Perfectly reasonable. Unless you exert enough force to fling 4*10^24 cubic metres of gas at escape velocity, it might take some time to regain its atmosphere, but you’re not going to destroy the planet.
What happens to the moon after you’ve blown up its planet?
Nothing good, I’m sure.
But will it happen fast enough to prevent the Rebels from evacuating their base and escaping the total destruction that Tarkin wanted (and could acheive by shooting at the moon itself)?
I think Deep Impact tried to split the comet along a fissure and have the halves go around Earth. IIRC. But my memory isn’t trustworthy.
The mission in Deep Impact was to divert the entire comet with surface nukes.
They failed, and wound up creating two chunks, one of which struck the Earth. the other was smashed into tiny bits when the ship sent to the comet for the mission self-destructed; those bits burned up in the atmosphere (which should, of course, have caused the problems mentioned earlier).
The mission in Armageddon was to do as you say - split the asteroid in half such that the halves would go around the Earth.
Hi,
This is my first post here. Please forgive me if anybody else has posted either of these two examples.
The first is from the second-season Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Royale”. (Admittedly, the writing of nearly all of the episodes in season 2 were inferior, and this one was one of the worst.)
The Enterprise has been sent to an inhospiatble planet to investigate a report of a wrecked ship that might be from Earth. Giordi LaForge is on the bridge, using sensors to measure conditions on the planet’s surface. He says:
“Nasty. Nitrogen, methane, liquid neon… surface temperature minus 291 degrees Celsius… winds up to 312 meters per second.”
Nasty indeed, especially the temperature. Absolute Zero (ie, the lowest temperature possible) is only -273.16°C.
Of course, Giordi might have meant Fahrenheit, except that at -291°F Neon is still a gas. (Neon’s boiling point is about -411°F, or -246°C.)
My second example is from the movie “Starship Troopers”, supposedly based on Robert A. Heinlein’s excellent novel. (Actually, they used some of the book’s characters’ names, and few, if any, of their actions. Beyond that, everything else is changed beyond recognition.)
In the movie, Buenos Aires is wiped out by an asteriod that was hurled through space from the home system of the “Bugs”. (In the book, the Bugs used nuclear bombs, carried in space ships that presumably could travel faster than light.)
Immediately after the scene where Johnny Rico’s mother, in Buenos Aires, is killed, the scene shifts to a TV news report, in which a graphic is used to show the trajectory of the asteroid. The distance travelled is, by my estimate, around 50,000 light-years.
Leaving aside the challenge of hitting a target as small as the Earth from a range of 50,000 LY, the asteroid must have taken at least 50,000 years to reach the Earth in the first place, and so must have been launched 50,000 years before the Bugs even knew that the Human Race existed. I wonder how they managed that…
The way I figured, space is big. Like, big big. If you’ve ever played a modern fighter simulation, you’ll know that even with a relatively short ranged air radar, you can’t just ping everything in range at once - if you use the radar on all “bands” (i.e. different altitudes it can scan relative to own plane), max horizontal swipes, max range, it takes an inordinately long time to do a full sweep, so long in fact that it’s doubly useless : one, you’ll warn everyone, even beyond your own radar range, that you’re here ; and two, you won’t even see whatever planes are inside your own radar range before they, themselves, have a good idea of where you are.
Applied to a full star system, that would mean that even should the Rebs have their space radars up and running, there are probably entire sections of the system that remain dark for minutes or hours. Or (more likely) the various detection measures only monitor an area close to the planet, possibly shorter than the Imperial destroyers’ max range, or their bombers’ max operating range. Hell, considering the rebels reaaally don’t want to be found, they may even rely on passive stuff only : telescopes and the like. Any radio beam sent out into space would get picked up and followed back home eventually.
Finally, as has already been said, coming out of hyperspace probably creates all kinds of weirdness, distorsions, radiations and the like that would have been wiser to hide by popping out behind another planet in the system or something like that.
Why not go to the beach and find out? I seem to remember seeing snails on the rocks that get covered with salt water.
Perhaps he was reporting the RealFeel Temperaturesup[/sup]… 
Anyone seen the movie ‘Sunshine’? No? Good. Keep it that way.
Lets see… we’ve got a ship with a giant reflector diving towards the sun in order to crash into it and blow up a mega sized atomic bomb because the sun is going out. Nevermind all the nukes in the world would be to the sun as a flea bite is to a blue whale.
Next we’ve got an issue with the reflector(which, despite only need to reflect light, nothing else, is made up entirely of moveable ‘scales’ that shift to reflect the light away differently. Or something.), so two guys have to suit up and go fix it. They lean the reflector a bit to get that edge in shadow, the two guys go up and do their fix. Uh oh! Navigation issue! Turns out a part of the ship that rotates for absolutely no reason went into the sunlight and melted(Even if the rotation has a purpose… STOP IT FROM ROTATING WHILE DOING THE REPAIR!), frying their comms, and for good measure starting a fire in their garden. Now they have no more oxygen generation, and they’re going to suffocate before reaching their target.
But hold on! Whats this? Now they’re showing this VAST chamber thats storing the nuke. Theres enough air in their for weeks! These people must have the metabolisms of hummingbirds. Oh! Oh! The nuke is apparently sooooo massive, it has its own gravity!!! Even though its about the size of a football field cubed, give or take. Sure, that has gravity, but these people are standing on the sides. 
So much wrong in that movie. >_<
Logical problems in the StarShip Troopers movie can be easily explained in a fun fanwank way with two things:
- A very gullible, well-trained populace
- A very manipulative, sneaky, less-than-fully-transparent government.
The asteroid being flung from Klendathu doesn’t make sense unless you admit the bugs have advanced FTL technology or a lot of careful planning or long-range communication. None of that stuff, even flinging the asteroid, makes any sense unless the bugs are highly intelligent, which the Federation is also shown as hesitant to accept. Also remember that in the movie, its implied that the humans antagonized the bugs first by encroaching on their territory.
So either the bugs are far more advanced than the humans wanted to accept/indicate, or the asteroid attack on Earth was a fraud perpetuated to justify a massive war against the bugs for some reason (or maybe both, the bugs are highly advanced, and the human government wanted an excuse to go to war with them for some reason).
Since all the movies are presented as propaganda films-within-films (especially the amazingly bad “Hero of the Federation”), it gets even weirder. Like the director of the film-within-the-film was just not very good at details or something. Or the director of the film itself maybe was fuzzy on speeds and distances or some such. 
Airplanes that dive into the water? Someone’s working on it.
Cool.
That’s not an option at all. Any slow-moving weapon would be obliterated by the ion cannon. This is why weapons aren’t “slow-moving” even here on Earth, in the present day. Slow = easy target.
Again, not an error. Just because Sirius is brighter than our Sun doesn’t mean their planet is as close to it as Earth is to the Sun. After all, the Sun is brighter than Sirius from Earth itself, right? Perhaps their planet was 100 times further from Sirius than Earth is from the Sun? Or, perhaps their planet has a thicker, more opaque atmosphere than Earth’s? Or both? There are myriad plausible explanations.
Now, go apologize to the ex!
That’s over 697 miles per hour. Wouldn’t a wind (made of pretty much anything) at that speed generate a HUGE amount of heat?
You’ll notice that they don’t go SMACKing into the water, though – they land and are reeled in. Pretty much as mycousin said back in the 1960s.
I don’t know if this one has been mentioned yet, but I just saw Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and I think I lost about 10 IQ points as a result. I don’t know what is more stupid: that the Van Allen belt catches on fire and raises the Earth’s temperature to 173 degrees, or the giant squid that decided to start humping a nuclear submarine at a depth that already crushed another submarine. (Actually, it blew up – go figure.)
Don’t quote me but I believe the ‘official’ fanwank is that Star Wars fighter craft have ‘etheric’ rudders.
re: Geordi - Since he was a Q, he could change the laws of the universe. (jk, he was an R)
re: Starship Troopers - But, but, it’s a BRILLIANT satire!
Welcome to the argument clinic, sir. 
There is no such thing as the ether. See Michalson Morley. 