Rom is burning

I'd like a longer paragraph on the death of the planet, actually.

Ten billion people died, the survivors were counted in the thousands. The government of the Lien, the great bureaucracies, the Emperor and his android wife ceased to exist. Great art and timeless music and beautiful pieces of literature vanished in a puff. Lives were cut short, live not yet begun were never given a chance. Lovers never got to say good-bye. There was no great dramatic death knell for the world and its people, it's culture. Simply, he planet and its moon ceased to exist.

Pardon me for re-writing your stuff. That's just what I thought.

I've read about it and watched it simulated (er. obviously, that's what you meant) and thus, I thought you got it right enough. I'm sorry I re-wrote the wrong part, but the first part didn't bother me. I read it, accepted it, moved on.

Sorry.

Personally I think the view should be from a distance of say....seventy light years or so? Maybe some non-charicter watching the sky when a sudden bloom of light in the sky. And little did he know, but it was the death of 10 billion people. Even if he did know, he would probably have been unable to comprehend it as most people have a hard time thinking of more than twenty people. But 10 billion.

That's just silly. That's an absurdly huge number. But that's the kind of numbers that make my head hurt. Those are the numbers that run the universe.

I just happen to have on my desk, a copy of The Ethos Effect by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. in which there are two scenes of planetary destruction. The instantaneous kind, not the kind caused by the collision of a moon, asteroids or comets. In Modesitt's story, the planet's star is caused to go super-nova. There isn't so much description of the actual destruction--the POV character uses a hyperspace drive and jumps out of the star system--but there are some interesting observations of the result.

Not the best SF book in the world, but worth a read.

To me, the paragraph that explains how the planet and the system dies is less important than what is lost because of the death. I can visualize wonderfully the sun expanding and engulfing the planet and destroying everything, but there's no emotional tie to it. It's just a science image. It's too abstract, it's just ten billion people dying. Cold, but there you are.

That's why I expounded more on the second paragraph. If I have the time to speak further on the death of the planet (as that paragraph assumes I do) then I use the paragraph to say what is lost, and to say good-bye as it were, you see? Because that's an emotion on my part, inserted into the narrative which the reader can comprehend and appreciate. It's sadness and death and farewell, and the reader can follow that better than a "and then ten billion souls were lost," sort of thing.

Who are the characters in your story? People who die on Rom? Survivors? How much of the book is set on Rom? (When Alderaan was destroyed in the first Star Wars movie, to be honest it didn't hit me all that hard. It's such a huge event, and I'd never been to the planet or seen any scenes set on it.) At what point in the story does this destruction happen - is it the climax? You don't need to compress all your evocation of how much is lost into one paragraph. You can take a whole book to do it if you like.

Or maybe you like big explosions and don't particularly mind what they do to your characters. Though if that's the case, I'm afraid I'm not among your target audience.

Reading your paragraph, I'm curious about who survived and how. Also by what you mean by a seventy year trip. Is that years or light years? It seems large, either way, but of course I don't know the context.

Kentuk said:

Thanks Pete. Should I add widows wailing and a couple bars of Babalyon has fallen?

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Smarty-pants.

Actually, what you posted just above here sounds very good, and I like it, for what that's worth. I think if that's your tail, then I'd just leave the beginning bit simple and sweet.

Are you acknowledging my stretchy pants? Or indicating your own?

Because if it's the latter, then I'd like to remain ignorant, thanks.

Kentuk said:

I would appreciate help with describing the planet's death. I dashed off the following without even knowing if such a thing is possible...

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Interesting bit.

I seem to remember a few different stories where some form of tech was used to induce nova in a star. Kinda like PeeDee, as long as I don't think about it too hard, I accept it and move on. It's SF; it's meant to stretch the imagination.

If I do think about it, making the star go nova with a few ships flying into it bugs me. The scales here are easy to slap numbers onto but difficult to conceive and truly grasp. Just talking about the amount of mass contained by a star somehow being upset to the point that the ships' arrival sparks instant nova offends the junior astronomer in me.

I might lean toward something with a little more lead-up, or find an alternate way for the barbarians to sack Rom. Here's a couple for-instances if you want to keep the star involved:

1. The ships fly into the star at just sub-light speed. Say 184,000 mps. Heck, it took the equivalent energy of a star to launch the damned things in the first place, it makes sense that their potential energy unleashes shock waves. The Rom-ans knew that would happen, they didn't know it would release that much. The shock interrupts the fusion, causing core collapse. The compression should've just restarted the fusion – instead, it sparked a mini-nova.
   
   or...
   
   
2. The ships hit the star and Rom knew there would be repercussions. They knew that much energy would disrupt the flow, but they knew that much mass simply couldn't be argued with. What they didn't realize was what kind of solar flare would be released – a kind of 7-million degree geyser that would vaporize anything in its path to nearly the 5th planet. Rom was the 3rd.
   ...If the ships' angle had been different by just a few arc seconds, it would've been survivable. Instead, the entry was dead-on...

But why involve the star at all? Poor star, just minding its own business. Why not have the fleet approach the planet itself? They drop out of light speed, then just keep going. Think about the meteors that have hit the earth: lets take a little one: Meteor Crater in AZ. Figure that squirt was only ~150 feet in diameter, a few hundred thousand tons (maybe the weight of the Empire State Building) and traveling at maybe 40k mph.

Size-wise, that matches up with a good-sized SF cruiser. Same potential energy, not counting speed. Now lets accelerate that ship, we'll call it the USS UpYours, to 40,000 mph. If the UpYours hit the Rom-an planet at that speed, we could expect Meteor Crater-sized crater, right?

Okay, let's up the potential energy a tad. Let's boost the incoming speed from 40,000 mph to 185,000 mp second. 2 seconds on the calculator tell me that 185,000 mps translated into 666 million mph (evoking an appropriate number there...). So the just-sub-light impact would release roughly 16,650 times the energy released in Arizona – or the equivalent of about a 333 gigaton warhead.

Now, my math may be wrong here because I think that's still less than what the Chicxulub impact did... but we also have to factor in that the impacts themselves would be different. Chicxulub was 6 miles wide and a heckuva lot heavier. Figure that it impacted entirely on the surface, but our rogue spacecraft would be far more compact and penetrating. Think... a bullet hitting a watermelon. Would the shock wave formerly known as the USS UpYours punch out the other side? Don't know (it would take the nuke specialists in Sandia lab to figure that one out).

Now, since you mention "cruisers" (plural), hit Rom with 6 of these in a short sequence (maybe one or two from perpendicular angles just to take advantage of the stress fractures) and Rom as an actual planet could be in trouble. It might not be enough to turn it into an asteroid field but you could shatter the physical integrity of the planet, wipe out the atmosphere, lose the oceans and obliterate most surface structures.

...Problem is: this doesn't amount to much more than a black eye. Sure, the seat of government is gone, but this is a 1,500 system empire, right? Think about how much redundancy the U.S. government has just for insuring its own survival. Think of our Continuity of Government and Continuity of Operations and Single Integrated Operations Plans plans. Wouldn't Rom have an arsenal of secret "Remote Locations" for just such a doomsday scenario? You don't run a 1,500 system empire by not planning and preparing...

Just a thought...

Ordinary Guy can crash any sci-fi story through sheer bloody-minded logic.



Joking aside, that was a really useful post. It's not even my story, and I made some notes.

Some further studies on similar event/problem here.

The instruments tracking the derelict Separatist cruisers seventy year trip into Rom’s sun didn’t survive.

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This sentence is difficult to understand. I am assuming that cruisers is supposed to be cruisers', because otherwise I can't get it to make any sense. Even so, I had to read it a couple of times to figure out what didn't survive, seeing as, presumably, nothing mentioned in the sentence survived.

But this is something you just dashed off really quickly, right?