RedImperator wrote:Ok, this I gotta hear: how does packing targets together tightly make nukes less effective?
He's probably thinking that with a planet like Coruscant you'd basically have to nuke the entire surface*, because it's all urban sprawl. With a planet like Earth you only need to nuke a relatively small percentage of the surface area to destroy all the cities and decimate the population.
*Well, not quite that bad. You could just target things like power plants and food production facilities; the inhabitants would starve quickly once the lights went out.
Really though, if your goal is extermination the only real important thing is to take out the enemy's space infrastructure. Once you've done that you can just lob large rocks at the planets at your liesure. Enough dinosaur-killers will kill everybody not matter how densely populated the planet is.
Gil Hamilton wrote:Of course, we have the X-factor that the Cylons almost certainly had help and were guided to their current state by something else. Who knows how much they could have helped or provided the cylons with, in addition to making them fleshy and batshit crazy?
And certainly, the research for that process had begun before the end of the first war.
I tell you, if things like this are left unanswered by this time next year, I'll vomit.
Themightytom wrote:they couldn't and it wouldn't be practical, but I think they need MORE base stars than what we have seen to carry the Raiders and/or carry troops. We couldn't know how many base stars were used until a plausible strategy is revealed. if it relies heavily on orbital bombardment, why use raiders when a base star can sit at a distance. if it depends strategic strafing runs raiders seem more neccesary, if it was just drop a few nukes to spread panic, use the virus to shut down defenses and land a butt load of centurions, than you still need more base stars
Why shoot missiles off from a distance, vastly increasing the chance that they will be intercepted, when they could jump in raiders and unload four nukes per raider and then jump out?
"Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me...God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist." -- Academician Prokhor Zakharov
"Hal grabs life by the balls and doesn't let you do that [to] hal."
"I hereby declare myself master of the known world."
Gil Hamilton wrote:The time frame is kind of the problem that's always bothered me. 40 years is not a whole lot of time given that the Cylons picked up and left Colonial space. Rebuilding a new spaceborne infrastructure and making the shift from Centurion-style Cylons to Skinjobs, then building an armada of warships to smash the human worlds seems like a real tight fit for that sort of timeline.
Well, it also depends on things like their economy and the endurance of individual Cylons etc. Consider what sort of a military we could build up on Earth if we didn't bother with any professions not directly connected with it, and if we could put every single human to work efficiently.
RedImperator wrote:Ok, this I gotta hear: how does packing targets together tightly make nukes less effective?
He's probably thinking that with a planet like Coruscant you'd basically have to nuke the entire surface*, because it's all urban sprawl. With a planet like Earth you only need to nuke a relatively small percentage of the surface area to destroy all the cities and decimate the population.
*Well, not quite that bad. You could just target things like power plants and food production facilities; the inhabitants would starve quickly once the lights went out.
I dunno. That sorta makes sense, but that doesn't reduce the "efficacy" (his word) of nukes, any more than you'd say New York reduces the efficacy of nukes because it's so big you'd need more than one to level it. And as you said, an ecumenopolis would be hideously vulnerable to nukes (or any other highly destructive weapon) because it relies on infrastructure to keep it habitable, not an ecosystem.
Really though, if your goal is extermination the only real important thing is to take out the enemy's space infrastructure. Once you've done that you can just lob large rocks at the planets at your liesure. Enough dinosaur-killers will kill everybody not matter how densely populated the planet is.
Giant rocks from space is pretty much always the fastest way to kill everybody, no matter how developed the planet. They're no good if you want to use the planet later, though.
Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves…We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.--Ada Louise Huxtable, "Farewell to Penn Station", New York Times editorial, 30 October 1963 X-Ray Blues
DrStrangelove wrote:nBSG basestars carry 792 raiders according to battlestar wiki. 1584x50MT=79200MT
A nitpick but you're not going to get 50MT out of the little missiles the raiders carry with conventional thermonuclear technology. In real life a 50MT bomb would have to weigh at least 10 tons (not including launcher). Those huge warheads are only really useful for cracking very hard targets (i.e. deeply buried bunkers, as nBSG doesn't have shields) - for anything else you'd be better off with many smaller warheads.
For comparison, the Tomahwak cruise missile carries a 200KT warhead. The raider missiles are quite a bit smaller, but more advanced so I'd place them in the same ballpack. This is consistent with the level of damage we saw to Galactica assuming only moderately futuristic materials; a 50MT warhead would have vaporised the flight pod and shattered the hull, not just blown out some sections.
Starglider wrote:A nitpick but you're not going to get 50MT out of the little missiles the raiders carry with conventional thermonuclear technology. In real life a 50MT bomb would have to weigh at least 10 tons (not including launcher).
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For comparison, the Tomahwak cruise missile carries a 200KT warhead. The raider missiles are quite a bit smaller, but more advanced so I'd place them in the same ballpack. This is consistent with the level of damage we saw to Galactica assuming only moderately futuristic materials; a 50MT warhead would have vaporised the flight pod and shattered the hull, not just blown out some sections.
In the miniseries there are references to 50MT warheads being used against the colonies, but it happens off-screen, so we don't know where the missiles come from. But it seems reasonable based on the physics of it that these would be from heavier missiles carried by the basestars.
The missiles used in the hit on the Galactica in the miniseries is often assumed to be ~50KT. The reasoning behind this is that the raiders attacking Colonial One are fooled by "electromagnetic pulse generators" that spoof a 50KT detonation. So that places it in the ballbark of the 200KT you're suggesting.
