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Hydrogen ice bombs

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vegascat

SOC-13
Simple idea, hard to do, something like it already in use. Take a hard pentrator bomb casing, fill with a resistor heater mesh and frozed hydrogen ice. Use as gravity drop or missile warhead. Warhead strikes target, penetrates to desired depth, heater mesh melts hydrogen ice to gas bursting case. High pressure hydrogen gas fills target area. When appropriate partial pressure gained through dispurtion, Hydrogen ignites like the Hindenburg. End result, mass overpressure in target area, no ozygen in an enclosed space, no remailing fires burning out of control. No one left alive in target area due to blast, fire, lack of oxygen. What more could you ask for to get rid of pesky revolutionaries holed up in bunkers.

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In the end, Murphy will rule
 
Originally posted by vegascat:
Simple idea, hard to do, something like it already in use. Take a hard pentrator bomb casing, fill with a resistor heater mesh and frozed hydrogen ice.
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End result, mass overpressure in target area, no ozygen in an enclosed space, no remailing fires burning out of control. No one left alive in target area due to blast, fire, lack of oxygen. What more could you ask for to get rid of pesky revolutionaries holed up in bunkers.
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Fuel air burst... nasty stuff.

Another easy to do stunt. Drop a big rock from high orbit. Real simple to use... fairly accurate... and prone to leveling HUGE areas very quickly.

Then theres the tamped californium shells from CT:Mercs...
 
Thermobaric weapons rock. have the nasty habit of eating up all the air in the affected volume too.

Of course on the other hand a nice C-charged rock is already approaching MC squared as it's V approaches C. (E=MV squared too) Making even nucleor warheads superfluous.

Garf
 
droping rocks from on high may be fun, but how dod you get a body count of the bad guys. Perfect thing when you need a small contained explosion that leaves evidence of the bad guys evil ways.

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In the end, murphy will rule
 
"Yep... we used to actually plow the ground back in the old days... used to pull stumps and cut trees too. Nowadays we just hires us some tramp trader captain to drop a bunch o crowbars from orbit and gets out the real big marshmellows... course, evera now and again some drunk screws up and drops the load on a farm house... but all in all it works out just fine..."
 
If you want to clean out an area of people who do not have contained suits, the simplest way is to use a CO2 bomb. It goes off, and there's no free oxugen nearby. Respirator and masks are no defense as they deal with impurities, but they cannot free oxygen from a chemical bond.
CO2 bombs are usually available from suppliers of fire suppression equipment. They have no parts that a chemical sniffer would pick up. Starship crews fear them...

Originally posted by vegascat:
droping rocks from on high may be fun, but how dod you get a body count of the bad guys. Perfect thing when you need a small contained explosion that leaves evidence of the bad guys evil ways.

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In the end, murphy will rule
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GGeeeeezzzz - and some of you guys think I am mean!!! - man - you guys would KILL EVERYTHING MOVING!!!....turn every living thing to
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---Hard core, man, Hard core!!!
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I expect that spacecrew have oxygen masks with 10-30 minute supplies, not respirators. Given a pressure loss from a 1-10 cm hole hypoxia would be a problem long before embolism demands a pressure suit. Besides, I expect partial depressurization (to 4 psi) will be SOP for an on-board fire.

How does this CO2 bomb work?
 
Speaking of mean, I have a former player whose favorite weapon was nuclear, and the bigger the better. A current player is almost as bad, but he usually cleans up the fallout with nuclear dampers afterwords.
 
I doubt you would want to use hygrogen fuel for an airburst. A lot of the effect is derived from the way the fuel is atomized through-out a large volume of air before it is detonated. Since hydrogen will instantly react with any atmospheric oxygen, it won't be able to spread before it begins it explosion, so you won't get the same kind of large scale effect you do with the FAE munitions we have even today.
 
I have been reading articles about bunker busters, the hard thing is penetration. Of course isn't that always the case? ;) It has been very difficult to build a casing that will pentrate deep enough to get into deep bunkers. At the speeds a missle or bomb hits massive amounts of kinetic energy has to be overcome to keep a war head intact to penetrate deeply into rock. The distance is then limited. You would have to have some type of boring machine on it and have it burrow into the ground. Nuke bunker busters rely (again according to articles I've read) on the shockwave and vaporization powers they have. But even they have limited penetration distance due to the rigers I'v already said.
 
Originally posted by TheColonel:
I have been reading articles about bunker busters, the hard thing is penetration. Of course isn't that always the case? ;) It has been very difficult to build a casing that will pentrate deep enough to get into deep bunkers. At the speeds a missle or bomb hits massive amounts of kinetic energy has to be overcome to keep a war head intact to penetrate deeply into rock.
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True enough. Its easier to drop a big rock from orbit... sure, you wreck everything for miles... but the bunker knows that its been hit. If you prefer precision strikes, it should be possible to construct super-dense KE penetrators that can be dropped from orbit (with suitably high terminal velocities) that should be able to drill down quite a way. Drop enough of them in a tight area and secondary explosives are probably not even needed.
 
Dropping a rock from orbit will hit at about 10 KPS, ignoring air resistane, say 8 kps for a nice streamined bomb-shape. A 20 Kg rock will hit with 1120 megajoules, or the energy of 140 Kg of TNT, about the same as a Vietnam war 750 lb bomb. So dropping about 800 sixty-pound rocks is the equivalent of a full B-52D Squadron on an Arclight mission. Be very afraid.

Makes you think about missiles. A 50 Kg missile accelerating at a modest 3G for two turns (2000 seconds) will have a velocity of 59 Km/sec, ignoring any closing velocity of the target and the velocity of the launching vehicle. For a 50 Kg missile that is 31 Gigajoules, or the equivalent of 6.1 metric tons of TNT. Who needs a warhead?
 
Call me nostalgic, but I like the tried and true method of flying 50ft in an air-raft over a group of enemies and dropping a satchel of TDX in thier midst ^_^ Cuts them off at thier knees for yards around and even as low as you are you're safe from the blast
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Originally posted by vegascat:
Hydrogen ignites like the Hindenburg.

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In the end, Murphy will rule
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Forgive the digression but recently it was determined that the Hidenburg blew up because of the paint, not the hydrogen. You can throw a lit match into a hydrogen gas bag and if you don't have any oxygen, it'll put out the fire. The paint of the ship's skin was an aluminum-oxide base....something we call 'rocket fuel' nowadays
GIven the conditions present and the Hindenburg would have went up the same if the gas bags had been filled with water. Another point of trivia...the hydrogen burns so quickly that those who didn't jump to their deaths let the fire wash over them and then ride the frame down...they survived.

I know it doesn't have much to do with your weapon proposal...but there it is for the sake of it.

Here's a variant for your bomb...instead of solid hydrogen, use a liquid core...doesn't even have to be hydrogen...helium would do and easier to make liquid. Have a two stage warhead. One with the liquid He core and the second stage being conventional explosive. Think how structurely weakened everything suddenly flash-frozen would be....now detonate the 2nd bomb.


Snowflakes
 
Against a mil target, Anti-Air canons should be able to push the rock off target (Gauss guns against a predictable flight path). Ditto for missiles

If the victim doesn't have the sort of tech that would give them a counter to small dropped rocks, then what are you doing dropping rocks on them - they are totally helpless. Instead of dropping a rock, float down on your contragrav, hover a couple of hundred meters and use your laser turret until the entire area is slagged - much more precise and you get to see what you are doing (and hear the screams piped over the intercom).

Yes you can carpark helpless civilians with rocks and you will achieve a huge success (in pure body count terms) however the forces of law and order may have some difficult questions at the trial (ie do you want top bunk or bottom?).

Of course, if you want to talk about deniable devastation, that's a much more interesting topic. (one of my players favourites was getting the crew member of a rival trading fleet to carry a "package" for them - Half way through the jump week, the Thermite charge went off and made a decent attempt at burning a hole straight through the hull - with resultant fire risk, life risk and decompress risk (not necessarily in that order).

Once word got arround, nobody (including players) would take packages. This reduced my adventure hooks, so I hope not come up with a "counter" to it in future.
 
25 kg rock coming down at 8,000 m/s in not going to be moved much by a burst of VRF gauss. Using the Striker rules you could engage at 3000m, about 0.4 seconds before impact. Assuming a 0.1 sec burst, and that 1/6 shot hits, all hits perpendicular to the flight path, and hits at the MV of 4500 m/s it can move the rock 14.4 m. Not bad. If he follows it all the way to the ground firing 1600 rounds he can move it about 40 meters, still not out of the blast radius.

And what does he do with the other rocks?

The rocks aren't precision weapons,they are area bombardment weapons like "dumb bombs." They are suitable for military ops, and justified anytime an artillery barrage would be.
 
Originally posted by Uncle Bob:
25 kg rock coming down at 8,000 m/s in not going to be moved much by a burst of VRF gauss. Using the Striker rules you could engage at 3000m, about 0.4 seconds before impact. Assuming a 0.1 sec burst, and that 1/6 shot hits, all hits perpendicular to the flight path, and hits at the MV of 4500 m/s it can move the rock 14.4 m. Not bad. If he follows it all the way to the ground firing 1600 rounds he can move it about 40 meters, still not out of the blast radius.

And what does he do with the other rocks?

The rocks aren't precision weapons,they are area bombardment weapons like "dumb bombs." They are suitable for military ops, and justified anytime an artillery barrage would be.
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But why not use a large gauss weapon and start firing from it's extreme range. The rock get's identified to a fair thee well because it doesn't dodge so you can start putting fire onto it from waaay past your normal maximum range.

Given that military forces are still used, there must be a common counter (otherwise canon would be unsupportable) so having VFR gauss able to operate in this "anti-rock" mode seems the least damaging change.

Yes I know that vertical range is subtly different from horizontal range - however I use whatever I need to make the story work.

If you are going to use rock's like this, why not just stop well short of the planet and use your Man drive for a couple of weeks pushing a large rock at 4G. By the time it get's there it's moving at a significant fraction of C - much harder to see it coming and it packs a much bigger punch than just dropping it from orbit.
 
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