Dear Bethesda,
I know, you’re probably sick of my letters flooding your mailroom by now. Look, I just
really needed to tell you about your laser rifles. I don’t, like, think your game is
bad because of it--I think it’s bad because of the settlement system.
Aaaaaah, I’m just messing with you. Seriously, I don’t expect you to think of everything.
I mean, even though it’s TOTALLY absurd that laser rifles have recoil. I mean, everybody
knows that light doesn’t have mass. Right? Everyone know that?
Anyway. I’m over it now. Thanks for entertaining me. Besides, laser weapons are alright and
all, but I have to agree with my friend Psychoangel here and say that laser weapons? Pfff, who
wants flimsy, ineffectual flashlights? But plasma weapons? Now there’s a weapon for
a badass wastelander. Slow firing, slow moving death machines. And when it hits stuff? None
of this fucking whimpy “no kinetic energy transferred” shit. Hell no, I’m blasting
you with blindingly-hot plasma. Plasma has mass, motherfucker. DO YOU
FEEL IT, YOU PIECE OF SHIT?! MELT, ASSHOLES, ALL OF YOU, MELT AHAHAAHAHAHAHAHA--
Wait a second. Oh shit. Oh no. Oooooooh no. And we...we just made up. Sigh. Alright. I.
I’m sorry, but I have to do this.
Bethesda, your Plasma Weapons make no fucking sense.
Well, actually, that may not entirely be true. But I have to know: DO they? First, let’s
go over what plasma is, since I did, um, a, ahem, somewhat questionable job describing
it in my laser rifle video. I was right when I said Plasma is one of the four fundamental
states of matter, after solids, liquids, and gasses, and it is by far the most plentiful
in our universe. Every star is made out of it, and there are a LOT of stars. But what
is plasma? Well, plasma can be created one of two ways: either by heating a gas, or subjecting
it to a really strong electromagnetic field. This either increases or decreases the number
of charged particles, or ions, in it. A high level of heat or continued presence of electromagnetism
is necessary in order to maintain this state, otherwise the plasma eventually returns to
an inert gas. That’s why there’s a lot of plasma in the sun: it’s hot as fuck.
SCIENCE.
Plasma behaves a lot like a gas in how it fills a space, though. So, like, shouldn’t
plasma like, just kinda disperse like a wet fart as soon as it exits the barrel of the
rifle? Well, that’s what I thought, too, until I saw that University of Missouri engineer
Randy Curry and his team were able to fire self-contained rings of plasma as far as two
feet in their lab. The plasma doesn’t emit any radiation or heat. You can stand right
in the room with it. Curry was able to do this by giving the plasma a way to create
and maintain its own magnetic field.
Holy shit. This whole...this whole thing was going to be about how plasma rifles could
never exist and now...like some dude in Missouri is fucking MAKING ONE. Sure, it can only fire
two feet now, but who knows what’ll be possible decades from now?
HA! But I’m not done yet, not by a fucking long shot. Because, you know what? We’re
not just talking about the feasibility of plasma being lobbed over a distance. Look
at this shit. It just melts people into nothing. Fuckin’ vapoorizes their asses. Jesus Christ.
It’s awesome. JUST LOOK ADDIT. But is this even POSSIBLE?!
You probably think this is a question without an answer, don’t you, Bethesda? Lookit you,
Todd Howard. Sitting there. All smug. With that smug smugness. And that...sexy hair and
deep brown eye--
BUT YOU’D BE WRONG. HAHA. SUCKERS. Thankfully for me, people with science degrees and government
grants at the University of Leicester (Lester) are apparently mad scientists in training,
and they DID THE MATH. You don’t believe me? Well, they did. I even checked their numbers
myself. For time I’ll spare you their methodology, but you should check their papers out (links
in the doobly doo).
They figured out that it takes 2,990,000,000 joules, or 2.99 GIGAjoules of energy to vaporize
a human. Joules are just a measurement of energy. Maybe it’s better to think of it
like power, which is energy over time. Watts, for instance, are joules-per-second, so 2.99
Gigajoules is roughly equivalent to 2.99 Gigawatts, or the amount of power the average american
home would use in just 273 years. Or, for the explosive-inclined, about 3/4 of a ton
of TNT.
Oh shit. That’s...a lot of energy, all delivered in what looks like about a second.
But...it gets worse than that. Because, you know, plasma rifles? They don’t just turn
humans into vaporized goopuddles. No, they melt...shit, just about everything, from Radroaches,
to robots, to fucking Super Mutant Behemoths.
...wait. So. How much energy does it take to melt a super mutant behemoth? I mean, if
I determine a super mutant behemoth as being roughly seven times the mass of the average
human with an infallibly scientific measuring technique, they clock in at roughly 542.0
kg, or about half a ton. Going with 70% water, 15% skeleton, and 15% soft tissue--since Super
Mutant physiology is based off human-- molar mass of molecules, 131,100 calories of meat(all
in a balanced breakfast), and add them all together. Holy shit. HOLY SHIT. It takes 20,600,000,000
joules, or 20.6 gigajoules to melt a supermutant into a liquid pile of green shit in under
a second.
The largest capacity power plant on the planet is the Three Gorges Dam in China. It outputs
22.5 gigawatts. So, basically, melting a super mutant down into goo takes the same output
as this HUGE FUCKING DAM. Jesus Christ.
The energy in plasma is mostly heat. I mean, it’s not kinetic. Look at it. It moves slow
as hell. That means all the damage it’s doing is from transferring heat into whatever
it’s hitting. So how hot does this plasma have to be in order to deliver the same energy
as the largest power plant in the world, but in the size of a tiny little ball of gas?
Thankfully if you know a little thermodynamics, this isn’t impossible to figure out.
Using g=mcΔt, where g is energy in joules, m is mass, c is specific heat (which is the
amount of energy it takes to heat one gram of a specific material 1 degree kelvin), and
ΔT is change in temperature. That’s the thing we want.
For our gas we’re going to use Hydrogen, because it is by far the most efficient element
to turn into a plasma, and has the most amount of energy with the least amount of
heat and mass. Choosing the right mass was tricky. So, on one hand, the more hydrogen
you have, the less you have to heat it in order for it to have the same amount of energy.
The problem is each Plasma Cartridge holds at least 12 shots of plasma, meaning if one
round of Hydrogen plasma is 1 kilogram, that means the cartridge has to have 12 kilograms
of hydrogen compressed into it--which both stretches the believability of the device,
but also would make each cartridge a whopping 26 pounds. So let’s say, instead, each shot
of plasma is 250 grams instead, which makes each cartridge a still-quite-heavy but still-believable
6 pounds. How hot would our little 250 gram plasma bolt need to be in order to deliver
20,600,000,000 Joules of Super Mutant Behemoth Soup-Making energy?
A balmy 5,762,237 degrees Kelvin. How hot is that? Well, honestly not impossibly hot,
thankfully. The writer in me wants to say it’s 993 times hotter than the surface of
the sun, but the surface of the sun isn’t that hot, relatively speaking. Our little
ball of superheated plasma is somewhere between the radiative zone and the core in temperature,
and when it hits our super mutant behemoth, it’s delivering the same amount of energy
that’s in nearly 5 tons of TNT.
And you know, even in a perfect transfer of energy, which is impossible, if you’re firing
this thing at anything smaller than a super mutant, like a human or god forbid a rad roach,
it’s going to disperse all of that extra energy once it’s done melting the target
by expanding at supersonic speeds, fusing with the surrounding atmospheric molecules,
sending out bursts of deadly radiation and melting the face off of anything that’s
nearby, including yours. Luckily this would likely happen at fractions of the speed of
light, so you’d probably be dust before you could feel anything. This thing should
be destroying a city block every time it’s fired, Jesus Christ. Every time you fire this
thing it’s like scooping out a clump of hydrogen from the middle of the sun and slinging
it at enemies.
Not to mention it would take the largest power plant in our history in order to get our hydrogen
plasma hot enough to begin with. Ain’t no way microfusion technology is that good--that’s
some bending the laws of the universe shit. Actually, at this point it’s more believable
that, instead of creating plasma, the rifle is actually opening a dimensional rift into
the center of the sun and scooping out what it needs and hurling it at our enemies using
magic slingshots.
So. You know. Think about that next time you’re using the plasma rifle. You’re not firing
flimsy energy blasts. You’re defying the laws of reality and hurling chunks of the
sun at your enemies, like a god from greek myth. You’re immortal, motherfucker! Just,
you know, try not to miss.
I don't really swear that much, do I?
[Now starts a montage of swear words]
Thank you everyone for watching my video! How'd you like it?
It is a little different from the previous ones I've done isn't it?
For those of you that are curious, it is heavily, heavily inspired by the "What If" blog by Randall Monroe.
If you haven't seen it, you should go read it. It's freaking cool man. Links in the description.
Also in the description I have links to the math I used in this video if you want to check my work or maybe
fiddle with the numbers a bit can kinda make your own custom plasma radius death bomb thing.
Are there any weird game physics science questions that you might have for any franchise?
I want to take your questions and answer them. I want to take your weird hypotheticals and explore them
using actual science because I love learning new math and stuff but I like explaining it to you all.
So if you like this video, I want you to share it because I want this format to succeed.
DICK, DICKDICKDICKDICKDICKDICK.
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