[0rph3u5]

5GT

... which is yield that has no strategic or tactical use. Nightmare, you really have to loose the illusion that weapon yield says something about its usefulness.

[Nightmare]

It's the Harbinger yield FYI. If you prefer a weapon the size of a Tempest with 0 Exatons of TNT equivalent, go ahead.

[Colonol Dekker]

My background in service, and job now and forever is in munitions, ERW, UXO and EOD.    This is a hilarious convo.


I'm not going to engage but yah, this funny.

[manwiththemachinegun]

I mean, contribute or don't? Don't just dangle it out there.

[Nightmare]

Just read the last posts in the thread and put the pieces together.

[Colonol Dekker]

I mean, contribute or don't? Don't just dangle it out there.

I choose not to contribute.  But take a second and think about just how many posts, in how many topics say something without contributing. 

I'm certainly not going to ignore how farcical what prompted my comments was.    I'm not ego hungry enough to force it in other people's faces, but I am far from above letting people know there's an elephant or two wandering around the house.


I'll set one link down here and point one out for you lot to quibble over.  But I won't let in my opinion unqualified people dilute my mindset, affecting my work by talking "shop" over (and think hard about it) weapons in a game by the same company that made the dubstep gun.


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_yield


I'm very qualified in this subject, I teach people who've been in the army doing what I did,  I TEACH them when they get out into the civilian sector so I know more than anything people will find on the Internet to try and force an incorrect opinion down my throat.  It's my kung fu.  It pays my mortgage and any speculation based on anything less than first hand experience is worth as much as a jam sandwich being used in a heart transplant. 

[Iain Baker]

I mean, contribute or don't? Don't just dangle it out there.

I choose not to contribute.  But take a second and think about just how many posts, in how many topics say something without contributing. 

I'm certainly not going to ignore how farcical what prompted my comments was.    I'm not ego hungry enough to force it in other people's faces, but I am far from above letting people know there's an elephant or two wandering around the house.


I'll set one link down here and point one out for you lot to quibble over.  But I won't let in my opinion unqualified people dilute my mindset, affecting my work by talking "shop" over (and think hard about it) weapons in a game by the same company that made the dubstep gun.


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_yield


I'm very qualified in this subject, I teach people who've been in the army doing what I did,  I TEACH them when they get out into the civilian sector so I know more than anything people will find on the Internet to try and force an incorrect opinion down my throat.  It's my kung fu.  It pays my mortgage and any speculation based on anything less than first hand experience is worth as much as a jam sandwich being used in a heart transplant.

I guess thats everyone told...except...what if the heart surgeon gets low blood sugar and gets the shakes? A Jam sandwich might be just the ticket in that situation 

Popular mainstream Sci-Fi weapon yields tend to be stupidly over powered since the writers probably have little knowledge of realistic weapons and are following the rule of 'moar is better'.

A perfect example of a mis-match between stated specs and on-screen effect is the Helios torpedo. It allegedly has a yield of 10.5 GT (Gigatons of TNT) - which is frankly ludicrous. For comparison, the Tsar Bomba - the largest nuke ever detonated -  had a yield of about 50MT.

10.5GT = 10500MT. This mean the Helios is about 210 times more powerful in raw yield than the Tsar Bomba. I have launched twin Helios torps at targets at point blank range and got away unharmed. Considering the Tsar Bomba's fire ball was several KM in diameter this seams unlikely. Ok - yeah, its space different medium different effects yada yada but we have detonated far smaller nukes in space which caused significant issues.

TL;DR - its a game, no need to take it seriously. Plus we all know the ultimate sci-fi weapon is to use an infinite improbability drive to turn your enemy's fleet into a collections of wales and and sentient pot plants 


https://wiki.hard-light.net/index.php/GTM_Helios
http://www.kylesconverter.com/mass/gigatonnes-to-megatonnes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
 

[Nightmare]

On a side note, both nuclear and antimatter weapons have still physical limitations in terms of the energy they can generate, so while it wouldn't change much about the discussion here (destroyers would be gone anyway) it's not like you could just enter what you want either.

[Assassin714]

I mean, contribute or don't? Don't just dangle it out there.

I choose not to contribute.  But take a second and think about just how many posts, in how many topics say something without contributing. 

I'm certainly not going to ignore how farcical what prompted my comments was.    I'm not ego hungry enough to force it in other people's faces, but I am far from above letting people know there's an elephant or two wandering around the house.


I'll set one link down here and point one out for you lot to quibble over.  But I won't let in my opinion unqualified people dilute my mindset, affecting my work by talking "shop" over (and think hard about it) weapons in a game by the same company that made the dubstep gun.


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_yield


I'm very qualified in this subject, I teach people who've been in the army doing what I did,  I TEACH them when they get out into the civilian sector so I know more than anything people will find on the Internet to try and force an incorrect opinion down my throat.  It's my kung fu.  It pays my mortgage and any speculation based on anything less than first hand experience is worth as much as a jam sandwich being used in a heart transplant.

I guess thats everyone told...except...what if the heart surgeon gets low blood sugar and gets the shakes? A Jam sandwich might be just the ticket in that situation 

Popular mainstream Sci-Fi weapon yields tend to be stupidly over powered since the writers probably have little knowledge of realistic weapons and are following the rule of 'moar is better'.

A perfect example of a mis-match between stated specs and on-screen effect is the Helios torpedo. It allegedly has a yield of 10.5 GT (Gigatons of TNT) - which is frankly ludicrous. For comparison, the Tsar Bomba - the largest nuke ever detonated -  had a yield of about 50MT.

10.5GT = 10500MT. This mean the Helios is about 210 times more powerful in raw yield than the Tsar Bomba. I have launched twin Helios torps at targets at point blank range and got away unharmed. Considering the Tsar Bomba's fire ball was several KM in diameter this seams unlikely. Ok - yeah, its space different medium different effects yada yada but we have detonated far smaller nukes in space which caused significant issues.

TL;DR - its a game, no need to take it seriously. Plus we all know the ultimate sci-fi weapon is to use an infinite improbability drive to turn your enemy's fleet into a collections of wales and and sentient pot plants 


https://wiki.hard-light.net/index.php/GTM_Helios
http://www.kylesconverter.com/mass/gigatonnes-to-megatonnes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
 

Those weren't 'in space' though, they were in the upper atmosphere. And IIRC it was stated in FS1 that energy shields are very effective against explosive shockwaves, causing them to 'wash over' the ship without much damage. Before you got shields, even the detonation of something like a Ma'at would kill you if you got too close.

The weapon yields are actually underpowered, if anything.

Consider the equation KE = 1/2 * M * V^2 (Kinetic Energy equals one half times mass times velocity squared).

The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs had an impact energy of around 100 teratons. This asteroid was estimated to be about 10 km in diameter, barely larger than a Sathanas. Of course the asteroid was solid whereas the Sathanas isn't, but that could be somewhat compensated for by the Sathanas being made of much denser materials than rock. Even if we assume that the Sathanas has only 1/10th of the mass of the asteroid, that means it would only have to be moving a little over 3 times as fast to have as much kinetic energy.

The asteroid would have hit at the typical speed of reentry for a meteor (around 17 kilometers per second). As long as we ignore the ridiculously slow ingame ship speeds (which make no logical sense and can be chalked up to game mechanics, and IIRC we see ships moving much faster in cutscenes, such as when they escaped Vasuda Prime), this isn't farfetched. Combine that with the fact that in space, there is no effective 'speed limit' aside from the speed of light itself - with continuous acceleration, any object will just continue to speed up, as there is no friction to slow it down. So in effect, measuring the 'speed' of a spaceship is less relevant than measuring its acceleration. Even real life space probes have reached speeds of over 68 kilometers per second, and that is using technology hundreds of years behind that in Freespace.

[Mito [PL]]

Those weren't 'in space' though, they were in the upper atmosphere. And IIRC it was stated in FS1 that energy shields are very effective against explosive shockwaves, causing them to 'wash over' the ship without much damage. Before you got shields, even the detonation of something like a Ma'at would kill you if you got too close.

Not sure about the FS1 shield statement, but I agree with the latter part. In early missions of FS1 the player really has to be very careful of objects larger than fighters exploding. That also includes bombs, I definitely died a bunch of times when chasing them down.

The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs had an impact energy of around 100 teratons. This asteroid was estimated to be about 10 km in diameter, barely larger than a Sathanas. Of course the asteroid was solid whereas the Sathanas isn't

Yes, but no. The asteroid would still be significantly larger than a Sathanas (comparing a blob 5km in radius to a 4 by 2 km object with... strange geometry), not to mention that the Sathanas would be largely hollow both due to its external and internal geometry.
But remember that asteroids are usually basically large batches of loose gravel held together by whatever minor gravity they generate, while a Sathanas is a warship and has much more "solidity" to it than a blob of loose gravel.

[Nightmare]

The Sathanas actualy body is 2.5*2.5*3.5 km, the rest is just spike which easily fit into the empty space of this smaller bounding box. Ofc it's just headcanon but since the Sath probably isn't massive on the interior it could have the same density as rock since the higher density of steel is compensated by shivan athmosphere.

[Assassin714]

Well my point is that if you have engines that can move multi-km chunks of metal through space at speeds that can actually get them anywhere in a reasonable amount of time, then 10 gigaton bombs are perfectly reasonable.