Nuclear weapons IN SPACE!

[zorg]

Originally Posted by Sunrunners_Fire

I suggest invoking Genre Convention and write the entire idea out of the campaign/setting.

Whatever the eventual in-game solution, I'd make sure that the players understand the above. This *is* a question of how the game is supposed to look and feel like, and that's, basically, something you have to agree on as a group. In the same way as you agree on playing scifi in the first place, really.

Originally Posted by Crakkerjakk

Honestly, nukes are just one example of the whole problem of space combat in general. You have so much energy at your fingertips you can turn damn near anything into a weapon if you have an engine that can get you from one planet to another.

Definitely. Banning nukes won't help much when the PCs can just accelerate asteroids at their enemies (or have asteroids accelerated at their home base).

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Captain-Captain

The damage that comes from the blast is heat light etc for the most part. A very reflective armor on the ship helps tremendously.

To my understanding this is inaccurate.

For common fusion reactions the amount of released energy that is in the form of neutrons hits 80%.

The remainder is charged particles and photons with the photons peaking well above the visible range. A great deal of the visible light and heat in an airburst is secondary radiation coming from interaction of the primary radiation with the air.

Damage from a nuke detonated in space will fall off more rapidly than an airburst. It ought to be capable of simplifying into a simple inverse square relationship.

That is if the warhead delivered a full megaton at 1 meter it should be down to "just" a ton at 1000 meters. That would still be fast particles and hard photons that ought to rate about a (5) armor divisor.

So call it 6D x 90 (5) to use round numbers and you need a very thick-skinned ship to shrug that off. A DR 100 ship _could_ handle it at 10 kilometers.

So if point defense is good enough that there is essentially no chance of getting a proximity-fused 1 mt nuke within 10 k of a ship, a 1 mt nuke is not a viable weapon at all.

Maybe that will help.

[Langy]

I think the simplest way would be to implement serious repercussions if you do just nuke a place. That's why we don't nuke places now, and that's likely why we won't nuke places in the future - it has little to do with how possible it is to nuke a location and everything to do with how you can deal with the fallout. If you make it so your PCs get in serious trouble for killing thousands of civilians (like you probably should in any game that's not supposed to be Atrocities R Us), then you don't really need to worry much about them nuking everything. They may pull it off once, but when the PCs who did it get executed for it the others probably won't decide to pull it off again.

Asking 'why can't we just nuke the whole place?' is a lot like asking 'why don't we just kill the shopkeeper and take his stuff?' Both answers should deal with the consequences of those actions, not how possible/impossible it is to pull it off (especially in a hard science campaign).

You have slightly more problems in space if you want to avoid players using nukes against military warships, but personally I think that should be a perfectly viable tactic - it might kill one ship, but it probably won't kill more than that unless you catch them off guard, and if you do, good for you. Still, you can implement ways to shoot down missiles easy in order to avoid that if you really want to. Likewise, if you want to avoid 'let's nuke this barren planet in order to kill the evil alien creature we're hunting' ALA Aliens you're going to have trouble, but you should just avoid stories where that's practical if you really want to avoid players from wanting to use nukes.

[rosignol]

Originally Posted by Trachmyr

Same holds true for pirates... no nukes or you don't get paid! A few well aimed laser shots then it's time to board with a shotgun.

Always remember Rule 1: Pillage, then burn!

Also: http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2002-02-07 (<- warning: strip has been updated daily since June 2000. Don't dive into the archives unless you have a significant amount of free time on hand).

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Langy

I think the simplest way would be to implement serious repercussions if you do just nuke a place.

Exactly.

More specifically, it depends on the exact situation in your game-world, as others have noted, it depends on what you mean by 'hard' SF, too. There are other plausible weapons (meaning they could probably be built down the road, requiring no new physics) to worry about, too.

For example, very high-frequency laser beams make a dandy weapon in space, in a way they don't on the surface of an Earth-like world. The higher the frequency the longer the effective striking range, everything else being equal, if you're using X-ray lasers, you might conceivably be able to deal death to any point in a star system from installations orbiting down close to the star (where energy is plentiful).

This could be a bigger problem for spacecraft than nukes, because even a relatively low-power laser beam might force it to pull it whatever it uses for heat radiators...and it's got a problem. A high-power high-UV or X-ray beam might simply destroy or disable a ship at enormous distances. Within the bounds of known physics, this is tricky to defend against, too.

What kind of war is it? Who is fighting it, and why? That might give you the answer to why the superweapons (of which nukes are only one) aren't being used.

For ex, if it's a 'private war' between rival noble houses, corporations, or just a perrsonal feud, maybe they're worried about drawing the attention of some more powerful force. Maybe there's an Emperor who ignores private war on a small scale, but slaps down anybody that goes nuclear, and he has all the major laser installations. Or maybe there are other powers (nobles, corporations, nations) who are ignoring this fight as long as it stays local.

Maybe there's some religious prohibition against it, or maybe the goal of the fight is to capture the enemy's stuff for use or resale.

It depends on the details.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Dangerious P. Cats

That's more my concern. It's hard to justify why the PCs have to fight door to door house to house when they could just nuke the place from orbit. Likewise players have a habbit of asking things like "why havn't they nuked us yet?" when the enemy is attacking them. I'd like to have a good answer.

The same reason door to door fighting ever happens. You want to capture the target relatively intact, or political factors (including treaties) prevent indiscriminate destruction. I assume this is a military campaign; otherwise "you/they don't have nukes" is a perfectly plausible answer.

[Frost]

Originally Posted by Dangerious P. Cats

That's more my concern. It's hard to justify why the PCs have to fight door to door house to house when they could just nuke the place from orbit. Likewise players have a habbit of asking things like "why havn't they nuked us yet?" when the enemy is attacking them. I'd like to have a good answer.

As others have said ship to ship nukes aren't worth the expense as a general rule. In for lack of a better word 'interface' scenarios remember that on the whole nukes are not ideal weapons if you want to use something in the target area or even occupy the target area in the short term. If your ground target is something other than living space for long term use then nuking it from orbit is a non starter and either conventional weapons or boots on the ground are going to be needed.

From personal experience in several campaigns of this sort one of our regular GM's seems to have an endless supply of plausible reasons for PC's to end up going house to house or other equaly unpleasent scenarios even when nuking from orbit is an option.

[Michael Thayne]

The Caliph world from Alternate Earths (a.k.a. Infinite Worlds) had a nice solution to this problem: robofacs mean extremely concentrated industrial production mean "lets go capture their industrial production" makes a lot more sense as a strategy. So, the world war in that world hasn't gone nuclear yet, even though that doesn't mean it couldn't.

[Dangerious P. Cats]

The other issue is how do you stop campaign bad guys from nuking everything, or explain to the players why they havn't.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Dangerious P. Cats

The other issue is how do you stop campaign bad guys from nuking everything, or explain to the players why they havn't.

Assumption 1: The bad guys have nuclear weapons.

Assumption 2: They are wiling to use them at any vaguely practical opportunity with little thought for themselves.

Solution? Deny them any opportunities, possibly by shooting them at the earliest chance.

Alternate solution? Change assumptions 1&2.