Rigel Stardin
SOC-13
Let say, an enemy 100 Ton Scout is caught with no way to escape. The race is known to be suicidal in these situation. So they detonate their reactor. What would be the yield in Kilotons?
General Hypothetical: Detonating your reactor.
- Thread starter Rigel Stardin
- Start date
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 5K
Rigel Stardin
SOC-13
I'll throw this one in as well:
Turning on the Jump Drive within the gravity well of a planet.
In MTU doing this with a Hyperspace Generator cause this much damage: F=DC squared. Or Force=Displacement times the speed of the Constant squared. 100 x speed of light squared. 0r 37,200,000 damage in hull points. Deep enough into the Gravity Well and you can crack the mantle of a planet and cause earthquake planet wide. Add in the velocity you were traveling at towards a planet and you could be a planet killer.
It also adds another damage to Misjumps and gives the players a darn good reason to do Annual Maintenance.
My three options for Misjumps are:
1. The Hyperspace Generator is burned out and is turned into a lump of metal.
2. You are thrown 3 times your Range with major damage to the Generator. (Or whatever the plot requires.)
3. Finally, the field collapses and you become a 1 meter sphere weighing 100 Tons. (Hull size divide by 100.)
Turning on the Jump Drive within the gravity well of a planet.
In MTU doing this with a Hyperspace Generator cause this much damage: F=DC squared. Or Force=Displacement times the speed of the Constant squared. 100 x speed of light squared. 0r 37,200,000 damage in hull points. Deep enough into the Gravity Well and you can crack the mantle of a planet and cause earthquake planet wide. Add in the velocity you were traveling at towards a planet and you could be a planet killer.
It also adds another damage to Misjumps and gives the players a darn good reason to do Annual Maintenance.
My three options for Misjumps are:
1. The Hyperspace Generator is burned out and is turned into a lump of metal.
2. You are thrown 3 times your Range with major damage to the Generator. (Or whatever the plot requires.)
3. Finally, the field collapses and you become a 1 meter sphere weighing 100 Tons. (Hull size divide by 100.)
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
1. Science fiction trope has the magnetic bottle failing in the fusion reactor.
2. If this works, kilotonnes could be per power point.
3. Jump drive would be equivalent to black globe, considering that the energy is within the capacitors.
4. So deliberately activate/overload the capacitors, without jumping?
5. I don't think a misjump by itself would create the conditions for a massive explosion, externally, since I don't think the opening up of the transition point of hyperspace reacts that way with the normal universe.
2. If this works, kilotonnes could be per power point.
3. Jump drive would be equivalent to black globe, considering that the energy is within the capacitors.
4. So deliberately activate/overload the capacitors, without jumping?
5. I don't think a misjump by itself would create the conditions for a massive explosion, externally, since I don't think the opening up of the transition point of hyperspace reacts that way with the normal universe.
Rigel Stardin
SOC-13
I'll add a Fourth then 
.
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kilemall
SOC-14 5K
Problems with reactor or capacitor overload self destruct are the possibility that either system gets disabled before setup/detonation, and it will have a chance of not destroying intel assets like computers/data storage, advanced weapons/engineering and key crew.
A truly militant society will have self destruct systems composed primarily of nuclear scuttling charges. In the most hardcore navies, they will be built into the ship and hard to get to.
The charges would be placed primarily to destroy computers, bridges, high tech weapons, engineering and secondarily to break up hulls to prevent enemy reuse.
This suggests that a major precursor to successful capture is to get a boarding support vessel with a nuclear damper in very close to disable nuclear scuttling.
A truly militant society will have self destruct systems composed primarily of nuclear scuttling charges. In the most hardcore navies, they will be built into the ship and hard to get to.
The charges would be placed primarily to destroy computers, bridges, high tech weapons, engineering and secondarily to break up hulls to prevent enemy reuse.
This suggests that a major precursor to successful capture is to get a boarding support vessel with a nuclear damper in very close to disable nuclear scuttling.
What suggests that a fusion reactor can "detonate"?
What suggests that the reaction will sustain as anything explosive once the containment field (however manifest) is removed or damaged?
Can it cause a fire? Perhaps. A plasma escaping the bad containment field? Maybe. But is it a dual use power plant/H-bomb? I don't think so. I think the mechanics and conditions for nuclear fusion explosion and fusion reactor are quite different.
So.
0 Kilotons.
I think it would just be a bunch of sparks and fire that's short lived.
What suggests that the reaction will sustain as anything explosive once the containment field (however manifest) is removed or damaged?
Can it cause a fire? Perhaps. A plasma escaping the bad containment field? Maybe. But is it a dual use power plant/H-bomb? I don't think so. I think the mechanics and conditions for nuclear fusion explosion and fusion reactor are quite different.
So.
0 Kilotons.
I think it would just be a bunch of sparks and fire that's short lived.
Enoki
SOC-14 1K
Likely, zero. Reactors are really hard to detonate. Every known design of a fusion reactor is impossible to detonate.
It'd be easier to gut the ship with a hydrogen fire started after releasing the fuel into the ship.
Agreed. The minute the containment drops, the expanding plasma would cool off and the thermonucler reaction would shut down. You might have a nice thermal explosion in the engine room, though.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Fusion reactors do not explode.
The best you could do would be to release the fusion plasma from its containment which would give you a number of EP equal to the power plant rating.
A 100t scout has a 2EP reactor - so you release 500MJ - about the explosive equivalent of 125kg of TNT.
You would be better off charging your jump capacitors then 'detonating' them...
The best you could do would be to release the fusion plasma from its containment which would give you a number of EP equal to the power plant rating.
A 100t scout has a 2EP reactor - so you release 500MJ - about the explosive equivalent of 125kg of TNT.
You would be better off charging your jump capacitors then 'detonating' them...
Rigel Stardin
SOC-13
Ok, so you can't detonate the power plant. Bummer. We have to go back to the old self-destruct charges.
I still think activating you Jump drive deep in a gravity well is going to do a heck of allot of damage. Why else is there a hundred diameter safety zone around a planet?
I still think activating you Jump drive deep in a gravity well is going to do a heck of allot of damage. Why else is there a hundred diameter safety zone around a planet?
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 5K
Fusion power plant detonation ... not so much.
Anti-matter power plant detonation ... um ...
Anti-matter power plant detonation ... um ...
Assuming it's a fusion reaction, not much. The reactor melts when you exceed containment. Maybe you flash fry engineering. You're not going to get a supercritical mass. Period. It'll melt before it can.
Fission? Assuming TL8+ reactors, again, not much, as they're most likely to be coolant-enabled/moderator-enabled reactors, not moderator disabled ones of TL 6 and 7. You boil off the coolant, and it's just sitting there producing a slow source of steady radiation without a boom.
TL6 to 7 moderator disabled? you don't get a boom. You get a runaway melt, the power goes out, and then it sits there melting engineering. If you had filled engineering with water, you might get a decent steam explosion.
Antimatter? The moment containment is off, it goes BANG!!! Engineering goes to pieces (literally) as the 9E16 J/kg liberates... 4.8E15 is 1 megaton...
so 1g is roughly 20 megaton. Unless they're within a couple thousand km, not much is going to happen to the enemy.
(Starfish Prime wiped out some sats at 2000km, at ~1.5 MT. Doing the math, 1g is 18.75 MT, Starfish was 1.4 MT, so 1kg is 13.393× SP. SO 3.66×SP's knockout range. SP knocked out unshielded electronics within about 1500km, including in orbit. So, 1 kg of Antimatter is about 5500 km EMP radius... not going to do much to a ship at the 10 to 30 Mm ranges of 1 grid in most Traveller space combat modes. It WILL blind sensors momentarily.... out to a couple hexes, but only the facing ones.
(Yeah, I'm letting realism spoil a good story...)
Bottom Line TLDR: Your suicide bombers die, the enemy gets a laugh at their expense, and life goes on, safer from the extremist nutjobs.
There's nothing to suggest that "real space" even notices a mis-jump. The ship winks out, and gets torn apart or flung to who knows where or to which jump plane when it enters jump space, but other than that, "outside", there's just the jump flash.
GypsyComet
SOC-14 1K
Safety zone?
Officially, that's just the physics of jump space. You can't stay in jump space as you approach a mass like a planet, and entering jump space within that horizon produces unpredictable and usually bad results.
I think DGP may have given some effects for jumping from inside the jump horizon, but they're mostly for the ship itself. Effects on the area around the ship, like the air around a flying ship or the landing area if it tries from the ground, are probably akin to an implosion as the mass in the center vanishes. Maybe a bad end for the poor ground crew dude taking a nap in the shade of the ship, and you might lose the hover-jeep parked nearby and crater the immediate tarmac, but it's not going to shake the buildings a kilometer away.
IMO (and IMTU) the Jump Bubble seals off a pocket of "normal space" from the rest of the universe, then the Jump Drive kicks it out of the rest of the universe into some higher-order dimension. This leaves an absence of "normal space" where the Jump Bubble was. This isn't simply a vacuum, it's a hole in spacetime. The edges of that hole will instantaneously converge to a point at the center, dragging whatever matter is on the boundary with them -- and all of that that matter will attempt to occupy the center point simultaneously*. High energy physics ensue.
Normally this is done in a vacuum, so the effects of the occasional stray hydrogen atom or electron get lost in the Jump Flash.
Another interpretation is that some portion of the energy generated/used by the Jump Drive (the full 36EP/Td capacity of the Jump Capacitors, not just the 2EP*Jn*100Td to trigger Jump) is transferred to the surrounding environment.
----------------------------
* Spacetime near, but not actually at, the boundary is dragged/stretched to fill in the gap. The effects are hard to evaluate after the fact, since anything solid close enough to be affected and measured probably won't be solid an instant later...
Normally this is done in a vacuum, so the effects of the occasional stray hydrogen atom or electron get lost in the Jump Flash.
Another interpretation is that some portion of the energy generated/used by the Jump Drive (the full 36EP/Td capacity of the Jump Capacitors, not just the 2EP*Jn*100Td to trigger Jump) is transferred to the surrounding environment.
----------------------------
* Spacetime near, but not actually at, the boundary is dragged/stretched to fill in the gap. The effects are hard to evaluate after the fact, since anything solid close enough to be affected and measured probably won't be solid an instant later...
It can't be supercritical anyhow. The only thing keeping the reaction going is that it's contained. The yield is the instantaneous power output of the reactor, at most. Treat it as an fusion gun battery hit to the drives -- battery rating equivalent to however many fusion guns the power plant could support, break it into multiple batteries if the rating exceeds 9. Expect size crits. Won't do anything much beyond "contact" range.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
A bit of research shows my EP to damage calculation above is the equivalent of setting off a mk 81bomb in the engineering compartmet - scout ship go boom.
en.wikipedia.org
Now if you fully charge the jump capacitors and then release that energy explosively you get 36 EPs released instantly - a 1.6kt equivalent explosion.
Mark 81 bomb - Wikipedia
Now if you fully charge the jump capacitors and then release that energy explosively you get 36 EPs released instantly - a 1.6kt equivalent explosion.
on a space combat range, 1kT isn't even noticed outside the ship falling apart...A bit of research shows my EP to damage calculation above is the equivalent of setting off a mk 81bomb in the engineering compartmet - scout ship go boom.
Mark 81 bomb - Wikipedia
Now if you fully charge the jump capacitors and then release that energy explosively you get 36 EPs released instantly - a 1.6kt equivalent explosion.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Correct, but does explain the ship explodes critical affect.
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