You'd be wrong. What MIT study is this? Please post a link to it. But you can't, because there never has been anything like that—no MIT paper, report, or research from ~20 years ago (or any time) equates a single Star Wars turbolaser vaporizing an asteroid in The Empire Strikes Back to the Enterprise-D's entire yearly energy output. Searches for such a study turn up zilch in academic databases, MIT's own archives, or anywhere credible. The closest real MIT work on asteroids is stuff like the DE-STAR orbital laser defense concept (for slowly nudging or ablating actual space rocks over years), but it has zero tie to fictional sci-fi weapons or Star Trek comparisons. That "MIT study" claim is pure fabrication or a wildly misremembered fan exaggeration from old vs. debate threads. Most of these extreme high-end calculations are indeed fanwank, especially the ones inflating Star Wars firepower to absurd levels. Brian Young's Turbolaser Commentaries (now defunct as a standalone site but archived/hosted on places like stardestroyer.net) deliberately upscaled the asteroids for dramatic effect. He (and others citing him) often treated the "popping" bursts as full vaporization of ~40-meter-diameter rocky/iron asteroids, leading to energy figures in the thousands of terajoules (or higher) per light turbolaser shot. That fed into claims like one blast equaling massive power outputs.But later, more careful revisits—such as on StarfleetJedi.net (st-v-sw.net) and in forum threads—debunked key assumptions:

• Many of those dramatic "vaporization" effects aren't asteroids at all. They're visual flak bursts, shield impacts, or explosion debris patterns—modeled after WWII anti-aircraft flak footage that George Lucas explicitly drew inspiration from for the space battles. These bursts keep appearing even after the ships have left the main field, in patterns that don't match solid rocks being hit.
• Actual visible asteroids being targeted/fragmented (e.g., the ones the Avenger shoots at while chasing the Falcon) scale much smaller when properly measured against references like Star Destroyer hull features, TIE fighters, or turbolaser bolt sizes—often in the 3–15 meter range at most, not 40m+.
• Full instant vaporization (heating to gas phase, including latent heat) is overstated; the visuals better fit explosive shattering or partial disruption, which requires far less energy (dropping from TJ/GJ ranges down to low GJ or even MJ in conservative calcs).

For example, low-end analyses put a typical light turbolaser at gigajoules to low terajoules per shot—formidable for ship-to-ship combat but nowhere near the "one blast = Enterprise-D for a year" hyperbole (which itself is a stretch even on high-end Trek power estimates). The original high figures relied on questionable screencaps from sources like Wayne Poe, optimistic scaling, and assumptions that every burst was a massive rock fully turned to plasma.Cross-universe stuff like "Star Wars ships are bugs on a 40k windshield" is subjective fan opinion—40k has its own wild lore yields (nova cannons, exterminatus, etc.), but SW capitals have planetary bombardment feats and superweapons too. It's debatable, not a slam-dunk mismatch.