Dye grenades, WP shells and shock launcher changing effect type? WTFF!

[NKF]

(question...forget if its the tank, the heavy gauss or the craft gauss, but isn't there some sort of hidden alternate round type for one such gauss weapon? how does one get at t?)

 

The exact in-game name escapes me at the moment, but there is an unused Gauss ammo type with its data still present in the game. It was originally meant for the Craft Gauss Cannon. For some reason each round costs $10,000 (!) a pop. I'm glad the craft Gauss Cannon ended up sharing the ammo for the Coelecanth/Gauss, since that's considerably cheaper.

 

The only way to get the other ammo type to show up is to use an editor. I think XComutil's command line tools that open up all the research/manufacturing topics can do this for you. Apart from the novelty factor though, nothing can make use of it.

 

And while the damage done is determined at mission start/load time is it 100% thusly calculated? Perhaps the damage differential is less obvious with torpedo weapons vs torpedoes, or cannon v cannon but how about cannon vs torpedoes, cannon or torpedo v sonic, and anything v PWT missiles.

 

When the weapons become available I'll have to test it. As it just seems common sense (ahem...thisis TFTD I guess..) that shooting down a cruiser or harvester with gas or gauss cannon and torpedoes, or twinlinked DU armor-piercing torpedoes would inflict proportionally far less destruction than would hitting that same fr.ex. cruiser woth the stonking great force waiting to unleash hell in the guise of an interceptor mounting twin pulse wave torpedoes.

 

Would make more sense if damage was considered to be perfectly honest. It would have added a certain tactical advantage to using a weaker weapon and not going full Sonic Oscillator later on.

 

How a sub is damaged is fairly well understood at the moment, both through actual tests (lots o' save and reloading) and confirmed with binary (and later assembly) code digs. What the game does for any shot down alien vessel is to first place the alien sub onto the map intact. Then it checks through the parts of the sub and every time it encounters an object that's considered a power source, it will then give it a 75% chance of causing an explosion. When it does explode, it explodes with a blast strength between 180 - 250HE.

 

- NKF

[sp1ke]

One thing you can do with the unused Craft Gauss Cannon ammo type is re-use it to create new ammo types that are more useful.

[Tsathoggua]

'Sblood!

 

For 10K a round, then I'd want not a mere coelacanth or displacer, but a full-blown battle-tank,mounting a scaled to just about fit, a modified craft gauss cannon as a dedicated weapon, or with a couple of side&rear turrets mounting a fully automatic, very high-speed but relatively low caliber, short-ranged gauss, something like a gauss rifle type sponson-mounted weapon but designed for faster and more continuously firing (think lower TU cost per round, damage increased, but range far restricted

The idea bring to use a conventional short-range defensive weapon to take down enemies, albeit only effective against the weaker ones, or perhaps capable only of repelling but not easily killing, etc. so as to allow one not to have to waste highly expensive rounds. Afterall, who wants to e.g drop a PWT round worth tens of thousands on scoring a kill on a lowly aquatoid soldier, deep one, gill man trooper etc:P

 

 

 

Interesting to know the mechanics of craft damage. Another big oversight in the rushed design of TFTD.

Would have been better to retain the usefulness of smaller and/or earlier weapons systems in taking out smaller craft, rather than as said,dumping everything in

favor of equipping sonics or PWT on everything.

 

Sp1ke-how does one do this?

 

And rounds for the tank, or for the craft?

[sp1ke]

These are craft weapon rounds not tank rounds. So they would be only usable on craft weapons. You can change pretty much all of the stats by text editing. You can also trick it into appearing on the UFOPaedia. Hacking the tech tree to make it researchable is possible, but you could have it available from the start. You could change the name, rounds, power, price. It's slightly trickier to change the weapons that will 'take' the ammo but that could be done. There are other unintended side effects and bugs possible when using an 'unused' ammo type rather than modding one of the existing types. The hardest part would be getting some existing weapon to use this unused ammo type. I'm not sure how that is done (or if it's possible actually).

 

It's a shame there isn't an unused torpedo type. It would be 'interesting' to add a nuclear armed torpedo. 500 damage? 1000? maybe 2000 or more (since the damage is random up to that maximum level). 2500? But a standard or worse chance to hit. Very expensive. And probably you would lose Score for using them - but that would be a complex mod and hard to implement.

[Tsathoggua]

Is it possible to modify the tanks at all?

 

 

As for nuclear warheads on torpedoes, well that would result in a BETTER chance to hit. After all, the effective kill-zone is far larger for nuclear weapons, even tactical relatively low yield nukes give you a much bigger explosion, more thermal effects and the secondary shockwave that propagates outwards from the epicente rof the blast.

 

Compared to a conventional warhead (by this I mean HEAT, armor-piercing tandem charge HEs, explosively-formed jet munitions, HESH, thermite or willy pete incendiaries, you get the idea) even a near miss is likely to result in a kill. And what constitutes such a near miss is also a lot larger range than with all but the most massive conventional HE warheads compared to the smallest battlefield tactical nukes

 

 

 

 

And then there is the electromagnetic pulse effect....now that could add some interesting possibilities.

 

I'd suggest modifying the craft gas cannon, range, ammo capacity, damage etc. Its shit for all intents and purposes, and other than in the very early stage of the game its utterly useless, make the ammo something needing manufacture, or its not possible to do so, then the alt. ammo for the craft gauss, would fit, almost, with the claimed tech behind the rounds, the gauss weapons in TFTD have nothing in common with realworld gauss weapons, which fire solid slugs (although for the railgun type ((now there could be a decent idea for modifying the gas cannon or gauss...long range, high damage, ultra-high round-to-target speed but long or very long reload time)) the ones in TFTD are effectively antimatter-based weapons. So should cause a hell of a lot more damage than they do. Something like a lobsterman shouldn't be at all resistant, the only way to shield against it would be electromagnetic, and even a near miss should utterly obliterate any target, hell even pistol rounds should by rights, be effective against main battle tanks although of course that would

more than unbalance the game if implemented. Antitank machinepistols...would be the envy of jihadis the world over haha.

[sp1ke]

Is it possible to modify the tanks at all?

Slightly but not much, and it tends to crash the game.

You can mod the armour levels with XComUtil or TFTDExtender, and fix the ammo bugs.

[sp1ke]

I'd suggest modifying...

 

Yeah. All the craft weapons are unbalanced and most of them are more or less pointless. DUPs then Sonic Oscillator is the optimal route. Which makes it all a bit boring. In fact even some of the subs are pointless. This aspect of game balance is not a strong point of TFTD, alas.

 

Gauss weapons are electromagnetic 'projectiles', rather than electromagnetically propelled projectiles, but no one has the copyright on what the term 'gauss weapon' "really means". It's basically a fight between Traveller and its source material, and TFTD. Who's to say who is right? Railguns are different, a third thing. distantly related. Frankly, none of these weapons have much of a chance of working underwater. The Gas Cannon and the Jet Harpoon are probably the most realistic. (Sonic, yes, but good luck making it directional and focused. I guess that's why it's Alien technology.)

 

Why do you think Gauss weapons are antimatter weapons? If they used antimatter as the 'kill mechanism' rather than a power source, they would make nukes look like a picnic.

[NKF]

In fact even some of the subs are pointless. This aspect of game balance is not a strong point of TFTD, alas.

 

I would agree if we were talking about UFO's Lightning as an interceptor (the troop carrier side up to personal preference). However to TFTD's credit, it has done some fantastic rebalancing to make the Hammerhead quite a useful ship. Compare the ship stats against the Lightning and even against the Manta to see what I mean.

 

I could espouse all of its virtues and weaknesses, but I think it would be quicker to check out the quick comparison tables on the aircraft and sub pages on the Ufopaedia.org for reference:

 

https://www.ufopaedia...index.php/Craft

https://www.ufopaedia.../index.php/Subs

 

The key points to look at are the price, fuel capacity and max speed. Yes the Leviathan still trumps them all, but it has its own problems.

 

- NKF

[magic9mushroom]

Folks, just a quick reminder that the purpose of adjusting your weapons to shoot down alien submarines is simply to get them down. The severity of damage done to them is irrelevant for determining what you can recover from the crash site. Instead that is determined at the time the map is generated when your ship lands.

 

That means if even if you miraculously shoot down a Very Small with a Pulse Wave Torpedo, you might still find it relatively intact on the ground. Similarly with a larger ship taken down with a single Craft Gas Cannon could st ill get all of its Ion Beam Accelerators blown to bits and wipe out much of the interior.

 

- NKF

 

Your clarification is itself mildly ambiguous; I know you meant "get them down *intact*" but someone else who doesn't independently know all this might be confused and think you meant "defeat them".

 

Yeah. All the craft weapons are unbalanced and most of them are more or less pointless. DUPs then Sonic Oscillator is the optimal route. Which makes it all a bit boring. In fact even some of the subs are pointless. This aspect of game balance is not a strong point of TFTD, alas.

 

Technically, none of the subs are pointless. The Hammerhead comes close (it's even worse as a troop transporter than the Lightning, since Displacers are more important than Hovertanks were in UFO), but it's got a slightly better chance to solo a Dreadnought than a Manta has (the Hammerhead only has one gun, but it has more than twice the Manta's HP). And the Manta and Hammerhead are less pointless to build than their UFO equivalents since the Leviathan doesn't immediately unlock after researching them.

 

Gauss weapons are electromagnetic 'projectiles', rather than electromagnetically propelled projectiles, but no one has the copyright on what the term 'gauss weapon' "really means". It's basically a fight between Traveller and its source material, and TFTD. Who's to say who is right? Railguns are different, a third thing. distantly related. Frankly, none of these weapons have much of a chance of working underwater. The Gas Cannon and the Jet Harpoon are probably the most realistic. (Sonic, yes, but good luck making it directional and focused. I guess that's why it's Alien technology.)

 

Why do you think Gauss weapons are antimatter weapons? If they used antimatter as the 'kill mechanism' rather than a power source, they would make nukes look like a picnic.

 

I think you may be misinformed.

 

A "gauss gun" in RL refers to a coilgun, one of two common kinds of electromagnetically propelled projectile weapons (railguns are the other). If you talk to a scientist about "gauss weapons", this is what they will think you mean. I don't know what Traveller is, but this is an RL name, not a reference to any fictional work.

 

TFTD's "Gauss" weapons are known to be antimatter weapons because of this line in the Heavy Gauss's UFOpedia entry:

 

The anti-proton stream is confined inside a Gallium Arsenide shell that implodes on impact releasing the anti-matter.

 

It's a load of incoherent technobabble, but it certainly seems to be referring to antimatter in the bullets.

 

And any given antimatter weapon need not be more powerful than any given nuclear weapon. A given amount of antimatter will produce far more energy than an equal mass of uranium/plutonium, to be sure, but unlike nuclear weapons antimatter can be scaled down indefinitely (I mean, when they're finished with antiparticles at CERN, they just turn off the containment, because with the quantities they're working with the energy release isn't even noticeable). You just use less antimatter and you get less bang.

[NKF]

Your clarification is itself mildly ambiguous; I know you meant "get them down *intact*" but someone else who doesn't independently know all this might be confused and think you meant "defeat them".

 

Or rather, downed, not destroyed. Shooting something down intact might be even more difficult.

 

- NKF

[Zombie]

Would make more sense if damage was considered to be perfectly honest. It would have added a certain tactical advantage to using a weaker weapon and not going full Sonic Oscillator later on.

 

How a sub is damaged is fairly well understood at the moment, both through actual tests (lots o' save and reloading) and confirmed with binary (and later assembly) code digs. What the game does for any shot down alien vessel is to first place the alien sub onto the map intact. Then it checks through the parts of the sub and every time it encounters an object that's considered a power source, it will then give it a 75% chance of causing an explosion. When it does explode, it explodes with a blast strength between 180 - 250HE.

 

When I first started playing X-COM: UFO (aka UFO:EU), I initially thought that it was better to shoot down the scout UFO's with weaker weapons to prevent destroying a craft outright (or over-damaging it). For the Small Scout, yes, this is true to a certain degree. It does not have a Power Source, so nothing is destroyed per se, however, it can be destroyed outright by powerful craft weapons. If that happens, there's no crash site to investigate at all, and you'll lose the single unit of alien alloys, the occupant, and the kit it was carrying (which always includes a Mind Probe which is super-duper expensive). If the craft weapon isn't very powerful, it'll just crash the UFO instead, and it's here where we come into explosion mechanics.

 

Like NKF said, if you shoot a craft down, the game doesn't plop down a pre-damaged UFO and call it quits. The game places the undamaged UFO on the map first, checks to see if there is a "power source" present, determines if the power source explodes (75% chance it does) and then picks a random number between 180-250 and centers an explosive blast around the power source with that strength. It does this for the whole UFO so if there are more power sources present, it'll run the routine again and again if necessary. The PS explosion is what creates the damage you see on a mission, the act of shooting the UFO down didn't do any physical damage at all.

 

The reason why you would want to shoot down the Small Scout with powerful weapons is two-fold

1. You can't be bothered to specially equip a craft with weaker weapons expressly for this purpose
   
2. You don't care about the recoverables, and don't want to carry out yet another away mission
   

In the beginning of the game it's advantageous to go after those Small Scouts if possible since your craft weapons will be rather weak anyway and if you recover the Mind Probe it'll net you a tidy sum on the black market which can keep you in the black. Later on, those Small Scout missions are just annoying because you can get more loot from the bigger crafts to justify your involvement.

 

- Zombie

[Tsathoggua]

I'd agree once one obtains sonic oscillators, since after they have been built, no ammo is required to keep them operational, they just recharge. But good luck shooting

down scout craft and not reducing them to a density somewhere less than that of an aerogel:P Even the long-ranged ASROC just splatters whats left over several miles worth of seabed much of the time. And thats using one of them. Twin-linked DUP heads? hehe, poor bastards don't stand a chance:D Bigger weapons

whilst a more or less certain way to exterminate craft and occupant both making it unnecessary to run a mission and give the bugger a chance to shoot at your men

but who wants to waste a very expensive PWT round or two on taking one our? thats like pulling a sawnoff out to remove a mosquito sitting on your wall,

hungrily eying up your tasty warm blood.

 

IMO its not all THAT much less difficult downing a very small than it is taking down a battleship, but for the entirely opposite set of reasons. Not because its capable

of obliterating an interceptor in a single burst from its weapons systems, in fact good look to them ever managing to even FIRE the weapon,they just aren't likely to

survive trying to close to their combat range long enough, before whatever it is your intercept craft are packing blows them out of the water. So the inverse of the battleship/dreadnought. Theres only really the craft gas cannon, the craft gauss that they stand a chance of an opportunity to put slimy green webbed finger to trigger, and even if they do manage to squeeze off one shot, the odds of a second crack at it are not ones I'd want to bet on. And forget about taking down any interceptor

unless its pilot does not know the meaning of the words 'back to base' or 'retreat', and is armed with PWTs or DUP heads, and misses with every round they brought

with them. Thats assuming pretty much deliberate suicide however, anything else is suicide on the bugs part.

 

For all their pitiful weakness though, it must be said, that those really small craft are very dangerous. Not because of what they are armed with or damage resistance, they haven't got anything more more threatening than a pointy stick with the word 'poke' carved into the end. But they really should be caught and shot down as a high

priority target, because its those little nuisance craft are often on infiltration missions intended to subvert the CFN and world govts. The most dangerous mission type of all if it succeeds; so these USOs should be blown to hell the moment one can get an interceptor out to engage the damn things. Shoot on sight is the best, and

for that matter, only policy.

 

One can fail a terror site, a base assault, even lose one of your own bases assuming you have more than one but once some stupid prick politician (if it were up to me personally I'd have traitors like that assassinated; ideally by a squad of troops wearing the skins/exoskeletons of some dead aliens, kind of a terror site in reverse, to spread fear and hatred amongst politician filth, anyone signing a pact would find themselves the recipients of a present that goes 'boom!' in the mail. And the package containing the bomb, plus the device itself liberally wiped down first with a piece of aquatoid flesh, to make sure its as thoroughly contaminated with their DNA as possible. Hell, maybe 'property of the bugs, if undelivered, please do NOT return under any circumstances to T'leth'

 

Signed-'yours terroristly, the aliens'

[magic9mushroom]

Small Scouts and Survey Ships don't have guns, so no, they will never shoot back at you no matter your attack method.

 

Also, they are found on basically all missions; they're not particularly likely to be doing infiltration. The only one I remember them not showing up for is Alien Terror in UFO.

[Tsathoggua]

Oh and as for why I said TFTDs gauss weapons were antimatter based, the heavy gauss is another reason.But the gauss rifle and pistol make mention of their discharge being based on firing a stream of antiprotons using a particle accelerator of some variety, multiple accelerators in the rifle and heavy gauss cannon. Neglecting the heavy gauss which is meant to operate by launching a solid projectile that sounds more or less like a shell containing an antimatter payload, the pistol and rifle aren't said to operate that way; but direct expulsion of an antiproton beam is implied. The amusing thing is, that the reason claimed for developing the gauss tech in the first place was because the plasma weapons from the first alien war, against the sectoids and etherials exploded when attempting to fire them under water. Makes sense, fire a superheated bolt of ionized gas into water, said water is going to turn into steam. A lot of steam, very quickly, right in the face of whichever aquanaut is both unfortunate enough to be ordered to fire and stupid enough to comply.And I think even TFTD can get the physics of cooking your face off with a burst of superheated steam pretty close.Steam burns are just plain evil no matter how they occur, they can do quite a bit of damage pretty quickly, one doesn't get much if any chance to successfully mitigate the damage by removing the part of yourself in the way of the steam, at least not in the sense of reducing the injury caused, only by limiting the time of exposure.Never had a truly serious one happen (I.e one that meant my going to hospital etc) but the ones that have happened it seemed like the damage was done way before getting the hell out of the way could have helped, by the time its noticed as happening at all, the shit has already been introduced to the air recirculation system and come back raining down upon one's noggin:PThe TFTD type 'gauss' weapons woudn't work under water either though, just like the plasma weapons of the first alien war, the heavy gauss might do given they fire shells, but a weapon firing an antiproton stream could only work in a vacuum, where there isn't any matter for the payload to annihilate with.Even if the weapons accelerator tech and power source were both miniaturized and made portable they'd still result in irradiating the gunner as well as the target shot at and the rest of the X-com squad(s) nearby due to the burst of y-radiation that comes from the antiprotons annihilating with the first bit of ordinary matter they encounter.Mention, as said above, gauss weaponry to any engineer or scientist familiar with them, and they are always going to think either coilguns of the various types, quench guns, or railguns, all of which fire solid projectiles, althoughthere is a variant of the railgun that uses plasma pressure instead of a solid armature, and even some that are intendedto fire a bolt of plasma, using ablative projectiles (usually)Thats odd, because the hyper-wave decoder seems to show up many more of the tiny 1-pilot scout craft as infiltrators, they tend to send bigger and bigger ships to do it when they realize that whenever they send out those tiny ones they are beingcaught in the act and blown to hell. The same pattern shows in UFO enemy unknown once the means to snoop on alien transmissions becomes available.The false diplomacy is done by their smallest craft, the one with no recoverable power core and a single unit of aqua plastics. Well I'm going from UFO defense here, so it may be different, but during the first alien war, it was those little bastards that seemed (as evidenced by decoded transmissions showing the race and mission type) most often to be the ones behind such bastardlyness)Just started playing it again recently for the first time in years after managing to find a full-version copy for download in order to be able to use openXcom. Loving it:DAnd I'd estimate 85-90% of the time when there is an infiltrator craft about then its one of those minimal size things, although I've seen a handful, and only a handful, after a very successful period, where 5-6 X-com bases were in operation all packing intercept squadrons equipped with dual plasma cannons or fusion bombs for the largest craft, radar and hyperwave coverage extending throughout most of the world, forcing the enemy to make use of a few narrow passageways if they didn't want immediate detection and blowing out the sky accordingly, the intercept teams had been wiping the floor with anything other than the very largest of enemies, and had just gone in and left more bases than I could count on one hand in smoking ruins, leaving no survivors, other than KO higher-ranking or otherwise valuble targets, anything else just got the customary cannon/autocannon HI round to dispose of them without bringing then back.

[NKF]

but who wants to waste a very expensive PWT round or two on taking one our? thats like pulling a sawnoff out to remove a mosquito sitting on your wall,

 

I'm going to be cheeky here and say: 'cause you can.

 

Yeah, late game, stores overflowing with Zrbite that you end up storing them in cartons on the floor all along the corridors, in the bathroom, in the showers, in the base commander's private chilly bin, etc. Might as well get the engineers pumping out DPLs and go mad with power and start smashing pins with sledgehammers.

 

- NKF

[magic9mushroom]

Even if the weapons accelerator tech and power source were both miniaturized and made portable they'd still result in irradiating the gunner as well as the target shot at and the rest of the X-com squad(s) nearby due to the burst of y-radiation that comes from the antiprotons annihilating with the first bit of ordinary matter they encounter.

 

Same applies (to a lesser degree) with ordinary particle beams. This is one of the reasons nobody's seriously developing particle beam weaponry (like UFO:EU's Plasma line) in RL - the backscatter bremsstrahlung is inevitably going to irradiate whoever's firing it.

[Tsathoggua]

Surely not if the particle beam is confined (or rather prevented from pointing backwards, so to speak, shielded electromagnetically (charged particle beams, obviously)

One needs a solid object to result in bremsstrahlung, no? and of course the likes of cyclotrons and synchrotrons, its controllable by confinement of the particles within the acceleration field, something of course, indispensable if your not simply making a very energy-hungry waste of space)

 

Mushroom, did you read the news about element 115? its now been provisionally named and accepted by IUPAC. Called tennessine, after the american state.

Good look leaving it lying around, IMO the commander of the base would be really, really PISSED to find something like that in their sock drawer:D.

 

Most unstable too, being a heavier analog of astatine. Whilst I've only actually looked at isotope decay tables for At, not tennessine, I keep wondering if an isotope that decays only, or almost only but preferably as a single decay mode, via the means of electron capture could be stabilized and prevented from decay, as long as one can find a nuclear isomer that as said, decays via electron capture by keeping it in a Rydberg state (if it would work, I;d think that chances would be better if the nuclear isomer also undergoes an isomeric transition normally, down to a lower energy level. Rydberg atoms are those which have been excited and pushed up through into such a higher than normal energy level that the outer valence electron is so far isolated from the rest of the electron shells that effectively they and the nucleus both are seen as a tiny little point charge and in effect, isolated from interaction with the rest of the atom.

 

I'd bet a monovalent element such as a halogen would be the perfect sort of element to try with too. I want to know if continuous pumping using fr.ex. a finely tuned

dye laser and confinement of the resultant rydberg state within say, a Penning trap, could force the cessation of nuclear decay in a suitable isotope that selectively undergoes electron capture, so long as the Rydberg atom plasma was continually pumped to force it not to drop to lower energy levels, although the thinking behind my idea is that if the outer, valence electron is prevented from interaction like that then it might not be capable of losing the energy by dropping back to the ground state via isomeric transition . Still need to look through the tables, but theres an awful lot of metastable nuclear isomers of astatine for instance. v

 

According to wikipedia Rydberg states do indeed decay a bit slower all on their own, but I know of no experiment trying the above.

[magic9mushroom]

Surely not if the particle beam is confined (or rather prevented from pointing backwards, so to speak, shielded electromagnetically (charged particle beams, obviously)

One needs a solid object to result in bremsstrahlung, no? and of course the likes of cyclotrons and synchrotrons, its controllable by confinement of the particles within the acceleration field, something of course, indispensable if your not simply making a very energy-hungry waste of space)

 

There is a solid object, though. It's called "your target". As I said, backscatter.

 

And cyclotrons/synchrotrons do indeed produce large amounts of radiation - that's why they build bigger ones, to reduce the radiation losses.

 

Mushroom, did you read the news about element 115? its now been provisionally named and accepted by IUPAC. Called tennessine, after the american state.

Good look leaving it lying around, IMO the commander of the base would be really, really PISSED to find something like that in their sock drawer:D.

 

Most unstable too, being a heavier analog of astatine.

 

Nope. 117's the one below At. 115 is below Bi.

 

Whilst I've only actually looked at isotope decay tables for At, not tennessine, I keep wondering if an isotope that decays only, or almost only but preferably as a single decay mode, via the means of electron capture could be stabilized and prevented from decay, as long as one can find a nuclear isomer that as said, decays via electron capture by keeping it in a Rydberg state (if it would work, I;d think that chances would be better if the nuclear isomer also undergoes an isomeric transition normally, down to a lower energy level. Rydberg atoms are those which have been excited and pushed up through into such a higher than normal energy level that the outer valence electron is so far isolated from the rest of the electron shells that effectively they and the nucleus both are seen as a tiny little point charge and in effect, isolated from interaction with the rest of the atom.

 

I'd bet a monovalent element such as a halogen would be the perfect sort of element to try with too. I want to know if continuous pumping using fr.ex. a finely tuned

dye laser and confinement of the resultant rydberg state within say, a Penning trap, could force the cessation of nuclear decay in a suitable isotope that selectively undergoes electron capture, so long as the Rydberg atom plasma was continually pumped to force it not to drop to lower energy levels, although the thinking behind my idea is that if the outer, valence electron is prevented from interaction like that then it might not be capable of losing the energy by dropping back to the ground state via isomeric transition . Still need to look through the tables, but theres an awful lot of metastable nuclear isomers of astatine for instance. v

 

According to wikipedia Rydberg states do indeed decay a bit slower all on their own, but I know of no experiment trying the above.

 

Works only for isotopes that decay only by electron capture. Transactinides do not fit into that category; the reason they are unstable is being too large rather than having the wrong ratio of protons to neutrons, and as such they primarily decay by alpha emission or spontaneous fission. Both processes are independent of the electron shell.

[Tsathoggua]

Oh..shite...oops. I was forgetting that, I was looking at the periodic table and mentally lumping it in with the rest of the halogens.

 

With the transactinides etc its basically the strong nuclear force being unable to exert its effects over so large (relatively speaking) a distance as fr.ex. a big fat wide lump like the transactinides, meaning a much weaker ability to hold themselves together, no?

 

You reckon my rydberg/EC isotope idea would work in practice? that is, more so than already occurs in Rydberg states (not including the , transactinides etc)

 

Talking of building bigger and bigger cyclotrons/synchrotrons-you read about plasma wakefield accelerators? jesus, the difference in efficiency is absolutely astonishing when contrasted with an ordinary cyclotron (more familiar with these than synchrotrons, Was reading about them the other day, have a look at this if you haven't already and take an interest in that sort of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_acceleration

 

2 GeV/2cm.....jesus. just...jesus.

 

Whilst I cannot really say I'd have all that much use for an electron accelerator compared to a proton accelerator (or deuterons, more specifically) would be of more interest to me. thats impressive to say the least. Makes me kinda rethink that position.