Eternal_Freedom wrote:Well, when I say "shaped charge" effects it's probably more akin to what the bouncing bombs did to German dams, more of the energy went one way rather than be evenly distributed.
...Yes, and you will note that those bombs were used against
hydroelectric dams, which are both (1) very large, and (2) made of concrete. You just plain don't need the same degree of 'oomph' to destroy things made out of dirt or wood that is required to destroy steel and masonry.
Essentially I'm thinking some sort of magical field that's cone shaped, so all the blast and heat from an explosion is focused against a target. I'm thinking of deploying this (eventually) with my Siege Regiment for breaching city/fortress walls. 1750 was roughly when fortress walls became lower and thicker wasn't it? To make ordinary cannon less effective against them?
The Italians were pioneering fortifications of this type as early as the 1400s. For this reason, the system of broad, earthen ramparts, wide, deep trenches, and complicated geometric arrangements of bastions and walls that allowed each part of the fortress to use gunfire to cover the other parts, became known as the "
trace italienne." Guys like Michelangelo and da Vinci, when they weren't busy being legendary geniuses, often took some time as contractors to use their knowledge of geometry to lay out fortifications of this type.
Fast-forward to the 1600s and defenses like this were ubiquitous all over Europe.
Although there were still a lot of medieval-vintage fortifications with high stone walls in and around various European cities and towns. Because even though nobody'd built forts that way in 200 years, there were
so many constructed in the Middle Ages, and they were so expensive to either tear down or refit, that in many cases the old medieval walls of a city simply remained in place regardless of circumstances.
If you attack a place in the Ohioan Empire that is of any real strategic value, you can assume there will be defenses built along the lines of the
trace italienne to resist cannon fire. The scale of these defenses, and the extent of any outworks that will prolong the defenses' survivability, depends on the importance of the target, the politics of fortification, and so on.
Conversely, the Ohioans' methods of siege warfare are built around the need to reduce such defenses, because anyone smart enough to put up much of a fight already knows how to build them. We've got a new guy who's got some ideas for that, who's currently studying maps of the defenses of Detroit.
I imagine that Orion, similarly, will have extensive
trace italienne defenses at any place important enough that it might plausibly be attacked with a cannon.
Incidentally, this shaped-charge-field-thingy was originally suggested by my housemate as part of the crude nuke; airburst it with the shaped cone pointing downwards for no wasted energy. Yeah, it's a strange house I live in aint it
Your gunpowder-based gun-type fission device weighs several tons; how exactly do you propose to get it airborne?
Beowulf wrote:High precision is needed for an implosion design. Gun type is doable with 1750s technology, really... assuming you have the fissile material. The problem is the fissiles. You don't have a way of enriching the uranium, and there's no reason why mages would even think about needing to do so.
Assuming you have the fissiles,
and the knowledge required to compute what constitutes a 'critical mass' and to detect and understand the behaviors of fissiles in the first place (which requires advanced scientific instruments to learn much about)...
Well, okay. Maybe you could make a gun-type device using black powder. Although if there's any way to fizzle a gun-type device, I suspect that you'd be the one to find it, trying to do that. Then again, even a "fizzle" with a fission device could have a yield of tons or tens of tons of TNT, which would be pretty darn impressive by pre-industrial standards, though not nearly impressive enough to justify the investment of effort that went into enriching fissiles to begin with.
Eternal_Freedom wrote:Knowing that getting the fissiles is the only real stumbling block to a basic nuclear weapon in this game is simultaneously awesome and terrifying.
Well, the scientific knowledge is also a real stumbling block, since you need things like Geiger counters and laboratory assay balances and detailed knowledge of chemistry that in turn requires you to make high-grade glassware and metalwork for instruments that go into the scientific research, and so on, and so on. Science and technology build on themselves. A lot.
Another obstacle is being able to manufacture and handle the fissiles in an environment where production actually
happens rather than just being a needlessly complicated way to get your entire work force killed uselessly.
Yet another is, as I alluded to earlier, the delivery vehicle. A realistic nuclear weapon made with primitive technology, even assuming it works on the minimal 'fizzle' level that would still be massively devastating and explosive by the standards of the era... it's going to weigh several tons. It's bulky, it's delicate, you have to physically PUT it somewhere. Your options are basically:
1) Fly it to the target, which none of us who are participating in this conversation have the means to do so far as I recall
2) Walk up to the target carrying it in a wagon, which has a lot of interesting ways to go wrong, among them the fact that getting out of range of the blast is likely to take a looong time on foot while you leave a ticking nuclear device with a literal fizzing gunpowder fuse (like those bombs from cartoons, or from the Legend of Zelda series, with a burning string) on the enemy's doorstep in a conspicuously large package.
3) Tunnel under the enemy and plant the bomb underneath their position. Which is a viable tactic, but if you HAVE a tunnel under the enemy's position you might as well just pile up five or ten tons of gunpowder, since that amount of gunpowder would be infinitely cheaper than a nuclear weapon, and would STILL be enough 'bang' to
blast a massive crater in any conceivable defenses.
Though...IIRC, radioactive materials and so forth were originally discovered in slag heaps from the Joachimsthaller (sp?) silver mines. "Pechblende" I believe it was known as. And those mines had for centuries carried a reputation of making workers sick in unknown ways. Perhaps Orion Biomancers decided to investigate similar cases in a silver mine in our territory, leading to pondering about radiation. As for refining, well, alchemy is a thing in fantasy settings, no?
Alchemy that can duplicate 20th century industrial chemistry really, really ought to be barred under the "no post-1800 technology" statute.
Otherwise, that statute exists
ONLY to punish those of us who play low-magic nations, by enabling high-magic nations to obtain capabilities we can't possibly hope to match.
Suffice to say I have no intentions of deploying crude fission weapons for many decades of game-time yet...i]but[/i] it does provide me with a big overarching storyline I can work with, along with my "Succesion Crisis" plotline I'm cooking up.
).