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?
DontTreadOnBigfoot@lemmy.world 11 months ago
NASA paper on this very subject
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I spent 20 minutes searching for an answer to this, and all my searches turned up nothing but video games and short stories.
Appreciate you posting that, and honestly a little frustrated on why that didnt come up for me.
GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip 11 months ago
Web search has gotten so bad, I hate it
Ziggurat@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
For the fun fact, shockwave do propagate in the interstellarmedium. Most likely a conventionnal nuke isn’t big enough, but we can see the shockwave from supernova explosion, and voyager did measure the moment it left the sun one.
Radiation may be another beast with a well designed bomb, it’s pretty hard to stop neutrons, and they do a lot of biological damage. However, radiation poisoning isn’t an instant dead. Like shoot a nuke, leave. Come back 2 weeks latter and everyone is dying. Radiation could definitely damage electronic but I would assume spaceship designer worked properly, and the humam will be poisonned before the electronic starts to fail. A note though. The 1/r^2 law would still apply and space is huge. Being 1km out of the explosion divides the dose by 100 compared to being 100m away. 10 km away would divide the dose by 10 000. So the death radius won’t be that big.
GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Okay, but now we’re comparing nukes and supernovae, and that’s kind of like comparing the erosion of a drop of water to that caused by a tsunami. Sure, the same forces may be at work, but they’re small enough to be negligible in one.
bouh@lemmy.world 11 months ago
With a heavy dose of radiation you are sick extremely fast, and dead soon after. You may survive for some hours if you have medical care.
If the bomb explode next to the ship, the ship will need solid protection for people to survive.
mojofrododojo@lemmy.world 11 months ago
And EMP effects. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
Anarch157a@lemmy.world 11 months ago
That’s because it detonated in orbit, so it interacted with Earth magnetic field. Far from the planet, I think there wouldn’t be an EMP, unless the targeted ship has it’s own magnetosphere. But I’m not a nuclear physicist, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
EmoDuck@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Follow up question. If I build a giant vacuum chamber on earth and ignited a nuke in the middle of it, what would happen to the blast?
Would the chamber just explode with the full power of the nuke or would it remain unharmed (save for debris of the nuke itself)?
Silentiea@lemm.ee 11 months ago
All the radiation that normally heats up the surrounding air into a giant fireball would heat up the walls of your vacuum chamber into a giant fireball.
mojofrododojo@lemmy.world 11 months ago
this is vapor fyi. the nuke and whatever was immediately around it are atomized, literally.
iAvicenna@lemmy.world 11 months ago
scratch all this if the missile explodes right in the middle of your bridge
ramble81@lemm.ee 11 months ago
What about the EMP component of it?
General_Shenanigans@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The massive EMPs that blasted the Pacific back in the day were generated with upper-atmospheric testing. The way it interacted with the upper atmosphere was special. If you set off the charge higher in space with no atmosphere, the EMP effect is lessened.
Bipta@kbin.social 11 months ago
That's one type of radiation it releases.
rambaroo@lemmy.world 11 months ago
That’s true in a vacuum, but a weapon would presumably detonate on the surface of a hostile ship, in which case the ship goes bye-bye.
Good_morning@lemmynsfw.com 11 months ago
So, that’s how we get the fantastic four