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

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Mith
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Re: WH40K - 40K misc numbers... (SDN)

Post by Mith » Thu Jul 18, 2013 10:20 pm

Mr. Oragahn wrote:Yes, it's very straightforward. You just have to look it up for any definition of the prefix tetra. That's why I tried to come with a "slang" explanation.
Can't remember what it was though. It's been a while I read this thread or typed anything about 40K.

But one could say it was a typo. Even I, knowing very well the difference, am not above making a typing mistake about such units.
*shrug*

Whatever the case, the objection was withdrawn. I personally think it's a typo. As you've said, it's easy to mix one units. I've personally mixed watts and joules even when I know there's a very important difference between the two.

Terajoule beams don't give much information about power. To obtain the power of a nuke, and yet only deliver some terajoules, a laser would need to have a power figure ~10^6 times the energy figure, and yet also not be fired for more than microseconds (or less). Otherwise, we get the same amount of energy delivered into the target, but I wouldn't count on much of a nuclear blast. More like a huge cooking, really. And still much slower than a nuclear cooking.
Yeah, I should have updated that. I realized that nukes and lasers tend to be rather different. The only way this thing is going to come anywhere close to acting like a nuke is if it's fired together tightly enough to basically equate to atom smashing.
I think that if you fire a terajoule beam over one second, in terms of equivalent nuclear effects, you are essentially firing a stream of megajoule nukes (nuclear grenades) at a rate of 1/ µs (so you have fired a million of them in the end).
I am not sure about the nature of the blast that will be formed that way.
Surely, energy piling up tht way will probably be much more efficient at digging into a small spot, but the blast?
The shockwave would be, imho, less formidable. I wouldn't count on getting anywhere close to those 20 psi of overpressure.
Basically.
It is however much more interesting when it comes to shells. They may not be of nuclear nature (although I think there are many descriptions shell variants being loaded with fusion or fission explosive I think), but we're definitely within the palatable realm of detonations, for which blasts will be closer to what nukes produce. Beside, I don't expect the shells to be less potent than good ol' TNT charges. :P
I actually realized a second mistake in there. I think when I was doing the calcs, I had thought that when it was referring to the direct explosive power (ie, anything immediately hit is destroyed) was referring to it in square kilometers. It actually stated it as meters across. Since the blast wave is described as being larger than the immediate area determined to be automatically destroyed, I take that to mean that the fireball itself is a couple dozen meters across.

At a yield of 1.5 kilometers, the fireball would be .04 kilometers across, or 40 meters. So we could probably determine that your average macrocannon has a yield of roughly 1-3 kilotons. The lance still eludes me since it's obvious that they treat it like a nuclear bomb, but lasers work a bit differently. And unfortunately, no calculator I can find really does a good job of working on something of that level of firepower. Of course, we could make an educated guess that a lance probably isn't more than one or two digits (at most) greater than that of a single macrocannon. So anywhere between 20 - 200 kilotons is where these ships are going to absolutely have to max out. And honestly, the later is so much more powerful that it's unheard of.

So my personal figures would be:

Macrocannons: 1-3 kilotons
Lances: 10-30 kilotons.

But as an aside, I'd like to post something else I find...amusing. It's in regards to the absurd claims of acceleration. Just some things I've picked up from Battlefleet Koronus:
The Gryphon
Hull: Battlecruiser
Dimensions: 5.4 km long, 0.85 km abeam at fins approx.
Mass: 29 megatonnes approx.
Crew: 107,000 crew, approx.
Accel: 2.3 gravities max sustainable acceleration
The Gryphon is an ancient and redoubtable ship, said to be constructed in the Jovian shipyards more than five millennia ago. Like most Mars-class battlecruisers, she's equipped as a fleet flagshihp and carrier vessel, preferring to remain out of range of her opponents so she can pummel them with Nova CAnnon and long-range lance fire, then smother them with waves of attack craft.
For the record, 2.3g acceleration is 23 meters per second. That's right folks, the ships that can apparently produce countless gigatons/teratons of energy are limited to 2.3g accelerations.

Speaking of the Nova Cannon though...
Mars-pattern Nova Cannon
Though Nova Cannons are quite rare, even by standards of starship construction, the Mars pattern is the most common construction template. These massive cannons--hundreds of meters in length--fire an enormous shell that echoes a traditional explosive shell, though on a much larger scale. These shells are accelerated to near relativistic velocities, causing an explosion that detonates, causing an explosion that detonates with more force than a dozen of plasma warheads.
If I remember correctly, relativistic speed is considered to be at 10% the speed of light, or 30,000 kilometers a second. According to this source, the Nova Cannon can't even reach relativistic velocities.

Going back to acceleration though, to be fair, the Gryphon is a bit slower to the cruisers, which have accelerations up to 2.5Gs. Their raiders however, are considerably faster:
Cobras of Wrath of Saint Drusus Squadron
Hull: Raider
Dimensions: 1.5 km long, .3 km abeam at fins approx.
Mass: 5.7 megatonnes approx.
Crew: 15,000 crew, approx.
Accel: 7.6 gravities max sustainable acceleration.
The Cobra-class destroyers of the Wraith of Saint Drusus Squardron are quintessential examples of their design. The vast majority of their interior space is taken up with torpedo tubes and stowage space, with only a few macrocannons for defense.

For extra lulz, the super fast Eldar aren't so fabulous either.
Hellbore
Hull: Frigate
Class: Hellebore-class frigate
Dimensions: 1.8 km long, .3 km abeam
Mass: 5 megatonnes approx.
Crew: Unknown
Accel: 9.5 gravities max sustainable acceleration
Gaining infamy as "the most heavily armed frigate in the Gothic Sector" during the devastating Gothic War, Hellebores are designed to sow confusion among a target fleet through a swift dispersal of torpedoes. It then follows up with a barrage and pulsar fire.
Eclipse Cruiser
Hull: Cruiser
Class: Eclipse-class cruiser
Dimensions: 4.7 km long, 1.4 km abeam at wings
Mass: 18 megatonnes approx
Crew: Unknown
Accel: 8 gravities max sustainable acceleration
The Eclipse class is one of the most feared Corsair voidships as it combines heavy firepower (courtesy of the paired Pulsar Lances in the prow) with multiple squadrons of attack craft (usually evenly split between Darkstar fighters and Eagle bombers). This allows a single Eclipse carrier to eviscerate a convoy of civilian and military vessels.
Their frigates tend to clock in at 9.5Gs (95 meters a second) acceleration while their cruisers (fairly large ones at that!) clock in at 8Gs (80 meters a second) acceleration. To be fair--that is fucking fast as far as modern craft is concerned. Getting something with a mass of 18 megatonnes to break the sound barrier in just over 18 seconds takes an immense amount of power. To be fair, this is even damn impressive for Imperial craft, which can accelerate at 25 meters a second on average, which would mean it'd take them just under a minute to accelerate something with the of 20-30 megatonnes to supersonic.

Of course, when you compare it to things like Star Trek and Stargate...the acceleration is just bad. Going by the TNG TM, the Galaxy Class has an acceleration of 10 kilometers a second. And that's Starfleet's equivalent to a heavy battlecruiser. Of course, the Enterprise is much smaller (and lighter thanks the mass reduction fields...), but that doesn't change the point. Against Star Trek, Star Gate, and other sci-fi not limited to double digit Gs of acceleration, an Imperial vessel is going to be rather slow and incapable of combating something like that.

It's rather sad when you look at the Darkstar Fighter, an Eldar fighter craft, whose cruising speed is 2,750 kph. Supersonic ranges from 1,470 kph to 6,150 kph. This thing moves at 763.88 meters a second. Even assuming this thing can reach its cruising speed in 1 second flat, its acceleration is only 76.38Gs. I also find it unlikely, even for the Eldar. As a note, its tactical speed is suggested to be 30 meters--if that is its acceleration, it would suggest 3Gs. That's not bad really. It'd take it only half a minute to reach its full velocity. The Eagle Bomber in comparison, has a cruising velocity of 2,000 kilometers per hour and a tactical speed of 20. So assuming that means 2Gs of acceleration, it'd reach its top speed in 27.77 seconds.

The only problem I really find here though is that this would mean that their capital ships have better accelerations than their actual fighters.

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Mith
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Re: WH40K - 40K misc numbers... (SDN)

Post by Mith » Fri Jul 19, 2013 12:18 am

Magos wrote:If the anti gigatons is so strong, why can't you create a convincing case on Spacebattles?
Because none of the fanboys want to hear it?

Seriously, that argument is about as effective as claiming that all scientists are stupid because they're not all rich.
Also on the topic of orbital bombardment...

Planetstrike page 4
Megatons.
Planetary invasions are urgent, swift and terrible affairs, characterized by deafening noise, bone-shattering explosions and the stench of death. Thousands of reckless and battle-hungry warriors plunge downward upon trails of flame and vapour like vengeful angels, pouring from the drop-craft and low-orbiting spaceships that darken the skies above. Megatonnes of ordinance hammer down around these skyborne warriors, their detonation so devastating that the skies themselves seem afire; red, black and blinding white like the fires of hell.
Um, that doesn't prove anything. Save for the fact that in total, megatonnes worth of ordinance were dropped down by "skyborne warriors", not unless you want to claim they were all carrying the same bombs...
Fallen Angels
Magma bombs are likened to fusion bombs.
The eight shells struck the target area more or less simultaneously, their magma warheads detonating with the heat and force of a fusion bomb.
...Okay? You can have bombs as low yield as a few tons or less if you wanted. All it suggests is that it uses fusion to get the job done.
At a thirty kilometer distance a shock wave picks up a space marine and tosses him through the air. Crouched, his profile might be a m^2. A very powerful shock wave which likely has much further to go. Probably gigatons (a few maybe). The space marine bit is interesting, worthy of further attention --- it could turn out that this requires biggotons for a shockwave to do that at so far.
This...seems entirely based on loose logic and calcs.
Also take note of the space marines reaction - it implies this bombardment is unusally powerful, something he had not seen before (contrast to macrocannons and lances), and was unprepared for. Interesting.
...Which doesn't help your argument.
These were no simple meteors, falling in thin streaks of light before vanishing into oblivion. Nemiel counted eight separate streaks of smoke and flame, plunging down in a steep arc and converging on a common point: the heart of the forge complex, some thirty kilometers away. When they struck, the entire northern horizon blazed with terrible, white light.
Nemiel had witnessed more than one orbital bombardment in his time, but those had been blazing trials of lance fire that carved across the ground like a burning blade, or salvos of poorly aimed macro-cannon fire that saturated a target area with huge shells. He'd never been close enough to experience the fury of a barrage of bombardment cannons, and wasn't prepared for what followed.
The eight shells struck the target area more or less simultaneously, their magma warheads detonating with the heat and force of a fusion bomb. His onboard systems registered the over-pressure from the blast and had just enough time to yell, 'Get down!' before the blast wave hit.
He dropped to the ground and pressed his helmet to the pemacrete as a roaring wall of superheated air howled over him. His temperature sensors spiked, pushing into the red zone, and the force of the wind lifted him off the ground and tossed him like a toy down the narrow lane. The thunder of the blast was something he felt through his armour, reverberating down into his bones. His autosenses overloaded and shut down once to prevent permanent damage.
It was over in a matter of moments. One second the entire world felt as though it were coming apart at the seams, and the next everything was almost eerily silent. Nemiel lay on his back, trying to regain his bearings. Icons blinked on his helmet display, informing him that his autosensors and vox-unit were resetting. As his vision cleared, he saw tendrils of smoke rising from his scorched armour.
...
It was only then that Nemiel fully saw the devastation that the bombardment had wrought. An enormous column of ash and smoke rose into the sky off to the North, where the volcano and the forge's centre used to be. The rising sun tinged the climbing column of debris in shades of blood red and fiery orange, whiles closer to the ground Nemiel could see thin veins of pulsing orange, tracks of real magma flowing like blood from the volcano's shattered flanks. Fires blazed out of control from horizon to horizon, consuming the shattered husks of wrecked buildings in a vast swathe surrounding the epicenter of the blast. For all intents and purposes, the forge complex had been destroyed.
Exactly what does this prove?

I really don't think half of you guys claiming gigatons even understand what a single gigaton will do. A gigaton isn't a bomb that just blasts a city off the face of the Earth. A kiloton bomb can and has done that. A gigaton bomb is an entirely different animal. When you say, nuke a city like Chicago with a 1 gigaton bomb, you aren't nuking just Chicago. You're also hitting a good chunk of that state (Illinois) and its neighbors (Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin). Detonating a 1 gigaton bomb in Chicago would mean that the thermal radiation would be so intense that even as far as Milwaukee, Rockford, Madison, and Norton shores would be hit with enough to inflict third-degree burn to all exposed flesh and set everything flammable on fire-and given the abundance in grass, farmland, and other highly flammable materials, I can assure you that you're looking at just about all of that turning into a massive firestorm the likes you've never seen. It'd make the yearly struggles that California puts outright laughable.

And that's one single gigaton. Over at Space Battles, they're claiming MIRV-style warheads with 5 gigaton warheads. A 5 gigaon warhead centered on Chicago would have a thermal radiation radius so great that it would engulf all but the most southbern area of Illinois, about half of Wisconsin, 2/3rd of Michigan, and just about all of Indiana. In addition to that, you'd also be hitting the edges of Iowa, Missouri, Minnesota, and Ohio to varying degrees. Just one of those 122x 5 gigaton warheads would easily wipe the United States off the map. With just 27 of those nukes, I can cover just about every square inch of the United States. We're talking about almost six times that number. And that's one MIRV warhead. The idea of an Exterminatus weapon would be absolutely laughable.


Nightbringer
Strike cruiser(?) can at least level all within a 50 kilometre radius. Probably gigatons.
Lol. A single, 1 gigaton nuclear bomb would level just about everything within a 70 kilometer blast. A 5 gigaton bomb would level just about everything within 120 kilometers.
Lord Admiral Tiberius had wanted to level the entire palace with orbital bombardment, but Uriel had resisted such a plan, knowing that the vast forces the Vae Victus could unleash would level everything within fifty kilometers of the palace.
And this doesn't support your claim at all either. Let's assume say, 100 macroguns. Let's look at say, 1.5 kilotons. It has a destructive radius where just about everything will be demolished at a range of .32 kilometers. If he just fired a hundred shots, not that much if he has a pretty large warship, with an effective laydown pattern, he could easily cover 32 kilometers. If he fires 200 shots, he can do well over 60 kilometers. And considering Koronus suggests one ship that has a thousand macrocannon batteries, hitting a radius of 50 kilometers is child's play, as he could extend the radius of destruction up to 320 kilometers. Limiting his field to 50 kilometers would pretty much assure, with an effective firing pattern, that everything in that area us utterly destroyed.
Latest Core Rulebook (the same one which talks about conventional vs exterminatus bombardment, Imperial ships prefer to smash planets through brute force until they break apart)
In all, maybe a multi-hundred meter deep shaft, coupled with a square kilometer of slagged ground around according to RT. Megaton range - perhaps.
The largest of the las-weapons - such as the lance-strike batteries employed upon spacecraft of the Imperial navy - produce beams that can sear away entire hab-blocks, leaving only smoking craters hundreds of feet deep.
Except lances focus all of their energy at one point. Going with a beam power of 25.1 TWs for 5 seconds (125.52 terajoules, equal to the energy unleashed by a 30 kiloton bomb), the laser would be able to drill down to a depth of 75.1 meter at a speed of 15 meter per second. On armor grade steel. Using ice, you could punch down 5.45 kilometers deep and you'd have a blast width of 23.9m meters.
Execution Hour
Again hundreds of meters deep - consistent. This time it sounds as if their raking the beams along, making the energy requirements higher, but power remains the same
Armaments that could hurl energy hundreds of thousands of kilometres across space now turned their power on the planet's surface in an awesome display of destructive capability, gouging wounds hundreds of meters deep into the rock and soil of the hills in search of the silos, command bunkers and generator caverns buried there.
Again, this means nothing. Without an indication of width and the timeframe, this tells us nothing. A laser with an output of 25.1 terajoules with a width of 5 meters could penetrate 75 meters deep into armored steel. Guess what happens when you keep that same laser going for just half a minute? It penetrates 450 meters into armored steel. And you know what? That only equates to total energy output of 753.12 terajoules--or 180 kilotons.

All this shows us is that you really, really don't understand how lasers work. A laser, unless it is a very dense one, will not explode like a bomb--it will bury itself deep into the target. And this is the energy it requires to burrow down through armored steel--you can imagine that concrete, dirt, and rock aren't going to be nearly as resilient as that will be.

You want to talk about megatons? At that same width and output, spending the equal to a one megaton bomb would allow you to melt your way through 2.5 kilometers of armored steel. Even for a group "stuck" with fusion power, this amount of energy is probably trivial to generate over the course of 2.78 minutes. That's right, before you'd be able to make yourself a sandwich, a laser with "just" 25.104 TWs could punch through two and a half kilometers or armored steel and probably much more in the way of dirt, rock, and other crust materials.
Lathe Worlds
Six day bombard depopulates a city world.
Wow, I almost fell out of my chair. A six-day bombardment. Son, with a dozen guns spouting 1-3 kiloton firepower that can refire every five minutes, it should take you the afternoon to depopulate New York City. A 1 gigaton bomb would kill just about everyone in Chicago and that's with about forty percent of its shockwave soaring over into a lake.

With a hundred guns, I could turn Chicago into a smoldering crater with a single volley. For God's sake, the fireball radius on a 1 gigaton bomb is 7.61 kilometers and covers 182.02 square kilometers.
An entire battlefleet attended to the world, obliterating any existing life in a cataclysmic bombardment of lance and torpedo that lasted a full six days. The fleet then rested a day, searching for any evidence that anything living survived, before completing the annihilation with a firestorm cannonade that burned any remaining oxygen from the atmosphere. Satisfied with their utter eradication, the fleet departed for other combat operations. Such total devastation is normally done on the order of the Inquisition, but the lack of a more simple cyclonic torpedo attack to accomplish the task indicates otherwise. Other planetary attacks during the crusade were often as destructive, though seeking only to kill off any xzenos or rebellious armies, and not to remove all life no matter the type. Whatever their enemy might have been, the Crusade required its complete extermination and was willing to take valuable time during the war to ensure this goal to the best of their ability.
Furthermore, your point is off. This is a battlefleet that destroyed the population of a world. Using just the macrocannon figure from the book for 1.5 kilotons and assuming each ship has 200 cannons, and if we assume an Earth-sized planet with 30% of it covered with land, like Earth. That would give us 150,000,000 square kilometers of land to hit. Assuming we use 1.5 kilotons and measure it by its shockwave of its lower psi value, but strong enough to collapse houses, it would put it at being able to cover 2.24 square kilometers. Assuming your ship fired 1.29 times per second with just the macrocannons, you could cover every square inch in six days. With four ships, you split that work four ways.

And that's only bombardment cannons and at half the maximum yield I suggested, that being 3 kilotons, a single ship would have to fire .8 times per second. Between four ships, you can again split that four ways. Or six ways.

So where's the gigatons?
Plenty of stuff that could easily be megaton range to single gigatons at least in the bombardment cannons case (30 - 50 Km radius which levels "anything" so 20PSI, which might not be enough to throw a square meter ton object at 30Km meters through the air).
Circular logic. A 4.6 psi will level all but the most heavily built concrete buildings. With multiple warheads, you could spread that damage well over 30-50 km without trying too hard.
Based on those two bits, its arguable a salvo of eight magma bombs is several gigatons, which sets a ballpark for strike cruisers and battlebarges.
That is one of the dumbest things I've heard all day. A single--a single 5 gigaton bomb is enough to level everything within 45.58 kilometers--even most heavily built concrete buildings. Splitting that argument up only further destroys your theory. That's 635 megatons each and at that yield, a single one of those will take out everything within 22.9 km with a pressure of 20 psi. This is vast overkill with just four or six of those bombs. It also doesn't take into account that structures will be repeatedly struck by lesser 4.6 psi shockwaves repeatedly.

Let's try to use some actual common sense, shall we? According to Battlefleet Koronus, the magma bomb operation affects an area twice the size of a macrocannon bombardment. A single macrocannon hit will destroy anything it strikes, within several meter radius of its target. Assuming 50 meters, we can assume this to mean 100 meters for the magma bomb. This equates to about 18 kilotons. With seven of those evenly spread out, you could effectively kill most things within 11.25 kilometers with a single strike, if you spread them out properly. Small gaps, but nothing too important. And some small sacrifice of area could probably fix that out.

So yeah, said ship would only have to really a half dozen times with magma bombs to create that same sort of effect. A few dozen times if you want to assert total destruction. Ie, with 48 magma bombs, even only looking for high 20 psi airblast damage, you could take out 35.77 kilometers. With multiple ships or just lots of bombs, you could easily perform that effect with just your magma bombs. That doesn't include things like macro cannons and lances.

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

Post by User15046 » Fri Aug 02, 2013 10:33 pm

Because none of the fanboys want to hear it?

Seriously, that argument is about as effective as claiming that all scientists are stupid because they're not all rich.
Lol, that’s not a counterargument, just a question. If your case is so strong, you should be able to put them all in their places, smacking down a beautiful plethora of evidences down on the table, that they can’t contest. Instead, most of the time, you seem to resort to ad hominem.
Um, that doesn't prove anything. Save for the fact that in total, megatonnes worth of ordinance were dropped down by "skyborne warriors", not unless you want to claim they were all carrying the same bombs...
True, I’m not making any specific claims with that one. The ordiances were not deployed by the “skyborne warriors” but the starships.
...Okay? You can have bombs as low yield as a few tons or less if you wanted. All it suggests is that it uses fusion to get the job done.
Agreed.
But it does add to the list of quotes that imply atomics or possible nuclear fusion weapons are used, and remain effective. 6MT’s per ton is the theoretical modern upper limit for nuclear fusion bombs, setting a max yield of 6 gigatons for thousand ton macro-shells – and yea, anything below that too.
...Which doesn't help your argument.
Maybe not with you. But It does imply this bombardment is more powerful than most macro or lance barrages, or even most of those that the space marine has seen. Some claim multi-hundred and multi-thousand gigaton salvo’s for capital ship firepower…
Exactly what does this prove?
A space marine is -not- an easy thing to hurl through the air. The shockwave would kill a man or bring down a wall. Nukemap classics down at the moment.
I really don't think half of you guys claiming gigatons even understand what a single gigaton will do. A gigaton isn't a bomb that just blasts a city off the face of the Earth. A kiloton bomb can and has done that.
Has not. A multi-gigaton bomb will utterly level a larger city, a few kilotons might level one of the large parks in London.
A gigaton bomb is an entirely different animal. When you say, nuke a city like Chicago with a 1 gigaton bomb, you aren't nuking just Chicago. You're also hitting a good chunk of that state (Illinois) and its neighbors (Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin). Detonating a 1 gigaton bomb in Chicago would mean that the thermal radiation would be so intense that even as far as Milwaukee, Rockford, Madison, and Norton shores would be hit with enough to inflict third-degree burn to all exposed flesh and set everything flammable on fire-and given the abundance in grass, farmland, and other highly flammable materials, I can assure you that you're looking at just about all of that turning into a massive firestorm the likes you've never seen. It'd make the yearly struggles that California puts outright laughable.
I use nukemap, SDN’s calculator is very conservative. Everything beyond 100MT is speculation to some extent anyway.
And that's one single gigaton. Over at Space Battles, they're claiming MIRV-style warheads with 5 gigaton warheads. A 5 gigaon warhead centered on Chicago would have a thermal radiation radius so great that it would engulf all but the most southbern area of Illinois, about half of Wisconsin, 2/3rd of Michigan, and just about all of Indiana. In addition to that, you'd also be hitting the edges of Iowa, Missouri, Minnesota, and Ohio to varying degrees. Just one of those 122x 5 gigaton warheads would easily wipe the United States off the map. With just 27 of those nukes, I can cover just about every square inch of the United States. We're talking about almost six times that number. And that's one MIRV warhead. The idea of an Exterminatus weapon would be absolutely laughable.
That does seem to be the consensus over there yes, tens, hundreds, or even thousands of gigatons per salvo. Some are more “slag a continent in a single salvo” too. One example of exterminatus takes a full 24 hours to purge a planet of all life, which does set certain limits.
Anyhow, to level everything (20 psi) within a 30 kilometer radius does equate to some gigatons. Single digit. All eight bombs struck the exact same point, and were not optimized for taking out as much area as possible.
xcept lances focus all of their energy at one point. Going with a beam power of 25.1 TWs for 5 seconds (125.52 terajoules, equal to the energy unleashed by a 30 kiloton bomb), the laser would be able to drill down to a depth of 75.1 meter at a speed of 15 meter per second. On armor grade steel. Using ice, you could punch down 5.45 kilometers deep and you'd have a blast width of 23.9m meters.
I scaled the lance lens diameter, its twenty meters. Could you repeat your work using a 20 meter wide beam?
Again, this means nothing. Without an indication of width and the timeframe, this tells us nothing. A laser with an output of 25.1 terajoules with a width of 5 meters could penetrate 75 meters deep into armored steel. Guess what happens when you keep that same laser going for just half a minute? It penetrates 450 meters into armored steel. And you know what? That only equates to total energy output of 753.12 terajoules--or 180 kilotons.
All this shows us is that you really, really don't understand how lasers work. A laser, unless it is a very dense one, will not explode like a bomb--it will bury itself deep into the target. And this is the energy it requires to burrow down through armored steel--you can imagine that concrete, dirt, and rock aren't going to be nearly as resilient as that will be.
You want to talk about megatons? At that same width and output, spending the equal to a one megaton bomb would allow you to melt your way through 2.5 kilometers of armored steel. Even for a group "stuck" with fusion power, this amount of energy is probably trivial to generate over the course of 2.78 minutes. That's right, before you'd be able to make yourself a sandwich, a laser with "just" 25.104 TWs could punch through two and a half kilometers or armored steel and probably much more in the way of dirt, rock, and other crust materials.
Again the beam is not going to be 5 meters across, the lense/beam is twenty meters in diameter. Demonstrate a 20 meter wide beam penetrating hundreds of meters into the ground, please post the results of the laser calc.
Wow, I almost fell out of my chair. A six-day bombardment. Son, with a dozen guns spouting 1-3 kiloton firepower that can refire every five minutes, it should take you the afternoon to depopulate New York City. A 1 gigaton bomb would kill just about everyone in Chicago and that's with about forty percent of its shockwave soaring over into a lake.
With a hundred guns, I could turn Chicago into a smoldering crater with a single volley. For God's sake, the fireball radius on a 1 gigaton bomb is 7.61 kilometers and covers 182.02 square kilometers.
I’ve done the calcs, this can easily get into the gigatons per second time averaged firepower. The results vary widely depending on how powerful you assume the guns to be in the first place however. Note there are limitations on how many torpedoes the fleet will have with them.
ircular logic. A 4.6 psi will level all but the most heavily built concrete buildings. With multiple warheads, you could spread that damage well over 30-50 km without trying too hard.
That is one of the dumbest things I've heard all day. A single--a single 5 gigaton bomb is enough to level everything within 45.58 kilometers--even most heavily built concrete buildings. Splitting that argument up only further destroys your theory. That's 635 megatons each and at that yield, a single one of those will take out everything within 22.9 km with a pressure of 20 psi. This is vast overkill with just four or six of those bombs. It also doesn't take into account that structures will be repeatedly struck by lesser 4.6 psi shockwaves repeatedly.
Let's try to use some actual common sense, shall we? According to Battlefleet Koronus, the magma bomb operation affects an area twice the size of a macrocannon bombardment. A single macrocannon hit will destroy anything it strikes, within several meter radius of its target. Assuming 50 meters, we can assume this to mean 100 meters for the magma bomb. This equates to about 18 kilotons. With seven of those evenly spread out, you could effectively kill most things within 11.25 kilometers with a single strike, if you spread them out properly. Small gaps, but nothing too important. And some small sacrifice of area could probably fix that out.
So yeah, said ship would only have to really a half dozen times with magma bombs to create that same sort of effect. A few dozen times if you want to assert total destruction. Ie, with 48 magma bombs, even only looking for high 20 psi airblast damage, you could take out 35.77 kilometers. With multiple ships or just lots of bombs, you could easily perform that effect with just your magma bombs. That doesn't include things like macro cannons and lances.
All the shots hit the exact same point, and created a shock wave powerful enough to hurl a space marine whom was thirty kilometres away. A 60 kilometre shockwave in all, and a powerful one at that.
Replacing the damage over a large area with lower yield weapons is doable, but its not what happened. All eight warheads struck in the exact same point, they were not spread out. To create a 20psi shockwave which expands thirty kilometres out to hurl the marine requires several gigatons.

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

Post by Khas » Fri Aug 02, 2013 11:04 pm

For the kiloton blasts leveling cities, I think you're forgetting about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The nukes that destroyed those cities had yields of 16 and 21 kilotons, respectively.

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

Post by User15046 » Fri Aug 02, 2013 11:23 pm

Khas wrote:For the kiloton blasts leveling cities, I think you're forgetting about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The nukes that destroyed those cities had yields of 16 and 21 kilotons, respectively.
They weren't leveled end to end and they weren't very large. Nukemaps not working at the moment, but some of the parks in London are large enough to eat a low yield kiloton nuke, you need nukes orders of magnitude more powerful to totally level it outright.

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

Post by Khas » Fri Aug 02, 2013 11:54 pm

There were over 100,000 people killed as a result of the explosion. However, there's also the fact that London is a much larger city, both population and outright size-wise than Hiroshima is, but the point still stands that a kiloton level bomb is enough to level a somewhat large-ish city.

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

Post by User15046 » Sat Aug 03, 2013 5:47 pm

Okay, about 1.5 gigatons will have a 20psi -space marine slinging- shockwave out to 30 kilometers, and 6 gigatons would be the very upper limit for "level everything within 50 kilometers" radius of the palace.

http://www.nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/classic/

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

Post by User15046 » Sat Aug 03, 2013 5:51 pm

Khas wrote:There were over 100,000 people killed as a result of the explosion. However, there's also the fact that London is a much larger city, both population and outright size-wise than Hiroshima is, but the point still stands that a kiloton level bomb is enough to level a somewhat large-ish city.
Indeed, check out what 21 kilotons looks like in the centre of london. http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

About 40 megatons will encompass the whole of London, everything but the very outskirts - "at 5 psi overpressure, most residential buildings collapse, injuries are universal, fatalities are widespread. Optimal height of burst to maxmimize this effect is 9.8 km" - but people will be surviving and heavily built structures will survive.

To totally level the city will require something closer to 800 megatons - "At 20 psi overpressure, heavily built concrete buildings are severely damaged or demolished; fatalities approach 100%. Optimal height of burst to maxmimize this effect is 8.46 km" -

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

Post by sonofccn » Sun Aug 04, 2013 5:12 pm

Magos wrote:They weren't leveled end to end and they weren't very large...you need nukes orders of magnitude more powerful to totally level it outright.
All of which presumes "leveled" must be interpeted strictly in an absolutely literal sense,that this couldn't be described as "leveled" because a building didn't collasp, rather than invocative of a looser and more general idea of intent.
Magos wrote:To totally level the city will require something closer to 800 megatons
To be blunt talking of needing 800 megatons to "level the city" is akin to saying you need an Atom bomb to totally destroy a city building. The destructive effects would be such as to overshadow the original city/building. Hell using Nukemap2 a 100 megaton bomb, the highest it allows, centered on New York city would still be felt in places like Bridgeport and Mt. Olive Township.
Magos wrote:Okay, about 1.5 gigatons will have a 20psi -space marine slinging- shockwave out to 30 kilometersOkay, about 1.5 gigatons will have a 20psi -space marine slinging- shockwave out to 30 kilometers
How, then, do you explain the relative lack of destructive effects on target? The structures still standing, apparent lack of a predominate crater, ect?

Further what steps have you taken to determine this blast, whatever yield it was, was provided wholly or in large part by the bombardment cannons rather than some reactor or technology in this "forge complex" or released via the suddenly released volcanic pressure?

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

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sat Aug 17, 2013 5:40 pm

Magos wrote:
Because none of the fanboys want to hear it?

Seriously, that argument is about as effective as claiming that all scientists are stupid because they're not all rich.
Lol, that’s not a counterargument, just a question. If your case is so strong, you should be able to put them all in their places, smacking down a beautiful plethora of evidences down on the table, that they can’t contest. Instead, most of the time, you seem to resort to ad hominem.
The main problem being that no one, strangely enough, has ever created a website dedicated to the study of firepower and other grand claims attributed to 40K, with the clear intent to tame them, for a change.
Oponents can also reject logic when it is logic that is necessary for a demonstration, by claiming the logic bogus, without doing much work to prove their claim. It's an easy accusation and once doubt is cast, it takes time to counter the claim. Generally the best way to do that is simply point out that the contradictor didn't counter-demonstrate anything beyond an empty attack.

Now I don't know about you, but if you look into my threads and those of General Donner, you'll see that although they're not always perfectly ordered, they're chokeful with direct evidence, quotes and sound debunking.
The main problem also being the brick wall syndrome. Although the accusation can obviously fly both ways, what is there to do when one side obtusely refuse to admit being wrong on the straightest piece of evidence possible?
Beyond the anti-logic attack, they'll bring the bad-interpretation one, which even precedes logic : simply put, you can't read the text for what it says.

That, assuming you're fighting on equal grounds. But the deck is already largely stacked against you, both because of a general "consensus" (which only asks to be challenged and broken) and the heavily biased moderation, there's not much to do I'm afraid.

I humbly believe that if I hadn't decided to frontly attack some of Connor's silly claims and take the blunt of the venom at Spacebattles, the old statuquo would have never been contested.
I made some diplmatic mistakes and got banned, not without defending my claims, which I still consider way superior to this day.

Now if you want to get a taste of the kind of bias I went through when I was more active, you can look into those SFJN threads (some also include other members who got the same treatment, like Mith, who although toned down his position when it was super dangerous for the small minority dissenters):

http://www.starfleetjedi.net/forum/view ... f=4&t=2079
http://www.starfleetjedi.net/forum/view ... f=4&t=1331

Same kind of behaviour when it comes to Star Wars:

http://www.starfleetjedi.net/forum/view ... f=4&t=1235

Notice that I got several bans dealing with SW around 2007-2009, taking much of the flak, before the ICS got taken down to its rightful place: just another random EU source at tension with the vast majority of former and even later EU lore. This is also why I got a sulfurous reputation at SB. Obviously I was a bit mad jumping at the throats of the two most popular, precious and wanked over franchises ever supported at SB.

Now, aside from the 40K threads in the "other analysis" section of this forum, you can find this thread in the "other websites":

http://www.starfleetjedi.net/forum/view ... 9&start=30

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

Post by User15046 » Wed Sep 04, 2013 9:51 am

Why don't you make a website with such contents? Would give you the opportunity to consolidate your sources into a far more concise manner and get them heard by many more people. Stuff would be waaay easier to find on a website than it is in these forums.

You could even do it on free webs, which involves no code, very nice graphics and is free (very cheap to get a propper website name if you choose too) and would be on the first page of google.

Its clearly something you care about, so why don't you go for it?

Sono, those are good points. But I don't think the volcano would really contribute much, at most megatons going by real volcanos, which still leaves all the other gigatons. A new book actually mentions "multi-gigaton" yields for magma bombs, which does sorta jive with this scene too.

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

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sun Sep 08, 2013 6:47 pm

Magos wrote:Why don't you make a website with such contents? Would give you the opportunity to consolidate your sources into a far more concise manner and get them heard by many more people. Stuff would be waaay easier to find on a website than it is in these forums.

You could even do it on free webs, which involves no code, very nice graphics and is free (very cheap to get a propper website name if you choose too) and would be on the first page of google.

Its clearly something you care about, so why don't you go for it?
I hardly found time to make one for Stargate despite the huge amount of material I had to post about it. Warhammer only comes a certain distance behind that. Besides, I'm not knowledgeable enough about Warhammer 40000 to launch a website specifically dedicated to this universe, as a fan website would typically be. It could only take the form of a versus-related critical "website".
The best platform, I guess, would be a blog, to deliver an article from time to time, picked from here and cleaned up, and if necessary, cut into several parts. Those articles could easily be updated. Or a small website, as you said, but I would certainly NOT want to waste anytime on design and domain management whatsoever. I don't want to have to code any single line.
That, perhaps, I could do in a year or two - I have much more pressing and profitable matters to attend to right now.
Of course, anything that could combine a blog and a website with a front page linking to each article in an easily accessible and readable format would be perfect.

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

Post by User15046 » Mon Sep 09, 2013 12:30 pm

Sounds like webs.com would fit the bill then - no coding, nice looking design and supports blogs. It even supports forums.

Its also free, but for full functionality such as embedded videos and additional file space for more pictures does require membership. A free website does have to be websitename.webs.com too, unless you buy a domain name.

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

Post by sonofccn » Wed Sep 11, 2013 11:46 pm

Magos wrote:Sono, those are good points. But I don't think the volcano would really contribute much, at most megatons going by real volcanos, which still leaves all the other gigatons
The point of issue is there is much descrepency on if it was a multi-gigaton event. "at most megatons" may be all that was required.
Magos wrote:A new book actually mentions "multi-gigaton" yields for magma bombs, which does sorta jive with this scene too.
IIRC you claimed between 1.5 to 2 gigatons for a salvo of eight magma bombs, 250 megatons apiece, which wouldn't jive with magma bombs which are "multi-gigaton" apiece. However you certaintly can post the relevant section and add it to our collection.

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

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Wed Nov 06, 2013 2:40 pm

The GeoM destroys some kind of planet sized metal lasagna on his own.

From Forgeworld Betrayal pg.83

"Gorro was a layered sphere of debris and scrap sifted from the space lanes and wreck drifts of the Telon Reach. It hung in the light of a red sun like a rolled ball of crushed metal held together and shielded by magnetic and gravitational field generators. When a thousand strong fleet dropped out of the warp above Gorro it was the Emperor himself who gave the order to begin the assault. The Fields holding Gorro together also made it highly resistant to bombardment."

Later we have the Emperor dealing with the planet and its field generators.

"Together father and son led their forces deeper an deeper into the sphere until they reached the center of Gorro. The heart of the scrap planet was a self-sustaining plasma sphere contained by a warp-fold envelope the like of which had never been seen before or since. It is said the Emperor himself worked to collapse the plasma sphere allowing it to implode into the Warp. In its place he opened a hungering hole in unreality. Without its power source Gorro's magnetic field generators and power fields collapsed into the vortex and the internal structure of the the scrap sphere began to fall apart. Metal sheered and crumpled, levels twisted together and the whole structure began to deform. Gorro ate itself from within as the imperial forces withdrew. When the vortex collapsed a hollow skin of rusted metal around an empty void was all the remained to mark the death of the Ork world."
Seems they had managed to land a mobile party and went down the innards of that world to reach the plasma core.
That's the only way that makes sense to me since the planet's generators still seem to have kept the fleet at bay.

Turns out it wasn't so impressive: he basically put a sink right in the middle of that giant thing. The self-feeding collapse is what brought it all down from there, being flushed into that hole into unreality.
We have no information on how the Emperor achieved the sabotage, and it's literally written under the flavour of Stuff of Legend.
Like, let's drop a subspace or black hole grenade and let the whole thing eat itself. Now RUUUUNN !!

EDIT: it's even possible that the Emperor just had to find a way to let the warp-fold enveloppe deteriorate or collapse to allow the planet to crumble. There is no indication in the text that the Emperor summoned any Warp rift all by himself. Not to say that "he opened a hole" doesn't necessarily follow the most gratuitously exagerated interpretation.
If you place explosives onto a bunker's wall and detonate them, you do open a hole into the wall. Here, the method isn't mentionned, but obviously rabid fans would claim the use of mighty powers instead of assuming that activating a failure into the warp-fold system that maintained the plasma core was what resulted into the chain reaction. Boo.
As always, from one partly elusive piece of text, wankers pump it up to a feat wherein a drop of sweat falling off from the GeoM's left eyebrow blew up an entire galaxy, or something equally reasonnable.

Picked from here.

Oh and this vlaaad12345 is really an upper tier idiot.

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