out of fuel, and 500,000 stormtroopers would be left to combat the world's militaries and 6 billion civilians.

Assuming mankind is willing to absorb the casualties that'll happen in the meantime.
You do grasp the point of demonstrating the proof of this, correct?[/quote]

Tens of thousands of non nuclear ICBMS raining down on the invasion force would wipe out the entire force minus the AT-ATs and tie fighters.

A pity we don't have ANY non-nuclear ICBMs. AT ALL.

2 tie fighters couldn't hit the Millennium Falcon from a few feet away while moving at sub sonic speeds,

You will now provide evidence for this.

so don't come bullshitting about how their uber targeting systems would stop tens of thousands of ICBMS moving at several thousand miles per hour.

Yes they would, if we actually HAD that many ICBMs to begin with or ANY of them had conventional warheads to begin with. Oh, and let me introduce you to the concept of RELATIVE speed. I don't care how slow the Falcon was RELATIVE to the TIE fighters. If all involved parties are moving at nine billion c, the fact that the APPARENT speed differential is subsonic (which isn't a constant BTW) doesn't change that they're moving at 9 billion c (and no Wars speeds are nowhere that fast).

The invasion force is screwed due to limited logistical capabilities and limited anti air capabilities.

What limited antiair capabilities? They have 100 effectively invulnerable (in the air) fighters as long as their supplies last. Their problem is logistics because they don't have the numbers OR the supplies to conquer Earth.
If world domination is really required their best bet is the rest of the planet surrendering after they see what happened to the Americas.[/quote]