A request for somewhat more realistic nukes

Now, when I say realistic, I don't mean less range, or radiation, or even larger radii, what I mean is that there's just a part of nukes that have always been showcased in strategy games that has always bugged me.
As soon as the explosion begins, the units around it die, even if the shockwave is shown.
And in PA, when a nuke explodes, it has an initial flash, followed by the shockwave quickly covering the aoe
So basically, what I'm requesting is that when the nuke goes off, the units only die as the shockwave passes by them.
The shockwave isn't slow enough to outrun, and it would look pretty cool, especially if they were just atomized as they were hit, and it would add a splash of realism that, IMO, is needed in the strat genre.
What do you think?

Against "hard" targets like giant tanks and mechs, Nucks would likely only deal proper damage right within the fireball, the shock/heat waves and radiation don't have nearly as much effect compared to "soft" targets like Humans.

Which IMO opens the door nicely to let smaller Tactical Nucks deal focused "point damage" while other types like a 'Jericho' Missile from the Iron Man movie deal with roles such as area damage and what not.

Mike

I have no idea how taxing it would be on the server, but if it's cheap enough to do then I'd like to see it happen.

I would love to see various nuke types (tactical, ICBM, IPBM, MIRV's, etc), but I think we need some sort of missile defense revamp to really allow that.

Yup. Or rather, not so much a revamp as much as a diversification as I've talked about before as well over here.

Mike

If you are talking about a nuclear warhead, a 'soft target' is considered to be a city, a hard target an underground bunker, and most of the structural damage is done by the shock wave, which is a localised change in atmospheric pressure.

I wouldn't underestimate the changes in atmospheric pressure if I were you.

Yeah lets have nukemissile slugfests instead of metalavalanches clashing .... that sounds like more fun ....

My thoughts exactly Sir. My thoughts exactly.

If I am not mistaken this happens for trees already. You can see them disappear in a circular pattern when a nuke hits them. Or was this only on planet smashing?

Too bad in PA we don't really have those things.......Secondly why the Shock wave is capable of doing damage, I don't believe it would do the same amount of damage at it's edge compared to just beyond the fireball.

Mike

It's a still a nuclear explosion, I mean it gives off the kind of heat that instantly turns sand into glass and melt iron. Also the kind of pressure that can destroy buildings and, for lack of a better word, skeletize people. Not to mention most nukes are strong enough to topple building kilometres away from the initial fireball.

Mike,

While true that it will reduce in effectiveness with increased distance, the numbers I think are still big enough such that I think a single point wouldn't be quite realistic. The fire ball is also not where most of the energy is typically, it's in the thermal radiation and blast wave.

For the RL reference, I'd look at the line in the table about flying railcars, energy distribution is described at the top of the page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_nuclear_weapon#Summary_of_the_effects

If we are going to have more exciting nukes, I want more exciting counters.

PA is not a game of global thermonuclear war. Let's keep it that way.

Fixed damage AoE is three times as powerful as AoE that uses a linear damage falloff. Modeling a more realistic nuclear damage zone (lethal fireball, tickling shockwave) would reduce the damage even more. It's a pretty important factor.

IIRC this happened in supcom, but it got patched out since the shockwave traveled so slowly people would just walk out of it.

It was definitely AWESOME, though.

That's right bobucles, it's not global, it's interplanetary nuclear war. Don't forget we'll almost certainly be getting an orbital nuke launcher.

Correct. So soft targets are some structures and most units, hard targets are other structures.


The shockwave does damage because it compresses the air in the atmosphere to greater than atmospheric pressure and creates massive amounts of wind (because of the heat).

An over-pressure of 62 kpa is sufficient to throw railcars around. And 62 kpa is equivalent of 0.61 atmospheres. I.e. it's equivalent to what happens when you are under 1.8 metres of water.

The shockwave travels at the speed of sound.

Imagine what happens to you when a sheet of water with an area of say, 1 meter squared, and 1.8 meters deep, hits you travelling at the speed of sound.

Imagine what happens to your car.

Considering you know, a tidal wave only travels at about 80km an hour when it hits land.

Just had the same thoughts on the nuclear shock-wave damage, turned out someone had already thought of it

It definitely would look better, you'd get the impression of mini chain-reactions going off with individual buildings and units exploding in an expanding concentric ring. Perhaps even leave behind small craters?

On another note it would be awesome to have some sort of Independence Day style inferno weapon that had a large AOE but a slower fireball expansion rate, ideal for base annihilation but sufficiently slow for units to escape.

That'd be a pretty sweet addition.

Very small addition. But very nice one.

I think that would be cool, right now the effects are still not really complete. They have said that they really only have 3-ish temp effects that they are using for every explosion. When the time comes to polish nukes I think they will make a custom effect and then maybe worry about that.

This sounds like a pretty cool idea. Considering the whole melting aspect of the heat, I think it'd be cool to visualize that somehow too (not anytime soon though, stable release build is foremost!). I'm not sure of the technical aspects, but maybe the effect that's used when a building is going from green nanolathe to actual building texture can be turned orange-y yellow and played really quickly in reverse on units in the blast radius, to make it look like they are instantly melting and disintegrating or something.