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Weaponizing hyperspace


Guest El Chalupacabra
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Guest El Chalupacabra

 

Well, if droid brains are installed on every ship, why is a crew needed? All those life-support systems could be replaced with weapons, and those soft, squishy organics with impossibly slow reflexes are just hampering the ships' abilities to fight effectively. :)

Newton's second law does not hold at relativistic speeds, so I can't tell you how many X-wings at hyperspeed you would need to destroy a Star Destroyer. Assuming Star Destroyers don't have shields with "fractional refresh rates", it may be that no ships can ever trick their way through the shields.

As for the First Order, well, they already outgun the Resistance. You don't need to use desperate measures when you're already winning. Maybe they will try attaching some hyperdrives to small asteroids, though.

Plot Armor Law suggests that droid brains only take care of hyperspace jump calculations and the humans do the rest. :)

But I did actually touch on the idea of sending unmanned WMDs through hyperspace above!

 

Hyperspace drives on asteroids would be something either side would/should consider. Mass drivers on asteroids worked for the Centauri in Babylon 5!

 

 

 

 

You're wrong about the mass and infinity - nothing has infinite mass, ever, under any conditions. Better to refer to momentum instead of mass, which will increase without limit as the object approaches c (but it still won't be infinite). A pebble moving at the same relativistic speed as a planet will still have very different momenta. But do we really want to get into a discussion of relativistic physics here?

Not that I, and probably Poe, want to get into a drawn out explanation, but I think a possible reason for this misconception is (at least on my part) Newton's Second Law, the Force=mass*acceleration theory, and possibly confusing it (at least I did) with DC Comic's imaginary idea of Flash's infinite mass punch (as I understand it, the Flash can move so fast that when he punches someone, it is with a greater force than even Superman, or something). I probably should have did a quick google search, to understand they aren't really the same.

 

I think the regular Star Destroyers are about a mile long (and super star destroyers are something like 8 to 10 times that). Literally the size of a small city. For rough estimates, maybe we can assume that a regular Star Destroyer is about 5 times the size of a Nimitz class carrier (which are about 333 meters/1000 feet long and something like 100,000 tons/90,718,474 kg). An xwing can also be assumed to be roughly the size of an F16 jet fighter (no mass on xwing, but wiki says 12.5 meters...but an f16 is 14.9 meters/just under 50 feet and weighs about 20,000 lbs/9071 kg).

 

 

I realize this is all imaginary, Pavonis, and that it would be hard to calculate, but is this something that we can even know how much damage could be done to a Star destroyer (assuming complete penetration of shields), by an x wing traveling at the speed of light or faster, based on all that? The furthest I can get is multiplying the F16 mass by the speed of light 186,282 miles per second/299.272 KM per second for force/velocity, but I don't have any idea how to calculate the damage to a vessel the size of a star destroyer! It's been many years since I took intro to physics, and I barely pulled a C at that!

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Plot Armor Law suggests that droid brains only take care of hyperspace jump calculations and the humans do the rest. :)

But I did actually touch on the idea of sending unmanned WMDs through hyperspace above!

 

Hyperspace drives on asteroids would be something either side would/should consider. Mass drivers on asteroids worked for the Centauri in Babylon 5!

Can't penetrate plot armor, I suppose, unless it has a fractional refresh rate. I was remembering the asteroid bombardment of the Narn homeworld in B5, too!

 

 

I think the regular Star Destroyers are about a mile long (and super star destroyers are something like 8 to 10 times that). Literally the size of a small city. For rough estimates, maybe we can assume that a regular Star Destroyer is about 5 times the size of a Nimitz class carrier (which are about 333 meters/1000 feet long and something like 100,000 tons/90,718,474 kg). An xwing can also be assumed to be roughly the size of an F16 jet fighter (no mass on xwing, but wiki says 12.5 meters...but an f16 is 14.9 meters/just under 50 feet and weighs about 20,000 lbs/9071 kg).
I realize this is all imaginary, Pavonis, and that it would be hard to calculate, but is this something that we can even know how much damage could be done to a Star destroyer (assuming complete penetration of shields), by an x wing traveling at the speed of light or faster, based on all that? The furthest I can get is multiplying the F16 mass by the speed of light 186,282 miles per second/299.272 KM per second for force/velocity, but I don't have any idea how to calculate the damage to a vessel the size of a star destroyer! It's been many years since I took intro to physics, and I barely pulled a C at that!

It's all for fun, of course! I'll borrow your numbers, more or less. Let's say an X-wing fighter is about 10,000 kg of mass (I imagine those hyperdrives are pretty dense). We can't get it to exactly lightspeed, but let's say it managed to reach 99.9% of c in real space. If it hit a Star Destroyer, and if I calculated the energy correctly, I get about 2 x 1022 joules (about 20 zettajoules). That's about 30 million times the energy released by the HIroshima bomb, or about 100,000 times the largest nuke humans have detonated (the Tsar Bomba in 1961). So, yeah, it might destroy a Star Destroyer. It would help to know more about the mass of Star Destroyers, not just the sizes.

 

A smallish asteroid (say 5 km in diameter - smaller than some ships in the SW canon - with a mass of about 3 x 1014 kg) fitted out with a hyperdrive to get it up to 99.9% of lightspeed would be sufficient to destroy most terrestrial planets.

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Re: why don't they kamikaze the first order via hyperspace?

 

1) the resistance doesn't have enough kamikazes

2) kamikazes don't get paid enough and have lousy retirement plans

 

Re: fractional refresh rates blah blah blah nerd stuff

 

My brain interprets "fractional refresh rate shields thingies" to mean it constantly pulsates on and off at some unspecified intervals, so if you fly in quick enough you can slip in. The bigger problem is how do you know you are timing it right? Unless the falcon has some magical computer that just knows everything and can calculate...that, then Han was just rolling the dice. Like he always does. Excuse me: did. How insensitive of me.

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I imagine that coordinating shield behavior across an entire planet must result in some lag due to signal travel time. They refresh the shield generators fractionally, i.e., some are on and some are off on a rotating basis. Maybe the size of the planet determines the fractional refresh rate, and since Han is a preternaturally lucky pilot (he established that in the Hoth asteroid field) he slipped through.

 

I wonder if the shield around Scarif had a fractional refresh rate. Maybe the rebels could have slipped through if they had that information back then.

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Maybe the laser bolts we see on screen are just tracer rounds.

 

Shields apparently allow visible light through, but may block other wavelengths. UV or x-ray lasers would be invisible and the shields may reflect them. We would never know without technobabble.

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Guest El Chalupacabra

 

 

Plot Armor Law suggests that droid brains only take care of hyperspace jump calculations and the humans do the rest. :)

But I did actually touch on the idea of sending unmanned WMDs through hyperspace above!

 

Hyperspace drives on asteroids would be something either side would/should consider. Mass drivers on asteroids worked for the Centauri in Babylon 5!

Can't penetrate plot armor, I suppose, unless it has a fractional refresh rate. I was remembering the asteroid bombardment of the Narn homeworld in B5, too!

 

 

I think the regular Star Destroyers are about a mile long (and super star destroyers are something like 8 to 10 times that). Literally the size of a small city. For rough estimates, maybe we can assume that a regular Star Destroyer is about 5 times the size of a Nimitz class carrier (which are about 333 meters/1000 feet long and something like 100,000 tons/90,718,474 kg). An xwing can also be assumed to be roughly the size of an F16 jet fighter (no mass on xwing, but wiki says 12.5 meters...but an f16 is 14.9 meters/just under 50 feet and weighs about 20,000 lbs/9071 kg).
I realize this is all imaginary, Pavonis, and that it would be hard to calculate, but is this something that we can even know how much damage could be done to a Star destroyer (assuming complete penetration of shields), by an x wing traveling at the speed of light or faster, based on all that? The furthest I can get is multiplying the F16 mass by the speed of light 186,282 miles per second/299.272 KM per second for force/velocity, but I don't have any idea how to calculate the damage to a vessel the size of a star destroyer! It's been many years since I took intro to physics, and I barely pulled a C at that!

It's all for fun, of course! I'll borrow your numbers, more or less. Let's say an X-wing fighter is about 10,000 kg of mass (I imagine those hyperdrives are pretty dense). We can't get it to exactly lightspeed, but let's say it managed to reach 99.9% of c in real space. If it hit a Star Destroyer, and if I calculated the energy correctly, I get about 2 x 1022 joules (about 20 zettajoules). That's about 30 million times the energy released by the HIroshima bomb, or about 100,000 times the largest nuke humans have detonated (the Tsar Bomba in 1961). So, yeah, it might destroy a Star Destroyer. It would help to know more about the mass of Star Destroyers, not just the sizes.

 

Thank you for doing the calculations on that! This could be a cool exam question for your students! LOL!

 

So, 100,000 times a Tsar Bomba? That right there just might be a small nation killer, at least.

 

I don't know if someone has been geeky enough to provide the mass of a Star Destroyer. The only thing I was able to find was that Star Destroyers are some 1600 meters long, which is just a hair under a mile. So, I borrowed the closest real world war vessel I could think of: a Nimitz class carrier, which are around 1/5 as long and close to 91 million kg. I just assumed the Star Destroyer being about 5 times as massive, too, but who knows what imaginary metals they use, right? Let's just say the metals are twice as dense, and the Star destroyers clock in at 1 billion kg. What would your calculations say as to how many joules would be needed to destroy a Star Destroyer, in that case?

 

 

 

 

 

A smallish asteroid (say 5 km in diameter - smaller than some ships in the SW canon - with a mass of about 3 x 1014 kg) fitted out with a hyperdrive to get it up to 99.9% of lightspeed would be sufficient to destroy most terrestrial planets.

 

 

Death Stars seem almost quaint by comparison, now. A good thing the Galactic Empire never took on the Centauri Republic, right?!

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Thank you for doing the calculations on that! This could be a cool exam question for your students! LOL!

So, 100,000 times a Tsar Bomba? That right there just might be a small nation killer, at least.

 

I don't know if someone has been geeky enough to provide the mass of a Star Destroyer. The only thing I was able to find was that Star Destroyers are some 1600 meters long, which is just a hair under a mile. So, I borrowed the closest real world war vessel I could think of: a Nimitz class carrier, which are around 1/5 as long and close to 91 million kg. I just assumed the Star Destroyer being about 5 times as massive, too, but who knows what imaginary metals they use, right? Let's just say the metals are twice as dense, and the Star destroyers clock in at 1 billion kg. What would your calculations say as to how many joules would be needed to destroy a Star Destroyer, in that case?

 

Death Stars seem almost quaint by comparison, now. A good thing the Galactic Empire never took on the Centauri Republic, right?!

 

I couldn't find any references to the masses of Star Destroyers, either. On further consideration, it might not help much to know the mass. I was using the gravitational binding energy of a planet to estimate the amount of energy needed to blow it apart. Star Destroyers aren't held together by gravity, though so I can't go that route. The mass would help us estimate the density, though, and from that the likely composition of the hull (assuming some percentage of the ship is filled with air, or even vacuum). It could be that the ships are built out of much lighter and stronger composites rather than much denser metals, so that they may be surprisingly light for their size. At any rate, they're so small compared to planets that I'd have to take another route to estimate it. But 100,000 nukes is more than enough, I imagine.

 

 

By the looks of things, Starkiller Base could've used a little more heat.

Odd considering how close it was to that sun. And you think that basically siphoning that star would have melted a lot of that snow. But hey if it weren't for that CinemaSins would not exist.

 

It could've been on the outer edge of the habitable zone. And the snow probably was going to melt, eventually. It could have even been there as a heat sink!

There's also a Dyson Sphere paradox with Starkiller Base (and possibly Death Stars too). Anyone with the technology that could overcome the challenges of building it probably wouldn't need to build it.

How better to demonstrate your technological might than to build an unneeded superweapon and then be indifferent to its destruction? :)

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Guest El Chalupacabra

 

Thank you for doing the calculations on that! This could be a cool exam question for your students! LOL!

So, 100,000 times a Tsar Bomba? That right there just might be a small nation killer, at least.

 

I don't know if someone has been geeky enough to provide the mass of a Star Destroyer. The only thing I was able to find was that Star Destroyers are some 1600 meters long, which is just a hair under a mile. So, I borrowed the closest real world war vessel I could think of: a Nimitz class carrier, which are around 1/5 as long and close to 91 million kg. I just assumed the Star Destroyer being about 5 times as massive, too, but who knows what imaginary metals they use, right? Let's just say the metals are twice as dense, and the Star destroyers clock in at 1 billion kg. What would your calculations say as to how many joules would be needed to destroy a Star Destroyer, in that case?

 

Death Stars seem almost quaint by comparison, now. A good thing the Galactic Empire never took on the Centauri Republic, right?!

 

I couldn't find any references to the masses of Star Destroyers, either. On further consideration, it might not help much to know the mass. I was using the gravitational binding energy of a planet to estimate the amount of energy needed to blow it apart. Star Destroyers aren't held together by gravity, though so I can't go that route. The mass would help us estimate the density, though, and from that the likely composition of the hull (assuming some percentage of the ship is filled with air, or even vacuum). It could be that the ships are built out of much lighter and stronger composites rather than much denser metals, so that they may be surprisingly light for their size. At any rate, they're so small compared to planets that I'd have to take another route to estimate it. But 100,000 nukes is more than enough, I imagine.

 

 

By the looks of things, Starkiller Base could've used a little more heat.

Odd considering how close it was to that sun. And you think that basically siphoning that star would have melted a lot of that snow. But hey if it weren't for that CinemaSins would not exist.

 

It could've been on the outer edge of the habitable zone. And the snow probably was going to melt, eventually. It could have even been there as a heat sink!

There's also a Dyson Sphere paradox with Starkiller Base (and possibly Death Stars too). Anyone with the technology that could overcome the challenges of building it probably wouldn't need to build it.

How better to demonstrate your technological might than to build an unneeded superweapon and then be indifferent to its destruction? :)

 

So, can we declare it Mythbuster-style that if an Xwing can penetrate the shields, it can in fact take out a Star Destroyer, in a hyperspace kamikaze attack?

 

And yeah, the Dyson Sphere paradox doesn't apply if your organization is dedicated to......

 

 

 

Every time one posts in this thread they add a month to the next time they will get laid.

Only a month?

 

Yeah, we don't need Pav to do the calculations on the probability of me getting laid in the next month, or otherwise.

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Getting laid does not concern me, Admiral.

 

But for fun's sake, I'm not sold on the X-Wing isn't massive enough thing either. I can't do relativistic kinetic energy calculations myself (so I'm not quibbling with pav's maths), but Wolfram Alpha gives me 5.4e17 joules / 129 MT (TNT equivalent) for a 1 kilogram mass with a velocity of 0.99 c. Reduce the velocity to 0.9 c and you get 1.2e17 joules / 29 MT. Increase it to 0.999 c and you get 1.9e18 joules / 451 MT. You can go as high as 0.99999 c before it stops giving you an answer, and 0.99999 c gives you 2e19 joules / 4780 MT (MT conversion from somewhere else).

 

(10000 kilograms at 0.999 c gives 1.9e22 joules, so pav's figure)

 

If you want to get silly and use the 0.99999 c amount, then you get 2e23 joules / 47801147 MT for 10000 kilograms. That's almost 48 teratons TNT equivalent, about half of the estimate for the amount of energy released when the Chicxulub impactor hit the Earth (about) 65 million years ago.

 

My regular internet forum is one centred on science / evidence-based stuff. Most people there liked TLJ, but a couple of them joked about that explosion / event not being big enough. Billions of kilograms instead of thousands...

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