I'm reading Ghosts of Onyx at the moment, and have come across a pretty powerful description of the UNSC Nova bomb. I haven't seen this calced anywhere, and don't have the capability to do it myself, so I was wondering if anyone has already worked out a power level for the weapon?
Here's the passage in question:
A star ignited between Joyous Exaltation and its moon. Every ship not protected on the dark side of the planet boiled and vapourised in an instant.
The atmosphere of the planet wavered as helical spirals of luminescent particles lit both north and south poles, making curtains of blue and green ripple over the globe. As the thermonuclear pressure wave spread and butted against the thermosphere, it heated the air orange, compressed it, until it touched the ground and scorched a quarter of the world.
The tiny nearby moon Malhiem cracked and shattered into a billion rocky fragments and clouds of dust.
The overpressure force subsided, and three-hundred-kilometer-per-hour winds swept over Joyous Exaltation, obliterating cities and whipping tidal waves over its coast lines.
The description of the weapon:
This is the prototype Nova bomb, nine fusion warheads encased in lithium triteride armour. When detonated it compresses its fusionable material to neutron star density, boosting the thermonuclear yield a hundred-fold.
And in First Strike:
'We'd been working on a new bomb, called the Nova. It was a cluster of nukes, each with a lithium-triteride casing. now, these things, in theory, not only detonate, like you'd expect a nuke to - but they also force their tritium cases together in one big superheated and pressurized center.' He made a fist and slammed it into his other palm for emphasis. 'Boosts the yield a hundredfold.' A grin spread across his face. 'Planet killers. We had planned to use these things in space battles to level the playing field'
...
'A bomb like that would crack their home world in half'
1.) Boiling/vaporizing the ships. If you know the distancecs of the ships involved, you could do some sort of scaling based on distance and intensity to estimate the total yield. Offhand it looks like it might be implying its vaporizing ships even thousands of miles away (ie any not protected by the bulk of the planet) but that's just conjecture.
To estimate the intensity, figure out the mass of the ship in question, assume iron composition (or whatever other material you wish to use, titanium, aluminaum, whatever) and multiply mass by the energy needed to vaporize 1 kg of it. Then divide by surface area of the ship (however its facing - I suppoce "head on" or "rear facing" would be less conservative due to samller surface area compared to broadside) and there you have approximate intensity.
Example: If we assume a 100,000 ton ship was vaporized, and has thermal properties similar to iron, and was 500 meters long by 80 meters tall, the intensity might be ~19 Gigajoules per square meter. If we assume ~7000 km distance (about the radius of the planet assuming roughly earthlike), to vaporize the kind of ship aboe you would need around 1.2e25 joules of energy.
Note: The above calc is pure conjecture for use as a pure example. Do NOT use it as a valid calc for the nuke. I am not bloody responsible for anyone who does, so don't attach mym fucking name to it if you do decide to use it.
B.) "heating the air". Offhand, temperatures corresponding to "orange" color in rock or metal tend to be around 1200-1300 K, so its probably raound 1000-1500K for air. It suggests that the air over "a quarter of the world" was heated to that temperature (it was heated orange until the effects "touched the ground" and scorched "a quarter" o fthe world.) THe mass of atmosphere in an EArthlike planet is 5.1e18 kg, so you can take 1/4 of that, plug in the specific heat of air with the temp given above, ,and estimate a low end figure for the nuke yield.
This is probably somewhat more reliable than #1, since the properties of planets and air are more well known than of non-inert starships. Sincee its an omnidiretional blast, one also has to account for the fact that only part of the energgy strikes the planet. Like with the first example, intensity x distance (the former figured by taking 1/4 the surface area of the planet divided by the energy input into the atmosphere)
c.) The pressure wave stuff I'm not sure on, and I generlaly ignore because its pretty weird. Someone I know once suggested that it refers to the effects on the atmosphere (which is a possible interpretation) I generally assume that like the Weberverse they have some way of making nukes that release blast/plasma effects.
The fact that the nuke has some odd "100x" multiplier in both GoO and FS also indicates its not "just" a regular nuke, there's something much more complicated toing on there.
d.) If you knew the size of the moon and its distancec form the explosion, you could also try to figure out the destructive force as per above. If we assume the asteroid is the size of Deimos (Mar's moon) roughly, and use cratering on the ADC, it takes at least 181 MT to shatter, possibly as high as a couple GT for a "non centrally buried" explosive of similar diameter but other composition (IE igneous rock or iron) If you know the distance and intensity, you can again estimate the output.
e.) the simplest relies on "planet killer" interpreatation. This suggests the yield is at leat mass extinction (1e8-1e9 megatons) but somewhere less than mass-scattering (5e16 megatons)
Edit: bear in mind that the nukes because they are "technobabbles" in some respects may not scale linearly with other nukes
Well the ships are a Covenant armada numbering approximately 200 vessels, the flagship (and presumably largest) of which is the supercarrier Sublime Transcendence. I'm reasonably well-versed on Halo-lore, and this is the grandest class of Covenant ship I've heard mentioned, save for the Unyielding Hierophant, which was a station, and High Charity, which again is more of a movable station. The Ascendant Justice was described as a 'flagship', is above cruiser class, and is three kilometers in length. I reckon a supercarrier would be bigger than this but there's no concrete figures.
I do, however, have figures for the standard Covenant cruiser, which would probably make up a sizeable portion of the fleet (other vessels being larger or smaller assumed to cancel each other out approximately).
Length: 1782.2m
Width: 861.7m
Height: 230.8m
My mathematical ability is woeful, but I presume this will be helpful? As for the distance from the planet, beyond the fleet being in orbit there's no detail.
At any rate, what potential power range are we talking here?
And of course, it's the Separatist fleet that gets hit by the Nova bomb...the fleet that likely would have joined up with the UNSC against the Loyalists slaughtering them.
Yeah that was a bit shit, but to be fair there was no way Whitcomb could have known that would occur. Regardless, that fleet could have already taken billions of human lives before they decided to jump ship in a contrived plot twist...
Actually that fleet was really the supremacist fleet, the elites who still thought of humans as vermin to be destroyed but hated the Prophets just as much, as opposed to the faction of the elites who follow the Arbiter and are willing, to lesser and greater degrees depending, to fight alongside humans following his example.
