Ship Size

[Cidasa]

Has any thought about how big the ships in Stellaris must be? Every missile explosion that hits a ship is a nuclear bomb, meaning that a single ship must be around the size of a small country. How do you manufacture that. It dosen't bother me too much though.

 

[Exemplar Voss]

Ships are not to scale. They're highly visible as one of the most important parts of the interface.

 

[stumason]

Ships are not to scale. They're highly visible as one of the most important parts of the interface.

It's depressing this even needed explaining.... Clearly, nothing on the map is to scale - the Suns are too small, the planets too large, the distances too short...

Humans

 

[REDDQ]

It's depressing this even needed explaining.... Clearly, nothing on the map is to scale - the Suns are too small, the planets too large, the distances too short...

Humans

So much this ^^

 

[Kiselmann]

Since when does it standed that nuclear missiles have to be ICBM-size only? History knows lots of weaponry operating smaller sized nuclear ammo, and I do believe that in Stellaris ships use small rockets as well, with smaller nuclear blasts too, so saying that ships are "a size of a country" is kinda odd to me.

 

[Jean-Luc]

While not a particularly engaging topic the OP never referred to scale or any implications thereof nor made any specific claims, but simply pointed to the idea that something that requires the use of what are commonly believed to be strategic weapons must itself be impractically large.

But as mentioned above they can be tactical nukes rather than WMDs. Galactica also got nuked in BSG. Ultimately ships size, as well as pop size, is "whatever is right and appropriate".

 

[Ziffallo]

Since when does it standed that nuclear missiles have to be ICBM-size only? History knows lots of weaponry operating smaller sized nuclear ammo, and I do believe that in Stellaris ships use small rockets as well, with smaller nuclear blasts too, so saying that ships are "a size of a country" is kinda odd to me.

Good point.

 

[Gregsplays]

Has any thought about how big the ships in Stellaris must be? Every missile explosion that hits a ship is a nuclear bomb, meaning that a single ship must be around the size of a small country. How do you manufacture that. It dosen't bother me too much though.

Don't forget these are ships too, a country is a collection of lots of dirt, buildings and people, in other words, really easy to blow up, and even a nuclear bomb struggles to destroy an entire city, so imagine how hard it is to get through the hull of a ship and wreak tonnes of damage, especially when this ship is designed to take that kind of pain.

 

[Cannes]

Speaking of the scale, I would like there to a bigger difference in the scale of the ships, to make it more clear what is what in the swarm of ships circling in a discoball of lasers, missile explosions and shield reactions.

 

[stumason]

Don't forget these are ships too, a country is a collection of lots of dirt, buildings and people, in other words, really easy to blow up, and even a nuclear bomb struggles to destroy an entire city, so imagine how hard it is to get through the hull of a ship and wreak tonnes of damage, especially when this ship is designed to take that kind of pain.

Nuclear weapons wouldn't be anywhere near as destructive in space as on Earth - very little in the way of the shockwave you see here because there is no air to heat.

 

[Cannes]

Nuclear weapons wouldn't be anywhere near as destructive in space as on Earth - very little in the way of the shockwave you see here because there is no air to heat.

This is wrong.
The shockwave is not the air being heated.
The blastwave and the thermal radtion are two seperate events that occur in any explosion. Each damages stuff in different ways.
In space, yes the shockwave would be next to non existant, but the thermal radiation would have the same if not higher effect in space.
Edit. Just to make it clear: Ask yourself how the heat of the sun reaches us here on earth through 150 million kilometres of empty space...

 

[Taragon]

so from http://history.nasa.gov/conghand/nuclear.htm

"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."

This would be essentially nuclear weapons are just giant high frequency radiation emitters, lethal to things sensitive to radiation (like humans) but not destructive to the ships themselves.

 

[Kiselmann]

...So how does nuclear weapons affect ship sizes aanyway?

Exept for obvious destruction, of course.

 

[swiftsvre]

In my personal headcanon nuclear weapons in space are usually nuke-pumped lasers as seen in the Honorverse, for example.

 

[Bob_Herzog]

so from http://history.nasa.gov/conghand/nuclear.htm

"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."

This would be essentially nuclear weapons are just giant high frequency radiation emitters, lethal to things sensitive to radiation (like humans) but not destructive to the ships themselves.

Always like when someone pulls that one out. Just shows how boring space-battles in TV would be, if attempt of doing it realistic would be taken to far (no sound, no blasts, no explosions unless a hull i breached, ...).

But it is a rather old document and while not plain wrong about thermal radiation it does not tell the whole story. What they mean is that there is no agent for either convection or conduction. So you won't get burned in a ball of heated gas. But the thermal radiation is of course still there.

...So how does nuclear weapons affect ship sizes aanyway?

Exept for obvious destruction, of course.

If we have to talk about "realistic" version of space warfare with nuclear weapons (which is kind of the boring scenario) then it is all about radiation. Essentially give the nucelear missile or bomb a high enough yield and we have yet to invent any shielding that is not measured in hundrets of meters thickness that could protect the crew from a lethal doseage.

The argument for the thermal radiation is similar. In an atmosphere the thermal radiation is nearly instantly converted via convection and conduction. Since both is not possible in space it would all be thermal radiation but space is big and "cold" (a bit wrong since yet again it is a vaccum space can be quite hot in the right area but there is no agent to be heated. But god help you, if you become said agent. When a spacecraft or suit works on the sunny side they have to put quite a lot work into radiating the incoming heat out again and thanks to the top notch isolation they have to regulate the heat build up from the bodies inside the crafts too [=> yes space-suits have watercooling! So much for cold space]) so it becomes a matter of distance. If the nuclear warhead explodes close enough to the target the thermal radiation will begin to react with it (think of a pot on an electric stove).

So ultematley bigger ship = thicker hull = more chance that said hull will stop the radiation before it becomes lethal or the crew gets cooked.

The original topic was about measureing the size of an imagenary spaceship with help of the explosion of an imagernary nuclear space missile that hit it. And while I would have been perfectly agreeable with the two answers: 1. Ships not measured to scale and 2. You don't even know the yield of the missiles. But the discussion got further until someone brought up that nuclear missiles wouldn't even explode in space. So deciding, if the size of a ship is realistic by the blast of a weapon that would in reality have no blast is quite a problem.

One could create nuclear weapons that have a blast in space but that would mean carry the agent that creates the blast with them and that is rather ineffecient. So it would be low yield weapons with a rather small amount of gas. Maybe that is the explenation for the small blasts?

The other question was how deadly nuclear weapons would be in space warfare with such realistic assumptions. That is quite hard to answer. From our current view quite deadly since we wouldn't be able to shield the radiation or build a ship that won't get cooked by a close enough hit with a high enough yield. On the other hand a true space-fareing civilization would have to invent measures to deal with radiation early on. And we see at least the science vesels go quite close to stellar objects that emit quite a lot of dangerous radiation (gas giants, stars, and so on).

• So one could argue that for a civilization that has found such soloutions as well as soloutions for thermal radiation (ship scanning a star from a pretty close distance ...) a nuclear weapon in space is not much of a threat anymore.
• But one could also note that there is no real upper limit for the yield of thermonuclear weapons (just add more fuel) and thus also not for the radiated energy. So while the civilisation may have a soloution for the normal radiation a big enough bomb might just be to much. Also one could design such a missile or bomb to emit quite specific radiation i.e. radiation that reacts with material that counters radiation one encounters normally in space quite badly and thus destroys part of the hull through a rapid decay.

As so often with predictions about future technology the most honest answer is: Nobody knows.

 

[Kiselmann]

Oh, now I see it, thanks