Somtaaw Dreadnought (HW Cataclysm) versus GCS

[Xon]

Do Homeworld vessels have reactor problems? No matter, let's see where this goes. Assuming there were no aggravating variables, and the destroyers vaporized the frigate in one second. How much firepower are they putting out?

Reactor problems, like what?

As for timeframe, its at least 2 seconds but less than a minute (it says "matter of seconds" in the Cataclysm manual.)

Err sorry. What I meant was do their reactors cook off?

The ships typically explode after they have had the shit utterly beatten out of them. Nevermind the HW:C heavy ships can vent drive plasma into their interior(crew areas), survive and be back up to full strength rather fast.

[Xon]

The ships typically explode after they have had the shit utterly beatten out of them.

I really should clarify that these explosions can generally be attributed to ammo stores and such cooking off. The explosions are tiny, generally less than the ship size and dont do any damage to stuff around the explosion.

[Connor MacLeod]

Okay.. I got tired of hunting around for more specific stats so I'm gonna use baseline iron as the composition for the ship (good enough for an low-end order of magntiude calc, which this will be since homeworld materials aren't using exotic bonding processes or stuff.)

according to Catacylsm, the most massive frigate (assault frigate) masses some 15,000 tons. (oddly enough, in the original homeworld, the mass figures are larger.. if they are in "tons" - which may not be the case, since no unit is given... multiply the above by 4, since the most massive frigate was 60,000 units.)

It takes bout 7.6 mJ/kg to vaporize iron (in a vaccuum, like in the TESB asteroid calcs.) at 15,000 tons (1.5e7 kg) = 1.14e14 joules low end (ignoring the effects of ablative armor, inefficiencies, etc.)

absolute minimum? 9.5e11 watts sustained firepower for a single destroyer (1.14e14 J divided by 60 seconds, divided by 2 destroyers.)

"upper end" minimum (1.14e14 joules divided by 2 seconds, ,divided by 2 destroyers) - 2.85e13 watts sustained firepower.

Alright, so what is your conclusion? Can you convert those figures to explosive, just for the sake of this thread.

9.5e11 watts is 950 gigawatts (.22 kilotons per second or so, roughly)

2.85e13 watts is 28.5 TJ, or about 6-7 kilotons per second. Both are low end.

[Ra]

The explosion of a fusion reactor, or even a fission reactor would be pathetically small. Fusion is extremely hard to maintain, so as soon as magnetic containment breaches, the chain reaction is halted, not going out of control. Even if you built a ship entirely out of reactors (tokomak, laser-fusion, hell, even cold fusion), it still wouldn't go off like a bomb. The only types of reactors that would blow up would be a matter-antimatter reactor, because of the loss of AM magnetic containment, or a theoretical zero-point reactor, because of the possibility for a cascade reacton.
So, the "detonation" of a fusion core would factor very little, although inside a ship the reactor would vent very intense heat and plasma. However, while this will melt bulkheads and stuff around the core, it won't blow up anything. Plasma cools at an incredible rate, returning to hot gas in seconds. This reason is also why so-called "plasma rifles" are impractical.