Would Nuclear Weapons be as destructive in ship to ship space combat, as they are on the ground in an atmosphere?

A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 161 points –

As far as I know, the big damage from Nuclear Weapons planetside is the massive blastwave that can pretty much scour the earth, with radiation and thermal damage bringing up the rear.

But in space there is no atmosphere to create a huge concussive and scouring blast wave, which means a nuclear weapon would have to rely on its all-directional thermal and radiation to do damage.. but is that enough to actually be usful as a weapon in space, considering ships in space would be designed to handle radiation and extreme thermals due to the lack of any insulative atmosphere?

I know a lot of this might be supposition based on imaginary future tech and assumptions made about materials science and starship creation, but surely at least some rough guess could be made with regards to a thernonuclear detonation without the focusing effects of an atmosphere?

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I always thought the initial explosion was so hot it vapourised everything in a certain radius. Would an atomic frag work?

Nasal developed a reactor, orion iirc, that was basically nuclear pulse propulsion: a directed nuclear explosion would propel a jet of plasma on a shield on the back of the ship to propel it, and the ship would use regular explosion for propulsion.

I don't know the exact dynamic of the nuclear explosion. The temperature turns a lot of things into plasma indeed. But I suspect some construction of the bomb (specific layers with specific materials) could make some kind of frag work.

At the very least you can have an efficient plasma bomb anyway. Your frag is simply plasma in this case. Plasma is still matter that can have high kinetic energy, but it's very hot too and with specific electromagnetic properties.

In this case, the atomic explosion replaces your powder, and what matters is everything around it.