Topic : counting the number of Trade Federation ships, based on their baseless estimation of the requirements to blockade such a planet.
It's literally funny, though unsurprising, that one can literally pretend making some pseudo calculation, and get a result of 1.2 million Trade Federation ships blockading Naboo.
But let's get it post by post.
Someone said, on a previous page, "When did we see the Trade Federation with more than a thousand ships at Naboo? Remember Movie canon."
Enters Stark:
If 99.99% of your solutions to quit a planet are concentrated in the astroports, it's, on the contrary, fairly easy to blockade a planet. Place a couple of ships in geosynchronous orbit above them, and you're done.Stark wrote:TF ships at Naboo can be extrapolated by the density of ships surrounding the planet. It was a blockade, and we get a sense of the spacing between blockade ships, so maths show us how many total there should be. The idea you can blockade a planet with a small number of ships is absurd.
Dialogue being 100% correct is a hilarious take on 'canon'. It's 'canon' Han SAID IT, it's not canon it was correct.
Wings of fighters would complete the picture, by providing additional space interdiction.
Besides, if any cargo was to enter the system and head for Naboo, it would be intercepted.
Finally, Naboo has near to no defenses, and couldn't even properly engage one ship.
So that's quite an easy blockade to enforce here.
Next. Darth Servo's turn.
And again...Darth Servo wrote:When Qui-gon and Obi-wan are on approach. Trade Fed ships were spaced roughly 20 km apart.
Assuming Naboo is similar to Earth: Earth's circumference is ~24,000 km. At a ship ever 20 km, thats 1200 ships just to form a ring around the equator at ground level. I'm not even including the third dimention or accounting for the increase in circumference due to the ships elevation.
Darwin thinks "that seems awfully, awfully close. Those ships are barely smaller than 20km. 10,000km apart is still plenty tight to blockade, and they won't be accidentally ramming into each other either."Better numbers for the Naboo blockade.
Earth radius: 6378km
Surface area: 5.112E8 km^2
Ships 20km apart or 400 km^2 per ship
Means about 1.28 MILLION ships, for a full planetary blockade at ground level.
Huh, a guy who registered in 2002 at SDN, has several hundreds of posts there, and still thinks that these ships were 20km wide. Sheesh. Even the official site has a size for them.
Darth Servo corrects him, and revisits his fleet size estimation:
At the end of the page, Darwin admits his mistake regarding the ship sizes, and asks the following question:As for spacing:
http://image30.webshots.com/31/0/0/10/2 ... nNN_ph.jpg (note: broken link)
Hmm. Perhaps its closer to 30 km apart. But even at 40km, thats still over 300,000 ships.
This question remains unanswered on the following page.Darwin wrote: looks to be 30-40km from that screenshot, yes. Is that representative of the entire blockade though, or are they clustered? Bears further examination.
Darth Servo retaliates:
So basically, we see that all their estimations are based on possibly the most pointless shot they could have found.
Surlethe wrote: Just eyeballing it, it looks like they're in low orbit -- about 800 km up. If the ships are 30 km apart, with 900 km^2/ship (I'm not sure if that's the proper math for this, but I'm tired so it'll do), then the area they cover is 6.5e8 km^2 and the number of ships is a little over 700,000.
EDIT: I used 800 km in my calcs, not 2000. Whoops. 2000 km is an upper limit.
And since a bit more wank does not hurt...Darth Holbytlan wrote:My calculation based on the above numbers:
Ships 30 km apart means that each ship is roughly covering a disk 15 km in radius, or a bit over 700 km^2/ship. At 2000 km up, they are at a radius of about 8400 km (assuming Earth radius) or 8.8e8 km^2. This makes the blockade over 1.2 million ships.
1. The range against such small vessels isn't even good enough to let such ships fire beyond 90 km.Connor MacLeod wrote:Note that if one does go for lower numbers for the blockade, then the ships in question have to be able to cover/target a wider area with their weapons to ensure that noone could escape. This would imply a range of many thousands or tens of thousands of kilometers, given that the blockade wasn't completely englobing the planet (someone launching from higher up "above" or "below" the blockade ring would naturally be further away, and would need to be within weapons range to be stopped.
Ranges could drop some if the number of ships increases, but there would still be limits on range since they still AREN'T englobing the entire planet, so they'd still probably need thousands/tens of thousands of km. (The firing on the Naboo cruiser reinforces this.)
Given that those were lighter weapons and not heavy guns (the cruiser is a fairly small target) is another factor.
Even using more favourable angles wouldn't change the figures enough to let them argue for thousands of kilometers.
At best, we have the hundreds of kilomters from the ROTS novelisation.
2. The weapons used against the Naboo yatch are, for all intents and purposes, the heavier weapons the ship had at her disposal, especially considering how later on, during the space battle, N-1 fighters were shot down with the heavier weapons mounted on the droid control ship: the quad cannons.
Now, let's put that nonsense to rest, with a picture (no DVD cap, sorry):
Hundreds of thousands of ships? Even... tens of thousands of ships?
Views from the bridge show Naboo in the background, but no noticable ship either.
At that point, the fact that none of them was even arsed or honest enough to post that picture, or would even remember that the film's very opening offered enough evidence to dispute those extravagant claims, is tiring. I find it hard to believe that none of the members taking part in this discussion, notably the likes of Servo or MacLeod, wouldn't remember that the opening sequence contained all the evidence they needed.
Besides, remember that this started with someone asking, on one of the two boards, how they could make those claims, despite the movie canon?
Well, as you can see, they pretty much completely ignored that single point to obtain their absurd fleet numbers.
Now, I also spotted this from Ender:
For anyone who'd like to verify that claim from the film, you would actually notice the energy arc between the two engines.Ender wrote:Never mind the fact that it is blatantly contradicted by the movie - Qui-Gon gives Anakin a power cell that he stole from Watto to power the podracer.Darth Servo wrote: Did you see his "analysis" of the ROTS novelilzation on the fusion issue?
Novelization: "Children on Tatooine tell each other of the dragons that live inside the suns; smaller cousins of the sun-dragons are supposed to live inside the fusion furnaces that power everything from starships to Podracers."
Darkstar: Once again, we have it clearly stated that Star Wars power systems are fusion-based like suns are, much as was seen in the other novelizations. It can hardly get any plainer.
This stands in stark contradiction to the claims made elsewhere.
EU-philes are attempting to claim that this quote is either non-literal, based on children's delusions, or is somehow supposed to refer to fusion of EU hypermatter, any of which are intended to maintain the claim of ridiculously-large energy generation numbers for SW vessels. Just reading the quote, however, shows that none of these attempted reinterpretations have any basis in reality. Sun-type fusion is the power system of Star Wars vehicles.
Yes, Darkstar is actually insisting on a literal interpretation of a statement that talks about DRAGONS living in stars.
But I guess that's a natural phenomenom, and the power cell handled by Qui-Gon couldn't have been used to start the computer or control systems.
Truth is, a power cell is nothing more than a charged battery, and the podracer's engines were already active before Anakin's plugged the power cell.