[Mars]

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.

[Fury]

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.

[Luis Dias]

10 gigatons and alpha 1 survives being just a few dozen meters apart.

Incredible. Must have an otherworldly alloy

[Snail]

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.

[Droid803]

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.

[Astronomiya]

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.

[Mars]

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

[Klaustrophobia]

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.

[Flak]

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.

[Mars]

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.

[Mars]

Okay, the Jackhammer is gonna be 6.25 Gt of TNT roughly.

The Warhammer is going to be 312 Mt of TNT.

[noodlezombie]

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.

[Droid803]

Unobtanium armor FTW.

[Shivan Hunter]

yeah that or collapsed-core molybdenum

[Snail]

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.

[Droid803]

Actually, with such low crew counts, they could probably have ten, twenty meters of armor around everything XD

[Snail]

Actually, with such low crew counts, they could probably have ten, twenty meters of armor around everything XD

Indeedy!

[-Sara-]

An Orion is roughly 6 times as long as a Nimitz-class supercarrier.

[General Battuta]

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.

[Flak]

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.