I was just wondering about explosions in space. I know they occur, such as supernovae and all. I haven't yet studied fluid dynamics and such. How does it all work up there? How much force is transferred how far? Would an explosion a hundred yards from a shuttle affect that shuttle, and if so, how big an explosion would it require?

(Yes, I'm trying to work out stuff for a game.)

Given there's no medium to transmit a shock wave, the only forces you'd receive are ones made by impact with the radiation and debris. Both should continue until they hit something. There wouldn't be any shock wave, as in an atmosphere.

Egad Jaxom! Are you telling me those nifty shockwaves seen on Star Trek don't really happen? :eek: Next thing you know I'll find out you really can't hear the phasers hitting the shields in space :bugeye:

jk :p

I'm actually tired of seeing that same ring explosion shockwave in every space movie. Talk about recycling...that and the Matrix effect, which worked in The Matrix, but is so lame now in all these commercials...

Adam, the biggest questions are how to determine the resultant breakup (number of pieces), velocity, and direction of each fragment of the exploded object. I can't help there, but once you have a velocity and mass for each piece, you can easily determine the kinetic energy available.

And if you want a realistic game you might want to obey good ole Newton's laws. Primarily- An object in motion will remain in motion unless affected by another force.. Since the explosion is in space, there's not a whole lot of matter hanging around (unless it's dark matter or some other nifty physics invention). There will be gravity, solar winds, gas clouds, stardust, and tons of other stuff to affect it. But it all depends on how realistic you want your game, and how much you want your computer to commit suicide with the streams of data it computes.

There was a thread in here a while ago that delt ith how a nuclear blast would work, but I can't find it.

Have a look for atmospheric burst nukes, nukes exploded by the usa in the high upper atmosphere.
The shuttle is still within the atmosphere at 300 miles up, it's just very thin. So you would get a shockwave, I reckon it would travel faster but have a lower amplitude, if you understand that.

For a game, you would just have to calculate the forces at 4 points on the shuttle, front, rear, top, bottom from the blast center.
That way you could make it spin correctly.
Also If blast at any point > set number then break apart.
You could use set sequences of breakage. ie 1 wing flies off and front of shuttle breaks off.
The blast would be spherical.

By the way if this is a 3d computer game, do you want a low res poly model of the shuttle(no textures sorry) 1864 polygons, I think.