OMG Explosives

[jbalsle]

OK, my googlefoo has failed me and I can't find if this has been talked about before.

Explosives. Not the piddly grenades that you throw at people, but the big explosions you get in space settings -- like Star Trek!

So, let's take the typical photon torpedo. It has a roughly 50 to 60MT warhead (1.5kg of antimatter). Using the revised CubeRoot(WeightInLbsTnT * 8), which is supposed to address the square root of explosives vs. cube root of hit points issue, I come up with this:

CubeRoot((50,000,000 * 2,000) * 8) = 9,283
That's 6d*9000 damage from a photon torpedo hit.

In Space, that's 6d*900 damage, or roughly 18900 points for an average torpedo hit. A ship has to be SM+21 to even be in the range of surviving that. That's a 70,000yd monstrosity of a ship that masses in at 10 billion tons.

1.5 kilograms of antimatter can bring down a 10gigaton ship? Is that right?

Suggestions from the Collective on how to fix this, please? :D