Originally posted by geddarkstorm
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Well... no, actually. It's completely reasonable that the Destiny's shields can handle a star and not do so well against the drone weapons, for two reasons:
1) A star's energy is heat (electromagnetic waves). There is some drag, and thus frictional forces, but to such a smaller degree we can ignore them. Now, it's concievable the Destiny's shields are designed in such a way that they can handle electromagnetic radiation with ease. It's like how different grades of steel handle different stresses differently. High temperature steel can handle the inside of a fusion reactor where normal steel would melt. While normal steel can handle the high compression and tensile forces of being in a bridge that would immediately snap the more brittle high temperature steel. They are both types of steel, but they can absorb different pressures orders of magnitude differently.
If Destiny's shields are tuned to deal with the types of energy and -frequencies- of waves it'll encounter in a star, it may be, therefore, extremely susceptible to other types of energy. We have no idea what the drone's weapons are, nor even what the Destiny's are.
2) How force, pressure, energy and power work. A star gives off massive amounts of energy, yes, but for any given area of a star, it has a lot less POWER than you'd think, because the ENERGY DENSITY is low. A star is obscenely huge, and the full output of a star is averaged over the entirety of its size. So in reality, the small area the Destiny represents is only going to be exposed a very small fraction of that energy and power. This is why, with femtosecond lasers, we can deliver more power to a small area than the output of the sun!
Let me give another example. You can dive many meters under the ocean, to where you have hundreds of pounds of pressure per square inch applied on you, yet you'll be completely fine (the only danger to the human body is having pressure suddenly relieved, not applied, over its entirety. This has to do with how fluids are incompressible, thus we are too being mostly fluid). However, a knife will slice through you like butter when only orders of magnitude less amounts of force (energy) is applied than the entire ocean was giving while you were doing that dive. Why? Because the force of the knife's edge is being applied over an extremely small area; and while the compressive and tensile strength of the entire body can take large amounts of PSI, any given SMALL AREA of the body has greatly reduced strength.
Tap your arm with a finger; you don't cut and are completely fine. Now tap your arm with the same force but using a needle. Yeah, get my point yet?
Destiny is in the same situation. Having the energy of a vanishingly small section of a star applied over its (almost) entire surface area is far easier for the shields to handle, than a much smaller amount of energy that's applied over an even smaller amount of area. The total energy density and power of the drone shots can, for that reason alone, well exceed anything a star could ever do; simply because the shot is concentrated at a small spot.
Again, this is how lasers work in the real world. This is why kilowatt lasers can heat things above the temperature of the sun. The sun sure as heck outputs more than a kilowatt! But it's the amount of AREA that an energy/force is applied to, and the amount of time (power) that the energy is applied for that determines the amount of stress an object actually experiences. Remember, power = energy/time. Even a small amount of energy given over a small amount of time can be as POWERFUL as orders of magnitude more energy that's given over orders of magnitude more time. So, it's actually very easy to exceed the sun itself in POWER, with our current technology (many fusion experiments have used this principle, and so too does the LHC in its experiments to recreate the big bang)!
1) A star's energy is heat (electromagnetic waves). There is some drag, and thus frictional forces, but to such a smaller degree we can ignore them. Now, it's concievable the Destiny's shields are designed in such a way that they can handle electromagnetic radiation with ease. It's like how different grades of steel handle different stresses differently. High temperature steel can handle the inside of a fusion reactor where normal steel would melt. While normal steel can handle the high compression and tensile forces of being in a bridge that would immediately snap the more brittle high temperature steel. They are both types of steel, but they can absorb different pressures orders of magnitude differently.
If Destiny's shields are tuned to deal with the types of energy and -frequencies- of waves it'll encounter in a star, it may be, therefore, extremely susceptible to other types of energy. We have no idea what the drone's weapons are, nor even what the Destiny's are.
2) How force, pressure, energy and power work. A star gives off massive amounts of energy, yes, but for any given area of a star, it has a lot less POWER than you'd think, because the ENERGY DENSITY is low. A star is obscenely huge, and the full output of a star is averaged over the entirety of its size. So in reality, the small area the Destiny represents is only going to be exposed a very small fraction of that energy and power. This is why, with femtosecond lasers, we can deliver more power to a small area than the output of the sun!
Let me give another example. You can dive many meters under the ocean, to where you have hundreds of pounds of pressure per square inch applied on you, yet you'll be completely fine (the only danger to the human body is having pressure suddenly relieved, not applied, over its entirety. This has to do with how fluids are incompressible, thus we are too being mostly fluid). However, a knife will slice through you like butter when only orders of magnitude less amounts of force (energy) is applied than the entire ocean was giving while you were doing that dive. Why? Because the force of the knife's edge is being applied over an extremely small area; and while the compressive and tensile strength of the entire body can take large amounts of PSI, any given SMALL AREA of the body has greatly reduced strength.
Tap your arm with a finger; you don't cut and are completely fine. Now tap your arm with the same force but using a needle. Yeah, get my point yet?
Destiny is in the same situation. Having the energy of a vanishingly small section of a star applied over its (almost) entire surface area is far easier for the shields to handle, than a much smaller amount of energy that's applied over an even smaller amount of area. The total energy density and power of the drone shots can, for that reason alone, well exceed anything a star could ever do; simply because the shot is concentrated at a small spot.
Again, this is how lasers work in the real world. This is why kilowatt lasers can heat things above the temperature of the sun. The sun sure as heck outputs more than a kilowatt! But it's the amount of AREA that an energy/force is applied to, and the amount of time (power) that the energy is applied for that determines the amount of stress an object actually experiences. Remember, power = energy/time. Even a small amount of energy given over a small amount of time can be as POWERFUL as orders of magnitude more energy that's given over orders of magnitude more time. So, it's actually very easy to exceed the sun itself in POWER, with our current technology (many fusion experiments have used this principle, and so too does the LHC in its experiments to recreate the big bang)!
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