The Woldan wrote...
You know, now that I think about it, I don't think anyone has come up with a good reason why nukes wouldn't work as Reaper killers.
I have one, nukes may create impressive amounts of energy and a big blast wave, but you know what? They have very little penetration power. If you take the Tsar bomb with its 50 megatons, it was tested on earths surface and -compared to its power- left only a rather shallow crater. And the earths surface isn't made of hundreds of meters of super reinforced metal with shields and whatnot. I imagine that the blast wave and the heat of a nuke is great for taking out a lot of medium sized spacecraft, but a several kilometers long super advanced shielded spacecraft? I don't know, I'd rather take a mass accelerator.
Look at modern tanks and how anti-tank missiles work, they don't just blow up like a giant firecracker and create a shockwave to destroy the tank, that wouldn't work, modern anti tank missiles use so called shaped charges - warheads with v-shaped steel cone inside that directs all the power of the explosion to a little piece of steel, the pressure and the heat from the explosion instantly liquefies the steel - a jet of molten metal punches through the armor with unbelievable power and with a velocity of several kilometers a second.
Much more effective than a primitive bomb that has ten times the explosive charge but lacks the precision.
I imagine combining the power of a nuke with the precision of a shaped charge, it would be like a giant anti tank missile. For a giant armored spacecraft. Sounds good IMO.
Oh, and by the way, do explosives in space even create a blast wave? I mean, there is no air, zero pressure!
I was thinking more along the lines of a couple dozen nukes per Reaper. The thing is, and it can't be said often enough, the Reapers shields are kinetic barriers (at least they have never been mentioned as being anything else/noticeably different), and kinetic barriers are explicitly mentioned as being useless against heat and radiation. I have to think that setting off dozens or even hundreds of nukes mere metres from the hull of a Reaper would kill the thing, even in space.
Now, it's interesting that you bring up shaped charges because personally I'm much more a fan of the various "sci-fi" variations of nukes than I am of straight up nukes themselves.
There's a nuclear version the same basic explosive formed projectile technology that has been around since WWII. I'm not sure if you're familiar, but it's called the Casaba-Howitzer and the Americans performed fairly extensive experiments with the thing during the Cold War. They eventually seemed to come to the conclusion that, as a weapon, nuclear shaped charges were only good for, well, killing giant armored spacecraft (of which the Russians had none) so the project was discontinued.
There's also the bomb-pumped laser that was part of the discontinued 'Star Wars' initiative. Then Americans eventually gave up on that project not for any flaw in the theory of the weapon, but because they could never get the targeting to work right (also a pesky little treaty banning nuclear weapons in space).
When I like to imagine a Reaper killer, I like to picture a marriage of those two concepts. Just as a shaped charge funnels the force of an explosion to create a stream of molten metal (or, in the case of the Casaba-Howitzer, plasma), my vision of a Reaper killer channels the X-ray radiation of a nuclear explosion into a single laser rod, creating an insanely powerful, one-shot per unit laser beam. A laser beam which, being electromagnetic radiation, proceeds straight through the Reaper's barriers and which, being insanely powerful, proceeds straight on through the Reaper.
Modifié par General User, 10 août 2011 - 02:41 .
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