a battle to end all battles

[Avenger_7]

erm... the Executor wasn't a planet killer. The Death Star's beam, on the otherhand, has an output around 2.2E38 J.

[҉]

Yah. Death Star, Eclipse, those could kill planets. As I've been saying since the beginning, though, it takes an entire fleet of normal ships to do that.

[Avenger_7]

40k only needs one ship cruiser or larger :P

Although that's generally because they carry doomsday weapons...

[Keon]

Okay, so how many ISD's does it take to kill a planet? A bunch.

How many overloaded/unshielded/just open and blazing with the light of a few suns right in low orbit/ ISD hypermatter reactors would it take to kill a planet? Less than one.

Not quite. A hypermatter reactor is capable of producing that much energy, but they don't release nearly that much into normal space when they fail because a lot of it goes back into hyperspace. That's why ImpStars don't kill entire fleets when they blow up. It's still a hell of an explosion, especially when using nonstandard reactors (as the crew of the Battle Lance would testify, if they still had multiple atoms stuck together), but it's not a supernova.

They can use this energy of the reactor when they jump, correct? So clearly they can use it. But as for using it as a weapon, they can't?

[Ivan2006]

Okay, so how many ISD's does it take to kill a planet? A bunch.

How many overloaded/unshielded/just open and blazing with the light of a few suns right in low orbit/ ISD hypermatter reactors would it take to kill a planet? Less than one.

Not quite. A hypermatter reactor is capable of producing that much energy, but they don't release nearly that much into normal space when they fail because a lot of it goes back into hyperspace. That's why ImpStars don't kill entire fleets when they blow up. It's still a hell of an explosion, especially when using nonstandard reactors (as the crew of the Battle Lance would testify, if they still had multiple atoms stuck together), but it's not a supernova.

They can use this energy of the reactor when they jump, correct? So clearly they can use it. But as for using it as a weapon, they can't?

They don´t have weapons installed capable of such power intake.
After all, there weapons also need people who operate them and plasma weapons need tibanna that need place, and with a generator this big+ practically the rest of the lower half of the ship being taken up by the hangar, and considering that ion engines aren´t exactly the most energy-effective sublight propulsion (we already have them IRL) there is in the multiverse, there are several reasons why they didn´t just build a superlaser into an ISD.

[҉]

Okay, so how many ISD's does it take to kill a planet? A bunch.

How many overloaded/unshielded/just open and blazing with the light of a few suns right in low orbit/ ISD hypermatter reactors would it take to kill a planet? Less than one.

Not quite. A hypermatter reactor is capable of producing that much energy, but they don't release nearly that much into normal space when they fail because a lot of it goes back into hyperspace. That's why ImpStars don't kill entire fleets when they blow up. It's still a hell of an explosion, especially when using nonstandard reactors (as the crew of the Battle Lance would testify, if they still had multiple atoms stuck together), but it's not a supernova.

They can use this energy of the reactor when they jump, correct? So clearly they can use it. But as for using it as a weapon, they can't?

Well, they could. In a few cases they do. Like the Eclipse, which is a bit smaller than the Executor but carries one massive superlaser designed to punch through a planet's crust. But that's the only ship I know of that channels that much power into one weapon. Executor uses tons of power for weapons, but it's split up amongst five thousand weapons batteries. And, again, we're talking about peak power. This is as much as it can possibly draw at one time. It would almost never actually do that, and I highly doubt that it could sustain it, although that's just speculation. I don't have anything to back that up.