Damage scale of warheads and missiles and nuclear weapons

[Mork2]

I've just been reading a few threads about warheads and making of logic controlled torpedo system. I was thinking of making a extreme range bombardment system for my titan. I've also been reading a lot of comments about small ships using the equivalent of nuclear weapons to blow up titan class vessels. Then I did a bit of thinking and even though this isn't a realistic type game like "space engineers", are we in theory with starmade already using nuclear warheads in starmade or atleast small ones.

When you get down to it one armour block is a metre on a side. While there is many things that can with difficultly punch a small hole though a 1meter of steel armour there isn't much short of small nuclear weapons (equal to hundreds of tonnes of TNT) that can blow large holes though or cave in a metre of armour in space with no atmosphere, let alone a couple metres of armour. Without atmosphere a lot of the explosive force is not transmitted by shockwaves. Also I find it unlikely that the building materials for armour would be limited to steel. Currently the world is researching the area of nano materials and meta materials. Currently a metre thick of the armour used on the latest battle tanks M1A abrams or equivalent, would be extremely difficult for even the hole punching weapons to get through.

So in a way you can say were already launching nuclear weapons at each other with missiles in starmade. The cannons would be railguns to get that kind of penetration or something else.

Even in atmosphere large amounts of armour does make a difference. The larger battleships at the end of world war 2 had (my original post was in error thanks Vilab for the correction) 24 inches or 300mm armour in is main waterline belt armour. The armour varied around it but I forget the name the sister ship to the battleship Yamamoto took 30 plus torpedoes hits on one side and a few more on the other and 30 bomb hits to sink. 1metre of armour is around 40inches... over 3 times the thickness of world war 2 mass produced steel, and its not like you have to worry about sinking in space.

This idea kinda breaks when you hit things on a planet surface which has atmosphere and is really small....

Just an opinion since this is a made up sci-fi game you can make your own reasons for whatever config changes you want.

For instance the other way around warheads could be large scale antimatter bombs which is why it blows up when hit or collides with something and explains the massive damage level....

 

[Beld]

I don't mean to be rude, but I read your post twice and i'm stilling wondering if you had a point or not.

 

[shadowulf]

OK, comparing this to the real world is not ideal, but I think I understand what you're trying to say. Weapons in StarMade are massive because of the bulky block system. Their power is akin to wmd's of Earth. While true, I don't understand the point you're trying to make.

Is it warheads should be given more power, because if so that's a can of worms. People will argue its a griefers tool, and others will say it balances fighter vs titan then people will say a titan shouldn't be touched by a fighter etc etc etc.

Personally, your last paragraph is a bit confusing, maybe reword it?

 

[<SCRIPTKITTY>]

I think the point of this is that starmade has a scale that is ridiculous and often people that play the game tend to forget this.
For someone (like me) that is not very aquatinted with military weapons and their effectiveness this is something that's not been obvious to me until now. But a ship that's 500m long (I think the longest naval ship is 282m correct me if I'm wrong) being considered small is just as crazy as the weapons in terms of military might today . The best part of this thread tho is it's not like he's saying any of this is wrong just trying to give people a perspective of the weapons of mass destruction they are piloting

 

[shadowulf]

Why include warheads is what I'm wondering. Yes, missiles can be compared to tactical nukes, and cannons probably act just like rail guns, and beams are gigawatt or more lasers. Warheads at this point are more akin to a 1000-lb bomb. Their damage is trivial compared to other weapons, but not in Earth standards.

 

[Comr4de]

The ship was named the Kongo, by the way.

 

[Mork2]

Thank you Comr4de.

I'm not very good at writing things up and I have a tendency to disjointedly ramble on.

But yes its to point out using 1metre armour blocks as a scale in starmade, we are throwing around a lot of weapons that would be considered small to large nuclear level when you consider there is no atmosphere. Of course this is assuming a sci-fi computer game is being completely realistic which is obviously false.

The post was meant to provide people with some arguments they can use for and against for things in the game or config changes, if they wanted to bother arguing.

The second idea in the post was to give people an idea of just how tough some of this stuff is when scaled up for armour and some of the implications of the scale of large ships. Also to acquaint people with some real world weapon issues, just for your information.

I'm a big ship kinda of pilot and I see a lot of posts about how small fighters should be able to blow up titans cause you can carry nuclear weapons. I'm just pointing out that you could argue (fictional game and all) that we are already using nuclear scale weapons in the game.

Warheads config settings and scale argument
I was also reading some posts about some people changing their server configs to make warheads do a base 500k damage. Allowing you with logic and push effect to make unguided torpedoes that are massively damaging one shot weapons. Especially dangerous as it ignores shields. Depending on who is arguing for or against you could say that the warheads could keep their default damage as all the weapons being fired are nuclear already, though they would have the advantage of ignoring shields. An argument for setting the damage to 500k is that they are anti matter bombs which would explain why they do so much more damage and are easy to set off. I actually like the idea of torpedoes though I'm looking at it for extreme range bombardment launched from a large ship.

Large ship scaling
For example a 1080m spaceship compared to the largest US WW2 battleships 50,000tonnes and 270m long. If you were to build it 1080m long seabourne battleship it would have a mass of 320,000 tones. length is multiplied by 4 then the mass and volume is cubed roughly to 64 times. Note armour thickness increase for that would be roughly 4 times thickness as well included in that mass increase. For a 1080m battleship that would be from 300mm to 1200mm of armour (My original post was wrong thanks Vilab). You would probably need a low kiloton range nuclear warhead to disable it with a single hit. considering armour and the shear size.

Spaceships compared to water vessel armour
Spaceships in general can have thicker armour than a water vessel. The WW2 battleship has to float on water, that limits the density of the ship. As a space craft you can just pile the weight on. Armour is very heavy and doesn't take up a lot of volume. Iron is roughly 8 tonnes a cubic metre. Some metals hit over 25 tonnes/m3. The only limits being what acceleration you want to have for your engines and what your structure can take for the stress of moving at that acceleration.

Then change the armour to modern composites and structural design and these things get absolutely ridiculously tough.

Why you don't use anti-tank weapons against large ships
There are a lot of anti-tank weapons that can punch though 600mm of steel. At this point its probably even man portable with that penetration. But they don't do a large scale damage on the inside. For a battle tank they do, because the inside is very small and you only need to kill the couple people inside or set the fuel on fire or detonate the ammo. But you don't generally use anti-tank type weapons against a large vessels. Its like using a sewing needle against a person. Yes it will punch though my skin and hurt. But there is a lot of places you can hit someone with a sewing needle and they will survive. If you get hit with a pile of them your could be in trouble though.

Future warfare technology reference
If you want to check out the scale of nuclear weapons and various armour types etc I would recommend checking out some of the Traveller RPG game stuff particularly around the Traveller New Era or T4 series. For a hard sci-fi roleplaying game that has a lot of material on warfare, the implications of various technologies and its ramifications of how it would effect warfare is well thought out.

Just hoping this post is an interesting read for someone.

 

[Vilab]

Mork 2 : "Even in atmosphere large amounts of armour does make a difference. The larger battleships at the end of world war 2 had 12 inches or 150mm armour in is main waterline belt armour. The armour varied around it but I forget the name the sister ship to the battleship Yamamoto took 30 plus torpedoes hits on one side and a few more on the other and 30 bomb hits to sink. 1metre of armour is around 40inches... over 3 times the thickness of world war 2 mass produced steel, and its not like you have to worry about sinking in space."

The ship was named the Kongo, by the way.

well, most of WW2 battleship had a max armor thickness of around 300mm ( just above/under the waterline, and also on the front of the main turrets )

the Kongo was a rather old batleship built during/just after WW1.
the sister ship of the Yamato ( which took a dozen torpedos ) was the Mushashi, this is the one which was hit by lot of impacts.


slightly more in topic : the nuclear weapons doesn't only destroy by "explosive forces", but rely a lot on heat ( enough to melt-down any steel based armor ).

 

[Comr4de]

Ah, fuck me you're right. Blame sleep deprivation.

 

[shadowulf]

Thick armor isn't just what is used though. Currently there are ablative and reactive type armors that would decrease the amount of armor needed to allow room for further weapons. Reactive armor(explosive detonation to fight RPGs) and ablative armor( shatters on impact to dispell kinetic/explosive impacts) will fall to rail guns, though. And yes, there were armor thicknesses of up to 19.7 in (500mm) in wwII, but only at strategic/survival points

 

[Keptick]

In space it'd be more about melting away the enemy's armor rather than punching a hole through it. Better armor is heavier, so it can absorb more energy before breaking. The old damage textures had an orange tint, which looked like melted metal (I liked it better than what we have now tbh). Having thicker armor means that it'll take more energy to overheat/destroy it.

That's the way I see it :p

Longest modern ship is a 458m long oil tanker btw.

 

[Zaphord]

The ship was named the Kongo, by the way.

Kongo was the class of ship, Yamato was one of the ships of that class.

Similar to how the USS John F Kenedy is part of the Nimitz class aircraft carrier.

 

[BDLS]

I always imagined starmade armor blocks as being a frame cube with plating on all sides, not 1 block being completely solid metal (except maybe advanced armor)

 

[Mork2]

Yeah my post about battleship armour thickness was out by a bit to say the least. I'll update the previous post. The main armour belts along the waterline to stop torpedoes was 300mm. If I remember right there was usually a couple inch outer plate then an air gap then the main armour belt.

The thickest armour was usually located on the front of the main turrets and yeah around 500mm there. I'm also guessing that they would have the some fairly thick armour around the main shell magazines as they couldn't afford to have anything penetrate into there.

In current military designs you can't afford to be well protected everywhere with armour. So what you end up doing is protecting critical areas and where your more likely to be attacked from.

For example I put the thickest armour to the front of a capital ship since you tend to face your opponents. I've put an armoured block around the core block. Since hitting the core doesn't kill the ship anymore the purpose of that armour block is to protect you when you get ejected from the core at 50% system damage. This gives you a chance to run to an escape pod to get away. I also have a tendency to put advanced armour on small turrets. After the main ship shields are under 50% the advanced armour can absorb some small hits and keep the turret functioning.

All the basic hull blocks also contribute to your overall armour HP as well.

One of the Honor Harrington series of books by David Webber had one part of a book devoted to armour design, basic materials and cost implications. You end up putting the heaviest armour around anything critical to the ships survival and some areas get very thin because you don't need that section to survive. Also generally you can't use the best armour type cause its to prohibitively expensive to make a ships armour out of that. Unless there was some reason you could ignore the cost implications you would have to go with an armour type which is not to expensive and easier to manufacture in large amounts.

 

[Tunk]

On the multiple torpedo note, many ships of the time had bulge or blister armour.
A ablative buldge below the waterline to prematurely detonate and absorb torpedoes damage.

Equiv is starmade is spaced armour.

 

[sayerulz]

In space it'd be more about melting away the enemy's armor rather than punching a hole through it. Better armor is heavier, so it can absorb more energy before breaking. The old damage textures had an orange tint, which looked like melted metal (I liked it better than what we have now tbh). Having thicker armor means that it'll take more energy to overheat/destroy it.

That's the way I see it :p

Longest modern ship is a 458m long oil tanker btw.

The orange tint did look cool, untill it had been days since the thing was shot and it was STILL glowing orange.... Perhaps if they could make it fade over time....