Nuke damage

[MrMom]

Now i know that the Rifts book gives damage tables for missiles with nuke warheads but what i was wondering was how much damage would say one of the old city buster type nukes do to say Atlantis or Chi-town. Some of them were said to be strong enough to take out all of NY or LA or other big citys. They were i think supposed to be upwards of 1000's of Mega-tons. Please correct me if i am wrong. Thank you

[finn69]

cs navy has onfo on the cs arsenal of citybuster nukes.

[CyCo]

Or you could try searching the net for a Rifts website (can't remember which one...), that had a far more realistic section on nuclear warheads/missiles.

Good luck!!


8]

[jedi078]

I think 1,000 mega tons is a gigaton, and the USSR blew up a 57 megaton bomb once as part of a test.

Anyhow other then tactical nukes, nuclear weapons should only be used as plot devices. Even so a tactical nuke is not something you want to hand to your PC’s frequently.

[glitterboy2098]

I think 1,000 mega tons is a gigaton, and the USSR blew up a 57 megaton bomb once as part of a test.

Anyhow other then tactical nukes, nuclear weapons should only be used as plot devices. Even so a tactical nuke is not something you want to hand to your PC’s frequently.

for tactical nukes, IE: 10 kilotons or less (usually much less, i'd not trust players with anything over a Davy Crockett, .5 kiloton or less), i'd suggest using the SB4 stats,just reducing the area of effect on the extra damage stuff listed.

a davy crockett would probably be about 8d6x10 md, in a blast radius of about 500 feet (150m). the radiation is much more deadly, leathal dose out to 500 feet (150m), and a probably fatal one out to 1/4th mile. (400 meters)

anything over 10 kilotons is a city killer, and its easier just to say "your dead".

i used to be in the "the nukes are too weak" camp, but in further research i found that the effects of a 20 kiloton bomb and a 200 kiloton bomb aren't much different damage wise, it's just the larger bomb spreads the damage out over a larger area.

i still think they are a bit too weak (i'd bump up most myself to about 5x the damage), but i no longer see them as quite as high MD weapons.

[wolfsgrin]

I think the point with MD weaponry is that you can get the HE with out putting lethal doses of RADS in the enviroment. An army can just move in and rebuild instead of waitng decades to move in and make the bombed area usefull to them.

[Nekira Sudacne]

Now i know that the Rifts book gives damage tables for missiles with nuke warheads but what i was wondering was how much damage would say one of the old city buster type nukes do to say Atlantis or Chi-town. Some of them were said to be strong enough to take out all of NY or LA or other big citys. They were i think supposed to be upwards of 1000's of Mega-tons. Please correct me if i am wrong. Thank you

your way overstating the tonnage.

1000 megatons, or gigatons, would wipe out most life on the planet.

[DocS]

A city buster... a rule of thumb is... it's really not much of a worry as to how much damage they do. If the party's caught in the blast, they fried. There is a point where the numbers would be so large one way or another (millions of MD), that a definitive value is of little use...

Unless you're setting up something like using a nuke to kill Splyncryth. Then the GM simply needs to answer 'yes' or 'no', a damage value is kind of more trouble than it's worth

[glitterboy2098]

city busters' rarely got over a few hundred kilotons. the 200 kt warhead of the Tomahawk is your basic citybuster.

the MIRV'd warheads on SLBM's (like the Trident missile on the Ohio class) each have a yeild of about 475 kt. each trident carries 8 of them. stats wise your looking at about 50% higher than the tomahawks warhead in SB4.

in order to destroy a city the size of LA or New York, US doctrine calls for a multiple warhead strike using overlapping blast radii. thus creating the maximum blast coverage with the minimum of yeild.

the largest warhead in the US's arsenal was the B53, a 9 megaton device carried by bombers like the B-52 or mounted as the warhead of a Titan II missile. it was designed for 'bunker busting', using a groundburst to transmit massive shockwaves through the ground, able to cause even hardened bunkers and facilities to collapse. it would worked pretty well as a citykiller too.

the most powerful current warhead in the US stockpile is the B83, which has a maximum yeild of 1.2 megatons.

thankfully, none of these are likely to get into the hands of players in rifts, and the few groups with these or equivilants (Coalition, NGR, new navy), are all reluctant to use them, mostly due to the knowledge that it was a nuclear war that sparked the cataclysm in the first place.

[MrMom]

Thanks Nekira that was part of what i was looking for. As to the other part i was wondering how much damage the citys themselves would take since they are made of MD materials. If i am still not getting it just tell me so. Thanks

[Nekira Sudacne]

the CS Navy book has the stats.

Answer: 3d6*10 SDC from the blast and 2d6*10 SDC from the heat.

Yes, SDC. an average hand grenade in Rifts is more powerful than a nuke, just less blast radius.

That's the real reason why no one uses nukes. They're obsolete.

[glitterboy2098]

actually, it's:

3D6x10 SDC or 1 MD to anything within 6 miles from heat.
3D6x100 SDC (3D6 md) out to 10 miles from the dynamic overpressure (shockwave), also hurls small objects with lethal force.
damage from radiation is 1D6x100 sdc out to 3 miles (3D6x10 to megadamage creatures), 5D6x10 sdc out to 6 miles (2D4x10 md to megadamage creatures), with a successful save against poision reducing damage by half. (radiation only effects living things)
there is also a 90% that EMP destroyed any electronics within 10 miles.

this is in addition to the 3D4x100 MD to a 1000 foot blast radius and 1D4x100 MD out to 3 miles of ground zero caused by the bomb itself.

of course, this is for a 200 kt blast.


----------------
MD buildings would still be standing if not at ground zero, but they'd be empty, twisted, burned, half-knocked over wrecks. tall buildings like skyscrapers would likely have been blown over, leaving shattered stumps.

SDC buildings, unless made of bunker like designs (which pretty much count as MDC) would be blown away, with those farthest from ground zero maybe left intact but twisted/burned/half-knocked-over. woodframe buildings pretty much disintergrate, turning into so much kindling in the shockwave. the heat pusle from the detonation tends to flash fry them too.



i recommend watching Terminator 2, the depiction of Judgement day in Sarah Connor's dream has been caleld the most accurate depiction of a nuclear blast in a movie.

[demos606]

Just for point of comparison, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was reported as a 13 kiloton explosion.

[MrMom]

Wow Giltterboy 2098 that was great thanks for the info.

[Qev]

1000 megatons, or gigatons, would wipe out most life on the planet.

A gigaton explosion wouldn't be that big a deal for life on Earth. It would probably cause a few years of climate effects, but you'd not likely see mass extinctions or anything (though it'd be awful rough on the local neighborhood ).

The explosion of the Krakatoa volcano in 1883, for example, is estimated to have been a fifth of a gigaton (200MT), four times bigger than the largest nuclear device ever detonated, and ~15000 times more powerful than Little Boy. A space rock with an impact energy of around a gigaton ought to impact the Earth roughly every 30-50 thousand years.

[finn69]

the MIRV'd warheads on SLBM's (like the Trident missile on the Ohio class) each have a yeild of about 475 kt. each trident carries 8 of them. stats wise your looking at about 50% higher than the tomahawks warhead in SB4.


each trident sub carries 24 tubes with 16 Mirv warheads each.

[glitterboy2098]

the MIRV'd warheads on SLBM's (like the Trident missile on the Ohio class) each have a yeild of about 475 kt. each trident carries 8 of them. stats wise your looking at about 50% higher than the tomahawks warhead in SB4.

each trident sub carries 24 tubes with 16 Mirv warheads each.

each Ohio class sub carries 24 tubes of Trident II SLBM's, 8 MIRV's per SLBM.

the D-5 model of Trident II can techncally carry up to 10 each, but treaties limit them to 8. the non-nuclear warhead version of the Trident II carries 4-5 Kinetic impactors. (roughly 1d6x360 Md. to a single target. each. at 10 km/s velocity, thats alot of damage from impact, making explosives redundant. 'blast radius' does factor in, call it 10-20 foot radius, due to the thermal expansion such an impact would cause when the projectile vaporizes on impact, not only releasing a heatpulse but showring the area with the shattered remains of whatever it hit))

Global Security

prior to the deployment of the current W88 MIRV warhead, Tridents caried the W76 MIRV warhead, whch was a mere 100 kilotons. (would do 25% less damage than the tomahawk entry above. about the same as the CS' "firefly" torpdeo.

of course, the CS could have obtained the SSGN Ohio's, the cruise missile refit. 154 Tomahawk Cruise Missiles fitted in VLS arrays, 9 to each former SLBM tube. one tube got refitted as a diver lockout chamber.
this would make the CS so much more dangerous.

That's the real reason why no one uses nukes. They're obsolete.

no more obsolete than a bullet in a world dominated by lasers. even in rifts, nukes are the most powerful single explosive device ever. sure, in rifts a pistol can have the firepower of a modern 120mm tank cannon, but a nuclear weapon is so much more powerful than that that it's not funny.

the'nuclear' warheads on LRM's are probably laser induced fusion warheads with only a few grams of hydrogen and tritium. the same bang as a few tons of HE, but at a fraction of the mass and bulk. a true nuke like the city killers described in SB4 are still the most destructive technological weapon in the game.

even the antimatter warheads of phase world don't rank much higher, being a mere 4-8 times higher yeild. (the Antimatter cruise missile being roughly 400 kt yeild (only a few grams of antimatter), the singularity cruise missile being about 1 megaton (a few kilogram or so of hyper-compressed matter).

[cornholioprime]

city busters' rarely got over a few hundred kilotons. the 200 kt warhead of the Tomahawk is your basic citybuster.

the MIRV'd warheads on SLBM's (like the Trident missile on the Ohio class) each have a yeild of about 475 kt. each trident carries 8 of them. stats wise your looking at about 50% higher than the tomahawks warhead in SB4.

in order to destroy a city the size of LA or New York, US doctrine calls for a multiple warhead strike using overlapping blast radii. thus creating the maximum blast coverage with the minimum of yeild.

the largest warhead in the US's arsenal was the B53, a 9 megaton device carried by bombers like the B-52 or mounted as the warhead of a Titan II missile. it was designed for 'bunker busting', using a groundburst to transmit massive shockwaves through the ground, able to cause even hardened bunkers and facilities to collapse. it would worked pretty well as a citykiller too.

the most powerful current warhead in the US stockpile is the B83, which has a maximum yeild of 1.2 megatons.

thankfully, none of these are likely to get into the hands of players in rifts, and the few groups with these or equivilants (Coalition, NGR, new navy), are all reluctant to use them, mostly due to the knowledge that it was a nuclear war that sparked the cataclysm in the first place.

With the possible exceptions of the Beautiful Dreamer (Rifts: Mercenaries) and the Chiang-Ku known as Rama Set and Lo Fung, nobody on Rifts Earth knows or knew what brought about the Great Cataclysm. Nobody.

Certainly not the contemporary human inhabitants of pre Rifts Earth -they were too busy trying to survive the Rifts and the Monsters to collect much data...

[finn69]

possibly the cs knows as well. they do have the lonestar base and the records of the dimensional portal experiment in sub level 9

[Borast]

Remember, that the bombs that the US dropped on Japan were low level air bursts. "Ground Zero" was effectively erased from existance.

Easiest way to run it is simple... Do some quick research on the blast effects of a nuke, then halve the radii vs MDC structures.

For a tac nuke, whatever it is attached to is just gone, regardless of how many MDC it has. After that, consider it an uber powerful sachel-type charge...scale-up the blast radius, multiply the damage by 100, and then add extra blast radii and scale back the damage to x50/x25/x12/x6/x3/x1 for each "ring."