fish@ihu1g.UUCP (Bob Fishell) (05/02/84)
(oo)
It's not necessary for the Death Star weapon to supply all the
energy to blow up the planet, any more than the small plutonium
A-bomb that triggers the great, big fusion explosion in an
H-bomb supplies all that energy. My hypothesis is that the
Death-Start weapon has a catalytic effect on whatever it hits,
causing nuclear reactions. Note that in ROTJ, the Death Star
weapon was used to blow up space ships, but the energy available
was limited to the size of the object. If it contained all the
energy needed to blow up a planet, the whole fleet would have been
destroyed, and we'd have had a rotten ending for the movie.
This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Experiments in controlled
fusion use massive lasers to trigger fusion reactions. Perhaps
the Death Star weapon is just an immensly powerful laser, or more
likely, a particle beam weapon producing a high-energy wavefront.
Consider the effects of bombarding fusionable Hydrogen with a
powerful beam of, say, anti-protons. I think you could get
something going.
--
Bob Fishell
ihnp4!ihu1g!fish