New update. Some more calcs and the introduction of the Fists...
Page 176
Each piece [of Kroeger's armour] was heavy, almost too heavy, and were it not for the wheezing mechanical arm Kroeger's butcher-surgeons had frafted to her shoulder she would have been unable to lift his armour clear..
An indication of Space Marine armour mass This includes the breast and back plates, the greaves, and the gauntlets (and probably associated arm/leg components). This would tend to suggest that Space Marine armour pieces are too heavy for most normal (unarmoured) humans to carry
Page 176
- aforementioned mechanical arm has "biomechanical components" that insinuate themselves in the recipient's body. Whether this is true of all such grafts or only a feature of Chaos-inspired augmetics is unknown although the Guardsman's reaction to the graft probably suggests the latter.
Page 177
- I could be wrong here, but the implication seesm to be that Kroeger (a CSM) is actually raping a human woman (Larana Utorian, captive from the Jouran Dragoons) although given Kroeger's inherent Khornate tendencies its possible his lusts run to more bloody/violent bents than rape. Either way, he's tormenting her.
Page 182
- mention of "mystical surveyors" for detecting approaching ships. Is this more Adeptus-Mechanicus (or Dark Mechaicus) technobabble or is it some sort of genuine "magic detector?" (or just a magical means of detection?)
Page 183
- the Iron Warriror's sorcerers are corrupting a captured A-M adept's body (augmentics and all) with a modiied form of the Obliterator "techno-virus"
Page 187
A body lay against one wall, ,the little flesh that remained on its skeleton was scorched and black.
This was originally one of Hawke's companions, head blown off earlier by Honsou's bolt pistol and then further damaged by the grenade. It looks like much fo the flesh may have been stripped off by predators, but it is noted that the body appeared to be badly burned by the grenade, which suggests it had a significant thermal component as well as blast/fragmentation.
Page 190
- the Hydra Cordatus citadel's shield is offering incomplete protection because the aformentioned Amatheon is required to exert effort to maintain it, ,and he has difficulty doint ghis under bombardment while maintaining all the other systems of the citadel (like the laboratorium) This seems like a curious drawback, as other eaxmples of shield facilities we've seen (such as Vervunhive, or the Belatis palace in Execution Hour) did not seem to exhibit such flaws. It my be that the half-mad Amatheon refuses to let the shield be managed passively for some reason.
Page 196
- the Jouran dragoons are using black flak jackets for the night assault. This suggests they have varying kinds of gear for different kinds of fighting ( as well as being skilled at night fighting itself.)
Page 196
The traitor line was still a few hundred metres away.
Distance of the Dragoons from the enemy lines. Vaubon is concerned with being spotted and attacked before reaching the enemy lines, so this may be considered a (rough) indicator of the engagement ranges the enemy (and thus the Jourans themselves) are capable of.
AS a side note, there is an implicaton here of being able to fire at long ranges at night, as with below.
Page 196-197
- mention of one of the Iron Warrior slave-troopers having a "battered pair of field glasses" that could see in the dark. Since most Chaos troops use looted Imperium gear, we can conjecture that there are regiments using such equipment. (Hell, if Chaos cannon fodder has it, the Imperium almost certainly does.).
Page 197
Yosha pulled out a set of blackened and ancient field goggles. A bizarre protruberance slotted over the eyepiece and Yosha pulled it over his shaven head. He rested his chin on his hands and trained his gaze over the parapet.
They look or seem like night vision goggles of some kind, similar in appearance/function to modern NVG?
Page 197
A sharp buzzing crack whipped by him and blasted the back of Yosha's head open in an explosion of blood and brains.
...
Sniper!
Klane ducked down behind the parapet and cocked his rifle, his head working left and right to see other sentires dropping, no doubt picked off by Imperial snipers on the walls of the Ravelin.
Earlier on page 183, it is noted that the trenches (at the point where the Iron Warriors artillery was emplaced) was about 600 meters from the ditch of Hydra Cordatus. IT is not known or ever noted that the Jourans have dedicaed marksmen or snipers, so we may conclude that the "snipers" discused here aren't dedicated marksmen like Larkin but rather skilled troopers using lasguns. Given that he believes an attack is coming in but cannot see it, this seems likely.
We should also note that as before, the Chaos soldiers are all using bolt action rifles. As noted, these rifles tend to employ very powerful rounds with a result of also being long-ranged. 600 meters would also be within the range of such weapons, and it is never once mentioned that the Iron Warrior's troops held any sort of range advantage over the Jourans.
There is also the matter of the damage - though we dont actually learn the weapon that does it (implied to be a bolt weapon though), the fact the warrior considers it a las weapon from the Jourans probably suggests a lasgun could do comparable damage. Boiling the interior of the head (or even half of it) woudl take hundreds of kilojoules easily (for a las weapon).
This quote also more definitively gives the Jouran weaponry some sort of low-light/infrared/night vision scope - I doubt a target could be hit out to 600 meters at night.
Page 202
- the torpedo Hawke is helping to reprogram is at least 30 (maybe 40) meters tall. This makes it somewhat smaller than the torpedoes mentioned in Battlefleet Gothic, at least on the low end.
Page 202-203:
- with the help of a Tech-priest, Hawke's vox-caster was hooked up to an orbital attack torpedo and used to transmit/upload targeting data into its cogitator/targeting spirit. Thus it seems reasonable that a function of Vox-casters is the transmission/reception of data to other devices, which can presumably include visual data as well or targeting information from one source to another. The sophistication of the basilisks earlier would confirm this.
Page 203
.The top of the giant missile was rounded and strangely irregular. There was a serrated, spiral groove cut in the warhead and Hawke guessed that this was to help it burrow through the thick hull of a starship before detonating deep inside
.
Torpedoes penetrate via mass/velocity (momentum) before detonating. Thus they are as much physical impacotrs as they are explosive devices. Some (as we note below) also use shaped charges for penetrating armour in some cases as well.
Page 205
- under the right (unspecified) circumstances, bolter fire CAN breach Space Marine armour. Probably not a surprise, since even Power armour is not armoured equally everywhere.
Page 208
Hawke fired a hail of las-bolts, ripping the man's chest to bloody ruin and blasting clear the wall-mounted grille behind him.
No idea what a "hail" of las-bolts mean (aside more than two.) but the passage indicates that while his torso appeared to be mostly intact (in the sense he wasn't severed to pieces) it chest was pretty well torn up/apart (presumably much of the skeletal structure remains intact) - the las-blasts are also indicated to have penetrated through.
Assuming half the chest was torn apart (but the lower part was mainly intact.) conjecturing a volume of .0165 m^3 (for the upper chest 30x22x25 cm) you get between 12-15 kg in mass (Depending on exact density - the human body is roughly the density of water but the internal volume is not uniform.)
Assuming low end boiling point for the flesh content, and 1-2 seconds of fire at the 220 RPM ROF from the Uplifting primer, Energy input is at least 3.2-4 MJ divided between 3-7 shots.. so between 430 kilojoules and 1.3 MJ minimum per shot. If cauterisation occurs (see below) the calc could be several times higher, depending on exact temperature used.
"Bloody" may or may not suggest cauterization occured, (bleedign can be triggered even after cauterization occurs, depending on the lasgun and the setting used.) and it doesn't acount for any vaporization occuring. And it doesn't account for inefficiencies either. Body armour and chaos mutations are also a possibility.
Really, there's alot of ambiguities to this calc (precise effect, rate of fire, etc), so its not as reliable as certain others and more useful as a supplementary calc
.Page 210
- "Glaive Class ground-launched orbital torpedo"
Page 211
As it [torpedo] reached a height of nearly one hundred kilometres, the first stage of the torpedo separated and stage two ignited, increasing the velocity still further as the war-spirit caged within the warhead calculated hte time, distance, ,and vector to its target.
..
The torpedo nosed over, traveling at almost fourteen thousand kilometres per hour, and began hunting for its prey.
14,000 km/hr is only about 3.89 km/s, fa below escape velocity for a habitable planet. Clearly they weren't using it at full capability.
Page 213-214
The torpedo impacted almst exactly in the centre of the Kane Bastion of Tor Christo where its triple stage warhead detonated with devastating results. The lead element of the warhead was designed to crater an opening through the thick hull of a starship, while the tail element would explode simultaneously, acting as a propellant and hurtling the middle charge deep within its target.
But instead of the metres-thick, reinforced adamantium bulkhead of a starship, the torpedo slammed into the ground of the Kane bastion, traveling at over a thousand kilometres an hour. The first stage of the torpedo exploded with phenomenal power, flattening everything within three hundred metres and blasting a crater fifty metres deep. The tail section blew and thrust the torpedo deeper into the rock of the promontory where the more powerfulc entre charge detonated with the power of a sun, ripping the rock of Tor Christos apart.
...
A surging mushroom cloud billowed a thousand metres into the sky, hurling ash and burning rock in all directions.
The ramparts of the bastions either side of the torpedo impact sagged and cracked, their rockcrete walls splitting under forces they were never designed to endure. The crater in the center of the promontory expanded with terrifying rapidity, tonnes of rubble and artillyery pieces collapsing into the fiery pit.
....
with a tortured groan, millions of tonnes of stone cracked and rumbled, sliding free of the slopes of the promonetory, crashing down in a rocky tidal wave of destruction.
Several things of note:
- this torpedo is multi staged. The first is an armour-breaching charge, the third acting as a booster (to push deeper through the weakened section.) these two f urther the penetration. The middle charge is the "main" and more powerufl explosive.
Curiously, this does not seem to behave quite like how plasma torpedoes are described in Battlefleet Gothic (the plasma engine contributes to the explosive warhead.) os it may be a different kind of weapon.
- the first charge is hard to calc totally, but creating a 50 m "deep" (radius) crater can require between 180 tons and 1 kiloton of TNT (depending on how one defines crater and composition) although the physical impact aspect complicates this.
- the middle charge is stated to detonate "with the power of a sun" - this could mean its merely a fusion warhead or its a plasma detonation, or it may refer to the actual output of the weapon being comparable to such. It may also refer to literally the power output of a sun, but if so it couldn't be a large one, since anything above a few hunderd gigatons/teratons would have nasty/significant effects and these seem to be far too localized for such, even with a "buried" nature.
We dont know how large the final crater is, ,but even assuming a few kilometers or more, its not likley to be more than megaton range, or a few gigatons. It is worth noting that since the Imperial forces merely wished to harm the Iron Warriors without obliterating themselves in the process, we can surmise they would have also "dialed down" the yield on such weapons to limit their own casualties. There is also the titans which weren't fucked over in the explosion.
Page 214
The blast wave buffeted the towering form of the Dies Irae but the workers had done their jobs well and the towering buttresses and scaffolding held, keeping the monstrous leviathan from toppling. The massive Titan shook, its joints groaning and squealing as its external gyros fought for balance, but the shockwave passed over it and left it intact. Several other Titans were not so fortunate and three Warlords of the Legio Morrtis were brought down by massive huunks of rock or collapsed by the force fo the blast.
..
All that remained of Tor Christo was the void-shielded keep, perched precariously on a splintered corbel of rock.
Warlord titans are crushed by debris from the explosion (but not the blast wave.) the Dies Irae also survives the blast wave, though being visibly buffeted in the process. It wouldn't take more than a few megatons (or a few hundred kilotons) of explosive to do this. This tells us titans can survive nuclear level detonations from some distance away, in any case.
Also note the keep's own void shields protected ti from the torpedo, giving a lower limit on shield toelrances.
