Not in elite. Remember elite is universe where hole star systems are in scale comparable to small towns. In elite you don't fight over single cities or even planets. 300 mega ton sound small weapon to be honest in elite scale to even be effective: In scale of elite destruction of planet with 7 billion people is nothing on grand picture. Wiping cities with 300 mega ton bombs seem like slow process in bubble scale warfare, like Americans bombing terrorists with firecrackers.
300 mega-ton fusion bomb? Are you serious? (GalNet)
- Thread starter CMDR Zadian Lichtfrost
- Start date
Not in elite. Remember elite is universe where hole star systems are in scale comparable to small towns. In elite you don't fight over single cities or even planets. 300 mega ton sound small weapon to be honest in elite scale to even be effective: In scale of elite destruction of planet with 7 billion people is nothing on grand picture. Wiping cities with 300 mega ton bombs seem like slow process in bubble scale warfare, like Americans bombing terrorists with firecrackers.
Whether or not you consider it pointless is rather irrelevant. You said hard limits of technology. There isn't one.
Voidwalker has a point. but maybe not exactly the one he's been trying to make. Let's say that in theory you can build a 300 Mt bomb and also that you can build a portable 'suitcase/backpack' nuke (which is possible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Munition ), the problem is that they cannot be the same device. In other words you can build a big bang or a portable bang but not both.
If the Taylor limit is correct, even a perfectly efficient bomb would need to be about 31 tonnes to yield 300 Mt, in practice it's more like 50 tonnes.
Even given a bit of leeway about the definition of portable, I don't think a 50 tonne object really counts as portable at least not in practical terms
If the Taylor limit is correct, even a perfectly efficient bomb would need to be about 31 tonnes to yield 300 Mt, in practice it's more like 50 tonnes.
Even given a bit of leeway about the definition of portable, I don't think a 50 tonne object really counts as portable at least not in practical terms
Well, they could put it into a Dolphin, for example, and have it auto-dock with no one inside. Boom goes the station.
Where would you place a bomb that hurt enough for players to care about a storyline? 
Last edited:
Where would you place a bomb that hurt enough for players to care about a storyline?
Farseeer.
Where would you place a bomb that hurt enough for players to care about a storyline?
Jameson Orbital. The
+ rep because not only do I agree with you but I love your forum avatar picture!
Last edited:
I never mentioned that earlier in this thread...
Like Post #27.
Great minds think alike.
Imagine the Colossal CG...add Thargoids.
Nukes in that range could vaporize good portions of atmospheres. Never underestimate the power of people knowing you have a single use weapon that could make an Earth-like permanently uninhabitable.
The Taylor Limit is quite probably correct today (or at least if it's not no public information about weapons that exceed it exist), but modern fusion weapons are nearly 50/50 fission/fusion yield to reach this limit and only a small fraction of either the fission or fusion fuel from any stage of the reaction is actually converted...the rest is just flung out with the explosion.
These limits are almost certainly irrelevant in the Elite universe and I highly doubt the fusion weapons in ED have any fissile components at all. If I had to take a wild guess about what these weapons consisted of in the fictional 34th century, it would be essentially the energy releasing components of a frameshift drive set to consume fuel during a charge until it it was unable to contain the reaction any longer, at which point it would explode rather than sending a ship through hyperspace. If all it did was convert hydrogen to helium, and it did this with near 100% efficiency, it could get almost 70kt of yield per kilo of fuel...so one canister could be sufficient (not man portable, but something a small group could steal and conceal). If it was able to just annihilate matter and convert it all directly to energy, then it may well be suitcase sized for a 300MT device. Of course that's speculation, a heavy dose of fantasy, and wouldn't even be a fusion weapon at that point.
If we ever discover a way to reliably contain even micrograms of antimatter without enormous cryogenic traps, the Talor limit would be greatly exceeded in real life.
Anyway, for story purposes, I think canister size would be plausible enough.
Last edited:
That's assuming that this secret outpost had outfitting and you could easily move the bomb to outfitting. Anyway that doesn't really sound like something you would call portable and being taken in a hurry. Though how much of a hurry the raiders were in would depend on who set off the distress beacon. If it was set off by one of the staff they you're probably talking a few minutes before someone arrives to investigate, so the raiders would not have much time. The alternative is that the beacon was set off by the raiders themselves as they left. that would suggest an extortion attempt rather than wanting to take out a specific target.
Who needs a nuke. Disable the emergency stop function of the FSD and accelerate a cutter to 0.99999c aimed at a planet. That should take care of any life there pretty quickly.
Won't even bother trying to handwavium what would happen at 2001c.
Or does the handwavium itself impose the speed limits on the FSD, not an emergency stop thingamabob?
![BigBANGtheory [VR]](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/71/71385.jpg?1644873788){kind=avatar}
If you can buy/craft it, use it, interact with it great if not then its just pointless fluff.
Remember, this is Elite, where things are the way the GM says, not people with RL experience say...
A Taylor Limit device in a ship could be very large indeed. A size 2 internal, using half the mass for nuclear material, would yield around 1 MT.
Self destruct devices are eminently feasible. One would certainly trash a docking bay. Beyond that, it's up to Frontier as to what goes...
A Taylor Limit device in a ship could be very large indeed. A size 2 internal, using half the mass for nuclear material, would yield around 1 MT.
Self destruct devices are eminently feasible. One would certainly trash a docking bay. Beyond that, it's up to Frontier as to what goes...
Why not just stick a FSD on a huge asteroid and send it over?
Instant extinction-level event.
Why not just stick a FSD on a huge asteroid and send it over?
Instant extinction-level event.
no, I was serious. at nearly the speed of light you just need a cutter and not an asteroid to end all life on a planet. heck you could probably just strap an FSD on a soccer ball
the asteroid we associate with dinosaur extinction was probably moving ~0.0001c
as the speed of any object with non zero mass approaches the speed of light, its energy will increase without bound. it's not even really an object anymore
so at a speed like .99999c, something very small could end all life on a planet, and an asteroid would probably turn the entire surface into magma and/or significantly change the planet's orbit
Last edited: