Michael Wong Star Wars Fan Wank

[Kaelik]

But the Star Wars fighters would just be puzzling to the Star Trek Federation.

Well the vast majority of Star Wars fighters have shields, so... Not sure that they would actually be that confused.

All the Rebel Alliance/New Republic/Old Republic/crumbling Empire/Random Bandits fighters had shields, it was only the "we have an infinite supply of soldiers, and we are Capital E Evil" empire built fighters that didn't have shields.

[Libertad]

I'd like to give a big shout-out to fbmf for making this new thread. Thanks, man!

Relevant video.

[Sashi]

I think Wong has some long argument about how they aren't really lasers, like a "laser rifle" has no actual rifled barrel but is a long gun and thus isn't really a rifle. Or something.

I don't remember him actually defining what the lasers were, except they weren't plasma because plasma sucks. and they weren't lasers because they move too slowly.

This is simple: in sci-fi nobody uses lasers. Full stop. Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Flash Gordon, Transformers, whatever. None of them use lasers. End of argument. Everyone is using "Laser Blasters" or something. At the worst, assume they're actually saying "Lazer" and it's a trade-name for some particle cannon.

Lasers are incredibly inefficient on both ends. It takes massive amounts of power to produce a laser, and most of the laser energy won't actually do anything to the surface it strikes, you'd be better off throwing your power source at the enemy because the impact will probably be more damaging.

Lasers have incredibly easy countermeasures. Reflective surfaces, mylar shards, water vapor. Hell in spaceship battles you can just use distance and the fact that lasers aren't perfectly coherent. You basically require the other side's cooperation and permission before you can hurt them with a laser.

If you could actually get a laser to damage something, all it will do is burn a hole in the target or heat it up until it melts. No explosions or sparks or anything. Even if you could make a laser effective you can't make it dramatic. And Sci-Fi shows want drama.

[Vebyast]

I was planning to stay out of this thread because it was mostly fans fighting with each other about interpretation, but if you want to argue real physics I'd be happy to.

It takes massive amounts of power to produce a laser, and most of the laser energy won't actually do anything to the surface it strikes, you'd be better off throwing your power source at the enemy because the impact will probably be more damaging.

False. Diode lasers are approaching 70% electricity-to-photons efficiency. Even crappy lasers are better than railguns or explosives for useful-energy-versus-heat. On the other end, visible-light albedos for common materials range from .01 to .3, meaning that more than 70% of a visible-light laser goes into the target. In ultraviolet and higher, most common materials absorb with near-perfect efficiency, albeit after the photons penetrate a ways. There is very nearly no such thing as a gamma-ray mirror.

Lasers have incredibly easy countermeasures. Reflective surfaces, mylar shards, water vapor. Hell in spaceship battles you can just use distance and the fact that lasers aren't perfectly coherent.

Reflective surfaces and mylar shards burn off instantly - microscopic imperfections absorb extra energy, become macroscopic imperfections, and your reflector is useless. Dumping enough water vapor into space to shield you also doesn't work, mostly because you have to saturate volumes. It'd be more useful being held in a tank as armor. Distance is a problem, but it's even more of a problem for any other weapon in your arsenal - when you're a light-second and a half out, your biggest problem is hitting things, not focusing your laser on them.

If you could actually get a laser to damage something, all it will do is burn a hole in the target or heat it up until it melts. No explosions or sparks or anything.

And also false. Weapons-grade laser pulses cause explosions as clouds of vaporized, boiling metal expand at the speed of sound. I know that the scenarios on Atomic Rockets are a bit optimistic, but we've got lasers that fire MJ-range shots today. And even lower-power lasers cause blinding flashes of light and horrific burns, destroy sensors, and sometimes leave targets with radiation sickness.

---

Lasers are just about the best thing we've got, physically speaking. "Plasma cannons" and particle beams just plain don't work IRL and skate by on technobabble and suspension of disbelief. You're completely correct that lasers produce pathetic special effects, but that's the only reason they're not used more often.

[Whipstitch]

All the Rebel Alliance/New Republic/Old Republic/crumbling Empire/Random Bandits fighters had shields, it was only the "we have an infinite supply of soldiers, and we are Capital E Evil" empire built fighters that didn't have shields.

Yeah, the classic TIE LN was the epitome of a poor dumb mook ship: no shields, no hyperdrive, no hope, and for no reason. It supposedly got by on its speed and maneuverability but that's a bit of a hard sell given that while its profile is OK in a head on strafing run the big honking side panels meant that any mistake which resulted in taking fire along your lateral axis was likely going to be fatal. So the TIE ended up as both an icon and a bit of an anomaly in the SW canon, with EU characters and factions commonly retrofitting old TIEs with shields before putting them back into service.

[RadiantPhoenix]

So, I was poking around Memory Alpha, and found out the following:

• The Federation does have 1-2 person 'attack fighters'
• They are mostly used by civilians (and at least one group of resistance fighters)
• Starfleet did use a bunch during the Dominion war, though. (presumably because they were outmatched and needed as many ships with guns as they could get their hands on)
• According to this site, they're 30m long, which is approximately the size of the Millennium Falcon.
• The have deflector shields, phasers, and photon torpedoes.

(Note that both ships are somewhat pancake shaped)

[K]

In space, everything is pancake-shaped.

[fbmf]

I'd like to give a big shout-out to fbmf for making this new thread. Thanks, man!

No problem.

Game On,
fbmf

[RadiantPhoenix]

In space, everything is pancake-shaped.

Not so!

[Josh_Kablack]

Trek Universe: something like a 1-in-12 chance of bumping into an omnipotent entity on a random planet.

Star Wars Universe: something like a 1-in-12 chance of bumping into a toothy critter big enough to swallow your spaceship whole on a random asteroid.

[Sashi]

A lot of Wanking.

You're basically right in theory, but in practice you are so so wrong. Lasers aren't "the best we have" that would be missiles.

Diode Lasers are efficient because they use semiconductor physics to excite the gain material. This technology does not scale well to high energies. Dye/Ion/crystal lasers use an external light source (which can be an array of LED's, a flash lamp, or another laser) to pump the gain material. Free electron lasers use particle accelerators. This process is ... not efficient.

The good ship Collateral Damage becomes aware of an incoming hostile missile. Collateral Damage has a laser cannon with a ten meter radius mirror operating on a mid-infrared wavelength of 2700 nanometers (0.0000027 meters). The divergence angle is (1.22 * 0.0000027) / 10 = 0.00000033 radians or 0.000019 degrees.

The laser cannon has an aperture power of 20 megawatts, and the missile is at a range of four megameters (4,000,000 meters). The beam brightness at the missile is 20 / (π * (4,000,000 * tan(0.000019/2))2) = 15 MW/m2 or 1.5 kW/cm2.

If the missile has a "hardness" of 10 kilojoules/cm2, the laser will have to dwell on the same spot on the missile for 10/1.5 = 6.6 seconds in order to kill it.

Figured another way, at four megameters the laser will have a spot size of 0.66 meters in radius, which has an area of 1.36 square meters. The missile's skin has a hardness of 10 kilojoules/cm2 so 13,600 kilojoules will be required to burn a hole of 0.66 meters radius. 20 megawatts for 6.9 seconds is 13,600 kilojoules. 6.9 seconds is close enough for government work to 6.6 seconds.

So that's a 10meter mirror on the West coast pointed at a dinner plate on a moving object on the East coast and holding it there for over six seconds. There's no way you're going to be able to move that thing fast and precisely enough to do that kind of thing without a gigantic and complicated drive train, inertia won't let you.

Even if you could start producing "clouds of vaporized, boiling metal expand at the speed of sound." those clouds will by definition be spurting out into the path of the laser beam, dispersing it and absorbing the heat, turning the vaporized metal into slightly hotter vaporized metal.

It also seems to be assuming that "shielding" will be single slabs of steel or ceramic, and not thousands of sheets of accordian-folded aluminum foil with water sandwiched between it. The further you can spread the energy out the more easily you can dissipate it.

So in other words, one side has a 10m mirror with two schoolbusses worth of power generation and aiming machinery. The other side has all of their trash, in a box, on a gimbal that orients it to always face the enemy.

useful-energy-versus-heat.

Useful energy where versus heat where? Frankly I don't care if an explosive weapon dumps waste-heat into the hull of an enemy vessel, that's just one more problem for them to deal with. Producing heat on my own ship just so I can try and melt a vital area of my opponent's ship is a losing proposition.

[Username17]

I don't know where you got that "craziness", but it's deeply dishonest on a bunch of levels. The most obvious is that the 10 meter laser cannon is completely irrelevant for the discussion, since the arbitrary properties of the missile are measured in hardness per cubic centimeter. Now, apparently the "hardness" of the missile that we have to overcome is equivalent to vaporizing a centimeter and a quarter of titanium at each attacked square centimeter. That's a pretty boss missile: 10 kilojoules per square centimeter is a lot of power (enough to vaporize a human to a "depth" of about 45 centimeters - which is to say that it would boil your body all the way through and keep going out the other side).

But the basic setup is that the person set up a goalpost that was literally a thousand times smaller than the ball he was kicking (a square centimeter target definition and a ten meter power distribution). Of course you get stupidly high numbers if you inflate your demands by three orders of magnitude.

TL;DR: Do the same calculations with a more sensible 10 centimeter laser cannon with the same power output, and now we're vaporizing the titanium coating on the target missile with a time on target of 7 hundredths of a second. Or roughly two frames of a motion picture.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

Screw missiles and lasers, relativistic shrapnel is where it's at. A cloud of tiny projectiles moving a 0.999c is immune to interception, and impacts with the force of several nuclear bombs. Unlike missiles you don't have warheads and rocket fuel eating up your mass limit, so you can pack plenty of ammo.

[Kaelik]

Yeah, I'm going to have to vote for lazers or mass drivers instead of missiles unless you have replicators.

Missiles are really bad in a mass to damage ratio, and require complex construction. So that means you ships run out of missiles and have to load up on more missiles really fucking often compared to mass drivers or lazers.

Whereas Mass Drivers can probably just grab a bit of an asteroid to make more ammo, and lazers can fire directly off your power generator.

[Sashi]

I don't know where you got that "craziness", but it's deeply dishonest on a bunch of levels. The most obvious is that the 10 meter laser cannon is completely irrelevant for the discussion

The "craziness" is actually from the site Vebyast linked that's trying to defend lasers as a viable weapon.

The focusing mirror is 10 meters in diameter because beam diameter is directly proportional to your maximum range. They've got a 10 meter mirror so they can have a 0.33 meter spot size at range.

d = 1.27*f*l/D
d = minimum focus diameter
f = focal length
l = wavelength
D = beam diameter

So a high powered YAG laser (1 micron) trying to hit a target 0.01 light seconds away will need a focusing mirror at least 7.5 meters in diameter just to get a 0.5 meter spot size.

It's wavelength dependent, so you could use an X-ray laser and a 10cm optic to get an actually fantastic spot diameter (380 microns) but now you're wrangling an X-ray laser which brings a whole host of problems, itself. Not to mention trying to get a material that can handle 20MW on such a small area.

I didn't even want to get into the "hardness" of the material because it came so out of left field and wasn't defined. But I think it comes down to you have to instantly vaporize the material or else laser blasts don't "explode like a bomb" and that whole line of reasoning falls apart.

[Hadanelith]

There are a couple of specific advantages to missiles over lasers or mass drivers (granted, they make missiles complicated and expensive, but all hardware design is tradeoffs). The biggest is that missiles let you offload your weapon waste heat into another object - not a huge deal when dealing with mass drivers, but lasers are HOT in the necessary power ranges.
Second, missiles allow off-bore targeting - you know, hide behind an asteroid and bombard? Conveniently, this also allows multi-axis attacks, which make it harder to dodge.
Third, missiles can be self-aiming. Granted, missile seekers can be jammed, fooled, or blocked, but it does allow fire-and-forget capability, which is quite useful in a multi-target environment.
Fourth, missiles force your opponents to deal with another type of weapon, which means they need to have more varied defenses. Forcing an enemy to develop missile countermeasures is only an issue if they don't have them, of course, but if they don't, it gives you a considerable tactical edge until countermeasures exist.
Fifth, missiles allow varied warheads. Mind you, there are a fairly limited variety of practical payloads (EMP, nuke, and bomb-pumped lasers immediately spring to mind), but it does allow some flexibility.
Finally, missile tubes are simple, cheap, and low mass. They don't have to be on turrets (off-bore targeting), and they have reasonably low heat issues (depending on the drive system of the missile, of course).

There are downsides to missiles. As Kaelik points out, running out of ammo is the biggest. Second is the expense. Third, missiles are interceptable. Fourth is that missiles are range and speed limited - they only work when you can get a solid lock, and the ratio of missile speed and agility to target speed and agility can really screw you. Fifth is the need to maintain a lock - missiles can be spoofed, but I've never seen a way to confuse a laser beam. Or, for that matter, a relativistic rock.

All of that said, I'd generally say that missiles are at least worth considering for weaponry. Realistically, their utility depends on enemy defenses and the capabilities of your direct fire weapons, of course, but they are worth thinking about.

[hyzmarca]

You can always combine missiles and mass drivers. Use the mass driver to launch your missile, so that it doesn't need to burn fuel to get up to speed. That way it only needs enough propellant to maneuver.

[Kaelik]

There are a couple of specific advantages to missiles over lasers or mass drivers

...

Fourth, missiles force your opponents to deal with another type of weapon, which means they need to have more varied defenses.

You are kind of dumb.

[jadagul]

Regardless of the debate over the merits and usability of lasers--which is fascinating, so please don't stop--it is the case, canonically, that Star Wars weapons don't actually use them. Because it's canonically the case that what's going on actually looks like the movies, and real lasers don't look like discrete blasts of light you can see from the side. So canonically, blasters emit these discrete chunks of particles wrapped in a tracker beam that glows so you can see where your shot is going. I don't know that this makes any physical sense at all, but neither do lightsabers or hyperdrives and that's what the canon says.

[Hadanelith]

There are a couple of specific advantages to missiles over lasers or mass drivers

...

Fourth, missiles force your opponents to deal with another type of weapon, which means they need to have more varied defenses.

You are kind of dumb.

(EMP, nuke, and bomb-pumped lasers immediately spring to mind)

So I suck at formatting, and one should have been before the other. The point stands.

[Kaelik]

There are a couple of specific advantages to missiles over lasers or mass drivers

...

Fourth, missiles force your opponents to deal with another type of weapon, which means they need to have more varied defenses.

You are kind of dumb.

(EMP, nuke, and bomb-pumped lasers immediately spring to mind)

So I suck at formatting, and one should have been before the other. The point stands.

Except that your retcon to try to pretend that five and four are the exact same thing, but still count as two separate points is still wrong and dumb, because the defenses against all of those are identical, assuming that "bomb pumped lasers" is actually something not stupid. The defenses of distance, being fast, being numerous, any kind of particle shields, and chaff would all work on all of that.

Not to mention claiming that the people who use Ion Cannons should use EMP missiles in order to increase the number of defense systems that people need to have is pretty fucking funny. Because after all, lazers can only do large amounts of damage or turn off electronics, whereas missiles can do large amounts of damage, turn off electronics, or large amounts of damage, thus making them way more varied.

Now, the actual Star Wars books go over how shields work, and the answer is that they instantly vaporize missiles super hardcore, which is why real missiles are only used after you break down their shields or fly under them (the planetary ones with "holes"), alla Tie Bombers.

And the very existence of tie fighters as a thing that people have makes a Star Destroyer that uses missiles as any great portion of its armament pretty fucking dumb.

Missiles in space are really not that fucking great for Capital Ships if you have to resupply from space, because you just do not have the actual ability to kill all the things. Yeah, if we were going to launch Challengers right now to fly up, kill something, land and then resupply, we would totally want to use Missiles with our current tech, but any setting that talks about fleets of ships that are miles long that cannot land on planets and have to resupply all their food already by cargo shuttles is not going to also apply a similar logistics train to missile batteries.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

The big question if you want to do Enterprise vs Death Star is "Does the Death Star's planet buster laser deal enough damage shield to care, and is the Death Star's shield strong enough for the Enterprise's phaser banks to care?" Even if you assume yes on both counts I'm still giving it to the Enterprise, though, because the Death Star is incapable of generating its own shield and the Death Star was only used successfully on targets that can't dodge effectively (A Mon Cal battlecruiser, the space equivalent of a Aircraft Carrier, and the planet Alderaan). I'm sure the Enterprise is maneuverable enough to dodge, at least long enough to notice that the shield is coming from that planet nearby and lock their sites on that.

[Kaelik]

because the Death Star is incapable of generating its own shield

The Death Star does generate its own shields. That is why they didn't just kill it with two Mon Cal Cruisers. Those things shoot TurboLasers that would melt huge chunks off the Death Star if it didn't have shields. But it did, it just had them spread out so far that fighters could slip through in places, like Planetary shields that Tie Bombers can fly under.

[Prak]

How does Wong know that Federation citizens don't think the Federation-style ships are the height of spaceship fashion?

More to the point, doesn't just about every single Star Wars series, with the exception of DS9, focus on a single military ship lost in space? Why the hell does Wong think that the Enterprise would be tripping over douchebags in the red space corvettes?

One of the manuals is Star Wars: Incredible Cross-Sections

I think I have that book, or one of them, it's a fucking kids book. It's like using a colouring book as a citation in an essay.

And not of something exotic and awesome like adamantium or latinum, but he smuggles drugs.

A quick google says that he was smuggling weapons for Jabba in the specifically referenced noodle incident, which is kind of awesome, in that it means he's a gun runner.

[Lago PARANOIA]

A quick google says that he was smuggling weapons for Jabba in the specifically referenced noodle incident, which is kind of awesome, in that it means he's a gun runner.

I refuse to believe that, as it is probably the stupidest thing for anyone to smuggle in the Star Wars universe in a ship of that size. Personally, I think it would be much more awesome if Han Solo was smuggling fine artwork.