Mith wrote:Mr. Oragahn wrote:That amount of power is, however, perfectly in line with the primary explosion and all the effects described in the book Death Star.
Would it? Hmm interesting. In any case, outside of some idiot assuming that the Enterprise D or a Retribution class Imperium warship could laugh off the superlaser, I see it as mostly academic.
Multiple teratons is the bare minimum to cover a large area of a planet, and several petatons most likely allows for the waste of energy from an indiscriminate attack and some extra "overkill" damage.
The splash-whitening of a whole hemisphere of Alderaan fits with that (that's before the super explosions that bursts on the other side of the planet).
The mountain upheaval and worldwide crust splitting of Despayre after the first two shots also fits with that.
Any supplemental effect is allowed by gaining a damage bonus from hyperspace. Depending on how fast you reach the "hello hypaspess can i has teh xtra joules?" threshold, you get the ring (some kind of compression, a shockwave, which fits with principles of inertia) and that also explains why despite also reaching that threshold at Despayre, we didn't get any ring (there's no description of them, yet the third shot is so many orders of magnitude more destructive than the first two ones despite relying on the exact same amount of power from the DS' core), most likely imho due to the fact that the necessary exotic hyperspace window effect whatever was only reached after three shots instead of one.
There's obviously going to be differences in effect if you dump X joules in a few seconds, or dump the same total over a series of three pourings, each spaced by some hour and like fifteen minutes of charging (I think that was the time but you better check).
It's interesting that a hypermatter core (named as such in the age old first ICS) precisely managed to open a rift into hyperspace after reaching a certain level of power.
Or in other words, that some hyperspace related phenomenon that's tied to the production of the energy in the DS core literally piggy backed the entire superlaser beam to be transfered to the planet.
Heck, we could even say that part of the destruction caused to Despayre after the first two shots already was caused by the chaotic formation of that hyperspace rift which wasn't ready yet. So with some distorsion, mass was moved in all directions and mountains went up and down and the crust started to crack.
Perhaps it depends on the mass of the planet, the mass shadow, and that you can only blast a planet into hyperspace once you have brought enough raw energy to allow a hyperspace rift to form in the region of the planet despite its shadow mass.
From there, once the rift is open, it's Piñata!