Well, in the Marvel Comics, one of the lame super hero groups fought Godzilla (i think when Defenders was at their lamest) And Big G was still walking. I bet Godzilla could lift Thor’s Hammer and become G-Ray Godzilla, then he’d march into the Death Star and start kicking clone butt. Shirtless Kirk would beat me, since i would run screaming from him.
And if that Sperm Whale was Moby Dick, it would beat the Enterprise E, but fall before the might of Voltron, who would fall before Robocop, who would lose to the Terminator, who will be killed trying to uninstall Bonzai Buddy.
Being capable of repelling at least 16 teratons worth of energy is “weak”?
First off, TIE fighters do not have shields. Second, these are fighters, a dozen meters long, not 1600 meters long. Thirdly… would that be indicative of weak shields, or strong weapons?
Case in point: In ANH, Luke goes in for a strafing run on the surface of the Death Star. A dozen laser blasts or so vaporize enough armor plate to create a heat storm encompassing a couple square kilometers of the Death Star’s surface. Them’s ain’t weak weapons, my friend.
For a better example of starfighter-sized weaponry (actually, slightly larger than starfighter-sized, but not by much), take a look at the strength of the Slave 1’s blasts in AOTC while chasing Obi-wan through the asteroid field. The manual released with the movie pits the ship’s guns at a max firepower of 2 kilotons per blast… which is consistent with the witnessed destruction of the asteroids in the field.
Patently untrue. Star Trek shields are “porous”… there’s a frequency to them, which means that the shield oscillates between on and off. This frequency is used to allow weapons fire to pass through the shields (though transphasic shields exist which eliminate this weakness, but don’t allow the ship to get its phasers or photon torpedoes through).
Ultimately, what this means is that, even with shields at full, there’s a chance that the ship can still take damage. Seems like quite the glaring weakness, there.
Furthermore, let’s look at Nemesis, the most recent Star Trek movie. There’s a scene in which debris from a destroyed Romulan ship hits the Enterprise. The debris is travelling at a few hundred meters per second. It knocks the Enterprise’s shields down to 10%… from 90%. That kinetic energy wasn’t even equivalent to the Hiroshima bomb.
Don’t need 'em when your primary energy weapons don’t require huge magazines of potentially volatile explosives to create a bang that’s just as strong, if not stronger.
Feel free to post some numbers. So far, the most generous yield for Federation torpedoes is 128 megatons for the Q-torps… and that’s from the tech manual that’s contradicted numerous times by the episodes and the movies.
Ah… lasers CAN’T go slower than light (in a vacuum). Further, lasers wouldn’t radiate outwards… they’d be invisible (again, in a vacuum). Turbolaser blasts are NOT lasers (nor are “laser cannons”, actually). The laser inside the cannon is just the catalyst for a much more powerful weapon. What this weapon is, exactly, is unknown… but it ain’t no laser, that’s for sure.
Untrue. Phasers travel both slower than light and have been seen to have less-than-perfect accuracy rates (check out some of the big DS9 battles sometime). Another example is the Voyager episode Timeless (I believe that was the name), where a Federation ship is pursuing the Delta Flyer… several phaser shots are seen fired, and several of them miss.
Correction: The magazine of missiles that the A-wing carried blasted through the entire bridge tower.
But, yes, ISD’s armor is quite weak relative to its shields. Thankfully, however, its shields will protect it quite well from the E-E, even with its future technology.
But much less explosive energy. Concussion missiles can have yields up to 190 megatons apiece… the kinetic energy of the Enterprise-E’s collision with the Scorpion was less than a few dozen kilotons.
Hardly a fair comparison.
Granted… but it’s not like the E-E can detect a ship in hyperspace, either.
Ah… also untrue. The speeds of hyperspace require that a ship be capable of detecting a significant gravity shadow - from a star or planet - from several lightyears away. Furthermore, it should be noted that the Falcon is NOT an ISD.
And, yet even furthermore, the Enterprise’s sensors only work at such long ranges when detecting a very large object, OR an object that is at warp. Ships that are approaching in realspace are capable of coming within a few million kilometers before they’re detected.
True, but while it’s at warp, it can’t do anything to the ISD. In the meantime, the ISD just leaves and, oh, fries Earth or something.
A TIE’s cannons can pump out kilotons worth of damage, potentially. The Enterprise-E, as per Nemesis, can barely take a dozen kilotons worth of energy before losing almost all its shields. You do the math.
'Course, I WILL grant that Nemesis presents us with a very low-end scenario. Being generous, and going with tech manual numbers (64 megatons per photon torpedo), and assuming that the Enterprise can take, oh, three dozen of them before losing shields (far better than it took in any episode I’ve ever seen), that puts its shields with a capability of repelling 2.3 gigatons worth of damage (man, you should be happy that I’m so generous). Against this, a TIE fighter would mean squat, yes… but the TIE Bombers, on the other hand, that can pack 100-megaton (and greater) missiles, could unleash a good bit of hell.
How do you figure? The shields on an ISD can repel more energy than the Enterprise-E is capable of generating even if it detonated all its stored antimatter. It is, to be frank, impossible for the E-E to deal any significant damage.
Where do I get my numbers, you ask? The Star Wars Technical Commentaries, primarily… the Star Wars Episode II Incredible Cross-Sections book (which pits the heavy guns on a ship half the size and three decades older than an ISD at 200 gigatons a pop, its shields at 16 teratons repulsion capability, and points out that large starships can have accelerations in the multi-hundreds to even a couple thousand of G’s), and, finally, Mike Wong’s webpage, primarily used for its Star Trek episode index.
Bah, everyone knows you can take out an ISD with ease with just a Y-wing. Three torps per shield tower and a quick ion cannon run, and the thing is lunch.
I’m sure Data and Geordi would quantify The Force and figure out some way to harness it and defend EE from it.
Wait. Nemesis reference follows.
Data’s dead. Would his “soul” live on like ObiWan? Thus allowing him to assist?
I re-assert my point about transporters. Beam a Genesis Device over to a Daeth Star or ISD, see what happens. (since SW universe doesn’t have transporters, no defense against them)
Okay, I’m not an expert like SPOOFE or Psi Cop when it comes to this. I’ve seen the movies from both series, watched the t.v. shows (including the Droids and Ewok cartoons), but haven’t read any technical manuals or anything like that. That’s why I generally keep quiet in these threads, but there’s something everyone always brings up, and it needs some clarification here.
Trek fans always, ALWAYS point out the “Well, it only took one A wing to crash into the bridge to take out a super star destroyer,” and I’m sick of it. It wasn’t just a friggin’ A-Wing…watch the movie again and you’ll see that once the Rebels realized that the shields on the Death Star were still up, Akbar ordered every capital ship in the fleet to focus their attack on the SSD. So, not only did you have small fighters straifing the thing doing what damage they could, but you had an ENTIRE FLEET OF CAPITAL WARSHIPS firing on the damn thing. Even then, they didn’t seem to take out the shields entirely, for when the A-Wing started heading towards the bridge, the commander ordered that they focus the shields to the bridge…apparently, as seen in Episode IV as well, shields in the SW universe can be reinforced and manipulated to focus on either a specific area, or spread thin to cover the whole ship. With an entire fleet bearing down on it, apparently, the shields were still opporational at some points on the SSD. If it can take that much damage, what makes ANYONE think ANY Star Fleet ship can take it down “easily”?
Of course, that is the SSD and not a regular SD, but there are several different types of Star Destroyers, so maybe some specifications need to be made. If we’re going with Star Fleet’s best, why not use the Empire’s as well?
Anyway, another reason that little argument about the A-Wing pisses me off is because it’s been proven in ST that small ships can indeed bring down big ships. In their first battle with the Dominion, the Enterprise D’s sister ship was taken out by a single fighter. How, you ask? The fighter RAMMED THE SHIP!!! The ship flew in threw the shields, hit the hull, and boom. End of story. Claiming that Nemesis’s ramming scene shows how tough Fed ships are is crap. Of course two large ships ramming each other aren’t going to do that much damage, because the force of impact is spread out among a larger area. A small ship can deliver more preasure per area than a large ship, so whereas a big ship vs. big ship will cause more surface area damage, a small vessel will punch a hole straight through a specific point, and if it’s in the right place (i.e. the bridge of a ship), it will do more. I’d like to see any Star Fleet vessel take a runnabout to the bridge and not go down.
Also, as the battle with the Dominion showed (well, more with the Breen), ion cannons do quite a number on Federation shields. Again, I don’t have any of the technical manuals to back it up or anything, but I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard to outfit a SD with a few of those. To my knowledge, Fed ships don’t have such technology, so one solid hit from that, and the Enterprise is nothing more than a floating tomb.
As a side question for those that know more: In many of the Star Wars video games, SD do indeed have many proton torpedo cannons. Are these discussed in the technical manuals as well, or just something created for the games?
Just out of curiosity, why is it Star Fleet never really seems to use boarding parties? The only time I’ve seen boarding parties work well is when someone else uses them (Borg, Klingons, Romulans, those stupid body part stealing people from Voyager…).
Star Wars technology is always used incompetently.
The ISD would not be able to destroy the Enterprise because it’s well established in the films that Imperial troops cannot aim. They apparently do not possess technology like gunsights and target-tracking radars. Their having “eleventy grillion teratons of energy” or whatever SPOOFE found in a fansite is meaningless; it’s not in the movies, so it doesn’t count, and it’s just random blather anyway, like “Twelve parsecs” and “point five past light speed.” Numbers written randomly into the script do not confer meaning.
The Enterprise would not be able to destroy the ISD because something on the Enterprise would break at a critical juncture, and even if it didn’t, Picard would decide it would be wrong to kill everyone on the other ship. Also, photon/quantum torpedoes apparently never work, since they never make very big explosions (see Star Trek VI, where the photon torpedoes that hit the Enterprise are about as explosively powerful as bowling balls.)
The Rebel fleet had moved in to engage the Imperial fleet long before this line. As Adm. Akbar says the famous line “Concentrate all firepower on the Super Star Destroyer,” beyond him we see an ISD blowing up.
The fighters were strafing the SSD, and the cruisers were delivering full broadsides, until…
*Sir! We’ve lost our bridge deflector shield!
Intensify forward batteries – I don’t want anything to get through!*
The Rebel fighters had destroyed the insanely-vulnerable shield towers, and the bridge tower was down to bare armor. So the SSD commander ordered the forward guns to start firing very rapidly in an effort to prevent exactly what happened a minute later. The order just didn’t get out to the gunners fast enough.
Okay, I’ll address the points of other people first, than return to Spoofe for a fuller argument.
I do realize the shields were down; I’m quite familiar with the content of the three movies. While I don’t have the complement of specs from the technical manuals and novels, I am familiar with each movie. When I was referring to that A-wing, you’ll notice that the entire paragraph was about star destroyer armor. Not shields. I never stated it went through shields, too.
On Ion Cannons… I really doubt they’re the same sort of weapons that the Breen used. Even if they are, a Star Destroyer is vulnerable to it (See “The Empire Strikes Back”). Federation ships had never seen it before, now they know it exists and can develop a defense. The Empire doesn’t have a defense for it, after decades.
On ramming… it isn’t the pressure at a point that matters so much as the kinetic energy. I don’t care if the fighter is going faster, it won’t do as much damage. It may penetrate deeper into another ship, but it doesn’t have nearly as much energy. As for ramming going through shields… see below. I’ll speculate some on that.
On missile turrets… at least in X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, there’s only a single missile launcher at the bow of the ship. But Spoofe already implicitly agreed with my statement they don’t use missiles much, so I’ll leave that alone. As a side note, I reinstalled XvT last night to play. There’s a great flaw in the game that I love… if you destroy the aforementioned “nose cone” of the Star Destroyer, you can actually fly inside the ship and keep firing your weapons to destroy it from the inside… the SD weapons can’t touch you, neither can starfighters. It’s a great little bug to play with.
Now on to Spoofe…
Yeah, the Federation Warships thread sort of lingered for a while. I went away for the weekend and went four days or so without posting anything, and so did other people. No one responded when I finally did post again, so I just let it go.
I’m actually going to use this against shields… those weapons crack open the hull quite nicely. Strong they may be, but I think the answer is more likely that the shields are weak. If shields aren’t even strong enough to defend against an X-Wing’s lasers, why bother having them?
I know that the TIEs don’t have shields (which would mean the death of them whenever they hit a micrometeor traveling at those speeds), but I was actually referring to the X-Wings on the Death Star run, not the TIEs.
Okay, I’m going to do a dissertation on shields here. First, though, I’d like to state that I disagree with your numbers. I can’t actually verify that the 10 and 90 numbers are wrong, but I have a strong suspicion that they are. I’ll come back to this when Nemesis is out on DVD (you’ll have a long wait).
Both Star Trek shields and Star Wars shields are inconsistent, I’ll admit. Trek shields, when properly modulated, can dissipate the energy of a star (metaphasic shielding). This only happened once though. Other times, shields go down with a sneeze. On the other hand, look aat Wars shielding. Asteroids merely bounce off of a Star Destroyer’s shields, yet mere turbolaser blasts and torpedo blasts seem to impact against hulls directly with no shield interference whatsoever. The Falcon even snuggled right up against the back of a Star Destroyer while those same asteroid-repelling shields were up. Inconsistent from scene to scene, let along movie to movie.
I hypothize that shields work differently with pure energy delivered via radiation, and energy from impact. The more mass an object has, the more likely it seems to be able to punch right through shields. That would explain why the X-Wings could hit the Death Star in SWIV… they were already beneath the shields. As you’ve pointed out, it was designed to repel capital ships, without regard to starfighters slipping beneath.
Even with Einstein’s equations, energy and mass aren’t exactly the same, so I suggest we not treat them that way. A car can deliver more kinetic energy than a small bomb, yet the car will bounce off of a brick wall where a bomb can shatter it in many cases. Sort of the same with ramming.
I actually meant via percentage of weapons carried. But don’t sneer at a mere 128 megatons. You’re talking about a fireball with a multi-mile radius, if detonated on earth. What do you think it would do in space? And on that note…
Somehow I doubt it. Otherwise they’d just be set for proximity so they don’t miss TIE fighters by a mere half kilometer. They could just detonate in a multi-mile fireball and fry the unshielded ships. Also, why would a missile designed for fighter impact carry that large of a warhead? It would be much more economic to have a “mere” kiloton-weapon. Good Lord, most of our submarine based nukes today are in the kiloton, not megaton range, and we have no “energy shields.” A single nuclear torpedo could take out an aircraft carrier, let alone a ship a few dozen meters in length, at most.
On phasers… I was sort of being sarcastic when saying that lasers were slower than light. I know that they can’t be. Besides, logically, we wouldn’t actually see the lasers and phasers from a side view anyway. A laser pointer, for example, doesn’t cast an actual beam, just a point on the wall. Unless you have a foggy atmosphere, but that doesn’t apply in space. Phasers are far more accurate that turbolasers though. I presume you’re talking about the pulse lasers that miss… yeah, I know. That’s also a Star-Warsie type concept that I think was ill-advised to add to the Defiant. Phasers can miss, I suppose, but not a kilometer long target. Tubolasers, on the other hand, missed a frigate at relatively close range in SWIV… multiple times.
The Enterprise is most definately NOT a planet sized mass. Nor does it cast much of a gravity shadow. The ISD wouldn’t ever see it. Now if the Enterprise was permanently tethered to a mobile planet that it towed around wherever it went, you might have a point for sensor range in battle. Oh, and it wouldn’t matter that the Enterprise couldn’t detect a Star Destroyer in hyperspace. The point was more that it could do its own running and still keep tabs on it.
Actually, it can fire Torpedoes at warp. Reference the episode “Q-Who?” among others for a cite. Besides, if the ISD wants to go around and kill planets, it could outpace any Federation ship easily. It could taken as long as it wanted to lay siege to any planet in the Federation and the only thing Stafleet could do would be to defend each planet with static bases and starships. They can’t equal hyperspace speeds.
Now, now, don’t make asserations like this so quickly. A squadron of X-Wings with missiles can take out an ISD, according to the various books and games. Assuming a generous six missiles per craft, that’s a total of 72 missiles to take out an ISD. Even if their missiles are twice as powerful as Starfleet torpedoes (you said 190 megatons vs. 128), the Enterprise carries well over 150 torpedoes anyway.
I used to think that Star Wars made no effort to go for any sort of consistency when it came to their technology’s specs. After reading some of SPOOFE’s posts, I have changed my mind. I now believe that SW technology becomes consistent if you tack on a few extra gigas and teras here and there, so that the specs wind up resembling pinball scores.
I guess it makes sense. After all, in the Star Wars universe, you can paint a smiley face on an overturned bucket, stick it on a coatrack, and expect it to be sentient.
If a Star Wars ship can fire lases with “teratons” of energy, why did they build the Death Star, and why did Han Solo say it would take the whole fleet to destroy a planet?
A weapon with a teraton of power would most definitely be enough to wipe out a whole planet. That’s a million LARGE nuclear bombs going off all at once.
The Death Star’s shields either weren’t up or had cracks in them that allowed fighters to slip through. Remember what General Dodonna said: “The Empire doesn’t consider a small, one-man fighter to be any threat… or they’d have a tighter defense.”
Furthermore, recall that the Death Star managed to withstand ejecta from Alderaan’s destruction moving at speeds in excess of several thousand kilometers per second.
Again, would this be an indication of weak shields, or strong weapons? We’ve seen what kind of damage the weapons can do (vaporizing massive amounts of armor plating on the Death Star’s surface), and we know that the shields can withstand massive amounts of damage. Which conclusion, then, would make the most sense?
I’m just quoting someone else’s review of the movie. I haven’t seen it myself. However, similar instances of heavy damage from minor kinetic energy is witnessed throughout the Trek series… numerous battles from DS9, for instance, show Jem’Hadar fighters ramming Federation ships, with kinetic energy FAR lower than anything that their weapons are supposed to be capable of dishing out, and the target ship is destroyed utterly. In fact, this is how the Enterprise-D’s sister ship was destroyed.
I disagree. SW shields have been quite consistent throughout the movies.
The shields can be reconfigured to be right against the hull, or extended from the hull’s surface. The “extension” setting would be useful in allowing smaller shuttles or fighters to get out of the docking bay and gain their bearings before flying off on their own in potentially hazardous territory. Hull-hugging setting minimizes the total surface area of the shields, thus allowing them to be stronger overall.
We don’t know exactly when the Falcon latched onto the ISD’s hull. For all we know, Han got right up next to the shields and waited until they were dropped before attaching.
True. However, I simply can’t buy an orders-of-magnitude difference between being able to repel heat/radiation energy and being able to repel kinetic energy.
Not much to a Star Destroyer.
Obviously, not ALL missile weapons have such high yields. The missiles that Luke had in ANH, actually, were kiloton-ranged. The higher the yield of the warhead, the more expensive it is.
The 190 megaton figure is attributed to the concussion missiles used by Slave 1 in AOTC. Furthermore, the mines that Slave 1 used to destroy a multi-kilometer-wide asteroid in the same scene is given an approximate yield in the gigaton range.
Anti-capship missiles.
Again, I must disagree. We’ve seen beam phasers miss quite often, in the aforementioned Voyager episode, for instance. Another Voyager episode shows the ship firing at smaller vessels, moving no more than a few hundred meters per second in roughly straight lines… and Voyager missed, horribly.
Wasn’t trying to imply that it was… simply pointing out that SW sensors are quite capable of looking around for some distance.
So, the Enterprise disappears into Warp, and you think the ISD will remain right where it was?
Only at another target at warp. We have never seen a TNG+ era ship firing at a target sitting in realspace, while at warp. It is not one of their capabilities.
Yup. There’s those anti-capship missiles that I referenced earlier.
I said 190 megatons for concussion missiles. Proton torpedoes can be even more powerful. Furthermore, concussion missiles and proton torpedoes are directed warheads - meaning they focus the bulk of their energy at the target - while photon torpedoes are not… only about a third to a quarter of their total energy will hit their target (unless it manages to burrow under the surface somehow).
Anyway, that’s all for now… I must be off to rehearsal…
(A) Transporters can’t normally operate through shields, so there aren’t many opportunities to use boarding parties; and
(B) The Borg, Kingons, Romulans, and phage-infected aliens are all big bad meanies. The Federation is a bunch of laid-back nice guys. Once they’ve pounded on an enemy ship hard enough to bring down its shields, they invite them to beam over to the Enterprise to share some granola and relate to the experience. Boarding parties are, like, violent and oppressive and stuff, man.
We argued this point in the other thread, too. Shields don’t differentiate between a small ship’s attack and a capital ship’s attack… they’re the same, except in terms of magnitude of the blast. So there wouldn’t be any reason the Death Star wouldn’t merely reflect normal X-Wing blasts too.
As for the “ejecta,” I maintain it wasn’t there to take the impact. In “The Empire Strikes Back,” the captain of a Super Star Destroyer complains that the asteroid bombardment will damage the ship and strain the shields. Note that the asteroids are moving at an easily predictable pace, in orbit of the sun. Technically speaking, the asteroids should have never been hitting the Star Destroyer in the first place, because normal asteroids are many many kilometers apart moving in predictable orbits, but that aside… shields can’t even stand up under normal asteroid bombardment for long, much less a planet exploding.
Weak shields. If weapons were strong enough to render shields useless, one wouldn’t bother including them on the X-Wings. Imperial fighters are far more maneuverable, in part because not having the added complexity of a shield system. Obviously, their method is to not be there when the weapon hits. Why don’t X-Wings employ the same method if it’s so much more effective?
There’s a large difference between a scrap hull hitting a ship, and a full-fledged self destructing ram. Torpedoes carry 1.5 kg of antimatter… what do you think the warp core of even a small ship would carry? Besides, you didn’t really respond to my point about mass vs. energy. I think the mass penetrates through shields more than pure energy.
And I disagree with that. As you haven’t provided examples, allow me to do so. In order how I remember…
-The opening scene (IV) with shields deflecting bolts just fine.
-The Death Star, according to you, surviving the planetary destruction.
-The Death Star taking damage from small laser blasts firing by single-person fighters.
-The Death Star exploding because it couldn’t deflect a single low-yield warhead.
-A Star Destroyer being disabled from an ion cannon.
-Multiple Star Destroyers being pounded by relatively slow-moving asteroids, with their captains complaining.
-The Battle of Yavin… shields randomly rising and falling multiple times. For example, the Executor only losing shields after a few moments of fleet pounding, but Rebel ships losing shields almost instantly when they close with the Star Destroyers.
This is consistent? I think not.
Well, considering they were still in the asteroid belt with asteroids “pounding” on them, I find it extremely unlikely that the Star Destroyer would drop shields for a half second, long enough for the Falcon to snuggle up.
I can, but then again, I’m not a physicist. Maybe we should ask Chronos to come in and comment… he’s usually on top of the physics game.
Oh? But it would certainly fry an unshielded TIE fighter quite nicely. Heck, you could just fire a missile at the launch bay of a Star Destroyer as TIEs were coming out, and destroy entire squadrons with multi-megaton fireballs, if your figure is correct.
As for Phasers… you’re basing your statistic off of a few episodes of Voyager, vs. seasons worth of evidence from TOS, TNG, DS9, and the rest of Voyager. There are years of evidence refuting your point on phaser accuracy.
For planet masses, sure. But they can’t differentiate. If they don’t have accurate Star Charts, they couldn’t differentiate between a planet and an interdiction cruiser with those sensors (neglecting that there’d be a sun and other masses in a planetary system, that could also be detected).
Torpedoes are warp capable on their own, and warp theory states that objects leaving a warp field drop out of warp, if nothing else. Merely because they’ve never needed to show that in a show doesn’t mean it’ll work. Okuda’s own tech manual backs this up, and the official Tech manuals do have legitimate canon status.
I have to refute the 190 megs for concussion missiles. Since you claim the books have canon status, I quote “Wedge’s Gamble,” book two of the X-Wing series by Michael A. Stackpole. A pair of concussion missiles aren’t even enough to topple a statue of Emperor Palpatine on Coruscant. In fact, the book even says directly that the kinetic energy of a TIE fighter was much greater then that of the missiles.
I also have to wonder where you get the “directed energy” from. Not to mention how it would be directed. A 190 megaton blast would annihilate any way of directing the energy in the first second. On the other hand, it also isn’t ever stated that photon torpedoes aren’t “directed weapons” if they can exist. Your claims are a bit… ragged around the edges, so to speak.
Y’know, I’m on the Star Wars side in this, but I don’t think the first Death Star had shields. It would take a hell of a lot of energy to create a shield with the surface area of a small moon. The goddamn thing’s so big, it doesn’t need shields. Sure, the X-Wings were making big explosions, but they’re against a ship that’s big enough to effect tides.
Psi Cop:
-The opening scene (IV) with shields deflecting bolts just fine. Keep in mind, the SD was trying to disable, not destroy the Tantive V. It was probably using lower-powered blasts so as not to overwhelm the shields and damage the ship too severely.
-The Death Star, according to you, surviving the planetary destruction. Personally, I think it jumped to hyperspace before the debris reached it.
-The Death Star taking damage from small laser blasts firing by single-person fighters. Like I said, I don’t think the Death Star had shields, so this point is moot.
-The Death Star exploding because it couldn’t deflect a single low-yield warhead. See above.
-A Star Destroyer being disabled from an ion cannon. A Star Destroyer being disabled by a planetary ion cannon. That gun was the size of a capital ship by itself. It’s far larger and more powerful than any armaments carried by any starship short of the Death Star itself.
-Multiple Star Destroyers being pounded by relatively slow-moving asteroids, with their captains complaining. Complaining, sure, but the SDs all survived, didn’t they?
-The Battle of Endor :p… shields randomly rising and falling multiple times. For example, the Executor only losing shields after a few moments of fleet pounding, but Rebel ships losing shields almost instantly when they close with the Star Destroyers. The Executor is a gigantic freakin’ ship. It’s got state-of-the-art weapons and defences. The Rebel fleet is made up of battleships left over from the Clone War and converted pleasure cruisers.
