How resiliant is Wars armor?

[adam_grif]

I always get the impression from this board that Wars tech is all completely invincible, but I'd like some hard numbers if anybody can provide them. Not counting shields, how resilient will, say, a Star Destroyer be? If modern day Earth could sneak some 500 KT bombs on board somehow, would it do anything more than piss them off? Would the Tsar bomba clean one up? Would it leave some minor scorching?

Any help would be appreciated.

[Srelex]

There was a similar thread: http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=140187&

Anyway, the upper ends of SW armor is very high, as both the Executor and Malevolence were able to shrug off presumably teratons of incoming enemy fire even with shields down.

[Ghost Rider]

You're asking an extraordinarily vague question with wanting a specific answer. Define your question with something more then a couple random explosive devices and a specific target.

As for the answer? Maybe.

[Darksider]

Erm. Sneaking a nuke on board an ISD has nothing to do with armor resilience. The armor's designed to resist attacks from the outside, not the inside. In the original X-wing game the Rebels did destroy an ISD by sneaking a nuke (explicitly described as a nuclear warhead) into the hanger bay.

[Simon_Jester]

Hangars are tricky, because they'll contain very energetic stuff like proton torpedo warheads and fighter fuel. All that stuff cooking off might release far more energy than the initial explosion, given the obscene power levels being thrown around in-setting.

On the other hand, that does place an upper bound on the ship's durability: it cannot shrug off its own magazine explosions.

[Lord Pounder]

Hangars are tricky, because they'll contain very energetic stuff like proton torpedo warheads and fighter fuel. All that stuff cooking off might release far more energy than the initial explosion, given the obscene power levels being thrown around in-setting.

On the other hand, that does place an upper bound on the ship's durability: it cannot shrug off its own magazine explosions.

IIRC the Star Dreadnaught Knight Hammer was also taken down by a squadron of it's own bombers which where in a hanger at the rear of the ship.

Is this a common design flaw in Imperial ships?

[Batman]

I wouldn't exactly call that a design flaw. Interior explosions have ALWAYS been able to cripple warships much more easily than enemy fire, and if you have a wing of armed parasite craft, you have to store them and their munitions SOMEWHERE inside the ship. It's a hell of a lot easier to kill a ship if you DON'T have to get through the shields/armour first.

[Napoleon the Clown]

A nuke detonated INSIDE the ship is going to kill everyone inside, even if it doesn't kill the ship. In Outbound Flight Thrawn detonates a radiation bomb inside Outbound Flight, killing everyone except the people inside the separate storage container. So, internally, there isn't much radiation shielding outside the engineering area or anywhere else that will be pumping out radiation.

Externally? Tsar Bomba or equivalent may blind some sensors due to affecting a greater area than a turbolaser blast or torpedo detonation, but overall it won't even piss them off. The armor of the Executor, as stated, was shrugging off shots up to 200 gigatons. Tsar Bomba was a piddly little 57 gigatons. So yeah, the greater blast radius may make you more likely to fry some sensors, but they've got backup, most likely, and will just turn on the sensors you didn't manage to fry.

[Srelex]

A nuke detonated INSIDE the ship is going to kill everyone inside, even if it doesn't kill the ship. In Outbound Flight Thrawn detonates a radiation bomb inside Outbound Flight, killing everyone except the people inside the separate storage container. So, internally, there isn't much radiation shielding outside the engineering area or anywhere else that will be pumping out radiation.

Externally? Tsar Bomba or equivalent may blind some sensors due to affecting a greater area than a turbolaser blast or torpedo detonation, but overall it won't even piss them off. The armor of the Executor, as stated, was shrugging off shots up to 200 gigatons. Tsar Bomba was a piddly little 57 gigatons. So yeah, the greater blast radius may make you more likely to fry some sensors, but they've got backup, most likely, and will just turn on the sensors you didn't manage to fry.

The Tsar bomb was in the megaton range. If it had been 57 gigatons, then a bit more people would have noticed, to put it lightly.

[Stark]

A nuke detonated INSIDE the ship is going to kill everyone inside, even if it doesn't kill the ship. In Outbound Flight Thrawn detonates a radiation bomb inside Outbound Flight, killing everyone except the people inside the separate storage container. So, internally, there isn't much radiation shielding outside the engineering area or anywhere else that will be pumping out radiation.

Externally? Tsar Bomba or equivalent may blind some sensors due to affecting a greater area than a turbolaser blast or torpedo detonation, but overall it won't even piss them off. The armor of the Executor, as stated, was shrugging off shots up to 200 gigatons. Tsar Bomba was a piddly little 57 gigatons. So yeah, the greater blast radius may make you more likely to fry some sensors, but they've got backup, most likely, and will just turn on the sensors you didn't manage to fry.

I'm not sure an undefined 'radiation bomb' going off on a ship pre-arranged to kill its crew is going to be a useful comparison.

[Ritterin Sophia]

I wouldn't exactly call that a design flaw. Interior explosions have ALWAYS been able to cripple warships much more easily than enemy fire,

Yeah, seriously. This can not be overstated, the Battle of Midway is a good example of this.

[Napoleon the Clown]

A nuke detonated INSIDE the ship is going to kill everyone inside, even if it doesn't kill the ship. In Outbound Flight Thrawn detonates a radiation bomb inside Outbound Flight, killing everyone except the people inside the separate storage container. So, internally, there isn't much radiation shielding outside the engineering area or anywhere else that will be pumping out radiation.

Externally? Tsar Bomba or equivalent may blind some sensors due to affecting a greater area than a turbolaser blast or torpedo detonation, but overall it won't even piss them off. The armor of the Executor, as stated, was shrugging off shots up to 200 gigatons. Tsar Bomba was a piddly little 57 gigatons. So yeah, the greater blast radius may make you more likely to fry some sensors, but they've got backup, most likely, and will just turn on the sensors you didn't manage to fry.

I'm not sure an undefined 'radiation bomb' going off on a ship pre-arranged to kill its crew is going to be a useful comparison.

This is true.

ETA:

The Tsar bomb was in the megaton range. If it had been 57 gigatons, then a bit more people would have noticed, to put it lightly.

Oops.

[Connor MacLeod]

Answer: Armor is as resilient as they want to pay for it to be and what you put it on. There are lots of different qualities of armour, and they mount it in varying thicknesses in ships. Some of the high end stuff includes the Molecularly-bonded armor from Han Solo At STars end which can easily withstand turbolaser fire, to the commercial versions of the quantum-crystalline stuff from KJA's novels to that laminaium crap they stuck on YVH droids. They may also use something else, like Dura armour, durasteel or Quadanium steel, etc. Like with armament and power generation technologies, SW has alot of options to go with, and there's no reason to assume all ships use the same thing all the time, or even all STar Destroyers are neccesarily equipped the same. equipment could differ according to roles, cost, needs, or any of a number of trade offs.

As far as sneaking bombs onboard.. depends on where they go. Inside the ship you have the ammo storage bays (munitions and such) the reactors, the fuel supplies, the power distribution networks (which run along the center of the ship) various capacitors (such as for weapons) as well as shield heat sinks and whatnot. There's alot of potentially dangerous or volatile things that could go off. We know from the ROTJ novel that attacking the inside of a hangar (cf Imperial communications ship) is a weak point in ship design, so sticking a bomb inside the hangar could do the same thing. Would 500 kilotons bombs be enough? no idea, and no idea how many you'd need.

[Vympel]

Well the Communications Ship was something of a particular case - its hangar bays were particularly large IIRC and the reactor was exposed to direct attack therefrom!

[Darksider]

As for the bomb in the hanger bay, It should be noted that the Nuke itself was not strong enough to destroy or rip apart the Invincible, as there are numerous secondary explosions seen erupting from it's hull before the big blast that vaporizes it completely. It's possible that the bomb triggered secondary explosions that eventually overloaded the reactor or cooked off all the fuel at once, but it didn't blow the ship up in one go.

[adam_grif]

As for the bomb in the hanger bay, It should be noted that the Nuke itself was not strong enough to destroy or rip apart the Invincible, as there are numerous secondary explosions seen erupting from it's hull before the big blast that vaporizes it completely. It's possible that the bomb triggered secondary explosions that eventually overloaded the reactor or cooked off all the fuel at once, but it didn't blow the ship up in one go.

Would you consider it likely that a MT yield device detonating inside a hangerbay would generate enough secondaries to take ships out, or do you think this was a fluke?

Erm. Sneaking a nuke on board an ISD has nothing to do with armor resilience. The armor's designed to resist attacks from the outside, not the inside. In the original X-wing game the Rebels did destroy an ISD by sneaking a nuke (explicitly described as a nuclear warhead) into the hanger bay.

I'm interested either way.

[Darksider]

Would you consider it likely that a MT yield device detonating inside a hangerbay would generate enough secondaries to take ships out, or do you think this was a fluke?

Hmm. Not sure. The nuke used in the game was the size of an imperial supply crate (seen in the second cutscene here) How much boom would a terrestrial nuke of similar size have?

[Napoleon the Clown]

Based off a quick look on Wikipedia, it looks like it's similar size to a suitcase nuke. The article says, with the following source ( The Swift nuclear device, tested in Operation Redwing's Yuma test on May 27, 1956. See Redwing Yuma at the http://www.nuclearweaponarchive.org website.) that the yield is well under a kiloton, at 190 tons of TNT. Anyone know how small a thermonuclear device can be? If they used one of those, it would put the yield a fair bit higher.

Without citation, Wikipedia also says the following:

The largest yield of a relatively compact linear implosion device was under 2 kilotons for the cancelled / never deployed (but apparently tested) US W82-1 artillery shell design, with yield under 2 kilotons for a 95 pounds (43 kg) artillery shell 6.1 inches (15 cm) in diameter and 34 inches (86 cm) long.

If it were a larger crate design, which we can't rule out, as the bomb is place too close to the camera to get clear perspective on, it could have been as large as the Little Boy bomb, based off what I could tell from an image search on Google. This would put the yield into the low kiloton range. Keep in mind, getting perspective on it from what I could find on Google, with no people by it, this makes this a rough guess at best.

Short answer: Low kiloton range at best, unless you can make a hydrogen bomb that size.

Based off of how small it was, though, I'd say that it was definitely a case of it causing other explosives to cook off rather than it being the nuke itself doing the damage. And the cinematic pretty clearly shows fire erupting in multiple places rather than a single fireball eating the ship. That we didn't see it easily go through the hull where it was very close to the surface is another clear indicator of just how strong SW armor is.

[adam_grif]

Easily KT yield, possibly higher. I didn't really get a good sense of how large, exactly, it was. For reference a 155mm shell is a puny 76 T yield, but a 280mm atomic cannon munition (which is probably the closest in size to that, possibly a little larger) goes up to 15 KT. So, ~Hiroshima, fireball >300m in diameter, blast doing significant damage out to 1 KM.

[Batman]

TLAM-N, ALCM and SRAM all had triple figure KT yield while being a fraction of Little Boy's size and the actual warhead again being a fraction of the delivery vehicle's size. Even using modern day technology getting MT range out of something that size should be entirely possible, nevermind a tech base that can apparently fit GT/TT warheads into something the size of a thermos bottle.

[adam_grif]

I imagine that you would have trouble squeezing 1 MT into something that size, since there will no doubt be limits on how much energy you can get from your materials per unit of material. The W80 warhead that goes into the TLAM-N is already getting close to the upper limit on what you'd think that bomb could be:



But "could modern Earth blow them up with a device of the same size" wasn't really what I was getting at. I just wanted to know the approximate level of firepower that it would take to bring one of those things down from the inside.

[Sea Skimmer]

I imagine that you would have trouble squeezing 1 MT into something that size, since there will no doubt be limits on how much energy you can get from your materials per unit of material. The W80 warhead that goes into the TLAM-N is already getting close to the upper limit on what you'd think that bomb could be:

W-80 warheads aren’t really intended for maximum yield, cruise missiles didn't need it given the high accuracy, but they did need low weight for more range. The W-83 gravity bomb uses a physics package that isn’t much larger and thought to be directly related, which yields 1.2 megatons, but its a fair bit heavier. Since you have certain minimal size constraints on a multistage nuclear weapon, something which yields in the hundreds of kilotons is going to be proportionally larger then a megaton plus device.

Plus US nuclear warheads from the 1960s on had a rapidly increasing array of safety and security features that also push up size a fair bit. These issues tend to make cruise missile and gravity bomb warheads heavier then ICBM warheads. An ICBM warhead just sits in a silo, while the other warheads have to be safe even if the fully fueled bomber crashes into a mountain. People wouldn’t give a damn nearly as much in Star Wars. So much firepower exists that someone getting a hold of a nuke isn’t even news. So nukes could be yet more powerful for the size of the physics package. Plus safety systems could easily be more compact thanks to more advanced materials and better explosives.

[Darksider]

Yeah. To echo Sea Skimmer's point about nukes "not being a big deal," The rebels lifted the bomb from an unguarded freighter and the empire dispatched a single storm trooper transport without escort to retrieve it. We clearly aren't talking about the Empire's idea of a doomsday weapon here.

[adam_grif]

I imagine that you would have trouble squeezing 1 MT into something that size, since there will no doubt be limits on how much energy you can get from your materials per unit of material. The W80 warhead that goes into the TLAM-N is already getting close to the upper limit on what you'd think that bomb could be:

W-80 warheads aren’t really intended for maximum yield, cruise missiles didn't need it given the high accuracy, but they did need low weight for more range. The W-83 gravity bomb uses a physics package that isn’t much larger and thought to be directly related, which yields 1.2 megatons, but its a fair bit heavier. Since you have certain minimal size constraints on a multistage nuclear weapon, something which yields in the hundreds of kilotons is going to be proportionally larger then a megaton plus device.

You mean B-83 right? Well, there's no W83 listed on Wiki's list of nuclear weapons, but there is a B83, which is a gravity bomb, so I'm assuming that's what you meant.

I had no idea they could be so small though.

[Sea Skimmer]

You mean B-83 right? Well, there's no W83 listed on Wiki's list of nuclear weapons, but there is a B83, which is a gravity bomb, so I'm assuming that's what you meant.

Yeah yeah, B instead of W because it’s a gravity bomb. A W-83 form did exist though, at least on paper. It may have been intended as an alternative warhead for the Pershing II missile but its not clear.

I had no idea they could be so small though.

The smallest nuclear weapon the US ever tested fit in a 127mm x 622mm tube. Serious work was done on 127mm and 105mm nuclear artillery shells were worked on but never type classified or produced. 155mm devices were mass produced. The 105mm shell would have weighed just 40lb, a much smaller then even the famous Atomic Demolition Muntions. Of course the yield of these devices was or would have been very low, as they had only single dysfunctional stages to be so compact, but it’s still letting you have a small shell with as much firepower as a whole B-52 squadron carpet bombing.