Vince

Bolter guns are man portable, the heavy bolter is tripod like the E-web. So yea, ordinary non-super human people can wield these guns and all their firepower THere is a lot of 40k firepower inflation on some forums. This can be annoying. Then there are smaller parties that go completely in the other direction, it turns into high vs low. From conventional warships having firepower enough to atomize a continent, vaporize an ocean, or even mass-scatter entire worlds, to barely capable of vaporizing a town or a few hundred tons of rock.

Tbf, there are things blasters can do that bolters could not, like destroying the grate in only one shot. They will probably drop one of those space marines, as a plasma gun can, and they are comparable magnitude. Bolters might have superior penetration. Blasters are good for more shots.

lol, the EU hate is strong here.

Good observation, i have seen that as well. But observed effects of the man portable weapons of the Imperiumd do get into the hundreds of megajoules, and even gigajoules for the anti-tank weapons. Those same gauss flayers invariably leave people skeletal when fired upon, sometimes described "vaporized" perhaps hyperbolically, as more often they are described in detail as pealing them away atom by atom. Either requires more than several, or even several dozen megajoules easily. So here, i think where dealing with technobabble weapons with the Necrons. Like phasers they get much more than what they put in, or, they produce power at a rate of hundreds of megawatts. My calcs suggest lasguns can get into the megajoules, several sources give them peak outputs of 19 or more "megathules" at maximum power. So nothing on a blaster there. BUT, then we have plasma guns, which can vaporize an entire man, or even two or three on the maximal AoE setting, and are good for around 20 shots. Melta's which can reduce 12 cubic meters of ice into steam or reduce a tank to slag in one shot, ammo for six iirc. Multi metlas can reduce a bunker to slag, which will probably get us into the hundreds of gigajoules. Plasma guns and melta's can both be man-portable :_). 40K is a scary setting, most so on the ground front. Those bolt guns are also kinetic rather than DET, so a mere energy output comparison isn't be fair on them.

Wow. Just wow. This is stellar! 7 8 and 9 on the way. This is both an excitable and worrying time! I wonder what direction they will take it in, this is a continuation after all.

Besides the difficulty in deploying the virus into the ship through its defenses, we also have to consider that all the stormies are protected against such an attack, at least for a limited time, and that the Death Star is the size of a small moon, with every single room separated from the rest of the station by a blast door. Starships in general can quarantine parts of the ship effected in these situations, much like they do when the hull is breached. I don't know anything about the virus in question, but starships in general should be very good at protecting from such attacks. Once its quarantined it can be blown back out to space.

I agree Khas, not tht they lack KT weaponry, but that they wernt firing those blasts at the mountain. If they had, then they should have destroyed the base. The generator however, we see the multi-kilometer fireball, this is upon initial impact. THEN the generator goes of with a mushroom cloud and a *larger* fireball. Plus, if we accept ordinary tanks discharge tens/hundreds of gigajoules, and cannot damage AT AT's, but AT AT's can, it make sense that their up to an order of magnitude more powerful. Like the logical extrapolation from blaster weapons to tank weapons. I know thats not what i originally said, but thinking about it, it wouldn't make sense. They do after all want prisoners.

Though, the Essential Atlas gives a diameter of 7,200Km to Hoth. Maybe this is contradictory the ordinary gravity in the film. I wouldn't like to say. 17Km should be far beyond the horizon of a planet that small. Maybe it was down to ideal terrain.

Before they fire a gunner states distance, dosnt explicitly state "kilometers" but given the distances involved, and the fact that everywhere else in books and such they often use SI units, it is the most likely unit. Agreed on low end sci fi's possess do a *lot* of power. I mean, Star Treks primary source of fuel is anti-matter, that something is not easy to create. And they have it in abundance.

The shield generator was said to be over seventeen kilometers distant when they fired in upon it in the film; from that distance it has been scaled in the past to be ~1.8 kilometer long structure. I have yet to see another movie where a vehicles beam weapon can destroy a metal structure of this size, or create a 2Km fireball in diameter. So yields aside, these represent unforgivably powerful weapons. http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?t=10360 with scalings and math, straight to the point. Theres a minimum amount of energy needed to create a fireball. These effects all represent a lot of firepower In the base we saw people stumbling into walls, objects falling from the ceiling, and corridors being destroyed. All from the tremors created by laser impacts. This base does appear to be underground. These are the effects you might expect from a 4.1 to 4.9 earth quake. To cause that with the AT AT's pulses represents a lot of energy. THe juggernauts weapons are also said to focus nuclear level heat into one small spot - raising to one hundred or more million degrees. The anti-tank turrets on the LAAT' only yield 300 gigajoules and these weapons and ones like it on tanks are no use against AT ATS, there you need there the heaviest artillery. So it makes sense that the heaviest guns, like those of the ATAT and other large vehicles be many times more powerful than those on much smaller and less powerful vehicles. I'd think an ATAT has firepower enough to threaten another AT AT after all. Its worth pointing out that this generator would be considered a cruiser in starship terms. If it were significantly armored, *a lot* of firepower would be required to penetrate its hull. Considering its role and strategic importance it might just well be armoured. The armoured skin of combat vehicles are around an order of magnitude more resilient to thermal weapons than conventional steels, because of their negation of blaster fire. The fireball scaling estimates on the old post produced a 260 kilotons lower limit required to create a fireball 2 kilometers in diameter. Finally, its guns are of similar scale to those of starfighters. All in all i think theres a pretty strong case for hundreds or thousands of terajoules here. And, if you extrapolate from the ICS, they should at least be single digit terajoules per shot. If you can disprove all of that, then i'll move the At At down a video. 40K and manga mechs aside, I cannot think of anything that could sit down and exchange firepower with one of these and come out on top.

The evidence and indirect evidence for that magnitude in the films is three fold. The fireball diameter with maximum firepower would be kilotons, im talking the first explosion, not the latter bigger one that comes from the reactor. There are two you see, one probably from the weapons, and a latter one from the reactor. Also, heavy vehicles can shake of ordinary tank guns, which can yield up to hundreds of gigajoules... you would need kilotons to down something like an ATAT. Ordinary vehicles require tens or hundreds of gigajoules to kill each other, because triple digit megajoule blaster weapons cause nothing more than trivial surface damage - equating to indirect evidence. Then there are shots that cause tremors throughout the mountain and base... Wikipedia wrote: "Noticeable shaking of indoor items, rattling noises. Many to everyone feel it with slight to strong intensity. Slightly felt outside. Generally causes none to slight damage. Moderate, heavy, major, or significant damage unlikely. Some falling of objects." This is a richter scale 4 - 4.9 earth quake. I think energy weapons would be very much less effective at recreating tremors like this when compared to actual earth quakes, bombs or kinetic impacts. Earth quakes of this scale peak at about half a kiloton max. but energy weapons are massless, its going to take many times greater energy to shake the mountain using the AT AT's guns. But at a lower limit you could say, hundreds of tons. Probably kilotons here too. And I agree, I have extracts that heavily imply kilotons for 40K titans.

Perhaps ill edit in examples in the future, with sci fi weapons comparable magnitude to the events.

Nice, though the only franchise i have found where such examples are really applicable is 40K (i use them on some pages) I'll add to the list. 11 tons of explosive (assuming tnt) ~46 gigajoules. This one is comparable to bomber payloads in 40K, or the output from meltas - though their thermal transfer flamer type weapons, not bombs. Hand held phasers, when disintegrating large amounts of soft material like rock, would require a DET thermal weapon of this magnitude to recreate its effects, testament to their effectiveness. 50 tons of TNT or 209 gigajoules 100 tons of TNT or 418 gigajoules Some kilotons / terajoules - this is the sorta magnitude we might expect from Titanic weaponry in 40K, such as volcano cannons, or the weapons from the heaviest vehicles in star wars, like juggernauts or ATAT's. In both cases, they are DET thermal energy weapons rather than bombs however, but similar magnitude. Famous one hundred teraton dinosaur killer - this is similar to what a Venator might dedicate to guns each second, or half what a ISD does; star destroyers in the Eu can extinguish all life without leaving survivors, despite the speed at which they can escape. This asteroid only wipes most life within months, rather than all life in moments. The effects of a petaton range asteroid collision. This one is comparable in magnitude to the power generated in a super star destroyers reactor each second, or similar to the Eclipse superlaser in destructiveness. Also, to melt the crust of Terra in one hour using the bang table, would require a couple petatons per second. So t would require a fleet using DET weapons to inject a couple petatons -or similar magnitude to this asteroid- every second to recreate the effects of a fleet bombardment in star trek.

Hmm. Would you not consider capital ships combating in atmosphere, trying to killing each other a contradiction? If we saw full scale bombardment in TCW I would imagine it be similar to their combat in atmosphere, or the bombardment of that city world in Old Republic, but would in turn contradict the lower limits in the films. Which should be low megatons for the invisible guns. There are a few secondary sources you could extrapolate ICS like magnitude firepower too, granted they are very much a minority, greatly outnumbered by the comics that give TL's the firepower of an artillery shell.

Rather than thinking of this as some arbitrary multiplication of firepower in space, we should think of the results as the ‘equivalent energy yields of phasers when bombarding soft targets’, or the yield they would have to be if they were energy weapons to create the effects they do when bombarding planets. It could also tell us something of the jump in efficiency between The Enterprise era and TNG. Maybe the asteroid was iron, and iron is to dense to be considered a ‘soft target’. Khas stated that based on his own scaling of the mountain, the weapons on the original Enterprise outperformed their energy output forty thousand times over. So when bombarding planets, and soft silicon materials, their efficiency is around 4,000,000%. To recreate the shock-waves seen in the events of TDiC with a nuclear weapon would require the input of several petatons of energy, according to Wong’s calculator. Even with the most optimistic power output of the Enterprise that would be two orders of magnitude more than the entire ships energy output. Hence, the effectiveness of phasers in terms of efficiency when bombarding planetary crusts has increased by at least one order of magnitude. When phasers (even the small arms) fire upon dense materials such as what might be used in armour an iron asteroids or energy shielding, they we shouldn’t use this efficiency or multiplication of firepower, because it is only applicable against soft targets composed of less dense materials, like rock. Given actual performance it would be safer to use something much closer to their actual weapons fire would suggest when where talking about ship-to-ship combat or certain events where they struggle to destroy a certain mass of metal. It is surely quite well understood that phasers of all sizes outperform their energy output by an order of magnitude or more when dealing with soft targets? And that they clearly struggle with the denser targets? We only have to look at the megawatt small-arms making cubic meters of rock literally vanish to come to this conclusion (with no vapour so wasn't vaporized, just vanished). FOr a DET energy weapon to remove cubic meters of rock it would have to inject many gigajoules of energy. Supportive quotes and instances in space only further solidify this hypothesis. The mountain destruction incident isn't a contradiction, but instead a supportive piece of evidence like the Die is Cast case study, as the weapons clearly out perform their stated 500 gigajoule yield. Though i haven't seen the episode myself, this all pends on it being a single 500GJ shot that done all the work.

Looked at the thread, but didn't get to relevant the deflector bit.. I'll take your word for it. Its just so much bigger i thought it would be logical to assume its more powerful, or at least has greater capacity then fair enough. Well according to Khas and others the mountain is smaller when scaled. So we could assume hyperbole, or we could take script over visual. Either way the weapons outperform their energy output by quite an amount.

I don't know of any serious sci-fi on screen which puts out petatons with ordinary ships. Besides Lexx which is in excess. It used to be claimed 40k had petatons, as silly as that was back in the day. Any way, im pretty certain petatons matches the TDiC bombardment.. so your efficiency theory probably isn't that far from the truth when we are talking about planetary bombardment. I have to ask, was it stated firepower was the issue? I imagine it was but i cant recall for certain. Imo the actual firepower of most Trek ships is somewhere in the megatons.

I don't know of any serious sci-fi on screen which puts out petatons with ordinary ships. Besides Lexx which is in excess. It used to be claimed 40k had petatons, as silly as that was back in the day. Any way, im pretty certain petatons matches the TDiC bombardment, or at least high teratons.. so your efficiency estimates probably aren't that far from the truth when where talking about. I have to ask, was it stated firepower was the issue? I imagine it was but i cant recall for certain. Imo the actual firepower of most Trek ships is somewhere in the megatons.

Interesting narrowing down on the efficiency of phasers though! That makes them 4,000,000,000% efficient when dealing with soft targets.... and one hundred percent efficiency is impossible by modern physics (:

Isn't the deflector dish more powerful? That might have been why he used it, because of its larger capacity. Then phasers could be the same. Phasers consistently cause an order of magnitude grater effect than their energy would imply. Look at the 4.7 megajoule capacity phaser rifles, whether that is energy capacity or megawatts the fact remains that they *can* indeed disintegrate a whole person, which in terms of ordinary energy weapons would require hundreds of megajoules or even over a gigajoule. Then we have the disintegration of rocks, where the phasers outperform their power output by at least one order of magnitude, if not two. They are also consistently less effective against shields, hulls, and hard targets like iron asteroids, showing performance perhaps closer to what their actual energy output would imply. The planetary bombardment in TDiC outperform the yield of photons/phasers/ship power output by a couple of magnitudes as well. They might (in TDiC) for example be capable of inflicting effect comparable to what would be expected from said hundreds of petatons. But when dealing with dense metals, armours, shields, hard asteroids, etc. they should perform closer to what the actual energy input suggests, a few orders of magnitude below their max. potential against un-armoured targets IMO. On a side note, I have seen it suggested that the 'McKinley' sized mountain was an exaggeration of the mountains sized, based on scalings. Haven't done the work myself though, and its not that relevant.

That was a strain on my eyes . Had so much trouble sleeping recently. Yea it being classed as parallel on its own isn't necessarily definitive, considering there is an actual canon tree which lists eu as "c-canon" . Now i don't even read much EU, but I like its existence, namely because it makes the SW universe feel, well more like a universe. All those things you wanted to see or know, can be seen and extrapolated in the EU. I like it because it fills the galaxy, we only see a couple of worlds a few starships and a few dozen species in the films - but through various quotes or indicators of scale, we see that there should be millions of world, millions of ships, millions of species, yet we see like 0.01% of that. (well actually in the death star we probs see closer to ~50% of the fleet in volume XD). The eu gives us all those cool things like species planets, starships, back stories, new vehicles (ones that feel the roles that must exist but are not seen in the films) like the AT AA (which happens to be one of my favorite walkers). "his universe" is the films and the clone wars "The parallel" is the eu and games. I don't think Lucas really means to say his universe is void of all these things that happen or exist, only that he well, dosnt care for them. He is a director, the creator, his creations and concerns are the films, not the eu. He lets the eu write within the consistency confines of the films, and his story. I wouldn't take it as literal, like there are actually two sw universes in isolation from each other. (though thats up to opinion/perspective as it stands) I would go as far to say however, anything potentially after the last film might not have happened or be canon. He has actually definitively said "luke does not get married" for example, amongst a few other things, like probably the emperor dosnt come back etc.