Master of Ossus wrote:It occurred to me, however, that thermal detonators may just operate as advertised. The seismic charges Jango Fett used against Obi-Wan in AotC demonstrate that SW weapons can somehow channel and focus destructive energy. A thermal detonator, then, could be one application of this technology, but instead of creating destruction along a seemingly-infinite plane, it could allow an operator to destroy things in a sphere with a given radius. Thoughts?
I made this connection long before that, but it was merely an unsupported theory until AOTC. With the NEGTWT it's pretty much nailed down.
Ah, and while TD's baradium core is said to be unstable, the cylinder version carried by Stormtroopers has to be quite stable given that we have never seen one go off.
The heart of a thermal detonator's explosive power is the compact sphere of volatile baradium found inside a thermite shell. Once the thumb trigger is activated, the baradium enters a state of fusion reaction that creates an expandable particle field capable of disintegrating everything within a 20-meter blast radius. The detonator is typically set on a timer, since the explosive radius is quite large and represents an extreme hazard to the weapon's bearer.
Although a variety of detonators exist, almost all are very carefully regulated and outright illegal to own. The Merr-Sonn Munitions Class-A thermal detonator is an extremely powerful model. Baradium is dangerously unstable, and fusion reactions have been known to start due to improper handling or jarring of the detonators.
The standard Imperial stormtrooper armor features a smaller, low-yield thermal detonator built into its belt design. The canister-shaped weapon, encased in an axidite shell, has a blast radius of only five meters, and is code-protected in such a way to prevent Rebels from stealing and using the explosives.
So it sounds to me like there's a fusion process whose energy either directly triggers or else is used to fuel a disintigration process in the TD's effective radius. The force-field blender and hyperspacial displacement theories seem to be bumped off here. It would hardly be the first time quasi-official sources have been wrong if this isn't the case, but there are, afaik, no on screen TDs actually going off, so it wouldn't be like the Executor's size.
Well my forcefield blender (i like the term btw) isn't totally out of the picture yet, depending on how you interpret things like 'particle field' (=> particle shield?). There's also 'disintegrates', presumably requiring an NDF-like mechanism. Does anybody know if NDF used elsewhere in SW? (besides the Superlaser Effect (tm), of course )
Robert Gilruth to Max Faget on the Apollo program: “Max, we’re going to go back there one day, and when we do, they’re going to find out how tough it is.”
The explanations here (though non-canon) all describe mechanisms whereby the destructive effects of the explosion should drop off more or less inversely proportional to the square of the distance.
On the other side, how many sources are there that describe the spherical "fixed radius" damage effect? Are there a lot, of relatively high level canon?
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