Lazarus wrote:
*snip bullshit*
I'm actually a little tired of this, since you now seem to be set on deliberate distortions of my own argument to cover your own goddamn ass. In case you forgot, I demanded you provide evidence to back up those made up statistics you cited earlier. The
only one of them that may have any basis is the one based on Curtis' population estimates for Coruscant, and even those are not free from interpretation. (IF you wnat to play the "pure canon" game, its only one trillion.) The actual number of residents at any given point on Coruscant, howver does not matter.
Your attempts at sidestepping burden of proof, of course, are irrelevant. Even allowing for your made up numbers, and allowing that they are the ONLY POSSIBILITY (heaven forbid, for example, taht they might try burying the ship say, at night, when the vast majority of the population on one half of the planet MIGHT be asleep....) because your "cloak wank" fails to account for things basic science ought to tell us. Instead, you rather try to vaguely handwave those away through appeals to a "mysterious unknown mechanism" much the same way Darkstar did with his pet superlaser theory.
To be more specific::
- The specific source stating that cloaking shields don't stop ion engines come from the Imperial sourcbeook:
Imperial sourcebook, page 66 wrote:
A cloaked vessel is virtually immune to DER (dedicated energy receptor) scanning by all but
the most powerful systems manned by the most expert technicians. DERs can only locate cloaked vessels by picking up ion engine heat.
There's also the not-so-minor fact that the Hand of Thrawn Duology had cloaking devices where weapons fire, TIE fighters, the Falcon, and so on and so forth could pass through unharmed. So again, ion exhaust shouldn't be stopped either.
"But wait, that doesn't address repulsors!" you scream. Well, you see, this is where you look particularily stupid, because
I don't really need the quotes to prove you full of shit. See, basic physics will tell us if a cloaking shield blocked ion engine emissions or repuslor emissions, the ship won't be able to move (at least not without violating conservation of momentum - Ion engine exhaust will push against the ship, hit the shield, and cancel out any thrust it provides. Repulsors won't be able to push against a planet's surface because the shields block them.) Frankly, I'm at a loss to think how you expected the ship to move or even stay in orbit if the cloakign shield blocked the emissions like you seem to think - did you hope the lusankya would just drop to the ground like an asteroid and coincidentally land in the right spot?
Likewise, if you actually thought about it, you'd realize that blocking your ship from emitting waste heat is a bad idea, namely because it means that unless you run your ship "silent/dead" or at best at minimal levels, it runs the risk of overheating itself (or, more probably, destrroying itself from all that waste heat its containing. Which at best hampers your mobility efforts (and makes actually reaching the planet a slower proposition, GRREATLYlengthening the time needed to "divert" any traffic around the landing coordinates and thus increasing suspicion of activities. At worst, the ship ain't going fucking nowhere.)
Of course, given we know SW ships operate primarily by neutrino radiiators and we already know particles and matter can pass through cloaking shields unopposed (as well as the fact you can fire capital ship weaponry though said shields - a feat which would incur substnatial waste heat pentalie - again the Hand of Thrawn duology.) we are left with yet another gaping hole in your theory. Besides, if we go by the established facts of cloaking shields, they consume substnatial amounts of energy, which also means that there is going to be waste heat involved in THEIR operation.
- Acoustic and motion sensors. Again, your ignorance betrays you.
Active motion detectors work by various methods, but they all rely on active emissions that are broken/disrupted by the presence of a mass (which is what a cloaking shield will do.) A cloaked ship, as described in the EU, still has its fucking mass and will still disrupt any sort of "beam" like that.
As for "passive motion detectors" as described in the link above... Again already dealt with by simple science as I described above. If the ship is to remain active, it can't "block" its waste heat disposal functions or the ship will overheat (catastrophically.) Not being able to "block" the waste heat means that the ship will be detectable passively at least in SOME form (unless it runs dead or at low power, neither of which is very plausible in this scenario.) The only other thing it could do is to redirect the waste heat in a given direction (away from other sensors).. but again this isn't feasible, no matter where it sends it, it will be picked up.
A cloaking shield will also not stop sound waves (any more than it will stop the moving matter I described above.), so acoustic sensors and sonar-based motion sensors will work. (And again, the canon only dictates that cloaking shields are designed to block starship sensors, primarily EM-based ones. Since space is a vaccuum, there is no mention nor reason for cloaking shields to work against sonar, even if it were possible.)
- atmospheric disturbancecs: Largely an extension of what I've already established, and what you seem to have blatently ignored or failed to recognize. A ship as big as the Lusankya, even when travelling at low speeds through the atmopshere (say a hundred meters/seconds), would generate IMMENSE kinetic energies, and thus immense frictional forces simply by virtue of its mass/volume and the atmosphere (We're talking tens or hundreds of megatons worth of KE minimum, and more probably gigatons.) Sound and air displacement (again a huge, noisy mass of metal moving through the air at fairly high speeds) are also not going to be blocked by the cloaking shield, much for the same reasons I outline above.
Oh, and did I mention that based on the evidence in the Essential Guide to Weapons and Technology (both editions) the SSD cloak on the
Terror was lost when the Rebels sabotaged it? Do you have evidednce a prototype or the research survived so that it was easily replicable?
The utterly sad part of all this is is that your cloaking wank falls apart from merely ONE of the above being true - the ion engine/repuslor bit alone breaks it, nevermind waste heat or all the rest. And its nothing you can hand-wave away by vague appeals like you tried, either, ,because the physics ARE known (even if the exact operation of the cloaking shield isn't, we can analyze or describe its effects and science can tell us enough based on that.) And yet... you still feel that a cloaking shield would be a better option.
Its rather obvious you didn't give the matter a great deal of thought. Even with your cloak, you would still need other ways to "mask" the ship's presence, particularily against all your invented fictional numbers (If they were true, that is.) You do realize that you are presenting a false dilemma, right? You failed to consider, for example, that it is possible for a Force user to "cloak" a ship from being visible to others as well as the "mind fogging" bit. Force users can also disrupt machinery as well as memories (Luke did it often enough in the Black Fleet Crisis, Tyrant's Test in particular.) And it fails to take into account other possibilities too. What if Palpy engineered a massive power failure? Or some sort of terrorist EMP/ionization attack to take out machinery in a large radius on the planet? Or a combination thereof?
AT worst, the above require the assumption of one or two things at most to make it workable, but its still far less complicated than your cloak wank, and it also accounts for the things that your theory utterly failed to address.
So don't give me this bullshit about your theory being better, or pretend you've met your burden of proof so you can try to pawn it off on me. You didn't bother to fucking think it through, and the gaping flaws in your theory are obvious (at least to anyone with some understanding, anyhow.) So either back up your claims or concede.
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