Well and I always had the impression that even if the T-Bomb wouldn’t break a planet apart, it could still cause major damage, since in theory most earth-like planets probably have some level of tectonic vulnerability.
Apart from the fact that a tectonic weapon could only damage the outer crust of a planet and that it is impossible to let a planet explode that way (maybe it _could_ work on a moon like ours though, I'm not sure.) I think it an interesting question, also with different versions of the story in different games:
A weapons that somehow uses tectonic vulnerabilities (basically it is a weapon that causes earthquakes, I dunno how but that's Dr. Severin's job) to attack a planet would do major damage to at least a continent.
Imagine someone drops a Temblor bomb into the San Andreas Fault in a time where there is big tension there, using a resonance frequency <technobabble>. They could trigger an earth quake that the people in California and the whole pacific area certainly wouldn't like (clue Tsunamis). Same goes for the people in Japan when someone drops a Temblor bomb into the Japan Trench.
Kilrah is tectonically unstable. That means it is less stable than Earth I presume. On Earth you would just destroy a part of a continent and cause some more destruction on the surface of the planet elsewhere, by Tsunamis and stuff. It is still a weapon of mass destruction but it has only a local effect on the one or two tectonic plates that are involved there. On Kilrah the tectonical structure was far more complex. It had many tectonic plates that shifted along all the time, building up tension everywhere. Also Kilrah had no oceans it seems, which is part of the problem. Those huge bodies of water absorb some of the shock (Tsunamis are not fun as we all know, but they don't do much damage - geologically speaking) and oceans normally have much thinner crust under them (10-15km compared to the 30-70km under a continent) that breaks more easily, allowing the whole system to get rid of some tension more often. Everyone knows that shock waves travel faster in solid materials than in liquids or gases (something the WTC truthers should read about, it explains some stuff they don't get even after more than ten years). So yeah, I can imagine why a planet like Kilrah would suffer more from a Temblor bomb attack.
Back to the games: I found it very interesting (and cool, and fitting to the "realistic" style I like in SciFi) that when we saw Kilrah in WCP it was not completely blown apart but it looked like this:
https://cdn.wcnews.com/newestshots/full/kilrah.gif
I like that roughly a thousand times better than what we see in WC3 (huge explosion, nothing remains. boring IMO)
Some remarks to that:
- Why is it still hot in the 2680s? Well, that's because there is nobody to cool it down. Space is a rather cool insulation since there is nothing (except your own radiation) to carry your heat away.
- Why does it still look like it is exploding? Big things are known to happen slow (except supernovae, those aren't). The Temblor bomb may have shaken the planet apart but I can't imagine how the planet could have exploded, since tectonics only happen in the crust, that is (even if you assume that Kilrah had a much thicker crust than Earth) just a small part of the planet is crust and thus likely to be influenced by tectonics. (to put it into perspective: Earth has a radius of 6371km, the crust is thickest under the big mountain ranges and it is nowhere thicker than 100km, normally it is just between 10km and 70km thick) So what we see is actually more than I would have expected. There must have been an explosion (we know that because we have seen it in WC3) that really spat parts of the planet into orbit.
- We see a ring of asteroids around the equator area. So we know the explosion was years ago, since it takes some time to form such rings. So that also fits nicely (I want to remind you that this is SciFi. In reality such things take hundreds or thousands of years to happen). We also know that Kilrah is still spinning, otherwise a ring like that would not be possible.
- What is with the stuff that looks like solar prominences? Cool thing! It tells us something about Kilrah's core.
Kilrah must have a rather big iron core with a strong magnetic field, and also quite a lot of iron in its mantle and crust material. What we see are parts of the planet that were blown away and are now returning to it, attracted by the core's gravity. They follow magnetic lines of force. They were blown away pretty fast which is the reason why some of them stayed in a kind of orbit for a while before finally the gravitation pulls them back in. It will still take some years for all of them to return. And when they finally hit Kilrah they will splash other parts up into space. That may happen a few times (actually what we see in the picture might already be the second or third time). Also Kilrah is constantly hit by bigger solid parts that were previously blown away.
I hate that the confeds did that to the Kilrathi. I can fully understand Melek: "In my bones I wish to kill you". Losing a war is hard. Losing it like that is... worse. Much worse.
Imagine a Kilrathi that lost everything his life was based on that day: His family, his clan, his Emperor, his home, his religion's places of worship and all hope that they may ever return. And he will always see it. There is no "cleaning up the rubble" like it happened in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Coventry, Dresden, or Guernica. The remains of Kilrah will stay right in the middle of Kilrathi space for thousands of years to come, reminding the Kilrathi that they were utterly and completely defeated.
Ahhh... I think I got carried away there. a bit. again.
Let's consider, though, the planetary missions of WC3, how huge the surface is compared to your fighter, and imagine the implications - how many ships would it take to guard a planet and make sure no one ever leaves it? For this reason, the safest way of quarantining an entire system is to blockade the jump points.
