[Vehicles] How big should a self-destruct be?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by DataPacRat

After eyeballing some more charts, I finally got an estimate that about 15 metres of air absorbs half of the X-rays of this wavelength.

I wrestled with this once with antimatter and gamma rays. As a gameable simplification you can probably jsut compress these distance numbers based on material density.

So 15 meters of air turns into 15mm of water and that compresses into 1.5mm of lead. Perhaps even half that of uranium, tungsten or some platinum group metal if you want something that may not have heavy metal toxicity. Though breathing fine particles of tungsten has been suggested to e not much better than breathing fine particles of uranium.

It is my expectation that this heavy metal jacketing is what would be done and I think you would then have a fairly conventional plasma explosion.