Comic Book Resources
Comic Book Resources (usually abbreviated CBR) is a large website dedicated to news and information about comic books and related media. Posters on the message board attached to the site, and specifically the Comic Book Rumbles forum, have historically been a significant source of argument and amusement for members of the Stardestroyer.net message board.
The Eruption of Late 2005
Autumn of 2005 saw the beginning of a large spate of Star Wars related versus threads in the Rumbles forum, with several dozen started in the final two months of the year and continuing at a reduced pace over the first six months of 2006. This activity attracted the attention of SDN and several members went there to participate. Inevitably, the fact that they were members of SDN resulted in them being dismissed out of hand by many.
While most participants in these threads demonstrated the illogic and ignorance of science typical of the average person, a vocal and arrogant subset of them took it to extraordinary levels. A selection of posts from these people are shown below.
Dhusk
On the Cretaceous-Tertiary Impact:
Holy crap, you're insane.
100 teratons = 100 TRILLION tons of TNT. That level explosion would have cracked the entire planet in two, not just created a 300 mile-wide crater off the Yucatan.
The 4 to 6 gigaton explosive range of the K-T impact has been calculated by actual RL scientists and experts in their field who have studied the phenomenon for decades and ran simulations on billion-dollar supercomputers. They were not rabid warsies with pocket calculators and bad science assumptions, so I'll take their word for it, not yours.
LOL, you're moonbat crazy, or your sources are. Where are you getting those figures from? And people wonder why SD.net people are so readily dismissed.
4 to 6 gigatons is plenty to cause a global extinction event. Are you even aware of the environmental mechanisms that cause such a thing? Probably not, or you wouldn't even be making the assertions you are. Christ, just run the numbers yourself; the mass of an asteroid a few miles across deadfalling from orbit at about 7 miles per second (minimal unpowered re-entry speed from space)
The combined nuclear arsenals of the US and USSR during the height of the cold war equalled about 4 gigatons. Are you saying a full-scale exchange between those two wouldn't have triggered an apocaylptic environmental catastrophe? And that's with the explosions spread out, not slamming into the planet in one spot like God's own bullet.
Plenty of Earthquakes with gigaton-level and even teraton-level energies have shook the Earth, and yet none known have ever caused an extinction event, UNLIKE asteroid impacts, which have been verified to do the same. earthquakes and surface explosions expend their energies in different ways and have much different impacts on the planet as a whole. Why don't you learn some RL science instead of the warsie version before you begin dragging it into a debate?
Dhusk never produced a source supporting his claimed four to six gigaton figure for this event. Actual scientific research has produced figures ranging from ten to as high as eight hundred teratons.
On the effects nuclear weapons and similar high energy events:
So if we're assuming that SW beam weapons deliver as much damage as atomic bombs, where does all this the energy go, especially when they hit unshielded targets? When a TIE fighter, which has no shields and is just a flying box of metal, gets hit, what should happen with kiloton-yield weaponry is that all the matter of the fighter get superheated instantaneoulsy into plasma; the plasma expands explosively into a huge glowing plume many kilometers wide, and could take up to an hour or more to cool off to the point where it becomes dark again.
In vacuum there would be no atmosphere to resist the expansion of the vapor produced. It will continue indefinitely, shortly becoming too diffuse to be visible regardless of temperature.
SuperSaiyaMan12
On the legitimacy of the ICS and Curtis Saxton:
Darkstar had a point about ICS, that it should not be canon. No turbolaser blast has even come close to *1* gigaton, let alone 200.
Hell, Curtis Saxton even admitted he was wrong about that.
No evidence was provided for this supposed admission.
The Incredible Cross Section Book. Saxton even contacted Wong for the figures, and didn't even consult the movies, EU, etc. for realistic calculations, he took Wong's word for it. Lucas made ICS non-canon due to all the contradictions to his movies and his EU.
No evidence was provided for these claims.
On Michael Wong's calculations:
- http://forums.comicbookresources.com/showpost.php?p=2194000&postcount=33
- http://forums.comicbookresources.com/showpost.php?p=2194005&postcount=34
- http://forums.comicbookresources.com/showpost.php?p=2194020&postcount=35
SuperSaiyaMan12: In the EU, I have yet to see one turbolaser fragging a planet. Wong made those calculations up.
Cognitive Genome: No, not a single one, hell no. An entire SD's arsenal slagging a planet over an hour.
SuperSaiyaMan12: Wong's calculations use ONE turbolaser, putting it at 60 gigatons.
In fact, Michael Wong's Base Delta Zero calculations, which can be seen here, involve 12 heavy and 120 light turbolasers firing at a rate of one shot every two seconds for an hour. Yield figures derived from this are 22 gigatons and 179 megatons for heavy and light turbolasers, respectively.
On astronomy and the power of the Death Star:
Oh, if the Death Star has 100,000 times the firepower to destroy a planet, couldn't it destroy half a galaxy or at least a Solar System in one blast?
Volume wise, the Solar system out to Neptune's orbit is 3.5e17 times larger than Earth. The galaxy is over 1e41 times larger than Earth.
fuaak
On the legitimacy of the ICS and Curtis Saxton:
Curtis Saxon (the hack responsible of the ICS) is a religious fanatic when it comes to Star Wars. He's a long time SD.netter and his personal mission is to make SW's space dick look bigger no matter what. He created the ICS without having even seen the movie the tech of which it's supposed to describe, consulting Mike Wong, and the sole purpose of the thing was to create ridiculously bloated figures for SD.net geeks to masturbate over.
The power outputs listed in the ICS are based on nothing more than his wet dreams and have absolutely nothing to do with the movies - he literally scoured all the EU for the highest one-time figures he could find, made them higher still, and slapped them on the page. Not only it's not canon, it doesn't even try to resemble canon. It's fanwank in the purest sense.
In the very movie the SD.net is supposed to be based on, Slave I's main guns are fired at Obi-wan, resulting in an explosion equal to about a stick of dynamite. They are fired at tiny asteroids a couple meters across, resulting in fragmentation, not vaporization. And the novelization says that the shot at Obi-wan emptied the guns' power packs. Yet we are to believe that those same guns are capable of thousands of times more?
The Star Trek equivalent would be to claim that the TOS-era Enterprise's phasers can kill divine beings (because they, y'know, have), then extrapolate that by Voyager era they must be so advanced they can cut the universe in half.
A couple general notes:
1) Apparently, the guy who penned the kiloton weapon powers into that fanwank cutsection book (which, BTW, is the ONLY source that supports such power levels for SW weapons) mixed up the words "kiloton" and "kilojoule". If you just replace every word "ton" there with "joule", you get energy outputs that are actually fairly consistent with the movies (and most of EU as well).
Ren
On the destruction of Alderaan:
- http://forums.comicbookresources.com/showpost.php?p=2256355&postcount=18
- http://forums.comicbookresources.com/showpost.php?p=2256392&postcount=1024
- http://forums.comicbookresources.com/showpost.php?p=2256450&postcount=35
- http://forums.comicbookresources.com/showpost.php?p=2256462&postcount=40
petapascal: The e32 J number is based on the planet expanding at escape velocity. If it was only expanding at escape velocity it would take ten minutes for its radius to double. Alderaan's radius doubled in less than a second, which takes more energy than its binding energy.
Ren: Interesting. So, its radius doubled, but it failed to continue the motion. Scientific inconsistancy... In Star Wars? Noooo...
petapascal: I didn't say that. Doubling its radius is just an example. I could say that it would take the planet twenty minutes to triple its radius, which Alderaan also did in less than a second. It would keep expanding after that in both.
Ren: It would... But didn't.
Take special note of what Ren said here: he is claiming that once Alderaan's radius doubled its expansion abruptly ended.
Afterwards
The episode eventually culminated in a moratorium on Star Wars threads in the Rumbles forum which began on July 24 2006. Originally intended to be a month long, within a few days of August 24 it was extended another month, then extended again a month later. The moratorium was lifted on October 24 2006, and while Star Wars threads started to reappear, they never again reached the heights they attained months earlier.
External Links
(SDN) I take back any claims of intelligence in CBR, B cubes vs DS