Instead of just using ship length, which Google A.I. assumed was diameter for a sphere,
let’s:
- volume section 1: calculate those spheres’ volumes
- volume section 2: calculate more-probable ship volumes; L × 1/10 L (for W) × 1/10 L (for H) (using 1/10 just for simplicity’s sake, not attempting to determine exact ship measurements)
- comparison: determine how much more voluminous a sphere of diameter equal to ship length would be
- masses
- densities: note that while an asteroid or meteoroid is denser than cavities/hangars in a ship, it might Not be denser than alloys/armor
- speeds: determine how fast a MWD or afterburner can get the thing going
- breakup: assume good shields prevent breakup in atmosphere
- compared to Earth/modern
- reasoning for these calculations
- easier numbers
- in-character motives
- reactors: factor in the reactor going supercritical on (or before; manually interfered with) impact
- brought with the ship: factor in the firing of all weapons during approach
- limitations/constraints
- destinations
- conclusion
- - - - -
SPHERE (NATURAL OBJECT) VOLUMES:
- “Based on typical densities for stony asteroids, a 1-tonne (1,000 kg) asteroid is estimated to be approximately 1 to 2 meters (roughly 3 to 7 feet) in diameter.”; volume = 1.77 m^3.
- “A 10-tonne (10,000 kg) stony asteroid would be approximately 2 to 3 meters in diameter, assuming a standard, relatively dense composition.”; volume = 8.18 m^3.
- “A 100-tonne (100,000 kg) asteroid typically has a diameter of approximately (4) to (5) meters ((13) to (16) feet). These small, rocky bodies are common and generally cause atmospheric airbursts rather than surface impacts.”; volume = 47.71 m^3
- “The diameter of a 1,000 tonne asteroid is approximately 9 meters. Because asteroids vary in composition, the exact diameter depends on the material’s density.”; volume = 381.7 m^3
- “A 10,000-tonne (or 10,000-metric-ton) asteroid is estimated to have a diameter of approximately 17 to 20 meters (56 to 66 feet).”; volume = 3,315.23 m^3
- - - - -
SHIP VOLUMES:
Death Star 1 had an estimated volume 2,140,000 km^3
(with a 160km diameter).
vs.
An Iapetan-class super-titan volume might be 1,250,000 km^3
(if ~500km long x ~50km wide x ~50km tall).
- - - - -
SPHERE VOLUME COMPARED TO VOLUME OF A SHIP OF THE SAME LENGTH:
- Iapetan-class ex.: 1,250,000 km^3
vs. sphere of same length (diameter) = 65,400,000 km^3;
the ship is like a rod, thus obviously far less voluminous –52.32 times less voluminous, in this case
- to have a comparable volume to an Iapetan-class super-titan, the sphere would need to be 133.66km in diameter; it would have to be >3.74 times narrower/shorter
- - - - -
MASSES:
Ship masses in tonnes:
- Shtl = 1,600 tonnes
- Corv 1,000
- Frig 800-1,700
- Dest 1,000-1,800
- Crui 11,000-15,000
- Btcr 12,500-15,000
- Batl 80,000-100,000
- Carr 1,100,000-1,150,000
- Drea 1,250,000-1,300,000
- Tita 2,075,625-2,379,370
- Iape: determine based on how much more voluminous 516 km in length and 157 km in height (×157 W)… is than an Avatar’s L×H×H (~13.5km x ~1/10 that x ~1/10 that –an avg., since the front is so much wider than the rest of the body): Avatar volume = 24.60375 km^3
Iapetan-class volume = 12,718,884 km^3
24.60375 goes into 12,718,884 slightly more than 516,949 times.
516,949 times an Avatar mass (2,400,000 tonnes) = 1,240,677,604,023.77686… tonnes;
The Iapetan-class super-titans may be >1 trillion times more massive than the regular/modern titans,
and that is certainly enough to cause an E.L.E., even if they just crash, even if that crash occurs at normal speeds (not approaching light speed).
Amarr Shuttle mass = 1,600 tonnes
Amarr Executioner mass = 1,090 tonnes
That mass when in freefall; terminal velocity = nearly 12 tonnes of TNT; .00001195 MT
That mass when at warp speed =
(2 AU/s for freighter)
“An object with a mass of 1,600 tonnes moving at 2 astronomical units per second would release approximately 7.16×10^28 Joules of energy upon impact, which is equivalent to 17.1 trillion Megatons of TNT.”
..
It would only take several thousand megatons to cause a global E.L.E..
..
vs. (9+ AU/s for interceptor)
“The impact of a 1600-tonne object traveling at 9 AU/s would release approximately 1.45×10^30 Joules of energy, equivalent to 3.46×10^14 Gigatons of TNT.”
..
“To release an explosion equivalent to several thousand megatons (Mt) of TNT, a 1,600-tonne 1.6×10^6 kg object would need to strike the ground at a relativistic speed, specifically above 99.9% of the speed of light (c).”
..
Avatar base-speed = 50-60 m/s
with MWD: 300-350 m/s
mass 2,400,000 tonnes
"How fast would a 2,400,000 tonnes object have to hit the ground in order to release an explosion equivalent to several thousand megatons of tnt?
“To release an energy equivalent to 3,000 megatons of TNT, a 2,400,000-tonne object would need to impact the ground at approximately 102,274 meters per second (or about 102.3 km/s).”
I don’t know why Google A.I. misinterprets “several thousand” to mean “3,000”, not “7,000”, but whatever.
..
“The impact of a (2,400,000) tonne object moving at (300) m/s would result in an explosion of approximately 0.0258 megatons of TNT.”
..
Short answer: A titan cannot cause a global E.L.E. by crashing at its top speed into a planet.
What it can do is fire its hundreds of thousands of nuclear weapons, and its doomsday device (multiple times, if able to “hang out” in the area long enough), and then crash onto the most industrial/productive city/area.
- - - - -
DENSITIES:
Most stony asteroids/meteorites have densities between 3.0 and 3.7 g/cm³. Several metals, alloys, and armor materials are significantly denser, including Iron-Nickel alloys (7-8 g/cm³), Lead (11.3 g/cm³), Tungsten Carbide (≈ 15 g/cm³), and Depleted Uranium (≈19 g/cm³). Osmium, at 22.59 g/cm³, is the densest stable element.
- - - - -
SPEEDS:
max MWD speed boost for different ship classes:
ex.: titan = 60 m/s base, with MWD = 300-350 m/s
30,000 m/s = Earth’s avg. speed around the Sun, and is ~1% LS
(modern real Earth) Space shuttle = 7,743 m/s (in orbit)
warping = 8+ AU/s; 149,600,000 km/s
‘jumping’ = bypassing/crossing 5-10 LY instantly (47,303,652,362,904 to ~94,610,000,000,000 km/s), but this bypasses regular physical Space
Ways to speed up a ship to cause more MT worth of an impact explosion:
- specialized implants
- nanofiber internal structure
- overdrive injector system
- auxiliary thruster/s
- afterburner
- polycarbon engine housings
- hyperspatial velocity optimizers
- MWD
- MJD --but this technically moves a ship beyond physical space, thus it would not smash into a surface
- - - - -
BREAKUP:
Unlike a natural object, a ship is specifically designed to maintain its structural integrity in-atmosphere, and it has armor and energy-shielding to help, plus other features such as knowing how to adjust its velocity or trajectory to minimize air friction and other unwanted things.
Even upon impact (i.e. collision/crash), its shielding and armor will allow it to punch a bigger/deeper crater than a natural body ever could.
What will be broken up sooner, I suspect, are all the unshielded/normal surface buildings, plus a considerable amount of the land they are on.
- - - - -
COMPARED TO EARTH’S MODERN ERA:
EVE Online lore is all about taking modern figures and upping them by degrees of magnitude;
our millennia of recorded history became tens of millennia,
our billions of people became trillions,
carriers got outdone by super carriers and titans,
nukes by antimatter,
terraforming by Deathless Circle changing/moving an entire solar system,
etc.
So kamikazes in New Eden might not be targeting the biggest ships and stations anymore, but entire cities, if not entire worlds.
Which class of ship in New Eden might logically take on a target the size of a civilization spread out across a planetary, or at least lunar, surface?
- Frigates might still tend to target small buildings the size of frigates; mansions and strip malls.
- Destroyers: midsize buildings; high-rises
- Crui’: large buildings; skyscrapers
- Btlcr’: city blocks
- Batl: downtown areas
- Carr: large towns / small cities
- Drea: carpet-bombing large cities and even regions
- Tita: global ELE, such as via instantly vaporizing an icecap (by firing its doomsday; not by just crashing)
- Iape: global destabilization; shattering (since they are longer than the Death Star is wide –though still not as voluminous / massive)
- - - - -
REASONING FOR THESE PARTICULAR CALCULATIONS:
Why calculate spheres… or rectangular prisms… when CCP already posted masses?
It’s just another way to gain a more complete understanding of how some of these vessels might react to colliding with a planet or moon.
Some ships are blockier than others, so a calculation based on their dimensions might help.
For curvier ships, maybe the sphere volume might help, if only to be halved to account for smaller details and gaps.
“CCP determines the mass of EVE Online spaceships through manual, developer-defined balancing, rather than a direct, consistent physical formula based on size or lore, as the game’s physics are abstracted. These values are assigned primarily for balancing agility, propulsion, and mechanics like warp disruption and wormhole mass limits, resulting in a non-linear scaling across ship classes.”
After how impossible many of the orbital distances in planet- and moon-info pop-ups have been, this summary of ship-masses doesn’t surprise me.
In other words, even though the mass of each class of ship is posted in-game and on the wikis, those masses do not necessarily reflect what the real masses of those ships would be if based solely on their dimensions or parts and density.
In short, as I mentioned in a previous post in this thread, those masses are made up, thus we have only speculated on them.
- - - - -
EASIER NUMBERS:
Google’s estimate of what each mass, moving at 42 m/s (avg. speed of meteoroids), would cause in MT:
- 1 tonne (commercial-grade, heavy-duty pickup truck or light commercial vehicle, and some compact cars): 2.11×10^-10; 0.000000000211 MT
- 10 tonnes (medium-to-heavy-duty commercial truck): 2.108×10^-9; 0.000000002108 MT
- 100 (~3x a capsuleer pod): 2.108×10^-8; 0.00000002108 MT
- 1,000 (~corvette or frigate, ~half a destroyer): 2.11×10^-7; 0.0000002108 MT
- 10,000 (<cruiser and <battlecruiser): 2.108×10^-6; 0.000002108 MT
- 100,000 (~battleship): 2.108×10^-5; 0.00002108 MT
- 1,000,000 (<Archon carrier, and <half an Avatar’s weight): 2.108×10^-4; 0.0002108 MT
- 10,000,000: 2.108×10^-3; 0.002108 MT
- 100,000,000: 2.108×10^-2; 0.02108 MT (like the first atomic bomb)
- 1,000,000,000: 2.108×10^-1; 0.2108 MT (avg. modern (2026 A.D.) nuke)
- 10,000,000,000: 2.108×10^1; 2.108 MT (higher-yield ICBM nuke)
Thus, as some of you have already pointed out, a crashing titan would not cause an E.L.E., but a normal nuclear-level explosion, or about the same amount of damage as an average nuke.
It will take acceleration to significant speed to add enough energy to the equation to result in an explosion capable of damaging more than the local crash site.
The number of nukes and doomsday firings the titan unleashes will be what does the most damage to the targeted civilization/world. Accelerating as much as it can before crashing, and ensuring its reactor goes supercritical along the way, will probably do a lot less damage.
- - - - -
IN-CHARACTER MOTIVES:
Why would anyone crash a ship onto a planet?
For the same reason they sacrifice them in battles, and ganking, and as bait; sometimes it is cost effective, or just effective in general.
Maybe they want to demoralize competition, and cannot yet just set up P.I. themselves.
Maybe they want to change the direction of expansion into unsettled systems.
Maybe they are just terrorists or something else.
The U.S. used to nuke islands and entire fleets of old ships just to see what would happen.
They nukes Army units (on their own soil/homeland) whose troops were told to just lie in ditches and then stand up, facing the mushroom cloud.
Why wouldn’t people, millennia ahead, do the same types of tests, but on the global scale?
Why wouldn’t New Eden empires cause E.L.E.s of different types just to see how they play out?
Not much could stop them. Sometimes, far enough out from their capital planets, those tests might even go unnoticed.
The Talocan make man-made wormholes and stellar engines.
Deathless Circle moved an entire star system.
There are many reasons different groups might consider crashing a ship into a world.
- - - - -
REACTORS:
Then we factor in what a nuclear reactor hitting a planet would do:
Vocab’:
Critical (stable self-sustaining nuclear reaction; normal, operational, safe power production)
Vs.
Supercritical (“Supercriticality in a nuclear reactor is only dangerous when it becomes “prompt critical,” meaning the fission chain reaction is sustained solely by immediate (prompt) neutrons, leading to an uncontrollable, exponential power spike that can destroy the core. While slight, temporary supercriticality is normal for raising power, rapid, unplanned supercritical states—often due to operator error, control rod failure, or cooling loss—are dangerous, causing fuel overheating, meltdowns, or explosions.”)
..
So any ship with a nuclear or antimatter reactor could be intentionally rendered bad-supercritical, as explained above, sure to explode more than a regular-crash explosion of a ship merely falling from orbit.
Types of Reactors:
- Amarr: Antimatter Reactors
- Caldari: Graviton Reactors
- Gallente: Fusion Reactors
- Minmatar: Nuclear Reactors
- Triglavian: Singularity Radiation Convertors
- CONCORD: a mix of those types
- Jove: secret (not revealed in lore) and far beyond the tech’ available to capsuleers/outsiders
Biggest explosion resulting from a nuclear reactor:
“The April 26, 1986, Chernobyl explosion was a massive steam explosion, not a nuclear detonation, that destroyed Reactor No. 4, blowing off its 1,000-ton roof and releasing 100-400 times more radiation than the Hiroshima bomb. It caused immediate deaths, sent radioactive fallout across Europe, and created a 30-km exclusion zone.”
IOW: Factoring in the reactor of any of these ships can dramatically worsen the effect of crashing one into a planet, when compared to a natural body of the same mass and velocity.
- - - - -
BROUGHT WITH/IN THE SHIP:
If a titan uses 75k isotopes per doomsday firing,
and can carry hundreds of thousands of isotopes,
it might bring enough isotopes to fire its doomsday 2-3 times.
It can also, of course, be resupplied without it docking.
“Specific radioactive isotopes can cause massive explosions, but only under specific, engineered conditions.” Those fuel isotopes probably aren’t going to produce a nuclear explosion, or enhance such an explosion. They are just mentioned here to explain how much damage a titan can do to a world, even before it crashes itself.
Then we factor in how many nukes an EVE Online ship can carry:
Launcher Capacity: A typical titan fits Siege Missile Launchers, which have a capacity of 15 missiles per launcher. With multiple launchers fitted, a Titan can carry thousands of missiles in its cargohold.
Ammo Bay/Cargo Size: Titans generally have a cargo bay size of roughly 56,000 (m^{3}).
Missile Volume: Citadel Torpedoes (used by Titans) have a volume of 0.1 (m^{3}) to 0.3 (m^{3}).
Total Capacity: Given the, say, 56,000 (m^{3}) cargo hold, a Titan can realistically carry hundreds of thousands of Citadel Torpedoes, easily exceeding 100,000+ missiles depending on the specific fit and cargo capacity modules used (e.g., Expanded Cargoholds).
compared to:
- shuttles: technically, plenty of room to at least transport a dozen or so; just gotta activate them without standard launchers
- frigates: dozens (90+)
- destroyers: ~a few hundred
- cruisers: ~more than a few hundred
- battlecruisers: ~several hundred
- battleships: ~thousands
- - - - -
LIMITATIONS:
Min. distance to lock onto a destination for warp: 150km
Depth of most terrestrial atmospheres: ~100km
Any ship could jump or be jumped to within hundreds of km of a planet, then ‘burn’/warp to the surface.
Planetary defenses will stop some of that barrage, but can any really say with certainty they would be able to stop a ship suddenly firing all its weapons and then ‘burning’ or warping straight to the surface?
Any developed/guarded world is likely to be easily able to destroy or redirect incoming asteroids, comets, meteoroids, etc., but a ship with a shield, guidance system, weapons, and accelerating/warping straight for them, maybe after taking out one of their defenses along the way, maybe escorted by a fleet? That might succeed in striking the surface.
- - - - -
DESTINATIONS:
It has been said that intentionally hitting a major body of water would cause more damage in the long-run than if just aiming for a city or major industrial center; while initial damage to such a developed area might appear greater or more favorable, a towering wave spreading out in all directions would be able to flood/damage a greater area, displacing far more people and other assets.
What mass and impact speed would generate a 10m tall tsunami?
“To generate a 10-meter tall tsunami upon reaching a coastline, an asteroid would typically need a mass of approximately 1.0x10^10 kg (roughly 200 meters in diameter) impacting at a speed of 15–20 km/s.”
“To generate a tsunami with a height of 100 meters (approximately 330 feet), an asteroid impactor typically requires a diameter of 500 meters to 1.1 kilometers, moving at typical orbital speeds of 12 to 20 km/s.”
Eve ships have such dimensions and mass, and can reach such speeds, so while they might not permanently sterilize a planet, they can certainly wash away big portions of any civilization upon it, just by crashing in various ways.
- - - - -
CONCLUSION:
By themselves, sometimes even when accelerating to significant sub-light speeds, New Eden ships (other than the super-titans) will not cause an E.L.E., but all of them (even shuttles, technically, just not with in-game mechanics/options) are capable of bringing enough firepower to ruin at least one city, if not hundreds or even thousands of cities, all before they crash, and this is especially true if they intentionally crash at high speed into a major body of water (causing tsunamis), or trigger a major fault line (causing civilization-shaking earthquakes, not to mention increased volcanism).
_