EP#46: First Annual MacroFab Star Wars Christmas Special

First Annual MacroFab Star Wars Christmas Special

This is a reupload of Episode 46 into one continuous podcast. Originally it was broken into 4 parts.

• Vehicles of Star Wars
  • Tie Fighters
  • Hovercraft and 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.
• 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.
    • Energy gathered from a Sun? How would that work?
  • Light Sabers
    • Elegant weapon for a more civilized age. Lots of mystical lore surrounding this weapon.
    • Force aligned crystals are necessary for their construction.
    • How would the blade be created? Plasma?
  • Blasters
    • They are not laser weapons!
    • Gas cartridge and a power cell.
    • Gas can be mostly anything but typically is Tibanna - a naturally gas found on Bespin home of cloud city.
• Light Speed Travel
  • Faster then light travel in Star Wars is accomplished by transporting the vessel to near light speed and then jumping to a "Hyper Space" dimension where faster then light travel is possible.
  • Possible if this "Hyper Space" is worm hole tunneling.
• Prosthetics
  • Mechanics exist to make them work.
  • General Grievous.
• The "Force"
  • The force is actually the main character of SW. That’s why prequels suck.
  • Fundamental problem with midichlorians.
  • Force as consciousness.
  • Is the "Force" possibility the control over dark matter/energy?
• R.F.O.
  • What is your favorite Star Wars Character?
    • Organic?
    • Robot?
  • Favorite sound effect?
  • The prequels
  • Why do some Jedi disappear after dying and others don’t?
  • What are we excited or concerned about most in the new Rogue One movie?