The effects of the SSD collision with the DS2 were quite large. Remember the explosions going off around Luke as he was dragging Vaders body? The station was tearing itself apart and in my opinion would have been pretty much a loss after the collision. All those crewmen werent running in panic over a few shots from rebel fighters and you know the rebel cap ships wouldnt be wasting their time shooting at the DS2 with the Imperial Fleet right there to shoot at.

We never know for certain though since the main reactor is hit and the DS2 goes boom no more than a few minutes after the SSD crashed into it anyway.

Well the problem there is that we don't know how close that area was to the impact point. It may have only been a few kiliometres from the impact point, and thus it would have received significant damage itself, whereas areas that were 50-100 km away may have suffered no damage at all from the hit. Remember that the second DS was at least 260km in diameter, a 12km long ship isn't going to do significant damage to that sort of structure.

__________________
Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

How big of an asteroid needs to hit the Earth to cause a major extinction effect? Sure the asteroid will probably be travelling faster than the Executor was but the Earth is alot larger than the DS2.

The trouble with comparing the Earth and the DS is that they are totally different things. The DS has all the structures kept internally (yeah I know there where spires, but the living areas were still internal to those) it doesn't have an atmospehere surrounding it. It is also armoured, falling wreakage might damage and scar the plating, even break through in places, but those areas can be sealed off, preventing harm to areas that didn't receive direct damage. You can't do this with the Earth. An asteriod that would be considered a global killer wouldn't do a huge amount of damage to the Earth, but the result would be a pall of dirt and dust in the atmosphere that would block the sun, plunge the world into a deep iceage, killing the plant life and thus animal life. I would doubt that any asteriod that hit the Earth, short of one that literally split it open, could wipe out life in an instant, death would occur over the following months as the skies were covered and the earth cooled. Humans would probably survive even then by use of technlogy and fleeing underground, but the Earth would never be the same.

If you look at the collision, only the very tip of the Executor hits and penetrates the DS, the rest blows up high above it, so what would then be happening is that, that wreakage would rain down across an area of the DS, but a lot of it wouldn't do more than land heavily against the superstructure.

__________________
Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran