"Magic Bullshit Bomb"?

That honestly sounds like something I'd want to use in a story xD

Like, seriously, I want to go use that as a line in a fanfic now ._.

But, anyway, as always awesome work!

More like erasing evidence.

Well, of course! If you want to erase something, you want to make sure that people can't come back in and snoop around the ashes afterwards!

. . . Uh oh.

Then there was no reason to shoot the others - other than the 'fun' of it, as all evidence of their actions would be nuked away ...

Well, you don't want anyone around to potentially go messing with the demolition charge while you're busy getting to minimum safe distance...

Heh, unlike the movies, it's not all that hard to make it hard to stop/mess with in the time they have left, and if they 'do' manage to stop if (or the tech failed to pull the pin) the ship can still fire a missile into it for the same results.

Another reason to leave no survivors before demolition is there's nobody to get the word out.

Oops.

Their actions and attitudes are indicative of extreme cultural xenophobia: anyone not not like them are the enemy. Anyone not like them aren't people, at which point it's easy to espouse a policy of genocidal "ethnic cleansing", it becomes their duty to exterminate anyone "not them" , to commit all manner of atrocities.

The nuke is probably a two-fold tactic: it will erase any evidence they might have left behind (projectiles, shell-casings, misplaced equipment, food packaging, murdered crew, survivors etc), and it's probably rigged (or timed) to detonate when the EDF ship is in proximity or docked.

Not so much xenophobia as righteous absolutism. Half-right about the nuke, erases all evidence, and if it spoils the location (spins or breaks the asteroid, all the better to deprive it from further value) but the EDF is not going to get close to a situation in which they'd expect booby traps.

5Mt? Compensating much?

In a space station a few-kT would be plenty enough, given how little /hard/ shielding would even the remotest areas have.

The ILR is thorough. And the concept of warfare is pretty new to all of these constructs, so I imagine that they're learning this as they go along.

They may be trying to take out the responding ship, which would require a much larger bomb than one to destroy the station. Explosions don't transmit well in a vacuum. But they are indeed Very Nasty Bunnies.

As for size... it's going to be heavy, anything using uranium and that sort of stuff will be. But the size is not unreasonable.

Good point there. A 5MT nuke detonating inside of a space station and accelerating all of that mass as shrapnel will have a wider effective range than detonating it in vacuum.

What shrapnel? You mean the high temperature plasma, don't you?

A 5Mt weapon would have a fireball a few kilometers wide -- at the sea level inside a continuous atmosphere. In vacuum, with little to attenuate the hard-rad pulse, it would vaporise everything in a much greater range.

Yes, in this case, high temperature plasma=shrapnel. Extra oomph against any enemy ships in range.

Actually nukes in vacuum are lethal at far greater distances than in the atmosphere -- while there is no air to cook off into a shockwave, there's also no air to attenuate all the hard-rad that the explosion gives off.

Some documents I found suggest eight to twelve times the lethal radius for a given yield in space; additionally, you don't have to exactly blow a ship to smithereens to kill it -- cook off enough equipment and crew and it's as good as done.

True enough for our current gear. Ships that can move at significant fractions of lightspeed have to have shielding against that kind of gamma-bath, though, since it's what they'd get in the normal course of duty. Moving at even 10% c turns the solar wind into a truly hellish radiation bath.

And no, there wouldn't be a destructive effect similar to a ground burst - the radiation would travel farther, yes, but it wouldn't couple nearly as well, so the wider range would be less destructive, aside from doing nasty things to electronics and DNA.

It all depends on peak flux. It's hard to say what kind of particle flux would these ships typically see going at high fractions of C -- versus what they would see at a given distance from a nuke. The first one is impossible to predict with our current knowledge of solar systems; the second one is either never tested or a very closely guarded secret.

There is also one more complication here: a ship going fast only needs it's armor placed up front on the velocity vector; other sides don't need so much protection and even with Super Fusion Engines the Rocket Equation still holds.

In space, all the energy that would have been coupled to the atmosphere for thermal pulse and air shock would instead be an unmitigated x-ray and neutron flash. Considering the various intervening inefficiencies with an atmospheric shot, I'd WAG that the absolute energy on target in space would be much higher. Even in an atmosphere, the real mechanical damage range falls off rather quickly, especially for hardware designed for it.

Don't argue nuclear physics with the nuclear-trained physicist. I'm speaking in generalities here because I'm not -allowed- to do more.

To that I'm tempted to call bullshit. True, I don't know about the potential effects of the rad pulse of a nuke in space beyond a vague WAG, but as a trained former target, I do know about surface and airburst weapons effects. It would be informative, though somewhat disappointing to learn that nukes in space actually impart less "useful" energy on target in comparision.

Disappointing but true. Most of the ground damage is due to strong coupling - it's why an underwater burst is more damaging than an airburst, forex. The energy couples better to the medium involved. The tradeoff is that the better the coupling, the shorter the range. So a space nuke will cause less damage close in but at least some over a wide radius, while an airburst causes more over a shorter range, underwater even more so, and a subterranean explosion makes a big hole and beyond that just a few shockwaves.

Still wondering about useful energy on target, as an airburst flash is both rather delayed/drawn out and represents only a portion of the yield, while a space shot is all the energy all at once.

That's power, rather than energy. A medium absorbs and re-emits the energy, which slows it down and spreads it out as well, since the re-emission direction may not match the original direction. Some of it gets caught and rebounced inside the light-speed expansion wave, which is why you get more energy on target, though at a lower power yield (because of the increased time; less power but a LOT more time yields more energy on target closer in), the thicker the medium is. In a vacuum you get a smaller fraction of the energy spread out over the shorter time of the chain-reaction event itself. There is always a point where the thinner medium will start yielding more damage at a given range because of less attenuation.

Are either one of you taking your data from Starfish Prime?

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/b...../#.WCF9mCRuM5s

The thread liiiives! And in my case, no, I'm taking it from knowledge of physics and a book I inherited which was a 1953 study of 'atomic bomb' effects. Although I suspect that some of my data is based on Starfish, yes.

You don't even need the nuke to vaporize the place, a small charge of a single kiloton should be enough to 'pop' the station and give all the occupants a good exposure to Hard Vacuum.

collateral damage much?

That big a bomb is very much an overkill for the station, perhaps they have a one size fits all policy, or want to mess up the excavation site as well, or just make a statement. Regarding nukes in space, if in free vacuum, not much of an "explosion", just a really nasty X-ray pulse and varying flavors of neutrons (depending on bomb details). In a station (or near by ship), the X-rays couple with the mass and you get the fireball effect which is the obvious explody part of nukes as we know them. As an EDF ship would stand off a fair distance from a scary bad situation, being caught by a surprise bomb is not very likely.

It will get attention.

In free space, you have the Xrays, yes. But you also have the hyper heated matter of the bomb itself going off in every direction at really high speeds. And in a vaccuum, it doesn't cool quickly. Your heat shields better be pointed at the boom or your gonna get lava temperature pulse of stuff on you. It's the reason we studied using nukes to take out incoming nukes at apogee. As I recall, this was the Nike system. Supposedly they surrounded the warhead with a light metal having a very high melting temperature -- my guess would be titanium, but beryllium would probably have been more plentiful.

And of course, if it's inside something, that something will be vaporized and sent flying at high speeds as well.

Kinetics aren't very good at any real range as they will disperse so much, and light metals are exactly not what you'd want, as they don't carry the same punch as more massive materials. And neither Be nor Ti have remarkably high melt temps. However, such is moot, as the weapon would entirely vaporize the vehicle and any extra gimmick hardware around it, so any thoughts of fragmentation equivelent effects for an ABM are so much BS. Nike Safeguard/Spartan had a 5Mt warhead for radiation kill. Blowing up a station would disperse debris and those could be a danger, but, again proximity versus dispersion would come into play.

Hmm. Yeah, true. Your range for a kill on the Nike was something like a mile. You're probably right that the Nike was radiation pulse only. The rumor of the bombs having kinetic shrapnel jackets was just that - rumor.

For the longest time after reading this issue back in *mumblemumble*, due to my still-developing grasp of English vernacular, I thought these bunnies meant a "demonstration nuke" instead of a demolition nuke. And I kept wondering what kind of society this was that people kept around small nukes to show off... :)

The best worst society Ever! = )

A: "Have you seen my Nuke?" *Steps aside*
B: "Wow! That's gotta' be what... 2, maybe 3 megatons?"
A: "It's Five. The new compact model. Has a Trituim booster and everything. Here, let me show--" *BOOM*

YES EXACTLY and boy was I puzzled. :l :l

I knew it was obviously wrong, I just didn't know what was correct. Rereading a decade or two later (sigh) I felt very silly. Same as the use of "klicks" in Birthright, and this despite living in a metric country for distances. I just never had heard that abbreviation before.

Don't know when it was first used, but in the US, it seems to have gone into the popular vocabulary during the Vietnam war and the use of metric by the US military became more of a thing. Outside of the military and related folk, metric is still largely unknown in the US, except for, maybe litre size drinks, grams or kilos of drugs, and ammunition calibres, though track and field is using meters instead of yards more and more.

I'm in Canada, but grew up in french. About 2 or 3 years after seeing klicks in BII, I started coming across it locally when I had more colloquial anglophone friends.

I had forgotten about Carla and Friend. Their appearance is a nice touch to the plot.

The Blast that will live in infamy.

sadly those guys are gonna pop. in the nuclear radiated death way D:

Should make for interesting fireworks, atleast.

Stashing an atomic Easter egg are we?

These bunnies really know how to throw a Blast of a party!!

Again with the "science in science-fiction" thread from Our Host. Loving it. And people think this stuff is just animals in the space army...

still loving it...

V.

And a little detail regarding hiding. These ships and stations don't have ductwork as commonly presented, no interconnected array of convenient tunnels. Each compartment has its own little environmental support unit. But most compartments have all kinds of storage, most related to long term emergency survival, so there are all kinds of nooks and crannies, especially if one has any time to shuffle stuff around.