Nukes and stuff

Blaster

Blaster

Rear Admiral
I could be wrong about some of this but I believe that the wc2 torpedoes had either nuclear warheads or equivalent antimatter warheads and they were supposed to do little damage if they went off outside the shields of a capital ship. By wc3 weapons technology had increased and fighters were able to take down the shields on big ships with guns and regular missiles. Does this mean that guns in wc3 are as powerful as nuclear weapons? I’m sure the guns release a lot of energy but I never really got the impression that they were that powerful.
 
I'd argue that each cap ship weapon in Wing commander has two components, the actual detonation device to cause damage and the "Electronic countermeasures" component which allows it to cross a "shield".

Thus nuclear devices and antimatter detonators might be the most powerful in WC but if a nuke goes off against a phase shield of a cap ship or fighter there is appearently little to no damage.

However, add a rather large "electronic counter measure" package and get it through the phase shield and it appears that you can take down the largest cap ship in two or three hits.

Same goes with the guns, if the lasers in WC3 can penetrate the phase shields of the time, they are inherently stronger than a nuke that can't and thus guns come back into style as cap ship killers.

It appeared in WC1 that guns could cross phase shields, then couldn't (causing everyone to switch to big anti-matter torps), then in WC3 it apprearently reverted back to guns being able to cross. It's too bad they didn't stick with the WC2 technology, I felt that it made the most sense and made for exciting game play.
 
The WC3 shields ARE the same shields that were used in WC2--it's just that over the intervening couple of years both the Kilrathi and Confed have brought in a new generation of fighter guns that can penetrate them. Then in Prophecy we see a new generation of shields.

Basically, locking guns or torpedoes (or missiles) onto a phase-shield-protected target is a cryptography battle. It is a race between the attacking ship's computers trying to decipher the defender's shield patterns, and the defender's computers trying to change the shield patterns unpredictably faster than the attacker can keep up.

This means that when only capships can carry powerful enough computers to defeat the defender's computer, then only they can pierce shields. Once they become available in bomber-sized craft, then torpedo bombers can be used. Finally, when a fighter's computers can figure out the shield pattern in the interval between gun shots, it becomes possible for fighter guns to pierce the phase shields. When that happens, there is a sudden incentive to invest in even MORE powerful computers (and faster-responding shield generators) for the capships so that they can become invulnerable to fighters again, and the cycle repeats.
 
Heyy, I missed Nukes and stuff. Space Point.

In short, the idea (some would say conceit!) is that the guns in Wing Commander III+ *do* do more damage... but that the armor and shields are also much higher (or rather the shields are the same.) Does that make them as powerful as a nuclear weapon? It's hard to say, since that isn't a standard for measuring anything... nuclear weapons can range from tiny tactical weapons to giant city destroying beasts.

Torpedoes in Wing Commander II have antimatter warheads - there are versions out there with fusion warheads, too (they show up in WCIV.) The idea is that torpedoes (all torpedoes) lock on to pass safely through the shields of a ship and so only do damage to the hull... they don't do so much damage that they take down the shields and the hull at once (this is, however, how the Mace works.)
 
Is there any information on exactly how powerful the torpedoes are? It would make the games feel a little different if I knew that each salvo from my guns had the same amount of energy as even just a few kiloton nuke.
 
The Wing Commander IV torpedoes were said to have a "multi megaton" yield - I can't think of anything more specific than that.
 
I might be wrong about this, but isn't Megaton used to describe all high energy events in comparable terms to conventional explosives, not just nuclear weapons?
 
Yes, he was wondering about the yield, not whether or not it was a nuclear weapon (it is, though - they're said to have fusion warheads.)
 
Ryock - Yes, a megaton yield is equivalent to million tonnes of TNT in energy output. (Hence kiloton being 1000 tonnes, though apologies for cross-threading metric/imperial measurements). I don't suppose this has to be a reference to nuclear weapons only, it could refer to matter-antimatter annihilation just as easily.
 
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