That is the question. It was a harden facility. Not a run down Temple. It is possible the Facility did survive that blast, but what condition it was in is really what I want to know.

In comparison there are concrete buildings that were still standing at Ground Zero in Hiroshima. So It is very conceivable that a Hardened Imperial Facility might have a chance. I doubt any of the personnel survived, but that does not mean the facility isn't there.

What about the 2nd shot? Pretty sure Tarkin hung out and did a little BDA while Vader ran down the filthy rebels...

Considering the "mushroom cloud" of the impact went all the way into orbit the debris fallout would cover the entire surface.

Both those planets are royally f'd for the foreseeable future.

9 minutes ago, Takeshi84 said:

That is the question. It was a harden facility. Not a run down Temple. It is possible the Facility did survive that blast, but what condition it was in is really what I want to know.

In comparison there are concrete buildings that were still standing at Ground Zero in Hiroshima. So It is very conceivable that a Hardened Imperial Facility might have a chance. I doubt any of the personnel survived, but that does not mean the facility isn't there.

Hiroshima was firecracker in comparison. The minimum power blasts from the death star are more along the lines of dinosaur killing asteroids at the very least. It might not destroy planets, but I'm pretty sure it makes everyone on the planet have a really bad day.

The Scarif facility could be the most solid building in the galaxy, but I very much doubt it would matter against a weapon powerful enough to strip away the ground it's standing on and dropping said ground on top of it.

26 minutes ago, Takeshi84 said:

In comparison there are concrete buildings that were still standing at Ground Zero in Hiroshima. So It is very conceivable that a Hardened Imperial Facility might have a chance. I doubt any of the personnel survived, but that does not mean the facility isn't there.

Do you remember what happened on Jedha with a blast of the same power? That miles-high wall of rock moving at supersonic speed? Even Imperial engineering at its finest isn't going to survive that. And if some super-thick durasteel vault did, miraculously, "survive" (however crushed and melted it might be), it'd be buried under gigatons of rock.

BTW, the Hiroshima blast was a puny 15 kilotons. Had it been hit with a more modern, thermonuclear device in the megaton range nothing whatsoever would have been standing anywhere within a couple of miles of the epicenter.

The single-reactor blast at Jedha (and Scarif) yields roughly 100,000,000 megatons. That's equal to 6.7 billion Hiroshima bombs, all exploding in the same spot at the same time. Sure, the blast didn't hit the tower directly. It doesn't have to. Again I'll point you to that supersonic miles-high wall of rock we saw on Jedha.

On 1/23/2017 at 5:30 PM, bradknowles said:

I’ve seen tape cartridges before. That didn’t look like a tape cartridge to me.

That looked more like a large bare hard drive.

Looked vaguely like an old bernoulli disk. Man those things were cool at the time.

Yes a Single Blast is far more powerful than the 15kiloton blast that was Hiroshima, but a single reactor would be more a kin to 100,000 Megatons than 100 Million Megatons. I will drop a link to an article that I am using as my reference.

https://www.inverse.com/article/5275-how-much-power-would-the-death-star-need-to-blow-up-the-earth

To get to my point of bringing that up. From what we have seen we can scale up the blast radius and possible damage. Even though the damage is further out you will still have bands of relative damage and the further out you go the more things are left intact.

http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/classic/

I am using 100k Mt on Paris. That at the range going out to 120km you will have almost total destruction with the possibility of severe damage to Heavy Concrete Building. Beyond that up to 320km most standard buildings are still gone, with Heavy Concrete still standing. Comparing that to the Tzar 50mt bomb it only goes up by a factor of 12. With those two radius' being 10km and 26km respectively. Throwing in Hiroshima which was 1.4km and 1.8km in those damage ranges.

So yeah it is a super huge blast, but it doesn't mean everything will be totally wiped out.. There is still a reasonable chance that on both Jeddah and Scarif that if the facility was over 150km it would be standing. Yeah it would be heavily damaged and who knows what the chance of salvaging the site would be.

The number, 100,000,000 megatons was from a different site, that stated 100,000 gigatons. Link is here. For the sake of comparison, the full power of the DS, when used against Alderaan, is 57,361,376,670,000,000 megatons. That's not a typo. It's 57 million times more energy to blow apart the entire planet than to just wipe out Jedha (and pretty much all non-microscopic life on the entire planet).

BTW you're seriously underestimating the destructive force (kinetic energy) of the shockwave of even a real-life thermonuclear blast. Not to mention the temperature of the fireball, which is as hot as the core of the sun (tens of millions of degrees). Assuming the Scarif tower is too far from the laser's point of impact to be vaporized, and that's a big assumption given the view we see of the approaching fireball in the beach scene with Jyn near the end, the heat of that blast front should still be enough to melt all rock it touches into glass and turn durasteel into metallic puddles in that glass.

4 hours ago, RicoD said:

Considering the "mushroom cloud" of the impact went all the way into orbit the debris fallout would cover the entire surface.

Both those planets are royally f'd for the foreseeable future.

When I saw that the first thing that went through my mind was "extinction level event".

1 minute ago, papy72 said:

When I saw that the first thing that went through my mind was "extinction level event".

Agreed. This becomes quite clear when you see the blast effects from the perspective of those watching aboard the Death Star. The scope of crustal deformation appears to be greater than that of the "dinosaur killer" that impacted just north of Yucatan circa 65 million years ago. (There are plenty of computer simulations of that event so it's relative easy to compare video clips of Rogue One to those of any of several History/Science channel or BBC documentaries.)

I'd argue that Star Wars is more fantasy than scifi, and that it's technological levels doesn't follow what we'd consider logic, but rather a somewhat unashmed rule of cool. Thus, the advanced intelligence of droids doesn't necessarily say anything, really, about the ability to store data in other ways. That being said, of course I needed some sort of way to approach this when GMing, especially as I've previously mostly GMed various what we in swedish call "doll house settings", i.e, settings where everything is very interwoven and plausibility and internal causality is a big big thing.

Thus, upon GMing Star Wars for the first time, my players adviced me to basically envision most of everything as WW2-level tech, but in space. I had this in mind when watching Rogue One, and then it really made sense. The main confusion in my mind wasn't really how the data worked (and you guys have already made some interesting points about that, too), but an utter lack of comprehension as to the properties of planetary shields. In one movie, they stop -information-, in another, you can hyperspace jump through them...god it's confusing. Sure, according to my own statement above, I shouldn't expect too much logic from Star Wars, but at least I wanna understand what the h is going on...

but back to the data. One thing I find confusing is that Edge of the Empire talk about slicers a lot and even imply you can hack an enemy space ship in combat (Force and Destiny rulebook, page 241), whereas canon Star Wars media never seem to imply that something like that is even possible, and mostly gives the impression that wireless computer connections more or less doesn't exist. So I have a reeally hard time to envision that hacking starship action in a way that feels remotely Star Wars-appropriate, and it conflicts with that "WW2 tech" rule of thumb I've been using a lot. What do you guys think?

No wireless computer connections? Tell that to the Trade Federation and their droid control ships.

That never happened as far as I'm concerned.

2 hours ago, papy72 said:

No wireless computer connections? Tell that to the Trade Federation and their droid control ships.

That could be why we see less of it in the future. Their invasion army was defeated by taking out the command ship. Ok, we better fix that before the Clone Wars..

I don't think it's a matter of wireless technology doesn't exist, just that it is unsafe to use so most don't hook it up to their facility or ship. Then, add that wireless has very low bandwidth (to explain why holograms over the holonet are so crappy) and it's all good for me.