The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Would it be legal to write a story about the Ur-Quan invading the Star Wars universe, and then submit it to LucasArts with the intention of them publishing it for profit (even if whether or not they do is an entirely different matter)? I know that the Ur-quan Masters is Open Source, and that you can create derivative works off of it, but I figured I'd ask to make sure.

The program code is open source (GPL), the content isn't.

If you only send the story to LucasArts and let them decide what to do with it they obviously can't have any issues with it, but the story is likely to be considered a (non-licensed) derivative work of UQM or some other TFB production. While TFB has been tolerant of fanfic so far, I doubt that they'll let LucasArts publish stuff with their characters/races. For the same reason, I doubt LucasArts would publish it.

Of course, if TFB and LucasArts are OK with it, it probably is OK.

I certainly hope this was a hypothetical -- LucasArts isn't going to dilute their brand that way. And anyway, the Ur-Quan would get their asses kicked by the Empire.

This thread is now officially derailed :D

I beg to differ, tough before this discussion can fully commence you have to clarify a few things.
- They would kick the Ur-Quan only, or the entire Hierarchy?
- Only the Kser-Za, or the combined Ur-Quan forces?

Either way I think the Ur-Quan would put up an even fight.
Their intelligence, patience, and ruthless efficiency is unparalelled by anything in the Star Wars universe.
They are not weak-minded fools, so they can't be manipulated by the force.
Their Dreadnought's can take on any Star Destroyer.
If the Empire would want to use the Death Star, Sa-Matra would blow it to bits before it would have a chance to get in position.

So, how did you arrive at your conclusion?
(note: I am aware this could be a joke, but damn, this topic looks like it could be a lot of fun ;))

The Ur-Quan have ships with just 42 crew and no shields. Star Destroyers have
hundreds of gun turrents and shields. I have a feeling the conflict would
be fairly one sided.

Come on, the amount of crew is symbolic in my humble opnion.
A ship with 42 crew members? That's barely a capital ship if it even qualifis as one.
And gun turrets are good against fighters, but I don't see any advantage over one great big fussion cannon, when it comes to fighting against big slow moving vessles.

There are less Star Destroyers than Dreadnoughs - the Ur-Quan have advantage in numbers over Empire.

Then let's set some ground rules; formulate your arguments simliarly to the articles found at:
http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/

Star Destroyers may be less numerous, but each one is a mile long.  They all have energy shielding, and 72 TIE fighters (each pretty darn equal to an Ur-Quan fighter).

The Sa-Matra is closer in comparison to the Executor, which is 11 miles long, has 860 TIE fighters, and thousands of turbo-lasers.

A Death Star is like a precursor planeteering-tool factory: churning out planetary destruction one hyperspace jump at a time.

Novus: Thanks, that's what I wanted to know. Looks like I'll just submit it to TheForce.net as fanfic, then. I'll post it here, too.

As to how the Ur-Quan would fight... I'd say that an individual Ur-Quan Dreadnought could put up a fight with an individual Star Destroyer (though the Galactic Alliance has many more ships than the Ur-Quan do). An Ur-Quan Dreadnought can survive multiple direct hits from nuclear missiles, and their fusion cannons seem to pack as much power as Star Destroyer turbolasers do, judging by their effects on ground targets. As for their strategy... I'd imagine that they'd target the more aggressive species first, in order to build up a new Hierarchy of Battle Thralls (and build their numbers to take on the Galactic Alliance). So, pretty soon it would be the Ur-Quan, Mandalorians, Gungans, Rodians, Wookies, Trandoshans, etc. vs. the Galactic Alliance.

As for Sa-Matra vs. Death Star... largely a moot point, since the time period I'm setting this in is post-Yuuzhan Vong invasion, so the dominant force in the Galaxy is the Galactic Alliance, who don't favor superweapons. Additionally, we never saw the effects of the Sa-Matra's main guns in action, and remember that the Death Star is designed to withstand the attacks of capital ships (which is why the Rebel Alliance attacked it with fighters- attacking it with capships was suicide).

TheForce.Net seems to believe they can get away with this sort of thing, and as long as you're just taking general ideas and not specific characters (that may also be trademarked; for example, "Darth Vader" is a registered US trademark of LucasFilm), the copyrighted material you're using is sufficiently minimal to be (arguably; this is a grey area) OK. Recently, LucasFilm has shown tolerance toward fan material (e.g. Star Wars: Revelations (http://www.panicstruckpro.com/revelations/); see also this Wired article on Star Wars fanfics (http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,64067,00.html)), so you should be OK.

TFB seems to be quite relaxed about fanfic (Accolade must have paid them for the right to do SC3, so I don't think that counts), so I doubt they'll give you much trouble if you stick to non-commercial distribution.

We have no specs for the Dreadnought, so we have to guide our  judgement by a general feeling of it's size. I'd say it's pretty damn big.
I'd agree the fighters are equal, but how many hits can a Star Destroyer's shields and hull take from the main weapon of a ship who's second name is Planetary Siege Unit.


I strongly disagree.
The Sa-Matra destroyed entire fleets before they even had a chance to see what they are up against. It's range, accuracy and firepower make it pretty much unstoppable by any capital ship, hence the comparison to the Death Star.


Yes, the Death Star has a lot more firepower, but it needs a lot of time to get in position, and charge it's weapons before it can fire.

[edit]Oh, by the way. Funny you mention the precursor planeteering tool. Remember it took an amplified precursor bomb to destroy the Sa-Matra?[/edit]


Yeah, but again, Sa-Matra's main weapons have very long range and firepower greater then most capital ships. Even if the Sa-Matra couldn't destroy it instantly, she could cause great damage before the Imperial fleet could even had the chance of responding.

What? TIE fighter equal to a Deadnought? Such nonsense! I'd more imagine a TIE fighter being about equal to 3 or 4 Dreadnought fighters...

Anyways, we had this kind of discussion before, and ended up concluding that Ur-Quan would seriously "pwn" Empire's asses off...

Ha! Using false logic, we'd then get that Zelnick could totally wipe the Empire! Ha! :P

Really though, the Ur-Quan have nearly unlimited ammounts of ships, with gazillions of battle thrall ships, and a very powerful longrange battle platform. No way in hell the Empire is going to beat that, especially not if the Kohr-Ah decide to help their "brothers" (would they?).

I think the UQ have about a thousand ships.
a. they took a long time conquering the SC2 quadrant
b. they need battle thralls to defeat the alliance
c. the Shofixti were able to destroy a third of their fleet in one supernova, and those were hundreds of ships I think.

So ... probably this nomadic race had no chance against a well-equipped empire that covers an entire galaxy.

1. Star Control hyperdrives are orders of magnitude slower than Star Wars hyperdrives. In Star Wars, the average ship can jump across the galaxy in a day. In Star Control, a ship would be lucky to jump to the next star in a day.
2. And they'll need battle thralls to take on the Galactic Empire, too. Like the Mandalorians, the Gungans, the Wookies, the Trandoshan, etc.
3. Yes. They have a weakness to supernovae. I'll point out that Star Destroyers are destroyed by supernovae too.

I used a-c to underline the point that their fleet isn't that big.


Uhm, no, that would take months as far as I could understand.
I think it's a hundred lightyears each day or something like that.

All you'd need is one little Shofixti wielding The Force, and a few strategically placed self-destruct buttons.

Really?
How did you get that impression?
We don't really know much about the Dreadnoought's fighters other then that they are quite efficient at taking apart even very big ships.


I must object.
You, and several others, are treating the gameplay of Star Control 2 far too seriously.
The amount of ships you can meet in hyperspace or on homeworlds, wasn't so big to give you an estimate of the actual size of a given race's fleet.
It was supposed to symbolize your lack of ability to single-handedly influence the universe by brute force.

If you are going to treat everything so literally, many more problems will surface:
Do you really think space combat takes place one ship at a time, while the others are just watching?
Are capital ships really about half the size of an avarage planet?

Heh, no. Take a look at The Phantom Menace. They go from Naboo to Tatooine in less than a day (a quarter of the way across the galaxy at least- Mid Rim world to Outer Rim world),  then from there to Coruscant in about a day (halfway across the galaxy- Outer Rim world to Core world). Take a look at all the other movies, and you'll see the same thing happening. Star Wars hyperspace travel is very, very fast.

Or the SW galaxy is very very small...  I'm on your side, but we have to look at all the possibilities.   :-\

I've read some SW books, and there it's not so fast... maybe the travel time is simply not mentioned in the movies ?
However... this is probably the correct authority ;)
http://www.starwars.com/databank/technology/hyperdrive/index.html (http://www.starwars.com/databank/technology/hyperdrive/index.html)
Although this is a bit vague, too.

I kinda mentioned this [urhttp://uqm.stack.nl/forum/index.php?topic=2933.msg37504#msg37504]before[/url], but since Star Wars happened "a long time ago in a galaxy far far away" and Star Control happens here and just a little into the future the events of Star Wars are long over when the events of Star Control start. Now if you want to just throw a "time warp" bandaid on the concept to make it work, worse things have been done to justify this sort of thing, but that's just so cheep I can't justify it.

Star Wars wins, hands down. Star Trek would too.

I get the impression travel in Star Wars is very fast. Now, I think
it's faster in the prequels than the originals. In the originals it
appears to take a few days to travel any great distance. However,
in Episode III (for example) it seems to take a few hours max to
travel from the inner regions to the outter rim. So, I agree, either
a really small galaxy or really fast hyper-drive.

Just thought I'd bring this to attention:

LucasArts' web site Terms of Use (http://www.lucasarts.com/legal/terms/)

But Star Trek gets their arse kicked (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNxhrPaaCA4) by Star Wars.

I was actually hoping to find an ancient piece of fanfic I once found, but it seems to have vanished fro mthe internet. It told the story of a wormhole between the two universes, and some groovy combat. Still, this slightly crappy footage will have to do.

Try stardestroyer.net, hit the forums, and look for the cleaned-up fanfics section. The proprietor has a good crossover fic on the subject. There are several others.

I would say that the sa-matra is quite strong, probably more akin to one of the EU superlaser-equipped super star destroyers.

Submit or die, pathetic Americans! (http://fabrix.waw.pl/a/jasiek/ssd.jpg)

Shucks, I thought you were linking to this (http://www.solidsharkey.com/ur-quan04.html).

The Furry Conflict (http://www.furryconflict.com/storyline/toc.html) mayhaps..? ;)

Nope. To be honest, I doubt it is around anymore. It was insanely long, around 200 pages or some such, and the SW side was post empire, with han and leias children having gone over to the dark side after their parents murder.

Er... not that I rememebr much. It was fanfiction after all.

Oh, and I had forgotten how awesome that Ur-Quan 04 thing was. It is truly inspired.

I concur, and I tend to the politcal right.   ;D

Hehe, that's not so bad. A little choppy but funny none the less.



I'd vote for them, just to hear their music play during the press briefings.

That really sounds like Darth Wong's fanfic, findable on Stardestroyer.net (if nowhere else, on the forums)

It's here (http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/) too.

Are you crazy? One Galaxy class starship beat a super star destroyer and survives an entire fleet (to retreat safely) and that's getting beaten? That's a Bunker Hill style victory 'if we keep winning battles like this, we'll lose the war!'. ;D
Hehe...


Another note, I wouldn't use stardestroyer.net for precise information. It seems to be fairly biased. THe following site is better: http://www.st-v-sw.net/
I haven't looked at it in a while. I believe it has a few mistakes, but it's mostly good...

To compare Star Control to Star Trek or Star Wars, one could probably use the MX missile to get an idea of relative firepowers.

Except that there's no nukes in star wars and you never get to see a nuke hitting a trek ship directly.

Are you?



Yes, it is biased in the same direction as the visual evidence. And visual evidence has a well-known SW bias (to paraphrase a more political statement)


Erm. The overview provides an absurd estimate of SW power-generation capabilities. They then move from there to firepower calculations which are contradictory with the very easy to see elements of Alderaan, and even Slave-1 toasting asteroids.
The overview then seems to say that the UFP goes faster than the empire.
Uh, what? Seen AotC recently? Compare to Voyager.

No, they're not vaguely accurate.


so... no.

Whoa, whoa, whoa!  Gentlemen, the Wars vs Trek skirmish already has dedicated battlefields.  If we're going to co-opt a thread, lets stay on topic; throw a little Control in the mix.  :D

I don't really want to debate Star * vs. Star **. I was just linking that site for those interested. As I previously said, I thinkt hat both sites make major mistakes. As a physicist, I know that some things they try to explain in terms of everyday things actually need futuristic sci-fi explanations.

Anyway, we can calculate the power of Star Control weapons. The MX missile today is equipped with several conical warheads, each about as tall as a human.
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Weapons/W87.html
According to this site, each warhead is 300 kilotons worth of energy, with an upgrade possible to 475 kilotons. Since the Star Control warheads need to take out Dreadnoughts, it is reeasonable to assume that the warheads are indeed the upgraded variety. Thus, since the missile carries ten warheads, 4.75 megatons (4.97 petajoules - 4.97x10^15 joules) per missile is a reasonable estimate, or very roughly 1.1875 megatons  (19.9 petajoules - 1.99x10^16 joules)per point of damage.

For more evidence that star wars would murder star trek in battle, look at the size differences between the candy assed, robo-moralist, tightly-wound, federation blabber-mouth geeksters' fungus shaped petting-zoo/luxury-suite-hotel/warships and the unyielding power of the galactic empire's imperial armada!:

http://www.merzo.net/index.html

And this is without taking into account the power of the force. All picard can do is slow time a little. That's good if you are late for your shuttle, not so good if you need to counter distance force choking.



Then why not throw in a little Flight or Craft.



That is only useful if the other universes you wish to make this comparision against use the same measurement system you work out. I don't remember them mentioning kilotons in Star Wars.

I am not sure what you mean by your comment on measurement systems. I'm using regular kilotons. I even converted to joules. 4.18 joules will heat one cubic centimeter of water by one kelvin. I remember some calculations on the site that I linked that had things in joules. What else would one use to find energy?

As for the force choke, I say that force is lame! ;D If Darth Vader was really so awesome, he would totally have just force choked all the rebels from orbit - or something. ;D

Finally, I would like to make a general comment here on size comparisons. Size taken by itself is much less relevant then having size and power together. If one calculates a certain level of power in a ship, then if the power is crammed into a smaller area, the ship has higher technology level. If it takes alot of space and mass to get the same power, a lower level of technology is implied.
This means that estimates of the Ur-Quan Dreadnought being a kilometer long are absurd, taken together with the Shofixti Scout being 5m long. This would imply that the Scout is far more advanced! ;)

It's not about what we use to measure energy, it is how it is measured in the other universes, especially Star Wars, which happens so long and far from here that they wouldn't use any of those measures.

The technical manuals were not written in a galaxy far, far away, though...

Oh, we definitely can't accept what the characters in any television show or movie say as being 100% accurate (even assuming they use the same units as us, and I would think that they would not refer to a popular unit while actually meaning something different). Almost everyone makes mistakes sometimes or could simply be wrong. Another explanation is that they are just exagerrating or being sarcastic as a minor joke.
Important calculations to determine abilities are done based on seemingly accurate statements and actual results.

As for technical manuals, they should always be ignored. They are not part of the actual shows at all. Who know if the authors even know the differance between a watt and a joule? I admit that I've only looked at one technical manual at some point in the distant past, but it was full of mistakes compared to the show, and how would it have any bearing on the actual show in the first place?

Considering that the author of the SW technical manuals was a consultant for ILM when they were producing the prequels, and his technical manuals are considered canon, and happens to be a PhD in physics...

I'd say he knows a watt from a joule and his material is relevant.

Well, actually, I beileve that Voyager was in some episode bombarded by nuclear missles, and it did hold out pretty well. It was on some planet with time lot faster then our own. I'm not sure about the details, though.

"Ah," though I, "a physicist. He should know what he is talking about and have good calculations."
I found that he actually has a web site, which I looked at.
http://www.theforce.net/swtc/index.html

Unfortunately, he seems to make mistakes. Also, he seems to use everything related to Star Wars including the books and comics. This is no good. Why should anything but the movies be used? It doesn't even matter what is consulted by the writers, only the movie things are part of the actual movies.

On to his mistakes, he seems to not understand what "vaporization" of an astoroid would look like (the astoroid seems to disappear in a manner not known to physics, not be vaporized). Also, he seems to assume that the Death Star II is not mostly hollow when he calculated the "Ewok extermination". Other errors that I caught after a skim include an assumption that even the individual chuncks were solid (they would be composed of decks with equipment if that large), and that a mass extinction even would NOT be visible from the shield generator area where everyone was partying at the end.
That's what he gets for not having peer review!!! ;)

Why not? It's canon under LFL's canon policy. What part of 'considered true unless contradicted by movies' bothers you?


Not really. If you vaporize an asteroid that violently in a total vacuum, it will expand and adiabatically cool to low temperature very quickly. Also, a diffuse monatomic gas of nickel is transparent. So, it disappears. That does not mean that nothing is there.


Not at all. Suppose that metal in the 900 km wide DS2 is only 100m, mostly near the surface. In other words, we assume a filling fraction of about one part in 1500. Compare this to the Graf Zeppelin filling fraction: about one part in 2300. Is that empty enough for you?
Total mass: 254 thousand cubic kilometers of metal.
(compare to 382 million cubic kilometers of metal in a solid sphere that size)

Now, only consider the 15.4% of that that is directed towards Endor. Let's round that off to 40 thousand cubic kilometers of metal.

If we were to wrap that up in a ball, we'd get an impactor of radius 21 kilometers. Ouch! That's over twice the mass of the asteroid that is hypothesized to have wiped out the dinosaurs. Of course, this didn't get to fall from such great height. On the other hand, it was actively hurled at the ground at several times escape velocity. That's not better, that's worse.


Or, assume that most of the mass fell gently. Then let's figure out how thick the debris would fall on Endor, shall we?
15.4% (450 km/5200 km) ^2 *100 meters = an average of 12.5 cm of debris, or around 5 inches.

Ouch again!

it's easy to say he seems to have made a mistake. It's not so easy to actually make sure he made a mistake.

What if the debris was dust small enough to burn up in the atmosphere? Lot's of heat I guess.

I remember the episode with Voyager and the nukes. Single nukes are not a threat to Voyager. I think it got in trouble because it got hit by many in a very short period of time (time speedup thing).


It'd be interesting with a program that estimates the volume of an arbitrary spaceship and suggests typhical subsystem ratios aswell as space efficiency and structure material. It'd output volumes and values for like hull structure, shield gens, main cannon, turrets (surface area), energy generators, fuel store, engine, hangar, storage, bridge, medical, prison, living quarters, recreation, life support, suggested crew compliment, etc etc.

Well, I beileve that such a thing would be nearly immopossible considering all the sources you could be getting information from and that info itself is heavily modified throuought any series, Star Trek, Star Wars and that in Star Control there aren't any real information of that tipe. Besides, when a scriptwriter writes some episode/film, I seriosly doubt that every time he runs to check if that is phisically plausible or not and otherwise.
Oh, and www.irregularwebcomic.net (http://www.irregularwebcomic.net) has some great comics about Star Wars plausibility, I'm just too lazy too check which one.

I wrote the program. Needs a lot of tweaking, there's probably a lot of ship systems I haven't thought of, like shields and quasiplex portal flux capacitators... I just set some values (hierarchical, as indicated by --) and the program does math stuff with the volume. The square floor data is calculated with a 2.5m roof height, ^2 would give the amount of square meters (right now it's the side of the floor/room). I'm not sure if all the math is correct though.


Length: 300.00m
Cube: 2.66
Total volume: 1434560.31cu.m (100.00%, 112.78m cube, 757.51m square floor)
--Hull & structure volume: 573824.13cu.m (40.00%, 83.10m cube, 479.09m square floor)
--Drive and fuel systems volume: 573824.13cu.m (40.00%, 83.10m cube, 479.09m square floor)
--Other volume: 286912.05cu.m (20.00%, 65.96m cube, 338.77m square floor)
----Weapons volume: 172147.23cu.m (12.00%, 55.63m cube, 262.41m square floor)
----Hangars volume: 57382.41cu.m (4.00%, 38.57m cube, 151.50m square floor)
----Systems volume: 28691.20cu.m (2.00%, 30.61m cube, 107.13m square floor)
----Crew compliment: 386.67 (74.20cu.m per crew)
----Crew total volume: 28691.20cu.m (2.00%, 30.61m cube, 107.13m square floor)
------Quarters volume: 7733.48cu.m (0.54%, 19.78m cube, 55.62m square floor)
------Corridors volume: 13146.91cu.m (0.92%, 23.60m cube, 72.52m square floor)
------Lifesupport volume: 3093.39cu.m (0.22%, 14.57m cube, 35.18m square floor)
------Recreation volume: 386.67cu.m (0.03%, 7.29m cube, 12.44m square floor)
------Medical volume: 386.67cu.m (0.03%, 7.29m cube, 12.44m square floor)
------Quarantine volume: 38.67cu.m (0.00%, 3.38m cube, 3.93m square floor)
------Prison volume: 38.67cu.m (0.00%, 3.38m cube, 3.93m square floor)
------Lifeboat volume: 773.35cu.m (0.05%, 9.18m cube, 17.59m square floor)
------Workstation volume: 1933.37cu.m (0.13%, 12.46m cube, 27.81m square floor)
------Sanitation volume: 386.67cu.m (0.03%, 7.29m cube, 12.44m square floor)
------Dining hall volume: 386.67cu.m (0.03%, 7.29m cube, 12.44m square floor)
------Kitchen volume: 386.67cu.m (0.03%, 7.29m cube, 12.44m square floor)


A 1600m star destroyer would have a crew compliment of 58659.87, but I'm sure they would settle for a lot less and waste a lot more space in general due to the size. A 150m ship would have 48.33 crew, but might waste less space  and skip things like prison cells etc. It would be cool to get some real data from a naval vessel to put into the program.
edit: Millenium Falcon only gets 0.88 crew with my program, but since it's such a small ship there won't be any elaborate crew areas, and ship structure can be lighter.
edit: pretty close crew number on the star destroyer though, only 10k off. However, the hangar and weapons on the star destroyer seems to be low. Hundreds of meter between each turret, compare that to the armament of a naval ship. The hangar is either small or inefficient spacewise. Makes me wonder what's actually inside the ship. It would be interesting to do a ship-volume vs weapons or hangar comparison and see how it changes with ship sizes. I predict that maybe the volume relative power of a ship will go down with like an inv.sqrt or something..

Death 999, sorry for writing “seems” so much in my posts. I needed to prepare some things, so was typing too quickly, and thus, the general structure of my post was lacking in elegance…  ;D

As for the “canon policies”, I guess that is a matter of personal opinion. For myself, I don’t like the idea of some things in one story being “true” and some being “false” based on a weird set of priorities, which can be further compounded by “greater” sources “implying” things while a lesser source “states” a “fact”. I would take only take original material of various shows and movies to be canon. Hell, I would even ignore the Star Control 2 manual as a source of “facts” (though in that special case, perhaps accept its explanation for a know phenomena if there are no better explanations more consistent with anything else).

If you deliver energy from one point on an asteroid, I am not even sure if it will vaporize. It would probably melt/vaporize a small part and then cause the rest to explode.
At any rate, it is extremely unlikely that the asteroid was mostly nickel. Asteroid compositions are somewhat unknown, but it would probably be mostly iron and silicates, though nickel could certainly be a notable part of it.

For the Death Star impact on Endor, why assume any filling percentage? It is easily big enough to be incredibly massive without needing to assume the filling of even blimp. We know from the final scenes that a cataclysmic event did not occur (there would have been visible effects, even if the Calamari Cruisers blocked debris near the shield generator). Thus, either the Death Star has less mass then thought and/or the Calamari ships somehow blocked more debris (but we didn’t see this on the screen).

If the 80km/sec estimate of the speed is correct, though, then the Debris WAS moving about three times faster then the dinosaur impact, according to rough estimates.


Arne, on the matter of volume and crew considerations, there should be considerable resources available to you about various ships of the last century or two.
A naval ship design program (1850-1950) you might find interesting is Springsharp:
http://www.springsharp.com/

I have done a brief search, but have not been able to find a page with volumes for warships. However, if you input the mass, draft, freeboard, width, and length of a known warship into Springsharp, you can get a rough estimate of the volume.
This is done by using the block coefficient that Springsharp will give you from the above.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull_(watercraft)
The block coefficient is the ships total volume divided by the volume of a block with lengths equal to the ships length, width, and draft (NOT total height, which would include parts above the surface).
Thus, to find the volume of a ship, you should just have to multiply length*width*draft*block coefficient.
I hope this is using the proper clock coefficient definition. I have seen a few different ones across the internet.

Here are some good sites for naval information:
http://www.fas.org/main/home.jsp
http://www.hazegray.org/
http://navalhistory.flixco.info/

Finally, just convert tons (I’m pretty sure that warships are given in long tons) to kilograms by using 1016kg/long ton.

Edit: I found some additional volumetrics information here for Star Trek Ships and Star Wars ships:
http://www.st-v-sw.net/STSWvolumetrics.html
I would generally ignore the analysis on the third crew density page, though, and consider things independantly.

I don't think they were nuclear missiles. I remember them being antimatter things of some sort...

Regarding Nukes and Federation (ST) shielding, does anyone remember how close the runabout got to the nuclear bomb test in the episode of DS9 where Quark & Odo (and someone else) went back in time on Earth?  That should be pretty conclusive; if memory serves, they needed to be in the blast to irradiate their engines.

Oh, and regarding Trek vs. Wars vs. Control:  I'd say Trek wins hands down; I forgot how easy it was for Federation ships to travel through time (and wipe out the beginnings of life in a galaxy far far away or in an alternate reality where big bugs replace the borg).

Thanks Neutrino! I'll try to compile that info into little cute diagrams. Maybe it would be cool to plot the correlation between length and volume (my cube value), aswell as volume and crew (density). The color of the plots could depend on the universe (StarTrek, StarWars, Submarines, Naval ships, Airplanes)

I made this little tutorial for quick volume estimation. It's about as accurate as you are careful when making the model. Tut Pic (http://itchstudios.com/psg/tuts/claycube.jpg) stuff (http://web.telia.com/~u48508900/spaceshipsizes/)

Pushing on something with a force large enough to deform it heats it. If the force is large enough, it can be vaporized.


Fine, replace all instances of 'nickel' with 'any atom at all, period'. Doesn't change the result.


1) Because we saw ships flying through the thing, and it was nothing close to empty.

2) Because we can see the interior structure to some extent, and it's actually got quite a bit of stuff

3) are you REALLY trying to say there isn't even 100 meters of stuff on the surface? That'd be thinner than the super star destroyer.

4) Anyway, if we scale down the hull thickness to a mere 20 meters, we still get a whole inch of metal dust coating the surface of Endor. That'd still be a major catastrophe.



This is a fairly good point, except that Dr. Saxton addresses it, and, IMO, adequately (i.e. the dust has not yet settled; the large bits were blasted by the Mon Cals, but it still landed as dust). Don't forget, the mass of the DS and ecological catastrophe on Endor is a subpoint of a subpoint: whether Dr. Saxton's site is riddled with inaccuracy and ignored issues is the subpoint of what we were talking about, on the general subject of ST vs SW superiority.

If some small bit with depth of the asteroid is given a lot of energy quickly, then it will push the other parts apart in an explosion in this situation. This would most probably happen before those parts could be vaporized.

If iron and many other elements in an asteroid were vaporized, they would be greatly lit up.

We saw ships fly through the Death Star, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t mostly empty. There would need to be something connecting the surface area with the center area, and the Death Star was still under construction too.

What I’m saying, is that is was thin enough (and/or ‘something’ blocked much of the debris) to have no noticeable effect on Endor celebrations at the end. Lots of dust in the atmosphere would have blocked out the sun in a highly noticeable way. If the dust had magically settled instantly, then the atmosphere would look fine, but we would notice dust… 8)

Anyway, I am not saying the site is “riddled” with errors (I’m sure he has most things right, especially things that don’t involve super-technology such as ship lengths :)), just that it has at least a few important ones. The other problem is the weirdness of the “canon”, which I don’t agree with as mentioned in my previous posts.

If you supply enough energy, it will be vaporized. Or do you think that the outer casing of your average hydrogen bomb emerges in solid state from its use?


Why, yes, they would be lit up, in the incandescent period before they adiabatically cooled. And, what do you know, this is observed in the GFX. A ball of incandescent gas which expands rapidly and then disappears. The only mechanism capable of cooling it quickly is the adiabatic expansion that we incidentally know that it is undergoing.


Just as long as you realize that being 'thin enough' would mean making it only a couple meters thick on average.
I'd personally go with the 'blocking' theory since the cruisers could deflect large chunks out in some other direction.


I don't know of any endor-based shots on the order of minutes after the death star's destruction, until after sundown, except for one (with the fireworks), which IIRC does not do much either way for clean/dirty sky, since we're at an unknown point during sunset.

A nuclear bomb will vaporize its case because the case is much smaller then an asteroid, and it explodes in the center of the case. If you had a super-duper-mega amount of energy in the turbolaser blast, it might be able to vaporize the asteroid, but exploding a large part of it without vaporization is much more likely.
It can be confirmed, however, that the asteroid is not vaporized.

The asteroid shows no signs of glowing bits moving in large expansion, only a small puffing effect for the glowing stuff. Also, unless the frames on Saxton’s website are a long time apart, the glowing stops very quickly, so either the asteroid disappeared, or its pieces are no longer glowing.
If the pieces were really really hot, they would not stop glowing in under a second. Just consider some thin liquid (or hot solid) iron in a factory with no atmosphere. It would not stop glowing in under a second, despite the fact that it would radiate very quickly at higher temperatures (but as it cools, it radiates more and more slowly…). Vapor would be similar, just a bit faster, not orders of magnitude faster.

On the Death Star, I would think that the Rebel cruisers would be busy fighting the imperials, who wouldn’t surrender until the Death Star was destroyed. We didn’t see any deflection at all in the explosion picture. Still, some might have been deflected (especially the nasty pieces) in the last seconds, but we don’t see any kind of decisive impact. However, we don’t see much debris moving toward the planet in the first place…

You are right in that the Death Star might not have its decks evenly distributed under its surface. Still, one should be able to get a reasonable number of decks total, at least a few dozen Executer super star destroyers worth. Remember though, that a certain thickness is not that of solid material. In fact, due to futuristic material technology the Empire no doubt has, the decks are probably very thin (except the armor deck, of course!).

Another way to reduce the size of the debris is to reduce the size of the Death Star itself. However, this isn’t really a good method…

Using my super knowledge of advanced classical mechanics, I have determined by examining the characters (and other objects) motion that the gravity on Endor is exactly one times the gravity of Earth ;D. This means that Endor will have a radius fairly close to that of Earth, which is 6378km. Using the following picture, I roughly calculated:

Endor: 136 pixels
DSII: 14 pixels – scales to 1313km
(http://img224.imageshack.us/img224/3205/rotj090so6.th.jpg) (http://img224.imageshack.us/my.php?image=rotj090so6.jpg)

Since the Death Star is closer, this is an upper limit, and there is some uncertainty in it since Endor probably isn’t the exact size of Earth.

However, the following two pictures but a monkey wrench into this calculation.
(http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/5489/rotj091ex6.th.jpg) (http://img84.imageshack.us/my.php?image=rotj091ex6.jpg)
(http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/4231/rotj130jd2.th.jpg) (http://img84.imageshack.us/my.php?image=rotj130jd2.jpg)

It is clear in the first picture that the Death Star scales to be much smaller relative to the planet. Similarly, it is clear in the second picture that the death star is far larger then a mere1313km since the super star destroyer is in the high teens kilometers long (I am too lazy to get the exact figure). By some very rough eyeballing, the sizes are an order of magnitude smaller and larger then what I originally calculated. Clearly, the producers made mistakes in scaling the different things, but where does that leave us?

…

That’s not a rhetorical question! :)

In the party scenes, a massive amount of dust in the atmosphere would be clearly visible (probably with structure too), and some would have reached near the ground (also visible), making the characters most uncomfortable. As if the smell of Vader’s ‘open-air’ funeral wasn’t bad enough…




On another note, I calculated the length of the Earthling Cruiser in the “Earthling Cruiser” thread, and confirmed it by looking at the Vindicator picture. I used the site http://www.merzo.net to get some relative lengths and added the Cruiser in. Thus, I can now present two images with a bunch of popular ships in 1 pixel = 1 meter and 1 pixel = 2 meters scaling.

(http://img224.imageshack.us/img224/1602/sizechartscale1rh3.th.jpg) (http://img224.imageshack.us/my.php?image=sizechartscale1rh3.jpg)
(http://img224.imageshack.us/img224/7134/sizechartscale2dc5.th.jpg) (http://img224.imageshack.us/my.php?image=sizechartscale2dc5.jpg)

But that's the thing! When you have liquid or a solid experiencing an explosion, it does not obey the ideal gas law; its parts have temperature defined in respect to each other, and not to the overall volume over which the liquid or solid is distributed.
On the other hand, vapor does obey the ideal gas law, and as it expands rapidly, it cools rapidly.



yes, the 'they got lucky and the explosion was anisotropic' argument works fine, I'll grant. Saxton could very well have missed that one.


Their support beams and such do not seem thin, really. We get to see lots of macroscopic structures in Ep 4.



My similarly highly sophisticated analysis also came to that conclusion. Brilliant!


Actually, this is a weak dependence because increasing the radius also increases the separation from the center of mass.. So surface gravity varies as radius to the 1/3. The gravity depends more straightforwardly on the density, which is free to vary substantially.


900 km is the figure I've been using. If you include the height the station has above the surface, it's a fairly substantial part of this, so the upper-limit-ness is important here.


Kind-of. I took the first picture, moved over the DS to the edge of the planet, and scaled it up until the DS was the same size as in this shot. The curvature was not all that much greater.
As further support, if you draw the tangents of the rim of Endor near the edges of this shot, you get around a 12 degree angle, over a length of about 7.5 DS2 diameters. 12 degrees = 1/30 of a circle, or around 0.2 radians, or 0.4 of a diameter. Thus, this shot supports a diameter of the DS2 which is around 0.4/7.5 = 1/18.75 of that of Endor.


If you have a graphing calculator, graph y = sqrt(90^2 - x^2) and zoom in on the peak of this graph. It's awfully flat even compared to a single unit line segment. I think this is consistent with a ~tens kilometers SSD and 900 km DS.




I agree that this is odd.

I don’t think the ideal gas law is appropriate for this situation. The gas would need to lose its energy via radiation very quickly, or else we would see glowing material flying off, instead of just disappearing.

An anisotropic explosion could indeed account for some more of the Death Star’s mass (though it alone could not be decisive or we would see it in the explosion). In fact, we already know that “something” about the destruction was anisotropic due to the usual ring o’ blowin’ big things up that we see.

I don’t remember much about the Death Star interior except for the scene where obiwan was standing near the long pylon to use a terminal. I assumed the pylon was filled with stuff…important stuff…
Are any pictures of these available? A quick google search yields nothing…

There is of course uncertainty in the precise radius of Endor, but it could go either way compared to the Earth. However, I would say more likely that Endor is larger and less dense then the Earth, which was struck by the Moon (then a really big asteroid), and absorbed some of the Moon’s iron, a very dense substance.

For Death Star sizes, see below images. The planet radii are clearly much different on the first, and in the second, nowhere on the big circle is there an area of apparently constant slope like the area near the super star destroyer (which is scaled to 900km deathstar for the circle and 17.6km super star destroyer in the small image).

(http://img170.imageshack.us/img170/9999/rotj091mod3ek3.th.jpg) (http://img170.imageshack.us/my.php?image=rotj091mod3ek3.jpg)

(http://img207.imageshack.us/img207/7331/ssddssizesjt1.th.jpg) (http://img207.imageshack.us/my.php?image=ssddssizesjt1.jpg)

The incandescent glow is due to collisions among the gas particles. If they spread out quickly (which they are observed to do), they will occupy a region large enough they will no longer collide.

Another way of looking at it is that its disordered kinetic energy (heat) is quickly transformed into ordered kinetic energy (gaseous expansion). The entropy loss from that is more than made up for by the volume increase.

I
That was the DS1, which used a very different floor plan.

If the Death Star is orbiting Endor, most of the debris caused by it's explosion stay in orbit, right?
Or wrong? ;)

It's not in orbit, it's sitting on some sort of force field (presumably a different one than the one on the ground). Anyway, after being thrown out of an orbit at velocities far in excess of escape velocity... the debris is not  in orbit anymore.

Sorry, I was a bit sleepy typing the E-mail, so wasn’t very clear or even fully articulated. The ideal gas law is not directly applicable if there is any outgoing radiation, since that takes away energy (thus making the process non-adiabatic as well). This may be significant if it was a metal that was vaporized, since radiation is proportional to T^4.

Still one can assume none is and use the ideal gas law combined with the adiabatic condition to obtain (if I remember my thermodynamics correctly) constant = V*T^(f/2) where f is the number of degrees of freedom. f depends on the configuration of the gas molecules: 3, 5 ,or 6.  If dealing with a monoatomic gas, it is 3, diatomic 5, and other 6 (I think).

Since the radiation involves temperature, we should see it decline steadily as the volume decreases, but we really don’t. It goes from white-hot to hardly illuminated while not expanding much at all. He is a picture with some circles:
(http://img241.imageshack.us/img241/9205/astoroidcircled3hb9.th.jpg) (http://img241.imageshack.us/my.php?image=astoroidcircled3hb9.jpg)


P.S. Looking at the matter more closely, I am again unsure if the heat could transfer quickly enough to vaporize the entire asteroid. The temperature gradient would be large, but the hot part would already be vaporized, so would just have one collision to transfer energy before it bounces away, and not all molecules would originally bounce in the right direction to transfer heat. Thus, the kinetic energy shockwave would break it apart while the molecules supposed to be transferring heat would just fly off. We don’t see debris, so maybe we are just not close enough, or maybe it is just turbolaser magical properties...

Also, for the Death Star interior: didn’t you refer to episode IV in your earlier post? That should be the one with the original Deathstar...

Arne, I would like to correct my earlier statement about the block coefficient. On closer examination, it appears that using the block coefficient in the manner described in my earlier post will only yield the volume of the ship that is underwater. On the bright side, the http://navalhistory.flixco.info/ link gives block coefficients.

The problem is that for naval ships, mass is a much more important indicator of power then total volume, so total volume is essentially never given. I am working on a volume estimate for Iowa class battleships that I will complete and post Friday or Saturday as soon as I finish some grading. It is also fairly easy to calculate submarine volumes if you know their dimensions and have a decent picture.

It is directly applicable. It is an equation of state. If the temperature dropped due to other factors, that will change the temperature independently. You mean the adiabatic approximation is invalid, then? You already quite correctly pointed out that radiative cooling was so slow as to be irrelevant. That means it's adiabatic.

If you don't believe it's fast enough, I'll get quantitative: you have the gas at the boiling point of the metal, initially confined to around a volume 30 meters on a side. It is thus glowing-hot. How much volume must it expand into to drop to a temperature too low to glow red? Answer: a volume roughly T(boiling metal) / T (red hot) larger, which I guesstimate to be a factor of 30 (though this would be hotter than the surface of the sun). That corresponds to a linear expansion increase of only THREE TIMES.

This expansion occurs very quickly, as you may have noticed.


I don't see why this is the case. If the beam transferred energy along a line, then almost all of the initially vaporized particles would have nowhere to escape to, and be forced to dissipate their energy to the surrounding metal, as heat and as  a compression wave as it expanded.
That would in turn be transferred to heat.


And if you accelerate an object hard enough just by pushing on it, the compression wave is converted into heat...

I would say the best explanation for the visual effect is that the turbolaser deposited energy through a significant volume of the asteroid (medium coupling permits it to deposit not only on the surface), which thus evaporated fairly uniformly (though certainly violently). This would minimize large debris fragments which could hit the ship or its fighters.


Uh, yeah. I meant 6. Oops?

My following facts:

1a:  The Ur-Quan won their war against the alliance of the free stars, though they were stalemated for a long time.

1b:  The sa-matra was destroyed by a improved planeteering device, its raw form believed to be a planeteering tool of some kind, perhaps a planetary destroyer, It was maneauvered in at great cost only after being stripped of most of its guard.

1c:  Their ships can slag cities from orbit, and have sensor capablity to search ocean floors, deep under ice crusts, etc.

2a:  The empire lost their war against a set of much less supplied, manned or strategically brilliant rebels who used converted passenger liners rather than real war-ships to do their capship fighting.

2b:  The first Death Star was lost to a single (or maybe two?) fighter-carried missle(s) due to an engineering mistake that no one with an ounce of competence would make.

2b-2:  The second Death Star was lost because the ground forces protecting its shield were defeated by stone-age carebears assisted by a very small rebel ground force.

2c:... and despite having most of the imperial fleet guarding the star in a startling ambush who's very design was to crush the rebel fleet, they managed to lose their flagship (the executor) the death star, and suffered devastating tactical defeat, at the hands of said same motely rebels.

My conclusion?  The Ur-Quan will win.  'Cause they're competent.  :P

Edit:  I tried to report this post to a moderator via link because it's just another Star Wars/Trek/Fleet/Cat/Dog/Whatever VS. Star Yak/De/Yak/De/Yak and has absoultely nothing to do with the open source question somewhere before this started, but the link said I can't report my own posts, as it doesn't make any sense.  Oh well. :3

You don't need a moderator to delete or modify your own posts, so why would you want to report them?

He was joking, that was the punch-line.

My sense of humour needs calibrating. Again.

Okay, a precise volume calculation can't be done with my present materials, and even a good estimate can't be done since I don't know if the block coefficient applies to light, standard, normal, or maximum displacement (I estimated using draft as 10 meters)). However, I was able to make a rough estimate of 116,200 cubic meters. The Iowa battleships had 2,700 crew during WWII and 1,500 in more recent service.
Here is the picture I used to make the rough estimate:
(http://img83.imageshack.us/img83/4861/calcbbiowajp5.th.jpg) (http://img83.imageshack.us/my.php?image=calcbbiowajp5.jpg)


Ironically, I had put one big box in the picture for the initial calculation and got 120,000 meters, but then decided that that wasn't accurate enough, so I spent the next 20 minutes doing the more detailed work above that got essentially the same value... ;D

Death 999, I posted the relevant equation. Temperature and volume are not related inversely, but by constant=V*T^(f/2) where f=3 for monatomic particles (such as pure metals, it is larger for more complex molecules). Thus, using your own estimate of a temperature drop of 30x and making the minimum assumption of pure metal, the volume change would need to be ~164 times greater, or assuming that it’s a sphere, the radius would need to be ~5.5 times larger. We only see a small amount of expansion, linearly much less then a factor of two.

Why would the beam deliver energy in a line within the asteroid? It should deliver energy to a single sport on the asteroid at the surface. Many of these particles would be able to escape outward, along the path of the beam, and absorb even more energy from the beam as they do this. Also, if the energy was deposited uniformly, we should see a spot of white-hot material in the first picture on the other side rather then just around the edge as the blast moves through.

One can heat something by compressing it, but the compression could also simply break it into smaller pieces, like smacking a cracker into a table. It all depends on the compression...

Finally, where are the support beams in episode VI? I am not sure where to look.

Also, to Holocat: the Ur-Quan might not win since they are very bureaucratic. Yoda could just reword their Path of Now and Forever doctrine using the force (or something), and then they would have to just talk about flowers or help clear Yoda’s swamps to make more productive gardening land. The question is, would they consider computerized copies sufficient, or would rewording the original initiate the change?
Anyway, I suppose the original question in this topic has been answered, but this discussion should really be moved into that thread with the Ur-Quan vs. Star Wars story where it is more relevant.

Oops, I mis-considered the situation -- pressure can change! PV = NkT does still apply, it just isn't helpful.


Well, Actually, I only chose that temperature drop because I was trying to drive in a point. Nickel evaporates at 3187 celsius. Glowing red cuts off  at around 750 celsius. Ratio? 4. Taking that to the 3/2 power yields an expansion factor of 8 -> length scale factor... 2.
Anyway, it's not like it's an expanding balloon. It's got a denser, hotter core, and a diffuser cooler outer region. This makes the expansion factor smaller (the hottest gas escapes most quickly, cools most quickly, so it's alreay gone; other superheated solid elements are trapped but evaporate when they can, which means rapid cooling occurring to a small portion of the asteroid at once).

And sorry,  but that image does not show an expansion factor 'much less than 2'. Note that your neat little red circle does in fact have a lot of stuff sticking out of it. Also, that asteroid was nothing like spherical, and if it has the usual 'potato' shape, it'd probably be kind of thin in the z direction. Only one dimension close to the red circle radius...



1) my super-1337 forensic skills (very similar to your endor-moon-gravity-measuring skillz) revealed that all SW weaponry effects were very similar to that of planted charges, not consistent with surface insertion of energy. This raises the question of 'how'.

2) If the particles in the turbolaser are relativistic, they can proceed through matter a substantial distance before interacting (we use this  effect today, in radiation therapy). While the turbolaser's visual effect proceeds less than C, it has been observed that things would blow up before the visual streak arrived, which suggests that it is either a tracer or a peak in a density wavelet which proceeds at a slower pace than each component of the beam.


I see a white-hot spot on the far side; don't you?
In any case, what we know for sure is:

1) The blasted asteroid does not  release chunks back towards the Star Destroyer that are heavy enough and high-enough velocity to be a threat to the Star Destroyers
2) The whole asteroid would have been a threat.
3) The blasted asteroid vanishes quite thoroughly quickly enough to be inconsistent with radiative dissipation.

There can be small fragments which were ejected too fast to see, but they should all be sent away from the Star Destroyer. A large portion of the asteroid was vaporized. Star Destroyers' kinetic shielding is, at least under certain circumstances, not good. As for the cooling, we have an adequate mechanism, there is no need to reach for technobabble.


When they're flying through the Death Star, they are always surrounded by... stuff. Heavy stuff. Lots of it.

Neutrino: In the end, and in the beginning, I've just been taking exception to your one-sided assessment of "1 GCS destroys SSD LOL" and "Sources? Saxton is worthless, st-v-sw is good".


Holocat: The spaceborne forces were only defeated by foes of comparable technological level. Ground forces are a different question altogether. Note that the Ewoks took massive casualties, far in numeric excess of the absolute number of Imperial casualties.

I often feel the urge to report my own posts after I've written something witty or otherwise awesome, just so that the moderators will notice what a great guy I am. I

I'm rather the opposite.  I often feel the urge to report my own posts when I feel i'm contributing to a problem, such as a endlessly over-and often done discussion.  Like Star Wars vs. X, or Star Wars physics.  It was a great work of fiction, but any pretentions to it or its technology being a kind of physically explanable reality is very silly.  I mean, lightsabers, flakking turbolasers, blasters that seem to have no more range, accuracy or firepower than (sub)standard modern military weaponry. 

I suppose it's fun to apply physical knowledge (such as we have it) to situations such as the movies, but having done this many, many times before I guess i'm jaded to it now;  It will never make sense, the writer nor the effects managers were calculating the whatnot in the whatsit when they made the pretty green laser things.

For some odd reason, I still enjoy applying my scant physical knowledge to Star Trek, but I think that's because I like it more. :3

Death 999, sorry this took so long. I’ve been busy...
I would quote you in sections, but all the associated copying and pasting is soooo long, so hopefully this is understandable.

When considering adiabatic things, one still uses the ideal gas equation to obtain various relations, which is handy. It’s just that the basic relation CdT = -PdV for adiabatic changes is the starting point.

Of course, once the temperature falls to below the melting point, the material (almost certainly containing lots of iron if nickel is present in significant quantities) will condense to form a hot liquid or solid (depending on the pressure), which would be visible. Note that melting and boiling points depend not only on the temperature, but also on the pressue.

You are right that an expanding gas would be denser in the inside. However, f=3 only for a monatomic gas. If the asteroid is the most common, it is probably composed of silicates, which will have f=5 (for a power of 5/2 in the adabatic equation relating temperature and pressure).

I am not sure why you don’t like my wonderful red circle. At any rate, you can’t draw any line in any image in that picture through the center of the asteroid that is nearly twice as long as the asteroid itself.
What do you mean by “potato”-shaped asteroids being the normal? How can you draw any conclusions about the area of the asteroid behind that in our field of view being short? If anything, I would think it’s at least the same distance as roughly circular part of the asteroid we can see. This is because the glow is seen around the side of the asteroid, and hasn’t had time to travel to the center.
...or are you not counting the white area in the first picture as part of the asteroid? I think it is, but the pictures on Saxton’s site didn’t show the thing before the turbolaser hit...

If the explosions are identical to the planted charges, then we should also see that they are not so high energy afterall! Too low energy in fact, so it ends up as “???”.
Anyway, if the turbolaser particles somehow penetrated the asteroid, they would still have deposited more energy on the surface then in the center, and they would continue to deposit a decreasing amount of energy throughout the whole thing before emerging on the other side in reduced (perhaps invisible) state.
The beam of the turbolaser certainly moves slowly, but the asteroid only explodes a bit before the beam hits, leading on to believe that the velocity of the turbolaser I similar to that of the tracer. Of course, if it were not, then the tracer would be pointless, as relativistic particles would be essentially “point and shoot” (though not at long ranges, but slow tracers wouldn’t help there), and tracers would be useless.

I do not see a bright spot on the far side of the asteroid. Could you circle it? It might have something to do with the red dot I put in the center. I needed to reconvert the image to .jpg form, which blurs everything due to some probably stupid reason (I do all measurements with downloaded originals converted to .bmp).

Your three points seem right, but an explanation can’t have any inconsistencies, which a boiling asteroid seems to have. Another explanation might be that the explosion is low powered, with the debris quickly scattering to small mostly non-glowing bits (or just have the glow provided by the turbolaser tracer), not a threat to the star destroyers.

Overall, my GCS vs. Super Star Destroyer assessment was not based on any of my own things, but on the movie that was linked! I was just reinterpreting the movie... Even assuming a canon Galaxy class starship has much better technology, the super star destroyer could still win since is so much bigger, increasing its combat ability.
I also said that Saxton’s site was not worthless, but usually good. My main issue was his choice of sources, but canon policy is a nebulus topic for me...
Meanwhile, I also said that st-v-sw.net had mistakes.
When working with so much material, one is bound to make at least SOME mistakes and omissions, especially with as complicated an issue as sci-fi science!
I would consider both sites to be much better then that slightly loony stardestroyer.net site, which was why I refered to st-v-sw it originally. If I had know about Saxton’s site then, I would have linked to it too with the same warning I gave for st-v-sw.net (besides also mentioning the sources thing):
“I believe it has a few mistakes, but it's mostly good...”

I was under the impression that the Imperials had a much more powerful fleet overall, but some had essential Empire-maintained duties elsewhere, so their ambush fleet was not decisively more powerful then the rebels. Then the rebels won due to better crews and construction doctrine (not sure about the latter – I might be confusing it with the Star Wars games I played a long time ago...), and getting lucky by destroying the super star destroyer (lesson: do not put windows on your ship).
...and finally, how did the Ewoks take massive casualties? It seemed to me that they were completely outfighting the imperials, and only had three dead or so.

Cheers,

In reference to the movie, okay, I didn't notice that that was what you were reacting to, it just sounded like the kind of thing that certain ST fans say (I actually knew one who said that the Defiant would be able to destroy the SSD in about 3 seconds with no risk to itself, every time).

Now that I've actually watched the movie, I have to agree with your assessment.


My point was that it will only be able to cool to that temperature by evaporating, and once it has done so, it is so dilute that it will not recondense.

Oh, and yes there is pressure dependence; but being in a vacuum does produce the lowest boiling points.


Actually, this is for a thermal gas, which though adiabatic remains homogeneous and ergodic. This gas is not homogeneous, and is most certainly nonergodic.

How is this most relevant? First, position is very much a function of velocity. The faster you go, the further you are from the point source. If you go with one angle, you will quickly self-select to be with particles moving at that same angle. This is the opposite of homogeneity.

Second, time has not been given to permit the energy in the spin degrees of freedom to equilibrate with the energy in the kinetic degrees of freedom. In any case, such equilibration will require collisions to conserve momentum.  So, the silicate factor would only be a concern for the part of the gas which is still close enough to the center to still be undergoing collisions at an appreciable rate.
This system is thus nonergodic.

If you stuck it in a box that was two asteroid radii wide, then sure, I would immediately grant that it would remain quite hot, as the system would lose its velocity selection. This would then permit more collisions, which would allow energy exchange with the spin degrees of freedom.

But it's not in a box.

As for the circle:
I only looked at it in the low-res version at first (I didn't realize there was a high-res version until returning to it). It appeared to have a bright dot on the far side from entry. Further, due to mixing bright and dark tends to favor bright, the boundary favored the explosion and made the asteroid look smaller.
This point is conceded.

As for the planted charges: Well, yeah, it's smaller than otherwise. I'm trying to fit the visuals, not maximize SW power. Check out the trees they blew up in RotJ, check out just about any of the explosions. They look like central explosions, not side explosions.

As for the turbolaser and relativistic particles:
I have a model for the turbolaser, that I didn't get into before because it's just my idea and I'm not really saying you should go for it.
However, it does permit some things you said were not permitted.

The green streak is a plasma lens which focuses a laser onto point in front of it. That point may have a small projectile present, or nothing. That laser tweezes the projectile, causing nuclear fusion; or some exotic physics gets involved. Either way, that greatly amplifies the effect.

Thus we have a laser, and somehow it gets 'turbo', and the green streak still does something. It also explains the 'flak bursts' sometimes seen.

Note that this fits nicely with the graphics of the Death Star and the mini-superlasers seen on the small landing craft in AotC.... only in this case, the high-powered reaction is done under a more controlled circumstance. And right next to the shooter, where if it went off in the wrong way it would be catastrophic. Which is one reason such systems may not be used routinely.

This reconciles the minimal but nonzero damage to shielded objects with the collossal damage to unshielded ones (shields usually screw up the lens so that the high-powered reaction does not occur; but you still get hit by the laser, the target projectile, and the plasma; and sometimes shields don't work fully and the high-energy reaction occurs at least a little bit).


In any case, more pertinent to the present discussion, it also may explain why the bolt as a whole moves very slowly, but the damage leaps ahead of it just a little bit; and it permits relativistic particles to be created upon impact.


Re: Stardestroyer.net:
The front page and certain elements of the presentation are indeed silly. The individual more technical pages are not. I have not looked at every page, but I'd be curious as to what you think is loony.

Re: Imperial navy at Endor:
Sounds about right. Note that naval engagements typically occurrred at very long range. The imperial training may not have emphasized short range, which is where most of the fighting actually took place. I am not familiar with canon sources comparing the relative merits in construction of star destroyers and the rebel vessels.

Re: ewok battle:
The ewoks siezed the advantage in the opening moments, and continued to outfight the ground troops, though taking not insignificant casualties. The armored elements caused a great deal of trouble until the counters came into play.

I recall about an even number of scenes of ewoks and imperials dying. The ewok scenes were played up for the teddy bear aspect, of course.

It would be interesting to do a tally.


In any case, I am enjoying this debate much more now that I know you weren't like that guy I referred to up top.

I’m not sure what you mean by “cool to that temperature by evaporating”. I think you might be right about the fact that the gas would never recondense, however. The temperature would fall, but the pressure would fall as well, preventing condensation (I overlooked the pressure falling previously).

As a side note, you don’t “boil” things in a vacuum, you sublimate them, transiting directly from a solid to a gas. Since there is no pressure, breaking the solid structure converts straight to a gas, instead of just to a liquid.

The adiabatic calculation is of course, an approximation, but it is roughly decent, for in the interior of the gas there are still many collisions. Density is a function of position for sure, which reduces the radius in which we would expect to see a glow, but then again, our earlier example had the turbolaser providing just barely enough energy to vaporize it, which sure would be a coincidence.
I actually had looked for the equations for a ball of gas expanding in a vacuum earlier, but didn’t find any on the internet, and I don’t remember any of my thermodynamics books having them either. I lack the time to try to derive them, as you can probably tell since I’ve been taking too long to respond to everything on this board...

Also on the glow, it seems to only expand in some directions, and not in others. The brightness gradient also varies from extremely high in some zones to decent in others, which is inconsistent with fast vaporization of the asteroid.

Your turbolaser idea was similar to one I entertained a couple years ago, but I believe it has an important flaw. The green bolt moves with the initial velocity of the Star Destroyer, but if the Star Destroyer is accelerating, the barrel of the turbolaser will no longer line up with the green bolt when it hits the object. Also, a powerful and small enough laser would show up in the atmosphere when dealing with blaster fire.

I don’t have any of the movies right now to look at in more detail (I had tapes that are now at my parents house). Actually, I haven’t touched anything with “Star Wars” in its name since Episode One. *shudder*. I used to be a big fan too; I could quote the armaments and shields and such (from the Tie Fighter game) of the different ships...

It’s been a couple years since I’ve visited stardestroyer.net, so I don’t remember specifics right now. I’ll try to take a look at a few of the pages sometime in the next week or so and comment.

P.S. Do you work in the sciences? I find that most people would never know what “ergodic” means...

I mean that the temperature drops as the gas expands into a larger volume. Of course, it is doing so in a completely different way than the expanding box method, rather using a velocity selection method.


Well, yeah, if you want to be technical.


or careful doling out of the firepower. Excess might be counterproductive.


My approach would be to calculate the relative velocities, basing it on the angle subtended by the source for two dimensions. In the third dimension, we would have to worry about hotter particles overtaking colder particles released earlier.

With that approach, we can get the time between collisions even without the temperature as a function of expansion. That would give a hint as to the optical depth, which would in turn indicate how much glow we'd see.


Inconsistent with homogeneous vaporization, sure. If the middle vaporized first, as makes sense, then it would fly out in the directions it could.

We also don't know what magnetic or otherwise anisotropic forces the turbolaser field itself carries.


I know about the first problem; it's much more severe for fighters, of course. I believe you meant the bolt is oriented back toward the cannon only in the cannon's original rest frame, not that it moves with the original velocity...
In any case, there are a variety of solutions which do varying levels of violence to the idea of turbolasers, continuity, physics, etc.
The simplest would be that the laser does not need to be sent straight up the plasma, but merely needs to hit the plasma, energizing it. This does minimum violence to continuity and the concept of turbolasers, but isn't exactly gentle to physics.
As for the second, it could be an infrared or deeply UV laser such that we wouldn't see it anyway.

The other option is that the electromagnetic energy was locked into the plasma trail when it was fired; when the plasma is distorted then the energy is released. Problem is, the only way we've found to freeze light does involve a carrier wave being sent through the medium in question, so we'd need a laser going all the time instead of just on impact.


PhD student in physics at UPenn.

With a very high energy event, I would think that the process would be more homogeneous, leading to a more homogeneous dispersion pattern, at least during the time at which there is no more solid left. As for variable firepower or anisotropic abilities for the turbolaser, I would think Occum’s Razor comes into play, though the nature of the turbolaser being unknown somewhat dulls the razor...

This isn’t my area of expertise, but wouldn’t a low powered laser in the atmosphere be invisible at any color (unless the atmosphere is polluted), while any powerful enough to excite the atmosphere would be visible? Presumably these weapons would use powerful lasers...

Anyway, I think a simpler explanation would be that the green stuff is normally invisible, but that the laser somehow “activates” it. The part that hits before the green area hits does interact, but it is just leftover and does very little damage.

Re: Stardestroyer.net
Again, I do not like the fact that he refers to many technical manuals and books. Also, he seems to not consider many explanations that might be superior to his own in almost all topics.
For example, skimming the photon torpedo page, he seems to instantly take the tech manual’s statement as an upper limit. He certainly thinks that the blast cannot somehow be directed energy, citing the worry from backblast, but he says somewhere that shields reflect energy, and exploding debris would be backblast too. He states that torpedoes are not effective against highly moanuverable targets and thus what would be the point of phasers? Well, torpedoes in a DS9 episode were effective against Birds of Prey, and there are several reasons that phasers would be useful too (precision, variability against different shields, etc etc etc...), so that statement seems ignorant. He says that quantum torpedoes have some sort of disadvantage (in deployment or ability) compared to regular torpedoes, but nearly all new weapon systems take time to supply to an entire fleet.
Another very specific point in the large website (obtained from a link to the torpedo page): he seems to think that the Star Destroyers were taking many asteroid impacts since that was what was shown on screen, but there is no reason to assume this, especially since the screentime would show...things happening. He also assumes in the ROTJ battle that the ships were constantly exchanging fire, but there seemed to be only a few Calamari Cruisers, and the battle was at long rage for quite awhile, well outside the effective range of turbolasers based on the velocities.
It’s too big of a website for me to address completely unless I had dozens of hours to write, calculate, and look things up. He seems very opinionated in almost every page. I do like the Creationism versus Science section though. ;)

And with that last caveat in place, we have no argument left; but that occurs rather late in the process.


I like that image. I don't find it at all unreasonable to suspect variable firepower; and as you suggest below in reference to photon torpedoes, directionality isn't at all unreasonable.


"Exciting the atmosphere" would be a frequency requirement, not a power requirement.



I'm unsure what you mean -- where is this activating laser coming from, that it does not hit that leading portion?


I'll agree there. His ST shields page in particular aroused my ire, after which I proposed my ST shield theory on the discussion boards. His only rebuttal was that I couldn't explain X, where X was something his theory couldn't explain either. Kind of annoying.

Directionality for turbolaser (or other ‘laser’ weapons – what are the ones on the fighters called?) batteries is more difficult then for torpedoes (photon, proton, either way...) since the actual laser could come into the beam at any angle, while directionality can be built into torpedo weapons. There’s also the problem of actually having a proper angle on the green stuff with the laser in the first place, since fighter weapons seem to be pointing in a fixed direction. Variable firepower is easier to accept, though.

For the rest, it looks like I accidentally deleted several sentences when revising my post. Simply exciting the atmophere’s molecules is dependant on frequency of the photons, but any sufficiently powerful laser will encounter problems in the atmosphere since it will ionize many air molecules in its path, which should be quite visible.

For my turbolaser explanation, I had meant to say that the laser interacts with the green stuff before the green stuff is fired, so the laser never even leaves the Star Destroyer. The leading edge may simply not have been hit by the laser. Do all turbolaser hits start the explosion before the green part hits, or do only some of them? If the latter, it may just be impreciseness in shooting the laser at the green stuff before it exists the barrel.

Ah, got it.

By the way, in many cases, destruction does not begin before the green bolt arrives.