In the film and the television series, exploding a nuclear device in the bad guy space ship creates a sphere of energy. I’m good with that, in a weightless vacuum I would expect energy to move in all directions. However, there is always a ring expanding from the sphere, as the rings of Saturn orbit the planet.
What is up with that? I would expect everything to expand in a sphere, be it energy or whatever debris results.
It looks cool.
That it does, save that I became very unpopular with my future wife upon watching Star Wars; “You can’t use control surfaces in space!”
For a while when they first got popular, those planar space explosions were called “Big Stupid Rings” as an online meme but I can’t find any trace of that online meme anymore. I was really annoyed when the Star Wars special edition added a pointless one to the Death Star explosion, and it wasn’t even aligned with its equatorial trench.
Side note - is “speecial” in the threat title intentional or just a typo? Because every time I see it, my inner proofreader twitches.
You know it happens to you as well!
-cough-
Back to the thread. I could make up some handwavium, such as the fact that the nuclear weapon was specifically enhanced using crystal technology by Ra, the better to destroy Earth with. And who knows how that enhancement was supposed to work, perhaps partially compressing the blast and thus a ring.
But we all know that @Chronos has it, that it’s just supposed to look cool.
I wonder if Brad Wright is a 'Doper.
Yes, that is my fat fingers on a laptop keyboard.
I dooooo hopeeee a mod willlll changeee thatttt.
That said, the first attempts to model supernovas using supercomputers failed, and it turns out that the problem was that they were trying to model them as spherically symmetric for simplicity. Remove the assumption of symmetry, and they work much better.
Though, the dominant source of asymmetry, in explosions in space, is usually rotation of the thing that’s exploding, and that usually results in more energy in the polar directions, not in the equatorial.
I thought it was a clever way to hint that the effects were specious.
If it had had a few more "e"s, I would have thought it was a mockery, such as the classic Church Lady skits, “Isn’t that speeeeciaaal…”
But just the one forced me to ask.
If two nuclear blasts went off in close proximity to each other, say one 100 feet above ground and another directly above it at some close distance, at the same moment. Would there be a greater diameter and more concentrated blast wave outward between the two?
Or even with conventional explosives? So as to focus the blast effects in a more horizontal plane?
I don’t know that this can be answered. Maybe yes, maybe no.
Constructive and destructive interference are well known and studied. So, another explosion could add to the power or decrease the overall power of the explosion. Indeed, reactive armor is a thing on tanks. When a projectile hits the tank it has explosive armor which detonates and reduces the incoming power from the projectile that hit it.
I’d think it would take some very big supercomputers to model two such nuclear explosions to decide what the result would be.
It seems to me that if the casing of the bomb were made spherical, with two equal halves, and if we then assume that the join will fail first, then the effect makes sense. But sadly, big movie bombs always seem to be . . .er . . . “rocket” shaped.
I suppose they could still be two cylinders joined in the middle?
Then again, as I picture it, doesn’t the ring always show up after the main explosion? Oh, well.
In the Stargate franchise they tend to look more like vacuum cleaners.
The way to do that is to report your OP, not make a post in the vain hope a mod might read it.
I’ve done that for you.
In the real world of real nukes there’s a phenomena called the “Mach Y stem”:
The escape planning for gravity bombing using airplanes and nukes includes carefully avoiding getting eaten by that thing.
IMO the effect of two perfectly identical perfectly spherical explosions would be to produce a similar planar feature. How much the natural imperfections would disrupt the feature is an interesting question.
Speecial is my new favorite word because it’s so speecial.
I fixed the title for you.
The Mach stem effect is well understood as far as what happens when nuclear blasts are close enough to be reflected by the ground. As you describe above, the reflected wave front interacts with the incident wave front to create a ring-shaped shockwave more powerful than either of the two waves that contributed it. Intuitively it seems very likely that two nuclear blasts would interact with one another in the same way.
Though I have to point out, the real-life military effect of nuclear weapons depends almost entirely on the atmosphere’s ability to transmit the shock and heat effects. In the vacuum of space, you do really need to detonate the weapon on or inside the target. Without having a lot of other surrounding mass to mediate the effects, the bomb’s energy and matter will disperse rapidly as it expands, producing a brief radiation pulse and depositing a thin layer of radioactive material on a ship that’s probably already very well-shielded against radiation.