scvn2812

After reviewing the Memory Alpha article on chronitons, I'd say its a pretty big leap to assume that chronitons would be a decisive weapon against warp beings. The only instance in which they've been used against non-linear beings was the Prophets, who are one species of non-linear being. We just don't know enough about the specific mechanism behind them being harmed by it. Warp entities could have an entirely different "biology" and not be meaningfully harmed by chronitons. If you want to declare all non-linear entities physiologically the same by fiat for the purposes of this discussion then that's cool but there's no basis for saying they'd work that way without author fiat. Allowing tech "sharing" just makes things worse. The Empire doesn't need help militarily crushing the IoM, the IoM's apocalyptic strategic position will do that for them. I'd even go so far as to say that a few task forces similar in size and composition to Death Squadron might even be able to tip the IoM from a slow motion defeat to a much more rapid defeat just by taking out a few key IoM systems and task forces without a corresponding loss of strength to the IoM's foes. It really reads like the IoM's situation hangs on that narrow of a knife's edge. The problem for the ABQ side is that they won't really influence the way the war is fought in any meaningful way, they really bring so little to the table. The Empire can win militarily without them although having access to Treknology opens up a lot of possibility for asymmetric warfare if the Empire can retrain their engineers to think creatively with gear operating under new physics they've never known before. The main problem with Treknology being that to use it creatively generally requires intimate knowledge of the physics and equipment, its almost never as simple as just pushing a button to stop time locally or turn the main deflector dish into silver bullet for slaying noncorporeal Cthulian horrors. The Starfleet officers who turn physics on their head to save the day have had years of education in their fields and experience handling their equipment, it may seem like they're making it up as they go along but that's what professionals do, make it look so easy a child could do it. Can subspace voodoo and chroniton kabbalah be taught on the fly or to enough Imperial engineers to make a difference to the outcome of the war on the galactic scale? Palpatine is a Sith Lord and also has a role to play. He's a megalomaniac. In his younger days, he was pragmatic evil but in his later days, if the complex gamble that the Battle of Endor and his underestimation of Vader are any indication, he might have been starting to lose the plot. Which means he might do something incredibly stupid and vain like actually try to occupy the 40k universe or try to study the warp in the hopes of augmenting his power. The ideal battle plan is for the Empire to blitz the IoM as fast as they can chart safe routes and throw everything they've got at the Tyranids so they don't potentially become a threat to the GFFA some day or at least are severely blunted if they do or just go home, use the 40k galaxy as propaganda and fort up. Sol might be a tough nut to crack and it may pay off to have allies of convenience so that the Empire's losses are not so severe that when they and the Rebellion inevitably return to fighting, the Rebel threat is much harder to counter. Logistically, the ABQ should probably avoid stand up fights against the IoM, they can't marshal the sheer numbers of two heavily militarized galactic civilizations. Losses would hurt, a lot.

Detonating the fleet? I really don't like the sound of that from a suspension of disbelief stance.

Bought it a while back, its not my dream space 4x game but I've played much, much worse. Nothing ever seems to match the depth and character of Alpha Centauri though. Brian Reynolds needs to stop whatever it is he's doing and make a space 4x as a spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri.

One thing that occurs to me is that the Star Wars forces are going to be able to mass in a way that they have never been able to before. In the early stages of the conflict, there really is no limit to the size of the fleets that the Empire could assemble (other than ship availability of course) because they have no home territory to defend if there is a truce with the Rebel Alliance. If the GFFA is at peace, then the Imperial fleet does not need to be spread out keeping the peace and combing several hundred billion stars (and the space between them) for rebels or showing the flag to star systems that might get funny ideas. If the occupation of its home galaxy is temporarily at an end, then you have 25,000+ Star Destroyers and their command and supporting ships to throw at the IoM and, at least until the GFFA starts to accumulate meaningful amounts of systems to defend, they can throw every last one of them into any battle they please. The IoM still has exactly the same problems it had before this scenario that prevented it from gathering the kind of force it needs to put an end to issues like the Tau, Chaos' holdings inside the material universe, major Ork infestations, the Dark Eldar, the Necrons and the Tyranids, namely that is has every last one of the aforementioned issues all at once right now and they've got just enough force to hold a line that slips just a little with every passing edition but if they pull enough force from any one front to finally squash one problem forever and finally, they'll get rolled by the front they pulled out from or if they weaken all of the others just a little to commit to a major offensive on one of them, then they lose a little ground that they might not have the force left over to regain once they've dealt with one of their outstanding problems. Imagine if the Tyranids suddenly decided Milky Way biomass tastes awful and decided to head for Andromeda, that wall of metal and blood that's slowing down the Hive Fleets while the rest of the galaxy scrambles for a Plan B could be put to use purging Chaos from the material universe, bombing anything and everything the Orks might be able to use to venture into space, eradicating the Tau or crossing off any one item on the Imperium's To Do list. Except they can't, because no one is going anywhere anytime soon so the Imperium is obliged to take on all comers simultaneously and now on top of all the other hostile forces that they are slowly losing to, you've just set loose the forces of a galactic dictatorship and the masters of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat by bouncing a neutron particle beam off the main deflector dish. The only bright side, is that the Imperium won't fall in an afternoon because the GFFA won't be able to set their cruise controls to Plaid until they've thoroughly mapped their invasion routes (a process that I don't think anyone can really guess as to how easy or hard this is, other than the Atlas has the colonization of the GFFA taking several millennium, although that was with the industry and infrastructure of a developing galactic civilization rather than a mature one) and, short of finding convenient worm holes or identifying warp "high ways" that are used to rationalize craziness like visiting the edge of the galaxy or the core, the ABQ alliance will be launching transwarp fleets to meet up with their original warp drive fleets to replace their centenarian ensigns on the opposite side of the Imperium by the time they make any meaningful progress at conquest.

A torpedo miss shook a hallway that was presumably close to the warhead, Tarkin never felt even the tiniest jolt in the command center. You still did not mathematically prove that Voyager at relativistic speed carries enough energy to overcome Death Star's shields which we know must dump energy equal to the waste energy produced by the reactor at any given moment or a portion of the energy from Alderaan going poof.

Ultimately, uniting the industrial capacity and speed of the Empire with the asymmetric warfare potential of Treknology will likely result in a win, this will be a bit of a slog until the geography of 40k's Milky Way is fully mapped out to the extent that hyperdrive can be used to maximum effectiveness. Rewatching A New Hope the other night, I realized that there are hidden limitations to hyperdrive that are never fully explained: namely, SOMETHING caused the Death Star to HAVE to drop out of hyperdrive on the wrong side of Yavin and have to spend 15 minutes slogging through real space orbiting Yavin to bring the super laser to bare on Yavin IV and I don't believe it was Tarkin's flare for the dramatic. The Imperium lacks the ability to coordinate its forces across the galaxy like Star Wars can due to their communications limitations. However, you can't just fight the IoM. The Orks, Tyranids and Necrons just aren't going to vanish. If anything, they may react rather harshly to a new contender for the galactic super power title, especially one with firepower similar to the IoM but superior logistics. I'm really only familiar with 40k through analysis on SB and SD.net so there's not much I can contribute for that side. I've never read any of the books and am not really inclined to, I'm not really into nihilism.

And the kinetic energy of an Intrepid-class starship is what? Also, since when do Starfleet ships have sensor jamming equipment? Starfleet's mentality is that they do not take precautions against being detected under the assumption that the tactical risk will be outweighed by the strategic benefits of being perceived as an open and benevolent power in the galaxy, reducing the number of conflicts where stealth would be useful. Also, I just watched A New Hope the other day. There were localized explosions when the X-Wings strafed gunnery towers but no signs of problems anywhere else in the station except where they shot it up. Tarkin for example, never saw even so much as a slight tremble in the command center.

TFC? What's that? I actually see this as a potential positive. If you look at the last few Marvel movies, especially the ones that hadn't really started yet when the Disney acquisition happened, you can point to a commitment to quality. They're not Shakespeare but they're far from the agony of Elektra and X-Men Last Stand. Disney doesn't make awful movies if they can help it. I felt a bit underwhelmed by Pirates of the Caribbean On Stranger Tides but I didn't exactly feel cheated either. I could nit pick a lot of things I didn't care for but it was a net enjoyable experience. They can make a pretty darn good PG-13 action adventure that won't win awards but will be worth the price of admission. I do believe that this will further move the novels, comics and games into a more distant form of canon as a seventh movie almost can't take place during a period of time described in the EU. Unless they go the route of The Old Republic MMO and set it during a time when no iconic characters are around and the EU is sparse to nonexistent, which is a gamble. If this really is Episode VII then it probably is a sequel though, in which case it will tread on the EU. This isn't such a bad thing though, as with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, while there will be those who cry desecration of the sacred, using the old mythology to create a new mythology that pays homage to the past while going in its own direction is not necessarily a horrible thing. Finally, George Lucas is a brilliant world builder and a terrible director. He's still in the picture to some degree but in the role that made A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back and to a slightly lesser extent, The Return of the Jedi such wonderful films: feeding ideas to people who (hopefully) will be skilled at making them come alive. Now we might even see that live action series that was hung in limbo for years now because of cost. We can only hope since our last, best hope for space opera, good, bad or otherwise, Syfy won't cough up the cash to do anything more than give people the cameras and cassette recorders to film themselves wandering creaky old houses.

Those videos serve as a potent reminder of just how vastly more powerful even "low end" science fiction is. If you have casual surface to orbit travel, then the economics and energy densities of your civilization are such that if their destructive power is in proportion to their propulsion (or greater, as it is now) then it stands to reason that even Firefly ought to be able to put some very nasty weapons into the hands of its troops and mounted to its vehicles. Consider that Serenity does two Space Shuttle mission equivalents a trip and makes interplanetary flights and it costs so little that hauling cows equals profit. To do this in any kind of practical time is going to involve probably an order of magnitude greater energy density than we have since Serenity appears to be more cargo hold than fuel tank and space flight in general would need to be a literal million (if not greater) times cheaper. The math of low end scifi taken to its logical conclusions is pretty sick. Honestly, feeling insecure about being a Star Trek fan is like complaining that you got stuck being Batman in a game of Justice League. Sure there are faster, stronger characters with heat vision but he's a billionaire ninja with a never ending supply of increasingly absurd but conveniently useful gadgets on his belt who can out fight just about any non-super and many supers in hand to hand. I happen to like Batman, powers or no powers.

You do realize that I can turn this around (again) for Star Trek? No matter how realistically pessimistic we get about it, its still flat out absurd. A civilization able to manufacture antimatter on a scale large enough to have reactors of arbitrary power, said ships can endure M/AM explosions in said reactors, dozen and two hundred kiloton starships have moved themselves in and out of planetary atmospheres without visible cataclysm from unleashing nuclear scale forces required to move them only just as slowly as the space shuttle yet nuclear weapons are a plausible threat to them according to the science officer. By your reasoning, these ships should not be able to survive their own feats of acceleration, power generation and logistics and yet we know they do because they do it on screen. We can infer that in order to achieve thousand gee accelerations they must have X degree of power output and their weapons will be similar. * Why? Because for our own civilization, it is actually easier to harness energy for destruction than it is for productive uses like propulsion. Violently destroying a planet requires Y -tons of firepower. * And we are given no reason in the movies to assume that the properties of the Death Star's weaponry are unique and cannot be scaled downward for use on smaller platforms such as Star Destroyers. Violently destroying asteroids (with guns too small be seen on screen no less) requires Z - tons of firepower. * And we know they have bigger guns and if they were able to control forces similar to those involved in their accelerations and proportionate to the Death Star, then the total value of the firepower gets a lot bigger. Two books had around 30 pages of mostly illustrations to lay out the principles of how Star Wars tech works for ships and vehicles. The same author was a consultant on Into the Worlds of the Original Trilogy, again mostly illustrations. There have been hundreds of hours of Star Trek and we still don't have a clear idea of how their technology works or even what order of magnitude their properties are in real world units due to a whole lot of absence of clear explanations of the topic (the only attempt, the Tech Manuals, to lay it out in a complete way having been dismissed as utterly non canon because *parts* of them are inaccurate) and a lot of conflicting examples. Star Wars debaters took what could have been conflicting examples (lack of explosive cataclysms when ships take off for example) and fit them into the theory. Some required more or less mental gymnastics but generally less than it would to hammer out a whole new theory of how everything works. To expect every answer to every puzzle in universe to be found in 3 books of mostly artwork is absurd. If Star Trek can't answer all of our questions in hundreds of hours, why expect all the answers to be found in 3 cross section books? Mean while when the issue is raised in Star Trek about 400 GW particle beams and nukes being declared a relevant threat by Spock, no one wants to take a stab at squaring this with the notion of gigaton power outputs for the E-D or terraton phasers due to nadion multiplication. I'm assuming from the lack of clarification in the OP that the author did intend for phasers to literally hit with the force of petatons against all targets rather than the differing performances against different materials. In which case, the theory needs a lot of work because I don't know how you get these radically conflicting examples to fit it. Expecting one side to show their work, put effort into explaining possible conflicts and the other to be allowed to cherry pick their evidence rather than explain all of it, that would be a double standard. Good thing we don't indulge in those. And I'm not saying Khas wouldn't have gone on to explain how the other stuff works but this thread only went 1 page without an implicit complaint another universe's technology and fanbase so I don't think that's the direction this thread was headed in the first place. If I'm wrong, then someone please take the thread in that direction. Let us not waste time covering very, very, very well trod ground again. The ICS thread has hundreds of posts in it where I'm pretty sure we will find our arguments and counter arguments stated, debated and repeated at least two or three times. Think there's something new to say, take it there.

You do realize that I can turn this around (again) for Star Trek? No matter how realistically pessimistic we get about it, its still flat out absurd. A civilization able to manufacture antimatter on a scale large enough to have reactors of arbitrary power, said ships can endure M/AM explosions in said reactors, dozen and two hundred kiloton starships have moved themselves in and out of planetary atmospheres without visible cataclysm from unleashing nuclear scale forces required to move them only just as slowly as the space shuttle yet nuclear weapons are a plausible threat to them according to the science officer. By your reasoning, these ships should not be able to survive their own feats of acceleration, power generation and logistics and yet we know they do because they do it on screen. We can infer that in order to achieve thousand gee accelerations they must have X degree of power output and their weapons will be similar. * Why? Because for our own civilization, it is actually easier to harness energy for destruction than it is for productive uses like propulsion. Violently destroying a planet requires Y -tons of firepower. * And we are given no reason in the movies to assume that the properties of the Death Star's weaponry are unique and cannot be scaled downward for use on smaller platforms such as Star Destroyers. Violently destroying asteroids (with guns too small be seen on screen no less) requires Z - tons of firepower. * And we know they have bigger guns and if they were able to control forces similar to those involved in their accelerations and proportionate to the Death Star, then the total value of the firepower gets a lot bigger. Two books had around 30 pages of mostly illustrations to lay out the principles of how Star Wars tech works for ships and vehicles. The same author was a consultant on Into the Worlds of the Original Trilogy, again mostly illustrations. There have been hundreds of hours of Star Trek and we still don't have a clear idea of how their technology works or even what order of magnitude their properties are in real world units due to a whole lot of absence of clear explanations of the topic (the only attempt, the Tech Manuals, to lay it out in a complete way having been dismissed as utterly non canon because *parts* of them are inaccurate) and a lot of conflicting examples. Star Wars debaters took what could have been conflicting examples (lack of explosive cataclysms when ships take off for example) and fit them into the theory. Some required more or less mental gymnastics but generally less than it would to hammer out a whole new theory of how everything works. Mean while when the issue is raised in Star Trek about 400 GW particle beams and nukes being declared a relevant threat by Spock, no one wants to take a stab at squaring this with the notion of gigaton power outputs for the E-D or terraton phasers due to nadion multiplication. I'm assuming from the lack of clarification in the OP that the author did intend for phasers to literally hit with the force of petatons against all targets rather than the differing performances against different materials. In which case, the theory needs a lot of work because I don't know how you get these radically conflicting examples to fit it. Expecting one side to show their work, put effort into explaining possible conflicts and the other to be allowed to cherry pick their evidence rather than explain all of it, that would be a double standard. Good thing we don't indulge in those. And I'm not saying Khas wouldn't have gone on to explain how the other stuff works but this thread only went 1 page without an implicit complaint another universe's technology and fanbase so I don't think that's the direction this thread was headed in the first place. If I'm wrong, then someone please take the thread in that direction. Let us not waste time covering very, very, very well trod ground again. The ICS thread has hundreds of posts in it where I'm pretty sure we will find our arguments and counter arguments stated, debated and repeated at least two or three times. Think there's something new to say, take it there.

I don't think the main deflector thing really ever popped up in this thread. Although its a good illustration of how things are more complex than just how many tons of TNG equivalent you're slinging. To restate the deflector argument a bit. Its entirely reasonable that the deflector might be able to accept a higher total power input than the phaser arrays. Its job is to nudge debris out of the Enterprise's flight path before gravel can hit it like an A bomb. The deflector might for example be able to generate an energy field that shovels debris out of the way but can't be precise enough to hit a maneuvering ship at range with enough joules to burn through the shields and harm the hull. People get too hung up on the total amount of energy being thrown around. A star releases an ISD broadside every second of every day for billions of years but it does it in all directions and attenuates with distance so if you happen to be 8 light minutes out, your planet becomes the most desirable real estate for life in the known universe to date. A few minutes closer and its a volcanic hell. Weaponize that power and put it to use firing beams with cross sections of just a few meters and you've just created an apocalypse for anyone in an astronomical unit who gets in the way of said beams.

How they outperform their energy output is rather important though. Specifically in that time and time again, we see targets effectively removed from existence with little more than scorch marks left. No clouds of vapor, no secondary effects of any kind. Just a target there one minute, gone the next with maybe, occasionally some mild pyrotechnics that are in no way proportionate to what you'd see from direct energy transfer. This does not at all in any way shape or form imply energy amplification. What seems to be suggested here is that you get literal terratons from gigatons when none of the corresponding effects come along with it when what is taking place is a completely different effect. Matter is basically getting removed without the effects of vaporization. It would be a serious leap of logic to assume that shields would be hit with a thousand fold of the energy that was actually used in generating the beam. In fact, it would be flat out absurd unless the shields too are a thousand fold more resilient than the power source backing them and I'd like to see someone try and explain how that is supposed to work. The original author clearly did not think through the consequences of their conclusions for the rest of Treknology or even canon. That much firepower invalidates entire plots and there's no known technobabble that implies that shields can be any stronger than the energy used to produce them with the possible exception of metaphasic shielding which enabled the E-D to go deeper into a star for longer than ever before with off the shelf equipment. So you're left with shields being a thousand fold (a million fold by the original theory) less powerful than weaponry, unless that effect is restricted only to matter. Tellingly, there is no attempt to reconcile this with conflicting evidence that implies lower power outputs and weapon yields. A lack of interest in addressing potentially conflicting evidence implies to me working backwards from a goal, that goal being to bloat the numbers as much as possible to satisfy some need for Star Trek to be "on top" of the franchise pile.

So how does your theory explain the decision not to tear apart the asteroid in Pegasus to destroy her rather than venturing into the cave? Can it coexist with the Husnock weapons damaging shields at 400 mw?

Oooh, was that the studio model? That is some fantastic detail on the guts of the ship.

Looking back at the transcript, that is indeed a misquote. The "most" of her torpedoes comment refers to bombing their way to Pegasus in order to destroy her. Which still should be no problem for megaton phasers. Kiloton phasers would do the job as well, just not as quickly. Though this is seemingly in contradiction with the episode where they drilled into a planet's crust. The main point is that its not enough that a theory of what kinds of power outputs phasers and ships have satisfy a few criteria, they have to explain them all. In this case, there is no plausible circumstance in which the Enterprise-D can be threatened by destabilizing an asteroid with the firepower suggested by that theory given that she regularly squared off against foes with similar or superior firepower and lived. For that matter, passing very close to the surface of stars shouldn't be a problem and we know it is. Let alone 400 GW overwhelming the shields. I'd go so far as to say that energy outputs aren't necessarily that relevant to Trek combat, the Husnock example doesn't need to be 400 GW of direct energy or it could be something more exotic, but when a theory invalidates an entire plot point as in Pegasus, its got serious problems. If a theory cannot be made to explain why characters chose not to pursue a particular course of action that would be blindingly obvious, its not a valid theory. Human beings can use hyperbole or misspeak, for that matter they can be incompetent but that is a very hard and very controversial approach to demonstrate and just leads to accusations of bias. So if the Enterprise-D can destroy Pegasus with her phasers without seriously compromising her safety (such as draining away fuel and ammo stocks with the potential for engagement with an enemy looming) why not do it? If the destruction of Pegasus to prevent her from falling into enemy hands is her goal and her crew fail to do this, then either the ship can't do it or the crew are incompetent.

The asteroid the Enterprise-D was stuck in once called, it would like to know why its still around if it could have just been made to "go away" with the direct application of gigatons, let alone the equivalent effect of petatons.

I don't speak Klingon and I didn't see a lyrics sheet. I watched it again today, its up to over 3 million views. I don't whether to be amazed or disturbed.

What kind of mind comes up with the idea of mashing up Yakkity Sax and Eminem? Shockingly, it actually lines up pretty well.

This is a sort of sketch of a possible prologue to an idea that's been bumping around my head for years now. A science fiction universe that has evolved into something somewhat resembling fantasy but not nearly as grim dark for the sake of grim dark as Warhammer 40k. This is me toying with the idea of using the language of fantasy to sketch out the universe rather than a direct, David Weber style Info Dump. Edit: Removed for long term copyright / privacy concerns. I would like to possibly publish this some time and so I'm not going to leave it up indefinitely. Easier to delete it than sue if it gets copied and pasted and republished.

I feel a bit more justified in my view of the movies as the documentary version of events in Star Wars and the EU as something between the Illiad and an inconsistently vetted history written long after the fact. I don't really see this changing much in fandom. EU fans are going to remain EU fans, purists may get a sense of smug superiority of this and those who don't exactly have warm, fuzzy feelings for the EU but don't fully dismiss it either will still love what they love about it and roll their eyes at the inane stuff. I suspect though as the EU continues to swell and becomes increasingly dense and self referencing and as The Clone Wars adds anomalies of its own on top of those of the prequels, and people become more desensitized to the notion of reboots, indifference will probably set in to a greater degree. I quit following the EU to any significant degree during the Vong arc when it just seemed to become completely inaccessible. The EU characters were presented frequently without any reference as to who they were, what they had done prior and why I should care if I hadn't read the books they were in and the Classic Trilogy characters had drifted so far from their original characterizations as to be unrecognizable, to say nothing of how extreme some of the different interpretations of them are from author to author. I've liked a bit of the Clone Wars era books, the writing of the ones I've read have generally been fairly sensible. The Labyrinth of Evil, Revenge of Sith, Dark Lord trilogy was fantastic. Since then, I haven't really found any actual arcs to latch on to. The various forums made the "Jacen Solo goes crazy and becomes the new Sith Lord" series out to be nearly unreadable, internally inconsistent drivel. What I've read in the way of impartial synopsis hasn't really sold me either. What's your take Khas? You posted it after all.

Well, Mara's opinion as a military commander and spy is not entirely uninformed but I think it's one of Obi Wan's infamous "true from a certain point of view" scenarios. The Death Star is a prime example of design compromise and doing the best you can with what you've got. Not built like a true warship: Probably "weak" in the sense that she can't plausibly turn aside her own firepower. (although is this a realistic expectation given how warships deliver perhaps minutes of reactor output in seconds, the Death Star hours of output in seconds) Spherical shape limits the conventional artillery that can be brought to bare to at most half of her total. Yet the difficulty of turning something that size would mean that a blade design would be horrifyingly vulnerable to flanking maneuvers. Micro jumping is an EU phenomenon not directly seen in the movies but in the unlikely event a foe could assemble enough force to threaten the Death Star's rear, the Death Star would not easily be able to reply. There's no flanking the spherical Death Star, you can evade the super laser but any approach brings you into view of half her guns until you get to point blank range. From an engineering stand point, if you have an artificial object massing as much as a small planet, even though the Empire has a mastery of all forces that is staggering, it will still be more cost effective to give in to gravity and build a sphere. That way your structure doesn't need to be as robust so less investment in exotic super materials and force fields. Were someone to build a Death Star equivalent of warship spec or assemble a battle fleet with a combined similar per second total reactor output, it would handily cream the DS1. I suspect that the greater volume of DS2 was partly to address some of the issues with the DS1 in the event of say, a sudden but inevitable betrayal by an underling who somehow rallies the Imperial Starfleet to his cause rather than throwing you down a ventilation shaft. Ever notice that the downfall (pun intended) of megalomaniacs tends to be overlooking small details like that in favor of planning for much grander scenarios?

I'm uncertain about that as well: the planet killer beam represents hours, as much as a full day's worth of the Death Star's main reactor. It is a very robust weapons platform due to the heat dissipation requirements of running such a tremendous reactor flat out for far longer than any other space craft is thought to do. As well as tanking some fraction of the destruction of Alderaan as well but I don't think there is any reason to assume the Death Star is able to take a full on shot from her super laser. The standard (and in my opinion, the most reasonable) assumption is that the Death Star is not built like a true warship. She's more like a mobile turbolaser of incredible scale than a warship with substantially greater percentages of her volume given over to power generation, power storage, fuel and everything else needed to support the operation of a planet killing super laser and not nearly as much by volume given over to defenses and things not directly related to making planets explode. For the Death Star to have been built with a warship's proportionate resilience just strains credibility. Although the Death Star Deuce by virtue of its ludicrous size might be another story were it to have been finished but that's speculative, who knows what all that extra volume would be used for.

In scifi debating as in politics, taking a position or association with a particular prominent figure automatically seems to lead people to make assumptions about unrelated matters or assume poorly in general. For example in the lead up to the RNC I was rather shocked to discover there are gay Republican groups. Obviously they don't want to criminalize themselves so obviously the term Republican is a much broader label than I'd assumed. if you make sweeping generalizations about people, you can often be wrong. On the scifi side, if you argue that ICS is a fair representative of the Star Wars universe, you automatically must hate Star Trek. Alternatively, if you argue that Star Trek is superior, clearly you must hate Star Wars and if you oppose ICS you must be scientifically illiterate. Good examples of the old expression about what assume does to u and me....

For the reasons stated, I don't think using this tactic on the Death Star would be practical. However, if you've managed to establish orbital supremacy over a planet and need to breach a planetary shield in a hurry and aren't too concerned about civilian casualties, that might not be such a bad idea, providing the planet doesn't have any defensive batteries. Although there's not many factions in Star Trek or even Star Wars that are too keen to just wreck a perfectly good planet.