Registered: Feb 2005
Location: Hiding from zombies
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.
Registered: Jul 2005
Location: Center of the Omniverse
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.
Registered: Feb 2005
Location: Hiding from zombies
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.
Registered: Feb 2005
Location: Hiding from zombies
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?
"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.
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.
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. "
__________________ http://darthglentract.tripod.com/index.html Go Jawa's!!
"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."
__________________ http://darthglentract.tripod.com/index.html Go Jawa's!!
Oct 13th, 2005 11:16 PM
http://darthglentract.tripod.com/index.html Go Jawa's!!
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. 
