Rhydonium

[Vince 520]

It is not suprising explosives can do this from the inside. Especially if the hull is super enhanced by internal technologies. And if the super-compression technologies are compromised , the fuels may become orders of magnitude less dense, which might have some kind of effect. The fact some debris destroy a frigate is interest, i didn't notice that.

[Vince 520]

Something to consider is that fighter suicidal relativitc ramming attacks are unprecedented , presumably unfeasible. So starships might have significant protection against relativistic missiles retaining gigatons of KE. The Falcon flying around the gas giant should have had these sorts of KE. But maybe it is the slow blade which penetrates the shield and causes significant damage to unprotected hulls.

[scvn2812 504]

Something to consider is that fighter suicidal relativitc ramming attacks are unprecedented , presumably unfeasible. So starships might have significant protection against relativistic missiles retaining gigatons of KE. The Falcon flying around the gas giant should have had these sorts of KE. But maybe it is the slow blade which penetrates the shield and causes significant damage to unprotected hulls.

 

Some rambling:

 

There's two main strains of thought with regards to shields and KE that I can think of. The first being that if KE was that much harder to defend against than energy, everyone would use KE. The Trade Federation would have just carpet bombed the Gungans. Some types of shields, like the Gungans and the Death Stars's, are permeable to slower moving objects in much the same way that you can wade into water without ill effect but if you jump off of a bridge, unless you hit it just right, your bones and internal organs are goo.

 

Or maybe shields are significantly more threatened by KE but KE has fallen out of favor due to cheap, abundant energy sources that can be stored in such a way as to not seriously hamper the performance of space craft thus making it all but idiotic to spend mass on large missile or projectile magazines that cannot be stored without effecting the ship's mass. The vulnerability to KE is known but with no wars to fight, pre-Clone Wars military procurement was dictated by budget not necessarily effectiveness and/or hampered by centuries old doctrine about the inefficiency and irrelevance of KE. So when it comes time to fight an actual galactic scale conflict, everyone is using energy weapons for their primary weapons but there are novelties being dragged out of the cellars of the galaxy like EMP bombs and mass drivers, the wide spread use of which is hampered by the lack of logistics to support them - most military infrastructure being designed around the construction and maintenance of energy weapons. KE might be starting to come back into vogue as a primary weapon by the Battle of Coruscant (Invisible Hand seeming to have a battery of them) but its too little, too late. Having the resources of an entire galaxy to draw on, the Empire can just build more and bigger warships than any single system or political entity that is likely to try its hand at rebelling so it refrains from encouraging the development of weapons that might upset the strategic balance and also that would necessitate rebuildng an entire galaxy wide logistics network to support a military capable of repressing an entire galaxy that needs a whole new set of equipment to go to war with.

 

Kamikaze tactics are probably not viable under either scenario (weak KE shields / strong KE shields) as fighters would still need a fair bit of time to accelerate up to speeds where they could mangle a capital ship (and its debatable exactly what would happen, a fighter with relativistic KE might over penetrate and only leave a fighter sized hole through the ship, which would not really accomplish a whole lot unless you aimed really well.)

 

Also the longer you accelerate, the harder it is to change your vector. Said kamikaze fighters would have to have enough Gees over their prey to run them down no matter how much delta v their target burned up trying not to be where the fighter is aiming. A Star Destroyer can change its position in space by 30 kilometers with a one second burst of her engines. If she puts the pedal to the metal when the fighter is on her final attack run, good luck changing the vector enough to get a hit.

 

Also a Star Destroyer could always kick her own engines into overdrive and try and slow down the relative velocity of the impact. Given an ISD can run down the Falcon, there's every possibility that an ISD could add enough time to the fighter's attack run that she can down the kamikaze with sheer volume of defensive fire, even if she doesn't have the Gees to bring the relative velocity down to something more tolerable.

 

It is not suprising explosives can do this from the inside. Especially if the hull is super enhanced by internal technologies. And if the super-compression technologies are compromised , the fuels may become orders of magnitude less dense, which might have some kind of effect. The fact some debris destroy a frigate is interest, i didn't notice that.

 

Internal explosions are almost always worse than external ones since you generally design a ship around resisting damage from outside, which prevents the number one cause of internal explosions in a combat situation: enemy action. Magazine hits have always been the most violent way to end a ship's life at sea. Since they don't generally look like an artificial sun when they explode, its safe to assume that whatever powers Star Destroyers is not very volatile but that's a long ways away from there being nothing aboard the ship that you wouldn't want to have explosive charges attached to.

[scvn2812 504]

Back to Han's quote about all the possible calamities about traveling through hyperspace:

 

I don't get the snark, after all, with a name like Millennium Falcon you'd think it was built to last. Its not like its called the Aluminum Falcon.

 

(Okay, someone posted something on Facebook that reminded me of that line from the Robot Chicken sketch so I couldn't resist...)

[Vince 520]

The thing is, we do see X-wings remain relative to the Death STar, despite it itself moving at many km/s, and the maneuverability of fighters at four digit accelerations should be far greater than a capital ships. A fighter should out delta V a larger ship? It is also negotiable that a ISD may require substantial time to power up vital systems, such as the engines, because we see that near crash between two in the film, and they fail to halt. So it might take minutes to power up the engines of a main capital ship, maybe as systems readjust to handle such power.

 

You make a good point regarding intergalactic logistics and the issues there.

 

The only time we see perhaps relativistic missiles [that i know of] impact a starships raised shields is in the EU, with the 3 ISD's and the Executor. This bodes kindly for very effective particle shields. In primary canon, even the arguably gigajoule range ballistic weapons penetrate the other ships armour, but only in regions where there is perhaps less than a foot of said armour.

 

Finaly landing inside a star is always worse than skimming the surface, because you have the stars mass crushing down on you. The Falcon would surely be crushed.