Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire my mind got to wandering at work the other day...

so i went to work a little distracted the other day. my mind was elsewhere all day long, and for some reason i got to pondering Star Wars. i loved the movies, and still prefer the older ones to the new ones.

but i also got to thinking what kind of energy it would actually take to power that laser on the death star that destroyed the planet.

could you imagine how much energy it would actually take? i mean, how many homes could you power with that? what would it look like if you shot a ground squirrel with the death star? would you really have to hit it?

i dont know any of the answers to these questions, but it made me think about some awfully wierd stuff to make the time pass.

what do you get to thinking about when your mind wanders at work?

Why the hell didnt I go to college

you could under the trade act...

Did you know each second during the eruption of Mt. ST. Hellens was equilivant to the energy of one of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan to end WWII? It went on for nine hours at that rate. And that was a small volcanic eruption as volcanos go.

Dont know what your talking about. I probly will still go though. Just gotta get alotta schit figured out first

i didnt know that Rich, but thanks for enlightening me.

seems pretty intense for a small eruption though. a lot of damage was done there.

like what to study???

among other things

HA HA, i'm a ranger now!!!

Well, I found some figures in an article written about using lasers to drill for oil that you need a pulse (dono how long, but not very) from a 920W laser to vaporize one cubic centimeter of Berea gray sandstone from a range of approximately one inch.

So...if Alderaan was an Earth-sized world made entirely of Berea gray sandstone, and we assume that the energy required increases linearly with the volume of rock (which it almost certainly doesn't), and the Death Star fired from, say, five planetary diameters out to avoid being destroyed by flying debris...

...then vaporizing 1.10 octillion cubic centimeters of Alderaan would require a pulse from a laser of 1.01 nonillion watts. That's 1.10e27 cm^3 vaporized by 1.01e30 W. We'll assume space is perfectly transparent, and ignore the inverse-square law since we're dealing with a laser rather than a point source. (Some physics guy can correct me if I'm wrong about that.)

Now keep in mind, that's output power. The lasers we know about today range from around 0.1% efficiency to 30% efficiency. Let's assume that a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, they figured out how to make high-powered lasers 50% efficient.

That of course means that to get a power output of 1.01e30 W, you'd need a power input of 2.02e30W. 1.01e30 W is transferred to Alderaan to vaporize it, and the other 1.01e30 W--enough to vaporize another Alderaan--is produced inside the (much smaller) Death Star as waste heat.

I'll let somebody more conversant with the E = mc^2 equation figure out how much matter would need to be converted directly into energy to produce a 2.02e30W pulse of energy (say, 0.1s long?).


Well, you can run most homes most of the time on 5kW. 2.02e30 / 5e3 = 404e27: over four hundred octillion homes. For a tenth of a second, anyway.


Same as what it'd look like if you shot Alderaan with the Death Star, I imagine.


You'd at least have to hit the planet it was on, yes.


Tapioca, mostly.

thank you Barak for this enlightening post...

i will put a top notch Leupold scope on my death star laser immediately and start persuing ground squirrels at once. i am thinking 1.5-4x magnification. i think that would suffice to find a planet with a ground squirrel dont you???

And to think I just fantasize about my wife or the latest Cowboy Action gun I would like to get.

When my mind wanders it often takes me a while to find it.

Bruce

Only if the planet's in the same star system you are.

Actually according to the current Democrat administration, it will take only one gallon of ethonal, one 5x5 solar panel and one windmill....with $900,000,000,000,000, in new taxes to produce the ethonal and windmill first....

yes, and the taxes would come from the lower middle class people who are still employed, and nothing from the higher classes who dont even need to work.

I dunno, my mind wonders to my wife often, but then again I"ve never thought of tapioca, but I sure think of it after supper is done often enough... Might have to move it up a notch or so.

It's alla dat there nuk-u-ler energy, ya see.

Sometimes I wonder why I didn't bother joining the military and trying to join special forces. Sometimes I also wonder about other stuff I've done and wish I did differently.

Have seen some cool CO2 (carbon dioxide) lasers here at the School of Engineering. The Electrical Engineering department has couple. They had small one burn a hole in small brick, the big one is powerful enough to burn a hole through the building. It only take about 10 years of graduate level classes in 3 different departments to be allowed to play with them, too.

Piker.

Huh my mind got to wandering at work the other day...

But then I realized I'm retired?