The Holy Imperium might not be as industrial as the Galactic Empire, or Utopian as the Culture, but they still have the firepower to destroy continents, and worse. In "Xenos" by Dan Abnett, lances/weapons batteries when fired are described as "Continent sized fireballs" and in "Caves of Ice" by Sandy Mitchell to be able to turn a planet uninhabitable for generations from bombardments. If this continent is the size of North America, it would be over 11899990000 megatons or 11.89999 petatons of TNT, damn that's huge, but lances/batteries do vary, some of them are laser based, others are lots of little weapons filling up much space (these fire low gigaton blasts together) and etc. But, the Xeno planet was possibly unsymmetrical and could have far more or far less kilometers of land, I'll never know. To hellfire missiles. It's official that the missiles do 610 gigatons shot. "Space Hulk rulebook, Scenario book (board game)-pg.3 ================ Four Gothic-class cruisers–Intolerable, Invincible, and Righteous Force–awaited four parsecs from target. Each ship carried 100 Hellfire nuclear missles. Each missle 122 warheads, each with a firepower of 5 GT. If boarding action fails, nuclear missles will turn a ship to dust." See, these weapons are designed to go past shields and into weak spots. Very strong against ships from the inside, but useless from the outside. Now onto Cyclonic Torpedoes. They can destroy a planet in an explosion, see, Colchis, however, they are technobable weapons that pierce into the core to make a super big explosion, and there are Super Cyclonic Torpedoes which make a bigger explosion. On the Nova Cannon. Well, I never read a novel with a feat, but some calculations give it over 700 teratons of kinetic force with anywhere between 22 to 33 petatons of the explosive effect, which is quite good. I might ask for some quotes to get an estimate. I used a Stardestroyer.net calculator if anyone cares. Please correct my calculations because they do feel inaccurate in some way. Anyone have a page where I can calculate weapons like lasguns and meltaguns?
My estimations and understanding of the fire power of the imperium is as follows Official figures 560 gigaton missiles 610 gigaton missiles 1 kiloton mac cannons (rouge trader) Armor (ground) 95mm= 365mm steel Lasgun 19 mega “thules” Ground based Land raider Armor 3 heat dissipation layers likely rocky or softer in texture 2 hard layers Each layer is 19 mm If you assume the heat resistant layers are still as strong as steel then the 38 millimeters of hard stuff "titanium-plassteel and Adamantium" would have to be 8 times stronger than steel So the heat dissipation of a tank can shake of high end megajoule attacks and mid range gigajoule attacks; and has 38 millimeters of armor 8 times stronger than conventional steel Estimations and figures for ground based figures Lasgun 19 megajoules (Megathule) Plasma gun 400 megajoules (incinerating a humanoid) Lascannon 500 megajoule focused beam 6*6 cm (40k wiki “triple digit megajoule lascannon”) As for The Imperial Fleet Missiles and torpedoes are triple digit gigaton warheads that are only effective if they hit exposed areas of a ship or kinetically penetrate and explode amongst the ship or armor maximizing their yield into a focused area. They go through shields and travel at tens of kilometers per second. They can be 100 feet in length. Mac cannons have a high rate of fire maybe even ten shots per second 1 kiloton warheads A plasma missile (space combat weapon Broadside mounted) can completely melt a city block. If you assume a 100*100 meter base and a height of 1 kilometer with 1 meter thick walls made of solid iron, then the building would have a volume of 1000*100*4= 400,000 cubic meters Top 100*100= 10,000 cubic meters Total: 410,000 cubic meters Iron weight per cubic meter 8000 Kg 410,000*8000=3,280,000,000 kilograms Melt 1Kg requires 289 kilojoules of heat energy 3280000000*289= 947920000000/1,000,000= 947920 gigajoules/4.184= 226.5 kilotons Round up to 250 kilotons for a round number RoF 10 per second = 2.5 megatons per second (strongest weapon) Mac cannon = 10 kilotons per second weakest weapon Average per weapon = 1.225 megatons per weapon per second A weapon battery on a cruiser measures approx 340,000 square meters area, if every weapon takes u a mere 100 square meters of space it would mean a single weapons battery could have over 3000 weapons 1225 kilotons* 3000 weapons = 3.6 gigatons per weapons battery, this figure likely varies in the amount of gins and in quality. Weapons battery 1-6 gigatons per second Cruisers can have 4 such batteries and battleships can have 6 Ships would have multi teraton shielding to resist this fire power for 30 minutes or even hours Ships have extremely resilient hulls that can take heavy bombardment of other vessels, the armor is “meters thick” maybe up to tens of meters thick, I would guess that 50 meters thick armor on larger ships would be common. This 50 meter thick armor can resist the megatons of incoming firepower for lengths of time. The fire power of 3 gigatons would be explosive and spread over an area similar to size of the weapon battery firing it. Therefore 300,000 square meters of 50 meter thick armor would have to resist 3,000,000 kilotons per second; that’s 10 kilotons for every meter every second, if the armor can take such firepower for an hour before penetration that would come to 36,000 kilotons divided by 50 cubic meters. That is 720 kilotons to destroy every cubic meter of armor. A lance has a barrel roughly thirty meters diameter and an area of over 900 square meters, these weapons can fire a max power shot every thirty minutes. On the assumption a shot from this can penetrate the 50 meter thick armor and a beam 3 meters in diameter it would have to destroy 900*50 meters of armor. That’s 50*900*720= 32400000 kilotons or 32.4 gigatons.
@steelpulse Incorrect. "at tens of kilometers per second" That's a low end because we've got Imperial ships traveling at 0.75c(as a attack speed,also a moon sized station traveled at that speed,but it wasn't an attacks speed) and accelerating to 0.25c in seconds. Here's Nemesis. . Then we have Caves of Ice where they bombard Necronvbuildings kilometres below ground and 20km of ice and the side effect is that the planet will remain uninhabitable for generations. Teraton event.
The energy cannons have the capability to boil an ocean. The time scale is not given; the capability of to evaporate the entire ocean on Earth could take 800 teratons approx of energy, this yield would likely be the result of an extended bombardment which takes place over hours, not a strike. The ability to decapitate mountaIns is expected from 40K. The torpedoe arrays however, do have a time scale, that is a single strike. The level of fire power would between 10-25 teratons to level the continent. 25,000 gigatons from a volley of torpedoes is very impressive. A cruisers payload of torpedoes amounts to over 60 teratons. Striking structures under 20km of ice and several km of surface rock would be no problem for a lance strike. Striking to this depth would require a 45 gigaton blast, or significantly less if using focused weapons such as a lance. A distinction level cuased by man made weapons does not need a teraton of energy, even a modern nuclear war utilizing megaton weaponry would cuase very devestating global damage and fallout. The 610,000 megaton nuclear based torpedoes on the prow of the ship would likely render the planet unhabitible through shear damage to the atmosphere or radiation. And yes i agree, 10s of kilometers is very slow when you consider thier effective range and speed in game.
