Star Wars: Rogue One (Spoilers!!!)

[PakledHostage]

3 hours ago, tater said:

Sure, I'm fine with retelling old stories in a new way. It could have been a space-opera retelling of any number of classical tales and I would be fine with it. What I don;t like is for movies within  a series to tell the SAME classical tale over more than once.

I think that the trouble with Star Wars for people who grew up with the original trilogy is that it is like an old flame... Every few years it calls you up and pleads "baby I've changed", so you give it another chance only to be disappointed yet again. We keep falling for it because it was great once upon a time.

[kerbiloid]

Don't forget that all those your "doors", "hulls" and other "solid" stuff are just clouds of trembling subatomic particles held together with the electromagnetic field.
Even more, all those particles-schmaticles are just clots of quark-gluon plasma guggling in the probability pot like a lava lamp.
(Btw remember this every time when you raise your hand. Myriad clouds of particles suddenly move in unpredictable directions without any visible reason from the subatomic pov.)

Ok, let that so-called "door" be hard. Let it be made of aluminium, just because.
How much energy stores this "door"? As much as you need to disintegrate it into separated atoms. This is heat of evaporation. (Round it up to add the heat of melting.)

So, aluminium. Density * HeatOfEvaporation = 2700 kg/m³ * 10900 kJ/kg = 2.7*10³ * 1.09*10⁷ = 3*10¹⁰ J/m³.
Those "door", "hull", other so-called "material" objects are just self-confining packs of energy of 30 GJ/m³ density.
So-called "particles" are just droplets of glue binding this energy without external energy source and also they interact with free photons making them to interact with the transparent itself electromagnetic field.

Is 30 GJ/m³ a lot?

Look at the photons of Planck length.
Each photon energy = h * Frequency = hc / Wavelength = 6.6*10^-34 * 3*10⁸ / 1.6*10^-35 = .1.2*10¹⁰ J = 12 GJ.
I.e. the energetical density of the aluminium is 2.5 Planck photons per m³.
 

Let's calculate.
The density of electromagnetic field enrgey is σT⁴/c.
So, 5.67*10^-8 * T⁴ / 3*10⁸ = 30*10⁹.
T = 3.5*10⁶ K.
So, the aluminium solid is equivalent to 4 megakelvin hot electromagnetic field. Just without electric plug.

What do you need to knock the door out? Say, 1 meter thick, 10x10 m wide.
Energy = 30*10⁹ * 10 * 10 * 1 = 3*10¹² J = 0.7 kt.

I.e. one shot of a pulse laser 1 kt per shot.

Say, we launch a projectile at 0.1 c speed.
(0.1 * 3*10⁸)² * Mass / 2 = 3*10¹².
Mass = 7 g.
I.e. a rifle bullet.

An antimatter bullet,
E = mc².
m = 3*10¹²/(3*10⁸)^2/2 = 1.7*10^-5 kg = 17 mg.

Say, we radiate photons of Planck length.
We need 2.5 * 10 * 10 * 1 = 250 photons to evaporate the door.

So, "material" armor is ephemeral, while the force shield is solid.
Once the door is knocked out, you may say bye-bye to it.
Once the shield is discharged by an enemy hit, you should await its recharge.

All you need - to create enough dense electromagnetic field to force appear/disappear virtual particles inside. Particles will make it opaque and absorb electromagnetic impulses.

Is it uncommon?
Think.
M = m / sqrt(1 - (v/c)²).
dM = M - m = m (1 / sqrt(1 - (v/c)²) - 1)
Let dM = m.
So, 
1 = 1 / sqrt(1 - (v/c)²) - 1
2 = 1 / sqrt(1 - (v/c)²)
sqrt(1 - (v/c)²) = 1/2
1 - (v/c)² = 1/4
(v/c)² = 1 - 1/4 = 3/4
v/c = sqrt(3/4) = 0.866
So, when you are accelerating something up to 0.9, its full (relativistic mass) from the immobilized observer's pov is more than twice greater than its initial mass. The greater part of full mass is energy applied to accelerate it.
Is this thing still "matter" or mostly "energy"?

P.S.
Star Self-destroyer is absolutely inviable thing.
True ship must be a toroidal solenoid.
 

 

[razark]

9 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Don't forget that all those your "doors", "hulls" and other "solid" stuff are just clouds of trembling subatomic particles held together with the electromagnetic field.

(lots of math snipped out because I got bored and couldn't be bothered to actually put too much thought behind arguing fictional technologies )

Interesting.  But when the Rebels shoot out the main power reactor or the shield generator, the walls (unlike the shields) don't cease to exist.

I mean, sure, if they shoot the wall, the wall goes away.  But that's only in one local area, not the entire ship's hull.  We can shut airtight doors between the remaining part of the people storage tank and the hull breech.

[tater]

3 hours ago, PakledHostage said:

I think that the trouble with Star Wars for people who grew up with the original trilogy is that it is like an old flame... Every few years it calls you up and pleads "baby I've changed", so you give it another chance only to be disappointed yet again. We keep falling for it because it was great once upon a time.

This. I liked Star Wars when I saw it because it was unique at that time, and I was just the right age for it to really grab me (about my son's age, now).

The next one was OK, but Jedi really bugged me. I was appalled by Phantom Menace and vowed not to spend a penny on the other prequels (and haven't). My feelings about the "improvements" Lucas did to the original on DVD is best summed up by the South Park episode about it.

 

[kerbiloid]

9 hours ago, razark said:

if they shoot the wall, the wall goes away.  But that's only in one local area, not the entire ship's hull.

As you can see, a shot of megaton-class single-use laser, or 1 g of antimatter, or a pack of rifle bullets at 0.1 c, or several thousand photon of Planck wavelength should make the Star Selfdestroyer to spread around as bolts and nuts.
Unless its hull is protected with a large spherical and very dense electromagnetic field which would evaporate projectile and absorb radiation.

All that math is just to show: all hull, doors and other objects seeming material, contain really negligible amount of energy compared to the energy of a force shield which is absolutely required to protect it.
Say, 1 megaton-class gamma-laser could be created by humans more or less right now, while SW battleships require many centuries of technical evolution more. So, if they would invade, but Earth had,s sy ten years, they would lose.
In shell-armor competition the ball is totally on the shell side here, unless using force shields.

So, the hull would just protect from occasional oops'es like a collision with a wrench lost on orbit.
But the hull of such size would be enough thick for this in any case, just to stay rigid. It would be just a hull, not an armor.

So, when 99.9(...)% of your protective energy is held in a force shield, the other 0.(...)1% held in the hull just play no role.

And the force field is much easier to implement with toroidal super-solenoid, where it is also the main engine, relativistic flight shield, gas collector, magnetic chute and so on.
(And maybe a centrifuge inside which solves the problem of artificial gravity)

Edited January 3, 2017 by kerbiloid

[TheKosanianMethod]

I just saw it, and I really liked it. The transition from Rogue One to A New Hope is almost seamless. In fact, you could stitch the two movies together into one long movie and it would seem viable.

[ProtoJeb21]

On 12/24/2016 at 1:58 PM, razark said:

Ok, did I miss something?

  Reveal hidden contents

 

They can't transmit the plans through the shield, so they have to destroy the shield gate to get the message through.  So they transmit a message through the shield, telling them to destroy the shield so a message can get through?

If they can get message A (Destroy the shield) through the shield, what prevents message B (Death Star plans) from getting through?

 

 

One possible explanation is that the shield contains a density of particles that is meant to scatter most radio transmission waves. Only powerful transmissions, or sparse ones, can go through the barrier. Strong beams of radio waves have more of a bulk and can survive contact with the shield energy. However, wide transmissions will have so much space between photons that most, if not all, will escape the shield particles. And by so much space I mean a few feet. Remember, there is quite a lot of space between molecular and (sub)atomic matter, even in "solid" objects.

[FishInferno]

On 12/24/2016 at 1:58 PM, razark said:

Ok, did I miss something?

  Hide contents

 

They can't transmit the plans through the shield, so they have to destroy the shield gate to get the message through.  So they transmit a message through the shield, telling them to destroy the shield so a message can get through?

If they can get message A (Destroy the shield) through the shield, what prevents message B (Death Star plans) from getting through?

 

 

Another possible explanation is that they hooked up the stolen shuttle into the Empires's communication network, but they needed the shield down to transmit directly to the rebel ships without going through the Empire.  The "destroy the shield" message was quick enough that it got through in all the chaos before the Empire could block it, but the plans took much longer to transmit and could have been blocked had they gone through the Empire's network.

[monstah]

Yeah, I think that part was supposed to be: they need the big antenna for the plans because of its bandwidth, but it's inside the shield. They hack a port that connects (physically? this part doesn't make much sense) to a small antenna outside the shield but that lacks the bandwidth for the plans, and use it to broadcast a request to take down the shield. It sort of makes sense, but it still seems to be a roadblock just for the sake of drama.

[Spaceception]

This is awesome