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[Dwarfslayer]

Greetings! I decided to make this post to check out the relative power of some Starsector weaponry. Before I start, I'll just say hi and that the devs are all doing brilliant work and you guys on the forums are great.


Okay let's start off with some examples of current-day technology and the kinds of power they produce.

For example: the most powerful man-made detonation on earth is generally considered to be the soviet test of a 50 megaton (fifty million tons of TNT) nuclear weapon, for perspective the combined yield of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki devices used in WW2 is estimated to have been at most 40 kilotons (forty thousand tons of TNT) and probably more comparable to 25 or 30 kilotons.

As a non-nuclear reference: modern conventional (read: non-nuclear) weapons tend to range from below a single ton up to 11 tons for one of the United States' most powerful conventional weapons, the GBU-43/B MOAB. (a very large unguided bomb deployed by aircraft)

For a non-explosive comparison, the ~1100 kilogram inert shells (read: kinetic weapons) fired by the massive 16 inch caliber Mark 7 United States naval gun on their Iowa-class battleships has a total energy of approximately 350 megajoules, converting to roughly 0.08 equivalent tons of TNT.


Also, I have hopefully correctly done the sums and the amount of energy required to boil an Olympic sized swimming pool is about 7.2 terajoules or 1.7 kilotons of TNT (to put that in perspective, the Large Hadron Collider can use enough energy to boil two olympic pools... every second). In order to just raise the water from swimming pool temperature to boiling point takes considerably less energy (about a factor of 10), probably 750 gigajoules or 180 tons of TNT.


Now that we have a set of references to more or less imaginable firepower, we need to work out the relative yields of the Starsector weaponry. To the best of my knowledge, the codex only provides sufficient information on one weapon to work out its power; the antimatter blaster. The key information is the mass of antimatter used in the projectile, stated to be 10 micrograms (typically positrons). The maximum possible energy released purely from the annihilation of this much antimatter is relatively straightforward to work out: the total energy equivalent in TNT appears to be about 430 tons.

Now that we know the yield of the antimatter blaster, along with its per-shot damage rating, we can work out that 1 damage =~ 0.36 tons of TNT... It should be noted that this is in pure energy terms, not taking account of the sophisticated nature of the explosive weapon design used in other weaponry etcetera, however it should also be noted that this is basically the most generous possible estimate, given that antimatter charges cannot be shaped and will always spread their energy virtually uniformly in a radiating sphere, coupled with the dubious nature of an immediate total annihilation of all the antimatter in a single instant.


So, now that we have a (probably generous) estimate of the amount of punishment involved in a single point of damage, we can start to compare a few weapons other than the AMB:

Kinetic Damage*

Spoiler

Light Autocannon: 50 damage per shot ~ 18 tons TNT
Railgun: 100 damage per shot ~ 36 tons TNT
Graviton Beam: 100 DPS ~ 36 tons TNT per second
Hypervelocity Driver: 275 damage per shot ~ 99 tons TNT
Arbalest Autocannon: 150 damage per shot ~ 54 tons TNT
Storm Needler: 75 damage per shot ~ 27 tons TNT, however the continuous stream makes the DPS important here ~ 270 tons TNT per second

*The sheer difference here from the power in the U.S. naval example should indicate that, for kinetic damage at least, the actual power may be much less while still causing high damage due to concentration of energy.

[close]

High Explosive Damage

Spoiler

Harpoon Missile: 750 damage per shot ~ 270 tons TNT
Heavy Mauler: 250 damage per shot ~ 90 tons TNT
Assault Chaingun : 40 damage per shot ~ 14.4 tons TNT
Hellbore Cannon: 750 damage per shot ~ 270 tons TNT
Cyclone Reaper Launcher: 4000 damage per torpedo ~ 1440 tons (1.44 kilotons) TNT

[close]

Energy Damage

Spoiler

Tactical Laser: 75 DPS ~ 27 tons TNT per second
IR Pulse Laser: 35 damage per shot ~  12.6 tons TNT
Phase Beam: 150 DPS ~ 54 tons TNT per second
Mjolnir Cannon: 400 damage per shot ~ 144 tons TNT
Tachyon Lance: 750 burst damage ~ 270 tons TNT
Plasma Cannon: 2250 burst of 3x750 ~ 270x3=810 tons TNT

[close]

So, I'm probably going to marginalise the kinetic weaponry here as it seems to not fit too well with the metric I'm trying to use and I can't think of a way to compensate for it. High explosive weaponry is probably fairly accurate, depending on the way the explosive force is directed and controlled it could be much less actual power, but would have a similarly damaging impact as it's equivalent amount of TNT just placed against the hull. Energy weaponry is probably also quite well approximated here, although it depends on the nature of the weapon and how it delivers its damage.


TL;DR
As we can see, most of the weaponry on display for starships seems horrendously powerful by modern conventional standards, but are by no means planet-cracking city-levelling nuclear weapon alternatives, a reaper torpedo seems comparable to a very low yield ~1 kiloton tactical nuclear device. However the fact that spaceworthy ships with extremely delicate and dangerous equipment on board can survive hits from these does indicate the incredibly advanced nature of their armour and even speaks strongly about the strength of their hulls; for example the Hound is by no means a massive ship, but can survive a single Harpoon missile even with depleted armour.

Thanks for reading guys, if you question my maths I can post some of the full working (there wasn't that much).

Holy balls that is a very long post I think. I just thought it was quite interesting to get a better idea of the scales people in the universe deal with, the guys in the Lore Corner might like some of this I guess.

All IRL values pretty much obtained from Wikipedia and/or my vague recollection of physics


EDIT: I did mistakenly use a much larger amount of antimatter than I should have (read: one thousand times as much), so these values are actually too high (a thousand times too high?)

[PCCL]

holy **** welcome to the forums, and what a way to make an entry

always love analysis of the game, especially with comparison to science and IRL

ty for that

[FloW]

First off: that's a lot of work you put in this post. Nice one, welcome to the community.

That being said: don't use Wikipedia as a reference if you intend to go for scientific accuracy, and don't try to force real-life physics into a game of spaceships (unless said game is a simulator).

Kinetic damage might not fit in because of changes in projectiles. Maybe the Starsector-projectiles are not the same ones we use today. They might be specialized for work in space, but I'm no expert in ballistics.

[naufrago]

If you look at the description for the Gauss Cannon, it mentions that it fires a 300mm caseless shell of "depleted infernium" at relativistic speeds. If you make a few assumptions and replace "depleted infernium" with lead, you can calculate that it has a minimum yield of about 170 kilotons of TNT (I made the calculations somewhere on this forum, can't remember where). Kind of a disparity in our calculations =p (It also mentions something about using hundreds of giga-amperes to fire, but I don't know if it's possible to convert that into joules)

If anything, I think this means the description for the AM blaster should be changed to 100 milligrams of antimatter instead of 10 micrograms.

Also, welcome to the forums.

[Dwarfslayer]

Ah, naufrago has pointed out a foolish mistake on my part. I believe I actually did use a 10 milligram amount of antimatter rather than micrograms. What a boo-boo on a first post, jeez. If that just corrects simply which I believe it does, then all my actual weapon calculations are a factor of a thousand too large? Which would decrease the equivalent amounts of TNT, again by a factor of a thousand - if that's right then that is a whole different story of some bizarrely underpowered weaponry.

Or maybe an unusually effective antimatter casing getting deep into the ship.
Or maybe again the damage is exacerbated by the rupturing of flux containments in the hull etcetera, which would mean a larger effective explosion from a smaller amount of antimatter?

@FloW You have a point there of course about good ol' Wikipedia and I avoid using it to write anything too serious, but I think it's accurate enough in the general sense for this purpose since I'm only speculating to satisfy my own active imagination 

Thanks for the welcome guys

[Vinya]

Great first post. I had a wee rant about weapon range that would go well with this.


If you want to be really realistic in relation to the engine, anything you see on-screen should be intangible to anything else on it's plane of movement, since they're 2D images

[phyrex]

welcome !

while that was an interesting analysis, i feel that starsector isint gonna lend itself very well to these kind of things

[Sproginator]

Hmm, Rather good breakdown, Nicely done. I'll analyze it more when i get more time

Welcome to the forums too!

[Decer304]

Wow, what a post. It kept me reading all the way through. Welcome to the forums.

Although, i would like to know how you got your weapon - tnt power conversion.

[Sproginator]

I've read through it more, very interesting, your thoughts on how advanced even the lowest ships are in order to survive such large blasts is most interesting, perhaps calculate the exact specs of armor in order to judge tensile strength and such

[Zaphide]

Brilliant. (but to my constant dismay RL is not a spaceship game )
Thank you

[Dwarfslayer]

Although, i would like to know how you got your weapon - tnt power conversion.

Basically you can work out the energy released by the annihilation of antimatter using E=mc² and then just look up the energy released by a mass of TNT. Alas, my apparently flimsy grasp of the metric system let me down a bit on the kilograms to micrograms conversion... Darn it

[Upgradecap]

First off, i'd like to say; Welcome to the forums! Quite the first post you got there, certainly one of the best (if not _the_ best) i've seen so far, mine included.


As for a second, i'd just like to state that, in my dear and probably irrelevant opinion (), the metric system is often far easier to be used in these equations (Or any equations regarding E=Mc²), but that might just be me. :p

[Gothars]

Welcome to the forum Dwarfslayer

While extrapolating this kind of data is a fun exercise, everybody should be aware that all results are, in the end, utterly meaningless. Random numbers like this are just used to spice up the descriptions, they are not supposed to allow any real world comparisons.

Allow me to demonstrate that with another example:

The phase beam has, according to it's description, an energy output of somewhat below 6.66 gigajoule. Let's assume 6 GJ. So the beams 150dmg/sec would be the equivalent of ~1400 Tons of TNT/sec. Maybe shave it down to 1000 TTNT/sec to account for any inefficiencies in the weapon (although beams are extremely efficient as indicated by their low flux production).

In the (corrected) AM-blaster scale the beams has 0.05 TTNT/sec, that's 0,005% of the value in the phase beam scale. Then there's the Tachyon Lance, which apparently consumes 35 terrajoule (1terra =1000giga) of energy, I will not even start to convert that. But you see, all these numbers are as substantial as a Talon in dogfight.

[PCCL]

Of course, but thats no reason to stop some fun bantering and speculating, right?