Young Freud wrote:

Yes and no. While this is the extreme example of what a thermobaric explosion looks like, they would be a rarity in EP, mostly because of they would be restricted by the environment they could be deployed in. You might see them on Mars or Venus, but never in an asteroid colony or cylinder. [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAQ-7O3YFWo&feature=related]The yield associated with the RPO-A Bumblebee[/url], however, is what most players would be familiar with.

Very true. Thermobaric weapons simply don't work in vacuum. There may be equivalent weapons for such an environment, however, perhaps utilizing vacuum's tendency to disperse matter to better spread the fuel prior to detonation. They would probably have to contain oxidizers, however.

Smokeskin wrote:

Most of the time, I wouldn't see any problem with explosives going off in a habitat, unless it was a really small or thin-skinned one. We're talking about nothing more than a few hundred grams of explosive or fuel, compared to the amazing structural strength needed to keep a spinning habitat together.

Habitats are constructed to hold together: the parts act against the air pressure and tension forces due to rotation. Paranoid engineering probably has a safety factor of 10: hull sections should hence be able to handle an overpressure of 1 megapascal. The core structure of the ship or station is even sturdier. TNT gets up to an overpressure of 27 megapascal close to the detonation. That ought to be very bad for hulls. Fuel air explosives get up to a few megapascals, so they might be a bit less dangerous. However, it is a pressure sustained for a while and extended over a sizeable area, and this means that it will exert bending or shearing forces on parts of the hull where there are pressure differences (such as where an airtight bulkhead ends). But there is also the problem that while the compressive or tensile strength of the station or environment might be more than adequate, the blast can provide forces in the "wrong" direction that easily wrecks it. Concrete has an excellent compressive strength (~82 megapascals) but less than 10% the tensile or bending strength - buildings tend to crumble when subjected to sideways pressure. Fullerene cables can handle tens of gigapascals but will just slacken if subjected to pressure. So a rotating station with an explosion will get a brief destabilization as part of it "lifts" and then "falls back", which is then transmitted as a fierce jerk by the other cables to the rest of the station. They better be attached very firmly or they will just rip loose and the whole unbalanced wheel will start to disintegrate. I also suspect that there will be a surprising number of pieces of a station that will not handle the blast as one would wish even in a well-designed station - and in a retrofitted scum barge things will be worse. Oops, the explosive release clamps of all escape pods activated! If the hull is able to handle the overpressure, then the extra gas has to spread out. Which of course means a blast wave in a confined environment (unless we are talking about a big, open air cylinder). That is going to be very bad for the inhabitants, not to mention things like life support systems. If you are really lucky pressure bulkheads are in place and closed. Then you only lose one section and everyone in it. Ah, yes, fires in space can get pretty exciting too. In microgravity we can get impressive dust explosions (nature's own fuel air explosives). Sprinkler systems activating close to a really hot source can cause a secondary steam explosion. And while we are at it, heat is bad for the strength of metals and even worse for supermaterials like fullerenes or graphenes. It is at this point you start wishing the hull had actually breached, since a metal fire in a closed environment eating away at core structures is far worse than just a hull breach.