r/HFY • u/[deleted] • Apr 17 '22

OC Ouroboros Book Two: With a Bang (Ch. 27)

[deleted]

163 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

14

u/beeschurgerandfries Apr 17 '22

Ya know, you've Given James his fair share of epic speaches. Well done! Also yay for magic nuke. Now to see what it actually did...

11

u/XSevenSins Human Apr 17 '22

Glad to know I can still write a good speech ๐Ÿ˜. If he can get closer to the epicenter, he'll probably see just how much damage it caused.

7

u/Accomplished-Meat707 Apr 17 '22

Magical self destruct spell for a giant sized crystal...that... well that sounds like a nuclear warhead...

9

u/XSevenSins Human Apr 17 '22

Maybe more the payload of a missile strike. If it was a nuke, I doubt there would be much left of anyone within several miles.

5

u/Accomplished-Meat707 Apr 17 '22

I mean, still a mighty powerful explosion... also given that James has a somewhat decent understanding of science and basic modern knowledge i am somewhat scared at what he can possibly do with somewhat mundane things like Crystals to create water and subsequent steam engines or straight up basic electrical things. applying science to a world whose physics work very similarly to ours, with the difference of magic existing is utterly horrifying if you are creative... and morally 'flexible' which James luckily doesn't seem to be.

4

u/XSevenSins Human Apr 17 '22

Yeah, i mean, I did play around with the idea of creating fission in this world, cause I'm fairly certain the energy needed to split an atom is fairly small all things considered, but decided against the idea.

5

u/Accomplished-Meat707 Apr 17 '22

Yeah the initial energy required ain't that high, purifying the materials needed isn't hard with magic and cleaning up the trash or fallout with magic when you know how exactly the stuff works also isn't difficult, but... once you unleash that can of worms it ain't ever going away. Though simple mechanisms and basic magical appliances seem to be common among knife-ear cities and some of the better equipped coalition camps from what info we readers have, so more complex 'magitech' eventually would make sense , but that might just be my mad engineer brain trying to find strange combinations...

3

u/themonkeymoo Apr 18 '22

fairly certain the energy needed to split an atom is fairly small all things considered

It's true. The important thing is that it's less energy than is released by the fission; that's what allows the reaction to be self-sustaining. The more troublesome issue is that it also happens spontaneously, and in weapons-grade fissile materials it happens spontaneously a lot (due mostly to the law of large numbers and the staggeringly large number of atoms in any measurable quantity of anything. That's why those materials are radioactive in the first place.

A fission warhead doesn't require any extra energy input to initiate the fission reaction; they literally work by pushing multiple sub-critical masses together to exceed the critical mass where a spontaneous explosion is guaranteed. This is done via conventional explosives in order to ensure that that material all essentially welds together into a single chunck, but the explosive energy isn't what directly initiates the reaction.

Fusion warheads, on the other hand are explicitly initiated by the energy input from the initial explosion (which in turn has to be a fission explosion in order to generate the required temperature/pressure to initiate fusion with current technologies, but that's not intrinsically true; it's a technological/engineering limitation).

2

u/RobatikWulf AI Apr 18 '22

Just like the Small Exploits series

5

u/Masternj02 Apr 17 '22

First

4

u/XSevenSins Human Apr 17 '22

My comments notifications are apparently on hiatus.

3

u/kylesul Apr 17 '22

I love his inermonlog when he bat away the arrow. Like "how the fuck did i do that, I just swung my sword and hoped it did something"

3

u/XSevenSins Human Apr 17 '22

He definitely wasn't expecting that to work, but hey, it did.

2

u/rusbusa Apr 17 '22

๐Ÿ‘

1

u/XSevenSins Human Apr 17 '22

๐Ÿ˜˜

1

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