Oh, sorry. For some reason, I didn't even notice that the thread continued ! Shame on me.
I have to ask if SS4 sees himself as a mod or a debater, because he bases his moderation on his own analysis of your arguments (oh, again, bad arguments blah blah), plus nitpicks on other silly things, and yet I find his debating aptitude rather lacking in this thread.
You were right about the semantics, because blasting off is indeed totally different to cracking and scorching.
Contrary to what Fell thinks, cracking a continent (and this doesn't say how much cracked it is btw) could require one or two OoMs above what is enough to actually move tectonic plates underground (we only get to see the results on the surface). It's apples and oranges to what would happen if you literally blasted off a continent, and considering their abuse of quote literalism, I can easily see how someone would take Schatten's words literally.
There's like a vast sea of OoMs separating both descriptions. It's even worse since Schatten did use plural while speaking of blasting continents off. We're speaking of a large chunk of any planet here, all blasted into space.
SS4 should really take some distance if he's really that bad at making the difference. Just as Schatten, who apparently has conveniently forgotten that the bolts that brought down the shields of the Naboo yacht in TMP weren't even capable of completely vaporizing mere droids. See? That's a couple megajoules there, tops, which is all the more amusing considering the numbers given in AOTC for the other Nubian ships of the same or even inferior size: petawatt shielding, no kidding, and I doubt the decades gap explains it. Logically the yacht should have at the very least a shield capacity in the comfy terawatt range.
So the size of the Battleship's reactor is pretty much irrelevant. What matters is what the bolts were doing to targets with a constitution we can safely assess to get an idea of the yields.
They'd have to claim, for some reason, that the shield, although it does let pass some energy through, would still leave out only some few megajoules out of bolts that would need to be like... millions if not billions of OoM greater.
It comes down to your preference. Do we go with the idea that the shield did let a bolt hit the hull, precisely where it looks like shields could be manually managed from outside (we see a red reflection on the hull pointing at the panel one frame before the blast) or de wo believe that this part popped off because the shield was tanking too much energy, and therefore find ourselves with a shield that clearly was about to collapse anyway?
Will they pretend that the droids were protected by those same volumetric shields with completely random criteria as to how, when and how far from the ship bolts should be intercepted? :)
Besides, I don't get the fuss about "whooptedoopedia". That's just looking for any stupid excuse to get you negative points. It's verging on the mindless repressive a**hole attitude, as it's wrong on so many points I wouldn't even know where to begin with.
Schatten should also take a break. He's being way too hang up because of one person missing out the obscure reference about the Praetor reactor thing put (and probably suggested by Saxton) into the Complete Locations' chapter devoted to Hoth.
Regarding
CPLF's post, perhaps he should note that there's no real evidence for either side? Actually, if we go by the way torpedo spheres work, as they look for a specific weak spot and saturate it, it's *possible* that focusing fire on a single point of a shield would be more efficient. Heck, I think something like that just happened in the Thrawn Trilogy, when Mara Jade and her squadron of outdated fighters all concentrated their fire onto the shield protecting some ventral section of an ISD, during the battle of the Katana Fleet (or whatever remained of it). Not only that, but it follows logic that a high pressure on a concentrated spot is more damaging than when spread over an entire area.
But God forbid using logic. Ever.
Oh, and the fact that the shield withstood some bombardment for months or years is irrelevant. What matters is what it could withstand all at once at moment X. Clue: it has something to do with power, not total energetic consumption.
General Donner wrote:The Eclipse superlaser? And bringing up the Dark Empire Sourcebook to support it?
[quote="Sourcebook chapter 6, "Starships""]The most important advancement in the Eclipse is its main weapon, a spine-mounted superlaser modeled on the main weapon of the Death Star itself. The Death Star's prime weapon was composed of eight individual lasers that could focus together, generating enough power to destroy an entire planet. By comparison, the Eclipse carries only a single laser, but recent focussing and generator advances make this ray much more powerful than the units used on the Death Star. The beam packs enough destructive power to shatter the most powerful planetary shields and sear whole continents in a flash.
[quote="Chapter 9, "Planetary Shields""]The superlaser, main weapon of the Death Star and the Imperial flagship Eclipse, takes another tack. Instead of weakening a shield, the superlaser is able to pierce through it by using a coupled neutrino charge. This neutrino charge not only plunges through the shield, but it penetrates the mantle and lower levels of the planet. Great chunks of the crust can be vaporized, sometimes sending the surface exploding outward with enough force to shatter the world.[/quote][/quote]
They won't mention that because they need to ignore it. As pointed out in numerous threads where the superlaser power was brought up, if they acknowledge the limited effects of a Death Star superlaser against a full-coverage planetary shield, they'd have to drop the idea that Alderaan had a shield. Knowing that the entire quote (the rest of what you posted) precisely says Alderaan had no such shield is the final nail in the coffin.
