Terran Nuclear Tech (split from Terran Q&A)

[MBehave]

I don't know if I am doing something wrong but I get completely different number.
I get ~50m diameter at 50km with 0.057 beam angle.
Triangle
Side a = 50000m
Side b = 50000m
Side c = 49.74188m

Angle A = 89.971
Angle B = 89.971
Angle C = 0.057

Checking by cutting circle into 0.057 degree slices and dividing also matches up.
360 degrees / 0.057 = 6315.789473684211
6315.6 for ease

50000m radius circle
314000m circumference
314000/6315.6 =49.71m

can also increase by just changing m to km for ~50km wide beam at 50000km

So assuming I didn't make a mistake.

Outsider Terran GWS HS-100 100kg KKV 400 km/s damage 27
Energy 8000000 MJ

85% of 100mt= 355300000000MJ
355300000000/8000000=44412.5

44412.5 times greater energy.
Energy at 50000km with 50km wide beam spread over 314000000m2
355300000000/314000000 =1131.53MJ m2
damage per m2=0.00381891375 in outsider damage charts

Well that seems useless... is it?

1kg of TNT has 2.175MJ of energy.
1131.53MJ=520kg of TNT per m2.
Vaporization for steel is ~6.8MJ per kg at 0c
166kg of steel per m2 is vaporized by the blast at 50000km(this is 2.2cm but its not actually correct because less steel evaporates while the steel will shatter like glass from the evaporated material expansion to at least 30cm depth)

Nope not useless at all but its still kinda puny compared to other weapons...
But its more shotgun then focused beam so lets add up its total damage.

Whats the total energy its delivering to a ship.

Top down hit on the Tempest at 50000km would cover 112500m2.(best case hit, can't work out a front on profile because I don't know its height and no profile picture to try to estimate)
Quick and dirty surface area by 750m*450m/3 due to 66/33 empty/filled space estimation on its profile picture.

112500m2*1131.53MJ
127237500MJ of energy delivered to the tempest on a top down blast at 50000km
It hits with 15.9 times the energy at 50000km then the Terran GWS.
Most powerful Plasma weapon is the Historian Plasma Array: Overloaded 26-40 damage at 5000km.
Loroi Waveloom max damage 160 at 100000km.
Casaba Howitzer full top profile hit on the Tempest = 429 points of damage at 50000km in outsider damage.

Hydrogen particle beam is also a plasma, Loroi and Umiak shields overload if hit by a powerful plasma blasts and cause damage to the ship even if the plasma was deflected.




Effects at 50000km
Can't be dodged due to area covered.
Their shields are going down.
They are taking damage from overloaded shields even if the shields protected the ship.

Without shields or maybe with them.
The hull will face massive crushing forces even if the armour is not shattered.
Massive amount of heat will be pumped into the ship, more then any kind of conductive/evaporative/radiant system could hope to deal with for the short term at least.
I suspect they will lose all sensors/turrets/engine nozzles and anything else on the side of the ship hit even if armour holds.
Possible spalling of internal hull sending shards of razor sharp shrapnel kicking around the inside hull.

Despite its awesome destructive power its not a GOD weapon....

Loroi and even Umiak have weapons that outrange the Casaba Howitzer and have ships with vastly greater acceleration, after the first engagements they would both just reverse engines and never let Terran ships get in range to be effective and pick them off at a distance.

Contextually I'm guessing that this is arrived at by taking the KE of the described railgun projectiles in the weapon profiles page and then getting a joules-per-damage point conversion? The validity of that as a general rule is up to you I guess, but I'll run with it for the moment.

With a divergence angle of 0.057, 100 MT, 85% efficiency, and that conversion factor, at 50km the howitzer is a pretty fearsome weapon. Around 154 damage per square meter of exposed target hull, on 7.7 km radius zone. The meanest Umiak single torpedo has a max damage of 4000, and the meanest cluster munition 4320, with actual performance probably lower due to spent fuel. The Loroi counterparts do 3000 and 12000, respectively. Interestingly, the weapon profile page mentions that torpedoes can be omnidirectional, for damage to potentially multiple targets, or as a shaped detonation to hit a single target but not have to get as close before detonating. Sounds familiar.

The wave-loom does between 20 and 160 damage at a range of 100 megameters(max range being 600Mm, but much weaker there), where our notional casaba blast will be attenuated to around 0.00004 damage per square meter. Pulse cannons and plasma foci are still doing damage in that range band and beyond, too. Obviously not a perfect comparison since you'd want the howitzer to cross some of that distance first, but it gives some context to how coherent and long ranged those weapons are. Close range in this conflict isn't 50 km, it's 5000 km.

[icekatze]

hi hi

I'm not sure how the total energy hitting this ship is terribly relevant if it isn't focused.

Do we have some indication that defensive screens are perfectly flat barriers? If not, there's also no reason to assume that they would not absorb the incoming energy over time, probably an exponential curve if it's like most electromagnetic things.

[Zorg56]

Is it possible to make multistage thermonucler warheads?
This thing will cost absurd amount of money, and will be useless for all combatants, but for TCA?

[MBehave]

Extending shields is a bad idea.
Casaba is 1-2ms pulse moving at 10000km/s. Assuming a perfect spheric shield 2km in diameter around the Tempest, your extending the absorption time by 0.1ms but increasing the 2d surface area by 28 times.

Shields 2km in diameter need to absorb 12012 damage worth of energy in 2.1ms at 50000km from a 100mt Howitzer.
Don't think 5-10% increased absorption time is worth 28 times the energy needing to be dealt with.
8 charge wave loom does 160 damage and takes 8 minutes to charge and overheats and shuts down the Tempest in a single shot.

Total energy is very important for shields, its also important in heat.

The advantages of the plasma focus are very high power and good armor penetration/ablation. The disadvantage is limited range, and like particle beams the plasma usually has a net charge and so will be significantly affected by defensive screens; however, plasma from the heaviest of these weapons can cause a splash effect that may overload screens even when successfully deflected.

Loroi/Umiak shields just cant handle the sheer energy according to insider.

Beams are quite wide in outsider as in meters across.
Hopefully I can be corrected if wrong, I am comparing profile pictures to battle pictures and could be completely off.
Type-KT Strike Cruiser

That puts the 2 forward weapons as Umiak MR Type-7 Heavy Plasma Focus. The muzzle appears to be 10m wide.(this was a real rough guess)

10m wide at muzzle thats 78.54m2 area and it does 10-14 damage so 14 damage points= 0.18 damage per m2
at 50000km assuming the beam is the same width(have no data on it) with 9-12 damage=0.15

Its about 37 times more concentrated at 50000km then a howitzer.
However they are duration weapons.
This following is made up obviously as I don't think anywhere we are told actual beam duration for weapons.
Lets say Umiak MR Type-7 Heavy Plasma Focus fires over 1/20th of a second, 50ms.
So lets work out energy per ms per m2 for Howitzer and Plasma Focus.

Umiak MR Type-7 Heavy Plasma Focus 50ms duration time
0.15/50=0.003 energy per m2 per ms.

100mt Casaba Howtizer 1-2ms duration time.
0.0038/1=0.0038
0.0038/2=0.00191
Comparison
At 50000km Howitzer delivers 63-126% the energy per ms as the Umiak MR Type-7 Heavy Plasma Focus.

Again this is made up we don't actually know what duration the beams are but I think 1/20th of a second beam duration is reasonable. We know it is a duration beam style weapon due to this from outsider.

Loroi Pulse Cannon
When the Historians gave the Loroi the plans for a dumbed-down version of their plasma focus, it was still too advanced for the Loroi to copy exactly; they could only get it to work in short bursts. The result was the Loroi pulse cannon, which sends multiple pulses of plasma down the carrier wave to the target; it doesn't do as much damage as the Umiak plasma focus, and the damage is highly variable, but it can do significant damage at much longer ranges. Currently the premier Loroi heavy weapon, the pulse cannon is effective both at overloading defensive screens and at damaging armor.

Howitzer isn't focused over distance but it is concentrated over time, ablative armour and the like is also less effective the quicker the energy is dumped into the target. Assuming 20ms beam duration for one of the best Umiak weapons it does comparable energy over time and over far greater area but for far shorter duration.

hi hi

I'm not sure how the total energy hitting this ship is terribly relevant if it isn't focused.

Do we have some indication that defensive screens are perfectly flat barriers? If not, there's also no reason to assume that they would not absorb the incoming energy over time, probably an exponential curve if it's like most electromagnetic things.

[Mr.Tucker]

Honestly, I think your 85 percent efficiency is grossly optimistic. In such "directed energy" charges, the narrower the cone, the less the efficiency. SDI studies (for weapons that is) ranged from 5% to 10%.
You are also underestimating the fact that part of the energy would be used to shove, rather than heat the target ship. A magnetic screen would also serve to turn more of that speed into heat (stagnant flow effect), while also being flexible (magnetic screens deform like bubble paper, and are unbreakable/immaterial, but, depending on how powerful they are, can effectively be as strong as mild steel; see any article on fusion energy, where they used 20+ Tesla fields; IF they were material they would have an absurd young's modulus). In fact, I suspect that Terran fusion drives use some kind of magneto-inertial-impact fusion, where a blob of fusion material, perhaps wrapped in either plasma or thin lithium foil, is launched at high speed into a specially shaped field, where a combination of eddy current heating and high speed compression cause it to fuse. Presto! Instant torchship, with little radiator needs. We already know terran railguns can reach routinely reach 400kps, so the target speed for impact fusion is only 2.5 times higher (roughly 1000kps; doable probably with more unconventional accelerator designs; though would be limited to large ships, which means small ones like shuttles must still use fission; 'takes notes').
If you wanna see REAL nuclear speculation:
http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/04/nuc ... on-to.html

[Siber]

I get ~50m diameter at 50km with 0.057 beam angle.

Right, I think I got crossed up and thought you were proposing that it was dangerous when the beam was dispersed over a 50km wide area, instead of being detonated at 50km. This comes from the idea that I recall being a starting point but I think we've wandered from, that a cassaba howitzer based firing chamber was a reasonable competitor weapon. If you can get your bombs up within 50km then yes it's probably an effective blast, but as I noted in my last post the combatants apparently already use shaped blasts to extend the kill range of their torpedoes, so it's not a very special trick.

However, in my experience divergence angle in these kinds of contexts is measured as angle from the center of the cone to the outside, not angle from far sides of the cone. That would make this a ~50 meter radius, not diameter. I was not able to find a source for the 0.057 beam divergence CHs that was perfectly explicit on this distinction, so I did my math on what I understand to be the default. So all other things being equal you should be getting intensities four times higher than I am.

However, 314000000m^2 is the area of a 10km radius circle, not a 50km or 25km one.

With a 50km radius area of effect, other assumptions permitted, I end up with the surface of the tempest absorbing a total of 17 points of damage, not 429.

112500m2*1131.53MJ
127237500MJ of energy delivered to the tempest on a top down blast at 50000km
It hits with 15.9 times the energy at 50000km then the Terran GWS.

Perhaps, but you already did the math to what damage is done per square meter, and it's not that impressive. If their shields are any good at deflecting plasma, and the armor any more significantly sophisticated than steel, I wouldn't expect this to be a big deal. This is exacerbated if the impact gets spread out at all along the time axis by the trip, which I expect it might be.

Since we don't know the actual operating principles of their shields and the weapons they are built to repel(I suspect both depend on magnetics that aren't actually possible in reality) then we can't say for certain if this kind of broad slap actually has the same effect as a focused impact.

It's also worth considering that the most optimistic number I was able to find on Atomic Rockets was a jet velocity of 10,000km/s, with most figures being much lower. At the ranges under consideration that gives five seconds(or more, in less optimistic numbers) for the plasma to radiate energy and do other interesting things, as well as time for the target to react with turning and/or burning.

[MBehave]

You know I have no idea how I managed to do that... I even ran numbers twice to make sure...

My understanding.
Beam angle is the total angle measured.
Beam deviation is half the angle taken from the vertical.

I have found divergence being used to mean both but SDI paper states beam angle and then beam divergence so meh.

25000m radius circle(25km) which is 50km has an area of 1.96E9 m2
1960000000
314000000
~6.2 greater area.

At 50000km it will take out shields on pure energy alone(68 damage) which is greater then point blank shot of any of the Combatants plasma weapons.
Actual hull damage is another thing entirely... It will still do damage and still pump in a ton of heat(take out a modern day tank for example) I will assume advanced armour likely can stop most of the effects and only sensors and other stuff would be destroyed since they are soft targets.

At 50000km its going to take down the shields pump in heat and take out sensors and damage turrets to some degree but I am going to assume the ships armour will hold.

All my numbers are applicable for 20000km range not 50000km
Its still respectable weapon compared to the other combatants but not nearly as effective range wise.

You can't use antimatter for a shaped charge with the same degree of cohesion, atom formation by neutrons after an antimatter explosion will dirty your propellant rendering any produced beam irregular. That said Umiak/Loroi do have "carrier waves" and if they generated one for it to travel down then it could be vastly more effective then a Casaba then ship based weapons and be instant kills.

I did however discover something interesting, 5.7295779513082E-7 is the current reached deviation on a particle beam.
Particle beam advances are actually being made rapidly due to research and development of hydrogen injectors for fusion chambers and not weapons research. However due to advances made in collimation of particle beams the USA started this year a new particle weapon development program as its been deemed viable with current technology.

Minimum hydrogen beam deviation is
0.0000030939720937064
so
A particle weapon can have inverse divergence, it actually condenses as it moves if its cooled during focusing. Wouldn't work for a Casaba Howitzer but particle weapons don't need a carrier wave to travel long distances in Outsider. It makes complete sense, cool gasses condense when you think about it but its rather cool(no pun intended) yet very simple idea.

I get ~50m diameter at 50km with 0.057 beam angle.

Right, I think I got crossed up and thought you were proposing that it was dangerous when the beam was dispersed over a 50km wide area, instead of being detonated at 50km. This comes from the idea that I recall being a starting point but I think we've wandered from, that a cassaba howitzer based firing chamber was a reasonable competitor weapon. If you can get your bombs up within 50km then yes it's probably an effective blast, but as I noted in my last post the combatants apparently already use shaped blasts to extend the kill range of their torpedoes, so it's not a very special trick.

However, in my experience divergence angle in these kinds of contexts is measured as angle from the center of the cone to the outside, not angle from far sides of the cone. That would make this a ~50 meter radius, not diameter. I was not able to find a source for the 0.057 beam divergence CHs that was perfectly explicit on this distinction, so I did my math on what I understand to be the default. So all other things being equal you should be getting intensities four times higher than I am.

However, 314000000m^2 is the area of a 10km radius circle, not a 50km or 25km one.

With a 50km radius area of effect, other assumptions permitted, I end up with the surface of the tempest absorbing a total of 17 points of damage, not 429.

Hydrogen is very penetrating and their is no physical way to stop it besides more mass, a modern day tank at 50000km even with the correct numbers would still have the crew cooked.

Yes shields can stop it, but insider states that even if plasma is defected the shields overload due to the energy level of the hit.
Its still delivering more energy at 50000km with the correct numbers against shields then point blank plasma shots.

112500m2*1131.53MJ
127237500MJ of energy delivered to the tempest on a top down blast at 50000km
It hits with 15.9 times the energy at 50000km then the Terran GWS.

Perhaps, but you already did the math to what damage is done per square meter, and it's not that impressive. If their shields are any good at deflecting plasma, and the armor any more significantly sophisticated than steel, I wouldn't expect this to be a big deal. This is exacerbated if the impact gets spread out at all along the time axis by the trip, which I expect it might be.

Since we don't know the actual operating principles of their shields and the weapons they are built to repel(I suspect both depend on magnetics that aren't actually possible in reality) then we can't say for certain if this kind of broad slap actually has the same effect as a focused impact.

It's also worth considering that the most optimistic number I was able to find on Atomic Rockets was a jet velocity of 10,000km/s, with most figures being much lower. At the ranges under consideration that gives five seconds(or more, in less optimistic numbers) for the plasma to radiate energy and do other interesting things, as well as time for the target to react with turning and/or burning.

[MBehave]

Casaba Howitzer has almost no beam divergence.
A secondary laser is used as the waveguide instead of trying to do it all with magnetic fields.

Yep its a real thing

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/space ... /PROCSIMA/

This also makes Arioch "waveguide" technology actually real.
So thats actually really awesome.

[Arioch]

PROCSIMA is not a Casaba howitzer.

[MBehave]

Your right, its only half of a PROCSIMA system(ok its not PROCSIMA at all but the laser waveguide is valid), the other half is the laser array circling the output aperture.

PROCSIMA is not a Casaba howitzer.

[Arioch]

The PROCSIMA concept requires a neutral particle beam. The output of a nuclear shaped charge is a jet of ionized plasma.

[MBehave]

Which has a overall neutral charge, Casaba fusion pumped particle weapon produces quasi neutral plasma.

The PROCSIMA concept requires a neutral particle beam. The output of a nuclear shaped charge is a jet of ionized plasma.

[icekatze]

hi hi

First of all, PROCSIMA is still really hypothetical, and there are a lot of reasons why it might not work.

Second of all, it requires an absolutely neutral charge, not an overall neutral charge. Any transverse interactions between atoms being drawn toward each other by electromagnetism would ruin the hypothetical effect.

[MBehave]

All neutral plasma is "quasi neutral" the laser would effect a Casaba Howitzer beam in this regard just fine.
I got a second opinion.
Gradient pressure isn't theory, you can pick up a speck of graphite from a pencil with a decent laser pointer at home.

hi hi

First of all, PROCSIMA is still really hypothetical, and there are a lot of reasons why it might not work.

Second of all, it requires an absolutely neutral charge, not an overall neutral charge. Any transverse interactions between atoms being drawn toward each other by electromagnetism would ruin the hypothetical effect.

[Mjolnir]

All neutral plasma is "quasi neutral" the laser would effect a Casaba Howitzer beam in this regard just fine.
I got a second opinion.
Gradient pressure isn't theory, you can pick up a speck of graphite from a pencil with a decent laser pointer at home.

Quasi-neutral or not, the interaction of plasma with light is very different from that of neutral atoms. What you want is an extremely uniform column of cold neutral atoms extending from your beam generator to the target with a very narrow distribution of particle velocities. The idea is to shine a laser down through the entire column, so you don't actually want much matter in it.

What the Casaba Howitzer gives you is a more or less directional blast of vaporized and mostly-ionized bomb material that is likely to also vaporize your laser source, making the fact that it's largely opaque to electromagnetic radiation fairly irrelevant.

Edit: also, you're going to need more than a laser pointer to levitate anything. You're going to need both a couple orders of magnitude more power and a laser source of sufficient quality to be focused to a tiny area. Since you mention graphite, you're probably thinking of optical manipulation of magnetically levitated graphite.

[icekatze]

hi hi

Gradient pressure isn't theory...

Could you maybe unpack this a little bit? I don't know of any Law of Gradient Pressure. Are you talking about Newton's Second Law of Motion, Pascal's Law, or maybe the Ideal Gas Law? Why does it matter if there is a theory behind it or not?

Also, if you're talking about optical levitation, you want a transparent, dielectric material, not graphite. And you're going to want at least 1 Watt for a 50 micrometer diameter sphere. Laser pointers are generally 5 milliwatts or weaker.

[MBehave]

Youtube has quite a few laser levitation videos using cheap laser systems at home.

From dust to graphite from a pencil to tiny diamonds.
Sprinkle the tiny dust/lint/graphite particles through the beam and some will get trapped and you can move the laser around with them trapped inside. If you can modify the focus you can move the particle up and down the beam.

I thought it was same method as optical tweezers using gradient of force.

The argument was the beam had to be true neutral for a laser to be coupled with it.
It does not.
It also does not need to be cold.
The beam does need to be monoenergetic, the hydrogen particles having like energy level.

Which is a hurdle for a Casaba and I was told pretty much impossible.

The fact its happening in a firechamber and the beam is getting processed means its not out of the question IF the technology for the magnetic fields is there. Which has been my premise all along, the magnetic field strength for the Terran railguns is of such power using a firing chamber to collimate the beam shouldn't be impossible.

200kg to 400km/s almost 4 megatons over very small surface area and a length of 10m or so.
Such a weapon isn't possible, but it is in outsider so jumping on that technology as a basis I am saying the Ship mounted Casaba Howitzer is possible in this regard.


Ok
I didn't work this out Matterbeam at ToughSF did.

400km/s in 10m is an average acceleration of 8000000000 m/s^2. Acting on 200kg, that's a force of 1.6 teraNewtons. If the projectile is 10cm wide at the base, the magnetic pressure could be the equivalent of 2e14 Pa, or 203 teraPascals.
It is hard to give an atomic bomb a 'pressure' in space, but in general terms you will need about 1 Pa to contain 1 joule in 1 cubic meter. Therefore, 2e14 Pa can contain the yield of 47.8 kT inside 1m^3.

A firing chamber 20m across can contain 100mt fusion reaction easily using the same level of technology behind the Terran Railguns.
So the only technological hurdle left working out if its possible to process the hydrogen beam to be monoenergetic.

icekatze
Laser beam with a differing intensity between the core and the edge has a gradient of force when that beam interacts with particles.

All neutral plasma is "quasi neutral" the laser would effect a Casaba Howitzer beam in this regard just fine.
I got a second opinion.
Gradient pressure isn't theory, you can pick up a speck of graphite from a pencil with a decent laser pointer at home.

Quasi-neutral or not, the interaction of plasma with light is very different from that of neutral atoms. What you want is an extremely uniform column of cold neutral atoms extending from your beam generator to the target with a very narrow distribution of particle velocities. The idea is to shine a laser down through the entire column, so you don't actually want much matter in it.

What the Casaba Howitzer gives you is a more or less directional blast of vaporized and mostly-ionized bomb material that is likely to also vaporize your laser source, making the fact that it's largely opaque to electromagnetic radiation fairly irrelevant.

Edit: also, you're going to need more than a laser pointer to levitate anything. You're going to need both a couple orders of magnitude more power and a laser source of sufficient quality to be focused to a tiny area. Since you mention graphite, you're probably thinking of optical manipulation of magnetically levitated graphite.

[Mjolnir]

Any optical tweezer demos done with low power lasers are using lasers that are still many times more powerful than a laser pointer, and manipulating particles suspended in a fluid, using thermal effects on the liquid or air surrounding the particles. It should be obvious why this wouldn't work on gas particles in a vacuum.

The beam has to be neutral particles. Being neutral overall is not sufficient. The problem with plasma isn't that it doesn't interact with light, it'll interact quite well, and you won't get your focused beam, you'll just get some hotter and faster expanding plasma. It also absolutely does have to be cold. The confining effect of the laser is not strong, and if the molecules are moving too quickly they will escape. They also need to occupy a very narrow range of velocities in terms of overall beam motion, or they will collide with each other, convert the motion to heat, and escape. Additionally, doppler effects will change how the beam interacts with the particles. You want something as close as possible to a bunch of particles flying in formation to the target.

Ionized hydrogen consists of free electrons and protons. The whole concept of energy levels only applies to bound systems...neutral hydrogen.

You need a continuous beam of transparent, extremely uniform, cold, high and very consistent energy, neutral gas of sufficiently low density that a laser can travel along the length of the entire beam to the target with little attenuation. A nuclear device is not a reasonable approach to generating such a beam.

And as icekatze said, it's not clear how workable PROCSIMA actually is. The system seems certain to be unstable at best. Basic conservation of momentum makes a strong argument that you can't keep deflecting both neutral atoms and photons near the edge of the beam inward to keep the beam collimated.

[Mjolnir]

A firing chamber 20m across can contain 100mt fusion reaction easily using the same level of technology behind the Terran Railguns.

Accelerating a couple hundred kg of inert projectile is nothing at all like confining a detonating thermonuclear weapon in a chamber tens of meters across. How can you suggest the two are anything like equivalent?

So the only technological hurdle left working out if its possible to process the hydrogen beam to be monoenergetic.

And all the other stuff. Oh, and justifying such a mechanism for generating cold, uniform neutral particle beams when there's got to be about a billion more suitable approaches.

[MBehave]

The peak field strengths required ARE alike, or actually less for the fusion chamber.

A firing chamber 20m across can contain 100mt fusion reaction easily using the same level of technology behind the Terran Railguns.

Accelerating a couple hundred kg of inert projectile is nothing at all like confining a detonating thermonuclear weapon in a chamber tens of meters across. How can you suggest the two are anything like equivalent?

So the only technological hurdle left working out if its possible to process the hydrogen beam to be monoenergetic.

And all the other stuff. Oh, and justifying such a mechanism for generating cold, uniform neutral particle beams when there's got to be about a billion more suitable approaches.