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Missile ship yield calc ( lore and boredom)

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7 years ago
Sep 26, 2017, 4:47:19 PM

One of the things i like more about sci fi is to apply some science and numbers on it to get more immersion from it, its something i try to do in my free time and something i like to share, althought im not an engineer or anything like that i know some really basic stuff from school and i like to play with numbers so i tried to do this with Endless space since is my fav sci fi franchise of the moment anyways.


I found the following tech text.


"Fusion Torpedo: Fusion reactors, powered by the same reaction that lights the stars, are a powerful source of energy and when miniaturized can form devastatingly effective missiles. The warheads may be the size of a small house, but they are still highly effective."


I found on the internet that an small apartment on NY can have a total area of 40 m2 using that as a template and assuming a cubic shaped volume warhead you get a volume of 253m3 and we know that the density of lithium deuteride is 820 kg/m3 so.
Density of lthium deuteride = 820 kg/m3

Mass =207445kg of fuel

Assuming only 25% of the fuel reacts (like real life nukes).

Mass = 51861kg

Molecular weight of Lithium deuteride  is 112.35gr/mol i think.

Number of moles = 5827093 Moles

Number of atoms = number of moles x Avogadro number

Number of atoms = 3.5079103e+30 atoms
Each atom releases 20 MeV worth of energy during nuclear fusion

So energy = 7.0158207e+31 MeV

Energy = 1.1240584e+19 j

Or

2.6 Gigatons.

My math could be a bit off and chances are that not 100% of the energy is being transmitted to the enemy ship recieving the attacks.

Still i guess it could give a general idea on how powerful are low end ES2 weapons also there is the fact that ships tends to fire several dozens of those during firefights.

I think that an UE dreadnought can be equiped with 4 normal sized missile launchers each capable of firing 4 missiles and an XL one which probably fires larger missiles so barrages of 16 missiles or 42.9 gigatons.


Of course the number might be lower since the warhead probably has an spherical or diferent shape ( i dont know the shape of a nuclear warhead) and most of the energy will probably dissipate on space rather than focus on the enemy ship, although its the future maybe the missiles focus the energy in some sort of plasma beam or something weird like that. 


If you are better with numbers than me, feel free to correct me, actually its something i would appreciate. 

Updated 7 years ago.
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7 years ago
Sep 27, 2017, 8:23:41 AM
solrac137 wrote:



My math could be a bit off and chances are that not 100% of the energy is being transmitted to the enemy ship recieving the attacks.

Heat and shockwave (two major components of the destruction of atom bombs, future or not) cannot travel across the vacuum of space. A major drawback unless a direct hit is involved, in which case, admittedly, only a fraction of the warhead is likely to be dealing damage.


I'm not a mathematician by any stretch of the imagination, though, but I happen to be reading The Dark Forest, by Cixin Liu, which partly deals with this subject.

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7 years ago
Sep 27, 2017, 2:53:28 PM
Frogsquadron wrote:
solrac137 wrote:



My math could be a bit off and chances are that not 100% of the energy is being transmitted to the enemy ship recieving the attacks.

Heat and shockwave (two major components of the destruction of atom bombs, future or not) cannot travel across the vacuum of space. A major drawback unless a direct hit is involved, in which case, admittedly, only a fraction of the warhead is likely to be dealing damage.


I'm not a mathematician by any stretch of the imagination, though, but I happen to be reading The Dark Forest, by Cixin Liu, which partly deals with this subject.

I agree although if they can archieve the same efficiency of today nukes ( actually today nukes can archieve 40% efficiency i think and 25% is an old number) the missile will do a good deal of damage .The warhead alone is larger than any of todays warheads and with a mass of 50 tons its far heavier than most of todays ICBM warheads, the thign alone would have 1/4 of the mass of the largest ICBM ever produced ,now, dont understand why they use nukes since those are supposed to be fairly inneficient in space.But maybe they use something like the cassaba howitzer 


A cassaba howitzer if i understand correctly is a particle beam created from a nuclear blast basically concentrating the power of the nuclear blast into a narrow cone.


http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php#id--Nukes_In_Space--Nuke_vs._Spacecraft 


Some cool info. 


Another problem would be to carry all of those massive missiles, since the largest Endless space ships are about a kilometer long, for this i have 2 theories


1. Ships carry a limited amount of ammo ,which might be why space combat consists in limited amount of rounds (i know this is due game mechanics but it might be a nice lore explanation)


2. Ammunition is stored in some sort of 4 dimensional container larger inside than outside. ( the tech exists in the ES2 tech tree and it think it was mentioned in ES1).


The fact that massive nukes are used could also explain the lost of crew with lots of neutron radiation killing the crew members frying circuits ( riftborn) and stuff like that, although i would think that due their insectoid nature and some texts in ES1 cravers would be highly resistant to ionizing radiation but thats another topic.


Thanks for answering!. 





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7 years ago
Sep 27, 2017, 5:45:13 PM

Maybe Craver ships look very crude because they don´t need to care that much about "radiation safety measures" when loading their ships with nukes.

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