You do realise they were just throwing numbers around for SW starships?
Wrong, the turbolaser numbers in that page are taken from the ICS, but
here is a good quantitive analyse of the astroids scene from ESB giving us a sense of the scale involved in a ship that CAN vapourize astroids.
Besides, those numbers are not from movies but some collectors manuals, books or something that was realeased to make money later.
Except that these books are considered canon and are therfor relevent to the discussion. The numbers in the first page I linked to, regarding the acclemator, are taken from the Episode 2 ICS, written by Dr. Saxton(author of the
Star wars technical commentries). While the second are extrapolations of astroid destruction in the chase scene of episode 2.
Hell, I can invenat a Sci-fi series and later print manuals that saz the weapons on the ships generate 99999999 bajjilion TW or power per shot, but that is the realm of fairy tales.
And if I was discussing your verse, I'd have to take those numbers into account, unless they are contradicted by your discription of the weapons in any other text. In this case, the movies are the highest canon, and using the ESB astroid vapour scene, we get quantative numbers.
If Slave 1 could indeed deliver 64000 GW, it could glass a planet on its own...
It's the equalent of giving a mercenary today a portable nuclear missile launcher...thus..REDICOLOUSLY STUPID.
Uh no, again
quoting from SD.net.
The absolute minimum energy requirement for destroying an Earth-like planet is roughly 5E16 megatons. This is 500 million times the K-T extinction asteroid impact (and hundreds of millions of times the firepower of an individual ISD or Shadow planet-killer).
The information on how to derive the force needed to destroy a planet is
here, to quote the relevent parts.
The accomplishment of the complete disruption of an Earth-like planet sets a lower limit to the destructive capability of the Death Stars' prime weapon. The gravitational binding energy of a planetary body is the minimum amount of energy required to eject all of its material with sufficient force that it will not fall back together. (It is also the total energy which would be released as heat if the entire substance of the planet were gathered together from free space.) For an object of a given mass the gravitational binding energy is increased when a greater fraction of the mass is concentrated near the centre. The density of a planet tends to increase with depth from the surface, because the weight of overlying material causes pressure to increase with depth, and heavier materials tend to sink towards the core when a planet forms.
Alderaan is probably a typical habitable planet, with much the same dimensions and composition as our Earth. An approximation for its gravitational binding energy can be obtained according to the density structure profiles of the Earth or Venus. An approximate figure for the binding energy of Alderaan, assuming Earthlike composition and mass of 5.9 x 1024 kg, is:
U = 2.4 x 1032 joules.
It should be noted that this is simply the minimum energy required to destroy a terrestrial planet. The Death Star's maximum capability is much greater.
For the full math on how this number was arrived to, slightly differant results due to differant estimations, but roughly same scale.By the way, thank you hades, these comparisons are mostly meaningless, as each verse has it's own power scales, which fit the story, comparison is technically possible(using simple physics) but also irrelevent. But it's a fun hobby.
