Explosive damage from destroyed parts?

[intelliCom]

I recently remembered a video by Scott Manley about metallic hydrogen. Rewatched it and he mentioned how it being really powerful as a rocket fuel makes it just as powerful at exploding if there's a problem. This makes me wonder if we're going to get explosive damage from destroyed parts, mainly fuel tanks.

I know explosions in space wouldn't be nearly as big without the oxygen necessary, but let's say a metallic hydrogen fuel tank was destroyed from an impact or overheating. Should that fuel tank's destruction result in a large explosion that can damage other parts? It would make rapid unscheduled disassembly more fun to watch, while also providing more incentive to protect your fuel tanks.

If the destruction of a metallic hydrogen fuel tank would cause a large damaging explosion, what other fuel tanks would? Would helium-3 tanks do this? What about Orion pulse units? Etc, etc.

[The Aziz]

The explosion system is based on mass and content of exploding part. So definitely expect bigger boom from MH tank than some monoprop.

[darthgently]

I'm on the edge of my seat anticipating criticism that SRB explosions should look different than liquid fuel tank explosions, because "blowing chunks" is different that "spewing fluid".   Surely a critical game stopping discussion that will occur, lol

[intelliCom]

16 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

The explosion system is based on mass and content of exploding part.

Wait, "is"? Was there a dev log or show and tell I missed?

2 minutes ago, darthgently said:

I'm on the edge of my seat anticipating criticism that SRB explosions should look different than liquid fuel tank explosions, because "blowing chunks" is different that "spewing fluid".   Surely a critical game stopping discussion that will occur, lol

Well, there'll be people asking why, and then they'll learn like with all the other things KSP2 has to introduce. Really reinforces the "solid fuel" part of it.

Also, considering how SRBs are essentially solid, would solid chunks exploding everywhere mean they just burn brightly for a few seconds like a bunch of flares, while fizzling down to gas?

[darthgently]

2 minutes ago, intelliCom said:

would solid chunks exploding everywhere mean they just burn brightly for a few seconds like a bunch of flares, while fizzling down to gas?

That is what I'm picturing but really don't know.  It would be cool to see an effect like that

[The Aziz]

10 hours ago, intelliCom said:

Wait, "is"? Was there a dev log or show and tell I missed?

 

Misinformed about the mass, I was. But maybe it is in the calculation.

But yes, here

 

 

Edited November 16, 2022 by The Aziz

[intelliCom]

19 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Misinformed about the mass, I was. But maybe it is in the calculation.

But yes, here

 

 

That's more about how the explosions look. That's nice, but I'm referring to the explosion of a part damaging other parts. Seems kinda silly to have a huge explosion from a fuel tank while that's the only thing that ends up being destroyed.

[Vl3d]

We need diverse explosions, but as important is that parts without fuel or pressure should have crash animations without explosions. Not everything should go boom like in KSP1. Rolling over a rover with 1 battery should not cause it to explode. Maybe just flare a little because of the lithium.

Also I would love to see parts showing their age by looking worn down, to see parts disintegrating and melting, to see plastic deformation.

And I would like to see more actual soil damage and permanent debris - on the ground and in space. So we start to actually care about the difference between deorbiting boosters and just blowing them up in the Tracking Station.

Edited November 16, 2022 by Vl3d

[mcwaffles2003]

15 hours ago, Vl3d said:

We need diverse explosions, but as important is that parts without fuel or pressure should have crash animations without explosions. Not everything should go boom like in KSP1. Rolling over a rover with 1 battery should not cause it to explode. Maybe just flare a little because of the lithium.

I believe the devs mentioned non explosive parts wouldnt explode

15 hours ago, Vl3d said:

Also I would love to see parts showing their age by looking with down, to see parts disintegrating and melting, to see plastic deformation.

And I would like to see more actual soil damage and permanent debris - on the ground and in space. So we start to actually care about the difference between deorbiting boosters and just blowing them up in the Tracking Station.

This is in no way a realistic expectation and monitoring all the debris and surface damage would really fill up game memory and bring lots of systems to a slow.

 

21 hours ago, intelliCom said:

That's more about how the explosions look. That's nice, but I'm referring to the explosion of a part damaging other parts. Seems kinda silly to have a huge explosion from a fuel tank while that's the only thing that ends up being destroyed.

Im going to laugh when we crash an orion drive and a nuclear explosion erupts only for the fuel tank to be the only thing destroyed.

[intelliCom]

25 minutes ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

This is in no way a realistic expectation and monitoring all the debris and surface damage would really fill up game memory and bring lots of systems to a slow.

It could approximate it. The location of the damage doesn't need to be kept, but if individual parts maintain their own small integers describing the damage, a procedural texture could be placed over the top based on that damage.

 

16 hours ago, Vl3d said:

So we start to actually care about the difference between deorbiting boosters and just blowing them up in the Tracking Station.

This is probably a job for Kerbalism / RO. I'm all for it, but half the reason to delete permanent objects is due to memory usage. I only usually have about 3 or 4 active vessels at any one time, and delete debris / unused spacecraft when I get an opportunity to do so.

[shdwlrd]

2 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

Im going to laugh when we crash an orion drive and a nuclear explosion erupts only for the fuel tank to be the only thing destroyed.

There was a warning about using the Orion drive near the KSC and colonies. I think nukes will cause the amount of damage as you would expect. (Deliberate or not)

The funny thing is, I can see the storage getting destroyed by a nuke, but not seeing any type of chain reaction. Nukes are very stable, if they weren't, they wouldn't be used as weapons.

[mcwaffles2003]

1 hour ago, shdwlrd said:

The funny thing is, I can see the storage getting destroyed by a nuke, but not seeing any type of chain reaction. Nukes are very stable, if they weren't, they wouldn't be used as weapons.

I've been actually wondering about this cause I know nukes aren't like conventional weapons where a random nearby explosion will detonate them since detonating modern nukes requires very specific mechanisms to work in series. Old school ones just slammed 2 chunks of high purity U235/Pu239 together though so that could potentially happen accidentally upon an impact...

[shdwlrd]

2 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

Old school ones just slammed 2 chunks of high purity U235/Pu239 together though so that could potentially happen accidentally upon an impact...

If I'm remembering correctly, even the first nukes the nuclear reaction was a secondary reaction. They still used high energy chemical explosives to drive the catalyst into the radioactive core. (Think something  akin of a shape charge.)

So they were very stable from the beginning. But yeah, there was a (very slim) chance of accidental detonation. The modern designs are far safer. The nuclear reaction won't happen unless the detonation sequence happens in the correct order. If not, you're just spreading radioactive material everywhere. (Not as devastating, but not a good thing to happen either.)

Edited November 17, 2022 by shdwlrd
Typo

[mcwaffles2003]

33 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

If I'm remembering correctly, even the first nukes the nuclear reaction was a secondary reaction. They still used high energy chemical explosives to drive the catalyst into the radioactive core. (Think something  akin of a shape charge.)

So they were very stable from the beginning. But yeah, there was a (very slim) chance of accidental detonation. The modern designs are far safer. The nuclear reaction won't happen unless the detonation sequence happens in the correct order. If not, you're just spreading radioactive material everywhere. (Not as devastating, but not a good thing to happen either.)

You're talking about little boy I think and it wasn't a shaped charge anymore than a bullet is a shaped charge. For a fission explosion to happen all you need is enough fissile material in a ball, if the ball is too small the neutrons escape, as the balls diameter increases so does absorption due to path length and there's a steep exponential where after a certain point energy generation goes from almost nothing to "wow that's hot but its still just sitting there" to "wow holy jesus the town just disappeared". Advancments in the technology after the initial weapons scaled down the total charge mass and focused more on the use of neutron reflectors to increase path length, giving each neutron a greater chance to intersect instead of just adding more mass to generate more neutrons & path length. This means you can have a smaller ball of fissile fuel and just quickly clap together a molybdenum shell around it to get the same reaction a larger plain fissile ball would generate. Modern fusion based nukes rely on fission nukes to compress Deu/Tri (or whatever mix you like) which are the ones that require very specific geometries, but fission nukes are relatively easy to detonate. I'd be surprised though id the orion drive gets propelled by hydrogen bombs though as that is a lot of impact to absorb.

Edited November 17, 2022 by mcwaffles2003

[magnemoe]

7 hours ago, shdwlrd said:

There was a warning about using the Orion drive near the KSC and colonies. I think nukes will cause the amount of damage as you would expect. (Deliberate or not)

The funny thing is, I can see the storage getting destroyed by a nuke, but not seeing any type of chain reaction. Nukes are very stable, if they weren't, they wouldn't be used as weapons.

It was an developer comment that crashing an Orion drive hard enough to destroy the magazine will explode the magazine. 
Its not realistic, but here I say its Kerbal and rule of cool wins out. 
 

[magnemoe]

3 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

You're talking about little boy I think and it wasn't a shaped charge anymore than a bullet is a shaped charge. For a fission explosion to happen all you need is enough fissile material in a ball, if the ball is too small the neutrons escape, as the balls diameter increases so does absorption due to path length and there's a steep exponential where after a certain point energy generation goes from almost nothing to "wow that's hot but its still just sitting there" to "wow holy jesus the town just disappeared". Advancments in the technology after the initial weapons scaled down the total charge mass and focused more on the use of neutron reflectors to increase path length, giving each neutron a greater chance to intersect instead of just adding more mass to generate more neutrons & path length. This means you can have a smaller ball of fissile fuel and just quickly clap together a molybdenum shell around it to get the same reaction a larger plain fissile ball would generate. Modern fusion based nukes rely on fission nukes to compress Deu/Tri (or whatever mix you like) which are the ones that require very specific geometries, but fission nukes are relatively easy to detonate. I'd be surprised though id the orion drive gets propelled by hydrogen bombs though as that is a lot of impact to absorb.

You are correct, and the common design with shaped chares will just create an nuclear explosion if all the shaped charges goes off exactly at once as in length of the wires matter here.  
If it explode in any other way you get an nasty dirty bomb nothing else.  
Now the uranium gun style bomb would make an nuclear explosion if the high explosives  was triggered by accident so its much less safe. 

Another issue is that an Orion drive magazine contains plenty of high explosives but its questionable if you could get an chain reaction here. 

 

[magnemoe]

12 hours ago, shdwlrd said:

There was a warning about using the Orion drive near the KSC and colonies. I think nukes will cause the amount of damage as you would expect. (Deliberate or not)

The funny thing is, I can see the storage getting destroyed by a nuke, but not seeing any type of chain reaction. Nukes are very stable, if they weren't, they wouldn't be used as weapons.

This is good as it indicates explosion damage, so if one tank explodes it will damage other stuff if its stuff like fuel and oxidizer tanks they will also explode, hopefully other parts will either get destroyed or get an velocity away from the explosion. 

Also: Do not start burn, repeat do not fire from the shuttle here. 

[kerbiloid]

12 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

Old school ones just slammed 2 chunks of high purity U235/Pu239 together though so that could potentially happen accidentally upon an impact...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

9 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

This means you can have a smaller ball of fissile fuel and just quickly clap together a molybdenum shell around it to get the same reaction a larger plain fissile ball would generate. Modern fusion based nukes rely on fission nukes to compress Deu/Tri (or whatever mix you like) which are the ones that require very specific geometries, but fission nukes are relatively easy to detonate.

They are DT-boosted, and don't have enough fissiles to form a critical mass without fizzing into less that a 1 t of TNT without DT injection. 

But there were accidents when suddenly watered fissiles got locally and exploded with irradiating people in the room, or dried and exploding (probably, thermally) 100 t of TNT in a waste pool.

Keep the water from the fissiles, it's moderating and can suddenly affect the total cross-section.

***

The Orion nukes can be made safe. DT-boosted and pure uranium, without plutonium, or with minimal amount of it.

As their required yield is negligible (0.1 .. several kt), their high-exposives can be made thin.
If the plutonium is still used in their sparkplug, it should be not even compressed, just slapped to turn its metastable delta-phase crystal structure into alpha-phase.

In this case the total mass of explosives is relatively small (10..20 kg per charge or so), and the drums can be made blast-protected.

If the nukes don't contain the DT-boosting tritium before the shot (inject it from the cannon syringe on shot), they can't properly explode.

Edited November 17, 2022 by kerbiloid

[mcwaffles2003]

15 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

It's a crazy experiment, I like how Kyle Hill presented the story around it. Slotin should have lived in the Kerbal universe...

15 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

They are DT-boosted, and don't have enough fissiles to form a critical mass without fizzing into less that a 1 t of TNT without DT injection. 

But there were accidents when suddenly watered fissiles got locally and exploded with irradiating people in the room, or dried and exploding (probably, thermally) 100 t of TNT in a waste pool.

Keep the water from the fissiles, it's moderating and can suddenly affect the total cross-section.

***

The Orion nukes can be made safe. DT-boosted and pure uranium, without plutonium, or with minimal amount of it.

As their required yield is negligible (0.1 .. several kt), their high-exposives can be made thin.
If the plutonium is still used in their sparkplug, it should be not even compressed, just slapped to turn its metastable delta-phase crystal structure into alpha-phase.

In this case the total mass of explosives is relatively small (10..20 kg per charge or so), and the drums can be made blast-protected.

If the nukes don't contain the DT-boosting tritium before the shot (inject it from the cannon syringe on shot), they can't properly explode.

That's pretty cool, never knew they utilized that kind of structural mechanics to rapidly change density.

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

That's pretty cool, never knew they utilized that kind of structural mechanics to rapidly change density.

Living classics.

https://nuclearweaponarchive.org

https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/News/INESAPTR1.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_hydride_bomb

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo

The second link is also about the metastable metallic hydrogen and antimatter nuke hype reasons.

Edited November 18, 2022 by kerbiloid

[kspnerd122]

On 11/15/2022 at 9:28 AM, intelliCom said:

I recently remembered a video by Scott Manley about metallic hydrogen. Rewatched it and he mentioned how it being really powerful as a rocket fuel makes it just as powerful at exploding if there's a problem. This makes me wonder if we're going to get explosive damage from destroyed parts, mainly fuel tanks.

I know explosions in space wouldn't be nearly as big without the oxygen necessary, but let's say a metallic hydrogen fuel tank was destroyed from an impact or overheating. Should that fuel tank's destruction result in a large explosion that can damage other parts? It would make rapid unscheduled disassembly more fun to watch, while also providing more incentive to protect your fuel tanks.

If the destruction of a metallic hydrogen fuel tank would cause a large damaging explosion, what other fuel tanks would? Would helium-3 tanks do this? What about Orion pulse units? Etc, etc.

He3 Isnt flamable and it getting hit just means it spills out, it wouldnt explode
Nukes are VERY hard to set off accidentally, so no need to worry about orion pulse units being accidentally set off

[GoldForest]

2 hours ago, kspnerd122 said:

He3 Isnt flamable and it getting hit just means it spills out, it wouldnt explode
Nukes are VERY hard to set off accidentally, so no need to worry about orion pulse units being accidentally set off

Inb4 Jeb 'accidentally' 'short circuits' the firing mechanism on all the nukes while they're in the magazine. 

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, GoldForest said:

Inb4 Jeb 'accidentally' 'short circuits' the firing mechanism on all the nukes while they're in the magazine. 

Who was part of the endgame in Niven's Footfall. 
Granted this was an desperate mission, you build an orion battleship in an city so you launched it in the city. 
It obviously had an kamikaze option but this is non trivial, a bit like setting off the shaped charges and you can not use wires of the same length. 
Doable but not standard, on the other hand an early quote from devs said the nuclear charges will go off if destroyed as it's kerbal.