cornholioprime wrote:Holy CRAP!!!!
The Dead One REALLY does know his $h!+ when it comes to Nukes.
I may be a bit of a conservative blow-hard at times, but that doesn't mean I don't know what I'm talking about, (well... most the time
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/smile.gif)
). My Dad was in the Air Force in the good ol' days, serving directly under the legendary Curtis LeMay, patron deity of nuclear proliferation. Consequently, I've picked up a thing or two.
Hey Dead Boy!!!
Just so we can have a little fun with a Real World Rifts Equivalent, just HOW MUCH MDC do you think happened to Hiroshima at Ground Zero, RL???
Considering that the Damage was probably fairly Uniform over a limited Area, but SDC Girders STILL survived, do you even think that the Airburst's damage was even MegaDamage in the first place????
Well, lets see here. The Hiroshima Bomb was a 15 Kiloton "gun bomb", detonated at 1,980 feet, and flattened several square miles of city for the most part, (silly Japanese and their paper walls). If we go by Palladium's figures as the basis, using the nukes from CS Navy as a guide line for progression, we would get a whole whopping
5D6x10 MD at the point of impact and logically from the starting radius of the Mock Stem on out, (half damage to everything inside that radius of 2,800 feet on the ground). As we geeks know, the large area effect aside, that's the punch of a big Medium Range Missile in Rifts, and therefore can't be realistically right.
So if I were to guess the blast power of Little Boy on my own, ignoring the books' big scale nukes, I'd base it off of something small, and something we can precisely gauge. I', looking in the RGMG. pg. 129, at the 40mm Grenade Launcher. It's listed as 6D6 SDC explosive blast (we specifically want an explosive weapon, not just any old gun will do) and that happens to be something that exists in reality. Specifically the
The M203 Grenade Launcher, and since we want to use a blasting type of ammo only and not add any other factors like shrapnel into the equation, let's assume the round in the book is the
The 40mm M406 HE Grenade which weighs half a pound (0.23 kg) has has a charge equivalent to 35 grams of TNT (from different source than the link).
So, if we use that basis of 35 g of TNT doing 6D6 SDC, then we can do a little math and see what's up.
The maximum roll of 6D6 = 36
36 SDC / 35 g or TNT = 1.02857 SDC per gram of TNT
15 kilotons = 15,000,000,000 grams
15 Billion grams * 1.02857 SDC = 15,428,550,000 SDC
15,428,550,000 SDC / 100 = 15,428,550 MDC
And for the sake of the point of diminishing returns and convenience, lets round that 15,428,550 MDC to a nice even 12 Million MDC. So based on all that, to simulate the force of the 15KT Hiroshima "Little Boy" Bomb, I would roll
2D6xOne Million MDC which if I'm thinking right, is on a par with some of Robotech's big guns, making this sound about right. In mixing reality with game mechanics, everything inside a 2,800' radius directly above the air-burst at 1,980 feet would take half damage, while every thing out from there, where the Mock-Stem converges and doubles in strenght (offsetting the halving of the normal Palladium blast radius) would take full damage. Every thousand feet (1,000') from there out, knock off a Million MDC from the damage till you get to nothing, and then tack on another 3D6x10 MD to another mile form all the debris.
That work for ya?
While exploring this idea, I came across this site.
www.nukefix.org Lots of cool stuff there including that idea of what 8 bombs would do simultaneously.
![Demon :demon:](./images/smilies/demon.gif)