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- cross-posted to:
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Transcription
Tumblr post by arctic-hands:
When I was a teenager and still on Neopets I was part of a pretty big Star Trek guild and eventually became part of its council, with the solemn duty of creating weekly polls. Well one day I created the poll “Which would win in a fight? Borg Cube or Death Star?”. Naturally, since this was a Star Trek guild, the answer was overwhelmingly “Borg Cube”, but someone did have the rationality to point out we were biased.
So I look up a pretty prominent Star Wars guild and message one of their council and ask them to poll the same question and get back to me in a week. They do, and naturally the fuckin geeks said “Death Star”.
So then I look up a Stargate guild and messaged the lead council member, saying the same thing, and they get back to me almost immediately saying that the Death Star would immediately one-shot a Borg Cube but they would never be able to do it again to another Cube. And I took that wisdom back to my guild and we were mollified, and for one moment the Nerd World was peaceful.
Reply from evilsoup:
An image depicting the story of the “Judgment of Solomon”, where Solomon is labelled “stargate fandom”, and the two women are labelled “star trek fandom” and “star wars fandom”. The Star Wars lady is standing grumpily with her hands on her hips, while the Star Trek woman gestures with open arms. Between the two of them, on the floor, is a baby in a wicker basket. Solomon sits over them in judgment.
Googling says that it was capable of different power levels. But if the super laser just punched a hole in something, then Alderan wouldn’t have blown up. It would just have had a tiny hole punched in it too.
It blew up because it’s a plot point not because George Lucas was running simulations on a super computer in the 80s to calculate a planetary explosion.
Well sure, Star Wars is entirely ridiculous. But it’s also not without precedent. The most famous is President Kennedy’s head exploding when shot instead of a clean hole. So even if the Death Star used a small starship blast instead of planet blast, you wouldn’t get a clean hole punched through unless that’s what the plot called for.
thats… thats not how physics works. A bullet projectile has velocity. A space laser doesn’t.
The Space laser does have velocity. Even ignoring that photons have velocity c, we are shown it moving on screen. E=mc^2. m is mass. A large enough energy is equivalent to a large mass.
The reason you don’t think of a laser as making something explode is because your only experience is seeing something like a laser cutter where the energy is so low it carefully burns away the material rather than deliver so much energy that the atoms don’t have time to slowly oxidize and waft away into gas. It’s like if you only saw a water jet (which moves tiny bits of abrasives at high speed) cut material and concluded that a bullet couldn’t make a head explode.
Which is beside the point that we see Star wars and Trek getting blasted and exploding with only rarely a clean hole being made (like the Borg cutting ray).
Edit:
Here’s a high speed video of a laser hitting a surface.
https://youtu.be/HGFQvYdeKQg?si=ja9vw1UJ_E2z2TjH