BC-304 vs. Imperial Star Destroyer

[Buba uognarf]

Seriously, I don't see how it was hard to find host parts. The titles were written in bold orange, and the links directly linked to posts, not pages.
That said, I'm glad you've finally found them.

The link sent me to the top of the page, i thought that the Wraith info would be mixed in with the rest of the debate so i read the entire thing...anyway no need to dwell i did finally find it lol

[Mister Oragahn]

Did we not all have this arguement about the Odd vs a SD a few weeks ago?

There4 i am sure the outcome with the Daedalus would be the same as the outcome in the other thread inwhich i belive the SD was winning in a Figther vs Figther space conflict while the Odd won on a direct 1 on 1. (Am i right?)

However the daed not having the upgardes dose put it at more risk. There4 i would say SD. But the daed with the new class upgrades would win. like b4

That debate was pointless, from the moment you actually think a bit about it.
It required to know your stuff, but once done, everyone could realize the overkill situation.
Right now, there's enough evidence that an ISD is already outclassed by a 304. You know that means with the late version of the Odyssey.
Because contrary to popular belief, it's not because in a show, it takes a powerful shil A 100 shots to destroy a ship B, that this same ship B will be able to resist against 100 attacks from another universe's powerful ship.

People often glance over the meat and potatoes of what matters.
Firepower, weapon type and delivery, shield, dissipation system, manoeuverability, sensors, support crafts, etc.

If a ship has standard shields already able to withstand a total energy between more than 240 and roughly 3,420 gigatons, and on the other end a ship that's routinely described as downed by small and focused barrages of weapons in the kiloton/low megaton range (assault from fighter wings), and a majority of firepower descriptions putting it in the high kiloton and medium megaton range, there's really no wonder as to which ship is going to go down.
And quick.

[Dutch_Razor]

The Imperial II class star destroyer actually has 8 octa barreeled BIG guns, over 64 normal turbolaser towers and numerous ion cannons.

It can effectively render a planet inhabitable with it's cannons alone, and it has over 10 wings of starfighters and bombers.

Also it's shields can stop multi-gigaton blasts (as seen in Episode V by the mass of the astroids) easily, and for hours ( the search for the Falcon lasted quite long).

In short, I don't the Odyssee stands much chance.

Unending Spoilers

Spoiler:

Of course, with Asgard upgrades it's another matter, although I still lean towards the SD

[darth_timon]

Wow, I hadn't actually expected this thread to have even this much activity.

The highest firepower calculations derived from the episode Beach Head (see the link below
http://forums.spacebattles.com/showp...&postcount=24))
imply an impressive 25GT per shot for an Ha'tak class vessel. Since it usually takes a dozen or so shots from one Ha'tak to destroy another, it means an Ha'tak can take around 300GT. One Ori blast can kill an Ha'tak, 304s can take at least double that, meaning it takes a minimum of 600GT to punch through a 304's shields.

Can an ISD do that? Yes. EU sources refer to the Base Delta Zero operation, which a single ISD can perform in one hour. The operation involves reducing a planet's entire surface to slag- as in, molten, burning up, etc.

I refer you to this page: http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/...DeltaZero.html

It is also a canon fact that 30 year old troop transports in in the SW universe have 200GT heavy weapons. One salvo = one third of the firepower needed to bring down the Daedalus's shields. A Star Destroyer is a more modern ship and goes with the Empire's philosophy of building bigger and more destructive equipment. It therefore makes sense that it is more powerful.

[fugiman]

Sorry to sound blunt but do you read what people say, or are you going to hammer an opinion until it gets nailed into everyone's head?

Good luck.

Actualy I do read what other people say but I still see the SD winning becuase of what I said, so I do try to hammer my opinion because thats what we are trying to do here.

So once again I go with the SD because number of fighters, crews experience in space combat, firepower and the reinforced hull which will make up for the shields

[Jimbo-DR]

25 Gigaton per Ha'tak blast? Thats just stupid. Everybody seems to think that Sci Fi energy blasts do enormous damage, and they do, but not in the nuclear weapons range like your thinking. Rewatch the Sentinel, in which Svarog's Ha'tak rains down Energy blasts on the City, which go up like dynamite, but not like a 25 Gigaton nuclear blast.

In Star Trek: First Contact, the Borg Sphere that fires on Earth fires energy blasts that do pretty much the same exact thing.

[Mister Oragahn]

- PART I -

Okay, time to switch to full speed mode. I'll asume you know the basics, because the points you make are clearly abvoe the average knowledge of both sources.
Doesn't mean they're right though, and here's why:

The Imperial II class star destroyer actually has 8 octa barreeled BIG guns, over 64 normal turbolaser towers and numerous ion cannons.

Says the EU. I agree on the ISD Mark II bigger cannons, for which we can easily count the barrels by looking at the production models, but I'm yet to see the evidence for the rest. We know that there are some less powerful cannons, however, how and what types is another deal. Nonetheless, for the sake of simplicity, I'll accept the EU's numbers here.

It can effectively render a planet inhabitable with it's cannons alone

There are many many ways to render a planet inhabitable, unless it's given an operation timeframe that largely exceeds wankastic claims.

and it has over 10 wings of starfighters and bombers.

Good. And then?

Also it's shields can stop multi-gigaton blasts (as seen in Episode V by the mass of the astroids) easily, and for hours ( the search for the Falcon lasted quite long).

Episode V, The Empire Strikes Back, demonstrates nothing of that. There's a total of two asteroids seen crashing on ISDs. One, rather tiny, is instantly destroyed when hitting the ship.
The other, rather big, slams into the bridge of one of the ISDs supporting the Executor, and sees her bridge tower completely destroyed.
Of course, none of those cases demonstrate a capability to withstand multi gigaton blasts.
This is made up stuff.

Wow, I hadn't actually expected this thread to have even this much activity.

The highest firepower calculations derived from the episode Beach Head (see the link below
http://forums.spacebattles.com/showp...&postcount=24))
imply an impressive 25GT per shot for an Ha'tak class vessel.

Though I consider that level of firepower to be expected for a ha'tak, those calcs are meaningless.
They're the fruit of extrapolations and baseless ramblings, supported by nothing more than assumptions, like the way the ori shield absorbs energy, how much of it it absored, etc.
Nothing of that can be explained and made clear, precisely because of too many unknonws.

Since it usually takes a dozen or so shots from one Ha'tak to destroy another, it means an Ha'tak can take around 300GT.

I'm afraid that it's nothing more than pure guesses on your part.
What are hese battles you're talking about?
We've never seen any combat between vanilla ha'taks until Reckoning, and even there, they were special cases:

First case, which I actually used for my own ha'tak firepower estimations (and to demonstrate that beyond anything, the 200 MT from the alternate universe can't be the maximum yield those cannons can reach), had Teal'c's mini-fleet sitting like ducks and getting shot at by a few of Ba'al's ships.
Ba'al's ships were not even trying to shoot down Teal'c ships. Ba'al was buying time. Many of the bolts missed their targets, and two or three ha'taks at most fired among the fourty or so present, at very low rate of fire.

The second one involved replicators enhanced ha'taks, which is not going to prove anything, safe that normal ha'taks saw their shields falling much faster.

One Ori blast can kill an Ha'tak, 304s can take at least double that, meaning it takes a minimum of 600GT to punch through a 304's shields.

Triple. The Korolev took two complete blasts, and almost entirely sucked the third, but shields finally failed.

Can an ISD do that? Yes.

No.

EU sources refer to the Base Delta Zero operation, which a single ISD can perform in one hour. The operation involves reducing a planet's entire surface to slag- as in, molten, burning up, etc.

This is already adressed and debunked.

You're not paying attention at all!

I have the feeling that many people read the OP, post their replies and don't bother checking out if other people have actually already spent time adressing the same points.

It only makes the discussion redundant and going in circles with no conclusion.

I can also cite examples, such as Darksaber, with the Knight Hammer, an Executor class Star Destroyer, firing its batteries at maximum power at the surface of Yavin IV, yet only setting trees on fire. Nothing even remotely close to the claims by certain dishonest people who tried their best to ignore, distort, deny or alter already established facts.

" 'Do we have plans for an attack, Admiral?' the weapons chief said from his station, looking disappointed as he assessed his array of weaponry.
'Yes,' Daala said. 'We strike from orbit. All turbolaser batteries, full strength. Fire at will, targeting any structures in the jungle.'" [ "Darksaber", p. 311 ]

" The Knight Hammer's weapons chief fired another volley of deadly turbolasers, and another, and another." [ "Darksaber", p. 311 ]

"Even from her place in the Knight Hammer, high above Yavin 4, she could already see the forests starting to burn."

It actually doesn't take much to create wide spread fires visible from orbit.

"Callista looked up and saw another blast come down. With a single strike, the Super Star Destroyer obliterated an acre of ages-old growth. One lucky shot could level the Great Temple." [ "Darksaber", p. 350 ][ "Darksaber", p. 311 ]

TL bolt hits, an acre of trees are destroyed.

Callista's not being that far from the temple actually. Had the bolts been in the claimed gigaton ranges, temples, forests and Callista would be all gone.

What is admirable is how some people have claimed that this was the result of a light or medium TL hitting the jungle. Of course!

Well, what's remarkable is that when you actually push the thought a bit further, you then realize that if this claim were to be true, it would mean that among that soup of light, medium and heavy TL bolts, the author, reporting Camilla's thoughts, is actually concerned about the effects of a light or medium TL hitting the jungle, yet completely ignores the effect of the heavier TLs fired at the same zone.
That's literally focusing on the devastating effects of forest fire, but not considering those multi-kilometers wide craters due to those insane claimed yields... because they're negligible in contrast to forest fire.
I mean... SURE!
Not only is this completely absurd and stupid, but if those multi gigatons claims (not to say teratons considering the latest claims seen on internet) were true, then our dear spectator wouldn't be there to think about it anymore.

Now, capital ship firing their cannons:

"Moonshadow was coming up and turning to port, its port-side batteries firing against Direption's aft shields. Red and blue laser and ion cannon fire pumped terajoules of energy into the shields, but somehow they stayed up." [ "X-Wing: Isard's Revenge" p.111 ]

The shields of the other ISD-II were actually expected to get kicked out with that firepower, but for some reason, they resisted longer than planned.
What's important is what was expected then.

"Two New Republic Assault Frigates, the Tyrant's Bane and Liberty Star, cruised in toward the Golan station. Though each ship was less than a third as long as the station, they bristled with fifty laser cannons and poured terajoules of coherent light into the Golan." [ "X-Wing: Isard's Revenge" p.7 ]

The Moonshadow is an ISD Mark II. The other ships are assault frigates, armed with enough firepower to threaten a new ISD.
They all engage the enemy, in the goal to destroy them, and fire terajoules of energy. In other words, kilotons.

And examples of starfighter firepower, totally in line with the films, but utterly against figures claimed by Saxton and his dishonest pals:

"He tightened down on the trigger, pulsing kilojoules of scarlet energy into an eyeball's cockpit." [ "X-Wing: The Krytos Trap" p.54 ]

Kilojoules. Not even megajoules. Ergo, yields in kilograms of TNT.

" Corran hit the trigger and walked laser fire from stern to nose on the ugly. Two bolts blew the R5's flowerpot head off, then two more punctured the cockpit, exploding it into a cloud of transparisteel and duraplast fragments. The last bolts hit forward and touched off a proton torpedo's fuel cells. The fuel's detonation filled the slender craft with fire and sent the nose spinning wildly off into space." [ "X-Wing: The Krytos Trap" p.46 ]

You see the effect of a starfighter's bolts against an old droid's head.

" The quad burst of laser fire pierced the Headhunter's shields. The red beams sliced into the joint where the port wing joined the fuselage, sheering it off. The engine on that wing exploded and the ship itself whirled off in a flat spin." [ "X-Wing: The Bacta War", p. 75 ]

The effects once the shields are down. Not that impressive. Especially, goes against claims about weapons able to vaporize starfighters.

[Mister Oragahn]

- PART II -

I refer you to this page: http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/...DeltaZero.html

The unreliable page by perfection. Distorson + cherry picking + wank, and here's what they get. All of which is already adressed before.

What's incredible - or not - is how so many fans are perfectly fine with the idea that Saxton openly ignored core defintions of a true BDZ - which doesn't even require the complete destruction of the surface of a world - and immediately accept his reformed definition as true, despite the fact the sources which created the order's rules and parameters completely contradict his own wishful vision.

Where they claim several ships, eventually up to a hundred ships, Saxton claims only one single ISD.
Where they claim hours and several stages, he claims a one hour only operation, no more no less.
Where they clearly limit the leve of firepower so only industrial assets are destroyed, areas on the surface turned to smoking debris (and not slagged), with the expected destruction or capture of droids, and finally ending with mop-up operations (which would be both impossible and pointless on a world which surface would be slagged), Saxton claims the surface is entirely melted down to a one meter depth.

It's just that simple. For every core aspect of the definitions that does not fit the views he and his pals fancy, he totally ignored them and only took what pleased him, in order to reach the completely out of the blue so called "definition" we could see in one of the two ICS Curtis Saxton wrote.

Now, if fans could start using some sort of reasoning, reflection and think objectively, instead of swallowing lies...

It is also a canon fact that 30 year old troop transports in in the SW universe have 200GT heavy weapons.

No. It's Saxton deciding, out of the blue, that certain ships suddenly had a firepower manyfold above their already established, admitted and demonstrated yields.
As a matter of fact, no one, not even him, can show the evidence to back up his claims.

He just used his recent position as an EU author to enforce his views, and now there's a particularily vocal branch of Warsies hellbent on making Saxton's claims the only ones to be accepted, nevermind the vast amount of data that goes against it.

Please, read this carefully: Every single firepower claim he's made - through these two ICS books - which could be verified on screen, was shown wrong, as in excess of its true yield by, at the very least, three orders of magnitude if not sometimes six of them.

And since we know that all of his firepower claims are all more or less related and proportional to each other, you know that all those can't be verified unavoidably suffer from the same blatant flaws and distorsions.

One salvo = one third of the firepower needed to bring down the Daedalus's shields. A Star Destroyer is a more modern ship and goes with the Empire's philosophy of building bigger and more destructive equipment. It therefore makes sense that it is more powerful.

It only makes sense if you want to believe it does make sense.
In the light of a 304, a Star Destroyer is not more modern.
There's in fact no reason at all why the imperial ships should be so much powerful in comparison to ten years old ships, when we're talking about a galaxy that's been used to the same technologies for many centuries, if not millenia, without any sign of evolution.

The only big new toy en vogue is an experimental gun mounted on a battle station of the size of a small moon. Hardly a regular technology at all!

Actualy I do read what other people say but I still see the SD winning becuase of what I said, so I do try to hammer my opinion because thats what we are trying to do here.

But what you say is wrong. You provide no evidence, only beliefs.

So once again I go with the SD because number of fighters, crews experience in space combat, firepower and the reinforced hull which will make up for the shields

Fighters in that case is irrelevant.
Crew experience? Indeed, I think it was sufficiently demonstrated in ESB as being quite poor, between a captain exiting hyperspace out of the plan, so the rebels were warned of their approach, star destroyers ramming each other thanks to the cornering worth of a beached whale, coupled to the fabulous anticipation of their captains, whom the most graduated of them was completely fooled by Han's trick.
And let's not forget, above all, how those experimented captains were peeing their pants about their security with the idea of flying their ship through an asteroid field, or completely forgot to shoot down the biggest asteroids, you know, for example, to avoid the complete destruction of a star destroyer's bridge, instead of providing training for their cannoneers by taking potshots at 7m wide asteroids.
The firepower part has been adressed, you didn't listen, so I won't bother asking you to make an effort since you're obviously not even trying to defend your claims.
As for the reinforced hull, it's ********.

I'll just quote this:

Vector Prime, Chapter 11.

"Boom", Nom Anor said...
The nuclear fission explosives packed into the shuttle detonated, vaporizing the entire section of docking bays, blowing out out a huge section of the lower floor of the great battle cruiser, issuing a shock wave and a rain of white-glowing metal shards that folded many of the nearest buzzing starfighters in on themselves and lifted the tail of the battle cruiser, uprighting it ninety degrees before any stabilizing jets could halt the roll.

So we learn:
Contrary to ICS, SW hulls cannot shrug off thermonuclear blasts, not even fission blasts. The damage brought by relatively small fission explosives was catastrophic, putting cruiser out of comission. So, without shields, SW ships would be BLASTED by photon torpedoes. Given that in ROTS novellization, cruisers couldn't penetrate "Invisible Hand's" hull instantly, they must have TLs in KT-low MT range at best.
Also SW hulls are metallic. So neutromium IS some metal called so.

From here.

[Mister Oragahn]

25 Gigaton per Ha'tak blast? Thats just stupid. Everybody seems to think that Sci Fi energy blasts do enormous damage, and they do, but not in the nuclear weapons range like your thinking. Rewatch the Sentinel, in which Svarog's Ha'tak rains down Energy blasts on the City, which go up like dynamite, but not like a 25 Gigaton nuclear blast.

In Star Trek: First Contact, the Borg Sphere that fires on Earth fires energy blasts that do pretty much the same exact thing.

How yields in the gigaton ranges is so stupid, considering the established powers? Read the thread. I've listed examples of high yields (like what it takes to create a 1 GT goa'uld buster).

Now, you're fine ignoring them. Ok. But don't claim the others are wrong. If you have problems conceiving how SF can provide universes where ships can be that powerful, it's not your own issue, and we can't help you.

Hey, be glad that the show didn't literally tail on the five Stargate books, because in one of them, one of Ra's ships had guns able to completely vaporize a Ceres sized asteroid in one single salvo.
I let you imagine the level of energy required to do so.

So I suppose you consider that Ha'taks, Borg Spheres or whatever else have the firepower of hand grenades and dynamite cars.

Absolutely!

[Jimbo-DR]

How yields in the gigaton ranges is so stupid, considering the established powers? Read the thread. I've listed examples of high yields (like what it takes to create a 1 GT goa'uld buster).

Now, you're fine ignoring them. Ok. But don't claim the others are wrong. If you have problems conceiving how SF can provide universes where ships can be that powerful, it's not your own issue, and we can't help you.

Hey, be glad that the show didn't literally tail on the five Stargate books, because in one of them, one of Ra's ships had guns able to completely vaporize a Ceres sized asteroid in one single salvo.
I let you imagine the level of energy required to do so.

So I suppose you consider that Ha'taks, Borg Spheres or whatever else have the firepower of hand grenades and dynamite cars.

Absolutely!

Stop acting holier than thou for 5 minutes and re-read my post. I didn't pull any numbers out of anywhere, I simply "quoted" two scenes from two seperate shows. Watch The Sentinel and tell me if those blasts appear to be in the gigaton range. When he fires more than one shot at several different sections of the city and nothing happens but a building or two is destroyed, I'm guessing were not talking Nuclear explosion level devestations. The exact same thing happens in First Contact, even though the Borg routinely kick our asses all over the Milky Way.

[Mister Oragahn]

Stop acting holier than thou for 5 minutes and re-read my post.

I know to read, thank you, and I know what your intent was.

25 Gigaton per Ha'tak blast? Thats just stupid. Everybody seems to think that Sci Fi energy blasts do enormous damage, and they do, but not in the nuclear weapons range like your thinking.

Pretty clear. Drop the backpedalling & offended attitude.

I didn't pull any numbers out of anywhere, I simply "quoted" two scenes from two seperate shows.

Tell me one thing. Where did I claim you were pulling numbers out of your A**?
You're not inventing data. You're obviously willingly ignoring other elements to make a point about how gigatons blasts is absurd, by pointing at events which don't even depict kiloton level blasts.

Watch The Sentinel and tell me if those blasts appear to be in the gigaton range. When he fires more than one shot at several different sections of the city and nothing happens but a building or two is destroyed, I'm guessing were not talking Nuclear explosion level devestations. The exact same thing happens in First Contact, even though the Borg routinely kick our asses all over the Milky Way.

And so?
If your point was not to dispute those gigaton level claims, what was it exactly?
Your reasoning is clear, and it is utterly flawed.
Don't even act as you're surprised if some Goa'uld Lord decides to take it slowly to destroy a defenseless city, inhabited by peons impressed by pieces of technology they can't even remotely understand, borderline on magic identification, all with a ship sitting in orbit of the planet.
He wasn't even trying it hard, looking at the extremely low rate of fire.

Tell me how those weapons, if they were at maximum power, could hope renew the fires of a moon like Netu, or take down the shields and destroy the hull of a ha'tak that can easily withstand the impact with the ocean surface due to a totally uncontrolled reentry?

[Jimbo-DR]

Because your equating Kinetic Energy with whatever energy is employed by the weapons that those ships fire. I realize that it makes sense not to fire nuclear weapon blasts at a city your trying to take over, but we have very little canon evidence to go by, don't we?

We also saw an Ori ship shields withstand the impact from a Ha'tak moving presumably at Full sublight power, AND combining its own shield strength into that equation. And yet a couple shots from the Asgard Energy weapons managed to bring its shields down. If thats the case, then those Asgard Energy weapons must be firing even more ridiculous yields, right? But when they impact the hulls of the Ori ship, they create explosions, but nothing on the level that your talking about.

Also, think back to when Adria destroyed the Ancient Weapon on Dakara. It took 3 Ori shots to destroy that Mountain, whereas it only took 2 shots to bring down a Daedalus class ships shields. And yet we know that these shields are far superior to Ha'tak shields, which can't even handle one shot from the Ori main weapon.

I'm also remembering back to "Grace", when the helmsman of Prometheus reported, "There weapons are draining our shields". Now obviously weapons impact would damage Shield strength, but what she said implies that the weapons were actually designed to drain the shields of the ship.

This implies that the energy weapons fired in Stargate are always designed to drain shields, and perhaps carry a lot less Kinetic energy than they appear.

That, and the fact that these shows always do whatever the plot dictates. Hence why half of Star Trek episodes you don't even see shield impacts, but when the plot dictates that ineffectiveness of weaponry be shown, the shields are clearly visible on every shot.

[Jimbo-DR]

Just thought of another example:

In Full Circle, if standard Ha'tak energy weapons that powerful, why did Anubis have to use his big bad superweapon to take out Abydos? Why not just hit that pyramid with a single blast from a cannon, wouldn't that have destroyed everything within miles?

[Mister Oragahn]

Because your equating Kinetic Energy with whatever energy is employed by the weapons that those ships fire.

May you make your point clearer please?

I realize that it makes sense not to fire nuclear weapon blasts at a city your trying to take over, but we have very little canon evidence to go by, don't we?

We also saw an Ori ship shields withstand the impact from a Ha'tak moving presumably at Full sublight power, AND combining its own shield strength into that equation. And yet a couple shots from the Asgard Energy weapons managed to bring its shields down. If thats the case, then those Asgard Energy weapons must be firing even more ridiculous yields, right? But when they impact the hulls of the Ori ship, they create explosions, but nothing on the level that your talking about.

Yes, and that's quite a thing that plagues most SF shows.
Technically, only a few episodes nailed it right. Most systems, ships or else (stargates for example), considering their latent power, or their power cores, or whatever else, should blow up in huge blinding flashing fireballs.
Sometimes, it happens. Enemies. Redemption. Small Victories. Even Serpent's Venom had it right when Heru'ur's ship exploded. But the bolts hitting the ship, however, we're doing crappy explosions.
So a solution was to assume that his ship's hull did absorb the energy.
Incidentally, we should actually see luminous explosions anytime those weapons explode, be it against a shield (well, if it's not absorbed by the shield), or against hull, rock or whatever.

For Atlantis, all hiveships and even the Aurora got destroyed in blinding explosions, where most of the time, the capital ships are entirely vaporized. Of course, most of the time, we also get the Expanding Ring of Doom. Well, it's for the (outdated) coolness factor, but at least it's coherent to have that level of explosion.
They also have nukes producing blinding flashes. The nuke explosion in Siege Part III was particularily impressive.

However, the ones in First Strike were wrong because even if the size of the cooling fireball was relatively spot on, they should have kept glowing for maaaaany seconds. Yet, they darkened within, what? ten seconds at best.

The explosions in Family Ties were suffering from the same problem, especially the big one which shrinked and cooled off way too quickly.
Of course, in atmosphere, light due to the explosion is scattered, so the initial explosion will release a bright flash, which will quickly disappear to reveal the smaller but still glowing fireball.

See Trek, for example. Certain weapons are clearly identified to be in the kiloton or megaton range. Yet, when they hit targets and destroy them, we're hardly seeing any blinding flash, despite the very fact that there's a combination of both the yield of the weapons, and the ignition of whatever ammo and fuel they use, sometimes antimatter, which is so sensitive that the tiniest crack should create cataclysmic explosions (multi megaton range explosion can't look like fire crackers, yet they do repeatedly in that show).

I don't know, maybe it's a SF brain bug, where VFX staffs and producers think that bright flashes and huge explosions don't look right and would be boring.

The other brain bug in Stargate is that it seems only nukes should produce those blinding flashes.

Question: what do you think those 200 MT blasts should have looked like in that alternate reality, huh?
And why would they look different when hitting a city than when hitting the hull of a ship?

The show which is the most accurate for the moment is Battlestar Galactica. When they fire nukes, you get the appropriates flashes (there's in fact a very brief succession of flashes in reality, but they're so tightly close to each other time speaking that there's not enough frames on a video medium to display them).
When they fire conventional weaponry, you get hot explosions, sometimes even luminous (the asteroid destruction in that episode, Pegasus part II I think, where Kat and Hot Dog train in an asteroid field, with Adama listening to the radio comms), but not bright as nuclear explosions.
The brightness, besides the kind of radiations emitted by those devices, is largely due to the actual power of the explosion.

Also, think back to when Adria destroyed the Ancient Weapon on Dakara. It took 3 Ori shots to destroy that Mountain, whereas it only took 2 shots to bring down a Daedalus class ships shields. And yet we know that these shields are far superior to Ha'tak shields, which can't even handle one shot from the Ori main weapon.

Hey, you kow, we're talking about weapons that somehow, have exotic properties to drain shields at super fast rates, to fragilize hulls at stupid levels, yet only release the energy equaling amounts of a few tons of TNT, and yet they're considered super powerful enough to do what you know in that much controversial SG-1 episode from season 10!

There just are moments where I resign. I like the universe to be coherent and all that, but sometimes, it's just... impossible.
I believe we already talked about the Ori ship firing at that village, and how the explosion seen from space corresponded to some gigaton level event, and how on the surface, it wasn't even powerful enough to dig a crater, but only torch the grass around - otherwise, phased or not, the village would have felt into the newly created smoking hole.

I'm also remembering back to "Grace", when the helmsman of Prometheus reported, "There weapons are draining our shields". Now obviously weapons impact would damage Shield strength, but what she said implies that the weapons were actually designed to drain the shields of the ship.

It could be anything. When you see the percentage falling, saying that something "draining" your shields is a rather quick layman term to say that the shields' going down pretty fast.

This implies that the energy weapons fired in Stargate are always designed to drain shields, and perhaps carry a lot less Kinetic energy than they appear.

I'm not a foreigner to that train of thought. I do believe that many advanced stargate weapons are actually capable of draining shields.
However, to make sense and be worth the bother, they would require to be much more efficient than raw weapons.

The asuran beam is a good example of that. It barely burns a small hotel sized asteroid, it doesn't vaporize much water, yet it drains the ZPM tied to the lantian shield at a rate even superior to the wraith weapons. And we're speaking of a power source (the ZPM) which uses energy from zero point fields, which means tremendous magnitudes of power (billions of billions of joules would be a severe understatement).

That, and the fact that these shows always do whatever the plot dictates. Hence why half of Star Trek episodes you don't even see shield impacts, but when the plot dictates that ineffectiveness of weaponry be shown, the shields are clearly visible on every shot.

Ok, but does it makes you right to consider that gigaton yields for Stargate are stupid? I don't think so.

Just thought of another example:

In Full Circle, if standard Ha'tak energy weapons that powerful, why did Anubis have to use his big bad superweapon to take out Abydos? Why not just hit that pyramid with a single blast from a cannon, wouldn't that have destroyed everything within miles?

Oooooh. Man, that's a twitchy case. Fans can't even know if Abydos is really destroyed.
I for one have been pointing out at the fact that for a planet's surface that can be summed up to sand, sand and even more sand, a wave that raises dunes up tens of meters in the air is hardly going to destroy a planet, even if you're anal enough to consider that destroys means wasting the surface only.

See, his superweapon was said to target stargates and destroy them. Later on, we've seen what it takes to destroy stargates.
Namely, as per Meeeerlin's words, a gatebuster strategically placed behind the event horizon, if the stargate is connected (on that they've always been more or less consistent that a connected stargate allows more energy dissipation in the great plot void between two stargates, and it also allows massive flux of energy).
We know the Chapa'ai was destroyed, but they cut the wormhole before the final pulse went down the beam.

That said, if we take the dubious Redemption claim (1 GT for the final explosion - yeah, my ass, look at that thing in the sky!), we're still far from that in Full Circle.
Plus the effects are all funky, and I believe we're seeing a pattern of succesive parallelal kinetic waves actually occuring one after the other, going down. Think many successive ripples. First the apex of the pyramid. Then deeper. Even deeper, until it reaches the base, and then another wave spreads within the sand.
But whatever happened, nothing of the effects seen on screen could destroy the surface of Abydos. Not even the area of a nation. It's absurd.

Yet... "I will destroy Abydos"... Anubis has probably been uttering those words like thrice in the episode.

[BlankDots]

I agree with Jimbo.

In several episodes we have seen the lack of power by the ships in StarGate when to actual TNT equivalence. When the ships attack the earth and various other planets the firepower demonstrated is a Joke.

I couldn't understand what your link Mister Oragahn about Kelowna was about. I read it and didn't understand it.

But it is a fact that Hat'aks do jack to a planet. In one of the episodes i remember Hatak's firing at the planet surface from orbit. The hits were NOT visible at all from orbit. If it was indeed 200megatons per shot, this would be CLEARLY visible from space. Also when they attack earth, it takes them days to take over the planet.

If they had 200 megaton shot guns. THey fire say 60 shots per minute. 40 ships. Thats what 2400 shots per minute. That would easily take out earth and all its centres in one minute.

People have said that earth is capable of self destruction. With its current arsenal of sub 50 megaton warheads this is possible.

The TNT equivalnce attributed to ha'taks just don't stack up.

This is compared to ISD which is said to at least be capable of some planetary destruction by itself.

Your quote about the girl seeing the forests begining to burn is significant. To see forests burning from space is significant. Especially when seeing a hatak shoot at the surface of a planet seems to do nothing.

You cant say daedy can beat an ISD or vice versa. You have to prove that stargate weapons are just as effective against ISD shields as turbolasers are in SW universe.

One of the SSD's has a laser which supposedly has the firepower 2/3rds of the death stars main laser.

If a ISD is even 1000th the size of a SSD, it should have 1000th the firepower/energy output. It begs to ask the question how powerful 2/3000th of a death star beam is. I'd say pretty powerful.