Darth Wong, when delivering an Imperial SMACKDOWN wrote:
The ass that was then know as firefly wrote:
when sd.net talks about the weapons firepower of the ISD, it does some bad math here and there. for example, sd.net refers to the asteroids to come up with an average power of 1500 J to vaporize an asteroid. ok, i'll go with that. however, bad math comes into play next. this is what the site calculates:
since Watts = Joules/sec ... and the asteroid was vaporized in 1/15 sec...
1500 TJ / (1/15 sec) = 22500 TW
woah woah woah. you can't do that. i'll explain in a bit, but let me show u how he arrives at the conclusion of 22 GT turbolasers.
Actually, modern pulse lasers are rated for the pulse, not averaged to include downtime. He's full of sh*t.
The ass that was then know as firefly wrote:
(what sd.net says...) 22500 TW per small turbolaser (TL). the large ones are roughly 125 times the size, so they should be roughly 125 times more powerful (2.8 million TW). there are 12 large turbolasers and 120 small ones on an ISD. each turbolaser shoots roughly once every 2 seconds. therefore, the large turbolasers equal roughly 94 million TJ (22 GT), and the small ones equal 750,000 TJ (179 MT).
He's a lying cunt. The 750,000 TJ figure comes from BDZ calcs, not the asteroids. He's mixing and matching conclusions from different parts of the page to make it appear as if I've played with the numbers, the lying little sh*t.
The ass that was then know as firefly wrote:
however, this is all still wrong. let me point out all the flaws with the site.
1. First of all, he started with a value of joules (1500 TJ), then changed it to watts (22500 TW), then somehow changed it back to joules and made the original value even larger (750,000 TJ).
Pure bullshit; the 750,000 TJ figure comes from the BDZ section of the page, not the asteroid section.
The ass that was then know as firefly wrote:
2. the change from 1500 TJ to 22500 TW shouldn't have been done in the first place, because that would be saying that the turbolasers can fire every 1/15 of a second. that's not the case, since turbolasers can only fire every 2 seconds according to sd.net. so what would the TW value be? 750 TW. not very impressive, eh?
Five hundred times the entire combined power generation of present-day planet Earth is not very impressive? Sure, whatever
The ass that was then know as firefly wrote:
3. also, the 1500 TJ, converted to gigatons, is only 0.00036 GT, or 0.36 MT. that's rediculously small.
Notice how he completely ignores the fact that this is a Hoth-asteroid lower limit, and other incidents indicate a much higher lower limit.
The ass that was then know as firefly wrote:
4. you can't do a direct proportion of size to increase the power of the larger turbolasers. sd.net says that large ones are 125 times the size of small ones; therefore, it should be roughly 125 times more powerful. WRONG! SORRY! there's actually no way to tell how much more powerful the large turbolasers are. heck, they might even be just as powerful as the small ones. it could be that the larger size means an older model, or perhaps they have more stability than the smaller ones, or have better targeting.
It is a reasonable assumption; most weapons do, in fact, follow such scaling laws. The onus is on him to show why the error in this method would be greater than an order of magnitude.
The ass that was then know as firefly wrote:
5. he is also taking the COMBINED TOTAL of all weapons and massing them together as one. this means that, in order for the ISD to be that powerful, ALL turbolasers must hit its target. that, of course, is impossible.
Actually, it is that powerful regardless of whether it can bring all of that power to bear on one target. He is actually arguing that it is NOT "that powerful" if it can't bring all of its power to bear at one point; what kind of logic is that? By that token, since a nuclear power plant's output is split up among countless 120V AC sockets in peoples' homes, its rated power output is wrong
The ass that was then know as firefly wrote:
so what does all of this mean? an ISD, having 12 large turbolasers and 120 small ones, has a minimum output of 198,000 TJ, or 47.37 MT. that is for the COMBINED strength of ALL their turbolasers. granted, that's only the MINIMUM, but that's still WAAAAAY small.
Where's the errors? *snicker* Here's a list:
He assumes that a huge turbolaser has no more firepower than a small one (a precise multiplier of 125 as opposed to, say, 50 may be debatable, but a multiplier of 1 is ridiculous).
He ignores every piece of evidence on the entire turbolaser page except for the asteroid calcs
He treats a lower limit as an upper limit
And he generally makes an ass out of himself. This is the kind of bullshit debating tactic that anyone can clearly see is wrong if they bother to read the page he's critiquing (which he obviously hopes they won't). Classic Trekkie bullshitter.