Thoughts on Nuclear Weapons in the game *Spoilers*

[Coriolis]

I have had an occasional chuckle at the way nuclear weapons are portrayed in Endless Sky. I don't see why the present-day nuclear taboo should be projected upon a fictional future featuring interstellar war. I understand the importance of keeping the game relatable to the player, but this seems a bit silly to me.

There were a couple thousand nuclear explosions in the 20th century on Earth, including hundreds of open atmospheric tests. The relative effect of these weapons on Earth's habitability is negligible (on the planetary scale, I mean; obviously Bikini Atoll isn't the best place to live).

In one side-mission, the player is smashing asteroids into a planet as a means of peaceful terraforming to melt its ice caps, sidestepping the fact that the scale of energy involved in that kind of event would dwarf the combined energy in present-day humanity's collective nuclear stockpile. This is portrayed as something that isn't at all hard to do; a graduate student takes care of it with the player at a hefty discount.

In the late stages of the campaign, the Syndicate is packing nukes on its ships, and the implication seems to be that they're threatening to paste Earth clean of human life. There's a commonly-held belief that our nuclear weapons could destroy planet Earth and wipe out our species. I've actually done the math on what it would take to blow up planet Earth, what it would take to destroy its surface, and what it would take to irradiate its surface enough to kill the population. The combined global arsenal of today is orders of magnitude too small to do any of these (if you're as much of a nerd as I am, I'd be glad to show you my calculations; it's fun... to me, anyway).

Nuclear weapons vary in yield from the equivalent of a few dozen tons of TNT to tens of millions of tons of TNT. While there is no theoretical upper limit, it seems odd to use that kind of weapon in an era of commonplace space travel. I'd be far more concerned if the Syndicate got ahold of a big asteroid and threatened to smash it into Earth. The only way that a nuclear weapon could even approach the kind of threat that it's portrayed as in the game would be if it was an absolutely massive thermonuclear weapon, like a scaled-up Tsar Bomba. The threat of such a weapon wouldn't be so much from the fact that it was nuclear in nature, but rather that its yield would be so very large.

Furthermore, I find it kind of funny to suggest that people who have mastered fusion reactors would require a major weapons development program to re-invent something that humans created back in 1945 without using computers.

To the average layman, this inaccurate portrayal won't mean much, because from our perspective, a nuke with a yield of a few dozen tons of TNT is "huge," and nuclear weapons are regarded as the most terrible thing humanity has invented. However, given the fact that the story of the game keeps a good deal of reality (micrometeor threats to space stations, radioactive isotopes leftover from a nuclear explosion, et cetera), it would be nice if the story text didn't buy into and in turn feed feed the hyperbole driving many people's perceptions of these weapons. It would also make sense that humanity will likely invent far worse things a thousand years in the future than nuclear weapons.

(side note: Why is nerve gas so very horrible in the game, when one could simply vent the atmosphere of a disabled ship, killing the crew, patch the hole, and then repressurize the hull? Vacuum kills a lot faster than nerve gas. Also, nerve gas would risk contaminating your own ship while you're boarding the enemy ship. That seems a bit counterproductive.)

[euphm1]

Subsequently, penetration is the most important factor in overcoming armor in space. EWAR is where it's at. Or, y'know, rapidly altering the vector of a ship without directly affecting the crew. Nukes would be good at that. But Shh.... no one's talking about how thousands of missiles are viable to be fired less than seconds one after another... That's a hell of an auto-loader to non-pressurized from standard cargo storage feat if ever I saw one. Think of the rapid compression/decompression/heating cycles...

Also, in his defense, nuclear winter is a problem. Terraforming a planet without the infrastructure for it, directly altering the lifecycles of its inhabitants, and contaminating necessary things like water would be kind of different. Really hard on trade, too. I just always assumed the nuke threat was about its secondary effects.

It also takes time to safely gather the materials for the rather significant number of warheads we're talking about in this instance, especially secretly. And the technology for nukes, being present in a big portion of the galaxy, might not have been the major focus. Properly adjusting the yield and detonation procedure may have been more significant. Though I'm not entirely sure why the tests just didn't occur in some unmonitored open-space backportion of a solar system somewhere. Anyhoo... there are several reasons to test munitions before use in battle.

I think it's fair to say the game hits at somewhere around a 3 on the soft to hard science bit. Clearly physical engineering isn't the dev's most emphasized point. But since he has provided a rather decent vehicle and is a respectable story teller, I won't cry too loudly. You could always provide a mission rewrite ;-)

[Coriolis]

Nuclear winter, at least the severity of it suggested by Carl Sagan, has been thoroughly debunked, and by Sagan's own admission, it has not held up in light of several analogous events, including the 1991 gulf war oil fires and numerous volcanic eruptions. Ash in the stratosphere can lead to cooling, but not on the scale that Sagan suggested. The fact that hundreds of nukes popped in the open atmosphere without any detectable cooling seems to support this. I'm not saying it's an open-and-shut case against nuclear winter, because atmospheric simulations are insanely complicated and difficult to verify experimentally, but if the 1000 megaton volcanic explosion that led the the "Year without a summer" in 1814 didn't wipe us out, then I'm very skeptical that a few Hiroshima-type events could.

Radioactive contamination from weapons explosions is also a lot less than most people think. Most nukes are designed to explode in the air, which spreads out the contamination. This might sound bad, but the solution to pollution is dilution. By reducing the concentration of the contamination to negligible levels, these types of nuclear explosions result in very little in the way of health effects from fallout. Now, a nuke popping on the ground is a totally different animal, creating intense radiation fields around ground zero and throwing a lot of concentrated fallout into the air. You'd have to really want to salt the Earth to blow up nukes that way, because you'd actually cause physical damage in a smaller radius than you would by blowing up the nuke high enough that the fireball doesn't touch the ground.

You can actually simulate this on a web page: http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
Try it out; you can see what a nuke of varying sizes would do to your favorite places. FYI, if you're looking at radiation effects, 100 rads will make you sick, and 400 rads is an average lethal dose.

I'm not saying that I want everything to be hard science, but I think we could improve this without significantly affecting the overall plotline. Where can I find the procedure for submitting a rewrite?

[euphm1]

For the rundown on the scripting, the wiki section[github.com] is a good place to start.

For actual submission purposes, I'd just pack up a mod.[github.com] The community as a whole could either get behind it or not, and the author could like it or not. But at least the pieces would be present. General procedure seems to be Google Drive and then link in the mods section.

For an actual submission,[github.com] it's a github thing - not really my forte. I'd recommend the mod approach first since testing is useful and this would be a low priorty thing.

[euphm1]

Side note - I think you're wanting to look into the file "free worlds reconciliation.txt"

If you're not a modder - notepad++[notepad-plus-plus.org] is a good tool for that kind of thing.

[Avior]

The Syndicate has a lot of nukes.

Originally posted by Coriolis:

In the late stages of the campaign, the Syndicate is packing nukes on its ships, and the implication seems to be that they're threatening to paste Earth clean of human life. There's a commonly-held belief that our nuclear weapons could destroy planet Earth and wipe out our species. I've actually done the math on what it would take to blow up planet Earth, what it would take to destroy its surface, and what it would take to irradiate its surface enough to kill the population. The combined global arsenal of today is orders of magnitude too small to do any of these (if you're as much of a nerd as I am, I'd be glad to show you my calculations; it's fun... to me, anyway).

Off topic, but could you tell me how much it would take to blow up the moon?

Originally posted by Coriolis:

It would also make sense that humanity will likely invent far worse things a thousand years in the future than nuclear weapons.

Weaponized antimatter!

[Coriolis]

Originally posted by Avior:

Off topic, but could you tell me how much it would take to blow up the moon?

Sure. Assuming that the moon is a perfet and uniformly dense sphere that has no spin (approximations that make this calculation simpler), we can look up the following on wikipedia:
Average radius = 1737.1 km
Mass of the moon = 7.342*10^22 kilograms

The energy you'd need to blow up the moon is then given by the moon's gravitational binding energy:

Blowup Energy=3*(Newton's Gravitational Constant)*(Mass of moon)^2 / (5* (Moon Radius) )

The derivation of this formula is a neat little trick of calculus from Newton's law of gravitation.

Punching these in, I get a Blowup Energy of 1.24*10^29 Joules. That's 1.98 quadrillion Hiroshima bombs, or 54.3 billion times the combined explosive yield of the entire U.S. strategic arsenal. To put it into perspective, if you took the entire energy output of the sun, magically focused it all at the moon, and the moon magically absorbed all that energy and converted it into kinetic energy, it would take the sun about 10 minutes to destroy the moon.

(for the curious, it would take the sun about a week to destroy the Earth that way)

Another way to express this: If you wanted to blow the moon up in 1 second with a zap from some kind of energy weapon, the firing power output of that weapon would have to be over 600 times the entire output power of the sun. That's a big zap.

[euphm1]

Originally posted by Coriolis:

Another way to express this: If you wanted to blow the moon up in 1 second with a zap from some kind of energy weapon, the firing power output of that weapon would have to be over 600 times the entire output power of the sun. That's a big zap.

Seriously, this kind of dedication and singular points of advancement are why the Empire would take out the Federation.

Totally off topic, but worth it.

[Sinsling]

I'll admit I'm not hardcore science, but we are never told the exact yield of the nukes built by the syndicate. I always got the impression the test site you find is big enough for you to comfortably land what the story assumes is a mid-sized vessel (I think that is along the lines of a 600-800 ton spacecraft), have Ijs step out, look around, and notice the damages caused by underground testing. Hell, he was able to tell it was the correct isotope in a matter of minutes after presumably several years of man induced overgrowth and nuclear decay.

The game also describes why it would have to be tested that way, as the Navy atmospheric scans would easily pick up excess radiation from an atmospheric detonation of a nuke that size. The real question I guess is how the hell would they pick up the stellar tests from light-years away? Or you know... the syndicate could of used those stolen jump drives to test them well away from navy patrols. Derp.

[Coriolis]

To give you a sense of scale with nuclear craters, this is a picture of the crater from a 100 kiloton shallow underground test explosion:
http://old.seattletimes.com/special/trinity/art/sedan_crater.jpg

The crater is about 100 meters deep and about 390 meters across. You could easily fit a metal ship weighing thousands of tons inside it.

[Ker]

there are a few things to keep in mind:

Nukes have been around for a long time and have a high yield-to-mass ratio, they also have a huge EM radius even if their blast radius is restricted in space. Nukes using hyperspace or warp drive technologies as described both in the game and in real life could be effective space-based weapons because of their use of spacial compression and/or exotic matter. A "nuke" and an "atom bomb" are two entirely different things in context.

Further, the threat of all-out nuclear war has led to nukes in space being banned since, like, the cold war. Nukes in space is a scary concept unless you ask the one little niche group of idiots who think its a good idea. The threat of a nuke carrying hyperspace capable fleet would be a frightening prospect, even in the future, because you don't have to nuke the entire planet to disable a planet. Just launch a handfull of nukes at a single highly populated city and the planet will likely submit. Nukes being banned means they aren't ready to respond to this threat because the threat isnt supposed to exist.

This leads to another level of psychological warfare, "We could have stopped this if we thought anyone would try it, but we tried really hard to ensure such things would never happen in the first place." Nukes are more scary an idea than scary in practice. They are frightening, but somewhat impractical, people just don't realize the latter and focus on the former.

Originally posted by Sinsling:

Or you know... the syndicate could of used those stolen jump drives to test them well away from navy patrols. Derp.

There are at least 2 syndicate factions that are in a cold war with each-other but formed something of a mutual trust pact. One has the jump drives, the other developed nukes. This is covered in the main story.

[jafdy]

@Coriolis If you particularly want to rewrite the story, then you can go ahead and one of us that is also on GitHub can put it forward for you.


As Kiko has said you could make a planet surrender with just a few well placed weapons. In the initial bombings, two very important sites were wiped out. Although the planets were mostly unharmed, their relevance to the war diminished dramatically.

In the checkmate branch, Parliament says that their building would stand up to conventional weapons and that the Argosy was not carrying nukes, implying that the building would not stand up to a direct nuclear attack.
In the reconciliation branch, it is said that the only reason the Navy wasn't shooting at the Syndicate was that Parliament hadn't ordered it and that they wouldn't do so with the Syndicate in orbit with nukes.
One well placed nuke could wipe out the entirety of Parliament; that was the threat. Even if Parliament tried to scatter to survive the attack, the public backlash would likely destroy their political career; no politician would allow that. The proposed threat to be used in the Checkmate branch is the same.

@Avior: Shhh

[Avior]

Originally posted by jafdy:

[snip]

I apologize, but I personally find this extremely difficult to read and understand, so I have to fix it for the good of the forum...

Originally posted by jafdy (fixed):

If you particularly want to rewrite the story, then you can go ahead and one of us that is also on GitHub can [put it forward?] for you.


As Kiko has said you could make a planet surrender with just a few well placed weapons. In the initial bombings, two very important sites were wiped out. Although the planets were [mostly] unharmed, their relevance to the war [diminished dramatically?].

In the checkmate branch, Parliament says that their building would stand up to conventional weapons and that the Argosy was not carrying nukes, implying that the building would not stand up to a direct nuclear attack.
In the reconciliation branch, it is said that the only reason the Navy wasn't shooting at the Syndicate was that Parliament hadn't ordered it and that they wouldn't do so with the Syndicate in orbit with nukes.
One well placed nuke could wipe out [the entirety of Parliament]; that was the threat. Even if Parliament tried to scatter to survive the attack, the public backlash would likely destroy their political career; no politician would allow that. The [proposed?] threat to be used in the Checkmate branch is the same.

[Coriolis]

Originally posted by Kiko:

there are a few things to keep in mind:

Nukes have been around for a long time and have a high yield-to-mass ratio, they also have a huge EM radius even if their blast radius is restricted in space. Nukes using hyperspace or warp drive technologies as described both in the game and in real life could be effective space-based weapons because of their use of spacial compression and/or exotic matter. A "nuke" and an "atom bomb" are two entirely different things in context.

Further, the threat of all-out nuclear war has led to nukes in space being banned since, like, the cold war. Nukes in space is a scary concept unless you ask the one little niche group of idiots who think its a good idea. The threat of a nuke carrying hyperspace capable fleet would be a frightening prospect, even in the future, because you don't have to nuke the entire planet to disable a planet. Just launch a handfull of nukes at a single highly populated city and the planet will likely submit. Nukes being banned means they aren't ready to respond to this threat because the threat isnt supposed to exist.

This leads to another level of psychological warfare, "We could have stopped this if we thought anyone would try it, but we tried really hard to ensure such things would never happen in the first place." Nukes are more scary an idea than scary in practice. They are frightening, but somewhat impractical, people just don't realize the latter and focus on the former.

Originally posted by Sinsling:

Or you know... the syndicate could of used those stolen jump drives to test them well away from navy patrols. Derp.

There are at least 2 syndicate factions that are in a cold war with each-other but formed something of a mutual trust pact. One has the jump drives, the other developed nukes. This is covered in the main story.

I sometimes like to think that God is chuckling about how we've banned nuclear explosions in space, where things like supernovas happen. You're quite right that we've banned nuclear explosions in space due to the effects of the few exoatmospheric tests done back in the Cold War. Basically, sattelites are expensive, nukes close by Earth tend to disrupt them, and nukes also cause some nasty EMP effects for electricity-dependent stuff on the ground when popped in space. That ban is very Earth-centric; if you popped a nuke beyond the Moon's orbit, I doubt there would be any significant effect on Earth. That ban will need to be revised if we ever want to use nuclear explosions to knock an asteroid off a collision course with Earth.

I agree with you on the idea of the yield-to-mass ratio, you don't need an absolutely gigantic weapon to have an absolutely gigantic yield. It might be preferable to either emphasize the fact that the Syndicate has gigantic thermonuclear weapons or weapons that are akin to present-day nuclear weapons, but much more powerful. Since humans use something called an Armageddon Core to power really big ships, we could tie into that with Armageddon warheads that use some type of nuclear reaction even more powerful than fission or fusion, that are perhaps triggered with a thermonuclear device.

The way you characterize the psychological threat to parliament specifically is good; perhaps it might be useful to play that up.

[Coriolis]

Originally posted by Avior:

Originally posted by jafdy:

[snip]

I apologize, but I personally find this extremely difficult to read and understand, so I have to fix it for the good of the forum...

Originally posted by jafdy (fixed):

If you particularly want to rewrite the story, then you can go ahead and one of us that is also on GitHub can [put it forward?] for you.


As Kiko has said you could make a planet surrender with just a few well placed weapons. In the initial bombings, two very important sites were wiped out. Although the planets were [mostly] unharmed, their relevance to the war [diminished dramatically?].

In the checkmate branch, Parliament says that their building would stand up to conventional weapons and that the Argosy was not carrying nukes, implying that the building would not stand up to a direct nuclear attack.
In the reconciliation branch, it is said that the only reason the Navy wasn't shooting at the Syndicate was that Parliament hadn't ordered it and that they wouldn't do so with the Syndicate in orbit with nukes.
One well placed nuke could wipe out [the entirety of Parliament]; that was the threat. Even if Parliament tried to scatter to survive the attack, the public backlash would likely destroy their political career; no politician would allow that. The [proposed?] threat to be used in the Checkmate branch is the same.

I'll look into some revision suggestions; I have a couple of individual mission ideas I've been tinkering with, too.

[Ker]

Originally posted by Coriolis:

I sometimes like to think that God is chuckling about how we've banned nuclear explosions in space, where things like supernovas happen. You're quite right that we've banned nuclear explosions in space due to the effects of the few exoatmospheric tests done back in the Cold War. Basically, sattelites are expensive, nukes close by Earth tend to disrupt them, and nukes also cause some nasty EMP effects for electricity-dependent stuff on the ground when popped in space. That ban is very Earth-centric; if you popped a nuke beyond the Moon's orbit, I doubt there would be any significant effect on Earth. That ban will need to be revised if we ever want to use nuclear explosions to knock an asteroid off a collision course with Earth.

I agree with you on the idea of the yield-to-mass ratio, you don't need an absolutely gigantic weapon to have an absolutely gigantic yield. It might be preferable to either emphasize the fact that the Syndicate has gigantic thermonuclear weapons or weapons that are akin to present-day nuclear weapons, but much more powerful. Since humans use something called an Armageddon Core to power really big ships, we could tie into that with Armageddon warheads that use some type of nuclear reaction even more powerful than fission or fusion, that are perhaps triggered with a thermonuclear device.

The way you characterize the psychological threat to parliament specifically is good; perhaps it might be useful to play that up.

Knocking asteroids around with nukes is generally a bad idea. Gravitational tractoring works far better, and matchbooking them works best (firing an array of solar powered lasers at specific points on the asteroid in order to release gases that slightly change the trajectory of said asteroid so that it doesn't hit the planet.) Hell, just straight up crashing a non-explosive rocket into it and keeping the engine firing for as long as you can after, but only on specific rotations, works the best.

As for the psychologocial threat, that is already covered in both free worlds storylines, and will continue being built up across the Republic, Pirate, and Syndicate storylines, as well as my "sidekick" storylines (deep security forces, Tarah's pirate coalition, and the different colored indie) That psychological aspect is the key to why Nukes are so important in the game as it stands - even if they are impractical.