Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-27642965-20160211003725/@comment-4851119-20160922213200

Oh really now? Well, pray tell, how do Teraton-power Turbolasers break the coherence? We know they're capable of vaporising asteroids without effort. We know they can turn an entire town into glass with one shot from orbit (without even spreading the power, like an explosion would). The asteroid vaping obviously refers to the asteroid field scenes in ESB. Which gets you megatons at best, see below.

Not seen the town glassing thing, do you have a link to that?

We know that the starships have a ridiculous amount of power hooked up to their shield generators (the Executor-class has an output similar to that of a medium star connected to its shields). Citation needed.

Where does the coherence break? Let's look at le Thermal Oscillator scene from TFA.

We see the X-Wings unloading Proton Torpedoes, an anti-capship weapon that allows fighters to maintain relevance against capital ships. I'm unfortunately not knowledgeable enough to do an actual calculation but just eyeballing I'm dubious that those explosions are even in the range of some tens of tons of TNT.

Some EU material to spice things up: Throughout the Trioculus affair, the New Republic was engaged in a protracted military campaign for possession of Milagro, a world located at a key hyperspace junction. The Empire was prepared to lay waste to Milagro rather than allow the Rebels access to its manufacturing facilities. Following three months of exhausting clashes between AT-AT walkers and the New Republic Army, the defeated Imperials slagged the planet's surface with a withering orbital bombardment, then fled.

Sunlight ripples across a sea of shimmering glass. Glass that had once been part of iridescent domes, towering minarets, soaring archways, vertical towers, and all the other structures that constitute a city. A city reduced to a sea of manmade lava, as Imperial laser cannon carved swathes of destruction through the once-beautiful metropolis. The resulting slag was thicker where buildings had been clustered and thinner out toward the suburbs, where the military base had been established.

The past could still be seen, on a hill where a nearly translucent temple glittered with emerald beauty, on a rise where a half-melted statue stretched a hand toward the heavens, and out on the silicone plain where isolated groups of dwellings remained untouched. Dark Forces 3: Jedi Knight Melting an entire city sounds impressive at first but we have no time frame and no indication of the volume of material involved, it could've been single shots from gigaton weapons or days of pounding from sub-kiloton weapons.

Actually, consider the following: the Imps were denying resources to the enemy. They'd already lost the ground war. They had absolutely no reason to hold back in the bombardment of Miraglo. It stands to reason that they'd be firing at maximum power. Yet where are the holes hundreds of kilometres deep punched into the crust? Why did they carve "swathes of destruction" and leave a sea of magma instead of just causing the whole city to outright vanish from a near miss tens of kilometres away? Not seeing no teratons here.

That's cool. See how much power it takes to vapourise an asteroid the way they did in ESB, and you will find that it is somewhere in the Petajoules. I've seen that calc. Looking it up again I see 31 petajoules at the high end. Since 1 ton of TNT = 4.184 gigajoules we can see that this comes out to a little under 7.5 megatons of TNT. In 40K terms that's on the order of what you want to fight a shielded Titan using sensible calcs, not what you want to actually fight a 40K warship.

No clue. Apparently, fast enough to avoid point-defence fire. Considering the quality of point-defence weaponry in Star Wars that isn't a very high bar to clear.

Vader is stronger in the Force than Vitiate. Citation needed. Can you actually show Vader performing feats of force power on the same scale and magnitude as Vitiate?

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On another note, let's have a totally different setting, several in fact, that answers the OP's request:
 * The original space opera, EE Smith's Skylark quartet.
 * Skylark's younger cousin, the Lensman series.
 * Red Flag's War of the Krork (a long-running empire builder quest which uses 40K as its template but has IMHO significantly better worldbuilding and background than canon 40K).