Syn Callibri
Minmatar Blacklight Incorporated
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Posted - 2010.08.02 13:41:00 -
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Originally by: Pilk This is an old post I'd made on another alliance forum, and I figured EVE as a whole might appreciate it. The question is, when Dust514 comes, can bombardment by orbiting EVE ships significantly affect the battle on the surface of the planet?
Originally by: "mceivalley" You know what? Here's a better comparison: The biggest explosive projectile gun on an EVE non-capital is a 1400mm howitzer. On RL BSs the guns size was a little more than 400mm. And their weakest ammo wasn't nuclear...
Well, the Gallente and Caldari regularly fire Antimatter, so I think it's safe to assume that, given a bit of push in that direction, the Minmatar could develop an AM warhead. CCP specifies that the shell is Titanium, but not what the antimatter is composed of. Since using anything produced beyond the Alpha process is presumably more expensive, but since we apparently have the hypertechnology necessary to contain quantities of antimatter suitable for use in a 75mm-diameter gun, and to produce it more cheaply, per unit mass, than livestock, let's go with antiiron as the contents.
At room temperature (ha!), antiiron has a density of 7.874 kg/m3. If we assume we need a 200mm-thick shell to contain the antimatter, that leaves us with a convenient 1000mm sphere of antimatter, or approximately 0.523598776 cubic meters. Let's say 0.5, that's easier.
With 3.937 kg of antimatter (0.5 m3 * 7.874 kg/m3), you can generate (very approximately) 3.937 * 1.8*10^17 J of energy. This is the same energy output you'd get from 221,456,250,000 kg of TNT, or 110 megatons. The entirety of World War II saw the dropping of approximately 5 megatons of bombs--and that includes the two nuclear ones. Applying some possibly-dodgy math, detonation of this antimatter would result in a fireball with a diameter of almost 11km, which would fit quite neatly around Chicago. Presumably, the supersonic shock wave and heat resulting from instantaneous mid-air annihilation of a few kg of antimatter would suffice to eliminate any pesky outlying suburbs.
Now, remember that we're firing eight of these. From each ship. Simultaneously.
The surface area of the United States is approximately 9.6 million square km. Each of our warheads is directly incinerating just about 100 square km, and presumably rendering uninhabitable quite a bit more. Still, we want to be thorough! So, it will take 12,000 volleys of eight guns to take care of the United States. Hopefully, we've had the foresight to stockpile some modules to affect rate of fire, so we'll use a RoF of one volley per fifteen seconds. This is over two days of bombardment by a single ship. Since we don't have time for that sort of silliness, we'll drop 500 ships on them, who will sort out the job in about six minutes. If you'd rather be a bit less thorough (I mean, who really cares about Montana, amirite?), you could doubtless improve these numbers by an order of magnitude.
Originally by: "CmdrRat" I bet this is against some part of a Yulai convention.
Sweet god, I hope so.
--P
P.S. If you liked this, you'll really like this: http://qntm.org/destroy.
P.P.S. Bonus factoid for the Minmatar roleplayers: it'd take approximately 31.6 quadrillion ISK worth of the hypothetical 1400mm antimatter round I envision, above, to destroy Amarr Prime. Start saving.
Apparently you've never heard of a funny little thing called...a sugical or tactical strike, no?
Syn Callibri Ilharess of the Scorpion Tribe
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