[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.

[DataPacRat]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

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.

So, 4.5mm of lead would attenuate the rads as much as 45 metres of air - enough to bring the levels down below 100 rads, even immediately next to the explosion. Handy trick to have available...

... Of course, if all it takes to turn a rad-safed isomer explosive back into a radioactive death-field is to peel off the outer coating, then it would still seem to be in the LC 0 to 1 range. :)


And as a side-note, having a type of particularly-energy-dense battery that's LC1 (or less) (and could potentially be disassembled to sterilize everything in a couple dozen metres) is one of those weird details that makes worldbuilding so fun. :)