[NGTM-1R]

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.

[bigchunk1]

   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.

[Hades]

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.

[General Battuta]

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.

[bigchunk1]

Aah, good. That actually makes me feel a lot better about freespace as a sci-fi world universe.

[NGTM-1R]

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.

[General Battuta]

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.

[Qent]

Oh so that's why direct hits with secondaries do double damage compared to very close detonations.

[Astronomiya]

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.

[General Battuta]

well sometimes they put me and me son inside a bomb and when i get angry with me son well

sorry nvm

[SomeGuyWithAName]

well sometimes they put me and me son inside a bomb and when i get angry with me son well

Battuta, Everyone. 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

[The E]

In BP, we are treating jump nodes sort of like stellar Lagrange points.

[Klaustrophobia]

i don't follow you there.   they are required to be at a lagrange point? 

[General Battuta]

No, but they move around as the position of various other bodies change.

[Scourge of Ages]

La Grange points?

[Infamus]

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.

[Qent]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antineutron

[General Battuta]

Yeah, there is actually an antineutron with opposite baryon number.

[Snail]

man gcse physics is where my knowledge ends i so stupid

[The E]

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).