Combat in atmosphere, STAR WARS

[Vince 520]

According to some, the combat above coruscant was close enough to the planet that nuclear fireballs would occur with the energies being unleashed. And then we got the capital ships dueling in atmosphere in TCW. 

I have a possible rationalization inspired by force-field enhanced armour (but it is rather sillY! lol). 

[Tyralak 12,068]

This does create a very large problem. Especially since Turbolasers and Blasters are thermal weapons. Perhaps the power level is lowered in the atmosphere? There's also the possibility that they aren't as powerful as we thought. Anyone know what would happen if that much thermal energy was released in an atmosphere?

[Khas 12,158]

The air would be super-heated, creating shock waves that would level everything around them for miles.

[Vince 520]

Khas, if those turbolaser bolts were a couple of megatons a piece, would they still cause fireballs/shockwaves? Or kilotons a piece? Is there any simple math / sources you could share so i can get a better idea.

[Vince 520]

One of my rationalizations considers the mundane limitations of armour. This armour must be enhanced by energy fields so that it can endure the impossible energies some sources would suggest, and these energies, along with propulsion, weapons and shields will require power. A SW ship produces so much power that it must use it, turbolaser capacitors for example seem only to hold a couple of seconds worth of built up energy before its discharged, and if a ship does not expend all the power through its systems, it probably wont have capacitors large enough to store the energy for very long before it overflows. So the ship must use its power, externally to avoid build up. 24h watts being used externally ought to be unhealthy for the planet, maybe even if it is in the form of energy shields. 

 

I also imagine, that as time went on and the capability to end worlds or ground battles from space became easier and easier, laws and unspoken codes become more and more complicated and layered to compensate, as either side dosen't want to destroy resources, nor perform attacks that would open them up for the same kind of attack. If two ships were slinging about teratons/petatons in atmosphere, its fair to say it could have some very nasty world ruining secondary effects before either side were destroyed. According to some, the battle in Coruscant should have cause nasty effects in the planet too with such yields. 

 

Perhaps it is a possibility that weapons nor shields can be used in atmosphere without nasty secondary effects? The armour and shields being ramped up to full power they may react violently with the atmosphere, this is not an unrealistic proposition considering they may be 24th watts in power. So ships may mutually lower both weapons AND shields/armours to compensate for this, or it may be an involuntary built in function of the technologies that don't allow for maximal use in atmosphere - because of the secondary effects. This would allow ships to fight atmospheric battles using only giga/terajoules of energies (whatever the visuals allow) whilst still destroying one anther. 

Provided we never see evidence of this on-screen or in books and logical plot points like one side deciding to ramp up the armour or firepower and turning the battle never happen, it makes sense that the reason for low yields is not one under a captains control. So either it is a built in counter-measure to ensure fair combat and preservation of the environment, or ships simply cannot run their reactors at full capacity in atmosphere for unknown reasons. 

[Vince 520]

Its a bit far-fetched, I know  

[Tyralak 12,068]

Its a bit far-fetched, I know

 

Actually it makes sense. It has to be something like that, otherwise the only other explanation is that we've grossly overestimated their firepower.

[Khas 12,158]

Khas, if those turbolaser bolts were a couple of megatons a piece, would they still cause fireballs/shockwaves? Or kilotons a piece? Is there any simple math / sources you could share so i can get a better idea.

 

Yes.  I mean, look at thunder.  It's a shock wave created by air that's been super-heated by lightning.  Lasers have been known to super-heat and ionize air IRL.

 

http://www.lightningsafety.com/nlsi_info/thunder2.html

Scroll down to "Science of Thunder".  No matter how bright lightning is, less than 10% of it's energy is displayed as visible light.  Most is released as heat.  Considering that turbolasers seem to be charged particle or plasma beams, much like lightning, there should be a similar effect.  lNote that lightning is sub-KT, and it still produces the shock waves we hear as thunder.  At close range, thunder can cause damage.

 

Also, the fireballs produced by the atomic bombs?  That was due to the intense radiation super-heating the air around it.  The shock waves were largely due to the air that hadn't ignited being super-heated and expanding.  The Tsar Bomba, a 50 megaton nuclear bomb, created a 5 mile-wide fireball.  It's shock wave was recorded on it's third passage around the Earth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

 

 

However, even if turbolasers only release one wavelength of light, like actual lasers (Unlikely), at the intensities stated. they'd be ionizing the air around them, as shown in that video, which would super-heat the air around it, and we'd still get shock waves.

 

Look, for right now, I'm just extrapolating from real-life phenomena.  I'll post calcs as soon as I find them, which, believe it or not, they're somewhat hard to find with what limited resources I have on me right now.

[Vince 520]

The asteroid and millennium falcon calcs peak at some megatons in the films, most of the time with KT lower limits. Anyone got ideas on how to calculate the effects of a 1 KT fighter laser, considering wattage and stuff like that, using resources like Atomic Rocket and the SD page on it? Its beyond me I'm afraid. 

[Vince 520]

Actually it makes sense. It has to be something like that, otherwise the only other explanation is that we've grossly overestimated their firepower.

Yep. If the on-film firepower would also result in greater secondary effects, it would give some credence to the idea. 

[Brian Young 11,994]

I still fail to see a problem. All the energy is deposited into the point of impact. That material is vaporized, and anything else that happens is a secondary effect as a result of that. Gases cool quickly, as demonstrated when approximately 500 megajoules was delivered to the grate, but didn't injure anyone in an enclosed space. The expansion causes cooling.

As far as blast effects, the rate of injection is key. Bombs and impacts deliver their energies much more rapidly than turbolasers, resulting in much greater lateral blast effects. The difference is orders of magnitude.

[Brian Young 11,994]

In fact, over in my part of the forum, I calculated the difference in duration of energy release vs collateral damage of blasters/turbolasers of a similar yield to explosives scales almost exactly. The difference in collateral damage was about 14,000 times, and the difference in duration was 19,000 times. That's uncanny consistency, and if anything, proves the yield estimates of turbolasers.

[Vince 520]

Well most spectators don't agree with those conclusions unfortunately, claiming total energy is still important and that explosions don't scale linearly according to power. Under their assumptions, the point-defense guns used to vaporize asteroids in TESB would result in town-destroying shock-waves and multi-hundred fireballs if used in atmosphere. 

According to your own methodology, the teraton guns would still be like megaton nukes demanding far greater secondary effects than what we saw, something more like the Tsar bomb each time a ship is struck. In the episode explosions are no larger than they are in space.

[scvn2812 504]

Quick question: are there bombardments from the main guns on a soft target like a planet's surface in a situation where we should expect them to be taking advantage of how much energy they can throw around? I know there's a few instances of shields and armor tanking shots that would level a city according to Brian's and Wong's models without more fireworks than what we would expect from a WW2 fight. That I assume is due to implausibly efficient and resilient armor and shields that prevent more than a token amount of energy escaping.

 

Ground bombardment without a need to reduce collateral damage would be messy to explain.

[Vince 520]

Theres one instance where shots miss a ship and hit a planet in one of Brians videos, the laser one I think, but other than that there hasn't been a "maxim bombardment" in the primary canon. The only time I know of a heavy turbolaser being used is in one of the novels, and that was to destroy a single Hellfire droid.

 

Ships absorbing all the energy was one of my initial ideas too, but its seems quite implausible that they could sustain 100% efficient energy absorption once they start sustaining serious damage and the tech responsible for that absorption is compromised. 

 

If ships do scale their shields armour and weapons down so so many orders of magnitude to fight in atmosphere, then in theory a single shot form a ship in orbit could engulf them all in a single all destructive fireball, wiping out both fleets.  I imagine if this is the case, it is because they must. Shields or weapons might not be capable of generating that much energy in atmosphere without nasty secondary effects to the planet or the ships forcing both sides to play down. I can't easily imagine both sides agreeing upon setting weapons and shields down to one billionth (or whatever) their capacity to fight fair and not damage the planet, and all it would take is for one side to ramp up the power ten or a hundred times to start creaming the enemy. 

 

Another possibility is that their actually technobabble like phasers, achieving massive damage to the primary target with little to no secondary effect. The primary effect often looks like blasting or vaporization non the less, and there is evidence in the EU for weapons shunting excess matter/energy into other dimensions (death star / thermal detonators containment fields), and even primary canon leaves us wondering. 

 

Some do assume what we see there is the upper limits on a Venators firepower, because it overcomes shields and armour. Logically it must be powerful enough to do so, so Venators are limited to WW2 level firepower. But then ships such as Slave 1 or X-wings from the movies would rival them in firepower, which makes no sense. 

The only ways to reconcile this example imo, is to assume technobabble or to assume situational variable everything.

[scvn2812 504]

I have the same reservations about both flawless damage control even as damage is being taken and the notion of a gentleman's agreement not to leave planets with their populations and climates devastated by adding stellar amounts of heat into the planet. Especially in the case of the latter where we can't get every country to agree to stop using landmines, cluster bombs, chemical weapons, phosphorus weapons etc on just one planet. Its hard to imagine such a consensus arising in a civilization of numerous species.

 

On the other hand, they can and do throw some pretty fantastic energy around with zero apparent consequences to the environment. The Millennium Falcon can take off without knocking over Stormtroopers a stone's throw away or kicking up any debris at all.

 

The Death Star technicians work next to beams containing a chunk of the energy needed to destroy a planet without any obvious protection.

 

Yet their ability to manipulate energy isn't so perfect that you don't have things happen like the ISDs that explodes at Endor rather than being bludgeoned into scrap. An explosion where the visible portion is large enough to consume a mile long warship ought not to be pleasant to have happen over your house no matter how conservative the assumptions.

 

I suppose it's possible that in either case, they take the chance that their safeguards might fail or someone might cheat and dial the power up to apocalypse. Although I would imagine going to full combat power might take time if the reactor and associated systems are running at their low end, everything would have to be brought to full strength in tandem, you'd have to walk the reactor up to max, since every magnitude increase in output would require all the safeties to be ramped up to handle it. So it might be difficult to cheat as the other guy would probably notice and start ramping up their power too, neutralizing any advantage from racing to see who can cause the apocalypse first.

 

I've remarked a few times that as far as on screen canon goes, aside from one side trying to build a Death Star, it's a pretty civil civil war. Aside from the Death Star, the hundred megaton missiles defending that one planet are the most powerful weapons we have direct confirmation of existing rather than extrapolating their existence and enough of those would handily do the job of slaughtering millions and devastating planetary economies and environments. Yet we have no canon planetary holocausts except Alderaan and almost Yavin and that was after 20 years of military dictatorship rather than a 3 year civil war after generations of peace on the galactic scale.

 

Terraton turbolasers or not, if they want to murder planets they can but don't.

[Brian Young 11,994]

The problem with scaling the damage vs an armored ship is the fact it is armored. We can scale the damage vs soft targets due to the input duration and direct observation, because we can assume similar vaporized material with similar energy input within an order of magnitude, just different pressure due to time.

However, advanced armor does not vaporize so easily, and therefore we're still looking at orders of magnitude less collateral damage, or indeed damage of any kind, than vs soft targets.

To state that we should be seeing huge fireballs miles across when a turbolaser pulse hits the armor is to assume that massive amounts of the armor would be vaporized, just as easily as dirt. This assumption is false by orders of magnitude. The same weapon that might blow a 15 mile city apart might only blow a 60 meter hole in heavy advanced armor, as seen onscreen. The armor would absorb most of the energy, and it apparently takes heavy guns to damage it at all. A few cubic meters would probably be vaporized, causing the 60 meter hole, and this would cool quickly as it dispersed due to expansion cooling.

Put simply, armor works.

 

Good to see you back in the saddle, S.

[scvn2812 504]

Playing with numbers using this calculator with the assumption of 1 kiloton yield, a 5 meter lens, wavelength of 2.9 e -7 (the default value) and a beam duration of .3 seconds, we'd get a 1.6 kilometer pin hole in the ground with a radius of 35 centimeters or so if the ground were made of tungsten and the beam fired at a distance of 1,000 km. Said calculator also informs me that impulse shock, which it defines as the rate of vaporization exceeding the speed of sound causing shockwaves in any material nearby. How far those shockwaves would extend is beyond the calculator's scope.

 

So if there's enough inefficiency in the disposal of heat to cause melting of something with a melt point of gigatons, a rounding error's worth of excess energy above the capacity of the armor ought to cause some local turbulence in the atmosphere in ship to ship combat. For that matter, don't even WWII caliber naval guns cause shockwaves? I seem to recall an aerial picture of an Iowa broadside where the water is moved by the violence of the firing of the guns, I would imagine the explosion on the receiving end would likewise cause some shockwaves as well. The explosions in that video of the Separatist and Republic ships fighting in atmosphere certainly seem WW2 in scale yet I don't recall shockwaves. Is there a way these ships can have chunks of hull flying off of them without producing some sort of atmospheric shockwave? A terraton missing and hitting a planet ought to be a bit more violent.

 

If there is a reasnable expectation that even the scale of blasts that we do see should have a shockwave then we seem to have two conclusions, both opening doors to rabbit holes that make claiming anything we do is scientifically justiable rather tricky, the first being that everything we see in at least Clone Wars is a recreation with flawed effects akin to Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor (except I don't think Michael Bay would ever soft peddle the scale of explosions ) which still leaves us with the question of whether that's a 1 ton explosion the animators failed to put a shockwave around or a 1 ton explosion that is just the tip of an ice berg of pain the size of a small sun that was safely absorbed by the shields / armor and not permitted to escape into the environment. The 1 ton being what our eyes tell us, the 1 ton + significantly more that we can't see because it was absorbed being what the Death Star, General Dodonna, causal asteroid destruction etc. tell us.

 

The second being that its some sort of reverse voodoo physics phaser where military targets are harmed far more savagely than soft targets - either way without a shockwave, at which point everything up to and including the Death Star's hypermatter reactor burning condensed orphan tears is not fully able to be ruled out.

 

As analyists looking at a children's cartoon based on a movie franchise with live actors, are we obligated to mind trick ourselves into forgetting that's its a children's cartoon if we hit a brick wall with our ability to contrive excuses for why the cartoon doesn't match even our most conservative estimates of what is happening in the movies such as the Hoth asteroids being blown to smithereens? I don't mean that to make a mockery of what we do here but I do think its a fair question.

[Brian Young 11,994]

"...if the ground were made of tungsten."

We are talking about turbolasers in space (or in the very thin upper edge of atmosphere) striking advanced armor. Ground and tungsten are both false assumptions, explaining the inconsistency.

[Brian Young 11,994]

You see, when dealing with a beam weapon, ANY collateral damage is completely dependent on vaporization at the point of impact.

A bomb is not similarly limited, as the energy naturally spreads in all directions.

But the beam energy strikes exactly one point, usually the smaller the better. If material is vaporized (energy), the gasses will affect the area immediately surrounding the impact. If there is enough energy, perhaps some of that material will also be melted or vaporized. If it is vaporized violently enough (power), these gasses will be under pressure, which will cause a shock wave (blast effect) in atmosphere.

As this is a secondary effect, the blast result is invariably much less than a bomb of similar yield, where blast effects are primary.

Lets imagine a teraton laser pulse hits advanced armor, and all that energy simply spreads across the hull and cools in a fraction of a second. As no material is vaporized, there would be no shock wave. Period. From a teraton.

Lets say this stuff has an incredibly high heat capacity, and it takes several teratons, all delivered in a fraction of a second (to avoid the quick spread) to vaporize at all. You hit it with a 20 teraton laser pulse, which vaporizes a few cubic meters, but violently enough to blow a 60 meter hole, due to the quick input causing a shock wave.

Again, the lateral effects are utterly dependent on how easily the material vaporizes.

Now, in that mindset, how can this compare to firing the same weapon on tungsten? Dirt? An unarmored target?

Obviously, the softer targets would vaporize more easily, resulting in greater collateral damage.

[scvn2812 504]

Read the above a bit more carefully dude

 

Its pointed out that there are stray hits in capital ship on capital ship combat in atmosphere that hit the ground instead of the ship which we must assume was intended to be hazardous to the other ship's health. Hazardous to the other ship's health requiring nuclear force at minimum.

 

I took yonder laser weapon calculator and plugged in a kiloton of wattage and used tungsten as the material because I didn't feel like trying to decide what value to use for rock. However, it does make a good stand in for a low end starship armor. Actual starship materials and energy weapon yields would be significantly stronger / more potent as evidenced by Hoth.

 

My above calc was to show that a beam weapon hitting the ground with even a kiloton equivalent in wattage will result in shockwaves to some extent or another. By the calculators' determination, enough to cause significant destruction within the confines of a single compartment, however large that is expected to be. An effect similar to this was not seen or so I'm getting from reading this second hand (I don't know precisely which video is being referred to where this instance of a turbolaser aimed at a ship hits the ground.)

 

With regards to starships, the assertion is not that turbolasers are Kilotons in wattage nor that ship armor can accurately be described by tungsten. I'm exploring an idea that if enough death ray energy hits something with enough energy that it causes an explosion, an explosion of several dozen meters in diameter as we sometimes see inflicted on ships in these videos would likely cause a shock wave proportionate to the size of the explosion itself. The potency of the explosion being based on just how much more vigorous the beam was than the armor was resilient. If there's enough overkill to cause an explosion that looks like a bomb going off then a shock wave is a reasonable assumption if the atmosphere is thick enough. Its only the energy above and beyond the ability of the materials to handle causing the shockwaves so it wouldn't be continental in scale in any case.

 

The Venators vs Munis fight may be too high of an altitude but I've also seen Acclamators downed by flak explosions with no shock waves either. I'm going to go out on a limb and say we probably have a lot of explosions in film toon canon that probably ought to have shockwaves.

 

If that is the case, I beg the question, then what? Do we add this to the list of known weapon feats or call it an error? If the latter, might that have consequences for other universes with goofy effects like phasers are treated?

[scvn2812 504]

Another thought: if armor rated for say 1 terraton gets hit by 1 terraton and a kiloton, might that be a bad experience for the crew and anyone nearby the ship?

[Vince 520]

If that is the case, I beg the question, then what? Do we add this to the list of known weapon feats or call it an error? If the latter, might that have consequences for other universes with goofy effects like phasers are treated?

If SW beams are technobabble I'd still assume their quite different to phasers, regardless of lacking secondary effect. With phasers targets normally appear to just disappear, blasters do appear to melt, vaporize, and blow up the target, but always with very little explosiveness. 

[Vince 520]

For there to be no shock waves, explosiveness, literally all of the teratons would have to be absorbed and stored inside the ship at 100% efficiency. And that doesn't explain the stray shots.

And surely if a metal needs a teraton to vaporize one cubic meters, that just means its going to be very explosive when it finally is vaporized? As in, the gasses are expanding much faster than they would if you vaporized a thousand cubes instead?