SC:L Editorial: Quantifying the C-14 “Impaler” Gauss Rifle

[Gradius]

By l33telboi. Read it here.

And thanks to ZealotPowerade for the art!

[ArcherofAiur]

Wow!

Incredible art ZealotPowerade. Reading now.

[pure.Wasted]

Eeppiicc.

I remember reading bits and pieces of this back when it was posted on the Lore forum. This is a lot more thorough and exhaustive though, and was a very entertaining read. Kudos on the research and smarts, Mr. l33telboi, it shows.

[Arkalis]

Really nice essay l33telboi, and the art is pretty neat ZealotPowerade!

Will you be making more essays on other weapons? Like to say something, the C-10 canister rifle? Or studying Protoss weapons would be cool

[ArcherofAiur]

WTB Psi-Blade Editorial

[Arkalis]

WTB Psi-Blade Editorial

What about Antimatter Cannon Editorial?

Psi Storm Editorial

Firefly (Phoenix) Editorial

[LordofAscension]

Glad you all enjoyed. This has been in the works for quite a long time but had to take a back seat to beta for a bit. But I just wanted to say thanks to l33telboi for his awesome guest editorial and to ZP for his awesome contribution (he's on staff - wait till you see what's next :O)

~LoA

[ArcherofAiur]

wait till you see what's next

Oh come on! You cant do that.

[Hamshank]

Oh come on! You cant do that.

Muhahahaha

[Shadow Archon]

I know he did a small calculation about Banelings from the short story Broken Wide. Here it is:

Yes, we can.

First, here's the description on the size of the explosive blister Ayers found: "I decided to dissect one of the smaller blisters, an angry green specimen the size of my fingertip. I charged up the med-laser and made a small incision." And here are the after effects: "And I woke up two hours later in the med-bay with my skin burning. Lieutenant Orran was standing over my gurney, his face sick with worry. He told me how the grenade had brought him running, how he had found me underneath a collapsed wall in the next room. That's when I glanced down and saw the remnants of my suit. The entire right side looked like a candle that had been held to a flame: the armored plates had been fused together. The lieutenant told me that, the next time I wanted to "off" myself, I should remove my armor first. Yeah, he's a funny guy."

A small finger-tip size blister was enough to kick a fully suited medic into the next room of bunker-esque location. A lower limit for this would be to assume it's a modern grenade, about a megajoule in yield. Though that's a serious underestimate since modern handgrenades don't tend to throw around fully suited marines through the walls of fortified underground bunkers.

Assume the blister was spherical with a diameter of 3 centimeters and you get a energy per volume ration of 1 megajoule per 0.0000141m^3. The volume of a baneling would be something like 0.5m^3, assuming it's a meter in diameter. That'd mean the baneling is something like 40,000 times more energetic then a handgrenade. Of course we'd have to factor in that the blister in question was just explosives while the baneling is the explosives plus the carrier. Whatever the case, the baneling should be in the double digit gigajoule region in terms of explosive yield as an extremely conservative estimate, a more likely estimate would be in the triple-digit gigajoule region.

Of course this all assumes the author did the math, which he probably didn't. And it'd also mean the token baneling is between MOAB and small nuclear explosive in terms of yield. Which is absurd and should therefore be accepted without question as highly scientific fact, as is traditional on spacebattles.

http://forums.spacebattles.com/showt...light=baneling