Originally posted by Woolie Wool
That isn't really a good way to go about it. Fluff > in-game, so take each weapon yield from the fluff. Extrapolate capital ship weapons and bombs from the Harbinger yield of 5 gigatons.
*cough* Read that again. That's the yield of
two Harbingers.
Originally posted by Woolie Wool
A photon torpedo is around 3 megatons according to some calcs, with a quantum torpedo being twice as powerful.
Says who? Have they actually been fired at a target where we could judge?
Originally posted by Woolie Wool
An Acclamator transport's heavy turbolasers are rated at 200 gigatons per shot, and an ISD, being (a) a real warship and (b) a lot bigger, is presumed to be considerably more powerful.
First, what the HELL is an Acclamator transport? Being the proud owner of most Star Wars novels, the Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels, all the X-Wing series of games, and a bunch more stuff, I have never heard of such a ship. And it's misspelled to boot.
Second, that doesn't hold up. Orbital turbolaser bombardment is not destructive enough for that. The demonstration bombardment by the
Chimera in Dark Force Rising, for example, was directed at an area outside a Noghri village. The buildings were made of wood. The
Chimera presumably fired all batteries that could bear, certainly not a single shot. Yet by your standards a hit by a single shot anywhere within fifty miles should have caused the village to at least burst into flame. It didn't. Information assembled from other novels indicates that a Star Destroyer could, in theory, slag a good-size city with a thirty-minute bombardment. A whole planet, though? That would take weeks, maybe months. A Star Destroyer
is capable of knocking an undefended or lightly defend planet back into the Stone Age within a few days, but total destruction is absurd.
Another example: The Super Star Destroyer
Iron Fist's bombardment of the Alliance base on Noquivzor. It delievered a forty-five minute bombardment. Noquivzor Base was underground, but not deeply buried. Alliance casualities were high and multiple levels of the base were destroyed, but the hanger complex survived intact. At 200 gigatons a shot, with a forty-five minute bombardment and the number of guns on an SSD,
Iron Fist's bombardment should have been the equivalent of the meteor that wasted the dinosaurs. It wasn't. Damage was contained to the base only, and not even all of the base. Clearly turbolasers are considerably less powerful then you state.