Mike DiCenso wrote:That assumes that megaton range MTLs on the much larger ISDs are really actually doing what Warsies have claimed over the years. The whole exploding and burning asteroids bit kind of puts more than a bit of a dampener on that. As for the the rest, we might be generous in assuming that the gun ports have some sort of shielding up that may be absorbing at least some portion of the TL energies. However, if you look at the exterior scenes again, you'll see fireball impacts on the hull of the various ships where there are no obvious gun ports. Furthernore, TCW's "Downfall of a a Droid" shows clearly what megajoule to gigajoule-range walker blaster bolts striking the unshielded aft ends of Munificents look like, and it looks an awful lot like what we see in RoTS.
-Mike
In general, hulls don't seem to be the prime mean of defense. Shields are. A Jedi starfighter with shields up can soak some considerable damage from shots that broke apart rocks about a few meters large, and those ships are rather very cramped.
It's a matter of scaling this up. Tanking like several dozens of megajoules with a power generator that's probably not even one cubic meter big would allow a 10^3 meters wide generator to power shields capable of withstanding a thousand times more energy.
It goes without saying that there could be miniaturization issues, meaning that past a certain volumes, certain better technologies exist.
Take the Millenium Falcon. It was said the bazooka-looking weapon carried by the snowtroopers would
destroy its hull. Now we know that the MF's hull could withstand the shots from the blasters, which probably are a notch about modern firearms in terms of power, like an order of magnitude superior, to account for the holing and melting of round sections of the stormtrooper armour, which is supposed to be relevant against thermal damage. The bazooka weapon and its independent power source would have a firepower considerably higher, in order to make a real difference between a hull which can safely laugh at the blasters shots, but which would suddenly be ruined by the larger gun. That clearly means a severe increase of firepower.
So we can make that large gun (
E-Web in the EU) be worth 10 times a blaster shot. That should give us a capacity of low three digits kilojoules.
The power source contained inside the transportable power pack would be providing that energy. It's about a bit larger than one of those large cardboard boxes we use to move stuff from one house to another, which one bloke can carry on his own. Looking at the size of the trooper's hand and using clues such as the dome ontop of the power pack, plus the fact that it's obviously as wide as it's high, and has a length a bit less than twice its height, we can go with a size of 50 x50 x100 cm, for a volume of .25 m³.
Assuming that shields are linked to power capacitors which are precharged (that would be the idea), a power pack about four times bigger would fit with the Jedi starfighter's feats since it would allow her shields to be charged up to several megajoules worth of protection in little time.
Globally, scaling up all weapons from those feats would lead to medium terawatt power production for small capital ships, which seems to fit with all SW lore. It would fit with the firepower, notably references in the EU, and allow for charging up shields to possibly a couple hundreds of kilotons for those same warships, up to several megatons worth of shielding for ISDs.
That seems quite a safe set of figure, counting, as I said, the possibility of better power tech past certain thresholds.
