How much damage does it do? .....

That's not the real question. What I really want to know is what would happen if it was fired at a gas giant or a star? I'm wondering because Yavin is a gas giant and it blocked the firing on Yavin and I'm curious why they just didn't shoot Yavin and then move onto Yavin 4.

How much damage? Plot.

As to why they didn't fire at Yavin? Drama, and ipso facto: plot.

In universe reason: cool down time. Perhaps the death star has slow firing 37

It does all of the damages.

Lets go all technobabble for a second.

The energy to completely destroy an Earthlike planet is minuscule compared to the power of the F.. Err.. I meant, compared to the power requirement of blowing a Gas Giant that is possibly an order of magnitude more passive.

Neptune, for example, is about 17 as massive as the Earth. Yavin is probably closer to Jupiter in term of weight, so thats 317 times the mass of the earth.

Its been stated that the achievement of blowing up Alderaan was staggering. So i think the Star Wars verse is not ready yet for Gas Giant detonation.

Lets go all technobabble for a second.

The energy to completely destroy an Earthlike planet is minuscule compared to the power of the F.. Err.. I meant, compared to the power requirement of blowing a Gas Giant that is possibly an order of magnitude more passive.

Neptune, for example, is about 17 as massive as the Earth. Yavin is probably closer to Jupiter in term of weight, so thats 317 times the mass of the earth.

Its been stated that the achievement of blowing up Alderaan was staggering. So i think the Star Wars verse is not ready yet for Gas Giant detonation.

So in theory if they could generate enough power they'd be able to blow up a gas giant too?

Given that Alderaan isn't shown to explode away from the force of the blast I'm dubious that the station would survive the explosion of something several hundred times larger.

Plot is the best answer as this is SciFi and physics doesn't necessarily apply.

But if we look at the Alderan situation it's like the beam reverse gravity on the thing it hits, or creates an antigravity well at the center of the target object. In a rocky planet that's like a grenade going off, sort of. In a gas giant though it may just make a very large Nebula as all the plasma at the core rapidly spreads out. The nebula would be very hot, but still a nebula.

Or the gaseous nature of the outer layer of a gas giant diffuses the beam so it does not have sufficient power to destroy its solid core (That we think they have, nobody knows for sure).

I understood the "official" explanation was that high powered shots took too long to recharge. Low powered shots (hitting ships in the Battle of Endor) recharged quickly. Of course if you took out Yavin then the moon would probably be wrecked in the initial loss of it's gravity centre, killing and destroying most things on it in the short term and everything on it in the long term when it flew off into deep space, just like Space 1999.

Ooooh, that would make a nice plot hook. Find the lost moon of Alderaan and the hidden treasures on it!

Neptune, for example, is about 17 as massive as the Earth. Yavin is probably closer to Jupiter in term of weight, so thats 317 times the mass of the earth.

I think you could make a very reasonable argument that Yavin Prime is even larger, for the simple reason that it has a moon with gravity and atmosphere similar to earth.

Of course, there's always the possibility of Yavin 4 having a super-dense core or some such alteration that would result in a smaller planet(oid) having similar gravity to earth, but in the absence of such a suggestion, I'd say it's just as plausible to assume that Yavin 4 is roughly the same size as Earth.

Upon that stipulation, I think there's a solid argument to be made that Yavin Prime is at least bigger/more massive than Jupiter by a factor roughly dictated by the factor of sizing between the moons of Jupiter and Earth (that is, if Earth is approx. 3.5x more massive, you could apply that 3.5x to Jupiter's mass to get Yavin's).

Plot is the best answer as this is SciFi and physics doesn't necessarily apply.

But if we look at the Alderan situation it's like the beam reverse gravity on the thing it hits, or creates an antigravity well at the center of the target object. In a rocky planet that's like a grenade going off, sort of. In a gas giant though it may just make a very large Nebula as all the plasma at the core rapidly spreads out. The nebula would be very hot, but still a nebula.

A nebula forming sounds fairly awesome. What are your thoughts on the effect it would have on a star?

Plot is the best answer as this is SciFi and physics doesn't necessarily apply.

But if we look at the Alderan situation it's like the beam reverse gravity on the thing it hits, or creates an antigravity well at the center of the target object. In a rocky planet that's like a grenade going off, sort of. In a gas giant though it may just make a very large Nebula as all the plasma at the core rapidly spreads out. The nebula would be very hot, but still a nebula.

A nebula forming sounds fairly awesome. What are your thoughts on the effect it would have on a star?

I imagine it would be more or less the same as if the star died normally (except faster). So that's a super nova if it's big enough, expanding drastically otherwise. Either way it's not something you'd want to be near.

Plot is the best answer as this is SciFi and physics doesn't necessarily apply.

But if we look at the Alderan situation it's like the beam reverse gravity on the thing it hits, or creates an antigravity well at the center of the target object. In a rocky planet that's like a grenade going off, sort of. In a gas giant though it may just make a very large Nebula as all the plasma at the core rapidly spreads out. The nebula would be very hot, but still a nebula.

A nebula forming sounds fairly awesome. What are your thoughts on the effect it would have on a star?

I dont think a Gas Giant would form a Nebula. Considering a Nebula is dozen of light years wide.. And a gas giant wont even have enough matter to cover a star system

My guess is it would have little or no effect on a star.

So in reality the Jupiter size planet would initially create a Nebula, then some will be sucked onto the star, the rest could form into a planetary disk, over a couple of hudred thousand years...

A star is a lot hotter, and bigger than any planet. The energy required to reverse the crushing gravitational forces of the interior of a star are extreme. Assuming a society that can go FTL have technology that's capable of such large amounts of energy then there's s couple of things that could happen.

So assuming the device reverses gravity, and there is a lot of gravity in a star, then very rapidly the star would essentially explode, similar to a Super Nova. It's going to spread fast, and still be very very hot. All the atoms are going to have a lot of angular momentum around the center of gravity too, so although the new gas cloud will be spread it will still be spinning quite fast, especially in the central area.

The next question is "how long does the anti-gravity last?" If the atoms are not spread out enough before gravity returns to normal then it will rapidly collapse back. This may affect close in planets, slowing their orbits enough for them to crash onto the surface of the star.

If the anti-gravity does last long enough then it's a super hot cloud of rapidly spinning gas. It would need to spread a long way, so if our star did it every planet would be inside this cloud. And every one of them would be super heated. All atmospheres would be stripped off, all life destroyed. This would essentially reverse the entire planet formation process. Devastating.

There is also the question of what happens to planets orbits. Do they get repelled by the same ant-gravity force, sending them into an escape orbit, or at least raising their orbits and completely changing their length of year and surface temperature. Deviation.

So pick any of these options, and describe the destruction, or potential destruction if the device is used. But I can't see anything surviving without an incredible amount of protection.

When I say Nebula I do mean it to be very small, it's more the visual concept I'm trying to evoke. It would still be orbiting the star.

And none of these are actually real possibilities to our current knowledge, just speculation with a little touch of physics.

Bruce; "Can we have one?"

GM: "Have what? A Death Star?"

Bruce: "Yeah! you can make it our starting spaceship!"

GM:"Yeah lemme think about that. NO."

Bruce: "How about just the super weapon then?"

GM "NO, Bruce!"

I've though about this before and in my mind the Superlaser is simply not powerful enough to have any significant effect on a gas giant or star.

You could make it a different 1 use only weapon, but a technology the Empire could easily mass produce. Perhaps a "bomb" with a Hyperdrive, aim it at the star and let it hit at FTL speed, that gets it to the center where it does it thing. Basically the MacGuffin of an adventure where the PC's are trying to stop it being built and tested by the Empire or some twisted Corporation

Or a regular ship has been sabotaged to hit a particular star on a particular route to kill an Ambassador the Party is to protect. The target star is a key system in some ongoing tense negotiations the Ambassador is trying to solve. Lead in with some simpler attempts, then pull this out, while the PC's are on said ship on said Hyper route.

My interpretation has always been that approaching a mass shadow in hyperspace is devastating to the object in hyperspace but does nothing to the realspace object creating the shadow. This specifically voids using hyperdrives as weapons.

You may be correct, I don't know the Legends well. I was more thinking of it as a way to deliver the payload to the centre of a star, not the thing that does the damage. It's a Theoretical weapon in a Universe with different laws of Physics that just so happens to be fictional! Looking for plot here.

You just want to make sure you're not allowing easy access to a superweapon for that anybody with a hyperdrive and an autopilot.

How much damage does it do? .....

That's not the real question. What I really want to know is what would happen if it was fired at a gas giant or a star? I'm wondering because Yavin is a gas giant and it blocked the firing on Yavin and I'm curious why they just didn't shoot Yavin and then move onto Yavin 4.

They would have to recharge. s0 it might have been faster to simply wait.