How the Energy Bomb works theory...

[Amaranth]

I must admit that I find an energy bomb a useful escape tool when all other options have failed. Since MNSR will remove the energy bomb and it is likely that it will rapidly return as an OXP weapon, how about setting some parameters that will make it less of an uberweapon? for example, it drains all your energy and shield, leaving you vulnerable until you have recharged, possibly it will damage systems or cargo, in the same manner as some witchspace malfunctions.

[DaddyHoggy]

I have a theory as to how the Energy Bomb works... please don't see this as a means to justify its existence in-game, I'm perfectly fine with it being banned by GalCop. But I just thought I'd try to figure out how it works in the first place.
Feel free to improve my theory, I know it's probably very flawed, I'm no PHD.
In my Ooniverse, the Energy Bomb is a device that releases a shower of incredibly destructive particles in all directions for aprox. 25 kilometers. The particles are charged when they pass through the shields of the deploying ship.
After the particles clear the shields, they accelerate and destroy everything in range, tearing apart shields like paper. The effect is like an atom bomb's full force hitting a car.
The stations are too big to take much damage due to a heavily reenforced hull, although if detonated from inside, all that's left is a Coriolis-shaped shell.

I haven't read the rest of the thread yet, so this may have been explained already - but in the original Flight Manual there's an explanation of the E-Bomb, it vaguely insinuates that some form of energy pulse, tuned to your own engine (and thus establishing immunity) destabilises the witchspace matrix of all "small" nearby engines with instantly fatal consequences)

[Yah-Ta-Hey]

I may be way off base but this is how I have worked out the problem
1. you purchase an energy bomb.... so it is a contained item that is attached to your ship.... I prefer to think it is attached to your engines and has nothing to do with energy status of shields.
2. this package is POTENTIAL energy probably under huge presssure containment.
3. this is a single shot modality item
4. once attached to your engines, it becomes a potential source of energy that will act on your ship as a point of singularity
5. The triggering of the unit, allows the POTENTIAL to become ACTIVE and is allowed to flow through the engines which add it's capabilities to the energy flow.
6. the flow is released all at once, creating a singularity in the ship which will act like a miniature "big bang". All this released energy will flow out and over the surface of the ship and escape radially outward being generated at the speed of light with the pulse comparable to that of a 10 Megaton Electromagnetic Pulse.
Any small ship caught in the influence of this pulse siimply cannot generate enough shielding energy and thus fails at the instant of overload. Bigger ships can conceiviably survive if they are at the edge of the effect or have enough shielding to survive.
7. Once the effect is accomplished, the ship returns to original status until it receives another ebomb addition. and the pilot puts on a new pair of pants, dress, kilt or whatever he/she/it utilizes for covering.
8. then the ship is piloted to the next planet having ebomb provisions.

[RyanHoots]

I may be way off base but this is how I have worked out the problem
1. you purchase an energy bomb.... so it is a contained item that is attached to your ship.... I prefer to think it is attached to your engines and has nothing to do with energy status of shields.
2. this package is POTENTIAL energy probably under huge presssure containment.
3. this is a single shot modality item
4. once attached to your engines, it becomes a potential source of energy that will act on your ship as a point of singularity
5. The triggering of the unit, allows the POTENTIAL to become ACTIVE and is allowed to flow through the engines which add it's capabilities to the energy flow.
6. the flow is released all at once, creating a singularity in the ship which will act like a miniature "big bang". All this released energy will flow out and over the surface of the ship and escape radially outward being generated at the speed of light with the pulse comparable to that of a 10 Megaton Electromagnetic Pulse.
Any small ship caught in the influence of this pulse siimply cannot generate enough shielding energy and thus fails at the instant of overload. Bigger ships can conceiviably survive if they are at the edge of the effect or have enough shielding to survive.
7. Once the effect is accomplished, the ship returns to original status until it receives another ebomb addition. and the pilot puts on a new pair of pants, dress, kilt or whatever he/she/it utilizes for covering.
8. then the ship is piloted to the next planet having ebomb provisions.

That makes sense, I can see how such a device would work.

One more thing I've noticed, though. When the E-Bomb goes off, it usually leaves behind a bunch of white lollipops on the scanner. I haven't investigated this, but are these cargo canisters? If so, how could the flimsy sheet metal crates survive? With any of these theories, I fail to see how anything within the detonation area would survive other than the player (another reason to remove the bomb).

[Yah-Ta-Hey]

The white lollipops that I check out usually end up being pieces of space craft wreckage, I have yet to pick up more than a couple of tonnes of cargo and they are usually at the periphary and are moving at an accelerated off- tanget path. (in other words, they are buggers to catch). I do get bounty credit for the offenders but recently I have noticed that I have been getting "Rank fugitive" ratings and it takes about 6-8 jumps to clear myself to offender status.
I once attacked a navy fleet to see what happens ... the small ships near me got wiffed out but the frigates and bigger ships just got terribly annoyed and taught me a lesson that I learned rather painfully and escaped by doing a quick jump when my last vestige of energy was gone( thank you for putting that safety feature in the vortex... It has saved my rump several times). I will always keep an ebomb with me and am trying to figure out how to install another as a backup(without success). As far as removing the ebomb.. I think that is wrong... some people (like me) use it a lot, other use it somewhat, others don't use it at all.
so why reduce the gaming pleasure just for a few who think that their voice speaks for all? That is egotistical to the max.. so let's prevent uber ships, vortex, caudecus, and all the others that are not part of the original game to be banished also just because someone believes that uberships give an unfair advantage.
why not , instead limit usage to certain galaxies where mayhem and ouotlawness is rife with galcop in it's final death throes? That is the " wild west of space" and ANYTHING goes... the end justifies the mean.

also in your comment about survivability of other ships consider this:
most small ships have 2-4 banks of energy units.... good for firefights using lasers... but the deplete quickly. Take the same ship and the various shield enhancers, navy grids, etc and you just did a quantum jump in the shield generation and sustanability of those shields. they just might survive an ebomb if far enough away.
The larger ships have 6-8 shield banks and if they install the shield enhancements, they also gain tremendously in the survivability field.
The relly huge ships can generate enough shield energy to approach unity (1.0) but that is not a good thing... Space cannot support the strain on the interatomic fields so space will buckle and can add to the ebomb energy but if they pulse their fields fast enough ( 1 billion/sec) they can create fields that will not last long enough to buckle space nor allow energy leaks to occur... By pulsing even faster space designers may be albe to make a space ship hull strong enough to withstand anything and at the same time, make it transparent ( credits to short story: Not final and it's sequel.) the book is titled: Jupiter.

[Yah-Ta-Hey]

here is the listing:
Author : Isaac Asimov
date 1941-1942
titles: Not final! and Victory unintentional
from Not Final!: A conversation between the ship's Captain and a technician reveals that this ship utilizes force-field technology in an ingenious way, which the scientists on Ganymede have not thought of. By trial and error the technician discovered that the field explodes, losing an arm and an eye in the process. However he has circumvented this by turning the field on and off at a high frequency, so it is never on long enough to explode, but is never off long enough to lose air.
If you can find these... they are well worth the reading.

[Cmdr. Maegil]

I may be way off base but this is how I have worked out the problem
1. you purchase an energy bomb.... so it is a contained item that is attached to your ship.... I prefer to think it is attached to your engines and has nothing to do with energy status of shields.
2. this package is POTENTIAL energy probably under huge presssure containment.
3. this is a single shot modality item
4. once attached to your engines, it becomes a potential source of energy that will act on your ship as a point of singularity
5. The triggering of the unit, allows the POTENTIAL to become ACTIVE and is allowed to flow through the engines which add it's capabilities to the energy flow.
6. the flow is released all at once, creating a singularity in the ship which will act like a miniature "big bang". All this released energy will flow out and over the surface of the ship and escape radially outward being generated at the speed of light with the pulse comparable to that of a 10 Megaton Electromagnetic Pulse

Except for the singularity issue (which in the science lingo actually means something like "from here on there be dragons, so don't ask"), you were going well until that last sentence...

The fact is, a nuke in space does not produce an EMP blast all by itself - what it does produce is an atrocious amount of undampened X and Gamma rays (which are indeed higher-frequency electromagnetic radiation, but do not induce the desired voltage fluctuations by themselves).

To simplify, EMPing with a nuke also requires:
a) an atmosphere from which the X and Gamma rays can remove electrons through Compton scattering;
b) a planetary magnetic field, upon which the electron storm generated in a) can finally convert its energy to EMP through electromagnetic induction.

Optionally, you could try to power a NNEMP device with a nuke, but I'm quite certain it wouldn't last long enough to produce the desired results before being turned into plasma by the X and Gamma rays at near light-speed. In any case, here's the RL energy bomb

Damn... A physics quiz while getting out of bed is really no fun!

[Selezen]

Damn, I love you, Maegil. I'd love it if you had a "For Science!" t-shirt..

You may have given me an idea, actually. Magnetic and gravitational forces are always at play in space - every stellar body has a magnetic field and the sun generates a field that travels out beyond the solar system. I believe Voyager 1 recently travelled beyond the limits of that field.

Could the energy bomb contain a variant of an EMP that harnesses that magnetic and/or gravitational energy in an expanding "wave" from the point of origin? It uses energy from the energy banks to activate a particle accelerator which then releases those charged particles into the area around the ship. These particles collimate and expand and create a ball of pressurised particles that can "pick up" the magnetic and gravimetric forces. When this pressure wave hits a ship the shields can do nothing against it and it destabilises the energy banks of other ships and causes damage of varying degrees depending on the resilience of those energy banks and (of course) their levels at the time of the reaction. The asteroids explode because the charged particles react with iron or other ores in the asteroid and literally shake it apart.

The manual's explanation of the energy bomb is:

Medusa Pandora Self Homing Energy Bomb (available at Tech Level 7 worlds or higher) is a tactical weapon capable of Megazon Destruct Force 13. Has heat radius of 900 km. Developed by Klaus-Kline laboratories for multi-role combat using ‘launch-and-leave’ techniques.

The charged particle theory could hold water here too, since the "heat radius" could be the friction of the charged particles as they collide with either a ship or each other!

[Kaks]

Wait, if you embrace the 'sun EMP' theory, how do you explain EBs working in interstellar space?

[Selezen]

<thinks>



OK, strike the natural magnetic field usage. Energy Bombs have an internal electromagnetic field generator coil.

[Cmdr. Maegil]

Energy Bombs have an internal electromagnetic field generator coil.

Finally! That is what I've been trying to say since my first post in this thread...

[Fatleaf]

And here we are again trying to shoehorn physics into Oolite But please continue I am enjoying the lesson

[CommonSenseOTB]

No, no, no. You're all way off.

This is how the energy bomb works, as described in the patent for said device(many grogans died for this information).

1)Power-up quantum mechanical prayer circuit and engage improbability device(fill cup with tea, etc.)

2)Quantum mechanical prayer circuit establishes communication with divine entity.

3)There are 2 possibilities returned, pick possibility "God loves me" .

4)Divine intervention has now been initiated. Entity readies thumb and forefinger.

5)Flicking motion is rendered as divine entity "pstoinks" simultaneously all things within prayer range.

6)Quantum mechanical prayer circuit intiates "thank-you" subroutine, divine entity whistles merrily, thoroughly satisfied from a "happy days' smiting".

7)Whale and bowl of petunias materialize over Xexedi, the whale glad to meet someone new for a change and the petunias thinking "Oh no, not again!". Liability issues resulting from said cross-dimensional residues are solved as there's no proof the device caused directly this phenomena, and anyway, that's somebody elses problem now, isn't it



You know, I think god needs a break. Remove the energy bomb from the core game and replace with a one-shot hyperjump device that instantly jumps you to random system within range like/as in Elite A.

[Kaks]

You know, I think god needs a break. Remove the energy bomb from the core game and replace with a one-shot hyperjump device that instantly jumps you to random system within range like/as in Elite A.

And finally the 'esc' button would make sense!

On one hand, it might put the player into a worse situation. On the other, it would be a slick 'vanilla'/strict mode way of saving the player when stranded in interstellar space...

[RyanHoots]

I think CSOTB's theory is the only one without faulty physics.