EVE General Discussion

You know, I've been flying the explosions in girder factories for years, but I only just now realized why they had thermonuclear triggers as an essential component in their T2 construction:

Minmitar fluff makes frequent mention that they have metric crap-loads of uranium and other fissile/fusion material. Their ships have thermonuclear triggers for something. Then I remembered a little something called 'Operation Plumbbob', in which back here on earth, some bright sparks at Los Alamos launched a manhole cover into space by accident, because the nuke detonation at the bottom of a shaft turned the blast into the chamber of the world's largest gun, and sent the metal plate flying at 60 km/second.

So, the Minmitar make up for the 'primitive' technology of their weapons with gross and wholly excessive overkill via using thermonuclear warheads as the propellant in their weapons. It also handily explains the size differences, as the difference is made up both in a disposable barrel liner that protects it from the blast as well as likely the round deforming from the impact of the highly excessive 'boom', with the massively larger sizes of the artillery pieces due to the much longer barrel and wider expansion of the projectile for greater propulsion.

It would be more useful to use them for propulsion. Below a certain yield, nuclear weapons are less powerful than conventional explosives, which would make using them for guns impractical. Capital weapons could probably get away with it, and maybe 1400s on a battleship.

True, but the thing is that even a 1 kiloton device would be enough to really launch the crap out of something. There's a relatively hard limit to the effectiveness of chemical explosives, mostly determined by how many nitrogen atoms you can string together before they spontaneously NOPE apart. The theoretical most we can reliably chain together as far as we know is 8, which doesn't give us too much of an edge on TNT/C4, which are actually pretty bad as propellants. Okay, you could MAYBE use ClF3 or FOOF, but then you run into the issues of 'oh god why is my gun barrel melting' and spontaneous ammo detonation from your propellant deciding to randomly setting fire to everything, not to mention the minor issues of any gun firing such ammo being permanently toxic and unservicable from their byproducts, what with the whole 'person-firey-melty acid' issue that will arise.


But, even the average small minmitar arty piece is about 280 mm, which is kinda/sorta the size of an Iowa's main gun round (if I haven't screwed up my metric to imperial). Beyond that size, you start experiencing extreme issues with the propellant not entirely burning off properly, the forces of acceleration needed, and other salient issues which limit the effectiveness. Even a few kiloton device (say a 1-5 kT) would give tremendous advantages in propulsion for the engagement ranges of minmitar vessels, allowing them to reach out and touch somebody like their weapons are known to.

If you read the link, you might note that the bomb used to launch that plate was a measly 300 ton detonation. That's how small of a bang you'd need. 300 ton boom, 2000 pounds of ouch launched at a minimum of 60 km/s (aka: faster than orbital velocity by a factor of four.) You can totally make a nuke that small reliably. We don't because we don't have a use for something that small, but the minmitar have all that lovely fission material, lots of empty space where nobody cares about fallout, and a lot of enemies that need to experience explosive tribal love at a distance.

so, these guys use nuclear weapons to shoot otherwise NORMAL bullets at people

so either they are nuts, or just dont comprehend the difference in damage large scale nuclear arsenals could do to their enemies compared to peashooters


On the propulsion note, now all I can think of is one REALLY imbalance minmatar engineer with some ludicrously stereotypical mad science gear insisting on screaming "BOOM" over the intercom every time the captain says "all ahead full", and the entire crew having no fear of battle, because theyre more likely to die of engine malfunction than anything

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Factoids. ...Radio 2 much?