You know what I mean
. The Hand of God / DM won't let that happen. Hm... how much power would be needed to push planets out of orbit or disturb the fusion/gravity balance of stars?
300 mega-ton fusion bomb? Are you serious? (GalNet)
- Thread starter CMDR Zadian Lichtfrost
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. The Hand of God / DM won't let that happen. Hm... how much power would be needed to push planets out of orbit or disturb the fusion/gravity balance of stars?
TheMegaTurnip
Banned
Thats no moon..
It's a 300 megaton fusion bomb!
It's a 300 megaton fusion bomb!
You also have to do this covertly and hope no one notices them until it's too late to deflect them.
A bomb in a canister, inside a ship, can likely get much closer, with much less suspicion.
With a yield-to-weight of 6MT/tonne (high, but theoretically possible) we'd probably be looking at about a 50t payload, plus casing. Fairly straightforwardly portable on many medium-sized ships.
Electromagnetically contained antimatter would have a much higher yield-to-weight, but would also need a continually powered casing - and no sudden shocks - to stop it just exploding at random, which might make it rather less practically portable.
That's not entirely accurate. Population growth rates depend on a wide range of factors. In the modern era, industrialisation allowed populations to grow quite quickly, but they do hit an upper limit at which point population growth rates slow to a crawl. Factors include population health, comfort, accessibility (to jobs, infrastructure, etc), and of course, resources. The resource limit is the big one, and the primary reason why overpopulation is actually impossible, because as we approach that limit, the population will actually start to decline naturally, as those without resources simply die off. A balance occurs.
In the future, with greater technological advances leading to medical breakthroughs and improved societal comforts, as well as living on multiple planets, it's highly likely that populations on individual planets won't be more than 1 to 2 billion, depending on how accessible those planets are. If they're not easy to access, those population numbers will probably be higher, due to lack of migration.
It's actually a very complex subject, population growth, and to take our civilisation's recent (in the last 100 years) population boom as an example of a constant population growth rate is actually over-simplifying how population growth actually works. You can get a better idea if you look at the growth rates for individual nations. For example, the US, Australia, UK, Canada, and other advanced western democracies all have very low population growth rates. However, if you look at China, India, and many places in Africa that are industrialising, you'll find much higher rates. Those places in the world experiencing their first
'industrial revolution' are experiencing the highest rates of population growth. Those nations that are post industrial revolution, and in the midst of their information age, are experiencing the lowest rates. There are reasons for this, but it'll take an essay to go through them, so I'll leave it for you to look into.
To push a planet out of orbit the easiest way would be to hit it with another smaller planet. Calibrating the impact so that it meaningfully adjusts the targets orbit while keeping it intact is really tricky ... and you still need a way to get the smaller planet on the right course (hit it with a moon, which you hit with a really large asteroid, which you hit with a small asteroid, which you accelerated up to speed with conventional drives) ... so more practical would probably be to hit it with a series of small moon-sized objects in series, to gradually adjust the orbital parameters and let it cool down after each impact so it didn't just break apart.
To disturb the fusion/gravity balance of a star you'd need to dump a very large amount of extra mass (ideally non-fusable mass) into it. That's possible - drop a white dwarf or a neutron star into it - but getting the white dwarf onto the right trajectory would be tricky since they're pretty heavy in their own right.
You'd need to steal a lot more than one 300 MT device, anyway.
Yeah, that article used to be better written. There are no theoretical limits to it, but, that doesn't mean there aren't practical limits.
As the explosive yield gets bigger, a higher and higher percentage of its energy dissipates in the air above ground zero, blasting a portion of the atmosphere out into space, so a hundred megaton bomb doesn't cause ten times as much damage as a one megaton bomb, because it blasts the same portion of atmosphere into space, just at a higher velocity. With 10x the explosive yield only about twice as much destruction is cause. This is also part of why lower-yield nuclear weapons cause more, much longer-lasting fallout. In fact, a 300MT bomb is likely to have virtually no fallout at all. So that's a plus, at least.
In other words, it's pointless.
Also, this is Elite. If we're going to be attacking cities, it's going to be much cheaper and easier to just fire kinetic rods from orbit, no warhead required, maybe an inertial guidance system AT MOST, to get that job done. Look up 'Rods from God' for reference.
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I very much doubt that, if we were to use modern day missiles then I'd concede but in 3300 I'd expect them to be extremely precise thus not needing nearly as much power to damage the target.
When I read this story: Ambrose Foundation Bankrupted Overnight I thought, well in that other space game this would have been a player triggered and player driven story (with lots of forum drama along). Meanwhile the control freaks at FDev only allow to blaze your own trail ON RAILS.
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"Lucifer Device", eh? Guess it's a 300MT gamma ray burst designed to disrupt any protective shields and bake whatever is protected by it. No very good against dug in military bunkers but devastating against civilian targets.
"The city did not catch fire. It burned out in mere moments when the sky bloomed in pure white and everything from horizon to horizon burned. All that is left of the city is slumped over ruins of slag and ashes surrounded by a ring of fire on the horizon where the Lucifer Device did not apply enough energy to outright scorch whatever it touched."
"The city did not catch fire. It burned out in mere moments when the sky bloomed in pure white and everything from horizon to horizon burned. All that is left of the city is slumped over ruins of slag and ashes surrounded by a ring of fire on the horizon where the Lucifer Device did not apply enough energy to outright scorch whatever it touched."
Such yield to mass ratios were reached in the early 1960s. The W47-Y2 (an operational production level device that was on Polaris missiles) for example is ~330kg has a 1.2 megaton yield. Peak yield can also scale faster than mass even with very conventional designs, because the fusion components are the lightest parts of any thermonuclear weapon.
I wouldn't consider a 300MT device fitting in a single 1 ton canister to be implausible, because fusion of far less than that mass of light elements is needed to produce such energy. We already have frameshift drives that can apparently fuse multiple tons of fuel virtually instantly, in controlled reactions, to power hyperspace jumps. An explosion should be far easier to accomplish.
How do you propose to attack a fortification that is surrounded on all sides by dozens or hundreds of kilometers of ice, rock, and/or metal without a weapon of massive yield, provided they don't just let you walk in the front door (which would be at the end of a correspondingly long, not remotely straight, tunnel with numerous barriers and defenses)?
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So what exactly is this supposed to nuke?
You use several small devices to blow up the exit and supply shafts, leaving the facility buried and isolated. Repeat treatment when they try to dig themselves out.
1) - Science-fiction ('fusion' bomb being the OP).
2) Darth-Vader, BA (History), pleasure to meet you.
[video=youtube;N1HMCArgqWM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1HMCArgqWM[/video]
When you use IRL examples to justify a conclusion, you're using reality, not fiction. And I don't care about your qualifications. They're literally meaningless if you can't demonstrate you earned them. Welcome to the internet, where nobody knows you're actually a cat IRL.
You'll notice I never tell anyone about my qualifications. It's because you don't need to if you actually have good arguments.
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Any such facility, would likely be provisioned to be able to be completely self-sufficient for a protracted period of time (real bunkers usually are, and they don't even have to contend with being space based). Keeping such an installation under siege with a protracted campaign of low-yeild strikes and blockades would be vastly more difficult and costly than attempting a decapitation strike with a weapon powerful enough to just kill everyone there, even if such a weapon needed to be absurdly (by our standards) powerful. Indeed, such a siege may not even be able to prevent such a base from performing it's command and control functions as there are likely communications methods that could work through such a mass of materials and be relayed by hidden observers.
... and other non-sequiturs.
I pointed to the quals in direct response to your suggesstion that I should 'look into it', i.e I have, thanks. And I mention that this is science fiction, so it doesn't need to be an academically water-tight argument to count as plausible. Certainly doesn't need the essays you mention.
If your quals are directly related to any topic appearing here, and someone suggested that you 'look into it', you would be more than justified in pointing out that you already did, and also in pointing out that it is largely irrelevant since 'science fiction'.
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There are no upper limits for nukes except their increasing uselessness. The tzar-bomb allready leveled the terrain. We haven´t built bigger bombs because there´d be nothing to conquer while a set of 5 5MT MIRVs´d deal much more damage and be cheaper to build/maintain and launch.
A 300MT device´d destroy a Coriolis station if detonated in the hangar bay i guess so it´s a plausible story.
A 300MT device´d destroy a Coriolis station if detonated in the hangar bay i guess so it´s a plausible story.