[Yiddish]May you stumble through life as a blind horse in a dark ditch at midnight.[/Yiddish]I like cats. They would never…ow! Hey! Stop!
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But he wasn’t a real Greek.
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Nobody ever believes me!
He didn’t pay his fraternity dues?
To be fair, the air-to-air missiles with tiny warheads part was a parable. You didn’t get it.
To be fair, they didn’t say it was a parable, and it looked like a science fiction movie. To be given an ill-thopught-out parable when you were expecting a science-fiction movie — especially considering that it cost as much as a science fiction movie – is a perfect reason to complain loudly and to throw things* at the screen
*like M. Night Shyamalan.
No kidding. That was possibly the most evil post I’ve ever seen on the Dope. shudder
Okay, back on the topic of slamming Star Wars. Er, bad science.
That first movie of the prequel trilogy. They take a submarine through the planet’s core. Okay, sure; whatever.
They end up in a lake/canal/river/whatever, adjacent to the Nabooian capitol… which leads to a waterfall that drops down from there.
How did their sub get UP the frackin’ waterfall!?!
Also, how did water pressure at the planet’s core not crush their submersible and all of that ridiculous Russian-Doll-predator chain?
Wouldn’t the act of blowing up the asteroid actually dissapate some of the forward kinetic energy? It doesn’t seem right that all the fragments would continue on with the same combined force as the original object. Blowing it apart has to cause some of the energy to be lost, even though there are more particles.
I’m not saying it would be a good idea, but energy must be lost, and maybe the combined result of the smaller pieces after would be preferable to the one large object.
They were fighting low enough that ships were falling out of orbit. Maybe they were still in the upper reaches of the atmosphere?
I assumed they were weapons to be used exclusively against non-clone fighters and freighters, if they may have good salvage (like a Jedi general as another hostage/P.O.W.).
Some of it, sure, but depending on the mass and approach speed of the asteroid, it might not amount to much. We discussed something like this a while ago in a GQ thread titled “Can We Shoot Nuclear Missiles Into Space?”; here’s a post I made with a few rough numbers. Basically, assuming a huge several-miles-wide doomsday rock with a mass of about 10[sup]15[/sup] kilograms approaching at 60 km/s, even ten thousand 50-megaton nuclear warheads couldn’t reduce its kinetic energy by more than 0.05%.
I think your analogy is flawed. Part of what makes a bullet lethal is that its kinetic energy is packed into a very small package. If you took that kinetic energy and spread it out across the entire body, it would require a doctor visit, but probably not a visit to the morgue. It’s exactly what body armor does, in fact. It spreads the kinetic energy of the bullet out…leaves a nice bruise, but is much less lethal.
Edit: I just saw the post by Stealth Potato, which seems to show that a few nukes wouldn’t be able to affect the mementum of something as large as what was represented in the movie. I still don’t think the idea is compeltely without merit, though…what are our other options?
Another of my posts in that topic contains a roughly computed estimate that the kinetic energy of that same doomsday asteroid, sunk into the atmosphere as heat, would increase global temperatures by an average of maybe 3000 degrees Celsius. :o
A simplistic analysis, certainly, and probably a lot of that heat would be radiated outward instead of being all absorbed by the atmosphere, but still it would likely turn the planet into an oven. There’s just no winning with a rock that size on a collision course with the Earth. The bullet analogy is imperfect because a bullet kills a person by puncturing their squishy parts, and spreading the energy out can certainly prevent a piercing wound. Similarly, breaking up an asteroid will prevent the asteroid’s mass from puncturing (or even hitting) the earth’s surface, but that’s not what would kill us anyway. The massive release of heat and particulate matter into the atmosphere is what would do us in, and you still have that.
That’s why I used the example of a mountain falling on you. A bullet kills because it’s a relatively small amount of energy ( you can fire a gun without being knocked over by the recoil, after all ), concentrated on a small area in a short period of time. An asteroid, like a mountain falling on you is lethal due to the sheer amount of energy involved.
Besides the button-in-the-back shirts, I have to defend the merits of such a universe on account of its style.
The man depicted above isn’t stupendously stupid, he’s on a mission; a mission to kick–and get–some ass.
…Ok, maybe he looks kinda ridiculous. But he’s an OG in terms of the swashbuckling, space opera hero. Genuine OG’s get free passes.
Im trying to make a case that Aliens should be included.
Send out a squad of Marines to investigate a planet and yet have no starside back up, as in the spaceship is completely automated it seems.
Every team has its weakest link, meet the lieutenant, hello weakest link.
Instead of being somewhere useful like actually with the combat team, this guy is in the rear inside an armored APC watching everything from camera feeds to Bio-metrics. Way to inspire the troops, when you have to tell em to hold off using the real firepower.
One , sending out a wet behind the ears LT seemed kinda stupid. I get that as far as the Marines knew it was just a colony that had dropped off the net and someone had to go knock knock. Sounds like a reasonable mission for a first time LT, but this guy did not seem , um mentally agile enough to go with a fluid situation.
No one informs the drop ship to button up or provide some sort of security for it. Again, boring duty and usually ends up hunting some native fauna but they seemed way to complacent for a Marine gunship crew, on a planet that has dropped off the comm nets and the population has mysteriously vanished
Now we have a big reactor that when you remove the cooling , goes off with the fireball of a forty megaton fusion bomb, has no sort of failsafes. (Actually I would have perfered if they removed the safeties and so forth) , what did that reactor contain that would generate that explosion.
Weapons loadout.
10 mm armor piercing , along with those crew servo’d heavys and flame throwers, (the book says automated manjacks too). Just what the average marine fire team needs for visiting a colony of humans thats dropped off the net, the fact that the above mentioned reactor must be in the specs and no one thought of it. It takes a merchant marine officer to notice and ask the big question.
Loved the movie , but somethings …
Declan
I’m sorry, but you don’t think this has ever happened IRL? An inexperienced, unprepared officer getting in over his head?
How do you know that his planet is so close to Sirius that the brightness level is greater than here on Earth? I mean, any planet that could sustain life around Sirius would have to be damned far away. Might also be under a permanent cloud bank, a la the way Venus was described in the old Burroughs era novels. :smack:
Sorry about that, but here’s something with a better outcome:
Wasn’t there some general releae movie that involved a submarine and an iceberg? (Maybe someone can cite the movie, because I’ve never seen it, and can’t recall anything else this one reviewer said about it.)
There is supposedly a dramatic scene in which chunks of ice from an iceberg started to fall down on the submarine, endangering the crew.
Now, just think about that for a while…
ICE FLOATS! ICE FLOATS!!!
That’s what one of the science “guys” (“Bad Physics” site, maybe?) yelled out during the scene. It wasn’t a deep concept at all, and everybody in the theater immediately realized the silliness of the scene and cracked up!
What control surface?
If you mean the “wings” on the X-wing fighter, that’s not a true wing. It’s a way of positioning the jets so that more precise control is able to be had, since they are separated from each other. 
Maybe it was heavy water.
But if the ice was made from heavy water, surely the ice would explode! when it hit something.