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Orion
Lieutenant Commander
Joined: 16 May 2008
Posts: 146
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 Posted: Sun May 06, 2012 12:34 am Post subject: |
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| Fallon Kell wrote: | | A metric ton of water vapor at 1000 degrees has more energy than a gram of water at the same temperature. Mass is relevant. |
From your example of mass I think I now understand where your going wrong, your misunderstanding what heat is. Heat is a measurement of energy lost, so the 1 kiloton that is listed for the laser cannon is what the entire blast does, not a portion of it. Theoretically, if you fire a laser in a complete vacuum, without dimensional limits, it will go on forever and never lose any energy and therefore never develop any heat. Heat isn't developed until the beam interacts with other substances.
So in that theoretical scenario, if it were possible to feel heat in a vacuum, the beam could pass within a mm of your face and you would not feel any heat, because it hasn't encountered anything to cause it to release energy. The 'volume' or the duration of fire doesn't matter as long as they remain constant for each respective shot, for both weapons, that means you can compare the two as equals, which means if they have similar or the same heat, they have similar or the same energy, and therefore similar or the same damage results. If they do not, then they do not have the same or similar heat.
| Fallon Kell wrote: | | The amount of gas required increases with power, too, which is why the rebellion often cannot find the blaster they need for fleet action, but usually can find the gas they need for hand blasters. |
As I said whether it makes sense or not is another thing but I will drop this point, because I dislike their definition, so I don't want to argue for it.
| Fallon Kell wrote: | | So your argument here is a null point, neither for not against either of us. |
No, this point and the point above were directed at your theory of fusion in blasters, which you keep making reference to and I don't agree with, not toward the main discussion.
| Fallon Kell wrote: | | As I showed above, your premise here is wrong. An ounce of matter at any given temperature will do less damage than a pound. |
No, you only believe it's wrong, something I hope I've changed with the above.
| Fallon Kell wrote: | | I know Castle Bravo was a mixed device, but that shockwave came from the fusion, or at least 99.9% of it did. Fusion bombs are roughly 1,000 times more powerful than fission bombs, for thier size, despite having a comparatively small fission charge. The reason they're more powerful is the fusion. If we built a working fusion bomb without a fission component it would still have a shockwave just as big as any other H-bomb. |
You may have known it was a mixed device, as you put it, but your assertion about the shockwave, proves to me that you don't understand how it works. It has a fission primary and fusion secondary. The primary is detonated which sets of the secondary, since fusion releases lots of neutrons those neutrons bombard the fissionable material causing the fission reaction to last longer and more completely consume the fissionable material. In a fission only bomb the fission reaction stops long before it runs out of fissionable material. Essentially fusion is the perfect detonator for a fission device as it makes it work more efficiently, which gives you a bigger boom. Now about shockwaves.
Copied from Fission Wiki(emphasis mine hopefully to make it easier for you to see my points):
| Quote: | | ...x-ray energy produces the blast and fire which are normally the purpose of a nuclear explosion. |
Copied from Fusion Wiki(emphasis mine hopefully to make it easier for you to see my points):
| Quote: | Fusion produces neutrons which dissipate energy from the reaction.[8] In weapons, the most important fusion reaction is called the D-T reaction. Using the heat and pressure of fission, hydrogen-2, or deuterium ( 2D), fuses with hydrogen-3, or tritium ( 3T), to form helium-4 ( 4He) plus one neutron (n) and energy:[9]...<edited out a formula that won't display well>...
Notice that the total energy output, 17.6 MeV, is one tenth of that with fission, but the ingredients are only one-fiftieth as massive, so the energy output per unit mass is greater. However, in this fusion reaction 80% of the energy, or 14 MeV, is in the motion of the neutron which, having no electric charge and being almost as massive as the hydrogen nuclei that created it, can escape the scene without leaving its energy behind to help sustain the reaction – or to generate x-rays for blast and fire.
The only practical way to capture most of the fusion energy is to trap the neutrons inside a massive bottle of heavy material such as lead, uranium, or plutonium. If the 14 MeV neutron is captured by uranium (either type: 235 or 238) or plutonium, the result is fission and the release of 180 MeV of fission energy, multiplying the energy output tenfold.
Fission is thus necessary to start fusion, helps to sustain fusion, and captures and multiplies the energy released in fusion neutrons. In the case of a neutron bomb (see below) the last-mentioned does not apply since the escape of neutrons is the objective. |
Please note that the Fusion article states that 80% of the energy can escape and not be used to generate x-rays, which the fission article listed as the cause of the blast and fire. The reason it says can is that you can catch that energy with lead or fissionable material. It doesn't define what happens with lead, but since the articles are take from an overview of nulclear weapons design we can safely say it has no use for a weapon. It however does define that fissionable material will create a fission explosion, so a mixed device is a fusion enhanced fission bomb, which means it has the characteristics of the fission device not the fusion. The closest thing we have to a pure fusion device is the neutron bomb, which I will address now.
Copied from Neutron Bomb Wiki(emphasis mine hopefully to make it easier for you to see my points):
| Quote: | | A neutron bomb is only feasible if the yield is sufficiently high that efficient fusion stage ignition is possible, and if the yield is low enough that the case thickness will not absorb too many neutrons. This means that neutron bombs have a yield range of 1–10 kilotons, with fission proportion varying from 50% at 1-kiloton to 25% at 10-kilotons (all of which comes from the primary stage). The neutron output per kiloton is then 10–15 times greater than for a pure fission implosion weapon |
A Neutron Bomb only has a fission device to achieve efficient fusion, so if you had a different means to achieve efficient fusion you could remove the fission device in favor of that and have a pure fusion device. Please note that the kiloton blast ratings for the Neutron Bomb are noted to all come from the primary stage which is the fission stage, so if you take away the fission stage you take away the blast as well. No fission, no blast, just neutron radiation.
| Fallon Kell wrote: | | ..The fact remains, it's true. Do your own research, and you'll find I'm right. |
I wish that were true then I wouldn't have had to put this post together, but the information I've found leads me to believe it' not true.
| Fallon Kell wrote: | Thank you  if only my confidentiality agreement would let me show you what's usually going on as I respond! |
Now you gotten me curious, I know of course I can't get the answer, but your welcome |
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Fallon Kell
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Joined: 07 Mar 2011
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Location: Tacoma, WA
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| Posted: Sun May 06, 2012 1:47 am Post subject: |
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Fusion Devices:
All you've shown is that a shroud of fusible material around a fission bomb will increase the yield of said fission device. That's true, but it will not increase it a thousand fold, bringing it into a megaton range. Neither is that evidence that a fusion device would not create a shockwave, which is the core of the issue. We've never built a pure fusion device on this planet, so I can't point to blast effects as proof, but let me try to make a convincing argument from the other side.
A fission device makes a shockwave because it heats a few dozen pounds of fissionable materials to several million degrees in a tiny fraction of a second. That matter, like all superheated matter, wants to expand rapidly under the influence of many tons of electrostatic force. It does so, creating a massive plasma cloud sometimes called artificial sunshine. This cloud displaces atmosphere the same way a normal bomb does. A shockwave is born.
Fusion releases more energy than fission, and a fusion bomb heats several pounds of hydrogen to even higher temperatures than the fission bomb, and even faster. Now what is this superheated matter going to do? Slowly expand like aerosol foam, or obey the command of thousands of tons of electrostatic force shouting "Move outwards now"?
Laser cannons: Lasers move at light speed, and as you have mentioned, don't radiate light out to the sides. Laser cannons and blasters don't shoot at light speed and do radiate light out to the sides. From this, we can conclude laser cannon and blaster bolts are not pure energy, but rather material mediums for the transmission of energy. The "laser" part, I assume, is a reference to how they work.
Heat: Heat is energy lost, but a ton of water can lose a million times more energy than a gram for the same temperature change. If you drip water on a 700 degree skillet, it will evaporate. Toss that same skillet into a swimming pool, and you'll see some steam, but all in all, the pool will still be there. Toss a 700 degree freight train engine in the pool, and you'll see a lot more evaporation. That's because the freight train has more mass and therefore more thermal energy. The same is true of the laser cannon blast as relates to the holdout blaster.
Coup de grace:I thought of a pure fusion explosion that creates a truly epic shockwave. Read the first few paragraphs of wikipedia's article on supernovae.
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Or that excessively long "Noooooooooo" was the Whining Side of the Force leaving him. - Dustflier
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Orion
Lieutenant Commander
Joined: 16 May 2008
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| Posted: Sun May 06, 2012 1:55 pm Post subject: |
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Laser Cannons:We see things differently, isn't that surprising  , I see them as Lasers that are made from Plot-devicium, they don't need to conform to our Laws of Physics to work, because lets be honest the reason they don't work like a laser in our universe is that it looks cooler to do it the way that they are shown in the movies. So I just accept that the Laws of Physics are different then SWU, which means I don't draw your conclusion, and that also means that my interpretation means that my laser matches up with the in universe difference between blasters and lasers, blasters have a material component, and lasers do not.
Because I don't see it your way the mass you keep pointing out to me is not relevant as the laser bolt has no intrinsic heat it is just energy and doesn't become heat until it interacts with a material, how much heat is generated depends on the mass of the material it interacts with. In other words, the 1 Kiloton rating of the laser cannon, is it's heat potential, once it has encountered enough mass to dissipate that heat, it ceases to exist, it can dissipate it all at once or a little at a time, depending on the material it encounters, it doesn't matter, the limit on the heat the entire bolt can produce is 1 kiloton.
Fission devices: Currently a fission device, actually releases 10 times more energy per fission event than that released per fusion event. The greater energy output people talk about with fusion only come into effect when you consider the mass of the materials used to create the events, the mass of the fission materials is 50 times greater than that of the fusion ones, so the energy per unit of material is greater for fusion, but not the energy of the individual event. The megaton ratings of fission devices come from multiple stages, that is more than one fission device, which are enhance by one or more fusion devices. The resulting fission explosion is in the megatons.
Also of importance is the difference in the type of energy released in a fission explosion, I'll quote from Wiki again(emphasis mine as per before):
| Quote: | | The remaining 93% is kinetic energy (or energy of motion) of the charged fission fragments, flying away from each other mutually repelled by the positive charge of their protons (38 for strontium, 54 for xenon). This initial kinetic energy is 67 TJ/kg, imparting an initial speed of about 12,000 kilometers per second. However, the charged fragments' high electric charge causes many inelastic collisions with nearby nuclei, and thus these fragments remain trapped inside the bomb's uranium pit and tamper until their motion is converted into x-ray heat. |
As noted in my previous post x-rays are what cause the heat and blast effects of the fission device and since 93% of the energy released from a fission event goes into this process, it's lots of heat causing a very big blast. Of the remaining 7%, only 3% is kinetic energy from the release of neutrons, now these neutrons do add some energy to the blast, but not very much because they are not charged particles, they do not do it as effectively as they are not slowed quickly.
Fusion devices: Yes, I will admit that fusion explosions do have shockwaves, but what I should've been saying, was not that they don't have shockwaves, as all explosive reactions have a shockwave of some kind. I should have been saying that you need a much larger fusion explosion to get a potentially deadly shockwave. That they don't exist at all, was not what I was thinking about, it's that to get them to exist at the damaging level we're talking about they need to be much larger than what we are talking about. I will admit to poor word choice as well as not scaling the device to massive levels, but we are not talking about large devices we are talking about very small ones and I'm still not sure that the shockwave from detonating the fusion part of the neutron bomb would be high enough to cause damage to structures, which are far more easily damaged by overpressure than we are.
As I noted above the actual energy from the fusion event is about 1/10th that of a current fission event. Now 80% of that is in the kinetic energy of the neutron release, compared to 3% in a fission device, which means that the total energy that stays behind in a fusion event is a about 2% of the energy of a fission event. Neutrons do not have a charge so they are not effected by electrostatic force, which is why the quote in my previous post mention that they don't stick around to help the fusion process or get converted into x-rays, the primary driver of the fire and blast of a fission event. Another way to put it is the neutron radiation is far more potentially harmful to people, as 80% percent of the events energy goes into it, than the blast from the event.
To efficiently harness their energy, you need to catch them with a heavy material like a fissionable material, but doing so gets you a fission explosion not a fusion one. So what you have is 20% of the energy release staying and helping the sustain the fusion reaction most likely in the form of heat, but of the remaining 80% only a portion, and probably a small one at that, is actually transferred into any blast energy, because of the nature of neutrons. So, though you are right, they do have some kind of shockwave, it's not nonexistent, it's existence doesn't mean it's of sufficient force to be potentially deadly to people especially in the size of device that we are talking about. |
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jmanski
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| Posted: Sun May 06, 2012 2:07 pm Post subject: |
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Seems to me this thread has become absolutely derailed. Can we get it back on track? Maybe this laser cannon/fission/fusion discussion can be it's own thread?
My ADD kicked in and I have stopped reading the quote war.
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Orion
Lieutenant Commander
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| Posted: Sun May 06, 2012 2:39 pm Post subject: |
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| jmanski wrote: | Seems to me this thread has become absolutely derailed. Can we get it back on track? Maybe this laser cannon/fission/fusion discussion can be it's own thread?
My ADD kicked in and I have stopped reading the quote war. |
 I wasn't aware we were off topic as this 'quote war' as you put it, is about whether it's plausible in the SWU to shrink a Concussion Missile warhead down and fit it inside a 12 gauge shell.
Fallon thinks it can and I disagree with him, so we've been discussing it. Seems on topic to me, since this thread is about creating an Omya Kaboom in the SWU. |
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Fallon Kell
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Joined: 07 Mar 2011
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Location: Tacoma, WA
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| Posted: Sun May 06, 2012 2:55 pm Post subject: |
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Oh, we've already hashed out what the original thread was about. It's just down to a matter of whether tiny concussion missiles are practical, and about someone being wrong on the internet as relates to nuclear fusion.
In light of your request, though, I'll make my final three arguments, and then bow out.
Edward Teller: Edward Teller is the father of the hydrogen bomb, and knew more about any of this stuff in the '30s and '40s than either of us do now. He originally wanted to skip over the fission bomb and build a pure fusion bomb, because it made a bigger boom. He only relented when it was shown that you need a fission device to get the hydrogen hot enough to fuse. Pure fusion devices make big shockwaves.
Supernovae: Sure, a sun is a massive bomb, but the blast radius of a supernova is measured in hundreds of light years, and the shockwave moves at 10% of the speed of light. That's astronomically larger than any bomb ever built on earth, even in proportion to the size of the fusible materials. Pure fusion devices make big shockwaves.
Plot Device-ium: I'll explain an earlier argument of mine. Since this discussion is about whether tiny concussion warheads are practical in Star Wars, wouldn't the same plot device-ium that powers your lasers that don't behave like light be able to power little concussion missiles that work just like big ones? I mean it seems like a much smaller leap of faith to scale down a concussion missile than to slow down the speed of light, something treated as a constant by such physicists as hyperdrive engineers, and such astrogators as Han Solo.
I look forward to reading your answers, although I shall not respond unless directly asked to. If you want, I'll continue the discussion in PMs.
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Or that excessively long "Noooooooooo" was the Whining Side of the Force leaving him. - Dustflier
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Orion
Lieutenant Commander
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| Posted: Sun May 06, 2012 4:24 pm Post subject: |
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| Fallon Kell wrote: | | Edward Teller: Edward Teller is the father of the hydrogen bomb, and knew more about any of this stuff in the '30s and '40s than either of us do now. He originally wanted to skip over the fission bomb and build a pure fusion bomb, because it made a bigger boom. He only relented when it was shown that you need a fission device to get the hydrogen hot enough to fuse. Pure fusion devices make big shockwaves. |
This doesn't mean that they have big shockwave, all this means is that he understood the given payload restrictions on delivering weapons and that a fusion device had more energy potential for the given weight. It doesn't mean that he knew about the difficulty in harnessing the neutron motion energy, but in any case that's a large bomb not the tiny one we're talking about.
| Fallon Kell wrote: | | Supernovae: Sure, a sun is a massive bomb, but the blast radius of a supernova is measured in hundreds of light years, and the shockwave moves at 10% of the speed of light. That's astronomically larger than any bomb ever built on earth, even in proportion to the size of the fusible materials. Pure fusion devices make big shockwaves. |
And the device is astronomically larger, as well, not too mention there is no atmosphere to slow down the material that gets thrown. Besides, IIRC, at least one type of supernova, ends up burning iron for the fusion process, do you think that even in the SWU, you could get that to happen in a bomb. Not a very realistic example of what a bomb could do in my opinion.
| Fallon Kell wrote: | | Plot Device-ium: I'll explain an earlier argument of mine. Since this discussion is about whether tiny concussion warheads are practical in Star Wars, wouldn't the same plot device-ium that powers your lasers that don't behave like light be able to power little concussion missiles that work just like big ones? I mean it seems like a much smaller leap of faith to scale down a concussion missile than to slow down the speed of light, something treated as a constant by such physicists as hyperdrive engineers, and such astrogators as Han Solo. |
There's a big difference, as I am not using Plot-devicium, I am saying that the author's of the SWU did, whereas you would be using it to explain something of your own creation. Neither you nor I are author's of the official SWU, only our own little private version of it. Only author's can use Plot-devicium. What your suggesting, is that a player could change your world with Plot-devicium, without your approval.
| Fallon Kell wrote: | | I look forward to reading your answers, although I shall not respond unless directly asked to. If you want, I'll continue the discussion in PMs. |
I kept them brief as you seem to agree with jmanski, but if you would like to continue, PM'ing is fine with me. |
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jmanski
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| Posted: Sun May 06, 2012 7:00 pm Post subject: |
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I'm not trying to be a buzz kill, I enjoy a lively debate as much as anyone. I do appreciate the brevity, though.
To summarize:
1) Explosive damage is undetermined
2) Rapid-fire adds damage
3) shells are expensive
Anything I'm missing?
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Orion
Lieutenant Commander
Joined: 16 May 2008
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| Posted: Sun May 06, 2012 8:19 pm Post subject: |
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| jmanski wrote: | | I'm not trying to be a buzz kill, I enjoy a lively debate as much as anyone. I do appreciate the brevity, though. |
No worries, unfortunately the things we were discussing are not easily conveyed in brevity, and despite the length of our posts we were still having misunderstandings.
| jmanski wrote: | To summarize:
1) Explosive damage is undetermined
2) Rapid-fire adds damage
3) shells are expensive
Anything I'm missing? |
I'd say that just about covers the broad strokes. There were I think 4-5 specific ideas put forth, but other than that it's been largely the discussion Fallon and I were having, which would be largely covered under point 1. |
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