EVE General Discussion

space is NOT a true vacuum.... space is full of particles of gas, water (ice), and dust

I thought you just had a smaller area of effect for a explosion in space...shrapnel would go much futher and tha blast wave would disapate faster.

[rp] That's just the autopilot detecting those large hulking ships and automatically evading them while applying the standard manoeuvring inertial dampers — it can't detect or react fast enough to mitigate itty bitty warheads (no, not even when they are the size of volkswagens). [/rp]

Sorry, no. The creates-its-own-medium theory isn't a good one. Chemical or nuclear explosions in space are much less spectacular than in an atmosphere. Basically what happens is that the material exploding flashes extremely brightly at the site of the explosion, vaporizes stuff nearby, and then dissipates almost immediately. The time scale for this is less than a second regardless of the type of explosion. Nuclear explosions in space are much brighter, but much faster as well. The timescale for a nuclear explosion in space is minuscule. But it's still extremely damaging - it would completely vaporize anything nearby. A crater in a ship caused by a nuclear explosion would be almost perfectly spherical, and have a sharp, defined cutoff at which anything meltable would be melted solid. Closer to the explosion beyond that point would just be gone, and beyond that would suffer thermal and EM damage where applicable.

In any case, there wouldn't be hardly any debris, because it would be vaporized almost instantly. No shockwaves to speak of, just "now you see it, now you don't."

Unfortunately, explosive, kinetic, and thermal damage in space are truly inseparable. If you heat something up enough, it explodes. If you hit something with something else moving very quickly, it explodes. If you explode something next to something else, it gets very hot and explodes.

But this is a game. Whatever.

There is also the fact that Nukes do EM damage along with thermal and explosive. So yeah.

Double post is double

Too many geeks here, no wonder I feel at home

EM damage: Electromagnetic pulse which fries electrical systems rendering your ship useless. Instead of damaging your ship directly, it causes equipment inside of the ship to malfunction which in turn causes physical damage to your ship. E.g. your capacitors short out, causing them to discharge, reactor safeties malfunction causing it to meltdown, and whatever other "rp magic" you need to make this work.

Thermal damage: A high amount of heat is applied which either causes the structure of your ship to melt, or possibly just warp/deform - thus compromising structural integrity.

Kinetic damage: kinetic energy is focused into a small area/single point so that the structural integrity of your hull is breached.

Explosive damage: 'even' application of kinetic energy across the entirety of the ship's structure, causing the structure to "buckle" under stress, thus compromising structural integrity.

True.

Still, the rest of us call them stars.