EVE Fiction

So, recently I made an attempt to determine the power of EvE weaponry via an analysis of railgun rounds. Unfortunately, as one person noted, we don't actually know the velocity of EvE railgun rounds. So much for that, then.

Well, I figured, perhaps there is something that can be quantified. And, since I'm home from work with food poisoning today, I had time to go browse the EvE Fiction forum, where someone had posted about these two articles (in the Lapetan Titans thread). This thread references the titans we use, by the way, not the Lapetans. Anyway, here are the two articles:

Reschard 1
Reschard 2

So, Reschard V was destroyed by the old Avatar doomsday weapon. Which is great - I mean, not great for Reschard V - but great because we can know the average damage of an Avatar's Judgment doomsday - and when I speak of the Avatar's Judgment doomsday in this post, I am exclusively referring to the old one. We also have a fairly good idea of how much energy it takes to inflict that level of damage to a planet. Specifically, we can correlate it to the energy released in an asteroid strike.

Incidentally, because Titan doomsdays do the same amount of damage, we can also dispense with any worries about overestimating the potential damage of an EvE weapon. EM would do less damage to a planet than Kinetic, perhaps, but certainly not more.

Now, we know how much base damage an Avatar does with the old Judgment doomsday: 46,875. For ease of calculation, and also as a hedge against overestimation, I'll round this to 50,000. Increased skills on the part of the pilot can raise this a bit, but it's a good base number.

How much damage did Reschard V take? Well, it appears to have taken damage somewhere in the range of a large asteroid strike. Preliminary estimates in the news theorized that around 87% of all life on the surface was instantly killed. Later examination in the second article stated that the entire surface of the planet was incapable of supporting life, although a few survivors (percentage-wise) were recovered from caves and ruins. So we can conclude that the strike on Reschard V was, in terms of damage to the planet, nearly a total extinction event.

In comparison, the roughly 10 km-wide asteroid that caused the Cretaceous Extinction killed about 75% of all species on earth, according to present knowledge, and did so over a period of time, as much of the dying was caused by secondary environmental effects. Thus, we can conclude that Avatar's Judgment weapon possessed much more destructive power than the Chicxulub impactor. This is especially true when you realize that the spherical nature of the Judgment doomsday would have only partially impacted the planet, as the Avatar was in low orbit, whereas the entire power of the Chicxulub impactor was expressed. On the other hand, since the damage Judgment inflicts does not vary by size (a Dread takes the same amount as a frigate) it seems that damage done is a flat amount per entity. This is just a point of interest, then.

I then did some digging to see what kind of impact could express the necessary energy for the destruction of Reschard V. It turns out that you would probably need an asteroid of a size of 16 km or more. Since I'm trying to be as conservative as possible, I will use the 16 km size, although I could justifiably argue for larger.

A 16 km asteroid striking a planet would possess a destructive yield of 200 million megatons, or 200,000,000,000,000 tons of TNT. That's - if I got the math right - 200 trillion tons of TNT. We can safely say that an Avatar's Judgment doomsday weapon (the old one, still) possesses at least that much power.

Now we can simply divide the power of the weapon in real terms by EvE damage units. That is to say, an Avatar's weapon does roughly 50,000 damage in game, so we divide 200 million megatons by 50,000. That comes to 4,000 - again, if I'm doing the math right. Which means that every point of EvE damage works out to at least 4,000 megatons.

Even if you think that my estimates, which are hopefully based on the reasonably well-grounded science of asteroid impact, are far too high, even if you think that my estimates should be reduced by 75% (In which case Reschard V should have merely had a bad day), that still works out to each point of Eve damage expressing 1,000 megatons of energy.

And someone had the bright idea to give capsuleers these toys.

Hmm, I think that you are perhaps thinking that I'm being more specific than I am. I don't need to worry about the "form" of energy, for two reasons.

One, because the damage an old Avatar's doomsday weapon did was exactly the same as the old Leviathan or Erebus doomsday. So, in EvE, the damage potential is precisely the same.

Two, because I'm not using the asteroid impact to establish an upper bound to the damage EvE weapons do. I'm using it to establish a lower bound, that is to say, the energy release cannot be less than this.

For example, the Chicxulub impactor, which killed, over time, 75% of life on Earth (Reschard V is apparently an Earth-like planet) did not boil the oceans and melt polar caps. On Reschard V, 88.7% of life-forms were immediately rendered extinct, and the polar caps were immediately melted.

Given laws such as the Conservation of Energy, we can therefore say that whatever hit Reschard V had to have more energy than a large meteorite impact, whatever its form. Since we can know how much energy an impactor must produce to create a similar effect, and since the same amount of energy must be delivered either way, we can calculate how much energy a doomsday must have released to accomplish the same thing.

Incidentally, as I noted, an asteroid strike is a very efficient means of destroying a planet, generally much more so than electromagnetic radiation, which is the damage type of the old Avatar doomsday weapon. So much so that the pilot of said Avatar might have been better off dragging an asteroid into the planet. As well, I used a 16 km impactor as my comparison, when, in reality, it would probably take a 20 km one to deliver the destruction described in the articles. In all likelihood, therefore, my estimates are way, way low.

Well in the text of the reschard V incident there is a mention of a full polar meltdown and assuming that the polar icecap of reschard V had a similar volume of wáter to earth icecap we could use that to make a calc but the number would be unreal something like 2 petatons and a 2 petaton blast would ve killed all life on reschard V not just a mere 90% it would ve been a full sterilization event no short term survivors So i guess that the amarr DD use some sort of technobladde thingy and that would make it hard to quantify but there is something we can use to quantify said event and is this picture http://www.placidreborn.net/images/ReschauldV-A.png
Now in the text its mentioned that the part of the land Surface of reschard V that didint get flodded by the polar meltdown got scorched by the reléase of energy with that and the picture above we can make a calc using square inverse law.

Reschard V radius = 37000 KM

Reschard V circunference = 2PI x R

Reschard V circunference = 232477. 8 KM or 232477856 meters

Now we can see a massive firestorm on the planet and alot of smaller ones and there is one almost at the south pole of the planet so it could be say that at least that half of the Surface recived enough energy to cause fires. Now i dont know how much energy is required to cause a fire so im going to use the affirmation of nukemap where is mentioned that 35 calories / cm2 are enough to set dry Wood on fire, So we have the following. Energy required to set dry Wood on fire = 35 calc/ cm 2

35 calc / cm2 = 1464400 joule / m 2

R = 232477856 meters m/ 2

R = 116238928 Meters

Now if im not wrong inverse square formula would go like this

Energy/ 4PIR*2 = 1464400 joule / m2

Energy / 4PI 116238928*2 = 1464400

Energy = 16979037e17 x 1464400

Energy = 2.4864102e23J or 59.4 Teratons

Now extrapolation could be made from that the destruction of the shigeru a caldari titan is a cannon event as far as i remember and it took araund 9 minutes from concetrated fire from 25 dreads in siegue mode to down the shigeru shields from 21% to 0,assuming that the shigeru shields are good enough to tank just 1 DD then with 21% shield it should be able to tank 12.4 terarons or 22.1 gigatons per second,dividing that betwhen the ammount of dreads and the number of turrets you get 153 megatons per second for each turret with an alfa of 1.56 gigatons per turret and 9.18 gigatons assuming a RoF of one shot per 10 seconds.