[Carl]

Originally posted by Nuke
ships would have weak points that could be exploited (vents, rcs thrusters, unpowered engine ports, airlocks, turret wells, fighterbays...

[karajorma]

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

None the less it's an equally valid possibility based on what was written.

[Pnakotus]

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.

[Jetmech Jr.]

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.

[karajorma]

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.

[Woolie Wool]

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.

[Woolie Wool]

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.

[Flipside]

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?

[StratComm]

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.

[Flipside]

Ah... I understand now thanks, I know physics, just not Nuclear physics

[karajorma]

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

[Kie99]

Maybe its Super Anti Matter.

[Flipside]

We call that stuff 'Doesn't Matter'

[Cannikin]

Some useful tables on energy yields:

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq12.html

[Jetmech Jr.]

Hey! Cannikin's back!

[Carl]

23 kg of antimatter = about one gigaton according to E=MC^2

[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.

[StratComm]

23kg of antimatter + 23kg of matter = about 2 gigatons, but with only 23kg of reactant that you have to carry.

[NGTM-1R]

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.

[Night Hammer]

so how much do we think the yield of the meson warhead is/was?