Explanation or opinion on firepower discrepancy in star wars

[Connor MacLeod]

Honestly? I dont know and i'm not sure anyone else does. maybe those aren't asteroids colliding. my theory is space slug dung

You can make the argument, but its just going to get messy doing so. besides, is it really that objectionable that TLS might be KILOTONS? i mean if we watch AOTC we see Slave-1 shooting asteroids there and unless you assume those are gas too they should be pumping out at least a few gj per shot. The idea that a ship orders of magnitude bigger might pump out more energy is far from unreasonable. nevermind that we never seem them launching missiles (then again maybe nuclear weapons are a lost art in Star Wars? )

[Havok]

I've never had a problem with kilotons, it's the MEGABAZILLIONJULESANNIHILATETHEFEDERATIONWITHONESHOT that has always bugged me.

[Connor MacLeod]

the huge yields don't bug me per se, but they've always been a pain in the ass to reconcile with alot of examples (EG recoil.) Even the death star doesn't work perfectly in the 'brute force' department because of recoil and we sort of have to bend over backwards to make it sense.

i mean fuck, in some ways it would make more sense to go BEAM WEAPONS ARE NDF in Star Wars, and the same thing that happens to asteroids is what happens to Alderaan. As far as the story goes it would mean about the same thing since the story isn't really driven by the numbers.

On the other hand there's also the fact they JUST HAPPENED TO BUILD a fuckoff huge moon sized battlestation that they can move around via engines too, which is not exactly trivial as far as resources go either way, and you can't just treat it as LEGENDARY MAGIC SWORD. Nor is this a castoff of the BENEVOLENT OLD ANCIENTS. or anything like that.

I just rationalize it as: Star wars doesn't do 'practical warfare'. They do flashy and neat looking and convoluted and complicated, because at their core they're a pretty stable society. efficient, widespread warfare would disrupt that. So you still have ground wars conducted by fleshy organics rather than hyper effiicent KILLBOT supertanks and starships are human crewed cheesewedges and the SUPAR HUGE starships are comparatively rare (rather than commonplace.) If they're not fightin gefficiently, why assume they need to be using SUPERFUCKINGHUGE yields all the time? i imagine lower yields would work just as well, and probably save money.

[Stark]

You know what has no problem with asteroids?



Uh oh


Issa rock gonna SPLODE??


All kinds of scifi has no problem showing consistently high firepower and the consequences of such. While I think there's definitely a case for high SW firepower, actual SW itself isnt very consistent about actually showing it. Some universes have been exploding asteroids with laser guns for decades and just don't have this problem.



Maybe there's a perspective where SW has extremely high power at the top end, but that what we commonly see just isn't that high. I mean, is the issue that blasters aren't 'powerful', or that they're not AS POWERFUL as people claim when they say 'vaped steel beams' and 'threat to starships' and the like? They have space jets and explode starships and planets, maybe multi-kiloton machine guns is a bit outside what we see - unlike other universes that show what they say.

If you shoot a reactor with a laser gun it will explode with the power of nculear bombs. Really?


Really. No novel required. No role playing supplement can nerf it.

Maybe this is why people have 'personal canon', so they can build just the stuff they want and ignore the rest. You can watch the movies and say 'why didn't they use a multi gigaton hand grenade to win', but you're not really talking about the movie when you say that, if you get me, because the movie doesn't have any of that stuff actually in it. We bring that stuff in with us.

[Connor MacLeod]

It's actually been kind of bugging me how the entire thread seems to operate on the premise that one has to chooser one way or another which is RIGHT, but NO OTHER WAY to resolve it. I mean, its like.. we know they can build fuckoff huge doom battlestations, giganto spaceships robot armies, etc. But they don't really seem to be that commonplace the way stuff like the Death Star implies. the potential is certainly there, but it seems like the actual will to make use of that potential is not. They build large numbers of 'small' ships like ISDs and shit, but we don't see the bajillions of executors or scores of death Stars like they might be able to build.

Maybe Star Wars society has some sort of ingrained imperative against utilizing its full potential - perhaps out of fear of destroying the galactic society, or something. Keeping things small and underpowered can limit the damage.

Edit: i've also grown to think that emphasis on 'CANON' more than consistency creates more problems than it solves, and it just feels 'restrictive' when you have to keep adhering to some nebulous canon that never really stays consistent anyhow, and it reinforces that idea that you're in more of a religious dispute.

[Stark]

Yah, and I think people like Hav etc are of the mind that the more tortuous the mental juggling you have to do to make one thing and another consistent, the less meaningful that can be.

I think solutions like political will, propaganda, ignorant characters and the like are more convincing than 'oh they left their bazillion power ray pistol at home that day' or 'they didn't really want to defeat the rebels in that battle'.

[Connor MacLeod]

I dont think the mental juggling for the firepower has to be that complicated, as long as people are willing to make concessions that certain things may not be possible, like with the whole 'efficiency' issue. I mean look at the Death Star, I think its safe to say that noone would say that the yields they use to blow up starships are anything like 10% or even 1% of the yield used to blow up planets (more like trillionths). Or look at modern nuclear weapons vs what is used in conventional war you can easily get a discrepancy in FIREPOWER of millions there too.

Sure, you lose much of the ability to say ISDs are trading PETATONS or TERATONS but that's just an interpretation of hte facts rather than fact itself. Hell, I can make an argument off the ICS that max power isn't used routinely in combat (it's stated that max power shots vaporize starships in a single shot.)

Another interpretation from the the movies: what if TURBOLASERS are actually projectile firing weapons, complete with casings. I mean there's plenty of CANON EVIDENCE for that. In which case it can quite be argued that firepower and reactor power aren't related at all. And you could still keep BIG YIELDS with that interpretation too, at least under certain constraints.

[Luke Skywalker]

You still don't get it...How does the TL convert reactor power into a TL bolt...Does the reactor convert the energy release to electricity...How efficient is the process at every step along the way...How much power...Which agian brings us back to 'the numbers aren't absolute

Look here. I never said that, based solely on primary canon, one could derive "absolute" figures on anything. What you can find, however, are reasonable ranges in which an actual value would fall under. You cannot derive exactly 200 gigatons for an acclamator's quad medium turbolasers by watching Attack of the Clones. You can, however, derive a figure within an order of magnitude of the same statistic.

Which is why it baffles me why you think I need to explain exactly how efficient a turbolaser will be when powered by a main reactor of a certain size, instead of doing the reasonable thing and "assuming" (I know you hate that word) that it will be more efficient than a microwave laser, for example, because they are favored over such weapons, and then find a range of values from there. Appeal to ignorance arguments are stupid and lame. I hate to use a clique argument, but you're following the ridiculous creationist mentality of "hey! Your theory can't explain everything, so it must not be correct! Yeah, you can't explain exactly how many years, minutes and seconds transpired for the first sexually reproducing organism to produce offspring, so fuck you."

So bravo, you've proven to everyone that a medium turbolaser, not counting the ICS, might not be 50 gigatons; it might be 19, or 123.4!

Please, explain to me how any of your objections are in the slightest bit relevant to my case, why waving the "you can't name an exact value of efficiency!" matter when any reasonable range of efficiency still proves my point.

[nightmare]

Consistency isn't that hard to find. Consistency that people won't complain or argue over is another story. That includes firepower, industry, etc.

Well, you're never going to find that.

Oh and the Iron figure? It actually relied more on something I remember discussing with Ender. He used water as a baseline density (which is actually pretty close to average densities of submarines, or so I hear.) and internal volume estimates. No indication of 'percentag eempty' or hull thickness or anything like that was done. But it does show how mass figures can vary depending on the parameters and assumptions. And it may or may not fit with other evidence easily - such as the ability for all manner of huge ass starships ot land on planets (AOTC, ROTS, etc.)

I really don't think water density is a good approximation for Star Destroyers. Iron and 95% air estimates gives you over a billion tons, however. That's a very conservative estimate in itself. You seem to be arguing that we can't be certain of anything, but you know as well as I do that's no premise for vs. debates. Or even just figuring out... anything.

Why?

I already mentioned why. Lack of apparent exhaust gas or sonic booms are irrelevant compared to demonstrated feats. You don't get to invent technomagic just because.

But that doesn't exist in the movies now does it? If we're getting into the 'official' material things get complicated on a whole nother level of 'interpretation.' (ICS vs other authors, for example.)

It's not in the movies, but I don't really care. The EU exists to fill in gaps like that, as taken directly from the horse George's mouth.

How exactly can you dismiss repulsors? Do you know how they work on the basis of the movies alone? What's more, how do you know its the engines causing the thrust? We don't see any sort of exhaust trail or other indications that we might otherwise expect from such high accel/high energy events. Things like that can't be ignored.

Because none of those things matter compared the demonstrated feat. K=1/2 mv2 demands the use of work. It does not require visible exhaust.

Actually it DOES matter, because for any sort of reaction drive (barring any mass lightening handwaving or something like that) to push a certain mass at a certain acceleration, it will require a certain amount of energy. You do realize THAT is in point of fact one of the premises behind Star Wars' 'uber firepower' from the omvies, right? The abilities to push billion ton-plus starships at thousands of gees, and so on. And energy cannot just disappear into thin air. That's part of the problem.

Energy didn't just disappear, it was used to get a starship off the ground. How it looks like doesn't matter. It's easy to invent a technobabble explanation for it, but we don't need one, nor should we invent things not in canon.

So why should we go with the 'realtime' inference over the timeframes stated in the movie? You do realize it can be argued either way, and thus far there is nothing arguing for your interpretation over any other (mine or other people's.)

What timeframes stated in the movie? There isn't any in the ROTJ seqeuence, which is what I was talking about. I guess you mean Yavin IV?

Vectored thrust is canon from the movies now? Or are we dipping back into the non-movie sources?

Vectored thrust is Newtonian physics, and you're the one who found the directors on the ISD model.

Which is again the problem. People can cite 'opinion' all they like, but it won't od much to resolve things. Some peopel hold the opinion that the Death Star isn't a brute force planet destroyer, after all.

I like to base my arguments on observed facts, not opinion. Opinions are nice and all, but they have little place in analysis and none in vs. debating. Arguing premises into oblivion is the sort of thing that opponents like to do, but that's not how you conduct proper analysis.

As I recall the Imperials were engaging in some rather heavy jamming (one reason they couldn't get a reading on the shield, after all..) why should the Imperial ships be any easier to detect through jamming? The Crux of your argument seems to be 'the Imperial fleet should have been spotted instantly' which is not unreasonable, but it is far from the only (or even most likely) conclusion.

It is the only viable conclusion. Once the rebel fleet has turned around and the imperials are over the horizon, they're clearly visible. My position requires no assumptions whatsoever, because this is what happens in the movie as we see and hear it. Nothing more, nothing less.

So you're saying its okay for anyone to make up any old excuse based on their own opinions, and people don't have to obey any sorts of constraints or limits (like energy having to go someplace.) Isn't that the supposed problem with the 'critics' of the super-high-OMFG yields?

Au contraire. What I was saying is that we can't base calcs off hyperjumps because we don't know what's going on there. There are no power requirement calculations for getting to faster than light travel. If the premise is that the ion engines do regular energy conversion based acceleration up until a point, where is that point? 99.9999% lightspeed? .1% lightspeed? Dunno.

Moreover, what makes 'SUPER HUGE INSANE ACCELERATIONS FROM ION ENGINES' somehow more plausible. As I recall you're arguing for tens of thousands of gees, which is pretty insane given that it makes some of those problems worse (like Dooku trying to escape the planet) Accelerations beyond a few thousand gravities have some pretty hefty problems behind them (in the form of 'you burn your fuel down even faster. And a 3000 gee accel for an ISD lasts only around 10K seconds or so, as I recall from Curtis' own statements on the calcs he did for the ICSes - which I might add are supposed to be BASED on those very same movies.)

I'm arguing that in some cases we see 'tens of thousands of gees' in canon. I'm not saying that it's the one and only truth. We always get a spread from observed feats, with some outliers thrown in. I'm generally satisfied with the ICS acceleration figures as reasonable estimates, although I'm starting to get the impression that the ICS books are actually too conservative when it comes to, guess what, firepower. The base for that is our good ol' high end; the Death Stars. Economy of scale is a factor, but I draw the line when orders of magnitude start piling up. I don't have time for a more detailed analysis however, so this is just a footnote.

Thanks. And you don't have to rush responding to this right after the fact I have. These debates don't exactly disappear fast, and I'm not going to hold it against anyone if they take some time between replies (at least I won't as long as they avoid pissing me off.)

Yeah, I won't be around, again. Lots of work to be done before the summer holiday, lots of family events during the holiday, lots of things to fix up after it. Anyway, have a nice summer.

[Lunacy1]

The canonical/official stance on the arbitrary destructive capabilities of ships such as star destroyers are in the terratons as seen in the ICS [the validity of which was confirmed by Chee - the first place he would look for reference to firepower]

We do observe multi-thousand G accelerations in film, the power required to perform such with a billion ton star destroyer is of a stellar magnitude, even fighters would require power equivalent to a megaton bomb every second based on the films. Firepower is going to be an order of magnitude or two from their overall power.
EU provides a whole range of firepower examples, peaking at base delta zero operations, destroying all infrastructure and life on a planet, and in some cases turning the entire upper crust molten, and is accomplished within 1 to a few hours. THis requires averaged firepower of terratons/second for a star destroyer to accomplish. <- All of this can be sourced.

ICS provides triple digit gigaton figures for maximum power middle weight turbolasers. This would be the magnitude of firepower required for ships to release planet wide slagging firepower in multi-hour timeframes. Interestingly [as some people are discussing percentages of power dedicated to weapons and such] 12, 200 gigaton turbolasers with an re-fire rate of 10 seconds would average firepower of 240 gigatons per second, meaning something like 0.5% peak reactor output dedicated to weapons when set to maximum power.

The terratons/second firepower required for a star destroyer to slag an entire world in hours would also equate to something under 0,5% its total peak reactor output.

I agree that turbolasers may have some limits on how long they can be fired on maximum power for before fatigue/over heating becomes an issue, but the time before fatigue becomes a serious issue will be hours, time enough for cruisers to slag entire planetary surfaces. In one book, internal bracing's of lasers are said to be designed to handle forces or pressures comparable to the energy of gigaton range explosions. Issues such as recoil are derivatively dealt with, as turbolasers are stated and required [in the most extreme bombardments] to have said yields.

There are maybe other routes one could take when looking to the films, but to me deriving power required to perform observed accelerations is the most apparent basis. Derived multi thousand g accelerations, extrapolated power generation, and firepower are confirmed in the technical DK books [ICS] and other sources [defining BDZ,s or reference to thousand G accelerations].

The case for the 'highend' firepower is strong for STAR WARS.
Ill upload a presentation to youtube breifly for anyone whose interested. I do like to work with the 'canonical' stance on things, so please dont let the bigatons offend you. I haven't got round to doing a firepower vid yet anyway, this one just discusses the accelerations derived power and related technologies derived from the films — explained in the EU.

[Lunacy1]

sorry for the painful voice, could be better http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5M00-5N4n0