Do nuclear or similar WMD exist in ED lore

[Star Admiral]

What the title says. Humanity has somehow managed to create an alcubierre drive but we don't seem to be able to use our ships as relativistic bombs.

Then i see capital class ships roaming around. And people still using outdated railgun tech (a railgun is basically a ballista on steroids). Why then, don't we see tactical nukes employed? Surely captial ships would try to nuke each other into space dust instead of plinking at one another with pulse lasors all day.

I'm new to this game so I don't know the lore behind the series. I remember in Dune that every House had its own stash of nuclear weapons, which was the most valuable thing they owned (other than huge stores of Spice I guess).

Even if nuclear/hydrogen bombs are obsolete, surely whatever power source is used to power our FSD can also have military uses for the creation of a powerful bomb.

 

[Alex Brentnall]

Good point but I think its more a gameplay reason than a lore reason (However, if someone knows the real reason please post ). I mean if the only weapons were "Nuke launcher" in small, medium, large and huge flavours I can see the game getting rather boring quite quickly.

 

[Meric]

Previous versions of the game had some very large bombs. I think they've left them out of this version for reasons of fun... I'm sure you don't want to get nuked by some idiot (there might well be a few idiots playing )

 

[OnePercent]

in a multiplayer game balance means no I win weapon, you only have that sort of fun in singleplayer games or 4x empire builder games.

 

[Axelsson]

Would be fun if we could get the nukes back for military strike missions (against outposts, capital ships etc), but I think it is a good idea not to be able to use them against smaller ships operated by players.

 

[Bran Tse Mallory]

What the title says. Humanity has somehow managed to create an alcubierre drive but we don't seem to be able to use our ships as relativistic bombs.

Then i see capital class ships roaming around. And people still using outdated railgun tech (a railgun is basically a ballista on steroids). Why then, don't we see tactical nukes employed? Surely captial ships would try to nuke each other into space dust instead of plinking at one another with pulse lasors all day.

I'm new to this game so I don't know the lore behind the series. I remember in Dune that every House had its own stash of nuclear weapons, which was the most valuable thing they owned (other than huge stores of Spice I guess).

Even if nuclear/hydrogen bombs are obsolete, surely whatever power source is used to power our FSD can also have military uses for the creation of a powerful bomb.

Alan Dean Foster looks at this in his series of books, The Damned. You launch a conventional nuke at your target, in order to survive the blast you must be a fair distance away... Your target has enough time to shift to frameshift - nukes are useless in normal space except for planetary bombardment but if you want to invade the planet why nuke it? The only way to deliver a nuke is to give it it's own sort of frameshift drive

The drives used in his books are gravity well based which gives them some advantages over frameshift tech.

SCCAM Missile: SCCAM is an acronym for Severely Concentrated and Catastrophic Accelerated Motion. It consists of a small thermonuclear device and a KK-drive (Gravity based engine able to move objects at FTL speeds). The missile's casing is made of Osmiridium. It is launched using a stingship's (Small fighter ship manned by a crew of two) own drive field (Ships also use a gravity based engine). At a safe distance the missile's own drive is activated. The missile is attracted to another ship's drive field; and the two interacting fields, coupled with a fusion explosion, destoy the ship. The system is incapable of a near-miss.

 

[Mephane]

I am fairly sure nuclear weapons (fusion and fission) do exist, but are rarely used because there other devastating and options with better precision. For example, plasma accelerators are typically used for orbital bombardments so that you can, for example, destroy specific buildings (in a single hit each) without flattening the whole city.

And in space, nuclear weapons aren't as effective because the lack of atmosphere means there is no shockwave, which plays a huge role in the destructive potential of nuclear weapons.

 

[Io_Sys]

Spoiler

Wanna bet the Cerberus plague is a bioweapon?

Fun fact, instellar warfare (within newtonian physics) would likely revolve around multi-stage missiles carrying high-yield warheads up and above the hundred megaton range, just so anyone could hit anything. Then everything gets worse when you add in a multi-missile bus similar to the MIRV.

Other big offenders would be rocks-- kinetic missiles. Doesn't matter if it's just a piece of metal fired from a ship or an asteroid with engines on, once it's accelerated up to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light it really doesn't matter if it carries a warhead or not-- however, ships and even large fleets in formation can evade-- at which point kinetics become useless against anything but stationary and predictable targets-- i,e planets and large space stations. Missile fire can be misdirected with EW/ECM/Chaff spoofing up to a point.

Imagine a ship sits outside of a system, then accelerates on a trajectory with the target inhabited planet/industrial complex, etc up to about .5c, then launches a barrage of kinetics.
Absolute devastation, namely because it would be damn near impossible to detect them in time and intercept them.

Now imagine such a ship accelerating up to .5c launches a multi-stage missile packing 6-12 independant warheads. the main missile bus could probably get it up to something like .7c at which point again, interception would involve throwing so much stuff in the trajectory and just hope it hits because of relativity.
It would cross an optimal interception zone in seconds. Bear in mind, current KKVs (kinetic kill vehicles-- specifically the SDI stuff that's supposed to stop ICBMs from sending us to the next ice age) are essentially giant metal nets.

Of course, such a missile at .7c would have its own problems knowing where the hell it is and thus targetting stuff at that kind of speed so you'd need some serious FCS hardware to line up the shots, at which point EW/ECM start to become more effective as the missile is relying on time-late data.


Then again, most of that isn't really applicable since ED is more a traditional space-fighter brawler. 3km ranges instead of 300Mkm and all that.

 

[Unfluffydave]

Yes they do, in previous games you had nukes and energy bombs.

 

[Star Admiral]

You could destroy a statuion just by rigging a Sidewinder so that it doesn't drop out of supercruise on emergency. Slam into it at 10c and it's dust.

I definitely see a use for nukes if we have reaking RAILGUNS in this game that can hit ships in space. If nothing else, nuking capital ships sounds like a plan. They don't seem to move much.

 

[dreamer1986]

Good point but I think its more a gameplay reason than a lore reason (However, if someone knows the real reason please post ). I mean if the only weapons were "Nuke launcher" in small, medium, large and huge flavours I can see the game getting rather boring quite quickly.

"Sees enemy Sidewinder, fires large nuclear missile, Sidewinder blows up, half a planet nearby blows up, you blow up. The end"

 

[Izzy Spanner]

WMD were in the lore - 'Smart bombs' in the BBC original were a useful Get out of Jail card, destroying everything on your scanner. A bargain at 5000 credits back then in 1984! Can see why they wouldn't fit in a multiplayer environment!

 

[Psycho Romeo]

They wouldn't be unbalanced. I mean, PD would knock them out of the sky right?

 

[Vasious]

Originally I expected Torpedoes to have a Nuclear payload to differential them from the chemical explosives in the missiles.
in FE2 you have missions to nuke enemy Listening stations, however the nukes were programmed only to arm if they were targeted at the right thing.

A Plasma accelerator is pretty much a WMD in my opinion.

"[The Large Plasma accelerator ]hasbeen known to be used as a planetary assault weapon, destroying selected
areas of cities from orbit. This has a devastating effect on the local population, because the terrifying noise of the [beam] cutting through the
atmosphere can be heard for hundreds of kilometres, and will deafen anyone unprotected in the vicinity."

There were also Energy Bombs which "Generally only of use against smaller ships. This causes the main reactor of all small ships' drive systems (within a range of about 100km) to resonate and overload. it is linked to the drive of the ship using it, so will not cause that to detonate."

 

[Snarfbuckle]

WMD's are rarely needed simply due to newton.

-Mass Driver/Railguns used for orbital bombardment would have enought kinetic energy to give the same effect as a nuclear weapon without the sideeffects (except death and destruction).

 

[lonewarrior]

Just a theory
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Maybe once shields were created they became obsolete?
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Maybe like normal missiles the explosion and heat (which wouldn't work to it's full effect in space) were next to useless against ships
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So perhaps they stopped making them

 

[Apos]

War demands efficiency, not style. A rail-gun of maximum efficiency is much more than a balista on steroids.

Thinking about it now, it should penetrate small ships and keep going.

 

[Star Admiral]

War demands efficiency, not style. A rail-gun of maximum efficiency is much more than a balista on steroids.

Thinking about it now, it should penetrate small ships and keep going.

Dude it's basically a tungsten arrow shot from a magnetized tube instead of a bow. How can you compare it to a hydrogen bomb?

 

[Vasious]

Dude it's basically a tungsten arrow shot from a magnetized tube instead of a bow. How can you compare it to a hydrogen bomb?

Railguns are harder to build and are reloadable, fusion bombs one use and so 1950s

 

[Neutronium]

WMD were in the lore - 'Smart bombs' in the BBC original were a useful Get out of Jail card, destroying everything on your scanner. A bargain at 5000 credits back then in 1984! Can see why they wouldn't fit in a multiplayer environment!

The energy bombs from the original Elite didn't make much sense: How on earth could your ship survive the blast (the EMC pulse or whatever kind of shockwave it was) and just destroy all surrounding vessels?

However I can see a potential and more realistic use of a weapon of mass destruction: You could carry one for a suicide mission or when you are interdictied by many ships (1-2 wings with maxed-out Conda's, Pythons, Vultures etcc) and you have no chance of taking them one-by-one. you blow up and take them with you to the otherside of witchspace

On the other hand I think nukes (fission and/or fusion) would be out of fassion in the 33rd century: Why not use something like an Anti-matter WMD? or as suggested above an FSD tech-based weapon? Surely with the ability to hyperjump between star systems the technology should be more than capable enough for more advanced and destructive WMD. But as it was suggested above it is quite unfitting for online gaming because of the potential abuse by idiots/griefers etc..