Caprica City

[Tos]

Helo and boomer were wondering around Caprica city in one of the earlier episodes, shouldn’t that be a smouldering crater after the bombs dropped in the pilot episode?

[Anonymous]

It’s a good question. And I don’t have a good answer except to hazard a guess that Caprica City didn’t take any direct hits, or is one massive city since many of the windows and structures were in good shape 😳

[Headgehog]

Here’s the quick answer.

Nuclear weapons aren’t nearly as strong as people believe. Obviously the area immediately around the explosion will be vaporized, but everything else will just suffer radiation and massive concussive wind damage. Remember that the Galactica survived a direct hit from a nuke.

Most of the damage from a nuke comes from the large shockwave of air it produces. The bombs generates a lot of heat, which causes the air to expand rapidly. This rapid expansion is what causes most of the damage, so its recommended to detonate a nuke above a city, where it will generate the largest shock wave. Detonating above the city will also resulting a larger does of radiation for a larger area.

The reason the Japanese atomic bombing were so devastating is because the Japanese built their structures out of paper and wood (so that they’d be easy to rebuild after and earthquake or volcano). If the bombs were dropped over a western city, ex: Berlin, the damage would have mostly been a human one (and broken windows, tossed cars). Caprica City is constructed like a western one (a lot like Vancouver 😉 ) So the Cylons would have had to detonate a large thermo-nuke on every street corner to level the city.

There should be a LOT more broken glass, and fire damage, but maybe the Twelve Colonies have better material science knowledge then we do.

[Author]

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