Oolite Bulletins

While trying to figure out how to present my OXP's missiles in the Wiki, I stumbled upon infobox(es) of the standard Oolite missile(s).

I think I'll use same kind of infoboxes. But there's one thing in the Oolite missiles' info that made me wonder though: why the Explosive yield is such an arbitrary number? 12.5 kilotonnes for weapon_energy = 4500 = weird IMHO .

I'd like to standardize the presentation of missiles' Explosive yield, so it would be easier to compare different OXP missiles with the vanilla ones. We could take a semi-realistic and same time straight-forward approach here, like saying that one unit of weapon_energy is one gigajoule (for keeping the yield in the kiloton range). Thus both standard Oolite missiles would have Explosive yield of 4500 GJ or 4.5 TJ (~1.1 kilotons). Comparison: Hiroshima nuclear bomb had a blast yield of ~67 TJ (16 kilotons).

How about it, shall I mess with the Wiki?

The complication is that weapon_energy is not the only variable determining the damage caused by a missile. Two missiles with the same weapon_energy can deal completely different amounts of damage in otherwise identical conditions.

For reference, the damage caused by a missile detonating a distance D metres outside the collision radius of its target, with weapon_energy W, and an AI "dealEnergyDamageWithinDesiredRange" command with the desired range set to R is: For a standard missile W = 4500, R = 250m, and D is intended by the missile AI to be around 25m, for a median damage of around 265 against the primary target. That 265 number is probably the best measure of yield for the Wiki page, whatever conversion factor you wish to apply to get it into GJ or kT; both R and "intended D" should be reasonably clear from the missile's AI.

... to complicate further, 1.77 will have a new way of detonating missiles which uses a different formula to avoid some of the bugs resulting from the above formula, though the actual damage done in practice should not - bugfixes aside - change much as a result. Look up ship.dealEnergyDamage on the wiki for details.

Not so simple, eh ?

But why not, the Explosive yield unit could by all means be "Energy" - not so 'realistic', but directly derivable from relevant files and absolutely relevant to the game.