Resisting the superlaser.

[Lord of the Abyss]

A ship with a puppeteer General Hull might be able to resist - definitely if it has its stasis field on.
The Excession from the Cultureverse would be immune.

Nah. EM radiation through the hull would be a killer- the green light from the beam alone would probably bake the contents of the hull. Frankly, a GP hull can't be immune to high-energy radiation any more than it is to antimatter, because it's still made out of atoms even if the interatomic bonds are impossibly good.

Stasis fields, OK, could stand off the beam. I wouldn't bet anything I cared to lose on a General Products hull doing the same.

I have my doubts; it wasn't that brilliant - in fact there were guys in the DS exposed fairly close up to light from one of the feeder beams without being fried. However the superlaser works it clearly doesn't radiate a whole lot of electromagnetic radiation.

And the Sun Crusher resisted the beam despite also being made of matter; it was knocked aside though IIRC.

We know that a General Products hull can easily survive impact with a neutron star (part of the plot of the Niven story Neutron Star). A micro black hole though will "eat a General Products hull without noticing". That's a durability range of sorts.

[Omeganian]

there were guys in the DS exposed fairly close up to light from one of the feeder beams without being fried. However the superlaser works it clearly doesn't radiate a whole lot of electromagnetic radiation.

There could have been shielding between them and the beam.

And the Sun Crusher resisted the beam despite also being made of matter; it was knocked aside though IIRC.

A weaker beam (one stated to be incapable of destroying planets). A full power beam may get through, and even if not, may toss such a small ship around with enough force to crush everything inside.

We know that a General Products hull can easily survive impact with a neutron star (part of the plot of the Niven story Neutron Star). A micro black hole though will "eat a General Products hull without noticing". That's a durability range of sorts.

A range which puts infinity as the upper limit.

[Marcus Aurelius]

I suppose the Shellworlds from Matter could probably survive a DS superlaser, albeit with damage. Not really enough information available to calculate but we know that they require a large amount of antimatter annihilated near to the core in order to destroy them, so they should be considerably more resistive to external threats. The fact that the Iln could not destroy them easily despite almost certainly possessing firepower comparable to the Culture also tells something about their durability.

For the record, the DS laser has more power in the beam than an entire moon sized mass of antimatter blowing up at once.

Yeah, I know that, but internal explosions tend to be a lot more effective way of destroying structures than external attacks of any form. Even more important is the consideration that destroying the Shellworlds apparently required major efforts from the Iln; they could not just park a ship near and blast them with gridfire, which we know is capable of destroying planets.

[Simon_Jester]

I have my doubts; it wasn't that brilliant - in fact there were guys in the DS exposed fairly close up to light from one of the feeder beams without being fried. However the superlaser works it clearly doesn't radiate a whole lot of electromagnetic radiation.

Fair point, fair point, but I'd expect to see a certain amount of EM generated just from... random effects, call it. Enough to be weaponizable, but an utter joke (20 or 30 orders of magnitude lower?) than the superlaser's main beam.

A lot of that would be very hard gamma from whatever poor unfortunate atoms of interstellar hydrogen happened to be along the beam path, or something like that.

And the Sun Crusher resisted the beam despite also being made of matter; it was knocked aside though IIRC.

The Sun Crusher has, in essence, a super-version of the GP hull going on; if the technobabble about that armor is to be believed it's basically neutronium with an extra sideorder of handwaves.

We know that a General Products hull can easily survive impact with a neutron star (part of the plot of the Niven story Neutron Star). A micro black hole though will "eat a General Products hull without noticing". That's a durability range of sorts.

Did the hull survive impact, though? Though just standing up under the tidal effects- well. Now that you mention it, I'd have to think that one over.

I mean, credit GP hulls with binding energy on the order of that of an atomic nucleus, say 10 MeV per nucleon. Given some semi-reasonable number for how much the things weigh, you can turn that into an estimate of just how much energy they can stand without flying apart, because even an atomic nucleus will fly apart[/i] if you hit it hard enough.

[takemeout_totheblack]

Maybe Gatlantis of the Comet Empire from Space Battleship Yamato 2? Not the structure itself, but the freaky shield thing that withstood an entire fleet's worth of Wave Motion Guns with little ill effect, and there's the fact that it survives the mass-energy conversion of a (presumably) earth-sized planet that was literally right next to it (it was going to ram the planet). The planet exploded and the Comet just drove through the epicenter of the explosion, coming out the other side with minimal damage (although the shield was temporarily sheared away)

Although, my money is on the Beast Planet, that thing is a bit of a badass. That series needs to be remade with our future space technology, to give the series the scale it so richly deserves!

[Omeganian]

Maybe Gatlantis of the Comet Empire from Space Battleship Yamato 2? Not the structure itself, but the freaky shield thing that withstood an entire fleet's worth of Wave Motion Guns with little ill effect, and there's the fact that it survives the mass-energy conversion of a (presumably) earth-sized planet that was literally right next to it (it was going to ram the planet). The planet exploded and the Comet just drove through the epicenter of the explosion, coming out the other side with minimal damage (although the shield was temporarily sheared away)

What's it's size? It'll have to be hundreds of kilometers across in order to have been hit by a superlaser level of energy (6E24 kg, 5.4E41 joule, 5E8 Km^2 planetary surface).

[takemeout_totheblack]

What's it's size? It'll have to be hundreds of kilometers across in order to have been hit by a superlaser level of energy (6E24 kg, 5.4E41 joule, 5E8 Km^2 planetary surface).

I think the actual construct is maybe 10km across, but I remember them saying in the series that the shield cloud itself was something like 6000km across. I'll have to watch the series again though.

[Lord of the Abyss]

there were guys in the DS exposed fairly close up to light from one of the feeder beams without being fried. However the superlaser works it clearly doesn't radiate a whole lot of electromagnetic radiation.

There could have been shielding between them and the beam.

Transparent shielding if so - just as transparent as a GP hull. If the light was dangerous you'd think they'd at least, say, put a wall between the operators and the beam. Nor for that matter does the side of the DS light up green when the superlaser is fired as it would if the beam was radiating huge amounts of light.

[Molyneux]

Obviously, any Star Trek ship would be able to survive the Death Star's main laser, since all Star Trek shields are capable of stopping laser weapons.

I daresay a Planet-Killer might be able to withstand a Death Star shot - though a shot down the gullet would definitely blow it to pieces. Do we have an upper limit on the PK's durability, not counting internal damage?

[Lord of the Abyss]

Obviously, any Star Trek ship would be able to survive the Death Star's main laser, since all Star Trek shields are capable of stopping laser weapons.

I daresay a Planet-Killer might be able to withstand a Death Star shot - though a shot down the gullet would definitely blow it to pieces. Do we have an upper limit on the PK's durability, not counting internal damage?

Just that phasers are as much use against it "as matchsticks".

[Zaune]

Just that phasers are as much use against it "as matchsticks".

Quantum torpedoes, not so much. And something that's always vaguely bugged me about the plot of Episiode 4 was the fact that they concentrated their attack on a glorified manhole at the end of a narrow trench instead of the damn great "superlaser focus crystal" that would have been nearly impossible to miss.

[Batman]

That'd have been the part where the attack on the 'glorified manhole' allowed them to destroy the station with one hit, while taking out the superlaser crystal would have achieved what, exactly? Damn. The superlaser is no longer working. Guess we better give up instead of, I dunno, simply BDZing Yavin 4 with the rest of the Death Star's armament or its ample complement of parasite craft. The whole point of the operation was to destroy the Death Star, not inconvenience its operators for however long it would take them to get the main weapon repaired. Unless you have information saying that blowing up the crystal would have blown up the station as well?

[Zaune]

That'd have been the part where the attack on the 'glorified manhole' allowed them to destroy the station with one hit, while taking out the superlaser crystal would have achieved what, exactly? Damn. The superlaser is no longer working. Guess we better give up instead of, I dunno, simply BDZing Yavin 4 with the rest of the Death Star's armament or its ample complement of parasite craft. The whole point of the operation was to destroy the Death Star, not inconvenience its operators for however long it would take them to get the main weapon repaired. Unless you have information saying that blowing up the crystal would have blown up the station as well?

Fair point, though it still would have been worth looking into as a delaying tactic so they could call in reinforcements and mount a somewhat less unequal attack; it's only thanks to Tarkin's hubris that they got away with it with the forces they had.

[Batman]

That'd have been the part where the attack on the 'glorified manhole' allowed them to destroy the station with one hit, while taking out the superlaser crystal would have achieved what, exactly? Damn. The superlaser is no longer working. Guess we better give up instead of, I dunno, simply BDZing Yavin 4 with the rest of the Death Star's armament or its ample complement of parasite craft. The whole point of the operation was to destroy the Death Star, not inconvenience its operators for however long it would take them to get the main weapon repaired. Unless you have information saying that blowing up the crystal would have blown up the station as well?

Fair point, though it still would have been worth looking into as a delaying tactic so they could call in reinforcements and mount a somewhat less unequal attack; it's only thanks to Tarkin's hubris that they got away with it with the forces they had.

What makes you think there were reinforcements to be had? And other than more snubfighters, what difference would they have made?
But even assuming there were reinforcements available, what good would it have done them to kill the superlaser? Unless those never mentioned in the movie reinforcements were less than half an hour away they wouldn't matter. And if they had those reinforcements available, why didn't the Rebels bring them in for the original attack to begin with?

[Molyneux]

Just that phasers are as much use against it "as matchsticks".

Quantum torpedoes, not so much. And something that's always vaguely bugged me about the plot of Episiode 4 was the fact that they concentrated their attack on a glorified manhole at the end of a narrow trench instead of the damn great "superlaser focus crystal" that would have been nearly impossible to miss.

Wait, do we actually see quantum torpedoes used against a Planet-Killer in Star Trek?

[Omeganian]

There could have been shielding between them and the beam.

Transparent shielding if so - just as transparent as a GP hull.

A lot of SF shielding seems transparent, even when the ships approach stars point blank.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Just that phasers are as much use against it "as matchsticks".

Quantum torpedoes, not so much. And something that's always vaguely bugged me about the plot of Episiode 4 was the fact that they concentrated their attack on a glorified manhole at the end of a narrow trench instead of the damn great "superlaser focus crystal" that would have been nearly impossible to miss.

Wait, do we actually see quantum torpedoes used against a Planet-Killer in Star Trek?

Considering that there was only one (barring the non-canon novels) and that quantum torpedoes weren't even close to being invented at the time, no.

[Firnagzen]

There could have been shielding between them and the beam.

Transparent shielding if so - just as transparent as a GP hull.

A lot of SF shielding seems transparent, even when the ships approach stars point blank.

Simon Jexter's point was that the visible part of the beam would cook the contents of a GP hull. So, shielding or not; the visible part of the feeder beam is not cooking the operators, ergo, the visible part of the main beam would presumably not cook the contents of a GP hull.

[Luzifer's right hand]

The shields used to protect the swarms(mobile star clusters) from Perry Rhodan can take the impacts of star systems moving at 0.5 c which should enable them to resist something like the DS superlaser.

[Atlan]

Transparent shielding if so - just as transparent as a GP hull.

A lot of SF shielding seems transparent, even when the ships approach stars point blank.

Simon Jexter's point was that the visible part of the beam would cook the contents of a GP hull. So, shielding or not; the visible part of the feeder beam is not cooking the operators, ergo, the visible part of the main beam would presumably not cook the contents of a GP hull.

A GP hull is a single huge artificial molecule (not an atom) with reinforced molecular bonding. I wouldn't worry about it being destroyed by a superlaser shot, I'd worry about the momentum transfer. It's nice having an indestructible hull, but what good is it if everything else inside of the ship is transformed into a puddle of material coating the inside of the hull?

[Darth Hoth]

The Skylark DuQuesne from the novel of the same name is the ship to pit against Death Stars. For those who do not read Edward Smith, in brief it was essentially the DS-II on crack cocaine, but with more technobabble and Culture-like reaction speeds. Its power generation and "conventional" weaponry were such that it was considered a trivial thing to volatilise (=vaporise) Earth-like masses, and its shields set up a "complete stasis in the ether" (Something akin to a "warp-field" in the more hardish-scifi sense, perhaps?) that rendered it effectively immune to any kind of attack that utilises electromagnetism.

Then again, the Skylarks are among the few settings that I feel I could toss at the Culture and be confident of easy victory, so that is extreme overkill. But it felt vaguely appropriate, both ships being humongous spheroids about 600 miles wide.

On another, somewhat related note, I wonder how a "free" ship from the Lensman setting would cope with a superlaser blast . . .

[Batman]

Well if we're introducing ships that could simply kill the Death Star as opposed to actually withstanding the superlaser blast, the Perryverse BASIS. Selphyr/Fataro device. Instakill from 18 lightyears away.

[seanrobertson]

Unicron?

Depends how big you figure he is. Transformers is notoriously bad at scaling and he's probably the worst case.

That's ... being very even-handed

He could range from roughly the size of Saturn (eating full planets, as is depicted in some comics) to a couple dozen miles tall, scaling from spaceships and individual Transformers.

If you go with the high end he'd likely survive anything except a headshot; at the low end his atoms wouldn't even stick to each other.

I'm not familiar with the comics, but his wildly different size in the movie is very interesting to me.

Based on comparisons with Galvatron, he's shockingly small -- much, much shorter than dozens of miles tall.

Galvatron's height is easily enough determined; although the differential between him and Cyclonus varies somewhat, as seen in the following images:





Nonetheless, it's safe to say Cyclonus is somewhat taller. Since he was conceived as a "warrior" and Galvatron's chief enforcer, that's little surprise

Cyclonus himself is about 7 meters tall onscreen.



That seems a little short given the show's pre-production art, which depicts Megatron at almost 9.25m tall ...



Galvatron seems slightly bigger, bulkier and perhaps marginally taller than Megatron, so one would expect Cyclonus might clear 10m if we go with the artists' intented sizes.

In any case, Galvatron is 10m tall or less. So let's look at how Unicron stacks up:



Even if we changed my old 7m measurement to ~10, Unicron would only stand a little over a mile tall in "robot" form.

The downside to all of this is obvious: Cybertron itself would be only a few miles wide! That makes no sense.

Subjective as it is, I -- and no doubt you and many others -- got the impression the place was significantly larger. Sure, the Transformers themselves were dumb and all that , but the planet was big enough that Megatron's ruthless reputation (which, judging by "The Five Faces of Darkness," established that he was literally created to raise hell) was unheard of by at least a small part of the globe, like the portion Orion Pax and his pals inhabited, presumably much later on.

To that end, let's reverse things and compare Cybertron to Unicron, as you do in your follow-up post:

Since we saw in Ultimate Doom that Cybertron is in the same order of magnitude as the Earth's moon, size-wise, Movie Unicron is limited to a diameter somewhere in the mid single digit thousands of km. Lithone and Cybertron's moons are fairly small.

(with a margin of error of several thousand percent, like I mentioned before. )

Indeed

Now, I don't think Cybertron is anywhere near the size of our moon.

I picked apart this planet scale chart the artists purportedly used for the '86 movie ...



... and, based on Earth's size, it'd appear Cybertron is about 5,000 km wide; consequently, Unicron's "planet" mode is about 4,600 km wide:

Unfortunately, this chart makes even less sense than a multi-km wide Cybertron, and for the very reason you noted: "The Ultimate Doom."

More to the point, Cybertron was literally pulled into Earth's atmosphere. Based on my old research, Cybertron was one-fifty-second Earth's diameter, as you can [barely] see in this image. (When I acquire Blu-ray quality TF episodes, I'll go back and update these images.)



That puts a firm upper-limit on Unicron's height in the movie, i.e., on the order of <80 kilometers tall in robot mode.



Reconciling that with everything else that happened is probably impossible. We're left with a bit of a dilemma here.

Honestly, the greater majority of the evidence suggests he's a mile tall or less; e.g., how Trypticon and Metroplex's eyes fit his sockets in "Ghost in the Machine," and how Unicron appeared when he swallowed Galvatron ...



... and/or how Galvatron appeared opposite Unicron's "abdominal wall" in the movie.



(Note: you might ignore the notes accompanying some of those images. As I said, I tackled this subject years earlier and I'm reusing some of them now.)

On the other hand, as I said, a multi-kilometer Cybertron doesn't make any sense, either. And by the most consistent Unicron scalings in robot mode, well ... they'd require Cybertron is unrealistically small.

Transformers scaling is, as we all agree, notoriously inaccurate. Many things about the show are. In the first season, Devastator was almost unstoppable; his only real challenge was a combined assault from the Dinobots (who also became massively pussified in subsequent seasons). But then, in a third season episode (albeit among one of THE worst), fucking Perceptor, one of the weakest Autobots, managed to blow Devastator into his Construction components with a single shot!



I digress, as is my penchant and poison. As I see it, we're left with the following:

*a Unicron humanoid mode most often depicted as a mile or less tall onscreen.

*a Uni who, opposite Earth, is thousands of miles tall per an arguably relevant size chart.

*a Uni who, opposite Cybertron, itself in relation to Earth in "The Ultimate Doom," stands almost 80 km. tall.

Regardless, a single heavy turbolaser blast should be sufficient to handle those Unicron iterations. If we limit him to his apparent size while fighting Galvatron and the Autobots hauling ass through his remaining good eye? LOL. A single light turbolaser blast would fuck him over, and then some. At that size, Trek ships should be able to fuck him up in short order.

Insofar as a Saturn-sized Unicron's concerned, I don't think the superlaser would need a precision hit to take him out. If Unicron, in planet or robot modes, encountered one of the two Death Stars, I think the Chaos Bringer would get fucked over pretty hard, no matter where he was hit. Recall the overkill involved in the DS1 blowing Alderaan to kingdom come; at 1E38J, even a Saturnian-sized Unicron would probably be blown to bits.

Assuming some parts of his body survived ... The Death Star would simply pick apart the remains with the superlaser and/or let some of its Star Destroyer escorts deal with the remains. Capturing a giant sentient droid's processing center could very well benefit His Royal Majesty, the Emperor Palpatine.

[Sriad]

Well that was... very thorough.

At the lower end, Unicron is clearly thoroughly boned--a 200GT heavy turbolaser shot would vaporize him.

I went to the planetary property calculators and at the extreme-high Saturn end a lot depends on what Unicron's physical reaction to being hit with an ungodly amount of energy is. The superlaser doesn't pack enough punch to overcome the gravitational binding energy or melt energy of a planet that size, even allowing for the fact that there's a lot of empty space in him, but it would leave a crater some tens of thousands of kilometers across in planet mode; a shot to the body in robot mode would almost certainly blow him in half.

Since his brain survived the explosion of his body my gut feeling (and we know those are accepted without question on SD.net! ) and personal generosity suggest that he'd "survive" the single shot enough to satisfy the OP's requirements but he'd wish he hadn't.

Honestly, the Saturn size is extremely tenuous--it's based on a line of exposition in the comic ~60 issues before his debut--but it's interesting to look to show how BIG something needs to be to sort-of-survive a shot from the Death Star without shields or other soft-SF cheats.

(addendum: on the other hand if we take on the Saturn size he'd need to be made of nearly General Products level unobtanium to stand on Cybertron, let alone move his arms and legs around at perceptible speed, but I feel like I've beaten this dead horse enough)

[Andras]

The Skylark DuQuesne from the novel of the same name is the ship to pit against Death Stars. For those who do not read Edward Smith, in brief it was essentially the DS-II on crack cocaine, but with more technobabble and Culture-like reaction speeds. Its power generation and "conventional" weaponry were such that it was considered a trivial thing to volatilise (=vaporise) Earth-like masses, and its shields set up a "complete stasis in the ether" (Something akin to a "warp-field" in the more hardish-scifi sense, perhaps?) that rendered it effectively immune to any kind of attack that utilises electromagnetism.

Then again, the Skylarks are among the few settings that I feel I could toss at the Culture and be confident of easy victory, so that is extreme overkill. But it felt vaguely appropriate, both ships being humongous spheroids about 600 miles wide.

On another, somewhat related note, I wonder how a "free" ship from the Lensman setting would cope with a superlaser blast . . .

Well, some inertialess cruisers were destroyed while 'free' by the hot-rodded macros at Helmuths fortress, the ones that lead directly to primary beams. Inertialess planets were destroyed by the sunbeam, which handles less energy then the DS. However, some sources say that the Lensmen shields are immune to DET and only harmed by 4th order beams IIRC.

OTOH, a 'free' Lensmen craft would be un-targetable by the DS. They are FTL in real space. A light 'bombing' cruiser could swoop in and drop a half dozen negabombs on the DS and it's done.