GrahamKennedy wrote:As to whether special planetary bombardment weapons were used, I tend to think not - or at least, if they were then such weapons were not tremendously more powerful than normal weapons.
The reasoning is this : we see beam disrupter weapons being used in the bombardment. It seems very unlikely to me that shipboard disrupters within existing hulls and power systems could be refitted to be orders of magnitude more powerful than normal - if they could do that then everybody would just refit them all that way as standard, after all. I'm sure weapon output can be boosted to some extent, but really how far could that go?
Therefore those are standard, or at most modestly boosted, disrupters.
And there must be approximate equivalence between the beam and torpedo weapons, or else why bother using the disruptors at all? It would be like a nuclear bomber using a 20 mm cannon to strafe the target as it dropped a nuke on it.
Yes, they may have boosted the disrupters as much as they could, and they could be carrying weapons optimised for surface attack... but the difference from normal weapons must be a matter of a few times more, at most. Not hundreds or thousands of times more.
I tend to agree with you, which was I posed the question of the existence of specialized bombardment weapons in the first place.
Deepcrush wrote:So you're saying we should just discard canon for no other reason then you feel like it? That is beyond stupid.
I miss you when you're gone, Deep. No, I'm saying what I said (and you cited,) which has absolutely zero resemblance to the way you paraphrased it. If you don't understand hat I say, ask for clarification - but don't make it out to be something to which it isn't even remotely connected.
Deepcrush wrote:It tells us that 20+ ships and 4 seconds of fire = 30% of a planet's surface destroyed. Tells us that a dediated attack by ship could easily destroy a large portion of a planet, not just wreck a few buildings as we saw in the attack on earth. Also tells us that with this evidence we can be rather sure that the Breen attack failed as if even a single ship had gotten through then there would have been millions of casualties and not just building damage and some morale issues.
It does tell us that, at least the former part. None of that, however, has anything at all to do with anything I said.