So how thick does steel have to be to stop a nuclear reaction

>>32487699
Space has radiation so the Galactica likely had shielding prebuilt into it.

>>32487699

Depends on the "radiation".

For example-

You are not stopping gamma particles without lead and lots of it.
(or heavy water, which can be used as a propellant)

>>32487699
I really doubt that Galactica was made of steel, seeing as how it dropped its ass into atmo and didn't turn to liquid.

I'd venture it's made of space-metal that doesn't undergo neutron-activation and is at least somewhat opaque to gamma rays, seeing as how only a few dozen crewmen were fatally dosed because they were close to the outer hull when the nuke went off.

Steel is at best mediocre when it comes to rad-shielding, you'd want layers of aluminum spaced with organic/boron salts and polyethylene and backed by heavy water or tungsten plates.
Of course, that's all heavy as shit.

>>32487699
Nukes are pretty wimpy in space if you go by hard science.


Instead of giant explosions, nukes going off are more like concentrated energy...like a molten slag shot.

>>32487699
Not thick, but steel be heavy yo.

Start here: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/radiation.php

>ctrl+f "shielding"

>gamma radiation
>particle
No

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>people worrying about gamma rays

wew lad

neutrons from fission are defo the most serious and the hardest of hard radiation both in penetration and actual bio-damage(alpha particles may be slightly worse idk exactly but you have to ingest them)

they can turn you into a fallout ghoul like that poor japanese guy who poured too much uranyl nitrate and created a self-sustaining nuclear fission in an unshielded container.

even though the radiation alarms when off instantly and the guy immediately evacuated he was basically dead by the time he the room and just like poor poor Louis Slotin it was only a question on how drawn out his death would be(in the case of Ouchi it was very long and painful )

>>32488457
What you really want is neutron beams. Near light speed, low dispersion of particles over distance.

>>32488735
>Ouchi

With a name like that..

>>32487699
Advanced space faring society capable of Faster than Light space travel, probably not building spacecraft out of anything even resembling steel.

>>32487699
Battlestars also have water storage between their hulls in some sections. good for absorbing high energy particles. not so good for dissipating the forces tho.

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>>32488784
No.... You need to force it all in one direction.. Something lethal that kills all organic life and rips a big molten hole through armor, decks, bulkheads, everything.

Bomb pumped X ray laser warheads.

OP here

Nuke warheads would be for two reasons

Planetary bombardment or nuclear shaped charges for destroying speesh ships kilometres away or trying to destroy huge space battleships with ten meter thick steel bulkheads covered by ridiculous armor

So... What is the effect

>>32488457
Nukes were used because the enemy was robots. EM pulses are a bitch.

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>>32490035
I mean a compressed beam of neutrons does that as well.

>>32489313
Yea, it's probably made from a harder metal like diamonds.

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>>32487699
Nukes were just used for buckling armor or disabling/destroying lightly armored sections of ships. Sure basestars would lob nukes all fucking day and eventually destroy Galactica, but they also launched Raiders to chew through its heavy plated armor so the nuke could actually do major damage to the super structure.

Same thing for Basestars, whenever Galactica & Pegasus encountered one they would just bombard the piss out of it with artillery instead of lobbing nukes because they did more damage.

You could probably build something with the performance of the galactica hull with the best materials we have now. No one will fund mass production of these materials though.

You would probably find composite plates high temperature high hardness ceramics backed by high hardness steel reinforced with silicon carbide filament then many layers alternating between ceramics, carbon foams, fiber reinforced polymers and heavy metals such as lead or DU.

Some of these things are like $20,000 per meter, only governments can invest enough to bring production costs down.

>>32490932
the point defense systems in BG were the tits.

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>>32491096
Was more of a fan of the forward batteries myself, you rarely got to see them used.

>>32487699
Not that thick actually, when testing nuclear weapons on retired battleships the conclusion was if it exploded above the vessel it could theoretically limp back to port, bellow would basically cause buckling effect similar to a torpedo, the real problem is the radiation, which they found out about by walking around on it soon afterwords.

>>32488100
Think they stored water in the hull somehow. The ship lost a bunch in one of the earl episodes after a bomb was planted in there.

>>32490701
I argued on /sci/ that diamond was actually a metal and I won.

Like it means anything

>>32488457
No atmospheric blast, but at decent ranges the energy transfer will ablate your exterior at explosive speeds. Making your own armor explode and transfer the resulting shockwaves inside through the connecting struts like a HESH shell is not-bad.

>>32489339
And then you got to dring radioactive water...

>>32490472
>Planetary bombardment

Assuming you have a battle spaceship like the Galactica, it makes waaaaay more sense to have stored tungsten phone poles for kinetic bombardment. You only need a little rocket to send it in the right direction and off it goes, zero maintenance (unlike a nuke) and will produce the same effect.

>>32493482
Still easier to ditch and replace than radioactive hull plating

Additionally, in space, nukes have a much less severe effect as an explosive. With no air to create a compression wave (which is what knocks houses over in places like Hiroshima), what you get is a momentary flash of heat, light and x-rays, then it's all gone.

>>32490494
EM is ridiculously easy to shield against. It was a threat in the 80's, and pretty much purely towards civilian infrastructure.

>>32491282
>>32490932
Those scenes got my dick so fucking hard goddamn

>>32491282
Were there ever any stuff like fact-sheets made for the batteries, point defence guns, missiles and so on? That shit would make my scifi-boner hard

>>32490932
I liked the effort to actually think of some logical weaponry and tactics.

>>32491282
>Fat fuck Lee sacrificing the more combat capable ship.

>>32491065
If that's similar to what they are using in BSG I would love to see how their engines work, because all of that stuff would be heavy as fuck.

>>32493930
I always felt that way too, but he made the right decision. If he hadn't rescued Galactica he would have had a more powerful ship with no one to crew it.

>>32490494
EMP from nukes is due to the radiation propagating through an atmosphere. No atmo, no EMP.

>>32494092
Well, Galatica's big enough to swallow a Nimitz whole in one of her flight pods. Even if she's made of tissue paper she'd be a fat fuck.

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>>32493930
I'd say the writers were more to blame for that, but it was still fucking retarded.

>Galactica is a barely functional ship, half its armor plating removed, only 1 landing-bay works, only 8 dorsal gun batteries, has to enclose its landing bays to jump, 90% of its vipers are Mk.II's

>Pegasus is the newest and most powerful Battlestar ever made. 2 dual-sided landing bays, dozens of heavy artillery batteries all over it, can jump with bays fully extended, ALL its vipers are Mk.VI's and it can manufacture more in its machine shops.

But lets sacrifice it to save the literal museum ship because that's the shows name, even though we see Pegasus absolutely skull-fuck a Basestar with a single salvo and cripple the other 2. I mean how hard would it have been to have the Galactica crew escape on a Raptor to Pegasus and just rename the Pegasus?

>>32494128
The crew was escaping New Caprica in their ships while Galactica got pounded. Saving Galactica was pretty stupid.

>>32488735

>There have been two Tokaimura nuclear accidents at the nuclear facility at Tōkai, Ibaraki.
>
>On 11 March 1997, a small explosion in a Dōnen plant.
>On 30 September 1999, a serious criticality accident in a JCO plant.
>When time is not specified, in most cases the 1999 incident is the one being referred to.

Why are the Japaese even allowed to mess with nuke power at this point???

>>32493517
stop this shitty meme, tungsten rods are much weaker than nukes, and are not weight effective

they don't work like you saw in GI Joe

>>32495679
Godzilla isn't going to create himself.

>>32496102
Yes they are.

>>32488100
>You are not stopping gamma particles without lead and lots of it.
... Go back to elementary school. It's about mass, not density.

>>32487699
Nukes in space are not nearly as powerful as their Earth based counter parts. The shock wave dissipates almost instantly in vacuum with nothing to transfer the energy.

>>32491282
So what exactly was Starbuck?

An angel or something?

That series jumped the fucking shark and went off on so many awkwardly handled and pointless tangents.

>>32498341
Almost 50% more effective than TNT when launched from a typical orbit, so about equal to advanced explosives like HMX, CL20 or thermobarics.

>>32498583
>the shock wave dissipates
There never is a shock wave. That's caused by gamma heating the atmosphere.

>>32498613
I have no fucking clue. The series was fine when they were mostly holding true to the original series premise, but as soon as they started with the mystical bullshit it went way off course. Which reminds me, why wasn't Kobol all blown up like the first earth they found? Was that supposed to be their original home planet, in which case wouldn't they have warred with that cycle's cylons? Or were those cylons the thirteenth tribe? Which wouldn't that mean that the cylons blew themselves up? That shit got so confusing.

>>32490701
>Play children of a dead earth
>Make your speeshship out of diamond
It is actually a nice material if you don't need to worry about its brittle property.

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>>32493517
>will produce the same effect.

So is galactica any good? I always loved watching clips of the space battle scenes but from what I read about it, it was more focused on rape drama and other gay bullshit. The space fights are really fucking good though.

>>32500320
It's actually pretty passable. It falls apart in the last season, but the first season is God tier

If an enemy had deep pockets, it could use a charged particle beam on a heavy target. This uses the armor against itself, irradiating the crew. So I think as thick as minimum would work, no need to overdo.

>>32491322
yeah and they only stopped walking around on and trying to decontaminate the crapped up boats when a navy doc proved his point of it still being too hot by catching a fish in the lagoon at bikini and pressing it against film, the fish was so radioactive it developed the film.

>>32495508
>But lets sacrifice it to save the literal museum ship because that's the shows name, even though we see Pegasus absolutely skull-fuck a Basestar with a single salvo and cripple the other 2. I mean how hard would it have been to have the Galactica crew escape on a Raptor to Pegasus and just rename the Pegasus?
It's because they don't want to build new sets. It's one huge limitation with live action scifi. The writers have to find endless excuses why everything takes place in the same few rooms every episode.

>>32498618
50% more effective than TNT is not much..

You can play children of a dead earth right the fuck now.

>>32487699
It's made of handwavium.

>>32488735
>>32495679
>>32496116
Damn Nipponese and their differing mindset. Why can't they just see the world as we do?

>>32493930
True, but even if they had managed to hold on to both Battlestars, one would end up a fucking ghost ship running with less than a skeleton crew.

>There were all kinds of people tho
But we're forgetting about the civilian ships that weren't in the area, like the Tyllium ship, the prison ship and the flying greenhouse one. Need those fuckers crewed.

>>32487699
Since no one seems interested in actually answering OP's question, here you go

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/radiation.php#radarmor

>>32498854
They're in the fracking ship!

>>32498430
It's about probability of absorption. Putting more electrons in the way of a photon means you have a much greater chance for absorption. Density is more important than raw mass, though as long as you have the same amount of electrons in the way then it doesn't really matter (The reason we can discount large nuclei is that nuclei are extremely small even compared to the size of an atom and are basically meaningless).

In laymens more electrons = more absorption
More electrons = more protons = higher element # = (usually) more density.
You're right in saying that more "mass" in the way will stop radiation but 1kg of steel is by far not equivalent to 1kg of lead for EM Absorption coefficients.

>>32498618
>There never is a shock wave.
Can we stop this meme?
Explosives have a shockwave even in space. The material of the explosive (chemical or otherwise) inherits kinetic energy from the explosion. So a nuclear weapon going off in space could be designed like a hand grenade to send ~few kg pieces of dense shrapnel at even millions of m/s.

>>32501071
>http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/radiation.php#radarmor
>at least 500 grams per square centimeter
This websites measuring notions are really weird. Mass bounded by two dimensions doesn't exist outside of Q.E.D.
But whatever, according to this it should be ~3m of steel

.5kg/cm^2 / 0.076kg/cm^3 = 65 cm = 0.65
so a little more than half a meter of standard steel according to that source to protect from even solar event (not sure if close nuclear weapons have more energy density than the solar events used in source but w/e), OP.

>>32502637
>But whatever, according to this it should be ~3m of steel

That was for the rock numbers source was using later. Ignore that.

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>>32487699
Who needs a nuclear reaction to melt your steel beams? I have jet fuel.