Re: [GZG] Gzg-l Digest, Vol 37, Issue 24

On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 11:30 PM, 
<gzg-l-request@mail.csua.berkeley.edu> wrote:

> This sort of reminds me of optional rules I've thought of for Full
Thrust where magazine or fighter bay hits (i.e. threshold failures)
should perhaps be just a little bit more painful than the loss of a
system.  These have been just about every naval captain's worst
nightmare for centuries, whether it was the powder rooms in sailing
warships, or the spectacular magazine and/or ordnance hits that
destroyed several British battlecruisers at Jutland, the Hood in the
Denmark Strait, the Arizona at Pearl Harbor, the Yamato at Okinawa, or
most of the Japanese carrier fleet with a whole air wing's worth of
ordnance sitting on or near its flight decks at Midway.  Throw that
together with maybe a little more spectacular results when a ship is
destroyed (e.g. maybe a power core explosion should actually hurt other
ships nearby and/or fighter screens), and maybe that'd be a more
effective deterrent to overloading on missiles, fighters, or bunched up
ship formations than trying to tweak
>  the point defense rules.

How effectively do explosions propagate in a vacuum?

I don't have a PhD in the subject, but the practical experience I have
with explosives suggests that past the immediate vicinity of the
explosives (immediate vicinity being roughly relative to the square
root of the quantity of explosives), much of the damage is done by
shock wave -- which energy transmitted by compression of air.  No air,
no shock wave.	So explosions would be really destructive on that
ship, but I think less so further away.

Especially given the distances commonly assumed in space combat -- if
an inch is even 100 km, there would have to be some pretty 'earth
shattering kabooms' to have even a tenth of an inch in radius.

John
-- 
"Thousands of Sarmatians, Thousands of Franks, we've slain them again
and again.  We're looking for thousands of Persians."
--Vita Aureliani
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