Nuclear Technology

[atlantis2112]

cuz noone has written an FLHook plugin that scans to see if they have those and then makes a damage radius around their explosion. Would be funny tho to threaten LPI/Pirates with a ship full of nukes XD

me: "Ok, i want 5million in 60 seconds or I destroy everyone near manhattan"
LPI 1 "/lol"
LPI 2 "We do not negotiate with terrorists"
LPI 1 "Take him out"
*poof*
XD

I was under the impression that nukes do not blow up if you blow up the nuke. The sequence has to be engaged, the atom split..

Not just *poof*

[masternerdguy]

I was under the impression that nukes do not blow up if you blow up the nuke. The sequence has to be engaged, the atom split..

Not just *poof*

Terrorist Says: "Nuclear Detonation Sequencer: An automated countdown has been initiated that will detonate in 60 seconds."

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Send the fat kid in to see if its a trap

[Boss]

Terrorist is shot within three seconds. LPI: 1, Terrorist: 0

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Just go play the game and have fun dammit.

all in all the conclusion is that disco doesn't need antagonist factions, it doesn't need phantoms, it doesn't need nomads, it doesn't need coalition and it doesn't need many other things, no AIs, the game is hijacked by morons to confuse the game with their dickwaving generic competition games mixed up with troll-of-the-day.

[Canadianguy]

Terrorist is shot within three seconds. LPI: 1, Terrorist: 0

LPI always win

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[masternerdguy]

LPI always win

yeah since its OORP for them not to XD

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Send the fat kid in to see if its a trap

[Mounteblanc]

yeah since its OORP for them not to XD

Wait... What? The LPI loses all the time.

Nuclear cruise missiles for Caps could be fun.

"Fire duh nukez! Blarg!"

Everything within 10k goes boom.

[The Joker]

Nuclear mines should have a big flash when they explode, like normal nukes.

Good idea - Flash would temporary blind everyone around in, let's say, 500 meters radius, because of its smaller warhead . Even small EMP effect as a side-effect would be cool and realistic as well.

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[11of10]

I'm not sure about the EMP, but I think it's actually produced by the Gamma rays cutting through the Earth's magnetosphere... so it's quite debatable if it would actually be a common occurence in space.

For activating a nuclear weapon... well, even with all advances in technology, they are still fragile things, and unless almost everything is ideal, they won't go fission, just go poof and make a lot of noise and radioactive debree. The catch is, you have to use explosive lenses to compress all the nuclear material into supercritical state, so that the most of atoms of fuel go to fission at the same time (the more the better, it's a bomb not a powerplant.. same principal like with chemical explosives... the faster it burns, higher the effect).

As for nuclear missiles, sure, I'd like to have a shot at that, if they were expensive and took some cargo hold, so they couldn't be spammed like crazy... Or, rather, make the current nuke mines more powerfull... that way they shouldn't be easily abused.

On another note, why we don't have any capship mines?

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Be excelent to each other!

[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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[mith]

Nukes in Space (ahem) are a completely different kettle of fish.

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/pao/History/conghand/nuclear.htm

The biggest thing a nuclear weapon would do in space is melt your face: Your ship would remain largely undamaged but you would get hit for a massive dose of radiation and given that we're using similar technology for our engines, it's fairly safe to assume our ships are relatively well shielded from such radiation. Other than that, the nuclear mines aren't that far off what you'd expect - a nuclear explosion in space would be a comparatively tame affair compared to what we see when we detonate one on the surface of a planet. It's possible that a blinding flash and some electromagnetic disruption could be experienced.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKvvrNrCOnw