Captain Seafort

Maybe I missed it but I didn't see anything about their turbolasers being at full power. Jacen's monologue outlines the exact same mentality, almost point for point, of both the reasons not to fully incinerate a planet and in causing a major humanitarian crisis that will draw off resources from war fighting. If he really wanted the whole planet dead, then he could just nuke it. Have every ship in the fleet unload on all of the major population centers and kill as many people and as much infrastructure as possible. Instead only his ship fires and even minimizes the initial damage by focusing on one area rather than spreading it out or concentrating on just the population centers.

They're also way outside the system, given that they're using "long-range" turbolasers, and even the bog-standard version can hit planets in the green belt from the edge of the system (per the Enemy Lines duology). Indeed, it may be that they are firing full-power shots, and they're simply at the outer edge of their range - the fact that TL bolts shed energy laterally means that even tera- or peta-ton shots must be reduced to a mild tickle at some point, even if that point is a few dozen light hours out.

In other words, nothing even remotely resembling a BDZ, which would in any case be counterproductive. As you quoted:

Unable to hide is frustration, Caedus whirled on the boy. "Think, Ben. What do we both need to break the stalemate? What are we losing here and the Confederaiton gaining?"

Ben recoiled from the venom in Caedu's voice, but he answered quickly, "Allies."

"Correct." Caedus placed his hand on Ben's shoulder, but he was so angry he had to stop himself from drawing back and striking the youth. "And if the Confederation hopes to make an ally of the Wookies, what must they do?"

Twizzl's eyes lit with angry comprehension. "Come to Kashyyyk's defense."

"Which means they have to abandon their drive on Coruscant," Ben finished. "And burning the forests is going to provoke more of a public outrage than just capturing the Kashyyyk assault fleet. If the Confederation doesn't help the Wookies, they're going to have trouble recruiting more worlds. It'll look like they don't care about anyone bu themselves.

If Caedus was trying to destroy the planet he could have done so in hours, possibly faster, as has already been explained. He wasn't, he was trying to draw off the Confederation fleet - force them to break off their drive on Coruscant to defend Kashyyyk. To do that he had to ensure that the bombardment lasted long enough for any Confederation intervention to be meaningful.

Admiral Motti had said that "This station is now the ultimate power in the universe", implying that the Imperial fleet paled in comparison to the Death Star.

In 1945 nuclear weapons were the ultimate power of this planet. That doesn't mean that a conventional bomber raid was anything to sneeze at. Or inferior, given what happened to Tokyo a few months earlier. It simply means that a nuke-armed bomber make more of a mess than a conventional bomber.

I'd be interested to see what we might be able to compare it to, density wise. Its not intended to be a warship so I wonder if it would compare more to the ISS or the old Russian station whose name escapes me at the moment.

If you rearranged Mir's modules into a straight line the station would be about 70-odd metres long, with a mass of 130 tons. Scale that up to 8k and it would be about 140 million tons. JMS could have done with adding another order of magnitude or two to B5's mass.

a portion of the energy from Alderaan going poof.

A portion which on it's own would be enough to cause Alderaan to go poof.

Then you're in even worse shape, given that Phobos is far larger than the Ex.

With the warp field. As for shoving the Death Star around like this, I very much doubt it, given that the moon in question is about half the size of the Ex.

How fast was the E-D moving?

Very slowly. They expected to take seven hours to accelerate the moon by 4km/s.

What was worse was when KirkSkywalker and StarWarsStarTrek started debating each other.

Really? It sounds like pitching these two against each other could be good entertainment.

Cheers.

As for Mr KirkSkywalker...wow. Although scarily I'm not sure if it's the most bonkers "theory" I've ever heard or not.

I guess I'm just tired of seeing people treat ST and SW as hard sci-fi.

Who the fuck treats either of them as hard sf? And where's the WTF smilie when you need it?

ESPECIALLY since the KirkSkywalker saga on SFJ.

Never go there myself - what did this character get up to?

Bump. I've been reading more into City Planets, and frankly, they just don't work.

In reality, sure. Coruscant obviously does though.

Sure, you can have radiators, but they'd need to be ridiculously massive. And you can't have too many, or else, you'd lose efficiency, as the radiators would just radiate heat into each other, and we all know that's just a recipe for disaster.

One word: neutrinos. SW vessels (and probably city-planets as well) use neutrino radiators to dump excess heat, which removes the problem of the dumped heat interacting with the environment. Yes, it's effectively magic, but so are hyperdrives, lightsabers, and pretty much every other technology in SW.

We can't theorize these titanic yields and ignore the complete lack of effects supporting them.

What lack of effects? There was a km-wide fireball. As for the rest, the obvious conclusion is that they're a lot weaker - the 130kt shot was when Veers ordered maximum power to take out the generator.