Because your argument seems centered around focusing on what the Enterprise can do, while assuming that the ISD will simply sit there and twiddle its figurative thumbs while Picard and his crew resolve to ram the star destroyer, or try to transporter-through the shields, or whatever. Given that:
1. A star destroyer can turn the surface of a planet into molten slag within a matter of hours.
2. A star destroyer's reactor (powering weapons and shields) has the power output of a small star, based both on official figures from the ICS, scaling from the Death Star, and acceleration feats.
3. Even individual tie bombers can be armed with deadly thermonuclear warheads, and we see even dominion ships struggle mightily to hit significantly clumsier fighters.
all the strategies you've devised for the Federation simply don't have the time to be executed, even if they would have worked.
Last edited by Master Han on Aug 27th, 2013 at 12:42 AM
__________________ Recently Produced and Distributed Young but High-Ranking Political Figure of Royal Ancestry within the Modern American Town Affectionately Referred To as Bel-Air.
I'd like to point out several problems I am seeing in the recent arguments:
1. The Enterprise D has a much longer range of fire than a Star Destroyer. All the Enterprise D has to do is stay out of range and continue to bombard the Star Destroyer.
2. Star Trek shields can most certainly be transported through and it has been done many times. But it requires specific technologies that are not present in the Star Wars universe (more on this, in point 5).
3. The old Enterprise (TOS) could take 90 Photon Torpedoes at once before failing. The general yield of a Photon Torp is 25 isotons. 25 isotons is enough to vape a city in seconds...so roughly as powerful as the most powerful thermonuke weapon ever detonated by humans. The newer ships from the D's era had absurdly more durable shields. To what extent, it is not known. But it was enough to make the old Enterprise's shields look like paper.
4. The shields in Star Trek are made specifically to block certain types of energies (harmful radiations, transporters, and so forth). Star Wars shields will not have been designed to block transporters because they simply do not exist in Star Wars. The argument of their shields blocking transporters is moot. We already know some forms of radiation get through those shields because light is able to reflect off of their ships and reach the "viewer". Unless their shields only allow visible light to pass through the shields, it is impossible case to logically make that the Star Destroyer shields would black transporter shields since the Star Trek shields were specifically designed to block transporters (but later were upgraded enough to allow "acceptable" ships to transport through those shields). In fact, we know Star Wars shields are ineffective against more than just visible light. They are also ineffective against pretty much everything except energy weapons. Kinetic impacts? Nope: no protection. That stuff seems to pass right through. Some types of communications? Nope, those seem to get right through, too. So what DO those shields actually block? Anything? Looks like it only blocks energy based and particle based weapons. That's rather specific. More to the point, they are not designed to block subspace energy-beams. Subspace transmissions and matter-streams don't even exist in Star Wars. Why is this important? Because that's how transporters work: turns matter into energy, sends the matter-stream (which is energy, at this point) through subspace to the destination, pulls it out of subspace at the target, and rematerializes it. On snap, Star Trek haters are going to have to find a new argument because they didn't know how Star Trek worked.
5. The Enterprise D has a shield inverter which can basically redirect high energy particles...Sooo...sooo....plasma weapons would be hilariously useless against the Enterprise D?
6. The metaphasic shields really do provide continuous protection from a star's corona...which is the equivalent of sitting in the hottest portion of a nuke blast, for extended periods of time, over the entire surface of the shields, while also negating the effects of the plasma flow (resisting the "plasma winds" in the corona). Shields "holding steady" under those conditions is not something that can be easily dismissed as being irrelevant to this discussion. It would seem Star Trek shields are much more suited for energy and energy type deflection than kinetic weapons. However, Star Wars shields seem to offer no resistance to kinetic weapons. Rail guns would make short work of Star Wars shields.
7. The Enterprise D has decent maneuverability as it can navigate, with a deft pilot, through subspace anomalies with very limited warning (2 seconds warning). Additionally, Picard seems to have no issue piloting through an asteroid field...unlike his Star Destroyer friends from ESB:
(please log in to view the image)
Hehehehee!
8. It has been posted by me at least 3 times: the Enterprise, alone, is enough to destroy the entire surface of a populated planet in hours as stated by Commander Riker. Seems the firepowers of a Star Destroyer and Enterprise are much more closely matched than thought. Different types of weapons so a direct energy measure is fairly useless. lulz, rofl
Here are the conclusions:
Star Wars shields offer no protections from transporters because their shields were not designed to specifically block transporters like Star Trek shields are.
The Enterprise is much faster and more mobile than Star Destroyers which are very stationary. Moving in a straight line isn't everything. Duh.
Star Trek shields are more than capable of withstanding the equivalent of the constant energy of powerful nuke blasts at the most energetic portion. Constant.
Plasma based weaponry can simply be redirected with the shield inverter making plasma weapons a bad idea.
Star Wars shields offer little to no (most likely no) kinetic resistances while the Star Trek shields do.
Enterprise D has a significantly farther weapons range than a Star Destroyer making the entire thread spite: it has no way to damage the Enterprise as the D can just stay out of range.
By all means, enlighten us on those "energies required to do so".
Hint: your answer will be in joules per second per unit area OR just simply a total joules per second (if you want your answer to be in terms of the entire surface area of the shield's surface). So you'll need the surface area of the elliptical shield of the Enterprise D. You are given that 2 million degrees C is your coronal temp. You'll need to add the force of energy (which is an almost convoluted problem, in and of itself. Hint: Pascals) the average velocity of the plasma winds has on the surface of the elliptical shields. Then you'll need to convert the magnetic field to energy and figure out how much dissipation the shields offer to negate that energy system. THEN you will need to find the other forms of radiation a body will undergo at that proximity to a main-sequence star (x-rays, gamma-rays, etc.) and figure out how much will have to be negated by the shields. You certainly are pretty dang smart if you were able to easily come up with this figures and then easily dismiss them as being "not very impressive". Good luck. Let me know how it goes.
Wow, finally, an intelligible argument from the other side...
Incorrect. Are we going by standard observed ranges, or maximum effective ranges? There's a reason why your typical firefight doesn't extend out several hundred meters, despite most modern semi-automatics easily having such ranges.
In 90+% of ST engagement, we observe starships trading shots from a few dozen kilometers apart, at best. Look no further than your typical fleet vs. borg cube engagement; despite tackling an enemy of obviously enormous size, they still feel the need to almost hug their hull. Or look at the battle in Nemesis; cloaked starships engage the Enterprise in such close proximity that they were getting hit by blind firing!
In contrast, whilst we see point-blank exchanges in Star Wars, RotJ, and more specifically the novelization, make it clear that such engagements are last resort desperation tactics, and that the vast majority of battles happen across ranges of hundreds of kilometers (RotS novelization, Star by Star).
Now, you could doubtlessly pull up examples of Star Trek engagements (usually smaller ones) occuring at ranges of hundreds of thousands of kilometers...but you could easily pull off the same for Star Wars (ie., Vader intended to bombard the Rebel base on Hoth from outside the star system, and we have an EU example of a turbolaser shot hitting a YV worldship from light minutes away).
Even ignoring far more conservative firepower estimates based on other evidence...
A medium turbolaser can yield hundreds of gigatons.
And BTW, Leland Chee confirmed on two occasions that the ICS's are not only canon, but are the first place he'd look to in regards to firepower yields.
Also, look at scaling from the Death Star's superlaser.
Let's assume for a brief moment that your extrapolations are correct. (and you make several outright factual errors; for example, Star Wars shields can deflect kinetic impacts; indeed, the Death Star novel describes the battle station's shields' deflecting hypersonic debris the size of mountains following the destruction of Alderaan).
Any tactics that would involve transporters would be far slower and less sure of success than the star destroyer's plan of vaporizing the Enterprise with a single shot.
You're scientifically literate. Surely you know that such a device would have obvious limits, and would not extend towards defending against weaponry orders of magnitude more powerful than any conventional weaponry ever seen used by the Alpha Quadrant powers.
And turbolaser bolts aren't plasma weaponry.
Actually, there's an episode where Data points out that the Enterprise would only last a certain amount of time at a certain distance from a pulsar before its shields would drop. Someone calc'd it on spacebattles to be around half a kiloton (LOL).
I'll see if I can find it.
Not all asteroid fields are alike. The one observed in ESB is almost impossibly violent.
No, not really. "destroy the entire surface" <<<<<< turn it to molten slag, blow away its atmosphere and boil its oceans, all of which have occurred in Star Wars canon.
(cont)
Last edited by Master Han on Aug 28th, 2013 at 07:31 PM
Addressed above. Some of these claims, such as turbolasers' being plasma weapons and Star Wars shields offering little kinetic resistance, are just flatout misunderstandings of the universe's lore.
Sorry, I should clarify what I meant by "impressive". By realistic tech standards, it would certainly exceed connotations of the word, but compared to a star destroyer's shielding capabilities...
The Star Wars: Complete Locations (canon) gives the Executor's shielding systems the power output of a medium star, ie. around e26 watts. A star destroyer's reactor is around one hundrenth of the SSD's size, and built from the same technology of the same era.
Similarly, we know that turbolasers on predecessors to the ISD can cause magnitude 10 earthquakes upon impact (RotS: ICS), ie. 15 gigatons being the lower limit to their firepower.
So, unless if you would seriously argue that sitting in the corona of a star would translate to being able to withstand gigatons/teratons of concentrated firepower...you know it doesn't. The output of the entire sun is "only" e26 joules.
Incorrect: we are going by onscreen, G-level canon evidence which trumps all others. The ranges are specific and significantly smaller than Star Trek ranges. This is not an argument that can change. I will not address any points to this, any more because it simply cannot be debated (seriously, there's nothing to debate, here).
Visual effects don't match up with what was really happening. This is what ST supporters do when they are clearly wrong. For example, Riker says they are "55 seconds to firing range" of the "Lysian Central Command". Visually, they are right there. Yet, they are supposed to be traveling at impulse speed! That speed is generally around 50%-80% the speed of light. 55 seconds is a really really long time. So why did they show the two structures being so visually close? Simple: it was a visual effect to keep the show from being uninteresting. Yes, that's right: Star Trek gets science horribly wrong just like Star Wars (you won't see Trekkies admit this).
So they were either millions of km apart in that episode or the instruments were wrong and they were far closer.
I'll stick with the more correct interpretation. Going back to that episode that Riker served as a Klingon first officer, they talked about getting in to 40,000 km and yet, visually, they were right on top of each other. hmmm....what's up? Oh, right, the director of the episode can't very well show the enterprise as being invisible or the audience would not know what is going on.
Things get muddier during close-combat skirmishes, in Star Trek. Now we are supposed to just believe they are close again just because it works for the audience, visually? It is one of the failings of Star Trek.
Well, I am willing to concede this point if you can make the same argument I am about Star Trek's obvious fail with the visual effects. But, from what I could tell of ESB, they were in orbit above Hoth, not out of the star system.
We have to stick with the G-level canon results, not with what some manual says. It turns out that the Enterprise D can do the same thing to the surface of a planet as a Star Destroyer. It would appear a simply "Joules" measurement is not possible so that argument is out of the window, too. That is one thing with Sci-Fi that makes these discussions sometimes difficult. We could say the average Star Trek phaser emitters are rated at just 1 watt a second but if that is enough to vaporize and entire moon, the values are fairly meaningless and incomparable to Star Wars on-book figures. So, we compare the results.
For proof of these results, the Enterprise D's phasers were significantly modified and toned down to do some drilling on a planet. It a very short period of time, the underpowered and refocused phaser drilled several kilometers into a planet to adjust/relief some of the . So what Riker tells us about a planetary bombardment seems to hold true. So as far as particle weapons are concerned, they are comparable.
I could do the math for that drilling phaser feat. The width of the beam may have been given but I could estimate, visually, the area of the beam as a city appears next to one of the beams in their firing sequence. Just a simple guess: it vastly dwarfs the asteroid vaporization feat we saw in ESB (a feat often quoted and cited as triumphant proof of the superiority of the Star Wars Star Destroyer's fire power). I would say it is an order of magnitude in difference of power (10 times or more). There's that much of a difference. But unlike the Trekkies, I am not going to pretend the phasers are vastly superior: I will conclude, logically, that when pressed for maximum effort, they both can level the entire surface of a planet. So I put them on roughly equal footing.
That would be an incorrect statement on your part because it contradicts G-level canon. Namely, mere asteroids were harming Star Destroyers and we also have a scene were a Star Destroyer takes a rebel ship right to the control bridge but hits absolutely nothing on its path towards the Star Destroyer. Adding in the EU is fine when it makes clarifications. But adding it in when it directly contradicts G-level Canon is a no-no: you discard the EU in favor of the films.
That's incorrect. Star Destroyer's don't have subspace shielding because sub-space technologies do not exist in Star Wars much less shielding against those technologies. Additionally, we know the range of transporters is 40km because that was Riker's trick in "A Matter of Honor." That's comfortably out of the range of the weapons on a Star Destroyer.
Incorrect: that type of shield redirected highly energized particles from an entire planet. The real problem, here, is you just did not know what I was talking about so you barked in ignorance. It's okay: we all do that, at times.
So let me put it more clearly, all of the laser cannon fire will easily be redirected by the inverter shield. It's just a shame that Star Wars uses particle weapons of this nature.
"Why do phasers work against those shields?", you might ask. Because it is phased energy and make-believe particles known as "nadions". ROFL
I guess you didn't understand: a main sequence star is not a pulsar. A pulsar would be several orders of magnitude more dangerous that a main sequence star. The fact that it would last any amount of time in a pulsar's corona is astounding. Pulsar's are a particular type of neutron star. It is like packing something as massive as our sun into a tiny, extremely hot, object that has a diameter of 20-30 km. The gravitational effects of such an object would be absurd. So if you're telling me the Enterprise D could survive any amount of time in the "corona" of a pulsar, that's so far beyond any durability feat of anything done in Star Trek that we can forget about surviving in a main sequence star's corona.
Yeah, because we have so many asteroid fields to compare them to, right? I KEED I KEED!
That changes nothing about my statement: their shields don't appear to be resisting kinetic damage.
However, if you need me to be as honest as possible, that asteroid system does appear to be more violent than our local neighborhood asteroid belt. It appears to be denser, too. But, to me, that is a red herring to my point.
I believe "vaporize" is the word Riker used. I consider this to be a word game and it changes nothing about the argument.
You mean "particle" weapons. Read this post, again: "...high energy particles...". You're trying to play word games to win an argument. You definitely know me: you should know that won't work. And you’re also using contradictory EU Evidence so that does not change what I said about the little to no kinetic resistance the Star Wars shields display.
No, no, you were on to something with your statement. In order for you to make such a statement, you need to back it up with something tangible. Or else I can just state, "Being able to enter a star's corona is several magnitudes more impressive (by the math) when you look at the energies required to do so and compare those to the pathetic display the Star Destroyers’ shields exhibit in an asteroid field."
Now that would not be a very fair statement of me to make, would it? I did not substantiate that claim with the actual numbers. It would be rather difficult to do so because of the variables I listed in my post (and if you can pull off that calculation and get your figures relatively close, you'll become my new god and I'll worship you like the ancient peoples of the amazon worshipped the sun). Basically, If I observed a Trekkie making such a statement (the one where I repackaged your statement but in favor of Star Trek), you had better believe I would protest.
While impressive, those figures become useless in the face of onscreen feats. Small asteroids seem to give those awesome shields quite a bit of trouble. Small rebel fighter craft seem to pass right through those shields.
Interesting. And the weakened and focused phasers produced earthquakes similarly in TNG, as well. The only thing I can reasonably conclude is a planet is not safe from a planetary bombardment from either a Galaxy Class ship or a Dreadnaught class Star Destroyer.
I pretty much proved that the argument by numbers is a fairly futile endeavor (and the bane of Star Wars and Star Trek arguers, alike).
But, yeah, let's get into that.
3.8×10^26 J is how much energy the sun puts out each second.
That's 380,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000j
So statements made about "small star" are simply rubbish and demonstrably false. What it amounts to is some EU writer getting too happy/excited with some numbers and not knowing what those numbers actually mean. Similarly, translate that over to the weapons. Figures on paper vs. "real" world performance just don't add up.
15 gigatons doesn't even come close to the sun's 1 second energy output by an extreeeeeemely large amount.
Forgive me for any mistakes I have made: I did not have time to proofread and my typing can be horribly atrocious without proofreading, first. I leave out words, misspell things, and miss clarifying punctuation if I don’t proofread my own work. You’re in for a treat of confusion. I dare not go back and read what I typed.
Off topic, but don’t **** up, this time. Around this particular part of the boards, no one gives a crap if you’re returning to sock the forums. No one will report you and no one even cares. We are all adults in this neck of the KMC woods so have at it. I don’t hate you and I am not ignoring you in places like the Religion forum and GDF. Those are just the places Ushgarak frequents and are obviously places I have to watch what I do. So I meant no offense by ignoring you: I’m just trying to save my own ass.
Some parts of your reply, I snipped to avoid redundancy.
So we’re using “on-screen” Star Wars evidence, whilst you dismiss on-screen Star Trek evidence as not being accurate?
With all due respect, this is a horribly unscientific, or, more plainly, retarded method of analyzing evidence. If someone tells you the sky is red, and you look up and see that it is clearly blue, obviously what actually is trumps what people say. Visuals > dialogue. Reality > fallible third parties.
To use another method of debate would fly in the face of suspension of disbelief and make any coherent analysis impossible.
Correction: C canon stands as legitimate unless contradicted by higher canon. And Dr. Saxton has a doctorates in astrophysics and had made a website dedicated to detailed analysis of Star Wars technology. I think he’s a pretty credible source, and Leland Chee, who is in charge of sorting Star Wars canon, has stood behind his work on two occasions.
The Enterprise has never demonstrated the ability to destroy a planet’s surface to the same degree that a star destroyer can. In “The Die is Cast”, an entire [b]fleet of ships apparently tries to vaporize 30% of the founders’ homeworld’s crust, but one can see from the visuals that this is not at all the case, and that the fireballs suggest megaton range firepower at best.
A single star destroyer, on the other hand, has been described as being able to turn a planet’s surface into molten slag from orbit.
I could then point towards the imperial fleet’s circumnavigating Endor in under a minute in Return of the Jedi, implying power reactors with outputs comparable to small stars (confirmed by the ICS’s). Logically, a warship would be able to dedicate a large portion of its reactor power to its main guns.
Hardly damning.
1. Those turbolasers were light, barely visible ones, not the heavy trench guns designed to take on warships.
2. The asteroid vaporization calculations are extreme lower limits.
Meanwhile, we have X wings’ circumnavigating Yavin Prime (a gas giant) in 4 minutes, and decelerating to match speeds with the Death Star traveling in the opposite direction. That = astronomical power outputs.
I don’t know what accuracy incident you’re referring to (and would point out that Federation ships’ accuracy is hardly beyond questioning; look at plenty of Dominion War examples), but with a single exception (the massive asteroid ramming into the control bridge), none of the star destroyers are actually visibly damaged.
40 km isn’t out of a star destroyer’s range. The RotS novelization describes ships’ firing from hundreds of kilometers apart. At Endor, imperial warships could have fired at the Rebel fleet from far beyond 40 km, but are ordered by the Emperor to hold their ground.
Some of my math might be wrong; I did it very hastily (but had individually posted similar calcs on spacebattles, in case if you find others there), but it gives an indication as to the astronomical power generation abilities of SW combat craft, based on evidence from G canon.
This has already been addressed. Don't talk in circles or you will get cut and paste replies.
1. Almost everything we are discussing is not scientific regarding these pseudo-scientific movies and TV Shows.
2. Ignoring visual effects in sequences where it is quite clearly not being depicted accurately is a must unless you yourself want to come up with retarded conclusions like "the Entperise D is moving at full impulse which is 50-80% C, it takes them 55 seconds to get into weapons range, but in the visual depiction of the ship and the command center, the Enterprise is less than 100 km away from the command center." But you DO want to come to those conclusions because you want to low-ball Star Trek.
So what do reject to make this right? Do we reject the visual or the multiple other facts just to make the visual correct? Since we know from the "making of" commentary that they were not about to show two ships millions of km apart (because it does not work from a directing point of view (pun)), we know what to reject in that particular scenario: to not reject the visual would be retarded.
This same thing holds true for Star Destroyers. We can see in some space battles that their guns appear to have an effective range of 1-2km, TOPS. But we also clearly see that a fleet can bombard a planet (Hoth) from space which is tens of thousands of km away from the surface. So which do we reject? The visual of 1-2km firing range or the fact that they can bombard a rebel base from orbit? I recommend the visual of 1-2km gets rejected because, again, it is just a director's problem because he has to cater to the dumb audience.
3. Actually, you just posed a very philosophical question about subjective experience. It is possible that one person is actually seeing blue where another is seeing red even when we point out the wavelength of the light, the size of our cones and rods, and the nerves used to carry these signals to the brains. I would avoid using deep philosophical comparisons because those things get too "heady" for this type of discussion.
I seem to be doing just fine and on top of that, my methods allow for internally consistent analysis of both Star Wars and Star Trek. Imagine that: rejecting factually incorrect visual FX is allowing me to more objectively compare both universes to themselves and to each other. Do I get an award? Surely I get an award for not being bias.
Correction: all elements are rejected if they contradict G-Canon, just like I stated. Any other clarifications from here, are unnecessary, because they are irrelevant to my points. If I wanted to reject C-Cannon issues or talk about those things I would have. I didn't so we won't. (Cue the “well, I brought up this and that and this…not interested and here’s why: then I can start bringing in Star Trek EU which then stuff gets ridiculous).
Additionally, I reject almost all feats from anything EU. C-Canon is almost as far as I will take it. If you even know what C-Canon and G-Canon are, you would know that the EU is a separate universe from G-Canon. As a matter of necessity, C-Canon probably takes place...mostly...within the G-Canon universe...maybe. Has GL made an official statement on that? It's too late, now. What did Chee say?
I just rewatched that scene because I remembered it differently. Not only are you wrong, it is much worse than that. Each blast take up a significant percentage of the entire planet. Each one of them. Not only do I think Riker's statement about vaping the surface of a planet in hours is accurate, I think Riker low-balled the timeframe.
If you wish to express such destruction (which occurred in seconds) in megatons, you'd end up with 1,000,000 megatons as your more accurate answer. (that's several orders of magnitude more powerful, in case you wanted to know).
From what I saw, it looks like they could have vaped the entire surface in less than a minute with those 5-8 ships, alone.
I appreciate you citing that because that has really changed things for this thread, imo. It is not nearly as close as I thought it was.
Yes, we've been over that. By the way, vaporization is a more energetic/more powerful way to destroy something than just melting it.
That's pretty dang slow compared to the in-star system speed of Star Trek ships being in the 50-80% lightspeed range. The Enterprise could have done the same thing in less than 10 seconds.
But, this point of yours does not address the screen shot I posted. Picard guided the D through an asteroid field with some mad skills. He did the same with those subspace anomolies, too. Agility, not "in-system" speed is the target of this point.
Actually, you are not grasping this. The blast was vastly depowered and focused so it would drill into a planet's crust instead of vaping cities. It vaporized several kilometers of the crust in mere seconds with a cross-sectional conic area being the size of several city blocks. If only the phaser vaped just 1 meter of the surface with this beam, that would be an order or two of magnitude more powerful than the asteroid vape "feat".
But since it was kilometers of crust in mere seconds, this is getting ridiculous. That's not supposed to be damming, at all. That's supposed to show that the power ratings/figures of either universe's ships is not really telling. It also shows that even a weakened and focused phaser blast from the D (pun?) is many orders of magnitude more powerful than the often cited asteroid destruction feat.
I think coming out of hyperspace is a much more significant deceleration feat.
This is a cop-out. It is the classic trolly answer of "it wasn't seen onscreen so it didn't happen." That is not going to fly. They were shitting themselves because they were taking heavy damage from the asteroids because they were too big and slow to navigate the asteroid field. Deal with the fact that Star Destroyers appear to have little to know kinetic shielding and don't try and pull that type of cop-out again.
The Enterprise-D approaches a pulsar from 20 million kilometers, and Data specifies that they would last 18 minutes at that range.
"Qeveren" calc'd it this way, and I'm inclined to agree:
"I'm just guessing how big Ent-D's shield bubble is, I'm guesstimating that it's about 50m off the hull, giving it a front-on cross section of ~105000 m^2. So they're soaking up roughly 2.14 GW, also assuming they're pointed directly at the neutron star. Total energy soaked after 18 minutes is 2.3 TJ or... half a kiloton? Seriously? "
This is ignoring plenty of other low-end showings for Star Trek. Trust me, they aren't pretty.
This logic doesn't fly. That their kinetic shields are not invincible doesn't mean they don't exist. Especially since the EU has mentioned them repeatedly, which stands unless contradicted, and especially since even the Gungans have a shield generator that can deflect AATs' physical shells.
As anyone with the internet can see, you also used the word "plasma", so I don't see where you get your smug sense of indignation from. I was right; turbolasers clearly aren't plasma weapons.
And, just to note, your argument contradicts itself: if SW shields don't protect against particles, how do they work against turbolasers, which, according to you, are just high energy particles?
Basically, even at the sun's core, the radiation intensity is a "mere" 62 megawatts/m^2...
In comparison, every star destroyer has an e^24 watt reactor in its core, and you don't see them melting away, do you? Your feat isn't really impressive. That I can’t calculate with 100% precision its precise implications…is not only a shifting of the burden of proof but also irrelevant.
Wait…so why did you even bring it up, then?
Small asteroids? Those asteroids looked pretty large to me. And many were moving at massively supersonic speeds. The fleet also stayed in the field for possibly days, waiting for various bounty hunters to assemble there. I think you’re forgetting to scale the asteroids with the star destroyers’ massive sizes in mind.
Not that I see the relevance here; by your own claim that there are distinctions between EM/“high energy particle” weaponry and kinetic weaponry, and given that the Enterprise largely uses the former, trying to make rough estimates from a vague asteroid sequence doesn’t do you much good.
Right, but I’m not letting you off on calling it a wash. Star destroyers have demonstrated firepower orders of magnitude beyond anything the Enterprise has ever done. The only feat that comes close is from a fleet of ships that claimed to vaporize 30% of the planet’s crust in a single volley, but…clearly did nothing of the sort.
No, it’s the only objective endeavor without resorting to arbitrary agreements that we should just focus on whose weapons…look more powerful intuitively? I dunno.
I’m sure Dr. Saxton understands what a small star is, given that he’s an astrophysicist.
But your complaints are irrelevant, since the movies alone make a case for >e24 watt reactors, certainly in the range of a small star – I’d label the sun as a medium star, around the power output of the Executor.
So…it’s an extreme lower limit of the firepower of a single gun based on its aftereffects. The AotC ICS ranks a medium quad turbolaser as 200 gigatons per shot. It’s still beyond anything the Enterprise has ever demonstrated.
I dunno why you think I’m a sock, or who you think I am. But of course, that’s what I’d say if I were a sock, so…
You’ve tried calculating events yourself, so it’s a little late to be turning around and conveniently pulling the “I don’t have to be scientific/logical/reasonable” card.
No, I want to come to those conclusions because your notion that the words coming out of characters’ mouths is more accurate than what actually happens is patently absurd. If someone claims that he’s 6 foot 2, and you measure him to be 5 foot 4, he’s probably 5 foot 4. That you subjectively argue that the creators really “intended” something doesn’t move me; what actually comes out is more important than some subjective “real” events.
Yeah…your rebuttal is pure sophistry. You get my point: visuals trump dialogue by basic common sense. You’re trying to argue some idealized version of what ST “should” be rather than what it actually is.
There is no rational basis to argue that dialogue trumps visuals beyond resorting to “authorial intent”, in which case, I’ll just concede the debate by pointing out that the good guys always win, and that the creators of a hypothetical crossover would focus more on what’s convenient for the plot, not what’s most consistent with demonstrated capability. As you can tell, that we’re even debating tactics, ranges, firepower, etc. is unto itself a departure from “authorial intent”, so you can throw that out the window. Or do you seriously think that whoever came up with the Enterprise’s drilling a hole into the Earth took time to consider its implications?
LOL, so I guess the Death Star is the “ultimate power in the universe”, and that “nothing can get past [a TF battleship’s] shields”?
C-canon is the EU…
…no. There is no visible ejecta, the fireballs’ durations are far too short to have yields that you claim, and the destruction is actually less luminous than city lights. It’s certainly not what you’d expect from a “30% of the planetary crust vaporized” forecast…and I think you know this.
Yeah, because you’re still under the insane idea that what fallible mortals say is more accurate than what we actually see.
The three star destroyers above Dankayo blew away its atmosphere.
Impulse engines have some sort of sub-space component, since they’ve been used to go FTL before. Ion engines, on the other hand…
And how often do you see the Enterprise dogfighting enemy starships?
Feel free to give some estimates, then.
Yeah, but you don’t know if it has anything to do with hyperspace’s qualities, so I left it out. But I’m not leaving out circumnavigating a gas giant in a matter of minutes.
Do the math, then. Because you clearly have no understanding of how large those asteroids were. You seem to think they were tiny.
EDIT: also note the visual effects when an asteroid collides against a star destroyer. It disappears in a blue flash - obvious indication of shielding.
Well, that can almost be ignored. The calculation is nearly impossible to make.
Let me go down all the variables:
Gravity: the gravity at that range would
I came up with 1.32023e+8 for the force of gravity, alone. (that would be in kilogram meters a second squared)
This ignores the Gaussian element, too. Pulsars are also weak Magnatars. I won't go to say that all pulsars are close to the Gaussian power of absurd magnatars: around 10^14 gauss. I cannot even been to calculate all the elements involved in the magnetism involved. I'd go with 10^9 gauss for the pulsar.
Then there's the high frequency radiation which is extremely dense. Then there is the energy and particle propagation from the pulsars which is around .5-.9c.
Then they also rapidly rotate which changes how the energy is output all the time.
Then there is the heat output of a pulsar (again, which constantly changes).
All this together and you've get some absurdly robust shielding going on from the Enterprise D. Something that I find incalculable and immeasurable because there are too many unknown variables. In fact, I think the resistance of that shield is so much stronger than most scenes in films that I'm going to discard that scene and go with other things that are more useable: it is just too far above everything else the shields were shown doing. I don't think the writers knew the Gaussian element of pulsars.
The logic is fine. They don't resist asteroids even slightly. They don't resist small fighter-craft, even a little bit. They (kinetic shields) have not shown to exist, at all, for Star Destroyers.
Additionally, I reject the idea that the droid bots used physical shells in the films: they simply were not seen.
Add in that that droids simply walked through the shields once they got close enough and you'll see why I think kinetic shields probably don't exist in G-level canon.
I assure you, the energy required to step through the shield is much less than that of a tank shell.
As anyone on the internet can see, I also used the words "...high energy particles..."
If you wanted to know, high energy particles are plasma. We, as humans, even have something similar to the shield inverter I talked about. We use "plasma lenses":
Obviously, the enterprise uses some future tech and not a plasma lense.
But, I hope that shuts you up regarding that. No more on this subject or are you still going to go on about it?
You still have no addressed my question or concern. You're dodging. Simply put, you cannot answer it.
But, I'd do it this way: pretend that the energy output is high. Whatever methods the Empire uses to keep their ships from blowing up or vaporizing in an instant...wouldn't matter much for the Enterprise D: they'd just be able to fly right through energy. hahahaahahahahah WEEEEEEEEEEE!
Deez nuts.
It was to show you how dumb you statement is. That's the equivalent argument. It is still accurate and the statement I made in quotes is still relevant. The kinetic resistance of he solar winds at that range is probably greater than the resistance required from shields on a Star Destroyer, which they don't have. What Sci-Fi movies don't show is the solar wind. It would get pretty violent and turbulent if you flew closer to a star because of that "wind" element. Meh. But, anyway, yeah, Star Trek shields are generally more kinetically resistance than Star Wars shields, easily.
No, those were not large asteroids. They were small asteroids. A large asteroid can be many times larger than a Star Destroyer. Do you remember the asteroid that the Millenium falcon landed in? That was a large asteroid.
I saw none that were moving at supersonic speed.
Also, I did not forget the scale of anything. However, you clearly had no concept of scale because you thought those "asteroids looked pretty large."
Yes, based on the shield technologies used by the Federation, there is a distinct different between high energy particles (plasma) and kinetic weaponry like massive gauss cannons (rail guns).
And considering that physical objects literally bounce off of the shields of Star Trek shields (including once episode where Tom Paris bounces a shuttle off of Voyager's shields at high speed...potentially impulse speed?), yeah, it's pretty obvious that the Trek shields have kinetic shielding where the Star Destroyers greatly lack. HA! I just thought of something:
The Enterprise D just has to scan the ships, see that they have no resistance to physical objects, and then just launches a shuttle, remotely, with a photon torpedo in it. heheheheeheh
Hey, if they cannot hit rebel fighter pilots moving at subsonic speeds in space, what makes you think they can hit shuttles moving at .9c? MMM? heheheheheehehhe
Even better, they use something similar to the Riker Maneuver: they drop out of warp, beam a photon torpedo into the bridge, and jump back into warp in fractions of a second. I dare say, good man, that's faster than the reaction time of gunners on the Star Destroyer. hehehel;asdkjf;alksjdflkja;sdjf;laksdf
Will you spank me, too?
No they haven't. If they could, then they would have just vaporizes the Hoth base from orbit even IF the base had shields. Here's why: they could vape all of the land around the shields, cause the complex to collapse, thus causing the equipment that powered that shield to also break in the collapse. This is assuming those guns were as powerful as you say they are. Clearly, they weren't hat powerful. When they hit ships, did the ships vaporize instantly? NOPE! So clearly, those figures you're getting from idiots are wrong. So will you put that shit to bed? Please? Will you stop pretending that they are that powerful and just accept that, in Star Trek, they can legitimately vape a planet's surface? Then I'll pretend that the Star Destroyers can do the same thing (An orbital bombardment that can vape a planet's crust).
No, it’s the only objective endeavor without resorting to arbitrary agreements that we should just focus on whose weapons…look more powerful intuitively? I dunno.
Okay, we can go with that ambiguous statement and then assume it applies to the astrophysical notion of a "small star." It's energy output would be several orders of magnitude less powerful than our sun.
Let's go with 1/300,000 the energy output since that what it says for a brown dwarf, compared to our sun.
1,266,666,666,666,666,666,667j/s
That's still far too powerful to be realistic. Still full of dumbassery to make statements like that.
Why do you think Sci-Fi introduces things like "hyperdrives" and exoctic matter? It's so you don't end up in situations where you have a reactor putting out that much energy in such a small space. But let's go with that much energy...and watch every single ship out their vaporize itself into oblivion the moment it activates it's "reactor"....which is absurdly large (let's not forget how large that reactor would be...they'd be towing around something many times larger than the death star).
So you'll have to excuse me for dismissing the bullshit from people that clearly have no sense of real world physics.
Check this out: even scientists can be horribly wrong about things they are immersed in studying. It happens all the time.
No they do not make a case for that. That's stupid. Not just stupid, asinine.
And this is why that shit is rubbish. That's not how powerful it is. It is not anywhere even remotely close to that powerful. Unless there is tons of energy being lost somewhere in the system. Nothing it does shows it is even 1/10000000000 that powerful.
When we see some of those Star Destroyer guns hit even little fighters, the explosions would not only be massive, their little ships would vaporize instantly. They don't do that so they aren't that powerful.
Nya nya. You figures are shit.
And this is why Star Wars geeks lose the arguments about their absurd numbers. This is also why they need someone to go through and clean out all that shit and create more accurate guides. It's so people like you don't believe them and get a false idea of how powerful these systems are.
I'll respond more in depth later, but some of your arguments are…quite old by this debate’s standards. Take, for example, the Hoth base example; even assuming for the sake of argument that the Rebels had no contingency plans against such a maneuver, such as shields that also extend below the ground or something, Vader wants Skywalker alive, and in the novelization even specifies that “clean” bombardment is impossible.
And the e24 watt-range power reactor estimates are derived from:
1. Base delta zeros – turn a planet’s surface into molten slag in a few hours
2. Acceleration feats – for example, take the X wings’ circumnavigating Yavin Prime and scale to a star destroyer, or just look at the star destroyers’ circumnavigating Endor
3. Scaling from the Death Star (whose superlaser was e38 joules…)
(this is actually how Saxton did it)
That it isn’t “realistic” is beyond the point; this is the scale of firepower that’s been observed, and can therefore be analyzed through the scientific method. That it doesn’t necessarily come out as plausible from our universe’s standpoint is irrelevant; the SW universe should be internally consistent, but not necessarily equivalent to our own. But we know from various evidence that their laws of physics, barring hyperspace and whatever, are the same as ours (or else all movement and interactions would appear entirely alien), so we can still calc events in such a manner.
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KMC Community Forums
Aug 27th, 2013 12:30 AM
The newer ships from the D's era had absurdly more durable shields. To what extent, it is not known. But it was enough to make the old Enterprise's shields look like paper. 
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