Thomas has come up with an interesting point.
If you're unfamiliar with the issue at hand, the Sakura wants to be able to enter the Great Southern Nebula and fire its aether shock cannon at Mishhu forces.
To do this, an enterprising engineer (Miles Gunn by DocTomoe) has come up with a device to clear the gas of the nebula away. Not all of it of course; just enough to fire the cannon without frying everyone inside.
What Thomas has said (and from what I learned in astronomy, he's right) is that even an unordinary nebula is in no way dense enough to begin with to worry about all this gas burning up into RED HOT FIRE.
But even if the nebula were dense enough ... nebula carry next to zero oxygen, if not zero entirely. Even if we were to assume that the Great Southern Nebula was along the lines of a planetary nebula -- which at 10 light-years wide seems unlikely -- there still isn't enough oxygen to ignite anything. Hydrogen, which there's plenty of, also wouldn't flare up because it has no oxygen to help it along.
There's also the issue of what an aether beam does. Thomas takes it as such --
If we were talking about a scalar pulse, that's one thing. Perhaps it could ignite some of the heaviest elements in a nebula. But that's comparable to trying to ignite a metal bottlecap using a glowing ember of wood from thirty feet away -- the density simply isn't there, and the elements are difficult to ignite anyway.
I'm no scientist. So if anyone wants to lance the work, feel free. And I know I'm bringing real-world physics into a fantasy setting. But something tells me that Lor's helpful cloud shield isn't very helpful at all, and it doesn't take a strange device to make it safe to fire a weapon inside. Besides which, Lor must exist in a hole in the nebula -- surely it revolves around a star somehow, which would've used up the gas and dust of the area to form itself.
After all, as Thomas said in his opening argument, if aether could light a nebula on fire, how could nebulae create stars?
If you're unfamiliar with the issue at hand, the Sakura wants to be able to enter the Great Southern Nebula and fire its aether shock cannon at Mishhu forces.
To do this, an enterprising engineer (Miles Gunn by DocTomoe) has come up with a device to clear the gas of the nebula away. Not all of it of course; just enough to fire the cannon without frying everyone inside.
What Thomas has said (and from what I learned in astronomy, he's right) is that even an unordinary nebula is in no way dense enough to begin with to worry about all this gas burning up into RED HOT FIRE.
But even if the nebula were dense enough ... nebula carry next to zero oxygen, if not zero entirely. Even if we were to assume that the Great Southern Nebula was along the lines of a planetary nebula -- which at 10 light-years wide seems unlikely -- there still isn't enough oxygen to ignite anything. Hydrogen, which there's plenty of, also wouldn't flare up because it has no oxygen to help it along.
There's also the issue of what an aether beam does. Thomas takes it as such --
- Aether beam touches something.
- Aether beam annihlates it outright.
If we were talking about a scalar pulse, that's one thing. Perhaps it could ignite some of the heaviest elements in a nebula. But that's comparable to trying to ignite a metal bottlecap using a glowing ember of wood from thirty feet away -- the density simply isn't there, and the elements are difficult to ignite anyway.
I'm no scientist. So if anyone wants to lance the work, feel free. And I know I'm bringing real-world physics into a fantasy setting. But something tells me that Lor's helpful cloud shield isn't very helpful at all, and it doesn't take a strange device to make it safe to fire a weapon inside. Besides which, Lor must exist in a hole in the nebula -- surely it revolves around a star somehow, which would've used up the gas and dust of the area to form itself.
After all, as Thomas said in his opening argument, if aether could light a nebula on fire, how could nebulae create stars?
