StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Spanky The Dolphin wrote:The only thing that had quantum armour was the Sun Crusher, and IIRC, producing armour for something the size of a starfighter cost about as much as a full Star Destroyer.

I wish. The Shadow Chaser had quantum armor, the Gemdiver station had a quantum armoured diving bell (and could still barely stand against the corusca dust). I've even heard worse things, but I can't confirm them since I haven't read Shadow Academy myself. Such as the Academy itself having quantum armor and a corusca gem could cut through it in minutes. I think those are just rumours though... I hope...

That's cute. SOMETHING must have!

Canon policy. All EU counts. Something DID. Saxton's incomplete and rationalized-to-hell list doesn't change that.

Off the top of my head, issue #1 of Rogue Leader shows the clean up efforts going on at Endor weeks or months later (after Bakura) and the illustrations unquestionably show us that the ecosystem is intact.

And if a planet-sized forest moon is dying all around you, you don't fucking go under a theatre shield and celebrate with the natives.

Very few things could have stopped the Holocaust. It's agreed that the full efforts of the Rebel fleet would be insufficent. A repulsor or shield activated on Endor's surface and capable of protecting the whole planet is the only solution I can think of.

Stark wrote:Nope, still not getting it. Endor has no defence against the explosion and related effects except the rebel fleet, and perhaps later the portashield the commandoes brought with them. So I figure the fleet provided a measure of protection.

Please explain to me how the Rebel fleet can shield against global fire storms, air blasts, ground quakes, and all the nasty effects resulting from multi-TT (or higher) impacts. Or prevent the partticulate matter from interacting with the atmosphere. (Remember that the Rebel fleet can only affect a FRACTION of that debris to begin with, and diverting a tiny fraction isn't going to be enough even if it hits dozens of miles away. At extinction-level firepower its virtually impossible to leave a single partt of the planet untouched.)

You list the effects of the explosion and describe the impossibility of the effects being averted. So... what's your point? They clearly were averted, at least locally and temporarily. Since you're not going to tell me what you're talking about, I'll just assume you figure there was a planetary shield in place. Clearly something had to protect at least the area around the commandoes, but I was under the impression Endor was unshielded.

Christ, are you always this dense?

Apparently, you need me to break this down for you into the simplest possible manner:

1- Death Star explodes. Explosion releases energy roughly in the e29-e31 joule range at least. At least part of this is going to hit the planet. (even assuming 1-10% of the energy inpacting means that more than tens of billions of megatons - or more - worth of energy will be directed at the planet.)

2 - According to the Asteroid impact section of Mike's PK page, the impact of debris at that magnitude is goign to be severe. (Curtis notes at least several dozen large, multi-mile chunks that move at many tens, possibly several hundreds, of km/s)

The result of such impacts would be devastating: fireballs tens of km wide(for multi-GT impacts: hundreds of km, in the case of multi-TT impacts) and lasting for many minutes or hours. Secondary radiation (severe enough for fatal burning even dozens or hundreds of miles away from the point of impact.) There's also the wake radiation, the ground quakes, the air blast (devastation for dozens or huhndreds of km in diameter, even at relatively lower "gigaton" range impacts.) and global firestorms (all the ejecta produced by the impact will superheat the atmosphere, something that will also occur when the vapor/plasma cloud from the fireball makes contact with the moon itself.)

Most of these effects are going to ocucr at ground level as well, so the issue of the Rebel fleet 'protecting" against them becomes problematic (they'd have to project their shields hundreds of km towards the surface in a conical formation, and maintain such a effect for hours on end.) What's more, the impacts would begin occuring no more than a minute from when the DS2 exploded (more like half a minute, going by the 80 km/s velocity Curtis estimated on the Endor Holocaust page.)

3 - Given the readiness and lethality outlined above, it would be patently absurd (and fatal) for the Rebels to have stuck around to celebrate (much less evacuate ANY Ewoks, even with local fleet protection) much less the "hours later" implied by the nighttime celebration (seen in the movie and mentioned in secondary sources such as the novelization.) In fact, the Rebels likely would have died (they'd never make it back to the shuttle in time.)

Seriously, do you really NEED to be told that billions of megatons in kinetic energy striking ANYWHERE on a planet is a Bad Thing no matter whether you are acutally close to the devastation or not? Sooner or later, ,as long as you're on the planet, you're going to DIE very quickly. That's why its an extinction level event. (Indeed, at tens of billions of megatons, the atmosphere is so hot that all life is effectively sterilized - as noted in the Planet Killer page above.)

With regards to the repulsor (which I guess had to still be working, since DS2 didn't fall out of the sky) it's obviously capable of supporting the DS2s mass. Would it be capable of deflecting the high-speed mass headed directly at the moon?

Impossible to say, given we don't know the peformance parameters of the repulsor (aside from the fact it could hold the DS2 aloft in a stable orbit, at least.) The Repulsor would actually only have to handle a portion of the station's actual mass (omnidirectional explosion.) and the time between explosion and impact allows for more time to exert force on the debris. On top of that, they don't actually have to stop it with th repulsor - diverting it away ought to work enough.

Edit: As mentioend before, momentum is still an inevitable issue, since the repuslor (or the shield for that matter) woudl transmit the impact into the surface of the planet, and that would still have all manner of unpleasant effects. It would simply lack the immediate lethality of the massive KE influx of the debris.)

nightmare wrote:

Spanky The Dolphin wrote:The only thing that had quantum armour was the Sun Crusher, and IIRC, producing armour for something the size of a starfighter cost about as much as a full Star Destroyer.

I wish. The Shadow Chaser had quantum armor, the Gemdiver station had a quantum armoured diving bell (and could still barely stand against the corusca dust). I've even heard worse things, but I can't confirm them since I haven't read Shadow Academy myself. Such as the Academy itself having quantum armor and a corusca gem could cut through it in minutes. I think those are just rumours though... I hope...

The Sun Crusher version was IIRC effectively the prototype design. the first object ever to be armored on that scale. The production model could (for various reasons) be much cheaper (the most obvious reason would be that they sacrificed some of the raw "toughness" to make it cheaper, like the diving bell.)

IIRC YVH droids were armored in material that was in fact superior to QC armor.

IIRC Qwi-Xux was using Quantum Crystalline armor to help rebuild that stupid Cathedral thingy Ackbar crashed into in the NJO

Connor MacLeod wrote:IIRC YVH droids were armored in material that was in fact superior to QC armor.

This I have a hard time to believe. Anything with quantum armor should be able to shrug off heavy capital turbolaser fire like a mild rain. It's not like you can make a thinner version of it, though I buy your costly protoype suggestion.

"By introducing quantum-crystalline armor, where only a few layers of atoms are stacked as densely as physics permits, laminated on top of another thin film just as tough but phase shifted, we can be confident that nothing will harm it. Not so much as a dent."

It seems to me that KJA needed something even more over the top later on to top himself, so he quickly made quantum armor more commonplace, while topping it off with corusca. In other words, quantum came to suffer from writer inflation. But that's all non-SoD, of course.

If we presume the repulsor is an antigravity field (i.e., its characteristics are similar to gravity's), and that it is surface-mounted and unharmed by the shield generator's explosion, we can reason as follows:

The Endor moon's gravitational acceleration at the Death Star's suspended location (assuming Earthlike characteristics for the sanctuary moon and a radius of 5.2e6 m [ref. SWTC]) is

a = -(6.6e-11)(6e24)/(5.2e13) m/s/s = -7.6 m/s/s.

Now, assuming the repulsor is surface-based and decreases with the square of the distance from the emitter, we have a = α/r² for some proportionality constant α; the Death Star is suspended at 2e6 m above the Endor moon's surface [ref., again, SWTC]. Since the battle station is neither rising nor falling, we have

7.6 m/s/s = α/(4e12) m/s/s;

solving for α, we have α = 3e13 m³/s². Thus, the acceleration from the antigravity field (in a straight line above the repulsor) is approximately given by the function a = 3e13/r². However, this won't give us the net acceleration, which will be the acceleration because of the sanctuary moon subtracted from the repulsor's.

The question of the shape of the repulsor field now beckons. It is convenient to regard the field as a cone extending up around the Death Star with its apex on the planet's surface and a radius of 4.5e4 m at a height of 2e6 m.

I'm not entirely sure how to proceed from this point to calculate the effects of the repulsor on the expanding debris; My guess is they would slow, then fountain out into a higher orbit before falling back down to the sanctuary moon. The issue is the time frame of the fountaining and backfall.

Lets think about this people - the repulsor field was applying just enough force to keep the DS from falling.

When it explodes, it obvuoisly does so with far more force then gravity.

Therefore, the pieces will overcome the field and impact. It changes nothing.

Ender wrote:Lets think about this people - the repulsor field was applying just enough force to keep the DS from falling.

When it explodes, it obvuoisly does so with far more force then gravity.

Therefore, the pieces will overcome the field and impact. It changes nothing.

If the repulsor field acts like an antigravity field, then the repulsive force will increase without bound as you approach the emitter, which is different from escaping from a planet's gravitational well; the thing I'm not sure about is how long that fact will delay the inevitable. Of course, I'm not sure at all how justified the assumption it's a continuous field is, and it would make sense that destroying the generator (as Dr Saxton posits on his site) would also deprive the repulsor of power.

I figured the repulsor could have been used in a merely scattering way: of course, this assumes anyone with a clue was at the repulsor controls, which isn't guaranteed. The rebels certainly weren't in control of that facility, and the Imperials didn't know the DS2 would explode and might not even have a procedure in place to prevent it.

The Endor Holocaust, I understand does seem to make sense, but it just seems to me that, and I know that writer's intent is not really acceptable, but there is no one writing the books who wants that to happen. It seems that from the intent of almost every EU book mentioning Endor, the Ewoks are supposed to be alive.

However, my whole perception of the theory is rather colored from a Star Wars RPG forum I visited in which a poster wanted rules for an Ewok Jedi, post ROTJ. Another group of posters stormed in, and insisted that was impossible, because all the Ewoks were dead. When he tried to argue that he didn't want it that way, it was his game, and he could do it the way he wanted to, they told him he wasn't really playing Star Wars.

Surlethe wrote:

Ender wrote:Lets think about this people - the repulsor field was applying just enough force to keep the DS from falling.

When it explodes, it obvuoisly does so with far more force then gravity.

Therefore, the pieces will overcome the field and impact. It changes nothing.

If the repulsor field acts like an antigravity field, then the repulsive force will increase without bound as you approach the emitter, which is different from escaping from a planet's gravitational well; the thing I'm not sure about is how long that fact will delay the inevitable. Of course, I'm not sure at all how justified the assumption it's a continuous field is,

Consider the environmental effect of what you are suggesting. I'd say not very.

Further, given the similarity between tractor beams and repulsors, consider the effects if tractor beams worked that way.

and it would make sense that destroying the generator (as Dr Saxton posits on his site) would also deprive the repulsor of power.

Repulsors don't require power for sustained operation according to AOTC ICS.

However, my whole perception of the theory is rather colored from a Star Wars RPG forum I visited in which a poster wanted rules for an Ewok Jedi, post ROTJ. Another group of posters stormed in, and insisted that was impossible, because all the Ewoks were dead. When he tried to argue that he didn't want it that way, it was his game, and he could do it the way he wanted to, they told him he wasn't really playing Star Wars.

The other group is wrong, even if a Holocaust event did occur. It is well noted that there were other populations of Ewoks in the galaxy (even an independant colony of about 20,000 somewhere IIRC). Whether they were moved before or after the battle, they did live on off their homeworld. Heck, there is a minor Ewok character in the Dark Nest Trilogy, I believe.

Ender wrote:If the repulsor field acts like an antigravity field, then the repulsive force will increase without bound as you approach the emitter, which is different from escaping from a planet's gravitational well; the thing I'm not sure about is how long that fact will delay the inevitable. Of course, I'm not sure at all how justified the assumption it's a continuous field is,

Consider the environmental effect of what you are suggesting. I'd say not very.[/quote]

The environmental effect would be something along the lines of disrupted weather, I think. Doesn't the Empire have the ability to control weather, though? Or are there more obvious effects I'm missing?

Further, given the similarity between tractor beams and repulsors, consider the effects if tractor beams worked that way.

So it would be more reasonable, then, to assume it's a constant acceleration, instead of varying with distance?

and it would make sense that destroying the generator (as Dr Saxton posits on his site) would also deprive the repulsor of power.

Repulsors don't require power for sustained operation according to AOTC ICS.

Okay. Thanks.