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

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that I understand it (and I'm not a physicist either), the issue is that
a ship in vacuum basically has to provide the matter to serve as its own
blast front. Compared to the volume of space and the distance scale (as
John Atkinson illustrated in his example), even a very large ship
doesn't provide enough matter to cause a lot of blast damage to nearby
ships/craft. Of course, I Could Be Wrong(tm).

Best,
Ken

--- On Mon, 9/27/10, Michael Brown <mwsaber6@msn.com> wrote:

From: Michael Brown <mwsaber6@msn.com>
Subject: Re: [GZG] Gzg-l Digest, Vol 37, Issue 24
To: gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
Date: Monday, September 27, 2010, 10:57 PM

Is not a lot of the "force" in an explosion the rapid expansion of the
gasses released from the chemical reaction.  I understand not having a
lot of atmo to compress to get more effect, but HE does "carry" some of
it with it

Michael Brown
NOT a Phyicsit
mwsaber6@msn.com

--------------------------------------------------
From: "John Atkinson" <johnmatkinson@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, September 27, 2010 8:34 PM
To: <gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu>
Subject: 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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