EP#46: First Annual MacroFab Star Wars Christmas Special: PART A
38 min •
16 december 2016
Podcast Notes
Part A
Vehicles of Star Wars
Tie Fighters: Twin Ion Engine. This tech exists but its super low power but efficient.
Hovercraft and levitation. Land speeders, Pod Racers, Repulsor Lift technology. Magnetic levitation?
Power: Fission batteries? A AA battery weighs around 23g. Convert it all to energy e=mc^2 and you get 2 quintillion Joules of power. 2,067,136,911,094,680,572 Joules to be precise.
16 Teslas to levitate a frog. This consumed 4MW of energy according to the paper. A “common frog” weighs 22.7g. Compact car weighs about 1200kg. So that is 211,453 and some change MW or Joules per second. 8.4million Teslas. This is 211,453,000,000 Watts. A Fission AA battery could power this for 9,775,869seconds or around 113 Days.
Weapons of Star Wars
Death Star
Cost of Steel alone would be $852 quadrillion which is 13,000 times the worlds GDP.
How much steel required to make it? It is 160km in diameter and they modeled the Death Star to have a density similar to a modern warship. Which gives us 1.08×1015 tonnes of steel. World wide production of steel is 1.3 billion tonnes a year which will take over 800K years to make enough steel.
Thats no moon. Speaking of the size. Earths moon is 3,474km. Smallest moon in our solar system is Methone which orbits Saturn with a diameter of ~3km.
How much energy would be required to blow up a Planet? Earth would require 2.24 × 10^32 Joules to blow apart the gravitational binding energy of the Earth if you consider it a uniform sphere. In 1 second the Sun generates 3.8 x 10^26 Joules. Which means in 589,473 seconds or about 6.8 days worth of energy. Gives a reason behind Star Killer Base.
Star Killer Base
Its not as silly as people make it out to be in comparison to a Death Star.