Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: Jetmech Jr. on April 20, 2005, 03:14:50 pm
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I've Heard 11+ Gigatons based on it doing over twice the Damage of a 5 Gigaton Harbinger. However, I'm now confused. IIRC, to achieve twice the Effect of 5 Gigatons with a Nuke or similar, you'd need something around 27 Gigatons.
Am I missing something? Can some of the more informed members of the board help me out here?
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Personally, I think it's because the weapons in FS2 are so vastly over-rated it's a bit silly ;) I would have thought that a single 11 Gigaton hit would snap even a 9km long ship in half.
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I don't think the Helios is Nuclear, though the power rating your stating sounds right (it's the same no matter what explosive method you use, as "ton" refers to an energy output rather than an actual weight). Though be careful when using comparisons based on real Nuke data; it works differently in space. If all damage is applied to the surface rather than through a shockwave, then 10 or 11 gigatons is about right.
Originally posted by Flipside
Personally, I think it's because the weapons in FS2 are so vastly over-rated it's a bit silly ;) I would have thought that a single 11 Gigaton hit would snap even a 9km long ship in half.
If that rating is for force, then it should. Though I am pretty sure that rating actually refers to thermal output, which is only going to melt the hull plating around the point of impact.
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That, and the Helios is an antimatter weapon. Straight up antimatter does ridiculous amounts of damage... That's what I thought was too unrealistic... It didn't do enough damage.
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Truthfully, it SHOULD. A 5 Gig Nuke would make a Fireball 19 Km in diameter, large enough to engulf a Sathanas 3 times over with space to spare. Than again, I'm not entirely sure the Fireball would retain that same size in Vacuum.
EDIT: This was at Flipside.
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EDIT: Nevermind.
Ghost: Though antimatter would produce an insane amount of energy if as much of it were detonated as there is fuel in a Nuke, the containment apparatus for such a large amount of the stuff would be cruiser-sized, at least. The raw energy discharge from a few grams of AM isn't that much more than a few gigatons IIRC.
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Well, looking around, I found this: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/conghand/nuclear.htm
It makes no mention of a smaller Fireball, but does state that the Blast/Shockwave and Thermal Radiation would utterly disappear.
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Translation: no fireball. All you'd have is a bright flash and a small but extremely hot (and expanding) ball of plasma from the material in immediate contact with the Nuke as it went off.
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Yep, Shockwaves depend on Air to superheat and expand/contract. I read it as the equivalent of strapping 5 Million Tonnes of TNT onto a single point on the ship and detonating. I don't think the tonnage rating even on terrestrial nukes take fireball/radiation into account, purely blast.
So I think it is as Stratcomm says a very small but powerful blast area. So it would depend, at least partially, on the heat dissipation capabilities of the armour?
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But in order to achieve double the effect of 5GT, wouldn't it still need a far higher yield then 11GT
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I think it's about direct applied force, so, no, I don't think so, but we get onto an area of physics I'm by no means confident on, so you would be well advised to question the wisd... sorry, to get a second opinion :)
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Originally posted by Flipside
I don't think the tonnage rating even on terrestrial nukes take fireball/radiation into account, purely blast.
Well, if I'm reading this (http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq5.html) right, they take into account Blast, Thermal Rad., and Ionizing Rad.
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Hmmmmmmmm but that's not for working out the initial tonnage of the bomb, that just seems to be an overview of the effects?
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All of which is still released in a vacuum, it just doesn't have a means to propogate. That's why I said bright flash; I'm not sure that a nuke actually releases any radiation in the visible spectrum, but it does release a ton of energy in the form of radiation. Most thermal, which is why I say it would melt the hull, but also a good bit of RF as well as the nastier kinds that tend to kill people. The damage dealt in a space sim would be more a factor of heat dissipation in the armor than specific characteristics of the warhead.
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Strat: Not necessarily. This is 330 years in the future, after all. There's no telling how big an antimatter containment box would be. And if a 'few grams' equals a 'few gigatons,' then we're talking Boop-there-goes-the-Sath kind of boom here.
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Originally posted by Flipside
Hmmmmmmmm but that's not for working out the initial tonnage of the bomb, that just seems to be an overview of the effects?
Somewhere in there they measure out the Energy Distribution between those 3 as 50%, 45%, and 5%, respectively, for a >1Mt Warhead.
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No, because we're getting back into the gigaton =/= massive destruction in space issue. And AM containment won't get much better than a strict containment field that, even if Star-Trek like in its strength (and we're talking about something not feasable in the FS universe) it would still be relatively large compared to the amount of antimatter that it would contain. Remember that if it comes in to contact with any matter, it goes boom. And that includes the containment unit.
The other issue is that the radiation released by matter/antimatter reaction isn't necessarily of the form that's going to incur massive damage on armor plating. As I recall, it's mostly high-energy radiation in the form of X-rays and gamma rays, neither of which will have a huge impact on the hull itself. On the crews inside, however, the effects would be pretty substantial if the radiation shielding wasn't adequate.
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The Harbinger, as Karajorma once point out, is only 2.5 gigatons.
The 5 gigaton figure given is for the maximum number a GTVA ship is allowed to haul around without special permisssions and such, and that number is 2.
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Originally posted by ngtm1r
The Harbinger, as Karajorma once point out, is only 2.5 gigatons.
The 5 gigaton figure given is for the maximum number a GTVA ship is allowed to haul around without special permisssions and such, and that number is 2.
And WHERE, praytell, did you derive this from? I disagree.
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The Helios has a yield of somewhere between stupid and ludicrous.
Incidentally, this partly answers RE: 5 gt limit
[q]GTM - N1 HARBINGER
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 fighters and bombers are limited to carrying 2 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.
[/q]
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1kg of antimatter = 57MT explosion. don't remember where i saw it, but it was here somewhere
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Originally posted by aldo_14
[q]GTM - N1 HARBINGER
Fusion bomb surrounded by 3 salted fission bombs; [/q]
Go look up exactly what a salted fission bomb is designed to do - the GTA are arseholes... :D
EDIT - A rsehole is censored? FFS...
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1 Kilo of antimatter (plus 1 kilo of matter) would equal a 43 Megaton H-Bomb. I worked that out somewhere on the board but I'll be buggered if I can find it :)
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It's still antimatter, Strat, so pretty much any ship it comes in contact with is screwed.
EDIT: that is.. that's how it would work in the real world.
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Originally posted by Black Wolf
Go look up exactly what a salted fission bomb is designed to do - the GTA are arseholes... :D
Meant to limit the spread of radioactive fallout?
:wtf:
In a weapon? Against Shivans? In Space?!
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Originally posted by Ghost
That, and the Helios is an antimatter weapon. Straight up antimatter does ridiculous amounts of damage... That's what I thought was too unrealistic... It didn't do enough damage.
but you can only put a little bit of animatter in a bomb, otherwise the magnetic field wouldn't be able to hold it, and it would touch the sides, destroying it prematurely. 5000 megatons = 116+ kilograms, which is much more than you'd expect it to be able to hold.
Originally posted by StratComm
The raw energy discharge from a few grams of AM isn't that much more than a few gigatons IIRC.
The raw energy discharge from a few grams of AM isn't that much more than a few kilotons.
Originally posted by Jetmech Jr.
But in order to achieve double the effect of 5GT, wouldn't it still need a far higher yield then 11GT
err...no, gigatons is the affect. 11GT is more than twice the affect of 5GT. basic math.
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Originally posted by Raa
Meant to limit the spread of radioactive fallout?
Read again. A salted bomb is meant to maximize radioactive fallout over the longest time. And the GTA were originally dropping these things on cities. Hence, arseholes.
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Originally posted by Black Wolf
Read again. A salted bomb is meant to maximize radioactive fallout over the longest time. And the GTA were originally dropping these things on cities. Hence, arseholes.
Ahh. I skimmed through the first article I found, and it claimed it wsa to limit the spread of fallout. Must have been false info :p
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Originally posted by Ghost
It's still antimatter, Strat, so pretty much any ship it comes in contact with is screwed.
EDIT: that is.. that's how it would work in the real world.
No, that's how it works in Sci-fi. It anihilates whatever it comes into contact with, yes. But when you consider the fact that the antimatter itself is a very low mass relative to the bomb that's housing it, much less the entire ship it's hitting, the cumulative effect of the anhilation of a few kilograms of surface plating on an armored warship isn't catastrophic.
@kara: I stand corrected. I forget that more than just matter->energy is responsible for the energy output of fusion. Yes, kilograms of antimatter are needed for a suitably sized explosion.
But as I said earlier (and I was correct in this) an antimatter explosion isn't even that powerful. The vast majority of energy liberated in an anhilation event comes out in the form of Gamma radiation, which while harmful to organic life is completely benign to structures. And since deep-space hulls will be designed with radiation shielding in mind, the effects are significantly reduced.
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Originally posted by aldo_14
Incidentally, this partly answers RE: 5 gt limit
[q]GTM - N1 HARBINGER
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 fighters and bombers are limited to carrying 2 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.
[/q]
No, it doesn't answer at all. 5000Mt Total for the Fusion+3 Fission Bombs. Thus, 1 Harbinger (Combo of 4 Bombs)=5 Gigatons.
err...no, gigatons is the affect. 11GT is more than twice the affect of 5GT. basic math
What are you talking about? The effect of an 11 Gt explosive is not twice the effect of a 5 Gt Explosive.
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There's a major difference between the blast radius and the damage incurred though. Strictly speaking, in space (without that all-important medium to carry the shockwave) 11GT isprecisely 120% (2.2 times) as damaging as 5GT. However, remember that (without even counting the effects of air) the energy density of a shockwave falls off with a rate proportional to the inverse square of the distance from the origin, not linearly, and so a 11GT bomb will produce, without considering other factors, a shockwave only about 1.4 times as large and powerful as a 5GT one. It would take roughly 20GT to produce a blast with twice the radius. However, as I previously stated, this does not apply in a vacuum.
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Ah, I see.
...I think...
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...no, not really. But I think I'll take your word for it until someone proves otherwise
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nukes are measured by there equivelent damage output of tonnes of tnt. unfortunately tnt would respond differently in space than it would in an atmosphere. so if you were to put a nuke on the ground and detonate it, two things would happen, a crater would be created, and a shockwave would be produced. the crater isnt created by the shockwave, but rather the vaporization of the material in the ground. in space the cratering effect would be the only thing formed.
when you detonate a nuke you are essentially creating solar equivelent tempuratures which no existing or theoretical material can withstand. so you could calculate (and il let you do that cause i suck at math) the thermal output and falloff of the bomb and compair that to the meltingpoint of the armor material. then you can locate the point of radius at which the the thermal output of the bomb can no longer melt the armor plate and that would be the effective radius of the bomb.
now if that is big enough to completely penetrate through the bulkhead armor all that vaporised metal would first be blasted through the internal structures and coridors of the ship in the same manor an antitank shell works (but on a much larger scale) essentially killing the crew in those areas of the ship and flooding the interior with radioactive contamination. then of course you have there problem of decompression which would quicly flush most of the radioactive liquid metal back into space. decompression saftey measures would seal off the section of damage. mind you the blast wouls screw up alot of saftey systems, alot of contamination doors would be blown before belast is defeated. so it would render a sizable portion of the ship interior an uninhabitable death trap.
of of course it doesnt melt through then you would just have a crater in your armor and the ship is really unharmed. ships would have weak points that could be exploited (vents, rcs thrusters, unpowered engine ports, airlocks, turret wells, fighterbays, ect). but i suspect you would kill the crew with the bombs long before the hull would crack.
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What about Shear force? Surely the shearing in the superstructure caused by such a blast would do far more internal damage, also, how come when a ship is hit at the front, it doesn't start spinning at about 400 revs per minute? Or at least, when it does, it's a bug ;)
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Cause being hit by a large number of gamma rays would have very little kinetic effect.
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you wouldnt have the push effect of an atmospheric shockwave in space. only the actual mass of the nuke impact would be exerted on the hull. it would have about the same effect of throwing a pebble at a bus. even when the mass is converted directly to energy that energy is mostly just gamma rays and heat and abunch of other not so good things. you would have the effect of instantly vaporizing metal which would blast as much into the ship as out and thus would counteract any 'kick' so to speak. all nukes would have is a melting effect, followed by a blast of radioactive super hot liquified armor plating.
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Originally posted by Jetmech Jr.
No, it doesn't answer at all. 5000Mt Total for the Fusion+3 Fission Bombs. Thus, 1 Harbinger (Combo of 4 Bombs)=5 Gigatons.
Actually, if you read it again, that's where he's getting the 5GT limit from; he's simply interpreting the plural 'payloads' as being for the total of 2 bombs on the ship rather than the total for the bombs forming the individual Harbinger.
Given that 'payload' can refer to either warhead payload or fighter payload, IMO it's an understandable assumption. And as the weapons limit is given as being due to the warhead power, assuming there is a cap of either 5 or 10 GT (depending on how you determine the Harbinger yield) on ordenance carried by ships makes logical sense.
You wanted to know where ngtm1r derived it? I'd wager that's where.
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Well he's wrong :p
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Actually, that'd be karajorma's interpretation. I subscribe to it, but he came up with it.
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Doesn't make it less wrong :p
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Originally posted by Nuke
ships would have weak points that could be exploited (vents, rcs thrusters, unpowered engine ports, airlocks, turret wells, fighterbays...
(http://www.starwars.jp/technology/image/proton_torpedo.jpg)
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Originally posted by ngtm1r
Actually, that'd be karajorma's interpretation. I subscribe to it, but he came up with it.
Oddly enough I don't remember coming up with it :D
None the less it's an equally valid possibility based on what was written.
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Hang on, hang on... are we using techroom fluff to determine yield? HA!
Game mechanics are a silly thing to base analysis on (go ask any HALOites) but Helios detonations aren't deadly to even fighters outside a pretty small range. Unless we're going to inflate standard FS guns etc to ridiculous levels of firepower, it's not very consistent. They certainly aren't focussed, so roughly 50-60% of the yield will be wasted: more if it strikes a pointy bit, as on a Shivan ship. So what's the consensus on sources here? Are we just going to read the techroom and believe it, even when its wrong?
Using fusion detonations AND antimatter is textbook weapons wanking. Not only is antimatter a silly thing to make a weapon out of (god knows what'd happen if you blew a fighter up carrying such a device) but it's too hard to get proper effiency, given the low odds of getting each antimatter particle to hit a piece of matter at exactly the same time before the fusion bombs(lol) force them apart into an explosion. Thankfully, since the techroom is already inaccurate, we can ignore it! ;)
Realistically (ho ho) nukes in space would reduce warfare to hiding as far away from everyone as possible and trying to catch someone in the killzone of a detonation.
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Err, not really. It's also in the Reference Bible, whick IS canon to FS2.
They certainly aren't focussed, so roughly 50-60% of the yield will be wasted: more if it strikes a pointy bit, as on a Shivan ship
Less if its strikes a recessed (sp?) area.
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Originally posted by Pnakotus
Hang on, hang on... are we using techroom fluff to determine yield? HA!
1) We've got f**k all else to use to determine them
2) FS2 has never been in the slightest bit realistic.
3) If you don't start saying that FS1 era bombs are at least nuclear then you really do have to wonder why the f**k they didn't use nukes to take out the Lucifer.
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Originally posted by Jetmech Jr.
Truthfully, it SHOULD. A 5 Gig Nuke would make a Fireball 19 Km in diameter, large enough to engulf a Sathanas 3 times over with space to spare. Than again, I'm not entirely sure the Fireball would retain that same size in Vacuum.
EDIT: This was at Flipside.
FS ships are probably made of uber-strength technobabblium materials. Also, fireballs do not occur in detonations in space.
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Originally posted by Ghost
Strat: Not necessarily. This is 330 years in the future, after all. There's no telling how big an antimatter containment box would be. And if a 'few grams' equals a 'few gigatons,' then we're talking Boop-there-goes-the-Sath kind of boom here.
50 kg of antimatter = about one gigaton.
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It's simple physics that defines rotation though, 'equal and opposite effect' so surely a massive detonation on the skin of an object would be similar to an 'ohms burn' of massive proportions, even if on 1/3 of the Nuke is kinetic force reverberating through the armour, that basic law of action and reaction would still apply?
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A nuke intrinsically has no kinetic force, other than that imparted by the physical missile and warhead moving into its target. Well, other than the rapid expansion of the reactant itself anyway. The actual nuclear reaction only produces heat and radiation, of which the heat will cause the melting of the armor I was talking about and the radiation will dissipate off into space. No physical medium to expand to form and propogate an explosion = no kinetic force.
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Ah... I understand now thanks, I know physics, just not Nuclear physics ;)
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Originally posted by Woolie Wool
50 kg of antimatter = about one gigaton.
But only if you completely forget about the matter you're using to create the explosion and have somehow discovered total conversion of antimatter to energy :p
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Maybe its Super Anti Matter.
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We call that stuff 'Doesn't Matter' ;)
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Some useful tables on energy yields:
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq12.html
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Hey! Cannikin's back!
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23 kg of antimatter = about one gigaton according to E=MC^2
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one thing to note: the explosions from a cyclops and helios are deadly to fighters without shields, otherwise it simply seems to wash over them, indicating that the shields fighters possess are of either considerable strength, or use some mechanism that repels the energy from shockwaves fromt hem.
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23kg of antimatter + 23kg of matter = about 2 gigatons, but with only 23kg of reactant that you have to carry.
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That's also assuming 100% mass-to-energy conversion...which is a bit unlikely. The intial explosion will be smaller and wreck some of the other material.
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so how much do we think the yield of the meson warhead is/was?
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Originally posted by StratComm
23kg of antimatter + 23kg of matter = about 2 gigatons, but with only 23kg of reactant that you have to carry.
No it doesn't.
Look at the bottom of this Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E%3Dmc2)
1kg mass converted = 21Mt
So 50kg of matter and antimatter = ~1000Mt = ~1 gigaton
So unless you're all using different figures for the Megaton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaton) from me I don't know why you're getting different results. (Of course I'm assuming 100% conversion and that none of the energy is carried away by neutrinos).
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Originally posted by Jetmech Jr.
Hey! Cannikin's back!
Heh, didn't think anyone would remember me around here.
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Originally posted by Singh
one thing to note: the explosions from a cyclops and helios are deadly to fighters without shields, otherwise it simply seems to wash over them, indicating that the shields fighters possess are of either considerable strength, or use some mechanism that repels the energy from shockwaves fromt hem.
Maybe shields are more sensitive to kinetic (ie physical) impacts. The Avenger and Flail, IIRC, were both ballistic-style weapons.
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according to cannon shields actually fail against em weapons, like the kayser or the banshee. with that little piece of data i dont see why emp blasts of nuclear weapons dont completely destroy shields. or perhaps the em of nukles are far less precisely tuned to result in shield damage while em weapons are. none the less if your at ground zero of a nuke blast your gonna hurt.
does anyone know what part of the em spectrom would mater/antimatter detonation generate. perhaps the gtva has the technology to precisely tune there weapons of mass destruction fully to the infrared spectrum thus causing more thermal damage.
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A matter/AM explosion would dissapate almost all it's energy as gamma rays.
Some of that energy would be taken in by the surrounding materials and re-radiated with other wavelengths (Explaining why AM explosions aren't completely invisible).
So if shields are largely immune to gamma rays it might explain why they can survive a helios burst nearby.
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so its essentially the metal in the microwave thing.