Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - FS2 Required => Blue Planet => Topic started by: General Battuta on October 27, 2010, 03:05:50 pm
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Just for scale, the Apocalypse standard-issue antimatter-tipped ship-to-ship missile fired in swarms of four or eight is 40 meters in length. Longer than a Titan II ICBM. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-25C_Titan_II)
The ordnance expended in Aristeia alone could probably match a good-sized Cold War nuclear exchange. A full artillery duel between a Narayana team and a GTVA battlegroup would be apocalyptic in proportions.
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Must be fun for GTVA pilots to hunt down missiles that are bigger than their fighters ^^
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Must be fun for GTVA pilots to hunt down missiles that are bigger than their fighters ^^
Knowing how huge FS fighters are...I'm not sure that's true.
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Hmm... By the size and type of its explosive... shouldn't it be just as strong as nuke in WINGS?
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Well-known statistic: The Harbinger apparently has a payload of 5000 megatons. The Fury has a payload of 2 kilotons.
(these numbers make no sense)
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Antimatter explosion (is that even the right term?) =/= Nuclear explosion.
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Antimatter explosion (is that even the right term?) =/= Nuclear explosion.
Depends. A relatively small antimatter weapon will equal a large nuke.
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Antimatter explosion (is that even the right term?) =/= Nuclear explosion.
The units are TNT equivalent. If it's an explosion, the units can still be used.
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Hmm... By the size and type of its explosive... shouldn't it be just as strong as nuke in WINGS?
Nope. It scales properly with other FreeSpace bombs, and the nuke in WINGS is a piddling tiny little firecracker compared to FreeSpace weapons. The low-end Harbinger bomb had a yield of 5000 megatons!
Most of the size of the weapon is probably tied up in its enhanced range versus other FreeSpace anti-warship secondaries.
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If the missile is so big, couldn't they fit some ECCM in there?
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If the missile is so big, couldn't they fit some ECCM in there?
Sure, vast amounts. But in general I think we assume that the ECM environment is as ridiculously overscaled as the warhead yields.
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Antimatter explosion (is that even the right term?) =/= Nuclear explosion.
The units are TNT equivalent. If it's an explosion, the units can still be used.
I know, but claiming that the numbers make no sense when two entirely different types of explosive are used is fallacy.
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Antimatter explosion (is that even the right term?) =/= Nuclear explosion.
The units are TNT equivalent. If it's an explosion, the units can still be used.
I know, but claiming that the numbers make no sense when two entirely different types of explosive are used is fallacy.
He's claiming the numbers make no sense because they're ridiculously huge compared to the effects seen in-game. (Plus I don't think Fury damage scales to Harbinger damage at all, but blast TNTonnage doesn't necessarily = damage points I guess.)
An antimatter blast actually would behave pretty much like a nuke: you'd get a ton of gamma, an EMP (moreso in an atmosphere than in space), and a neutrino pulse. The rule of thumb I've seen (it even made it to Wikipedia, looks like!) is that a kilo of antimatter, annihilated at high efficiency, is about as good as a 20mt thermonuke.
Don't believe the myth that a matter/antimatter blast converts 100% to destructive force. You lose about half the blast energy to neutrinos. (If the neutrinos were crazy dense enough, they could cause breakdown of nearby fission weapons, hilariously enough - rendering nearby nukes inoperable.)
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I always thought that was a scary thought: two kilograms (one matter, one antimatter) could be as powerful as some of the most powerful nukes ever created. Of course, with antimatter, the actual bomb would probably be huge compared to the amount of antimatter it contains because you have to store the antimatter in a a way that it absolutely cannot come into contact with any form of matter, so the containment mechanism would probably be very complex.
I was reading some of the tech entries in WiH the other day, and I was wondering, how much antimatter did you guys envision the UEF's weapons, from their torpedoes to the mass drivers, using?
And yeah, the numbers [V] threw around for their weapons seem ridiculous. I don't know how effective nukes and such would be in space, but if they're even a tiny fraction as effective as they are in an atmosphere, a 5,000 megaton nuke should shatter a destroyer in one shot, and yet a Sathanas shrugs of 5+ gigaton Helios (Helios>Harbringer) like its nothing. Basically, I've never taken those numbers seriously, and regarded them as some game developer throwing numbers around.
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We envisioned them as having not much antimatter. The UEF has a lot of the stuff, as antimatter goes, but it's gotta be handled carefully.
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Must be fun for GTVA pilots to hunt down missiles that are bigger than their fighters ^^
Knowing how huge FS fighters are...I'm not sure that's true.
FS fighters are around 20-25 meters long
So yes, they'll be hunting missiles that are bigger than their fighters
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I feel that something does not match...
Size, speed, weapon power, there's definitely something wrong in FS.
Each week, I take a train that goes faster than 220 mph... In 2336, my fighter : 80 mph. :lol:
I liked the way IWar 2 Edge of Chaos handled speed : it was more a matter of acceleration than absolute speed.
And I want nuke effects like in Battlestar Galactica, or some more understandable figures in the tech room.
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Don't believe the myth that a matter/antimatter blast converts 100% to destructive force. You lose about half the blast energy to neutrinos. (If the neutrinos were crazy dense enough, they could cause breakdown of nearby fission weapons, hilariously enough - rendering nearby nukes inoperable.)
I don't see neutrinos involved, really.
Electron-positron annihilation produces only gamma photons of about 511 keV energy (or more if the particles had lots of momentum before their collision).
Proton-antiproton annihilation (at lower than about 2 GeV energies) produces four gamma photons and a chargeless pion, which decays into two gamma photons.
Neutron-antineutron annihilation produces two gamma photons directly.
What you lose in destructive force is the fact that gamma rays are stupidly penetrating stuff. Most of the gamma radiation passing through stuff like human tissue just goes through doing nothing, which means you need quite large intensities of gamma radiation to actually cause a harmful amount of ionizing impacts on the tissue (this level depends on the tissue, some are more sensitive to damage than others). Additionally, the intensity (of course) reduces fast as distance grows, in the inverse square of distance.
Hence, despite the massive amounts of raw energy unleashed, harnessing it into mechanical work is not quite straightforward. The gamma radiation itself doesn't cause immediate damage unless it is so dense that it transfers huge amounts of energy into nearby materials and vaporises it, but due to the penetrating properties of gamma radiation this would require quite a massive yield, and most of the energy would still escape.
The best way to actually utilize the energy of gamma burst released from the annihilation is to encase it in a non-solid fragmentation shell made of lead or other very dense element (but lead is probably the cheapest, depleted uranium tends to be a bit sparse) which would attenuate the gamma radiation significantly, heat up by a corresponding energy, and turn into expanding cloud of lead vapour and parts of the outer fragmentation shell. This could cause more damage in the vacuum.
In atmosphere, similar system could increase the amount of energy captured at the blast site. If that were not done, the annihilation would produce a mass of gamma rays which would probably heat up the air enough to cause an impressive fireball and lots of radiation sickness nearby, but if there was a shroud around the annihilation that would gather the majority of the gamma rays released, it would constrict the energy release to a much smaller area, and would likely result in pretty much larger destructive power overall.
EDIT: Typio
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Oh, I love those discussions.
Now, I'm not entirely sure, but isn't the 100% efficiency only when the proper particles are used? Electron and Positron will result in 100%, but weren't there actually ways a positron could react with a proton or neutron if they are forced into each other properly? I think the standard model and sub-hadron mechanics played a role there...
Hm, I really would have to go back and try to read that stuff again, if only I could remember where that was. I might be confusing stuff altogether here as well. But IIRC there were many different particles that could result from different antimatter-matter reactions. So without knowing about what exactly is in those warheads, we shouldn't be able to really make a call on what the explosion would be like.
And as for the flight physics not being anything like real spaceflight would be like - I love Freespace, but when I want (pseudo)realism, I go for Elite 2 or 3 (with fanpatches). BP does a good job in being authentic in it's own frame of reference without trying to bring "real" realism into freespace.
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The gamma radiation itself doesn't cause immediate damage unless it is so dense that it transfers huge amounts of energy into nearby materials and vaporises it, but due to the penetrating properties of gamma radiation this would require quite a massive yield, and most of the energy would still escape.
Considering that the hulls are made to block cosmic radiation and withstand nuklear weapons (like the torpedoes) wouldn't that mean they aren't easily penetrated by gamma rays?
So unless they found a way to deflect radiation away from the hulls, wouldn't that mean instead of going through without causing harm, those gamma rays instead heat up the inside of those armor plates?
Apart from possibly making those plates softer till they can cool off again (depends on the material I guess) that should also raise the ships internal temperature causing the crew some discomfort and reducing the effectiveness of the cooling systems for beams and reactors.
Also antimatter tipped warheads sound like a shaped blast to me, so in front of the impact site there would be intense energy released, probably enough to vapourise the hull there. And if that material get's into the corridors of the ship, it'd be rather catastrophic I think.
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AUTOMATED WARNING: INTERNAL TEMPERATURE AT 27,000 DEGREES. DEPLOYING DISASTER BEACON.
Yeah, that can be disconfortable ^^.
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...and yet there were somehow still bodies for Levi to see... :confused:
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The gamma radiation itself doesn't cause immediate damage unless it is so dense that it transfers huge amounts of energy into nearby materials and vaporises it, but due to the penetrating properties of gamma radiation this would require quite a massive yield, and most of the energy would still escape.
Considering that the hulls are made to block cosmic radiation and withstand nuklear weapons (like the torpedoes) wouldn't that mean they aren't easily penetrated by gamma rays?
So unless they found a way to deflect radiation away from the hulls, wouldn't that mean instead of going through without causing harm, those gamma rays instead heat up the inside of those armor plates?
Apart from possibly making those plates softer till they can cool off again (depends on the material I guess) that should also raise the ships internal temperature causing the crew some discomfort and reducing the effectiveness of the cooling systems for beams and reactors.
Also antimatter tipped warheads sound like a shaped blast to me, so in front of the impact site there would be intense energy released, probably enough to vapourise the hull there. And if that material get's into the corridors of the ship, it'd be rather catastrophic I think.
Yes, that would work - for all the ships in close proximity. Would be interesting to do the math on how much gamma radiation would be needed for hull plating to absorb enough energy to start significantly heating up, though. It'll cause radiation sickness long before that happens, I would wager, but don't take my word for it, it's just my intuition.
The problem is, gamma rays spread evenly from a point source, and their effectiveness reduces in inverse square of distance. The even distribution means that at reasonably short distance, they won't be doing much damage at all (at least immediate damage - they may cause radiation sickness, but that doesn't immediately put a warship down like compromised hull structure will.
If you instead convert most of the energy from the reaction into kinetic energy (assumign you can do this) and send shrapnel from the blast site, you get a much more "coarse" distribution of possible damage - but at the same time, the damage delivery is more efficient. The probability of getting hit by pieces of shrapnel will decrease in the inverse square of distance, but individual pieces of shrapnel don't lose their initial kinetic energy, which means the individual pieces of shrapnel retain their effectiveness regardless if distance, unlike a free gamma burst.
Or, let me put it this way.
Let's say you have a free gamma burst of a 0.1 kg anti-hydrogen warhead. Assuming a clean conversion from energy to gamma rays, you will be getting 9x1015 Joules of gamma radiation, spectrum spikes at 511 keV (electron-positron-annihilation spike) and 125, 307 and 530 MeV spikes for proton-antiproton annihilations. This is about 2.151 Megatons of TNT. This energy might sound like a lot (and it is, considering it's from 100 grams of antihydrogen), but let's break it up into what sort of effect it would actually have.
The higher the energy of photons, the more penetrating they are, which means their linear attenuation coefficient is reduced when they go through the same thickness of absorber. If you have, d metres of hull plating at attenuation coefficient α, you could relatively easily calculate the linear attenuation for each gamma spectrum spike and thus determine the percentage of absorption of pass-through gamma radiation:
I = I0 e-αd (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer%E2%80%93Lambert_law)
Where I0 is the intensity of radiation when it impacts the absorbing hull plate, which can be pretty trivially calculated if you know the distance from the annihilation site (and if you want, you can just deal with energies instead of power and intensity, since the time of annihilation reaction is pretty short).
I have no idea of the attenuation factors of spaceship hull material, but they'll be different for each gamma wave length. However, let us generously assume that the hull plating absorbs 80% of the gamma radiation.
The energy released in 0.1 kg antimatter warhead is, like said, about 9x1015 Joules. At 1000 metres distance, the amount of energy passing through one square metre of space is
9x1015 J / 4 π (1000 m)2 = 716197244 J m-2
Which is about 716 megajoules of energy per square metre.
For comparison, if you have a ton of water ice at 273.16 K temperature (solid form), it takes 333 megajoules to thaw it to 273.16 K temperature liquid. But if you had a cube of water ice with mass 1000 kg, at 1000 metres from the annihilation site, it would probably not melt all the way because the attenuation factor of water isn't too high; much of the gamma radiation would pass through.
So that's the practical effect of 0.1 kg annihilation warhead at one kilometre distance. If you replace the ice cube with humans, they'll heat up a bit and contract severe radiation sickness, but I doubt it would have radical effect on ship hull plating. Closer to the blast site, sure, but 1000 metres is relatively small distance even in FreeSpace.
Now, let's look at another scenario: let's say 80% of the annihilation energy is converted into kinetic energy of shrapnel pieces.
To be ambitious, let's make fragmentation shell with following configuration:
-Total mass 12566371 kg
-Mass of individual fragments on average 1 kg.
80% of 9x1015 Joules is 7.2x1015 Joules.
That as kinetic energy given to mass of 12 566 371 kg yields a velocity of 33.85 km/s.
Each fragment has thus velocity of 33.85 km/s and, unsurprisingly, kinetic energy of 572.9 MJ (which is 80% of the radiation of gamma rays passing through the one square meter area.
You might wonder why I picked such a random-looking value for the amount of shrapnel particles. Well, the reason is that the surface area of a sphere with radius of 1000 metres is 12 566 370.6 square metres, and when you evenly distribute 12566371 shrapnel particles on that area, you should get about one shrapnel piece per square metre, which is important in comparing the efficacy of this setup compared to the free gamma ray setup.
We've established that there will be about 12.5 million 1 kg pieces of shrapnel flying at almost 34 kilometres per second, and by average at distance of 1000 metres you will get one of them per one square metre of surface area.
Now you'll remember that the effect of gamma radiation on a block of ice was quite... lacking in destructive power. By contrast, I don't think anyone has any difficulties about what happens to a block of ice when it's impacted with one kilogram mass moving at 34 km/s.
Similarly, a projectile with 34 km/s is much more efficient against space ship hulls than an even spread of gamma radiation. Against organics, sure, you'll achieve a high mortality rate with induced radiation sickness, which may be an interesting way of acquiring ships relatively intact; gamma radiation does not irradiate materials like neutron radiation does, so in a way this would be much better way of dealing with space ship crews without causing excessive damage to the ship itself.
But, in open combat this would not work. The crew would stay operational for some while after the gamma burst. That's why as a pure weapon, the shrapnel based one would function better.
Any thoughts? Spot any calculation errors?
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...and yet there were somehow still bodies for Levi to see... :confused:
That disaster beacon was only from one ship. The crew spaces are compartmentalized anyway.
Don't believe the myth that a matter/antimatter blast converts 100% to destructive force. You lose about half the blast energy to neutrinos. (If the neutrinos were crazy dense enough, they could cause breakdown of nearby fission weapons, hilariously enough - rendering nearby nukes inoperable.)
I don't see neutrinos involved, really.
le nooooooob :p
Proton-antiproton pair goes to charged and neutral pions. The neutrals go right into gammas but the charged ones make it a little ways and decay into muons and neutrinos; the muons in turn give you electrons and more neutrinos.
Thus half the blast to neutrinos, even with absolutely perfect particle-antiparticle mixing and collision.
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I see a lot of possible paths for a proton-antiproton annihilation, and most of them don't include charged pions.
Let's assume that the predominant reaction is the one that results in a pion and anti-pion, and their further decay.*
In this scenario, yes:
proton + antiproton -> pion+ + pion- + gamma ray
pion- -> muon + muon neutrino
pion+ -> antimuon + muon neutrino
muon -> electron + electron neutrino
antimuon -> positron + electron neutrino
So basically in this case we do have two muon neutrinos and two electron neutrinos (though since they can oscillate into each other the specific type doesn't really matter all that much).
The problem is determining how much of the energy is actually carried away by neutrinos. I'm having difficulty finding actual experimental data on how much energy bleed goes into them, but on a gut feeling I doubt it's as much as half of the energy, considering neutrinos being the lightweights of standard model.
But ok, let's accept that the total mass sets just an upper limit for the (useable) annihilation energy yield. This is, after all, strictly academic exercise in determining the effects of future space warfare weapons...
...right? :nervous:
*This apparently assumes that the proton and antiproton are at rest (have very little kinetic energy at the beginning). This may be the case initially for the first reactions, but the hydrogen - antihydrogen mixture would rapidly form a high-energy plasma, though I hesitate to speculate on how much collision energy the particles may have in this situation.
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*tear*
*Has to demonstrate why he still owns his title...*
I bet you get 100% (http://www.nerdtests.com/mq/take.php?id=24131) :p
Me? 58 :nervous: Really, can we please have an :embarrassed: smiley?
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65% but there were flaws in the questions.
In question 12 I answered that I couldn't answer it, but that was not exactly the right answer because the calculation is not defined (div by zero). Maybe that's the right answer to give, maybe not. And in question 29 the area below the curve is technically infinite since they didn't specify a lower limit to it (though I suspect they meant to ask the area limited by the curve and the X-axis and answered according to that...).
Oh and I plugged a few questions straight to wolfram alpha and said I used a calculator. Which it is (a symbolic one).
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well given how antimatter was portrayed in Angels and Demons, it takes an incredibly small amount to create a large explosion... but then again that was in a atmosphere so...
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well given how antimatter was portrayed in Angels and Demons, it takes an incredibly small amount to create a large explosion... but then again that was in a atmosphere so...
That was...not a great source.
Also I loved how the critical evidence in the book was stored on a camcorder, which still worked after an antimatter detonation, which would have caused an enormous EMP
also I like how their solution to the imminent blast is to take it up over the city where it can airburst and be more devastating
also
Okay I just thought that part was dumb.
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OH ! WE ARE THREATENED BY AN ANTIMATTER BOMB !
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Let's make it a thermobaric device, and have fun !
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Just to add my 2 cents worth, since I love these scientifically based discussions that pop up:
The gamma burst suggested above, if unshielded, would easily surpass the 1000 REM level that is generally considered lethal. However, after doing a few calculations a 30 cm thick layer of lead would reduce the dosage rate to just .006 mREM per hour if considering a detonation like the one above takes place every second for an hour. Granted that is a pretty hefty chunk of lead, but almost any dense material would have a similar effect. I would not be surprised if there was not a similar thickness of hull plating in use on capital ships in the freespace universe. However, I will concede that there is, as far as I know, no canonical support for this assumption.
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Well, it's sort of an extrapolation at best, but the fact that ships routinely get hit with nukes and don't seem to worry about crew radiation levels may be telling.
also are you a cameron class battlecruiser
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AUTOMATED WARNING: INTERNAL TEMPERATURE AT 27,000 DEGREES. DEPLOYING DISASTER BEACON.
Yeah, that can be disconfortable ^^.
The first time I went through the campaign, that part really hit me. And the subsequent yelling to 'cut them out of the net' honestly had me in a contemplative mood afterwards.
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perhaps ;7....but when I grow up I want to be a Leviathan.
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I've always tried to reason away the absurdly large detonation yields of FS weapons with the scale of FS starships allowing for absurdly large amounts of armor. They are so large that the amount of armor on one must be absurd. Something on the order of +10m worth of molybdenum or other heavy metal plating.
That's a three-plus story building worth of solid metal.
Holy crap.
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And they could have multiple decks of that stuff as NGTM-1R (I think) first expostulated. Compartments and crap.
Hard to kill. No wonder they're slow.
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also are you a cameron class battlecruiser
I guess he isn't. :(
I really don't see either of his DropShips around either.
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Well, I seem to have mixed up my assumptions a bit, as it turns out, the main products of antimatter-matter annihilation are basically always gamma photons and particles that themselves wouldn't add much to an explosion, mostly pions that quickly decay as it seems. Shaped antimatter charges that "eat" the hull of the ship as they react seem most effective to me.
Although I still couldn't find my original source, I remember once reading a really well written popular science text about everything related matter/antimatter annihilations, but it could have been offline...
As for spaceship armor - I wonder if they use super-heavy elements. You know - the ones that have the magic number of nuclei and reach the island of stability. It would seem feasible for those elements to be useable as alloys for spaceships, and as long as we cannot produce them, they are mysterious enough to serve as an interesting bit of science fiction material.
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also are you a cameron class battlecruiser
I guess he isn't. :(
I really don't see either of his DropShips around either.
He said he was.
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I kind of feel ashamed that I'm the one with the physics bachelor's degree, and yet Battman is throwing around elementary particle names I've never even heard of. Can't you confine your 1337ness to a single branch of study? :p
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if it makes you feel better i've got (in 1.5 months anyway) a NUCLEAR engineering degree and don't know a lot of that. but in my defense we don't really care about anything but neutrons.
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These particles are the realm of quantum physics and are not really important outside of it.
It is likely that other specializations wouldn't care about them.
Neither of them except the neutrino exisits long enough to mean much outside of the atomic nucleus and neutrinos (is that the correct pural form?) are so dinky that it is only possible to detect their presence by checking for missing energy, since they only interact with gravity or weak nuclear force, neither of which can be realiably used in detectors (which also means that they don't deserve anything more than a footnote when talking about most nuclear reactions from a practical POV).
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according to my astrophysics professor, there actually ARE giant neutrino detectors buried in the earth. they use them to detect supernovas and whatnot by the countrate jumping from 2/min to 10/min :P
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The neutrino detectors are giant buried water tanks. They are awesome.
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an EMP (moreso in an atmosphere than in space)
There will be no EMP in space, at least none that matters, because there's no atmospheric electrons to go about blaring synchrotron radiation and bremssthralung all over the damn place.
I don't see neutrinos involved, really.
What Battuta said, and also: Holy pair production Batman! Given the extremely high radiation and particle density that will be present in the annihilating matter, you'll get a ton of pair production, and this produces additional opportunities to generate neutrinos and other particles that will carry away energy in forms not conducive to making things dead. Whether or not this creates enough neutrinos to carry away 50% of the energy, I don't know, but 50% conversion efficiency is certainly plausible, mostly because not all the reaction mass will react, as it's going to be getting blown apart by the already reacting matter/antimatter.
Yes, that would work - for all the ships in close proximity. Would be interesting to do the math on how much gamma radiation would be needed for hull plating to absorb enough energy to start significantly heating up, though. It'll cause radiation sickness long before that happens, I would wager, but don't take my word for it, it's just my intuition.
Not necessarily. We can assume the armor plating is not very thin, and is probably made of uber-materials up to a meter thick in places (SWAG though this may be). I would wager that these would be able to absorb almost all of the gamma flux, and most of this would go into shock heating the armor, causing deep cracks, vaporization, and all around failure of the hull. It most likely would not push it around much.
The problem is, gamma rays spread evenly from a point source, and their effectiveness reduces in inverse square of distance. The even distribution means that at reasonably short distance, they won't be doing much damage at all (at least immediate damage - they may cause radiation sickness, but that doesn't immediately put a warship down like compromised hull structure will.
If you instead convert most of the energy from the reaction into kinetic energy (assuming you can do this) and send shrapnel from the blast site, you get a much more "coarse" distribution of possible damage - but at the same time, the damage delivery is more efficient. The probability of getting hit by pieces of shrapnel will decrease in the inverse square of distance, but individual pieces of shrapnel don't lose their initial kinetic energy, which means the individual pieces of shrapnel retain their effectiveness regardless if distance, unlike a free gamma burst.
You can't do this. Because the gamma rays will have essentially random momenta and energies (with several peaks around the annihilation energies of the various particles), the absorption of a whole lot of them will not be very effective at propelling something in the direction you want it to go without converting most of the kinetic energy the gamma rays had into thermal motion. This has the side effect of vaporizing anything you might want to encase the bomb with (find me a material that can withstand millions of Kelvins, and we'll talk). This also has the side effect of rendering the rest of your post moot, though your math looks right, even if you did use way too many sig figs.
The best bet is to detonate the bomb as close as possible to the hull of the enemy ship, to compromise its hull through extreme shock heating. We see this in game as well, to a more ridiculous degree, where a near miss does jack squat, while a direct hit can be some major hurt.
The neutrino detectors are giant buried water tanks. They are awesome.
The first one was a big-ass tank of bleach down a deep mine.
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an EMP (moreso in an atmosphere than in space)
There will be no EMP in space, at least none that matters, because there's no atmospheric electrons to go about blaring synchrotron radiation and bremssthralung all over the damn place.
Not so! This is a common thing to say but not striiiiictly true. In atmosphere the mighty EMP is produced by pumped-up air molecules relaxing and letting out photons. Even in vacuum, however, the explosion itself will release light, which is by definition an electromagnetic pulse. I doubt it'll have any effect on hardened military equipment whatsoever, though.
(Even a conventional explosion in atmosphere can generate an EMP of sorts, to my understanding.)
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Not so! This is a common thing to say but not striiiiictly true. In atmosphere the mighty EMP is produced by pumped-up air molecules relaxing and letting out photons. Even in vacuum, however, the explosion itself will release light, which is by definition an electromagnetic pulse. I doubt it'll have any effect on hardened military equipment whatsoever, though.
Your second and third sentences are correct, but not the first. There are three components to an atmospheric EMP, named E1, E2, and E3. E1 is what I was talking about, and is what does most of the damage, given its incredible speed (less than a microsecond) and high strength (up to 6.6 MW/m^2). E2 is caused by the Compton scattering of gamma rays towards the Earth's surface by the atmosphere; it is generally no more harmful to protected electronics than a lightning strike would be. E3 is a geomagnetic-storm like effect cause by the explosion literally pushing the Earth's magnetic field away from the detonation point, followed by the field relaxing back to its previous configuration, just like after a CME.
In space, E2 will be the only significant pulse, and it won't do anything to military electronics, especially since spaceships are giant Faraday cages. So yeah, I guess it's wrong to say "no EMP in space," but "no EMP that matters in space" still holds.
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Yes, that would work - for all the ships in close proximity. Would be interesting to do the math on how much gamma radiation would be needed for hull plating to absorb enough energy to start significantly heating up, though. It'll cause radiation sickness long before that happens, I would wager, but don't take my word for it, it's just my intuition.
Not necessarily. We can assume the armor plating is not very thin, and is probably made of uber-materials up to a meter thick in places (SWAG though this may be). I would wager that these would be able to absorb almost all of the gamma flux, and most of this would go into shock heating the armor, causing deep cracks, vaporization, and all around failure of the hull. It most likely would not push it around much.
Shock heating basically is what I was talking about. Depending on the thermal capacity of the hull material and the temperature jump (caused by the absorbed gamma rays' energy) it would be interesting to know how much of a temperature jump the hull could withstand, and also how much of the absorbed heat could be radiated back into space and how fast.
The problem is, gamma rays spread evenly from a point source, and their effectiveness reduces in inverse square of distance. The even distribution means that at reasonably short distance, they won't be doing much damage at all (at least immediate damage - they may cause radiation sickness, but that doesn't immediately put a warship down like compromised hull structure will.
If you instead convert most of the energy from the reaction into kinetic energy (assuming you can do this) and send shrapnel from the blast site, you get a much more "coarse" distribution of possible damage - but at the same time, the damage delivery is more efficient. The probability of getting hit by pieces of shrapnel will decrease in the inverse square of distance, but individual pieces of shrapnel don't lose their initial kinetic energy, which means the individual pieces of shrapnel retain their effectiveness regardless if distance, unlike a free gamma burst.
You can't do this. Because the gamma rays will have essentially random momenta and energies (with several peaks around the annihilation energies of the various particles), the absorption of a whole lot of them will not be very effective at propelling something in the direction you want it to go without converting most of the kinetic energy the gamma rays had into thermal motion.
This is exactly what I described. Basically what I suggested was to surround the annihilation source with a shell (or mantle) of material with high attenuation coefficient, sufficiently thick to absorb majority of the gamma burst and vaporize as a result.
This core device would be surrounded by the shrapnel pieces, which would be accelerated into great speed by the expanding vapours.
What I ignored in my calculations is the thermal energy required to heat the mantle mass and vaporize it. Which, depending on material used and its amount, might cause a significant energy bleed from the available kinetic energy for shrapnel.
This has the side effect of vaporizing anything you might want to encase the bomb with (find me a material that can withstand millions of Kelvins, and we'll talk). This also has the side effect of rendering the rest of your post moot, though your math looks right, even if you did use way too many sig figs.
The idea would be to use high-density mantle mass that would absorb enough gamma rays to vaporize, and the expanding vapours would generate both a mechanical shockwave (as well as an EMP since it'll essentially be totally ionized plasma) and accelerate the shrapnel pieces outward from the detonation center.
Problem would be to make the mantle out of a material that has high gamma attenuation factor (density), and the absorbed energy should be sufficient to vaporize the mantle while leaving most of the shrapnel materials relatively unaffected.
The best bet is to detonate the bomb as close as possible to the hull of the enemy ship, to compromise its hull through extreme shock heating. We see this in game as well, to a more ridiculous degree, where a near miss does jack squat, while a direct hit can be some major hurt.
That is definitely the simplest way to utilize an annihilation based explosive device.
Just trying to figure out a way to convert gamma burst into kinetic energy, and gamma->thermal->kinetic felt the simplest, though in hindsight I realise I did forget to subtract the required thermal energy from the available kinetic energy. And now I realize that the thermal to kinetic conversion isn't quite simple because I would have to calculate the vapour expansion velocity as function of time (v(0) would have the highest value and would give the upper limit for the shrapnel velocities), vapour density as function of time, and based on that calculate the force it would exert on a piece of shrapnel... gah. A bit too complex to do on my free time. :p
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This may sound like a stupid question, but wouldn't it be simpler to just allow the antimatter to hit the ship and annihilate whatever material the hull is made of? It seems to me like this would have a far more devastating effect than relying on the explosions themselves to take care of it.
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Easier, yes. But not more destructive. A properly shaped and designed warhead can be more reliably destructive, and more efficient, than a simple application of AM to the hull.
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This may sound like a stupid question, but wouldn't it be simpler to just allow the antimatter to hit the ship and annihilate whatever material the hull is made of? It seems to me like this would have a far more devastating effect than relying on the explosions themselves to take care of it.
Not...necessarily. You can't guarantee that all the antimatter in your warhead will annihilate properly with the hull, and the blast will be omnidirectional (in fact, guessing intuitively, most of it will probably 'richochet' back into space.)
Doing it inside your warhead allows you to maximize yield and maybe even get a nice jet of radiation and plasma going.
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If a torpedo buried itself inside the the armor and propelled antimatter forwards so it only anihilates with a small part of the warhead's nose and hull plating in front of it could also be effective. I don't have any equations for that though.
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As an anti-subsystem weapon that also does some hull damage?
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If a torpedo buried itself inside the the armor and propelled antimatter forwards so it only anihilates with a small part of the warhead's nose and hull plating in front of it could also be effective. I don't have any equations for that though.
Shaped charge antimatter?
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Shock heating basically is what I was talking about. Depending on the thermal capacity of the hull material and the temperature jump (caused by the absorbed gamma rays' energy) it would be interesting to know how much of a temperature jump the hull could withstand, and also how much of the absorbed heat could be radiated back into space and how fast.
Assuming a direct hit, the radiation dump will be easily enough to vaporize any material you care to put there, no matter how transparent to gammas it is. As strong as FS ship hulls are, to my knowledge they cannot withstand a million degree instant temperature change; no conceivable atom can withstand that kind of temperature, much less molecules and macroscopic materials. This will cause a very destructive shockwave to propagate through the hull, most likely thoroughly compromising it in the affected area. Going to game mechanics (yeah, I know, I know, but we don't have anything else to go on), since we don't see large portions of ships getting utterly vaporized by Harbingers/Helioses, we can assume they have some sort of field or super dense material that is able to "conduct," as it were, most of the received energy all along the ship's hull, spreading it out and preventing the ship from being destroyed immediately on impact. Therefore, when a ship's hull is "critical," this whatever it is is at capacity, and will soon be unable to control where the energy goes, resulting in the ship going kablooie.
This is exactly what I described. Basically what I suggested was to surround the annihilation source with a shell (or mantle) of material with high attenuation coefficient, sufficiently thick to absorb majority of the gamma burst and vaporize as a result.
This core device would be surrounded by the shrapnel pieces, which would be accelerated into great speed by the expanding vapours.
What I ignored in my calculations is the thermal energy required to heat the mantle mass and vaporize it. Which, depending on material used and its amount, might cause a significant energy bleed from the available kinetic energy for shrapnel.
You would need a large, not very dense medium to do this properly, because you need to spread the energy out over a large enough area that whatever the initial casing comes into contact with isn't vaporized, etc. This makes for a rather unwieldy bomb. Far better to just get the bomb real close and let the gamma rays do their dirty work.
That is definitely the simplest way to utilize an annihilation based explosive device.
Just trying to figure out a way to convert gamma burst into kinetic energy, and gamma->thermal->kinetic felt the simplest, though in hindsight I realise I did forget to subtract the required thermal energy from the available kinetic energy. And now I realize that the thermal to kinetic conversion isn't quite simple because I would have to calculate the vapour expansion velocity as function of time (v(0) would have the highest value and would give the upper limit for the shrapnel velocities), vapour density as function of time, and based on that calculate the force it would exert on a piece of shrapnel... gah. A bit too complex to do on my free time.
The problem is that without something like the Earth's atmosphere to attenuate the radiation over several hundred meters or so, and thence violently thermally expand, the thermal effects are so overwhelming as to utterly vaporize anything you try to encase the bomb with. This is why nuclear weapons are ultra-super awesome tools of destruction on Earth, but merely awesome tools of destruction in space. A very good explanation of how nukes (and by extension, M/AM weapons) work in space can be found at this site. (http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3x1.html)
Shaped charge antimatter?
Yup. The site I link to above also describes a design for a nuclear shaped charge that would work for an M/AM bomb with a little modification.
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Shaped charge meson bombs. :cool:
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I am beginning to love this thread more and more, because I am actually learning quite a bit of pop-science sci-fi pseudoknowledge, which I absolutely love to death.
Now, because I obviously lack the knowledge of both physics and weapon technology of others in this thread, let me say this as sort of a "dumb question":
In my imagination the best way to use antimatter bombs would be a shaped charge, which something like a 60/40 antimatter/matter ratio. In my sci-fi imagination it would work thusly: Concentrate the gamma burst as much as possible, and weakening the structure of the hull at the same point, by concentrating a stream of energized antimatter into the hull.
Now comes the part where I really am unsure if this would work as I think: In the highly energized surroundings I would expect the antimatter overflow to annihilate parts of the armor - of course on a nuclear level. That would mean that the elements of the alloy change, probably also become unstable isotopes, and themselves cause alpha and beta decay, which then could also further affect it's surroundings.
(Of course, one would assume in the immediate area, everything would break down no matter what, with the mere amount of energy released, so it actually may be completely pointless to begin with, now that I think about it)
If they would really use some sort of sci-fi super-dense elements from the island of stability like Ununquadium, I could imagine it breaking down completely in an array of decays down to a sub-Uranium level eventually.
Also, due to part of the reaction taking place inside the hull, the resulting energy should also be absorbed more efficiently by the hull, while even a shaped charge would waste most of it's energy into space.
As I said, I am really not that knowledgeable about it, and even though we can't really talk about realism anyway, all of the above is just a pile of half thought ideas... I love making things up with the little bit of trivia in my head. I actually had an idea of even more ludicrous ways, involving using sci-fi-plot-energy-fields to condense it into a cascade of small antimatter black holes, which would then burst into a mixture of Hawking radiation and "piled up" gamma radiation as soon as they lose their mass inside the hull. I highly doubt it would even begin to work, but it just sounds so wonderfully, ludicrously absurd.
Now, meson bombs... They are completely up to our imagination in how they are supposed to work I guess? I mean, did they explain it in Freespace lore or did they do what any sensible Sci Fi writer does: Add the word bomb to a cool sounding particle?
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Meson bombs almost make sense.
quark-gluon weapons **** yeah
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I always wondered why subspace wasn't explored further by the GTVA as a direct weapon. Spawning a subspace aperture inside the bowels of a spacefaring vessel can be quite devastating. With the technology reverse engineered from the Knossos portal it should not be too farfetched.
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I guess it might have something to do with the GTVA only starting to dabble in such technology. Even the rapidly recharging jumpdrives of the Carthage and Arteus are officially labled experimental technology.
But if I have the techroom describtions correctly in my head the Vishnan bombs utilize subspace.
I wouldn't be surprised if the GTVA and/or the UEF would build like weapons (allthough much weaker of course) from the scan-data the 14th battlegroup collected from Vishnan weapons in WiH 2 or BP3.
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I always wondered why subspace wasn't explored further by the GTVA as a direct weapon. Spawning a subspace aperture inside the bowels of a spacefaring vessel can be quite devastating. With the technology reverse engineered from the Knossos portal it should not be too farfetched.
Accurate targeting is probably a bit of a *****. For that matter, we don't know it's possible to open a window if there are objects in the way, or how the ship's atmosphere and artificial gravity would effect it. We've not seen an in-atmosphere jump despite a number of cutscenes and CB anis where it would have been very convenient to do so.
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A brief sci-fi rant. You all seem to be going hard towards the realism aspect. Given the nature of this topic I think it's important to bring this up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HYhXzN-opo&feature=related
These are nukes in the 50s-60s. Based on the figures demonstrated in the video, such explosions create novas which expand and engulf the entire FS2 'mission area'. Given 24th-25th century weapons technology explain it how you will, be it some kind of antimatter thermal quark subspace rift blast from the manifold plane resulting in an electromagnetic plasma flux vortex of entropic chaos etc, I would imagine that the areas of effect would be much greater and much more destructive.
'Going nuclear' does not seem to have any moral implications in space, so from a realism standpoint, it would make sense for weapons to have a much wider blast radius.
There have been explanations of how capital ships would get away with surviving indirect impacts from weapons of mass destruction, nano polymers, active armor, or good old massive sheets of steel, but It does nothing to explain the impressive visual impact these bombs would have.
The way I try to explain it away in my head so it does not bug me in the game is that future space based armor is so advanced, yes an unshielded fighter can resist a nuke, that any meaningful destruction requires very focused energy distribution of warheads, and that a wide blast radius is a 'waste of energy'. 24th century weapons channel their energy (somehow) into a small area, but they are extremely destructive. This still does not explain how Shivan fighter shields are so resilient to anti-capital ship warheads and why laser turrets are a better bet. I remember volition trying to explain the UD-8 Kayser as having some sort of wave diminishing effect on Shivan shields by cancelling its electromagnetic waves crest meets trough style.
I guess at some point you can say, how dare you impose boundaries on a society that broke the fabric of the cosmos? Just like trying to explain the idea of a jet bomber to a medieval man. "It's a flying castle that drops fire!", "BUT HOW?!" gaps the medieval man. I'm sure at some point 21st century science would be hard pressed to explain 24th century technology.
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Explosions are the main force behind any bomb, and comparing any bomb's explosion in the atmosphere to it in space is silly, considering the explosion, due to the lack of air molecules, would be a whole lot smaller.
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These are nukes in the 50s-60s. Based on the figures demonstrated in the video, such explosions create novas which expand and engulf the entire FS2 'mission area'. G
Remember though that those are blasts in atmosphere, with a medium to excite, and a fireball that can expand and rise. In space you would just get a very brief, very bright flash of extraordinary power, and a relatively small fireball that would rapidly dissipate.
Nukes are much less deadly in space.
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Aah, good. That actually makes me feel a lot better about freespace as a sci-fi
world universe.
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And everyone here is still talking about secondary effects of the bombs rather than primary, which is you set it off in direct contact with his hull for a pressure wave. :P
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Given that nukes in FS don't prox detonate (and hardly do anything when they do) that's exactly what happens.
That said I'm not totally clear on what kind of mechanical force transfer you'd get.
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Oh so that's why direct hits with secondaries do double damage compared to very close detonations. :P
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Given that nukes in FS don't prox detonate (and hardly do anything when they do) that's exactly what happens.
That said I'm not totally clear on what kind of mechanical force transfer you'd get.
Go read the site I linked to. I'll just quote the relevant section by Luke Campbell here, because he explains it better than I was going to:
First, consider a uniform slab of material subject to uniform irradiation sufficient to cause an impulsive shock. A thin layer will be vaporized and a planar shock will propagate into the material. Assuming that the shock is not too intense (i.e., not enough heat is dumped into the slab to vaporize or melt it) there will be no material damage because of the planar symmetry. However, as the shock reaches the back side of the slab, it will be reflected. This will set up stresses on the rear surface, which tends to cause pieces of the rear surface to break off and fly away at velocities close to the shock wave velocity (somewhat reduced, of course, due to the binding energy of all those chemical bonds you need to break in order to spall off that piece). This spallation can cause significant problems to objects that don't have anything separating them from the hull. Modern combat vehicles take pains to protect against spallation for just this reason (using an inner layer of Kevlar or some such).
Now, if the material or irradiance is non-uniform, there will be stresses set up inside the hull material. If these exceed the strength of the material, the hull will deform or crack. This can cause crumpling, rupturing, denting (really big dents), or shattering depending on the material and the shock intensity.
For a sufficiently intense shock, shock heating will melt or vaporize the hull material, with obvious catastrophic results. At higher intensities, the speed of radiation diffusion of the nuke x-rays can exceed the shock speed, and the x-rays will vaporize the hull before the shock can even start. Roughly speaking, any parts of the hull within the diameter of an atmospheric fireball will be subject to this effect.
In any event, visually you would see a bright flash from the surface material that is heated to incandescence. The flash would be sudden, only if the shock is so intense as to cause significant heating would you see any extra light for more than one frame of the animation (if the hull material is heated, you can show it glowing cherry red or yellow hot or what have you). The nuke itself would create a similar instant flash. There would probably be something of an afterglow from the vaporized remains of the nuke and delivery system, but it will be expanding in a spherical cloud so quickly I doubt you would be able to see it. Shocks in rigid materials tend to travel at something like 10 km/s, shock induced damage would likewise be immediate. Slower effects could occur as the air pressure inside blasts apart the weakened hull or blows out the shattered chunks, or as transient waves propagate through the ship's structure, or when structural elements are loaded so as to shatter normally rather than through the shock. Escaping air could cause faintly visible jets as moisture condenses/freezes out - these would form streamers shooting away from the spacecraft at close to the speed of sound in air - NO billowing clouds.
EDIT: Oh, SomeGuyWithAName, your ideas sound like they could work. I'm not sure how well, and I don't have the free time to do all the analysis, but they don't throw up any immediate red flags. I will say that I doubt the creation of radioisotopes in the hull will be all that significant, because of the lack of heavy neutron bombardment. Still, it's an interesting thought exercise. As for meson bombs, I'm going to go with "name that sounded physics-y and cool," because I know of no conceivable way for mesons (pions and friends; no meson has a lifetime longer than a microsecond) to catalyse or otherwise be involved in an explosion of that power.
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well sometimes they put me and me son inside a bomb and when i get angry with me son well
sorry nvm
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well sometimes they put me and me son inside a bomb and when i get angry with me son well
Battuta, Everyone (http://instantrimshot.com/index.php?sound=rimshot&play=true). He'll be here every evening, and don't miss his show on saturdays: "Battman and friends".
I always wondered why subspace wasn't explored further by the GTVA as a direct weapon. Spawning a subspace aperture inside the bowels of a spacefaring vessel can be quite devastating. With the technology reverse engineered from the Knossos portal it should not be too farfetched.
I always wondered that as well, especially now, with subspace missile strikes obviously proving to be very precise. One would assume the best hull plating in Science fiction history would only serve to concentrate the force of an explosion even more into the inside when you could just jump through it.
We can just guess somehow you can't leave subspace at a point in space where there's matter or energy already in place. In a way something like that could make sense, with subspace obviously being linked to gravitational fields and such in some way or the other (only being able to jump freely inside a system and being dependend on nodes to jump from one gracitational "well" to the other).
What I also always wondered was: Are nodes orbiting around their sun, are they perhaps moving in odd patterns through the system, drastically changing position when a huge planet comes near, or are they "fixed" and only move with the system through the galaxy?
But this is getting way off topic there... If there ever was staying on topic in this thread anyway
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In BP, we are treating jump nodes sort of like stellar Lagrange points.
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i don't follow you there. they are required to be at a lagrange point?
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No, but they move around as the position of various other bodies change.
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La Grange (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vppbdf-qtGU) points?
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Also, about nukes in space, the explosions from any kind of bomb are naturally chaotic and are subject to having an uneven explosion. The armors of the 24th-25th century would probably be built directly around stoping such forces, also to prevent the ship from ripping apart if any compartment has a breach.
Therefore indirect weapons fire would be almost completely useless, unless of course it was a cosmic force like that of a subspace rift bomb (like the Trinity Torpedo from Into the Depths of Hell). Still however, a focused blast would be required, and this would mean to down-size the blast radius tremendously using some sort of device. Also a direct impact would be required so that the target would be caught in the weapon's blast's point-of-origin.
So, yeah. That's why the explosions are smaller.
And even if the GTVA got to one of the planets or moons and bombed a city, they would have to use similar directed weapons fire, or the blasts would spatter uselessly across the frame of the buildings. Which most likely, especially if they are military, would have more armor than a capital class of similar size.
Oh and I don't think that there is any such thing as a "anti-neutron." It's an oxymoron. Neutrons have no charge, therefore they cannot have an opposite.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antineutron
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Yeah, there is actually an antineutron with opposite baryon number.
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:(
man gcse physics is where my knowledge ends i so stupid
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Also, as has been stated upthread, explosions appear smaller in space mainly due to the lack of atmosphere. If FS warheads were to be used in an atmosphere, the shockwave would be infinitely more devastating. Remember, the most devastating part of a nuclear explosion is the shockwave, not the radiation. Hardening buildings against nukes isn't really practical (For one, nuclear attacks are relatively rare, and two, the first step in doing that usually consists of digging a hole in the nearest mountain).
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I feel that something does not match...
Size, speed, weapon power, there's definitely something wrong in FS.
Each week, I take a train that goes faster than 220 mph... In 2336, my fighter : 80 mph. :lol:
I liked the way IWar 2 Edge of Chaos handled speed : it was more a matter of acceleration than absolute speed.
And I want nuke effects like in Battlestar Galactica, or some more understandable figures in the tech room.
It's actually 80 meters per second
That's equal to 178 mph.... Not that fast, I know, but I guess its because of game-play reasons
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Also, about nukes in space, the explosions from any kind of bomb are naturally chaotic and are subject to having an uneven explosion. The armors of the 24th-25th century would probably be built directly around stoping such forces, also to prevent the ship from ripping apart if any compartment has a breach.
Nukes in space will have almost completely spherical detonations; the amount of energy released is so large that it won't be anything but without rather extreme measures, like including material that is heavily reflective to X-rays in part of the casing. The chaotic nature of explosions that you are used to is because a) you mostly see events which are very low energy, and b) there's this thing called air that happens to be in the way. In space with nukes, both of those things are no longer true.
Therefore indirect weapons fire would be almost completely useless, unless of course it was a cosmic force like that of a subspace rift bomb (like the Trinity Torpedo from Into the Depths of Hell). Still however, a focused blast would be required, and this would mean to down-size the blast radius tremendously using some sort of device. Also a direct impact would be required so that the target would be caught in the weapon's blast's point-of-origin.
If a shaped charge is pointed in your direction, it will affect you significantly from farther away than an unfocused weapon will. Shaped charges are all about getting more energy to where its needed, with as little waste as possible, either to limit damage to the surroundings, or to get away with using a smaller charge. To do significant damage, a focused blast is not required. It doesn't really matter if you catch 40% of the energy or 80% of it when the 40% is more than enough to vaporize or heavily damage you.
So, yeah. That's why the explosions are smaller.
No, it's because there's no air, and a neat thing called the inverse square law. Go pick up a physics textbook and think about more detailed reasons why.
And even if the GTVA got to one of the planets or moons and bombed a city, they would have to use similar directed weapons fire, or the blasts would spatter uselessly across the frame of the buildings. Which most likely, especially if they are military, would have more armor than a capital class of similar size.
Civilian buildings are not designed to stand up to direct nuclear attack; it's worthless to do so, because of the sheer rarity of such attacks and the fantastic expense involved, even in the FS universe - remember, even with the industrial resources of entire solar systems, the GTVA does not have an especially large fleet. Most military buildings won't be armored like ships are either; again, it's almost certainly just too expensive.
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A nuke impacting against a hull still releases more than enough energy to melt the impacted section down to radioactive slag in a microsecond.
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Gameplay, the highest form of canon for FreeSpace, disagrees with you, good sir.
It will, however, **** **** up, just not quite to that effect.
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So punching a big hole in the hull doesn't significantly weaken the overall hull integrity? This is actually one thing that was fairly well reflected by FS gameplay given the power of the Harbinger.
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It would, yes, except it doesn't punch a big hole in the hull. It impacts, you see the shockwave, and the ship keeps fighting.
Yes, it's hurt. Yes, the bomb is reeeeally painful, but it doesn't melt holes in the sides of destroyers.
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I dunno, I kinda buy what Kosh is saying. It'd be awesome to see shallow glowing craters in the armor.
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i bet if V could have done that with the engine, they would have.
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/me looks furtively in the direction of the festering pile of decal code that was recently expunged entirely from SCP
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That wasn't V code though.
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And yeah, the numbers [V] threw around for their weapons seem ridiculous. I don't know how effective nukes and such would be in space, but if they're even a tiny fraction as effective as they are in an atmosphere, a 5,000 megaton nuke should shatter a destroyer in one shot, and yet a Sathanas shrugs of 5+ gigaton Helios (Helios>Harbringer) like its nothing. Basically, I've never taken those numbers seriously, and regarded them as some game developer throwing numbers around.
Not necessarily. We could make a case for the official numbers being wrong based on the observed effects not matching the numbers, but "big = wrong" doesn't follow. I'm frankly not up for running the numbers right now, since I'm tired and about to go to bed, but offhand I'm willing to say a 5,000 megaton (or 5 gigaton) bomb isn't outside the realm of possibility for a tech base that has mastered faster-than-light travel and (at least post-beam development) has weapons capable of blasting a planetary surface clean through orbital bombardment. Keep in mind that an explosion in space is not going to look like the big mushroom clouds we get in a planetary atmosphere and gravity field. Also keep in mind that an omnidirectional explosive in space will waste most of its energy on vacuum rather than the target, so the actual destructive yield on target is unlikely to be anywhere close to the explosion's full power.
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Yes, it's hurt. Yes, the bomb is reeeeally painful, but it doesn't melt holes in the sides of destroyers.
It doesn't, true, but I'm with Kosh on this one: it should, dammit. However, since bombs in FS don't do so, my hat goes off to the materials scientists/engineers of the 24th century for coming up with something that is miraculously able to instantly dump that kind of energy somewhere that is both a) not anywhere in the hull and b) not anywhere in the interior either. I'm just going to call it Handwavium with a side order of Unobtanium.
And a 5 GT weapon yield isn't really that bad, although the Harbinger's mechanism for it is; salted fusion bombs in that kind of package aren't going to be generating anywhere near that energy ever. A M/AM weapon, on the other hand, could do so (assuming perfect annihilation) with about 47 kg total mass. This is an ungodly large amount of antimatter, sure, but presumably the GTVA has found a way to manufacture it in much larger amounts, given the proliferation of Helios and Tsunami torpedoes.
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Harbinger is M/AM, AFAIK.
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Harbinger is M/AM, AFAIK.
"Fusion bomb surrounded by 3 salted fission bombs - propulsion unit is a half-size version of a regulation GTA fighter thruster (Class II) - given the weight of the payloads, the missile is slow despite the power of the thruster - as the Harbinger is exceptionally large, GTA bombers are limited to carrying 6 of these weapons at any given time - the resultant shock wave from this weapon is potentially deadly, due to the size of the payloads (5000 Mt in total) - use near allied installations or allied ship groupings is strongly discouraged by the GTA - most effective when used in preemptive defensive strike against non-military installations.
The Harbinger is our best chance of destroying the Lucifer."
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Yes, it's hurt. Yes, the bomb is reeeeally painful, but it doesn't melt holes in the sides of destroyers.
It doesn't, true, but I'm with Kosh on this one: it should, dammit. However, since bombs in FS don't do so, my hat goes off to the materials scientists/engineers of the 24th century for coming up with something that is miraculously able to instantly dump that kind of energy somewhere that is both a) not anywhere in the hull and b) not anywhere in the interior either. I'm just going to call it Handwavium with a side order of Unobtanium.
We were talking on IRC yesterday and realized that when the techroom says 'collapsed core molybdenum', it might literally mean 'collapsed core molybdenum', as in 'degenerate matter', as in 'good ****ing god how the **** are these ships even able to move' :shaking: :shaking: :shaking:
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Sure explains the 20m/s capships. (except not. Why wouldn't these things act like neutron stars?)
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Harbinger... most effective when used in preemptive defensive strike against non-military installations.
GTA policy is to nuke civilians first! And those dirty Tevs followed right in their footsteps! Feds fo' life!
Nah, but srsly, that seems kinda harsh.
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The hulls being degenerate matter just brings up more questions, like "How the hell do they hold that **** together?" It should just fly apart at those masses.
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Yeah it makes no sense whatsoever. But whatever, FreeSpace.
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Harbinger... most effective when used in preemptive defensive strike against non-military installations.
GTA policy is to nuke civilians first! And those dirty Tevs followed right in their footsteps! Feds fo' life!
Nah, but srsly, that seems kinda harsh.
Keep in mind non-military installations could mean things like shipyards, subspace communication hubs, and other vital pieces of space infrastructure. It doesn't seem so harsh since your goal is to rip out the supporting backbone of their military might. No wait, that is harsh, but war is supposed to be about making things harsh for the other guy.
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Yes, it's hurt. Yes, the bomb is reeeeally painful, but it doesn't melt holes in the sides of destroyers.
It doesn't, true, but I'm with Kosh on this one: it should, dammit. However, since bombs in FS don't do so, my hat goes off to the materials scientists/engineers of the 24th century for coming up with something that is miraculously able to instantly dump that kind of energy somewhere that is both a) not anywhere in the hull and b) not anywhere in the interior either. I'm just going to call it Handwavium with a side order of Unobtanium.
We were talking on IRC yesterday and realized that when the techroom says 'collapsed core molybdenum', it might literally mean 'collapsed core molybdenum', as in 'degenerate matter', as in 'good ****ing god how the **** are these ships even able to move' :shaking: :shaking: :shaking:
Maybe that's why they move at 20 m/s, thus explaining low speeds!
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Shipyards is something I consider definitely a military installation - or at least military shipyards, there is no way you have the same shipyards for military and civilian ships.
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Yes, it's hurt. Yes, the bomb is reeeeally painful, but it doesn't melt holes in the sides of destroyers.
It doesn't, true, but I'm with Kosh on this one: it should, dammit. However, since bombs in FS don't do so, my hat goes off to the materials scientists/engineers of the 24th century for coming up with something that is miraculously able to instantly dump that kind of energy somewhere that is both a) not anywhere in the hull and b) not anywhere in the interior either. I'm just going to call it Handwavium with a side order of Unobtanium.
We were talking on IRC yesterday and realized that when the techroom says 'collapsed core molybdenum', it might literally mean 'collapsed core molybdenum', as in 'degenerate matter', as in 'good ****ing god how the **** are these ships even able to move' :shaking: :shaking: :shaking:
Maybe that's why they move at 20 m/s, thus explaining low speeds!
already made joke was ALREADY MADE
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I don't care! It's more awesome when I say it!
If I spend the time reading what everyone says, then my computer will crash before I get to post!
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he's right!
/me prepares space for Droid in all threads
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Yes, it's hurt. Yes, the bomb is reeeeally painful, but it doesn't melt holes in the sides of destroyers.
It doesn't, true, but I'm with Kosh on this one: it should, dammit. However, since bombs in FS don't do so, my hat goes off to the materials scientists/engineers of the 24th century for coming up with something that is miraculously able to instantly dump that kind of energy somewhere that is both a) not anywhere in the hull and b) not anywhere in the interior either. I'm just going to call it Handwavium with a side order of Unobtanium.
We were talking on IRC yesterday and realized that when the techroom says 'collapsed core molybdenum', it might literally mean 'collapsed core molybdenum', as in 'degenerate matter', as in 'good ****ing god how the **** are these ships even able to move' :shaking: :shaking: :shaking:
Maybe that's why they move at 20 m/s, thus explaining low speeds!
already made joke was ALREADY MADE
well it doesn't matter since there's not enough mass to keep the degenerate matter together anyway....
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Yes, it's hurt. Yes, the bomb is reeeeally painful, but it doesn't melt holes in the sides of destroyers.
It doesn't, true, but I'm with Kosh on this one: it should, dammit. However, since bombs in FS don't do so, my hat goes off to the materials scientists/engineers of the 24th century for coming up with something that is miraculously able to instantly dump that kind of energy somewhere that is both a) not anywhere in the hull and b) not anywhere in the interior either. I'm just going to call it Handwavium with a side order of Unobtanium.
We were talking on IRC yesterday and realized that when the techroom says 'collapsed core molybdenum', it might literally mean 'collapsed core molybdenum', as in 'degenerate matter', as in 'good ****ing god how the **** are these ships even able to move' :shaking: :shaking: :shaking:
Maybe that's why they move at 20 m/s, thus explaining low speeds!
already made joke was ALREADY MADE
well it doesn't matter since there's not enough mass to keep the degenerate matter together anyway....
Like I said,
Yeah it makes no sense whatsoever. But whatever, FreeSpace.
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Keep in mind non-military installations could mean things like shipyards, subspace communication hubs, and other vital pieces of space infrastructure. It doesn't seem so harsh since your goal is to rip out the supporting backbone of their military might. No wait, that is harsh, but war is supposed to be about making things harsh for the other guy.
Considering the size of the warheads and the fact they're salted for extra fallout, I'm pretty sure civilian causalities are the object. It's designed for planetary targets, and the warhead is a continent-killer with extra fallout. Even if you drop it on a military target you're going to get huge civilian casualties.
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I never really realized they were salted warheads, always read over that part...
A 5GT salted warhead actually sounds like a doomsday device right out of Dr. Strangelove. It doesn't really make sense outside of genocidal applications. Especially in space - why would you want salted warheads in an environment without fallout?
I guess the Fed supportes can make a claim that the GT(V)A always had genocidal tendencies... "A planet wants to secede from our alliance? No problem, we can afford to lose a planet - WITH 0 POPULATION! (insert evil laughter)" or at least "A Vasudan Planet? Why waste marines to get a colonizeable planet, just doomsday their asses and leave scorched earth behind!"
Against Shivans, it makes no sense whatsoever.
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Like I said,
Yeah it makes no sense whatsoever. But whatever, FreeSpace.
woooooooooosh.
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:bump:
I never really realized they were salted warheads, always read over that part...
A 5GT salted warhead actually sounds like a doomsday device right out of Dr. Strangelove. It doesn't really make sense outside of genocidal applications. Especially in space - why would you want salted warheads in an environment without fallout?
I guess the Fed supportes can make a claim that the GT(V)A always had genocidal tendencies... "A planet wants to secede from our alliance? No problem, we can afford to lose a planet - WITH 0 POPULATION! (insert evil laughter)" or at least "A Vasudan Planet? Why waste marines to get a colonizeable planet, just doomsday their asses and leave scorched earth behind!"
Against Shivans, it makes no sense whatsoever.
Perhaps it was for the Vasudans. I've always wondered about that. What would have happened to the losing species of the Terran / Vasudan war exactly?
As for the collapsed-core Molybdenum, I've always taken it that somehow the atoms themselves had been collapsed. As for how it's kept in such an ultra-dense configuration, I point out "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." and that this same society can produce anti-matter by the ton, travel between stars in hours, possesses beam cannons that can glass whole planets, and whose vessels are routinely hit by those cannons.
There was a time we were pretty sure we'd never break the sound barrier. A stone age human would be utterly confounded by our current technology. (granted, 500 years is quite a fast advancement.)
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Perhaps it was for the Vasudans. I've always wondered about that. What would have happened to the losing species of the Terran / Vasudan war exactly?
I don't think either side would have utterly genocided the other - if the hatred was that strong, they'd never have been able to forge an alliance, Shivans or no Shivans. If it were me, I'd have kept the Vasudans either planet bound and disarmed or eliminated their shipyards and allowed them to buy Terran ships (utterly disarmed, of course, with some kind of tracking device in each ship). I guess it'd depend largely on whether they got to keep any/many of their colony worlds. You'd also have to control all the nodes between different systems... actually, that'd be a pretty cool alternate history campaign/story - if the Terrans had won the TV war in 13 years, and the Shivans arrived a year later. Would the eradication of any HoL threat have offset the loss of the Vasudans? Would they ever have been able to stop Lucy without the Vasudan discovered ancient research? Would the Terrans use captured Vasudan vessels?
Interesting.
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Considering the reason for the war was a stupid translation mistake I take it a peace treaty could have been reached, or at least a conditional surrender, after the home system of either species got cut off from the rest of the universe.
In case of a surrender, limiting the loser military to a certain size is far more likely than a full dismantling of their fleet, otherwise you would either hang out a welcome sign for any wannabe pirate all over terran and vasudan space to come to a free banquet or be forced into a permanent military occupation. Neither of which is an ideal situaton.
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(http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/8757/apocalypsescale.jpg)
About the length of an Ursa
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People here spoke about an anti-matter / matter bomb.
Hell, why not a fully antimatter bomb? Shoot it against the hull of a ship and the antimatter just marries up with the hull in an orgasmic light fashion, using up all the remaining pieces of hull matter around the core of the explosion as shrapnel against the ship itself.
And Booom, one big hole in the hull.
(Probably not worth the cost.... conventional missiles are way cheaper ;))
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About the length of an Ursa
hmm I think we should use Ursas for torpedoes so then we can fire torpedoes from our torpedoes
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That would probably not work all that well since one of the big challenges with AM weapons is getting a good mixture.
If you're not familiar with it, there are already a number of antimatter or m/am weapons in FreeSpace, like the original Tsunami (which was pure antimatter) or the Helios (which was a matter/antimatter mixture.)
In reality antimatter weapons are unlikely to outperform nukes.
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Tsunami = AM
Harbinger = Nuke
Case and point, pretty much, summing up difficulties of AM weapons (in FS verse at least).
You can actually kill stuff with Harbingers.
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Helios is also matter / anti-matter to be fair.
I imagine a nuke that fuses Lithium or the like will outperform a Hydrogen bomb by a significant margin. Also, I'm sure at that point in technology, a fission seed won't be as important.
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Wait... a Harbinger is 5 GT... so then what the hell kind of yield does the Apocalypse have?
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Well, if base damage ~ yield in gigatons
The Karuna Apocalypse missile is about .78 gigatons
The Narayana and Solaris Apocalypse variants are 1.56 gigatons
The Helios is about 10
I kind of doubt it's completely proportional, and keep in mind much of the size of the Apocalypse is likely an engine that allows it to go almost ten times the distance of the Harbinger.
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Wait... a Harbinger is 5 GT... so then what the hell kind of yield does the Apocalypse have?
One Apocalypse (Narayana variant) is 1/3rd Harbinger, though there is always four in one volley.
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10 gigatons and alpha 1 survives being just a few dozen meters apart.
Incredible. Must have an otherworldly alloy ;)
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Considering the reason for the war was a stupid translation mistake I take it a peace treaty could have been reached, or at least a conditional surrender, after the home system of either species got cut off from the rest of the universe.
Terran mishandling of the "Conversation" is said to be one of the contributing reasons for the war, not the sole cause. Also note that the FreeSpace 1 tech entries were written from a biased point of view, so they have to be taken with a pinch of salt.
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10 gigatons and alpha 1 survives being just a few dozen meters apart.
Incredible. Must have an otherworldly alloy ;)
You don't survive without your shields up.
Shields are pretty otherworldly.
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Helios is also matter / anti-matter to be fair.
I imagine a nuke that fuses Lithium or the like will outperform a Hydrogen bomb by a significant margin. Also, I'm sure at that point in technology, a fission seed won't be as important.
No it won't. Hydrogen fusion is the most efficient fusion process available, with about 26 MeV released per event, IIRC; The binding energy per nucleon goes way up as the atom gets heavier, reaching a maximum with iron (it then decreases again after that, so fission becomes a net energy gain instead of fusion)*. In stars, the next fusion process, that of helium into carbon, releases only about 7 MeV per event.
*Remember that binding energy is negative, so something that has more of it is more tightly bound; helium is more tightly bound than hydrogen, so energy is released when helium is formed, as it has a lower energy.
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Helios is also matter / anti-matter to be fair.
I imagine a nuke that fuses Lithium or the like will outperform a Hydrogen bomb by a significant margin. Also, I'm sure at that point in technology, a fission seed won't be as important.
No it won't. Hydrogen fusion is the most efficient fusion process available, with about 26 MeV released per event, IIRC; The binding energy per nucleon goes way up as the atom gets heavier, reaching a maximum with iron (it then decreases again after that, so fission becomes a net energy gain instead of fusion)*. In stars, the next fusion process, that of helium into carbon, releases only about 7 MeV per event.
*Remember that binding energy is negative, so something that has more of it is more tightly bound; helium is more tightly bound than hydrogen, so energy is released when helium is formed, as it has a lower energy.
Thank you for that, I never would have figured that out XD
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while the energy released per fusion goes down, the bomb yeild may in fact go up with other fusion reactions if the cross sections are higher. i'm too lazy to look those up though.
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How about the Jackhammer and Sledgehammer torpedoes? I suppose those are more powerful, but are not meant to be fired Macross style like the Apocalypse and Warhammer.
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I honestly haven't done the math for them yet, I will get to them in time as I also help to do the ship database in my free time. I believe they are significantly weaker than the apocalypse, but I may be wrong.
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Okay, the Jackhammer is gonna be 6.25 Gt of TNT roughly.
The Warhammer is going to be 312 Mt of TNT.
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I just chalk this kind of thing up to 'sci-fi writers have no sense of scale'. The amount of firepower being thrown around in science fiction is general is often beyond absurd. Not absurd because the firepower itself is impossible, but because the idea of defending against it is rather inherently ridiculous. WiH even makes note of it several times, like the entry for the UEF bomber saying a single one has enough firepower to easily level several major cities. With so much destructive power being thrown around in such massive quantities, I honestly can't see how even the largest and most armored of ships can survive even a single volley. I don't care how many meters of super-space metal you have, if someone scores 10 direct hits with a nuke, let alone some kind of anti-matter warhead, there won't be any 'health percentage drops by 20%' nonsense like in FS. You'd be ****ing dead, a cloud of debris, if even any of that was left. There's a reason so much sci-fi has magical energy shields, and even those don't make much sense. Even if you could do them at all (how do FS shields work? Are they ever explained beyond the most vague of terms?) the energy requirements to stop, say, a barrage of photon torpedo would be insane. This is all of course ignoring the fundamental fact that since there's no friction in space to slow things down, you wouldn't need nukes (or warheads at all) in the first place. Just take a lump of metal and accelerate the hell out of it, Halo style, towards your target and let physics take over.
But then the games would be rather boring wouldn't they?
On a related note, I doubt the ships in Freespace have meters of armor. The things are big, no doubt, but I've always found them to be treated as far bigger than they actually are. For instance the crew counts. 10,000 on an Orion? Yeah, I seriously doubt that. Or the claim that the Colossus has at least 1200 decks. I especially doubt FS2's assertion that there are 'thousands of people aboard' a Deimos corvette. Maybe my perspective is just completely wrong, but as portrayed in the games they don't seem THAT big.
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Unobtanium armor FTW.
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yeah that or collapsed-core molybdenum
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On a related note, I doubt the ships in Freespace have meters of armor. The things are big, no doubt, but I've always found them to be treated as far bigger than they actually are. For instance the crew counts. 10,000 on an Orion? Yeah, I seriously doubt that. Or the claim that the Colossus has at least 1200 decks. I especially doubt FS2's assertion that there are 'thousands of people aboard' a Deimos corvette. Maybe my perspective is just completely wrong, but as portrayed in the games they don't seem THAT big.
They don't seem that big because of FOV issues. They're kilometers long. A modern-day aircraft carrier with its several thousand strong crew could fit inside a TC-TRI cargo container.
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Actually, with such low crew counts, they could probably have ten, twenty meters of armor around everything XD
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Actually, with such low crew counts, they could probably have ten, twenty meters of armor around everything XD
Indeedy!
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An Orion is roughly 6 times as long as a Nimitz-class supercarrier.
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It's definitely absurdium technobabblium, but in BP we've always gone with the notion that the armor is indeed slabbed on in meters-thick layers with all sorts of alternating ablative and shock-absorbent and buffer layers and probably embedded shield generators like they had on the Stiletto way back on FS1.
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Thick armor is necessary in space. Even for civilian vessels, not only you have to deal with pressure difference, but also with the possibility to be hit by some random space junk which may hit much harder than a 120mm SABOT shell. So, it is not absurd if most of the ship's mass is from the armor.
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(I'm replying to the first post) Comparing this thing to 20th century superweapons is nonsense given the fluff specified by the FreeSpace techroom.
All the bombs in the world would look ridicolous compared to a single Harbinger.
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Didn't GB say Aristeia had as much ordnance flung around as a good-sized Cold War nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union?
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Can it get anywhere near 5000 megatons?
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(I'm replying to the first post) Comparing this thing to 20th century superweapons is nonsense given the fluff specified by the FreeSpace techroom.
All the bombs in the world would look ridicolous compared to a single Harbinger.
I hope you realize how incredibly stupid it is to speak basic fluff to someone who's been playing this game for eleven ****ing years.
Really. I hope you realize.
In fact I'll give you a chance to confess how incredibly stupid it is before I take any further measures.
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. At least the techroom says it is actually antimatter warhead rather than fission/fusion nuclear warhead, so at least it is a lot 'cleaner' (ie no radioactive fallout). Explosions are also behave somewhat differently in vacuum.
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The primary output of both matter-antimatter reactions and fusion and fission reactions is hard radiation. It's just that all of the ship in the game appear rather resistant.
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In a good antimatter explosion all the atoms would be annihilated, so there's no loss that would cause radiation.
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Annihilated atoms turn into?
Fast moving sub-atomic particles, or photons, or exotic particles of some sort, right?
Radiation.
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No, they become energy.
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No, they become energy.
Tread softly. We have what seem to be experts in the field on this forum.
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No, they become energy.
"Energy" as you know it is often in the form of electromagnetic radiation... AKA photons...
Mostly gamma rays and X-rays, which is also known as hard radiation if it has enough ability to penetrate a certain amount of lead.
Oh my.
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So standing near an antimatter explosion will make you grow another head? Go figure.
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Well if it doesn't take off your head, possibly.
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So standing near an antimatter explosion will make you grow another head? Go figure.
No. Radiation doesn't work like that. You don't mutate like in badly written sci-fi. You just die.
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It can cause mutations to future generations in low doses to your gametes I believe.
But mostly you just die.
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There is a lot of radiation from the detonation of course. However, it will be mostly short lived and will presumably die out in after a short time, which could be in minutes or days. However, for antimatter warhead, there would be no 'toxic waste' or those kind of radioactive fallout so the wreckage can be salvaged quite sooner. Like said before, radiation at worst (assuming you don't die from it) will cause some internal mutation such as cancer or messing up your genes. It won't cause you to grow another head whatsoever.
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I hope you realize how incredibly stupid it is to speak basic fluff to someone who's been playing this game for eleven ****ing years.
Really. I hope you realize.
In fact I'll give you a chance to confess how incredibly stupid it is before I take any further measures.
No, I'm afraid it's really 5,000 megatons, and even if it is indeed basic fluff, I don't think you should debate it without considering this fact.
And I don't care if you've played FreeSpace more than a decade. You still can't change the game, no matter what you do.
Unless your real point was a "more realistic interpretation" of FS weaponry.
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The 5000 megaton figure was pulled out of someone's ass and makes no sense in the game. 50 megatons, even 500 megatons would be more sane.
In general BP is about making stupid things more sane.
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There is a lot of radiation from the detonation of course. However, it will be mostly short lived and will presumably die out in after a short time, which could be in minutes or days. However, for antimatter warhead, there would be no 'toxic waste' or those kind of radioactive fallout so the wreckage can be salvaged quite sooner. Like said before, radiation at worst (assuming you don't die from it) will cause some internal mutation such as cancer or messing up your genes. It won't cause you to grow another head whatsoever.
Space is full of radiation anyway. :nervous: