User:Autisticfroggy/Advanced Guide to Toxins
Colton's Guide to Making Bombs
This guide is a work in progress. It is unlikely to ever be finished.
Introduction
So, you've created your first few batches of tritium, tinkered with hydrogen, made your first few bombs and are ready for more. Well, this is where you'll get more, and probably more than you need. Toxins at its very essence is a game of thermodynamics and balancing two energy values against each other, the rest is regular atmos. This guide will focus on the dynamics unique to toxins and will leave the more complex nuances of atmos to their respective guides.
Requirements and expectations
It is expected that you understand the basics of gas synthesis, gas cooling, have made a few bombs and know how to use the toxins simulation computer. Extra experience working atmos tech shifts is also a plus. While knowledge of fusion is not strictly necessary, it certainly helps for the larger bomb reactions.
The Fundamentals of Toxins
Toxins can be split into its three primary competencies, namely, formulation (composing a gasmix to achieve a desired effect), synthesis (creating the gases that comprise the desired gasmix) and execution (the setup, timings and general skill by which the bombs are made). Each deal with different types of optimizations and require different skillsets. While it is true that one can simply copy the work of another in one particular competency (work sharing between specialists is not unheard of), this guide assumes that you have no such specialist to base your work on and will teach you what you need.
Moving on, the three competencies can generally be better defined as:
Formulation
Formulation is fundamentally about devising a gasmix that will produce as much energy as possible to create the largest bomb possible, with different ways of going about it. Its most common form is when people discover that using a mixture of cold oxygen and tritium with a hot plasma primer results in a much larger explosion than using regular oxygen and plasma. This is something you have probably done. Most will have gone further, tweaking and optimizing the ratio of oxygen to fuel to maximize burn rates and energy output. There is also the tweaking of gasmix temperatures to fit more moles into the mix while still allowing for enough thermal energy in the heat primer to trigger the combustion reaction. Further still are the rare few who experiment with other gases such as hypernoblium, stimulum and zauker in their gasmixes. If you want to create even bigger bombs, or are just wondering why your bomb doesn't explode and has a paltry sub-10 central explosion size, you would be well advised to study the art of formulation.
Synthesis
Synthesis itself is best covered by an entire dedicated guide, but as toxins scientists do not work under the same scarcity free conditions that atmospheric technicians do, special constraints apply. Here one will learn how to best make use of their limited resources, how to be creative with your small spaces and even how to brew up fusion in the confines of science (safety provided by atmos' work environment not included)!
Execution
Execution is how one proceeds with their work in toxins, whether they take their time and work safely, or whether they plan on rushing the production of their gas as fast as possible to make a large (but not hyperoptimal) bomb early enough in the round to give science a sizeable boost of research points to spend on powergamer gear. Timings, balancing the benefits of certain additions to your setup and their associated time costs, safety factors and all that is what is covered here. If you want to learn to be that one guy in science that gets fifty thousand research points twenty minutes into the shift, or you just want to make your science fusion setup Grey McRetard-proof, this is what you should read.
Formulation
Formulation is the part where you compute the precise mixture of gases necessary to achieve the goal you have set out to do.
Stochiometry
If you recall your high school chemistry classes, you'll remember stochiometry. In our specific case, stochiometry is performed to determine the heat capacity of a gasmix, and by extension its thermal energy. This is very important in toxins as thermal energy is the end all and be all of
Calorimetry
<insert formulas here>
<add the burnrate and energy release over time integrals when you find them, it'll be hilarious>
Reactions and their Utilities
<something about how the basic combustion reaction is the mainstay but that there is nuance between different burnrates>
Tritium vs. Hydrogen vs. Plasma
<something about burnrate variance and combustion output having different heat capacities, add some graphs>
Hypernoblium
<HEAT CAPACITY>
Stimball
<Something about how it's actually really strong>
Fusion
<Something about how it's quite viable if you can set up the boosted fusion procedure necessary to trigger it>
Boosted Multi-Stage Toxins Bombs
<Bring out the funny integrals, it'll be great>
Synthesis
<Probably just do guide to synthesis for the deep bits, give a bit of extra guidance on how to use limited resources, specifically low trickle rate tritium breeding and dual chamber hydrogen synth>
Execution
<Time pressures, and maybe hint about EMP boosting? Gotta ask anvil about that one>
Usable section ripped off of MBrain
Transcribed from the MBrain, is the general gist, just expand wherever.
Point calculation is asymptotic, just get the biggest bomb you can get.
A bomb has three components, total thermal output, thermal threshold and byproduct generation.
Thermal output is best optimized via the use of a pure hydrogen-oxygen mix as it burns the fastest and releases a lot of energy. It is technically inferior to stimball based bombs and boosted fusion bombs, but they have the largest radius due to a bad design quirk in toxins that I will discuss later.
Thermal threshold is the target temperature at which your combustion reactions begin. Usually this is 100C, boosted fission bombs use two thresholds, 100C for the primer and 10000C for the fusion bit.
The thermal threshold determines the amount of total thermal energy in the combined gasmix of both tanks in order to succeed, go below this threshold and your bomb will fail to ignite, resulting in a simple pressure rupture, go over it and it will ignite. You therefore are advised to stay as asymptotically above the thermal energy threshold of the toxins mix as possible to optimize.
Total thermal energy is calculated by a simple stochiometric equation
To determine whether your bomb will ignite, calculate the thermal energy threshold of the resulting gas mix, then check if the individual tanks' thermal energy is above that threshold when combined.
Obviously, you want low heat capacity gases in your cold tank to ensure that your cold side thermal energy is low
As for the the hot side, you want high heat capacity gas such as plasma, or ideally hypernoblium.
Byproduct generation, the resulting gas when combustion occurs, is important because they have different heat capacities, and the higher the heat capacity, the lower the resulting temperature and pressure of the bomb.
As bomb pressure is the sole determining factor of bomb size, the byproduct dominates the selection of bomb type, despite other reactions generating significantly more energy.
For example, the stimball reaction yields the same amount of energy as fusion does per mole of plasma consumed, but emits a large amount of nitryl which hinders the heat of its byproduct, not to mention the inclusion of plasma in the cold tank will raise the thermal energy requirements of the entire gasmix and would thus constrain the amount of moles used to a very low amount.
As such, the hydrogen-oxygen reaction is preferred.
The sole reason for its use is that it burns faster than tritium.
This faster burn is important because tanks are constrained to 3 reaction ticks before the tank ruptures, as such making the amount of thermal energy released per tick (effectively calculating for output) the most important selection for gas reaction to be used in your bomb type.
And as such is the primary reason for why hydrogen-oxygen bombs are the most common and recommended, despite the existence of boosted fission bombs.