314 replies to this topic

[harlock]

The canon of Mechwarrior/ Battletech says NO. Too many safeguards, and the fusion reactor simply does not work that way. However, if it's nuclear explosions you want-- the Antartica accords ban the use of nukes. That implies that battlefield nukes DO exist, and are available- no doubt for an exorbitant amount of cash. However , if a person used one of those , and they survived the battle, then they become war criminals, guilty of crimes against humanity. Their household would be hunted down and destroyed.

[Litefeather]

Assuming you had a design simalar to the Tokomak, no, this would not happen. Why? Because to fusion the Hydrogen isotopes it uses a ring of super-heated plasma suspended by magnetic fields. Now, if you cored the center out before safety functions could shut said reactor down and the plasma was, say, ejected like a dieing star would do, you would get something that LOOKED like and explosion. But in reality, unless all the ammo the 'mech had left on it went up, the plasma would cool back to a gas state very quickly, and do very little, if any, damage at all.

[Namikaze]

FactorlanP, on 22 June 2012 - 06:13 PM, said:

Fusion reactors don't go out of control like fission reactors, quite the opposite. The process is delicate and finely tuned. Messing with that balance should cause the reaction to stop, not go out of control.

Actually a fusion bottle would vent whatever plasma it contains if punctured. It doesn't just go away. It wouldn't be a full blown nuclear explosion, but it should melt the mech into a puddle.

[XionsFate]

i think it should be statistically changeable as in customizing. great to go nuck in a scout! Bonzai!!!!!

[Jiri Starrider]

XionsFate, on 08 July 2012 - 02:12 PM, said:

i think it should be statistically changeable as in customizing. great to go nuck in a scout! Bonzai!!!!!

And here I thought Curly was more of an Assault class...

(ya, I know it's supposed to be with a Y, but hey, internal monologue can't spell for beans either.)

[steck]

I did not read all 15 pages, only about 4 of them or so. Chances are someone else already posted this up, but just in case.


I read this and I had to think about it for a second or two, then I remembered something I had read while playing the table top game. Its quoted from Sarna but I could dig up where it is really from without a problem.

Sarna said:

Fusion engines usually will only shut down if damaged, and they are absolutely no risk of being a fusion bomb. There have been a number of cases of fusion engines being "over revved" and exploding with devestating force, but this is more akin to a boiler explosion than a true nuclear explosion. More often a destroyed engine will be punctured by weapons fire. Because the plasma is held in a vacuum chamber (to isolate the superheated plasma from the cold walls of the reactor; contact with the walls would super-chill the plasma below fusion temperatures), a punctured reactor can suck in air where the air is superheated. Normal thermal expansion of the air causes the air to burst out in a brilliant lightshow often mistaken for a "nuclear explosion". The Thermal Expansion damages anything within 90 meters of the destroyed 'Mech

Also I could be wrong but a lot of the mech's deaths I remember from the novels were just blam and the mech stops/falls over. I remember a short story from one of the rulebooks where a clanner challenges another clanner to a duel so she could get a new mech, it dosnt make sense to do that if there is a large chance of the mech you want as a new mech is about to go supernova on you.

[Melcyna]

jlbdeath, on 08 July 2012 - 12:25 PM, said:

any thing that makes power fusion, fission, water, coal can be "MADE" to explode just have to have the right ingenuity. dont even need an external explosive. a power pack the size the mech's have i can think of a bunch of ways they can be made to go boom on command.

Explode? sure... steam explosion, gas overpressure, oxygen/combustible material explosion, etc...

nuclear explosion? nope...

anyone claiming otherwise on a nuclear power plant is essentially lacking basic knowledge of physics.

Fission power plant CANNOT undergo nuclear explosion since the fissile materials are of much lower enrichment factor than the ones necessary for nuclear weapon usage, it is PHYSICALLY impossible for them to undergo fast reaction nuclear explosion, they still can experience steam explosion though and overpressure... which is about as bad as a dirty bomb.

Fusion power plant on the other hand CANNOT undergo nuclear explosion since there is never enough fuel in the reaction chamber to start anything resembling one, and the reaction chamber itself have to produce enough power to actually maintain the reaction especially if more fuel is added into the chamber, so by design it's virtually impossible to detonate the fusion fuel into a nuclear detonation.

These are not 'difficult situation to produce explosion' situation

There are 'PHYSICALLY NOT POSSIBLE TO OCCUR' situation.

[Joe Luck]

Curious about this science problem.
I haven't read all 15 pages only 6 so maybe somebody answered this or mentioned something similar.

The ITER project in France (Largest fusion reactor being built) will supposedly reach temperatures of 99,999,727 ºC or 100,000,000 K. My question then is what actually happens when Hydrogen heated at 99,999,727 ºC interacts with Air (N₂ O₂ ) which is at about 20 ºC?

I would love to know the science behind what would happen there because its bascially what would happen when a fusion reactor goes critical. Does it just dissipate? Where does all that heat go? Would sitting next to a destroyed mech be like sitting next to an open lava pit or worse? Any science guys who could point my ignorant self to understanding this would be welcome...

[Mr T]

Dude, honestly why care so damn much if its cannon. Guess what, there weren't founder mechs in canon or the idea of experience points like MWO has. Arguing so flagrantly about its cannonicity is really ridiculous.

Also, MechCommander didn't have mechs go nuclear, they just exploded in large blasts.

I vote yes, because theyre in MW Living Legends and theyre freaking awesome in that game. Also i've never lost a mech to the blasts and i havent felt disuaded from closing range because of them. Infact the critical explosions only really disuade people from ramming each other with mechs to fire inside your geometry since they wont be able to escape the blast radius if they do, besides being more likely to cause one with continuous heavy blows like that. Either way, its one of the great parts of that game and should be replicated in MWO.

Also, I realize its not scientifically accurate, but theres a lot of holes you can punch with some science, like for example:

The fact that any laser's visible color exists in the game at all is not only defying science but a lot of the cannon as well. Many of the books mention the invisible beams of energy, melting away slags of armor as opposed to the disco light show we've come to recognize and enjoy. The only times you should ever see light from the lasers is the point where it strikes your target, where it travels if the situations are smoky/foggy or where it eminates from if you happen to be stupid enough to be looking down the barrel at the time.

However i think the idea is to go with whats fun and mechs just falling over 100% of the time is not entertaining. Critical explosions are supremely satisfying.

Edited by Mr T, 08 July 2012 - 07:32 PM.

[PixelPixie]

it would be kinda cool the attackers would have to be careful in in your face attacking..but going nuclear should not be the norm...i would think they would have safe guards built in to stop such a thing such as the reactor would scram and shutdown at such a point before an explosion would take place...beside if mechs went nuke there really would be alot of salvage left..not that there will be salvage ingame from what i heard.

love pixie

[Monsoon]

Yeah, I`m for the chance of a Mech going nuclear, it`s part of Battletech lore and I`m use to it.

[Mr T]

As for the chances of it happening, i should mention that in MWLL, it basically happens somewhere between 10% (with tons of heavy firepower being thrown around) to less than 5% times a mech is downed, pretty much never in smaller skirmishes or one on ones, maybe a slight bit more often if you have a bunch of Assault Mechs alpha"ing some heavy mess on a lot of medium and lighter mechs. Basically its a rare chance, made more probably by suprememly overwhelming damage, IE: punching through a Bushwacker's CT when its at about 10% armor remaining, with all four of the Light Guass rifles on the Fafnir at once; Light/heavily wounded mechs being hit dead on with Long Tom shells or pairs of arrows, etc..

Edited by Mr T, 08 July 2012 - 07:59 PM.

[Melcyna]

Monsoon, on 08 July 2012 - 07:35 PM, said:

Yeah, I`m for the chance of a Mech going nuclear, it`s part of Battletech lore and I`m use to it.

...

15 pages in with repeated mention that the physics itself ruled it out impossible and the very lore itself puts forward that the reactor does not go nuclear and i see we're still stuck in this notion.

Edited by Melcyna, 09 July 2012 - 10:17 AM.

[Rychard Starheart]

Melcyna, on 09 July 2012 - 10:00 AM, said:

...

15 pages in with repeated mention that the very lore itself puts forward that the reactor does not go nuclear and i see we're still stuck in this notion.

because people are stupid as @!%&.

[Hexadecimus]

light487, on 24 June 2012 - 08:57 PM, said:

Yes.. and no... I think MW:LL has it pretty good last time I played it...

Ultimately it should be possible but not too frequent.. it needs to be something that happens infrequently enough that you go "OH MY GOD!" when you see it.. but also needs to not be too damaging to other mechs but more of a eye candy thing.. I'd like it if there was a shockwave that made the mech shake and all that.. but unless there was a way to balance things, wouldn't want it to actually damage like a nuke would.

This is what I was thinking too.

[Allison Avani]

FactorlanP, on 22 June 2012 - 06:13 PM, said:

Fusion reactors don't go out of control like fission reactors, quite the opposite. The process is delicate and finely tuned. Messing with that balance should cause the reaction to stop, not go out of control.

Actually you are wrong. Cold fusion only occurs in an environment where the Higs field is concentrated enough to force atoms to combine using the Higs-boson's small nuclear force alone. In a contained environment such as the size of a Mech, cold fusion is impossible (unless the environment is a near absolute zero environment AND you speed millions if not billions of tons of mass to near the speed of light [which would need more energy than the human race has used in all its existence combined] and smash it into each other creating an extremely large concentration in the Higs-boson field) in a Mech's reactor due to the amount of mass needed. In a Mech's reactor (regardless of what the lore says, you can not have cold fusion with only that small amount of mass) you would have to start the fusion reaction with a fission reaction. Which would be a hot fusion reaction and would go catastrophic and create a huge ammount of superheated radioactive fallout when the form of containment apparatus you are using to control it, is no longer powered. So SCIENTIFICALLY it makes sense for the Mech to have some sort of aoe damage when it dies, maby not a neuclear bomb, but still some form of aoe in the immediate vicinity.

Edited by Allison Avani, 19 September 2012 - 02:07 PM.

[Alex Wolfe]

Allison Avani, on 19 September 2012 - 02:00 PM, said:

In a Mech's reactor (regardless of what the lore says, you can not have cold fusion with only that small amount of mass) you would have to start the fusion reaction with a fission reaction. Which would be a hot fusion reaction and would go catastrophic and create a huge ammount of superheated radioactive fallout when the form of containment apparatus you are using to control it, is no longer powered. So SCIENTIFICALLY it makes sense for the Mech to have some sort of aoe damage when it dies, maby not a neuclear bomb, but still some form of aoe in the immediate vicinity.

According to science, FTL travel is impossible as well (or at least not proven, it's just as well).

So either we have both FTL and cold fusion in BattleTech, or we don't have either. It only needs to be "somewhat plausible", not hard science with seven pages of bibliography to be good enough for Space Robots Opera. If BT lore says it's FTL, it's FTL. If it says giant robots, it's giant robots. If it says cold fusion... well... you know the drill. It's just a part of the setting.

BT manuals couldn't even get their Japanese right for Draconis mechs, don't expect them to be peer-reviewed physics papers. Sometimes you just get to accept that "fiction" part of "science fiction".

Doesn't change the fact that mech reactors blowing up as "nukes" is stupid not only on such basic "scientific" level, but also because it would invalidate them as means of waging war in-universe. Both Inner Sphere and Clans are starved for resources, tech and other materiel is extremely precious. In such a universe nobody would risk contaminating cities and obliterating potential salvage by walking nuclear explosions waiting to happen, so they cannot be nuclear explosions waiting to happen. Heat, ammo blowing up, sure. Not nukes. Those two things combined put it firmly even out of the realm of "somewhat plausible (if you squint a fair bit)"

I understand that there's but one book author that wrote an explosion like that somewhere, and its echo is still coming back to haunt the franchise like sentient birds or Kell family magic. Unfortunate of a fact as it may be that such outlandish things appar from time to time in derivative works/tie-in fiction, the "mainstream" canon/lore (manuals themselves, for one) doesn't support mech nukes all the same.

Edited by Alex Wolfe, 19 September 2012 - 04:17 PM.

[rvndmnmt]

There was a roll to determine if a critical hit to the engine would cause an explosion. However, from what I remember, Actual explosions were extremely rare.

[Alex Wolfe]

rvndmnmt, on 19 September 2012 - 04:20 PM, said:

There was a roll to determine if a critical hit to the engine would cause an explosion. However, from what I remember, Actual explosions were extremely rare.

Yeah well, the thing is that the whole thread seems to be misunderstood. Very rare explosion from a superheated engine, sitting inside an armor stuffed with weapons and ammo and hit by a missile or something is perfectly plausible.

An actual nuclear explosion (with EMP, fallout and all that stuff), as per the thread title, is just silly and unsupported.

Edited by Alex Wolfe, 19 September 2012 - 04:30 PM.

[CenturionOmega]

@ WW8, possibly. I am not a chemist, but I do know that hydrogen's flame is transparent. Even though it might be a trnasparent fireball, one would notice light distortions caused by the heat, which is sort of like a mirage.