Population in SEIV

[Phoenix-D]

"Good luck killing anyone with a depleted uranium cannon from outside the atmosphere of a planet."

Depends on how fast said cannon shot is moving. a hunk of whatever moving at .9C is going to do a lot of damage.. The DUC is probably pretty slow though.

Phoenix-D

[PvK]

Ya I hardly think every empire would start with a relativistic cannon by default. Also, if you have a shell travelling at .9C, would it help if it were uranium? Maybe it would trigger a fission reaction on impact...

In any case, my point is that anti-ship weapons would not I think generally be effective as tools of genocide from space. It doesn't really fit my imagination to have single shots eliminating millions of civillians at once, the way they currently do.

If the ship weapons are supposed to be as strong or stronger than thermonuclear bombs, then how does any ship ever survive even a single hit?

I can appreciate that some sci-fi weapons could do massive damage to planetary populations, but I don't think all of them would, and many I don't think would be capable of causing casualties in the millions at all, though the same weapons might still be quite good at neutralizing weapons platforms...

PvK

[Phoenix-D]

"If the ship weapons are supposed to be as strong or stronger than thermonuclear bombs, then how does any ship ever survive even a single hit?"

Really really strong armor? Remember that these ships can do other weird things as well- like fly through the same sector as the center of a black hole and come out unscathed (as long as they don't stop)

Phoenix-D

[PvK]

No... moving across a black hole obviously does not represent surviving the event horizon - it just means flying dangerously near, without entering. It's an abstract representation of 3D space, momentum, etc.

PvK

[Phoenix-D]

Which is why I said same sector and not *through* it.

Phoenix-D

[Baron Munchausen]

Heh... actually, in space where there isn't as much material to transmit a shockwave it's not that inconceivable to survive a nuclear weapon as long as it's not a 'direct' hit -- detonation in actual contact with the ship.

And remember, scale is everything. What's the size of the warhead? Isn't it easier to load lots of small warheads (a few hundred kilotons?) on smaller missiles than to put the very biggest bomb you can make (50 megatons? 100 megatons?) on larger missiles? It's the usual trade-off: Smaller warheads are much more survivable individually but easier to get a hit with because you can launch more. Larger warheads might wipe out the target completely but with fewer of them available they can be more easily countered various measures.

There was a project in the late 1950s to build a space ship powered by nuclear bombs. Yes, bombs would be dropped out the back and a 'pusher plate' on the underside of the craft with enormous shock absorbers would take the bLast. It was called the Orion Project. Do a Google search for it and you'll find plenty of resources. It's had some recent attemtion due to the son of Freeman Dyson (who was a major contributor) writing a book about it.

[ July 13, 2002, 23:18: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[PvK]

I guess my point is that the game values do not reflect the real-universe differences between weapons, and clearly we all have very different imaginations of what the same things represent.

However, I would say that if one considers that components like Bridge and Life Support can absorb 10 damage points each, that 60 points for a thermonuclear warhead hit seems at least "a bit" light (some would say incredibly so), since a typical smallest unarmored exploration ship can absorb typically 210 damage points.

As for passing through the black hole, again, it seems clear that the only way to enter the destructive zone of one in SE4 is to END the turn within the pull radius of the center, in which case the object takes damage. Moving through the same location on the 2D map and then moving to a safe distance is obviously (to me, anyway) not representing a move into the destructive area. To me, it seems like actually not a bad abstract representation, as long as one doesn't insist on interpreting it too literally and two-dimensionally.

PvK