Oolite Bulletins

According to the Wiki, a missile warhead is equivalent to 12.5 kilotonnes. Really? 12,500 tonnes of TNT?

The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima was the equivalent of about 12,500 tonnes of TNT. Is that really what's stuck in the top of those 30 Credit missiles - an explosive warhead equivalent to the Little Boy atomic bomb?

Should it be "12.5 tonnes" rather than kilotonnes?

12.5 tonnes of TNT would fill a removals van. It's going to make a big pop when it goes off. The safe distance, when inside a building is about 360 metres. In the open, it is 2 kilometres!

The question is (1) where the information in the  Wiki comes from, and (2) what the term 'kilotonnes' in the context of Oolite even means.

(1) If the information comes from the manual, it's pretty much canon, but I don't know the source. It could be that some Wiki contributor just made the number up.

(2) We already know that a 'ton' of commodities in Oolite obviously doesn't mean the same as a 'ton' in 21st century RealLife™. And we have absolutely no way of establishing what the reference system to the 'kilotonnes' is. Except of course: making it up.

Commander McLane wrote:

I don't know the source. It could be that some Wiki contributor just made the number up.

It was added in this edit, so you’d have to ask Arexack_Heretic.

As for the question at hand… I gave up on trying to make sense of units and scales in Oolite a long time ago, but I would expect missiles fired between handwavium-shielded spaceships to use (small) nuclear warheads. Conventional explosives aren’t much use in space unless they’re in direct contact with the target. (For real-world, unshielded spacecraft, you could probably do a lot of damage with a fragmentation warhead driven by a conventional explosive. Pineapple missile, anyone?)

Ahruman wrote:

(For real-world, unshielded spacecraft, you could probably do a lot of damage with a fragmentation warhead driven by a conventional explosive. Pineapple missile, anyone?)

That would be the Fragmentation Missile from Missiles & Bombs.oxp.

And indeed, I share the sentiment about units and scales.

@SandJ: It's absolutely futile to try to connect anything within Oolite to anything within the current real world. You can't get it to work, no matter how hard you try.

Ships that can shrug off collisions with barely more than shield damage may even withstand small nukes in close proximity.