something about battlestar galactica that is bugging me

Well who is to know the size of the warhead. Given that we must take some liberties with the show and suspend disbelief for 42mins then one could easily summerize a few things that could make sense.

Armor Plating.

We have seen Galactica take many hits from many different weapon types and hold up pretty well. The armor the ship must have would be have to be extrodinary to take the stresses of the jump to FTL so it's not too much of s stretch to think that it could withstand a nuke. We do see craters all over the ship from hits, so there is damage.

Space itself.

The how and why's of the behaviour of a nuke blast in a vacum aside (i'm sure someone will post something thoughtful on it) it's reasonable to assume that the blast is nothing like what we expect on Earth.

The Warhead.

Perhaps the term "nukes" hold a slightly different meaning in BSG. It is of course meant to be very similar if not the same as what we know, but it's up to us the audience to decide for ourselves the exact meanings of such things.Maybe the warheads are just not that powerful.

The size of the ship.

It may have suffered damage but the size of the ship relative to the damage taken may make it look like there was little effect. Galactica is meant to be around 1400m long and over 500m wide so when looked at in scale a small warhead may not do so much visable damage from a near miss.

For whatever reason some structures hold up well to nuke blasts. After WWII the German Heavy Cruiser Prinz Eugen was awarded to the US Navy and was subjected to two nuke tests. It survived both. It did spring some leaks after the second test but was deemed to eradiated to allow workers to safely complete repairs.

If a WWII warship can survive two blasts (though not direct) and not be a hulk of melting steel, then i'm happy to just believe that Galactica has stong enough armor to withstand direct nuke hits.

So as part of a space weapon one would probably include somekind of particulate matter in the warhead to transmitt the pressure wave, a compressed gas maybe?

Sure, though the amount of gas needed would be rather large i guess. Far more than one would hope to contain within the confines of a missle.

Though, one could also assume that the compression techiniques used would be far greater than what we know of today. That coupled with superior pressure vessels it seems like it could be a solution.

A Nuke in space doesn't have anywhere near the destructive potential that it does in an atmosphere. The actual "explosion" part of a nuclear blast comes from superheated air near the nuke itself. In space if it hit near enough to a ship it would melt it, and if it hit near enough and close to some material that's susceptible to being vaporized there'd even be an explosion.

SO...effects of nuke in space:

1. Temperature

2. light pressure from radiation.

If for argument's sake, BSG was plated with a few meters worth of artificial diamond in a tungsten matrix it could very well stand up to a near-direct hit to a tactical nuclear missile, provided it also had enough radiation shielding of some sort to back it up.

Which, given the radition found in space that Galactica would be subjected to in everyday use, that's a reasonable assumption.

Also, as far as the size of the nuke, if it's the one you're talking about wasn't it launched from a Raider? Those raiders are more or less the size of a viper, and the missiles themselves are stored in the wings so they are no longer than the width of one. So as far as nukes go, that probably couldn't have been too powerful of one.

For reference, in one episode Galactica itself showed off its nukes (when they were fighting for the control of the temple of Apollo was it?) and if you compare the missile sizes there was quite a bit of a difference.

hmmm. i thought nukes always just emitted EM Radiation in space(no air to explode). maybe the nuke was designed to punch a hole in the hull before detonating.

When did Galactica take a nuke?

At the end of the miniseries, when they led the fleet out of the nebula and the Cylons were waiting.

You're forgetting that the impact and blast energy would be transmitted as shockwaves through the body of galactica herself, causing stresses throughout the ship's superstructure but particularly around the impact site. My guess is all the ordinance she took is one of the main reasons she was in such a bad state in Season 4

Two things.  First, insofar as size is concerned we know that the Cylons had nukes at least up to 50 Megatons (the size of some of the largest nukes produced by us and far larger than the normal American nuclear warhead used for countervalue targets, which averages between 200 and 400 kilotons).  Second, it is quite possible that the Galactica's armor plating could consist of several types of armor, to include a high tech "skirt" style, reactive armor, or a combination of these to to produce armor in depth.  Remember that armor doesn't necessarily mean (and in our military today often isn't) simply a hard plate.

I would be more worried about the EMP blast frying every computer onboard than the nuke actually blowing the ship up. Maybe that, and giving the crew a radiation bath, especially because there's no athmosphere to attenuate the gamma rays. Not that it would matter in a direct hit.

More on the effects of nuclear explosions in space directly from the eggheads.

I would say that an EMP wouldn't be a concern, being a warship built to withstand nukes it's easy to assume some form of shielding for all components.

In fact would a EMP behave the same in a vacum as it does in the atmosphere? I'll admit i'm not bothered to look up the physics of it but i suspect the properties of the pulse would be vaslty different in space.

Radiation, again would be shielded just for every day use of the ship in space. Though of course any fracture of the hull would allow that radiation in.

As for the size of the Nuke. Yeah 50M was what was used on the colonies, there is no way a raider carries that size of a nuke. Yes, i'm sure in BSG they have considerably more smaller warheads in size with a large yeild compared to us, but they differ not so much in weaponary so i think that, yes it could be bigger than a few hundred kilotons but i doubt that they can cram a 50megaton warhead into a raider, or basestar launched missle.

I'm sure the info is out there somewhere if someone is willing to sift for it.

Just on the 50megaton warhead. That's actually the biggest detonated warhead ever. The Soviets deployed it once in 1961 and it was so large that the shock waves were measurable after 3 passages around the world.

Over 6km of fireball and its affects were felt and heard over 1000k/m away....frightining stuff..

But i digress....

Anyway, the reason Galactica survived a space battle is because movies are magic!

In a *real* space battle, they would've hit that hulking behemoth from across the solar system with a X-Large laser beam or a mass driver projectile. You wouldn't even see the attacker. And the fight would be over in about ten seconds.

Not very fun to watch, is it.

For a great depiction of what a sci-fi battle would look like if it were based on realism and not on big explosions (though there are plenty of those there as well), look up Peter F. Hamilton's "Reality Dysfunction" trilogy. Good stuff.

As for nukes, I imagine any sort of an anti-ship nuke would have an armor-piercing head designed to bury itself in the hull plating and then detonate. I don't know if BSG has those though, but it makes sense.

Oh, and as far as "not making sense", how about them Cylon raiders not making mince-meat out of the Vipers? I mean, they are machines, correct? *Built* for the purpose of flying in space? So how come they can't pull off stunts which carry them way above the G threshold of humans? Raiders should always be able to outmaneuver human pilots simply because they won't black out when the G's get too rough.

I had thought that before myself. Worse though is how does what only ever seems to be maybe 2 dozen vipers actually hold off the swarms of raiders we see. At time there must be over 100 raiders, yet the vipers always manage to hold their own.

Not complaining, just always found that curious.

I really enjoyed BSG's take on space warfare. It was a welcome change to see "big guns" as main weaponry instead of some laser/phaser/torpedo.

Why nukes were not used more often though i don't know. Remember when Lee shows up in Peaguses and fires a large salvo of nukes at near point blank range and rips apart the basestar?

Great scene, i loved it, but made me think why it wasn't used more often....

Anyway like you say, it's a movie/show where we have to fill in the blanks and just for a little while believe that the good guys are that invunerable.

Wasn't hard to do....

Depending to what degree they ignored the (far better) miniseries, they didn't get into fights as often because they were out of ammo - and didn't have enough time to resupply fully during their stay in the anti-cylon-magic-nebula-ammo-depot.

Ahh good explanation. I guess it's a little hard to manufacture more nuke warheads in the machine shop!!

Well, my theory.. if you remember in the beginning they were losing quite a few vipers (and there was that Scar episode with the Raider Elite), but we also learned that the raiders only get better because when they die, they can also re-download so the new raider learns from the old.

But once they started blowing up resurrection ships (one in season 2 , and then they just did away with the hub completely later), any new raider would be a complete rookie compared to the trained viper pilots.

If you didn't see the miniseries, Galactica was going to be retired, so it is safe to assume that the Galactica has been around for awhile.  With this, that would also mean that we can assume that the armor of the ship has been upgraded a lot and i think it also mentions this in the miniseries or series.  With this upgraded armor, the ship would be able to withstand near misses from nukes and also a direct hit or two that i saw in the miniseries.

Maybe there were a few Advent Dudes standing by to mitigate the effects of it...

yeah...i'll wear that, to a degree. In the end the Raiders are still machines. they would have programming that would surpass the knowledge of any nugget.

Plus sheer weight of numbers would still offset lack of skill, but it's a reasonable assumption still.

I've seen it all. But again thats another good explantaion. Though the counter to that though would be that it is still a 40 yr old ship. No matter what upgrades you did, it could still be vunerable to a direct nuke hit, espeacially sinve the colonial fleet would have been upgrading with little knowledge of what the Cylons were now capable of.

But they're not completely machine. When Starbuck took over the downed raider and piloted it, the inside was all bio-mechanical goop. Granted, I would still expect them to be far superior to humans, but it iw worth pointing out. So maybe they aren't pulling crazy moves that humans can't because the raiders can't do it either, because of the limitations of the bio part of their systems. Although you would then think that the Cylons would just build a pure machine raider, but who knows?

I get the impression that Battlestars were made to take a serious beating, and that they could probably take a couple nukes and for the most part just shrug it off. As they were built for fighting an opponent far superior to them, the designers probably would have put on as much armor plating and defensive systems as possible, just to give them a fighting chance.

c'mon...radiation bomb only does what? few hundred hull points?

Agreed.

Agreed again. Thats my take on it as well.

@^....ROFL!!!!

That's assuming the builders' knowledge surpasses the knowledge of a trained viper pilot. Which it wouldn't The programming would still be limited to basic physics and "this is how you control space flight". What do the skinjobs know about dogfighting?

Imagine a complete rookie chess player trying to program an AI to play chess. The rookie knows how the board works, but beyond that..