Graham kennedy post

[PainRack]

Graham kennedy
Considering who wrote it, I thought it will be approiate for the vs forum.

I don't really know what he's trying to say, other than just puncturing the obvious errors, so, here's my reply to Weyoun in SB.

SB

[Cyborg Stan]

Your BBCode is incorrectly done. It should be [url=http://www.xxx.com/]Insert Text Here[/url] instead of [url=http://www.xxx.com/[/url]Insert Text Here[/url] like you have it.

[Darth Wong]

Nobody wants to use your broken links

Here's the quote:

I was watching this today, and it set me thinking about what the
Enterprise did to kill the Denevan parasites. The dialogue goes :

Kirk : "Your figures are, of course, accurate."

Spock : "Of course. The light of the sun at the proximity where
the Denevan declared himself free was one million candles per
square inch. If this works, the satellites we orbit will produce
light of such intensity that even someone in a closed, darkened
area will be affected by it."

I looked around the net, and according to this site :

http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/dictC.html

a candle is the same thing as a candela, which is defined as
a light source which emits a certain amount of power per unit
solid angle; the site says that over a whole sphere, it
equates to 18.3988 milliwatts. So a million candles is
18.3988 kilowatts.

Now the satellites were to produce this much per square inch,
all over the planet. Earth's surface area is about 510 million
square km, which is about 2,000 quadrillion square inches.
(Deneva seems to be Earth-like - we can argue that it may be
much smaller, but then it's equally likely to have been much
larger.)

Multiplying 2,000 quadrillion square inches up by 18.3988
kilowatts per square inch, we find that the satellites put
out 3.7 x 10^22 Watts - about 37,000,000,000 Terawatts.

The light is only to last for ten or twenty seconds or so,
so we're looking at about 370,000,000,000 TeraJoules. That's
an awful lot of energy! At 100% efficient conversion you'd
have to react about 4,000 metric tons of matter and antimatter
to produce it.

Interestingly, however, the satellites are not M/AM powered;
the light is produced by a reaction between tritium and
"trimagnesite". Ordinary magnesite is a compound of magnesium,
carbon and oxygen; what tri-magnesite might be is not
specified, but it presumably is one of those odd new substances
like di- and tri-lithium that we speculated about recently.
If so then the energy may have been liberated by some subspace
reaction.

Spock makes clear that the light will be bright enough that
even people in closed and shaded areas will be affected by it,
so the actual output is quite possibly several times as much
as I calculated.

On the other hand, we could argue that the light is only going
to be focused on the inhabited areas of the planet - the
population is established to be around one million, which
means that the whole lot of them might well live in the
single city that we see. This would cut the energy required
by many orders of magnitude.

It's certainly a fairly drastic action that the ship is about
to take; they're planning to bombard the planet with light
which is a good 15 times or so brighter than ordinary sunlight.
On a global scale that might quite possibly mess up weather
patterns, wipe out much animal life, and will probably
trigger many very widespread fires. It would be much less
damaging if this was only going to be done on one local area.

Against this idea, how could they ever be sure that the
parasites themselves would be so kind as to cluster in that
one location? True, parasites might tend to cluster around
their host population, which may well have been contained
within that one city... but these are not animals. They
are intelligent beings - they were making the Danavans build
ships so they could reach their next target planets - so one
would expect them to spread as far afield as possible precisely
so as to make it hard to eradicate them in this way. And if
only one location was to be irradiated, why would they need
the suggested string of satellites - why not only one?

It's also notable that the ship did not have these satellites
on hand, they were going to build them - and apparently did
so in short order. How many satellites were built is something
we can't be sure of; if each one could irradiate ten thousand
square miles on the surface, they would still need around
20,000 of them! If each could irradiate a *million* square
miles they would still need 200.

Either it's trivial to build a satellite which can deal with
a huge area, or it's trivial to build tens of thousands of
satellites. Take your pick, either way it's an impressive
feat.

Note the assumption that Spock's numbers are correct, even though 10 cal/cm^2 will cause third-degree burns. As usual, Kennedy does not bother to check his figures against any verifiable physical data. This guy never changes.

[Darth Servo]

Against this idea, how could they ever be sure that the parasites themselves would be so kind as to cluster in that one location? True, parasites might tend to cluster around their host population, which may well have been contained within that one city... but these are not animals. They are intelligent beings - they were making the Danavans build ships so they could reach their next target planets - so one would expect them to spread as far afield as possible precisely so as to make it hard to eradicate them in this way.

Don't most Fed colonies tend to be a single settlement on the planet?

And if only one location was to be irradiated, why would they need the suggested string of satellites - why not only one?

Maybe because the satelites aren't nearly as powerful as he wants them to be?

[Quadlok]

Why the hell would the parasites not be clustered around the settlement? Assumedly, the more parasites on the job, the quicker it would get done, so the intelligent thing to do would be to have them all there so as to finish as fast as possible. With such an obvious weakness, I doubt they'd want to stick around once they've been found out.

Even if some parisites survive, the crew can distribute high intensity floodlights to the now freed colonists and they can take care of it themselves.

Also, what's with Kennedy's habit of only working the numbers out for the most overblown theory he can come up with?

[Darth Wong]

Also, what's with Kennedy's habit of only working the numbers out for the most overblown theory he can come up with?

This is the guy who claimed with a perfectly straight face that a shuttlecraft would effortlessly shake off a direct hit from a Death Star superlaser blast, remember? He's really no different in terms of "absurdity factor" then Darkstar, but he lacks Darkstar's delusional paranoia and sheer determination.

[Quadlok]

Also, what's with Kennedy's habit of only working the numbers out for the most overblown theory he can come up with?

This is the guy who claimed with a perfectly straight face that a shuttlecraft would effortlessly shake off a direct hit from a Death Star superlaser blast, remember?

Yeah. I tried to read his fanfic one time, but gave up about a chapter and a half in after counting more than three dozen lies, falacies, double standards, omissions, and other various stupidity.

[apocolypse]

Shit...I didn't know General Kali was Graham Kennedy. I got into a couple scraps at SB over TDiC with him. I guess I never payed much attention to the initals before.

[SirNitram]

Vintage Kennedy; with that ode de bullshite.

[Praxis]

Yeah. I tried to read his fanfic one time, but gave up about a chapter and a half in after counting more than three dozen lies, falacies, double standards, omissions, and other various stupidity.

Too bad for you. I spent an entire hour of LAUGHTER reading that. It was quite fun (and amusing), considering just how BAD it was.

[DaveJB]

Interestingly, however, the satellites are not M/AM powered;
the light is produced by a reaction between tritium and
"trimagnesite". Ordinary magnesite is a compound of magnesium,
carbon and oxygen; what tri-magnesite might be is not
specified, but it presumably is one of those odd new substances
like di- and tri-lithium that we speculated about recently.
If so then the energy may have been liberated by some subspace
reaction.

Ah, the old Trekkie pseudoscience cop-out! Can't explain what happened? Blame it on subspace!

[PainRack]

Shit...I didn't know General Kali was Graham Kennedy. I got into a couple scraps at SB over TDiC with him. I guess I never payed much attention to the initals before.

He's not. He's weyoun.

[PainRack]

Your BBCode is incorrectly done. It should be Insert Text Here instead of Insert Text Here like you have it.

Oops.

[Morilore]

Why did I just break out in uncontrollable laughter? PainRack, you DO realize you just accidently linked to a pron site?

And you know, the third degree burns thing.... seemed pretty obvious right from the start. The procedure to remove these parasites doesn't sound exactly trivial.

[Ender]

Spock's numbers are clearly wrong, despite what he says. IIRC, at anything greater then 10KW/m^2 the air turns opaque because it becomes plasma. That's one of the problems DARPA's HEL project has to overcome.

[Rogue 9]

Yeah. I tried to read his fanfic one time, but gave up about a chapter and a half in after counting more than three dozen lies, falacies, double standards, omissions, and other various stupidity.

Too bad for you. I spent an entire hour of LAUGHTER reading that. It was quite fun (and amusing), considering just how BAD it was.

I fell out of my chair laughing when he said that the Imperial Starfleet was roughly equivalent to the Coast Guard.

[YT300000]

Yeah. I tried to read his fanfic one time, but gave up about a chapter and a half in after counting more than three dozen lies, falacies, double standards, omissions, and other various stupidity.

Too bad for you. I spent an entire hour of LAUGHTER reading that. It was quite fun (and amusing), considering just how BAD it was.

I fell out of my chair laughing when he said that the Imperial Starfleet was roughly equivalent to the Coast Guard.

Hey, remember, this is the same guy who said an F-18 could totally own a Tie fighter.

[Patrick Degan]

Against this idea, how could they ever be sure that the parasites themselves would be so kind as to cluster in that one location? True, parasites might tend to cluster around their host population, which may well have been contained within that one city... but these are not animals. They are intelligent beings - they were making the Danavans build ships so they could reach their next target planets - so one would expect them to spread as far afield as possible precisely so as to make it hard to eradicate them in this way. And if only one location was to be irradiated, why would they need the suggested string of satellites - why not only one?

1. The parasites will be where the humans are; it makes zero sense for them to be located where host beings aren't; particularly as they're out to control hosts where shipbuilding facilities are located. Given the Deneva colony's population of only one million people, the whole lot would tend to be located in either one city or a cluster of cities within close proximity of one another, possibly within a radius of only a few hundred kilometres.

2. Unless the satellites are in geostationary orbit, it would be necessary to have multiple units orbiting over the target city (cities) since orbital velocity would carry each unit over its target in about two minutes or less.

[Rogue 9]

Too bad for you. I spent an entire hour of LAUGHTER reading that. It was quite fun (and amusing), considering just how BAD it was.

I fell out of my chair laughing when he said that the Imperial Starfleet was roughly equivalent to the Coast Guard.

Hey, remember, this is the same guy who said an F-18 could totally own a Tie fighter.

Well... TIEs do suck in atmosphere. Gotta give him that.

[YT300000]

Well... TIEs do suck in atmosphere. Gotta give him that.

The fact that Ties can fly straight into an atmosphere at full throttle (in one of the Steele comics) without taking damage would suggest that they're pretty tough (although whether tough enough to withstand an AIM-120 is debatable). Either way, they can outrun it (the missile and the fighter), and strafe the -18 on a return pass, reducing it to scrap metal.

[apocolypse]

Shit...I didn't know General Kali was Graham Kennedy. I got into a couple scraps at SB over TDiC with him. I guess I never payed much attention to the initals before.

He's not. He's weyoun.

Damn...my bad. Does weyoun post much at SB? The name is familiar, but I hardly ever see it. Thanks for the info.

[Rogue 9]

Well... TIEs do suck in atmosphere. Gotta give him that.

The fact that Ties can fly straight into an atmosphere at full throttle (in one of the Steele comics) without taking damage would suggest that they're pretty tough (although whether tough enough to withstand an AIM-120 is debatable). Either way, they can outrun it (the missile and the fighter), and strafe the -18 on a return pass, reducing it to scrap metal.

The fact that the solar panels shear off if they try to break in atmosphere would suggest that they're not that tough and would have a hard time even making another pass. If he was head to head with the fighter, it'd be even worse; he's moving towards the missile, breaking to avoid it will destroy the TIE, and the high speed is actually hurting him if he's not heading away from the missile.

[Quadlok]

Well... TIEs do suck in atmosphere. Gotta give him that.

The fact that Ties can fly straight into an atmosphere at full throttle (in one of the Steele comics) without taking damage would suggest that they're pretty tough (although whether tough enough to withstand an AIM-120 is debatable). Either way, they can outrun it (the missile and the fighter), and strafe the -18 on a return pass, reducing it to scrap metal.

The fact that the solar panels shear off if they try to break in atmosphere would suggest that they're not that tough and would have a hard time even making another pass. If he was head to head with the fighter, it'd be even worse; he's moving towards the missile, breaking to avoid it will destroy the TIE, and the high speed is actually hurting him if he's not heading away from the missile.

I believe the incident you are alluding to was one in which the TIE had already been hit in the support pylon, and therefore the structural integrity was weakened severely. It is possible I'm wrong, but either way, it would be nice of you to actually post a quote proving the wing was sheered off, or at least say what book its in, so people can check.

[Connor MacLeod]

Well... TIEs do suck in atmosphere. Gotta give him that.

The fact that Ties can fly straight into an atmosphere at full throttle (in one of the Steele comics) without taking damage would suggest that they're pretty tough (although whether tough enough to withstand an AIM-120 is debatable). Either way, they can outrun it (the missile and the fighter), and strafe the -18 on a return pass, reducing it to scrap metal.

The fact that the solar panels shear off if they try to break in atmosphere would suggest that they're not that tough and would have a hard time even making another pass. If he was head to head with the fighter, it'd be even worse; he's moving towards the missile, breaking to avoid it will destroy the TIE, and the high speed is actually hurting him if he's not heading away from the missile.

So you think the TIEs pursuing the Falcon through Bespin in TESB were flying only in straight lines and the Falcon just coincidentally avoided making any evasive turns?

[Praxis]

The fact that the solar panels shear off if they try to break in atmosphere would suggest that they're not that tough and would have a hard time even making another pass. If he was head to head with the fighter, it'd be even worse; he's moving towards the missile, breaking to avoid it will destroy the TIE, and the high speed is actually hurting him if he's not heading away from the missile.

I believe you're referring to "Wedge's Gamble", in which a TIE fighter tries to match a snap-turn of an X-wing in atmosphere and shears its wing off.

A few things to note:

1) It was stated that the TIE would have survived had it been in space
2) It was the hardest snap turn the X-wing could possibly do, and the pilot was inexperienced, trying to maneuver as if he was in space.

Notice #2. The snap turn of the X-wing was probably FAR faster than any modern day fighter could POSSIBLY do, probably fast enough to kill an organic pilot without inertial compensation. The fact that the TIE fighter was unable to follow the maneuver when the pilot was inexperienced with atmospheric flight only suggests that the TIE cannot snap turn as fast as an X-wing in atmosphere. The TIE can still outperform an F-18, and it can still fight, since the more experienced TIE pilots were chasing the Rogues all over the place and one TIE even kept on Corran's tail in the middle of the worst Coruscant thunderstorm in centuries. This likely would have EASILY blown an F-18 away, since the Headhunter Corran was flying could barely keep on course.