Nuclear Technology

[sovereign]

Fission is easy.

Take a rock*.

Hit it with another rock*.

*Disclaimer: rocks must be made of radioactive material- certain uranium and plutonium isotopes are ideal.


It only gets more complicated as you try to maximize the potential- if you only need a megaton or two, a thermonuclear weapon can be remarkably durable. (Remember that Hiroshima was fifteen kilotons.) However, it still needs to be detonated. Simply blowing up a nuke just blows it up- unless the fissile material is compressed/joined into a critical mass, it won't start the chain reaction and will act like normal (if radioactive) rock. A rough analogy to conventional explosives might be that you can burn C-4 safely (and indeed some soldiers did to keep warm) so long as you don't then apply significant force (like stepping on it to put the fire out).

I would guess that our nuclear mines are fission-only weapons of less than half a kiloton. A nuke that small is finicky to produce, but would be a lot cheaper than a larger weapon once you built facilities for it- and uranium isn't exactly hard to come by (LD-14 and probably every single planet has some). Larger weapons (up in the megaton range), while certainly doable given the proliferation of deuterium and H-fuel, are unlikely to be used in space outside of very specific and well-coordinated situations for a reason already brought up; the flash. The pilots of some nuclear bombers during the Cold War were eventually trained to make the final approach with a lead eyepatch on, turn their head before the explosion went off, and make it back to base with the 50% blind eye they had previously covered with the eyepatch (the other eye would be permanently blind). Your ships would need to close thick lead walls around the cockpits to protect your pilots from going blind if you tried to use any sort of tactical nuclear weapon, not to mention how the shockwave would throw fighters all over the place. In essence, you would have to design your ships and fighting styles with tactical nuclear weapons in mind, and that's probably against the Freelancer equivalent of the Geneva convention.

Nukes still might be used strategically, though, due to their effectiveness against stuff like stations and cities. While I can't see houses hitting each other with nukes (again, Geneva convention sort of thing) we know that the Corsairs nuked Planet Cork as well as the usage of anti-station weapons in Gallia. A nuke in the hundred megaton range would punch a whole through any station not designed to withstand that sort of beating and likely liquefy the nearby interior sections as well. Such a weapon detonated inside a station of any kind would turn the inside into metallic goo, perhaps leaving the exterior relatively intact if it was well armored.

*looks at the time*

Anyway, the gist of this is that nukes are vastly inappropriate for large space battles, and that nuclear mines could probably be produced at their current price given their tiny payload and the ease of acquiring the necessary materials (uranium is a rock, like any other) and assuming normal Freelancer-physics fudge room. Nuclear super-weapons could be very dangerous with Freelancer technology (not to mention Nomad Power Cells) but as far as space goes we're okay as is.

Although that explosion does look -really- silly...

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