Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-5303512-20180429165312/@comment-8881468-20180503094337

actually you have not shown any reasonable measurements... which is the basis of the critique. guesswork is about as reliable as a wet fart.

I am not denying opportunity, I merely rightfully question the fact that there is next to no clean measurement to be had and thus no reliable data available.

authors have no say in wether people analyze their stories or not, that is true, however, given that they base a good chunk of their stories on materials with unknown physical properties, whatever people try to read into that is more often than not merely wishful thinking and not really "measuring".

little example: in the first necromunda novel d'onne Ulanti uses a plasma pistol at point blank range on an unarmoured head (literally pressed against the head) of a person, result is: the whole body is annihilated (which does not make sense but hey, fiction) in other books, a plasma gun melts through tank armour in one shot, in another book it takes several shots, in the next title it takes an even bigger gun to get the same result. or take a different example: in flight of the eisenstein the death guard flagship is said to be the size of one of the gun turrets of the vengeful spirit, a couple of books later, it is revealed that they are about the same size. or take the eisenstein, which is a cruiser in galaxy in flames (f.e. see chapter 13) and a frigate in  flight of the eisenstein take bolter ammunition, which in some books blows out fist sized chunks out of people, in others utterly annihilates torsi or penetrates several bodies one after another when used against baseline humans....

if your source is already unreliable/ the storytelling is more important than any sort of comparable basis, then you literally have no reliable data.

Which is for example, why I asked you for energy expenditure for the hange from solid to gaseous for a cubic centimeter of ceramite. Because that is  actually asking for something that is measurable under laboratory conditions.

Or to give you another perspective: the term planet sized is utterly useless, as it can range from the size of Kepler-37b (a little larger than our moon) to Kepler 10-c which is about 2,3 times the earth's diameter but 17 times it's mass (which in turn influences gravity) to something like CG Lupi b, which has several times the radius of Jupiter (for comparison, earth fits more than 1200 times into jupiter)

it is a figure of speech that does not hold up to scientific scrutiny but then again, it does not hve to, as that is unnecessary for the function of the comparison