Re: Another nerf for SW firepower...
Posted: Wed Apr 19, 2017 6:30 pm
There's just a problem with the GBU-43. It's chemical and uses at lot of material to spread and ignite over a large area. It has little to do with proton cannons (the ones used by the CIS forces).
The GBU-43/M is ought to produce large and thick smoke clouds. Also, the fact that it explodes against the ground is going to pancake the fireball and spread it even wider.
Besides, the NATO forces used to destroy ammo and fuel depots at large (there are plenty of explosions of that on youtube), so what we see may have been enhanced by some munition caches blowing up.
All I could find in terms of information is that:
The only official width for an Acclamator I know of is 460 meters. At 1:37 you've got an explosion that is close to the belly of the Acclamator on the right of the screen. Close enough to illuminate its hull more than any of the four previous blasts (the fourth one somewhat mildly illuminates a small portion of the same ship's hull for a brief moment). With youtube's slow mo mode (.25), you can get a large fireball that seems about one fifth to one fourth of the width of the ship, making it 92 to 115 meters wide, but it could be a bit smaller if closer to the camera than the ship, although it so well illuminated the hull that it wouldn't have bursted much below the ship.
If you take a look at the video I posted before, specifically at this time index, we're told that the black disc on the ground is a 500 feet (152 m) wide bull's eye.
As you can see at 2 m 29 s, the already cooling fireball (partially darkened) is roughly a third of the disc's diameter and detonated 340 meters above the ground (data about the Tumbler-Snapper tests here). So the fireball is only 50 meters wide. The nuclear weapon for the second shot also had a yield of one kiloton.
In other words, based on this data, I may have been underestimating the yield of those shots.
Also, since 50 meters is really a small fireball in light of what we observe during the battle over Ryloth, going for a 1 KT yield per shot would easily be acceptable as a conservative estimate.
A smaller figure may be provided if we consider some of the fireballs to be close to the ships too and being about 1.5~2 times wider than the vertical edge of the lateral trenches at the farthest end point on the "wings". Perrhaps we'd get diameters in the 30~40 meters and allowing us to put the yields at several hundreds of gigajoules per shot, although none of those fireballs ever illuminate the hulls.
Another explosion that lights up a portion of a hull is the one resulting from the destruction of a thruster: one can easily see the gradient of red over the starboard side's slanted section of the ventral hull. However, we also see closeby explosions being surrounded by a red halo, quite far from any cruiser. The thing is, you could argue that it's a post prod effect applied in 2D anywhere where white pixels are detected, but if it were true, then the destruction of the thruster, which does create a mass of white pixels on the screen, would have also applied such a surrounding effect; yet it wasn't, since only the underneath 45° oblique hull was lit up.
All in all, yields in two figures in the gigajoule range appear too low to me.
The GBU-43/M is ought to produce large and thick smoke clouds. Also, the fact that it explodes against the ground is going to pancake the fireball and spread it even wider.
Besides, the NATO forces used to destroy ammo and fuel depots at large (there are plenty of explosions of that on youtube), so what we see may have been enhanced by some munition caches blowing up.
All I could find in terms of information is that:
That being said, it's hard to peg the value of those proton-based projectiles but the diameter of the fireballs may be of use, although I dread using visuals from that show so strictly.Wikipedia wrote:Description
A GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb strikes an ISIS-K cave and tunnel systems in the Achin district of the Nangarhar Province in eastern Afghanistan at 7:32 p.m. local time April 13, 2017. The strike was designed to minimize the risk to Afghan and U.S. forces conducting clearing operations in the area while maximizing the destruction of ISIS-K fighters and facilities. ISIS-K, also known as the Khorasan group, is based in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region and is composed primarily of former members of Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban. (DoD video)
Date
April 13, 2017
The only official width for an Acclamator I know of is 460 meters. At 1:37 you've got an explosion that is close to the belly of the Acclamator on the right of the screen. Close enough to illuminate its hull more than any of the four previous blasts (the fourth one somewhat mildly illuminates a small portion of the same ship's hull for a brief moment). With youtube's slow mo mode (.25), you can get a large fireball that seems about one fifth to one fourth of the width of the ship, making it 92 to 115 meters wide, but it could be a bit smaller if closer to the camera than the ship, although it so well illuminated the hull that it wouldn't have bursted much below the ship.
If you take a look at the video I posted before, specifically at this time index, we're told that the black disc on the ground is a 500 feet (152 m) wide bull's eye.
As you can see at 2 m 29 s, the already cooling fireball (partially darkened) is roughly a third of the disc's diameter and detonated 340 meters above the ground (data about the Tumbler-Snapper tests here). So the fireball is only 50 meters wide. The nuclear weapon for the second shot also had a yield of one kiloton.
In other words, based on this data, I may have been underestimating the yield of those shots.
Also, since 50 meters is really a small fireball in light of what we observe during the battle over Ryloth, going for a 1 KT yield per shot would easily be acceptable as a conservative estimate.
A smaller figure may be provided if we consider some of the fireballs to be close to the ships too and being about 1.5~2 times wider than the vertical edge of the lateral trenches at the farthest end point on the "wings". Perrhaps we'd get diameters in the 30~40 meters and allowing us to put the yields at several hundreds of gigajoules per shot, although none of those fireballs ever illuminate the hulls.
Another explosion that lights up a portion of a hull is the one resulting from the destruction of a thruster: one can easily see the gradient of red over the starboard side's slanted section of the ventral hull. However, we also see closeby explosions being surrounded by a red halo, quite far from any cruiser. The thing is, you could argue that it's a post prod effect applied in 2D anywhere where white pixels are detected, but if it were true, then the destruction of the thruster, which does create a mass of white pixels on the screen, would have also applied such a surrounding effect; yet it wasn't, since only the underneath 45° oblique hull was lit up.
All in all, yields in two figures in the gigajoule range appear too low to me.