Star Wars Vessel Densities

[DSG2k 4]

Okeedokee, so here are the relevant supporting images and the tale.

Basically I was looking at this cap . . .

 

. . . and I drew the line showing that it is flat.

 

 

It's like white-girl-booty-joke flat.   It's like EKG-of-poop flat.   There's nothing there, curve-wise.

 

But, being thorough, I was looking at the others and noticed something.   Take a look here:

 

 

Basically, the horizon seems to expand upward . . . my best guess for an in-universe explanation would be . . . well, I don't have one.   See, at first I was thinking maybe that the apparent horizon is just due to our being very near the Death Star's terminator, meaning the apparent curvature could be dark areas getting lit up.  However, that idea is total crap.  Not only does this shot clearly show light from the left leaving shadows to the right, but remarkably this light angling is actually pretty consistent with the scene of the Executor falling out of position.  So, that can't be it.

 

Alternatives include a blow-off of dust or just a mirage effect of hot gases clinging to the Death Star surface, though none of those are emotionally satisfying.

 

So, anyway, I looked at one which showed a touch of curvature, and stuck another straight line on it like this . . .

 

. . . so that was odd.  You can see that there's more red over the horizon on the edges than in the middle.

If you can't see it that way, here's a difference-based overlay in which you should be able to see the white- or light-colored skinny crescent on the horizon.
 

 

So there's definitely some something there.   Interestingly, it is also present right around the Executor when it crashes in the earlier frame.   And, it seems to dissipate in an irregular fashion, as seen a few frames later:

 

 

Here's the difference between that frame and the bright blast frame:

 

 

And here's the difference between that frame and that earlier frame I first drew a line on of the Executor knifing the Death Star:

 

 

I note all of this not to simply wow you with hugemongous pictures of pretty explosions (but c'mon, who doesn't love that?), but to make the point that whatever the devil this is, I don't think it is actual Death Star surface.

 

Nevertheless, since the middle bright blast scene is the best one showing curvature, I decided to pretend that it actually is Death Star hull showing, and fiddle with it accordingly. 

 

Thus, we ended up with me doing stuff like this:

 

 

and this:

 

 

Suffice it to say, it takes a very large circle to match what little curvature there is.

 

Here's the result of a 90,000 pixel circle.   As you can see, it's fairly close, but to my eye there's more red over the middle than at the edges, implying a larger circle is needed.

 

 

So, here's a 100,000 pixel circle.

 

 

I think there's still room for improvement, but it's a closer match to my eye.

 

So, that suggests a Death Star of at least 100,000 pixels compared to the Executor.   The visible Executor is about 520 pixels in height in the knifing frame, so even if we assume 80 more pixels are hiding inside the Death Star (giving us a round 600 pixels), that's a Death Star some 100000/600 times larger than the Executor, or 166.67 times the size.

 

If you buy the 17.6km nonsense, that's basically a 3000 kilometer Death Star . . . in which case, it's only somewhat smaller than the Moon.

 

With 100 meter-ish towers on it, which may also be like 10 kilometers, but not visible from afar, or something.   Galileo would be amused.

 

I'm just gonna go ahead and discount this shot as having any utility at all, mmkay?

 

EDIT: 

 

Forgot to note, for those who want to play at home.  Using the GiMP, the circles are as follows:

 

The 90,000px circle is at position -46730 by 364 with fixed aspect ratio.   (The positioning is unfortunately based on a rectangle's upper left corner rather than the center of the circle like I would prefer, but whatever ... it's convert-able if one cares.)  I recommend turning off anti-aliasing since otherwise things bog down on slower processors.

 

The more satisfying 100000px circle is at position -51984 by 360, and naturally also fixed aspect ratio.




 

Edited June 17, 2014 by DSG2k

[Khas 12,158]

Actually, I think you got miles and kilometers mixed up.  Last time I checked, Mercury is about 4800 km in diameter.  3000 km is closer in size to Luna.

[DSG2k 4]

I had already caught it, thanks though. I tried to change to radius but the sentence flow broke, so I changed to the moon.

[Tyralak 12,068]

Something that came to mind; People seem to regard Alderaan as a solid, inert object. However, it's a geologically active planet with a magnetic field, much like Earth. Destroying the planet may be as simple a matter as popping a balloon. Pierce a geologically active planet, and the stored energy inside the planet causes it to explode.

[359 11]

Earth is considered geologically active, but it is not ready to just pop as far as I'm aware (and as I hope). A quick google search came up empty, but I don't think there's quite enough energy stored tectonically to blow up an entire planet.

 

A 9.0 richter scale earthquake releases a 'mere' 480 Mt (4.8*10^20 J) of energy, to reach the 10^38 J needed to mechanically blow up a planet would require the pent up and simultaneous release of 2.083*10^17 earthquakes of 9.0 magnitude.

 

Incidentally, certain starquakes may be able to tear apart a planet.

[Tyralak 12,068]

Earth is considered geologically active, but it is not ready to just pop as far as I'm aware (and as I hope). A quick google search came up empty, but I don't think there's quite enough energy stored tectonically to blow up an entire planet.

 

A 9.0 richter scale earthquake releases a 'mere' 480 Mt (4.8*10^20 J) of energy, to reach the 10^38 J needed to mechanically blow up a planet would require the pent up and simultaneous release of 2.083*10^17 earthquakes of 9.0 magnitude.

 

Incidentally, certain starquakes may be able to tear apart a planet.

 

True. Possibly instantanious fusion of the heavy elements in the core? My whole reason for this line of thought, is to account for any possible secondary reactions which could have aided the destruction.

[Captain Seafort 17]

True. Possibly instantanious fusion of the heavy elements in the core? My whole reason for this line of thought, is to account for any possible secondary reactions which could have aided the destruction.

 

Why?  We've already got a much simpler solution staring us in the face: it's the ultimate BFG.  There's no need to go jumping through hoops to come up with a mechanism that involves vastly lower power levels when its not necessary, and indeed would leave unexplained phenomena that the BFG theory explains nicely.

[Tyralak 12,068]

Why?  We've already got a much simpler solution staring us in the face: it's the ultimate BFG.  There's no need to go jumping through hoops to come up with a mechanism that involves vastly lower power levels when its not necessary, and indeed would leave unexplained phenomena that the BFG theory explains nicely.

 

Do we want the correct answer, or just the easy one? The BFG theory works, yes. However, we should explore what would happen to a planet if a piercing beam of high energy were to penetrate to its core. This way we can develop a true lower limit by factoring in secondary effects. It's always good to establish an upper and lower limit, so the range of possibilities is narrowed down. Without resorting to NDE weaponry (There is no canon evidence of NDE technology in SW) or mystical Hyperspace handwaving, what is the lowest amount of energy required to achieve the destruction seen onscreen, utilizing secondary effects? After all, It's easier to put together a house if you have a floor.

[Tyralak 12,068]

Dudes/geeks don't take this the wrong way.

 

*This is NOT a troll comment*

 

I loved all the Star Wars films except Ep #1 and love TNG/DS9/VOY, but how can you guys argue over and over for years and years about which cannon is stronger and which shield gives more protection, take some drugs fuck some prostitutez kill a pensioner.

 

There is more interesting things in life than the same debates you have been having since you were 12, don't take this wrong I love you all I'm just a bit amazed that you still have the same arguments/debates.

 

Lots of love Eat Shit And Die X

 

A fair question, ESAD. However, the reason we do it is simply because we enjoy it. The same reason people debate literature, music, and sports. It's our hobby.

[Vince 520]

So I think it’s fair to say that there may be some discrepancies with the Death Star's size. It must be more than 900 Km according to the super destroyer crash scene, yet it's size relative to Endor is inconsistent; sometimes it's much smaller, and sometimes implicitly consistent. I'll take a closer look at all those scenes sometime. 

 

Edit GK5, I don’t see how you can so easily dismiss these very magnificent feats of acceleration.  In A New Hope the X wings flew past the radius of the gas giant Yavin within less than half a minute [all within a continuous shot], and they covered the giants diameter in much less than five minutes when they were already engaged above the Death Star, having flown all the way from Yavin's fourth moon. 

So in Star Wars can fly past gas giants within minutes ~ Battle of Yavin. 

 

This indicates velocities thousands of times the speed of sound and multi-thousand gravity accelerations.

 

It’s generally conceded that the way these super-G acceleration are used indicates there may be some build up time in most cases, unless a ship is already prepared for flight – expecting the need for super velocities. Otherwise you could easily flee beyond visual range within moments of the maximum thrust need for some of these other scenes to even work. 

 

Edit 2 And there are several scenes throughout the films and the Clone Wars where such speeds are observed. Take Han Solo’s trip from between two systems without any hyperdrive. The Falcon must have accelerated to a sublight velocity approaching the speed of light in order to achieve this within only a few years, or at best, months even if these two stars were especially close.

 

You haven’t yet offered up any feasible alternatives to explain the TCW evidence. A ship travels between the corona of a yellow star and one of its inhabitable planets within a few seconds of uncut footage. Even light takes a matter of minutes to reach the Earth within the Sun’s goldilocks zone. That was a ship that lacked any FTL and that was traveling at sublight speeds.

 

A feasible explanation is that they had accelerated to near light speeds, so that the effects of time dilation had the crew (and the audience) perceive only a few seconds, even when the trip really took several minutes. This is plausible given a relativistic velocity. And decelerating from almost a million times the speed of sound to subsonic velocity within minutes suggests even higher acceleration than these other instances or any of the numbers in the ICS. 

 

[DSG2k 4]

I told you I'll be presenting it and I shall, when I'm good and ready to do so.   I want to do it all at once, properly written up.   If you have no patience, that's too bad.

 

Perhaps, in the meantime, you, as a user of the ICS, would care to explain why a starship with mass manipulation technology would suddenly refuse to use it at sublight, thereby refusing to alter the required energy for all these accelerations you're so excited about.

 

However, let's ponder one of those accelerations, just as an example, in the hopes of whetting your appetite for a bit.

 

For instance, A New Hope is claimed to show a near-ground-to-orbit event during the Falcon's escape from Tatooine, featuring approximately 11 seconds from post-take-off engine output increase to a scene of the ship in orbit.  It is even claimed that when Han is looking at his instruments after the atmosphere shot, that he's only "just now" getting to look at them and hadn't beforehand, a clear (and all-too-common) injection of the claimant's own personal narrative into the film.

 

However, the canon itself shows no such thing.  What it does show is a clear cut from atmospheric flight to orbital flight with no time in-between shown on screen, but which obviously exists.

 

While the light angles between the set and the CGI are not wholly consistent . . . there's a shadow on set not present in the CGI, though this could be explained with a large artificial light source that turns off as the ship is taking off . . .  here's what the Falcon cockpit lighting looks like while the ship is within DB94:

 

 

 

Then the ship takes off and flies away with the orange morning sun to its port side:

 

 

And the next scene is of Han at the controls, supposedly just now looking at his instruments:

 

 

Sun to port?  Yes.  But clearly no longer any atmospheric filtering.  Indeed, the coloring of the light looks most like:

 

 

Well, let's see what Han looks like after the above shot, when we know he's in orbit.

 

 

Huh.  Lighting's exactly the same.   Let's ask Chewie:

 

 

Yup, he agrees.

 

And oh by the way . . .

 

 

 

. . . who's the guy in the hallway walking off?  Looks an awful lot like Obi-Wan . . . but we saw him strap in "just now", didn't we?

 

Huh . . . maybe not.

 

So basically, unless we make up in our heads the notion that Han's is "just now" checking his instruments, what we end up with is Luke and company running to strap in after Han runs down the cockpit corridor, then the ship takes off, then we see Han in the cockpit lit as if in space and with Obi-Wan walking off from the cockpit.

 

It's enough to make you think there was unseen time in-between the take-off shots and the on-orbit shots.   How much?   Well, take a guess, but be warned that your guess is not canon.  All we know for sure is that there is more time than what is seen, and thus any 11-second-esque jump-cut-ignoring claim is false.

 

But hey, let's be fair and confirm this with the script and novel, eh?

 

EXTERIOR: TATOOINE -- MOS EISLEY -- STREETS.

        The half-dozen stormtroopers at a check point hear the general
        alarm and look to the sky as the huge starship rises above the
        dingy slum dwellings and quickly disappears into the morning
        sky.

INTERIOR: MILLENNIUM FALCON -- COCKPIT.

        Han climbs into the pilot's chair next to Chewbacca, who
        chatters away as he points to something on the radar scope.

EXTERIOR: SPACE -- PLANET TATOOINE.

        The Corellian pirateship zooms from Tatooine into space.

INTERIOR: MILLENNIUM FALCON -- COCKPIT.

        Han frantically types information into the ship's computer.
        Little Artoo appears momentarily at the cockpit doorway, makes
        a few beeping remarks, then scurries away.

HAN: It looks like an Imperial cruiser. Our passengers must be hotter
than I thought. Try and hold them off. Angle the deflector shield
while I make the calculations for the jump to light speed.

EXTERIOR: SPACE -- PLANET TATOOINE.

        The Millennium Falcon pirateship races away from the yellow
        planet, Tatooine. It is followed by two huge Imperial
        stardestroyers.

 

 

That basically sounds like the film, except that we know Han didn't get good and strapped in until the ship was already headed skyward.   And we have Artoo showing up for no apparent reason.  Other than that, the ship is zooming from Tatooine into space, but Tatooine is clearly still visible. 

 

The novel plays it about the same, but says of the stormtroopers watching the Falcon going into the sky that it "shrank to a pinpoint before any of them thought to bring a weapon to bear."    Well, since we know how long it took to not even become a pinpoint, that's a quote regarding the timing of Stormtrooper mental processes more than a statement on acceleration.

 

So, no points from the script or novel support the flawed claims in any way.  The devil's in the details.

 

The most you could possibly do is claim instantaneous or near-instantaneous jump-to-orbit in the time between frames, with requisite acceleration and deceleration to match the slow travel shown.  Of course, you'd also have to claim such instantaneous action for Obi-Wan Kenobi in this case.   Sadly, history suggests that some might be tempted to claim such things, but I, fortunately, am not one of them, and I hope no one here is, either.

 

Now, as I said, I have a lot more stuff sketched out based on the other claimed examples, and I'll get to it in my own good time, including your Republic ship moving at 99.999 percent lightspeed (which is completely absurd if you actually watch the scene), other ground-to-orbit nonsense, et cetera.  For the purposes of this thread, however, I consider acceleration claims like the ANH one discussed above a complete non-starter in regards to vessel density.

[DSG2k 4]

Other than the fact that we don't see tumors erupt from Leia when Bail brought her home, suggesting at least a tolerable level of radiation and thus a magnetic field and thus a dynamo, do we have any evidence against Alderaan being rock-solid through and through?

 

Just saying, maybe the sun's polite, and the local interstellar neighborhood free of nasty rays, for the most part, for all we know. I don't think it makes a difference for superlaser purposes, so it's no skin to me either way.

 

In any case, though, I get nervous when I hear suggestions of releasing a planet's "stored energy". It's very kung fu, but usually the math fails or the idea is so impossibly impractical that TheForceDidIt is just as good. At least with the hyperspace domain there is a potential source of energy for our convenience.

 

As for the explanatory power of DET, that's been the very problem for ages. I am shocked to see it claimed that other mechanisms would leave unexplained phenomena that "BFG" doesn't. Why the rings? Silence. Why the band? Silence. Why a more powerful secondary explosion at all? Silence. Where does material visibly disappear to? Silence. And now why the recurving/disappearing sparkles? Silence.

 

So why stick with DET at all? DET just doesn't work. It is an assumption, and, as we have once again established here, not necessarily the logical one. (Even Seafort has acknowledged this by analogy, though he refuses to apply the logic to the Holy BFG Superlaser.)

 

If taken as a hypothesis, DET clearly fails to match observations, isn't even based on much observing, rejects the facts of the universe in question, and yet it is rather amusingly claimed as the scientific high ground, with all who refuse to accept it are flamed as heretics.

 

Sounds more like a religious belief to me.

[Tyralak 12,068]

And that really fits in with the more authentic Star Wars realism perspective that was prevalent before fusion and steel became re-imagined as hypermatter and neutronium in recent years.

 

The TPM novelization refers to Coruscant as steel alloys and glass. The ascension cables were steel-clawed. The ANH script refers to the door sealing the chasm that Luke and Leia swing over as steel. The ANH novelization refers to the Death Star exterior as steel and references its "steely horizon". The RotJ novelization refers to Boba as "steel-masked" and Luke's hand as being made of steel. The floor of the Emperor's room in the Death Star is made of steel. The Imperial shuttle has a "steely hull", and its landing ramp is described as chilly steel. The bunker corridors are made of steel. Melted steel floats amongst the debris of the final battle.

 

And, of course, there's the hydrofoamed permacrete and other weight-saving measures of that nature as I've mentioned before and will no doubt mention repeatedly.

 

These bits don't support super-dense ships, but instead point toward more readily-comprehensible densities and masses.

You make a powerful point there, in fact I mentioned it to Brian and he just put out a video agreeing with you on it.

 

[DSG2k 4]

Very diplomatically put, Tyralak. My compliments. That is certainly one way of looking at it.

 

Given what I have seen of his history, however, recent and distant, I see it rather differently.

 

For starters, he only "agreed" inasmuch as he was able to cherry-pick and misapply what I said. I did leave that door half-open and anticipated someone walking through, but did not realize it would be done with such gusto, so kudos to him there.

 

I say "half-open" because while it is entirely possible to generalize based on my examples (the many parts leading to a rule of thumb), it is (a) fallacious to declare the composition of the Holy Grate settled from those examples (the rule of thumb claimed as proof of a contested specific). Further, he ( conveniently ignores the follow-up paragraph in which I mention weight-saving measures like the hydrofoaming of permacrete on ships, which you quoted. Here is further reading:

 

http://dsg2k.blogspot.com/2014/02/permacrete.html

 

One would think that if weight is a concern on a vessel as 'small' as the Hand, it would be a vastly greater concern on a huge mobile battlestation. Besides which, if you have tachyonic mass reduction gobbledygook, you would hardly need to bother.

 

And, of course, it hardly seems likely that Brian was pure-heartedly applying my name to his point merely for attribution's sake. Rather, it seems much more likely the goal was to goad a "fanatic", a la 'thanks for proving my point', however inaccurate that goad may be in this case.

 

I laughed either way, since many of his videos are or are in part obviously meant to contest assorted pages and points of mine (usually the oldest pages, explicit conjectures (e.g. bullets and Borg), or pages marked as "incomplete" "brief notes" which he inexplicably claims I am using currently to counter whatever his latest claims were before he even graduated to my attention list a few months back (e.g. Leia's arm)).

 

Through all that he only rarely identifies his target, making this reference to me stand out . . . and the feigned ignorance of my URL was icing on that cake.

 

As for the Holy Grate itself, I will be addressing that in my own good time based on the rough outline I have in mind, in text, and in audio notes. As I have mentioned, Brian's claims on things like acceleration and blaster firepower were not a significant blip on my radar. Well, at least until his recent tantrums about me and StarfleetJedi.Net, such as people daring to comment on his presentation (while he discusses actresses and their lesser or greater attractiveness in some of his videos (funny, that)). Incidentally, while I have you here, I still haven't seen where someone supposedly says he's ugly, as claimed.

 

So, I plan to tackle things as they come up while I work to update my antique site.

 

I am sure he'll be watching, but I will try to post pertinent details here, too.

[DSG2k 4]

Here's more demonstration of both the fallacy and the rationale for my take on the video compared to the diplomatic version:

 

Brian Young

7 hours ago · Shared publicly

 

I should have noted that he wasn't talking about the grate in that argument. However, I feel his argument was decisive for THIS issue. After all, one cannot argue that practically everything in Star Wars is made of steel, EXCEPT THIS GRATE.

So, in case there is any confusion, he made the argument for a steel grate without realizing it. Credit is still due, as he did all the leg work.

Blue milk? Made of steel. Armor? Steel. Clothes? Steel.

 

Fallacy.

[Vince 520]

Well, give the references, the most consistent trend would seem to be "metal? Steel. Metal? Steel. Metal? Steel. Steel? Metal". 

[Tyralak 12,068]

Here's more demonstration of both the fallacy and the rationale for my take on the video compared to the diplomatic version:

 

Blue milk? Made of steel. Armor? Steel. Clothes? Steel.

Fallacy.

Clearly in this context, when he says everything, he's referring to the construction of buildings and ships. Iron is cheap and abundant. Makes sense.

[DSG2k 4]

Clearly in this context, when he says everything, he's referring to the construction of buildings and ships. Iron is cheap and abundant. Makes sense.

Hence my reference to armor in the mix, right after blue milk. That sequence was supposed to obviate the fallacy of distribution (division, specifically, but really the composition one's page is far more descriptive, if you merely invert the points) wherein my rule of thumb generalization based on many parts was claimed as proof of a separate and unequal specific. 

 

By Brian's reasoning, the Star Destroyer's an ironclad, for all intents and purposes. If I wanted to play tit for tat, I'd attribute the point to Brian, noting that he just made that argument without realizing it.

[Tyralak 12,068]

Hence my reference to armor in the mix, right after blue milk. That sequence was supposed to obviate the fallacy of distribution (division, specifically, but really the composition one's page is far more descriptive, if you merely invert the points) wherein my rule of thumb generalization based on many parts was claimed as proof of a separate and unequal specific. 

 

By Brian's reasoning, the Star Destroyer's an ironclad, for all intents and purposes. If I wanted to play tit for tat, I'd attribute the point to Brian, noting that he just made that argument without realizing it.

 

Humor me then, if you would. What do you think an ISD is made of and what is your opinion on the material of which the infamous grate is constructed?

[DSG2k 4]

That's a bit of a subject-change deflection, but we'll roll with it.   At least there was no attempt to defend the fallacy itself.

 

I don't claim to know the composition of an ISD's superstructure, hull, or armor.   Indeed, the perilously low ship counts indicated by Dodonna's quote (at least including the novelization reference which Brian totally skips over when discussing it) might make more sense if we presume that the Death Star was constructed as simply as possible whereas the fleet was made of greater materials which required more lead time or resource acquisition or what-have-you.   It's one thing to make a steel warship, but quite another to make a carbon fiber boat.  But, that's purely conjectural.

 

That said, steel would not be terribly inconsistent with the way in which Grievous's claw dug into the Invisible Hand's hull, or the way the ISD bridge tower was obliterated by an asteroid, et cetera, but you could say the same about any number of materials.   However, I'm more interested in demonstrated capability than assigning names.  If a name's assigned in canon then we have to roll with (e.g. fusion), but other than that the Rumplestiltskin game is only useful for pondering purposes and conjecture.   It's not a good idea to assign a name to something in your own head and then try to limit the canon from that.

 

This is certainly true in regards to the Holy Grate.   In that instance, an event which no one would reasonably assume to be related to iron or steel is assigned that designation, requiring all manner of ad hoc rationalizations (e.g. "all the vapor of metal expanding hundreds of times in volume was sucked down the chute, leaving only a puff of smoke giving no indication of that wind-tunnel velocity") to try to keep afloat.   It's silly.  

 

If you're bent on Rumplestiltskinning it, I'd just as soon call it hydrofoamed permacrete.  Certainly the behavior would be more consistent.   Have you ever seen red- or recolored-back-to-the-pre-SE-version-white-hot metal cool in 1/24th of a second?  (Of course, that's where it would be helpful to abandon the whole yarn where anything that has a red or magenta coloration to it due to red light falling upon it is suddenly red-hot, but that's another story.)

 

Besdes, we wouldn't bother making a real-life detention-block garbage chute grate out of wrist-thick bars of iron or steel, and we certainly wouldn't do so if our shipbuilding technology featured techniques like hydrofoaming (and poorly-framing) wall material to save weight.

 

But in any case, as I said, "As for the Holy Grate itself, I will be addressing that in my own good time based on the rough outline I have in mind, in text, and in audio notes."   The points above only scratch that surface.

[Khas 12,158]

In case you're wondering where he got "hydrofoamed permacrete" from, well, it's mentioned in the Revenge of the Sith novelization.  So, canon, as opposed to EU.

[Tyralak 12,068]

That's a bit of a subject-change deflection, but we'll roll with it.   At least there was no attempt to defend the fallacy itself.

Not everything I say is an attempt at some sort of cheesy parliamentary debate tactics. I was genuinely interested in where you stood on these ships' composition.

 

I don't claim to know the composition of an ISD's superstructure, hull, or armor.   Indeed, the perilously low ship counts indicated by Dodonna's quote (at least including the novelization reference which Brian totally skips over when discussing it) might make more sense if we presume that the Death Star was constructed as simply as possible whereas the fleet was made of greater materials which required more lead time or resource acquisition or what-have-you.   It's one thing to make a steel warship, but quite another to make a carbon fiber boat.  But, that's purely conjectural.

 

That said, steel would not be terribly inconsistent with the way in which Grievous's claw dug into the Invisible Hand's hull, or the way the ISD bridge tower was obliterated by an asteroid, et cetera, but you could say the same about any number of materials.   However, I'm more interested in demonstrated capability than assigning names.  If a name's assigned in canon then we have to roll with (e.g. fusion), but other than that the Rumplestiltskin game is only useful for pondering purposes and conjecture.   It's not a good idea to assign a name to something in your own head and then try to limit the canon from that.

 

This is certainly true in regards to the Holy Grate.   In that instance, an event which no one would reasonably assume to be related to iron or steel is assigned that designation, requiring all manner of ad hoc rationalizations (e.g. "all the vapor of metal expanding hundreds of times in volume was sucked down the chute, leaving only a puff of smoke giving no indication of that wind-tunnel velocity") to try to keep afloat.   It's silly.  

 

If you're bent on Rumplestiltskinning it, I'd just as soon call it hydrofoamed permacrete.  Certainly the behavior would be more consistent.   Have you ever seen red- or recolored-back-to-the-pre-SE-version-white-hot metal cool in 1/24th of a second?  (Of course, that's where it would be helpful to abandon the whole yarn where anything that has a red or magenta coloration to it due to red light falling upon it is suddenly red-hot, but that's another story.)

 

Besdes, we wouldn't bother making a real-life detention-block garbage chute grate out of wrist-thick bars of iron or steel, and we certainly wouldn't do so if our shipbuilding technology featured techniques like hydrofoaming (and poorly-framing) wall material to save weight.

 

But in any case, as I said, "As for the Holy Grate itself, I will be addressing that in my own good time based on the rough outline I have in mind, in text, and in audio notes."   The points above only scratch that surface.

You do have to know what sort of material and its properties you're dealing with if you're going to do any sort of accurate calculations. Also, the theory I have regarding Blasters and Turbolasers (which will be the subject of my second video, if I ever have time to make it) really renders the composition of the grate moot. However, when looking at massive shipbuilding projects, we have to consider what would be the most reasonable material to use. Would they build shittons of ships out of unobtanium and crystallized unicorn farts, or would they use a common, cheap material? I'm not saying Star Destroyers are huge chunks of hollowed out iron. That would frankly be insane. However, a mostly steel superstructure WOULD make sense. The hulls aren't that thick either. "Jedi Crash" shows the hulls to be about a meter thick.

[DSG2k 4]

Not everything I say is an attempt at some sort of cheesy parliamentary debate tactics.

Let's just say your earlier excess of diplomacy had me concerned.

 

You do have to know what sort of material and its properties you're dealing with if you're going to do any sort of accurate calculations.

When has anyone involved in this sort of thing done accurate calculations? I jest there to some extent, but usually even if it is crystallized unicorn farts (nice) our sort of nerd just says "if it was iron, at such and such thickness, it would take X joules to penetrate as seen".

 

 

However, when looking at massive shipbuilding projects, we have to consider what would be the most reasonable material to use. Would they build shittons of ships out of unobtanium and crystallized unicorn farts, or would they use a common, cheap material? I'm not saying Star Destroyers are huge chunks of hollowed out iron. That would frankly be insane. However, a mostly steel superstructure WOULD make sense.

You're preaching to the choir. Recall that I rather clearly never subscribed to the neutronium (or part-neutronium) hull theory of the inflationists.

 

It would, after all, hardly make sense for me to be all Mr. Fusion and Steel while also being Mr. Dude ISDs Are Totally Made Of That Crap The SunCrusher Was Made Of.

 

The hulls aren't that thick either. "Jedi Crash" shows the hulls to be about a meter thick.

Good eye.

[DSG2k 4]

You haven’t yet offered up any feasible alternatives to explain the TCW evidence. A ship travels between the corona of a yellow star and one of its inhabitable planets within a few seconds of uncut footage. Even light takes a matter of minutes to reach the Earth within the Sun’s goldilocks zone. That was a ship that lacked any FTL and that was traveling at sublight speeds. [/size]

 

 

A feasible explanation is that they had accelerated to near light speeds, so that the effects of time dilation had the crew (and the audience) perceive only a few seconds, even when the trip really took several minutes. This is plausible given a relativistic velocity. And decelerating from almost a million times the speed of sound to subsonic velocity within minutes suggests even higher acceleration than these other instances or any of the numbers in the ICS. [/size]

 

 

I told you I'll be presenting it and I shall, when I'm good and ready to do so.   I want to do it all at once, properly written up.   If you have no patience, that's too bad.

 

 

Right, soooooo . . . I have no patience either.   Pardon me for half-assing it a bit, but here are the facts about the "Jedi Crash".

 

To summarize, unless we just up and pretend things about what we see to try to shoehorn what we believe into the canon, then it doesn't follow the inflationist line at all. 

 

Cross-posted from http://dsg2k.blogspot.com/2014/08/jedi-crash-and-space-ecqos.html

 

======================

 

 

Jedi Crash and Space ECQOs

 

So I've been seeing some really strange claims about "Jedi Crash"[TCW1] lately.

 

Basically, a Republic Frigate crashes on a planet, hence the episode title.  To get to that point, however, the ship seemingly hyperdrivesalmost into a star then comes out of hyperspace, whips around it, and only then meets the planet.

 

The strange claims are numerous, but let's deal with a few parts first.

 

Claim 1.  The ship was traveling at relativistic speeds between the star and the planet.

 

This claim is based on the fact that there is one continuous shot from the ship coming from behind the sun to the ship and planet being visible in the same frame.   Thus, it is argued, the ship must've traveled from the vicinity of the sun to the habitable zone of the solar system in the time of that scene.

 

Of course, since the scene is only four seconds in length, and in the case of our solar system the habitable zone is around eight light-minutes away, some bright spark got the idea to claim relativistic velocities so as to enable this time compression.  Thus, the trip "really did" take eight and a half minutes (assuming an Earth-like solar system), but it only seemed like four seconds to the people in the ship.

 

How fast would that be?  Well, the time for light to reach Earth from the Sun averages about 8 minutes and 20 seconds, or 500 seconds.  But if 500 seconds seems like only 4 seconds to the people on the ship, then they must be moving at a rate sufficient to cause time's rate of passage to alter by 125 times or so.

 

Doing the math, that works out to about 0.999968c for an average velocity.

 

So, this is all very clever.   However, it is also insane.  I can say that because the ship was seen to crash with an impact velocity measurable in the dozens or low hundreds of meters per second range. 

 

So we would have to presume one of the following:

 

1.  The ship was at 0.999968c or thereabouts until hitting the planet's atmosphere. 

 

This doesn't work out too well, since even if we assume that somehow the atmosphere was thick enough to stop the ship in the required amount of time, it would still involve a huge amount of kinetic energy being dumped into it.   A Republic frigate is basically an upgunned Republic space cruiser, so we can guesstimate a mass somewhere in the 10,000 to 20,000 tonne range.    Even ignoring relativistic considerations, the kinetic energy of the ship moving at even .75c would be a minimum of 60 teratons.  (That's 10,000,000 kilograms at 224,844,343.5 meters per second, resulting in about 2.53E23J.) 

 

Even if we treated it like a meteor and recognized that this 60 teratons would be spread out along the entire flight path (over, say, 30 kilometers of worthwhile atmosphere), that would still be about two teratons per linear kilometer, which just doesn't fly.  A teraton is a million frickin' megatons, and two teratons per linear kilometer would be the equivalent of 125,000,000 Hiroshimas per kilometer. 

 

Instead, what we actually see is undisturbed clouds and atmosphere along the ship's path, a path highlighted, not by nuclear effects, but by a boring smoke trail left behind as the damaged ship passes.   

 

 

 

2.  The ship was decelerating for the entire voyage from the star and only just barely failed to stop. 

 

You're moving at almost lightspeed and decelerate to almost zero, but you can't stop?   Really?   And you can't even do anything to avoid hitting the planet?  Really? 

 

No, sorry. 

 

And don't forget here that trajectories in a gravitational field are usually curved . . . if you've ever played a game involving orbital trajectories (or even a decent artillery game) you know that the speed can determine the final placement as much as the direction can.   All you'd have to do to avoid the planet is quit decelerating before you're on top of it.

 

So basically, that whole idea is broken on its very face.  We must literally assume an intentional crash, which hardly makes sense in context.

 It is completely ludicrous to suggest that the crash was necessary or prudent if they had the capacity to avoid it.  Ergo, they couldn't avoid it, ergo they could not accelerate or decelerate to prevent it, ergo they did not accelerate to a hair away from light-speed for two seconds then slow down only enough to gently crash, because if they could do that then they could have just stopped, or even hovered, et cetera.

 

But wait!   It gets worse.   First, once the planet comes into frame, it is many thousands of kilometers away, and unlike a planet being approached at a significant fraction of lightspeed (what, you thought that was just random?) it gives the appearance of being stationary, with no closing speed evident.

 

So, any near-lightspeed velocity must've been confined to the three seconds prior to that.   Oh, well, except we can also see the sun for a few frames, and it isn't receding at near-lightspeed either.

 

Oops.

 

Of course, there are almost exactly three seconds of time in which the sun is not visible and the planet has not yet come into frame.   One could argue that the ship accelerated and then decelerated, but then there's that whole crash thing again. 

 

Oops.

 

So how fast was the ship really going?

 

Well, there are different ways of estimating it.   One technique might be to simply check the planet's rate of apparent size change in a scene about five seconds after the planet initially comes into view . . . Ahsoka notes they're going to crash into the planet, at which point we see the planet looming in the window.

 

The shot lasts about three seconds. As with the approach at lightspeed above, I chose to roughly model this in Celestia.  Of course, all the same caveats apply, but even moreso since we're trying to match an existing scene.

 

Unfortunately, after many hours spent driving around in Celestia approaching Earth with the window at half-transparency and the real second or two scene from Jedi Crash looping in the background, I was forced to give up. It's tough to do, not simply because the camera is shaking or because Celestia is somewhat ill-suited to this particular task, what with not having the finest control of speed or direction.   It's tough because, although I can match the curvature change to some extent, I cannot simultaneously match the motion of the cloud formation on the left which suggests a low range.   Even when I switched to Mars I couldn't get a satisfactory result.   I finally concluded that the shot is obviously zoomed compared to prior shots of folks in the cockpit, or otherwise has issues.  The only alternative is that the planet itself is tiny.

 

This means that at best I can only guesstimate based on a range of possible matches . . . and this refers to much more than the usual guesstimation level.

 

Suffice it to say that if the planet is Earth-sized then the vessel was probably a few thousand kilometers away from the planet and traveling at dozens of kilometers per second.

 

(The ship crashed 14 seconds after the end of the scene, but we know there's missing time.  Why?  Because we go from the bridge shot of the looming planet immediately to a shot of the ship completely engulfed in re-entry flames, and from there to a shot of the bridge showing re-entry plasma in the window. 

 

 

Of course, in the Brian Young universe where a ship taking off and then being seen in space equals INSTANT UBER-ACCELERATION, the concept of missing time might be debated, but whatever.)

 

But, this gives us at least an extremely rough guide, and tells us that either (a) the ship passes next to a star then suddenly accelerates to near-lightspeed for no good reason and then decelerates from it in time to crash rather gingerly into a planet ('gingerly' being compared to crashing at near-lightspeed, anyway), or ( the star and planet aren't very far apart at all.

 

If the ship had the capacity to accelerate in such a fashion, striking the planet wouldn't have occurred.  The merest touch of the proverbial accelerator pedal and an attitude control thruster would've allowed them to peel away from the planet fairly readily.

 

Thus, it seems clear to me that the planet and its stellar neighbor weren't very far apart.  And, given that this would be remarkably unhealthy in most cases, we would have to posit that the star itself was exceptionally dim or otherwise non-Sol-like.

 

The only alternative is that we ignore the shot of the sun with the ship emerging from behind it.   But that brings us to another claim.

 

Claim 2.  The Republic Frigate survived a solar corona transit, proving remarkable durability

 

Following on from the above, the so-called star was not very Sol-like.  As it happens, this is fairly easily demonstrable.  How so?   Well, the star here is presented as absurdly tiny.

 

 

Unlike our own sun which is approximately 1.4 million kilometers across, meaning that a 115 meter ship sitting near it wouldn't even show up at the craziest of zoom levels, this so-called star is sufficiently tiny that it is only about 60 times larger than the Republic Frigate that goes behind it.

 

In other words, the entire star is only a handful of kilometers across, something like seven kilometers wide.  We can safely call it less than ten. 

 

This is readily provable via another tack, as well.    Note that the cockpit invariably gets pretty hard shadows on it.  Indeed, there's even a whole scene seemingly dedicated to showing the hard shadows circling around the control panel as the lights on it came on and Ahsoka could finally act.  When she does, the scene shows her from the cockpit floor showing the hard shadows circling around her, as well, until the light source is behind them.

 

Hard shadows simply would not be the case if you were close to a real sun, because you'd be receiving light from almost 180 degrees of the sky all around you, rather than a distant point source.

 

Clearly, this makes little sense from any realism-oriented standpoint.    Either it was a full-size star which the ship did not come very close to (which requires that we ignore the scene of the ship emerging from behind it completely, as well as assuming that the scales here in the going-behind-it shot are simply wrong or gravitationally-lensed or something), or else it was a tiny star.

 

Unfortunately, the precedent here is in favor of a tiny star-like object.   Recall, if you will, the mysterious Abregado Object, a very small red-glowing sphere surrounded by a low-pressure atmosphere.   Its tiny size was demonstrable by the debris field and other details.   This object is definitely brighter and perhaps even smaller, but fits the same narrative, however odd it might seem.

 

Now, we obviously have no precedent for this sort of thing in real life.   Certainly a nuclear-fusion star could not exist at such a tiny size without outside influence . . . without several hundred thousand more kilometers of gas to produce pressure on the interior due to gravity, there's no reason for such a small gasball to have fusion afoot, and a burning ball of tibanna or somesuch hardly makes sense.

 

Nevertheless, this is the situation we're left with, so other than a tiny black hole that captured a rogue planet or somesuch, I don't have a lot of educated guesses at the moment.   Perhaps there's some other class of compact luminous objects which, if close enough to a planet, can sustain life on it.

 

As for me, flying close to a ten-kilometer-or-less quasi-stellar object is a bad idea no matter whose ship you're riding on, but certainly we can't claim miraculous resilience from such a peculiar event . . . indeed, we can't claim much of anything.   Given that the ship came partially apart on re-entry a short time later and featured breaking glass or transparisteel upon contact with the ground in a relatively low-velocity impact (compared to lightspeed or other similarly high velocities, anyway), the claim of super-resilience was an odd one to start with.

 

Those who prefer to ignore the canon in favor of cherry-picked elements of it and mix those with claims of rigorous science will no doubt have issues with the conclusions here, but the first step in any scientific investigation is to observe the universe.   Peculiar as it may seem to our thinking, we must acknowledge that what we observe is an extremely compact quasi-stellar object (an ECQO, if you will) very close to a habitable planet.

 

To claim otherwise is to suggest that all our powers of observation of the universe in question are suspect, at which point we might as well just start making things up anyway, as our inflationist friends do.

 

Claim 3.  The Republic Frigate showed great resilience in surviving the crash mostly intact.

 

Since I was the first to make this claim, I naturally agree . . . it did much better than we might commonly expect.  The structure failed in the engine area and there were assorted broken hull parts and broken transparisteel, but the ship didn't completely break apart on impact, which is quite remarkable.

 

Smart inflationists would focus on this rather than trying to create hypervelocity events.

[DSG2k 4]

Since the Death Star yield was used as evidence of density, it is pertinent to note that the new TCW story reels recently released demonstrate that the weapon yield was tremendously amplified via the use of kyber crystal(s), which are themselves not especially dense.  Literally, minimal input produces tremendous output.   It violates all sorts of stuff, but there it is in the canon.  It even seems to vaporize people like a phaser, and shows the planar effects we've come to expect.

 

"Out of the stories of old, this crystal comes. Long ago in forgotten times when the Sith and Jedi fought for control of the galaxy. Weapons, there were of unimaginable power. Always at their heart, a Kyber Crystal was just like the one you described."

- Yoda

 

More on the kyber crystal's effect is found in this thread at StarfleetJedi.Net . . . especially look for Lucky's post with extensive quotes.   Basically, as I state there, "short of an Adult Swim scene of Palpatine cursing into the phone about the delay this was gonna cause to the Deathticle (not to mix my metaphor there), it couldn't have been more clear."   "And just to make sure the point is clear, even if you are feeling charitable and grant your local inflationist's claim that the Death Star was a DET weapon, said inflationist still cannot have a reactor that generates energy commensurate with the yield, because of this crystal power amplification whatzit."

 

That's the final nail in the coffin of inflationist claims related to the Death Star, fellas.  I proved long ago that it was not DET . . . I theorized it was a Superlaser Effect related to some sort of hyperspace energy tap.  Now, we have a crystal as the medium for that (assuming the energy comes from hyperspace and not just thin air).

 

Without DET, you cannot make a claim about the reactor energy which you then scale down to ships.  Without DET, you have no recoil argument, nor any clear indication of the amount or velocity of debris that are claimed to have hit the Death Star offscreen (over and above the odd debris trajectories and effects noted in this thread), and thus no shield argument.   The only other thing left that I can think of is the claim of Death Star acceleration at Yavin, but so far as I recall there are no actual solid numbers for that.

 

Put simply, even moreso than before, inflationists have nothing to work with here . . . even if some other desperate argument is available, the preponderance of evidence is clear.   The Death Star is a fusion-powered battlestation capable, thanks to one or more massive kyber crystals, of destroying a planet.   That is all.   It does not equate to megaton blasters or any other scale-down effort.

 

The Death Stars will forever own the versus debates because of what they can do and the massive industrial capacity they represent, but even if inflationist claims could be taken seriously before "The Big Bang", they cannot after.