Dear id Software,
Hi, it’s me, Austin!
Whatcha dooooooin’?
While I wait for you to get back to me, let me tell you what I’ve been up to: reminiscing.
What about?
DOOM.
Actually, I suppose, your entire franchise.
Wolfenstein 3D was my very first foray into First Person Shooters, and to be honest I
was probably way, WAY too young to be playing it when I did.
Oh well.
I guess you’re never too young to shoot nazis.
Speaking of guilt-free murder and sadistic torture, thanks for making Doom this year.
I really, really needed to be able to mindlessly murder an entire species without any guilt,
especially since I essentially dedicated six months on this channel to making videos encouraging
people to empathize with the enemies in video games.
It turns out that even those with a conscience occasionally need to validate themselves with
a good ol’ fashioned genocide.
Anyway, id, I’m writing to you today for a couple of reasons.
Reason the first: thanks for corrupting my main save file and making this video a hell
of a lot more of a pain in the ass to make!
You’re the best!
The second reason I’m writing is to talk to you about one of the most iconic and badass
cornerstones of the entire Doom franchise.
It’s so badass, in fact, that only one name can truly encapsulate this behemoth: the Big
Fucking Gun 9000.
This weapon of demonic decimation is capable of felling all but the most impossibly huge
hellbeasts in one fucking shot, sufficiently ending their existence in a shower of blood
and gore that is both spectacular to behold and annoyingly taxing on my system when I’m
trying to get footage for it.
The Big Fucking Gun has existed as long as Doom itself, and for its entire career has
been an overpowered deathdealer.
In spite of its popularity and ubiquity, the exact methodology behind how it works has
remained a complete and total mystery.
Until now.
That’s right, here at Shoddycast, we put our SCIENCE!
Team hard to work and they have finally, FINALLY figured out how this Big Motherfucking Gun
makes even the most snarly little shits of Hell piss their pants before exploding into
god-damned fucking ROASTED MEAT.
We’ve got a little meandering to do before we get there, however.
Let’s talk a little bit about Doom to help wrap our heads around how this plasma-ejaculating
piece of overcompensation works.
The new iteration of Doom seems simple enough at face value.
You are a big mangly manmanpants who loves killing demons.
As a bonus, there happen to be a plethora of demons all over the fucking place like
goddam cockroaches.
The entire game is you playing paranormal exterminator, except instead of using nerdy
proton packs like in Ghostbuster --holy shit that’d make a great episode topic.
FOCUS, AUSTIN, FOCUS.
Instead of using nerdy proton packs like OTHER unnamed paranormal exterminators, you use
manly manpants guns that cock and fire everywhere, turning these demons into moldy piles of meat.
Of course, if you look a little bit more closely, you start to see that the story is a bit more
complex than that.
Gone are the days of the 90s when you shot things for three hours without thinking only
to get a small paragraph at the end contextualizing everything.
No, now we have to have a stoooooooooory.
Well, thankfully Doom’s isn’t too terrible.
Doom, perhaps in an effort to capture more ethereal-yet-very-real fears over the original
game’s preference for jump scares, takes our very modern concerns about energy famines
and availability and cranks them up to 11.
In the FAAAAAAAAAAAR future, the energy crisis has been averted.
Phew!
Of course, there’s one liiiiiittle tiny problem: this new source of energy was taken
without permission from the VERY CHASMS OF HELL ITSELF.
It’s never exactly explained how this works, and maybe we’ll look into it eventually, but
for now, all you need to know is that Hell itself provides energy in the form of Argent
Plasma.
Presumably, since energy for the entire history of humanity has been primarily heat energy,
argent plasma is probably pretty similar to our real plasma.
This Demon Jizz doesn’t just power homes and cities, though, it’s also used in weapons,
like the plasma rifle and, of course, the Big Fucking Gun.
You might’ve noticed I talk a lot about lasers and plasmas--that’s cause goddamn
video game developers and science-fiction writers fucking LOVE PLASMA.
It solves all their problems, or so they think.
id Software dodged a bit of a bullet, of course, in that they made up a whole new substance.
Fuckers.
There’s no Specific Heat Capacity listing for the argent element.
YOU BASTARDS!
You’re trying to get in the way of my Science!
But you can’t!
YOU CAN’T STOP THE SIGNAL, BABY, HAHAHAHAHA.
The Big Fucking Gun launches a terrifying blast of Argent Plasma at your enemies and
makes them explode.
While we don’t know the properties of Argent, that can’t stop us from figuring out
EXACTLY how it works.
So...how do you explode a demon?
Simple.
You turn it into a potato.
Wait, that’s not right.
Fuck, damn it, I messed up the FUCKING REVEAL, FUCK!
Sigh.
Anyway.
Do you have a potato and a microwave in your home right now?
Go and toss the potato in the microwave for, oh, I don't know, 7-9 minutes.
Chances are, if you do this, it’ll explode, unless you cheated and poked holes in it first.
Aren’t YOU a smarty pants?
Potatoes and presumably other foods will explode when they’re heated up because the water
inside them starts to vaporize as the microwave pumps heat into it.
As the water vaporizes, it expands, and tries to find a way out.
Without holes to vent the pressure, this pressure builds up, and BOOM.
You just simulated a demon exploding because of a BFG.
And you have a mess to clean up.
I read on a forum post once, in the early days of researching an episode, a post made
by a United States marine who had seen combat in Afghanistan.
Someone was asking the best way to turn a human into a liquid, and the marine’s response
was “easy, launch a rocket-propelled grenade into them.
They’ll be liquid in no time.”
Grisly, but true -- while in general it’s easier to blow people up by, you know, blowing
them up, in the world of Doom, engineers and military personnel have apparently gotten
bored with more domesticated methods of murder and invented a device that explodes people
and demons alike by vaporizing their water content.
So...how does this work?
For some of this, we’re definitely going to have to presume that demons have a similar
biology to humans--or at least other mammals, although at the energies we’re talking about,
it honestly doesn’t matter.
More on that in a bit.
A good portion of our water content is tied up in our blood, which has sodium, which does
slightly raise the boiling temperature of water, but not by a lot, though, and for the sake
of exploding a human body by vaporizing their water content, we don’t need to bother that
much with it.
Also, unlike Mei’s gun, which freezes its victims entirely solid, our BFG 9000 doesn’t
necessarily need to do a perfect job.
It doesn’t need to vaporize all the water in our bodies, it just has to vaporize enough
to cause an awesome explosion.
Since this energy is getting transferred incredibly quickly, this also reduces the requirements quite a bit.
Let’s go with... oh, hell, 50% of the water content needs to be turned into steam in order
to explode our human potato.
Given that the average United States Marine (the closest real-life equivalent to our Doom
Marine) is 196 pounds or 88.9 kilograms with a body water content of 60%, this means that
we only need to vaporize 26 kilograms of water.
AWESOME.
Thankfully, I’ve already built a model human, and I just need to reorganize it for this,
and in order to vaporize enough water to explode a Doom Marine over 63 MEGAjoules needs to
be imparted into their body.
This is enough energy to launch a 1kg package from our planet into space and reach escape
velocity.
God fucking damn.
That’s a lot of energy, but it’s not an impossible amount.
After all, we send things to space all the time.
Of course, as with all things, there’s energy waste due to resistance and just, you know,
not everything happening in a vacuum, and the BFG is capable of doing this to tons of
assholes all at once, so the ball of death that it is has WAY more energy inside it.
In fact, humans are the smallest things on the list that can actually be turned into fucking
mulch by this thing.
The largest and most terrifying potential victim for this monstrosity is the Baron Of
Hell, a pile of raw meat and bad attitudes.
And probably racist opinions.
I mean, just look at him.
You know he just has the worst ingrained stereotypes about humans.
Although, since his primary engagement with our species is, you know, watching his friends
and family get massacred, I’m going to let this one slide.
So, sure, we can figure out how to vaporize a human’s water content,
but a baron of Hell?
How the fuck do we do that?
There’s no lore information on them when it comes to mass or composition, and
I’m way too lazy to copy-paste something for scale.
But thankfully, for the resourceful, there’s another option.
You see Barons of Hell have been around since the early days of Doom, and the original Doom
engine has a lot of fun little stats and variables in them, along with one tiny, often-ignored
mechanic: mass.
Mass in the original Doom is actually pretty similar to our real-life mass.
At its most basic level, it’s resistance to being moved.
The default for the human marine is one hundred.
The baron of hell, though?
one THOUSAND.
This means, effectively, that the Baron is 10 times the mass of our marine, which actually
seems pretty accurate.
This brings the bastard up to almost 2000 pounds, or almost 900 kilograms!
At this size, and given similar body chemistry, how much energy would have to be absorbed
by their body to elicit an amazing steampunk explosion?
644 megajoules, or precisely ALL the energy contained in a single bolt of lightning.
I’m not talking about the energy delivered by a bolt of lightning--no, the entire, cumulative
force of a lightning bolt.
Given an incredibly generous 75% energy waste, this means that each blast of the BFG, which
is capable of mutilating every monster it comes into contact with, has to have at least
7 gigajoules of fucking energy, which is several times the total amount of energy your heart
will output for your ENTIRE LIFE!
To put this in perspective, in order to get 2 kilograms (or almost 5 fucking pounds, so
enjoy the 50 pounds of kickback per shot of the BFG) of Hydrogen to carry this much energy
we’d have to heat it up to over 100,000 degrees celsius, which would quite likely melt the
face off of anybody firing it, and is in the temperature range we only see naturally in small
stars and nebula.
That means inside this demon shit-head it’s like god-damned fireworks as argent energy, the
very stuff that humans have been stealing from his people, lights him up like a god-damned
Christmas tree -- in fractions of a second, his interior body temperature spikes dramatically
as his body fluids immediately vaporize, putting pressure on his internal organs, rupturing
them, tearing sinew and bone as steam escapes, and immediately deleting his childhood memories
from the face of the universe, his last vision being that of a foreign invader, taking gleeful joy in
murdering him and his compatriots by turning their own energy against them and converting
their bodies into glorified pressure cookers.
God damn it!
FUCK!
No wonder the demons hate humans!
We’re kind of assholes.
But, fuck it.
Who cares?
I love killing things.
I don’t give a shit if the demons didn’t consent to have their energy stolen.
Fighting a one-man war is fucking fun,
and it’s even more fun doing it with a gun that has the word “fuck” in it.
Sincerely, Austin
P.S.
STUFF.
I love stuff,
which is why I love Lootcrate.
Lootcrate is a pretty cool group of folk who go through the effort of finding a menagerie
of cool stuff so you don’t have to.
Not unlike Ira Glass, each week they bring you a different theme, and a number of stuff
related to that theme.
This July, it was The Fuuuuuuuuuture.
You know, science fiction.
A.K.A. the stuff we tear apart here on the daily here at Shoddycast.
This Lootcrate came with all sorts of amazing stuff, like a robocop waterbottle, a Buck
Rodgers poster, a Gundam model for you to assemble, and a badass Pacific Rim figurine.
Lootcrate gives you a buttload of different options to pick from, with prices starting
as low as $13.95 a month, and going upwards to $100 for limited edition crates.
Oh, and, like, if all the shirts you own are complete garbage, you can also sign up for
“level up,” their subscription devoted specifically to decking out your wardrobe
with awesome nerdy gear by giving you shirts and other stuff every month,
like this badass Voltron shirt.
ARRRRGH.
I miss Voltron.
I used to watch that show all the effing time.
Screw the Power Rangers.
That giant robot was where it was AT.
Head on over to lootcrate.com/shoddycast and pick your montly dose of nerdy poison now
for 10% off.
Next month’s theme is anti-heroes.
The deadline to lock in next month’s subscription is the 19th, so hurry up!
Remember: use lootcrate.com/shoddycast, or the discount code “shoddycast,” or click the link in the
description for 10% off.
CRAP, I FORGOT THE WATER BOTTLE.
ALSO, today marks the beginning of the official Shoddycast Amateur Overwatch Tournament.
Head on over to Twitch.tv/shoddycast this afternoon-slash-early-evening to check it out.
Here’s the schedule, and don’t miss Tuesday, when our very own Team Shoddycast is going
to be entering the running.
There are no prizes this time, but it will be a fun time.
You get to vote on who you think will win, what our next tournament game should be, and a
bunch of other super awesome stuff.
Anyway,
go there.
Twitch.tv/shoddycast