MythBusters does the AT-ST log smash

[Firmus Piett]

That's a fair point. However I think ferrocrete is more appropriate. Steelcrete was used to construct blast doors; if a handgun could put a meter wide hole in it, they wouldn't use it to make blast doors. Ferrocrete is more commonly used for more mundane constructions, like roads and buildings.

[2046]

As per the evidence provided in the links, they didn't use steelcrete to make blast doors, just the normal bridge door. The blast doors, separate from the normal door, were indeed metal, and apparently solid metal, to boot.

[359]

Perhaps this is an example of the "ferrocrete" mentioned in the EU. A concrete / ferrous metal composite that acts like concrete but contains enough iron to magnetically suspend a clone trooper against gravity.

I would stick with non-EU material like steelcrete unless ferrocrete shows up in the radio plays.

I'll one-up both of those with Fred's Formidable Ferric Foam™ :)

I did try tweaking the lighting to make the jagged outline clearer, but it didn't go very well. I might have another go when I update the page, to make it clearer.

I'd suggest cutting along the fracture outline and using that instead of an ellipse for scaling, if possible.

[Mr. Oragahn]

We've also seen hand Phasers have similar effects on rocks at least a meter wide (deja Q I believe) and in Insurrection where they blow up quite a lot of rocks blocking off a cave exit...

To which, to be fair, blasters compare favorably too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEnFTtPjGxc

Edit; oh you meant similar to blasters right? Not anti-tank stuff.

Everything in that show is exagerated, on either sides. You either get too much of awesome or too much of silly and lame.
How can we take those examples at face value when you could find legions of examples from the same cartoonish show of impacts doing squat?
Let's even start with the first episode of season 1 where tank guns can't even blast through coral-like trees.
It's like those megajoule yields in Trek which are seldom used in cases where they'd help a great deal. You know, like having a MJ impact a few meters close to a pack of enemies, or even shooting at the middle of a corridor or roof when enemies are hiding around the corners on both sides, obviously a megajoule nearby blast would help a great deal. The advantages of having access to frag grenades yields at the tip of your beam weapon on repeater mode is most insane against infantry.
But back to the CW show, it's too much farcical and not even realistic or serious enough in itself to take anything it shows for granted.
At best, you get an overall idea. I'd probably go the narrative route and treat this as if it were coming from tale and not a documentary; that is, at some point, troopers used their guns to blast rocks.
It's quite silly because those blasters probably did as much damage as did the rocket launcher used much earlier in the same show, and they had to aim at a rock precisely because that was the best way to get rid of the enemy. Now, if the tech was so impressive as to allow blasters to crack rocks so easily, you'd expect the projectile from a rocket launcher to be able to attain extremely impressive yields.
Now, what we might know is that blasters may have an ability to perforate certain materials in a near-drilling way. Seen with blaster bolts punching through droids and making clean holes like if they had been exposed to the super hot ejecta of plasma torches. Which is not the case. So only a degree of exotism can compensate for those observed effects.
Then, depositing a projectile which can also explode, deeper inside a rock, is going to make it easier to crack.
The broken lumps were quite larger anyway, not so much pulverized.
You can crack big pieces of rock by firmly wedging a wooden spike into one and then letting water expand the wood's volume until it splits the rock and cuts chunks away.
We don't know much about the properties of those rocks, and let's also notice that gravity worked against them.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Actually, in the first case, the impacts themselves would have not been anywhere close enough to blast rock. The rock bridge was already weak.
In the second case, they produce lots of small rubble and dust, with numerous shots. A degree of damage not too dissimilar to what was seen done by Solo's blaster in the docking bay 94 at Mos eisley.
The last case is the most problematic but the pieces of rock that fall are very large and we just have no idea how solid the whole roof was, at least from that video alone. Then again, the minimal amount of pulverization is rather odd.

[Mr. Oragahn]

We've also seen hand Phasers have similar effects on rocks at least a meter wide (deja Q I believe) and in Insurrection where they blow up quite a lot of rocks blocking off a cave exit...

Reviewing the topic, I still wonder how is that bit of info any way relevant?
I mean, aside from enticing Trekkies to increase the offtopicness by talking about phasers and all that... way to pollute the thread.

[Mr. Oragahn]

That's quite an overstatement of the chunk's size, from the episode it is clearly only a clone's stance in diameter, less than one meter.
Here's an image from your site showing the size of the chunk, you calculate it to around four feet, yet in the image above you compare a much larger chunk to Han, a chunk the size of 6' 1" Harison Ford.

I scaled the hole based on the feet. The diameter of the region fragmented by the bolt is ~4.6 times the length of a clone troopers boot, substantially greater than the space between his feet. Thats over a meter.

This is unfortunately some usual mistake in scaling I've seen made on and on.
The problem here is that the foot has always the same length, but due to perspective and depending which direction it points at, its visible length will measure up to different amounts of pixels. If the foot had been pointing at the right of the screen, you could have used the length. But there you can only ues the width of the foot, or the distance between both feet.

Btw, welcome to this small but cosy place. ;)

[Lucky]

We've also seen hand Phasers have similar effects on rocks at least a meter wide (deja Q I believe) and in Insurrection where they blow up quite a lot of rocks blocking off a cave exit...

Reviewing the topic, I still wonder how is that bit of info any way relevant?
I mean, aside from enticing Trekkies to increase the offtopicness by talking about phasers and all that... way to pollute the thread.

It was to help illustrate the difference between blowing up rock the size of a man, and causing a cave-in more or less.

[Lucky]

The rocky bridge is the only formation to show any signs of weakness. The other formations were obviously robust, since hundreds or thousands of tons of rock could not be supported above the ground in a cave like structure if it weren't. You'd have to be doing some serious fragmenting to get hundreds or thousands of tons of previously solid rock to come down in chunks like that. Gravity is only gonna pull the rocks to the ground, not pull them into fragmented chunks.

I don't really care if phasers or blasters can potentially destroy marginally more rock than one another, I don't feel there's much difference either which way. My arguments originally addressed a couple of Darkstar's pages. His phaser page implied that he felt bullets from modern rifles are more effective than blasters; I contend that blasters have caused thousands of times more damage than bullets to inorganic targets on more than one occasion. His Imperial armour page concludes that phasers could drop AT ST's; I contend that they'd merely pockmark them, like blasters. Leia's arm and all the other scenes like it are obvious examples of low energy blasting. The highest settings are thousands of times more powerful. This isn't exactly a controversial never ending topic subject to debate like power generation seems to be, it's pretty straight-forward and I don't see why there should be any major disagreement about it.

I know you guys will refute any megajoule calculations I present on the grounds that you do not accept the premise that SciFi energy weapons in all the big shows consistently cause much less collateral than bombs, and can melt large sums of material with ungodly amounts of energy without explosions remotely comparable to similarly energetic bombs. So instead I'll present some images from my site which scale the damage blasters have inflicted on stone and metal against Han Solo; phasers are not hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than blasters and so they will not destroy armoured vehicles in star wars. http://www.galacticempirewars.com/effects-on-the-body

The cave ceiling was held up by arches in one of your examples implying its stability was in question.

Megajoule blasters aren't out of the question for Star Wars, but not all blasters are created equal. Han Solo's blaster for example is abnormally powerful. I'd easily compare one of its bolts fired on Storm Troopers as he Luke and Obi Won left Tatoonie in Episode 4 to a stick of TNT, but then I model blaster bolts after explosive rounds like those fired by a PAW-20 or an AA-12 with a magazine of Frag-12 shotgun shells.

Few blaster bolts match those fired by Han's gun. A prime example of how much weaker other blasters are normally when compared to Han's is if you look at what a near miss by an E-11 did to Leia on Endor, and what Han's near misses were doing to storm trooper on Tatoonie.

+++++

The "Boom Table" on this page is rather interesting.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/r ... onvent.php

Another large apparently melted hole in metal.

I'm not sure your image shows melting? It looks to me like it may show the grate shattered and then fell into the shaft..

Why isn't this level of damaged shown anywhere else in the detention block? There are possible hundreds if not thousands of shots fired on screen in that fire fight, and yet this one shot seems to be vastly more destructive then the others?

Without knowing what weapon did that it is of little use.

Sooty scorch marks and bright flashes don't mean much in my experience. Flash bangs have similar effects.

Oddly enough, if wikipedia can be trusted a blaster bolt might be as dangerous as a stun grenade. They might be intended to only stun you, but like a firecracker, you don't want one going off when you are touching it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stun_grenade

Notice the large sooty area left when the Black Snake stops burning?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_snake_(firework)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3aAksyabes

Where is the image to Han's right from? If it is the door from the Tantive IV or the wall from the cell block on the Death Star we never see how the explosions were cased. They could have had an AT-AT just out of sight for all we know.

[Firmus Piett]

Thanks for the welcomes, guys.

Mr. O

I'm not gonna ignore impressive displays of blaster fire because their from Clone Wars. The measurements based on feet might not be 100% accurate, but they are close enough.

Blasters having weak effects or causing very limited damage to the ground is nothing new. Variable effects, variable yields. Just like virtually every weapons system observed in star wars, even the explosive projectile ones.

"It's quite silly because those blasters probably did as much damage as did the rocket launcher used much earlier in the same show, and they had to aim at a rock precisely because that was the best way to get rid of the enemy. Now, if the tech was so impressive as to allow blasters to crack rocks so easily, you'd expect the projectile from a rocket launcher to be able to attain extremely impressive yields"

And they do have very impressive yields. On highest settings they can fragment comparable amounts of rock - in a single shot. Vehicular armour is much more effective against energy weapons than projectiles or explosive.

Lucky, that image is one of the chunks blasted from the hangar walls. It looks much smaller when it lands because about a third of it comes of as its flying meters through the air. Its width compared to the stormies head is consistent with its width in the scale image I presented.

"Few blaster bolts match those fired by Han's gun. A prime example of how much weaker other blasters are normally when compared to Han's is if you look at what a near miss by an E-11 did to Leia on Endor, and what Han's near misses were doing to storm trooper on Tatoonie."

Examples of low energy blasting are abundant, indeed. Carbines similar to E-11's were responsible for the rock blasting feats in TCW and the E-11 had no problem blast-melting that grate, an obvious example of high firepower. My site proves that it was not "fragmented" but even if it were, fragmenting seven liters of metal is still incredible firepower, obviously representative of a higher setting than is typically fired upon human targets. The Han / grate image shows that the same shot would destroy your torso; Leia's arm does not represent the upper limit of E-11 firepower.

"Sooty scorch marks and bright flashes don't mean much in my experience. Flash bangs have similar effects.

Oddly enough, if wikipedia can be trusted a blaster bolt might be as dangerous as a stun grenade. They might be intended to only stun you, but like a firecracker, you don't want one going off when you are touching it."

I'm not talking about the sooty marks. I'm refering to the ~1 meter holes in the metal surface. Stormtroopers did that - with their guns. One of em was carrying a T-21 to be fair.

359, thanks for the tips. I'll see about cutting the jagged shape out in the future, I don't think i have the right software for it at the moment. Which is unfortunate, the oval pic does look kinda lame / misleading.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Mr. O

I'm not gonna ignore impressive displays of blaster fire because their from Clone Wars. The measurements based on feet might not be 100% accurate, but they are close enough.

So I guess we can take at face value troopers and droids missing each other while standing ten meters apart?

Blasters having weak effects or causing very limited damage to the ground is nothing new. Variable effects, variable yields. Just like virtually every weapons system observed in star wars, even the explosive projectile ones.

Thing is, these weapons dislodge huge pieces of rock while dealing insufficient damage at the point of impact.
Impacts which clearly happen on the surface of the rock btw.

Lucky, that image is one of the chunks blasted from the hangar walls. It looks much smaller when it lands because about a third of it comes of as its flying meters through the air. Its width compared to the stormies head is consistent with its width in the scale image I presented.

It is very interesting to note that the piece of adobe that detaches itself from the wall is pushed away by an explosion that happens behind it.
If you've done some masonry, you'll notice that sometimes you can break entire chunks off walls with just one good hammer swing.
Finally, how much energy would you put into this event?

I'm not talking about the sooty marks. I'm refering to the ~1 meter holes in the metal surface. Stormtroopers did that - with their guns. One of em was carrying a T-21 to be fair.

We striclty have no idea of the weapons used.

The humourous Troops clip had TIE fighters damage the sandcrawler, but it might not be far from the truth.
Since the SE, we know that the squads searching for the droids had access to at least one Sentinel-class shuttle, which would not only carry a number of infantry weapons for the troopers, but also sported their own laser cannons and even an array of concussion missiles.
On the same token, a E-web is described as a "bazooka-like" weapon in the TESB novelization, and was said to be a threat to the Millennium Falcon.

[2046]

Thanks for the welcomes, guys.

Indeed, the thread got busy. I'll post this then give you breathing room . . . I don't know about you, but I hate busy threads. But in this case, the dogpiling is just one guy . . . Oragahn is a machine here on page three. ;-)

I'm not gonna ignore impressive displays of blaster fire because their from Clone Wars.

Nor should you. But if we're going to take those at face value, there's a whole lot of TCW to take at face value.

the E-11 had no problem blast-melting that grate, an obvious example of high firepower. My site proves that it was not "fragmented" but even if it were, fragmenting seven liters of metal is still incredible firepower, obviously representative of a higher setting than is typically fired upon human targets.

Or it was not metal, and of course not vaporized (or melted, depending on which one you are arguing), and was the exact same setting as fired on human targets.

I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to be lumping your grate arguments (which are generally identical to Brian's, or vice versa) in with Brian's on a forthcoming page on "The Quest for the Holy Grate".

One question, though . . . are you in the melt or vaporize camp? Brian seems in most of his videos to be of the vaporize persuasion except in a recently-found one, but your page has it a little ambiguous.

Leia's arm does not represent the upper limit of E-11 firepower.

Nor has anyone suggested as much.

Not even me, despite efforts by some (meaning this is not directed at you, unless you've been doing it too) to claim that as my meaning on an ancient (circa 2002) page listed as a "brief note" and "placeholder" for a future Star Wars weapons page a la the Trek page on my site. The amusing thing is that while certain folks like to make up tall tales about how I use that example in debates as a counterpoint to higher examples all the time, the reality is rather different.

Indeed, instead of making strawman ad hominems in that fashion, they'd do better to try to argue the point based on the canon itself. For instance, with the RotS novelization we get reference to Dooku's "armorweave cloak". Given the streaming sparks, I'd be willing to entertain the notion that Leia's camo was such a material. Of course, we'd still have all the weak shots against dirt and whatnot to consider.

(It's a pretty sad state of affairs when I have to do the other side's analysis work for them because they're too busy with personal attacks they claim not to be engaged in to do what they claim to be doing.)

359, thanks for the tips. I'll see about cutting the jagged shape out in the future, I don't think i have the right software for it at the moment. Which is unfortunate, the oval pic does look kinda lame / misleading.

Actually, you could just use Windows Paint to draw white lines on the relevant fracture points you're interested in, perhaps doing so on an un-ovalled screencap as well just to make it clear what's up.

[359]

359, thanks for the tips. I'll see about cutting the jagged shape out in the future, I don't think i have the right software for it at the moment. Which is unfortunate, the oval pic does look kinda lame / misleading.

Actually, you could just use Windows Paint to draw white lines on the relevant fracture points you're interested in, perhaps doing so on an un-ovalled screencap as well just to make it clear what's up.

[/quote]If you're looking for a free photo editing program I'd suggest GIMP. I haven't used it much personally, but it should be able to that fairly easily; and it can definitely do more than MS Paint.

[2046]

http://www.starfleetjedi.net/forum/view ... f=5&t=3859

Updated the "tools of the trade" thread.

[Lucky]

Lucky, that image is one of the chunks blasted from the hangar walls. It looks much smaller when it lands because about a third of it comes of as its flying meters through the air. Its width compared to the stormies head is consistent with its width in the scale image I presented.

Thank you, you can't tell what you are looking at in the picture you posted.

Wouldn't it be better to use the creator for judging the yield instead of a blast that came from inside the wall? We are talking about stucco and/or packed dirt.

Examples of low energy blasting are abundant, indeed. Carbines similar to E-11's were responsible for the rock blasting feats in TCW and the E-11 had no problem blast-melting that grate, an obvious example of high firepower. My site proves that it was not "fragmented" but even if it were, fragmenting seven liters of metal is still incredible firepower, obviously representative of a higher setting than is typically fired upon human targets. The Han / grate image shows that the same shot would destroy your torso; Leia's arm does not represent the upper limit of E-11 firepower.

1) I'm not sure why anyone would assume an energy weapon's barrel length determines how powerful it is? Han's blaster actually seems larger then the E-11 excluding barrel and stock. Heavy blaster pistols like what Han Solo uses are stated in some sources to be more powerful then most blaster rifles.

2) Why should I assume the grate is not a mistake on the part of the writers/visual effects crew? Is there any other time an E-11 shows that level of power?

3) Why should we assume the gate was melted? It doesn't seem like heat is the primary damaging factor with blaster bolts much like explosives to me.

4) Causing rocks to fall like often see in SW:TCW might have happened if the characters had yelled for all we know. The bolts don't penetrate the stone very far if at all.

Caves and mines can appear stable, but be about to collapse. It is very easy at times to release potential energy. It's part of the reason you want a team of paranormal investigators working with you when you are working old mines.

I'm not talking about the sooty marks. I'm refering to the ~1 meter holes in the metal surface. Stormtroopers did that - with their guns. One of em was carrying a T-21 to be fair.

1) This may sound like a stupid question, but what holes in the Sand Crawler? I've never noticed any. It all looks like soot and areas where the rust got blasted away to me.

2) The problem is that we never see the troops who kill the Jawas. For all we know, they had E-WEB, or or a disruptor, or something even heavier.