Is Behemoth's energy output sufficient?

C

Crowley

Rear Admiral
This is very nitpicky, but I was browsing the trivia archives and came upon what Admiral Tolwyn says the output of Behemoth's main gun is: 500 million gigawatts (or 500 petawatts). According to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaton one megaton of explosive power equals 4.2 petajoules. This would mean that one second of continuous firing from the Behemoth's main gun equals a nuclear bomb with explosive power of roughly 120 megatons. I don't remember accurately how long the Behemoth fired during the test run, but I'd say it was five seconds at most. A 600 megaton blast would leave a freaking big crater and destroy everything for miles and miles around it and burn up a significant amount of the atmosphere around the point of impact, but I doubt it would come even close to blowing an Earth-sized planet into pieces.

Please, somebody prove me wrong. ;)
 
The Behemoth wasn't supposed to directly destroy the planet - just start the planet on shaking itself apart tectonically (like the temblor bomb). Confed wasn't sure if the Behemoth would be capable of completely destroying a more stable planet (according to the WC3 novel).
 
Maybe...

It could be because all those craters being created by that five or six second blast is so centralized into one beam. And maybe after one crater is made then one is made deeper, and then deeper until it reaches the planets core. I would think that would be an apocolyptic thing to happen. I mean if the energy of all those blasts were all over the planet, then yes, perhaps it would survive. But I just imagined since it was all focused in a single area, that the damage became exponential with every millisecond.

That's just my idea. I don't know the math or anything. But who knows what other unknown variables were in the Behemoths design. When Tolywyn was briefing the Captain and Blair, I'm sure he was summing up just the most rudimentary elements in the Behemoth's design. Those two weren't exactly science buffs you know.
 
I was also thinking that this might have something to do with the target planet's tectonic unstability. Anyway, I dug up some points of comparison. About a million years ago a meteorite impacted in Zhamashin, Kazaksthan producing an explosion of about 100 000 megatons (and the theoretical meteorite impact that ended the age of dinosaurs would've been a thousand times bigger). The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 was about 200 megatons, and the eruption of Thera which is believed to have happened around 1650-1500 BC was several times bigger. Yet the Earth hasn't been blown apart.
 
don't get specific, it's sci-fi!!! use you imagination! if a beam of 500 petawats destroys a planet, then it does!
 
lol....sometimes it's good to just take things at face value and not get all technical...
 
Well, I wasn't all that serious here to begin with. Reminds me of a certain physics major who calculated that the Death Star couldn't produce enough energy to destroy a planet the way it did even if it converted it's entire mass to energy.
 
It's all good

It was actually one of the better threads I've seen in awhile and I enjoyed talking about it. In all science fiction I like to talk about the logistics of things. Some things can make sense, and others require a stretch of the imagination. A good science fiction story will have stuff that is obviously fictional, but will make rules that even these made things must abide by.

I always thought the Behemoth looked too fragile to really produce that high energy beam. I don't just mean that it was weak in armor but it didn't look like it had much structural integrity to begin with. I think all the ships in WC3 have this look about them like they were just a bunch of steel rods welded together. The Concordia was a solid looking ship. Obviously the Vesuvius appeared like a rock solid submarine...er something.
 
I remember reading somewhere on these forums that the ships in WC3 were for the most part older than the ones in WC1, they were simply modified a bit to serve as frontline military vessels as the Confederation lost more and more of the latest stuff. Of course, much of the look of the ships were due to the limitations of 3D technology of the time (that's at least my intepretation). This is most obvious in the Kilrathi ships. Before they were quite rounded, now they're sharp and jagged. Takes less polygons.
 
some of the ships are older (ranger class for example) while others are ships of new design (tallahasse cruiser) that were meant to go only with new carrier designs (lexington class)

I also think that the 3d factor might play a role in the look of some ships....
 
To the best of my knowledge, the Tallahassee cruiser is fairly old. And its design certainly had nothing to do with the Armada Lexington.
 
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