So, recently I made an attempt to determine the power of EvE weaponry via an analysis of railgun rounds. Unfortunately, as one person noted, we don't actually know the velocity of EvE railgun rounds. So much for that, then.
Well, I figured, perhaps there is something that
can be quantified. And, since I'm home from work with food poisoning today, I had time to go browse the EvE Fiction forum, where someone had posted about these two articles (in the Lapetan Titans thread, where Falcon chimed in to blab some more about just how fucking awesome the Federation attack on Caldari Prime was).
Incidentally, in these articles, it is NOT a Lapetan Titan, but an Avatar. Anyway, here are the two articles:
https://community.eveonline.com/news/news-channels/eve-online-news/planet-wide-explosion-strikes-reschard-v/?_ga=1.175351074.1267934737.1413253271https://community.eveonline.com/news/news-channels/eve-online-news/rescue-ships-finally-reach-disaster-planet-surface/?_ga=1.175351074.1267934737.1413253271So, Reschard V was destroyed by the old Avatar doomsday weapon. Which is great - I mean, not great for Reschard V - but great because we can know the average damage of an Avatar's Judgment doomsday. We also have a fairly good idea of how much energy it takes to inflict that level of damage to a planet. Specifically, we can correlate it to the energy released in an asteroid strike.
Incidentally, because Titan doomsdays do the same amount of damage, we can also dispense with any worries about overestimating the potential damage of an EvE weapon. EM would do less damage to a planet than Kinetic, perhaps, but certainly not more.
Now, we know how much base damage an Avatar does with the old Judgment doomsday: 46,875. For ease of calculation, and also as a hedge against overestimation, I'll round this to 50,000. Increased skills on the part of the pilot can raise this a bit, but it's a good base number.
How much damage did Reschard V take? Well, it appears to have taken damage somewhere in the range of a large asteroid strike. Preliminary estimates in the news theorized that around 87% of all life on the surface was instantly killed. Later examination in the second article stated that the entire surface of the planet was incapable of supporting life, although a few survivors (percentage-wise) were recovered from caves and ruins. So we can conclude that the strike on Reschard V was, in terms of damage to the planet, nearly a total extinction event.
In comparison, the roughly 10 km-wide asteroid that caused the Cretaceous Extinction killed about 75% of all species on earth, according to present knowledge, and did so over a period of time, as much of the dying was caused by secondary environmental effects. Thus, we can conclude that Avatar's Judgment weapon possessed much more destructive power than the Chicxulub impactor. This is especially true when you realize that the spherical nature of the Judgment doomsday would have only partially impacted the planet, as the Avatar was in low orbit, whereas the entire power of the Chicxulub impactor was expressed. On the other hand, since the damage Judgment inflicts does not vary by size (a Dread takes the same amount as a frigate) it seems that damage done is a flat amount per entity.
I then did some digging to see what kind of impact could express the necessary energy for the destruction of Reschard V. It turns out that you would probably need an asteroid of a size of 16 km or more. Since I'm trying to be as conservative as possible, I will use the 16 km size, although I could justifiably argue for larger.
A 16 km asteroid striking a planet would possess a destructive yield of 200 million megatons, or 200,000,000,000,000 tons of TNT. That's - if I got the math right - 200 trillion tons of TNT. We can safely say that an Avatar's Judgment doomsday weapon (the old one, still) possesses
at least that much power.
Now we can simply divide the power of the weapon in real terms by EvE damage units. That is to say, an Avatar's weapon does roughly 50,000 damage in game, so we divide 200 million megatons by 50,000. That comes to 4,000 - again, if I'm doing the math right. Which means that every point of EvE damage works out to
at least 4,000 megatons.
Even if you think that my estimates, which are hopefully based on the reasonably well-grounded science of asteroid impact, are far too high, even if you think that my estimates should be reduced by 75% (In which case Reschard V should have merely had a bad day), that still works out to each point of Eve damage expressing 1,000 megatons of energy.
And someone had the bright idea to give capsuleers these toys.
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Topic: Strength of EvE Weaponry. (Read 16919 times)