As far as I know, the big damage from Nuclear Weapons planetside is the massive blastwave that can pretty much scour the earth, with radiation and thermal damage bringing up the rear.

But in space there is no atmosphere to create a huge concussive and scouring blast wave, which means a nuclear weapon would have to rely on its all-directional thermal and radiation to do damage… but is that enough to actually be usful as a weapon in space, considering ships in space would be designed to handle radiation and extreme thermals due to the lack of any insulative atmosphere?

I know a lot of this might be supposition based on imaginary future tech and assumptions made about materials science and starship creation, but surely at least some rough guess could be made with regards to a thernonuclear detonation without the focusing effects of an atmosphere?

  • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    961·
    6 months ago

    I spent 20 minutes searching for an answer to this, and all my searches turned up nothing but video games and short stories.

    Appreciate you posting that, and honestly a little frustrated on why that didnt come up for me.

      • MeatsOfRage@lemmy.world
        218·
        6 months ago

        I’ve completely switched over to using ChatGPT as my basic question search engine now. Like I get that it’s confidently wrong at times and I wouldn’t go there for legal advice but for silly curiosities I’ve got a better chance at finding an answer to satisfy my query.

        • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
          36·
          6 months ago

          I beta tested Bard and have used ChatGPT and the number of times they responded with completely wrong answers was stunning. Confidently wrong is a greatvway to put it.

          I switched to DuckDuckGo a few years back and it’s been better than Google for a bit. At this rate, I expect Encyclopedia Britannica to make a strong comeback.

          • AmidFuror@kbin.social
            7·
            6 months ago

            What if you can’t afford the whole encyclopedia set and can only buy the sample volume?

            And speaking of volcanoes, man are they a violent igneous rock formation!

            • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
              4·
              6 months ago

              Jokes aside, the future of paywalled curated knowledge is already here. With the current assault on public libraries, I expect that fairly soon, knowledge will once again be a privileged of wealth.

          • Quexotic@infosec.pub
            1·
            6 months ago

            I’ve had good luck with that and using GPT4. Both have their strengths. They’re both great at tldr-ing, If you prompt well.