this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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As far as I know, the big damage from Nuclear Weapons planetside is the massive blastwave that can pretty much scour the earth, with radiation and thermal damage bringing up the rear.

But in space there is no atmosphere to create a huge concussive and scouring blast wave, which means a nuclear weapon would have to rely on its all-directional thermal and radiation to do damage.. but is that enough to actually be usful as a weapon in space, considering ships in space would be designed to handle radiation and extreme thermals due to the lack of any insulative atmosphere?

I know a lot of this might be supposition based on imaginary future tech and assumptions made about materials science and starship creation, but surely at least some rough guess could be made with regards to a thernonuclear detonation without the focusing effects of an atmosphere?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

The shock wave needs a medium (air) to travel through. So if the bomb was touching a ship, it would certainly transfer kinetic energy, but if there was any space (not air) between them, there is still no shockwave for the ship to feel.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

A railgun would be far more effective for transfering kinetic energy and it's munitions would likely be cheaper

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

How about a railgun with a nuclear payload? Breach the hull and the nuke would work again

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (2 children)

With a hull breach the atmosphere within leaks out and I doubt there would be enough oxygen in the ship to really help with detonation. Maybe some self sealing projectile with a nuclear tip but really any traditional explosive would work fine in that case as the ship would act as a sealed canister

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I think you overestimate how fast the atmosphere would leak out, or underestimate how fast a nuclear blast goes off. You could detonate the nuke before air really has a chance to start leaving behind the wake of the projectile moving at Mach 12 or whatever. The hole left behind i don't think would change how the explosion worked inside the ship.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I doubt there would be enough oxygen in the ship to really help with detonation.

How would oxygen help with a nuclear detonation?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

A shockwave can travel along the solid structure itself as the medium. Any ship that is actually directly hit would be vaporized. It's just the whole point of nuke is not needing a direct hit. I doubt any realistic space vessel with anything even remotely similar to plausible near future technology could survive a direct hit from even a moderately sized conventional explosive.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, it takes incredible amounts of energy just to move unarmored ships slowly around our own solar system.

Seems like adding armor would make them so heavy and slow that they wouldn't be worth using.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Yeah that's why any reasonable hard sci-fi has to rely on highly advanced fusion or speculative energy technologies