Vince

As of today, the entire EU is now non-canon.

http://www.theforce.net/v3-story/frontMoving_Beyond_Existing_EU_Lucasfilm_Announces_New_Direction_For_Star_Wars_Canon_157581.asp

 

Only the movies, TCW, and Rebels are canon anymore.

Sounds good. 

If you encircle the planet and lower the circle into the end explosion we find that it does encompass a large quantity of matter which must therefore be relatively static and could represent the mass which composed the latter Alderaan Graveyard postulated by the EU and encountered by Han Solo on his arrival. The quantity is superficial compared to the total distribution of planetary mass and relatively insignificant compared to a planetary volume, but could compose a small asteroid field compared to the planet. 

http://www.galacticempirewars.com/superlaser

She did have time to change the switch before the blaster was brought in to view which, in my opinion, seems more fitting than plastic grates.

Another thing to consider, what kind of thermal properties would the grate have to have to allow blasters to melt / vape 8 liters of that material yet only scorch other materials on the same setting? We go from the walls being orders of magnitude more durable than conventional metal to the grate being orders of magnitude less durable than normal metal and stormtrooper armour. I have found ample evidence in TCW that the low powered settings which pock mark conventional metal also kill stormtroopers so those E-11's were on lower settings prior to the grate. The walls are therefor not uber armour. 

But it seems infeasible that the grate could be a thousand times easier to melt than stormtrooper armour is to penetrate and metal is to scorch. It seems unavoidable that the setting must have changed, whether the target was plastic or metal.

While it's conceivable that she could have turned the power back down after she blew out the grate, the next question would be why? If the blaster was that much more effective cranked up, why would she want to turn it down again when firing back at the Stormtroopers? Especially considering the predicament they were in, putting it at it's highest setting would be the best course of action. Not to mention, let's consider the mentality of the characters at the time. Highly frazzled and looking for a means of escape. It's doubtful a politician with limited weapons experience would have the forethought to crank up the power without looking at it, blast the grate then lower the power back down.

This could well be a limitation of the weapon itself. The damage caused by a blaster literally ranges four orders of magnitude so the highest energy shots would be a significant drain on the power pack. The gun also has to have some kind of technobabble recoil dissipation going on due to the way they sometimes deliver huge momentum. And they must remain cool despite heating things to thousands of degrees on the receiving end. Those features might limit the availability of the higher settings to a handful of shots or the gun melts internally rendering it useless (which is a popular concern in eu works) or gets to hot to handle, which is mentioned in the film novelizations iirc. 

The reason I looked at the scene, was because I was working on research as to what blasters actually are. What type of energy do they fire? How exactly do they work? So, I decided to start doing a frame by frame of various scenes. I started with this one. Forgive me, I don't have a Blu-Ray capture device, so I will have to get creative about screencaps at a later time. Most sources talk about blasters producing a coherent energy beam that is combined with Tibanna gas then fired through the barrel. I observed that almost every shot resulted in some sort of gas being ejected from the barrel. I also noticed that whenever an object was hit, the same cloud was present at the point of impact, followed by a bright flash and a scorch mark on the object. I have begun to hypothesize that the way blasters and turbolasers work, is by containing a highly energetic plasma (charged Tibanna gas) in a magnetic bottle. When the bolt hits it's target, the containment field is ruptured and the plasma does massive thermal damage. This could partially explain why we don't see blaster bolt sized holes in things, and items like the grate were melted over a large surface area. Going by each frame, it looks as if something superheated "splashed" over the grate, melting it. That would be consistent. It would also be consistent with the large, spread out scorch marks on the walls. Not to mention the armor effects on ships. 

That is consistent with a lot of examples. When hitting a large, thin object like the grate or blast door they tend to utterly annihilate the object without over-penetrating. 

Have you got any screen shots? 

I don't see a third option, unless someone could point one out to me. 

There is a second-long delay between Leia taking the gun and shooting the grate and for almost all of that time her left hand thumb was positioned on top of a power setting slider. She could have easily ramped it up, considering the points you bring up, its likely she did. 

Also, let's factor in a few things.  One - plastic is likely to be cheaper than metal.  On a project as big as the Death Star, serving a government as corrupt as the Empire, people are likely to cut costs on non-essential things.  No one would likely think a garbage chute grate would be super-essential.  

Possibly. Iron is the most abundant metal in the universe to be fair, it (or equivalents) would be dirt cheap in Star Wars.

Another thing is just the way the grate reflects light.  It doesn't quite look metallic to my eyes.  Course, I could just be imagining things, but it just lacks a metallic luster.

Its subjective. It looks like metal to me and it blends seamlessly in with the surrounding metal walls. I feel a metallic composition is more consistent as almost everything else in starships short of certain parts of droids and computer screens is metal. 

Where else have you seen plastics besides the lights and monitor screens? As far as I've seen, everything grey short of naval officer uniforms is metal in starships..

 

Actually, a laser cuts by vaporizing the material in the direct area of where it hits.  This laser would vaporize its way through 20 feet of steel per second.

Are you sure about that? I'm pretty certain I've read differently. If this were the case then the laser could only vape a hole much less than a cm wide through 20 feet of steel. Superdispersive armour would render the weapon useless because the energy / effect is spread over a much greater surface area. 

http://panoptesv.com/SciFi/LaserDeathRay/DamageFromLaser.php

Against SW armor, however, it might to better than you think.  The MythBusters, on their January 4th Star Wars special, calculated that the logs used to crush the AT-ST on Endor had an impact force of two megawatts, and while it is true that laser and kinetic damages behave differently, it's still "pretty" low.  In fact, if the Empire had invaded Earth during WWII, the tanks of that era would have been able to blow up AT-STs pretty easily.  But then again, the AT-ST is a pretty shitty machine anyway.

True, theres nothing to suggest star wars armour does particularly well against kinetics in space or on the ground, and the AT ST's are especially vulnerable. But their armour is orders of magnitude superior at handling directed energy weapons than they are kinetics. Blasters can inflict thousands of times more damage to rock or metal than armoured SW vehicles, so their armour is thousands of times more effective at handling energy weapons. 

This doesn't really affect the calculations on the grate because those estimates are based on the minimal energy needed to melt the grate, heating it red hot. Or 500 MJ to vaporize it. The real life laser does not melt or vaporize its way through 20 foot of material. 

It could be argued that blasters in star wars are incredibly inefficient because they insist on superheating stuff red hot over larger surface areas. While a real life laser can blast through feet of material at a fraction of the power. A star wars blaster effects a tinier quantity of material but heats it to far greater temperatures. Surface area should be taken into account to establish the volume of material blasted. 

This laser wouldn't penetrate SW tank armour. 

 

What do your guts think about Brians new SwVSt videos so far? 

Well, I may have jumped the gun a bit by adding the analysis before all the examples have been collected. Sometimes it's easy to get ahead of one's self. I have quite a few clips to add, and am still finding more. I will post as many as I can, and if you have any please post them. If you don't have the clips, but know where they're from, I will be glad to rustle them up for you.

Well i have seven series of TNG and i think one series of DS9, so I'll compile anything i find as i find. I'm watching TNG at the moment, its always been my favourite along with the original series. I'll be sure to scour it for all technical tidbits on this run through ! 

I'll organize them into categories as i go along, see what folders get the biggest. 

 

 

The reactor is apparently providing power to normal ship systems. Life support, navigation, communications, computer core, navigational deflectors, sensors, lighting, artificial gravity, holodecks, etc. Impulse engines supposedly have their own fusion reactors, so they likely wouldn't be drawing from the main warp core. From the indications I see here, it leads me to conclude that 12.75 exawatts is the amount of power generated and used in normal ship operations. Essentially the equivalent of sitting at a stoplight.

In context only to the examples in this thread this is difficult to rationalize. All of the clips which represent the kinda power the ships use seem to range from 1 terawatt peak comms output to tens or hundreds of terawatts. You'd probably need hundreds of thousands of such systems to amount to the lofty 12.75 million terawatts, so given these examples I might be more inclined to go with watt-hours.

I can't imagine life support or computers requiring the energy of gigaton bombs every second to run, but their sensors are pretty bloody fast; their able to simultaneously can multiple near by star systems in a matter of seconds and determine the existence of life forms, evidence of advanced planetary civilizations and even detect traces of weapon discharge in orbit! This implies their sensors are not only uber advanced in the fact they can detect pretty much anything and everything in a star system, but they are also millions of times faster than lightspeed providing near instant multi-light year range. So perhaps these sensors could be the power hungry beast which munches the exawatts. 

Edit: although the dialogue does state the gun is "terawatt powered" I don't necessarily think that a terajoule per second interpretation is most consistent with the effects. The volume of damage other energy weapons like 20 MJ phase pistols and the ~4GJ CRM anti-vehicle rifle produce imply the effects of the Thoron gun are probably more consistent with 40 gigajoule 1/24th second terawatt pulses (ray gun page). And thats still an order of magnitude more powerful than the CRM. 

That website I mentioned a year or two ago has finally taken shape..

http://www.imperialguidetowarfare.com/

It had better live up to TCW, or there'll be trouble. 

I prefer the old robocops looks, not so keen on the changes. The whole wake up sequence looks a bit gay as well. 

I'm considering doing my own vid comentary on that one, or at least a collection of videos and reasoning. Some scenes depict for example multiple heavy blasts from fighters where one destroys a "small arms" proof droideka in single shots while the other goes of and hits some marble leaving no more than a sqaure meter of black scorching, literally orders of magnitude less firepower than handheld weapons cause in other scenes. Furthermore its the only way to rationalize some scenes in TCW.

I'm not sure what you mean? What's your assumptions on proton yield? Highest calcs based on asteroids are like 100 or 200 megatons. An ISD dedicating 5% of the reactor output to weapons would be over a hundred teratons a second, so 20 TT per heavy turret isn't unreasonable. 100 ships firing of their entire payloads of 200 torpedoes would add up to two teratons (at 200 megatons each). The highest stated figure for Enterprise reactor output is equivalent to two gigatons per second (hundred odd gigatons for a fleet of fifty ships of comparable ability). 

So a TL bolt strikes with with the directed force of 100,000 times the energy of said proton torpedoes. We see in one Episode of Star Trek that the Enterprise can take ship sized chunks out a unprepared cube with single phaser strikes, and that the focused firepower of a fleet into a single area of a adapted cube can do critical damage... they are not indestructible. 

While I think a cube would be vaporized by a single turbolaser strike, Brian proposed they would fly right through leaving a shaft from one side the other leaving limited collateral damage, meaning it may take a few salvos. But I'm doubtful a flotilla of borg cubes could do significant damage to a ISD's shields in any kind of realistic timeframe; they'd need shield penetrating (if exists) teleportion for any kind of hope.

 If they can develop teleporters that can penetrate an ISD's shields, they would need to teleport a high megaton range munition into a vital spot of a ISD's interior, instantly destroying the entire ship. This would turn it into a who shoots first wins situation.

Star Wars fan, signing off  

 

For naysayers I perfumed an extremely conservative calc: the requirements to reduce just the upper centimeter of the asteroid white-hot... the result was single-digit tons in TNT terms, comparable to what some now imply the main guns of a Venator star-destroyer to be (at least indirectly) based on TCW atmospheric combat and comical comic book extracts. 

Realistically the asteroids mass was at least melted considering the luminosity (black body radiatioN) of the debris. We also see another asteroid in the same shots in the distance, several times the diameter of Obi's fighter as he flies past it, no more than 8 - 10 shots does a similar thing to that one, again requiring at least triple digit tons per shot. 

 

Strange. I did update it so the pictures were neater, but the URL usually stays the same.

http://www.imperialguidetowarfare.com/slave-1-firepower

Okay took this straight of a powerpoint, its very sloppy.

First draft, i'll figure out how to make it look better in the future.

For those who don't watch the videos I have recreated some of Brian's work regarding Slave 1, asteroids and kilotons . I'll post a link to the site with detail analysis later. If I can figure out how to to upload and paste pictures I'll post the analysis here too for ease of reference.

Preemptively I understand that many asteroids (some way smaller than the one I'm even talking about) were not vaporized or even melted, merely fragmented or split apart. This shows a disparity in firepower and not a contradiction, because the asteroid i refer is most explicitly superheated melted and probably vaporized, it was very large.. and very near the end of the chase...

This sorta does imply the shots we see at the beginning are a thousand times less powerful than the shots near the end (lol), and RoF didn't change so it ain't easy to explain...

I'm just looking at what the gun can do, at maximum power (and its impressive!)

That it did  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3i6lH4OKCI

We see in TCW that creatures exist that can withstand loads of firepower from blasters taking no damage, and in the end they decide its easier to shoot down tens or hundreds of tons of rock to block these creatures passage than to actually kill them with shots to the eye. They can do that with a spray from their guns, or split meter thick stone support columns, but not even scratch these creatures.

This could indirectly flow with the intelligent guns idea as the gun detects it is firing upon organic targets it fires kilojoule shots capable of pockmarking your shirt with a kill shot to the chest or injuring your arm. It seems quite far fetched to believe creatures are so supernatural in their endurance that a few cubic center meters of their armoured hide is harder to destroy than a hundred pounds of iron. 

You also have to remember that the USS Vengeance was also heavily damaged at the time.  The fact that it hit at such a steep angle, and didn't break apart until after hitting the ground shows it has better endurance than the Invisible Hand when it comes to re-entries.

Isn't the red glow as the hull is heated something that happens regardless of if the ship is taken damage or not? 

To be honest it doesn't look like Invisible Hand is suffering to badly from mere atmospheric entry, considering it was pock-marked with 60 meter holes and was cut in two. Jedi Crash offers another example of a heavily damaged ship with failing power in systems crashing into a planet.