Planet Destruction by Ships of the Line

[Electric_Monkey]

Inspired by the recent vs threads, I got to wondering exactly why we reckoned the Imperium of Man to be stronger than that other militaristic galaxy spanning empire we all know and love (other than its leader's fondness for siting his throne room next to open reactor shafts and then inviting his most dangerous enemies in for a spot of taunting, I mean).

In the best tradition of www.stardestroyer.net I thought about an objective measure for comparing naval firepower - the imperial navy can do an Exterminatus by sheer firepower, and Star Wars Star Destroyers can accomplish the Base Delta Zero with similar effect. However, I don't knwo enough about the two settings to know which fleet can accomplish the feat in the least ship-hours. Also, are there any other settings with documented BDZ/Exterminatus equivalents? Since this exercise is to provide a point of comparison for ship-to-ship combat, specialised planet killers such as Virus Bombs or Death Stars are excluded.

[warty goblin]

I think one of the reasons people conclude that the Imperium of Man is stronger than the Galactic Empire is that it survives wars with powers that make the Rebel Alliance look like little puppy dogs frolicing in the sunshine with the butterflies. The Galactic Empire is taken down by what amounts to a small geurilla army, while the IoM deals not only with random outbreaks of Chaos in its territories, but massive and unimagnably powerful exterior threats.

Another reason that I at least hold as to why the IoM wins is that its ships don't suffer from the "designed by a moron" syndrome, which all GI ships seem to. Star Destroyers? Let's make them threatened by asteroids. Super Star Destroyers? Let's put the bridge sticking way way out in space where its insanely vulnerable, instead of somewhere in the core of the ship. Death Star? I'm not going to even bother.

[Swordguy]

Compare the sizes of ships. Frigate-sized vessels in the Imperium are the size of Executor-class SSDs. A crew of a medium-sized combat vessel in SW is perhaps 3000 people. In the Imerpium, that's the crew of a single gun turret.

Depending on whether you go by the movies or EU, fleet size in SW varies, but it's certainly finite. 300 ships (Katana fleet) was a considerable fighting force. The average Imperium sector Fleet is thousands of ships. There are thousands of sectors (200x200x200 LY-cube, how many of those are in the Milky Way?).

A single frigate-sized vessel is capable (as per the Horus Heresy) trilogy, of releasing the virus bombs that wipe out Istvaan...III I think. The fact that there's lots of vessels doing so is intentional overkill, as mentioned in those same books. So, assuming that the ship is preloaded with the virus bombs, it can hit weapons range, dump a load of torps, and leave, and the planet is cinders behind it. I have no idea how many hours that is, but it's pretty darn efficient.

[Illiterate Scribe]

One thing to remember about the Imperium's fleets is that, while together, they dwarf, and could probably defeat that of any other setting (even the Culture! :smalltongue:), they are ridiculously thinly spread, and their admirals are loath to pull them all into one big hammer punch; sure, you might protect front X, but the Tyranids will be unopposed on front Y, and the Tau will make massive conquests on front Z.

That's why in, say, the Black Crusades, the Imperium is always sent reeling at the first few blows, but then gets stronger and stronger as five battlefleets pile in.

As a result, it's likely that many other settings would be able to get off a quick first strike or three, destroying planets, but before long you'll be knee deep in battleships.

This problem is alleviated somewhat by the fact that you have got Inquisitors zipping about in their corvettes - they normally do have Exterminatus capability, and, since they're free agents, will often be ready to use them.

Also, remember that Exterminatus normally isn't planet destruction - it normally just wipes out the atmosphere and maybe the crust.

[Prophaniti]

I know you're probably exaggerating to prove a point, Swordguy, but c'mon. No rulebook, fluff, or novelization of 40k even approaches a crew of 3000 for one gun turret. Fact is, a lot of people seem to overestimate the size of an IoM frigate, and just about every other ship in 40k. Flight of the Eisenstien details the Eisenstien, a frigate, at about 2km in length. Since the Imperium's ships tend to be long and narrow, it's likely less than 1km wide, perhaps less than half a km. That doesn't leave anywhere near enough room to have 3000, or even 300 per gun turret. 3000 actually sounds like a fair estimate of the entire crew compliment, discounting servitors. Ships in WH40k really aren't THAT big, except for notables like Phalanx (bigger than some moons), and some of the largest Battleships, like Spirit of Vengeance which leave lots of room for huge collonades and audience chambers.

The thing about 40k is less the size of the ships, but rather the amounts of them. A typical battlegroup headed by a Battleship will have dozens of frigate-class vessels accompanying it, along with plenty of craft for the sizes in between. Comparing Imperium of Man to the Galactic Empire, the disparity is in numbers, not size of ships. The Imperium is simply incomprehensively vast, and administratum officials spend their entire lives cataloging the smallest portions of it and it's workings.

[GoC]

Warhammer 40K appears more consistent than Star Wars...

[Icewalker]

Hell, considering they are loaded with a lot of these anti-planet bombs, most larger IoM ships could probably take out several planets apiece, could they not?

[Illiterate Scribe]

Hell, considering they are loaded with a lot of these anti-planet bombs, most larger IoM ships could probably take out several planets apiece, could they not?

Technically, it doesn't even have to be that. A warp-capable Inquisitorial corvette could easily slip in, boom, and then out. It would be very fragile, though, and you'd have trouble doing so many warp jumps under fire.

[Hasivel]

Other folks have already covered the basics of why the Imperium of Man is so much mightier, but I'll add this:

For a vs. debate, in general a TV show will be very weak, a movie middle road, and a tabletop game or book massively strong all other things being equal. Over time the show inevitably has idiot moments that show them as stupidly weak or their technology failing to something simple, and this drags and sci-fi show down a lot. Movies also suffer from this, but not as much because there just isn't as much canon and the higher SfX budget usually makes for bigger and more powerful looking weapons and ships. Books and Tabletop games, having no budget at all, rely entirely on an authors description and those tend to be awesomely powerful in comparison to Hollywood's ideas, where frequently supposedly mighty future weapons are significantly weaker than real-life ones. Computer Games have elements of all the above and can land just about anywhere.

For instance compare the book Starship Troopers with the movie version. I'm pretty sure book Rico by himself could kill every trooper in the movie without any serious trouble.

Lastly StarDestroyer.net is a rather bad site to get any good information from, they tend to be rather dishonest. Not in their math, but rather in making little base assumptions that massively boost the apparent power of their calculations. For instance, visit their Turbolaser Commentaries (http://www.stardestroyer.net/tlc/Power/index.html). Notice how, in a nifty bit of deception, they claim that an asteroid of iron takes less energy to vaporize than stone, hence their numbers are very conservative since they assume iron. This is totally false, take a gander at their own Asteroid Calculator (http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Science/Asteroids.html). Plug in any random size. Notice that an iron asteroid takes many times more energy than a stone one. Strange that they claim the exact opposite on another page where it favors their chosen side, no?

[Nerd-o-rama]

Both settings are completely ridiculous, and are dictated by the Rule of Cool rather than anything approaching objective physics.

I wouldn't worry about it.

[factotum]

It depends to an extent what you take as canon in each universe. We never see or hear of a Base Delta Zero operation in the Star Wars movies, for example; it's a term that was invented for the Expanded Universe, which is mostly written and therefore can afford to be much more powerful than the movies, as Hasivel points out. Exterminatus, on the other hand, is unquestionably canon for the WH40K universe.

Size of ships? Well, that would probably come mostly from Battlefleet Gothic, which was more devoted to the niggles of ship-to-ship combat than the base WH40K game needed to be (since it generally involved ground troops). ISTR that the ships in Battlefleet Gothic are pretty darned large...there's one shown on Merzo.net which is 7.5km long.

As for the entire crew of a ship 2km long being only 3000, I think that's a massive underestimate. A Nimitz-class aircraft carrier is only 330m long, yet its full crew complement is nearly six thousand!

[warty goblin]

Well, a Nimitz Aircraft carrier also doesn't have a bunch of droids doing the maintenence, which I imagine really helps cut down on the crewcount...

[Lord_Asmodeus]

yes but its not 2km long, and since there are usually alot more people than servitors, and there are tech-priests and ecclesiarchy and all those gun-slaves and yadda yadda, theres a hell of alot of people on an average Imperium Ship of the Line.

[WNxHasoroth]

I believe the book execution point (Its the novel about Captain Semper in the Imperial Navy) details a gunnery crew of a thousands and notes how dozens are killed every time they swivel the turrets to target a new threat, crushed underneath the tracks.

[Dorizzit]

Warhammer 40K appears more consistent than Star Wars...

BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!! Oh god, that was a good one. Heh heh, WH40k, consistent....Ha ha ha ha...

[Swordguy]

I know you're probably exaggerating to prove a point, Swordguy, but c'mon. No rulebook, fluff, or novelization of 40k even approaches a crew of 3000 for one gun turret. Fact is, a lot of people seem to overestimate the size of an IoM frigate, and just about every other ship in 40k. Flight of the Eisenstien details the Eisenstien, a frigate, at about 2km in length. Since the Imperium's ships tend to be long and narrow, it's likely less than 1km wide, perhaps less than half a km. That doesn't leave anywhere near enough room to have 3000, or even 300 per gun turret. 3000 actually sounds like a fair estimate of the entire crew compliment, discounting servitors. Ships in WH40k really aren't THAT big, except for notables like Phalanx (bigger than some moons), and some of the largest Battleships, like Spirit of Vengeance which leave lots of room for huge collonades and audience chambers.


Battlefleet Gothic Rulebook states the crew of a single lance turret on a Lunar Cruiser is 3000 souls.

[Eita]

BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!! Oh god, that was a good one. Heh heh, WH40k, consistent....Ha ha ha ha...

Actually, it is. Why? Because, every new thing is canon, even if it contradicts something else. The contradicted part is then stricken out. And really, even then, I have not seen many cases of it. Unless of course you're talking about the translation from fluff to game.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Battlefleet Gothic Rulebook states the crew of a single lance turret on a Lunar Cruiser is 3000 souls.
From what I understand of 40K, this may be including parts of the weapon, as well as the gunnery crew.

[WNxHasoroth]

If your talking planetary destruction, could you be specific? As in, destroy all living souls, or actually do a "laser blast through the core explosion"? If the former, the Imperium of Man probably wins out, seeing as it'll drop nuke after nuke, lance strike after lance strike until the surface of a planet is flame and ash.

If they want to do a really thorough job, they drop a virus bomb which dissolves every thing into paste, which is then ignited by a firestorm from orbit.

However, in terms of cracking a planet in half your going to have to look at other universes. With the exception of the Talisman's of Vaul in 40k, all ships usually just drop enough fire power to waste everything on the surface. This isn't to say a sufficiently supplied Imperial ship (or any other ship in 40k) can't drop enough bombs to finally crack a planet in half, but it'll take a long time.

[Electric_Monkey]

I'm referring to blasting the surface of a planet until it is barren and uninhabitable - as in the BDZ and Exterminatus actions, not Death Star style destruction. Also, I'm taking the stardestroyer.net approach of using objects that are presumably common between settings to get an idea of weapons power - if imperial battlecruisers can lay waste to a planet in fewer ship-hours than star destroyers, then their guns are more powerful, and knowing what kind of guns the shields can resist gives us a starting point for hteir capabilities as well. For this reason, I'm interested in the use of weapons that would be used for ship-to-ship combat on ships of the line, such as stardestroyers and whatever the 40k equivalent is.

Thinking further, I'm not so sure an Exterminatus and a Base Delta Zero are as close as I had first assumed - the stated objective of a BDZ is to destroy every economic asset on a planet - including all arable land, fisheries and deep mines, and there was one partcular planet (whose name escapes me), which was so thouroughly devastated that it was cheaper to terraform a completely barren planet, than to start over on the BDZ'd planet. Exterminatus on the other hand, was survived by the Tallarn in their bunkers.

[Bavarian itP]

BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!! Oh god, that was a good one. Heh heh, WH40k, consistent....Ha ha ha ha...

He said more consistent than Star Wars.

[Closet_Skeleton]

However, in terms of cracking a planet in half your going to have to look at other universes. With the exception of the Talisman's of Vaul in 40k, all ships usually just drop enough fire power to waste everything on the surface. This isn't to say a sufficiently supplied Imperial ship (or any other ship in 40k) can't drop enough bombs to finally crack a planet in half, but it'll take a long time.

2 Imperial Plasma Torpedoes can slice a planet into pieces, but you need to majorly bribe the Adeptus Mechanicus and be an Inquisitor to get hold of one.

[Swordguy]

From what I understand of 40K, this may be including parts of the weapon, as well as the gunnery crew.

Naw, it mentions the turret being a self-contained mini-city. The people crewing it never leave. That means there's sleeping and eating quarters in there too...

[Lord_Asmodeus]

I don't know about the IMPS but Chaos forces actually have a ship called the "Planet Killer" which fires a massive lance/laser beam straight into the core of a planet, which sets fire to the atmosphere burning all life from it, and then proceeds to crack and destroy it :smallbiggrin: YAY CHAOS! :smalltongue:

[Hunter Noventa]

I don't know about the IMPS but Chaos forces actually have a ship called the "Planet Killer" which fires a massive lance/laser beam straight into the core of a planet, which sets fire to the atmosphere burning all life from it, and then proceeds to crack and destroy it :smallbiggrin: YAY CHAOS! :smalltongue:

I believe that falls under the 'Death Star' level of power. If the empire doesn't get a Death Star, 40k doesn't get the Planet Killer. Not to mention that the Planet Killer is a heretical abomination of the ruinous powers of chaos.

[puppyavenger]

Well if it was a planet without any Fauna then the tyranids would probably get through pretty fast...
Also, where does it say that standard cruisers come equped with exterminaties weponry? just asking because in the BFG mission Exterminatus! only one ship with an exterinatus prow can wipe out a planet.
Also



Also, are there any other settings with documented BDZ/Exterminatus equivalents? Since this exercise is to provide a point of comparison for ship-to-ship combat, specialised planet killers such as Virus Bombs or Death Stars are excluded.

The covenet from Halo can glasss a planets atmospere with plasma if I remember correctly

[Talkkno]

I think one of the reasons people conclude that the Imperium of Man is stronger than the Galactic Empire is that it survives wars with powers that make the Rebel Alliance look like little puppy dogs frolicing in the sunshine with the butterflies. The Galactic Empire is taken down by what amounts to a small geurilla army, while the IoM deals not only with random outbreaks of Chaos in its territories, but massive and unimagnably powerful exterior threats.


.......The empire was desinged to collpase after Paplatine's death, as it clearly shows in EU that it fell apart mostly by infighting by various Imperial holdouts. The fact that Thrawn managed to cripple the New Republic despite massive amounts of Imperial strength was being diverted to Byss by the reborn Emperor only proves his brilliance.

[Talkkno]

This proves that the Empire is massively undermilltiziized, i mean I bet they spend more each day feeding all the stormtroopers then they spent on the Death Star.
"Okay, if we take take the stated dimensions of a Venator class ISD and scale as is appropriate to get the Imperator Class it works itself out to be roughly 1600x771x100 (we disregard the bridge tower as the actual height of the ship, as its significantly taller than the rest of the ship). Multiply by the area necessary to get the three dimensional volume of such a shape (1/2BxHxH (or 800x771x100)) and you get 61,680,000 M^3 of space. Now then, the DS2 clocks in at a whopping 900 kilometers in diameter. To get its volume (assuming completion) we use R^3(4/3)xPI or 450000^3(4/3) X 3.14... equals out to roughly 3.817035074E17 M^3 of production area. Now, if we multiply that by 60%, the commonly accepted percentage of completion... 2.290221044E17. Now, divide that by the above mentioned 61,680,000... and we get 3,713,069,138 Imperator Class Star Destroyers.

Take that number and divide it by a six month time period (182.5 days) and it equals out to... 20,345,584.32 ISDs per day. Or, if we really want to get nitpicky, 847,732.68 ISDs an hour, 14,128.878 ISDs a minute, or a whopping 235.4813 ISDs per second."
And this is within the ablity of a mere shipping company.....and keep in mind its a lot easier to build lots of small objects then one really big one....
(Note I don't hate 40k, i think its actually kind of cool, but it's not a curpstomp by any means.)
Though I really don't want to debate this point again, so I'm taking a leave from this thread...

[factotum]

However, in terms of cracking a planet in half your going to have to look at other universes. With the exception of the Talisman's of Vaul in 40k, all ships usually just drop enough fire power to waste everything on the surface.

Doesn't really work terribly well for Necron tomb worlds, though--pretty sure the Imperium has got some goodies that can take those out as well, so the implication is that they can destroy a planet so thoroughly that even deeply-buried Necron tombs get wiped out.

[Sundog]

The only other universe I can think of that has an equivalent of Exterminatus is Jerry Pournelle's CoDo Universe. Two worlds are known to have been extinguished there - Sauron, at the end of the Secession War which ended the First Imperium, and Istvan, during the Second Imperium.

Sauron was hit by every ship the First Imperium had left after a decade of warfare with the Outworlds Alliance; but it had major defences, and a star fleet protecting it. From the glimpse we get of it in one of the War World books, by the end of that battle Sauron was well on it's way to being an asteroid field.

Istvan, on the other hand, had no orbital defences, but it's population was huddling under the Langston Fields of the major cities. Five Battleship-class warships turned the surface of the planet into molten rock, dooming the populace to a slow death by starvation. Notably, at that point the Second Imperium was considerably less advanced than they had once been under the First.

[Renegade Paladin]

Another reason that I at least hold as to why the IoM wins is that its ships don't suffer from the "designed by a moron" syndrome, which all GI ships seem to. Star Destroyers? Let's make them threatened by asteroids. Super Star Destroyers? Let's put the bridge sticking way way out in space where its insanely vulnerable, instead of somewhere in the core of the ship. Death Star? I'm not going to even bother.
You'd have a hard time making a ship not vulnerable to an asteroid field as dense as Hoth's. At the relative speeds involved, the amount of kinetic energy possessed by the asteroids is enormous, and the Star Destroyers were in the field for hours. And, I would note, none were destroyed.

The Executor was under immense amounts of fire from the entire Rebel armada before the bridge shields failed.

The Death Stars? The destruction of the first was pure deus ex machina, and the second had an unfinished superstructure, allowing the fighters to fly inside it.

And Imperium of Man ships do indeed suffer "designed by a moron" syndrome, because the entire Imperium is composed of morons. "Ignorance is a virtue" is even part of their religious doctrine. :smallamused:


Compare the sizes of ships. Frigate-sized vessels in the Imperium are the size of Executor-class SSDs. A crew of a medium-sized combat vessel in SW is perhaps 3000 people. In the Imerpium, that's the crew of a single gun turret.
Let's have some sources and figures. I have never seen any reference to IoM screening vessels being 16 km or more in length.

[puppyavenger]

And Imperium of Man ships do indeed suffer "designed by a moron" syndrome, because the entire Imperium is composed of morons. "Ignorance is a virtue" is even part of their religious doctrine. :smallamused:
.

Exept the tech-adepts, who wroship the god fo machinery.

[WNxHasoroth]

You'd have a hard time making a ship not vulnerable to an asteroid field as dense as Hoth's. At the relative speeds involved, the amount of kinetic energy possessed by the asteroids is enormous, and the Star Destroyers were in the field for hours. And, I would note, none were destroyed.

The Executor was under immense amounts of fire from the entire Rebel armada before the bridge shields failed.

The Death Stars? The destruction of the first was pure deus ex machina, and the second had an unfinished superstructure, allowing the fighters to fly inside it.

And Imperium of Man ships do indeed suffer "designed by a moron" syndrome, because the entire Imperium is composed of morons. "Ignorance is a virtue" is even part of their religious doctrine. :smallamused:


Let's have some sources and figures. I have never seen any reference to IoM screening vessels being 16 km or more in length.

Eh, not really. The ships were designed by geniuses in ages long past. Now the guys just mass produce the standard templates without really knowing how it works. Theres a nice little story in the GW BFG website about how a certain class of cruiser was so easy to make, that Imperials convinced a planets feral population to "sacrifice" offerings of metal ingots etc. It took a few generations but eventually, enough raw materials were poured in and a new ship was made.

Mass produce able, sturdy, and armed to the teeth.

[warty goblin]

You'd have a hard time making a ship not vulnerable to an asteroid field as dense as Hoth's. At the relative speeds involved, the amount of kinetic energy possessed by the asteroids is enormous, and the Star Destroyers were in the field for hours. And, I would note, none were destroyed.

The Executor was under immense amounts of fire from the entire Rebel armada before the bridge shields failed.

The Death Stars? The destruction of the first was pure deus ex machina, and the second had an unfinished superstructure, allowing the fighters to fly inside it.

And Imperium of Man ships do indeed suffer "designed by a moron" syndrome, because the entire Imperium is composed of morons. "Ignorance is a virtue" is even part of their religious doctrine. :smallamused:


Let's have some sources and figures. I have never seen any reference to IoM screening vessels being 16 km or more in length.

Your asteroid point doesn't hold up I'm afraid. The ISDs had weaponry capable of destroying asteroids, and neither the asteroids nor the ISDs were moving that fast, I'm guessing that the kinetic energy disappated by the asteroids on impact would be far less than the energy of a weapons strike, which is after all capable of reducing one of those asteroids to a fine grain sand. Unless that rock is moving a substantial fraction of the speed of light relative to the ISD, which they are clearly not, they will have less energy than the weapons used to destroy them. Hence the ISDs are incompetantly designed, since they are threatened by projectiles less powerful than the ones employed by their enemies.

It is possible that blasterfire destroys its targets through thermal energy, in which case it would make a certain amount of sense that anti-blaster armor would be weak against kinetic impacts such as asteroids, but this just shifts the moronic design problem farther back. If this is the case, why don't people build ships armed with railguns? They'll damage armor very well, and will have a faster projectile speed than the blasters, making it far easier to hit a target. Hence one way or the other, ISDs are designed by morons.

Yes I know the Executer was under lots of fire before the shields failed, that was not my point. My point was that they put the bridge sticking way the hell and gone up in the middle of the ship, making it totally exposed, and failed to allow the ship to be controlled from anywhere else, in case their hopelessly vulnerable bride was destroyed. A non-moronic design would put the bridge someplace in the middle of the ship, under about half a kilometer of armor. It would require networked screens attached to cameras with outside views, but I'm reasonably certain that's within the technological capabilities of Star Wars, given that they have cell phone sized devices that can send information faster than light.

As to the Death Stars, remember any time your moon-sized battlestation is destroyed by a farmboy in a cheapass little fighter and aided by glorified bacteria, the engineering department screwed up. It didn't even take a complex infiltration and sabatague mission, just one proton torpedo to a point with poor defenses. If your moon-sized battlestation has a weak spot, actually try putting some anti-fighter guns in there, it could help. Deus ex Machina does not excuse this. Sure anything can be destroyed by Deus ex Machina, but at least make it so it takes a bit of a beating.

[Renegade Paladin]

Your asteroid point doesn't hold up I'm afraid. The ISDs had weaponry capable of destroying asteroids, and neither the asteroids nor the ISDs were moving that fast, I'm guessing that the kinetic energy disappated by the asteroids on impact would be far less than the energy of a weapons strike, which is after all capable of reducing one of those asteroids to a fine grain sand. Unless that rock is moving a substantial fraction of the speed of light relative to the ISD, which they are clearly not, they will have less energy than the weapons used to destroy them. Hence the ISDs are incompetantly designed, since they are threatened by projectiles less powerful than the ones employed by their enemies.
1.) Remember that the Star Destroyers were in the asteroid field for hours.

2.) Again, none of them were destroyed.

In fact, I'm not seeing at all where you're getting this idea that they're particularly vulnerable to asteroids.


Yes I know the Executer was under lots of fire before the shields failed, that was not my point. My point was that they put the bridge sticking way the hell and gone up in the middle of the ship, making it totally exposed, and failed to allow the ship to be controlled from anywhere else, in case their hopelessly vulnerable bride was destroyed. A non-moronic design would put the bridge someplace in the middle of the ship, under about half a kilometer of armor. It would require networked screens attached to cameras with outside views, but I'm reasonably certain that's within the technological capabilities of Star Wars, given that they have cell phone sized devices that can send information faster than light.
There is a secondary bridge at the base of the bridge tower. It takes time to reroute the controls, time that they didn't have. As for the why, the sensor domes at the top of the bridge tower apparently need considerable clearance to operate. See here (http://theforce.net/swtc/warships.html#towers).

As to the Death Stars, remember any time your moon-sized battlestation is destroyed by a farmboy in a cheapass little fighter and aided by glorified bacteria, the engineering department screwed up. It didn't even take a complex infiltration and sabatague mission, just one proton torpedo to a point with poor defenses. If your moon-sized battlestation has a weak spot, actually try putting some anti-fighter guns in there, it could help. Deus ex Machina does not excuse this. Sure anything can be destroyed by Deus ex Machina, but at least make it so it takes a bit of a beating.
"A bit of a beating?" You may notice that three - count 'em, three - fighters made it back from the mission. And yes, the engineering department screwed up; Bevel Lemilisk was executed for his failure. None of this invalidates the sheer power the Death Star demonstrated.

[Talkkno]

It is noted in Heir to the Empire that they did recognize the error inherent in the DS1, but Paplatine was too arrgonat to change a thing.

[sikyon]

Imperial fleets posses enough firepower to litterally shatter a planet through standard orbital bombardment, trading fire with anti-capital ship guns on the planet. Case: Destruction of Caliban by the Dark Angels fleet. The planet suprise attacked the fleet from ground, destroying a large portion of it in the opening salvo. The fleet then retaliated and a protracted combat including surface to space and space to surface combat erupted, ending with the literal disintegration of the entire planet.

Granted, a legion sized fleet is much larger than standard fleet sizes in the 41st mellenium, but still.

Also, boarding actions against empire ships would result in massacres, especially if done by space marines. Stormtroopers are pathetically weak, their armor doesn't even do anything. It cracks from a tumble down a hill, does not ever seem to block blaster fire, and blasters themselves seem rather startlingly weak.

[thorgrim29]

Bwahahahaha..... I just had an image of a squad of space wolves shredding through an army of stormtrooper, shrugging off the lasguns, and literally ripping their oppenents in twain because they've run out of ammo..... very grisly.

[warty goblin]

hmm, I feel I did perhaps overstate my case on the moronic design of Star Wars ships. My asteroid point I concede as being wrong on, although I admit it still doesn't make a lot of sense to me, given the power of Star Wars weapons, shouldn't a highly durable ship be able to deal with asteroid impacts? If not, why? Anyway, I concede the point.

On the Executer I feel my point stil stands however. Even if they had a secondary bridge, why was the primary sticking up like that? Even if the sensor arrays need to stick up like that, which given the afformentioned cell phone sized devices that transmit 3D images instantaniously over interplanetary distances seems a little weird to me but whatever, that's no reason to make the bridge stick out, only the sensor domes. Sure it means that if the sensor domes are destroyed the ship's flying blind, but if the sensor arrays are killed, there's a pretty good chance that the bridge is as well, and at least with the interior bridge the ship is still in control.

[Eita]

I feel I must protect the Stormtroopers right now. Their armor in fact does protect against glancing shots, which really if you think about it is a ton of shots.

[sikyon]

I feel I must protect the Stormtroopers right now. Their armor in fact does protect against glancing shots, which really if you think about it is a ton of shots.

Glancing shots from a blaster will barely wound someone. Case: In Return of the Jedi, princess Leia is struck by a blaster bolt on the arm. She is barely injured.

http://www.st-v-sw.net/STSWblaster.html

[tyckspoon]

Glancing shots from a blaster will barely wound someone. Case: In Return of the Jedi, princess Leia is struck by a blaster bolt on the arm. She is barely injured.

http://www.st-v-sw.net/STSWblaster.html

A glancing hit from a standard 40k lasgun probably wouldn't be any more damaging, and a glancing hit from a bolter might be equally harmless, depending on how sensitive the bolter explosive's triggering sensor is. If the round goes off, it would utterly shred an unprotected person's arm. I will say with the utmost confidence that a direct hit from a bolter will destroy Stormtrooper armor.. and the people who carry bolters tend to be very good shots. And we haven't even started to consider the other assault weaponry that might be used to sweep a ship, like flamers and plasma. I have to agree with Sikyon- a crew/marines against crew/marines situation would not turn out well for the Star Wars universe.

[warty goblin]

A glancing hit from a standard 40k lasgun probably wouldn't be any more damaging, and a glancing hit from a bolter might be equally harmless, depending on how sensitive the bolter explosive's triggering sensor is. If the round goes off, it would utterly shred an unprotected person's arm. I will say with the utmost confidence that a direct hit from a bolter will destroy Stormtrooper armor.. and the people who carry bolters tend to be very good shots. And we haven't even started to consider the other assault weaponry that might be used to sweep a ship, like flamers and plasma. I have to agree with Sikyon- a crew/marines against crew/marines situation would not turn out well for the Star Wars universe.

Four words: Terminators. With. Assault. Cannons.
There's going to be blood, lots and lots of blood.

[Ubiq]

One thing to remember about Star Wars is that the Star Wars galaxy is one that has been fairly stable for thousands of years and one where the government and its citizens actually have access to most of the resources of the galaxy (well, galaxies actually seeing as how Attack of the Clones shows that the Republic actually has some influence over two smaller, satellite galaxies). Significant portions of the Milky Way are contested if not entirely in the hands of other powers so the Imperium of Man doesn't have that sort of economic capacity.

In Star Wars, you see things there like individual corporations capable of fielding a fleet of hundreds or thousands of ships that dwarf Star Destroyers (a Trade Federation Battleship is well over twice the length of a Venator Star Destroyer) like in The Phantom Menace. Beyond that, the Empire was capable of half-building a structure nearly the size of The Moon in a manner of months and in total secrecy until they chose to leak the information.

Meanwhile, much of the Imperium's best ships date back hundreds, if not thousands of years, and cannot be easily replaced. Even if the Imperium had a firepower advantage (which is somewhat dubious from what I've seen), the Empire could simply outbuild them. Beyond that, the Empire has ships capable of travelling across half the galaxy or more in a matter of hours if not less. This is vastly faster than anything the Imperium has access to.

The Imperium of Man has a decided advantage when it comes to terrestrial combat (though the Empire could always go the CIS route and throw quadrillions of battledroids at them), but space would almost certainly be in the hands of the Empire.

So if it came down to a contest between the two, the Empire could easily swarm the Imperium's planets with Star Destroyers and skip merrily away with hyperdrive before any help could possibly arrive. Unless the Imperium has planetary shielding on the scale of the Star Wars galaxy (Alderaan's shield blocks the Death Star's beam for a split second), it's going to go very badly for them.

Meanwhile, the Empire's planets could be reinforced almost instaneously thanks to their transgalactic communication network and hyperdrive (and would have the shielding mentioned earlier to help them hold out) and any losses inflicted on their ships could be easily replaced. The Imperium doesn't have that luxury.

[Emperor Tippy]

One thing to remember about Star Wars is that the Star Wars galaxy is one that has been fairly stable for thousands of years and one where the government and its citizens actually have access to most of the resources of the galaxy (well, galaxies actually seeing as how Attack of the Clones shows that the Republic actually has some influence over two smaller, satellite galaxies). Significant portions of the Milky Way are contested if not entirely in the hands of other powers so the Imperium of Man doesn't have that sort of economic capacity.
WTF are you talking about?

The Emperor of the Imperium of Man has lived in the Golden Throne for 10,000 years. The IoM has had the same man ruling it for even longer. As for the economic base of the IoM, they regularly loose entire planets with billions of citizens because of the rounding errors in the census. And they have blown up entire populated worlds on the suspicion that a heretic leader was on the planet. They have numerous worlds that are just giant factories. Battlefleet Sol has more ships in it then the Empire had ISD's.


In Star Wars, you see things there like individual corporations capable of fielding a fleet of hundreds or thousands of ships that dwarf Star Destroyers (a Trade Federation Battleship is well over twice the length of a Venator Star Destroyer) like in The Phantom Menace. Beyond that, the Empire was capable of half-building a structure nearly the size of The Moon in a manner of months and in total secrecy until they chose to leak the information.
The IoM can mass produce Death Star sized ships.


Meanwhile, much of the Imperium's best ships date back hundreds, if not thousands of years, and cannot be easily replaced.
Incorrect. The ships were designed a while back but they can be replaced easily. The Forge Worlds spit them out by the thousands.


Even if the Imperium had a firepower advantage (which is somewhat dubious from what I've seen), the Empire could simply outbuild them.
A Lunar Class frigate is capable of death staring a planet (using Two Stage Torpedos) and out masses an ISD. That is an escort ship. The Emperor Class Battleship can have a crew of up to three million. As for out building the IoM, not likely.


Beyond that, the Empire has ships capable of travelling across half the galaxy or more in a matter of hours if not less. This is vastly faster than anything the Imperium has access to.
Incorrect. First off the Star Wars Galaxy is not the Milky Way, it is significantly smaller. And second, the speed of the warp varies greatly. Sometimes you can cross the galaxy in a day, other times it can take you centuries.


The Imperium of Man has a decided advantage when it comes to terrestrial combat (though the Empire could always go the CIS route and throw quadrillions of battledroids at them), but space would almost certainly be in the hands of the Empire.
For every battledroid you can field the IoM can field a dozen Imperial Guardsman. We actually worked out the math back in one of the IoM vs. Star Wars threads and the IoM gains soldiers faster (and in exponentially increasing numbers). The IoM has so many soldiers that you can't kill them fast enough to stop their number from increasing.


So if it came down to a contest between the two, the Empire could easily swarm the Imperium's planets with Star Destroyers and skip merrily away with hyperdrive before any help could possibly arrive. Unless the Imperium has planetary shielding on the scale of the Star Wars galaxy (Alderaan's shield blocks the Death Star's beam for a split second), it's going to go very badly for them.
There are only 2 solar systems that matter to the IoM. Sol and some place that begins with a C. Battlefleet Sol is more than a match for the entire navy of the Galactic Empire from Star Wars. It is in permanent station in the Sol system. Sol is also the home of the Grey Knights. And Holy Terra is the home of the Inquisition. And the moon has been turned into 1 large defense fort.

As for shielding, one of the IoM's psykers just mind controls the guy controlling the shield and lowers it.


Meanwhile, the Empire's planets could be reinforced almost instaneously thanks to their transgalactic communication network and hyperdrive (and would have the shielding mentioned earlier to help them hold out) and any losses inflicted on their ships could be easily replaced. The Imperium doesn't have that luxury.

The IoM has instantaneous communications to anywhere in the galaxy thanks to their Astropaths. It's actually faster than that of the Star Wars universe.

--------------
To summarize, you have no idea what you are talking about.

[Dervag]

In the best tradition of www.stardestroyer.net I thought about an objective measure for comparing naval firepower - the imperial navy can do an Exterminatus by sheer firepower, and Star Wars Star Destroyers can accomplish the Base Delta Zero with similar effect. However, I don't knwo enough about the two settings to know which fleet can accomplish the feat in the least ship-hours. Also, are there any other settings with documented BDZ/Exterminatus equivalents? Since this exercise is to provide a point of comparison for ship-to-ship combat, specialised planet killers such as Virus Bombs or Death Stars are excluded.It takes about three star destroyers to reduce a planetary surface to a crater field; three is the standard for a BDZ. It's not so much that they need all three ships to get the job done eventually as that they don't want the people on the other side of the planet to get away, and you really do need at least three ships to cover all angles of retreat from a sphere effectively, even if your ships have arbitrarily long ranges.

I don't know how many Imperium ships it takes to do an Exterminatus.


I think one of the reasons people conclude that the Imperium of Man is stronger than the Galactic Empire is that it survives wars with powers that make the Rebel Alliance look like little puppy dogs frolicing in the sunshine with the butterflies. The Galactic Empire is taken down by what amounts to a small geurilla army, while the IoM deals not only with random outbreaks of Chaos in its territories, but massive and unimagnably powerful exterior threats.On the other hand, the Empire gets beaten up so much in large part because all the massive nation vs. nation conflicts are often just a backdrop for the Jedi/Sith struggle. So, for instance, the Confederacy of Independent Systems and the old Galactic Republic might each have thousands of star systems and enormous fleets with enough firepower to ruin hundreds of planets simultaneously (not blow up, mind, but ruin).

And yet, it didn't matter, because the real war was Palpatine playing both sides off against each other with the aim of recruiting a new competent apprentice and destroying the Jedi Order- a group of only a few thousand men and women. Everything else was secondary to that goal in the mind of the person controlling the war.

Likewise, the Rebellion succeeded because Palpatine was so caught up in his desire to recruit Luke Skywalker that he messed up the tactical aspects of his plans. Even then, the Rebels had to get massively lucky.


Another reason that I at least hold as to why the IoM wins is that its ships don't suffer from the "designed by a moron" syndrome, which all GI ships seem to. Star Destroyers? Let's make them threatened by asteroids.I think the reason the Star Destroyers were threatened in that way was because Darth Vader was so obsessed with running down the Rebels that he knowingly ordered his capital ships to charge into the debris field at a speed too high to be sure of clearing all the rocks out of their path.


Death Star? I'm not going to even bother.You know, they really only forgot one thing, on a planetoid-sized ship design. They forgot to put torpedo baffles in the exhaust ducts. It was a terrible mistake, but many real life warships have fought and won wars despite much more significant weaknesses.


I believe the book execution point (Its the novel about Captain Semper in the Imperial Navy) details a gunnery crew of a thousands and notes how dozens are killed every time they swivel the turrets to target a new threat, crushed underneath the tracks.Why again do they not install safety features? What's the point of having a crew that takes roughly 1-2% casualties every time you bring your main battery to bear on a new vector? Why not just use a smaller crew and keep them away from the massive mancrushing heavy machinery?


The only other universe I can think of that has an equivalent of Exterminatus is Jerry Pournelle's CoDo Universe. Two worlds are known to have been extinguished there - Sauron, at the end of the Secession War which ended the First Imperium, and Istvan, during the Second Imperium.

Sauron was hit by every ship the First Imperium had left after a decade of warfare with the Outworlds Alliance; but it had major defences, and a star fleet protecting it. From the glimpse we get of it in one of the War World books, by the end of that battle Sauron was well on it's way to being an asteroid field.

Istvan, on the other hand, had no orbital defences, but it's population was huddling under the Langston Fields of the major cities. Five Battleship-class warships turned the surface of the planet into molten rock, dooming the populace to a slow death by starvation. Notably, at that point the Second Imperium was considerably less advanced than they had once been under the First.However, neither Imperium had anything like the firepower of the Warhammer Imperium.

Wrecking the surface of a planet isn't especially difficult. It is well within the power of human beings today to devastate a planetary surface such that it would be uninhabitable by higher forms of life. Unfortunately, the planet in question is our own, a fact which has unnerved many.

For any spacecraft capable of travelling at speeds that make interplanetary voyages viable, delivering a surface wrecking barrage is only a matter of time and fuel- you go to the nearest asteroid field, find a chunk of rock a few miles wide, and tow it up to dinosaur-killer speeds. Aim at the planet. Repeat.

If you have beam weapons capable of very large, nigh-arbitrary numbers of shots that have kiloton-range firepower, you can just hover in orbit and keep shooting until the planetary surface is liberally salted with impact craters. Likewise, not hard.

So the real question is spacecraft-hours and the amount of damage a planet killer does to the interior of the planet. It takes billions of times more energy to smash a planet into pieces than it does to reduce its surface to something like the craters of the moon, because with a cratering you aren't trying to take every last bit of planetary mass and kick it into outer space against the planet's own gravity.

Any weapon capable of smashing a planet must be transcendently more powerful than a weapon that can merely crater a planet.


Exept the tech-adepts, who wroship the god fo machinery.If they don't understand the underlying principles they're no less ignorant than the masses, and therefore just as "stupid."


A non-moronic design would put the bridge someplace in the middle of the ship, under about half a kilometer of armor. It would require networked screens attached to cameras with outside views, but I'm reasonably certain that's within the technological capabilities of Star Wars, given that they have cell phone sized devices that can send information faster than light.This is true but not unprecedented. For example, the pride of the Royal Navy going into World War One were a set of battlecruisers that were faster than any normal battleship and just as well armed, at the cost of reduced armor protection. The theory was that they could outmaneuver enemy battleships and hammer them from directions where many of their own guns couldn't bear, or easily sink enemy cruisers (they actually weren't supposed to fight battleships straight up, but got dragooned into doing it pretty fast).

It wasn't until about two or three years into the war that people realized that the battlecruisers had a very serious weakness. Their deck armor was light, which meant that long-range artillery fire could easily punch right down through the deck. If it hit one of the ship's magazines, the explosion would flash right through the other magazines (one for each turret), blowing the ship apart with roughly 99.9% casualties.

This happened three times in the same battle once, at Jutland. And the Germans didn't even know it was possible- they weren't trying to accomplish it; each of the three hits that blew up those battlecruisers was luck.

And then the same thing happened to a WWII British battlecruiser, HMS Hood, which was supposed to have been designed with the lessons from those earlier battlecruisers in mind. So that kind of thing can happen easily in real warfare.


As to the Death Stars, remember any time your moon-sized battlestation is destroyed by a farmboy in a cheapass little fighter and aided by glorified bacteria, the engineering department screwed up. It didn't even take a complex infiltration and sabatague mission, just one proton torpedo to a point with poor defenses. If your moon-sized battlestation has a weak spot, actually try putting some anti-fighter guns in there, it could help. Deus ex Machina does not excuse this. Sure anything can be destroyed by Deus ex Machina, but at least make it so it takes a bit of a beating.They had anti-fighter guns, just not enough. They also had squadrons of fighters on standby to intercept any enemy fighters that got close. And their weak point was something so bizarre that an enemy who didn't have perfect blueprints of the ship wouldn't stand a chance of finding it and exploiting it. So it did take a complex infiltration and sabotage mission- namely, the one that retrieved a copy of the Death Star plans.

So yeah, they lost the Death Star with all hands because of a design flaw. But it was a very small flaw compared to the scale of the design (a real life design would likely have dozens of such weaknesses unless people spent centuries troubleshooting it). And it was a flaw that the Rebels were only just barely able to exploit when the enemy didn't even realize the flaw existed to protect themselves from it until right before the end.


Granted, a legion sized fleet is much larger than standard fleet sizes in the 41st mellenium, but still.Agreed, but...


Also, boarding actions against empire ships would result in massacres, especially if done by space marines. Stormtroopers are pathetically weak, their armor doesn't even do anything. It cracks from a tumble down a hill, does not ever seem to block blaster fire, and blasters themselves seem rather startlingly weak.You may be underestimating that armor. In the movies, blasters are seen gouging holes in stone, metal, or plastic walls the size of a man's head or torso. While Space Marine body armor might laugh at such a weapon, it would probably be a threat to anything we have now with the possible exception of a main battle tank. It doesn't surprise me that it's hard to make man-portable armor that can withstand weapons like that; a lot depends on your assumptions of just how strong futuristic materials can reasonably be.

The site stardestroyer.net has plenty of flaws, sure, but they do make a valid point that even in the movies stormtrooper armor can withstand anything short of a direct hit from a high-powered hand energy weapon. It appears to shrug off shrapnel (as you'd expect from a near miss where a blaster gouges a head-sized hole in the wall next to you) easily. Which means that it can play the same role for blasters that modern infantry body armor plays for modern guns- despite the fact that the blasters are something like an order of magnitude more powerful.

Space Marines have much better weapons and armor, of course. No contest there.

[Winterwind]

One thing to remember about Star Wars is that the Star Wars galaxy is one that has been fairly stable for thousands of years and one where the government and its citizens actually have access to most of the resources of the galaxy (well, galaxies actually seeing as how Attack of the Clones shows that the Republic actually has some influence over two smaller, satellite galaxies). Significant portions of the Milky Way are contested if not entirely in the hands of other powers so the Imperium of Man doesn't have that sort of economic capacity.You are running on the assumptions here that
a) the Star Wars galaxy is of equal size as the Milky Way,
b) the Star Wars galaxy has an equal density of inhabited worlds as the Imperium, and
c) the Star Wars worlds have the same economic and industrial potential as the WH40k worlds on average.

I see no reason for either of these assumptions; in fact, as far as I know, each of them is wrong.


In Star Wars, you see things there like individual corporations capable of fielding a fleet of hundreds or thousands of ships that dwarf Star Destroyers (a Trade Federation Battleship is well over twice the length of a Venator Star Destroyer) like in The Phantom Menace. Beyond that, the Empire was capable of half-building a structure nearly the size of The Moon in a manner of months and in total secrecy until they chose to leak the information. Considering the Trade Federation was capable of throwing the entire Republic into civil war, I strongly presume it was not just some standard corporation by Star Wars standards.

Emperor Tippy already addressed the other points.


Incorrect. First off the Star Wars Galaxy is not the Milky Way, it is significantly smaller. And second, the speed of the warp varies greatly. Sometimes you can cross the galaxy in a day, other times it can take you centuries.He does have a point about Star Wars ships moving faster though - while travelling times in WH40k may vary, as far as I know they are usually in the magnitude of weeks, are they not?
Also, variable travelling times would make for a strategical horror. When you can't plan when your reinforcements will arrive, you lose a lot of strategical options.

Now the question is whether, and how, the Star Wars fleet could abuse this edge.

[WNxHasoroth]

Why again do they not install safety features? What's the point of having a crew that takes roughly 1-2% casualties every time you bring your main battery to bear on a new vector? Why not just use a smaller crew and keep them away from the massive mancrushing heavy machinery?

12/3000=0.004

Ok that was just pointless semantics but the fact is, there is so much human life in Warhammer that losing three thousand is no biggy. Literally billions of people have disappeared off censuses due to errors made by Administratum clerks when rounding and the Imperium doesn't feel the loss.

Also, throw in the fact that the three thousand are convicts on death row usually, or gangers etc and no one cares too much about them. Theres a constant stream where they came from.

Its why the Imperium of Man doesn't just strafe an enemy position with missiles and blow them apart with Cyclonic torpedoes but launches massive ground invasions instead. Its because its far cheaper to field a hundred thousand men, than to use a thousand missiles. Not to mention that good, live able worlds are rare and if millions have to dye for it, so be it. Theres only a finite amount of H-Congruous worlds but theres an almost infinite number of trained soldiers to die for it.

[Destro_Yersul]

For all your ship length needs: Starship Dimensions (http://www.merzo.net/)

Retribution Class Battleships are listed at 7.5 kilometers long. The Cobra class is listed at 1.5 kilometers. This places their Frigate, based on a size comparison, at roughly 2km long. Super Star Destroyers are 19km long.

Based on Empire at War, which isn't a great point, I know, it takes 4-5 Kedalbe Class battleships to destroy a Super Star Destroyer. One Kedalbe is around the Same size as a regular Star Destroyer which, incidentally, is 1.6km. If Five Kedalbes can take out a Super Star Destroyer, and one Retribution Class Battleship is the same size as four and a half Kedalbes, This does not bode well for the Star Destroyer.

Second, boarding torpedoes. Teleporters. Space Marine Battle Barges. Terminators. Psykers.

Oh, and to answer an earlier question? 3 Star Destroyers to BDZ a planet. For the Imperium to virus bomb a world? One ship. And not even a capital ship.

[GolemsVoice]

The point with varying travel times due to the chaotic nature of the warp is really troublesome. There have been cases where entire fleets just disappeared into the warp, or where armies arrived for to respond to an emergency that was sent 1000 years ago. But again, this can be used in favor of the IoM, as they are able (and willing) to take such losses.

[Rutee]

Oh, and to answer an earlier question? 3 Star Destroyers to BDZ a planet. For the Imperium to virus bomb a world? One ship. And not even a capital ship.

I am fairly certain that the EMpire develops similarly destructive viruses that are expanded on in the EU. They just don't use them. I suppose it's the same reason they don't really BDZ that often. Or perhaps it was that hte virus was /just/ slow enough to escape offworld, making it really hard to use right..

Actually, this Virus Bomb already bugs me, and it wouldn't if WH40k didn't, at least in my mind, try to get some sort of reputation for realism. Viruses are literally incapable of replicating beyond a certain speed, because by definition, a virus depends on the host's body replicating it. Yet the Virus Bomb is pretty much described as an Instant Killquick; Which is literally impossible. I suppose this is why one must be careful when writing sci-fi.. if you get too 'realistic', then break it, well..

[Talkkno]

You are running on the assumptions here that
a) the Star Wars galaxy is of equal size as the Milky Way,
b) the Star Wars galaxy has an equal density of inhabited worlds as the Imperium, and
c) the Star Wars worlds have the same economic and industrial potential as the WH40k worlds on average.



The G.F.F.A is approximatively 100k light years across, so its smaller, but not by a huge margin, besides, the Astronomicon only extends out to 50k light years or so. And those two other points are unprovable, seeing that i have already poitned that the Death Star amounts to seveal thousand Star Destroyers per second, given that its easir to build alot of small objects then one really big one, its most likely a lot more.

[Talkkno]

Based on Empire at War, which isn't a great point, I know, it takes 4-5 Kedalbe Class battleships to destroy a Super Star Destroyer. One Kedalbe is around the Same size as a regular Star Destroyer which, incidentally, is 1.6km. If Five Kedalbes can take out a Super Star Destroyer, and one Retribution Class Battleship is the same size as four and a half Kedalbes, This does not bode well for the Star Destroyer.



.......Game mechanics... are not a factor in this discussion. and besides, does anyone know how many guns are on Imperium warships anyways, I think thats a more important factor then size in any case.

[Talkkno]

Space Marines have much better weapons and armor, of course. No contest there.

Dark Troopers have armor that resist lightsabers....and given since that they are droids, there will be much more easy to produce then a space marine.

[WNxHasoroth]

Thats why multiple salvoes of Virus Bombs are fired, because they're so quick acting. Eventually it eats itself and a new batch is fired. This leaves a planet devoid of life which is quite easy to take over again.

Its not a one shot run away and wait weapon XD

[Talkkno]

Considering the Trade Federation was capable of throwing the entire Republic into civil war, I strongly presume it was not just some standard corporation by Star Wars standards.



In Darksaber, a mere Hutt crime lord managed to reconstruct the Death Star's superlaser and the power needed to power it, minus the defenses(Though it was crudely built and failed to fire due to trying to build on the cheap, that in itself is a impressive feat considering this he controlled at best a few hundred planets at most.)

[sikyon]

I don't know how many Imperium ships it takes to do an Exterminatus.

You may be underestimating that armor. In the movies, blasters are seen gouging holes in stone, metal, or plastic walls the size of a man's head or torso. While Space Marine body armor might laugh at such a weapon, it would probably be a threat to anything we have now with the possible exception of a main battle tank. It doesn't surprise me that it's hard to make man-portable armor that can withstand weapons like that; a lot depends on your assumptions of just how strong futuristic materials can reasonably be.

The site stardestroyer.net has plenty of flaws, sure, but they do make a valid point that even in the movies stormtrooper armor can withstand anything short of a direct hit from a high-powered hand energy weapon. It appears to shrug off shrapnel (as you'd expect from a near miss where a blaster gouges a head-sized hole in the wall next to you) easily. Which means that it can play the same role for blasters that modern infantry body armor plays for modern guns- despite the fact that the blasters are something like an order of magnitude more powerful.

Space Marines have much better weapons and armor, of course. No contest there.

One ship with the appropriate weapon can shoot a single torpedeo. The torpedo will catalyze a chain reaction which will cause all living matter on the planet to disintegrate rapidly, at which point huge amounts of methane and similar gasses will be flung into the atmosphere. The ship them makes a single lance strike against the planet, which will ignite the atmosphere and literally steralize the entire planet with fire.

If you look at the post I made above, you can see that a hit by a blaster on leia's upper left shoulder causes minimal damage. If you then consider that this is what stormtrooper armor can stop, then whoop-dee-do. You can then consider that stormtrooper shoulder armor cracked when a stormtrooper got kicked over a hill by an ewok, and it is therefore not particularly effective against kinetic impacts. In short, it does not seem to actually do anything. In comparison, imperial guard lasguns are generally stated as being able to blow off entire limbs on unarmored humans.

Doesn't seem like stormtroopers can even stop imperial navy boarding parties.

[13_CBS]

.
If you look at the post I made above, you can see that a hit by a blaster on leia's upper left shoulder causes minimal damage.



But also look at Dervag's argument: those same blasters can blow holes into METAL and STONE. That's pretty powerful.



You can then consider that stormtrooper shoulder armor cracked when a stormtrooper got kicked over a hill by an ewok, and it is therefore not particularly effective against kinetic impacts.

Eh...according to at least one source (the visual guide, I think), stormie armor is nigh-immune to slug throwers (and no, you are forbidden from pointing out that Ewok arrows managed to kill stormtroopers. Don't even go there. :smalltongue: )

[Talkkno]

Eh...according to at least one source (the visual guide, I think), stormie armor is nigh-immune to slug throwers (and no, you are forbidden from pointing out that Ewok arrows managed to kill stormtroopers. Don't even go there. :smalltongue: )
It is retconed that Ewoks knew the weakspots in the stormtrooper's armor(body glove), as well being very good shots.
At to prove the above point, keep in mind these just carbines...
http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b57/talkkno/Other/DockingBay94.jpg

[Rutee]

Thats why multiple salvoes of Virus Bombs are fired, because they're so quick acting. Eventually it eats itself and a new batch is fired. This leaves a planet devoid of life which is quite easy to take over again.

Its not a one shot run away and wait weapon XD

Beyond the logistics of designing a Virus that will accept /all/ life..

WINDMILLS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY

Viruses are, to my knowledge (And I am not the perfect Bio student; If I'm wrong, /fine/, but please produce a source on it, because this is a gap in actually important knowledge) incapable of affecting other Viruses; Here's why. Viruses reproduce by siezing control of an individual cell within the host's body, and forcing that cell to, rather then continue with its normal activities, cause the cell to reproduce more copies of the virus until the cell busts from being so full of viruses. so right there, you have a limit to how quickly a virus can kill someone; They only reproduce as fast as the Host's body allows them. And that's before any assumption of antibodies, of course.

Second, a virus /can not eat itself/. Viruses do not possess the means to replicate any form of life on their own. There's just nothing to rewrite or sieze control of, effectively.

Sigh. I have no idea why I'm even saying this. Planet-busting beams don't bother me in the slightest, nor send me into a WINDMILLS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY rant, but a virus bomb does? Humanity is so bizarre.

[sikyon]

But also look at Dervag's argument: those same blasters can blow holes into METAL and STONE. That's pretty powerful.



Eh...according to at least one source (the visual guide, I think), stormie armor is nigh-immune to slug throwers (and no, you are forbidden from pointing out that Ewok arrows managed to kill stormtroopers. Don't even go there. :smalltongue: )

Great, they can blow holes in metal and armor, but they can't seriously wound someone with a limb hit. That's fantastic. Fan-tastic.

Movies > other sources. That's all I have to say to being immune to kinetic energy weapons.


Beyond the logistics of designing a Virus that will accept /all/ life..

WINDMILLS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY

Traditional viruses cannot, this is true. But advanced future viruses might be able to. It is possible that the virus does not only self-replicate, but also self-catalyzes or both replicates and catalyzes into flammable gasses after X time. This type of mechanism would not be very advantageous in nature, but it could be possible.

[Destro_Yersul]

Dark Troopers have armor that resist lightsabers....and given since that they are droids, there will be much more easy to produce then a space marine.

The Dark Trooper program was scrapped. Those things aren't being produced anymore, and the only reason they were lightsaber resistant anyways is because their frames were made of phrik metal (rare and expensive). Still didn't stop Kyle Katarn from destroying a bunch of them and blowing up the ship they were made in.

Also, since they are droids, they will be vulnerable to the Curse of the Machine spirit, which is normally used to blow up enemy tanks.

As to how many guns imperial warships have... Well, I'll go with lots. A broadside from a retribution class has been noted as destroying enemy ships before they could even get close enough to shoot back. It also has a ramming prow which, of course, is extremely heavily armoured. This means that facing it head on isn't great either, because it will punch through your armour first.

As an added side note, the Imperial Class Star Destroyer, which is the largest commonly seen ship in the movies, is the same size as an IoM ESCORT ship. It has also been noted as having 174,000 separate design flaws.

[Rutee]

Also, since they are droids, they will be vulnerable to the Curse of the Machine spirit, which is normally used to blow up enemy tanks.

The what of the who? What curse?

[Destro_Yersul]

It's the name of a Psychic Power used by Imperium Psykers. It disrupts technology.

[Rutee]

Alrighty then. Thought this was something that disabled droids specifically on top of the fact that, IIRC, the technopriest doods said artificial intelligence was ebil~~~.

[Eita]

Yep. After that whole Age of Iron debacle.

[Destro_Yersul]

Not to mention Commissar Gaunt's "Vermilion Treasure"

Gaunt found an STC designed to produce Iron Men. It had been corrupted, and the Iron Men it made were... psychotic. This did not improve the Imperium's view of AI.

[Talkkno]

Great, they can blow holes in metal and armor, but they can't seriously wound someone with a limb hit. That's fantastic. Fan-tastic.

Movies > other sources. That's all I have to say to being immune to kinetic energy weapons.


Keep in mind, it was a merely a carbine, not a full on rifle that can make a 1 meter hole in ferrocrete.

[Talkkno]

The Dark Trooper program was scrapped. Those things aren't being produced anymore, and the only reason they were lightsaber resistant anyways is because their frames were made of phrik metal (rare and expensive). Still didn't stop Kyle Katarn from destroying a bunch of them and blowing up the ship they were made in.



Extactly, the Empire devoted so little resources, one star destroyer, give or take a few, they could easily restart it again, given the scale of the impending threat that they are imposed to deal with. Kyle Katarn is the Master Chief of Star Wars, so that isn't a exactly a fair comparison.

[Talkkno]

As to how many guns imperial warships have... Well, I'll go with lots. A broadside from a retribution class has been noted as destroying enemy ships before they could even get close enough to shoot back. It also has a ramming prow which, of course, is extremely heavily armoured. This means that facing it head on isn't great either, because it will punch through your armour first.

As an added side note, the Imperial Class Star Destroyer, which is the largest commonly seen ship in the movies, is the same size as an IoM ESCORT ship. It
has also been noted as having 174,000 separate design flaws.

...that isn't being specific enough, a Imperial-1 class has at least 60 heavy tubrolasers which have a absolute lower limit of 200 gigatons each shot, 60 ion cannons, and at least 6 heavier turbolasers.
Whats the yield on the average turret on a IoM warship? What is the a reasonable estimate on the number of guns? Range? Star Wars ships ranges are measured in the light seconds.
It is brutally blunt point that capships don't generally engage to close combat regardless.
And keep in mind Mon Cal crusiers are noted for there efficient and powerful shields.

ROTJ novelization p.154

"Desperately, he was shouting into his comlink, over the noise of continuous explosions, talking to Ackbar in the Alliance command ship. "I said closer! Move in as close as you can and engage the Star Destroyers at point-blank range- that way the Death Star won't be able to fire at us without knocking out its own ships!"

"But no one's ever gone nose to nose at that range, between supervessels like their Destroyers and our Cruisers!" Ackbar fumed at the unthinkable- but their options were running out.

"Great!" yelled Lando, skimming over the surface of the Destroyer. "Then we're inventing a new kind of combat!"

"We know nothing about the tactics of such a confrontation!" Ackbar protested.

"We know as much as they do!" Lando hollered. "And they'll think we know more!" Bluffing was always dangerous in the last hand; but sometimes, when all your money was in the pot, it was the only way to win- and Lando never played to lose.

"At that close range, we won't last long against those Star Destroyers." Ackbar was already feeling giddy with resignation.

"We'll last longer than we will against that Death Star, and we might just take a few of them with us!" Lando whooped. With a jolt, one of his forward guns was blown away. He put the Falcon into a controlled spin, and careened around the belly of the Imperial leviathan.

With little else to lose, Ackbar decided to try Calrissian's strategy. In the next minutes, dozens of Rebel Cruisers moved in astronomically close to the Imperial Star Destroyers- and the colossal antagonists began blasting away at each other, like tanks at twenty paces, while hundreds of tiny fighters raced across their surfaces, zipping between laser bolts as they chased around the massive hulls."

[Ubiq]

WTF are you talking about?

The Emperor of the Imperium of Man has lived in the Golden Throne for 10,000 years. The IoM has had the same man ruling it for even longer. As for the economic base of the IoM, they regularly loose entire planets with billions of citizens because of the rounding errors in the census. And they have blown up entire populated worlds on the suspicion that a heretic leader was on the planet.

Utterly irrelevant seeing as how my point was that Empire has an entire galaxy's resources at its beck and call while the Imperium of Man doesn't. There are considerable regions of the Milky Way under the control of other organizations while the Empire doesn't really have any rivals on a galactic scale.


They have numerous worlds that are just giant factories.

Same for the Empire. The Techno Union from the prequels had dozens of worlds that were nothing but droid factories.

In fact, I'll go you one better. There are entire star systems like Kuat and Bilbringi that are nothing but shipyards and facilities to produce parts for those ships. If I recall correctly, just about every planet in the Kuat system has rings of shipyards that completely encircle it on top of those scattered throughout the solar system and almost all of the system's moons have been stripmined to the point that they're barely even there anymore.


Battlefleet Sol has more ships in it then the Empire had ISD's.


Source please.

At any rate, I'm going to assume that you base this on the notion that there are only 25,000 Star Destroyers in the Empire. Things like the 25,000 ISD quotes suggest that there's only one ISD for every forty member worlds in the Empire (and only one for every two thousand smaller worlds), which doesn't really match how common they seem to be in the original film. Beyond that, it's also derived from the notion that there were a thousand sectors in the Empire, which doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Going by number of Senators we see in The Phantom Menace, there ought to be two hundred times that. If the same ration of ISDs to sector holds, that's about 5,000,000 ISDs, which makes more sense when compared to the number of planets they have to patrol.

If nothing else, several of them popping up over Tatooine ought to have got a bigger reaction out of Han. Official numbers, barring those produced by Saxton, almost always lowball the Empire and never match what we see in the film.

Even then, that 25,000 does not include Venators, Victories, Tectors, or even the variant ISDs necessarily. It definitely doesn't include the first three categories. So there are far, far more Star Destroyers than just 25,000 of them.



The IoM can mass produce Death Star sized ships.

Mind providing sources for that? What ships in 40K are Death Star sized? The largest ships I see that could be considered common vessels are in the same size range as the Executor.

The fact that the Empire can build the second Death Star in secret means that they could easily build a sizable quantity of them if they devoted their full resources to doing so.


Incorrect. The ships were designed a while back but they can be replaced easily. The Forge Worlds spit them out by the thousands.

Everything I've ever heard about Warhammer battleships says that the best of the batch date back to the Heresy and can't easily be replaced.


A Lunar Class frigate is capable of death staring a planet (using Two Stage Torpedos) and out masses an ISD. That is an escort ship. The Emperor Class Battleship can have a crew of up to three million.

Hate to point this out, but an ISD is an escort ship itself. That's why it's called a Destroyer. Even then, an ISD is easily capable of doing in a planet by itself, though it takes a while.

Crew numbers are irrelevant seeing as how more men does not mean a ship is more capable. If anything, it means that they require more people to do the same job as an equivalent sized Star Wars vessel.



As for out building the IoM, not likely

Why? Because you say so?

Again, there are companies in Star Wars that are so large that they own entire sectors. One such organization owns an entire spiral arm of the galaxy.


Incorrect. First off the Star Wars Galaxy is not the Milky Way, it is significantly smaller.

Wrong. The Star Wars Encyclopedia states outright that their galaxy is larger. It's 120,000 light years across, which is almost a quarter again the size of the Milky Way. Beyond that, again, they have access to the satellite galaxies seen in the map during Attack of the Clones. The Empire's sphere of influence is larger than that of the Imperium of Man.


And second, the speed of the warp varies greatly. Sometimes you can cross the galaxy in a day, other times it can take you centuries.

Most sources say that it takes at least months to cross the galaxy using the Warp; even then, hyperdrive is relatively risk-free and travels at a consistent rate. If nothing else, there's no chance that you'll be eaten by demons just because you use your FTL system.


For every battledroid you can field the IoM can field a dozen Imperial Guardsman.


Where do you get this from exactly? The usual number for the droids is well into the hundreds of quadrillions or even quintillions in a few sources. The numbers I've seen for the Imperium of Man suggest that its population is only in the quadrillions.



We actually worked out the math back in one of the IoM vs. Star Wars threads and the IoM gains soldiers faster (and in exponentially increasing numbers). The IoM has so many soldiers that you can't kill them fast enough to stop their number from increasing.


There's no reason that the Empire couldn't field troops at the same rate as the Imperium if they wanted to do so and were on a war footing against a galactic power of their scale. None. If anything, they should have a larger population base to work from if they began a draft, the ability to mobilize them faster, and have easy access to cloning facilities to boot.


Battlefleet Sol is more than a match for the entire navy of the Galactic Empire from Star Wars.


Based on what? None of the numbers I've seen for 40K weaponry are that much more powerful than the numbers provided for Star Wars weaponry (not to the extent that it should be taken for granted that a 40K ship will slaughter it's Star Wars counterpart), nor have I seen anything that indicates that Battlefleet Sol has more than the millions of vessels attributed to the Empire by things like The Imperial Sourcebook. The Star Destroyers are merely some of the vessels constructed by the Empire and would not include anything that they gained when they nationalized the CIS members or still have left over from the Clone Wars.

If anything, most Star Wars vessels should be a rough match for an Imperium vessel of a similar size, but the Empire has a definite speed advantage and numbers on their side as well.



It is in permanent station in the Sol system. Sol is also the home of the Grey Knights. And Holy Terra is the home of the Inquisition. And the moon has been turned into 1 large defense fort.

Good for them. That'll keep Holy Terra nice and safe while the Empire is running around the rest of Segmentum Solar burning off the surface of their planets.


As for shielding, one of the IoM's psykers just mind controls the guy controlling the shield and lowers it.

Any evidence that they can alter the mind of a person at that distance?

Beyond that, one of the information books implies that shielding in Star Wars actually extends into different dimensions, so it might well prevent Warpy things like psykers from interfering with the minds of people behind the shields. If nothing else, certain types of the shielding definitely cuts people off from The Force, so it might well cut off pyskers from their power sources.


The IoM has instantaneous communications to anywhere in the galaxy thanks to their Astropaths. It's actually faster than that of the Star Wars universe.

How so? The Astropaths have to relay messages like telegraph operators as they acquire them while Vader and Obi-Wan can hold realtime conversations with people on a Core World while they're on the edge of the galaxy. Obi-Wan was even using the equivalent of a cell phone to do so.



To summarize, you have no idea what you are talking about.

Well, that applies to one of us at any rate.



You are running on the assumptions here that
a) the Star Wars galaxy is of equal size as the Milky Way,


No, it's larger. Again, sources state it's 120,000 lightyears across versus the Milky Way's 100,000.


b) the Star Wars galaxy has an equal density of inhabited worlds as the Imperium, and

There is something along the lines of fifty million permanently inhabited worlds in Star Wars. These range from ecumenopolis worlds like Coruscant and Denon with quadrillions of inhabitants (Humbarine was another, but its population was exterminated by General Grievous) down to scrub worlds like Tatooine with its population of several hundred thousands to low millions. There are other worlds like Dagobah and Endor, but those don't actually figure into the count seeing as how they're not part of the Republic or Empire.

Considering the lack of Chaos, Orks, and other hazardous living conditions, there's no reason to think that the Star Wars galaxy wouldn't be far more densely inhabited than the 40K Milky Way.


c) the Star Wars worlds have the same economic and industrial potential as the WH40k worlds on average.

Frankly, I have to wonder why they wouldn't be far better off, let alone equivalent at worst.

Hyperdrive and droid labor are accessible even on as dirt-poor a planet as Tatooine and that's the poorest inhabited world that I can of from any of the six films. From what I understand, there are plenty of member worlds in the Imperium that are stuck in what is essentially the Middle Ages. That's far worse off economically than even a Outer Rim backwater like Tatooine.

Sure, there are planets like Endor that might be stuck in the Stone Age, but, again, that wasn't part of the Empire. Even then, there were still inhabitants of that moon with access to technology roughly on the same level as the rest of the galaxy going by the Ewok movies.


I see no reason for either of these assumptions; in fact, as far as I know, each of them is wrong.

From what I can see, you hadn't really put much thought into it if that's the conclusion you came to.



Considering the Trade Federation was capable of throwing the entire Republic into civil war, I strongly presume it was not just some standard corporation by Star Wars standards.


Considering that the InterGalactic Banking Clan, the Techno Union, the Kuati Corporation, Corporate Alliance, and Tagge Co all appear to be operating on roughly the same scale as they do, I would think that while a big fish, the Trade Federation isn't that much more powerful than most of its competitors.

It's certainly not as powerful as the Corporate Sector Authority.

[Renegade Paladin]

Glancing shots from a blaster will barely wound someone. Case: In Return of the Jedi, princess Leia is struck by a blaster bolt on the arm. She is barely injured.

http://www.st-v-sw.net/STSWblaster.html
Did you seriously just cite that? Darkstar lost what little credibility he ever had years ago.

[Solo]

It's the name of a Psychic Power used by Imperium Psykers. It disrupts technology.

I thought it would be Windows ME.

[Talkkno]

"The galactic economy turns of the wealth and products of billions of worlds." Star Wars: Saga Edition Core Rulebook pg 117

[Renegade Paladin]

It is retconed that Ewoks knew the weakspots in the stormtrooper's armor(body glove), as well being very good shots.
It's not a retcon; you can clearly see that no arrows penetrated the stormtroopers' body armor. I have screenshots to prove it.

http://www.libriumarcana.com/Uploads/Rogue/Pictures/JPEGs/Star%20Wars%20Evidence/arrow3.jpg

Look at the trooper bending over on the right. The arrow is clearly in the body glove at the neck joint, not sticking through the armor; you can see it interposed over the armor plate. As an added bonus, see the arrow coming in at the trooper on the left? It isn't coming in at all; it hit his back plate dead on and bounced off:

http://www.libriumarcana.com/Uploads/Rogue/Pictures/JPEGs/Star%20Wars%20Evidence/arrowbounce1.jpg

http://www.libriumarcana.com/Uploads/Rogue/Pictures/JPEGs/Star%20Wars%20Evidence/arrowbounce2.jpg

Looks like the end for him there, doesn't it? But wait!

http://www.libriumarcana.com/Uploads/Rogue/Pictures/JPEGs/Star%20Wars%20Evidence/arrowbounce3.jpg

Yeah.

Which is not to say that the Imperium's ground forces wouldn't stomp the Galactic Empire's right into the ground; they would. The Empire's military isn't especially built for ground fighting because it doesn't need to be; it rules through intimidation and absolute control of space. And boarding actions in space are pretty much a non-issue; at the ranges involved it simply won't happen. (The Battle of Endor was explicitly a massive exception to the rule; the Rebels specifically forced a point-blank engagement to prevent the Death Star from firing on them.)

[Rutee]

<Snip>
Now, I do not mean to make this sound like an accusation of evil, but you're essentially saying "To hell with Canon" because Sci Fi Writers have no clue wtf they're talking about (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScifiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale) and applying common sense and logic to what the Empire has and can do?

Rock on, if so. Just making sure I understand.

[Talkkno]

Now, I do not mean to make this sound like an accusation of evil, but you're essentially saying "To hell with Canon" because Sci Fi Writers have no clue wtf they're talking about (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScifiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale) and applying common sense and logic to what the Empire has and can do?

Rock on, if so. Just making sure I understand.

Well technically speaking, Peallon was technically to only 1 type of Star Destroyer, the Imperial-II's, out of the dozen's or so that existed.

[tyckspoon]

Yeah.

Which is not to say that the Imperium's ground forces wouldn't stomp the Galactic Empire's right into the ground; they would. The Empire's military isn't especially built for ground fighting because it doesn't need to be; it rules through intimidation and absolute control of space. And boarding actions in space are pretty much a non-issue; at the ranges involved it simply won't happen. (The Battle of Endor was explicitly a massive exception to the rule; the Rebels specifically forced a point-blank engagement to prevent the Death Star from firing on them.)

Space Marines (and Orks, but they're Orks) carry out boarding actions all the time. This is presumably because they train primarily for ground combat and can better put that training to use in a boarding attack (not that they're bad at spacemanship); the Imperial Navy isn't quite so fond of that kind of attack. Still, if there are Marine vessels in the combat, they will be looking to close the distance and launch boarding torpedoes or arrange to teleport in boarding squads. Even the Navy will be wanting to get closer than the Empire's ships are probably used to fighting at; lances are relatively short ranged and anti-ship torpedoes work best if you launch them from too nearby for any evasive action to be taken.

This is probably another 'sci-fi writers have no sense of scale' thing, but close-quarters combat is not at all unusual in 40k space combat.

[Renegade Paladin]

Yes, but it is for Star Wars. Which means that the Galactic Imperial Navy would simply maneuver to keep the range long. Essentially, in space you can only close if both parties wish to close.

[warty goblin]

For people quoting figures of a light second engagement range for Star Wars ships, that's frankly rediculous. Their weapons are to slow moving and to clearly visable for such a thing to be practical. Hell, its not even practical to engage at a light second with light speed weaponry, let alone something that moves as slowly as blasterfire, which can be traced by the naked eye. I'm not saying that they'd lose a space battle because of this, but I thought it worth pointing out.

Now, on the Empire vs. Imperium in space, I am going to have to hand it to the Imperium, for the simple reason that Star Destroyers are after all threatened by asteroids and lone one man fighters crashing into them. I'm fairly sure that this is not the case for Imperium warships. Even if the kamikazi run is a one in a million chance, the Imperium of Man will strap 2 million dudes into cheap fighters and their population and economy won't even notice. Its not even like its something that the Imperium would have a problem with ethically- they'd probably be deluged in volunteers.

Let's look at fighters as well. Wikipedia gives the standard interceptor craft of the Imperial Navy, the Fury, as being up to 70 meters in length and armed with multiple lascannon emplacements and anti-fighter missiles as well as relatively decent armor. Again, according to Wikipedia, a carrier can hold up to six thousand of these things. That's a darn lot of fighters, only ~1,500 less than the Death Star, and that's an average carrier. Granted, the Death Star also has a lot of other craft in its hangers, but there's a lot more carriers than their are Death Stars I'll bet. At this point I'm going to give fighter superiority to the Imperium. In the movies its fairly well established that large ships get screwed over by fighters and bombers, and if the Imperium beats the Empire's fighters, all their ships have to do is to survive while the fighters and Starhawk bombers unload buckets of anti-cap ship missiles into the vulnerable rear of Star Destroyers and their ilk.

[Talkkno]

Superseded below.

[Talkkno]

Let's look at fighters as well. Wikipedia gives the standard interceptor craft of the Imperial Navy, the Fury, as being up to 70 meters in length and armed with multiple lascannon emplacements and anti-fighter missiles as well as relatively decent armor. Again, according to Wikipedia, a carrier can hold up to six thousand of these things. That's a darn lot of fighters, only ~1,500 less than the Death Star, and that's an average carrier. Granted, the Death Star also has a lot of other craft in its hangers, but there's a lot more carriers than their are Death Stars I'll bet. At this point I'm going to give fighter superiority to the Imperium. In the movies its fairly well established that large ships get screwed over by fighters and bombers, and if the Imperium beats the Empire's fighters, all their ships have to do is to survive while the fighters and Starhawk bombers unload buckets of anti-cap ship missiles into the vulnerable rear of Star Destroyers and their ilk.

Ya...after there shields get deplated by capship weaponary first...
and you aren't citing yields or anything, while its known that proton torps are at least high megaton level given armor on a outdated troop transport can shrug off megatons.

ROTJ novelization p.148
"Forward ships have made contact with the Imperial fleet, sir."

"Concentrate your fire on their power generators. If we can knock out their shields, our fighters might stand a chance against them."

ROTJ novelization p.164

Lando, Wedge, Blue Leader, and Green Wing went in to take out one of the larger Destroyers- the Empire's main communications ship. It had already been disabled by direct cannonade from the Rebel cruiser it had subsequently destroyed; but its damages were reparable- so the Rebels had to strike while it was still licking its wounds.

[Ubiq]

Now, I do not mean to make this sound like an accusation of evil, but you're essentially saying "To hell with Canon" because Sci Fi Writers have no clue wtf they're talking about (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScifiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale) and applying common sense and logic to what the Empire has and can do?


If you mean that I'm trying to apply common sense and logic based on what we see in the film, well, yeah, I'm trying at any rate.

The main problem with so much of the Expanded Universe is how utterly idiotic so much of it is. Lines like "The construction of the Executor nearly bankrupted the Empire" are mindbogglingly idiotic when they're able to build things like the Death Star II as it implies a five mile long ship (which was a stupid thing to argue in the first place as you can see the Executor is well more than five times the size of an ISD) was a bigger threat to the economic well-being of the Empire than a space station five hundred miles across.

It's odd how Star Wars tends to go the completely opposite route of most series when it comes to how their fans and writers deal with the scale of the galaxy. Rather than puff up their side like fans traditionally do, you usually see them undercut things by quite a bit. The Star Wars we see in the novels is rarely ever the one we see in the films as a result.

So when things like that come up, you have to discard them in favor of what we see in the films. Like the article you link to, it lists Coruscant as having a population of about a trillion. That's only about 150 times the population of Earth. Doesn't that seem a bit, well, low when you consider that most of the planet Earth is uninhabited whereas Coruscant is completely covered by a city with buildings around ten to twenty times as tall as skyscrapers on Earth?

Using the numbers from the Star Wars Technical Commentaries (http://theforce.net/swtc/astro.html#coruscant) on the subject, a population of one trillion only averages out to be about 2,000 people per square kilometer of the surface. Unless those skyscrapers we see in the prequel cover over a square kilometer apiece, then they're splitting two thousand people up among several buildings two to three miles tall. Even if it's only one skyscraper per square kilometer, that's even worse as it would only be about three people per floor (assuming fifteen feet to the story and a two mile tall building). By way of comparison, the Sears Tower is about one seventh as tall as these buildings and has over 10,000 people working in them (which works out to be about one hundred per floor or over thirty times what the one trillion number would suggest).



Rock on, if so. Just making sure I understand.

Again, that's what I'm trying. Don't know how well it's working, but I'm trying.


For people quoting figures of a light second engagement range for Star Wars ships, that's frankly rediculous. Their weapons are to slow moving and to clearly visable for such a thing to be practical. Hell, its not even practical to engage at a light second with light speed weaponry, let alone something that moves as slowly as blasterfire, which can be traced by the naked eye. I'm not saying that they'd lose a space battle because of this, but I thought it worth pointing out.

Star Destroyers having ranges of at least light seconds is supported by the fact that Vader wanted to attack Hoth from outside the system. Why else get angry at Ozzel like that? Beyond that, the two fleets in Return of the Jedi begin exchanging fire while the Rebels are on the other side of the system from the Imperial ships.

As far as the speed of turbolaser bolts go, if you watch closely, you can usually see some sort of interaction with the target before the visible bolt reaches it. As such, those are most likely tracer fire and not the actual weapon.


Now, on the Empire vs. Imperium in space, I am going to have to hand it to the Imperium, for the simple reason that Star Destroyers are after all threatened by asteroids and lone one man fighters crashing into them.

In the first case, the Star Destroyers suffer damage after being in the field for several hours and being constantly bombarded by asteroids as a result. The Executor, on the other hand, was taking fire from the entire Rebel fleet when it went down.


That's a darn lot of fighters, only ~1,500 less than the Death Star, and that's an average carrier. Granted, the Death Star also has a lot of other craft in its hangers, but there's a lot more carriers than their are Death Stars I'll bet.


The source for the Death Star's fighter component is the same that attributes 144 fighters to the Executor, which suggests that a ship ten times the length of a ISD only has twice as many fighters (the fact that a ship the size of an ISD only has 72 fighters is a bit foolish to start with when you consider that a Venator carries over 400). Which is yet another a symbol of just how stupid some of the secondary sources are and how they don't understand the sheer size of the ships that they're dealing with. If nothing else, it doesn't match the number of fighters we see during the Emperor's arrival in Return of the Jedi.

[warty goblin]

Given that a fairly large Imperial fleet had to move out of an asteroid field because the asteroids were a threat, I shudder to think what a railgun bank on a Imperium ship could do to a Star Destroyer.

[graymachine]

As a note, the bio agent in a Virus Bomb isn't really a virus in the traditional sense; it is simply called this as hyperbole. It's more accurate to think of it as an agent that spreads exponentially through the biosphere, rendering all of biomass into sludge that has released all of its gases into the atmosphere. It takes the agent a few minutes to complete this process on a planet, after which it then burns itself out. To answer the question on how many ship-hours this takes, I'll be generous here and say 20 minutes. Although the bio agent is assumed to have been engineered in the Dark Age of Technology there is the slight possibility that it is a produce of the Chaos God Nurgle, given its insane efficiency at killing.

[Rutee]

Again, that's what I'm trying. Don't know how well it's working, but I'm trying.

I think you're doing a pretty good job so far; Heck, my repeated statement on the Imperium is that their only real numbers advantage is that their canon is actually on a numbers scale with a semblance of accuracy.

[Talkkno]

Given that a fairly large Imperial fleet had to move out of an asteroid field because the asteroids were a threat, I shudder to think what a railgun bank on a Imperium ship could do to a Star Destroyer.

In the novel Death Star, it states among the many types of defenses on the Death Star were railguns, given this is canon proof that they were implented at least a nominal scale, it is logical to assume since they have the technology, yet it is not used for capship weaponry besides the above example, it is reasonable to conclude they are not more effective then turbolasers or else everyone would be using them.

[Rutee]

In the novel Death Star, it states among the many types of defenses on the Death Star were railguns, given this is canon proof that they were implented at least a nominal scale, it is logical to assume since they have the technology, yet it is not used for capship weaponry besides the above example, it is reasonable to conclude they are not more effective then turbolasers or else everyone would be using them.

Why would it be used at all if it were less effective? I can think of a myriad of reasons why a superior technology wouldn't be made standard.

...Of course, this is the Empire we're talking about, so the only one I can think of is "It performed better but some general killed it because it made him look bad." Then again, that still wouldn't handle the Rebel Alliance or other factions, so..

[Ubiq]

Given that a fairly large Imperial fleet had to move out of an asteroid field because the asteroids were a threat, I shudder to think what a railgun bank on a Imperium ship could do to a Star Destroyer.

They didn't leave the asteroid field because of the damage. They left because leaving the field would improve Vader's cell phone reception.


I think you're doing a pretty good job so far; Heck, my repeated statement on the Imperium is that their only real numbers advantage is that their canon is actually on a numbers scale with a semblance of accuracy.

One thing that I don't think people quite understand is how much of a difference hyperdrive makes for the average citizen of the Empire and the Imperium.

Hyperdrive reduces the whole galaxy to a situation like our current world: almost any destination is merely a day or two away by airplane.

Warp, on the other hand, is an extremely dangerous method of travel than can take days if you're lucky or have a short distance to travel, but weeks or months under most circumstances.

It's comparing travel by jet airline to covered wagons.

[Eita]

Darth was mad at Ozzel because he wanted to slink in without being detected.

"They have raised the shield. They must have spotted us."

<snip>

"You have failed me for the last time."

He wanted to attack quickly and quietly.

Death Star sized ships? I give you the Ramilies Starfort. (http://us.games-workshop.com/games/bfg/downloads/assets/Ramilies.pdf)

It's quite clearly shown to be huge compared to Imperial Battleships.

[Talkkno]

Darth was mad at Ozzel because he wanted to slink in without being detected.

"They have raised the shield. They must have spotted us."

<snip>

"You have failed me for the last time."

He wanted to attack quickly and quietly.

Death Star sized ships? I give you the Ramilies Starfort. (http://us.games-workshop.com/games/bfg/downloads/assets/Ramilies.pdf)

It's quite clearly shown to be huge compared to Imperial Battleships.

That doesn't invaldaite the previous point however.

[Eita]

You mean the Battle of Endor one? Uhh, yeah, no. Shots were exchanged when they saw each other. That's not on the other side of the system. They had just orbited around.

[Ubiq]

Darth was mad at Ozzel because he wanted to slink in without being detected.


The specific complaint was that they came out too close to the system. Again, it makes more sense if they were planning to slip up and begin firing from outside of the solar system.

Even then, they were still on the outer edge of the system when Piett informed Vader that bombardment wasn't actually an option. So they must have been planning to do even then.



Death Star sized ships? I give you the Ramilies Starfort. (http://us.games-workshop.com/games/bfg/downloads/assets/Ramilies.pdf)


Strictly speaking, that's not a ship as it doesn't move under it's own power, but is towed by other vessels. Death Stars can move by themselves so they qualify as ships as well as space stations. If they didn't need to be able to move, the Empire could have easily made them far larger than what they did.


It's quite clearly shown to be huge compared to Imperial Battleships.

To what extent?

For instance, Battleships seem to be roughly the same length as Star Dreadnaughts like the Executor. The second Death Star has roughly 4.5 million times the volume of the Executor or an Imperium Battleship. The first Death Star has about 35,000 times as much volume.

Is a Ramilies starfort over four million times as big as a Battleship? Is it even 35,000 times?

[Renegade Paladin]

Given that a fairly large Imperial fleet had to move out of an asteroid field because the asteroids were a threat, I shudder to think what a railgun bank on a Imperium ship could do to a Star Destroyer.
"Move us out of the asteroid field, so we can send a clear transmission."

They moved out of the asteroid field so it would stop screwing with their comms when the Emperor wanted to talk to Vader, not because it was tearing them apart.

[sikyon]

Did you seriously just cite that? Darkstar lost what little credibility he ever had years ago.

Oh wow that is such a great argument. I have never heard a better one ever in my entire life. You know what? If you think it's wrong, prove it. Your statement means nothing. I am tired of people belittling the site. Not once, ever, in my entire life have I seen a single mathematically supported argument drawn from highest level cannon against anything presented in the site.

Please, for once in my life, someone present a well thought out, movie supported argument against this.


Upon learning that Obi-Wan is in danger on the planet Geonosis, Amidala and Anakin depart Tatooine to attempt a rescue. Amidala argues that they can arrive much faster than any Jedi force from Coruscant, given that Geonosis is "less than a parsec away."

as this site shows http://www.st-v-sw.net/STSWaotcparsec.html#conc2
You can measure the time the trip took using the time passed on Couresant inbetween. Giving a limit on hyperdrive speeds.

Sure, you can take EU stuff into consideration. However, the movies are cannon and EU stuff is a level below. Anything in which EU stuff diagrees with the movies is flat out wrong on the part of the EU. If you don't accept this, then you forgo consistency and nothing can be extrapolated from SW universe data.

[Talkkno]

as this site shows http://www.st-v-sw.net/STSWaotcparsec.html#conc2
You can measure the time the trip took using the time passed on Couresant inbetween. Giving a limit on hyperdrive speeds.

Sure, you can take EU stuff into consideration. However, the movies are cannon and EU stuff is a level below. Anything in which EU stuff diagrees with the movies is flat out wrong on the part of the EU. If you don't accept this, then you forgo consistency and nothing can be extrapolated from SW universe data.

Some how Amidala is somehow a expert on astronavgation? That hyperspace travel is not merely a matter of traveling in straight lines? That the space lanes from Tattoine to Geninsous are presumbly much less traveled then one orgianting from Courstant? In the ROTJ novelisation "It [the Rebel fleet] was hundreds of light-years from the Death Star -- but in hyperspace, all time was a moment, and the deadliness of an attack was measured not in distance but in precision." (page 145) Now, we know that the Rebel fleet does not even jump into hyperspace until after Threepio informs Han that there is a secret entrance to the shield bunker "on the other side of the ridge." Its not sure how long it takes the Rebel Fleet to arrive at Endor, but the difference could not reasonably be more than one day. The lower limit speed is thus 200 light years over twenty four hours, or nearly 75,000c. A much more reasonable speed is 400 light years over two hours, which comes out to 1,752,000c

[Destro_Yersul]

...that isn't being specific enough, a Imperial-1 class has at least 60 heavy tubrolasers which have a absolute lower limit of 200 gigatons each shot, 60 ion cannons, and at least 6 heavier turbolasers.
Whats the yield on the average turret on a IoM warship? What is the a reasonable estimate on the number of guns? Range? Star Wars ships ranges are measured in the light seconds.
It is brutally blunt point that capships don't generally engage to close combat regardless.
And keep in mind Mon Cal crusiers are noted for there efficient and powerful shields.

That's as specific as I can get. I have no knowledge of any source where the armament and output of an Imperial battleship is stated. It does, however, Dwarf the Imperial-1 class by approximately 6 kilometers in length. I therefore propose that it has a hell of a lot more guns and power than the Imperial-1. Exactly how much more I can't say, but that's what happens when you've got no specifics to work with.

[Ubiq]

Please, for once in my life, someone present a well thought out, movie supported argument against this.


Here's Curtis Saxton's take on it:


The Galactic Empire is over 120,000 light years in diameter but has only existed under Palpatine's government for a mere quarter-century or so. If news of the establishment of Palpatine's regime was carried outward from the Core Systems in such a way that it only reached the Outer Rim Territories by the time of his death then the starships bearing the news would have average travel velocities of over 5000c. However we know that transgalactic travel is feasible within the early part of an adult lifetime (Han Solo crossed the galaxy before he turned 29), and furthermore the coherence of the Empire as a single political, economic and cultural entity demands trans-galactic travel times of several weeks at the most. According to this propagation timescale the equivalent realspace speed of hyperdrive travel is typically greater than 1,200,000c. This speed scale is supported in several novels references (eg. Dark Force Rising p.212).

Going by that, it would take 60 years for a ship to travel from the Core to the Rim according to the speeds calculated by Darkstar, which is ridiculous seeing as how we see it happen numerous times in the series and those trips invariably happen in a day.

For instance, Vader states in Star Wars that "This will be a day long remembered. It has seen the end of Kenobi and will soon see the end of the Rebellion." Therefore, from Alderaan in The Core to the Outer Rim is less than a day, which means that the Death Star travelled well faster than 1,200,000c. That's based on the notion of crossing the galaxy in weeks while the Death Star is able to do so in days.

This is backed up by the fact that the Empire sent scouts to Dantooine (on the outskirts of the galaxy) to investigate the Rebel base from Alderaan who reported back the same day.

Ever see Behind the Magic? It provides a chart that says that Tatooine to Alderaan is only a mere eight hours of travel. That's another instance where you see travel across a third to half the galaxy in less than a day.

Not only are Darkstar's numbers off, but they're at least a thousand times less than what the films and simple logic suggests.

[Renegade Paladin]

Oh wow that is such a great argument. I have never heard a better one ever in my entire life. You know what? If you think it's wrong, prove it. Your statement means nothing. I am tired of people belittling the site. Not once, ever, in my entire life have I seen a single mathematically supported argument drawn from highest level cannon against anything presented in the site.

Please, for once in my life, someone present a well thought out, movie supported argument against this.
Very well.

http://stardestroyer.net/Empire/HateMail/RSA/

Hehehe. I was quoted at the top of the page. :smallbiggrin:

Moving right along, you asked me to substantiate my claim. My claim was that Robert Scott Anderson, AKA Darkstar AKA Guardian2000 has lost all credibility. This is due to the fact that he has in the past claimed:

* That humans in Star Wars naturally have metal spines. (In response to the fact that Vader's skeleton, seen during his electrocution by Palpatine, clearly displays metal vertebrae.)

* Since I brought this up in response to you talking about his blaster page, this is appropriate: He claims that Docking Bay 94 was composed of packed dirt, and that it is therefore not impressive for a blaster to blow a big hole in it. I don't know what movie he was watching, but that's clearly concrete.

* Leia commenting that "the fleet will be here any moment" prior to the Battle of Endor to the contrary, he contends that the Rebel fleet did not arrive until dawn the next day. Because the stormtroopers would hang out drinking coffee for a day before marching the captured rebels outside.

As for his more mundane arguments, I present the complete rebuttal of his site as it stood at the end of 2002 (http://stardestroyer.net/Empire/HateMail/RSA/MoO/index.html). Not much new has come up since then, so that should be sufficient; let me know if you need something else refuted and I'll do so, because to my knowledge the man has never come up with a coherent argument in his life, and I've been involved in this debate for a long time.

[Eita]

The specific complaint was that they came out too close to the system. Again, it makes more sense if they were planning to slip up and begin firing from outside of the solar system.

Even then, they were still on the outer edge of the system when Piett informed Vader that bombardment wasn't actually an option. So they must have been planning to do even then.

I quote the script: "INTERIOR: VADER'S STAR DESTROYER -- VADER'S CHAMBER -- MEDITATION CUBICLE

The dark cubicle is illuminated by a single shaft of light
which falls on the brooding Dark Lord as he sits on a raised
meditation cube. General Veers enters the room and approaches
the silent, unmoving Vader. Although seemingly very sure of
himself, Veers is still not bold enough to interrupt the
meditating lord. The younger general stands quietly at
attention until the evil presence speaks.

VADER: What is it, General?

VEERS: My lord, the fleet has moves out of light-speed. Com-Scan has
detected an energy field protecting an area around the sixth planet of
the Hoth system. The field is strong enough to deflect any
bombardment.

VADER: (angrily) The Rebels are alerted to our presence. Admiral Ozzel
came out of light-speed too close to the system.

VEERS: He felt surprise was wiser...

VADER: He is as clumsy as he is stupid. General, prepare your troops
for a surface attack.

VEERS: Yes, my lord.

Veers turns smartly and leaves as Vader activates a large
viewscreen showing the bridge of his mighty ship. Admiral
Ozzel appears on the viewscreen, standing slightly in front of
Captain Piett.

OZZEL: Lord Vader, the fleet has moved out of light-speed, and we're
preparing to...Aaagh!

VADER: You have failed me for the last time, Admiral. Captain Piett."

True, you can still support it from this, but, wouldn't any competent tactician make it so that death came unseen? However, just because ranges aren't typically recorded in light seconds (impossible since most blaster bolts dissipate rather quickly) that doesn't mean you can't do such a bombardment with missiles. They could do that, but only to a stationary target thus making it impractical for space combat. I could go on if you wish, but I am somewhat tired.


Strictly speaking, that's not a ship as it doesn't move under it's own power, but is towed by other vessels. Death Stars can move by themselves so they qualify as ships as well as space stations. If they didn't need to be able to move, the Empire could have easily made them far larger than what they did.

A Ramiles Starfort does move under its own power. Except for Warp Travel. Technically, that makes it a ship.


To what extent?

For instance, Battleships seem to be roughly the same length as Star Dreadnaughts like the Executor. The second Death Star has roughly 4.5 million times the volume of the Executor or an Imperium Battleship. The first Death Star has about 35,000 times as much volume.

Is a Ramilies starfort over four million times as big as a Battleship? Is it even 35,000 times?

Hmm... True. Very well. The Imperium does not have Death Star sized ships. Chaos however has one. Abbadon's Planet Killer.

[Destro_Yersul]

Edit: Found something.

In the Novel "Execution Hour" one Hades Class heavy Cruiser is blown in half by five torpedoes The sixth one detonates inside the hull, obliterating the remains. The Dictator Class Cruiser that fired those has Six such torpedo ports, three on each side. This can be confirmed by counting the torpedo ports on the actual model.

The Retribution class battleship would appear to have a similar number of torpedo parts, albeit much larger ones. It would also appear, based on direct size comparison, that the warhead on a torpedo fired by a Retribution class is bigger than an Imperial-1's bridge. The two lance batteries mounted on the bottom are bigger than the Imperial-1 itself.

[GolemsVoice]

Ok, here is what Codex Battlefleet Gothic has to say on the production of Imperial Ships:


Imperial Ships originate from four main sources: those salvaged from hulks drifting in space (very occasionally), those build by planetary overlords as part of their tithes to the Imperium, those build by the major fleet bases of the Imperial Navy, and those build at the forge worlds of the Adeptus Mechanicus

It is also mentioned that salvaged ships are highly sought after, because of their age and therefore superior technology, but it is also evident that the Imperium is mor than able to rely on own production.

Also, the ship's statistics given in the codex show that an Imperial Emperor Battleship only has 4 hitpoints less than the blackstone fortress (fortress 16, Emperor 12), which shows how hard the thing is. Even Abaddon himself could only capture the blackstone fortresses because he found a way shut down their power.

EDIT: Found out more! There is actually a scenario called Exterminatus! The basic setup is this that the attackers have one ship in their fleet carrying the Armaggedon weapon. The attackers must bring this ship close to the planet so that it may fire, while the defenders must prevent this.
Of course the scenario does not go into details, but it is obvious that only one weapon is needed to destroy an entire planet, and likewise only one shot, with possibilities for further damage within the planetary system.

[WNxHasoroth]

Judging from the weapon ranges found in BFG, Imperial ships could fire at Earth from Saturn. I don't think any universe is quite as capable of that range but I could be wrong.

Whilst aiming the damn weapons would be a pain, relatively fixed positions like planets could be nuked to pieces far away from orbital defenses.

[Talkkno]

Judging from the weapon ranges found in BFG, Imperial ships could fire at Earth from Saturn. I don't think any universe is quite as capable of that range but I could be wrong.

Whilst aiming the damn weapons would be a pain, relatively fixed positions like planets could be nuked to pieces far away from orbital defenses.

Galxey Gun missiles can go from one end to the galaxy to another with yield settings, capable of disgenerating anything from a small base to a entire planet. Though that is a outlier, so thats a moot point.
What Destro_Yersul is interesting, reminds me of Covenant from Halo, in the way they only got a few big guns on there ships, but each of them are really powerful, as a flagship measuring several kilometers only had about 6 plasma turrets, but each of them were more then enough disable to UNSC ships and other Covenant ships with equal ease with only one or two shots.(Halo:First Strike)

[sikyon]

As for his more mundane arguments, I present the complete rebuttal of his site as it stood at the end of 2002 (http://stardestroyer.net/Empire/HateMail/RSA/MoO/index.html). Not much new has come up since then, so that should be sufficient; let me know if you need something else refuted and I'll do so, because to my knowledge the man has never come up with a coherent argument in his life, and I've been involved in this debate for a long time.

I'm not going to argue about the speed of travel, because it is crazily inconsistent. It travels at the speed of plot, really.

However, on blasters, from the site you quoted:


Anderson showcases several screenshots of Princess Leia being fired on in RotJ. The blaster burns her arm, but does little damage. He then goes on to claim that the shot is representative of blaster firepower in SW by stating that he would rather fire bullets than blaster shots. This is reasonable, from this particularly isolated example, but additional images from the movies clearly disprove his basic premise.

The aditional images the site then provides are of blasters vs inanimate objects. The low damaging property of blasters against flesh is never explored or refuted. He simply sidesteps the question.

This is like saying, "OK. We want to find out how much energy it takes to break a rope by pulling on it. We have 1 test, which shows that it takes 5000J of energy to break it. On the other hand, we have another test which shows that if we melt the rope, it takes 300J of energy. Well then, let's use the lower end test."

Basically, the blaster firepower evaluated against inorganic targets, and then applied to organic targets would be reasonable if there were not direct evidence to the contrary.

One does not do computer simulations if one already has experimental data. If a paper were to be published based on this, it would be rejected upon peer review.

So do not presume to judge the effectivness of a blaster by how much damage it does to a rock. Blasters are ment to kill people, not rocks, and they have been demonstrated to be ineffective at that job. It doesn't matter one whit how effecivly they can blow up rocks. In the presence of direct evidence to the contrary, attempting to link the two with conventional physics is not possible.

[Talkkno]

This is like saying, "OK. We want to find out how much energy it takes to break a rope by pulling on it. We have 1 test, which shows that it takes 5000J of energy to break it. On the other hand, we have another test which shows that if we melt the rope, it takes 300J of energy. Well then, let's use the lower end test."

Basically, the blaster firepower evaluated against inorganic targets, and then applied to organic targets would be reasonable if there were not direct evidence to the contrary.

One does not do computer simulations if one already has experimental data. If a paper were to be published based on this, it would be rejected upon peer review.

So do not presume to judge the effectivness of a blaster by how much damage it does to a rock. Blasters are ment to kill people, not rocks, and they have been demonstrated to be ineffective at that job. It doesn't matter one whit how effecivly they can blow up rocks. In the presence of direct evidence to the contrary, attempting to link the two with conventional physics is not possible.
.....They were merely carbines used mainly for police work, not a clone trooper's rifle that could blast droidaka's into pieces. Besides, the Force has been shown to give Jedi the ablity to survive more then a few blaster shots, Leia was no Jedi at that point, but she was guided by the "Will of the Force" so to speak, the same way how Luke destroyed the first DS1.

[sikyon]

.....They were merely carbines used mainly for police work, not a clone trooper's rifle that could blast droidaka's into pieces. Besides, the Force has been shown to give Jedi the ablity to survive more then a few blaster shots, Leia was no Jedi at that point, but she was guided by the "Will of the Force" so to speak, the same way how Luke destroyed the first DS1.

Why would they make a carbine like that. I don't remember very high rates of fire even. Compactness is nice but something that ineffective should not be used as a weapon, ever, and that demonstrates something much worse than storm trooper ineffectivness - terrible engineering on the part of the empire.

Do you have any evidence to support that the force somehow reduced the blaster impact?

[Talkkno]

Why would they make a carbine like that. I don't remember very high rates of fire even. Compactness is nice but something that ineffective should not be used as a weapon, ever, and that demonstrates something much worse than storm trooper ineffectivness - terrible engineering on the part of the empire.

Do you have any evidence to support that the force somehow reduced the blaster impact?

"Leia, the force is strong in my family" (Or something to that effect)
Given failed Padawans that wash out so badly that they are regulated to being farmers can deflect blaster bolts, I would argue Leia was following her part in the desinity as accorded by the Living Force by helping restoring the balence in the Force. Even subcousionally it will work its ways, such how Anakin was the only human who enough skill to pilot a podracer despite his igorance, and Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn speculated that the will of the Force caused his Anakin's birth.

[warty goblin]

.....They were merely carbines used mainly for police work, not a clone trooper's rifle that could blast droidaka's into pieces. Besides, the Force has been shown to give Jedi the ablity to survive more then a few blaster shots, Leia was no Jedi at that point, but she was guided by the "Will of the Force" so to speak, the same way how Luke destroyed the first DS1.


Might I enquire why a high priority military base guarded by, I believe, a crack Storm Trooper battalion (I could be misremembering this point though), but certainly a detachment of the Imperial Army, equiped with heavy armor (AT-ATs, AT-STs, although those are light), was armed with weapons designed for police work? Its not like they were in the middle of a city and had to worry about not upsetting the populace. Anybody trying to gain access to that bunker without permission is either 1) An ewok, and therefore should be killed on principle, or 2) A rebel, and therefore killable on principle. They don't need weak weapons for that job, they need powerful ones.

Personally, I seem to recall the blasters doing just fine in Ep. 4, and would be content with a "plot armor" explanation for their ineffectiveness against Leia, because we all know that protagonist flesh is just more resiliant, although their clothes are seemingly less so.

In terms of power I'd put a blaster at about the same level as a lasgun, the important difference being that the lasgun is just about the weakest weapon used by the Imperium, and the blaster is just about the only infantry weapon used by the Empire.

[Talkkno]

Might I enquire why a high priority military base guarded by, I believe, a crack Storm Trooper battalion (I could be misremembering this point though), but certainly a detachment of the Imperial Army, equiped with heavy armor (AT-ATs, AT-STs, although those are light), was armed with weapons designed for police work? Its not like they were in the middle of a city and had to worry about not upsetting the populace. Anybody trying to gain access to that bunker without permission is either 1) An ewok, and therefore should be killed on principle, or 2) A rebel, and therefore killable on principle. They don't need weak weapons for that job, they need powerful ones.

Personally, I seem to recall the blasters doing just fine in Ep. 4, and would be content with a "plot armor" explanation for their ineffectiveness against Leia, because we all know that protagonist flesh is just more resiliant, although their clothes are seemingly less so.

In terms of power I'd put a blaster at about the same level as a lasgun, the important difference being that the lasgun is just about the weakest weapon used by the Imperium, and the blaster is just about the only infantry weapon used by the Empire.
We went over this already.
"During the Endor battle, the most likely reason for the lack of grenade use is volatility and simple overconfidence. Inside the bunker, with its important equipment and the Rebels' explosive charges all over the walls, it would have obviously been insane to use grenades. Outside the bunker, they were felled by simple overconfidence. Their light armament reveals deplorable overconfidence (the scout troopers had handguns, the stormtroopers had carbines, and they didn't bother carrying any of the heavy weapons we saw in ANH or TESB), so it's really no surprise that they didn't bother carrying grenades. Before we leap to the conclusion that such foolishness is impossible in the Emperor's "finest troops", I would urge readers to study the example of the US Army's elite Rangers, SEALs, and Delta Force commandos in Somalia. During a disastrous mission in which two Blackhawk helicopters were shot down, they demonstrated exactly the kind of overconfidence that I'm describing. They arrogantly performed what should have been a night operation in broad daylight, and they didn't bother bringing any "unnecessary" dead weight, such as water canteens, bayonets, or night-sight equipment. Some of them even removed the armour plates from their flak jackets, so they would be more comfortable in the heat! Worse yet, mission security was horrendous; Somali staff at the U.S. Embassy easily discovered the time and place of the mission, and forwarded this information to Aidid's men! The problems didn't even stop there; they had no heavy reinforcements or armour in case of serious resistance, and they only had one rescue team, which became a huge problem when not one, but two choppers went down. They couldn't even co-ordinate their activities; the Rangers and Delta Force commandos butted heads over tactics and chain of command, and an Orion spy plane wasn't permitted to give direct instructions to the men on the ground even though it was the only platform with a clear view of what was happening. The litany of mistakes continued with the rescue convoys, which literally got lost and ambushed en route to the crash site because of unfamiliarity with the city streets and poor direction from the helicopters above. In the confusion, the Americans fired on anyone with a gun, and then anyone who was around someone with a gun, and eventually, at anything that moved, thus causing hundreds of civilian casualties. A simple mission to kidnap two men turned into a chaotic 12 hour firefight, in which nearly a hundred American soldiers were killed or wounded. If this were a fictional war story, it would have been lambasted for being hopelessly unrealistic. People would say "no real soldiers would be so incompetent". But these men were not incompetent; they were overconfident and inadequately prepared. They demonstrated to the world (at least, the part of the world that reads books instead of getting all their information from action movies) that even the best trained, best equipped soldiers can still can be stymied by poor preparation and the inherent difficulties of combat in difficult and unfamiliar terrain."

[Renegade Paladin]

However, on blasters, from the site you quoted:



The aditional images the site then provides are of blasters vs inanimate objects. The low damaging property of blasters against flesh is never explored or refuted. He simply sidesteps the question.

This is like saying, "OK. We want to find out how much energy it takes to break a rope by pulling on it. We have 1 test, which shows that it takes 5000J of energy to break it. On the other hand, we have another test which shows that if we melt the rope, it takes 300J of energy. Well then, let's use the lower end test."
Yes, what you're saying is exactly like saying that. The hit against Leia is so radically different from every other instance of blaster performance as to be an outlier. Now, tell me what you do with outliers when they crop up in an analysis. Hint: It isn't "take the low-end outlier as representative and throw out everything else."

[warty goblin]

Ah, OK, so in other words the Storm Troopers were commanded by morons/are morons. Makes sense, although I never mentioned grenade use. Also, guarding that bunker on Endor with police rifles is, IMHO, a degree of stupidity beyond that of US forces in Somalia, who after all actually did bring their military grade guns, as opposed to police sidearms, which is apparently what the Stormtroopers did.

[Hasivel]

At any rate, I'm going to assume that you base this on the notion that there are only 25,000 Star Destroyers in the Empire. Things like the 25,000 ISD quotes suggest that there's only one ISD for every forty member worlds in the Empire (and only one for every two thousand smaller worlds), which doesn't really match how common they seem to be in the original film. Beyond that, it's also derived from the notion that there were a thousand sectors in the Empire, which doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Going by number of Senators we see in The Phantom Menace, there ought to be two hundred times that. If the same ration of ISDs to sector holds, that's about 5,000,000 ISDs, which makes more sense when compared to the number of planets they have to patrol.If only there was some sort of in-movie quote to give us a vague idea of how big the fleet is. Something like:

"The Entire Fleet couldn't destroy the whole planet, it would take a thousand ships. . ."

[Talkkno]

If only there was some sort of in-movie quote to give us a vague idea of how big the fleet is. Something like:

"The Entire Fleet couldn't destroy the whole planet, it would take a thousand ships. . ."

"The Death Star carries a firepower greater than half the star fleet."
General Dodonna

[Renegade Paladin]

If only there was some sort of in-movie quote to give us a vague idea of how big the fleet is. Something like:

"The Entire Fleet couldn't destroy the whole planet, it would take a thousand ships. . ."
1.) You assume Solo knows the exact size and composition of the Imperial fleet because...

2.) Note that the line goes on to say "with more firepower than I've ever..." before he's cut off by the sensors picking up the TIE fighter. So not only would it take a thousand ships, it would take a thousand ships with more firepower than any existing ships, even assuming that Solo both knew what he was talking about and was not engaging in hyperbole in the heat of a very stressful moment.

3.) A galaxy-spanning empire could not maintain supremacy with only a thousand ships; they could not possibly patrol the entire vastness of space with so few. The Empire is galaxy-spanning, therefore we know that Solo's statement cannot be correct.

4.) If the Empire only has a thousand ships, then why were they investing so many of them to chase the Falcon over Tatooine? If there are only a thousand warships, total, then that many Star Destroyers should have gotten more of a reaction out of Han than "don't worry, we'll lose 'em."

5.) Later in the movie, General Dodonna states that the Death Star possesses firepower "greater than half the Starfleet." If its firepower was actually greater than the whole Starfleet, Dodonna would have said that; therefore we may suppose that the Imperial Starfleet can, in fact, command firepower greater than the Death Star alone and therefore could, in fact, destroy a planet. That Han writes this off as impossible can easily be put down to the fact that they'd simply never done so, therefore he didn't conceive of it.

In short, you can't rely on that as an absolute statement on Imperial firepower.

[sikyon]

Yes, what you're saying is exactly like saying that. The hit against Leia is so radically different from every other instance of blaster performance as to be an outlier. Now, tell me what you do with outliers when they crop up in an analysis. Hint: It isn't "take the low-end outlier as representative and throw out everything else."

Provide the rest of your statstical data, taken from top level cannon, relating to unarmored limb hits. Prove that it is an outlier by providing the rest of the data set to which it belongs. Hint: The data set is not called "all blaster hits" it is called "unarmored limb blaster hits".

[13_CBS]

Provide the rest of your statstical data, taken from top level cannon, relating to unarmored limb hits. Prove that it is an outlier by providing the rest of the data set to which it belongs. Hint: The data set is not called "all blaster hits" it is called "unarmored limb blaster grazing hits".

Fixed it for ya.

[Rutee]

Provide the rest of your statstical data, taken from top level cannon, relating to unarmored limb hits. Prove that it is an outlier by providing the rest of the data set to which it belongs. Hint: The data set is not called "all blaster hits" it is called "unarmored limb blaster hits".

Why is the data set 'Unarmored limb hits" instead of "All blaster hits"? I thought we were discussing the efficacy of Star Wars blasters. It'd seem like you want all hits, not an extremely small subset of hits.

[Ubiq]

True, you can still support it from this, but, wouldn't any competent tactician make it so that death came unseen?


Well, yeah, but Ozzel wasn't competent which is why Vader killed him.


However, just because ranges aren't typically recorded in light seconds (impossible since most blaster bolts dissipate rather quickly) that doesn't mean you can't do such a bombardment with missiles. They could do that, but only to a stationary target thus making it impractical for space combat. I could go on if you wish, but I am somewhat tired.


Turbolaser shots attenuate with distance due to energy losses as the visible lateral light emissions. However the waste luminosity is small compared to the energy that a shot typically carries, and the attenuation range is generally longer than a solar system. Therefore attenuation is normally not a significant factor affecting weapons ranges in starship combat.

An Iowa class battleship's 16 inch guns have a range of approximately 23 miles. Now, it's not optimal to use those guns to fire at a moving target that far away, but that doesn't mean that those guns can't hit a static target at that distance. Nor does it mean that they can't hit a moving target either, though it'd require anticipating heading, speed, and other factors that can affect such things. The better sensors you use, the more likely you are to hit to target.

Same for turbolasers.

The official range for the heavy turbolasers on a Venator is ten lightminutes (which would suggest that the larger, more powerful ISDs would have even longer ranges for their turbolasers as it's basically an issue of how much power is pumped into each shot). Since that came from Saxton, who knows his stuff, and, more importantly, isn't flattly impossible according to canon, I don't see any reason not to accept it.


A Ramiles Starfort does move under its own power. Except for Warp Travel. Technically, that makes it a ship.

A barge would be a more appropriate description. If nothing else, I wouldn't classify it as a starship because it lacks a proper method of interstellar travel.



Hmm... True. Very well. The Imperium does not have Death Star sized ships. Chaos however has one. Abbadon's Planet Killer.

Wasn't that built in the Eye, where the laws of physics have went on a permanent vacation? The Empire is able to build Death Stars without the benefit of major production facilities.


If only there was some sort of in-movie quote to give us a vague idea of how big the fleet is. Something like:

"The Entire Fleet couldn't destroy the whole planet, it would take a thousand ships. . ."

As somebody else already pointed out, you omitted the rest of the statement. More importantly, the Republic had more than a thousand ships during the Battle of Coruscant in Revenge of the Sith. Since the Empire is much more militarized than the Republic, the notion that they have less than a thousand ships is untenable.

[Hasivel]

1.) You assume Solo knows the exact size and composition of the Imperial fleet because...This is hilarious. First Amidala, who was a skilled pilot as we saw in Ep 2, can't navigate. Now Solo has no idea how many many ships exist in the galaxy by well over an order of magnitude or three. Does anybody in the SW universe have an competence at all?

Well let's see, the fact that he is, according to the novelization and most of the EU fluff, a former officer of the Imperial Navy? And not just any officer, a decorated Combat Veteran to boot.

Now it is highly likely that Solo doesn't know the exact size and composition of the fleet. But being as he was a part of the war machine, it's equally absurd to assume he has no clue whatsoever about how large the fleet he served in is. Your suggestion here is akin to having a modern day US Marine officer-turned-mercenary estimate that the US Army has a thousand men in it. The fact is Solo is a smart cookie, he used to be an Imperial, and as a smuggler it would behoove him to keep track of his enemies.


2.) Note that the line goes on to say "with more firepower than I've ever..." before he's cut off by the sensors picking up the TIE fighter. So not only would it take a thousand ships, it would take a thousand ships with more firepower than any existing ships, even assuming that Solo both knew what he was talking about and was not engaging in hyperbole in the heat of a very stressful moment.Actually the part about "any existing ships" is entirely something you just made up. We have no idea what Solo was going to say. Perhaps ". . . than I've ever seen in one place." for instance.


3.) A galaxy-spanning empire could not maintain supremacy with only a thousand ships; they could not possibly patrol the entire vastness of space with so few. The Empire is galaxy-spanning, therefore we know that Solo's statement cannot be correct.Now you're trying to apply real-life reason to override the canon. And making your own estimate of what is and isn't possible. Han Solo knows the SW universe better than you do. He lives there, and you did not serve as an officer in the Imperial Fleet as he did.


4.) If the Empire only has a thousand ships, then why were they investing so many of them to chase the Falcon over Tatooine? If there are only a thousand warships, total, then that many Star Destroyers should have gotten more of a reaction out of Han than "don't worry, we'll lose 'em."How big is this galaxy, really? Why do we wind up on Tatooine in four of the six movies? Why, for that matter, do we keep going back to the same planets even in the EU (Luke decides to build his Jedi Academy on Yavin. . . which turns out to be the base of an ancient Sith leader in the older SW history on top of that. In KOTOR the Ebon Hawk even goes and visits Yavin on an important mission. If the SW galaxy has so many billions of planets why do the same ones crop up over and over again?


5.) Later in the movie, General Dodonna states that the Death Star possesses firepower "greater than half the Starfleet." If its firepower was actually greater than the whole Starfleet, Dodonna would have said that; therefore we may suppose that the Imperial Starfleet can, in fact, command firepower greater than the Death Star alone and therefore could, in fact, destroy a planet. That Han writes this off as impossible can easily be put down to the fact that they'd simply never done so, therefore he didn't conceive of it.I believe you're implying a dichotomy where none exists. Solo says the whole fleet can't destroy a planet. Dodonna says a weapon that is more powerful than half the fleet can destroy a planet. How much more powerful? Is it more powerful than 3/4ths the fleet? All the fleet? More than half encompasses both possibilities. Since 1 > .5 their statements actually agree perfectly.


In short, you can't rely on that as an absolute statement on Imperial firepower.Not an absolute statement of firepower, no. But we can certainly take it as an educated estimate of numbers, which is what I actually said as firepower had no mention originally. Solo, as an Imperial Officer and combat veteran, should have some idea how big the fleet was. He may well be off by 10%, even by 20%. Could he really be off by 2500%? 100,000%? A million percent? This seems vastly less likely.

[Renegade Paladin]

Provide the rest of your statstical data, taken from top level cannon, relating to unarmored limb hits. Prove that it is an outlier by providing the rest of the data set to which it belongs. Hint: The data set is not called "all blaster hits" it is called "unarmored limb blaster hits".
Leia is incredibly, powerfully Force-sensitive, even if she's untrained. That, given the observed effects of Force sensitivity in other individuals, is more than enough to explain mitigating a blaster hit even if we assume that her clothing was not armored in some way.

The troopers on the Tantive IV died like flies when stormtroopers stormed the ship. Blaster hits killed the defenders to a man.

Unless you plan on contending that stormtrooper armor actually serves to amplify blasters, every single hit against a stormtrooper shows how deadly they are.

The defenders of Hoth died in droves when stormtroopers blasted their way into the base.

There are plenty of examples of blasters hitting flesh besides that one; the fatality rate is enormous.

[sikyon]

Why is the data set 'Unarmored limb hits" instead of "All blaster hits"? I thought we were discussing the efficacy of Star Wars blasters. It'd seem like you want all hits, not an extremely small subset of hits.

The data set is not all blaster shots because we are only interested in how effective they are against people, not rocks. We know they can drop people with full hits, but we are wondering if they can drop people with hits to the limbs or do damage at all. Therefore, we should analyze that data set.

[warty goblin]

"The Death Star carries a firepower greater than half the star fleet."
General Dodonna

I'm going to have some fun with this quote, since it is after all from a general who presumably knows his stuff. Bear in mind that this is all speculation and educated guesswork drawn from this quote, and not actually canon, but I think its pretty reasonable.

Now the power(death star) > 1/2 Imperial fleet, but by how much? Well, generally when people use a figure like "more than a half" they don't mean a whole lot more than a half, and certainly well less than 90%, because otherwise they would have used the more impressive figure. I'm going to use an outside estimate that the Death Star has 2/3 the power of the rest of the fleet, which is a pretty generous interpretation of the statement, yes?

Hence the Empire has 2 1/3 planet killing weapons available to it. The Death Star + 2/3 the fleet + the other third of the fleet. Now let's assume 100,000 Star Destroyer equivelent ships, I'm not sure if this is reasonable, but its not a bad off the top of my head number. This means that it takes ~ 66,000 Star Destroyers to kill a planet (by kill, I'm using the Death Star metric of reducing it to fine grain dust).

Given that we know that a single properly equiped Imperium ship can kill a planet with two stage torpedoes, I'm giving the planet killing advantage to the Imperium.

[Talkkno]

Unless you plan on contending that stormtrooper armor actually serves to amplify blasters, every single hit against a stormtrooper shows how deadly they are.



Actually Stormtrooper armor, at least in the Legacy era, 125 years after the Battle of Yavin, shows the armor is at least capable of taking a full on blaster shot to chest and leaving the man inside relatively unharmed and ready to join the fight again soon after. Given the slow rate of techonglicial development in the GFFA...
And the heavier Katern-class armor used by the clone commandos and ARC troopers could hold off anything up to a light blaster cannon.

[Talkkno]

Given that we know that a single properly equiped Imperium ship can kill a planet with two stage torpedoes, I'm giving the planet killing advantage to the Imperium.

It takes a magnitude more energy to make a planet explode so violently that fragments escapes the gravitional binding energy in a speed that is a fraction of c of a earth like planet, then it does to to actually obliterate the planet, as noted earlier.

[Talkkno]

Are there any fringe groups that at best control a hundred planets can construct such two stage torpedoes? A mere Hutt crime lord in Darksaber built the Death Star's superlaser and the power core needed to power it that pitiful amount resources.

[sikyon]

Leia is incredibly, powerfully Force-sensitive, even if she's untrained. That, given the observed effects of Force sensitivity in other individuals, is more than enough to explain mitigating a blaster hit even if we assume that her clothing was not armored in some way.

The troopers on the Tantive IV died like flies when stormtroopers stormed the ship. Blaster hits killed the defenders to a man.

Unless you plan on contending that stormtrooper armor actually serves to amplify blasters, every single hit against a stormtrooper shows how deadly they are.

The defenders of Hoth died in droves when stormtroopers blasted their way into the base.

There are plenty of examples of blasters hitting flesh besides that one; the fatality rate is enormous.

On a direct hit, that's fine. I don't contend that a direct hit from a blaster isn't deadly. However, how effective is it against a grazing hit? That is the question I am proposing.

The point that I am trying to make, or that I was initially trying to make, is that stormtrooper armor is a joke in the movies. It barley stops kinetic impacts and is very brittle for battle armor, and it doesn't even stop blasters. This would make boarding actions intensly easy for the imperium, even without space marines. Standard naval boarding parties could blow their way through a star destroyer to the main portions with relative ease.

[13_CBS]

On a direct hit, that's fine. I don't contend that a direct hit from a blaster isn't deadly. However, how effective is it against a grazing hit? That is the question I am proposing.

The point that I am trying to make, or that I was initially trying to make, is that stormtrooper armor is a joke in the movies. It barley stops kinetic impacts and is very brittle for battle armor, and it doesn't even stop blasters. This would make boarding actions intensly easy for the imperium, even without space marines. Standard naval boarding parties could blow their way through a star destroyer to the main portions with relative ease.

I don't think most of us are arguing that stormies have a real chance against Space Marines; that's just ridiculous. We're instead trying to argue that stormtrooper equipment isn't THAT bad.

[Talkkno]

The point that I am trying to make, or that I was initially trying to make, is that stormtrooper armor is a joke in the movies. It barley stops kinetic impacts and is very brittle for battle armor, and it doesn't even stop blasters. This would make boarding actions intensly easy for the imperium, even without space marines. Standard naval boarding parties could blow their way through a star destroyer to the main portions with relative ease.

Where does it show it is vulnerable to KE impacts? And see above.

[13_CBS]

Where does it show it is vulnerable to KE impacts? And see above.

He has argued that, in ROTJ, a stormtrooper fell on his pauldron during a battle. Said pauldron cracked, and therefore the armor is poor against kinetic impacts.

[Talkkno]

He has argued that, in ROTJ, a stormtrooper fell on his pauldron during a battle. Said pauldron cracked, and therefore the armor is poor against kinetic impacts.

I pretty sure we have dismissed Darkstar site by now, and besides, we see stromtroopers getting thrown by at by pretty heavy rocks, and none of there armor broke or anything.

[sikyon]

I pretty sure we have dismissed Darkstar site by now, and besides, we see stromtroopers getting thrown by at by pretty heavy rocks, and none of there armor broke or anything.

You would be assuming incorrectly, and you also cannot know the weight of those rocks. You are also failing to explain this "outlier".

See, what you are doing is not providing a counterarguement. You are providing other examples, but you have not explained the incident in question. Stop sidestepping.

EDIT:
I don't think most of us are arguing that stormies have a real chance against Space Marines; that's just ridiculous. We're instead trying to argue that stormtrooper equipment isn't THAT bad.

I'm trying to postulate that a standard imperial guard naval boarding party will destroy stormtroopers in ship to ship action. You don't even need space marines, stormtroopers are so bad.

[Paragon Badger]

You see, your all using the special effects of the 70s as canon. Which, sure it technically is, but that doesn't mean you can compare the two. :smalltongue:

I'm sure, that had the star wars trilogies came out in reverse order, with the limitations of the times, you'd be saying, "The Anakin vs. Obi-Wan fight is slow and sluggish. Clone trooper armor is flimsy and they coulden't hit a parked star destroyer." and then after the second trilogy, "Stormtroopers are super awesome, the Luke vs. Vader fight was ultra fast!"

Really, you can't compare 40k to Star Wars when they are on entirely different platforms. Warhammer being introduced in 87 and the first Star Wars a decade before.

I mean, really, the Stormtroopers looked so incredibly incompetent merely because of the limitations of the time. No semblance of militaristic stunt men, the 'poor' effects of the 70s, ect.

You can't compare the two when one was limited so much by the budget constraints and the day's technology.

[Talkkno]

Does standard Imperial guard armor include Automatic polarizing and anti-flash blinding lenses which protects against intense glare and enhanced combat vision, Holographic Vision Processors (which allowed vision through many barriers such as smoke, darkness and fire), comlinks, NBC protection, up to 20 minutes of protection in vaccum, and a sensor suite which ties into an integrated computer core that can project onto the lenses using a form of HUD display or holographic display:smallbiggrin: .

[sikyon]

You see, your all using the special effects of the 70s as canon. Which, sure it technically is, but that doesn't mean you can compare the two. :smalltongue:

I'm sure, that had the star wars trilogies came out in reverse order, with the limitations of the times, you'd be saying, "The Anakin vs. Obi-Wan fight is slow and sluggish. Clone trooper armor is flimsy and they coulden't hit a parked star destroyer." and then after the second trilogy, "Stormtroopers are super awesome, the Luke vs. Vader fight was ultra fast!"

Really, you can't compare 40k to Star Wars when they are on entirely different platforms. Warhammer being introduced in 87 and the first Star Wars a decade before.

I mean, really, the Stormtroopers looked so incredibly incompetent merely because of the limitations of the time. No semblance of militaristic stunt men, the 'poor' effects of the 70s, ect.

You can't compare the two when one was limited so much by the budget constraints and the day's technology.

We try :smalltongue:


Does standard Imperial guard armor include Automatic polarizing and anti-flash blinding lenses which protects against intense glare and enhanced combat vision, Holographic Vision Processors (which allowed vision through many barriers such as smoke, darkness and fire), comlinks, NBC protection, up to 20 minutes of protection in vaccum, and a sensor suite which ties into an integrated computer core that can project onto the lenses using a form of HUD display or holographic display .

Nope. Which probably explains where the budget for actual protection went :smallwink:

[Ubiq]

I mean, really, the Stormtroopers looked so incredibly incompetent merely because of the limitations of the time. No semblance of militaristic stunt men, the 'poor' effects of the 70s, ect.


People have a tendency to vastly overstate the "incompetence" of stormtroopers based on their perceived lack of accuracy on the Death Star. The fact that they were supposed to let Luke and company get away is completely lost on people despite the fact that Tarkin and Vader discuss this and, moreover, despite the fact that Leia specifically states that the Empire let them escape.

When they set out to kill people like they do when boarding the Tantive IV or on Hoth, they're remarkably successful at it.

People also make a big deal about the Ewoks, but that's because they ignore the fact that the heavily outnumbered Stormtroopers were winning up until Chewbacca hijacked an ATST.

[Talkkno]

Ok, i can't bother to exactly calc those rocks the Ewok's thrown, but we know that they were pretty big compared to the Ewoks, and they a little over half there size there 1 meter tall...
But anyways, in AOTC, we see a wheel-droid's missles destroyed one of the AT-TE's. Clone troopers clustered around the AT-TE were not killed or apparently even injured by the explosion.

[13_CBS]

Clone troopers clustered around the AT-TE were not killed or apparently even injured by the explosion.

Eh...I distinctly remember clone troopers getting blown off their feet. And in Star Wars land, unless you're a good guy, that almost always means that you just died.

[Talkkno]

Eh...I distinctly remember clone troopers getting blown off their feet. And in Star Wars land, unless you're a good guy, that almost always means that you just died.

There was no visible sign of armor penetration by the resulting shrapnel however, and the debris that showered on the Clone troopers after the Trade Federation Core Ship blew up did not even slow there advance. Consider that it is 700 meters in diameter....

[13_CBS]

There was no visible sign of armor penetration by the resulting shrapnel however,

True...


and the debris that showered on the Clone troopers after the Trade Federation Core Ship blew up did not even slow there advance. Consider that it is 700 meters in diameter....

Eh, that was more like lots of dust than real, "OMG a shard of metal just flew into my face" shrapnel/debris.

[warty goblin]

It is possible that they were killed by the concussive force, even if the shrapnel doesn't penetrate. It's also possible that there was no visable penetration because the movie was PG and shrapnel wounds tend to be rather R rated.

[Rutee]

It is possible that they were killed by the concussive force, even if the shrapnel doesn't penetrate. It's also possible that there was no visable penetration because the movie was PG and shrapnel wounds tend to be rather R rated.

And it's quite possible that WH40k weapons are as high powerred as they are because Warhammer is supposed to be brutal. Meta-reasons are important, but.. not very much so, in this case.

[factotum]

Now the power(death star) > 1/2 Imperial fleet, but by how much? Well, generally when people use a figure like "more than a half" they don't mean a whole lot more than a half, and certainly well less than 90%, because otherwise they would have used the more impressive figure. I'm going to use an outside estimate that the Death Star has 2/3 the power of the rest of the fleet, which is a pretty generous interpretation of the statement, yes?


There's an alternative interpretation. The General could have been talking solely about the Death Star's anti-ship weaponry, since that's what was important with regard to the briefing--after all, at Yavin the Rebels had no capital ships, and presumably no idea that the superlaser could be used against them in any case.

Of course, that interpretation might even help your case, because if the Death Star's conventional weaponry was that powerful, one might wonder what it needed the superlaser for... :smallbiggrin:

[Destro_Yersul]

And it's quite possible that WH40k weapons are as high powerred as they are because Warhammer is supposed to be brutal.

It really, really is. Space marines carry machine guns that fire mass reactive explosive rounds. That's their basic gun, which works out to str 4. How much worse is an assault cannon, which works out to str 6?

Boltguns blow people in half. Assault cannons shred them into unrecognizable fleshy lumps. Blasters? blasters make them sorta get a scorch mark and die. that's it.

((apologies for any incoherence. Just got back from the pub))

[Eita]

Aww... Come on man. You missed some of the best weapons! Plasma and Multimeltas don't just shred stuff into chunks, they totally and utterly destroy them.

[Talkkno]

Aww... Come on man. You missed some of the best weapons! Plasma and Multimeltas don't just shred stuff into chunks, they totally and utterly destroy them.

But they don't really know how to make those weapons anymore, heck they even understand some of there tech.

[Destro_Yersul]

But they don't really know how to make those weapons anymore, heck they even understand some of there tech.

Or, at very least, the stuff is very expensive and unreliable to make. Bolters are plenty destructive enough, and fairly easy to replicate. The point I'm making here is that blasters are much less impressive than even a lasgun, which has been known to blow limbs off people. If blasters are that much less powerful than 40k equivalents, what does that say about the relative power of ship weapons?

[Eita]

Impressiveness has very little to do with actual firepower. Most SW stuff is rather pinpoint, thus giving a possible explanation for some incidents. Their weapons cleanly kill. Of course, this has the drawback of having to accurately aim. You can probably see why IoM lasguns still trump Imperial blasters in a combat situation.

[factotum]

If blasters are that much less powerful than 40k equivalents, what does that say about the relative power of ship weapons?

Actually, very little. In the Warhammer universe ground combat seems to take place considerably more frequently than ship-to-ship combat in space, whereas in Star Wars it's the other way round--one would thus expect the best weapons on each side to be in the areas where they expect to encounter most combat. This is unquestionably true in Star Wars; Hoth is a perfect example, because the only large-scale fixed weaponry the Rebel base had was an Ion Cannon for taking out starships, whereas they had to rely on a few smallish gun turrets and a whole bunch of guys with hand weapons to hold off an Imperial ground assault. The largest ground-based weapon we saw in that battle was the AT-AT, which had a grand total of two forward-firing weapons...you'd think they'd at least fit the things with turrets to defend against enemy combat aircraft!

[Prophaniti]

Does standard Imperial guard armor include Automatic polarizing and anti-flash blinding lenses which protects against intense glare and enhanced combat vision, Holographic Vision Processors (which allowed vision through many barriers such as smoke, darkness and fire), comlinks, NBC protection, up to 20 minutes of protection in vaccum, and a sensor suite which ties into an integrated computer core that can project onto the lenses using a form of HUD display or holographic display:smallbiggrin: .

Depends on the regiment.:smallbiggrin: Some of them, like the Cadian regiments, have really high-end equipment and training. Gear very much like what you describe is given to 40k Stormtroopers (yes, they have the same name) and special units like Kaskrins. Regiments from the world known as Armaggedon, due to it's now highly irradiated and toxic environment, have almost completely enclosed chemical warfare gear. At the other end of the spectrum are units from Tallarn, Catachan, and others. Most of these units are simply given a lasgun and pointed at the enemy. There is a vast disparity in the gear for the Imperial Guard, simply because they come from so many different worlds and are sent to fight in so many different fronts.

Most units have gear approximate to what you'd find in a modern infantry unit, though.

[Dervag]

Hence the Empire has 2 1/3 planet killing weapons available to it. The Death Star + 2/3 the fleet + the other third of the fleet. Now let's assume 100,000 Star Destroyer equivelent ships, I'm not sure if this is reasonable, but its not a bad off the top of my head number. This means that it takes ~ 66,000 Star Destroyers to kill a planet (by kill, I'm using the Death Star metric of reducing it to fine grain dust).

Given that we know that a single properly equiped Imperium ship can kill a planet with two stage torpedoes, I'm giving the planet killing advantage to the Imperium.Can said two-stage torpedo blow the planet apart into a rapidly expanding debris field as the Death Star did?

For that matter, do we know what the upper bound on the Death Star's firepower is?


He has argued that, in ROTJ, a stormtrooper fell on his pauldron during a battle. Said pauldron cracked, and therefore the armor is poor against kinetic impacts.OK. Now we need to ask whether such a collision (high-mass, low-velocity) is similar to other probable kinetic impacts. Obviously if the armor cracks in a fall it cannot protect a stormtrooper from being run over by a truck or something, but can it protect him from other potentially dangerous kinetic impactors, such as a bullet?


You would be assuming incorrectly, and you also cannot know the weight of those rocks. You are also failing to explain this "outlier".Actually, one can estimate the weight of a rock fairly easily given its density and the fact that the gravity on Endor is about the same as Earth's (things that fall on Endor seem to fall at about the same speed as on Earth).

Hypothetically, the pauldron might not be designed to withstand an impact from that specific angle. I'm not sure about the precise geometry of the armor and the impact, though, so I'm not going to press that hypothesis very hard.


I'm trying to postulate that a standard imperial guard naval boarding party will destroy stormtroopers in ship to ship action. You don't even need space marines, stormtroopers are so bad.What is the quality of a standard Imperial Guard naval infantry unit?


Does standard Imperial guard armor include Automatic polarizing and anti-flash blinding lenses which protects against intense glare and enhanced combat vision, Holographic Vision Processors (which allowed vision through many barriers such as smoke, darkness and fire), comlinks, NBC protection, up to 20 minutes of protection in vaccum, and a sensor suite which ties into an integrated computer core that can project onto the lenses using a form of HUD display or holographic display:smallbiggrin: .Some of the above, probably, but not all of the above, probably. Of course, how much some of those features matter depends heavily on the conditions- if nobody's throwing nerve gas around then the fact that one side has better chemical warfare protection than the other is irrelevant.


Eh...I distinctly remember clone troopers getting blown off their feet. And in Star Wars land, unless you're a good guy, that almost always means that you just died.Remind me again how we know that?


Of course, that interpretation might even help your case, because if the Death Star's conventional weaponry was that powerful, one might wonder what it needed the superlaser for... :smallbiggrin:For penetrating planetary defensive screen at ranges beyond that at which conventional weapons could do so?

[13_CBS]

Remind me again how we know that?


The films, of course :smallbiggrin:

My statement was half-joking, by the way. But seriously, I get the feeling that the directors are trying to make you assume that, when people get thrown around by an explosion, they generally die.

[Renegade Paladin]

This is hilarious. First Amidala, who was a skilled pilot as we saw in Ep 2, can't navigate. Now Solo has no idea how many many ships exist in the galaxy by well over an order of magnitude or three. Does anybody in the SW universe have an competence at all?
The. Man. Was. Panicking. He was doing his best to hide it, but he's looking at undeniable evidence that somebody had just destroyed an entire core world. I, for one, wouldn't expect someone in that situation to take the time to call up precise figures even if he knew them rather than pulling an impressive-sounding number out of his behind.

Well let's see, the fact that he is, according to the novelization and most of the EU fluff, a former officer of the Imperial Navy? And not just any officer, a decorated Combat Veteran to boot.
That doesn't mean he has access to ship manifests. And again, hyperbole is extremely likely in a panic-inducing situation like the one he was in.

Now it is highly likely that Solo doesn't know the exact size and composition of the fleet. But being as he was a part of the war machine, it's equally absurd to assume he has no clue whatsoever about how large the fleet he served in is. Your suggestion here is akin to having a modern day US Marine officer-turned-mercenary estimate that the US Army has a thousand men in it. The fact is Solo is a smart cookie, he used to be an Imperial, and as a smuggler it would behoove him to keep track of his enemies.
And even with all that, we have source upon source upon source contradicting his one off-the-cuff statement. I'm sorry, he was wrong.

Actually the part about "any existing ships" is entirely something you just made up. We have no idea what Solo was going to say. Perhaps ". . . than I've ever seen in one place." for instance.
Well then, if it was a thousand ships with more firepower than he's ever seen in one place, it stands to reason that there are more than a thousand ships and they just don't gather them all. :smallamused:

Now you're trying to apply real-life reason to override the canon. And making your own estimate of what is and isn't possible. Han Solo knows the SW universe better than you do. He lives there, and you did not serve as an officer in the
The canon says that the Death Star did not actually have more firepower than the entire fleet. The canon also clearly shows that the Death Star has several orders of magnitude more firepower than is actually necessary to destroy a planet; for Alderaan to explode like it did means that there was far more energy than it could contain introduced into it by the superlaser. It was completely pulverized. Destruction of the planet could be accomplished with far less firepower, but it would break up over a comparatively extended period of time and result in much larger pieces. So, the Starfleet does actually have enough firepower to destroy a planet. Canon fact.

How big is this galaxy, really? Why do we wind up on Tatooine in four of the six movies? Why, for that matter, do we keep going back to the same planets even in the EU (Luke decides to build his Jedi Academy on Yavin. . . which turns out to be the base of an ancient Sith leader in the older SW history on top of that. In KOTOR the Ebon Hawk even goes and visits Yavin on an important mission. If the SW galaxy has so many billions of planets why do the same ones crop up over and over again?
This galaxy is, as previously stated in this thread, 120,000 light years in diameter. And we keep going back to the same planets in the novels because the writers are hacks who can't be asked to come up with their own material. :smalltongue:

I believe you're implying a dichotomy where none exists. Solo says the whole fleet can't destroy a planet. Dodonna says a weapon that is more powerful than half the fleet can destroy a planet. How much more powerful? Is it more powerful than 3/4ths the fleet? All the fleet? More than half encompasses both possibilities. Since 1 > .5 their statements actually agree perfectly.
If the Death Star was actually greater in firepower than the entire fleet, why didn't Dodonna say that? It's unreasonable to conclude from his statement that it's actually more powerful than the fleet.

Not an absolute statement of firepower, no. But we can certainly take it as an educated estimate of numbers, which is what I actually said as firepower had no mention originally. Solo, as an Imperial Officer and combat veteran, should have some idea how big the fleet was. He may well be off by 10%, even by 20%. Could he really be off by 2500%? 100,000%? A million percent? This seems vastly less likely.
Less likely, but it's the only explanation we have given the absolute weight of evidence against it.