9.2 KiB
[RT] Corrected: Public link to 'Star Wars, Except Smart'
-
Author: u/eaglejarl *
-
Score: 20
-
Created: 2016-06-12T03:42:25
Post:
Comments:
u/rationalidurr [+7] If fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight! (5 hours later)
HAH-larious!
Yeah, the planet base for rebels is a bit dumb, considering the Empire has vast resources to scour the galaxy and greater manpower.
u/eaglejarl [+5] (8 hours later)
In fairness, there are advantages to a planetary base. You aren't living in a closed system, so you can easily get water, mine things, etc. Air is free. Fire and heat aren't nearly as much of an issue. You can do that in ships as well by mining asteroids/comets and careful cooling, but it's harder.
Also, it really shouldn't be possible for the Empire to find them with the tech shown. The number of probes it would take is off the charts. The. There's the way it happened: to he probe that discovered them, for example -- they sent one probe to search an entire planet, and it happened to touch down within a few miles of the base? Also, the probe sent a signal back to the Empire, which I think is the only time we see interplanetary communication in the OrigTrij. Could be that the probe transmitted to something in orbit which then traveled back to the Empire, I guess. That's my new headcanon.
u/therearetoomanydaves [+2] (a day later)
I wonder about the RoTJ railgun idea, I would think that the asteroid would punch through the planet like a bullet through a watermelon without transferring much kinetic energy to the planet. Life around the entry and exit holes would suck, bu the planet would be basically OK.
In order to achieve the 'trash the crust all at once' effect, the asteroid would have to be going fast enough to impart enough energy to the planet, but slow enough to not punch through.
The asteroid targeting the Death Star presents a different problem. Even if the shield stays up, the kinetic energy has to go somewhere. Possibilities include:
- The shield heats up, cooking everything inside.
- A billiard ball collision with respect to the shield, but NOT the contents. Everything inside is turned into metallic goo.
- The 'safe against any bombardment' wasn't planning on a 0.9+c asteroid strike, the shield fails like any other shield when hit by too much energy.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (3 days later)
I ran it through the asteroid impact calculator (see the link) and that's what I got. If you'd prefer, assume they fired it at a slower speed. They had plenty of time to do modeling and testing, after all.
u/None [+1] (6 days later)
You're assuming that ftl drives increase momentum. The problem is that if ftl works that way it breaks the whole setting. As planet destroying weaponry would be ubiquitous and impossible to defend against. Their hyperspace travel is never really described, but I'd vaguely assumed it didn't affect the realspace momentum of the ship.
In the EU (no idea if its 'canon' now) a big plot point was that hyperspace was affected by gravitational fields in realspace, so an unexpected gravity well could pull you out of hyperspace. Which fits with the no momentum idea. But raises further questions....
This still leaves open the possibility of ftl capable missiles/drones that suicide jump into the target. Possibly after gaining a lot of momentum in realspace first by conventional means.
.
^[I ^thought ^from ^the ^"we're ^doomed" ^at ^the ^start ^they ^were ^going ^to ^say ^it ^was ^an ^obvious ^trap ^and ^stay ^the ^hell ^away ^from ^it. ^] ^
u/eaglejarl [+1] (6 days later)
The drive may not generate momentum, but I assume it requires quite a bit of energy to jump to hyperspace. If it didn't, you'd see hyperspace being used as a commodity technology for garbage disposal and hammerspace storage. The engines of the fleet just need to be energetic, that's all.
u/JackStargazer [+1] Primordial Apologist (3 days later)
If we assume 'any bombardment' includes another Death Star strike, well, that's been calculated at about 10^38 Joules, or about the energy the Sun produces with its entire output in 5000 years.
Relativistic weapons are strong, but even multiplying by C^2 I don't know if you're getting that far.
u/chaos-engine [+1] (6 days later)
Randal Munroe has already done the math for you :)
"If a meteor made out of diamond and 100 feet in diameter was traveling at the speed of light and hit the earth, what would happen to it?” https://what-if.xkcd.com/20/
tldr; You're going to have a really bad day
u/CCC_037 [+2] (2 days later)
LEIA: I put them in my Dropbox and then emailed the link to everyone in the Imperial Senate, plus all the major news media, plus the Rebel leaders.
...surely Vader would be jamming all transmissions from Leia's ship? Dropbox is a great service, but it doesn't work if you can't connect.
I really liked the mobile Rebel base, though. With Vader continually missing them by ten minutes...
u/eaglejarl [+2] (3 days later)
To borrow from Watchmen: "She's not a comic book villain. She did it thirty-five minutes ago."
More seriously: she did it before Vader got on her track. He couldn't be jamming transmissions, because he saw the incoming message. She saved that message to her Dropbox and sent out the pre-prepared emails. It took about a second and a half.
Or maybe the Bothans put it in their own Dropbox, sent the emails with her name forged on the From line, and the transmission Vader detected was just "It's done." I'm not really sure; she was being a little cagey when telling me the details, and kept going on about OPSEC and information hygiene and a lot of other fancy spy words.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (3 days later)
...fair enough. I can certainly see ways for the Empire to defend against both options, even both simultaneously - especially given that they can effectively and completely cut information transfers to/from a single planet if they so desire, perhaps only with a ship carrying a diplomatic mission being able to legally pass through the blockade - but then again, one must also consider that with Darth Vader chasing after said diplomatic ship, he's not personally manning the blockade, and that means that a good enough pilot with a fast smuggler's freighter can probably slip through their net with a message in any case...
u/eaglejarl [+2] (3 days later)
There's also an open question about the ability to communicate at inter-system range. Vader and the Emperor did it when Vader had the ship move out of the asteroid field. It happened a few times in the prequels. The probe droid on Hoth sent pictures back to the Empire. Given that we don't know the mechanism of any of these, they might not be jammable. They also seem to exist only when it's convenient for the plot.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (3 days later)
Didn't the Trade Federation jam a transmission from Naboo in one of the prequels? As I recall, by that time they were able to march their combat droids with up to the transmitter, so you might still need physical access to the transmission hardware in order to "jam" the signal for all I know...
u/None [+2] (6 days later)
Whatever the transmission system is, if ftl is cheap enough in the setting you could have hyperspace capable message pods on ships for that sort of eventuality, especially if you are in the senate and at risk of politically motivaed attack. Pod jumps to an arbitrary system and broadcasts, bam
u/CCC_037 [+1] (6 days later)
In the expanded universe, the Empire had access to technology that could (over a short range, and given a large energy cost) prevent FTL travel entirely, and even knock passing ships out of hyperspace. Alternatively, they could simply blast anything that sensors showed trying to charge up a FTL drive.
u/JackStargazer [+1] Primordial Apologist (2 days later)
Under 'all would have died' when talking about Endor, I think you meant to link to the Endor Holocaust page instead of the asteroid image twice.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (3 days later)
Huh, I thought I tested that. Yes, I did; thank you. I'll fix it when I'm back at my computer.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (a minute later)
I pasted the wrong link on the previous post. I tested that it opened a Patreon page, but didn't think to check that it was the public version as opposed to paid. (Since I had just copied the 'general public' link...or so I thought.) Anyway, it's fixed in the prior post but I figured I'd post this as well.
Sorry for the mistake.
u/sporifolous [+0] (5 hours later)
You should post the correct link here as well. Or at least a link to the other post.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (8 hours later)
The link in the title here goes to the correct Patreon post. The prior posting here on /r/rational was over here.