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Post by The Genocide God on Dec 14, 2016 11:59:15 GMT
I have observed what seems to be strange behaviour with the nuclear warheads. I was testing a modified vanilla siloship loaded with some 2.45 kt nukes and some 10 Mt nukes. I launched & detonated 10 of the 2.45 kt nukes right next to my ship, which did not destroy it but damaged the armour and caused it to glow red hot. Rerunning the scenario I released and detonated a 10 Mt nuke right next to the ship; it appeared to cause less damage to the armour than the 10* 2.45 kt nukes did. considering they were both exploded right next to the ship, but the 10 Mt nuke has in excess of 4e3* the power of the 2.45s, what could be the reason for this behaviour?
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Post by amimai on Dec 14, 2016 12:27:43 GMT
Small warheads are effective at short detonation ranges, 20x125t micro nukes exploding at 1m range has more effectiveness as a single 2kt nuke going off at that range, but 20x125t warheads going off at 1km is not nearly as effective as a single 2kt warhead at the same range...
something to note :
20x10Mt 100% kill by heat a whole fleet at over 5km range because they will literally melt AMcarbon/diamond radiators off the hull
200x1Mt will not
2000x100kt wont even heat the target ships hull at that range
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Post by goduranus on Dec 14, 2016 14:23:49 GMT
At the same range, 20 6kt warheads seems to do far more damage than single 10Mt.
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Post by dragonkid11 on Dec 14, 2016 15:47:18 GMT
At the same range, 20 6kt warheads seems to do far more damage than single 10Mt. That's if they are MUCH closer. Seems that megaton bomb will pretty much do damage even a kilometer away while multi nuke warhead require close distance but does more damage. It's like rifle and shotgun. |
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Post by amimai on Dec 15, 2016 9:22:27 GMT
I have had successful kills with 10MT nukes at well over 10km vs poorly armoured ships, and have once accidentally killed my own unalarmed missile ship 30km away when several 10MT nukes went off hitting the enemy
I can confirm, big nukes have much larger kill ranges then small nukes
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Post by The Genocide God on Dec 15, 2016 22:30:41 GMT
Interesting. Is there a scientific reason why adding power to nukes increases their effective range rather than damage @ a set range, or this behaviour a game artifact? When I checked the damage at range chart, it appears to indicate that the damage drops of with distance in what looks like an inverse cubic relationship. If this chart is correct then big nukes should indeed be effective at huge ranges, but at close range should absolutely annihilate just about anything. My 10 Mt nuke has a fluence of 3.42 PJ/m^2 at a range of 1 m, which is the approximate distance I detonated it at in the test; yet the amount of damage done appeared to be marginal, with a bit of heated armour and no disabled systems. That amount of energy is enough to wreck whole cities!
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Post by thorneel on Dec 16, 2016 0:20:36 GMT
Maybe this is because the big nuke's flash hits all at once, while the small nukes each hit with their own flash. If they are far away enough, light-speed lag may be enough to prevent simultaneous flash, depending on how much delay is necessary. Otherwise, maybe imperfect synchronisation can cause this effect, but I doubt the game is modelling that.
However, I would suspect this is a game artefact similar to multiple low-power lasers having different effect than one high-power laser, all things being equal.
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Post by n2maniac on Dec 16, 2016 7:38:38 GMT
inverse cubic relationship Should be inverse square |
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Post by amimai on Dec 16, 2016 9:07:51 GMT
Interesting. Is there a scientific reason why adding power to nukes increases their effective range rather than damage @ a set range, or this behaviour a game artifact? When I checked the damage at range chart, it appears to indicate that the damage drops of with distance in what looks like an inverse cubic relationship. If this chart is correct then big nukes should indeed be effective at huge ranges, but at close range should absolutely annihilate just about anything. My 10 Mt nuke has a fluence of 3.42 PJ/m^2 at a range of 1 m, which is the approximate distance I detonated it at in the test; yet the amount of damage done appeared to be marginal, with a bit of heated armour and no disabled systems. That amount of energy is enough to wreck whole cities! It's PJ of thermal energy, unfortunately there is no air in space for shock waves(the main damage mode of atmospheric detonations) so there is significantly less actual damage. It really should still be enough to just melt through a couple cm of armour, but effects like ablation, reflection, and difraction would cut out a large amount of that especially if you have fairly dense wipple shields or large meter thick graphogel pads in the armour |
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