Talk:Class-D nuclear warhead/Archive 1

I really don't know what level of speculation is appropriate here. I wouldn't have gone off on this nuclear bomb design digression, except that the previous revision was really confusing and seemed to imply that the Class D was implausible, which I don't think it is. Battlestars are jumping around at faster-than-light speeds, is it such a stretch to believe the colonies have advanced nuclear reactors to produce exotic isotopes, and really powerful explosives to compress them to supercritical mass?

I don't know, maybe it would be best to just cut this article down to "here's what the class D was in the series. Gee whiz, it must use some kind of advanced technology."

Evan 21:33, 27 March 2006 (CST) (first edit here!)

I think we need to clean this up (not because of you Evan). You see they say "hm, should be 40 Class-D nuclear warheads there" but Adama later says they only have "five nukes" aboard Galactica, leading to the possibilities that A) There are different KINDS of warhead, and the BIG ones Adama was referring to were different, OR that when they actually got to Ragnar Anchorage, there were less warheads than they expected. Hmmm...--The Merovingian ^{(C - E)} 22:28, 27 March 2006 (CST)

Based on reading up, it seems feasible. Our nukes were all designed rather a while ago, and sub-20kg would be doable with standard fissionable materials. A W54 was 23kg in 1961, and the Class-D was in a pretty big case. The yield is almost completely inestimable from available information, so the 1kt max for a W54 might even be close.

Anyway, why do the colonials have suitcase bombs? Seriously, they are a bit puzzling motivation-wise. --CalculatinAvatar 01:36, 28 March 2006 (CST)

The main, real Class-D warhead used by the US, the W-28, weighed about 1800 lbs. Here's an interesting article on suitcase bombs. [1] --Talos 06:17, 28 March 2006 (CST)

I'm not sure if you're claiming the US Class-D is the smallest nuke the US has possessed, but it was not even close. The link you point out confirms this readily. --CalculatinAvatar 11:30, 28 March 2006 (CST)

I wasn't. I was pointing out that a real-life Class-D warhead is much to big to fit in a suitcase. The W-54 is much smaller than the W-28. --Talos 12:01, 28 March 2006 (CST)

"Judging by the total instant destruction of the Cylon Basestar in Kobol's Last Gleaming, they would appear to have a yield in the megaton range." <--That's a misinterpretation of the explosion. First of all, what this "instant destruction"? A nuke explodes at essentially the speed of light, of course you'd be looking at instant destruction of the Basestar. And when you're blowing up something like a Basestar from the *inside*, you don't need nukes in the MT range. Considering the size of a Basestar (really not that big, especially compared to cities), its own onboard combustables and reactors and the incomplete vapourization of significant portion of the vessel, even a 20KT bomb would be more than enough do the damage observed. A MT-range bomb would've left *nothing* of the vessel, even a high KT-range bomb would've had you looking for the Basestar wreckage with a magnifying glass. Remember, a nuke exploding inside a target massively multiply the effectiveness of the nuke. I recommend editing out the estimated yield, period, and save the educated guess for when we've been sufficiently educated by additional onscreen material. --David Templar 15:15, 28 March 2006 (CST)

Gina's nuke was not a Class D warhead

I think we've overlooked this: when Tigh is going through a manifest of what is supposed to be at Ragnar Anchorage, he says there should be 40 Class D nuclear warheads there. --->In "Bastille Day", Adama says that "Galactica has 5 nukes left". For already had a few of these, which would be removed when the crew left (they couldn't just be safely detonated like normal ordinance). ***My point is, we don't know that those "5 nukes", one of which was given to Baltar who gave it to Gina, was actually a "class D warhead"; we don't even know if they actually found any of them.--->we go on at length talking about how it could or could not be a suitcase bomb, because the nukes that Galactica-Boomer and Gina used were that size; but we don't know that that is actually a Class-D warhead. --The Merovingian ^{(C - E)} 14:12, 29 March 2006 (CST)

Silly question, but does the miniseries use the phrase "Class D nuclear warheads" or just "Class D warheads"? There's a huge difference between the two, not all warheads are nukes. I also find it rather unlikely that the Colonial government/military would just leave that many nukes lying around an unguarded, half-abondoned, middle-of-nowhere depot, and none of the Galactica members seem to have freaked out at the idea that there was a thief onboard a station supposedly full of nukes (or wonder how he got there, suggesting that Ragnar wasn't exactly hard to get to). --David Templar 21:07, 29 March 2006 (CST)