As far as I know, the big damage from Nuclear Weapons planetside is the massive blastwave that can pretty much scour the earth, with radiation and thermal damage bringing up the rear.
But in space there is no atmosphere to create a huge concussive and scouring blast wave, which means a nuclear weapon would have to rely on its all-directional thermal and radiation to do damage… but is that enough to actually be usful as a weapon in space, considering ships in space would be designed to handle radiation and extreme thermals due to the lack of any insulative atmosphere?
I know a lot of this might be supposition based on imaginary future tech and assumptions made about materials science and starship creation, but surely at least some rough guess could be made with regards to a thernonuclear detonation without the focusing effects of an atmosphere?
Others have answered you question about non-directed nuclear blasts in space already. They don’t work the same way as in atmosphere; lack the blast or the thermal heat, etc. Enter the Casaba-Howitzer, a theoretical nuclear shaped charge that shoots a directed plasma stream at near light speed. This idea came about in the 60s along with nuclear blast propulsion.
The name comes from the casaba melon, a variety of honeydew, because the lab was “on a melon kick that year,” naming various projects after melons and having already used up all the good ones.
I can appreciate that sort of naming convention.
Its a good way to prevent bikeshedding. Which yes is a real thing.
Yamato cannon operational
Patching you in.
Thats fucking incredible. That deserves to be in more sci-fi.
I completely agree. It was used in To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini. I can’t think of many other works that use it.
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars
well that’s going on my list. ty!
ah, you beat me to it
To everyone else ☝️ Kurzgesagt made a good video about nuking the moon which fits pretty well with ops question. The moon has no atmosphere to speak of and the video explores the effect on terrain
Thank you. I enjoyed it so much, that I purchased their Universe in a Nutshell app!
Question is already answered, but. The BSG miniseries has a good nuke scene which is actually pretty reasonable: https://youtu.be/R-L4tVksGYc
That is largely true, but there are still 2 things : first, the plasma is still a super hot ball of matter with very high kinetic energy. Second, the radiations are still deadly at short range, unless you have specific protections, and radiation protections are heavy and bulky. At worse, the plasma can violently accelerate the target ship and damage it with this sudden acceleration.
But you can also easily turn your atomic bomb into a more refined atomic shell. The you can have projectiles propelled by the explosion (so it’s now an atomic frag bomb), or a penetring shell with a delayed explosion so the explosion occur inside the target ship.
I always thought the initial explosion was so hot it vapourised everything in a certain radius. Would an atomic frag work?
Nasal developed a reactor, orion iirc, that was basically nuclear pulse propulsion: a directed nuclear explosion would propel a jet of plasma on a shield on the back of the ship to propel it, and the ship would use regular explosion for propulsion.
I don’t know the exact dynamic of the nuclear explosion. The temperature turns a lot of things into plasma indeed. But I suspect some construction of the bomb (specific layers with specific materials) could make some kind of frag work.
At the very least you can have an efficient plasma bomb anyway. Your frag is simply plasma in this case. Plasma is still matter that can have high kinetic energy, but it’s very hot too and with specific electromagnetic properties.
In this case, the atomic explosion replaces your powder, and what matters is everything around it.
Nasal developed a reactor
Autocomplete lol
a reactor, orion iirc, that was basically nuclear pulse propulsion:
Yep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
Im getting pretty stuffy this season I could go for a Nasal Reactor tbh.
The electromagnetic pulse may not cause physical destruction, but it would likely disable any spacecraft in the blast. Which could result in death and destruction when the passengers can’t breathe or get warmth and the craft loses control.
Wouldn’t a spacecraft have a Faraday cage anyway, to protect the electronics from stellar winds?
That might reduce the impact of a given EMP.
If I’ve learned anything from watching nuclear blasts in space on sci-fi shows, it’s that hasshak, dal shakka mel!
Shal’kek nem’ron
Indeed.
This Video will tell you everything you could possibly want to know on the subject, answering your question exactly and in extensive detail. The long and short of it is, not really, no, but they could be made to be very exceptionally effective anyway.
You probably need to wrap the nuke in multiple layers of material. Some inner layer to absord as much energy as possible and transfers it as kinetic energy to an outer high-density layer to create extremly fast shrapnel.
So a nuclear pipebomb
From a NASA paper on this very subject:
If a nuclear weapon is exploded in a vacuum-i. e., in space-the complexion of weapon effects changes drastically:
First, in the absence of an atmosphere, blast disappears completely.
Second, thermal radiation, as usually defined, also disappears. There is no longer any air for the blast wave to heat and much higher frequency radiation is emitted from the weapon itself.
Third, in the absence of the atmosphere, nuclear radiation will suffer no physical attenuation and the only degradation in intensity will arise from reduction with distance. As a result the range of significant dosages will be many times greater than is the case at sea level.
Sounds like you’d end up with just a big blast of radiation
