AH, the final stretch analysis-wise!
PAge 283 - the
Inviolable Retribution is mistaken for a
Dauntless--class light cruiser by the Chaos ships, giving us a rough idea of the vessel's probable size relative to a larger cruiser like Macharius.
Page 283 & 284
Quote:
Four squadrons of Starhawks swarmed out of the Macharius's launch bays, forming up into attack formations and quickly speeding towards the line of enemy escorts.
Even before they got there, the line had disintegrated. The Arbites strike cruiser's formidable bombardment cannons opened fire, their linear accelerator systems hrutling a stream of lethal magma bomb warheads through the void at something approaching quarter light speed. The salvo of warheads exploded across the line of Chaos ships with terrifying accuracy. One of them disappeared in a white flash, a hundred thousand tonnes of metal and machinery simply vaporised out of existence. Another tumbled out of formation, already breaking apart into burning fragments. The last remaining raider manouvered away in panic, abandoning its attack as its captain frantically sought to disengage from the battle.
Bombardment cannon velocity seems to be nearly .25c. A "stream of lethal magma bomb warheads" implies they also may have fairly high rate of fire relative to other Imperium cannons weapons (although this may also imply that multiple barrels/cannon turrets firing at once.)
assuming a conservative 2-3 ton mass (about the mass of a gun battery macro-cannon shell) stated as weighing "several tons" in battlefleet gothic, page 21) Each warhead must possess at least 6e18 joules of kinetic energy and 1.55 e11 kg*m/s worrth of momentum at 2 tons. at 3 tones, the KE is 8.9e18 Joules and 2.3e11 kg*m/s worth of momentum. This is, of course, conservative.
Also, a chaos Raider masses "a hundred thousand tonnes", which seems rather light for a vessel which is probably about a kilometer or so long.
Page 284
Quote:
Now the Charybdis entered battle, its void shields flaring angrily as it passed through the expanding clouds of debris and residual energy vapour which only minutes ago had been its squadron of escort ships. It struck out with its forward lance batteries, beams of brilliant energy cutting through the Macharius's void shields and striking its prow, scoring burn lines metres thick into the super-dense material of the cruiser's armoured beak.
Assuming 100,000 tones (1e8 kg ) and iron composition, it takes roughly 760 TJ to vaporize a single raider. (roughly 2400 TJ for all three, Very conservative, in all liklihood. Assuming the explosive payload of a magma warhead is equal to its KE, it detonates 250 meters from the raider, broadside-on, and 4 warhead per salvo (I dont know how many bombardment cannons a Strike cruiser carries, I'm just guessing) you're talking about 4e18 joules of energy absorbed, total (roughly) This is still probably conservative, it also ignores shields, but the implication could clearly suggest that the raiders hulls are orders of magnitude more powerful.
Note that it took "minutes" to defeat the three escrots, which gives us a rough idea of their endurancee.
The diameter of a lance beam seems to be at least several meters.
Quote:
Outgunned, the Chaos ship was attempting to break off from battle, radically changing course and cutting off the flow of power to its main systems, rendering it invisible to the surveyor senses of other vessels. It was a stnadard manoeuvre, and, if successful, the Chaos cruiser would simply fade off the Macharius's target screens, ,drifting away unscathed and undetected.
Again, note that a common warship tactic is to cut power and "run silent". curiously, though, there is no mention of using active sensors to detect them, even though such sensors evidently do exist in 40K (cutting emissions would only hamper passive sensors.) Clearly some other measure must be employed to protect against active sensing.
Page 284 & 285
Quote:
In a pre=-arranged manoeuvre between the two vessels, the Inviolable Retirbution fired its bombardment cannons at the same time, the combined salvo finding and striking its targget with devastating force, ripping open the Murder-class cruiser's underside and blowig apart its starboard flank.
Evidently a coordinated strike between the MAcharius and the bombardment cannons of the Retribution. Not known how long it took for the torpedoes to land, but if it was a range could be established.
Page 286 - STarhawk Bombers can be equipped with melta-missiles (Evi dently the standard armor-piercing anti-warship missiles. By contrast, fighter missiles seem to be primarily krak warheads.
It will take an arbites shuttle and its fighter escrots an hour to reach the planet's surface from the Macharius' position.
PAge 297 - capacitors are mentioned onboard the Planet killer, confirming the assumption that it evidently charges up prior to firing - less than a da y though, but longer than a n hour or two it would seem. (an hour to get to the planet, the hour to "survive" before the Planet killer arrives, etc.)
Page 298
Quote:
He noticed too that the surrounding enemy ships kept a wary distance from the vessel they were supposed to be protecting; unfocused and uncontrolled, any one of these random energy discharges could rip through a capital ship's void shields or completely destroy a smaller escort-class vessel.
Evidnetly a fraction of the energy output from the Planet killer's weapon is sufficient to down a warship's shields (IIRC battleships and a battlebarge as well as cruisers made up the PK's escort here.) and smaller escorts are completely des troyed. Since the approximate output of the planet killer is known, the rough magnitude of energy it likely generates (sustained or otheriwse) also would be known.
Quote:
It was a terrifying craft, its very existence a threat to the order of the Imperium, Ulanti thought. He could well believe the whispered rumours that the details of its construction and estimated power requirements could not be easily explained by any normal technical means; that the powers of the warp themselves must have had a hand in its creation and operation.
Again, the power generation and capabilities of the Planet Killer are considered far above what standard Imperium warships (and conventional chaos vessels) are capable of.
Quote:
Magnified by the viewing bay opticon, he saw the launch bays of one of the chaos ships - one of the dreaded Styx-class heavy carrier cruisers - yawn open and spit out a stream of attack craft.
Viewport windows incorporate optical magnification.
PAge 299 - at the Macharius' current position, it will take 20 minutes to get back onboard. According to ulanti's estimates on page 297, it will take about at least an hour or so for the Planet killer to get within position. And the Chaos ships ahead of it will be in position within 20 minute or so ((roughly implying they are at least 2-3 times as fast as the Planet killer itself.)
Assuming two hours as implied elsewhere, it might grow to 4-6 times.
Quote:
KAether banked steeply away, charging all available power through to his forward shields
fighters and bombers have their own defelcotr shields even though Battle Fleet gothic implies ordnance is not normally shielded.
Page 300
Quote:
Several thousand kilometres away, a larrge grroup of Swiftdeaths were speeding towards the two Imperial warships. Kaether studied their changing surveyor patterns, suspecting that they were oscillating their energy outputs, attempting to disguise the presence of larger, more powerful Doomfire bombers within their formation.
The use of ship maskign tactics by varying outputs (to make a ship look bigger or smaller than it is.)
Page 301: "hours" not minutes, sincee Zealot Zane began fighting the Nurgle-creature that is attempting to sabotage Macharius in the reactors (which began earlier just before the bombers launched and just after the Macharius and I.R. fought their way past the chaos ships guarding the planet and launched the recovery shuttles.) Which gives us our benchmark timeframe-wise for the battle.
Page 303 - Zane adjusts his laer pistol to "full charge" - thus indicating that las weapons can be designed for variable outputs (a fact which will also be noted in the various Gaunt's ghosts novels.)
- EVidently the plasma reactors generate some "residue energy" or "gaseous waste" during their power generation. The former may be a power surge of some kind, or it may be some colloquial term for the plasma. The gaseous waste may be either coolant, or the plasma itself. either way it kind of suggests a "non-reactor" design for the reactor. (sometliing like Gou'uld reactors.)
PAge 304 - the Bombardment Cannons on the Inviolable Retribution are shorter-ranged than the standard batteries of Imperium or Chaos ships, as the two sides could exchange standard weapons fire (and lance fire), but the I.R. was unable to use its bombardment cannons. I'd assume they have a range of at least 75,000 km or so, maybe half a light second, but its pure supposition.
PAge 307-308
Quote:
In a torrent of energy that overwhelmed ships' surveyor senses and transformed hundreds of tactical screens into blank-faced displays of howling static, the Planet Killer unleashed its power on the world below. A roaring storm of destruction descended upon Belatis, passing through the atmosphere and increasing the temperature there a huundredfold in seconds, partially igniting it in a fiery borealis that swept out across the circumference of the planet
The energy blast struck the planet's largest ocean on the eastern hemisphere some two thousand kilometres south-west of Madina, sending up a huge cloud of steam clearly visible from space as millions of tonnes of sea-water were instantly vaporised, boiling away into the burning, super-heated atmosphere. The blast struck and cracked open the ocean bed, unleashing a super-tsunami tidal wave over three kilometres in height which would drown the two nearest continents and island chains and compete with the fiery borealis overhead in its race round the globe.
The Planet Killer's gunnery priests had not chosen this spot on the surface at random. Surveryor scans of the planet's geologic structure and daemon-voiced augurs had guided their aim. The planetary crust was weak and unstable here and the all-consuming energy beam ripped it asunder, setting off a series of cataclysmic underwater earthquakes, igniting chains of long dormant volcanoes into fiery, explosive life and cuasing new ones ot thrust up through the splitnering, broken crust. The seismic shockwaves rippled through the core of the planet, setting off disasters on the far side of Belatis long before the tsunami or firestorm would reach the continents there.
And all the time, the planet killer kept firing into an open wound now almost a hundred kilometres across in the planet's crust, the coruscating lance of otherworldly energy burning a hole deep into the planetary core, bursting open the planet's molten heart.
The Planet killer firing on another planet:
- a "hunderedfold" increase in temp in a matter of seconds. this implies the temperature of the atsmophere reached tens of thousands of degrees easily. However, given the later descriptions, it only heated part of the planet (a fairly large portion) in short order, and this presumably triggered firestorms which raced around the planet during the bombardment. Also note this is a secondary effect, in addition to the primary bombardment.
- instantly vaporizing "millions" of tonnes of water. 2 million tonnes requires megaton level enerrgy. Close to a billion a few gigatons. Not alot, but again, its only a part of the overall effects.
- as usual, the beam burns a hole a hunderd kilometers or so across down to the core of the planet (~2800 km deep). Assuming vaporization of the crust and mantle ought to take roughly ~1.2e27 joules of energy total, for a sustained firepower of roughly 1e24 watts. cracking the crust (1e10-1e11 megatons) should imply a sustained rate of fire of around e22-e23 watts, minimum.
- despite the fact it "blows the planet up", the bit about targeting a weak and unstable point, as well as the subsqeuent descriptions, clearly point to this as being technobabble mass-scattering, possibly at less than escape velocity.
Page 308 - the planet exploded apart after twenty minutes of sustained firing from the Planet Killer. Again, note that this indicative of a non-brute force destruction. the previous planet at the beginning of the book took hours to destroy, while others (like Savaven) took only an hour.
Page 310-311: the passage of the [i]Virulent through the shattered remains of the planet.. mention of "violent waves of gravitational flux" as well as the planet's gravity well "collapsing", the stress of which threatens to tear the Chaos ship apart. The presence of gravity in any significant form is curious if the planet is mass-scattered.. this implies enough of the planteary mass remains present currently for the gravity well to be mostly intact (if diminished.)
Or, its just a result of the funky dameonic chaos magic in the beam.
Page 313
Quote:
The torpedoes blazed towards their target, passing between the Macharius and Retribution in a bravura show of markshamship. Aboard the Virulent, Sirl was still trying to absorb the surprise of the Imperial cruiser's sudden appearance when the command deck alarms scramed in warning as the torpedoes' lock-on signals bounced off of the hull of their target.
Here torpedoes demonstrate active sensing technology.. and active targeting sensors at that.
Quote:
Dying and powerless, the Virulent blindly tumbled away through space, falling into the gravitational pull of the remains of Belatis. There, it would be either mercifully smashed apart in collision with any of the massive, continent-sized planetoid fragments or would drift together amongst the rest of the detritus of the planet's destruction.
- Again description implies a distinctly "non-brute force" mass-scattering event, as a substantial portion of the planetary mass and gravity well remains.
Page 315
Quote:
Behind them was a fading red glow that marked where the world of Belatis had recently been. In time, the drifting remains of the planet would spread out to form an asteroid belt halo around the system's sun, and future generations of Imperial statisticians and map-makers would mark the planet as Mundus Perdita, a world now lost to the Imperium.
- in compledte contradiction to what I mentioned above, evidently the planetary debris will eventually scatter to surround the sun (which implies it was not fast enough to reach solar escape velocity, which IIRC is around 50-70 km/s.)
my working theory is that the planet killer's bombardment caused a "build up" of chaos magic technobabble stuff that eventaully reached critical mass and technobabbled the planet aparrt, accounting for all the funky weird effects we normally see with it (planet flipping off it saxis, persistnat gravity wells, etc.) once the magic "dissipates", the effects return to normal and the planet probably will behave like normal (IE scatter eventually to form the asteroid filed, no longer held together by demon technobabble magic.)
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