Arctic Fox, on 09 May 2012 - 04:25 AM, said:
It should be noted that BattleTech's fusion reactors violate conservation of energy completely and utterly. Matter/Antimatter is nothing compared to the drives that can accelerate BattleTech's WarShips and DropShips to large precentages of the speed of light with ridiculously low mass ratios.
Anyway, I'd have to wager on the SLDF. It will be fairly hard for them to win against the Covenant's handwavium in an actual fight, of course. But if both sides are dropped into the real world then the SLDF's will only lose their FTL drives and much of their drive's and armour's efficiency, while the Covenant ships would be utterly helpless.

I'm sorry, but I really highly doubt that BT fusion reactors are anywhere near 100% efficient at liberating energy from matter.
That's just the nature of fusion reactors.
That means less energy for weapons, shields (oops, BT ships don't even have them), and this plays out tangibly, because even a UNSC ship should be able to mission kill any BT ship
with one shot, considering that they appear to outstrip their per-shot energy capability by a factor of about 1000.
Also, I'm fairly sure we're not talking about what would happen if each were dropped into real-world physical conditions (in which case neither would function particularly well). When one says "Covenant ship", or "SLDF ship", or references any ship in a BT debate, it generally refers to such a ship with its actual canonical abilities intact. If it didn't, there'd be no point in having a vs debate
Besides, there's no directly evidence that the technology in these franchises can't exist; we merely don't know if they can or can't. There are limits there, of course. Some franchises make claims that are just flat out wrong, such as Halo getting the mass of iron and tungsten wrong in their S-MAC rounds. That's just a flat out mistake. I'm inclined to count canonical capabilities so long as they don't start doing things like
that (or, you know, running reactors with more then 100% efficiency, like Star Wars EU)
Arctic Fox, on 09 May 2012 - 05:14 AM, said:
Just to illustrate. An SLDF 520,000 ton Whirlwind class destroyer normally carries a mere 5,000 tons of hydrogen fuel and reaction mass. Under heat-expansion mode, this is capable of accelerating it at 1 g for 126 days. And that's not even particularly impressive compared to some other ships...
Can I get a source on that? That's actually fairly impressive.
On the other hand, isn't it just as likely our advanced, FTL-capable race is simply able to employ mass-reduction tech of some sort?
If they have that much energy, why the pathetic weaponry? If BT reactor tech was that good, everything from ships to battlemech ought to be capable of orders of magnitude more energetic output than we see.
Also, if BT reactors are so thermodynamically efficient, why do mechs produce
so much waste heat when they draw energy, that they literally have to stop firing to avoid blowing up the reactor anytime they come
remotely close to drawing what said reactor can output? It seems like for every gigajoule of firepower I put out, I have to deal with about that much heat energy on my mech! That hardly sounds amazingly efficient
I'm seeing more than a little bit of inconsistency here.
Edit: Unless I'm not figuring this right, that's actually not very impressive, doing the math.
520,000,000*9.8*3600*24*126 = 55477094400000000J or about 55 petajoules. That's considerably less energy than is liberated from just one KILOGRAM of antimatter, and it takes BT five million kilograms of the stuff?!
Even if Covenant reactors were one ten thousanth of a percent efficient (with a tech that should be near 100% on paper), they'd
still be orders of magnitude better!
Edited by Catamount, 09 May 2012 - 05:42 AM.