Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

[Great Beyond]

So last weekend, thanks to a teleport that went horribly, horribly wrong, my players wound up to their eyeballs in Nazis, mobsters and bad guy capes who were in the middle of an arms deal - the Nazis were purchasing an atomic bomb for their nefarious schemes.

Seriously outgunned, the tank of the group quickly assessed what the hell was going on and blasted the large cylinder in the middle of the group - setting the 60 second countdown timer running (I do have to admit that it was a novel way to clear out the room quickly). After everyone fled, the players said "Ok, who has demolitions!"

Um. . . I thought you had it?

Oh dear. With not nearly enough time to run away, the tank gets the brilliant idea of physically slamming a chunk of sheet metal between the two catalysts, preventing them from mixing and going boom. The idea was sound enough, but it did spray nasty radioactive material all over herself and the room.

Anyway, to make a long story short - I didn't even have a clue what a ripping the heart of an atomic weapon out would do for damage. So I ask retroactively - what would a healthy dose of radioactivity be, damage-wise?

[Certified]

Re: Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

 

On guess, 2-4d6 RKA Explosive NND (Radiation Shielding). To nastyfy that maybe add Does Body and/or Continuous

[Beast]

Re: Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

 

1 a radiation accident so you or the player can rewrite the character(s)after they scrub your naked body raw to decontaminate it

2 death by radiation poisoning before they get a chance to scrub your naked body raw

3 death by radiation poisoning after they scrub your naked body raw to decontaminate it

4 time well spent recovering from radiation poisoning after they scrub your naked body raw to decontaminate it

5 time well spent recovering and filling out a ton of paperwork from radiation poisoning after they scrub your naked body raw to decontaminate it

6 time well spent recovering with your family and friends also suffering from radiation poisoning after they scrub your naked body raw to decontaminate it

[Clonus]

Re: Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

 

So last weekend' date=' thanks to a teleport that went horribly, horribly wrong, my players wound up to their eyeballs in Nazis, mobsters and bad guy capes who were in the middle of an arms deal - the Nazis were purchasing an atomic bomb for their nefarious schemes.[/font']

 

Seriously outgunned, the tank of the group quickly assessed what the hell was going on and blasted the large cylinder in the middle of the group - setting the 60 second countdown timer running (I do have to admit that it was a novel way to clear out the room quickly). After everyone fled, the players said "Ok, who has demolitions!"

 

Um. . . I thought you had it?

 

Oh dear. With not nearly enough time to run away, the tank gets the brilliant idea of physically slamming a chunk of sheet metal between the two catalysts, preventing them from mixing and going boom. The idea was sound enough, but it did spray nasty radioactive material all over herself and the room.

 

Anyway, to make a long story short - I didn't even have a clue what a ripping the heart of an atomic weapon out would do for damage. So I ask retroactively - what would a healthy dose of radioactivity be, damage-wise?

 

"Realistically" one point of Body per ten minutes until you die. On the other hand We Love Nuclear Power

[mallet]

Re: Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

 

Well "realistically" nuke's are actually fairly fragile and even a light - moderate amount of physical damage (to the bomb itself (not the housing)) would prevent it from going off (there still might be a small explosion as the charge detonates, but not a nuclear blast.

 

Also, I believe, there are no liquid "radioactive" components to spray everywhere or to mix together, rather it is a hard uranium core surrounded by shaped explosives.

 

But this is a game and that could (probably was) a super high-tech experimental bomb. So any of the above ideas could work perfectly for it. And in fact, if it was experimental who knows what exotic radioactive stuff was being used. You could have tons of non-deadly effects as well. Skin color change, rashes (causing -CV's for awhile), hair loss, warts, flipper babies, what have you.

[Metaphysician]

Re: Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

 

Figure. . . 4d6 Explosive RKA to represent the explosives, maybe slightly less.

 

As for the radiation or toxicity, presuming the brick has brick class Constitution ( 30+ )? I'd just have him subject to a dramatically appropriate period of incapacitation due to radiation sickness, presuming everyone involved is smart enough to get him decontaminated quickly. After a week or two of throwing up his guts, he gets better.

 

Remember, the stuff you make a nuke out of isn't *that* radioactive, especially if its uranium-based. Exposure has to be prolonged or internal to kill you, and a superhuman brick has a lot higher tolerance than a normal human.

[Vulcan]

Re: Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

 

They discussed it in one of the Digital Heroes. It was a stoooooopid amount of damage (like 300 AP or more worth) simultaneously of NND Killing does Body (radiation), plus RKA (thermal pulse), plus E-Blast (the shockwave), plus E-Blast again (the return blast), plus flash sight & hearing, plus a transform (you to with terminal cancer), all on a exapnded explosion (even megascale for the city busters). We're talking thousands of points even after applying '1 charge which never recovers.'

[Clonus]

Re: Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

 

They discussed it in one of the Digital Heroes. It was a stoooooopid amount of damage (like 300 AP or more worth) simultaneously of NND Killing does Body (radiation)' date=' plus RKA (thermal pulse), plus E-Blast (the shockwave), plus E-Blast again (the return blast), plus flash sight & hearing, plus a transform (you to with terminal cancer), all on a exapnded explosion (even megascale for the city busters). We're talking thousands of points even after applying '1 charge which never recovers.'[/quote']

 

That's an actual nuclear explosion which is not what's going on here. I also thought they got a little carried away. ED ought to protect against radiation.

[Pariah]

Re: Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

 

They discussed it in one of the Digital Heroes. It was a stoooooopid amount of damage (like 300 AP or more worth) simultaneously of NND Killing does Body (radiation)' date=' plus RKA (thermal pulse), plus E-Blast (the shockwave), plus E-Blast again (the return blast), plus flash sight & hearing, plus a transform (you to with terminal cancer), all on a exapnded explosion (even megascale for the city busters). We're talking thousands of points even after applying '1 charge which never recovers.'[/quote']

 

That's an actual nuclear explosion which is not what's going on here. I also thought they got a little carried away. ED ought to protect against radiation.

 

I think if one of the players in my game were to trigger a nuclear (or is that nukyaler? I can never remember) device, I'd probably tell them, "Grab the Bucket o' Dice. Roll them. All of them. That's how much damage you take. Treat it as an explosion. Apply any and all defenses you'd like."

[Metaphysician]

Re: Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

 

Replace "a little" with "insanely vastly incomprehensibly stupidly", and you've about got it.

 

Repeat after me everyone: "In a supers game, nukes are not unstoppable magic death artifacts."

 

( actually, they aren't in the real world either. . . )

[Pariah]

Re: Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

 

1 a radiation accident so you or the player can rewrite the character(s)after they scrub your naked body raw to decontaminate it

2 death by radiation poisoning before they get a chance to scrub your naked body raw

3 death by radiation poisoning after they scrub your naked body raw to decontaminate it

4 time well spent recovering from radiation poisoning after they scrub your naked body raw to decontaminate it

5 time well spent recovering and filling out a ton of paperwork from radiation poisoning after they scrub your naked body raw to decontaminate it

6 time well spent recovering with your family and friends also suffering from radiation poisoning after they scrub your naked body raw to decontaminate it

 

I sense a recurring theme here....

[Beast]

Re: Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

 

then why have LS vs radiation

 

yeah hurt the character a bit(say reduce str,con, body,end,stun by 2 to 3 dice for 1 or 2 game sessions)if they don't have LS vs radiation

give an extra XP ot 2 after they scrub your naked body raw to decontaminate it

 

That's an actual nuclear explosion which is not what's going on here. I also thought they got a little carried away. ED ought to protect against radiation.

[Cancer]

Re: Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

 

Thing is ... with a real weapon, as long as you don't set it off, or damage it so much it fizzles (that is, it goes critical but only for a tiny fraction of a second without the chain reaction running away to explosion) ... the radiation itself isn't going to be any worse than being in the same room with the intact weapon. I mean, we're talking about the same sort of damage to the weapon as would result from a highway accident involving a warhead transport truck (and yes, they used to do that) or perhaps a particularly bad example of a warhead getting dropped as it was loaded or unloaded to/from an aircraft. It would not surprise me in the least if that sort of thing had happened a number of times and the civilian world hadn't heard about it. Weapon designers aren't idiots, and the things have to be able to survive Stupid Airman Tricks of that sort.

 

What I think is the worst plausible case, the accidental-criticality situation, might go something like the Tokaimura accident.

 

If you broach the sealing on the fissile metal, then you run risks of exposure to small amounts of decay products (radon, for instance) but I don't think it's all that dangerous a thing, especially for supers. People seem to be fixed on a Chernobyl-type accident, and that came from a steam explosion that blew much a reactor core (much more mass and high-level activated matter than could possibly be present in a bomb) into vapor and aerosols. The only way you'd get that is, e.g., if Cyclops blasted the weapon and vaporized it in order to keep it out of the wrong hands as he was losing a fight, and that's not the description in the OP.

[Clonus]

Re: Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

 

then why have LS vs radiation

 

 

LS vs radiation is primarily intended for environmental radiation over long periods, not a sudden burst. LS should protect against the Transform Into Cancer Patient, but the immediate zap? ED ought to be effective against that.

[BNakagawa]

Re: Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

 

Hulk fixed it.

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What?

[Pariah]

Re: Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

 

then why have LS vs radiation

 

LS vs radiation is primarily intended for environmental radiation over long periods' date=' not a sudden burst. LS should protect against the Transform Into Cancer Patient, but the immediate zap? ED ought to be effective against that.[/quote']

 

This is the same line of reasoning as why someone with LS: Extreme Heat still takes damage from fire attacks. Sure, Colossus may be able to stand in the heart of an active volcano (thought he may not like it much), but if you hit him with a flamethrower, he's still gonna notice. Same kind of thing with LS: Radiation and a nuclear blast.

[Beast]

Re: Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

 

hitting a nuke

I would expect these effects to happen

1 the normal explosives going off

2 maybe a critical mass flash( that blue flash of hard radiation that does nasty things to your body that LS vs radiation would ward off or a lot of power def

3 radioactive dust from the core to breath in and that LS vs radiation to ward off

going to this

1 a radiation accident so you or the player can rewrite the character(s)after they scrub your naked body raw to decontaminate it

2 death by radiation poisoning before they get a chance to scrub your naked body raw

3 death by radiation poisoning after they scrub your naked body raw to decontaminate it

4 time well spent recovering from radiation poisoning after they scrub your naked body raw to decontaminate it

5 time well spent recovering and filling out a ton of paperwork from radiation poisoning after they scrub your naked body raw to decontaminate it

6 time well spent recovering with your family and friends also suffering from radiation poisoning after they scrub your naked body raw to decontaminate it

 

 

This is the same line of reasoning as why someone with LS: Extreme Heat still takes damage from fire attacks. Sure' date=' Colossus may be able to stand in the heart of an active volcano (thought he may not like it much), but if you hit him with a flamethrower, he's still gonna notice. Same kind of thing with LS: Radiation and a nuclear blast.[/quote']

[Captain Xenon]

Re: Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

 

actually you can defuse a nuke with a sledgehammer.... its just that when you knock the shaped charges out of alignment you dont get a nuke, just a big pipe bomb of uranium or plutonium that explodes and scatters radiation in a small area.

 

so your tank gets a point-blank BOOM of explosives and goes flying, anyone else in the room gets a smaller boom with shrapnel, and the building is irradiated... count it as a change environment that does damage until you take a shower.

 

good place for an excuse to get new powers, but no hero should die from a little radiation. just give em a penalty for a short time as they recover.

[Dr Archeville]

Re: Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

 

Replace "a little" with "insanely vastly incomprehensibly stupidly", and you've about got it.

 

Repeat after me everyone: "In a supers game, nukes are not unstoppable magic death artifacts."

 

( actually, they aren't in the real world either. . . )

The Leader might disagree. As would Maestro (well, sorta; he did get better, eventually). And I think the people of Japan might disagree.

 

And I would, too, in part because I've only seen one other use of a nuke-like weapon in comics (against Supes in the DKR sequel, and Supes survived because, well, he's frakin' Superman, though IIRC it did put a serious hurt on him), and in part possibly because I'm not exactly understanding what you're saying, and even in part because I don't know as much about nukes and other WMDs as I might like to think. Based on what I do know (of both nukes and the HERO System game), the stats for a nuke explosion in the Equipment Guide seemed perfectly fine.

I mean, for starters, how many supers comics (or other fiction/genre) characters have survived a hit from a nuke, even if just barely?

What percentage of real world people who were caught in a nuke blast survived (even if just barely)?

What do you think the stats for a nuke should be, and why?

[Metaphysician]

Re: Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

 

12d6 RKA for a tactical nuke, 15d6 RKA for a strategic scale one. And I've seen nukes, and bigger, used fairly regularly in comics. Notably at the end of the Kang War story arc. Which did exactly dick to Thor. They were also used to blow up the Watchtower, or try, several times in the Morrison JLA run. And thats not counting all the planetbusting weapons that appear in, um, every single cosmic comic run.

 

And frankly, the only reason the Hulk worries about *gamma bombs* ( not conventional nukes, note ) is because they screw around with his power source.

 

( as for real life? Only advantage a nuke has is that its smaller and more compact than an equivalent weight of conventional explosives. Nuke-level explosions have happened via conventional detonation, and nuke level destruction is entirely achievable via conventional bombing. It just takes more planes )

[Theron]

Re: Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

 

Does anyone here actually remember the original Great Nuke Debates on Usenet and Red October?

 

Bad times, man. Bad times...

[Dr Archeville]

Re: Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

 

( as for real life? Only advantage a nuke has is that its smaller and more compact than an equivalent weight of conventional explosives. Nuke-level explosions have happened via conventional detonation' date=' and nuke level destruction is entirely achievable via conventional bombing. It just takes more planes )[/quote']

What about the lingering radiation/fallout? That's something conventional bombs don't have, and is IMO not something to discount.

[Clonus]

Re: Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

 

What about the lingering radiation/fallout? That's something conventional bombs don't have' date=' and is IMO not something to discount.[/quote']

 

It's a serious issue for normals. For supers, not so much.

[SSgt Baloo]

Re: Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

 

I think the big sticking point for most people is the perception that hitting anything containing explosives will make it explode, and that hitting a nuclear bomb will set off a nuclear explosion. Not true. You have some radiation from the uranium or plutonium parts that made the bomb nuclear, but if the stuff isn't compresed just right (or the two masses brought together with enough force, in the case of some designs) you may not get any more "Bang" than if an equivalent amount of explosive went off. In fact, the level of radiation may not be much more than if the bomb hadn't exploded in the first place.

 

The only reason a nuclear blast spreads contamination far and wide is because it sucks up debris which is less heavy than the bomb materials, irradiates it, and then shoots it way high in the atmosphere where winds can spread it widely before it all settles out.

 

HOWEVER

 

There would still be radioactive chunks blown all over the environment. Even if the stuff were finely distributed as an aerosol, plutoniom and Uranium are very heavy substances. Like iron filings in a glass of water they would settle out very quickly. The people standing at ground zero of a failed nuke would primarily be concerned with surviving the initial blast. Having done that their next priority should be getting out of the contaminated area as quickly as possible and removing any potentially contaminated material from their bodies. It surprised many people to discover that ordinary soap and water will remove most nuclear contamination from the outside of a human body.

 

If they evacuated the contaminated area and decontaminated themselves correctly, there would still be the worry that they might have inhaled radioactive material or been struck by radioactive debris in the blast which then lodged beneath the skin layer. Of course, if I were a superhero, I wouldn't worry about it too much unless my player, instead of asking for a "radiation accident" asked if he could just let me die so he could write up a new, "better" character.

 

Most explosives are designed to be very stable, so they can be handled as necessary for shipping and so forth. Of course, sometimes accidents happen, (another example). Disarming a nuke by beating on it isn't the best way to minimize damage, but the destruction will be quite a bit less than if the bomb had functioned correctly.

 

And Furthermore...

The same explosive is also likely to be used in bombs with a delayed fuse, so the explosives might not explode anyway, especially if the destruction of the bomb resulted in damage to the timers or to the fuse(s) themselves.

[Dr Archeville]

Re: Wait - you punch WHAT?!? (or what would the damage from an atomic bomb be?)

 

It's a serious issue for normals. For supers' date=' not so much.[/quote']

Only if the super has LS: Radiation, I'd think.