I calculated the amount of Watts in one "e" in StarMade

[Imagination01]

This clickbait title says it all, me and RedAlert_007 had decided to calculate how much Watts are in a single StarMade unit of energy (an “e”)


As you may have noticed, StarMade measures power in e/s


When we got bored we decided to calculate how many Watts are in an “e”


We had decided to best way to do this was to take findings of someone who had calculated the energy required for the Death Star’s laser to destroy an earth like planet and convert it to StarMade terms


The original paper can be found here A2_8 That's No Moon | Boulderstone | Physics Special Topics


This calculation assumes the following things:

• That the planet portrayed in the death star paper is the same model of a StarMade planet
• Both the death star laser and a StarMade damage beam (with no effect or secondary module) operates at 100% efficiency (no lost energy)
• This paper does not account for a planet's natural HP regeneration after being damaged
• The death star laser is the equivalent of a damage beam in StarMade

Anyways onto the calculations


Firstly in the paper it states the amount of energy required in Joules for the Death Star Laser to destroy an earth like planet is 2 x 10^27 Joules (2000000000000000000000000000 Joules)



Seeing as Watts is simply Joules over time, we can calculate the amount of Watts the death star laser needs to fire by simply taking note that in the Scene of “New Hope” the laser fired for 3 seconds, we simply divide 2 x 10^27 by 3


(2 x 10^27) divided by 3 gives us 6.67 x 10^26 Watts needed to fire the death star laser ( http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(2*10%5E27)%2F3 )


Now to convert this into StarMade terms


Firstly, it should be noted that (assuming the damage beam is in one group) does 50 damage and requires 100 e/s to fire and fires for 1 second


We already know that a planet has 10,000,000 HP before being destroyed.


Therefore our damage beam will need to do 3,333,333.33 damage per second to destroy a planet


We can calculate how many blocks are needed to do this damage by dividing the damage needed by the damage per block


3,333,333.33 divided by 50 gives us 66,666.6666 since we cannot have .6666 of a module we will round this to 66,667 modules


We can now calculate the power needed in "e" by multiplying the modules by the power needed per module.

66,667 x 100 gives us 6,666,700

Now we only calulated the power needed to destroy a 3rd of the planet, so we simply multiply 6,666,700 by 3

This gives us 20000100 e, the amount of StarMade energy required to destroy a planet

Now what we know how much e is required to destroy a planet, we can use the amount of watts needed to destroy a planet with a laser to determine how much Watts are in one “e”


We already know that 6.67 x 10^26 Watts is required to destroy a planet so by dividing this by the “e” required then we get approximately



3.3349833251 × 10^19 Watts (had to round this up because of the sheer amount of numbers after the decimal the original number can be found here Wolfram|Alpha: Computational Knowledge Engine )


Yup thats right, approximately 3.3349833251 × 10^19 Watts (33349833251000000000 Watts) are in one “e” in StarMade.


That is one efficient reactor Schine!

 

[Crashmaster]

So then either 1 reactor weighs like 3.3x10^18 kg or thrusters are of suck efficiency.

 

[Madman198237]

Genius. Schine, your game is clearly saying screw-your-silly-laws-of-physics. Good job.
Energy density > Reason
Seriously guys, it's e=+/- mass times the speed of light SQUARED, not QUINTUPLED.

 

[Crashmaster]

Now, this is a story all about how,
My exponent got flipped, turned upside down,

 

[Jojomo]

Surely it would have been preferable to use the known mass of water to convert SM masses to RL masses, and then calculate energy based on acceleration of ships of a given mass.

No need to go via another fictional universe that way...

 

[Qweesdy]

Surely it would have been preferable to use the known mass of water to convert SM masses to RL masses, and then calculate energy based on acceleration of ships of a given mass.

Easier, and no need to go via another fictional universe.

Based on the amount of energy required to heat a cubic meter of water to boiling point; I've calculated that an 'e' is Starmade is worth zero watts...

 

[Imagination01]

Surely it would have been preferable to use the known mass of water to convert SM masses to RL masses, and then calculate energy based on acceleration of ships of a given mass.

No need to go via another fictional universe that way...

While the paper concerning the Death Stars Planet Destroying Beam is fictional, the calculations are based on actually real life mathematics and psychics.

Gravitational Binding Energy of a planet can be used to calculate the amount of energy required to be directed at the planet (such as a beam) to destroy it.

Also in StarMade Water, Wood, Sand, Rock and Soil weight the exact same (.02) so that would not be very accurate if used in the way you are suggesting.

 

[Crashmaster]

...real life mathematics and psychics...

pbfft

 

[Jojomo]

While the paper concerning the Death Stars Planet Destroying Beam is fictional, the calculations are based on actually real life mathematics and psychics.

Gravitational Binding Energy of a planet can be used to calculate the amount of energy required to be directed at the planet (such as a beam) to destroy it.

Also in StarMade Water, Wood, Sand, Rock and Soil weight the exact same (.02) so that would not be very accurate if used in the way you are suggesting.

The Death Star paper makes plenty of assumptions (which is fine, and necessary), but if you base another calc with its own assumptions on top of that you're basing assumptions on assumptions. Much preferable to avoid as many assumptions as possible.

Water has mass 0.03

 

[Igfig]

Planets in StarMade are much smaller than in Star Wars. I think a better way would be to figure out how much a unit of thrust is and work backwards from there.

 

[Igfig]

And in fact, I've done just that.

First of all, since water has a mass of 0.03, and each block is 1m on a side, and 1 m^3 of water has a mass of 1000 kg, one unit of mass in StarMade is 1000/0.03 kg = 33,333.3 (repeating) kg.

With that in mind, I created a ship with a mass of 300, or 10,000,000 kg. The ship included a single thruster, which according to the formula on the wiki page has a thrust of approximately 3.30504 and a power consumption of 33.3 (repeating) e/sec. Let's assume that that represents 100% efficiency.

I performed several time trials in which I accelerated the ship until it reached a velocity of 1.0 m/s, and recorded how long it took each time. My timepiece was a manual stopwatch, so all numbers from this section are relatively inaccurate. If anybody has a precise formula for calculating speed that I could use instead, I would be much obliged.

My average time came to approximately 8.75s in each of the trials. Plugging the numbers into a kinetic energy calculator told me that my ship has a total kinetic energy of 5,000,000 J at a velocity of 1 m/s; that implies that my single thruster has an output of 5,000,000 / 8.75 = 571428.57 W.

We now know that 33.3 (repeating) e/sec = 571,428.57 W.
From there, we can calculate that 1 e = 571,428.57 / 33.3 (repeating) = 17,142.857 J.

That's about 17 MJ. For comparison, 10 MJ is enough to run a hot shower for ten minutes.
A single reactor block produces 140.6 e/sec, or about 2,410,000 W. For comparison, 1 MW is the energy consumption of a medium-size hospital.
The power cap, a.k.a. the output of a medium size ship, is 2 million e/sec. That's about 34,286,000,000 W, or about 2/3 the total power demand of Australia.
(More comparisons here)