It’s too bad so much modern technology has been lost in the SW universe.
To: JDodonna@rebelbaseHQ.org
From: scruffy.nerfherder@mfalcon.com
Re: Death Star Plans
Hi, Jan! This is Leia, posting from some pirate’s computer. I’ve attached some secret Death Star plans to this email. See what you can do with them. We’ve got a tracker on board, so we’re going to go buzz some uninhabited planets for a while. LOL! If you dinf a flaw in the Death Star, LMK, ok?
–
Leia
Yeah, but if they just blew up a gas giant planet, they aren’t in a vacuum anymore, are they? All that gas has to go somewhere when the planet explodes. The Death Star would be ripped apart by a gigantic stormfront of superheated gas radiating away from where Yavin used to be.
I think we would need to talk to someone at TheForce.Net to get an idea of how the Death Star laser blows up a planet. If the idea is that it punches a hole in the planet, superheats the core, and causes it to shatter due to thermal stress, then you could conceivably use it on a gas giant, but the gaseous atmosphere (and the oceans below them) would dissipate a lot (most? all?) of the laser’s energy. Blowing up the semi-solid core as though it were Alderaan would definitely make life unpleasant on the moon, but would also present a serious challenge to the Death Star’s propulsion and navigation staff. Given the Death Star’s custom design, it’s not unreasonable to suspect that almost every Kilowatt of power on board is being diverted to the lasers, and that the power plant has to work very hard to keep the laser firing. Killing a gas giant might be possible, but take longer – which could leave the Death Star with too little backup power to mount an effective escape.
There seems to be a marked belief in this thread that – somehow – there might possibly maybe could be … PLOT HOLES in the Star Wars movies!!! :eek:
I’m not listening!! :: Hands over ears ::
LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA …
Because it’s a movie, and that’s what worked best to build a climax.
Cute e-mail…but I imagine all transmissions would be monitored. That’s why Leia had to hard-copy the plans into Artoo in the first place, wasn’t it?
Sheesh, can you imagine how damn big that attachment would have to be?
Dodonna’s gonna be pissed when his line is tied up for 8 days downloading it…
Naw, couldn’t be.
Alderaan exploded the instant the Death Star beam touched it. Shattering a planet by vaporizing its core would take hours.
When Leia gave Artoo the plans she still had hope of hiding the fact that she had them, forcing Darth to release her. If she transmitted them at that point, it would have blown her cover.
When she escapes with the boys, it wouldn’t have mattered if the Empire intercepted the transmission since protesting her innocence hadn’t gotten her anywhere anyway.
I still think she did it to lead the Death Star close enough to Yavin to launch an attack.
Perhaps you’ll ifnd the information you seek here, though I haven’t read it yet to know for sure.
Nah, X-wings (and presumably Y-wings) are hyper-capable, and while they’re not as fast as the Falcon, I’d imagine that they’d have to be faster than the Death Star. They could launch an attack against the Death Star anywhere in the galaxy from Yavin, at considerably less risk.
And I think that Leia tried the e-mail thing, but Han’s address is probably on a spam blacklist, so Dodonna never got it.
Or perhaps the real universe?
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030609.html
http://www.star.ucl.ac.uk/~apod/apod/ap950718.html
http://www.solstation.com/x-objects/sn1987a.htm
http://www-astronomy.mps.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit3/supernova.html
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/chandra_vela_000607.html
So, what then, they’ll only make point-three past light speed, and can only do the Kessel Run in 15 or 16 parsecs?
So why couldn’t they shoot through Yavin?
Not through the solid/sem-solid core but through the last bit they had to clear?
I guess the gas could refract the light of the laser.
What if they fired the main weapon and it missed. Would a planet destroying beam just travel through space till it hit something? All those shots that miss from the fighters and towers should. Do they?
If I remember correctly from listening to the commentary for “A New Hope”, the wait-until-we-get-around-the-planet wasn’t originally planned. The script had simply called just for the fighters to leave the base and go attack the Death Star. The planet-in-the-way thing was added to increase tension.
You know what’d be cool? If there was a transcript of the Star Wars commentaries.
It would, if the Death Star’s superlaser were a real honest-to-goodness LASER.
But has been established by the extended SW universe sourcebooks, what people in SW call “superlasers” or “turbolasers” are actually really big blasters.
Liquids and gasses are very good at dissipating energy. If the Death Star’s weapon works by imparting thermal stress, then attempting to destroy a gas giant would be an exercise in futility. The fluid nature of the planet would make it impossible to build up any kind of stresses within it. Even if you do manage to create a localized “hot spot,” the non-solid nature of the target means that you can’t possibly shatter it.
If, however, the weapon causes some sort of mass-to-energy conversion, then I would assume that a gas giant is simply too big for the Death Star to blow up. (Remember, it’s thousands of times larger than an earth-sized planet.) Also, if it’s a mass-to-energy beam, then any significant amount of matter would probably trigger the effect, so the Death Star would need a clear shot.
Hmm…
Or maybe it takes more than half an hour to recharge the laser?
How many guys would Vader choke when he found out that, having destroyed the gas giant they now had to wait a couple hours for the laser to recharge?
Something tells me that one would rarely need to blow up more than one planet per half hour. It probably wasn’t in the design specs.
-Joe
Well, it did happen “a long time ago” so email hadn’t been invented yet.