Destroying Starships from Within

[golentan]

The power output of a class one Star Destroyer is (according to wookiepiedia) ~7X10^24 watts. I'm making some assumptions here. Quick back of the envelope unless I've completely messed up (which is possible) means if you were to release the power output provided over a second, with say some shaped charges, the resulting blast would be about 500,000 megatons, about 10,000 times the blast force of the Tsar Bomba, the largest thermonuclear weapon ever detonated on earth.

With this much potential internal explosion on a ship designed to be shot at with turbolasers, I'm assuming there are all kinds of safeguards to prevent this sort of thing, some mechanical some computerized. That said, you get a good engineer to go bad and disable these, and I'm pretty sure that you've destroyed your vessel. And want to retreat to a distance of at least several hundred miles and some good lead shielding before that blast goes off. Even if you can't cut out all the safeguards, or the power generation stops faster in response to catastrophic destruction going off around it, if you can eke a 2 megaton blast out of it before the reactor cuts you off you've set off a blast comparable to a good sized nuke inside their shields and armor, that ship and its crew are not making it home from their mission.