Star Wars The Book of Boba Fett/Mandalorian/DIsney Star Wars Yields and calcs

[Zachowon]

Think of it as the bombing if dresden

 

[KilroywasNOTHere]

Think of it as the bombing if dresden

I'll also add that the empire may have chosen nukes because bombers and torpedoes in compression while more advanced would be too clean. Yes it's much cleaner to cut someone's vital arteries with a surgeons tool, but you don't get to savor the screams of blasphemy from the victim that you would get using a box cutter or a kitchen knife. The empire was basically run by a bunch of guys who if put under a mental examination would be red flagged for being serial kills. They didn't just want to kill the mandalore, they wanted to essentially mutilate them.

 

[Agent23]

keep in mind that the destruction of manalore was made before the Death Star was fully operational. They were just beginning the testing phases at the time. If it was working by that point I guarantee you that Gidion would have advocated (most likely successfully) to have mandalore completely erased from existence.

also keep in mind that nukes despite being so primitive are still highly feared in the Star Wars universe. They are incredibly dirty bombs by Star Wars standard and cause a lot of lasting destruction.

Even in our world, old tactics are still used. Russia destroyed the middle east by salting the area and nothing of note has grown ever since. That area is broken beyond repair.

I doubt it, the Deathstar and anything related to it were a lot above Gideon's pay grade, and Grand Moff Tarkin probably would have told him to sod off, this is my baby, go build yours.

In any case, dirty or not, the yield is more important than the irradiation, IMHO.
If you have capship level energy weapons and torpedoes that can release Gigatons-worth of damage it is immediately superior to any conventional nuke, a nuke would be useless in normal space combat, but a turbolaser would be useful for both BDZ and ship to ship or ship to fighter engagements.

A few gigaton or high megaton strikes on a planet could render it unlivable in minutes, Tzar bomba for example made a seismic event that was felt all over the globe, circling it 3 times, the mushroom cloud alone covered nearly 100 kilometers and there was a change in preassure that you could detect all the way in New Zealand.

Tzar bomba would not be able to scratch the paint of an ISD unless applied to the bridge, at least that is what ICS tells us.

Nukes in general and the nukes we saw used are pea shooters compared to what the Empire should have, ergo, the ICS calcs are all nonsense, and the Mandator IV-class Siege Dreadnought's bombardment canons, which were slow-firing and not all that powerful, also corroborates that.

Even in canon it says that a single shot can vaporize or turn into slag 100 cubic meters of mantle, well an 8kt nuke can do that to everything within a 34m radius around it given an underground test.Well, an 8kt nuke buried in rock vaporizes everything in a 34 meter radius and does extensive damage beyond.

So, yeah, either the ICS is total bunk and Wars weapons are massively under-powered, or Star Wars races are stupid enough to stockpile large amounts of extremely ineffective dirty bombs that require special containment and handling, dunno how good Wars anti-rad treatments are, though, maybe they have an equivalent to Fallout's RadAway.

 

[Agent23]

I'll also add that the empire may have chosen nukes because bombers and torpedoes in compression while more advanced would be too clean. Yes it's much cleaner to cut someone's vital arteries with a surgeons tool, but you don't get to savor the screams of blasphemy from the victim that you would get using a box cutter or a kitchen knife. The empire was basically run by a bunch of guys who if put under a mental examination would be red flagged for being serial kills. They didn't just want to kill the mandalore, they wanted to essentially mutilate them.

Yeah, so you use flint-tipped arrows that have been sitting in a pile of excrement for a day instead of machine guns and artillery, sure.

 

[KilroywasNOTHere]

I don't know what else to tell you man. I mean if you want me to ruin things, Turbo lasers are deliberately made underpowered because if giving more power than a nuke M.A.D will have to logically come into play and then at that point the movie wouldn't be called "Star Wars" it'd be called "Spy wars" or "satalite wars" Nukes are always going to be looked at as devastating weapons because we know that in real life if left in the wrong hands they are creation killers that can end all life on earth as we know it. There is a reason why weapons like the death star end up being metaphors for such weapons.

 

[Agent23]

I don't know what else to tell you man. I mean if you want me to ruin things, Turbo lasers are deliberately made underpowered because if giving more power than a nuke M.A.D will have to logically come into play and then at that point the movie wouldn't be called "Star Wars" it'd be called "Spy wars" or "satalite wars" Nukes are always going to be looked at as devastating weapons because we know that in real life if left in the wrong hands they are creation killers that can end all life on earth as we know it. There is a reason why weapons like the death star end up being metaphors for such weapons.

I am following the common process we used for these sorts of debate.
We have visual evidence of the inferiority of Star Wars weapons that proves ICS/Wongcalcs are bunk.
Blame the writers and CGI team if their actions gave Star Wars weapons a massive downgrade as compared to what ICS said Wars had.

 

[KilroywasNOTHere]

Blame the writers and CGI team if their actions gave Star Wars weapons a massive downgrade as compared to what ICS said Wars had.

honestly, I stopped taking vs debates seriously when shows casually had Big Bangs and Big crunches happening casually in the background of fights. Anime is really notorious about this. At some point you have to accept that while there is some logic involved there is something to be said about visual stimulation and "Rule of cool." that being said your suspension of disbelief may very. the "Holdo Maneuver" disintegrates my suspension of disbelief as it does the very thing turbolasers would do if they weren't scaled down. It invalidates the practicality of war. (Why fight when I can just blow your entire galaxy apart by knocking a few systems off thier orbits by crashing a fleet of capital ships or astroids at light speed into a few major planets.) kind of a problem when your movie is called Star WARS.

 

[Agent23]

honestly, I stopped taking vs debates seriously when shows casually had Big Bangs and Big crunches happening casually in the background of fights. Anime is really notorious about this. At some point you have to accept that while there is some logic involved there is something to be said about visual stimulation and "Rule of cool." that being said your suspension of disbelief may very. the "Holdo Maneuver" disintegrates my suspension of disbelief as it does the very thing turbolasers would do if they weren't scaled down. It invalidates the practicality of war. (Why fight when I can just blow your entire galaxy apart by knocking a few systems off thier orbits by crashing a fleet of capital ships or astroids at light speed into a few major planets.) kind of a problem when your movie is called Star WARS.

Ok, noted, your counter-arguments still don't hold water, though!

 

[KilroywasNOTHere]

Ok, noted, your counter-arguments still don't hold water, though!

mainly trying to explain it from a story prospective

 

[Agent23]

mainly trying to explain it from a story prospective

Well, I am only interested in the VS. perspective.

 

[ShadowArxxy]

Er.

Do I really have to point out that just because they're producing mushroom clouds does not mean they are nuclear weapons? A mushroom cloud is produced any time you have a sufficiently large omnidirectional explosion -- it means those weapons are nuclear level yield, not that they are literal fission or fusion weapons.

 

[ShadowArxxy]

As for how sensible Imperial tactics in this situation are or aren't, here's my take:

We know from the series that Mandalore was previously a loyal Imperial system, but due to the events seen in the Star Wars: Rebels CGI TV series, the Imperial loyalists were overthrown by a new government that was pro-Rebel. It is strongly implied, although not explicitly stated, that the Night of A Thousand Tears was a direct Imperial response to that rebellion.

As the Empire, the last thing we want to see is large numbers of fully trained Mandalorian troops, or potentially even large-scale assets like capital ships, actually joining the Rebel Alliance. So the only possible response to a Mandalorian revolt is to move in with absolutely overwhelming force, annihilate the rogue Mandalorians, and make a lesson of the situation. At the same time, we don't want to just BDZ the planet, because even if the Mandalorian people are no longer of use to the Empire, Mandalore is the galaxy's only known source of the ores used to make beskar, and beskar is extremely valuable.

Now, I would argue that the most effective Imperial retaliation is for the local sector fleet to immediately send a Star Destroyer force into the system to carry out the following:

1) Wipe out any planetary defense forces in space and establish control of the orbitals.

2) Limited orbital bombardment targeting planetary defenses and hardened military targets.

3) Follow-up TIE Bomber airstrikes using tactical nuclear scale weapons to level non-hardened targets, focusing on population centers and critical civilian infrastructure. Larger, higher-yield weapons and/or turbolaser fire would be much less efficient at leveling "soft" targets while avoiding collateral damage to facilities the Empire actually wants to keep (i.e. the beskar mines and any associated refineries).

4) Search-and-destroy sweeps using probe droids and infantry on the ground and close-support gunships in the air to find and kill survivors.

I would argue that both what we saw in BoBF and what Moff Gideon verbally described in Mando is perfectly consistent with the follow-up phases of such an operation; it doesn't actually prove that Mandalore had no defenses, simply that defenses were not being attacked during the brief glimpse we saw on screen.

 

[Agent23]

As for how sensible Imperial tactics in this situation are or aren't, here's my take:

We know from the series that Mandalore was previously a loyal Imperial system, but due to the events seen in the Star Wars: Rebels CGI TV series, the Imperial loyalists were overthrown by a new government that was pro-Rebel. It is strongly implied, although not explicitly stated, that the Night of A Thousand Tears was a direct Imperial response to that rebellion.

As the Empire, the last thing we want to see is large numbers of fully trained Mandalorian troops, or potentially even large-scale assets like capital ships, actually joining the Rebel Alliance. So the only possible response to a Mandalorian revolt is to move in with absolutely overwhelming force, annihilate the rogue Mandalorians, and make a lesson of the situation. At the same time, we don't want to just BDZ the planet, because even if the Mandalorian people are no longer of use to the Empire, Mandalore is the galaxy's only known source of the ores used to make beskar, and beskar is extremely valuable.

Now, I would argue that the most effective Imperial retaliation is for the local sector fleet to immediately send a Star Destroyer force into the system to carry out the following:

1) Wipe out any planetary defense forces in space and establish control of the orbitals.

2) Limited orbital bombardment targeting planetary defenses and hardened military targets.

3) Follow-up TIE Bomber airstrikes using tactical nuclear scale weapons to level non-hardened targets, focusing on population centers and critical civilian infrastructure. Larger, higher-yield weapons and/or turbolaser fire would be much less efficient at leveling "soft" targets while avoiding collateral damage to facilities the Empire actually wants to keep (i.e. the beskar mines and any associated refineries).

4) Search-and-destroy sweeps using probe droids and infantry on the ground and close-support gunships in the air to find and kill survivors.

I would argue that both what we saw in BoBF and what Moff Gideon verbally described in Mando is perfectly consistent with the follow-up phases of such an operation; it doesn't actually prove that Mandalore had no defenses, simply that defenses were not being attacked during the brief glimpse we saw on screen.

First off, irradiating the ore you want to mine is a bad idea.

Second, there is nothing to suggest the Galactic Empire used beskar on a large scale, aside from some pet projects like maybe Gidoen's Darktroopers IIRC.

It looks to be too rare to make any real difference in large-scale conflicts and military production.

Nice rationalization, though.

You still aren't addressing the fact that
1) Orbital bombardment can be limited in scope to just some military facilities and population centers.
2) There is the whole elephant in the room, which is the fact that neither Bobba Fett's seismic charges, nor the Siege Dreadnaught's orbital bombardment canons were as powerful as ICS/Wongcalcs say they should be.