It's raining asteroids! TESB topic.

[Ender]

A couple of things I'd like to say before I go on to crunching the numbers.

First, I'm disturbed that so many of you decided to try and flame me before I even put any numbers out. It just goes to show how unwilling most of you are to even consider other information. You're going to believe what you want no matter what.

You claimed they were wrong but provided no basis, what the fuck did youy expect? Hell, you even came in here for a "hazing"

Second, I'm surprised by Ossus. I had heard he was one of the worst "rabbid Warsies" but he was one of the only ones (if not THE only) that's actually willing to look at and consider my figures. Hats off to you Ossus, and I owe you an apology, you actually seem to be a fair person.

It's becoming rather obvious which person you believe is more accurate

Third:

I will state it again: Military protocal states that while in command the captain does not leave the bridge area. If command attention in another area is required, the Chief of the Boat or Executive Officer goes. This is a simple fact.

The Empire is not the United States Military. Trying to make the two seem the same is baseless and quite irrelevant. I don't understand how you can try to make an arguement by comparing two completely different things.

1) This is a military standard, not just a USA thing
2) Ranks, ship classes, and other traditions (IE marching) are the same, so provide some evidence that this would be different.

Anyway, onto the bridge tower asteroid hit.

*snip*

Wow, way tot totally ignore what Sean told you and do things in an overly complicated manner. And your numbers differ because you just guessed (translation: you pulled it out of your ass) whereas Mike scaled to get a different velocity.

And how exactly does Brian fit into this? Me thinks you just dragged his name in so that you could cover your ass incase Mike got pissed off at your shit.

So anyway, that's how I came up with those figures. What do you think? Do you see anything wrong with the calculations?

You eyeballed instead of scaling

Most importantly, how can an ISD, which is designed to take 300GT (according to SD.net) HTL shots, be destroyed (or atleast heavily damaged) by an equivilent 50 kiloton blast? I've heard the arguement, "The shields were weakened by asteroid hits", but that's not a very good excuse..

Dismiss it without saying why. Ingenius. Fucking troll. Between this, the TT level torps, and the using gravity bombs agaisnt a flying starship, how have you not been titled or atleast sent to the HoS yet?

But even if it's assumed a Star Destroyer is only able to take a single of its own HTL shots before being destroyed, it would have to have been hit by 5,999,999,999 70 meter wide asteroids. That's not very likely.

Right, they can build Mulit KM skyscrapers, they can build Planet Killing Moon sized space stations, but they can't build a simple energy dispersive armor like we are working on now.

On a related side-topic, in TESB a TIE fighter is destroyed by a meteor crashing into it. I don't have screen-caps on hand but I can estimate a generous 10 meter diameter for the asteroid, and the same 8mg/cm^3 density, and, let's say, 200 meters a second velocity. That equals to being only 19 tons of TNT! Even if every variable is included, that number won't be going up very much.

And with this statement, you reveal how limited your scientific knowledge is

What the hell good is a TIE fighter in a universe where capital ships are designed to take many hundreds of gigatons of energy? That would mean that a single HTL bolt could vapourize billions of TIE fighters.

Apparently the only thing you have less of then scientific knowledge is tactical thinking. Here's a clue: Look at the power a ship the size of Slave 1 can pack. Then look at how much difficulty capital hips have targeting smaller ships with their heavy weapons.

Anyway, these are just the figures I've come up with. If you see anything wrong, tell me and I'll do my best to answer to them.

As the rest of the thread shows, when people pointed out your problems, you ran like hell. Now there is some guts boys and girls.

[Ender]

Erm, let me elaborate.

If HTL's really did have 300GT of energy behind them, then a single shot on an unshielded target would have the same result as the DSII's superlaser hit on the Mon Cal Cruiser, at LEAST.

You mean like we fucking see happen in ROTJ?

Also, in TESB during the Falcon chase scene several TL shots miss and explode like flak around the Falcon.

Did you even read Young's analysis? THey guy may have speant more time on it then is healthy, but it is also on of the most indepth coverage of ANYTHING I have ever seen Most of those were small asteroids it was clearing out of the way.

The resulting explosion seems to be no larger than at most a ton of TNT, just small flashes around the Falcon. Are point-defense TL's supposed to be 300 billion times weaker than a HTL?

Ok, so far the kid doesn't understand
1) Basic debating concepts
2) Logical fallacies
3) Military protocol
4) Scaling
5) Basic conversion factors
6) Momentum
7) lower limits
8 ) Tactics
9) Viewing all evidence prior to a conclusion
10) Difference between physical impactors and energy blasts
11) Actions of a laser against a target in a vacuum

Did I miss any?

[Ender]

No, they aren't different things, Ender is talking about traditional Navy (a very traditionalist service) procedure found throughout the whole world navies, why should such procedures be different aboard military vessels in space?

Well, in light of that witty and complete rebuttal, I don't know what to say.

Wait, yes I do: Concession Accepted.

Now get back to nailing your blowup doll.

Kinetic impacts can be more destructive (urgh, sorry for using such ambiguous word!) than straight thermal/radiation transmission impacts.
A HTL could possibly punch right through an ISD's tower (depending on its size, right?), delivering only thermal effects to the nearby affected region of the created hole. A kinetic impact not only creates heating effects, but also (and this is the important part) imposes structural stresses that transmit through the whole structure by material continuity. In the affected region, the impact may be strong enough to overcome material strenght, resulting in the structural collapse of the whole affected region, as opposed to a more concetrated damage done by the HTL. In short, a strong enough kinetic impact, even if with a lower energy than a HTL, may cause more damage than a HTL.

Yes, but that depends on a TL shot not exploding on contact. TL shots have been seen exploding (like flak for instance), not simply travel on through space indefinately. THe 300GT has to be released somehow, and most TL's seem to release their energy in an explosion.

Please, please, please explain how a laser, or any energy weapon really, explodes at a predetermined distance.

Then explain what the fuck you are talking about that they explode when the movies (you know, the highest canon) show that flak is a bunch of crap.

[Ender]

A couple of things I'd like to say before I go on to crunching the numbers.

First, I'm disturbed that so many of you decided to try and flame me before I even put any numbers out. It just goes to show how unwilling most of you are to even consider other information. You're going to believe what you want no matter what.

You're being flamed because you have not put numbers out, yet dare to criticize other people's calculations.

Look, this is very easy. There are two possibilities.
1. You have run the calcs, and have a reason to say Brian Young's calcs are wrong. Solution: show us the fucking calcs post haste so we can bow before your wonderful numbers.
2. You have not run the calcs. You therefore have no reason to say Brian Young's calcs are wrong. Solution: put a gun to your fucking face because you are fucking moronic enough to criticize without cause.

Lmao. Dumbass, read the thread, I already did.

LIAR. You are a fucking LIAR. You showed no work until page 3, when you were accusing Brian (though he was just a cover for you going at Mike) of incompetence from the original post.

[Ender]

Actually a very large portion of the bridge is destroyed. The entire bridge itself is completely destroyed and only the neck structure survives.

Do we have any idea where officers go on the ship to have a holo-conference? If so, that could be the best judge for the damage done. Otherwise I have seen the visuals on Darkstar's site, and they're pretty convincing.

One of the few things people can agree with in regards to Darkstar. In all likelyhood the captain of the ship was in the secondary bridge or the CIC. Both are locations the captain can command from and they would likely have the proper communication centers.

That would be the XO who goes to those areas, not the captain.

[His Divine Shadow]

I don't really see otherwise what can be done here to estimate the location of the bridge, a frame-by-frame walkthrough?

That is exactly what Darkstar did. He walked through the frames and determined the exact location the bridge should be by calculating the rate at which the frames moved and then superimposed the bridge onto the picture for reference.

I did that myself now, DarkStar has got the tower several pixels too far to the left I think, I was not entierly right about the tower outline I see, but partially anyway, the upper sloping outline is actually now the lower outline of the tower seen earlier, it also fits in with the relative location of the tower beginnings to the superstructure, and as I see it, the main part of the tower seems hidden by blackness, which can possibly be dust thats not glowing, or without any light to relfect of it(which is not unusual in space), one of the domes seems gone though, since where it ought to be there is a brighter band thats uninterrupted, the dome closest is obscured by glowing dusts.

What this says to me are these two alternatives:
A) Part of the bridge might be gone where is blackness, the dome farther away is also destroyed.

B) The Tower is intact behind that blackness wich might be particulate matter, but the dome farther away is gone.

I made another gif:
http://www.hisdivineshadow.com/misc/ima ... _anim2.gif

[Ender]

Yet we see the bridge destroyed... Decisions decisions, where was the captain?

I'm probably the only "Warsie" that has always agreed that the command was completely destroyed, with the possible exception of the rear "neck" part surviving. Chris O' Farrell can back me up on that.

The captain was on the bridge. We merely saw the last transmission from the bridge of that ship on Executor. What happened to Occam's Razor, people? Why must we go through some elaborate crap about the captain using the holocomm in the bathroom on deck 162?

In the beginning of TESB, we see the probe droid land on Hoth. THEN, we see it AGAIN, but from Luke's perspective. Did TWO probe droids land?

Bingo.

Simple Fact: Captains don't leave the bridge.
Simple Fact: The thing took a fair amount of damage (not really suprising, the hull would be designed for energy not kinetic resistance)

This covers both.

Now if anyone want to go on about little Bobby's ultimate conclusion: That the loss of the bridge caused the whole ship to go up like a M80, I'll continue to fight that.

[Ender]

PS: +1!

[Warspite]

After watching the frames provided by Curtis Saxton in his ISD page (and composing an animation from them), the following conclusions can be made:

1- The asteriod doesn't impact at the center face of the tower, it impacts on the port "wing" of the tower,
2- the "pulverization" of the asteroid completely hides the tower until the scene changes,
3 - the ISD (postulated to be the Entor by Dr. Curtis Saxton) swerves upwards in the last frames, with the point of rotation in the impact zone.

The final point is important, since the ISD rotates at the impact point, the tower will mantain a (stable) relative position with the deflagration of the asteroid, meaning we don't see the tower in the last frame because it hasn't moved, only rotated, and as such, it stays obfuscated by the explosion.

As for the captain on the bridge, aside from the point of impact of the asteroid being away from the bridge, the explosion is past its most intense brightness, but in the last frame before the scene changes to Vader's conference, there is still some lingering luminosity. Given the time frame of less than a second (at most two seconds), the captain is reacting to the flash of the explosion, and perhaps to the window's destruction (since they would be the most vulnerable structure on the bridge).

In conclusion, the tower may have survived intact (most certainly it has, the scene changes before we can be total certain of that).

[Alyeska]

I don't really see otherwise what can be done here to estimate the location of the bridge, a frame-by-frame walkthrough?

That is exactly what Darkstar did. He walked through the frames and determined the exact location the bridge should be by calculating the rate at which the frames moved and then superimposed the bridge onto the picture for reference.

I did that myself now, DarkStar has got the tower several pixels too far to the left I think, I was not entierly right about the tower outline I see, but partially anyway, the upper sloping outline is actually now the lower outline of the tower seen earlier, it also fits in with the relative location of the tower beginnings to the superstructure, and as I see it, the main part of the tower seems hidden by blackness, which can possibly be dust thats not glowing, or without any light to relfect of it(which is not unusual in space), one of the domes seems gone though, since where it ought to be there is a brighter band thats uninterrupted, the dome closest is obscured by glowing dusts.

What this says to me are these two alternatives:
A) Part of the bridge might be gone where is blackness, the dome farther away is also destroyed.

B) The Tower is intact behind that blackness wich might be particulate matter, but the dome farther away is gone.

I made another gif:
http://www.hisdivineshadow.com/misc/ima ... _anim2.gif

Couple things. I have used my own measurements and Darkstar was correct in his superimposing location. There is no doubt to that. Yours was very far off the mark. Your second one is closer, but still to far to the right.

Two, this blackness you attribute you say the dome was still destroyed. This blackness covers both dome and part of the lower hull. You can clearly see that it does not extend towards the left very much at all. There is no blackness covering the side of the bridge not impacted by the asteroid. It should be visible. The blackness and the debris does not cover where it should be, thus the bridge is no longer there. As to the dome, I can make out SSD detail where the dome used to be. So the dome has to be gone.

[Mad]

In regards to the asteroid collision scene: E1701 on SB has noted that the ISD's main hull changes orientation during the scene. The change in orientation would, of course, also change the bridge's orientation. The orientation change may explain some of the oddness surrounding the scene.

E1701 said he tried to do a 3d render of the scene to see what was really going on. I don't recall his results, but perhaps somebody could redo his work and we can see where the tower should really be, after accounting for the ISD's change in orientation.

[Warspite]

Oh yeah, another thing, if the asteroid explodes, than we can infer that most of the kinetic energy was absorbed by it, meaning the tower is stonger than the asteroid, meaning the tower survived the kinetic impact, meaning, the tower is intact, if a little bumpy.

[Alyeska]

In conclusion, the tower may have survived intact (most certainly it has, the scene changes before we can be total certain of that).

Incorrect. We have enough information to determine several critical points of the bridge are out of view and there is nothing hiding them from view.

[Warspite]

In conclusion, the tower may have survived intact (most certainly it has, the scene changes before we can be total certain of that).

Incorrect. We have enough information to determine several critical points of the bridge are out of view and there is nothing hiding them from view.

The tower rotated backwards as the asteroid exploded, the domes ended up lower than the highest point achieved by the explosion.

[Alyeska]

In conclusion, the tower may have survived intact (most certainly it has, the scene changes before we can be total certain of that).

Incorrect. We have enough information to determine several critical points of the bridge are out of view and there is nothing hiding them from view.

The tower rotated backwards as the asteroid exploded, the domes ended up lower than the highest point achieved by the explosion.

WTF are you talking about? I have the clip and the ISD does nothing but plod along forward at a slightly up angle as when it started the clip.

[Warspite]

WTF are you talking about? I have the clip and the ISD does nothing but plod along forward at a slightly up angle as when it started the clip.

Shit you may be right... OK, I'm wrong on the rotation!
(grumbles off to coffe.)

[seanrobertson]

Actually.. I think you're right. I should have waited longer, but I don't really have patience. I like to get things out when I think of them because usually they don't last very long.

Vexx,

I was hard on you for two reasons.

One, yes, I was frustrated.

But the second, main reason was, I wanted to see how you might respond.

You responded well.

A troll would just raise a wall of ignorance and bite back at me. You did not.

I conclude you're not a geniune troll or even especially hard-headed--you're just new to this. In all fairness, almost every Trekkie wondered about the bridge tower scene at one point or another. Ages ago I know I came to a somewhat similar conclusion about the asteroid field/shields issue, though I didn't focus exclusively on that single impact (I did something more along the lines of what Michael did in generating his 3E20J figure.)

I was wrong in telling you to just sit back and watch. DO please study SD.net's findings in detail, but the only way you can learn sometimes is if you put your neck out there and make potential mistakes. It's one of the best ways to go

Welcome.

[His Divine Shadow]

Couple things. I have used my own measurements and Darkstar was correct in his superimposing location. There is no doubt to that. Yours was very far off the mark. Your second one is closer, but still to far to the right.

Almost, I made a much more accurate version now, DS's picture is off by 10px to the left, the distance from the tower to one of the notches on the upper superstructure is 80px, his is 70px and I have been able to get a very good picture now.
The reason they cannot match up entierly with the back of the tower seen against the Executors exhaust is because the ISD has turned from the explosion and the tower is more profile aligned with us, the back is going to look bigger from that and the front of the tower is gonna be alot smaller, hence all these 2D overlays of ours are't gonna get it right, what he have is like a worst case scenario, when infact the truth is that we really ought not see the tower and such where it is according to the overlays.
We need someone to do a 3D overlay for this to truly work.

Two, this blackness you attribute you say the dome was still destroyed. This blackness covers both dome and part of the lower hull. You can clearly see that it does not extend towards the left very much at all.

Where the dome is, it extends almost the entire picture, where the tower is, it extends enough to mask the tower, even if it hadn't turned, you can see this easily enough, but we can also see that the ISD twists and that it's fore section is travelling away rfom the screen giving the tower a smaller profile.

There is no blackness covering the side of the bridge not impacted by the asteroid. It should be visible. The blackness and the debris does not cover where it should be, thus the bridge is no longer there. As to the dome, I can make out SSD detail where the dome used to be. So the dome has to be gone.

There is blackness covering the bridge, all blackness and a few glowing pieces of debris, this is easily noticeable.
You can also easily see at first that the material which is first glowing is turning black against the white of the tower and pretty soon obscuring it, it's like soot, observe:


Later on in the last frame you can see that there is a greyish area that is uninterrupted, clearly the executors hull, the dome is gone, however right under that the tower is supposed to be, there it goes totally black with the exception of glowing debris, albeit it would have turned by now to present a smaller profile.

[His Divine Shadow]

WTF are you talking about? I have the clip and the ISD does nothing but plod along forward at a slightly up angle as when it started the clip.

It moves ever so slightly you know, thats why it's not possible to get a correct overlay here.

[Warspite]

WTF are you talking about? I have the clip and the ISD does nothing but plod along forward at a slightly up angle as when it started the clip.

It moves ever so slightly you know, thats why it's not possible to get a correct overlay here.

I'm getting the impression the ISD is moving towards us (camera), not away... Could be the perspective angle.

[NecronLord]

That one is slightly better, but still, your best bet is why there is no debris from the tower itself, otherwise it's tower & dust cloud Vs Destroyed tower.

None of this much matters, the damage resistance of the Excecutor's tower in RotJ inicates that this is probably a freak incident.

[Lord Poe]

"Flak bursts" are a work of fiction invented by SW fans who don't get it

Bullshit. They are stated to be flak bursts in the canon novelization.

But is a flakburst, from the perspective of the people in SW, anything more than say a bolt hitting some small particulate matter in the air(or small asteroids in space) that causes it to rapidly degenerate into a flak like effect, or a bolt-shield interaction itself?

No, no. You are mixing and matching. Brian Young walked me through this. (I'm at work, and unfortunately can't provide screenshots)

1) Anyway, Hits around the Falcon when being chased by the TIEs are flakbursts. I heartily disagree with the implication that these are shield interactions. This would mean that the Falcon's shields extend a full ship-length behind it!

2) Hits around the Falcon after it emerges from the asteroid field and being chased by Avenger are clearly hits to asteroids. The difference between the two are a spherical white burst, compared to a colored spiky non-spherical one.

I haven't the scientific background to explain it, but TLs DO flak burst. At least, in my opinion.

[Lord Poe]

Now come on guys. You've known Uncle Poe as a Trekkie Terminator for quite some time, right? That tower was destroyed. If we saw this same scene on Star Trek we'd be all over Trekkies who were trying to refute it.

[Dark Hellion]

Okay, while this theory my fail under closer examination, its the best I got right now(thats not saying much)
Form the times we see the interior of the ISD bridges there seems to be a great deal of empty space. Perhaps when the asteroid impacted it smashed much of the bridge back into the neck, leaving only small fragments to be hidden by the asteroid dust cloud. The tower thingeys are rather clearly destroyed but most of the back half is still obscured, so in theory this could happen.

[His Divine Shadow]

1) Anyway, Hits around the Falcon when being chased by the TIEs are flakbursts. I heartily disagree with the implication that these are shield interactions. This would mean that the Falcon's shields extend a full ship-length behind it!

I cannot believe they are flakbursts because then TIE's would have weapons that are only on par with heavy SW small arms.
Besides, I do not see the problem of the shields being out there, it seems to me that one can look at a shield like a glowing ball of metal or something, touch the surface and aouch, but you can still feel the heat from the surface quite far away.