I know physics and start wars don't really jive that well. I appreciated that some of the EU authors at times tried to explain some of the problems, but TLJ/R1 kinda ruined it for me.

In the old EU objects with sufficient mass created a mass shadow that prevented hyperdrives/FTL travel from working. Hence why ships had to leave the atmosphere (not just for reasons of friction) to go to lightspeed.

In R1 we saw the U-Wing jump to lightspeed in atmo which made me cringe. In TLJ they took it to the place I was afraid they would go. Weaponized hyperspace capable starships.

.... so I did some sketchy math and WTF - who needs a super weapon like a deathstar when a mid sized sedan with a hyperdrive can destroy a planet??!??!? All you need are some kamaka... never mind .... droid slaves and you can take your fleet of hyperspace capable starships and make your opponents planets uninhabitable.

By my estimates... if Every one of the nukes on earth are in the 1 megaton range (most are much smaller)...

A sedan at .9 of the speed of light has about 8.7 times as much Energy as every nuke on our planet, combined.

Those of you playing any of the RPG's out there.... drive your GM's nuts and take out a planet or three for me.

I've said this before and I'll say it again:

The SHIELDS of the Raddus were what caused the damage, not the ship itself.

3 minutes ago, Indy_com said:

I've said this before and I'll say it again:

The SHIELDS of the Raddus were what caused the damage, not the ship itself.

So shields stop energy weapons and kinetic weapons... do shields increase the mass of the ship? Might not even need a sedan, just a bicycle with a shield generator, R unit and a hyperdrive; lol.

1 hour ago, Cr0aker said:

So shields stop energy weapons and kinetic weapons... do shields increase the mass of the ship? Might not even need a sedan, just a bicycle with a shield generator, R unit and a hyperdrive; lol.

When the Raddus collided with the Supremacy , the experimental shield projectors were ripped off by the force of the impact, shooting ahead as tiny hyperspeed projectiles casting a net of rapidly moving solid shielding.

This shielding is what tore the Supremacy in half and wreaked multiple smaller ships behind it.

The Raddus itself became the GR-75 from the end of Rogue 1.

And what happened to the 49.5 billion megatons of kinetic energy? If the shields allowed a pure transfer of energy in the form of velocity.... those projectiles were probably in the Million or hundred thou range of megatons of kinetic energy... which goes back to the mouse's loose and dirty handling of already weak physics.

33 minutes ago, Indy_com said:

I thought about that scene as well.... but look... the GR75 is still moving at sublight speeds when it hits.

21 minutes ago, Cr0aker said:

I thought about that scene as well.... but look... the GR75 is still moving at sublight speeds when it hits.

I'm drawing an analogy.

The actual hull of the Raddus itself did about as much damage to the Supremacy as that GR-75 did to that Imperial Star Destroyer.

17 minutes ago, Indy_com said:

I'm drawing an analogy.

The actual hull of the Raddus itself did about as much damage to the Supremacy as that GR-75 did to that Imperial Star Destroyer.

I'm not sure that I follow, or could be able to tell that from the movie. At the velocity it was going... the hull of the raddus should have had the same consistency of the plutonium in a hydrogen bomb after detonation.

With all things hollywood - you need to suspend reality - I get that. What takes me out of a movie is suspending common sense.

Even if the physics are wrong , the ability to point a ship at 'X' and jump to lightspeed and destroy it would imply rational or irrational people will turn almost any spaceship with a hyperdrive into a one shot missile and destroy target after target after target.... every time. [We could lose an entire wing of resistance bombers taking that dreadnought out... or a sacrifice a single A-wing..... "A-Wing pilots?" "Uhh, send Bob he is the FNG..."]

Sadly, we will likely still see some kind of (now needless) superweapon in episode IX and it wont be destroyed by a droid in a small inexpensive shuttle with a hyperdrive.

I wont s*** on people who like TLJ. However, if you put your poop in a group - droidacide bombing with spaceships just became the cheapest way to destroy larger targets and should be used that way EVERY time.

Star wars sheilds have never stopped physical attacks, thats why torpedo's are so effective.

1 minute ago, Hobojebus said:

Star wars sheilds have never stopped physical attacks, thats why torpedo's are so effective.

In the old EU yes. Not so sure about this one.

I also almost forgot - didn't TFA make it cannon that at lightspeed... you can fly through shields? So the idea that the Raddus's shields caused the damage, not kinetic energy still has me calling bull hickey.

Frankly fekke Disney's cannon it's terrible and will be forgotten like all nightmares are.

8 hours ago, Hobojebus said:

Star wars sheilds have never stopped physical attacks, thats why torpedo's are so effective.

To further prove your point:

2:58 (sorry at the end) a piece of bull flies from the separatist captial ship and flies into the republic cruiser.

Also, that’s why fighters are need, to (relatively) slowly move through the shields and attack hard points. (ANH, TLJ and countless scenes in CW, ESB- walkers, and TLJ-walkers). A special planetary shield is needed for ROTJ.

8 hours ago, Cr0aker said:

In the old EU yes. Not so sure about this one.

I also almost forgot - didn't TFA make it cannon that at lightspeed... you can fly through shields? So the idea that the Raddus's shields caused the damage, not kinetic energy still has me calling bull hickey.

TFA, Han makes it a point of flying in between shield fluctuations.

10 hours ago, Cr0aker said:

I'm not sure that I follow, or could be able to tell that from the movie. At the velocity it was going... the hull of the raddus should have had the same consistency of the plutonium in a hydrogen bomb after detonation.

With all things hollywood - you need to suspend reality - I get that. What takes me out of a movie is suspending common sense.

Even if the physics are wrong , the ability to point a ship at 'X' and jump to lightspeed and destroy it would imply rational or irrational people will turn almost any spaceship with a hyperdrive into a one shot missile and destroy target after target after target.... every time. [We could lose an entire wing of resistance bombers taking that dreadnought out... or a sacrifice a single A-wing..... "A-Wing pilots?" "Uhh, send Bob he is the FNG..."]

Sadly, we will likely still see some kind of (now needless) superweapon in episode IX and it wont be destroyed by a droid in a small inexpensive shuttle with a hyperdrive.

I wont s*** on people who like TLJ. However, if you put your poop in a group - droidacide bombing with spaceships just became the cheapest way to destroy larger targets and should be used that way EVERY time.

No, don't you get it, Holdo was the very first person to discover this kind of attack, the first person who was ever desperate enough to do it...in the thousands of years that the Star Wars universe spans. (Sarcasm included)

9 hours ago, Hobojebus said:

Star wars sheilds have never stopped physical attacks, thats why torpedo's are so effective.

Aren't there ray and particle shields? I mean, whatever kind of shield the Scarif base had sure as heck stopped X-wings from going through it.

11 hours ago, Indy_com said:

When the Raddus collided with the Supremacy , the experimental shield projectors were ripped off by the force of the impact, shooting ahead as tiny hyperspeed projectiles casting a net of rapidly moving solid shielding.

This shielding is what tore the Supremacy in half and wreaked multiple smaller ships behind it.

Is that stated anywhere in the movie? I don't remember that being there and if not, has it been in any ancillary material? Cause all I've heard is that Rian said in an interview that Holdo was desperate and came up with it on the spot as a last ditch effort, meaning anyone could do it, which begs to question why any group would ever make large ships that are sitting ducks to this type of attack.

Using the new movies to make a point is kinda useless as they don't consistently obey their own rules.

It may be science fantasy but you're still supposed to have a clear divide between the possible and the impossible.

6 hours ago, Animewarsdude said:

Is that stated anywhere in the movie? I don't remember that being there and if not, has it been in any ancillary material? Cause all I've heard is that Rian said in an interview that Holdo was desperate and came up with it on the spot as a last ditch effort, meaning anyone could do it, which begs to question why any group would ever make large ships that are sitting ducks to this type of attack.

Just trying to apply logic to it.

An alternative point-of-view is that it's just increadbly hard to actually time your crafts impact.

If you're slightly to early, you'll just go poof and not to much damage.

If you're slightly to late, you'll just disappear into hyperspacce and hit nothing.

If you're bang on timing, you'll nuke whatever is infromt of you.

Can't just chuck a hyperspeed A-wing at everything because 90% of the time you'll fail miserably and likely die.

16 hours ago, Cr0aker said:

In the old EU yes. Not so sure about this one.

Even in the old EU, there was something called "particle shielding" which could stop physical objects like asteroids and torpedoes.

Which is why fairly slow moving asteroids vanish in a flash of light, against ISDs in TESB, without "leaving a mark".

Fast asteroids, on the other hand packing enough energy to go straight through a shield (especially if the shield is already depleted from a lot of collisions), can take out a whole bridge.

TLJ novel on what happened - doesn't say anything about the shields doing all the damage and the ship's actual mass being harmless. The ship is converted into a column of plasma by the impact - the shields fail - and then the column of plasma rips through the Supremacy and the fleet, on the way into hyperspace.

Page 232:

A hologram shimmered to life at her console.
"Admiral, we're taking fire!" reported a Resistance pilot, and she could hear panic in his voice. "What do we—do we turn around?"
"No! You're too far out. Full speed to planetfall! Full speed!"
An instant later the hologram flared out of existence. Holo thought she saw the pilot throw up his arms before it vanished.
Holdo choked back a dismayed cry. She had to do something. But what? There was no way the Raddus could defend the transports—they had moved beyond the protection of its shields.
A light blinked on the interface with the navicomputer.
Holdo called up the interface to dismiss whatever the alert was—it would only distract her while she tried to think—then paused.
Someone had entered hyperspace coordinates into the system, calculating a jump that had never been made. The navicomputer was asking if the coordinates should be purged.
It was Dameron, she realized—he'd rushed to the bridge as part of the plan he'd concocted, the one she'd correctly dismissed as too reckless and desperate to succeed.
Holdo called the coordinates up on her console. The Mon Calamari cruiser had kept travelling along its heading for Crait since the coordinates had been entered into the navicomputer. As a result, the entry point for the hyperspace jump Poe had calculated was now behind the Raddus,on the other side of the First Order fleet.
Holdo stared at her screen, trying to figure out what she had missed and concluded that her wild hope might not be completely unfounded.

Page 251-252:

Under ordinary operations, the presence of a sizable object along the route between the Raddus's realspace position and its entry point into hyperspace would have caused the heavy cruiser's fail-safes to cut in and shut down the hyperdrive.
But with the fail-safes offline and the overrides activated, the proximity alerts were ignored. When the heavy cruiser plowed into the Supremacy's broad flying wing, the force of the impact was at least three orders of magnitude greater than anything the Raddus's inertial dampeners were rated to handle. The protective field they generated failed immediately, but the heavy cruiser's augmented experimental shields remained intact for a moment longer before the unimaginable force of the impact converted the Raddus into a column of plasma that consumed itself.
However, the Raddus had already accelerated to nearly the speed of light at the point of that catastrophic impact—and the column of plasma it became was hotter than a sun and intensely magnetized. This plasma was then hurled into hyperspace along a tunnel opened by the null quantum-field generator—a tunnel that collapsed as quickly as it had been opened.
Both the column of plasma and the hyperspace tunnel were gone in far less than an eyeblink, but that was long enough to rip through the Supremacy's hull from bow to stern, tear a ragged hole in a string of Star Destroyers flying in formation with it, and finally wink out of existence in empty space thousands of kilometers beyond the First Order task force.

3 hours ago, Ironlord said:

Even in the old EU, there was something called "particle shielding" which could stop physical objects like asteroids and torpedoes.

In the WEG products this was ascribed as part of the hull value of ships. If particle shields failed your hull value was reduced. It was also ascribed as running smoothly along the hull, not able to be projected.

In EpIV.... they fly through the deathstar's shields to attack the surface.
In ROTJ.... its implied that the planetary shield will stop ships flying through it.

3 hours ago, Indy_com said:

Can't just chuck a hyperspeed A-wing at everything because 90% of the time you'll fail miserably and likely die.

Hence why droidacide is the way to go. But I doubt your failure rate will be that low... especially against large capital or planetary targets. And even if they do hit something else first.... that shotgun effect...

3 hours ago, Ironlord said:

Page 251-252:

Under ordinary operations, the presence of a sizable object along the route between the Raddus's realspace position and its entry point into hyperspace would have caused the heavy cruiser's fail-safes to cut in and shut down the hyperdrive.
But with the fail-safes offline and the overrides activated, the proximity alerts were ignored. When the heavy cruiser plowed into the Supremacy's broad flying wing, the force of the impact was at least three orders of magnitude greater than anything the Raddus's inertial dampeners were rated to handle. The protective field they generated failed immediately, but the heavy cruiser's augmented experimental shields remained intact for a moment longer before the unimaginable force of the impact converted the Raddus into a column of plasma that consumed itself.
However, the Raddus had already accelerated to nearly the speed of light at the point of that catastrophic impact—and the column of plasma it became was hotter than a sun and intensely magnetized. This plasma was then hurled into hyperspace along a tunnel opened by the null quantum-field generator—a tunnel that collapsed as quickly as it had been opened.
Both the column of plasma and the hyperspace tunnel were gone in far less than an eyeblink, but that was long enough to rip through the Supremacy's hull from bow to stern, tear a ragged hole in a string of Star Destroyers flying in formation with it, and finally wink out of existence in empty space thousands of kilometers beyond the First Order task force.

Here they clearly try to explain it as the shields contain the physical impact long enough to convert the kinetic energy into plasma which continues along its flight path destroying all in its wake.

This still brings me back to shuttles with droid pilots, and safeties removed have just(?!?!) became THE most economic way to destroy planets/large targets. And that the idea that Holdo is the first person to figure out ramming is an effective tactic.... is asinine.

The tactic is pretty timeless and used by most cultures.

Even Jihadists have figured out that a medium sized truck/van does terrible things to pedestrians.

178 of the 360 U-boats were sunk during the second world war, from a variety of ASW methods:

Mines 58

Depth charges 30

Submarine torpedoes 20

Gunfire 20

Ramming 19

Unknown 19

Accidents 7

Sweeps 3

Other (including bombs) 2 ^[8]

1 hour ago, Cr0aker said:

Hence why droidacide is the way to go. But I doubt your failure rate will be that low... especially against large capital or planetary targets. And even if they do hit something else first.... that shotgun effect...

The 90% failure rate I mentioned isn't 90% chance pilot dies, it's 90% chance you'll do next-to-nothing to the target.

As I said, if you hit reach the target too early you'll just crash into them and won't damage anything else around them.

And if you reach the target too late you'll actually make your jump and either end up somewhere random or be pulled out of hyperspace and into a nearby sun.

7 minutes ago, Indy_com said:

The 90% failure rate I mentioned isn't 90% chance pilot dies, it's 90% chance you'll do next-to-nothing to the target.

As I said, if you hit reach the target too early you'll just crash into them and won't damage anything else around them.

And if you reach the target too late you'll actually make your jump and either end up somewhere random or be pulled out of hyperspace and into a nearby sun.

I think he means that the droid would be able to more accurately calculate the right jump vector and moment to jump to perform the suicide lightspeed ram.

3 minutes ago, Animewarsdude said:

I think he means that the droid would be able to more accurately calculate the right jump vector and moment to jump to perform the suicide lightspeed ram.

If you're targeting a ship, it's going to be moving.

If you're targeting a Death Star, its going to blow you up before you even begin your jump.

The Supremacy decided to fire on the transports rather than the Raddus , allowing it to begin it's jump without interruption.

Throwing an A-wing at hyperspeed into the Death Star probably won't destroy it, due to the size difference.

The Raddus crashing into the Supremacy was like crashing the Empire State Building into New York, where as crashing an A-wing into the Death Star would be like launching an ant at the Moon.

27 minutes ago, Indy_com said:

If you're targeting a ship, it's going to be moving.

If you're targeting a Death Star, its going to blow you up before you even begin your jump.

The Supremacy decided to fire on the transports rather than the Raddus , allowing it to begin it's jump without interruption.

Throwing an A-wing at hyperspeed into the Death Star probably won't destroy it, due to the size difference.

The Raddus crashing into the Supremacy was like crashing the Empire State Building into New York, where as crashing an A-wing into the Death Star would be like launching an ant at the Moon.

An Ant going at lightspeed which would be pretty **** substantial.

20 minutes ago, McFoy said:

An Ant going at lightspeed which would be pretty **** substantial.

Indy's understanding of physics is more the issue.

At the speed of light... dodging or moving out of the way is not possible.

Sufficient distance to jump could be upwards of a light second away... far out of the range of any conventional (or unconventional aka deathstar) weapons we have seen in Star Wars.

E=MV^2..... he may have missed that the mass of an A-wing has probably the destructive power of TEN times all the existing nuclear weapons on earth. That = Big Boom, lol. Make a single reactor core ignition look like a chump.

I don't blame you Indy - our primary and secondary education systems are a little lacking - especially in math, finance/economics, and hard science. Pick up and read some earlier hard science fiction like Heinlein's "Have space suit, will travel" if you want to learn and have fun.
Hollywood is not a good place to learn how the world works, lol. In the Heinlein instance, space is not cold. If it were, your thermos or cooler would not work. it is a perfect insulator. One of the largest issue with spacesuits is keeping you cool. Your body produces enough heat to melt 40lbs of ice a day.... and in vacuum, your in the perfect thermos. Without a method to cool your body... you'll either cook to death or drown in sweat.

Also pretty sure in empire they lose a star destroyer to the asteroid field, if they had shields that could stop physical objects an asteroid traveling at relatively slow speed should be easier to deflect than a torpedo.

I mean real asteroid fields are so spread out you can't see other asteroids when close to one but movie logic.

I took a picture of, but am having trouble attaching, one of the author's notes in the collectors edition of Timothy Zahn's "Heir to the Empire".

In it he discusses (I should probably stop and point out that Zahn was finishing his thesis for his PHD in Physics when his prof croaked. Instead of starting over he turned to writing hard science fiction) how he developed a system to explain hyperspace travel in star wars. It was modeled on the time-dilation formula from relativistic physics, with a range of possible light speed numbers from zero (dead stop) to one (infinite speed).

He also spent a lot of time reinforcing the concept of "mass shadows" as he probably understands that humans (and theoretically aliens) are clever and would use hyperdrives to make missiles in a heartbeat if they could. That and he has made a living writing hard science fiction around interesting technology and how people would actually use it.

He is also the author who helped me understand (when I was a preteen) the following (in his words) "A writer absolutely has to make his villains clever and competent. It's no fun - and no challenge - for the heroes to get out of trouble without sweating about it first."

What does a weak villain look like?

Don't even get me started on Kylo Ren