Would Nuclear Weapons be as destructive in ship to ship space combat, as they are on the ground in an atmosphere?
Would Nuclear Weapons be as destructive in ship to ship space combat, as they are on the ground in an atmosphere?
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?
From a NASA paper on this very subject:
If a nuclear weapon is exploded in a vacuum-i. e., in space-the complexion of weapon effects changes drastically:
First, in the absence of an atmosphere, blast disappears completely.
Second, thermal radiation, as usually defined, also disappears. There is no longer any air for the blast wave to heat and much higher frequency radiation is emitted from the weapon itself.
Third, in the absence of the atmosphere, nuclear radiation will suffer no physical attenuation and the only degradation in intensity will arise from reduction with distance. As a result the range of significant dosages will be many times greater than is the case at sea level.
Sounds like you'd end up with just a big blast of radiation
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.
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.
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.
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)?
And EMP effects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
What about the EMP component of it?
scratch all this if the missile explodes right in the middle of your bridge
That's true in a vacuum, but a weapon would presumably detonate on the surface or inside of a hostile ship, in which case the ship goes bye-bye.
So, that's how we get the fantastic four
Others have answered you question about non-directed nuclear blasts in space already. They don't work the same way as in atmosphere; lack the blast or the thermal heat, etc. Enter the Casaba-Howitzer, a theoretical nuclear shaped charge that shoots a directed plasma stream at near light speed. This idea came about in the 60s along with nuclear blast propulsion.
The name comes from the casaba melon, a variety of honeydew, because the lab was "on a melon kick that year," naming various projects after melons and having already used up all the good ones.
I can appreciate that sort of naming convention.
Its a good way to prevent bikeshedding. Which yes is a real thing.
Yamato cannon operational
Patching you in.
ah, you beat me to it
To everyone else ☝️ Kurzgesagt made a good video about nuking the moon which fits pretty well with ops question. The moon has no atmosphere to speak of and the video explores the effect on terrain
Thank you. I enjoyed it so much, that I purchased their Universe in a Nutshell app!
Question is already answered, but. The BSG miniseries has a good nuke scene which is actually pretty reasonable: https://youtu.be/R-L4tVksGYc
Atomic Rockets has a whole page for this
https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php
If you made direct impact wouldn't the fuselage of the ship and the atmosphere inside it still allow for the traditional blast to propagate?
I think so. I don't think the bomb directly generates a shockwave, but rather the shockwave is generated by air being superheated which causes a pressure spike. All of the energy that would superheat air would still be present even if the bomb was activated in space, it would just be acting on the first thing it touches ie. the hull of the ship. Does vaporized metal still increase in pressure as temperature increases? I'm guessing it does, which should produce a shockwave. But idk, I'm not a doctor
The electromagnetic pulse may not cause physical destruction, but it would likely disable any spacecraft in the blast. Which could result in death and destruction when the passengers can't breathe or get warmth and the craft loses control.
Wouldn't a spacecraft have a Faraday cage anyway, to protect the electronics from stellar winds?
That might reduce the impact of a given EMP.
That is largely true, but there are still 2 things : first, the plasma is still a super hot ball of matter with very high kinetic energy. Second, the radiations are still deadly at short range, unless you have specific protections, and radiation protections are heavy and bulky. At worse, the plasma can violently accelerate the target ship and damage it with this sudden acceleration.
But you can also easily turn your atomic bomb into a more refined atomic shell. The you can have projectiles propelled by the explosion (so it's now an atomic frag bomb), or a penetring shell with a delayed explosion so the explosion occur inside the target ship.
I always thought the initial explosion was so hot it vapourised everything in a certain radius. Would an atomic frag work?
Nasal developed a reactor, orion iirc, that was basically nuclear pulse propulsion: a directed nuclear explosion would propel a jet of plasma on a shield on the back of the ship to propel it, and the ship would use regular explosion for propulsion.
I don't know the exact dynamic of the nuclear explosion. The temperature turns a lot of things into plasma indeed. But I suspect some construction of the bomb (specific layers with specific materials) could make some kind of frag work.
At the very least you can have an efficient plasma bomb anyway. Your frag is simply plasma in this case. Plasma is still matter that can have high kinetic energy, but it's very hot too and with specific electromagnetic properties.
In this case, the atomic explosion replaces your powder, and what matters is everything around it.
If I've learned anything from watching nuclear blasts in space on sci-fi shows, it's that hasshak, dal shakka mel!
Shal'kek nem'ron
Indeed.
This Video will tell you everything you could possibly want to know on the subject, answering your question exactly and in extensive detail. The long and short of it is, not really, no, but they could be made to be very exceptionally effective anyway.
You probably need to wrap the nuke in multiple layers of material. Some inner layer to absord as much energy as possible and transfers it as kinetic energy to an outer high-density layer to create extremly fast shrapnel.
So a nuclear pipebomb