Elmarnieh wrote:
And yes at least the NCC 1701D and greater can take on the death star (the NCC 1701 was reported to have enough armament to destroy an actual planet and the NCC 1701D had considerably higher yield weapons). It is likely capable of doing it without actually "raising shields" as the navigational shields are enough to stop light making lasers (the mainstay weaponry of all classes of star wars attack craft) ineffective.
Actually no, none of the
Enterprise varients come anywhere even close to the firepower needed to destroy a planet. We never actually see Enterprise come even close to destroying a planet or even rendering it uninhabitable so we? No? That's right we don't. Furthermore observed instances of their firepower
are nowhere near that levelQuote:
It is difficult to estimate photon torpedo yields because there has never been a substantive quantification of their output. However, the TM indicates that a photon torpedo carries 1.5kg of antimatter which presumably reacts with an equal amount of matter. This allows us to determine that the upper limit for photon torpedo yield is 2.7E17 joules (64.3 megatons), since Einstein's Theory of General Relativity predicts that E=mc²
Naturally, Federation cultists use this figure as a benchmark, assuming (for example) that if a GCS fires 10 photon torpedoes at a ship, then the target vessel will be hit with 643 megatons of energy. However, this is incorrect. The 64.3 megaton figure is an upper limit, and not necessarily a realistic estimate. Upper limits are extremely generous methods of estimation- for example, the upper limit for a Death Star blast, based on the Alderaan explosion, is well over 1E40 joules!. There are two principal assumptions incorporated into this particular upper limit:
1. The antimatter within the torpedo will react with matter at 100% efficiency. In other words, not one solitary atom or subatomic particle of antimatter will escape and be hurled out into space by the explosion.
2. All of the reaction products will contribute to the destructive effect of the torpedo. In other words, every single particle and erg of energy in the entire blast will directly affect the target vessel, with no useless particles and no wasted energy.
More assumptions are noted in the article; if we use the 64 megaton figure, significantly that since Photorps are not shaped charges, the energy goes in all directions, not just at the target when it strikes:
Quote:
The overall impact of a photon torpedo on its target is therefore an amount of energy, in the form of superheated matter, gamma radiation, thermal radiation, and highly energetic subatomic particles, which is less than or equal to 32 megatons in quantity for a direct impact, and as little as 10 megatons in quantity for a medium-proximity blast (decreasing with increasing distance, based on the radius beyond which charged pions decay into useless neutrinos). If we use the 74% efficiency estimate derived from the DS9 TM, we can determine that a photon torpedo should deliver roughly 24 megatons for a direct impact and as little as 7 megatons for a medium-proximity blast.
By comparison, while Elmo is right about light marking lasers not penetrating nav deflectors, SW "lasers"/blasters are not lasers at all. They
do not behave in any way similar to a laser.
Quote:
A Star Destroyer used its light trench-mounted guns to vaporize 40 metre wide asteroids in TESB with 1/15-second bursts (see Brian Young's Turbolaser Power page for more information), resulting in a lower limit of 22,500 TW for light turbolaser output. Note that this only applies to light turbolasers. If the ratio of light to heavy turbolaser output is proportional to the size difference, then heavy turbolasers must therefore output roughly 2.8 million TW. Some Federation cultists claim that the asteroids in TESB were actually disintegrated rather than vaporized, but they apparently did not notice that the "debris" (small coalesced blobs of superheated liquid that were metastable and in the process of vaporization) evaporated into invisible gas within a fraction of a second, while solid visibly glowing debris would have continued to be visible for at least 10 seconds as it cooled.
That is for LIGHT turbolasers.
Quote:
Base Delta Zero
Source Data:
According to the Star Wars Technical Journal, a Base-Delta-Zero operation is the act of melting the surface of a planet. The operation was performed on Caamas just after the Clone Wars (ref: Spectre of the Past), and it was so devastatingly ruinous that the planet was still totally uninhabitable forty years later. In fact, resettlement efforts of Caamasi survivors (presumably those who had been off-world at the time of the attack) were centred around the discovery of a new Caamasi homeworld, which would then be terraformed to Caamas' specifications. This indicates that it would have actually been easier to terraform a barren, uninhabited world than to make Caamas inhabitable again!
It is possible to generate a very conservative estimate by assuming a dry planet (no oceans) and assuming that this devastation will be caused by the melting of surface material to a depth of one metre. Therefore, if we use Earth as an example of a typical target planet, the Base Delta Zero operation must melt 5.1E14 m³ of surface material.
Energy Estimate:
The crust of a typical planet is composed mostly of silicates, so the thermodynamic properties of silicon dioxide can be used as a reasonable basis for estimating the characteristics of planetary crust material. The melting point of silicon dioxide (quartz microstructure) is 1883K, its density is 2220 kg/m^3, and its specific heat is roughly 1050 J/kgK at high temperatures (ref. Fundamentals of Heat and Mass Transfer 3rd Edition by Incropera and Dewitt). The energy required to heat 5.1E14 m³ of rock from 300K to melting point is therefore 1.9E24 J. The latent heat of fusion for SiO2 is at least 250 kJ/kg (ref. CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics 50th Edition), which adds 3E23 J to the energy estimate. This leads to a grand total of 2.2E24 J. This operation must not take longer than 1 hour or so, otherwise significant numbers of planetary citizens would be able to evacuate. The power requirement is therefore at least 600 million TW.
Weapon Breakdown:
There are 12 heavy turbolasers and roughly 120 light turbolasers on an ISD1 (ref. SWICS). The heavy turbolasers are roughly 125 times bigger than the light turbolasers (which were seen vaporizing asteroids in TESB). If firepower is proportional to size (an unsubstantiated but not unreasonable postulate) then the sustainable power outputs of the heavy and light guns work out to 47 million TW and 375,000 TW respectively. Refire rates seem to be roughly 1 shot per 2 seconds, so the energy level of each individual blast would have to be 94 million TJ (22 gigatons of TNT) for heavy turbolasers and 750,000 TJ ( 179 megatons) for light turbolasers.
Addendum
It should not come as a surprise that Base Delta Zero figures come under almost constant attack by overzealous Federation cultists. If you are curious to study the subject further, visit the dedicated Base Delta Zero page.
In other words, an ISDs heavy turbolasers are nearly one thousand times more powerful than a photon torpedo. No conclusion can be drawn based on the ability of Enterprise shields to stop light, primitive lasers; that is the No Limits fallacy and is the same as saying that because an M-1 tank can survive a hit from a machine gun undamaged it can therefore survive a hit from a battleship's main battery. The above noted firepower is what there would need to be evidence of (and there isn't any othe than verbal hyperbole by a few characters) for the claim that
Enterprise could destroy a planet. Note that Enterprise could do a lot of damage to the populace with 250 photorps it could nuke every major city on Earth easily but that isn't the same as destroying the planet.
And of course there is the
Death Star superlaser. I apologize that I cannot easily copy the calculations showing the gravitational binding energy of an earth-like planet such as Alderaan, because they are not in a board text, but they are at the link and they are common scientific knowledge.
Quote:
Now, we have a formula for the total binding energy of a planet of uniform density, and all you need is the mass and radius of the planet in question. In the case of Earth, we can easily substitute G=6.6726E-11 m³/(s²·kg), M=5.97E24 kg, and r=6.371E6m to the above formula. The result is 2.2E32 joules, which anyone can independently verify with their own calculations. This represents a lower limit for the gravitational binding energy of a planet, because the density of a planet is not constant; it is always highest in the centre. Therefore, the ratio of mass to volume will increase as the outer layers are "peeled away" rather than staying constant. This will increase the gravitational binding energy.
Note that the binding energy for a planet like earth is abouet 1.05E15 times greater than the energy of a photon torpedo.
Alderaan of course takes far more than just that minimum energy needed to overcome its own gravity since it blows violently apart in just a few seconds,a nd a very careful observation shows that a planetary shield even momentarily blocked the superlaser, meaning even more energy! Screenshots at the link, along with explainations about how the next quote is arrived at.
Quote:
The Alderaan debris cloud expanded at roughly 4% of the speed of light. If we assume that the inside of the cloud had an even simple distribution between 0 and 4% of the speed of light, its average velocity would be roughly 2% of the speed of light, so its kinetic energy would be roughly 1E38 joules. This is, of course, a staggering amount of energy. Try to imagine seizing the entire planet Earth and hurling it like a football at 6 million metres per second, or try to imagine how much power the Sun generates in eight thousand years, and you'll have some idea of how much energy it takes to blow apart a planet the way Alderaan was destroyed.
Light marking lasers indeed. Note that the amount of energy used by the Death Star is about 0.5E6 greater than the gravtiational energy of Alderaan making it about 1E21 (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) times greater than a photorp.
Quote:
Ion cannons are another story, we have no idea how ion cannons of star wars would react faced with standard or multi-phasic shielding though I would argue multi-phasic shielding would render ion cannons useless as multi-phasic shielding can survive in the suns corona where a tremendous amount of high energy ions are present.
And on exactly what observational estimate of energy yield and similarity of behavior between star coronas and ion cannons do you base this?
Don't bother coming back and arguing unless you can provide better calculations. (which by the way, you can't. Hundreds of Trek-wankers have tried and failed) Stardestroyer.net is run by an engineer and the
Star Wars technical commentaries are run by a Ph.D. in physics. They've done the math. I'm not going to re-create all their work here for you when you can read the sites yourself and have a good time doing it.
Don't get me wrong, nothing wrong with liking Star Trek but it just does not represent the same technology base as Star Wars.
Folks, the above is the kind of analysis that, when applied to real life, ends with Iowa-wanking. It is very poor, based on gut feelings. Don't do this.
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
