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Ted C

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Ted C last won the day on May 23 2013

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About Ted C

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  1. Possible explanations: As you noted, the Death Star itself may have kept some of the debris from escaping. Some of the debris would be naturally thrown on a trajectory to put it in orbit around the sun. Alderaan could have had one or more natural satellites that put some of the debris back onto a solar orbit path. The Death Star lingered in the vicinity. If there were other populated planets in the system, they may have been intentionally redirecting debris to keep those other planets from being affected. While willing to destroy Alderaan, other local settlements presumably still pay taxes, so having them destroyed by asteroid debris would be counterproductive. Besides, they're witnesses who can spread the word of the Death Star's power.
  2. Uneven distribution of the energy through the planet's mass and inefficiences of heat transfer will mean that not all of the planet's chunks will absorb enough heat to vaporize.
  3. The problem gets worse if your sensors only operate at light speed. If the target moves a ship-length per second and is a light-second away, a laser fired directly toward your sensor image is already off target, and it will only get worse in the propagation time of the beam. Add another second of delay if you're using active sensors for targeting.
  4. With lightspeed weapons and ships moving at thousands of meters per second, targeting is an issue. Your weapon may be able to hit something light-seconds away, but if the target moves more than a ship length in a second, it may be gone by the time your energy beam arrives. You can try to predict the target's position and fire to hit it, but evasive maneuvers and ECM can make your predictions unreliable. So, if you want to more reliably score hits, you close the range when targeting anything that can move fast enough to evade a shot that takes a second or more to propagate to the target.
  5. Ted C

    General Zod/Lursa/Non vs Nuclear Man

    If he goes straight to using those toxic claws against them, the Nuclear Man might be able to beat the Phantom Zone Criminals. If he draws it out like he did against Superman, the three will probably pound him, especially since his weakness is very easy to discern. If he gets knocked into a sewer system like Superman did in his battle with the criminals, the fight would immediately be over.
  6. We don't see much non-Starfleet space traffic of any kind in Star Trek. Aside from claims that the Federation is sufficiently communist that the government controls all space travel (your mileage may vary on that one), there's the issue of operational costs. A starship has to be expensive to build. Boosting materials to orbit will have a high energy cost (even if you use transporter technology, you have to pay for the potential energy difference), all the electronics will probably use a lot of rare elements, the infrastructure for building ships has to exist. Even small ships that can be built on the surface will incur a lot of these costs. These are costs that a government can probably bear a lot more easily than a private citizen or even a small corporation (not that we actually see many independent corporations in Star Trek). An individual with a starship is probably stinking rich, and wealth is not a recognized life goal in Federation society. As for the lack of Federation ships around Earth, I would suggest that their defense model is based on deploying most of their assets to their frontiers. Their goal is to detect and intercept threats at the border. To their thinking, an enemy fleet at Earth will have to have already fought through their defenses to get there. Their core worlds aren't supposed to be exposed to attack because their ships met the threat far away. This causes a crisis when an enemy shows up inside their defensive ring, and their fleets are trying to chase the attackers to Earth.
  7. I should probably also mention that the MI in the movie are so catastrophically stupid that they might well lose the ship's entire troop complement through sheer incompetence.
  8. Ted C

    Vampire Slugfest!

    1) The Cloud Creature, by virtue of its ability to drain multiple victims at once. Anyone inside the cloud is being drained, whereas the other vampires can only drain one victim at a time. 2) The Cloud Creature, since it can use its draining ability against any vampire in its volume, and there's no way for them to retaliate against an insubstantial cloud. 3) All would unite to put down the abominations.
  9. A Federation troop carrier will have hundreds of troopers on board and dozens of dropships. They will definitely have overwhelming numbers with which to face the xenomorphs: there were less than two hundred colonists at LV-426 to start with, and not all of them were infected. Mobile Infantry armor and firepower seems to be at least a match for Colonial Marine equipment. They don't seem to have any APCs or other support vehicles (which the book version didn't need, due to their powered armor), but the APC didn't seem to be *that* much of a factor in Aliens. MI might lose the unit on the ground and decide to nuke the place from orbit instead of risking more troops. The movie version aren't as gung-ho about recovering MIAs as the book version.
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