Originally posted by The_Tempest
If he's manually keeping it together, it should have began to rapidly disintegrate upon his death. If it's his mere presence uniting the ship, and his presence was imbued in his mask/armor, then it should have never collapsed... which contradicts avellone's quote.Unless, perhaps, the feat has been blown wildly out of proportion.
Friend, I always win this point between the two of us. There are many debates that you have won, but this is not one of them. (Also i am claiming victory for the N. thread from a couple weeks ago where you were trying to undermine Tobin's competence to speak to N.'s perspective.)
So let's look at your cases on display here: Either the cessation of N.'s manual preservation of structural integrity implies that his death should immediately precipitate the disintegration of the Ravager, or N.'s mere presence (but not direct application of TK) is the sufficient condition and so the ship will not disintegrate.
Since we have a clear contradiction in the first case (the ship needs charges to blow up) and a quote contradicting the second (the Ravager would slowly drift apart after N.'s death) you want to conclude that the feat is exaggerated.
If I've misunderstood your argument I invite you to clarify. But it seems to me that the disjunction you've offered does not exhaust the space of possible explanations. What if N.'s direct application of TK is needed to preserve the ship from shear forces involved in (sublight) acceleration and Hyperspace travel? The difference between a reaction force caused by a human striding across the bridge and the energy applied by the ship's massive engines is one of many orders of magnitude. The spot-welding and rust-welding between components of the ship are likely sufficient to survive the incidental vibrations from a person walking inside the ship. Hell, inertia alone is probably enough to soak a few hundred pound person's reaction energy.
However, this level of structural integrity does not guarantee survival in any accelerating maneuver involving enough force to move the entire millions-of-tons ship. It certainly doesn't guarantee the survival of the Ravager while traversing a gravity well that fused several planets (?) together and doomed multiple fleets. It does not guarantee survival during the entry/exit of hyperspace. Those are cases where the ship was under the thumb of an eldritch grip: N.'s large-scale TK with a demonstrated application of force (in the physicist's sense) that far exceeds all but the very uppermost tier of practitioners.
Both in the retrieval and the transport of the Ravager, N. has the single best TK strength and control feat that I know of.