Mr. Oragahn wrote:Burn in space? Fire heats air???? o_O
You can light a candle while onboard the ISS, mate. Or, for that matter, you can light a magnesium hull that's leaking atmosphere from a hole close enough to the burning area.
Explosions in space won't have lingering fireballs. Vaporized stuff meets no resistance in a vacuum, so it just keeps on sailing. When it's moving at speeds measured in the hundreds or thousands of kilometers per second (typical for a nuke-level explosive device), the result will be a blinding flash leaving nothing behind (save perhaps the eviscerated remains of the hapless target).
Actually, it depends on what is hit. The "fireball" per se wouldn't linger as it would freely expand super fast, but the heat transmited to the materials and the overall chaotic disruption of matter and more or less efficient ejection of particles around the point of impact would create a haze around the target and we'd still see a glow, perhaps a very, very luminous one. After all, not all particles will be properly ejected. Some will barely be pushed away. Also, once the main explosion has happened, the target might be leaking materials and be ejecting even more hazes of particles, but at a much lower pace.
Some movies and series actually got that part right at times.
You seem to be under the impression that there is a slight modicum of realism in Hollywood space explosions. Let me relieve you of that misapprehension. Unless there was a continuous reaction with a rapid influx of reactants (which would indeed produce a hazy glow distended somewhat in the direction of reaction flow), that "haze" will disperse at a rate proportional to the square root of the temperature of the glowing stuff. At room temperature, molecules are moving at an average rate of half a kilometer every second. If stuff's glowing a dull red, it's probably around 1000 K, and thus moving something like 0.9 km/s. If stuff's glowing white, it'll be closer to 6000 K, and moving at 2 km/s. And it won't slow down as it grows. Ever. So, no matter the yield of the explosion, it should be twice as wide as the Enterprise-D is long within one second (and proportionately dimmer, being more diffuse), and continue to grow and fade at the same rate forever. We never see anything even remotely like that. That alone means that 99% of the explosions we see onscreen are total bull$#!%.
As a general rule, this is what a a nuke striking an unshielded object should look like in space:
First off, the weapon itself. A nuclear explosion in space, will look pretty much like a Very Very Bright flashbulb going off. The effects are instantaneous or nearly so. There is no fireball. The gaseous remains of the weapon may be incandescent, but they are also expanding at about a thousand kilometers per second, so one frame after detonation they will have dissipated to the point of invisibility. Just a flash.
The effects on the ship itself, those are a bit more visible. If you're getting impulsive shock damage, you will by definition see hot gas boiling off from the surface. Again, the effect is instantaneous, but this time the vapor will expand at maybe one kilometer per second, so depending on the scale you might be able to see some of this action. But don't blink; it will be quick.
Next is spallation - shocks will bounce back and forth through the skin of the target, probably tearing chunks off both sides. Some of these may come off at mere hundreds of meters per second. And they will be hot, red- or maybe even white-hot depending on the material.
To envision the appearance of this part, a thought experiment. Or, heck, go ahead and actually perform it. Start with a big piece of sheet metal, covered in a fine layer of flour and glitter. Shine a spotlight on it, in an otherwise-dark room. Then whack the thing with a sledgehammer, hard enough for the recoil to knock the flour and glitter into the air.
The haze of brightly-lit flour is your vaporized hull material, and the bits of glitter are the spallation. Scale up the velocities as needed, and ignore the bit where air resistance and gravity brings everything to a halt.
Next, the exposed hull is going to be quite hot, probably close to the melting point. So, dull red even for aluminum, brilliant white for steel or titanium or most ceramics or composites. The seriously hot layer will only be a millimeter or so thick, so it can cool fairly quickly - a second or two for a thick metallic hull that can cool by internal conduction, possibly as long as a minute for something thin and/or insulating that has to cool by radiation.
After this, if the shock is strong enough, the hull is going to be materially deformed. For this, take the sledgehammer from your last thought experiment and give a whack to some tin cans. Depending on how hard you hit them, and whether they are full or empty, you can get effects ranging from mild denting at weak points, crushing and tearing, all the way to complete obliteration with bits of tin-can remnant and tin-can contents splattered across the landscape.
Again, this will be much faster in reality than in the thought experiment. And note that a spacecraft will have many weak points to be dented, fragile bits to be torn off, and they all get hit at once. If the hull is of isogrid construction, which is pretty common, you might see an intact triangular lattice with shallow dents in between. Bits of antenna and whatnot, tumbling away.
Finally, secondary effects. Part of your ship is likely to be pressurized, either habitat space or propellant tank. Coolant and drinking water and whatnot, as well. With serious damage, that stuff is going to vent to space. You can probably see this happening (air and water and some propellants will freeze into snow as they escape, BTW). You'll also see the reaction force try to tumble the spacecraft, and if the spacecraft's attitude control systems are working you'll see them try to fight back.
You might see fires, if reactive materials are escaping. But not convection flames, of course. Diffuse jets of flame, or possibly surface reactions. Maybe secondary explosions if concentrations of reactive gasses are building up in enclosed (more or less) spaces.
-Dr. John Schilling
Source. Emphasis added.
An explosion in space should have the following elements: 1) a blinding flash where the nuke goes off, with nothing worth speaking of beyond that at the point of detonation, 2) a rapidly dissipating haze thrown from the surface of the space craft, along with spallations, all expanding at a constant rate and never slowing down.
So as you can see, a DET nuke-level detonation will look
nothing at all like what we see onscreen. Therefore, either
ship-to-ship photon torpedoes operate on as-yet-unknown physics (just like the kind of things you propose for TDiC), or visual special-effects shots
in general are unreliable to the point that we should regard them as inaccurate until proven accurate. Pick your poison, or get a better expert than John Schilling.