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Can the Empire defeat the Covenant?

Oops, wrong forum.

The Empire would floor the Covenant. Covenant ships have been damaged by high calibre mag rounds. Imperial Star Destroyers have enough fire power to blow an entire Covenant fleet into nothing.

^agreed

Well I had a discussion about this with Magnevus he kept spewing stuff out about how the Covenant have superior technology and could attack while in slip space. But he has also read books about Halo.

Originally posted by Lord Simus
But he has also read books about Halo.
AKA video game fodder? Galactic Empire takes this.

He also believes the humans (marines) also have superior technology. He pretty much ignored the death star in the argument to.

I'd like to see Boba whoop up on that Spartan dude, that would be awesome.

Hell, I'd like to see friggin' Padme whoop on him.

The humans had superior technology? Is that why they lost every battle thus far?

He meant superior to the Empire.

Screw it, why not Wicket kill that green suited bastard.

Oh really? Well, he needs to get a grip, because the Empire's small turbolasers are powerful enough to blast a hole in Halo human ships since weaker Covenant weapons can do the same.

Hes pretty much a Halo fanboy.

But I know the Imperial ray-shielding don't protect much against high-caliber mag rounds.

Really?

Federation cultists have propagated numerous myths about Imperial shielding:

No particle shielding. They claim that deflector shields can't stop matter, based on the assumption that the DS1 exhaust port ray-shield was the only type of shield in the Empire. This is obviously untrue. Not only are particle-shields referenced in the SWEGWT as well as every other official source, but we saw specialized particle-shields in TPM such as the Gungan "hydrostatic" field that kept water out of the Otoh Gunga underwater city-spheres as well as the "Bongo" personal watercraft. Furthermore, the canon ANH novelization clearly states that the Falcon's deflector shields saved it from instant destruction when it emerged from hyperspace into the "meteor shower" that was Alderaan. As usual, they attempt to contradict this canon information with numerous misinterpretations:
They note that an asteroid struck the Falcon's hull in TESB, but the Falcon had its shield power redirected to aft shields due to the relentless pursuit and the asteroid would have logically hit the front part of the ship. Furthermore, some types of particle-shield exist on and below the surface of the armour according to the SWEGWT, so a physical object will strike the combined shield/armour at once.
They point out that the ISD's shields didn't stop the Falcon from landing on the bridge tower in TESB, but it must be stressed that it did not land immediately. It could have hovered in the sensor blind spot until the shields were dropped. Another possibility is that its magnetic clamp was able to secure it to the hull even though the shields were up, since the particle shields are so close to the hull.
They point out that the TESB novelization described asteroids striking the "hull" of an ISD, but they ignore the twin possibilities that the ISD shields were down, or that the particle-shield and hull are interchangeable concepts since some types of particle-shield exist on and beneath the surface of the hull.


The A-wing fighter that damaged the Executor's bridge tower didn't make its suicide attack until after the Executor's bridge deflector shields were dropped. If deflector shields were impotent against physical collisions, there would have been no reason to wait until the Executor's shields were dropped.

So really, where is the proof that the Empire doesn't have shielding sufficient to stop high caliber rounds?

That's why I do think particle shielding has a chance against matter at high velocity.

the covenant is horrible i beat both halos on ledgendary without a problem

Originally posted by Twilight Janick
That's why I do think particle shielding has a chance against matter at high velocity.

What exactly do you believe is high velocity?

Trust me, when it comes to physics, size matters.

Following from stardestroyer.net:

"Size Matters
Yes, size does matter, and it doesn't matter whether you like that or not. It's a reality of life, and you'd better get used to it. Here are some tragically commonplace misconceptions:
"Huge sci-fi ships don't necessarily mean high technology."
"Huge sci-fi ships only mean that they have lots of raw materials."
"The Federation could easily build huge ships if they wanted to."
"Smaller ships are more advanced because they're miniaturized."
Does that sound familiar? Sure it does. It's the "size doesn't matter" argument, and you've heard it a hundred times before. But size does matter. A 60km long ship must be a hundred times stronger than a 600 m long ship even after accounting for the size difference, and I intend to explain why.


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Stress
Before I begin, I must explain what stress is. Mechanical stress (as opposed to psychological stress) is expressed in units of force divided by area, and it is conceptualized as the load acting normal to a plane surface, divided by the area of that plane surface. If I just lost you, then perhaps the following diagram will help you visualize the idea:


The diagram shows a bar which is being stretched. We call this "tensile stress", and it's the simplest possible situation in stress analysis. The little arrows show the force acting on the bar, and of course, it's spread out over the entire area of the bar's cross-section. This cross-sectional area is often referred to as the "load-bearing area". For example, if the load-bearing area is 5 m² and the bar is supporting a 100,000 ton mass against the force of gravity, then the stress would be roughly 2E8 N/m², or 200 MPa (structural steel yields at ~260 MPa, in case you're wondering).

The critical factor is the load-bearing area. The length of the bar doesn't help at all, and you can verify this with an experiment. Get a length of good high-quality rope, tie one end to a solid post, and try to pull on the other end until it breaks. Does it matter how long the rope is? No. You could cut a 100 foot length and it would be no stronger than a 1 foot length. So the moral of this story is that the load-bearing capacity of our bar is affected by changes in width or height, but not by changes in length. If you scale the bar up by a factor of 100, then its volume will increase by a factor of 1 million but its load-bearing area will only increase by a factor of 10,000.



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So Why Does Size Matter?
Ask the nearest female But after you get your answer, try to remember that size matters from an engineering standpoint which has nothing to do with impressing women. Size matters because of gravity and acceleration. If you're building an immobile space station in a zero-gravity environment (such as the Borg headquarters array, a Federation starbase, or Mir), size doesn't matter. But if you're building a ship, then things become a whole lot more complicated. When that ship accelerates or enters the gravity well of a planet, the resulting forces will be proportional to its mass. Its mass, in turn, is proportional to its volume.
It doesn't take a genius to see the problem here: when you scale something up, the mass increases faster than the area. Mass will define load, and area will define load-bearing ability. If load increases faster than load-bearing ability, then we have a problem. For example, if you scale up a building by a factor of 10, it will get 1000 times heavier but it will only get 100 times stronger.

This problem isn't restricted to stress analysis; technological devices which apply force also don't scale with volume. For example, a hydraulic cylinder's maximum force is dependent on the piston area, not its volume. If you take a hydraulic cylinder and precisely scale it up 10 times in every direction, it will be 1000 times more massive but it will only exert 100 times more force. The same is true of biological systems such as muscles, for which the predominant strength determinant is cross-sectional area.

In general, if you scale up an object, its strength will increase with the square of the size multiplier, but its mass will increase with the cube of the size multiplier. That's why Galileo knew, many centuries ago, that there's a "proper size" for everything. You can't scale something up without radically altering the design, and when the size of an object reaches extreme levels, it becomes infeasible regardless of design. "

"Case Study: The Egyptian Pyramids
The pyramids are often used as "proof" that you don't need a lot of technology to make a really big building. However, nothing could be further from the truth. They represent a fascinating study in ancient ingenuity and precision stone-cutting techniques, but that's all they represent.
The Great Pyramid at Giza is the largest and most famous of the Egyptian pyramids. Its sides are sloped at roughly 52° and it stands roughly 140 metres tall. Its mass is estimated to be around 5.25 million metric tons. That may sound impressive (so much so that pseudoscience types spout the usual "alien visitation" theories about its origin, often buttressing their argument by exaggerating the precision and difficulty of its construction), but remember that their builders had to make three huge compromises:

The pyramid shape, which was not a purely aesthetic choice. It was a concession to their poor building materials. A building of that size, constructed primarily out of soft limestone with a decorative granite shell, would never have survived if not for the pyramidal shape. It was also the only shape they could build on that scale with their limited construction technology.
The paucity of internal spaces. This was also a concession to their limited technology; the vast pyramids had only a handful of internal chambers and tunnels, quite unlike the airy interiors of modern office buildings or even the interior of a typical Egyptian home dwelling of that era.
Time and money. It took an estimated 30 years for 20,000 labourers to build the Great Pyramid. If we convert this to modern terms, assuming a 5-day work week and a paltry $10/hr rate of pay, the labour costs alone would exceed ten billion dollars, to say nothing of the material costs.
Why a pyramid? The pyramid shape provides a large load-bearing area where it's needed the most: at the bottom. Pyramids have some interesting characteristics:
87.5% of the mass is in the lower half. That's the geometry of pyramids; the volume of any pyramid is proportional to h³ (in this case, it would be roughly 0.81h³), so the upper half is only 1/8 of the total volume.
The base area for a pyramid with 52° sloped walls is roughly 2.44h², or 48,000 m² in the case of the Great Pyramid. This means that its 5.25 million ton mass is distributed so that the average ground pressure is less than 1.1 MPa. By way of comparison, modern structural steel yields at ~260 MPa.
If you were to take the pyramid and reshape it into a 75 metre wide square building, it would be 400 metres tall (almost as tall as the Sears Tower in Chicago). Its base would take 8½ times more stress than the pyramid, but the compressive strength of limestone is actually high enough to withstand this. The problem is that they couldn't build it, and it wouldn't hold together if they did. They used ramps to slide the blocks up to the top levels of their pyramids, but how would they lift these blocks to the top of a square building? And while a pyramid is an easy loading scenario, how would a 400 metre tall limestone rectangle survive high winds? Wind creates a complex shear, tensile, and compressive loading scenario on a tall skyscraper, and limestone doesn't handle the first two types of load very well at all.
Pyramids and cones are the easiest, most natural shapes to project out of the ground. If you want to test this claim, simply go to the beach and try to build a huge pyramid, followed by a skyscraper of equal size. Which one is more durable, and easier to build? If you're working with soft materials, a pyramid is the only way to go.
So could the Egyptians scale up a small structure into a big one? Most certainly not ... their small strucrtures had a wide variety of shapes and designs, most of which were not pyramidal. But when they tried to make a large structure, they were forced into the pyramidal shape. In short, the design of the pyramids was driven entirely by their scale.
Even if we ignore the limitations of Egyptian construction techniques, we can easily determine that their construction materials would never support a modern skyscraper. Modern skyscrapers subject their structures to far more stress than the pyramid structure had to handle, because they support their weight on relatively small load-bearing supports rather than huge solid regions. Furthermore, that stress will be a combination of tension, shear, and compression as the building resists gravity and wind. Limestone, on the other hand, has middling compressive strength but it suffers from poor shear strength and almost no tensile strength (a common failing of ceramics), because it isn't anisotropic (insensitive to direction of load) like structural steel.

Contrary to the beliefs of some superstitious mystics, the pyramids don't represent unthinkable engineering skills on the part of the Egyptians or their imaginary alien benefactors. In fact, the pyramids show us their limitations in stark detail because those limitations drove the design, both in the area of construction technology and materials science. They're not examples of huge, ancient buildings; they barely qualify as "buildings" at all. A building is normally expected to be largely hollow, consisting mostly of habitable spaces. Houses qualify. Skyscrapers qualify. Even military bunkers qualify. But the pyramids do not. They're giant glorified rock piles, not "buildings" in the traditional sense."

"Case Study: The Dyson Sphere
"That's all well and good", you might say, "but this is a sci-fi website, not an ancient history website." True enough, so let's leave the dreary Egyptian desert and boldly go where no man has gone before. First stop: the Dyson Sphere. The Dyson Sphere was a spectacularly massive structure. In fact, it is the most massive structure I can recall seeing in sci-fi, even bigger than Unicron or any of the mighty worldships of Galactus. It was featured in the TNG episode "Relics", and no one knows who built it, or how old it is. The only thing we do know is that its builders must have wielded forces and engineering skills far beyond any of their counterparts in the Star Trek universe. Contrary to certain popular (albeit painfully simple minded) beliefs, the difficulty of constructing such a vast structure does not end with the procurement of the necessary raw materials.
This is a spherical shell with 100 million km radius. Let's imagine that its wall thickness is 2 km, and its shell has the same density as iron (yeah, I know, it's suposed to be "carbon neutronium", as if it makes sense to combine a lightweight element with superdense degenerate matter). Anyway, the mass of an iron shell would be roughly 2E30 kg, or one solar mass! Not only is this an absolutely staggering amount of resources to call into action (it suggests they'd be able to build stars at will, in places of their choosing, since they can summon up solar masses of engineering materials), but it would require staggering material strength.

It is tempting to imagine that it is rotating about its axis to generate artificial gravity, but if that were so, the resulting centripetal force would be unsuitable for the creation of a uniform M-class environment on the sphere's interior. The problem is that if we visualize the axis of rotation as vertical, then the centripetal force will be horizontal. At the equator, this will work perfectly. But if we move away from the equator toward the poles, we will see that direction of the centripetal force vector diverges farther and farther away from the "surface normal" of the sphere. In other words, as your latitude increases, the proportion of the centripetal force that acts like gravity will decrease, and the proportion of the centripetal force that slides you sideways along the surface (toward the equator) will increase, as shown below:



One look at the diagram and the problem should be obvious: all of the atmosphere, oceans, and other surface material will eventually end up in a thin band around the equator of the sphere. This is obviously unacceptable; there's no point building such a huge structure if 99.9% of it will be uninhabitable. Unlike Niven's far more realistic Ringworld, the Dyson Sphere cannot possibly generate its surface gravity through rotation. Therefore, the Dyson Sphere must have near-zero angular velocity in order to keep from pushing all of its material toward its equator, and it must use something other than the centrifuge principle to generate its artificial gravity.

So if there is no centrifuge stress, would there be any stress? The answer is yes, because an object of such stupendous size will generate significant gravity, which will add to the existing gravity of the star at its centre. Since the sphere's radius is only 2/3 of an A.U., its sun would have less than half of our Sun's luminosity (or the oceans on the sphere's inner surface would have evapourated), so it would probably have less than half our Sun's mass as well. This means that its mass is roughly 1E30 kg.

From an engineering standpoint, the Dyson Sphere can be thought of as a thin-walled spherical pressure vessel, and the gravitational force can be thought of as the "pressure" (once it's divided by the internal surface area, of course). The mass of the sphere is 2E30 kg, the mass of the star is 1E30 kg, and the radius is 1E11 m, so Newton's law of gravitation gives us 1.33E28 N. The internal surface area of the sphere is 1.26E23 m², so the equivalent "pressure" would be roughly 106 kPa.

Now, that's not a lot of pressure (it's roughly 1 bar), but it's acting over an enormous surface, and that comes into play when you try to calculate the resulting stress in the sphere wall. The equation for in-plane stress in a thin-walled spherical pressure vessel is pr/2t where p = pressure, r = radius and t = shell thickness, so the tensile stress on the shell would be roughly 2.65 TPa! To put this in perspective, it's roughly ten thousand times the yield strength of structural steel. Not bad, eh? It's also insensitive to the exact wall thickness of the sphere, because a thicker wall will increase the load-bearing area but it will also increase the mass of the sphere and hence the load (a full derivation would show the wall thickness term cancelling out).

As if it isn't enough to need steel which is ten thousand times stronger than normal, we still have to consider the construction problem: how would you build such a beast? A full sphere would have at least twice the mass of the star but the effect of its gravity on the star would be symmetrical and therefore nullified, so that the star isn't disrupted. However, what if they've got only one quarter of the sphere done? That would pull the star to one side, severely disrupting it in the process. They would have to carefully balance the construction of countless trillions of balanced segments around the star as they build the sphere so that symmetry is preserved at all times, and they would have to use huge engines to hold these pieces in place until they can be joined together into the finished sphere.

We can build a ping-pong ball today, but that doesn't mean we'll ever be able to build a Dyson Sphere (although, to be honest, Ringworld is a much better idea anyway). "

"Case Study: B-movies
I don't know about you, but I miss B-movies. When I was a kid, they would show these cheesy 1950's and 1960's sci-fi horror films on late-night TV, along with those wonderfully cheap kung-fu movies, bad dubbing and all. I still remember getting together with a good friend and staying up late to watch those crappy films, surrounded by buckets of junk food and pop. Alas, local television stations don't show that stuff any more, because they discovered they can make more money by showing those damned infomercials. After midnight, the tube is dominated by psychic hot-lines, cheesy mail-order products, and get-rich quick schemes ... a fine justification for capital punishment if I ever saw one.
Anyway, enough off-topic ranting for now. One thing about those old movies is that they were entirely preoccupied with size. Everywhere you looked, you would see creatures transforming or mutating into huge versions of themselves. Giant insects scaled buildings, Godzilla stomped Tokyo, and 50 foot women walked the Earth (complete with enlarged clothing and makeup). Ahhh ... now that was entertainment! Did any of this make sense? Of course not. But the realism problems didn't stop at the biological limitations that everyone knows and loves. People rarely ask themselves if these giant creatures would be structurally sound, and the answer is that they aren't. Let's look at a few examples:

Giant Insects
One of the mainstays of the classic B-movie era was the giant insect. Maybe there's something about giant insects that touches a primordial fear in all of us, or maybe they just made those movies because the special effects were easy to do. Either way, the image was a lasting one, and it still survives to this day, in the form of big-budget gorefests like "Starship Troopers".
Now, we all know that a bug's circulatory system can't be scaled up to enormous size, but what about its legs? Its wings? Its exoskeleton? Would they be able to stand the weight? People love to point out that an ant can lift 50 times its own weight, while a human can barely lift one times his own weight. As the saying goes, "if an ant were scaled up to the size of a human, he would be able to lift 7500 pounds!"

However, while the original observation (that an ant can lift 50 times his weight) is correct, the conclusion (that a human-sized ant would be able to lift 50 times his weight) is completely wrong. Just as the stress in a building's structural members is controlled by the ratio of load to cross-sectional area, the strength of animal muscles is predominantly controlled by their cross-sectional area.

Let's take an ant which is 5mm long, and enlarge it to about 1.7 metres long, like an average human being. Since the ant becomes about 340 times longer, it must become about 40 million times heavier, since mass is proportional to volume. However, the cross-sectional area of its legs would only be roughly 115,000 times bigger, so it would be 115,000 times stronger and its legs would be subjected to roughly 340 times as much stress. Proportionally, it will be 340 times weaker than it was at its "correct" size.

Therefore, while an ant might lift 50 times its own weight, if you scaled him up to human size, it would only be able to lift 0.15 times its own weight. This is like a 150 pound human being who struggles to lift a 20 pound dumbbell with both arms! That's utterly feeble, and such a feeble creature would most likely not be able to stand on its own power.

So if a human-sized ant might not even be able to move about on its own power, what about those huge building-sized ants in the B-movies? Try making our human-sized ant 20 times bigger. Now, the ant that could should lift 50 times its own weight would be limited to 0.007 times its own weight. This would be like a 150 pound human being who struggles to lift one pound! That's not even enough to survive. An ant of such size would collapse, its exoskeleton shattering like cheap glass, its eyes collapsing of their own weight and its internal organs rupturing spontaneously and spilling their fluids onto the ground.

The biologists criticize the giant-ant movies by saying that their circulatory systems wouldn't work, but the structural engineers can beat them to the punch: the giant ants won't get a chance to asphyxiate because they'll collapse into a puddle of goo first.

The 50 foot tall Woman
Did anyone else ever see these movies? It was almost a genre at one point, with huge people walking around all over the place. The structural problems faced by a huge person are similar to those faced by a giant insect:
A 50 foot woman would have nearly 10 times the height of a normal woman. If we assume the multiplier to be exactly 10 (for the sake of mathematical simplicity), this means she would weigh 1000 times as much as a normal woman, but the cross-sectional area of her muscles and bones would only increase by 100 times, so her bones would be subject to ten times more stress than normal. Normal adult humans can range in weight from under 100 pounds to over 1000 pounds so the skeleton wouldn't shatter under gravity, but acrobatic movements would be out of the question.
Since human muscle strength is proportional to muscle cross-section area, she would have only one tenth her normal strength. This wouldn't be enough to kill her, but movement of any kind would be very laboured.
Fluid systems are controlled by pressure, and pressure is proportional to area. Her heart would pump blood through her arteries at one tenth its normal pressure (because the heart is a muscle), and her veins would return blood at ten times their normal pressure (because the ratio of blood mass to vein cross-section area will be ten times greater). In other words, she'd have double trouble: the blood will pool around her ankles and her heart won't be able to pump it back to her head.
The first two problems would be severe nuisances, but the third would undoubtedly be fatal. Although I'm not a doctor, I can't imagine that 10% blood pressure in the arteries and 1000% blood pressure in the veins would be a long-term sustainable situation. The 50 foot woman should have died. It's as simple as that. Also, her high heels should have collapsed under the weight, and her clothes should have shredded easily as she moved around in them (which would have made the films more interesting if not for her quick death).
Godzilla
Hey, what discussion of B-movies would be complete without the almighty Godzilla? You can't help but love the big guy ... he crushes buildings, he has fire breath, and he shakes off artillery like a gentle rain. What's not to love?
But would he hold together? Godzilla has varied in size over the years, but let's look at his huge, 100 metre tall early 90's incarnation. That huge Godzilla is around 60,000 tons by most accounts, and if you scale him down to human size (accounting for his bulky shape) this figure seems plausible.

Now, would he hold up? When he stands, all of his weight rests on the bones in his legs. If we use the proportional thickness of the human femur as a basis for comparison, he would have to support his enormous weight on bones which have 3.5 m² of cross-sectional area at their narrowest point. And here's the bad news: 60,000 tons supported by 3.5 m² works out to a compressive stress of more than 170 MPa, or nearly twice the ultimate compressive strength of bone (note that I'm not even accounting for the fact that he can walk and jump, which will produce much higher stresses than merely standing still).

Moral of the story? Godzilla shouldn't survive. His bones should shatter, his epidermis should rip open like an overinflated water balloon, and his guts should spill all over the streets of Tokyo. Alternatively, if we decide to suspend disbelief, we can only look at him and speculate that he must have bones of structural steel and skin like armour plate. Oddly enough, this means that the more "realistic" fleshy and vulnerable Godzilla in the recent Matthew Broderick film is actually less realistic. If Godzilla exists at all, he must be quite literally built like a tank.

All hail Godzilla! King of the monsters."

Case Study: The Executor
Executor-class star destroyers are good examples of the engineering difficulties posed by large-scale starship construction. Let's look at the specs:
Length: 17.6 km
Width: ~6.5 km
Thickness: ~1.7 km
The Executor decelerated at a rate of roughly 30 km/s² in ROTJ along with the rest of the fleet, so what kind of force would be required? If we assume 10% solidity and iron construction, the ship's mass would be well over 35 billion tons. In order to accelerate that much metal at 30 km/s², its 13 engines would have to generate around 8E16 N apiece. If I recall correctly, each engine is perhaps 300 metres wide, so the outlet pressure would be around 1.13 TPa. An engine of such outlet pressure, scaled down to a pair of 10x10 metre squares and attached to the back of, oh, say, a 4.5 million ton starship would accelerate it at more than 50,000 m/s².
Even if we ignore the engines and look only at the structure of the ship itself, it would have to be enormously strong in order to simply survive this rate of acceleration. Let's take its cross-sectional area at the thickest point to be roughly 5.5 million m². If the ship is 10% solid, this would mean there is roughly 550,000 m² of metal which has to withstand a total of more than 1E18 N of force, for a resultant stress in excess of 1.8 TPa (nearly 7000 times the yield stress of structural steel). In fact, even if it were a solid block of metal, it would still have to be made out of a material which is 700 times stronger than structural steel in order to survive the acceleration without permanent deformation!

We also know that the Executor can survive the gravity of a planet even when it's powered down, because an Executor-class ship was buried for years under a mountain range on Coruscant. However, the stresses imposed on its frame from its high sublight acceleration would be much higher than the stresses imposed by the weight of a mountain range, so the ship's ability to survive its own engine output is still its most impressive attribute (particularly during hard turns such as the one in ROTJ, which would impose bending moments on the ship's frame). It must be constructed out of impossibly strong materials or it must incorporate some sort of forcefields in order to hold it together.



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Case Study: The Death Star
If we're talking about big Imperial starships, we can't go away without mentioning the Death Star. Contrary to popular belief (and Obi-Wan Kenobi's statement to the contrary), the Death Star is actually a starship rather than a battle station. Remember that a battle station is, by definition, stationary, while the Death Star was able to easily traverse many tens of thousands of light years in a matter of hours, under its own power. Now let's look at the numbers:
Diameter: 160 kilometres
Maximum sublight acceleration: at least 1 km/s² as demonstrated in "Star Wars: A New Hope"
Armament: tens of thousands of heavy turbolaser turrets, and one planet-destroying superlaser
The structural stresses imposed upon the Death Star during its 1 km/s² acceleration are huge. Let us imagine that the Death Star's interior is 10% solid, and composed of iron. This would give it a mass of 1.7E18 kg (a very conservative figure since it unleashes energy with a mass-equivalent of around 1E21 kg when it destroys Alderaan). Its sublight engines are distributed around its equator, but only half of them can possibly fire in any given direction at once. They are invisibly small from a distance of only a few kilometres away, so it would be extremely generous to assume that they are ½ km wide apiece (let's say they're round).
If there are 200 such engines spaced around the Death Star's equator, and half of them fired to accelerate the station at 1 km/s² in ANH, each engine would have to exert 1.7E19 N of force. Given the (ridiculously exaggerated) ½ km diameter of each engine, that would work out to very conservative 87 TPa. This would, of course, also be the bearing stress on the back of the engine (and it's more than 300,000 times the yield stress of structural steel).

How potent would these engines have to be? Let's put it this way: if you took an engine of such nozzle pressure, and scaled it down to 1 metre wide (like one of the engine outlets on an F-15 Eagle), it would produce enough thrust to accelerate the 21 ton aircraft at roughly 330 million g's! Those pilots stay in pretty good shape, but I think that would turn even the toughest aviator into a pile of goo.

What about a certain fictional starship, rumoured to be about 4.5 million tons in mass? Let's take our 87 TPa engines, scale them down to a pair of 10 metre wide squares, and put the pedal to the metal. How fast will it go? Try 3.9 million m/s². The Death Star is famed for its ridiculously powerful weapon, but its frame and its engines are rather impressive in their own right.

The lesson from the examples of the Executor and the Death Star is clear: in order for a huge starship to accelerate at great speed, its frame and its engines must be much stronger than those of a small ship, even after accounting for the size disparity.



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Conclusion
When some simpleton looks at enormous sci-fi structures and concludes that anyone could build them with enough raw materials, he is only betraying a pitiful lack of engineering knowledge, not to mention common sense. Have you ever seen the Tonka commercial where they shove a Tonka truck and real, full-size dump truck off a cliff? The Tonka truck bounces and clatters all the way down to the bottom, dented but intact. The full-size dump truck, on the other hand, crashes to the bottom as a twisted, barely recognizable pile of wreckage. The humourous subtext to the commercial was that Tonka trucks are tougher than the real thing, but the real story is as an object grows larger, its own mass becomes its worst enemy.
As an aside, this is one of the problems with automotive crash testing. By slamming a car into a nigh-immovable concrete wall or barrier, the NHTSA artificially elevates the crash-test scores of small cars while artificially depressing the scores of large cars. In a collision with a barrier of effectively infinite momentum (by virtue of being anchored to the ground), a large car will be crushed by its own weight. But in a collision with another car, the situation is entirely different. The car with lower momentum will suffer greater deceleration and hence, more damage. That's why sub-compacts score well in crash tests but fold like cheap tents in real-world crashes (the lethality of SUV's in collisions is partially due to their superior mass as well, but it's also due to their high bumpers which tend to crash through car windows, thus giving us yet another reason to consider raised SUV suspensions incredibly irresponsible).

Anyway, back to the subject at hand: you can't just "scale up" a design to make a bigger building or a bigger ship, even if you have the necessary raw materials. Bigger designs require entirely different engineering and construction methods, not to mention superior materials. Every time I get an E-mail from some dumb-assed Trekkie who says "the Federation could build a Death Star if they wanted to; it's just a matter of raw materials" (especially from the pin-heads who cite the Egyptian pyramids as proof), I'm reminded yet again that common sense is nowhere near as common as one might hope.

That's why, that the Federation would be able to build a standing base the size of a Death Star, but it would never be able to make it move.

What? The Federation lacks that logistics to build anything close in size to the Death Star. They also lack the technology. Their entire civilization generates less power than the Death Star.

I also guess you missed the second sentence.

"Contrary to popular belief (and Obi-Wan Kenobi's statement to the contrary), the Death Star is actually a starship rather than a battle station."


If they built something that big(which they never would be able to do) then if it didn't move, it would be useless as a show of might.

But the Death Star as a starship is a real slug.

It had hyperdrive, that's how it moved through space, which on ordinary terms, UNDER the speed of light, would take thousands of years.

I talk ONLY about realspace speeds.

Well SW is based around Hyperdrive man. No Hyperdrive, no SW.

And hyperdrive pisses all over Warpspeed any day.

Damn straight Deus.

Usually I try to get threads back on topic, but it's so one sided that I don't even care. The empire has so many more people that the Covenant would run out of ammo before they could even kill the storm troopers even if The Empire lined up to be killed. The Empire could fist fight them to death.

not to mention they can keep cloning 87% of their troops and hire some hard core bounty hunters to ruin the lives of the covenant leaders

God, what is it that leads people to believe that the Empire's Stormtroopers are ALL clones, even 5 years after ROTJ? Why do people think that Kamino is somehow churning out billions-trillion, of troopers, when throughout the Clone Wars they only somehow managed 1.2 million?

Most weren't Clones. There were 1.2 mil clones and several billion storm troopers.\

5 years after ROTJ there were clones again. Thrawn created a new batch of them.

And the Clones from Kamino wouldn't last until 5 years after ROTJ. They were ten by AOTC. 23 years later, thats thirty three years old. Nine years after that? Well, the Clones would be over eight because of growth acceleration.

curse you simus, you stole my idea! I would have posted this, so I posted the aliance

With a galaxy full of willing recruits, why WOULD the Empire waste time and money creating new clones at only a million or so at a time?

But with stormtrooper numbers dwindled and the rest horded by the Warlords, Thrawn needed the hidden batch of Spaarti cylinders to grow a million or so more to man his new fleet.

Damn this whole clone-stormtrooper thing, it's so full of plot-holes.

Kamino ain't the only place where to clone people. The Imperial armor can't protect stormtroopers against prehistoric arrows, as seen in ROTJ. Stormtrooper armor can defend only against gases. It means that Covenant ammo can pierce through stormtrooper armor. And how'd they get the coordinates of Covenant worlds? Hyperdrives need coordinates to work.

Same way the Covenant finds Imperial forces: this scenario assumes they stumble onto one another.

When the Hell did we see arrows penetrate armour in that film?

I saw rocks knocking them out, not arrows punching through their armour.

I didn't see that either.

And are we to disclude the fact that every piece of EU, (sighs) prior to AOTC, clearly shows, that every stormtrooper with the exception of Thrawn's clones, are men who were recruited or forced into service, and all of which came from their momma?

This is actually a good battle.

The Empire has the numbers (as far as we know) because the Covenant has no record of population. However, they are formed of multiple races and species, such as the Elites, Brutes, Drones, and Hunters. They do not have one simply recruiting pool. For whenever the Covenant cross another race, they use a tactic. Conquer and control.

Covenant lore dictates that the Elites and the Prophets once engaged in a war. However, they set aside differences, and set up the first caste. The Elites would serve as the generals and infantrymen, while the Prophets led politically, and religiously, governing the Covenant. And so, one after another, the Prophets' technology combined with the Elites' tactics, the Covenant fought and conquered each race. The Grunts, the Hunters, the Drones, the Jackals, and the Brutes.

As far as we know, the space battles would be in Imperial favor. Then you will couple this with their superweapons, and so forth. The Covenant has mass-fleets, but their capital ships are weaker than an Imperial Star Destroyer.

However, the Imperials will not so easily win on ground battles. Though they have immense numbers, the Empire in essence, are only humans. An Elite is far stronger than any mere clone, and is worth about a dozen Stormtroopers. Then, climb the Covenant's power rankings. A single Brute would decimate an Imperial squadron, and so would a single Hunter. Perhaps only the 501st Legion would stand a chance. In sheer ground battles, the Empire would probably lose.

Only would Palpatine's cadre of Dark Side users prove up to be a very hard fight. Then, you have Tartarus. Energy swords on Halo are, for all intents and purposes, their version of the lightsaber. They perform instant-kills and burn through a lot. Tartarus is far stronger than any Hunter or any Brute. Couple that with his energy shield, and he is a very dangerous foe. Vader's lack of speed, coupled with his own inferior strength, would perhaps lose to Tartarus. Only the Force would save him.

And back to space. High Charity is not easily found. They were only discovered when the Prophets decided to reveal High Charity on to Delta Halo.

The Space Battles - Imperial favor.
The Ground Battles - Covenant favor.

In the end, the Empire wins.

Wow. Dude, where have you been all this forum's life?

I must say I gisagree with you on the ground battles though. An ISD could knock out any Covenant from Orbit, making ground battles unecessary.

Also, in pure troops, I think you are underrating them against the Elite's.

Wikipedia states that the average unshielded Elite is about equal to a human marine, except with better weapons. No human marine is going to stand a chance against 12 Stormtroopers.


The Convenant also have less mobile weapons platforms from what I can tell. I'd like to see an AT-ST rip up covenant forces. A Banshee would fall against a Tie Fighter too.

Definetly, you rule the skies, you rule it all.

Wikipedia is wrong, since in Fall of Reach and other sources have shown that Elites are as strong as a Spartan in physical combat. This makes them -much- stronger than a simple marine.

An AT-AT couldn't defeat a Wraith tank. A TIE fighter has less shielding than a banshee even does. I'd not warrant the Imperials to the skies. And wikipedia can be edited by anyone. I've played the game. A single Elite can wipe out six or seven Helljumpers, which are the greatest of the Humans. A Brute could crush any contingent of Stormtroopers I'd care to name, and a Hunter could possibly do worse.

Imagine what a GROUP of Brutes would do.

Curious though... covenant energy shields are easily affected by their own heat based weapons. Blaster bolts are pretty on par with that. Elite shields won't work very well, and the rate of fire for a Wraith or Banshee is much lower than their Imperial equivalents.

The shields are affected by projectiles - but moreso - by 'plasma' based weaponry, which is the practical foundation for Forerunner technology. A blaster bolt would be less. It's not 'heat' that effects the shields.

But it is energy, people tend to forget the difference between Lead bullets and Laser bolts.

Then, you have Jackals. Jackals are trained snipers and assassins. Their senses are far more acute than any human, or clone. Each is also a nice shot with a Covenant sniper-rifle, insinuating they are crack marksmen. Then, you have Drones. Drones are incredibly agile and hard to hit when airborn, and they fire in quick successions. Brutes are all around, the best. They are quick, agile, and strong. To a level above the Elites. Any Brute, I'm afraid, could kill a contingent of stormtroopers. Any. And then you have Brute Honorguards... and eesh... I'd hate to be an Imperial.

Actually, a blaster bolt is charged gas particles discharged from the gun. The laser is actually an afterimage of the actual blast. And blaster bolts do considerable damage with heat-like effects because excited energy tends to do that to what it touches. Examples include Han Solo's heavy blaster in the dock ANH shoot out (Look at the size of the blaster bolt holes), the gun of a speeder in ROTJ splitting a small tree with ease, etc.

Considering that a standard pistol can take its toll on all personal energy fields used in Halo, a blaster carbine would take them down in a hot second.

And then you tend to forget. The Stormtroopers aren't the best shots on the planet. They'd actually have to 'hit' the targets. The Stormtrooper armor is also very weak. You'd have Covenant firing back at you with equally deadly weapons. Not to mention that, again I stress this, the Empire would lose in melee skirmishes. They are not stronger than an Elite.

Hopefully, the Stormtroopers would be smart enough to never do that, but they seem to lack intelligence... Lol.

How many forces do the Covenant have?

Also, are there any specs on the Covenant tanks?

Touche on the latter points, but the idea that STs can shoot is poor sampling based on one scene: the shootout in ANH in the hangar of the Death Star. And really, it's pretty evident that there was never any intent to kill the intruders, since a tracking device was planted on the Falcon. The Imperials were smart; they wanted to find and destroy the rebels.

Originally posted by Tangible God
When the Hell did we see arrows penetrate armour in that film?

I saw rocks knocking them out, not arrows punching through their armour.

www.st-v-sw.net has a page called Invincible Stormtrooper "Armor" where it clearly shows where stormtrooper armor had been pierced by arrows.

Don't flash that Trekkie fanboy site around here.

As far as we're concerned, it's the closest to neutrality site that we got about Star Trek versus Star Wars. Stardestroyer.net is the most rabidly pro-Wars site for any pro-Wars site.

Yeah, please, don't post sites that are based on VS themes when trying to prove a point.

None of it's real, it's fictional and can be effectively debated only by reason and fact, not fanboyism.

i dont know much about halo so i asked one of my friends that obsessed and he said that the covenant would activate halo destroying all organic life in the entre universe causeing a stalemate. but i though ti'd just throw that out there.

Originally posted by Twilight Janick
As far as we're concerned, it's the closest to neutrality site that we got about Star Trek versus Star Wars. Stardestroyer.net is the most rabidly pro-Wars site for any pro-Wars site.

Stardestroyer.net is logically sound, too. The site was made in order to compile data on how just out of the ballpark at win for the Federation against the Empire really was.

There seems to be very few fictional organizations that can take out the Empire.

My secret devout followers of the one TRUE Force God - No... not NJO Luke... but in truth, the omnipotent C-3P0. We can take on the Empire. Down with Artoo! Down with the Jawas!

....

I had such high hopes for you too.

Finish him!

*Sics elite sith jawas*

*hits Deus over the head with a magic marker*

Ha!

*puts hand on the Jawas head and holds them back*

Jawa air raid!

Bomb zem!

Beginning Hunter-Jawa mode.

Meet my latest creation...

Exar Simus Ragnos. Mwahahahahahahaha!

Attack the Jawas!

Artoo sez bring it, heretic!

http://img455.imageshack.us/img455/3160/artooinfidelcalling1xj.jpg

*Exar Simus Ragnos winks and Artoo disintigrates*

Artoo is invincible. Nothing can defeat him.

Artoo is invincible beyond invincible. He simply beeps and the entire fabric of eternity is destroyed.

Oh yeah, well... Well... Exar Simus Ragnos has the ability to make things vulnerable! Ha!

Not Artoo.

Where do you think Sith powers come from?

I lied... I don't worship C-3P0. It is Jar Jar whom I serve! Darth Jar Jar, the TRUE Dark Lord of the Sith. It was 'he' who manipulated Palpatine. MWahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

....

Yousa gonna die!

Artoo's eternal and sworn enemy. The Dark Lord of the Dark Things. Darth Jar Jar Binks aka Darth Mesa Clumsy! Lol. Mwahahahahahahahahahahahahahah

Death to the enemy!

http://img453.imageshack.us/img453/7146/darthjarjar4ie.jpg

Only two things in the known universe can stop Artoo.

Dead Batteries and Astromech porn.

Darth Clumsy says that Artoo is supposedly rumored to be an Astromech pimp. Is this true?

And as for the Astromech porn, I'll simply borrow the March issue of Deus's copy of 'Playmech' or 'Big Domes' (lol) to distract Artoo as my master kills him.

lmao!

Big Domes?

too close to call maybe the covies could win at least on a land battle, in space it's hard to say, i'd say whoever had numbers/shot first/better tactics as i think plasma torpedo's etc. would destroy basically any imperial ship, covenant ships seem at least equal, i'd say it comes down to tactics, so in all fairness the imperials kick ass unless the arbiter is in command, never mind vader>all halo charachters but for land battle arbiter could kill most sw charachters including many jedi as could master chief. but back on topic, it all comes down to tactics and imperial admirals seem to be better tacticians then most covenant idiots so imps win.

Originally posted by Darth_Frobo
too close to call maybe the covies could win at least on a land battle, in space it's hard to say, i'd say whoever had numbers/shot first/better tactics as i think plasma torpedo's etc. would destroy basically any imperial ship, covenant ships seem at least equal, i'd say it comes down to tactics, so in all fairness the imperials kick ass unless the arbiter is in command, never mind vader>all halo charachters but for land battle arbiter could kill most sw charachters including many jedi as could master chief. but back on topic, it all comes down to tactics and imperial admirals seem to be better tacticians then most covenant idiots so imps win. It's already been settled that on land, the Covenant wins, but in space, they'd be annhilated.

Astromech porn? You can suck my steel extension rod!

Originally posted by Tangible God
It's already been settled that on land, the Covenant wins, but in space, they'd be annhilated.

that depends on the power of the imps shields,if a plasma torpedo could instantly burn thorugh multiple layers of the most powerful titanium known to man they may be able to penetreate imp shields, the other thing is could imp blasters penetrate covenant shields which could withstand hundreds of missles and nuclear weapons, as i dont know the full specs on imp weaponry/shielding i'm not quite sure i could say with all certainty the imps would pull it off.

Originally posted by Darth_Frobo
that depends on the power of the imps shields,if a plasma torpedo could instantly burn thorugh multiple layers of the most powerful titanium known to man they may be able to penetreate imp shields, the other thing is could imp blasters penetrate covenant shields which could withstand hundreds of missles and nuclear weapons, as i dont know the full specs on imp weaponry/shielding i'm not quite sure i could say with all certainty the imps would pull it off. Actually, sheer numbers, speed, firepower, and energy shielding (which is quite effective against Covenant plasma) is what gives the Empire the edge.

On land though, the Covenant seem to be able decimate the Imps. One Elite is enough to take out a squad of Stormtroopers and the AT-AT's are the best the Imps can conjure, and it's obvious Wraith's and Ghost's and whatever the Hell else the Covies hav, can take out the Empire's ground Forces.

Originally posted by Tangible God
Actually, sheer numbers, speed, firepower, and energy shielding (which is quite effective against Covenant plasma) is what gives the Empire the edge.

On land though, the Covenant seem to be able decimate the Imps. One Elite is enough to take out a squad of Stormtroopers and the AT-AT's are the best the Imps can conjure, and it's obvious Wraith's and Ghost's and whatever the Hell else the Covies hav, can take out the Empire's ground Forces.

Don't forget the Covenant's equivalent of AT-AT's - Scarabs!

Ah yes, knew I forgot something.

The Empire would use star destroyers to bomb the covenent forces on land. Then they would send down troops to finish off any survivors. Lead by the Emperors Hands, just so that they don't just have crappy Storm Troopers.

Originally posted by jollyjim311
The Empire would use star destroyers to bomb the covenent forces on land. Then they would send down troops to finish off any survivors. Lead by the Emperors Hands, just so that they don't just have crappy Storm Troopers. It really isn't a GROUND battle if you use orbital bombardment is it?

No, but the Empire would do that. and I think the Empire would take the covenent forces on the ground. AT-ST's and AT-AT's, the covenent weapons couldn't get through their armor.

Originally posted by jollyjim311
No, but the Empire would do that. and I think the Empire would take the covenent forces on the ground. AT-ST's and AT-AT's, the covenent weapons couldn't get through their armor. Of course the Emoire would do that.

But we've been discussing whether the Empire could take on the Covenant with ONLY their ground forces.

And you're forgetting, the majority of the Imp's Ground's don't have any shielding. The AT-AT's are the most powerful of them all and they lack maneuverability. Also they lack sufficient shielding to protect against the Cov's plasma.

And the AT-ST's have absolutely NO shielding and the Wraiths could fire one shot and down go the Scouts. Stormtrooper batallions would be wasted by the Elites alone.

Not to mention the Scarabs. They're like the Halo version of Walkers and are much more capable.

If the Rebels weaponry couldn't get through the AT-AT's armor, I seriously doubt that the covenents can.

P.S.- when I said armor before, I meant the hull not any sort of protective sheilding.

And why can't burning plasma not burn through ordinary metal?

The Rebels used snowspeeders, crappy tow-craft with cables, which tripped the Walkers, ordinary cable tripped those things.

Scarabs would just have to WALK into AT-AT's to knock them over, not to mention that huge motherf*ckin cannon on the front of it.

The wraiths, when in numbers could move behind the AT-AT's and take out its legs.

Don't even get me started on Scout Walkers, they're weak and trip to easily.

The Speeder bike Troopers are really good pilots, you know, they would help a great deal. And the rebel lasers couldn't damage the AT-AT's.

Originally posted by jollyjim311
The Speeder bike Troopers are really good pilots, you know, they would help a great deal. And the rebel lasers couldn't damage the AT-AT's. What would speeder bikes do with their crappy lasers and "one shot and we're down" tactics?

And the whole SW galaxy uses lasers. So it's only natural that armour is created to repel lasers. But seering plasma isn't lasers. The Walkers had NO shielding, only tough armour.