WH40K - Storm of Iron (SDN)

[Mr. Oragahn]

Keeping with the series of looking at SDN's Warhammer 40000 threads, now is time to go through Storm of Iron. There's been a number of odd claims made there as well, as you'll see.
If anything, this will serve as another example of the phenomenon that turned WH4K into W4NK in versus debates.

Shall we start?

Page 14

Honsou sighted on the soldier nearest him, lining the fore and back sight precisely on the gap between the man's helmet and flak jacket.

Interesting that Honsou is aiming for a gap in the armour with his bolt pistol, because it implies that he knew the bolt round might have been either stopped or reduced in force if it hit either.

Also, this bolt pistol seems to use good ol fashioned fixed sights. Not neccsearily a problem, at least not for a space marine.

PAge 15

He swore, seeing Hitch and Charedo slump to the ground, gaping craters where their faces had been.

...

He grabbed Hitche's headless corpse and pulled, hauling his former squadmate inside, ,out of the door's path.

Bolt pistol round's effects, basically blowing the heads apart. Note that they hit at the neck, so the explosive radius would have been over ~15-20 cm. Even more, note the apparent lack of blood gushing out of the neck (or apparent absence of blood spraying around for that matter. This would imply significant cauterization occuring. Given probable head sizes, and say fairly low level cauterization (150-200C, about half what I do for lasguns.. ~400-580 kilojoules/kg roughly), we're rpobably looking at the energy equivalent of 1-2 kilos of TNT, at least (thermal effects only, not explosive)

Notice, above all, the absence of description of pretty much anything save for the missing heads. Steam? Foul smell? Flashes due to the sudden release of heat? Pulverized bits of flesh and pulped tissue? Any deafening explosion?
Nothing. Why focus on non described cauterization then?
Not to say that the figure presented to support cauterization is most absurd. How can it be that a bolt projectile which yield, a fraction of which being heat, didn't actually blow the torso?
You know, like you would actually expect after lodging one or two kilos of TNT right inside the nape of a man?

Here's a M67 grenade. About 180 g of Composition B, which is 59.5% RDX and 39.5% TNT. Let's just make that 60 and 40 percent, and thus respectively 108 g and 72 g. With RDX giving around 5.2 MJ/kg and TNT giving 4.2 MJ/kg, we get 0.5616 MJ and 0.3024 MJ.
That's about 0.864 MJ.
Now that is what the frag grenade does. Notice the distance, more than ten meters easily, the amount of earth it lifts and the radius of the affected soil.
Now tell me that amount of firepower directly lodged into the exposed nape of a man would have merely resulted into the head being severed at the neck.
And let's not pretend the projectile has more to do with concussion...

Now, let's look at this description of what a sniper can do to the head of a man, and the associated energy figures.
We see that the vast majority of kinetic energy figures are found to be between 3.5 and 6.8 KJ (except for the much higher .50 caliber bullets), and somewhere in those figures, there is a capacity to blow half of a face away.
The pistol was fired at a relatively very short range (Honsu started less than seven meters away from the back of the bunker and it seems he may have gotten up and closed the distance by the time he got noticed by Hawke).
I don't see where Connor got the idea that the projectiles blew the heads apart. That's silly. How can you blow a head apart and have a crater in lieu of the face at the same time?
Besides, why liken the projectile to an explosive?
After Hawke fires the aft autogun and jumps off the controls to move Hitch's body out the automatic door, Hawke is hit by the same weapon:

"A shape loomed up out of the dust. He fell back as a bullet tore across his shoulder."

And obviously, this is not an exploding shell. Notice that Hawke survives for the whole book.

Connor claims about 1 or 2 kilos of TNT, 4.184 or 8.368 megajoules. Only that.
That's oh just practically a thousand times greater than what could be considered enough to obtain the effects as described in the book!

PAge 16

Guardsman Hawke scremed as fire and whickering fragments lashed his body. The force of the explosion picked him up and slammed him against the wall of the listening post.

....

He had time to scream once before the pressure wave snatched the breath from his lungs, ,slamming his head into the wall and taking the pain away.

CSM throws a grenade into close confines. I think the Guardsmen in question might have been partly protected. but being phyiscally picked up and hurled against the wall is still fairly violent. This does imply that the flak protects against the kinds of Frag grenades Space Marines carry, which as we see can be fairly powerful.

Seriously, what's that? Time Bullet and Hollywood fizzix all rolled in one?
Since when can he scream before the supersonic nearby blast reaches him?

Solution: the book describes the guy screaming while he's been heaved. The grenades, here, are quite powerful though. We don't know anything about their size however.

Page 22

Nothing should be able to enter even the outer edges of the system without them being aware of it... could it?

...

No, the logic engines would have screamed the place down many days ago if it had detected this size of fleet approaching. Somehow these starships had avoided detection by some of the rarest and most precious equipment available to the Adeptus Mechanicus.

The implication of some FTL detection (passive) to detect the arrival/presence of a large fleet. It also indicates that it would take said fleet "days" to reach the planet. That would generally be suggestive of accelerations on the tens or hundreds of gees range. Then again its bound to contain transports as well as warships, so it could be the warships are constrained by the speed of the slower ships.

I quote this solely to remind the reader that the next part I quote below followed that one in Connor's original post.
It is relevant to what follows;

Page 24

Others smashed into runways, cratering them and melting the honeycombed adamantium with the heat of a star.

Magma bombs launched by a Iron Warriors battle barge above. "heat of a star" taken literally might infer mid to high gigaton/low teraton range warheads, (note the italics, because this isn't certain) but not much larger, because the yields would be well into extinction level. Hell, at the yields as it is, they probably could inflict significant global effects as it is. (Though Hydra Cordatus was already subject to extinction level firepower before, so its not exactly "habitable" to begin with..)

I don't know where the reference of a former artificial extinction level comes from, and I would obviously advise taking such a claim with a grain of salt.
That, because we also know what a magma bomb is worth of, and what it is used for (see here). Near extinction level firepower is certainly not part of such a weapon's function. Hell, even heavy magma bombs are still "only" used to reduce ground installations to rubble.
Now, I'm going to provide more than the cherry picked portion of the text Connor decided to highlight for his observation. There is stuff that's described before and after it. However, he picked this very limited piece, for a clear reason: it is the only one that allows him to suggest gigaton/teraton firepower.
It's simply impossible to call this something else other than dishonesty, and here's why:

NEARLY A THOUSAND men died in the first seconds of the Iron Warriors' initial bombardment of
Jericho Falls spaceport. The battle barge Stonebreaker fired three salvoes of magma bombs
into the desolate rocky slopes surrounding the spaceport, blasting vast chunks of rock
hundreds of metres into the air and flattening almost all the torpedo silos in the mountains
with unerring accuracy.

They throw debris into the air and flatten the silos in the mountains. They don't flatten the mountains themselves.
I'd be surprised if they reached beyond terajoules of concussion force.

Alarm sirens screamed and the spaceport's weapon batteries rumbled into firing positions as
their gunners desperately sought to acquire targets before being annihilated. A few hastily
blessed torpedoes roared upwards through the orange sky on pillars of fiery smoke and
powerful beams of laser energy stabbed through the perpetually cloudless heavens.
More bombs fell, this time within the perimeter of Jericho Falls, demolishing buildings,
gouging great craters and hurling enormous clouds of umber ash into the atmosphere.
Flames from burning structures lit the smoke from within and bodies lay aflame in the
wreckage of the shattered spaceport. Smashed aircraft littered the ground and more exploded
as the heat from the fires cooked off their weapons and fuel tanks.
Bombs slammed into the rockcrete, scything lethal fragments everywhere. Others smashed
into the runways, cratering them and melting the honeycombed adamantium with the heat of
a star.

Obviously nowhere gigaton level. The size of the "great craters" is hard to determine.
Magma bombs obviously come with a significant momentum, which will make their impacts much more efficient at cratering than if you tried to gouge earth by just blowing up a bomb placed onto the surface. Considering that the spaceport is reduced to burning rubble, that buildings and the runway are consumed by fire, etc., it's obvious that the cratering is extensive due to the fact it's a barrage of weapon fire, not because the craters themselves would be ungodly large.
We do not expect kilometer wide craters, and as such once again we would have no reason to look for more than terajoules of energy at play, really. And even that much firepower is quite silly since they wanted to establish some camp there, since apparently taking the runway was important.

The Marauders and Lightnings out in the open took the worst of the barrage, pulverised by
the force of the explosions.
The noise and confusion were unbelievable; the sky was red with flames and black with
smoke. Heavy lasfire blasted upwards.
A number of shells impacted on the main hangar's roof. Its armoured structure had absorbed
the damage so far, though vast cracks now zigzagged across the reinforced walls and roof.
The main runway was engulfed in flames, burning pools of jet fuel spewing thick black
smoke that turned day into night.
Hell had come to Hydra Cordatus.

No comments.
Notice that Connor never provides any supplementary material other than his "fine selection".

I'll pass on the notes used for the coming calculation...

[Mr. Oragahn]

PAge 31

Before the echoes had died, the Iron Warrior with the multi-melta rose from his concealment and charged forwards to fire. The guns' discharge built to a deafening screech before erupting from the barrels in a searing hiss. The warrior's aim was true and the air inside the bunker ignited with atomic fury, spurts of vaporised flesh and superheated oxygen blasting from the weapons slits.

Meltablast vaporizes the troops inside and, as noted before and later, melts the bunker itself to liquid. We have no idea how many troops were inside, but if they had at least a squad (possible) and vaporized them all, it could be easily several gigajoules minimum. More if incineration was involved (which is likely, discussed below)

It is curious to note, ,however, that the wepaons' effects seems to imply a more "explosive/area effect" weapon, as I noted long ago. This is, of course grossly conservative and I'll cover the other effects below.

I wonder if this bolt didn't hit ammo. I don't remember this point being brought up.
Other than that, the weapon would indeed need to provide gigajoules of energy, but the transfer of energy is most peculiar, as always.
Descriptions often attach the term nuclear to meltas, but the reaction is nothing as powerful as a nuclear reaction. That said, meltas are described as effecting the atoms of matter in a weird way, so that could be what's so "nuclear" about it. But clearly, the effects are not similar to detonations.

Page 32

He leapt over the Marauder's fuselage and sprinted towards the molten hell of the destroyed bunker, its walls now flowing like wax across the ground.

...

Honsou leapt onto the remains of the bunker, his ironshod boot sinking into the molten rock.

Again, note fo the composition and result of the meltablast to the bunker. Assuming a 3-4 meter tall bunker like a box, with half meter thick walls, it totally masses some 57,000 to 111,000 kilograms. Assuming rocklike properties as above, you can figure ~2-2.5 MJ per kg to melt. Roughly, you'll get between 120 GJ and 280 GJ minimum from all that, but if the walls are thicker (say a meter thick) you can get ~330-420 Gigajoules.

Even then,it doesnt factor in inefficiencies or even the fact its probably indirectly melting the bunker, or that the bunker in question could be much larger. For example, if we assume the bunker was 6 meters square but 4 meteres tall, with metre thick walls, the area affected could be well over 260,000 kg, which could output between 500-650 Gigajoules to melt.

The end result remains that the multi-melta is firmly in the triple digit gigajoule range, at the very least.

Page 32

Scorched and blackened limbs lay strewn about, all that remained of those stationed too close to the bunker; the backwash of the melta impact had burned flesh and bone to cinders in an instant.

As noted above, vaporizationw as conservative, as multiple Guardsmen are mentioned to have been incinerated as a mere side effect. The aforementioned squad being incinerated (in the bunker) would yield around 10-30 gigajoules depending on efficiencies. Assuming a man-size target (about 1-3 GJ to incinerate.) standing a few metres away could easily require between 50-70 gigajoules minimum up to several huundred gigajoules, which would be consistent with the "bunker melting" incident.

Uh-huh. Am I the only one not seeing a problem between the fact that the multi-melta is a very short ranged weapon, and that Connor describes it as explosive, yet claims yields near the terajoule range?

The melta seems to generate a volume of heat that radiates its energy not as fast as you'd think. A multi gigajoule explosion would really do more than just burn to ashes people close to the bunker and caught in the bursts of energy coming from every hole. The pressure alone from an explosion of TNT in the gigajoule range would be devastating. The bunker would cracked before ever having a chance to melt.
See here for example: 35 tonnes of ammo blown up at once. Quite big. Go tube more explosions.
Or 18.14 tonnes bang ... and no, it's not an energy weapon. :)

Page 32

Another white-hot blast of melta fire flashed and the Demolisher's turret was engulfed in the inferno of the impact. Steam and smoke obscured the tank for brief seconds, but unbelievably, it continued onwards through the boiling cloud.

Time slowed as Honsou watched the barrel of its main gun depress and knew that any second it would blast him to atoms.

...

Honsou roared in release as he realised the heat of the melta blast must have warped the barrel enough to cause the weapon to misfire and the shell to detonate prematurely.

Melta blast of aforementioned yield onyl cause minor damage (yet sufficient to cause gun to backfire, merely indicating that location is important.) to the tank. Indicative of extreme thermal toughness of Imperial Guard tanks.

Assuming "blast to atoms" means vaporize (literally might suggest somthing more akin to ionizing to plasma) and assuming a 500-1000 kg mass for Honsou would suggest the Demolisher shell was at least a couple gigajoules. This may not hav been purely thermal energy, however, given what we know fo demolisher shells (a kind of shaped charge, actually.) and it is a gross lower limit nonetheless. It also ignores most of that mass is going to be iron, which could easily increase the calc several times (IE 5-7 GJ, minimum, assuming iron composition for SM armour)

Well, sure, it's good, but "extreme thermal toughness"?
The explosion took place externally, this time there was no potential stockpile of ammo to blow up, and there's one more thing to say: Why not simply see it for what it is? That the rock has a lower melting point than this steel?
And taking blast to atoms literally is not serious, considering how this turn of phrase was used early on in the same book.

Page 39

The technicain fired a heartbeat later and Kroeger rocked back on his heels as the impact blasted a crater in his power armour. Before the Imperial could shoot again, Kroeger was upon him, backhanding his fist across his face and decapitating him in an explosion of blood and bone.

We have no idea how "big" a crater was made, but if we assume the armour is at least two inches thick, and assume 4 cm of penetration (80% of the way through the thickness), the crater diameter could arguably be 8 centimetrs assuming a roughly hemispherical hole. Assuming silicon and vaporization, it would take roughly 4.16 MJ to accomplish. Even assuming only one inch penetration, you could expect at least a megajoule. This all still disregards inefficiencies, and inferring from the "max output" above, we could conclude the "standard" or "low" settings (the 20-30 shots per pack one) as being in the hundreds of kilojoule range.

Why should we ever assume that much penetration?

Why not 1/3 of an inch for the depth and something like 2/3 for the width?
Not exactly ridiculous, considering the cutting depths of modern plasma torches, knowing that the generator is a honking piece of machinery generally the size of a large and very heavy suitcase.
So we get an ellipsoid of 0.6325 cm³.
Compared to a sphere that's 8 cm wide, which has a volume of 268.08 cm³, that's 423.842 times less.

But let's make a higher figure.
With a crater width of 3 cm - a hemisphere this time - scaling down from Connor's 4160 KJ, we get a yield of ~220 KJ for one of those super charged shots, which will give standard yields good enough to make big holes in people's faces once divided 20~30 times.

Page 42

The massive starship strained against the oppressive attraction of gravity, disgorging hundreds of landing craft from its belly like some vast sow giving birth to her litter
.
Each of the craft's spawn was hundreds of metres in length...

Landing craft "hundreds of meters" long.

Yes and a massive ship strained against the oppressive attraction of gravity. Doesn't jive well with the usual kilogee claims.

Page 45

- according to Honsou, surgical strikes are "almost unheard of" from orbital bombardment - orbital barrages aren't that precise without some sort of locator beacon to aim for. The use of locator beacons would also seem to imply some sort of guided munition as well, given the accuracy concern.

Although the weather wasn't exactly clear as day, it's quite something that Honsu had to spend three months solely to the task of planting a beacon at the spaceport.
Sensors + a bit od mist and dust = crap?

That has to explain, somehow, why ships really need to come so close to planets (200~500 KM) to shoot at the ground.

Page 56

- reinforcements are expected to reach Hydra Cordatus in 70-100 days. Note that it evidently took no more than a day or so for the message to presumably reach other parts of the Imperium.

Without a guess on distance, however, calcs are not possible.

Oh, we can make a guess, since the message was to arrive "very soon", and it was sent to "all nearby Adeptus outposts".
The prefix on the message would "engender the swifest response" btw.

Assuming it didn't take too long for the message to reach its destination, it's always possible to make estimates. That leaves a travel duration easily worth of more than two months, up to three.
Reinforcements would most likely come from somewhere in the sector, and they're generally 200 LY wide.

Note: With 365.25 days a year, c = ~2.73785 e-3 LY / day

On the fastest end, if the reinfos had to cover half the galactic width, the FTL speed for 70 days would be 260,893 c.

Of course, with a distance 100 times shorter (500 LY instead of 50,000 LY, which is muc more in line with sector formations), the top speed becomes 2608.93 c, which is much more in line with a typical FTL speed, as listed in the Space Fleet chart for example.

It could also be slower, depending on how nearby you think "nearby" is, but I think it's safe to consider some places not too far from where they were.

And before you wonder, it's all solely about the trip, and only the trip:

'It is impossible to say with any degree of certainty. Travel over such distances is fraught
with all manner of variables and there are many factors that could adversely affect the
arrival of our reinforcements.'

Page 62

The gleam of bone and the hand burned into a claw told him that it had once been his fellow suqadmate, Hitch.

This implies the grenade pretty much cauterized if not incinerated much of Hitch's body. This would probably push the grenade yield up to the mid to high (triple digit) MJ to low GJ range.

No seriously, I agree that these grenades were powerful, but a grenade at near a quarter a ton of TNT, in a small bunker?
Shouldn't we expect the scorched body to be more like... squished/pulverized?
Claiming incineration is ridiculous.
I won't even begin to wonder how the yields were obtained here.

Page 64

- "portable" vox unit, takes up half the space in Hawke's backpack and the battery packs weigh a kilo each. Rather hefty, but not exactly as straining as the "dedicated" voxes used by comms officers. Also takes a medikit, respirator, some "hydration capsules" (bottles?) and ration packs.

I find it funny that the same Empire which would produce weapons with energy packs worth of so many megajoules worth of energy, didn't come with smaller and lighter power packs. Not to count the dedicated voxes, indeed.

[Mr. Oragahn]

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Tea Time !!!

You may want to read this:

Weedkillers? Really?

I heard they were fungal-based, but considering their enemies (the technologically godlike Necrontyr and their C'Tan masters) I would've expected the Old Ones to have hardened them against chemical warfare to some degree..

In Xenology some Imperium weedkillers seriously fuck up an Ork. OTOH, considering the W40k universe, those weedkillers were probably Catachan-grade bio-napalm.

The full chemical name is given. Dichlorophenoxy acetic acid.

Well fuck me sideways. Was the Ork unconscious at the time?

You could say that. It was dead. However, the book is also quite explicit in that the resonance activity remains in the live cells that Darvus tested it on. It's not a brain thing, but a cellular thing. Most important of all, the use of 2,4d corrupts the spores. Darvus tests it by applying it to dead flesh, studying that under a microscope, and letting spores develop. The spores that develop after a 2,4d application are not viable orkoids, but rather, grossly malformed. 'untidy structures, lopsided and tumorous: wretched amalgams of orkoid species.' Use hollowpoint rounds with this stuff loaded into them, and part of the next generation of orks will probably be stillborn.

It's interesting that they're in a visible state like that after only an hour, though doubtless Darvus put them in ideal conditions.

The Old Ones could've decided to use the Orkz' latent psychic powers to protect them from such stuff. After all, humie gas can't hurt da boyz!

Unless the 'Brain Boys' were capable of such a thing, I don't see how that would work. I've seen nothing to suggest that th modern orks have special resistance to enviromental effects, beyond 'nigh-immune to cold.'

Interestingly they respire thusly:

Upper Cavity. Thick spongy mass between scapula, vertebrae (inflexible, hunched) and sternum. Distinct organs suggest pulmonary musculature (blood is chlorophyll-rich protein and carbon-copper [trace] compound, containing countless distinct fungal organisms) and dense vegetative 'gills' (cf. terran 'mushroom' archeosamples - osmotic oxygen absorption).

Given the existance of a sternum, they clearly breathe in and out, but their lungs appear radically different to our own aeveolal structure.

What? So this massive galactic threat that everyone rants and raves about can be stopped through the application of an easily manufactured industrial defoliant?

Great.

Yeah. You were taking Orks seriously? Even though they're a spacegoing charicature of soccer hooligans? They have a slave race who do most of their industrial work, are more intelligent than they are, and capable of rebellion, who don't just kill them. Orks are a threat through sheer numbers; the fact that we could in theory construct a viable weapon against them wouldn't stop them coming from the countless ork worlds by the billion and stomping us.

I should note that such information is not in the Imperium's hands, and is an example of how the application of the scientific method (hey, there's a hypothesis, let's test it) on a simple scale could make them more formidable. It's not standard practice, as the guy that discovered it works for the Necrons.

Nor is it a miracle cure (Darvus even says as much) you still need to win the battles. It's just that this would make mundane bullets have the stopping power of a lasgun. It's a viable infantry level response. I don't fancy taking on Gargants with weedkiller hollowpoints, though.

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[Mr. Oragahn]

Page 78

The ground whipped upwards, tossing her through the air as the first Basilisk shell impacted, blasting a crater fifteen metres across and obliterating a dozen men in an instant.
..
Scraps of flesh and bone spattered the interior surface of the crater, the stench of scorched human meat and burning propellant filling her notrils.

Going by the ADC, putting a 15 meter diameter crater in the ground would require at least .6 tons of TNT. (though going by 1/2 the "igneous rock" entry it is 1.7 tons. I generally trust the cratering calculator to be more accuate here, however.)

If the shell weighs as much as a 6 to eight in chs hell (around 40-90 kg, depending on size), the energy density of Imperial explosives would be between 30 and 60 MJ per kg, assuming the shell was entirely of explosive. This does not seem likely, howver. going by the stats on a 155mm HE projectile

here we could infer roughly 1/4 the mass of the projectile is TNT. Thus the actual figure could be several times greater (3-4x greater seems likely.) This would put the energy density of the explosives at or greater than hydrogen.

The ADC seems to focus on nukes only. The problem is that a solid projectile, with a noticeable KE, will have effects quite different than from lightweight nukes.
For one, the mass of the projectile and its momentum will provide greater coupling (transfer of energy to the surrounding terrain volume), allowing for greater gouging than with a light casing nuke of equivalent yield resting on the ground.

There is absolutely no reason to eye energy densities closing on that of hydrogen.

Page 89

More shells landed and this time Honsou was thrown to the ground as a mortar shell burst less than five metres directly above him, spraying him with razor sharp shrapnel.
...
Power armour was amongst the best protection a warrior could have, but even it had its limitations.

The reason he'd survived was because a marine atop him had tken the brunt of the blast. Space Marine power armour cannot survive the close range detonattion of a medium/heavy mortar shell.

Assuming it is a 120mm mortar being used, and that it is half full of explosive (seems likely), we're probably talking about 30-40 MJ of TNT at least. At 5 meters distance, the Space Marine armour would probably absorb a substantial portion of that (no more than half, but probably more than 1/6th. Since this is largely in the form of shrapnel, its a high velocity kinetic impact. Its also quite probably an order of magnitude lower than it should be, given probable differences in Imperial explosivs vs real life ones.

Say Honsu, that big hefty Chaos Space Marine, is like two meters tall and one meter wide, and is a flat rectangle. That's an area of 2 m².
A sphere of a 5m radius would have a surface area of 314.16 m².
Simply put, the dude would deal with 157.08 times less than the yield of the impact.

If it's about the shrapnel, even at 10 km/s, a piece of shrapnel of about 100 grams would have a KE of 5 MJ. And that sort of mid to high end would seriously damage the CSM's armour, from what we read above, to the point of threatening the wearer.

Page 101

- the Destiny Gate of the citadel measured 44 metres high, thirty wide, and each half of the gate is 4 metres thick, weighing hundreds of tonnes. The gates are set within the sixty metre high curtain wall. Assuming "hundreds" is taken literally (200-1000 tons) apiece, the average density of the door is between 76 kg*m^3 and ~400 kg*m^3.

. . .

Paper.
"The density of paper ranges from 250 kg/m³ (16 lb/cu ft) for tissue paper to 1,500 kg/m³ (94 lb/cu ft) for some speciality paper. Printing paper is about 800 kg/m³ (50 lb/cu ft)."

. . .

<_<

>_>

. .

MASS LIGHTENING!!!1!!

^~^

How one could not take it literally though? Thousands of tonnes would be correct, but it's said hundreds.
Here's the quote, in case:

The vast, Southern gate of the citadel measured exactly forty-four metres high, thirty metres
wide and was known as the Destiny Gate. Each layered half of the bronze gate was four
metres thick and weighed hundreds of tonnes. No one knew exactly how they had been
constructed, when they had been brought to Hydra Cordatus, or even how such massive portals
could be opened with such ease.

The only way to rationalize that would be to claim that the door's structure is akin to swiss cheeze, since you want to multiply the real density at least twenty times, while keeping the bulk density that low.
The thickness of the door plating would need to be like 20 cm on each side, same for the external rectangular frame, and then, inside, there would be an intricate mesh of beams holding all of this in place. Of course, with such little plating, the door would never hold against weapons which can easily eat through the plating of tanks and supertanks.
You just wish the author had done his math properly and said thousands of tonnes instead.
It's also possible that there's some "super magic alloy" here, something with a RHA that's quite good.
Then, again, if I missed a clue that said it was made of steel...

Page 111

when a shot streaked from a bunker in the center of the traitor line, covering the distance to its target in less than a second. A Leman Russ was slammed sideways as the missile punched through its frontal armour. The superheated core of the missile ignited the vehiciles fuel and cooked off its ammunition, blowing it aparrt in a greasy fireball.

A rocket launched by (presumably) a devastator squad had enough raw momentum (either by the impact or perhaps the warhead) to punch through the armour and knock the tank sideways - even though it was advancing forward. This gives us an idea of the momentum involved in any sort of anti-tank weapon, and corroborates what we know from the Ghosts novels (like Honour Guard, or when Ork Rockets in the Dawn of War Novel do something similar.). The momentum needed to actually knock a 60 ton tank around is many times that of a modern tank round, it goes without saying.

The fact the missile still took a noticable fraction of a second to hit despite being quite fast (supersonic even?) suggests the effective combat range was quite long here - many huhndreds of meters (but still less than a kilometre, of course.)

Dammit. Did he make it a profession of looking for the most impossible interpretations or what?
To slam doesn't automatically translate as to knock.
Check the dictionaries: it can simply mean hit. The tank was hit sideways, the missile going through the frontal armour. So obviously it was hit somewhere around one of the frontal angles.

Page 111

-Chaos Titan weapons blasting tanks to "atoms" with their weapons.

Vaporizing a single Russ would require at least around 450-500 gigajoules minimum assuming composed solely of iron, and its implying multiple weapons destroying multiple tanks.

The author uses flowery language. Example: with the 15 meters wide crater, there were men there, and they were "obliterated".
Initially in the book, when Hawke fired the aft autocannon in his bunker, the book read as:

"The supersonic shells blew up a storm, churning the mud and earth outside to atoms as thousands of rounds turned the area before him into a death-trap, shredding anything within its arc of fire."

There.
*sigh*

Page 112

He had barely cleared the ramp when a missile ripped through the side of the Chimaera. with the rear ramp open, much of the force of the epxlosion was vented outwards, but still the tank was lifted into the air by the blast.

Rocket penetrates the Chimera (presumably by force/pressure or some sort of shaped chage.) The actual warhead causes an explosion that is powerful enough to hurl a 40 ton tank some distance into the air, yet the vehicle remains largely intact (rather than, say, blasting apart into shrapnel.)

Most puzzling physics at play, if the tank's overall structure could channel the blast backwards, yet be lifted into the air. Obviously, it can only be concluded that the tank was lifted over one of its edges, presumably the front one. We don't even know if it was toppled.
That said, considering the way Chimaeras are built, they're asking for it. Not as much as Leman Russes though.

Remotely related, you may want to read this; A powerful blast penetrates a Merkava-3, topples it on its side and blows off its heavy turret. Note that the blast came from underneath, and we don't know the yield.
Still, as a comparison for weights:
Chimaera, 38 tonnes.
Merkava Mk 3, 65 tonnes.

Page 126'
- Warhound titan princeps is concerned about enemy tanks

Page 127

- Land Raider lascannon (at least two) brings down void shields on a Warhound Titan of undetermined state. No exact stats, but it would suggest Land raider's lascannon are considerably more powerful than Guard tanks or man-portable lascannon (possibly TJ range, but certainly at least triple digit GJ)

Or perhaps low gigajoule or less, because in reality, small Titans are largely seen going down with smaller firepower. Most illustrations show this, and it's largely reflected by a very old thread at SDN.

Page 128

- superheated vapour/coolant steam from plasma annihlator vaporises 100 men. This would be at least 20 gigajoules from the coolant alone.

Gouts of searing plasma energy spurted from the enormous gun,
hissing clouds of superheated vapour geysering downwards and vaporising a hundred men
in its fury.

Considering that it comes from one of the mightiest Titans, it's actually right, for a change.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Page 129

Incandescent fire [Hellstorm cannon] erupted from the weapon, explosive shells bursting at point-blank range against his already damaged leg. The joint exploded, the metal running molten like mercurial blood down the war machine's leg. Fierarch screamed as he felt his Titan's pain as his own, the feedback along the mind impulse unit frying much of his cerebral cortex.

If I knew the exact dimensions of a Titan's legs, I might be able to estimate the damage done to the joint, assuming iron. Assuming that the legs make up half the height, and that the leg has similar dimensions to a human leg (say a width ~ 1/5 the height of the leg itself) then the legs would be about 5 meters wide and maybe about that "thick" Assuming a roughly 5 meter diameter area affected, we're talking about 517,400 kg of iron affected. Melting it would require ~620 gigajoules dleivered over an unknown (but presumably short) timeframe, lower limit.

But since the joint was blasted, what was flowing would be less than the joint's mass.
Obviously the author is going for an implied metaphor, with the molten metal being blood.
Easily, the yield could be much less than that.

Page 157

Honsou tripped as the rocks slid out from beneath his feet, narrowly avoiding being obliterated by a shot from a lascannon.

Lascannon packing enough punch to "obliterate" Honsou (pity it didn't.) This suggests lascannon are within a same order of magnitude in terms of firepower as plasma and melta weapons (tripel digit MJ or low GJ)

Again, a shell that left a 15 meters wide crater obliterated 12 men.

Page 166

Forrix was noted as being almost three meters tall in his Terminator armour here. His chestplate (hit by the plasma blast earlier) is also noted to be "molten." That's probably from the plasma blast.

Assuming a half meter by hlaf meter breastplate molten to a depth of about 15 cm and density of silicon, the chestplate weighs about 70 kg. Melting would take around 150-175 MJ minimum.

Sure, it's adamantium, but is that an exercise in RHA equivalencies or something?
It would begin to make sense if he was considering what would be needed IF this breastplate was 15 centimetres thick and made of silicon.
However, considering what a Glaive-class could do to metres-thick reinforced Adamantium hulls and rock (see a couple paragraphs below), this appears as quite some huge assumption there.

Page 208

Hawke fired a hail of las-bolts, ripping the man's chest to bloody ruin and blasting clear the wall-mounted grille behind him.

No idea what a "hail" of las-bolts mean (aside more than two.) but the passage indicates that while his torso appeared to be mostly intact (in the sense he wasn't severed to pieces) it chest was pretty well torn up/apart (presumably much of the skeletal structure remains intact) - the las-blasts are also indicated to have penetrated through.

Assuming half the chest was torn apart (but the lower part was mainly intact.) conjecturing a volume of .0165 m^3 (for the upper chest 30x22x25 cm) you get between 12-15 kg in mass (Depending on exact density - the human body is roughly the density of water but the internal volume is not uniform.)

Assuming low end boiling point for the flesh content, and 1-2 seconds of fire at the 220 RPM ROF from the Uplifting primer, Energy input is at least 3.2-4 MJ divided between 3-7 shots.. so between 430 kilojoules and 1.3 MJ minimum per shot. If cauterisation occurs (see below) the calc could be several times higher, depending on exact temperature used.

"Bloody" may or may not suggest cauterization occured, (bleedign can be triggered even after cauterization occurs, depending on the lasgun and the setting used.) and it doesn't acount for any vaporization occuring. And it doesn't account for inefficiencies either. Body armour and chaos mutations are also a possibility.

Really, there's alot of ambiguities to this calc (precise effect, rate of fire, etc), so its not as reliable as certain others and more useful as a supplementary calc

I just like how in other analysis threads, the lack of mention of blood is assumed to meant cauterization happened, and how one has to be literal in most occasions, as far as to believe that the missing mass of flesh and water was vaporized instead of blown apart by lesser quantities of boiled matter... yet when the text says "bloody", doubts are allowed.

Now, it doesn't mean "bloody ruin" isn't meant to be understood as "fu**ing ruin", but it's a problem of standards of interpretation here.

Page 202

- the torpedo Hawke is helping to reprogram is at least 30 (maybe 40) meters tall. This makes it somewhat smaller than the torpedoes mentioned in Battlefleet Gothic, at least on the low end.

Page 203

The top of the giant missile was rounded and strangely irregular. There was a serrated, spiral groove cut in the warhead and Hawke guessed that this was to help it burrow through the thick hull of a starship before detonating deep inside.

Torpedoes penetrate via mass/velocity (momentum) before detonating. Thus they are as much physical impacotrs as they are explosive devices. Some (as we note below) also use shaped charges for penetrating armour in some cases as well.

Page 210

- "Glaive Class ground-launched orbital torpedo"

Page 211

As it [torpedo] reached a height of nearly one hundred kilometres, the first stage of the torpedo separated and stage two ignited, increasing the velocity still further as the war-spirit caged within the warhead calculated hte time, distance, ,and vector to its target.

..

The torpedo nosed over, traveling at almost fourteen thousand kilometres per hour, and began hunting for its prey.

14,000 km/hr is only about 3.89 km/s, fa below escape velocity for a habitable planet. Clearly they weren't using it at full capability.

Page 213-214

The torpedo impacted almst exactly in the centre of the Kane Bastion of Tor Christo where its triple stage warhead detonated with devastating results. The lead element of the warhead was designed to crater an opening through the thick hull of a starship, while the tail element would explode simultaneously, acting as a propellant and hurtling the middle charge deep within its target.

But instead of the metres-thick, reinforced adamantium bulkhead of a starship, the torpedo slammed into the ground of the Kane bastion, traveling at over a thousand kilometres an hour. The first stage of the torpedo exploded with phenomenal power, flattening everything within three hundred metres and blasting a crater fifty metres deep. The tail section blew and thrust the torpedo deeper into the rock of the promontory where the more powerful centre charge detonated with the power of a sun, ripping the rock of Tor Christos apart.

...

A surging mushroom cloud billowed a thousand metres into the sky, hurling ash and burning rock in all directions.

The ramparts of the bastions either side of the torpedo impact sagged and cracked, their rockcrete walls splitting under forces they were never designed to endure. The crater in the center of the promontory expanded with terrifying rapidity, tonnes of rubble and artillyery pieces collapsing into the fiery pit.

....

with a tortured groan, millions of tonnes of stone cracked and rumbled, sliding free of the slopes of the promonetory, crashing down in a rocky tidal wave of destruction.

Several things of note:

- this torpedo is multi staged. The first is an armour-breaching charge, the third acting as a booster (to push deeper through the weakened section.) these two f urther the penetration. The middle charge is the "main" and more powerufl explosive.

Curiously, this does not seem to behave quite like how plasma torpedoes are described in Battlefleet Gothic (the plasma engine contributes to the explosive warhead.) os it may be a different kind of weapon.

- the first charge is hard to calc totally, but creating a 50 m "deep" (radius) crater can require between 180 tons and 1 kiloton of TNT (depending on how one defines crater and composition) although the physical impact aspect complicates this.

- the middle charge is stated to detonate "with the power of a sun" - this could mean its merely a fusion warhead or its a plasma detonation, or it may refer to the actual output of the weapon being comparable to such. It may also refer to literally the power output of a sun, but if so it couldn't be a large one, since anything above a few hunderd gigatons/teratons would have nasty/significant effects and these seem to be far too localized for such, even with a "buried" nature.

We dont know how large the final crater is, ,but even assuming a few kilometers or more, its not likley to be more than megaton range, or a few gigatons. It is worth noting that since the Imperial forces merely wished to harm the Iron Warriors without obliterating themselves in the process, we can surmise they would have also "dialed down" the yield on such weapons to limit their own casualties. There is also the titans which weren't fucked over in the explosion.

First, a rocket does not need to reach escape velocity if its goal is not to completely escape gravity. Those rockets specifically are low orbit weapons, but they do not seek to place anything in orbit.
Therefore escape velocity is totally irrelevant and nothing proves that the rocket wasn't used to the best of its possibilities.
Not to say that the numbers wouldn't be spectacularly higher if we claimed that full escape velocity was in abilities of such missiles, since speed would double at best, multiplying the KE by 4 and the momentum by 2.

Secondly, the multi-stage warhead.
This is where it gets funny.
So the missiles are designed to slam into the metres-thick reinforced adamantium hull of a warship, get through and explode inside.
Hawke thought that the tip of the missile was used as a penetrator tip to dent the armour, but it's not exactly confirmed.
At best the tip would barely dent the hull, if a nuclear level gouging phase was needed for the rest of the heavy missile to move inward, pushed by the tail-stage.

What is literally fantastic is the fact that a metres-thick reinforced adamantium layer will be easily breached by a detonation which makes 50 meters deep holes in rock.
The ADC returns the following values for a 100 meters wide asteroid (50 meters radius for the crater):

Hard Granite : 180.9 tons
Nickel-Iron : 4.7 kilotons

Fragmentation Energy
(igneous rock) : 1 kiloton

The gouging charge would have all reasons to be shaped.

Still, let's take another look at this event, by using old equations that should suffice for kiloton levels nuclear explosions, found in "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 3rd ed" from 1977.

For example, said source says that 1-kiloton surface burst in dry soil or dry soft rock will leave a crater that's 120 feet wide (36.576 m). Radius at the crest of the lip (note: that's the small ring of removed material that sits above ground level), the radius will be 15 feet or so greater (crater radius + 4.572 m).
The apparent crater depth will be about 30 feet deep.
(Note: that's the final crater, but going by the figures, the transient crater will be a bit deeper).
In hard rock consisting of granite or sandstone, the dimensions will be somewhat less.
The equations are:
Radius_crater (in feet) = 60 x [yield in kilotons]^0.3
Depth_crater (in feet) = 30 x [yield in kilotons]^0.3

We can see that the radius is expected to be twice the depth.
The depth is most likely the apparent depth, so this would provide a high end.
The equation projects 100 kilotons to leave a crater that would be 120 ft deep. Since 50 meters corresponds to roughly 164 feet, the yield would be superior to that.

164 = 30 x W^0.3
W = 287.8 kilotons.

The yield for a stronger material would somewhat be greater, but notice that this equation is for an omnidirectional nuclear blast, with none of the momentum of a missile slammed into the ground and shaping its warhead energy forward.

No matter how you look at it, what remains is the fact that metres-thick reinforced adamantium hulls are pierced by kiloton level weaponry.

The yields of the central charge is pretty much irrelevant, since the internal bulkheads won't be more efficient than the reinforced hulls at stopping the blast.

Yet, we still need to complete the observation and criticism of Connor's numbers.
Unsurprisingly, he decided once more that the power of a sun statement should be taken literally, even if anyone understands that 3.846 e26 W would somehow result in effects *cough*a bit more impressive *cough* than that.
Despite realizing this, he still thinks it's right enough to push the figure up to claims of megatons or gigatons.

Nothing is said about the final crater size, and the explosion is certainly as buried as he would hope, since the rocket already fragmented and ejected copious amounts of matter out of the ground.
If anything, the fiery exhaust of the last explosion, which would take place at the bottom of the newly formed crater, would more or less look for the path of least resistance. Depending on how much matter of the former crater was already removed, the fireball would be more or less pushed upwards through the newly made hole.

To summarize, we have two options here:

• The former crater is not excavated yet, so the fireball is rushed through what essentially is a shaft, only to begin to expand more naturally at a certain altitude. This means the altitude at which the fireball mushroomed is likely greater than for a nuke of the same yield.
• The crater's mass is largely gone, enough for the fireball to freely expand. This, however, means that the explosion is even less buried than in option 1.

So, with a cloud that rises to about 1 km, you'd be hard pressed to argue for even mid range megaton yield.
Ivy Mike ended with a fireball that rose up to a maximum of 37 kilometers, for a yields between 10.4 and 12 MT.
The Sedan nuclear test was the detonation of a 104 KT nuclear charge buried 194 meters under the surface. It still pushed two clouds of debris up to 3 km and 4.9 km.

Now, before continuing, we need to get an idea of what the place looks like. Fortunately the author thought that including a map of the place was a good idea, and I think it is.

• • 

Tor Christo isn't particularly large either. Based on the drawing at the beginning of the book, scaling from the Destiny Gate, we see that TC is about 600 meters wide at best.
The battery built in front of the wall of the Vincaire bastion was buried under thousand tonnes of debris. This bastion, at the south-west of the Citadel, was about 412 meters away from the northern edge of Tor Christo's Mars Bastion.
The missile hit in the middle of the Kane bastion, located on the eastside of TC. Its center is about 690 meters away from the feet of the Vincaire bastion.
Nothing indicates that the crater expanded beyond the cracked walls of the bastions on either ends of TC.

I don't see how Connor can assume a final crater "a few kilometers or more", with a yield "not likley to be more than megaton range, or a few gigatons."

The description obviously never ever comes close to a St Helens explosion, which at best could be rated at 24 megatons of energy in total.

So what we have is a low three digits kiloton charge that easily goes through metres-thick reinforced adamantium hulls, and detonations of at best one digit megaton that is good enough to cause damage that would be noticed by the warship's captain and be considered a critical hit.
Most likely a 1 km long Cobra Destroyer would be completely busted by such a missile.

Then, of course, comes the usual claim that they dialed it down, despite nothing showing that they even bothered doing such a thing.
And finally, I'm not sure what to understand by Titans not being fucked over, since only the Dies Irae wasn't toppled by the blast, and that's because it had buttresses holding it in place.
Three Warlord titans, certainly not small by any definition, suffered:

Page 214

The blast wave buffeted the towering form of the Dies Irae but the workers had done their jobs well and the towering buttresses and scaffolding held, keeping the monstrous leviathan from toppling. The massive Titan shook, its joints groaning and squealing as its external gyros fought for balance, but the shockwave passed over it and left it intact. Several other Titans were not so fortunate and three Warlords of the Legio Morrtis were brought down by massive huunks of rock or collapsed by the force fo the blast.

..

All that remained of Tor Christo was the void-shielded keep, perched precariously on a splintered corbel of rock.

Warlord titans are crushed by debris from the explosion (but not the blast wave.) the Dies Irae also survives the blast wave, though being visibly buffeted in the process. It wouldn't take more than a few megatons (or a few hundred kilotons) of explosive to do this. This tells us titans can survive nuclear level detonations from some distance away, in any case.

Also note the keep's own void shields protected ti from the torpedo, giving a lower limit on shield toelrances.

We do have Warlord-class Titans which collapse under the blast, no just the debris.

As for the shield, you get a low end that's about a fraction of the central charge's blast.

Connor admits mitigating factors:

well alot of the blast seemed to have been absorbed by the outer walls, so that probably affects things somewhat. Moreover, the Titans themselves had been in battle at least once before against the Imperial Titans, including Dis Irae. That doubtless was a contributing factor.

As a rule, though, its probable that the keep has stronger void shields simply because that, as a fixed facility, it can be allowed to fit in a much bigger generator.

In case you wonder, the author is Graham McNeill. Just in case someone brings his name up in a WH40K debate, you may want to pay attention to what is said about him.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Page 272

Shots slashed through the air beside him, bright streamres of las-fire plucking at his armour or vaporising nearby patches of earth.
...
Heavier blasts of las-fire speared from the ramparts, blasting craters in the floor of the ditch and tossing severed limbs and gas-bloated corpses high into the air

Las-fire "vaporising" patches of the ground./ We're not sure how big a "patch" is, but if we assume a few inches diameter, we can assume 900-1000 kilojoules (or nearly one megajoule) if composition is identical to silicon. assuming a few inches in radius, the energy involved is easily several megajoules (up to say, 5-6 megajoules) per shot. This is, ,of course, conjectural, as the diameters, while conservative, are not explicit, but it is consistent with other known incidents.


Page 276-277

Six Iron Wrriors were obliterated in a single, devastating volley as a searing energy beam vaporised another's upper body, leaving the legs standing for a second before they toppled back down the reubble slope.

Energy weapon from one of the Scout Titans. We dont know if these were regualr Iron Warriors or the Terminators of Forrix's own grroup. Assuming that all six iron warrios (or is it seven) were vaporized (at least partially) we can conjecture its well into the GJ range (at least several hundred MJ per torso, disregarding armour, which coudl arguably double or triple the calc.) If only the single body is vaporized it would still be in the mid to high Mj range, and overpenetration (or lower powered shots) are still a possibility.


Page 283

A massive explosion threw up chunks of rockrete as the enemy's Titan's plasma annihilator opened fire and vaporised a corner gun tower on Vincare bastion, melting the rockcrete of the walls and causing them to sag under the intolerable heat.

We don't know for absolute certainty how big the gun towers might be, but we can conjecture. We know the walls are several tens of meters tall (say twenty metreS) and at least half that thick due to the maps. We may also further estimate that the Guard Tower should hold at least several heavy weapons squads (at least four troops) and could probably be considered to be 4-5 meters in diameter, probably more. Another possible way to calc it: the local state penetentiary near where I live has guard towers about 5 meters in diameter. Call it 6 meters, with the tower walls a meter and a half thick.
If the towers extend 25 meters up, we can estimate it masses roughly 1,230,000 kg. Assuming it vaporises a 5x5 meter chunk of that (or 1/5th the mass), its at least 3.2 TJ. If the towers were larger (or the portion of the tower vaporized greater, say half), the figure would be correspondingly greater.
This doesn't account for melting the walls either. If we assume a 5x5x5 portion of each "side" of the wall was molten, you can expect at least another 1-2 TJ.
Arguably, though, ti suggests much MORE of the wall was reduced to a molten state. If, for example, a 10x10x10 section of tower (and 2 10x10x10 section of wall).. call it 1,500,000 kg for the tower (assuming 3 meter thick walls) and 4,660,000 tons for the walls... at least 32 TJ.
Thus, it can be safely conjectured that Titan weapons are kiloton range (easily)

An all-in-one example of literal interpretation of the term "vaporize".

The first case shows that normal las rifles would supposedly glass patches on the ground, while suddenly hevier models don't glass but explode stuff that sends meatbags flying.

Then comes the case of a Space Marine that loses a great deal of itself to the weapon a Titan. If half of a Space Marine was truly vaporized, with a release of gigajoules of energy, does one really believe that its legs would have been nicely standing on the ground for a second before falling prey to gravity and the sloped uneven surface?

The last case is quite telling. Despite the book telling that a gun tower was vaporized, in order to pull a calculation on rockcrete being boiled off, Connor assumes then that only a portion of the tower was actually vaporized. Perhaps because it's also said that huge chunks of rockcrete flew and walls melted (how much of those walls, we don't know).
The fact remains that Connor cherry picks his evidence in order to obtain a large number.

We're also supposed believe that this theater of war, which is not so vast in fact when you know the distances between the bastions, is actually flooded by multi-kiloton firepower while all sorts of grunts in basic gear are also fighting.

Page 286 - the Dis Irae's plasma reactor was described as a "nuclear heart"

So no way to deny that Titan reactors are running on nuclear reactions.
It is then, literally amazing that despite having read that, Connor would still hold the idea that likening a plasma reactor to a nuclear reactor is something silly.
And that applies to all the people who argue the same thing.

Page 287

Burning plasma flooded the ditch, incinerating the corpses that filled it in an instant.

If we take the earlier sources about "hundreds" of corpses as applying to the ditches here (hundreds or thousands seems likey) we can conjeture the Dis Irae's plasma reactor overload released many kilotons of energy (At least) - probably much more.

The thing is, the author thinks plasma is a super hot form of napalm. Everything he describes about the plasma is akin to a heavy fluid, not a gas or even plasma. It flows, there are gouts of plasma that are sprayed, rivers of it that fill what basically is a trench, and finally, two Titans, including the Dies Irae, "thrashed weakly in the molten soup that filled the ditch".

If we had to be literal about it - the same assumption that allows claiming terajoules of energy for corpses being incinerated - we'd have to remember other sources defining these reactors as fission based, and somehow try to find a fuel that matches these parameters: can provide nuclear energy, but which if not properly consumed, will just spill as super hot material, partially undergoing a minor reaction that allows it to release gases or even plasma, while most of it, extremely hot, flows like magma.
This reminds me of a description of plasma resulting from a Titan's attack, filling a crater with "boiling plasma", whatever the heck this was supposed to be.

What the book describes here - if I had to convene of a proper idea for the fuel is - would be... syrup fissile fuel??
Something definitely fluid and thick at the same time, which once dumped into the reactor, releases energy through fission.

Then it becomes possible that a total of some terajoules of energy would be slowly released, as the Dies Irae, the largest Titan here, losing everything it has, leaking from everywhere.

Page 294

He squeezed off two rounds and the Servitor staggered, two massive holes blasted in its skull. It raised the heavy bolter and fired as Leonid's third shot took it in the throat, blowing its head clean off.

Leonid is using a las-pistol The first two hits do not blow the head aparrt, but that could be because of mechanical augmetnations as well as anything else. The third shot does decapitate it, suggesting it blows a 10-15 cm diameter hole through parrtt of neck and head (which may or may not have augmentics.)
Assuming the usual conditions for cauterization or boiling and flesh-like densities, we're talking hundreds of kilojoules worth of energy per shot, possibly as high as a megajoule or so with a sufficiently high cauterization temp or the larger diameter (which will more than double the mass affected and thus the energy involved.)

1 megajoule?
One or two digits kilojoule tops. A neck is not as big as a head.

Page 295

The Magos lifted his face and Leonid gasped in horror as he saw Naicin's true features, a swirling mass of thin, worm-like tentacles that glistened and writhed togehter to form the mass of his head. A cluster of milky and distended eyes bulged in the centre of his features, above a sphincter-like mouth, ringed with needle teeth.

Important for a calc below. All that's important to note is that the head is, despite bieng composed mainly of tentacles, roughly the same volume (and roughly therefore mass) of a human head.

Page 298

"But you won't be around to see it," snarled Eshara plucking the pistol from Leonid's hand and pulling the trigger. Naicin's head exploded, showering the platform with stinking yellow fluid and scraps of rubbery tentacled flesh.

As noted, a single shot from Leonid's laspistol blows apart the mutant's heaad. As noted, it seems "roughly" humanoid volume and therefore roughly humanoid mass.. so at least 2-3 kg, if not the full 4-5 kg noted previously. Assuming roughly boiling point you get between 500-800 kilojoules, up to a megajoule or so for the full 4-5 kg "boiling." If cauterization, it can get to several megajoules easily, agian depending on exact temp.
We can safely say "laspistol = hundreds or thousands of megajoules" regardless.

Can we?
Kilojoules, I suppose he meant.
Let's notice that the creature was shot thrice in the head with the same weapon beforehand, but everytime "a blaze of green light flared".
If the "head" of that creature was channeling a certain amount of energy to cast that obvious shield of some sort, it would influence the effect of the weapon, potentially increase it.
Besides:

Naicin's head exploded, showering the platform with stinking yellow fluid and scraps of rubbery, tentacled flesh.

And there's not even a skull anymore that could have kept all that thriving mass together, like in a shell.
Then, again, we look at those hundreds of kilojoules, and wonder what's reasonable. Now remember the example from a sniper rifle used earlier on. Connor's low end is hundreds of times greater.

Page 317

He was scanning the sky, desperately hoping the ship would return, when the first orbital lance strike lit up the sky with unbearable brightness and streaked through the atmosphere to impact on the citadel. He sat bolt upright as a massive explosion mushroomed from the citadel, scrambling backwards as a cascade of light fell from the sky, enveloping the citadel in blinding explosions.
Hawke watched, horrified as the barrage continued for another three hours. By the time it was complete, there was nothing left to indicate that the citdael had existed at all.

Three hours for lance attacks to apparnelty oblierate the Hydra Cordatus facility, which basically means vaporizing the entire area (and its undegroound facilities) which means many kilometers in diameter, the signs of the battle, and so on. The fact Hawke could watch without being fried or knocked down by blast does suggest it wasn't teraton (possibly low gigaton at best, even with the reduced trimeframe) given that the planet was not even significantly impacted on a global scale as far as we can tell... but then again the craft was already mentioned as being designed for "speed and Stealth" and fwe Admech vessels ever seen in fiction seem to be even closely "heavilly armed", if armed at all, so this probably is not going to be representative of the firepower of its Naval equivalent (and even if it is, as noted its a small end vessel.)

See, this is where I'm willing to call a cat a cat and deny Connor any doubt about his motivations - like if they were to be proven by now, regardless of his somewhat recent mitigated backpedaling, solely due to vs debaters having access to a new perspective about Warhammer 40000 that is not solely his and like minded people.

'Well?' demanded Matrada.
'You were correct, high magos. The laboratorium is empty and the gene-seed gone.'
'All of it?'
'All of it,' confirmed Sarfian.
'Have you found any survivors?'
'No, my lord, only corpses. From the wreckage and sheer level of destruction we have
discovered, it is evident that the battle was fierce indeed.'
'Have you removed all evidence of our blessed order?'
Sarfian nodded. 'The cavern has been purified with fire and melta charges set.'
'Very well, return to the ship and we will cleanse the entire site from orbit.'
'Yes, my lord,' said Sarfian.

The point is simple. Why bother "purifying" the cavern, where the gene-seeds were formerly stored before being stolen, with fire and melta charges, if beams from a ship in orbit would reach that far down and destroy it within the three continuous hours of bombardment?

Objectively, you could conclude that the ship can't really reach down there.
Even if the AM ship was sleek, stealthy and fast, it still was one kilometer long. IIRC, that's as long as a Cobra Destroyer.
There's no reason to believe it wouldn't carry a few heavy weapons. And it did, as it did have lances.

Why claim that many kilometers had to be vaporized (is he meaning literally?) when a diagonal that starts from the top left corner of the map, beyond the far distant wall of the Sepulcre, located west of the Citadel, is less than 1.6 km away from the opposite point of the diagonal, on the bottom right end, which extends well beyond the eastern tip of the Primus Ravelin?
Connor fully knows the sizes of the place, since he referred to the thickness of the walls of the bastions as indicated on the map a few paragraphs earlier.
Yet, suddenly, all of this doesn't matter anymore? The scales are forgotten?

What about the target? Perhaps the ship really destroyed the Citadel, then Tor Christo, then moved down the valley and drifted towards the spaceport?
Nope.
There is one target, and it is the Citadel, and only the Citadel. It's all in the quote. So the "entire site" is pretty much well contained to, at the very best, within a radius of 1 kilometer.

Finally, Connor speaks of a blast which could be as high as being in the teraton range, and at best would be in the low gigaton, range.
But let's see.
The Guardsman Hawke was a day away from the Citadel, having to walk down the mountains. He had the Citadel in sight. He run for a moment, and in total he managed to cover five hours of walk towards the Citadel before the attack from the Adeptus Mechanicus' ship began.
It goes without saying that Hawke wasn't in pristine shape. He could see the smaller ship taken by Matrada, Sarfian and other AM men take off from the Citadel.
If you assume that he was 19 walk-hours away from the Citadel (that's an assumption that you'd count men walking during the night, which is nothing certain, so it's a high end distance), and with an average walking speed of 4.8 km/h, he'd still be 91.2 km away.

Although the effects would not be absolutely similar to a nuke, they'd still share the same magnitude, and you'd still have copious thermal effect to account for.
The nuke calculator gives an idea of the power of a 1 GT nuclear burst. It's far from perfect (even if you wanted to use it for nukes) but it still shows that Hawke would have suffered third degree burns.

Besides, he seems to forget that the ship took three hours of constant pounding to get the job done.
Clearly, with a bombardment that lasts three hours, that doesn't threaten a man standing more than 90 km away from the site, and with the Ad Mech needing to plant charges, how could the average firepower not be in the shy terajoule range?

So yes, although this is not necessary a powerful ship despite its size, why not admit that the demonstration of firepower is obviously nowhere as high as he tought?
An ability to fire terajoules of firepower would also perfectly match the description made earlier on about the Glaive Class torpedo's power against rockcrete.
It would also fit with several over descriptions in other books and online supplements. For example, it would be in line with the description of the Bombardment Cannons used by the Space Marines to attack a planet, mass drivers firing heavy magma bombs and pounding planetary defenses to rubble, said to be equally "equally devastating in ship-to-ship combat, capable of blasting apart any capital ship in just a few salvoes."

Besides, let's just see how true it is that this ship would be weak.
A sleek ship designed for speed and stealth almost sounds like they "borrowed" it from Eldar. :)
Funnily enough, even a Cobra-class Destroyer is described as a craft faster than the average brick in your Imperial fleet.

Fleet of the AM (and Vessels of Mars: Ships of the Adeptus Mechanicus) says that "the Adeptus Mechanicus have at their disposal a large fleet of starships," and "it is important that they be heavily armed and armored. This is not only for their own protection from thise who covet their technology but to engage in combat when necessary to secure vital data or artefacts that may prove cruical to the Quest."

And what the AM were protecting there? Gene seeds, which if we believe was the mutant priest said, was the only other vault that existed.

What about the quality of their ships? For that, we have an answer:
Though the total number of ships the Adeptus Mechanicus has at its disposal dispersed among its many forge worlds is far outnumbered by that of the Imperial Navy, it goes without saying that those responsible for all starship construction reserve for themselves among the most powerrful and best-equipped warships encountered anywhere in the Imperium.

They best Imperium ships.

Gifts of the Omnissiah. Adeptus Mechanicus vessels represent the very apex of Mankind's technical prowess, and they have access to resources and technology unavailable to the vast majority of the Imperium.

It's pretty much confirmed that the AM have plenty of special ships:
Over many millennia, a large number of starships of various sizes, fitting no specific classification, have been seen bearing the insignia of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Many of these ships are incredibly ancient vessels, possibly recovered space hulks, re-commissioned so as to examine their characteristics under normal operation.

They're not said to be piss poor ships. They are very important, and by all means, they'll regularly be better than equivalent IoM Navy spacecraft.

[Kor_Dahar_Master]

Does anybody take this clown seriously?, i have rarely seen more absurd wanking from so little evidence and sometims because summat was not mentioned (the lack of blood spray being mentioned giving him the oportunity to claim cauterization and wank up the pistol dmg was a real moment of joy for me).

Either way there is way too much hyperbole in those comments to take them as fact...for example how can you have "craters where faces used to be" and then claim that the "heads were blown off".

Now both of those things seem mutually exclusive as you cannot have a crater where a face was without material to make up the edges and sides of said crater so how can the head be missing?.


SDN?, SB.com?, or just a general nutter of a fanboi?.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Does anybody take this clown seriously?, i have rarely seen more absurd wanking from so little evidence and sometims because summat was not mentioned (the lack of blood spray being mentioned giving him the oportunity to claim cauterization and wank up the pistol dmg was a real moment of joy for me).

Either way there is way too much hyperbole in those comments to take them as fact...for example how can you have "craters where faces used to be" and then claim that the "heads were blown off".

Now both of those things seem mutually exclusive as you cannot have a crater where a face was without material to make up the edges and sides of said crater so how can the head be missing?.


SDN?, SB.com?, or just a general nutter of a fanboi?.

It's quite funny because when there is no hyperbole, but instead very precise statements about what a missile could do to a reinforced adamantium hull that's several metres thick (that's the normal thickness), and when you get to see a comparison of what the same missile does to what essentially is rock, the entire comedy falls apart.

[sonofccn]

@Mr. Oragahn: Good job as always, bravo.

Does anybody take this clown seriously?,

Yes and most who do, that I've run into at least, stress that his are conservative, low end calcs. Even if you can calc the events lower, I've been assured, other people have calculated these events even higher so his are middle of the extreme and therefor more valid or acceptable.

[Kor_Dahar_Master]

@Mr. Oragahn: Good job as always, bravo.

Does anybody take this clown seriously?,

Yes and most who do, that I've run into at least, stress that his are conservative, low end calcs. Even if you can calc the events lower, I've been assured, other people have calculated these events even higher so his are middle of the extreme and therefor more valid or acceptable.

I doubt "most" do and id say "some" do and likely those who are as screwed up as he is.

Anybody who ups the stats on a weapon by claiming it cauterizes a wound (because the writer did not mention blood spray) is not really worth listening to. Especially when the same writer claims the faces of the individuals were cratered in by the shot and then later seems to use hyperbole and claims the heads were totally missuing, just send his crap to the same place Youngla0450 orange star is and file it under WTFLOL.