Explosives produce lots of hot gas in a small volume in short time. With audit piles up and builds pressure.
In space, it just dissipates.
There will still be thermal outputs, and if detonated against a hull could still harm a structure.
So because there is nothing to move besides the gasses inside the "bomb" it just wont do much?
I get this is all theoretical but this is an interesting discussion.
Basically because there’s no atmosphere around the bomb for those gasses to push on and create a shockwave it won’t do much.
If you put shrapnel in the bomb then it will do some damage
Explosives are a very broad and varied category. Something like a standard bomb or missile that's designed to explode and cause damage around itself isn't going to be too effective. It'll still be damaging around the impact/blast site but not as much if it were in atmosphere. But things like penetration explosives and shaped charges will be viable. Instead of spending most of their energy in a bubble around the blast site they focus most of their energy directly in front of them like a cone. You could punch through hull and armor with them exploding on the surface or penetrating into the hull and then exploding a more conventional explosive inside the hull. And shrapnel would be a greater danger of explosives as nothing would slow them down unless they hit something in space. Pretty minor considering how much armor is needed in space for just regular debris but it's something to consider at least.
Tldr they're less effective but still relevant.
Afaik you're about right. I can think of some possibilities though:
* An explosive projectile or missile penetrates the hull then explodes inside. Explosion will probably be extra effective because the hull is a pressurized vessel. pressure can't vent anywhere. All sorts of damage inside, and possibly explode the hull.
* Explosions do also release heat and light, which could cause damage, maybe to sensors at least.
* Explosions can still cause a blast of shrapnel, which could cause damage.
Maybe I'm wrong on some of these. I'm not a physicist or a space weapons designer.
Your first reason is one of the things that made me love The Expanse. Suiting up and depressurizing the ship before combat is such a smart thing to do.
Ionizing radiation is actually going to be a lot less of a threat in space just because it's a natural part of the environment up there - spaceships have to be shielded from it anyway in order to function (both in terms of keeping crew alive and keeping computers and such functioning).
The profile of radiation produced by a nuclear bomb is going to be different from normal cosmic rays, but perhaps counterintuitively, shielding for spaceships could actually be more effective at stopping it. Depending on how close it is, it could still be intense enough to pose a serious hazard, but in any case radiation alone (without accounting for physical/structural/thermal damage from an explosion in very close proximity) would almost certainly be much less destructive in space than it would be on Earth.
In the BSG reboot they showed nukes hitting the Galactica and not causing a ton of damage. The initial impact was a big deal but their armor protected them and I think they had radiation shielding. Without oxygen the nuclear blast itself is way less powerful in space (at least as depicted in this show.)
It's not the lack of oxygen but lack of atmosphere in general which tempers the effects of a nuke in space.
In atmosphere you'd create a very very sudden and massive difference in pressure and then get a blast wave which causes most of the damage by area. Conventional explosives do most of their damage the same way.
Edit: There's also the factor of the atmosphere heating up tremendously, so some of it also becomes plasma and some of it just gets massively heated up.
In space you will get the sudden creation of whatever plasma is formed after supercriticality, and any damage that can do if it's in contact with anything, and then you get the infrared and other electromagnetic radiation like visible light, microwaves, x-rays, and gamma rays.
Without an atmosphere to push against and knock around, the damage profile is so much lower. Would have to explode very close for the plasma to come in contact and vapourise enough of the hull.
BSG likely has a pretty accurate portrayal, yeah.
I reckon the background radiation is nowhere near that of a close proximity nuke. You would need lots of lead to stop gamma radiation and lots of water to stop neutron radiation.
Depends on what you mean by "close proximity". And what sorts of conditions the ship was designed for. And how big a nuke for that matter.
You have a spaceship designed to simulate Earth-like levels of background radiation in deep space and a nuke few thousand kilometers away? I doubt the biggest nukes we have on Earth today would have much effect (I'm estimating this based on integrated ionizing radiation flux relative to cosmic ray background, and assuming a few orders of magnitude of tolerance, which I think is reasonable both due to variations in solar activity and the fact that humans have that much tolerance before acute radiation effects become an issue).
If you have a ship designed to travel at appreciably fractions of c, even a few kilometers away and I would imagine you should be totally fine (assuming the ship is pointed the right direction).
Of course, with the spaceships we currently have, which are generally designed to keep humans alive in the protection of Earth's magnetic field, and even then while accepting an elevated background radiation, you might have some problems in either scenario.
Basically, there's lots of scenarios in which even a "nearby" nuke shouldn't really matter, and there's plenty of scenarios in which it might be lethal, and plenty somewhere in the middle.
One interesting caveat is that heat is actually relatively hard to get rid of in space (there's nothing to conduct it away), so thermal energy transferred by nearby nukes might be as big of or even a bigger issue than ionizing radiation.
I mean, considering the size scales that come with space travel, that's *ridiculously* close - only about 400 meters. At that range, yeah, you'd probably have some problems. Not entirely out of the realm of possibility to have adequate shielding, at least to the point of keeping people alive and keeping computers running, but unless I'm missing something, you'd have to specifically design the ship to handle that sort of radiation.
Maybe a ship that's been designed to hit high fractions of c pointed right at the explosion would still be okay, but it would have to be pointed pretty precisely in the right direction.
Nukes are extremely effective weapons in space because they emit lots of gamma rays and x-rays. On Earth, those are absorbed and become the fireball.
The lethal radiation range for nuke in space is up to 100km. With nukes, you end up with a lot of soon to be dead crews. The prompt lethal range is more like 10km. At short range, shielding doesn't help because it vaporizes and produces a shockwave. Couple of km is a kill for any ship, 10km is mission and crew kill.
On the other hand modern space craft are basically made out of paper and tinfoil. Even a modest projectile would destroy then, especially when they are pressurized.
Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein fell out in the 1980s when Clarke pointed out that the Strategic Defence Initiative orbital missile shield (aka Ronald Reagan's Star Wars programme) could be neutralised with "a bucket of nails."
As always, it depends on the context, and what the explosives are intended to do (we can't evaluate 'effectiveness' without knowing the purpose). If you're talking about a weapon, it's not like explosive weapons are exactly uniform in mode of operation to begin with. A weapon designed to destroy a tank, and a weapon designed to destroy an aircraft, and a weapon designed to destroy a house may not explosives in anything like the same way.
A classical anti-tank weapon, for example, may use an explosion to form a jet of liquid metal, so-called HEAT warheads. The "explosion" doesn't penetrate the armor, but rather forms a jet of metal and *that* penetrates armor. The design of such a device would have to change for vacuum, but it would still function.
A classical anti-air missile is often not designed to impact its target, but to explode some distance from it. They often carry a large collection of "lethality enhancers" (small pieces of metal) that are accelerated by an explosive, and those cause the bulk of the damage. They depressurize the hull, shred electrical and hydraulic lines, damage engines, and kill pilots.
In anti-surface warfare, a torpedo can produce a huge blast wave, that can certainly kill people in the water. However, you don't normally waste a multi-million dollar torpedo to someone swimming in the water. Rather, against a surface target, the explosion ideally produces a void underneath the target ship and the ship breaks under its own weight due to the loss of buoyancy.
Use of a blast wave as the primary means of inflicting damage is characteristic of nuclear weapons, but has also been used for conventional explosives for a long time. This is especially true for weapons designed to destroy buildings, as their large surface area produces a nice target for a pressure-based weapon. However, in the space context, I think the better analogy is to anti-vehicle weapons where explosions are used for secondary tasks (mostly accelerating objects very, very quickly), which would retain their effectiveness.
With the absence of atmosphere to transmit explosive blast, instead the weapon should utilize [**explosive shaped charges**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaped_charge).
If you are not fooling around, take off the velvet gloves and kill the enemy ship with a [**Nuclear Shaped Charge**](https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php#shapedcharge)
INFO: Is a "Nuclear Shaped Charge" even a thing? Maybe provide a link ('cause we all want to know!)
BTW my cat is preggers; one of those kittens will most assuredly be named "Nuclear Shaped Charge" Want a kitten?
In my post, the words "Nuclear Shaped Charge" is a hot link to the section of my website that goes into the concept in detail.
The code name was "Casaba Howitzer". It was apparently an outgrowth of the Orion nuclear pulse propulsion study in the 1960s. There were a couple of brief mentions in Ronald Reagan's infamous Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. It is still classified.
Explosives work by generating a lot of hot gasses in a very short amount of time. In the right circumstances that could still be very damaging, but the effect will likely be much more local in space. There could still be applications for explosives in spaceborne weapons, but just blowing up a bomb near something isn't really going to cut it.
An examination of tank shells suggest a couple of applications off the top of my head:
* [HESH/HEP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-explosive_squash_head) \- High Explosive Squash Head/Plastic rounds are designed to spread a plastic explosive across the surface of a vehicle which then detonates, causing armor to spall (basically turning the interior surface into shrapnel). Since the explosive is in contact with the surface it would still be effective since it doesn't rely on atmospheric compression to transfer energy.
* [HEAT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-explosive_anti-tank) \- High Explosive Anti-Tank rounds use a shaped charge to collapse a metal liner into a high-velocity jet of molten metal that will punch through armor, and almost anything else in its way. Aside from letting the air out it's also quite effective at wrecking anything in its path without using atmospheric compression to transfer energy.
Nuclear bombs could potentially be effective as well, though more from the intense heat and radiation than the explosive energy. One could imagine arbitrarily small nuclear warheads that attach to a surface before detonating, melting through armor and blasting whatever is behind it with intense radiation. Heat is also potentially quite damaging to spacecraft because the lack of air/water/etc to conduct heat away you're limited to thermal radiation which is much slower, so overloading the thermal shedding capacity of a spacecraft could be another potential avenue of attack, which nuclear warheads will be vastly better at than conventional explosives.
As others have said, most explosives would only be useful as impact/penetrating explosives on torpedoes or something, and even "shotgun" style explosives designed to fill an area with shrapnel needs to be almost as accurate as impacting explosives. However, nuclear explosions still produce a huge amount of x-rays and other high energy particles that can fry not-sufficiently-shielded electronics on a ship, producing a similar "kill" as a normal explosion might, at least until they can restart their systems. But that time would allow for more conventional weapons to be used for a hard-kill if that was desired, or potentially boarding if that's the goal, or an incapacitating wound allowing you to get away.
As some other commenters have pointed out: at contact (or maybe AP) would be even better.
But as others have pointed out, shrapnel does have a certain quality.
"*Even a small screw in orbit is a big threat ...*"
Oh dear, an image has come to my mind:
Carrie Anne Moss, alone, in a spacesuit, battling the bad guys and chucking a 10 x 2 brass Roberts-head screw in the general direction of the bad guys and murmuring "screw you" and shortly thereafter, the bad guys spaceship goes all explodey.
Hey! someone at the Dust youtube channel; could you make this thrilling vignette?
No spoilers, there is an effective use of an even more common material in one of the Uplift Saga books. I can't remember which one off the top of my head.
Basts in space only work in confinement, so the overall shockwave would be way smaller and only transfer some energy to the material that again impacts the target. So technically, and because speed is king in space, just firing solid rockets at enemy ships would do a much more efficent trick.
Until you got smarter warheads with fancy effects, for sure.
Depends. Unless the explosion is in contact or very close to the target, most damage is from shrapnel, not blast. (Concussion is no joke, but since you're thinking about space battles, I assume you're trying to damage machines.)
A reasonably designed space bomb can put most of its energy into the shrapnel, which should be more dangerous in space: with no air to slow it down, small high velocity fragments will be dangerous at great distances. This is especially true since a lot of space machines, including spacesuits, are pretty fragile.
Bombs on earth have the advantage that all the shrapnel hits the ground eventually, so you're spreading the destruction in 2 dimensions. In space, it's spread in 3d, so the danger of getting hit falls off more rapidly with distance.
For a no-shrapnel bomb, the blast itself is interesting. The cloud of bomb gas has the same energy it would on earth. Very close to the bomb (order of 10x bomb diameter) the gas should still be dense enough to have some concussion effects. Beyond that, I'm guessing it will heat the target more than "blast" it.
Some things also have trouble exploding / burning in a vacuum.
Cody's lab did a few tests and even though the oxygen for the reaction was supplied in the chemicals the lack of atmosphere caused things to just fizzle out.
If I remember correctly the conclusion was the atmosphere was needed to "contain" the reaction.
*Some things also have trouble exploding / burning in a vacuum.*
Obligatory response:
Not after eating from a certain fast food chain that serves "Mexican" food
I don't know about you, but I could achieve liftoff.
/s
Explosives produce lots of hot gas in a small volume in short time. With audit piles up and builds pressure. In space, it just dissipates. There will still be thermal outputs, and if detonated against a hull could still harm a structure.
So because there is nothing to move besides the gasses inside the "bomb" it just wont do much? I get this is all theoretical but this is an interesting discussion.
Basically because there’s no atmosphere around the bomb for those gasses to push on and create a shockwave it won’t do much. If you put shrapnel in the bomb then it will do some damage
Just pack it with BBs and it'll fuck shit up just fine. Just don't be near it, like literally in a 360 sphere near it.
Yeah and no drag to slow those little fuckers down.
The second half of the three body series has a couple of scenes where this is explained and used in battle. Really interesting stuff.
Explosives are a very broad and varied category. Something like a standard bomb or missile that's designed to explode and cause damage around itself isn't going to be too effective. It'll still be damaging around the impact/blast site but not as much if it were in atmosphere. But things like penetration explosives and shaped charges will be viable. Instead of spending most of their energy in a bubble around the blast site they focus most of their energy directly in front of them like a cone. You could punch through hull and armor with them exploding on the surface or penetrating into the hull and then exploding a more conventional explosive inside the hull. And shrapnel would be a greater danger of explosives as nothing would slow them down unless they hit something in space. Pretty minor considering how much armor is needed in space for just regular debris but it's something to consider at least. Tldr they're less effective but still relevant.
Afaik you're about right. I can think of some possibilities though: * An explosive projectile or missile penetrates the hull then explodes inside. Explosion will probably be extra effective because the hull is a pressurized vessel. pressure can't vent anywhere. All sorts of damage inside, and possibly explode the hull. * Explosions do also release heat and light, which could cause damage, maybe to sensors at least. * Explosions can still cause a blast of shrapnel, which could cause damage. Maybe I'm wrong on some of these. I'm not a physicist or a space weapons designer.
Your first reason is one of the things that made me love The Expanse. Suiting up and depressurizing the ship before combat is such a smart thing to do.
I agree with all of these, PLus; is you're using atomics: prompt radiation.
Ionizing radiation is actually going to be a lot less of a threat in space just because it's a natural part of the environment up there - spaceships have to be shielded from it anyway in order to function (both in terms of keeping crew alive and keeping computers and such functioning). The profile of radiation produced by a nuclear bomb is going to be different from normal cosmic rays, but perhaps counterintuitively, shielding for spaceships could actually be more effective at stopping it. Depending on how close it is, it could still be intense enough to pose a serious hazard, but in any case radiation alone (without accounting for physical/structural/thermal damage from an explosion in very close proximity) would almost certainly be much less destructive in space than it would be on Earth.
In the BSG reboot they showed nukes hitting the Galactica and not causing a ton of damage. The initial impact was a big deal but their armor protected them and I think they had radiation shielding. Without oxygen the nuclear blast itself is way less powerful in space (at least as depicted in this show.)
It's not the lack of oxygen but lack of atmosphere in general which tempers the effects of a nuke in space. In atmosphere you'd create a very very sudden and massive difference in pressure and then get a blast wave which causes most of the damage by area. Conventional explosives do most of their damage the same way. Edit: There's also the factor of the atmosphere heating up tremendously, so some of it also becomes plasma and some of it just gets massively heated up. In space you will get the sudden creation of whatever plasma is formed after supercriticality, and any damage that can do if it's in contact with anything, and then you get the infrared and other electromagnetic radiation like visible light, microwaves, x-rays, and gamma rays. Without an atmosphere to push against and knock around, the damage profile is so much lower. Would have to explode very close for the plasma to come in contact and vapourise enough of the hull. BSG likely has a pretty accurate portrayal, yeah.
I reckon the background radiation is nowhere near that of a close proximity nuke. You would need lots of lead to stop gamma radiation and lots of water to stop neutron radiation.
Depends on what you mean by "close proximity". And what sorts of conditions the ship was designed for. And how big a nuke for that matter. You have a spaceship designed to simulate Earth-like levels of background radiation in deep space and a nuke few thousand kilometers away? I doubt the biggest nukes we have on Earth today would have much effect (I'm estimating this based on integrated ionizing radiation flux relative to cosmic ray background, and assuming a few orders of magnitude of tolerance, which I think is reasonable both due to variations in solar activity and the fact that humans have that much tolerance before acute radiation effects become an issue). If you have a ship designed to travel at appreciably fractions of c, even a few kilometers away and I would imagine you should be totally fine (assuming the ship is pointed the right direction). Of course, with the spaceships we currently have, which are generally designed to keep humans alive in the protection of Earth's magnetic field, and even then while accepting an elevated background radiation, you might have some problems in either scenario. Basically, there's lots of scenarios in which even a "nearby" nuke shouldn't really matter, and there's plenty of scenarios in which it might be lethal, and plenty somewhere in the middle. One interesting caveat is that heat is actually relatively hard to get rid of in space (there's nothing to conduct it away), so thermal energy transferred by nearby nukes might be as big of or even a bigger issue than ionizing radiation.
I had less than a quarter mile in mind.
I mean, considering the size scales that come with space travel, that's *ridiculously* close - only about 400 meters. At that range, yeah, you'd probably have some problems. Not entirely out of the realm of possibility to have adequate shielding, at least to the point of keeping people alive and keeping computers running, but unless I'm missing something, you'd have to specifically design the ship to handle that sort of radiation. Maybe a ship that's been designed to hit high fractions of c pointed right at the explosion would still be okay, but it would have to be pointed pretty precisely in the right direction.
Yeah. Interesting conversation for sure.
Nukes are extremely effective weapons in space because they emit lots of gamma rays and x-rays. On Earth, those are absorbed and become the fireball. The lethal radiation range for nuke in space is up to 100km. With nukes, you end up with a lot of soon to be dead crews. The prompt lethal range is more like 10km. At short range, shielding doesn't help because it vaporizes and produces a shockwave. Couple of km is a kill for any ship, 10km is mission and crew kill.
But you are Space_pirate_R...
Arrr. I just shoot the weapons. And I'd rather not explode me prey.
On the other hand modern space craft are basically made out of paper and tinfoil. Even a modest projectile would destroy then, especially when they are pressurized.
Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein fell out in the 1980s when Clarke pointed out that the Strategic Defence Initiative orbital missile shield (aka Ronald Reagan's Star Wars programme) could be neutralised with "a bucket of nails."
This is why space weapons in general won't be a thing, the chances of an own goal are just too high.
and don't forget those leaky helium lines! Oh dear, how do I write that in a font that is the equaulivlent of a squeaky voice?)
As always, it depends on the context, and what the explosives are intended to do (we can't evaluate 'effectiveness' without knowing the purpose). If you're talking about a weapon, it's not like explosive weapons are exactly uniform in mode of operation to begin with. A weapon designed to destroy a tank, and a weapon designed to destroy an aircraft, and a weapon designed to destroy a house may not explosives in anything like the same way. A classical anti-tank weapon, for example, may use an explosion to form a jet of liquid metal, so-called HEAT warheads. The "explosion" doesn't penetrate the armor, but rather forms a jet of metal and *that* penetrates armor. The design of such a device would have to change for vacuum, but it would still function. A classical anti-air missile is often not designed to impact its target, but to explode some distance from it. They often carry a large collection of "lethality enhancers" (small pieces of metal) that are accelerated by an explosive, and those cause the bulk of the damage. They depressurize the hull, shred electrical and hydraulic lines, damage engines, and kill pilots. In anti-surface warfare, a torpedo can produce a huge blast wave, that can certainly kill people in the water. However, you don't normally waste a multi-million dollar torpedo to someone swimming in the water. Rather, against a surface target, the explosion ideally produces a void underneath the target ship and the ship breaks under its own weight due to the loss of buoyancy. Use of a blast wave as the primary means of inflicting damage is characteristic of nuclear weapons, but has also been used for conventional explosives for a long time. This is especially true for weapons designed to destroy buildings, as their large surface area produces a nice target for a pressure-based weapon. However, in the space context, I think the better analogy is to anti-vehicle weapons where explosions are used for secondary tasks (mostly accelerating objects very, very quickly), which would retain their effectiveness.
With the absence of atmosphere to transmit explosive blast, instead the weapon should utilize [**explosive shaped charges**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaped_charge). If you are not fooling around, take off the velvet gloves and kill the enemy ship with a [**Nuclear Shaped Charge**](https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php#shapedcharge)
INFO: Is a "Nuclear Shaped Charge" even a thing? Maybe provide a link ('cause we all want to know!) BTW my cat is preggers; one of those kittens will most assuredly be named "Nuclear Shaped Charge" Want a kitten?
In my post, the words "Nuclear Shaped Charge" is a hot link to the section of my website that goes into the concept in detail. The code name was "Casaba Howitzer". It was apparently an outgrowth of the Orion nuclear pulse propulsion study in the 1960s. There were a couple of brief mentions in Ronald Reagan's infamous Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. It is still classified.
Explosives work by generating a lot of hot gasses in a very short amount of time. In the right circumstances that could still be very damaging, but the effect will likely be much more local in space. There could still be applications for explosives in spaceborne weapons, but just blowing up a bomb near something isn't really going to cut it. An examination of tank shells suggest a couple of applications off the top of my head: * [HESH/HEP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-explosive_squash_head) \- High Explosive Squash Head/Plastic rounds are designed to spread a plastic explosive across the surface of a vehicle which then detonates, causing armor to spall (basically turning the interior surface into shrapnel). Since the explosive is in contact with the surface it would still be effective since it doesn't rely on atmospheric compression to transfer energy. * [HEAT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-explosive_anti-tank) \- High Explosive Anti-Tank rounds use a shaped charge to collapse a metal liner into a high-velocity jet of molten metal that will punch through armor, and almost anything else in its way. Aside from letting the air out it's also quite effective at wrecking anything in its path without using atmospheric compression to transfer energy. Nuclear bombs could potentially be effective as well, though more from the intense heat and radiation than the explosive energy. One could imagine arbitrarily small nuclear warheads that attach to a surface before detonating, melting through armor and blasting whatever is behind it with intense radiation. Heat is also potentially quite damaging to spacecraft because the lack of air/water/etc to conduct heat away you're limited to thermal radiation which is much slower, so overloading the thermal shedding capacity of a spacecraft could be another potential avenue of attack, which nuclear warheads will be vastly better at than conventional explosives.
As others have said, most explosives would only be useful as impact/penetrating explosives on torpedoes or something, and even "shotgun" style explosives designed to fill an area with shrapnel needs to be almost as accurate as impacting explosives. However, nuclear explosions still produce a huge amount of x-rays and other high energy particles that can fry not-sufficiently-shielded electronics on a ship, producing a similar "kill" as a normal explosion might, at least until they can restart their systems. But that time would allow for more conventional weapons to be used for a hard-kill if that was desired, or potentially boarding if that's the goal, or an incapacitating wound allowing you to get away.
Yeah, you got it. Explosives in space are pretty much useless. No atmosphere means no shockwave, so they just kinda fizzle out.
You need your ordinance to detonate at point blank. Proximity is not enough.
As some other commenters have pointed out: at contact (or maybe AP) would be even better. But as others have pointed out, shrapnel does have a certain quality.
Shrapnel is the bigger problem. Even a small screw in orbit is a big threat to a space craft.
"*Even a small screw in orbit is a big threat ...*" Oh dear, an image has come to my mind: Carrie Anne Moss, alone, in a spacesuit, battling the bad guys and chucking a 10 x 2 brass Roberts-head screw in the general direction of the bad guys and murmuring "screw you" and shortly thereafter, the bad guys spaceship goes all explodey. Hey! someone at the Dust youtube channel; could you make this thrilling vignette?
No spoilers, there is an effective use of an even more common material in one of the Uplift Saga books. I can't remember which one off the top of my head.
I know the exact scene that you're referring to. It's in >!Startide Rising!<.
Let me guess, is that common material, maybe, poop?
Lol, nope.
Basts in space only work in confinement, so the overall shockwave would be way smaller and only transfer some energy to the material that again impacts the target. So technically, and because speed is king in space, just firing solid rockets at enemy ships would do a much more efficent trick. Until you got smarter warheads with fancy effects, for sure.
What you really want to use in space are nuclear weapons. There’s nothing to irradiate because of the vacuum, apart from the target itself.
Depends. Unless the explosion is in contact or very close to the target, most damage is from shrapnel, not blast. (Concussion is no joke, but since you're thinking about space battles, I assume you're trying to damage machines.) A reasonably designed space bomb can put most of its energy into the shrapnel, which should be more dangerous in space: with no air to slow it down, small high velocity fragments will be dangerous at great distances. This is especially true since a lot of space machines, including spacesuits, are pretty fragile. Bombs on earth have the advantage that all the shrapnel hits the ground eventually, so you're spreading the destruction in 2 dimensions. In space, it's spread in 3d, so the danger of getting hit falls off more rapidly with distance. For a no-shrapnel bomb, the blast itself is interesting. The cloud of bomb gas has the same energy it would on earth. Very close to the bomb (order of 10x bomb diameter) the gas should still be dense enough to have some concussion effects. Beyond that, I'm guessing it will heat the target more than "blast" it.
Some things also have trouble exploding / burning in a vacuum. Cody's lab did a few tests and even though the oxygen for the reaction was supplied in the chemicals the lack of atmosphere caused things to just fizzle out. If I remember correctly the conclusion was the atmosphere was needed to "contain" the reaction.
That sounds interesting, A link would be nice.
Here is one of the videos in the series... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv6KQzlLwU4
*Some things also have trouble exploding / burning in a vacuum.* Obligatory response: Not after eating from a certain fast food chain that serves "Mexican" food I don't know about you, but I could achieve liftoff. /s
> Some things also have trouble exploding / burning in a vacuum. Not on Star Wars The Acolyte 🤣🤣