Thoughts on nuclear technology in my two favorite sci-fi games (Halo and Mass Effect)

[MagunBFP]

We know how plasma is generated - matter is simply heated until electrons are stripped from the nucleus. They actually never cover why humanity doesn't have such weaponry given they have all the pre-requisiite technology required. They have energy sources of staggering energy density (evidenced by the capacity for interstellar travel) and have long perfected the use of magnetic systems as a means of projectile acceleration (the MAC guns). From that all that truly would remain is building a containment system for said plasma.

Given the length of the war, one would simply assume this technological gap would easily have been overcome and yet the only significant development in military technology in a war that lasted decades and where the stakes appeared to be the survival of the species itself was related to personal protective armor. This is especially odd considering the fluff outright asserts that when it came to a slugging match on the ground, Humanity was easily capable of holding their own.

So we know how it's generated, we don't know how to use it as a weapon which the covenant are clearly able to do. Ultimately if plasma in Halo works exactly the way you say it does then you're probably right. Fortunately Halo is a work of fiction and Halo plasma may be similar but not identical to the plasma you obviously know and love.

In terms of why humanity isn't making scientific advances in leaps and bounds there's a slight issue of getting their ass handed to them, there's also the fact that we come into Halo right at the end of the war, well within the last year. We hardly get a comprehensive look at Humanity's technology before the war to compare it to what is available by the time we jump in.

According to the fluff on the ground the Spartans always win, humanity it doesn't officially say either way, but despite that Humanity always looses in Space. In the Second Battle of Harvest the UNSC Battle Group X-Ray (the largest battle group of its time) 40 UNSC ships engaged a single Covenant vessel, and were nearly over-whelmed. They were only saved by Admiral Cole's tactical brilliance, at the end of the battle the Covenant vessel was destroyed but 13 UNSC ships were lost. Up until that point 40 human ships weren't even equal to 1 single Covenant cruiser.

Largely eradicating human life on a planet using 36 ships? Easily possible. Dumping sufficient energy onto an earth sized rock sufficient to "strip the atmosphere" and heat all sources of water such that they "boil away" and vitrify all surface rock? Not even remotely possible.

This is a common problem of Sci-Fi: they have no idea how poorly things scale and how just plain old big something like a planet is.

The reason I say it is impossible is relatively simple: human ships in the Halo universe, while outmatched by covenant examples, are not mere canon fodder incapable of landing a damaging blow. In spite of a lack of shields and lacking in firepower in comparison, the fluff indicates that the advantage is far less than what you might imagine. For every ton of spacecraft the covenant bring to a fight, humanity needs for to make it a fair fight.

Imma let you finish but the Covenant has one of the best fleets of all time. In terms of comparative military strength/tonnage the ratio is more 1: >40 at that point with sufficient tactical genius the UNSC can win the day with approximately 33% casualties.

Given we have observed a relatively small UNSC ship slug it out at point blank range with a substantially larger covenant ship (the space battle section of Halo Reach) we can determine with relative ease that their capacity to deliver damage isn't even sufficient to instantaneously destroy a frigate a mere few hundred feet in length, how do you expect them to effectively heat the surface of a planet by hundreds of degrees in a twenty-four hour period.

Perhaps you missed the part where they one shotted a corvette? It's right before that space mission. There's also the fact that perhaps they have different weapons they use against small targets, say less then a few hundred feet long that move, and big ones, like planets that don't really manoeuvre too well.

In order to vitrify Reach (which we never observe in the game - we see lots of fires and such but no evidence of vitrification), which is roughly equivalent in size and composition to the earth, it would take several orders of magnitude more destructive power than the above - the equivalent of millions if not billions of Hiroshima bombs.

What the Covenant ships are provably capable of both in books and games when it comes to the actual observed ability to deliver damage simple does not even remotely match the destructive power implied by the claim that they can "glass" a planet. The explanation of this is relatively simple though: if your goal is simply effective eradication of human life, you require far less firepower. People tend to cluster in groups meaning one only requires a significant application of firepower to a relatively small fraction of a planet's surface to achieve.

We never actually see a planet that's supposed to have been glassed. In Reach we see the attack/campaign preceding the glassing but not the conclusion. Who's to say that the Covenant don't plasma weapons that burn millions and billions of times hotter then the original atomic weapons? You seem to be assuming that because we're unable to do something, it's impossible to that over centuries someone else can't figure it out. That's like seeing fire and laughing at the idea of the destructive power of a nuke.

As for your second point if your goal is to probably get most human life on a planet then you'd be right just wipe out the major population centres, but the goal of the Covenant is the definite and complete extermination of all human life, most just doesn't cut it. The more likely explanation is that glassing is an over-hyped word, it may not extend to vitrifying the whole surface of a planet but most likely its burning off the atmosphere, boiling the rivers and oceans, and reducing the planet to a barren rock. As a result of high-intensity plasma impacts parts of the surface, as well as most of the sandy areas would likely be literally turned to glass.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

So we know how it's generated, we don't know how to use it as a weapon which the covenant are clearly able to do. Ultimately if plasma in Halo works exactly the way you say it does then you're probably right. Fortunately Halo is a work of fiction and Halo plasma may be similar but not identical to the plasma you obviously know and love.

Plasma is nothing but an ionized gas. Using it as a weapon is simply a matter of compressing it (via magnetic field) and projecting it across a distance (via magnetic field). Plasma weapons are just kinetic kill weapons - the same as any other. The only things keeping such weapons from being a reality now is the realitve difficulty of the process of ionizing matter, compressing and then projecting it. That said, power supply is the key hurdle, namely, how does one deliver the staggering energies this requires without rendering various circut paths themselves into plasma.

In terms of why humanity isn't making scientific advances in leaps and bounds there's a slight issue of getting their ass handed to them, there's also the fact that we come into Halo right at the end of the war, well within the last year. We hardly get a comprehensive look at Humanity's technology before the war to compare it to what is available by the time we jump in.

The better part of three decades of fighting in a war for the species would be sufficient impetus I'd thank for major advances of military hardware across the board. Even if humanity rarely wins a battle, to assume they are loosing so badly as to never recover any technology to reverse engineer or produce new ship designs and tactics to counter what they see is silly.

According to the fluff on the ground the Spartans always win, humanity it doesn't officially say either way, but despite that Humanity always looses in Space.

The fluff actually points out that on the ground humanity is easily a match for the covenant but, since they inevitably cede space superiority, ground wars are quickly lost as a result.

We never actually see a planet that's supposed to have been glassed.

We see a post reach glassing with various widespread fires. We also see a lush green planet shortly after the war concludes a mere few years in the future. Full planetary vitrification would take more than a handful of years to recover the ability to produce even something as simple as grasses.

In Reach we see the attack/campaign preceding the glassing but not the conclusion. Who's to say that the Covenant don't plasma weapons that burn millions and billions of times hotter then the original atomic weapons?

Actually, it isn't reasonably possible for plasma to get much hotter than a nuclear blast. Hell, it'd be just shy of impossile to even approach temperatures seen at the heart of a modest nuclear blast.

Matter can be rendered plasma at reltively low temperatures of a few thousand degrees. Making matter into plasma isn't actaully all that hard to do or interesting. The one thing you gain by rendering some chunk of matter into plasma is that it is electrically charged and thus will natively respond to electromagnetic forces. The destructiveness of any such weapon is still going to be a function of mass and velocity. The difference such weapons offer above a conventional weapon (i.e. a large gun) is that you aren't limited by the maximum possible expansion rate of an explosive (e.g. gunpowder only expands at a few thousand feet a second and thus the maximum speed a rifle round can possibly go is somewhere under that. Given that kinetic energy is easy to calcualte (kinetic energy = .5 * mass * velocity ^ 2), having a much higer possible velocity is certainly an advantage). The effects of having something incredibly hot are relatively trivial in any case useful for weapon systems.

As for your second point if your goal is to probably get most human life on a planet then you'd be right just wipe out the major population centres, but the goal of the Covenant is the definite and complete extermination of all human life, most just doesn't cut it. The more likely explanation is that glassing is an over-hyped word, it may not extend to vitrifying the whole surface of a planet but most likely its burning off the atmosphere, boiling the rivers and oceans, and reducing the planet to a barren rock. As a result of high-intensity plasma impacts parts of the surface, as well as most of the sandy areas would likely be literally turned to glass.

Yes, rendering a part of a planet into glass is trivial. My point is that complete vitrification of the surface of a world is staggeringly difficult. Simply equalling the amount of energy the sun delivers to the surface of the earth (Which you'll note heats the surface to a relatively comfortable temperate on average) would require a staggering number of nuclear weapons. Heating the surface several orders of magnitude higher would require the equivalent of tens of millions of nuclear weapons to be applied in 24 hours. During the course of the franchise, we have never been given evidence that the covenant are even remotely capable of this feat, much less with a trivial force of a few dozen ships.