As a Loyal Imperial and advocate of The Emperor’s New Order, the revisiting of the Flagship Executor’s cascading terminal spiral with all command staff, officers and crew aboard into the gravity well of the superstructure of the unfinished (but fully operational) Death Star II is the very stuff of my nightmares and waking dreams since 1983.
This picture wounded deeply.
So you DON'T want an invite to the party on Endor?
Also looks nice! Cotton ball and paint?
I just wore this shirt yesterday:
1 hour ago, Darth Sanguis said:
*puts on pedantry hat*
This writer clearly was not an engineer (and neither was the character in all likelihood) because Lord have mercy there is no way that number is not off by at least four digits. If someone computed seven to eight, I'd find that entirely plausible.
For a sense of scale, assuming the USS Virginia's major characteristics are correct, and assuming spaceships are as cramped and space hungry as submarines (maybe, this is actually pretty debatable, but I wanted ballpark), and assuming Virginia was a perfect cylinder, you get an approximate density of .875 tons/cubic meter. Even if you cut that in half to .4375 we're going to have issues.
There are 1 billion (1,000,000,000) cubic meters in a cubic kilometer. At the lower density (which, to be clear, is wildly low in my estimation), that's 437.5 million tons of mass. Thirty billion tons at that density buys you a 68 cubic kilometer sphere, approximately 8 kilometers in diameter. DS-1, the smaller Death Star with the more accepted diameter figure, was one hundred and sixty kilometers in diameter. She was over 2.144 million cubic kilometers in volume. DS-2 at the current Wookieepedia figure of 200 kilometers diameter gets you 4.189 million cubic kilometers. I can't be bothered to do the math right now as I finish my lunch break, but I'll bet you that inhabited crust referenced on DS-1 is inches thick at that mass. Alternatively, the DS-2 reactor detonation was apparently anti-matter and annihilated enough mass it should have torn a hole in space-time (and the plot).
In short, do the math kids. It's not hard.
EDIT: I lied, I did more math. If you assume that DS-2 was half built, you get a volume of approx. 2 million cubic kilometers. 30 billion tons into 2 million km^3 is about 15,000 tons per cubic kilometer. Which sounds like a lot, until you compare. A cubic kilometer of air at sea level will run you 1,225,000 tons. So yeah.
Edited by GiledPallaeonWe’ve resorted to both math and trying to make scientific sense of Star Wars...
*yells and shakes a fist at the sky
“COVID-19, will you not just go away?!? Look what you are doing to us!”
16 minutes ago, GiledPallaeon said:For a sense of scale, assuming the USS Virginia's major characteristics are correct, and assuming spaceships are as cramped and space hungry as submarines (maybe, this is actually pretty debatable, but I wanted ballpark), and assuming Virginia was a perfect cylinder, you get an approximate density of .875 tons/cubic meter. Even if you cut that in half to .4375 we're going to have issues.
Eh, Virginia doesn't have to bring her own air and water along for the entire duration of her mission for her entire crew - her powerplant generates enough energy it is perfectly able to distill both from seawater, which won't be true of anything in space.
If you compare something like a Saturn V rocket, you'll note that the actual amount of metal in a space ship is reasonably small - the thing is MOSTLY fuel and oxygen. And the Death Star adds a Super Laser that seems to require a huge amount of hollow space in and around it (consider the firing sequence shot of the huge empty tunnel each beam comes out of), nevermind we already know the central reactor is large enough to fly around basically an entire squadron's worth of Rebel fighters and chasing TIE Fighters, as well as sufficient open space for them to have flown in and out without issue.
1 hour ago, xanderf said:Eh, Virginia doesn't have to bring her own air and water along for the entire duration of her mission for her entire crew - her powerplant generates enough energy it is perfectly able to distill both from seawater, which won't be true of anything in space.
If you compare something like a Saturn V rocket, you'll note that the actual amount of metal in a space ship is reasonably small - the thing is MOSTLY fuel and oxygen. And the Death Star adds a Super Laser that seems to require a huge amount of hollow space in and around it (consider the firing sequence shot of the huge empty tunnel each beam comes out of), nevermind we already know the central reactor is large enough to fly around basically an entire squadron's worth of Rebel fighters and chasing TIE Fighters, as well as sufficient open space for them to have flown in and out without issue.
In order:
That's not true, Virginia can replenish to a degree, but there are limits, particularly on the air one. She is operationally unlimited. There's a difference.
This assumes a similar energy density to the Saturn V. I don't find this particularly plausible either. I would be more convinced by a comparison to the space shuttle (which I'm not about to compute) or the command and service module, which I generously estimate at 130 m^3 for 28,800 kgs, for a density of approx. 220 kilos per cubic meter. This is incredibly light because the volume is very high (I did a cylinder instead of cylinder and cone). Ok, this is different, let's go forward.
Those aside, I don't find the known large spaces a terribly convincing argument. Let's review with the new density number. Updating our calculations only gets us to a sphere of 11.4 kilometers in diameter, or about 136 cubic kilometers at that density. Again, at half complete, the DS-2 is over two million cubic kilometers. In order for the mass to be accurate, for every cubic meter with the above density, which includes both inhabited and uninhabited spaces like the main reactor towers , there has to be 14705 cubic meters of empty vacuum. That still doesn't fly.
Addendum: that is a significantly lighter figure than the overall density of the Saturn V, which (again computed as a cylinder, so this is also light) at 335 kilos per cubic meter, which is not that far off the half of Virginia number when you consider how many orders of magnitude we're trying to find.
Edited by GiledPallaeon1 hour ago, Darth Sanguis said:
My major issue is the next panel in this Star Wars Tales comic states that the Rebels prevented most of the damage from hitting the moon. Or they threw it into waterworld from 9, I suppose. In any case, non-canonical panel, even for Legends!
Who'd have thought I'd make @GiledPallaeon look sensible?
I'll just leave this here .
QuoteThe ewok population is effectively extinguished. Most were killed in a mass-extinction event affecting life on their homeworld, due to unavoidable fallout and debris from the destruction of the Death Star II.
I got bored and did the math. At 30 billion tons of mass, if you put it as a shell around vacuum, at the calculated .22kg/m^3 computer above, with an outer surface set to 200 km in diameter and a half finished sphere generating those thirty billion tons, your shell is 2.2 meters thick. The rest of the sphere is hard vacuum. About 86 inches if you prefer that measurement system.
If you assume the 15.9% of the DS-2 mentioned in @Grumbleduke 's link, your shell climbs to 6.83 meters
Edited by GiledPallaeonThe thought of an Ewok mass-extinction has bummed me out a bit, especially as RotJ was the first of the films I saw in the cinema in 1984. I don't know if I'll be able to watch the film in the same way again now.
Maybe I should just imagine that the party at the end of the film was the Ewok version of the afterlife.
30 minutes ago, GiledPallaeon said:I got bored and did the math. At 30 billion tons of mass, if you put it as a shell around vacuum, at the calculated .22kg/m^3 computer above, with an outer surface set to 200 km in diameter and a half finished sphere generating those thirty billion tons, your shell is 2.2 meters thick. The rest of the sphere is hard vacuum. About 86 inches if you prefer that measurement system.
If you assume the 15.9% of the DS-2 mentioned in @Grumbleduke 's link, your shell climbs to 6.83 meters
This made my head hurt. So much harder than determining probability if I want to reroll a die or not.
42 minutes ago, JudgeDeath said:Maybe I should just imagine that the party at the end of the film was the Ewok version of the afterlife.
Or you could accept that the Star Wars universe doesn't follow our universe's laws of physics, so with different rules the ewoks may have survived?
1 hour ago, Grumbleduke said:Or you could accept that the Star Wars universe doesn't follow our universe's laws of physics, so with different rules the ewoks may have survived?
Nope. Same universe, just in a galaxy far, far away... seriously, it says so at the beginning of each of the historical documents.
3 hours ago, Admiral Calkins said:Nope. Same universe, just in a galaxy far, far away... seriously, it says so at the beginning of each of the historical documents.
And yet, we can hear the pew pew noises in space.. 😂 😂
1 minute ago, Muelmuel said:And yet, we can hear the pew pew noises in space.. 😂 😂
Not even that - space appears to be almost breathable, there, with a mask (citation: asteroid scene in ESB when the Falcon crew thought they were walking around on an asteroid).
Still, that doesn't necessarily preclude it being our universe - just a galaxy of unusually dense gases, that never expanded to the point where 'space' ends up the vacuum it is in ours.
I've always imagined the pew-pew noises as coming from the firing mechanism on the ship, and the sound traveling thru the air in the ship. Rationalizing inconsistencies out is sometimes desirable to suspend disbelief.
I think it was during one of the Rebels Recons Pablo Hidalgo discussed how Star Wars has different physics. Aside from the obvious examples, things like gravity and distances don't quite work, and the universe doesn't have any kind of special or general relativity (and doesn't really do normal relativity either). Even basic Newtonian mechanics doesn't work (my favourite example being the long-range guns in The Last Jedi, which arc for no reason).
Star Wars exists in a fantasy world, where normal physics doesn't apply. And that's fine; it means we don't have to worry about rationalising things.
On 4/21/2020 at 4:39 AM, Muelmuel said:And yet, we can hear the pew pew noises in space.. 😂 😂
Do we?
The movie spectator hears them: But he has to be somewhere, same for the pilots. Not impossible that the noises are just generated where ever the Observator and pilots are.
When I fley Alphabets and TIEs I can only say that this -generated- noises were a smart design choice and helped me a lot.
On 4/21/2020 at 4:43 PM, Grumbleduke said:I think it was during one of the Rebels Recons Pablo Hidalgo discussed how Star Wars has different physics. Aside from the obvious examples, things like gravity and distances don't quite work, and the universe doesn't have any kind of special or general relativity (and doesn't really do normal relativity either). Even basic Newtonian mechanics doesn't work (my favourite example being the long-range guns in The Last Jedi, which arc for no reason).
Star Wars exists in a fantasy world, where normal physics doesn't apply. And that's fine; it means we don't have to worry about rationalising things.
The Long range guns "arc" because the writers suck. So how do we solve that? Right: The new 3 Movies just dont exist. Disney canon is Disney canon, no Star Wars Fan can or should accept it (because nothing makes Sense anymore with the new canon)
38 minutes ago, DScipio said:The Long range guns "arc" because the writers suck. So how do we solve that? Right: The new 3 Movies just dont exist. Disney canon is Disney canon, no Star Wars Fan can or should accept it (because nothing makes Sense anymore with the new canon)
This is the way!
42 minutes ago, DScipio said:Do we?
The movie spectator hears them: But he has to be somewhere, same for the pilots. Not impossible that the noises are just generated where ever the Observator and pilots are.
When I fley Alphabets and TIEs I can only say that this -generated- noises were a smart design choice and helped me a lot.
And it helps the film a lot. Imagine all space combat in Star Wars without any noise. (If you can't just turn the sound off next time watching. Doesn't improve the experience.)
