But a small portion of a Nuclear blast is more impactful than rocks in space? I know they can impact with the force of a nuclear blast but they have to be big like several miles across right?
No. Like I said, it's a function of mass and the square of the velocity. If something with a millionth as much mass hits at a thousand times as much velocity, it imparts the same amount of energy. With high enough velocity, a speck of dust can hit as hard as a nuke.
Also why is Sara still acting like the Captain?
Because she is. She earned that position and the crew accepts her in it. And as Rip said, he recognized here that she's better at it than he is, so he ceded the role to her.
Plus, there's also the fact that Sara Lance is a more established character in the Arrowverse, and Caity Lotz is a more popular performer. So she, not Rip, is the central character of the show.
The Waverider is not her ship
It isn't Rip's either. He stole it.
and R.I.P is still an expert on time.
Spock is an expert on everything, but Kirk is still the captain. Ditto for Data and Picard. Knowledge and leadership are two different things. Rip was a terrible leader, lying to his team, using them for his own gain, and making unilateral decisions without consulting them. As Commander Steel said here, Sara has brought them together as a unit far better than Rip ever did. It's obvious why she's in charge, and this episode was all about affirming that even in Rip's eyes.
Also why couldn't they chill out in space for a while and fix the ship?
Because Ray was running out of air?
I was under the assumption despite slowing it down, the heat build up from the kinetic energy as it hits the atmosphere along with its mass turns it into a bomb with a nuclear force and in space while a direct hit would be fatal it would just smash you out of the way like a lorry hitting you rather than explode.
Physics doesn't work that way. At high enough velocity, the kinetic energy of impact is greater than the molecular binding energy holding matter together, so the impact instantly vaporizes the impactor and much of the target. The superhot plasma cloud would then punch a hole through the interior of the ship in a cone shape -- since it expands as it travels -- and leave a bigger hole going out than it made coming in. If the interior were pressurized, the heat and shock waves imparted through the interior atmosphere could blow the ship apart or certainly kill the crew -- which is why ships in
Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda and
The Expanse would depressurize most or all of their interiors in combat, since they don't have deflectors to prevent impactors from penetrating a ship. Moreover, if the particles were moving through the hull or the interior atmosphere at relativistic speed, they could trigger a cascade of neutron radiation or a burst of gamma rays, or both. Radiation is just particles moving at very, very high speed, and having a commensurately great amount of energy.
The thing about the "lorry hitting you" analogy is that impacts at different speeds behave in very different ways, because of the ratio between the impact energy and the binding energy that holds the objects together. In a low-velocity impact -- say, if the truck hits a wall at 2 km/h -- there will just be a light bump that has little or no effect on the structure of the vehicle. But if the truck hits the wall at 50 km/h, it'll significantly damage the front of the vehicle. If it hits at 100 km/h, it could total the vehicle and damage the wall. And judging from one or two
Mythbusters episodes, if it were launched on a rocket sled and slammed into the wall at nearly 1000 km/h, the truck would essentially disintegrate into dust on impact, because the impact energy then is much greater than its molecular binding energy, so it's as if it were just a truck-shaped cloud of particles hitting the wall and splashing. (Assuming the wall is strong enough to survive that.) So impact effects don't scale up with speed.
I wasn't doubting the serious damage but the ship seemed to take less damage from a direct Nuclear explosion, where the heat alone would tear any object apart.
Maybe the
Waverider's shields are better at deflecting thermal energy and radiation than physical impact.
What was unrealistic is that they encountered a super dense meteor shower in lunar orbit right at the worst time in the plot.
I was philosophical about that. I reminded myself that the Arrowverse is basically a comic-book universe, and one of the laws of comic-book and cartoon universes is that there's always a dense asteroid swarm. Heck, they were staples of old B-movies too. I've seen '50s and '60s space movies from America, England, and Japan that all had their intrepid space crews en route to the Moon or Mars or Planet X or wherever inevitably having to deal with a meteor storm en route. Fictional outer space is just lousy with the things.
