WH40K - 40K misc numbers... (SDN)

[Mith]

While I would like to say they are all in the Megatons, most of the fluff doesn't hold up to it. The most powerful weapons, the main batteries on battleships as well as lances and the like, are almost certainly in the megaton range. But I doubt all of them are.

Perhaps, I'm hoping that the new Space Marine game will reveal that. They show an orbital strike. If it's from a lance, it's easily kiloton to megaton. Eagerly waiting for the game to come out.

P.S. 'Hecto' means 'hundreds of', so a hectoton is a hundred tons; which is still above our most powerful non-nuclear explosives. While this may not seem like much in the debate world, anything which cam pump out that kind of energy at will will pretty much eat any real world army alive.

Either you're neither American or Russian or you've never heard of the US MOAB or the Russian FOAB. Ie, the US MOAB is 10 tons, while the FOAB is like 15-20 tons. They are both non-nuclear explosives.

And of course hectoton is a high number--there's no doubt of that. The MOAB and FOAB are really, really big bombs. And while it is possible that these ships use hectoton--I find it unikely if we are to consider them to hold nuclear level firepower, unles we're talking lower end of the scale. Otherwise, unless in seriously high number, those weapons would be silly in the presence of a lance battery.

However, it is possible that orbital defenses may use them, as they might be more numerous. But on capital ships? Unlikely.

[Dabat]

While I would like to say they are all in the Megatons, most of the fluff doesn't hold up to it. The most powerful weapons, the main batteries on battleships as well as lances and the like, are almost certainly in the megaton range. But I doubt all of them are.

Perhaps, I'm hoping that the new Space Marine game will reveal that. They show an orbital strike. If it's from a lance, it's easily kiloton to megaton. Eagerly waiting for the game to come out.

I wouldn't hold my breath. The computer games, and and the supporting meterial that has come out for them so far, have been terrible fluff-wise. The Blood Ravens novel made me want to rip my eyes out.

P.S. 'Hecto' means 'hundreds of', so a hectoton is a hundred tons; which is still above our most powerful non-nuclear explosives. While this may not seem like much in the debate world, anything which cam pump out that kind of energy at will will pretty much eat any real world army alive.

Either you're neither American or Russian or you've never heard of the US MOAB or the Russian FOAB. Ie, the US MOAB is 10 tons, while the FOAB is like 15-20 tons. They are both non-nuclear explosives.

And of course hectoton is a high number--there's no doubt of that. The MOAB and FOAB are really, really big bombs. And while it is possible that these ships use hectoton--I find it unikely if we are to consider them to hold nuclear level firepower, unles we're talking lower end of the scale. Otherwise, unless in seriously high number, those weapons would be silly in the presence of a lance battery.

However, it is possible that orbital defenses may use them, as they might be more numerous. But on capital ships? Unlikely.

Ah, part of the problem was I thought that you thought that hecto meant 'fraction of' not 'multiple of'.

I have heard of the GBU-43 and the ATBIP, but those are still in the dekatons. Even if the FOAB is as powerful as they say, and I have seen some convincing arguments it realisticly will only reach about half of it's theoretical yield, you would still need three of them to equal one hectoton.

I am comfortable with the sub-nuclear firepower of the average shot of in Imperial capitol ship, as in the fluff they pound on each other for an hour or more just to get their opponent's void shields to drop. While the total number of shots is not given, and in truth it likely varies wildly form ship to ship and from weapon to weapon, the art shows that in addition to a dozen or so large main guns, capitol ships are also studded with hundreds of secondary turrets, all of which are adding to the firepower of the primary weapons.

[Mr. Oragahn]

I am back again after a fairly long absence.

Mr. Oragahn, you and I have had words about this very topic before, I am an avid fan of the 40k-verse, more so than my other sci-fi loves (including both trek and wars). One can even go so far as to call me a 40k scholar, as I tend to know nearly everything there is to know about the setting... That said, I am not an avid defender of the 40k-verse, nor am I an avid defender of most fandoms, as those who defend them tend to turn their defenses into simple pissing contests of who could beat who.

I have no real problem with most of your calculations, there are a few I disagreed with in catching up with this thread (tho mostly I was far more with you than I was with the guys on SDN), but few were major enough for me to even remember them as I am writing this post.

For example, I have no problem with titan weapons being rated in the single, deci or low hectotons; nor do I have a problem with starship weapons mostly being rated in the range of the mid-high hecto to high kilotons (with low megatons being on the outside). Why? Because for those of us who live in the real world, those numbers are still a fucking lot.

I wouldn't think they'd go as low as hectotons. They're probably in the tons range at least, more than likely kiloton to possibly megatons.

And yes, at SDN and SB.com, you have people who either have absolutely no idea what sort of concept they're talking about (ie, Ricrery1, the guy who basically claimed that physics was wrong in its application of science) and people like rabbit or leo1 who know better, but simply want their retarded fanboy numbers.

While I would like to say they are all in the Megatons, most of the fluff doesn't hold up to it. The most powerful weapons, the main batteries on battleships as well as lances and the like, are almost certainly in the megaton range. But I doubt all of them are.

P.S. 'Hecto' means 'hundreds of', so a hectoton is a hundred tons; which is still above our most powerful non-nuclear explosives. While this may not seem like much in the debate world, anything which cam pump out that kind of energy at will will pretty much eat any real world army alive.

To add to what Mith said about the nano-powder bombs that easily tap into the decaton range, they're still fairly massive bombs. But then again the Manticore isn't really carrying small projectiles either.
Now I'm not sure how may of those conventional chemical IoM weapons would be just a notch below the kiloton range: remembering the values from Imperial Armour and other descriptions from the books about prolongated tactical bombardments, the collapse of buildings and the sizes of craters, or even the mere fact that people standing not so far from the bombarded ground, can survive while wearing nothing particular on their faces (no fully sealed helmets for example) makes me think that in general chemical yields aren't necessarily much higher than what we can do now.
Higher yields could be achieved by mini-nuclears, perhaps cleaner than what we can achieve now.

Now, keep an eye on this thread. There are three SBC threads of interest which I hesitated to comment on in another thread or here, but I'm not feeling like starting another thread, so I'll put my thoughts here.

For starters, I'll just drop a note about the bombardment of Cyrene. I've seen it crop up lately, so it's quite fortunate that I already covered this topic here:

WH40K - Cyrene crust-melting from DoW novel analysis (SDN)
Any new information about Cyrene will be added to the thread above.

Notice that there's also a whole part about the destruction of Rahe's Paradise. Both Rahe's Paradise and Cyrene were subjected to Exterminatus, and the final effects were odd, to say the least. The final conclusion, though, is that to bring that level of destruction upon a world, the IoM (or Chaos) forces have to rely on special weapons. We'll see more of that in the "misc" thread here.
Don't forget to look for the very end of the topic, there are two references about a Necron ship being attacked by weapons which, in the past, have been described in not so spectacular ways (relatively speaking, considering the wank that's on the other side). Something to do with solar flares (yes) and bombardment cannons (which we know how powerful they are).

[Mr. Oragahn]

A quick note on fleet sizes.
Stuff from White Dwarf.

The Battle of Callavell





"The battle for control of Callavell was one of the largest "set-piece" battles in Imperial history and is still used y Training Academies throughout the galaxy as the model by which a large-scale escalating engagement should be fought." It "mustered the largest number of heavy ships of the line ever seen in the Segmentum Solar", for a total as follows:

14 Battleships
7 Grand Cruisers
12 Battlecruisers
14 Heavy Cruisers
20 Cruisers
14 Light Cruisers

37 ships for the Loyalists, 46 for the Renegades.
83 in total.

It took place during the Age of Apostasy.

[Dabat]

I wouldn't think they'd go as low as hectotons. They're probably in the tons range at least, more than likely kiloton to possibly megatons.

And yes, at SDN and SB.com, you have people who either have absolutely no idea what sort of concept they're talking about (ie, Ricrery1, the guy who basically claimed that physics was wrong in its application of science) and people like rabbit or leo1 who know better, but simply want their retarded fanboy numbers.

While I would like to say they are all in the Megatons, most of the fluff doesn't hold up to it. The most powerful weapons, the main batteries on battleships as well as lances and the like, are almost certainly in the megaton range. But I doubt all of them are.

P.S. 'Hecto' means 'hundreds of', so a hectoton is a hundred tons; which is still above our most powerful non-nuclear explosives. While this may not seem like much in the debate world, anything which cam pump out that kind of energy at will will pretty much eat any real world army alive.

To add to what Mith said about the nano-powder bombs that easily tap into the decaton range, they're still fairly massive bombs. But then again the Manticore isn't really carrying small projectiles either.
Now I'm not sure how may of those conventional chemical IoM weapons would be just a notch below the kiloton range: remembering the values from Imperial Armour and other descriptions from the books about prolongated tactical bombardments, the collapse of buildings and the sizes of craters, or even the mere fact that people standing not so far from the bombarded ground, can survive while wearing nothing particular on their faces (no fully sealed helmets for example) makes me think that in general chemical yields aren't necessarily much higher than what we can do now.
Higher yields could be achieved by mini-nuclears, perhaps cleaner than what we can achieve now.

The Manticore is one of those weird things, it was first around in Epic, but only had limited fluff back then and it was generally ignored for fifteen some-odd years but then it was included in the latest round of 40k codices. While it is one of those things that 'always existed', there is little hard and fast info on what it actually does. Older sources claimed that while it was normally armed with some kind of thermobaric weapon, that it also had other rarer (mostly DAT) loads including plasma, vortex, viral, anti-life (radiation-kill weapons? though that is just conjecture on my part) and nuclear... But I haven't read anything about that in the newer fluff, then again I haven't been paying as much attention as I should in the last year or two.

Now, keep an eye on this thread. There are three SBC threads of interest which I hesitated to comment on in another thread or here, but I'm not feeling like starting another thread, so I'll put my thoughts here.

For starters, I'll just drop a note about the bombardment of Cyrene. I've seen it crop up lately, so it's quite fortunate that I already covered this topic here:

WH40K - Cyrene crust-melting from DoW novel analysis (SDN)
Any new information about Cyrene will be added to the thread above.

Notice that there's also a whole part about the destruction of Rahe's Paradise. Both Rahe's Paradise and Cyrene were subjected to Exterminatus, and the final effects were odd, to say the least. The final conclusion, though, is that to bring that level of destruction upon a world, the IoM (or Chaos) forces have to rely on special weapons. We'll see more of that in the "misc" thread here.
Don't forget to look for the very end of the topic, there are two references about a Necron ship being attacked by weapons which, in the past, have been described in not so spectacular ways (relatively speaking, considering the wank that's on the other side). Something to do with solar flares (yes) and bombardment cannons (which we know how powerful they are).

Ergh... I believe I made my feelings on the majority of fan wank known. To be 100% honest with you I feel that you are low-balling some of the 40k numbers, though that may be just to counter the majority of the pseudo-intellectual fan masterbation that exists on other sites. Which is something I have done more than once or twice.

Now I need to check out that other thread.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Just a thing about that new "Nemesis" book, which gets recently quoted a lot by Orsai and pasted by others all over the place, that in regards to imperial warship's firepower, notably in the now locked Wh40K Vs. Zentraedi thread at SBC.
Interesting. He got an enormous amount of leeway, just like white rabid. I've rarely seen people insulting their oponents so much for so little, and they're not even asked to tone it down a little.
Damn fool, he clearly is very good at cherry picking his evidence, largely focusing on hyperbole and relying on the ignorance of the opposition, since from the same very book he claims to contain devastating evidence, I easily found a small paragraph showing what the real Warmaster's "killpower" was: they need special (technobabble?) weapons, carefully aimed at specific locations, to trigger reactions which would split a planet's crust.

There are two quotes which Orsai presented.
Here's the first one, with more padding (it's his quote plus more stuff from the book):

Every weapon in the battleship’s arsenal was prepared and oriented down at the surface – torpedo arrays filled with warshots that could atomise whole continents in a single
strike, energy cannons capable of boiling off oceans, kinetic killers that could behead mountains through the brute force of their impact. This was only the power of the ship
itself; then there was the minor fleet of auxiliary craft aboard it, wings of fighters and bombers that could come screaming down into Dagonet’s atmosphere on plumes of white
fire. Swift death bringers that could raze cities, burn nations.

Weapon-wise, there are three different statements in that excerpt:

- "torpedo arrays filled with warshots that could atomise whole continents in a single strike" : could be anything. Torpedoes could be stupidly large, we don't even know how many of them there are, and we don't know if they use any technobabble. Not to say that "atomize" is rather vague, and it would be beyond silly to take it literally (but then why take most of them literally? - don't ask). What's a single strike by the way? A ship that doesn't need to reload? A ship that doesn't need to break formation for more than 30 minutes? Just one volley? It's good to remember that this is the Vengeful Spirit, Horus' massive flagship (see here and here).
The damn ship is supposed to be 15 km long, which means considerably larger and higher than even the largest super heavies.
It makes Orsai's claim that the Vengeful Spirit couldn't bear a firepower an OoM greater than of its escort ships particularly dishonest as possible. The whole flagship literally is thousands of times bigger than most escort ships, and bears a volumetric figure that's easily two to three OoMs greater than the general heavy classes (Grand Cruisers for example). The Vengeful Spirit was an enormous oddity, one of those rare ships that baffle official nomenclatures. (There may be more info about the Vengeful Spiprit in "Soul Hunters".)
- "energy cannons capable of boiling off oceans": that surely would require lots of energy, but nothing is said about how long it would take, nor how much ocean would be vaporized. Quite clearly, it cannot be in a few volleys, both in light of the overall sense of firepower you get from the two other elements, and from the one I'll present you later on.
A surprising way to look at it is that boiling an ocean can be understood as trying to achieve impossible things (see here). It's an idiom. In this case, it would mean the energy cannons could achieve godly things. For self-consistency purposes, it would actually be our best option.
- "kinetic killers that could behead mountains through the brute force of their impact" : good job. Mount St Helens was beheaed by a blast of a couple of megatons, the rest and higher energy yield being lost as heat.

Then the second quote:

A bombardment had begun, and the people of Dagonet's capital feared it was the end of the world.

They knew so little of the reality of things. High above in orbit, it was only the warship Thanato that fired on the city, and even then it was not with the vessel's most powerful cannons. The people did not know that a fleet of craft were poised in silence around their sister ship, watchful and waiting. Had all the vessels of the Warmaster's flotilla unleashed their killpower, then indeed those fears would have come true; the planet's crust cracked, the continents sliced open. Perhaps those things would happen, soon enough - but for now it was sufficient for the Thanato to hurl inert kinetic kill-rods down through the atmosphere, the sky-splitting shriek of their passage climaxed by a lowing thunder as the warshots obliterated power stations, military compounds and the vast mansion-houses of the noble clans. From the ground it seemed like wanton destruction; from orbit, it was a shrewd and surgical pattern of attack.

Somehow, Orsai wanted Episky and some other people to think that those pulled punches - which would just leave some craters on the surface of the planet - would be pathetic in light of the true scale of the conventional firepower those ships were capable of, supposedly having the capacity to crack crust and leave continents sliced open. All with pure DET weapons, of course.




Now, there is a third excerpt which Captain Orsai is yet to quote. One I found and which makes quite a difference.

DAGONET WAS ALL but dead now, her surface a mosaic of burning cities, churned oceans and glassed wastelands. And yet this was a show of restraint from the Sons of
Horus; had they wished it, the world could have suffered the fate of many that had defied the Warmaster, cracked open by cyclonic torpedo barrages shot into key tectonic target sites, remade into a sphere of molten earth.
Instead Dagonet was being prepared. It would be of use to the Warmaster and his march to victory.

Obviously, with ships carrying gigatons of firepower or more, such a requirement on the aiming and the very specific nature of the targets would be totally useless. Dontcha think?

Let's have some more, with Wikipedia.

The oceanic crust is 5 km (3 mi) to 10 km (6 mi) thick[1] and is composed primarily of basalt, diabase, and gabbro. The continental crust is typically from 30 km (20 mi) to 50 km (30 mi) thick, and is mostly composed of slightly less dense rocks than those of the oceanic crust.

Chicxulub crater: kinetic impact rated at 100 TT which left a gaping 180 km wide crater at the surface of the world. Now, craters are wide than they are deep, but the transient crater, not the final one, actually tends to be about as deep as the final crater's radius. So it's like punching 80-90 km down into the planet.

We even have real life examples that let us appreciate how much raw energy is needed to begin cracking crusts, from the lower levels.
Richter magnitude scale. Check out the details on the last three most powerful earthquakes.

Scale _____ TNT equivalent _____ Energy in joules _____ real event
9.1–9.3 _____ 1.34 gigatons _____ 5.62 EJ _____ Indian Ocean earthquake, 2004
9.2 _____ 946 megatons _____ 3.98 EJ _____ Anchorage earthquake (Alaska, USA), 1964
9.5 _____ 2.67 gigatons _____ 11.2 EJ _____ Valdivia earthquake (Chile), 1960
10.0 _____ 15.0 gigatons _____ 63.1 EJ _____ Never recorded by humans
12.55 _____ 100 teratons _____ 422 ZJ _____ Yucatán Peninsula impact (creating Chicxulub crater) 65 Ma ago.

2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami

Tectonic plates:

* Seismographic and acoustic data indicate that the first phase involved a rupture about 400 km (250 mi) long and 100 km (60 mi) wide, located 30 km (19 mi) beneath the sea bed—the largest rupture ever known to have been caused by an earthquake. The rupture proceeded at a speed of about 2.8 km/s (1.7 mi/s) or 10,000 km/h (6,300 mph), beginning off the coast of Aceh and proceeding north-westerly over a period of about 100 seconds.
* A pause of about another 100 seconds took place before the rupture continued northwards towards the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. However, the northern rupture occurred more slowly than in the south, at about 2.1 km/s (1.3 mi/s) or 7,600 km/h (4,700 mph), continuing north for another five minutes to a plate boundary where the fault type changes from subduction to strike-slip (the two plates slide past one another in opposite directions). This reduced the speed of the water displacement and so reducing the size of the tsunami that hit the northern part of the Indian Ocean.

1964 Alaska earthquake

At 5:36 p.m. Alaska Standard Time (3:36 a.m. March 28, 1964 UTC), a fault between the Pacific and North American plates ruptured near College Fjord in Prince William Sound. The epicenter of the earthquake was 61°03?N 147°29?W? / ?61.05°N 147.48°W? / 61.05; -147.48, 12.4 mi (20 km) north of Prince William Sound, 78 miles (125 km) east of Anchorage and 40 miles (64 km) west of Valdez. The focus occurred at a depth of approximately 15.5 mi (25 km). Ocean floor shifts created large tsunamis (up to 70 feet (20 m) in height), which resulted in many of the deaths and much of the property damage. Large rockslides were also caused, resulting in great property damage. Vertical displacement of up to 38 feet (11.5 m) occurred, affecting an area of 100,000 miles² (250,000 km²) within Alaska.

What about the most powerful event of all?

1960 Valdivia earthquake, Puyehue-Cordón Caulle 1960 eruption:

On May 24, 1960, 38 hours after the main shock of the 1960 Valdivia earthquake, the largest earthquake recorded in history, Cordón Caulle began a rhyodacitic fissure eruption. The earthquake had struck the whole of Chile between Talca (30°S) and Chiloé (43°S) and had an estimated moment magnitude of 9.5. Being located between two sparsely populated and by then isolated Andean valleys the eruption had few eyewitnesses and received little attention by local media due to the huge damages and losses caused by the main earthquake.[4] The eruption was fed by a 5.5 kilometres (3 mi) long and north west-west (N135°) trending fissure along which 21 individual vents have been found. These vents produced an output of about 0.25 cubic kilometres (202,678 acre·ft) DRE both in form of lava flows and tephra.

The eruption began in a sub-plinian style creating a column of volcanic gas, pyroclasts and ash about 8 km in height. The erupting N135° trending fissure had two craters of major activity emplaced at each end; the Gris Crater and El Azufral Crater. Volcanic vents of Cordón Caulle that were not in eruption produced visible steam emissions. After this explosive phase the eruption changed character to a more effusive one marked by rhyodacitic blocky and Aa type lava flows emitted from the vents along the N135° trending fissure. A third phase followed with the appearance of short north-north west (N165°) oriented vents transverse to the main fissure which also erupted rhyodacitic lava. The third phase ended temporarily with viscous lava obstructing the vents, but continued soon with explosive activity restricted to the Gris and El Azufral craters. The eruption came to an end on July 22.[4]

Relevant part underlined. Now this was a double-volcano waiting for a bit of push to vomit its lava.

Nevertheless, what is clear is that events in the high gigatons would easily split the crust at various points and let lava be spilled. It still doesn't undermine the fact that the cyclonic torpedoes literally need to be aimed at hotspots and other tectonic phenomena for the reaction to work and unleash lava.
And they need barrages of that stuff, which depending on what they do and their number, wouldn't even need to brew the equivalent of gigatons of energy where they're fired.

Quite clearly, if the lances were capable of vaporizing oceans in little to no time, the Warmaster's ships would have such firepower in their hands that those cyclonic warheads would certainly be absolutely trivial, so damn futile, and there would certainly be no need to aim for the tectonic weaknesses of Dagonet when the plan was to cover the planet with cracks and lava anyway.

EDIT: halved the long underscores in the quote, it made the stuff less intelligible.

[User1356]

Why do I always get the impression I'm reading a 13yr old girls diary when I read these things

[Mr. Oragahn]

Why do I always get the impression I'm reading a 13yr old girls diary when I read these things

Perhaps because Wh40K is written for bois of the same age? Or perhaps it's because of the colours of the forum?
What is your point, Skooj?...

Besides, I'll add that one for the moment. Thanks to Ricrery1 for providing it (one of those few times I may thank him).

Below the world burned too. The fleet's bombardment had torched Prospero, and ignited the atmosphere. Spiral patterns of soot and particulated debris thousands of leagues across cycled like hurricanes. Giant columns of plasma energy had roasted all vegetation and wildlife, and turned the seas into scalding banks of steam and toxic gas. Vast las bombardments from the heavy batteries had evaporated river deltas and flash-thawed ice-caps. Kinetic munitions and gravity bombs had fallen like Helwinter hail, and planted new forests of bright liquid flame that sprouted and grew, spread and died back, all in a few minutes. Shoals of targeted missiles, silver-swift as midsummer fish running from a catchers net, delivered warheads that blasted the soil into the sky and thickened the air into poisonous soup. Magma bombs and atomics, the godhammers, had altered the geography itself. Mountains had been levelled , plains split, valleys thrown up into new hills of rubble and spoil. Prospero's crust had fractured. We saw the throbbing, glowing tracks of its mortal wounds, brand new canyons of fire that split entire continents. This was the grand alchemy of war. Heat and light, and energy and fission that transformed water into steam, rock into dust, sand into glass, bone into gas. Swirling mushroom clouds, as tall as our Aett on Fenris, punctuated the horizon we rushed towards.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Just a quick note about the Exterminatus cutscenes and the very small moons bearing the gravity similar to Earth's.
I remembered that bit from the thread WH40k vs Star Trek (with a twist):

"They said you could feel the years on Titan, layers of history weighing you down. The truth was that Titan's gravity was slightly higher than Terran standard due to the superdense core that had been injected into the moon sometime during the lost Dark Age of Technology"

Grey Knights, page 221

Apparently DaoT humanity had some crazy matter compression technology, if they were able to change the gravity of a moon bigger than Luna by sticking something inside the thing.

So my little "pants on head retarded take it all at face value" explanation actually is totally supported by the WH40K canon itself.
Nice.

[User1450]

I have a quote I'd like to show everyone.

From the data, Gaunt had seen, there were at least four archenemy warships up above them. Unopposed, their combined firepower could raze the Civitas down to the bedrock: streets, habs, hive-towers, even the armoured shelters underground. If the enemy decided not to bother with the complexity and effort of a ground assault, and simply went for the kill, this war would be over before it started.

It's from "Sabbat Martyr".

[Mr. Oragahn]

I have a quote I'd like to show everyone.

From the data, Gaunt had seen, there were at least four archenemy warships up above them. Unopposed, their combined firepower could raze the Civitas down to the bedrock: streets, habs, hive-towers, even the armoured shelters underground. If the enemy decided not to bother with the complexity and effort of a ground assault, and simply went for the kill, this war would be over before it started.

It's from "Sabbat Martyr".

Cool.
People may want to know what Civitas is. Taken from Warseer, quoting one of the Sabbat Martyr books:

An often misused term assumed to mean, simply, the Imperial rule of law. Its actual meaning is more specific and, as scholars have learned from Warmaster Slaydo's personal diaries, of particular importance to the great leader. At the foundation of the Imperium of man, the Civitas Imperialis was laid down to 'guarantee the safety and assurance of any citizen of the Imperium of Mankind, wherever he or she travels or sets foot within the length and breadth of breadth of the Imperium.'

The Civitas was therefore meant to be the hallmark of refined Imperial culture, the measure of its power and security, and it was precisely this, the qualitative perfection of human civilisation, as opposed to the basic 'rule of law', that Slaydo was determined to restore to the Sabbat Worlds.

Now, I don't know what to make of the quote you provided, but if anything, the description of the devastation brought by four warships, not pulling punches, doesn't really sound like anything worth more than the megaton range, really, and certainly not necessarily the highest part of it either. And that's without saying that with concentrated firing from lances and mass drivers, even kilotons of energy would pull hives down and drill into the soil fast enough to reach armoured bunkers (which won't be that tough anyway, since they're generally meant to offer protection against the tactical scale bombardment preceding invasion).

[User1450]

The Civitas was a city around a dozen kilometers in diameter. It's not a multi-hundred kilometer city that some people might want to argue for when city-leveling quotes are mentioned.

[Mr. Oragahn]

The Civitas was a city around a dozen kilometers in diameter. It's not a multi-hundred kilometer city that some people might want to argue for when city-leveling quotes are mentioned.

OK. This settles that. Do you have a quote about the city's size?

[User1450]

The Civitas was a city around a dozen kilometers in diameter. It's not a multi-hundred kilometer city that some people might want to argue for when city-leveling quotes are mentioned.

OK. This settles that. Do you have a quote about the city's size?

No. It's a picture of Civitas at the beginning of the novel.

[Mr. Oragahn]

The Civitas was a city around a dozen kilometers in diameter. It's not a multi-hundred kilometer city that some people might want to argue for when city-leveling quotes are mentioned.

OK. This settles that. Do you have a quote about the city's size?

No. It's a picture of Civitas at the beginning of the novel.

Civitas Beati, I found.
What comes below is the only textual description I managed to find:

The Civitas Beati, the city of the saint, a minor shrine, just another of the many
places and many worlds touched by Sabbat thousands of years earlier and made holy.
It was a sprawling place the main population centre on Herodor. Three slab-like hive
towers of white ashlar stood like bodyguards around a higher, older, darker central
steeple, encircled by sloping skirts of lower level habs, manufactories, transitways and
brick viaducts. To the west lay the tinted domes of the many agriponic farms that fed
the city, farms that were themselves kept alive by the hot mineral springs on which
the city had been founded.
That's what made it a special place, Rawne thought pragmatically. It wasn't who
might have been here or what they might have done. This city was here only by the
grace of the thermal water that gushed up through the cold crust of the world in this
one place

Now, on another note, let's talk about the effects of nuclear bombardment.
Remember the nuclear winter scenarii? It was revised not so long ago, and found that you wouldn't even need as much nuclear firepower as formerly estimated, to be dropped all over Earth, in order to achieve mass destruction. It was pointed out that mid kiloton shots at several cities would amply suffice, the raging fires finishing the job of destroying the planet once and for all for several generations.

Well, I'd like to point to this Wired article, which provides another interesting perspective on the kind of global consequences would result from a localized nuclear war:

‘Regional’ Nuclear War Would Cause Worldwide Destruction




Think you might escape the aftereffects of a limited nuclear war that happens on the other side of the globe from you? Think again.

Imagine that the long-simmering conflict between India and Pakistan broke out into a war in which each side deployed 50 nuclear weapons against the other country’s megacities. Karachi, Bombay, and dozens of other South Asian cities catch fire like Hiroshima and Nagasaki did at the end of World War II.

Beyond the local human tragedy of such a situation, a new study looking at the atmospheric chemistry of regional nuclear war finds that the hot smoke from burning cities would tear holes in the ozone layer of the Earth. The increased UV radiation resulting from the ozone loss could more than double DNA damage, and increase cancer rates across North America and Eurasia.

"Our research supports that there would be worldwide destruction," said Michael Mills, co-author of the study and a research scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "It demonstrates that a small-scale regional conflict is capable of triggering larger ozone losses globally than the ones that were previously predicted for a full-scale nuclear war."

Combined with the climatic impact of a regional nuclear war — which could reduce crop yields and starve hundreds of millions — Mills’
modeling shows that the entire globe would feel the repercussions of a hundred nuclear detonations, a small fraction of just the U.S. stockpile. After decades of Cold War research into the impacts that a full-blown war between the Soviet Union and the United States would have had on the globe, recent work has focused on regional nuclear wars, which are seen as more likely than all-out nuclear Armageddon. Incorporating the latest atmospheric modeling, the scientists are finding that even a small nuclear conflict would wreak havoc on the global environment (.pdf) — cooling it twice as much as it’s heated over the last century — and on the structure of the atmosphere itself.

Mills’ work, which appears online today in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, used a model from National Center for Atmospheric Research to look at the impact of throwing 5 million metric tons of black carbon, or soot, into the atmosphere. He found that when a cluster of cities are burning together, they end up creating their own weather, pumping soot 20,000 feet into the atmosphere. Once there, sunlight would heat the smoke, and drive it up 260,000 feet above the earth’s surface.

Along the way, the hot soot would cause a variety of atmospheric changes with a net result of huge reductions in ozone, which in the stratosphere serves as sunblock for the earth. In the middle latitudes, the researchers found the ozone layer would be reduced by 25 to 45 percent, with the polar regions losing 50 to 70 percent of their ozone coverage. This thinning is known as a "hole" in the ozone layer, and would be many times the size of the famed hole over Antarctica.

According to research cited by the paper, the increase in ultraviolet light falling to earth at the 45-degree latitude — a little south of Portland, Oregon — would cause damage to DNA to increase 213 percent.

"It would have a dramatic effect on skin cancer and cataracts and be very damaging to crops and ecosystems," Mills said.

The reduced levels of ozone would persist for five years, with substantial reductions in ozone continuing for another five years after that.

Even if the cause of the war were local, its impacts would be felt across the globe.

"Pretty much everywhere [would be] affected," Mills concluded.

Photo: A nuclear bomb is detonated in a test blast at Mururoa atoll, French Polynesia, in 1971./Associated Press