My team has a tenancy to switch to boom when confronted with a problem, which capped on Sunday with a rather spectacular trio of 25 kg AMFO bombs, set with 10, 10, and 8 hits respectively.

It. Was. Epic!

So what's the biggest explosion that your team has caused?

"Accidentally" blew up a chemical plant <.<

We blew up a ship... which we wanted to salvage...

... and the crew ...

... and the hostages on board ...

... whom we were hired to rescue.

Hey! We did give back the advance we were paid.

We recently collapsed the top half of a small mountain in the Tsimshian Coast Mountain range.

Though to be fair that was not done by the group alone, but in part with a joint military operation involving a few cruisers and one battleship offshore providing the busters and other main fireworks while we were doing the footwork determining the target.

Did end up lighting up about 10 square miles of woodland in the process.

Those 'bears' won't be bothering anyone again....

ONLY 10 Square Miles? Piker.

Got the Bear, that's all I care.

We blew up the better half of a underworld casino because we had to eliminate two targets on the inside (and we pinned it onto someone else, though we're not quite sure whether or not that took). We tried hard to come up with other ways with less bloodshed, but were ultimately unable to carry out those alternate plans safely. Handing back the job also was not an option (and hasn't been since).
Don't quite recall how much explosive we used (that was kinda hand-waved), but it was low-grade and took up the trunk of a rather large car, I think.
I still feel like we didn't get paid enough.

A team and I blew up the seattle space needle to kill an executive back in the day. We were much more pink mohawk back then.

On one occasion we piped a gas main into the (air tight!) basement of a 10+ story building and set that on fire.

On another occasion we blew up a fireworks factory.

Pink Mohawk game years ago resulting in my player hitting his dead man switch after being left in a humanis/Alamos 20k training/living compound in Redmond. Blew up and leveled the 3 square city blocks that was the "compound" and after excessive exploding 6s also levels another two square blocks (for a five block complete level) with a good block and a half radius completely wrecked beyond that and a one block radius around that heavily damaged from the blast due to shrapnel, flying concrete etc.

Turns out the team really didn't do a good job with planning around the stored volatile explosives that the militants had been hoarding. Whoops.

Blew out three floors of a one square block corporate tower that had been converted into a temple of Y'golonac. FAE explosion to keep the rest of the building intact because our team was that kind of awesome.

Ace (The Adrenaline Junkie with a Fetish for explosives) and Guerilla T (Our Troll mercenary) used 3 Semi Tanker Trucks (9,100 Gallons each, total of about 27,300 Gallons or so) of LP Gas to take out a Dock Warehouse. It was a really cool scene, with an amazing lead in and Complete P2O Coverage... It took out a lot more than that, sadly. *Shakes Head*

Back in 3rd ed... a Force 12 Greatform Storm Spirit summoned in downtown Houston with the command to destroy. That... was not pretty.

Nice. Houston is the city I chose for my 5th ed game. We'll see how my group does, but I don't have high hopes.

I can top that, but I have to go back further.

Back in SR1, the Rigger book introduced unguided free-flight rockets, basically ripple-banks of rockets designed to saturate an area. Damage escalated based on the number of rockets you fired and the number of successes you got. They were converted in the back of the SR2 BBB, then quietly ignored as a horrible idea. But they were never removed, and when Rigger 2 came out, they were a legitimate item to add to your vehicles.

So, we were waiting for the street same to return, in the rigger's semi truck when a large-ish fire elemental manifested. It was about a Force 8, big but not huge. Problem was, our mage was nowhere to be found, and we didn't have an adept. The rigger panicked and went for the biggest weapon he had... the ripple rockets. The GM nodded, and said: "How many are you firing off?"

Rigger: "All ten of them!"

There was a brief moment of silence as he rolled. Each ripple contained ten rockets, that did 7D damage apiece. That wouldn't be so bad, except they added together. When he was done rolling, he managed to do around 500D damage to the fire elemental. And most of the city block around him. And a nearby hot dog stand, where our street samurai had stopped for a bite to eat. Hey, the remaining rockets had to go somewhere, right?

Once we realized what had happened, we collected most of the street samurai (he actually survived, although his hot dog didn't) and booked it out of there. In the meanwhile, the decker quickly whipped up a news item about a meteor strike, and sent it to all the major networks, and the rest of the team told the rigger he was dumping the remaining ripple rockets into Lake Washington.

and here I was thinking that 70, 70 and 60 Physical was a big deal. I just got schooled!

Has anyone here ever fired off a tactical nuke?

Not in Shadowrun, no.

They did in Chicago.

Define "tactical."

(Also: not in Shadowrun. Although I have contemplated setting off a galaxy wide nuke in AI War...)

I almost feel ashamed to admit that the largest explosion my team has wrought was sabotaging the engines of a luxury yacht in order to sink it.

Then again, they kind of make up for it with their creative uses for blenders and hammerhead sharks.

~Umi

Did the sharks have frikkin' laser beams coming out of their frikkin' heads?
If not, doesn't count.

Does Naval damage count?

I don't see why not.

This was in SR3. IIRC it was not long after the release of Rigger 3 and the Naval damage rules. Killed a Toxic juggernaut (I think) that was rampaging in a fuel refinery.

GM: You aren't skilled with the weapon.
Rigger: I walk the laser in onto the target.

Whatever the resulting explosion of approximately 30 pounds of Compound XII would do when placed in the center of the first floor of a gang safehouse in the barrens. It was a fun run... Wanted to do a back to basics simple shadowrun for easy money. The street samurai (my character) had all of this... Gear... Stockpiled from long fought gains and I was going to be leaving the group soon (moving away, namely) so I figured I may as well use it now while I had the chance. Back in the SR3 days.

Had a team back in the day called Plan B, because they're Plan B was always to blow things up. Eventually that just became their main game plan, as they were only hired for destructive jobs. One was to take out a research facility in the middle of nowhere. As in, take out the whole damn building. They made a botch of it, but did manage to crash an attack helicopter into in. It was fun simply watching their failures become successes.

Then there was the time the street sam with a minigun and backpack full of EX-EX ammo got engulfed by a fire elemental.

Elemental suffered a bit of indigestion?

probably not.

reminds me of a bumper sticker i once saw:

"I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy EVERY MINUTE of it."

The biggest explosion in any game I've been in thus far is probably proton torpedo detonations from Star Wars. But that was all in space combat, so it doesn't really count. In a Shadowrun game?

Just a few white phosphorous grenades... But.


I'll have to get back to this thread later on. The "adventure" my Eclipse Phase players are on now is one of the stock modules for the system. It's called "Mind the WMD." The module didn't specify anything, but I did some postulating and number-crunching and came up with a ten kiloton yield.

The best scenario is my players blowing it in place (to annihiliate several apocalypse-in-a-can nanoswarms.) The worst scenario involves them claiming it for themselves. (It's 250mg of anti-uranium in a suspension of fullerenes. In other words, it's small enough to be loaded into a 40mm mass driver and shoulder-fired as artillery.)

My math could be a bit iffy but firing a 10 kiloton weapon from any kind of direct-fire launcher is probably not going to be healthy. You said shoulder-mounted ARTILLERY so hopefully it has good range.

Also, I think your math is a bit off. I'm getting about 22500 Tetrajoules or 5377.6 Kilotons, give or take a bit. Still a serious bomb, but a bit less deadly than your estimate.

That sounds suspiciously like the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)

Except much bigger. the biggest Davy Crockett is 1 kt, 1/5th of the DDMP* these guys are hauling around.


*DDMP = Doomsday Device, Man Portable.

i'd expect some kind of power creep since the 50's

5,377.6Kt is way more lethal than 10Kt. Like, two orders of magnitude (and with a multiplier of 5.3 to boot) more deadly.

Remember, I said two-hundred and fifty milligrams. One-quarter of one gram. One gram of antimatter, by the way, would have a yield of 42.96Kt.

I used calculators:

https://www.google.com/search?q=Kilograms+to+Milligrams
Plug in 250mg, get 0.00025 Kg.

http://www.edwardmuller.com/right17.htm
Plug in 0.00025 Kilograms of Antimatter, get a yield of 0.010740000000000001 megatons.

http://www.unitconversion.org/energy/kilot...conversion.html
Plug in 0.010740000000000001 megatons, get 10.74 kilotons.

So, 10Kt, more or less; close enough considering that you're using a weapon with 10+Kt yield.
Now, even though there has been some debate as to the accuracy of Edward Muller's calculator (and in fairness, it is always appropriate to question the accuracy of anybody who uses Comic Sans,) this passes the sanity check, because Wikipedia states that 1g of weaponized antimatter would give a yield of 42.96Kt. The values I've gotten are within the ballpark of 1/4 that, which smacks me as being right, since I'm using 1/4 the antimatter.


http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
For extra fun, to get an idea what this would do if it were detonated at ground level on Earth, start plugging in values. You can turn off any radiation effects, since you're using an antimatter weapon. (Technically it's not a completely non-radioactive weapon, since I'm using a quarter of a gram of anti-uranium, but that will be consumed when it annihilates with matter anyway.)

Set your bomb on the ground outside 1 Times Square, NY, NY, a place practically every living human being in the United States with a television set is familiar with. (It's that place where they drop the ball at New Year's Eve.) Dial in a yield of 10.74Kt with a surface burst. You'll probably be interested in ticking all the overpressure rings, unticking all of the ionizing radiation since we're not actually initiating a nuclear device, and ticking the rings for third degree burns and dry wood usually ignites. And also teh fireball and crater rings, obviously!

Or you can just set off this one I prepared earlier.

Assuming that Manhattan is a flat island (actual buildings in the way of the blast will cause unpredictable effects, your mileage may vary, always take care when detonating antimatter weapons inside major metropolitan centers,) the crater will be a fairly small one; ignoring the beehive of subway tunnels and subway stations which are underneath 1 Times Square, you'll have a crater with an inside radius of 40m and a depth of 30m.

For 180m around the blast site, the air blast pressure will reach or exceed 200psi, which is approximately the pressure inside the boilers of the great steam locomotives of the early 20th century. This is pretty much the complete devastation zone; nothing in this radius is going to survive, period.

At 480m out - for reference, that's from 49th to 33rd - the air blast will be 20psi. Heavily built concrete structures are severely damaged or demolished, fatalities from the shockwave alone are pretty much 100% barring fluke miracles. Only a bunker could survive that.

The next interesting radius is 730m: that's the point where the thermal radiation hits 35 cal/cm^2. Dry wood auto-ignites at that thermal bloom, assuming it isn't smashed into flinders, which it probably will be.

At up to 1.12km, the air blast is 5psi. 5 is a small number, so it seems; 5psi is enough to knock down residential buildings and severely damage or destroy even skyscrapers. Nobody's getting through that without severe injuries, and most of those who experience that kind of overpressure are going to be dead. Which they'd probably take as a blessing, considering...

The thermal radiation will reach them first. The 100% guarantee of third-degree burns is a radius of 1,450km. That's from 60th Street (the line of which bisects Central Park) down to 24th. Or, to put it another way, everything from the Husdon River to 2nd Avenue, merely two blocks from the East River. If there isn't a physical object between you and the blast to shield you from the thermal radiation, something very solid indeed, you're going to get third degree burns over every exposed surface of your body. If you experience the thermal bloom at that range and you're very lucky, flying debris will kill you shortly thereafter, because you're still within the...

1.5psi air blast radius of 2,160m. That's everything from the literal middle of the Hudson river to the literal middle of the east river, or from 70th Street down to 15th, and is the range at which glass windows can be expected to shatter. At that range, the difference in shockwave speed and the speed of light is enough that folks who saw a bright light out their windows and go to them to investigate can look forward to being shredded when their windows implode like claymore mines.

And, Ghost help me, there's a significant chance my players will manage to seize this weapon and stash it away for a rainy day. Which brings me to...




1/10th of the DDMP, actually. 1Kt is 1/10th of 10Kt.

They don't actually have it, yet. It was part of the WMD magazine of a TITAN wardrone which fell in one of the many chaotic battles of the Fall on Mars, and was forgotten about by everybody. Dust has been burying it for ten years, but some crooks uncovered the remains of the battle and have been trying to excavate the goods to sell.

It was basically a robot with a mass driver cannon that could fire different ammunition. Most of the ammo it has is apocalypse-in-a-can nano-swarms, the kind of things that will go gray goo, merging people and things into exsurgent monstrosities and trying to consume-grow-consume. But one of the shells it contains is this beast, which is 250mg of anti-uranium suspended inside fullerenes, a lattice of 60 carbon atoms forming a shell which electrically repels the anti-uranium, keeping it stable in the middle... At least until the shell takes sufficient damage to warp and deform, letting the anti-uranium atom annihilate with some particle of matter, releasing energy which deforms the anti-uranium-containing buckyballs around it, and so forth and so on.

It's a pretty stable thing - you could throw it against a hard surface and it wouldn't go off, but crashing a truck, an air-drone, or shooting it? Booooooom.

As for it being able to fire a looooong ways, well... Sniper rifles in EP have an extreme range (the range at which you're taking a -30 penalty to your skill level) of 2,300m. That's increased by +50% for a railgun, giving an extreme range of 3,450m. Following the rules for gravity other than 1g, take the extreme range and divide it by the gravity: .376g, to get a maximum extreme range of 9,175m. (Note that this doesn't take Mars's thinner atmosphere into account.)

That's a range you can safely associate with a light artillery piece: the maximum firing range of a U.S. Army M30 mortar is 6,800m. And sure, actually hitting something head-on at that range would be awful impressive, but when you're firing a weapon with a yield measured in kilotons, "close" counts for a hell of a lot more than it does in horseshoes or hand grenades.

Well, since we're doing the math....

This doesn't count, since we never actually hit anything with it, but how much damage would one take from getting rammed by a sportscar going Mach 4.6?

And this proves I should not do maths when in bed with the flu.

Sorry, I missed this one.

Yes, but I was the GM at the time. The players were the ones who let it go off, though. It also was the first time I had a player go Hand of God on me, so I had to figure out how he could have survived a nuclear blast. There were no fridges handy, so I improvised.

I'm not entirely sure and I'm not up to doing the maths, but I'm going to say that a troll gets cut off at the knees and anybody else gets gibbed. Including the passengers.

Ok, not really a large explosion compared to the others in here, but has someones players already discovered the joy of grenade bolas in SR5 (or like the shadowtalk puts it, upgrading "chunky salsa" to "fine puree")?

Both SR4 and SR5 place a soft cap on Ramming Damage for a certain vehicle by stating anything beyond a certain speed just inflicts the same modifier. For SR4, this happens at 201+ m/turn. In SR5 the modifiers are the same up to that point, but they added a couple more thresholds above it and things finally cap out at 501+ m/turn.

Where the bulk of the damage actually comes from is the Body of a particular vehicle. Since we're talking a "sports car", I opted to go with the Eurocar Westwind 3000, which is a classic example present in both editions, and which has the exact same body in both cases. Mach 4.6 is equal to 1,565.334 m/s, or 521.778 m/turn, which caps us out for maximum modifier in each game system, and the EW3000 has a Body of 10.

Thus, in SR4, the multiplier caps at Body x 3, meaning you would inflict 30P to the target, and 15P damage to the vehicle making the ram. These are large numbers, but they're technically survivable given the right circumstances.

In SR5, the multiplier goes all the way to Body x 10, meaning the target suffers a whopping 100P, and an almost equally unhappy 50P hits the ramming vehicle. Both the target and the vehicle are instantly destroyed. ShadowDragon8685's hypothetical Troll doesn't get cut off at the knees, he pretty much atomizes.

This brings up a strange aspect of the Ramming rules in both editions. Although they both factor the Body of the ramming vehicle into account, neither of them factor the Body or Barrier Ratings of the target into the damage dealt. If you ram your sports car into a marshmallow, it both delivers and receives exactly as much damage as if you plowed headfirst into a brick wall.

~Umi

How does your math go from 1,565.334 m/s to 521.778 m/turn? A Turn is not a Fraction of a Second...

Since a Turn is 3 Seconds, that SHOULD be 4696.002 Meters/Turn (Multiple of 3 for distance traveled - Meters/Second multiplied by 3 Seconds Time Frame), not 521.778 (Divisor of 3 - Meters/Second divided by 3 for some unknown reason). And yes, Marshmallows are Deadly barriers which you never want to encounter.

Not to mention the weirdness that occurs in a head-on collision...who's hitting whom?

That's simple. Both are hitting and getting hit. So they both explode into a huge ball of fire.

Divided when I should have multiplied, just a silly gut reflex that I didn't think enough about. The human brain is designed to take shortcuts, and sometimes that leads us to take the wrong one because at a "glance" it appears correct. *shrug*

Fortune favors my daftness, however, as the net effect in game is the same.

~Umi

Aaah. But what if one of those vehicles is moving at a different speed?

based on his explanation, they both deal ramming damage to the other vehicle, and they both take half of that own ramming damage to their own vehicle, i think.

that said, so long as at least one of them is moving fast enough to inflict 100 to the other and 50 to themselves, it doesn't much matter how fast the other one is moving

Even against an Object that cannot possibly harm the vehicle (like the afore mentioned Marshmallow Wall). It, and the vehicle, simply comes apart upon impact.

What if one of them has a velocity of 0?

So... how DID they survive, exactly?

I would roughly calculate the relative impact speed and use this speed as basis for both ramming damages.
Head on ramming -> Add the speed
Both drive in the same direction -> Subtract the speeds
Right angle collision -> Speed of the vehicle hitting the other.